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Trope Codifier - TV Tropes
"Conan Doyle did not invent the detective story — that honor goes to Edgar Allan Poe — but through his immensely popular creation, and his inventive series of tales, he was almost single-handedly responsible for creating a huge public interest in tales of mystery and detection."
You have before you three series. The first, Series A, was the first known use of a trope, but it may or may not have been intentional. The second, Series B, was the first intentional use of the trope. The third, Series C, does not claim originality, and may in fact have ripped off series B, but was much more popular than Series A or B and is the template that all later uses of this trope follow.
Series A is the Ur-Example.
Series B is the Trope Maker.
Series C is the Trope Codifier.
In other words, if in tracing the history of a trope, one example stands out as the template that many, many other examples follow, that's the Trope Codifier.
The Trope Maker is frequently also the Trope Codifier, but not always. In particular, when the Trope Maker is a work of outstanding quality, the Trope Codifier may often be a story that shows how lesser authors can do a good imitation. Conversely, a great writer may gather up many old tropes and polish them to a shine, codifying them for later generations. Occasionally somebody rediscovers a Forgotten Trope.
The Trope Codifier may be the first theme park version or Pragmatic Adaptation. If the trope is Older Than They Think, the Codifier is usually mistaken for the Trope Maker. Really old tropes may have been codified every couple of centuries for millennia, as successive codifiers show how to adapt the age-old trope to their times. With the advent of television, a trope related to television may be codified by a new show every decade or two after the associations with previous codifiers have died out.
Important: "Trope Codifier" does not mean Most Triumphant Example. It means "Example that has fingerprints of influence on all later examples of the trope". The true marker of a Codifier is that it invents some unique spin on the trope that all later examples have some reaction to. Take, for example, Werewolves. There were earlier examples of werewolf stories, but it is with 1941's The Wolf Man that we first see werewolves as an infection (previously, it was a curse or part of a Deal with the Devil), silver vulnerability (previously, it was vampires or ghosts who were usually associated with weakness to silver), made the werewolf a human cursed to turn into a wolf-man (previously, all kinds of variations were available, from wolf that turns into a man, to man who was permanently turned into a wolf), and tied the wolf to the night of the full moon (previously, they either focused on the three nights around the full moon, or had little to do with the phase of the moon). Almost all later examples of Werewolves bear some of these subtropes, which originated with The Wolf Man, or at least discuss them in order to explain why Our Werewolves Are Different. Thus, we can state with confidence that it is the Trope Codifier.
Examples should be of Trope Codifiers that aren't Trope Makers themselves.
Related to Older Than They Think. If a Trope Codifier is particularly influential, and the Trope Maker a little twisted you may have an Unbuilt Trope. Even the Trope Codifier itself may qualify as Unbuilt Trope because it tends to frequently contradict modern interpretations of said trope (and indeed most Trope Codifiers often have several major Unbuilt Tropes). There may also be a Series D which is the Trope Namer, which is a series that uses the trope so commonly, so appropriately (or inappropriately, as the case may be), or so memorably,note Or so punnily; tropers can't resist a good pun that it provides a name for the trope.
Also see Most Triumphant Example. Compare Franchise Codifier and Genre Popularizer.
Examples:
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Advertising
- The Hire popularized the use of short films as a form of advertising, as the success of that series proved that short films were just as valid and effective an advertising method as broadcast television commercials, not to mention that they can bring major artistic merit to a brand. Since then, a number of high-profile and luxury brands have funded and produced short films every year for this purpose.
Anime & Manga
- Neon Genesis Evangelion is the Trope Codifier for Darker and Edgier, Deconstructed mecha anime with a metaphysical edge. GaoGaiGar and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann attempted to Reconstruct the genre after it became overtaken by Eva-inspired works.
- Evangelion completely redefined the whole medium of TV anime and what it could do. Before Evangelion the vast majority of TV anime was either adaptations of popular manga or family-friendly programs, but the show paved the way for several Anime First franchises which explored darker and more mature themes, material that before had been largely relegated to direct-to-video productions (the so-called OVAs) and therefore only reached a niche market.
- Speaking of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, while the Getter Robo series introduced the This Is a Drill trope to mecha fans, a lot of them will remember the former for taking said trope as a massive plot point.
- While Black Lagoon introduced the Cluster F-Bomb and Sir Swears-a-Lot tropes in anime, Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt has the most swearing out of any anime.
- Sailor Moon is frequently cited as the first user of the Magical Girl Warrior subset of Magical Girl shows. Cutey Honey used some of the tropes, but was usually seen as a straight-up Super Hero, especially since at the time "Magical Girl" meant Cute Witch. In Japan, if it's not the Sailor Senshi, you can bet it's going to be the Pretty Cure franchise instead.
- Ranma ½'s Ranma Saotome and Akane Tendo aren't even Rumiko Takahashi's first couple with Belligerent Sexual Tension. But they're the standard by which all others are measured.
- Ranma is also the most likely codifier for Martial Arts and Crafts unless someone who knows their kung-fu flicks can dethrone it — it's probably harder to think of a pursuit they didn't use in the series than one they did.
- Ryoga Hibiki is the codifier for No Sense of Direction. His sense of direction is so bad that he literally traverses across continents and oceans without even realizing it.
- Ranma Saotome himself is very likely the main Trope Codifier for the Gender Bender trope (or at least its Sex Shifter variation) in modern fiction. His transformation is due to an accident (earlier instances often had no explanation at all), he changes sexes due to specific stimuli (previously, transformation was most often only one way, and if there was ever a way of changing back and forth, it was something that could never be controlled from the outside), and he keeps his original personality at any time (before him, previous instances of the trope sometimes changed personality when transforming). While later instances don't necessarily share all of these elements, they are the standards by which those instances are considered, to the point the Gender Bender has been seen as a Characteristic Trope for the work, at least in the anime fandom.
- Love Hina essentially defined the turn-of-the-millennium style of Unwanted Harems.
- Fullmetal Alchemist popularized the concept of Equivalent Exchange and "Magic A" Is "Magic A", at least for anime and manga.
- If Fist of the North Star is the Trope Maker for the shonen Fighting Series, then Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z are the codifiers. Dragon Ball's very own Goku also codified the Stock Shōnen Hero.
- While there had been examples and uses of Cyberpunk tropes in other series such as Appleseed, Ghost in the Shell is seen as codifying Cyberpunk themes into anime such as cyborgs, The Metaverse, and other such themes.
- AKIRA was the TC for anime as a whole in the US and UK — a 'cartoon' that was dark, grim, violent, bloody, beautiful and not a little mind screwy. As a consequence, it burrowed into the collective subconscious and created a new image that took years more to shake off.
- Mobile Suit Gundam Wing jump-started the trend of Humongous Mecha series having Bishōnen protagonists to give it a Periphery Demographic of young females.
- Azumanga Daioh is the eternal Trope Codifier of the Schoolgirl Series and associated tropes, including Wacky Homeroom and Sensei-chan.
- In Rurouni Kenshin, the titular character is the codifier for "X" Marks the Hero.
- While mostly unknown in English speaking countries until The Prince of Tennis, the sports anime genre has been a staple for over half a century now. Having so many subgenres and approaches, the scene has multiple codifiers.
- In The '60s, Kyojin No Hoshi started the supokon (sports and guts) genre, putting the focus on the grueling training and sacrifice in the dogged pursuit of the top. It is the closest thing to a codifier for all sports anime and manga, and especially baseball. Tiger Mask and Tomorrow's Joe similarly codified wrestling and boxing series, respectively. All of them were written by Ikki Kajiwara, which makes him singlehandedly responsible for starting the genre.
- Attack No. 1 codified Shoujo sports series as well as volleyball manga with hotblooded grace, with Aim for the Ace! doing the same for tennis during The '70s.
- The '80s saw the arrival of one of the most popular sports manga and anime, Captain Tsubasa. While occasionally violent for drama, it was a much more bright-eyed, rip-roaring take on the genre. Physics-defying trick shots had appeared in other series long before, mostly in baseball series. But Tsubasa might be the most remembered for its bombastic use of them by an entire team. It codified soccer series as well as keeping more of the focus on the sheer fun of the game.
- Pro Golfer Saru began as a manga in the '70s but it was its '80s anime adaptation that came to real prominence. Featuring a young protagonist and very unorthodox, over the top golfing techniques to distinguish every swing while skipping the boring parts, it codified golfing series, at least on the shounen side of things.
- In The '90s, Slam Dunk became extremely popular despite keeping everything down to earth. So popular that it became the single best selling sports manga of all time, played a large part in upholding the golden age of Shonen Jump, and made the real life sport of basketball bigger in Asia. Rather than being about larger than life, superhuman geniuses, it balanced daily life, comedy, and relationships. The series codified basketball manga and how to realistically approach a sports series while keeping audiences hooked.
- While it certainly existed earlier, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha codified the Dark Magical Girl trope for anime with the character of Fate Testarossa.
- Yuno Gasai from Future Diary is essentially the codifier for the Yandere trope. While she had predecessors for this trope before her introduction, her character practically defined the trope in its current form, becoming both types throughout the story.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! is the reason we have Anime Hair.
- Its second anime adaptation Yu-Gi-Oh! codified the card game battle genre.
