“Bella was such a Mary Sue!” my teenager said in disgust after she got home from seeing the movie Twilight.
“Mary Sue?”
“Yeah, you know, she was like this little too perfect girl. Talk about epic fail!” she replied heading upstairs. “I promised my cosplay group I’d IM them when I got back and talk more about it.”
I’ve long since resigned myself to not understanding the vagaries of teenage communication (a definite sign that my own youth is long behind me), but the term had me curious … so I Googled it, and stumbled on a gold mine.
One of the first entries to pop up was a rather curiously named site called TV Tropes (http://www.tvtropes.org), which included a page specifically about Mary Sues:
The name “Mary Sue” comes from the 1974 Star Trek fanfic “A Trekkie’s Tale”. Originally written as a parody of the standard Self Insert Fic of the time (as opposed to any particular traits), the name was quickly adopted by the Star Trek fanfiction community. Its original meaning mostly held that it was an Always Female Author Avatar, regardless of character role or perceived quality. Often, said characters would get in a relationship with either Kirk or Spock, turn out to have a familial bond with a crew member, be a Half Human Hybrid masquerading as a human, and/or die in a graceful, beautiful way to reinforce that the character was Too Good For This Sinful Earth. Even back then, there wasn’t a total consensus on what was or wasn’t Mary Sue, since it’s not always immediately obvious which character is an Author Avatar. As this essay reveals, suspiciously Mary Sue-like characters were noted in subscriber-submitted articles for 19th-century childrens’ magazines, making this trope Older Than You Think.
The prototypical Mary Sue is an original female character in a fanfic who obviously serves as an idealized version of the author mainly for the purpose of Wish Fulfillment. She’s exotically beautiful, often having an unusual hair or eye color, and has a similarly cool and exotic name. She’s exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas, and may possess skills that are rare or nonexistent in the canon setting. She also lacks any realistic, or at least story-relevant, character flaws — either that or her “flaws” are obviously meant to be endearing. She has an unusual and dramatic Back Story. The canon protagonists are all overwhelmed with admiration for her beauty, wit, courage and other virtues, and are quick to adopt her into their nakama, even characters who are usually antisocial and untrusting; if any character doesn’t love her, that character gets an extremely unsympathetic portrayal…
While I was rather surprised (though in retrospect not that surprised) to see serious analysis of character depth and plot by my eldest, I was also intrigued by the site itself. A trope is … a literary convention, not quite a cliche but more like an identifiable character type, scenario or quality that’s common enough to be readily identifiable. In programming terms, a trope would be a design pattern, a configuration in a story that seems to recur in fiction.
By its name and structure, TV Trope likely started out as a way for fans to analyze Japanese anime, but over time, fans from other media and genres * – movies, tv shows, comics, and yes, even books – added their two cents worth, using a fairly standard Wiki platform (pmwiki in this case). As this evolved, what emerged was something that should be recognizable to anyone who’s dealt with ontologies. Every page is either a description of a trope of some sort with examples, a resource (anime, book, comic, etc.) that exemplifies one or more tropes, or a cross reference page that categorize tropes as sub-tropes of other tropes, and of course each of these tropes or resources are hyperlink referenced. Given that there appear to be thousands of entries, TV Tropes makes for a rather spectacular connected data web.
* [Author’s Note: As several Tropers have point out below in the comments – TV Tropes actually began (reasonably enough) as a Buffy the Vampire Slayer board – the positioning of Anime first had to do with alphabetical order solely.]
