Follow TV Tropes

Following

Trope Codifier

Go To

"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."
Cristopher and Barbara Roden, introduction to Sherlock Holmes

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  that it provides a name for the trope.

Also see Most Triumphant Example. Compare Franchise Codifier.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    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 
  • 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, who 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 arguably the single 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 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. Rather than being about larger than life 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.

    Art 

    Comic Books 

    Comic Strips 

    Films — Animated 

    Films — Live-Action 
  • 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.
    • Arguably, the Italian proto-slasher giallo film A Bay of Blood was the trope codifier for Friday the 13th (1980) itself (and, by extension, slasher movies with its derivative formula), featuring the aforementioned Sex Signals Death trope; a seemingly desolate forest setting (on an idyllic waterfront, no less); an exceedingly high body count; and an all-around liberal employment of Gorn. Indeed, both Friday the 13th and its first sequel directly recreated certain scenes from A Bay of Blood (including spearing a copulating couple to death twice and embedding a sharp instrument in a respective victim's face). Earlier gialli (and American slasher antecedents such as Psycho) also employed certain variations of these tropes, but not in formulaic tandem with one another.
  • 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 of monster movies in general together with King Kong.
  • 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, 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. Richard Widmark's performance became iconic influenced, among other things, the portrayal of The Joker in various Batman adaptations.
  • The Carry On franchise 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  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 Immunity 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, Salς, 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.

    Literature 

    Live-Action TV 

    Magazine 

    Music 
  • 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.
  • 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 Beyoncι, 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. Motφrhead 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.
  • 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 codifier (and Trope Maker) is 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 Music/blink-182 with creating the sound that early to mid 2000's pop-punk bands would be influenced by, vocalist swapping in particular) The concept of combining fast, aggressive music with pop lyrics, however, was invented much earlier by bands like Buzzcocks and The Undertones.
  • 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 Book Ends 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 Beyoncι.
  • 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.

    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 prior fued had really been more about Santo, with his partners their to make things even than being a unit in their own right.
  • Hulk Hogan is arguably 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 back story in the case of Vader (written by the famed Go Nagi no less!) and some truly impressive special effects in Taker's case(but not always)
  • All Japan co founder Akio Saito popularized the sit down power bomb 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 luchadors 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 , 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.
  • 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 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.
  • 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.

