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.
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.
> I've thought about this idea (without knowing there was a term for it!)
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.
Just spend a week on tvtropes.org and you'll instantly become a better writer I think.
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.
As time goes you might find your eigenvectors. Sometimes it takes a change of norms, sometimes it takes a change of bases. But things might be simpler when you live your eigenvectors :)
> how would you prevent such a thing? And should you?
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.
I watch an youtuber that makes videos about life in Japan and he mentioned recently about how this drives the direction of his videos against his will. Despite producing extremely high-quality videos, every video is accompanied by clickbait titles and the classic "=O" idiotic face thumbnail. The quality contrast between the cover and the video is immediately clear once you start watching the content.
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.
While we see this a lot with influencers (and I think Joe Rogan is another great example). The phenomenon isn't exactly new.
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.
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.
The article starts out interesting but the author lacks courage.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
To the best of my understanding, no. Part for whole thing is like an extended symbol and as a poetic device short lived at that, while flanderization is appears to be characterized as a longer term process that effectively focuses on a specific part without excluding the rest ( its importance is just progressively diminished ).
<<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.
> 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?
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 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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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 thought it was something like 'a place being turned into a country because its politically convenient for a great power'. Kind of like 'Finlandization'.
shanusmagnus|3 years ago
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.
Bakary|3 years ago
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.
racl101|3 years ago
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.
KaoruAoiShiho|3 years ago
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.
kcplate|3 years ago
cmehdy|3 years ago
matsemann|3 years ago
In the beginning, you explore. Later, you exploit by doing more of the things you found fruitful.
xattt|3 years ago
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.
pabs3|3 years ago
adamgordonbell|3 years ago
https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capt...
rockbruno|3 years ago
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.
themanmaran|3 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.
ZeroGravitas|3 years ago
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.
sircastor|3 years ago
hitekker|3 years ago
> 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.
dansl|3 years ago
kzrdude|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
Sateeshm|3 years ago
pavlov|3 years ago
Usage example: “London is undergoing strong Flanderization accelerated by Brexit.”
Turns out the Wikipedia definition is something pretty different!
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
lekevicius|3 years ago
themanmaran|3 years ago
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ForgotAboutHisPo...
vagrantJin|3 years ago
alexmolas|3 years ago
endymi0n|3 years ago
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.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
shusaku|3 years ago
^ for anyone who wants to go on a deep dive!
AdrianoKF|3 years ago
PKop|3 years ago
ehsankia|3 years ago
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.
matt-attack|3 years ago
dilyevsky|3 years ago
leephillips|3 years ago
bluedino|3 years ago
moralestapia|3 years ago
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.
willis936|3 years ago
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.
Waterluvian|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
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.
unnamed76ri|3 years ago
senorrib|3 years ago
In essence, they were all conceived as extremely flanderized and acquired complex traits over time.
motohagiography|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
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.
A4ET8a8uTh0|3 years ago
<<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.
lvxferre|3 years ago
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.
kirse|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20060512061148/https://tvtropes....
ineedasername|3 years ago
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.
6stringmerc|3 years ago
“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|3 years ago
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.
frodetb|3 years ago
oaththrowaway|3 years ago
thenerdhead|3 years ago
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.
User23|3 years ago
klyrs|3 years ago
Bakary|3 years ago
bee_rider|3 years ago
xwdv|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
This is coming from someone whose blog has zero readers.
4pkjai|3 years ago
oblak|3 years ago
petesergeant|3 years ago
oblak|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
mc32|3 years ago
Whether induced by the audience (external) or by the creator(s) internal.
kadoban|3 years ago
AlbertCory|3 years ago
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.
kibwen|3 years ago
bsimpson|3 years ago
panick21_|3 years ago
immigrantheart|3 years ago
sbf501|3 years ago
tylerhou|3 years ago