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Level Slide posted:Incidentally, does the real life section of the page list the reconstruction of the American South as a deconstruction of the concept of reconstruction? If yes, does that mean the Civil Rights Movement was a reconstruction of reconstruction? CoolZidane posted:What gets me is that when Tropers do this sort of Genre Savvy Lampshade Hanging poo poo, it always has the air of "Look at how loving clever I am." It's not about surprising the audience by defying expectations (as in the "35 minutes ago" scene in Watchmen); it's about jerking off to how brilliant they are for noticing/not following a cliche. Why do you think tropers like Joss Whedon so much? His most popular poo poo is basically, "look how clever my writing is I saw a cliche and pointed it out" while doing nothing particularly clever with the cliche. He's pretty much Troper Prime, a troper who can actually write. Venusian Weasel fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Feb 7, 2014 |
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Feb 7, 2014 21:09
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I've seen Martian Successor Nadesico described as being almost as much of a deconstruction as Eva, and it goes in completely the opposite direction to that series. I'm pretty sure they were both released around the same time, as well.
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Feb 7, 2014 21:11
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Venusian Weasel posted:Well, here's the thing - I never particularly identified with Shinji. Empathized, certainly, but I realized he was a walking trainwreck and most of the bad things that happened were the result of lovely decisions on his part. I think the parts of the show I enjoyed most were the conclusion and movie, the parts of the show that really felt experimental in their storytelling. Welcome to the NHK is great; the book it's based on is more or less semi-autobiographical, and both it and the show make it very clear that that's a terrible way to live. It's a wake-up call to anyone who remotely relates to the characters in it, because drat. It's also relevant to the thread because TV Tropes, as covered in previous threads, loves it for all the wrong reasons. Which sort of contradicts what I just said, but, well, tropers.
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Feb 7, 2014 21:18
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Roland Jones posted:Welcome to the NHK is great; the book it's based on is more or less semi-autobiographical, and both it and the show make it very clear that that's a terrible way to live. It's a wake-up call to anyone who remotely relates to the characters in it, because drat. And that was the reason I reacted so badly to it. I saw it when I was already falling into depression, and relating to a character who wasn't happy no matter what he did made me lose hope in life. It wasn't a pretty place to go, and took me a couple of years to climb out of it. It's a great story, but at the time it absolutely destroyed me.
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Feb 7, 2014 21:32
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Metal Loaf posted:I've seen Martian Successor Nadesico described as being almost as much of a deconstruction as Eva, and it goes in completely the opposite direction to that series. I'm pretty sure they were both released around the same time, as well.
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Feb 7, 2014 22:27
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Runcible Cat posted:I first saw them both at the same time (SciFi UK showed eps of Eva followed by Nadesico) and there was no doubt in my mind that Nadesico was shamelessly ripping the piss out of Eva (and a lot of other anime too). I must get around to rewatching it and see if it's still fun. You forgot to mention that they were showing both shows back to back on Saturdays at lunchtime. Also most of the stuff Sci-Fi UK used to show still holds up, though stuff like Excel Saga is still very much a love/hate thing. Venusian Weasel posted:And that was the reason I reacted so badly to it. I saw it when I was already falling into depression, and relating to a character who wasn't happy no matter what he did made me lose hope in life. It wasn't a pretty place to go, and took me a couple of years to climb out of it. It's a great story, but at the time it absolutely destroyed me. Yeah, I couldn't get into it for much the same reasons. I've never been anywhere near as big a weeaboo, but the depresson, the inability to leave the house, filling the void in your life with useless crap... may have hit a little closer to home than I'd preferred.
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Feb 7, 2014 22:36
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Venusian Weasel posted:And that was the reason I reacted so badly to it. I saw it when I was already falling into depression, and relating to a character who wasn't happy no matter what he did made me lose hope in life. It wasn't a pretty place to go, and took me a couple of years to climb out of it. It's a great story, but at the time it absolutely destroyed me. Ah, dang. I had the opposite reaction; I basically thought "god drat I do not want to turn out like this". It was rather motivating, in a way. Sadly there were external factors contributing to my situation that were still around and that I wasn't fully aware of or able to stop, so my newfound attitude ended up not being quite enough.
