NaNo 4328 / 50,000
Sounds like a plan.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
I'm ambivalent about stricter criteria, but I should note that it's not mutually exclusive with the supertrope.
How sweet it is
Hooked.
she/her | TRS needs your help! | Contributor of Trope Report
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
The crowner doesn't have an option to make Widget Series YMMV if it stays separate from the supertrope, even though there was discussion about it being subjective on the first page. (I'm aware that I should have brought this up sooner; I kind of forgot about this thread.)
I'm not going to add it (at least at the moment), because I'm not sure how to handle it (can't add it to the option for redefining Widget Series, since that would mean retroactively changing what people voted for).
Edited by GastonRabbit on Aug 1st 2020 at 7:47:36 AM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
Great idea, I'll add it as a separate option.
"It's just a show; I should really just relax"
We already have a Just for Fun page called "Weird-Ass Games" on the wiki.
Rock'n'roll never dies!
How sweet it is
I'll call the crowner tomorrow, to factor in the new crowner entry.
she/her | TRS needs your help! | Contributor of Trope Report
So... I'm guessing we can call this?
By the way, what's the difference between Widget Series and What Do You Mean, It Wasn't Made on Drugs??
I'd like to apologize for all this.
The idea behind What Do You Mean, It Wasn't Made on Drugs? is that the audience suspects something was made during drug use, but it's commonly misused as "This series is weird," which Bizarro Series will cover.
Rock'n'roll never dies!
How sweet it is
Calling in favor of making a YMMV supertrope and making Widget Series YMMV.
she/her | TRS needs your help! | Contributor of Trope Report
So we're keeping Widget Series but not redefining it? How do we figure out what is and isn't a Widget Series?
"It's just a show; I should really just relax"
A widget series would be something that would be weird outside of its home country's culture due to Values Dissonance, but wouldn't be as weird to its home country's audience. For example, I added Widget Series to Simple Samosa's YMMV page because it's a show about sentient Indian food. American children wouldn't even know about what food the characters are supposed to be!
Rock'n'roll never dies!
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I think that's a bit stretching it? Stories about Anthropomorphic Food isn't that uncommon, even if the particular foods are unfamiliar (i.e. it's not really a case of Values Dissonance). Unless the characters indulge in activities or discuss about topics that are specific to Indian-culture that might be confusing for audiences outside that culture, I don't think that particular work would count.
Here's what I think is a good example:
- Sarazanmai is themed around Japanese Kappa mythology, as the characters transform into kappas. A central mechanic of the series, which can easily come off as Squick, is that the transformation involves stealing people's shirikodama, an organ that symbolizes desire... and happens to be located in the anus, as it is in the traditional myths. This aspect, and much of the kappa mythology that underlies the series, would be familiar to Japanese viewers, but comes off as bizarre to others.
I am also happy to sponsor a TLP draft for Bizarro Show.
"It's just a show; I should really just relax"
Here's the draft for Bizarro Series
. I can start sorting out the on-page examples soon.
Did the winning suggestion say to move the Widget Series examples here, since it's practically being cut?
she/her
I don't think the crowner had consensus to do anything other than launch Bizarro Series as a supertrope and make Widget Series YMMV.
... Which seems pretty pointless when Widget Series is already being used as Bizarro Series. Are we at least going to cull the misuse and transfer valid examples to the latter?
Maintenance?
I presume Bizarro Series should be preemptively made YMMV for the same reason?
I'm back!
I started sorting out examples on Sandbox.Widget Series. The goal is to sort out/cut misuse.
"It's just a show; I should really just relax"
Still working on sorting examples in Sandbox.Widget Series. I've classified all of them but didn't finish sorting them into handy-dandy folders. Here is round one of entries I'm not sure about. Feedback appreciated.
