Basic Trope: Soldiers who mess up are disciplined by being made to do the most menial tasks.
- Straight: After going AWOL for a few hours, Private Bob gets assigned to latrine duty for a month.
- Exaggerated: Bob's punishment is to clean an entire city's sewer system by himself. With his tongue.
- Downplayed: After going AWOL for a few hours, Bob is assigned to take out the garbage that night.
- Justified: Giving Bob an unpleasant task as a punishment disciplines Bob and gets an unpleasant but necessary task completed.
- Inverted:
- Bob isn't punished for going AWOL — indeed, he may be rewarded with, for example, a promotion.
- Bob is a model soldier who way exceeds the high expectations placed on him ... and goes either unheralded or punished.
- Subverted: Bob actually enjoys latrine duty more than his normal duties, making the punishment worthless.
- Double Subverted: He was just pretending to enjoy it so his superiors would decide that there was no point in trying to punish him with latrine duty.
- Parodied: After going AWOL for a few hours, Bob is given a Cool and Unusual Punishment.
- Zig-Zagged: Bob is assigned menial tasks as punishment by his superior Alice. Then she finds out he is related to Charlie, her superior, so she starts treating him nicely. But her preferential treatment is found out and she is judged and replaced by a new commander, Dan; Dan resumes giving Bob menial tasks, until Charlie finds out and tells him to be nice with Bob. But Bob turns out not to be his relative, so all bets are off.
- Averted: Discipline is either nonexistent or uses some other method of punishment for misbehavior like A Taste of the Lash.
- Enforced: The show is aimed at kids younger than twelve years and needs to show them that you can't act up with impunity.
- Lampshaded:
- "One would think the army could pay a few janitors."
- "This private needs to be shown the consequences of withholding deserved respect from his superiors."
- Invoked: Dave is on latrine duty, so he encourages Bob to misbehave so Bob will get stuck with it instead.
- Exploited: "Emperor Evulz, this is Field Marshal Ruthless. I need people to clear landmines by walking over them. Could you send me some of those heroic dissidents you are persecuting?"
- Defied: Bob straightens up and flies right when he's warned he can be given latrine duty as punishment for misbehaviour.
- Discussed:Lt. Alex: You disobeyed my orders!Bob: Let me guess. I'm on latrine duty again.
- Conversed: Bob is a character in a Show Within a Show who is put on Punishment Detail. A veteran character watches the scene and comments on how true to life it may or may not be.
- Implied: Bob seems to be giving his superiors the slip, but then comes a Gilligan Cut to him scrubbing out the toilet.
- Deconstructed: The base is attacked while Bob is cleaning toilets, which keeps him from acting in defense of the base.
- Reconstructed: Which saves him of dying at the hands of the enemy, who win a Curb-Stomp Battle, so he can fight them in the future.
- Played for Laughs: Bob tries several wacky methods to make his incredibly boring, unpleasant job less so.
- Played for Drama: Bob is constantly subjected to the nastiest, most degrading jobs as punishment for his lax attitude towards following the rules, which slowly wears him down and breaks his will.
- Played for Horror: It turns out that no one cleaned out those latrines because they were haunted, and Bob spends as much time trying not to be killed by ghosts as he does actually treating and transporting waste.
Back to Punishment Detail
