TV-Nihon

(Discusses Ultraman story structures as an example, but no plot details.)

I recently finished Ultraman Decker. The finale was quite good, to be honest--easily the best finale, thematically and narratively, since R/B's or possibly Geed's. At the last fight's climactic base-form giant beam clash, though, I had to notice that I've seen this before--quite a few times. I'd called most of the basic shots of the series--an opening few episodes that don't often appeal to me, some form collecting and character focus episodes, an emotionally powerful final form two-parter that challenges the hero and sums up the emotional core of the series, at least one crossover and a couple really fantastic episodes mixed amongst the rest, and an ending that sticks the landing more often than not and usually ends its base-form fight with a big beam-to-beam clash (and a last-minute resurrection, though it looks like Decker skipped this one). A couple issues aside, I liked Decker as a series, and there were a couple of delightful points where I genuinely didn't know where the show was going, but overall I found myself less asking "what's going to happen?" and more "how, and how well, will they tell New Gen's story this season?" Since a lot of people here have seen far more of the often-similar Toei's modern shows than I have, I wanted to compare notes and decided this was a good place to ask: do predictable tropes & story structures make toku shows bad?

It's been proposed that spoilers don't matter, since TV is a form of art that can be enjoyed in its craft even if one knows the story; some research has even suggested that spoilers increase enjoyment if anything. This would imply that knowing "how the story goes," like knowing a franchise formula, isn't a detriment. After all, the DGP wasn't what got me into Geats, but rather wondering how the status quo would irrevocably change and what happens next. At the same time, though, story beats can only be repeated so many times before starting to feel more like interpretations and retellings, eventually having more in common with watching Hamlet with its 405th director than seeing a new story. A lot of this, especially regarding forms, is due to toy schedules, so that angle isn't very liable to change anytime soon.

So what are your thoughts? Obviously, this can be taken too far--one can make an enemy out of Freytag's Pyramid or Verse-Chorus(2x)-Bridge-Chorus songs and not be able to enjoy anything. Looking back at some of the Ultra and Rider content of the 2000s, though, I can't help but think the stories could be more varied.

See also on this forum:
Do the post Decade Riders suck? | What Ultraman Orb Needs (where I ironically asked Ultraman for more consistency 7 years ago)

I don't think tropes are bad at all. Some of a lot of modern story telling failures come from people bending over backward to try to go for a twist, sacrificing narrative and character consistency, plot progression, and just basic logic in order to fool the audience. Like sometimes you watch a romance because you want to watch two characters get together at the end. It's not a bad thing to cater to audience expectation, and like Mxylyv said, you can only write a certain narrative so many times without reusing a thing

Like KyuuRanger for example. They have like 20 characters, and it's a neat twist, but for me, splitting the character devlopment 30-ways ultimately left the characters and plot suffering. Essentially, the 40 member team boils down to a super-annoying catchphrase. There's a reason why they don't do 50 member teams for Sentai

Not to say, Mr. Toei, never experiment. The LupinRanger and PatRanger was a great season. And while the PatRangers ultimately did suffer a bit compared to Lupin, it was a pretty fun series in my opinion? There's a balance that can be found between the familiar and the novel.

Also DonBrothers constantly subverts expectations (often to its own detriment), and while it leaves some with a bad taste in their mouths, I sort of like it, despite recognizing when it doesn't work.

To pull from another show I'm currently watching, Poker Face is a murder mystery show (it's from the fantastic Rian Johnson and Natasha Lyonne). It's super formulaic. The first 20 minutes show the murderer and victim, their relationship, and how the murder takes place. You're not guessing who the murderer is, you have this knowledge. Then the rest of the episode is about Natasha Lyonne figuring out how the murder was done and dispensing some sort of justice. It's super formulaic, but I really enjoy it. Sometimes the difference just is the quality of writing behind a show. Tropes and genre fiction aren't inherently bad or rote or predictable, it just how people deploy those well-known mechanisms

Edit: And just cause I'm cheeky, I added a poll. So let's settle this democratically once and for all, are tropes bad?

Tropes aren't inherently bad, but I think of how those tropes play out can determine if they work or not. And like Take said, you can only write something in so many ways without something being reused.

Tropes are the basis for all modern storytelling. The original Cinderella story is over 2000 years old. Gilgamesh, arguably the first superhero, is 3000-4000 years old. Humans are drawn to the comfortable, to the story you know the ending to. The tricky part is to put enough of a twist on it that it feels different, but not too much that it knocks you out of that comfort spot.

Speaking of great adaptations, Madeline Miller's modern retelling of the Greek myths are fantastic. Not only is she an artisan with wordcrafting, but she modernizes the stories in smart ways that adds more character depth to these ancient allegories

Tropes can be a boon or a bust, depending on how they're handled. Most tokusatsu wouldn't exist if not for tropes. And the best comedies take advantage of those tropes to subvert expectations. For example:

Beginning with Battle Fever J, super sentai has always involved giant mecha fighting monsters that grow when defeated. As a result, in the trope-tribute series Akibaranger, the characters spend all night waiting for the defeated MotW to reappear as a giant, but he never does.

