ways_back_room | DE: Ground Hog's Day in December

Gundam Wing: People keep trying to drop colonies on Earth. (Yes, really.) Political factions keep splitting. Heero keeps threatening to kill people whose lives he then saves instead. Everybody keeps trying to self-detonate, and failing or surviving it anyway. Jo and TL, help me out here; there's a ton more.

If we're talking about the Gundam franchise at large, there's a ton of stuff like character archetypes, colony drops, psychics in space, etc, that gets very consciously carried through into various shows in the franchise. But I'm not really familiar with the others, except by some secondhand summaries.

Firefly: Plans never go smooth.

Claymore: Limb loss. Oh lordy, so much limb loss. Wait till Clare gets to the battle where three of her four limbs get detached! (She reattaches some. As you do.)

Marvel: Well, it's hard to tell yet from the cinematic universe, but I think it's safe to say THE EARTH IS THREATENED. And supervillain fights in major metropolitan areas. And massive property damage.

Things Thor never learns: not to charge at Loki when taunted. And he's a lot better at keeping a rein on his temper, but he's never going to be 100% on it, and the aforementioned massive property damage is usually likely to ensue when he loses it.

The same goes for Marvel comics! New York is constantly getting destroyed, to the point that recent comics canon has actually lampshaded this fact.

Heeeeee. INDEED.

If I still played Piotr Rasputin, my comment would have begun with "Xavier's mansion being reduced to rubble" and ended with "People coming back from the dead" and gone on for about a yard in between. God bless comics.

It's not that I think the films are inherently less ridiculous about this kind of thing, so much as that they just don't have the same weight of decades of momentum built up behind every single favorite trope.

Ahaha they always do! My favourite Marvel characters are the random New Yorkers who say things like, "That's it, I'm moving to Florida," etc.

They need pt bring back Damage Control, as a series though not just appearances like when they were contracted to rebuild the Avengers Mansion.

I still love the 'You'll pay for this Doom!' cover they had for Damage Control.

Mostly because he does as soon as he actually gets the bill. Latveria has an impeccable credit rating.

"All of this has happened before, and it will happen again."

Seriously, repetition is worked right into the fabric of BSG canon.

Looking back over this, I think I ended up naming major themes as opposed to really repetition or redundancy, they're just how these worlds work.

Robin Hood: Back and forth with the Sheriff, how long this goes on depends on the length of the interpretation. Its helpful at times for RP but other times I know its like but just get rid of the Sheriff.

X-Men: Charles vs Erik, dying and coming back, the government being afraid of them, new mutants, someone's power getting out of control

The Old Kingdom: Death and not knowing how to talk about anything. Lirael and Sameth dwelling on how they're not good at what they're meant to be doing, Yrael snarking.

Discworld: If its funny, it will happen, narrative explanations, reveals that sometimes aren't that surprising, footnotes.

Greek Mythology: Sex, death and transformation

Narnia: Belief triumphing

Gilbert and Sullivan: Wordplay, songs where you wonder how do they pull it off?

Edited 2012-12-14 20:11 (UTC)

Fantastic Four/MU: Ben's butt is handed to him to prove how dangerous the villain is. Reed's experiments/ideas will go wrong. Reed is an uncaring hyper-genius (really tired of this one). Let's go explore, what could possibly go wrong? Don't mess with family.

Spider-Woman: Bad childhood. Woe. Let's wreck some shit.

Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel: Family is what's worth fighting for, even if it's the family you find. Villains can become heroes. The past will come back to bite you in the ass.

Kate Daniels series: Magic sucks. Magic is dangerous. I'm a bad ass.

X-Men: Appearance issues. Government/People being afraid of mutants. Personal acceptance.

Hahaha, oh "Rescue Me." I would have grown tired of Tommy constantly making the same mistakes and making the same bad decisions if I didn't come to realize that his is a compulsive, addictive personality that cannot and will not change. I mean, talk about never deviating from the character -- I would actually have been disappointed if Tommy had evolved too much within the first four seasons. And in fact everyone on the show makes bad life choices. All the time, with varying degrees of horrible results. The amount of facepalming I have done is immeasurable, along with every time I said aloud, YEAH, THAT'LL END WELL. Basically NOBODY GETS TO BE HAPPY.

Fallout 3: No matter where you go and no matter how much protective gear you have on and no matter how many guns you are carrying and no matter whether or not you are being tailed by a green skinned giant with a Gatling laser plus an armored paladin plus the four legged incarnation of Leeroy Jenkins, idiots in spiky leather outfits are going to try to kill you. You can be the most famous person in the Wasteland and your name and description can be broadcast on every radio for miles and they will still attack you with baseball bats and .32 cal hunting rifles. Also, eventually your attempts to travel any distance whatsoever outside the city ruins will be periodically interrupted by giant scorpions. Over and over and over. Walk long enough and bam, THERE WILL BE SCORPIONS. (This is because the game's random hostile critter algorithm tries to scale challenges to your XP level and when you hit about level 20 or so, it more or less sticks at 'scorpion'. If you have Broken Steel installed it sticks at 'giant regenerating albino scorpion'.)

Fallout New Vegas: Again, no matter how potent you are and no matter what guns and armor you have visibly equipped, if you pass through an area where the leather-wearing spike people live, they will always, always, always try to kill you. If you walk through Freeside, someone with cow-skin clothing and a pathetically inadequate weapon will attempt to attack you at least once every time you walk through the area. Seriously, the number of little piles of ash in the street (I favor energy weapons over bullet guns) gets depressing. You'd think someone would spread the word that attacking the PC isn't a good idea.

