The Newest Ones in the Book

Fur and Loathing and '80s Hair. Two of these right here.

Some tropes are old. Some tropes are very old; you'll find those in The Oldest Ones in the Book. But there are some tropes that are really young, that still have that "New Trope Smell" — sometimes as recent as the Turn of the Millennium. Anything that has its origin after 1980 is one of The Newest Ones in the Book.

Of course it's hard to tell just how old a trope is, and it may turn out some we thought were new were actually older. Or some may turn out not to be that old, so they belong here. Some may have a clear beginning past this point, likely due to the Trope Maker being recent. Either way, it's a trope that simply didn't exist, at least in the way we know it, before Disco died.

Use the discussion page to determine if one is older than this.

Compare Newer Than They Think; a lot of the following tropes very well will be.

Contrast The Oldest Ones in the Book, Older Than They Think.

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Tropes:

Indices:

• New Media Tropes
• Video Game Tropes
• Wiki Tropes

• 420, Blaze It: The first mainstream mention of 420 as the weed number was in 1991.
• '80s Hair: Because The '70s had its own hair looks.
• '90s Anti-Hero: This edgy, violent, ruthless avenging superhero archetype first appeared after the publication of Watchmen in 1986 and was most popular in 1990s comics.
• '90s Hair: The evolution of '80s Hair.
• The Abridged Series: Since the Trope Maker started in 2006. And if you count The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), that show was created in 1981, so it still counts as a "newest one in the book".
• Actual Play: The earliest known example is Record of Lodoss War from 1986, however the genre didn't become popular until the new 10s.
• Ad Reward: Emerged from the rise of smartphones and the subsequent boom of server-based App Store games. Often serves as an alternative method for game developers to gain revenue from "free-to-play" games besides Microtransactions.
• The Ahnold: A parody of 1980s action heroes, especially those played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
• Alcubierre Drive: Professor Miguel Alcubierre proposed the drive in 1994, though the inspiration came from explanations given for Star Trek's warp drive in the technical manuals.
• Alien Autopsy: The Trope Maker is X-COM: UFO Defense, released in 1994.
• All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles: Emerged as a result of the anime "OVA Boom" in the late 1980s and early 1990s, specifically the dubs of Vampire Hunter D in 1992, Ninja Scroll in 1995, and Urotsukidoji: The Legend of the Overfiend in 1993 in particular
• Anal Probing: The earliest reference in any media to this activity between extraterrestrials and humans comes from Whitley Strieber's book Communion: A True Story, first published in 1987 (although note that Strieber didn't claim to know whether or not the beings he saw were extraterrestrials).
• Angels in Overcoats: The trend of angels wearing longcoats likely originated with Wings of Desire, which came out in 1987.
• Animated Shock Comedy: Starting in The Renaissance Age of Animation and continuing into The Millennium Age of Animation, shows like South Park and Family Guy would appeal to older audiences using vulgar comedy.
• Area 51: This top-secret Air Force base entered the popular consciousness in 1989 after a man named Bob Lazar claimed to have worked with alien spacecraft there.
• ASMR Video: First emerged on YouTube in the 2010s.
• Auto-Incorrect: Didn't exist before spellcheck, didn't become common until the smartphone revolution.
• Avoid the Dreaded G Rating: At least in The United States, the current associations of different Media Classifications began to take shape after the PG-13 rating got introduced in The '80s.
• Bad Influencer: There were some very, very early examples at the Turn of the Millennium, but this trope didn't start becoming mainstream until The New '10s and The New '20s, when social media became both ubiquitous and a viable career path.
• "Basic Instinct" Legs-Crossing Parody: Basic Instinct came out in 1992, introducing this iconic pose with it.
• Blank White Eyes: Only started popping up at the start of the New Millennium.
