Later Installment Weirdness is inherently flawed

So Later-Installment Weirdness wants to be the opposite of Early-Installment Weirdness. At first glance it sounds okay, but upon further inspection this trope falls apart.

Early-Installment Weirdness is when the early part of a series is vastly different from the non-early (e.g. midterm to recent) segments. This works because the early parts won't stop being early no matter how much time passes in real life, and they will represent a smaller and smaller percentage of the show as time goes by. On the flipside, Later-Installment Weirdness fails. Imagine that Episode 60 of 80 marks the point where a series goes in a new direction. It would qualify as per the trope. But one year later many more episodes have aired, and now the turning point is Episode 60 of 120. At this point the show is half one thing and half another. I wouldn't say the show's current direction is unusual anymore. People probably have grown accostumed to it by now. Worse yet, three years later the turning point will be Episode 60 of 300. Now the show has been predominantly about the later direction. The notable trope now would be the opposite: the first sixty episodes are Early-Installment Weirdness. The later "weird" part has become the standard.

The trope becomes obsolete itself by the passage of time. That said, I appreciate the point the trope is trying to make: how series break their formulas and deviate in new directions. But we already have Breaking Old Trends for that, and that trope doesn't become obsolete by the passage of time because it's not saying how recent or late an aspect of a show is. It just marks the turning point, something that doesn't evolve or become outdated.

Edited by Gosicrystal on Jun 5th 2022 at 3:18:45 PM

Wouldn't that problem be solved by making it No Recent Examples, Please!? Just add a long enough waiting period to make sure that the work is actually over and you're good.

A restriction to only allow works that have ended would probably be a good idea as well.

Yeah, I agree OP. Just glancing at the page and I already saw several examples that were blatant misuse. NREP might help, but then we'd still have examples like the Bonanza one, which has five subbullets.

Edited by Hello83433 on Jun 5th 2022 at 1:16:59 PM

Honestly, most examples I see are of shows long concluded already so there is hardly a rampant problem in that respect. While I agree a specific example shouldn't be placed immediately following a certain season, the scale of the trope is such that you are making broad observations about the content of a show and that is going to leave ambiguity about how severe the weirdness is. When a show is sufficiently a Long Runner there is enough material to go by that you can say with confidence there is a shift between the time the show became "iconic" and when it moves beyond that. The Simpsons can apply because the sheer volume of content leaves plenty of comparisons between seasons 1-5 with seasons 15-30. The examples I see that don't really qualify is Power Rangers, as being a Series Franchise means there is a constant change of tone year to year already and just highlighting one or two series with unusual qualities isn't really the trope.

The Bonanza example seems to be partial misuse at least to me, mainly describing "things this season did differently".

The only one that seems to fit in my eyes is the season 12 bullet.

I agree with Infitroper. LIW should really be restricted to series that have concluded.

I can get behind the restriction that only finished series are allowed.

Later-Installment Weirdness should be restricted to concluded works.

I don't think this trope needs TRS then, it just needs a visit to the No Recent Examples, Please! thread.

Yup, I checked some of the examples and like the ones for Arthur and The Fairly OddParents! are just "This show transitioned to Flash in its later episodes" (also mentioned in the Caillou example), which should go under Art Evolution and not there.

Why can't Art Evolution overlap with it?

Has the Nostalgia Critic gotten to the point where the entire pre-Demo Reel era can be considered Early-Installment Weirdness.

Given that it's an ongoing series that hasn't ended, it wouldn't count under that proposed new criteria.

That's why I asked for it to be moved from Late to Early

I don't think making this No recent examples is going to fix the issue though. As the OP and others have pointed out, there's an issue with works that have concluded, too. What does weirdness mean if the show has evolved over time along with its premise? For the examples in this post, the question isn't "why can't Art Evolution and this trope overlap" but "what qualifies as a valid overlap". Art style changing isn't inherently weird in of itself.

Early-Installment Weirdness seems to work because you can compare the rest of the show to those first few episodes and see what characters and premises were set-up and were seemingly dropped or phased out for what becomes the main characterization / narrative of the rest of the series. Later-Installment Weirdness doesn't really work the same. And the parts that do seem to fit the idea are already captured by more specific tropes that are already listed on the page like Denser and Wackier, Cerebus Syndrome, Breaking Old Trends, Jumping the Shark, and Flanderization.

Edited by amathieu13 on Jun 21st 2022 at 7:01:24 AM

I've added Later-Installment Weirdness to Tropes Needing TRS per and other comments.

So cut the page in case it gets TRS'd?

IF the TRS consensus decides that cutting is the best option.