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Snowclones
(aka: Snowclone)

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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 vs. Chekhov's Nightmare Phlebotinum! Everything's Better with Adverbly Adjective Hollywood-Gambit Moments of Doom Ex Machina, BITCH! (IN SPAAAAACEE!!!!)

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 "snowclone" 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 snow."

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

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.

Bear in mind that Tropes are Tools, so not every example given below is bad. Subtropes named after pre-existing trope titles or supertropes can make it easier to remember what those subtropes are.


Index of Snowclones:

    open/close all folders 
    #-D 
    E-I 
    J-P 
    Q-Z 

Alternative Title(s): Snowclone, Chekhovs Pun

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