Speaking of tropes, It's probably because I'm old and jaded but I find it gets harder and harder to enjoy many movies and TV shows because having watched so many I see the tropes.
I think the most obvious pattern in many modern TV shows/movies is the musical interlude. You insert some famous pop song as 3 minutes of filler and try to transfer the affection for the song to the show.
A recent example is in The Umbrella Academy one of the characters dances to "I Think We're Alone Now" by Tiffany. It is entirely superfluous. It's not a new technique. I recently watched Love Actually for the first time and it had at least 3 of these types of scenes. When they happen though I just tune out as my brain screams "you're being manipulated". They're filler. They're like "design by committee" or "marketing checklist".
Related is the downbeat 3 minute musical interlude montage. Something disappointing to the character happens and then there's a downbeat montage of them brooding etc. IIRC Angel had 1 or 2 per episode but they're all over in modern shows.
I see two ways to get out of this. One is to learn to think of those things and doing them well, even though they're not original, as part of the form. Like meter and rhyming might be part of a poem's form; it's about how you do them, not that you do them, since they're always there.
The other is to consciously decide to ratchet down your consumption of this type of entertainment and put more effort into finding things that are more "for you" -- they don't rely on the tropes you're used to. Look for foreign content, other types / genres of shows, and reduce your consumption so by the time you've watched as much as you used to in a year, several years have passed and the style has morphed a bit.
Sure but Umbrella Academy was a genuinely well produced show aside from the dramatic filler. There's very little to watch if we seek a level of intellectual honesty that is so rarely met by creatives let alone Hollywood.
Really?! I thought it was cliché after cliché after cliché.
I was definitely entertained, but intellectually? No way. The time travel bits make no sense whatsoever if you think about them for more than a few seconds.
It’s definitely a show where a super heavy dose of belief suspension is needed, and I would be ok with that if the clichés weren’t sooo pervasive.
Perhaps you can recommend some movies and shows then? I'd really appreciate it. Aside from Ex Machina and a few choice others like Moon and Black Mirror, I really haven't found any recent intellectual films or shows.
Doing a thing because that's how it's always been done sounds like stagnation to me. The purpose of meter is to make it flow well when you say it out loud. And rhyming, idk, it has a pleasant quality to it too. But if you don't care for these things, then don't force yourself into it.
Consider cooking. Certainly cooking has a lot of "tropes". And that's because they are tried and true methods of making it taste well. In addition I think you will all recognize the "Appetizer, Main, Dessert". Is that a method of "manipulating you" into enjoying your food? Yes it is! And that's why we love it.
Ok, but isn't that..... what a show is? They are actors. Acting out scenes. It is all fake. The reason to watch it is to suspend disbelief, immerse yourself in pretending that it's real, imagine you are the one going through the actions and emotions of the characters. But yeah it gets harder the more you watch and know what to expect.
When is music in shows or movies manipulation, and what counts as genuine use? If one of the characters plays an instrument in the show?
I'd say music is always manipulation as it's always triggering emotions in some way. Unless it's some genre or band you absolutely hate. But even then it's triggering emotions, just probably not the intended ones. :-)
When your parent put sugar in a cake, they you to enjoy the cake for you own enjoyment. They will dose the cake, and make you experience the cake in this context.
Kinder wants you to enjoy it so you buy it again. The goal is not the enjoyment but the reaction after it. Dosing the sugar, the other ingredient, the context you will consume it and the so on are going to be completely different.
When you hear "Ride of the Valkyries" being played in apocalypse now, you don't hear the voice of the director suggesting "now you should feel this particular way, because I said so". You just enjoy the craft.
Some movies and series now, it feels like the way they put music, cuts, etc. are just cheap plots designed by engineers to get something out of you.
You can't feel the desire of creating and sharing something, rather you are given a product designed to specs.
> When you hear "Ride of the Valkyries" being played in apocalypse now, you don't hear the voice of the director suggesting "now you should feel this particular way, because I said so". You just enjoy the craft.
This is a great counter-argument to your theory, since that song (like all choices in that movie) was explicitly chosen to manipulate — to make you feel specific ways about the U.S. military and the Vietnamese villagers, to induce tension, etc.
The intent hasn't changed, you have. You'll discover this when re-experiencing old favorites and discovering that they've lost the magic because you've developed the tools to see behind the curtain.
Exactly, saying intent is what makes the difference is all nice in theory. But faced with reviewing and watching actual shows/movies, true intent is never uncovered (unless the director admits to it). You can get cases where a person enjoys a film and another dislikes how they were 'manipulated'.
Take a example of a clueless director putting rise of the valkeryies on a chopper scene in his movie without knowing about the scene in 'apocalyse now'. He knows the song as certain qualities to it and his intent is to bring these emotions across. Yet, is the watcher being manipulated despite this genuine intent?
What's more useful than making a useless distinction between what's genuinely fake and what's manipulative is looking at execution. Is the director being clumsily formulaic (common with many netflix shows now) or does it fit coherently as a work.
So the AV Club did a thing where they retroactively watched + reviewed all the Futurama episodes, and I think about their review of, you know, that one, Jurassic Bark, an awful lot. Not just because that episode is so emotionally devastating or because the review does justice to that and is emotionally devastating too, but because of this bit:
> I said “Jurassic Park” is manipulative, and I stand by that; the way the episode exploits its flashback structure to build to the most devastating possible conclusion is about as subtle as that Sarah McLachlan SPCA ad. Acknowledging this isn’t the same as criticizing it, though. Manipulation fails when it becomes noticeable, and when the audience resents the efforts made to drive them towards certain feelings. [...] Clumsy manipulation reveals a certain unearned arrogance, even contempt; look how easy it was for me to trick you, how vulnerable you are to control. This episode is more about empathy, and that ending — that uncompromising, agonizing ending — has no contempt in it. Just the knowledge that these things happen, and that we have to live with them.
The difference is when the music doesn't actually enhance the emotional tone of a scene, but instead covers up the lack of impact there may be. Music is much easier to have a feeling over than story, and often they'll play a good song or some emotional music after something happens in a show and I'll think to myself "Would I really feel this way if I hit the mute button?"; the answer is usually no. Just my experience.
Conversely, I had a really interesting experience when taking my young cousin to go see a movie (I think it was GI Joe). I remember leaving the theatre thinking it was terrible, predictable, and full of every overused trope.
He absolutely loved it.
And I realized...he loved it exactly because of those tropes. For him, they were entirely new devices. There is a reason that certain story devices become tropes: they work and work well. And for someone who had not encountered them before it made for a fun/exciting/satisfying story.
Everything in a movie is a lie. All of it. The sound the music the writing. It is all a lie. Someone made it up and a group of people made it 'real'. But it is not real. The one thing that really nailed that home to me was the movie cobra. In the middle of a big fight he stops and drinks a coors beer. They had to stage it, film it, edit and foley it. There is a fractionally small amount of things we see on TV or movies that is real. Even what we watch on the news is an edited show done for effect. Once you know how the sausage is made the 'magic' is gone.
