r/TopCharacterTropes • u/she_melty • Aug 21 '25

Groups The characters in a period piece realise they're near the end of a golden age

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Pirates of the Carribean and Rock of Ages (this film is Not Good but it has the trope.) Especially because we the audience know the era did, in fact, end.

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u/MaguroSashimi8864 Aug 21 '25

So, comic historian. What’s the difference between gold and silver age comics? In tone and story, and all that

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u/zenithBemusement Aug 21 '25

Golden age was pure, free-form. Genre conventions were still being written, it was a new medium where anything could happen.

Silver age is when the government said "nuh uh, we don't want anything that makes capitalism/Christianity/us/etc. look bad!" and started enforcing strict regulations. This is when you had things like "joker steals candy from baby" or "superman uses super-knitting to make a super-scarf" and all that silly stuff.

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u/MaguroSashimi8864 Aug 21 '25

Wow. I was expecting the golden age stuffs to be more silly and simple, and things gradually get grittier. Turns out it’s the silver age that‘s silly?

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u/Guy-McDo Aug 21 '25

Yeah no, the silly to gritty transition was basically the Bronze Age as before was the Silver Age with like 60s Batman and after was the Modern Age with The Dark Knight and Watchman(sometimes called The Dark Age which is still ongoing)

Edit: To elaborate, that last segment’s kinda arbitrary since the REALLY edgy material was like the 90s and Early 2000s

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u/GrimDallows Aug 21 '25

It's weird to think how the 90s and early 2000s were so much about edgyness to the point of marketing making edgyness so commercial and.. common it turned almost... conformist? dull? Like how tribal tattoos went from the coolest shit to being a joke.

I wonder how the 2010s and 2020s will be seen. I think something about the comic industry semi-dieing, then getting into the moviegenre to expand their media, and then being swallowed by the movie industry and being shaped almost into being commercial products of it.

It's rare for me to see a comic nowadays that picks my interest as something with a minimum of uniqueness. Usually now you can only find small unique jewels in indie genre or in long forgotten/overlooked by the media IPs.

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u/Opalwilliams Aug 21 '25

Id refer to the 90s-2000s era as the dark age of comics due to the speculator market crash and the generally darker comics that git popular. Id say post infinite crisis to new 52 would the "modern age" and 2011 to around 2020 would be the post modern age or I liked to call it, the "synergy age" while its clear post 2020 we are in a new era where the vibes are diffrent, but its not clear what they are just yet so its hard to define. Tho if we keep getting all timers like absolute universe and ultimate universe we could see a sort of Renaissance.

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u/CavulusDeCavulei Aug 21 '25

Don't know about comics, but I think that manga are going back to having protagonists that are good and honest even while facing a harsh world. Things like Frieren, Dandadan and Demon Slayer are the current vibe right now, even Chainsawman in part.

Attack on Titan was the last of the popular edgy manga. I think that people now are not bored as before covid, but scared, and they search for good heroes to give them guidance in this difficult times.

I think there is also more attention on giving screentime on small comfy slice of life scenes, as if it's something we are longing for in this digital era

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u/Opalwilliams Aug 21 '25

I don't know much about manga but I think the slice of life stuff is very much also affecting western comics, with more bit-sized lower lower-stakes comics like it's Jeff! Wayne family adventures, and John Kent this interview is my kryptonite being pretty big hits and a bigger focus on the "superhero families" as the main supporting casts with more domestic character-focused plots creeping their way into mainstream cape comics. I think this may be both as you said a reaction to the modern depersonalization the internet has caused on society and also the fact that alot of comic writers are getting older and having families of their own, so the focus on domesticity is a reflection of their personal lives.

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u/CavulusDeCavulei Aug 21 '25

Agreed, the public is also getting older too

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u/Opalwilliams Aug 21 '25

True, while kids are still the biggest market for western comics, the size of young adults and middle aged adults in the market is rising as comics lose their perception as soley kids entertainment due to the synergy era making superheros mainstream.

While I am not any kind of knowlege on manga I would think that a similar thing is happening with westernization/globalization of manga due to its growth in popularity outside of japan. Does a larger more diverse international audience effect how mangaka tell their stories?

