Basic Trope: A report that has nothing to do with the subject given.
- Straight: Amy, a teacher, directs her class to write a book report on Moby-Dick. Ben spends most of his report rambling about sports and video games.
- Exaggerated:
- Ben's book report doesn't even bother to pretend it's about Moby-Dick.
- Ben is supposed to write his doctoral thesis on Moby-Dick, but spends most of it talking about completely irrelevant sports.
- There isn't even a single mention of a whale, let alone Moby-Dick himself.
- Downplayed:
- Ben's book report on Moby-Dick consists primarily of complaining about how boring it was.
- Ben's book report is mostly about Moby-Dick, but has a lot of less-than-relevant sports references.
- Ben's book report isn't quite what the teacher asked for because he misunderstood Amy's prompt.
- Justified:
- Ben is obsessed with sports, and will find a way to talk about them regardless of what the original prompt was.
- Ben's book report was a Last-Minute Project. Once he had written what little he knew about Moby-Dick, he was nowhere near the word count requirement and didn't have the time to do more research, so he tried to tie the book to sports and video games in a desperate attempt to pad out his paper.
- Ben based his essay on a weird adaptation of Moby-Dick that he incorrectly assumed would be just like the book.
- Ben misunderstood Amy's prompt.
- Inverted:
- Ben's "report" is too much like the book — he literally just copied the text of Moby-Dick into a text editor and called it a book report.
- Amy is an Apathetic Teacher who decides to have a lecture about video games when she's supposed to be teaching Moby-Dick.
- Subverted:
- Ben hands in a report about video games when Amy tries to collect book reports. It turns out that that essay was written for another class, and she gives him another chance to hand in the actual book report.
- Ben's book report introduces a topic that seems out-of-place, but then reveals that he has a nice way to tie it into the original prompt.
- Ben was writing about adaptations of Moby-Dick, with particular focus on a video game adaptation.
- Double Subverted:
- Ben's actual book report is mostly rambling about sports.
- Despite Ben's claim that he can tie the out-of-place topic to the original prompt, the connection is dubious at best.
- Parodied: Ben's essay ends up talking about every subject in the universe except what he was assigned.
- Zig-Zagged: With every paragraph, Ben's essay alternates between talking about Moby-Dick and something else.
- Averted: Ben's book report is entirely on-topic.
- Enforced:
- The writers don't know enough about Moby-Dick. To hide this, they avoid having Ben actually talk about it.
- The writers wanted an essay about video games to appear in the story, but they didn't think it's a realistic assignment, so they had the paper be an off-topic one.
- Lampshaded: "Wasn't this report supposed to be about Moby-Dick?"
- Invoked:
- Ben suspects that Amy is a Lazy Bum who doesn't bother to read her students' essays, so he intentionally writes a stupid and off-topic paper to see if she notices.
- Ben's naughty classmates get access to his computer and decide it'd be hilarious to take his paper and replace all the Moby-Dick analysis with random ramblings.
- Exploited: Ben writes a bunch of irrelevant stuff to make his essay a Wall of Text, so it seems like he did a lot of research and has meaningful content from a distance.
- Defied:
- Ben makes sure that his report is on Moby-Dick and nothing else.
- Amy outright refuses to let Ben get started with his off-topic report.
- Discussed: "Ben, you better not go off-topic and talk about baseball. Remember the subject."
- Conversed: "I don't think Ben's actually going to read the book. He'll go off and talk about something else, like cartoon characters always do."
- Implied: While giving Ben advice for his book report, Amy says, "And please don't randomly talk about baseball this time."
- Played for Drama: A Corrupt Politician is supposed to address complaints about a MegaCorp, but instead tries to distract everyone by bringing up his sleazy rival's scandal.
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