Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Complaining
, started by lalalei2001 on May 12th 2016 at 7:09:09 AM
I have a possible example I'm unsure about. The earliest examples I can think of for the trope of getting three wishes from a magic being or thing are 'Aladdin' and 'The Fisherman and His Wife' and these seem to me to totally lack the later idea that the wish granter will be excessively literal or will put a cruel twist on it like 'The Monkey's Paw' or pretty much any modern example of the trope.
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Just had to add, the tropes I'm referring to are here called Literal Genie and Jerkass Genie.
- Whomp!: The comic that named the trope Klingon Scientists Get No Respect has him getting overpowered at the end, despite the trope usually being playing so the people are forced to realize that they should respect all their society's jobs, because they're all essential.
Take your queries to Is this an Example. That gets a lot more traffic than Discussion pages...
Considering that the comic wasn't even included as an example when this trope was made, it's not a trope namer nor is it a trope codifier. It's a deconstruction that draws on the same source as the trope namer. Absolutely not an example.
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- Snow White is the Trope Namer for the Wicked Stepmother archetype, but that's only the censored version, in the original tale, she's Snow White's biological mother.
In the case of the Magical G Irl Warrior genre, I think Codename Sailor V which came before Sailor Moon in the Manga is even more of it.
Especially in light of how the genre today gains conflicting reactions from Feminists. They like the Girl Power but there is the fact they seem like reinforcing gender norms. So in that context the original Minako being kind of a Tomboy is quite a subversion.
Add to that how she was never part of a team in her own series, and kind of lost of her friends, and had to kill her true love. Quite a bit isn't what you expect form the genre which has been standardized for the last decade by Pretty Cure
So about this Hunger Games example...
- Being responsible for kickstarting the young adult dystopian craze in the late 2000s, The Hunger Games series is widely credited as a Trope Codifier for the genre. However, viewed backwards, you may be surprised at how deconstructive the first book of the series is. The teenage heroine has only ambivalent feelings about the dictatorship, relies on luck as much as on skill, and repeatedly endangers her own people by indulging her impulses. None of her actions put the dictatorship in any kind of existential danger, a fact that the heroine herself is resigned to throughout the book. It is only starting from the second book onwards that the series picks up the more conventional tropes of dystopian series which it is widely known for.
Saying that it's an Unbuilt Trope for the late 2000's YA dystopian Novel really sounds like an Overly Narrow Superlative. It's a trendsetter for sure, but it's not really the Trope Maker or even the Trope Codifier for the most part.
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OK, let's step back, then. Cross out the late 2000s and you'll still have a trailblazer. Were there YA dystopian series before THG? Course there were. But has any of them kickstarted a craze like THG?
Could any of them honestly claim credit for doing that?
Look at the genre after THG came in. Divergent, Legend, Shatter Me, Article Five—they all trace back to THG. They all Follow the Leader.
I'm not saying it's not Follow the Leader, but the "leader" isn't necessarily the trope maker or even codifier. It's just one that happened to be popular.
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Popularity in and of itself is critical in shaping the genre. That's how people form their perception to it.
Indeed, it is by being popular that THG has revolutionized the genre. It makes it accessible. It makes it approachable. It makes people realize, oh, look, perhaps there is fun and profit to be made in this genre after all; whyn't I take this book for example. And in doing so, it codifies the things you have to do in order to succeed in this genre.
It's been 10 days. If you genuinely have an argument, you'd have responded by now. No sense in letting this drag on indefinitely.
I'm putting this entry up. Do not delete it. Thanks.
Don't. Seriously. It's not an example. It didn't revolutionize the genre, it didn't create the tropes, it didn't even codify them. It just happened to be well-done at a good time, and it caught on. That doesn't make it a trope maker. All the "deconstructive" tropes that it has have been done before. In fact, every single example of being deconstructive listed in the example are already in Battle Royale, for example.
It winds up just sounding like shoehorning for the sake of gushing.
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Saw this discussion. While I think that the Hunger Games is sort of a Trope Codifier for a type of dystopian fiction (basically young teens rebelling against a society with some weird quirk and usually the protagonist is someone that stands out from the regulations of the society in some way). And yes, Divergent and all those other works are clearly following the leader.
However, it isn't really a case of Unbuilt Trope, since dystopian fiction has existed for a long while and my guess is that "teen dystopian fiction" probably owes its creation to The Giver. And as far as Unbuilt Trope goes, that would really apply better to some of the very first works like We, Brave New World and 1984, wherein the protagonists start as obedient cogs of the system and prove to be very ineffectual rebels.
