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@aureliusambrosius
in 2026 i am wishing for all of us the energy of bilbo baggins, who was headhunted for an extremely well paid role he had no qualifications or experience for, blagged the interview, and within his first week found a magic ring that does the job for him
thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes
reasons for this:
basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.
like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.
here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.
TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.
Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”
all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that
I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.
But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.
In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.
On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”
like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not
An incomplete list of really useful or interesting reads from TvTropes.
please note that yes many of these are concepts that exist elsewhere and a few are even taught in fiction writing classes but TvTropes just does an amazing job at displaying the range of things that can be done with them
legitimately so much of the terminology I use to talk about storytelling, and even think about it in my own head, i learned about from TvTropes
Willing Suspension of Disbelief
Watsonian vs. Doylist
Trope Tropes, for all the ways tropes are used, deconstructed, subverted, and played with.
The Oldest Ones in the Book, which is basically my favorite thing on the entire Internet
Punk Punk, for -punk subgenres
Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness, Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism
The Weird Al Effect is a fun one
Chekhov’s Gun, Chekhov’s Boomerang, Chekhov’s Skill, and further variations
Law of Conservation of Detail
Law of Conservation of Normality
Anthropic Principle
Word of God, Death of the Author
Sliding Scale of Fourth Wall Hardness
Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness
Genre Savvy
Flashbacks and Chronology breaks down all the ways you can handle chronology in storytelling
Show, Don’t Tell is a very good breakdown of what is showing, what is telling, and how both can be used effectively.
Lampshade Hanging
Noodle Incident is just fun imo
Genre Title Grab Bag
Fridge Horror
Rule of Cool, and also Cool of Rule
The Smurfette Principle
The Hays Code - not a trope but a very good breakdown of how the Hays Code affected storytelling in film
this is just a really short list of examples I encourage people who write or otherwise create stories to browse around on this site it’s so useful
Informed Attribute is one of the ones I reference most often as an editor.
Theory of Narrative Causality is one of my personal favorites, because it's kind of fun when a story acknowledges that things are happening in the story because that's what makes it a good story.
Also Applied Phlebotinum, because sometimes you don't need to know how something works, it just does, and that's all that matters for the purposes of the narrative.
LOL LOOK AT THE SHUTTERS
sometimes people experiencing psychosis and/or mania will come up to you on the street and talk in confusing or upsetting ways. your job is to either have a regular human-to-human conversation with that person or politely leave. your job is not to call 911. do not call 911. you might kill that person if you call 911.
I don't even have the energy to screenshot and respond to your tags- what the actual fuck is wrong with you? "the cops are scared and rightfully so" "mental health calls are the scariest for cops" OH so this isn't about the safety of psychotic & manic people this is about piggy feelings?
and no, actually, this is not USA specific and no, actually, people from other countries should not ignore this post. police violence and sanism weren't invented in the US and they are certainly not unique to here. if you (or anyone) thinks that this bullshit doesn't happen elsewhere then you are not listening.
cops r Some Guy with a Gun
do we want Some Guy with a Gun in this situation? answer is usually "NO"
This is legitimately useful reframing. A while ago I started replacing the word "cop" in my vocabulary with "a man with a gun." It really puts things into perspective.
This homeless person is making me uncomfortable. Should I call [a man with a gun]?
My neighbor is having a loud party. Should I get [a man with a gun] involved?
There are some teenagers skateboarding. Do you think [a man with a gun] would get rid of them for me?
It makes it very clear what you're saying. I can call a man with a gun to threaten or hurt someone mildly inconveniencing me. You're not calling the cops, you're calling A MAN WITH A GUN into a situation that does not warrant a firearm handled by a volatile lunatic who will not be held accountable for his actions.
^ ^ ^
Russian handwriting
I’ll forever be amused at the Russian word “deprived” (лишили) in cursive, which looks like
for people wondering how the hell that works
I still don’t know how the hell that works.
See, to me it looks a lot like ‘minimum’ in English cursive:
Ok not so bad right? But it gets worse…
Like… what even is this?
Can’t tell me that’s a word right? But it is! Sure you could dot the i’s, but would it really help?
source here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Handwriting/comments/1hgsc8/write_minimum_in_cursive_without_dotting_the_is/
Yes. Yes it would.
Wikipedia: Minim (palaeography)
Why the fuck would language evolve in such a completely illogical way like this
fuck every last bit of this
Humans invented writing as a way of communicating information and it’s pretty great on the whole but we maybe did not adequately prepare for depreciation in legibility
@official-linguistics-post ?
Wtf guys ten years
see every time i see this status i get angry because i’ve played through literally every scenario in rct1 and there is no place where this is a thing. there is never more than one park per map. and in rct2 you can’t make that happen i the scenario editor either. it is not remotely within the game’s functionality to simulate two discrete parks and these games were coded in assembly for christ sake so it’s not like someone modded it in by adding the line “int const TOTAL_NUM_POSSIBLE_PARKS = 2;”. there is no conceivable way this post is anything close to true and even though i know how writing all this out reflects upon me as a person and even though i know exactly how meaningless and trifling of a takedown attempt this is on some random facebook screencap with hundreds of thousands of notes im going to post it anyway because i’m too petty to have any say in the matter
i just can't convey the frustration and sorrow that it's been to grow up at first without the internet and then watching it bloom into this useful, fun, connecting force you sometimes spent time on, only for it to degrade into this constant oppressive waste of time and energy where people are constantly pumping out algorithmically designed content for max algorithmic appeal and even the most simple search generates either no results or an infinite abyss of ai generated slop none of which is usable or correct. we briefly had a library of alexandria and then fed it into a paper shredder so advertisers could sell a random mash of pulp back to us at a premium.
The bipartisan push to remove anonymity from the internet is ushering in an era of unprecedented mass surveillance and censorship.
"The problem is that there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are. A platform cannot magically discern that a user is 16 without collecting identifying information, whether through government documents such as a passport, payment information like a credit card, or other identity-disclosing data. Whether that data is stored by the platform itself or outsourced to a vendor, the result is always the same: A user’s offline identity is forever linked with their online behavior.
Stripping anonymity from the internet would constitute one of the most sweeping rollbacks of civil rights in recent history. It would allow for unprecedented levels of mass surveillance and censorship, endangering the most marginalized members of society. Whistleblowers exposing corporate wrongdoing could be tracked and fired, government employees speaking out about illegal behavior or bad policies could face prosecution, and activists organizing protests could be identified and surveilled before ever setting foot on the street."
I really like how the scientology speedrunning trend is developing, in this clip we see that the participants are
Not deterred by the closed door
Working as a group
Protecting their identities
Inflicting material costs to the institution via property destruction
Getting away at the end
These ideas were not all here from the beginning. They are genuinely gaining experience that can be applied elsewhere
The church of scientology is on tumblr and they are sending me anon asks telling me that they can't even commit to reporting a post
the opposite of this is the conspiracy theorist I talked to who used the fact that people's eyes glaze over when he talks to them as evidence that the illuminati is poisoning us with the alex jones frog chemicals or whatever. Absolutely legendary self report
KICK THE CAN!
Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.
To kick the can, reblog it. I wanna see how long this can go on for.
the oldest reblogs for this post that i can find are from january 2nd of 2013. this can has been getting kicked around tumblr for almost 13½ years now
And yet somehow this is my first time kicking it!
lie to me
The Kansas Industrialist, Manhattan, October 18, 1916
We need to bring up that Ursula K LeGuin quote about commodified fantasy more often. We need to be meaner.