TVtropes.org’s Treasure and Trash

The indie heritage website is the stuff stories are made of.
Art by Ellis Rosen, courtesy The New Yorker

Last summer, a very bad hardware failure took TVtropes.org—the wiki that catalogues storytelling conventions—offline. After only a few hours, the website’s  users, called tropers, began to worry about the existence of a full backup. “Could it end so suddenly? Just like that?” one wondered. “Would any of us have the determination to rebuild a cultural database from scratch?”

You have reached your article limit

Sign up for a digital subscription and continue reading all new issues, plus our entire archives, for just $1.50/month.

More Reads
Uncategorized

A Poem by Richie Hofmann

Richie Hofmann
Uncategorized

An Interview with Ahmed Naji

Summer Thomad
Uncategorized

David Shapiro Makes Memories Into Objects

Jonathan Lethem
More