Basic Trope: A school that always has something to do (strange things, Weirdness Magnet, etc.)
- Straight: Bob finds that his school has something odd happening. every other day he sees the transfer student get into something, but he normally only finds out after he has been kidnapped/brought into the issue.
- Exaggerated: Things happen at the school so often that no one cares. Teachers will only excuse absences due to the happenings if a. they physically can't get to class because of it or b. they would not have been fit to learn during the day because of what happened.
- Downplayed: The school has bizarre extracurricular activities like Calvinball, but is otherwise completely normal.
- Justified:
- It's an Extranormal Institute.
- It houses the launch bay for Troperion Gamma.note
- Inverted: A wizard or other-worlder finds a perfectly normal school.
- An exciting sounding location or task that seems like it should be a source of adventure and peril instead turns out to be a place of mundane study and stakes because it works the best. Being an international spy in a cold war between two great space alliances involves reading foreign transmissions and examining photographs to gather mundane information to put together a complete picture. There is no cloak and dagger treachery other than office politics - nobody wants to even have their militaries /in sight/ of each other for fear of a disastrous standoff.
- Subverted:
- It turns out that it's nothing after all. The ghost was just a rumor and some loose paper flapping around. Go on, you're late to math.
- It's his imagination.
- Double Subverted: The whole reason the paper was there was because a ghost was rummaging through a locker to find something they lost, asking Bob about it after school.
- Parodied:
- So many odd things happen that nobody really does any schoolwork at all, leading diplomas from the school to become worthless EXCEPT in paranormal investigation.
- A mundie finds the wizardry academy, expecting it to be this. Unfortunately, school is boring in every universe and nothing exciting ever happens. Hilarity Ensues as he tries to investigate the school for something odd and creates the very commotion that he was looking for.
- A character thinks and acts as if he's attending one of these (when in reality it's just a regular school) and treats every even mildly dramatic or interesting thing that happens as if it's the beginning of a larger intrigue or adventure.
- Lots of things are happening at the academy, but the characters are solely concerned with Wacky Fratboy Hijinx or actual academics, deeming those "extra things" (ancient conspiracies, extraterrestrial invasions, paranormal phenomenons, etc.) as a minor nuisance.
- Zig Zagged: Sometimes things happen at the school, sometimes they don't.
- Lampshaded: "I wonder who's going to get kidnapped this week?"
- Averted: It's a totally normal High School and the fact that something may be mystical about it is not mentioned at all.
- Enforced: "Since real High Schools are boring, there needs to be something exciting in it!"
- Invoked: The students of Adventure High, bored with their classes, figure out how to summon supernatural entities in the cafeteria to make things more interesting.
- The school staff deliberately sets up intriguing 'secret' extracurricular phenomenon for students to explore which call for students to do guide their own learning in order to progress. Essentially an educational LARP of sorts.
- Exploited: A journalist, hearing about all the odd things that happen in a particular school, starts camping nearby, waiting to capture and/or report all the weird stuff that happens there.
- Defied: The principal of Adventure High puts up a powerful magical barrier and an electric fence in order to prevent anything strange from occurring on campus, since the school is built in a magic-infused area.
- Discussed: "Aw, this high school is so boring! Can't we have mysterious kidnappings or battles like in movies?"
- Conversed: "Wow. That's three shows in a row about high school weirdness. Must be a popular thing these days."
- Implied: There is a locked classroom from which students are forbidden. Everyone thinks it's a just teacher's room until they hear a roar and crackling fire... They come to the conclusion it's a film room with a cozy fireplace.
- Deconstructed: The various dangerous incidents ends up having the school closed down, displacing the students and stopping them from looking into the abnormal.
- Reconstructed: The students that were displaced then band together to look into the abnormal, eventually founding their own Academy of Adventure deliberately.
Hey, what's that in the locker room?
