What is FranchiseOriginalSin supposed to be?

Judging from the Laconic it's supposed to be about a show that had a minor fault that was kept in check, but the fault eventually grew to be problematic. However, reading through the examples a lot of it seems to boil down to "People criticise show X for being/having Y, but akshually Y was there way before!" Which, to me, is getting very close to "Justifying They Changed It, Now It Sucks! By Saying It's Older Than They Think". Is an example repair project in order?

Edited by BreadBull on Apr 17th 2019 at 7:50:35 AM

Well, for starters, these examples should explain what them tolerable earlier on. Was it overshadowed before and not now? Was it a good thing that mutated into a bad thing? Something like that.

TBH, I'm not sure why this page even exists. It's basically another complaining trope with additional argumentativeness through the "used to not be a problem" part.

Speaking of Franchise Original Sin, there's a page for Fire Emblem where the entries, especially the bottom ones that are walls of text, read like wonking.

It could work if it was given a major rewrite and not just used as a complaining box.

I was reading some of these pages the other day, and I don't think it's all that bad.

There's definitely a tendency toward examples that at least feel like they're implying "this complaint is invalid because the series has had this element all along", but I feel like most of them have at least a token reference to that issue originally being kept in check.

That definitely needs clean-up, but in most cases it doesn't feel too negative to me and shouldn't need too much work. The line between complaint and critique can sometimes be blurry, but it's an important part of analysis to allow some of that.

I find Franchise Original Sin to often be an interesting bit of trivia about various franchises or genres. For instance, examples about modern criticism about comic books, and how some of those things originated in innocuous or outright praised stories, before the original context was lost over time, is an interesting historical read, and can even be positive to writers going forward.

Edited by Jokubas on Apr 21st 2019 at 1:39:50 AM

The trope is more like Flanderization but applied to a work as a whole rather than a character, kind of like Early-Installment Weirdness versus Characterization Marches On. In theory it could be rewritten to eliminate the audience reaction element, but I think there being a tipping point is necessary because otherwise examples would lean more abstract. Even saying "season seven is when x started to become more dominant" narrows the reference point.