Troperville
Help us survive. All donations are anonymous on the wiki and unacknowledged, as we don't wish to create a hierarchy among Tropers.
Editing
Tools
Toys
|
alt title(s): Flanderized; Flanderisation The act of taking a single (often minor) aspect of a character and exaggerating it more and more until it's huge and cartoonish and almost entirely consumes the character. Sitcom characters are particularly susceptible to this, as are peripheral characters in shows with long runs.
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 executives think doing this will appeal with their demographic better and boost ratings.
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.
Named for one of the examples in The Simpsons, Ned Flanders, who was originally just a clean and quiet-living, somewhat religious fellow ( contrast to Homer), in otherwords, the archetypical example of the American family-man who went to Church on Sundays, before becoming the meek super-religious guy most people know him as.
See also Never Live It Down for when the character is more associated with something than the character actually changing, and Fat Monica, when realistic quirks (usually weight) are mishandled by the writers. When this happens through adaptation, it's Character Exaggeration.
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.
See also Took A Level In Dumbass, Trope Decay. Not to be confused with Stupid Sexy Flanders.
Examples
open/close all folders
Anime and Manga
- Azumanga Daioh has a veritable boatload of flanderization in the manga. The anime versions of the characters are the end result.
- Kaorin's crush on Sakaki, though the series is arguably too short and Kaorin's crush simply less-discussed in the early stages for it to be a classic case, but it's still plenty discussed enough to get a shade creepy.
- Osaka starts out as a somewhat slow-witted and eccentric, yet generally still well-adjusted girl, but becomes weirder and creepier as the episode count goes up. Most people agree this is an improvement.
- Mr. Kimura the Classical Japanese teacher, in the manga, started out as being regularly drawn, but his trademark shocked expression was used so much, that by the time the manga grew, and the anime was made, this became is default expression!
- Yuuna's jealousy in Maburaho got Flanderized to the point that, though she was originally very bland, she actually became an entertaining character.
- Shuichi's hyperness and Tohma's obsession with Eiri (which starts out as merely protective and gets creepier over time) in the Gravitation manga. The anime has more stable characterizations, though skipping over most of the character development in the later volumes.
- Pretty much everyone in Tenchi Muyo, especially Aeka and Mihoshi. It Got Worse with each new series.
- Takamura's not-so-sudden (de-)evolution from a skilled and respectable boxer into a Jerkass in Hajime No Ippo. He's always been portrayed as a Jerkass outside of the ring, but there's a limit...
- Makoto in School Days transforms from a merely sex-curious teenager into an uncaring, womanizing bastard. Furthermore, the two main female love interests get reduced to only being known for their obsession with Makoto.
- Hey, when life gives you lemons (or in this case, a harem), you make lemonade (messes). You don't see the Keitaro's or Hosaka's of the world making this much progress with the ladies.
- Maybe to a small degree with Mikuru in Haruhi-chan, when comparing her appearance in the regular The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya. In the original plot arc, even though Mikuru is portrayed as a shy Moe Moe, she still ends up showing rather blatant interest in both Kyon AND Itsuki. She has sexual interests, just doesn't like getting Cosraped By Haruhi. But in the Haruhi-chan shorts? Mikuru now seems so terrified of anything sensual that she breaks down into tears when Kyon/Itsuki burst into the room dressed like Host Club guys.
- Debatable. Mikuru's personality really changes in accordance with the skit introduced. In one episode she was cosplaying in an attempt to outdo Nagato in sexuality.
- Kawachi from Yakitate!! Japan. He started out as a talented baker with "real person" problems and a tendency to need to have the hero's eccentricities explained to him (and thus the reader). Over the course of the volumes this degenerated into him becoming a total Butt Monkey, suffering any indignation or humiliation that the other characters were apparently too cool to have happen to them, and a tendency to shout disbelief at any tiny thing, causing others to mock and ridicule him. It finally culminated in even his beloved mother and younger siblings being dismissive of his abilities, and as the series went on he became the equivalent of Krillin hanging out with Goku and Vegeta... only without the abiding affection and/or small amount of respect those two gave Krillin, as Kawachi's "friends" took to using him to literally waste the opposing team's time.
- The whole Manga went completely over the top...It's losing more and more realism and being outright crazy. This troper liked the realistic beginning and the reactions, which were just a little bonus in the end. But the whole thing is becoming so bizarre, that this troper stopped reading it
- Minako from the Sailor Moon anime went from being a somewhat bubbly but otherwise more mature version of Usagi to being a hyperactive Genki Girl with a loose (at best) grasp on reality and silly schemes. Likely this was done to make her more distinct from Usagi, but by the end of the series they seemed to be on the same development path, just in different directions.
- Interestingly, the live action version of the story emphasizes Minako's early (and subsequently lonely) career, portraying her with a heroic but distant personality. Character Derailment or not, it might have been done to avoid the traditional overlap.
- Ranma 1/2: Kasumi went from a normal Yamato Nadeshiko to an unfazeble near-parody. Considering how comparatively dull she was before, it could be considered an improvement.
- Similarly done to both Nabiki's love of money (elevated from merely opportunistic and mercenary to an easy rival for David Xanatos) and Shampoo's role as The Ditz.
- In Nabiki's case, she started out materialistic and shallow, but smart and sarcastic. Some would say, she was unique in that she was a normal person among all the loons. She'd amuse herself by selling risque, but inoffensive, pictures of her sister and Ranma to Kuno, and then abusing the latter's generosity. As the manga went on, she became so interested with self-gain she's now perfectly willing to physically sell her sister and Ranma themselves (or her family's property) to pay for her own debts, happily sells nude pictures of Ranma to the entire school (and, indeed, briefly mentions international sales,) dates guys for the explicit purpose of fleecing them for all they're worth (and blackmailing them if they even dare accuse her of this,) and would rather hightail it than face Kasumi and apologize to her.
- Lady Of War Kan'u Unchou (Guan Yu) from Ikki Tousen is originally one of the more interesting characters, which gets fueled by her passion for her schoolmate and reincarnation of her leader in her past life, Ryuubi Gentoku (Liu Bei), whom she has vowed to protect. In the first episodes of the third anime season, her feelings for Ryuubi transform into a full-blown lesbian crush; while this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it does dangerously eclipse other traits of her personality, so she comes dangerously close to psycho lesbian territory.
- Thankfully, that full-blown crush immediately stops after the 4th episode. Afterwards, their relationship more or less went back to normal like the previous season.
- Pokemon, and how. By season seven many characters (I'm looking at you, Takeshi/Brock) are little more than walking collections of running gags.
- A surprising example from Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. In an anime where all the girls are made out of stereotypes, Kitsu Chiri starts out as a girl obsessed with everything being perfectly divided and distributed. She seeks to set things straight, often by rather violent methods. However, somewhere in the "story", the focus on perfection dulls a bit while her violence is upped to such a degree that she is often shown as a sadistic murderer.
- PaniPoniDash: Just about everyone ends up having one of their traits exaggerated to extremes; three obvious examples are Mesousa's uselessness, Himeko's super-high level of hyperactivity (maho), and Kurumi's plain-ness.
- Lina Inverse of The Slayers has suffered this severely, especially with regards to her greed. She started out as a bad-tempered Black Magician Girl who enjoyed going out and mercilessly destroying bandit camps for their treasure, but by the latest season (Slayers Revolution) has become something of an inhuman monster, going so far as to rescue a fishwoman, then immediately seek out a chef to sell her to him despite pleas not to! In the past, while Lina was definitely shown to be a mercenary, almost invariably refusing to help somebody unless they paid her for it, she never came across as so evil that she would sell a person whom she had just rescued. This, in this troper's opinion, has sent Lina beyond the Moral Event Horizon, ruining the character for him.
- Sagara Sousuke has this happen to him in the manga Full Metal Panic! Overload. Originally, He's shown being stern, a bit emotionless, rather socially inept, and taking certain extreme measures to protect Kaname. In this manga, he's made out to be a complete robotic sociopath that sees nothing wrong in mass-murdering people by misinterpreting Kaname's wishes. Many times, he's even shown blowing things up and causing damage to Kaname herself without so much as a blink of the eye - something his original self would never do. In fact, Kaname and Sousuke's roles are, in a way, reversed in this, where people will feel extremely sorry for her and wonder why she puts up with the insane physical abuse Sousuke deals out to her. Sure, it's all played out for laughs, but the Flanderization is incredible. His psychopathy is extreme to the point where he's shown getting withdrawal symptoms when he doesn't use his gun for a day. Seriously, in that adaptation, he could give Gauron a run for his money in being Ax Crazy.
- Jakken, Sesshomaru's henchman from InuYasha, started out as a sadistic and very competent evil sidekick who was an
excellent okay fighter and later on became a goofy weak klutz who often messed up his master's plans.
- Toshiro Hitsugaya as Bleach's Spotlight Stealing Squad. Okay, so the fangirls like him a bit TOO much. No, he has not taken over the show a la Sasuke Uchiha, as far as we know of. Pffffft.
- And don't forget his battle against Luppi. Toshiro managed to freeze him that could very well last forever, when suddenly a Negacion saved Luppi's butt and he boasts about it. To the haters who always flanderize Toshiro's battle record, it shall always be "Toshiro's ice is weak enough that even a replacement Espada can break free on his own"
- Hell, we can go on forever with Hitsugaya. He barely won against a Fraccion because he was under a limiter which severely limits his power. The Fan Dumb always forget the bolded parts. And back to Luppi, he got knocked down in the first round, and Fan Dumb calls it "One-shotted to death".
