Basic Trope: A character makes a remarkable observation about a person, place or incident based on clues not apparent to others.
- Straight: Alice is able to deduce that Bob works as an accountant based on his speech patterns, competence with numbers, style of dress, etc.
- Exaggerated: Alice is able to tell Bob his life story to an astonishing level of detail at their first introduction.
- Downplayed: Alice can tell that Bob just got back from vacation because he has a tan, but she's not good enough to tell that he's an accountant, married, has two kids, owns a dog, drives a Volvo, etc.
- Justified: Alice has practiced this skill over a long period of time and has a good memory for details. Alternatively, she's also an accountant and recognizes jargon, mannerisms, and dress from having known many accountants.
- Inverted:
- Alice is spacey, barely pays any attention to Bob and forgets even his name after being told multiple times.
- Alice hears that Bob is an accountant and is able to guess his appearance from that.
- Subverted:
- Bob laughs off Alice's observation and says he's actually a doctor.
- Alice actually knows that Bob is an accountant because he's wearing a name tag that says "Bob Smith, Accounting".
- Double Subverted:
- Bob is lying, possibly just to be contrary.
- Alice then remarks, "Oh, yes, a good surgeon given your excellent hand-eye coordination at video games."
- The fact Bob is still wearing the name tag only solidifies her guesswork was correct, although it do takes the wind out of her sails because everybody will assume that she read the tag the moment she saw Bob.
- Parodied:
- Alice is able to deduce that Bob works as an accountant based on a single unrelated post on an Internet forum.
- Alice deduces several obvious things about Bob from viewing her surroundings, and he freaks out and reacts as if she's psychic.
- Zig Zagged: Alice declares that Bob is an accountant, Bob denies this saying he's a doctor but it turns out he's lying about that, but it then turns out that he's still not an accountant, he's a method actor studying to play a doctor on TV. But he used to be an accountant and hasn't shaken all the mannerisms.
- Averted:
- Even though Alice is a skilled detective, she doesn't work this way. She relies on testimony, evidence collected at crime scenes and other conventional investigative tools.
- All of Alice's guesswork is wrong. Turns out that because of a comedy of errors nothing Bob is wearing provides clear evidence of what he does to earn a living.
- Enforced: "We need to show the audience what an awesome detective Alice is."
- Lampshaded: "Do you do this to everybody you meet?"
- Invoked: When Bob finds out Alice is a detective, he asks Alice to do a Sherlock Scan on Claire for entertainment purposes.
- Exploited: Bob knows that Alice will employ a Sherlock Scan so he plants the sorts of subtle clues she looks for to mislead her.
- Defied:
- Alice refuses to do a Sherlock Scan, possibly because it tends to alienate people.
- Alice admits from the get-go that she's a good investigator, but that "the Sherlock Holmes trick where I take a single look at you and deduce your whole life or at the very least your job and occupation" is beyond her capabilities.
- Bob immediately mentions that he's an accountant, making any kind of scan moot. It also leaves in the air whether or not Alice would have been accurate.
- Bob begs Alice to not do this trick when they meet. Whether or not Alice would have been able to do so remains a mystery.
- Discussed: "I don't like the look of that guy. If only we had a detective here like Sherlock Holmes, I'll bet he could figure out whats up with that guy."
- Conversed: "I love this show, my favorite part is when Alice figures out things about people just by looking at them."
- Deconstructed:
- Alice's explanations of how she arrived at such conclusions don't stand up to scrutiny. In fact, any number of professionals dress and act the way Bob does. People begin to doubt Alice and become put off by someone who so rashly leaps to conclusions.
- When Alice's scans fail, they fail big. She even mentions that Conan Doyle himself wrote about it being a "parlor trick" once or twice in his stories, and wasn't above having Dr. Watson mention that the Holmes stories he "made public" are the ones in which Holmes wins, with a few that left even Holmes baffled not seeing the light of day because readers would hate reading them.
- Reconstructed:
- But it turns out that Alice is just not good at explaining herself and her observational skills are so far beyond normal people's that she often has trouble explaining everything she notices or knowing which details she needs to highlight for others that are obvious for her.
- Alice acknowledges that what she sees has several possible explanations, one of which turns out to be right.
- Alice is Crazy-Prepared and has done extensive research in all kinds of clues, and unlike the regular "parlor trick" version of this Trope, she spends at least a good hour scanning her target because clues like rings are small and move too much to get a clear view. When she finally explains her conclusions, she points out that Bob's an accountant because he's wearing a ring given exclusively to the 1993 class of the local Ivy League's accountant class and that it has a higher chance of being his because pawning off and buying accountant class rings is a whole lot less profitable overall (less demand because they're less cool, you see).
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