- Yuuki Rito of To Love Ru was certainly not the first harem series protagonist to have a Suggestive Collision or Thanks for the Mammary moment, but he does it so often and to such a ridiculous degree that any other character with similar issues will be inevitably be compared to him.
- Queen Oyuki from Urusei Yatsura is frequently cited as the main reason why Yuki-onna are often presented as royalty, or at least wearing crowns.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is the main reason Japanese manga et al. has Guardian Entities.
- It also codified katakana Written Sound Effects for the English-speaking portion of the fanbase, to the point where they're often done in western media to specifically call back to Jojo's as opposed to any other series.
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica wasn't the first series to deconstruct the Magical Girl genre (as older series like Revolutionary Girl Utena and Phantom Thief Jeanne also examined its associated tropes from darker and more serious angles), but it was still the anime that made the Magical Girl Genre Deconstruction suddenly fill the market compared to the more traditional takes on the genre. It plays with just about every cliche magical girl trope and shows just how making young girls fight violent monsters can really mess up their lives.
- Crows and its sequel series Worst have their hands in just about every delinquency manga made after it. Its mixture of down to earth troubles, more nuanced observation of delinquent culture, and the more realistic art reflect in many series down the line.
- Chibi-Neko from The Star of Cottonland is one of the earliest known Cat Girls in manga and anime (as the manga was first published in 1978), and the manga is widely considered to be responsible for spreading the popularity of cat girls to other series.
- Most of the general formula for "standard" non-action Shoujo works can be traced back to Boys Over Flowers. The visual design and personality of the Stock Shoujo Heroine, the manly, aggressive love interest, the themes of inter-class romance, and the rampant Melodrama weren't invented by Tsukushi and Tsukasa, but they were all present simultaneously, as the main focal points in a work that got extremely popular and influential.
- While examples of the Whip Sword long predate it (the Indian urumi, a sword with a long and flexible blade, for instance has downright ancient roots) the standard "sword that can split into segments linked by a wire" design that most people think of was created and popularized by Panzer World Galient. In fact, in Japan, it's the Trope Namer: swords of this kind are near-universally referred to as "Galient Swords", sometimes even directly named as such in other media unrelated to the show.
Art
- Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, while not the creator of the Hand-or-Object Underwear trope, was one of the first to come out of the Early Renaissance and has been emulated ever since, directly inspired from the various Capitoline Venus ("Modest Venus") statues from Ancient Rome.
- Many paintings featuring the Reclining Venus pose from The Renaissance onward credit the Dresden Venus as their direct inspiration. It's credited as being the artwork that made this into a Stock Pose, inspiring copycats from Girolamo da Treviso to Titian, Valesquez, Diego Velazquez, and Cabanel. It is the first known reclining nude in Western painting, and together with the Pastoral Concert (Louvre), another painting disputed between Giorgione and Titian, it established "the genre of erotic mythological pastoral", with female nudes in a landscape, accompanied in that case by clothed males. A single nude woman in any position was an unusual subject for a large painting at the time, although it was to become popular for centuries afterward, as "the reclining female nude" became a distinctive feature of Venetian painting.
- The Scream codified several of the Expressionist movement's characteristics. Mainly, the exaggerated Color Contrasts and the aggressive brush strokes that prioritize conveying emotion over technique.
- The Swing marked the tonal shift from intense, religious artworks commonly associated with the early Baroque to Lighter and Softer depictions of the aristocratic life of the Rococo.
Comic Books
- Superman is the Trope Codifier of superheroes in general, and also for the Flying Brick kind of superhero, as well as the idea of superhero as The Cape.
- Lex Luthor is the Trope Codifier of supervillains in general.
- Watchmen and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns are co-codifiers of Darker and Edgier.
- Batman is the Trope Codifier of the Badass Normal superheroes and The Cowl.
- The Joker is the Trope Codifier for Monster Clowns. (It was Pennywise from Stephen King's It who truly took the trope mainstream, though.) He is also the Codifier of the Arch-Enemy, as his relationship with Batman has practically become shorthand for describing any particular character's greatest and most personal foe.
- Captain America is easily the Trope Codifier for Captain Patriotic, being one of the earliest and most prolific examples of the trope. He is also the Trope Codifier for Captain Geographic.
- Catwoman was the first really popular female antihero.
- Daredevil is widely considered the most prolific example of the Disability Superpower. Charles Xavier would otherwise be this, but he's more of an Ur-Example.
- Spider-Man is often credited as being the Trope Codifier for both the non sidekick Kid Hero and Wake Up, Go to School, Save the World. Also to Building Swing, since almost every time you see it anywhere else, it is a reference, or Lampshaded by a character.
- The Flash is the Trope Codifier for the Super-Speed hero.
- Robin is the codifier for Kid Sidekick.
- The Punisher is the Trope Codifier of the Sociopathic Hero. He was, by far, the most popular costumed "superhero" to kill his enemies rather than putting them to jail. And he's been doing it way before the Dark Age of Comics.
- The Incredible Hulk is the Trope Codifier for the Jekyll & Hyde Superhero. He is also the Trope Codifier for the Unstoppable Rage Superhero and the Hulking Out Superhero.
- Iron Man is commonly recognized as the definitive Powered Armor superhero.
- The Mighty Thor is one of the earliest and most iconic examples of the Superhero Gods trope.
- John Constantine, Hellblazer is the Trope Codifier of characters being Exiled from Continuity and Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?.
- Although he wasn't the first, Deadpool by far is the most well-known character who breaks the fourth wall. Virtually every media about him from comics to memes lack the aforementioned wall (and he knows it).
- Wonder Woman is the Codifier for female superheroes, as well as the first major superhero whose origin and universe are based on ancient myths.
- Supergirl is the Trope Codifier of Distaff Counterpart characters, having all of Superman's powers.
- Crisis on Infinite Earths is the Codifier for the Crisis Crossover, inventing many of the tropes associated with these types of events.
- The Mainline Archie Comics in the Archie Franchise is both the Trope Codifier for the titular Betty and Veronica and Love Triangle in American Popular Culture, for the over 70 years old romantic entanglement between Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge for the titular Archie Andrews.
- If Namor the Sub-Mariner was the Trope Maker of the Captain Fishman trope, then Arthur Curry, AKA Aquaman is the Codifier. Being the half-human son of Queen Atlanna of Atlantis, he would eventually become king and use his extraordinary powers to protect both species from anything that would threaten them, becoming a member of the Justice League of America. He's so popular, most (though not all) examples of this trope were deliberately made to be Stock Parodies of Aquaman, for better or for worse.
Comic Strips
- While the joke existed for as long as weekends did, Garfield is the codifier for Hating on Monday, with most straight examples of the trope being references to the comic.
- The Far Side was far from being the first single-panel comic strip, but it made the format popular again in the 1980s.
Fan Works
Films — Animation
Films — Live-Action
- While far from the first Evil AI in sci-fi, Hal 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey established a lot of the tropes and motifs around computers turning rogue, with most instances of A.I. Is a Crapshoot taking at least some inspiration from it even today.
- Typically, gangster films borrow from one of two cookie sheets: GoodFellas (for black comedies) or The Godfather (operatic tragedies). The Agony Booth:
Brando gives his best performance, a legendary bit of acting that's been imitated so often by so many people that calling it clichéd is, in itself, a cliché! You realize how odd that is? Jesus, a thing like that should rupture the flow of time and send reality as we know it into a tailspin. I'm not sure what's kept this from happening, but I'm fairly sure it's connected to the Cubs not making it to the World Series. Sorry Chicago, but I think
the safety of our universe’s existence
may depend on your baseball team stinking like death for the rest of eternity.
- Halloween (1978) was the Trope Maker for the Slasher genre, but Friday the 13th (1980) was the Trope Codifier. In particular, Friday the 13th (1980) was the actual Trope Maker for Sex Signals Death rather than Death By Not Paying Attention (Including Having Sex) for all the imitators that followed.
- Star Wars:
- is the Trope Codifier for Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey (as well as a heck of a lot of other ideas). Campbell described the pattern based on a range of heroic myths, but today, any good story that follows the Hero's Journey pattern is accused of ripping off Star Wars — and any bad story that follows the Hero's Journey pattern actually does.
- Star Wars (along with Alien and Blade Runner) was also instrumental in making the Used Future concept widespread.
- The Old-School Dogfight was popularized by the films' use of it as an homage to World War II air war films, with the Death Star trench run in A New Hope in particular inspired by The Dam Busters.
- Blade Runner is the codifier of Cyberpunk. It was one of the first films that portrayed the future as more dark and grimy and served as the inspiration for a lot of films.
- The Mad Max franchise is the most well-known example of the Post-Apocalyptic genre. Although it wasn't the first to use the idea, it did pioneer the standards on how the genre should be done, from a futuristic and bleak desert landscape, to scrappy resources, to crazy punk fashions, to the mad and totalitarian society; every apocalyptic film after that had a pint of influence that came from the series.
- The Mask is the most famous example of Heart Beats out of Chest, while Tex Avery was the Trope Maker.
- Godzilla is the most well-known Kaiju and basically created the tokusatsu, together with King Kong, both are the most well known giant monsters. Even though, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms set the standard for atomic monsters from their time.
