Episode 654 - tropes vs character growth
Sep 25, 2023
Today we're chatting about characters who're mainly based on tropes VS those that grow. You see this difference quite clearly in a lot of British comedy VS American comedy where characters are set up in certain ways, e.g. the nerd, the sassy one, the mature one etc- in British stuff they tend to revert to type, which is their most important trait, while in American stuff they tend to change and grow based on interactions and experiences. There are MANY exceptions though and one way isn't inherently better than the other.
Topics and Show Notes
There seems to be a few reasons for that: a huge established history of it in Britain and the BBC being a massively influential engine of creation that people emulate without even thinking, but mainly I think it's because most British stuff always used to have a single writer or a pair of writers working on something at a time and often changing them episode to episode, while American stuff often tends to be written by team. This means there's more continuity on American projects because when part of the team leaves they're replaced by others who join the existing team, while with British stuff you'll often have a full replacement. This means that with the single writer approach it's much easier to simply rely on tropes rather than keep track of what all the previous people who worked on it were thinking, but when you have a team people will remember from episode to episode so it's easier to build on characters and change them.
The original British Office Vs the American adaptation is a good illustration of the tendency of tropes VS change. Both sets of characters were based on certain tropes but over the course of the 2 seasons and the special episodes the characters in the original didn't really change or grow at all (Gareth is still a knob, David Brent never changes from being a sad wanker, Tim always thinks he's better than everyone despite hating himself), while as soon as the US episodes stopped directly copying the originals the characters began to grow (way before it went off into its multi season run). The British version had the same two writers, but they were following the popular British style. Both versions are great in their own very different ways and despite being trope based the British version is more serious and realistic, while the growing characters of the US version are cartoony and stylised.
There are other factors though and a lot of exceptions - show-runners can make sure things go in certain ways, The Simpsons have been going for a million years with many different writers and barely change, and things made with the same one or two writers episode to episode can still change and grow because you have creative continuity. Then you have creators who simply force characters to reset and revert to type regardless of the growth and experiences they've had,which is a terrible betrayal of the audience, but that's how bad writers roll. Related to that is the opposite version; where characters score unearned growth that just comes out of nowhere, which is another betrayal of the audience.
Do your characters grow and change or are they informed by the way they were originally setup? Which style do you prefer?
This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Beg - Platforming pixels in the deep, dark, scream haunted depths of a magical video game dungeon where only the bravest are able to carefully creep.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Featured comic:
Lauren Ipsum - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2023/sep/19/featured-comic-lauren-ipsum/
Featured music:
Beg - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Beg/ - by BettyTeaHorse, rated M.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
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Episode 653 - Star Treken
Sep 18, 2023
Today we're talking about STAR TREK! Star Trek is a pretty influential piece of pop-culture. Most interesting to me is that it's a future that is NOT a dystopia. It's a large scale vision of a future world where everything is NOT terrible and collapsing in on itself. You can count those on one hand. It's worth talking about just because of that. Instead of taking the boring, tried and true dystopia route the creators of this world decided to explore a premise of “what happens when a world actually works?”.
Episode 647 - characters screwed over by adapters
Aug 7, 2023
We're having a chat about characters that differ from the source material and turn out crap because of it. Characters where the people adapting them didn't care, understand, or even take time to read the original stuff because they thought they knew better.
Episode 637 - Rumours
May 28, 2023
Rumours can be damaging stories deliberately spread to harm people, they can grow organically of their own accord. Salacious rumours replace truth and stick around in history, like the silly stories of Catherine the Great and horses, Nero fiddling while Rome burned, Marie Antoinette saying “let them eat cake”, or the famously wealthy Roman general Crassus dying by having molten gold poured on his head. All rumours and silly stories but they become stronger than real history. Then there's the notorious story of poor Fatty Arbuckle and how he supposedly killed a woman during a sexual act due to his ‘enormous bulk“. A complete and utter fabrication but it destroyed his career and is still believed today.
Episode 635 - Warcast
May 14, 2023
We're talking about WAR here! Trying to leave out politics, though that's really hard with war because it's basically ALL politics but on fire. So we're talking mainly about depictions of it or at least aspects of it, in art and the media. Both Tantz Aerine and myself work on war comics, Without Moonlight and Pinky TA respectively (plus Tantz also does Brave Resistance with Pitface), so we have some knowledge of the subject from a creator perspective.
Episode 630 - Entitled
Apr 10, 2023
The Quackcast this week is about entitled bossy Karens. In fact it was originally going to BE “the Karencast” but the whole “Karen” thing is a bit sexist and pejorative. So why a Quackcast on overly entitled people then? Well aside from we stealing it from Tantz's newspost on Friday, those kinds of people make great minor villain characters. They can be comic relief baddies but they can also be deceptively dangerous when they really DO have connections to back up their arrogance!
Episode 625 - Designing Women
Mar 6, 2023
Character design is a fun process but not without its challenges. Do you design the character or their story first? I've followed both of those approaches, they have pluses and minuses. On one hand when you create the character first that can make it a real passion project, you make a cool character and then create a story for them to live in and be themselves. But that can also lead to Mary Sues, wish fulfillment and self inserts, which makes for a weak story. Creating characters to fit a story can sometimes lead to using a lot of stereotypes and ending up with fairly generic and bland characters, which can make for a dull story. So it's best to use a bit of balance and judgment.
Episode 617 - Adventuring we go!
Jan 8, 2023
Adventure is a fun genre! Not as many things get made for it these days but it used to be hugely popular in the past. It's one of my favourite genres and this is what we're chatting about for the Quackcast. What IS adventure? I think it usually involves a whole lot of different things like exploration, action, discovery, heroic protagonists, rivals, travel, exotic places, fights etc. It can be set in the past or in the modern day. Good examples are The Mummy, Indiana Jones, the original Tomb Raider, the two new Jumanji films, Strange World, Pirates of the Caribbean, Ducktales, Tailspin, Jungle Cruise, Uncharted and so much more. I'd love to know your faves!
