Flanderization
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
some points
* Shooting must be done on location
* All music must be incidental
* Genre movies are not acceptable
Is adding songs written in a minor key to TV shows manipulation so I feel sad?
> 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.
https://tv.avclub.com/futurama-jurassic-bark-crimes-of-the-h...
Wow. Brutal.
Then I read that piece, and read the comments on it, and cried some more, and then found this one.
https://tv.avclub.com/1804382181
I have no words.
Right, it’s the difference between an item being a prop, and being a paid-for product placement.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Ruh roh.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
Weren't we all?
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.
GRRM has style, and seems super original if you haven't read a ton of the genre.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well it’s not like they didn’t warn you! [0]
[0]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TVTropesWillRuin...
This holds true for classical music as well. You just don't notice because of survivorship bias.
Of course, the emotional landscape is often "what is this garbage, turn it off"...
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?
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 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.
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.
It definitely works great in that regard, but on the other hand it has plenty of "comedy tropes" which (to me) get old pretty fast.
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 like the Noel Gallagher montage when thatb kid is walking trhough the apocalypse
Or perhaps there haven't been any new developments in cinema over the past few decades.
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.
ps: for Umbrella Academy, keep in mind that it was written by a literal rockstar - explains the heavy focus on music
Because it could be a broader belief that is bleeding into your appreciation for film/tv and hurting your ability to enjoy it.
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.
That part always stuck with me and made me really notice how overt many movies and tv shows are about the music they use.
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.
Well those shows are quite formulaic. You get what you chose in some sense.
Try something completely different. For example netflix just launched a Turkish miniseries (bir başkadır).
Or there is a danish show called Rita I quite enjoyed as well.
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
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.
Everything he does is basically "remember this? Remember this thing you liked? Here it is again but I made it bigger and faster!"
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.
no it bloody wasn't
This seems to be the general direction many of the new sequels go. See also: Picard.
Agreeing though that JJ Abrams did it in a particular ham-fisted way, like in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
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.
Far too much Kirk Drift.
I think the only bit that made any sense was the section 31 stuff in the later film.
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.
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?")
I've watched the first three since I posted that.
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.
Even Obama writes about such a phase in his bio.
1998: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/12/21/the-patch-para...
2009: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/01/28/further-songs-...
2017: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2017/02/15/the-latest-fis...
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).
I think the world itself is getting Flanderized.
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.
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".
All this makes me remember how different the very first season of the Simpsons was to the rest.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
That's the connection between the two topics that I see.
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.
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.
https://news.avclub.com/cameos-top-earner-of-2020-is-the-off...
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.
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.
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".
Isn't that how MLK Jr is portrayed or am I missing something?
Maybe I'm overthinking this or getting it wrong. I have not read Baudrillard. Perhaps I should.
Those fleeting moments of humanity and growth were my favourite part of Simpsons as a kid.
> how has this been accomplished?
I always assumed it was user-driven like Wikipedia or Stack Overflow and that appears to be the case:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization?a...
I think the wiki is one of the modern world's most underrated -- and underexploited -- innovations.
There's incidentally an entry for those:
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?
Interestingly, there is now an "official process" for getting a page created. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Administrivia/Creatin...
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.
- The original statement: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Administrivia/TheGoog...
- The later historical revision: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Administrivia/TheCont...
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.
* How many of the wiki authors are actually screenwriters or showbiz ppl?
* How many pro screenwriters actually use this site for reference/inspiration?
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.
Politicians cannot afford to be complicated.
Agreed, but it's most exaggerated in winner-take-all systems. In proportional representation systems, politicians can afford to be more nuanced
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)
Thanks for the magic of internet some amazing person has done the numbers on this: https://buydemocracy.wordpress.com/2015/12/18/yoda-speak-ori...
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 :).
Also, great site!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.