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Basic Trope: The culture has tech far in advance of what they should have been able to invent.

  • Straight: Troperia has a mostly medieval culture, but still has motor vehicles and aircraft.
  • Exaggerated:
    • Troperia is a primitive caveman culture. They possess futuristic technology.
    • Feudal Future. Bob has to provide The Baron with 100 tons of food-grade algae and vat-grown pseudobeef by Autumn or he'll lose his biodome. Alice hand-crafts 16-TB Data Crystals. Their son Craig got a job at one of the transmutation facilities in the city, producing Phlebotinum for experiments at the Imperial College of Quantum Engineering. The Baron has to provide 100 megatons of each resource the colony extracts per year to the Emperor.
  • Downplayed:
    • Troperia has 21st century technologies, but the culture and social mores are from the 1800s.
    • A few anachronistic technologies are in place earlier but not outside their means to implement - for instance bronze age interchangeable parts and and a basic germ theory that calls for heat sterilizing medical dressing and surgical tools.
  • Justified:
    • The technology was left over from a collapsed empire. The way it works is one of the few things that hasn't been lost.
    • The technology was traded from a more technologically advanced (and possibly alien) civilization.
    • The technology was acquired from visiting time travelers from the future.
    • The aliens are noted to be exceptionally intelligent but solitary. Thus they tend to lack more advanced infrastructure due to sheer lack of cooperation but everything advanced they create could be created with low level infrastructure but sufficient knowledge.
    • Cultural and technological development have very little to do with each other. We still had bickering monarchies and squabbling empires back when airplanes and cars were new and nifty. If WW1 hadn't effectively broken the grip of kings and queens for good, we might still today when some truly Sci-Fi goodies are being cooked up.
  • Inverted:
    • Insufficiently Advanced Alien
    • Troperia has modern social structures beyond what could be supported by the technology of the time period and without the issues that would ensue such as starvation from too few farmers given agricultural techniques and yields to be capable of supporting the teachers and bureaucracies.
    • Troperia is an enlightened utopia with a functioning democracy, welfare system, universal education and equality between sexes and genders, but their technology is still in the Bronze Age.
  • Subverted:
    • Troperia isn't primitive as they seem despite their 'tribal' social trappings and traditions. Duels are done with spears to limit the lethality - the aftermath is attended to with modern surgical techniques and medicine. Their clothes look primitive but they are adapted to the climate, practical, and machine washable, and capable of dealing with their manufactured tools. All of this is specifically their own technology.
    • Troperia appears on a surface level to be "too advanced" but meticilous research into viability was done and it actually follows an Alternate Tech Line which fits with the geography and related exclusions of 'obvious' technologies which wouldn't be viable there.
  • Double Subverted: However Troperia considers it sacrilege to trap 'lightning' encompassing both light and electricity and yet has an abundance of technologies requiring electricity without so much as an 'outcaste' to produce those goods.
  • Parodied:
    • A conversation is shown between two Troperians, talking in a combination of Techno Babble and grunts.
    • Troperia is a colony of single-celled organisms. They are not only advanced in futuristic technology but are extremely good in video games and chat using internet language.
  • Zig Zagged: Troperia manages to be both above and below the cultural and technical requirements in fairly essential ways.
  • Averted: Troperia has technology appropriate to is cultural advancement.
  • Enforced: The technology is critical to the plot, but the story needs to be set long before it was invented.
  • Lampshaded: "How do we have cars, but not indoor plumbing?"
  • Invoked: Despite its comparatively primitive culture, Troperia invests a lot of money and resources into new technology.
  • Exploited: Bob manages to outright conquer Troperia by recognizing the cultural fallacies and inefficiencies and how their own technologies could be used against them.
  • Defied: Troperians aggressively modernize until their culture is as advanced as their technology.
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???
  • Deconstructed:
  • Reconstructed: With their superior technology, the Troperians have no problem conquering the nearby Republic of Tropes. The second time around, they are more careful.

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