Snowclones

Alternate title: What Do You Mean, Our Jesus And Cthulhu Are Different, So Screw The Sliding Scale Of What Measure Is Good and Evil True Art Versus Chekhov's Nightmare Phlebotinum—Everythings Better With Hollywood-Gambit Moments of Doom Ex Machina Ensues, BITCH! (IN SPACE!)

It's a fairly common practice in the wiki to make puns based on pre-existing trope titles. Outside of this wiki, this is called a "snowclone", where in a sentence "X is the new Y", anything the speaker wants to use can be substituted for X and Y.

The term "Snow Clone" originated on Language Log, from multiple examples of people claiming "[Culture X] has [Y] words for [concept Z.]" based on the statement that "Eskimos have 50 words for [50 types of] snow."

But very often, this new trope will have nothing whatsoever to do with its namesake. (And that's bad.)

This index used to be called "Chekhov's Pun" — the title (but not concept) was taken from Chekhov's Gun, a common target of the various punners that frequent TLP. Nightmare Fuel, Nightmare Retardant, Nightmare Dreams, Nightmare Valley, and Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant suggest that this is happening to another trope, though those are directly related to the original article.

Another example is the Just for Pun index, which is a pun on Just for Fun. In fact, many Just for Pun entries were named after other tropes.

The Title Bin was the place where silly wordplay used to go if it couldn't be justified by the trope description, as more creative ways of Naming a Trope should be used. It was eventually deleted as too few of the entries displayed any actual humor.

See also Everything's Worse with Snowclones for more reasons that you shouldn't name tropes this way.

Index of Snowclones:

Alternative Title(s): Snowclone, Chekhovs Pun

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