In a previous blog post, we introduced the research questions of our sixth tiny use case, presenting the kaiju genre as an interesting subject for examining kaiju-related tropes. In part II, we explore the consistency of the tropes attributed to live-action kaiju films via data-analytical methods.
For our analysis, we draw data from the fan-curated database TV Tropes. Our approach brings together two perspectives that have played only minor roles in film genre theory so far: The inclusion of the fan perspective, here based on the fan-curated database TV Tropes, and the focus on narratological tropes rather than the traditionally favored visual and sociocultural frameworks.
TV Tropes is a website that catalogs and explains recurring themes, storytelling devices, and character archetypes (known as tropes) across various forms media, including television, literature, video games, and more. More specifically, TV Tropes defines tropes as follows: “A trope is a storytelling device or convention, a shortcut for describing situations the storyteller can reasonably assume the audience will recognize. Tropes are the means by which a story is told by anyone who has a story to tell.” We refer to TV Tropes as our data source, as it provides insights into how fans categorize, lexicalize, and index popular cultural works—specifically, live-action films in our case. The website includes an index of tropes and genres to help categorize works, which we will use as a starting point for our analysis.
For our case study on kaiju, TV Tropes offers a webpage listing tropes indicative of kaiju films. Additionally, TV Tropes provides us with a list of live-action films categorized as ‘kaiju.’ For our analysis, we aim to examine the consistency of trope tagging and categorization of live-action kaiju films to explore the relationship between tropes and genre on TV Tropes.
To identify and compare the core tropes that characterize live-action kaiju films, we adopt a bottom-up approach by analyzing the data provided by TV Tropes. The dataset includes individual films and larger franchises, such as Gamera and Godzilla, as well as productions from multiple countries, including Japan, North and South Korea, and the United States. It also features the Ultra Series, reflecting the heterogeneous nature of the source data.
The dataset from TV Tropes regarding live-action “Kaiju Works” comprises 128 distinct kaiju films with 3,134 attributed unique tropes. This dataset reflects only one perspective on the kaiju genre. Other sources may provide different datasets depending on their definitions of genre and kaiju, as well as the parameters they consider. Additionally, the TV Tropes dataset may be incomplete—for example, it may lack certain films or tropes—since it has not been systematically accumulated and curated.
As the first step in analyzing the dataset from TV Tropes, we determined the number of occurrences of each trope and arranged them in descending order of frequency. The resulting list of the most common tropes provides initial insights into what might be considered indicative of the kaiju genre in the TV Tropes community, as these attributions reflect what is perceived while watching kaiju films. The distribution of all distinct tropes follows a Zipfian law distribution (see Figure 1), but it also reveals the generally low occurrence of distinct tropes. For example, the most frequent trope “kaiju” appears in only about one-third of all the films.
To reduce the number of tropes and their occurrences (6,806 occurrences overall) to a manageable size for our analysis, we set a threshold requiring tropes to appear at least in 10% of all the films, i.e., a trope must appear at least 13 times to be considered a core trope in this analysis. Since the distribution is skewed with a long tail, the most important and frequently occurring tropes are concentrated in the first few entries. This enables us to capture the small number of core tropes in the dataset and filter out rarely occurring tropes that may be specific to niche genres or unique films. This threshold can be adjusted in future research, depending on the specific research questions. Our filter leaves us with 41 core tropes (see Figure 2).
The list shows the trope ‘Kaiju’ at the top of the dataset. This attribution indicates that the term “kaiju” is used in different ways within the TV Tropes community, i.e., not only as a genre, but also as a trope that does not necessarily align with the kaiju genre, as the data suggests. A closer examination of individual films reveals that the ‘Kaiju’ attributions are predominantly associated with the Ultra Series, while a similar amount is attributed to various other films in the dataset. This may be the result of the heterogeneous group of contributors. While some might consider the Ultra Series part of the kaiju genre, as it depicts giant monsters, others might not, as this series is usually categorized as tokusatsu films, e.g., on Wikipedia (2024) and according to film scholar Jason Barr (2016). Although not distinctly visible, this attribution hints at an underlying distinction between the Ultra Series and the kaiju genre, despite their inclusion in the considered films. This might also suggest a possible kaiju subgenre within the TV Tropes community. This implicit differentiation reveals the complexity of genre definitions, the establishment of a genre-defining canon, and the diverse perspectives within fan discourse.
To our surprise, the list further reveals a considerable difference between the number of kaiju films (128 films) in the dataset and the occurrence of the ‘Kaiju’ trope (42 occurrences), which might indicate an inconsistency in the data, as discussed above. This must be taken into account in our subsequent analysis as it could have a significant impact on how the genre is constituted and understood on TV Tropes. On the other hand, the occurrence of the ‘Kaiju’ trope raises the question of whether ‘Kaiju’ is a genre by itself or merely a trope, thus revealing an indeterminacy in the fan discourse.
The identified core tropes still suggest necessary elements, such as the depiction of giant monsters, gigantic battles, and mass destruction, within the kaiju genre. However, these tropes alone are insufficient for defining the genre, as many of them are too broad and commonly appear in other genres, such as science fiction, horror, and disaster films. Therefore, the individual tropes lack the specificity required to uniquely characterize the kaiju genre. Future data analysis of possible patterns and clusters of these tropes may shed more light on the relationship between the kaiju tropes and the kaiju genre in the TV Tropes community.
A first comparison of the determined core tropes extracted from the live-action films with the list of core tropes provided by TV Tropes reveals additional complexity in what is considered ‘kaiju’ on TV Tropes. Among the 41 extracted core tropes and the 92 kaiju tropes, comprising 43 monster tropes and 49 plot-related or meta-tropes[1], only 11 appear in both sets. This divergence could further confirm our assumption that different interpretations are employed on TV Tropes and suggest that examining clusters of tropes, rather than focusing on individual ones, might provide better insights. It could also be the result of our highly specific analysis of live-action films alone, while the kaiju trope collection may encompass other media, such as anime, manga, and literature, thus indicating that, even though live-action kaiju films are pivotal to the genre, they are not representative of the genre as a whole.
A content analysis of the kaiju tropes that do not appear in the core tropes dataset shows that, despite their omission in the attribution, they are applicable to live-action kaiju films. This might further reveal the continuously evolving nature of the database and the dependency of live-action films on the historical and cultural context in which the attributions have taken place and been further developed.
Nevertheless, the extraction of the most frequent tropes of live-action films, which indicate common themes on TV Tropes, provides us with a first impression of what might be considered core tropes and a preliminary overview of how the TV Tropes community characterizes the kaiju genre. It also reveals tropes that may be considered irrelevant for defining the genre. The analysis also shows that one medium alone is insufficient to understand transmedia genres, such as kaiju. Therefore, we will analyze data from other media works that use kaiju as a genre category.
References:
Barr, J. (2016) The Kaiju Film. A Critical Study of Cinema’s Biggest Monsters. Jefferson: McFarland.
TV Tropes (2024) Kaiju Works, link: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KaijuWorks (last access: 10 October 2024).
Wikipedia (2024) Ultraman, link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraman (last access: 10 October 2024).
[1] Categorized according to TV Tropes.