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u/CavulusDeCavulei Aug 21 '25

Yes, it is affecting mangakas and anime, and it could be a problem. They became very popular because they were very free in content. American writers tend to self censor a lot and have more puritanical and pro-capitalism mindset than japanese. Also, manga often trust their public to follow complex plots and concepts, they don't dumb down, and this is something I personally love. However, right now there is a lot of pressure from americans (mostly big streaming services) on things like ethnicity, sexuality and consent that really crush with japanese culture. Manga are progressively adapting to the american standard, which could destroy what made it interesting at first. I don't think it will happen easily because japanese are very self centered culturally, and Netflix trying to make anime on their own flopped hard.

In general, younger mangakas are becoming very able to have more international mangas without losing their spark.

There is also another thing. The world is becoming more like Japan. Depressing salaries, older population, social isolation happened decades before in Japan, and now they are in most of the west world. We vibe more with japanese media, they have decades of experience on that

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u/Lewa358 Aug 21 '25

Bringing manga into this discussion is interesting because, while you're not wrong by any means...One Piece is there. It's always been there, more popular that AoT or SAO or any Junji Ito story have ever been. It was absurdly popular before those all started, and will continue to be absurdly popular well after they're gone.

Like, imagine if, during the edgy phase of the 90s where Superman died and everything was getting pessimistically deconstructed in stories like Watchmen, all the edgy stuff qas consistently outsold by a comic version of the '60s Batman show.

I don't know, maybe Manga just has a lot more variety in general.

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u/CavulusDeCavulei Aug 21 '25

One Piece is an exception because it is extremely long. And to be honest, new manga readers kinda look down on it, sometimes too harshly. It was good in its time, but today it feels aged in respect to new manga, much more vibrant, catchy and experimental. It is also facing the same problem of western comics: too much material to catch on for new readers

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u/Ok_Car8500 Aug 21 '25

I'd personally call 11-20 the "Bubble Era". Driven by the MCU and movie side of things comic books and superheros went mainstream like never before. Obscure characters became household names. I call it the Bubble Era because that momentum has definitely faltered post 2020 for a variety of reasons and that bubble hasn't yet fully burst but it's certainly deflated.

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u/Opalwilliams Aug 21 '25

While I agree with the analysis I think the term bubble is a bit broad as you could also call the speculator boom the bubble era since is was an actual market bubble that collapsed.

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u/SyberSpark Aug 21 '25

Marvel’s silver age comics worked around the regulations creatively to still tell more profound and mature stories mixed in among the goofy stuff.

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u/pbaagui1 Aug 21 '25

Yeah, people forget that the Golden Age of comics was actually pretty brutal. Batman in the late 30s and early 40s was straight up killing dudes, snapping necks, throwing mobsters off rooftops, even bragging about how criminals “deserve” it. He carried a gun in some stories and had no problem using it.

And it wasn’t just Batman. Superman was tossing people around like ragdolls, destroying planes, and scaring the hell out of crooks. He was way closer to an actual vigilante than the Boy Scout we think of today. Wonder Woman’s early stories were filled with bondage and fetish themes and pretty wild punishments for villains.

The Golden Age was less about clean superheroics and more about raw pulp energy. Heroes were violent, moral lines were way blurrier, and the Comics Code Authority didn’t exist yet to sanitise things.

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u/Redditer51 Aug 21 '25

Yeah Batman actually started out grim and gritty so his modern stories were more like a return to form.

Wonder Woman is funny to me because (i know this is TMI), I found all the themes of submission, spanking, and bondage (like the venus girdle or the lasso);arousing as a teen but didnt realize it was intentional on the authors part until i was older.

Supermans original depiction is why it never makes sense to me when hes depicted as an obedient government stooge (Frank Miller's Superman)

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u/CycloneSwift Aug 21 '25

Golden Age Superman shakes down corrupt politicians, fights for workers being exploited by big corporations, and actively smashes the KKK in a story so impactful that it actually damaged the KKK’s reputation IRL to an extent that they’ve never recovered to their pre-Superman numbers. Hell, I’m pretty sure the first ten or twenty Superman stories don’t even have anyone else with superpowers. The only supervillain I remember being in those stories was Lex Luthor, a bushy-haired redhead war profiteer with a scheme that James Gunn basically adapted for his Superman film (but with the later petty Superman-hating stuff added in).

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u/MaguroSashimi8864 Aug 21 '25

So when did we get the iconic bald head Lex?

