Fuck No TVTropes

Hello, everyone. It’s been years since I’ve touched this blog, and I assumed I should give everyone an update as to what’s been going on.

Are you dead?

A lot of people have sent asks about this but, no, I’m not dead. I even had someone ask if I was murdered at Pulse Nightclub, and I briefly wondered if that was a microaggression but it was nice that people were concerned about me, I guess. I’ve also had a fair few people thankful that I might be dead but that’s the internet for you.

The reason I stopped posting on this blog was kinda simple: I really had no reason to. When I became an adult-adult and not just a college-adult I realized that I had better things to do than field questions and make snarky jokes about a website that isn’t worth the time of anyone over the age of 21. I made the mistake of thinking that TVTropes wanted to be about actual media analysis and not just a website where they collected screenshots of Rugrats panty shots and pretended Gurren Lagann was deep. While I had a lot of fun with this blog over the years, TVTropes eventually just became a non-entity to me.

What have you been up to?

Quite frankly I’m living my dream. My biggest goal in life was to be a novelist. After years of work, I’ve finally gotten a literary agent who will be representing my YA novel series and I’m getting close to officially being a published author. I’m working through some final edits of my debut novel before my agent and I start working on finding publishers who will be able to get my book in stores and hopefully start a long and fruitful career.

I’m not going to say the title of my novel (or my real name for that matter) because I don’t necessarily need the baggage of this online persona to follow me into my professional life. I’m going through my social media accounts right now and editing or outright deleting everything necessary. Obviously, my old DeviantART account is fucking gone and I’ve removed most of the shirtless pics of me on my Instagram. This side-blog will probably be deleted within the next few months--and tbh my main blog might be too, depending on how thoroughly I can edit 7 years worth of shit.

What next?

I’m keeping FuckNoTVTropes up for a little bit longer just in case anyone wants to screenshot their favorite old posts. Don’t bother reblogging any because this site’s gonna go the way of MySpace in like a month anyway.

Eventually, my novel will be published and anyone who followed this blog and coincidentally reads the book might realize that the blog and the book were written by the same person. It’s far more likely that no one will find out the connection. Not to get philosophical, but that’s the way of the internet. You meet people, they log off, and you have no way of knowing what happens to them. Buuut maybe someone, somewhere will be able to piece the puzzle together about my true identity and if that happens I’ll say “...There was probably something better you coulda been doing with your time.”

Love,

Blerg.

For those not in the know: Matthew Shepard was a gay teen who was murdered in Laramie, Wyoming in 1998. Shepard met Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson outside of a bar and the two offered him a ride. The men then tortured Shepard–including, yes, pistol whipping him–and left him for dead, tied to a fence by the side of the road.

The defense argued that McKinney and Henderson just wanted to rob him and only murdered him because Shepard made a pass at them, otherwise known as the “gay panic defense.” This defense is still used today, but mostly in relation to the murders of trans women. Both men were given two life sentences, because fuck them. Effort was made to turn gay bashing into a hate crime, but it was for naught for a very long time. Clinton put effort into it but failed, Bush actively fought against it, and Obama finally put it into law.

Matthew Shepard’s story is the reason I have trust issues and fear holding my boyfriend’s hand in public.

Tail end. Lol.

It’s not hideous, but it’s not pretty either. It could use a lot of work. I appreciate how it has a more Wikia-format, but it’s got a very narrow window for actual content. The drivel at the right takes up way too much screen space. Is You Know That Show... really important enough to justify its placement there?

The trope pages themselves seem largely unaffected. When I frequented TVTropes (about two formats ago, I believe), the “hub” was at the left and the content was at the right. It’s just flipped, so, you know, big whoop. Still, like I said, I feel like the sidebars could be significantly smaller.

every indie dev """inspired""" by dark souls: holy FUCK [scambles to add a generic cthulhu to their next early access patch]

I mean, I guess it’s less weird that old guys in the Anime News Network forums who always have to sign every post with their full name using Lucky Star or Love Live avatar

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Using your own photo is better that than a pony. Although the signing their posts thing is kinda weird. I’m glad we’ve evolved away form using forum signatures. Could you imagine if we used signatures on Tumblr?

Aiyah.

Most of the entries on “Anvilicious” are apt. Things like Reefer Madness and The Happening, for example, are about as subtle as skywriting. “Anvilicious” comes with the connotation of not just having a moral, but writing it poorly. Outright stating the moral several times, using strawmen with opposing opinions as antagonists, etc. Most disaster movies try to hammer in “Man is hurting nature!” without having the writing chops to make it, you know, good. Often times, though, they decide that having any theme at all is “Anvilicious.”

You know what a story without a theme is? Pointless. Or porn. Rarely does porn have an underlying message. Sometimes, even actually subtle themes and morals get added to the page. One half-joking line from X2 and suddenly it’s “We get it, they’re all gay, geez.”

I would have said something Evangelion-related a few months ago, but someone brought this piece of trash to my attention.

Well we all know that it’s impossible for a woman to hate a man for any other reason besides being a tsundere, right? Totally.