Basic Trope: A character has trouble walking with high heels, because of pain or awkwardness.
- Straight: Alice decides to wear high-heel shoes for a gala with the upper crust of society. She comes to regret this decision as she begins to feel pain in her feet and has trouble walking around without risking a fall. By the end of the evening, she takes them off and spends the night barefoot.
- Exaggerated: Alice doesn’t manage to make a few steps without falling flat on her face, and the heels break off from the strain before the evening ends.
- Downplayed: Alice is uncomfortable in her shoes, but eventually gets used to them.
- Justified: Alice isn’t used to walking in high heels, or shoes for that matter, and suddenly having a heel to elevate part of her foot messed up her balance.
- “Alice” was not a girl until recently, and it’s just part of their many tribulations getting used to being the other sex.
- The shoes are too tight for her, or poor quality.
- Inverted: Alice is usually The Klutz, but to everyone’s surprise, she walks like a champ in high heels, kicking her foes with ease and utterly mastering the Supermodel Strut.
- Subverted: Alice is apprehensive when she learns that she’s expected to wear high heels, but after putting them on and trying to take a few steps, she finds out that she’s doing well in them.Alice: Hey, that’s not so bad!
- Double Subverted: … until she feels a pain in her foot and falls face first to the floor .Alice: Spoke too soon…
- Parodied: Alice is so frustrated that, rather than walk on her feet, she spends the entire evening doing a handstand. In fact, there are so many women doing it at the gala that the men pay them no mind at all.
- Zig-Zagged: At times Alice can be seen wincing from the pain in her feet, but at other times she doesn’t seem to have a problem with them.
- Averted: High-heel shoes, and whether or not they’re comfortable, does not come up in the story.
- Enforced: Alice’s actress wasn’t comfortable in the high heels she wore, and the director decided to go along with it.
- Lampshaded: “I hope whoever designed these atrocities is burning in hell for making women suffer!”
- Invoked: Carol, who is also attending the gala, made sure that the shoes Alice wears are cumbersome and uncomfortable as can be to make her look like a klutz in hopes she can approach her date, the charming millionaire Robert.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Alice decides to buy shoes without high heels so that she can be fashionable and comfortable.
- Discussed: “I don’t know how women can wear shoes such as these. How do they even walk in these things?”
- Implied: During a moment away from the hubbub of the gala, Bob comes to find Alice. She is sitting on a stair’s steps, barefoot, her high-heel shoes aside.
- Played for Laughs: Alice doesn’t just fall comically; she gets into all sort of cartoony, gravity-defying hijinks with her shoes on.
- Played for Drama: After her bout of wearing high-heels, Alice’s feet are so sore that she has trouble walking.
I don’t know how you can go back to High Heel Hurt with such shoes. That clearly hurts your poor feet!
