General examples: A - B | C - D | E - G | H - L | M - R | S - Z
Examples in specific videos: A - F | G - Z
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E
- Early-Installment Weirdness:
- Those who watched many grounded videos who end up watching older videos made with GoAnimate will wonder why Underdog and B-movie monsters are featured alongside the standard Comedy World-created characters, and may also ask what Super Rica and Rashy even is.
- The first ever grounded video
has a much fairer punishment for the troublemaker (he's merely banned from TV for two weeks and from attending a friend's birthday party). The reason it happens is also more understandable, namely that he back talked to his teacher, and he's readmitted and unpunished after he apologizes to the principal.
- Easily Forgiven: Averted, at some points. Apologizing doesn't mean that the troublemaker helps them escape their problems, as their parents find it useless and unacceptable enough.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: The "[Character] Gets Sent Away" videos sometimes act as series finales for various 'grounding series'. The character gets, well, sent away to an unpleasant place for acting out, but rather than go through with their punishment they start a new life somewhere else with their friends.
- Eldritch Location: The "Audience." We assume, considering that being sent there is considered the grand finale of several "punishment days."
- Encyclopaedic Knowledge: For someone who doesn't seem to be a film buff by any means, Warren Cook's father Alan always seems to know the exact release year and releasing studio of every film to stymie Warren's attempts at false VHS openings, even for the most unheard-of films.
- Enfant Terrible: At the end of the day, nearly all of the troublesome kids are intended to be evil, albeit with varying levels of success. There are a few kids who are genuinely villainous or at least just immense Jerkasses, however.
- Entertainment Above Their Age:
- In various videos, the troublemaker-of-the-day (who is normally an Enfant Terrible) wants to see a movie for adults, so they'll sneak into a theater to watch it, only to get busted by their parents.
- Sometimes, a troublemaker watches some adult show (i.e. Family Guy) and their parent comes in, shuts off the TV, and promptly grounds them for it.
- Zig-zagged in "(Character) Brings an NC-17 Rated Film to School" videos. Sometimes the character who brings an NC-17 rated movie to school has a Vague Age or is an adult who's still in school, but they're often a child. In those same videos, another classmate will bring an R-rated or PG-13 rated film for Movie Day, resulting in them getting a warning or being sent to detention (or worse).
- Everything Explodes Ending: It's not unheard of for a grounded video to end this way, usually thanks to the actions of a troublemaker. In particular, most "(Character) Misbehaves at (Restaurant/Store/Great Wolf Lodge)" videos end with the building "exploding" after the troublemaker throws their tantrum.
- Evil Counterpart:
- Boris the Teeth Guy (when portrayed as a separate character to Boris), a rude and psychopathic red-skinned duplicate of Boris with a huge mouth and eyes who somehow manages to be worse than Boris himself.
- Not to be outdone, there are many "evil" versions of baby show characters who are either there because the creator either hates the "good" version of the character so that they can have a good character for the troublemaker to mess with or if they like the "good" character, they just use it because they're running out of characters to ground. The most popular ones are Evil Pingu and Evil Strawberry Shortcake. Surprisingly, the more popular grounding victims rarely get "evil versions", mainly because people tend to make videos of the popular characters for entertainment, while more minor ones like Pingu and Strawberry Shortcake for spite against the show.
- Evil Laugh: Even if the target character is doing something nice, they'll always do a laugh.
- Evil Knockoff: The original Dora the Explorer design for GoAnimate videos is referred to as this, calling her "Fake Dora".
- Evil Teacher:
- Seen in spades with every teacher, including the principal, seen in regular grounding videos. Most (if not, all) are seen as being a Hair-Trigger Tempered Jerkass who hates the troublemaker's guts, and hand out over-the-top punishments for even the most simplest matters.
- Miss Martin gets the worst of this, however. She's simply a gender-swapped version of Boris with all the amount of disgust and hatred as him. This video has her expell Caillou for no apparent reason, only for
Laser-Guided Karma to hit her hard when Clementine's mother fires her.
