Tsundere: Opera posted:

L'elisir D'amore: Adina might be an early, operatic version of this. Her merciless teasing of the hapless Nemorino is finally revealed to be a cover for the affection she feels for him. Adina even goes so far as to accept another man's marriage proposal just to annoy the poor boy. She doesn't admit her true feelings, even to herself, until she sees him surrounded by female admirers.

Don Giovanni: Donna Elvira.

Type A posted:

The rose from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The book turns a tsundere flower into a commentary on the pain that love can cause so hauntingly beautiful that it will drive you insane.

quote:

Aravis Tharkeena from C. S. Lewis's The Horse and His Boy. Her Tsundere-ness is lampshaded at the end of the book, when it's mentioned that she and Shasta/Prince Cor got married because they were so used to their Slap-Slap-Kiss that they wanted to be comfier while fighting and then making out.

Type B posted:

Aglaya from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. Not only does the girl spend half the novel telling her love interest how stupid he is, the whole thing actually ends with a big girl fight-out over the guy. This is proto-anime writing at its best!

Demons's Marya Ignatyevna is also an example of tsundere. She spends most of the chapter A Woman Traveller verbally abusing Ivan Shatov but by the end becomes extremely clingy.
Also, in The Brothers Karamazov Lise acts rather tsundere to Alyosha, teasing him in order to get his attention and then blushing. Father Zosima calls her out on it.
Many more of Dostoevsky's characters fit the Sour Outside Sad Inside archetype. There may be a reason for his frequent use of these tropes.

Type A posted:

Kate from Shakespeare's play The Taming of the Shrew may count if you're one of those people who insist on believing that Shakespeare did everything first, although she was more of a Defrosting Ice Queen.

Some more modern interpretations of the play never have her lose her edge. However, Lilli Venessi, who plays Kate in the play-within-a-play in Kiss Me Kate definitely exhibits tsundere traits. Same goes to Catalina (played by Claudia Di Girolamo)from "La Fiera", a Chilean Telenovela also based in the play, though she's a Action Girl and older than the standard.
And Kat in 10 Things I Hate About You, which is also based on the play.

William Shakespeare has some more straightforward examples of a Tsundere than Katherine — Hermia, for example, who gets very fiery when roused, and Katherine Percy and Hotspur of Henry IV, Part 1, who are a Tsundere married couple. He constantly insults and belittles her while she threatens him with violence. And they are adorable.
Isabella from Measure for Measure also acts in this manner, although her moods are somewhat... bizarre from time to time.

Type B posted:

Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing is more a Type B; she is friendly and amiable toward most people, except Benedick. Their "merry war" fails to hide their true affections from the rest of the cast. She defrosts to a certain extent, but her relationship with Benedick races up and down the temperature scale throughout. She's also fiercely protective of her cousin Hero, to the point of wanting to see Claudio dead when he wrongly accuses Hero of infidelity.

quote:

Anyway, in matters I have more interest, if not more of a clue in, today's the first day since she got married that I saw the girl from high school that nothing happened with because we took turns being the pragmatist.
We go to the same church, which I've found awkward since our main reason for not dating in high school was because she was two years behind me and we thought I'd go off to college and we'd never see each other again, and then we kept seeing each other.
I'm not sure I've ever seen much indication from her that it's awkward for her, and in fact she's almost always initiated contact since then, but less and less often. Especially after she met the guy she just married.
While I was at college, I realized we didn't actually have much in common, and it became less so over that space of time. I'd still like to be friends on almost the same note we were in high school, but we have that near miss between us, and most of my contribution since then has only made it worse.
I'm the one always saying it's only as awkward as both parties allow it to be, but I'm realizing I've driven a wedge between us on my side, and I worry the damage is irreparable, but only on my part.
I thought her getting married wasn't going to change the level of awkwardness for me, but when I saw her today, for the first time since she got married a week ago, I made extra effort to avoid runnking into each other. A little while later, she passed by where I was sitting and said hi just as casually as ever. That was what made me realize just how much this is entirely on my end.

Namtab posted:

Tropers, and a lot of nerds in general, think that a deconstruction is just taking a work or genre and using a darker interpretation of the usual clichés.

