—Professor Lawrence Pierce, The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular
The act of taking a single (often minor) action or trait of a character within a work and exaggerating it more and more over time until it completely consumes the character. Most always, the trait/action becomes completely outlandish and it becomes their defining characteristic. Sitcoms and Sitcom characters are particularly susceptible to this, as are peripheral characters in shows with long runs.
One simple possibility is the disconnect between the media and real life. Real life, for the most part, is rather repetitive and dull. This is a death sentence for most shows, who have to be continually funny and never be repetitive. So when they go through all of the possible jokes for a character as they are, they slowly exaggerate the character to give them more material. When they've used all the jokes they can for a slightly dim character, they slowly stretch them out to a Too Dumb to Live character.
This can become very annoying if the character's aspects were originally unique and subtle, only to become more stereotypical as the story progresses, to fit the requirements of more cliche' plots. Especially dangerous if executivesthink doing this will appeal with their demographic better and boost ratings. When it happens to a character favored by the fanbase, it will often be cited as the moment the show jumped the shark. Not every viewer likes it when a character becomes a parody of themself.
However, Flanderization is not necessarily a bad thing. In some cases, viewers may find the over the top version of a character more entertaining than their original, subtler version, and can also be a result of the author having more creative enthusiasm for the distilled version. There has been serious study on why this works with audiences. Philosopher Henri Bergson in his essay "Laughter" wrote that comedy is based on inflexible behaviour, i.e. living people acting mechanically in their trademark manner, however inappropriate the circumstances. Early examples: Malvolio (from William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night) will always be self-important and anal-retentive and is thus easily gulled. Jack Benny will always be stingy, even with a gun to his head.
Named for one of the examples in The Simpsons, Ned Flanders, who was originally just a kind and mildly religious fellow (contrast to Homer), before becoming the obsessively pious milquetoast he is best known as today.
When Flanderization occurs as the result of adaptation from one medium to another (manga to anime, for example), it's Character Exaggeration and frequently a sign of Adaptation Decay. May sometimes be related to Lost In Imitation.
See also Never Live It Down for when the character is more associated with some action or event than the character actually changing, and Unintentionally Sympathetic, when realistic quirks are mishandled by the writers.
See also Took a Level in Dumbass, Trope Decay. Not to be confused with Stupid Sexy Flanders or the act of changing the setting and characters of a work to be in the Flemish part of Belgium. Planet of Hats can result from applying Flanderization to an entire population. Compare Rescued from the Scrappy Heap when this is done because the original characterization sucked, and please remember that Flanderization is not Character Development You Don't Like.
Contrast Hidden Depths. For examples specifically involving comedic aspects developing within once-serious villainous characters, see Villain Decay and Goldfish Poop Gang. If it's more of a flanderization of lifestyle than personality, it may be Corrupt The Cutie. When this makes early behavior seem odd in retrospect, that is Characterization Marches On.
Fandom can actually do this; but it's probably best not to put this here.
Regis from TDA Bank. At first he started off as a person who would question what the bank offers, until now? He doesn't know what electronic banking is and calls the hot blond woman every hour over the night about his balance.
In Harry Potter, Ron loves Hogwarts cooking, and usually takes several helpings at the start of year feast (after a ride on the Hogwarts Express, where no lunch is served, only snacks). In fanfics, he's portrayed as little more than a mouth with a human attached, continuously stuffing his face with food. Expect him to eat with his mouth open or talk with food in it as well.
Not to mention the fact that one of the many reasons why Ron indulges himself so much is because he spends the entire summer at his poor parents' home, where they can't exactly feed them heartily every night.
His film exclamations of "Bloody Hell!" and the such are over-exaggerated in fanfics as well.
Then there's Dumbledore who is turned either completely evil with a level of Bastard that puts Gendo Ikari to shame,or to a completely senile fool.
Gendo Ikari and Kyubey, in their respective canon, are indeed manipulativejerkasses, but they have their reasons and they go out of their way to kick dogs that don't directly affect their plans. Fanfic!Gendo and Fanfic!Kyubey, in contrast, are frequently out-and-out sadistic Complete Monsters who seeks to make everyone around them miserable for little apparent reason.
In Mahou Sensei Negima!, while Konoka has shown that she doesn't care for being called by her "Ojou-sama" title by her bodyguard Setsuna, she usually ignores or lets it go (that or she just gave up after the Kyoto arc). But since it makes a good source of fluffy cuteness, many authors will make it her personal pet peeve, calling out Setsuna in the middle of a sentence to remind her not to use it. The dialogue typically works like this:
Funnily, a dialogue like this was used in the series... once*
Weirdly, Setsuna expressed a desire to break this habit afterwards, but many authors tend to disregard that part
. Shortly after the popular scene in which the two finally kissed, that same dialogue was popularly recycled by KonoSetsu authors for the kissing scenes they would write.
In Naruto, Hinata only fainted three times.*
In the anime she fainted whenever Naruto's face was too close.
In fanfics, she does it every five minutes Naruto is in range. Also she stutters sometimes, and that taken to Porky Pig level.
Also his childhood goes from stares of contempt to attempted murder and destruction of property.
Kakashi goes from teaching Sasuke the chidori to completely neglecting Naruto and Sakura. In fact, in fanfic he sometimes goes out of his way to make sure Naruto's life is miserable.
Naruto Veangance Revelaitons has this with regards to the author's views. While the first chapter contains a Take That to Justin Bieber, the first 20 chapters only have occasional insertions of the author's beliefs, such as his chauvinism and opposition to (male) homosexuality. After about 20 chapters, Ronan becomes King of Konohagakure, outlaws religion, homosexuality and modern music, and within a few chapters, a council of capitalist feminist Christians take over. About 12 chapters after their introduction, they succeed in taking over Konohagakure and turn it into what the author considers to be the most undesirable place imaginable.
Shizuru's Mai Hime incarnation had repressed lesbian feelings for Natsuki, while her Mai Otome counterpart, in a world where relationships between women are more accepted, is quite openly affectionate with Arika. Fan works, which often take place after Hime!Natsuki learns about Hime!Shizuru's feelings for her, have Shizuru as a Lovable Sex Maniac with many different ideas she wants to try out with Natsuki, including a certain traditional flu remedy.
Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. For the first movie he was written to be a cliche serious and tough bad-ass pirate dude, but Johnny Depp took that dialogue and played it in a very comic way. The second movie took this to the extreme, going so far as to feature a scene where Jack becomes a pirate/fruit kabob with a posed reaction shot.
The third film manages to go further, flanderizing Jack's loopy Obfuscating Stupidity to the point that he even seems to be working it on himself... literally, in the scenes in Davy Jones' locker.
Or one could Take a Third Option and say that Jack's death, followed by a completely isolated stay in the locker for a period of at least several weeks, simply drove him crazy(er). Of course, being Jack, he takes this in stride and uses it to his advantage.
Jack was a late addition in the story and was always supposed to be a classic trickster (read, a certain amount of compulsory weirdness). The screenwriters who created him, Elliot and Rossio, described Depp's portrayal as being everything they'd intended but nothing like they'd anticipated.
Happened to Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther series. His French accent was originally straightforward, though A Shot in the Dark introduced odd accent-based pronunciation quirks ("beump" for bump, for example). When he revived the character in the mid-1970s, the accent was significantly thicker and the mispronunciations were more frequent ("minkey", "rheum", "leu"), etc. Other Shot in the Dark elements became Running Gags too: he donned more bizarre disguises with each film, and Cato's attacks grew increasingly destructive, as did the slapstick in general for the whole run of films. However, this went over like gangbusters with audiences and it didn't violate Clouseau's basic character, making it one of the less destructive examples of Flanderization on this list.
It's also important to note that, in the very first movie, Clouseau was a fairly competent, intelligent detective who did successfully solve the mystery (though nobody believed him at the time). It's only with each subsequent sequel that he gradually becomes an outrageously accented walking disaster zone... though he's admittedly funnier that way.
Let's not forget Chief Inspector Dreyfus, memorably played by Herbert Lom. He starts out in the second film in the series, A Shot in the Dark, as an irritable yet capable official who is quite reasonably vexed at Clouseau's bumbling. However, as the series develops, Dreyfus becomes increasingly unhinged both by Clouseau's idiotic miscues and by his ongoing lucky successes in solving high profile crimes. Eventually, in "The Pink Panther Strikes Again," Dreyfus has degenerated into a gibbering, tic-ridden lunatic who wants nothing more than to murder Clouseau, even at the risk of destroying the world.
In the first two films in the A Nightmare on Elm Street series, Freddy Krueger was a fairly serious, scary character. By the third movie, the dream deaths had become more..."creative" and Freddy started to make some wisecracks and puns. By Freddy's Dead, the character was so cartoonish that it was hard to believe that he actually used to be scary. Then it's reversed in Wes Craven's New Nightmare, where he is truly terrifying. He remains so in Freddy vs. Jason, though slightly less scary and again, a bit more cartoonish.
Probably the best-remembered characteristic of Chinese detective Charlie Chan is his use of pithy "Oriental" aphorisms — a trait which comes directly from the Warner Oland film adaptations, and which were the only aspect of those adaptations that Chan's original author Earl Derr Biggers himself heartily disliked.
Eddie Wilson in Eddie and the Cruisers started out as a serious musician who wouldn't sell out. By the end of the sequel, his only emotional response was to run away from anything that might be critical of his music.
