Cracked / Tropes I to Z

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Tropes A - H

As with the first half of the list, many of these links may be Not Safe for Work. You Have Been Warned.

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I

• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming:
  • "X Normal Description (Weird Criteria)"
  • "X Weirdly/Oddly Specific Y"
• Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance:
  • Gladstone lists 4 Douches Who Amazingly Don't Seem to Know They Suck. These include people who use a handicap tag for parking without actually needing one, people who grow weary of their customer service job, drivers who honk at other drivers merging onto a highway, and people who overreact to minor inconveniences.
  • In "Why 'Idiocracy' Would Actually Be A Utopia", Soren Bowie debunked the assertions that Idiocracy was an indicator of increasing anti-intellectualism, noting that in Idiocracy, the idiotic characters from 2505 are all aware about their idiocy, whereas in real life, genuinely stupid people don't have that sort of self-awareness. In Idiocracy, President Camacho admitted he didn't have all the answers to the addressing the country's food crisis and brought in Joe, who was identified by an intelligence test as the smartest man alive, to help him solve these problems, which suggests that he's actually a genuinely competent leader who actually wants to help people.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Not everyone does. One of 4 Things Movies Always Get Wrong About Awkward People is that people with No Social Skills don't necessarily want to be cured.
• I Knew It!: Invoked — In 2008, an article was written detailing "The 6 most depressing happy endings in movie history", where it was stated the ending of Toy Story 2 would only be happy until Andy threw his toys away — then along comes Toy Story 3, which deals with that issue.
• I Know Mortal Kombat: #3 of The 27 Most Impressively Nerdy Accomplishments is a professional race car driver who learned on Gran Turismo.
• Immortal Procreation Clause: 6 Horrifying Implications of Awesome Fantasy Movie Universes mentions Middle-earth in the time of The Lord of the Rings, claiming that "no one in the Elfish kingdom is getting any, anywhere."
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: 42 Sci-Fi Movies (If They Were Updated for Realism) shows a Star Wars stormtrooper getting fired for missing a paper target.
• Infinite Flashlight: Photoplasty advertises it in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
• In Name Only: There's literally nothing carrying over from the magazine save for the title.
• Insane Troll Logic: Marvels of the Science. Also, the sole operating principle behind Bucholz' series of advice-hotline parodies (typically, the solution to "So Your Clone Is Trying to Murder You" somehow involves the line "MY LOVE. MY HEART. WE HAVE ARRANGED FOR ME TO GIVE YOU CRISPY LOVE.")
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Photoplasty advertises two variants in "Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games": #23 and #16.
• Interchangeable Antimatter Keys: Photoplasty advertises it in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
• Intercourse with You: Discussed in an article about modern annoyances with evolutionary explanations.
• The Internet Is for Porn: Constantly referenced. Two notable uses: Swaim watching pornography and describing what he sees to the viewer (because Cracked is ostensibly a family website and they won't host actual porn), and in The Web Of Sites, part of the Agents series, Swaim finally learns that the internet exists and says:
  "I typed in porn, and porn came up! I typed in breakfast, and porn came up! It's the perfect system!"
• Internet Jerk:
  • #4 of 5 Ways the Internet Steals Your Soul covers this trope, explaining how anonymity allows people to get away with indulging in their dark sides and cyber-bullying.
  • Hey, Let's Fix The Internet is about the musings of a long-time internet user who is dissatisfied with the prevailing toxic behavior of most users today, as compared to the relatively calm behavior of his contemporaries. He concludes that modern internet users have an image problem, and it's up to themselves to fix it.
• Intrepid Reporter: Sometimes the columnists write out first-person stories, sometimes it's about them doing article research. Special mention goes to Chris Bucholz, who seems to do hands-on reporting 80% of the time.
• Intimate Healing: 5 Doctors Who Just Gave The World's Worst Medical Advice retells a CBS13 Sacramento story about a doctor who saw a woman with an oversensitive gag reflex and prescribed giving fellatio to her husband. PONOS to MOOTH, indeed.
• In-Universe Game Clock: Taking 10 minutes to climb a stairway is the #11 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games, and accelerated crop growth as seen in farm simulation video games such as Harvest Moon series and FarmVille is #6.
• Invincible Minor Minion: 29 Baffling Rules of Life in Video Game Universes shows the Big Bad from an action-adventure game, captioned "Bring it!" Then a common chicken: "Run away!"
• Ironic Hell: 16 Appropriate Punishments for Everyday Annoyances
• Isn't It Ironic?: The 6 Most Inappropriate Song Choices in Advertising mentions a few of the more prominent examples listed on the trope page itself, including Janis Joplin endorsing Mercedes Benz, and Chevrolet using John Mellencamp's heavily-veiled anti-patriotic songs that sound extremely patriotic.
• It's a Costume Party, I Swear!: The #6 Real Old-Timey Photograph That Will Give You Nightmares
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Invoked in 4 Insane Ways Video Games Changed During My 9 Year Hiatus by showing games that beat the level for you and spoon-feed everything so you know exactly what to do without having to think for yourself.
• It Makes Sense in Context: The comments section for this article about creepy phone apps appears to be completely nonsensical, with most top voted posts being snarky remarks about the lack of content in the article and referencing the letters "ph". Turns out, when the article was uploaded, an error caused it to be initially published with only the letters "ph" (for placeholder) appearing. Naturally, the Cracked regulars had a field day.
• I Want My Jetpack: 8 Movie Futures Already Proven Wrong.

J

• Jerkass:
  • Cracked.com has much to say on the subject of jerkasses, both their habits, how to fight them, what animals/baseball players/famous presidents were actually jerkasses, and how to tell whether you actually are one. See 6 Reasons Assholes Are Healthier According To Science, 6 Scientific Reasons People Act Like Assholes, 5 Simple Steps to Not Being A Total Asshole, 5 Nerd Hacks That Make You Less Of A Jerk, 5 Romantic Movie Gestures That Were Actually Dick Moves, and 6 Things That Secretly Make You Act Like A Jerk. This is only the tip of the iceberg.
  • Adam Tod Brown gets off on acting this way.
• Joke and Receive: In The 6 Most Hilarious Undercover Operations Ever Pulled Off:
  Honestly, in an organization where heritage is everything, [a completely non-Italian guy becoming a made man in the Gambino mafia] is like, we don't know, a black guy going undercover in the KKK.
  #5: A Black Guy Goes Undercover in the KKK
• Jump Physics: Mid-air direction changes and surviving falls are the #9 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games.
• Jumping the Shark: Discussed in "6 TV Shows That Completely Lost Their Shit".
• Just a Stupid Accent: Called The 4th Stupidest Way Movies Deal with Foreign Languages.

K

• The Krampus: Mentioned here.
• Killing Your Alternate Self: They published a guide entitled So Your Clone Is Trying To Murder You. Proposed solutions including summoning a third clone from one of the bad dimensions and murdering them instead. Averted when the original and the magical murder-clone agree to become housemates, but somehow still managed to end on the line "MY LOVE. MY HEART. WE HAVE ARRANGED FOR ME TO GIVE YOU CRISPY LOVE."

L

• Lamarck Was Right: Grandchildren of people who had lived through famine were less likely to catch diabetes. Mice exposed to enriched learning environments had offspring with improved memory. This apparent Lamarckian inheritance is the third creepiest thing hiding in your DNA.
• Lame Pun Reaction: From 6 Iconic Jobs That Are Going Away Forever, on axes: "Firefighter: Sorry sir, I need to ax you something. Ahah. Laugh or I won't save your family."
• Language Equals Thought:
  • 5 Insane Ways Words Can Control Your Mind
  • 5 Surprising Ways Your Language Affects How You Think starts by citing a study that found the correlation between grammatical gender in the language (der, die, das, or el, la) and a measurable lack of female workforce participation in the culture. It goes on to mention more studies about how use of a particular language by a bilingual speaker leads to more analytical thinking, shifting of ethnic prejudices, and shifting of expectations of family unity.
• Left Field Description: Pointed out in Any Franchise Left To Its Own Devices Will Go Off The Rails, which features an excerpt of a Garfield's Pet Force story in which Vetvix banishes the heroes◊ to a Phantom Zone-like dimension. The image caption draws attention to the passage, "Before any of the superheroes had a chance to react, the metal box that held them was flooded with a sickly green light the color of cafeteria walls," prompting the comment, "...What cafeterias has Jim Davis been eating in?"
• Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: The 5 Most Popular Ways Statistics Are Used to Lie to You covers some fallacies commonly used to lie with statistics.
• Life Imitates Art: Invoked -
  • One of the 4 Realizations That Will Ruin Science Fiction for You.
  • And comic books too. 5 Important Things You Won't Believe Comic Books Invented shows how Elvis Presley's appearance, Minecraft, and even ankle bracelets for monitoring criminals came from old comic books.
• Lightning Can Do Anything: Lampshaded in the "6 Horrifying Implications of Awesome Fantasy Movie Universes".
  "In Marvel world, the odds of winding up with super powers are less than half the chance of being hit by lightning (although to be fair, being hit by lightning in the Marvel universe would probably give you superpowers).
• Lima Syndrome: #1 on the list of The 5 most completely insane kidnappings.
• Limit Break: The #5 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games is that one in five men can transform under stress.
• Lobotomy: Lobotomies scored number 6 on the list of "10 Most Insane Medical Practices in History".
• Locked in a Room: The Most Horrifying Writers Room Ever.
• Loners Are Freaks: "6 Misleading Assumptions You Make About Quiet People."
• Loophole Abuse: Dan Seitz has described The 6 Most Creative Abuses Of Loopholes. Highlights include buying 12,000+ cups of pudding to earn millions of free airline miles.
• Love Makes You Crazy: And dumb. And evil. And a moon rock thief if these 7 psychos are any indication.
• Lunacy: #5 of 5 Unrealistic Movie Cliches That Are Scientifically Accurate explains moon fear as the result of a rise in lion attacks on the first few days after the full moon once the lions have become hungrier.
• Lyrical Dissonance: The 5 Most Insane Teams in the History of Sports describes an incident in the 1990s when the Canadian Football League was attempting to expand into the United States. At one game, the Canadian national anthem was sung to the tune of "O Christmas Tree".