My biggest gripe with many movies is pacing. It is hard to get just right. You either move to fast and everything is a blur, or too slow and it is 'boring'. That is just me though. I enjoyed GI Joe but it is not something I am going to go back and re-watch anytime soon. Something like John Wick I have watched it a few times since it came out. It is full to the brim with tropes. But they are done very well.
I remember seeing Dumb and Dumber in a theater when it came out, and laughing until my gut hurt. While doing this, part of my mind was saying the slapstick was so obvious, overdone and predictable, why am I laughing at it?
Perhaps it's like watching a Laurel and Hardy movie. Fans know that if there's a puddle in the street, Ollie will step into it and will sink in up to his neck. I know it's coming, everyone knows its coming, and it still makes me laugh. Maybe it's so funny because Hardy will look directly at the camera with a long-suffering "look what they made me do again" expression.
>The Umbrella Academy one of the characters dances to "I Think We're Alone Now" by Tiffany. It is entirely superfluous. It's not a new technique. I recently watched Love Actually for the first time and it had at least 3 of these types of scenes
The Umbrella Academy Tiffany scene was clever, because the characters although physically grown up are known as the Umbrella Academy children, they are in their childhood rooms and dancing alone, but together. So some character development involved in sort of underlining their estrangement from each other but given it is a love song also their love for each other. I could go on as there were several other clever touches in the scene.
The one I remember from Love Actually is the Pointer Sisters Jump, for my Love, which was not clever and sucked.
For what it's worth I dislike both of these songs quite a bit.
This happened to me after awhile, so I literally shifted to watching movies from a different culture. It’s all the same tropes, but delivered differently from a different cultural lens.
Ip-Man 4 is just a hilarious version of Chinese exceptionalism (as opposed to American exceptionalism ((hilarious as in woah this how ridiculous our version of exceptionalism must look like to everyone else))), if you’re looking for an English movie to get an idea of what I’m talking about.
90s Bollywood is great if you want to see how equally ridiculous Indian version of romance/marriage is idealized (as opposed how Americans idealize/romanticize their conception of guy-gets-girl).
The things they do really well are often pretty unique if you’re not familiar with their tropes. It’s very snobby and meta, but I can’t watch American movies anymore without getting bored.
If you want Chinese exceptionalism, watch Wolf Warrior 2. I watched it in a theatre in London full of Chinese people, and it was a surreal experience, because to me it felt like watching a Chinese version of Hot Shots or similar crazy parody, but nobody in the cinema were laughing.
I really enjoyed the movie, but it also shows Chinese filmmaking reaching the level of over the top patriotism you saw in 1980's US war movies.
American studios eventually turned to mocking that, as in the aforementioned Hot Shots movies and others. I wonder when we get to see the same mocking of Ip-Man and Wolf Warrior by Chinese movies.
Another good choice in similar vein is the Soviet MosFilm classics, essentially many of the same themes and tropes but seen through an entirely opposite cultural lens.
I just watched 'Assa' couple of months ago, it is almost like a soviet version of 'Blood Simple', sort, and every minute of it was engaging.
That’s true of all culture. To a great extent the suspension of disbelief requires your effort, not theirs. It can be hard for analytical people to fully engage with something as flimsy as fiction: the more sophisticated you get in your reasoning and perception, the harder it can be to really go with the flow, especially in media that is squarely aimed at teenagers. Ultimately though, no cultural artefact–fiction or non-fiction–can hold against criticism; there’s no cultural edifice that can be built without tool marks. But I still believe that you can enjoy a magic trick and know how it was done.
I’m not one to engage in Internet diagnosis, but Anhedonia is also a symptom of various illnesses including major depressive disorder. I’m not saying that’s you, but it’s all too easy to attribute things to the passage of time when there’s something else going on. Of course, you may just be bored of television – a not unreasonable stance!
Edited to add: would something like Jaws or The Third Man have the same emotional resonance without their iconic scores? Perhaps not, but the addition of music remains an emotional hack all the same.
And then you see the train scene in Andrey Tarkovsky's Stalker which is essentially the same, but so well placed and carried out that it stays with you for life.
When I applied for film school, two different film schools had a no music rule for the application process. This rule was in hindsight mainly meant to weed out very bad applications who would try to drown out other issues with music, but it was also a rule meant to be broken.
I feel very much the same as you do about the musical interlude: it mostly gives me nothing and throws me out, despite (or because?) me being a musical person who likes music.
I find the same with age. I've seen every plot, every type of character.
I have a friend who was working with movie scripts, and he described it like a factory. Generally every movie is a 5 act play, you get an intro to some typical character then something happens to them that's either funny or serious depending on genre, then there's a solution, etc.
But perhaps the thing to do is not to expect surprise in the general construction, but excellence in the execution. That's why I can still watch stuff that's highly rated eg Breaking Bad. Shakespeare is another one of those where you can how it's made, but it's made well.
Food is the same. It's gonna be a mixture of fat and sugar, with some water and flavourings. But some things are better done than others.
> There are only two plots: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.
Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl?
I suppose the meets-loses-regains sequence can be considered a journey if you squint at it enough, but that doesn't feel quite right.
> Although if you really think about it, there's only one plot, because a man who goes on a journey is a stranger who comes to town in another town.
Ooh, that's an interesting observation, the difference between the two is in swapping the foreground and background.
In fact, hmm, now that I think of it, quite a lot of episodic drama deliberately uses that same swap or superposition to occasionally change things up for an episode. And a few are always about the same stranger on a journey coming to an endless series of towns (The Incredible Hulk, The Pretender, even The Littlest Hobo).
I'll take a shot at it. There are lots of strangers who have come to Los Angeles: Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, Butch and Fabienne, Brett and Flock-of-Seagulls, the Gimp, etc. Marsellus is no stranger to Los Angeles, but he is a bit out of his element at the pawnshop. Vincent has returned home after a journey abroad, as has Captain Koons. Jules is at the beginning of a journey and will soon leave Los Angeles...
Of course there are "townies" like Marvin, Lance and Jody, the Wolf and Raquel, Kathy Griffin, Maynard and Zed, Esmarelda, etc. who mostly serve as foils to those on journeys, but that's perfectly normal. Mia was once a stranger in town, but she liked it enough to stay.
I did sort of like Game of Thrones. Yes, at some point not-formulaic became it's own sort of formula but I did enjoy the series.
Actually, there was that one section where it seemed like the budget for special effects got a boost and from that point onward they displaced a lot of plot.
I'm not sure what your experience with the books are but, as someone who's read a _ton_ on fantasy novels GoT is pretty boring and mundane. I can see where people do get excited about it but I can find a good 10 or 20 high fantasy novels that do everything that GoT does.
GRRM has style, and seems super original if you haven't read a ton of the genre.
I have a hard finding new fantasy books these days, because the synopsis are so boring. It usually goes "Yada yada presentation but bigger picture (usually about how the fate of the world is at stake and only the hero can save it)".
It's fine, that's what I expect from a fantasy book, but what's missing is what's your USP, why should I read your book instead of the countless others. Why did you write the damn book? It's a pretty big ordeal, so surely the author it could bring something different. They just seem to fail at expressing what.
I'm curious to hear your list. I've read a lot of fantasy and IMO the vast majority of it is poorly written schlock. GRRM stands out to me because he can actually write fairly well (though the quality has slipped a bit in the last couple books).
