Basic Trope Description: A reality show following a concept that makes participants suffer on purpose and/or forces them to do immoral deeds.
- Straight: The Summer Games are a reality show in which abducted teenage girls from poor families are dueling each other to the death.
- Exaggerated: The Summer Games force abducted teenage girls to battle each other to death...and they are also raped frequently, have to be naked against their will and are forced to turn the beautiful island where they are fighting into a Polluted Wasteland in their free time.
- Downplayed: Adult women, who are all volunteers, have to duel each other to first blood in the Summer Games.
- Justified:
- In the culture in which the Summer Games are broadcasted, they are viewed as a legitimate form of entertainment.
- Inverted: The Summer Games are a reality show about girls having fun on a beautiful island, and the show is a hope-bringer and a last beacon of morality in a Crapsack World in which crime is rampant and every city is a Wretched Hive. The winner will also get a great price.
- Subverted: Alice gets kidnapped and put into this year's Summer Games. She fears for her life, but then she and the other girls are sent to a luxurious hotel while the violent scenes they know from TV are shot with actresses playing them.
- Double Subverted: Nevertheless, all the kidnapped girls get killed after all scenes are shot, and the designated victor ends up Released to Elsewhere.
- Enforced: The author wants to give her heroine a lot to endure, and to make her an Iron Woobie by that.
- Lampshaded: "Well, the show is similar to the one in The Hunger Games."
- Averted: The Summer Games are discussed, but we hear nothing about their rules.
- Parodied: The involuntary participants of the Summer Games have to duel each other, but everything goes wrong. Guns are loaded with blanks, nobody can shoot straight, the blades don't even cut butter, and in the end, the last two standing refuse to fight and are turned into blueberries for it.
- Invoked: Denise, a Death Seeker, signs up voluntarily for the show to be killed in a way that will shock her Abusive Parents and leave them remorseful.
- Defied: Bella is kidnapped and forced to participate, but she manages to outwit her kidnappers and frees the other captives alongside herself.
- Discussed: "Doesn't that concept of a show...disgust you or anything?"
- Conversed: "Would that even be watched in real life?" "Maybe yes."
- Deconstructed: The fear of seeing their daughters suddenly in the Summer Games awakes massive Papa Wolf and Mama Bear tendencies in parents, what leads to a shortage in participants since teenage girls get sent to foreign countries or go into hiding before they come of eligible age for the Games. Also, most people are in fact disgusted by the show.
- Reconstructed: Over the years, people just resignate and go apathetic. Also, their children are educated to like the Summer Games, so at some point, nobody views them as disturbing anymore.
