This page (still) is under construction. Check back soon.
Professional time waster. Full-time college student. Occasional provider of Unwanted Assistance. Most likely to be a perma-noob. On-again-off-again metalhead. Might or might not be a semi-secret writer. The shit you see is probably not even close to a full display of the chaos in my mind. Since before even signing up here, I've been wasting an unholy amount of time browsing to the point of troping and even Trivia/YMMV'ing countless nonexistent works that I want to believe are tangible to other people in other universes. Naturally, since actually signing up, I've been wasting an even unholier amount of time here. I should probably just back the fuck away and get a blog. Also, I'm autistic.
My wiki projects:
- Cleanup/maintenance and adding entries to K-pop pages* . Trying not to alienate the few K-pop fans around.
- Adding more albums to the Albums Index. Could use some help, especially with the metal albums I have listed in Sandbox.Another Online Persona. Some of them are also in Summary.Music. This may also be extended to creating some more pages for Music Videos.*
- Occasional technical maintenance on various pages (like fixing broken links and formatting mistakes), usually on work pages/subpages I have varying degrees of familiarity with (including unrelated works that share their names).
As you might have guessed, my focus is mainly on the music pages here. I'm too preoccupied with college these days to really invest in shows, and I'm usually too broke to properly catch up on most movies I've been wanting to see.
Troper wall is now open here.
I am also known in some communities as Patrick_Nicholas. I was initially hesitant to reveal my identity upon joining, but figured I might as well reveal myself because I have some stuff published under my name. I still don't intend to advertise myself as a troper outside the community. I might or might not also have some other aliases.
- Year Zero (2016) - Read here.
Albums
- Addicted
- The Album
- All Hope Is Gone
- ...And Justice for All (1988)
- Avenged Sevenfold (Album)
- Blackwater Park
- Born Pink
- Demanufacture
- Death Magnetic
- Deliverance & Damnation
- Eyes Wide Open
- Formula of Love
- Ghosts I-IV
- Hand. Cannot. Erase.
- Hesitation Marks
- The Hunting Party (2014)
- I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love
- Iowa
- Ki
- Kill 'Em All
- Living Things
- One More Light
- Peace Sells... but Who's Buying?
- Pretty Hate Machine
- The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories)
- Rust in Peace
- So Far, So Good... So What!
- Sounding the Seventh Trumpet
- Steal This Album!
- Still Life (Opeth Album)
- System of a Down (Album)
- A Thousand Suns
- Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses)
- With Teeth
Music Videos
Musicians
- Accidental Art
- Aerith and Bob
- After the End
- And the Adventure Continues
- Anti-Hero
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking
- Art Imitates Art
- Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work
- Bait-and-Switch
- Been There, Shaped History
- Beethoven Was an Alien Spy
- Big Eater
- Big "SHUT UP!"
- Black-and-Gray Morality
- Black Comedy
- Bloody Hilarious
- Blue-and-Orange Morality
- Bond One-Liner
- Book Ends
- Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs
- Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick
- Brick Joke
- Call-and-Response Song
- Card-Carrying Villain
- Cerebus Rollercoaster
- Cloudcuckoolander
- Cold Ham
- Comically Missing the Point
- The Comically Serious
- Concept Album
- Concept Video
- Cluster F-Bomb
- Creepy Monotone
- Deadpan Snarker
- Death Glare
- Department of Redundancy Department
- Distinct Double Album
- Dragon-in-Chief
- Dramatic Unmask
- Eldritch Abomination
- Epic Rocking
- Everything Is an Instrument
- Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor
- Extreme Omnivore
- Fading into the Next Song
- Fourth Wall Psych
- Fish out of Temporal Water
- The "Fun" in "Funeral"
- Good is Not Nice
- Greater-Scope Villain
- Grey-and-Gray Morality
- Ham-to-Ham Combat
- Heel–Face Revolving Door
- Hidden Track
- Horrible History Metal
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming
- Impossibly Tacky Clothes
- Kangaroo Court
- Knight of Cerebus
- Lampshade Hanging
- Large Ham
- Laughably Evil
- Lead Bassist
- Like a Duck Takes to Water
- Longest Song Goes First
- Longest Song Goes Last
- Machine Monotone
- Minimalistic Cover Art
- Mood Whiplash
- No Fourth Wall
- Noodle Implements
- Nothing Is Scarier
- Not Me This Time
- Odd Name Out
- Oh, Crap!
