Condemned by History cleanup thread

^^ I remember those YA movie adaptations created the "One Book, Two Movies trend, starting off with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and ending with the first half of the last Divergent book.

YouTube is way too fractured for almost anything on there to be popular enough to be considered omnipresent in the way Deader Than Disco requires. I watch YT literally every day and I've never heard of this dude. It fails the "man on the street" test hard.

Edited by HighCrate on Jan 24th 2019 at 6:41:24 AM

I don't think the "man in the street" test is a good test, though. Nothing is universally popular; it should just have to be popular in its fan community (anime, comics, etc.) to qualify.

Yeah. The average person on the street probably has no idea who Erin Esurance is.

There is no unified YouTube "fan community." Again, it's too fractured. It's a medium, not a community. Two people could each spend twenty hours a week watching YouTube, and what one would consider massively important and popular, the other won't have heard of, and vice versa.

Edited by HighCrate on Jan 27th 2019 at 6:11:54 AM

My view was that if he's well-known enough to appear in a celebrity magazine, he's well-known enough for the trope. I know nothing about celebrities but I won't deny that they're well-followed by other people.

So the "fan community" is "people who read celebrity magazines"?

Okay. Was this person inescapably popular among those people? Or was he just kind of in a magazine once or twice?

I'm still not convinced. Remember, the ur-example here is disco. A genre that dominated popular music and all of mass media for years at its height. Not "showed up in a Billboard article or two."

Not every example is going to be quite that huge of course, but there ought to be some kind of comparison, at least in their particular milieu.

In the case of You Tube, something big enough to be comparable to disco would be less "this one particular dude that most people haven't heard of" and more "reaction videos," "You Tube poops," or "let's plays".

Edited by HighCrate on Feb 6th 2019 at 5:29:48 AM

Disco isn't even an example anymore. In the 90s? Sure. But many people unashamedly love disco nowadays. It's lost its stigma.

Uh Tbh I'm not entirely sure whether this is even tropable as even the Trope Namer is hilariously enough not even an example.

Edited by miraculous on Feb 6th 2019 at 6:38:48 AM

First Emo music isn't dead. Fall Out Boy and Panic! At the Disco are bigger than ever and haven't really changed their sounds. The term, Emo, has been an insult even in the genre's heyday. Also the "Emo Nights" (mentioned in the entry) show that there's some nostalgia for it anyway.

Second, I never heard of a backlash of any kind to power ballads. You can still hear them on any classic Rock station and many people still enjoy them. The 80's in general were kinda cheesy anyway.

Third Barney was never popular with adults and was criticized for its pandering and saccharine nature even in its heyday. Almost everyone above the age of 4 has made fun of the show. Basically it doesn't count because it was hated since day one and if anything, the hatedom has burned out slightly.

Finally I believe the youtuber Fred counts. He was one of the most subscribed Youtubers in his day and even got promotion from Nickolodean (which ironically might've been what killed his career). A mixture of failed spinoffs, Seasonal Rot, and people getting sick of his annoying humor caused him to go away. What do you guys think.

Edited by Idisagree on Feb 6th 2019 at 3:49:30 AM

Fred even got a movie. If any Youtuber counts it's him, though I personally fail to see where the appeal ever was in him.

The fact that disco isn't an example anymore of Deader Than Disco, IMO, points to a problem less with the page than with our approach to YMMV 'tropes' in general. Opinions can change over time; we don't acknowledge that enough.

Edited by nrjxll on Feb 6th 2019 at 5:45:18 AM

With how small the page is now, and the fact the very trope namer may not count as an example, I wonder if this phenomenon is simply Too Rare to Trope by our current standards. When was the last time somebody brought up an entry and it was actually approved?

I actually wonder if this would serve better as an In-Universe Examples Only trope, since there's plenty of in-universe examples listed and they're all focused on a simple concept (Disco is considered outdated and lame in a work).

Maybe this is an overreaction, but I legitimately seen far more entries getting shot down because "it wasn't popular enough", or "there were people hating on it back when it was popular". Thoughts?

Edited by chasemaddigan on Feb 6th 2019 at 7:16:01 AM

I completely agree.

(x5) Are FOB and P!ATD considered emo or are they just popular with the emo sub-culture? Either way, emo has always had a large Periphery Hatedom, so I don't know if it can count as Deader Than Disco. Likewise with Barney.

I actually think Emo is one of the best examples of Deader Than Disco in recent years. Emo's Periphery Hatedom was mostly a response to it's popularity and the scene culture that went along with it though. Emo music was around for a long time before it went mainstream, and only then did the haters begin.

Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco have both been in and out of hiatus for the last few years. Fall Out Boy was arguably never emo, and Panic! At The Disco have moved away from it in their more recent work. I would also dispute that they are still popular- while they certainly still have fans their days of mainstream success are gone.

Rock music in general is out of style these days, so I think it would be hard for any emo band to garner mainstream success. You could even make the argument that the backlash against Emo is what killed rock.

I've talked to plenty of people who were once very into Emo music or Scene culture and are now generally embarrassed by that phase. There are also musicians now making music (generally in a very underground manner) that's arguably emo but don't brand it as such, preferring to call themselves Post-Hardcore, Folk Punk, or even avoid genre labels altogether.

Edited by naturalironist on Feb 7th 2019 at 8:06:56 AM

They're no Cardi B or even Imagine Dragons, but they seem like two of the more popular rock bands in America right now.

