9 ms·

Flanderization

251 points by egfx 4y ago

kibwen 4y ago
Not to be confused with bowdlerization: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation
4pkjai 4y ago
Another example is Luanne from King of the Hill
- oblak 4y ago
  Can you provide an example? She didn't end up all that different from when she stared. Just matured a bit thanks to her man.
  - philipkglass 4y ago
    In the first season she wasn't book-smart but wasn't dumb. In season 1, episode 8 she fixes a problem with Cotton Hill's car on her own in a way that implies she is mechanically inclined and competent. She got dumber as the seasons went on. So did Peggy Hill. So did Dale and Bill. Hank didn't really become dumb but he was seriously Flanderized by way of his love affair with propane. 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.
shusaku 4y ago
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization ^ for anyone who wants to go on a deep dive!
- AdrianoKF 4y ago
  Well there went an hour of my life.. Thanks for sharing the link!
moralestapia 4y ago
It's interesting how this happens IRL as well, particularly on newcomers to an already established group of people. 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.
adamgordonbell 4y ago
There is a tendency for this to happen in real life with influencers. Certain aspects resonate with an audience and so they overemphasize them. https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capt...
- sircastor 4y ago
  There’s a YouTuber I like whose early work included a lot of genuine excitement and enthusiasm when he’d get a project working. Recently it feels like the energy is a little manufactured, for the audience. I still like his stuff, but sometimes it feels a little off.
  - djmips 4y ago
    That's pretty common to see. I immediately thought of several examples like Great Scott who I don't watch anymore.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  That seems very, very sad.
  - nkozyra 4y ago
    Well, it's a sad part of culture in 2022 - an enormous abandonment of creativity or authenticity for clicks. Even sadder that it works.
    - Multicomp 4y ago
      It reminds me of the ancient concept of patronage. If you were a patron, you housed and fed your client, and in return, they were expected to act the part out. So if you had a garden hermit, they needed to act their part out, and act grateful and glad to you. If you treated them badly, say, giving them a crappy house to hermit about in, they were expected to still act grateful to your face, but damage your reputation behind your back. 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.
motohagiography 4y ago
Is Flanderization just synecdoche - where one attribute becomes the reference for the whole, or is it a new co-oridnate on the spectrum of metonymy and simile? 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.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Rick And Morty really took a nosedive for me the last couple seasons. It's always just been a fun-when-high recycling of Star Trek episodes and well-known sci-fi ideas to me, but it always had its own style, clever writing and great acting(especially Sarah Chalke). 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.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    I don't think they ran out of sci-fi tropes so much as they ran out on the core idea of the show. They took two established characters (Marty and Doc Brown) and explored/deconstructed the inherent absurdity and great dynamic between those two that was never fully exploited by the original films. The decline started once they had done what they could with it.
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
      Right, that makes sense. I honestly wasn't aware of the Back to the Future inspiration, I watched it as a kid and it was never really my type of movie.
unnamed76ri 4y ago
I feel like most of the characters on Big Bang Theory were Flanderized pretty quickly.
- senorrib 4y ago
  I think the opposite happened in this show. Penny was a dumb midwestern actress wannabe and evolved into a complex character, for example. In essence, they were all conceived as extremely flanderized and acquired complex traits over time.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Penny is an obvious case of reverse-flanderization because she was the opposite of the typical nerds. When the show started appealing more to the common crowd and had to go beyond its original plot, it was obvious Penny had to be more than just a plot device centered around looks. Same happened to the guys. 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.
lekevicius 4y ago
I found one particular example of the opposite change quite annoying. In the TV Show “Suits”, the premise is that a character Mike has incredible photographic memory, can to read books and evidence at unbelievable speeds. As the show went on, this unique trait was almost completely removed. I think by season 3 it was just gone completely, turning the show into a regular law drama.
- themanmaran 4y ago
  Also a very common fictional theme. The "Forgot about his powers" trope. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ForgotAboutHisPowers https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ForgotAboutHisPo...