The main characters in the Dutch Flodder series of movies and The Series went through this. The plot of the first film concerned an antisocial family who are placed in a well-to-do neighbourhood for a set term as part of a social experiment to prove that a change of scenery would have a positive effect on them, and Hilarity Ensues. While they were occasional criminals, they appeared to be good-natured at heart and half of their activities came across more as counter-culture than a dangerous menace to society; by the end of the film they even got along fine with their neigbours! The sequels gradually abandon this to keep the basic Fish out of Water concept in place (and simultaneously replace half the cast), turning them into outright thugs that make the place a living hell, with no real rationale as to why they're still living in the same place when the trial period has long expired and the authorities are so obviously aware of their actions. The social worker assigned to their case also continues to defend them even when they blatantly abuse him or when he's confronted with their constant crimes. Their Flanderized versions are arguably more entertaining than the subdued originals, since it lasted much longer.
Agent Tom Manning from the Hellboy series. In the first film, he's a competent bureaucrat, though a bad field leader; he and Hellboy butt heads but eventually come to respect each other. In the second, he's comically incompetent, and the only way he can keep Hellboy in line is by bribing him with cigars.
The Lethal Weapon series gives us Dr. Stephanie Woods, who, in the first film was a competent psychologist with legitimate concerns about Riggs' stability. By the third film, she was an inept, touchy-feely shrink who served as little more than comic relief.
By "writers" we mostly mean George Lucas, who was sole writing credit on the first and third and only shared writing in Attack of the Clones.
Yoda seemed to only use his odd dialect during the original trilogy in more comic moments and, when serious, could actually be quite eloquent, even poetic. Compare his famous original trilogy line "Do, or do not. There is no try." to the prequel trilogy line above.
Darth Vader strangled only two people in A New Hope: the Rebel Captain Antilles, and Imperial Admiral Motti. In the latter case, it was only because he was actively pissing him off, and even then, Grand Moff Tarkin made him stop. But starting in The Empire Strikes Back, it's stated that Vader will strangle his subordinates if they disappoint him in any way, which has been both played up in the Expanded Universe, and parodied in such works as Robot Chicken.
James Bond in the original novels was pretty much a working stiff assassin who had some taste in luxury items (and welcomed the opportunity to treat himself while on missions), and who had a varying amount of knowledge of non-assassin related subjects. The movies definitely played up these aspects from the beginning, presenting him as a Cultured Badass, but as the movies got campier, this was exaggerated to the point that Bond became and over-the-top Quintessential British Gentleman and basically knew everything about everything.
In Freddy vs. Jason, Jason Voorhees is taller, slower and more stupid than ever, possibly in order to more sharply contrast with Freddy.
In several of the Terminator installments made after Judgment Day, including films, books and The Sarah Connor Chronicles television series, the Connors' paranoia and ability to adapt to unforeseen circumstances is greatly exaggerated from their portrayal in the first two films - so much so that it became the defining characteristic of both John and Sarah Connor. In Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines, it's revealed that Sarah (who died from cancer) was secretly buried south of the border and had her friends place a cache of weapons inside the coffin that was supposed to contain her body, in the event of another infiltrator unit coming to the past. In the T2: Future War book series and Sarah Connor Chronicles, the family hides dozens of guns in the walls of their houses, run military drills and live under assumed identities - their paranoia is even the source of jokes from other characters. By the time the Future War happens, John is a Properly Paranoid shadowy figurehead who is rarely seen by other Resistance members (also shown in SCC). Terminator Salvation reversed the Flanderization by showing John as a lieutenant who hasn't assumed control of the Resistance as the result of an alternate timeline.
In the first Rush Hour movie, Chris Tucker's character (whose Butt Monkey status stems from his Cowboy Cop tendencies alienating everyone around him) is actually a fairly competent detective, but simply not as combat effective as Jackie Chan's character. In the sequels, his character's competence is completely jettisoned, he becomes a classic Ted Baxter, and much Uncle Tomfoolery ensues.
John Rambo from the Rambo series killed precisely one guy in the first film. From II onward, Rambo was a Badass who made lots of bodies out of anyone in his way. Plus, the first film's kill is accidental and arguably karmic as well, since Galt, the guy who was killed, was going out of his way to antagonize Rambo.
A significant amount of time passes for him over the course of those books, and it's strongly implied that for almost all that time, things are running around trying to kill him. That would be enough to make a devoted coward out of many people.
Plus he's been to Unseen University where, despite his being ragingly incompetent at both the theory and practice of magic, he may well have learned a little — just enough — about the narrative nature of life on the Discworld. That's enough to fuel an entirely justified paranoia.
While she was originally just an aversion of the Model Minority stereotype, Claudia Kishi from the Babysitter's Club, despite being in eighth grade for about ten years, eventually gets to the point where she can't even spell her freinds friends' names (or her own!) Despite being able to spell them perfectly well in seventh grade, mind. Most of the other girls' quirks (Kristy's bossiness, Dawn's environmentalist soapboxing, Mallory's geekiness, and Jessi's anxiety about her race and dancing skills) suffered this to some degree, as well.
This is how self-will destroys the damned in The Great Divorce. If one embraces a sin and never lets it go, it overwrites the rest of one's character, and sometimes the rest of one's self.
Hannibal Lecter, who first appeared in Red Dragon, was originally just a very intelligent and cultured man, whose expertise in his chosen field of psychiatry made him a particularly dangerous (and somewhat ironic) insane killer. By the (book) sequel, The Silence of the Lambs, he is quite clearly one of the greatest if not the greatest psychiatrist in the world, and by the threequel Hannibal, he's revealed to be a world-class genius in pretty much any field he sets his mind to, from Renaissance art to particle physics.
Zoey Redbird in The House of Night series went from a somewhat more advanced vampyre who happened to have a boyfriend in the first book to The Chosen One with an Unwanted Harem by the third book.
In the Star WarsExtended Universe, apparently all Corellians find statistical analysis abhorrent, due to the method in which Han Solo told C3PO to shut up in The Empire Strikes Back ("Never tell me the odds!").
Nearly everything mentioned in the Star Wars movies as a side-note is turned by the Expanded Universe into the main characteristic of whatever subject. Another example: "You look strong enough to pull the ears off a gundark." The Clone Wars had its gundarks modeled with ridiculously huge ears. The explanation for one of the designers was "We know about the Gundarks that they have huge ears, so they have to be visible".
The Cthulhu Mythos suffers from this in popular culture, which would have you believe that it is all about invincible alien monstrosities that will return to Earth specifically to wipe out the Puny Humans once the stars are right and whose mere mention in assorted forbidden texts is enough to irrevocably shatter the reader's sanity. That impression, though, comes to a large part from taking the rantings of demented cultists and statements from other Unreliable Narrators in Lovecraft's stories out of context.
That, or people simply produce a schlocky, standard-issue supernatural horror story (manga, movie, whatever) and use names and references from the Mythos rather than Judeo-Christian terminology.
A similar, if less deliberate, thing happened in another one of K.A. Applegate's series, Everworld. In the first book, Search for Senna, the titular character was a quiet, withdrawn, and somewhat strangeEmotionless Girl who had a mostly positive romantic relationship with David, and demonstrated genuine concern for others on occasions. As the books went on, her negative traits were repeatedly emphasized and expanded, though this was initially saved from being Flanderization by her character also becoming more complex and interesting. In the last two books, her goal of overthrowing the powers of Everworld and crowning herself took over her characterization, and just about all of her other personality traits were thrown out in favor of it. She became an outright sadist, a tyrannical and megalomaniac Evil Overlord who no longer cared at all for how much death or pain she caused if it got her greater power.
Jacob Black from Twilight. Over the course of the saga, his initially fairly healthy and respectful affection towards Bella was Flanderized into obsession, probably done to sway "Team Jacob" shippers to be more sympathetic to Edward.
In the Star Trek Novel Verse, some accuse the Star Trek Vulcans Soul trilogy of flanderizing the relationship between President Zife and Koll Azernal, with Zife being an ineffective president relying on scheming Azernal to run the government for him. It is certainly more obvious in this trilogy than in Star Trek: A Time to.... The Brains and Brawn partnership of Rehaek and Torath from Star Trek: Titan is arguably flanderized by this trilogy, too.
In Warrior Cats, Hollyleaf starts as the smart one of the group who tries to respect the Warrior Code. By the end, she is completely consumed by the Warrior Code, freaking out if someone even mentions breaking it. This culminates with her finding out her mom severely broke the code and going on a murderous rampage.
In Neal Shusterman's "The Skinjacker Trilogy", Shusterman unveils a world between life and death, where your appearance is based entirely on your memory of yourself. This leads to such effects as remembering only the chocolate smudge on your face and turning entirely into chocolate, or remembering your acute sense of smell and gaining nostrils that extend to your feet. The Lawful Evil villain even encourages this trope as her thousands of followers reenact their "perfect day" every single day (when they're not fighting our protagonist). This example takes the trope in more of a literal sense, as you may have guessed, rather than the degeneration of a character's demeanor.
All of the Flock from Maximum Ride suffer this. In the first book at least they were a bit more realistic and believable. Now however, Nudge has gone from an extremely talkative young girl to a materialistic celebrity-obsessed tween, Angel is a manipulative Karma Houdini, Total is now even more of a cartoonish sidekick figure than he was originally and Iggy seems to be getting dumber and more childish in each book. Where in the first three he was treated by Max and Fang as one of the older kids, now he appears to have a mental age of twelve and spends most of his time with Gazzy, who admittedly has a similar outlook and personality, but is way younger than him. Fang too used to be a bit more of an interesting character (in the first book Nudge worries about whether he'd ever decide to leave the Flock) but now he's lost all the interesting sides to his personality. As for Max, she's recently started to use Totally Radical slang and seems to be occassionaly chanelling the spirit of Bella Swan, in the author's clumsy attempt to cash in on the teen romance success of late.
See also Sadly Mythtaken. Interpretations have made sunlight into vampire kryptonite, as well as wooden stakes through the chest. In the actual Dracula by Bram Stoker, the vampires are merely weakened by daylight, and the title count himself was killed not with a stake, but with an iron bowie knife to the chest. Iron in Slavic Mythology was pretty much kryptonite.
