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Hello and welcome! We like having newcomers around here and hope you'll stay around and contribute. You may not have a choice on that, however. To make things easier for you, here are some tips for navigating our wiki.

There are several ways to navigate this wiki. You may see a list of all trope pages, browse by Index or use the search bar in the upper-right section of the pageleft. The blue bar with all the links on it just above this space has links to all the major "divisions" into which our content has been divided.

Registering allows your contributions to be credited to you and lets others communicate with you easier through the wiki. Also, there are certain pages that can only be edited by registered users (usually the ones with very contriversial or hot-button topics). We don't require that all participants register, but we like it when they do.

If you should need assistance, please contact an admin.

This wiki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

The original TV Tropes site has this, written right on the front page: "We are not Wikipedia. We're a buttload more informal. We encourage breezy language and original thought." That's a great concept in theory, and its one that we try to live up to here on the Mirror. Unfortunately, the original TV Tropes wiki has, historically, failed to live up to this glorious ideal in a number of ways.

The moderation is heavy-handed and arbitrary. Pages are permanently deleted, renamed, reclassified, or heavily edited without real reason. Users are often permanently banned arbitrarily, often for expressing unpopular opinions and not because they are breaking the rules. All on a wiki that is supposedly built on "consensus building" and "the will of the tropers."

Granted, it's their site and they can run it any way they want, but when your guide-words are supposedly "we're not Wikipedia" and that you "encourage breezy language", it sort of behooves you to not act like the Wikipedia moderators act, and to actually encourage the less casual atmosphere.

As with the original site, this wiki is a catalog of "the tricks of the trade for writing fiction". Tropes are, as noted elsewhere, literary devices that writers rely upon to get common images and ideas across. They are things the audience already recognizes, even if they don't know they recognize them. They aren't necessarily cliche's, though they can be used as such sometimes. And we exist, like the site we are mirroring, to present those tropes in an entertaining and fun manner.

Welcome aboard!

Wikis are open to editing from all sides, which makes them self-correcting. For the most part (Trolls aside), people want to maintain a peaceful environment. This means that anything that rubs a little too harshly will be wiped away.

While this wiki is built upon being relaxed and carefree, it is still not a forum, and there are no soapboxes for you to stand on. We aren't interested in your personal vendettas, and will not play host for your internet war, whether you're importing it from somewhere else, or using us as a platform to make attacks against someone.

When something is posted that stands firmly on one side of a hot-button debate (political bickering being the huge one, followed closely by religion, with interpretations of Mind Screws running a close third), the editing machine will grind it back down or even kill it outright. If your example was outright deleted instead of whittled away, maybe there is another method of getting your point across without stepping on anyone's toes. Wording is everything.

It goes both ways, too: please do not use the The Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgement as an excuse to remove a viewpoint that merely goes against your personal beliefs. Again, this is not a forum, and you don't get to use this Wiki as a platform to spread your own agenda.

See also Notes on Editing Pages. Contrast with Internet Backdraft and Ban on Politics.

However, let no one be fooled into thinking that "no arbitrary moderation" means "no moderation at all." People who come a-trolling, and who vandalize pages will be blocked. People who start flame wars with other users will be blocked. People who import their own internet wars (or use us as a platform to export one) will be blocked. These are not arbitrary decisions, but are in line with the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment (see above).

In addition, just because we're freer and less uptight than the original wiki does not mean that there are some pages we simply don't want on our wiki. There is a Permanent Red Link Club on this wiki, simply because some pages are so controversial or trouble-worthy that they simply aren't worth having.

So, keep that in mind: we're not an anarchy... we have rules... we're just not arbitrary in our rules enforcement.

"If the Mirror Wiki is trying to catalog works, then the anime-bashing seems rather counterproductive." -- Silver2195, The TV Tropes forum discussion of the Mirror Wiki

Word is that we here at the Tropes Mirror hate Anime. This is why, so says the rumor, that we don't categorize Anime as its own special form of media like the original TV Tropes does. Apparenty our decision to treat Anime in the very same way the Japanese themselves treat Anime (that is, as if it were just another kind of Animation, and thus categorized as Animation), is "bashing" Anime.

We are not bashing Anime. We're just not treating it like it was (as Tyler Durden once said) "a beautiful or unique snowflake." They're just cartoons, and so we treat them like cartoons.

Secondly, no one here hates Anime. Admin Jack Butler, about whom this accusation is leveled most often, is actually a huge fan of the Gundam series, Ghost in the Shell, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Cowboy Bebop among others. He isn't an Anime fan boy, and does not succumb to the Fan Myopia that a lot of Anime fen succumb to, but by no means is he an Anime hater.

And labelling him, and by exension the rest of the Mirror Wiki, as "Anime bashers", thus is very inaccurate.

Once again, we don't hate Anime. We just have a realistic opinion of it: Anime is just cartoons from Japan, guys. Some are good (and some are very, very good), while others are bad (and some are very, very bad)... just like every other kind of cartoon.