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Feb 7, 2014 23:09
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Venusian Weasel posted:Why do you think tropers like Joss Whedon so much? His most popular poo poo is basically, "look how clever my writing is I saw a cliche and pointed it out" while doing nothing particularly clever with the cliche. He's pretty much Troper Prime, a troper who can actually write. Cabin in the Woods is basically TV Tropes: The Movie. I can't believe how many people recommended it, it tried painfully hard to be ~genre savvy~ and full of deconstruction/reconstruction/whatever the gently caress.
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Feb 8, 2014 07:10
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And despite how much it calls attention to common horror tropes and how they're used in the movies, TVTropes is incapable of producing an analysis page on it. Which is seriously low-hanging fruit, because it pretty much wears its subtext on its sleeve.  It's a softball question at worst, and there's a Joss Whedon quote on the main page where he comes right out and says what his intentions were (I know, I know, death of the author and all, but I doubt many interpretations will be much different from his) - it's more like a t-ball question. And still, tropers whiffed it.
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Feb 8, 2014 07:40
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Is there an actual alternative to tvtropes?
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Feb 8, 2014 07:52
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WastedJoker posted:Is there an actual alternative to tvtropes? Is there a need for one?
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Feb 8, 2014 07:54
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A degree in English Literature?
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Feb 8, 2014 07:59
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Their page for Cabin in the Woods seems to be composed primarily of spoiler warnings.Emphasis theirs posted:Five friends go to an isolated cabin in the woods for a weekend vacation. What could possibly go wrong? And drat near the entire tropes list is hidden behind spoiler boxes. Is there even that much in the movie to spoil? They show that the scientist organization is deliberately running a horror movie scenario after, what, ten minutes of the film? And then there are basically zero ZOMG HUGE SPOILER twists for the entire rest of the movie after that premise comes out? WastedJoker posted:Is there an actual alternative to tvtropes? The alternative is "don't go to TVTropes."
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Feb 8, 2014 08:04
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Lottery of Babylon posted:Their page for Cabin in the Woods seems to be composed primarily of spoiler warnings.
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Feb 8, 2014 08:21
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cptn_dr posted:A degree in English Literature? How would a degree in English lit help me find pony torture pornography?
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Feb 8, 2014 08:23
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Morkyz posted:How would a degree in English lit help me find pony torture pornography? When you go on a despair-at-English-degree-induced bender on that bottle in the back of the cabinet that you can't quite remember when (or if) you bought it?
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Feb 8, 2014 08:30
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quote:I tend to consider any WOG stuff pseudo-canon unless it's actually shown in the show, or is otherwise directly related to events that we've seen, especially if it's in regard to the cosmology as a whole, which could very well change. I.e. I'll take the writer's comment about "the number of candles on RD's birthday cake doesn't necessarily indicate her age" as being canon, but the comment about the sun not so much, because it's a general statement that could easily be disproved by further episodes. For now, my view of the sun in Equestria is just "big". And I'd also reiterate that just because it would take an enormous amount of physical energy to move doesn't mean it would take a lot of magical energy.
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Feb 8, 2014 08:33
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Morkyz posted:How would a degree in English lit help me find pony torture pornography?