M

• MacGyvering: 26 Half-assed Solutions That Actually Solved Huge Problems. Paper clips, rubber bands, and duct tape are used in many of the examples. Also, the invention of biological warfare.
• Mad Artist: Is there any other way to describe the 7 People Who Used Art As An Excuse To Show Off Their Junk?
• Mad Scientist: 5 Huge Scientific Advances Created by Even Bigger Dick Moves. Forcing a high sugar diet onto mental patients brought about modern dentistry practices. One man's torment of baby monkeys not only single-handedly started the animal rights movement, but also completely reinvented child welfare and modern adoption practices across the world (making orphanages completely obsolete). The inventor of Gynecology operated numerous times on the slaves he owned, and never once uses anesthetics to help their pain during the op or during recovery. Yeah, the sanity of those scientists is certainly questioned in the article.
• Made of Explodium:
  • Things That Shouldn't Explode But Did Anyway lists things that seemingly were made of explodium at some point, even an office chair!
  • Photoplasty advertises lots of explosive things in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
• Magic A Is Magic A:
  • Even fantasy stories need some consistent ground rules on which to build a conflict. Handwaving lack of internal consistency with extreme applications of Bellisario's Maxim is discussed in #3 of 6 Common Movie Arguments That Are Always Wrong.
  • From 8 Classic Movies That Got Away With Gaping Plot Holes: "at least follow the rules you freaking made up."
• Magical Defibrillator: When used by a teammate in a video game, one of the 7 Video Game Healing Methods Least Likely to Actually Work.
• Magnificent Bastard: Invoked by this article on The Ballsiest Living Cheater (Who Never Broke a Rule).
• Mail-Order Novelty: One of Seanbaby's Popsicle Pete comics includes a mail-order advertisement for toys, which is heavily implied to be Pete reselling the personal effects of his murdered victims.
• Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Spoofed here in a Trope Overdosed video that also includes a Spit Take, It's Not You, It's Me, Victorian Novel Disease, Incurable Cough of Death...
  • This sketch mocks this trope thoroughly. Bonus points for actually using the exact name of the trope.
  • Also examined in this article, which thoroughly explores the implications of the trope:
  Hollywood is still teaching women that "dumb" is "attractive," they're just hipsterfying it. I don't know when it happened (maybe after Clueless?), but sometime after the '90s, "Quirky Eccentric Weird Chick" became the new Bimbo. She's just as insultingly one-dimensional as the archetypal Ditsy Blonde Bombshell Valley Girl character that was all over the place a decade ago, except now she wears vintage knee-socks and listens to The Smiths, and that's supposed to be better, for some reason.
• Manly Facial Hair: If the subject of one of their articles has awesome facial hair, they will point it out.
  Commenter CavalierX, on U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves: That's not a man with a moustache on his lip; that's a moustache with a man on its ass.
• Mayfly–December Romance: Discussed in a couple articles.
  • 7 Awesome Super Powers (Ruined by Science), #1: Immortality.
  • One of the 6 Horrifying Implications of Classic Christmas Movies is that in Fred Claus, Santa Claus's immortal immediate family suffers from what the article calls the "Highlander Complex": "They will have to watch their friends and relatives wither and die right before their callous, eternal eyes."
• Mayan Doomsday: "The Embarrassing Aftermath of the Mayan 'Apocalypse'"
• Media Scaremongering:
  • A staple article topic is a list of mundane items and activities that can kill/maim you.
  • And conversely, things which are hyped as dangerous by films/television/news media etc., and in fact are not nearly as dangerous as made out to be.
• MegaCorp: 6 Secret monopolies You Didn't Know Run the World. Who would have thought that there's a corporation who owns a monopoly on sunglasses, or that one man has written the great majority of pop music that has ever reached the Top 40 on the charts for the last 2 decades?
• Method Acting: Invoked — The 5 Craziest Ways Famous Actors Got into Character mentions Adrien Brody, Tom Cruise, and more.
• Mighty Whitey: Cracked loves to accuse film and other entertainment companies of racism and sexism, despite the fact that their writing staff has always been composed almost exclusively by white males. As such, they both satirize and play this trope straight at the same time.
  • When a Chinese-American woman joined the team, each of her articles' comments have been filled with almost nothing but contempt for her for being non-white and female.
  • This article notes this trope in The Last Samurai.
• A Million Is a Statistic: Explained beautifully in David Wong's Monkeysphere article.
• Mirror Routine: The 6 Most Mind-Blowing Ways Your Brain Can Malfunction mentions a mental disorder called mirrored-self misidentification, in which someone looking into a mirror believes that the monster in the mirror is an intruder performing a Mirror Routine, not oneself.
• Mirror Scare: 14 different kinds.
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • Invoked - 6 Tricks Movies Use to Make Sure You Root for the Right Guy lists tools used to prevent this reaction.
  • The 5 Most Insanely Misunderstood Morals of Famous Stories
  • 5 Famous Jokes Everybody Manages To Screw Up
• Missing Episode: There used to be an article called "6 Helpful Tips for Kidnapping the President's Daughters," which was taken down after the person who wrote it, DOB, was confronted by the FBI and Secret Service.
• Mistaken for Racist: The author of this article explains how a video he made (called "Straya Day") came back to bite him after this happened because of too many people watching it not realizing it was satirical.
• The Mockbuster: Discussed in The 6 Most Psychotic Rip-Offs of Famous Animated Films.
• Mood Dissonance: Discussed in "The 5 Most Badass Musical Instruments Ever Built": "If you could kill Bond with your Nanoguitar pick, you'd use the Laser Harp to wipe out the rest of MI6 in one hellish afternoon of fire, blood, and inappropriately mellow tunes."
• Money Spider: Monsters having internal gold sacs is one of 27 Science Lessons As Taught by Famous Video Games and one of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games.
• Monumental Damage: The Statue of Liberty is the #1 Iconic Building That Was Barely Saved from Destruction because "when Lady Liberty gets destroyed, it means the apocalypse is here".
• Mook Maker: Photoplasty advertises it in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
• Most Writers Are Writers: Sometimes results in a staggering lack of perspective, both discussed and within the articles themselves.
  • 6 Things Movies Love to Get Wrong About the Workplace discusses how Hollywood films get other professions wrong by extrapolating from the experiences of Hollywood writers.
  • This article about intellectual property (which it calls Forced Artificial Scarcity, or FArtS) uses only copyrighted works of authorship (that is, media) as examples, failing to mention potential examples of patented works of engineering (that is, inventions) that arguably power more of the economy.
  • They've been aiming to avert this as of late 2013. They had a call in the forums to ask their members for information about their life experiences, so they can get the story from people who have experienced things firsthand.
• The Movie: These two.
• Mr. Fanservice: Swaim for his lack of a shirt and DOB for his boyish looks. John Cheese too.
  • Seanbaby gets fairly frequent comments from straight men who'd like to have his children.
  • Soren Bowie, who regularly has to cull his booty call lists and frequently gets compliments on his handsomeness from guys (who also explicitly mention their heterosexuality). Also, almost-naked-stripper Soren in a military uniform in the "Worst Bachelorette Party Ever" video.
• Mundane Luxury: "5 Great Joys in Life That Healthy People Never Experience". Glasses that mean you can actually see, a diagnosis that explains why your body fails in strange and inexplicable ways, and other beautiful moments that aren't understood or appreciated by people who are healthy.
• Mundane Made Awesome:
  • Agents of Cracked Season 2: The Overly Dramatic Trailer
  • "If Mundane Jobs Got the Indiana Jones Treatment"
  • "25 Propaganda Posters For Everyday Annoyances".
• Mundane Utility:
  • Idiotic Real World Uses of Awesome Fictional Technology, a Photoplasty collection depicting such things as Tony Stark using his Ironman Repulsor ray...to toast bread.
  • A later Photoplasty added more. 22 Terrible Ways We Would Use Sci-Fi Technology include using a Star Wars lightsaber to chop a cucumber, or using Doc Ock's tentacles to serve food to customers at a restaurant.
  • John Cheese suggests in 4 Ways the New Season of 'Heroes' Can Avoid Sucking that the writers of Heroes make the 2014 volume less boring by showing characters "using their powers to do normal, everyday things like making coffee with telekinesis or removing snakes from their yard with that snake tornado spell."
  • Invoked in 21 Real Problems We'd Actually Want Superheroes to Solve
• Musical Episode: If Everything Got Adapted into a Broadway Musical
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: Right off the bat in 5 Absurd Movie and TV Premises that Actually Happened.
  Kick-Ass was that movie where a bunch of normal people (and Nicolas Cage) decide to dress up as superheroes and fight crime.

