Flanderization(en.wikipedia.org) |
Flanderization(en.wikipedia.org) |
As someone who's writing a series of increasingly-fictional books (see https://www.albertcory.io), I can see how easy it would be to flanderize the characters. Fortunately, I haven't had too much reader feedback about them, but I can imagine that if a whole lot of people said "Oh, I love Janet, she's so <trait>!" I'd be SO tempted to make sure that <trait> appeared every time she did. Give the people what they want.
At the same time, you know that if Janet ever displays <anti-trait> you'll get complaints that "Janet wouldn't do that." It's gotta be tough for a TV writer.
In the end, she has to make sense to you the writer, and if you have readers who only want <trait>, well... they'll have to come along with you, or leave.
I've thought about this idea (without knowing there was a term for it!) wrt aging in real life. So many people seem to become increasingly caricature as they get older. The guy who likes woodworking and European travel becomes the embodiment of woodworking and European travel. It's all he talks about. His kids roll their eyes at Thanksgiving -- there dad goes again. Etc.
I've been playing around with metaphors, trying to get the flavor of this. I like the one about multiplying two vectors together, where small vector elements shrink, larger vector elements get (relatively) bigger. The vector becomes a more exaggerated version of what it was. And it makes intuitive sense: he spends more time wordworking, wordworking activities crowd out non-wordworking activities, his social engagements intersect wordworking, more of his friends become woodworking friends, and slowly the gravity of his internal world pulls everything in that direction. Nothing sinister about it.
I thought: how would you prevent such a thing? And should you?
Anyway, I'm rambling. But I would welcome any further pointers that could enrich my thinking about this idea.
From your own perspective, you have less of an interest in pursuing entirely new projects because the horizon of good experiences from those gets shorter, and as you have said you also gravitate more experience towards the things you have pursued, which unlocks other experiences on its own.
Orson Scott Card once said that Asimov was one of the few writers who kept improving in old age, because most others would fall into the trap of indulging in their eccentricity and assuming that the image people had of them was already set in stone.
I'd say it's helpful to always keep a slight distance, even from things that become increasingly foundational to your life. True bitterness comes when you cease to believe that new generations are actually capable of enjoying their things the same way you did yours in your youth. As long as you don't lose your capacity for theory of mind or refuse to believe that time goes on, you'll be fine.
Fun fact: STDs are common in young adults and in 55+ communities - the reason behind this is left as an exercise for the reader.
https://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/news-05-20...
When you are younger, you have a community of people and friends who push, pull, and otherwise shape you.
When you are older, there is no community. That’s an oversimplification, but it’s close enough.
So there’s no pushback about “hey man, that’s enough about your hobby.” There’s no influence to curb any parts of your personality. It’s just you, instead of being in a health community, living in a kind of void, in between your interactions w others.
Now it’s true there are people (say, your parents) who continue to exert influence. But it’s like the number of people actively involved w you falls from 100, to like 5. In terms of true peers who are your age - they number may very well fall to 0. So the amount of eccentricity, or really indulgence of personal preference above every other consideration, skyrockets.
I'd like to believe this was true, but much of Asimov's late works, particularly the final "Gaia" sequels to Foundation, were terrible.
The sheer breadth of his output (which went way beyond robot scifi) is impressive though.
I used to call it the "Kramer Effect", much like you, without knowing it was called Flanderization and was using it in the early 2000s to describe my displeasure with the character Joey from Friends.
Joey went from kind of low intellect to full retard by the end of the show and very inexplicably.
It's not to say that tropes are bad but it's important to use it as a repository of easily accessible writing mistakes so you can quickly learn from the past and contextualize them for your own synthesis.
If you're a writer you should be trying to say something new, but you shouldn't try to make everything new. People would be confused and put off by something that was violating and subverting every trope in fiction, but they would be amused by something that subverts one or two tropes in an interesting way. And subversion isn't even necessary to be good fiction, you could imagine a well executed work that isn't pioneering, but is still quite satisfying.
Maybe, but from my experience I find the more time I spend on browsing through tvtropes in a certain week, the more I overthink my writing and get absolutely fuck all done.
Don't get me wrong, it's worthwhile to understand tropes, but its not going to make you a better writer instantly. And repeated exposure to an attention-sucking site like tv-tropes doesn't help. It'll maybe make you a slower more methodical writer, but that's not necessarily a good thing. You can always fix quite a bit in editing.