I guess you can blame watchmen for this, as these nerds tend to ignore the subtleties in the work and only get "It is a dark, gritty take on superhero stories that is called a deconstruction, therefore a deconstruction is a dark and gritty take on a thing".

One other example of the nerd definition of "deconstruction" is what TVTRopes refers to as "Lampshade Hanging", the pointing out of a usual genre cliché by characters. Because by pointing out that a cliché exists, regardless of whether or not it is being used, characters break the fourth wall with genre awareness which totally deconstructs that genre, right?

Belisaurius posted:

So I want to know if this is a deconstruction of Pokemon or it's own thing.

So it's Thirty Minutes Into The Future and someone developed a practical anti-ICBM system (it's a giant laser, just assume it works). Without the threat of nuclear war, however, world powers ended up getting more aggressive militarily. In order to stem the manpower loss technologically advanced nations focus on drone warfare, making millions of remote controlled and autonomous war machines.

Problem was, drones were dumb. They never got a tactical AI worth a drat so entire battalions of drones marched fearlessly into killzones while the greater part of the division ended up destroyed in detail.

Remote control was slightly less successful. The anti-ICBM system was also an effective means of disabling satellites and just about every military in the world carried chaff grenades. Only signals from short range had a decent chance of getting through.

Eventually, modern armies figured out that the best way to control their drone forces was to have a human commander on location to keep track of the drones. This usually boiled down to a PFC. controlling a fireteam worth of drones. Lethality tended to drop as once all the drones were down the commander ran for their life.

When the brushfire wars finally petered out, mostly because the economic land gains were vastly outweighed by the cost of fighting, there was a vast surplus of drones with no real purpose. The vast majority were demilitarized, stripped of armaments and repurposed as tools. Veterans of the wars found that they missed the excitement of battle and sought to recapture the feeling (think hells angels).

With all those drones and bored commanders lying around it was only a matter of time before someone rigged up some paintball guns and flashbangs and had a mock combat match.

Things spiraled out from there. Within months there was the Drone Battles League setting regulations and broadcasting networks that finally have a year round sport.

With all that money flowing it wasn't long before third party developers figured out how to put a decent AI on a drone. Unfortunately, it wasn't much smarter than a dog and an unimaginative dog at that. However, it did give drones with the advanced AI a degree of personality.

X Ray posted:

So basically, I have the basic idea that there's this Buddy Cop couple (Sam Jackson and Denzel Washington), one of whom has to go to a psychiatrist (Morgan Freeman) because he suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder because of his time in the army (he's a veteran of the Iraq War). Similar to The Elements Of Crime, this movie is framed as Sam Jackson's character's explaining the events of the movie to the psychiatrist. Will Smith, meanwhile, is a local gang leader who is in conflict with the police, and Jackson and Washington's character, who are gang unit detectives, are trying to bring him down. Throw in Viola Davis as Jackson's wife maybe and Rosario Dawson as her opposite number as Will Smith's girl, we just have to get a blaxploitation spin on this to make it into a cataclysmic action movie which deconstructs the genre, but not to the point of parody.

So, what I'm basically asking is how one would go about deconstructing the genre of blaxploitation. Also, how could my brief summary be worked into a blaxploitation plot?

X Ray posted:

Yongary posted:

Have you actually watched any blaxploitation movies?

No, I have not. I was just tossing ideas around, is all.

Doomsday 524 posted:

If the writers decided to make a shift to make it both Darker and Edgier and to play Family Guy completely straight, without any Rule of Funny.

I'm thinking, Peter...Quagmire...Herbert...MEG...the flashbacks...

Meg would be Driven to Suicide. Quagmire would be a serial rapist Complete Monster, as would Herbert, and Peter would be an Abusive Parent Psychopathic Manchild who helped drive Meg to suicide by cutting her wrists in the bathtub, and his abuse is played straight. He has a Freudian Excuse because of his adoptive father Francis's emotional abuse, but Peter, mentally retarded, insane, and drunk, terrorizes and abuses his family on a frequent basis, and they don't feel they have a way out.

