Basic Trope: A nightmarish orphanage that is terrible to the kids living there.
- Straight: The Nomed Orphanage routinely abuses the kids living there, and only feeds them when they're about to die.
- Exaggerated:
- The Nomed Orphanage employees regularly beat and even occasionally kill some of the orphans there.
- The Nomed Orphanage doubles as a brothel.
- The Natas Orphanage is actually a front for a terrorist organization who force the orphans to become Child Soldiers.
- Downplayed: The Nomed Orphanage employees treat the kids like recruits at a boot camp.
- Justified:
- It's running in a country with very little government oversight for such things, so they can get away with anything.
- The institutional budget is just too small for anything beyond barest survival—even the staff aren't doing too well.
- It's a front for a criminal operation or some other Very Bad Thing done at the kids' expense.
- Inverted: Orphanage of Love.
- Subverted: While it's made out to be an Orphanage of Fear at first, you later learn that the Unreliable Narrator is making things up to make things seem more dramatic than they are—it's not bad at all.
- Double Subverted: It's actually worse than first thought—the narrator is so warped that the best thing he can think of is a slightly less evil orphanage.
- Parodied: The Nomed Orphanage doesn't allow the children to watch TV for more than four hours a day. Everyone treats this as if it were the worst child abuse ever.
- Zig-Zagged: After a while, it becomes obvious that the orphanage runs on tiers—orphans they like get the royal treatment you'd see in an Orphanage of Love, whereas orphans they don't like get treated horrendously.
- Averted: The Nomed Orphanage, despite its name, treats the orphans nicely.
- Enforced:
- "How can we give Alice a Dark and Troubled Past?"
- "Bob has to leave his home and collect Power Crystals, but he would never leave a loving home. Let's put him in an abusive place to give him an excuse to leave."
- Lampshaded: "How the hell is the place still in business?"
- Invoked: The Big Bad runs the orphanage in a hopes to raise someone who is just as evil as him to adopt.
- Exploited: A orphan blackmails the orphanage's headmaster—if he doesn't give him the royal treatment, he'll go to anyone that will listen.
- Defied: As soon as an orphan gets adopted, he tells his foster parents what the orphanage is like. They go to the authorities and get it shut down.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Orphans that are adopted out of the Nomed Orphanage, because of how terrible they were treated, often develop psychological problems and lash out at their adoptive families.note
- Reconstructed: Former Nomed Orphanage orphans get help for their psychological problems.
- Played For Laughs: The orphans at the Nomed Orphanage get Hilariously Abusive Childhoods.
- Played For Drama: The Hero visits Nomed Orphanage and discovers how horribly the children there are treated. They spend the final act of the plot trying to rescue the children from it and/or have the Nomed Orphanage shut down.
Back to Orphanage of Fear. And no, you may not have any more porridge.