I don't want to take the initiative to completely edit it out on my own (since it may make it irrelevant to the page altogether?), but the Yu-Gi-Oh! entry isn't completely true.
Everything the entry says about YGO being incredibly dark is absolutely true, but my beef is with the concluding sentence:
"Far from being a celebration of tabletop gaming, the story is about how obsessing over a hobby to escape your problems turns you into a nasty, miserable, misanthropic person."
That gives half the story at best. In fact, by reading the manga, you can see how much of a love for games was put into it (the protagonist's name MEANS "game"!). It's just that games are used as methods of testing the soul and revealing a person's true character. Therefore, most of the villains meet their demises and expose their true corruption via gaming. By that same token, though, many characters (Kaiba and Joey/Jounouchi especially come to mind) get lots of character development and even get redeemed via game playing. It's a double-edged sword.
A particular counterexample comes to mind—Tomoya Hanasaki, aka the Zombire fan. He's a character that featured in a few chapters of the manga, and he used the character of Zombire as an escape from reality. He was absolutely obsessed with the character and collecting merchandise—because his father was the one who bought it for him, and it was one of the few ways they could still connect. Tomoya is portrayed as naive and goofy, but the villains of the chapters are some greedy thugs who take advantage of Tomoya's and his father's love for Zombire as part of a much deeper scheme. The moral of the story isn't "don't obsess over a hobby to escape your problems," because sometimes that's an okay way to cope. The moral is, in fact, "even if you're just a fan, you can still try to be like your favorite heroes in your own way." In other words, even obsessing over hobbies can be good as long as you're still tied to the real world and you use them to better yourself.
I didn't want to say all that on the main page because of natter. All that said, would the trope even still apply to Yu-Gi-Oh?
I removed this comment from the example of Conan The Barbarian:
- This is because the word barbarian did not necessarily mean "latter-day Neanderthal caveman", but simply a foreigner (from Greek barbaros, "foreigner"). Barbarians in this sense of the word were not necessarily uncivilized, and many of them even became naturalized Roman citizens and served in the provincial governments. The first barbarians to widely act truly "barbaric" were the ones who invaded Rome during the latter days of the empire: the Goths, the Vandals, and the Huns.
It smacks of Conversation In The Main Page, and while it may be true, and Robert E. Howard was likely well-read enough to know it, his Conan stories are very clearly setting up a dichotomy between "civilized" and "savage". So while Howard may have understood the difference between the archaic definition of "barbarian" as "foreigner" and the contemporary one as "savage", he's clearly invoking the latter, even if those he later influenced didn't appreciate the distinction.
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The "Savage" definition did evolve in antiquity, because the Greeks and Romans viewed Foreigners as "Savages". In factor one ancient author forgetting the original meaning actually said "It was wrong to call all non Greeks Barbarians", citing that the Romans and Carthaginians had sophisticate Constitutions.
Cleric of Banjo
I removed this example:
- Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates deconstructs The Birth Of A Nation by pointing out how The Gilded Age wasn't a place to grow up in, especially for black folks: lynchings were commonplace in there.
I was originally going to take issue in that Birth of a Nation is far from the first racist work, and so an anti-racist work is not an Unbuilt Deconstruction of it.
However, more importantly, Birth of a Nation predates Within Our Gates, and so the latter cannot be an Unbuilt Trope version of the former (since in order to fit the trope, it would have to come earlier).
Based on the article on The Other Wiki, it sounds like Within Our Gates is more like a Denied Parody of Birth of a Nation.
Not to mention that subverting a trope and deconstructing it are two different things.
Like almost everywhere else on this wiki, this page has some serious confusion over what Deconstruction means. Too many examples here feel more like retroactive Aversions, not Deconstructions. For example, an early Bond film that includes little to no gadgets is not a Deconstruction of gadgets; it's an Aversion of them. Likewise with the Night of the Living Dead, Unbreakable, Prom Night, Planet of the Apes, and Taxi Driver examples formerly listed here; those are all closer to Aversion (or, occasionally, Subversion) than they are to Deconstruction.
Edited by 216.99.32.43
What happened to the Modern Warfare example? I'm pretty sure it counted.
Direct all enquiries to Jamie B Good
Cut the following:
- Urusei Yatsura was created as a parody of the Magical Girlfriend genre, making its main male character a pitifully lecherous Jerkass who rarely, if ever, appreciated the Magical Girlfriend, outright claimed to not want her, and often came off as not deserving her in the first place... and its Magical Girlfriend wasn't much better, being naive, bad tempered and jealously possessive, flirtatious and lustful in her own right, and more frequently a cause of trouble then a solution to it. So popular was the series that its general take on the "main male" (as someone who didn't appreciate his Magical Girlfriend and/or frankly deserved most of the trouble he got into) and "Magical Girlfriend" (a well-meaning bumbler) became archetypes of the genre in their own right, and its parody still remains fresh today with all the Strictly Formula Magical Girlfriend stories floating around.
