Franchise Original Sin cleanup and maintenance

Per a decision made in this TRS thread, consensus has elected to make a couple of changes to the way Franchise Original Sin will be handled going forward. The first is that it no longer requires an explanation for why a criticized aspect used to be tolerated more, though adding one is still allowed. The second is to create a cleanup thread, which I have been granted permission to start.

What should our first order of business be? Personally, I'm in favor of prioritizing identifying examples that come off as overly complain-y and rewriting or removing them, but I'd like to hear what other people think we should do.

Complaining cleanup, complaining cleanup, complaining cleanup. Many examples are needlessly bitchy and whiny, and need a serious weed-whacker taken to them (or at least a rewrite.)

Last I checked, the GTA subpage was pretty bad. Is it still? It may need some work done on it.

I think we might wanna start with going through the main Franchise Original Sin page, as well as the various sub-pages (FranchiseOriginalSin.Anime, FranchiseOriginalSin.Comic Books, FranchiseOriginalSin.Film, FranchiseOriginalSin.Live Action TV, FranchiseOriginalSin.Video Games and FranchiseOriginalSin.Western Animation) as well as any work that has it's own section (FranchiseOriginalSin.Dragon Ball, FranchiseOriginalSin.Batman Films, FranchiseOriginalSin.Game Of Thrones …etc) for potential misuse or complaining first.

Should I post about this thread in ATT?

Sure, why not. It worked for the original TRS thread for this trope.

Alright. I've made the announcement.

If you're looking at the various entries wondering what needs to go, may I suggest in the Film section, looking the entry for Cats which seems to be nothing but complaining:

• Cats:
  • Despite criticisms that Jennifer Hudson is too young to play the elderly Grizabella at 37, the first actresses to play her on stage (Elaine Paige in London, Betty Buckley in New York) were actually younger at only 33 and 34 respectively. The make-up on stage conveyed the White-Dwarf Starlet look fine and the suspension of disbelief is easier to take on stage. In the film, it's just Jennifer Hudson's very youthful face on a normal cat's body, making the Adaptational Attractiveness all the more apparent.
  • The stage musical is similarly divisive upon opening because of how strange and bizarre it is, but the experience of seeing it in theater made the spectacle worth watching. However, the film tries so hard at realism that it falls into the Uncanny Valley. The actors are scaled down to miniature and their faces on realistic cat fur in contrast to the make-up and choreography that is more evocative than literal.
  • Lindsay Ellis claims that certain controversial creative decisions can already be seen in Tom Hooper's previous Broadway musical adaptation, Les Misérables (2012):
    • Hooper defends his choice of making the titular cats more realistic. While this decision worked for Les Miserables, which is a fairly grounded musical to begin with, Cats is one of the gaudiest and most surreal musicals to ever be performed on Broadway, and any attempts at realism miss the point of the play and plunge it into the Uncanny Valley.
    • The All-Star Cast of Les Miserables was replicated, but whereas Les Miserables has a constantly rotating cast which can allow for many big names to appear, in Cats every character is on stage for the duration of the entire play. This forced Hooper to turn Macavity into a more solid antagonist to get the A-Listers out of the way, as many of them have busy schedules that prohibit them from being on set for long periods of time in addition to high salaries and various demands. In addition, said celebrities wanted to perform group numbers solo, thus lowering their quality.

I don't remember this being discussed in the TRS thread, so what's the rule for how far back an "issue" with the franchise has to go for it to be a Franchise Original Sin? For example, the first example in FranchiseOriginalSin.Pokemon talks about an issue that has only existed since the 6th generation. To me, that sounds like an issue with the newer games, not the franchise as a whole.

Also, how similar must the issue be from the start of the series to the present? One example from FranchiseOriginalSin.SpongeBobSquarePants says the sin is about gross-out humor. An example from later seasons is Spongebob getting a huge gross splinter (gif from the episode here), while the example from early seasons is...Spongebob's breath smelling. While you can argue that both are about gross-out humor, one example is taken to such an extreme that you can't compare the two.

