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Real Life

"Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-coloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? What is the use of having powers, Doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them?"
—Sherlock Holmes, 'The Sign of the Four'

"The real world is for people who can't imagine anything better."
—The Simpsons, ""Lisa The Drama Queen""

That dull, brown place you visit when you're not slaying vampires, traversing time and space, dressing like a flying mammal to fight a clown, learning wizardry, stopping terrorists, saving the world, dissing the Korean War from the rear, riffing at awful movies, piloting giant robots, going boldly where no man has gone before, doing both at the same time (with drills), fighting monsters all over the country and driving a really cool muscle car, keeping your homeroom classmate from abolishing the cosmos, stomping on evil, brown mushrooms or some other horrendously addictive activity.

Supposedly contains the Daystar, that terrible orb that burns you and gives you cancer. Sometimes considered an inaccurate reflection of the true world of fiction. Recommended as part of a balanced diet. Beware of characters who end up here.

Also the name of a webcomic whose actual connection to real life varies. "Varies" having the meaning here of including Time Travel and Humongous Mecha.

If a trope is actually possible here, and happens enough times, that makes it Truth In Television.

Not to be confused with Half-Life.

Best known for being the sole work in a completely different genre of its own, called "Reality". Also, suprisingly good graphics for a legacy system.

Real Life Provides Examples of:

  • Aborted Arc - People were really stoked over this "Betamax" thing...
    • Also the Segway.
    • HD-DVD too.
    • Dreamcast.
    • Then there's the World War Three arc that the Cuban Missile Crisis plotline was meant to set up. Probably for the best they dropped this one, all indications are that it was headed for a Kill Em All ending...
  • The Abridged Series: History textbooks.
    • Of course, all of the original series is lost, not counting occasional piece of text or picture describing it, so that's the only source for things that happened before you got into Real Life.
  • Absent Aliens: So far...unless the UFO folks are to be believed. Though, given the scale of the Universe, chances are that they do exist somewhere, too far away for us to find them or them to find us.
  • Acceptable Breaks From Reality: Subverted. Oh. So. Much.
    • Occasionally played straight with dreams.
    • " Legal fictions" are laws that are based on false "facts," but are followed as written anyhow because they seem to work.
  • All Planets Are Earth Like: Very averted. Out of all the non-Earth planets identified so far, 100% are not Earthlike, and this is considered by some to be a representative sample.
  • All There In The Manual: The background is quite sophisticated. Thus it is often hard to understand what's going on. Luckily some fans created a wiki with everything you need to know, especially if you vitally need to find out, say, instances of evergreens in popular culture. Except for what they don't consider notable, 'original research' (also known as 'I know this personally because...'), what ticks off the admins, or what makes special interests angry.
  • All Just A Dream: Suspected by many, especially Buddhists.
  • All Trolls Are Different: Trolls here may eliminate your not savable character, may ruin your character, may also doom your character if they disagree with your views. This is permanent.
  • And Call Him George: Some lower-level players may kill their pet creature by accident. Houseplants are also common victims of this.
  • And I Must Scream: Some religeons teach that you get tortured forever if you "lose". Also: Swirlies.
  • And Now For Someone Completely Different: According to some religions, this happens when a character dies.
  • Anime Hair: Played straight when a character just wakes up or pulls off a toque. Most people call this "Bed Head" or "Hat Hair".
  • Anthropic Principle: Often invoked to Hand Wave implausibilities in the setting.
  • Anti Poop Socking: Sleep.
    • Your player character can even die without it. Whether the Developer did this on purpose or it came as part of the "death" bug is unknown to players. Some even believe the game made itself.
  • Everyone Can And Eventually Will Die: Even you!
    • To be fair, it's still far short of Bokurano in terms of deaths.
    • Most biologists theorize that this is a built-in mechanism to prevent species from killing themselves off through overcrowding.
  • Apocalypse How: Strangely (yet happily) subverted...for the most part. In spite of numerous viruses (some engineered), natural disasters, and ur-example, the nuclear weapon. The fact that humanity and its homeworld are still here is proof to some that God truly exists.
    • And to others, proof that he doesn't.
    • And to others, just proof that karma doesn't.
    • And to others, that maybe humans are not complete bastards after all.
    • And to yet others... Give it time.
    • It's actually happened already, to the dinosaurs, as a result of an asteroid impact. Though it was actually fairly small-scale, given that the mammals and most other life forms survived. Could happen to us if we don't notice it.
    • If you want a proper Apocalypse look no further than the Permian–Triassic extinction event, more snappily known as the Great Dying, which happened 250 million years ago. It killed 83% of all life on Earth.
  • Applied Phlebotinum: There is a liquid substance called "oil" which is the energy source of almost every sea, air and ground vehicle and is also required to manufacture various useful chemicals and materials (like plastic). Bloody conflicts over its control ensue. It also turns out to be formed from the bodies of ancient dragons micro-organisms.
  • Alternate Universe: We create an infinite number of these every single instant. Maybe.
  • Arc Fatigue: The War On Terror Arc has been going on for nearly ten seasons.
    • Try Fifteen seasons of WWII after the 'Depression' arc which lasted over ten seasons, which was preceeded (eventually) by the disasterous WWI arc that killed over half of one specific type of character in Europe. And the server Europe is still not over the ending of the WWII arc, let alone what some Player Killers were doing to the Jewish character archtype.
    • Also the Crusades, which lasted almost 200 seasons, and from the very start reeked of Too Dumb To Live.
      • The early arcs were ok. Big fights, mighty nations fighting. And they'd been setting it up for hundreds of seasons. There was some Adaption Decay with the later ones though. The children's crusade, say.
    • Let us also mention the Cold War arc, which lasted for nearly fifty seasons even though nothing really came of it.
    • Some have said this has happened to the whole "War On Drugs" arc.
  • Arc Words: "Weapons of mass destruction" was the most recent. The 2008 season finale seems to be a "Financial Crisis" miniarc that will carry over to the next season.
  • Archive Binge: People have spent their entire lives exploring the backstory. This has lead to the ultimate Archive Panic. Just to make things even harder, much all of the archive is written by Unreliable Narrators.
  • Author Avatar: A few characters throughout the story supposedly were identified as Author Avatars. Whether or not any of them actually are, or even if there is an author, is the cause of much controversy, Fan Wank, Epileptic Trees, and Internet Backdraft. Several theories even hold that every character is an author avatar (at least to a certain extent).
  • Awesome But Impractical: Non-reproductive sex. Also, such things as video games and some most places on the Internet.
    • It is practical. Studies show it's good for relieving stress.
    • Speaking of which, this site.
  • Awesome Yet Practical: Reproductive sex. Also, fire.
    • Arguably cannabis. Even without all the controversy of the drug properties, the plant has many usages ranging from fuel to health food.
  • Badass Longcoat: Loads of people in the World War I and II story arcs; although Conservation Of Ninjitsu had a great majority of them die.
  • Badass Normal: The entire human race is an example. With nothing but intelligence and opposed thumbs, they have managed to become the masters of the planet, topping beings with natural flight, built-in weapons and super-speed. Need to fly? They made airplanes. Need weapons? They can obliterate entire cities. Need to move fast? They made motorcycles, cars, and planes that can move faster than sound.
    • As the only possessors of intelligence wouldn't it count as Humans Are Special? That presumes humans are the only possessors of intelligence; plenty of reports exist implying other creatures can do many of the things we ascribe to humans, up to and including willful deception.
    • A power most humans don't cultivate any more is endurance running. We're good at it. We're really good at it. In hot enough weather, a fast, fit, trained human can chase a horse until it collapses of heatstroke, and antelope are easier; before the domestication of dogs and the invention of ranged weaponry, this was the most successful hunting method. It's mostly a forgotten ability - most people actually believe that only being intelligent sophants sets us apart, and we'd be helpless otherwise. That sort of hunting is still regularly practiced by various tribes in Africa. Though there are some notable differences such as wearing Nikes and water bottles.
    • Humans are also considered to have excellent vision compared to most other animals Mammals.
    • Most other species of non-human in general also count. For example, studies show that rats can predict human movements after watching them for a little while. People say it's close to them being able to read minds.
    • Also, humans can swim much much better than their primate counterparts, leading some people to theorize that humans evolved to a halfway point between an animal as aquatic as an otter.
    • And humans have managed to make it into space using only materials mined from their home planet.
  • Bag Of Spilling: Played straight with reincarnation. Partially averted with inheritance (which is frequently subject to tax).
  • The Beautiful People: Sometimes played straight, occasionally subverted, but for most of us averted big-time.
  • Best For Last: Millions upon millions are involved with various religions because of this trope.
