Once Original, Now Common cleanup (formerly "Seinfeld" is Unfunny)

Once Original, Now Common, formerly known as Seinfeld Is Unfunny, is a mess. There are issues with rampant natter, complaining, gushing, some walls of text, indentation issues, Speculative Troping (mainly in the form of entries that say "a modern person might look at this and think it's old hat") and sometimes misuse, with entries sometimes not explaining why something would be considered "old hat" today (entries that only explain how revolutionary something is could probably be moved to Genre Turning Point anyway.)

This thread has been created per an ATT to help clean up these problems and more.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Dec 9th 2023 at 1:57:48 PM

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I deeply apologize for contributing to the Seinfeld Is Unfunny mess in the years I've been on the site. I agree it needs a cleanup, because it's being misused for "something that was groundbreaking but it's now bad".

Oh no that's fine. Everyone makes mistakes, my first edit to this site was a borderline ZCE.

Anyway, here's a questionable entry:

• Beavis and Butt-Head debuted in 1993, at a time when the Animation Age Ghetto was still very strong, and The Simpsons was just breaking through, while still remaining relatively family-friendly. Beavis and Butt-Head on the other hand was shocking and caused a panic among the Moral Guardians, being one of only a very very few animated programs that didn't target children. Nowadays we have Family Guy, South Park, the entire [adult swim] lineup, and countless other "Late Night Cartoons", to the point that Beavis and Butt-Head looks tame, and downright corny by comparison. On top of that, the main reason it got such a diehard fanbase was because of all the shock and panic it caused (a lot of it undeserved). Now, years removed from the hype, explaining to today's kids what's so great about it is flat-out impossible. With that in mind, it isn't too much of a surprise that the 2011 revival only lasted one season. Let's face it: before B and B, the "ignorant 14-year-old with no future" trope had virtually disappeared from popular fiction. Not only that, but this show was maybe the first on television to accurately portray the average 14-year-old's sex drive. Or the average 14-year-old boy's at any rate.

I bolded some useless natter at the end of this entry, but the whole thing is a complaining mess. What should be done?

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I'm going to go off the definition of SIU that is something that was groundbreaking/innovative at the time of release, but since has been co-opted so many times that the original doesn't seem that original anymore.

In that vein, I'm not sure B&B is the best example for the trope. It wasn't particularly innovative or groundbreaking at the time, it was mostly just shock factor at the time. The example even says its shock factor has diminished over time, which I feel is another trope that I can't quite name.

The bolded part is a def cut, and I'm not too keen on the example in general (though it's not a hill I'll die on).

I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me

Also, after looking at the pages, I notice that each subpage starts off with several very general (i.e. "most Underground Comics do X"). The Music suppage even has an entire General Examples folder.

I don't feel that these belong at all under Examples Are Not General and should be cut.

I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me

I cut the Beavis and Butt-Head example.

Maybe some of the general examples can be saved if they can be reworked into specific examples? Like the "breaking guitars" bit from the music subpage. Maybe it can be reworked into an entry about whoever originally did it first?

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While we ponder that, take a look at this folder from the Music section:

• Grunge suffers from this:
  • Nirvana and Pearl Jam making it big in the early '90s is heralded as a breath of fresh air, breaking the stranglehold hair metal had on mainstream rock and paving the way for grunge and alternative rock's ascendance from the College Radio ghetto. Today, however, it is hard to avoid Nirvana, Pearl Jam, or their millions of rip-offs on the radio for even 15 minutes.
  • By the time Pearl Jam released Riot Act, quite a few younger music fans accused the band of being a Creed ripoff. (It helps that Creed singer Scott Stapp has a voice which sounds exactly like Eddie Vedder's)
  • Even Nirvana, and a number of other popular alt-rock/grunge groups, were highly influenced by The Pixies. Kurt Cobain even admitted that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was his attempt at ripping-off of a Pixies song, specifically "Debaser" from Doolittle.
  • If anything, Nirvana is an inversion. It's amazing how many younger people you will see wandering around malls and other public environments wearing Nirvana t-shirts despite not being anywhere close to being born at the time Hair Metal was considered the norm for hard rock, and thus being able to appreciate how much Nirvana (and other popular alternative bands at the time) managed to kill an entire genre of rock music that had long gone stale almost overnight.

It goes all over the place, then circles back to Nirvana being an inversion...

Thoughts?

I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me

Here's one of the examples I contributed to on SeinfeldIsUnfunny.Anime And Manga

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• The Tsundere archetype originally emerged as a reaction to the popularity of Yamato Nadeshiko characters in Japanese culture and started as a simple reversal of it, featuring a prickly exterior and soft interior instead of a submissive exterior and assertive interior. However, throughout the 2000's it became so widely imitated and exaggerated that it's now seen as a cliché for anime as a whole. Today, the few tsundere characters that are still well-regarded are more deconstructive takes that tone down the harshness through character development.

---

While heavily edited now (it used to be a bloated Wall of Text), it's still basically complaining about the Tsundere archetype, and this was a BIG deal back in the 2000s and early 2010s.

So yeah, it's general AF, it's (as you point out) bashy, and as written, it doesn't seem to be an example.

Bearing in mind that I know little of anime history, was there a show where the Tsundere archetype debuted? And was that show highly regarded in its time, only to be seen as nothing special now?

If there's a show, lets use that as an example, as long as it fits the rest of the criteria.

I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me

Yeah I'm the one who did the rewrite; I generally don't follow the general anime fandom that much, so I'm not super-invested in the popularity of the tsundere archetype; I was focused more on re-explaining the point's, erm, points in a more digestible format. I wouldn't be too sore with seeing the point cut.

