TV tropes?

For today’s blog, I was instructed to go to a website and look up information on TV tropes.  Now, a TV trope is basically a character that one can easily interject into a storyline because of stereotypical thoughts.  For my trope, I chose the Asian Store Owner.

In our society, the Asian Store Owner is quite typical and usually used for comedic effect.  These people are devoid of pronouncing English properly and have little formal education.  The easiest example I can think of is Apu from The Simpsons.  Just by glancing at this character, Apu, one can see how stereotypical TV tropes really are.

Also, since I used the clip in an earlier blog, the store owners from “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood.”  Actually, now that I think about it, nearly every character in that film is a TV trope.  From the buffoonish men to the Asian clerks to the white man that is framing famous black people this film literally drips in tropes.

All of these ideas are basically used for one thing: to trivialize an entire group of the population for the enjoyment of others.  The fact that these “characters” are played out in nearly every film and television series in American society really shows the way we think of others.  The fact that characters can be boiled down to stereotypes is quite disturbing.

So what does this tell us as a society?  Well, it does a lot to show that we don’t see a need to invest in quality characters that do not meet the idea of hegemonic masculinity.  Because of our unattainable goals in masculinity, anything that is not is commonly devalued, disparaged and, eventually, “fetishized” by our society.