Internet dwelling movie and TV nerds have long lauded the genius of TVTropes.org, a massive, usually hilarious database of nearly every recurring cliche found in fiction. The site has all the old school Greek, Shakespearean, and Biblical archetypes, but where TV Tropes really shines is in its multitude of nuanced, previously nameless ideas that you’ve seen a million variations on, most of which have hysterically appropriate names like Shut Up, Hannibal and Beard of Sorrow.

It’s truly a rabbit hole of delightful time-suck, especially when you’re exhaustively searching for one terribly specific trope. Case in point, as I set to work on my review for the Dakota Fanning sci-fi action thriller Push, my first order of business was to summarize the totally effing exhausted cliche that the whole story’s built around. The film is about a cadre of people with psychic powers, who are on the run from the ruthless agents of a facility that wishes to capture, study, and probably kill them. Just like in X-Men, Heroes, Firestarter, and even lesser known super-mutant works like the anime Elfen Lied, Push relies on the age-old platitude that people with special abilities will be hunted and dehumanized. The Man fears that the mutants could use their powers to destroy the world, so they must be contained for the good of the populace. But then again, if The Man could just find a way to harness the mutants’ abilities, then they themselves could use the powers to destroy whomever they choose! Either way, the mutants live in fear of becoming dead lab rats, and The Man thrives on a general fear that the mutants are dangerous, black-magic wielding gypsies, preparing even now to give you the evil eye while they steal your baby.

I wondered what witty little name TV Tropes had for the old Persecuted Super Mutant idea, so I visited the page for X-Men, figuring I would recognize it in the list of related tropes. There was nothing obvious, so I tried Heroes, but to no avail. Soon, I was opening 20 tabs at once, clicking every promising looking idea listed under “See Also” relating to super powers and their social consequences, finding many oft-related plot points. I eventually nailed it, but only after realizing that I could only get at the construct through a combination of What Measure is a Non Human, Fantastic Racism, Super Registration Act, and The Corps Is Mother.

Part of the problem I had in zeroing-in on my goal was probably just that I’m not too smart. TV Tropes doesn’t really tout itself as a complete database of every appearance of every rhetorical device in every work of fiction; appearances are presented as “examples,” not as a comprehensive list. But I think that part of my difficulty was also due to an inherent flaw in trying to the map out movie descriptors — one I should have realized earlier, as the AllMovie staff has spent countless hours in poorly ventilated conference rooms, going over and over AMG’s descriptor tree, organizing Genres, Types, and Themes (in roughly that hierarchical order) as the room slowly empties of oxygen.

The flaw is that the systems pop culture uses to categorize movies are totally arbitrary. For instance, it can seem redundant to add a Theme specifically to describe ridonkulous Rom-Com plots where people mislead each other, like by pretending to be a sarcastic radio show host in The Truth About Cats and Dogs, or going out with a shirtless dude just to research a news article in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. That’s because these plots could technically fit under the existing Theme Cons and Scams — but that would lump them in with examples like The Grifters and The Last Seduction. Obviously, the Rom-Coms and the Thrillers are otherwise distinguished by Genre, Type, and everything else, but when does a stock storyline become stock enough to warrant its own name? Should Werewolves be a Theme, or should Werewolf Movie be a type? Does Monster Movie adequately cover Werewolf Movies? It never ends.

What’s worse is figuring out whether a really slippery term belongs in the category that makes the most sense logically, or the one that makes the most sense colloquially. Case in point: Indie. Literally speaking, the word Indie only describes how a film was produced, right? A movie made without studio support, independently. At AMG, this would take it out of the running for any content oriented classification like Genre or Mood, and place it under Production Style, alongside tags like Made For Cable and Web Series. Except that’s not necessarily what all, or even most users are thinking about when they search for movies based on this descriptor. Indie often denotes a cultural trend, or a certain precious, know-it-when-you-see-it aesthetic. So if we make Indie a Production Style, we lose out on a useful chance to classify titles based on a certain vein that no other word gets at with the same recognition. But if we make Indie a Type, then we have to take responsibility for helping dilute the once solidly understood definition of the word.

These problems are systemic, so I suspect that no author or database’s take on it could avoid these same pitfalls. It’s a shame, because I’d really like to end this by suggesting we combine our efforts, and have some kind of AllMovie and TV Tropes Descriptor Meeting and Potluck, but sadly, I don’t think there’s a conference room in the world with enough oxygen.