- Evil Versus Evil: Although many of the grounding victims tend to have it coming, the fact that in some of the more sadistic videos, their parents may go to some rather extreme measures in punishing them (sometimes they'll even kill the troublemaker) and, in some cases, even enjoy punishing the kids or celebrate their groundings, can make it difficult to take sides with anyone.
- Excrement Statement: Very frequent in both grounded video plots and individual characters.
- Grounded video plots include:
- The basis of "(Character) Poops On The Teacher" videos have the troublemaker defecating on their teacher when the latter won't let them go to the bathroom.
- "Character Pees On The Teacher" videos are the same thing as above, except it involves urination instead.
- "Character Poops On Character" videos. Enough said.
- Characters include:
- Bobbyispoopy loves to poop on everyone he comes across.
- Uolliac enjoys pooping on everybody.
- Grounded video plots include:
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Almost every grounded video is titled in this format: "X Does Y (And Gets Grounded or /Grounded)."
F
- Failure Is the Only Option:
- Outside of the rare occasion where they get thrown a bone for it, Caillou, Dora, or others of their ilk will always be grounded for some contrived reason no matter how good they are.
- The parent characters will often see their kid's misbehavior coming and attempt to prevent a tantrum or mental breakdown or repeatedly say no to a kid demanding something. Nine times out of ten, though, the parent characters cave into their kids' demands when they won't shut up or are unsuccessful in preventing their kid from throwing a fit.
- Faking the Dead: Whenever a troublemaker wants to see whether or not their parental figures really do care for them, they invoke this trope. In some videos, the troublemaker will merely do this as a prank that they will stop after their parental figures' initial reactions, while in some videos, they will (somehow) keep this up until right before their coffin is buried at their funeral. Either way, the parental figures always feel guilty for the way they treated their "dead" children, and become very angry once they reveal that they were just faking their death.
- False Flag Operation: When a bad user false flags an innocent user's video on YouTube and gives them a community guideline strike, they get arrested and go to jail.
- Fantastic Racism: Some of the more sadistic videos have folks considered to be "baby show" characters be hated by their peers so much it could almost be called this.
- Fantastic Slur: Being called a "bad user" or an "opinion disrespector" is probably the most heinous insult in the GoAnimate/Vyond community. "Baby show lover" comes up frequently as well.
- Fat Comic Relief:
- There are many videos where a troublemaker will eat an overwhelmingly large amount of food in one sitting and suddenly get morbidly obese as a result, then the parent will then find out and ground them, and maybe everyone else in the video will make fun of them for being fat.
- The character may also be fat from the start, where somehow their weight will cause disaster like in this video.
- Fate Worse than Death: Being grounded or getting a Punishment Day is often treated as a worse punishment than getting arrested or executed, and a standard insult hurled by trouble-making peers on the news is "I hope (character) gets grounded by their parents./(Character's Parents)? could you please ground them?" regardless of how terrible the character's actions were. By all accounts it kind of makes sense, considering the long grounding times and the ludicrous level of removed privileges.
- Fear-Induced Idiocy: Whenever the troublemaker of the day is about to attack their victim, their victim will just freeze on the spot and repeat a multitude of no's. Their inaction allows the troublemaker to beat them up.
- Felony Misdemeanor:
- The GoAnimate community wanted to kill a troll called Warren Cook for making fake VHS openings.
- Same for another troll named Memy9909 for allegedly trolling another user named Baxter - though what Memy did to Baxter can be justified as Baxter was an example of Small Name, Big Ego as some users considered him a king.
- Not only that, but in a lot of the videos where someone gets arrested, they get sent to jail (often for long periods of time and without a fair trial) over crimes like littering a single hamburger (or even walking up to a littered hamburger).
- No matter how minor the mistake or trouble a person causes, they will always be grounded for a ludicrously long time, even if someone just accidentally pushed someone else over or broke something.
