Basic Trope: The legal heir to another's wealth/success is deemed unfit to inherit the estate.
- Straight: Alan Ford is the founder and CEO of the conglomerate group, Trope Co., whose only son, Ben, is a bumbling spendthrift. Alan tells his son that unless he can raise $1,000,000 without his help, Ben would not inherit the company.
- Exaggerated: King Alexander has disowned, exiled and even murdered dozens of his children for not conforming to his insanely high standards of what makes a good ruler.
- Downplayed:
- Alan doesn't think that Ben is a very good businessman, but allows him to take over 40% of the company's shares while distributing the rest to professionals who would be able to guide Ben to make better decisions (or at least veto his questionable ones).
- Ben eventually inherits the company, and he actually turns out to by and large be a pretty competent businessman and does an adequate job in the role. He is, however, also nowhere near as ambitious and willing to take risks as Alan was, and as such his tenure as CEO is later looked back on as an overall pretty unremarkable period in the company's history in comparison to Alan's.
- Justified: Alan has worked very hard to build his company, and doesn't want to see his legacy ruined because it's left in the wrong hands, blood relations be damned.
- Inverted: Alan expects Ben to take over his company some day, even though Ben would prefer to be a professional footballer instead.
- Subverted: Ben needs to earn $1,000,000 in order to inherit his father's company—but his father never actually made such a stipulation. Ben sets up the challenge for himself, because he wants to prove that he is indeed able to run the company as well as his father had before actually receiving the position.
- Double Subverted: Alan had repeatedly belittled his son and told him that he's not worthy of the family name. While he never explicitly told Ben to earn the $1,000,000, that is exactly what he wants his son to accomplish before he'd even consider naming him as his heir.
- Parodied: Alan bars his children from "inheriting" the last piece of cookie from the jar, saying that only those who can reach the highest shelf where it is kept are worthy to eat the treat.
- Zig Zagged: Alan frequently complains about Ben, and moans about the dire fate of his company would suffer under his son's management. At the same time, he'd be the first to encourage Ben whenever the boy starts to have self-doubts about his capability of running the company as well as Alan.
- Averted: Ben inherits his father's estate with little to no trouble.
- Invoked: Ben really doesn't want to inherit his father's company for whatever reasons (too boring, not really his passion, too stressful, etc.), and deliberately acts so thrifty and incompetent (while still focusing hard on his real passion: Professional Football) that his father would disapprove in hopes that he will be taken out of the line of succession.
- Enforced: The show's premise revolve around a Game Between Heirs, but Ben is an only child. The creators need to give a reason why Ben needs to fight for his inheritance.
- Lampshaded: "You? Inherit Trope Co.? Ha! Knowing your incompetence, you'll probably destroy in one day what I've built in thirty years!"
- Exploited: Seeing their boss's disdain for his own son and heir presumptive, Alan's subordinates begins to butter up to him in hopes that one of them will be named as the company's successor instead.
- Defied: Alan's wife, Beatrice, convinces him that despite his shortcomings, Ben is still a capable man, and with proper guidance, he can become an adequate heir to the company. Alan begrudgingly agrees with her, and reinstates Ben as his heir.
- Discussed:Employee 1: I'm worried about this company. Mr. Alan's getting old, and Ben's no good.Employee 2: It's alright, I heard that Mr. Alan's not going to leave the company to Ben.
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: After disowning Ben, Alan is left without a legal heir. After his death, his company falls apart, as the rest of his board of directors has different ideas on how to run the company without a uniting vision. The corporation goes bankrupt much sooner than it would have, had he just let Ben take charge.
- Reconstructed: Ben accepts that he's not competent enough to run his father's business empire, so he settles on working as a freelancer. Alan's company sees itself flourish at the hands of the professional board of directors, and Ben still receives a fair amount of passive income from the company shares's dividends.
- Implied: After Alan's death, Ben isn't involved with the company for unexplained reasons.
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