Redway
14-03-2025, 05:44 PM
“Flanderisation”, for those who aren’t acquainted with the term, just means dialling up a character’s traits that were present but less exaggerated in the earlier seasons of the show, to the point where they almost become a caricature of themselves (Ned Flanders’s increasing evangelical zeal being the prime example from-which the name is derived in t’first place).
Dumbing characters all the way down is a major bug-bearer of mine. Sometimes it works and makes the characters more endearing (like Homer Simpson, who went from a gruff, child-strangling alcoholic to a loveable buffoon of a Bart-strangling duff drunkard) or just makes them out-and-out funnier (aka the orange soda-loving one between Kenan and Kel) but at other times it washes down the initial likability of and depth to the character. Chelsea in That’s So Raven is an example I come back to quite a lot. She starts off as a quirky but fairly grounded, book-smart and loyal best friend to Raven. She has her ditz moments here-and-there and it is a fundamental tendency in her character but she also has fiery wit, spunk and a bit of common sense. Season 2 exaggerates the ditziness a little bit but she’s still this fairly smart-ish environmentalist-vegetarian bestie to Raven who’s even more sensible than Raven at times and perfectly capable of keeping up with Raven and Eddie. In seasons 3 and 4, however, she’s dumber than a bag of bricks and just almost a completely different character to who she was in the first two seasons. In the earlier episodes, she didn’t act like that at all.
Jean Slater (EastEnders) is another one for me. Her eccentricity is marked from the off but it’s grounded in a tremendous amount of grit, especially when we see her through the lens of someone suffering from severe bipolar disorder. Once she becomes a full-time character she slowly transforms into a sausage-surprise caricature and despite a good spell in 2009 (when Stacey herself went manic and needed Jean to step up for her, in a way she hadn’t since at least Stacey’s earliest childhood) she’s just gotten so bad and so feeble with her eccentricities that she’s come across as someone with ‘generalised learning difficulties’ than a mental illness of any kind, and it just got hard to tell which parts of her ditziness were simply down to her natural personality and which were a result of being the bipolar-special needs hybrid she became after her first couple of years on the show. The writing doesn’t intellectually insult and undermine her like that anymore but she’s still a million miles away from the much grittier character we met in the noughties. Between submerging herself in water every few years to remind us that she’s still a hard-hitting depiction of mental illness, bullying Harvey (her current boyfriend) and that God-forsaken sausage-surprise nonsense, I can’t stand her now.
Dumbing characters all the way down is a major bug-bearer of mine. Sometimes it works and makes the characters more endearing (like Homer Simpson, who went from a gruff, child-strangling alcoholic to a loveable buffoon of a Bart-strangling duff drunkard) or just makes them out-and-out funnier (aka the orange soda-loving one between Kenan and Kel) but at other times it washes down the initial likability of and depth to the character. Chelsea in That’s So Raven is an example I come back to quite a lot. She starts off as a quirky but fairly grounded, book-smart and loyal best friend to Raven. She has her ditz moments here-and-there and it is a fundamental tendency in her character but she also has fiery wit, spunk and a bit of common sense. Season 2 exaggerates the ditziness a little bit but she’s still this fairly smart-ish environmentalist-vegetarian bestie to Raven who’s even more sensible than Raven at times and perfectly capable of keeping up with Raven and Eddie. In seasons 3 and 4, however, she’s dumber than a bag of bricks and just almost a completely different character to who she was in the first two seasons. In the earlier episodes, she didn’t act like that at all.
Jean Slater (EastEnders) is another one for me. Her eccentricity is marked from the off but it’s grounded in a tremendous amount of grit, especially when we see her through the lens of someone suffering from severe bipolar disorder. Once she becomes a full-time character she slowly transforms into a sausage-surprise caricature and despite a good spell in 2009 (when Stacey herself went manic and needed Jean to step up for her, in a way she hadn’t since at least Stacey’s earliest childhood) she’s just gotten so bad and so feeble with her eccentricities that she’s come across as someone with ‘generalised learning difficulties’ than a mental illness of any kind, and it just got hard to tell which parts of her ditziness were simply down to her natural personality and which were a result of being the bipolar-special needs hybrid she became after her first couple of years on the show. The writing doesn’t intellectually insult and undermine her like that anymore but she’s still a million miles away from the much grittier character we met in the noughties. Between submerging herself in water every few years to remind us that she’s still a hard-hitting depiction of mental illness, bullying Harvey (her current boyfriend) and that God-forsaken sausage-surprise nonsense, I can’t stand her now.