- This is particularly evident in "(Character) Gets Held Back" videos, where even the slightest things will result in setting a teacher off and the student immediately being knocked back a grade at the first offense. This includes such trivial or petty things such as talking in class, having sodas with their lunches, or even getting a single math problem wrong.
- Parodied in this video by NotSmirks where Warren Cook's dad calls the police to arrest Warren when he finds out Warren made fanfiction out of himself and "babby"."911? Me son made porno out of me! Am crying right now!"
- Founder Alvin Hung has gotten death threats from the site's users after GoPlus and many of the site's most popular themes were removed. Once the main site finally made the transition to a full-on business animation site, the site saw an increase in hatred towards Alvin before GoAnimate For Schools was finally upgraded to efficiently remove Flash-made themes. However, people still hold grudges against Alvin for this.
- Flanderization:
- A notable example in many videos is Boris himself. Take Isaac Anderson's depiction of him, for example - Solely over time, his violent Ax-Crazy tendencies started to dominate most of his character to an absurd degree, to the point that it has set the normal standard for Boris' depiction in many videos inspired by Anderson (especially in Deconstruction videos involving Caillou's nuclear family). Ironically averted by his "teeth guy" counterpart, who has always been like this.
- For characterizations in the Grounded videos themselves, early on in the history of the Grounded videos, most of the parent characters simply gave the extra long grounded times and called it a wrap. Very rarely were they actually violent when punishing the kids, and sometimes they actually did seem to not like having to punish the kids or just acted extremely disappointed rather than angry. Many later videos, however, saw all of these aspects get inflated to ridiculous proportions: Now you really have to search for recent videos that don't have the trouble-makers violently attacked by their parents for their wrong-doings, that don't have the parents act borderline sociopathic, absurdly strict, and/or Ax-Crazy, that don't have the parent characters fly off the handle at the slightest offense or actually act glad to punish the kids if they don't just outright hate them. For this, we can probably thank users like Isaac Anderson (who popularized the concept of "Punishment Day" in the Grounded videos) and certain other users whose Black Comedy takes on the Grounded genre were adopted by many other Grounded video makers.
- Flat Joy: Due to the voices not having much emotion, the characters will speak in a flat tone of voice even when they're excited or happy.
- The Food Poisoning Incident: In the "X Fakes a School Lockdown" videos, the principal is usually sick from having eaten spoiled takeaways for breakfast, to explain why they're not in the office.
- Forced Transformation: Sometimes the grounded kids will be turned into infants as punishment, though sometimes the reason they get grounded in the first place was because they inflicted this trope on someone else.
- Fountain of Youth: "Joe Gets Ako Turned Back into a Baby and Gets Grounded" has Ako turned back into a child.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: A few videos have characters in the video attempt to ground or rant at the users for whatever reason.
- Freak Out: Most "(Character) Fakes a School Lockdown" videos often have one or more students go beyond panicking to just outright having complete nervous/mental breakdowns during the faked lockdown, to the point they either injure themselves, get PTSD, or just go completely crazy and have to go to the mental ward for the rest of their life. This usually happens just to rub the consequences of the trouble-maker's actions in their face even more than they already are.
- "Freaky Friday" Flip: Evidently, body swapping in the GoAnimate/Vyond universe is not allowed, as many videos can tell you. Most commonly, the swap is between a parent and a trouble-making kid, and you really have to search for ones that involve any other participants of a swap.
- Freudian Excuse:
- Some videos (whether they are a deconstruction or not) have the parent characters give an explanation as to why they're so harsh on their kids when they get in trouble. For example, here, where, after calling out his parents and getting them sent to jail, Caillou asks Boris and Doris why they are always so harsh on him and ground him for the most trivial of reasons. Doris then explains how her own parents always grounded her for ridiculous reasons (such as when she innocently told her father about how she wanted her own TV show) when she was a kid herself. It was then that she swore to do the same thing to her kids when she grew up, apparently so they would know her pain. Caillou (appropriately) rejects her flimsy excuse, gives them both a short "The Reason You Suck" Speech, and leaves them for good.
