Basic Trope: A fight surrounded by a conveniently placed ball of smoke/dust/etc.
- Straight: When Alice and Bob fight, a ball of smoke surrounds them.
- Exaggerated: All of the fights in the show are in balls of smoke.
- Downplayed:
- The big ball of violence appears only during a brief moment during the fight.
- There's a lot of smoke / dust / etc., but just enough so that there's some good action going on.
- Justified:
- A smoke machine is near the fight.
- The two are brawling so hard that it kicks up dust.
- Inverted: A couple of smoke elementals fight, and human body parts surround them in a ball during said fight.
- Subverted: When Alice and Bob start fighting smoke comes up. But only around the floor.
- Double Subverted: But the smoke engulfs them anyway.
- Parodied:
- Alice and Bob fight inside of a cotton-candy cloud.
- The big ball of violence is made up entirely of onomatopoeia of the fight's sounds: "Pow!", "Bonk!", "Slap!", "Smash!", etc.
- The brawl happens in a Work Com or office setting, and Bob is called back into his shift. He pokes his torso out of the ball, and goes about his work routune—paperwork, photocopying, negotiations—while still inside the ball. He reasssures concerned coworkers by casually mentioning that this "happens all the time". When his shift ends, Alice grabs him by the collar and pulls him back in so that they can get the fight over with already.
- Zig Zagged: Alice and Bob's fight slowly devolves into a ball of smoke. While the smoke surrounds the fight, the scene alternates between onlooker Charlie's reaction to the battle and scenes inside the ball of the two trading blows, performing elaborate wrestling moves, and... playing chess.
- Averted: No ball of smoke surrounds Alice and Bob when they fight.
- Enforced:
- The studio just didn't have the budget/skill to animate a proper fight, so they go for this instead.
- The artists decided to leave the fight to the audience's imagination because Nothing Is Funnier.
- Lampshaded: "Wow, must be a serious fight when you can't even see their whole bodies, just a lot of smoke, or dust, or whatever that is surrounding them,"
- Invoked: Bob kicks up a lot of dust with his attacks in order to mimic this effect.
- Exploited: Alice and Bob purposely fight on a dusty floor so that they don’t have to sweep it by hand.
- Defied: As they fight, onlooker Charlie revs up a fan to blow away the smoke.
- Discussed: "Quit being paranoid, Bob. This isn't some cartoon. Unless we fight in a baseball field, we're not gonna get covered in some dumb cloud of dust."
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: The characters are allergic to dust. The fight isn't shown, the camera instead panning to Carol watching, but suddenly a lot of sneezing is heard.
- Deconstructed:
- The smoke actually obstructs their vision, making the fight harder to maintain.
- The dust and whatever type of particles within said dust causes pain and induce blindness to both Alice and Bob. The fight cannot properly continue.
- Reconstructed: Alice and/or Bob wear goggles during the battle.
- Played For Laughs: Alice gets thrown out of the ball and goes on to do her daily routine, while Bob beats himself up inside the ball.
- Played For Drama: The dust cloud is alive, and it traps Alice and Bob inside of it.
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