- alexmolas 4y ago
  just like what happened with Hulk
- vagrantJin 4y ago
  Too many shows go on for too long and end up "killing" the writers. When the juices arent flowing, best to fall back on tried and trusted.
6stringmerc 4y ago
Sounds a lot like in music when dealing with RIAA labels and their business model: “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.
- bitwize 4y ago
  I first came across Mix-A-Lot by winning a single of his at a school dance before "Baby Got Back" dropped. It was called "One Time's Got No Case" and was about being harassed by the police. 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.
  - 6stringmerc 4y ago
    Thankfully I’ve got great news! 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!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
pavlov 4y ago
My first guess was that Flanderization might mean the process where a region’s capital city outgrows the region and becomes culturally an entirely separate entity, as in the Belgian region of Flanders whose capital is Brussels and its inhabitants mostly don’t identify as Flemish. Usage example: “London is undergoing strong Flanderization accelerated by Brexit.” Turns out the Wikipedia definition is something pretty different!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mc32 4y ago
In some contexts this another expression of positive feedback loops and where there are few negative feedback loops, or they are ignored because they are annoying (like dismissing the high pitched alarm) Whether induced by the audience (external) or by the creator(s) internal.
Waterluvian 4y ago
My sense is that this, along with a lot of other writing decisions in shows like The Simpsons, is a form of “cashing in” on the investment of developing a character. 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.
- Frost1x 4y ago
  >My sense is that this, along with a lot of other writing decisions in shows like The Simpsons, is a form of “cashing in” on the investment of developing a character. 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.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Yeah that’s a strong point. I think I’m revising my mental model of this phenomenon along those lines.
petesergeant 4y ago
Still annoyed that Runkle in Californication went from a quirky but excellent publicist into just a generic loser
shanusmagnus 4y ago
This is one of those moments that makes me fall in love with the internet all over again. 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.
- kcplate 4y ago
  My father in law used to describe this as “the older you get, the more you are boiled down to your true essence”
- Bakary 4y ago
  As you age, the rewards you get from social conformity become less and less important because your social role starts to be squeezed in general. Pop culture stops catering to you as much, you are less likely to multiply intimate partners or discover new friends or change your circle to a great extent, though obviously this is a vague trend and there are tons of exceptions to this. 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.
willis936 4y ago
I argue that this is closely related to superdeformed versions of more serious contemporaries (SD Gundam and Teen Titans Go as popular examples in the West). 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.
User23 4y ago
A real life example from Computing Science is Edsger Dijkstra. His contributions to the field were extensive, but from talking to people and Google search results he’s now just the minimum spanning tree guy.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Collapsing multi-faceted contributors to a single algorithm considered harmful?
- Bakary 4y ago
  In the case of Von Neumann, his contributions are so extensive that he ends up flanderized even though the flanderization in question still pegs him as a multifaceted person
- klyrs 4y ago
  I'd say he's the cranky hot takes guy, because outside of academic writing, that's what people quote the most.
AlbertCory 4y ago
I liked this a lot. As someone who's writing a series of increasingly-fictional books (see https://www.albertcory.io 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.
matt-attack 4y ago
This applies to more than just cartoons. Look at Seinfeld. First 3 seasons, the characters were real, each w/ their own personalties, quirks, etc. By the final season, each character became so extreme, so one-dimentional in it's characterization and personalities it was entirely unwatchable (at the time) for me.
- leephillips 4y ago
  After Larry David left the show it went into a depressing tailspin. At least J. Seinfeld had the sense to mercifully kill it off before too long.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  Many shows seem to fall into this. Silicon Valley is another example where it happened to almost all characters except erlich and jian yang who were already extreme caricatures
- bluedino 4y ago
  Today's sitcoms just jump straight to it. The Neighborhood, for example.
PKop 4y ago