Music
One of the main things that annoyed The Beatles about their 'Fab Four' image was how it reduced all four of them to a quick-caption stereotype which lingered — John was the 'funny' one, Paul the 'handsome' one, George the 'quiet' one and Ringo the 'normal' (i.e. less talented and klutzy) one.
On this point, it's worth noting that both Lennon and McCartney deliberately fueled and maintained the notion that George and Ringo were "lesser Beatles" much to the frustration of the latter when you consider the worthwhile contributions they made to the band.
Then again, while George and Ringo's contributions to the band were indeed vital to the group's music and sound, Lennon and McCartney between them wrote 180 out of the 213 songs they recorded and released; while 'lesser Beatles' is pretty harsh, it's perhaps fair to say that Lennon and McCartney's notion isn't entirely without merit.
Ringo, in particular, is an extreme version of this trope, now being considered as a simple joker lucky enough to get a gig with the Beatles. Yet back in the sixties, he was already a bona fide star with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, considered one of the best drummers of his generation and it was purely on this merit that he joined the Beatles.
In modern times, the Lennon/McCartney writing partnership tends to be oversimplified as 'Lennon wrote all the angsty, complex, rebellious and therefore 'good' songs, whereas McCartney wrote all the Silly Love Songs and fluffy album filler.' Which not only tends to unfairly deny McCartney the credit in several cases and do a disservice to several of the songs, but collapses entirely when you remember that Lennon wrote "Mean Mr. Mustard", "Norwegian Wood ", "This Boy" and "Dear Prudence" and McCartney wrote "Eleanor Rigby", "Helter Skelter", "Carry That Weight " and "Yesterday". Furthermore, half of the Lennon/McCartney songs were genuine 50:50 collaborations.Lennon did tend more towards Creator Breakdown than McCartney in later years, however.
George is thought of usually as either 'quiet' 'mystic' or 'grouchy', but people forget that George Harrison wrote "Something", "Savoy Truffle" and "Here Comes the Sun".
George was also characterized in works like A Hard Day's Night and Yellow Submarine as being a somber and serious mystic (especially in the latter). His son Dhani complained about this once, as his dad actually had a pretty good sense of humor. The man personally financed Monty Python's Life of Brian just because he wanted to see it and the last letter he ever wrote was to Mike Myers about how much he loved Austin Powers.
Although to be fair, George outwardly projected an image of seriousness during a good portion of the 1960s, partly because he wasn't enjoying the whole 'Beatle' thing very much after about 1964 and partly because he took his spiritual awakening very seriously.
In A Hard Day's Night George is more "deadpan" than "serious", not only because it was part of his personality but also because he lacked the natural talent for comedic acting of John and Ringo. But he gets two of the funniest bits of the movie: the "what would you call your hairstyle?" joke and the scene where he's mistaken for a fashion model (both of which work well with a Deadpan Snarker).
Elvis Presley has been shamelessly flanderized after his death by Elvis impersonators. In his youth Elvis actually was slim with boyish good looks a pleasnt smooth tenor voice with only a little shaking in his voice. If he was anything like most of his impersonators he would not be nearly as popular as he was in the late 1950s.
In the 70s 80s and early 90s when the name Michael Jackson was mentioned people thought of his great voice and wild dancing; and while in the late 80s and early 90s there was some talk about his cosmetic surgery and alleged child molestation those were decidedly not his main defining traits. By the end of the end of the 90s however, his child molestation allegations and plastic surgery problems had become by far his most defining characteristics.
Has become somewhat averted after his death, when there was a surge of remembrance for his music again, probably in part due to being mere weeks away from starting his big comeback tour, of which footage was used to create a documentary tribute to him. Time will decide which one, if not both, will settle in the forefront of the historical record.
Mythology
Gods originally portrayed as Chaotic Neutral or even mostly good are frequently reinterpreted as evil by competing sects/religions historically. Modern media does the same and removes the character flaws of "good" gods in retellings of mythology in order to simplify them, making them fit modern good/evil dichotomies better.
Virtually every mythology in modern day media is subject to the latter. Hades and Set are victims of the former: the Greek god of the Underworld is frequently interpreted as the villain of the Greek pantheon when in fact he was feared but never unjust, while the Egyptian god of chaos and some aspects of death apparently became evil rather than a scary enforcer for good due to Egyptian religious political wars.
Also, Hades was NOT the incarnation of Death. That was Thanatos. People still depict him as the God of Death.
Some Chaotic Neutral mythological entities such as Loki even get upgraded to Chaotic Good by people that are Neo-satr.
Eris, the Greek goddess of strife has, due to the rise of Discordianism, been turned into the goddess of chaos and discord in recent times, and is now generally played as a benevolent deity by her followers.
Garfield managed to invert this trope, then play it straight. He started out very lazy and sarcastic, but de-Flanderized into a more playful attitude by the late eighties. Over time, he's gradually shifted back into his more cynical self.
Played straight with Jon Arbuckle, who started as being The Straight Man and a bachelor who cared for Garfield. During the first months of 1979, he was Flanderized into being the Straw Loser compared to Garfield (with his role of the Deadpan Snarker going to Dr. Liz Wilson), and by the late 1990's, he was given a more Cloud Cuckoo Lander personality.
While most of the FoxTrot characters had their personas taken to the extreme at times, Andy was quite extremely Flanderized, going from a simple, caring and concerned mother to the Granola GirlMoral Guardian of the strip who serves her family earth-friendly fare like braised zucchini every meal, keeps the thermostat so low that it flash-freezes the steam from a cup of coffee, and throws a fit if she catches the boys playing a violent video game. Unfortunately, since the series became Sunday-only, there's little chance of her changing. On the other hand, before this happened Andy pretty much didn't have a personality at all beyond Mom.
Since Greg Howard stopped writing Sally Forth, Ted has become quite the Man Child.
Political Cartoonslive on Flanderization. Any human who appears will have his/her physical features and opinions ridiculously blown out of proportion. Can lead to Unfortunate Implications when foreigners and ethnic minorities are portrayed in a stereotypical manner. Some examples:
Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy, both of whom have modest overbites, are drawn as Sir John Tennielesque rat-faced freaks (see Mallard Fillmore).
Professional Wrestling
The Undertaker went from being simply, well, an undertaker to becoming almost literally a god of death and the occult. Briefly reversed when he became a "biker" character for a few years.
Paul Bearer was no stranger to this trope either, with his voice and mannerisms getting progressively goofier over the years. Compare this early 1991 promo to this later 1994 promo.
Stone Cold Steve Austin, anyone? At the height of his popularity, he was simply a very tough working-class guy who was lashing out at the oppression of the modern world. Over time, the "underdog" side of his character became deemphasized and the "rebel" side became predominant, with the inevitable result that he devolved into an unabashed Jerkass - and the fans still cheered him!
Inverted with Triple H, who started out as an Upper Class Twit but eventually developed into a fairly normal, non-pretentious guy who just happens to be very rich.
Table Top Games
In Warhammer the Chaos God Khorne was flanderized from an incredibly bloodthirsty but moderately honorable warrior who preferred WorthyOpponents and whose servants would sometimes spare non-combatants, to wanting all blood from everyone all the time. Note that at no point was Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne! not part of the deal.
They have been trying to reverse the process of flanderisation and turn them back into an authoritative and overly bureaucratic but still functional dictatorship with genuine heroes.
Matt Ward has been working on Flanderizing the Ultramarines from a respected puritan Chapter of strict adherents to the Codex Astartes into the absurd force of unimpeachable and unbeatablyawesomeUltrasmurfs that we all know and hate.
At a stroke, he accomplished this mission for the Grey Knights with the 2011 codex, turning them from an interesting faction of thin-spread heroes fighting desperately against horrors which often threatened them and the entire Imperium into Big Damn Heroes who God Mode Sue it up, curb stomp all your foes in tabletop, and not only are completely incorruptible, but can't be beaten. Let's see. Game Breaker units? Check. Incorruptible Pure Pureness that can survive alone in the Warp and isn't tainted by bathing in the blood of Sisters of Battle? Check. God Mode Sue fluff? In spades. Before, Grey Knights were earlier well-liked by fans, who still used them even with a codex that was a bit out of date. Fan and critical reaction has not been positive to the changes.
One criticism of the second edition of Exalted is that it took the interesting characters from 1e and flattened them out. Especially the Deathlords - First and Forsaken Lion went from being an interesting character who wanted to take over the Underworld and didn't care about Creation to Mask of Winters v2 who wants to CONQUER AND/OR DESTROY EVERYTHING!
Web Animation
The title character of Homestar Runner was Flanderized from The Fool into The Ditz, while Coach Z's creepiness, the King of Town's unpopularity and Bubs's tendency towards dodgy dealings were also blown out of proportion. This was arguably for the better.
Strong Sad actually seemed to go through reverse Flanderization, going from a rather one-note downer to an artsy and snarkyOnly Sane Man.
In Kirbopher's Super Freakin' Parody Rangers series, the Rangers themselves are basic Flanderized versions of the original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: Meat, the Red Ranger, is an extreme sports nut who continually flexes his muscles (and is surprisingly also Genre Savvy); Willy, the Blue Ranger, is a short and stereotypical nerd; Pinky, the Pink Ranger, is definitely The Chick; and in reference to the original Black and Yellow Rangers, Mace the Black Ranger and Chan the Yellow Ranger are, well, an African-American and a Chinese girl, respectively.
In a way, Marshmallow in Annoying Orange has been flanderized from the start. Never gets hurt and is a cute, optimistic little Pollyanna. Sometimes he/she gets angry though. VERY angry.
