Basic Trope: People are terrified of mice.
- Straight: Alice sees a mouse run across the kitchen floor. She gets up on a chair and starts screaming.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice is terrified when she sees a swarm of mice getting out from that Mouse Hole.
- Alice is terrified of all animals, from invertebrates (even sea sponges!) all the way up to non-human primates, not just mice.
- Downplayed: Seeing a mouse makes Alice momentarily unnerved, but she regains her composure and kills it with a Mouse Trap or drives it away before too long.
- Justified:
- Mice carry diseases; Alice doesn't want that in her home.
- Alice had a traumatic experience with a mouse.
- The mouse that ran across Alice's kitchen was three feet tall and had fangs.
- Even though the mouse is normal-sized, Alice herself is small enough to be eaten by a mouse.
- Inverted:
- The mouse sees Alice, squeaks, and runs away in fear.
- Alice goes towards the mouse, offers it a piece of cheese, and makes it her newest pet.
- Subverted: Alice screeches at the sight of a mouse, because she just stubbed her toe.
- Double Subverted: The very reason she stubbed her toe was that she was distracted by her fear of the mouse.
- Parodied:
- Alice is cowering in fear of a computer mouse.
- Alice herself is a mouse.
- Alice has no fear of any animal but mice.
- Alice is a Giant Woman who is scared of normal people.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Some women are afraid of mice, others are not.
- Alice starts fretting when she sees a mouse running across the floor, but then she remembers her family's pet mouse. But the next time she looks at that spot on the floor, there are two mice — one is the pet but the other looks like a carbon copy of it, and she's torn by uncertainty over which is which.
- Averted:
- Alice is OK with mice.
- Mice don't exist in this setting.
- Enforced: Women Are Delicate, Hysterical Woman
- Lampshaded: "Eek, a Mouse!! Kill it!"
- Invoked: Alice sees a mouse running across the floor.
- Exploited: A Kitschy Local Commercial for a pest-control service uses this trope.
- Defied: Alice scoops it up and takes it outside, no fuss.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: "Ugh, it's so sexist to assume that Alice is deathly afraid of mice just because she's a woman!"
- Played for Laughs: A mouse crawls into Alice's pant legging, climbs up her leg, and eventually crawls around inside of her shirt. Meanwhile, this all causes Alice to start squirming, fidgeting, giggling, and laughing uncontrollably.
- Played for Drama: During her encounter with a mouse, the creature actually bites Alice. She goes to the doctor as a precaution and discovers that she has indeed contracted Rabies (one of the Justified reasons listed above).
What's that on the main ... Eek, a Mouse!!
