Most media have some kind of setting. A world, a time, some characters, maybe some backstory... but not here. There's only one thing for you to see or do here. No frill, no fluff. Most often seen in Retro Gaming, originally due to programming constraints but now mostly for style in the Casual Video Game. When used in video games, the main reason for not having any story or characters is generally because the player's not going to be interested- the Casual Game is meant for pick-up-and-play while waiting for the bus or something. If the game has any plot at all, it would, at most, be an Excuse Plot. This may already be becoming an Outdated Trope, as remakes of retro games often try to add a little "extra" to it, even if it is superfluous.

Since this is used so often in video gaming, let's not list every single example, just genres, notable exceptions, or inversions. Or specific references to this in other media.

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Examples:

Games

• Chess, checkers, GO, and other ancient board games.
  • In an interesting subversion, Chaturanga, the precursor to modern chess, has a "setting" in South Asia (presumably India) and is named for a battle in the epic Mahabharata.

Video Games

• Casual Game in general, because people don't have time to bother with story during their 5-minute smoke break.
• Driving Game: Trackmania
• Puzzle Game: Tetris or Bejeweled
• Rhythm Game: Beatmania, Dance Dance Revolution.
• Shoot Em Up: Space Invaders or Geometry Wars
• Fighting Game: While the manuals may contain some backstory for the characters, gameplay itself generally consists of nothing more than beating the other player up.
  • The Super Smash Bros. series didn't even have an Excuse Plot until Brawl.
• Simulation Game: Most simulation games often emulate real-world places. However, there are exceptions:
  • many "resource simulation" games, like Sim City or Rollercoaster Tycoon, will begin with a blank slate.
• First Person Shooter: multiplayer maps are usually nothing more than arenas for players to kill each other. Single player campaigns have varying levels of plot.
  • Team Fortress 2 is notable for its success, without any single-player component at all. Some Excuse Plot has been gradually added on the website, but the game itself pretty much remains plotless.

Examples of inversions

• Tetris is given some kind of plot in this movie trailer and possible explanation of its inner workings.
• Minesweeper is given the movie treatment.
• Pac Man's backstory is imagined to be an astronaut◊ hallucinating the ghosts of his fellow crewmates and ravenously eating anti-anxiety pills.

Former Title: The Butch Girl Kisses A Guy At The End Alt. Title: Thank Goodness She Likes Men

A subtrope of The Ladette, this is where the manly female displays some or most of the tendencies of the Butch Lesbian, but kisses a guy at the end to put the audience at ease and gives them a supposedly happy ending. Thank goodness she's not queer!

In short, it's the relief that homophobes feel when a woman runs back to men, a woman who would have been a lesbian if there wasn't Executive Meddling for Moral Guardians.

Optional: The female actually identifies as a lesbian for some reason. For WHATEVER reason, she may say that she's a lesbian. It could be that she's given into the rumor of her lesbianism that's gone around school, or she's a spy trying to get into an exclusive lesbian nightclub. Or she's a compulsive liar.

The opposite of Bait And Switch Lesbians, in that it's not Fem girls almost getting it on. The Butch is asexual, and there's usually no real flirtation with another girl. It's a butch, asexual girl who sometmes claims to be a lesbian and gets sexual with a guy at the end.

Easily gender-flipped for effeminate men.

• The Faculty: Stokely, who identifies as lesbian

• Mean Girls: Janis, who identifies as lesbian (complete with Drag King suit at the end)

• Miss Congeniality: Gracie, who keeps it vague until the big smooch. And her first "crush" was implied to just be a friend, and the "two dates" that she went on in the last decade, she worded in such a way that we don't know what gender they are. And yes, she's as butch as it gets.

• Sex And The City messes with the rules a little bit...
  • Season 1: Bay of Married Pigs - She scorned men up until that point, the butchest, most feminist of the S.A.T.C. gals, Miranda (played by "bisexual" actress Cynthia Nixon) works at a law firm where everyone thinks that she's a lesbian, and one of her co-workers match-makes her with a real lesbian named Sid, and they start dating so that Miranda can get invited to an exclusive, couples-only senior partner's dinner party at her firm. Complete with Drag King suit. The twist being that Miranda kisses Sid to make sure that Miranda is not gay. Thank goodness!
    • Season 2: The Cheating Curve - Charlotte spends time with her new friends, the "Power Lesbians" and makes them think that she's a lesbian, but at the end she admits that she's not, when one of the lesbians asks Charlotte point blank if she is, at which point she's informed that, "If you don't eat pussy, then you're not a dyke." Thank goodness!
    • Season 3: Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl - Charlotte poses as a drag king for a male artist at her gallery, but then kisses that male at the end. Thank goodness!
    • Season 4: Multiple Episodes - In Defining Moments, Samantha meets Maria, a lesbian painter, at Charlotte's gallery. Samantha enjoys sex with Maria, and proudly calls herself a "lesbian" in the next episode, What's Sex Got to Do with It?, followed by the breakup with Maria and going back to men in the next episode called Ghost Town. Thank goodness!

See Also: Dethroning Moment Of Suck

Up For Grabs

A system of measurement for something that doesn't seem like it could be measured in discreet units in the first place. Almost always used for humor.

Compare Hiroshima As A Unit Of Measure.

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• Futurama once had a device that measured coolness in mega-fonzies.
• An archon in Order Of The Stick measured evil in terms of kilo-nazis.
• The Daily Show book gauged the value of a news story in Buttafuocos.
• Beauty has been measured in miliHelens (the amount of beauty needed to launch a single ship) in The Rebel Angels, a novel by Robertson Davies, this system was invented by Cambridge mathematician W.A.H. Rushton. However, the term was possibly first suggested by Isaac Asimov.
• Fame is sometimes measured in Warhols.
• Early on in Schlock Mercenary, there is frequent mention of an absolute system of measurement for pain - namely, Kill-o-Hurtz. Various medical instruments are rated according to how much pain they inflict, ect... the concept hasn't been mentioned in a long time, however, as the Schlock Mercenary universe (if not the actual story) has gotten somewhat more 'serious'...
• In The Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, the sequel to The Illuminatus Trilogy, Dr. Dashwood is a sex researcher, whose scales are named after pornographic stars:
  "Sincerity we measure in Spelvins on a scale of zero to ten," Dashwood went on, totally absorbed in his subject. "Hedonism in Lovelaces-we've been lucky there; subjects are able to distinguish sixteen graduations. Finally, there's the dimension of Tenderness-we find zero to seven covers that, so that the perfect Steinem Job, if I may use the vernacular, would consist of ten Spelvins of Sincerity, sixteen Lovelaces of Hedonism, and seven Havens of Tenderness."

This is where there's general confusion about sequels due to continuity errors, parallel canon, naming and numbering eccentricities, non-linear storytelling, alternate media tie-ins, translation fun through international distribution, remakes and ambiguity about whether or not it's a remake or a sequel, or a prequel or a spoof. Those that top the list include Evil Dead, The Ring, Friday The Thirteenth , Terminator's tie-ins like its theme park ride and Italian "sequel" and TV show, Superman and how he's a teen in the 21st century when he was middle-aged back in the Golden Age, Dracula especially when you consider Vlad and The Wandering Jew, and all the movies connected to or inspired by Night Of The Living Dead, including the Zombi series. The Asylum Productions.

See here for more.

Do we have this one?

A sub-trope of What Could Have Been, The Almost Name is the name a work, character, or any other element of the story almost had. This includes any rejected titles and any rejected names. Sometimes this would have been better, and sometimes it would have been worse. Your Milage May Vary, as always.

Examples:

• Halo had many proposed names, including stuff like Covenant and even Red Shift. Something tells me there would have been a lawsuit from a formally Kirkland based FPS Developer if that had gone through. In the end, an anonymous Bungie employee (nobody knows who did it, even today) wrote on the whiteboard for names "Halo". It worked, and the rest is history.
• Valve went through this ALOT for Half Life 2. In fact, Gordon was originally Ivan (nicknamed Ivan The Space Biker). Breen was The Consul, Eli Vance was Eli Maxwell and had no relation to Alyx, Mossman wasn't named Judith, and countless others. It all changed between E3 and the launch of Half Life 2.
• In an episode of Justice League, a few heroes get sent into an alternate universe. There there they meet the counterparts to the League in that universe, the Justice Guild, who are based off of some of the 1950s DC heroes. Originally the "Justice Guild" was going to be the Justice Society of America, but it was changed at the last minute because DC had just gotten the JSA popular again and the Society/Guild acted realistic for the 1950s. It was for the better in the end, since Green Lantern mentions they also were the heroes in the comics of his childhood, which would have made little sense.
• Code Lyoko was originally Garage Kids, with a darker theme and lacking Aelita. The digital world was called "Xanadu" instead of "Lyoko". Also, Yumi could use telekinesis in the real world. It was later revamped, with a clearer boundary between the digital world and real world.
• As a shout out to Half Life, William "Bill" Overbeck originally had the last name Calhoun.

Stock Phrase: Whenever a character is trying to wake another up, expect the sleeper to mutter for 'five more minutes' before getting up.

Do We Have This One? Up For Grabs, Needs A Better Description.

Do we have this one?

People who recall events about which they shouldn't know.

For instance, the young woman who survived the last movie talks about what happened. The flashback sequence follows her now-dead friends to events at which she was not present. Possibly, she read the police reports, or she's psychic, or something, but it's not explained exactly how she knows everything down to every little detail.

Pretty much every movie does this where the narrator is also a character. A Christmas Story does this, mostly with the family members, like when the brother tells the mom that "dad's gonna kill Ralphie." Also, when the family is sitting around the Christmas tree as Ralphie's putting on the bunny suit.

I just saw Zombieland, and it more than fits this trope. Columbus borders on omniscience.

Stephen King's Wizard And Glass does this.

"Roland, how can you know every corner of this story?"

"I don't think that's what you really want to know, Eddie."

He was right about that.

Different from Infallible Narrator in that Infallible Narrator is when the narrator is too good at describing stuff, and too talented at describing everything. Right?

Up For Grabs

Seen It A Million Times, but not yet on this wiki.

Want to prove you're not a pussy, or that you're really dedicated to whatever cause you're fighting for?

Just injure yourself! Carve a rune into your own chest, stab youself and swear on the blood, or just punch yourself in the face to show that you can handle it!

This is one of The Oldest Ones In The Book, as well as a huge Truth In Television.

Examples

Anime & Manga

• Luffy from One Piece stabbed himself in the face in order to prove to his hero that he was tough enough to be a pirate. He still has a scar under his left eye from that.
  • Zoro/Zolo from the same series also near-disemboweled himself just to prove he was strong enough to fight wounded. Christ.
• Kongou Banchou: Iai Bancho slashes his own eyes open so that he doesn't get distracted by his opponents' breasts. (Wouldn't a blindfold have been better?)

Film

• Predator. Just before fighting the title creature, Billie cuts two wounds in his chest with his knife.
• Joe/Jack/Tyler Durden takes this WAY too far. Besides starting the titular clubs, of course. Extinguishing lit cigarettes against his own skin as a form of foreplay? Yes. Burning himself with lye just so he can experience pain? Yep. Shooting himself in the face, twice? Uh-huh.
• In Jarhead, the Marines mark the new guys who have shown themselves worthy... by branding them like cattle. They (pretend to) do this earlier, as standard hazing practice.
• Gary Busey's character in Lethal Weapon holds his hand in a lighter flame until it sizzles, as a demonstration of Badass Loyalty because his boss tells him to.
• The Lord of the Rings : The Two Towers film did this just before the burning of the Westfold (could be it's only on the extended cut) with the leader of the Dunlendings swearing an oath to Saruman while cutting his hand.
• Somewhat subverted in The World is Not Enough, where Renard holds a scalding hot rock - except he can't feel pain, so it doesn't matter to him.
• A Man Called Horse. Nothing says "I'm a macho idiot an Indian warrior despite being born an English gentleman" like hanging yourself from the ceiling by your skin.
  • That's practiced in real life too. By a minority of people from every ethnicity ... it's called body suspension and goes along with the piercing/tattooing subculture.

Video Games

• The Intro to the "Dante's Inferno" 360 game.

Live Action TV

• One word: Jackass.

Literature

• In the first Daughters of the Moon book, a girl tries to prove her devotion to the Dragon by carving his name into her chest. She is stopped before she gets past the first three letters. In later books, she still has the scars.

Music

• Marilyn Manson seems to do this whenever I see his concert videos.
• G.G. Allin.

Real Life

• A million fraternity/club/gang hazing rituals, a billion tribal "manhood ceremonies," and a trillion prison and military rituals.
• G. Gordon Liddy (of Watergate fame) would hold his hand in a candle flame until his flesh burned to prove his willpower.
• Of course, the tried and true method of self-flagellation (as demonstrated by the Evil Albino in The Da Vinci Code)
• Crushing beer cans on your head.
• Tattooing/piercing, especially when gang related. Temporary piercings apply even more, because you're subjecting youself to pain with no permanent body decoration to show for it.
• George Carlin called some womens' insistence on natural (pain reliever-free) birth "childbirth machismo."
• There's a festival somewhere in SE Asia, I believe, where all males above their early teens buy razor blades, barbed wire, and small knives, and spend a day slashing their own chests open in the name of... something. I saw a piece of a National Geographic documentary on it. If anyone could find more information on that, it would really help the trope.
• Seppuku.

A Video Game trope. The Safe Level is a level where the player isn't invulnerable, but there's a complete (or almost complete) lack of things which could attack them. Often a hub level.

There are two types of this.

Type A: The level is completely bereft of enemies, pools of non-swimmable liquid or any other hazards.

Type B: The level doesn't have enemies which can attack, but it is possible to be hit if you do something specific. Of course, this only applies if it's not a major part of the level - if the level is mostly made up of floating platforms over a pool of acid, it's not an example.

• Crash Bandicoot 2, 3 and Wrath of Cortex all have Type As. The exception is the sixth hub from 2 which is Type B, as it is possible to fall off if you walk through where you haven't activated a portal.
• Common in the Spyro The Dragon series. The first game has two Type Bs. From the first home world, none of the enemies can attack and run if they spot Spyro (you can fall into water at two regions of the level), while the sixth, a better example, doesn't have enemies and is one big platform. The five Flight levels are all Type As.
  • The second game's first home world is Type A.
  • The third game's first and second home worlds are both Type As. The third home world is a Type B: it is possible to die if you run into the flamethrowers and don't use the convenient invincibility powerup in front of them (it's really just show the player how the powerup is used).
• Yoshi's House from Super Mario World is Type A. The Yellow Switch Palace and Top Secret Area aren't examples: although bereft of any enemy activity, there is a timer.

This is in Lousy Alternate Titles, but I realized it's an actual trope.

It's someone who can't think of good names for things (or people if it's the character's kids). The names are too long, don't fit the thing(s), or are just weird.

Now this isn't how you feel about the names (this is an objective trope). It's about the story making it clear that the character chooses bad or weird names.

We would go for a truly awful title to make it self demonstrating, but this trope usually has the description of the thing stated in the show, just to make it clear how awful the name is.

And no using this as a Take That on trope titles you don't like. We will nuke any such entries.

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Examples:

• Named for Leonard of Quirm of Discworld. He invents loads of things, but his names for them just don't work.
• In the short lived western spoof Legend (not to be confused with the movie, but was by the same people who made The Adventures Of Brisco County Jr), the inventor Bartok gives overly long names for his inventions.
• In an Abridged Series of Trigun, Knives is voiced as though he was Dr. Evil, and his plans have names that are sexual in nature, and he never gets it. One plan is to steal a lumber from a place before dawn, and he calls it "Operation Morning Wood".
• In the film Where The Heart Is, a lady names her kids after candies.

