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troperville

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tools

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toys

• Straight: A Bar Brawl results in smashed bottles, chairs broken over backs, people thrown through windows...
• Exaggerated: When a Humongous Mecha "defends" a city from an Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever, they manage to pull half the city down in the struggle.
• Downplayed: What the police would call "signs of a struggle" - a few bits of furniture in disarray, a broken glass, a crack in the plasterboard, etc. Nothing that couldn't be fixed with five minutes of tidying and some filler & paint.
• Justified:
  • The fight involves a lot of Improvised Weapons; thrown crockery, furniture, and heavy objects, most of which miss the combatants and do a lot of damage to other parts of the room.
  • The fighters have Super Strength (and accompanying toughness and weight), so they may as well be fighting in a cardboard box fort.
  • It's a Bullfight Boss Fight; getting your opponent to smash himself into the arena is the only way to defeat him.
• Inverted: A fight in a reinforced cell results in a lot of serious injuries, with the exhausted and broken fighters ending up lying around a bloodied but undamaged metal table and chairs (both bolted to the floor). They're hauled out and the room is quickly hosed clean.
• Subverted: A Bar Brawl shapes up, but it turns out to be a Wimp Fight. When Andy picks up a chair, Bob screams and hides behind a table. When Bob eyes the large plate glass window and gets an Idea Bulb, he tries to lift Andy over his head... and can't, so drops him and tried to catch his breath.
• Double Subverted: ...So they just resort to throwing small objects at each other, breaking bottles, ashtrays and windows all over the place.
• Parodied: The Escalating Brawl moves straight through the wall of the dive bar to the next-door crystal glass shop, then into the Priceless Ming Vase dealer beyond that, then continues through Flatscreen TVs 'R' Us, The Rare Fish Emporium, an exhibition of precarious matchstick sculptures by a famous dead artist...
• Zig Zagged: The barkeep is on constant watch for Bar Brawls, running back and forth trying to stop things being broken like a man spinning plates. As soon as something is broken, his Berserk Button is activated, and he goes off on an incredibly destructive rampage against the brawlers.
• Averted: The fighters manage to beat each other up without involving the furniture.
• Enforced:
  • It's a parody of Westerns, and they're finished with the Saloon set anyway...
  • It's a video game, and the designers want to show off their destructible environment physics and versatile Improvised Weapon mechanics. To encourage players, you're directly rewarded for the amount of collateral damage your fights cause.
• Lampshaded:
  • The barman resignedly flips down the "X Days Since Last Redecoration" sign to "0".
  • "There's a security deposit for new customers." "It's OK, if anything happens my Hero Insurance will cover it."
• Invoked: "You owe us money, Charlie. When I'm owed money, I get angry, don't I, Bob? And when I'm angry, I take it out on my partner Bob here. Seems like a couple of tough guys like us fighting in a bar like this could cause some damage, don't it?"
• Exploited: The barman's wanted to claim on his bar's insurance for years, but doesn't want to get caught defrauding it. When a fight breaks out, he runs around halfheartedly trying to break it up, Accidentally On Purpose knocking over a bottle of vodka here, a candle there...
• Defied: *KA-CHK* "First man to so much as spill a beer is going home without any knees. Now Get Out."
• Discussed: "Ooh, a fight! Place your bets, I've got 2:1 on the floor-to-ceiling aquarium, 5:2 on the crystal chandelier..." "Twenty bucks on the plate glass window!" "Not taking bets on the window. The window always goes."
• Conversed: "Take a shot every time they break something!"
• Deconstructed: The brawlers try out all the moves they saw in the Westerns, and Reality Ensues. The chair doesn't break, but several ribs do. The guy thrown into a window bounces off it, concussed, and the guy who tries to smash a beer bottle makes a bloody mess of his own hand. After thirty seconds of this nonsense, the barman hauls them out whimpering and clutching their injuries, and demands that when they've sobered up they're going to pay for any damages.
• Reconstructed: ???
• Played For Laughs: The whole set is made of deliberately obvious props, and the entire fight consists of the combatants taking turns to hit each other with sugarglass bottles and styrofoam chairs. Eventually they start knocking down stage walls and cracking the camera lens — not even the Fourth Wall is safe from the destruction!
• Played For Drama: The barman is scraping by on his meagre earnings, and the destruction threatens to ruin him.