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.
- Caught Monologuing: Taking action while your opponent is busy talking.
- 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: A distraction that wasn't planned happens at a critical moment.
- 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: Distracting someone with food (often a Big Eater).
- Derailed Train of Thought: Forgetting what you were talking about in favor of an unrelated topic.
- 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: Two people kiss to divert attention from others.
- Fakin' MacGuffin
- Freudian Slippery Slope
- Girls Stare at Scenery, Boys Stare at Girls
- Go Fetch: Distracting a dog by playing fetch with it.
- Hey, Catch!
- Hitchhiker's Leg
- Inconvenient Itch: Being distract by an itch at an inappropriate moment.
- Infraction Distraction
- Institutional Allegiance Concealment
- Kiss of Distraction: Kissing someone to distract them.
- 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
- Primp of Contempt: Being distracted from what’s going on in front of you because your nails need filing and your hair needs some fixing.
- 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
- Sidetracked by the Analogy: Someone gets distracted thinking of the literal sense of an anology.
- Smoke Out: Someone activates a smoke bomb as a distraction to escape.
- Throwing the Distraction: Throwing something to distract a person.
- We Need a Distraction
- Wild Goose Chase: Sending someone on a fake mission to distract them.
Wait, what's that behind you?!
~Disappears~
