Tone Shift

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Over time, works can change in tone. A formerly episodic comedic work can become a dark political satire with a strong plot arc. A dark work about a future dystopia can become a lighthearted adventure series.

This can be a deliberate shift in tone that was planned all along, it can be done deliberately because of a perceived advantage to the new tone (almost always financial), or it may be an unplanned and almost accidental shift over time.

This is especially true in episodic media, such as Live Action TV, Comic Books, and Web Comics, where their long-running status and, in the first two cases, changes in writing teams can cause marked changes in tone over time.

This also frequently appears when remaking or re-imagining older media for a modern audience.

Changes to tone are not always permanent, but in order to qualify they must be long-lasting. A single dark episode in an otherwise light and fluffy show is not a Tone Shift.

A Super-Trope to:

Please only add examples that don't fit into one of the subtropes.

Compare Genre Shift.

Examples of Tone Shift include:
This page needs more examples. You can help this wiki by adding more entries or expanding current ones.