Follow TV Tropes

Following

Playing With / Not-So-Fake Prop Weapon

Go To

Basic Trope: A fake prop weapon is replaced by a real one.

  • Straight: Alice's character is to kill Bob's character in a play they are acting with, but her retracting fake knife has been replaced (without her knowledge) with a real one and she fatally stabs him.
  • Exaggerated:
    • The actors in a play are to have a battle and wield fake weapons, but all the weapons have been secretly replaced with real ones, and they all kill each other.
    • A comically-large plastic Cartoon Bomb setpiece has had real explosives snuck inside of it, causing numerous injuries and fatalities among actors and spectators alike, along with severe damage to the theater itself.
  • Downplayed:
    • Alice's fake weapon is secretly replaced with a real one, and she accidentally wounds Bob, but not fatally.
    • The weapon is discovered before Bob's scene is performed; he wasn't hurt, but he very well could have been.
  • Justified: The substituted weapon was so similar that Alice did not even look for a difference.
  • Inverted: Alice tries to kill Bob for real (outside of the theater), but when she tries to stab him she finds her knife has been replaced by a fake one.
  • Subverted:
    • Bob makes a very realistic show of dying, with blood, that everyone thinks the weapon was real. Then he gets up, unharmed.
    • Alice fires the real gun unknowingly but Bob is unharmed since she was aiming to miss to prevent accidents with blanks.
    • The weapon actually was fake, but Alice struck Bob with it hard enough to cause blunt force trauma.
    • The scene called for shooting Bob point-blank with a blank round, with none of the cast realizing the admittedly-not-commonly-known fact that even blanks are deadly at that range until it was too late.
    • The retracting knife's retraction mechanism had jammed up due to lack of proper maintenance.
  • Double Subverted: After the scene ends, Bob reveals that his being "unharmed" was itself acting; he actually was seriously wounded, but decided The Show Must Go On instead of getting immediate help.
  • Parodied:
    • Alice doesn't realize that the massive sword that replaced a realistically sized plastic one is real, even though it is extremely heavy and scratching the floor as she tries to drag it.
  • Zig Zagged:
    • The gun was replaced with a real one with a metal round. Charlie the prop assistant notices this, and replaces it with the prop disintegrating rubber bullet. Which turns out to still cause damage from the force. But Bob could take everything but was weak against rubber. Except that Charlie knew that she was weak against rubber and the original one would be harmless to her.
    • Alice wins a real fight against a would-be assassin backstage, so everyone assumes she had the real sword that the assassin planned to sneak in. But, no; the assassin still had the real one and Alice did have a prop, but Alice is just THAT good of a swordfighter.
  • Averted: Alice's character kills Bob's character with a prop weapon that actually is fake, just as they planned.
  • Enforced: Alice was originally written as killing Bob out of jealousy. Executives shot it down due to Bob's large fandom. But Bob still had to die for the plot to make sense and the decision came after the budget was used filming the action scenes. Charlie replacing the bullet is added before the on stage shooting and Alice is shown horrified and staring at the gun in disbelief.
  • Lampshaded: "Sheesh, talk about killing the OSHA whale."
  • Invoked: Charlie wants to kill Bob, and does it by proxy, by substituting Alice's fake weapon for a real one.
  • Exploited: When the theater is under siege by gangsters Daniel goes for the prop gun, knows that there is a good chance someone was planning on killing Bob so when armed men burst into the theater he goes for the prop gun to defend against the outside threat and foil the assassination attempt.
  • Defied: "Before I go onstage, I'll just check that I have the correct knife."
  • Discussed: "Do we have security cameras in the prop room? I keep getting scared those knives won't be the same ones when the play happens, if you know what I mean."
  • Conversed: "You know, this game uses the prop-swap murder so much it makes me worry the next time I stab some character to death because their game's shitty, I'll be the one in that dumb lawyer chair and Jay will be dead on the floor! THAT'S how repetitive these cases are!"
  • Deconstructed: Alice is declared insane as a result of her negligence in not picking up any clues that the weapon was real.
  • Reconstructed: ...and this starts off a quest to prove her innocence.
  • Implied: The following day, the play has been shut down after only one showing, and police are seen examining the props.
  • Played For Laughs: The audience thinks Bob's "performance" is one of the best parts of the play and can't wait for an encore.
  • Played For Drama: Losing Bob was bad enough for the theatrical troupe, but the surviving members stop trusting each other in the aftermath due to how many times it could have been caught and prevented, along with the troupe facing numerous legal difficulties that will likely force them to disband.

Back to Not-So-Fake Prop Weapon

Top