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Feb 8, 2014 08:39
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WastedJoker posted:Is there an actual alternative to tvtropes? I don't know any writing communities offhand (I'm sure there are plenty), but nothing that really has the same scope as TVTropes. A Good Thing. Learning to write by looking at tropes (cliches, really) is an awful idea. Yes, understanding certain tropes (both good and bad) can help your writing, but on the whole breaking down stories into cliches is reductive and strips a story of the elements that make it resonate emotionally or intellectually. Essentially, tropers try to reverse engineer stories so they can build their own. They take apart the mechanical parts of the story and look copy them for their own stories. They don't bother to learn why those parts or used, or how they're supposed to fit together to make a good story. They just see Differential Gear and Piston and Hubcap, think those look cool, and try to make a working 4-stroke engine out of them. A more specific problem to TVTropes is the idea that everything must be a cliche. This results in tropers trying to stuff multiple square pegs into round holes, ultimately confusing whatever lesson is being taught. For example, what do the Joker, Agent Smith, Lovecraft's protagonists, and Dr. House have in common? They're Straw Nihilists, of course! Even worse, tropers can't even agree on what a specific trope is, see the deconstruction chat on the last page. Basing a writing community around a community-compiled encyclopedia is a bad idea, and the original is bad enough. There's probably room for a better-written alternative, but even then it's just not all that useful a tool for budding writers. Learn the tricks of the trade before you go playing around with basic story conventions. Even experimental stories require some knowlege of the art form before you start screwing around. Think of Picasso. He didn't just wake up one day and create cubism, he was already a skilled conventional painter before he started playing around with form. Venusian Weasel fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Feb 8, 2014 |
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Feb 8, 2014 08:47
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WastedJoker posted:Is there an actual alternative to tvtropes? If you're just trying to find books about a thing you like, use LibraryThing and it's lists and tags. So if you want to read about knighthood in literature, you're set. Plus it applies to all kinds of things. Here's a list of books dealing with mortality, for example. gently caress TVTropes, you don't need their armchair, creepy analysis to find something to read.
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Feb 8, 2014 08:47
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The Leper Colon V posted:Well, part of the point of CitW was that you were supposed to go in blind. The cat's kind of out of the bag now, but for once, I can't fault tropers for playing along. As I remember it, the twist is fully revealed in the first few scenes. It won't "ruin the movie" to know it I dunno, to me all the flailing around about how this is the most spoilable movie of all time!! comes across as trying to make the movie out to be much more mind-blowing and clever than it actually is. It doesn't help that their fear of spoilers has kept them from actually writing anything about the movie other than a cast list; they could have written something behind spoiler tags if they cared, but nope, they were too busy writing a guide to writing fan episodes of Doctor Who.
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Feb 8, 2014 08:53
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WastedJoker posted:Is there an actual alternative to tvtropes? Pretty much anything about what you want info on, unless you need a stupidly exhaustive list of trivia about it. Beyond tidbits of information TV Tropes offers nothing Wikipedia, IMDB, or anything else doesn't, and pretty much anything from it that you can get elsewhere will be worse on TVT.
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Feb 8, 2014 09:00
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PUGGERNAUT posted:Cabin in the Woods is basically TV Tropes: The Movie. I can't believe how many people recommended it, it tried painfully hard to be ~genre savvy~ and full of deconstruction/reconstruction/whatever the gently caress. God. Goooooooood. I mean, I'll take CitW over most other Whedon-y stuff because it's short, basic and entertaining. But I got real sick of people talking about how "brilliant" it was when it was the most basic meta "twist" on a slasher horror movie imaginable, and they didn't even do enough with it to fill out a quick runtime. It's great to watch once. The climax is amazingly fun. But it has zero rewatch value principally because it's a bunch of filler curled up around the "twist," and the minute it starts taking itself seriously, particularly in the last five minutes, it ceases being fun completely and starts playing like a bad episode of Angel. The attempt at a serious-business message about how humanity should die off because it enjoys watching other people suffer in horror movies was misbegotten and nonsensical at best, and mean-spirited and tonally disjunct at worst. Bleh. [/rant] As it relates to TV Tropes at all, the entire Sigourney Weaver is the mastermind! bit and needlessly convoluted wallow in the mechanics of the sacrifice conspiracy...ugh. Just ugh. Real Whedon-y, and by proxy, real TV tropes-y. There's a lot of fun stuff in it, but all the things that leave a bad taste in your mouth when the credits roll are Whedon-flavored elements, from the self-indulgent terrible first-half pacing to the reference-wallows to the mindless shift to failed attempts at depth. Jay O fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Feb 8, 2014 |
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Feb 8, 2014 09:08
