Depending On The Writer / The Simpsons

As The Simpsons is a Long Runner that has had many different writers over the years, this was inevitable:

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• Bart:
  • He can be the most popular kid in school by a huge margin, have Milhouse as his only friend or anywhere in between depending on what best suits the story, though one episode did show that popularity can change rapidly as he went from the former to the latter after crying when hit with some mud.
  • Related to the above point, he can either be good friends with the bullies or live in fear of them depending on what's most convenient in the moment.
  • He can range anywhere from a Jerk with a Heart of Gold who's more talented than people give him credit for, a hyperactive idiot, or a sociopathic troublemaker, and everywhere in between.
  • His relationship with Lisa can range anywhere between him having a Big Brother Instinct and him being a Big Brother Bully. Case in point; one episode has him think that Lisa's in danger, so he races to help her, despite having a broken leg, while another episode has him hear the phrase "Kids can be so cruel", so he hurts Lisa and laughs when she cries. Both of these episodes are from the same season.
  • Bart's views of Homer frequently flip-flop between being embarrassed of having such an incompetent parent and being proud to have a guardian who shares his less-than-motivated philosophy.
  • Bart's knowledge of sex varies from him making lewd jokes about it to thinking that babies are made when a couple holds hands.
  • Similar to Homer listed below with regards to religion, Bart varies between whether he believes in God and the soul or not, though he's never depicted as being especially religious compared to the Flanders boys. Perhaps inconsistent spirituality is genetic in Simpson males along with low intelligence.
• Lisa:
  • Though she is never popular, just how unpopular Lisa is varies from episode to episode. In some episodes, she hangs out with Janey Powell and some of the other girls (including her usual bullies Sherri and Terri) but in other episodes she says she has no friends with even Janey teasing her.
  • Her intelligence as well. It can range from her being a Child Prodigy, to having moderately above average intelligence for her age group, to only getting good grades because Springfield Elementary is a Sucky School with low standards.
  • Sometimes she is ridiculously moralistic to the point of struggling to have any fun, while other times she seems to barely believe in the values she advertises and only promotes them for the sake of looking respectable.
  • Similarly, while they eventually settled on her being Buddhist, there was a time when Lisa could switch between a hard-nosed skeptic, Flanders v2.0, or a New Ager at the whim of the writing staff.
• Homer:
  • Homer's character varies with the plot's demands. He has been a well-meaning moron with selective common sense, so bored with life that he embraces any crazy idea he hears, and deliberately self-centered because he feels the rest of the world owes him. He's even lampshaded this:
    Homer: Because that's the kind of guy I am this week!
  • His physical prowess is another aspect of his character that varies. In some episodes, he's so weak that his punches can't kill a fly, and leave him completely exhausted. In other episodes, he's strong enough to use a motorcycle like a sword without breaking a sweat.
  • His personality can range anywhere from easygoing, Kindhearted Simpleton to short-tempered Jerkass.
  • How religious is Homer? This can range from just disliking going to church to being an atheist. In one of the Tracey Ullman shorts, he's the one who makes the family go and gets angry when Bart and Lisa say they're pagans.
  • Maggie is either so special to Homer that he keeps pictures of her at his work station as a motivation for staying in the dead-end job he needs to support a third child, or she's the one he keeps forgetting exists.
  • In terms of his parenting style, Homer is either unreasonable and overly-aggressive or an easygoing pushover who fails to enforce the most reasonable discipline; whichever extreme he's portrayed as embodying, it's his fault Bart is such a brat. Some episodes split the difference effectively, such as "We're On the Road to D'ohwhere," which shows Homer having a "fun" side and a no-nonsense "serious" side constantly battling for dominance when it comes to deciding how to handle his kids. Other episodes show that he's simply a person of extremes whose efforts to figure things out cause him to go from borderline child neglecter to Knight Templar Parent at the push of a button, or to make such heavy-handed attempts to atone for his mistakes that his kids react with We Want Our Jerk Back!
    Marge: Homie, I'm worried you're turning into some kind of super-cuckoo stage mother.
