A trope is a storytelling device or convention, a shortcut for describing situations the storyteller can reasonably assume the audience will recognize. Tropes are the means by which a story is told by anyone who has a story to tell. We collect them, for the fun involved.
Tropes are not the same thing as cliches. They may be brand new but seem trite and hackneyed; they may be thousands of years old but seem fresh and new. They are not bad, they are not good; tropes are tools that the creator of a work of art uses to express their ideas to the audience. It's pretty much impossible to create a story without tropes.
Here is a list of indexes, split into conceptual groups. At the bottom of each trope page you will find a convenient Next or Previous link that allows browsing alphabetically. This is a long list of all tropes we have already catalogued
. You may, however, want to take along a supply of Narnia Time in either case.
Main Indexes:
Other Indexes:
- Administrivia
- Audience Reactions
- Books on Trope
- The Contributors
- Creator Speak
- Creators
- Derivative Works
- Fandom
- Flame Bait
- Forgotten Tropes
- Formats
- Genres
- Home Pages By Language
- Information Desk
- Just for Fun
- Laws and Formulas
- Media
- Meta-Concepts
- Networks
- The Oldest Ones in the Book
- Omnipresent Tropes
- Overdosed Tropes
- Snowclones
- Sub Wiki
- Trope Overdosed
- Trope Tropes
- Trivia
- Tropes of Legend
- Truth in Television
- Universal Tropes
- Useful Notes
- Wiki Tropes
- Works
- Your Mileage May Vary
