"It's like they knew that we had seen this movie before, and we knew the curves they were gonna throw at us, but they made the curves just a little bit sharper than usual."
— The Distressed Watcher, on The Hangover, from his 2009 Top 10 movies list
When the writers decide to play with a trope by raising the results to the extreme.
Since Tropes Are Flexible, they can be taken to various degrees. This is about taking them to degrees much higher than typical, often to ridiculous extremes.
In short, this is why The Same, but More warns that higher degrees of tropes alone are not new tropes. Those are simply Playing with a Trope.
This is usually done for parody, but there can be other reasons to do this.
Compare Troperiffic, Serial Escalation, Refuge in Audacity, Logical Extreme, Crosses the Line Twice.
Contrast Downplayed Trope.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Speaking of Power Levels, Dragon Ball would occasionally switch to a new system of power measurement, likely to avert doing this.
- Space Runaway Ideon, GunBuster and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann do this with Humongous Mecha, featuring impossibly powerful and unbelievably massive giant robots.
- Negima! Magister Negi Magi exaggerates quite a bunch of tropes, such as School Festival (which is so large-scale it gives Disneyland a run for its money) and BFS (at one point, a character wields a sword the size of a building).
- Monster does this to Self-Made Orphan; growing up, Johan Liebert killed at least five sets of foster parents.
- Strawberry Panic! exaggerates Schoolgirl Lesbians.
- As does Sakura Trick, where the main couple makes it their mission to kiss every chapter.
- Queen's Blade exaggerates fanservice.
- Same goes to Ikki Tousen, to the point where some readers complained.
- Ecchi series Eiken exaggerates Gag Boobs to the point of extreme parody. The fact that even the 12-year old had boobs the size of her head was enough to get the series cut from the wiki.
- Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei exaggerates social commentary by making the eponymous teacher prone to committing suicide over everything that is not right about society.
- Elfen Lied takes Humans Are Bastards to stupidly unrealistic levels in an attempt to make the Diclonius and specially Lucy into poor little victims. To the point that, by the end, many viewers and potentially, some characters, simply don't care anymore.
- One character of Penguin Musume, Saki, exagarate Moe by cumulating nearly every major Moe tropes. Of course, this make Sakura Crazy about her.
- Digimon Frontier exaggerates Plot Armor Variant of Made of Iron.
- Kill la Kill exaggerates numerous tropes, both for laughs and deconstruction.
- Absurdly Powerful Student Council: With people getting expelled or even executed for the tinest of infractions, their capabilities of annexing other schools, and even having a student's status at school affect their quality of life in the city surrounding it, Honnouji Academy can be likened to a totalitarian regime.
- Coming-of-Age Story: Not only is the story exclusively female (which is rare for a Coming-of-Age Story), but every single cliche is cranked up until the knob pops off. Blood as a metaphor for menstruation? Have superpowered over-sexed clothing that drinks the blood of its wearer. A Rich Bitch Alpha Bitch Student Council President? She's trying to take over the country. High school feels like everyone is against you? Here, they are literally trying to kill you.
- Fanservice: The main character fights in a garter-belt bikini, every fight ends with the loser being stripped naked, and Mikisugi spends most of his screentime sensually removing his clothes for no reason at all.
- Bare Your Midriff: Ryuko does this a lot and wears many outfits. Her Pyjamas even do this as well besides from the usual Senketsu and so does her Motorbike outfit. Due to the Stripperiffic outfits, most of the other female characters do this as well at some point, as well as Mako's Fight Club uniform.
- Full-Frontal Assault: The rebels are literally nudists.
- Hot-Blooded: When Ryuko gets angry enough, her blood literally boils, causing problems for the symbiotic clothing that drinks it.
- Power Glows: Satsuki and her mother Ragyo both produce massive lights like stage effects at all times—Satsuki's lights are pure white, while Ragyo's are rainbow-colored. It's to the point that Ragyo's subordinates wear sunglasses at all times. In addition, Mikisugi's nipples and crotch glow pink.
- Your Size May Vary: Ira Gamagoori always towers over everyone else. If that means he has to grow some fifty feet to properly tower, then so be it.
- In Ceres, Celestial Legend, the exaggeration of Gory Discretion Shot in the scene where Mikage-in-Aki's body tortures Tooya via repeatedly gunning him down and taking advantage of his Healing Factor that won't let him die was so over the top that the scene itself was... funnier than it was probably intended.
Comic Books
- DC Comics Doomsday exaggerates Dumb Muscle.