- Mahou Sensei Negima has Tsukuyomi. Her first appearance saw her treating Setsuna with a decent amount of respect, and she was more of Punch Clock Villain than anything else. Then a bunch of chapters later, she shows up again, in total Stalker With A Crush Psycho Lesbian mode with a psychotic obsession with Setsuna, essentially moving from a somewhat ditzy minor minion to the only character in the series who is obviously and undeniably evil. She's also creepy as hell.
- Setsuna is also becoming a victim of this going from Failure Knight to mild Bodyguard Crush and in more recent chapter ending up with full Schoolgirl Lesbians. Who knows why?
- Considering how things have developed, the second one might count as positive flanderization. Could do without the first one, though.
- In regard to the first one: Konoka notices it, and the second one is a direct result of her attempt to counteract it. In either case, it could be considered Character Development.
- It can be hard to believe, but Sanji from [[One Piece]] wasn't always quite such a loser when it comes to romance and women. Early on, he was actually a Chick Magnet (20 at once one time, in fact), his attention to the main females more often seemed kind of sweet, and he didn't quite come off as a dorky pervert like he does now. However, Oda gradually turning him into a full blown Chivalrous Pervert (coupled with epic Butt Monkey tendencies) was actually a really positive change. In retrospect, there was a period of time where he seemed a little too perfect compared to other main characters, and was in need of a serious personality flaw in the same vein as Luffy's flakiness and stupidity, Zoro's lack of sense of direction, Usopp's cowardliness, and Nami's greed.
Comic Books
- Power Girl of The DCU has grown (literally) from a standard example of the Most Common Super Power to the poster girl for the trope.
- Most mainstays of the Giffen-era Justice League International suffered heavy Flanderization; that was sort of the whole point of the books.
- In a strange case of graphical Flanderization, Kingdok from Bone gets more monstrous each issue (compare his first appearance in ''The Great Cow Race''
 ◊ with his look in ''The Eyes of the Storm''◊).
- Not precisely Flanderization, but funny. In Bone, the Great Red Dragon has a distinctly pointy, somewhat equine face. In "Rose," a Bone spinoff written by Jeff Smith and drawn by someone else entirely, the Great Red Dragon's chin gets longer with each appearance until he looks not unlike Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness after being sucked into one of the false Necronomicons.
- More monsterous? He looks WAY scarier the first time we see him. His look became softer and kinder though at least the beast didn't character wise.
- Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four started off as a somewhat-conceited daredevil hero of the team. In the past five or ten years, though, he's become increasingly more stupid and narcissistic, to the point where he now appears to be a ditzy, Ambiguously Gay metrosexual completely in love with himself.
- His sister Sue, however, went the other way; starting off as just another weak Damsel In Distress, she gradually evolved into a confident, capable Action Mom who is widely recognised as the most powerful member of the team.
- Northstar of Marvel's Alpha Flight (later the X-Men) started off as an arrogant former athlete with an interest in politics and a devotion to his mentally ill sister. While John Byrne wasn't allowed to write Northstar as explicitly gay, he managed to work in a few hints. When Marvel finally got the bright idea to "out" Northstar... well, suddenly, it seemed like all that mature characterization vanished, and suddenly he was gay. Gay, gay, gay. So gay. Did he tell you how gay he is? Mind you, being handled by Chuck Austen probably didn't help matters...
- Bruce Wayne was originally depicted as merely Comfortably Well-Off. Now, he's one of the two richest men in The DCU. Of course, that's hardly the only example of Bat-Flanderiziation.
- Wolverine is a case study. During the '80s considerable Character Development evolved the character from a one-note Jerk Ass prone to Unstoppable Rage to a wise, intelligent, multitalented, and skilled warrior/mentor (with just enough issues to avoid Canon Sue status). Then he got popular and the lowest common denominator of Captain Fuzzity McStabStab won out with all the guest-shots even as they ramped his Healing Factor to Beyond The Impossible levels, making him pretty much the definition of a Canon Sue. And he's still the most popular character of the whole franchise. Because being Bad Ass is the only thing he seems to need.
- This Troper would disagree with a lot of that. While Wolverine is flanderized by many writers, the decent ones that pen the character retain the more complex Logan many of his fans prefer. Though his powers have inarguable gone through a massive Power Creep Power Seep progression.
- The "Enemy of the State" and "Wolverine: Origin" (Along with the following "Wolverine: Origins" book) stories elevated Wolverine's character to new heights, making him much more interesting again.
- Both Cable and Deadpool have gone through fluctuations of Flanderization. Both were very simple originally (Cable=Old soldier, Deadpool=Merc sent to kill the hero). Then they were both given overly complicated back stories (Why Liefeld, WHY?!). Then they devolved back to cliches. Then they became interesting again, and so on.
- Deadpool has both progressed and fallen at the same time in different books. While in his own series (Formerly shared with Cable. At the time it served a a "Team-Up" style book) he was becoming a hero, he was playing the ruthless morally ambiguous merc in "Wolverine: Origins." Of course, like everything else involving Deadpool, much of his Flanderization was for comedic effect.
- The Hulk's raw power has been exaggerated to the point that he might as well just be a super saiyan.
- Hey, has Dr. Light told you how much he likes rape lately? It's like it's his power now.
- Magica De Spell's obession with Scrooge Mc Duck's Number One Dime. In her first story, she was just looking for coins touched by rich men to use in a spell, when she accidentally gets Scrooge's Number One Dime, she realizes it would be the best Dime for the spell and refuses to give it back. Barks didn't use her that much, because he didn't really want Magica's obsession with the Number One Dime be her only shtick. Other authors had no such qualms, to the point where Magica's spell now specifically requires the first coin earned by the richest man in the world to work.
- Earlier stories usually had Magica simply wanting to become rich, and would often have her working on schemes completely unrelated to the dime. Nowadays, she's completely psychotic about that coin, and you rarely, if ever, see a Magica story without it as her prime goal anymore.
- The dime itself went through a sort of Flanderization. In the original story with Magica the dime had no initial magic powers, rather Scrooge's success and massive wealth gave it magic powers (according to Magica anyway). Later writers seemed to have missed this point, as there have been numerous instances where Scrooge has lost the dime due to things like theft and his financial luck and cunning were negatively affected.
- Squirrel Girl begun as an Ascended Fangirl in training, but nowadays her single most defining trait is her victories over Marvel's who's-who of the most powerful super villains.
- Booster Gold started as a well-meaning hero whose love of money often got him in over his head. Over the course of the '80s and '90s, writers forgot about the "well-meaning" part and turned him into a money-grubbing jerk. Thankfully, over the course of Infinite Crisis and 52 in the mid-'00s, DC built Booster back up, and now he's a genuine hero again—though the lure of fame and fortune still occasionally tempt him.
Film
- 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 dialog 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. This troper liked it better when we weren't sure if Jack was mad or just playing it up...
- He had better be mad, or else none of this would work. ... This troper wasn't aware that when Jack was alone in a white sanded Hades that it was a question of whether he was playing it up for anyone. Nor was there rum, so we couldn't blame that. Perhaps it isn't obfuscating. He's just weird.
- The way this troper hears it from the horses' mouths, Jack was a late addition in the story and was always supposed to be a classic trickster, (read a certain amount of compulsary 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. So technically, Captain Jack was realized, not flanderized.
- Of course, in the third movie, We don't know how long he was actually in the white sanded Hades since time would probably work differently there than in the 'living' world. So maybe he spent so much time there he finally lost his grip on sanity, which always seemed tenuous at best in the first two movies.
- And EVERYBODY seems to forget that "the secret, grand adventure of the infamous Jack Sparrow", the way he survived his marooning on a desert island, was by bargaining with the rum runners who used the island for a stash for a ride to civilization; he "spent three days lying on a beach drinking rum!" He's not sun-addled, he's just a ditz!
- James Bond, in the novels, was just simply a jaded undercover operative who had some basic idea of high society manners and luck with women. Right from the start of the film series, those two aspects were blown out of proportion, with only some minor bits of the less desirable traits showing through. The series has since had a back and forth over the "realistic" Bond (the closest to a completely straight portrayal of Fleming's original Bond is the recent Casino Royale) and the Bond that is about as likely to fail at stopping the villain's plot as he is to spill his martini.
- 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 also became Running Gags: he donned more bizarre disguises with each film, and Kato'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.
- And then there's Son of the Pink Panther, in which Clousseau's son (written to be exactly the same as his father, so it may still count) talks that way not from an accent, but because he actually thinks that's the way those words are supposed to be pronounced.
- And don't even mention the Steve Martin movies.... Especially regarding hamburgers.
- 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.
- 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.
- This troper was only familiar with the character through seeing clips of the later films. I got a hell of a shock when I watched the original.
- Reversed in Wes Craven's New Nightmare and Freddy VS Jason, in which Freddy returns to form, becoming the dark, sinister, freakishly scary monster from the original film. (And even WORSE in the former...THAT Freddy is truly terrifying.)
- The big bad wolf in Shrek; in the original film, he's still in his "grandma" disguise from the fairy tale. In the remaining films, he's a raging transvestite.
- You know what? Many fairy tale extras from the first and second films could qualify by the time Shrek III came out.