You know, that thing where there's a belligerent jackass, usually obese; he drinks, he smokes, he eats, and probably, if in the right genre, farts and tries to have sex. Very selfish, sometimes to the point of megalomania, and uses bizarre logic to explain himself and his bizarre activities, whether he believes it himself or not. This seems like an awfully specific set of characteristics, but take a look:

• Trope Namer: Pere Ubu, by Alfred Jarry. Even though the other examples are more famous, he's the most hardcore about it.
• Homer Simpson
• Peter Griffin (and to a lesser extent, most of the other characters on Family Guy, actually)
• Gargantua
• Weebl of Weebl & Bob
• Mojo of Marvel Comics
• Possibly Max of Sam & Max--not fat, but he does eat everything. A little more ax-crazy than most.
• One might even argue that the movie version of Peter Venkman would count.
• Real life: John Belushi and maybe Andy Kaufman. Maybe. Also Rodney Dangerfield.

It's also important to note that these crop up in buddy comedies fairly often, especially gamer webcomics, where the wacky messy fat guy likes to mess with the duller skinny guy, but I don't know enough of them to say what their names are.

Do We Have This One?

Probably as a result of infamous sailors like Blackbeard and Barbarossa, it's popular to give pirate or nautical characters names that reference their body hair. And not just sailors either.

Examples:

• Admiral Razorbeard from Rayman 2.

Needs A Better Title.

Drink this. YOU'LL BE A REAL MAN NAO!

Basically, Memetic Badass, applying to a food or drink.

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• POWERTHIRST! IT'S CRYSTAL METH IN A CAN!
  • Brawndo (IT'S GOT ELECTROLYTES).
• Beef Jerky: Made from little girls. Hot sauce also makes you grow chest hair.
• Whatever that drink was in Metal Gear Solid 4.

Current title is misleading.

Basically, an inversion of Ave Machina. The machines' religion. Two most popular scenarios are worshipping their creators or a Deus Est Machina.

Examples:

• The geth worship Reapers in Mass Effect.
• SCP-808, the Machines' God.
• Gunnerkrigg Court has one, to some extent.

Seen It A Million Times, just can't remember more triumphant ones.

Do We Have This, Should We Have This, Up For Grabs, etc.

Alice believes in Santa. Not merely as a concept, but as an actual entity. However, the culture deems that she should have found out or been told otherwise long before. In some works, she will be vindicated unequivocally; in others, the other characters may decide to maintain her beliefs, because they think it's cuter if she believes.

• In Azumanga Daioh, Kagura wonders if Chiyo still believes. Tomo goes to ask, but is dragged away to discuss what they should do if she does. Tomo comes up with a number of possible objections, while Kagura tries to think of ways to overcome them. Chiyo lets on that she already knows Santa is one's own father. (Which gets all those elements incorporated into Sakaki's mental image of Chiyo's father...)
• In Ichigo Mashimaro, it is discovered that 11-year-old Matsuri still believes, so Nobue decides to "show her Santa Claus" by having Miu dress up as Santa Claus and go to her room, where they discover that she's left her window open for him. Despite Matsuri waking up and seeing Nobue in a reindeer suit claiming to be Santa, they manage to "keep the dream alive".

The polar opposite of In The Future Humans Will Be One Race. This is when a work projects ethnic and cultural diversity into the future. Most often it's in the form of a "melting pot" in cyberpunk, but it can also be a future where ethnic and cultural differences are even more exaggerated than in the present, possibly due to large-scale societal collapse (EDIT: or in Space Opera, colonization of other planets by distinct ethnic groups from Earth).

(This troper, an aspiring novelist, was inspired to write this YKTTW because he is currently working on a book set in the 2020's and 2030's in which Spanish has eclipsed English as the dominant language in the U.S., an urban gangs After The End are, like contemporary inner city gangs, divided along racial lines rather than the White Gang Bangers common to the genre).

Examples:

• Babylon Five- humans, among the major races, are especially known for this.
• Blade Runner- the melting pot version. Gaff speaks a strange blended urban street language, [[Japan Takes Over The World Japan has taken over the world, etc...
• In Alien Nation, multilingual signage (usually in English, Spanish and the alien Tenctonese language) are prominent on street signs, in hospitals and other public places).
• Octavia Butler's works often explore racial themes. She herself is one of the few black women in Speculative Fiction.
• Truth In Television: in a few decades, Spanish speakers may be the majority in the United States. In many major urban centers in U.S., bilingual signage is already common.

EDIT: Seeing as how these could be construed as direct opposites (melting pot vs. multi-ethnic futures), should this be split, or are they close enough to be considered sister tropes?

A Language Of Creation is a language that, while nominally the same as every other language, holds some inherent power over the universe. Telepathy usually doesn't count, even if you consider it a language.

This is a supertrope of Language Of Magic. If a Language Of Truth's truthiness is imposed by some magic inherent to the language, it is probably a Language Of Creation.

Telepathy is excluded because any specialness of telepathy (such as being a Language Of Truth) is usually inherent to the medium (communication by thought), rather than some special property of the language. If, in some world, telepathy were limited to physical languages, and thinking in some language had some special significance, it would be a Language Of Creation.

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• The only example I can currently think of that isn't a member of a subtrope is the Supernal language from D&D 4th Edition. This is the language underlying all of the Astral Sea and the immortals that live there. Supernal underlies the creations of the gods so an immortal can, if e chooses, make emself understood to all mortals when speaking Supernal regardless of whether the mortal can speak or understand Supernal normally.

(Do We Have This? Searched for it, but could not find it.)

The beautiful young princess Alice has finally reached marrying age. So what's a good royal parent supposed to do?

Why find the first potential suitor for an Arranged Marriage and get rid of her, that's what!

Except, she's not having any of that.

No Alice is not going to married the handpicked-by-her-parents Prince Bob. She's going to marry for love!

This concept (and often times Stock Phrase) is used when a character in a story, who is almost Always Female, is unwilling to marry unless they choose and love the person. Usually there is an arranged marriage this character is being forced into, however they may just not want to get married to any old person.

Used for a few reasons. Since Arranged Marriages really were the most common way of marriage coming about for a very long time, marrying for love was a strange concept. Depending on the setting of the work, it is often used to signify a strong-willed female character who does not want to marry someone unless she has feelings for them.

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Examples:

• Princess Jasmin in Disney's Aladdin
• The titular Emma states that she will only marry for love.
• The plot to Coming To America is Eddie Murphy's prince looking for love to marry.
• Don Bluth's Thumbelina.
• Lizzie in Pride And Prejudice says she won't marry anyone unless it's for love. This causes her to turn down two marriage proposals, one from a well-off pastor and one from a filthy rich gentleman. She eventually marries the rich guy anyway, out of genuine love.

(Seen It A Million Times, but Needs More Examples)

In the earlier days of Hollywood, African-Americans were potrayed as assertive, impulsive, and aggresive. Understandably, many film makers tried to move away from this sterotype, but accidently created a new positive one, the Calm Black Guy. Chances are in a movie, the black guy will be the Reasonable Authority Figure or mild-mannered at least. Bonus points if you pair him up with a impulsive and/or panicy white or hispanic guy.

Might overlap with Scary Black Man (a calm person knows what he's doing and an opponent who knows what he's doing is very scary indeed)

EXAMPLES

• Any role played by Morgan Freeman, heck Morgan Freeman IS this trope
• George in The Final Destination
• Roger Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon, especially when compared to Martin Riggs.

Up For Grabs

A cousin to Head Tiltingly Kinky. It is common in all forms of animation, as well as in Real Life, for a character to tilt their head sideways in confusion. In anime this is often accompanied by a "...", while in western animation it is more often accompanied by a "...huh?". A raised eyebrow is common in every genre.

Not to be confused with the characters who tilt their heads because they're looking at something sideways, although the two can overlap.

Needs Examples; Rolling Updates

Will be launched in: 1 days

Examples

Commercials

• The old Victor ad with a dog with its head tilted quizzically as it listened to a phonograph record play, with the title "His Master's Voice◊".

Film

• Wild Wild West. A "blink and you'll miss it" Shout Out occurred when "Bloodbath" McGrath was lying on the ground and a dog came up and did the "His Master's Voice" bit while looking at McGrath's ear trumpet.
• The film version of Starman had Jeff Bridges tilt his head quizzically for most of the movie -- but that's because he was a non-human life form from outer space learning about the human experience as he went along, so everything was new and confusing to him.
• The Fifth Element: Leeloo gives a tilt of her head to the Major before breaking out of her unbreakable container and taking from him the key to opening it.

Live Action TV

• I think Spock did this.
• There's an episode of Will And Grace where Jack says 'reluctant pivot, inquisitive head tilt' as response to Will.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons, "Sweet and Sour Marge:"

Anime

• Luffy from One Piece is incredibly fond of this, tilting his head whenever something even mildly puzzling occurs. Don't know which direction is south? "Hm...." *Quizzical Tilt* "That way's warm, so it's south!"
• Those Creepy Cute little seedling spirits from Princess Mononoke are very much this.
• Osaka of Azumanga Daioh does this.

Professional Wrestling

• The Rock. Though it's usually accompanied with getting your ass kicked.

Video Games

• Mass Effect 2 includes a particularly good scene where Joker does this after EDI cracks a hilarious, albeit very poorly timed, joke.

Seen It A Million Times, How Did We Miss This One?

Apparently, the heart (being the organ responsible for powering the circulation of blood around the body) is an extremely romantic thing. Hence, "heart" is equated with emotions such as love and caring. It follows that someone that lacks ability to love and care sufficiently is "heartless," and someone that has recently experienced a romantic tragedy is "heart-broken."

In Animation as well as Graphic Novels, a cloud of hearts is sometimes used to indicate falling in love.

Indexes: Omnipresent Tropes, Love Tropes. Related to Mills And Boon Prose.

Examples

Music

• Countless Boy Band songs like "I'll Never Break Your Heart," "Quit Playing Games With My Heart" and "Deep In My Heart."
  • Parodied in a Mad Magazine article, quote: "very few successful love songs have been written about lungs." Another quote from this article is also the Trope Namer
• Parodied and deconstructed in Tom Lehrer's The Masochism Tango, "My heart is in my hand... yeeech!" (hence acknowledging that the heart is a rather sticky and ugly thing, hence isn't the best symbol for romantic love).
• Most Silly Love Songs mention the heart in their lyrics.

Western Animation

• Played annoyingly straight in Captain Planet And The Planeteers; "heart" refers to warm and fuzzy feelings and is also a ([1] rather lame) superpower.
• A Valentine's Day episode of The Simpsons also deconstructed this by having the school cafeteria serve beef hearts for lunch on Valentine's Day. Needless to say, this did not make things more romantic.

Real Life

• Valentine's Day plays this trope straight. Annoyingly so for the more cynical.
  • Thankfully for the cynics, there are chocolatiers that sell anatomically correct chocolate hearts. Sounds like a wonderful gift for one's significant other, no?

Live Action TV

• Averted (or possibly subverted) on The Wire with the gangster "No-Heart" Anthony: he got his nickname not from a reputation for cruelty, but because he once tried to escape arrest by shooting himself in the chest.
• Lampshaded on Red Dwarf with the song Tongue Tied.
• In the Pushing Daisies episode Corpsicle, a boy who was waiting on a heart transplant (because he initially had no heart) was rather mean. A played straight example.

Literature

• Apparently, a heart that was three sizes too small was responsible for the Grinch's lack of fondness for Christmas. The trope is played straight.

Video Games

• Typing "love" into Scribblenauts makes a realistic human heart appear. Said heart does nothing. A parody.
• Kingdom Hearts: the "Heartless" are composed of the darker and more instinctual emotions, and the "Nobodies" are almost Straw Vulcan-type beings with only logic and no feelings. A played-straight example, since the heart is still equated with the "warm and fuzzy" emotions.

Web Comics

• Averted in this Dresden Codak strip; when one of her friends makes a reference to "matters of the heart," Kimiko points out that "[her] heart is nothing more than an engine forged from the remnants of a dead star."

Do We Have This One?

A character, for some reason or another, feels the need to write two letters to two different people. One of these letters is usually very, very negative in tone. When the time comes to send the letters, the envelopes are mixed up, so the bad message is sent to someone the character does NOT want to upset.

When the character finds out about this error, do they try to plead forgiveness? Nope; instead, they create a Mission Impossible -esque plan to retrieve the letter before it's ever opened in the first place.

Examples:

• In one episode of Thats So Raven, the titular character mixes up her mom's Law School assignment with a letter containing everything the mom hates about her professor, written to relieve stress. This leads to Raven and her mom sneaking into a laundromat, as the letter was left in the pocket of a jacket the professor wants cleaned.
• Happens early in Confessions Of A Shopaholic, Or So I Hear.

Probably Needs A Better Title. It's related to Insult Backfire, Compliment Backfire, and I Take Offence To That Last One. It's like this:

Alice defends what she believes to be a bad stereotype of Group X, insist that most (or, at least, many) members of Group X do not fit said stereotype. Bob, a member of Group X, takes offence - because, not only is the stereotype true of him, but he takes pride in said stereotypical trait.

A variation would be if Alice denies what she believes to be a bad descriptive trait of Bob - and Bob's friend, Carol, takes offence. Carol not only believes that said descriptive trait is true of Bob, but it happens to actually be one of the things she likes most about Bob.

All Men Are Perverts may be one example of such a trope.

Very simple trope. Character bakes pie, leaves it on the windowsill to cool, where it tempts a greedy or weak-willed character to steal it. May result in Pie In The Face.

So, you and your squad are off on a mission. You've got armour, guns, grenades, etc. - everything you need. But there's a catch - on this mission, there is likely to be little cover. What do you do? Take some of your own with you, of course!

Deployable Cover can be anything from an energy barrier that deflects bullets to a big pavise that can be planted into the ground to protect you from arrow volleys. Often, the deployable cover won't be as durable as natural cover, eventually getting destroyed after it is shot enough (though, in the case of an energy shield, it may reactivate after a short time). It will, however, last indefinitely if it is left alone.

A piece of equipment of the same name in Halo 3 is the Trope Namer.

It seems like quite a common trope, worth putting up? If I get lots of examples I'll post it.

Examples!!

• The soldier's turret from Borderlands.
• Champions supplement Gadgets!. The Force Wall Generator was a device which, when placed on the ground and activated, would create an energy shield to block incoming fire.
• The Block ability in S 4 League.
• The Geth in Mass Effect seem to be fond of deploying hexagonal energy shields in areas with little cover.
• As has been mentioned, the piece of equipment in Halo 3 is the trope namer.

Sand In My Eyes mentions this, as do most Tear Tropes, but we don't seem to have this trope outright.

For whatever reason, a character is moved. However, this character is made of strong stuff: He is beyond blubbering and won't turn on the Water Works. He dammed up the Sparkling Stream Of Tears and had his Ocular Gushers surgically removed. Plus he promise himself! He is not going to cry.

Well, maybe just one drop.

A Single Tear describes any time someone cries only one teardrop. This is perceived to be extremely manly and dramatic and is one of the only times a man can openly cry in public. Tears can be shed for anything, from patriotism to pollution. On a more serious note, if someone is only crying one tear, they may be too traumatized to shed more. If a being is generally incapable of crying, this is a sign that are genuinely upset.

Mainly a Discredited Trope; most of the time you see it, it's a parody, although occasional dramatic uses spring up from time to time.

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Examples:

• The best-known example is probably the Crying Indian; he even has his own trope!
• This image◊, popular on the Something Awful forums.
• In Kings Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow, Alexander gains freedom from the Land of the Dead by making the Lord of the Dead cry one single tear.
• Most season one episodes of Moral Orel have Orel crying a single drop at the Rev. Putty's latest sermon.
• The animated short Kiwi has one.
• The picture from Gargoyles currently on Tears From A Stone.
• Oren Ishii cries a single tear at her mother's murder in The Origin of Oren Ishii. She probably would have cried more, but then the bed started weeping blood...
• This trope is actually Older Than Dirt; it pops in Dante's Divine Comedy, specifically in the first few cantos of Purgatorio. There is a soldier mentioned who is a brutal, bloody bastard his whole life, but when he is struck down in battle he cries a single tear of repentance, which is enough to send him to Purgatory instead of Hell.

