Basic Trope: Floral imagery reveals a character's sexuality.
- Straight:
- Violet is a lesbian.
- Peter is gay and normally wears a shirt with the image of a rose on it.
- Exaggerated: Violet is a violet who is a lesbian.
- Downplayed: Peter is Ambiguously Gay and one hint that he's gay is the rose bush he tends to.
- Justified: The Relationship Values between characters are called "lily points."
- Inverted:
- Violet is straight, but her crush on Peter leads to people finding out he's gay.
- Peter is secretly gay, but he's accidentally outed after his straight friend gives him a rose.
- Subverted: Violet is a tease and doesn't have romantic feelings for anyone.
- Double Subverted: Violet secretly is a lesbian and hides it by teasing anyone of any gender.
- Parodied: ???
- Zig-Zagged: Peter is seen buying roses for a "special someone." His friends assume he's gay, only to discover that he was buying the roses for his mom. After the friends leave, Peter produces a second bouquet of flowers—this time, green carnations—that he promptly gives his secret boyfriend.
- Averted:
- There are no floral metaphors. Or any floral imagery.
- Sexuality and romance are completely avoided in the story.
- Enforced: The Executives are LGBT history buffs who insist on the use of floral imagery to hide the homoeroticism from the Moral Guardians.
- Lampshaded: "Violets? You know Sappho wrote about these, right? Why don't you just give me a shirt that says 'I'M A LESBIAN!' and be done with it?"
- Invoked: Sara buys her girlfriend violets and a ticket to the isle of Lesbos.
- Exploited: Sara buys Jamie violets as a platonic gift and Jamie jokes about her being gay.
- Defied:
- Peter, who is secretly gay, loves roses but avoids them so as not to seem gay.
- Violet tries to prove to other characters that she's straight.
- Discussed: Jamie explains to Sara that buying another girl violets implies they have romantic feelings for each other.
- Conversed: Sara writes poetry that includes violets and Jamie talks about the Homoerotic Subtext in her poetry.
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