• Bob Ross Rib: Ross entered the public eye through his series The Joy of Painting, which started in 1983.
• Bonding Through Shared Earbuds: In-ear headphones or "earbuds" have existed since at least 1984, but took off with the introduction of Apple's iPod MP3 player in 2001, and thus this trope became popular with it.
• "The Breakfast Club" Poster Homage: The Breakfast Club was released in 1985, along with this iconic poster.
• Bullet Time: Originated with the obscure 1981 action film Kill and Kill Again, but now overwhelmingly associated with The Matrix films.
• Campaign Comic: DM of the Rings, running from September 2006 to September 2007, is the Trope Maker.
• Catfishing: Someone using a fake profile to lure someone else into an online relationship or for other means has been made possible through social media.
• Cats Love Laser Pointers: It wasn't until 1990s when the laser pointers became popular.
• Celebrity Break-Up Song: While "You're So Vain" by Carly Simon is arguably the Ur-Example, this trope really got kick-started when the marketing campaign for "Cry Me a River" by Justin Timberlake made clear that this song was about Timberlake's break-up with Britney Spears.
• Cell Phones Are Useless: Cell phones were not in general use until the early- to mid-1990s, although they begin to appear among the higher classes (see: Dallas) in the '80s.
• Character Blog: The Mars Rovers have Live Journals from 2006. The Japanese character blog Chiyu 12-sai also dates back to 2001.
• Chew Bubblegum: Comes from Roddy Piper's ad-libbed line in They Live!.
• Chupacabra: Although reports of farm animals drained of blood began in the 1970s, the term "Chupacabra" and the description of the creature as we know it originated in 1995, probably visually inspired by the monster Sil from Species.
• Civvie Spandex: This was a trend started by Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man in 1988, and then popularized by Rogue in the 90s.
• Clickbait Gag: A parody of online writing tactics, the term "Clickbait" itself only goes back to 2006.
• Climate Change Allegory: The scientific consensus about human-caused climate change emerged in the 1980s.
• Consulting a Convicted Killer: First codified by the character dynamic between FBI Agent Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter in the the 1981 novel Red Dragon and later popularized through Anthony Hopkins' portrayal of Lecter opposite Jodie Foster in the 1991 film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs.
• Creepy Camel Spider: While camel spiders have been known for centuries, the popularity of Internet photos of them in the 2000s, and subsequent urban legends surrounding them, propelled them to pop-culture icon status.
• Crystal Clear Picture: Fixing the de-sync between In-Universe screens and the camera to avoid Raster Vision was not possible with older CRT monitors until the '80s. It was Videodrome in 1982 the first production to figure out how to do it.
• Cute Slime Mook: Originated in Dragon Quest, which debuted in 1986.
• Cyberbullying: A new form of bullying made on the internet in general (websites, forums, social media, etc.) since the Turn of the Millennium.
• Date My Avatar
• The Day the Dinosaurs Died: The idea that the Cretaceous extinction event was caused by a meteor impact was proposed by Luis and Walter Alvarez in 1980.
• Deliberate VHS Quality: VHS was the dominant physical video medium until 2002, when DVD (which had been around since 1996) overtook it in sales. Before that, black-and-white footage would be used to make the video look older instead.
• Demonic Head Shake: A visual effect codified by the 1990 movie Jacob's Ladder.
• Devious Dolphins: The unpleasant aspects of bottlenose dolphins became known in the 2000s.
• Digital De-Aging: Use of CGI to make an actor appear younger.
• Digital Piracy Is Evil: Although there were plenty of efforts to strictly enforce copyright laws, it only became a media trope some time around 1980 with the "Home Taping is Killing Music" campaign.
• Dumped via Text Message: A trope heavily centered around the use of instant-messaging, which didn't exist until the 1990s.
• Embarrassing Browser History: Started with the move away from text-based Internet browsers in the early- to mid-1990s.
