TV Tropes

TV Tropes is a wiki devoted to classifying the tricks and trades of writing fiction, primarily focusing on television shows and characters. It contains an entry on Conservapedia, treating the site as a show or book, in which Andrew Schlafly is treated as a character in order to mock his values.

Problems with TV Tropes

Bloat

Users of the site have too much time on their hands and are obsessed with television shows, such as the vacuous occult teen drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Consequently, they need excuses to make new pages. As a result, most of the entries are over specialized variations of other entries. Effectively every individual scene, character or theme, no matter how specific, can be turned into an article, even if they are not tropes as such. The official policy is that "There Is No Such Thing As Notability", the only qualifying factor for page creation is that the subject must actually exist.

Soapboxing

A non-fiction educational wiki has been shoe-horned into TV Tropes as a way for the liberal editors to criticize it.

Inconsistent use of tropes

In certain cases, in particular with YMMV tropes, the criteria used for determining trope applicability have been deemed inconsistent, even when there was a rubric for including them. An infamous example of this is the Complete Monster trope, reserved for the worst of the worst among villains, where some villains get removed for qualifying as "lacking in heinous standard" even when said villains have been depicted as being truly evil, such as outright enjoying jobs at assassination and having zero qualms with murdering children. In addition, despite qualifying as YMMV, several entries relating to unintentionally sympathetic or unintentionally unsympathetic at times get removed due to the claim that they are insulting to the characters.

Liberal bias

The site tends to promote several liberal biases. For instance, some of the tropes, in particular YMMV tropes, can make negative statements about President Bush, yet if a negative statement was made regarding Barack Obama, they remove it under the pretense of how it's never good to negatively comment on a President.