Basic Trope: A character (usually, though not always, female) who is very sick.
- Straight: Alice is an attractive young woman stricken with Soap Opera Disease, which does nothing to hamper her appearance except for pale skin. Said disease makes her love interest Bob want to protect and take care of her.
- Exaggerated: The only indication Alice is even sick is her lying in bed for extended periods, and giving melodramatic poetic speeches about the futility of life.
- Downplayed: Alice's Soap Opera Disease does have some physical symptoms such as hacking cough and blood trickling from her mouth.
- Justified: People get sick. And sometimes, especially in times or places where there isn't modern medicine (or where there is, but no cure is as yet available), people's lives can be cut short by the disease.
- Inverted: Alice's disease makes her look hideous
- Subverted: Alice isn't actually sick, and is faking it for her own reasons, playing off the sterotype of the "cute sick girl".
- Double Subverted: Just when it seems to have cleared up, the Soap Opera Disease comes back with a vengeance, and this time, medicine cannot cure Alice. Cue A Death in the Limelight.
- Parodied:
- Alice is faking sick to get out of school or work, and everyone thinks she's dying.
- Alice and Bob, two elders in a hospital discuss Charlie a young adult cancer patient who is getting better with every reference to getting healthier described like it is about decline and dying instead and react to news about him going home like he died.
- Zig Zagged: Sometimes, Alice has "good days" is lying back making melodramatic speeches. Other days are "bad days" where Alice is shrieking in pain and making demands.
- Averted: Alice is perfectly healthy.
- Enforced: A Shout-Out to romantic literature (such as that by Edgar Allan Poe), or the writer wants to explore themes of sickness, death, and dying.
- Lampshaded: "How are you feeling today, Alice?"
- Invoked: Alice is faking it to get attention.
- Exploited: Wounded Gazelle Gambit.
- Defied:
- Alice is very sick, maybe even terminally so, but she refuses to stay in bed contemplating the last leaf on the tree outside. Instead, she goes out and makes the most of the time she has.
- Alice is very sick, but it doesn't stop her from being an Action Girl. Or really anything else.
- Discussed: "Alice doesn't have much longer..."
- Conversed: "It's totally cute to be weak and helpless—as long as she doesn't actually die from whatever."
- Deconstructed: Because Alice looks "stereotypically sick" her sickness is not taken seriously.
- Reconstructed: The doctors have enough information to know how serious her condition is despite her apperance.
- Played For Laughs:
- Alice fakes being seriously ill to get out of doing something she doesn't want to do.
- Alice makes a big fuss out of a common cold.
Get some extra blankets and medicine at *cough cough* Delicate and Sickly.
