Basic Trope: A character cracks their knuckles emphasize their badassness.
- Straight: Sean Li cracks his knuckles while some punk insults his former master and then beats him in the face when he lays a hand on his girlfriend.
- Exaggerated: Before a fight, Sean Li cracks every joint in his body like a wordless rendition of Dem Bones.
- Downplayed: Sean Li only cracks a few fingers to get rid of stiffness in the joints.
- Justified:
- For a case where it's a crack of the neck after the fight, the hero has a metal skeleton with a tendency to clang and a flair for the dramatic.
- The opponent got in the first hit, and dislocated something in The Dreaded Barbaric Bully Flash Young. Flash pops it back into position, and hits back.
- Inverted: Our hero Pete Perkins is the sort to nervously crack his joints but when his nerve builds up he stops and proceeds to kick ass.
- Subverted: Husky Russkie Maximilian Khan sees a crowd of mooks and walks over rubbing his knuckles as we hear the cracking... before it's revealed that he's walking over glass.
- Double Subverted: ...and then Flash cracks his knuckles and knocks Max out with a single punch.
- Parodied:
- As Flash cracks his joints, the clicks play out "Pop goes the weasel"
- Bryce Baxter, a combat/martial arts instructor devotes lessons entirely to dramatic joint cracking.
- Degree of joint cracking is an explicitly accurate (or treated by characters to be so) measure of combat capacity.
- Humongous Mechas regularly crack joints before engaging in combat.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: Flash walks into a bar, gets insulted by a drunk, slowly gets wound up, beats up the drunk, has a beer, leaves. The End.
- Enforced: The movie is being paid for by the American Orthopedic Society.
- Lampshaded: "You think you're scary cracking your knuckles like a Bruce Lee wannabe?"
- Invoked: Fighting is always a tough, exhausting process for Flash with plenty of injuries even if he wins so he reassured his friends by nonchalantly cracking his knuckles when he wins.
- Exploited: Max makes a target of the weak clicking joints.
- Defied: Max cocks his neck and starts to walk slowly towards Pete Perkins, who offers to give Max a massage for that crink in the neck rather than fighting.
- Discussed: "Dude, he's cracking his knuckles and staring at us. I think he's getting pissed."
- Conversed: "You know how Bruce Lee would always crack his knuckles in the movies as a warning whenever he was upset? Well what would he do if the guy was just feeling loose and flexible that day and couldn't crack them?"
- Deconstructed: An old master is bed ridden after not receiving a single injury in a fight in his life but his joints have become gnarled from all that clicking.
- Reconstructed: A group of old masters have been in hiding, using their arthritis as an excuse but after someone calls them out with the latest new medical research and points out that the toughening of the joints makes their fists harder, they leap back into action.
- Played For Laughs:
- Two fighters preparing for a fairly honorable duel try to out do each other in a pre-fight warm up "Click off"
- Crossed with Exaggerated: A Multi-Armed and Dangerous character performs the type two version with all pairs of hands at once.
- Played For Drama: A retired Bryce Baxter returns home to find his family killed and his home burnt down. He silent slinks in misery and grasps the charred remains of his home in his hands and crushes the wood in his grasp and a deadly resolve comes over him.
- Played For Horror: The knuckle cracking is Five-Second Foreshadowing before an utterly savage beating that leaves the victim half-dead, if not totally dead.
Back to Knuckle Cracking.