- Ominous Pipe Organ
- Or Was It a Dream?
- Outside-Context Problem
- Parody Product Placement
- Partially-Concealed-Label Gag
- Poke the Poodle
- Pragmatic Adaptation
- Pragmatic Villainy
- Precision F-Strike
- Protagonist Journey to Villain
- Reality Warper
- Redshirt Army
- Religion Rant Song
- Rule of Funny
- Running Gag
- Satanic Archetype
- Seinfeldian Conversation
- Self-Deprecation
- Shaped Like Itself
- Sinister Subway
- Sir Swears-a-Lot
- Snark-to-Snark Combat
- Spoof Aesop
- Surreal Horror
- Surreal Humor
- Then Let Me Be Evil
- Together in Death
- Trademark Favorite Food
- Tradesnark™
- Undignified Death
- Unfazed Everyman
- Unreliable Narrator
- Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight
- Villains Out Shopping
- Vocal Tag Team
- What Did I Do Last Night?
- World of Ham
- World of Snark
- Accentuate the Negative: I'm guilty of this, even towards myself. It's general knowledge that negative/cringe memories are more likely to stick when given the right trigger. For example:
- As a kid, I was an A/B honor student in elementary and middle schools, yet I have so many memories (mainly from elementary) of struggling to get anything done at all, let alone correctly, that I barely even remember how I managed to do anything right.
- Also, all it takes is one substantial negative review and ZERO substantial positive reviews to shatter any confidence I may have with any work I may have found in any way presentable.
- Alternate Universe: I probably do not come from one, nor have I discovered any tangible ones, but I do have countless alternate universes in my head.
- The biggest one, with the most people who (most likely) don't exist in this one but still interact with alternate versions of real people, nonetheless, is one in which I am the metal musician I wanted to be during my high school years.
- Another one, which has been mostly dormant since around 2012 but is notable for being the only major one until recent years that involved the real me, is one in which I had the most perfect girlfriend ever; a Perky Goth with pale skin and dark hair, she and her friends did just about everything possible to make my life less miserable and even revived my nonexistent band after my attempt at getting it going fell through the cracks (part due to an inability to find a respectable drummer, also due to moving to the city sooner than I was expecting).
- The more recent major one involves sending my soul back to relive my life from the start of my high school years, the last time I regularly interacted with several people in person, to try to avoid as many fuck-ups and (now most likely forgotten by everyone else) cringe memories as possible. That and be given Reality Warper powers to not just physically and mentally enhance my renewed life but improve music channels, improve transportation, clean the oceans, and try to prevent (as much as possible) the mid-2010s-present world as we know it (for the most part) from happening, including that goddamn pandemic. I've branched it out in a few ways but also decided I would need to declare certain moments fixed points in time to keep shit from getting too out of hand.
- There are multiple, of varying degrees of detail, in which many works that only exist in my head exist as movies, shows, music, etc. The first one above is the biggest one by far, but there are others for works that clash with the timeline, usually inspired by the real world.
- And a Diet Coke: Always buying Pepsi Max instead of regular Pepsi, though it's nonetheless a compromise over Diet Pepsi. I also ordered Diet Coke with my school lunches during the two years I wore braces, though that was less about weight and more about wanting to minimize sugar to keep the braces from rusting.
