Basic Trope: A random chasm or drop that kills you if you fall in it. Alternately, a pit that is effectively as deep as it needs to be.
- Straight: There is a massive chasm ahead on the hero’s path, and it’s so deep the bottom is invisible...whether due to camera issues or light issues. Jumping in leads to death.
- Exaggerated: The pit serves as a barrier to all passages, as it’s long enough to fill the horizon.
- Downplayed:
- Non-Lethal Bottomless Pits
- You can actually see the bottom of the pit, but it's obviously fatal to jump into due to it's depth.
- Justified:
- The game’s set on a Shattered World: of course these are everywhere.
- They’re literally bottomless, being holes in space-time that are more like black holes than true pits.
- Inverted:
- Jumping down the pit is the only way to save yourself from an otherwise unavoidable barrage of arrows.
- The pit opens in the roof and reverse gravity, sending you flying upwards into the stratosphere
- Subverted:
- The hero fails to jump over the pit... And it turns out that it’s actually rather short, and the pit just had a darkness spell over it to make it look deep.
- The winged hero falls down the pit… and then flies out. Duh.
- The hero jumps into the pit and emerges from the top of the screen.
- Double Subverted:
- The hero hits a trapdoor, and THAT one is bottomless.
- He’s then pulled back in by a massive hand that emerges from the darkness of the pit.
- Parodied:
- A villain falls down the bottomless pit. Once an Episode, for the rest of the series, they cut back to him doing something random.
- The pits are literally everywhere; inside houses, on walls, even inside chests!
- Zig Zagged: It’s actually a tunnel: anything going in will be thrown out the other side of the planet, neatly charbroiled due to the earth’s core.
- Averted: All pits have visible ends.
- Enforced: It’s a platform game.
- Lampshaded:
- “Seriously? A yawing chasm into oblivion? In a CASTLE? Who make these things?”
- “Ahh, it’s another one of those mysterious death pits isn’t it?” “How cliché. But they’re not disappearing anytime soon.”
- Invoked:
- Emperor Evulz insists on putting the pits everywhere.
- You gain an item mid-game that lets you put them anywhere you want.
- Exploited:
- You can kick your enemies into the pit. Screaming about ancient Greek city states while doing so is optional.
- The pit is used as garbage disposal.
- Defied: Bottomless Pit Rescue Service
- Discussed: “Why did you think that would work? I can FLY!”
- Conversed: “Why do you always die at the bottom of the pit? It’s not like you can hit the ground!”
- Implied: The hero drops a torch down the pit, and it disappears into blackness before hitting the bottom. He wisely decides to avoid it.
- Deconstructed:
- If you fall into a bottomless pit, you die of thirst. It takes days to die that way…in and out of game.
- Building all those pits has exhausted Evulz’s resources for little actual gain, as they do comparatively little to stop the hero’s progress.
- Anything that falls into a pit is lost forever. The pit will gradually drain natural resources and disrupt the ecosystem of any planet it’s on prevent it being recycled and slowly turning it into a barren wasteland.
- Reconstructed:
- The hero has a Cyanide Pill for this exact purpose.
- …Allowing Baron Bloodfirst to take over easily, who abuses the pits mercilessly.
- Anything going down the pit ends up in a new, stranger ecosystem, like deep sea ecosystems on earth. This allows some nutrients to be cycled back to ground level.
- Played For Laughs: The hero laughs off the idea he could fall into one of these pits, and then immediately trips over one.
- Played For Drama: The hero lost a loved one down the pit, and doesn’t even have a Tragic Keepsake to show for it.
- Played For Horror: Those who fall down the pit will go insane from being surrounded by nothing but blackness until they eventually die of thirst.
Respawn back at the Bottomless Pit main page.