It's almost like "specialization" or some sort of natural selection process. Characters accentuate specific unique aspects of themselves because otherwise they would have no reason to exist; the show could have anyone stand in to express generic qualities. Their quirks are what at first works with audiences, then writers keep going back to the well. The common aspects get selected out over time. A/B testing taken to it's logical conclusion.
- ehsankia 4y ago
  I also don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. It feels like many of the examples given are the more extreme cases where it goes too far, but looking at the pilots of most TV shows (especially sitcoms), the characters are fairly generic and uninteresting, and they slowly build up their personas over time as writers write to the actor and to what works. 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.
  - PKop 4y ago
    The tropes page mentions there's a bit of distinction between writer's figuring out the character; flanderization is addressing the point after the character is basically fleshed out, then accentuating whatever they are, often past the point of caricature as time goes on. So more of a long term process. I agree it doesn't have to be bad thing, I'd go so far as to say it is inevitable to large degree. It is writers jobs simply to manage this natural/inevitable dynamic, be careful with it, and eventually end the show before it loses it's appeal. Sort of a lifecycle of "success" of writing interesting characters especially in sitcoms where personality/humor dominates story, and there will be diminishing returns as character evolves to self parody.
kirse 4y ago
I don't know about TV Tropes "coining" the concept, I had already discussed this 5+ years ago wrt to computers and we even had a pitch for the "Flanders Threshold" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13353106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13353106 I'd accept that Flanders Computing is an offshoot of the overall much-later-coined flanderization process.
- hackingthelema 4y ago
  'Flanderization' as a term was on TV Tropes as early as 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20060512061148/https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization https://web.archive.org/web/20060512061148/https://tvtropes....
  - kirse 4y ago
    Well then, I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for you meddling kids.
    - danrocks 4y ago
      Also a TV trope: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouMeddlingKids https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouMeddlingKids
frodetb 4y ago
Years ago, I was talking to a friend about IASIP, South Park, and Arrested Development, and why they had held up so well. I argued that it partly had to do with the fact that the characters were already so extreme, they were resistant to Flanderization.
- oaththrowaway 4y ago
  IASIP dived deep into Flanderization. Mac being gay, Dennis being a psychopath, Charlie being an idiot, etc. They have all gotten more pigeon holed as the show has gone along.
  - phist_mcgee 4y ago
    Wouldn't you still call that character development? I mean Charlie was always an idiot, except for maybe season 1.
oblak 4y ago
> Some works have consciously attempted to avoid flanderization, such as Rick and Morty. 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.
- watwut 4y ago
  Well, you can't fladerize if you start in final flanderized state
immigrantheart 4y ago
Like that guy, Khalid Lame.
kadoban 4y ago
For topics like this, TV tropes is great: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization
endymi0n 4y ago
I‘ve noticed this happening not just with characters, but with narratives as well. 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sbf501 4y ago
There aren't enough examples for this to be considered a meaningful progression. Even the wikipedia page is struggling to prove its worth.
- tylerhou 4y ago
  https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization
  - sbf501 4y ago
    Whoa. That's a lot of examples.
thenerdhead 4y ago
I never knew this had a word to it, but it is definitely a strange phenomena itself. 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.
xwdv 4y ago
Part of why I could never really get around to starting a blog is because I have too many topics I’d want to talk about from so many different interests that there wouldn’t be much of an audience for it except for people who just want to know about my life, which is no one. You either flanderize or talk to the void. 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.
- lvxferre 4y ago
  Write because you have something that you want to talk about, not for the sake of an audience. This is coming from someone whose blog has zero readers.
ineedasername 4y ago
It seems like the term has a negative connotation in the article but I think it could go either way. 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.
bsimpson 4y ago
I totally expected this to be about the Dutch region of Belgium.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  I thought it was something like 'a place being turned into a country because its politically convenient for a great power'. Kind of like 'Finlandization'.

