Sandbox / Under Cover Sailsman

Current projects: drafting pre-TL Ps for fainting tropes, and reducing the length of Secret Identity (current is huge Wall of Text)

Some tropers are trying to clean up the very awkward soft-split in Fainting, and we think that some of the situations deserve their own tropes.

Pregnancy Faint

A woman fainting without an obvious reason? She must be pregnant.

While it is possible to faint because of a pregnancy, either due to a medical condition^note Gestational Diabetes is a common one. or to over-extending a body's resources, —Hey, building a miniature human is a big project!— fiction-land tends to exaggerate how common it is. In some works, an unexplained faint is a sure-fire way to detect early pregnancy.

A sister trope to Morning Sickness, and a sort of half-sister to Wacky Cravings, which tend to continue throughout pregnancy.

Films — Live-Action

• Zira fainting in the movie Escape from the Planet of the Apes.
• This type is used a lot in the Carry On movies, mostly with the wives married to the womanising Sid James characters that he doesn't find attractive anymore.

Literature

• The Parasol Protectorate: Near the end of Changeless, Alexia faints into her haggis while Lord Maccon is carrying out the very gory process of changing Lady Kingair into a werewolf. When she wakes up, Lord Maccon points out that despite the bloody goings-on, Alexia practically never faints. Madame Lefoux then takes it upon herself to reveal that she's figured out that Alexia is pregnant, to the surprise of her and her husband.

Live-Action TV

• Chloe from 24 discovered her pregnancy this way.
• Lidia in Cable Girls discovers she is pregnant when she is taken to hospital after fainting.
• Phoebe in Charmed fainted twice because of demonic pregnancy.
• How Days of Our Lives' Billie discovers she's pregnant—she's taken to the hospital after collapsing for the second time in a week.
• Jane in Jane the Virgin finds out that she's pregnant after fainting on the bus. Of course, she hadn't even entertained the possibilty because she's a virgin.
• Hatice Sultan of Magnificent Century faints early in her pregnancy. She didn't know she was pregnant until a physician was called after she fainted, to examine her.
• Happens several times in The X-Files episode "Requiem", which ends with Scully's pregnancy being revealed.

Theatre

• Roxie Hart from Chicago faked this to attract media attention and help influence the jury in her murder trial.
• Parodied in Of Thee I Sing, where President Wintergreen's impeachment proceedings are interrupted by his wife bringing the news that he's going to have a baby. He faints, and the Senators have no choice but to exonerate him, since they would never impeach an expectant father. (If you wonder how on earth a show from 1931 could parody a musical from 1975, see Adaptation Displacement.)
• In The Most Happy Fella, Rosabella finds out she's pregnant after she faints during a wild dance. The doctor tells her the truth, but tells Tony that she's "just a little dizzy from all the excitement."
• A Raisin in the Sun has Ruth fainting at the very end of the first act for this exact reason.

Video Games

• In Dragon Quest V, your wife faints on the trip to Gotha. Eventually, it's revealed to be this trope when she faints again while meeting King Albert.

Webcomics

• Happened to Shannon in Queen of Wands due to gestational diabetes.

Web Original

• A reversed version in this Not Always Healthy story. When the poster goes in for a routine follow-up appointment for a fractured wrist, the doctor wraps up the appointment by congratulating her on her pregnancy (the first she'd known about it). Her boyfriend immediately faints.

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Secret Identity

"Rita, a secret identity is as precious as a baby dipped in diamonds. NEVER give it out, especially to mutants."

— Wonderella, The Non-Adventures of Wonderella, "Mostly ARMLESS"

Put simply, a character (usually a superhero) keeps their involvement in the events of the plot secret from some or all of the other characters. Usually, they do this by creating a second, separate persona for themselves, which they use while participating in the plot.