    Video Games 
  • Quick Melee has existed in some form in shooters for a long time, but the Halo series is what started the trend in modern shooters, and the Modern Warfare series and Call of Duty: Black Ops are what made the "press a button to pull out your knife and stab with it in one motion" almost standard in recent shooters.
  • Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom by id Software weren't the first First Person Shooters (or even id's first First Person Shooter), but the two games popularized the genre and each inspired dozens of imitators. For a while, first person shooters were often called "Doom clones." While these games are very primitive by today's standards — you can't jump or even look up — Doom remains to this day a partial trope codifier, popularizing Death matches, FPS games with built in support for Game Mods, telefragging your friends, etc.
    • In fact, John Romero coined the term deathmatch and frag.
  • Duke Nukem 3D pretty much started the trend of realistic/organic level design in FPSes. While Quake was far superior from a technological standpoint (being the first all-3D FPS) the levels were infamously bland with green castle followed by grey castle followed by brown dungeon. Duke had levels with never before seen interactivity. Light switches, mirrors, CCTVs, wall sockets that electrocute you, televisions, rooms that make sense (like a bar, hotel rooms, nightclubs, reactors for the moonbase).
  • The infamous Rockstar Games masterpiece, Manhunt, is the mascot for supposed video games that turns people into sadistic killers. Even going so far as that, after its release, almost every major murder incident in the world had something to do with the game, and since then, it has been the bane of lawyers and parents alike.
    • It only got worse when they release a sequel Manhunt 2, which was playable on the Wii. Yes, you can play the game in near virtual simulation with the Wii Remote as your "weapon".
  • Breakout is the Trope Maker (and Trope Namer) for Breaking Out, but most future examples of the genre are more based on Trope Codifier Arkanoid, which added in power-ups.
  • Quake is the codifier for the "mouselook" control scheme, where instead of only using a keyboard to control an FPS character, you control the view with a mouse as well while using the keys to control the direction of movement for your character: forward-backwards-strafe. Bungie's Marathon is the Ur-Example, The Terminator: Future Shock is the Trope Maker, but due to Marathon being on the unpopular Apple platform, and The Terminator: Future Shock just not being popular, it took until Quake and its innovative online multiplayer before the mouselook feature became codified.
    • Also, although this one was by mistake, Quake codified Jump Physics for the First-Person Shooter genre such as the Rocket Jump and the Strafe Jump. For the former, it was initially discovered as a glitch, but was left in the game for one reason or another. Later sequels consider this glitch an integral technique, to the point that it's referenced in many gamesnote .
  • Even though DOOM was the Ur-Example of the Space Marine trope in videogames, Halo became the poster boy for the trope for the post-2000 generation. It also didn't actually pioneer any of the revolutions in gameplay it featured (all of them, from limited inventory, to Regenerating Health, to Quick Melee attacks, to separate buttons for firearms and grenades, had been done before in previous games), but it is unquestionably the game which popularized them all to the point that most modern First Person Shooters now use them by default.
  • Super Mario Bros. was the Codifier for Platform Games (see The Other Wiki's article on platform games).
  • EverQuest is the Trope Codifier for just about every single MMO trope of today. While it wasn't the first of its kind (MUDs and Ultima Online get that title), it was the first to establish the model that other MMOs would follow, up to and including World of Warcraft.
  • Pong is usually considered the first Video Game by the general public. The actual first Video Game is debatable depending on how you define Video Game, ranging from an unnamed game of Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device in 1947 to the 1972-released Magnavox Odyssey game console (the strongest contender turning out to lie smack in the middle, 1962's Space War!), but the consensus is that Pong is the Trope Codifier rather than the true Trope Maker.
  • Warcraft II, while not the first Real-Time Strategy game, was the first one to formalize the RPG aspects, including clearly visible hit point counters and Hero Units.
  • Similarly, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, which codified and formalized the supporting abilities, heavy emphasis on counter-play and Crippling Overspecialization.
  • Although there were definitely 3D beat'em ups/hack-and-slashers in the PS1/Sega Saturn/Nintendo 64 era, the first Devil May Cry gave the genre new popularity and credence and is widely seen as the key inspiration for similar "Stylish Action" games like God of War, Ninja Gaiden (the Xbox revival), and Spiritual Successor Bayonetta (created by Hideki Kamiya, who also created Devil May Cry and directed the first game). Many subsequent titles in the genre either directly take inspiration for it or, via aping direct so-to-speak offspring like aforementioned God of War, indirectly draw from it.
  • Street Fighter II for Fighting Games.
  • Capcom vs. games for the concept of "tag battle" fighters (discounting wrestling games, which have wildly different gameplay.)
  • Super Smash Bros. is the Codifier of the Platform Fighter subgenre of fighting games.
  • Resident Evil for the Survival Horror despite not being the first of its kind.
  • For the 3D Fighting Game, Tekken is the most likely codifier, bringing together concepts introduced in preceding 3D fighters like Virtua Fighter and Battle Arena Toshinden.
