Hey everybody!
Welcome back to Tanner's Books and Beyond.
How's everybody's DiverseAThon going?
I don't actually know when I'll be able to edit and upload this so it's entirely possible
that by the time you see it your DiverseAThon has finished! *laughs* Um, I was planning
on doing a DiverseAThon halftime report to just update on how things are going, but partly
because of the fact I haven't had a lot of time (I don't even know how much time I have
to film this) and partly because of the fact that there's been stuff happening this week
that I haven't had as much time to read as I hoped, I haven't been reading as many books
as I thought I'd be able to in this time.
So, instead, I'm gonna talk about something almost totally different: I'm gonna talk to
you guys about TV Tropes.
Don't worry, this is actually sort of relevant.
For those of you who've never heard of it - I highly doubt that has happened - BUT.
If you've never heard of TV Tropes, basically it is sort of a Wiki that catalogues narrative
devices, or "tropes".
So it will list a trope, for example, the "Straight Gay" character, a character who
is gay but they have no stereotypical gay mannerisms.
They will have that trope page and they will have a list of all of the works that have
examples of this; and then on the works page, you can click on the works page and go to
that work and it has a list of all the narrative devices that that work uses.
I know a lot of people take umbrage with it just because they don't like the obsessive
categorizing and parsing down all works into their basic parts.
I like it because it fulfills my need of obsessive list-making *laughs*.
Another reason I like it is because it's - like any Wiki, if you go on TV Tropes you're gonna
be on there for about a year the first time you go on there.
It is like a pit...made of smaller pits.
For example let's say you go in there and, just out of curiosity, you say "I wanna look
at examples of lesbians in anime that were turned into cousins in America" (because we
all know that's a thing) and so you go on there and you're like "Oh yeah, here's Sailor
Moon, and here's this other show called Utena, I've never heard of Utena" and you go check
on Utena, you're looking at their tropes and then you're like "oh!
Car Motifs! That's interesting!
I have actually thought of shows with motifs surrounding cars and vehicles.
I wonder if the show I'm thinking of is on that page".
And then you go there and you look at that page, and you find something else, and you
find something else, and you keep on going - after the first hour you're dehydrated,
you're shaking, and you have 1800 tabs open on your web browser because you are just falling
into this rabbit hole, this maze of works and tropes and narratives and plots and stuff like that.
Anyways, the reason I bring this up is because there have been quite a few times where I'm
going through TV Tropes and I stumble upon a book that I've never heard of before.
Maybe it came out twenty years ago, maybe it just came out this last year and somebody
put a page up for it just because they really liked it.
And so I'll stumble onto these things I've never heard of before and it'll tickle my
fancy, and I'll put it on my wishlist.
The thing is though, this has hardly ever happened with diverse books.
See the other thing I do is once I complete a work I go look at its TV Tropes page, but
quite often when I finish my diverse books I'll go check on it on TV Tropes and it doesn't
have a page!
It's honestly not that surprising, it does kinda go hand-in-hand with the fact that diverse
books themselves are undersold and under advertised, and underrepresented in general in the literature world.
So once again, in the spirit of DiverseAThon, it is up to us to promote this stuff.
So I'm just thinking that one of the ways that I and plenty of other people out there
could promote these diverse books is to help make Tv Tropes pages for them.
And it's really not that hard.
There's plenty of templates out on the website, I mean, you could even just find a book that
you like and follow the template that it has on its page.
It's free to edit, you can make an account but there's like - it's just a password and
username, you don't have to get vetted or anything.
There's no such thing as notability, so the book doesn't have to be like a Stonewall Honours
Award Winner, it can just be any book that you stumble across that you thought was cute.
You go in, you find some tropes that you're familiar with, that you recognize from reading
the book, you put those on the page, and then you take the book and you put those on the tropes page.
Slowly but surely you're able to insert the book into the tangled web of Tv Tropes, and
you ingratiate it into that entire network of stuff, you make it part of the rabbit hole
that people fall down when they're looking at stuff.
And I know it's not a huge thing, I'm not saying "aw, we need to, we need to get on
this right now, we need to put all of our resources towards this", no, this is, this
is something that you kinda just do casually when you feel like bringing it into the world,
but this is - again, it's another thing that helps promote the book, it helps draw more
people into it's...sphere of influence, guess.
And yeah, I'm probably putting more stock in this than it's worth, but my line of thinking
is that it's more exposure.
If even just one kid is scrolling through Tv Tropes and they're able to happen upon
a book that resonates with them, that contains characters that they've never been able to
find before in literature, and then because of Tv Tropes, because this book had a page,
they're able to discover it, then - everything.
The whole thing is worth it.
So that's all I wanted to say, just a little, y'know, idea I had.
I know I'm going to slowly but surely start going through the diverse books I have, the
ones I've read, and also keep track of them when I am reading them, just try and catalogue
the tropes that I can, make pages for what I can and when I get the chance to, because
like I said, it's the exposure, and any little amount of exposure is gonna help these books,
so...I'll probably go start seeing if I can find stuff for those books now, and until
next time I'll see you all *snap* later!
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