Webcomics
Achewood's Cassandra "Roast Beef" Kazanzakis is an interesting case. He didn't have a personality to speak of to begin with, but around the party arc we learn that he is depressed and borderline suicidal. Shortly after that the trait began to dominate his personality, though despite this high focus on his depression he remains a rather multifaceted and interesting character
Hannelore from Questionable Content, shortly after her first appearance, mentioned that she had severe OCD. Over time, she developed more and more quirks and phobias to the point of being essentially a female Adrian Monk (she even had a "sex" dream about him, where they cleaned together in the nude). It wasn't long before they had to Hand Wave the fact that she even has piercings, and the circumstances of her first appearance — loitering in a public restroom, nonchalantly talking to a man peeing in the sink — have become absolutely inconceivable. The problems had to be explained in Comic 1046, where Hannelore reveals she's always had these problems; it just varies by the drugs she takes.
Also from QC is Raven. At first, she was a little bit of a Genki Girl with rare flashes of wisdom and occasional casual sex. As of her most recent appearance on QC, she was a flat out bizarre Cloudcuckoolander (even by the standards of Cloudcuckoolanders), and has probably gone around the block an innumerable number of times.
Technically, at first she was an easy-to-rile goth stereotype who was not the brightest bulb. Then she reappeared as a PerkyEmo.
Even Pintsize to an extent. Originally he was just a quirky, sociopathic robot with weird fetishes. Now he is just /b/ personified doing anything for attention.
Possible Fridge Brilliance; Pintsize is trapped in an addictive cycle of exposure with the more horrible parts of the internet, causing an actual, in-universe Flanderization; he is, after all, an AI, and so will not have the same cultural or psychological limits as a normal human. The cast just doesn't notice because they've realised that it's just best to try and ignore it.
Ethan in Ctrl-Alt-Del began as The Ditz, but moved on to the Ralph Wiggum. More recently, he has surpassed this, and some fans are starting to suspect he is in fact clinically insane. (And he was recently put in a mental institution in the animated version...)
Szark Sturtz from Dominic Deegan was originally a master swordsman and a sadist. Following his Heel Face Turn and admittance to having a crush on the title character, he eventually became "Szark (who is gay)", according to one forum that follows the comic.
Richard from Looking for Group was always intended to be an Always Chaotic Evil insensitive dick and main comic relief, but his antics as of late have done nothing but break the pace of the story.
Least I Could Do, from the same creative team, has seen this happen to most of the characters, but it's particularly noticable with Rayne, whose childlike obsession with Star Wars and other geek properties and 12-year old boy-like obsession with getting laid have basically consumed his personality, to the point where it's a surprise when he acts like an actual person, or even gets something accomplished, other than weirding people out with his desire to be Emperor or getting laid.
David from Bittersweet Candy Bowl. The author originally intended him to be far less weird and wacky than his later appearances suggest.
The Angry Video Game Nerd started out as a jaded sort of fellow who would only start dropping F-bombs when the game truly deserved it, and concentrated more on the reviews themselves. As the series continued, the Nerd would collapse into screaming apoplexy at the slightest provocation, game-related or not, and the shows gradually got more and more taken over by movie-like set pieces and Large Ham supporting characters (this was about when Mike Matei got an expanded role.)
Most of the characters in Red vs Blue suffer from this and this is a good example of Tropes Are Not Bad. Donut starts as a somewhat wimpy rookie who is unfortunately assigned pink armor. He at first despises and insists is "light red" but later on he seems to embrace that armor becoming a full fledged flamboyant Ambiguously Gay. Caboose's childish incompetence becomes insanity. Simmons changes from occasionally kissing ass to displaying extremely sycophantic behavior ("You're not only a wonderful leader but also a handsome man, sir!"). Sarge's dislike of Grif progressed to actually trying to kill Grif on a fairly regular basis. Griff himself started as the most competent member of the reds with occasional references to slacking off, (most likeley because his work would have been utter nonsense anyway). This evolved into extreme sloth and gluttony. Tucker, who talked about "picking up chicks" in the first few episodes, became a literal font of innuendo by the series' end. Tex went from a skilled and amoral special forces soldier to a legendarily powerful Badass. Church, however, remained roughly as grouchy and cynical throughout, perhaps actually becoming more complex as time passed. Because of the Flanderization, what started as a mildly funny series became a hilarious show with the most exaggerated character traits imaginable.
Don't forget Doc. He started out as a conscientious objector but had no true defining behavioral quirks. Quickly he became a useless wimp (to the point that he reveals he ran track in high school because it was the least competitive sport he could find) and a counter-balance to Omalley's aggressive ranting.
Open Blue's Espartano unit went from ostensibly unisex Tyke Bomb training program to Amazon Brigade factory. Has a bit of Never Live It Down due to the main contributor just happening to prefer badass lolitas, thus inadvertently bringing the other players assume the factuality of said flanderization. They in turn started making Espartano characters using said assumption, resulting in the concept's flanderization.
A lot of people probably don't realize that the original "Caturday" pictures (now known as LOLcats) were captioned in proper English. They were still funny, because the photos were inherently bizarre, like photos you might see in magazine caption contests. Now it's escalated to the point where any photo of a cat combined with bad enough English is supposedly hilarious.
Germaine from Neurotically Yours was a teenage goth chick that, while absolutely loathing people in general, had a good head on her shoulders and had some common sense while just wanting her poetry to get more attention. As the series went on, she slowly slides into a blatant whore with a lot of sexual fetishes that she routinely denied when Foamy called her out on it and it grew to ridiculous levels when she gained a ton of weight to get men to stop treating her like a whore, only to become a bigger whore with the crowd that loved how fat she gotten, along with her butt and breasts, and tried to justify it by saying the money helps pay the rent. The series' creator explains this was Germaine's Character Development all along and it's starting to show since Germaine had woke up to the truth and started to take control of her life, putting the trope in reverse.
Jake from College Humor's Jake And Amir went from being a regular guy having to deal with Amir's antics to being somewhat of a Jerkass.
Tales of MU does this to gnomes (its version of hobbits) to a certain extent, when comparing the species to the one from Middle-Earth. The latter are respectable to a fault and don't think much of people who travel too much or have adventures - the former literally consider "adventure" a dirty word and take pains to use an Unusual Euphemism.
Hazel: What I mean to say is that she’s an... a lady of wandering interests [...] You know, prone to seek out, ah, random encounters.
Miranda of Miranda Sings started out as a fairly believable Stealth Parody of amateur singers on youtube who are deluded about their talent before her singing, fashion sense, and overall attitude slowly started getting more and more over the top. Compare this to this. Colleen Ballinger, the creator of the character, says she was deliberately exaggerating whatever traits were most derided in the comments section in order to make her more annoying. And due to Poe's Law, some still seem to not immediately get that she's a fictional character.
One of the many side-effects of the World Split hitting Ink City was certain characters undergoing this as a sign they were growing increasingly unbalanced. Don, for instance, is a fan of giving and receiving hugs, which he calls 'sugar'. Due to losing all his ink after the Split, he turns bright pink and can't say anything other than "Sugar sugar sugar."
TV Tropes
Possibly the root of the wiki's problems: There Is No Such Thing as Notability is the idea of Any media example is acceptable, no matter how obscure. A lot of people came to associate it with Anything is accepted, regardless if it has anything to do with tropes. This, of course, causes dissonance with the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment.
The Gratuitous Japanese page used to have an example taken from a single post on a GameFAQs message board. Small Name, Big Ego also had an example about an user of a rather obscure Internet Forum, not a moderator or someone in position of power, just a random user.
Also, leaving aside the issue of whether it should be included in the first place, Fan Fiction is often lumped together with the source material.
On the other wiki, people will occasionally say stuff like "Hey, you can't ban me for deleting the Main Page! Assume Good Faith!" Here, some people say "Hey, don't delete that line from a fanfic I haven't actually written yet! There Is No Such Thing as Notability!"
Another root cause of the wiki's problems is that some fans of works that are notable or popular feel the need to place as many examples from them into as many tropes as possible, regardless of how well the examples fit the tropes.
This is similar to a common problem among wikis, where well-meaning editors hyperlink to as much stuff as possible, even when it's unnecessary or erroneous. This is probably how a lot of tropes get flanderized.
The concept of 'trope' itself has become flanderized, changing from (as listed on the Home Page) "storytelling devices and conventions" to anything for which examples can be listed. This has resulted in an ever-expanding number of "trope" pages for things that aren't tropes. As for the most part they still have some observation information on the use of tropes they are kept around, but they are still often mistaken for tropes.
Acceptable Targets pages are for targets that are completely safe to mock without really stirring up public outcry, whether fairly or not. Please stop putting things that you feel should be acceptable targets on there.
Adaptation Distillation has become regarded as the "good" twin of Adaptation Decay despite Distillation being merely removal of elements while Decay is simply changing elements. The fact that the word "distillation" brings to mind pure water while "decay" brings to mind biodegradation doesn't help.
Adored by the Network was originally supposed to be a TV show version of Creator's Pet, where the audience didn't like the show, but the network kept cramming it down their throats to make them like it. Upon reading the page, you'll find several edits for shows that are adored by the network...but are also adored by the viewers, often the former is because of the latter. How is The Twilight Zone an example? It gets a two-day marathon twice a year because it's popular, and that's in addition to the cult following it's had since basically day one. In other words, some are using it as an excuse to complain about otherwise popular things that they personally don't like.
Anticlimax Boss and Breather Boss. The latter is meant to be bosses that are easy on purpose, the former bosses that aren't easy on purpose, but just easy due to simple or maybe in some cases bad design. Both seem to be used as a catchall for 'any boss that's ever been easy in a video game'.