After I wrote the original comment, I started thinking, even if you accept that hobbies / skills / preferences are a vector, what is the model where it makes sense to multiply vectors together? Then I thought, what if every time people encountered each other there was a kind of vector multiplication, about the salient aspects of their vectors? And this resultant "encounter vector" served to motivate the encounter, and potentially update each person's original "personality" vector? And day-to-day life could sometimes result in self-multiplication, depending on what you're doing.
That seemed fruitful, though obv very incomplete. I mention it in case you want to return volley :)
In the beginning, you explore. Later, you exploit by doing more of the things you found fruitful.
If all else were equal, it might be fine to pick something you like and just exploit the hell out of it till death. But I don't think all else is equal. Perspectives on the world, skills, knowledge, versatility, resilience -- an anti-caricature penalty on all this stuff seems good in a whole bunch of ways, even if I concede that you might be leaving some unexploited fun on the table.
Like I said, I am open to being argued out of this opinion; but that's where I am so far.
I once had a chat with an exec-level nurse. Don’t remember how it came up, but she mentioned that growth comes with leaving a practice area once the butterflies in your stomach leave and comfort sets in. Her experience was this came at about a 5-year cadence. My experience so far is this advice was spot on.
https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capt...
Usage example: “London is undergoing strong Flanderization accelerated by Brexit.”
Turns out the Wikipedia definition is something pretty different!
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ForgotAboutHisPo...
Mythbusters used to be my all time favorite TV show for almost a decade. They had such interesting myths (lead balloon!), authentic characters and real builds that also went wrong at times, with some pretty random occurrences.
And then someone from Discovery‘s analytics department figured out they got the best ratings on some of their explosions.
Which lead to this incredibly thought-diverse show jumping the shark by pivoting to basically „let‘s find yet another excuse to blow stuff up“ in the last seasons. Yawn.
I guess it‘s really due to catering to the mainstream. Who said it so well again: A one-size-fits-all solution barely fits anybody.
^ for anyone who wants to go on a deep dive!
Community is a good example of that, all the characters definitely developed a lot, though some maybe went too far like Britta. Parks & Recreation is another one, some of the characters were actually just background extras like Retta and Jerry. The whole woodworking part of Ron also came from Nick's own background and built into the character.
Said newcomer is expected to behave in a certain way to fit into a particular spot that the group needs/allows, so it could become molded to that; while other (valuable) personality traits are just ignored/lost in the dynamic.
You could draw a line from chibi in the 80s to flanderization. Of course flanderization ties in with a lot of other concepts related to positive feedback loops that others here mention. I just think it's interesting that there is a history of the cartoonization of cartoons and that character features are chosen to match appearance/vice versa.
By Flanderizing a character after eight or nine seasons, you unlock a whole new set of jokes and plot points for writing another thousand shows.
I wouldn't even quote cashing in, the effect is just an artifact of chasing demand signal to improve revenue. It's the same as iterative agile development that chases short term demand signals and over time tries to optimize the aspects that bring in money. The underlying driver for all these effects is capitalism.
You see characters take on bigger or smaller roles over time depending on audience response often. Jar Jar was cut back drastically Star Wars 2 and 3 compared to 1. Some characters even get spin off shows, like Young Sheldon from Big Bang Theory.
In essence, they were all conceived as extremely flanderized and acquired complex traits over time.
Most of the later episodes where the focus isn't on Leonard and Penny, they are mostly about sex, or Penny asking Leonard whether something Sheldon said was a burn.
Howard is another obvious case. Goes from stereotypical creep to a more complex character and gets a crazy amount of screen time to deal with his issues. Then later on, he's mostly a whipped husband (largely caused by Bernadette being flanderized), but they give him some screen time where he's more than just a doormat for wife and a snark to every other male character except Leonard.
Most of the other main/recurring cast members have similar cases or go straight from A to C and skip B.
The comment about Rick and Morty actively avoiding the flanderizing of their characters seems a bit off, as the whole season 5 finale was the flanderization of Morty, where he (a version of him) self actualizes as blandly malevolent, likely acting on urges that Rick identifies a few episodes prior in Morty's weak dad (Jerry) as not nice, but predatory:
> "You act like prey, but you're a predator! You use pity to lure in your victims! That's how you survive! I survive because I know everything. That snake survives because children wander off, and you survive because people think, "Oh, this poor piece of shit."
