Basic Trope: Everyone or almost everyone in a particular setting smokes cigarettes.
- Straight: All or almost all adults (and possibly teenagers) in the setting of the story or its world smoke cigarettes.
- Exaggerated:
- Smoking is promoted everywhere as healthy and normal adult behavior.
- Even babies, small children, and animals smoke.
- Humans or humanoid aliens in the setting breathe cigarette smoke instead of oxygen.
- Downplayed: The overwhelming amount of smokers turns out to be just one small part of a world where smoking is generally frowned upon, much like Real Life after around The '90s where certain countries, cultures, subcultures, and societal groups have an outsize amount of smokers but the general population has fairly low smoking rates.
- Justified:
- Inverted:
- Nobody smokes, due to people choosing to live healthier lifestyles, or a way other than smoking is developed to consume nicotine.
- Nobody smokes, due to smokers being punished on the spot with the death penalty and cigarettes being highly illegal to the degree that heroin is in most of modern society.
- Subverted: The smokers are all continually smoking something other than tobacco.
- Double Subverted: The thing other than tobacco being smoked continually is actually somehow even worse than tobacco (e.g. methamphetamine, or a Fantastic Drug with worse effects) and people are equally addicted to it as they would be to cigarettes.
- Parodied: Plants, inanimate objects, and robots smoke.
- Zig Zagged: Everybody Smokes, but everybody also repeatedly tries to quit and acknowledges how unhealthy smoking is, but then they're also failing repeatedly, and this becomes a major point of discussion or even a plot point.
- Averted:
- A society or culture that exists pre-nicotine/tobacco, or long post it.
- A society where some people smoke but the great majority of people do not, and smoking is looked upon as stupid, dangerous, boorish behavior limited to the lower classes/outcasts/similar.
- Enforced:
- Anything set from The '40s to either The '80s or The '90s in most of the developed world, and in The '50s specifically in the US.
- In most Film Noir.
- In many interpretations of The Western.
- In anything attempting a realistic depiction of large numbers of, or entirely set in the communities mentioned in the article, among others: TV/Film actors and actresses, the Heavy Metal and Visual Kei scenes to a point, active combat military units, and the mentally ill.
- In anything related to capnolagia (smoking Fetish).
- Lampshaded:
- "My god, don't these people realize how bad smoking is?"
- "Who doesn't smoke around here?"
- A character starts coughing, choking, tearing up, and falls to their knees when exposed to the sheer amount of cigarette smoke around.
- Invoked:
- A shot of a wide group of people is shown and most are smoking.
- Cigarette advertising is not limited to the places it traditionally is after The '90s in most of the world.
- Most of the on-screen cast is smoking at one point or another.
- Exploited:
- Product Placement by tobacco companies.
- As shorthand in parts of the world where smoking is seen as a form of stress relief, to show just how much stress everyone is under. (A good example of this usage would be in the bunker in Threads - Everybody Smokes despite it likely helping lead to their deaths from a much faster cause than cancer - loss of breathable air - but there is a nuclear war going on...)
- Because someone who is writing the setting thinks Smoking Is Cool.
- As a way of establishing that the characters don't really care about the long term impacts on their health of anything, and in some of the most depressing cases such as active combat forces, AIDS patients in The '80s to early in The '90s or other terminally ill people, or suicidally mentally ill people with no real prospect of recovery, because they may have no reason to think they'll live.
- Defied: In a World… where Everybody Smokes, someone decides to quit or never picked up the addiction - and this becomes somehow important to the story.
- Discussed:
- Someone complains about the amount of smokers.
- Inversely, in a world where Everybody Smokes but this is beginning to change, the smokers complain about why they all have to go outside since they all smoke.
- Conversed: "You know, we all smoke too much around here." "What, are you kidding?" lights cigarette
- Plotted A Good Waste: They all have one reason to smoke: to give carbondioxide to all the flora.
- Implied: Nearly everyone is shown smoking, there is ubiquitous cigarette advertising, people randomly ask for matches or lights...
- Deconstructed:
- The smokers are all dying of smoking-related illness but still smoke anyway.
- As in Exploited, the smoking is used to partially establish that no one in the world/scene/whatever expects to live to the age that smoking-related illness usually sets in.
- Reconstructed:
- It is a future world, and the most health-damaging properties of tobacco have been genetically engineered out, or the smokers are vaporizing it rather than burning it, and/or a relatively cheap and painless way to heal the effects of cigarette smoke on lungs is available to all.
- It is a future or fantasy world, and the smokers are robots simply doing it to look cool (and can suffer no ill effects due to the lack of human physiology to be affected), or are immortal or have healing powers to the extent that cigarette smoke won't hurt them (e.g. they are some sort of supernatural beings, or the medicine/healing arts have so advanced that a night's sleep or a visit to the doctor/healer removes all traces of damage to the body from cigarettes, or the smoker is a video game/fantasy character who can just cast Healing Magic/use a Healing Shiv on himself or herself)
- Played For Laughs:
- To show how backward and stupid the smokers are so a nonsmoking and "better" audience can laugh at them and their stupidity.
- As a plot point of all of the smokers trying to quit smoking and Hilarity Ensues.
- Played For Drama:
- The smokers begin to get cancer/heart disease/emphysema/other illnesses related to smoking and die.
- The smokers are trying to quit, but find themselves facing a difficult battle against addiction.
- In a combination of Exploited, Deconstructed, and this, the smokers are a population of people so disadvantaged, stressed, and/or whose lives are under such immediate threat that they cannot see themselves alive in 20 years, and/or that they don't care if they die years later.
Ash that out and get back to Everybody Smokes.