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So You Want To Be Originalquote:One cannot create something from nothing. Every fictional work (with a few exceptions) is based on previous works. In fact, all works use "elements" from previous works to make something new. That's basically why this entire website exists. Only a few ancient works actually draw from real life at all; everything else is nothing but incestuous derivatives of derivatives of derivatives of derivatives of derivatives. TVTropes objectively describes all works of literature just like the periodic table objectively describes all chemical compounds. quote:For instance, taking one popular element of fiction, dragons are apparently "made from nothing" given that they don't exist. However they are in fact a mixture of different kinds of reptiles that together made something "new". These new combinations are mixed again to create even more combinations like a "chain-reaction”. Here's a slightly more specific example: quote:When the human brain has unlimited creative freedom it is unable to actually create anything until its options are more rigidly defined. Instead of thinking, "I want to make cool story," think "I want to make a Magical Girl series about a girl that is also secretly a singer”. The reason why there is so much more fanfiction than original stories is because it is easier to create new stories based on older ones than from scratch. quote:The third paradox can be summed up in one of George Santayana's most famous sayings: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". If you don’t see how people before you made stories, it's very likely that you will unwittingly repeat the same ideas. And even worse, you might think that you were the first to come up with those ideas. If you see how past stories were made, you will still want to put your own spin on it. Tropes Are Flexible, so even if you rip off another work's concept, you can bend to fit the purposes of your story; the originality in this case is not the trope itself, but how you played with it. For instance, an Unwanted Harem is not very original, even if it does contain some non-human characters. A twist on this particular genre would be making the main character bisexual, enabling both male and female love interests. A Magical Girlfriend story is also rather unoriginal — after all, there are only so many times you can use ghosts, aliens, angels, etc, before it seems redundant and uninspired. In this case, originality stems from making the girlfriend a different type of non-human, a troll for example, or a creature made out of fire. Or perhaps you could take the plot of a Hentai anime and remove the porn, creating a story that's much different from the original. "How do you write original works? Copy some hentai" - a person who is literally incapable of writing an example that isn't anime. Lottery of Babylon fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Feb 8, 2014 |
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Feb 8, 2014 09:20
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The best alternative to TvTropes is the novel "How Not To Write A Novel." It's mentioned a few times on TvT, but applying its rules to their own writing is beyond tropers' grasp.
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Feb 8, 2014 09:36
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Arcsquad12 posted:The best alternative to TvTropes is the novel "How Not To Write A Novel." It's mentioned a few times on TvT, but applying its rules to their own writing is beyond tropers' grasp. ...correction, I had that book. Just realized I left it at my cubicle at an old employer's. A year ago. 
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Feb 8, 2014 10:05
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Lottery of Babylon posted:So You Want To Be Original I mean, what's it like to read a book or watch a movie for these people? Do they just spend the entire time looking for ways to catalog every single element? Or is it automatic? Jay O posted:tonally distaff 
Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 10:42 on Feb 8, 2014 |
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Feb 8, 2014 10:36
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Lottery of Babylon posted:So You Want To Be Original So... replace the ghost girl with a troll girl (or a robot alien maid, whatever), and you don't have to change the predictable cliche itself. It's no wonder they're so fond of deconstructions, if that's what passes for originality. Has anyone written a decent story starting with tropes?
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Feb 8, 2014 10:59
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MinistryofLard posted:I continue to be amazed that people look at the Evil Overlord List and, rather than chuckling and saying "Ha hah, movie villains do do that a lot, yeah." thinks "This is good writing material!" The thought process probably goes something like this 1) A good villain has to be 'smart'. That's somewhat true: pretty much every 'proper villain' has a trait where they're very competent in SOME field or skill or something. I can't think of many (main) villains off the top of my head who are basically glorified thugs (Lord Humungous from Mad Max, maybe?) 2) Tropers also consider themselves smart. 3) Tropers consume so much drat media that they burn themselves out on it. Ergo, they assume that a truly 'smart' villain would see the things that other fictional villains do and go out of their way to avoid doing them, ergo we would have a truly smart and hence more dangerous and hence greater, more memorable villain! 4)???? 5) Profit It doesn't seem to click to them that if you're going to have the villain avoid 'traditional' mistakes, there's probably something in their psychology that would produce other mistakes. Take the example brought up a few dozen pages back, with that terrible smug bit of masturbation Harry Potter and MAR. The writer made Voldemort 'so much more logical' by having him make a Horcrux out of some random rock and out of the Pioneer space shuttle, hence making it 'impossible' to destroy them. Even IF we could twist Voldemort's characterization around that he could work around his overwhelming arrogance to interact with Muggle technology and assume that even the splitting of his soul wouldn't be enough to make him live forever, there is no way that someone like Voldemort would just blithely leave chunks of his soul lying around or in the middle of nowhere without some failsafe to get them back if he needed them. His particular bit of villainous thought (being a narcissistic megalomaniac) wouldn't allow him to. This is a big issue where tropers and social awkwards fail in general: they want emotions to be like computer programs you can turn on and off, when in reality they're being messy complicated things that you have to actually, you know, FEEL and work through. If you have Voldemort just pretend those aspects of his character don't exist, then it's not Voldemort any more. It's some computer programmed for villainy wearing a Voldemort mask. Basically, tropers think that villains should be reading and watching all the stuff they do to learn how to do their villainy, when 'villainy' isn't something you really learn. It's something that you are.
