This is a wiki-type website with the mission
of cataloguing and indexing the complete gamut of
tropes you might run into in your day-to-day media consumption.
Though rooted in the realm of television situation
comedies, thence its name, it does not limit itself to sitcoms, or
indeed to television. It covers tropes from anime (very
trope-prone), film, pulp literature, newsprint,
video and tabletop games, comic books, and yes,
webcomics. The basic concept is to provide a common language for
describing tropes and discussing them. To name a thing is to control it. Thus, alongside
classics such as synecdoche and paraleipsis or standbys like the
spit take and technobabble, the site includes entries for the
"Three Is Company" (a plot based on a mis-overheard conversation) and the
"defrosting ice queen" (a romantic interest who starts out
insufferably arrogant, but warms up gradually to the hero). Each entry
for a trope includes a detailed list of examples and tropes are usually
named for the most memorable examples thereof.
Then, of course, there are the meta-tropes. There is a whole
language endemic to the website conjured to describe situations in
which tropes are subverted (the audience expects a particular trope,
but the writers deliberately subvert their expectations),
double-subverted, lampshaded (that is when an operative trope is
explicitly pointed out for comedic effect), or inverted (where the
roles in a common trope are reversed).
Say what you will about the effort, but you can't fault it for a
lack of reach: it does try to be complete. There has to be a Gödel's incompleteness theorem that applies to
something like this, hasn't there? I would imagine that any formal
system of describing tropes invites a subversion that escapes
description in the system.
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