I think partly what you’re running into is that we live in a postmodern age of storytelling.
This. Postmodern stories expect the audience to be familiar with the thing they subvert, but this expectation starts to fail when they become more successful than the thing.
(This does not have to be a fatal flaw. For example, Magical Girl Madoka is a subversion of the magical girl trope, but it makes sense even to an audience unfamiliar with the trope. Probably because the first two and half episodes kinda follow the trope, before the story starts to deviate from it. This is different from opposing the trope from the very start.)
I sometimes feel weird when I watch a movie for kids together with my children, as I see that the movie is subverting a trope that I am familiar with… but they are not. I wonder what kind of message they get from the movie; whether they somehow get it anyway, or it’s just “random things happen for random reasons”.
(My older daughter once asked me, why are adult males always depicted in movies as idiots. I guess the movie producers still see themselves as transgressive heroes who defy the popular stereotypes, but in fact they are just a part of the new monoculture. These days, a truly shocking story would be about a brave boy who succeeds to overcome adversity alone, and gets a girl… who does not turn out to be a lesbian.)
This. Postmodern stories expect the audience to be familiar with the thing they subvert, but this expectation starts to fail when they become more successful than the thing.
(This does not have to be a fatal flaw. For example, Magical Girl Madoka is a subversion of the magical girl trope, but it makes sense even to an audience unfamiliar with the trope. Probably because the first two and half episodes kinda follow the trope, before the story starts to deviate from it. This is different from opposing the trope from the very start.)
I sometimes feel weird when I watch a movie for kids together with my children, as I see that the movie is subverting a trope that I am familiar with… but they are not. I wonder what kind of message they get from the movie; whether they somehow get it anyway, or it’s just “random things happen for random reasons”.
(My older daughter once asked me, why are adult males always depicted in movies as idiots. I guess the movie producers still see themselves as transgressive heroes who defy the popular stereotypes, but in fact they are just a part of the new monoculture. These days, a truly shocking story would be about a brave boy who succeeds to overcome adversity alone, and gets a girl… who does not turn out to be a lesbian.)