What I recall liking that I read recently was anything by brent weeks (though lightbringer book 5 was a little long), and the chalion series by lois mcmaster bujold.
> But perhaps the thing to do is not to expect surprise in the general construction, but excellence in the execution.
I'm not a huge fan of mysteries, but I do find this to be the main criteria by which I judge them. Dorothy Sayer's "Lord Peter Wimsey" stories, for example, are simply a ton of fun to reread even after I know the solution to the puzzle. Everything else is so well done that the story can still stand on its own.
It's quite interesting when you come across a mainstream film which doesn't follow the standard structure and Tropes.
I remember watching 'About Time' in the cinema - a Richard Curtis concoction and thinking 'This did not follow the structure I thought it would follow at all'. Refreshing.
Tropes don't bother me, as long as they are skillfully executed, or subverted in some way, etc.
For example what you describe about use of music reminds me of "500 days of Summer" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1022603) where I the "musical segment" is used to great effect.
Same here. When watching the Elton John movie, I could see all the artificial image enhancements made to the picture to make it look better, but burning the sincerity out of it in the process. Same for sound, which made characters mouth completely out of sync with the music (the first scene, the voices are singing intensely, but you can see the faces not breaking a sweat, uncanny valley ensued).
This week, I started (and gave up) to watch "the witches", which has clearly been designed by committee. All the ingredients are nice, but there is this feeling that they are put in there because people though they should be, not because they felt it should. It was not story telling, it was product manufacturing. We were being sold concepts: this is a lovable character, here is a tragedy to bound, here is the bad guy, she is scary, oh, look at the grandma you wish you had, and so on.
The problem is, they do that because it works. Star wars remakes made banks. Disney live actions as well.
If I discuss this with my friends, they don't seem to mind, they enjoy it.
Now I ate at Mc Donalds for year, enjoying it, so I get that you can very well enjoy scientifically crafted quick and satisfying experiences.
But at least for movies, it's becoming hard for me. Maybe I have rose glasses about movies in the past, but I watched Groundhog Day last week, and it felt nothing like this. Pure creative and fun experience.
I guess it' a blessing: it will save me time and money.
On the other hand, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Don't know why I'm bitter about this, cause it's not like it's an important thing, but I react strongly to it.
Team America is great because it's still relevant to this day, (and probably for much longer) and it effectively deconstructs and makes fun of the most relevant tropes in contemporary cinema.
I dont think this is only because you have seen a lot of movies already. There appears to be a whole movement of youtubers doing movie critics who pretty much agree that modern productions have very bad story telling. Some of these are indeed a bit older, and that might be a reason why "we" agree.
But when I add my personal experience to the analysis, I can only say that I basically stopped watching TV a few years ago because I couldn't stand it anymore. Action filled stuff is so needlessly loud and over the top, and the story telling indeed feels very shallow to me. In a sense, I miss the times when technology wasn't so advanced and movie makers actually had to make up for that by a good story and nice pacing.
I think Interstellar was the last movie I enjoyed watching. The industry basically lost me as a consumer.
Taking musical training as an adult ruined pop music for me as well. Whether we've become educated or merely adopted a critical framework is a bit grey, but I would say I can still appreciate some modern music through the lens of competence. Although most of it is cloying and pandering.
Yes, it's likely that the best stuff survived, but three chords and an ABABBA song structure is not the same thing as a cantata or a fugue. Classical music is the expression of a different set of technical skills and art where most current pop music is basically a kind of folk porn. Some of it is fun sometimes, but they aren't the same.
It also depends on the style of classical music. The romantic period was an answer to the common man's complaint that Baroque style contrapuntal music was too intellectually demanding. Le sigh...
I know they're annoying, but sometimes, a fun thing to do with these tropes is to enjoy them for how campy and trashy they are, along the lines of B-movies and the perennial Adult Swim sketch which satirizes these tropes, Too Many Cooks [1].
One could probably say the same of most modern music (of any genre, pretty much). 90%+ of art isn't very good; especially when it's deliberately trying to optimize for maximum reach and appeal. It's just a matter of hunting for the stuff that's truly non-generic, creative, and artistic.
Music is still impenetrable to me because each song induces its own emotional landscape that is distinct from every other song, even in the case of over-produced tracks.
Of course, the emotional landscape is often "what is this garbage, turn it off"...
That's interesting, because it really feels like the exact opposite for me and it actually somehow hasn't even occurred to me before that others feel differently. I listen to a ton of music, and after years of hearing a large and broad selection of things, I feel like almost any and every song sounds basically the same as almost any and every other.
The few times I hear something that I consider genuinely novel and creative, I get very excited. I still listen to dozens of new albums per month, every month, just to chase that dragon of finding something actually original like that.
I don't really have an emotional response to music, generally, or even perceive what I'd think of as an emotional landscape, so that might explain the difference here. I just really enjoy music, and enjoy trying to make it, too.
To me it feels like it's just something that can be intrinsically pleasurable. Like Jackson Pollock - I feel zero emotion from any of his work, but it's extremely intrinsically enjoyable and my favorite visual art that I've seen. My favorite music is exactly like that (and often even shares some structural similarities to Pollock's work and techniques). When I look at a Pollock painting or listen to one of my favorite songs, it just feels like wireheading; it feels kind of like a lot of dopamine activity somewhere in my brain, basically. An appreciation of the pure aesthetics and "good"ness, with zero emotional sentiment or perception about it.
Out of curiosity, how many previously-unheard albums do you generally listen to every year?
>To me it feels like it's just something that can be intrinsically pleasurable. Like Jackson Pollock - I feel zero emotion from any of his work, but it's extremely intrinsically enjoyable and my favorite visual art that I've seen. My favorite music is exactly like that (and often even shares some structural similarities to Pollock's work and techniques). When I look at a Pollock painting or listen to one of my favorite songs, it just feels like wireheading; it feels kind of like a lot of dopamine activity somewhere in my brain, basically. An appreciation of the pure aesthetics and "good"ness, with zero emotional sentiment or perception about it.
I've never heard this put in words but that's broadly how I feel about a range of stimuli that is not limited to art or music. I haven't been able to find a clear rule as to what triggers this response.
>Out of curiosity, how many previously-unheard albums do you generally listen to every year?
I couldn't give you a precise measure but definitely in the 200+ range (although this doesn't imply a thorough listen in 90% of cases). Maybe fewer than 1 in 20 songs give me an immediate compelling landscape where I want to listen to it on repeat, but when they do I instantly recognize it. These songs can be unpredictably varied, from classical to obscure autotuned rap and everything in between. The landscape can be typically unrelated to the meaning or theme of the song, and is far more closely linked to the actual melody or instrumentation. For songs that induce a low level of interest, the landscape is very thin and not enjoyable. Sometimes it is even mentally painful to listen to songs I dislike. When I am tired or stressed, most songs can get irritating to listen to and I get close to the impression that all music is the same.