- Speaking of Magical Girlfriends, Tenchi Masaki began as rather worse-tempered than the Extreme Doormat and The Everyman types who followed him in the Unwanted Harem genre. For the first several OAVs, he was most characterised by a justified but decidedly insensitive desire to just be left alone.
...because I don't think anyone's ever actually looked at a timeline of this stuff. The only manga I can think of that was any kind of predecessor to Urusei Yatsura is Harenchi Gakuen. Shaenon Garrity, who knows a lot more about manga than most of us, has identified it as the original source for the Magical Girlfriend and Unwanted Harem tropes. (Though the "unwanted" part, of course, came later. Actually, specifically being averse to having the harem isn't really an integral part of the genre.) Of course, that in itself might qualify it for this — or not. The whole "looks like a parody in retrospect" thing might be some Square Peg Round Trope at work.
Really, though, an in-depth analysis of the history and evolution of shonen romantic comedy manga could be interesting, as long as it was clear on what was influential, and how. For instance, I've wondered — did Tenchi Muyo have any actual impact, for all its Cash-Cow Franchise status, or is it just prominent for its role in '90s American fandom?
Edited by ShayGuy Hide / Show Replies
The aforementioned Urusei Yatsura entry was merely Dummied Out instead of removed entirely. Do we have a reason to keep it like that, or should I remove it altogether?
Edited by Sparkysharps "If there's a hole, it's a man's job to thrust into it!" — Ryoma Nagare, New Getter Robo
Again, up for debate:
- Urusei Yatsura was created as a parody of the Magical Girlfriend genre before said genre had caught on (debuting a decade before Ah My Goddess!), making its main male character a pitifully lecherous Jerkass who rarely, if ever, appreciated the Magical Girlfriend, outright claimed to not want her, and often came off as not deserving her in the first place... and its Magical Girlfriend wasn't much better, being naive, bad tempered and jealously possessive, flirtatious and lustful in her own right, and more frequently a cause of trouble then a solution to it. Even with the series' popularization of the genuine loser lead and bumbling but well-meaning girlfriend as archetypes of the Magical Girlfriend genre, Urusei Yatsura's characters are still more interesting and colorful than the majority of later Magical Girlfriend series' leads and girlfriends.
- Speaking of Magical Girlfriends, Tenchi Masaki began as rather worse-tempered than the Extreme Doormat and The Everyman types who followed him in the Harem genre. For the first several OAVs, he was most characterised by a justified but decidedly insensitive desire to just be left alone.
- It's also worth noting that Urusei Yatsura came long before Harem took off as a genre (for comparison: Urusei Yatsura debuted in 1978; Tenchi Muyo in 1994; Love Hina in 1998) and practically reads as a parody or deconstruction of it. Ataru isn't the Accidental Pervert or unlucky but kind-hearted everydude most harem leads are, but a genuine, unrepentant pervert who openly expresses his desire for a harem and runs away from the one girl who actually wants him because he doesn't want to give up his dreams of a harem, even when it becomes clear that he'll never get one due to all other girls not finding his lecherous personality attractive in the slightest (and the few who do having questionable sanity).
- Incidentally, Ranma One Half also predates the Tenchi series by five years. It deconstructs the genre in the opposite way that Urusei Yatsura does: Ranma really doesn't want the harem, and not everyone involved wants to be involved in the mess either, but Ranma is engaged to several people for various reasons and, being an honorable man is stuck with it. Meanwhile, his relationship with the woman he actually loves is the former Trope Namer for Belligerent Sexual Tension.
- Even the Trope Codifier, Ah! My Goddess, took a while to find itself because of this. Originally, Keiichi was, while not quite as much of a Jerkass as Ataru from Urusei Yatsura, still not the Nice Guy Everyman we've come to expect, and spent the first several chapters trying to score with Belldandy before his phobia of intimacy and status as a Nice Guy settled in.
I am seriously questioning if this is really giving an accurate description of those genres or just the results of Small Reference Pools: Like Shay Guy asked, did Tenchi Muyo really create, codify, or even popularize the harem genre or is it just thought of that way because it was the first harem anime popular in English-speaking circles? The same for goes for Ah My Goddess with respect to Magical Girlfriend: Magical Girlfriend the trope at least is Older Than Feudalism.
On a different note, how the hell does having a perverted leads who wants a harem make something a parody of the harem genre? The Leisure Suit Larry is a pretty old trope as well.