    Bart: Yeah. For once, couldn't you just turn into a good father? Would that be so hard?!
  • While Homer's dynamic with Bart is always challenging due to Homer's various failures of parenting and Bart's constant disrespect and bad behavior, the actual quality of their relationship varies, from emotionally distant on both sides with Bart blatantly The Un-Favorite to a fairly effortless bond between two people who share similar interests and senses of humor and are genuinely happy to spend time together whenever they're not sparring (and sometimes even when).
  • Homer's competence at his job is usually subpar, but it can sometimes vary. For example, one episode has him lose the "Worker of the Week" award to an inanimate carbon rod, while another episode has him outwit Burns and take over the nuclear plant.
• Marge:
  • How well liked Marge is by other women can vary. One episode has her "friends" kick her out of their investment group, and then hire the Yakuza to kill her and her family after Marge starts her own pretzel franchise (although, that was because Homer hired the Mafia to help boost up Marge's sales, and they destroyed their business in the process). Another episode has Marge inviting some women over to her house to discuss a book, among which three of the people that tried to get her killed (Helen Lovejoy, Agnes Skinner and Luann Van Houten) are included.
  • Related to the previous point, Helen and Marge's relationship can go from being good friends to Helen trying to ruin Marge's life at every opportunity she gets, or something in-between.
  • While she's almost always the Straight Man in comparison to Homer, as Homer's parenting flaws vary, Marge's parenting philosophy does as well. Sometimes she's the bad cop to Homer's good cop, enforcing the rules firmly when Homer is unable to. Other times she's the more generous parent who is better able to put the children's mistakes into the wider context than Homer is.
• Nelson Muntz varies in character over a very broad spectrum. In some episodes, he's an insidious bully to Bart and the other kids at the school and he has no real friends. In other episodes, he is Bart's second best friend. Sometimes he is friends with Jimbo, Kearney, and Dolph. In most episodes, he's just the brat who goes, "Haw haw!" His friendship with Jimbo, Kearney, and Dolph also varies. In some episodes it seems like he's close friends with them, while others make it seem like he's only loosely affiliated with them. Either way though you'd think they would've at least attended his birthday party.
  • In the later seasons in particular, he also can sometimes be depicted as a more sympathetic character who only bullies in response to how difficult his life is... Though this doesn't stop his classic less relatable side to come out when it's convenient.
• In some episodes Jimbo, Kearney, and Dolph respect Bart as a fellow delinquent and get along with him, while in others they bully him and beat him up like they would any other kid at Springfield Elementary. A few episodes, like "The Telltale Head", "See Homer Run", and "Boyz N the Highlands" have Bart trying to impress them or join their group.
• Professor Frink can either be a legitimate, well-respected scientist who's just a bit quirky or a crackpot nobody listens to. He also ranges from dangerously crazy to the Only Sane Man.
• Discounting the trope he's named for, Ned Flanders can be a perfectly nice but boring guy in one episode, someone who can be pretty fun in another (he's been shown drinking and brewing beer, hosting BBQ parties, and even plays billiards in his house), or an obnoxious religious fundamentalist. Homer's relationship with him can also range from Sitcom Arch-Nemesis to Vitriolic Best Buds to outright wishing him dead.
  • Bart's relationship with Ned has seen an even wider variety of angles than Homer's, on a spectrum from viewing him as a Parental Substitute and explicitly preferring him to Homer, to being more annoyed by him than Homer is (something that Homer effectively weaponized in the episode "No Good Read Goes Unpunished" by spending time with and acting like Ned, causing Bart to beg for his jerk back).
• Mister Burns can be a senile old man who can't do anything on his own and still thinks it's the early 1900s, or an extremely conniving Corrupt Corporate Executive (often he's both). He can also be Affably Evil, Faux Affably Evil (more commonly) and even (albeit very rarely) a Jerk with a Heart of Gold.
