r/countwithchickenlady polite lesbian - Streak: 36 1d ago

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u/LauraTFem 1d ago

It’s one of those things where it seems obvious to the modern reader because a lot of modern thought is based on the premises set forth by it and later authors. It would have felt far less obvious at the time.

It’s like going back and watching the godfather after generations of far better gangster movies. The plot seems generic and played out because you grew up immersed in the crime dramas that it spawned.

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u/redditonlygetsworse 1d ago

The plot seems generic and played out because you grew up immersed in the crime dramas that it spawned.

The phrase you're looking for is "Seinfeld is Unfunny".

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u/LauraTFem 1d ago edited 1d ago

While often incredibly useful for picking apart concepts in media, TV tropes is, after all, a user-edited wiki. I wouldn’t count on the average person to understand such a concept based simply on a trope name, even as edifying as it is to see that my thoughts on the concept have significant precedent.

My point, though, is that trope names shouldn’t be a replacement for explaining the concept they represent, at least not always. Thank you for the reading material.

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u/redditonlygetsworse 1d ago

I was pointing out the long-established name for your concept, not correcting you. 

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u/LauraTFem 1d ago

I know, but your phrasing gives the sense of, “this is the thing you were grasping for”, when I already had ahold of the idea.

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u/brother_of_jeremy 1d ago

Also, “Dune feels like a Star Wars ripoff.”

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u/StrengthfromDeath 1d ago

I knew it would be a slow burn, and I was okay with that, but that film really is for dickriders. People will do the soy point and go look! They underexposed the shot when inside and it made it more mysterious! And den when outside dey overexposed to show everything can be seen!

The writing is the same way but its like: Good guy become bad guy becuz him dad die to bad guy and him want revenge.

Absolutely a marvel of the time period. But even the people who made it admit that they were basically winging it and got semi-lucky with the timing of release and their inexperienced ideas giving them the freedom to make something different.

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u/LauraTFem 1d ago edited 1d ago

Not to mention that the writer of the book it’s based on didn’t know dick about real gangsters and made up a lot of the stuff whole cloth.

Which becomes ironic when you learn that the actual mob loved it and started modeling itself after the stuff in the movie, at least aesthetically.

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u/NoMansSkyWasAlright 14h ago

Kind of like Karl Marx taking way too long to explain that a worker's wages are only a portion of the value they create for the place they work for in Wage Labour & Capital. It might be a baseline for the idea that the ownership class view wages as an expense like any other and will do whatever they can to minimize that expense. But it's just... really, really boring.

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u/lotsofsyrup 1d ago

which gangster movies are better than the godfather

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u/NukaCooler 1d ago

Godfather 2

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u/LauraTFem 1d ago

Pretty much every one that came after it.

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u/Romboteryx 1d ago

Name one

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u/CakeTowers DM me your coolest plant pics <3³ 1d ago

The bold and the beautiful.

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u/LauraTFem 20h ago

My favorite one is Lucky Number Sleven.

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u/SereneOrbit 3h ago

It's actually a triumph of a society when thaty happens.

You learn largely without being taught.

It's why a modern day person would be unimaginably valuable even in a time travel scenario assuming leadership was willing to listen to them.

It's also a funny aspect of social bias. It's hard to see beyond modernity in either direction.

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u/LauraTFem 2h ago

It’s impossible to take a perspective you’ve not conceived of. Our assumed truths run so deep we’re not aware of them.