Basic Trope: The requirements for joining an organization become easier over time.
- Straight: The Tropedian Army used to be considered a military with very rigorous training, in which only 1 in 20 applicants managed to graduate from boot camp and officially join. Currently, the majority are graduating.
- Exaggerated: The Tropedian Army used to be considered an elite military with hellish training, in which only 1 in 10,000 applicants managed to complete boot camp and officially join. At present, its training is so easy that to fail, you'd have to be either totally lazy or physically disabled.
- Downplayed: Although the actual training hasn't changed, some archaic or pointless restrictions on who may join (e.g. "white men only") have been abolished.
- Justified:
- The army's small size made it hard to defend Tropedia; even if each soldier is an expert combatant, they'll still probably lose to an enemy that's ten times larger.
- Tropedia recently experienced a population boom, and the military wants to take advantage with new strategies based around Victory by Endurance.
- The Tropedian Army is in the midst of a battle for key regions, but are suffering increasingly severe casualties. As a result, they've been forced to lower their recruiting standards to keep their personnel at a viable number.
- Inverted: The Tropedian Army raises its standards to weed out more cadets than it did before.
- Subverted: They seem to be lowering the standards because more people are graduating, but then it turns out that they are still as rigorous as ever, only now the quality of cadets is improved via better initial screening.
- Double Subverted: But then a major war breaks out in the country, so they must lower the standards anyway.
- Parodied: They let you join the army just by completing the application form.
- Zig-Zagged: The standards go up or down, depending on whether there is war or not.
- Averted: The standards never go down, even if there is war.
- Lampshaded: "These new meat are worthless, I miss the days when only the best recruits graduated."
- Invoked: The Tropedian Minister of Defense conducts some military studies and concludes that neighbour Examplestan could defeat Tropedia with a Zerg Rush. Therefore, he orders the Tropedian Army to lower its standards until it reaches a certain size.
- Exploited: A criminal group sends its members to join the army, knowing that it's recently lessened its background checks. These infiltrators steal supplies that the group sells for its own profit, and once they leave, they use their military training to run roughshod over rival crooks.
- Defied: The Field Marshal of the Army mounts an impassioned argument on why each and every soldier's quality is of the utmost importance, citing specific incidents where Tropedian soldiers delivered victory only through their exceptional skill and reliability. This convinces the government to rescind its order to lower standards.
- Implied: In an early episode of a series, some Tropedian soldiers are shown, and they're all powerfully-built men in smart uniforms. As the series goes on, the soldiers who appear become scrawnier, more disheveled, and older or very young.
- Deconstructed: The lowering of recruiting standards causes an influx of low-quality soldiers to their ranks, with an accompanying increase in unfit officers, physically incapable infantrymen, and the occasional Ax-Crazy psych case. This eventually turns the Tropedian Army from a legitimately competent Elite Army into a wildly useless laughingstock coasting mainly on the reputation it once had.
