TVTropes and the endless quest to itemise storytelling
Ever wanted to reduce your favourite novel to the sum of its constituent parts?
A few days ago, I finished reading Broken Angels, a 2003 sci-fi novel by an author called Richard Morgan (habitual browsers of Netflix might recognise Morgan for his better known debut set in the same universe, Altered Carbon, which was recently adapted by the streamer). It was a good read: all high-concept grimdark space-noir set against the backdrop of an interplanetary war, in which the main character, a sort of mercenary-cum-spy called Takeshi Kovacs, must oversee the excavation of a mysterious Martian artifact, centuries old. Morgan’s a slick writer, whole-heartedly embracing pulp but always tending just the right side of cheesy, packing his books with stylish violence and overwrought sex scenes and mind-bending conceptual twists. In fact, I would love to interview him for this newsletter, and plan to write about the Altered Carbon series again in the future, in some form or another – but whatever the case, by the time I closed Broken Angels, I felt like I wasn’t quite ready to stop thinking about the book.
So I opened my laptop and headed straight to TVTropes.
i. The Everything Encyclopaedia
TVTropes.org, the self-described “all-devouring pop-culture wiki”, is a user-generated online database of, essentially, different building blocks, character archetypes and plot conventions for fiction (which it calls tropes), many of which you don’t realise have a name until you stumble across them. Imagine a really, really, really detailed version of Wikipedia, but one which would explain the character archetypes of, say, each member of the Fellowship in The Lord of the Rings, and then elaborate on why each character acts in the way he does. Gandalf? Yeah, he’s embodiment of the trope called “Big Good”, which more generally can mean the “cornerstone of any heroic faction” in a story, according to the website. Frodo might be “The Chosen One” trope in Tolkien’s masterwork, but he’ll only reach Mordor with the help of Sam Gamgee, his “Caring Gardener” who also happens to be a “Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass”. Lucky Frodo.
In other words, it’s a website where a dedicated cadre of users are in the never-ending process of trying to categorise and itemise by type every single character, plot, location and concept in fiction. TVTropes was founded in 2004; I can’t find an accurate source for how many tropes it now lists, but it’s somewhere in the ballpark of 30,000. Each has its own explanation, links to related tropes, and an expandable list of media that feature the trope, plus the example(s) of the trope from that media.
It’s worth noting that tropes are not the same as clichés. If a cliché is primarily linguistic (and bad to use), a trope is more structural, and it’s not inherently negative to recognise the tropes in your own fiction. Often, subverting a trope or combining two or more at once into an unusual character can be a genuinely fruitful way to come up with something fresh and creative.
To return to the example above, the premise of Broken Angels is that humans can be brought back to life after death by downloading their consciousness from a “cortical stack” embedded in their necks, and “re-sleeving” it in a new, organically-grown body. In Altered Carbon, the main character, Kovacs, has to solve the killing of a billionaire who has been murdered and re-sleeved by his life insurance company, but who can’t remember who did it to him, or why. Per TVTropes, this concept/trope is called “Body Backup Drive”. If I wanted to read more fiction that featured a similar idea, I could visit the trope page of the same name, and skim down a long list of media – sorted into categories like Anime, Literature, Live-Action Films, Animated Films, Video Games, Webcomics and more – and discover that, oh, wow, Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga has a similar premise. Or, look, Elizabeth Bear came up with something a little like it in her Jacob’s Ladder trilogy. This website is an absolute trove of information for writers and nerds (often the same people), and an encyclopaedia for those who want to base their reading, and perhaps writing, on a very specific theme.1
Tropes are explained in almost overwhelming detail. Look at how the database not only explains the trope of the Femme Fatale, but how it differs from the trope the wiki has christened “The Vamp”:
While related to The Vamp, the Femme Fatale is not just any seductress; she has a distinct look and feel. The main distinction is how she presents herself. If you know she's dangerous from the start, but she's sexy enough that you don't care, she's likely a Femme Fatale. On a lesser note, the Femme Fatale generally uses sensuality instead of upfront sexual advances. She may imply that you could have sex later, but she'll never promise it, not even say it — that would decrease her air of mystery and power. Her wiles may include apparent helplessness and distress, and appeals to the man's greed, desire for revenge, or gullibility, as well as the implication of possible romance or sexual rewards, while The Vamp more often relies on raunchy sex or the promise of it sometime real soon.
Further down the page, there’s even more text explaining how a Femme Fatale is a different trope to those – all similar, but subtly different in different ways – called the “Heroic Seductress”, the “Lady in Red”, and the “Trickster Girlfriend”.
It’s a lot.
ii. All the stories, all the time
So what does all this imply for the culture?
