Cliché Storm: Difference between revisions

An important thing to note is that, as we enter the 21st century, the sheer number of works created makes it nearly impossible to write something "original". Also, our ability to securely store books and films in libraries makes it easy to access old works. That can make the newer material ''appear'' to be cliché storms, simply because we could see the similarity to countless older stories. With all that, [[Cliché Storm]] is about to become one of the most heard of tropes in the near-future. This is why we warn you that [[Tropes Will Ruin Your Life]].

 

 

== Anime/Manga ==

'''Dumbledore''': "Well, now I think you're just limiting yourself. Would it really be so bad if that did happen?"<br />

'''Snape''': "It doesn't really matter if it would or would not be since it ''won't''. And finally, I will most certainly not become his favorite teacher and or his mentor. I simply will not do it and this will not become an inspirational story. It will not." }}

* drconichero's Soul Chess is full of them. What's worse is that it's intentional (the only time it isn't is the character design for the expy of Jeremiah "Motherfucking Loyalty" Gottwald).

 

** Actually, everything Hazard says is made of this, from the "roll call" when he activates his troops to his combat banter.

* ''[[Street Fighter the Legend of Chun Li (Film)|Street Fighter the Legend of Chun Li]]'' has a terribly huge number of action movie clichés, even (perhaps especially) ones which contradict the canon and tone of the ''[[Street Fighter]]'' series.

* The 2007 hard sci-fi epic ''[[Sunshine (Film)|Sunshine]]'' borrows heavily from both ''2001'' and ''2010'', along with a host of other influences in the serious science fiction family of movies. The movie works though, mostly because you don't see its type very often anymore.

* ''[[Sleepover]]''. Mind you, it ''is'' a preteen chick flick comedy, but this is ridiculous. It doesn't help that most of the actresses are fresh out of Barbizon and don't even realize how many [[Dead Horse Trope|Dead Horse Tropes]] they're playing straight.

** Oddly enough, The Alliance ''is'' an evil empire, and Mal ''is'' the plucky hero and the rest of the movie goes pretty well as you would expect, albeit with enough emotional twists and turns to engage the audience.

** Actually, as Joss Whedon points out, the Operative is kind of right. While the Alliance is antagonistic to the main characters, said characters are thieves and smugglers. The Alliance is presented as actually being largely beneficial and benevolent. Granted, how much of this comes across in the film itself is debatable, since time for these subtleties is somewhat limited. As for Mal as 'the plucky hero' - even in the series Mal is far from the hero archetype, and for the film Whedon pushed him even further towards the darker, non-heroic side so he could undergo some sort of arc of development during the film.

* Cheap [[Sylvester Stallone]] vehicle ''[[Xtreme Kool Letterz|D-TOX]]''. Stallone plays a cop who, after punching a [[Cymbal Banging Monkey]], finds out his wife has been killed by his nemesis. He develops a drink problem and is sent to a remote, snowy rehab place. People get killed off one by one. And who's doing the killing? Why, the {{spoiler|[[Evil Brit]]}} of course! As you'd expect from a film populated by alcoholics, you get an [[Anvilicious]] message:

{{quote| "Booze may be a slow-burner, but it's still suicide."}}

* Many [[Quentin Tarantino]] movies are like this, but ''[[Kill Bill]]'' is the poster child. [[Tropes Are Not Bad|And you will love]] [[Refuge in Audacity|every last second.]]

* This trope is parodied in [[Trailers Always Lie|the trailer]] for ''[[Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters]]''.

* ''[[Daylight]]''; it's pretty much every disaster movie since 1972.

* The portions we hear of the speech the Federation President gives at Khitomer in ''[[Star Trek VI]]'' are basically a political/diplomatic speech cliché storm.

* [[Roger Ebert]]'s review of ''[[Stargate (Film)|Stargate]]'' was basically [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19941028/REVIEWS/410280308/1023 one long checklist of the cliches involved.]