I think "original sin" implies it was the first era of the franchise, or at least the earliest revered one.

I do think old SpongeBob had some gross out humor but the animation got more bizarre in later seasons and that's why it got grosser. But the idea that the old show had no gross humor isn't quite accurate.

Edited by mightymewtron on Jun 19th 2021 at 7:50:04 AM

Related to the above, YMMV.Crash Twinsanity has this example:

Franchise Original Sin: A common complaint about the Radical Entertainment games was the series getting increasingly Denser and Wackier, and many characterization changes. However, at least some of it can be attributed to this game starting it, since the game itself is more humor-based than the previous titles. The difference is that many argue that this game wasn't as immature about its humor, and this game managed to play with the character personalities in ways many felt added to them.

Edited by RainbowPumpqueen on Jun 19th 2021 at 9:40:03 PM

Yeah I think it should only apply to the truly first stuff. Any later feels like its not part of the original.

Well, since there are two redirects called "Dork Age Foreshadowing" and "Foreshadowing the Dork Age", I don't think the "original sin" part was intended to imply it's only for earlier installments.

Redirects used to be free-actions, so, I wouldn't put much stock into them.

Really? I didn't know that.

Still, Tropes Are Flexible, and that would just raise the question of what to do with the examples that aren't from early installments. At the very least, it's less of a hassle to leave them be.

Bump. I was going to take this entry from the GTA subpage to the Wall of Text cleanup, but I don't even know if it's legit:

• The Orbital Cannon introduced with the Doomsday Heist update proved to be The Last Straw for many players in terms of Rockstar's reliance on microtransactions to support the game, as well as what was seen as their pandering to griefers, such that Adam Wears of Cracked cited it as purely a tool for rich jerkasses and cheaters to ruin people's games with. This weapon was merely the culmination of issues that had been building with the game's business model for a while by that point:
  • The rising prices of DLC items, which were inevitably superior to those that came before, first became a noticeable problem with the San Andreas Flight School update. Before then, new vehicles and weapons tended to be expensive, but not outrageously so; even the most exotic vehicles like supercars, monster trucks, and classic cars typically cost no more than $500-750,000, with most of the content costing significantly less (often less than $100,000). Flight School introduced three aircraft that each cost well over a million dollars, but even then, these were aircraft, so it made sense that they'd be expensive. It made less sense for the Technical added in the Heists update, an old pickup truck with a machine gun mounted in the back that nevertheless cost almost a million dollars even with a discount. Before long, vehicles that cost seven or even eight figures were the norm for new updates, while vehicles that cost less than a million dollars grew few and far between. In fact, by converting in-game GTA dollars to real money based off of Shark cards, one can find that certain vehicles cost more than the price of the game itself. Yup, 60 dollars for the entire game, another 60 dollars for a car in the game.
  • Starting with the Offices in the Further Adventures in Finance and Felony update, the game also began introducing new, expensive, specialized safehouses that were required to access many new missions, the prices of which very quickly ran into the millions of dollars. The Orbital Cannon is essentially a mega-purchase that costs at least $2.65 million worth of in-game currency^note The combined price of the cheapest Facility ($1.25 million base price, with the most expensive Facility having a base price of $2.95 million), the Facility upgrade that unlocks the Orbital Cannon ($900,000), and a manually-aimed shot from the weapon ($500,000, with an auto-aimed shot costing $750,000) just to fire once, which is earned through either hours' worth of grinding or by purchasing a Whale Shark card (worth $3.5 million in in-game currency) for $49.99 in real money — or by taking advantage of exploits, which honest players don't like one bit. And on that note...
  • Trollish weapons and vehicles. As mentioned above, the Flight School update added purchases over a million dollars, but hey, all it came down to were a few aircraft that, due to lack of weapons, made it a nice tool to cruise around the map with at best. It first became a problem when the Heists update allowed players to purchase the Hydra fighter jet. The Hydra very quickly replaced the Rhino tank as the vehicle of choice for griefers, much to the annoyance of everybody else, but it was possible to counter the Hydra and shoot it down with the homing launcher. Later weaponized vehicles such as the Ruiner 2000 (a Serial Numbers Filed Off version of K.I.T.T.), the Vigilante (a Serial Numbers Filed Off version of the Batmobile), the Oppressor (a jet-powered motorcycle with wings allowing it to fly some distance), and various attack helicopters became an even bigger pain. The growing number of new missions that required working in free roam, rather than in a separate instance, also afforded griefers the opportunity to derail other players' mission progress by attacking them with one of these overpowered weapons, such that many fans suspected that Rockstar was encouraging griefers in order to push other players towards using the aforementioned microtransactions to get around the grind. The Doomsday Heist update brought the anger to a crescendo with the Orbital Cannon, the only use for which is to troll other players; it can only be fired from a fixed location inside the player's Facility (so you can't break it out as a superweapon while on a mission), and it inflicts a One-Hit Kill Death from Above attack that can wipe out entire groups of players and is virtually impossible to avoid unless you're hiding in your safehouse or playing in passive mode (which blocks all damage from and physical contact with other players, but locks players out from using weapons and participating in free-roam missions). As the icing on the cake, the Doomsday Heist update also introduced the Deluxo, a flying Delorean lookalike that can have machine guns and homing rockets mounted to it.