- Attention Whore: On my worse days. I'm usually quiet and introverted and might internally panic if I think I said too much, but I usually don't like feeling ignored whenever I do have something to say, so I might sometimes be deliberately provocative (but not too provocative) just to see if anyone would notice and/or get people talking. Fuck, I'm even troping myself right now! I'm even using a lot of no-real-life tropes because I don't know what other ways I can say (too much) shit about myself in a way tropers would understand (though some weren't made "no real life" until after I joined). I have also occasionally tried to shoehorn responses about myself into posts on seeing the right trigger words pertaining to me in some way.
- Big Eater: I do eat a lot on some days. Splurged on McDonald's every now and then. Also ordered the big New York pizzas. With the smaller British "large" pizzas, I can more easily eat a whole one myself. Throughout my adolescence, I found that I could eat three plates plus dessert at the buffet before getting full, much to my father's disapproval. It shrank to two plates plus dessert sometime after moving to New York City.
- Captain Obvious: One of my bad habits. My dad always called me out on it, especially as a kid.
- Celeb Crush: I've had several over the years. If you see some pages for works with some of them getting major edits, they're probably from me. These are the main ones:
- BLACKPINK's Jisoo is my current main one. She is very pretty, has a beautiful voice, and just happens to be probably the single most Adorkable person in an industry where being adorkable is pretty much a job requirement. See here and here. English version here * . I think it's safe to say that Jisoo is, without a doubt, my ultimate bias in Blackpink. I might be having some trouble trying not to gush about her.
- I don't know where else to put this: I also love TWICE's Tzuyu, but I find her far more endearing in a Moe way. Despite all the hype about her beauty, there is no way I could bring myself to go to certain lengths with someone like her, yet she is so irresistibly cute! I want her to be my little sister. *
- Victoria Justice was my previous main one, thanks to her late-2010s modeling/social media images, though it waned a bit with her going for longer periods of time away from Twitter (and eventually me going for long periods of time without logging into Twitter either). If her social media persona is anything to go by, she seems very friendly and approachable, super cute, pretty much Fun Personified, and very much adorkable. Her angelic smile melts me.
- Elizabeth Gillies* was my main one before that. Mainly because of Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll and especially her singing. It helps that Gigi, though not without issues, is easily the one with the softest personality of Liz’s main characters. The first season of Dynasty kept it up, but I failed to keep up with the show for much longer. Interest originated because I was looking for someone to be a goth girl in a nonexistent show; Liz popped into my head, and I ran with it because I couldn't think of many others, especially as the character was becoming molded into Liz as a Perky Goth. I died a bit when she revealed she got married to a guy who’s not just 20 years older than her but had been dating her since she was about 19 despite her having many admirers much closer to her age (though she claims that she was the one who pursued him).
- Jenna Coleman was one of my longest ones while I was absorbed into Doctor Who. It pained me to discover that Clara Oswald was the NuWho companion fans wished would just fuck off and die instead of develop with Peter, and that was before the seasons with Peter turned Clara into a drama magnet and the most "special" companion ever. I even based a character (a love interest, no less) in one of my earliest written stories after Jenna! Victoria kept it up a bit, but the name association made my mind start to wander towards a different Victoria.
- Emma Watson was the first and longest major one, which started when I was about 12. I realized it when I had a dream about her. When I was 13, I briefly wanted to go to England to find and marry her (I eventually did reach England as an adult, but for completely unrelated reasons). It definitely did not go away while the Harry Potter series was still running, though it was largely on the backburner before I even started high school as I started to become more seriously interested in girls I could actually interact with.
- Possibly my earliest notable one, which I didn't really count as a celeb crush because I did not know the actress' name until roughly 20 years after it faded, was Megumi Odaka, who played Miki Saegusa in the 90s Godzilla movies (and retired a few years after her last one)* . Being raised on Godzilla movies as a kid briefly made me want to marry a Japanese woman like her when I grew up, to the point of feeling a second-hand offense by a radio commercial from around 2002 (a beer commercial, I think) outright shitting on women of non-'Murican nationalities in what I now think was a display of post-9/11 jingoism:
"If you want American women, press 1. For Icelandic women, press [sound of 1 being pressed]".
