Tropes

I’ll Make You Pay for What I Did!

/ Kiki Writes / Leave a comment

Drawing of an old school TV with antenna, a dark orange casing, brown legs, and a grey screen.This may be one of my favorite-for-the-wrong-reasons trope. It’s typically found in cop shows, but I’ve seen it in other genres as well.

The basic premise is simple. Someone who did a bad thing in the past has come back to seek revenge on the person who caught them doing the bad thing and/or got them in trouble for it.

A great example of this is the Simon & Simon episode “Double Play”. Rick and A.J. find themselves being framed and the list of suspects is just people they put in jail. None of these people are innocent; they all did what they served time for. Some of them hold grudges, some of them apparently don’t. But the person who framed them absolutely did it out of revenge.

Because they blamed Rick and A.J. for them going to jail.

I can’t count (well, I probably can, but I’m too lazy) the number of times someone rode into Dodge City on Gunsmoke looking for Matt Dillon because he put them in jail once and now they’re looking to get even. More than once did Steve McGarrett have to contend with a blast from the past coming back to exact revenge on Hawaii Five-O because he put them in prison for a crime they committed.

I think what I love the most about this trope is the absolute lack of self-reflection, the 100% denial to take any responsibility for their own actions that it depends upon. Sure, I made all of these dubious, unfortunate life choices, but you can’t honestly punish me for that, can you? How dare you! It’s hilarious. It’s an adult version of a temper tantrum. I was held responsible for my actions. I’ll show you!

I would love to say that it’s an unrealistic trope, but unfortunately, lower stake versions of this sort of thing happens all the time. People will do gymnastics that rival Simone Biles to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions, gladly trying to stick the landing of blaming the person who called them out. Amazing.

I’ve seen one good twist on this trope in an episode of Barney Miller called “The Vandal”. The detectives of the 12th Precinct arrive to find that their squad room has been vandalized, including graffiti specifically calling Barney an unmentionable name. While there’s plenty of speculation of who the culprit is, it turns out to be a man from Barney’s past seeking vengeance for the ticket Barney gave him for littering decades before, an incident that Barney can’t even remember.

The twist comes from the fact that the man isn’t necessarily seeking vengeance for being held responsible for his “crime”, but that because Barney insisted on holding him up to write such a petty ticket, the man missed his job interview which led to his life descending in a downward spiral.

One can argue that if the man hadn’t littered in the first place, he never would have gotten the ticket, but it also shows that Barney wasn’t always the compassionate, understanding leader that we had by that time come to know. It also illustrated how something that can be insignificant for one person, can be monumental for another.

However, this is a rare instance. Most of these people are going to continue to make our heroes pay for catching them.

And I’m going to enjoy every minute of it for all the wrong reasons.

Three More Tropes I Hate

/ Kiki Writes / Leave a comment

I am back once again with a healthy dose of negativity. I’ve already posted five tropes I hate, and it was only a matter of time before I got around to posting a few more. Why three and not five? Because I thought of three off the top of my head and decided to be irregular about it.

Just a reminder, these are my dislikes, not yours. If you disagree, that’s great. But don’t try to change my mind.

  1. Good Girl/Bad Boy– We know this story. She’s a good girl. If she’s young, she’s a good student, model child. If she’s older, then she’s sweet, possibly innocent, a hard worker, and rule follower. An occasional glass of wine is the most drinking she’ll do. He’s a bad boy. In school, he’s flunking grades and causing trouble. Outside of school, he continues his rule breaking ways, maybe straying into lawbreaking ways. He drinks, he smokes, he probably wears a leather jacket to show his disdain for authority. The idea behind the couple is an opposites attract situation. Of course the good girl would be attracted to the bad boy and vice versa. They both have qualities that the other admires and/or needs. The bad boy can loosen up the uptight good girl and the good girl can instill some discipline and respect in the bad boy. I suppose it’s all fine in theory, but too often it comes across as the “I can change him” fairy tale that’s been the unrealistic foundation of cis het relationships for far too long. Worse, the good girl so believes her love has changed her bad boy that she refuses to see that her man hasn’t transformed a lick, like in the Hawaii Five-O episode “Engaged to Be Buried”. He’s a daddy’s boy who killed your friend and threatened to kill your father. Why are you crying over him? Throw the whole man away.
  2. Oh no! A Girl!– I want to say that this trope has been left in the past, but I know better than to get my hopes up. The trope is a play on the woman in a man’s job stereotype. The men are so weirded out that there’s a GIRL in their midst doing a MAN’S job that their brains short out and they act like the biggest misogynistic assholes shat out of a writer’s pen. There are two main reasons that this trope makes my eye twitch. The first is that it makes the characters we’ve come to know and love unlikable, and in some cases barely indistinguishable from some of the jerks already dealt with in the series. The second is that the women are frequently written to be annoying in their insistence on proving they’re worthy of the job. While that does have the basis in some truth (women have to work twice as hard to be considered half as good), they don’t have to be aggravating about it. Between the men and the women being annoying, I’m irritated and can’t enjoy the episode. One twist on this trope was in an episode of Chopper One called “Deadly Carrier” in which Burdick was first surprised that the doctor was a woman and then proceeded to treat her with a disrespect he’d never show a male doctor. This was later played off as bickering for sexual tension, which means the episode just went from one of my hated to tropes to another.
  3. Let’s Add a Kid– It’s probably most popular to do on a sitcom. The original children are getting older and less cute, so let’s remedy that by adding new children. The Brady Bunch is probably the most notorious for this because of Cousin Oliver (the scapegoat for the show’s cancellation even though the obvious declining quality of episodes is right there), but other shows have done it, too. On Roseanne, the kids were all grown or nearly so when she decided she wanted another baby and they ended up with Jerry. On Step by Step, the blended family ended up with a half-sister when the six kids started hitting puberty. Even Little House on the Prairie featured an influx of orphaned children when Mary and Laura got married and Carrie was one of the older kids at the schoolhouse. The one that irks me the most is on Family Matters. The Winslows started out with three kids -Eddie, Laura, and Judy- and Harriet’s sister Rachel had a baby named Richie. They ended up writing Judy off the show (pretty much Chuck Cunninghamed her) claiming they didn’t have enough stories for her, but then when Richie got older a few seasons later, he suddenly acquired a friend named 3J that ended up living with the Winslows. Didn’t even utilize all of the children they had, but still had to get another one. Guess they thought no one would notice due to all of the Urkel happening at the time.