For what it’s worth, here are all the dedicated subpages:

• Anime
  • Dragon Ball
• Comic Books
• Film
  • Alien
  • Batman Films
  • Friday the 13th
  • The Godfather
  • Halloween
  • Jurassic Park
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe
  • Terminator
  • X-Men Film Series
• Live-Action TV
  • American Idol
  • Doctor Who
  • Game of Thrones
• Multiple Media
  • Danganronpa
  • Harry Potter
  • Pokémon
  • Resident Evil
  • Sonic the Hedgehog
  • Star Trek
  • Star Wars
• Video Games
  • BioWare
  • Fallout
  • Fate/Grand Order
  • Final Fantasy
  • Fire Emblem
  • Grand Theft Auto
  • Kingdom Hearts
  • Super Mario Bros.
  • Super Smash Bros.
  • World of Warcraft
• Western Animation
  • SpongeBob SquarePants
  • The Simpsons

I decided to have a look at the Pokémon page.

This is a wall of text, and the last sentence (emphasis mine) is more about Game Freak going forwards-then-backwards, rather than continuing an "original sin".

Also, the entry about Pika-clones goes on for way too long and becomes an exhaustive list towards the end.

Edited by NitroIndigo on Jul 1st 2021 at 4:10:52 PM

Bringing up the following example from Black Widow (2021):

• Franchise Original Sin: Taskmaster's depiction, which bears no resemblance to the comic character, has been the subject of controversy among fans since the first concept art came out, and particularly exploded once people finally watched the film and learned the full details of just how different the character is. At the same time, the level of change (and even the details of the change) are no different than what Ghost ^note (who, like Taskmaster, is The Faceless, an Ensemble Dark Horse, Creepy Awesome, and even has a similar skull/ghost theme and tendency to work in the same circles) went through in Ant-Man and the Wasp. While the changes to Ghost didn't go without criticism, Ava Starr is generally regarded as being a solid enough character that it justifies the change. The difference, as it were, is that Taskmaster is significantly more popular and, unlike Ghost, actually possessed enough backstory and characterization details in the source material that the changes to them stand out much more, as opposed to the Ghost literally not having a known secret identity or unmasked appearance in the comics.
  • There's also the fact that by virtue of being another brainwashed assassin under Dreykov's command for a grand majority of the movie, the MCU incarnation of Taskmaster has virtually no agency or notable personality to speak of that can make them stand on their own two feet as a character in their own right. Whereas the MCU incarnation of Ghost is a Rounded Character with their own motivations and a distinct personality who maintains her agency as a character throughout the events of Ant-Man and the Wasp.

