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Inverted Trope

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"To say, for instance, that education is beneficial, it's a commonplace; but to say that education is harmful, it's a contrary commonplace. It's ostensibly more foppish, but in essence it's one and the same."
—Bazarov, Fathers and Children (a.k.a. Fathers and Sons)

A particular form of creatively reusing an existing trope: The trope is turned exactly on its head. For example, a trope that typically applies to heroes is applied to a villain, or a trope that typically applies to males is applied to a female character, or the other way around (Gender-Inverted Trope). Some good examples are also in Genre Blindness, where rather than being blind to the conventions of the story-type they are in, the characters are presented as being hyper-aware of the conventions. A trope can often be inverted in more than one way. Indicative of Post Modernism.

See Playing with a Trope for a comparison with many other ways that a trope can be used.

Oddly enough, this page is still pretty tiny, despite inversions of tropes constantly being mentioned on other pages. Let's add in as many as we can, shall we? See also Russian Reversal.

For the 2012 video game, see Inversion.

Examples

Anime

Comics
  • In Birds of Prey, Black Canary deliberately tries to reform Lady Shiva by giving her honest friendship and human contact. Shiva, however, is perfectly aware of Dinah's intentions, and lets Dinah get a good look at her real personality and history for one reason: she wants to make her stop.
  • MAD used to feature a recurring 'scenes we'd like to see', which often featured subverted or inverted tropes (for example, the (in)famous 'car races train' film ends up with train hitting car, car survives, train gets smashed to smithereens).
  • Darryl Cunningham's comic book Psychiatric Tales is an attempt to demystify mental illnesses and change their perception in media and in society. The trope Insane Equals Violent is played straight only in chapter "Antisocial Personality Disorder" (also known as "Mad Or Bad" on Darryl's blog). Other stories are actually an inversion, stating that people suffering from mental illnesses are more likely to be a victim of crime or harm themselves rather than anyone else.

Fan Works

Film
  • Disney's Fantasia films invert the classic animation trope Mickey Mousing. Each of the animated segments is produced to correspond to a piece of existing music.
  • In the beginning of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, the Jedi are trying to get into the control room where the Neimodians are. Lucas explained that this is an inversion of typical scene where a monster tries to get into the room where the protagonists are. And just like the monster may be scared away at the beginning of the film, so are the Jedi.
  • Star Trek: First Contact inverts the Artificial Limbs trope with the android Data◊ by having living flesh grafted onto his body by the Borg queen. It doesn't last.
  • A Kid In King Arthur's Court while having a lot of Chickification manages to invert a lot of tropes surrounding the two Princesses. Princess Katie is established as a capable swordswoman and horse rider - the tomboy of the pair. She is then abruptly kidnapped and must be saved by the heroes. We are led to believe that Katie was the toughest of the two sisters while her older sister Princess Sarah was a typical medieval lady. The end reveals that Sarah was the one who had been dressing as The Black Knight and stealing from the rich to give to the poor..
  • Sweet Pea in Sucker Punch goes through most of the story being the stereotypical Sour Supporter, reluctantly joining the team, reminding everyone of how dangerous and stupid the plan is, and eventually calling it quits when things get too dangerous. When it is revealed that the Sour Supporter - which is usually a left of center character at most - is actually the plot central character and the Heroic Sacrifice is made for her instead of by her, the trope inverts.
  • The Caveman's Valentine inverts the generally parent-to-child So Proud of You by having Lulu say this to her crazy father.
  • Whereas in Hollywood armies which relied heavily on formation seem to often forget all their training at the drop of a hat, in Gladiator an assortment of random fighters manage to form a very tight and cohesive formation, and even adapt it at a second's notice with no prior drilling!
  • In ...And Justice for All, the trope of a guilty person getting Off on a Technicality gets cruelly inverted with Jeff, who's innocent but can't get out of prison because of a technicality.
  • Edge of Tomorrow inverts the Guys Smash, Girls Shoot trope. Action Girl Rita Vrataski uses a Cool Sword as her preferred weapon, whereas Cage uses machine guns for most of the film.
  • The Marvel Cinematic Universe inverts Blond Guys Are Evil with Thor and Loki. Thor is a blond, Norse god, while Loki is dark-haired and quite evil.
  • Planet of the Apes inverts Escaped Animal Rampage: instead of an animal breaking loose from captivity and causing panic among humans, it's a human (Taylor the astronaut) who escapes from the apes' science facility and causes panic among the civilized apes.