  • Broadly speaking, nothing in any Blizzard game is new or original. They just introduce and tweak the successful elements of previous games to make ones that are quite good. One thing they did create was units giving ever more amusing responses if you won't leave them alone.
  • Worms codified the turn-based artillery gameplay of games like Gorillas and Artillery.
  • While Recca probably was the Ur-Example and Batsugun was definitely the Trope Maker, DoDonPachi codified very much of Bullet Hell. And it continues to redefine and codify the meaning of it as the True Final Boss Hibachi has progressively gotten harder and harder beyond belief.
  • Dragon Quest III is the video game where the Eastern RPG truly became a separate genre from the Western RPG, and set the template for all other JRPGs to follow, including rival series Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star.
  • Final Fantasy VII codified the Ominous Latin Chanting trope for video games with the Final Boss theme "One-Winged Angel". While it was absolutely not the first game to have a song with Latin lyrics, it is by far the most popular, and a large portion of video games which have Latin lyrics in the final boss theme are inspired by this song.
  • Grand Theft Auto, particularly Grand Theft Auto III, codified the Wide-Open Sandbox genre.
  • Pokιmon is the Codifier for the monster-capturing game genre, predated by the Darker and Edgier Shin Megami Tensei series.
  • Tower Defense games were one of the major categories of user-made maps in StarCraft, but the relatively primitive map editing tool and limited selection of combat-capable buildings meant that there was a far greater emphasis on mobile units. Warcraft III brought a more sophisticated editor which could be used to make custom buildings, and maps for that game codified the variety of towers, upgrade options, and lack of mobile attackers that are common in the genre today.
    • Arknights isn't the first tower defense game, but it popularized the tower defense genre with more complex gameplay mechanics and more focus on the storyline than other tower defense games.
  • Also on mods/user-made maps, Defense of the Ancients is not the Maker for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. The concept was Made by Aeon of Strife from the StarCraft days and DotA itself took or adapted ideas from predecessors in the genre. However, DotA is the best-known example of the type, the first to become big enough to be a competitive title, and it's no great stretch to claim that dedicated games like League of Legends or Demigod would not exist without it.
  • Unreal is the codifier for Secondary Fire, as every weapon in the game has an alternative firing option. This persisted through the entire Unreal series, including the Tournament games, and is now considered virtually mandatory in any FPS game.
  • Gears of War took the idea of Take Cover! as an integral part of the gameplay system — as opposed to an organic "hide behind stuff so you stop getting shot" — from earlier games, but the concept's subsequent popularity would most likely not exist without it.
  • Metroid was the first Metroidvania-game, and Super Metroid is the Trope Codifier.
  • The Legend of Zelda codified the Action-Adventure genre, boasting innovations such as a battery save feature and open-ended gameplay, while eliminating irrelevant tropes such as Scoring Points. However, it was predated by Adventure for the Atari 2600.
  • While most certainly not the first Survival Horror game, Silent Hill introduced, or at least popularized atmosphere with limited visibility that maximizes Nothing Is Scarier.
  • While Dune II is the most likely candidate for the very first Real-Time Strategy, Command & Conquer pioneers many of the features that are present in the genre.
  • While Modern Warfare wasn't the first game to use an RPG-esque leveling-up system for its multiplayer, you'd be hard pressed to find another online FPS today that doesn't use a system almost exactly like it. It's fairly easy to implement and can keep the player invested for another fifteen to twenty hours that they normally wouldn't have bothered with. It wasn't the absolute first modern military shooter game either, with Battlefield 2 among others preceding it, but most people blame it for making the setting popular, and it also popularised certain setpieces like breaching scenes and player-controlled Death from Above/fire support.
  • Twisted Metal wasn't the first competitive Vehicular Combat game (Both Battlesport and Cybersled predate it), but it certainly did popularize the genre and some features, such as tournament-based storylines, quirky characters and more differentiated vehicles.
  • The Roguelike genre has two important codifiers: NetHack introduced many features that have since become commonplace in the genre and Angband created a whole, thriving sub-genre of its own. Additionally, the Mystery Dungeon series established many standards for roguelikes made by Japanese developers.
    • The Binding of Isaac later set the Rogue-lite sub-genre in stone, with many games following its heavy emphasis on Macrogame progression, large array of items with quirky passive effects, and streamlined gameplay mechanics inspired by more mainstream genres.
  • Any new Wide-Open Sandbox space simulator is highly likely to be compared to at least one of three games: Freelancer, the X-Universe series, and EVE Online. The latter two are better known among younger gamers that may not be familiar with Freelancernote . Single-player sims are more likely to be compared with X, Egosoft being essentially the only game in town for nigh-on ten years, while MMOs are usually compared to EVE. As a result, Freelancer creator Chris Roberts' single-player/MMO hybrid Star Citizen has drawn comparisons to both.