Here goes. Brian can't actually talk. The family has been deluded into thinking he can as solace from the fact that Peter abuses them (Meg in particular). And the flashbacks are also their way of attempting (and failing) to cope with their horrible reality. Peter's drunken abuse caused Stewie's head to be shaped the way it is.

What do you think will happen?

Not A Deconstruction posted:

If the kingdom is invaded by a brutal neighboring nation, the royal family's murder described in Gornful detail, and the princess repeatedly raped before being sold into slavery, this is Darker and Edgier but not a deconstruction.

Decon Recon Switch posted:

The Pony POV Series is a good example. It takes various aspects of the series, deconstructs them, and then reconstructs them. The best example is the basic premise of Reharmonized Ponies; that the World Healing Wave that accompanied Discord's defeat didn't heal the mental damage he caused...but friendship can still heal it. It also took the idea that Fluttershy's Discorded self was a split personality Discord created with the character of Fluttercruel, Fluttershy's Child By Mind Rape by Discord who at first tries to take over, but eventually is reconditioned by Fluttershy's parenting and becomes the mane cast's Sixth Ranger.

quote:

It's safe to say that deconstruction in the Derrida sense and deconstruction in the troper sense are divorced enough that there isn't really much you can compare between the two of them. I've got no problem with the troper definition of 'showing inherent inconsistencies and/or flawed assumptions in a given genre'. Words can mean different things, that's fine.

quote:

While sometimes perceived as an aggressive attack on the meaning or enjoyableness of a work or text, deconstruction is not properly about passing judgement (and in fact, the term "deconstruction" was picked over the German term "Dekonstruktion" to suggest careful attention to the detail within a text over violently emptying the work of all meaning).

Apple Tree posted:

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Then they shouldn't be equivocating the two.

DStecks posted:

None of this changes the fact that the tvtropes sense of deconstruction is still a useful descriptor for a work of fiction, going by their original definition of "a work that explores how the typical cliches of a genre or work would play out with a higher degree of reality imposed upon them", or in short, "in real life this wouldn't work at all".

It isn't deconstruction in the Derrida sense, but that doesn't mean that tvtropes deconstruction isn't a real thing in media.

KingKalamari posted:

They're talking about the show Bob's Burgers. Specifically the episode where the family keeps going on a gameshow to win a new mini-van and eventually the host gets so sick of them he rigs the game so they'll lose. I have no idea how the hell anarchy factors into this situation in any way so I'm just going to assume The Shop Soldier is using big words he doesn't understand to sound smart...

quote:

None of this changes the fact that the tvtropes sense of deconstruction is still a useful descriptor for a work of fiction, going by their original definition of "a work that explores how the typical cliches of a genre or work would play out with a higher degree of reality imposed upon them", or in short, "in real life this wouldn't work at all".

WickedHate posted:

"If it was an anime it wouldn't have ended as badly as it did."

Content:



That's so much worse.

And yes, there is a full page about it.

Apple Tree posted:

Ah yes, 'lolis'. Another word in the TVTropes Newspeak lexicon. Normal English is so oddly lacking a word that means 'little girls you can lech at while being shocked, shocked if anyone calls you a pedophile in response.'

Tatum Girlparts posted:

Uh, isn't that the super pedophile anime that the anime forum literally banned from being mentioned?

And taking it from grade school to kindergarten is improving it, huh?

Burn it all down.

DStecks posted:

None of this changes the fact that the tvtropes sense of deconstruction is still a useful descriptor for a work of fiction, going by their original definition of "a work that explores how the typical cliches of a genre or work would play out with a higher degree of reality imposed upon them", or in short, "in real life this wouldn't work at all".

It isn't deconstruction in the Derrida sense, but that doesn't mean that tvtropes deconstruction isn't a real thing in media.

vvvvv


Not disagreeing.

WickedHate posted:

"If it was an anime it wouldn't have ended as badly as it did."

Content:



That's so much worse.

And yes, there is a full page about it.

SALT CURES HAM posted:

e: Also the "better than it sounds" page is where they deliberately make things sound terrible so I think y'all might be misreading it just a little

Khazar-khum posted:

The word they want is 'analyzing'. Hell, it even has anal in it.

SALT CURES HAM posted:

I watched like one episode of that when it was new (years ago) and I don't remember it being anywhere near what that description makes it sound like. The tone of it was basically "aww lookit the little kids doing cutesy things " more than anything.

