Basic Trope: A desert is portrayed as a featureless expanse of sand and very little else, in which navigation is difficult.
- Straight: Alice and Bob are stranded in the Sandy Desert, where they spend a long time wandering aimlessly among the dunes before being able to get out.
- Exaggerated: Alice and Bob are stranded in the Sea of Sand, a continent-sized expanse of featureless sand only crossable by literally sailing across it by sand ship.
- Downplayed: Alice and Bob are stranded in a desert composed of sandy stretches among barren rocks, and are able to find their way back out with some difficulty by following the few notable landmarks.
- Justified: By sheer dumb luck, Alice and Bob's plane went down over one of the few extensive sand seas in the northern African deserts.
- Inverted:
- Alice and Bob are left adrift on the high seas.
- Alice and Bob are lost in the middle of a trackless jungle.
- Subverted: Alice and Bob think they're lost amidst trackless dunes, but it turns out they're only in a small sandy area in a more realistic rocky barren.
- Double Subverted: The a huge sandstorm comes along and covers everything else in sand anyway.
- Parodied: Alice and Bob literally start swimming in the sand.
- Averted: Alice and Bob cross a realistic desert composed of rocky hills, badlands and scrub, without notably sandy expanses.
- Lampshaded: "Why is it... that deserts... are always so big and sandy? Is a signpost... too much to ask?"
- Exploited: The Desert Bandits make their hideout within the Sandy Desert because they know that nobody can find their way to it through the desert without knowing a closely guarded secret route.
- Defied: Alice and Bob know that finding their way through the Sandy Desert will be borderline impossible, so they just fly over it instead.
- Discussed: "Look, I don't care what cartoons are like. Real deserts are more than just dunes from here to the horizon!"
- Conversed: "And now the characters are lost in the desert, which is of course nothing but dunes upon dunes. Watch, they'll be seeing mirages of ice cream bars inside of five minutes."
Good luck trying to find your way out of this endless Sea of Sand.
