Talk:Unintentional Period Piece

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Does this trope deserve to exist?

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Derivative (talkcontribs)

Me and Geth were talking about shit that TV Tropes that Kiwi Farms had picked up upon and that ATT might also have inadvertently kept a copy of, and we both immediately agreed the more sexual improprietous shit should be immediately deleted, however they do make some good points about other pages, and therefore I would like to start a discussion based upon what a user called NARPASSWORD said.

"According to TV Tropes, referencing something that happens to be popular from that time period makes that work an unintentional period piece.

In reality, every piece of fiction will, or already has, become dated to some degree, so there's no point in this particular "trope"."

TBF, I can't really disagree with him. Datedness is a natural factor of time and aging.

I would like to have some other views on this, because I think that KF can in their own humorous ways be a third-party in which they can do an MOT on leftovers that the forking that started this wiki brought.

Labster (talkcontribs)

Well, yes it does deserve to exist, but in its present form the page examples read like a cross between nostalgia and "assigned in English class".

> For example, while the 1990s sitcoms Seinfeld and Frasier show their age in some respects, they don't wear The Nineties so blatantly as to have this trope apply to them.

I don't think this is really true. I think they feel dated by now.

I think this should probably be added to Omnipresent Tropes or Universal Tropes. I guess the question is, do standard Period Pieces get dated in the same way? If so, it's the first category., if not it's the second one.

And possibly also Audience Reactions, because while the work itself is a time capsule, this reaction to it depends a lot on who is watching it.

SelfCloak (talkcontribs)

"[T]his trope only really applies to works that wear their dates so blatantly that a viewer can identify the era or even year it was made in as soon as they begin to watch it."

So everything that looks dated can be included as an example, as long as it's undeniably from their time.

But then the article mentions before that: "While just about every work becomes somewhat of a period piece after it becomes more than a decade old due to the characters referencing old trends, wearing out of style fashions and using out of date technology, [...]"

I see a contradiction between what the trope is and what most examples describe.

Luc (talkcontribs)

Sorry to revive the thread, but it's actually a somewhat interesting topic:

The thing is, yes, it's a trope, but not as TVTropes has it described currently.

The trope is about things that unintentionally slap you in the face with when they were made in ways that stand out extraordinarily. It needs to literally be bleeding "I was made in [year]" out its eyeballs in order to be a true Unintentional Period Piece, IMHO.

The Barney Miller example (discussion of police raids on gay bars, and a possible smallpox outbreak) provided the perfect example because it was dated in a very sharp, very particular way. The current TVTropes "concrete example" is too vague by comparison.

And yeah, you're right, it's an Audience Reaction.

Looney Toons (talkcontribs)

I think what makes "Unintentional Period Piece" happen in a work is an unconscious assumption on the part of the creator(s) that some element of the story or setting -- like the raids on gay bars in the Barney Miller example -- is universal and unchanging when they're not, to the point that to an audience after the time that things changed, the reference is almost incomprehensible. Intentional period pieces know when they hit these things that they'll need to provide context or explanation for the audience. Unintentional period pieces assumed everyone would always know what they were; however, they have since been sideswiped by History Marches On and now confusion and incomprehension is the best they can hope for when an audience stumbles across one of these elements. (If not outright Values Dissonance -- "How can the good guy cops in Barney Miller even joke about raids on gay bars?") It's kind of the funhouse mirror reflection of Too Soon.

Another way it happens is when a work goes out of its way to be deliberately oh-so-modern, which generally means pinning itself firmly to specific ephemeral fashions, issues and trends. Some of these may last long enough to still be current when the work finally reaches the audience, but eventually the relevance will fade. A lot of films in the 60s were like that. The 1953 version of The War of the Worlds suffered from this because it tried so hard to update the story to the contemporary era that it's permanently affixed to it.

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