Go Animate / Tropes General S To Z

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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S

• Sadist Show: The grounded videos. They apparently take place in a Crapsack World where one little slip will get you grounded, arrested, or even executed/murdered whether you deserve it or not. It doesn't help that in some videos, people seem to take glee in dishing out the punishments on the grounding victims, and will even celebrate their getting grounded/arrested/killed. Woe betide you if you're a "baby show" character, too, as everyone in the world (including your own family) will hate your guts and will gladly inform you of this fact, show No Sympathy when you get yourself in trouble (even if you just badly injured yourself), and will gladly punish you in severe ways if you even just step slightly out of line. The level of sadism in the videos tend to fluctuate, with some users' grounded videos being more silly than cruel, while other users' videos have characters (especially "baby show" characters) getting grounded or arrested for simply existing.
• Sadist Teacher:
  • Many of the teachers come off as this seeing as how they fly off the handle and suspend/expel students or send them to the principal over the slightest offenses. Even then, they sometimes come off as sadistic or unfair even before someone misbehaves: What sane teacher would make it so that coming in last place in a swimming race would get you suspended?
  • Some of the teachers in the "Gets Held Back" videos come off as this, particularly the ones that get mad and demote the misbehaving student over petty, illogical, or unfair reasons such as crying or not having homework, which they don't have, thanks to them just entering the class right then.
    • Even worse, there are instances in some "Gets Held Back" videos where the troublemaker gets held back because they brought in their homework when the class was going on a field trip.
• Scream Discretion Shot: Sometimes happens in "Punishment Day" videos when the troublemaker receives some sort of physical punishment.
• Sdrawkcab Name: Caillou has a Bizarro counterpart named Uolliac (usually pronounced "You-Ollie-Ack") who is the subject of the "Tlt Uolliac" videos as well as many of the more surreal videos.
• Send in the Clones: There have been a few movies where Caillou either creates or meets more duplicates of himself.
• Sensory Abuse:
  • Because the text-to-speech voices always speak in a monotone, people "rectify" this by cranking up the voices to very unnecessarily loud levels. NotSmirks' videos parody this by cranking it up to eleven (a la YouTube Poop).
  • Said videos also tend to have the background music turned up louder than can be necessary, as well. (such as during the news segment in this video). This is also often a subject of parody in NotSmirks' videos.
  • Sometimes both the loud punishing and the music are cranked up to high decibel levels, so much so the already ear-splitting voices are completely drowned out by what sounds like Merzbow in the background. The result is pure aural pain.
  • One possible punishment troublemakers often receive in "Punishment Day" videos include loud music (which is oftentimes just as loud to the viewers). The authority figure usually tells the viewers to turn down their volume beforehand.

• A common "humorous" fixture in samster5677's Scooby-Doo and Dora videos. It's not uncommon for characters to have conversations where ALL of the dialogue is raised to the highest possible volume, and/or have repeated loud sound effects played over and over. This video contains both at high frequencies, and it makes the "Holocaust section" in live versions of My Bloody Valentine's "You Made Me Realize" sound easy to listen to in comparison.