Do these trope dislikes age me? Make me come across as a crusty, disgruntled old woman?

Good.

There will be more.

Five TV Tropes I Love

/ Kiki Writes / Leave a comment

Since I already ran off at the mouth about five tropes I hate (with the promise of more), it’s only fair that I give the tropes I love the same treatment. As with the hated tropes, these are in no particular order because you can’t rank love.

Elaborate Schemes- If you’ve ever listened to Book ’em, Danno, you already know this. I adore elaborate schemes, the wilder the better. They don’t have to make sense. They don’t have to be practical. They just have to be bold. That’s why Wo Fat is one of my favorite villains. The man has a gift for theatrics. I’ve raved about his long-game frame job. But Hawaii Five-O is full of great plans and grand schemes. Elaborate plans to rob banks and steal diamonds and commit murders. There are times they border on ridiculous and unnecessary. There are times they absolutely cross that line. Sometimes they end up an absolute mess and don’t make much sense at all. None of that matters to me. A for effort. Get complicated. Get weird. I’m in.

Doppelgangers- That Wo Fat frame up included a doppelganger and that is also my joy. A doppelganger plot, regardless of what kind of show it’s on, is going to be ridiculous. Sitcoms frequently use the Prince and the Pauper set-up, sometimes literally. Davy took the place of a shy prince in order to win him the girl. Ginger’s doppelganger Eva Grub ended up on the island with the castaways and after a make-over, went back to civilization to take over Ginger’s career. Gilligan also came face to face with a spy with his face. And Mr. Howell had his own dealings with an imposter bearing his likeness. In retrospect, there were a lot of doppelgangers on Gilligan’s Island. Of course, it’s said that everyone has one. Naturally occurring doppelgangers are great; created doppelgangers are better. These happen a lot on dramas. People impossibly surgically altered to look like someone else for nefarious purposes. It’s absolutely unlikely and totally ridiculous, which makes it that much better.

Improbable Countdowns- You know the drill. There’s five minutes, two minutes, thirty seconds left before the big terrible thing happens but somehow our heroes are able to beat the clock despite the fact that they ran out of time three times over easy and we all know it. Rarely are shows able to do what needs to be done in the allotted time and that’s fine. We’re not expecting 100% accuracy here. But there are times when it’s so egregious it’s laughable and those are the one I love the most. There’s an episode of Baywatch Nights in which Mitch, Ryan, and guest character Claire have to get off a rig that’s going to explode in 90 seconds and they use half of that time sitting and dialoguing. There’s no way they got to the railing in the time they had, but thanks to the law of TV countdowns, they had time to spare. And I’m not mad about it.

It Was All a Dream- I admit this is a controversial love, but stick with me here. There’s an episode of The Golden Girls where Blanche’s husband George appears to have faked his death, meanwhile, Sonny Bono and Lyle Waggoner are pursuing Dorothy relentlessly, straight up fighting over her. It’s a wacky episode and funny as hell. And it’s not until the end that’s it’s revealed that it’s all a dream, a recurring one that Blanche has which is rooted in some unresolved feelings she has surrounding her husband’s sudden death. It’s quite bittersweet when she reveals that this dream was different because she finally got to hug her husband as she usually wakes up before then, suggesting that she’s come to terms with an aspect of her grief. So, there are times in which those dreams episodes can be well done. But they don’t have to be for me to enjoy them. Saying an entire season of Dallas was a dream just to get Patrick Duffy back on the show and therefore fucking up canon across that universe is amazing for the chaos alone and I’ll ride with it. Also, St. Elsewhere‘s series finale? Come on. Some dreams are legendary.