Literature
- In Discworld novels the characterisation of Rincewind shifted from sensible fear of the unknown to fully fledged cowardice, and finally to having an entire philosophy based on the principle of running away from things. However, this is arguably Character Development since it's suggested Rincewind, who is somewhat Genre Savvy, really is correct about an inordinate number of things wanting to cause him trouble and harm.
- While the Sherlock Holmes novels themselves do not do this, almost every adaptation of the source material has taken Watson from simply being Holmes' chronicler who is not nearly as brilliant as his mentor but still an intelligent man and a respected physician, to a blithering idiot played up as a Plucky Comic Relief of something. The movies with Nigel Bruce seem to be the poster example.
- This seemingly has stopped as time goes by. Ian Hart's Watson was quite tempery and unafraid to snark at Holmes (especially if played by Richard Roxbourgh) when he felt it was needed, as far as This Troper remembers.
- This is also averted in the Jeremy Brett adaptations, and, reportedly, in the upcoming Guy Ritchie-directed film.
- Oddly enough, the stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle are a rare subversion of this trope. In the earliest stories written by
Dr. Doyle Sir Arthur, the police inspectors of Scotland Yard are depicted as blundering fools who couldn't catch a cold, much less a criminal. Later stories, however, depict the police, particularly Inspector Lestrade, as being not so much stupid as simply lacking Holmes' Hyper Awareness, often gathering important facts for Holmes' use or otherwise helping in their own ways.
- The Xanth series got this way with puns. The first couple of books featured some puns in the book, but was mostly unique. For instance, the tangle tree was never a pun, just a common plant. Now, the author's note features 4-5 pages of reader suggested puns. The placement of the puns is getting forced too. In book 27, characters being forced to walk through a "petrified forest" filled with puns, and needing to correctly identify the pun to move on.
- What the heck do you expect in a series that even *has* a book *27*
- As a very clear example, since the 27th book was mentioned, it's title was Cube Route, and was supposedly the end of the first Xanth Trilogy. Do the math.
- While she was originally just an aversion of the Model Minority stereotype, Claudia Kishi from the Babysitters 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. 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) 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 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, Hannibal, he's apparently a world-class genius in pretty much any field he sets his mind to, from Renaissance art to particle physics.
Live Action TV
- Saved by the Bell: Screech's stupidity (originally a quirky genius, his growing stupidity was epitomized when he became an assistant principal in Saved by the Bell: The New Class)
- Friends: Monica Geller's obsessiveness and competitiveness and in the Fat Monica flashbacks, her attachment to food. Remember when she was the smartest and most mature of the gang? Joey's stupidity (he started out just shallow and vapid), Chandler's effeminacy (remember when he actually liked sports?) and wit. Phoebe's quirkiness.
- Even Ross' nerdliness and failure with women. Seriously, was Rachel the only one who evolved at all?
- Uh, Rachel evolved? You mean the woman that was still blaming all her problems on everyone else, putting all the problems with their relationship on Ross, and still huffing every time everyone around her didn't leap at her every whim? Rachel may have avoided any real Flanderization, but she did it by staunchly refusing to change her personality at all.
- This Troper would argue that Rachel did suffer from Flanderisation in late season 9, where she went from a little ditzy and Book Dumb, to a complete idiot who laughs at "homo-erectus", in a transparent attempt to make her relationship with Joey more realistic. It did not work. Luckily, she manages to recover somewhat in season 10.
- Married With Children: Kelly Bundy's stupidity (she was originally merely Book Dumb), along with Bud's geekiness. The latter ended up being a blessing in disguise when it led to actual intelligence, making him one of the few successful Bundys.
- This arguably applies to all the characters in general. However, their exaggerated, cartoony personalities are generally seen by many of the show's fans as more entertaining than their subtler, more down-to-earth versions.
- Cliff Clavin's eccentricity on Cheers.
- Stuart Bondek's sleaziness on Spin City.
- Agent Seeley Booth from Bones. Booth went from merely being more intuitive and emotional than Dr. Temperance Brennan to becoming functionally retarded, merely to highlight how different he is from Brennan.
- While "functionally retarded" might be taking it a bit far, "socially retarded" might not be taking it far enough in Brennan's case. You'd think she spent the first fifteen years of her life being raised in a closet instead of in a relatively normal home in normal America. She's consistently portrayed as so completely out of touch with basic human manners, emotions, and common culture (she doesn't know who the Grinch is, just for starters) and so obsessed with pure rationality and exacting reality that it eventually seems practically impossible that she could have written a fiction novel, let alone the steamy thriller her book is said to be.
- Karen's shrillness and addictions, and Jack's shrillness and idiocy on Will And Grace.
- Chloe from Smallville went from someone who was okay with computers to being able to trace a bug's point of origin, discover anything about anyone, and she even had a shot at decoding a Kryptonian virus on her PC... when all the power on Earth had been shut off. Basically she filled in any plot holes where the writers couldn't think of a way to get Clark to the place he needed to be, but she was far from the only person to be Flanderized. This might be considered a more realistic example of the trope in action; people do, after all, get better at skills they use a lot in real life, and have been known to get a lot better very quickly if under sufficient pressure.
- Of course, there is a point when Brainiac downloads its intellect into her, pretty much super-Flanderizing her computer skills.
- Corporal Walter "Radar" O'Reilly in M*A*S*H grew more and more infantile as the series progressed (while, ironically, actor Gary Burghoff's hair grew thinner and thinner). In the early seasons Radar, while certainly young and inexperienced, wasn't a total innocent; he drank, played poker with the guys, helped himself to Colonel Blake's cigars, and was clearly a sly and knowing individual. In later seasons he became so childlike that he drank nothing but grape soda and couldn't say words like "nudity" without stammering. Additionally, his literal telepathy — demonstrated in more than one early episode — eventually degraded to simply an ability to detect incoming helicopters before anyone else, a feat which Hawkeye was able to duplicate during his Temporary Blindness.
- No, that degrading into simply being able to sense incoming helicopters was an unflanderization, as this was the original "power"—hence the nickname "Radar".
- Not so. Radar's power was originally telepathy, as proved when he seemed too good at poker and Hawkeye outed him by mounting a racy photograph on the wall behind Radar and staring at it during a game.
- Subverted, also, with Corporal(later Sergeant) Max Klinger, who slowly stops his attempts to get out of the army as a crossdresser. He comes up with some pretty creative alternatives, however, including attempting to eat a jeep, threatening to set himself on fire, and pretending that he's seeing the camp as Toledo, Ohio.
- Missy on Neds Declassified School Survival Guide was originally just The Libby who happened to have a crush on the protagonist, which escalated into a persistent Stalker With A Crush, which escalated into a dangerously obsessive Clingy Jealous Girl.
- Ann Veal, a recurring character first appearing in the first season finale of Arrested Development, was Flanderized in record time: in "Afternoon Delight", six episodes after her first appearance, her family was shown having a religious Christmas party (with three hours of silent prayer). The very next episode, "Switch Hitter", was the final appearance she would make without a subplot involving religion.
- Tobias Funke also was to some degree Flanderized. He began the show as a satire of "sensitive new-age dad" types and his seemingly obvious closested homosexuality was only part of his character; over time, it became the crux of his personality.
- Gob Bluth begins the series as a magician with no stage presence and unexceptional magic skills. But as the series progresses, his ability to do simple magic tricks diminishes more and more ("Yes, but where did the lighter fluid come from").
- Who remembers when J.D. on Scrubs was just a little emotionally needy due to him wanting a father figure to replace his own dysfunctional family? Fast forward to season three where J.D. is a appletini (light on the tini)-swilling "feely" who can't hold on to his "man cards" (which would be taken away from him if he did something girly) for a full day, and it only got worse from there on.
- Other characters don't have it much better. A recent episode exaggerated Carla's pride in her heritage to the point that she's scared if she doesn't dream in Spanish (rather than the content of the dream, which would be more worrying to anyone else).
- Look at how the Janitors starts as being an honest bad guy / Heroic Sociopath for whatever reason. Then, his insanity is played up, to the point where half of his jokes draw source from it, instead of being The Pesci like he used to be.
- Same goes for Kelso's goofiness.
- You could also say Elliot gets more neurotic with each season.
- Dr. Lisa Cuddy from House underwent this kind of treatment. In season Two, she was taking fertility meds to get a baby. As seasons progressed, her baby obsession became worse and worse, until she turned into a weepy wannabe mom whose biggest ambition in life was to bring up a kid.
- Stargate SG-1: Colonel O'Neill starts out as the kind of guy who is definitely not unintelligent, but isn't interested in the technobabble of how some Applied Phlebotinum works so long as it does, or the details of some Human Alien culture so long as Daniel can speak their dialect of Ancient Egyptian. In season two, he becomes The Watson... but the things being explained to him for the audience's benefit stop being so complicated as time goes on (possibly as a result of Viewers Are Morons at work) so he starts to look a little dull. By season three, he has devolved into having all the knowledge and maturity of a mentally challenged four-year-old. Afterward, he'll go back and forth: you have episodes like "The Warrior," where he's as awesome as ever, and episodes like "Birthright," where every line is a childish joke and the others have to pick up the slack.
- SG-1's also got the Villain Decay of the Goa'uld: their factionalized status with Ra having bitten the dust in The Movie starts out as simply the writers' way of keeping the full might of The Empire from descending upon poor little Earth before we've got enough Imported Alien Phlebotinum to cope. However, from the fifth season onward (after the second-biggest Goa'uld, Apophis, was Killed Off For Real), Goa'uld politics becomes the point of all their appearances, and instances of a Goa'uld and/or his minions being a direct, showing-up-in-today's-Adventure Town-to-do-bad-stuff threat become vanishingly rare.