Additionally, it's possible for a landscape to change the more I listen to a specific song or genre. There are some genres like metal that I used to never listen to, but my relationship with most genres has changed quite a bit over the years. I generally classify songs as sunny or dark, sunny being the wireheading type and dark being the intense landscaping (the name comes from the fact that positive songs tend to be the former and more pensive songs tend to be the latter)
I've almost stopped being able to enjoy shonen anime because of this - the exact same tropes just get rehashed in series after series, with every huge success introducing a new one that will invariably get inherited by 90% of new ones in the years after.
Then again, shows like One Punch Man work because you know all of those tropes, and doesn't seem to work nearly half as well if you don't know what they're referring to.
(I've tried showing it to someone with rather little prior exposition to traditional shonen and the person found it rather boring. A sample size of one, I know that says almost nothing)
If you haven't watched it yet, give Hunter x Hunter a try - sure you'll see lots of re-occurring tropes, but it's a bit of a breath of fresh air, promised.
Maybe I'm a bit more old and grumpy than you - for me OPM was great for most of the first season, but quickly deteriorated into spending half the time (exaggerated) ooh-ing and aaw-ing over "the S rank heroes power" and all that. Loved Mob Psycho 100 from the same creator, though.
I did try Hunter x Hunter last year - I gave up precisely because I felt like I've seen everything 100 times already.
I guess I should just take the uncle commentor's advice and stop trying to watch this class of shows if they aren't rewarding.
OTOH I really did enjoy Yakusoku no Neverland and Decadance in the past year, so I guess there's always something.
Seconded that Mob Psycho 100 is an improvement over One Punch Man when it comes to subversiveness, character development, and general storytelling. Extremely relevant to this thread in that it shows how the skillful subversion of tropes can keep the interest of someone who's otherwise numb to those tropes.
I had another theory, budgets for streaming shows are falling. Adding a song as filler is probably one of the cheapest ways to add 3-4 mins to your 60 min contractually obligated episode length? Or maybe not. I have no idea if it's cheaper.
The Queen's Gambit had one in the 2nd to the last episode. It was clearly filler and has been called out by many critics. I still loved the series over all but after few moments of that filler I skipped forward to the end of the song.
I have frequent musical interludes in my own life, so I don't really see this as a problem. Music is important to a lot of people, particularly at difficult times in their lives, so I often find I can empathise with these moments.
I watched Birds of Prey a few days after seeing the finale opera house scene at the end of Season 1 of Umbrella, and I'm a big fan or Heart but both used Barracuda and I'm sure I came across it somewhere else recently as well. Oh well, great song.
I'm sorry but I'm not going to be able to let you say something negative about Love Actually and get away with it... yeah there are cheesy musical interludes, but that's the charm of it - the whole film is designed to be like a box of christmas chocolates.
ps: for Umbrella Academy, keep in mind that it was written by a literal rockstar - explains the heavy focus on music
I watched it recently because it was some podcasters favorite movie. I like good romcoms but sadly I personally found Love Actually to be horrible and was surprised by the high ratings. There is no "love" in "Love Actually" there is only lust except maybe the old rock star. Every pictured relationship is extremely superficial. I'm also surprised the sexual harassment issues in two of the stories are not called out more. Then again, 400k people rated it 7.6 which is high so clearly they all see something I don't. There are plenty of romcoms I like though. ... though if you go read the user reviews on IMDB, after the first page or so they get pretty negative, so I'm not alone in not getting it.
Just a wee laddie. Though I didn't watch hardly any TV until I was in my 30s, because my parents thought TV was bad for kids, and later because my life was full.
Similar to this is the trope of having a short musical suffix to every scene. Music fades up or intensifies during the height of the emotion in a scene and then the show cuts to a new scene.
I first noticed it in Suits and Billions but it's used in loads of shows. It gets pretty annoying once you are aware of it.
In a novel I read years ago one of the characters hates the idea of movies being considered serious art and says something to the effect of, "How can you take a medium seriously that plays music throughout to tell the audience how to feel in any given scene".
That part always stuck with me and made me really notice how overt many movies and tv shows are about the music they use.
I feel similar. There seems to be so little effort spent on the scripts of most shows these days, resulting in tiring copy-pasta plot element etc.
Most recently I tried to watch Cursed. From the very first episode me and my gf predicted every plot beat. I tried to force myself to watch the rest of the show, just to see if it improved, but it was the same lame stuff throughout.
Another big pain point for me it's drama for the sake of drama. I almost categorically avoid 20-episodes-per-season shows because they almost always contains tons of filler drama that does nothing to advance the show or characters.
In sum it really narrows down what I deem watchable. Instead I find myself watching a lot of YouTube videos, with informative or creative content.
At least I avoid yet another rehash of a tired trope which was included solely for the rest of the plot to happen.
Watching shows can be enjoyable but when you observe someone else watching a show, you suddenly realize how contrived and zombie-like the experience is and how grating the tropes and sound choices are.
A friend introduced me to an experiment[0] to reevaluate my relationship with television and I've been spooked enough to not watch a show since
It's the same for me. I think the magic stops working once you see the mechanics. And if you consume enough instances of some medium, you can't help picking up on them.
I've noticed a trend in the final episodes of some shows being cancelled where the primary actors will suddenly start wearing outfits that are much more form fitting (flattering) than their clothing from prior episodes. Not sure if it is driven by a desire to line up future work for themselves or if it is an effort by the director to increase ratings...
It has helped me to adopt the attitude that what matters is the skillful execution of tropes, and whether the artist can make me feel something. Because everything is tropes. Even Charlie Kaufman and Fitzgerald use tropes.
I once spent days reading tv tropes as a kid. I couldn't recognize a single trope until today because of it.
The only thing that causes me to see tropes is to just watch a lot of movies and notice the patterns myself.
This sums up some of my problems with the JJ Abrams take on/Kelvin-verse Star Trek, existing character traits seemed to consume the characters entire presences instead of being elements in parts that made up the whole.
Kirk getting the worst of it, the risk taking, jovial and daring Starfleet officer who sometimes clashes with his superiors? Let’s just turn him into a total renegade who disregards authority and gets into bar fights while jamming to 20th century hip hop and end the trilogy with Kirk on a motorcycle...while jamming to 20th century hip hop.
And I know: the movies were trying to give us younger versions of the crew but sheesh..
About the only character who seemed like someone who could even remotely come close to growing into the character of old was McCoy, and that’s probably just due to Karl Urban absolutely crushing the role—-even though I thought the scripts gave him almost nothing to do until the third movie.
This is so true! I never was as big a Trekkie as I was a Star Wars fan, so I didn't really see it with JJ's Star Trek. I actually liked his first movie.
And then came Star Wars. I kind of could accept his remake of Episode 4, but after that, man they made me like the prequels so much more. Not that the movies itself were bad, they just totally ignored the fact that 6 other movies already existed, not even speaking about all the legends stuff. He could have easily used ships, characters and locations from Legends, all the designs were there. Using them would have had the same effect on new viewers while eing great for oldtimers like myself. He didn't, everything had to be his, and bigger and faster and with more bang.
That it can be done differently was shown by Feloni.
His "mystery boxes" shtick has gotten so old. It sort of made things interesting in Lost, but it seems like he keeps doing it, over and over again, in each of his films.