This may be done for several reasons:

• The World Is Not Ready to know about them, or their enemy, if they have one.
• Despite their superpowers, they still want to have a normal life during those times when they are not fighting crime or evil, and they want to keep that normal life separate from their life as a superhero. Especially if they're a vigilante and what they do is against the law.
• They may wish to protect their loved ones from possible retaliation by their enemies. (Oddly enough, they often don't inform said loved ones of any risk. And in some cases, it doesn't even work.)
• Their insurance policy don't have a superhero clause.
• They have been accused, or even convicted, of a crime (in either identity) and need the separation to protect them from the law.
• Someone may go after the hero themselves, and use them for unethical experiments, probably to attempt to replicate their powers. Or just kill them in their sleep.
• Similarly, the hero uses a special item to have powers and become the hero, both the big villains and small crooks may try to steal it, leaving them without powers, and bad people with it.
• The hero wants to be something mysterious or even scary, to strike fear in bad guys.
• They just enjoy the privacy.
• They are using their secret identity as a way of keeping tabs on the world, the way Superman uses his guise as Clark Kent to learn about problems Superman may need to fix.
• Both identities may be useful for crimefighting, if the civilian identity is someone rich, with political powers, or has a job with authorities, they may be able to do stuff in their civilian identity that the hero identity cannot.
• Any combination of two or more of the above.

While trying to protect that secret, the superhero is often placed in the worst kind of situations that threaten to expose it. For instance, there is the Bruce Wayne Held Hostage scenario. In more mundane moments, the superhero often has to quickly come up with a Secret Identity Change Trick in order to get out of sight. They may have to cut off most relationships to prevent this necessity. Especially romantic relationships. And those that survive may have to be secret.

People who guess at the connection almost invariably guess correctly. No matter how closely two superheroes resemble each other, no one will confuse them.

In superhero stories, these are particularly vulnerable to to the superpower The Nose Knows.

This is effectively a single-person variant of the Masquerade. Sometimes a select group of people are allowed to know the hero's secret identity. If they stay largely out of the action, outside an occasional errand or trap setup, they're simply Secret Keepers. If the relationship with the hero is deeper, at least on a professional basis, then the insider may be a Battle Butler. If one or both of a hero's parents were ever heroes themselves, they'll often be overjoyed rather than shocked at the child's heroism, and reveal it as part of their Secret Legacy.

See Secret-Identity Identity for heroes where the secret identity isn't necessarily the "real" one. For the logical inverse, see Collective Identity.

The family and friends of such a hero are usually at risk of having tea with the villain. Other good personas include the Ridiculously Average Guy, The Nondescript, or The Generic Guy.

It is less common, but villains may also have secret identities. These examples are easy to justify: most of these villains are wanted criminals that would be locked up in seconds if their true identity was known. It's common for this kind of villain to be famous, rich, and powerful, and to secretly use their money and political powers for their evil deeds — on the other hand, the villain may have become rich and famous thanks to their secret evil powers in the first place. The general public believes they are just another celebrity/businessman or even idolize them, while despising their evil alter ego. It's also common for these villains to have their identity hidden from even the audience, so it can be revealed later, often as a huge twist.

Experts point to The Scarlet Pimpernel, written at the turn of the 20th century by Baroness Emmuska Orczy, as one of the earliest pure examples of this trope. However, the Older Than Print Chivalric Romance Roswall and Lillian has the hero work as a servant at court and fight three times at The Tourney disguised in armor, without revealing his identity; it also appears in various Fairy Tales, though in all these it is a temporary measure, and not the perpetual double identity of the modern secret identity, and so is more of an Ur-Example.

Bob Ingersoll considers secret identities to be actually detrimental to fighting crime. Even so, it has become a staple of the Super Hero genre, to the point where it's easier to list exceptions, subversions and variations than straight examples.

A Sub-Trope of Living a Double Life, Two Aliases, One Character, Invented Individual.

