Basic Trope: A character can't go up and down stairs, for whatever reason.
- Straight:
- Alice has to look for elevators and ramps.
- Robby Robot has hardware and/or software limitations that prevent him from using stairs.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice cannot even use ramps.
- Every time Robby Robot tries to climb stairs, his software crashes and then his hardware crashes, necessitating repairs and reboots.
- Nobody can use stairs, not even the characters who look like they should be able to.
- Downplayed:
- Alice can use stairs but it is slow and difficult to do so.
- Robby Robot has a secondary means of locomotion reserved for stairs, but it's more energy-efficient to take the elevator.
- Justified:
- Robby Robot has wheels in place of legs, so of course stairs would be a challenge for him.
- Alice's puppy legs are too short. Going up is a big no, and she hasn't tried going down since …You know.
- Alice is a wheelchair user.
- Alice is a baby.
- Inverted:
- Alien Alice has a body built for perpetual cliff-climbing. She can't stand or walk on horizontal surfaces without falling over.
- Robby Robot can handle stairs just fine, but the way his arms are designed (if he even has any) makes it impossible for him to push the elevator buttons.
- Subverted: Alice groans in frustration at a flight of stairs... then presses a Big Red Button on her Super Wheelchair to deploy its rockets.
- Double Subverted: The rockets are out of fuel.
- Parodied: ???
- Zig Zagged: Robby Robot keeps getting rebuilt in different forms, some of which are better at climbing stairs than others.
- Averted
- Everybody can use the stairs.
- There are no stairs.
- Enforced:
- The writers are trying to make An Aesop about the importance of designing buildings to accommodate people with special mobility requirements.
- The work is meant to promote baby-gates that protect babies against Staircase Tumbles.
- Robby Robot has all sorts of cool and useful built-in gadgets that would make him a
God-Mode Sue. The writers gave him this flaw as a means of Holding Back the Phlebotinum.
- Lampshaded: "Hey, has anybody seen an elevator?" "Why do you need... oh, right."
- Invoked: Dirk Dastardly blasts Alice's legs off, then builds his lair with lots and lots of stairs.
- Exploited: Alice and/or Robby Robot start chasing Bob. Bob makes his escape up a flight of stairs.
- Defied:
- Robby Robot upgrades his hardware and software specifically for staircase-compatibility.
- The few stairs that Alice needs to traverse have stairlifts installed.
- Discussed: A team of engineers and computer programmers start chatting over coffee to brainstorm the aforementioned upgrades.
- Conversed: "Poor girl, if only there were more elevators around." "But aren't elevators an extremely risky thing that would only endanger more lives in case of, y'know, a fire?"
- Implied:
- Alice and her friends are in a multi-floor building. Every time her friends start to climb a staircase, Alice leaves, only to rejoin the group a few minutes after they climb the staircase.
- The camera shows Bob repairing Robby Robot at the bottom of a staircase, grumbling, "Dang it, Robby, that's the fifth time this week! I Warned You not to install that locomotion software before I finished debugging it!"
- A stairlift company's van is parked at a nearby house, implying that, unless this is one of the company's employees' home, the trope is being defied.
- Played For Laughs:
- A Staircase Tumble results in Amusing Injuries.
- Continued from Exploited: From the top of the staircase, Bob childishly taunts his thwarted pursuer(s).
- Played For Drama: Robby Robot and Alice are on the second floor of a burning building. The elevators aren't working anymore and there are no ramps. The stairs haven't caught fire yet and would give Robby Robot and Alice a clear path to the exit... if they could use the stairs.
Take the elevator back to Can't Use Stairs