- Cloudcuckoolander: I'm rather "out there" in the head. I've been "out there" since I was a kid who barely knew how the world even worked. I was barely even sentient for the first few years of my existence, so much so that I managed to get expelled from preschool! An aspect I find myself capable of describing is how I used to pretend I could make something exist just by refusing to look at the place where it would be. As a kid, I sometimes annoyed my father with some random, unsolicited thoughts and observations. Even now, I’m still "out there" but self-aware (and reclusive) enough to try not to let it show too much, absorbing a shitload of time googling random exact phrases and (and have more recently taken up searching phrases on Twitter as well to see what people are saying despite only logging in occasionally now). And that's not even getting into the countless alternate universes I want to believe are real in some way. Sometimes I feel like I'm outright delusional for trying to explain things that seem to make sense in my head.
- Deadpan Snarker: Occasionally. Sometimes turned up in political posts on social media (though not as much post-2020 due in part to my relative inactivity). I find myself having to restrain myself at times to not make an ass out of myself when even I'm not sure if I'm serious or not.
- Eating Lunch Alone: I often tried to do this deliberately throughout my high school years, hoping to avoid having to socialize most of the time.
- Everyone Has Standards: I consider myself likely to get yelled at for disagreeing with the rules - and I may have trouble keeping up with all of them or even be aware that I'm breaking some, even though I am aware that the rules have been getting increasingly stricter - but I may cut things that have gotten blatantly out of hand and/or break multiple rules at the same time (especially if they're obviously shoehorned) and may still recoil when I occasionally get yelled at over an unintentional fuck-up.
- My profile page suggests that I am more tolerant of real-life troping on the wiki than I should be, but not as much when they get too deep into creators' private lives; public/stage/reality-show personas are fair game when they provide a lot of media to back the tropes of their personas, but still with some restraint: avoiding particularly controversial tropes, or having sections that take up enormous chunks of pagesexample . I consider k-pop pages to be fair game, for the most part, because of the multimedia aspects of it in regards to most groups. They don't just have songs/videos/stage performances, but also reality shows, variety show appearances, livestreams, certain interviews, and other media to back their media personalities. However, I still know that there is a fine line between the idols' media and their personal lives, and have stepped in when some things have gotten blatantly out of hand at the expense of scaring some fans away. I tend to have my explanations for cutting some "no real life" violations on certain pages, usually K-pop pages, go a bit deeper than simply "this is a 'no real life' trope." Things that would be considered Too Controversial would be where I would most likely chime in when tropes are taken to the Real Life Section Maintenance thread (especially if the trope in question involves modern politics).
- It's hard to avoid complaining due to human nature and a lot of almost inherently negative tropes (especially YMMV), but I still think it should go when it's unnecessarily tacked onto entries in an obvious way, involve tropes being blatantly misused (beyond simply violating no-real-life) for complaining, or getting too deep into people’s personal lives. There are also times when natter is not obvious to me (aside from obvious indentation issues) but I may be tempted to cut it when it seems like it's commenting on entries with sub-entries that are only minimally relevant to the example. I have even taken some particularly problematic K-pop pages, at least the ones that attracted the most drama importation, to the complaining sandbox for when the issues are too big for me to deal with myself.
- Gushing is probably even harder to avoid in some cases, but I do try to keep myself from going overboard with it and try to keep it relevant to the example. Similar to complaining, I also think it should go when it's tacked onto examples while having little to no relevance to them.
- Zero-context examples may also be hard to avoid in some cases - mainly in regard to tropes with definitions simple enough to make entries feel likely to attract redundancy (such as simply restating the trope's definition) or details that are of little to no relevance - but I am more likely to give more context to what I know than to simply comment out ZCE entries (though I may still cut them if they're far to vague to be worth keeping at all). I want to be primarily a contributor, not a cop.