- Ronon Dex seems to have become O'Neill's Stargate Atlantis counterpart, to the point of it being Lampshaded by another character:
Todd: [explaining his plan to destroy Michael's facility] I was going to write an elaborate program designed to slowly create a fatal error in the primary capacitor, but I doubt there'll be time for that now.
Ronon: I was just gonna blow it up.
Todd: [exasperated] Naturally.
- My Name Is Earl's Randy Hickey has gone from "simple-minded but occasionally quite deep" to "repeatedly attempting to stick extremities into a bug zapper".
- Odd reality-TV example: Parthenon on the second season of Who Wants To Be A Superhero began as Straight Gay. By the time he left the show he had turned into a foremost example of Camp Gay.
- Lester from Beakmans World was originally a down-on-his-luck actor forced to don a rat suit and be the...ahem...Lab Rat for most of the experiments. By the end, he was a big eating obnoxious farting Jerkass who gets everything ridiculously wrong.
- Fonzie on Happy Days gradually evolves from a mysterious and vaguely threatening hood with a skill for mechanics to an almost superhuman paragon of coolness who can do literally anything...even jump over a shark!
- In the first couple of seasons, Potsie and Ralph were actually somewhat sharper and more wordly-wise than Richie. They soon devolved into a huge nerd and a compulsive lame jokester, respectively.
- Jack Bauer on 24 is an interesting case. In season one he was a somewhat cocky, "normal" federal agent with some elements of Cowboy Cop and a few badass scenes (the "towel torture threat" being the most famous). Then his wife is killed in the season one finale. In season two Jack, is reasonably hardened and antisocial and his badass quotient goes up. Character Development gets him into a better place, but he doesn't stop being badass. In the first season his badassery was more subtle, but in the later seasons he becomes Badass Incarnate, with writers trying to top each badass feat with the next badass one. It's almost gotten to the point where the show is less about intriguing thriller and more about "What Badass thing can Jack do next?" The reason it's interesting is because, unlike the other Flanderization examples, you won't find many complaints about this one.
- It's The Jack Bauer Power Hour...what do you expect?
- In Life On Mars, DC Chris Skelton goes from being a well-meaning if slightly naive officer in the first series to a complete and utter twonk that leaves you wondering how he ever made detective in the second.
- This gets better on Ashes To Ashes.
- Everyone in Ashes to Ashes is flanderized, to the point where they seem little more than caricatures. The fact that the main character KNOWS for a fact that there not real (or at least THINKS she does. Till THAT cliffhanger at the end of of season 1...) and acts so genre savvy as a result doesn't help.
- The title character from Leave It To Beaver went from an innocent, naive kid in earlier seasons to a borderline idiot toward the end of the show's run. Possible side effect of Not Being Allowed To Grow Up.
- In Supernatural, Dean went from flirt-happy to being so slutty that he couldn't believe anyone would remain a virgin by choice. As Dean is an admittedly very attractive male, some might not think of this as a bad thing. The Flanderization has gotten so bad even the actor Jensen Ackles teases that Dean might act like a hooker to pay the bills.
- And while John was never seen to be a good father anyway ("Shadow" might possibly be the only pro-John episode out there), he's getting to be more appalling everytime they mention him.
- Not so much flanderization as legitimate plot developments. It's been pretty clear from the start that he was a crappy father. We're just seeing more and more of HOW crappy he was at the whole "Fatherhood" thing.
- David Platt on Coronation Street went from cheeky schoolboy to teenage tearaway to deranged, violent criminal who attempted to kill his mother, smashed up half the titular Street and is now serving time in prison.
- Chelsea on Thats So Raven went from a an occasional (but still likable) ditz to a Ralph Wiggum who irritates even her best friends.
- Boy Meets World's Eric Matthews went from a merely shallow, girl-crazy airhead to an Adult Child.
- Of course, then he became Batman, so it's ok.
- Charlesin Charge's Buddy Limbeck was an earlier example of this by the same producer(Michael Jacobs). Buddy and Eric both started out as girl-crazy guys who had no interest in academics but weren't stupid at all. As their respective series progressed, they both became progressively more stupid and eventually insane.
- The title character of MacGyver originally started out as a reasonably intelligent, inventive field agent who lives a fairly clean, active lifestyle and was generally a nice guy all around. As the series progressed, his inventiveness started warping reality to facilitate it (although, due to the series also phasing the improvisational inventions out at the same time, this probably started happening because they needed to make sure that one aspect counts each time it gets used), his clean living became almost pseudo-hippie, and him being a nice guy somehow mutated into being the only refuge of sanity who has to deliver Anvilicious Aesops by the truckload. By the last two seasons, he was pretty much just a shell for which the writers could insert their filibusters.
- Robert Hewitt Wolfe's original plan for Seamus Harper on Andromeda was for him to mature and get over the constant sexual innuendos. After Wolfe was booted, the character became all about childishness and innuendos.
- MST3K's Professor Bobo, introduced in the eighth season, started as a slightly dim but basically competent Planet Of The Apes spoof who chastises his colleagues for their simian behavior, but over his run became progressively more idiotic and bestial until by the end of the series he's literally flinging his poo and wearing a dog tag.
- Arnold Spivak on Murder One was a very competent and mature lawyer in season one, with the worst you could say about him being that he was somewhat socially awkward, but in a mostly endearing way, and would occasionally get a bit petulant over not being given more responsibility in the firm. In season two he became a complete Butt Monkey, existing only for a running gag about never being assigned second chair on a case.
- Judge Judy used to play it straight, only occasionally losing her temper with the most thick-headed litigants. The popularity of her scathing wit turned her into a prejudicial psycho-bitch.
- Merton Dingle from Big Wolf On Campus went from someone who considers himself relatively handsome and talented (both academically and in the various entertainment arts) to someone with an ego the size of Texas.
- In the early seasons of 30 Minute Meals, host Rachael Ray was quite calm, comparatively quiet, and did not use many acronyms in her speech. There were but a few hints to her underlying quirkiness. Over the run of the show, she transformed into a hyperactive, noisy, acronym-using parody of what she once was.
- The Big Bang Theory has a case of good Flanderization. Sheldon started as a less assertive/more arrogant version of Leonard who was nervous around Penny and competed for her attention. A couple of episodes in and he had evolved into the asexual narcissist whom we all love to hate. Penny on the other hand went through a reverse Flanderization. The first episode establishes her as a ditz with low intelligence (she's a vegitarian who eats steak), but those elements faded as the show focused on her being a more normal person around the geeks.
- Two Pints of Lager & A Packet of Crisps has multiple examples, such as:
- Donna goes from a snarky, somewhat sardonic individual to one who is incredibly bossy and sometimes violently angry in later seasons (this was pushed to increasingly high levels in the seventh season, to the point where she was almost a caricature of her former self).
- Then there's Louise, who started the series as a naive, narcissistic, somewhat manipulative, not particularly intelligent girly-girl, with a touch of quirkiness about her. By the seventh season, she is incredibly manipulative, sometimes very spiteful and bitchy, very snobby, and incredibly self-centered - to the point where she names her newborn child "Louise Louise" (after spending an episode not wanting the child because of her fears that it would be "prettier" than her). She also goes from not minding Jonny at all (and not showing a hint of disgust when he kisses her in the episode 'Lard', and stating that she actually likes him "in a way"), to outright despising him for the most trivial of reasons (she even gets him shot by the police, after she gets a job at the Office for National Statistics and changes his profile to that of a serious criminal).
- Jonny's "feminine side" being exaggerated in later seasons is another example.
- Happened to virtually the entire cast of the French Canadian show "Le Coeur a Ses Raisons" as the show moved further away from being a parody of American soaps and more toward comedic absurdity: Ashley started out as a slightly ditzy nurse, and later became a few steps away from mentally retarded. Criquette began as spoiled and melodramatic and became downright hysterical about the slightest things later on ("You left the toilet seat up! This proves you have a mistress!"). Characters introduced in later seasons came along already flanderized.
- Dan Fielding of Night Court started out as a relatively straitlaced prosecutor, but quickly turned into the narcissistic, skirt-chasing faux-jerk we know and love.
- Eric, Kelso, Donna and Fez on That70s Show: from a relatively normal teenager, Eric turned into an absolute nerd; Kelso went from awkward and indecisive to plain stupid; Donna became so aggressive that she was a borderline Straw Feminist; and Fez, formerly a classic desperate virgin, turned into a pervert. Also, Red was a somewhat stern, but no-nonsense parent in the first season, but as seasons went on, he became a constantly angry introvert that borderline terrorised and bullied Eric.
- Pretty much everyone on TheOffice but Michael went from being an obnoxious boss who really did mean well to being a total spaz who couldn't handle being shown up.
- Don't forget Jan and her assets
- The Daily Show has been almost entirely focused on riffing on National Political stories, whereas The Colbert Report has picked up covering the quirkier science and entertainment news that was once the former's purview. Arguably, this has been to both show's advantage.
- Somewhat averted by the character of 'Sidney Balmoral James' in {{Hancock's Half Hour}}. In the radio show, he was a CMOT Dibbler whose dodgy schemes generally had the luckless Tony Hancock as their victim. In the TV show, his criminal tendencies were played down, he became more of a Deadpan Snarker deflating Hancock's ego.