Of course, I'm pretty much expecting to put my foot in my mouth because tropers like it, but still.

e: Also the "better than it sounds" page is where they deliberately make things sound terrible so I think y'all might be misreading it just a little

SALT CURES HAM posted:

I watched like one episode of that when it was new (years ago) and I don't remember it being anywhere near what that description makes it sound like. The tone of it was basically "aww lookit the little kids doing cutesy things " more than anything.

Of course, I'm pretty much expecting to put my foot in my mouth because tropers like it, but still.

e: Also the "better than it sounds" page is where they deliberately make things sound terrible so I think y'all might be misreading it just a little

Djeser posted:

[Blaxploitation "Deconstruction"]

Rhinoceraptor posted:

His choice of actors for this is probably the most hilarious part.

DStecks posted:

It would be like writing a dark exploration of Busby Berkeley musicals.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Troper wants to turn a Norse saga into a steampunk YA novel. Flails desperately when she realizes that she'll need a miracle for it to not be poo poo, fails to take the hint and abandon her worthless idea.

Wait a minute... Morwen? Isn't she supposed to be one of "the good ones"?

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Troper wants to turn a Norse saga into a steampunk YA novel.

Metal Loaf posted:

"I'm not a paedophile, I'm a lolicon. It's accptable in Japan, you racist, so if you have so if you have a problem with it you're just a kink-shaming prude who obviously has a very vanilla sex life."

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Wait a minute... Morwen? Isn't she supposed to be one of "the good ones"?

WickedHate posted:

There are no good ones. Just ones that seem okay until you find out how terrible they are.

The loving OP posted:

You know what this forum needs? An Exalted thread.
So Scroll of Heroes came out, and I was thumbing through it, and loved that they put more than just mortals in there. Also, loli flaw is hilarious.

quote:

Its called "Child", but everyone is gonna use it to make themselves lolis. In a subversion, it is actually quite a crippling flaw. I can't post it on here, but just know that you will be much weaker and bad at socializing with adults, and that's just for young. Go very young, and just don't roll the character.

WeaponGradeSadness posted:

Morven is the good one, actually. I'm not sure whether he's on TVT still or not, though. Usually people got banned the instant we mentioned we like them, but Morven was a mod so maybe that was protection against the goon purges.

Razorwired posted:

Yeah, I think in thread 2 we found out that if you call a Troper one of the good ones they've got two weeks before either:

Fast Eddie screams that they're a Goon Agent and bans them, leading to them joining SA for whatever reason.

or

Finding out that the guy with the okay gender views hates all black people and has joined NAMBLA.

Speaking of, I don't think their Tradgame forum was there the last time we were mocking Tropers. Exalted is a "favorite" in grognards.txt. Let's see what Tropers have to say about it.


Oh goddamnit did White Wolf leave the creepy child rape thing in there?


Nope, these guys just can't think "child" in fiction without thinking "sexualized anime kid". TVTropes makes you a more diverse writer!

DA Student posted:

Reminder to those coming in late and confused due to the organizational stuff we've been talking about that the current work under review is mine. My turn will end on the second of August at 9:32:10 AM if I have five reviews by then, on the sixteenth of August at the same time regardless of how many reviews I have, and at some point between the two if I get five reviews at some point between those two times.

Izon posted:

About half-way through. I'm at the part where Gene masturbates. By... filling out a form........

Izon posted:

In Act 2... you really went to great lengths to make sure every well-known sex trope was conveyed using the metaphor of the yellow slips. And this makes me wonder - was that intentional? Since this strange world is meant to be a streamlined version of reality, it seemed like a LOT of time was spent covering the sexual escapades of the different characters. Of course, I can understand this being fundamental to the story, since sex(birth) and death are both a huge part of it (each one getting their own act in the story). But still, it seemed like Act 2 could've been cut down significantly. It was very, very clear early on that writing = sex; taking away the metaphor, Act 2 consists of what's basically just a long string of archetypal sex stories, as opposed to one original story like in Acts 1 and 3.