  • Best Level Ever: This.
  • BFG: Staple military equipment. Especially tanks and artillery. For those that don't want to look at the link, the largest tank ever proposed used a 800 mm cannon that shot a 7 ton projective up to 23 miles. Normal tanks use something in the range of 100-120 mm cannons.
  • BFS: Heavily averted. NOBODY uses these. Well, except Jack Churchill. Granted, it was "only" a Scottish broadsword, but he used it to capture Germans with machine guns.
    • Actually, Churchill's sword wasn't that big. Of course, you know what the size of a man's sword says about him.
    • I'd check your info there, Apparently back in the old days there were some crazy 'Zweihander' weapons going around. Might want to check those out- They're very unrealistic.
      • In addition to the German Zweihander, there's also the Scottish claymore and a number of large swords from various cultures. They weren't used very often, but they were used.
  • Big Bad: Plenty, obviously. Though Satan is considered one of the biggest... Maybe...
    • They've been fairly uncreative with the Big Bads as of late, with a long series of dictators including Hitler, Stalin, and the most recent Big Bad, Saddam Hussein.
  • Big Good: God is considered the poster boy for this. On a more recent note there is Barack Obama.
  • Big Eater: Humans' advanced brain metabolism causes them to require more food than would be expected for an organism of their size.
    • The human brain's 25% consumption of total caloric intake is impressive, and shows why other animals haven't bothered to grow such enormous, hungry brains. But as for Big Eating, try shrews, which eat their own weight in insects daily, or hummingbirds, who can starve after 15 minutes of activity without their sugar water. Or blue whales, which need an estimated 1.5 million calories daily and get it by eating two or three tons of itty-bitty plankton. Per day.
  • Big Red Button: Lots of these in industrialized countries!
  • Bittersweet Ending: This, too, shall pass.
  • Blessed With Suck/Cursed With Awesome: There are some... things... that give hefty bonuses along with hefty disadvantages to your stats.
  • Body Horror: Averted in most cases, played absolutely straight with a few viruses (like flesh-eating disease) and other unfortunate events, like vehicle crashes.
  • Bonus Level Of Hell: If it exists, it's an Unwinnable Bonus Level slash Nonstandard Game Over unlocked in the afterlife from which there is no return.
  • Bonus Stage: Vacations.
  • Boring But Practical: Schooling and work, which help you get the better classes and earn money, respectively.
  • Bragging Rights Reward: Subverted. Most awards you earn can be used to level up incredibly fast, gain massive amounts of prestige, and/or win even more awards, and more!
    • Actually, there are things (such as learning Klingon) that play this straight
    • So they say, but this player earned quite a few awards during the High School stage and they didn't even unlock the Upper-Tier University bonus level like all the guides said they would! What a rip-off.
  • Breaking The Fourth Wall: Many theistic religions apparently revolve around communicating with the author(s).
  • Bribing Your Way To Victory: Often the easy way for those with access to large amounts of cash, often draws the resentment of those less fortunate as it is considered a Game Breaker
    • Averted in Communist countries where said money probably won't get you past the bread line.
      • Played straight for especially rich people. Any environment where there is heavy bureaucratization, and a lack of clear guidelines of how to behave leads to corruption. As such, in many communist countries, heavy bribes were needed for drivers licenses, university grades, and food.
      • Err, yes and no. It's not that bribing didn't get you anywhere in Communist countries, it's that very rich people didn't exist, so large monetary bribes were simply not an available option. Corruption was usually fueled by personal favours instead of money.
  • Broke Episode: The Great Depression. And the current episode. Some predict that the "Credit Crunch" arc is leading to another one of these. Others think the "Credit Crunch" arc is a hoax.
  • Broken Aesop: "The truth will set you free!"
  • Bruce Lee Clone : The Original
  • But I Play One On TV: You'd be amazed how common this phenomenon is.
  • Butt Monkey: More of them than you'll ever be able to shake a stick at.
  • Canon Dis Continuity: Alot of the early storylines is being declared this, notably some early parts of Genesis. There's a very rabid fanbase that aren't happy about this.
  • Canon Sue, possibly.
    • Joan of Arc - a teenage girl who almost singlehandedly ended the British occupation of France, and was then burned at the stake, becoming a martyr.
    • Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, after being crippled by polio, went on to be elected President of the United States, leading it through the Great Depression and World War II, and being the first and only US President to serve more than two terms in office (he died at the start of his fourth).
    • Alexander the Great. At the age of eight, he mounted a horse no one else could mount. He went on to rule Macedonia later, conquering more land with his Macedonian army - all while not losing a single one of those battles. He's even named several cities after himself. Surprisingly, he didn't die in battle either, considering how many times he was in them - instead, he dies from malaria from a mosquito bite.
  • Capital City: Several, though the main ones are New York, Moscow, London, Tokyo, Milan, Paris, Hong Kong, Washington D.C. and Berlin.
  • Cargo Ship: Goes back a lot further than battery-powered toys, If You Know What I Mean.
  • Cast Herd : Due to the six billion plus characters it's not all the surprising that they organize themselves into smaller groups based around nationality, religion, profession, politics, personality type, hobbies, etc., which makes it much easier to keep track of them.
  • Cat Girl: Averted, except in the Comic Convention levels.
  • Character Development
  • China Takes Over The World: It had the largest growing economy in the world and is increasing its military power as we speak. Also India to a lesser extent. Both were ganked by the British Empire guild/ Cast Herd. And poor guild leadership and/or defense. They since Have Gotten Better.
    • The United States, one of the youngest Cast Herd abd has become the leading powers after the WWII arc, leading through the Cold War arc, and for a bit after (the Internet Bubble arc as was called by Wall Street.) It's continued leadership role is in doubt.
  • City Of Adventure: London, Paris, New York - really, all of the larger cities seem to be cities of adventure to some extent. Not a day goes by without a dramatic murder mystery to solve, or a new romantic interest cropping up for one of the main characters. Tokyo and New York, however, get most of the spotlight.
  • Class And Level System: The most extensive one ever devised, and more are added whenever an expansion to Science or Commerce occurs.
    • Prestige Class: Movie mogul, President/King, CEO of a major corporation, Nobel Prize winner...
  • Cliché Storm: Good luck finding a character archetype that isn't included. Also, World War II.
  • Color Coded For Your Convenience: usually only with food.
  • Commie Land: Popular during the Cold War arc, however, writers have kept a few pieces of the old arc alive (like Cuba or North Korea) for the sake of nostalgia.
  • Complaining About People Not Liking The Show: Suicide prevention groups.
  • Complaining About Shows You Dont Like: Related to the above, many people get thoroughly disenfranchised with this series, for any myriad number of reasons. Some have reached a Dork Age in their "high school" story arcs, become Butt Monkeys, suffered Character Derailment, Gone Mad from the Revelation, found themselves in the cast of a Crapsack World, etc. Many people complain about mini-games and a few cutscenes not being grounded in the main game's physics. Of course, most of these people are no fun.
  • Complaining About Shows You Dont Watch: Censorship.
  • The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard: Computers can accomplish certain goals far more efficiently than humans can.
  • Completely Missing The Point: Possesing brains as subjectiveas ours, Humans are very prone to this.
    • Notable offenders include: Religion, liberals, The Woodstock Festival, and most people on this planet
  • Complete Monster: Many people in the world through the ages. From around-the-corner criminals to most influential dictators.
  • Conservation Of Ninjitsu: How often do you think you could rely on public opinion?
  • Continuing Is Painful: Regressive tax.
  • Continuity Porn: It is very difficult to understand any one part of Real Life without knowing the circumstances leading up to it (e.g., you can't understand the War on Terror without understanding the Cold War, which you can't understand without understanding World War II, which you can't understand without understanding World War I, which you can't understand without understanding the Congress of Vienna, etc.).
  • Cool Boat: People love to sail in nice boats.
  • Cool Plane: So many they get their own page.
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive: All over the place. An overt and well-known example is the Enron story arc.
  • Cosmic Plaything: Everyone.
  • Crack Is Cheaper: Guaranteed to absorb all your money, free time, work time, energy and attention, before you know it.
  • Crapsack World: Selected episodes and settings. It's the default setting for much of the human race, though it's at least of the mutable sort.
  • Critical Annoyance: Shortness of breath, heart attacks, and other such symptoms of impending death. Wheezing, and allergies, which is your immune system being fucktarded.
  • Crowning Moment Of Awesome: So many that it has its own section. You'll be inspired by how many of these your fellow tropers have.
  • Crowning Moment Of Funny: "Why does a chicken cross the road?" We'd tell you the answer but it's too good to spoil.
  • Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming: The first time a newborn takes a breath and cries.