251 points by egfx 4y ago

Not to be confused with bowdlerization: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation

4pkjai 4y ago

Another example is Luanne from King of the Hill

oblak 4y ago
Can you provide an example? She didn't end up all that different from when she stared. Just matured a bit thanks to her man.
- philipkglass 4y ago
  In the first season she wasn't book-smart but wasn't dumb. In season 1, episode 8 she fixes a problem with Cotton Hill's car on her own in a way that implies she is mechanically inclined and competent. She got dumber as the seasons went on. So did Peggy Hill. So did Dale and Bill. Hank didn't really become dumb but he was seriously Flanderized by way of his love affair with propane. 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.

shusaku 4y ago

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization ^ for anyone who wants to go on a deep dive!

AdrianoKF 4y ago
Well there went an hour of my life.. Thanks for sharing the link!

moralestapia 4y ago

It's interesting how this happens IRL as well, particularly on newcomers to an already established group of people. 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.

adamgordonbell 4y ago

There is a tendency for this to happen in real life with influencers. Certain aspects resonate with an audience and so they overemphasize them. https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capt...

sircastor 4y ago
There’s a YouTuber I like whose early work included a lot of genuine excitement and enthusiasm when he’d get a project working. Recently it feels like the energy is a little manufactured, for the audience. I still like his stuff, but sometimes it feels a little off.
- djmips 4y ago
  That's pretty common to see. I immediately thought of several examples like Great Scott who I don't watch anymore.
kzrdude 4y ago
That seems very, very sad.
- nkozyra 4y ago
  Well, it's a sad part of culture in 2022 - an enormous abandonment of creativity or authenticity for clicks. Even sadder that it works.
  - Multicomp 4y ago
    It reminds me of the ancient concept of patronage. If you were a patron, you housed and fed your client, and in return, they were expected to act the part out. So if you had a garden hermit, they needed to act their part out, and act grateful and glad to you. If you treated them badly, say, giving them a crappy house to hermit about in, they were expected to still act grateful to your face, but damage your reputation behind your back. 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.

motohagiography 4y ago

Is Flanderization just synecdoche - where one attribute becomes the reference for the whole, or is it a new co-oridnate on the spectrum of metonymy and simile? 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.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Rick And Morty really took a nosedive for me the last couple seasons. It's always just been a fun-when-high recycling of Star Trek episodes and well-known sci-fi ideas to me, but it always had its own style, clever writing and great acting(especially Sarah Chalke). 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.
- Bakary 4y ago
  I don't think they ran out of sci-fi tropes so much as they ran out on the core idea of the show. They took two established characters (Marty and Doc Brown) and explored/deconstructed the inherent absurdity and great dynamic between those two that was never fully exploited by the original films. The decline started once they had done what they could with it.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    Right, that makes sense. I honestly wasn't aware of the Back to the Future inspiration, I watched it as a kid and it was never really my type of movie.

unnamed76ri 4y ago

I feel like most of the characters on Big Bang Theory were Flanderized pretty quickly.

senorrib 4y ago
I think the opposite happened in this show. Penny was a dumb midwestern actress wannabe and evolved into a complex character, for example. In essence, they were all conceived as extremely flanderized and acquired complex traits over time.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Penny is an obvious case of reverse-flanderization because she was the opposite of the typical nerds. When the show started appealing more to the common crowd and had to go beyond its original plot, it was obvious Penny had to be more than just a plot device centered around looks. Same happened to the guys. 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.

lekevicius 4y ago

I found one particular example of the opposite change quite annoying. In the TV Show “Suits”, the premise is that a character Mike has incredible photographic memory, can to read books and evidence at unbelievable speeds. As the show went on, this unique trait was almost completely removed. I think by season 3 it was just gone completely, turning the show into a regular law drama.

themanmaran 4y ago
Also a very common fictional theme. The "Forgot about his powers" trope. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ForgotAboutHisPowers https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ForgotAboutHisPo...
alexmolas 4y ago
just like what happened with Hulk
vagrantJin 4y ago
Too many shows go on for too long and end up "killing" the writers. When the juices arent flowing, best to fall back on tried and trusted.

