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This is when a character is quite literally paper-thin, as if they were a paper cutout. This can also apply to normally three-dimensional characters who have been flattened as a result of, say, a 300-pound weight being dropped on them.
Not to be confused with Flat Character.
Examples:
Comic Books
- Calvin once imagined he had become two-dimensional, allowing him to escape notice by turning sideways.
- Sam & Max undergo this at one point, in order to get under a locked door to obtain a Super Mario Bros.-styled coin.
- Max: Lose weight and make money? Where do I sign up?
- Sam: I dropped a whole dimension and I've never felt better!
- Flat Man of the Great Lakes Avengers
- One robber / rapist crushed by a millstone in a story by Wilhelm Busch. Other than typical for this trope, he doesn't exactly revert.
Film
Literature
- Flat Stanley is about a boy who is flattened by a falling bulletin board.
- Flatland has an entire paper-thin WORLD.
- In one scene in A Wrinkle in Time, Meg finds herself transported briefly into a two-dimensional world, where she can't breathe ("a paper doll cannot gasp"), and her heart can't pump blood properly ("a knife-like, sideways beat"). It was, Mrs. Which explains, an oversight on her part (apparently she and her two companions were perfectly comfortable there).
- In Pyramids, one of Ptaclusp's sons accidentally becomes this trope due to the twisting of dimensions by the grossly-oversized Great Pyramid. He also tends to drift horizontally at a steady rate, as the "fourth dimension" of Time now runs that way for him.
- The Beautiful Culpeppers is a children's book about a family of paper dolls owned by a little girl. They also have a 2-D paper house, which is tacked to a wall; they can go inside it, but we never get any details about what it's like in there.
Real Life
- Flatworms
- Ediacaran biota
- Trichoplax adhaerens, sole member of the phylum Placozoa
- Plane trees
Tabletop Games
- Grimm has the flat folk — people who were crushed under the falling Beanstalk but weren't killed by it, and were squashed into two-dimensionality. Well, physical two-dimensionality. Humans native to the Grimm Lands are always two-dimensional in the literary sense.
Video Games
- The universe of PaRappa the Rapper is inhabited entirely by paper people.
- In Paper Mario, almost everyone is literally a paper cutout.
- Turned into a gameplay element in the sequel, Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door: Mario can turn into a paper airplane, turn sideways to fit through cracks (and even has to hop to move around in said form) and several other curses.
- Mr. Game & Watch
- Everyone in Harvest Moon: My Little Shop.
- The Flatso enemies in Banjo-Tooie, which pop out of the floor of Cloudcuckooland's Central Cavern.
- the fact that they make a 'cha-ching' sound like that of paper money adds to this effect.
- Hype The Time Quest has tapestries with pictures of soldiers on them in the monastery. When you walk by them or retrieve something or otherwise trigger them, the soldiers rip themselves off the tapestries and attack you, still flat as paper. Fortunately, them being paper/cloth, fire magic tends to work well against them.
- The Darwinians of Darwinia look like paper cut-outs. The basic Virii are just moving patterns on the ground.
- Cheat codes will let you do this to Spyro the Dragon in the PS1 games Ripto's Rage and Year of the Dragon.
Web Original
- This
 Whole Movie is built off this trope.
- "The Reddish Radish" animation from Homestar Runner.
- Mister Origami, a World-War II-era supervillain from the Global Guardians PBEM Universe, was paper-thin and could fold himself into many different paper animal shapes... and assumed the abilities of the animal in question.
Western Animation
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