Basic Trope: All the important life in your story.
- Straight: A bunch of characters are there to move the plot forward.
- Exaggerated: The characters are super-diligent, surprisingly complex minds.
- Downplayed: The characters are in an H.C. Andersen-like story where it's usually that things happen to the characters instead of them acting.
- Justified: The story needs life.
- Inverted: Characters would be the least useful story element if they were in the story; the other ones, like the plot devices and the plot do the job well enough, as if the story would be anti-character.
- Subverted: In your abstract poem, the audience wonders where the characters are.
- Double Subverted: They're actually there, but the confusing writing made them hard to see.
- Parodied:
- The characters act like completely disobedient actors.
- Show Within a Show: Making fun of the relationship between the audience and the characters.
- Zig-Zagged: If averting the characters wouldn't be a Mind Screw already, not knowing if they're there is even worse.
- Averted: Impossible to do outside of descriptions of a lifeless world, but nothing happens there so no story can form.
- Enforced: Writers know that characters are needed in a story.
- Lampshaded: Characters Breaking the Fourth Wall to express self-awareness would do this.
- Invoked: Some non-character god makes life.
- Exploited: The characters act like nihilists, doing whatever they want to each other, even killing, knowing that they can be brought back anytime and not fearing death at all.
- Defied: The characters are fired from the story before it begins.
- Discussed: An abstract poem may or may not find a way to make the story appreciate characters.
- Conversed: The audience has its own opinions on the characters.
- Deconstructed:
- The importance of morality and moving the plot forward makes the characters badly prepared for Real Life, where these two concepts wouldn't work properly.
- Compared to real-life people, characters feel like robots or individuals with personality disorders, leading to the former looking down on them.
- Noticing the Fourth Wall, in the case of a character feeling like everything is fake and can cease to exist at anytime.
- Reconstructed:
- However, they make perfect, theatrical actors.
- The characters actually have as much personality as real-life people. It's just that nothing let them express all their sides, especially if they were made as stereotypes.
- The story is like a recording of their fantastical world, and if it ends, we just don't know what happens to them afterwards.
- Played for Laughs: Happy characters in a comedy.
- Played for Drama: Emotional characters in a drama.
- Played for Horror: Fearful characters in a horror.
- Implied: The characters are always hidden from the audience's sight, but they leave footprints of their actions.
Back to Characters, those who make the story happen.
