All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XVII

[Bob Schroeck]

I think I've just stumbled over a non-existent work that's represented on the wiki only as a set of examples that have slipped under the radar since before the fork. There are a goodly number of pages that cite a manga or anime allegedly called "Animerica" which does not appear to be the magazine. For example, this item from the trope "Virgin Power":

* Janine from Animerica truly believes that [[True Love's Kiss|kissing is the ultimate form of showing one's true love for another...]] {{spoiler|Too bad she gets raped by the [[Big Bad]] afterwards...}}

And the very first example on "Hair of Gold" is

Janine from ''Animerica'' symbolizes this in the purest form imaginable, making her a direct contrast not just to her [[Love Interest]], but to the black-haired Lita and the red-headed Malin. In fact, just about every blonde (except for Takuya and Shirogane) in the series symbolizes this.

And "Took a Level in Badass/Anime and Manga" has paragraphs of text.

I got curious (because I knew about the magazine and I was thinking of the need for a disambiguation page) so I did some googling. In particular, I searched on the title and six character names from the various examples I found ("janine", "makoto", "takuya", "shirogane", "ron" and "malin") -- and Google doesn't even return any false positives. It gave me one of the very few "I got nothin'" pages I've ever seen. Without the title I get a random assortment of obvious no-starters. The closest I got to a "real" hit was a thread on a board called "Ancient Land of Ys" from 2009 complaining about finding references to "Animerica" on TV Tropes but not being able to find it when they went to look for it.

It goes without saying that Wikipedia also knows absolutely nothing about a work of this name.

I did note that Wikipedia had a page for a companion magazine to Animerica called Animerica Extra, which ran shojo manga during its brief (1998-2004) lifespan, and the only thing I can think of (at least for a non-hoax) is that some very stupid person thought that all the individual stories it carried were one huge work called "Animerica" and wrote them up accordingly? Except some of the character names and plot points in the examples still don't match the dozen or so stories Wikipedia says were carried (including Fushigi Yuugi, Utena, Maison Ikkoku and X/1999).

I'm calling this a bogus work and I plan to hunt down the examples and remove them unless someone can show me a real work that matches them.