History Main / TropeBreaker

*** In ''Film/{{Scream 2}}'', of the first scenes features a dumbass trying to prank call [[FinalGirl Sidney]] and claiming to be Ghostface; she looks at the caller ID and tells him off. It's actually been said that the first film triggered [[TheRedStapler a threefold spike]] in the adoption of caller ID systems.

[[caption-width-right:350:[-[[AltText Well, we really only settled the question of]] [[SupernaturalLight ghosts that emit or reflect visible light]]. Or [[{{Poltergeist}} move objects around]]. Or make [[WhisperingGhosts any kind of sound]]. But that covers all the ones that appear in ''[[Film/Ghostbusters1984 Ghostbusters]]'', so I think we're good.-]]]

* The LivingDinosaurs trope became a lot less popular after the discovery of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater Chicxulub crater]] in the early 1990s, which definitively proved the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvarez_hypothesis Alvarez hypothesis]] (the theory that the dinosaurs went extinct due to an asteroid striking the Earth) first proposed in 1980. Prior to the Alvarez hypothesis, many scientists believed that the dinosaurs died out ''gradually'' due to long-term environmental trends (such as climate change or ocean regression), which made it somewhat more plausible that some of them could have survived into the present day. Once it became clear that their extinction was more likely the result of a sudden and dramatic cataclysm, that became a lot harder to take seriously.

* Streaming services (such as Creator/{{Netflix}}), [=TiVo=], On-Demand channels, {{Timeshift Channel}}s, and [=DVRs=] are all Trope Breakers for AppointmentTelevision. However, many people do still like (or only have time) to watch their shows at a particular time or wish to see them ASAP to avoid {{Spoiler}}s on social media or in conversations around the water cooler at work the next day.

* A fascinating example is the American use of area codes as regional identifiers. Despite area codes being made obsolete by mobile phone technology, using a string of three numbers to identify an area has become ''more'' popular, being carried through sports fandom and HipHop.

** The growing awareness of harmful substances like [=CFC's=] that tear up the ozone layer and the Montreal Protocol signed in 1987, which regulates and phases out those harmful substances worldwide, also helped break off the big hair trend.

A Trope Breaker is a change in cultural context, such as a change in customs or mores, or an advance in technology, which renders some well-loved trope [[DiscreditedTrope moot in contemporary storylines]], at least in certain parts of the world. Hollywood usually responds to Trope Breakers sluggishly [[UndeadHorseTrope and clings to broken tropes]] via lame, [[VoodooShark sometimes outright bizarre]] justifications. Sometimes a Trope Breaker is just flat-out ignored, leading to lots of FridgeLogic.

* The advent of digitalized special effects and LCD technology for screen displays made the CrystalClearPicture no longer a necessity if the creators wanted crisper InUniverse screen displays. Now, fixing the de-synch between the CRT screen's scan rate and the camera's frames-per-second is automatically corrected.

* Artificial insemination smashes a lot of SexTropes to bits by making sex no longer necessary to produce kids. For instance, AllLesbiansWantKids and OnlyYouCanRepopulateMyRace no longer require the woman to LieBackAndThinkOfEngland with all the potential angst this might involve. There are reasons why the old-fashioned way might be necessary (it's cheaper, the man might not want to make a deposit at a sperm bank, or the work might be set somewhere where artificial insemination is forbidden or otherwise unavailable), but they're rarely used; instead, the idea almost never even comes up except as FridgeLogic.