• Smithers, as Burns's toady, can be similarly variable in morality. In general, he can be anywhere from pretty moral, to willing to go along with Burns's schemes but still having his limits, to having no illusions about the nature of Burns's schemes (to the point of simply asking Burns who he needs killed when Burns suggests cheating at sports). Though he's been consistently written as in love with Burns since around season 2 and he does identify as attracted to men, whether that means he has a Single-Target Sexuality for Burns or a general attraction to men but with Burns being his true love is something that varies from joke to joke.
• The competence of the rest of the Power Plant (especially Lenny) can range between functioning fairly normally considering its conditions to so imbecilic they almost make Homer look intelligent.
• Rev. Lovejoy has run the gamut: He has been outright apathetic towards Christianity, a fire-and-brimstone preacher, a reasonable but boring minister, and an engaging preacher. On rare occasions, he has even been something of a Badass Preacher, such as rescuing Flanders from baboons.
• Depending on what the situation requires, Chief Wiggum can be motivated but incompetent, competent but villainous, lazy/apathetic, or brutally harsh.
• Depending on the episode, Snake can be anywhere from a petty thief to a legitimately dangerous armed criminal. Also, like Homer his strength and toughness varies. Sometimes he's able to restrain a man of similar size with one arm, but a few episodes had him being beaten up by Homer with little to no effort.
• The relationship between Lenny and Carl can be anywhere between people with little connection aside from a shared workplace, good friends who are Mistaken for Gay, Vitriolic Best Buds who beat each other up at the slightest provocation, or being unambigously in love and Everyone Can See It.
• Principal Skinner ranges anywhere from a Reasonable Authority Figure to an uptight Dean Bitterman who treats Bart unfairly. Additionally, there are episodes where he comes across as genuinely tough and dangerous, as befitting a war veteran (in "Lisa the Beauty Queen", he casually beats up Disney goons), while in others, he's a complete loser who can be cowed by the most minimal effort, even when it's not coming from his mother.
• While Edna Krabappel's personal life tends to be pretty consistent, her philosophy to teaching can be anywhere between barely caring more about her profession than Ms. Hoover does and being an extremely passionate educator stuck in an incompetent and poorly-funded district.
• The writers can't seem to make up their minds regarding how old Rod and Todd Flanders are. They are generally assumed to be the same ages as Bart^note Ten and Lisa^note Eight, respectively. However, both of them have been described as ten in two different episodes, and both of them were and able to speak prior to Lisa's birth, as shown in "Lisa's First Word." However, in "My Sister, My Sitter," they are said to have a two-year age gap. According to Word of God, the writers aren't entirely sure which brother is which and often have to look at their model sheets to know for sure, which is at least partly responsible for the inconsistencies.
• Krusty the Clown rates anywhere from a highly influential TV comic beloved by many celebrity fans to this day, to a washed-up has-been struggling to regain a bit of his former glory, to a no-talent hack who was never widely considered funny in the first place. The original idea behind him was that he was the star of a local TV program in the vein of Bozo the Clown—hence why the show is filmed in Springfield and Krusty's presence seemed mostly localized there—but as the parody drifted, so too did the character, and he became the show's default representative for Hollywood and celebrity in general. The one thing that's consistent is that Bart loves him. Whether he owes his pale face and red nose to his unhealthy lifestyle or simply wears clown makeup constantly also varies.
• Dr. Hibbert can be a competent and respectable doctor aside from his inappropriate sense of humor, a skilled man who nonetheless cares more about profit than actually helping patients, or a quack who's only marginally better than Dr. Nick.
• The Halfway Plot Switch is a mainstay trope in the Simpsons' universe, but how well it's pulled off varies a lot. Sometimes, the plot switch is believable, i.e. Homer encountering a bear in a forest (and developing a fear of them) while trying to get rid of a giant cotton candy ball he made Marge for Mother's Day at her insistence. Sometimes, the switch is contrived, i.e. after destroying the family photos, Marge has them restage and retake all of the photos and one of them just so happens to have a celebrity scandal in the background, leading to Homer becoming a paparazzo after selling it to the press. Other times, the switch comes out of nowhere from something hardly related, i.e. Homer buying a tennis court after discovering that the cement he bought for Grampa's funeral plot can cover the same space (he even lampshades this).

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