Archived Discussion Main / GenreBlindness

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

I removed the anime example of Konata because whoever wrote it is clearly full of shit. Konata makes very explicit references to all kinds of genres, primarly ones she partakes in actively, not to mention all kinds of Konata-I-Mean-Hirano-Aya references.

Nezumi: ... That's not entirely accurate. She does succeed at recognizing her series' own tropes at times, yes, but she's also constantly evaluating her world in terms of tropes and conventions that don't apply. Equating brides with the lead girls from Wedding Peach, comparing marriage to the marriage choice from Dragon Quest V, saying she has high social skills in reference to an RPG character of hers, evaluating dentists as sounding like shounen anime... and once the series gets in a few episodes, she starts making very frequent references to event scenes, flags, and the like that make it clear she views her world as a giant dating sim more than anything else. It'd probably be more accurate to say she's a Cloudcuckoolander or a subversion of Genre Savvy -- able to recognize tropes at a glance, but entirely unable to recognize which are applicable to her genre and which aren't. The latter is where I originally placed the entry, then someone moved it here.

Cut this:

• In Hogans Heroes, we are asked to believe that the saboteur heroes are able to operate inside Nazi Germany for multiple seasons of stories and not have to face the Gestapo coming in full force to turn the region and Stalag 13 upside down to find out what is going on.

That's a Willing Suspension of Disbelief. It's not Genre Blindness because A, it's not about what the characters think, and B, "Prison Camp Comedy" isn't a genre, or at least it wasn't when Hogan was on the air.

... as being hard to lay out, and being a bit on the repetitive/superfluous side.

Seth: Isnt that Lampshade Hanging anyway?

Fast Eddie: Cut ALL this:

Subverted by WWE wrestler Batista, whose defining character trait for some time after his Heel–Face Turn was his lack of Genre Blindness. More recently, John Cena has been conquering his genre blindness:

Jonathan Coachman: "I've decided to give Umaga a very well-deserved night off."

John Cena: "A night off? Like I haven't heard that one before. What does that mean, that he's showing up in five minutes? That he's gonna show up when I go to my car tonight? That he's gonna show up when I'm in the sho-- You know what, just don't let him show up when I'm in the shower. I don't think any of us want that."

• Inversion: the title character of Suzumiya Haruhi No Yuutsu has the diametric opposite of this trope, seeing everything in terms of TV tropes, even where they might not otherwise have been.
• Another, similar inversion: Terry Pratchett's young adult Discworld novel The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents features Malicia, a young girl who posesses a rudimentary (if flawed) sense of the Theory of Narrative Causality and insists on seeing things in terms of stories, ranging from fairy tales to contemporary adventure novels like Tom Swift, The Hardy Boys, and The Famous Five (she even claims at one point that four kids and a dog is "the right number for an adventure"). Where she gets it wrong is her difficulty in coping with subversions and exceptions, and her making herself out to be the main character of the "story".

... because the idea of "inversion " is completely opaque to me. I am smart guy. If I don't get "inversion", nobody does.

Ununnilium: Well, I certainly get "inversion". It's reversing the trope. In this case, instead of the characters being blind to genre tropes, they see everything in terms of genre tropes, even things which really shouldn't be. I'm totally for putting these back in. And why did you cut the wrestling one? That's a straight-up subversion.

HeartBurn Kid: I'm witn Ununil... Ununun... listen, can I just call you Unu? We're talking about the inverse, the opposite of the trope. Since the trope here is that the characters can't see tropes, even when they're completely obvious, the inverse of that is going to be that the character sees everything as a trope, even if it has to be stretched, folded, spindled, and mutilated to get there. (And no, I'm not just mad that you cut my pro wrestling example :). It's almost a No Fourth Wall, except that they're not really directly addressing the audience, or implying that what they're doing isn't real. You know, let me put it this way; they see their entire lives as an episode of AATAFOVS.

//Later: Well, if we're not going to discuss this, I'm at least putting the wrestling stuff back, since that's straight subversion, not inversion.

Fast Eddie: Sorry, got caught up for a day or so with the making-a-living thing. Actually, that whole cut should go back in ... it's aversion I don't get. I was thinking about that while looking at this. <brain-fault>

Ununnilium: Yeah, "aversion" is pretty much the same as "exception".

It makes Boss Hogg keep chasing the Duke brothers in The Dukes Of Hazzard while never arresting them for resisting arrest because they ran.

... and ...

On Highlander The Series, protagonist Duncan Macleod leaves Seacouver and Paris littered with headless corpses (including one on top of the Eiffel Tower), yet the police and the public don't even seem to notice. However, one of the duties of The Watchers Council is hiding Immortal activity, so they may just be really good at it.

... because it also seems to be about overlooking something, rather than what the trope is about.

H. Torrance Griffin: I am going to give my fellow tropers a week to give me a reason not to put the To Catch A Predator segments on Dateline NBC on here as a Real Life example. I have gotten to the point where I wonder if they are only catching the stupid babyrapers looking at the reactions when the interviewer or cops show up.