Basic Trope: When confronted by a danger from one direction, no one ever thinks to evade it by moving to the side.
- Straight: Ash is outrunning a rolling boulder on the street, but never thinks about evading left or right.
- Exaggerated: Ash sees rolling boulders coming at him at opposite directions. Not knowing what to do, he runs back and forth instead of stepping aside.
- Downplayed: Ash is running from a boulder in a tunnel slightly wider than the boulder. He never thinks to try pressing himself against a wall.
- Justified:
- The boulder is wide enough that turning would slow Ash down too much because of inertia; it would catch up to him before he could get completely out of the way.
- There's nowhere to go sideways to; on one side is a wall, and on the other side is a cliff.
- In Ash's mind he's still in the tunnel.
- Ash doesn't have much time to think, so his natural human instinct is to run in the opposite direction of what is threatening him.
- Ash is running from the falling wall of a building, trying to make it to where a window would land on him instead of the rest of the wall.
- Inverted:
- Ash runs towards the boulder because he has Super-Strength.
- Ash runs to the side or any other direction but forward in a situation where the most logical thing to do is run forward. And as a result, he dies.
- Subverted:
- Ash runs forward for a bit, then evades the boulder by going sideways.
- Ash has Super-Speed and can outrun the rolling boulder entirely.
- Double Subverted: ...Only for the boulder to follow suit, which at that point Ash gives up about evading sideways and continues to outrun it.
- Parodied: Ash desperately outruns a small, slow-moving boulder down a wide street while ignoring plenty of obvious escape routes.
- Zig-Zagged: Ash is part of a group. Some members jump to an escape route to the side while others continue straight.
- Averted: Ash sees a rolling boulder on the street. He jumps aside.
- Enforced:???
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: Emperor Evulz deliberately set the boulder rolling that way to get Ash to run to a spot where he can capture him alive.
- Defied: After Bob sees Ash run forwards, he says "No, you idiot, move sideways!", and Ash moves to the left.
- Discussed: Bob talks to Ash during a training about running in diagonal when seeing an object and prevent incidents like being crushed by the object because of always running forward.
- Conversed: "Why do people in those films that are being chased always move in the direction that the chaser is moving? Why not move to the side?"
- Implied: At the very end of a Death Course lies the boulder trap. There is a massive trail of blood and mashed organs leading forward and only a few footprint paths on the left and right.
- Deconstructed: Ash gets crushed to death by the boulder.
- Reconstructed: Kyle sees a boulder covered in blood and runs in the opposite direction while also neglecting the sides.
- Played for Laughs: While Ash is running from the boulder. There are 2 signs pointing left in right saying "Live" and the middle one reads "die". Ash accidentally crashes into the middle one right before the boulder joins him.
- Played for Drama: Ash dies to the boulder while the people who already moved to the other directions have to watch.
- Played for Horror: Austin tells Ash to move to the side. However, Ash cannot hear him and dies seconds later.
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