Games that try to avoid Only Six Faces often offer a wide range of customization for the player. This can be achieved by letting the player choose from a palette of pre-made faces, or, like many newer games, letting them change single elements of the face with sliders, thereby making it theoretically possible to create thousands of different faces. (Ripped from Only Six Helmets)

Then the thousand heads all get stuck on 1 of 2 bodies ("Male" and "Female", with reskins for skin tone) and look the same under the neck. In fantasy games, each race may also have a separate body type, but still only 2 (or 1) body.

Examples

• The Elder Scrolls has two bodies for each race, I think Oblivion has even fewer.
• Mount And Blade
• Averted in the first Knights Of The Old Republic (Each class has a separate build and underwear, Soldiers are taller and more muscular than Scoundrals for instance), played straight in the second one.

A fanwork that goes out of its way to emphasize how much the fan creator hates one or more of the characters.

Let's face it, even if you're a big fan of a particular work, you might hate one of the characters. Maybe they're The Scrappy or The Wesley, maybe they're getting in the way of your OTP, possibly they just are antagonistic to the character who's your favorite.

So when you create a fanwork based on that original, it is tempting indeed to give that character "what they've got coming." Suddenly, everyone else in the story sees the designated bashee the same way you do. They're dumped by their canon love interest, mocked and shunned by all the good guys, switch to the Dark Side, killed off in embarrassing or especially painful ways and even the narration hates them.

Sometimes seen in professional works where there are multiple authors working with the same property, though usually they have to be a bit more subtle. It has to pass the editor, after all, and the other writers might not appreciate what you're doing to their favorite character.

Supertrope for:

• Die For Our Ship
• Dropped A Bridge On Him (when it's clear that it's been done because the writer hates the character)
• Ron The Death Eater

and a couple of others. Often involves Character Derailment or outright Retcon to justify the bashing.

Okay folks, what other tropes is this a supertrope of (Possibly the Awesome Versus Dull YKTTW currently on this page)? I don't know if we need examples, but if so, they should only be ones that don't fit on the trope pages we already have.

this is a trope in which a villin esp. a magnificient bastard who is powerful and/or intelligent and widely feared becomes a bumbling idiot when ever our-far younger and less trained- hero is involved. usually found in kid/teen seriesthis is particularly obvious in Harry potter

Do We Have This One?

When a character in fiction's power or gimmick revolves around things like a void, or general nothingness (however that works).

Characters who fall under this may happen to be Nietzsche Wannabes. Can go in line with Dark Is Edgy.

Examples:

• Exdeath from Final Fantasy V's whole plan and goals revolve around his beloved Void.
  • Similarly, the Cloud of Darkness from Final Fantasy II came from a void and wants to engulf the world in darkness.
• In a Michael Moorcock story, one of the protagonists encounters an area of the world that's a complete white void. After wandering around for a while, he discovers a Reality Warper that for various reasons wants to be one with the perfect void. The protagonist grants his wish by shooting him with an arrow at point-blank; once the Reality Warper dies, the white void becomes a normal landscape again.
• Xemnas from Kingdom Hearts is said to be attributed to the "element" of nothingness, something he certainly acknowledges. Despite this, the majority of his attacks, including his signature Aerial Blades, are manifestations of Pure Energy, the closest thing to an attack of nothingness being the White Void Room he pulls Sora and Riku into for their final battle.

A name for the time period between when a film stops being shown in theaters and when it gets released on DVD.

Do We Have This? Should We Have This? Is This Tropable? I don't intend to launch this, and if it's already on the wiki, I'd like to know where. This is a Video Game character who is the exact polar opposite of the Exposition Fairy. While the Fairy provides helpful hints and advice, Nick Tillman only gives misinformation and bad ideas. Typically shows up in a game where the reliability of NP Cs is questionable. In fact, Nick Tillman is actually quite useful, in that he can always be trusted to suggest the very thing you don't want to do. The Trope Namer is a character from Oregon Trail II, who is a nice enough guy and certainly bears no ill will toward the player, but he just can't give a single bit of helpful advice. That's the only example I can think of. If this isn't tropable, I'm sure the TV Tropes Hive Mind will discard it.

Do We Have This One?

The idea that Wish Fulfillment for a female audience will alway include being physically attractive as a major factor (if not THE major factor), and therefore that even in works aimed at women, the female Point Of View character or Audience Surrogate must be beautiful, or if she starts off not, the plot must feature Beautiful All Along or The Makeover. Even if she's not supposed to be conventionally attractive, she'll be an Unkempt Beauty or maybe just stunning When She Smiles. Any aversions/subversions are likely to be Anvilicious.

Do we want straight examples for this? I think that would make it 100 miles long, so maybe just aversions/subversions?

Aversions:

• Shrek: The princess stays an ogre. This is a happy ending.
• The Wallflower: No makeover for Sunako, thank you very much.

Sort of the inverse of Good Is Dumb. This is the idea that either a lack of intelligence or even just not having had an academic education has an adverse effect on the personality. In short, it creates a character who's unable to control their base instincts.

Inexplicably, this seems to be coupled with sheer physical strength and often also ugliness, at least in males. Female characters can just as well be beautiful, but both of them will possess the following unpleasant traits:

A tendency to bully, unbridled wantoness which in males is even predatory, in male characters a tendency to use brute strength to solve any problem, in females a tendency to be completely vain, in both an extreme xenophobia and both lacking any self-awareness and all the virtues that come with self-control. Therefor no courage, no resilence, no dignity or - god forbid - any style in these characters.

Do I need to mention the Unfortunate Implications? I think it's related to Medieval Morons, since the logic behind it is: Medieval farmers did not go to school therefor they were barely more than animals.

If anybody can think up a better title, feel free to suggest it.

Basically, we've got an angry mob who shows up for some reason or another. Fortunately, there's one person at the place the mob shows up at who manages to stop them, prevent them from making a huge mistake (how he does it varies from story to story). It looks like a crisis has been averted, right?

WRONG!!! Because the moment the anger subsides from the crowd, a voice will pop up, shrieking their original battle chant, and whether they manage to re-spark the mob or not varies from story to story. Do We Have This One?

Examples:

• A great example of this happened in the Stephen King / Peter Straub novel Black House. The resetter, a local sleazebag journalist, was shut up by a flashlight to the skull.

The New Era Speech is all well and dandy, but it presumes the villain has some reason to be halfway honest about things. And let's face it, it's usually for no better reason than to amuse themselves.

However, your more devious villains find it more amusing to put all their craft of eloquence into a speech that the members of the audience - but usually not the surrounding characters - know flies in the face of everything that has happened. The audience won't know whether to shake their fist in rage or their head in admiration.

A common case is that the villain has just scored a major coup, and now has to give a speech of deep sorrow and swift action regarding said coup. At other times, it'll be a masterful work of damage control, where the damage isn't so severe that they'll require a Motive Rant instead. In any case, chances are it will rally the Gullible Lemmings to their side at a vulnerable moment.

Examples:

• Zeroth Law Of Trope Examples: Marc Antony's speech in Julius Caesar. It's the granddaddy of all inverted Sarcastic Confessions.
• Light Yagami gets a particularly infuriating one in Death Note - perhaps twice in the same episode, depending on how much emotional melodrama you think a monologue can stand before it stops being a speech.
• Rob Pierre, at the end of an early Honor Harrington book, uses one to solidify his, you guessed it, Reign Of Terror.
  • A bit later, a Grayson Steadholder commits an epic dodge against all possible accusation, drastically souring the basic end-scene formula for most of the books up to that point.
• Vayne in Final Fantasy XII is introduced with a remarkably low-key Bastardly Speech. It's so well-done that the only reasons you know he's the villain are that he's incredibly pretty, and the guards apparently don't want to make him angry.
• Palpatine's speech in Revenge Of The Sith is a less critically-acclaimed example.

A corollary to Tainted By The Preview, this is where a work is perceived to be better or worse as a result of its reviews after release.

For example, a highly regarded critic posts a scathing review, pointing out all the flaws in a work that is generally regarded to be of excellent quality. The fans of that work, having loved it initially, try to dismiss the review.

But wait... those critical points may have some validity. Sure, the car chase seemed tacked on, but the rest was pretty good. Right? From then on, the work is tainted in the eyes of the fans. Those doubts set in, and gnaw away at them.

This can be due to the review pointing out Fridge Logic, Bad Writing, Special Effects Failure, or even simple general dislike for the work itself. The "I can't believe you didn't like it as much as me" factor.

Examples:

• Watchmen was released to highly divided reviews. Roger Ebert gave it four stars and praised the highly complex and involving story, the visuals, and the development of the characters. Others, however, were not so affected by it. Many pointing out the apparent lack of emotion within the film, bad acting on the part of Malin Akerman and Matthew Goode. As well as director Zack Snyder's preference for style of substance. It's now impossible not to notice those things, even while appreciating the strong points.

So, is this Tropable? Too subjective? Needs More Examples, although personal opinion being what it is, that shouldn't be a problem.

I think it's a good name, but we can come up with another one if it's too misleading or the reference is too obscure.

Military units are big. Most tanks are about twelve metres. Fighters are often 15 metres. And of course, there's the massive size of naval ships. The biggest warship, the USS Enterprise (no, not that one. Or that one. Or that one.) is almost 350 metres from bow to stern. Of course, these huge monsters take up a lot of room, and therefore it can be difficult to accurately portray their size in a game. But wait! You don't want to take the Units Not To Scale option. The solution, therefore, is to build a small unit which can fit on the screen.

This is where units are designed to be smaller than their real world equivalents based around the sizes of the characters.

Examples:

• Advance Wars, with practically every unit which isn't entirely made of infantry. The basic tank is barely larger than a two-seater golf cart. The medium tank is about the size of a small van and the Megatank is the only one anywhere near the size of a real world tank. The naval units are much smaller than real ones, as are the aircraft. Even so, a bomber can take off from and land on a carrier easily.
  • Battalion Wars does slightly better with land units, as the 3D graphics and lower numbers making it possible to show bigger tanks.
• Sonic The Hedgehog is generally pretty good with this, but the dwarf aircraft carriers in Sonic Adventure 2 are an exception. The fighters are little as well.

The Pesci loves to get angry, and people usually tread carefully around them. Even calm people may have a Berserk Button regarding their race, background, or some other physical trait or lifestyle choice. So the paranoid and oversensitive will be so worried about offending them they become a Bucket Of Ears trying to avoid it. They take so many precautions and make such awkward clarifying statements that they aren't racist/sexist/whateverist that they just dig their grave deeper.

Often seen in comedy, this is usually used for the ennui laughs at the Butt Monkey's expense as they blunder due to their own clumsiness. If the "anti-pesci" (really, any character can fill this spot, they just usually take a long time or spectacular effort to really offend) is a enough of a Nice Guy, they'll assure the blunderer they aren't offended. Or, if the blunderer is really good at this, succeed at actually offending them.

On animated TV, web/newspaper comics and in comic books, you often have extra characters with few or just one personality trait, who show up rarely.

This trope is where their entire point of existing is to Lampshade how crazy/silly everything has gotten, and then go away again for episodes or sometimes seasons at a time. If they are used often enough it can be a Running Gag. Differs from the Only Sane Man or Arthur Dent in that they're not the protagonist or have much influence on the plot, which can be a reason why they get frustrated and leave.

Examples include:

Craig from South Park, Carl from The Simpsons, Tim from Scary Go Round, after having been Put On A Bus, Penelope from Questionable Content, prior to Character Development, Scott from Ctrl-Alt-Del and parodied by Monty Python, with the "Stop this, it's getting much too silly" Army officer.

I don't read many webcomics, I was hoping for more examples?

Subjective. Do we have this?

We all enjoy our Fan Service. That's what it's there for, after all. The show's designers know what your dirty little mind wants. But there are times when Fan Service is used in such a way as to harm not other characters in the setting (that would be Marshmallow Hell), but against the very viewers of the show. This is the fan service that is designed in such a way as to make you feel guilty for enjoying it. Often this is done by lampshading the fan service to the point of absurdity, or interweaving incredibly horrifying or blatantly misogynistic elements directly into the fan service.

A subsection is Weaponized Moe, when a character is incredibly adorable, but also highly sexualized, to the extent that as much as your natural urges may want them, your protective instincts make you feel very, very guilty about this sensation.

Different from Guilty Pleasures, which appear much less intentionally cruel to the viewer, and in which case the show in question may not actually be good. Contrast Fan Disservice which is not actually appealing to the general audience, though the line between these two is very indistinct.

• Almost the entirety of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei does this to the viewer, including out-of-context panty shots, and an opening containing graphic renderings of the female characters in rope bondage positions with their faces erased and replaced with the characters in their names. Indeed, this was the series that caused this troper to recognize the trope's existence.
• Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan also revolves around the idea of this, constantly teasing the viewer with high octane fan service (which never quite goes far enough) and conversely punishing Sakura-kun for enjoying it as much as the audience in truly horrifying ways.
• This troper finds Asahina Mikuru to cross the line into being Weaponized on several occasions, most notably the brief shot of her in the original series opening in the cheerleader's outfit. Moe tears at the edges of her eyes? Check. Full independent gainaxing? Check. Painfully woobie? Check. Are we feeling guilty for enjoying her suffering? Oh yes.

Sometimes, you notice a woman for her chest. Sometimes, you notice her rear. But other times, you take a really long look at how long her legs are.

This trope deals with women who have notably long legs (usually taking half of her height). Almost all the time, they are used for Fanservice and Fetish Fuel purposes. These women usually wear skirts so they can Show Some Leg (or in this case, half of their skin). Cartoon and Anime artists sometimes draw their characters with long legs due to unbalanced proportions.

Needs Better Description.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Haruhi Suzumiya
• Rin Tohsaka. Bonus points for Zettai Ryouiki
• Misty from Pokemon. This is also true for the games.
  • The other female protagonists May and Dawn also have this as well.
• Sailor Moon - the art style gives them very long, model-esque legs, and the short, short skirt doesn't help.

Film

• This is parodied in the third Naked Gun and Spy Hard.

Professional Wrestling

• Former WCW/WWE employee Stacy Keibler was notable for having legs that took up half her height. She would rely on them in the ring as well, using them to choke other Divas by pinning them against the turnbuckle by the throat. In fact, one of her theme songs was a cover of ZZ Top's "Legs" sung by Kid Rock.

Video Games

• Street Fighter's very own Chun Li is a different case: it's not that she has long legs; it's that she has really thick thighs.
  • Cammy, on the other hand, has long bare legs and her fighting style involves mostly kicks.

Needs A Better Title.

This is where a first time or lower level artist produces a highly successful work; whether it's producing quality work on a low budget, with no Protection From Editors, achieving on a much higher level than expected, and generally showing talent far beyond their current means.

What usually results is that, in the follow up to their first hit, The Powers That Be open up the bank and let the artist do whatever they want. The reasoning behind that being, if the artist is so good on a lower scale, once given all the resources available, they must be outstanding!