A Super-Trope to:

• Angel Unaware: A mysterious character is implied to be an angel or other supernatural being.
• Anti-Climactic Unmasking: Someone rips off a superhero's mask, expecting someone extraordinary, but they get someone ordinary.
• Black Knight: A powerful, mysterious knight who wears black armor.
• Bruce Wayne Held Hostage: The villain tries to draw out the hero by holding the hero's secret identity hostage.
• Celebrity Masquerade: A superhero whose secret identity is famous in their own right — sometimes more than the hero.
• Clark Kenting: The hero's civilian identity is basically the hero wearing a Paper-Thin Disguise.
• Color-Coded Secret Identity: Someone's everyday civilian clothes just so happen to be the same color(s) as their superhero costume.
• Death by Secret Identity: Someone finds out the hero's secret identity, but dies before they can do anything with the information.
• Flung Clothing: Someone changes into their costume by tossing off their disguise in one flick motion.
• Friend of Masked Self: The hero, in their civilian identity, claims to be friends with their own alter-ego.
• God Was My Copilot: A deity in disguise.
• Hates My Secret Identity: A hero knows someone dislikes them in their secret identity, but likes their super identity.
• Identity Impersonator: The hero protects their secret identity by appearing in public with someone pretending to be their alter ego.
• King Incognito: A ruler disguises themselves as a commoner.
• Loves My Alter Ego: Someone's Love Interest is only attracted to their heroic identity, not their secret one.
• Likes Clark Kent, Hates Superman: A hero with a secret identity knows someone who likes one identity, but can't stand the other.
• Multilayer Façade: Someone wears multiple disguises over each other at once.
• Old Beggar Test: A god or other powerful being tests someone by turning up at their doorstep posing as someone in need.
• The Reveal Prompts Romance: The hero reveals their secret identity to their Love Interest, which causes them to commence a relationship.
• Second Super-Identity: A superhero creates another super identity.
• Secret Chaser: Someone constantly follows around the hero protecting their secret identity, trying to find it out.
• Secret Identity Apathy: The villains aren't interested at all in learning the hero's secret identity.
• Secret Identity Change Trick: A person with a superhero identity must improvise a way to get out of sight to change identities.
• Secret-Identity Identity: It's called into question on whether the person regards their super identity or their secret identity as their true self.
• Secret-Keeper: A friend the hero has allowed to be aware of their secret identity.
• Secret Secret-Keeper: Someone finds out the hero's secret identity, but doesn't let the hero know that they are aware of their secret identity.
• Secret Public Identity: Someone uses their real name instead of an alias.
• Self-Proclaimed Knight: A character secretly becomes a knight.
• Sexier Alter Ego: A person's costumed persona has better luck getting dates than their civilian identity.
• Sweet Polly Oliver: A woman disguises herself as a man.
• The Unmasking: The hero reveals their secret identity to someone, willingly or by force.