Navigating through this space can easily eat up hours of your time, especially as you discover the subtle (and not so subtle) nuances that tend to hide behind out literary conventions. For instance, the “villain” trope is in fact a super-trope that can be subdivided into such characters as the Amoral Attorney, Bad Santa, Blondes Are Evil, Evil Minion, and one of my favorite, the Magnificent Bastard. Evil Minions, moreover, subdivides even further into such lovable characters as Punch Clock Villains (“Hey, it beats slinging hamburgers!”), Gas Mask Mooks (think Imperial Stormtroopers), and Middle Management Mooks (Imperial Stormtroopers in Brooks Brother Suits). Or there’s this example from Ralph Bakshi’s film Wizards:
Max: Fritz, get up for God’s sake! Get up! They’ve killed Fritz! They’ve killed Fritz! (Draws gun) Those lousy, stinking yellow fairies! Those horrible atrocity-filled vermin! Those despicable animal warmongers! They’ve killed Fritz! (starts shooting off-screen) Take that! Take that! (Fritz gets up) Take that, you green slime! You black-hearted, sharp, bow-legged-
Fritz: Max, Max, I’m okay. I’m okay, Max. Just a scratch; look, I’m all right.
Max: Oh. Oh, damn. There you go again, stepping on my lines, raining on my parade, costing me medals. Oh, damn. (Gun misfires, killing Fritz) Ooh. Oh, Fritz?
Tropes and Linked Data
While fascinating from a cultural standpoint, TV Tropes is in its way as significant from a Linked Data standpoint. The concept of Linked Data was first articulated by Tim Berners-Lee in a paper from 2006, Design Issues: Linked Data, in which he outlined four principles concerning the development of Linked Data:
He later gave a formal presentation about Linked Data at the TED 2009 Conference, citing it as a necessary precursor to the rise of the Semantic Web.
While many people in the Semantic Web community tend to see Linked Data in terms of RDF, TV Tropes actually represents all four of these principles to a surprising degree:
The vision that Tim Berners-Lee set out is perhaps a bit at odds with the current layout of the web, though if you look specifically at the rise of RESTful URLs, in which a given URL has a clear association with a resource (or resource collection, which can also be a resource), you can see that they have the same characteristic. Specifically, part of the URL serves much the same purpose as a namespace identifying a classification scheme or ontology, with the individual terms following that portion of the namespace identifying specific resources within the space. This association between resource and unique name is a critical part of the concept of Linked Data.
Admittedly, this is true of any encyclopedic work – an encyclopedia by its very nature is essentially a linked data namespace, with each article title being a specific term in that namespace and each cross-reference being typically either a link to another article in the encyclopedia (the ontology) or a citation to an external resource. However, its also worth noting in TV Tropes that there is an implicit (though not necessarily code visible) additional layer – most cross-references also contain some formal relationship. For instance, Bella from Twilight is a Mary Sue actually defines two distinct relationships – Bella is contained within the Twilight entry, and Bella has a link to the Mary Sue entry in an isA relationship. In many cases tropes are identified as being “similar to” other tropes or being the “opposite of” another Trope (such as a Red Shirt (a VERY expendable good guy minor character) being the opposite of a Mook). Additionally, there are instances where a Trope becomes subverted (the Red Shirt actually manages to survive the evil death ray and becomes a more fleshed out character in the process).
These relationships lay at the heart of the Semantic Web, because they define the relationship between terms, or between terms and resources, which opens up some interesting avenues for exploration. In a given Trope Term page, the term itself establishes a context, and all other links on the page to the same namespace then have either implicitly or explicitly defined relationships that could be read by a spider, or even encoded directly by authors in those cases where the relationship isn’t obvious. For instance, most links to other tropes will be “Similar To” type links, but being able to add markup for indicating inversion or subversion of a trope would make building an RDF link-base from either the page or the overall site much easier (although even here, the specific use of RDF isn’t necessarily required).
The overall link database, in whatever form, can then be used to see related relationships graphically, to “deconstruct” a given story based upon its underlying tropes, or even use it to generate story ideas directly. TV Tropes already does this to a limited extent, providing “toys” that will let you pull in plot, characters, settings, narrative devices and so forth to build a prototype story, or that will let you put together the perfect elevator pitch the next time you’re in Hollywood. These are fairly crude, but its not hard to see how combining this with RDF/OWL capabilities could open up a whole new avenue for writers to sketch out that next new story or screenplay.