    • Also, weddings, particularly the "you may kiss the bride" bit.
  • Crowning Music Of Awesome: Also has its own page, but the organic soundtrack gets its own mention too: I mean, songbirds? Humpback whales? Music of the spheres? Genius!
  • Crystal Dragon Jesus
  • Curb Stomp Battle: Common enough that things like chivalry and Geneva Conventions were developed to avert it. They're not always obeyed, of course.
  • Cut And Paste Environments: Played straight with the ancient Romans, who are said to have built the same city (and the same fort, with the same floor plan) hundreds of times.
  • Cyberspace: Known in the previous season as "ARPAnet", nowadays known as "Internet".
  • Dark Is Not Evil: Shade is a welcome refuge from the wrath of the dreaded Daystar. People with dark skin/hair/clothes are no more inclined to evil than anyone else. And dark chocolate in moderate quantities can improve the Constitution stat.
  • Deader Than Dead: Fairly common in war and disaster arcs, even though it's not really necessary since in this series, everyone who dies stays dead.
  • Death By Childbirth: Many insects reproduce this way, though it's not birth so much as laying eggs. Was common among humans until the last 100 years or so, and is still common in countries that don't have modern medicine. Note that most vertebrates have few problems with it; humans suck at giving birth because they converted a quadruped skeleton to a bipedal design while concurrently enlarging the skull.
  • Death By Pragmatism: Subverted
  • Death By Sex: AIDS
    • Sex is a physical activity. It's pretty likely that at least one individual has died from exhaustion as a result of overdoing it.
    • Autoerotic asphyxation may lead to this. For those who don't know, it bases on the fact that men get an erection when they are low on oxygen.
  • Death Takes A Holiday: Averted very, very hard. Death is so busy that if it went AWOL for even one day, people would notice.
  • Death Throws: Played straight with depressing frequency in high-speed vehicle crashes. Fairly easy to avert with a safety device known as a seat belt.
  • Deathworld: Used to be played straight, though humans are the most powerful (and dangerous) part of Real Life these days. Some parts still remain pretty dangerous, though.
  • Deconstructed Trope: Almost every single trope.
  • Demonic Spider: Many are quite infamous because of their ability to transmit poisons and diseases that impair your character for days and (quite possibly) kill them off for real before you even notice them.
  • Designated Victim: Look around you. '''Look in the mirror.'''
  • Designated Hero
  • Dethroning Moment Of Suck: Every war, every broken heart, every starving child.
  • Deus Angst Machina: To the point where they're just known as "bad days" when they happen.
  • Deus Ex Machina: The World War Two arc was resolved via Superweapon Surprise. This was foreshadowed via dramatic irony when Rutherford made his statement that only fools could think that harnessing atomic power would ever be a possibility. Some of the codenames were somewhat "inspired".
  • The Dev Team Thinks Of Everything: And I mean everything. No matter what you do, real life has rules for it.
    • Sadly a surprising number of things are arbitrarily ruled as impossible. As a result people have created alternate rule sets which are lumped together under the genera of "fiction."
    • There are a few Epileptic Trees surrounding the apparent incongruity between Quantum Mechanics and Relativity.
  • Did Not Do The Research: You'll often find teachers and professors who apparently don't know a thing about what they're teaching.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu: Nietzsche.
  • Die For Our Ship: Unfortunately, in extreme cases, it can become literal.
  • Difficulty By Region: People in more prosperous or peaceful countries like the United States, Canada, and Western Europe tend to have it easier than people in, say, Africa or the Middle East.
    • You can pretty much thank European colonialism for that.
  • Difficulty Spike: Trying to level from poor to middle class, as well as from middle class to rich. To further compact this problem, governments tends to increase the percentage of money you pay in taxes as you earn more money. There are many loopholes, of course. Many of which can are used by the characters with the Politician class.
  • Discontinuity: Some people pretend the Holocaust arc never happened. This is frowned upon by the majority of the fanbase, however.
    • A large number of people also discount the first 12 to 14 billion or so seasons, believing that there have only been 6000. Of course, a lot of people would just not understand the evidence for the existence of those billions of years, and even the evidence may be off(the Universe may be even older than what is currently known).
      • There is some evidence for the 6000-years side, but the sources tend to contradict each other.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: Played straight with far too many law codes.
  • DMPC: According to one source book, one who was able to ignore character creation, item crafting, viscosity, and perma-death; more or less in that order.
  • Dont Touch It You Idiot: If you disobey safety precautions, you're likely to find out the hard way why they were there in the first place.
  • Doomed Hometown: The Doomsday Clock stands at 5 minutes to 12 now in 2009. This has happened in many previous arcs as well. Seems that the end of the world happens often, and none of the characters notice.
  • Downer Ending: Happens so often the possibility of it happening to you borders on Nightmare Fuel.
  • Down The Drain: Occasionally subverted by deep sea diving tours. In general it's harder to survive the water levels than the surface levels.
  • Dropped A Bridge On Him: Played straight, often there are no hints at all that a character is going to be killed off. Indeed, many characters were unexpectedly and anticlimactically killed off, some accuse this as being gratuitous use of the Reset Button to prevent anyone, especially potential world-conquerors like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union from taking over the world.
  • Dropped A Bridget On Him: Rare, but it can happen, much to the laughter of those not actually involved.
  • Eagleland Osmosis: Played straight, and subverted by the 'Financial Crisis' arc.
  • Egopolis: See Alexandria, Ho Chi Minh City, Stalingrad, Constantinople Istanbul ...
  • Easing Into The Adventure: Some species hit the ground running, ready for survival within moments of birth. Humans, on the other hand, take months to acquire physical coordination, years to learn how to walk, more years to reach reproductive age, and even more years to acquire all their survival skills.
  • Easy Mode Mockery: The stigma that comes with being an adult and still living with your parents in times and places that put a lower emphasis on the extended family, let alone relying on them for money. This applies especially to trust fund kids, many of whom are Rich Bitches.
  • Easy Sex Change: Brutally averted. In fact, it's made much harder than necessary.
  • Elemental Rock Paper Scissors: Averted, with the help of over 100 different elements and potentially infinite combinations. Water, air and earth are not elements, they are compounds, and fire is a process, not a substance.
  • Empty Cop Threat: if you run afoul of the wrong cops.
  • Energy Being: The human race, and in fact all the other lifeforms. The energy is just contained as mass.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Especially in the form of Posthumous Character, see below, but not exclusively.
  • Epileptic Trees: There are a numerous fan theories that the government secretly staged elements of series canon, such as the Apollo moon landing and the WTC terrorist attack. Every religion has a few.
  • Epiphanic Prison: According to eastern religions...
  • Estrogen Brigade Bait: The Hollywood males.
  • Eternal Engine: Certain boats, oil platforms, factories, towers, and whatnot can fall under this trope, but certain cities, like the Energy Corridor of Houston Texas, or Pittsburgh before the 1960's also can be considered.
  • Everybody Owns A Ford: Subverted.
  • Everyone Calls Him Barkeep: Played straight very frequently. Calling something by its full official name is frequently reserved for scientists.
  • Everyone Get In Here: Conference calls. Also, there used to be this game people played with telephone booths ...
  • Everythings Deader With Zombies: There's a form of protest called "Zombie Walks." Played straight with the Hallow'een in-game event
  • Everything Trying To Kill You: Both averted and played straight depending on where and when you live.
  • Everythings Messier With Pigs (Subverted. The recent "Swine Influenza" arc seems to be focusing on intrahuman transmission, rather than zoonoosis.)
  • Evil Is Cool: A very popular trope among adolescents.
  • Evil Is Sexy: Inverted, according to some, who regard sexy as evil.
  • Evolutionary Levels: Shockingly averted. "Evolution" seems to describe the process by which species adjust to outside influences to maximize survival, as opposed to a process by which living beings get bigger, smarter, and more powerful over time that can be measured by "levels". An unheard of concept outside of this setting, one that remains controversial to this day.
  • Expansion Pack World: The uninhabited continent of Antarctica was retconned onto the bottom of the map to allow for a better budgeted, more dramatic remount of the popular "Race to the Pole" Tournament Arc. And the second half of the 20th century saw the addition of the new "Earth Orbit" and "Moon" regions as part of the accessible world. Of course, the much promised "Mars Mission" expansion has proven to be vaporware. Some would argue that everything beyond Europe, Asia, and north Africa is part of the Expansion Pack, with various degrees of justification. The Americas and the whole "people went there before 1492" retcon is particularly jarring. We stilled haven't finished uncovering all the juicy info about the Pacific Depths (version 3.2 Ocean Floor Patch) or the Amazon, there's still a lot of wildlife to catalogue and several Bestiaries to fill with creature names.