- Rocky is the most well-known sports film that introduced the underdog archetype to the modern viewers.
- Batman (1989) was not the first Superhero movie, but it was the one that showed that superheroes were very profitable. It also altered the archetype of the Summer Blockbuster from "huge mass-marketing machines that were as much made to sell merchandise as they were to sell tickets" to "huge mass-marketing machines that were as much made to sell merchandise as they were to sell tickets, and are based on an existing property that the audience already has an attachment to".
- The 1931 movie version of Dracula codified most modern Vampire Tropes.
- The 1941 film The Wolf Man codified the tropes for werewolves, as well as being the Ur-Example of several tropes such as silver bullets, the famous poem about the curse, and the contagious nature of werewolf bites — before the film, weakness to silver and contagion were vampiric traits.
- The Birth of a Nation pulled together all of the little camera tricks and editing techniques that were tried in the early years of film into a coherent set of storytelling tools, making it one of the most important movies in the history of film. It was also horrendously racist. The gymnastics film history classes have to go through because of this are quite amusing.
- The film caused such a headache for critic Roger Ebert when he repeatedly considered featuring it in his Great Movies series of essays that he always held off writing about it. When he finally decided to address it, he did it in two parts, explaining to readers that Part 1 would discuss the racism and history, just to get it out of the way. Part 2 would then be free to discuss the art of filmmaking without offending anyone. Even with the boundaries clearly defined, he had a heck of time writing that essay.
- Triumph of the Will was this for certain cinematographic techniques. It is not this for the documentary genre (it is almost completely bereft of commentary — the subject material get to stand on its own, it's just that it is cleverly filmed and ordered to encourage the 'right' emotion), but this doesn't really help film historians in dealing with it. It also helped that it had the resources of an entire totalitarian state and a genuinely talented (if ideologically misguided) director to throw at any issues that might have arisen. Think about it; the Nazis wanted you to think of this movie when you thought of them — and scenes from this movie are among the most commonly used shorthands for the Nazis.
- This Is Spın̈al Tap: The Codifier for the feature film Mockumentary genre. The Trope Maker is probably Woody Allen's Zelig, released just one year before (1983). The older example, The Rutles' All You Need Is Cash (1978), was a television film.
- While the concept of the Shared Universe is something that's crossed over from several genres of fiction over the years (making it quite hard to determine the Ur-Example), the Marvel Cinematic Universe has established itself as the most famous (and successful) depiction of it, branching out numerous franchises, properties and settings all derived from the comics into one overarching (and ever-evolving) story, to the point that its success has led to many other franchises using its blueprint as the bedrock for expanding into their own cinematic universes in recent years, with varied levels of success. The Trope Maker of this trope likely goes to Hammer Horror, as they were the first studio to depict famous horror monsters interacting with each other in the same setting. And they did it way before Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko made Marvel Comics what it is today.
- The Blair Witch Project is the trope codifier for the found footage mockumentary horror films of the 2000s. The trope maker is Cannibal Holocaust.
- 1972's The Poseidon Adventure pretty much established the template for future disaster movies, despite sharing many elements with earlier entries of the genre like A Night to Remember.
- Time Travel: the Ur-Example is hard to identify, the Trope Maker is The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, the Trope Codifier is Back to the Future.
- The Creature from the Black Lagoon wasn't the first Fish Person, but he's certainly the best-known and most influential example.
- There were car chases on film before, but the one in Bullitt became the most famous one which all films after tried to emulate.
- Black Hawk Down is the first major movie that semi-accurately and dramatically depicted modern, 21st century (although the movie actually takes place in 90s, the principle is intact) warfare. Portrayal of urban warfare in almost virtually every single form of visual media that came after either directly or indirectly gets aesthetic inspiration from this movie, particularly video games such as Modern Warfare, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, and Resident Evil 5.
- The Hollywood Nuns trope owes itself largely to three films. The Song of Bernadette (1943) was the initial Trope Codifier, and The Nun's Story (1959) and The Sound of Music (1965) solidly reinforced the trope. Because they were so popular, they were used as templates for nuns in film forever after.
- For Pie in the Face, the massive pie fight in the Laurel and Hardy silent short The Battle of the Century
- Rebel Without a Cause and American Graffiti made the teen movie a popular and profitable genre with its use of teenage wangst and parties, that teenagers around the world loved and related to. However, films such as Mean Girls and American Pie innovated the genre further by adding pre-marital sex and fascist school hierarchy to the mix, to the point that years later, other teen films are still duplicating these elements.
- You Only Live Twice and other Bond films featuring Ernst Stavro Blofeld are the codifier for many supervillain tropes, including the Volcano Lair and/or Elaborate Underground Base, Right-Hand Cat, Blofeld Ploy, Shark Pool, and color-coded Mook jumpsuits.
- Examples of Giggling Villain go at least as far back as Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, but the Trope Codifier is deeply deranged giggling psychopath Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death (1947). Richard Widmark's performance became iconic influenced, among other things, the portrayal of The Joker in various Batman adaptations.
- The Carry On... Series codified Affectionate Parody because of their movies based on other films and genres; it also broke barriers between claims of copyright from Hollywood, who threatened to sue them, eventually losing their case in court.note This is probably the reason why parody is filed under Fair Use. However, the movies were the Trope Maker of Awful British Sex Comedy (the codifiers were Confessions of a... series) due to the use of explicit nudity in a time when British media was against it. Ironically, when the Carry On franchise did a parody full of blatant Fanservice, it was called one of the worst in the series.
- While Steampunk existed before the 1998 film Wild Wild West, the movie brought it into the mainstream for the first time, combining Victorian aesthetics with pre-electric machinery. Most Steam Punk fans don't like admitting that the genre owes so much to a 90's Will Smith movie, but its visual effects were widely praised as the film's sole redeeming feature, and its influence can be seen in Steam Punk works to this day.
- Mr. Vampire was not the first of jiangshi genre films; jiangshi movies were made as early as 1936! However, Mr. Vampire definitely set the standard for them and helped propel the genre into popular from 1985 to the mid-1990s in East Asia.
- Lethal Weapon 2 laid out the blueprint for criminals invoking Diplomatic Impunity to commit crimes without the slightest fear of reciprocity.
- Lassie is the codifier for the Heroic Pet Story. While not the first Action Pet, she is the most iconic and helped kickstart the genre.
- The Wizard of Oz is to credit for the popular convention of depicting a Wicked Witch as green-skinned.
- David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986) codified two tropes — one of which came to define an actor's career.
- Most any sci-fi/horror film — or media beyond literature, in fact — that involves a Slow Transformation of a human into something else takes off from how memorably and powerfully the trope was used in this film, especially in an era when Transformation Is a Free Action was more common.
- The Doomed Protagonist Seth Brundle was not the first Gibbering Genius on film, or even the first one Jeff Goldblum played (that would be the developer of an artificial heart in 1981's Threshold). But it ended up being Goldblum's Star-Making Role, and made him the go-to actor for similar characters — most obviously Dr. Ian Malcolm in the Jurassic Park franchise — and Motor Mouths in general for decades to come.
- Ed Wood's entire filmography is credited with establishing the So Bad, It's Good trope in cinema after he was named "The Worst Director of All Time" by the Golden Turkey Awards in 1980.
- Saw and its sequels are definitely this for Torture Porn. Whilst the Trope Maker is often debated, many point to either Cannibal Holocaust, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom or The Last House on the Left.
- The Bourne Series became this for modern, realistically-presented action thrillers, particularly through its heavy use of documentary-style Jitter Cam, liberal use of Le Parkour, and brutally-efficient fight scenes, as well as giving a new shot of adrenaline to the One-Man Army trope. While the likes of Michael Mann and Luc Besson had made films in this style before, the success of the Bourne franchise saw it explode in the mid-2000s.
- Groundhog Day was not the first film to introduce the concept of a Stable Time Loop where a person relives the same day over and over; at least two other films did so before, including the 1993 TV film 12:01 PM, as did the 1992 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Cause And Effect", but it became the trope namer and trope codifier for the "Groundhog Day" Loop trope.
- Breakfast at Tiffany's: The Little Black Dress is thought to have originated during the 1920s, but Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in the 1960 adaptation is generally thought to be the Trope Codifier.
- The mad scientist's hunchbacked lab assistant originates with Frankenstein (1931) and its stage predecessors. But the boilerplate Igor — bugeyed, dressed in hooded Medieval clothing, and named "Igor" — was codified by Mel Brooks' parody Young Frankenstein. (His name was borrowed from Son of Frankenstein, but Ygor there is a villain in his own right and not merely Frankenstein's sidekick.) It's probably telling that just about every Igor who fits the pattern of how an Igor is supposedly supposed to look, talk and behave in this vein of horror is a parody.
- While King Kong (1933) was an Ur-Example of an early Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever, it was the film Them! that codified the tropes that other films featuring giant insects would later use (or in general, almost anything, as shown by the Trope Namer Attack of the 50 Foot Woman).
- Surprisingly, despite being a parody about parodies of the James Bond franchise, Austin Powers is the first thing many think of when a "parody of '70s spy movies" is mentioned. The phenomenon is such that Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the character that Dr. Evil is parodying, ended up being overshadowed by the parody itself.
