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Well This Is Not That Trope
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Greenslade: Into this complex world of crime, of move and counter move, stepped a man of great ingenuity, daring, resource and brains. Eccles: Ain't me, folks. — The Goon Show
You know how when someone describes something they actually tell you about the thing itself? Well This Is Not That Trope.
Subversion distilled to its purest essence: you directly build up the audience's expectations with an elaborate description of something, then tell them that you're actually talking about something else.
Most often a Comedy Trope, but can be Played for Drama if done correctly. Compare Dissimile, Analogy Backfire, Bait-and-Switch Comparison. Related to Bait-and-Switch Credits.
Examples:
Comic Books
- Watchmen: "You know the kind of cancer you ultimately get better from? ...That ain't the kind I got."
Fan Fiction
- From chapter 8 of Rob Haynie's Ranma ½ fic, Girl Days:
The walk back was uneventful.
No, sorry, that was a different walk back. THIS walk back was something other than uneventful.
Film
Literature
- Done twice in Piers Anthony's book Under A Velvet Cloak. First he describes the story of King Arthur and follows it up with "This is not that story." Then he describes the story of a girl who would be an ancestor to many Incarnations and says "This is not that story either."
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place...
This is not her story."
- Even this subversion is subverted a few books later, in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. It opens up the same way as Hitchhiker's Guide, then says, "This is her story."
- There's also a sequence where Arthur asks Ford about how the universe was born, and Ford goes off on a tangent about buying a bathtub, filling it with sand, then watching all the sand drain down while filming it, and then playing the film back in reverse. Which, he adds, is nothing like how the universe was born.
- "Maybe once in a lifetime, there comes a book with such extraordinary characters, thrilling plot twists, and uncanny insight, that it comes to embody its time. Atlanta Nights is a book." — Adam-Troy Castro
- The winner of the 2007 Lyttle Lytton Contest freeform challenge:
"Scaling Everest was, by far, the most amazing and transformative experience of my life. Unfortunately, this is a thesis on context-free grammars."
- The Adventures of Pinocchio opens with one: Once upon a time, there was a king! No, there was a piece of wood.
Live-Action TV
Radio
Western Animation
- Computer Animation Showcase, a collection of computer-animated shorts, started one of them with this voiceover: "Every once in a great while, a movie comes along that touches everyone's lives. *beat* Eh, but not this one.
- In one Animaniacs episode, the Warner siblings are being chased off. Soon enough, they start climbing back into the water tower, and Yakko sobs, "I know when we're not wanted." When the antagonist is gone, he adds, "And now is not that time," and climbs back down.
- Only one hero can track down Cave Guy. Only one hero has the heart to fight this fiend. That hero is... On another network. Thus we have no choice but to turn to this fellow.
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