The Rashomon Effect- Quick refresher: this is the device of telling the same story from the viewpoint of different characters and because people tend to interpret and remember their realities differently for various reasons, it can get pretty entertaining and messy. One of my favorite instances of this is in a Mama’s Family episode actually called “Rashomama”. Thelma ends up in the hospital thanks to a cookpot to the head and Ellen, Naomi, and Eunice all give their versions of what happened, which naturally paints each teller as a saint without fault. We never do learn exactly what happened and who put Thelma in the hospital. Gilligan’s Island uses the Rashomon Effect to retell the events of an episode we’ve already seen, painting each teller as the hero when we all know that Gilligan was the one who saved them, which is a pretty unique spin. CSI: Miami did a fun version of this having Ryan, Calleigh, and Eric investigate the same murder, each coming to a different conclusion from their evidence. Naturally, Horatio straightens things out and the correct killer is caught in the end. So, give me all of the viewpoints. I won’t get bored.

I admit that my love of some of these tropes is rooted purely in my love of the ridiculous and there’s no doubt that all of these have the potential to go off the rails. But I never said they were necessarily good or that they could be (and probably are) overused. I said that I loved them.

And I do.

Five TV Tropes I Hate

/ Kiki Writes / 2 Comments

During one of our Eventually Supertrain discussions, Dan suggested I write “10 TV tropes I Hate” and I decided to take his suggestion. However, I chose to cut the number in half. It felt a little aggressive to do ten.

I figure I can make a series out of this if I am so inclined.

And given how many tropes irritate me…

So, here they are in no particular order.

Five TV Tropes I Hate.

  1. The Bickering Couple -Blame the societal standard that het couples should detest each other. Married or dating or unresolved sexual tension, this seems to be the go-to way to show that two people are meant to be. Look at how they bicker with each other! Sure, couples bicker. They give each other shit. But if this is their sole way of communicating, it’s fucking annoying. I complained about this during the discussion of the Tales of the Gold Monkey episode that inspired this post. Jake and former-lover-turned-nun Bridget spent most of their conversations bickering, to the extent that if one of them said the sky was blue, the other one would disagree. That’s not chemistry. That’s grating. It’s hard to enjoy an episode when you’re irritated the entire time.
  2. Will They or Won’t They? -I don’t care. I don’t care about the arbitrary obstacles thrown in the couple’s way to prevent them from coming together and drag out the unresolved sexual tension as long as possible. I don’t care how they’re obviously meant for each other and any other human they interact with is an agent of the devil sent to prevent this holy union. It’s boring and takes up valuable screen time that could be spent on something more interesting, including getting these two characters together in a more creative way.
  3. A Good Ol’ Miscommunication -You know what I’m talking about. If one person would just talk to another person, it would all be worked out. Granted, the episode would only be about four minutes long, but still. I wouldn’t be subjected to all of the justifications of why this simple solution hasn’t happened yet. Same with seeing two characters interacting from a distance and then jumping to a conclusion. If this person is supposed to be close with one or both, wouldn’t they just ask? Yeah, they would. Because assuming makes asses of us all.
  4. Secretively Bratty Children -I’ve already discussed how I’m not big on children in TV shows to begin with. I feel they’re written so poorly. But of all of the TV children I despise, the secretly bratty kids make me wish it were possible to reach through the TV and slap someone. I’m not talking about the Eddie Haskells, who are shit to their fellow young people, but kiss asses to the adults. Nor am I talking about the spoiled kids whose parents will always defend them. I’m talking about the kids who are shitty to one adult in particular and then an angel to every other adult, making those adults doubt the other adult. Yes, this is a very specific hate. This sort of trope is usually played for laughs, but I’m not amused. My blood pressure is elevated just writing about it. I don’t advocate violence against children, but seriously, throw those kids in the trash. You think they’re cute now, but they’re going to grow up to be your least favorite coworker.
  5. No Sunglasses When It’s Sunny -This is less of a trope and more of a petty hill I will die on, but I think it’s absolutely ludicrous that you stick characters in sunshiny locations and then deprive them of the appropriate eyewear. Especially when they’re driving. I don’t want to share the road with these people who are squinting so hard to see that they’re giving me a headache. I realize that the justification of this is so we can properly see the actors emote, but I will counter that argument with Darth Vader and the Mandolorian. They don’t seem to have a problem. Y’all make fun of Horatio Caine for rocking his sunnies, but you don’t see him squinting, now do you? No.

Are all of these dislikes a little petty? Yes. Will listing them out like this change the course of television writing? No. Writers are going to continue to execute these tropes to their dullest and I’m going to continue to roll my eyes and pine for the rare instances when writers choose to subvert or even all together avoid them.

Hope springs eternal and these tropes will no doubt last forever.