- The idea of domestic dinosaurs in the modern day wasn't that new in the '90s, not even the idea of a dinosaur park, and even if the novel was already popular, the movie of Jurassic Park (1993) is the staple of a dinosaur park that everyone wanted to visit (even if the point of the story was the contrary). Also, it is considered as an staple of digital effects in cinema, a technology that wasn't that new at the time (Terminator 2 and The Abyss made a good example of that) but in terms of creatures so realistic that even later entries in the franchise show their dinosaurs faker than the ones in 1993 and 1996. Not to mention all the tropes related to dinosaurs. If works have scaly and oversized Velociraptors, spitting Dilophosaurs, gentle sauropods, a based on movement-attacking monster or a battle between a T. rex vs. an Spinosauroid dinosaur, be sure they were watching Jurassic Park a lot.
- Speaking of which, James Cameron wasn't the first to made an entire world in CGI. Movies like The Phantom Menace could be considered as a precursor with the planet Coruscant, but Avatar was promoted as this alien world completely made for immersion in theaters.
- Although many consider that Iron Man defined the style and formula of the superhero movies of the 2010s, many believe that Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) contributed in part to the style of humor used by the Marvel film franchise. Before that, superhero movies couldn't be in the middle, either they tried to be as realistic as possible or they leaned towards the absurd. The line between those was very fine.
- When you think on a voyage to the inside of the human body, you are basically thinking on Fantastic Voyage.
- Alien codified the biomechanical look and the weird alien biology. The sequel, Aliens, popularized a certain type of "space marine" and bug alien-like life.
- Predator also codified the alien proud warrior race. Even if that trope existed before in series like Star Trek.
- Rosemary's Baby and The Omen give the Antichrist a modern look.
- An earlier work by William Gibson coined the term "Cyberspace". Both Neuromancer and TRON set the standards for what we think of it.
- Even if the fantasy setting mixed with pirates existed before Pirates of the Caribbean, many tropes from the movies were cemented in popular culture for this setting specifically, such as the Kraken or the Fish People.
- The John Woo movies, and most recently remembered, The Matrix, codified the Bullet Time trope.
- Although the onryō dates back to 8th century Japanese beliefs, The Ring and Ju-on helped characterize the onryō as a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl.
- Night of the Living Dead (1968): Inspired by I Am Legend, the movie codified the basic elements of a Zombie Apocalypse and defined the characteristics of a Flesh-Eating Zombie.
- Indiana Jones combined a lot of characteristics of characters way before him to create the living image of the Adventurer Arqueologist. Even if he wasn´t the first of his kind.
Literature
- The Standard Fantasy Setting's Trope Maker was The Lord of the Rings; the Trope Codifier was Dungeons & Dragons.note As a minor footnote, the concept of a Trope Codifier was originally suggested by the fact that Dungeons & Dragons clearly pioneered and set in stone many elements of the Standard Fantasy Setting, but didn't seem to qualify for full Trope Maker status. As Terry Pratchett once put it, Tolkien's influence appears in modern fantasy the way Mt. Fuji appears in Japanese art — and if it doesn't, either the author is deliberately facing away, or they are standing on Fuji. Ur examples go back to mythology, but early 20th century writers such as Lord Dunsany seem to have influenced both Tolkien (a little) and D&D (a bit more). One key trope that doesn't come from Tolkien is Vancian Magic, which was made by Dying Earth and codified by D&D, and Poul Anderson was a big influence on, just for one example, D&D's trolls.
- D&D can also be seen as the Trope Maker for Fantastic Miniatures War Games (Chainmail was the Ur-Example of a Mini's games heavily featuring fantastic elements, and D&D was originally just the "small warbands" variant of it), but Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 are the Trope Codifiers.
- Another Trope Codifier was Terry Books's novel The Sword of Shannara, which showed that Doorstopper fantasy novels that weren't written by Tolkien could also go on to sell zillions of copies.
- And in the 2000s, George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire became another key High Fantasy series, bringing a much Darker and Edgier feel to the genre.
- Sherlock Holmes is the Trope Codifier for many detective tropes; Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin stories were the Trope Maker, featuring such tropes as the less astute Watson figure as narrator and the far-reaching deductions based on attention to seemingly trivial details. A second contender, wildly popular at the time but now more obscure, is The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. It placed such concepts as the private detective helping out the near useless police and the Locked Room Mystery into the popular consciousness a few decades before Doyle's novels.
- James Bond defines the most popular image of Spy Fiction. Virtually every fictional spy in later stories has their roots in the Bond character, or will sooner or later be defined by how unlike Bond they are.
- Earthsea codified the idea of people and things having "True Names" that give power over them to any speaker in the context of magic systems.
- Medea is the Trope Codifier for the Woman Scorned, although Ishtar from The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest known example.
- Raymond Chandler is considered the codifier of hard-boiled crime fiction, following Carroll John Daly as the Ur-example (his "Knights Of the Open Palm" was published several months before Hammett's first Continental Op story) and Dashiell Hammett (the Trope Maker).
- The earliest use of Ancient Astronauts is Edison's Conquest of Mars from 1898, but the first popular story to use the concept was At the Mountains of Madness from 1931. Even do, the space invation of Edison created a lot of tropes for future space operas.
- The Red Badge of Courage codified War Is Hell.
- The Count of Monte Cristo is codifier for the "return for elaborate revenge" story.
- While Dracula was the first modern codifier for vampiric tropes, The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice was a subversion that served to codify the current template used by everyone from White Wolf to Twilight and Underworld (2003). Both kinds of vampire are still in active use, of course. With one exception: for easily understood reasons, most successors have thrown out Anne Rice's vision of vampires as lacking sufficient bloodflow to get it up.
- Contrary to what some fans believe, Harry Potter didn't originate the Wizarding School trope — but it is such a prominent codifying example that everything that comes after (and some things that came before) will have to either Follow the Leader or strenuously differentiate itself from Hogwarts.
- Snow Crash is widely recognized as the codifier for The Metaverse and the Digital Avatar but William Gibson did them first.
- Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal is regarded as the codifier of the Stealth Parody.
- Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian codified the Barbarian Hero — and many other Sword and Sorcery tropes, at least among those he wasn't the Trope Maker for.
- There have been intelligent and malicious weapons before, but Stormbringer from Moorcock's The Elric Saga is the codifier for Evil Weapon (even for weapons that aren't swords like the Speaking Gun). Stormbringer set the bar for the degree and type of power and treachery in an evil weapon.
- The Twilight Saga is the codifier of the mainstream Paranormal Romance genre.
- We is the trope maker for dystopic fiction, but Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are the codifiers.
- For Want of a Nail is an Alternate History textbook that explores two hundred years of counterfactual events following a failed American Revolution. It serves as codifier for the genre, more specifically, the type common to AlternateHistory.com, which often features narratives presented like a non-fiction description of actual events.
- The Phantom of the Opera is a major Trope Codifier for supervillains.
- Watership Down and Warrior Cats are this to the Stray Animal Story and xenofiction genres. The former helped solidify aspects of the genre and popularize the genre. The latter helped popularize more "mainstream" and less fantasy-heavy variations on the genre.
- Miss Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice is the trope codifier of Spirited Young Lady. There are some earlier examples (going back to snarky noble ladies from Shakespeare's plays), but none is that influential and widely referenced as Lizzy Bennet.
- The climax of The Monkey's Paw is the Trope Codifier for Ominous Knocking.
- Stephen King 's Carrie is the Trope Codifier for Prom Wrecker. Many examples of the trope involve something nasty being dropped on someone, usually the Prom Queen.
- When it came to geek-related reference overdosed meta-universes, Ready Player One is essentially both the Trope Codifier and the Ur-Example, at least in literature. Other influential works from this genre are the books Escapist Dream and Otaku Girl. The former focused more on 1980s pop culture while the latter two emphasized more on 2010s internet geek culture.
- Sword Art Online:
- The protagonist, Kirito, popularized the concept of the Stock Light-Novel Hero, with the archetype of a dark-clad, sword bearing protagonist with a calculating mind and know for his wits becoming a mainstay of the medium.
- While the Portal Fantasy has been a well-known genre in both sides of the pond for decades (with Japan itself having major titles in the genre for anime and manga like Inuyasha and Digimon Adventure from the 90s), Sword Art Online popularized its later Japanese incarnation of what is most popularly known as the Isekai ("Another World") genre today, with numerous other Light Novel series following suit. The main character being a Escapist Character trapped in a world that is almost always a medieval fantasy land that runs on typical JPRG mechanics is an especially common setup. Interestingly enough, Sword Art Online itself isn't quite that, since it's set in an actual video game that the protagonist is trapped in; however, subsequent works that follow in its footsteps tend to use a fantasy world that has RPG mechanics in it, but is real otherwise.
- Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation, building off of Sword Art Online as the Trope Maker of modern isekai stories, established the basic conventions of Reincarnate in Another World stories. Unlike SAO, its parallel world was a real place instead of a video game (the Six-Faced World) with its own worldbuilding, and it also introduced mainstays of the isekai genre such as a group of heroines for the main character to romance (Eris, Roxy, Sylphiette), use of Deliberate Values Dissonance for a grittier tone (e.g. slavery and aristocratic politics), and a divine character as a Mentor Archetype for the hero (Hitogami, although they turn out to be the story's Big Bad).
