Basic Trope: An Aesop about why we should care about the environment, often mixing with Science Is Bad, Gaia's Vengeance, Humans Are Bastards, or some combination thereof.
- Straight: In Alice and Bob, our main characters learn that the environment is important and that everyone must take action to protect the planet, such as recycling, composting, and driving and flying less.
- Exaggerated: The cast learns that the Earth is dying and Humans Are Bastards/The Real Monsters and if nobody acts, they will eventually see The End of the World as We Know It.
- Downplayed: The cast learns to save trees by recycling.
- Justified: Characters care a lot about the planet and ways to protect it.
- Inverted:
- The world is trying to kill us for no reason! OH NOES!!
- Characters learn that human survival and scientific progress is more important than saving a few trees.
- Pollution is what saves the day.
- The whole plot happens because mankind’s attempts at going green somehow went haywire.
- Subverted:
- It turns out that caring about the environment is bad.
- The main villain has a Green Thumb and gets their powers from nature, and getting people to save the environment was just a ploy so they could become more powerful.
- Double Subverted:
- Except that there's a better solution out there!
- The villain's Start of Darkness occurred when they saw humanity's lack of care for the Earth. After our hero talks to them and agrees to get people to care more for nature the villain has a Heel–Face Turn.
- Parodied: The Designated Hero sees someone spit on a plant, and immediately pummels that someone to death as hordes of bystanders cheer.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Depending on the Writer, it's sometimes this and sometimes and a story with a Science Hero. The story goes back and forth between Romanticism Versus Enlightenment.
- The villain of the story is a vengeful nature spirit trying to destroy humanity. On one hand, it makes a good point about humanity's influence on the environment. On the other hand it's harming innocent people, and nature may be beautiful and necessary to life on earth, but it is brutal and overall less than pleasant.
- Averted: Characters learn nothing about the environment.
- Enforced: The creators really care about the environment and thinks everyone else should too.
- Lampshaded: The characters ask if there's a message about the environment during the event(s) of the work.
- Invoked: Characters seek out advice about saving the planet.
- Exploited: A company advertises its products as environmentally friendly so more people will buy them.
- Defied: Characters dismiss any 'Save the Earth' message as preachy and unnecessary.
- Discussed:Alice: Maybe we should say a few words about the environment.Bob: Uhm, OK...
- Conversed: "I hate these environmental messages, especially when they're just shoehorned into a story that had nothing to do with the environment otherwise."
- Deconstructed:
- "Going green" turns out to be ungodly expensive, causes people to lose their jobs, and causes the firm to lose money or productivity.
- A fanatical but well-meaning environmentalist organization does everything it can to 'save' the environment by destroying all the polluting factories and power stations. They don't adequately consider the vacuum that will result from the sudden disappearance of these things from societies built around them, and not given enough time to 'wean' themselves off them. The result is starvation, pain and misery: the environmentalists realize they’ve done something horrible. Or, for a more cynical approach, they don’t even care.
- Reconstructed:
- ...But then it turns out that even if, in the short term, it's not entirely good, it turns out to be better in the long term.
- The environmentalist organization does everything it can to help rebuild the civilizations it destroyed, while making sure to build them around cleaner sources of power. It takes blood, sweat, and tears and many people suffer in the meantime, but at long last they pull it off with the environmentalists walking away from the whole debacle with the realization that there are no simple solutions, and resolve to find a way to get the results they want without the pain and misery their hamhanded approach had caused.
- Played for Laughs: Bob manages to cause a tidal wave from the polar ice caps to recede by unplugging all the stuffs from the electrical outlets.
- Played for Drama: A dystopian (if not outright apocalyptic) world caused by manmade disasters like pollution, deforestation, climate change, etc. is shown in full detail, and everyone suffers for it because it's now too late to do any meaningful change.
- Implied: A muck monster is the main villain, and it is mentioned to be created by "human greed". It might be something else, but it appears to be an environmentalist message.
- Plotted a Good Waste: An environmental message is used as allegory for an equally pressing but more widely recognized problem that society faces, or vice versa, to encourage the audience to consider the other.
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