Franchise Original Sin cleanup and maintenance

TBH, I kind of feel like that renders the trope fairly meaningless. Especially because nostalgia filters and the internet incentivizing negativity in general means newer installments attracting more complaining is sort of the default.

@Ayumi-chan: I'd definitely cut the first one at least, because while TBH I've always found that complaint a little odd in general, as the entry itself notes Joshua's not actually a Clueless Chick-Magnet in the first place. (Nor is he actually the protagonist, for that matter).

I think it's notable for similar reasons as Common Knowledge or Pop-Culture Urban Legends — it reminds the audience that a certain fandom misconception (i.e. that a newer installment "invented" a problem) is false or at least exaggerated. We can still include the "however this is why the fandom didn't mind it as much then" point, but requiring it is just inviting people to nostalgiawank.

As part of the complaint cleanup effort, I decided to take a look at Infinity Train: Seeker of Crocus due to it being a very controversial fanfic, and one of the pages that I decided to check out was FranchiseOriginalSin.Infinity Train Seeker Of Crocus... and hoo boy, it's a long list. Anything to cut out?

Right, I just realized this thread exists.

I tried voicing this in another thread a while back, but Star Wars has a lot of "this is why the later use of something that was in earlier works sucks", especially in the section on the sequel trilogy. I think this sort of thing also comes up in Franchise Original Sin/Terminator and possibly other places

I wrote this entry that I think encapsulates a criticism of RWBY

• The series has always made use of the Mystery Box storytelling as part of its appeal, with information about the world and characters being sparse and revealed over time. For example, the series Opening Monologue is given by an unknown character revealed to be the Big Bad at the end of Volume 3. 3 volumes later, her and her main rival Ozpin's backstory, as well as the context of their war and the existence of the world of Remnant, were revealed to both the main characters and audience in a Whole Episode Flashback. But by later seasons, some of the remaining unanswered questions, like what said Big Bad actually wants, why she and Ozpin fight in secret, how she recruited her minions, the state of human-fanuas rights in the Kingdoms, or what the two unseen relics do, ^note  The relic of choice is seen being used in supplementary material, but only in an in-universe fairytale, others of which are demonstrably unreliable sources of information, and many viewers still failed to understand what its supposed powers were. have begun to grate on viewers, who feel that not knowing these hurts their emotional connection to the story. The show has had every chance to answer these questions, and some important characters have taken their secrets to their graves, making it seem like the writers either don't realize the importance of these questions or are deliberately toying with fans. The characters themselves also seem to rarely ask these questions despite having theoretical access to the information, making them seem disinterested in their own world and conflict.

Do you all think this qualifies?

I think you're misusing Mystery Box there. That trope has nothing to do with this show. You might have been thinking of Jigsaw Puzzle Plot, but that usually applies to convoluted mystery shows like Lost rather than shows with a fairly straightforward plot that just takes time to play out. Otherwise, every long-running manga or anime would be an example. Also, your entry lists a lot of questions that the show has already answered.

Overall, your entry is just complaining about the speed at which the show sets up, develops and reveals the plot, which isn't what FOS is for. It's for a flaw that's been in the show from the beginning but the fandom gave it a pass originally and don't anymore (like the show's writing quality, which is already an entry). The concept of taking a long time for the plot to unfold cannot, by its very nature, be present (for the fans to accept or complain about) from the beginning because it needs to have played out for some time before "taking too long" becomes relevant. Having said that, some fans have had a complaint since the beginning of the show that plot questions are not instantly answered or revealed within a couple of episodes. However, that's not FOS either because those fans never gave it a pass at the beginning of the show and still don't give it a pass now.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Oct 26th 2023 at 12:23:09 PM

Recently the Star Wars page had some examples updated to include counter examples within the entry. (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/article_history.php?article=FranchiseOriginalSin.StarWars&page=23#edit39476121) Obviosuky, this kind of stuff isn’t allowed, but does this mean we remove the additions to the entries or do the counter arguments mean the entry as a whole is invalid and should be cut?

For context here’s the enties in question I’m talking about, with the counters within the entries speaking for themselves:

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• A common criticism of Star Wars Rebels was the lack of casualties among the heroes and their numerous victories making the Empire look ineffective despite them ostensibly being the tyrannical rulers of the galaxy. You could almost say the same about Star Wars: The Clone Wars. In The Clone Wars, the heroes commonly make it through battles unscathed, with the Separatists suffering numerous defeats. It is more forgivable in The Clone Wars, as canon dictates most of the main cast has to live until Revenge of the Sith, and there are still numerous casualties among the supporting cast. In contrast, the main cast of Rebels consisted entirely of characters who had never appeared in the films (aside from Chopper, who makes a cameo in Rogue One), making their continued survival stick out more (up until season 4 when a major cast member was finally killed off, due to Kanan's Heroic Sacrifice). In addition, while Revenge of the Sith establishes the Clone Wars were stuck in a stalemate prior to Count Dooku's death, the opening crawl of A New Hope establishes that the theft of the Death Star plans was the Rebellion's first major victory, something that Rebels blatantly and repeatedly contradicts. On the other hand, the Death Star was a central feature in Palpatine's plan to cement his personal control over the galaxy, being introduced alongside the confirmation that the Galactic Senate has been abolished. Lothal, the setting of Rebels, is a backwater with almost nothing of real significance happening; the first thing the rebels do is steal a small food shipment. They only get victories of real significance after years of struggle and development, and their final victory against Thrawn coincides with the theft of the Death Star plans and the beginning of the original trilogy. Not only does this mean that the show mirrors the franchise in sequel escalation, it was actually far more careful about how it did so and never undermined the threat that characters like Vader were always meant to represent.

• A few fans weren't exactly pleased with Obi-Wan Kenobi revealing that the titular character had rescued, and became close with, Leia Organa as a little girl nine years before the events of A New Hope would occur, despite little, if any indication that the two had a personal connection in the original trilogy. Many of those same fans might've forgotten how Chewbacca and Yoda had a similar relationship Revenge of the Sith, with Chewbacca having fought alongside Yoda near the end of the Clone Wars on his home planet despite there being zero indication in the Original Trilogy that the two would've ever known each other. But while Chewbacca and Yoda's friendship doesn't really factor into future events all that much, Obi-Wan's show makes his rescue of her and the development of their relationship a huge plot point. This made some people accuse the writers of attempting to play loose with canon, since while Leia states that she knows who Obi-Wan is in A New Hope, she doesn't indicate that she knows him on a personal level like what is shown here. Meanwhile, Obi-Wan himself has no indication that he previously knew who Leia is in ANH, with people finding his insistence that no one can know about their friendship to be a weak excuse to handwave the issue. On the other hand, Obi-Wan said "I don't recall ever owning a droid", despite having one to help him pilot his starfighter in the prequels and The Clone Wars. He also should have recognized R2, but the fact that R2 was Anakin's personal astromech wouldn't be retconned until the prequels, just as this show gave Obi-Wan and Leia a closer relationship than was indicated in A New Hope.

I think the counter examples can stay in some form but both examples are way too long as is.

The first example could more or less be "the main characters are Saved by Canon in The Clone Wars while the characters of Rebels mostly scrape by because they're not big parts of the rebellion and tend to avoid the full might of the Empire".

The second example is much weaker IMO and could go, since the situation with Chewbacca and Yoda is different (they never meet in the original trilogy so there's not much chance for them to recognize each other). I also haven't seen this spin off but you could argue that Leia simply remembers Obi Wan as "the guy that saved her once", and/or doesn't value whatever connection they made almost a decade prior. You could also say that Obi Wan says he doesn't know Leia or R2 because he's lying.

So delete the whole counter example, or remove the entire entry for the Leia thing? And doesn’t keeping the counter example for Rebels count as Natter and/or justifying edit

I'd delete the Leia entry entirely since it seems pretty weak as someone that hasn't seen the show in question.

The counter example for Rebels is a justifying edit, but it's still valid information and doesn't make the example misuse. So here the example could be kept if it was just trimmed down a lot and had more natural flow between the different parts (which would make it more like nuance instead of a justifying edit)

Recently this entry was added to the Star Wars page but it doenst specificy why it was tolerated in earlier installments to be hated in others. You think this entry can be salvaged at all or should it be cut?

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• Shattered Empire's Operation: Cinder - Palpatine's arrangement to have the Empire glass several planets in the event of his death as an act of intimidation, regardless of how loyal or otherwise the planets in question were to the Empire beforehand - is derided by some as a pointlessly evil and impractical tactic, especially after later material indicated that Palpatine intended to return to life and retake control of the galaxy at a later date. Such tactics have been a staple of the Empire's playbook as far back as A New Hope, where it put a massive amount of resources into constructing the Death Star - a single gigantic space station with little purpose besides giving the Empire a means to destroy planets and the subsequent intimidation factor - rather than investing in more capital ships or even the TIE Defender line, either of which would've been a far more efficient and practical means of combatting the Rebels and policing the galaxy. To say nothing of the same film having Grand Moff Tarkin use the Death Star to destroy Alderaan for little reason besides spiting Leia, with Legends material outright indicating that this act caused many Imperial supporters and neutrals to switch their loyalties to the Rebels instead. And then the Imperials decided to build another Death Star in the third film of the franchise.