N

• Negative Space Wedgie: The 6 Most Mind-Blowing Things Ever Discovered in Space and 7 Horrible Ways The Universe Can Destroy Us Without Warning
• Network Decay: Invoked
  • Subject of The TLC Experiment: Just How Dumb is The Learning Channel?
  • Another one was done on the History Channel.
  • 5 Sad Ways A&E Became the Walmart of Television Networks.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: One of the 4 Realizations That Will Ruin Science Fiction for You.
• N.G.O. Superpower: The 5 Shadiest Crimes Ever Pulled Off By Famous Corporations states that the Shell oil company all but literally owns the entire country of Nigeria. They swept in and took control of all the oil deposits in the country almost as soon as they were discovered. They infiltrated their influence into every noteworthy organization and department of the government. While the Nigerian military wasn't directly on Shell's payroll, they were directly on Shell's payroll.
• Nice Guys Finish Last: Being too nice is one of 5 Innocent Things That Science Says Make People Hate You.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: 5 Catastrophes Caused By Idiots Trying To Prevent Them gives us the biohazard caused by a precaution against terrorism and other failures.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: 6 Fictional Villains Who Accidentally Saved The Day
• The Nicknamer: DOB tends to give nicknames to everyone that change every time he refers to them in rapid succession. The nicknames are either puns, insults, terms of endearment, or a disturbing combination of all three.
  • And they're all usually directed at his boss Jack O'Brien. To name a few: Jaxploitation, Jack to the Future, Jackbook Air, Jacts of Life, etc.
• Nightmare Retardant: Invoked with 5 Horrifying Videos That Blow It At The Finish Line.
• Nintendo Hard: The 10 Most Irritatingly Impossible Old-School Video Games.
• No Budget: Invoked. A Photoplasty considers what would have happened If 40 Famous Movies Had $50 Budgets.
• No Export for You: Invoked in 6 Arcade Games Too Awesome to Get Released in the West.
• No Plot? No Problem!: Discussed in the Escort Mission segment for the Mortal Kombat franchise and most recent game, where l33t tries to explain the long, convoluted story the games have gotten, which comes as a surprise to n00b, who hasn't played Mortal Kombat since the original arcade game and misses when it just had an Excuse Plot for brutal-looking characters fighting and killing each other in violent, cartoonish ways. l33t suggests that the change happened because the arcade games were just meant to be played a few minutes at a time while the newer games are played at home for hours at a time.
• Noodle Incident: The opening of this article says:

  "[A]nd Jack O'Brien plus a huge bag of X gave us a Cracked office party that we're still not allowed to blog about."

• No OSHA Compliance: OSHA is mentioned by name in #6 of 6 Sci-Fi Movie Conventions (That Need to Die).
• Non-Indicative Title: Many times a Photoplasty will have a title with a vastly different title from the original topic where viewers posted the entries, explaining why some entries do not fit the description and are thus criticized in the comments (i.e. Artsy Posters for Low Brow Films -> 28 Artsy Posters for the Crappiest Movies Ever).
  • Many a article will have it (to the point complaining about title inaccuracy is a Running Gag on the comments). At least once they lampshaded:
  Disclaimer: Yes, I know that the Batman TV series is not a movie. No, I don't care. Yes, you're absolutely right, sharing the link to this article with everyone you know would be the best way to express your dissatisfaction with the inaccuracy of this column's title. That will show me.
• Nonstandard Game Over: The 6 Most Bizarre Ways to Lose in Popular Video Games details such bizarre ways to lose like Sonic the Hedgehog jumping to his death if you forget to pause the game, having your dog maul the Mayor to death at the start of Harvest Moon DS, or watch Commander Shepard go out with a "bang" in Mass Effect 2.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
  • On The 7 Ballsiest Sports Cheats Ever, one of the cheaters looks so much like one they have to use this trope.
  • On a Mazes and Monsters cover; "This is not Photoshop."
  • They use this when talking about Mr. Kellogg's use of circumcision and Corn Flakes to combat masturbation.
  • On Real Life supervillians; Mussolini's evil lair. Seriously. That is not Photoshop.
  • From 5 Animal Rights Campaigns That Managed to Screw Over Animals, about the dogs rescued from Michael Vick's dogfighting ring:
  One of the survivors was put in a program called Paws for Tales, where kids too shy to read aloud to human audiences practice their reading skills in front of dogs. No, really. That's not a sarcastic fake program we made up. (And that's not a stock image. That's Jonny Justice, the actual dog we're talking about.)
  • Not a single comic panel in this article has been modified.
  • In "The 5 Worst Things Almost Done to Beloved Characters", after describing an aborted Superman movie in which Jor-El disembowls himself:
    Cezary Jan Strusiewicz: However, this completely unnecessary death of one of the most inspiring characters in cinema history isn't the main reason why you should be happy this script never went to film. That honor belongs to a sequence early on in the movie where the Kents are changing baby Clark's diapers and are horrified to discover that Kryptonian poop is way smellier than human poop.
    (image of a section of the script describing exactly that)
    Image caption: You thought that I was kidding, didn't you? DIDN'T YOU?!
• "Not So Different" Remark: "4 Ways Rock Stars and Teen Pop Stars Are Exactly the Same".
• Not the Nessie: Photoplasty Famous Images, As Seen From a Different Angle depicts an elephant swimming and putting its trunk above the water as a snorkel, forming the famous photo of the Loch Ness monster.
• Not What It Looks Like: This trope is mercilessly mocked in number 4 of "21 Phrases Movies Don't Realize Nobody Actually Says".

O

• Obfuscating Stupidity: One article paints Bill O'Reilly, Flavor Flav, Dr. Oz, and a several others as playing this trope to the absolute fullest.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: 16 Ridiculous Examples of Bureaucracy in Action has more than its fair share of all types of bureaucracy trope examples.
• Obviously Evil: Discussed with Joffrey from Game of Thrones in this article.
• Obvious Rule Patch: Plenty of them resulted from events described in Xavier Jackson's 5 Dumb Ways People Have Won at Sports.
• Older Than They Think: In-Universe
  • Discussed in 7 Modern Conveniences That Are Way Older Than You Think, which mentions Persian air conditioning, Roman shopping malls, Neanderthal medicine, and more.
  • 6 Forms of Modern Depravity (Way Older Than Your Grandpa) shows late medieval Scottish rap battles, Japanese Edo period celebrity culture associated with the Kardashians, the Furry Fandom in ancient Rome, medieval Catholic acceptance of gay marriage, and late medieval treehuggers in India.
• Old Media Are Evil: Though most Cracked writers are perfectly willing to make fun of the internet too, articles like 6 Subtle Ways The News Media Disguises Bullshit As Fact, 7 Clearly Fake News Stories That Fooled The Mainstream Media, and 5 Awesome Cases of The Internet Owning The Mainstream Media show a pretty strong bias. Old entertainment media fares no better than news media, with articles like 5 Reasons The Oscars Matter Even Less Than You Thought and 6 Cheap Acting Tricks That Fool The Critics Every Time.
• Old Shame:invoked Conversed in ''Six Musicians With Pasts They Hope You'll Forget''
  • Also 10 Movies That Famous People Don't Want You to See and 5 Classic Cartoons They Don't Want You To See.
  • The site invoked this with a rather touchy column excoriating The Daily Show and Jon Stewart for using the logo for the old Cracked magazine as the punny graphical accompaniment for a segment. The site considers the magazine to be something of an Old Shame and doesn't think it's fair to be associated with it.
• Once for Yes, Twice for No: In #3 of the 7 Personal Experiences as a Nun, one of the former nuns says that "particular friendships" means that you "don't get close to anybody because we don't trust that you won't start snogging in the pew." Below is a pic of two nuns praying apart from each other, with a caption that says, "Do you like me? Pray in silence once for yes, twice for no."
• Once per Episode: A bust photo of a large-breasted woman with only a single button closed on her shirt and nothing underneath is shoehorned into the majority of the lists, which usually hang a lampshade on it when she appears.
  • They eventually ID'd her in this article. Her name is Kate, and she has a face.◊
  • It stares into our souls.
• One-Hit Kill: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "no matter how strong and powerful you are, some scrub will take you out with a death spell."
• One-Man Army: The 6 Most Epic One Man Armies in the History of War.
• One Size Fits All: Photoplasty advertises one-size-fits-all armor in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
• Only You Can Repopulate My Race: In the 2011 All-CGI Cartoon Rio, Blu is the last blue macaw left. The article 6 Disturbing Unanswered Questions from Children's Movies shows what would probably happen in the next generation: Brother–Sister Incest in the next generation would result in infertility.
• Open Secret: It's been pointed out that if The Dark Knight Trilogy gunned for realism, as this video shows, Bruce Wayne's "secret" identity as Batman isn't so secret any more. In this case, it's kept hushed by having Commissioner Gordon go to some gossiping teenage girls and forcing them to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
• Orange/Blue Contrast:
  • Called the #4 annoying trend that makes every movie look the same.
  • Why the New 'Hunger Games' Movie Is Orange and Blue discusses this color scheme in the second Hunger Games film.
• Orphaned Punchline: Parodied and discussed at the beginning of 14 Super Powers That Every Movie Character Apparently Has.
• Oscar Bait: Discussed in the A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever, and also in this article.
• Out with a Bang: The 6 Most Bizarre Ways to Lose Popular Video Games describes an odd Nonstandard Game Over in Mass Effect 2.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: "The 5 most overused jokes on the internet": Édouard Manet? Best 19th-century French Impressionist Painter Whose Last Name Is One Letter Away From Another French Impressionist. Ever!
  • Zootopia: Easily the best-animated comedy about racial discrimination that [the author has] ever furtively masturbated to in the back of a movie theater.