- Shakugan no Shana and The Familiar of Zero popularized the Tsundere stereotype.
- Baccano! popularized the Cast Full of Crazy trope, with everyone (across three storylines, no less) being horribly broken, downright unhinged, or just plain nuts.
- Expeditionwas the codifier for bizarre alien worldbuilding for many other projects, as well as The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades and After Man for speculative biology. All of those drink from the previous trope creator, The Time Machine, by HG Wells.
- Speaking of Wells, his most mafous works were codifiers for science fiction. The Invisible Man for invisibility tropes such as Invisible jerkass. The Island of Dr Moreau for mad doctor and beast-men. The Time Machine for... well, a time machine. And let's not even start with War of the Worlds.
- Space Cadet and Starship Troopers were the reason of why we still think on military alternatives in space exploration, with the second one beign the codifier of Power Armors and Bug Wars. Both were made by Heinlein.
- The Rosemary Baby and The Omen cimented modern aspects of the Antichrist (see it on the Film cathegory). Later on, Good Omens would make a parody of those tropes with the codifiction of Anti-anti-christ.
- Treasure Island served to consolidate the popular image of pirates in fiction. So much so that historians are tired to repeat that some of those tropes were innacurate or at least not that popular as the novel portrayed.
- Allan Quatermain from theH. Rider Haggard novels is consider to be a codifier of the Gentleman Adventurer. Ironically, he isn´t even the example in the novel that codified the trope, and Quatermain is way more respectful to other civilizations than his contemporaries.
- The Eternal Champion saga was the codifier to the never ending cycle of [[Order Versus Chaos from Main.Law Versus Chaos Order and Chaos]] in fantasy settings (plus, it popularized the Magic of Chaos symbol) along with Terry Pratchett´s Discworldthatthat also codified the Flat Planet image... with a turtle under it. A very old image, even used by authors like Tolkien or Lewis, that was used as an universal joke in the books.
- Conan the Barbarian is the trope codifier of the Barbarian Hero.
- The Man in the High Castle was one of the main exponents of the codifiction of Alternative History, but stands as the most popular of its time.
Live-Action TV
- In Reverse Whodunnits, the Trope Codifier is Columbo, Trope Maker being R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke.
- Despite the name, Dawson Casting was neither made nor codified by Dawson's Creek; Beverly Hills, 90210 does the codifying honors there. Possible Trope Makers include Bye Bye Birdie, in which 21-year-old Ann-Margaret played the 16-year-old-lead, and the many 1960s beach movies in which Annette Funicello, in her late thirties by the time the last ones were made, played ostensibly fresh-faced debutantes.
- 90210 is also the Trope Codifier for a Teen Drama; it borrowed heavily from Degrassi Junior High and, besides adding the too-old "kids" moved the setting from a nondescript part of Toronto to one of the shiniest places the writers could think of. Two things most teen dramas since have kept in the mix.
- Star Trek did not invent modern science-fiction television; but it made many science-fiction tropes commonplace on television, so much so that it is its own franchise and has influenced almost every subsequent speculative fiction series since, up to and including Heroes.
- Star Trek: The Original Series did codify the Red Shirt, but in the earliest episodes they weren't actually wearing red shirts.
- Likewise, it was not the first TV show to have fanfic, organized conventions, letterzines, etc. However, there are ridiculous amounts of Fanfic tropes that can be traced back to Classic Star Trek, and Roddenberry was one of the few pre-Internet series creators and rights holders who didn't actively go on a seek and destroy mission with the lawyers (he laughed it off as free advertising, and being a Dirty Old Man meant the sexually-explicit stuff didn't bother him), meaning it was a relatively safe haven for pre-Internet fandom.
- The Kamen Rider franchise, while not the first Henshin Hero example (that would likely go to the Ultra Series), is the go-to standard for Henshin Hero.
- The first usage of Sentai doesn't come from Super Sentai, but Katanas of the Rising Sun of Imperial Japan during World War II. The term "Sentai" was relegated after the war, but Super Sentai codified this term for the squadrons with Color-Coded Characters.
- Mork from Mork & Mindy is the most prominent example of an Amusing Alien.
- Iron Chef is the Trope Codifier for the Cooking Duel trope.
- Malcolm in the Middle is the trope codifier for the single camera, on-location, Laugh Track-free sitcom that became popular on United States broadcast television during the 2000's. There were a handful of pre-Malcolm shows that featured such setups, but these (namely The Adventures of Pete & Pete and The Larry Sanders Show, both of which qualify as the Trope Maker of such setups) aired on either pay or niche cable channels as opposed to the then-more popular broadcast television networks.
- A year before Malcolm premiered, Spaced did the same thing for British sitcoms.
- Everybody Loves Raymond was hugely influential to later sitcoms and is a codifier for All Women Are Prudes in sitcoms (the notoriously anti-sex Debra)
- It was also a reinforcer of the feminist wife who was always right, even if she argued that the sky was kelly green, initially codified by Home Improvement, where wife Jill was a self-admitted feminist and Tim was the one who screwed up 99.5% of the time.
- The Real World is the Trope Codifier for Reality Shows.
- V (1983) is the Trope Codifier for Ominous Floating Spaceship and Reptilian Conspiracy.
- Lionel Luthor from Smallville is the Trope Codifier for Magnificent Bastard. The phrase itself comes from the 1970 movie Patton, and was used extensively by Television Without Pity's recaps of Smallville, to describe Lionel and the prodigious wheeling and dealing he engaged in throughout the course of the series.
- Kamen Rider Ryuki is the trope codifier for Battle Royale-esque fiction in Japanese media.
- Cheers and Belligerent Sexual Tension. Sam and Diane provided the template for sitcoms to follow. Ditto for the Will They or Won't They? romantic storyline.
- Oobi for Bare-Handed Puppetry. Parodies and homages to the bare-hand puppets on Oobi are just as common as unrelated uses of this trope, if not more so.
- American Idol would very well be the Codifier for Talent Show (Star Search is likely the Maker). It is also both the Maker and Codifier of not only entertaining viewers with the talent of its contestants but also with an "eccentric" judging panel as well as the audition sections, which often contains plenty of Funny Moments.
- The Addams Family for Creepy Good. May be the maker as well. They're creepy and spooky and altogether ooky but generally loving and benevolent.
- Doctor Who: It is the Trope Codifier for Reverse Polarity, with many other shows using it as a Shout-Out to the franchise.
- Game of Thrones is the Trope Codifier for Anyone Can Die, although many regard The Walking Dead as a close second.
- Law & Order is the Trope Codifier for the Police Procedural.
- Steve Urkel of Family Matters is easily the Trope Codifier for Black and Nerdy. He's a brilliant scientist on par with Reed Richards, dresses in Impossibly Tacky Clothes, has a high-pitched nasally voice and an Annoying Laugh, is The Klutz on a truly epic scale, and his weird hobbies include everything from collecting insects to playing polka.
- Monster Garage is the first Gearhead Show to focus on not only building vehicles but revamping and customizing them, which would set the trend for future such shows.
- The Muppets show and Sesame street codified the muppet shows.
Magazine
Music
- Bauhaus were the codifiers for Goth Rock, setting the idea of the scene and paving the way for future bands.
- The Beatles were the codifiers for The British Invasion, the modern rock band lineup and writing conventions, and, with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, modern recording techniques such as layered, multi-track production.
- Billie Eilish is the trope codifier for Bedroom Pop, setting the standard for several artists after her.
- Dizzee Rascal's debut album, Boy in da Corner, popularized grime, a fusion genre mixing rap with electronic music.
- While Clipse were not the first rappers to rap about selling cocaine, their name is pretty much synonymous with the subgenre called "coke rap."
- Emerson, Lake & Palmer are almost certainly the codifiers for Rock Me, Amadeus!; they used it far, far more than anyone else had before them and brought classical works like Pictures at an Exhibition to entirely new audiences who otherwise would probably never have heard them. Each of their albums contains at least one example of this trope. Keith Emerson's previous band, The Nice, also did this a lot.
- If this trope is possible on one network, then Hilary Duff is the trope codifier for the current batch of teenage Idol Singers on Disney Channel. Before her, Disney Channel stars didn't really do much outside of the show. After her, Disney practically required all of their actresses to sing regardless of talent.
- Ichiro Mizuki is widely credited as the maker and/or codifier of the animusic genre. There's a reason he was known as The Emperor of Anime Songs and referred to as "Aniki"/"Big Brother" by not just his fans, but just about everyone in the entire Japanese entertainment industry.
- Janet Jackson codified many tropes for female pop/R&B singers in the decades since she became popular, such as her performance style, fashion and even her ability to crossover into the mainstream from R&B music (which historically has been somewhat difficult for non-white artists). More specifically, her dancing and performance style has been cited as an influence by a variety of musicians, from Britney Spears, to Usher, to *NSYNC, to Beyoncé, to Lady Gaga.
- Granted while he was not the first to do it or even make a full album out of it, John Oswald was the one who gave the name to the genre Plunderphonics and also its very identity with his album Plunderphonics.
