Go Animate / Tropes General C To D

GoAnimate Trope Examples
General examples: A - B | C - D | E - G | H - L | M - R | S - Z
Examples in specific videos: A - F | G - Z

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C

• Cannot Tell a Lie: A very large majority of the videos will have the troublemaker do bad things with not a hint of remorse. But the second an authority member asks if they are responsible, they will immediately admit to what they have done. It's usually prefaced with a bunch of "Um"s.
• Canon Foreigner:
  • In some videos, Caillou has an identical twin named "Daillou". Although he's obviously never appeared in the original cartoon, many users have created videos about Daillou's adventures... which usually involve getting grounded (grounded grounded). In more extreme videos, Caillou has multiple 'lost siblings' with each of their names bumped up a letter (and yes, there have been videos where Doris has had a very impossible sexvigintuple pregnancy of 26 boys with each child taking a new letter rooted by -aillou, ranging from Aaillou to Zaillou).
  • If a troublemaker of the day either has unseen parents or no parents at all, (such as the Five Nights at Freddy's animatronics, Barney, Joe, or any number of the Sesame Street or Thomas & Friends characters), sometimes the user will invent parent characters just so there's someone to ground them. (Though it's also common for people to just use existing characters from their respective home series instead, such as the night guard or Freddy for the animatronics, Steve for Joe, or Sir Topham Hatt/The Fat Controller for the Thomas engines. However, despite the fact that adult human and puppet characters are present in Sesame Street, they are almost never used in grounded videos.)
  • Introduced by the user MattTheGoAnimator, Daisy is a younger sibling/Satellite Character to Rosie and Caillou (who is extremely naughty) who has become adopted by a few other users.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin':
  • The "Grounded" videos that involve Dora tend to reach absurd levels as no matter how impossible it is for them to know, Dora will always be ratted on by students, police, video cameras and fired teachers. This often applies to anyone else who decides to be a troublemaker, as well.
  • In particular, "(Character) Fakes a School Lockdown" videos are particularly ridiculous about this. Sure, trying to fake a school lockdown for the sake of pulling a prank warrants some kind of punishment. But in these particular videos, the retribution of the troublemaker's actions don't stop with them being suspended or expelled from school, as by the video's end, the troublemaker's prank will end with massive media attention (often to humiliate the troublemaker rather than actually reporting on what just happened), fellow students being injured or traumatized for life, massive fines (for either the school or students' medical bills) that the troublemaker's family has to pay, and the troublemaker getting grounded (or arrested) all for a simple school prank.
• Character Exaggeration: The most common interpretation of Caillou in these videos has his bratty habits (something that usually only showed up from time to time in his actual TV show) cranked up to absurd Hair-Trigger Temper heights.
• Clueless Aesop: Some videos try to tackle serious topics... try being the operative word here.
• Comedic Sociopathy: As you would not believe. The main point of the videos is characters getting punished played for comedy. Here's just one out of countless examples of this.
• The Complainer Is Always Wrong:
  • Sometimes, the troublemaker of the day will receive hate (and even get grounded) for simply not liking a subject the majority of other characters like, with the majority's only defense being how much they like the subject.
  • Sometimes, an execution video will have one or more characters actually mourning the character being executed. (Often because the executed character was their best friend, was only a kid, or they (somewhat understandably) find the execution Disproportionate Retribution of the highest order.) If the other characters catch them showing sympathy for the executed, they'll either ground, mob, or even kill the offending character for daring to show sympathy for the character whose death they are celebrating, which only serves to add to the disturbing premise.
• Computer Virus:

• Some videos have the troublemakers installing a virus (either a Barney Error or of other sorts) onto their parents' or school's computer with predictable results.

• Contrived Coincidence: Some of the ways people find out about a troublemaker's wrongdoings outright defy logic sometimes. In most cases this happens via someone just happening to walk by in time to see the troublemaker making their escape or one or both of the troublemaker's parent figures showing up out of nowhere as the kid is committing their bad deed.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment:
  • A lot of "Grounded" videos feature the parents giving all sorts of unusual punishment to the kids. They make their kids watch shows for little kids, eat weird things, and maybe even put a diaper on them or turn them into babies.
  • In some videos, characters will be punished by being forced to watch random TV shows, including completely innocuous sitcoms like Seinfeld or Friends. This is treated as some kind of horrible punishment by the people getting grounded.
    • Sometimes, the shows being forced to watch tend to be the "inverse" of what is considered acceptable. For instance, it's not uncommon for a "baby show" character to be forced to watch South Park, Family Guy and... My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.^note  Which is ironic, as the latter show is targeted for children.

• Crossdressing Voices:
  • Whenever you see Dora used, the model is clearly male, but the voice is always female.
  • One of the most popular voices to use for Caillou is the "Ivy" voice setting.
  • Sometimes female characters will use a sound effect of a man laughing.
• Crossover: A very large number of videos involve characters from various media all living in the same universe. As a vast majority of GoAnimate's video creators were (or are, under Vyond) young children, many of these characters are from children's cartoons, including pre-school cartoons like Dora The Explorer or Caillou.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Many Punishment Days and "Gets Executed" videos end with characters getting offed in some bizarrely cruel, yet off-the-wall ways.

D

• Dark Parody: Many users either make at least one video like this or base their videos around being this trope, but 90 percent of the time this is done by simply adding gratuitous blood, characters dying randomly, adding creepypasta characters like Jeff the Killer, or constant swearing. It's very difficult to find a Grounded video that is truly successful in using this trope.
• Damned By a Fool's Praise: Oftentimes, the troublemakers will like works the creator (and often the other characters) dislike, and can even be used as an excuse for grounding.
• Deadly Euphemism: Asking someone to "engage" you is treated as this in-universe.^note  As seen under Bowdlerise, this is because this is a censored reference to South Park, with "engage" being a stand in for the word "fuck". Some videos even add a crowd gasping sound-effect when someone asks another person to "engage" them.
• Deadly Prank: A lot of times, the mass mayhem and injuries or deaths caused by the trouble-maker of the day were the result of a prank, with varying levels of reaction from the troublesome prankster. (From being horrified at the unintentional side effects of their prank to still thinking their prank was terrific despite the massive damage it caused.)
• Death by Falling Over: In the "(Character) Misbehaves at (Indoor Water Park or Place that Has One)", two of the atrocities committed by the trouble-makers include them pushing some slow-moving riders down a water slide and shoving a kid off some floating walk-pads. In both cases they wind up severely injured or dead.
• Death Is Cheap: Reviving a deceased character in these videos is as simple as just willing them back to life. Either that, or depending on Negative Continuity.
• Deconstruction:
  • After Tumblr discovered the GoAnimate community, several attempts at deconstructing grounded videos have been made. Most notable are Eric gets grounded and wakes up to a realization and Eric's Dad Discovers the Truth. Some other users also tend to deconstruct, but more often just satirize the absurdity of grounded/dead meat videos. After the latter gained unironic subscribers from the GoAnimate community, it became a Stealth Parody.
  • Also done with users like NotSmirks (formerly) and Warren Cookie, although in a way that evokes the darkest side of YouTube Poop.
  • YouTube user Wileyk209zback is fond of doing these kinds of videos, often making fun of the "Grounding" videos by making it so Boris is mentally unbalanced and has an unhealthy obsession with grounding people, and tries to pin it on Caillou being an obnoxious brat, but most of the time Doris confronts Boris and tells him to stop grounding Caillou for every little thing he does, and may even fight with him over it. It even goes so far they go to court over it!
• Denser and Wackier: Not that the videos were ever considered very serious in the first place, but many of the earliest grounded videos were more... erm... grounded in reality, as you can see in Unbuilt Trope below. It was about when Caillou, Dora, and other baby show characters began appearing that the usual tropes of grounded videos came into play and sent the Grounded videos headlong into absurdity and infamy.
• Deranged Animation: Very common in the satirical videos by users such as NotSmirks, Warren Cookie, and NotZick Zick, though it's not unheard of this to happen in the non-satirical grounded videos as well.
• Diabolus ex Machina: No matter how impossible it might look for a character to get caught and grounded, somehow, someway, something will happen that will expose the trouble-maker and their schemes to someone and end with them grounded, no matter how illogical it seems. There are also other instances of this trope outside of exposing the trouble-maker.
• Denied Food as Punishment: In one Justin Bieber Gets Grounded video, Justin's parents force him to eat poop and drink pee as a punishment.
• Disproportionate Restitution: A lot of times the naughty kid will begin apologizing to people or their families for what they did wrong once they get caught. The apologies really don't hold much water if the bad thing they did resulted in mass mayhem and panic, massive property damage, or people getting hurt or killed. This can also be reversed when all the naughty kid did was, say, steal someone's cookies, and their parents still refuse their (more reasonable) apology.
• The Dog Bites Back: Zig-zagged - many videos have the punished parties get fed up with the groundings and enact some sort of revenge scheme to get them in trouble. However, a very rare few allow them to get away with their revenge.
• Domestic Abuse:
  • Fred gets depicted as emotionally, verbally and physically abusive towards Daphne, just like he is to the rest of Mystery Inc.

• Do Not Touch the Funnel Cloud: There are a surprisingly large amount of videos involving tornadoes hitting the city that most Grounded videos take place in, and in most cases, nothing actually gets damaged (nor do people get injured or killed) until the tornado actually hits them.
• Don't Like? Don't Read!: Quite a number of videos will have the author of the video asking for viewers to "respect [the creator's] opinion". Nine times out of ten, it's usually "If you even disagree with what I say, it means you're a baby show lover". Another variation of this is for the author to proclaim that they "don't support child abuse" and if you're offended by the video, don't watch it.
• Double Standard: The usual given reason for everyone's loathing for baby show characters such as Caillou and Dora is because...well...they're "baby show" characters. For whatever reason, though, no one seems to care that Rosie, Boris, Doris, Diego, or any of Caillou or Dora's other family members are technically "baby show" characters themselves. The likely reason is because they all dislike the main characters themselves so everyone just brushes this off.
• Downer Ending: There are too many instances of this trope in the grounded videos to list them all individually. Generally speaking though, if the main character was trying to correct their problems, help somebody, or they had good intentions when they misbehaved, expect the ending to be this if they still get grounded.
• Dream Sequence: "(Character) has nightmares/bad dreams" videos primarily take place in a dream being had by the Character/Troublemaker Of The Day. Many of these videos often involve scary logos due to Recycled Script from NitroG’s Dora’s Nightmare trilogy. Also, a number of these videos end with the character's parents coming in to ground them, just because they can (or, as in the original Dora’s Nightmare video, for stealing their “nighttime medications”). Videos involving nightmares are the most prevalent of these types of videos, but Grounded videos involving good (or just plumb weird) dreams are out there.

• Dumbass No More:
  • You'll find no bumbling dads or moms here. Even the goofiest of parents (such as Richard Watterson or Papa Bear) are now competent enough to catch their kids in the act of troublemaking and heavily discipline them.
  • In the videos where Arthur (or D.W.) is the troublemaker, Mr. Haney, who is typically somewhat of an air-head, is usually shown to be equally as competent (and harsh) as all of the other principal characters in the grounded videos.

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