P

• Painfully Slow Projectile: 29 Baffling Rules of Life in Video Game Universes contrasts painfully slow energy weapons with hitscan bullets in Doom.
• Parallel Porn Titles:
  • Video: Do you have what it takes to title porn?
  • The 10 Most Misleadingly Pornographic Movie Titles lists movies that could be mistaken for their own parallel porn title. It even lists which scenes could be kept unchanged.
  • Girth, Wind and Fire. An article about unappealing porn titles notes that a much better title would have been Sperm, Bend & Tie Her.
  • 6 Adult Movie Titles Altered To Be Oscar Contenders inverts this by taking porn movies and changing their titles and stories to be non-sexual.
• Parody of Evolution: The #14 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games is an allusion to Rudolph Zallinger's illustration "The March of Progress" done with game sprites.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": Not always, but M. Asher Cantrell's The 10 Biggest Password Mistakes People Make lists a few that several "million uncreative bastards" end up thinking of under time pressure.
• Percussive Maintenance: "I've even seen people who insist that their televisions or vehicles require a special touch that only they know, a touch that usually turns out to be a pretty substantial punch or kick, which I guess makes their superpower physical abuse?"
• Periphery Demographic: Invoked in The 4 Most Unexpected Fan Bases in Pop Culture. Includes perhaps the most complimentary treatment of bronies on the entire site.
• Permadeath: Parodied in a Photoplasty. Inability to start a new game after having lost all lives is the #22 terrible idea that would have ruined Super Mario Bros..
• Perspective Flip:
  • "28 Great Movies From the Perspective of Minor Characters". These are posters for films about bit part characters, whether they be minor supporting characters or iconic extras who showed up in one scene. This includes Vernon Dursley and the Ungrateful Nephew, I'll Just Pass Him, Terror on Endor and its related film The Sarlacc: The Day of Much Feasting, Why Can't I Remember Anything That Happened Last Tuesday?, Why Can't I Do That: The Story of a Truck That Was Destined to Just Be Itself, Abe Froman: The Mysterious Sausage King of Chicago, The Assassination of Greedo By The Coward Han Solo, Kill Some Lady in a Yellow Jumpsuit, The Night Two Weirdos Trashed the Neighbor's Car, and The Woman in Red.
  • Another one features titles like The Toys Are Alive, the 'Q' film Destroyed Equipment^note No specific Bond film being parodied here, SQUIRREL!^note The dogs from Up photoshopped on a The Dark Knight poster, The Queen's Monster: A Story of Forgiveness and Survival^note Frozen if told from Elsa's second snowman Marshmallow's POV, The Rise and Fall of Khartoum, In My Drawers, Killing Kong, Luke's Cool Hand, I Think We Just F**ked Up^note From the POV of the construction workers, and My Journey on the Ash Grey Road.
  • And now 26 Great Movies from the Villain's Point of View, which is basically what the posters for certain movies would look like if they had the villain be the protagonist. This includes such films as Iceberg, Terrible Shepherds, Saviors of the Lost Ark, The Assassination of Hans Gruber By the Coward John McClane, Ed Rooney's Day At Work, The Jewelry Thieves: Give It Back, You Bastards!, Lighten Up, Tom Riddle And His Magic Diary, Wide Awake: The Senator Kelly Story, Holy Shit I Slept Through The Entire Plane Ride: WTF It Was A 14 Hour Flight.
• Pet the Dog:
  • "Give Them a Dog" is #6 of 6 Tricks Movies Use to Make Sure You Root for the Right Guy.
  • "17 Inspiring Acts by World's Most Hated People" is devoted to this trope.
• Pet-Peeve Trope: 6 Stupid Characters That Hollywood Now Puts In Every Movie takes aim at films like Jurassic World, Terminator Genisys and Avengers: Age of Ultron for their insistence on putting these tropes in their movies: No One Has Any Fear Of Death, Movie Villains Can Instantly Pick Up The Skills Of The Heroes, Everyone Gets Magic Expositional Plot Visions, "Kickass" Female Characters Who Don't Really Do Anything, and Main Characters Are Now Fated To Be Heroes.
  • Characters Are Aware That Their Movies Are Ridiculous
• Phony Veteran: Roger Day.
• Pietà Plagiarism: #10 of 20 Annoying 'Modern' Trends That Are Older Than You Think illustrates how both DC and Marvel comics rip off Michelangelo over and over.
• Pink Girl, Blue Boy: It used to be inverted. #5 of 5 Gender Stereotypes That Used To Be the Exact Opposite is that pink being for girls is a recent idea.
• Pink Product Ploy: Mocked in "The 5 Most Pointlessly Women-Specific Products".
• Planet of Hats: This is #3 of 6 Sci-Fi Movie Conventions (That Need to Die).
• Plot-Inciting Infidelity: Referenced in an episode Obsessive Pop Culture Disorder. In the episode "6 Bizarrely Specific Scenes Hollywood Won't Quit Using, this trope is covered and examples from several works are given and reasoning behind it is explored. The basic conclusion is that it's often used as an excuse for the (almost invariably male) lead to leave his old life behind and start anew.
• Poe's Law: Invoked - The 5 Most Epic Backfires in the History of Bad Jokes. From the lead: "The problem with sarcasm is that you can do it so well (or so poorly) that people don't realize you're joking."
• Police Are Useless: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that police cars in a Beat 'em Up are just for decoration. "Only trust your fists; police will never help you."
• Political Overcorrectness: J. F. Seargeant seems determined to disprove this trope. YMMV on whether or not he raises any sound points, but the commentators all agree that his articles are self-congratulatory and full of holes.
• The Pollyanna: What Pollyanna calls "the glad game" and others call "counting their blessings" is a coping mechanism that Felix Clay calls "trivializing adversity" in 4 Ways We Don't Realize We Suck at Coping With Adversity.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis:
  Current Generation: There was a magazine?
• Porn Stash: Stashes of erotic magazines and VHS tapes are one of 7 Ridiculously Outdated Assumptions Every Movie Makes.
• Power Perversion Potential: 6 Substances That Wipe Their Ass with the Laws of Physics gives us LiquiGlide, a completely natural (and edible) material that prevents any and every type of condiment from sticking inside the bottle. Ketchup, Mayonaise, everything. This quickly escalates into the idea of using it on your dishes so you don't have to wash them again, but the food you apply to the plate will then fly off like a frisbee at the slightest application of motion.
  Of course, you will have to worry about the slightest arm motion sending your frictionless mac-and-cheese Frisbeeing off your plate and across the living room — but hey, just LiquiGlide the walls and you're all set. And the floors. And the couch. LiquiGlide everything. LiquiGlide. Everything. *Shows a picture focused on a male underwear model's crotch* EVERYTHING.
• Power-Up Food: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "weakling + Amanita mushroom = bodybuilder."
• Promoted Fanboy: Invoked. 5 Celebrities Who Got Famous by Being Obsessed Fan Boys
• Psycho Ex-Girlfriend: Sara in America's Best Girlfriend: World's Worst Reality Show, who tries to (poorly) fake an entire reality show to humiliate her exe's new girlfriend Danielle and thus convince her ex-boyfriend to take her back. It fails disastrously on multiple levels.

Q

• Queer People Are Funny: Seanbaby is possibly the worst offender.
• Quote Mine:
  • The article "5 Despicable Things People Do for Good Online Reviews" lists this practice under #2: "Ads Take Critic Quotes Out of Context to Make Them Seem Positive".
    […] one blurb for the famously shitty Norbit read: "Eddie Murphy's comic skills are immense." What it didn't mention was that the critic was actually speaking about Murphy's other, non-terrible movies, before wondering why he would appear in what he defined as "a comedy for masochists."
  • "HITLER = MLK" - Daniel O'Brien, 2013
  • "Hitler was right" and "Hitler...was saving the world" - David Wong, 2012