If they were avoiding flanderizing Morty, they would seem to have just backed right into it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13353106
I'd accept that Flanders Computing is an offshoot of the overall much-later-coined flanderization process.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060512061148/https://tvtropes....
In some cases you could interpret it as the fact that early is a series the audience has very limited experience with a character’s personality. What seems like a minor trait could seem that way only because we haven’t had the opportunity to see more of a character and once we do it is shown to be a defining trait.
In fact this is not that different than real life. When you first meet someone you have no idea who they are, but after a few years in may be that initially minor (seemingly) aspects in fact run very deep. Using Ned Flanders as an example here actually fits real life perfectly: I have known people who are extremely religious with much of who they are, especially in their own minds, defined through their faith. Rarely is this obvious upfront. Like anyone else, the more I got to know them the more they revealed about who they are and how strong their beliefs are.
“YES! That was a massive hit! Now do it again!”
…and Sir-Mix-a-Lot has said routinely in interviews the more of the novel element but turned up wasn’t the best idea as a follow up to “Baby Got Back” the legit smash.
Let’s just say his next album’s lead single became a punchline in Aqua Teen Hunger Force as spoken by the Moonenites.
Such a talented fellow doesn't deserve to be an effective one-hit wonder.
I think PSY suffered from the same problem: the world (outside South Korea) wanted another Gangnam Style.
He moved into production and I learned he’s pretty close with the two main guys of Presidents of the United States of America (band - “Peaches” - “Lump”) and they make a living that way as studio cats & hired producers.
Too much talent for pop stars and touring!
I mean Charlie was always an idiot, except for maybe season 1.
Especially with content creation. People become the X person. The writing person. The growth hacker person. The data science person.
It almost pigeonholes you into being a one-trick pony. Platforms like TikTok and LinkedIn especially push flanderization in this light and good luck getting out to diversify yourself without a new account.
The more obvious example is politics though. There are certain exaggerated traits you associate with the most popular candidates because of how often you are exposed to them.
Instead, I write comments everywhere across several different threads in many forums. I am an expert in many topics. I find it more satisfying, and I have small micro audiences within each thread.
This is coming from someone whose blog has zero readers.
I have seen many characters in different comedies get dumber over subsequent seasons. Presumably this is because it's easier to wring comedy from people making bad decisions. Even Malcolm in the Middle -- a series centered around a boy with an in-show IQ of 165 -- had Malcolm making absolutely stupid decisions in the later seasons.
I am not sure to phrase my disagreement with such a statement because Rick oscillates between a few crazy states but Jerry has been pretty one-dimensional for most of the show's life.
Whether induced by the audience (external) or by the creator(s) internal.
He mentioned that he despises this with every inch of his being, but is forced to do so because YouTube's algorithm would dump the video otherwise.
I'm sure that I'm not the only one.
If it's abroad in Japan, I would say he's found a great way to hit mass appeal but still maintain his authentic and snarky takes on the country.
If it's Paolo from Tokyo, I'd say he's defensively changed over the years and has become much more focused on clicks over real substance.
If it's neither of them, then still give those two channels a watch, especially the stuff from several years ago.
News anchors, writers, country singers, etc. have all been doing the exact same thing for decades. Doubling down on simple characteristics that resonate with their target audience.
Rewatching early Simpsons episodes as someone who first saw Flanders post Flanderization: He’s a less compelling satire because it’s so nuanced, complex, and narrow.
He’s not the obvious bad person that Marcy D’Arcy is, but he’s also not the aspirational zen master that Wilson from Home Improvement is either. He’s just kind of a normal-ish OK guy who’s not a compelling foil to Homer.
Take his funniest characteristic (calling reverend Lovejoy at night) and make him a broad vehicle to satirize American Protestantism, and he’s actually a compelling character.
On the other hand, Lisa’s evolution kind of sucks.
Louise Mench was leading anti-bullying campaigns on Twitter and bullying people on Twitter for example.
And Quilliam are the ex-extremist Muslims who did a 180 and parroted whatever the weird anti-islam movement after 9/11 wanted to hear.
These were not sober thinkers led down a path by their audience.