Armor-Piercing Slap referred to when a superpowered character is physically assaulted by a weaker female, and despite their powers, it hurt. Now it seems to just mean "regular slap", since many examples are of people without superpowers, and who aren't necessarily physically strong by normal standards.
This seems to be people taking it to be the physical equivalent of Armor-Piercing Question, which doesn't specifically have to be against somebody with superpowers. Because of the misunderstanding, it more or less has become this.
Ascended Extra and Demoted to Extra used to specifically refer to a character's role increasing or decreasing in an adaptation (back when they were called "Super Grape" and "Isn't It Sad?"), but have since expanded to include when it doesn't involve adaptation. Not that that's necessarily bad.
Asshole Victim was originally just a mystery trope, but given the name, has since expanded via Pot Holes to be about any gigantic jerkwad who gets killed. The non-mystery version is usually used for much the same reason, so the result is almost logical... if the description wasn't mainly about mysteries.
Ass Pull is supposed to be about plot twists that come out of nowhere. Now it's used as 'any plot twist I didn't see coming from a mile away'.
Badass. It has become very, very subjective. From the trope page: "A Badass is a fantasy figure whom the audience roots for precisely because they break or stretch the Willing Suspension of Disbelief." Now it's used in a way that having a single action scene is enough for a character to qualify as a badass. It has also spawned an overly long list of subtropes.
Berserk Button is making a slow but steady shift from "thing that causes a character to fly into a complete and utter rage which include attempts at violence or destruction" to "thing that annoys a character slightly and makes them grumpy if you bring it up".
Better Than It Sounds was made for series that have an inherently ridiculous premise. Soon, people started adding examples of reasonable premises and phrasing them in ridiculous (and not always accurate) ways. The trope is now listed as Just For Fun, and it probably works better that way.
Big Bad was originally meant to refer to a core, over-arching enemy, such as the classic Buffyexamples. Since then, it has gradually become catch-all shorthand for "villain".
Big Damn Heroes is almost always confused with The Cavalry, to the point most people don't even use the latter.
Big Lipped Alligator Moment became meaningless almost immediately after launching, with many entries added that didn't fit the criteria well enough. Some examples were added simply because they weren't discussed afterward, and there were enough claims of entire episodes that were BLAMs that a whole other trope was created.
Nostalgia Chick: I said no! It doesn't work! The movie has to have some sort of cohesion. In a movie where shit keeps happening and no one ever mentions it again, this just doesn't work. — Nostalgia Chick, from her review of Xanadu.
In addition, people were putting in examples that only met one or two of the criteria, and those are frequently edited out.
Basically, the definition changed from the intended "weird scene with no impact on the plot" to the utterly meaningless "scene I don't like". It's actually very similar to how "Mary Sue" became "character I don't like".
Blue and Orange Morality is supposed to be used for highly unusual (usually even alien) moralities. Nowadays most people seem to treat it as "any philosophy I don't agree with". Not to mention that listing quirky characters as examples only works if they actually have a defined set of morality rather than... these characters just being quirky.
Blondes Are Evil and Blond Guys Are Evil used to be a startling tendancy for blond characters in a work to be villains, especially the women, e.g. Alpha Bitches, Vamps, and evil queens. Nowadays it includes any non-heroic blond character. We might as well make a Brunettes Are Evil trope to complete the circle.
Bunny-Ears Lawyer is getting used more and more loosely. Being good at your profession but having a short temper or listening to unconvential music or preferring to eat exotic food would be examples that should not qualify. A Bunny-Ears Lawyer is supposed to be, well... weird while at the same time making you wonder why their bosses haven't fired them yet.
But Not Too Black is pretty much starting to list any light-skinned black actor, even in roles when they star opposite another, dark-skinned actor.
The Chick was originally "the member of a Five-Man Band who is The Heart / spiritual". Now it seems to mean "the sucky, useless member of the team." People also tend to shoehorn any member of an ensemble who happens to be female into The Chick even if she doesn't qualify and the ensemble is not a Five-Man Band.
Chickification and Faux Action Girl were about Action Girls who are either changed into more passive ladies without any convincing explanation, or don't live up to the Action Girl fame they have in canon. Now, if an Action Girl has a bad day or loses a fight, she has gone through Chickification.
Well, a Faux Action Girl can still be a genuine Action Girl. The point is that her Action Girl qualities are exaggerated.
Girls Need Role Models. It was originally about putting strong female characters in a work, as role models for girls. Now it seems any female character that is competent at something or just not useless qualifies.
Camp Gay. Basically a gay man can't like fashion, or not like sports, or have a moment of being a little flamboyant without being immediately labeled as Camp Gay.
Compelling Voice technically shouldn't have a Real Life section to begin with, but people took it literally and started putting in examples of people who merely have voices that are compelling, rather than giving orders that force the receiver to obey.
Complete Monsters are getting a lot less evil. The definition of the trope now seems to be "any villain who's too evil to like" as opposed to the original definition of "a villain who does such horrendous acts that they could hardly be any more evil, and is therefore likely to appear only in very dark or very cynical works". It's arguable whether the trope is better or worse this way.
Cool Ship, Cool Boat, Cool Plane, etc. have lost much of their coolness and have simply turned into: "the main characters frequently use this vehicle" (thus apparently making it cool by association).
Cowboy Bebop At His Computer is supposed to be about journalists who Did Not Do the Research, or maybe They Just Didn't Care. Either way, it's about articles on entertainment. However, some people submitting entries to this trope have included mistakes made by other people besides journalists that don't quite fit the meaning of the trope. (Kind of ironic, when you think about it.)
Crapsack World was defined as a world on the extreme cynical side of Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, with Black and Gray Morality that is almost "Black and Black", and inhabited by universally or almost-universally awful people, where life sucks for everyone. Now the page is littered with examples of worlds that simply feature really powerful villains or really tragic situations, no matter how extremely idealistic they are otherwise.
Creator's Pet often ends up becoming "unpopular character who isn't Put on a Bus as soon as they appear or happens to be a main character".
Crowning Moments of Awesome just ain't as awesome as they used to be. Used to feature a character doing something so amazing you just have to stand up and cheer. These days a character only has to do something fairly competently to get on this page. Also, while it's supposed to only apply to when a character manages to accomplish something, people use it just to list any general thing they like.
Not to mention the original definition was the single most awesome thing a character ever did (emphasis on single, possibly with a second one where they arguably topped themselves). But people wasted no time in listing every single awesome thing every character ever did. It got bad enough that the moments of awesome from a series have now been segregated off into their own little sub-page ŕ la Headscratchers, so that every single slightly cool thing the characters do doesn't take over the entire trope page.
A Tear Jerker used to be an ultimate moment of sadness — something which honestly made you cry when you saw it. It now seems to mean 'any moment which is a bit sad'. And then there are those times when it's used as a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming.
Cue Cullen is about a project that was hated until a news announcement causes fans to look forward to it. Named for when everyone hated the idea for a Transformer's movie, until it was announced that Optimus Prime would be voiced by Peter Cullen. It has now become about talking about how awesome recent video game announcements are, never mind that no one hated them before.
Most likely this is a side effect of changing the name of the trope to something that was far more generic that what it was originally intended to apply to.
Dawson Casting started out as "casting actors that are clearly much older than their characters, usually very obviously so", and is now pretty much "casting actors that are not the exact same age as their characters, regardless of by how much or how old they look on screen".
Deader than Disco is supposed to be about things that fell so far from popularity that they've become jokes, and people are embarrassed to admit they liked. Nowadays, it seems anything that isn't as popular as it used to be (Looney Tunes, the Muppets, and such) but still has a number of fans and isn't almost universally seen as 'lame' or an embarrassment is added.
Deadpan Snarker is beginning to degenerate into "this character has at some point said something sarcastic". A lot of people mistake "snark" for "being rude, whinny and vitriolic".
Deconstruction is starting to change from "using a trope in the way it would be more likely to happen in real life" to "playing with a trope" and "playing a trope straight in a work that happens to be Darker and Edgier". We're gonna need a Not A Deconstruction page soon. Incidentally, the people who confuse a Deconstruction with a single or several Deconstructed Tropes is staggering.
A Determinator is defined by the trope page as "A character... who never gives up. Ever. No matter what." It is defined by much of its usage as, "A character who at some point overcame a difficulty." Even characters who have entire plot arcs committed to their having given up apparently still qualify.
Dethroning Moment Of Suck has sort of gone from "something that made me stop watching the show/playing the game /etc. forever" to "something I didn't like that much." Even worse, with polarizing shows like Family Guy, it'll often be reduced all the way down to "somewhat offensive joke that didn't make me laugh."
Did Not Do the Research seems to be applied to elements that could very well be the result of Artistic License. Heck, a lot of critics and websites, including Bad Astronomy, seem to disregard or ignore Artistic License. Secondarily, it is labeled in adaptations "regarding the source material", i.e. Dragonball Evolution.
Eldritch Abomination has steadily expanded in inclusivity from "Alien beyond comprehension... an affront to all reason" to "any ugly monster" to, in a growing number of cases, "any monster".
To a certain extent, the definition of Even Better Sequel seems to be degrading from "an even more excellent sequel to an already excellent work" to "any sequel that was better than the original, even if the original was only ok". Some of the examples, particularly in the Music section, sound like they should be on Surprisingly Improved Sequel or Growing the Beard instead.
Fanon Discontinuity seems to have moved away from "works that the majority of the fandom doesn't acknowledge for reasons of bad plotting, character derailment, or conflict with canon" and toward "whatever any one person feels like adding, even for entirelytrivial reasons".
The rampant potholing of Fanon Discontinuity is ironic in a sense that it ensures no one will ever forget about the things attempting to be forgotten.
