I Think It's Time I Walked Quietly Away from TVTropes

[Bob Schroeck]

I just received an interesting email last night about conditions over at TVTropes. With the sender's permission, I'm reproducing it here:

First off, just wanted to say I've always loved your "Drunkard's Walk" storyverse.

Seriously, it is still one of the best fanfictions I've ever read.

Anyway, as for TV Tropes, you were right to leave. I'm still there (but I'm about to walk myself), and IT GOT WORSE.

Page deletions are getting ridiculous, you can get called a troll for protesting the littlest things (and you have no idea how much you have to kiss up to the moderators to get away with even a little protest), there is an Orwellian order out now that if trope page goes down, it (and any references) did not exist, they never existed.

Also, most of the P5 is filled with gleeful deletionists who practicality brag about their newfound power to strike down stuff they don't like, and they have an insane bias of favoring Western works over Japanese works, with some pretty tasteless, tawdry Western works getting immediate safe harbor while banning pages on anime licensed in the US they feel is pedo pandering left and right.

I'll spare you the rest of the horrible details, but you were right to leave when you did, and to be honest, it's so bad I rarely edit anything and I'm frankly terrified to make any new pages (if it's remotely objectionable by their current draconian standards, it will wind up on the funeral pyre they call the "Content Violation Report" and castigated to the pit).

Anyway, I'm sorry for the gross disrespect you've suffered, and, one disgruntled troper to another, I'm sorry for what you had to go through.

P.S. - Honestly, after reading your forum, I'd love to see an alternative to TV Tropes, because the version that exists now was born out of George Orwell's night terrors.

If this is an accurate account -- and I have no reason to believe it isn't -- perhaps we should warn writers in other anime fanfic venues that they may want to try to ask TVT to take down pages or citations to their fics before they get smeared with the "pedophile" label by the xenophobes on the P5. After all, the moderator in the ATT thread rather smugly declared that they would respond to requests. If they weren't just lying outright, an email to Fast Eddie should be sufficient. And Fast Eddie's email address at TVTropes.org is pretty obvious.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.