* The trailer for the new Steven Soderbergh actioner ''[[Haywire (Film)|Haywire]]'' (starring MMA hottie Gina Carano) promises a cliché storm the likes of which even God has never seen, despite a terrific supporting cast including Michael Fassbender, Ewan [[Mc Gregor]], Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas.

 

 

* The ''[[Inheritance Cycle (Literature)|Inheritance Cycle]]'' often comes across as this. One of main reasons [[The Film of the Book|the movie]] was worse was that it took anything vaguely original from the book and replaced it with [[Narm|Narmful]] clichés. For example, in the movie, Saphira goes from being a small dragon hatchling to a fully-grown dragon in a matter of moments. How? She flies up into some stormy clouds. The book actually has her physically growing, over the course of a few months, without the use of magic clouds.

** Christopher Paolini actually said at one point that he was attempting to pay homage to the vast store of high fantasy archetypes. Given that he said this about a book he wrote when he was in his early teens, and that that was the least painful book of the series, this troper is inclined to believe that he actually just writes really clichéd works.

** Impossible! [[Sci Fi Ghetto|Terry Goodkind does not write fantasy, you moron!]]

* ''[[The Fionavar Tapestry]]'' reads like a deliberate attempt on the part of Guy Gavriel Kay to see how many high fantasy clichés can possibly be strung together in 1,000 pages of text.

** Unfortunately all of his works have a more than certain familiarity to each other...

* ''[[Maximum Ride]]''. So what if you've never read it? In some form, you already have.

* Nicely [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] and then subverted in the [[Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms]] series by [[Mercedes Lackey]]. Here, the "cliche storm" is almost literal: a metaphysical force called The Tradition which gathers around significant events and people, directing magical energy to flow in [[Archetype|archetypal]] directions and following certain tropes that have been set down through folklore and that consequently reinforce themselves by inspiring even ''more'' folklore! Characters throughout the series find themselves guided by, opposed by, and sometimes rebelling against The Tradition -- a witty metaphor for the writing process itself!

* ''[[Jim Springman and The Realm of Glory]]'' has a [[Show Within a Show|book within a book]] that purports to be about 'A unique fantasy world of hope and fear, good and evil, beauty and barbarity', where 'A teenager armed only with a magic sword and a stout heart takes up this impossible quest'. The (fictional) book is filled with cliches.

* ''[[Twilight (Literature)|Twilight]]'': [[Mary Sue|Awkward, clumsy girl]] moves to new school and is instantly adored by all? ''Check''. New girl falling in love with the [[Relationship Sue|hottest (cough) guy in school]]? ''Check''. Hot boy falls in love with new girl? ''Check''. Girl is so in luv she will do anything for her twu wuv? ''Check''. And that's just the beginning...

* Played with in George R. R. Martin's story ''The Hedge Knight''. It begins with every possible cliched circumstance around a knight joining a tournament. Then every single element of the story is revealed to actually be something else.

 

* The ending of [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3TkyqsEy54 this commercial.]

* On ''[[The West Wing]]'', when Bartlet debated his [[Strawman Political]] opponent Robert Ritchie, we hear a snippet of one of Ritchie's responses that goes like this:

* The ''[[Supernatural (TV)|Supernatural]]'' episode "Monster Movie". Every classic horror movie cliche you can think of -- {{spoiler|because the bad guy, a shapeshifter, is deliberately [[Invoked Trope|invoking]] them.}}

** That's because the episode was an [[Affectionate Parody]] of the old Universal monster movies, right down to the way it's shot.

* Alton Brown's commentary in ''[[Iron Chef America]]'' have been this from the start. The Chairman's conversations with the challenger have turned into this.

* The ''[[Charmed (TV)|Charmed]]'' episode "Chick Flick" parodies all the typical slasher movie cliches when a demon releases psycho killers from horror movies and sends them after the sisters. Since their powers don't work on the killers, the sisters have to follow the typical cliches. And there's a nice little shout out to ''Psycho''.

