Basic Trope: Someone wants to be amazing.
- Straight: Alice want to be a princess.
- Exaggerated: Alice wants to be a princess Idol Singer, actress and Amazonian Beauty whom even the girls want.
- Downplayed: Alice would like a little more excitement in her life, but not all that much and she won't go to extreme lengths for it.
- Justified:
- Alice strives to be special because she, like many people of her age, is often told by role models that she has the potential to be special, which obviously feels good.
- Alice is The Woobie, and constantly gets picked on for no reason.
- Alice saw several movies where the characters had more exciting lives than she did.
- "Well Done, Son" Guy
- Alice's friends have cool powers and she doesn't.
- This trope is common in Youngsters, Man Children, and Unlucky Everydudes.
- Alice leads a very dull, monotonous, uneventful life working a job she hates and coming home to nothing. Who exactly wouldn't want to be special?
- Inverted: I Just Want to Be Normal
- Subverted: Alice says that she dreams of having more power, but she then reveals she just wanted to get promoted.
- Double Subverted: ...promoted all the way up to the supreme queen of the universe.
- Parodied: Alice is overpowered in every way, having more powers and money than Superman and Scrooge McDuck put together. She constantly complains that she wants to be special... by which she means she wants a pretty, new hat.
- Zig Zagged: Alice comes from poor, humble origins, so her wild, impossible aspiration is actually fairly mundane. Her friends and family treat it like a pipe dream, but she meets a mentor from a higher class who tells her to go for it. But she runs into many difficulties along the way that make it seem out of reach...
- Averted: Alice has a Humble Goal, or is content with her current situation.
- Enforced: "I'm writing a book for girls eight to ten, and a lot of them wish they were special, so I have the heroine Alice wanting to be a princess."
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: Many schools instil the mindset of "striving to be special" into students, so they have more incentive for self-improvement.
- Exploited: Evulz makes a deal with Alice, knowing that her desire to be special means she would never refuse the offer.
- Defied: "Don't you wish to be something more?" "I mean, being special is nice and all, but right now, I am perfectly OK."
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed:
- Alice eventually finds out that being special is not as glamorous as she thinks.
- The real reason Alice wants to be special is because she's envious of Beth, a pretty, popular, perfect princess.
- Alice has horrible self-esteem issues. Even if she were to become special in some way, she would just want to become more special, or even kill anyone she thinks might become more special than her.
- Alice is a narcissist.
- Alice, being Too Dumb to Live, does a bunch of stupid and dangerous things to become special.
- Alice just wants to be special... and so does everyone else. Despite a wide and varied cast of privileged, accomplished and/or badass characters, each one fails to value themselves while envying or idolizing someone whom they consider better. Pointless misery ensues.
- Reconstructed:
- Alice works on her self-esteem and realizes she's pretty cool too.
- Alice does a bunch of stupid and dangerous things to become special, which results in her actually becoming special in a not nice way. This is, however, the way she likes it, because according to Alice, anything is better than normal.
- Alice does some stupid and dangerous, not to mention questionable, things in her quest to become special. However, she figures out what's happening, makes amends, and ends up genuinely being special because the situation brought out her best qualities.
- Played For Laughs: In her quest to become special, Alice tries to be a blatant parody of an overly perfect character, because that's her idea of special. She changes her name to something really over the top, dyes her hair to some crazy color, starts wearing a tiara (made of plastic) and riding a unicorn (a kid's toy horse on wheels, with a horn attached by Krazy glue). She becomes everyone's laughing stock.
- Played For Drama: In her quest to become special, Alice becomes a monster. Then she is faced with the reality of what exactly had she become.
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