you're going dark on me again @blinkaftermidnight - Tumblr Blog

The beautiful thing as you get older is that you realize so many “rules” are made up and you can just do whatever. Posters can go anywhere in the house not just my room. I can sit down while cooking a meal or taking a shower. I can make the same thing for breakfast lunch dinner for a week straight. I can roam around the house shirtless. I can wear a dress with jeans. The world is my oyster key word my and I can live as I please embracing little things such as this

headspace-hotel

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

headspace-hotel

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

thesaltofcarthage

Informed Attribute is one of the ones I reference most often as an editor.

musicalhell

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.

youmetuscany

SARAH PIDGEON getting ready for the Chanel Tribeca Festival Artists Dinner (June 8th, 2026)

#sarah pidgeon

stuckinapril

life is so hard when you’re a very lazy girl by nature but you also want to do a lot of things in your one wild and precious life

youmetuscany

SARAH PIDGEON getting ready for SAG-AFTRA Foundation Conversations Presents "Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette" (June 03, 2026)

#sarah pidgeon

youmetuscany

SARAH PIDGEON photographed by Matt Priestley for ELLE (2026)

#sarah pidgeon

herssian

"there is no way you're not using chatgpt for at least a few things here and there no matter your stance on it" what the FUCK are you talking about

allykatsart

softbrah

“online fandom bestie that you once shared intense intimacies with but don’t really talk to anymore simply bc we drifted into new blorbo obsessions” is such a specific type of relationship that has to be impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced it

mmleepmlorp

My five year plan is to just see what happens

cash4bees

I think the reason I still enjoy tumblr is that even though this all still pisses me off, I know that anything that makes me mad on here is 100% earnest. It's not ragebait or engagement farming, y'all are actually just that stupid sometimes

cbk1000

As a society, we need to go back to understanding that strangers on the internet are, you know, strangers. I feel lately that I'm seeing a rise in 'An author I love blocked me because they took my comment the wrong way' posts on the ao3 subreddit, and then the comment is them calling the author a fucking bitch or something like that.

Don't do this. Tone doesn't translate well in text, and if you don't have a rapport with that author, they are not going to interpret, 'You're a fucking bitch' as, 'Author I hate you for being so talented and making me feel so keenly.' They're going to interpret it as you being an asshole. You can shit talk with your friends because you have an established relationship with them and can distinguish between playful banter and genuine anger. You do not have this with a stranger, no matter how much you like their fics. You will have a much more pleasant time in fandom and not get cockblocked from interacting with your favorite writers if you remember this.

derinthescarletpescatarian

#I don't often see comments like these when I'm reading a fic but there have been a few that made me raise an eyebrow#I don't know if I would block over someone calling me a bitch on a fic I wrote but I'd probs try to gently tell them it's not right#coz honestly I feel like this is an issue with younger age groups who are new to reading fics and might not understand fandom culture#or at least I hope it's younger people who simply don't know better 😬#otherwise... yikes

This isn't some esoteric niche aspect of fandom culture, strangers at the potluck also do not like being called a fucking bitch.

derinthescarletpescatarian

People in the comments like "you just need to add a /pos tone indicator to your comment!": strangers at the potluck do not like being told "You're a bitch!" with a smile and a thumbs up.