On that note, it does go into a recurring problem with figuring out how to define Seinfeld Is Unfunny. The Laconic section summarizes it as innovative works getting so overly-imitated that they seem derivative to newer audiences, but in common practice most cases seem to be "the work was so influential that the things that originally made it innovative are lost on modern audiences." Heck I was convinced that the trope was about that until today.

Be kind.

There are three anime that made the Tsundere archetype popular as it is today: Love Hina, Fate/stay night and Shakugan No Shana (the latter of which gave birth to Shana Clone).

Edited by DivineFlame100 on Sep 5th 2021 at 4:59:16 AM

Regarding the point about Rockers Smash Guitars, you could probably rewrite it to focus on The Who, who popularized it to the extent of being the page image for that trope.

As for the grunge one, I can't really tell if there's a good way to approach it. If we do accept the "once innovative, now novelty-less" version of Seinfeld Is Unfunny, you could maybe rewrite it to focus on how, despite maintaining a following today, the stuff that initially made Nirvana popular are now lost on an audience generationally removed from stuff like the Hair Metal boom and the Milli Vanilli lip-syncing scandal. To newer listeners, they're more "another good classic rock band" rather than "the voices of a generation."

Be kind.

Seems like it's trying to describe two separate tropes then?

• One is the notion that a Trope Codifier or genre popularizer has been so copied and repeated over time that modern audiences would find the work itself derivative or trite. This appears to be the intended aim for the trope.
  • The thing with e.g. Tsundere does seem potentially valid, if we're distinguishing between early examples and popularisers of a genre and those of a trope. i.e., a work as a whole might not count as Seinfeld Is Unfunny, but the way it introduces or uses something in particular is. But that's close to Unbuilt Trope? Not sure there's a general trope evolution lifecycle.
• A specific type of Values Dissonance where the reason a work or creator was popular at the time of its release is no longer familiar to modern audiences, even if the work is.

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EDIT: Yeah, I'm wondering if the trope has a clear enough definition. Alot of what I'm seeing in the page is "This was wildly popular, but now isn't"

Edited by laserviking42 on Sep 5th 2021 at 8:31:29 AM

I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me

Didn't this sort of thing happen with the now-defunct "Deader Than Disco" trope, where it was misused as "it was once popular, but now it isn't"? I also remember A LOT of the former examples moving to Seinfeld Is Unfunny after the former was deemed too much of a mess.

Hmm. Maybe this does need TRS.

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Feels like it's not a case of bad entries so much as bad entries plus definition ambiguity.

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I thought Deader than Disco's problem was that it was being misused for instances where shows literally made fun of Disco music. It's now Condemned by History, which I believe was also gone through to remove the nattery portions.

I think we're in broad agreement as to what Seinfeld Is Unfunny is about here. If someone can show misuse via a wick check then we could take it to TRS, but I'm not sure we're at that point just yet.

In my view, the main issue with the page is that it deals with once popular works, and this seems to invite endless speculation as to old shows, music trends, the nature of popularity, etc. The examples are sprawling everywhere as people seem compelled to bash/praise old works, new works, change, whatever's on their mind.

I think the crux of the trope is: Works that were innovative when released, but now seem derivative, mostly due to multiple other works co-opting that innovation.

Thoughts on the definition?

I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me

I guess the only real point of confusion is determining how we define "seems derivative." As in, does this exemplify enough of the clichés of its imitators to feel, well, comparatively cliché? Does it feel like the bare minimum compared to later works? Is it just a case of it no longer feeling as novel/special/standout/revolutionary as it used to (regardless of its actual quality)? Et cetera.

I understand that Tropes Are Flexible, but it'd be good to define the range of flexibility here so we can better draw the line between that and Square Peg, Round Trope.

Edited by bowserbros on Sep 5th 2021 at 9:24:16 AM

Be kind.

It's still worth thinking if "Was popular for reasons that modern audiences wouldn't be aware of even if it's still popular" is a trope, as the page seems to have examples of that too—e.g. Nirvana cited above—which would be useful for launching a new page, in my opinion. It's definitely related; there's a good chance that such things would spawn copycats, which might lead to Seinfeld Is Unfunny.

On the flip side, a sufficiently old Long Runner can also easily qualify; from memory The Simpsons is a parody of a sitcom genre/dynamic that went out of favour partly because of it?

Hm, or is that too similar to Genre-Killer?

I have literally never written anything for TLP and wouldn't know where to start except by rambling.

Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 5th 2021 at 6:17:58 PM

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Maybe "seems derivative" isn't quite the best wording, perhaps "no longer seems fresh and innovative" is better. Taking the trope namer, Seinfeld is still enjoyable, and certainly still has its fans. But the things that Seinfeld pioneered, the unsympathetic protaganists, plots based entirely on observational humor, etc, have all been since done and redone. Basically kids watching it today just don't see what the fuss is all about.

If you feel that it should be a new trope, that's certainly worth developing over on TLP. However, for Seinfeld Is Unfunny, I think we should narrow our focus here, rather than sprawl this thread into other discussions.

I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me

I'm assuming The Force Awakens doesn't fit this trope?

What did it do that was unique at the time, but is not anymore?

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More that people who weren't there won't be able to appreciate why it was such a big deal at the time than anything.

This trope is specifically about what works did that make them unique when they came out, but which aren't unique anymore. I don't think that example fits anywhere, not even Condemned by History which requires that the work now be disliked.

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