Basic Trope: A character is said to be poor but calling them "poor" is definitely a stretch.
- Straight: Alice, a teenager doesn’t have a car of her own and has a job so she can afford to herself nice things. She is referred to as poor (or even sees herself as poor), especially in contrast with her rich friends.
- Exaggerated: Alice insist she's homeless, despite being established that she's the CEO of a MegaCorp.
- Downplayed: Alice's apartment looks a little nice for a poor person.
- Justified:
- Alice is (or pretends to be) rather modest.
- Alice is a middle-class person who lives in a rich neighborhood full of condescending jerks.
- Alice is just stingy.
- Alice's neighborhood has a high standard of living. Even with a decent income, she struggles to keep up.
- Alice hates her job, and thinks anyone who has to work for a living is therefore poor.
- Implied: Everybody mocks Alice for living in a gritty slum and eating nothing but cheap microwave food, but her house or what she eats is never shown.
- Inverted: Alice is a minimum-wage worker and somehow people think she is a millionaire.
- Subverted:
- Alice was feigning her wealth.
- They meant in sense, not dollars.
- Double Subverted:
- Doing so would still require more money than she should reasonably have.
- She still has some common sense and is at times the Only Sane Man despite being considered poor in sense.
- Parodied: Alice thinks being unable to buy a Ferrari-Limo makes her poor.
- Zig Zagged:
- Sometimes Alice have enough money to invite her friend to diner, other times she can barely afford a bus pass.
- The story goes back and forth between having Alice poorer then her absurdly wealthy friends and neighbors, or just plain poor.
- Averted: Alice's lifestyle reflects the amount of money she has.
- Enforced: Alice was originally designed as a hopeless beggar, but the creators felt that her character was seen as too tragic and tried to downplay her poverty a little, but ended up overdoing it.
- Lampshaded: "If Alice is poor, what are the rich like?"
- Invoked: Someone donates nice things to Alice and somehow stops her from selling them.
- Exploited: A right-wing commentator uses Alice's status to attack welfare programs.
- Defied: Alice can't buy nice clothes or live in an upscale house/apartment due to a rigid social caste system that prevents her from accessing those things because she's poor.
- Discussed: "Hey Alice, you keep talking about how tight money is, but you never seem to actually have any issues affording nice things."
- Conversed: "Have you ever noticed that the show keeps hammering in how poor Alice is, even though she lives in a really nice apartment and keeps going out to eat at restaurants?"
- Deconstructed: Alice is actually living beyond her means.
- Reconstructed: It's a good life for now, and it doesn't really matter she can't afford it.
Back to Informed Poverty