Don't forget somehow Kirk manages to go up 6 ranks overnight, from an Cadet at the Academy (about to get drummed out!), all the way to Captain. Including jumping over a number of people on the way, such as Spock.
And I do realize the commanding officer of a ship is called Captain regardless of rank, the previous Captain was promoted to Admiral, implying that he held the rank of Captin.
That film series hardly felt as if he were a captain in command of a ship as much as if he were, barely, the alpha among a pack of secondary schooler friends.
Section 31 has been completely modified throughout the years in Star Trek.
When it was first introduced in Deep Space Nine, it was an extremist rogue branch of Starfleet. It did not officially exist; was technically illegal; and many members of Starfleet attempted to capture it's members — but it was nevertheless protected by various powerful figures in the U.F.P. who felt it's continued existence was necessary.
Enterprise changed nothing about this and indeed Archer had never heard of it's existence and Section 31 sabotaged his ship and Reed was court-martialed for being a member.
Then in Into Darkness, it became a secret branch of Starfleet that was nevertheless completely legal, but most officers were not aware of it's existence.
And finally in Discovery, it was a known, fully legal branch. That Discovery also took place before D.S.9. made it all the more bizarre that most Starfleet officers in D.S.9. had never heard of the existence of an organization which was publicly known a century prior.
> And finally in Discovery, it was a known, fully legal branch. That Discovery also took place before D.S.9. made it all the more bizarre that most Starfleet officers in D.S.9. had never heard of the existence of an organization which was publicly known a century prior.
Discovery was a deeply classified ship that was further reclassified under Klingon War Intelligence, Prime Directive, the unspoken Mirror Universe Prime Directive, and Temporal Prime Directive due to various actions Discovery has taken part of over the course of its deployment.
Supposedly no one on DS9 ever heard of Discovery (or should have heard of Discovery) either.
So it's not entirely unfair for Discovery to have a lot of deep, direct knowledge of Section 31, more than most ships and crews would have, given their existing high classification level likely meant they had high clearance in return. In addition Season 2 offers some evidence for why Section 31 was nearly destroyed and likely went into hibernation through most of the TOS and TNG years, including the death of high ranking officers, a ton of institutional knowledge in the loss of their computer files, and the extra-temporal extrication of the person most groomed to likely take over the organization (Georgiou).
(That said, I still think Section 31 is one of the dumber things added to Star Trek lore, and the DS9 writers can complain all that they want that Section 31 has been almost nothing but misused from their original intentions since they created it, but it is the DS9 writers' own fault for retconning Section 31 into the Federation charter in the first place and not expecting for everyone working elsewhere in the timeline to wonder or be questioned "What would Section 31 be doing right now?")
Thanks for taking the time to write that up - genuinely appreciated. Some good points. I've watched Discovery, Enterprise all the way through but not DS9 so that covers some gaps.
DS9 is peak Star Trek for me. It took what I loved about TNG and gave it the "Babylon 5" Arc treatment with a bit more darkness to it. I would highly recommend watching the whole series. It's available now on just about every streaming service.
> Kirk getting the worst of it, the risk taking, jovial and daring Starfleet officer who sometimes clashes with his superiors? Let’s just turn him into a total renegade who disregards authority and gets into bar fights while jamming to 20th century hip hop and end the trilogy with Kirk on a motorcycle...while jamming to 20th century hip hop.
And I know: the movies were trying to give us younger versions of the crew but sheesh..
Agreeing with your general point, but I found this depiction actually believable for Kirk in his 20s.
Take a look at real-life celebrities in their 30s/40s who have an "edgy" reputation. They often were a lot more extreme in their youth.
Seems to me they wanted to portrait Kirk as a bored rich kid who doesn't really know yet what direction to take in his life. That's not that unusual, even for persons who later found a very strong direction.
I'm just hoping that somehow someday someone will produce a mix of Nordic noir with dead-pan humour and right amount of special effects in a proper sci-fi plot to treat people like the adults they are.
Interesting example, the visual aspects of the Penny Arcade characters have definitely been exaggerated over time, but the writing of the characters has been toned-back I think.
Artwork: Some of this is Flanderization pure and simple, but I think some of it is that Mike's progression as an artist has allowed that to happen. In the early days if things were so exaggerated, it would have been sloppy; but as he's improved as an artist he has an increasing ability to exaggerate things and have it be stylized rather than sloppy. And so he utilizes that stylization to have the characters better emote.
Writing: I think there are 3 parts to this. I think part of that is that they let more of their true selves through to the characters, and easing up on the invented personas. I think as the characters develop more "real" personas they don't have to lean as much on the initial defining traits of the characters. I think they've mellowed as they've grown up; once they were uber-hard-core and could spend 16 hours in a raid; now they have children and responsibilities (or put more in terms of the comic: These days there's a place in the comic for more casual gaming that did not exist in the early comic).
This is only tangentially related, but I love that first comic. Without knowing when it was published, you wouldn't understand the joke, because that's now the reality for many triple-A releases.
I have a personal theory where the character from 30 Rock, Tracy Jordan as played by Tracy Morgan, is an example of reverse Flanderization. In the first episode, his character has a breakdown and is wandering the Brooklyn Bridge in diapers swinging a fake lightsaber screaming “I’m a Jedi.” It’s hard to get crazier than that. Tracy stays crazy, but the novel stuff because his normality. In the mid-seasons, they have arcs where he hates partying and has never cheated on his wife - despite the image he has created that imply those things.
He never becomes normal, but he starts out over-the-top. When a character starts there, sometimes showing normal behavior is more surprising than trying to be even more over-the-top.
I'm surprised that Monica from Friends is not there. It's amazing now normal she is in the initial episodes.
But I get the case of doubling down on the traits over time like in Simpsons. They need to run for so many years you need both some kind of character change and still a lot of familiarity, so... let's make characters even more of the same. Different from Southpark with "we'll change what we want".
I'm surprised that this article isn't called Homerization, Homer Simpson seems like the classic example of this. Another comment's description of Kevin from the office applies just as well to Homer.
Flanders happened first. It was a fairly long time before it got to Homer, and that was largely after a lot of people grew out of watching the Simpsons.
Monica's compulsive cleaning and neat freak characteristics are central plot points in season one already. The ending of S1E6 ending is one of the examples of this.
The tvtropes article itself notes that it isn't necessarily bad, which is interesting, and that it happened right after the very first season as well - such that the 'golden era' had already had quite a bit of flanderization. At some point it ruins the characters, of course.
All this makes me remember how different the very first season of the Simpsons was to the rest.
Sit coms are really hard to do well for more than one season. The reason is in the name: It's comedy rooted in some situation, so you can't allow the situation that is the source of humor/drama to ever resolve or the premise for your show ceases to exist.
This is why MASH was so long-running: The situation in question was The Korean War and the conflict between career military types and draftees who had hippie-like values and really didn't want to be there. This allowed for a lot of swapping out of characters when things went sideways.
The TV show was based on the movie and over time Burns became increasingly toxic and crazy and they finally wrote him out of the show and replaced him with a character who could have some of the same inherent frictions with other characters without it being Flanderized into something really stupid and ugly and no longer actually funny.