There's also the fact that the reason frequently have nothing to do with continuity. You'll thus see people claiming discontinuity on things for reason of quality even if it didn't have any negative effect on canon (including things like acting/animation quality which isn't part of canon) as well as things for show that follow Status Quo is God and Negative Continuity and thus no episode has any effect on anything.
The trope was Flanderized so much that it basically turned into "complaining about plots points and events you don't like". For example, one of the example was complaining about peoples Sequence Breaking in Metroid (something that has absolutely no effect on the storyline) and another example discontinuited something that wasn't even out at the time of the writing because of a single plot point.
Recently, someone went to great lengths to weed out the examples that were personal, explanation-free, or just "that did happen, that's stupid!" and rewrote the main page to remind people that it's only suppose to be if a large amount of the fandom thinks so... after which people immediately started back up at it.
Disposable Woman can now be described as "a (usual) woman who dies at some point in or before the story."
The Ditz doesn't have to mean "someone who's supposed to be dumb". Now it means "someone who regularly holds the Idiot Ball".
Draco in Leather Pants has been Flanderized from ignoring all of a character's negative traits and focusing on/fabricating positive traits, mostly for the purposes of Perverse Sexual Lust, to the point that if there are people who like a villain (or Anti-Villain or Designated Villain or whatever) for any reason whatsoever, even if it's because they're huge bastards, they are a Draco in Leather Pants. It's also turning into Complaining About Characters You Don't Like.
The page contains a number of protagonists that have their deeds and actions related in the worst possible light, taken ridiculously out of context, or twisted beyond recognition until the antagonist of the series seems like a saint for opposing them. Which, basically, made the page an example of itself. This has since been split off to Ron the Death Eater.
It's also getting to the point where people cannot so much as try to look a little deeper into a villain or suggest something might have caused them to be that way - if you do, it's a Draco in Leather Pants.
The Dragon used to mean a right-hand man who was stronger than his boss, and whom the hero must face before dispatching the weaker main villain. Now, it means "right-hand man".
Eight Point Eight was intended to cover reviews of video games by major publications that assigned outlying scores to a game and as a result ruffled the fanbase's feathers, but has degenerated to some degree into "any review that differs from the established consensus" or, worse, "any review I disagree with."
Emo Teen is often stretched, like Wangst, into "any teenager who expresses any kind of emotion besides sheer sugary joy" rather than actually being a teen that self-identifies as "emo".
And One-Scene Wonder has itself been flanderized to include just about any good or famous actor in a minor role (or just someone delivering a single funny line).
Everyone Looks Sexier If French has lost all meaning, as apparently two thirds of the world have now been added to the list, most of them with the reason that there is one actor from this country that the Troper likes.
Exactly What It Says on the Tin was supposed to be about titles that are so descriptive that you could come up with a reasonably accurate plot synopsis just from hearing the title. Now it seems to refer to any title that is not a total non-sequitur.
Expy was supposed to feature characters that copy some other characters to the point of being almost one and the same. Now it includes not only examples of characters that, say, borrowed some visual elements from some other characters, with whom they have absolutely nothing in common personality-wise; but also examples of character pairs that share no unique traits at all.
Not to mention "Expy" is only supposed to refer to two or more characters by the same creator. 90% of the "Expies" mentioned on this wiki are really more like Captain Ersatzes, and some of them aren't even that.
Fan Dumb. For the most part it's used properly, but there are occasions where when a series has a notable fandumb, any complaint is automatically filed under the trope. For example, some people may hate things just because they changed it, but even if a person has specific, thought out reasons as to why they hate the changes, there's still a chance they'll be seen as fandumb. Similarly, whenever there's contradictions in the fanbase, people assume that it's fans being hypocrites, as opposed to different fans wanting different things.
Fetish Fuel. It was meant to be something that was unintentionally arousing. Now it's taken to be anything that's purposefully sexy, or anything that could vaguely, in an aphrodisiacal, drug-laden haze, be taken as remotely sexy.
Fission Mailed originally meant sequences in a game which make you think that you've failed at a mission, but are actually what you're supposed to do. Now there are plenty of examples of fake game crashes or anything else which is meant to fool you into thinking you've lost progress in some other manner than losing by the normal game rules, as well as examples that don't have anything to do with getting you toward a goal.
Five-Man Band was originally made to describe a very specific sort of cast that shows up in certain action shows, mostly Sentai ones. Nowadays, every ensemble in existence has to be a Five-Man Band, even if half the characters don't fit the roles they're given, under the old definitions or the newer, more vague ones.
Fox News Liberal is now turning into Complaining About Conservatives('s Shows) You Don't Like. Or, alternatively, it's used as "Democrat who doesn't completely toe the party line" or "Republican who's not a living, breathing Strawman Political and thus all those nasty stupid conservatives say isn't loyal enough".
Fridge Brilliance: To quote the Square Peg Round Trope page: Fridge Brilliance isn't "My favorite show is awesome and makes no mistakes". All series have Plot Holes and issues, even if insignificant, and trying to deny it with a "I Can Explain" won't change this. That'll just lead to Fan Dumb.
Gameplay and Story Segregation originally covered situations in video games in which the storyline directly contradicts an established gameplay mechanic, but now basically means "things in a video game that don't make sense."
The Hannibal Lecture was a speech given by the captured Hannibal which inspired tremendous doubt and insecurity in his captors, until it was the prisoner doing the interrogation — IOW a villain so wily and persuasive that even when defeated, he is able to turn the tables in his favor using the power of speech. It's not any "The Reason You Suck" Speech the villain gives.
Hey, It's That Voice! is supposed to be about when two roles by the same voice actor have a similar voice, but most of the wicks outside of the page uses it to say "X character has the same voice actor as X" even when the characters don't remotely sound similar.
Ho Yay / Les Yay is homosexual subtext. If the characters are explicitly gay, it's not an example of the trope.
Humans Are Bastards is going from "This work compares humans to nonhumans and says humans are intrinsically worse" to "This work shows humans for the evil cruel monsters that they are so that you want them all to die". It's not quite all the way to the latter yet, but almost.
Extreme example: there once was a page called I Am Not Making This Up which was about people listing entries with ridiculous premises. However, people ended up adding tons of things, even only slightly unusual ones. The title of this page didn't help either. It was then removed and blocked from editing. Even the discussion page.
Idiot Plot is being applied to just really dumb storylines, when it's supposed to mean a storyline that can only move forward if just about everyone involved carries the Idiot Ball.
Incredibly Lame Pun used to refer to an egregiously bad joke in-universe, where the characters call out on it, but it is used on the wiki as a pothole for puns in general.
In the sense of "exaggerating one particular trait", the Informed Ability page can be said to suffer from flanderization. The first definition of the trope is a badly written ability. The second is an ability that's never shown, but the viewers have no reason to doubt a character has, the example given being a Fyarel demon's mucus power from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yet almost all, if not all, of the examples are from the first definition. Granted, they're more interesting, but still.
Interface Screw is very messy, too. It includes games with bad controls or games where one of the Standard Status Effects makes controls or vision field weird. Sometimes this page includes examples with user interface going crazy and doing things it's not supposed to do.
The description for I Thought It Meant seems to imply that it's supposed to be about actual misinterpretations of trope names; while there are undoubtedly some on there, more often than not it's just a place to put down Puns involving double meanings for trope names.
It Was His Sled has definitely fallen into this. The trope refers to spoilers/Reveals that are so out that even people who didn't watch the movie/read the book/play the game probably know them, such as Darth Vader being Luke's father or that Aeris dies - but most of the examples are from things that are far from being mainstream enough for the trope to apply (like Shrek)
From the Jerkass page "A Jerkass is a character who is so completely obnoxious that it is unbelievable anyone would willingly interact with him." Now it seems doing or saying something slightly mean once is all it takes for a character to qualify as a Jerkass. The misuse overlaps with Complaining About Characters You Don't Like all too often.
The Jimmy Hart Version went from being about shows using sound-alikes of popular songs because they couldn't get the original to any piece of music that sounds like another piece of music (sometimes only very vaguely).
Just Eat Him was intended to be a counterpart to Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? and Just Hit Him, where a large being swallows another being whole when eating him normally and lethally would make more sense. Currently, close to half of the examples (and the page image) display examples of devouring other beings that does kill them.
Not to mention that, killing them or not, swallowing the target whole when it's a creature that would not normally do this is specifically cited as an example, used as a form of Family Unfriendly Death or as the impetus for a Womb Level or Fantastic Voyage. A huge number of the examples list cases where a toothy carnivore that would normally rip its prey apart instead swallows the victim whole as "aversions."
Laconic Wiki is supposed to be about defining long articles in a few words, but now it does it to articles that aren't overly long. It's also getting less and less Laconic for the sake of being cute.
The Large Hams are getting less and less hammy, to the point where simply raising one's voice now and again can earn the designation. Some examples are just either NO INDOOR VOICE or hamming a certain line only once.
Love It or Hate It was theoretically supposed to be a list of things that the consensus response to was almost all on the extremes of really loving it or really hating it. It now seems to be a list of literally anything without a completely homogeneous response, listing well over a hundred things that have received copious if not a majority of relatively neutral criticism.
Any villain or anti-hero who is both popular and not a complete retard is apparently a Magnificent Bastard.
The terms Macekre and Woolseyism appear to have lost meaning. The former is supposed to refer to when loads of stuff is cut so that the plot of the show ends up being altered, instead it has become a place for editors to Complain About Dubs They Dont Like, which admittedly do make edits (such as name changes, music changes and the removal of the occasional bloody nose) but do not destroy the show's plot. The latter meanwhile has become the opposite of the former's Flanderized definition, where it is supposed to be when jokes are added to replace ones that won't work in translation.
Mary Sue. Any character who has even a slight degree of competence and plot relevance (like, say, the main characters) getting labeled a Sue. Frequently used to Complain About Characters You Don't Like.
