And what you see is not what you get! Movies and tvshows rarely take the time to show you all the tropes, and then go “but actually, it’s a lot more complicated than that!”.

Like, in the making money adaptation, we never see reacher gilt being a deliberate construction of ‘evil business man’ by the man himself. It gets played pretty straight. Or, same movie, we see otto, looking like a spirit halloween vampire. Kinda weird, but okay. But we dont see the bit from Thud!, where vimes realises that that too is a very purposeful playing into harmless stereotypes.

Things like that means taking time, in a genre story, to built up expecations and then change things, while still being sincere. There’s no ironic fourth wall break, “well that just happened”, i cant believe we have to fight an evil wizard on top of a tower, thats such a clichee", the subversion is that the evil wizard is a kid with a shitty dad.

“The phrase ‘Someone ought to do something’ was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider ‘and that someone is me’.”

Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

It stuck with me since i was a teen. Whenever ‘someone should do something about this’ i have second thoughts of ‘…and i guess someone is me’