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Feb 8, 2014 12:41
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There's also the fact that, in these kind of stories, events and happenstance virtually contort themselves in a way so that the bad guys can be beaten. Look at Lord of the Rings: the One Ring, an artefact of massive importance is lost. It gets found by a hobbit, who becomes obsessed with it, keeping it out of the world for a century or two, then it's found by another hobbit, who does much the same thing, eventually leading to a chain of events where Sauron is defeated. If Voldemort had used a grain of sand as a Horcrux, that grain would've eventually been used to create a giant stained glass window of himself, transforming that into a Horcrux, because that's the way magic (and narratives) work. It's like Terry Pratchett once said: one in a million chances crop up nine times out of ten. If the bad guy really is that drat clever, having that cleverness turned against them just makes the end that much more satisfying.
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Feb 8, 2014 12:56
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kaleidolia posted:So... replace the ghost girl with a troll girl (or a robot alien maid, whatever), and you don't have to change the predictable cliche itself. It's no wonder they're so fond of deconstructions, if that's what passes for originality.
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Feb 8, 2014 13:25
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I don't think tropers invented their definition of "deconstruction", iirc people were using it for things like Watchmen before TVTropes was even a thing.
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Feb 8, 2014 13:59
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The thing is, they can't tell the difference between an author making a character ridiculously stupid to make the plot work and a character making a bad decision as the result of an established flaw. The thing in Friends where Monica thinks Chandler was masturbating to sharks is in the same What An Idiot category as Robb doing something dumb because it's the honorable thing in Song of Ice and Fire. I think their ideal story is the horror story Abed tells in Community where everybody does the smart thing, so they end standing back to back holding knives as nothing happens. \/\/\/ I've seen Japanese translations of Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby on the bookstore shelves. Gatsby was pretty prominent for a while there because of the movie. Hell, there was a whole Ghost in the Shell arc full of Catcher in the Rye references. Sure, everybody has their own national classics too, but these things travel across country lines more than you'd think. Thinky Whale fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Feb 8, 2014 |
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Feb 8, 2014 15:21
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cptn_dr posted:A degree in English Literature? This is one of the things that annoy me the most about this thread. Do you just assume that everyone who posts on an English-speaking website needs to know and understand English literature? English is the language of the Internet (along with Russian, to a lesser degree) and a lot of people are forced to learn it in order to communicate in an international community. TvTropes are full of people to whom English is a foreign language. I keep seeing certain works mentioned as something critical to understanding any kind of literature, but they seem to me like things that should be completely off the radar for everyone outside of English speaking countries. The Catcher in The Rye? The Great Gatsby? Why should I know about these books? Here's an opposite example: I'm a huge fan of Tolkien, but I think that Ivo Andric rightfully received the Nobel prize in literature for The Bridge on The Drina, and that that book is a far greater work of literature than The Lord of The Rings. Should I just call everyone who never heard of the book an illiterate idiot? Hell, is a degree in literature so critical to being able to analyse a book? I mean, yes, if you have a degree, you should have a much better understanding of the underlying structures, and a billion other things, but the majority of people who enjoy reading don't have one, and they're quite capable of saying why they like/dislike a book or its elements. Why wouldn't there be a place for casual discussion of popular media, and even jokingly pointing out elements which are common in a particular type of media? And as for people in this thread bragging that we goons understand literature better than the tropers? Remember the Clockwork Orange chat some time earlier in this thread? When another poster used the slang from the book and I replied in the same slang, and the poster said that we, unlike the tropers, actually read the book and understood it? I never read the drat book. I never heard about it until reading this thread. I literally just googled it for 10 minutes and spliced up a fancy-sounding reply, and the results were praised as being oh-so-much better than what tropers do. And nobody called out anyone