"Presumably brick-joking back to..."
Is this place actually just Tv Tropes or something?

Andyoats said:

"Presumably brick-joking back to..."
Is this place actually just Tv Tropes or something?

This translation may or may not have been performed by someone who had been a serious troper around a decade ago.

We're all Tropers in one form or another.

Seriously. It's hella useful when we can summarize a whole trope into a couple of useful words.

The obsessive categorization fits like skintight latex. Made for each other.

It may also ruin your vocabulary.

I mean, it does make us instantly able to take a look and say "Oh, they're doing that" when consuming any given media. Very useful.

In the Book of Genesis, it was through giving animals names that man gained power over those things. Being able to define something is the first step to being able to understand it, then to have control over it.

It's not as though they're hard-and-fast boxes to place everything into, but by understanding why you keep seeing the same basic patterns in storytelling, you can start to talk about what storytelling purpose those patterns tend to have, and what reactions they can bring about in the audience.

To use Unspoken Plan Guarantee as an example, if characters say they have a plan and lay that plan out in detail, then seeing everything go according to plan is boring, so most writers won't let it go (at least entirely) according to plan. If the characters have a plan, but don't let the audience know what it is, however, then basically no matter what happens, as long as it's a successful outcome, those characters can declare that was their plan all along, no matter how ludicrously improbable. Of course, played to the hilt, that can also make stories boring - "I know this plan will fail because they told me what it was" - but, to use Scooby Doo as an example, every single episode, they create some awful plan to catch the rubber mask monster that invariably fails, only to have the monster get caught by crashing into something that half-buries them so that their masked face is uncovered, but their arms are trapped.

If nothing else, if you can list all the times that a certain trope is used/abused, you can start working on ways to either work on ways to achieve similar results among audiences jaded by seeing the same thing over and over, or to deconstruct and reconstruct the trope to being reformed.