Video Games
- Many secondary characters in Sonic the Hedgehog suffer horribly from this trope: Amy Rose started out with a perfectly normal crush on the titular character, only to quickly turn into a psycho stalker with a Piko-Piko hammer; Tails started out with a small affinity for mechanics before becoming the good version of Dr. Eggman (and, for some reason, becoming younger with each game, as part of his place as one of the younger Sonic characters); Knuckles' devotion to the Master Emerald and minor naivete when distinguishing between friend and foe eventually mutated into obsessive gullibility, etc.
- Even Sonic's not immune to this, his 'tude starting out small before inflating into a superego (perhaps because this aspect of his personality was what differentiated him the most from Nintendo's mascot, the blander Mario).
- Curiously, starting in Sonic Adventure, Robotnik's tendency for his plans going out of control and teaming up with Sonic to stop it has evolved into such a cliche, he's almost never taken as anything more than comic relief anymore, no matter how much the poor developers try. You know that you're a failure as a villain when one game introduces your Evil Twin.
- Judging from the Sonic Unleashed trailer, Eggman's Villain Decay may have come to an end—he actually managed to catch Sonic.
- The same goes double for the once ingenious and menacing Dr. Wily of the Mega Man franchise, who returned with the exact same plan for world domination (eight robots who were weak to each others' weapons, thematically appropriate stages, fortress, fight) about five times too many.
- This was averted in the Battle Network series and the Zero series. In Battle Network, he's got a (semi) justifiable reason for being such a homicidal maniac, but his plans vary enough that he avoids the trope. In Zero, Weil is just a Complete Monster with absolutely no redeeming qualities, eventually unifying himself with his Super Weapon in 4 to kill Zero, even though he'd die in the process.
- Johnny Cage from Mortal Kombat became so diluted he became a parody of what he strove not to be. In the beginning he was more serious (but no less arrogant) and a very competent fighter, but devolved into a Plucky Comic Relief character as the series went on.
- In Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney, Larry Butz went from a loser with terrible luck in love into a lecherous, shallow pervert who thinks nothing of hitting on a nine-year-old girl. He also slid from a 'best friend' who often annoyed Phoenix, into someone Phoenix 'wouldn't call a close friend'.
- The Judge also. In the first game he is still rather dim, but this is mostly an excuse to have the lawyers explain the facts of the case in great detail so the player can keep up. On the whole, the Judge in the first game is fairly level and keeps a stern voice of authority within the courtroom. As the series progressed, the Judge's stupidity and short attention spand was played up more and more. By the fourth game, he is almost child-like in his naivete, often brings up personal issues or problems during the trials, and lets blatant lies slide right by him, whereas before he might have noticed.
- Lara Croft started as a modest, down to earth woman in Tomb Raider. In Tomb Raider 2 she became more witty and slightly more threatening and bloodthirsty. Later on she was heavily Flanderized into a Hollywood-style tough girl for Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, and by Angel of Darkness this had become exaggerated to the point that she had reached Jerkass level.
- Interestingly, this was taken from one extreme to another in the next game in the series, Tomb Raider: Legend, in which Lara became a slave to her emotions, which may be considered an improvement, because at least she now had more depth than a teaspoon.
- Lara's emotions got even more influential to her actions in Tomb Raider: Anniversary in which Lara takes just one human life, after which follows a lengthy emotional moment in which she practically turns into Lady Mac Beth and constantly looks at her hands for the rest of the game.
- However, it is important to note that the Lara Croft of Tomb Raider: Legend onwards is basically a different character to that of the previous games in the series, as Crystal Dynamics completely rebooted the franchise, and changed Lara's backstory and personality along with it.
- How is it no one's mentioned the funbags? In the first game, they were noticeable, but still realistic, though the publicity material for the game made them enormous. They kept progressing in size to the point that the only way they could possibly be realistic is if Lara decided to break the world record for most silicone in one rack. The reboot dropped her cup size back again, though they're starting to get bigger again as of Underworld...
- Axel Almer in Super Robot Wars Original Generation suffered from this in the GBA incarnation of OG 2. He is turned from a loyal, cold subordinate of the Shadow Mirrors with some slight dislike for Artificial Humans, into an overly headstrong man who is obsessed on beating his rival Beowulf (and that even surpasses his loyalty to Shadow Mirror, he even has to struggle about following superior orders if his rival is in front of his eyes), and being thoroughly disgusted when one of the dolls risks her life to save his own. In the remake, the writers and producers fixed Axel's personality for better, resulting in a more refined, respectable villain who later performs a Heel Face Turn.
- Considering almost all of his dialogue is word for word from the game he originated, complete with his hatred of cyborgs/androids and his hatred of Beowulf (though only limited to a couple of lines, as Kyosuke Nanbu wasn't around to take it out on). His so-called 'good guy' persona if he's the protagonist is just as cruel and jerkish to Lamia Loveless.
- That one was justified because if not picked as a protagonist, Lamia never learn about her own conscience, about what is good and what is bad, about what she truly wanted outside obeying orders, since she never interacted with the Londo Bell (which is VERY responsible of any of the protagonist's change in mind) which pretty much becomes as Axel thought: 'A lifeless, order-obeying doll'. If Lamia did develop into the protagonist self, and meets protagonist Axel, he'd probably have a better opinion on her. And in OG 2 GBA... he actually insulted Lamia more times than in Advance (as the rival version, of course).
- Master Vrook of Knights Of The Old Republic. In the first game, he is just distrustful of you at first but will come around if you do good deeds. But in the sequel, he seems to hate your character with an absolute passion and never misses a chance to criticise you, even when you do something right.
- And worse still, his unpleasantness seems contagious: when you meet Masters Kavarr and Zez-Kai-El on the planets that they're hiding on, they are welcoming and friendly, and both of them show regret for what they did to your character in the backstory. But in the Light Side path, when they arrive on Dantoiine and team up with Vrook, they automatically see you as a threat and try to cut you off from the Force without even giving you a chance to defend yourself.
- Also a good example of Executive Meddling, as the designers were forced to cut a huge amount of story off the end of the game.
- In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, one could potentially argue that HK-47 was somewhat Flanderized. In the original, he was calmer, and tended to display his sociopathic tendencies only in isolated situations, like during certain "aggressive negotiations". Outside of combat and negotiations, he was a perfect gentleman, though he spoke with a disturbing flippancy/eagerness about death and destruction. In the sequel, he became a straightforward Killer Robot, speaking boldly and constantly about slaughtering all meatbags. This, however, worked in his favor, as without it, the now-famous line, "Definition: Love is making a shot to the knees of a target 120 kilometres away using an Aratech sniper rifle with a tri-light scope," would never exist.
- Also done with his unusual speech pattern. In the first game the "Definition:" or "Statement:" or "Query:" before his dialogue was relatively simple, there weren't that many of them (maybe five or six at most) and they served to logically categorize the things he said. In Kot OR 2, HK-47 and the HK-50s' prefixes start becoming increasingly specific to the point that they often serve to ironically undermine the following statement completely, a la Stephen Colbert's "The WORD" (i.e. "Hasty Retraction:", "Condescending Explanation:" or even "Fabrication:".)
- The whole Command And Conquer: Red Alert has undergone this. While some people complained that Red Alert 3 was ridiculously over the top compared to the previous games, it had already drifted dramatically starting with Red Alert 2. Red Alert had time travel, an Action Girl, and some over-the-top technology and characters, but it was about as serious as the Tiberium Series. Red Alert 2 expanded on this with much more over the top stuff (Giant mind controlled squid?) and much more cartoonish units and scenarios. Red Alert 3 is par for the course after this.
- Mega Man X: As Executive Meddling forced the series to go beyond the creator's planned ending, X5, some of the main characters had certain aspects of their personality stretched out to artificially create conflict for the next few games. While Zero always stayed friendly to X, he became rather gruffer and more stereotypically badass as the series went on, especially when Axl was introduced. Sigma degenerated just as badly as Dr. Wily, if not worse, as he went from very nearly destroying the world and being a truly Magnificent Bastard...to a shivering pile of zombie-animated debris in just one game, and by the next game explained his final boss status as simply "because I'll never stop until you're dead!" It was X that the fans complained about the most, though: while he had always been more pacifistic and less violence-inclined than Zero, this was expanded into the defining aspect of his personality, so that rather than being a reluctant cop, he was a stereotypically annoying whiner who kept advocating non-violence even when the situation had clearly gone south. This led to him abandoning active duty at the beginning of X7, so we started off playing a Megaman X game not playing as Megaman X. He does return, though.
- There's still some debate to this, but Kratos of God Of War could be considered to fall into this. In the first game, his bloodlust is a facet of his deeper personality - he channeled the memories of what he had done into his rage to become more brutally efficient. In the second game, Kratos lost that, and became simply bloodlust and badassery in human form.
- In Pikmin, the pikmin were inmmune to their respective elements. Now, in Super Smash Bros Brawl, they have elemental powers.