    • Though billions of other Daystars have been seen, thousands visible by just looking up at night, the present version of Real Life is limited to only one. The "Interstellar Travel" expansion in which they're included is presently quite a few shelves out of reach; the much punier "Mars" expansion is already proving to be a big deal to get. Fortunately, the present Daystar subscription will last for another couple of billion years before it expires.
      • The Earth subscription is valid for only another 500 million years. This subscription may be canceled at any time by rather large number of individuals...or possibly by the administrator.
  • Expy: Dinosaurs appear to have been recycled as birds. Some grass species were adapted into wheat, rice, and maize. A selection of early primates were polished up, given new appearances and a LOT of new powers, and appeared in later editions as humans.
  • Filler: Be honest. You're reading this at work, aren't you?
    • School, actually.
      • Teacher?
      • That would make it work.
  • Failed A Spot Check: Happens all the time, most frequently with small oft-used items such as keys, eyeglasses, and pencils. Many animals have camouflage coloring whose purpose is to invoke the trope deliberately, for catching prey or avoiding predators.
  • Fake Difficulty: You get only 1 life, no save points, and quest items/paths can easily be lost forever. Though, according to some religions, you get multiple lives, taking the form of a different character with each respawn. In addition, there are countless quest paths/items/what have you, to the point that no one will ever be able to write a full strategy guide (though many partial ones are in the works). Unless you mess up some early story arcs, you can usually have a decent score by the end.
  • Fake Longevity: Considering how Real Life boasts years of play, it's no surprise that almost a fourth of your time is spent either being in school/work or doing work that you've been given to take home from school/work. Also, you spend quite a bit of time doing things such as eating, sleeping (which takes an average of a third of your time), and bathing. And exactly what you're doing at this moment.
  • Fan Dumb: Hard to keep track.
  • Fan Fic: Fiction based off of real life is a multi-billion dollar industry. Real Life Fan Fiction often has very little to do with the source material, and is popular enough that there exists a wiki dedicated to categorizing common tropes.
    • Bio Pic: Fiction focusing on particular characters.
    • PWP: The pornography genre.
    • Crack Fic: Fantasy, and those weird tales that Grandpa NPC tells you.
    • Song Fic: Musicals
  • Fan Myopia: Oh, come on. Who doesn't know about Real Life?
  • Fanon: Hoo, boy.
  • Fan Service: Porn and strip clubs. Also movie stunts.
  • Fan Disservice: Sexual harassment and assault.
  • Faustian Rebellion: America, al Queada, Nazi Germany, to name a few.
  • Fetish Fuel: Once again, porn! Need not be sexual, as almost anything can be a turn-on to some people.
  • Final Death: You die, that's it for your character. Most believe that a Fluffy Cloud Heaven or The Nothing After Death follows. You may or may not be able to start over again, with a new character. No one's really sure. And depending on your beliefs, starting again may not be something to be proud of.
  • First Town: Every town could qualify as this, as there are billions of protagonists throughout the world.
  • Flame War: Both figurative and literal applications.
  • Follow The Leader: So many copycats, it's hard to find a place to start.
  • Forced Level Grinding: School.
  • Foreshadowing: If you watch real closely. Alternatively, you may call a psychic, but most players believe they don't work. Nostradamus' strategy guide is believed by some to be canon, but others argue otherwise.
  • Four Lines All Waiting: Europe, India, China and the New World civilizations developed independently for thousands of years.
  • Fourth Wall: Arguably the sturdiest Fourth Wall in existence. But see also dreams or psychoactives for the most reliable challenges to it.
  • Fridge Logic: Men have nipples.
  • Fridge Brilliance: Go to college, study any subject, see what happens. Also, look at the incredibly subtle foreshadowing to the rise of any historical leader and you'll be quite surprised how far back the signs go. Inferior writers usually can't get this except by accident.
  • Functional Magic: Rule Magic(the laws of physics) is slowly and laboriously decoded and verified by science and arcane mathematics, and implemented into Device Magic(technology) which anyone can use provided they can afford to buy it. Most players take this for granted. Also, Vancian Magic is the case for some of the particularly restrictive aspects of Real Life's Rule Magic, like thermodynamics and the conservation laws.
  • Game Breaker: Each era has an example. Steel, gunpowder, and the airplane are good examples. Currently, nuclear weapons. Such an extreme example that their usage is formally banned, and many want them to be removed completely.
  • Gay Option: Until recently, those who were found to have taken this option were ostracized at best. Nowadays you're allowed to take this option with little or no repercussions provided you live in the right area.
  • Genre Savvy: So-called common sense, though of course it's not nearly widespread enough to vitiate the drama.
  • Geo Effects
  • Getting Crap Past The Radar: The people have a right to know - but only what (and how) the Mainstream Media considers 'newsworthy', and in the process...
  • Get On With It Already: Characters in Real Life spend at least 12 years learning the background and physics of the world. Subverted in that those who finally finish find out that work is even worse.
  • Ghibli Hills: Some regions, but they are few and far between. And diminishing.
  • Glass Cannon: Humans are far from the toughest creatures on the face of the planet, but have invented powerful weapons to compensate for their poor defense. Thus, a human with a shotgun has a decent chance of slaying a bear in a fight, but if that bear manages to take the damage and keep going, despite heavy penalties to movement and HP, then it can quickly wipe out the human who attacked it.
  • Glory Days: There is a popular fan theory going around that this is what the recent Obama Arc will lead too. To most people, it was their childhood.
  • Goddamned Bats: Mosquitoes, bedbugs, rats in some places, as well as many others.
  • Government Conspiracy: There are some unconfirmed theories and several confirmed ones throughout the ages.
  • Grand Finale: There is fan speculation on whether the series will end with one, but in the meantime many of the most memorable arcs ended with this. Probably the most recent would be the very popular World War II arc which ended with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
  • G Rated Sex: Averted oh so very hard.
  • Green Hill Zone: Yards and public parks.
  • Grey And Gray Morality: Most conflicts between character groups are this.
  • Growing The Beard: Many agree that the series found its foothold when the concept of Humanity was first introduced.
  • Growing Up Sucks: But most agree it's worth it.
  • Guide Dang It: And to make it worse, there are lots of different guides with different advice!
  • Happiness In Slavery: Dogs, the poor bastards. Inverted with cats, the smug bastards.
  • Harder Than Hard: The International Baccalaureate high school program, said to exceed the difficulty of Honors and Advanced Placement classes. And of course, difficulty also depends on region - the school systems in some countries, like Japan or India are harder than anything you could find in say, the U.S.
  • Have A Nice Death: A thoughtful obituary is almost a given. Some lucky souls even receive two or three post-death debriefings, with dramatic displays costing large amounts of currency. But you only get to die once.
  • Heart Trauma: Firmly averted. If your heart is suffers physical damage, you'll get weaker or die, but your personality is unlikely to change. Replacing parts of the heart (or even taking out the whole thing and putting in a pump) does not alter people in any way that would be noticeable without a medical exam.
  • High Octane Nightmare Fuel: Nightmares.
    • Also, see the relevant section
  • High School Rocks: But only for those who manage to be popular because of good looks (usually), funniness and/or some respected talent. For others, high school is four consecutive Scrappy Levels.
  • Hilarity Ensues: One word: schadenfreude.
  • Hit Points: Averted. Life forms are too complex to sum up their vitals in a number.
  • Hitlers Time Travel Exemption Act: Either we can't manage time travel, or this rule is in effect.
    • Two other options: the timeline is unalterable, or if Hitler wasn't there something WORSE would happen.
  • Hope Spot: While there's life, there's hope.
  • House Rules: Many groups of fans have come up with their own sets of rules for playing, some considerably more restrictive than others. The game may well be more fun without them, but they are convinced that following these extra rules is worth more points. Disagreements about these different play styles have led to many nasty Flame Wars.
  • Humanity Is Superior: We've already conquered one planet, and there are plans on the table to add several more. Eventually.
  • Humans Are Bastards: A common belief on Earth, but it seems there's just about as many good people to counteract this.
    • Except they're all starving to death so yeah [[Crapsack World]].
  • Humans Are Cthulhu: According to environmentalists, animal-rights activists, and vegans (which groups tend to overlap). Some say the Internet feature justifies the characters in turning into this, particularly with the popular 4chan mod.
  • Humans Are Special: They're the only known species to communicate complex abstract ideas and make tools for making other tools.
  • Humans Are Warriors: We have several millenia of expirience with warfare, and while it's not a trait we're always proud of, we are very, very good at war.
  • Hyperactive Metabolism: Mostly averted, though a few lucky people subvert it by being Big Eaters that don't gain much weight.