involved for it. We mock tropers for not giving enough attention to important literatureTM, but just look at the threads in our very own Book Barn. Which books do you think get the most attention? And which books never get more than a failed thread that only gets an OP and no discussion at all? Sorry about the rant, it isn't meant to be an attack on any of you personally, or a defense of TvTropes. The big problem with TvTropes (other than, you know, being a toxic cesspit of pedophilia) is that it's a casual popular media discussion group pretending to be a serious place to learn about writing, and deceiving people who are just learning the basics by persuading them that they don't need to improve. I'm just baffled by the complete lack of self-awareness I see here. my dad fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Feb 8, 2014 |
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Feb 8, 2014 15:30
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Really, if you think about it, who's to say that Lolita is in any way more significant than Loli no Imouto no Hearto Romantica?
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Feb 8, 2014 15:59
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Kaboom Dragoon posted:In troperspeak, it's like this: take Evangelion. For the better part of 30-odd years, giant robot shows had been adventure and excitement - kid finds giant robot, uses it to save the day, everyone laughs. There were exceptions, but by and large, that was the formula. Then Eva comes along, takes everything about the genre and plays it straight. Kids piloting giant robots are closer to child soldiers, one false move can destroy half the city and the guys in charge aren't even remotely altruistic. That's the deconstruction, taking the individual aspects of the genre and showing what they'd be like in the real world. What's crazy is that none of this is even true. Giant robot shows were light-hearted fun for 5-7 years tops, then shifted dramatically in focus in 1979 when Gundam came out. Gundam introduced the child soldiers, the collateral damage, the psychological trauma, the mentally hosed up characters and the grey morality and by the time NGE came out these were entrenched as the standards of the genre, represented in almost every show for nearly 20 years. Anno wasn't a critic, he was a fanboy, but people have such a vague idea of what came before NGE that they assume its cynical tone had to be some grand response to something. When it comes to "reconstruction", people usually either cite GaoGaiGar or Gurren-Lagann as the example and they're unsurprisingly equally nonsense. GaoGaiGar was part of an annual franchise that continued unimpeded after NGE was aired, so there's no indication that they created it as a response to anything. Gurren-Lagann was produced by the same studio as Eva, but worked on by different staff members, and it was the second wacky robot anime they had made in the time since Eva aired, yet people overlook 2004's Diebuster completely. You've probably noticed the pattern here, which is that the TVtropes version of anime history is built around only the shows that were popular in America. Rather than figure out how a genre in a foreign country works by looking at what was happening in that country, they instead take the small handful of imported shows they're familiar with and extrapolate a completely made up history, based on this tiny sample. tl;dr the deconstruction and reconstruction pages on TVtropes are tens of thousands of words long and have hundreds of examples and they are literally all wrong. Dozens of writers got together and compiled a huge article based on delusions and they don't see the problem with it at all. Even if we accept that TVtropes have invented a new definition of the word that has nothing to do with Derrida, they've managed to water down the new definition to the point that it doesn't mean anything either. Broniki fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Feb 8, 2014 |
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Feb 8, 2014 16:16
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Lottery of Babylon posted:Really, if you think about it, who's to say that Lolita is in any way more significant than Loli no Imouto no Hearto Romantica? Lolita is a globally influential work, but a lot of things you take for granted as world-reaching are most definitely not. Tropers have a similar problem, and actually believe what you just posted. (I have no idea what that other thing you posted is, but it sounds like pedo poo poo) What I'm saying is that I'm noticing a similar trend both on TvTropes and in this place (which doesn't bode well for this place) - Viewing things only in the way they relate to English literature and media. On one hand, you get people ridiculed for not knowing about this or that novel or show or whatever, when it's quite possible they've never had any reason to know about it, not coming from an English speaking country. On the other hand, you have situations like the one mentioned by the poster above, where tropers try to establish the history of a mostly Japanese genre, basing it only on a tiny number of works that were also published in the West.