{{quote| '''Piper:''' "I'm being stalked by psycho killers and I hide in the shower?"}}

* In the season 3 finale of ''[[Leverage]]'', the team writes a speech for a politician that is intentionally made up of nothing but political speech cliches. The public eats it up.

** Granted, it was a small country with a one-party democracy, so the public wasn't yet disillusioned with political cliches, and the team took advantage.

* ''[[Gilmore Girls]]'' has an episode when Rory is moving into her college dorm and another student has lost a bet between him and his girlfriend and must only speak in cliches. A cliche storm follows.

 

* ''[[Eternal Sonata]]'' seems to teeter between this and [[Troperiffic]], with varying opinions as to which side it leans more heavily towards. It has many elements of the traditional JRPG, but it could be argued that this was intentional.

* A fair few people argue that the first ''[[Atelier Iris]]'' game, and maybe the second one, work on this level as well -- yeah, it plays a lot of common RPG adventure tropes completely straight, but they're used so ''well'' and the tone of the games is fundamentally so bright and optimistic [[Troperiffic|that the audience ends up loving the product anyway]].

** Mask of the Betrayer makes more sense if you think of it as the deconstructor to ''Neverwinter Nights 2'''s cliche-storm.

* ''[[Mass Effect]]'' is this in game form, although that's the point -- it's like ''playing'' a [[Space Opera]] to the hilt.

* ''[[Grandia II]]'', ''[[Luminous Arc]]'', and ''[[Tales of Symphonia (Video Game)|Tales of Symphonia]]'' are, like, ''the'' threesome of cliché storms, being built around identical framing devices and having largely the same plot twists.

* ''[[Legend of Dragoon]]''. When it first came out, many fans couldn't stop comparing it to ''[[Final Fantasy VII (Video Game)|Final Fantasy VII]]''. [[Follow the Leader|There is a good reason for this]]. It didn't help that the few "original" elements were downplayed. One of the "big revelations" ({{spoiler|one of the members of your group has been mass murdering anybody that comes in contact with The [[Reincarnation|Reincarnated]] [[The Chosen One|Chosen One]] for hundreds of years}}) was just flat out ignored immediately afterwards without even so much as a chiding.

* ''[[Live a Live]]'' is like this for most of the game, with chapters made up of incredibly cliched characters and plots. Then you unlock another chapter that starts like this but turns into an exceptionally brutal [[Deconstruction]].

* ''[[Just Cause (Video Game)|Just Cause 2]]'' falls into the category, most likely as a stylistic choice. Having the good guys really wrestle between helping the average Panauan and serving the Agency? Resolving the [[Excuse Plot|"plot"]] with something more sensible than the vile oppressive evil ''slimy toad'' of a dictator pulling a nuclear threat along an international struggle over a huge oil field that was totally there all along? Come on now, it'd just distract you from the ridiculous car chases and the [[Impressive Pyrotechnics|80's style]] [[Made of Explodium|gasoline explosions.]]

* ''[[Dead Space (Franchise)|Dead Space]]'', which played everything so very straight that it ''actually included'' the line "[[As You Know]]" without irony or [[Lampshade Hanging]]. Hell, the designers admitted that Isaac's suit was inspired by the [[Alien|Power Loader]], to which one imagines the world replied "Yeah, we know."

* ''[[Black Sigil]]'' is pretty much every late-80s/early-90s JRPG cliche rolled into one really slow DS game. It also suffers from the "One [[Random Encounters|random fight]] every three steps" syndrome that plagued a lot RPGs of the era.