  • Idiot Ball: Alcohol is often used to this end.
  • Idiot Plot: An unbelievable amount of characters had to be involved in a giant Credit Card Plot to start the current Financial Crisis miniarc.
  • I Got Better: Both played straight and averted. In rare cases, subverted; some characters may be cursed with autoimmune traits that turn their normal Healing Factor into auto-damage.
  • Immortality Procreation Clause: Played straight with all species if infant mortality is factored in (a few long-lived species, such as trees, can reproduce in great numbers, but most of their offspring die young). If birth control is available, human birthrates actually drop as the environment gets more conducive to good health, maintaining the inverse ratio of procreation to life expectancy.
  • Incendiary Exponent: Played straight in war scenes. Hilarity Ensues in chemistry lab backfires. Averted most of the rest of the time.
  • Insurmountable Waist Height Fence: Played straight for your first level or so. All non-twinks have the choice to avert this trope for a long time, but as your level reaches the max cap it becomes enforced again. Many players are so acquainted to this trope that they never attempt to break it. Some players on the other hand...
  • In The Hood: Averted. In most environments, wearing a hood tends to draw curiosity, if not outright suspicion. If the local culture or weather makes hoods commonplace, a hood won't cause a character to stand out, but it won't make her any less noticeable, either.
  • Infant Immortality: Brutally subverted: According to UNICEF about 25,000 children under the age of five are Killed Off For Real every day. In fact, the vast majority of animals die as larva or infants.
  • Infinity Plus One Sword: Again, the nuclear bomb. Restricted to people who hit the maximum Job Level for Politics, and with a lot of restrictions on it even then. That said, there are persistent rumours of bugs in the code that might allow unlevelled characters to gain access to assorted Infinity Plus One Swords. None have yet been demonstrated, but the rumours alone have made many in the fan base quite upset, especially a few seasons ago.
  • In Name Only: Goths today have nothing to do with the Goths that sacked Rome. Sadly, few people have even heard of the latter.
  • Inventory Management Puzzle Averted by a small number of people who take vows of poverty, but this is unusual and often considered deviant.
  • It's Easy, So It Sucks: Prominiscuous women, also known as My Girl Is Not A Slut. Subjective value: See also My Girl Is A Slut.
    • In some regions, people try to make life hard for themselves as much as possible through a combination of multiple jobs and full school workloads.
  • It's Short, So It Sucks: Averted. Some believe that life is short, yet so they try to make the most out of life. Ironically, unless you believe in an afterlife, this is the longest game you'll ever play.
  • It Gets Worse: The recent wave of celebrity deaths.
  • Insignificant Little Blue Planet: All known events that humanity(apart from astronomers, astrophysicists and cosmologists) considers to have any worth have occured on an insignificant little pale blue mote of dust called "Earth" by its even more insignificant inhabitants. Given the scale of the universe, what goes on here is an unimaginably small fraction of what goes on in the expanded Real Life-verse. Many fans hope for expansion packs to allow exploration of the rest of the 'verse, but most refuse to think about it. A lot of fan work contains guesses about the content that might be in any such expansion pack, however.
  • Izchaks Wrath: Try to rob a gun store and see what happens.
  • Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Deconstructed during several arcs, memorably "Holy Inquisition" and "War on Terror".
  • Karma Houdini - Not everyone, thankfully, but we all know of a few.
  • Killed Off For Real: Not just common, it's universal. Occasionally averted with last-minute desperation tactics, such as defibrillation and CPR, but no character can stave off Character Death longer than about 100 years.
  • Kill Em All - Every single member of the cast has eventually been killed off, and there doesn't seem to be any change in the script anytime soon. A few characters have been rumored to have been Put On A Bus, including Elijah, Enoch, Jesus, his mother, and Apollonius of Tyana.
  • Killer Rabbit - All animals (and people) fall under two categories: those that don't look dangerous but can kill or injure you horribly, and those that do look dangerous and can kill or injure you horribly.
  • Kill It With Fire: A form of Applied Phlebotinum called "fire" has been adapted into various forms of Depleted Phlebotinum Shells(flaming arrows, black powder bombs, flamethrowers, napalm, fuel-air bombs and laser-guided thermobaric missiles, to name just a few) in order to Kill Em All. See also Hellfire.
  • Kill It With Water: According to some, the GM decided after the first few seasons that the characters and plot were going completely Off The Rails. The GM felt that the best course of action was to drop a flood on everyone except for a few of the characters; just enough for a Reboot.
    • Ironically, water is a key component for every lifeform in the entire series. And will remain so for the foreseeable future.
  • Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: So far, this has held true in Real Life, from slings and stones, to bows and arrows, crossbows and bolts, cannons and shells(and guns and bullets), and more recently, guided missiles. And in the future, mass drivers like railguns and Gauss cannons provide a logical path for even further advancement of kinetic weapons. Energy Weapons have also existed for quite a while, in the form of fire, and recently a couple of experimental lasers as well, but have never been so prominent.
  • Kudzu Plot: So complicated, even the characters don't know what the hell's going on most of the time. Whether the author(s) do(es) themselves is hotly debated among the fans(apart from the issue of whether the author/s even exist).
  • Kobayashi Mario: It just keeps going and going.
  • Lampshade Hanging: Art, especially comedy. And this wiki, of course.
  • Leave The Camera Running: Most of the time.
  • Lensman Arms Race: If humans are 200,000 years old, the last 0.05% of the story's seen us go from crude rafts and sticks with sharp stones attached to nuclear weapons and space flight.
  • Lighter And Softer: The "Western Civilisation" subplot seem to have gone this way in recent seasons, though arguments abound that it's actually a very cunning and cruel subversion.
  • Light Is Not Good: Literal examples (sunburn, skin cancer) as well as regular examples (The Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, The Crusades.)
  • Like Reality Unless Noted: The Trope Namer. Played straight to the most part, except for the 'unrealistic' bits...
  • Linear Warriors Quadratic Wizards: The "nerd" class has a really hard time going through the early levels, especially High School and the PVP, while "jocks" can mostly go around doing what they like unhindered. The tables are slowly reversed as higher levels are reached, and a high-level nerd will usually be better at the game than a high-level jock.
  • Literary Agent Hypothesis: The Trope Maker.
  • Loads And Loads and loads and loads and loads and loads and loads of Characters— Nearly 6.9 billion to be exact. Not counting the other species. Not counting the chance of other life-possessing planets in the galaxy. Not counting the chance of other life-possessing galaxies...
  • Long Runners: 12,000 years of human civilisation measured from the start of the Neolithic, with many Missing Episodes along the way. 15 billion years back to the presently held beginning though, the Big Bang, which itself could be questionable. Several other series set in the Real Life-verse were also Long Runners, such as some fan-favorites, including the dinosaurs and mammoths, who were Killed Off For Real, but some scientists speculate that they could be resurrected through inserting their genes into other animals. Whether this will work is questionable. Dinosaurs weren't exactly Killed Off For Real. They've been having smaller, feathery appearances since before the Mammalian Order became prominent. And mammoth's smaller, bald cousin shows up from time to time. Others, like the Arachnids, have been around far, far longer, and show no signs of stopping.
    • And of course, bacteria, some of the very first characters to appear, still make up more than half of the cast list.
  • Lost Forever: Too many to count, and there generally isn't a warning. The good news is that it's still possible to progress even without a Lost Forever item.
  • Love Dodecahedron but usually not Played For Laughs
  • Love Hurts, but also Love Redeems, and sometimes frequently Love Makes You Crazy. All of these may be experienced by the same character at various points, in some cases multiple times.
  • Love It Or Hate It
  • Make The Bear Angry Again: Recent seasons, especially the high-point in the Southern Ossetia arc in the middle of season 2008.
  • Luck Based Mission: The lottery. Or surviving the Plague.
  • Macross Missile Massacre: Favorite tactic of militaries across the world, heavily used in air and naval combat. Combined with nukes to make a game breaking superweapon called the ICBM. It's becoming less popular as newer doctrines become popular. Especially in light of recent developments in the manner of war.
  • Magic A Is Magic A: Those dang laws of science.
  • Magical Computer: Most notable aversion... even if some seem not to realize this.
  • Magical Realism: May or may not be explainable by the psychiatry profession.
  • Magikarp Power: See that kid mutilating classic rock songs on his new guitar? Remember his name.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Played in every direction. Particularly memorable was during the WWII arc, where they ran rampant all over the place. The same arc featured a deconstruction with Oskar Schindler, a racketeer concerned mostly concerned with filling his pockets who has one of the most moving Heel Face Turns in the entire series. Also, some characters are convinced that the author is one of these.