Film Examples:

• Christopher Nolan had great success rebooting the stagnant Batman franchise with Batman Begins. As a result, Warner Brothers then basically let him do his thing with The Dark Knight, with the result being a highly regarded sequel that broke $1 billion worldwide. Further on from that, he now had full reign to create Inception, his secretive $200 million arthouse sci-fi film starring Leonardo Di Caprio.
• Neil Blomkamp, after producing highly successful short films and commercials, he was approached by Peter Jackson to direct a Halo film, after his "Landfall" short showed a fraction of what he could create with that setting and style. After the budget swelled to over $200 million and the project was abandoned, Jackson offered $30 million to adapt his short film "Alive in Joburg" to the big screen. The result was District 9, the $204 million box office hit. Now, it's assumed that he'll be able to make any film he wants.
• George Lucas has this, going from the super low budget THX 1138 and American Graffiti, to the birth of the Summer Blockbuster with Star Wars. It was the success of Star Wars that allowed FOX to give him the blank check for the Prequel Trilogy, as well as a string of infamous flops such as Howard The Duck.
• Dennis Hopper, one of the three geniuses behind Easy Rider was given a blank check and made The Last Movie, which has been called by some one of the 50 Worst Films of All Time [1].
• Zack Snyder, after the success of 300 and the Dawn Of The Dead remake, had enough clout to change the Watchmen film back to what was envisioned in the original comic, as well as convince Warner Brothers executives to allow the film an R rating. Slightly deviating from this trope is the fact that he did not, however, recieve his proposed $200 million budget. So the cheque wasn't blank, but still rather unreasonably large considering the nature of the material.
• Similar to the Zack Snyder example, Brian Singer was able to make his ambitious Superman Returns project, a reboot of the long dead Superman franchise, as a result of his success with the X-Men franchise, proving he could handle such material.
• Michael Cimino, after winning a Best Director Oscar for The Deer Hunter, was then given an unprecedented $42 million budget to make Heaven's Gate, a film which flopped horribly and went on to earn $3.5 million at the US box office,

Video Game Examples:

• Hideo Kojima: The original Metal Gear was designed to circumvent the MSX computer's limited capabilities (because the MSX had a heavy limit on how many projectiles could be on-screen at once, hence the stealth-oriented gameplay) and while the first two Metal Gear games and Metal Gear Solid were fairly straightforward, aside from the latter's deconstruction of action movie archetypes, the next game, Metal Gear Solid 2, dove straight into exploring abstract concepts such as the idea of one's identity and meme theory, along with other controversial changes from the first game's formula that made the game fairly divisive.

Up For Grabs. This seems to be building up to launch status. If someone would be so kind....

The characters in a series run into a mythical being or fantasy creature. Said creature is then identified in the text or dialogue by the name of a similar (or not) mythical being or fantasy creature. Cue a moment of confusion for the viewer.

Could be employed just to underline in red crayon that Your Monsters Are Different. Alternatively, of course, the writer Did Not Do The Research -- or did a little too much research, finding an extremely obscure name or form of a familiar creature.

Title is a takeoff of Call A Rabbit A Smeerp, of course, and is a reference to one of the well-known...

Examples

• In E. Nesbith's The Book Of Beasts, the hero must summon a creature identified as a hippogriff to save his city from a dragon. The creature that appears is what most people would identify as a pegasus, a winged horse. To be fair, you can't say that a hippogriff isn't a winged horse (or that a pegasus isn't part horse, part bird for that matter). It's also possible that Nesbith figured that the word pegasus must only refer to the Pegasus; this was ages before My Little Pony remember.
• Similarly, Dream has three guardian beasts, one of which is a winged horse. This character is also identified as a hippogriff (or maybe named Hippogriff; it's been a while since I read it). Given that this is Neil Gaiman writing, it's likely an E. Nesbith tribute. Then again, isn't the dragon guardian identified as something odd too?
• An older example is Frank Stockton's short story, The Griffin and the Minor Canon from 1885, in which the eponymous monster -by it's description- is clearly a dragon. The story might actually be considered a Lampshade Hanging on this trope, as the dragon sees a statue of a griffin and assumes that (since it also has four legs, wings, ect.) he must be of the same species and that "griffin" is what humans call him. Got all that?
  • Sir Arthur Charles Fox-Davies warns against confusing the two in his A Guide to Heraldry, so it was apparently a common Victorian mistake.
• One of the stranger examples is in the book Thorn Ogres of Hagwood. A character wanders into the action about halfway through the story. He is a short humanoid with a big, big beard and he carries a lot of different tools and has a great talent for metalwork. He is identified as a dwa... no, wait, he is a Pooka. Uh... (Pookas technically can appear as dwarves but -as you'll recall from Harvey, they also tend to be a lot weirder.)
• Another bizarre example: World of Warcraft has large predatory cats with bat wings and scorpion stingers. They are called manti... no, they are called wyverns. (Wyverns are usually bipedal dragons; to be fair they also have tail-stingers but...)
• In Dungeons And Dragons Gorgons are the creature known as Catoblepas in more classical bestiaries. The creatures that resemble the Gorgons of Greek mythology are named Medusas after one specific Gorgon with that name. Oh, and there are monsters called Catoblepases in some editions of the Monster Manual as well, so yeah.
• Somewhat related: The creatures that attack Arthur and Merlin in the Merlin miniseries are Raptors with squirrel-like patagia no matter how much Merlin insists on calling them griffons.

Tags: Rolling Updates, Up For Grabs.

Alternative titles:

• Mother Earth

Do We Have This? Seen It A Million Times, and it is mentioned in Nature Spirit's page that combining it with Anthropomorphic Personification yields Mother Nature; yet not all depictions of "Mother Nature" are anthropomorphic - some are quite impersonal, like Final Fantasy VII's Planet - its supposed embodiment, Minerva, from the Compilation sub-franchise, does seemingly come across as anthropomorphic, however.

It's certainly not Mother Nature Father Science, which is purely about a metaphor-based association of the titular opposites (Nature vs. Science) with specific genders, from which stems the Real Life concept of Mother Nature.

Examples!!

• Gaia, the spirit of the Earth, from Captain Planet.

Don't know if this is a trope, or trope by another name, but it's based off of the scene in the silent hill movie, where the little girl is cornered by Rose deSilva and says the line, and bursts on fire.

The point of this trope is the character who knows they can light some Nightmare Fuel, draws attention to this fact, and then lights it off.

Although the girl from Silent Hill is the trope namer, Hidan from Naruto fulfills this trope with his main ability. He drinks a bit of the victim's blood, makes a funky magic circle of doom, and then uses himself as a voodoo doll. There's probably others, but these two are the ones I know.

When someone's nuttiness is demonstrated by their consumption of food in an unusual manner.

Examples:

• L and Mello from Death Note.
• Anemone and her jam in Eureka 7.
• There was the CHOOOOOOOOCOLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE guy from the one episode of Spongebob Squarepants. You never see him eating any, but he was pretty crazy about it.
• Goku and Gohan (possibly all Saiyans?) from Dragonball Z are pretty crazy eaters.
• The main character in the movie Elf has an extreme Sweet Tooth, to the point where it is rather disgusting to normal people, piling on candy, syrup and sugar with joyful abandon.
• Rorschach from Watchmen eating cold beans straight out of the can. Fine like this.
• Didn't see the film but in the ads for K-PAX we saw Kevin Spacey as the title character eat a banana without peeling it.
• The Basket Case from The Breakfast Club with her throwing the baloney from her sandwich on the ceiling and replacing it with captain crunch and pixie sticks, as well as exploding her soda and licking it off the desk.
  • I... I've done that. And I've never seen the movie. Oh, this may be bad.
• Evil Bakura from Yu Gi Oh eating a steak like he's some kind of carnivorous animal. This was also covered in Big Eater.

You know when an item or technique specifically designed to stop something ends up utter failing. Like crosses don't work on the devil in end of days or on dracula. Or like in shinkenger when they use the sealing character but it ends up failing.

You know how when you were a kid your parents wouldn't get that awesome Lego set for you because it would cost "an arm and a leg"? This is slightly more literal.

Basically, limb loss as dramatic device. Comes in three flavors, although some examples are neopolitan: 1:Chocolate is that the character deliberately cuts off their arm for some reason. 2:Vanilla is the loss is accidental, occurring in an explosion, from heavy wounds and/or infection, or someone else decided they didn't need it anymore. 3: And the bloody strawberry is when another person deliberately deprives them of the use of one or more of their limbs.

Alright, so far we've got:

• Edward Elric accidentally lost his leg and then deliberately sacrificed his arm to bring back his brother
• Captain Ahab in Moby Dick
• HP and the Goblet of Fire
• Honor Harrington's arm was shredded by flechettes
• Captain Hook in Peter Pan
• Nihi'liir in Drowtales
• Vision Of Escaflowne: Lord Folken's arm was bitten off by a dragon.
• Metal Gear Solid: Ocelot (type 3 the first time he loses an arm, 1 the second), Liquid (type 3, post-death), Gray Fox (type 3), Raiden (several occasions, type 1)... in 4, even the Metal Gears themselves lose limbs.
• In The X Files there was a Russian village where they all chopped their left hands/forearms off, because somehow that would keep them safe from the Black Oil(?). Or something. They were going to do it to Mulder but he escaped; they did it successfully to Krychek.
• Becky from Funky Winkerbean lost her left arm in a drunk driving accident, caused by Wally Winkerbean... her future husband.
• Jaime Lannister in A Song Of Ice And Fire has his hand cut off by a rival kingdom at one point. It's rather worse than just the loss of a hand though, as he's a knight (and one of the best swordsmen around), and his sword hand was the one chopped off.
• Roots - Kunta Kinte's foot is removed to keep him from running away.

Anime

• Since no one dies in Bleach, this is a popular method to show that someone is badly damaged. Grimmjaw got his arm sliced off as punishment for being too reckless ( Orihime fixed it); more recently, Soifon asked her lieutenant to chop her arm off when it got infected by Barragan's Super Death Powers. Also the gate guard the group encountered when they first went to the soul society got his arm lopped off by Ichigo (and healed by Orihime).

Film

• Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump.
• The Evil Dead Trilogy: In the second film, Ash cuts off his own hand after it is infected with evil.
• Star Wars loves this trope: off the top of my head I remember 8 lost hands, 3 of them belonging to someone named Anakin. Also Luke and Tenel Ka of The Expanded Universe.
• In the James Bond series of books Bond's CIA friend Felix Leiter had his arm & leg bitten off by a shark. Twice. (In the book but not the film of Live And Let Die, then in License to Kill for the first time on film and in its novelization for the second time in Literature, since the film novelizations kept the book continuity.)

Role Playing Games

• In both 3.5 and 4th editions of Dungeons And Dragons artificers that become reforged remove one of their limbs and replaces it with an artificial one.

Western Animation

• Justice League: In the episode "The Enemy Below", Aquaman cuts off his hand to save his son.

Newspaper Comics

• In Doonesbury, B.D. lost his leg in Iraq.

Real Life

• Unfortunately, though some go on to Take A Level In Badass.
• Aron Ralston is a well-known recent Real Life example; his arm became trapped under a boulder while hiking, and he wound up cutting it off when it became clear that his choice was between self-amputation and death by dehydration.
• The Tin Man from Wizard of Oz was based off of the Civil War amputees Baum saw growing up.

Seen It A Million Times. Needs A Better Title. How Did We Miss This?

Looked for this under computer tropes, but can't find it. Find it very hard to believe we don't already have it, but still...

In the real world, the vast, vast majority (certainly at least 75%) of personal/home computers are P Cs running some variant of Microsoft Windows. Whether or not you think that's a good thing is irrelevant to its status as fact.

In particular, the vast, vast majority of scientists, engineers, accountants and teachers - y'know, people who actually use computers for computing - use Windows P Cs. A fairly small number of geeks run Linux, leaving Apple Macintoshes as the minority interest mainly of "creative" types - artists, writers, musicians etc.

Of course, given that those latter kind of people are by defintion the ones responsible for all media, and given the kind of messianic zeal that hardware/software seems to generate in all who buy into it, Apple computers are massively disproportionately represented.

Note that this does NOT apply to iPods, which are legitimately ubiquitous in the real world.

Different from The Wiki Rule in that this article would define mediums and works that have their own Wiki dedicated to them. The Wiki Rule states that areas of interest on their have their own wikis for them, usually. The Wiki is an example that goes into a work to state that there is, in fact a wiki dedicated to this work, and that nearly everything you'd want to know in a technical way about it is in there.

Up for grabs, seeing as I don't want to actually get into making tropes for works as of yet and I can't think of one off the top of my head.

(My first YKTTW, yay!)

A Driving Game series by Atari, Test Drive has seen races across the globe, in almost anything with wheels. The latest installment, Unlimited set players loose on the island of Oahu. It's a Long Runner, as the series has been around since 1987.

Tropes (Work In Progress):

• Critical Existence Failure - contact with vehicles, cars, or anything else instantly causes the car to crash - as does redlining the engine.
• Timed Mission: Timer is not displayed, and going to slow causes a loss at the next checkpoint.
• Enemy Detecting Radar, used by cops to catch speeders. You can detect its use, but it can also mean there's an incoming truck.
• Level Goal - checkpoints.
• Unknown name - the setting is a cliffside, but aside from turns, it's rather monotonous. A similar trope for a 2D game would be simply using a background go in a perpetual loop.
• Bug Splatter (Not listed as an existing trope)
• Copy Protection - copy protection wheel used car keys

(I know, Works Pages Are A Free Launch, but I'd rather run them through here to gather up tropes and a good description. Rolling Updates, Up For Grabs.)

"Morning honey. You look angry about something" "No, I'm not angry" "Hey mom, what's up?" "Oh, your dad's upset about something" "*?* I said I'm fine." "Mommy, what's dad angry about?" "I SAID I'M FINE!"

Checked as best I could, so I'm pretty sure this doesn't exist. Basically when someone does not have a feeling (specifically, anger), but due to the constant prodding of other characters develops that feeling. Seen it (and felt it) a thousand times, but the most concrete example I can think of is oddly a really old (90's) Drabble comic, which roughly plays out as above. May narrow this specifically to anger, may expand this for all emotions.

Contrast That Makes Me Feel Angry. Truth In Television for pretty much everyone at some point.

• This Dinosaur Comics strip.
• Aforementioned Drabble strip.
• Avatar The Last Airbender: "I'M COMPLETELY CALM!"

A character has an old robot and deliberately keeps him in spite of new models being around. It can be done for pratical reasons or just for money-saving. If it's not, it's always a trait of good characters, or, when villains do it, a Pet The Dog kind of trait. This is often An Aesop (and not even a very hidden one) where the old robot will be shown to have a much more developed (and human-like) personality, while the new models will be more able and better looking but unfeeling.

Examples:

• Anachronox
• Pluto Nash
• In the play within the manga Kare Kano Steel Snow, the main character keeps 'Antique' an old robot around because it resembles his first love.
• Dexters Laboratory certainly doesn't do this. Dexter just keeps right on building - nothing is ever good enough. There is one episode in which he rediscovers an old part of his lab, along with a group of "primitive" robots, who lament, "We were all your best work..."
• Helper from Venture Brothers is certainly of the money-saving variety. Dr Venture prefers to repair or reuse his father's old tech than invent his own.
• In Blade Runner, the character played by William Sanderson has a house full of "misfit toys" so to speak.
• C3PO and R2D2 from Star Wars. Especially C3PO in the prequels.
• More or less the premise of The Brave Little Toaster. More or less.
• Happens on an episode of The Jetsons, when Rosie is apparently outclassed by a later model of robot.
• Asimov likes this trope.
  • From Foundation: R. Daneel Olviaw, even before he aged 20,000 years
  • In "The Bicentennial Man", which was made into a movie, Andrew (later known as Andrew Martin) is owned by the Martin family. Most other robots are leased and recycled after a number of years. After Andrew's "individuality" annoys the CEO of U.S. Robotics, the company buys back all old robots (the Martins refuse to sell) and destroys them. The company even later begins to reduce the intelligence of the robots, with all higher functions being done by central computers in communication with the robots. Sort of like PCs today, where you can buy netbooks and/or browser OS.
  • In short story Light Verse, a wealthy socialite and artist refuses to fix her old robot butler, finding his eccentricities charming, but it turns out that it was the malfunctioning robots who were creating her art.
• This comes up in Ghost In The Shell a few times. The first season of Stand Alone Complex has an episode revolving around an old model of android gynoid which were still popular because they were easy to customise. Another episode has the CEO of a company use what is essentially a box with four legs as his body, as he likes the old fashioned style.
• DC Comics' Star Hawkins - Space Detective! His robot secretary, Ilda, is very much an antique model - Star admittedly can't afford better, but he wouldn't get rid of her even if he could. (Except in Twilight [or "Let's make all our goofy sci-fi characters Darker And Edgier"], where he says he'd have junked her if he'd had a chance. But that wasn't the real Star Hawkins.) An even better example is Stella Sterling in Whatever Happened To ... Star Hawkins, who can certainly afford a top-of-the-range robot bodyguard, but prefers Automan, a robot who dates back to the 1960s.
• Old Bob in The Black Hole.
• The Robot from Meet The Robinsons is the lowest tech thing the family has, apparently built when Lewis was just a kid. His son inherits it.
• The last part of the Red Dwarf episode The Last Day centres on this.

