Ambiguous Name: The Firefly Effect

The Firefly Effect has multiple issues (although some of them stem from its ambiguous name.)

First, according to the first line of its description, it's an audience reaction trope that refers to viewers who refuse to watch a show because they believe it will be cancelled.

A huge number of its inbounds, though (most of the ones I caught in a quick search) seem to be using it as either Screwed by the Network or Executive Meddling, and especially 'Executive Meddling based on the fact that this is a weird sci-fi show that executives are worried people won't get.' This is unsurprising, since those are what Firefly is famous for. (A few others seem to be using it just to say 'This Troper is worried this show may not last long!' without actually using those worse — which is a bit closer to the trope's intended meaning, but without any assertion that people are actually not watching it. Other places, like Lie To Me, seem to be using it to say "this show was screwed by Fox specifically.")

For misuse, see eg. It's Popular, Now It Sucks!, C-List Fodder, Jumping the Shark, Lie To Me, Live-Action TV, Only Barely Renewed (the last three all use it to mean 'screwed by fox'), Misblamed... I didn't list all the "character" examples, because that's linked to another problem, which is...

Its own description isn't even consistent about what it means:

"The Firefly Effect refers to viewers being afraid of committing to a new series because they don't believe the series will last long enough to make up for the investment of time and emotions. "The network is just going to cancel this, so I'm not giving it my heart." If enough viewers think this way towards a particular TV series, it may become a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy — people don't watch because they think the show will be canceled, and then the show is cancelled because no one is watching it."

"A subtype of this trope can occur with specific characters in a series rather than the entire series itself. In this case a series will contain a particular character who isn't getting much screen time because the authors are having difficulty coming up with story ideas for him or her."

...those two definitions seem completely unrelated (and make me suspect that the trope has seen a lot of reworking, ultimately just reflecting a central thesis of "we need a trope to memorialize Firefly.") It's possible that they mean "viewers refuse to fall in love with this character because...", but there's no indication of that in the description or in any of the inbounds that use it as the "character version" if The Firefly Effect — they seem to just be using it as "this character was Screwed by the Network because they were too dumb to be able to figure out what to do with it, like Fox with Firefly" or something along those lines.

The initial concept expressed in the first few lines is probably tropeable to some extent, but it feels like this trope exists under this particular name mostly because someone wanted to talk about Firefly and how it affected them, and to create a trope that would assert that Firefly had a big impact on people. The description's weird insistence that this is a sci-fi-specific trope is a dead giveaway — to the extent that this is a real audience reaction, it is not at all specific to sci-fi. In fact, if it were parsed down to the basic idea in the first few lines, and the other associations that come with Firefly were dropped, I would say that this reaction is much more common for big literature series — I know some people refuse to start reading them until they're finished, and there might be room for an audience-reaction trope for that sort of thing.

That said, whether that is tropeable or not, I think that Firefly has too many different highly-charged emotional associations for "The Firefly Effect" to ever serve as a useful name; it's all over the place even on this short list of inbounds, and "screwed by Fox" seems to me like too much of an inherently logical association that people want to make for that name.

It has good inbound links and has been around from the first days of the wiki. Let's give it a "grandfathered." It is just a named audience reaction, anyway. Not a trope.