The problem with Meganekko is that there is no specific male equivalant, except Stoic Spectacles. The problem is, while more spectacled males are stoic, some of them are not.
One example of Meganekko is deleted because she has no "Meganekko-like personality traits". What happened to the "cute girl with glasses" concept? It can mean any cute girl with glasses!
Me Love You Long Time has been flanderized into "any couple with a white guy and an Asian girl". Even though the trope description explicitly says that it is NOT how the trope qualifies, it doesn't prevent those kind of entries. More understandable with the recent rename into Asian Gal with White Guy and changes to the trope description to now cover all interracial romances of this sort. See also Where Da White Women At? below.
Memetic Mutation. While it means "a catchy derivative of some aspect of pop culture that is parodied and repeated constantly", it does not necessarily mean "just because it's on the Internet, it's popular".
Hell, memes actually exist even before the invention of the internet. But some people kept deleting entries, citing the reason, "Hey, the Internet fandom does not recognise it, so it's not a meme!" And don't even get us started with memes that are remotely popular for fans of the work, but not everyone else.
And some memes are only popular to a certain group (we're looking at you, 4Chan), so these memes aren't that popular, and don't really qualify.
Mighty Whitey was originally about how some white guy learns to hunt from a tribe of natives or whatnot and becomes better than they are, ŕ la old safari movies. Now, if the Token White proves to even be competent at anything at all, he's Mighty Whitey.
Mis-blamed was originally just suppose to be about translation, but has been extended to many other things. This is probably a good thing though, as it's still cases of "Misplaced Blamed", and it's probably not worth splitting the article over. Actually; this is arguably an aversion.
Moral Dissonance often looks like more of a place to Complain About Heroes They Don't Like rather than a list of examples where a hero's actions don't line up with their rhetoric and it's portrayed as being just fine. Too many examples are summarized as "no one bats an eye at the collateral damage"
Most Common Superpower was supposed to refer only to female superheroes, but is often used to describe any woman with an ample chest whether she is one or not. This is likely due to there being no other generic trope for it (Gag Boobs usually doesn't fit with the person being described, either). And in some places it's being used for women who don't even have particularly large breasts.
Gag Boobs and Most Common Superpower now seem to be interchangeable. Also, in some cases they seem to mean "anything bigger than a B cup."
Most Common Superpower and Stripperiffic seem to have a lot of interchangeable use going on these days as well, and with the latter sometimes seeming to mean "anything more revealing/tighter than a comfy sweater and jeans".
Narm initially meant "means to be serious, ends up funny", but now it can mean "any scene that fails to invoke whatever the intended feeling was, even if it doesn't make it funny" or "any dramatic moment that ends up being corny". A lot of people also think it's interchangeable with Large Ham.
Never Trust a Trailer has become Complaining About Movies I Don't Like, under the excuse that "The trailer made it look like I'd like this movie, and I didn't. So it LIED!"
Nietzsche Wannabe was originally just about the stereotypicalStraw Nihilist, until it became a rant about, guess who. While there are additions of literal examples about anyone who thinks s/he's so damn clever for abusing Nietzsche's philosophy against someone s/he doesn't like (like, guess again). Then it was cut and locked, but ended up being further flanderized as being just about anyone who hannibal lectures (itself flanderized from its original definition to just any Reason You Suck Speech) about nihilism, straw or not.
Accidental Nightmare Fuel was originally about things in media aimed at children that are unintentionally scary. Most examples forget the unintentional part, others simply list things that are only remotely scary.
The original description for the trope also stated that the examples were intended to be normal or only slightly scary to children, but ended up frightening to an adult. Of course, this didn't stop stuff like Doom from being included. High Octane Nightmare Fuel was created for this reason. It has similar problems.
Nintendo Hard is steadily getting easier. For example, Roguelikes and all Atlus games. We could give Atlus its own trope. Why "1994's Lion King" and "Friday the 13th" aren't listed but someone wanted to place Gauntlet and Solital there. Plus it includes Platform Hell examples but that's a different trope.
Older than They Think (at least for video games) went from a trope that described cases where there was a high profile or wide spread belief that something inspired its precursor but has come to be any game that has a similar game that came before it that was less popular.
Our Vampires Are Different is supposed to be a trope describing the different ways vampires are portrayed in fiction. But some seem to think it's an 'Everything's Better With' trope (Everything Sucks With Vampires?) and just put in works of fiction that have vampires in them, without bothering to explain what the vampire rules are in that particular fictional work. Same with a few other Our Monsters Are Different tropes.
Padding used to mean "unnecessary scenes added to a film or TV episode in order to bring it to proper length". Now it seems to mean "I think this movie is too long".
Porting Disaster now seems to refer to "a port that had to make sacrifices, but is still decent" instead of "a port that had to make sacrifices and is nigh-unplayable because of it."
A Quirky Mini Boss Squad apparently doesn't have to be quirky anymore, it just has to be a squad.
Rape The Dog. Initially referred to villains committing an evil deed so Squicky and excessive that it serves as Character Derailment and alienates the audience from the character permanently; many of the examples now cited are neither violent and disturbing nor out of character for the villain in question.
And then, one day after the split, there was an edit made to MEH to include a character who was a Complete Monster from the start and thus had no MEH to cross. This character was already on the Complete Monster page. Flanderization moves fast.
Every single Token Romance or somewhat cloying romance is now a declared a Romantic Plot Tumor. This includes Titanic, which is a romantic historical drama movie.
Rouge Angles of Satin is when a writer is too reliant on spellcheck and use visually similar but different words (Rouge/Rogue, Satan/Satin, Here/Hear ect...) that change the meaning of the sentence, but a big number of wicks outside the page use it to refer to any typo.
People often confused Ruined Forever with Jumping the Shark. The former is the fan's reactionsbefore their favourite show is well...ruined forever. Jumping the Shark is the end result when it actually happened.
Rule Abiding Rebel was described as works where the creator suddenly ends up conforming to societal standards after starting off edgy and unconventional. Naturally, that led to many examples criticized solely for not being 100% nonconformist, and just guess what so-called "rebel" topic gets brought up the most. If you guessed gender wank, you guessed correctly.
The standards by which a character will be listed as a Scary Black Man have gotten ridiculously low. A character doesn't have to be scary, black, or a man to be listed as one. The standard now seems to be "A usually non-white person (there will be some characters listed who it would be a stretch to say are even Ambiguously Brown) who is usually a man got angry at some point, fought at one point, or is a villain." Two out of three can work if you stretch, but the if the character is only one of those, or god forbid, none of them, you're shoehorning.
Science Is Bad was originally meant for stories that consistently presented science and technology as evil and destructive, with the implication that we ought to stop further research and development and where simple, "closer-to-nature" living was shown as superior. Nowadays, it seems that if a story presents any threat borne of technology, where any scientist does something bad or morally ambiguous, or where scientists aren't 100% right about everything, its a Science Is Bad story.
The Scrappy is also becoming a place for people to Complain About Characters They Don't Like, especially if Die for Our Ship is involved.
Shaggy Dog Story now means "the hero fails at his goal" instead of "a story that ultimately goes nowhere and has no real resolution".
From the So Bad It's Horrible page: "Important Note: Merely being offensive in its subject matter isn't enough to justify a work as Horrible. Hard as it is to imagine at times, there's a market for all types of deviancy (no matter how small a niche it is). It has to fail to appeal even to that niche to qualify here." The page has turned into Complaining About Works You Don't Like. Few examples actually qualify.
Apparently now all a series/movie requires to qualify for So Bad It's Horrible is finding a single vitriolic review of it. On someone's blog.
By now Wall Banger devolved even beyond Complaining About Shows You Don't Like. No, at least Anime and Manga sections at the current point can be summed up as "Complaining About Shows That You Like To The Point Of Obsession, So You Know What Should Have Happened Better Than Their Authors" and you can almost use them as a quick reference of the most popular recent series.
"Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped" was meant for specific stories that had an anvilicious message, but the story actually worked better because they were so blatant about it. Due to the misleading title, it quickly became "Any message I agree with that was done in an anvilicious manner."
This is probably caused by the fact that Anvilicious is misused to mean any story that tries to make any sort of point, especially if it's a point that the person yelling "Anvilicious!" doesn't agree with. If every Aesop is an anvil, then all that remains is to debate whether it should have been dropped or not.
Somewhere, a Palaeontologist is Crying is chock full of examples from works that clearly don't take place on Earth, which completely misses the point of the trope.
Spell My Name with a "The" went from "People who insist you put a The in their name" to "Anyone who is called by a name with a The" pretty quickly.
Spotlight-Stealing Squad has rapidly devolved into whining when any character receives more attention than the favorite of the poster. Many of which include such things as whining that the main character gets more focus than anyone else.
Start of Darkness is about a prequel which tells the backstory of the villain. Doesn't stop people from adding stuff like The Dark Knight there because somebody became evil within the length of that movie.
"Stop Having Fun" Guys was almost instantly Flanderized from being specifically about "arrogant or condescending tournament / 'hardcore' gamers" to people who prefer tournament rules to people who go to tournaments regardless of how they behave.
Scrub also suffered from this, possibly as revenge.
A Strawman, strictly speaking, is a character that is a twisted caricature of some ideology, voicing the opinions of that ideology in such a way as to make them easy for the author to rebut. Reading the examples in this category, you get the impression that the definition is "any character who can be associated with some ideology and who is not 100% reasonable, benevolent or infallible."
Strawman Has a Point refers to an author being so incompetent that the strawman he set up ends up sounding more reasonable than the side we're supposed to agree with. The page contains a lot of examples involving characters who are villains but aren't strawmen.
