An Averted Trope that causes death and Deconstruction by its absence.

Basically, whenever an example is described with "Cruelly averted..." or "Averted, hard...".

(Death And Deconstruction might actually be a better trope name. Thoughts?)

Examples:

• Spider Man's aversion of Not The Fall That Kills You.
• Watchmen's aversion of Big Damn Heroes.

From the forum.

Anime trope but probably more general. Guy is living uninteresting life, then the Call To Adventure comes in the form of a pretty girl.

Trope, yes, no, etc.

Somewhere between (YKTTW Plug) A Pirate 400 Years Too Late and (YKTTW Plug) A Disgrace To Blackbeard are these pirates: they don't follow the traditional salty parrots-and-peglegs pirate style, but they don't just grab a weapon and hijack people's boats without any style. Instead, they decide to bring their own Post Modern style to piracy.

If they're doing this because they're In Space or otherwise not on the water, they're Space Pirates.

Examples:

• This is where Black Lagoon goes.

Updating a work with new footage (or the domain-local equivalent) in post-production to better reflect developments since the original was shot.

If this was planned while shooting, it's Fix It In Post.

Examples:

• The ending of the film Fever Pitch was rewritten after the Red Sox won the World Series.
• Two of the examples on the Ascended Meme page (X-Men and Snakes On A Plane) had supplemental shots with the memes added.
• Team Fortress 2's "Meet The Spy" video was accidentally leaked to You Tube (due to the iPhone app not respecting privacy restrictions) the weekend before it came out. When the high-resolution version was finally released that Monday, Valve edited a massive control panel of possible things to report seen in the opening to include an entry for "Leaked Video".

When presentation/technical elements and setting elements influence each other for practical reasons.

Examples:

• Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind is told through Anachronic Order flashbacks into the protagonist's relationship with a (deconstructed) Manic Pixie Dream Girl. You can tell what point in the relationship the flashback takes place in by the color of her ever-changing hair.
• Lost is a show that takes place entirely (for the first few seasons, anyway) on a desert island. The setting doesn't get stale, however, as every episode is interspersed with flashbacks from before the plane crash that stranded them on the island. This has since become the show's trademark.
• Portal takes place in a sterile lab environment, which allows the developer to make levels that use very simple geometry with a low chance of having the portals break the engine.
• The Blair Witch Project's limited presentation from its low budget was a large element of its creepiness.
• Several of Shakespeare's comedies featured women disguised as men. This took advantage of the fact that, at the time Shakespeare was writing his plays, all women's roles had to be performed by men or boys.

Rolling Updates

Sometimes, characters develop over the course of a show. And sometimes, shows will present new scenes from earlier time periods. And sometimes, characters in a flashback will exhibit character unlike the way they acted before the time the flashback is occuring.

For example, when Bob started on a show in 1991 he was characterized as a Jerk Ass, but became a Jerk With A Heart Of Gold in 1993, and then just became a nice guy by 1995, but is shown in a recent flashback to 1990 to have been a nice guy in 1990, with no explanation/extenuating circumstances.

Usually, this happens unintentionally due to Flanderization and Characterization Marches On, often due to the too many flashbacks to track characterization in an Expansion Pack Past. This might be used to Ret Con an existing flashback, maybe because it also had to be reshot since it was a Flashback With The Other Darrin.

Trope name comes from "backporting", a concept in software development where features from a new codebase are imported to an older branch of development.

Related YKTTW Plug:

• Retfauxactive Continuity

Alternate Titles:

• Forgotten Flaws

Examples:

• In the first episode of Monk, they establish that he's so messed up because of the death of his wife. By the final season, he's suddenly been weird/crazy since he was a little kid (to the point where they're making Webisodes all about it called "Little Monk"), in a way completely destroying the emotional impact of his wife's death, as well as making his suspension from the force, and his inability to be officially brought back on, simply odd.
  • Fridge Logic justification dictates that he was always messed up except for the brief moment in his life when he was with Trucy.
• In Star Trek Nemesis, they show a picture of Jean-Luc Picard when he was young, and for some reason, he was bald, despite the fact that his balding had everything to do with his age, as previously shown in the show. This also makes the villain quite baffling.
• Averted in Lost, which cuts around with its flashbacks, but keeps characterization as established when the scene takes place (noticeably when Shannon and Boone are shown shortly around the time of the crash, Shannon is still doing nothing but complaining.)

Rolling Updates.

When characters, after a brief speech in their character-native language, announce that they will continue in English. A workaround for a Translation Convention.

Examples:

• O-ren Ishii's speech in Kill Bill Volume I.
• Hans Landa's conversation in the beginning of Inglourious Basterds. Justified later on as a deliberate choice of language that both he and the man he was speaking to knew but the people listening in who he was conspiring to kill did not.

Use of a normally stylistic or otherwise non-narrative trope as an Enforced Trope by the narrative.

Examples:

• In Lost, Michael has to return to the Island to be able to die, enforcing Back For The Dead as part of the plot.

When an element is fully preserved in an adaptation of a work with no retooling or decay, despite vastly higher difficulties involved compared to the original.

Examples:

• Dr. Manhattan's penis, which is present in all its big blue glory in the film version.
• In Jurassic Park, the voice on the guided tour is who it was written as in the book.
• The Tick's Emotive Antennae are physically present in real time in the live-action TV series.

Alternate titles:

• Adaptation Recreation

Realted to Real Life Writes The Plot. When various actions by players or otherwise unintended and unwritten events go down in a game's history just as much, if not more, then its written lore.

Examples:

The Corrupted Blood incident in World Of Warcraft has its own long Wikipedia page.

Dissuading the villain from killing your Love Interest by telling him that he'd gain nothing from killing her, as "she means nothing to me".

If they're not bluffing, it's You Can Keep Her.

Examples:

• Trope Codifier Goldeneye uses, explains, and Gender Flips this.
• Averted hard in Lost when Ben Linus tells Martin Keamy that he doesn't care about Alex and that he might as well shoot her, which Keamy obliges.

Fix It In Post, long after Post, after the movie/book/film/game has been out for quite some time.

In Film, usually accompanies a Re Cut. This has become particularly common in Video Games since the advent of The Internet, which allows developers to push "patches" to their computer (and, later, console) games. Compare Downloadable Content and Expansion Pack, which "add on" to the game while not changing the core game itself.

Examples:

Film

• Possibly the most controversial example would be the Star Wars Special Edition, which, in addition to replacing many of the low-budget 70s-era bad effects with 1997-era high-budget bad CG, adding missing detail to several shots (such as windows in Cloud City), and adding a few scenes, reworked/replaced elements like Han shooting Greedo in the cantina to have Greedo shoot at Han first, making him less of a Magnificent Bastard.
  • The DVD Release had another set of these that fixed the Special Effects Failure (as well as things that would later become Plot Holes relative to the rest of the universe, such as the use of Roman script on the Death Star Power Core rather than Araubesh or whatever). It still drew ire for fixes made for consistency with the Prequel Trilogy, such as re-recording Boba Fett's voice and replacing Anakin Skywalker's ghost in the last shot of Return Of The Jedi with Hayden Christensen.
• Steven Spielberg's 20th anniversary Re Cut of E.T. was similarly maligned for (partially out of post Nine Eleven sensitivity) removing all incidences of handguns and replacing them with walkie-talkies and keys and replacing a single utterance of "terrorist" with "hippie".
  • The DVD Release of this cut included two discs, one "with changes" and one "without". These changes were made in both.

Western Animation

• The first two examples under "film" are mentioned in the South Park episode "Free Hat", which featured a hypothetical recut of Raiders Of The Lost Ark with the same changes.

Video Games

• Team Fortress 2 is absolutely nuts with this. Since the game launched, they have more than doubled both the game types and the number of maps, as well as adding entire meta-game subsystems and Cosmetic Awards. They've also added several additional animations, dialogue lines, and response events. They've also added/changed the behavior and functionality of several weapons (to the point of retooling a few classes attributes altogether to compensate). They even used supplemental material to patch in the Backstory.

Real Life

• Josef Stalin was known for removing people executed by the party from stock images.

I could have sworn we had this one. Using someone else's Signature Style.

Examples:

• This image which has much of the appearance of Mike Mignola's work.

