Basic Trope: The Undead in the story can dance, and demonstrate it.
- Straight:
- The undead legions raised by Charles the Eternal routinely break into a song and dance.
- At the New Year, when the boundaries between life and death thin, the ghosts come to the cemetery and dance.
- Exaggerated: The undead routinely perform dazzling Busby Berkeley Numbers with hundreds of skeletons and vampires participating.
- Downplayed: Charles is an undead character who likes dancing, but only does it once or infrequently.
- Justified:
- Charles is not actually evil, and fights other, evil liches by setting their minions free with the expressive power of dance and music.
- A Necromancer forces Charles to dance.
- Dying has given the ghosts new perspective; many of the problems they fretted over were foolish, and their new good sense makes them happy enough to dance.
- In life, the individuals were excellent dancers, a skill they retain after death.
- Inverted: The undead causes people to dance.
- Subverted: The undead try to dance, only they are rubbish at it due to the degraded state of their bodies.
- Double Subverted: Then, Charles busts out his special magic, and his undead begin dancing in earnest.
- Parodied:
- There is an entire school of magic centered around dancing undead, and its practicioners are known as the necrodancers.
- The ranks of the dancing undead include thinly-veiled parodies of famous real-life dancing stars.
- Zig Zagged: When the time to dance comes, some undead (like vampires and skeletons) are brilliant at it, and others (like zombies and death knights) can't dance to save their un-lives.
- Averted: The undead in the story are supposed to be dramatic and threatening, so they never get the need to dance.
- Enforced: The story is comedic fantasy, and Charles with his undead regularly break into a song and dance to break the tension.
- Lampshaded: "The time has come, we are awake / The world's fate is now at stake / Now hear the clatter of Death's hooves / It's time for us to bust some moves!"
- Invoked: Charles tries long and hard to get his undead to dance, since before becoming a wizard and then a lich, he used to be a Quirky Bard, and wants something to remind him of his old days.
- Exploited: The Hero sees that Charles and his undead legions are not particularly villainous, so to get past them, he challenges them to a dance-off instead of a fight.
- Defied: Charles refuses to dance.
- Discussed: "It's a dead man's party, who could ask for more?"
- Conversed: The two characters in a Sketch Comedy have a Seinfeldian Conversation about which types of the undead would be best suited for dancing.
- Implied: Charles is never seen dancing onscreen, but he does mention that he likes to dance.
And now, you can dance the skeletal salsa back to The Dead Can Dance.