Needs A Better Title, Rolling Updates.

Probably needs a better title.

Between their role in Ancient Egypt and their satanic connotations from the Middle Ages, cats are often seen in a mystical light. This trope refers to cats capable of teleportation or easy movement between worlds.

• The cat in Coraline can move between the two worlds without using the only entrance seen, and is the only character to do so. He can also teleport between holes in logs and disappear behind thin branches.
• The Cheshire Cat.
• In Night Watch there is an offhand comment that cats exist simultaneously at all levels of the Twilight.
• In this Dresden Codak the Ancient Egyptian gods ban cats from straddling the boundary between life and death, making Schrodingers Cat a problem.

Rolling Updates, Needs A Better Description

Two or more identical things are shown, but only one of them is significant. Either the viewers or some of the characters know which one it is until they get mixed up. They do not come into view already mixed. The most common variation involves covering an item such as a peanut with a shell and shuffling it with other shells, and playing cards may be substituted. The next most common variation has a hero and a look-alike get in a fist-fight while in sight of another hero.

Frequently results in Spot The Imposter and Needle In A Stack Of Needles.

Examples

Literature

• Harry Potter And The Philosophers Stone had this happen with flying keys that all looked alike.
  • In the beginning of Deathly Hallows, the Order has to transport Harry safely from the Dursleys' to the Burrow. They have six order members take Polyjuice potion with bits of Harry, turning them into exact replicas of him, so that when the Death Eaters attack they'll be unable to tell which is the real Harry.

Live Action TV

• Star Trek The Original Series episode "Whom Gods Destroy". Captain Garth ("LORD Garth!") Lord Garth shapechanges into the form of Captain Kirk and fights him, so neither the audience nor Spock know which one is which.
• Used metaphorically in The Outer Limits: "O.B.I.T", for the reason why no department will admit responsibility for the mysterious machines of the episode title.

Webcomics

• Interestingly played with in Order Of The Stick: Xykon (a lich) is attacking Azure City, but there appears to be three of them. Since this is a Stick Figure Comic, they're all walking skeletons that look identical to Xykon. Haley mentions the "shell game" aspect here.

Video Game Trope.

In general, if you play a game on a higher Difficulty Level, it gets harder in some way. That's the whole point of having difficulty levels, as it means that those who get really good at the game can play on a higher setting and have a greater challenge.

Sometimes, however, playing one particular level or challenge on a higher difficulty is, for some reason, easier than playing it on easy mode. Perhaps two elements of the challenge were made more difficult to overcome in a way that causes them to cancel each other out. Perhaps enemies are more aggressive on the higher difficulties and thus easier to hit. Or perhaps the game just wasn't programmed very well. Whatever the case, it's easier on hard mode.

---

Examples

• One level in Perfect Dark requires the player to sneak on to Air Force One and warn the president of an attempt on his life, after which Datadyne agents board the plane. In the first part of the level, the player must avoid the president's bodyguards, and they get more competent as the difficulty increases. In the second part, the bodyguards help the player; since their competence does not diminish, this part becomes easier on the higher difficulty settings as the bodyguards are better able to eliminate the Datadyne agents.
• One event match in Super Smash Bros Brawl is a Fixed Scrolling Level where the player takes control as Bowser and has to reach the end while being attacked by three Marios. As the difficulty increases, so does the scroll speed - which makes the challenge easier, as there is less time in which the Marios can attack Bowser, and the player can keep moving faster.

Do We Have This ?

A common occurrence in video games, usually to preserve the difficulty of the game.

Your character is surrounded by Mooks, and you're busily combating all of them. All of a sudden, an unseen Elite Mook unleashes a blast of his BFG, and the entire place goes up in smoke.

Except it's only you.

Mooks, and sometimes bosses, are capable of hurting you, and only you. Not only that, they can even defy the laws of physics, overlapping each other, occupying the same space, and generally giving quantum physicists horrible, horrible nightmares. Any beams, bullets, or blades they unleash will pass harmlessly through each other and harmfully into you. Usually seen in conjunction with Everything Trying To Kill You.

If the player is able, nay, even encouraged to cause enemies to harm each other, it becomes an example of Set A Mook To Kill A Mook.

• In Contra, lackies walk and shoot through each other quite often as they flood the screen.
• The titular opponents of Asteroids pass through each other rather effortlessly.
• Partially subverted in Monster Hunter. Enemies can hurt each other, but it's always just Scratch Damage. What will kill you in one hit will barely phase another enemy.

I believe this doesn't exist yet, I've checked but feel free to flame me to Hell and back if I missed it.

It's the future. The wildest dreams you had in the past have come true. You have your flying car, you have your jetpack.

But one thing you don't have anymore is the good ol' movie house down the street.

There is a strange tendency in SciFi for today's most popular form of cheap entertainment to be absent years down the road. Whether movies have been consolidated into smaller devices or absent entirely, their absence is jarring.

---

Examples:

• Star Wars is particularly egregious about it. In a galaxy where space flight has been mastered, hologram technology has been perfected, cloning is easy, among many other things; there's no sign of people watching movies. The closest we get is the opera in Revenge of the Sith, which seems to be no more than a flashing hologram of a blob with strange musical accompaniment.
• Justified in Equilibrium, where movies would be part of the forms of media banned by the government.

[1]

Needs A Better Title. An extension of Limited Wardrobe. This is when a character flashes back to their childhood (or even just their "younger days"), or the show shows a scene from the character's future, and they're wearing the exact same (or almost exact) style of clothes that they wear in the present.

Examples:

• The movie Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs opens with A Minor Kidroduction, showing the main character, Flint, wearing clothes that are similar to the ones he wears in the rest of the film (including gaining the spray-on shoes and lab coat that he wears from then on). Played straighter with young Brent, who wears the exact same kind of monogrammed tracksuit and flipflops that he does as an adult.
• When the 9 year olds on South Park flashback to when they were 3, they're wearing the same style parkas.
  • Also invoked in the episode "My Future Self 'n' Me," where actors are hired to portray older versions of kids, usually wearing the same kind of clothes.
• Something Positive has a few examples, like Davan's shirt with the red dot (though apparently he just has several of the shirt) and Aubrey and her choker-and-blouse outfits.

Needs A Better Description. Rolling Updates.

Is This Tropable?

The heroes and villains are in a race to recover a Mac Guffin. The story follows the usual tropes of adventures or mysteries, frequently following trails of clues or crossing perilous obstacles whilst battling the villains all the way. But then, at the climax of the adventure. . . there's no Mac Guffin. Sometimes it never existed at all, and the reward is meant to be what the characters learned along the way. Another variant is to reveal that the Mac Guffin has simply decayed away with time. Most often, the Mac Guffin was real, but a third party took it long before the main characters arrived. Done wrong, it can leave viewers with the feeling that the entire thing was meaningless. Compare Dark Horse Victory.

Obviously anything entered here is likely to be chock full of spoilers.

• In Treasure Island, much of the plot is driven by the Pirates and Loyal Sailors competition for Flint's map. But in the end, the map is useless since Ben Gunn had found the treasure years earlier and hidden it in his cave, the map only leads to a hole he'd dug up.
• The first two-thirds of the first live action Transformers movie revolves around a pair of glasses that have clues leading to the allspark. But when the autobots finally get the glasses and leave, we learn that Section Seven has the Allspark hidden in Hoover Dam, and had all along.
• An Episode of Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century was a quest to find an unstoppable computer virus hidden away years earlier before Moriarty got it. Turns out, computers had advanced a bit over the years and the virus worked against modern systems exactly as well as you'd expect software and hardware gone obsolete decades earlier to.
• One Mac Guyver special revolved around a quest to find the Treasure of Atlantis. Since the clues were in a book with platinum pages, the heroes and villains alike concluded that a fortune in precious metals awaited. The actual treasure turned out to be a box of scrolls containing the knowledge of Atlantis, that disintigrated when grabbed by the villain, and then subsequently dumped into the water by the heroes. This Troper couldn't help but wince, knowing that real archeologists might have opened and read the scrolls with proper care and the right tools.

We've got Denied Food As Punishment, for when someone else takes food away. We've got Forgets To Eat, for characters who get so wrapped up in a problem that ... you know. It doesn't look like we have anything for a character who chooses not to eat for non-eating disorder reasons.

What brought this to mind was checking something on the Nero Wolfe page. There's one novel in which Wolfe is so upset/angry about his failure to crack a case that he announces he will not drink beer or eat meat until the murderer is caught. And for the most part, he sticks to it -- he does have Fritz grill a steak immediately before the Summation/Arrest, on the grounds that he can't face that on an empty stomach.

Do we have this, do we need this, you know the drill.

If there's any interest, Rolling Updates will kick in.

When you're watching a movie, any movie, and the quality seems to be going down. You're just about to turn it off, when suddenly--an amazing musical number starts, and you forget all your problems with the movie just for a second. The musical number, coincidentally, turns out to be the one thing that makes you keep going back to said movie because the song itself is so amazing on its own. Sadly it may be the movie's only redeeming feature. Bear in mind, however, that this is entirely subjective.

Examples: Trope Namer: A little-known reviewer called The Cartoon Hero, who created the name based on the "Smooth Criminal" number in the Michael Jackson-based film Moonwalker. This was in turn inspired by the Nostalgia Critic's Moonwalker review.

Though the rest of the film can seem hypocritical or badly executed, Quest for Camelot had "Looking Through Your Eyes," which in this troper's opinion, is the best-written part of the movie.

An American Tail: Fievel Goes West had "The Girl You Left Behind."

Spartacus: "When a free man dies, he loses the pleasure of life. A slave loses his pain. Death is the only freedom a slave knows. That's why he's not afraid of it. That's why we'll win."
-- Spartacus

Being a slave sucks. For some, dying is the best alternative. Or if they can fight for their freedom, the chance that they will likely die in that fight still means they have that fate instead of becoming a slave again.

Compare Better To Die Than Be Killed, Dying As Yourself..

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• The Jaffa of Stargate SG-1 say this, although I don't know if the phrase was written for the show or not.
• Mentioned a few times in Roots.

(Aka Burst Damage Character, if that's clearer)

A character archetype that can deal phenomenal amounts of damage in the blink of an eye but can't keep up the pace for a microsecond longer before needing to take a break, whether due to skill cool-downs, ammo depletion or simple fatigue. Their job is usually to unload everything they have on an enemy who is distracted by the party Meat Shield and then escape before their foe turns around. Expect Critical Hit ability to be the main focus when building such a character, whose skillset may include many varieties of Back Stab.

Thieves or assassins are traditionally associated with this role given that it's plausible for such characters to have skills that allow them to escape unseen and hide until they get their second wind, not to mention that surprise kills are the stock-in-trade of their Real Life counterparts. Fighters and wizards usually have too much staying power to fall under this archetype while archers rely more on their range advantage. However, some 'builds' of non-thief classes can skew towards this trope if they maximize 'burst damage' ability.

Examples:

• This is the hat of the Rogue class in World Of Warcraft, although depending on their stats and skill builds other classes can do just as well or better.
• In Maplestory thieves start out playing this role, although archers and warriors join the fun later on. Mages in this game specialize in sustained damage, not burst damage.

A subtrope of the Law Of Chromatic Superiority. It basically states that shiny stuff is better than non-shiny stuff. A silver sword is better than a regular sword. The Super Mode armor has gold trim. Stuff like that.

Just to make a clean break with the Law Of Chromatic Superiority, let's put two rules in place: 1) There has to be some kind of non-metallic version to compare to, and 2) the metallic version has to at least imply "better" in some way.

Up For Grabs

Examples:

• Most Sixth Rangers in Power Rangers; either they have a silvery suit or a colored suit with gold trim. Occasionally a Battlized Red Ranger falls under the latter category, too.
• The Big Bad Beetleborgs (blue, green, and red) upgraded to the Beetleborgs Metallix (gold, silver, and, erm, purple. But shiny purple!).
• The Legend Of Zelda: In Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, you can customize your transport. Complete sets of golden parts grant a longer life bar than the rest. Also the silver arrows in Link to the Past.
• All over the place in Bionicle; elite Toa wear metallic armor, powerful artifacts are golden, that sort of thing.
• Super Mario 64: Metal Mario is Nigh Invulnerable.
• Pokemon's first generation games were Red, Green, and Blue Editions; and generation two upped the ante with the Gold and Silver Editions.
• Digimon: The Golden Armor in Adventure 02, and in Tamers and Frontier Takato, Takuya, and Koji got upgraded digivices with metallic trim.

Simply put, this is when The Dragon is a Barbarian. Among his own people, he is Large And In Charge, usually granting the Big Bad the ability to command said barbarian's Barbarian Tribe, or if he's really lucky, The Horde, through him. He's always The Brute or The Ogre, and usually uses some form of Hulk Speak. He may be The Berserker, The Juggernaut, a Blood Knight or a combination of the above. He is the most powerful of all the Bigbad's service because he is a Giant Mook or even a King Mook, but beyond that, he's actually a Badass Normal.

Needs examples. And a better name.

Woman gets the drop on a bad guy, who is threatening either her or the good guy. Usually the bad guy doesn't believe she will shoot and makes a move. She shoots him, looks horrified at what she's done, drops the weapon and bursts into tears. Sometimes she collapses. This doesn't seem to be as prevalent as it used to be, possibly because there's less emphasis now on women being the 'weaker' sex and there are more 'badass' female characters around. However, I've noticed it a lot in Films and TV made before the 1990's although,sadly,I didn't think to make notes on where and when! However, I'm confident that it's a common trope because I remember having a conversation about it with my girlfriend, who was also familiar with it, while watching 'Dempsey and Makepeace'. And that was in about 1986!

If a similar thing happens to a male, it's generally portrayed as a Rite of Passage, something that makes a Man of them (see Upham in Saving Private Ryan, the son in A History of Violence). They don't drop the weapon and they don't cry.

• Saw it recently on TV in the John Wayne movie, 'Rio Lobo'. Amelita (Sherry Lansing) shoots a corrupt sheriff repeatedly, then breaks down sobbing, despite the fact she has recently borne having her face viciously slashed by the same character with nary a tear.
• The Van Damme movie "Hard Target' contains something of an aversion to this trope : Yancy Butler shoots one of the bad guy's henchmen and is admonished by the Van Damme character's Uncle Douvee (Wilford Brimley) for doing a man's work. He attempts to take the gun off her but she takes it back and walks grimly away.

Heroes have detractors and helpers, and to keep their lives interesting the former tend to outlive the latter.

In any setting where the hero is hounded by horrors, pursued by police or trying to expose a threat, the hero will have these allies killed, defect, or otherwise neutralized. On the other hand, any non-evil but antagonist third party will rarely get put out of the picture. Of course, this is to maintain Status Quo Is God and create more difficulty for the hero.

If one of (if not the) main goal of the story is to get access to a powerful force for good or convince one of those antagonistic third parties that he's innocent/the bad guy is a threat, they'll never get a chance or end up in an incriminating situation that discredits them.