Due to a wish to stay off the grid, criminals are more likely to use a facility not expecting to deal with human patients as their Back Alley Doctor. Sometimes overlaps with Closest Thing We Got.

Examples:

• John Connor gets his meds from a vet in Terminator 3.
• The season 4 episode of Lost "The Economist" has Ben treat Sayid at a vet.
• The season 8 South Park episode "Good Times With Weapons" has the boys take Butters to a vet so as not to get in trouble for getting a ninja star stuck in his eye.

Possible shorter titles:

• Vet Con
• Hospital Aversion

How Did We Miss This One?

Simply put, the way to keep your Villain Protagonist clearly on the good side of the Moral Event Horizon is to show that one of the key features of his plan to steal millions and millions of dollars (or whatever) is that Nobody Gets Hurt.

This is one of the most likely things to go wrong.

Examples:

• As Idiot Comics points out, this is Every Movie Ever.
• Part of would be a spoiler if I could remember's plan in Suicide Kings. It Got Worse.

Characters with only a surname that describes them.

Sister Trope of Something Person.

If the word for their surname doesn't have any obvious relation to the character in question, it's (YKTTW Plug) Mister Arbitrary. If it's not a character but an offhand description of a prop, look toward I Call It Vera (or the demonstrative I Call Him Mister Happy). If their name reflects their color, it's Colorful Theme Naming.

Examples:

• From South Park, Mr. Garrison's puppet Mr. Hat, followed by his replacements, Mr. Stick and Mr. Slave.
• Mr. Men◊
• Mr. Show with Bob and David
• The Riddler of Batman frequently also goes by the pseudonym Mr. E.
• The characters in Clue are named after the color of their pieces: Mr. Green, Mrs. White, Ms. Scarlet, Mrs. Peacock, Colonel Mustard, and Professor Plum.
• Mr. Furious in Mystery Men.
• Mr. Glass from Unbreakable.
• The song "Mister Cellophane" from Chicago.
• Mr. Pump in the Discworld novel Going Postal. Of course, he's a Golem who was employed pumping water at the bottom of a well for a few hundred years, so it's an apt description (his 'name' was previously Pump 19)
• In Soul Eater it takes Maka some time to coax Chrona out of "Mr. Corner" (or Smith Corner, according to some Fansubs).

Characters with arbitrary words as their Only One Name. If the word is a Meaningful Name, it's (YKTTW Plug) Mister Descriptor.

Examples:

• Mr Bean.
• Half of the characters in The Amazing Screw On Head fit this formula, and the other half seems to: the titular Mr. Head, his former manservant Mr. Manifold turned archnemesis Emperor Mr. Zombie, and his new manservant Mr. Groin.
• The Strangers in Dark City, such as Mr. Hand, Mr. Book, and Mr. Sleep.
• The robbers in Reservoir Dogs, who are all named after colors: Mr. White, Mr. Orange, Mr. Blue, Mr. Blonde, Mr. Brown, and Mr. Pink.
  "Why do I gotta be Mr. Pink?"
  "BECAUSE YOU'RE A FAGGOT!"
• Likewise, in the film adaptation of Clue, the main characters are given the codenames Mr. Green, Mrs. White, Ms. Scarlet, Mrs. Peacock, Colonel Mustard, and Professor Plum. In the board game, this was Mister Descriptor, as it described their piece colors.
• Used by a lot of musicians. Mister Joker, Mr. Mister, Mr. Kite, Mister Monster, Mr. Leen, Mr. Bones, Mr. Gang, Mr. E...

A recurring shot in the works of a film director. Halfway between Signature Style and (YKTTW Plug) Creator Trademark. The literary/unintentional equivalent of this is an Author Catchphrase, and the actor equivalent of this is just a normal Catch Phrase ("I'll be back").

May be the result of conscious or subconscious Author Appeal.

Does not include overarching Signature Style elements of a body of work, or explicit Iconic Logo trademarks, such as Alfred Hitchcock's silhouette or Walt Disney's signature.

Many of these can be found in trivia sections on IMDB.

Examples:

• James Cameron: Shots that start at the feet.
• Quentin Tarantino: Trunk shots.
  • He's also partial to feet as well.
• John Woo: Disturbed Doves.
• Tim Burton: Tunnel Vision.
• Robert Zemeckis: Things flitting around (like the feather in the beginning of Forrest Gump).
• Sam Raimi: Whip Pan (along with Raimi Vision).

Trope Namers:

• Stanley Kubrick: the Kubrick Stare.
• Sam Raimi: Raimi Vision.

When I Am Not Shazam is only half the battle, due to the first or last name appearing in the title along side a word which is not the other part of the name, possibly as part of an Epunymous Title.

Related to The Danza, which is when people might be confused about part of a character's name because the other part is shared with the actor.

Examples:

• Chrono Trigger
• Doctor Who

In prison, you lose nearly all of your personal freedoms, from the way you dress to the cell you keep. Not the case in TV Land: Apparently, it's crucial to your reform that you keep your supervillain identity during your stint in the slammer, so you're allowed to accentuate your Institutional Apparel with whatever elements from your costume you can manage without affecting the overall effect.

Outside of the joint, this is a Non Uniform Uniform. Going too far with this, you'll eventally see these villains living in a Luxury Prison Suite.

---

Examples:

• Many of the prisoners Batman and Green Arrow round up in the beginning of the Batman The Brave And The Bold episode "Day of the Dark Knight!" compliment their Institutional Apparel with their supervillain masks.
• Averted as part of Watchmen's deconstruction: After his arrest, Rorschach screams "GIVE ME BACK MY FACE!"
• After The Monarch gets arrested (season 1 spoiler image), he and several other villains are seen in prison with their supervillain Cranial Accessories.

Rolling Updates.

Somewhere between Mythology Gag, Development Gag, Continuity Nod and Production Throwback. This is when a work references stylistic changes since prior works in the same series.

YKTTW Plug: When this is used to refer to events that happened at the time of the referenced style, it's Retfauxactive Continuity.

Examples:

• At one point in the original Paper Mario, there's a pot Mario can jump into. If he does, he comes back out as his sprite from Donkey Kong.
  • Mario's blue-clothes-red-overalls Palette Swap in the Super Smash Bros. games is the color scheme he used in his first Video Game appearance as the protagonist in Donkey Kong.

An umbrella trope for several untroped Schmuck Bait tricks to make people glance down:

Your Shoelace Is Untied

• Used by Biff on George McFly in Back To The Future.
• Used in Black Lagoon to land a vicious punch and start an epic catfight.

You've Got Something On Your Shirt

• On Third Rock From The Sun Mary taught Dick this one. She flicked his nose when she did it to him, he gave her a right cross when he did it to her.

Your Fly Is Down

• Subverted in Return of The Pink Panther

My Fly Is Down

• The black guy in Clarence Boddicker's gang in the beginning of Robocop gets Murphy's partner with this.

The Mac Guffin's Right There

• The Spy Who Loved Me

My Weapon's Right There (not to be confused with My Fly Is Down)

Peer Pressure

• In the Cowboy Bebop movie, Spike tricks a guy into looking down just by staring at the ground without saying anything.
• Just looking at the ground was used by Indy in Raiders Of The Lost Ark against the bald Nazi.

Reverse Psychology

• Power Rangers: Monster Of The Week Peckster tells the Rangers NOT to look down. So they do...and are ambushed by Putties.

If you're lucky, all they'll do is flick your nose with their finger. If you're less lucky, they'll get you at The Circle Game and punch you in the arm. If you're really unlucky, they'll give you a Tap On The Head, and if you're really, really unlucky, they'll use this opportunity to kill you.

Alternate titles:

• Another Excuse To Look At Shoes

A script written by one of the cast members.

The writing version of Directed By Cast Member. If this happens often enough, it may lead to (YKTTW Plug) Actor On Executive Board.

Examples

• David Duchovney wrote many of the episodes of The X Files that dealt with the myth arc and his character.

Trope Namer is The Play Wot I Wrote, which you can read all about on Wikipedia.

Accidentally kidnapping someone. This might be What Did I Do Last Night or Mistaken Identity, or Crime After Crime (possibly started by the first two).