• Serious Business:
  • Make fake VHS openings? Then don't be surprised when the Grounded community wants your head on a silver platter.
  • Likewise, the community will promptly turn their backs on you (and possibly make you the subject of a Grounded video) if you say anything nice about any "baby show". (Even if you just say you liked said "baby show" when you were little.)
  • Depending on where you look, if you like or dislike site founder Alvin Hung, At least some of the community will try to 'punish you'.
  • Many of the users tend to be strongly opinionated, and one or more people disagreeing with them (often referred to in-fandom as "disrespecting one's opinion") can lead to them pulling videos from their accounts or even Rage Quitting video-making altogether.
  • In-Universe: Chuck E. Cheese's is treated as such, especially to Caillou, who will pass up a trip to Disney World or Six Flags just to go to one. Getting exactly what you want at a restaurant or store is this as well. "Engaging" people or going on a rampage is apparently the way to go if you can't get an Oreo McFlurry with your Happy Meal.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Nearly every "(Character) Misbehaves On The Way To See (Movie)" video invariably ends with the family missing the movie, either by the troublemaker being successful in making them late for the movie, or having them arrive with time to spare, only for the theater itself to take some sort of action that will ensure the family won't be able to watch the movie.
• Shockingly Expensive Bill: "Nappies and Watching PBV Porn" by Matthew Austin has Lara messing herself in front of Marcy, being put in diapers, and then causing Marcy's TV bill to go insane by watching pay-per-view porn on TV.
• Share Phrase: All the parent characters say, "[name], how dare you [infraction]? That's it, you are grounded, grounded, grounded for [long time]. Go to your room now."
• Shout-Out:
  • It is unclear whether it was intentional, but one of the stock characters in the Anime theme looks exactly like Touma Kamijou.
  • Two of the default characters in the Comedy World theme look very similar to Justin Long (PC Guy) and John Hodgman (Mac Guy) as they appeared in the 2000s "Get a Mac" commercials.
  • The Comedy World setting has two hairstyles that look very similar to the hairstyles Fry and Leela don.
  • The Stick Figure theme has several Dragon Ball-related head accessories and animations, such as the trope-naming Kamehameha and Fusion Dance.
  • The Lil’ Peepz theme has parts that let you make Mario, Peach, Link, Zelda, and Naruto.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: While any character can become this depending on the level of vulgarity in a user's videos, the most consistent example across all the Grounded videos is Red Boris/Boris the Teeth Guy; 80% of his dialogue in a single video is usually long strings of profanity.
• Sizeshifter: The trouble-making kids are sometimes shown to have the unexplained ability to grow to an enormous height when they can't get their way.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Many early videos tend to end with "Pomp and Circumstance" playing in the background whenever a character is grounded. There are also a few examples of "Carol of the Bells" playing when the same thing happens.
• Spelling Bee: Some videos have various characters compete in a spelling bee, where some of them spell words wrong and are punished for doing so. Expect them to be grounded afterwards.
• Spoiled Brat: Every trouble-maker is intended to be this (being brats who always want to get their way), albeit to varying levels of success. Sometimes, the "trouble-maker" may not actually come off as this despite the efforts of the user. Where the characters actually succeed in being this trope, though, they can be almost sociopathic in their brattiness.
• Spoiler Title: A huge number of videos list what will happen in the title.

• Stock Sound Effects:
  • Par for the course for GoAnimate/Vyond, but whenever someone is attacked, falls down the stairs or characters suffer major injuries, the clip of a German child smashing a keyboard in anger is most likely used.
  • Audio from The Tourettes Guy or Angry Grandpa videos being used when characters are mad is also a fairly common occurrence.
  • Sometimes users will even use stock Caillou screams from either the actual show (such as from from the infamous Circus episode) or Caillou YouTube Poops for whenever Caillou throws a tantrum.
• Stock "Yuck!": Every troublemaker will usually hate what dinner their parents serve them in videos with little-to-no reasoning.

• Stupid Evil: Most of the antagonists in the grounded videos are compelled to perform heinous deeds, even if it doesn't benefit them in any way. Quite often they'll do terrible things and then proudly display their handiwork to their parents... who immediately flip out and ground them.
• Stylistic Suck: Most satirical videos crank up the flaws of most Grounded videos (such as poor grammar, Random Events Plot, the Disproportionate Retribution, etc.) up to eleven for humor value.
• Surprise Pregnancy: Seen in several videos where a mother announces her pregnancy right before her water breaks, often with no indication beforehand. This is usually used to justify the addition of characters to a series.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Whenever someone makes a fake VHS opening, they always put "Real, not fake" after the title.
• Swiper, No Swiping!:
  • Some videos like these will have a character go on a seemingly unstoppable rampage, only for the punisher to tell the troublemaker to stop it. (Which they do without any hesitation.)
  • In general, when characters are on a rampage or are terrorizing a setting in some other way, characters (particularly their parents) will stop them simply by grounding them.

