Basic Trope: The protagonists use a route that is very difficult to travel.
- Straight: The normal route has been blocked off, forcing the characters to take a much more difficult one.
- Exaggerated: The route involves a lot of near-impossible-to-overcome obstacles.
- Downplayed: The route is only slightly more difficult than the normal one.
- Justified:
- The alternate routes are very long detours and almost as difficult.
- The Hero is being pursued: The harder the route, the easier it is to pull off a Try and Follow. note
- Inverted: ???
- Subverted: The characters expect to have to take the difficult route but find that there is another way.
- Double Subverted: ...but the other way is then also blocked off forcing them to take the difficult route.
- Parodied: The route is difficult in ridiculous ways.
- Zig Zagged: The characters have to take the difficult route, but only to find and make an alliance with the mooks who were making the route difficult in the first place.
- Averted:
- There is an easy route to take.
- No journey is required.
- Enforced: Saying 'It's the Only Way' is not just an excuse.
- Lampshaded: A Genre Savvy character points out how ridiculously difficult the route is.
- Invoked:
- The Big Bad decides to force the protagonists to take this route.
- The characters use this route to escape an enemy, thinking they either won't follow or will be defeated by it.
- Exploited:The Big Bad uses the fact that the protagonists have to use the route to their advantage, perhaps making the route even more difficult by throwing obstacles at them.
- Defied: The route would have had to be taken but the characters decide to fly to their destination instead.
- Discussed: Characters need to get somewhere and talk about how, in fiction, this often means people have to take the difficult route.
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: The journey itself isn't shown, but we see the characters afterwards with torn clothes and/or injuries.
- Deconstructed:
- Reconstructed:
- The characters use the route and are successful but there are serious drawbacks and/or casualties.
- It's clear that if they weren't so pressed for time to stop the end of the world they'd have preferred to take the safer route. Taking the dangerous but faster way was a case of the Godzilla Threshold being crossed as far as navigation.
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