- If Led Zeppelin was the Ur-Example of Heavy Metal, and Black Sabbath was the Trope Maker, Judas Priest is certainly the Trope Codifier. They started the standard image of leather, spikes, studs, and denim, removed much of the blues elements that were very apparent in earlier examples of metal (Led Zeppelin was called blues-rock, after all), and made metal cool again in the late 70s. Motörhead also helped in the codifying of metal. They took influence from Punk Rock and from Heavy Metal and, in turn, inspired much of Thrash Metal.
- W.A.S.P. was the Trope Codifier of heavy metal's image in the 1980s, combining the Judas Priest facade above with KISS and Alice Cooper-style shock rock antics turned up to eleven, unsubtle Satanic imagery, songs about sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, big hair, pointy guitars and spandex.
- Metallica, Slayer, and Exodus (Band) are the codifiers for American Thrash Metal, with the vast majority of thrash bands modelling themselves on one of the three. In Germany, the codifiers are Kreator, Sodom, and Destruction (collectively known as the Three Teutonic Kings of Thrash Metal), and in Brazil, the codifiers are Sepultura, Sarcófago, and Vulcano.
- In the public eye, Cannibal Corpse is generally held responsible for popularizing Death Metal outside the metal underground, but Deicide, Morbid Angel, and Obituary were the trope codifiers in the metal scene, being among the first true bands in the genre. For the Swedish scene, the codifier is generally considered to be Entombed or Dismember.
- For Technical Death Metal, the codifiers are Atheist, Death, and Necrophagist for "straight" tech, Cynic, Edge of Sanity and Opeth for prog-tech, Suffocation and Origin for brutal tech, and Gorguts for experimental tech.
- Melodic Death Metal's major codifiers are At the Gates, In Flames, and Dark Tranquillity for the genre as a whole, Children of Bodom for Power Metal/Neoclassical Metal-inspired melodeath, Soilwork for Alternative Metal-tinged forms, Ensiferum for Folk Metal-melodeath fusions, and Wintersun for symphonic melodeath.
- Mayhem, Burzum, Darkthrone, Immortal, and Emperor are the collective Trope Codifiers for Black Metal, particularly the Second Wave. For the First Wave, the codifiers are generally agreed to be Bathory, Hellhammer, and Celtic Frost.
- For Viking Metal, the codifiers are Enslaved and Graveland.
- Silencer and Xasthur codified Depressive/Suicidal Black Metal.
- Burzum and Darkthrone also codified the one- or two-man studio-only metal band. While not the first metal bands to do this, and not even the first Black Metal bands to do it (see latter-day Bathory for an example), they were the first bands where such and arrangement was a central part of their identities, and given their status as major inspirations for many bands, many of those band unsurprisingly also set themselves up like them.
- The codifier for Power Metal tends to vary depending on the region, with Helloween and Stratovarius being the European scene's codifiers, Manowar, Jag Panzer, and Manilla Road being the American scene's codifiers, X Japan being the Japanese scene's codifier, and Angra being the Brazilian scene's codifier.
- Though the genre has existed since The '70s in the form of bands such as Black Sabbath, Pentagram, and The Obsessed, the main codifiers for Doom Metal are generally considered to be Candlemass, Saint Vitus, Trouble, and Cathedral.
- Nine Inch Nails, Fear Factory, Rammstein, and Marilyn Manson are all pretty much equally responsible for popularizing Industrial Metal, the former two moreso earlier, and the latter two moreso later on. In terms of influence, however, Fear Factory undoubtedly had the most impact.
- Fear Factory also codified the one-man Soprano and Gravel technique. While similar vocal styles had existed in both metal and punk since the 1960's, Fear Factory was the first band to use the contrast between clean and harsh vocals as a key element in their sound, paving the way for dozens of Groove Metal, Melodic Death Metal, and Metalcore bands since.
- Dream Theater may not have been the first Progressive Metal band, but Images and Words is the album that defined the style and what the entire genre is built upon.
- While Pantera's status as Groove Metal's Trope Maker is debatable (whether they or Exhorder hold the status as the "first" groove band depends on who you ask), they undoubtedly were the band that set the tone for the rest of the genre from them onward.
- The Trope Maker of Avant-Garde Metal was probably either Celtic Frost, Voivod, or Atheist, while Mr. Bungle or Korn are sometimes considered Trope Maker for experimental. Therion is generally considered to have codified avant-garde metal while Enter Shikari codified modern avant-garde. Faith No More are considered trope codifier for experimental metal, Meshuggah for djenty experimental (as well as being Trope Maker for djent), and System of a Down for modern experimental. The eastern scene has its own codifiers, Dir en grey, Sigh, Sound Horizon, and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.
- Korn are also considered the Ur-Example for Nu Metal, Coal Chamber (whose work initially coined the term) the Trope Maker, and the Big 4 of Limp Bizkit, Slipknot, Linkin Park and (debatably) Disturbed codified the genre leading into the early 2000's.
- Music resembling Symphonic Metal has been around since Deep Purple performed Concerto for Group and Orchestra in 1969, but Nightwish and to a lesser extent After Forever and Therion largely codified the subgenre in the late '90s and early 2000s. Nightwish is particularly important in symphonic metal's frequent overlap with Power Metal, and for it being one of only a handful of music genres to be utterly dominated by female lead vocalists, usually ones with classical and/or opera training.
- The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur are the joint codifiers for Gangsta Rap.
- By the time of Michael Jackson, music videos were evolving beyond just shots of the band, but he set the standard for everything that came after him.
- In the Punk Rock genre, The Ramones is considered to be the Trope Makers. Not only did they inspired others to imitate their music, they were also the first band in history to be called a punk band (though they disliked it). However, it was the British bands such as the Sex Pistols and The Clash who created the modern punk image. Sex Pistols themselves were the first ones to add genre staples such as cursing, politics, and moral views, making them the Trope Codifier of Three Chords and the Truth. These UK bands were the ones who invented punk ideology.
- The Sex Pistols' songs such as Anarchy in the UK and God Save The Queen are considered to be the first modern punk rock songs.
- For the Hardcore Punk subgenre, the codifiers are considered to be Black Flag, Bad Brains, and Minor Threat for the Eastern United States and Dead Kennedys for the Western United States.
- For Post-Punk, the codifiers (and arguable Trope Makers) are Joy Division
- Interpol is the second codifier for the genre. They led the revival movement for the genre, and pretty much every Post-Punk band after was influenced by them.
- For Pop Punk, the codifiers are generally considered to be Green Day and The Offspring (with some also crediting blink-182). The concept of combining fast, aggressive music with pop melodies, however, was invented much earlier by bands like Buzzcocks, The Undertones and the aforementioned Ramones.
- Kraftwerk is the Trope Maker of Electronic Music, and Aphex Twin is the Trope Codifier with his seminal Selected Ambient Works 85-92 album.
- Despite BUCK-TICK and X Japan being prominent early examples, Kuroyume set the template for nearly every Visual Kei band that followed, including better known (at least in the West) examples such as Dir en grey and Luna Sea.
- LL Cool J's "I Need Love" is considered the first rap ballad (though the Ur-Example would probably be Sugarhill Gang's 1982 song "The Lover in You"), showing that rappers need love too. Because of this song, even the most gimmicky One-Hit Wonder-y rapper will release at least one slow love song.
- With Indie Pop rising to popularity in The New '10s, Lorde quickly became the codifier for the genre. Not only for "Royals", one of the biggest indie pop hits ever, but also for Pure Heroine, which is quite possibly the most successful indie pop album of the decade. Billboard even named her the "Queen of Alternative".
- While songs complaining about how much jobs suck have existed since the invention of jobs, "Sixteen Tons" by Merle Travis (later made popular by Tennessee Ernie Ford) is the leading example that all modern Working Class Anthems owe one to; a song about the day-to-day of a working class man who's laborious job is a constant cycle of paying of debts and feeding back into the very business they give their lives to.
- Nitzer Ebb combined many of the particulars of early EBM bands and brought all the elements together for the sound that most EBM bands afterward would follow. Front 242 created the name EBM, and DAF (or perhaps Kraftwerk) had many of the elements of the sound, but Nitzer Ebb would be the model for the future.
- Pierre Schaeffer's 1948 opus Cinq Études de Bruits was not the world's first musique concrète. John Cage's Imaginary Landscape and perhaps other such works predate it. But it was the first music to have that label (coined by Schaeffer), and codified the genre.
- Pink Floyd is the Trope Codifier for the usage of Bookends in music, incorporating it on many of their albums (The Dark Side of the Moon has a Heartbeat Soundtrack, Animals and Wish You Were Here (1975) have one song split into the opening and ending tracks, The Wall's ending segues into the opening).
- Richard Wagner coined the term "leitmotif" in an 1851 essay and codified the concept in his famous cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, which he had been working on at the time. But the trope was invented two decades earlier by Hector Bérlioz, who called it "idée fixe" in his own writings.
- If you see a Greatest Hits Album with a title like Notable Song by the Artist or Thematic Word Related to Artist: The [Artist] Story or An [Artist] Anthology or The Best of [Artist] (Year-Later Year), with a career-spanning tracklisting and extensive liner notes and credits, it's following the template Rhino Records established for their successful reissue compilations in starting in The '80s, specifically with the compact disc format in mind.