Fan Works
- Hetalia: Axis Powers fanfic Gankona, Unnachgiebig, Unità
: Let's just say Italy's superspeed was taken Up to Eleven from just being able to run fast to being able to travel from Japan to Germany within a few hours. A few hours.
- the whole Call of Dooty Doom Mod are Take That! against Call of Duty series.
- Ultraman Moedari takes some Ultra Series tropes, most notably the multiverse concept of the Zero Film Trilogy, and takes them beyond eleven. So much so that there are categories for groups of multiverses. Previous hero's powers? Take them all and combine them!
Films — Animation
- Tangled:
- The Frying Pan of Doom is exaggerated to the extent that at the end of the movie, frying pans are made the official weapon of the town guards.
- The movie also exaggerates Light Is Good. As quoted from the trope example: "Rapunzel, a gentle, caring girl who is a Friend to All Living Things, loves daylight (as well as starlight) and has golden hair because her mother ingested a flower that had grown from a drop of liquid sunlight."
Films — Live-Action
- Starship Troopers: Any tropes about war, army, etc...
- Avatar: Going Native. The protagonist physically becomes one of the People.
- Lifetime movies exaggerate pretty much every trope that makes men look bad.
- Lifetime movies about eating disorders tend to exaggerate the effects. Starving in Suburbia actually has the main girl manifesting her eating disorder into an imaginary friend who she converses with and in one scene the mother inspects the smell coming from her daughter's closet and finds she had been stuffing food in her pockets and it was left there so long it went rancid.
- The TRON universe (films, games, comics, animated series) have Good Colors, Evil Colors and Tron Lines as Exaggerated and Justified Tropes. A Program's circuitry patterns and coloration indicate their loyalties, native system, and relative social class. If a character changes their social position or loyalties, their circuitry will change to match.
- 1982's slasher-parody Pandemonium satirized the various "hand tools as murder implements" tropes ubiquitous to the subgenre, with a baddie who not only killed with power tools, but converted his victims' remains into furniture afterwards. And was very good at it, such that his victims' "corpses" are portrayed by actual cabinets, dressers, and end tables.
Literature
- The House of Leaves is much, much Bigger on the Inside.
- Discworld:
- Rincewind's mother "ran away before he was born." This is never explained, because it is unexplainable.
- Monstrous Regiment, in which every single enlisted soldier in the squad is a Sweet Polly Oliver, even the legendary sergeant who leads them and at least a third of the Borogravian High Command.
- Dulcinea del Toboso is a Shadow Archetype that Don Quixote imagined from a peasant girl called Aldonza Lorenzo. She represents for him all that is lovable about a woman without any of the defects of a real person, emboding the Satellite Love Interest. (Nobody is more shallow than a shadow).
- H. P. Lovecraft does this with Puny Earthlings trope
- The Planet's Revenge in Judas Unchained is this for Weather of War.
- Our Werewolves Are Different, but Jim Butcher's werewolves in his second The Dresden Files novel Fool Moon are even different from each other; the book features four entirely dissimilar and unrelated kinds of werewolf. Later books give the exact same treatment to Our Vampires Are Different, too.
- Children of the Lens does this with Earth Shattering Kabooms, as a result of being the final book in the Trope Namer series for the Lensman Arms Race. Planets are used as anti-missile missiles, to counter planet-sized negaspheres aimed at Arisia.
- Don't forget the planets that the good guys borrowed from the other dimension, which has the speed of light as a low bound (ie, everything in it is moving much much faster than light). Transporting two of these planets to our dimension on a collision course such that they meet with the bad guys planet between them, gives new meaning to the equation F=0.5mv(squared), when 'm' is two planetary masses and 'v' is two times many times the speed of light.
Live-Action TV
- iCarly does this with Comedic Sociopathy.
- A Too Dumb to Live drug dealer in the Castle episode "Sucker Punch" has an exaggerated version of Cut Himself Shaving inflicted on him. His injuries are very obviously the result of being beaten half to death by the local Irish mob ("very obviously," as in Castle and Beckett literally walked in on the beating), but he explains it as having fallen down the stairs. And his eye being swollen shut due to having hit a door on his way down. And his mangled hand as a result of getting it caught in a grate at the bottom.
Castle: Well. Thanks for keeping it real.
- Blackadder Goes Forth: "A fate worse than a Fate Worse than Death? ...That's pretty bad."
- In How I Met Your Mother, Victoria and Klaus were simultaneously treating each other as Disposable Fiances. Victoria is convinced to write a note to Klaus, but when Ted goes to drop it off, he bumps into Klaus himself... who was also running away from the marriage and ditching Victoria. Turns out that he realized that she is almost what he wants, but not quite.