T

• Take That!:
  • When the character who gets grounded/arrested/killed/whatever is a fictional character, it's safe to assume that this trope is in effect. Baby shows (or even shows merely perceived to be baby shows by some users) are the most frequent target. Even more so, when someone kills, grounds, or otherwise maims one of these characters, they are un-grounded or otherwise rewarded for doing so.
  • Users are known to regularly make rant videos disparaging shows or movies they don't like.
  • Many of the satirical videos by Smirks (AKA theomgwtfproductions) under his NotSmirks account, as well as the ones from Lee Weber (also known as LW97, Rubens Weil or Pancake Master), were originally intended to be mocking the fandom, as well as the "grounded" video trend in general. Instead, this led to many people taking this as funny satire and using memes intended to mock them. In fact, it caused Smirks to eventually give up on making satire videos and to leave the site in general.
• Tantrum Throwing: Some "Character Gets Sent To Bed Early" videos have the main protagonist getting sent to bed early for throwing their dinner at the wall. And that's barely even scratching the surface...
• Teens Are Monsters: Similar to the Kids Are Cruel trope, this is more noticeable in the "X misbehaves at Y" videos as the thing that prompts them to go to "Y" is being laughed at by their peers.^note It's actually quite hard to tell if these really are teens or not, due to how the characters are used.
• Teeth Flying: Caillou sometimes gets his teeth knocked out during punishment days.
• Temporary Bulk Change: A category of videos show a character ordering a ridiculous amount of food at a restuarant, usually a fast food place. They are not shown with their stomachs enlarging, they just instantly pop out.
• Tempting Fate:
  • "...and (Character), I want you to be on your best behavior, or else you'll be grounded." One has to wonder if the kids actually would behave if the parent characters didn't give this warning before going off on a trip or vacation.
  • Some videos open with the parents telling the trouble-maker of the day not to do some ridiculously specific action. The rest of the video writes itself. Take this video for example; the way that nearly every adult figure the main character meets repeatedly tells him not to do one specific action ("Don't pee or poop on the Watterson's bathroom floor") gives away what'll get him in the doghouse later on.
• 10-Minute Retirement: NotSmirks was one of many who had opted to quit after the removal of the old options. However, discovering GoAnimate for Schools prompted him to return to the field once more.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: "Warren Cook Gets Grounded" videos usually have Warren's dad call a massive mob of random characters, who proceed to yell at Warren. That said, given the emotional maturity of your average GoAnimate user, most of their speeches are along the lines of "You are a bad bad bad bad bad bad boy."
• That Russian Squat Dance: The children Cartoon Classics characters have this as their dancing animation.
• They Killed Kenny Again: This applies to anyone, really. Anyone who gets killed tends to return the next time a video requires them to. This includes Caillou, Dora, and other grounding victims, Caillou's other family members (Rosie in particular), or school faculty members.
• The Tape Knew You Would Say That: In Caillou Gets Blackmailed, the prerecorded message that Boris sends Caillou responds to Caillou as if he was talking to him.
  Caillou: But then how do I get 5 billion dollars?
  Boris: If you're about to ask, doesn't matter where. Figure it out yourself.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: There are a number of videos where the one grounded could end up being ungrounded and/or rewarded for their behavior.
• Toilet Humor: With a good number of kids using the site, this is bound to happen. You get things like characters pooping on teachers, selling pee disguised as lemonade, being made to wear diapers as punishment, etc.

• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Many of the kids are just begging to get grounded with some of the things they do. Two of the most common ways of characters being this are immediately doing something that they were told not to do less then ten seconds after their parents leave, or continuing to annoy or ask their parents for something even after being told that they will be grounded if they do it again.
  • In extreme cases, some videos have the kids being told that they'll be rewarded or ungrounded if they behave...only to immediately misbehave or do something bad as soon as their parents/teacher leaves, despite having the chance to escape a grounding or Punishment Day.
  • Rosie, in particular, is this as she often believes anything Caillou tells her and gets severely hurt or killed as a result. Everyone has their moments of this particular way of being Too Dumb To Live, but none more-so than Rosie.
  • Whenever one or more characters get told by a troublemaker that the troublemaker is going to beat up or kill them, nine times out of ten, the victim character(s) will just stand there in place screaming or saying "Nononononononono" as the troublemaker runs up to maim/kill them when they could be running away, defending themselves, or calling for help.
• Took a Level in Jerkass:
  • No matter how nice an existing character may be in their home series, their GoAnimate/Vyond counterparts will invariably be a terrible person. Even characters who are normally best friends (such as Caillou and his friends, Arthur and Buster, etc.) will express distaste for each other or get each other grounded without a second thought.
  • In particular, the parents of existing kid characters deserve special mention here. Nine times out of ten, they become explosive Jerkasses who will ground, torture, or kill their kids for the slightest offense or laugh at their misfortunes, no matter how nice or patient they are in their home series. This is most apparent with Caillou's parents, who in canon are some of the nicest people around, but in the grounded videos are either apathetic uncaring Jerkasses (Mommy/Doris) or borderline Ax-Crazy (Daddy/Boris).
• Took a Level in Kindness: Doris tends to be far more reasonable and willing to defend Caillou in a lot of Deconstruction videos, to the point of standing up for Caillou in front of Boris.
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • Caillou will move heaven and earth to spend a day at Chuck E. Cheese's.
    • He also seems fond of beer in several videos.
  • Most Tlt Uolliac videos have the eponymous character going on and on about strawberry shortcake. (Or, as put by Uolliac himself: "Strayberry strayberry strayberry strayberry strayberry shitcake.")
  • McDonald's also seems to be very popular with the kid characters as well, as are Burger King and Dave And Buster's to a lesser extent.
  • For some characters, Peter Piper Pizza seems to be the go-to Evil Counterpart to Chuck E. Cheese's.
• Traumatic Haircut: The main subject of "(Character) gets a haircut" videos are the troublemaker character getting an embarrassing haircut against their will. Also tends to be a fairly common punishment in Punishment Day videos.

U

• The Unfavorite: Most troublemakers are this in their families and/or at school, especially Caillou and Macusoper Busters.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Sometimes characters will actually help other characters, and right their wrong-doings. Often their parents will still ground them anyway for some contrived reason, just to be jerks, or just to keep up the status quo.
• The Unintelligible:
  • The Spanish-language voices were intended for writing dialogue in Spanish, but many users who make Grounded videos use these voices to write English dialogue for Hispanic characters anyway. As a result, these characters speak in heavily accented, barely legible English, and frequently have to be captioned. Dora's Dad and Grandma, as well as Alejandro from Total Drama, most frequently fall under this.
  • Uolliac (Bizarro Caillou) speaks in barely comprehensible Word-Salad Humor with the occasional "ah-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-ah" thrown in from time to time.
• Unsatisfiable Customer:
  • Most of the troublemakers in "(Character) Misbehaves At (Restaurant)" videos. The gist of these videos is that the character goes to a restaurant such as McDonald's, but something they order is unavailable. The troublemaker usually loses their temper and either trashes or completely destroys the establishment because they won't take no for an answer when denied the food they were trying to order or refuses any other food options. Oftentimes the missing food isn't even the main thing they were trying to order (such as a certain kind of milkshake), making them downright unreasonable on top of unsatisfiable.
  • This also extends to "(Character) Misbehaves at (Store)" videos. A character will want a certain type of item, but the parents will not let them, usually because it's too expensive. When offered a cheaper replacement, the character will usually demand the initial item before ultimately flipping out and wrecking the store.

• Unusual Euphemism:
  • "Getting in dead meat", which appears to be a term for getting a bad behavior card and expelled from school, when put in the context of "X Gets in Dead Meat" videos. For the record, 'dead meat' is a slightly-outdated term meaning that someone or something is or will be in serious trouble.
  • "Engaging" someone started as a euphemism for "fuck" due to a South Park reference, but it devolved into a euphemism for "kill".