  • Mega Neko: Lots! Lions, tigers, cougars, jaguars, leopards ... but they rarely make good pets.
    • Maine Coons, Savannahs and Norwegian Forest Cats are less-Mega Neko that do make good pets.
  • Meganekko: Also well-represented.
  • Mighty Glacier: Unfortunately, not quite as mighty as global warming.
  • Million To One Chance: Averted 999,999 times out of a million, as might be expected. However, this doesn't stop some characters from basing their behavior on fantastically unlikely events.
  • Min Maxing: Largely averted, as the most successful people are usually those who have bothered to build up their Charisma alongside whatever technical knowledge needed, and a great many people who have focused on building knowledge at the expense of social networking haven't done as well.
  • Mind Screw: Philosophy and Quantum Physics.
  • Misplaced Wildlife: Zoos. And invasive species.
  • Missing Episode: The reason archaeologists are still in business.
  • Mohs Scale Of Sci Fi Hardness: Way, way over on the hard side, to the extent that it accurately represents laws of physics that have not yet been discovered.
  • Money Sink: Some of which are required to survive. Real estate is a popular one whose necessity for survival is somewhat debatable.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Crossed frequently throughout the series, many consider this an unfair ploy by the writer to endear the viewer to the other side.
  • More Dakka: A popular tactic in recent past seasons.
  • Ms Fanservice: The Hollywood Females.
  • Munchkin: Scientists and engineers, whose choose jobs consisting of memorizing the complex equations and rules that govern Real Life so they can squeeze every last possible advantage out of them, including figuring out even more of the rules. Unlike other munchkins, though, their work carries with it a good deal of respect and prestige.
  • Must Have Caffeine: Coffee is second only to petroleum for gallons consumed per year.
  • Myth Arc: Somewhat of a subversion, considering the plot has grown so convoluted that some are beginning to question if there even is one.
    • However, there has been one ever since the end of the World War I arc. This set off the Depression arc, then the World War II arc, then the Cold War arc. Since then, it's been mostly quiet, but the War on Terror arc seems to be beginning a new one.
  • Nameless Narrative: Everything is nameless when introduced, but will receive a name if it sticks around humans for long.
  • Naughty Tentacles: Cephalopods (octopus and squid) actually do the nasty like this.
  • New Game Plus: According to religions that believe in reincarnation.
  • Nice Job Breaking It Hero: The best intents of mice and men ... have nasty unplanned consequences. Notably the environment, since humans have more power to alter it than any other species, and with great power ... well, you know. Thus we get hunting to extinction, overly efficient forest firefighters, DDT, climate change, invasive alien species (no, not that kind). In the non-environmental arenas, we have nuclear physics, foreign policy, medical malpractice, and many more.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Cancer, diseases, vehicle wrecks, wars, terrorism, the Titanic, real life itself on occasion...
  • Nintendo Hard: Many, many examples, from high-level school and college courses, to job-hunting during economic recessions, to simply trying to survive in war-torn countries. In short, life isn't fair.
  • No Fame No Wealth No Service
  • Nonstandard Game Over: The death penalty.
  • No Holds Barred Beatdown: The universe to pretty much everyone.
  • No Indoor Voice: Many examples, including cicadas, parrots, and humpback whales (yes, those "songs" are deafening up close, what did you expect from a creature bigger than a bus?)
  • No OSHA Compliance: While usually averted, it is played straight occasionally.
  • Not So Different: A common problem for political figures.
  • Nothing Can Save Us Now and Nothing Can Stop Us Now: These tropes have gotten a workout in recent seasons.
  • Not So Harmless: Many characters, although prominent examples include Adolf Hitler, an out of work ex-soldier wannabe artist turned fascist dictator, and Osama Bin Laden, a quiet, nice religious boy from a moderate, prosperous family turned mass murdering terrorist mastermind.
  • Novelization: Biographies, textbooks, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
  • Official Couple: Too many to count. Unlike nonreality, you might actually have a chance for a romantic fan fic not written about you.
  • One Hit Point Wonder: The human race is extremely fragile and can easily be killed with a single attack. Also subverted because humans are tougher than they look - time, though, eats up HP something fierce. Also, modern weaponry have made humans one-hit kills, and it would take a much longer time to bring one down with just hands.
  • Only Known By Their Nickname: Welcome to the Internet.
  • One Steve Limit: Averted massively.
  • Only Sane Man: "All the world is queer save me and thee; and sometimes I think thee a little queer." - Quaker expression.
  • Only Smart People May Pass: You're repeatedly tested on your knowledge in the "School" phase as well as the optional "College/Uni" phase. Depending on the character class you choose, you'll also have to do this kind of thing frequently during your job.
  • Ontological Mystery: Characters enter the world naked and crying with no idea whatsoever of their purpose for existence. Might all be a giant Shaggy Dog Story.
  • Our Presidents Are Different: Even more so starting with the Turn Of The Millennium arc.
  • Peoples Republic Of Tyranny: The more a country's name sounds like the personification of an ideal, the more likely it is to be the opposite.
  • Perpetually Static: Subverted.
  • Pinball Scoring: Some currencies' values are so low that one USD is equal to thousands of that currency. And then there's hyperinflation; post-World War I Germany, for instance, had bank notes with values as high as 100,000,000,000,000 marks.
  • Player Versus Player: Between Law/Crime and opposing Military players. Technically any player can engage, but it's not a very good idea.
  • Planet Of Hats: Averted six billion ways to Sunday, although this doesn't stop a lot of authors from trying to play it straight. Declining in popularity these days.
  • Plot Armor: Averted. The plot follows character development, rather than the other way around.
  • Poor Communication Kills: Played straight loads of times.
  • Possession Sue: A common practice in Real Life fan fiction.
  • Posthumous Character: Influential characters from early seasons can have surprising influence on later plotlines even after they die. The Doomed Moral Victor from the Rise of Rome storyline is now (arguably) the posthumous main character. The Wide Eyed Idealist The Chessmaster from the Arabia arc and the Jerk With A Heart Of Gold from the Bo Tree arc have been almost as influential, and even the Crazy Awesome Mad Scientist from the Restoration Arc (and his later counterparts in the World War I and World War II storylines) is still considered important.
  • Power Gives You Wings: Inverted — wings give you power! Just ask any Air Force.
  • The Power Of Rock: Played straight. Rock music was played to get Manuel Noriega to surrender during Operation Just Cause.
  • Power Perversion Potential: My, my, my. Where do we begin? This trope was the founder of one of Real Life's first job classes.
  • Present Day, Present Time: Always.
  • Press X To Die: Suicide.
  • Prestige Class: Doctor, lawyer, president.
  • Prequel: "Real Life Prehistoric"
  • Protection From Editors: The creator clearly believes the work is perfect as it stands and needs no editing. According to one (possibly apocryphal) anecdote, when one of the staff criticized the early script, the creator had him and his friends fired. Said ex-staff member and his friends would go on to form their own rival studio that would attempt to derail the characters and plots even further.
  • Purely Aesthetic Gender: Averted in the extreme. For instance, male characters have a weak point while female characters suffer a nasty debuff once a month. Actually, females have the same weak point that males do.
  • PWP: No matter what you expect it to stand for, it's played straight here.
  • Ragdoll Physics: Actually done right.
  • Random Number God: Character generation, which is especially weird thanks to requiring two players to generate a new one, each from a distinct half of the player base. Stats are based on the stats of several related characters, not just to two that instigated the generation of a new characcter, and has some mediocrely-coded randomization in choosing stats to use for the new character (and there are a LOT of stats!). Some other tiny random changes are also implemented, giving unique new values for stats, but a lot of the time these either have no effect on gameplay or actually hinder the new character. A good number of new characters are also deleted before gameplay really begins due to a poor stat roll or problems during the later stages of character generation. All in all, Real Life character generation is really fun at first, but becomes highly inconvenient later on, and downright painful at the end. Recent patches have introduced methods to generate characters without the usual player pairing, making a new version of the same character (with zero experience, of course), and even customizing the new character from the VERY START with much less interference from the RNG. All of these methods are still in the early beta stages, and have gotten a lot of outcry from the player base due to their game breaking potential, plus distaste at the high wealth requirement to even attempt them. Even then the character changes after generation, and can change based on interactions within the game, as well as self-modification which occures semi-randomly. Whew.. it's complicated.
  • Rasputinian Death: Trope namer.
  • Real Is Brown: It is. It's also many, many other colors, to the delight of species with color vision.
  • Reality Ensues: This always seems to happen for some reason...
  • Reality Is Unrealistic: Trope Namer
  • Real Life Writes The Plot: Well, it is the plot, but discoveries and wars are almost entirely based upon players' actions.