A character -- usually a woman -- needs to get changed, but is in the middle of a plot-relevant conversation with another character, usually male. Since their getting dressed would require them to strip naked or almost-naked in front of this person, they duck behind a convenient modesty divider, thus solving the problem -- or so you would think. However, the divider appears to be made out of some sort of thin paper, and the sunlight is streaming right through it, allowing the man -- and by extension the viewer -- to gain a silhouette view of the woman that leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination.

Tends to appear in period pieces made around the era of the Hayes Code, designed to provide tantilizing views of the attractive women in the cast while still getting around strict rules about nudity in film during the time. Also tends to appear in movies set around the same time.

Do We Have This One?

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• The Alec Baldwin version of The Shadow plays this straight with Penelope Ann Miller's character.

"It's like someone made a submarine out of metal, and metal submarines became the norm, then someone came along and said 'everyone makes submarines out of metal, let's make one out of bread!" - Zero Punctuation

The term Bread Submarine is meant to cover needless innovation, essentially fixing what wasn't broke as well as adding a new level of problems and complexity.

Too Human: as mentioned in the title, part of the innovation for this game was that the analogue stick that normally works with camera angle was used for combat, this was not only odd for players who were more likely used to using it for camera angle but it also meant that trying to keep focused on any one thing was difficult essentially making this ground breaking innovation into a headache.

Once, a long time ago, Alice did something for Bob. It wasn't anything big - at least not for her. But for him, it was a milestone in his life, an unforgetable event. Now, Alice is in trouble, and Bob will do anything to help her - even though she doesn't remember that event, years ago, and have no idea why he'd go to such lengths...

Inevitably, at the end, it will finally be revealed what happened between them back then - expect a Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming.

• In the first Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney game, Phoenix helps two of his old classmates - Larry Butz and The Rival, Miles Edgeworth - beat their respective murder-accusations, stating in both cases that he owes them for something that happened 15 years ago. Miles, in particular, is surprised at his vehemence, since they've previously butted heads in the courtroom. The event in question: A 'classroom trial' where Phoenix had been accused of stealing Miles' lunch-money. The entire class, teacher included, had basically convicted him anyway, but Miles stood up for him, stating that there was no evidence, while Larry - who, being a known troublemaker, was used to being accused of just about anything that went wrong at school - did a Shaming The Mob about the baseless accusations of the class. A defining moment in Phoenix' life, which was what made him decide to become an attorney. After this revelation, it turns out that Larry Butz actually WAS the thief in that case - and that Miles had already figured out as much, but hadn't told Phoenix since he didn't see it as a big deal...
• In Kaze No Stigma, Kazumi has several attempts made on his life by a young woman of the Kannagi clan, who blames him for the death of her lover. Initially, he's suspected of actively killing him, but even after it's proven that he was framed, she continues to blame him for failing to save the guy, since he was right there. Nevermind that the guy had sought out Kazumi in an attempt to murder him. Enough said, her continued attempts at Kazumi's life are a great embarassment to the Kannagi clan, not to mention utterly futile considering her low-level powers and Kazumi's Over Nine Thousand powerlevel... Kazumi could tear her appart with the blink of an eye, but not only does he refuse to raise a hand against her, he even asks the Kannagi clan to leave her alone when they start grumbling about killing her to salvage their honor. In the end, she winds up killing a lot of innocent people in order to boost her powers... to the point where he can't just ignore her, but would actually have to kill her to stop her. Even then, he fights extra-hard to stop her without harming her, and succeeds with some help from Ayano. And after all this, she still has no idea why the otherwise cynical Bad Ass would go to such lengths to help her... but it turns out, there was a reason: Back when Kazumi was still living with the Kannagi clan, he was considered an outcast for not possessing the clan's inherent fire-based abilities, and all the other children would routinely bully him - especially since even the kids who were younger than him could easily handle him with a bit of fire-magic. The only member of the household who ever stood up for him was her, and even then, just that one time when she told off some other kids for picking on someone 'weaker than them'... that incident burned itself into Kazumi's memory, and so, no matter what she did, he refused to hurt her.

Needs A Better Title; suggested, "Nuke the Balloons"

The military in fiction generally doesn't have a good reputation. One way of demonstrating this is by making military personnel quick to attack anything they see in the sky that isn't something they recognize-- even when it's completely harmless. It doesn't matter if it's Superman out for a spin or Santa Claus on Christmas night; if they're in the air and unidentified, they are going down.

This causes much stress to the flier, of course. Bonus points if this is done to a flying character on their first flight. This is a good way to insert some action in the middle of a story.

Expect to hear the word "bogey" and see a radar screen with a beeping dot indicating the location of the "unidentified object" and the approaching missiles. Very rarely does anyone suggest finding out what the object is before getting the surface-to-air missiles ready.

---

Examples:

• In Nena's 99 Red Balloons, a song criticizing militarism and the "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality, a couple send out ninety-nine red toy balloons for fun; due to a bug in the software and Cold War paranoia, the army thinks it's an attack and retaliates, leading to nuclear war.
• Jack Skellington is shot down by the military on Christmas night. In this case, there was a reason-- he was handing out harmful and sinister toys-- but shooting him down is rather excessive.
• In Earnest Saves Christmas, Earnest is nearly shot down after taking Santa's sleigh on a joyride.
• The Iron Man movie: Tony Stark is flying home after shooting up a town full of terrorists, but is intercepted by the US Airforce. To their credit, they do try to find out what the bogey is, but it quickly progresses into Old School Dogfighting.

The cousin to Fake Brit and Fake American and a subtrope of Fake Nationality.

Irish characters are some of the most frequently depicted foreigners in British and American media but due to the rather small number of Irish actors actually working they tend to be played by non-Irish actors with, ahem, 'variable' success when it comes to accents.

Scottish actors and actresses seem to be disproportionately likely to play Irish characters, which is unlikely to help those who already can't tell the two countries apart.

Examples:

Anime

Film

• Julia Roberts played real-life Irishwoman Kitty Kiernan in Michael Collins and fictional Irishwoman Mary Reilly (in the film of that name) in the same year.
• Scottish actresses Kelly Macdonald and Shirley Henderson played Irish sisters in Intermission.
• The 1995 film Circle of Friends was particularly full of fake Irish: Minnie Driver, Saffron Burrows, Colin Firth (English), Alan Cumming (Scottish) and Chris O'Donnell (American) played the leads.
• Ryan's Daughter had English, Australian and American leads surrounded by Irish extras.
• Yorkshireman Sean Bean played an IRA man in Patriot Games. In fact only 3 actors in this film were actually Irish: Richard Harris, Patrick Bergin and Jonathan Ryan. This means all of the other Irish characters were this trope. Englishwoman Polly Walker plays the IRA terrorist Annette, though it is revealed in film that Annette is British born (presumably of Irish ancestry).
• Richard Gere played a (former) IRA man in the The Jackal.
• Tommy Lee Jones played a (former) IRA man in Blown Away (notice a pattern here?). In the same film Jeff Bridges played a Boston cop who was - you guessed - formerly in the IRA.
• The Scottish Ian Bannen played Jackie O'Shea in Waking Ned Devine.
• Emily Watson (English) and Robert Carlyle (Scottish) play Frank McCourt's parents in Angela's Ashes.
• Kim Catrall played Brendan Gleeson's Irish wife in The Tiger's Tail.
• Debateable examples: Leonardo Di Caprio and Cameron Diaz played Irish/first generation Irish-American characters in Gangs Of New York.
• Michael J Fox and Lea Thompson in Back To The Future III, part of the Identical Grandson / And You Were There of the series.
• In a mix between Fake Irishman, Fake Nationality and Fake American, British actor Alan Rickman played real life half-Cuban, American born, Irish revolutionary Eamon de Valera in Michael Collins.
• Scot Ewan McGregor portrayed James Joyce in Nora.
• Scot Gerard Butler portrayed Hillary Swank's late Irish husband in P.S. I Love You.
• Ronin - Natasha McElhone is British in real life.
• Both parents in In America are played by English actors, though the daughters are played by real life Irish sisters.
• Daniel Day-Lewis frequently plays Irish characters but is actually from London and is half Anglo-Jewish. On the other hand he became an Irish citizen in 1993 and is partially resident in Ireland so depending on your point of view this trope may or may not apply to him.
• Far and Away gave us an 'Irish' accented Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

Live Action Television

• Galway born Angel of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (and Angel) is portrayed by Buffalo born David Boreanaz.
• None of the characters who appeared in the brief 'Peter in Ireland arc' in Heroes were portrayed by Irish actors (though one was an Irish-American). Two seasons later we had American Robert Knepper playing Samuel.
• Burn Notice has both a regular and an in-universe example. Brit Gabrielle Anwar plays former-IRA Fiona Glennane. American Jeffrey Donovan plays American Michael Westen, who uses a cover as Irish terrorist Michael McBride. Also, Michael's Irish accent is so good, Fiona's brother Sean tells him his American accent is "a bit dodgy".
• A pre-fame Heath Ledger played a young Irish warrior prince in the short-lived Hercules/Xena knock-off Roar.
• British actor Paul Whitehouse played Irish estate worker Ted (of the Ted & Ralph sketches) in the The Fast Show.
• Father Ted - of all shows - used this at least once with native Glaswegian Clare Grogan playing Sinead O'Connor Niamh Connolly, an Irish radical feminist pop singer.

Video Games

Western Animation

• Of all the characters in Jakers! The Adventures of Piggley Winks only the adult version of Pggley is voiced by an Irish actor (Peadar Lamb). The others are all voiced by Americans, except Molly and Dannan O'Mallard who are voiced by Canadian Tara Strong.

Real Life

• Patrick O'Brian (born Richard Patrick Russ) the Hibernophile English author of the Aubrey-Maturin series at the very least made no move to correct journalists who thought he was Irish though whether he actively pretended to be Irish is a bit murkier.
• Errol Flynn, who was an Australian of partial-Irish descent, passed himself as Irish in his early Hollywood career in the belief that few people knew of Australia.

When a Historical Domain Character collides with Hollywood History the results can be a little strange. In order to satisfy audience expectations (and fit in with the actors they want to cast) one of the first things to be fiddled around with is the historical character's age.

Generally the actor playing the character will be older than the real person was but inversions are not unknown.

Examples:

• Liam Neeson was already 44 when he played the title leader in Michael Collins (the real life Collins was killed at the age of 31)
• Likewise Public Enemies star Johnny Depp was 46 when he played John Dillinger (who also died at the age of 31)
• Both averted and played straight in Shakespeare In Love - Joseph Fiennes was actually roughly the right age to be Shakespeare but Rupert Everett was far too old to play Christopher Marlowe.
• Rome was usually pretty good in averting this trope (though Cato was much too old), but in a rare inversion actress Kerry Condon was younger than Octavia.

This one would be when one character is a known badass (normal or otherwise) and another character playfully attacks them only to be stunned when their implacable friend drops like a sack of bricks or cries out in pain. I can only think of three examples, so unless someone else has a few it's probably not going to make it.

Contrast Offhand Backhand?

Examples:

• In an episode of Pokemon, Brock hit the Elite Four's Bruno with a branch, thinking he would block it.
• In the first episode of Rurouni Kenshin, Kaoru playfully punches him in the face, having expected him to see it coming.
• In the Cell Saga of DBZ, Krillin throws a rock at a sleeping Goku, thinking that Goku would blow it up or something.

The original idea for the title was Unlimited Potential Limited Mortals, but I felt it was a little long.

This is related to Time To Unlock More True Potential and Strong As They Need To Be, and possibly the supertrope.

This is where someone is specified as being capable of advancing far beyond where they are now, and in many cases that is what the villain fears the most. That if they are able to tap into that hidden power nothing would be beyond their grasp.

There is also a corollary to this. Magic, Applied Phlebotinum, Kung Fu, some sort of Meta Origin, all of these may bestow fantastic gifts upon a select group of people or person. Even when given the gift, they are told that with such power there is nothing outside their capability. But if this is the case, why are there enemies with no such unlimited cosmic power still able to be a threat?

The answer, and it is implied with almost any sort of "Unlimited Power" claim, is that while the power has no limitations the person using it is still fallable. It is their own willpower that is unable to use the unlimited power. As their willpower grows in strength they are merely capable of tapping into the source better, the actual potential doesn't change.

Examples:

• The Green Lantern Ring, explicitedly able to create anything the user wills it to, but unable to do anything beyond their willpower.
• The Force of Star Wars, told that its power surpasses the Death Star's ability to destroy a planet, but no Jedi or Sith demonstrates the capability to do so. When is comes time for him to die, Yoda says "Strong am I with the Force, but not that strong."
• This is what Frieza feared about the Saiyans in Dragonball Z.
• Yusuke's potential was what made him a target for many later villains, most of them DeathSeekers. Even at the beginning of the series Koenma chose Yusuke because he surprised the entire spirit world with what he is capable of.

Do We Have This One? As an Acceptable Break From Reality, most First Person Shooters don't place the viewpoint accurately; typically the player's weapon is located much higher up in the field of view than would be expected when holding it at the hip (it's more like held inside the shoulder), and isn't obscured by depth of field blur; the field itself is all considered in focus unless, in recent games, the iron sight is being used. As well as this, the "inside" of the player's face is never depicted, leading to an odd implication that the player's eyes are actually blinkered and hovering just in front of their neck, or sometimes lower still.

There's many reasons for this; it's hard to simulate a realistic human field of view without a game requiring multiple monitors placed in an arc, and as yet impossible to simulate the player's eyes focusing. The purpose of grenade warning indicators and direction-of-impact displays is to make up for the loss of peripheral vision.

Examples:

• Basically, every FPS ever made. Particularly obvious cases follow:
• In the first three Turok games the perspective was lower still, resulting in a field of view lovingly Christened the "groin cam" by critics.
• A stranger shift was in one of the early Jurassic Park games, where in some versions the player character either had eyes in their torso or their gun attached to the side of their head.
• At one point in Haze the opposite occurs with the player's viewpoint much too high; they're able to look down and see their own neck.

Could probably use some brushing up in terms of the writeup, just throwing the idea out to see what I get.

(Do We Have This One?)

When an artist plays the main character as well as their rival in a music video. Often, these videos tell the story of a type three or seven Love Triangle, but not always. The competition might be professional or in general not related to a romantic relationship.

Usually, each character will have widely different hair colors and opposed clothing styles, making them easy to differentiate from one an other despite being played by the same person. The "good" character's look trends to be similar to the signer's IRL appearance.

Examples :

• Avril Lavigne in her Girlfriend video, plays the black haired protagonist and the red haired, nerdy girlfriend she wants her crush to get rid of.
• Taylor Swift in You Belong With Me, both as cute geeky blond and bitchy brunette.

TV programs that pretend to be interested in architecture, or implementing eco-friendly building solutions but are really about showing off big expensive houses.

Examples:

The british TV series, Grand Designs To some degree, Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous.

Needs A Better Title. Alice has a problem and she goes to Bob for some advice. She pours her problems out to him, unaware that he isn't paying attention, or even there, but by the end of their "conversation" she's figured out the answer to her problem and thanks Bob for his help. On the other hand, Bob may be all set to give her some advice, but before he can get a word in, Alice comes up with a solution and runs off, thanking him, and leaving Bob bewildered, though he'll still probably say, "You're welcome."

Basically, this is when a character has a Eureka Moment without being inspired by the other character, but acts like the other character gave them just what they needed.

Examples:

• In the South Park episode "Are You There, God? It's Me, Jesus," Kyle asks his baby brother Ike for advice and just gets gibberish in response, but he comes to a conclusion on his own.
• In TinkerBell and the Lost Treasure, Terence vents his frustations with Tink to an owl, and actually answers the owl's hoots ("Who?"), working through his problem this way. After he leaves, Fairy Gary shows up, looking for advice about the guys making fun of his kilt.

You know that thing where all or most of the devil worshipers are elderly. Sometimes, Satanism is confused with Witchcraft, Paganism, Voodoo, or some cult, or whatever Religion Of Evil by writers who Did Not Do The Research.