- Father Ted exaggerates Badass Cape with Bishop Brennan, whose cape somehow grow in size when he gets pissed.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - In the episode "House Of Quark," D'Ghor gets disowned by the Klingons openly for threatening to kill Quark, when unarmed. However, it's the way this scene is excuted that makes it seem like it devolved, hilariously, into self-parody. It's more hilarious than serious. Leans on narm.
Music
- Tom Waits does this with the Star-Crossed Lovers trope in his song "Fish and Bird". This doesn't stop the song from being a legitimately sad tear-jerker.
- On Something/Anything?, Todd Rundgren does this to the Distinct Double Album trope: each of the four LP sides has its own individual concept.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40,000:
- In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only grimdarkness turned up to 40,000!
- Pretty much every other trope that it uses: Hyper Space Is A Scary Place (it is hell, quite literally), Warrior Monk, Super Soldier, Church Militant (those last three all relate to each other), BFG, BFS (often combined with Chainsaw Good), Cool Tank, Tank Goodness, We Have Reserves (to the point where the Chinese forces in the Korean War and the Red Army seem to be places where you have a decent chance of survival in comparison to the Imperial Guard), Kill It with Fire, and Black-and-Grey Morality (verging on Evil vs. Evil frequently) are some of the most obviously exaggerated ones.
- Exalted exaggerates... well... as many tropes as it's (super-)humanly possible to put in a heroic fantasy. To not exaggerate the length of this page we suggest you to head on to its works page.
Video Games
- Disgaea does this with Character Levels, including going literally Over Nine Thousand.
- Book 2 of Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem exaggerates Heroes Prefer Swords, as axes are relegated to being Unusable Enemy Equipment, and cavalry units are forced to dismount in indoor chapters, thereby switching to swords. With Knights being the only melee units that can equip lances in indoor chapters, it's not unlikely to have a large chunk of the player's army equip swords at a given time.
- Mega Man Battle Network = Everything Is Online. No, everything. That doghouse out front, too. And the squirrel statue.
- Ōkami does this with Friend to All Living Things, cranking up Amaterasu's animal magnetism far beyond "fuzzy woodland creatures love her" to reach "flowers literally bloom wherever she walks."
- As shown above, the hairstyle of Rival Schools' Yurika Kirishima takes Ojou Ringlets to a ridiculous level.
- Touhou Soccer does this to most things that appear in it. For example, its take on Absurdly Sharp Blade has Youmu cut the moon in half with her katana.
- In Dragon Age II, the silly dialogue got this treatment.
- Ginormo Sword. Take a guess.
- The X-Encyclopedia makes mention of several Planet Spaceship built by Kardashev-abusing Sufficiently Advanced Aliens that are each the size of an entire solar system.
- Asura's Wrath does this for any Rage and anger tropes, as well as super strength, and, later, Humongous Mecha tropes similar to the anime examples above in it's final DLC chapter.
- Viva Piñata exaggerates Amazing Technicolor Wildlife.
- In Minecraft, an inch-deep puddle of water will completely negate any and all falling damage, even if you're falling at terminal velocity.
- Silver Surfer is one of the most ludicrous examples of Badass Decay in all of fiction.
"I CAN'T TOUCH THE RED POT?"—The Angry Video Game Nerd in his review of the game.
- While the first Shining Force plays Earthquakes Cause Fissues straight after the first battle, its sequel exaggerates this much further by having the earthquake open up an enormous chasm surrounding the Ground Seal, which swallows an entire kingdom and most of a mountain.
Visual Novels
- Fate/stay night does this with Earn Your Happy Ending. Shirou goes through Hell, literally at one point, to get to the true ending of Heaven's Feel.
- The School Days franchise exaggerates Murder the Hypotenuse, with several bad endings invoking it.
Web Animation
- Similar to the South Park example below, the creators (who lampshaded it in their segment) of The Most Popular Girls in School exaggerated Potty Failure by revealing in Episode 29 that Deandra the New Girl pooped outside of her pants, all over her cheer squad, on everything within a 30-foot radius, and on the city!
Brittnay: [about to puke] Oh, oh, oh my god, please stop, I'm gonna be sick. Ulp!
Deandra: When you pressure-blast Mountain Dew out of your anus it's not easily forgotten! After that, I was ruined. I wasn't just the girl who pooped her pants. I was the girl who monster dumped on two prom court members, a candy cane princess, and the junior class treasurer!
Webcomics
- 8-Bit Theater:
- It does this with Tempting Fate. "Everything is good and it will be that way forever!"