Literature

Live-Action TV
  • In the pilot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an apparently high-school-age couple is in the school at night; the girl is nervous about being out at night while the boy reassures her. Since it's clear from the title that this is a vampire show, the expectation is the boy will suddenly reveal himself as a vampire and bite the girl; instead the opposite happens, and the girl is the vampire.
    • Buffy herself is an inverted trope. Blonde teen girl who hunts down monsters, when normally they would hunt her. Word of God states that this was the entire point of the story.
  • Invoked by Gregory House: "It's not what you think! I know it looks like we're cleaning dishes, but actually we're having sex."
  • Babylon 5:
    • In the episode "There all the honor lies," a gift shop opens in the space station that sells human masks for space aliens to wear.
    • Similarly, Londo takes issue with the state of the genitalia present on the dolls made in his likeness; when it's assumed he's upset about a breach of decency, he clarifies that he's upset because there are none shown. It turns out that ALL Centauri depictions of a nude form are anatomically correct, and he feels he's being literally portrayed as dickless. And due to Londo's Bizarre Alien Biology, being "dickless" means the doll is missing six tentacles sticking out of its sides!
  • Quite a lot of instances on Friends. An example would be Phoebe's husband, in season 2, quoting stereotypical lines like "experimenting in college" to excuse himself for going out with women, a trope used the other way around for straight men or women realizing that they are gay. Here is the other way around.
  • Normally, complaints about TV programs concern inappropriate content. With the British broadcast of Monty Python's final show, the complaints concerned the lack thereof.

Video Games
  • Brütal Legend inverts the trope Terminator Twosome, both in terms of where the twosome goes and what happens when they get there. Succoria, Emperor of the Tainted Coil, goes to the future to retrieve its technology; Riggnarok, humanity's champion, uses the opportunity to assassinate her by masquerading as one of her slaves. However, Succoria has a Villainous BSOD upon realizing that the future belongs to humankind, and Riggnarok takes pity on her. Love Redeems, but in this case, Redemption Equals Death by Childbirth, and Riggnarok ended up raising protagonist Eddie Riggs in the modern world on his own.
  • Custom Robo ties Humongous Mecha into knots by having a tournament-arc style Fighting Series with knee-high customizable bots that one psychically controls.
  • Final Fantasy V inverts Hopeless Boss Fight: Galuf's Heroic Sacrifice against Exdeath is an automatic success, since Galuf won't die at zero hit points.
    • Likewise, Final Fantasy X has a Final Boss battle where your entire party automatically has auto-life cast on them, meaning you can't lose. note 
  • Easy-Mode Mockery is inverted in Mega Man 9 and 10. You cannot earn Achievements in the harder difficulty modes, or when playing as Proto Man in 9.
  • Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean inverts the Vendor Trash trope. A certain item from a random drawer in someone's house (called the Small Debt) actually removes money from your wallet if you sell it. Holding on to it will cause it to evolve into Large Debt, which removes more money from your inventory if sold, and finally into the Snowballing Debt, which removes a tremendous amount of money. Fortunately, you don't have to sell it, and the game shows the price of selling it clearly.
  • In Knights of the Old Republic 2 your morally ambiguous mentor Kreia routinely gives you ANTI-friendship speeches, and your relationship values go down for answering like a Love Freak.
  • In Daikatana, those who played this game consider Superfly's and Mikiko's deaths to be the best part of the game, inverting the Alas, Poor Scrappy trope. Mind you, this isn't really an example, since this was unintentional; players just hate the game so much they take cynical glee in the suffering of its characters.
  • Gameplaywise Redemption Demotion appears in Warcraft III in the Scourge campaign. Arthas, the main character in the human campaign, by the end will have likely maxed out, acquired a number of really strong items, and as part of his Start of Darkness, Frostmourn, giving him a massive boost to melee damage Chaos-type damage for his attacks that allows him to deal full damage to all armor types. By the start of the Scourge campaign, he's just an ordinary Death Knight, and will never be as strong as he was before.
    • Another case of this with Illidian going into Frozen Throne. When the player controls him in the original campaign, he'll be able to go into a permanent demon form, which he loses in Frozen Throne, where the player is fighting him more often then using him, though he's still a level 10 demon hunter.
    • Yet another case, this time with the gameplay itself in the Scourge campaign from the Frozen Throne expansion. Arthas starts as a level 10 Death Knight, but he loses levels from one stage to the next, going from level 10 to level 2 as his power source (The Lich King, before Arthas merged with him) grows weaker. He gets all his levels back in time for the last stage of the game.
  • Kingdom Hearts Saix inverts X Marks the Hero.
  • LittleBigPlanet 3 inverts the Grind Boots trope by allowing Sackboy to use a helmet to ride the rails.
  • Mass Effect inverts Maligned Mixed Marriage by having the Asari ostracize Asari who have romantic relationships with other Asari.
  • Spec Ops: The Line inverts the intended usage of the trope Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated by revealing that Konrad had been Dead All Along. The ghost of Konrad amused by Walker's reaction to this revelation says, "Looks like reports of my survival were greatly exaggerated."
  • VVVVVV has 3 auto scrolling levels; the autoscrolling is justified by an Advancing Wall of Doom, and an inversion (RetreatingWallOfDoom).
  • Tactical Shooter games often invert Insurmountable Waist High Fence by having fences be the only obstacle you can hop over. This is done not so much for the purpose of trope play but rather for purposes of realism.
  • The Flash game Don't Escape is an inversion of the Room Escape Game - the protagonist is a werewolf whose goal is to lock himself in as best he can before he transforms and becomes a danger.
  • In Katawa Shoujo, Lilly's good ending inverts Your Princess Is in Another Castle. The good and bad endings play out exactly the same, except the former has a few additional scenes.