- Even though Street Fighter in general has been through this, a few examples are notable: Ryu (along with everyone else in the series) used to be just an extremely competent martial artist, as well as literally a bum with no family or friends except Ken. At this point he is (and always has been according to other media) the second coming of Goku. Akuma/Gouki went through something of the same thing, but managed to subvert and straight this simultaneously. Originally possessed by a demon, but just "really good at kung fu." Indeed, this is a major plot point of SF EX (the first 3d Street Fighter series), and is why Akuma isn't in any of the EX games besides 1. Now he can split mountains and breathe underwater, but he supposedly is not nor ever has been demon possessed. US Bison/JAP Vega you kind of have to read between the lines for: originally Bison was clearly a rip off of the communist general stereotypes that abounded in such Vietnam war stories such as MIA with Chuck Norris. Whether he looks more Asian than White in his old matchup photos is up for debate, but for a clue as to how much the communism theme influenced the character, note that the Shadoloo insignia doesn't become a part of Bison's uniform until SUPER SFII. Before it was a simple gold star. Keep in mind that SFII was released right as the Cold War was ending, and the original storyline involved Charlie being dying in CAMBODIA during an arduous prison escape, as opposed to the retconning that has taken place with him dying in SFA 3. Now he's just the second coming of Marvel's Onslaught.
Web Animation
- The title character of Homestar Runner was Flanderized from The Fool into The Ditz. This was arguably for the better.
- 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.
Webcomics
- 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. 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.
- This was finally dealt with in Comic 1046, where Hannelore reveals she's always had these problems; it just varies by the drugs she takes.
- Considering the things she's freaked out at, that should tell you something about just how hopped up she was.
- 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.
- Fighter from 8-Bit Theater was just a bit dim and gullible in the first few pages of the comic, but quickly got stupider and stupider as the comic progressed. It probably didn't help that Black Mage kept stabbing him in the head. He currently hovers somewhere between Cloudcuckoolander and Ralph Wiggum.
- Likewise, Black Mage was just an insensitive asshole with a slight sadistic streak at first, but is now so over-the-top evil that he'd be appalling if he wasn't so funny.
- Also, while his overall intelligence has declined, Fighter's moments of intelligence seem to have become more and more frequent.
- Thief's skills in intrigue and his general competence have grown by leaps and bounds since his first appearance.
- Pretty much EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER in 8-Bit Theater has been Flanderized ridiculously.
- 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.
- Well 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.
Web Original
- Most of the characters in Red vs Blue suffer from this. Donut starts as mildly effeminate and becomes very obviously 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, and Tucker, who talked about "picking up chicks" in the first few episodes, became a literal font of innuendo by the series' end. Church, however, remained roughly as grouchy and cynical throughout, perhaps actually becoming more complex as time passed.
- Caboose's is the only one of those justified by in-story events: he began to suffer a mental breakdown following the destruction of Sheila, his only friend, which was compounded when Church, Tex and O'Malley got into his mind and started blowing things up, after which he became noticeably more unbalanced.
- 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 inadvertantly 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.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons has this almost across the board, starting with Homer Simpson's stupidity, but his callousness even more so (though the latter was toned down later on). Just about all of the characters have begun to showed some signs of this, probably because the show's long run means that the subtler character jokes have been used up by now (and/or the show's sense of humor changes Depending On The Writer). Even worse than Homer is Moe, whose mild self-loathing has grown into outright suicide attempts.
- And, of course, Ned Flanders.
- And who can forget Smithers? He merely started out as an employee who had too much admiration for his boss. Now he's out-and-out gay.
- Hell, even the writers have admitted (albeit subtley) that they've Flanderized Smithers from a sycophant to a flamboyant gay. They said in the commentary for 'Homer the Smithers' that, if Burns was a woman, Smithers would be straight. He loves Burns. He's Burnsexual.
- Homer's stupidity might have been lampshaded by the writers in a 'Simpsons Spinoff Episode', where a supposed fan 'asks' "I think Homer gets stupider every year.", after which Troy McClure says that isn't a question, but they'll let the viewers decide for themselves, and a bunch of clips of Homer's idiocy show up. They do something similar with Smithers, a fan asking "What's the real deal with Mr. Burns' assistant? You know what I'm talking about.", naturally showing many clips of Ho Yay after.
- One could say something similar happened to Lenny and Carl. Originally, they were Homer's best friends, and considered each other the same. Nowadays, they're still Homer's best friends, but between each other, that's another story.
- It's been revealed that they're half-brothers.
- Ralph Wiggum is probably a character that benefitted from this: he was originally just another generic classmate of Lisa's before becoming the unbelievably dense collection of non-sequiturs we all know and name tropes after.
- Various characters of Family Guy, due to the writers usually taking one joke that was successful before and building on it in future episodes; the most prominent being Lois, who went from a meek, caring housewife who appreciated a healthy sexual relationship in her marriage to #2 on Maxim magazine's list of TV's Best Nymphos, although this could explain why she can stand Peter...
- Peter himself has always been a Jerkass, but in the earlier seasons he was shown with a geniune good side and actually cared a whit about his kids, even Meg. And let's not even go into what happened to her... Meg has "developed" from an ordinary, level-headed teenage girl with teen problems into an outrageously hated and despised punching bag who's desperation for happiness and love often makes her insane. At one point she even snaps and beats up a passing car driver who is picking on her, and stalks Brian when he goes to the prom with her out of pity.
- Not to mention Peter's transition from idiot to legally retarded.
- There's also Brian's attraction to Lois and Author Avatarness.
- Stewie's change from sexually confused to all-out homosexual.
- And when's the last time he tried to kill Lois where it wasn't just a stimulation?
- That is an awesome Freudian Slip.
- While the jokes at the beginning of the series focused on his machismo and subsequent inability to attract women, Johnny's stupidity and immaturity were greatly exaggerated in seasons two and three of Johnny Bravo.
- Numbuh Three (Kuki Sanban)'s ditziness and obsession with Rainbow Monkey dolls in Codename Kids Next Door.
- Numbuh Four's (Wallaby "Wally" Beatles) is a bit more noticeable. Originally a tough guy with a tendency for violence but was skilled in combat to compensate, he however quickly degenerated into a whiny dullard and has even begun to lose his combat prowess, thus making him, essentially, a needless team member.
- In The Fairly OddParents, much to the chagrin of longtime fans, Timmy's callousness and Jerkass tendencies, Cosmo's stupidity, and Wanda's nagginess have all been outlandishly Flanderized for the sake of redundant gags, and that's just the main characters. Vicky the babysitter went from manipulative and bossy to a sadistic sociopath who lives to not only order around kids, but make them suffer.
- On Ed Edd N Eddy, Ed went from a somewhat dim oaf with a love of comic books and horror movies to a non-sequitur-spouting Ralph Wiggum who seems unable to differentiate fantasy from reality, Edd went from a somewhat obsessively organized boy who was the voice of reason protesting Eddy's crazier schemes to a borderline hypochondriac goody-two-shoes, and Eddy lost most of the "loveable" part of his Loveable Rogue personality and became more violent, manic, and surly. Again, that just covers the main characters.
- Even worse, the episode all Eds are off! had the Eds, Kevin, Rolf and Jhonny gave up thier "habbits". This trope was used to each of them as shown here:
- Ed: Used to say "gravy" for no reason in the earlier episodes, along with having a tub of gravy. The former was dropped pretty fast. In this episode, he is obsessed with it, having it almost everywhere in him.
- Edd: Probobly the worst. He used to say "complex" words once in a while, again in the first episodes, but here... every other word is "complicated".
- Eddy: HE GOT A PRETTY LARGE HAM OUT OF NO WHERE!
- Kevin: Calls the Eds "dorks" before, yet this was toned up here, where nearly every dorking other dorking work is dork.
- Rolf: Had his meat brought up from time to time, he eats it all the time in this episode.
- Jhonny: Was able to stop listening to Plank back then, in here he can't.
- In the Pilot movie for Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends, Bloo was only slightly mischievous. As the series has progressed, some fans have complained that Bloo has become progressively more anarchic, selfish, and obnoxious, reaching Jerkass levels in recent seasons.
- The entire cast of "Drawn Together", especially Princess Clara.
- Grimlock from Transformers Generation 1 went from being a canny, if brutish, brawler in the first two seasons to being a mentally challenged but powerful child for The Movie and season 3.
- In Transformers: Beast Wars, Silverbolt began as an idealistic, over-the-top Paladin-type who followed chivalry and loyalty to often comedic extremes. His relationship with Blackarachnia nearly took over his character by the third season, though it was written with some level of competency. More egregious is Blackarachnia's overnight transformation from Dark Action Girl who, oh, had a boyfriend into a romantic who would stop at nothing, including disloyalty and downright foolishness to get her lover back in Beast Machines.
- In The Land Before Time, Petrie was cowardly and could be a bit of a jerk from time to time. As the series progressed however, his cowardice has been increased to the point of full blown superstition. In the TV series he refuses to fly over a volcano based on the theory that it would make said volcano angry and cause it to errupt.
- Many characters on Spongebob Squarepants, Spongebob himself for example in the first three seasons was a smart but naive and responsible type of guy who generally cared for his friends and neighbors and would do anything to help others and from season four and onwards, his disregard for background characters, love for his job, naiveness and stupidity, and horible boating skills have been flanderized to death.
- Saranoia in Yin Yang Yo. Initially, she loathed Yang and men and loved Yin because she was The Unfavorite compared to her brother Mark, and incorrectly projected that situation onto the siblings, even calling Yang "Mark". Over the course of the series... this backstory started to fade and her already over-the-top idolization of Yin and hatred of Yang was flanderized to the point that she started to come across more like a creepy pedophiliac lesbian Stalker With A Crush, peaking in one episode where she posed as a popular girl to become "Sweat Sisters" with Yin — everyone in the show even commented on how creepy that was. Since that episode, though, she's essentially reverted to her original characterization, in an unusual reversal of a Flanderization.