Examples:

• Happens in various fashions at multiple points in Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia:
  • The straightest example of this trope would be, after a critic writes a bad review of Paddy's, Charlie and Mac get drunk (or just Charlie being stupid, can't recall) and kidnap him, leaving the rest of the episode has an exercise on how to release him without legal repercussions.
  • In "The Gang Gets Extreme: Home Makeover Edition", the gang kidnaps a family in a misguided attempt to remodel their house. After destroying their house instead, they have to give Dee's newly-acquired house to the family in compensation.
  • In "The Gang Exploits The Mortgage Crisis", Frank forces the kids of the family resident in the house he just bought to do work in the basement when their parents are at work. Same ending as the last one.
• Happens with a traffic cop in Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels.

In certain videogames, units long range weapons have an additional disadvantage in the Tactical Rock Paper Scissors scenario - not only are are they weak to direct assault but they can't even retaliate against hack and slashers. Their weapons have a minimum range and can't be fire at enemies who are right next to the unit.

When the only person who gets to speak with realistic diction is the brilliant but quirky scientist. Maybe you want to show that the character in question thinks faster than their mouth.

Examples:

• Daniel Faraday on Lost.
• Films where Jeff Goldblum doesn't do this:
  • The Life Aquatic

Alternate titles:

• Genius Jabber
• Gibbering Genius (current favorite due to Added Alliterative Appeal)

Do We Have This One? A character takes out their frustrations at being rejected by another by finding anybody else and jumping them.

Examples:

• Oz stops Willow from doing this with him in Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
• Kate does this to Sawyer after seeing Jack eating with Juliette on Lost.
• In Austin Powers The Spy Who Shagged Me, after being spurned by Austin, Felicity Shagwell goes off to stick something in Fat Bastard's ass.

Up For Grabs.

Works based entirely around featuring forgotten and abandoned sections of the canon and going beyond A Day In The Limelight but making an entire Ensemble Cast of Ascended Extra / Ensemble Darkhorse characters.

Examples:

• Batman The Brave And The Bold: which, among other services to the DC Rogues Gallery, made a Memetic Badass out of AQUAMAN.
• Epic Mickey
• The (sadly Japan-only) Wii game Captain Rainbow, in which the player controls a superhero who has to fulfil the wishes of a bunch of Z-List Nintendo characters, including Birdo, Little Mac, a platoon of Advance Wars soldiers and Lip from Panel de pon.

Rolling Updates

How can you show your group to have a cohesive and united front? Show them whistling the Colonel Bogey March. This is originally Lost In Imitation from The Bridge On The River Kwai, where it was used as a Getting Crap Past The Radar for the Bawdy Song.

• Done by the Dink Dinks in Spaceballs.
• Desmond, Jin, Charlie, and Hurley do this in the Lost episode "Catch-22".
• The Breakfast Club.

Rolling Updates.

Formerly Continuity Orgasm. People complained.

A single shot, scene, line or panel full of Continuity Nods. Super Trophy Super Rack's Super Trope.

When a work is made primarily of these, it's known as Continuity Porn.

Examples:

• The Robot Devil's wheel with the name of every robot ever seen on the show in the Futurama episode "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings".
• I can't remember which, but one episode of The Simpsons has a scene at a funeral open with a panning shot of the Springfield Cemetery with the gravestones of several characters who died in previous episodes (including Beatrice Simmons, whose name is followed with "(GRANDPA'S GIRLFRIEND)").
• Every episode of Police Squad ended with Frank listing all the other arrestees that that episode's culprit would be joining in prison, although this never got to very high levels as the show only had six episodes.

Should We Have This One? Similar to Written In Absence or Absentee Actor, except the character is actually present in an episode, just not much.

Exactly What It Says On The Tin. Giant rows of piano keys that you can walk on.

Examples:

• One of the most memorable scenes from Big.
• Half of the suggestions to Giant Piano Puzzle YKTTW (please repost the relevant ones here).
• A recent Real Life example was implemented as a way to encourage people to use the stairs: http://mashable.com/2009/10/11/the-fun-theory/

Walking in on a couple having sex, startling them into stopping it almost immedately.

If it's your parents/you're a kid, it's the Primal Scene.

The aversion of this (where the couple doesn't get startled and stop) is Coitus Uninterruptus (which this name currently acts as a redirect to).

Examples:

• In Firefly, this is how Mal first met Kaylee.
• One episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer required this to happen to the Titular Protagonist to stop a house full of sexually-repressed poltergeists.

Parting words, right after drugging someone, right before they hit the ground. May take the form of a Preemptive Apology. Similar to a cross between the Bond One Liner and (YKTTW Plug) Pre Mortem Warn Liner. The last words from the guy they drugged are (YKTTW Plug) Parting From Consciousness Words.

Trope name comes from Tony Basil's "Mickey".

• The Venture Brothers:
  "You'd be surprised at the amount of chemicals the average cigarette contains."
• Mystery Men: Right after Captain Amazing asks what he just picked up is if not evidence, it shoots out a cloud of pink smoke:
  Casanova Frankenstein: "It's a chloroform-deploying portable enticement snare."
  Captain Amazing: "... - Ah, dang!"
• Dexter: Debra's new fiancee explains how ashamed he was at accidentally leaving one piece of evidence as the Ice Truck Killer.
• Subverted on Lost. Juliet was handed what was told to her to be a glass full of tranquilizers.
  Ethan: "You... probably shouldn't have drank that so fast..."

Right before dying/going unconscious, seeing The Reveal.

Examples:

• In Unbreakable, right after Samuel L Jackson (as the fragile "Mr. Glass") falls down a flight of stairs, he sees the gun that David intuited was on a suspicious man.

Last Words, but before Instant Sedation rather than dying.

If they don't have any meaning, it's Non Sequitur Thud.

YKTTW Plug: Why Can't You Say Good Night, the last words from the person doing the drugging.

Examples:

• Dave in College Roomies From Hell: "I will use the last of my consciousness to state that this is not cola, this is in fact plain and simple paint thinner."
• Mystery Men: Right after Captain Amazing asks what he just picked up is if not evidence, it shoots out a cloud of pink smoke:
  Casanova Frankenstein: "It's a chloroform-deploying portable enticement snare."
  Captain Amazing: "... - Ah, dang!"

A Pre Mortem One Liner spoken to an unsuspecting victim that contains a hint at what's about to come. May take the form of a Preemptive Apology or Your Trope Is Broken. When not the former, this is usually a very quick (so as not to be foiled) Evil Gloating, Just Between You And Me, or Reason You Suck Speech.

Examples:

• Lost: Ben Linus explains to John Locke over a pit of bodies that "he was smart enough to stay out of that ditch, which I guess makes me smarter than you." Then he shoots Locke into it.
  • Never mind that it isn't properly fatal.

Using Stock Footage (or the medium's local analogue) for a flashback from a time when it used a drastically different/cruder style/technology.

If you remake the scene for the new technology/style, it's a Flashback With The Other Darrin. When this trope is invoked with what is actually new footage, it's (YKTTW Plug) Retfauxactive Continuity.

Examples:

• Metal Gear Solid 4 didn't update the models used for flashbacks to cutscenes to the older Metal Gear Solid games. Even the original Play Station 1 game from a decade prior, where the characters were <100 polygons.

Needs More Examples.

Is This Tropeable? When a normal comedic work takes time out for Mood Whiplash on Christmas.

Examples:

• The first several missions in Elite Beat Agents are all happy, upbeat affairs like a babysitter getting help from her football-star boyfriend for looking after her charges, by using I Know Madden Kombat football techniques to placate and delight the children. Then, there's You're The Inspiration, in which a little girl's daddy dies in a car accident while on a business trip right before Christmas. It ends with his ghost coming back to give her the present he was driving back home to deliver.
  • The comedy is preserved, however, with 2 of the 3 "bad performance" versions of each scene. Instead of stumbling upon an old family image of the three of them together, the mother and daughter stumble upon an image of the father in a thong, and instead of the wind blowing out the candles on a birthday cake made in his memory, it blows it across the table and into the mother's face. (The third just has the daughter awakening in the middle of the night haunted by dreams of her father and bursting into sobs. Yeah.) If you get all 3 bad scenes, instead of delivering a boy teddy bear for the daughter's girl teddy bear, the ghost of her father gives her a cold metal robot bear.
• The Christmas episode of Batman The Brave And The Bold takes a couple brief interludes from Red Tornado's robot quest to find the meaning of Christmas to show why Batman doesn't like the holiday: it's the anniversary of when his spoiled childish ingratitude led to both of his parents getting gunned down before his eyes.
• For some reason, all comedic Christmas Carol episodes drop the comedy once the Ghost of Christmas Future shows up.
  • Even Wonderella did it. Despite not changing the name on the grave.

Rolling Updates

Daryl MacPherson: I still don't like changing diapers, but ever since Hammie came along my reflexes have really improved.

--Baby Blues

Any time Hilarity Ensues because someone without experience is taking care of a baby, you can expect the writers to bring out the horrible and dreaded act of the diaper change for quick and easy Toilet Humour. This is frequently taken one step further when the child in question is a boy, since the infant will frequently "open fire" on his caretaker mid-change.

A Truth In Television trope, as anyone with any significant experience in caring for babies will confirm. Hardly exclusive to boys in real life, but in fiction it's only ever really brought up with them since they're the only ones for whom it's a potential projectile.

See Urine Trouble, which covers a broader range of such incidents.

---

Anime & Manga

• An episode of Sailor Moon during the "Eiru & An" arc featured Darien caring for a baby. An got this whens she tried changing the baby's diaper.
• Yui of the ecchi series Koharu Biyori has this happen to her while babysitting. Worse, the accident causes a short in the Robot Girl's system that deletes all the baby care information she had downloaded specifically for the task.

Live Action TV

• In an episode of The Nanny, Fran is changing a baby boy's diaper when Max warns her to stand over to the side rather than in front in case of this trope, commenting that his own son was able to hit the wall clock.
• Spoofed in Dinosaurs. It appears that Baby Sinclair is doing this to Earl, but he's actually shooting him with a water pistol.

Newspaper Comics

• A strip of Baby Blues featured dad Daryl dodging, weaving, and ducking the first three panels, before finally saying the page quote to his wife Wanda as he holds his son.

There's a type of time loop that appears in fiction that appears to be a Stable Time Loop, but unlike that kind of loop, creates a Temporal Paradox by having no definite beginning or end. This is called a Recursive Time Loop. In contrast to a Groundhog Day Loop, a recursive loop is explicitly Time Travel, not simply a Snap Back, and there is no escape clause - once you're stuck in it, you're there forever.

Let's take Alice ('A') in the page image as an example.

1. Alice lives her life, moving forward normally in time.
2. An event occurs that sends Alice back in time, but instead of creating a duplicate of her, Alice becomes her past self, losing all memory of her "future".
3. Alice then repeats the sequence of events leading her to be sent back, ad infinitum.

The result is a paradox. At no point in the loop are there ever two Alices. Either the entity that is "future" Alice disappears, or the entity that is "past" Alice disappears. Whichever is the case, nothing comes out the other end. For all intents and purposes, Alice is gone from reality once she enters the loop.

The other version is an object that gets looped back on itself. Consider a common pair of glasses that Bob buys. Later, Bob goes back in time and sells the glasses. Those glasses then become the same ones that Bob bought in the future. Now ask yourself: where did the glasses come from? How old are they? There's no discrete point in time when they were created or destroyed -- thus, a paradox.

This type of time loop, when seen in science fiction, is often a sign that the work is on the softer side, or that the author Did Not Do The Research about Time Travel. Alternatively, it can simply be given a Hand Wave as A Wizard Did It, if the work is not intended to be taken seriously. Either way, it's a guaranteed Mind Screw for anyone who thinks about it too long.

Note that a Groundhog Day Loop can be a type of Recursive Time Loop, but the participant(s) retain some memory of previous iterations, sufficient to eventually alter the outcome.

YKTTW Note: This trope is intended to split off examples from Stable Time Loop. Please examine examples from that trope to see whether they might fit better here.

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Examples:

Film

• In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, McCoy presents Kirk with a pair of antique glasses as a birthday present in the 24th century. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Kirk sells the glasses in the 20th century to an antiques dealer...

Literature

• Used in the Discworld novel Pyramids, where a major character, Dios, through a method of semi-immortality, has been trapped in an 8000 year loop for an unknown number of go-rounds.
• Robert A Heinlein's short story By His Bootstraps illustrates elements of both a Stable Time Loop and a Recursive Time Loop. The character who participates in the loop observes a straightforward progression from his point of view. However, in doing so he steals a notebook from his future self containing a full dictionary of a foreign language. During the loop, he finds that the book is wearing out so he copies it to a new one (thus solving the entropy paradox). What is the paradox? The information contained in the notebook -- where did it come from?

Live Action TV

• In the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Cause and Effect", the Enterprise becomes bound into a time loop with a ship it collided with. For the Enterprise they retain just enough of a sense of DejaVu to eventually break the loop, but the crew of the other vessel apparently lacks even that.

Webcomics

• In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, this is the ultimate fate of the villainous unicorn-turned-motorcycle Sparklelord, sent back in time to the moment when he first entered the protagonist's world with no memories of what happened, thus being forced to live out the same sequence of events for eternity.

Is This Tropable? One of the basic safety rules we learn as children is "never run with scissors." Thus, references to this rule and instances of characters running with scissors show up in the media all the time.

Examples:

• One Weird Al album was titled "Running With Scissors," and showed this as an Olympic event on the cover art.
• In Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, while fleeing from a giant runaway fishbowl, Brent, carrying ceremonial scissors, comments "I really shouldn't be running with these!"
• The title of one of Augusten Burroughs' memoirs is Running With Scissors.

Quite widespread trope in video games, especially in platformers. Whenever a player approaches a stalactite or icicle (sometimes a chandelier), they fall down. I wonder do we have a trope for this already?

In a Class And Level System, as characters gain levels, they become more powerful. Some games have enemies (usually of the undead variety) which have the ability to take these levels away from a character, which has the effect of weakening the character, usually described as an attack that drains the character's Life Energy.

If there is no way to easily gain these levels back, enemies that can do this often take on the status of Demonic Spiders, especially if they appear in groups and can drain more than one level per shot. Characters who lose all their levels this way typically die, and often come back as the creature that killed them, or a subordinate creature under the control of their killer, particularly if the creature was undead.

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Examples:

• Dungeons And Dragons, as you might expect, is the Trope Maker and Trope Namer. Under most circumstances, the only way to defend against level drain was by making a saving throw against it, or by using magic items that acted to negate the drain.
  • In the older games (and the retroclones based on them), if you lost a level to level drain, it was gone for good, and the only way to gain it back was the hard way, since restoration magic was out of the reach of spell casters until the highest levels.
  • Third Edition introduced the concept of negative levels, which was basically temporary level loss that you then had to make a Fortitude save against at the end of the fight for every level that you "lost" this way. If you made it, you got the level back, but if you failed the save, it was gone for good and you had to gain it back the hard way.
  • Fourth Edition did away with level drain entirely, instead having monsters that originally level-drained you (such as wights and wraiths) instead inflicting the Weakened condition on you (which simply halves the damage that you deal in combat until you make your saving throw to end it), immobilizing you (you can't move from your space unless you teleport until you make your save), taking away healing surges, and so on.
• Many Roguelikes, such as Net Hack, have this as just one of the many dangers that your character can face. Yes, they're Nintendo Hard.
• A certain monster in Disciples II (Wight?) did this and also brought the target down one Evolution Level.
• Runescape has many monsters, especially quest monsters, who do the temporary sort of draining, and there's even 'disease' from special undead, which hits a random stat for 10 to 1 levels, and there are potions to restore levels and cure disease, as well as jewelery that takes the disease for you.
• Final Fantasy V had several enemies and powers that cause level drain, though thankfully it's all temporary.
• Final Fantasy Tactics has a "level down" trap that you can use to abuse the leveling system for ungodly powerful stats (though most players generally don't bother).
• This is Xykon's favorite form of attack in Order Of The Stick. He's used it on multiple occasions to take down other epic spellcasters.

I tried this once before, but it fell through.

Rolling Updates now in effect.

You get the Obstructive Bureaucrat, who is just being a bit of a jobsworth and stopping something crucial from happening. And then you get the Beleaguered Bureaucrat.

The Beleaguered Bureaucrat (God I'm going to get sick of spelling that soon.) would love to help you with your problems... if they weren't dealing with a dozen other equally important (in the bureaucrats eyes) matters at the same time, usually while being shouted at for not being able to do five things at once. Basically, this is a character who is swamped with too much work whose performance (and stress level) is clearly suffering for it. If its a main character, expect their stress at this to become a Running Gag. Can become a problem for heroes if they need something done by this character quickly.

Signs that you are dealing with this character are:

• When told "This is serious!" they will snap "Yes, and so are the other dozen things I'm expected to do today."

• They will typically be buried, sometimes literally, under waves of red tape and paper work. Expect every comic bureaucrat related trope to be in full force. If on the phone, they will either be talking very quickly or getting yelled at. Bonus points in animation if they are trying to answer two phones at once.

• They will constantly look frazzled and will usually be short tempered even after work. This is often played quite seriously.

This trope is quite closely related to Hanlons Razor. Don't always assume that people in office work or government aren't managing things properly because they're corrupt or malicious. They may simply have way too much work on their hands, and not have the skills or resources to deal with them.

Yay! We now have examples!

Examples

Real Life

• Many, many heads of state run into this problem. One indicator of a strong leader is how good an administrator they are.
• Busy libraries can give this impression. If you see a long snake-like queue, its probably best not to bother the staff about that book you want to locate. They're probably praying for their next tea break.

Tabletop Games

• In Gurps Traveller Intersteller Wars we are told that the Vilani Imperium was deliberately organized to make the Emperor this. The idea was that there would be less volatility if everything was slowed down.

Television

• Just one of Jim Hacker's many problems in Yes Minister. His woes regarding this trope continue in the sequel, Yes Prime Minister.
• In Star Trek, Starfleet Command sometimes give the impression of being between this and Obstructive Bureaucrat

Video Games

• In the Broken Steel DLC for Fallout 3, the guy that the Brotherhood of Steel puts in charge of administrating Project Purity and the water distribution campaign can be accurately described as this. He's got reports coming in at all hours, and his office is pretty much stacked with files and forms from wall to wall. If you talk to him, he's kinda snippy towards you and blames you for his current workload; you know, cause you're responsible for the damn purifier being completed and turned on in the first place.

The Crowning Moment Tropes, What It Says On The Tin

CM of Awesome Cm of Funny CM of Heart Warming Cm of Heart Breaking CM of Badass CM of Creepy

This would be a special form of Periphery Demographic, and similar to Germans Love David Hasselhoff.

Essentially, this is a trope where classic works continue to spawn a significant fandom amongst the younger generation.

Classic children's literature and Western Animation series would provide a specifically interesting case where, essentially, the whole current fanbase would be a Periphery Demographic - since there would be the usual Animation Age Ghetto, along with this trope.

Generally, it's works that are not Deader Than Disco that are likely to spawn this trope.

What better way to introduce the protagonist of the story than start at his/her birth?

Examples:

• Bambi in Bambi
• Littlefoot in The Land Before Time

Do We Have This?

Some authors plan meticulously. Before they even start to write, they have a detailed plot synopsis, character biographies, pages on setting, and a detailed backstory to the main tale... at the least.

Others just sit down at their word processor and type whatever comes into their head. This trope is dedicated to them.

This is not necessarily a trope about authors who simply write without a speck of planning at all (although it can be), but rather those who, overall, are improvising as they write. They may already have invented their characters, perhaps they have a vague plot bubbling in their head, even a few notes on backstory or setting. What separates this kind of writing from planned writing is that these writers are prepared to throw those notes in the trash the moment they come up with an idea that they prefer. Writing a hardboiled crime fiction novel? Remember that takeaway place you thought up on the spot to give your sleuth somewhere to eat his lunch? That would be perfect as a front for the Big Bad's drug-dealing business. Making a movie? That actor's take on that character is way better than what you originally had in mind. Why not rewrite half his part to take advantage of that vision?

Like most things, this can be done well, or badly. The Chris Carter Effect is what happens when Writing By The Seat Of Your Pants leaves too many loose plot threads.

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Examples:

• The Battlestar Galactica revival. A lot of things were admitted to not be planned to not shoehorn the work.
• This is how Douglas Adams wrote the original radio scripts for The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. Apparently, he'd often still be rewriting the ends of episodes as the cast were recording the beginning. In this case, of course, it worked.
• According to the DVD Bonus Content, Freakazoid was written with very little planning because of time constraints.
• Casablanca was being written as it was filmed.
• Yellow Submarine began production without an ending. Which is why it doesn't have one.
• Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 at a pay typewriter in 9 days.
  • To be fair, it was based on his previous short story The Fireman.
• Ren And Stimpy episodes never had real scripts. The creators went straight to storyboards and improvised each next image.
• Garth Nix says this is how he writes - all his worldbuilding is made up on the spot.
• Stephen King falls into this category-- he never plans ahead, he just writes until he has a good idea and runs with it. TV Show, especially soaps, fall prey to this as well. It's essentially the nature of doing a work "live."
• The original writers of Impulse admitted they were writing by the seat of their pants in the first trade.

Rolling Updates, Needs A Better Title?

Note: This is the mutated/evolved descendant of a trope originally proposed by Zero0.

Dying is a part of the circle of life. And because of this, death should be embraced.

Okay, let's face it. We all know dying sucks. Many writers know this and save you the aesop. Thus, their stories may embrace the idea of immortality. It's not necessarily wrong, because none of us will ever get the opporitunity, anyway.

Examples: - Atlantis: The Lost Empire features Atlanteans that live inhumanely long through the use of a blue crystal attached to their necklaces. Everyone on the crew gets one. - Twilight dabbles on it, but in the end, it's supported when Bella becomes a vampire.

Seen It A Million Times, Needs More Examples. Up For Grabs.

Self-explanatory. In the future, the time system (ESPECIALLY in America, so to best illustrate the fact that it's, you know, THE FUTURE, since the present runs on the base-12 clock) will run on the 2400 hours style clock.

One example: The future (2032 AD) in Demolition Man runs on Military Time.

Unlockable biographies for all of a game's Faceless Mooks, featuring things like their age, Home Town, Blood Type, their philosophy on life, how they actually come from the future and intend to kill their parents, and so forth.

Examples:

• The almanac in Plants Vs Zombies has this for both the plants and the zombies.
• Exit
• Space Channel 5

Voluntary Shapeshifting is a really powerful and useful ability for a character to have. But occasionally they run into a problem of logistics(besides this one); how do they get the information to change shape? Sometimes it is just enough to look or touch whatever the character wants to change into.

Other times, nastier things have to be done. For whatever reason a face stealer often has to physically harm, usually fatally, their target in order to take their form. While sometimes almost any body part will do, bonus points for actually skinning of the other character's face. As you can expect, this sub-trope of voluntary shapeshifting is nearly exclusive to villains. This does have the added benefit of making it easier to pretend to be somebody else when they are no longer running around.

See Kill And Replace, which is what this trope often leads to.

Examples(Rolling Updates in effect):

• The Trope Namer here is Koh, The Face Stealer in Avatar The Last Airbender. He would kill people by taking their faces, whilst keeping the appearances around to use as masks.
• The Chameleon from Spider-man comics. Usually he uses a special gas to make a mask out of his target's sking, but some continuities have him actually eat the target.
• Alex Mercer from Prototype eats people and uses this so often he starts body surfing.
• Chriopterans in Blood Plus can take on the form of anybody whose blood they have drunk. Used for extra squick points when Diva walked around as Riku, the protagonists little brother who she had previously raped and killed
• There also was a monster from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers with this name. Needless to say, the scene in which some of the Rangers had their faces stolen is Nightmare Fuel.
• In Inu Yasha, one of Naraku's henchmen was a faceless man who wore the faces of people he'd killed.
• The Agents in The Matrix have absorb people's data in order to mimic their forms.
• Accidental usage. Their was a character in Heroes who had the ability to mimic people with just a small physical sample for their DNA. Then Sylar met him, stole his ability and became a Face Stealer in his own right.
• The gingerbread... thing in the Brothers Grimm movie only got a face after she stole that of a girl, leaving her with a blank face.
• The Chitauri in Marvel's The Ultimates needed to consume a human to take their shape.
• Pavi Largo in Repo The Genetic Opera, a vain playboy whose own face was scarred horribly by some unseen accident, and who now wears the skinned-off flesh of women's faces bolted over his mutilated flesh like masks. (It's implied that he takes them from women he rapes- and that he possibly even stole them as trophies anyway even before he was disfigured. After all, we see a picture of him with a normal face cutting away a dead woman's skin in an alley...)
• This is Batman villain Jane Doe's entire M.O.
• An obscure Iron Man villain was a Japanese demon called the Face Thief, who was exactly that.
• Another comic-book example: the Warwolves, creatures from Marvel's Excalibur series, could drain a living target's life force and then assume its form by wearing the empty skin that remained.
• Marvel Universe Dire Wraiths
• Invasion Of The Body Snatchers
• The Thing
• The Bug in Men In Black
• The Zandozan assassin in The Last Starfighter
• The Ganabe in Chill
• In Thief III this is how Gamall, the main antagonist infiltrates the Keepers. This involves skinning people, so it's a very literal example.
• Further literalism: Orlando, a minor demon from The Invisibles series skinned his victims' faces off and, pretending to be them, went on to kill their relatives.

In real life, you want the high ground. From the top of a hill you have a better view of your oponent. If you have a gun you can pick of enemies easier. And if you don't have a gun similar weapon, at least running down hill takes less energy.

In fighter games, especially side scrolling ones, this tends not to be the case. Characters are typically given attacks that can strike up, but not down. It's dificult to program the groun to be at the right angle for an attack to work like it would in real life. However, this often doesn't apply in the opposite dirrection. If you strike up while an enemy is on a platform above you it probably will hit. In such a game, the practical thing to do is get in the lowest spot and wait for an enemy to get down to your level or just above you. If not they can get below you and attack you while you have no chances of striking back.

Do We Have This One?

Seen this a Million times. The Hero has the Villain cornered and call him out on how his actions are evil, etc. But the villain doesn't care if their actions are evil or not, because at least they're aren't a hypocrite when it comes to their beliefs and/or philosophy. May be related to Villains Never Lie. Up for Grabs.

An aesop that was pretty common in the 90s when homosexuals started becoming more and more prominent in the media. Basically, a character will be introduced that is soon revealed to be a homosexual (or if they were gutsy enough, a previously known character would be outed). Then the rest of the episode would be spent on one of the main characters being bigoted and discriminating against him or fearing that he'll turn him gay or something.

Obviously by the end, the main character learns his lesson that "homosexuals are people, too" and should be treated equally just like everyone else.

Pretty much a Discredited Trope now as gays are now so prevalent that it's no longer a big deal. They can even be major characters now.

The only example I can think of is that one Simpsons episode where Homer befriended a guy and found out he was gay, then spent the rest of the episode fearing Bart was gay. My memory of this episode is very fuzzy, though, so a Simpsons buff will have to correct me if I'm wrong.

Related to Order Versus Chaos, but with a political spin, this is a particular antagonism between villain and hero types. The villain is typically Affably Evil and has a Utopia Justifies The Means / Necessarily Evil type of plan. On the other hand, the hero is an individualist and often a jerk. This relationship gets into the idea of whether greater good should be favored over the individual. With some of these characters, there's a Strawman Political aspect, as people are likely to favor the villain or hero according to their political views (yes, I know you should favor the hero regardless, but this is like favoring the hero especially for philosophical reasons)

Examples:

• Gun X Sword has the Claw and his minions as antagonists, and all are the nicest people you could imagine, and they have an Assimilation Plot in mind. They are opposed by the heroes, who include Vann and Roy both of whom can be real jerkasses.
• Watchmen has affable villain Ozymandius who wants to bring world peace through killing millions and socially inept (and crazy) hero, Rorschach.
• While kind of implied in the Firefly series, Serenity has an arguably well-intentioned Alliance opposed by Jerk With A Heart Of Gold hero, Mal.
• Some interpretations of The Incredibles see this as an example. Because the villain, Syndrome makes a comment about wanting to make everyone super because "if everyone is super, no one is", the result is some viewers praising the film as an Objectivist parable, and others liking Syndrome out of a belief that he is a hero fighting about smug supers.

There's definitely been a few of these, but I'm having trouble thinking of specific examples.

Basically, a team of characters who seem to be thrown together just for the hell of it. In The Verse, they're usually leftover characters who can't carry a title on their own and don't fit in anywhere else at the moment. Mostly seen in comics.

Examples:

• The original Champions, a Marvel team consisting of Hercules, Black Widow, Ghost Rider, Angel and Iceman. Literally thrown together over lunch because Marvel needed three new titles by the close of the day and nobody was using them.
• Next Wave seemed to have been built from whatever characters Warren Ellis wanted to make jokes about (and could get his hands on). One of them was an "original" character who may or may not have been dozens of obscure heroes.
• The Defenders (Marvel again? wow) started out as one of these with Hulk, Namor, the Silver Surfer and Doctor Strange. Over time, though, they've developed an interesting dynamic together even though they're rarely used.

Do We Have This? Should We Have This? Needs A Better Title.

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Possible Laconic Wiki Article: Endless fountain of Memetic Mutation.

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You know this guy. We all do. Ohhh yes. Even though you haven't even watched the show, even if you have no idea which video game he's from, you know this guy and have every one of their lines memorized. Their every word has a place in lulzy eternity.

This person, nay, this god(ess) of popular culture, can come in many forms, but they all are the same thing. They are the Walking Meme.

Be it due to Narm Charm, Large Ham-ness, or simply due to their own glorious Badassery, every sacred line this being spouts is an instant Memetic Mutation, to be repeated by the Internet-savvy throughout the ages.

For more information regarding these characters' holy exploits, see Memetic Badass, Memetic Sex God, and similar pages. See also Youtube Poop for practical applications of their blessed dictions.

When in doubt about examples, keep in mind the Rule Of Three. There's no specific cutoff point for awesomeness, but three Memetic Mutations is generally a good baseline. One probably won't cut it. It is also recommended, though not required, that you give us a sample of the character's works, so we too may revel in their awesomeness.

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Show me yo' examples:

• Captain Falcon says "YESZ!" to being shown some moves.
• Luigi's lines in the Mario cartoons are hilariously over-the-top, particularly in the "Mama Luigi" episode. "That's Mama Luigi to you, Mario!" *wheeze*
• The CD-i Zelda games are basically Walking Meme: The Game. The cutscene animation is so nightmarishly bad and the lines are so narmful that the cutscenes are basically 20 minutes of prime meme bait scattered throughout both games.
• Mario in the CD-i Hotel Mario game is well known for, among other things, proudly proclaiming that All toastas toast toast and looking about 300 pounds overweight, leading to the nickname "Fat Mario".
• Peppy Hare would like you to do a barrel roll. Additionally, Falco would like to inform Einsteinyou that he's on your side.
• Dr Ivo Robotnik in the Sonic The Hedgehog cartoon is this. He really hates that PINGAS!hedgehog.
• Chuck Norris was an example of this before it even existed.

You're standing on the edge of a balcony, you need to get down quickly but don't have time for the stairs. To your right is a long curtain and you happen to have a knife on you, so in classic swashbuckling action hero style you leap to the curtain and jam your knife into the fabric. Doing so slows your descent at least enough to survive the landing. It is likely to be one of the tricks used by a traceur.

There are many different variations to how this works including the impliment used to slow their fall, the material of the "curtain" and of course the exact situation they are in (whether it was on purpose or accidental, whether they slide a long distance or just stop, or it isn't a straight drop but still a steep surface).

As to how believable this is, it would require incredible grip strength to hold on to the knife. And many times the surface they use is not a curtain, but solid rock. Why? Because it's cool.

Examples:

• Aladdin and the King Of Thieves had Aladdin do this when he was thrown off a cliff, using his father's dagger to drag into the rock side.
• A gameplay mechanic of the 3D Prince Of Persia games uses this largely with the traditional curtain slide. The 2008 game gives the Prince a hand gauntlet that allows him to do the same thing but with solid rock again.
• Batman's arm blades are used for this quite often. In Batman Begins Bruce saved himself and Ducard from falling off a cliff by slowing his slide down a steep hill. In some incarnations (at least in the DCAU as far as I know) he has deployable claws that he uses for the same effect, in addition to assisting with a Wall Cling.
• Optimus Prime in the Transformers movie combined this with some Le Parkour moves to drop from a high roof to ground level, digging his feet into the wall and jumping back and forth between two buildings.
• In the pilot episode of the 2002 He Man And The Masters Of The Universe, He-Man's father was thrown off a cliff and He-Man jumped after him. He-Man used his sword to slow their descent and stop, but they were both essentially stuck until someone could come and rescue them.
• Mythbusters tested the variation used with pirates doing it with a sail. Their verdict was that it was busted, sails have little wood strips lining the fabric and that you would need an incredibly sharp knife (which would also increase your rate of falling) and incredible grip strength to hold the knife at a particular angle.

Do We Have This One already?

Unfortunately for you, you're The Chick, and the bad guy has decided to kidnap you. He could just beat the crap out of you, but the Moral Guardians are much scarier than the hero. He could just carry you off unwillingly, but then he'd have to deal with all that kicking and screaming. So what does he do? POW! One shot to the stomach, and you are now limp and unconscious, ready to be carried off to the evil lair...

The GKO is a staple in Kamen Rider and other tokusatsu series, possibly because a blow to the gut is less offensive than beating a helpless woman over the head or choking her into unconsciousness. If the hero does it, it's so he doesn't have to resort to more brutal measures. If the villain does it, however, it's probably either to keep the damsel quiet or to keep them alive.

• Kamen Rider Kiva: Taiga puts one to Maya so that he can pretend he killed her and drive Wataru into a violent rage, all for the sake of a fair fight.

The phone rings. you pick it up. "Hello! who's there? I can hear you breathing! stop calling this number!!!". usually happenes as part of one of two plots- Either a serial killer is after you and he wants to hear you squirm- or a guy is inlove with you and he doesn't have the guts to talk. It's almost always a woman picking up and a guy calling.

Sometimes the audience really hates a character. When the character is minor, it usually isn't so bad. However, on occasion the main character of the show is hated. Fans may still watch a show because there's another character who's more interesting, or just because the premise is good.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Shinji from Neon Genesis Evangelion
• Seiya from Saint Seiya

Film

• Jason from The Forbidden Kingdom is often hated for taking the focus away from Jackie Chan and Jet Li being awesome, and for being a white American who seems to be in a movie set in ancient China solely because the producers can't imagine Americans being able to relate to Chinese people.

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Needs A Better Description. No doubt there are examples that can be stolen from some of the other Scrappy pages.

Pretty much the inverse of Fandom Rivalry. Just like with how the belief often held in a Fandom Rivalry consist of if you like Show X, you can't also like Show Y - this one one deals with the belief that if you like Show X, then you also have to like Show Y.

Sometimes, this view may only have a one-sided consensus: i.e., the fandom consensus of Show X may act as if you also have to like Show Y - while the fandom consensus of Show Y may not hold the same view of Show X. In extreme cases, the fandom consensus of Show Y may actually hate Show X. This could result in a major Hype Backlash from fans of Show X who don't also like Show Y - because not only are they being pressured by their fellow Show X fans to also like Show Y, but it turns of that the inverse view is not even shared by fans of Show Y.

An example of the second variant:

• Led Zeppelin fandom vs Pink Floyd fandom

Exactly What It Says On The Tin. Seen it a million times. Do We Have This? Every time a character comes from that particular island, or just has the accent, they will invariably wear the Rasta colors, the beanie, the dreadlocks, they will either listen too of play Reggie music (completely ignoring the various other genres of Jamaican music) and, depending on the age demographic of the work, will smoke copious amounts of Mary Jane. This is the common stereo type of a Jamaican, a Rastafarian, and might even extend to anyone of Afro-Carribean extraction.

A companion trope to Small Annoying Creature, this is where a character will have a pet, often a Ridiculously Cute Critter / borderline Intellectual Animal which will disappear from the story, only to reappear to do something useful. Typically, this is a pet small enough to fit in the character's clothing or cleavage or might even be "disguised" as an inanimate object (e.g. Wendy's turtle at first looks like a piece of jewelery).

Examples:

• Fuu's pet flying squirrel, Momo, in Samurai Champloo
• Wendy's pet turtle in Gun X Sword
• In the new season of Darker Than Black, Suou begins with a pet flying squirrel that definitely fits this it's also a Checkovs Gun of sorts, as it ends up as a new body for Mao
• Aang's pet lemur (or something), Momo in Avatar The Last Airbender.

*24 Hour Launch Notice.* - will be launched around 2 PM EST if this is alright with everyone.

forum discussion on this

A given political and geographical division is often misrepresented in the eyes of those who are "close", but not near-by. For example:

• This troper lives in New York. Without telling you much, would you assume New York City?
• Or could you name a city other than Chicago in Illinois?

The basic premise of this trope is this:

1. Take a socigeographic, and/or political division.
2. Ask the natives about their neighboring regions?
3. Now ask the natives of those regions.

Compare And Contrast the results. If the natives go by a Hollywood Atlas, or something similar, the results will be surprising: There's nothing in X except Y (where X is a major political division [like a US State] and Y is a corresponding City within X).

Subtorpe of Small Reference Pools & Hollywood Atlas. Related to Big Applesauce & Tokyo Is The Center Of The Universe, except those are more about "where the action is" instead of "what the neighbors call us". For national tropages, see Freestate Amsterdam & Britain Is Only London. For time related events in that location, see Its Always Mardi Gras In New Orleans.

(Thanks Troper Madrugada for help)

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Examples:

North America

Eagleland

• The best example I know of is New York State (will be a troper tale when launched).
  • Staying with in the State bounds, and going by the natives of New York City, you only have: NYC, everything north ("upstate"), and everything east (Long Island). This is too the annoyance of many natives in those NORTH-OF-NYC regions, whom could careless about the city; rather, they don't like being referred to as "upstate" since, to them, they are in the middle of the state and therefore New York City is down state. I've seen many a debate between two people (one a native, one a New Yorker; both attending a central New York college) in which one would include lines like: "I'm not upstate, you're downstate", "I don't know how it is here, upstate", etc.
  • Flip it around, a lot of People native (although not all) to the central regions of New York will believe that it's just New York City and the ocean. Long Island is either wrapped up into New York City, or none-existent. A friend of mine whose home was closer to Canada than to New York City automatically assumed I lived in Manhattan because I came from the "New York City" area. Another one was surprised to find out there were farms on Long Island.
• Chicago is the only place in Illinois
• Miami is the only place in Florida
• St.Louis is the only place in Missouri.
• New Orleans is the only place in Louisiana.

Canada

• Canada is only... um...

Mexico

Middle East

UAE

• Dubai is the only place in the UAE.

Europe

[1] Freestate Amsterdam

• Northern Europe is only Amsterdam.

[2]

• Italy is only Rome.
• Greece is only Athens, which is only the Acropolis.

United Kingom

• supertrope of Britain Is Only London.
• France is only Paris.

Asia

Japan

• Japan is only Tokyo.

Russia

• Russia is only Moscow and Russia is only Siberia

South Armerica

• Brazil is only Rio.

Africa

• Africa is only jungle, with a few small tribal villages tossed in. And aliens.
• The Philippines is only Manila - even to the locals.

• Egypt is only pyramids.
• Germany is only beer, sausages, and quaint little villages. Besides, you know...
• Outside of Brazil, South America is just a big hill of cocaine.
• India is only Sikhs.
• Antarctica is only ice and penguins. This is somewhat valid.

Exceptions

In America

• California only has LA, San Fransico, San Diego, etc.

*24 Hour Launch Notice.* - will be launched around 2 PM EST if this is alright with everyone.

Alt Title: Bargain Of Opportunity

A bargain that two or more parties enter for their own benefit, with mainly their own goals in mind, and in which one or all parties plan to double cross the others as soon as they have what they need.

These usually end with all parties benefiting, and all of them plotting when to betray their "allies" and/or waiting for someone to make the first move.

It's generally to be expected that villains will do this to each other, or to the heroes, if given the opportunity. Expect less Genre Savvy individuals to cry "but we had a deal!"