From the ''Fallout franchise original sin page:

• By a similar count, the first few games dipped themselves in a Raygun Gothic aesthetic that conjured up visions of old-school 1950s Americana and Patriotic Fervor. But they were also a dark and twisted satire of that ideal, and Pre-War America was near-universally treated as hypocritical, violent, imperialistic, and prejudiced. As the series went on, though, the patriotic fervor elements of the series became increasingly less satirical. Though there were still attempts made, such as the Mass Fusion subplot in 4, they were counterbalanced by the cartoonishly overblown nationalism and associated imagery being either played straight or treated in such a manner that they might as well have been. Compare the treatment of Frank Horrigan and Liberty Prime, for an example. Both are marvels of old American super-science and in-universe Memetic Badasses with cartoonishly violent personalities that embody the warlike nature of America, but where Frank is still treated dead seriously as the ultimate villain and Final Boss of Fallout 2, Liberty Prime assists the protagonist while spouting propagandistic lines in such a cartoonishly-overblown fashion that it becomes endearing, so much that even though he's technically utilized against the genocidal remnants of the American government in his first appearance, not many people remembered him that way.
• Furthermore, Bethesda Softworks and Zenimax's growing obsession with Fallout's branding, plastering things like Nuka-Cola or Vault Boys everywhere they could manage, saw things that were meant to satirize the hyper-capitalist ideals of Pre-War America being taken and used to sell merch. The result was a series originally meant to lampoon patriotic '50s nostalgia now trading heavily on its aesthetic without a hint of irony. The drippingly patriotic introduction to Fallout 76, in which America's tricentennial is celebrated with the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the completion of Vault 76 (a video that, in past games, would probably have been presented as a piece of in-universe propaganda), was merely the point at which it seemed that the last traces of satire were scrubbed from the series.

The first point I think can be kept, through with a re-write since I don't think pre-war America was whitewashed in any in even under Bethesda and every game moreso points more and more towards how nasty they were. Even the series, which, without spoiling how and why, josses a very popular headcanon about something really evil fans have long assumed they did, still made them quite complicit in setting up the sociopolitical system of unfettered capitalism that allowed the actual perpetuators of said atrocities to consolidate power and do that evil thing I am not going to spoil.

The latter point is wayy to broad feels like less "franchise original sin" and more complaining "Anti-capitalist media" or media formerly being "subverted" because of corporate greed and/or (so-called at least) late-stage capitalism, which are complaints you can lodge about any big budget media property that started out having anti-establishment themes.

Edited by xie323 on Apr 11th 2024 at 7:14:24 AM

Yeah as bad as Bethesda is I’m not sure how pertent tuff they’ve done IRL is pertent to the story of the games

From Dragon's Dogma II:

I definitely know that this is probably incorrect as FOS and that as is, the entry is weirdly defensive about the criticisms, but I'm not enough of a modern Capcom fan to know how true this holds up if rewritten as something like an Older Than They Think example.

The Simpsons:

• Entering its fourth decade, the show has been criticized for giving unsympathetic characters happy endings, which clashes with the original portrayal of Springfield as a dysfunctional town full of unhappy people. Of course, Homer and Marge are a textbook example of Ugly Guy, Hot Wife, even if earlier seasons did imply Marge looked somewhat dowdy and plain, producers made clear Homer was "lucky to have her". But later seasons put several characters in a similar position - Comic Book Guy's wife is a Genki Girl who looks to be about half his age and seems to be a wish fulfilment fantasy, a Japanese manga artist who loves cosplay and is strangely devoted to him. Moe's fianceè, despite her short stature, was considered beautiful by Homer and the other barflies, took him back despite his insulting behavior and accepted a crappy marriage proposal, abandoning her nice house to live in his basement apartment. The annoying failure and Sadist Teacher Mr. Largo suddenly married a polite-looking gentleman, Obnoxious In-Law Patty is shown having a recurring girlfriend, Violent Glaswegian Groundskeeper Willie got an episode where he married his attractive former flame who's willing to move into his shack with him, and even Krusty and Mr. Burns got happy endings in relationships with a former fan turned TV host and retired actress, respectively (although those last two were ignored due to Negative Continuity.)

Is this something people have been complaining about? I don't follow The Simpsons closely, but from what I heard people liked the episode where Moe got married. Also, is Willie so hated that fans don't like the idea of him getting married?

...Yeah, I've never seen anyone complain about that.

Several of those characters have fanbases who consider them sympathetic and support the relationships, particularly Moe. I don't think it's unanimously hated at all, and those episodes tend to give the characters some development to justify them finding romance (though it doesn't always stick).

Yeah, that seems like a real stretch. Most of those characters aren't even unsympathetic, being jerkasses at worst.

Meanwhile, the Disney page got cut again, since even though its characters are sometimes marketed as one franchise, they are all technical under a single studio instead.