DA Student posted:

I don't think I'm cutting down Act Two because it just all flows together in my mind. I don't think there's really anything redundant or superfluous in there. I can see why you'd have the comments you do, and I considered that same issue when I was writing, but I ultimately disagree.

De Marquis posted:

Gene invents masturbation. On stage. Logically, that should have happened way earlier.

And now he just invented peadophilia. This guy is very inventive.

De Marquis posted:

Rape scene- that was uncomfortable.

LaughMyselfTo posted:

I note that I just picked out the most glaring highlights, and the overall troper assessment of this thing was neutral to positive.

Benny the Snake posted:

So from my limited experience with both "1984" and "Brave New World", TV Tropes seems to be an unholy mismash of the two. Newspeak meant to obstinate the true meaning of their vile fetishes and obsessions while tropes are literally their stimulus to keep themselves oblivious to everything else. I have to wonder how terrible the respective trope pages are.

Nineteen Eighty-Four posted:

This is the book. One of the most horrifying and depressing codifiers for the Dystopian genre, ever.

After reading Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian thriller We, George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four as a Pragmatic Adaptation of the novel for non-Russian audiences. It became one of the most iconic stories in the English language, and introduced the phrases “Big Brother Is Watching You”, “thoughtcrime”, “Thought Police”, and “doublethink” into the English lexicon (but not “doublespeak”).

In spite of it suffering from a bad case of Twenty Minutes into the Future as the title alone testifies, Nineteen Eighty-Four remains one of the best and most horrific dystopian works ever.

The BBC adapted the book for television in 1954 with Peter Cushing as Winston Smith. Questions were asked in the House of Commons when it was alleged that one viewer had actually died of shock while watching.

Two film versions were made, in 1956 and (appropriately) 1984. The 1956 version changed the ending, completely ignoring Orwell’s point (on purpose, it turns out), although to some extent proving it. The brilliant and depressing 1984 version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, starring John Hurt as Winston and Richard Burton in his final role as O'Brien, is far more true to the original novel, but is often compared unfavorably to Terry Gilliam's surreal dystopian movie Brazil (which came out one year later, in 1985), which takes a much more subversive and blackly humorous view of Orwell’s themes. According to IMDb, Tim Burton is working on another adaptation of this movie.

Also, this book is frequently compared to Brave New World as a way of showing the perspectives of the dystopia-esque society. Note that Nineteen Eighty-Four shows that what we fear controls us, while Brave New World shows that what we love controls us.

Compare also with Jennifer Government, another Dystopian novel in which it’s not the state or a single party, but corporations who control everything. Contrast Fahrenheit 451, where dystopia came about from the people while the government was less involved.

Interestingly, sales of the novel tend to skyrocket following political scandals involving wiretapping or mass surveillance.

quote:

NOTE: Do not identify this book as being anti-communist or anti-fascist anywhere on this wiki. It's anti-totalitarianism. Orwell was personally a socialist, but thought that both extremes were bad and would inevitably lead to the same thing. The original political leaning of the Party is deliberately vague, and their sole concern is retaining power - no more, no less, as stated In-Universe by O'Brien near the end.

Brave New World posted:

A 1932 dystopian novel written by Aldous Huxley. Quite possibly the only serious Western Dystopia involving too much happiness... as provided by the totalitarian state.

In the future, most of humanity and the environment people live in has been tailored to make everyone happy. There are five castes of people (Alphas through Epsilons), divided further into sub-castes ranging from the leader Alpha Pluses down through the barely-human grunt Epsilon-Minus Semi-Morons. Everyone is grown in jars and their general roles in society planned before "birth". The population is pacified with virtual reality and the pleasure drug soma. Human needs are satisfied—by biological engineering when necessary; orgies are the norm; and anything that might possibly cause dissatisfaction is simply left out of society.

The cost of continuing to breed people smart enough to keep society running is the risk of emotional instability in those people. Genius creates the risk of madness—yes, in this society, unhappiness qualifies as madness. We have a Type Alpha who is not as tall and strong and beautiful as most, looking more like a Type Gamma; there are continual jokes about his jar getting spiked with alcohol. He fantasizes about being unhappy. And we have a Type Alpha who's in a critical position in society: he writes advertising jingles. Unfortunately, he suddenly wants to create True Art, and True Art Is Angsty. (No, he doesn't actually create True Art. Wanting to is bad enough.)