6stringmerc 4y ago

Sounds a lot like in music when dealing with RIAA labels and their business model: “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.

bitwize 4y ago
I first came across Mix-A-Lot by winning a single of his at a school dance before "Baby Got Back" dropped. It was called "One Time's Got No Case" and was about being harassed by the police. 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.
- 6stringmerc 4y ago
  Thankfully I’ve got great news! 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!
- deleted 4y ago
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pavlov 4y ago

My first guess was that Flanderization might mean the process where a region’s capital city outgrows the region and becomes culturally an entirely separate entity, as in the Belgian region of Flanders whose capital is Brussels and its inhabitants mostly don’t identify as Flemish. Usage example: “London is undergoing strong Flanderization accelerated by Brexit.” Turns out the Wikipedia definition is something pretty different!

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mc32 4y ago

In some contexts this another expression of positive feedback loops and where there are few negative feedback loops, or they are ignored because they are annoying (like dismissing the high pitched alarm) Whether induced by the audience (external) or by the creator(s) internal.

Waterluvian 4y ago

My sense is that this, along with a lot of other writing decisions in shows like The Simpsons, is a form of “cashing in” on the investment of developing a character. 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.

Frost1x 4y ago
>My sense is that this, along with a lot of other writing decisions in shows like The Simpsons, is a form of “cashing in” on the investment of developing a character. 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.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Yeah that’s a strong point. I think I’m revising my mental model of this phenomenon along those lines.

petesergeant 4y ago

Still annoyed that Runkle in Californication went from a quirky but excellent publicist into just a generic loser

shanusmagnus 4y ago

This is one of those moments that makes me fall in love with the internet all over again. 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.

kcplate 4y ago
My father in law used to describe this as “the older you get, the more you are boiled down to your true essence”
Bakary 4y ago
As you age, the rewards you get from social conformity become less and less important because your social role starts to be squeezed in general. Pop culture stops catering to you as much, you are less likely to multiply intimate partners or discover new friends or change your circle to a great extent, though obviously this is a vague trend and there are tons of exceptions to this. 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.

willis936 4y ago

I argue that this is closely related to superdeformed versions of more serious contemporaries (SD Gundam and Teen Titans Go as popular examples in the West). 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.

User23 4y ago

A real life example from Computing Science is Edsger Dijkstra. His contributions to the field were extensive, but from talking to people and Google search results he’s now just the minimum spanning tree guy.

bee_rider 4y ago
Collapsing multi-faceted contributors to a single algorithm considered harmful?
Bakary 4y ago
In the case of Von Neumann, his contributions are so extensive that he ends up flanderized even though the flanderization in question still pegs him as a multifaceted person
klyrs 4y ago
I'd say he's the cranky hot takes guy, because outside of academic writing, that's what people quote the most.

AlbertCory 4y ago

I liked this a lot. As someone who's writing a series of increasingly-fictional books (see https://www.albertcory.io 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.

matt-attack 4y ago

This applies to more than just cartoons. Look at Seinfeld. First 3 seasons, the characters were real, each w/ their own personalties, quirks, etc. By the final season, each character became so extreme, so one-dimentional in it's characterization and personalities it was entirely unwatchable (at the time) for me.

leephillips 4y ago
After Larry David left the show it went into a depressing tailspin. At least J. Seinfeld had the sense to mercifully kill it off before too long.
dilyevsky 4y ago
Many shows seem to fall into this. Silicon Valley is another example where it happened to almost all characters except erlich and jian yang who were already extreme caricatures
bluedino 4y ago
Today's sitcoms just jump straight to it. The Neighborhood, for example.