> I knew there were limits to my desired independence, because, whether we like it or not, we all become like the people we surround ourselves with. So I surrounded myself with the people I wanted to be like. On Twitter I cultivated a reasonable, open-minded audience by posting reasonable, open-minded tweets
Every influencer sees their audience as reasonable & open-minded, every influencer thinks they only speak reasonable and open-minded thoughts. Meanwhile his pinned tweet is https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal/status/1545510413982474253, a smorgasbord of insight porn that's addressed to "his friends".
The article focuses on an extreme & obvious failure in weak authors and audiences; it's telling that he did not use his insight to dissect the relationship between he and his own audience.
Even sadder that it works.
Lately the writing has felt a lot lazier, and I guess they ran out of good Star Trek episodes(understandable since none have been made for almost 20 years now...) to "steal" because a lot of the episodes felt like gimmicks based on some action anime I never heard of, fucking Ocean's 11, superheroes, dragons(seriously?), etc.
The decline started once they had done what they could with it.
They were able to pull a good few seasons, but it starts looking as the same destructive jokes over and over.
I still watch it and enjoy it, but I feel a bit empty inside, it’s such a bleak view inside humanity…
You are gone have some stinkers in there, like dragons. Their take on heists was pretty damn awesome I have to say, very nice spin on the traditional heist. The dragons thing was terrible.
<<If they were avoiding flanderizing Morty, they would seem to have just backed right into it.
I am not sure if I agree. The show is not even. Some episodes are absolutely brilliant and some are very forgettable at best, but I can't really cast Morty as being flanderized since it is not main protagonist's sidekick, but 'evil morty'. And even then, it is not Umbrella Corporation level of evil, where it is apparently written somewhere down in the business plan, mission and strategy to be evil. He is evil based on the goals he chose for himself and what it takes to get him to those goals.
Not quite; it's a character development process, not a figure of speech. The final result might lead to the attributes being the sole reference for the whole, but what matters is the process.
I agree that a lot of late Asimov isn't as great as some of his foundational (heh) works.
It could be the case that it's not the usual way things go however, and instead of finding a perfect transformation instead an imperfect one loses some of the information (for example if you and I were to have this exchange in a language where one of us isn't comfortable and the other is). And I guess there's also the question of what to do with the resulting projections we get when we do get some.. are they part of feedback loops around the measure of engagement between people, perhaps? Can the measure of that projection become actionable in any meaningful way to either party? etc.
When challenged on it they responded that when they didn't their sales went down by a significant percentage.
I avoid any and all videos using the tactic because it feels crude, tho..
According to my mother, is because nobody in her retirement village is afraid of getting pregnant anymore.
To counter the anti-caricature penalty, there's also the stereotype of the older person that never found something to anchor them in life. This stereotype of an older person never found a hobby, friends, community, or partners and travels from place to place constantly searching and consuming. Most people are probably in the middle and most people relative to themselves probably become more focused with age.
And, like you said, some people would be happy being totally captured by woodworking / European travel, and wouldn't see it as a problem. And maybe some people would be happy in the anchorless, 100% drifting way, although I personally am suspicious of that -- if you have to choose, being a caricature is probably better than being completely un-anchored.
Somewhere today the concept of cultural patronage is still a thing. We the audience give you clicks and attention and see the ads that make you dollars, you the influencer play the role of an entertainer that gives us enjoyment for giving you our entertainment. We've identified what parts of you entertain us, so play your part, client.
And thus the influencer is in some ways the influenced.
If all you see are the click-optimized, by definition you are looking in the clicking arena where they will be the most present.
As B.F. Skinner might have predicted.
Flanders looks like a poor foil because we no longer see Homer's family as scandalous. He is indeed a good 'straight man' (in the comedic sense) but early Homer is no longer as goofy so we fail to see it.
He still is shitty to Tod, so it’s not like he’s a satirically perfect dad; he lives in a roughly equally sized home to Homer, so it’s not like some inequality comment. Everything is just a little off all in. Even within the context of Bush’s America.
I’ve heard that the idea behind Flanders was to invert the “wacky neighbor” trope (think Kramer) that was prevalent in sitcoms at the time.
Being a normal and competent father is what makes him a foil to homer. I think both versions of the character are good.
I’m not saying it’s bad, it’s just a little off and somewhat muddy, because the character is still so undeveloped.