The only exception to all of this are the "Savage Reservations", barbaric and primal communities where people still live with nature and its cruelties and limitations, where people are born naturally and know the full range of emotions. After growing up on a New Mexico reservation, one of the novel's protagonists leaves for the wider world (along with bringing some Shakepeare with him), where he quickly becomes a celebrity but at the cost of his own sanity as his ideals and emotions clash horribly with that of the rest of society.

This novel is famous for quite a few things. For one, the biological techniques described in the book (such as cloning) would turn out to be remarkably similar to those used in the modern day, despite this novel being written in the 1920s, decades before real science would ever reach this stage. It helps that Huxley is a member of one of Britain's most important and productive scientific families (his older brother Julian was a leading evolutionary biologist and his grandfather Thomas was Darwin's Bulldog, the man who argued Darwin's idea in public for him.).

It's also a true example of Crapsaccharine World and Crapsack Only By Comparison. The Brave New World is a fully-functioning society where everyone is happy, youthful, healthy and productive, but it is presented as a dystopia because this comes at the cost of creativity, free will and progression. The Reservation is a free community of emotion, but it is also a dirty, disease-ridden tribal wasteland where the weak are ostracized and pain equals redemption. Aldous Huxley would later go on to express regret at not including a third option that would have been a happy medium of the two. (He does, in his later book Island, but not for the Savage.)

Huxley has often been accused (including by Kurt Vonnegut) of plagiarizing We in writing Brave New World. Despite the numerous similarities between the two books, Huxley has always denied this, so compare and contrast the two.

Also, this book is frequently compared to Nineteen Eighty-Four as a way of showing the perspectives of the dystopia-esque society. Note that Nineteen Eighty-Four shows that what we fear controls us, while Brave New World shows that what we love controls us.

Also compare Fahrenheit 451, a later work with similar themes of an oppressive, pleasure-driven society, vacuous entertainment, suppression of emotions and the elimination of the past (i.e. books).

And before you ask, the Iron Maiden song of the same name was inspired by the book. Not to be confused with it, though.

quote:

Sex Is Evil and I Am Horny: John's fundamental conflict. His traditional values on things such as love and sex clash horribly with those of civilized society, and when he finally gives into his impulses, he becomes so guilt-ridden afterwards that he commits suicide.

quote:

We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future: The lower (read: intentionally retarded) castes. Justified; they've got the technology to make a great deal of that work obsolete and in fact tried just that, only to find out that it made people unhappier. It's better to give the Epsilons somewhere to go and something to do for 8 hours, so labor-saving technology was intentionally dialed back to create more make-work. As for why they didn't just stop breeding/manufacturing the lower castes and let a society of free, intelligent humans operate the labor-saving devices themselves: they tried that too, and the island they tried it on collapsed into civil war within a couple of years; it turns out that the higher castes need someone to boss over and will not do anything that they feel is beneath them.

quote:

Villains Never Lie: The protagonists all take Mustapha Mond's story about the Alpha society of Cyprus failing at face value, even though Mond is probably the most Unreliable Narrator imaginable for dictating why a free society of equals can't work.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Troper wants to turn a Norse saga into a steampunk YA novel. Flails desperately when she realizes that she'll need a miracle for it to not be poo poo, fails to take the hint and abandon her worthless idea.

quote:

"In a future in which the world has been devastated by a nuclear war and genetic engineering has led to the creation of elves, dwarves and other fantasy races..."

Venusian Weasel posted:

We're also told that the story has aged badly, but no reason is given to the hows or whys.

Benny the Snake posted:

I took a class on Science Fiction as Literature and one of the things I learned is that good sci-fi writers don't write to keep current with tech. If so, we'd have constant new versions of established books or we wouldn't have Science Fiction in the first place. The "fiction" part allows writers to create a narrative based loosley on current tech in order to make some kind of grand statement on the advancement of technology in relation to the progress of humanity. William Gibson's version of cyberspace in "Neuromancer" is antiquated and analog but it's not about the tech, it's about how the progression of technology has led to a regression in the human condition.