- It also does this with Brick Jokes. An off-hand comment in episode 7 turned out to be foreshadowing for an important plot point in episode 1221, almost nine years later.
- Homestuck:
- Dave Strider has to do this with Breakable Weapons. Due to how Abstratii work, when one of his swords break in half, ALL of his swords break in half, and he's unable to equip any swords until they get broken as well.
- Homestuck does a Planet of the Apes-homage Earth All Along reveal not by showing a ruined Statue of Liberty, but by showing that the surface of the planet is littered with thousands of shitty old Statues of Liberty.
- Square Root of Minus Garfield exaggerates Dream Within a Dream in Recursive Nightmare and Y Combinator Garfield, which enter an infinite dream loop.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal exaggerates Deconstruction.
Web Original
- SCP Foundation: SCP-2000 exaggerates the Reset Button trope with an extremely long narrative, relentless Techno Babble and a very convoluted process to actually hit the button. Oh, and it's been used several times before. The current iteration of the Foundation broke the damn thing so that it doesn't actually work anymore, though.
Western Animation
- A lot of the Disney Princess artwork really loves to crank up Everything's Better with Sparkles.
- Phineas and Ferb:
- The Hilariously Abusive Childhood of Doctor Doofenshmirtz's Multiple-Choice Past: "It all started when I was born. Neither of my parents showed up." He had to pretend to be a lawn gnome after theirs was repossessed, he had to wear dresses, he wasn't allowed to go swimming in public pools, his father preferred the dog and named it "Only Son" and he was abandoned and raised by ocelots.
- Phineas and Ferb's Homemade Inventions—they think nothing of building a mountain ski resort in their backyard, a rollercoaster that spans the city or two spacecraft and mission control with a free morning, and Candace's inevitable case of It Was Here, I Swear!: whatever it is, and however much of a mess it should leave behind, everything vanishes without trace by the time she tries to show their parents.
- Done in Adventure Time with Affectionate Pickpocket: When Finn and Jake assume they converted little orphan girl/thief Penny into living a new life, she gives Finn a thank you hug... then runs off after swiping all his clothes!
- South Park:
- The episode "World Wide Recorder Concert" exaggerates Potty Failure. When the boys slip the brown noise into the sheet music of rivals, it accidentally gets added to the sheet music for the entire concert, which is being broadcast worldwide...
Reporter: Like the rest of the world, everyone here has crapped their pants. Some crapped themselves to death. And still others ...ruined perfectly good pairs of pants.
- They do this a lot, especially how they exaggerate Hell seeing as how it has a million times more people than Heaven. In "Best Friends Forever" we also exaggerate Off Screen Moment Of Awesome as Kenny leads an army outnumbered a million to one and wins.
- The episode "World Wide Recorder Concert" exaggerates Potty Failure. When the boys slip the brown noise into the sheet music of rivals, it accidentally gets added to the sheet music for the entire concert, which is being broadcast worldwide...
- The SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Kracked Krabs" exaggerates Stealing from the Hotel. Mr. Krabs and SpongeBob winded up stealing the entire room. They even call it "exaggerating".
- Drawn Together exaggerates nearly every trope it uses. In the first episode, it's revealed that Xandir has died millions of times.
- In The Simpsons, Ralph Wiggum is such an extreme example of The Ditz that at times one wonders if he has any functional brain cells. At one time, this wiki had its own trope called "Ralph Wiggum" which worked as an exaggeration of The Ditz.
- The Ren & Stimpy episode "Fake Dad" does this with Real Men Eat Meat when the huge, burly convict Kowalski requests a meat on meat sandwich [toasted], which he washes down with a glass of meat.
- In the original batman comics, Batman's villain The Ventriloquist act is mediocre, because Scarface has an Speech Impediment (he substitutes the letter "B" for a letter "G", an infortunate fact if you are going to fight "Gatman and Rogin") that is a common problem with Ventriloquism. Batman: The Animated Series exaggerates Adaptational Intelligence upgrading the Ventriloquist skills to ridiculous levels: Scarface not only can perfectly pronounce the letter "B" on all his appeareances in the show, but "Read My Lips" shows the batcomputer analyzing The Ventriloquist and Scarface's voices like two different people. Also, Batman knew the greatest ventriloquist of his time, recognized as the world's best Stage Magician, Zatara (Zatanna's father) and believes the Ventriloquist could teach him lessons. So now the Ventriloquist act is so good he can fool an Artificial Intelligence and he can give lessons to the best Ventriloquist in the world.
