Basic Trope: Bad media is treated as traumatizing or even physically injuring.
- Straight: Tropers: The Movie is a horrible movie that causes Alice psychological pain and traumatizes her when she sees it.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice ends up having an aneurysm from the abysmal quality of the movie, which in turn causes her to suffer a seizure not five minutes into the movie and end up hospitalized.
- Tropers causes Alice's head to explode after the first horrible pun.
- Tropers is so terrible that it causes Alice to Go Mad from the Revelation and undergo a slow, hideous, agonizing metamorphosis before violently exploding, as well as the summoning of an Eldritch Abomination.
- Downplayed: Alice is disgusted by the movie to the point of vomiting, but not actually physically injured.
- Justified:
- Alice's sensation of illness has been unintentionally triggered by a subconscious Pavlovian response, as the images in the movie instinctively remind her of a traumatic event.
- Tropers contain scenes that are just plain icky.
- Tropers was cursed.
- Or the viewers were cursed to feel sick or pain when they watch a bad movie.
- Inverted:
- Tropers is such a great movie that it cures Alice's illness.
- Tropers is such a great movie it causes anyone who views it to have a spontaneous orgasm.
- A more downplayed inversion: Tropers is so good a movie, it makes the viewers feel like they're getting a massage.
- Tropers is so awesome, people who watch it hear a thousand angels singing.
- Tropers is so awesome, anyone who watches it explodes violently.
- Subverted:
- It wasn't the movie — the theater was filling with poisonous gas from a terrorist plot.
- Alternatively: The pain is in Alice's stomach, because the movie is so unintentionally hilarious that she's nearly died laughing.
- Double Subverted: Actually, the gas was an accident. The movie, swapped with a decent one, was the terrorists' actual weapon.
- Parodied:
- Alice is so traumatized that she becomes a gibbering wreck whenever anyone even says the word "movie", much to her friends' confusion.
- Masochists like the movie.
- Tropers is threatened to be used as torture, making anybody who hears the threat surrender.
- A dictatorial regime employs forced viewings of Tropers as a means of executing dissidents, noting it to be a cheaper and more efficient way to kill people than a firing squad.
- Zig-Zagged: Tropers causes Alice to fluctuate between extreme psychological pain and extreme psychological pleasure.
- Averted: Tropers merely depresses Alice briefly before she forgets about it.
- Enforced:
- The author includes Tropers which is actually a parody of another horrible work.
- Or Tropers is that horrible piece of work.
- Lampshaded: "Hey! You in the audience! Are you feeling it yet? Well, you will be — from now on this shall be a musical!"
- Invoked: Weapons designers hired somebody who had never made a movie before to create a Mind Rape device in the form of a movie.
- Exploited: A villain steals a copy of Tropers and broadcasts it around the world to Mind Rape mankind.
- Defied:
- Alice takes an aspirin before watching Tropers.
- Alice makes a point of not watching Tropers because she heard it was awful.
- Discussed: "Wouldn't that movie cause people inside it to turn into a sea of vomit?"
- Conversed: "Ah, movies. Useful as instruments of torture."
- Deconstructed:
- Tropers was created by the government as a weapon of torture. It's a double-edged sword — the cast and crew all suffered physical and psychological harm by making it.
- Alice's extreme reaction is a sign of some mental health problem. After all, it's just a movie.
- Reconstructed: Tropers was created by beings with very different concepts of what makes a good movie, who can therefore watch it safely. They just hadn't considered its effect on humans.
- Implied: Alice watched Tropers offscreen and has a blank, Thousand-Yard Stare in her first appearance after she saw it.
- Played for Laughs:
- Alice's reaction to watching Tropers is so over-the-top it makes the people around her burst out laughing.
- Tropers is the newest In-Universe project of a memetically bad director such as Uwe Boll. The moment the characters hear who directed it, which is when they have their butts in the theater seats, they know they're doomed.
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