Dream Tropes Wiki/Doorstopper

Template:Trope
A common literary term that refers to a book being so thick and heavy that it can be used as a doorstopper. Or a literary weapon. Or a substitute for barbells. Or a method with which to give an orthopedist a job. While it is likely to be used in a spirit of derision, as it evokes the idea of Padding in spades, there are also many fine books that could technically stop a door or kill a man in a pinch.

Proper Doorstoppers (also known as Tree Killers) should be over 500 pages. If one book is over 1,000 pages, it is probably a Doorstopper. This goes double if the typeface is smaller than 10 point.

When talking about a "doorstopper series", the series in question is likely to involve great battles between good and evil, a Chosen One and mysterious jewelry. It is a doorstopper series if, and only if, every actual book in the series is a Doorstopper.

Oftentimes, publishers will turn an ordinary trilogy, tetralogy, or series into one huge book. The result is not always a Doorstopper but it is an "Omnibus", and the biggest ones can still be used to stop doors, press flowers, act as fake gold in a bank robbery, or crush small children. These are sometimes for the convenience of fans of the series. Other times, with very long series or ones where the order almost doesn't matter, it's to sell volumes that don't sell anywhere near as well as the most popular books in the series. Conversely, a publisher might avoid releasing an intimidating doorstopper by having the book Divided for Publication.

If there's any chance that a doorstopper can be adapted into film, they could either be condensed or split if the content could not be fitted into two or three hours.

Can and will cause massive muscle fatigue when reading while holding the book in your hands. Can also cause the written text to disappear into the centerfold — or the book itself to rip apart halfway through reading!

Technology Marches On, and these days, a doorstopper can still be really, really long, but all fits neatly on your comparatively light and small smartphone or favorite e-reader. Keep in mind how lucky we are today compared to the 20th century and before, when bookworms had to decide if they really wanted to lug the doorstopper of a book they were really enjoying with them on the bus to work.

The Visual Novel genre of Video Games and any video games that use this trope has taken this to an art form. These games can have upwards of 70+ straight hours of reading (around double the length of an average game, which is 25–40 hours) being unusually common for the high-profile games.

When a character takes this trope a little too literally, see Useful Book. Extremely useful if one wishes to Throw the Book at Them.

And what's a doorstopper without Loads and Loads of Characters? Of both types.

A doorstopper can incite a case of Archive Panic with one single volume.

## Real Life

* The El TV Kadsre Book is a complete guide to everything ever produced by El TV Kadsre and its subsidiaries. At multiple pages per show/episode/movie, plus profiles on the characters, analysis of everything related to ETVK, and complete lists of several mundane details, plus a massive index, the current edition clocks in at thousands of pages long and weighs 5 kilograms. The intro calls it "the biggest, thickest, most-lethal-if-it-were-dropped-on-your-head companion to ETVK yet".