- Fantadroms, a Latvian cartoon about a shapeshifting cat robot that goes around his homeworld stopping various disputes between other characters. This trope actually prevented this show from getting an American release - Streamline Pictures had plans to release an American localization of the show, but they scrapped it partially due to them considering it too bizarre for American audiences. Bizarro series. If it doesn't have foreign audiences, they can't use the show as an example of how the culture is weird.
- The Touhou M-1 Grand Prix features a Monster Mash of characters, including many from Japanese Mythology, from a shmup video-game doing stand-up comedy. not sure about this one
- EIEIO (Excessively Irish Example of Intentional Oddity)
A Note: The Irish film industry is very small, even the large scale local films are only comparable to most US Indies. As a result, most domestic films don't bother toning it down for foreigners, and just make movies for ourselves. Expect profuse swearing, Grey-and-Gray Morality, a propensity for offbeat characters and very, very dark humour. Keep all? Not sure. Seems like entries are written from and Irish perspective
- Waking Ned Devine: The eponymous Ned dies of a massive heart attack after winning the lottery. The local town bands together to cover up his death in order to claim his winnings. Hilarity ensues. Also, a very old man rides a motorcycle while very, very naked.
- The Butchers Boy: A young lad in rural 1960's Ireland loves nothing more than playing with his best friend. Then his mother commits suicide and he slowly starts going mad. As a result he's sent away to a borstal, where he has visions of a foul mouthed Virgin Mary, played by Sinead O'Connor, before being molested by a priest. Eventually he escapes, and returns home to his abusive alcoholic father, before finally losing it completely and going on a murder spree, having hallucinated the world being destroyed by nukes and being repopulated by humanoid flies. This is a comedy.
- The Guard: An over the top homage to 70's Dirty Harry-esque, mismatched partner Cop Movies ... set in small town Ireland. The eponymous Guard (Irish Cop) takes acid, molest corpses, hires prostitutes, insults his American counterparts, buys his dying mother cocaine and contracts an STD. By comparison, the drug dealers he's taking down discuss existentialism and morality, and there's an off kilter scene about gay IRA operatives.
- A Film with Me in It: a film about a guy who really wants to be in a film but has been generally unlucky in his life, who keeps ending up with people being killed in incredibly incriminating accidents around his flat while he and his best friend keep proposing film scenarios in order to figure out how to get out of their predicaments.
- Grabbers, a monster film about a group of giant squid-like bloodsucking aliens that attack a seaside town. High-alcohol blood is poison to them, so when they rampage one evening there's only one way to survive the night: get everyone to the pub and keep them sloshed all night long.
- Adam and Paul, a more-or-less plotless dark comedy about two heroin addicts (modeled on Didi and Gogo and Laurel and Hardy) who spend a day wandering around Dublin trying to scrape money together to buy a fix. There are Amusing Injuries, an encounter with a patriotic Bulgarian, lots of dialogue that goes absolutely nowhere, and a generally weird and tragicomic tone.
- The Young Offenders, a pair of Lower Class Louts go on a road trip on stolen bicycles in order to salvage cocaine bales from the sea in order to get rich and are pursued by a cop with an unhealthy obsession with arresting bike thieves and an Evil Cripple with a nail gun.
- The Twentieth Century A surrealist, aggressively historically incorrect retelling of the story of Mackenzie King, Canada’s longest-serving prime minister. Though almost every substantial fact about King’s political career, and indeed, Canada itself is portrayed laughably wrong (prime ministers are not selected by winning a seal-clubbing contest, for example, and King did not have a crippling boot-sniffing fetish) there’s just enough truth snuck in, in terms of events, characters, and places, to make it function as a work of social commentary on the habits of the late Victorian-era Canadian ruling class (which, incidentally, wasn’t even King’s era). The director has described it as “a nightmare King might have had,” in the sense it’s full of things King would have been aware of, but warped beyond all recognition. Definite Bizarro series, not sure about cross-cultural aspect
- Survive Style 5 Plus. An entirely Japanese movie... starring Vinnie Jones.
