r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Ultrimus-Prime • 1d ago

miscellaneous Media Made to Prove the Haters Wrong

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Tunak Tunak Tun (Daler Mehndi) Critics claimed his music videos were only popular because they featured attractive women dancing. Mehndi responded by making a music video featuring nobody except multiple green-screen versions of himself. It became a massive hit and his most famous song.

Five Nights at Freddy’s - Scott Cawthon previously made a family-friendly game called Chipper & Sons Lumber Co. Critics complained that the characters looked like creepy animatronics. Rather than abandon that visual style, Cawthon decided to turn them into an actual horror game using scary animatronics.

Superman Kingdom Come - Mark Waid and Alex Ross were reacting to the 1990s trend of increasingly violent, cynical superheroes.

Their story deliberately challenged the belief that traditional superheroes like Superman were outdated. It portrayed the consequences of abandoning heroic ideals and argued that compassion, restraint, and morality were still essential to superheroes.

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171

u/Eran-of-Arcadia 1d ago

Someone: "You can't write a compelling fantasy series with some random premise like . . . Pokémon meets the Lost Roman Legion!"

Jim Butcher: "Bet."

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u/supremo92 1d ago

Codex Alera is the name of the book series.

Tbh, the challenger was a fool because they accidentally chose two things that sounds extremely compelling together.

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u/MakeItHappenSergant 1d ago

He also stretched the "Pokémon" concept pretty far to "animist nature magic".

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u/sushi_cw 1d ago

Yeah, it strays from that initial "premise" pretty quickly and pretty dang far, to the point that it's hard to call it a premise. By the end of the series, it's got more in common with Starcraft.

More like an initial brainstorming prompt... in any case, it turned out to be a fun read.

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u/StuffSufficient954 1d ago

Like Palworld.

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u/Plannercat 1d ago

He learned after the success of the Dresden Files (he intentionally made the first book out of nothing but cliches and thought it would fail)

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u/Chris22533 1d ago

He wrote it to prove his creative writing teacher wrong and accidentally proved her right.

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u/MakeItHappenSergant 1d ago

The first book follows a very standard, potboiler detective story formula, but it's still good.

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u/Caleth 1d ago

Cliches if used well are great. it's when you're leaning on them to do all the work for you that they suck.

Hey see look funny guy does funny thing. LAUGH AT HIM!!!!!

Vs. the sometimes funny guy did a thing at a thematically appropriate time for him to do it and it was a witty insightful joke or some subtle satire of the situation.

Wizard works with the cops to solve a complex murder that someone is causing using the power of storms is pretty non standard. Even if Harry's a bit of a wanna be hard bitten detective with a thing for "saving dames" (even when they don't need it like Karen.)

Vs. Jon detective man is a drunk PI that solves why the femme fatal murdered the guy that no one can prove she did murder in a gin soaked haze in the 50's. He's got a girl that's dead and can't get over it, but maybe this sexy chica he's investigating can light a fire back up in his heart right before she puts a knife in his back.

Context and work make a cliche work, vs being lazy and expecting the cultural context to do the work for you.

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u/Gmknewday1 1d ago

It's a shame Harry Dresden is now associated with a guy having a mental breakdown 

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u/Next-Run-7026 1d ago

It opened doors for him?

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u/PlasticAngle 1d ago

Dude thought it would fail but still write the second book before he even find a publisher for his first book.

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u/DefNotUnderrated 1d ago

Well, that explains a lot. I remember wincing during much of the dialogue because it sounded like badly done wanna be film noir garbage. The plot was interesting but I only stuck with the series because I’d been told that it got better after the first few books. I just chalked up the initial awkwardness to Butcher being like 19 when he wrote it

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u/fakecuzpornandstuff 23h ago

/u/Chris22533 has it right. When I heard him tell the story it wasn't about using nothing but cliches, it was about using his writing teacher's entire methodology which he (at the time) thought ridiculous. Filling out worksheets, writing out character bios in advance, literally drawing an arc on a piece of paper and putting labels at the start, and, and intermediate points to track the story's arc. "...and that was how Storm Front happened."

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u/DienekesMinotaur 1d ago

Also Jim Butcher: I'm sick and tired of being told that books should be written along certain preset stories like the Hero's Journey, I'm going to write one specifically along those lines to prove it won't work.

Book becomes his first big success and longest running series.

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u/Doomboy911 1d ago

Sibling I got like two pages into codex Alera before going back to chicago ten or so years later I picked it back up. Genuinely not a single dull moment, the bit in book three with our undercover agent caught me by surprise.

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u/fakecuzpornandstuff 23h ago

Listen. If you're gonna tell the story, you have to tell it right.

So Jim Butcher, best-selling author of the "Dresden Files" novels, is goofing off on an internet forum for writers one afternoon. Presumably, he is at least somewhat well-known there, because another user comes to him with a challenge. "I bet," says the other user, "That even you couldn't write a good book about a bad idea."

"I'll do you one better," says Jim, "I'll write a good book about two bad ideas, and you get to pick 'em."

"Okay, uh... Pokemon, and the Lost Roman Legion."

And thus was Codex Alera created.

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u/STylerMLmusic 21h ago

Always happy to see Jim Butcher mentioned in the wild. I'm twenty books into the /r/dresdenfiles

Codex Alera was also outstanding even if I sometimes didn't enjoy some characters perspective chapters.

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u/Now-Thats-Podracing 1d ago

And it’s one of my favorite fantasy series of all time.

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u/StewartPot 1d ago

kamen rider creative process:

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u/Raidoton 1d ago

Someone: "You can't write a compelling fantasy series with some random premise like . . . Pokémon meets the Lost Roman Legion!"

Are we making haters up so it fits this "trope"?

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u/SquashOk4174 19h ago

Pokemon Africanus had entered the chat.

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u/zLREN 1d ago

Context?

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u/Khorgor666 1d ago

Codex Alera

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u/Tels315 1d ago

If I recall the idea was that an author can't write a good story if the basis isn't interesting. Butcher aimed a good author can make a good story out of any story idea and challenged the claim. He was told to make a story mixing the Lost Roman Legion and Pokémon as a premise and created the Codex Alera.

Jim Butcher has a habit of being challenged to write impossible things and doing it anyway. Like Harry Dresden was written as a collection of close detective tropes and spawned a massive hit.

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u/DoctorNayle 1d ago

A little later in The Dresden Files he also responded to another sort of challenge. He was on a panel for urban fantasy and in answer to a question one of the other authors (sorry I can't remember which one right now) said something along the lines of "you can't really make vampire bondage sex a major plot point."

And then he just went and did that.

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u/KneeDeepInTheDead 1d ago

So its about Romans using captured mythological beasts to fight wars?

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u/JedenTag 1d ago

Honestly to my mind the pokemon angle doesn't really stand up to scrutiny, but the premise is a lost roman legion stumbled into another world centuries ago, made bonds with elemental spirits, and created a new kingdom on the world. The series has a slight angle of capturing spirits at the start but quickly discards it. Its a great read though.

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u/KneeDeepInTheDead 1d ago

Does sound like a neat premise

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u/digitaltransmutation 1d ago

Everyone manifests a "fury" except the MC, who is uniquely deficient. The furies are also present in nature; like there are some lightning beasties who can descend from certain kinds of storms.

Now that I think about it, it isn't too different from the spren in Way of Kings in some ways.