They have their uses
Tropes that cover things that distract or divert a character's attention, whether by accident or design, as well as the characters that plan or fall for them.
For examples of things that might distract you, the reader, from something you really should be doing instead, see Wiki Walk and TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life.
Tropes:
- Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: A character is easily distracted by the most trivial of things.
- Cacophony Cover Up: Covering up a loud noise with an equally or greater loud noise.
- Centipede's Dilemma: When asked how they are able to do something, the character loses their ability due to being too focused on figuring out how it is so.
- Chasing a Butterfly
- Convenient Decoy Cat
- Conveniently Timed Distraction
- Covering for the Noise
- Crashing Through the Harem
- Cuteness Proximity: When a person sees someone or something adorable, their first instinct is to stop whatever they're doing and gush about how cute the cute person or thing is.
- Decoy Convoy
- Delicious Distraction
- Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?
- Distracted by the Sexy: Someone gets distracted by an attractive person.
- Distracted by My Own Sexy: Someone gets distracted by their own reflection.
- Distracting Disambiguation
- Draw Aggro
- Easily Distracted Referee
- Escort Distraction
- Fake-Out Make-Out
- Fakin' MacGuffin
- Freudian Slippery Slope
- Girls Stare at Scenery, Boys Stare at Girls
- Go Fetch
- Hey, Catch!
- Hitchhiker's Leg
- Inconvenient Itch
- Infraction Distraction
- Institutional Allegiance Concealment
- Kiss of Distraction
- Look Behind You: You escape someone pursuing you by lying that something they'd be interested in seeing is behind them so that they'd temporarily turn away from you.
- Not Distracted by the Sexy: Someone tries to be flirty to another person, but the person they're trying to seduce only ignores their advances.
- Not Listening to Me, Are You?: Someone tries talking to a distracted person.
- Outfit Decoy
- Paralysis by Analysis
- Privacy by Distraction: Distracting someone so you can have some privacy.
- Pushed at the Monster: Someone deliberately trips up another to distract someone, usually a monster, chasing them.
- Show Some Leg
- Smoke Out
- Throwing the Distraction
- We Need a Distraction
- Wild Goose Chase
Wait, what's that behind you?!
~Disappears~