A Straw Vulcan is everyone who thinks that logic and reason is more important than emotion, regardless of what that means for the plot (if anything). The original definition was that the character only (often exaggeratedly) exhibits these traits so that he could be proven wrong, with An Aesop that emotion is more important.
On a more general note, the "subjective" in "Subjective Trope" is often stretched to the breaking point. While it's supposed to mean subjective in the sense of an example being arguable and subject to Your Mileage May Vary, some take it to mean, "You can't argue against it or delete it because it's my opinion," even when the given example doesn't even fit the trope's stated definition.
Pages like Narm and Wall Banger are especially prone to this.
There's also the fact that, because people take "subjective trope" to mean "if so much as one person found this to be a Narm, we can list it", literally over half of all dramatic moments in every work ever are now listed as Narm.
That One Boss is about a video game boss being much more difficult than all of the other bosses in a game, as the name of the trope indicates. However, there's about a dozen of examples saying "Every Boss in X game is That One Boss.". That One Boss is not supposed to be about a boss that is simply difficult.
This! Is! SPARTA! went through an immense case of Flanderization at one point. People added any case of someone screaming something (even single words), up to the point that somebody had to go through the examples and remove the excessive ones.
Some examples aren't even written! LIKE! THIS! And some lines! DON'T! EVEN! SOUND! LIKE! THIS!
Too Dumb to Live is starting to become "one of the stages of Ralph Wiggum", rather than "characters who die because of their stupidity". Nearly every entry of the page are the former. Even trope descriptions say something like "If this happens often, the character is Too Dumb to Live". The fact that this isn't a Death Trope is the most likely factor.
Twofer Token Minority and Token Minority have seemingly begun to list every possible example, regardless of intent. In all likelihood, it's not tokenism to feature a black woman in the cast when the majority of the cast is non-white and female.
Ugly Guy, Hot Wife has a hell of a lot of examples where the guy is merely average looking. While sometimes this is due to a Hollywood Homely guy being played up as this ugly nerd (like JD on Scrubs) within the show, there are way too many average looking guys on the list.
Remember when most of the entries in Unfortunate Implications were actually offensive? Now, it seems that if anything an author writes bears any resemblance at all to a real world culture/group/phenotype, it's Unfortunate Implications. Because, clearly, when an author chooses to give his villain red hair, he means that all redheads are vile monsters who need to be wiped off the face of the earth.
Apparently Weird Japanese Things don't have to be Japanese anymore. Then again, other countries are weird even by Japanese standards,
We Wait - Is it about a waiting from a hero or a villain to fall into a trap or video game puzzles which require waiting?
What an Idiot should have been renamed "Complaining About Character Decisions/Characters You Don't Like" long ago, to avoid unnecessary confusion. Seriously, by the current standards of this trope any and all character decisions, influenced by emotions and/or made without perfect prescience qualify for it.
Also, What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?. It's supposed to mean "things that are thought of as being for kids when they are definitely not". Now, people are listing tons of random things that aren't for kids, regardless of whether anyone mistakes them as such (sometimes with a Hand Wave and sometimes without). Worse, the page is now becoming "even if this was meant for kids, I don't think it should be, so I'm listing it here". Which, ironically, means those examples should probably be listed under the very opposite.
People are also missing the point, listing games that aren't kid-unfriendly just because "they're too hard for kids".
What the Hell, Hero? was meant to "showcase" incidents of others calling out (Anti)Heroes on Moral Dissonance. However, it soon dissolved into being a generic catch-all for "good guys" who took things too far and even just frustration with the writers of the series (encompassing Moral Dissonance, Jerk Ass, Designated Hero, and Wall Banger), while neglecting the important bit about calling them out in-series. There are, fortunately, ongoing efforts to rectify this problem.
Where Da White Women At? now includes any couple made up of a white girl with a black guy, even if the relationship was never a plot point, never important and not because the black man was intentionally seeking out white women. See also Me Love You Long Time above.
The Woobie should be about characters that have bad things happen to them so that the audience will go "aww", but seems to have been broadened by some people into "character that bad things happen to" (which tends to be true for characters in, oh, all stories except the ones for toddlers). I mean, Luke Skywalker? Terra out of Final Fantasy VI? How are they The Woobie?
What The Hell, Casting Agency? is the case of really odd casting. Playing Against Type is the case of this, and it pulled off. But if it's the actor's request to go to the latter, it's not the former.
A Xanatos Gambit is supposed to be a situation where the villain benefits from a given event regardless of whether the heroes succeeded or failed, but nowadays it seems every plan that isn't instantly obvious to the heroes gets this title.
People mistook it for 'any clever plan' and Batman Gambit had to be created.
Xanatos Speed Chess is even worse. If someone has a plan and is forced to drop it or change for any reason, it's automatically labelled Xanatos Speed Chess, even when it's not even Xanatos-worthy in the first place. Yet things not going 100% according to plan and being forced to switch gears and adapt happens all the time. XSC should only be reserved for actual grand schemes or repeated change of tacs, not "I wanted to eat cornflakes but discovered I had no milk, so I ate a sandwich instead."
Your Mileage May Vary was intended for things that have an equal split between how many people like it and how many hate it. Then people added examples of things that are generally universally reviled or loved, based on the fact that there are a few people who take the minority view. Currently, this trope has been "fixed" by moving the examples to Love It or Hate It.
Real Life
Try asking a group of friends, or family members to role-play as each other. The results will be... amusing.
Ayn Rand (and her associated philosophy) has a strong tendency to be the victim of Flanderisation, and ironically, this can even be the case with people who claim to be advocates of it. Both sociopaths (who will claim support of the philosophy) and people within the Progressive Left have a tendency to view Objectivism as justifying amorality, when in fact, trying to claim that it's perfectly ok to live life For the Evulz wasn't actually Rand's intent.
Alzheimer's disease, at some stages, may bring some traits out of its victims and exaggerate them to the extreme.
Sports broadcasters and a lot of radio personalities do this to themselves as time goes on. Chris Berman, Tony Kornheiser, Dick Vitale, Jim Rome all immediately come to mind as people that have particular quirks that are used more in more as they continue and their knowledge hasn't grown so they cover it up with their personality.
Political strategy in general tries to flanderize politicians to more easily accomplish shifts in popularity. All it takes is just a few incidents, repeatedly referenced, to put a politician into the desired "frame". Choose your own example.
The eighteenth century conjures up nothing but "snobs in powdered wigs" for some people. Ironically, many of the most progressive and even radical ideas of that century were formulated by those powdered-wigged snobs.
When people picture The Great Depression, they often imagine almost everyone being pathetically poor, and a very tiny fraction of the population being obscenely rich. In fact, an American middle class (albeit a small one) did exist in the 1930s.
The Fifties gets this a lot, with stereotypical depictions either making the decade out to be absurdly puritanical (never mind that it was actuallylesspuritanical than previous eras) or decrying its supposed ubiquitous racism and other forms of bigotry. There's also the assumption for some reason that Fifties-era Americans were disgustingly gluttonous, even though they generally ate less and were in better physical shape than modern-day Americans.
In general, fictional depictions of just about any era since the 1920s will show almost all characters - even the elderly! - mindlessly engaging in whatever the hip new fad of the time was (tie-dyed clothes and hippies during the late Sixties, for example). Only occasionally will it be brought up that many people disapproved of the fad in its time - and in that case, the narrative will often exaggerate how much of an outcry there was against the fad. (Example: An episode of The Simpsons has Marge's mother showing a photo that was taken of her in the '20s when she was arrested for "indecent exposure" on a beach. The swimsuit she is wearing is a turn-of-the-century number that stops at about knee length, but in fact bathing suits that were even skimpier than that were tolerated at the time.)
Mad Men seems to have totally 180'd people's impressions of the 1960's. Before the show was popular the 60's were usually seen as a tie-dyed era of free love, hippies and beat poets. Now many people see the 60's as a time of art deco, skinny ties, oysters rockefeller and constant drinking and smoking.
Such people don't seem to realize that every decade starts out one way and ends up another, or that in each decade you'll encounter at least two subcultures that are radically different. Most people tend to think of The Sixties as a prelude to The Seventies, but it started out as an epilogue for The Fifties.
Historical figures are extremely prone to flanderization, if Napoleon Bonaparte's shortness, George Washington having wooden teeth and anyone with toothbrush mustaches being associated withHitler (and thus, pure evil) are any indication.
And in the above three cases, two of them never had that above mentioned trait they've become famous for.*
Just in case you were wondering, Napoleon was 5' 6" in British imperial measurements, a respectable height, and while Washington did have several sets of false teeth, none were made of or with wood, and instead made of human teeth and/or animal ivory
Let's also not forget that Richard III was not really born deformed or hunchbacked, although Shakespeare portrayed him this way, albeit for purely political reasons (Richard III was defeated by Henry VII, grandfather of Queen Elizabeth I and great-great-grandfather of King James I (the two monarchs during Shakespeare's writing career)). These traits were included as exemplifications of his evil nature. Thus, this trope is Older Than Print.
George Washington Carver's accomplishments are often exaggerated with respect to finding different uses for peanuts. Also, he did not invent peanut butter.
Real-life people are by necessity caricatured when appearing in fiction (it's impossible to avoid loss of depth in transition from a functional human to character in fiction) if the actual person isn't the star. Such examples are noted on the pages for these people.
There is a theory that using the internet will eventually do this to everyone since all information of any niche interest is freely available. For example: A metalhead will soon become a walking metal encyclopedia, a gamer becomes completly obsessed with his hobby, those with an interest in the esotheric turn into spaced out druids and an average Anime fan who was intially just looking up some info about his favorite Pokémon becomes a full blown Otaku. Not to mention, using this very website too much will destroy your ability to watch a work of fiction without analyzing it to shreds. So basically: the Internet will exponentially expand your little quirks.