There's these on YMMV.Young Justice:

Reposting one more time for feedback:

emeriin deleted this from The Nostalgia Critic:

• One of the most base-breaking aspects of the post-2013 videos are the Mid-Review Sketch Show cutaway gags, with many feeling that they take too much time away from the reviews. However, sketches are nothing new to the series and have been featured since the early days, and some episodes from what's considered the "classic" era like Home Alone 3 featuring recurring segments that wouldn't feel too out of place in the modern videos. The difference is that sketches in the earlier reviews were used more sparingly and not in nearly every episode; they were also much shorter, lasting up to half a minute at most, and also only focused on Critic himself, while modern sketches are in most reviews, can take up to a few minutes, and focus on gags between new additions Malcolm and Rachel (later on, Tamara), which could often extend a review to over 40 minutes. With all this new focus on sketches, one could say that post-revival Critic is a Spiritual Successor to his now-scrapped show Demo Reel, which received a lot of backlash even from fans.

Their juxtaposition being "there were whole episodes dedicated to sketches, Ruxpin for example (others can deal with the rest, but I know this isn't true)"

I don't know if I fully agree, because even the older sketches in episodes were never as extensive production-wise as the modern-day ones, and there were fewer sketch-heavy episodes and the Teddy Ruxpin one was more of an outlier. With the new definition, they easily could have just rewritten this to cut the "The difference is..." bit, though I guess they didn't know about the retool yet. Should I re-add it without that bit?

Edited by mightymewtron on Aug 6th 2021 at 1:07:56 PM

Go ahead, you know more about the Critic than I do considering I stopped watching him when the whole #ChangeTheChannel thing happened.

Cool. There's actually a lot of entries on that page and many of them need a rewrite post-TRS, if they don't need to be cut altogether for being nothing but complaining:

• Franchise Original Sin:
  • The reboot's penchant for more offensive jokes isn't new, if you go back to 2007/2008 videos you can see a lot of casual rape jokes, homophobic jokes and sexist jokes (like the Hottest Women list calling sexual harassment fun). Thing is, he got better with that – Patch Adams for instance spent a lot of time pointing out the misogyny of the film, Homoerotic Subtext increased, and there's even been reboot episodes like Fury Road that have abusive men as the villains – so people are really just confused why episodes like Catwoman and Sailor Moon exist. I think NC has always been inconsistent on gender issues like this. Is it something that's been called out more recently? And can that be attributed to anything more than a culture shift?
  • Reviews on later films. The Critic did review films from the 2000s prior to the retool, but the difference there is they were usually from the earliest part of the decade (2000-2002) with a few movies occasionally being from after such as Baby Geniuses (2004) or TMNT (2007). The difference was that these were either special requests or one-offs, or they were still relevant to "nostalgic" media, typically being reboots. He would also often talk about characters, films, and specials from later times in his countdown lists, but this was usually given more leeway due to still featuring nostalgic works as well being mixed in. Now in his modern videos, he primarily talks about movies from the later 2000s and 2010s and even movies still in theaters (the latter of which he promised not to review, only to break it in protest of the video takedowns), which has made some people wonder why it's still called "The Nostalgia Critic" due to it being an Artifact Title. Tweak to remove the complaining. Also it's an easy explanation for why he's still called "The Nostalgia Critic": because his audience has nostalgia for 2000s movies now, plus most of the recent movies are connected to nostalgic franchises like superhero films. Those that aren't are special requests, much like the old times.
  • The jabs at things Doug Walker doesn't like. The Critic has always employed these jabs, it's just that the newer reviews use them a lot more often, and they tend to be much harsher. I think the newer reviews just have more time for Take That!. I also don't know if they're that much harsher, just more intense and drawn-out.
  • It was pretty obvious from the beginning that Doug Walker has basically no formal education in film or film analysis; going back to his first reviews, many of them had pretty shallow criticism, bad research, or him missing the point. It wasn't problematic in his early days because he was both one of the only games in town in terms of video-based film reviews and analysis, especially considering his schedule, and he (by nature of his format) chose films that were soft targets for criticism and not widely discussed or defended, like Batman & Robin or The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. When he started doing reviews of recent or popular films, the limitations of his style and skills as a reviewer became a lot more evident, especially with the dozens of film critique and review channels by people who actually studied film professionally or as a hobby, be they students, critics, or even filmmakers, that have popped up in the intervening years. All of this came to a head with his widely-panned review/parody of the 1982 film adaptation of Pink Floyd's The Wall, which received plentiful criticism for providing only surface-level analysis of the movie, failing to demonstrate proper research (such as apparently ignoring the fact that the album predated the movie by roughly 3 years), and missing much of the point of the original album. Even in light of Walker making it clear that he himself enjoyed the album and simply thought the movie was a bit full of itself at times, his video on The Wall has been touted as a microcosm of several long-persisting issues with his content that made themselves more than apparent here. It doesn't help that the focus of the show has obviously shifted from laughing at the character's bad critiques to expecting the audience to take his word as gospel no matter what, nor does the fact that Doug apparently disregards his own criticisms whenever he feels like it. Holy Wall of Text, Batman! Anyway I think most of this relies on Seinfeld Is Unfunny and not Franchise Original Sin, and if it could be tweaked at all, it could be that he was not originally meant to be a serious critic and was a comedian first. The only reason that doesn't land as much now is because he also does some more legitimate criticisms too.
  • The weaknesses in the show's filming (bad special effects, amateur cinematography, cheap production values) are a weird case, in that they've undeniably improved from where they were when the series began. But when the series began, it was one guy in front of a camera riffing on movie clips; the humor came from the movie first, the guy's jokes second, and any sketches or stuff that required actual filming a distantly third bonus. When later reviews, especially post-revival, upped the number and length of those sketches considerably (to the point of taking up the entire review in reviews of recent films, due to Doug's policy of recreating clips as sketches rather than waiting for the home release^note presumably due to him not wanting to be Screwed by the Lawyers), while they did improve, their lacking quality became a lot more evident. It also became a lot harder to use Stylistic Suck as a defense when the Critic has become a more legitimate enterprise with a studio and an actual budget, but still uses the same cheap Halloween costumes and bad green screen. It's kind of a given that his budget improved with popularity. The structure between the two review styles here is so different that I don't even know if it counts as Franchise Original Sin.
  • Doug's humor as well. While a lot of it came from the Critic reacting to the movie, being based around a Manchild who hates any film he watches, it's only gotten a lot more harsh as well since the revival. The Critic is also not the one mostly getting hurt, as he more causes pain to others rather than getting hurt himself. The Critic used to get a considerable amount of Laser-Guided Karma than he currently does for acting like an ass, but now other people do who probably didn't even deserve it. Considering most other review shows like his generally have the hosts being nice people that the audiences can latch on to, this only stands out further. I don't even really see the part that fits this trope, it just looks like complaining that the show is a Sadist Show.

This was just added to Teen Titans:

• Franchise Original Sin: The show is often credited for Starfire's whitewashed portrayal in subsequent media. Prior to the show, despite being an alien, Starfire was drawn with Ambiguously Brown features (most notably, her curly hair), giving another layer to her Dark and Troubled Past of being captured and enslaved (which included implied sex slavery). However, the show would then portray Starfire as an orange anime girl with straight hair while also making her outfit and backstory Tamer and Chaster. Since then, many of Starfire's portrayals have been closer to the cartoon due to its impact on pop culture.

Not anymore. A recent TRS voted to cut that requirement to reduce complaining.

Edited by mightymewtron on Aug 6th 2021 at 10:12:37 AM

I've linked the cleanup thread to the main page, for what it's worth. Now, anyone willing to tackle FranchiseOriginalSin.Fate Grand Order?