Sometimes,
Genre Savvy characters talk about tropes. There are at least three kinds of such discussions:
This trope covers that third category, where a trope is brought up by the characters, and is directly relevant to the situation at hand, but is not taken necessarily as
Truth In Television.
This kind of conversation is used to set up either a
justification (Invoked Tropes normally just sort of assume the trope is Truth in Television), a
fully noted aversion, some variety of
deconstruction or a way of
hanging a lampshade.
Distinct from
Conversational Troping in that a Discussed Trope will have some relevance to the situation at hand, and distinct from an
Invoked Trope in that an Invoked Trope is always either played straight or expected by at least one character to be played straight.
See also
This Is Reality, which this trope generally invokes.
Examples
Anime and Manga
Comic Books
Literature
- The Lord Peter Wimsey stories tended to feature dialogue in which somebody discussing "If this were a mystery story..."
- Particulalry common when his Love Interest Harriet Vane is present, as she is a writer of mystery stories.
- Sam Vimes' Genre Savvy discussion of Clues in various Discworld books is another good literary example.
- Discworld and Discussed Tropes go together like dwarves and gold. In Sourcery, an Evil Chancellor actually SAYS of some evil action he is undertaking, "I am the Vizier after all. It is rather expected of me."
- The Black Jewels book, Tangled Webs, by Anne Bishop has a couple of examples, mainly because the villain is a hack author. Two characters who had been making fun of the author's cliché-ridden writing are trapped in a house that's trying to kill them while the author watches from inside the walls and records it all as fodder for his next book. At one point, the characters comment that in a horror story, this is exactly when one of them would be stupid enough to go into the cellar. As they're saying this, the cellar door slams shut of its own accord—if they had gone down the stairs, they would have been trapped. Later in the book, the (gay) male main character remarks to the female main character that this is the point in the story where they're supposed to have sex. They look at each other for a moment, and then the woman says, "So what do you want to do in the five minutes that would have taken?"
Webcomics
Western Animation