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Feb 8, 2014 18:37
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Lolita's really good, though, because Nabokov was a genius.
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Feb 8, 2014 18:39
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I don't think that word means what you think it means. Oog. Sorry.  Tapped that out last night in a hurry before passing out asleep. I meant "disjunct." But yeah. That movie. Uuuuuugh. As for all the deconstruction/reconstruction stuff, I think the easiest way to settle on what is *actually* an example of whatever tropers are talking about, you should probably just stick to the things that were directly stated to be responses to said work. Like, Gaogaigar is not a response to Evangelion, it is its own thing with a long franchise history. Gurren Lagann is not a response to Evangelion, it's a response to super-robot shows from the 70s, and it's pretty much a wholesale celebration of them, so the response isn't anything critically revelatory, it's just "Yay, we liked this!" As is the same with Kill La Kill being a "response" to Go Nagai works from the 70s. The response there is also "Yay, we liked this!" There are plenty of "responses" to Evangelion that are reconstructive of its deconstruction. The most famous one is RahXephon. But in that specific case, EVA was such a *massive* game-changer for narrative in anime, it was so overwhelmingly popular and influential, that it kind of has to be looked at as its own thing with its own subset of response works, rather than some dumb cycle of deconstruction and reconstruction. RahXephon was made to  Evangelion's outlook on the world, not to "put back together" what EVA took apart. What EVA did was so unique at the time that it was largely just seen as "a new thing entirely" not a tearing down of old things. (Although it was both.) Madoka Magica is often seen the same way. It was clearly just intended to be a new thing entirely. It does, however, successfully tear down a lot of old things.And I think this applies to a lot of works on that trope page. Works mostly weren't written to reinforce or tear down a "trend" or genre, they were written on their own, and if they're a response to anything, it's probably a response to a very specific work, not a genre or trend. Responses to genre such as parody or satire are usually extremely transparent. And we have a word for them, they're called parody or satire. Jay O fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Feb 8, 2014 |
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Feb 8, 2014 18:43
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Broniki posted:What's crazy is that none of this is even true. Giant robot shows were light-hearted fun for 5-7 years tops, then shifted dramatically in focus in 1979 when Gundam came out. Gundam introduced the child soldiers, the collateral damage, the psychological trauma, the mentally hosed up characters and the grey morality and by the time NGE came out these were entrenched as the standards of the genre, represented in almost every show for nearly 20 years. Anno wasn't a critic, he was a fanboy, but people have such a vague idea of what came before NGE that they assume its cynical tone had to be some grand response to something. Basically my point: anyone with any understanding of a particular genre (in this case, giant robots) knows that it often takes more than a single work to alter a genre so decisively. Gundam, granted, is such a show, but by and large, a genre has several works making tentative steps in a certain direction, before something else comes along and puts it all together in just the right way. But tropers don't see it like that: they see it as everythingelsebeforeitSHOWeverythingelseafterit. Anything that has similarities or deals with similar themes? Has to be ether a de/reconstruction or a rip-off. Usually the first two, unless they're really shameless about it. Jay O posted:Like, Gaogaigar is not a response to Evangelion, it is its own thing with a long franchise history. Gurren Lagann is not a response to Evangelion, it's a response to super-robot shows from the 70s, and it's pretty much a wholesale celebration of them, so the response isn't anything critically revelatory, it's just "Yay, we liked this!" As is the same with Kill La Kill being a "response" to Go Nagai works from the 70s. The response there is also "Yay, we liked this!" Gainax seems to be in a thing of 'what if we did all the cool stuff we liked as kids, but updated for modern sensibilities and with a budget the show deserves'. Which is a pretty solid/admirable goal. There are a lot of people who still think TTGL was an 'apology' for Eva (for the record, that would be FLCL, which was more an apology for a hideously stressed-out staff), hence why I used the term.
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Feb 8, 2014 19:06
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