Up For Grabs

• Rosemarys Baby
• House of the Devil
• The 'Burbs
• The Remake of Bedazzled, all the people in the night club are actually old people
• Skeleton Key

This seemed to be a staple of 1970s Italian directors. Bava, Argento, Fulci... they think that Witches are Satanists, though.

EDIT: I mentioned Hot Fuzz, but that doesn't work, as there are no Satanists in Hot Fuzz, and Matthew The Raven said "Hot Fuzz" and also melloncollie said, to me, that there are no Satanists in Hot Fuzz, so there were two replies about Hot Fuzz, and I realized that two people said had mentioned Hot Fuzz instead of adding examples, so I removed it, as there were already two people mentioning it.

In a moment of doubt, self-loathing, If Its You Its Okay, inebriation, or greed, a young, closeted gay male character (and it's Always Male) has sex with a woman. Pregnancy inevitably ensues. Nearly always part of the primary conflict in the story; it's very rare for this to ever show up as a subplot. It also happens to be a very convenient way of demonstrating or exaggerating the consequences of being in the closet. A subtrope of the Coming Out Story, because this plot is always linked with a coming-out plot.

Does not apply to deliberately induced pregnancies, regardless of the parents' sexualities, motives or the method of conception.

Seen It A Million Times, and yet Needs More Examples.

Examples:

• Howard Cruz's comic Stuck Rubber Baby
• The off-Broadway stage musical Bare A Pop Opera
• Saved!

Most works have relatively small casts, and don't even pretend to try to accurately portray a cross-section of an entire culture. On the other hand, you also have works with A Cast Of Thousands... among which certain groups are Conspicuously Absent. Entire demographics are often left out of fiction set in eras or places where they logically should exist. Depending on when and where the work itself was made, this can be a result of Values Dissonance, Did Not Do The Research and/or Author Tract, and - especially in newer works - often leads to Unfortunate Implications. Especially common in genres like Historical Drama, Slice Of Life and Science Fiction, in which it's expected that the work will make some effort to realistically portray the setting. Genres with wholly invented settings, particularly High Fantasy, are generally exempt or can at least reasonably Hand Wave their way out of the trope, provided they're careful not to overplay it.

Supratrope for Least Common Skintone. Compare Hide Your Gays and Ambiguously Brown, where the demographic is technically present but flies under the radar. Often goes hand-in-hand with Discount Lesbians and Token Minority, where the barest possible attempt at averting this trope is made. A logical consequence of Monochrome Casting, at least in multi-ethnic settings. In science fiction, can be averted outright via In The Future Humans Will Be One Race. Can sometimes be made much worse by inadequately addressing the absence.

Examples:

• Star Trek: no gays, despite having a literal Cast Of Thousands
• Star Wars: famously monochromatic, particularly in the original trilogy.
• ''Harry Potter: averted at the last second, thanks to a final-book Hide Your Gays (and Word Of Gay, if the subtext wasn't clear enough. YMMV).
• Mass Effect: another no-gays universe, much to the ire of forum dwellers everywhere. (But note that there is a token bisexual in the second game, and the series as a whole is probably the Most Triumphant Example of Discount Lesbians.)
• Battlestar Galactica: Tory, the Only Indian In Space, appears about halfway through the show.
• Lost: Borderline example, but you'd expect a plane taking off from Australia to have more than one Australian on board. Also, the show has upwards of a hundred recurring characters and no gays one gay.
• Peter Hamilton's The Naked God: A Cast Of Thousands, no gays. (One Depraved Bisexual, though! He's literally the Devil.)
• The Ten Commandments, thanks to Monochrome Casting.
• Real Life example: Asian Jews and Christians rarely come up, despite being numerically significant by Western standards.
• A notable Real Life inversion: Journalistic tradition requires any news story to have "balance" in the form of proponents for two or more interpretations of the subject, particularly in politics. Newspapers in areas with overwhelming support or opposition for a given political cause will still quote both sides, even if it means quoting organizations most of their readership regards as wingnuts.
  • Case in point: the San Francisco Chronicle frames articles about Prop 8 along support/oppose lines, even though San Francisco voted 96% against the measure.

This is when the producers think that having a Jewish character adds diversity to their monochrome cast. Paris on Gilmore Girls, Willow from Buffy, Grace from Will & Grace, Neal from Freaks & Geeks, etcetera.

The tendency of Moral Guardians to be harsher towards homosexuality than heterosexuality. Although different-sex couples can kiss and make out in G rated movies, a slight peck from a same-sex couple is an automatic PG-13 if not an R. And of course there's no way to include even a tame sex scene without getting an R rating or worse.

Please note, this is distinct from Hide Your Lesbians, which refers to the tendency to reduce canon relationships to subtext. Because Sackett apparently mistook them for the same thing, he cut this and for some reason I could not restore it. The original discussion is as follows.

added: 2010-01-31 23:33:58 by Fanra Real Life: CBS television network announced they would accept a TV ad for the 2010 Super Bowl from an anti-abortion group, in a change from their "no controversy" policy. However, they turned down an ad from a gay dating service. Needless to say, they have no problem with heterosexual dating services.

added: 2010-02-01 05:27:13 by animeg3282 Butterflies Flowers has an M rating...because of a single gay joke.

added: 2010-02-01 05:28:14 by animeg3282 Compare Black Bird from the same company which has OT rating despite erotic licking of an underage girl.

added: 2010-02-01 08:54:33 by Sackett Hide Your Lesbians

You want a character express their love for another in the form of a hug, or a kiss, or just by being exceptionally nice? Think twice about it.

Some of us can't wrap our mind around the idea that sexuality may not neccessarily follow from intimacy, and for some reason television has even higher standards about what counts as appropriate behavior between people in a platonic relationship. Any aaffectionate ction that violates this will be blown out of proportions and misinterpreted as the character having an interest in the other. Physical closeness in particular is almost completely prohibited and is seen as "wrong" even among family members.

The two major offenders who exploit this trope are fanfiction writers, where this trope often becomes the source of Shipping, and the Moral Guardians.

A character, usually the Butt Monkey of a given work, is treated for the first time in their lives with genuine kindness and friendship. Only, it wasn't really genuine kindness and friendship. Turns out that the "nice" person had their own agenda, just like everyone else.

While normally this would be seen as a giant act of betrayal (and oftentimes is in-universe), in this case the life of the Butt Monkey has sucked so much to this point that even fake kindness makes a lasting impression. As is such, they will be exceptionally loyal to their benefactor, even if the benefactor herself admits that it was all a lie. Consequently, they will be quite immune to Twisting The Words.

Examples:

• Marv's attitude toward Goldie in the first issue of Sin City. He's not an idiot- he realizes that Goldie almost certainly got close to him because she needed protection from whoever it was that killed her in the opening pages. But be that as it may, she's the only stranger that's ever shown Marc any genuine kindness, and it's also implied that she's the only woman who wasn't too terrified of his appearance to be with him. So he searches relentlessly to find her killer.
• Code Geass has a big one late in the second season. Rollo continues to be loyal to Lelouch even after the latter has a nervous breakdown and tells Rollo in no uncertain terms that the affections he showed to Rollo were fake and all part of his machinations. Lelouch is naturally astonished when Rollo comes out of nowhere to save him from execution by the Black Knights. Lelouch, resigned to his death, begs Rollo to stop, insisting that Lelouch's life is not worthing Rollo killing himself through overexerting his Geass. Rollo explains in spasms while freezing time that even if Lelouch's affections were fake, they were still meaningful to him- and that being with Lelouch was the only time in his whole life where he genuinely felt happy.

Not a very fun title I know, but I haven't thought of anything better yet.

Gathered most of these from the mook page and a title search for "mook" but I'm sure we have more:

Mook varieties

• Boss In Mook Clothing
• Elite Mook
• Evil Minions
• Faceless Mooks
• Fake Ultimate Mook
• Gas Mask Mooks
• Giant Mook
• Helpful Mook
• Invincible Minor Mook
• King Mook
• Kung Fu Proof Mook
• Mascot Mook
• Mecha Mook
• Middle Management Mook
• Mook
• Mook Bouncer
• Mook Driver
• Nocturnal Mooks
• Personal Mook
• Player Mooks
• Punch Clock Villain
• Slave Mooks
• Superpowered Mooks
• That One Mook
• Zombie Mooks

Mook tropes

• Actually Four Mooks
• Dancing Mook Credits
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy
• Million Mook March
• Mook Chivalry
• Mook Face Turn
• Mook Horror Show
• Mook Maker
• Mook Mobile
• Mook Promotion
• Multi Mook Brawl
• Multi Mook Melee
• Set A Mook To Kill A Mook
• What Measure Is A Mook

Do We Have This ? I looked through all of the love tropes, and there didn't seem to be any that dealt with 'family' love, or at least this trope.

Distinct from Missing Mom or other Parental Abandonment tropes in that the parent of the character in question was an active force in their life, for good or bad, but is now permanently gone. Killed Off For Real, or maybe just certifiably dead from the beginning.

The character in question states to another character, who may be a rival, love interest, sibling, or another parent about how badly they miss their other parent. Expect Ocular Gushers or Manly Tears. May be a Freudian Excuse, or something slightly more poignant. Unfortunately, I'm too fatigue-drunk to think up any examples. Up For Grabs .

When Hollywood does a movie adaptation and turns a confident leader character into a self doubting leader character.

Name and examples taken from the following quote: "...even if Peter Jackson’s Aragorn had to be all self-doubting and reluctant (even more so than Tolkien’s character) to seize his destiny, because Hollywood equates certitude with folly and doubt with thoughtfulness. (The Aragorn Complex, as I call this doubtful-leader device, can also be seen in The Prince of Egypt‘s Moses and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe‘s Peter Pevensie.)..." -Stephen Greydanus

• Aragorn in The Lord Of The Rings.
• Peter in The Chronicles Of Narnia (especially Prince Caspian) goes from mighty Narnian king to whiny doubting Narnian king.
• Moses in The Prince Of Egypt

Do we already have this?

Freddy: "She was mine!"
--Freddy Vs Jason

Bob the Avenger is locked in mortal combat with the warlord Baron Von Bloodlust. Then the Baron gets knocked down. Bob has him. He brings up his sword to make the final strike... and then the Baron falls down without Bob touching him. There's a knife in his back, held by Alice Dreamrider. She just smirks, and says "Too slow", before swaggering away.

What the hell? Sure the Big Bad is gone, and there is peace to the world, but dammit, that was a Kill Steal!

This is a common way to establish a rivalry in stories about killers. Stealing a kill is a sure way to piss these characters off. Heck contests over who kills the most often encourage this.

Oh, and it even happens in Real Life, like Tabletop Games (especially with The Munchkin) or online games (especially with Griefers).

Compare The Only One Allowed To Defeat You.

---

Examples:

• This is what sets off the "versus" in Freddy Vs Jason, as seen in the quote.
• Henry does this in a cutscene for one of the bosses in No More Heroes.
• The heroes of DM Of The Rings complain when Gandalf does this.

I know we have a couple tropes that reference this, but none to my knowledge attack it head on. Also Needs A Better Title, maybe.

So you have your Sweeps Week Lesbian Kiss, and then you got this, where a Token Minority gay character is introduced into the fold, and crushes on a regular. Problem is, the regular isn't gay at all, and has shown no interest in starting that sort of relationship. And yet, for some reason, this new person has brought out feelings in this character that have never surfaced before, and one making sure later, the regular is absolutely sure that they have switched sides. Obviously, Sexuality is Shareware.

Generally, this sort of thing only happens once with one lead, and may or may not be temporary. But depending on the niche of the work, the entire universe could be put in play and (re)define the universe of the work. Also, I'm pretty sure this isn't the way GBLT-stuff works in real life, so Dont Try This At Home.

Examples:

• Gretchen, for Heroes, starts Claire out on the Friends With Benefits path, and is slowly building their relationship.
• Zii from Menage A 3, on the other hand is no where near as subtle, and is of the "redefine the universe" subtypes.

A fighter in a fighting competition marked by their high loses. See also, Jobber.

• Glass Joe (and his student, Gabby Jae) of Punch Out
• Dead-eye Duncan of the dueling ring on Taris in Knights Of The Old Republic.

Sligh, don't edit the main YKTTW -Deuxhero

You know the drill, folks; Character A, while in disguise or otherwise not recognisable as Character A, uses the opportunity to compliment himself, usually with some formulation of the words "No, I have no idea who this Mr Character A is, but he sounds really handsome". It's been YKTTW'd about eleventy billion times (I think I remember one of them being "Superman Compliments Clark Kent" or something), but bugger me if it's ever been launched. Disguise Trope. Up For Grabs.

Examples:

• Happens multiple times in Eight Bit Theater, such as here and here.

Do We Have This One?

A character who at the end of the day is a good person, but is to lazy to ever go out of there way to help people. Near the end of a story they will usually get off there buts and actually help the protagonists.

Examples:

• Ronson from The Gods Of Arr Kelaan is a shining example of this trope, and gave me the idea, and it is best expressed by his followers, who believe in doing the right thing as long as it does not require to much physical effort.

Random, funny chatter on a financial news channel or radio station. Usually about how the price of pork bellies has rose once more.

• In The Simpsons episode, "Krusty Gets Kancelled", Homer was boxing with Krusty as part of his rehabilitation after losing his job. Maggie switched on to the Gabbo show enraging Krusty to pummel Homer. However, Maggie then switched to news channel in the middle of a talk about the price of porkbellies. This causes Homer to return the favor to Krusty.

How do we not have this one?

Are you hung over? Did you forget to drink water before bed? Do you wish to avoid the Hideous Hangover Cure? All that is no problem, no problem at all: here's some of whatever it was you drank last night! Your hangover will be over in no time flat!

A classic remedy for the hangover, insofar as it dulls your ability to feel the effects of the hangover. Of course, all it does is delay the hangover by a couple of hours.

The name of the trope is of course traditional: it derives from the (entirely false) superstition that if you were bitten by a dog, you could avoid disease by taking the hair of the dog that bit you.

Examples

• In All The Kings Men, Willie Stark didn't drink until his first campaign for Governor. Then, one night, he drinks for the first time in his life. Suffering from the hangover of his life, Sadie Burke recommends the hair of the dog. He then delivers the speech of his life.

Y'all have Seen It A Million Times. Hell, you've probably tried it at least once.

Do We Have This One?

In the movie theatre, most people get up and leave as soon as the credits start rolling. Most movies don't have anything to show, anyways, usually just a stylized sequence at best. Some movies, however, hide a little "bonus" after the end of the credits- hints at a sequel, the "real ending", or whatever. Quite often it's a Spoiler.

Examples:

• Iron Man: A scene with Nick Fury inviting Tony Stark to create the Avengers.
• Dawn Of The Dead: What happens after they get "safely" onto the boat.
• Cloverfield: voices, possibly "Help us" and "It's still alive!"

A person (almost always a middle aged white guy) is happily living their life. They have a good job, a good family, and good friends. Then someone comes along and disrupts that balance, causing chaos, minor destruction, and generally causing mayhem of a nature intended to be hilarious. The MAWG is, of course, horrified by this disruption- but every single person around him finds the actions of the intruder endearing and the MAWG to be a stuffy old jerk for not agreeing. At the end of the movie the MAWG either has learned to cope, now agrees with everyone else, or is driven insane. A comedy trope that is especially prone to fridge logic. Title is inspired by the Beethoven movie series and inspired by, but not related to, the Shoot The Dog tropes.