    Those games in turn owe much of their formula to the Elite series, the Trope Maker for Wide Open Sandboxes in general.
  • Fighting massive creatures in games isn't anything new, however, after Shadow of the Colossus came along; taking on behemoths would never be the same again. Hence, the Colossus Climb.
  • The two most common forms of contemporary Western RPG were codified by Bethesda and BioWare after the genre's crash in the mid-90ies:
  • During the Golden Age of the Western RPG, the codifier was Wizardry. The first-person, party-based Dungeon Crawler format became the standard format for computer RPGs. Ultima remained a major series, but largely did its own thing with its top-down maps and slightly greater focus on story (though it was extremely influential on the codifiers of the Eastern RPG, and on Bethesda and BioWare in later years).
  • Dead Rising is most likely the codifier for the whole popular "zombie apocalypse from the inside of a mall" trope, even though it was released as recently as 2006. It has been done many time since, notably by Left 4 Dead 2 (released 2009), with the second half of its "Dead Center" campaign, which takes place entirely in a mall. This was most likely an intentional parody of Dead Rising, as Valve has made references to Dead Rising before, like how Dead Rising had an achievement called "Zombie Genocider" which required you to kill 53,594 zombies (the population of the town), and Left 4 Dead (2008) featured an achievement called "Zombie Genocidist" which required you to kill 53,595 zombies, upping it by exactly one.
  • Metal Gear for Stealth-Based Games.
  • Borderlands is the more notable Codifier for uniting the genres of First-Person Shooter and Role Playing Games into one lovely little franchise, although the RPG and loot system was originally codified by Diablo, Borderlands still deserves this spot for the previously mentioned reason and then some.
  • Current RPG/Match-Three Game hybrids take their cues from Puzzle & Dragons, rather than the Trope Maker, Puzzle Quest.
  • The Sanity Meter has cropped up more often in electronic gaming (it had been fairly standard in tabletop horror gaming for a while), and it will always get compared to Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem as a result, especially since that game used the meter to screw with the player as well.
  • Story of Seasons is both the Trope Maker and Trope Codifier for the Farm Life Sim.
  • Dark Souls inspired a trend toward action-RPGs with punishing difficulty and bleak, grimdark aesthetics.
  • The Atelier series, specifically the first two games, Atelier Marie: The Alchemist of Salburg and its sequel Atelier Elie, are the reason why most JRPGs released after the year 1998 have an Item Crafting system, as the popularity of these titles (at least in their native Japan) caused most Japanese developers to want a slice of the alchemy pie.
  • beatmania isn't the first Rhythm Game; that honor goes to Parappa The Rapper. However, beatmania established a lot of the conventions that would go on to be the foundation of other rhythm games: Multiple lanes of notes with one lane per button, a timing judgement system that awards points based on how accurately the player pressed the note, and a wide variety of songs about 1-2 minutes each in order to be more accomodating to the three-stage arcade game format.
  • Antimatter Dimensions popularised several mechanics found in the Idle Game genre, including polynomial growth (the idea that producer one makes the resource and each one above makes the one below), milestones that would make repeated New Game Plus resets faster and more comfortable, and a mode that makes progress slower when active while producing an exclusive resource.

    Visual Novels 

    Web Animation 

    Webcomics 

    Web Original 
  • 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.

    Web Videos 
  • The Slender Man Mythos is the codifier for The Blank, and with 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.

    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.
  • An earlier work by William Gibson coined the term "Cyberspace". Both Neuromancer and TRON set the standards for what we think of it.
  • 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.
  • 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.

Top

Baby Got Back

THE stuffy old song about the buttocks by Sir Mix-A-Lot.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (7 votes)

Example of:

Main / StuffyOldSongsAboutTheButtocks

Media sources:

Report