The Iconic TV Website Created Because Of Buffy The Vampire Slayer
If you watch enough television, you eventually discover TVTropes, the website that exists to catalog various tropes across different types of media. The site has become an amazing informational resource, and it’s fair to say that it has completely changed how general audiences understand and talk about the media they consume. However, what even some of the site’s biggest fans don’t realize is that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was originally TVTropes’ sole focus and the reason it exists.
Fast Eddie, Gus, And Janitor Changed The Game
Just how the heck did Buffy create TVTropes? Weirdly enough, this story goes all the way back to the ‘70s, when three students met each other at MIT. These students (known to TVTropes fans by their handles Fast Eddie, Gus, and Janitor) initially bonded over their love of the old-school RPG Traveller, and they stayed in touch over the years, something made easier by the advent of the internet.
Before either Buffy or TVTropes existed, the group liked to talk about various TV shows over on Salon.com (hey, it was the 90s, man). Once Buffy came out, the three friends were part of a larger group that, in Fast Eddie’s words, “would go on these rampages about Buffy.” Other Salon users found these discussions more than a bit annoying, so these future TVTropes founders and their group migrated to a Buffy fan site, Buffistas.
Bloviating About Buffy Led To TVTropes’ Creation
Now, these three and other fans of the Slayer could talk about their favorite show as much as they wanted, and a specialized vocabulary soon developed.
Everyone on the site was very familiar with a series of tropes from literature and other sources … for example, they would discuss how an episode of Buffy or Angel employed the “damsel in distress” trope as a conversational shorthand.
Eventually, they began wondering if there was any website that had a comprehensive list of the tropes, themes, and various genre conventions they constantly dished about and were surprised to discover that no such site existed.
Humble Beginnings To Widespread Use
Deciding to be the change they wanted to see in the world, these Buffy super-fans developed TVTropes, but it started as nothing more than a PC in Fast Eddie’s basement. But as Eddie himself said, “after we were featured on Boing Boing, we had to expand fast.” Since then, the site has waxed and waned in popularity, going from having 40,000 users in 2010 to about 16,000 at the present time.
An Invaluable Tool For Aspiring Filmmakers
While some of its shine may be lost and its focus extended way past Buffy the Vampire Slayer, TVTropes has changed the landscape of how we discuss and even create multimedia content. The site has been around long enough that we now have professional screenwriters who grew up using it to understand various storytelling tropes. Cynically, that might explain why so many Marvel projects feel cut from the same cloth, but Fast Eddie himself takes a more philosophical influence on how good creators can use old tropes to effectively platform new ideas.
Taking Tropes To The Next Level
Eddie once described how audience familiarity with various tropes can be used “to capture people’s attention,” and only then do creators “Have the opportunity to extend your viewpoint and offer up what you’re trying to say.”
The key, he says, is to “get their attention with something familiar, so they’re not struggling to figure out what’s going on.” With this philosophy, it’s only fitting that Buffy inspired TV Tropes…after all, this is a show that first became a pop culture phenomenon by luring us in with familiar horror tropes and then subverting them in the best possible way.
