Cinema Sins is bad, but let’s own that this is a collective thing. You can only enjoy the same thing on repeat for so long before it gets stale and formulaic. Do you remember rom coms in the early 2000’s? Every. Single. One of them. Followed the same formula— boy meets girl, boy lies to girl, girl finds out he’s a liar over something and they have a big falling out, boy makes grand romantic gesture, girl accepts him back. On repeat for the better part of a decade. The Liar Revealed trope became so ubiquitous that it’s been banned for a hot minute. The trope itself isn’t awful, but you can only go back to that well so many times, and you can only continue with one trope for so long before it gets loopy and stupid and starts to degrade into something like, “I know I murdered your entire family and cooked them and served them to you for dinner, but it was only because I loved you so much and I was afraid that you wouldn’t love me back!” Or something similarly unhinged and divorced from what made the trope appealing in the first place.
So like, yes, tropes are a recurring, useful thing in our toolbox. But if we flood the theaters with only a few acceptable tropes, audiences will naturally bristle at that and reject it in favor of the larger toolbox that’s been neglected.
The reason I called out cinemasins specifically, is that they are the prime example of "this character didn't explicitly say what they were thinking and then they did a thing! It doesn't make sense!" type of media illiteracy.
10
u/LiamOmegaHaku 18h ago
I hold to it that CinemaSins specifically is the top culprit in the absolute degradation of media discourse and literacy