This page is under construction. But so am I, so we have that at least.
Favorite tropes:
- Gone Horribly Right.
- Fantastic Time Management (really, anything involving Time Travel).
- Achievements in Ignorance, but see Pet Peeves, below.
- Mundane Utility
- Cerebus Syndrome - Seriously, I love series where everything start out all cheerful and happy and then the cracks begin to show and people slowly figure out that they live in a Crapsaccharine World.
Least favorite tropes:
Tropes that can go either way, depending on the writing:
Pet Peeves:
I hate when a trope is described in a way that is clear, specific, and unambiguous, yet people still get it wrong all the time. I understand that sometimes you have a brain-skip, and think something is an example of a trope when it really isn't (I've done that occasionally), but there are some tropes that, for whatever reason, are perpetually misunderstood.
The one that's currently grating on my nerves is Achievements in Ignorance. The trope, as it's described, is: A person does something thought to be impossible, because they didn't realize it was supposed to be impossible. Currently, most of the examples (and wicks) are for: A person is stupid, but accomplishes something amazing anyway.
This was brought to the trope repair shop, where it languished for a while and died. I'd like to bring it back, and I'd even be willing to fix it myself, but I just don't have the time.
In my opinion, it needs to be split up into 3 tropes:
1) Someone accomplishes something even though they have no idea what they're doing. (For example, everything Patrick Star has ever done.) - This one will keep the "Achievements In Ignorance" name, since this is the definition most people think it has.
2) Someone accomplishes something that is physically impossible, because they're too dumb to realize that it's impossible. (For example, Wile E Coyote stepping off a cliff and not falling, or Roger creating upside-down fire in the page image currently on the Achievements in Ignorance page.) - This one could be named "Ignorance Trumps The Laws of Physics". Note that since this involves breaking the laws of physics, it cannot, by definition, have any real-life examples.
3) Everybody "knows" that a certain task is impossible, so they don't try to do it. However, one person who doesn't know that it's supposed to be impossible tries to do it and succeeds. This version can have real-life examples, and in fact, the best illustrative example of this is the real-life incident that inspired the movie Good Will Hunting: A teacher wrote an unsolved - and presumably unsolvable - math problem on the blackboard. A student who came to class late mistook it for a homework assignment and solved it. note - This one could be called "Didn't Know It Was Thought To Be Impossible", which is a mouthful, be we have some other tropes with really long names. This, by the way, is the definition that this trope was originally supposed to have.