  • Reclusive Artist: So reclusive that there have been thousands of opinions about the artist: Some consider there to only be one artist, some consider there to be multiple artists, and some think it's all a big conspiracy and the work was produced without any artist.
  • Red Baron: The Trope Namer
  • Redemption Equals Death: Since Anyone Can Die, this trope comes in straight, subverted, averted, and every other possible combination. The straight version often spawns religions.
  • Redemption Equals Sex: Reportedly played straight in many ancient religions, averted in most cases today. Still played straight in Tantric yoga and a few New Age cults.
  • Refuge In Audacity: Oh, so many, many examples...
  • Replacement Scrappy: Too many examples. From the staff of your favorite Starbucks to world political leaders, at some point in your life you're guaranteed to have someone you like replaced by someone you don't.
    • Moving from one school, workplace, or area of residence to another can create a lot of these.
  • Ret Con: Changing the origin story from creation by a higher power to gradual, random evolution over billions of years. Note that the former was a Ret Con itself; some long-time fans fondly recall the various gods and divine intrigues that dominated the early seasons. Retconning also comes in the form of amnesia and blocking out memories (usually of traumatic experiences), though it's handled quite differently here than in most other series.
  • Rodents Of Unusual Size: Capybaras.
  • Rule Of Cool: Partially subverted by the obsessive emphasis on consistent physics, chemistry, biology, etc.—much of which turns out to be incredibly cool in itself.
    • Of course, this serves to make the true badasses look even better.
  • Rule Of Fun: Subverted. Learning to play guitar takes months of lessons and practice, shooting up friends kills them off for real and is a criminal offense, fighter jets have far more controls than an 8-way stick and "fire" and "bomb" buttons and can only move forward, making whole lines of blocks doesn't make them vanish, and sports take lots of practice, require you to be in great athletic shape, and can cause more serious injuries than worn-out thumbs.
  • Rule Of Funny: Played straight.
  • Rule 34: To the point where Real Life porn is a major industry.
  • Sanity Ball: It's mine, all mine, and you can't have it!
  • Save Scumming: Averted, there appears to be no way to save the game at all.
    • Unless this theory is correct and we all have unlimited save games.
      • Nightmare Fuel alert. It also mean that despite you are reading TV Tropes, there are countless "you" lying dead in countless universes.
  • Scenery Porn: Sets the standard for all other scenery, and most media can't hope to measure up. 126 million light receptors per eye makes for some really good graphics, and the resolution cannot be beat. Full 3D, pan, dynamic light and shadows, adjustable focus, and (with the proper upgrade equipment) zoom. AND a visible spectrum of several million colors. Also has changing times of day, living landscapes, near-infinite fractals, and weather effects that are never the same twice.
  • Schizo Tech: Because of a lack of Product Placement, new equipment has to be bought, resulting in people with the latest game console, a 5-year old cell phone, 13-year-old car and a fridge that's older than its owner. Increasingly averted for characters that buy from companies that practice planned obsolescence. With a little careful purchasing though, one can still play this straight.
  • Science Is Bad: It becomes responsible for most of the more horrific weapons used throughout the series. This is somewhat of a derailment, for the majority of the main continuity science has been largely beneficial, it is only really in the last couple of seasons that this becomes an issue. Subverted somewhat when the most destructive weapons wind up encouraging peace via mutually assured destruction. There are also hints that lesser weapons sometimes have a similar effect, but this seems to be far less consistent. That, and it's been proven many times before in the series that science overall is a great thing when it's used for good, meaning that this trope is averted.
  • Schematized Prop - many, most notably the digestive system. The reproductive system also deserves mention.
  • Schmuck Bait: Oh, so much.
  • Scoring Points: Many classes in schools and colleges use points to determine your grades. Also, credit scores.
  • The Scrappy: Bill collectors for very justified reasons. Have a very bad reputation for being rude, acting like thugs, and attracting the criminal element. Make their money at the expense of families going through tough times. This round of exceptionally rough economic times has become the golden age for collections.
    • Also, cops. Not only are there criminals who hate them, but there are non-criminals who dislike cops who abuse their power.
  • Scrappy Level: Middle school, for most people. High School too, it varies. Large numbers of the fanbase might argue that its entirely made up of Scrappy Levels.
    • Also, The "IRS Audit" level has proved roundly unpopular. Same goes for the "minimum wage job" stage. However, the "divorce" stage has is probably one of the most hated in the entire game.
  • Scrappy Mechanic: Certain diseases/symptoms, also the fact that you have to queue up for many things because of limited server capacity.
  • Screw The Rules I Have Plot: Usually averted since no one can figure out what the plot is. Though some events make you wonder...
  • Screw The Money I Have Rules: Non-profit organizations.
  • Screw The Rules I Have Money: Some major corporations exhibit this trope.
  • Screw The Rules I Make Them: Common enough to be represented by an entire job class — they're called dictators.
  • Sealed Evil In A Can: Many viruses.
  • Sealed Good In A Can: Coca-Cola, the Marines, penicillin, iPods, paperback novels ... Your Mileage May Vary of course.
  • Seinfeld Is Unfunny: The reason why a child sees everything in the world as wonderful, while with most adults, familiarity has bred contempt.
  • Sequel Displacement: World War II is far more remembered than World War I.
  • Serial Killer: A few characters seem to be this.
  • Series Fauxnale: The Great War arc (later known as World War I) was advertised as "the war to end all wars". It's been ninety seasons now since it finished.
  • Sex Montage: It's happening right now.
  • Ship Tease: Spreading rumors about characters dating each other. Prevelant in many characters' high school arcs and among the Celebrity job class.
  • Ship Sinking: Allllll the time. Occasionally cause for a Heroic BSOD.
  • Show Within A Show: With a large cast of characters, it's not surprising that every major group have a large number of fictional and nonfictional novels and books, a tribute the the attention to detail the Creator of the series took in his/her worldbuilding.
  • Single Biome Planet: Averted.
  • Sliding Scales
  • Slippy Slidey Ice World: Antartica, Siberia, the local ski resort... all there.
  • Spoiler: Subverted, since many characters purport to offer information about future story arcs, which later will turn out to be blatantly wrong. Possibly the best example in the current arc is a spoiler about The End Of The World As We Know It found in ancient Mayan hint books which will fail to happen in the year 2012.
    • Many would argue that the above example is an Urban Legend Of Zelda — the hint books only actually predict the end of a calendar, a la the millennium.
  • The Slow Path
  • Spinoff: Second Life. Widely considered to suffer from severe Adaptation Decay, although its fans will argue that it's merely pragmatic.
  • Squick: Approximately 25% of the internet. Shock sites compose at least 10% of this. Certain sites can actually be High Octane Squick. Heck, there's a bunch of this outside the Internet.
  • Standard Status Effects: Humans are vulnerable to poison, paralysis, sloth, blindness, beserk, confusion, and death. Some would say cursing can happen as well. Petrification is rare but a gamebreaker, see Pompeii. Muteness is almost unheard of (though speech impediments are common).
  • Star Trek: While there is no Starfleet, there is NASA, which is a civilian agency which utilizes military personnel and attempts to explore space. It even includes a ship called Enterprise in its fleet (though it doesn't fly), and includes the phrase "Where no man has gone before" in its literature. They're still working on warp drive and teleporters though.
  • Stop Having Fun Guys: The responsibilities and reduced free time that comes with growing up.
  • Stop Helping Me: Parents. Sometimes this persists well into the adult arc and even the married-with-children arc for some characters.
  • Stripperiffic: Also known as varying degrees of "indecent exposure."
  • Sweet Polly Oliver: Female crossdressing for a good cause.
  • Tactical Rock Paper Scissors: An extremely complex web, constantly changing with technology. Factors for any military unit include firepower, mobility, survivability and dozens of niche roles. Most units are able to counter their counters as well, and are highly versatile.
  • Tear Jerker: Many, but the biggest one would be the unexpected and tragic death of my goldfish.
  • The Game. You are losing it.
  • The Many Deaths Of You: Averted, in that death is usually one-time and permanent. However, there are a lot of different ways to do it.
  • The Tetris Effect: Billions of people are addicted to Real Life. Curiously, those who try to end their addiction are considered mentally disturbed and given psychological "help" to keep them addicted.
  • That One Boss: The SATs. Also, interviews for those who've neglected their social training.
    • Occasionally, an actual boss.
  • Theory Of Narrative Causality: Usually averted. But occasionally played straight.
  • The Ghost: "She". Your character never meets her, but a lot of other characters know her, and she shure is talkative.
  • They Changed It Now It Sucks. Constantly, many people complain that the present series is not as good as 'the olden days'.