• Emo Teen: Whiny teenagers are probably as old as humanity itself, but Emo Music originated in the late 1980s and emo as a teen subculture wasn't popular until the mid-2000s.
• #EngineeredHashtag: See also #HashtagForLaughs.
• Environmental Narrative Game: LSD: Dream Emulator, released in 1998, might be a proto-example, but the genre as we now know it only really came into its own in the late 2000s: the first version of Dear Esther, generally considered the Trope Codifier, was released in 2008.
• Everything Is An I Pod In The Future: Apple introduced the iPod in 2001.
• Fake Texting
• Faux Furby: The real-life Furby toy was initially released in 1998.
• Freddie Mercopy: Expies and parodies about Queen frontman Freddie Mercury based on his handlebar mustache look of the early-to-mid 1980s.
• Fur Against Fang: Vampire: The Masquerade from 1991 more or less popularized this trope, and its spin-off Werewolf: The Apocalypse from 1992 codified it. Prior to that, werewolves and vampires were usually depicted as allies or at least connected.
• Fur and Loathing: It was just around since the early 1980s. There were people against fur before, but the effect on general media was just since that trope.
• Gay Option: Great Greed released in 1992, was the first game with a gay romance released overseas.
• Gentle Gorilla: The Killer Gorilla became a Discredited Trope in the 1980s by Dian Fossey's studies on gorillas revealing their gentle nature.
• Goofy Feathered Dinosaur: Sinosauropteryx, the first definitely non-avialan dinosaur with feathers, was found in 1996. This conclusively demonstrated that at least some dinosaurs had feathers, and forever changed the public's image of dinosaurs.
• Googling the New Acquaintance: The World Wide Web was not created until the late 80s and this practice seemed to become common near the turn of the millennium.
• Greedy Televangelist: Earliest examples are largely in song form from the early 80s, with Ray Stevens and "Would Jesus Wear a Rolex?" as a Trope Maker. It was the minority opinion as well, until the late 80s, when Jim Baker and Jimmy Swaggart's highly publicized scandals truly cemented this trope, ending the portrayal of televangelists as Good Shepherd types practically overnight.
• Gun Fu: It was invented for the 1986 film A Better Tomorrow.
• Gun Kata: It was created for Equilibrium in 2002, though some earlier works, mostly anime, featured gun fights with similar elements.
• Hanahaki Disease: The trope originates from the early 2000s.
• #HashtagForLaughs: Popularized by Twitter, which was started in 2006.
• "Here's Johnny!" Homage: This specific variant of Axe Before Entering originated with Jack Nicholson's improvised line in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror classic The Shining. In turn, that line itself was a Shout-Out to how Ed McMahon on The Tonight Show would introduce Johnny Carson.
• Hoax Hogan: Expies and parodies based on the popular American wrestler Hulk Hogan, who popularized the Professional Wrestling during the 1980s.
• I Approved This Message: Came into being following the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002.
• I'm Going to Disney World!: The iconic ads started in the late 1980s.
• Instant Humiliation: Just Add YouTube!: YouTube was first founded in 2005.
• Internet Safety Aesop: Started in the mid-1990s as more people began using the internet.
• Internet Stalking: It's been around since the internet became more widespread.
• iProduct: Started with Apple's iMac computers in 1998.
• Jenny's Number: The Tommy Tutone song "867-5309/Jenny" was released in 1981.
• Jurassic Farce: The book that spawned the Jurassic Park franchise was written in 1990, and the first movie was released in 1993.
• Konami Code: Originated with Gradius in 1985.
• Leet Lingo: Originated in the early forums of the primordial 1980s internet.
• Legacy Board Game: The Ur-Example is 2011's Risk Legacy. However, the older Tabletop RPG is related, and you could see similar ideas in certain games, like Magic: The Gathering with its now-abandoned ante mechanic.
• "Lion King" Lift: Parodies of the "Circle of Life" scene in The Lion King, which was released in 1994.
• LOL, 69: Like other internet slang, seems to have first emerged in the late 1980s.
• Magical Girl Genre Deconstruction: The genre has precursors but it was codified by 2011's Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Even the oldest precursors date only to the mid 1990s.
• Make-A-Wish Contribution: Make-A-Wish first came into prominence when it was founded in 1980.
• Make the Bear Angry Again: Now that the Soviet Union is no longer around as a convenient antagonist, a common trope in post-Cold War speculative fiction is to have The New Russia regain its former power and menace.
• Mammoths Mean Ice Age: Was cemented in the public mind after the decline in popularity of the Hollywood Prehistory trope in The '80s. Prior to that, woolly mammoths were often depicted living in a warmer climate alongside dinosaurs, like in The Flintstones.
• Mandela Effect: The term arose in 2009, when Fiona Broome talked about how she and many other people mistakenly believed Nelson Mandela passed away in the 1980s, when in reality, he would pass away in 2013.
• Mascot Horror: Started with Five Nights at Freddy's in 2014.
• Mascot with Attitude: Popularised by the character of Sonic the Hedgehog in The '90s.
• Mayan Doomsday: Predicted for 21 December 2012, so the panic kicked into full gear as that date approached — only for nothing out of the ordinary to happen that day. Although doomsayers claimed inspiration from the Maya calendar, the sensational apocalyptic interpretations are much Newer Than They Think. Ethnic Maya themselves — who are still very much around, mind you — found all the hullabaloo quite baffling.
• Meek Mesozoic Mammal: Arguably achieved popularity in the late '80s when Hollywood Prehistory lost its popularity and the Dinosaur Renaissance had started taking effect in popular culture, influencing the public that the rule of dinosaurs and other reptiles during the Mesozoic Era prevented early mammals from growing and developing beyond rodent- or possum- or badger-like forms.
• Michael Hackson: Based on Michael Jackson's public image as a celebrity, particularly his adult career from The '80s to the Turn of the Millennium.
• Michael Jackson's Thriller Parody: Based on the music video for Michael Jackson's "Thriller," released in 1983.
• Microtransactions: Started in the 6th generation of video games. Though, arcade games could be considered a precursor of microtransactions, requiring a player to pay for each continue.
• Millennium Bug: These fears originated in The '90s as the Turn of the Millennium drew closer and closer. While many laughed at the hysteria after January 1st of 2000 passed, the main reason nothing happened was thanks to many programmers putting in the tireless hours of correcting this error before it did any damage.
• Moe: "Moe" is a phenomenon of the 21st century, although prototypical forms existed in the 1980s and 1990s.
• Mons Series: The Ur-Example was Digital Devil Story and the game franchise it spawned in the late 80s. The trope was not codified and popularized as a genre until Pokémon in 1996.
• Moody Trailer Cover Song: Popularised with the trailer for the 2010 film The Social Network.
• murder.com: Relies on widespread and easy access to the internet, which was not available before the 90s. The earliest examples appear to be from Millennium (1996) ("The Mikado", 1998) and Homicide: Life on the Street ("Homicide.com", 1999).
• My Little Phony: Based on the My Little Pony franchise, which started in 1981 and has continued to the present day. Parodies of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, which began in 2010, are even newer.
• Mysterious Cube of Rubik: Although developed in 1974, it become an international phenomenon in the 1980s.
• Noughties Drama Series: "Noughties" refers to the decade from 2000 to 2009, known on this wiki as the Turn of the Millennium.
• Old Media Playing Catch-Up: Releasing outside the net takes longer.
• Old School Introductory Rap: The first (and potentially only) rap song to use this structure was released in 1980, with the versions in works of fiction not popping up until nearly a decade later.
• Omegaverse: Primarily a fanfiction trope, originated in the Supernatural fandom during The New '10s.
• Online Alias: Started in the 90s with the advent of the World Wide Web and has become popular starting in the late 00s due to the influence of social media.
• Parodies for Dummies: The first For Dummies book (DOS for Dummies) came out in 1991.
• Parodies of Fire: The original Chariots of Fire came out in 1981.
• Pineapple Ruins Pizza: Pineapple only began to pick up steam as a pizza topping after the turn of the millennium, leading to the backlash by those who dislike it.
• Phonýmon: Parodies of Pokémon, which began in 1996.
• Please Subscribe to Our Channel: Appeared with the rise of Youtube.
• Pluto Is Expendable: Especially noticeable in media after Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet in 2006.
• Pocket Dial
• Pompous Political Pundit: Started around the same time as the neoconservative movement within the American Republican Party, sometime in The '80s or The '90s.
• Pop-Up Texting
• Post-Soviet Reunion: Russia reunites with post-Soviet states into an alliance, supranational union or superstate, after the USSR had dissolved in 1991.
• Power Up Mount: Originated with Rush from Mega Man (Classic) and Yoshi from Super Mario Bros., both of whom debuted in 1990.
• Predator Pastiche: Based on the monsters from the Predator franchise, the first installment of which came out in 1987.
• Predatory Big Pharma: Medicines only started being produced and/or circulated en masse at the beginning of the twentieth century; companies to produce them weren't created until after the Second World War. Processes to keep track of pharmaceutical spending in government and medicine only started in the U.S. in 2013. The opioid epidemic (commonly associated with this trope) started in the late 1990s, and therefore fictional presentations tend to follow that.
• Premium Currency: One of the logical conclusion of Microtransaction, where players can pay real money to buy special in-game currency (which are often much harder to get than its regular currency), which in turn can be used to buy premium items and what-not.
• Raiders of the Lost Parody: This one is just past the cutoff date — Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981.
• Raptor Attack: Raptors or dromaeosaurids, while discovered in the 1920s and became better known to science in The '70s, were popularized by the release of the Jurassic Park franchise in The '90s.
• The Real Spoofbusters: A parody of Ghostbusters, which was first released in 1984.
• "Reborn as Villainess" Story: A genre where a woman is reincarnated in a romance story as the evil love rival, which started in the 2010s.
• "Risky Business" Dance: The movie Risky Business came out in 1983.
• Rei Ayanami Expy: Rei herself originated in the 1995-1996 anime Neon Genesis Evangelion.
• Sailor Senshi Send-Up: The Senshi appear in Sailor Moon and Codename: Sailor V, which debuted in 1991.
• Sanity Meter: Another one that's just over the line, as the first edition of Call of Cthulhu introduced this in 1981.
• Savage Spinosaurs: Spinosaurus, despite being discovered in the 1910s, was made one of the famous dinosaurs by Jurassic Park III in 2001. Baryonyx, the spinosaurid that revealed the crocodile-like head distinctive of the family, was discovered in 1983 and named in 1986.
• School Grade Hacking: Codified by WarGames (1983).
• Selfie Fiend: Selfies have existed for decades but became popularized with the rise of social media in the 2000s.
• Shallow News Site Satire: Said news sites came into vogue in the 2010s.
• Shifted to CGI: Computer animation did not come to mainstream prominence until The '90s, and the first documented case of this was with the Frosted Flakes mascot Tony the Tiger in 1998.
• Shotoclone: Based on Ryu and Ken from the Street Fighter games, the first of which came out in 1987.
• Simpsonwave: The first Simpsonwave videos came out in the mid-2010s.
• Sluggish Sloths: Sloths were quite rarely featured in media until the 2010s, though they've always been known to be slow.
• Snowy Sabertooths: Like with mammoths, the association with saber-toothed cats with cold, snowy environments rose to popularity after the decline of the Hollywood Prehistory trope in The '80s.
• Social Media Is Bad: Social media didn't start becoming widespread until the 2000s, so stories about its detriment didn't pop up until a while later.
• Solar Punk: The term was first coined in 2014.
• Spinosaurus Versus T. rex: The two giant theropods first clashed in 2001 in Jurassic Park III.
• Standard Japanese Fantasy Setting: The trope was first started in the early 80s, with Sword World RPG and Record of Lodoss War, being codified in 1986 with Dragon Quest.
• Status Cell Phone: It began popping up in the 1980s and lasted well into the 2000s, however the widespread usage of cellphones has since caused a quick decline in the trope.
• Stock Light-Novel Everyman: Light novels became popular in the 2000s.
• Stock Light-Novel Hero: As stated, light novels became popular in the 2000s.
• Stock Shōnen Hero: Codified by Goku from Dragon Ball who debuted in 1984. The trope dates back to the 1980s.
• Stock Shōnen Rival: Codified by Vegeta from the aforementioned Dragon Ball who debuted in 1988 and by Seto Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh! who debuted in 1996.
• Stock Shoujo Heroine: This didn't become a stock character until the 1990s when series like Sailor Moon and Boys over Flowers made it popular.
• Streisand Effect: Inspired by Barbra Streisand's 2003 efforts to suppress photographs of her estate, which instead made them more well-known.
• Student Debt Plot: Until the Reagan Administration, while tuition wasn't free, it was subsidized to where you could easily cover the remainder with a part-time job at minimum wage (which was also much higher relative to the cost of living).
• Suspicious Missed Messages: The trope assumes the characters involved have access to phones or computers on a daily basis, in normal circumstances.
• Tech Bro: Tech jobs began being seen as glamorous with the Internet revolution turning the nerd/jock rivalry into a Discredited Trope. Really took hold in the 2010s with apps like Facebook making their developers extremely wealthy.
• Teenage Mutant Samurai Wombats: Based of course on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who debuted in The '80s.
• Terminator Impersonator: The Terminator franchise, which inspired these guys, began with The Terminator in 1984.
• Trenchcoat Brigade: John Constantine of Hellblazer fame, the Ur-Example here, debuted in 1985.
• The Trope Formerly Known as X: Parody of the most common workaround for the deliberately unpronounceable glyph that Prince used as his stage name from 1993 to 2000.
• "Truman Show" Plot: Inspired by the movie The Truman Show made in 1998.
• Trumplica: Donald Trump rose to mainstream prominence in the 1980s, so caricatures of him started appearing in the same period. The newer, Trump-as-President version dates to 2016 onwards.
• Two Gamers on a Couch: Started about 1998 or so.
• Useless Without Cell Phones: As old as the touchscreen cell phone.
• Valley Girl: Popularized by the 1982 Frank Zappa song, which inspired the 1983 film Valley Girl
• Video Review Show: Have existed since the invention of YouTube in 2005.
  • Let's Play: Became popular in the early 2010s.
  • Mid-Review Sketch Show: Popularized by The Angry Video Game Nerd and The Nostalgia Critic around 2008.
• The War on Terror: Started with the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
  • Post-9/11 Terrorism Movie: A specific genre of film based on the above.
• Vampire-Werewolf Love Triangle: Became popular by the second book in the Twilight series, New Moon, in 2006.
• We Didn't Start the Billy Joel Parodies: Based on Billy Joel's 1989 song "We Didn't Start the Fire"
• Weirdly Underpowered Admins: While computer networks with admins go back to the 1960s, this trope arose in storytelling when the public gained access to the internet in the mid-90s.
• Wacky Startup Workplace: Started to pop up in fiction in the early 2000s.
• Why We Are Bummed Communism Fell: Nostalgia for the Cold War era after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.
• Wonderful Werewolf: This trope was likely popularized by Teen Wolf in 1985. Prior to that, werewolves were almost always depicted in a villainous or at least unfriendly light.
• You Can't Handle the Parody: Originated from a line by Jack Nicholson in Rob Reiner's 1992 film A Few Good Men.
• YouTube Kids' Channel: This trend began in 2009 at earliest and only became popular circa 2013.
• YouTuber Apology Parody: Came into form in the 2010s.

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