Basic Trope: A previously comical act is retconned to being something completely serious.
- Straight: Bob trips up on an banana for a gag. Later it's revealed to have caused brain damage that ended in a coma
- Exaggerated: Bob trips up on a banana, falls on to a spiked ball also on the floor, causing him to jump up and hit his head on the fan. At first it's just a gag, but later it's revealed bob died from it, and was a zombie this whole time, living in constant pain from the wounds he received but he could not say anything about it because he was under magic control.
- Downplayed: Bob slips on a banana peal for a gag. Later Alice gets chewed out over it.
- Justified: Some supposedly wacky stunts really are dangerous.
- Inverted: Bob finds out he has cancer. He later finds it to be ''hilarious''.
- Subverted: Bob starts to feel sad, but just forgets about it...
- Double Subverted: ...then remembers it lately and is deeply hurt about it.
- Parodied: Bob complains about tripping on a banana, crying and wailing, but no one cares and he just sighs and forgets about it.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted:
- Bob avoids the banana.
- Alternatively, Bob doesn't complain and he may as well never have tripped on the banana.
- Enforced: "All right, gang, we need to make this show more serious. What gags have we done that are actually quite deadly?"
- Lampshaded: "Who'd a thought bananas would be so dangerous."
- Invoked: The Evil Overlord deliberately plants bananas all over the floor so that everyone will think he's harmless before realizing that tripping over a banana is exceptionally deadly.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: "I'm about to slip on that banana, then I'll be really hurt! I'll just step over it then."
- Discussed: "I don't care what Cerebus would do. Me slipping on a banana is not deadly."
- Conversed: "In shows where everything starts getting serious, people always feel sad about things that happen to them comedically."
Back to
Cerebus Retcon