See also Thirty Xanatos Pileup. Between Genre Savvy alliances, expect a lot of I Know You Know I Know stalemates.

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Examples:

• Predictably happens a lot in Pirates Of The Caribbean, usually centered around Jack, who makes a lot of these in the first movie. A lot fewer of these, but still some prominent ones, happen in "Dead Man's Chest", and pretty much everyone is doing this in "At World's End," even breaking such deals and immediately entering a new one, or having more than one going at the same time with opposing sides.
• In StarCraft: Brood War, the four way alliance against the UED is pretty much this, with both Arcturus Mengsk's Evil Empire and Kerrigan's Zerg swarm both planning on betraying and destroying the others when they succeed, while Zeratul and Raynor are more benevolent and plan to honor their agreements, but fully expect someone to pull a double cross eventually.

I know I have seen this quite a bit. The "alien pest" on four legs that leaps at it's foes to attack them.

• Kinrath in the Star Wars Expanded Universe
• Antlions in Half Life 2
• I think the 3rd chapter of The Witcher (game) had these, forget the name.

Kids can be cute, whiny, mouthy, innocent, bratty, heroic, and even magical. But they can also be good businessmen too.

These children are great with money and are always looking for ways to make more. They always seem to be coming up with one Zany Scheme after another and will always try to cheat other children, and occasionally adults, from their cash. If they're good at it, they could also be a Child Prodigy or a Teen Genius. In shows with a particularly lax depiction of realism, these children could even have their own legitimate companies and firms with actual clients who take them seriously.

Examples:

• Cory from "Thats So Raven" and Cory In The House.
• Eddy from "Ed Edd And Eddy".
• Jenny from the comic "Safe Havens".
• Danny from "The Partridge Family". He's the one who got them an agent (among other things).
• Possibly Ur Example: "The Great Brain".
• Artemis Fowl. Teenage billionaire evil genius. Learned everything he knows from his ruthless father, though as time goes by, both Fowl men are less on the evil end of the spectrum.

Needs More Examples. Rolling Updates.

Rolling Updates

Simply put, a plan that is conceived and put into motion while most (if not all) of the individuals involved are completely hammered. Thhe most common subversion is probably the (sober) Ditz or Cloud Cuckoo Lander coming up with a crazy plan that the drunks would normally never go along with.

Really Needs A Better Description

Examples

Comics

• One strip in Krakow references this, with a panel showing that Japan's decision to bomb Pearl Harbor was initiated as a drunken dare.

Literature

• Bored Of The Rings (a Lord Of The Rings parody). After the defeat of Sorhed's attack on Minas Troney, the victors have a drunken feast. When Arrowroot (AKA Stomper) is challenged to prove that he's worthy of being king, he decides to take an army to fight Sorhed, and the inebriated crowd agrees with him.
• The flying party in Life The Universe And Everything was made to fly because it seemed like a good idea to a bunch of drunk rocket scientists.

Live Action TV

• Of all people, Lois of Malcolm In The Middle tries this with a group of people from a book club. Yes, you read that right. A book club. The plan involved vandalizing the car of a very successful and popular woman whom the rest of the group were jealous of. Hilarity Ensues.

• Many of the plots of That70s Show are set up like this, usually with the "while high" variation.

Webcomics

• Questionable Content uses this on occasion, such as Sven hiring Lydia and not remembering it in the morning.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

-- TS Eliot

Tropes about fear:

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• Afraid Of Needles
• Cat Scare
• Circus Of Fear
• Cowardly Lion
• Dirty Coward
• Fear Leads To Anger
• Fearless Fool
• Fear Of Thunder
• Girls Are Really Scared Of Horror Movies
• Lovable Coward
• Miles Gloriosus
• Orphanage Of Fear
• Scare Chord
• Scare Campaign
• Scare Em Straight
• The So Called Coward
• What Do They Fear Episode
• Why Did It Have To Be Snakes

Subjective Tropes

• Nightmare Fuel
• High Octane Nightmare Fuel
• Primal Fear

Close to a launch here. Examples or objections, post 'em if you got 'em.

Congratulations, hero, you've finally done it. You've defeated the Big Bad. After an epic Sword Fight, you've managed to plunge your Cool Sword right through his evil heart. The lights in his eyes dim; he staggers; blood trickles from his mouth. You, being sure of victory, turn to make sure that the nearby Damsel In Distress is unhurt, and to accept her showers of grateful kisses. Looks like everything is settled.

But what's this? The bad guy flinches! Is he trying to take another step? Are his fingers making a grab for the sword that even now rests in his breastplate? Is he such a Determinator that he can endure so much damage and keep fighting?

No. He's dead. His body is just twitching a bit. And yet, he doesn't fall, his muscles so perfectly conditioned they can continue to function without any signals from his brain. So he just stands there like a morbid practice dummy. He's Died Standing Up.

This is a device used when a character is so utterly Bad Ass that even in death they refuse to accept utter defeat. The body continues to strive for victory even when its driving will has been extinguished. This goes hand in hand with a Badass Normal or any other absurdly strong character, especially one with a Charles Atlas Superpower. It may be mixed with Taken For Granite, when a villain's magical body has No Ontological Inertia and turns to stone at the moment of death. Despite the description above, this can happen to both heroic and villainous characters.

This is technically possible in Real Life (especially with the help of rigor mortis), though absurdly unlikely, and in any case a corpse's lack of balance control will cause it to topple sooner or later. The realms of fiction simply contrive to end the scene before this happens.

In deference to gravity, falling to one's knees also counts, so long as the final plunge into a prone state doesn't follow. Taking another step forward despite being clearly dead also counts.

Examples:

Anime and Manga

• In an episode of Detective Conan, the victim had just finished an exacting workout and her muscles were tense enough to keep her standing after being murdered. Conan recognizes this after seeing a statue of a legendary Japanese warrior who had died the same way in a battle. (See Benkei, below)
• A variant in Naruto: Rock Lee, after being completely and mercilessly thrashed by Gaara, pushing his body way past its limits, and suffering permanent damage to two limbs, manages to stand back up despite being unconscious at the time, presumably by sheer willpower.

Comics

• Punisher MAX had a crazy mobster henchman who after having one of his eyes pulled out, getting cut, beaten, shot, impaled on an iron spiked fence and having Frank blow his head in half with a shotgun still took two more steps making even Frank panic a little.

Film

• Glory. While Denzel Washington's character slumps forward after being shot dead he doesn't let go of the flag.

Mythology and History

• Saito Musashibo Benkei is said to have died this way.
• Rumor claimed that Blackbeard's headless body, after being thrown overboard, swam between 2 and 7 times around the Adventure before sinking.

Video Games

• Ganon in two iterations of the Legend Of Zelda. In Wind Waker, he turns to stone after being stabbed in the head by the Master Sword. In Twilight Princess, he stays in the same position after being stabbed through the chest.
• Possibly parodied in Mother 3 when a pigmask watches you get in a horrible hovercraft accident. If you examine him afterwards, it is revealed that he has passed out, presumably from fright, yet he's still standing up. With his arm raised.

Or Tragic Mistake.

In a formal Tragedy, there is be a specific scene where the Tragic Hero is given a clear choice, and they choose wrongly. Often this wrong choice can be blamed on the hero's Fatal Flaw, but sometimes they just get screwed over by fate. This moment may not be obvious at the time, but looking back, it becomes clear that this moment was crucial to the hero's tragic downfall. The results of this bad choice lead inexorably towards the hero's catastrophic end; this is also the last moment where, had the hero chosen correctly, the catastrophe could have been averted.

EDIT: To clarify, this is not supposed to be an event that gets the plot moving. It's a point after the plot is in motion, which serves at the point of no return for the Tragic Hero.

Structurally, this moment is the climax of the story, and everything afterwards is Denouement, though the emotional climax of the story frequently falls later.

BIG TIME SPOILERS AHOY

This character is someone who believes with perfect faith that the universe is governed by an all-powerful and perfectly just supreme being, and that the righteous will be rewarded in heaven, while the wicked will be punished in hell. This character also knows that he has done something so terrible that he is in the latter category. It should be noted that while this character is obviously usually a villain, antiheroes can fall into this category as well. The trope-namer is obviously Mac Beth, as indicated by the quotation.

Is This Tropeable? Do We Have This?