The 99% trope thing has an associated concept of its own: fan service.
Once you go past a certain level of tropey-ness (tropiness?) you're unavoidably telegraphing a message to genre fans because everyone else rejects your work as derivative.
But giving it a name -- fan service -- is kind of a new version where all parties are aware of it and actively engaged with it.
And it gives rise to a new way for directors to have all the fun of breaking the fourth wall without breaking the fourth wall -- to have the characters also aware of the tropes of the circumstances in which they find themselves.
There's so much of this in TV in particular and a lot of it is
because of the influence of Joss Whedon, but Rocke S. O'Bannon did some of this in Farscape (and then much more explicitly as I understand it in Cult, which I haven't seen yet).
You could argue that a certain strand of films of the late 80s and early 90s really kicked it off, not least the original, quite underrated Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which is all about trope awareness.
Once you go past a certain level of tropey-ness (tropiness?) you're unavoidably telegraphing a message to genre fans because everyone else rejects your work as derivative.
But giving it a name -- fan service -- is kind of a new version where all parties are aware of it and actively engaged with it.
And it gives rise to a new way for directors to have all the fun of breaking the fourth wall without breaking the fourth wall -- to have the characters also aware of the tropes of the circumstances in which they find themselves.
There's so much of this in TV in particular and a lot of it is because of the influence of Joss Whedon, but Rocke S. O'Bannon did some of this in Farscape (and then much more explicitly as I understand it in Cult, which I haven't seen yet).
You could argue that a certain strand of films of the late 80s and early 90s really kicked it off, not least the original, quite underrated Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which is all about trope awareness.