Hear ye hear ye!

I think storytelling is really cool. I think stories are really cool. I appreciate most mediums of storytelling. Narratives help us attempt to understand what it means to be human.

One form of storytelling which I think has not, for the most part received its fair share of artistic streed cred is television. This is, on the whole, due to the fact that television since inception has been incredibly market driven and tailor made for the masses; and the safest way to appeal to the majority of the masses (does that even make sense?) is to appeal to the common denominator. This has made for some really shitty television, considering that we live in a country where the number of designer A&E shirts in one’s closet is more cause to brag than the number of books one has read (I should make note about quality here; this week’s latest self help guru’s over-priced rags doesn’t count as much as, say, Milton’s Paradise Lost.) Still, shows such as MASH, Twin Peaks, and Lost have managed to show us that, yes, quality teleivison programming that doesn’t rely on ham-fisted writing and cheesy over the top zaniness can be done.

Anyway, that was a bit of a sidetrack. The point of this entry is to plug this really cool site I’ve come across, TVTropes.org.

A trope was originally used to describe a particular literary device found in various writings from various books through various ages. Such examples include The Mary Sue, a character of seeming invincibility who seems to have few flaws; the ones that exist existing solely so that he may overcome them (See Harry Potter) and the MacGuffin, A noun that needs to be found but only exists to advance the plot (See the X of Y in every Harry Potter title.)

This website is a pretty good list of tropes, some of my favorites being:

Book Dumb. Its good to know I’m not the only one who noticed that the fact that main characters being portrayed as “Street Smart” are usually on shows aimed to viewers not too likely to be ordering subscriptions to Popular Physics Monthly and more likely to lose their unemployment check in a bathroom at Arby’s.

Pet The Dog. I hate it when this happens, seeing a really cool character, like Dr. House, turn into Kenny the Badass mail clerk.

NGE. And of course, the incredibly accurate and inexplicably extensive Neon Genesis Evangelion article (Veronica Mars only has a quarter of a page but this gets whole sections dedicated to it) which I think gives the Wikipedia Article a good run for its money.

Okay its 11 am and I haven’t slept. You know what that means…BIG AMERICAN PARTY!