Basic Trope: A fictional illness that gives you spots.
- Straight: Alice gets "Spottyosis" and spots appear all over her skin.
- Exaggerated:
- The entire cast gets Spottyosis.
- The spots appear on Alice's eyes, hair and tongue as well as her skin.
- Downplayed: The spots only appear on one part of Alice or there's only a few of them.
- Justified: Spottyosis is an In-Universe disease that works in some in-universe way, and Alice got exposed to it.
- Inverted:
- Alice gets an illness which makes her get stripes.
- Alice, for whatever reason, normally has spots all over. When she gets sick, they disappear.
- Alice spends most of the series sick. At the Grand Finale, she is cured and gets spots.
- Subverted:
- Alice turns out to be faking Spottyosis.
- They thought she had Spottyosis, but really, she just had chicken pox.
- Double Subverted:
- She catches it anyway.
- Bob catches it.
- Parodied:
- Spottyosis comes with an insatiable love of polka as one of its symptoms.
- Spottyosis is cured by washing the spots away.
- Zigzagged: Alice spends the episode with spots all over. The rest are trying to figure out their cause, which may or may not be an illness.
- Averted:
- Alice does not get sick.
- Alice does get sick, but doesn't get spots.
- Alice does get spots, but they're a symptom of a Real Life ailment.
- Enforced: The writers wanted to have an episode where Alice gets a realistic skin infection, but due to the symptoms appearing disgusting, ratings won't let them show the real-life style skin infection. So the disease is censored to a less gross polka dot disease.
- Invoked: Bob, for whatever reason, tries to infect Alice with Spottyosis.
- Exploited: Bob smuggles it in on a critter whose fur pattern would camouflage the disease.
- Defied:
- There's a vaccination against Spottyosis. Alice takes it.
- Alice makes a point of not exposing herself to Spottyosis.
- Discussed: "What's that illness that makes you break out in polka-dots?"
- Conversed: "Spots always mean trouble in these shows."
- Implied: Alice is seen looking out of sorts with spots that can't be measles or chicken pox for whatever reason (they're the wrong colour, she's had the MMR vaccine, she's had chickenpox before etc).
- Deconstructed: Any spots that large would be highly uncomfortable and scarring. Recovery from Spottyosis leaves Alice looking even worse. With the disease no longer occupying her skin she now has very large pockmarks.
- Reconstructed: Fortunately, medical technology has advanced to repair the damage easy enough. Applying a skin colored cream to it conceals and eventually allows it to recover without a scar.
- Played for Laughs: The Polka Dot Plague causes the infected to gain an overwhelming love of polka but is otherwise harmless.
- Played for Drama: Spottyosis could be life-threatening.
- Played for Horror: If left untreated, Spottyosis patients will develop several horrifying symptoms.
Back to Polka-Dot Disease.