PKop 4y ago

It's almost like "specialization" or some sort of natural selection process. Characters accentuate specific unique aspects of themselves because otherwise they would have no reason to exist; the show could have anyone stand in to express generic qualities. Their quirks are what at first works with audiences, then writers keep going back to the well. The common aspects get selected out over time. A/B testing taken to it's logical conclusion.

ehsankia 4y ago
I also don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. It feels like many of the examples given are the more extreme cases where it goes too far, but looking at the pilots of most TV shows (especially sitcoms), the characters are fairly generic and uninteresting, and they slowly build up their personas over time as writers write to the actor and to what works. 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.
- PKop 4y ago
  The tropes page mentions there's a bit of distinction between writer's figuring out the character; flanderization is addressing the point after the character is basically fleshed out, then accentuating whatever they are, often past the point of caricature as time goes on. So more of a long term process. I agree it doesn't have to be bad thing, I'd go so far as to say it is inevitable to large degree. It is writers jobs simply to manage this natural/inevitable dynamic, be careful with it, and eventually end the show before it loses it's appeal. Sort of a lifecycle of "success" of writing interesting characters especially in sitcoms where personality/humor dominates story, and there will be diminishing returns as character evolves to self parody.

kirse 4y ago

I don't know about TV Tropes "coining" the concept, I had already discussed this 5+ years ago wrt to computers and we even had a pitch for the "Flanders Threshold" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13353106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13353106 I'd accept that Flanders Computing is an offshoot of the overall much-later-coined flanderization process.

hackingthelema 4y ago
'Flanderization' as a term was on TV Tropes as early as 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20060512061148/https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization https://web.archive.org/web/20060512061148/https://tvtropes....
- kirse 4y ago
  Well then, I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for you meddling kids.
  - danrocks 4y ago
    Also a TV trope: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouMeddlingKids https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouMeddlingKids

frodetb 4y ago

Years ago, I was talking to a friend about IASIP, South Park, and Arrested Development, and why they had held up so well. I argued that it partly had to do with the fact that the characters were already so extreme, they were resistant to Flanderization.

oaththrowaway 4y ago
IASIP dived deep into Flanderization. Mac being gay, Dennis being a psychopath, Charlie being an idiot, etc. They have all gotten more pigeon holed as the show has gone along.
- phist_mcgee 4y ago
  Wouldn't you still call that character development? I mean Charlie was always an idiot, except for maybe season 1.

oblak 4y ago

> Some works have consciously attempted to avoid flanderization, such as Rick and Morty. 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.

watwut 4y ago
Well, you can't fladerize if you start in final flanderized state

immigrantheart 4y ago

Like that guy, Khalid Lame.

kadoban 4y ago

For topics like this, TV tropes is great: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization

endymi0n 4y ago

I‘ve noticed this happening not just with characters, but with narratives as well. 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.

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sbf501 4y ago

There aren't enough examples for this to be considered a meaningful progression. Even the wikipedia page is struggling to prove its worth.

tylerhou 4y ago
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization
- sbf501 4y ago
  Whoa. That's a lot of examples.

thenerdhead 4y ago

I never knew this had a word to it, but it is definitely a strange phenomena itself. 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.

xwdv 4y ago

Part of why I could never really get around to starting a blog is because I have too many topics I’d want to talk about from so many different interests that there wouldn’t be much of an audience for it except for people who just want to know about my life, which is no one. You either flanderize or talk to the void. 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.

lvxferre 4y ago
Write because you have something that you want to talk about, not for the sake of an audience. This is coming from someone whose blog has zero readers.

ineedasername 4y ago

It seems like the term has a negative connotation in the article but I think it could go either way. 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.

bsimpson 4y ago

I totally expected this to be about the Dutch region of Belgium.

panick21_ 4y ago
I thought it was something like 'a place being turned into a country because its politically convenient for a great power'. Kind of like 'Finlandization'.