Wait, who are you? I'll pick whoever TNO is!

AwesomeCoolCat

sweet, dude...

hee hee hee 

Sarcastic? Noooooo... just kidding! Don't worry, M.W, I was being sarcastic too! Don't worry everybody, Honeylovetootsiepop here does NOT (NOT) like Warriors! That is why Honeylovetootsiepop is Honeylovetootsiepop and not a name like "Earthstar" (if anybody is actually named that, no offense!).

Virtual Hugs,

Honeylovetootsiepop

TV Tropes is a site cataloging tropes, which are commonly used devices in fiction (not just TV). They are not cliches, they are fun ideas that can be played with, subverted (Joss Whedon does this a lot, with great success), inverted (i.e., Colour-Coded For Your Convenience, where villains where black and heros wear white; the inverted trope would have the villains in white and the heros where black; the trope could be subverted by having the villain wear, say, pink), or played straight. Tropes can be lampshaded, or pointed out by the characters (i.e., Wash, having been informed that River is psychic, says, "That sounds like something out of science fiction." His wife Zoë replies, "We live on a spaceship, dear." Wash retorts, "So?". Firefly was a science fiction show, so it both lampshaded itself, then subverted the lampshade, then subverted the subversion. As I said, JW is a genius for this kind of thing.)

Applied Phlebotinum is a trope in which a substance, usually either magical, technologically advanced, or a strange thing unknown to science, which acts as a plot device. E.g., Dr. Horrible's Wonderflonium. Superman's kryptonite. X-Men's adamantium. Basically all fantasy and science fiction has Phlebotinum somewhere.

Other tropes include Deliberately Monochrome and Dark is Not Evil (Tim Burton is KING of those two), Right Hand Cat (many villains often carry around a cat, often in some shade of white), Kick the Dog (when a villain attacks or threatens a helpless, loveable character (not necessarily a dog) for no reason, thus establishing that they are evil). The Moral Event Horizon is an action that puts a character, hero or villain, forever past the point of (most) audiences liking them. Ear Worms are songs that stick in your head (Ballad of Jayne! Firefly theme! Every Dr. Horrible song! A Little Priest!), and Lyrical Dissonance is when the lyrics do not fit the tone of the music (Stephen Sondheim's A Little Priest from Sweeney Todd wins this one forever).

TV Tropes are fun. :)