Basic Trope: A character with a tendency to avoid footwear.
- Straight: Alice expressly dislikes wearing shoes, and goes barefoot regularly.
- Exaggerated: Alice has such a dislike for shoes that she cannot stand watching people wear them.
- Alice will avoid wearing shoes even if it’s impractical.
- Alice doesn’t own shoes, even though she has the financial means to.
- Downplayed: Alice doesn’t like wearing shoes, but will wear a pair when attending formal events or work.
- Alice tends to wear open-toed sandals, which she can take off at a moment’s notice.
- Alice doesn’t like wearing women’s shoes, and has a particularly strong dislike for high-heels.
- Alice doesn’t have a problem with shoes, but if she has a choice, she'll gladly go barefoot.
- Justified: Alice has a condition that is eased by going barefoot, or wants to avoid having athlete’s foot or other conditions.
- Alice is a nonconformist who likes to go barefoot to set herself apart as a quirky or down to earth person.
- Alice has earth and/or nature-based superpowers/magic that won't work unless she constantly maintains direct contact with the earth.
- Alice feels more spiritually connected by going barefoot.
- Alice simply finds going barefoot more comfortable than wearing shoes.
- Alice comes from a country where people remove their shoes before entering a home. She's so used to this that, even though she lives in a different country, she still goes barefoot in her house.
- Alice is a martial artist.
- Inverted: Alice loves shoes and is always seen wearing a different pair.
- Subverted: Bob notices that Alice is barefoot, and when he asks her about it, she doesn’t understand until she realizes that she forgot to put them on this morning.
- Double Subverted: She promptly brushes it off with a "Silly Me" Gesture and says that she doesn’t mind being barefoot anyway.
- “… I can’t be too mad though; now I have an excuse to be barefoot.”
- Parodied: ???
- Zig-Zagged: Alice has a tendency to go barefoot in public, but if she really has to, she will wear shoes without complaining too much.
- Averted: The subject of shoes does not come up.
- Enforced: The actress who plays Alice has a habit for going barefoot in real life, and the element was implemented in the story because the director had no objections.
- Alice’s actress could not find her shoes when she was due to go on and did the scene barefoot, and the director decided to Throw It In! as a character trait.
- The character Alice is a perpetual barefooter. So in preparation for the role, the actress went barefoot for months.
- It’s a case of Author Appeal.
- Lampshaded: “Alice, what is it with your aversion for shoes?”
- Invoked: Alice has many friends who love shoe-shopping, and she doesn’t care much, so she adopts this trait to amuse them.
- Alice wants to show that she doesn’t conform to society’s consumerist trends by avoiding shoes altogether.
- Exploited: Alice’s enemies set traps that are especially dangerous for bare feet, like glue-based puddle traps or Spikes of Doom.
- Defied: Alice lives in an environment where the ground is craggy or hot, so no matter how much she dislikes the shoes she has to wear, she has to wear them for protection.
- Discussed: “It’s not everyday you see people go barefoot so casually like she does.”
- Deconstructed: Even though her dislike for wearing shoes is strong, Alice is not always comfortable going barefoot, with the terrain she has to traverse being full of pebbles and other inconveniences. She also walked on glass shards or still lit cigarette butts and got splinters in her soles more than once.
- Reconstructed: Alice’s dislike for shoes is so strong that she would rather suffer what she sees as mild annoyances than wear them. And even then, she has gotten so used to it that she knows to watch where she walks and avoid these hazards.
- Played for Laughs: Bob gives Alice a pair of shoes as a gift. She pretends to accept it at first, but the moment he has his back turned, he has the still full shoebox tossed back at him, hitting him square in the back of the head.
- Played for Drama: Alice eventually walks into an obstacle so sharp that her foot is impaled, leaving her with a Game-Breaking Injury that prevents her from walking.
- Played for Horror: Alice is a Serial Killer who operates barefoot, and her Calling Card is leaving a trail of bloody footprints after walking barefoot in a puddle of her victim’s blood. Despite the evidence she would leave otherwise, the police cannot identify her from her prints due to Alice deliberately burning her feet to erase her prints.
Back to Prefers Going Barefoot.