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Arly Hanks

• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • Subverted In Maggody and the Moonbeams. Arly states that she avoids arguing with people armed with shotguns, rifles, handguns, crossbows, or even spatulas. The spatula seems like the trivial entry in the list ... until readers recall that the chief spatula-wielder in Arly's life is her mother, who runs a bar & grill. And is not lightly to be argued with, if Arly wants to live on something besides canned soup that day.
  • Straight example from Mischief in Maggody, from a teen bluntly told to leave by a (fake) psychic:
    Carol Alice: Do you think she saw something terrible about me in the sand? Like I was going to die tomorrow or get hit by a chicken truck or flunk out or get thrown off the cheerleading squad?
• As the Good Book Says...: Played with, as bungling preacher Brother Verber regularly misquotes the Bible. (He was ordained through a mail-order seminary.)
• Church of Saint Genericus: The actual denomination of Brother Verber's Voice of the Almighty Lord Assembly Hall is never stated. The narrative shows Brother Verber being suspicious of Catholics, Methodists, Unitarians, Lutherans and Episcopalians at various times, and there's a Baptist church down the highway that competes with him for followers, but the Assembly Hall's exact affiliation is never specified (of course, Verber's "theological training" was via a Las Vegas correspondence course that he seems barely to have passed, so it's possible he doesn't know either).
• Cluster F-Bomb: Hammet Buchanon can barely open his mouth without swearing unless there's an immediate payoff for not doing so. The joke is that Hammet is about nine when introduced, and his siblings' language is even worse.
• Comically Missing the Point: Subverted by the antique-shop owner in Maggody, whose sign ("Antiques: New and Used") seems to miss the point of an antique, but is actually Obfuscating Stupidity employed to lure in gullible tourists.
• Crop Circles: In Martians in Maggody, the appearance of crop circles in moonshiner Raz Buchanon's field draws a horde of UFO fanatics to the little Arkansas town, eager to photograph (for $10 a head, payable to a grinning Raz) this "inexplicable" phenomenon.
• Cult: Subverted in Maggody And The Moonbeams, where a reclusive all-female Christian sect is actually a front for a group of battered women in hiding, whose members are being exploited for cheap manual labor by their corrupt leader.
• Dead Guy on Display: In O Little Town of Maggody, the mannequin from the "Take Your Photo With Matt Montana" display in Mrs. Jim Bob's gift shop is removed during the night and replaced with a real corpse. Once it's discovered, the body is fully visible through the shop's front window and a crowd of tourists gather to watch Arly and Sheriff Dorfer examine it.
• Deadpan Snarker: Arly makes innumerable sarcastic comments, yet almost no one in the county has enough brains to get the joke. Thus, she mostly has to make do with First-Person Smartass monologues except when interrogating out-of-town suspects.
• Dirty Old Monk: Brother Verber (a Protestant preacher) spends a lot of time studying pornographic magazines and videos only so as to better understand how the Devil might lead his flock astray (or at least that's what he tells himself).
• Don't Try This at Home: After describing the aftermath of a kitchen grease fire in Maggody and the Moonbeams, Arly warns readers not to set off fire extinguishers indoors to find out if her description is accurate, or they'll be sorry.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Arly has a deputy working for her in the first book, and the sheriff's office largely takes over the investigation into Jaylee's death, in contrast to later books when she has no underlings and is railroaded into doing all the grunt-work because Sheriff Dorfer is out fishing or watching baseball. Mrs. Jim Bob actually chews out her husband for hassling Arly, rather than sniping at her in Holier Than Thou fashion, and Jim Bob himself seems genuinely fond of fishing and hunting, rather than using them as a cover for his philandering.
• Full-Boar Action: Though tuskless, domesticated, and female, Raz Buchanon's pet pig Marjorie once bit the leg off a mule, and chased a man out an upstairs window, causing his death.
• Half-Identical Twins: In Maggody and the Moonbeams, Dahlia insists that her twins are "identical", because they look a lot alike to her and she's convinced it'll get them successful Hollywood careers. The contrary fact they're different sexes is ignored, as she doesn't actually know what "identical" means in this context.