- Panini from Chowder — yeah, you wouldn't think it judging from the short run, but... compare her actions towards Chowder in "Chowder's Girlfriend", where she was just simply clingy and overeager about her love, to the 2nd season episode "Panini for President", where she practically goes insane and flatout admits that she wanted to be president so she can pass laws making Chowder "her property."
- Chowder himself doesn't fare much better either. In earlier episodes, he was simply a very eager yet rather naive child who hoped to someday become a great chef. The more recent episodes? He's a hyperactive and highly incompetent idiot who is a danger to everyone around him.
- This is especially evident when in one episode, he's so incompetent he's considered a "Scatterbrain" and is so dim-witted he thinks a FORK belongs in an electrical socket. Compare this to an earlier episode, in which Chowder's main flaw is a moderate case of ADD and is simply very naive.
- Hank Hill of King Of The Hill is known for preferring traditional things over trendy new ones. This starts to get overdone in the later seasons; case in point, "Get Your Freak Off". To make a long story short, in this episode, Hank is more Amish than the Amish; he's almost medieval. Throw Luanne's short but Anvilicious speech into the mix and you have this troper's least favorite episode.
- It could be argued that Luanne's speech (about oversexualizing pop culture) was supposed to be for laughs, considering that she is saying it while wearing a skin-tight crop-top.
- Similarly, in early seasons Peggy seemed to have reasonable Spanish skills, but then they decide to play up her incompetence and overconfidence for laughs.
- In the beginning, Bobby was a late bloomer, but an otherwise ordinary kid: he was immature and impressionable, but in some ways wiser than his straitlaced family. Bobby's immaturity eventually became the entirety of his character, to the point it's difficult to believe he was ever showing any sort of character development at all.
- Luanne's shift from dim bulb to ditzy hillbilly can be blamed almost entirely on The Scrappy, Lucky. She's always been rather dim-witted and immature, but as of late she's been nothing more or less than Lucky's wife.
- While there were a few characters in Daria who had this happen, the two most notable were probably Jake Morgendorffer and Tiffany Blum-Deckler. Jake went from being an ineffectual, easily-confused father with clear family issues to being an obsessive, infantile rageaholic and the show's Butt Monkey. Tiffany, conversely, was initially portrayed as being a somewhat narcissistic yes-woman to either Sandi or Quinn, depending on which one she was speaking to at the time. By the time the third season came around, though, her self-absorbed nature and incredibly slow speech patterns has developed to the point where it's a miracle that she's even made it to junior year of high school without having to repeat a few grades.
- Also somewhat subverted by the arc of Stacy Rowe, where her insecurity and panicky nature was initially Flanderized, but then over the course of the fifth season and series finale gained enough self-confidence that she became capable of standing up for herself and making her own decisions.
- Philip J. Fry from Futurama started out as just an ordinary, kinda dumb 20th-century everyman. After accidentally getting cryogenically frozen for a thousand years, he was just your average modern college dropout trying to adjust to an unrecognizable sci-fi future where everyone he ever loved was long-dead, but within a few episodes of the pilot, his below-average intelligence started getting more pronounced until he was nearly Too Dumb To Live, even by modern standards. Word Of God says Fry was intended to be a normal guy the audience could relate to, and humor would be derived from his inability to cope with his strange new surroundings... but he ended up adapting far faster than the writers had planned, so they made him into an Idiot Hero to keep the comedy flowing.
- If Fry was ever meant to be someone we could relate to, that failed, as he's a severe case of You Suck.
- On Total Drama Island, Trent was originally a cool, laid-back guy who was probably more normal than anyone else in the cast. In the sequel series Total Drama Action however, he became a borderline psychotic creep who was obsessed with Gwen and ...the number nine. This eventually led to them breaking up and her convincing the Grips to vote him out. Did I mention it all happened over the course of two episodes?
- And when did Bridgette and Geoff do anything but make out?
- Pete in Disney's cartoons: to the mere pursuer of a typical cartoon pursuer-pursue relationship with Mickey to a criminal mastermind.
- Daffy Duck in Looney Tunes: from a eccentric bird-version of Bugs Bunny to Warner Brothers's answer to Donald Duck.
- Dr. Drakken from Kim Possible was introduced in the first season as a super villain underdog who despite some quirks was threatening to the world and Kim. From Season 2 and onwards the creators took his quirks and made him a full General Failure.
TV Tropes Wiki
- Even the term "Flanderization" itself seems to be undergoing the process, as tropers on this very wiki start to use it in broader and broader terms, until it now seems to apply to stuff that was intended as a parody/stereotype or exaggeration from the start.
- Not to mention that the trope no longer appears to apply exclusively to characters.
- And when it does apply to characters, it seems to be used about a third of the time as Complaining About Characterizations You Don't Like. Sometimes this gets pruned when people point out "Uhh, the character was always like that" and similar, but sometimes it just gets edit warred back to the original.
- The Takahashi Couple was originally a specific canon act of a Tsundere being paired up with a Jerk With A Heart Of Gold. But lately, it seems every anime couple is being labled with the Takahashi brush. A lot of the examples on the page only half fit, due to the large number of Tsundere in anime. However, their love interests typically don't fit the Jerk With A Heart Of Gold element of the couple. I mean, most of the examples on the Takahashi couple page arn't even jerks to begin with. A lot of them just have the misfortune of being an Idiot Hero.
- Jerk With A Heart Of Gold now seems to mean 'Any protagonist who isn't Pure Of Heart'. And in reverse, Purity Personified has dropped down into "Any character that isn't a Jerk With A Heart Of Gold."
- Narm has gone through a similar process. It 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". Let's not even get started on all the examples that were obviously supposed to be funny.
- The standards for "So Bad Its Horrible" have dropped considerably.
- Indeed, it's been applied to stuff that is actually considered really enjoyable by a lot of people. This troper thinks they even saw someone call Ghostbusters 2 So Bad Its Horrible. Seriously, Ghostbusters 2? Apparently now it just means "I didn't love it, so it sucks."
- Apparently now all a series/movie requires to qualify for So Bad Its Horrible is finding a single vitriolic review of it. On someone's webpage.
- Wall Banger has undergone similar flanderization. If one person doesn't like a plot point, even a little bit, it automatically becomes a Wall Banger. The list of ones for Star Trek in all its incarnations, for example, includes more than a few plot points that were perfectly reasonable in the context of the series; to this troper they read like someone not all that familiar with the franchise saw the fifteen minutes of the program in which the mentioned event took place. Also, since a lot of these were aimed at Enterprise, it certainly seemed to this troper that it was less actual Wall Bangers and more a combination of Trek's Unpleaseable Fanbase and Complaining About Shows You Dont Like. Same goes for many of the Dr. Who entries under that trope.
- Considering how highly subjective Wall Banger is, expressing shock that other people may find certain plot points to be an example of this seems to defy the intent of the trope.
- Hey guess what's Flanderized now? Saying some random page is Flanderized. Can you tell I'm being sarcastic?
- 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.
- It's been Flanderized to point that anything, gamer or not, casual or hardcore, can be listed as Stop Having Fun Guys. Just check the troper tales entries, 90% of them are about how the supposedly "Stop Having Fun Guys" are complaining about the fact the troper in question is too much of a selfish dick to put the items on. Another good Flanderized part is any section not related to interactive media like comic books or "meta".
- Wangst too. If the characters are not well-adjusted happy people that have nothing wrong with their lives, they are Wangsty little girls.
- Not just on this site, but was there ever a real definition of "emo"? Does it mean whiny? sad? angry? impassive? Those aren't the same things!
- When created, the people that actually identified as emo apparently defined it as "being extremely in touch with one's emotions", thus emotional=emo. Since most of them were teenagers, most of those emotions weren't positive (IE, they came across as being sulky, whiny and depressed). Now it's a general-purpose insult, to the point that the very idea that it could be used in its original connotation, or even just used a bit tongue-in-cheek, is dismissed out-of-hand.
- Emo was originally a subgenre of punk rock, which most people who use the term "emo" have never ever heard of, let alone listen to.
- 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".
- The Nightmare Fuel examples. Sure, most of it's acceptable, but there are things on there that toddlers can handle effortlessly.
- To say nothing of the fact that the Nightmare Fuel catagory was originally intended for things that were unintentionally horrifying, which most tropers seem to ignore when listing examples. Now, examples are added based on whether they could, in any conceivable way, be considered the least bit scary.
- The original description for the Trope also stated that the examples were intended to be normal or only slightly scary to Childrens, but ended up frightening to an adult. Of course, this didn't stop stuff like Doom from being included.
- Plus stuff like Billy and Mandy and a Tear Jerker from Alvin and The Chipmunks are in there. Atleast the new mascot shows the unitentionally scary thing.
- Most? Most of it is acceptable? more like a small amount. a real small amount.
- Fat Monica originally meant any poorly written quirk. It seems to have metamorphosed into meaning exclusively 'overweight'.
- 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.
- 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.
- This is why the page was archived, and separated into "Moral Event Horizon" (one event) and "Complete Monster" (character who does this thing constantly), which better clarifies what it's about (though it's not necessarily Character Derailment).