- I trope myself. I even use "no real life" tropes on myself. I have a few trivia items, but I will not YMMV myself. I also will not describe myself as a hero, so I will try to avoid using tropes with "good" or "hero" in their names. I also don't consider my YMMV opinions (of which, I probably have many) noteworthy unless I have a way to mention them in entries for objective tropes. I also try to avoid using "played with" examples, aside from the occasional Invoked Trope.
- Sometimes I get annoyed when certain tropes, including tropes I like, get taken to TRS and usually killed. Same goes for tropes declared "no real life" by Real Life Section Maintenance. However, I may sometimes still agree that, if nothing else, the on-page examples were a fucking mess anyway.
- ROCEJ violations are not always obvious to me, but I may be tempted to step in when cases do seem glaringly obvious to me.
- Flat Joy: There is another trope I've invoked a lot. Yay.
- Harsh Vocals: I discovered I could do them sometime in the middle of my high school years, though I didn't really practice them much. My initial idea for a band that never went anywhere was to have them. I have not practiced them at all in ages; I don't want to disturb the neighbors and/or my mother.
- Hates Reading: I'm slow and tend to lose focus, especially with Doorstopper books. It took so long to finish reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I refused to read the last three books because of the sheer size of them. I have since made no attempt to read The Lord of the Rings.
- Hypocrite: How else do you describe someone who uses "no real life" tropes to describe himself?
- Hypothetical Casting: I do a lot of this in my various imaginary works. When I can't find the right person, though, I will usually make that person up. I actually stumbled down the K-pop rabbit hole this way!
- I Hate Past Me: As a kid, I used to cry and scream a lot over just about anything that didn't go my way. I also barely had any idea of what was even going on, even when other kids were more connected to reality; I have a bottomless pit of cringe memories. I do not hate my comparatively less cringe-y adolescent self, but I do find that he seriously needed guidance from his future self.
- The Klutz: Oh, fucking shit, that does apply to me. My motor skills are shot, and my hands are heavy. I have unintentionally fucked up many a computer mouse just using it harder than I thought I was. I have somehow managed to carry this over to this very wiki, as I have been clumsy enough to need to make a bunch of consecutive edits to fix typos and/or formatting mistakes and then fix the mistakes I made while trying to fix the previous mistakes. It tends to happen when I feel too confident to hit the preview button before saving my edit. It's even more frustrating when I make mistakes in my explanations for edits and can't edit them.
- Ludicrous Speed: I tend to invoke this (figuratively, obviously) when I find myself putting a lot of my college shit (essays et al.) off until I have to force myself to do it at the last minute, which is about 90% of the time. Side effects may include staying up well past dawn, having to repeatedly respond to nature's calls over just a few hours, and forgetting to brush my teeth. This has occasionally backfired on me.
- Metalhead: I pretty much defined myself as this in the early 2010s, in case the albums in the third folder didn't make it obvious. I've been on and off since around the late 2010s, even before getting sucked into k-pop, though prog rock partially brings me back. I'm currently trying to return to full(ish) time metalhead despite distractions. Trying.
- Must Have Caffeine: I absolutely need my coffee to fully wake up. I also need Monster when I have to stay up late to get my college shit in on time.
- No Social Skills: Socializing was never something I aced at, and I've become a lot more self-aware about it. Sometimes I get a sudden case of amnesia when asked simple questions I wasn't already prepared for. I completely dread having to talk on the phone.
- Not a Morning Person: And I fucking hate being forcefully woken up early in the morning.
- The Quiet One: I don't normally have much to say, much to my father's eternal disappointment. I'm better at writing than at speaking; even so, I may still disappear when not forced to appear.
- Rail Enthusiast: I have a fixation with trains (freight, subway, etc) and secretly watch railfan videos because I'm too far away to see many trains for myself (though I'm on and off about it). Picked the enthusiasm in part from my brother, who was THE railfan of the family when we were kids, but he had long since outgrown it.
