I meant more that the notion of the ‘anti-hero’ in popular fiction eventually made morally ambiguous characters more acceptable in general, so even outright bad guys who eventually reformed could be accepted by the audience to have ‘happy ending’ redemption arcs.
But also, I think we debated what an ‘anti-hero’ is in another thread a couple years back. Your definition is valid, but an anti-hero, I believe, can also be defined as one who generally does the right thing, but with no regard to morality. legality, or consequences. Or even one who crosses back and forth over the right / wrong line but generally has redeeming qualities. Deadpool, for example.
I think under that definition WW almost fits the bill as anti-hero-- he started out on his crime spree initially to support his family, did cross the line into outright bad guy, but eventually had a redemption arc. That was the genius of the show- it walked such a fine line you were never sure whether to root for him or hope for his downfall.
I had that happen at work just last week: someone tried to trick me to say something (mildly) bad but I didn’t. Then I thought and said “He’s right behind me, isn’t he?” like I was living in a sitcom.
However, the trope of establishing shots of a busy, crowded street in New York City, with everyone, especially the cabbies, honking like crazy, is true, at least compared to other American cities.
There’s a whole host of horror movie tropes, mostly dating from the 80s, that are so overused that nowadays they usually only appear in parody form.
Such as the “oh noes I just looked in the bathroom mirror and something horrible is standing right behind me! But when I turn around, it’s gone. Musta just imagined it ”
Or the ever-popular “screeching cat fake-out jump scare”.
Similarly, you rarely see the wall/locker slam in manga/anime these days, where the male character basically pins the female character against the wall and slams his hand next to her, generally right before confessing his love for her. Oddly enough, this is mostly a trope seen in shoujo works where the target audience is adolescent and young adult women. A lot of the classic Japanese romcom tropes have become tired cliches that rarely get used purely straight: the female main character running into the male main character with toast in the mouth because she’s late for school (or just running into each other in general in a crash), the “indirect kiss” of drinking out of the same container, and so on. All to the good as far as I’m concerned as they are generally terrible.
Another trope that has thankfully dissipated is the idea that as long as the bad guy isn’t ‘in frame’ the good guy can’t see him. This one drives me insane. For example, in a wide shot the hero is alone. Them in a close up the bad can sneak up on him. You still see it occasionally but only in very badly written scripts.
A classic example is Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.
Reminds me of the ‘getting hit by a truck or a bus that comes out of nowhere’ trope. Perhaps the most ridiculous example is here, in the movie Final Destination, on a quiet street that isn’t even an intersection but a ‘T’ where there’s no street for the bus to have come from-- it literally appears from nowhere.
I have to disagree with this one. Bickle is psychotic or otherwise deranged. He was going to assassinate a Presidential candidate, but got scared off by the Secret Service. So he settles for killing a pimp and another bad guy, and is lauded by the public as a vigilante hero, but the message (I think) of the movie is “be careful who your heroes are” (a moral we can all do well to follow these days). I wouldn’t consider him an anti-hero at all, though. Maybe an accidental hero… maybe.
Deadpool 2 had a fun reversal of that, with Wade badmouthing Cable to his group of friends then deadpanning “Oh no, he’s right behind you, isn’t he?” as Cable has snuck up behind them.
Still going strong, at least in anime, where getting hit by “Truck-kun” is the opening scene of multiple isekai (other world) animes (and some others like Zombieland Saga). Even that was being parodied as far back as 2012 with Konosuba, where the main character “tries to save a classmate from being hit by a tractor that he mistakes for a speeding truck and dies of acute stress reaction”.
”