Categorisation is a timeless human impulse, but it’s never been easier to do than now. TVTropes is fuelled by an impulse that is not dissimilar to Goodreads, or Letterboxd – any of those internet platforms where you can track and record the media you consume. Everyone has content addiction these days; categorising and sorting through that content – and, as TVTropes allows us to do, the very components that make up that content, its characters and its setting and so on – gives us a sense of achievement. Yes, I have seen and rated all the episodes of The Sopranos. Yes, I posted a review of Yellowface on the novel’s Goodreads page. No, I still have to see season twelve of Below Deck. In 2024, we all want to sort through and understand the stuff on which we’re spending an average of 28 hours per week (and that’s just streaming).
TVTropes isn’t the first attempt to classify storytelling, by any means. From the 1930s through to the 1950s, the – follow this next bit closely – American folklorist Stith Thompson took an Edwardian-era compilation of all the different archetypes found in German and European folklore put together by a Finnish folklorist called Antti Aarne and translated it into English, adding new elements and updating it to include Asian folk tales (Thompson’s own work would be updated and revised by a native German, Hans-Jörg Uther, in 2004, creating the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index of folk tales, or the ATU Index).
Thompson’s catalogue of the different folk-storytelling components looked a little like a simpler version of TVTropes. It has wide-ranging categories such as “The Dead”, “Cosmography” and “Animals”, which themselves contain smaller sub-categories such as “Reincarnation” or “Ghosts”. His section on Ogres, for example, is divided into several subcategories, one of which has its own subcategories:
Any story that features ogres or ogre-type characters – Jack and the Beanstalk, say – should fit into one of Thompson’s subcategories, and can then be classified with a library-style tag ranging from G10 to G699.
When it comes to categorising folk tales, which by definition have no recognised author or creator, Thompson’s thematic system was very useful. TVTropes, though, can seem brutal by comparison, dealing as it does with the creative brainchildren of (in many cases) living, breathing writers and present-day works of art. If you write fiction and you think you’ve come up with a killer premise, it can be oddly disorienting to find out that the idea you thought was original actually has a name; not only that, but TVTropes offers a list of examples of works of fiction that already use exactly the same premise.2 Breaking stories down into their constituent parts can be flattening.
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Interestingly, the publishing industry works on a similar basis to TVTropes: the fiction end of the business is totally trend-driven and publishers rely on basic comparisons to other popular recent novels to predict and drive sales. If there’s a successful novel one summer and it focuses on, say, cannibals who drive around central Asia eating people, then agents and editors suddenly all scramble for those yet-to-be-published manuscripts which literally feature the same building blocks. They’ll be looking for the next hot novella where the main character picks his teeth clean with human rib bones, or the next road trip novel set amid the bazaars of Tashkent and Bukhara – ideally both.
Thinking in trends, and in archetypes, is profitable in a world where there’s utter over-saturation of media for consumers to enjoy.3 After all, consumers have already cast their vote of confidence in the original work. Give those archetypes a name – and I promise you that there already exist names for both my examples – and you can start collecting all the different works of storytelling under each label.
If you think that your favourite books or films have been spared the TVTropes treatment, you’re probably wrong. Mine certainly haven’t. The website is great for sinking hours into, and a very useful resource for choosing your next watch or read. (Spoilers are blanked out on the wiki and treated very seriously, so you can look up anything you want on there without fear of ruining it.) But writers, artists, storytellers beware: if you think that you’ve come up with something original, you have been warned.
In fact, the very thing that pointed me towards Altered Carbon in the first place was the TVTropes page for “Cyberpunk”, which is really more of a subgenre of sci-fi than a trope, per se, but the website’s recommendation was spot on. I wanted to read a cyberpunk novel, looked it up, and found one.
But then, it can also be reassuring. If someone has had the idea already and it’s popular enough to be on TVTropes, it must be a good – or at least marketable – idea.
This is precisely the reason why the post-war period was so creatively fruitful; Modernists very consciously didn’t think this way.
Tropes are fun!
This reminded me of the collective consciousness reached in Jennifer Egan’s Candy House (the entire human experience reduced to itemised letters and numbers leading to the creation of the ultimate cloud). Potential technological advancements aside this raised some questions about what this type of collective consciousness could mean. Am in agreement we don’t need to desperately seek originality or authenticity (a la Natalie Portman suddenly bursting into dance in Garden State) for a story to be worth telling (god knows I’ve unashamedly enjoyed enough enemies to lovers rom-coms in my time and cannot wait for the next). And perhaps we all just want to be understood and contain the world around us blah blah… But will there be a saturation point, compounded by the internet’s obsession with constantly categorising just about everyone and everything? Maybe there’s a concern, or possible computer bug, we’ll come up against in people becoming overly cognisant of tropes and externalising them to the extent that they start performing tropes and archetypes in their everyday lives. So we lose the space for authenticity?
Before I go off on a tangent about the controlled spaces performing archetypes might be useful (saturnalias and such) my main point I think here is a question of self-fulfilling prophecy and the a post-modern overly-iterative world (see AI services creating text based on previous text and so on). Ergo everything is overly consumed, iterative, inauthentic, and devoid of meaning. Bad. Or maybe it’ll all be chill to be fair.