Basic Trope: Living in the real world is preferable to watching too much escapist fiction.
- Straight: Bob learns An Aesop that escapism isn't good for him and leaves behind his dream world to return to reality.
- Exaggerated:
- Just about everyone learns that reality is far better than fiction.
- Fiction as a whole is portrayed as bad and creativity is the greatest force of evil in the setting.
- Downplayed: Bob learns not to have too much escapism.
- Justified:
- Bob realizes that escapism doesn't make his issues go away.
- Bob's dream world is actually destroying reality, especially his loved ones.
- Staying in the dream world will cause Bob to die of starvation.
- Bob comes from a culture where avoiding an unpleasant reality is deemed as cowardly and immature.
- Inverted: Bob learns that it's ok to indulge in the escapist pastimes he loves rather than feeling guilty and self-hating for not toughening up and facing reality, especially when he's not nearly mentally healthy enough to face it.
- Bob finds his attempts at being less escapist and forcing himself to focus on the "Real World" leads to Creative Sterility and losing what made him who he was.
- Bob lives in a simulation world and disdains it, wanting to get back to reality, but realizes that everyone in that world is conscious like him and he can't just dismiss and destroy their lives arbitrarily because they are "not real".
- Bob's disdain for escapism is shown to have made him an Indubitably Uninteresting Individual who's considered a bore by everyone around him.
- Bob stops taking time out for fantasy when the real world becomes too much, thinking it'll make him more conscientious and proactive. What actually happens is constant exposure to real world problems desensitises him and makes him far less inclined to act on them.
- Bob is autistic and needs to indulge in his interests a great deal. Taking them away, or even reducing them to a "healthy" level by neurotypical standards, causes debilitating anxiety, overwhelm and burnout.
- Subverted:
- Bob learns that he shouldn't spend too much time watching TV... because it will mess up his eyesight.
- Bob decides that his obsession with fiction is best shelved... after winning a 320-billion-dollar contest because said obsession gave him the answers and he has no further need to worry for anything else in reality.
- Double Subverted:
- And because "Come on, Bob, you have a life to live away from the idiot box."
- It's a pain in the neck to deal with the IRS if you keep your nose in a Twitter feed, however.
- Parodied: Alice runs around yelling at anyone who enjoys any sort of media.
- Zig Zagged: Bob constantly goes back and forth on the goods and harms of escapism.
- Averted: There is no lesson, or if there is, it focuses on neither the good nor the bad of escapism.
- Enforced: "People are too hooked on their own worlds. I'll give out this lesson that escapism is bad just to get them back to reality."
- Lampshaded: Bob says that his life has improved dramatically since he left his escapist dream world.
- Invoked: Bob's friends head to the dream world to convince Bob to come back to reality.
- Exploited:
- Therapists begin lucrative programs to help people leave escapism and face reality.
- The Big Bad's Evil Plan is to demolish all escapism so the people he bullies will have no other option but to suffer forevermore.
The Big Bad: Grow up, loser! - Defied:
- "Fuck reality! They're just saying escapism is wrong because they hate seeing people happier than they are."
- "I love to watch TV. And that is shows, not news. I only need to drive from work to home and back to see how fucked up the city has become and I want to shut down my brain for half an hour so I don't feel like splattering it all over the wall. If you don't like that, FUCK YOU!!"
- Discussed: Alice talks about how much better her life with Bob has become since he stopped obsessing over his escapist world of choice.
- Conversed:
- "Do these writers truly think they'll convince us that escapism is bad even though they're doing this on a escapist-based work?"
- "I know there's guys in real life who take it too damn far and are so loud that they paint the whole fanbase as madmen without really trying, but porttaying every single fan of Alice and Bob: The Series, and that is all fifty million of them as mentioned in the opening Info Dump, as freaking feckless junkies is just asking for the audience to be very deeply offended, especially nowadays."
- Implied: Various opinions on escapism are delivered in a balanced way, so it's not clear what the author's position is. However, in the end, the strongest arguments are against escapism.
- Deconstructed:
- Bob chooses reality, but after spending enough time in his perfect escapist world, the dreary hardships of reality makes him absolutely miserable. He spends the rest of his life wishing he had stayed.
- Bob chooses reality, but then things go From Bad to Worse. This leads Bob to question how could anyone consider reality better than fiction when the former is filled with such evils such as suffering, war, corruption, poverty, and disease.
- Fiction brought some genuine benefits to Bob's life, and he's not as happy without it.
- Alice takes away all of Bob's escapism in the hopes that he'll mentally toughen up and start "facing" reality, only to learn the hard way that Bob used escapism as an emotional crutch to help with his mental illness and problems that are otherwise out of his controlnote . Rather than become a stronger person, Bob spirals even further into depression and self-loathing until he ultimately kills himself, much to Alice's shock.
- The reality that Alice wants Bob to return to is a Crapsack World where nothing is ever going to be "better". Alice knows this and as a result, has a hard time trying to find a means to convince Bob to return from his Crapsack World, Escapist Sanctuary.
- Alice thinks she's doing this trope by taking away all of Bob's hobbies, but in reality Bob was a very normal guy with a functional lifestyle and a normal desire to have something in his life to let off some steam, which Alice just destroyed (hobby and maybe even lifestyle, if she really screwed up). The result then becomes Alice being seen by everybody else as a bullying killjoy and ostracized.
- Bob knows that fantasy is no substitute for reality. So, knowing how much better fantasy is, he sets to work on making it a worthwhile substitute, deliberately changing his perception of reality to match his fantasy. After all, if Your Mind Makes It Real, why not take advantage of it?
- The Anti-Escapism Aesop is used by a government or similar to divert attention away from structural issues in the system and shunt the blame onto the common folk who are struggling underneath their regime, calling them lazy and useless, leading to them becoming increasingly ostracized and sinking even further into escapism.
- Fiction is just fine in moderation. Bob managed to find all the benefits of escapism without any of the negative effects.
- Reconstructed: In the end, Bob would always slowly but surely get addicted to fiction; Slowly falling into an escapist dreamland, to the point he doesn't know the difference between reality and fiction.
- Played for Laughs: Bob is a geeky neckbeard virgin who's constantly glued to his computer/television screen, and his unsocial personality is exploited for all the mockery it's worth.
- Played for Drama: Bob is a sad, pathetic loser suffering from depression, absorbing himself in fiction and daydreams in a desperate attempt at distracting himself from his problems.
- Played for Horror: Real Life is a hard-core Crapsack World and the representation of "escapism" within the show's universe is a fatal Lotus-Eater Machine that causes starvation-related Body Horror. Either option will get you killed, but one is indisputably the more visibly disturbing way of dying.
Back to Anti-Escapism Aesop, but don't stay too long, because otherwise, TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life.
