The Other Wiki

There is a vast Wiki that is not Wikipedia; and it describes the greatest achievements of humanity.

The greatest achievements being, of course, contained in works of fiction; where they are not bound by the constraints normally placed upon us.

It’s called TV Tropes, it bills itself as “the all devouring pop-culture wiki”, and I recommend a read if you have too much spare time:

TV Tropes

As the name suggests, the information is organized around “tropes”; themes and patterns in fiction that happen often enough to be worth naming.

But it is also cross-indexed by works; meaning that you can go to the page for a work of fiction that you like, find a list of everything identified as a pattern in it, then from those pages find any work so tangentially connected with the one you like.

You start to see, I think, why a large amount of time might be consumed reading it.

For example, starting from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” we find that Arthur Dent is an example of the Unfazed Everyman trope; and that this links him to Alice, Bilbo Baggins and Rincewind.

Or starting from “Anathem” we find that it holds an example of “Recursive Canon”, in which a story mentions its own existence; and that Sherlock Holmes is an example of the same trope, with Watson well known as the writer and publisher of Sherlock stories.

Starting from “Babylon 5” we find it shows off the “Deal with the Devil” trope, which leads to discovering the numerous examples of said trope in the “Planescape Torment” computer game.

And so on, from work to trope to work, into forever. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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