- Back then, we lived two miles from the tracks but could hear a lot of train horns. There was a closer track roughly three or four blocks from my childhood apartment complex: I never saw a train on it, and it was dismantled (around 1999) before I could even have a chance to see a train on it. One of the only memories I had of that line, aside from seeing some railroad crossings on it, was walking along the tracks that had blackberry bushes alongside them; I heard a train horn, but my dad told me it was coming from a track that was further away. I was happy to have my childhood park moved from a small one where trains could only be heard to a bigger one (near the Amtrak station) where they could actually be seen from a certain spot!
- I rode the subway in three or four cities as a kid (London, Paris, Buenos Aires, maybe Madrid) and thought the subways were so cool (favorite was probably Paris), I became disappointed to find that no Florida cities are even capable of having one, though New York and some other US cities do have them. Eventually, I moved to New York City…
- I consider myself enough of an enthusiast to catch inaccuracies regarding New York City Subway stations and/or trains in fiction - stations served by the wrong trains, stations that don't exist in the real NYC, etc. - usually produced by people who are clearly not New Yorkers.
- I also get a little sad when I come across a railroad in real life and/or Google maps only to notice it to be abandoned. I have also gotten frustrated on repeatedly passing certain tracks/crossings and never seeing any trains there. This included a very short industrial spur near a major intersection relatively close to a house where I used to live (that is probably only used occasionally for storage and late at night) and a track regularly crossed on the nearest major road near a house where I lived for about six months in upstate NY. The upstate one is probably even more frustrating in hindsight because I discovered many years later that it's on a lengthy active line going all the way to Canada and was crossed at multiple different times of day.
- Reclusive Artist: I don't know how much of an "artist" I really am, but I've been pretty reclusive since the start of the pandemic, even with more and more people pretending that it's over. Even before the pandemic, my post-high school, in-person social interactions had been minimal. I'm also very selective about who I open up to, what I open up about, and when; I might cut this whole section if this annoys you.
- Self-Deprecation: My profile page alone probably has too much of it. Also, if you see a lot of "bad tropes" on at least one of my Troper Works (specifically this one), a big percentage of them might be from me. I've also slandered myself in the TV Tropes Slander Thread on several occasions. I think I should stop this shit.
- Sir Swears-a-Lot: You've been fucking warned, motherfucker!note
- The Teetotaler: Unlike my two brothers, I do not drink alcohol.
- Trademark Favorite Food: As a Big Eater, I have several (Long List alert). These are (for the most part) the regular, semi-regular, and ex-regular ones (which I did not give up by choice). You might have a higher chance of winning me with at least one of these, especially with Pepsi or coffee:
- New York pizza
- Chicken nuggets
- Chicken over rice
- Cookies
- Chocolate
- Tortellini
- A McDonalds Double Quarter Pounder With Cheese (specifically a double)
- Ice Cream
- Almost any kind of cake or pie
- Fish and chips, when the fish is a big chunk of deep-fried cod
- Meatballs
- Beef empanadas
- Quiche
- Sandwiches de miga
- Rice pudding
- Salmon
- Pretty much anything made of potatoes
- Chinese food
- Sausage, egg, and cheese croissant sandwiches
- Cheese
- Understatement: One of my most frequently-used forms of snark.
- "Well Done, Son" Guy: Not intentionally - given that I left him when I had the chance because the alternative was to stay and get yelled at constantly - but I was usually easily swayed by my father's opinion when I was a teen, and I've known him to be highly opinionated. Some of it has stuck, though I won't go too deep into it here. The closest I have come to invoking it is when I thought I could get my work published sooner and make enough money to buy a shitload of records to send to him that were of the aspects of my music interests that I thought would have been the most presentable to him. I eventually decided it was not worth the effort even if I were to hit the jackpot since he apparently no longer has a record player he uses.
- Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Most of my writings (including almost all of what I've done for my classes) have been written largely on the spot. My earlier class writings were throwaway (though there is one I'm considering publishing, but I'm unsure if I want to continue it first or publish as is). I tend to get writer's block and have to force myself out of it to meet deadlines.
- I should probably get a blog.