- And then, one day after the split, I saw an edit made to MEH to include a character who was a Complete Monster from the start and thus had no MEH to cross. Said character was already on the Complete Monster page. Flanderization moves fast.
- 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.
- The examples are also becoming less about how some fans have lionized a character, and more about pointing out every single one of the character's flaws, real or perceived. Essentially, with these two things taken together, it's turning into just Complaining About Characters You Don't Like.
- Not to mention that it's no longer just about villains. 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, makes the page an example of itself.
- They Changed It Now It Sucks used to be a place to note fans being an Unpleasable Fanbase or Fan Dumb over changes to something they were fans of, IE things like "TRUKK NOT MUNKEY". Now it's a place to be an Unpleasable Fanbase or Fan Dumb in earnest and complain about changes.
- This seems to have happened (to some degree) to ALL the It Sucks pages.
- 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, while neglecting the important bit about calling them out. There are, fortunately, ongoing efforts to rectify this problem.
- 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, a la old safari movies. Now, if the Token White proves to even be competent at anything at all, he's Mighty Whitey.
- 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.
- 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 eliminating examples completely.
- Or possiby, it was suppose to be things where people either loved or hated them immensely, regardless of numbers (it was never really very clear). Not that it hasn't gone to where something can be included on the list if anyone one person hates something that's otherwise generally liked (and it's usually that one person that added it to the list going into disproportionate detail of why they hate it).
- 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, it seems that any Action Girl has lost right to either show a more vulnerable side, have a bad day or more, lose a single fight (even if she does fight to the fullest) and/or handle difficulties in any other way than using a Megaton Punch, lest they'll be accused of being Chickificated and/or having been Faux Action Girls all along. (Apparently, a woman is only strong if she acts like a stereotypical man and she is forbidden of having girly tastes or needing a male's help.)
- Not to mention, the mere Chickification trope name can be seen as misogynistic and flanderized, implying that being The Chick in the Five Man Band is automatically demeaning no matter how said Chick is portrayed. Not exactly the best way to promote empowerment of any kind of women, huh? Hell, we eventually even renamed "The Chick" "The Heart".
- Or attempted to, at least. Somehow they ended up as separate tropes.
- More specifically, there used to be an example on the Chickification page claiming Gatomon of Digimon to be an example of this, using her degradation from Champion Level to Rookie Level as a justification. Yeah, because being less overpowered compared to the rest of the cast automatically makes you weak.
- Girls Need Role Models is getting like this too. While the page description still states that it's actually a kind of Positive Discrimination where the girl is more perfect than the guys so that she can be a role model, most of the examples on the page have become snarling diatribes about how female characters identified as role models aren't Bad Ass God Mode Sue types who do all the work and get all the glory while the guys stand around and stare in wonder.
- Similarly, a successful example of Straight Gay is apparently only possible if the character is 99.5% like a stereotypical straight man, with the remaining half a percent encompassing the entirety of his sexual attraction towards men. Basically a gay man can't like fashion, or not like sports, or have a moment of being a little camp without being immediately thrown in the Camp Gay prison and locked up there forever.
- 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.
- Acceptable Political Targets, like the other Acceptable Targets pages, used to be for targets that you were completely safe to mock without really stirring up public outcry, whether fairly or not. Now it's actually added into the page description that it's perfectly okay for them to be acceptable targets because the people listed on the page are/were evil or incompetent. This addition happened about the time that George Bush was added to the page, funny that.
- Alternate Character Interpretation is steadily turning from a page noting actual different interpretations of a character by fans or different writers into a page for general Wild Mass Guessing.
- This troper conceived, proposed and wrote the Dynamic Entry trope as covering a very specific type of entrance: a horizontal or diagonal diving kick. Fewer and fewer of the entries being added fall under that category. He is not pleased.
- Probably should have called it "Flying Kick Entry", then.
- Yeah, seriously. "Dynamic" is way too broad of a term if you wanted it to be that specific, it would only have about three examples, and it doesn't really seem worth having separate articles.
- Break The Cutie is starting to become The Woobie.
- Arguably. The two overlap a lot.
- The Wesley 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".
- Mary Sue. Its gotten to the point where any character who has even a slight degree of competence and plot relavence (like, say, the main characters) getting labeled a Sue.
- Americanitis is suppose to be about removing aspects of foreign culture in translation, but half the examples are film and TV Shows that were completely remade in another country and acting if that it inherently some sort of sin against nature.
- 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 entirely trivial reasons".
- 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, explanationless, 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 otherwise they should go elsewhere.. after which people immediately started back up at it.
- The rampant potholing of Discontinuity is ironic in a sense that it ensures no one will ever forget about the things attempting to be forgotten.
- Crowning Moments of Awesome just ain't as awesome as they used to be. Used to feature a character doing something to 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.
- "You know what? The entire movie/book/etc is a crowning moment of awesome."
- 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 a la Just Bugs Me, so that every single slightly cool thing the characters do doesn't take over the entire trope page.
- While the above is true to an extent, the idea of trying to narrow anything down to just one example, or even just a couple, on a wiki this size and with so many contributors is just plain idiotic, and while some things are overly pimped, that series of pages seems to be the best place to offer people a corollary to those pages which offer a License To Whine. Or at least it had been pretty much impossible to narrow things down until instituting actual vote offs.
- The standards for distrust in Never Trust A Trailer have gotten ridiculously low. If a trailer doesn't adhere to strict chronological order of events, doesn't be completely and utterly straightforward, or uses even a moment of footage that wasn't in the final theatrical release... well, yeah. Essentially all a movie trailer has to do to be included on there is be a movie trailer.
- Twofer Token Minority and Token Minority have seemingly begun to list every possible example, regardless of intent. I seriously doubt it's Tokenism to feature a black woman in the cast when the majority of the cast is non-white and female.
- 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.
- 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.
- The Scrappy is also becoming a place for people to {{Complain About Characters They Don't Like}}.
- Possibly the root of the wiki's problems: There Is No Such Thingas Notability has gone from Any media example is acceptable, no matter how obscure to absolutely anything, page, example, whatever is fair game
- For example, the God Is Evil page used to have an example that was just an idea a troper had, not anything that had ever been written down. The Gratuitous Japanese page also used to have an example taken from a single post on a Game FA Qs 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.
- Another root cause is that some people who are fans of works that are notable (or, at least, 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.
- 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
meaningless vague ones.
- Fox News Liberal is now turning into Complaining About Conservatives('s Shows) You Don't Like.
- 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.
- 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.
- Sonic Syndrome was being used as "Jumping The Shark, Sonic The Hedgehog style", which lead to a rename.
- Remember when most of the entries in Unfortunate Implications were actually offensive?
- Along similar lines, the Double Standard page. It's come to the point where you kind of wonder whether people are simply just making up stuff to be offended about.
- Any villain or anti-hero who is both popular and not a complete retard is apparently a Magnificent Bastard
- The page has been purged repeatedly and now comes with a big-ass disclaimer about how subjective this is.
- Is it me or is Nintendo Hard getting a little easier. I mean Roguelikes and all Atlus games. We could give Atlus its own trope. Don't get me started on what does and doesn't get in! I mean why "1994's Lion King" and "Friday the 13th" aren't listed but someone wanted to place Gauntlet and solital there. Plus you include Platform Hell examples but that's a diffrent trope.
- Survival Horror has gone from "an overwhelmed protagonist uses careful resource management against insurmountable odds with a supernatural/horror theme" to "it's got monsters in it." Seriously, Splatterhouse, people?
- The Jimmy Hart Version went from being about shows using soundalikes 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).
- That One Boss is about a videogame 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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. 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. I mean, what was smoking the troper that included One Piece 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.
- Ensemble Darkhorse originally referred to a character who does little in a story yet still becomes popular among fans. Now it seems that anyone who is popular despite not being the main character qualifies, even the secondary main character or the main villain.
- 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.
- Laconic Wiki is supposed to be about taking overly long articles and defining them in a few words but now it does it to every article INCLUDING articles that are only a few sentences long.
- Apparently Weird Japanese Things don't have to be Japanese anymore.
- Also, a Quirky Mini Boss Squad apparently doesn't have to be quirky anymore, it just has to be a squad.
- Downer Ending isn't immune either.
- Ugly Guy Hot Wife has a helluva 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.
- Every entry on the Sugar Wiki seems to have degenerated to "just post stuff we like on these pages".
- 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.
- Deadpan Snarker is beginning to degenerate into "this character has at some point said something sarcastic".
- Big Bad was originally meant to refer to a core, over-arching enemy, such as the classic Buffy examples. Since then, it has gradually become catch-all shorthand for "villain".
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 homogenous response, listing well over a hundred things that have received copious if not a majority of relatively neutral criticism.
- Double Standard used to have a pretty decent balance of double standards as applied to both men and women. It's being steadily changed into just a list of supposed double standards that are unfair to women, and previous examples of double standards being unfair to men are also rewritten so that they're either "not that bad" or also unfair to women. Again, making the page an example of itself.
- This is a particularly depressing example of Flanderization, as it shows that many people are still ignorant on how sexism really works. (Alternatively, it's an hilarious example of Hypocritical Humor.) See the discussion page for the article if you feel like Face-Palming.
- Big Lipped Alligator Moment became Flanderized 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 BLA Ms that a whole other trope was created.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Just Eat Him was intended to be a counterpart to Why Dont 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.
- 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 the recent video game announcements are never mind that no one hated it before.
|
|
