Flanderization

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.

There is a tendency for this to happen in real life with influencers. Certain aspects resonate with an audience and so they overemphasize them.

https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capt...

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.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization

^ for anyone who wants to go on a deep dive!

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.

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.

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.

I feel like most of the characters on Big Bang Theory were Flanderized pretty quickly.

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.

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"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13353106

I'd accept that Flanders Computing is an offshoot of the overall much-later-coined flanderization process.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Another example is Luanne from King of the Hill

Still annoyed that Runkle in Californication went from a quirky but excellent publicist into just a generic loser

> 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.

For topics like this, TV tropes is great: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization

I liked this a lot.

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.

Not to be confused with bowdlerization: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation

I totally expected this to be about the Dutch region of Belgium.

Like that guy, Khalid Lame.

There aren't enough examples for this to be considered a meaningful progression. Even the wikipedia page is struggling to prove its worth.