V

• Vacation Episode:
  • Many videos involve families taking vacations only for that one kid to cause some sort of ruckus that gets them grounded and often ends the vacation early.
  • Another frequent trend in these types of videos is a troublemaker taking a trip to a "Great Wolf Lodge" with either their family or a friend's family. Upon getting there, the troublemaker maims or even kills people, scares everyone out of the water, and eventually burns the property down after attacking a skeeball machine.
• Vague Age: Many of the videos make it heavily ambiguous as to whether Caillou or Dora are still kids, if they're going to high school, or if they're grown up and the animators are just lazy to change designs. Rosie is rendered mostly as a tiny adult figure, though she still acts like her canonical two-year-old self. Bizarrely, some videos even show Boris (Caillou's dad) attending Caillou's school, sometimes to the point that he's in Ms. Martin's preschool class alongside Caillou.
• Villain Ball: The troublemakers often cause trouble for literally no reason, even if they'll get little to no benefit from causing the grievance they commit and/or are told point-blank by their parent(s) or teacher the consequences for doing so.
• Villain Protagonist: The characters who get grounded in the grounded videos (even though they sometimes may not seem like villains).
• Voice Change Surprise: A common punishment in "(Character) gets his/her voice changed" videos.
• Vocal Dissonance: Whenever a user decides to provide their own voice to a character, particularly when it's a kid who hasn't hit puberty yet voicing a clearly adult character. (Which sounds every bit as off as it sounds.) You could also make a case for most kid characters, who often have adult voice settings given to them that sound nothing like kids, much less the character they may be based on. (Though that can be excused by users having only those voices to work with.)
• Voices Are Mental: In the body-swapping videos or a lot of times when a character is turned into another person.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot:
  • Some characters when they drink lemonade that was made from urine during "Character Makes A 'Lemonade' Stand" videos throw up onscreen.
  • Characters will throw up onscreen when they eat the poop samples that are sold by the troublemaker in "Character Sells Poop Samples" videos.
• Vulgar Humor: Along with Toilet Humor, this is also frequent, and rarely, even have South Park levels of vulgarity or extreme violence, considering most users are kids who love any adult cartoons and anything created exclusively for adults.

W

• Whole-Plot Reference:
  • The "(Character) Gets Held Back" videos play out pretty much like the Beavis and Butt-Head episode "Held Back".
  • The plot of some "(Character) Burns the House Down" videos is taken directly from the SuperMarioLogan episode "Junior's House Fire".
• Wilhelm Scream: Surprisingly, although it's not a Stock Sound Effect found in the program, this has been used in several videos, such as in a short to promote the now-cancelled sequel to GoAnimate: The Movie about PC Guy working at a movie theater, when a customer at the theater falls down.
• With Friends Like These...: Caillou's relationship with his friends and Rosie, most notably. If Rosie and/or Caillou's friends aren't against him from the start, they'll get along well with him. But once Caillou steps out of line, well, you probably know the deal by now.
• Wondrous Ladies Room: The basis of "(Male Character) Uses The Girls' Bathroom" videos is about a male troublemaker deciding to go to the female bathroom in school, either because he just decided to or because the male bathroom was unkempt and gross. Inverted in the rare videos where it's a female troublemaker going to the male bathroom instead.
• Worst Aid: Seen in spades with numerous doctors and nurses in the grounded videos, whose methods of treating the other character's ills sometimes are often incredibly painful or the exact opposite of how you would treat such a thing. (But somehow they almost always work.) Quite often they are even shown doing major operations without any anesthetic, which sometimes makes the patient's condition worse. (But the troublemaker is blamed for it rather than the doctors.) Sometimes they do this on purpose because the patient is someone they don't like or, occasionally, at the insistence of the troublemaker's parents as part of a Punishment Day.
• Worst News Judgment Ever: The recurring TV channel GNN News apparently has the most inexperienced news director in the world, as it spends most of its broadcast day reporting on all cases of children "engaging" their parents and destroying buildings (usually restaurants), as well as chastising parents to immediately ground their children for bomb threats and lockdowns. The former usually has the reporter and witnesses on-scene repeat what occurred during the "engagement" two or three times, then has a studio interview where the "engaged" parent repeats the story one more time while parading the child around to shame them publicly. And this isn't even getting into GNN's inexplicable glee when reporting on child executions for troublemakers.
• Wrongful Accusation Insurance: In Grounded videos where a person is sent to jail, they will always break out of jail to get the person in trouble. They are never sent back.
• Would Hurt a Child: The adult characters (whether they're parents, police, or teachers) typically have no qualms about physically punishing kids, especially Caillou and Dora.

Y

• You Are Grounded!: The whole point of grounded videos.
• You Don't Look Like You: Trying to recreate some characters from existing works will make them look... really weird. Notable examples include the trains from Thomas & Friends and Chuggington, all animal characters from Dora the Explorer, and Peppa Pig and her family.

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