TV Tropes
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Type of site
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| Available in | English |
| Website | tvtropes.org |
| Alexa rank |
 2,630 (January 2017[update]) |
| Commercial | Ad-supported |
| Registration | Required for editing and other features aside from viewing |
| Launched | April 2004 |
| Current status | Active |
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Content license
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CC-BY-NC-SA from July 2012 |
TV Tropes is a that collects and expands descriptions and examples on various conventions and devices (tropes) found within creative works. Since its establishment in 2004, the site has shifted focus from only television and film tropes to cover those in other types of media such as literature, comics, video games, advertisements, and toys. The nature of the site as commentary on pop culture and fiction has attracted attention and critique from several web personalities and blogs.
The content of the site was published as free content from April 2008. TV Tropes changed its license on July 2012 to only allow noncommercial distribution of its content while continuing to host the prior submissions under the new license.
TV Tropes was founded in 2004 by a programmer under the pseudonym "Fast Eddie", who described himself as having become interested in the conventions of genre fiction while studying at MIT in the 1970s and discussion on 1990s internet forums. It is privately owned, as of 2016 it publicly lists two owners besides Eddie.
For example, the trope "I Am Spartacus" is a specific type of scene that appears in multiple works. It refers to scenes where a character is shielded from identification by other characters who are also claiming to be that particular character. The trope name references a famous scene in the film Spartacus. This example is included, along with examples from South Park, Power Rangers in Space, the Talmud and even recent stories from real life. Not all examples of a trope may be cases where it is "played straight". They may also include cases where the trope is parodied, played with, inverted or even averted (i.e. avoided altogether in a context where it would be expected).
In addition to the tropes, most articles about a work also have a "Your Mileage May Vary" (YMMV) page with items that are deemed to be subjective. These items are not usually storytelling tropes, but audience reactions which have been defined and titled. For example, the page of the well known trope "Jumping the shark", the moment at which a series experiences a sharp decline in quality as in the notorious story point in Happy Days, only contains a list of works that reference the phrase. TV Tropes does not apply the term to a show, that being a subjective opinion about the show, but cites uses of the phrase by the show ("in-universe"). Most articles also have various pages within them. For example, the article may have an "Awesome" page to describe crowning moments of awesome (i. e., a moment in a show or other fictional work that the majority of the readers or viewers regard as one of the high points); a "Fridge" page which describes examples of the tropes "Fridge Brilliance", "Fridge Horror", and "Fridge Logic"; a "Laconic" page which describes an article/trope in a few short words; and more pages that focus on a particular aspect of an article/item.
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