- Skinny Puppy was the codifier for Industrial Music's current, electronica-influenced sound; before them, Industrial tended to be a dark, dissonant, and experimental affair.
- Seo Taiji and Boys provided the Trope Maker for modern Korean Pop Music conventions like the use of English phrases, the focus on dance, and Western music (most notably hip-hop) influences. These conventions would be codified by SM Entertainment, which used them as a template for modern idol formula with the Boy Band H.O.T. and later the Girl Group S.E.S. SM would later introduce the concept of some groups having large rosters with Super Junior (which debuted with twelve members) and Girls' Generation (which debuted with nine members).
- Using Auto-Tune for a robotic effect didn't become prominent until the arrival of T-Pain in 2005. Unlike other artists that relegated it to subtle uses or genres aiming for a digitalized sound (such as electronica or techno), T-Pain used it obviously and flagrantly on nearly all of his releases. His huge success led to a slew of imitators within pop, R&B, and hip hop.
- Kanye West popularized the Chipmunk Soul production style in hip-hop.
- While Todd Edwards certainly didn't invent sampling, he made it into an art form. What he does is he takes sometimes up to 100 samples from different songs and creates new melodies with them. This type of sampling is often referred to as "microsampling", and has since been used artists such as Pogo and Skrillex.
- Tina Turner is the trope codifier for female diva singers with over the top wardrobes. She specifically has influenced female African-American singer such as Beyoncé.
- Vaporwave has two. For first-wave vaporwave (2011-2013), Vektroid's Floral Shoppe album under the pseudonym MACINTOSH PLUS was easily the most popular vaporwave album. For second-wave vaporwave, that title belongs to 2814's Birth of a New Day album. Case in point? It was featured in Rolling Stone.
- "Weird Al" Yankovic codified the Song Parody.
- David Bowie and Björn Andrésen codified the ambiguous gender in the musical landscape, in the west and the east respectively.
- Gorillaz, but specially Hatsune Miku, codified the Virtual Celebrity.
- Ol' Dirty Bastard's feature on the remix to "Fantasy" by Mariah Carey codified A Wild Rapper Appears!, with rap features on radio-friendly pop singles becoming much more common after this song's success.
Print Media
Professional Wrestling
- "Superstar" Billy Graham created the "flamboyant bodybuilder" wrestler archetype as we understand it today, directly inspiring Hulk Hogan — and, also, probably serving as wrestling's Trope Maker for Real Men Wear Pink. (Buddy Rogers and Ric Flair also had blond hair and tanned skin, but they didn't really have the muscles.)
- The Lucha Libre Internacional match in 1977 featuring Huracan Ramirez and Black Shadow teaming up with El Santo to face Negro Navarro, El Signo and El Texano, the latter team becoming known as "Los Missioneros de La Muerte" in the aftermath of a truly frightening rematch with Rayo de Jalisco Shadow's place, is what made the six man "tercias" match the most popular match type in Mexico and synonymous with Lucha Libre. Blackman, Kato Kung Lee and Kung Fu are, in turn, the trope codifier for the tecnico trio as Los Tres Fantasticos, since Los Missioneros de La Muerte's prior feud had really been more about Santo, with his partners there to make things even, rather than being a unit in their own right.
- Hulk Hogan is the codifier for the All-American Face, given that his name has practically become synonymous with the archetype.
- Big Van Vader and The Undertaker are the trope codifiers for the Wrestling Monster, drawing on the earlier "wild-man" characters of Wild Red Berry, Gorilla Monsoon, and George "The Animal" Steele (themselves swiping the gimmick from carnival sideshows) adding in an elaborate Backstory in the case of Vader (written by the famed Go Nagai no less!) and some truly impressive special effects in Taker's case.
- All Japan co-founder Akio Saito popularized the sit down powerbomb in the United States, which would later be taken up by the likes of D'Lo Brown(a running variant) and Batista.
- CMLL's mini estrellas were the trope makers for having the same gimmick on multiple luchadores of different sizes, most notably Mascara and Mascarita Sagrada, but AAA codified the idea with its mascot division, where every tag team/pareja had to be made up of a larger luchador and smaller mascot/smaller luchador and larger mascot.
- Sable set the standard for what a WWE Diva was supposed to look like. Previous women who wrestled had been less glamorous and had dressed more modestly.
- Stacy Keibler was WWE's codifier for Cute Bruiser (Terri Runnels being the Trope Maker and Tammy Lynn "Sunny" Sytch being the Ur-Example).
Radio
- The Trope Codifier for combining the Brainless Beauty and Dumb Blonde tropes into one character might have been the enormously popular late 1940's radio sitcom My Friend Irma starring Marie Wilson as the very pretty but oh so dim Irma. The series would spin off into feature films, a television series in the early 1950s and a long running comic scripted by Stan Lee!
- The Goon Show (and the work of Spike Milligan in general) is the codifier for Surreal Humor.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- It managed to be both maker and codifier for tabletop — and to only a slightly lesser extent, computer — role-playing games in general. Even games totally unlike D&D usually have to be defined in terms of how they differ from it, when speaking to people not already familiar with the hobby (and to some people who are).
- D&D also either made or codified a whole slew of more specific gaming tropes, including Armor and Magic Don't Mix, Character Class System, Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards, and so forth.
- D&D also codified "Magic A" Is "Magic A". Even if Vancian Magic remains uncommon, the idea of magic as a force with dramatic effects and precisely defined limits that any human can learn if they're smart enough traces right back to the Player's Handbook — after all, it wouldn't be very well-designed for magic to have no rules. As with many tropes, it's something that usually gets associated with "Tolkien-style fantasy" despite Tolkienian magic having none of these traits.
- It's unclear whether or not Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was the first to present an alignment system beyond good/neutral/evilnote Dungeons & Dragons used Lawful, Neutral and Chaotic for alignments. AD&D picked up from there and added good and evil as modifiers to all three., but it was definitely the most prominent, and its nine-point alignment system comprises all of the Character Alignment tropes today. Ironically, the most recent version of the game has done away with the alignment system, for the most part.
- The Order Versus Chaos aspect was borrowed from Michael Moorcock and Poul Anderson, for what that's worth.
- Original D&D only used Law/Neutral/Chaos. Later in the Strategic Review (the forerunning of Dragon) Gygax penned an article with five alignments: Neutral plus the four pairs using Good/Evil crossed with Law/Chaos. This version was used in Holmes's Blue Book Basic D&D. Soon after the AD&D PHB had the nine-fold system.
- While the connection might be coincidental, The Nolan Chart (a Trope Codifier in its own right) was published in 1971 (seven years before the AD&D 1e Players Handbook) as a two-dimensional alternative to the traditional left-right political analysis. Communitarianism vs. individualism might be analogous to law and chaos, but YMMV as to whether free markets are chaotic and good or chaotic and evil.
- Interestingly enough, Dungeons And Dragons is actually the Trope Codifier for the Trope Codifier trope itself - the idea was developed as a distinct trope from Trope Maker by noting that D&D, while not the origin of the tropes it popularised, was instrumental in making them the default in the fantasy genre, and looking to see if other works were in the same position.
- The Zerg of StarCraft may have been the namers for Zerg Rush, but the Tyranids, of Warhammer 40,000, were infamous for the tactic long before the Swarm came around. Of course, both being based on the Bugs from Starship Troopers the similarities are unavoidable, the result being an odd case where the Trope Namer came after the Codifier.
- Also the book also broke all the Bugs into castes of Worker and Warrior bugs, all directed by a special hierarchy of subterranean Brain Bugs.
- Warhammer:
- The game is a strong contender for the Dark Fantasy genre. While the concept of a less-than-happy fantasy obviously existed before (the fathers of fantasy fiction — J.R.R. Tolkien and R.E. Howard — both contributed to it), many of the typical traits such as the vaguely Central European late-medieval settings or focus on lower classes and social outcasts seem to have been first put together here.
- Warhammer is also the modern codifier for orcs. Before Warhammer, the iconic orcs of D&D hewed more closely to Tolkien's Uruk-hai, being regimented, Lawful Evil minions of your average Evil Overlord. Orcs being Chaotic Evil tribal barbarians was an invention of Warhammer, where they were portrayed as a satire of Football Hooligans who lived for a brawl and who fought wars like they were pub crawls. They also invented the green skin that would later become a standard. Later editions of D&D, as well as WarCraft, drew more on Warhammer's depiction of orcs as savage, stupid brutes than on the original from Tolkien.
- Champions/Hero codified point-build systems, closely followed by GURPS, which seems to be the codifier for "system designed as generic from the start".
- GURPS quite literally defined the Weirdness Magnet trope. (Blue Devil is the Trope Maker here)
- With its iconic clean attribute/skill/advantage/disadvantage four-way split, GURPS is probably also the codifier for Skill Scores and Perks. (Champions already did something similar, but blurred the lines by having several distinct types of perks — including an entire build-your-own construction system for superpowers, which it in turn is probably both codifier and Ur-Example for.)
- Although there were Trading Card Games older than Magic: The Gathering (mostly using baseball cards), most of the tropes associated with modern TCGs started with Magic.
