Basic Trope Description: A pet, usually cute, is abandoned in a box on the street for someone else to find.
- Straight: Alice walks along the street and suddenly spots a box with holes that is meowing. She opens it and finds an abandoned kitten.
- Exaggerated: Alice finds a box on the street that holds a whole clan of abandoned cats.
- Downplayed: Alice meets and befriends a strange kitten on the streets, but it isn't abandoned.
- Justified:
- The cat was abandoned by an irresponsible owner who couldn't care for the kitten anymore and hoped for someone to find it (or to die there).
- The cat was born from a stray, who died shortly after birth, and the cat eventually found itself inside a box to live in, at least until Alice came along.
- Inverted: Alice is a human baby that is abandoned on the street by an irresponsible mother who couldn't care for her, and is found by a cat.
- Subverted: Strolling along the street, Alice finds a box with holes in it that meows. She approaches it carefully and opens the lid...only to find a radio making meow sounds in it.
- Double Subverted: When Alice removes the radio and switches it off, the meowing continues anyway. She looks again and finds an abandoned kitten in the box that was hidden by the radio at first glance.
- Enforced: The author wants to give Alice an Animal Companion.
- Averted: Alice buys herself a kitten from a cat breeder to get a companion.
- Invoked: Ethel abandons her kitten in a box on the street since she thinks that someone will find it and take enough pity towards it to care for it instead.
- Exploited: The abandoned kitten has seen this trope on TV before and hides in a box on the street on purpose, thinking that it is some kind of magical gadget that will lead a new, loving owner to find it.
- Defied:
- Ethel re-thinks her idea and brings the kitten to a licensed animal shelter.
- The kitten runs away as soon as it understands that it is to be abandoned in a box.
- Zig-zagged: Alice thinks about adopting a stray cat, but doesn't know how. She strolls along the street, trying to forget the idea, when she suddenly finds a meowing box. Nevertheless, there is only a meowing radio in it. She switches it off and walks on, just to find another box. An abandoned cat is in it, but sadly dead. Nevertheless, something meows also in this box. Looking for the sounds' source, Alice pushes the cat's body away, only to find her kitten still alive.
- Lampshaded:
- "Man, you here in this cold night and I come along, seemingly just in the right moment to find you...following TV logic, we are destined to become friends now. Aren't we, little kitten?"
- Vet: "You say you found it in a box? I hate those irresponsible owners."
- Discussed: "This cat isn't mine, I found it in a box on the street..." "I know. I will examine it for diseases, and then we will look for its owner. But it already seems like there is no owner anymore."
- Conversed: "Literally most people in fiction have pulled their pet out of a box on the street."
- Deconstructed: The kitten got terribly sick in the night out there and dies in a quite short time after Alice found it.
- Reconstructed: Nevertheless, it is a Bittersweet Ending, with the kitten at least having the luck of spending its short time and dying in a loving owner's arms and Alice never forgetting how much happiness the kitten brought into her life.
- Implied: Bob asks Alice where she got her new kitten from. Cut to a wet box still standing next to her sofa.
- Played For Drama: The kitten was in fact just hiding in the box, and there were still owners. Alice took it with her without second thought, believing it to be abandoned. Now the owners think that Alice stole their kitten and plot revenge on her.
- Played For Horror: The kitten in the box is in fact a deadly monster of the Killer Rabbit type that used the trick to trap and devour Alice in a bloody way.
