Casting Gag/Actor Allusion and rampant decay and misuse

Casting Gag and Actor Allusion have to be two of my least favourite tropes on the site. Conceptually, they're fine. The former is when an actor is hired for a role that pays homage to a previous role they had, while the latter is when an actor isn't hired for a previous role specifically but the work still nods to that role.

But oh my god they are so horrifically misused. They've both devolved rampantly, to the point where rather than listing actual nods intended by the work they've become dumping grounds for people to draw any comparison between two characters played by the same actor. It's especially bad on character pages. The number of times I've seen this exact wording template:

• Casting Gag: This isn't the first time [actor name] has [list of vaguely similar traits/actions that another character they played did].

It makes my blood boil.

The problem here is the lack of burden of proof. Like, take this one that was added to Eda's character folder for The Owl House recently:

• Actor Allusion: Before Eda, Wendie played Fenghuang, a Funny Animal owl with Supernatural Martial Arts.

Like, maybe Wendie Malick was cast as Eda because she played an owl in some show at some point before. Probably not, but I can't disprove it. It's really hard to prove a negative, which opens the floodgate for people to use these tropes to just make Pepe Silvia-tier random connections.

Also sidenote, but this one definitely should a Casting Gag rather than an Actor Allusion if it were valid. There's a secondary issue with the two being used interchangeably when they're actually pretty distinct.

I don't know if this is a TRS problem because I do think the core idea of these tropes are valid, but their current usage is a problem. My question is, are there any requirements to open a Long-Term Projects thread for these two tropes? 'Cause, I would really like to spearhead a cleanup.

I'd definitely be up for a cleanup, though both probably need TRS at some point or another (the classic solution of "dumping a lot of the current stuff on Sugar" as its own thing seems viable).

The misuse absolutely reminds me of bad Hilarious in Hindsight entries, especially with the "this isn't the first time"-esque phrasing. You'd think people on TV Tropes would be less surprised that certain thematic and storytelling aspects tend to appear concurrently a lot.

back lol

I'm kind of wondering where OP thinks the tipping point to "yeah, this was probably deliberate" ought to be with Casting Gag, absent Word of God confirmation.

A lot of these examples could be moved to Typecasting.

Maybe some of them, but a lot don't work with typecasting either. Typecasting is when an actor does the same type of role over and over. A lot of bad Actor Allusion and Casting Gag entries are like "Character A and Character B played by the same actor both fought a lightning guy once" (just making up a random example).

I don't know for sure, and I think it really changes case-by-case. That's why I want to go the cleanup/maintenance thread route, so people who are familiar with a given series can discuss the problems with specific entries.

Even if you aren't familiar with both works being referenced, if you know at least one then it's usually pretty obvious when something is being taken out of context or having details severely warped so it kinda looks like something else.

Ok, so let me throw one at you that I wrote, for the sake of comparison:

• Reign of the Seven Spellblades: In the anime:
  • Oliver's voice actor Atsushi Tamaru previously voiced another Master Swordsman protagonist of a Wizarding School Light Novel series who walks in on a partially clothed Love Interest in the first episode, namely Ayato Amagiri from The Asterisk War. And just like in his previous series, he and his Love Interest duel shortly after meeting only to have the fight stopped by a third party.
  • Satoshi Hino provides the voice of Alvin "Purgatory" Godfrey, who is famed for his abilities with fire powers. "Purgatory" is a translation of "Rengoku" in Japanese. Only a couple years earlier, Hino voiced Kyōjurō Rengoku in the anime of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, who likewise has fire-related elemental powers.
  • Enrico Forghieri's voice actor Hōchū Ōtsuka looks almost exactly like Enrico, except for having a bit more hair.

The Hōchū Ōtsuka one is probably pushing it, but the other two were at least noticed by more people than just me (the Satoshi Hino casting I got from a Crunchyroll comment, not having watched Demon Slayer).

The first one does not sound like an example. The second also doesn't really sound like one either, but I'm not 100% sure with that. The third one is probably Ink-Suit Actor.

To me, an Actor Allusion/Casting Gag is something that only makes sense if it's that specific actor doing it. Otherwise it's just a coincidence. One example I can think of is in Last Man Standing, where an episode had Tim Allen's character comment that a kid's Buzz Lightyear costume had its wings on upside-down. That joke only makes sense because Tim Allen voiced Buzz Lightyear. That's the kind of thing this trope should be used for.

This is not a YMMV trope. It can't just be something that "people noticed", it has to be deliberate. Undeniably deliberate.

I was thinking, shouldn't both tropes be trivia instead, is they are about behind-the-scene decisions? Or at the very least Casting Gag?

Also, turns out, both tropes are on Tropes Needing TRS

I swear that Actor Allusion used to be Trivia, and one day, out of nowhere it was changed. If not, then why does it appear almost exclusively on the Trivia subpage?

I'm trying to find some proof that I'm not crazy in the Repair Shop Morgue, but nothing pops up. What I did find was a wick check for the trope dating back to 2021, but it seems it was never used.

Edited by SoyValdo7 on Apr 21st 2024 at 12:34:19 PM

Valdo

The problem with both comes from nitpicky troping habits that dilutes the intentions behind the tropes, and both are basically interchangeable in how they are being used. Celebrity Paradox suffers from pretty much the same thing. I would say that Meta Casting is a comparable trope that is nonetheless significantly healthier because the emphasis is on how it impacts the narrative of the work.

Ideally:

• Actor Allusion: When a story beat takes a moment to hint at the history of a specific actor, often writing it into the script after the actor is cast. Example is a doctor in a medical drama revealed to have participated in rodeos as a kid because the actor did.
• Casting Gag: A character is cast in a role specifically to riff on a previous performance, something handled in the writing/casting stage for a specific reason. Example is an actor cast in an antagonist role because they were the hero of a previous work with a similar premise.

Of course, they also deal with the ambiguity of "It's textual in the script/direction/production design/advertising but has one foot in behind-the-scenes decisions" issues.

Do you not know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weevils!

By searching the Trivia page, I found that both pages were removed from that index in 2018, citing this TRS thread.