Theater
- William Shakespeare is another example; he used almost entirely unoriginal plots (with his fame coming from executing them brilliantly), so anybody harkening back to Shakespeare for a basic plot is going to the Trope Codifier, rather than the Trope Maker.
- "Laurey Makes Up Her Mind" from Oklahoma! was the Trope Codifier for Dream Ballets in musicals.
- Oklahoma! can also be considered the Trope Codifier for integrated musicals in general. Prior "musicals" were generally either plays interrupted by occasional songs or flimsy plots that were just an excuse to move between song and dance numbers. Show Boat is usually considered the first musical to integrate song, dance, and story, but it was hard for others to imitate. Oklahoma! provided a template that other musicals used pretty much until Andrew Lloyd Webber showed up.
- Gilbert and Sullivan didn't invent the Patter Song — there are examples of them going back over a century before G&S appeared on the scene (one early example from Don Giovanni has the Don's servant singing out a Long List of his lovers and tastes). Gilbert and Sullivan made it their own however with two important changes: virtuoso rhymes for Least Rhymable Words that often border on Painful (the Major General Song for example has strategy/sat a gee, hypotenuse/lotta news and century/adventure-y; "Matter Patter" from Ruddigore even manages to rhyme idyll and individual) and a pace so fast that half the fun is just hearing the actors get the words out. Practically every fast-paced piece in any musical from the last century or so has had a little bit of Savoy in it.
- The Ring of the Nibelung codified theHorny Viking along with a bunch of common nordic tropes in popular media.
Video Games
Visual Novels
Web Animation
Webcomics
Web Original
- LOLCats and their explosive popularity in the 2000s are the primary reason for the concept that The Internet Is for Cats.
- Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and so influential that few wikis exist that aren't, functionally, specialized encyclopedias rather than, say, community projects or collections of cross-referenced essays. The most obvious counterexample, Everything Two, predates Wikipedia.
- SCP Foundation codified the Artifact Collection Agency. Before its popularity the trope was far broader in both what kind of organisations existed, what they were collecting and why. Now, a rapidly growing majority of instances are nebulously supernatural organisations of unclear origin collecting unnatural items under the justification that they shouldn't exist, as well as more specific tropes like large amounts of redacted information, disposable minions for testing, and even the word "anomolous" or some synonym to describe what they're collecting.
Web Videos
- The Slender Man Mythos is the codifier for the Internet Myths and The Blank, with a very good reason.
- While not the first Video Review Show, The Angry Video Game Nerd popularized the format.
- And while the Nerd was the first character reviewer, The Nostalgia Critic was the first to go deeper, having multiple arcs on how being a Caustic Critic has ruined his life, unfolding an abusive backstory out during his run.
- Ryan ToysReview is not the first children's toy review channel (in fact, it's inspired by earlier ones, such as EvanTubeHD), but it ended up being the most famous and influencing later toy review channels.
- YouTube may not be the first video sharing-website but it most certainly did solidify the idea.
- Critical Role is the codifier for Actual Play web streams. Its popularity has led to the "Matthew Mercer Effect", wherein some new players of Dungeons and Dragons expect (1) that their Dungeon Master will run their game in a way similar to Mercer, (2) that their game will be as entertaining and fun, and (3) that if they stream their game it will also be as successful as Critical Role.
- "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared and its television series both codified Disguised Horror Story and Surprisingly Creepy Moment respectively.
- Epic Rap Battle of History codified the rap battles using popular media characters.
- Game Theory codified the format of internet theories in video format for videogames... and movies... and clothes... and food...
- Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series is the unquestioned Trope Maker for The Abridged Series. But subsequent series have taken their cues from TeamFourStar and Dragon Ball Z Abridged.
Western Animation
Other
- Digital Devil Story codified the Shin Megami Tensei metaseries, providing the original source material that eventually set the rules for all Mons.
- Acorn Computers' Arthur OS had the Ur-Example. NEXTSTEP had the original and the user-interface trope namer. But if you've got a dock in your operating system, the OS you're inevitably accused of copying is Apple's Mac OSX. So of course it's also Older Than They Think.
- For graphical interface conventions in general (mice, menus, windows, etc.), the Ur-Example was Xerox PARC's groundbreaking research of the '60s and '70s, which never turned into commercial products on their part, but was Xeroxed by Apple (the Trope Maker) as the basis for its Macintosh interface, and then ripped off (and made even more popular and mainstream) by Microsoft in Windows, the Trope Codifier.
- Fortune teller characters nowadays will likely take some influence from Miss Cleo. This results in Romani with Jamaican accents.
- Clarence Darrow's defense of Leopold and Loeb was the codifier for Society Is to Blame.
- Dan White's trial for the murder of Harvey Milk in 1978 (or rather, the media's complete and utter misunderstanding of what the Defense lawyers actually said) codified the use of the ridiculous excuse in murder cases (in this case, junk food).
- James Watt didn't invent the first stationary steam engine, and George and Robert Stephenson didn't invent the first steam locomotive. But their versions were so much more efficient than previous ones that they are often credited as the inventors.
- Former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir is believed to be the first person to utter the "even a paranoid can have enemies" line so often used in reference to Properly Paranoid characters.
- Geoffrey Chaucer is the Trope Codifier for the English Language. He wasn't the first poet to write serious literature in English — there were several other major poets working in English at the same time — but he was by far the most influential. Between the Norman Conquest (at which point English was fairly unrecognizable to the modern eye) and Chaucer's day, most literature in England was written in Latin (if it was serious) or French (if it was meant for entertainment).
- Stephen Hawking is one for Genius Cripple.
- Charles II of Spain for Royally Screwed Up, the biggest reason ever given to breed outside the family once in a while. It's often remarked that the disorders from syphilis in the womb would have been among the few new genes in his bloodline.
- British actor Sean Bean is the Codifier for the Chronically Killed Actor. The majority of the roles Bean has taken over the years end in that character dying (and sometimes not in a pleasant way), and has inspired memes surrounding the trope that have his name on it.
- For Virtual Idol Singers and the concept of an artificial singer in general, look no further than Hatsune Miku of Crypton Future Media, originating as the second of their Vocaloid Character Vocal series. While she has a predecessor in Sharon Apple of Macross Plus, her widespread popularity both in physical appearance and in voice make her one of the first thoughts people have regarding artificial celebrities.
- In one of the greatest upset victories in US election history, the 1948 presidential election between Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey is the Codifier of the Assumed Win. The photo of Truman proudly holding up the newspaper reading "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN" remains one of the most iconic images of his presidency.
- The Trope Maker for the general-purpose programming language is Fortran (with the Turing Machine as the Ur-Example), but the Trope Codifier has to be C, to the point where modern languages not influenced by C in any way are a rarity
- For Object Oriented programming, the Trope Maker is Smalltalk, but it was codified by C++, and then further by Java. Funnily enough, according to Wikipedia an Ur-Example could be the cell. As in, the cell from biology. Seriously.
- For modern, more weakly typed programming languages, Javascript and Python are the trope codifiers.
- Visual programming languages, which rely on graphics more on text for programming, have existed in the '90s, examples being Etoys, Alice, and Max, but Scratch codified the genre, with its block-based programming as an influence on later, especially educational, ones.
- The iPhone is not the first smartphone ever, but you'd be hard pressed to find a modern smart phone not influenced by it.
- The underpinnings of modern French haute cuisine were laid by the likes of François Pierre La Varenne in the mid-to-late 17th century, and Antoine Carême in the early 19th century developed a style of cooking we recognize as the origin of our contemporary understanding of French gastronomy (particularly his emphasis on sauces and his classification of sauces by "mother sauce"). However, Carême's style was but one of several high-class cooking styles in France until the mid-to-late 19th century. It was the work of Auguste Escoffier in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which codified and streamlined Carême's ideas and became the reference point for all French cuisine after it.
- Trickster God and, by extension, The Trickster, can largely be attributed to three deities: Anansi the Spider, Coyote the Trickster, and Loki the Lie-Smith.
- St. George and the Dragon codified the Dragonslayer figure. Even if Marduk made exactly that many centuries before.
- Following the 2003 debut of a redesign for the $20 USD bill, people discovered that, by folding it a certain way, one can make the rear illustration resemble the World Trade Center on fire. The coincidence became a popular schoolyard parlor trick, and the fact that it was discovered concurrently with the rise of 9/11 conspiracy theories resulted in the Currency Conspiracy trope becoming a popular shorthand for nutty Conspiracy Theorist characters.
- The whole figure of Jesus Christ could be considered as a codifier of the messiah, but Zeus from Greek mythology helped to cement the idea of god beign an old man with a beard sitting on a throne.
- OpenAI's ChatGPT was not the first LLM (large language model), but it was the first one to become commercially available and gain widespread attention. Not long afterward, other LLMs (e.g. Anthropic's Claude, Google's Bard/Gemini, Meta's Llama, Mistral's Mixtral) also became commercially available.
- Charles Ponzi was hardly the first to pull off a scheme of the type that would come to be known as a Ponzi scheme. (Defined as a scheme in which people pay in with the promise of huge returns, which eventually collapses, leaving people with little or nothing.) However the way he did it was so iconic that the scheme came to be known for him and named after him.
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