• Hamster-Wheel Power: Complaining about her PD's microscopic budget, Arly claims in Merry Wives of Maggody that her computer is powered by squirrels running in a wheel. She tells Sheriff Dorfer that one of his deputies will have to run background checks on some suspects because her computer's on the blink: one of the squirrels died.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • Often locals boast of being the soul of discretion, swearing not to blab some secret they've been entrusted with, then immediately pass it on to a third party.
  • Brother Verber's internal monologue suggests he's honestly convinced his forays to strip clubs and porn theaters are for "research" into potential moral threats.
• I'm a Man; I Can't Help It: Mayor Jim Bob's philandering is so much a part of his personality that, when his wife asks him why he's come home late, the only trace of guilt he ever feels is for lying about why: the possibility he might not sleep around never even crosses his mind.
• Kitschy Local Commercial: In The Merry Wives of Maggody, the boat salesman who contributed the bass boat to the golf tournament is first seen filming a commercial that was meant to feature a bad pun about taking the bull by the horns, but the bull rented for the filming kept wandering off.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Brother Verber recites Bible phrases at the drop of a hat. As he's the inept product of a fly-by-night correspondence-course seminary, he constantly misquotes them, mistakes their verse numbers, and/or takes them so far out of context as to be irrelevant.
• Lampshade Hanging:
  • At one point, police chief Arly muses on the ludicrous number of murders (and weirdos) that've beset the quiet town of Maggody since she's moved back there.
  • In The Merry Wives of Maggody, the men of Maggody make a bargain that could encourage them to kill each other, prompting another character to mock how much it sounds like a plot-device from a cheesy mystery novel.
• Lie Back and Think of England: Mrs. JimBob's mother taught her that a proper wife should lie back and think of England. She takes this recommendation literally, although she'd never understood what England had to do with a small-town Arkansas woman's sex life.
• Lord Error-Prone: Brother Verber is a correspondence-course preacher who periodically becomes convinced he's the one thing standing between his town and Satan, so gets drunk on sacramental wine and heads out to do battle. Hilarity Ensues... assuming he doesn't get distracted by the porn he "researches" so he'll know what he's up against.
• Magic Tool: * In Mischief In Maggody, Kevin gets a job selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. The brand he's selling apparently does everything from regular vacuuming to leafblowing to paint-stripping to scaling fish. Heaven help whoever has to clean out the vacuum's filters and dust bag....
• Mountain Man: Diesel Buchanonis a non-period parody of a mountain man. In a modern(ish) world, he lives in a cave in the Ozarks, scares backpackers, and subsists on squirrels and roadkill.
• Mystery Magnet: County coroner McBeen has accused police chief Arly of attracting crimes to the town. She snarkily replies that it must be all those classified ads she places in newspapers, inviting murderers to come practice their hobby in town.
• No Name Given: One minor character, who keeps house for Mrs. Jim Bob, is known only as "Perkins' eldest". Considering the kinds of cockamamie names people in Maggody stick on their kids, it may be just as well.
• Noodle Implements: In The Maggody Militia, Arly grumbles about her mother's fondness for flea markets and how it's affected her past birthday presents. She's not sure how, but she snarkily muses how her survival might one day depend on her having a bicycle pump, a muffin tin, and a 1984 world almanac ready to hand.
• No-Tell Motel: Ruby Bee absolutely refuses to acknowledge that the motel she owns is used primarily for one-night-stands, even though it's an open secret that's what all the passing truckers rent rooms for. The only one who doesn't use it for his trysts is Mayor Jim Bob, who takes his girlfriends to Farberville's No-Tell Motel to be farther from his wife.
• Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here: Maggody, Arkansas is a too-small-for-the-mapmakers flyspeck town where the locals consider the burning of Hiram's barn to be the sole event of historical note in decades. In those same decades, said flyspeck has variously been invaded by porn movie-makers, a rehab clinic, pot farmers, UFO fanatics, tabloid reporters, militia nutjobs, golfers, Civil War buffs, country-western music groupies, fake psychics, the Internet, televangelists, and feminists, all of them with a distressing tendency to get themselves murdered. And people still claim that nothing exciting ever happens if asked.
• Phony Degree: Brother Verber got his theology degree from an unnamed correspondence-course seminary. His constant misquotations of biblical verse and misuse of theological terms suggest that his alma mater was either a substandard diploma mill or an outright fraud.