R

• Race Lift:
  • "Make Them American, Even if They're Not" is #3 of "6 Tricks Movies Use to Make Sure You Root for the Right Guy".
  • In "The 5 Most Insulting Defenses of Nerd Racism", J.F. Sargent defends the casting of black actor Michael B. Jordan as the normally white Johnny Storm in the 2015 Fantastic Four remake.
• Ramming Always Works: #2 in The 5 Most Badass Movie Scenes That Happened In Real Life. The article even mentions and links to the trope's page itself.
• A Rare Sentence: In 5 Absurd Ways Comic Books Have Resurrected Dead Superheroes:
  "[S]omehow [Spider-Spider-Man was pregnant with Peter Parker, in human form, fully aged, and then died giving birth to himself. Of all the sentences we thought we'd never get to write, that was easily in our top twenty."
• "Rashomon"-Style: "Who Killed Ian Fortey?"
• Rated M for Manly:
  • "The 8 Manliest Images on the Internet"
  • "The 9 Manliest Names in the World"
  • Pretty much everything Seanbaby does, but especially his "Man Comics", and its even manlier spinoff "Fuckin'-A Comics".
  • Brockway's column is titled "Robert Brockway: Word Puncher".
  • And then there's Seanbaby's column, "Flying Blind on a Rocket Cycle", the art for which features him dropkicking Hitler in the face.
• Reality Is Unrealistic:
  • They have so far published no fewer than nine lists of "Images You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped".
  • "5 True Stories Cut from Movies for Being Too Unrealistic" lists "mind-blowing moments from real life that Hollywood decided were too fantastic", such as John Dillinger taking three people hostage in Public Enemies but seventeen in real life.
  • "6 Scientific Discoveries That Laugh In Face Of Physics"
  • The video that shows that the Mystery Machine gang from Scooby-Doo would have a lot of trouble with the police in real life whenever they got involved in a mystery.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Most of David Wong's articles consist of this due to his habit of writing almost exclusively in the second person. It's one of, if not the biggest, reasons he's such a divisive figure among readers.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: In "The 5 Most Seemingly Sinister Google Behaviors," Host Breandan Carter splits into blue and orange shirted versions of himself, in order to debate the pros and cons of Google.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: Discussed in:
  • "7 Movies That Ignored World Changing Discoveries".
  • "5 Powerful Sci-Fi Technologies Wasted by Their Own Movies".
  • "6 Magical Movie Items They Wasted on Bullshit".
  • "5 Famous Movie Characters Who Wasted Awesome Superpowers".
  • In addition, many of the 21 Real Problems We'd Actually Want Superheroes to Solve fall into this category.
• Regenerating Health:
  • The regeneration in first-person shooters since Face Ball 2000 is the #23 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games.
  • One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is to "duck and cover and stay put until you are fully healed."
• Required Secondary Powers
  • Discussed in 7 Awesome Super Powers (Ruined by Science).
  • Implied by 6 Awesome Superpowers (That Would Suck in Real Life). For example, being able to throw lightning would require immunity to effects on sight and hearing similar to those of stun grenades, and force fields would need immunity to Not the Fall That Kills You….
• Retronym: One of Winston Rowntree's The 4 Reasons We Fall in Love With a Piece of Pop Culture is that it's "porn", which he defines as any cultural work "that you seek out to animalistically fill a specific need." He runs through a bunch of things jokingly called porn, coining the retronym "Sex Porn" in the process.
• Reverse Polarity: This is #4 of 6 Sci-Fi Movie Conventions (That Need to Die).
• Ribcage Stomach: The #8 Real Old-Timey Photograph That Will Give You Nightmares is of an amusement park's souvenir shop whose decoration invokes this.
• Ridiculously Human Robot: Swaim, evidently.
• Rivals Team Up: The 5 Most Insane Teams in the History of Sports calls the Steagles, an alliance of longtime rival NFL teams from Pennsylvania when most of their regular players were drafted to fight World War II, "too stupid even for a sports movie".
• Rock Beats Laser: "Make Them Technologically Inferior" is #5 of the 6 Tricks Movies Use to Make Sure You Root for the Right Guy.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: ...who are too badass for Disney movies.
• Rubber-Band A.I.: Listed as the number 2 most annoying video game character (Anyone who does it).
• Rule of Cool/Rule of Funny: Cracked has refined these into a logical heuristic, frequently stating that given a lack of concrete evidence as to what happened, we are forced to assume the most bizarre, awesome, and/or ridiculous scenario.
• The Rule of First Adopters: One of 22 Terrible Ways We Would Use Sci-Fi Technology is using a Star Trek replicator to make a sex toy. It wouldn't be a stretch from real-life 3D printed sex toys though.
• Rule of Three: From "4 Signs That 2014 Is a Shitty Year for Women in Hollywood":
  (the end of the section about how female characters' clothing has become more stripperiffic, especially with underraged girls)
  It's almost as if costume departments are made up entirely of creepy uncles.
  (the end of the section about female protagonists being lesser in number recently, epsecially authoritative female protagonists)
  Hmm, it's almost as if these movies are getting cast by dudes who only see women as decoration.
  (the end of the section about female Token Minority characters being fewer in number)
  It's almost as if ... well, you get the idea.
• Rules of the Road: Several in 32 Alternate Interpretations of Common Warning Signs
• Running Gag: Many themes recur over similar articles, usually referencing particularly popular articles.
  • Among the columnists, Brockway's drug use, Soren's prettiness and social superiority, Swaim's freaky kinks, Dan's nicknaming, and Bulchoz's Canadian roots.
  • Praise of Theodore Roosevelt's super-human powers in the art of violence now spans topics, articles and lists.
  • Many of the articles feature an outlandish assumption on the part of the writer, in the formula: "Reports do not say if [X crazy thing] happened, so we're forced to assume it did."
  The text does not mention whether [the sculptures] have evolved cavernous maws and a dark, endless hunger, so we are forced to assume they have.
  • [Citation needed]..
  ...which means if you put a jellyfish in the space shuttle, and it fired its stingers at the moment of takeoff, it would travel back in time [citation needed].
  • The word "Baffling" is often used in titles of articles.
  • Similar to their love of Roosevelt is their love of Nikola Tesla, and their complete and utter ball-crushing hatred of Thomas Edison. Like Roosevelt, this is because the things you could make up about either man in favor of their position on said man are only slightly less exaggerated than real life.
  • Have we mentioned Australia yet? Well, Cracked does a lot.
  • Can be taken to exasperating extremes when the writers start taking potshots at other cultures' idiosyncrasies for the sake of a laugh. One or two jokes is one thing, but... well, see for yourself. Worse, the cultural jokes aren't just annoying, they're frequently wrong. At least it's justified whenever they're bashing North Korea.
  • Ke$ha's debauchery is a fairly common theme.
  • "Gary Busey crazy" was often used when mentioning something they considered insane. Often including an image of the man himself.
  • Whenever they are in doubt of what picture they should use for an article, they will frequently reuse the same photo of a woman's large cleavage◊.
  • Several articles have been devoted to the over-the-top mean, weird, or just plain laughable antics of world dictators, especially North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il.
  • A searing hatred for and fear of spiders.
  • X does (action) because fuck Y, that's why.
  • Al Gore invented the internet.
  • They tend to bring up the infamous "I'm Han Solo" from Kinect Star Wars whenever possible.
  • Whenever nerds are brought up, there's a good chance this◊ will be the accompanying picture.
  • Pretty much every time the word boobs shows up in an article, it links here.
  • Cezary Jan Strusiewicz's "5 Movies That Came So Close To Being Watchable (But Failed)" had "Don't tell my wife" and, exclusive to the RoboCop 3 section, referring to RoboCop himself by different names^note CyborgPeacekeeper, MechaFive-O, AutomatPolice, iLEO, MachineLawEnforcer, ComputerOfficer, Copper 2.0, and ApplianceConstable.
  • The image captions for Zanandi Botes's 5 Movie Posters That Go Crazy When You Actually Look At Them had a lot of fun with one of Heavy Petting's taglines:
  "... and it's gonna get ruff." — a cry for help from an almost certainly suicidal copywriter.
  
  "This serial killer snowman is about to meet the dog sworn to stop him ... and things are gonna get ruff!"
  
  "And when you find out this love expert is a dog!? ... it's gonna get ruff!"
  
  "When two men with no depth perception get a job as stuntmen, and one of them likes dogs, it’s gonna get ruf- kill me. I yearn for death, but lack the strength to greet him.”
  
  "When these ten yards meet 20 yards of dogs ... it's gonna get ruff! You know what? It doesn’t even hurt anymore. It feels like nothing."
  
  "Jimmy 'Tulipan' je zpet ... and ya, it is going to get ruff!"
  
  "When these survivors of the Biblical apocalypse meet this rowdy canine ..." *sound of gun cocking*

S

• Sarcasm Failure: In the Mister Rogers tribute article, the author repeatedly looks like he's gearing up for a joke, only to clarify that no, he really means the cheesy stuff he's saying, because that's what Mister Rogers does to people.
• Save Scumming: How time works with this in play is the #17 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games.
• Scandalgate: Named the number four thing the media loves pretending are news. Parodied in the same segment by "Gatesgategate", a hypothetical scandal involving then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates misappropriating public funds to install a new gate on his property.
• Schmuck Bait: Occasionally inserted in the form of warnings not to follow a link. From "5 Candies You Hated Getting Every Halloween":
  Don't make our mistake and look up "Fun Dip" on Urban Dictionary.
  