Zenkaiger turns a lot of tropes on their head and even creates their own tropes just to throw a curve ball. When they do their first few roll calls, the villains are all trying to figure out what this crazy group of misfits is doing. In Zenkaiger and other super sentai, the villain will sometimes even interrupt the roll call. DonBrothers introduced a new villain who decided the Nooto had to have their own roll call (something not often done with sentai villains).

Another example was when Zenkaiger established a trope of each member misfiring and hitting a mook the first time they handle their weapon, only to have the final member nearly shoot herself instead.

One often forgotten trope with Showa-Era Kamen Rider was the fact that they generally didn't have weapons, yet in the very first episode, Ichigo grabs the weapon off of an enemyduring a fight and uses it against the remaining enemies. This became an ongoing thing throughout every Showa series. However, in the Heisei era, it became standard for each Rider to have their own signature weapon beginning with Ryuki (Kuuga transformed objects into weapons while in Agito only the cyborg Rider had his own signature weapons from the beginning while the mystical Rider only had signature weapons in certain forms and the mutant Rider lacked any signature weapons). Borrowing weapons was a great trope because while you knew the Rider would use SOMETHING for a weapon at some point, you never knew just when it would happen or what the weapon would be.

There are also very significant character tropes, with the personalities of a Super Sentai team often being predictable based on the member's colour. Red is always hot-headed, blue is bookish, yellow was traditionally the comedic relief throughout the Showa Era, etc. The secondary Rider in Heisei KR is always hot-headed and usually either physically younger or more immature with annoying and flashy gimmicks to make them more interesting. They also tend to have exaggerated quirks, such as an obsession with mayo or the need to constantly upstage the main Rider.



But what about when tropes fail? I think there are three times in which this happens unerringly.

The first is when an episode is so by the book that you pretty much know everything that's going to happen before it happens and there's very little value left in watching the episode. There has to be some hook to keep you interested, be it a new character development that's outside the box or the introduction of a surprise element that couldn't have been predicted. In the Showa Era, this often involved the death of a major character, from the second KiRanger in GoRanger to the tragic and sudden death of JetBlack. The predictability of tropes can make things feel safe and familiar, but there has to be something new added to the table or there's no point in watching at all.

The second is when tropes exist purely to sell toys. Kamen Rider and Super Sentai have both suffered greatly in recent years because of their heavy reliance upon gimmicks over storytelling. Instead of giving kids action figures of the MotW or generals, they instead get a million variations of the good guys, a Pokemon-style product line of baubles, and (if they're REALLY lucky) one or two baddies that will end up being shelf warmers because they're not the baddies kids like. In fact, the Pokemon trope is extremely ingrained in modern tokusatsu, with even Ultraman becoming a "gotta collect them all" gimmick fest. Tropes can be good, but when their sole function is marketing, they tend to take away from the story more than they add to it.

The third is when a trope doesn't translate well internationally. This is especially true when a completely innocuous trope in one country is highly political in another, or when a trope is added in an attempt to appeal to foreign audiences when that trope actually involves a negative stereotype.

A perfect example of the former is Sonoshi, a character that could be described as being effeminate by people in most of the world. However, in America and parts of the UK, this character is seen as "problematic" because of the western concept of gender political ideology. To that portion of the population, it's a crime to simply be an effeminate man and therefore must be defined as "nonbinary" or some other purely Western concept. And if that character happens to be considered a villain, suddenly there's total outrage. Yet for most of the world, Sonoshi is simply a guy that has some feminine traits and his own reasons for doing what he does - and that's the end of the argument. When a trope can be turned into politically-charged outrage, especially by niche groups, it can have a negative impact on the ability of people who don't share those same political views to enjoy the show, even if the character would have been a fan favourite for them. Had Gaim been produced today, Oren would have sparked intense outrage in the west because he filled much the same role as Sonoshi does in DonBrothers (right down to him being an effeminate antihero for much of the show who has since been portrayed in a purely comedic light).

And a perfect example of the latter was the completely uncalled-for use of a political trope in the epilogue of Kamen Rider Black Sun in which it references an event that has since been disproven by eyewitnesses, body cam footage, and an autopsy. The inclusion of the trope after such an amazing and thought-provoking series soured the whole thing and ruined the message, all because Toei wanted to include a trope they thought Western audiences would love. Had the show been released in 2020, perhaps it wouldn't have been so damaging, but to include it years later when the truth of the event is public knowledge nearly ruined the entire series. Thankfully, the entire epilogue can safely be ignored, as it sends an undeniably opposing message to everything the rest of the series was trying to convey. Remove the epilogue and the show is absolutely amazing.



So yes, tropes are (usually) a good thing, and tousatsu wouldn't exist without them. In fact, tropes are the building blocks for every single story ever written and no story can exist without them. There are only 37 possible dramatic situations (i.e. plots), and every one of them can be considered a trope. So unless you argue that Waiting for Godot breaks the need for a trope or plot, there's no denying that tropes are important. Of course, the best tropes are those which create an expectation only to subvert it by switching tropes at the last moment or completely vacating the trope right before it comes to fruition.

But tropes can also be bad if thy fail to translate across cultural or political divides, or the story relies so heavily upon tropes that there's nothing new or unique to keep the viewer interested.