I've long considered writing a blog about the moral bits in MASH and/or other sitcoms. I sometimes think that might be a better outlet for my keen eye for social patterns than turning my baleful eye on actual people, which tends to be taken as extremely cutting. It's sort of an "occupational hazard" as someone who spent too much time in therapy and sorting my own crap to be at all socially acceptable for small talk with most people.
Two and a half men is a great example of when this really becomes tricky. To the point that in later seasons the characters become more and more self-aware that they are stuck in a situation that is ridiculous and increasingly express frustration that they can't understand why. This especially comes to the fore after Charlie exits, when it seems the writers realised the situation was now so crazy they had little choice but to just play into it.
Alan in particular is also a great example of being flanderized from a down on his luck but somewhat normal person to a mooch prepared to do anything to stay in the house at even the cost of good own happiness, while giving up any pretense of wanting to work his way out of it.
Jake as well - in fact in the final episode they flat out state it in dialogue: Alan points out that Jake wasn't really dumb at first, but he was funnier dumb. (The final episode breaks the fourth wall a lot to point out many of these things)
Avoiding this was one of the brilliant parts of The Good Place: after the first episode, I thought I knew where the rest of the season was going to go. I was completely wrong, and they fulfilled that arc in the first three episodes. I think the showrunner consciously avoided the sitcom trap of always maintaining the status quo which was satisfying because the situation kept constantly evolving. Which is important, because one of the themes of the entire show is that people can change.
The situation might wear out, but if they do a good job, the writers and to some extent the actors will figure out the sweet spots in the characters. Also, a lot of useful context will get built up, which makes it easier to tell richer stories. I would say Seinfeld, NewsRadio, and Frasier are good examples of this.
I'm not familiar with NewsRadio, but both Seinfeld and Frasier are simply named after the main character. This inherently gives the show some latitude.
But, say, Three's Company was based on the premise that this guy was pretending to be gay in order to justify living with two women because they all were pretty poor and he couldn't find another place. That's pretty constraining as to what you can do with the plot line.
It means that any episode that was at the beginning holding out hope that one of the characters would suddenly start making more money and be able to afford to move or something was an episode where the viewer could confidently predict that this would fall through because if it didn't you no longer had a show with the premise that some guy needs to pretend he's gay in order to have an affordable housing situation where he lives platonically with two women.
What's funny there is the tension of, no, they aren't having a threesome. No, he's not sleeping with either of the women. No, he's not really gay, but most people would never believe he's honest to god just living with two women to split the rent if he weren't pretending to be gay.
It's funny because it casts some light on a lot of serious social issues in a way that's socially acceptable to poke fun at, but it's extremely contrived and you can't otherwise try to address those kinds of topics. They are too hot button.
So you can't do it humorously without an extremely contrived situation and you can't do it in earnest without it being terrible drama.
Humor is one of the ways society processes hot button topics and works through them without it turning into terrible real life conflict.
Seinfeld is an outlier, I think, because the characters are purposefully unsympathetic. You like watching the characters, but you don't like them. You wouldn't want to spend time with them. That means you're never rooting for Jerry to find a satisfying relationship, Kramer to finally succeed in a scheme, Elaine to finally leave the group or George to find fulfillment in anything. Rather than making the reversion to status quo painful, it becomes funny and cathartic. The fun basically becomes watching them be and make each other miserable.
The writers do this because people sometimes do this to real people too. Are you kinda smart and look/dress/talk the part? You're now "the smart guy" in many people's perception. Do you know how to sound authoritative regardless of actual knowledge/capability? People will gravitate towards of you as their leader. There's a downside too. Did you embarrass yourself a couple times? You're "the clumsy guy" for many people.
Then how people treat you in front of others affects how others perceive you - similarly to how first impressions work. People are full of cognitive biases.
Is it? Your personality (how others view it) is simplified to its most defining traits and then that perception is gradually reinforced by how people treat you (consciously or not). Seems pretty similar to me.
> Your personality (how others view it) is simplified to its most defining traits
Instead, the more people know you, the more they perceive your other traits and the more complex opinion of you they have.
> then that perception is gradually reinforced by how people treat you
There is definitely such a thing as strong influence of various people on each other. But, it does not do flanders-like simplification to single trait nor does it persistently exaggerate that single trait all that much.
Still no. And in case of those people, I dont even get to observe how others treat them, so the other effect from parent comment does not apply either.
I think that the popularity of sitcoms and similar actually makes it more likely for us to treat people this way, as caricatures of themselves. It invades our mind.
That's the connection between the two topics that I see.
I think there is something worth cross examining. It's easier to relate to people when they are simplified. It's easier to be relatable when you are simplified. Since there is a social drive to relate with others being a trope has some reward.
The article discusses that the easy laugh takes priority over richer character development. Seems shallow, but it sells, just like being more easily relatable would sell.
It's an angle I don't pursue personally but I wonder if I should get into football or something just so I could relate with a larger population.
In my darker moments, I wonder if it is not a subconscious attempt to simplify an entity so that they do not enter our Dunbar's Number-sized cohort. Spend too much time (just how many hours are these series?) with "too real" of a character with too many moving parts and they're suddenly closer than one would like.
Flanderization is so obviously employed in The Office. Characters get crazier or weirder over the seasons. Kevin was initially a slow guy, but understood everything and got things done. They ruined his character by turning him into a "stupid fat guy". Really bummed me out.
Other than Kevin (you're right about him), I feel like all the characters had several focal traits, not just a one-dimensional schtick. They definitely refined and brought these to the forefront over time (especially right after season 1), but I don't feel like they ever got flat.
Also, a huge part of that show is the number of "main" characters, and seeing how those handful of traits among a large number of characters mix and mash and interact, both with each other, and in varying situations. I.e. Andy and Oscar may not be that complicated individually, but they hardly interacted until like season five and then suddenly got put in a situation or two together, which made for something fresh. That kind of thing happens constantly over the course of the show.
Yep! The comedic cringe and the awkward, ludicrously brilliant situations were amazing, and very well written. One of the reasons why it's still one of my go-to shows when I have nothing to watch :).
The Office was interesting because they only had a handful of actors but they couldn't work in an empty office so the rest of the characters are played by the writers of the show. I bet they didn't even have names for them to begin with.
I agree they went too far with Kevin. But at the same time, they hadn't gone far enough in season 1. He's just too boring and uninteresting at the very start, in my opinion. They needed to find a nice middle ground.
In some ways Dwight was un-Flanderized. He stopped being a hapless sycophant to Michael, and he started showing comprehension of other peoples’ feelings. Mellowing him out like that made him more relatable but ultimately not as much fun.
Before clicking the title I thought "Flanderization" referred to another phenomenon I've noticed.
Here comes a rant.
I'm a christian protestant, have been a christian protestant my whole life and I live in Mexico, where being a christian protestant is not the norm. So I am used to the media making fun of me, or people like me and my family.
At 40 it seems just normal, you know? "Ha! christians are so backward-thinking close-minded goofus people" is a recurring trope and even I will laugh if the joke is funny. I also recognize that a lot of the mocking is well deserved. People like that do exist and they do harm.
