Humans are social beings, and pretty much all works of fiction portray the social lives of them or reasonably similar entities.
Thus, tropes about social interaction, social behaviour and social structure are so common that we don't list them all here individually. Instead, see the indexes to the right.
Below follows two kinds of tropes:
- A) Those that are about social interaction/behavior/social structure without fitting any of the indexes to the right, and
- B) those that do fit at least one of those indexes, but contain a special focus on social structure... or lack thereof.
Tropes:
Categories:
- Authority Tropes
- Class Relations Index
- Crime and Punishment Tropes
- Dirty Social Tricks
- Discord Tropes
- Empowerment
- Family Tropes
- Friendship Tropes
- Gender and Sexuality Tropes
- Human Rights Issues
- Immigration and Diaspora Tropes
- Indebted Index
- The Jerk Index
- Language Tropes
- Military and Warfare Tropes
- Money Tropes
- Morality Tropes
- The National Index
- Occupation Tropes
- Organization Index
- Politics Tropes
- A Polite Index
- Philosophy Tropes
- Prejudice Tropes
- Psychology Tropes
- Race Tropes
- Rebel Tropes
- Religion Tropes
- Rituals and Ceremonies
- Rivalry Tropes
- Servant Tropes
- A Slave to the Index
- Social Engineering
- These Tropes Are Equal
- Tropes About Taboos
- Values Dissonance
- Victimhood Tropes
- Violence Tropes
- Abomination Accusation Attack: Accusing a person of doing or intending to do something horrible, such as murder or rape.
- Abuse Mistake
- Activist-Fundamentalist Antics: Religious fundamentalists who do nothing but annoy and harass everyone.
- All Therapists Are Muggles
- Both Sides Have a Point: Rather than portray either side of an argument as wrong or right, both sides' views are portrayed as being warranted and valid.
- Category Traitor: A person is considered a traitor to their kind for liking something that goes against their people's culture.
- The Chosen People
- Condescending Compassion: Looking down on someone by mockingly stating you feel sorry for them for being inferior.
- Culture Justifies Anything
- Defiled Forever: The belief that losing one's virginity prior to marriage (often by rape) means that the person is tainted now and that no one would ever want them.
- Fan Flattering
- For Want of a Nail: One single action done by one character is what kicks off the main problem for the work.
- Freedom from Choice
- Future Society, Present Values: A work doesn't age well because of how society has progressed since the work's original release.
- Godwin's Law: Insinuating that someone or something is bad by comparing them to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
- Happiness Is Mandatory: Being openly unhappy is taboo.
- Heteronormative Crusader: A homophobic activist obsessed with combating what they view as sexual deviancy.
- Homosocial Heterosexuality
- The Horseshoe Effect
- Internalized Categorism
- The Missing Faction
- Manufacturing Victims
- Original Position Fallacy
- Opinion Override
- Outdated Hero vs. Improved Society
- Post-Mortem Conversion
- Property of Love
- Romanticized Abuse: Abuse is made to look more attractive than it actually is.
- Scam Religion: A religion is founded solely to trick gullible people out of their money.
- Sex Is Evil, and I Am Horny
- Sham Ceremony
- Subterfuge Judo: When two parties know the imposing intentions of each other, but attempt to improvise in-the-moment ways of avoiding them.
- Son of a Whore: A person who is the child of a prostitute and was fathered by one of their mother's clients.
- Straw Angst
- Too Good for Exploiters: When those who maliciously exploit a previous system want, at any cost, to keep that in place, instead of using a newer, better system.
- Troubled Sympathetic Bigot
- Withholding the Cure
- Would Be Rude to Say "Genocide": A group of people committing a genocide use more benign terms to describe the foul deed to sugarcoat the fact that they're killing an entire race.
- Your Normal Is Our Taboo