• Population: X, and Counting: Inverted, in that Maggody's "Pop. 755" sign never does get updated, despite a multitude of murders and at least two births. Protagonist Arly Hanks facetiously argues that it's always accurate by somebody's definition: it depends on whether or not you count drifters, woods-dwelling weirdos, family pets, and livestock as part of the population.
• Pronouncing My Name for You: Joan Hess got tired of people calling the town of Maggody "Mah-goad-ee", so added some scenes where residents correct others' pronunciation, or rhyme it with "raggedy" in a song.
• Rambling Old Man Monologue: Pretty much everyone in Maggody talks in long-winded rambling fashion, young or old. This makes questioning people insanely frustrating for Chief Hanks, or anyone else who wants a straight answer for that matter.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: In-Universe at the end of O Little Town of Maggody, when Hammett swipes a bunch of Christmas ornaments to set up a spindly, ragged runt of a holiday tree for Arly. He could have swiped the perfectly-symmetrical, flawless spruce that the ornaments had been hung on, but because Hammett grew up in a shack on Cotter's Ridge — a trackless backwoods covered in real coniferous forests — he didn't think the farm-raised tree, which had never bent in the wind or suffered a fungal infection or been nibbled by porcupines, looked like a "real" tree at all.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • Arly once reads a mystery novel about an amateur sleuth whose daughter Talks In Capital Letters, while remarking that its plot seems ridiculously contrived. The bookstore-owner sleuth of Hess's other mystery series, Claire Malloy Mysteries, is the mother of a teen with this very Verbal Tic.
  • In Martians in Maggody, a character snarkily suggests that one of the UFO "experts" may already be planning a new book with some really stupid title, like "Martians in Maggody".
• Serious Business: In Muletrain to Maggody, some of the Civil War re-enactors are so intensely devoted to their hobby (some would say obsession) that they deliberately collect welts and blisters from overly-stiff boots, drink contaminated creek water to contract historically-accurate diarrhea, and incur 2nd degree sunburns while stubbornly playing dead, all in the name of "not being a farb". One would've sworn off dentistry for that just-two-teeth-left-and-they're-blackened-stumps look, had his wife not threatened divorce.
• Small-Town Tyrant: Mayor Jim Bob Buchanon of the Arly Hanks mysteries is a piggish petty tyrant of sorts, at least to the meager extent possible in a skint-broke town with less than 800 people. He falls short where genuine evil is concerned, due to incompetence and a tendency to fall prey to real villains.
• Smelly Skunk: Getting sprayed by skunks is a common bit of Laser-Guided Karma for Jerkass characters in Maggody.
• Tontine: The men of Maggody arrange a tontine for possession of the bass boat in Merry Wives of Maggody, apparently not aware that such a document is illegal and unenforceable. Roy Stiver Lampshades how tontines had never made much sense to begin with, even in mystery novels.
• Trail of Bread Crumbs: At the end of Madness In Maggody, Lamont Petrel is tarred-and-feathered by a gang of high school boys and then flees into the woods with his business partner Jim Bob hot on his trail. While the boys hadn't heated the tar enough to do Petrel serious injury, he unwittingly leaves a trail of tar-smears and chicken feathers behind for a furious Jim Bob to follow.
• Unfortunate Names: A running gag is the cockamamie names that Stump County residents apply to their kids. Some get phonetically-spelled versions of words that might've been tolerable (if rustic) had they been spelled correctly, like Hospiss; others sport names that the parents just thought sounded interesting, like Rubella Belinda. Occasionally this is elevated to weird Family Theme Naming, as with brothers Diesel and Petrol.
• Vomit Chain Reaction: In Madness in Maggody, someone tampers with the deli hot sauce at the grand opening of Jim Bob's new supermarket. While the first round of puking is set off by ipecac in the tamales, one of the investigating deputies mentions how at least some of the samples taken from the scene weren't of interest to the lab, having been deposited due to people vomiting in reaction to the existing vomit smell.
• Vomiting Cop: Chief Hanks herself occasionally pukes, particularly in The Merry Wives Of Maggody in which she has morning sickness as well as corpses to deal with.
• Who Would Want to Watch Us?: In Merry Wives of Maggody, a Deadpan Snarker dismisses the possibility that an inquisitive visitor might be writing a book about the town, on the grounds that nobody would want to read one.