People mock and parody conventions as overused that were never common in the first place.
TV Tropes names it for the celebration of the death of something that never lived. Its standard example is 'the butler did it', a twist rare in classic detective fiction but so widely parodied that it is remembered as a cliché. The parodies become most people's only evidence for the thing being parodied.
In practice
- A campaign ridicules a position that none of its opponents actually holds, and the audience leaves believing it was widespread.
- A new manager mocks the old way of doing things, which turns out to be a caricature nobody at the firm ever practised.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is that parody is more memorable than its target, so it becomes the source of people's picture of a genre. Another is small reference pools: people who know a field only through its jokes cannot check the jokes against it.
- In its favour
- Consistent with documented cases in which a famous cliché is hard to find in the works it supposedly dominated, and with the straw man pattern in argument.
- Against it
- Hard to establish, since rarity has to be shown across a whole genre, and some supposed dead unicorns turn out to have been common in works that critics no longer read.
- Standing
- Compare the straw man and small reference pools.
- Subject
- Communication & Media
- Essay
- The folk laws of argument and attention