troper
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈtɹəʊ.pə/
ipa: /ˈtɹoʊ.pɚ/
Forms: form: tropers
Etymology: From trope + -er.
Senses: synonyms: tropist
glosses: One who tropes.
topics: Christianity
glosses: A book of tropes (phrases or verses added to the Mass when sung by a choir).
examples: text: Since its [TV Tropes’] founding in 2004, more than 42,000 people have volunteered to be “tropers” like Barbara—a mixture of fans, writers, educators and amateur academics smitten by pop culture and accessing their inner Joseph Campbell. […] There’s a section called “Troper Tales,” about the ways tropes have shown up in the tropers’ real lives. […] He [Fast Eddie] thought up the site [TV Tropes] during a discussion on Buffistas.org, a community of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” enthusiasts, a group of whom became the first tropers.
ref: 2010 February 28, Zachary Pincus-Roth, “Feel like you have seen this all before?”, in Los Angeles Times, page D10:
text: Thus, TV Tropes was born, an online encyclopaedia, which allows open collaboration among its contributors (the “tropers”): anyone can add pages, and edit or delete existing ones. Registration is needed for access, but it is free and instant. […] On the site, each trope and each work has its own page: these contain a short description and a list of examples, often with comments and explanations from tropers.
ref: 2012 April, Linda Kata Börzsei, Literary Criticism in New Media: A critical analysis of the website Television Tropes and Idioms and the place of literature in digital culture, Bachelor’s Thesis, Loránd Eötvös University:
text: The main task of “tropers”, the name under which TVTropes contributors self-identify, is to pinpoint tropes, describe them, and match them with creative works. […] Whether a certain recurrent situation amounts to a trope, or not, is often a matter of controversy. This is why TVTropes includes a complex set of guidelines and an online debate area for tropers aiming to pinpoint a specific trope and put it into words: the “Trope Launch Pad”. […] This is also the place to find the trope “a snappy name” and to identify illustrative examples, in collaboration with other tropers.
ref: 2016 September, Cosima Rughiniş, “Citizen science, gallaxies and tropes: Knowledge creation in impromptu crowd science movements”, in 2016 15th RoEduNet Conference: Networking in Education and Research, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, →DOI:
text: Troper Tales was originally a subsection of the TV Tropes website where writers, called tropers, could share their own experiences of the tropes in real life, and which include their opinions on both those experiences and the trope itself. […] [This troper has a decent knowledge of Japanese…] […] Tsundere is actually beginning to enter this troper’s vocabulary. […] This troper suffered this fresh off his trip to Japan when he was still a OldShame failtacular teenager who thought he was cool randomly injecting Japanese swears into conversations.
ref: 2019, Rowan Elizabeth Arbuthnott Gardiner, ‘Weeaboo Japanese’: Exploring English-Japanese Language-Mixing in Online Japanese Popular Culture Fandom, thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Philosophy in Linguistics at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand, pages 21, 52, 53, and 54:
text: Though tropers, as participants call themselves, started off analyzing patterns in television, the site [TV Tropes] now encompasses analysis of works across a wide variety of media, from literature and film to “real life,” which apparently adheres to storytelling conventions often enough to qualify as a medium in its own right. […] Tropers and fridge logicians have their own specialized argot and practices, some of which have made it into the public consciousness. Troper concepts such as lampshading (pointing out an inconsistency before it rises to the attention of others) and gaslighting (denying or subtly altering another’s perception of reality), among many others, emerged in fan analysis but have entered the public discourse. Tropers and fans have long recognized patterns, such as “Bury Your Gays,” or the far disproportionate tendency for gay characters and especially couples to be killed off, and “Stuffed into the Fridge,” or the gruesome murder of female characters for impact on a male character, and their specialist understanding and nomenclature has led to real awareness of, and action on, these issues.
ref: 2021, Patrick Smyth, Negotiated Access: Haccessibility, Autonomy, and Infrastructure in the Age of the Abstraction, dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York, pages 125 and 130–131:
text: Many “tropologists” (as academic scholars in the field call themselves) or “tropers” (as the contributors to TV Tropes call themselves) are interested in understanding tropes and the relations between them in comprehensive and systematic ways. […] The tropers of TV Tropes, on the other hand, are not concerned with limiting the number or determining the order of the tropes archived on the wiki site (nor do they use the term “tropology” much), but they do strive to draw very clear distinctions between the different tropes they document, and to define the relationships between those tropes (such as “super-trope” and “subtrope,” “sister tropes,” and the different ways a trope can be “played”—“straight,” “inverted,” “subverted,” etc.). […] This is an emerging toolkit… and an opportunity to dive a little deeper into the work of exemplary tropers including Kenneth Burke, the TV Tropes community, and Sara Ahmed.
ref: 2022, Esther Grace Witte, Transfigurative Access and Journal-Keeping Practice: Theorizing Anti-Oppressive Rhetorical Scholarship, dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan, page 55:
text: This study explores collaborative authorship in the online wiki TV Tropes, a combination encyclopedia and dictionary of media devices, where wiki editors, or tropers, can work democratically to create new jargon (tropes) for the wiki dictionary. This quantitative study incorporates elements from both computer mediated discourse analysis (Herring, 2004) and digital conversation analysis (Giles, 2015) to analyze tropers' discussions on the Trope Launch Pad, a forum for DMC regarding proposed tropes and their definitions. […] Issues of formatting and clarity are especially salient topics as tropers strive to follow the wiki rules and to produce distinct tropes with precise definitions. […] The Trope Launch Pad and other discussion sections of the TV Tropes wiki provide an untapped data source of DMC on a unique platform where tropers not only catalogue and discuss media topics, but intentionally collaborate to create neologisms that add to the wiki's dictionary and become enduring pieces of TV Tropes⁠' jargon.
ref: 2022 May, Kelly Levans, Collaborative Definitions: An Analysis of Trope-making on the TV Tropes Wiki, thesis (M.A.):
text: As collaborators (known as “tropers”) at TVtropes.org have written, “It’s not entirely clear how sentient she is, but the Scoobies seem a little unnervingly cavalier about how they treat her.”
ref: [2023, Madeline Muntersbjorn, “Dismembering (the) Buffybot”, in Alyson R. Buckman, Juliette C. Kitchens, Katherine A. Troyer, editors, Slaying Is Hell: Essays on Trauma and Memory in the Whedonverse (Sherry Ginn, editor, Worlds of Whedon), McFarland & Company, →ISBN, page 89:
text: Under “Deliberate Values Dissonance,” tropers note, “the filmmakers make a point about the open sexism of the time almost Once per Episode.” […] [W]hile many male characters might be openly sexist to female characters within the storyworld, tropers expect that this explicit sexism does not align with the moral attitudes of the show’s creators.
ref: 2024, Doria Killian, “Defective Detective Meets Sassy Secretary, Plot Ensues: Babylon Berlin, TV Tropes, and Pop Narratology”, in Hester Baer, Jill Suzanne Smith, editors, Babylon Berlin, German Visual Spectacle, and Global Media Culture (Visual Cultures and German Contexts), London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, →ISBN, part 1 (Babylon Berlin, Global Media, and Fan Culture), pages 52–53:
topics: lifestyle
related: word: Troper
glosses: A contributor to the wiki website TV Tropes.
Related terms: tropify
tropable