  • Thirty Xanatos Pileup: When you've got over 200 states and polities competing for every possible advantage, as well as countless factions within each one, it's more or less inevitable.
  • This Is Reality: Justified.
  • Throw It In: The series is an ambitious project, in that none of the actors are given scripts to memorize, and almost all of the dialogue is ad-libbed.
  • Tier Induced Scrappy: The homeless.
  • Timed Mission: Each human has, on average, 66.12 years to live. This time limit can be extended if you're healthy enough. Unfortunately, it's also luck based, as your time limit can be drastically reduced depending on where your character lives; for example, a character based in Africa is likely to have a lower time limit than one in Europe. Sometimes your characters time limit is unexpectedly ended by just plain unfair things, like being hit by a car.
  • Time Keeps On Slipping: Which, combined with Final Death and the lack of Save Points makes for incredibly unforgiving difficulty.
  • Too Awesome To Use: Money, especially amongst the upper classes.
  • Too Dumb To Live: There is a reason why The Darwin Awards exist.
  • Took A Level In Badass: Played straight by countless individuals, but can also happen on a larger scale, up to and including an entire species. Fan favorite moments include the Agricultural, Industrial, and Digital Revolutions.
  • Travel Cool: A lot of the human race's engineering efforts yield cool machines to suit their Badass Normal style. The higher-level examples of the Cool Starship, however, have not yet been unlocked as nobody has the cash for that expansion pack yet.
  • Tropes Are Not Bad
  • Tropes Are Not Good: See also Television Is Trying To Kill Us.
  • Trope Maker: While it is under recognized as a source of tropes, the fact remains that this series is, quite literally, the baseline for most any work you can name.
  • Trope Overdosed: To specify, it is the Ur Example, Trope Namer, Trope Maker, and Trope Codifier for not only everything on this page, but every trope on this wiki, if Shows Within Shows count.
  • True Art Is Incomprehensible: Zig zagged.
  • Truth In Television
  • Try To Fit That On A Business Card: Monarchs since the dawn of time and accomplished British citizens, among others.
  • Turned Against Their Masters: Slave rebellions.
  • Uncanceled: The Cuban Missile Crisis was one notable example.
  • Unobtainium: Oil, uranium, gold, diamond, and lots more(depending on what you want, where you are, and what you can give for it). An extreme case would be antimatter, which is extremely difficult to create and annihilates anything it touches into pure energy(and hence must be stored in electromagnetic fields).
    • Nicely subverted with pure aluminum, which used to be more valuable than gold and is now used to store cheap beverages.
  • Unpleasable Fanbase: Many fans aren't satified with their character in Real Life.
  • Unreliable Narrator: To many, the mass media.
  • Unstable Equilibrium: Played brutally straight, with the poor being stuck in the infamous cycle of "can't earn money -> can't go to school -> can't get a job -> can't earn money", while the rich are able to buy up other businesses, making them even richer.
    • Averted with socialistic countries where said school is affordable by mostly everyone, and if not, you can buy required stuff used. Of course, get too socialistic and money may not be too useful anyway.
    • Played straight with job hunting. People with experience can more easily score jobs, while those without are much less likely to be taken seriously.
  • Unwinnable: Go ahead. Just try it.
    • Since all achivements are open to interpretation, winning is possible by some definitions and impossible by others.
  • Useless Useful Spell: The aforementioned Game Breaker nukes. Everyone is so afraid of facing retaliation for using just one that they remain stuck in the inventory.
  • Vaporware: Fusion reactors, flying cars, nanobots, etc. The slower-than-expected development of some things, though, is counterbalanced by surprise inventions like cheese, nuclear bombs and lasers. Flying cars have been completed, but they turn out to be nothing more than Awesome But Impractical gimmicks. They're still being worked on, alongside Orbital Tourism.
  • Violation Of Common Sense: Laws don't stop people from doing bad or completely stupid things. In fact, the Darwin Awards exist to reward blatant violations.
    • Also most of Quantum Physics and Relativity - evidently, the Universe doesn't bother about complying to the common sense of those insignificant little humans on their tiny pale blue bit of dust called Earth.
  • The Virus: Way too many to count; some of them are also High Octane Nightmare Fuel. Some of these tend to be Game Breaking Bugs that lead to many a Downer Ending.
  • Wake Up Call Boss: Elementary (or "primary") school.
  • Wake Up Go To School Save The World: Averted, sadly.
  • Wall Banger: The biggest one of all time.
  • War Is Hell: Though the degree varies from war to war, country to country, soldier to soldier, and citizen to citizen. It also depends on the technology in play: An F-22 Raptor pilot flying at a cool altitude of 50000 feet, casually shredding enemy planes while remaining invisible and practically invincible himself, certainly has a much better time than a poor infantry grunt in the trenches of World War 1 or the jungles of Vietnam.
  • Weaksauce Weakness: Allergies.
  • Welcome To Corneria: Averted if you're talking to an adult human of normal mentality. Playing it straight may be a sign of developing language skills, retardation, or a psychological disorder.
  • Wham Episode: Many, but the most recent one would be the infamous 9/11 episode.
    • ...In America.
    • And fifty years earlier, there was the Hiroshima episode, which ended the lengthy World War II arc and began the Cold War arc.
  • What Does This Button Do: Depending on the button, anything from "nothing" to "nuclear Armageddon, god help us all." The number of safeguards on a button is a rough (but inexact) guide to how big a thing would happen if you pushed it.
  • What Do You Mean Its Not For Kids: It is for kids. It's also for everybody else, which usually results in a few Growing Up Sucks moments on the way to adulthood.
  • What Measure Is A Non Cute: Cultural example: In most European countries rats are considered to be pests and unclean. In India there is a 600-year-old temple of clean rats, with every generation free of disease, that are friendly with people. Anthropomorphic faced animal vs. non-anthropomorphic/fuzzy animal example: Pandas have billions of dollars spent on their survival and they don't contribute greatly as a species, while other very important insects and other critically endangered species are ignored massively in comparison, even though it will actually cause big problems to see them go.
  • Who Would Be Stupid Enough: You bet your ass someone would. (It's rumored that while the series population is continually growing, the sum of their total intelligence remains fixed.)
  • Wide Open Sandbox: The effective playing area is a single small planet that requires immense resources even to leave for a few days, so almost no one does. Thanks to the planet's transparent atmosphere, you can see immense distances into the Wide Open Sandbox; you just can't get there. May be a Broken Bridge, or the content just hasn't been added yet.
    • Well, technically you can get there if you're willing to wait for ages. And if warp drives are ever invented, the Sandbox is effectively opened.
  • Wiki Walk: Many of the more interesting conversations in life, not all of them held on controlled substances.
  • Wild Teen Party: Can you say, spring break?
  • The Woobie: Baby seals, so much so that they've become a trope in themselves.
  • Word Of God: Too many to count. For many religions, the Bible (in whole or part). For Catholics, the Pope (under certain circumstances). For Muslims, the Qur'an and Hadith. For still others, the voices inside their head.
    • The difficulty of proving one knows the author(s) means that at best this is Word of Dante and is more likely Fanon.
  • World Half Empty/A World Half Full
  • Xen Syndrome: Old age.
  • Year Inside Hour Outside: "I swear I was thirteen just twenty minutes ago- wait, it was twenty years? Wow. I knew The Nineties were in there somewhere but....Wow."
  • You Fail Biology Forever: Averted, though not for lack of trying. Humans have come up with a wide variety of methods to twist biology or explain its mysteries, and most of them do not work.
  • You Fail Law Forever: Played straight often enough to keep the bad lawyers in business and give the good ones a bad name.
  • You Fail Logic Forever: Quantum physics - which proves that the Universe needn't comply with human intuition. See also: The Mc Coy.
  • You Fail Religious Studies Forever: Every time a new religion starts or there's a schism, the practitioners of the old school will cry this trope.
  • You Have Researched Breathing: Subverted; you don't need to know how something works to use it, but if you want to research your bodily functions, go ahead. Played straight in the Biology Class and Firearms Licence levels.
  • You Kill It You Bought It: The implied purpose of every war in history. If those in charge claim they're fighting for something else, they're either lying or misinformed.
  • You Killed My Father: Played straight with Genghis Khan, who decided to kill everyone in the Tatar clan to get his revenge after his father was killed by them. He didn't stop there. It actually became a very large story arc which affected millions and is still looked back on by many of the fanbase.
  • Your Mileage May Vary: See Difficulty By Region, Nightmare Fuel. Some characters get over 100 seasons and others don't even get one.
  • You Should Know This Already: Certain pieces of information are required to survive. Many of these are self-evident. Some are not.
    • Breathing is a notable one.
  • You Suck: Inverted. You rock!
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