But, recently I've been noting how Hollywood and media in general is bent on not showing any kind of positive representation of christians.
Take the Tolkien biopic (2019) for example, where there's not even a passing mention of him being a Catholic and the great importance theology and religion had on his work and on his life. I'm now expecting the new Amazon LOTR series to tone-down or even subvert the obvious christian motifs of Tolkien own works.
Another example is A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), based on the life of Mr. Rogers. Like I said, I grew up in Mexico and I didn't know anything about Fred Rogers, but 15 minutes into the movie I was incredulous on how saintly the man was portrayed to be. Turns out he was not only a Christian but a presbyterian minister, something which the movie goes greats lengths to "hide".
I'm not saying people should not make negative portrayals of christians (or any other religious group), but come on, wouldn't be great to have a positive representation of a christian minister who is good and kind and very anti-racist? I guess we'll never know.
I think that it should be remembered that there are maybe a few things at play.
1. Christianity of some flavor is the dominant religion in the west by a huge margin. Media can make fun of Christians safely because it is punching up. Punching up is pretty safe. Pick on any other religion and you are punching down. Punching down when it comes to identity is pretty dangerous.
2. A minority of Christians loudly do very un-Christian things in the name of Christ. You won't see people making light of faith based organizations that feed the poor. You WILL see people making fun of evangelical ministers with private jets. I'm not a Christian or a bibilical scholar, but I have a hard time believing that Jesus would approve of a lot of the more right-leaning American christians.
"Punching up" only goes so far. It's not an unlimited license. The idea is that it counters prevailing culture, and is funny because of that. It's almost self-deprecating.
But there isn't much of a pop culture of Christian values today. All positive messges about Christians are supressed in pop culture. The elite are largely secular or keep their religion very quiet and personal (except for politicians from districts where Christianity is a political advantage).
I don't think punching up really applies in this context. Laughs about Christians feel more exclusionary and negative... more like "let's laugh at that idiot" than a positive "I see some of that character in myself, haha".
Christianity is not the dominant religion of the ruling or media class in any meaningful sense, most likely not even in a nominal sense. It’s hard to understand how it’s “punching up” for rich billionaires to mock the beliefs of predominantly the working classes and rural areas.
Christianity was far more dominant in Mexico and France, but in neither case did it prevent secularists from slaughtering Christians in huge numbers e.g. The cristero war and the war in the Vendee.
Is there a general term for this sort of thing? It's like a Simulacra and Simulation kind of thing where over time, representations become symbols, maybe because it's "easier" and a shortcut to communication, and soon we've reduced things down so everything can only be described with few discrete symbols, making it difficult to have nuance discussion.
Maybe I'm overthinking this or getting it wrong. I have not read Baudrillard. Perhaps I should.
What they did to Flanders really sucks. He was a wonderful character. The Leftorium episode is absolutely heartbreaking, but gives Homer such an opportunity to redeem himself.
Those fleeting moments of humanity and growth were my favourite part of Simpsons as a kid.
I'd argue the show has worked their way out of this trope in the recent 5 seasons or so. Ned Flanders in recent episodes has figuratively grown a backbone: he stands up to Homer, he remarries a woman with a colored past, etc. His character has certainly evolved (possibly with awareness from the writers of this specific trope).
Slightly OT, but I find tvtropes.org as a whole totally fascinating. Partly it's having my eyes opened to the substructure that spans across our media, and partly it's just awe at how enormous and meticulously thorough this taxonomy of concepts is.
The wealth of knowledge is unreal, however, I feel it's unorganized. For example, I wish I could see the most noteworthy examples of a trope, but often times you basically get a list of "In season 2, episode 6 of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Aang uses the phrase "dang" which is a euphemism"
All the characters on that show got Flanderized. Simpson was kind of slow, Bart was kind of naughty, Lisa was kind of smart and they become extreme versions of those traits over time.
(The article sort of alludes to this)
> I think the wiki is one of the modern world's most underrated -- and underexploited -- innovations.
Agreed on the underrated front. But I feel like I interact with enough wikis that its not obvious to me that they are significantly underexploited. What is an example of a place where you think a wiki could be used to significant effect?
I created a page a while back after reading the Wiki Magic page, which at the time described how a page might be created without much content and, if the community saw value in it, fleshed out by community members, as if by magic. The example given of the process was the Mega Neko page.
All of that has been removed, along with the notion that it might be OK to just create a page and see what happens. But although the official process was already in place when I made my page, the direct process hadn't been shut down. I didn't even realize I wasn't supposed to.
Coming back to something of a point, TvTropes, like Wikipedia, seems to have come around to the conclusion that user-generated content was valuable in the past, but they don't want more of it than they already have.
I refer to it as the great index of humanity. what is tv/cinema but a way of capturing & portraying the many foibled forms of humanity? trying to re-distil those many portrayals out into organized, trope-ic forms? pure gold. an index of all humanity.
Similarly as with Wikipedia, TV Tropes is a good source of interesting factoids, viewpoints, trope descriptions and examples; but, even more obviously than Wikipedia, TV Tropes suffers from a lack of editorial oversight: there are usually many unverifiable, nonsensical and/or false factoids per page.
Except, of course, when the trope or title be sexual enough that the advertisers might complain, then the “content policy” kicks in — which is of course really all about how pornography has no plot and thus has nothing to talk about, not at all purely about advertisement revenue, as was originally freely admitted.
Of course, describing tropes that deal with graphic maiming, slavery, mass murder and all that deliciously family friendly matter that Google AdSense doesn't complain about, as the full might of the collective Soccer Mum has never been unleashed against such things, can carry on without incident.
That's a result of viscious relationships: media needs ad views, ad views are best harvested via outrage, and politicians need ongoing and widespread exposure.
Subtlety and nuance just makes a politician vulnerable to outrage and doesn't itself easily generate views and exposure. Outrageous and definitive statements, and outrageous and damning accusations generate ad views and exposure.
> AOC is a good example in politics, suddenly everything is some truth bomb tweet espousing every cutting edge liberal perspective.
I suspect your exposure to AOC’s tweets is mediated by intermediary's whose interest in them favors selection to favor this impression.
As someone who follows quite a few political feeds including AOC’s, I see hers as a lot less focussed on ideological “truth-bombs” than many more centrist Dems.
I'm distanced from American culture (to the extent that you can actually be in the West, which is not much) and what they said rings true to me, although there's no real point in focusing on specific politicians. For instance, most articles in the New York Times often seem like a parody of themselves. I am under the impression that American culture is flanderizing at a faster relative speed, but I am not sure what the nature of my bias is at this point.
It’s in a cathartic state, which basically means a concentration of undirected energy. We’re riling ourselves up over unarticulated core feelings. We have a sense of a slipping middle class (sustainability of quality of life, or inequality or social injustice (on both the right and left), and the demagogues like AOC and Trump are the closest thing to a conduit, or worse, a gutter, for the underlying emotion. None of the topics I just mentioned are partisan, they are real for everyone in America, some demagogues monopolize the championing of certain things over others (trump with sustainability, AOC with injustice and inequality).
Are we going to build the wall or rethink immigration policy (trump)? Are we going to defund the police or codify citizen rights and codify accountability in police departments (AOC).
