Basic Trope: Uncooked/live crustaceans are depicted as red.
- Straight: Lenny the lobster is bright red.
- Exaggerated: Crustaceans are always depicted as bright red in the work.
- Downplayed: Lenny is depicted as a medium shade of red — it doesn't quite fit with live lobsters usually being brown or green in real life, but is still slightly more realistic than bright red.
- Justified:
- Lenny is of a species/color mutation of lobster (whether real or fictional) that really is red.note
- Lenny is established to be Anthropomorphic Food rather than being based on a living lobster.
- Lenny is red with anger.
- A lobster, having survived cooking, gave birth to these red lobsters.
- Inverted:
- Bob eats a lobster for dinner, which is shown to be brown/green instead of the bright red that cooked lobsters usually are.
- Lenny is an extremely rare blue lobster.
- Subverted: Lenny appears red because his shell was painted.
- Double Subverted: Once he cleans the paint off, he's bright red underneath.
- Parodied:
- Lobsters are just MS Paint red.
- Brown/green lobsters attracted to red ones are seen as necrophiles.
- Zig-Zagged: Lobsters gain a random shade of red depending on how well they're cooked.
- Averted: Lobsters, if there are any, are depicted as the shades they usually are in real life.
- Enforced:
- Artistic License
- The only lobster props the show could afford were red children's toys.
- Lampshaded: "I'm not even cooked yet."
- Invoked: Dr. Bob genetically engineered Lenny's skin color to be red.
- Exploited: The lobsters play possum.
- Defied: Red, uncooked lobsters are exterminated, letting the brown/green ones thrive.
- Discussed: "Can mylid look like it's been cooked?"
- Conversed: "Do cartoonists realize that lobsters and crabs don't tend to be red unless they're cooked?"
- Implied: Live lobsters are never seen, but a basket contains both uncooked and cooked lobsters, and they're all red.
- Deconstructed:
- One might mistake a red lobster for a cooked one, only to be disappointed to see that it isn't.
- It's now harder to tell if a lobster is cooked or not.
- Reconstructed: Cooked lobsters are marked in some way.
- Played for Laughs: Red lobsters tell jokes about how being cooked is no big deal.
- Played for Drama: Lobsters are shocked when seeing red ones, especially when wondering if they were cooked or if they're in pain.
- Played for Horror: Some lobsters are red because they've painted themselves with blood from chefs, and we see the gruesome kills of both humans and lobsters in the kitchen.
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