* ''[[Wet]]''

* ''[[Last Scenario (Video Game)|Last Scenario]]'' works sort of like the ''[[Tales Series]]'' in this respect. A [[Mysterious Informant]] shows up to tell the [[Farm Boy]] that he is [[Heroic Lineage|the descendant of a legendary hero]] and must help [[Good Republic Evil Empire|fight the Empire]] to gain strength for the inevitable [[Sealed Evil in A Can|awakening of the demons]]. He goes off to fulfill his destiny, overjoyed to be saving the world. By the end of the game, he's found out that {{spoiler|a) he isn't related to Alexander, b) the demons [[Writtenbythe Winners|aren't]], and c) Zawu was an agent for the Kingdom, whose up-and-coming [[Magnificent Bastard|General Castor]] was [[Playing Both Sides]]}}. Even {{spoiler|''the intro text scroll''}} was a lie.

* The [[Play Station 2]] game ''[[Shining Tears]]''.

* ''[[Forty Winks]]'' for the [[Play Station]].

* ''[[Dragon Age]]''. Granted, the game ''does'' have quite a few original things, but when one looks at the setting...with few exceptions...it's practically every Tolkienian-inspired [[Medieval Fantasy]] plus a few things, minus a few things. Forest-dwelling elves who are big on Archery and hunting? Check. Subterranean Mountain-dwelling dwarves with a fondness for alcohol and crafting? Check. Mage towers? Check. Humans who speak with British accents? Check. Obvious influence from the British Isles or Western Europe? Check. Mages wound up destroying the world and creating Darkspawn? Check. Dwarven warriors? Check. [[Fantastic Racism]]? ...eh, mark it but not fully played out. [[Real Is Brown|Green and brown-stained landscapes?]] Check. Evil dragons that are just giant animals in terms of intelligence? Check. Last in the line of kings? Check.

* ''[[Disaster Day of Crisis (Video Game)|Disaster Day of Crisis]]'' plays every single [[Disaster Movie]]-Cliche known to mankind painfully straight. And somehow, it [[Narm Charm|still works.]]

* ''[[Guild Wars]]'' is particularly guilty of this, [[Play the Game Skip The Story|though it doesn't get much attention. ]]The storyline in all four campaigns is pretty cliched itself, but if you listen to the dialog you'd think you were listening to a dictionary of cliche things to say. From the motivational speeches you quite often get ("We are the light that will shatter the coming darkness"), to the supposedly dramatic twists in the storyline ("But something tells me if they see for themselves what the White Mantle really do with the Chosen, they'll have a change of heart about their masters"), it's about as bad as I've seen it get.

* [[The Feeble Files]] is kinda cross between genuine cliché storm and parody of it.

* [http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/495903 Super PSTW Action RPG] is this for video game RPGs.

* ''[[Super Robot Wars]]'' (especially ''[[Super Robot Wars Original Generation]]'') is built on this it's not even funny, starting with a [[Ascended Fanboy|mecha otaku turned giant robot pilot]], a ''German [[Samurai]]'' with his [[Char Clone]] [[Heterosexual Life Partner]] as [[Memetic Mutation|real men who ride each other]], [[The Stoic]] gambler and his [[Manic Pixie Dream Girl]] partner, guy with ridiculous [[No Sense of Direction]] with one of the [[Elemental Powers]] on his tows AND two talking cats, a ridiculously busty [[Artificial Human|android girl]]... and so on. Really, and it's still ''awesome''.

* ''[[Darksiders]]'' has been noted for mainlining on [[Grimdark]] tropes: set [[After the End]], featuring a stoic [[Badass]] on a [[Roaring Rampage of Revenge]], fighting against the [[Legions of Hell]], and so on and so forth. General consensus is that it ''works''.

** To be fair, ''[[Fire Emblem Akaneia]]'' wasn't [[Seinfeld Is Unfunny|as cliche in their day as they seem now]] - consider Akaneia helped establish the genre it's a part of; compare ''[[Fire Emblem]] 6'' and ''8'', which were about a decade and a half after Akaenia.

** Fire Emblem 9 was, backstory and setting aside, pretty much this to Fire Emblem games. However, it's interesting to note that about half way through the game, they start playing with the Fire Emblem tropes, such as having the princess instead of being a plot figure don armour and become full out playable. Fire Emblem 10 meanwhile goes into full-on [[Deconstructor Fleet]].

 

== Webcomics ==

* Everything in ''[[Sonichu]]'' that doesn't [[All There in the Manual|fail to make any sense unless the author explains it]] has been seen before in so many other, better works.

* Parodied on ''Hiro'' with [http://drunkduck.com/hiro/index.php?p=414050 Lo, the Cliche King].

* The ''[[Mega Man (Animation)|Mega Man]]'' animated series specialized in giving its viewers a sense of familiarity, from plots such as [[Pinocchio Syndrome|"I wanna be a real boy"]] and [[Incredible Shrinking Man|"shrunken protagonist"]] to "hypnotic hard rock."

* ''[[Delgo (Animation)|Delgo]]''. In an incredibly bad way. Considering how it has gone down in history with the worst opening weekend for a wide-release movie in history...

*** It's even worse when you add in the annoying sidekick, who is just [[The Load|so useless]] until the end when he "saves" the hero, except he gets attacked by some flying frog things as a result...

* ''[[Storm Hawks (Animation)|Storm Hawks]]'' can be seen as this from a mile away.

* Whether intentional or not, ''[[The Fairly Odd Parents (Animation)|The Fairly Odd Parents]]'' feels like an example of this right from the start. There are scenes after scenes and jokes after jokes that one can almost guess the outcome, or ask oneself, "why have I heard of this before?" At the worst one will emit an inner groan at the overused joke, but also at times one can find it charming.

* Pretty much the entire point of ''[[Total Drama Island (Animation)|Total Drama Island]]'' is to be a Category-5 Cliche Hurricane, especially for [[Reality TV]] tropes. [[Played for Laughs]].

* The [[LEGO]] [[Hero Factory]] mini-series, also called "''Rise of the Rookies''". A great cast with some big names and CGI models with over-detailed textures a good story do not make. It relied so much on recycled formulas and rolled so well on clichés, that it neglected to explain the very driving force behind its plot: {{spoiler|Just ''what'' did Von Nebula want revenge for? Nobody has done ''anything'' to him.}} Heck, the first episode included a scene during which the characters tell us just how awesome the main hero is, and that he ''will'' end up saving the day. Just in case you feared that the series would have something interesting and unexpected in stall for him (and surprise, surprise, his whole character development was also wrapped up in the same episode).

** Arguably, its p-redecessor ''[[Bionicle (Franchise)|Bionicle]]'' started out this way, playing all the tropes very, very straight in the first few years, [[Tropes Are Not Bad|although still managing to be enjoyable]]. It's only in the later years that it became more subversive and ascended to [[Troperiffic]]. There's still a chance for HF to do the same.

* ''[[Cars (Animation)|Cars]]'' is this for [[Pixar]] movies. It's easy to imagine a little counter in the corner dinging whenever you see a Pixar cliche. Stranger in a community or group? Check. Brooding moment from a side character? Check. Wacky sidekick who forms a comedic duo with the main character? Check. Said group full of wacky members with their own quirks? Check. All of the development threatens to go downhill when something happens to separate or alienate the stranger? Check.

** Probably because the show had a heavy emphasis on comedy; the writing made it clear that they knew it was all cliched, so at times it could come off as an [[Affectionate Parody]] of the superhero genre.

* ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender (Animation)|Avatar: The Last Airbender]]''; the basic plot is one you've heard before. The world is in danger, there is a single [[Chosen One]] who has to defeat the legion of evil despite his young age, and he only has a year to do it! But like other cliche storms, like ''[[Harry Potter (Literature)|Harry Potter]]'', by giving characters good back-stories and depth and creating a fleshed out world, [[Tropes Are Not Bad|it still works]].