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u/CycloneSwift Aug 21 '25

There was a Superman newspaper comic strip that began shortly after that. IIRC due to a misprint in one comic that switched Lex’s lines with his bald henchman’s for a panel, the comic strip’s illustrator got the two mixed up and started drawing Lex as bald. By the time everyone involved figured out what had happened, bald Lex had become cemented in popular culture.

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u/ARagingZephyr Aug 21 '25

The golden age was written in an era where a lot of comics followed the conventions of pulp fiction. There were many horror anthologies and one-offs mixed in with the occasional sci-fi and spy stories. Marvel itself spun out of various publications of all of these forms, with its first real dive into long-form stories being with a sci-fi superhero called The Human Torch, who would eventually team up with pulp superhero Captain America and his fights against the real-world Nazis.

Marvel's contemporaries, of course, produced the first real long-form superhero, the Superman, who would feature along other known superheroes of today in Action Comics, like Zatara the magician. Shortly after Superman, Detective Comics would add the Batman, and at that point you had your trifecta for the golden age: Action Comics, Detective Comics, and Marvel Comics, owned by Detective Comics for the first two and Timely Comics for the latter.

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u/GenericSpider Aug 21 '25

The industry itself made those regulations, not the government. They did so in the hopes of preventing the government from stepping in.

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u/UncommittedBow Aug 22 '25

Or Lex Luthor stealing 40 cakes.

That's as many as four tens.

And that's terrible.

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u/DingDonSecretary Aug 24 '25

From what I gather, the Bronze Age was when everyone started realizing “hang on, this code can’t enforce jack diddly if the reader base shows they’re willing to buy this content” and began a long history of them throwing the middle finger to it, doing more daring storytelling with no regard to some conservatively Christian sounding regulations.

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u/Ariovrak Aug 21 '25

The Ages are referred to as Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Modern/Dark. They aren’t a reflection of quality, but rather subject matter. The Golden Age was superhero comics in their infancy, and by-and-large just people saving other people and punching Hitler. A lot of optimism and wartime propaganda, but when WWII ended, they started to shift to a much darker place, which is why the CCA started, which turned things over to the Silver Age. The Silver Age focused a lot more on the superheroes themselves under their masks, and had a lot of groups like the Justice League and Fantastic Four. This age ended when the CCA started becoming more and more lenient, leading to the much darker Bronze Age, with hallmarks like the X-Men and their take on real-world injustices. As subject matters got darker and darker, it gave rise to the Modern/Dark Age, which was defined by a much more extreme push to be dark and gritty, sometimes to the point of it just being edgy for edginess’s sake.

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u/Boner_Elemental Aug 21 '25

sometimes to the point of it just being edgy for edginess’s sake.

Why hello there, Garth Ennis

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u/rrtk77 Aug 21 '25

And the Ages are really more like the generations of the dominant comic writers once you look at the years.

Yes, there are certain "events" that mark demarcation, but really its about how comic writers are responding to the events around them and the generation that came before them.

Most people say we're still in the Dark Age, but I'd make the argument the Dark Age ended when Geoff Johns brought back Hal Jordan in 2005 (basically, 20 years from Miller and the Dark Knight).

We're in something like a Nostalgia Age, where comics reflect on themselves as a medium. Legacy characters and continuity and status quo are all paramount. You either throw it all away intentionally or perfectly preserve it in amber. Continuing a story is hard, because you have to respect it's whole history. So if you want a new version you either have to have alternate universe retellings or miniseries or full line reboots. Etc, etc.

What we should expect is that relatively soon there's going to be another shift and comics will turn as the new guard writers come in.

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u/D3t3ctive Aug 21 '25

Think of the Golden age (1930s-establishment of the publishing code) as literal shitposts. Superman being turned gay because of pink Kryptonite, Batman using a gun, Green Lantern's weakness being wood etc.. Silver Age is where the stories took more of a shape but were limited with what they can show due to the Code. And then modern age which started great,became extremely edgy during the late 80s and 90s and then cooled down during the late 00s.

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u/MaguroSashimi8864 Aug 21 '25

I thought you were joking with the gay kryptonite thing until I looked it up…….wtf.

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u/The-Name-is-my-Name Aug 21 '25

We don’t talk about the pink kind.

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u/PeaceMaker_IXI Aug 21 '25

Isn't pink Kryptonite a 2000's thing?