Basic Trope: A person claims something by planting a flag.
- Straight:
- Bob lands on a new continent and sticks his flag in the soil to indicate he owns it.
- Bob takes over a fort from emperor Evulz and replaces Evulz' flag with his own.
- Exaggerated: Bob plants millions of flags to indicate that he owns the continent/fort.
- Downplayed: Bob plants a flag as a petition for a stake in the land.
- Justified:
- Many people in Bob's world can't read, but they can recognize flags.
- Flags are designed to be recognizable from a distance so that others can be told that this land is claimed, with the implicit threat of retaliation that goes with it if this is interfered with — doing so while potential enemies are far away serves as a deterrent to violence.
- Inverted: A previously-planted flag is removed, either by Bob to indicate he or the country he represents is relinquishing claim on that land, by someone else to more forcefully contest Bob('s country's) control of a land (without planting a flag of their own, perhaps as an intentional diplomatic gesture to indicate that they consider the land's ownership status undetermined at this time), or simply by time and weather eventually withering the flag away as no one has actively kept up the assertion of ownership in a long time for whatever reason.
- Subverted:
- Bob walks up a hill and sticks something firmly in the dirt...which turns out to be a walking stick.
- As Bob plants the flag, we zoom out to see the school auditorium where he's performing while the flag is acknowledged as an acceptable piece of Hollywood History
- Double Subverted:
- … Which he then uses as a flagpole.
- … except it really happened in the historic event depicted.
- Zig-Zagged: ???
- Parodied: Bob uses flags to claim everything, including food.
- Lampshaded:Bob: With this flag, I claim this land for Troperia!
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: Bob climbs off his ship into new land carrying a flag and later returns without it.
- Defied: The continent forcibly removes the flag because in their eyes, flags don't automatically mean you own the whole thing. You have to fight for it.
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