  Trust us. Don't.
• Science Is Bad: "7 Ways Science will kill you by X" is practically a template. Only matched by the number of articles about horrifying animals.
• Science Marches On (Paleontology): Invoked. 42 Sci-Fi Movies (If They Were Updated for Realism) shows a retouched Jurassic Park scene with the feathers that dinosaurs are now believed to have.
• Scope Snipe: In The Vietnam War, Carlos Hathcock landed the #3 Most Impossible Sniper Shot Ever Made.
• The Scream: Photoplasty Famous Images, As Seen From a Different Angle shows what the figure in Edvard Munch's "The Scream" painting was screaming at Superman.
• Screw Yourself: Mentioned in a few articles, including one by Dan O'Brien that's almost entirely about the subject. Said article is referenced when Dan meets his counterpart from Broked.com's Similar Squad in Agents of Cracked.
  BOD: You know, I remember reading somewhere that there are only two truly meaningful things you can do with your doppleganger when you're locked in a room. You can fight them... Or f*** them.
  *Dan takes a fighting stance*
  BOD: Wrong answer.
• Scunthorpe Problem
  • 6 Spectacularly Failed Attempts to Be Politically Correct tells how Microsoft banned an Xbox 360 user from Xbox Live for being from Fort Gay, West Virginia.
  • Seen on Cracked itself in the comments section, due to a word filter that targets a given word sequence even as part of a larger word. For instance, the racial slur "Jap" is rendered as "J*p" so that it'll also catch "Japs" and turn it into "J*ps", and consequently the comments on an article about Japanese subcultures talked about "j*pan" (in lowercase). This makes writing "j*panese" a bit of a problem. "Cum" is also banned, so you can't say "doc*mentary". "Cock" is banned as well, which is a problem since most articles are made of dick jokes. "Spic" makes it a problem writing the word "susp*cious". We could list a whole bunch of examples. Basically, their filter s*cks d*ck.
  • The filter also refuses to post any comment with a link in it, in order to avoid spammers. Normally not a huge issue, other than the fact that decent comments get deleted wholesale with no warning because they happened to have a link somewhere. However, it's a huge problem in the comments for their video series Rom.com, since the filter reads that as a URL thus deletes the post immediately. That's right, readers can't say the name of the series in the comments.
• Second Verse Curse: Discussed in "5 Insane Lost Verses That Change the Meaning of Famous Songs".
• Seen It All: Losing the ability to be surprised by entertainment is one of 5 Warning Signs That You're Finally Getting Older. Entertainment will ruin your life with or without TV Tropes.
• Seinfeldian Conversation: The series After Hours is built on this trope.
• Selective Gravity: Levitating coins are explained as lighter-than-air currency in the #7 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games.
• Self-Deprecation: Everyone who contributes to Cracked are always most likely to take a cheap shot at people that are like them, or Cracked itself. The main contributors are also likely to talk about how much of an asshole they are, the sad fact that they write internet articles,r and that they work at a headquarters that serves gruel-like slop and doesn't have indoor plumbing.
  • Christina H frequently laments how fat and ugly she is, even while explaining why women tend to have artificially low opinions of themselves.
  • Gladstone takes a shot at Felix clay in 5 Times When You Just Have to Shut Up for Your Own Good.
  Sometimes people have to fail in order to learn. It's why Cracked keeps letting Felix Clay write articles. (He's getting there!)
• Self-Imposed Challenge: The 6 most mind blowing and pointless gaming achievements details a Call of Duty player who has racked up over 30 THOUSAND kills using nothing but a knife to stab enemies in the back or by throwing them from halfway across the map with extremely deadly precision, a The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim player who went around punching everything to death and never so much as ever picking up another weapon or used magic, and two World of Warcraft players who reached maximum level by never killing a single creature, among others.
• Self-Insert Fic: A good amount of Dan O'Brien's stuff is this, depicting himself as a Jerkass fond of annoying the protagonists and lampshade hanging.
• Serial Killer: There are two lists of serial-killer animals.
• Serious Business:
  • RAD, where the entire culture of a town is built around BMX, is cited in "The 4 Weirdest Lessons '80s Movies Really Wanted to Teach Us" as the most ridiculous example of a hobby that saves the world.
  • 5 Unimportant Things with Giant Armies of Crazy Advocates.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: After a writer once told the viewer they were "incredulous", he realized few would know what that meant.
  "OK, admit it. You're incredulous. Wait, look up "incredulous." Now admit it"
• Severely Specialized Store: Photoplasty advertises a store that sells only three things, like those in The Legend of Zelda series, in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
• Sexy Whatever Outfit: Parodied.
• Shameless Self-Promoter: Pick up "Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody" on book stands now.
  • Shared when other Cracked columnists also help with promoting Brockway's book.
  • And of course, David Wong will never let us forget that he wrote a book once.
  • And now with the release of the first Cracked.com book they've been even more blunt with no less than two full articles advertising it.
• Shaped Like Itself:
  • In 5 Little Known Sequels That ruined Iconic Stories.
    Casablanca is literally the Casablanca of movies.
  • The 5 Creepiest Things Ever Done With a Fake Medical Degree: "A healthy booty is attractive to some people, but an ass that looks like Billy Barty with his ankle clamped in someone's asshole trapped in a net of yoga pants looks like exactly what I just described."
  • The 6 Most Horrifying Product Recalls in China begins, "China has a population of all the people in China, and that is a hell of a lot."
  • Adam Tod Brown's "The 5 Biggest Lies Everyone Tells About the Super Bowl" cites a Nielsen poll stating that the Super Bowl is not even among the top five alcoholidays despite that "football and beer go together like football and beer."
  • 6 Dinosaur Superpowers That Science Just Discovered starts off explaining how powerful a T-Rex's arms really were. The first line starts with "Tyrannosaurus Rex was the Tyrannosaurus Rex of the dinosaur world. You don't need metaphors when you've got a bite force in excess of the weight of an African elephant."
  • In 8 Bizarre Horrors Found in the Squarest Comic Book Ever.
    When you're a writer and you name your fat character Fatty, that's like a writer naming his fat character Fatty. It's the absolute minimum of human thought ever put into the creation of a thing.
  • Describing the impossibility of the Beast's situation in Why 'Beauty and the Beast' is Darker Than You Remember, Daniel O'Brien claims "Ryan Gosling couldn't get somebody to fall in love with him under those circumstances, and his dick is made of Ryan Gosling's dick".
  • 6 Spectacularly Embarrassing Celebrity Kickstarter Fails says that Uwe Boll is the Uwe Boll of Video Games.
• Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing: 42 Sci-Fi Movies (If They Were Updated for Realism) shows what would happen to the Hulk if his pants were not magic.
• Shoplift and Die: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is to avert this by putting a basket on the shopkeeper's head. "Robbery is easier than you think."
• Shout-Out: In page 3 of "6 Batshit Crazy Ways Superman Tried to Protect His Identity", Seanbaby says that Superman mistakenly sending his own song to Pat Boone, only to discover too late that the first letter in each line spells out "Clark Kent", is like the police discovering that Bon Jovi was secretly "Star-Guradian Ieaiii Wstsba" (which is actually the first letters of the lyrics to their song "Wanted Dead or Alive").
• Single-Biome Planet: Part of #3 of 6 Sci-Fi Movie Conventions (That Need to Die).
• Single-Season Country: Lampshaded in this article, where the fourth entry (It's Always Winter in Moscow, and It's Always Sunny in Australia) details how often Hollywood likes to depict Russia and Australia with the same season, while also pointing out that this is not the case in real life.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Apparently Adam Tod Brown is Gladstone's (with a side order of Vitriolic Best Buds, since they seem to hang out plenty of times regardless).
  • Confirmed here.
  • To the site as a whole, British tabloid/clickbait peddler The Daily Mail. Not least of which because of the Mail's repeated plagiarism of Cracked articles.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: The articles go all the way to cynicism for laughs.
  • This one, however, is much more idealist than the rest of the site. Too bad it's a Hope Spot.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • "[Circumcision] can result in death, or even worse, loss of the penis."
  • In the Escort Mission segment for Evolve, n00b starts having a seizure from watching l33t play the game because of all the confusing action and l33t doesn't stop the game to help him until his character dies.
• Small Reference Pools: When Cracked says "5 Greatest ___ in Films", those films will inevitably be limited to sci-fi fare and other products related to the geek subculture, e.g. Star Wars, Alien, or Batman. "Greatest Trilogies" must mean The Lord of the Rings or The Matrix, never, say, Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy. Justified because of their base of readership. After all, if they do cover all media, unfamiliarity will make the articles far less interesting.
• Smart People Wear Glasses: #4 of 5 Unrealistic Movie Cliches That Are Scientifically Accurate points out a study finding that intelligence and education are somehow correlated with nearsightedness in real life.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: Invoked - 6 True Stories that Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity
• The Smart Guy: Gladstone, compared to DOB or Swaim.
• The Smurfette Principle:
  • Most of the videos on the site have a single female.
  • The 6 Most Bizarre Ways to Lose Popular Video Games describes a pub in the game Dishonored as containing "Havelock the leader, Piero the geeky inventor, and Callista the woman."
• Snake Oil Salesman / All-Natural Snake Oil: 5 Awesome Things With Inexplicably Bad Reputations tells of how the whole snake oil concept comes from the Chinese immigrants from the 1800s. They used Chinese Water Snakes to make the oil from, which is incredibly high in Omega 3 fatty acids, good for use as an anti-inflammatory. Since it was a tad difficult to obtain a snake not native to North America, they had to use poorer substitutes like rattlesnake oil and cow fat.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Pretty much all the articles have a hint of this, especially those by the main contributors.
  • This is may be the greatest example of this trope ever.
• Space Is an Ocean: Mentioned by name in #2 of 6 Sci-Fi Movie Conventions (That Need to Die).
• Space Madness: This seems to be happening to Marcus in this series of videos, starting with this one.
• Special Effect Failure: Invoked - Christina H., an animator by trade, explains some common CG examples.
• Species Surname: In Funny Animal world, Justin Bieber is a beaver. This is illustrated in a Photoplasty ("19 Things Old People Suspect About Modern Culture") and a mobile phone game Joustin' Beaver.
• Spiders Are Scary: An exaggerated fear/hate of spiders is a Running Gag.
• Spiky Hair: Photoplasty advertises hair gel that makes it possible in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
• Spoiled by the Merchandise: Discussed regarding a mug that spoiled the identity of the Wicked Witch of the West from Oz the Great and Powerful in "The 5 Most Ridiculous Ways Studios Spoiled Their Own Movies".
• Spoof Aesop: At the end of 5 Batman Villains Too Lame To Survive a Single Issue:
  Seanbaby: I think the moral of the story is that human life was cheap in the '40s. Batman and Robin crack jokes over a dead body while it's still twitching. Also, Batman brags every time he counts to 10.
• Springtime for Hitler: 5 Classic Movies Made by People Who Wanted Them to Fail mentions the 1955 romantic dramedy Marty, starring Ernest Borgnine, which was expected to fail (and save the studio a bundle on income tax) but when its ugly actors ended up resonating as more authentic to viewers, it ended up winning four Academy Awards and a Palme d'Or. The article describes its production as having "literally started out as the plot of The Producers."
• Sprint Shoes: Photoplasty advertises 30 Second Energy in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
• Stealth Parody: The article "6 classic songs that were supposed to be jokes" discusses several examples from music.
  • Cracked has done some of their own. For example, Soren Bowie's "5 Lessons You Learn Growing Up Rich" and Robert Brockway's "5 Things You Learn From a Lifetime of Screwing Up" are probably parodies of David Wong and John Cheese articles.
• Stepford Suburbia: Behold 6 weird realities of living in a town run by Disney
• The Stinger: As of 2012, all of Cracked's videos when posted to YouTube have added at the end of them humorous messages from Cracked's staff asking people to subscribe to the channel. Highlights include DOB failing at impressions, "Sorenrotica", and Cody acting wacky and ending with "Cracked you later!"
• Stock Footage: Swaim's co-host in Cracked TV, "Clippy", which consists of out-of-context clips from films or viral media, such as "Orientation guy from The Hudsucker Proxy", "Still-lives of fruit alongside Holocaust survivors", and "Clips of chips."
  • Chips clips? TOTALLY RAAAAAAAAAAANDOOOOOOM!
  • Not to mention "Clips of CHiPs".
  • Gladstone changes his shirt in one episode to match stock footage.
  • As of Swaim's new series, his "co-host" is stock footage of various bad Youtube bloggers. Clippy, meanwhile, is having a new body built for him - which, at this time, consists of a can of Monster, a cell phone, a light bulb, and Doritos.
  • And then Clippy came back.
• Straw Feminist: According to Ian Carey, ants.
• Straw Loser: Winston Rowntree tends to characterise anyone who is passionate about pop culture as this. Especially if they're men.
• Straw Misogynist:
  • MRAs, to the point that even those that dislike the group and the movement think Cracked takes it over the top at times.
  • Another article states in no uncertain terms that "you can pretty much guarantee that anyone who calls you a SJW is not only a racist or sexist but a fairly nasty one."
  • Alice Jane Axness takes this trope to its most logical conclusion so that she can justify shooting men down in the meanest way possible on dating sites. To quote:
  Male User: Hey, how's it going?
  AJA: You are literally 99% enemy^note  OK Cupid's rating system. 1% compatible with her. You're pro-life, sexist and homophobic. You also believe there is a situation where someone is OBLIGATED to have sex with you which is like, super not-okay and rape-y. So...no thankyou, try someone else.
• Straw Nihilist: Cracked author Mark Hill admits that he was this in the depths of depression, wondering why he should do anything if it's all going to be forgotten. However, after he got (mostly) through considering suicide he became an Anti-Nihilist, and has this to say to all nihilists who think about why they even bother:
  Mark: And a million years from now, no one will know or care what you did. But you're here now, goddammit. And I want you to stay here, to tell your friend a dumb joke, to make something you can be proud of while you still can. Because if we don't have each other, if we don't have you, then we don't have anything.
• Stupid Sacrifice: 5 Heroic Movie Deaths That Didn't Actually Help Anyone
• Stupid Sexy Soren!: Whenever Soren Bowie is mentioned by another columnist, or, in fact, anyone, this seems to come up a lot. Likely originated in 5 Terrifying Things Movies Don't Tell You About Los Angeles, where for entry #2, Robert Brockway talks about how every job requires you to submit a resume with a face photo, and offered images of himself and his co-workers as examples, with Soren being the first among them. A significant segment of the comments talked about how good-looking Soren was, and a meme was born.
• Sub-Par Supremacist: Inverted in the comedic article Dumb Things White People Secretly Suspect About Other Races, in which the narrator (a "young, white, middle-class American male") believes anyone not white has abilities far beyond his own (acceptance, conversation, endurance, Animorphism...). The reason he's in court-mandated therapy was that he saw a woman trapped on a building and tried to beat a Native American onlooker into turning into an eagle to rescue her.
  Therapist: Most offenders placed in my program have some hostility to work through, but yours seems to be rooted almost entirely in jealousy.
• Super Drowning Skills:
  • The Strid is a segment of the River Wharfe in Yorkshire that will murder you. This article compares it to "exactly how water works in a video game".
  • 29 Baffling Rules of Life in Video Game Universes illustrates the Master Chief breathing in space but drowning underwater. Also "Ninja = swim. Turtle = swim. Ninja Turtle = no swim."
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • 7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly) defies just about everything that would lead up to a Zombie Apocalypse.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Robert Brockway loudly and repeatedly interrupts Ian Fortey's last article to insist that he did not kill Ian Fortey, had no reason too, didn't make sure he had the opportunity to and certainly had made no detailed plans to kill him. So much so that he's still insisting it immediately after someone else matter-of-factly confesses to it.