Lessons for a Semanticist
There are a few lessons that Semantic Web proponents can take away from sites such as TV Tropes:
Don’t be too quick to dismiss this type of thinking as being only appropriate for Wikis. Most sites’ navigational structures can be reconceived in terms of ontologies of “described” terms and correlative links, something that is well known to long-time users of Drupal, Joomla or other “community management systems” as well as wikis. It requires a change in the way that you approach web design, moving away from a mode based primarily on layout and towards one more built around concepts, but this shift in thinking comes with a number of benefits … especially when your site exceeds a threshold of a couple of dozen pages or so:
There are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of sites like TV Tropes on the web, representing islands of linked data that should be seen as necessary precursors to full-blown semantic webs. The challenge increasingly is to recognize these sites for what they are and to understand that knowledge (and innovation) frequently comes when such islands come in contact with one another. So, whether your interest in the Semantic Web is a Mission From God or simply a Geeky Turn-on, the combination of community driven ontologies and linked data can results in a truly Crowning Moment of Awesome.
Kurt Cagle is the Managing Editor of XMLToday.org. He can also be followed on Twitter.
Comments
Thanks
Thanks for informative post
Just a short note
An interesting write up on TV Tropes, from a perspective I’ve not seen it looked at from before. Well written.
Let me just point out a minor annoyance: the name of the last trope you link is Crowning Moment of Awesome rather than Crowning Moment of Awesomeness. The link is in fact directed to an empty page, which is a pity, since the intended page offers many examples of what you have been talking about, as well as several really cool things in general.
Fixed
Thank you for saving me from this particular Epic Fail.
Confirmation
Just as a point of reference, I am the anime fan referenced above. When I discovered the Tropes wiki shortly after its creation several years ago it had a dummy page in place for anime tropes, which I took it upon myself to actually implement. It has since gotten somewhat away from me, and I merely stand back and watch in wonder as it runs rampant.
That said, I find your analysis of the Wiki (and wikis in general) in terms of the Semantic Web to be intriguing and insightful. I will note, though, that taxonomy has always been one of the problems of the TVTropes Wiki, more so at the beginning of its life than now. Early on, deciding if something were a trope (as we used the term then), a device or something else entirely was a problem if one weren’t exactly clear on how the subject interacted with the context in which it “lived”. As the Wiki grew, examples and organizational structures accumulated, grew, were split apart and reorganized, and eventually settled down into a system that I think now helps the contributor figure out just how what he wants to add fits in. The process, though, is very dynamic and occasionally counter-intuitive — it has a lot of “two-steps-forward-one-step-back” to it, with intermediate stages of greater chaos that are necessary for the eventual growth of even greater order. I suggest that anyone using wikis as a model for a larger structure be prepared to understand, accept, and allow for what might appear at first glance to be systemic breakdowns, but which are actually the midpoints of reorganizations.
I believe the site was
I believe the site was originally started by some Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans. The reason anime examples usually come first is simply because “anime” starts with an “A.” It also attracted an anime fan or two very early on who had willingness and ability to make a fairly extensive Anime Tropes directory from scratch. Wikipedia’s article on TV Tropes had a link to a summary of the site’s history, but that article was deleted for — you guess it — non-notability.
And EVERYONE likes Magnificent Bastard. So much that there’s a big problem with people shoehorning their favorite character in and gushing about him/her. Just look at the picture.
We are also one of the only sites on the Web to have a page on guns that shoot bees.
One quibble
Howdy, I found this article when someone linked to it on the TV Tropes forum. Pretty cool writeup.
My only complaint is that the site didn’t come from the anime fandom, but from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom. Because Buffy, and its main writer, Joss Whedon was remarkably Genre Savvy and delighted in playing with the audience’s expectations.
The preponderance of anime on the site is due to the fact that most of the regular users are young nerds. And anime examples are listed first on most trope pages because there’s an unofficial policy to arrange the media types alphabetically.