Edited by thatother1dude
So, has it been established whether or not Urusei Yatsura is an Unbuilt Trope to the Magical Girlfriend trope or not? Because Unbuilt Trope is linked to on the Urusei Yatsura article because apparently "Urusei Yatsura was the first Magical Girlfriend show to depict the Magical Girlfriend as a cause of problems rather than a solution to problems", so either it needs to be added here or it needs to be removed from there.
The Industrial Metal entry is entirely incomprehensible for someone who isn't into the genre. I'd love to re-write it myself, but since I'm obviously not a fan I don't actually know why the sounds of those bands should be so confusing.
So an Unbuilt Trope is a Trope Maker that seems like a Deconstruction compares to the latter stereotypical examples. But what about one that seems like a Subversion and/or Inversion?
Because that's how I feel The Vampire Diaries books (Where where wrriten in the Early-Mid 90s) seem compared to modern Teen Vampire Romances Love Triangles of the 00s and Tween years, including it's own TV adaptation. In Twilight, True Blood and TVD tvshow, much of the drama revolves around the Human Female Lead's various Supernatrual love interesting fighting over how best to Protect her. But Book Elena isn't a Distressed Damsel at all, more often then not it's her who wind sup saving the day. And while TV Elena and Bella seem like personality lacking characters for the reader to easily imagine themselves into, Book Elena is basically a Subversion of the Blond Queen Bee type character.
Book Katherine also seems like a Subversion of her TV counterpart, and other Femme Fatale Vampiresses who are the Sires of the Good Guy Vampire Heroes like Darla for Angel and Caorline on Moonlight. In the Book Katherine isn't a Bad Girl at all but practically The Ingenue, she didn't want to cause conflict between the brothers ((And she wasn't the sole cause, Damon blamed Stafen for their mother's death) she wanted them to be a One True Threesome together, but they couldn't put their Hatred for each aside. Really their more responsible for why she winds up so Crazy Evil latter.
Stefan might qualify as an Un Built Trope for Angel however, like Angle he lives off Animal Blood and is very Broody, but his living off Animal Blood makes him far weaker then most Vampires and completely ineffective as a Hero.
Edited by MithrandirOlorin
No Live Action TV examples? The original Star Trek can often seem deconstructive next to the other Campy Sci-Fi shows the mimicked it. And what about Professional Wrestling? There are bound to be examples of this there.
I also notice only 1 Video Game example?
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Azor Ahai
Regarding the Avatar versus District Nine example, the latter originally existed as a short film some time before Avatar. However, I still don't think it counts. District Nine is kind of like a darker take on the concept of Alien Nation. Not sure if it actually is inspired by Alien Nation, but the two works (and in humorous examples Coneheads and Third Rock From The Sun) are about an "aliens as immigrants" theme.
This is a really different them than Avatar which I guess you could narrow down to "aliens as noble savages". While Avatar is similar in the way all these works allude to real-world racism, it's probably no coincidence that it's the only of these works where the aliens don't have more sophisticated technology than humans (because it's about a different theme).
Edited by Jordan Hodor
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Doktor von Eurotrash: So should The Truman Show be here at all? The original entry makes it sound like it invented the concept of reality TV, which it didn't - if anything, it jumped on the bandwagon of satirising a hot new trend. And acting like Big Brother was the first reality show... we do have memories of more than two years back, right?
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I think you're right. It could fit a trope (whose name escapes me) to the extent that it (arguably) predicts things actual reality shows would go on to do- but still, reality shows existed before the movie.
Hodor
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Doktor von Eurotrash: Nuked this with extreme prejudice from Literature:
- An odd variaton where the "trope" is a person. Elaida from The Wheel Of Time would look like a critique of George W Bush- except that the first 9 books in the series were published before he was president, and by that point all the paralells were set up.
1) While I haven't read those books in a while, and didn't even read the last couple, I've no idea how Elaida is supposed to resemble Bush (and if it's because she's evil and stupid, that's some Internet Backdraft right here), and 2) even if she did resemble Bush to any reasonable degree, that's still not an example of this trope.
It does not matter who I am. What matters is, who will you become? - motto of Omsk Bird
I think that the trope name should point out more that it seems like a deconstruction. I suggest preconstruction. Any thoughts?
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I think that would do nothing but add confusion.
"Unbuilt" means deconstructed before it's built anyway.
Mathematics Is A Language.
The section on Arthurian legends seems to be plagiarized from Overly sarcastic productions video on the Arthurian legends, specifically the text during the credits. Perhaps it would be wise to rewrite the section so as to be more original.