Crisis

If Episode 25 of Death Note helped me sort of realize why we do art and made me believe in theater and art again, then...

TVTropes made me sort of realize that art is pointless.

Backing up:
It's surprising that I made it this long without visiting TVTropes. It's just the sort of website that, had I discovered it at a different time, I would have worshiped. From my limited knowledge of the beast, it is a website that is dedicated to naming and cataloging each and every trope that appears in every single book, film, television series, manga, comic, game, etc. It is an excellent resource, and because it grew from the very stuff it was made to analyze, TVTropes is also quite clever in the realm of inappropriate pop culture references. (Example: the "Holy Hand Grenade" trope is used to describe any occurrence of a force of good committing horrific and violent mayhem. Hilarious.)

I was warned upon first visiting the site - TVTropes can be EXTREMELY overwhelming. My first visit was a mere 30 minutes (laughably low), and I still emerged shaking and questioning the nature of art and fandom (See: above. See also: this blog post.) When I arrived, I casually navigated to the Death Note page (being my fandom of choice at this moment, I thought, why not?) and by the time I left, each and every delightful plot device and fascinating character had been broken down into a series of unintelligible labels that they shared with countless other series, films, and games (countless = hundreds). The Abandoned Warehouse is meaningless, all character complexity has been reduced into "Alternate Character Interpretation", the note itself is an "Article of Death", and nearly all of the most exciting narrative moments have been weighed, measured, and found lacking:

Actually I Am Him
Adrenaline Time
Alone With the Psycho
And I Must Scream

This is all before we reach the Bs.

Battle Butler: (Watari)

Most of my friends know that when I decide to like something, I tend to go overboard. Every waking moment is spent thinking about it, if I am not otherwise completely engaged. This is how I end up saying things like "equivalent exchange" at work. See: both of my Gollum cardboard cutouts, my L t-shirt, my Harry Potter bed sheets. (I know, I know. Merch does not a hardcore fangirl make. But it helps.) See also: the stash of fanfictions behind my bookshelf. Some of them written by me. My nickname in middle school was Gollum Girl. It is all too easy - and all too fun - to

But lately, I don't think I want the nerd to outmatch the nerd. I don't want obsessive love for the item in question (LOTR, Doctor Who, Death Note) to eventually overshadow and nullify the beauty of the thing itself. I don't want to fall more in love with the L of countless fanfictions than with the simple, elegant, very, very limited actions of the original. I don't want the most profound images to be rendered meaningless by a six-hour marathon of shoddy AMVs.

In my drama classes, I've always thought of myself as a really good audience member, but not as a good artist. I love to watch the work of my classmates, but I have difficulty isolating the smaller components that make it what it is.

Once we dissect a thing until its particles are all tiny enough to be generalized, cataloged, and labeled, we begin to lose the ability to appreciate it for its beautiful, divine, mysterious self. I think that's what I'm saying today.

Problems I have with this post:
Am I advocating a mistrust of progress?
Am I contradicting my previous post about how awesome fanart is?
Is all art eventually going to be troped and sorted before anyone can experience it?