Dragon Age 2: Dammit, Bioware, would it have killed you to program more than one set of caves and more than two building interiors? Seriously, they saved on .... something, I don't know what.... by making literally every single cave system have exactly the same map and just throwing barricades or closed doors up in different places to change things around a bit. It gets really damned annoying. Especially since everything else about the game is kind of gorgeous.

Mass Effect 2: The turian counselor will be a snot to your face. Always. Every single time you talk to him. Certain stores will be announced as Commander Shepard's favorite store on the Citadel every time you walk past them (actually, this is optional, but most people record an endorsement at these stores to get Paragon points and a discount, so effectively 'I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favorite store on the Citadel' gets said forever and ever and ever).

It's been a while since I actively reread Hektor's canon but good Lord, Homer could sling the repetitive epithets with the best of them... then again I'm not blameless, Hektor's user name is what my Greek-English dictionary assures me is the Romanization of the Greek word for 'tamer of horses', which is one such epithet.

Half-Life: Again, video game, could cite any number of repetitive points. I'll stick with this: if you make it as far as the center of Ravenholm, there will always be more headcrab zombies. Always. You could park your butt there and kill headcrab zombies until there are more corpses lying around than there are addresses in Hong Kong and the zombies will just keep coming.

There's more in my other canons but those will do for now.

Another repetitive element in the Half-Life series: cliffhangers. So many goddamned cliffhangers. It wasn't until 2011 that Valve showed they could put out a story that had a definitive, satisfyling ending.

Oh, Bethesda. You keep putting the same charmingly annoying things into your games.

Nolanverse: I think that Nolan has managed to call it a day before anything has really had a chance to become repetitive. Although, the 'Drugs are bad' message was really hammered home several times in the first two films.

Marvelverse: What Gen said

Enderverse: Oh look we've got these IF certified military geniuses, let's not tell them anything, or trust them at all, because they're just going to try and take our jobs, despite the fact that there is another set of them on the other side, who have left them unshackled and trust them completely.

Also, conspiracies to make these geniuses just figureheads.

Jack West's canon: Stupid humans who want power over others will doom the world!

Oh yeah. I forgot this earlier. One of Reilly's favourites:

Anyone, and I mean anyone, can die. Yeah, Absolutely anyone can die.
Even if you've been a stalwart part of the series for 2 and a half books.

Did I mention that anyone can die? Well, they can.

Runescape : Umm. Nice job, hero. I'll spare you the TvTropes page. Also cabbages and penguins and pop culture references. A recent one that raised my hackles is the character Meg because of ewww Family Guy and eww their treatment of Meg, and eww you have the option to tell off Meg in game. Most references aren't bad but eugh, Family Guy.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic: Poor communication skills. So many episodes would be over in five minutes if the cast would just talk to each other instead of leaping to conclusions.

I can't think of any redundancies in The Old Kingdom.

Slayers has the Mazoku, the Monster Race, repetitively trying to destroy existence in one way or another, though there are occasionally variations on this theme (Mazoku helping save the world from an outside threat because they don't want to be shown up, an outsider doing what they've been trying to do for centuries, etc.).

The only recurring theme I can think of in Sunshine is Sunshine not putting connotations together to come up with a conclusion, because she's subconsciously afraid of what that conclusion might be.

Negima is a textbook source of cosplay. Maids, nuns, ninja, school girls (with additional variations on that theme), bunny girls, cat ears, samurai and more.

I don't recall any pirates off hand Haruna got that airship and I don't think we see how...

Basically, Ako has very good reasons for shrugging and rolling with holiday costume changes.

Jim's canon largely avoids repetition as far as I can remember. There is the running "That's HEDLEY!" gag, though.

Within Borgel itself there aren't any recurring ideas, but within Daniel Pinkwater's broader work there definitely is. The protagonist is typically around 12/13 years old and is invariably "not one of the popular kids." Somewhere hidden beneath the underbelly of a typical American town is something strange, mystical, and ridiculous. Adults in Daniel Pinkwater stories are almost universally either useless or insane (or at least highly eccentric).

As for Leela...well, if I talked about things that keep showing up in Doctor Who I'd be here all day. The Hinchcliffe era seemed to be quite fond of the "disfigured, long-dormant villain seeks to re-emerge from his centuries-old prison" story. And of course, the classic series always seemed to have a problem with stories that consisted largely of "get captured, escape, then get captured again" sequences. I'm looking at you, Frontier in Space.

Kane never stays dead for long. Ever. He always, ALWAYS comes back the next game with no explanation at all.

Atrus just keeps having awful things happen to him and have the Stranger bail him out while he, for various reasons, sits it out in another Age entirely.

Tuco - "There are two kinds of people in the world, those who do thing X and those who do thing Y. You do thing Y."

Caius's canon, being a Bethesda game, features a lot of the same things that Cam pointed out with Fallout 3. Particularly the "Hey look, the Nerevarine, vanquisher of gods and kings, is standing over there in his full set of Daedric armor and super-duper-enchanted sword of KILLING EVERYTHING. I think I'll run over and try and kill him. With this chitin club." And then there's the cliff racers. OH GOD SO MANY CLIFF RACERS I DON'T EVEN

Edited 2012-12-14 23:40 (UTC)

Psych - it's never the first suspect.

Venture Bros. - NO ONE CAN BE HAPPY ON THIS SHOW, EVER. (.... okay, that might be overstating it a bit, but the creators have said the theme of the show is failure. I have issues with my canon sometimes, can you tell? >.>)

Homestuck is built on repeating motifs. If you hate repetition you will not like this comic.

Also, everybody dies.

Edited 2012-12-15 09:38 (UTC)

They pull "It was all Just a Dream" twice to get out of outlandish season finales in Reno, to the point where they actually self-mock it.

Psych prides itself on being non-repetitive, as does MLP. Brisco was too short to lap itself.

DE: Ground Hog's Day in December

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject