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Troperiffic
aka: Troperrific
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You know you want to watch it! While some works love Playing with a Trope and others are so lacking in self-awareness that they play everything painfully straight, there are some gems that take delight in their tropes and then turn them Up to Eleven. This is especially common in Reconstructions, where all the narrative conventions that made the genre fun are present in full (and generally goofy) force, or parody works, usually of the affectionate variety, where the whole point is to laugh at as many tropes as humanly possible.
So, the grizzled veteran will jump on a grenade. The Kid Hero will find that last bit of Heroic Willpower to fight off The Virus and vanquish the newly freed Big Bad once and for all. The seven Runes of Borax will be gathered when the planets are aligned to free the Ultimate Evil who will inevitably turn on the evil overlord.
In short, works that are deemed Troperiffic apologize for absolutely nothing and just have fun with every convention or tried idea and taking it to places never thought possible. MST3K Mantra will be sometimes be a requirement to enjoy the work, because without it, Troperiffic works can come off as confusing. Then again, a good Troperiffic work will be fairly obvious about it in some way.
Note that one person's Troperiffic is another person's Cliché Storm, although most Troperiffic works have a certain level of Lampshade Hanging, sarcasm, or underlying love for the genre the work exists in. That, and Rule Of Cool in copious amounts.
Compare Serial Escalation, Exaggerated Trope. A work that is verifiably like this can be said to be Trope Overdosed.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Record of Lodoss War is based on a Dungeons & Dragons campaign its creator played. It shows. And yet it's still a classic.
- On the other hand, Slayers skewers all of those very same cliches (with a good healthy dose of pop culture references) for laughs.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann! A Kid Hero, an Idiot Hero and a Small Girl, Big Gun fighting fate with Humongous Mecha and In the Name of the Moon speeches. A pure hearted lost princess. Yours is the drill that will pierce the heavens!
- Gao Gai Gar as well. In fact, GaoGaiGar may beat TTGL in sheer Super Robot Camp.
- There's a reason the Haruhi Suzumiya series is on the Trope Overdosed list up with the long-running series and major franchises, despite being twenty-eight episodes long, with a few scattered mentions of the unanimated novels. There's also a reason we named the title character Goddess of Tropes, and it's not just the obvious.
- Cowboy Bebop is a Noachian deluge of tropes and clichés from countless genres, from heroic bloodshed to spy films to spaghetti Westerns to blaxploitation to space opera and more. It appropriates them, it subverts them, it plays them straight, it pays loving homage, and all the while it does its own thing.
- The first episode of The Tower of Druaga (which the creators have put up online
 '') comes out swinging, hitting just about every RPG trope possible (and a few Giant Robot tropes in the process). Subverted in that it's all in the hero's head.
- Mahou Sensei Negima!: 31+ characters, each with some character-type of every form (some with many) used throughout Anime and Manga history: The Vampire (in victorian-styled clothes) stands atop a gothically designed building in the moonlight◊, the mercenary gunslinger uses Bizarre and Improbable Ballistics while charging massive bills for her services, The Medic wears a red-rimmed white outfit, the extremely shy librarian has privacy-invading mind-reading powers, and the main heroine has a magic-negating power and wields an Anti-Magic Paper Fan of Doom-turned-BFS, and that's just for starters. All set up in a universe that fully embraces Fantasy Kitchen Sink in a crazy boarding school, it plays every trope it explores well with irony, humour, wit and the occasional lampshade (sometimes to the point where no bulb is left bare). And Video Game references. Lots of Video Game references.
- Code Geass is a fifty-episode series about a robot war, a magical Evil Eye, and a comedic high school played for as much drama as goddmann possible, with an absurdly colorful cast of characters.
- Getter Robo: If there's a Super Robot trope, it's in here. If there's a Real Robot trope, it's probably in here too. And you can expect them all to be turned Up to Eleven.And everything associated with Hot Blood is in Getter Robo. Also dinosaurs.
- Kanokon: Sure, other hero/heroine duos get by on The Power of Love, but can they summon several story fireballs of love? Didn't think so.
- Sailor Moon. The first anime to (successfully) combine the Magic Warrior / Magical Girl Genre with a Sentai or team format. It set the standards for many that came after it and thus has a lot.
- Vision of Escaflowne: A Shojo heroine, a shonen hero, giant robots, Cat Girls, an Ordinary High School Student Trapped in Another World, Love Dodecahedrons, Gender Bender, and more. The show seems to deliberately throw in as many anime-related tropes as possible. What's more, it refuses to limit itself to just shonen or shoujo tropes, so it makes use of both. We have extremely complicated Love Dodecahedrons involving copious amounts of bishonen in a war-torn world where Giant Mecha duke it out.
- Outlaw Star is generally regarded as one of the most trope-crammed Space Westerns in fiction. As one reviewer puts it:
"This show gets a free pass for being the most wish-fulfilling sci-fi title ever. Everything you can love about sci-fi is here: space races, space combat, diverse planets, alternate dimensions, weird aliens, hot aliens, aliens of questionable gender(seriously, what is that?◊), giant robots, bio-androids, human cyborgs, cold-sleep beauties, shapeshifting beastmen, laser- gun fights, sword fights, fistfights, paintball, Mad Scientists, Tao magicians, robotic panthers, kung-fu housecats, and a Hot Springs Episode that is actually funny.
- The recent GAINAX-animated, 3-episode OVA adaptation of Cutey Honey takes the campiness of the '70s anime and cranks it up to 12! * why it's twelve but not eleven.]]
- The producers of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha are big Super Robot fans, which explains the sheer number of tropes that the franchise has utilized.
- Heroman seems to be turning out this way, especially if you know Stan Lee. The story so far is your generic Kid Hero-recieves-giant-robot-by-fate storyline. The hero has only one friend, and then there's a cheerleader Love Interest, two Mad Scientists, a Hot Teacher, and the The Government who are stereotypically evil and care only about their country's interests. There's more when you throw in a Missing Mom and Disappeared Dad combo, aliens who have no complex motives for world conquest, and the hero's sister who's made her return to his life after some time away. While these are the staples of Saturday morning cartoon shows, die-hard anime fans have viciously criticized the show for it's Pro-Americanism-meets-Marvel-comics-meets-80s-animation approach as opposed to the more serious kids shows that Japan often produces. As the second arc begins, the series is beginning to show a little edge, but not enough yet to bring back those who criticized it for being too American.
- Black Lagoon has been described alternately as a love letter to the action movie genre, a Stealth Parody of it, or even both. In any case, it certainly takes many of the genre's tropes Up to Eleven.
- There are very, very few tropes that Excel Saga doesn't mock, and pretty much none that get played straight, since each episode is an Affectionate Parody of a different movie or television genre.
- What do you get when Gainax makes a Magical Girl anime with the weirdness of FLCL, the HSQ of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, the Refuge in Audacity of Bayonetta, and the art style of The Powerpuff Girls? Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, that's what.
- Sekirei.
- Ouran High School Host Club lampshades or lampoons all the old classic shojo manga tropes, to hilarious and sometimes sweet effect.
- The World God Only Knows heavily relies on the main character's ability to invariably recognize numerous Dating Sim tropes and Stock Character archetypes, which it plays with in every possible way.
Comedy
Comic Books
- Astro City is extremely casual about things like, say, Earth being the only portal between the realms of the warring Frigions and Thermeons. Even their names are troperiffic.
- Gold Digger takes tropes from a half-dozen genres, superheroes, SF, fantasy, martial arts flicks, Indiana Jones-style adventure movies, and mixes them all together.
- Invincible seems to flip back and forth between this and Subversion of the superhero genre.
- PS238 takes every last superhero-related trope in existence (and a few unrelated, just for good measure), deconstructs them, reconstructs them, plays them straight (though rarely) and averts them. Next thing you know, they're dancing on the tables, wearing lampshades and chugging frothy mugs of water. And it does it all while taking place in a public school.
- Top 10 takes the Astro City concept to an absurdist extreme with a city literally populated by nothing but superheroes, allowing for every trope of the genre to develop and take center stage.
- Nextwave. To borrow from Word Of God:
- Sin City plays every trope Frank Miller loves.
Fan Works
- Shinji and Warhammer 40K takes all the respective tropes from its parent series and mixes in heaping helpings of Serial Escalation, Crazy Awesome, Rule Of Cool, and HSQ.
- Compare any fic by Killashandra to the Big List of K/S Clichés. Yet, she is one of the biggest names in the Star Trek Slash fandom, and her fics aren't half bad, either.
- From the Pokémon fandom, Latias Journey and its sequel. It helps that the author is a troper.
- Kyon: Big Damn Hero is a Haruhi and TV Tropes crossover. Yes, a series already on this list has been crossed over with this site.
- Fanfiction is SO Cliched, a Pokémon fic which variously subverts, lampshades, or deconstructs practically every fanfic cliché in the book.
- Doom Repercussions Of Evil gets special mention for sheer density. The page lists 31 tropes at the time of this writing: roughly one trope every seven words. It's even noted that the works page is longer than the story itself.
- Hunting The Unicorn is a Deconstruction Fic that mixes Glee with The Last Unicorn, and is naturally on its way to this. It seems to gain several tropes with every update (and is now well past the hundred mark), which is not helped at all by the author being a fellow troper.
- Decks Fall Everyone Dies has an awful lot of tropes for a Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series / Moulin Rouge! Film Fic. There does seem to be some Reconstruction attempted of both works.
- Calvin & Hobbes: The Series uses a lot' of tropes from several genres: adventure, science fiction, the occasional film noir...
Films — Animation
- Redline is possibly the most troperiffic racing movie ever, rivaled only by Speed Racer, and with even more insanity and more explosions, and it will explode with its color and art style into your retinas forever.
- The Princess and the Frog mixes all the best parts of the Disney Animated Canon in a bowl, adds a few twists for extra spice, then deep-fries it like a beignet.
- Megamind advertised itself saying "The superhero movie will never be the same again." Granted, it was the same, but only for the first fifteen minutes or so... and then we have some lovely plot twists that kind of turn a parody of Superman into its own engaging story. Whether or not you like this film, you probably have to admit that the people working on this movie REALLY knew their Superhero Tropes well; just look at Megamind's Character Development and you'll get what I mean.
Films — Live-Action
- Sucker Punch
- Wanted, the film of the comic book is an incredibly played-straight The Hero's Journey, or more accurately Anti-Hero's Journey (it also took some liberal inspiration from The Matrix).
- Arguably, the entire work of Timur Bekmambetov, be it Russian- or Hollywood-era. He is fond of playing common film tropes unflinchingly straight — all while adding enough tongue-in-cheek remarks and intentionally over-the-top antics. As Anthony Lane put it in The New Yorker,
How, for example, does [Bekmambetov] make a cup of coffee? My best guess, based on the evidence of the film, is that he tosses a handful of beans toward the ceiling, shoots them individually into a fine powder, leaves it hanging in the air, runs downstairs, breaks open a fire hydrant with his head, carefully directs the jet of water through the window of his apartment, sets fire to the building, then stands patiently with his mug amid the blazing ruins to collect the precious percolated drops. Don't even think about a cappuccino.
- Pirates of the Caribbean both subverts pirate/adventure movie tropes and plays them straight. It even presents unrealistic tropes straight with a realistic twist at the end. For example, Barbossa shoots Pintel, a reference by the writers to when the bad guy in a movie shows how evil he is by killing one of his own men, which would lead to him not having a lot of henchmen left. But Barbossa and his men are immortal, so he gets to shoot Pintel with no repercussions! Hooray! Another happens when the prisoner in the next cell from Jack tells him that he's "heard stories" about the Black Pearl, and how, whenever it attacks a city, it never never leaves any survivors. Jack's response: "No survivors? Then where do the stories come from, I wonder?"
The second Pirates of the Caribbean film even includes a parody/homage to the "hero endures a whipping" scene (a trope of old pirate films, long before it became a subverted form of fanservice in exploitation films), which is played out similar to old pirate movies, only that the captain and the crew that sentence Bloom's character to the punishment are a bunch of half-human monsters, and he only receives a few hits before he is spared.
- Speed Racer never even tried to justify any of the weird things in the original, and instead ran with them as fast as the Rule Of Cool could possibly allow. If you try to take it at all seriously you're watching the wrong damn movie.
- Kill Bill is this as well, Quentin Tarantino's love letter to the katana and basically every other action film trope ever. It draws liberally from old kung fu flicks, old violent exploitation movies and old spaghetti-westerns.
- Grindhouse: Planet Terror takes those silly B Movies from The Seventies and brings their So Bad, It's Good charm all the way to So Cool It's Awesome.
- Star Wars mixes the Westerns, Samurai movies, and pulp sci-fi George Lucas loved as a kid. He also studied The Hero With A Thousand Faces intensely while writing it. It is worth noting that Star Wars is one of the biggest Trope Codifiers in history.
- Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!: I'm sure the next film will be written by scanning this website for any they missed.
- Enchanted is entirely based on Disney gathering up a list of both tropes from its classic animated films and from modern romantic comedies, putting them in one movie, and subverting, inverting, and generally dicking around with and laughing at all of them.
- Shoot 'Em Up revels in turning every Gunplay Trope in existence up to levels even John Woo wouldn't dare to.
- Tropic Thunder is basically one giant parody of Hollywood and movie-making as a whole.
- Zombieland. It's what happens when a Genre Savvy Action Survivor teams up with a Crazy Awesome Badass in a Zombie Apocalypse.
- Creepshow is a pastiche of 1950s horror comics, reveling in their predictability and storytelling symmetry.
- Whip It combines the standard sports movie with a side of Teen Drama and corresponding Parental Issues. It's a story that's been told many times before, but it's done well enough that you probably won't mind.
- Carriers is one big collection of post-apocalyptic survivor film tropes from Mad Max to Zombies.
- Avatar combines this with Doing It for the Art. Yes, James Cameron knows exactly how cliched he's being, and he doesn't really care.
- Sick Girl has so many Horror Tropes it's insane.
- The Fifth Element. Mysterious Waif MacGuffin Girl? Check. Large Ham Sissy Villain? Check. Ultra-manly man Action Hero played by Bruce Willis? Check. Rubber Forehead Aliens, hovercar chases, Waif-Fu, the Ultimate Evil, and the world being saved through The Power of Love? Check, check, check, check, check. This movie is practically cheesy sci-fi incarnate, and it's AWESOME.
- Stardust pretty much plays every fairytale trope to the hilt. An earlier example of the same is The Princess Bride.
- The Expendables. There's a reason why it's currently the trope's picture.
- Mortal Kombat: Annihilation was apparently written with a copy of the Evil Overlord List at hand to make sure that every single point possible (excluding the high tech ones) was prominent in the plot. #1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 20 (in practically every scene), 21, 22, 24, 26, 29, 32, 33, 34 (my personal favorite), 35, 36, 39, 53, 55, 56, 58, 64, 73 (the entire point of the movie!), 75 (more so in the first movie, but still here), 78 and 88 are all done in true Up to Eleven style.
- Black Dynamite finds a way to work in almost every relevant trope, filmmaking convention, and even plotline from 70s Blaxploitation films in the course of creating an Affectionate Parody of the genre. According to Word Of God it was even deeper in that the actors were actually playing the fictional actors making the film.
- The Quick and the Dead puts every Western stock character into a Quick Draw tournament to find The Fastest Gun in the West
- TV channel Five US are currently celebrating '80/90s action film tropes via the medium of hair rock full of lampshades. Celebrates (at least, just the lyrics) Car Fu, whatever-the-heck-the-trope-is-for-indestructable-hair (although they show a Hair Reboot in the video), Dodge the Bullet (while showing Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy), Stuff Blowing Up, Good Old Fisticuffs, Outrun the Fireball, and Pre-Mortem One-Liner within the space of under a minute.
- Hot Fuzz
Literature
- Every Simon R. Green series ever. The characters are literally walking tropes, complete with their catchphrase and taglines which they often introduce themselves or others with. Jon Taylor, in particular, often tells people, "It's Jon Taylor and Suzie Shotgun, otherwise known as "Oh God it's her, run!""
- The Chronicles of Prydain, by Lloyd Alexander, are gleefully full of Older Than Print tropes from Welsh myth. And they're still awesome. Although he does take a few liberties for purposes of fiction — for instance, converting Arawn to an Evil Dark Lord.
- John Barnes's One for the Morning Glory, where all the characters have Medium Awareness that they are in a Fairy Tale, so that tropes are invoked, lampshaded, and even relied on — but not excessively, since they don't know for certain what their roles are.
- David Eddings' Belgariad. An intensely derivative work treading over ground walked by fantasy novels since time immemorial and still managing to be an enjoyable read. And his Elenium uses a lot of the same tropes as The Belgariad, but is often considered by fans to be even better. It's after that that things start getting dodgy...
- Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible gleefully describes a street-leveling superbattle involving a world-threatening Mad Scientist with tons of tricks up his sleeves facing down a normal human with an animal on the chest of his uniform, a lightning-summoning fairy, a bipedal tiger, and a flying invulnerable woman, started when the Mad Scientist was just trying to drink some coffee. Almost perfectly invincible flying man with heat-beam eyes saves a lovely reporter from constant kidnapping by a villain intimately tied into his past, dies and has a massive funeral, or rather, fakes it for a very short time, and always saves the world. The bad guy defeats the good guys and ties them up in Death Traps. Famous heroes sacrifice themselves to save the planet from warring aliens, while villains never die and always escape, or go to Cardboard Prison. No one finds these events strange or unbelievable. Very shocking in a book where said Mad Scientist wonders why he doesn't find a career that'd make money rather than involve him being beaten up by powered heroes, and the bipedal tiger is known to have back problems.
- John Moore's Heroics for Beginners is a send up of all the swashbuckling and RPG clichés that ever were. In fact, the whole premise of the novel is about a Prince who goes off to fight the Big Bad to win the hand of the Princess with the help of "The Handbook of Practical Heroics" (which is essentially a user's guide to Genre Savvy). The Evil Overlord, He Who Must Be Named, makes it disturbingly obvious that the writer has read the Evil Overlord List. His ventilation ducts ARE too small to crawl through. From the back cover:
When a seemingly crazy, poorly dressed soothsayer tells you not to let a magical talisman fall into the wrong hands, take him or her seriously. DO NOT laugh it off and leave said talisman simply lying around on a side table; you might as well just end the world yourself. — The Handbook of Practical Heroics, p. 134
- Garth Nix's The Old Kingdom books are rife with tropes but make them all work.
- Jim Butcher is particularly good at this.
- Pick a Terry Pratchett novel. Any Terry Pratchett novel. The man seems to have a fetish for tropes, as his novels consist entirely of deconstructing, reconstructing, parodying, averting, subverting, and inverting various tropes of all shapes and sizes. Coupled with his decisively British humor, it makes for consistently entertaining literature.
- Rudyard Kipling's "The Three Decker" is a defense of (not to say exultation in) the Troperific three-volume novel.
- Stardust takes every fairytale trope Neil Gaiman could think of and turns it Up to Eleven.
- Harry Potter. Mostly because it was such a lengthy series, but contains just about every type of character you can imagine.
- Like with the Terry Pratchett example above, take any Kim Newman novel. From the Anno Dracula series about an Alternate History where Dracula won to the Demon Download novels; in which Elvis Presley fights Eldritch Abominations with a Cyborg heroine.
- The entire Enchanted Forest Chronicles is full of references, subversions, deconstructions, and parodies of various fairy tale and fantasy tropes, with nearly every character highly Genre Savvy.
Live-Action TV
- The A-Team. Part of the appeal is knowing, blow by blow, how each episode will play out before you watch it. There will be a scene where B.A. throws a guy over a car. Murdock will act silly and tick B.A. off. Face will fall in love with every remotely attractive woman he sees. It's just fun. And lots of machine guns will get fired, but no one will get shot. The Big Bad's car will ramp off another vehicle, fly twisting sideways over a ground camera, and crash on its roof. The Big Bad and his Mooks will crawl out, uninjured, and surrender. The basic formula stays the same, but the writers switch up the specifics. Take Murdock, for instance: he'll act crazy, of course, but how? Will he decide he's a cab-driving superhero? Pretend he's Captain Ahab? Act like an artsy filmmaker? Psychoanalyze a bunch of pecans while switching between a German accent and just plain German? ...And yeah, he did all of those things.
- Chuck seems to tend towards this, with many tropes played straight, though often for laughs. It's predictable, but humorously so (often dialed Up to Eleven). Someone sets a trip wire to stop Thanksgiving thieves at the Buy More? A bad guy will trip over it before the end of the episode.
- Burn Notice embraces a wide variety of tropes and proceeds to use, subvert, deconstruct, avert, and in general play with all of them. Sometimes the show follows a pretty clean formula for the individual stories, and unfortunately that is its main flaw. But in the narration there is more than a dozen quotes you could use to describe an individual trope that are so specific you know they did it on purpose.
- Power Rangers RPM is wonderfully aware of inherent unavoidable silliness of Power Rangers, healthily lampshades it, reconstructs it, and still manages to crank it Up to Eleven. Want proof? Head on over to the entry for the series at your own peril.
- Human Target takes action move tropes and dials them Up to Eleven resulting in one of the most awesome action shows on TV.
- Glee, in that it relies heavily on plot clichés and a very large amount of character tropes. It's quite predictable, but never completely in the way you'd expect.
- iCarly and it's use of various Kid Com staples.
- The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. unashamedly plays with every trope in the book in pursuit of the Rule Of Cool and Rule of Funny. Even Dead Horse Tropes.
- Community. Abed is a troper. He invokes tropes.
- Supernatural invokes all the Did We Just X Cthulhu tropes.
- Remote Control, the MTV TV trivia Game Show that revolved around a TV junkie-turned-game-show-host and parodied just about every game show in existence and then some, naturally played with as many Tropes as it could get its hands on.
- Doctor Who is a show about a time travelling alien that fights other aliens in different times. It has used every science-fiction trope in the books, and even named some of them. Notable that in its nearly 50 year run, its not only used most sci-fi tropes, but also ones belonging to fantasy, historical fiction, horror and comedy. And that's not even touching on things like character tropes.
- Degrassi. Just look at its page. It's basically explored every possible angle of the Teen Drama, not to mention being the successor of the shows that created the genre in the first place, and is now a certified Long Runner.
- Everybody Hates Chris did this with Race Tropes.
Music
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40000 takes every sci-fi trope and cliché imaginable, paints it black, pumps it full of a cocktail of every drug known to man, sets it on fire, sends it off into space screaming WAAAGH! and waving a chainsaw sword. As an example, Space Marines are recruited with an extreme form of The Spartan Way which only one in every hundred aspirants survive, given years of insanely dangerous training and religious indoctrination to turn them into utterly fearless, pitiless fanatics. They're equipped with gigantic millenia-old suits of Powered Armour and spend their days fighting unkillable zombie robots, gigantic flaming-head sex demons and the like. This is what one faction does with one trope as background for its basic troops choice. And they have Chainswords.
- As implied at the top of the page, Dungeons & Dragons campaigns can get like this. Really, the game is designed so that an enterprising DM can run a fantasy campaign based around just about any model: versatility is the game's greatest strength. The 4th Edition DM's book actually encourages it:
Don't be afraid to steal ideas from books, movies, and other sources for your personal use. The DM's job is to entertain, not to be original.
- What Warhammer 40000 does with sci-fi, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay does with fantasy. Okay, maybe it's not quite as whacked-out, but it's still a pretty awesome mish-mash of every fantasy trope you could care to name. One example is The Empire: A Fantasy Counterpart Culture of the Holy Roman Empire led by a particularly awesome Emperor (who runs around with either the Reikland Runefang or Sigmar's own warhammer, and rides either a dragon or a griffin).
- "Exalted is a game where one of your main antagonists is Death, Creator of the Underworld. Except there's several of him, probably six or seven. Oh, and he's got 13 dread henchmen, one of whom was probably you at some point in time. Also, Hell has a personal grudge against you this time. Did I mention Magical America regularly trains and sends ninjas out for you personally? Ninjas specially trained in *** -kicking? Which, if they won't work, they keep giant robotic suits of armor on reserve for. Oh, and the Transformers have united under Omicron, and are invading. The Jedi have corrupted Heaven and usurped your rightful place as the Masters of Everything. Your ex-wife just dropped by, and she's a two thousand year old shape-changing man-eating monster now, interested in maybe going on a date next Thursday. Your best friend from your last life and while growing up now seeks to cover all the lands of Middle Earth in darkness, if he can just find this damn ring. And your God has the world's biggest crack habit, and needs some serious rehab." — Darius Solluman
- Genius The Transgression, a fan-made line of the New World Of Darkness, is filled to the brim with science-fiction tropes and treats the Applied Phlebotinum tropes as blueprints.
- Grave Robbers From Outer Space, a card game about making low-budget genre movies that both mocks and glorifies the numerous cliches and archetypes of a variety of genres.
- Gurps Cliffhangers: The GM is urged to avoid subtlety and use every pulp fiction cliche he can think of because a game based on pulp fiction should have cliches.
- Cleopatra's Caboose, a tongue-in-cheek European-style board game that throws in just about every cliched Euro-game theme or mechanic the designer could think of: trains, ancient Egypt, bidding, building, special powers, resource management, limited actions...
- Strike Legion is so derivative it digs right out the bottom of Cliché Storm and becomes this. A MST.
- Tabletop Game/Monsterpocalypse uses every trope used in a Kaiju setting.
Toys
Video Games
- The first Atelier Iris is this to a fair number of people. A girl with wings! A catgirl! A hero on a vague quest for knowledge and reputation! A wisecracking older dude who's along mostly just because! Ancient evil! Recent evil! Ineffectual Sympathetic Villains! And yet, the game plays with the cliches just enough (such as making The Hero the White Mage of the party, and making him the butt of every joke imaginable partially for it yet still making him seem legitimately badass and awesome) that the game just clicks for a lot of people.
- Anything Blizzard Entertainment ever made. Nothing in their game catalog is even remotely original but they have a knack for taking every single High Fantasy, Heroic Fantasy and Space Opera cliché in existence, throw them into a blender and then slooooowly cook the resulting stew into something so polished and superbly entertaining it somehow becomes fresh and delicious again.
- City of Heroes is essentially one big Shout Out, Homage, and Affectionate Parody of superheroes as a whole in MMORPG form, with the players all encouraged to join in the fun.
- Command & Conquer of course, where else can you find such amounts of Science Fiction, tanks, military, social, political, tanks, religious, technology, tanks and design themes, both in a cheesy and serious way? Did I mention the tanks? And don't forget the characters! Kane Lives!
- Dead Or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball disposes of the male characters, plot and the whole Fighting Game thing to focus on the Jiggle Physics of girls in bikinis and a sport that best shows it off.
- Evil Genius lets you play the role of a '70s Diabolical Mastermind in all its over-the-top splendor.
- I Wanna Be the Guy takes all the classic Nintendo Hard "Fuck You"s from all those old 8-bit Side Scrollers, takes them to ridiculous extremes, and then causes you to explode into a million little bloody bits while laughing the entire time.
- Kingdom Hearts. Playing that game, you spend half of your time laughing as every single cliché you've ever seen pops up nicely in a row, and the other half with your finger glued to the button to see what happens next. The Messiah Sora, Rival Turned Evil Riku, and Distressed Damsel Kairi are each the pure, distilled embodiments of their roles in the series. Hey we're taking about a game that's a crossover between two of the most troperiffic franchises in existence. So it's pretty much a given.
- BlazBlue does this on purpose, but also subverts the hell out of many well-known tropes, which only serves to create even more trope examples.
- Kingdom Of Loathing lives off of this idea. If more evidence is needed, check out its Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot and the ability to adventure in an area literally named The Obligatory Pirates Cove. And if you fight the right side in the War, you get to defeat The Man.
- Left 4 Dead is nothing more and nothing less than absolute distillation of everything zombie and everything co-operative multiplayer into one incredibly freakishly fun package, especially with microphones and friends. Can you say, "OH GOD GET IT OFF ME GET IT OFF ME!!!"?
- Metal Gear Solid. Every trope, whether it's a Gambit Pileup or even simple Ho Yay, is played so ridiculously straight that they eventually curve back in on themselves to create such an impenetrable mess that it becomes near impossible to tell what's serious and what's parody, while still managing to elicit the reactions and results that the tropes were intended for in the first place.
- Skies Of Arcadia is stuffed to the gills just about every heroic fantasy cliche there is. Perhaps because it came at a time when every RPG in a five-year radius was trying to be dark and edgy, subverting every trope they could, Skies' return to a group of adventurers who enjoy each others' company and go looking for the MacGuffins to save the world from an Evil Empire ended up being a breath of fresh air.
- Pretty much the whole Tales Series could fit in the trope, specially after Symphonia. They combine bizillions of tropes with some well-calculated unexpected twists and/or original ways of presenting those tropes. And, ironically, thanks to that they manage to pull off some great, hard-to-forget stories. In other words, in Namco Tales Studio know very well what they're doing.
- Tales Of Symphonia, each character exhibits at least 3 character tropes, and the plot itself has predictable twists, founds itself on Fantastic Racism and Utopia Justifies the Means, and plenty of other tropes and cliches thrown in for good measure, and still manages to look like an original game despite it all.
- Tales Of Phantasia is this for basically the opposite reason: it plays almost every trope straight, but it just works.
- Team Fortress 2 throws all the unnecessary bits like plotting and storyline out and gives a varied, memorable cast who all have a very distinct but very expected way of kicking ass. It basically turns away from the modern notion of more "realistic" multiplayer FPS games for a full and complete embracing of the Rule of Fun. To put it differently, it caters to about a dozen different categories of tropes. Each of the nine characters has a trope-tastic personality and/or backstory (The Heavy, The Demoman, as well as many weapons that apply for tropes (Batter Up, Grievous Bottley Harm, Stuff Blowing Up, etc). In addition to first-person shooter tropes, it also has a few RPG/MMORPG tropes, with the class system and all.
- Touhou = Japanese folklore + Moe + Moe + Moe shoot 'em ups, with some Deconstruction. Clocked up to the maximum by fans. Just look at the character sheet.
- You Have to Burn the Rope. It takes longer to list all the tropes that it embodies than it does to finish the game.
- The Legend Of Zelda Twilight Princess was made to play the tropes of the series to the letter, since they knew that they were going to change things up for the next game.
- What Metal Gear does for action movies, Max Payne does for noir. The Private Eye Monologue is played so straight it becomes awesome.
- With fourteen games and numerous spinoffs, the Final Fantasy series has used (and sometimes created) nearly every single RPG cliche ever seen.
- Spoofed in The Simpsons Game, where you collect clichés (and Comic Book Guy explains them).
- Super Robot Wars, being what it is, tends to use pretty much every Humongous Mecha trope at least once or twice a game.
- The scene in Final Fantasy XIII when Snow and Fang rescue Ligthning and Hope in Palumpolum pushes very hard to find out how many tropes you can pack into one minute: Lightning and Hope come across a huge screen that shows a live broadcast of the capture of two fugitives, which causes an Oh Crap moment as the camera zooms on them. Surrounded by a small army of soldiers and facing a Bolivian Army Ending, Lightning tells Hope to run while she makes her Heroic Sacrifice, while the commander reminds his troops of What Measure Is A Nonhuman. Even though There Was a Door, Boisterous Bruiser and Badass Longcoat Snow and Hot Amazon Fang make arrive as the Big Damn Heroes. Snow points out that his Indy Ploy doesn't need a plan, makes a Gun Twirl, and starts Roof Hopping over the handrail. In mid-flight he pulls out his Mon, giving us a nice Transformation Sequence with lots of Instant Runes and freezes the entire place with Instant Ice, Just Add Cold. Then he and Fang ride down the ice bridges on their Cool Bike, for Fang to shots the TV camera. All in less then 2 minutes.
- This is The Only Level incorporates several video game tropes to change what is otherwise the exact same level over and over again.
- Bayonetta omnivorously gobbles up every action game trope, cliche, and visual flourish of the past twenty-five years and synthesises them into something uniquely mad.
- How about Dragon Quest, where all the cliches are just used as filler for what just boils down to lighthearted adventuring. Plus some of the tropes used for the more emotional scenes actually are pulled off phenomenally. Anyone who says seven isn't sad is lying.
- Gotcha Force is based off of 1: Toy fights that children have with their action figures, and 2: Gatchapon toys based off of popular anime/video games/movies/etc. Combine these two together, and you have a video game that takes inspiration from an infinite area of resources, and proceeds to pit Ninja, cowboys, samurai, knights, tanks, mecha infantry, transforming mecha, jet planes, dark monsters, tokusatsu heroes and so many more against each other...with every single trope associated with them all kept intact.
- Any BioWare game in existence, the more power over the world they have, the more troperrific their games are.
- Dragon Age is this on many levels — and anyone who's tried to read the Codex knows it has many, many levels.
- The number of tropes Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 use is surprising and not limited to classic SF ones. The authors are especially fond of subverting and double subverting tropes. In fact, the pages have repeatedly had to be split to prevent them from crashing the wiki; counting just the main tropes pages for the individual games and series as a whole, there are fourteen pages. This does not include subpages (such as YMMV and Character pages) or the Expanded Universe content.
- Obsidian Entertainment does not usually engage in this, but the original campaign of Neverwinter Nights 2 is a rare example, where the game heartily engages in a by the numbers adventure story with a few unexpected twists and turns — all while merrily lampshading it. When they aren't unleashing a Deconstructor Fleet against everything from D&D to George Lucas's idea of morality, that is...
- While Red Steel is a Cliché Storm, Red Steel 2 is Troperiffic. Red Steel 2 combines Desert Punk and Samurai tropes in every way possible. In every AWESOME way possible, mind you.
- Chrono Trigger just had almost RPG cliché you can think of at the time it was released, such as rebellious princesses with mysterious pendants, Heroic Mimes who live with a single mom (no dad), are woken up by said mom to get ready for the fair, and Saving the World from the Cosmic Horror...WITH TIME TRAVEL! Nevertheless, the story itself and the characters were praised by many for its brilliant usage of these cliches. Its successor, Chrono Cross, was less troperiffic than its predecessor, and that itself divided the fanbase on the game.
- Most Jidai Geki drama set around the Sengoku Jidai period will predictably straddle around Cliché Storm and Troperiffic, although two sets the bar for the video games department:
- Thief pulls off every Film Noir and Low Fantasy City Noir trope imaginable... and gets away with it by subverting the hell out of them... Not to mention hilariously lampshading anything that invokes a possible Cliché Storm or is in dire need of an MST3KMantra.
- A Sierra Adventure Game was usually loaded to the gills with whatever Trope was handy. Leisure Suit Larry had sex and porn tropes. King's Quest took any Fairy Tale trope and went crazy with it. Laura Bow handled murder mysteries. Space Quest skewered sci-fi tropes most of the time, but when they played it straight... Fridge Horror galore.
- FunOrb's Tomb Racer is stuffed with as many Temple of Doom cliches as its creators could think of, resulting in a fine example of why Tropes Are Not Bad.
- Mortal Kombat is basically a bunch of action heroes in an Enter the Dragon-style scenario. You've got the evil spirit who wants revenge, the Bruce Lee Clone, the actor who wants to prove his moves aren't faked, the thunder god, the Marine Action Girl, the criminal, the Chinese assassin, the Proud Warrior Race Guy, and the Evil Sorceror. Subsequent games have added a Magical Native American who at 6'3" is probably a plains Indian, Badass Princess, her evil clone who is notable for almost seeming like a good guy at first, another bunch of Proud Warrior Race Guys, Terminator clones, the guy named after his ancestor, the blind swordsman, and many more. And oh, yeah, the Big Bad gets more and more eldritch with each game.
- Alice Soft does this frequently, but especially with the Rance series which is an H-Game Indecisive Deconstructive Parody of the Medieval European Fantasy Role-Playing Game powered by Rule Of Cool, Rule of Funny, Rule of Sexy, and definitely Refuge in Audacity. The Designated Hero is a Sociopathic Hero Lovable Sex Maniac on a Quest for Sex with his Badass Adorable Sex Slave Sill. They wander around in a World of Badass Fantasy Kitchen Sink filled with Schizo Tech playing the trope Rape as Comedy (almost) always straight while fighting a variety of Cute Monster Girls, Horny Devils, Demons, and Eldritch Abominations. Lastly, the Crapsaccharine World is ruled by three Chaotic Evil Jerkass Gods all created by a Space Whale who created strife and suffering For the Evulz. Note that this is one of the few franchises (if not the only) that can claim to include ALL of the Rape Tropes in some shape or form. Yes, even the ones that seem to contradict each other.
- Asura's Wrath, Of course. The setting is Space Opera and Science Fiction meets Asian Mythology, for starters.
Visual Novels
Web Comics
- If individual characters can be Troperiffic, Antihero For Hire's Dr. Nefarious is.
- In-story example: In Gunnerkrigg Court, Dr. Disaster's holo-simulator plugs its users into a story straight out of 1950s pulp sci-fi: Latex Spacesuits, Death Rays, and alien moon fortresses are played gleefully straight. Antimony is the only one who has any problem accepting this, and even she eventually lightens up and has a great time.
- Chris Hastings once wrote down every single '80s action movie trope that he could remember. Then he crammed ever one of them into a story. The result was The Adventures of Dr. McNinja Story Arc "D.A.R.E. to Resist Ninja Drugs and Violence".
- No Rest for the Wicked: How many fairy tales can you stick into a single webcomics? Quite a few, actually.
- Terinu combines old school YA science fiction coming of age, super powers, space pirates, a galaxy wide war story, cyberpunk style net hacking... WITH FURRIES!
- Adventurers! skewers basically every RPG trope in the entire TV Tropes Wiki.
- The Order of the Stick is determined to have an example on every page here. Even mutually exclusive ones. Especially mutually exclusive ones!
- And Girl Genius is another Trope-alicious example.
- Problem Sleuth, like Adventurers!, goes out of its way to use, lampshade, avert, subvert, invert, and pay homage to nearly every single RPG and Adventure game trope out there, culminating in one of the most gloriously surreal Final Boss battles ever, as all the tropes collapse in on themselves like some giant Post-Modernist singularity.
- Homestuck, the MS Paint Adventures currently in progress, does the same thing for simulation games, fantasy, and sci-fi that Problem Sleuth did for adventure games, noir, and Anime-style action. Many time travel tropes, a jillion different kinds of Applied Phlebotinum, video game themed technobabble, characters with increasingly bizarre traits, and a great big heaping of Tropes of Legend all mix together with a great soundtrack and whimsical art style into the one of the most Troperiffic things in existence. The main work page itself became so long that the tropes listed had to be put into folders! In fact, Homestuck as well as other hugely Troperiffic franchises are in part responsible for some of the recent server crashes. They have so many tropes they are crashing the site.
- Even though The Dreamer only has 10 issues so far, it is particularly trope-filled.
Web Original
- The SCP Foundation is a heartless, ruthless secret organization dedicated to containing (and occasionally destroying) hundreds of abnormal objects that variously subvert, deconstruct, or play straight loads of Urban Fantasy and Cosmic Horror tropes.
- In a podcast, the LoadingReadyRun crew have expressed a desire to use every trope in the main TV Tropes directory. Good luck to them.
- Everything by the Duncan Bros. Their hallmark is a short movie of around 5 mins which takes on a given genre and crams in as many tropes and clichés from the genre as possible while still being very funny.
- The Best Story Ever, a NaNoWriMo novel in six EXTREME sentences.
- If it's a Super Hero trope, or a gender blending trope, it's probably found somewhere in the Whateley Universe.
- Darwin's Soldiers has a spectacular amount of tropes that are played straight, averted or subverted. It probably helps that all three of the main players are tropers. But despite the massive amount of tropes, the story never manages to get corny.
- Tropes Are Not Good: Both Nyan~ Neko Sugar Girls and The Ugly Barnacle *]] are highly Troperiffic, containing several tropes per minute/word. But that's just because they're so short in the first place.
- The Cracked/BriTANick video A Trailer For Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever has most of the tropes in popular Oscar winners.
- The That Guy With The Glasses anniversary specials such as Kickassia and Suburban Knights have as much fun as they can with tropes, usually tropes seen in movies the cast has reviewed in the past.
- On the note of That Guy With The Glasses, Obscurus Lupa is an especially trope saturated show; the show's page examples are a good measure of this.
- If Gaia Online isn't the most Troperiffic online community, then we don't know what is.
- True Capitalist.
- Mall Fight is especially not ashamed of that fact.
Western Animation
- While many superhero comics since the end of the Silver Age try to avoid the almost inherent silliness of the genre, Batman The Brave And The Bold embraces them so hard that it goes back around from "stupid" to spectacular. It also adds the occasional dash of Bronze Age and Modern Day super-hero tropes to keep viewers on their toes.
- Buzz Lightyear Of Star Command took what could have been a cheap knock-off show and turned it into pure awesome through a combination of Genre Savvy and this trope. Zurg gets extra points for being Dangerously Genre Savvy...most of the time.
- Avatar The Last Airbender. Example: it takes Elemental Powers, plays them to the hilt by having the benders use their powers for more than just fancy martial arts. There are a few subversions, notably Azula's interruption of Aang's Avatar transformation and Zuko's subverted Heel Face Turn at the end of the Season 2 finale. This just makes those trope subversions all the more jarring and awesome.
- The Simpsons, in spades. Just check out the length of their page.
- Phineas And Ferb. Their favorite is Better than a Bare Bulb, but judging from the page length, they're no strangers to any trope — almost every single one has been played straight, subverted, double-subverted, inverted, etc.
- The Scooby-Doo reboot, Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated. By the first episodes official airing its page had dozens of tropes, and as of this writing only around seven episodes have been replaced and it's almost as big as the main page. It's also noteworthy that very few other shows in the series have their own page yet.
- Sym-Bionic Titan is just one huge love letter to the super robot genre and tokusatsu and boy, does it ever show.
- Jimmy Two-Shoes. The show isn't even two seasons long yet, but the page for it is filled with tropes.
- Adventure Time. This entire show is just one big love-letter to The Nineties' cartoons.
- Regular Show is another, if not bigger love-letter to The Nineties' cartoons and even goes as far to have many references to The Eighties. Its characters, crazy plots, and overall surreal nature is loved by many a tv troper.
- My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic. The two-part pilot draws from nearly every Magical Girl trope in the book. The rest of the series is a Slice of Life comedy with heavy Looney Tunes influences, numerous shout outs that the target demographic might not get, and An Aesop applied at the end of nearly every episode. It's also self-aware enough that it lampshades most of these tropes. Is it any wonder why this show got such a vocal Periphery Demographic?
- Total Drama Island, both because of its parody of reality show tropes and its 24+ different character types with their own personalities.
Real Life
- Eric Berne wrote a book called Games People Play, which was essentially a collection of tropes of human interaction. Berne gave them games memorable titles such as "Now I've got you, you son of a bitch," "Wooden leg," "Yes, but...," and "Let's you and him fight."
- More disturbingly, Nazi Germany could be called this. Part of their strategy for drumming up the support of the German people was using a lot of pageantry, theatrics, and such to make being a Nazi seem exciting. Not to mention the truly staggering amount of Villain Tropes they embodied... They inspired some, too. A Nazi by Any Other Name would be just as sociopathic.
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