I used to read through it to pass time about 5+ years ago. I just liked seeing the way different things were categorized and referenced, etc. But ultimately it is also Joseph Campbell territory in a lot of ways. The deconstruction of story and narrative into a collection of tropes is ultimately kind of alienating to me from the experience/reception. If you get too wrapped up in IDing tropes while experiencing a narrative, you quickly start to distance yourself from the actual context and depth of that complete narrative/media. That might be helpful if the story is just shoddy tropes stapled together, but it can destroy immersion in a good story too. I guess you could compare it to fan service in a franchise. It's not good storytelling, but it really feels good to all the dorks that ID it. 'I see what they did there' inside joke lols. Another comparison would be stereotyping. Once you have internalized the tropes, it's easy to reflexively do stereotyping of tropes even if they only sort of match up. Much like how an AI trained on racist datasets turns out to be racist. It's just trying to associate what it knows from the data is has been given.

As long as you don't internalize it too much, I don't think it's so bad.

There's this concept that I vaguely recall reading about around the time I used to click around TVT. The theory of database consumption.

translated into English as Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (2009), cultural critic Azuma Hiroki develops a philosophical and historical analysis of contemporary media consumption in Japan https://jmpc-utokyo.com/keyword/database-consumption/

In contrast, Azuma proposes a mode of consumption to gain access to the “database” of elements that make up the work. Particularly among fans of manga, anime, and games, as well as novels featuring manga/anime characters, Azuma highlights a practice of breaking works down in terms of elements, which trigger moe, or an affective response. The elements are often aspects of character design, but they can also be patterned voices and stories. In general, rather than narrative, Azuma argues that what is important today is the database of elements, which can be mixed and remixed to create new works and trigger moe.

There is no need for a grand narrative in this database consumption, or in the consumption of the database of affective elements. The database is, in many ways, a “grand non-narrative”

Consuming databases, not narratives. This is a very different mode of social narrative interaction from classic storytelling in many ways. So TVT is like a meta database of narrative concepts. Which also happens to reinforce this non-narrative analysis of narratives. A story is not a whole anymore, and it becomes instead a collection of connected tropes.