Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

[[File:girl walking in dirty house.jpg|frame|Compare the elegant lady with the cobwebbed chairs.]]

 

{{quote|''He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes...''|''[[Nineteen Eighty-Four|1984]]''}}

 

Compare with [[Slobs Versus Snobs]].

 

Shiny:

* [[Used Future]]

* [[Wretched Hive]]

 

'''Note:''' Try to post the examples in the shininess and grittiness order, not at the bottom of each category.

 

 

 

* ''[[Ouran High School Host Club]]''. Except for one extremely gritty scene which is [[Played for Laughs]]

* ''[[Digimon Xros Wars]]'' is very idealistic, very optimistic, and - in the later half especially - everything gleams as though polished for hours.

 

 

* The ''[[Star Wars]]'' [[prequel]]s

** Leia's ship that gets captured at the beginning of A New Hope is also a good example. While the hallway is very smooth and shiny, the utility corridor she hides in with R2 is much more gritty.

** Also the insides of Star Destroyers, parts of Death Star II, Home One, and at times, Darth Vader's suit.

 

 

* The various ''[[Star Trek]]'' series. Even ''[[Deep Space Nine]]'' mostly had sets that looked neat and tidy. Perhaps that's just an unspoken credo of the Federation.

* ''[[Mad Men]]'': The Sterling Cooper offices are elegant examples of the International Style, the brand-new SCDP offices—particularly Roger's office—are enthusiastically Mid-Century Modern (i.e. That Style You See And Immediately Think "Sixties" No Not Hippie Stuff The Other Thing, Yes, Like JFK Airport), the Draper house is well-furnished (though not expensively so), even Peggy's small Brooklyn apartment is well-kept (well-worn, but hardly "gritty"...unless you would describe a well-maintained kitchen as "gritty"...), and the hotels and restaurants we see are mostly top-hole. And let's not forget the [[Gorgeous Period Dress]]. Of course, the series follows ad executives in the early Sixties (i.e. the era of the Three Martini Lunch and other such examples of excess), and additionally borrows heavily from the "visual vocabulary" of the era, so it's hardly surprising that despite the lean towards cynicism, the show is pretty much on the shiny end. Mind you, the occasional bit of dirt shows up, but it's not terribly common.

 

 

* [[Barbie]]

 

 

* ''[[Robot Unicorn Attack]]'' Now this one is getting a bit too far.

* [[Space Channel 5]] series. In fact one level is so colourful, an ''Epilepsy Warning'' had to be put in it!

 

 

* ''[[Goblins]]'' stays on the Shiny end nearly all the time, especially for characters wearing metal armor. It only moves towards Gritty when blood is involved.

 

 

* ''[[My Little Pony]]''

* Most [[Pixar]] movies, until the first half of ''[[WALL-E]]'', tended towards the clean end (it helps that "clean" is generally easier to do in CG).

 

 

 

* The [[James Bond]] films can tend towards either end of the scale.

** Although the 6th film is very washed out and bleak. The scene where Harry uses sectumsempra on Malfoy is so desaturated it is practically in black and white save for Malfoy's blood.

 

 

* Australian and New Zealand soaps (e.g., ''[[Neighbours]]'', ''[[Shortland Street]]'')

* ''[[Degrassi the Next Generation]]'' is more gritty than most teen dramas, but it can still be pretty shiny at times.

 

 

* ''[[Resident Evil 4]]'''s' famous art direction included a huge amount of detail in how the places looked, including the decaying village and military base, contrasted with the ornate castle.

* ''[[World of Goo]]'' has elements common in both ends.

 

 

* ''[http://www.blastwavecomic.com/index.php?p=comic&nro=1 Gone With The Blastwave]'' takes place in a completely ruined city, but the would-be [[Badass Longcoat]] soldiers manage to somehow stay fairly clean.

 

 

* The [[Disney Animated Canon]] usually is clean without being too obvious about it, but does fall into the shiny end when the princesses are involved.

* ''[[The Transformers (animation)|The Transformers]]''

 

 

 

* Certain anime such as ''[[Texhnolyze]]'', ''[[MD Geist]]'', and ''[[Violence Jack]]'' tend to ''really'' push the envelope for grittiness.

 

 

* [[Frank Miller]].

 

 

* ''[[Blade Runner]]'' was gritty for the most part, especially in contrast to the [[Executive Meddling|tacked-on happy ending]].

* ''[[Pirates of the Caribbean]]'', very much so.

