Put simply, Auto-Erotic Troping is creating and/or editing articles about yourself or your work for the purpose of stroking your own... ego. Let's just leave it at that. TV Tropes is a place for fans to document tropes in media, not a platform for creators to advertise or pimp their work.
It's understandable: as writers and artists, we're proud of our work and enjoy sharing it with people. It's only natural to want to take that to TV Tropes and use this site to broaden our audience. However, there are a number of problems that can occur, along with some common signs that you've taken things too far:
- You haven't actually created any tropable works. This is a big one; while we don't have notability standards per se, we do care that an article describe something that exists in a discrete form that can be meaningfully troped. Blogs, vlogs, photographs, drawings, covers, remixes, roleplays note , Let's Plays note , reaction videos, and things like that don't typically count. (Exception: Unpublished Works can get put on Darth Wiki, but other rules about troping your own work still apply.)
- You are adding Subjective Tropes, Audience Reactions, and/or publicly inaccessible Trivia about your own work. Creators are not objective about their own work. If it looks like you're editing an article mainly for the purpose of telling us how great you are, it's not a good sign. Giving us "insider information" about your own work is similarly not good — first, it's likely that only you care; second, any Trivia items should be things that can be researched independently.
- You are adding recommendations for your own work. This is explicitly forbidden on the wiki. There are dedicated recommendations threads in the forums where you can post about your own content.
- You are shoehorning yourself into articles. This is particularly evident when you shoehorn links to your article as commentary or annotations to a broader topic. For example, if there's an example about Lord of the Rings in The Hero's Journey, you tack on a sentence like, "[creator] discusses this in his/her blog." It's First-Person Writing in a slightly different form.
Note that, while self-publication sites like DeviantArt and YouTube can give individuals a wonderful platform to share their work with others, having a DA page or a YT channel doesn't mean you automatically qualify for a Creator article on TVTropes. We prefer that other people independently contribute to your article once you become popular enough to generate the interest. Otherwise your article will wither and die for lack of Wiki Magic, and/or will turn into little more than you telling us how awesome you are. Worse, it'll lead to other people thinking that's okay and doing the same thing. (Corollary: Don't make work or creator articles just to complain about a person or site you don't like.)
Similarly, collaboration and role-playing sites are not inherently tropeworthy unless they result in the publication of discrete works. It's cool that you hang out with a group of people who all have nifty ideas about stuff they might publish, but that doesn't justify a TVTropes article for your online community. Most of the time, those just turn into troping the users as if they were fictional characters, which is absolutely forbidden.
Addendum: If you thought the title of this page meant something else... we don't allow fetish-y editing, either. See Fetish Fuel for more details.
See also: The Fic May Be Yours, but the Trope Page Is Ours; Creator Page Guidelines