T

• Tactical Suicide Boss: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "it may take a few tries, but life gets easier once you figure out the patterns." The example is from Punch-Out!!.
• Take That!: The tendency to mock MAD has continued, especially since the magazine's sales figures have been in decline whilst Cracked has enjoyed a reasonable amount of success as a website. This article is a good example, which, upon closer reading, can be seen as a "The Reason You Suck" Speech towards Mad.
  • This, aimed squarely at Lady Gaga.
  • Kristi Harrison seemed to start the whole attitude the other writers have towards Zooey Deschanel. Invoked
  • 4 Insane Pieces of 'My Little Pony' Fan Art (By Grown Men) has this to say about bronies:
  The children's cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic inexplicably has a legion of obsessively weird adult male fans who proudly refer to themselves as "bronies," because the Internet has made it much easier for people to confuse "individuality" with "being a sociopath."
  • 4 Ways We're Failing to Live Up to Back to the Future Part II describes the Mr. Fusion device as a tiny nuclear fusion reactor that converts garbage into power, not unlike Michael Bay.
  • 5 Facts About Colors That Will Change How You See the World takes a jab at the Jacksonville Jaguars.
  Cyan is the color most of us know as the one they keep painting aquarium gift shops in. It's also what they make the Jacksonville Jaguars play in, a team largely composed of aquarium gift shop employees.
  • 7 Famous Artists You Didn't Know Were Horrible Sellouts discusses how Art Spiegelman created the Garbage Pail Kids (and keeps it far away from his resume) described as "a somewhat less dignified artistic endeavor that would have probably won him the opposite of the Pulitzer if such a thing existed." The Rand? The Meyer? The [name of the 50 Shades lady we don't want to look up]?
  • On 7 Books We Lost to History that Would Have Changed the World, the Grand Library of Baghdad is described as "where the Persians likely kept the greatest hits from their history, including discoveries in science, medicine, astronomy and technology that made them the biggest swinging dick on the planet for several centuries." Cue a picture of Glenn Beck with the caption, "A title now held by this man (minus the swinging)".
• Tastes Like Purple / Mushroom Samba: "...and when you're walking down a road made out of wind and purple, you'll know you're tripping just the right amount of balls."
• Technology Marches On: Invoked
  • 6 Technologies Conspicuously Absent From Sci-Fi Movies explores technologies widely available when several well-known science fiction films were first published that would have completely broken their plots: bicycles, night vision goggles, unmanned combat vehicles, Wi-Fi, GPS, and cell phones.
  • 26 Hilariously Inaccurate Predictions about the Future even includes the quote listed at the top of the trope page itself as an example.
• Tempting Fate: A frequent source of humor.
  • In 5 Hilariously Awkward Meltdowns Hidden on DVD Commentaries, after citing Roddy Piper rambling about The Bronswik Affair as if it were a genuine documentary during the DVD Commentary for They Live!:
    We can't rightly extrapolate that out to say "Roddy Piper thinks They Live was a documentary." He's never said anything of the sor-
    (screenshot of this Twitter message from Piper)
    Image Caption: ... oh.
  • From "4 Signs That 2014 Is a Shitty Year for Women in Hollywood":
    Look, we get why female characters are underrepresented in Hollywood: It's not like movies with women as protagonists make huge amounts of money, or win lots of awards, or both.
    (image collage of movie posters for Gravity, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Brides Maids, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Frozen, and Zero Dark Thirty)
    Oh.
  • In "6 Baffling Early Prototypes of Your Favorite Video Games", after discussing that Super Mario Bros. was going to be more combat- and weapon-oriented than the final product:
    While it's probably for the best that they simplified the game, we can't help but wonder what a game starring a gritty, badass Mario would be like. He could even roam around an alternate world New York, with realistic Goombas and Koopas and ...
    (screenshot of the Super Mario Bros. (1993) movie)
    Image Caption: Oh wait.
• Testosterone Poisoning: Mentions of anything remotely badass will generally include comments relating to testicular fortitude completely unironically. Probably intentional.
  • "Punched your eyeballs right in the dick" is one of the more extreme examples.
  • Many of these Harry Potter book disguises is retardedly manly.
  • These
  • And these.
  • This article has the author talk about old-timey magazines suffering from this.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: 29 Baffling Rules of Life in Video Game Universes shows an RPG hero using a big freakin' Buster Sword to kill tiny insects.
• This Is Your Premise on Drugs: Invoked - In The 5 Most Aggressively Crazy Websites on the Internet, Mark Hill compares Boohbah to "the findings of a scientist adding LSD to baby food."
• Throw It In!: Invoked - 6 Iconic Movie Scenes That Happened by Accident cites Viggo Mortensen's broken toe in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, among others.
• Time Crash: Maybe going back to try and undo a lame retort wasn't such a good idea after all...
• Time Is Dangerous: 6 Time Travel Realities Doc Brown Didn't Warn Us About. And again. And again, for women only this time. Yet again, but this time more specifically historic activities such as hospitals.
• Time Stop: Declared to be the ultimate super power in After Hours' "The Best Super Power (Is Not What You Think)". Specifically, the Zack Morris "Time Out" from Saved by the Bell.
• Tim Taylor Technology: Mentioned by name in #4 of 6 Sci-Fi Movie Conventions (That Need to Die).
• Tomato in the Mirror: How The 8 People Who Will Ruin Your Attempt to Lose Weight ends.
• Too Dumb to Live: Pretty much any of the men who sent messages to "The Worst Online Dating Profile Ever". Bonus points to the one who was told in the message about her tendency to invoke The Baby Trap, and still wanted to hook up.
• Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket: 9 Simple Tasks That No One in a Commercial Can Do Right. Including actual blankets.
• Toothy Bird: The toothlike serrations inside a penguin's mouth, used to grip fish, are #3 of the 7 Most Terrifying Mouths in Nature.
• Top Ten List: "The leading source of list-based humor." This can get forced at times, though, like "What the Next 11 Marvel Movies Will Be About", which discusses said movies in release order yet is still presented as a countdown, and "The Best Order To Watch The Star Wars Movies", which counts its sections down from #4 to #1 despite the "4" appearing nowhere in the article's title.
• Tough Act to Follow:invoked
  • "5 Works of Art So Good, They Ruined Their Whole Genre" calls 2001: A Space Odyssey, David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Fight Club, two Bob Marley albums, and Animal House tough acts to follow in their respective genres.
  • "5 Scrapped Episodes That Almost Ruined Famous TV Shows" notes that Walter White's later actions in the show would lose their shock value if Breaking Bad ended its first season with him kidnapping a drug dealer and holding him prisoner in his basement, cutting off parts of his body every day and using a blowtorch to cauterize the wounds. As JM McNab analyzes, having Walter become a madman so early on would make the show's Protagonist Journey to Villain premise lose its substance in the long run.
• Training from Hell: 6 Military Units Whose Training Would Traumatize Rambo.
• Training Montage: Mocked.
• Translator Microbes: Called The 3rd Stupidest Way Movies Deal with Foreign Languages.
• Trapped in Another World: One of the 4 Realizations That Will Ruin Science Fiction for You.
• Trauma Inn: One of the 7 Video Game Healing Methods Least Likely to Actually Work
• Tree Buchet: #4 on 5 Greatest Animal Escapes
• Tree Top Town: The Korowai tribe of Papua New Guinea live in tree houses 100 feet up to escape floods and predators, according to 9 Houses You Won't Believe People Actually Live In and 6 Isolated Groups Who Had No Idea That Civilization Existed.
• [Trope Name]: This video takes generic and turns it up to eleven for roughly three-and-a-half minutes.
• Trope Overdosed: This is largely because of their numerous media related articles. Many lists feature tropes.
  • They even occasionally link to this website. So after you're done reading Cracked...
  • And then came TV Tropes: The Movie...
  • The TV Tropes topic.
• Troperiffic: How many of these 22 Awful Jokes, Cliches & Lines That Show Up In Every Movie can you identify?
• "Truman Show" Plot: The Truman Show is called one of 6 Movies That Accidentally Recreate Real Mental Illnesses because its plot resembles the real-life delusion that one's life is a reality show, a mental illness investigated by doctors Joel and Ian Gold.
• Truth in Television: 5 Unrealistic Movie Cliches That Are Scientifically Accurate explores the real-life counterparts of five tropes that are more realistic than they may sound.
• Turn-Based Combat: From 29 Baffling Rules of Life in Video Game Universes: "OK. It's their turn to attack, so nobody move. Hopefully we'll survive. Then we can attack them."
• Turns Red: 5 Soldiers Whose Horrific Injuries Only Made Them Angry
• 24-Hour Armor: One of 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "real men sleep in their armor."
• Typecasting: Invoked - 6 Actors Who Play the Exact Same Role in Multiple Movies mentions similarities among multiple roles of Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, James Earl Jones, and more.