- Grim Prairie Tales: Two travellers in The Wild West played by Brad Dourif and James Earl Jones try to top one another with increasingly outrageous stories in this anthology movie. maybe keep? Is this bizarrely American?
- The Rocky Horror Picture Show: The midnight movie to end all midnight movies. not sure
- Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!: a parody of cheesy monster films, a hallmark of American cinema. maybe keep? Are cheesy monster movies uniquely American?
- Casa de mi Padre: A parody of Mexican telenovelas starring the very WASPy Will Ferrell as a Mexican who must defend the family home. not sure
- The films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, anyone? Bizarro show? not sure
- Delicatessen is about a butcher in post-apocalyptic France murdering the janitors he employs in his apartment building and serving them in his shop, and when his daughter falls in love with one of the janitors, she enlists the help of a team of militant vegetarians to save him.
- The City of Lost Children is about a mad scientist who lives on an oil rig offshore from an unspecified Steampunk city abducting children so he can steal their dreams; and when he abducts the little brother of a circus strongman, the strongman and a little girl from an orphanage go on a quest to get him back. And it involves a brain in a tank.
- Amélie is about a woman attempting to make her neighbors' lives better by taking a garden gnome from one of them and taking pictures of it vacationing around the world, tricking an abusive greengrocer into thinking he's insane, and escorting a blind man to a train station giving him vivid descriptions of the surroundings.
- Micmacs is about a video store clerk falling in with a clan of weirdos who live in a junkyard after he gets shot in the head, and then him and the clan taking revenge on the two biggest weapons manufacturers in France (one of whom created the landmine that killed his father, the other one which made the bullet that he got shot with) via a procession of "Home Alone" Antics.
- Daft Punk's Electroma. Who ever imagined a town populated by people wearing Daft Punk helmets? lacks context, might be Bizarro Series
- Save the Green Planet!, a film by South Korean director Jang Joon-Hwan about a man who kidnaps and tortures to death people who he thinks are alien invaders. And he's the hero! It is, naturally, primarily a comedy Bizarro Show, though you could argue that the heavy black comedy and unexpected melodrama are characteristically Korean
- Aachi and Ssipak is a strange South Korean animated socio-political action comedy about a dark futuristic world that is powered by fecal matter. Needless to say, there is a lot of Toilet Humor. Not sure. Is the political aspect enough for Widget? Is it weird enough for Bizarro series?
- Judging by the trailers of movies like Obonsam Besu note , 2016, and The Godfathernote , the entire movie industry of Ghana seems to run on this trope. It's a SWAG (Surreal and Weird Arriving from Ghana). And special mention to Nkrato for this comment:
"I was expecting the silly karate, CGI monsters, and lots and lots of talking. Like any good Ghana Film. But nothing, absolutely nothing could prepare me for the cat mouth missile at 0:44"
- Valhalla Rising: a Danish/UK film about a mute one-eyed Norseman and a young boy, both slaves, who kill their pagan masters and join a bunch of Crusaders trying to get to Jerusalem. However, the crew gets lost and end up in America, where they all go crazy and get killed by mostly-unseen natives or each other. The film has very little dialogue, with long stretches of almost complete silence. Definitely Bizarro Show, cultural aspect is borderline
In a lot of cases my confusion stems from uncertainty or lack of context about how culturally-specific a particular element is. This is why I need more eyes on it.
"It's just a show; I should really just relax"
I think these unclear entries are more appropriately put on the appropriate discussion page, I don't think waiting for TRS to clear them up is going to work.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Crown Description:
Widget Series is supposed to be "a series that doesn't make much sense outside of the culture of its country of origin, and is used in other countries as indicative of that culture's strangeness", but is often misused. What should be done?
Crowner options round 2:
- Create new, YMMV supertrope Bizarro Series (name TBD) about works whose premise is considered weird. If Widget Series is cut, move examples here.
- Add stricter criteria and redefine Widget Series to be about works that are weird for culturally-specific reasons
- Cut Widget Series.
- Do nothing
"It's just a show; I should really just relax"