Basic Trope: Someone falsely believes that someone else is masturbating.
- Straight: Alice walks in on Bob and thinks he's masturbating due to seeing him from the back making a lot of grunting noises in a fairly dark room, but there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for what he's doing - he's just trying to undo a stubborn double-knot in his shoelaces.
- Exaggerated:
- Everyone is somehow led to believe that Bob was masturbating.
- Bob was only scratching his back when Alice came to that conclusion.
- Downplayed: Bob is believed to be watching porn, but it's actually just a brief suggestive scene in the movie he's watching.
- Justified:
- Alice has caught Bob with his pants down in the past.
- In cases such as the second "exaggerated" example: Alice was told that masturbating is "touching yourself", and assumed it applied to any instance of someone touching any body part for any reason.
- Inverted: Alice assumes that Bob was just building a model or something similar, but he actually was masturbating.
- Subverted:
- Bob worries Alice might get the wrong idea if she listens in, but she realizes he's building a model without him saying.
- Alice accepts that Bob was building a model and leaves. He then sighs in relief and opens up a porn tab.
- Double Subverted: Bob mutters, "stupid pop-ups" and closes the tab to reveal instructions for building models.
- Parodied: ???
- Zig-Zagged: Alice speculates on what Bob is doing, sometimes thinking he's jacking off and sometimes thinking he's doing other things.
- Averted: Nobody is falsely believed to be masturbating.
- Enforced: To add some Cringe Comedy.
- Lampshaded: "I thought you were- nevermind."
- Invoked: Claire wants to cause discord between Bob and Alice, and she tells Alice he's masturbating in her house in hopes she'll get mad at him about this and reject his explanation.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Bob outright tells Alice that there's a completely logical explanation for what he was doing before she can make any assumptions.
- Discussed: "Crud! If she hears me, she'll think I'm jacking off!"
- Conversed: "Why do fictional characters always assume that everyone who is grunting must be jacking off?"
- Implied: Bob makes an offhand comment about something along the lines of "touching himself" (which Makes Sense In Context), and Alice appears confused.
Back to Mistaken for Masturbating