 

 

* Irish soaps (eg ''[[Fair City]], Ros na Run'')

* ''[[The Wire]]'' was intentionally shot to maximize the run-down aspects of Baltimore. The studio executives were uncertain about this decision at first, but in the end went along with it—to great effect.

 

 

* ''[[Machinarium]]'': Game takes place in a mechanical city made largely out of decaying buildings made out of cracking stone and rusty metal. This world is completely devoid of living animals although there is some plant life present.

* The ''[[Diablo]]'' games are gritty in the extreme, depicting a world invaded by demons who decorate with blood, limbs, impaled corpses and tortured souls.

 

 

 

* [[Masamune Shirow]] tends to make the major cities in his works so shiny that they're ''reflective''. However, there's always lots of grit outside the cities or just below the surface (introduce a bit of [[More Dakka|firepower]] into the mix and it becomes a moot point). The only exception is ''[[Dominion Tank Police]]'', where ''everything'' was gritty.

* ''[[Code Geass]]'', most notably how the shiny Imperial Enclave of Tokyo and the run-down Shinjuku ghetto, practically opposites on the scale, are separated only by a railway.

 

 

* [[Superman|Metropolis]] and [[Batman|Gotham]] are often compared in the DCU, with the former being the shinier (at one point, Catwoman wonders if they ever turn off the lights at night) while the latter is normally very bleak (In The DCAU, the writers admitted to being freaked out by Gotham during a clear sunny day whenever they drew it, and only did so once due to the alternate universe setting it was being presented in.) Considering the types of heroes who operate in this city, it seems the city adapted to them instead of the other way around.

* The comic book ''[[Baker Street]]'' started out very shiny and and a bit cartoony, but became steadily more gritty and realistically-rendered as the viewpoint character became more depressed by the horrible things that were happening on the way to the [[Downer Ending]].

 

 

* [[The BBC]] vs. 2005 movie versions of ''[[Pride and Prejudice]]'' come to mind. In the BBC version, everything is shiny, even though it's the English countryside. In the movie, the Bennets' home is more realistically dirty.

 

 

* ''[[Wicked Lovely]]'' contrasts a [[Red Light District]] known as Huntsdale (presumed to be in Pennsylvania) with the harsh beauty of the [[The Fair Folk|fey]] world.

* Played up in ''[[The Hunger Games]]'' where a ''very'' gritty, dystopian Real World in the satellite states, where most people are basically starving/worked to death and are forced to fight to the death for the amusement of the people living in the shiny city in the centre. And it is really very shiny. Think random tech that doesn't even exist in real life and fashion obsessions.

 

 

* ''[[Firefly]]'' varies quite a bit. By dint of being a [[Space Western|western in space]], it often lands on the gritty end of things, but episodes set in the Core worlds, with all the shiny spiffiness, tend to be much cleaner and pretty. This is deliberately contrasted in many parts of the series and movie.

 

 

* ''[[Warhammer 40,000]]'' runs the entire spectrum, with the [[The Fair Folk|Eldar]] at the shiny end, [[The Corruption|Chaos]] at the gritty end & everybody else somewhere in the middle.

** Slaanesh worshippers thrive on being shiny.

 

 

* The musical ''[[Wicked (theatre)|Wicked]]'' manages to combine both aspects with Shiz and the Emerald City being fairly shiny, but the Witchunters and Kiamo Ko being pretty gritty.

 

 

* In ''[[The Legend of Zelda]]: [[Ocarina of Time]]'', Adult Zelda is shown wearing a much more elaborate dress than her younger counterpart is, even though by that point she had no home, no posessions, her kingdom is in ruins, and she has been on the run for seven years, {{spoiler|posing as a Sheikah}}.

* ''[[Portal (series)|Portal]]'' is shiny in the test chambers (and even there, there are broken parts) and gritty after the [[Wham! Episode|Wham Level]]. The first half of the game is shiny, the second half is gritty.

 

 

* ''[[Insektors]]'' was basically about a war between Gritty and Shiny.

* ''[[WALL-E]]'' consciously hits both extremes: it has a very dirty setting (the ruins of Earth) and a very clean setting (the spaceship). WALL-E himself is filthy and made up of spare parts, and EVE is shiny, sleek and streamlined.

 

 

* This is most definitely [[Truth in Television]]. Basically, the more concentrated the wealth and power, the shinier, newer, and better maintained the buildings, clothes, and people will be.

** The [[Big Applesauce]] in [[Real Life]]. Everything more than ten feet above the ground is shiny. Everything less than ten feet above the ground is gritty.