Every or is not what these conduits are sincere about, and since they are accurate but non-action based avatars of our subconscious expression (in the purest sense, a literal cinematic actor), they are pure performance. Nonetheless, the underlying need to yell at the political attrition the US has been in is real. We all feel that.
Is there value in the performance? Certainly. But life’s not a movie, and this is where we’re stuck. By turning to demagogues we basically say ‘find me a Joaquin pheonix or a Daniel Day Lewis and have them portray this emotion’. That’s fine, for the movie, but the actors are not gonna do it for next part of this.
All humans will exhaust their catharsis, the yelling into the void, and finally seek a path forward. It’s a waiting game at this point.
I actually judged her more for the stuff she championed in the Green New Deal bill. You know, that bill is supposed to make America energy conscious and follow the rubric of Germany’s energy plan, but her and proponents of it (ironically) polluted it with ideology (broad ideology too):
(H) guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States;
(I) strengthening and protecting the right of all workers to organize, unionize, and collec- tively bargain free of coercion, intimidation, and harassment;
(J) strengthening and enforcing labor, workplace health and safety, antidiscrimination, and wage and hour standards across all employ- ers, industries, and sectors;
(O) providing all people of the United States with—
(i) high-quality health care;
(ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing;
(iii) economic security; and
(iv) clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature.
I’m a developer, and I’m in the cult of Agile whether I like it or not, but for the love of god these people do not understand how to scope something that should be a clear fucking deliverable.
Like, no, don’t bring sustainable housing, living wage, or healthcare into an already contentious debate about energy ambitions of a nation.
So in her I sense a strong anti-compromiser, and I see the same Trumpian demagogue in a different suit.
Indeed, the tricky thing is what to do when we get stuck in sub optimal Nash equilibriums. Historically civilizations got out of that by having a sufficiently large external shock, but now for the first time ever we have a global civilization. Actually that dynamic seems to apply to all levels of this trope too, curious!
It feels like so much of what is done is very predictable, derivative or random. Ie not only music or television, but even real life.
What if you were told Simpsons already aired an AI generated episode and nobody noticed. Or a talk show guest was not the real person but an AI version trained on past appearances. A lot of the stuff is quite formulaic.
(That said, Simpsons is doing new things all the time)
Was thinking about this recently in the context of Yoda in Star Wars. In the original movie he sometimes spoke in what has been dubbed "Yoda speak", e.g. "Speak backwards, I do" but I didn't get the sense that it was the form for the majority of his dialogue. Then it felt like it became a meme and, by the time that the prequels came around, this was the main way that he spoke, to the detriment of his overall character.
TLDR; Empire: 22% Yoda Speak. Jedi: 33% Yoda Speak. Phantom Menace: 74% Yoda Speak. He seems to have become very much a caricature of himself during his pop culture hiatus between the movies.
Many thanks for posting this and giving me a name for this phenomenon :).
EDIT: While TV Tropes is an amazing rabbit hole, the article of Poirot-speak surprisingly gets it wrong. The key of course is mispronouncing or getting wrong common English words or phrases while having no trouble with more complex or esoteric ones.
Flanderization, seems to be a result of appealing to a larger target audience. Nuanced characters just can't be quickly understood, so sitcoms unwittingly simplify characters to predictable stereotypes...
Interestingly, I feel like in "Big Bang Theory", the opposite happened -- the first few episodes, the characters were almost entirely a bag of stereotypical "geek" quirks; they slowly became more human as the show went on.
I think I remember in an interview one of them saying that filming before a live studio audience actually helped with that -- you got immediate feedback about what the audience thought of the characters and the show; and people are just more interested in characters they can identify with.
It’s driven by the nature of jokes in a long-running medium. Jokes both require and create context; this joke’s punchline is that joke’s setup. If the setup isn’t rooted in the current context, it’s nonsensical. If the punchline is in current context, it’s boring.
It’s easy for this process to feed back, especially with large casts of characters. I heard a writer once talk about “protecting” characters from some jokes, I believe to prevent a process like this.
I believe it’s more about available time. When you only have 20ish minutes to pack as many gags as you can, and the narrative setup is fundamentally immovable (i.e. episodes are entirely self-contained, there is little or no substantial continuity), subtlety will soon go out the window, and characters will become stereotypes who exist to trigger jokes.
Also, that sort of narrative setup tends to accrete over the years: if you’ve seen Barney being the idiot drunk for 5 years, that’s where your mind will go as soon as he’s in the picture, even if he’s had the occasional redemption story (he’s a poet, moviemaker, etc).
In early appearances, he would blackmail, hide evidence, embezzle, extort, threaten his own clients into admitting their wrongdoings, taunt his superiors, and everything other.
In later appearances, he's mostly a funny wisecracker with an inappropriate sense of humor.
one can also see that as a symmetry breakup process. The things getting caught in their potential holes/local minima, or an emergence of an attractor under the same map being iteratively applied many times, etc.
As a counter-example of this phenomenon I think the character of Joe MacMillan from Halt and Catch Fire moved away from being a sociopathic manipulator with infinite charisma in the first two seasons and ended up as someone with sincere/honest intentions and genuine empathy for others without needing to exploit them for his goals.
I was a little disappointed to see them tone down this aspect of his character, which made for some compelling scenarios in the first two seasons. Nonetheless I’m happy that they gave him a more nuanced arc, even if it did make for less captivating TV.
Granted, the show is not a sitcom, so perhaps it’s not a great example.
Oh my god. I love it when I learn there is a term like this that perfectly explains what I’ve been trying to say about things like why I used to love It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. We get it, Dennis is probably a sociopath, Mac is gay and confused, Dee is desperate to mean something to someone, and Charlie is really dumb. But it was a lot more fun when all those traits were more nascent and only peaked out from behind their more normal personalities every now and then. Now I can predict how just about every interaction they have will unfold because they’ve found their formula and it’s all they do.
> The trope is named for The Simpsons character Ned Flanders, who was originally depicted as a friendly, generous Christian neighbor and a model father, husband and citizen, thus making him a contrast to Homer Simpson. As seasons progressed he became increasingly obsessively religious to the point where he eventually embodied almost every negative stereotype of the God-fearing, bible-thumping American Christian evangelist.
I bet this happens with a lot of Muslim characters too, right? Right? Because there’s definitely no anti-Christian bias in Hollywood. And no, I am not Christian, not by a long shot.
I think the most obvious pattern in many modern TV shows/movies is the musical interlude. You insert some famous pop song as 3 minutes of filler and try to transfer the affection for the song to the show.
A recent example is in The Umbrella Academy one of the characters dances to "I Think We're Alone Now" by Tiffany. It is entirely superfluous. It's not a new technique. I recently watched Love Actually for the first time and it had at least 3 of these types of scenes. When they happen though I just tune out as my brain screams "you're being manipulated". They're filler. They're like "design by committee" or "marketing checklist".
Related is the downbeat 3 minute musical interlude montage. Something disappointing to the character happens and then there's a downbeat montage of them brooding etc. IIRC Angel had 1 or 2 per episode but they're all over in modern shows.