Follow TV Tropes

Following

Playing With / Artifact Title

Go To

Basic Trope: A title that used to apply to a work, but no longer does so.

  • Straight: The show Alice the Teenage Troper keeps its title long after Alice turns twenty years old and troping stops being the main focus of the show.
  • Exaggerated:
    • Alice the Teenage Troper and the Search for Power Crystals is a Long Runner that keeps its title, even though Power Crystals became irrelevant by the first season, Alice is thirty-three, has changed her name to Bella, and has been Put on a Bus. Oh, and no one is a troper.
    • Alice turns twenty in the middle of the first season.
    • Alice turns twenty in the pilot episode.
  • Downplayed:
  • Justified: Alice may be over nineteen, but still acts like a teenager.
  • Inverted:
    • Alice the Teenage Troper begins with Alice being a ten-year-old non-troper, but in the second-season finale, she becomes a Troper and is now fourteen years old.
    • Alice the Teenage Troper began with the Working Title of Alice the Young Woman, but somehow the series got its name changed — yet Alice remains twenty years old and the series has nothing to do with tropes.
  • Subverted: Alice celebrating her twentieth birthday turns out to be All Just a Dream.
  • Double Subverted: The real Alice is now a thirty-year-old who dreams of her past as a Troper.
  • Parodied: "On this episode of Chocolate Deodorant of Alice the Teenage Troper and the Origami Cat Food: Alice celebrates her twentieth birthday... and we ruin the only meaningful part of the title!"
  • Zig Zagged: The show jumps back and forth in time and Alice can never decide whether she wants to continue troping.
  • Averted:
    • The show stops before Alice's twentieth birthday.
    • The show uses Comic-Book Time.
    • When Alice turns twenty, the new season gets a new name, and the "Teenage Troper" part of the title is retconned into being a subtitle.
    • After Alice moves out to go off to college, she leaves the show (despite the character still being a teenager for at least another year). The show now focuses on her younger cousin, also named Alice.
    • The title was a Word Salad Title or Never Trust a Title. It never accurately described the work.
  • Enforced:
    • "If we change the title, moronic viewers won't understand that we're still doing the same show."
    • The show has a invokedFan Dumb. Changing the title will result in They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.
  • Lampshaded: "Hey, wasn't our title more accurate before Alice turned twenty?"
  • Invoked: Bob tries to persuade Alice to cease troping.
  • Exploited: ???
  • Defied:
    • Alice refuses to stop troping and gets the show trapped in a time loop.
    • Meaningful Rename
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: "When was Alice the Teenage Troper about a teenager named Alice that tropes?"
  • Implied: Alice's age is not mentioned directly, but the show has gone on for eight years, so if Alice started the series as a teenager, she isn't any more.
  • Deconstructed: The audience wants nothing to do with a work whose title has nothing to do with it any more.
  • Reconstructed: However, they get curious about the earlier seasons and watch them instead.
  • Played For Laughs: The characters intentionally try to make the work's title obsolete, with various results.

Back to Artifact Title

Top