I don't know if the Scrappy Doo example counts. Modern works joke about him being The Scrappy, but it seems like he actually has a lot of fans. I assume he went through a sort of Scrappy cycle where he was unpopular for a period but has since gained fans. Flim-Flam is the true Scrappy.

From Playstation All Stars Battle Royale

While people do make fun of PSASBR roster nowadays, it's mostly lighthearted "Is it Playstation Allstars?" jokes when there is a Cloud vs. Snake match. The game's quality is mostly forgotten.

Edited by RAlexa21th on Feb 24th 2019 at 3:48:00 AM

I remember it having a poor reception even upon reveal. I don't think the game was ever that well-received. It was always So Okay, It's Average to many gamers. So, no, I don't think it counts as Deader Than Disco.

Would it be acceptable to put Sugarland back on the Music subpage? I pulled it myself because I wanted to give the reunion album a chance, but it bombed hard and Jennifer is back to doing solo singles. It seems the Indiana State Fair incident still looms over them.

I would like to add the following example to the main page of Deader Than Disco, but want to be sure everything doesn't look like whining/ranting/etc. before I add it.

• The modern military First-Person Shooter was a huge trend in video games during the late-2000s / early 2010s. The genre first kicked off in 2007 when Call of Duty, a series known for World War II shooters, went into Next Sunday A.D. with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare to depict a more modern setting, story, and gameplay. This was followed up with Modern Warfare 2, which briefly held the highest opening weekend gross not just for any video game ever, but any piece of entertainment ever. The Modern Warfare series was praised for production values, in particular a single-player campaign that felt on par with the average summer blockbuster movie. The multiplayer was also cited as revolutionary, changing what could be done with an online game and creating a template that many online games copied and are still building on. Developers Treyarch and Infinity Ward, along with publisher Activision, were raking in the cash, making billions of dollars every year from the games. It seemed like a constant money-making machine, and it was cited as proof that gaming had finally broken through to the mainstream in a way that it never had before.
  
  However, the good times wouldn't last. After Call of Duty: Black Ops, the series began to gradually lose momentum, even as it kept generating record sales numbers. As the games grew in popularity, so did the backlash against their story and gameplay. Criticisms of barely changing the overall gameplay year after year, dull-looking graphics in an attempt to be "realistic," and focusing too hard on the American side of any conflict in a historical setting began to grow louder with every new installment. Also, in 2012, the genre would get a brutal Deconstruction with Spec Ops: The Line, criticizing the genre's reliance on America Saves the Day and the inherent power fantasies that come with the genre. But what really sealed the fate of the modern military shooter was everyone else trying to replicate the success that Call of Duty was having. Franchises like Medal of Honor, Battlefield, and many others flooded the market in the early-2010s with similarly-themed games, leading the general public to get bored of them and the backlash to keep increasing. This would reach a head with Call of Duty: Ghosts in 2013, which got the series' lowest critical scores since it went modern. Critics and fans alike lambasted what they saw as a heavy-handed single-player campaign, and multiplayer that, while solid, was just more of the same. Call of Duty would eventually attempt to stay fresh with Call Of Duty Infinite Warfare in 2016 that was set 20 Minutes into the Future, but the same criticisms that had bogged down the series since Modern Warfare were outdoing any praise the game got, and its sales numbers were sharply below the previous entries. Meanwhile, Battlefield would go back to the historical shooter in 2016 with Battlefield 1, which focused entirely on World War I, in a move that was widely seen as returning to the roots of FPS. Call of Duty would follow suit the next year with Call of Duty: WWII, but sales figures were again below expectations, and proved that the days of Call of Duty as a mainstream powerhouse of gaming were over.
  
  While Call of Duty is still around, it has nowhere near the sales figures and playerbase that it once did, playing Follow the Leader itself with Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, taking cues from such games as Overwatch and Player Unknowns Battlegrounds. The genre of modern military-themed first person shooters has gone from "summer blockbuster" levels of profit to a niche market in the video game industry. The rise and fall of the military FPS has been used as a cautionary example of what happens when you take a good idea and run with it too long, as well as what can happen when everyone else tries to copy a successful formula.

Edited by KingLyger on Apr 1st 2019 at 10:04:02 AM

Doesn't this trope require retroactive backlash (people ashamed of having liked it in the first place)? Modern Warfare is still well received, so I'm not sure this is the trope. Seinfeld Is Unfunny might fit better.

Edited by Ferot_Dreadnaught on Apr 5th 2019 at 4:37:09 AM

Would the success of "Old Town Road" be enough to get Billy Ray Cyrus off the list?

Just for the record, Disco can’t be an example ever, because the trope's name is deader than Disco, that means that for its own definition Disco can’t be part of it, as everything that is included has to be more dead than Disco itself.

Regarding other aspects: under what measure is Rock considered out of fashion nowadays? Is that the case in the US? Because where I live rock music is still by far the most popular form of music (which also brings the question to what extent this entire trope refers to just what happens in the US and not the rest of the world).

Youtubers will always be a complex case because Youtube is a niche. I watch hours and hours of Youtube per day and didn’t hear of Fred until many years after his downfall. But I do agree he’s as much mainstream as it gets regarding youtubers.

Edited by Luppercus on May 15th 2019 at 1:59:47 PM