Flanderization/Web Original
Examples of Flanderization in Web Original works include:
- The Angry Video Game Nerd started out as a jaded sort of fellow who would only start dropping F-bombs when the game truly deserved it, and concentrated more on the reviews themselves. As the series continued, the Nerd would collapse into screaming apoplexy at the slightest provocation, game-related or not, and the shows gradually got more and more taken over by movie-like set pieces and Large Ham supporting characters (this was about when Mike Matei got an expanded role.)
- Partially true, The Nerd has cursed less than the beginning.
- Most of the characters in Red vs. Blue suffer from this and this is a good example of Tropes Are Not Bad. Donut starts as a somewhat wimpy rookie who is unfortunately assigned pink armor. He at first despises and insists is "light red" but later on he seems to embrace that armor becoming a full fledged flamboyant Ambiguously Gay. Caboose's childish incompetence becomes insanity. Simmons changes from occasionally kissing ass to displaying extremely sycophantic behavior ("You're not only a wonderful leader but also a handsome man, sir!"). Sarge's dislike of Grif progressed to actually trying to kill Grif on a fairly regular basis. Griff himself started as the most competent member of the reds with occasional references to slacking off, (most likeley because his work would have been utter nonsense anyway). This evolved into extreme sloth and gluttony. Tucker, who talked about "picking up chicks" in the first few episodes, became a literal font of innuendo by the series' end. Tex went from a skilled and amoral special forces soldier to a legendarily powerful Badass. Church, however, remained roughly as grouchy and cynical throughout, perhaps actually becoming more complex as time passed. Because of the Flanderization, what started as a mildly funny series became a hilarious show with the most exaggerated character traits imaginable.
- Don't forget Doc. He started out as a conscientious objector but had no true defining behavioral quirks. Quickly he became a useless wimp (to the point that he reveals he ran track in high school because it was the least competitive sport he could find) and a counter-balance to Omalley's aggressive ranting.
- At one point, Open Blue's Espartano unit went from ostensibly unisex Tyke Bomb training program to Amazon Brigade factory. Has a bit of Never Live It Down due to the main contributor just happening to prefer badass lolitas, thus inadvertently bringing the other players assume the factuality of said Flanderization. They in turn started making Espartano characters using said assumption, resulting in the concept's flanderization. This was cleaned up in v5, when the new unit for the role, the Engelmacht, was explicitly stated to be unisex.
- A lot of people probably don't realize that the original "Caturday" pictures (now known as LOLcats) were captioned in proper English. They were still funny, because the photos were inherently bizarre, like photos you might see in magazine caption contests. Now it's escalated to the point where any photo of a cat combined with bad enough English is supposedly hilarious.
- The Evil Overlord List and its additional points. Just look at it! Dangerously Genre Savvy doesn't even cover it.
- And of course there's now the Benevolent Ruler List
- Germaine from Neurotically Yours was a teenage goth chick that, while absolutely loathing people in general, had a good head on her shoulders and had some common sense while just wanting her poetry to get more attention. As the series went on, she slowly slides into a blatant whore with a lot of sexual fetishes that she routinely denied when Foamy called her out on it and it grew to ridiculous levels when she gained a ton of weight to get men to stop treating her like a whore, only to become a bigger whore with the crowd that loved how fat she gotten, along with her butt and breasts, and tried to justify it by saying the money helps pay the rent. The series' creator explains this was Germaine's Character Development all along and it's starting to show since Germaine had woke up to the truth and started to take control of her life, putting the trope in reverse.
- Jake from College Humor's Jake and Amir went from being a regular guy having to deal with Amir's antics to being somewhat of a Jerkass.
- Tales of MU does this to gnomes (its version of hobbits) to a certain extent, when comparing the species to the one from Middle-Earth. The latter are respectable to a fault and don't think much of people who travel too much or have adventures - the former literally consider "adventure" a dirty word and take pains to use an Unusual Euphemism.
Hazel: What I mean to say is that she’s an... a lady of wandering interests [...] You know, prone to seek out, ah, random encounters. |
- Miranda of Miranda Sings started out as a fairly believable Stealth Parody of amateur singers on youtube who are deluded about their talent before her singing, fashion sense, and overall attitude slowly started getting more and more over the top. Compare this to this. Colleen Ballinger, the creator of the character, says she was deliberately exaggerating whatever traits were most derided in the comments section in order to make her more annoying. And due to Poe's Law, some still seem to not immediately get that she's a fictional character.
- One of the many side-effects of the World Split hitting Ink City was certain characters undergoing this as a sign they were growing increasingly unbalanced. Don, for instance, is a fan of giving and receiving hugs, which he calls 'sugar'. Due to losing all his ink after the Split, he turns bright pink and can't say anything other than "Sugar sugar sugar."
- StarDestroyer.Net got an essay about this phenomenon, Brain Bugs. Especially noting how whole alien species quickly turn into "farcical one-note caricatures" even if the first appearance was not like this. Mostly in Star Trek, but before delving into generic SF memes the author mentions that it's "an inevitable side-effect of having so many writers" - a Shared Universe not controlled by one author (or a draconian continuity editor) undergoes internal equivalent of Adaptation Decay repeatedly and as such is doomed to move toward Lowest Common Denominator.
- Back to Flanderization