Markup View

Author: jkbeta

Jun 18th 2012 at 1:10:37 PM

Finally, some thoughts about all this.

* What is described here sounds like an interesting point of view on the development of styles, genres and media in general. One point that is problematic about this is that it cannot really work in connection with a single work, since it requires us to consider a long lineage of works for the identification of trends. While we have tropes that have similar properties, such as GenreLaunch or the different ways of PlayingWithATrope, these can usually be pinpointed to one work or a small number of related works. (For the mathematically-minded people: this concept describes a global property, whereas tropes are local properties.)
* While the ideas expressed here are quite interesting, I am personally at a loss to find valid examples. While there are some good points in some of the examples (e.g., the over-interpretation that often occurs in school literary classes), I am not sure if they are actually cases of the concept presented here, or would be better described using different, more localized tropes.
* There is a huge danger that a combination of FanMyopia and an imperfect description of this trope will lead to extremely low-quality examples - it's quite easy to misinterpret this as "these works are FollowTheLeader and I think they're AdaptationDecay, so I'll just list it here".
* I'm not sure if the things described here are not already covered by various other tropes (or maybe meta-examples of these tropes), such as FollowTheLeader, LostInImitation, AdaptationDecay, Flanderization and so on.

I think the major issue to address here is that we need to find a way to make this concept into an actual trope, i.e. something that can be localized to one work or a small, dense cluster of works. Otherwise, it's a (possibly interesting) observation about fiction. Alternatively, this could be reworked into an interesting analysis text for an appropriate trope (how about FollowTheLeader? AdaptationDecay?).