Examples:

• Beethoven: A big (and shaggy!) dog comes into the life of a MAWG, destroying property, disrupting business meetings, and generally causing allegedly funny mayhem. He's horrified and wants the dog gone, but the wife and kids plead with him not too. When he finally does get rid of it, the vet turns out to be a bad guy, so stuff happens and the dog ends up back in their home with the MAWG now more accepting of his destructive nature.
• What about Bob?: The trope codifier. A psychologist, Dr. Leo Marvin, has a happy life all around and is ready for a relaxing vacation from which he plans to launch his new book. He's a calm guy, almost zen. Another psych asks him to take on a patient, Bob, just before the vacation. Said psych is giggling erratically as he packs his bags to get away from his job. It indicated that this is not Bob's first psych. Long story short, stuff happens, Leo is driven insane, his vacation house is blown up and Bob marries his sister. And we are supposed to be happy with this ending because Leo didn't know his son well enough to teach him how to swim, clearly an indication of underlying jerkassitude.
• Bringing down the House: Peter is a tax attorney that is doing very well. Although he is a workaholic,and somewhat disconnected from his kids, he nonetheless is chatting online with what he thinks is a hot blond attorney that wants to meet him. He ends up getting a black BBW of a con that broke out of prison to try and get him to prove her innocence. Hijinks ensue, she embarrasses him as he tries to get a billionaire client and move his way up the firm and causes him to lose his job, and his kids and best friend love her more every step of the way. But it's okay, because the people at his job were jerks, he proves her innocence, and lands the billionaire as his first client.
• A useful device for The Bernie Mac Show
• In The Simpsons episode "Homer's Enemy", new nuclear plant employee Frank Grimes tries to get everyone to see that Homer is a jerk but they all laugh off Homer's antics. The producers in the show said, "We wanted to do an episode where the thinking was 'What if a real life, normal person had to enter Homer's universe and deal with him?'".
• The Cable Guy Chip, the title character of that movie, turns out to be a villainous Stalker With A Crush who ends up bringing a lot of hurt into Steven Kovacs's life. Chip even gets Steve arrested at one point when it's discovered that all the new cable equipment that Chip installed for him early on in the movie was actually stolen. When Chip tries to get his hooks into Steve's Love Interest, Steve has to take him down in a final showdown.

Sometimes, the creators of a lousy work declare it Canon Discontinuity, and it is no longer part of the series. Then you have this, where a work is reissued with a character, place, event, or even a line of dialogue excised.

The Trope Namer is Sunflower, the racist-caricature centaur from Fantasia, who was removed from the Pastoral Symphony animation for obvious reasons.

When the Big Bad is part of the Heroes Nakama from the very beginning. He's not in sheep's clothes though. he's human, and likable and truly friends with the heroes, or at least until they find out that he's the one who caused all their hardship (Sometimes intentionally, sometime inadvertently). Sometimes the Big Bad was using them all along, sometimes not. Point is, the heroes and audience both thought he was a hero too, right up to the Final Boss Battle.

Only example I know of off the top of my head is in Dollhouse

A character has discovered something that no one would ever believe (usually the existence of aliens/wizards/ghosts/vampires/magic in general/something like that). Naturally, this must be kept a complete secret from everyone she knows. But it's hard not to be able to talk about it with anyone, and eventually the pressure gets to be too much for her. So finally she decides to tell just one close and trusted friend (or family member), thinking that even if no one else would understand, surely that person will.

Well, he doesn't call her a liar, at least -- but he doesn't believe her either. Rather, he tells her that he believes that she believes it, implying that he thinks at best that she has an overactive imagination and at worst that she's crazy. (But hey, at least this way The Masquerade is still intact...)

This probably can happen in non fantasy/sf works too, if someone, I don't know, uncovers a government conspiracy or something, but I don't recall ever having seen it in that context.

Examples:

• I remember Liz on Roswell getting this from someone regarding the aliens (though I can't remember who it was).
• Though the Stock Phrase isn't used in so many words, Wataru in Brave Story characterizes his uncle's reaction to Wataru telling him he met a wizard this way. (Sorry, the grammar in that sentence was a bit convoluted.)

(Do We Have This One, by the way? I couldn't find it, but I've been known to fail my spot checks, and I haven't been on the site in a while.)

Do We Have This? Seen It A Million Times.

Oftentimes when the hero visits famous landmarks, the Pyramids especially, even in the middle of the day, there will be neither tourists, nor even security guards, around.

• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen took this to new extremes. There should have been tons of tourists in the crossfire.
• Actually justified in Jumper, where he used his powers to break in after hours.
• Subverted in X-Men when the lack of ANYONE (even security) at the Statue of Liberty could be explained by the UN summit.

Become the test subject for a drug company's new product and receive lots of money in return (as well as the effects and side-effects of the experimental drug). Usually includes a waiver stating that the company can't be held accountable for any undesired effects of the experiment.

• In The Simpsons, after Homer lost the family's savings in an stock investment gone bad, Homer volunteered to be the human test subject at medical testing centre at advice of his friend Barney, whom had functional ears growing out of his torso after his drug trials.
• In Malcolm In The Middle, Reese volunteers at multiple clinics to try experimental drugs for extra money. Oh and did I mention he did all the trials simultaneously by lying to the physicians if was taking any other medications.
• Inverted in Johnny Test, volunteers for the effects (and side effects) of his sisters' experiments for free.

I'd like there to be some sort of mathematical formula on this site for determining exactly how "scary" a work of fiction would be to a "scaredy-cat," and for what reasons. In short, a Sorting Algorithm Of Trauma - Nightmare Fuel combined with Your Mileage May Vary. It would attempt to explain works that are not inherently scary, but that contain something beneath the surface that would frighten a particularly sensitive person.

We all know about those movies or TV shows or whatnot that gave us the creeps when we were kids for some strange reason or another. An example for me personally would be Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1971 musical Jesus Christ Superstar, of which I saw a performance when I was 15. Most people who don't like that play (and the movie based on it) tend to find it either dated or offensive; I found it absolutely terrifying.

What, exactly, did I find so horrific? There are many things - some of them so minor that a casual viewer might miss them completely. I remember feeling a bit shocked and scared when Jesus lost his temper and shoved over all the vendors' booths in the temple; the actor's maniacal delivery didn't help matters. Then there's the scene where a mob of diseased derelicts - who are literally made up to look like the walking dead - come to Jesus on the edge of town and hysterically beg him to cure them, and he screams at them to go away in a What The Hell Hero moment. I also found Jesus' increasingly nihilistic attitude as the hour of his death approached greatly disturbing, as well as Mary Magdalene's hopelessly naive outlook and her continuing to insist to Jesus that "Ev'rything's Alright" when it clearly wasn't.

And Judas Iscariot....God, don't get me started on Judas Iscariot. Both the man and all the imagery surrounding him chilled me to the marrow of my bones. Where to begin? There's the very name "Judas" itself, which sounds like a serpent hissing on the wind. And there's the fact that he's portrayed almost as a paranoid schizophrenic with repressed homosexual feelings for Jesus (I don't think it's an accident that both he and Mary sing "I Don't Know How To Love Him.") AND there are those two weird, faceless mime artists who were always following him around; I guess they were supposed to be devils, but to me they were borderline Uncanny Valley. AND there was his song, "Damned For All Time," with its absolutely psychotic guitar riff. AND, finally, there's his full-blown Villainous Breakdown after Jesus is taken before Pilate, ending with him CRYING LIKE A LITTLE GIRL AND HANGING HIMSELF. Thanks for haunting my dreams, Sir Andrew.

Over the years, I've tried to figure out exactly why Jesus Christ Superstar disturbed me so. Divining the reasons would, I suppose, be the key to establishing the "algorithm" for this trope. Basically, I would chalk up my particular reaction to a combination of inexperience, cultural bias, and contextual anomaly. In terms of experience, my Baby Boomer parents had only exposed my sister and me to folk-rock and roots-rock and the more "commercial" styles of music from their youth, so I was utterly unprepared for the sheer weirdness of acid rock; it was like heavy metal to me. Culturally, I had been raised as a traditionalist Christian and had only ever seen or heard of Christ's passion interpreted in pious or non-threatening ways. And finally, contextually, I was so used to seeing harmless, happy-go-lucky musicals in that theater that the experience of Jesus Christ Superstar was for me like a bucket of ice water to the face.

So a combination of personal reference points, cultural norms, and memory can go into teh brewing of the noxious stew that is Nightmare Fuel. I only wish that we had some pseudo-scientific means for gauging this....

Bad title, please help. Do We Have This etc. This trope is for when a character creates clones of himself (via technology, magic...) and sends them all off to gain experience, education, etc. and then somehow collapses all the clones, inheriting all the skills and knowledge each clone acquired. Subtrope of Mes A Crowd.

• Naruto does this to learn (among others) his Spinning Orb technique in record time.
• Dr Mc Ninja's current story arc has him doing this by sending all his clones to different colleges.
• Jamie Madrox, the Multiple Man.
• In Eclipse Phase, it is possible to do this in the short run with digital copies of yourself. In the long run, however, it will drive you insane.
• This is a standard part of society in Charles Stross's novels Accelerando (at least in the later bits) and Glasshouse.
• Impulse, The Flash's cousin, gains this power after getting hit by a ray that gives people superspeed. Since he already had superspeed, he developed "scouts" that he could send out and reabsorb at will. Though officially he never lost the power, he hasn't used it for years after an incident on Apocalypse, where one of his scouts was killed and he absorbed its feelings as it died. (Also, it was something of a Game Breaker.)
• David Brin's Clay. Technically, they are made of clay, therefore, they are golems.
• The entire premise of Surrogates.
• Omi tries this in Xiaolin Showdown with the Ring of Nine Dragons. As it turns out, it splits his body and his mind, so each clone gets only a portion of his strength, intellect, reflexes, etc.

Do We Have This One?

When old people are shown in fiction, they are shown to be eccentric at the minimum. At their worse, they are essentially elderly CloudCuckooLanders.

Subtopes: Dirty Old Man, Dirty Old Woman

Do We Have This One?

Time is money.

Therefore, if you control time, you control money.

The easiest and most popular way of using Time Travel for mercantile purposes is is the Compound Interest Time Travel Gambit, but there is a lot of other ways.

• You can make a time tour agency.
• You can trade through time.
• You can use your knowledge of the future to make money in the past. Example: go to the future and find out what horse is going to win, stock is going to rise, lottery number is going to be picked, etc.

Beware of Time Police, though.

Examples:

• In The Green Futures of Tycho, Tycho becomes hugely rich by paradoxically selling off future copies of his own time machine.
• Spider Robinson's Callahans Crosstime Saloon story "Have You Heard The One...?". A time traveler from the future arrives, offering to sell miraculous devices for all the pennies in the bar. He plans to bury the pennies in the present and dig them up again in his own time, where copper is extremely valuable due to resource depletion. He does it this way so the Time Cops don't realize he arranged for their finding through time travel (which is illegal in the future).
• Back To The Future II brings us the infamous Grays Sports Almanac.
• It's implied the Doctor did this with a lottery ticket which he gave to Donna in The End of Time.
  • Lampshaded in the episode Tooth and Claw. Rose bets the Doctor a fiver she can get Queen Victoria to say she is 'not amused'. The Doctor explains that he can't do the bet because he would be abusing his privileges as a time traveller. She ups the stakes to double and he agrees. She won.

Seen Ita Million Times, Rolling Updates.

This is probably something of a Dead Horse Trope, unless it's still used on radio these days. But I noticed we don't have this Stock Phrase in the list. On a related note, I remember an old phrase used not only in radio but also on animated TV shows, where the Narrator would end an episode saying, "Tune in next week, when you'll hear X say..."

Needs A Better Description, Needs Examples.

Actually, this isn't necessarily heroes, but the use of janitors and similar cleaning-lady types in fiction. And we're not talking the Almighty Janitor; we're talking the ones who really don't have much power. Low pay, low status, socially invisible. They do the work that greases the wheels of society, and we'd really, really noticed if they all went missing, but for some reason people consider them as bottom of the totem pole, something like "the untouchables" caste of... India?

As is noted on the Almighty Janitor page, these guys know a lot. They're invisible servants and often overhear and witness things you wouldn't expect. And they know the ins and outs of places that few others do. For this reason, my mom makes it a point to seek them out when we're, say, touring a cathedral or something, because the janitor lady will know a lot about the unofficial aspects of the place.

Anyway, examples:

• To begin with, the hero in Space Quest. (This is the reason my mom adored that game back in the day and still thinks fondly of it when it's mentioned.)
• There's Mo, from Pixar's WALL-E.
• Kingdom Of Loathing has Ninja Snowmen Janitors.

Anyway... Up For Grabs.

One last bit of business before this trope launches. What name do y'all like best? I favor Stuck Items b/c I reckon folks'll instantly know what the trope's about. Leave It On has its' sexy implications but its' real meaning will be easily missed. Got a better name?

The game you're playing allows you to swap equipment in slots on party members. There're some slots the game won't allow players to empty. There're three categories of this trope

A. Defaults. A character comes with an item that can't be removed.

B. Uniquipables. You can equip the item but only once. Often an effect of Cursed Equipment.

C. Swappables. You may reequip the slot but never leave it empty.

Ex:

1. Used for flavor in Baldur's Gate: Minsc won't allow Boo to be removed from one of his potion slots.
2. In Final Fantasies IX you cannot have your weapon slot be empty, though you may change weapons around and run around "naked" except for your dagger/staff/racket/spear whatever. In Final Fantasies VII and X you can't have either your Weapon or armor slot be empty, if headlessnewt's memory serves.
3. Dr. Nusaken in Saga Frontier is one of the characters with stuck items.
4. The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion won't allow you to drop quest items. This implmentation has all sorts of bugs. You need fan made (Not official) patches fix this.
5. Planescape: Torment - You cannot remove the armor from any character except The Nameless One, who, ironically, doesn't wear armor except for a cosmetic/disguise robe. Some characters have items that can't be replaced like Dak'kon's Zerth Blade, Vhailor's helm, and Fall From Grace's journal. Other characters have weapon slots that can't be emptied like Annah's daggers, Nordom's crossbows, The Nameless One's Eye and Morte's teeth. Most even have voiced lines if you attempt to try.
6. Star Ocean 1 had accessories that couldn't be removed from Phia and Ioshua.
7. There's a Vocaloid song about the singer being stuck with "cursed glasses" she can't unequip, which is a problem because she has 20/20 vision normally and with the glasses on she can't see. ... yeah, it's pretty weird.
8. Wild AR Ms 5 allowed you to swap bullet cartridges for your AR Ms, but not the actual weapons.
9. Justified in War Craft 3 which has several (plot-important) items that can't be dropped; if you could drop them it'd be a Lost Forever situation.
10. In World Of Warcraft, you cannot un-equip the backpack you start with, ever. Which is annoying, as there are a few easily attainable alternatives readily available with 4-6 slots more.
11. Gear weapons in Xenogears.

What do y'all think of Leave It On as a trope name? I got an even better trope name! Stuck Items.

Rolling Updates

Do We Have This One?

Basically, the tendency for clothing worn by characters to have the ability to avoid things in the vein of wardrobe malfunctions.

There's the Gag Boobs carrying girl in Absolute Cleavage who jumps and gets thrown around without having to worry about her goods plopping out. There's the girl in a really short skirt who does acrobatics without worrying about flashing everyone she knows.

In addition, people in incredibly tight fitting or far going clothes never have to worry about having things ride up, make them chafe, and generally bring distressing discomforts. The metal thong clad Action Girl in particular is completely free of this.

Examples:

• Happened a lot in Xena Warrior Princess and Hercules The Legendary Journeys especially with Aphrodite. How did she get in to and stay in those costumes? This troper was fortunate enough to meet the actress at a con once and her response was 'smoke and mirrors.'

Do We Have This One?

When you think of Hollywood and other places within the entertainment industry, as well as the stars that inhabit them, you think of glamorous men and women who create the magic you see in movies and television, right?

WRONG! In Hollywood Babylon, the actors and actresses are braindead, spoiled, and addicted to various substances. The directors are egomaniac control freaks. The assistants are overworked and underpaid. The fans are insane and you might gain some stalkers. The executives are fond of excessive meddling and just plain corrupt.

Essentially, it's the entertainment industry depicted as a Crapsack World. See also Celebrity Is Overrated.