- In somewhat of a meta-example, a common Alternate Character Interpretation of many of the kids (especially Caillou and Dora) are that the only reason they act out so much is because of the abuse of their family and friends, something that is often thrown back into the latter group's face in the Deconstruction videos.
- Some videos (whether they are a deconstruction or not) have the parent characters give an explanation as to why they're so harsh on their kids when they get in trouble. For example, here
- Fun with Flushing: Videos that involve people getting flushed down the toilet (whether it's someone getting flushed down the toilet by a trouble-maker, or the trouble-maker being flushed down the toilet as a punishment) are fairly common.
G
- Gender Bender: A common punishment given to the troublemakers is to have their sex changed via Magic Plastic Surgery in the "X gets his/her gender swapped" videos. It is also common to have troublemakers get grounded because they inflicted this trope onto someone else. (Whether by turning them into merely a gender-flipped version of themselves or turning them into a random person/fictional character that happens to be the opposite gender of the character being transformed.)
- Genre Deconstruction: Some videos serve as a deconstruction of the "Grounded" aspect. They tend to focus on Caillou's dad's Only Sane Man and Disproportionate Retribution attitudes, essentially calling him out on his random punishments and reasonings as to why he does so.
- "Get Out of Jail Free" Card: When any troublemaker is sentenced to prison, no matter how much time they spent there, they are guaranteed to be let out of the prison like nothing ever happened and without explanation in a succeeding video.
- GIS Syndrome: It's not uncommon for users to insert familiar characters into the GoAnimate/Vyond setting via stock images of them from off the internet. Here's one such example of this.
- Giving Someone the Pointer Finger: Thanks to there not being animations for the characters to punch, throw things, or whatnot, the characters' animation for pointing ahead is often used in place of those and many other actions (and often adds to the hilarity as a result).
- Go to Your Room!: After a troublemaker gets grounded grounded grounded, their parents tell them to go to their room.
- Gone Horribly Wrong/Right: Countless times have the schemes of the naughty kids blown up in their faces because of things they didn't anticipate.
- Good Is Not Nice: Anyone who isn't the person currently getting in trouble and grounded. This is more evident in the more sadistic grounding videos where the troublesome character is beaten up or murdered by their family and friends for their actions, or "Punishment Day" sequences with more severe (and less humorous) punishments.
- Goo Goo Getup: Characters are often made to wear diapers as punishment.
- Gosh Darn It to Heck!: Profanity is often replaced with minced oaths. Justified, as much of the community is composed of children who share their computers with relatives. Not that this stops some people though. See Obligatory Swearing below.
- Greek Chorus: Parodied; a handful of (mostly satirical) videos have the events of the video commented on by a Gonkish character sitting at a computer (who seems to only be a head wearing a baseball cap) who takes some random issue with it. (And is likely a representation of the worst parts of the GoAnimate grounded fandom.) (One video featuring this character.)
- Groin Attack: A running gag on the now-terminated Isaac Anderson's videos is Caillou getting his penis cut off, such as this one.. This also happens on a few other videos as well by other users besides Isaac. It's also a common punishment seen in "Punishment Day" videos.
- Growling Gut: One of the sound effects with the arrival of HTML is a "stomach gurgle".
- Grounded Forever: Parents in Grounded videos will often ground the child for a very long amount of time (ex: 112233445566778899 years) or forever.
- Gross-Out Show: Seeing as how many of the users on the site are/were little kids, and there's an effect that makes people vomit, you can expect a lot of GoAnimate/Vyond videos to be this.
- Grub Tub: In Caillou's 2nd Punishment Day, one of Caillou's punishments is being forced to swim in a pool full of mashed potatoes.
- Guilt by Association Gag: Sometimes in the "Gets Held Back" videos, when there are multiple characters involved, a single character in the grounded party will be the only one to cause trouble in a grade (sometimes even with an unrelated character), while their peers stand by and not cause any trouble along with them. With few exceptions, all characters are still told to go back a grade regardless.