Web Animation

Web Comics

Western Animation
  • Superman: The Animated Series played straight the Hide Your Lesbians trope throughout the series, giving only the tiniest of hints that Maggie Sawyer was gay, despite her status as an out-lesbian in the comics since 1988. However, the series not only subverted, but inverted the Bury Your Gays trope when it came to Maggie. The opening scene of Apokolips...Now! contained a perfect set up for her death, she is blown out of her car during an attack by Intergang and the next shot has her badly burned and motionless beneath a crushing pile of rubble, without moving her eyes or her fingers, but she ultimately survives the encounter. That is a straight subversion of the Bury Your Gays trope. However, the show then went on to invert the trope as well, as the same scene that revealed that Maggie had survived (Subverting the trope) was also the first scene to hint at her sexuality, when she was visited in the hospital by a woman the DVD commentary and credits reveal to be Toby Raines, her partner from the comics. Bury Your Gays is often used as a way of getting rid of homosexual characters, of obscuring their nature before it could be brought into the story, but here it is used as a way to reveal a homosexual character. Also Inverted when her straight beat partner Dan Turpin is Killed Off for Real.
  • As is partially expected given the circumstances of his creation as a diametric opposite to a classic Disney villain, (in his current form at least), PJ from Goof Troop inverts multiple tropes:
    • Overlord Jr.: He is completely opposite from his father in all but the shallowest sense, fearful and resentful of him, and an entirely sympathetic character... speaking of which...
    • Cats Are Mean: Cats Are Harmless Victims.
    • Both Fat Bastard and Big Fun: He's kind and friendly... while also being a withdrawn Straight Man and the series' biggest downer. If his Character Development in the second movie is taken into account, he qualifies as an inversion of a subversion of the latter.
    • Evil Sounds Deep: Actually inverts both parts of it by being very kind and having a very high voice, even as an adult.
    • No Guy Wants to Be Chased: Not only does he need to be chased, but his girlfriend doesn't want to be chased by his friend.
  • Pelswick inverts Obfuscating Disability. The main character is disabled (paraplegic for nebulous reasons), but is afraid that a girl he met online won't like him if she finds out, especially since she loves to dance, so he gets robotic legs in order to pretend to be able to walk. Hilarity Ensues. She never discovers the ruse, but dumps him anyway for not being "laid-back" enough.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:

Real Life
  • The real-life phenomenon of streaking was beautifully inverted in June 2009 when a fully-clothed person ran across the field at an annual naked rugby game in New Zealand.
  • James Buchanan knew upon leaving office that he was unpopular, and that he was blamed by many for the national crisis that was starting. Buchanan said at the time "history will vindicate me". No such luck, as he's still considered one of the worst American Presidents, 150 years after leaving office.

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Alternative Title(s):

Inverted, Inversion, Eport

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