U

• The Unapologetic: 4 Reasons Porn Stars Are Nothing Like You Think gives us this little gem about the mental stability of your average porn star:
  Interestingly, porn stars also tend to be more spiritual than your average person, which is presumably why they scream "Oh God!" all the time. I will not apologize for making that joke.
• Undignified Death: "The 5 Most Humiliating Ways the Wilderness Can Kill You".
• Uninstallment: In 4 Hilarious Scenes Left Out of Comic Book Movies, Maxwell Yezpitelok mentions an ill-fated 2007 article called "7 Reasons Why Iron Man Is Stupid and No One Likes Him and Never Will".
  • 7 People Who Never Gave Up (But Absolutely Should Have) references an article called "The Top 7 Crazy Guys Who Came Out On Top, So Good For Them".
• The Unintelligible: Depending on the article, people either understand what Chris Bucholz is saying or see him as entirely unintelligible as no one can decipher the gibberish language he calls ‘Canadian English.’
• Universal-Adaptor Cast: Mario's numerous roles are evidence of a multiverse in the #15 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games.
• Unperson: This happened to John Cheese after allegations of sexual harassment came out. He had already left Cracked and gone over to The Modern Rogue, but after the allegations came out his bio and all his articles were removed from the site's archives.
• Unproblematic Prostitution: The Oldest Profession may be older even than humanity, as it appears to emerge in the presence of money. 6 Things You Won't Believe Animals Do Just Like Us describes several experiments in which researchers introduced money to communities of monkeys. In one, a female monkey ended up trading sex for money so she could buy some grapes.
• Unseen Pen Pal: Parodied by Soren Bowie with his article "The Spambot Who Seduced Me: A True Story of Forbidden Love", in which he responds to actual messages sent to him by a dating site spambot (also mocking how common these spambots are in the comments on Cracked articles), with each reply being more and more lovesick.
• Unsettling Gender-Reveal: Discussed in "#5. We're Not Trying to Trick Anyone" from "5 Shocking Realities of Being Transgender the Media Ignores".

V

• Very False Advertising: 23 Outrageous Marketing Lies You See Every Day. No Animals Were Harmed, indeed...
• Video Game 3D Leap: Parodied as the #25 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games which teaches that the third spatial dimension was discovered in 1996 (the year Super Mario 64 was released).
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Mocked here, then paid back.
  • Seanbaby took this up to eleven with this.
  • Robert Brockway has gotten in on the action with Fallout: New Vegas
  • All of the articles relating to dick moves done by players in online gaming discusses how people take this trope and ran with it to grandiose and creative heights. At least one or two on every list so far has mentioned EVE Online.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: One of the reasons no one laughed at your joke is "They Didn't Have Enough Information to Get It". It states that the best practice for an In-Joke that relies on knowledge of something obscure like Rocky IV or Battlestar Galactica (1978) is to find a discreet way to explain the reference in the setup.
• Vindicated by History:
  • In-universe. 6 Great Novels that Were Hated in Their Time
  • And Neville Chamberlain.

W

• Water Is Air: An underwater lake is the #5 most mindblowing thing found underwater.
• The Watson: #4 of 4 Realizations That Will Ruin Science Fiction for You is that science fiction needs a "straight man" to whom the setting's rules are explained.
• Waxing Lyrical: Brockway is fond of this. Especially if the song in question is Life is a Highway.
• We Buy Anything: Photoplasty advertises such a shop in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.
• We Have Reserves: This article details that this was pretty much Ancient Rome's primary tactic for warfare. The first war against Carthage resulted in 100,000 troops being lost in a single day, and the war lasted for more than a decade and a half after that. The 2nd Carthaginian War resulted in over 400,000 Roman soldiers lost before the enemies finally lost, and Rome didn't give a damn.
  ''The Roman Empire wasn't really interested in outwitting its opponents — it just outlasted them. If Rome had a problem, it kept throwing troops at it until it stopped causing trouble.
• Welcome to Corneria: "Psychology: People tend to say the same thing over and over" is the #9 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games.
• Whale Egg: Pokémon coming from eggs is the #27 Science Lesson As Taught by Famous Video Games.
• Wham Line: A truly horrifying one at the end of 6 Realities In A Super Religious Family That Wants Me Dead:
  A few weeks after reaching out to us, while the article was wrapping up development, Azime stopped responding to our messages.
• What Could Have Been: Invoked in Photoplasty 21 Real Deleted Scenes That Completely Change Famous Movies.
• What If?: Many of the Photoplasty contests.
• What Measure Isa Non Human: The general reaction to 6 Strange (Sometimes Illegal) Realities Of Fox Hunting.
• What You Are in the Dark: Robert Brockway is a horrible person according to Fallout: New Vegas
• Whole-Plot Reference: Funnily invoked with The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and House of the Dragon, which are "accused" of being good adaptations of Stranger Things, respectively The Crown (2016).
  We mentioned earlier how The Rings of Power’s chief streaming rival, HBO’s House of the Dragon, was seemingly taking its cues from The Crown. Well, the Lord of the Rings show may be doing something similar, but with another popular Netflix series: Stranger Things.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?:
  • Explored in 5 Reasons Immortality Would be Worse than Death.
  • Brought up as a possible reason why Gustave the Crocodile is so keen on killing people without actually eating them in The 5 Creepiest Serial Killers (Who Were Animals), arguing that he's so sick of his own immortality that he spitefully destroys life whenever he sees it just to pass the time.
• Why Did It Have to Be Spiders?: Many authors of articles express their hatred and fear of spiders.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: The video "Why Supervillains Always Keep the Good Guy Alive" provides a deconstruction of this trope with an excerpt from Albert B. Celery's fictitious William Blonde film The Malice of Regret.
• Wiki Walk: OK, they're not actually a wiki, but it is really easy to get trapped for a long time just by clicking the links at the end of each article. If they were to drop the last two letters, their name would be almost chillingly appropriate.
  • The addition of the Random Article button does even more to add to it.
  • #5 of 6 New Kinds of Anxiety the Internet Gave Us is "The Irresistible Impulse to Follow a Link Chain".
• Withholding Their Name: One article was about a guy who filmed a porn movie on short notice. The director didn't give his name, but for the sake of clarity told the author to address him as Mr. [Name of the street they were on].
• The Worf Effect: "5 Movies That Came So Close To Being Watchable (But Failed)" is mainly Cezary Jan Strusiewicz complaining about cheap copouts in certain fight scenes, but special mention goes to RoboCop 3, where Murphy easily goes down against robot ninjas twice, totally despite his Implacable Man traits.
• Worse Than It Sounds: Invoked - In the "Escort Mission" segment for Assassin's Creed, l33t keeps trying to explain to n00b why he thinks the plot of the games is bad, but every time he tells it, he keeps making it sound awesome by accident.
• Wrong Insult Offence:
  Somehow, lazy racism is more offensive than intellectually rigorous racism.

Y

• Youngest Child Wins: #6 on this list shows that the older children will have more health problems than the younger ones based on order of birth.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: An ex-convict neo-nazi experienced this after being released from jail and ending up working for a man named Keith who was "Incredibly Jewish", due to his conviction making job seeking very hard. The writer fully expected to get ripped off by Keith, but instead Keith was actually impressed with the work he put in, gave him extra money, a full time job, and when the writer messed up, Keith told him to stop criticizing himself.
• Your Mom: #10 of 20 Annoying 'Modern' Trends That Are Older Than You Think shows examples from William Shakespeare's plays Timon of Athens and Titus Andronicus.

Z

• Zero-G Spot: Shot down in 6 Reasons Space Travel Will Always Suck.
• Zombie Apocalypse:
  • One of favorite subjects for lists and parodies.
  • Deconstructed in David Dietle's 7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly). For one thing, maggots and gut flora would devour the undead.

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