Basic Trope: Those wax statues look a little too much like real people...
- Straight: Madame Alice's Wax Museum contains a number of wax figures made with corpses.
- Exaggerated: Every single wax museum on the planet makes every one of its wax figures with a corpse.
- Downplayed: The wax statues contain preserved, still-living people in conscious, suspended animation.
- Justified: ???
- Inverted: A crematorium appears to have dead bodies readied for cremation but they turn out to be wax fakes which would produce a passible ash. The real bodies are stolen and used for some other purpose.
- Subverted:
- Detective Bob notices a number of people have gone missing around Madame Alice's Wax Museum and sneaks in to get a look at the wax-works...to find that Alice pays people in exotic trips and other things of the sort to get models for her wax figures.
- The models allowed Madame Alice to make full body molds and she forgot to adjust the molds to avoid the Uncanny Valley for the end product.
- Double Subverted: But when he sees an actual "modeling session", it turns out that the process gradually drains the model's life force so Alice can capture their image.
- Parodied: It's blatantly obvious that the "sculptures" are corpses, yet the visitors are none the wiser.
- Zig-Zagged: Detective Bob notices a number of people have gone missing around Madame Alice's Wax Museum, but he finds that Alice pays people in exotic trips to get models for her wax figures. However, when he sees an actual "modeling session", it turns out that the process gradually drains the model's life force so Alice can capture their image. When Detective Bob accuses her, however, Alice points out that one of his relatives suffered from delusions, and given that the "model" dies when the process completes itself, usually far away from Alice, Bob can't prove that he's correct.
- Averted: No wax museums appear in the work.
- Enforced: ???
- Lampshaded:Detective Bob: I hate this place; it always feels like those figures have more in them than wax.
- Defied: Municipal law calls for all wax statues to be x-rayed to ensure that there isn't a real body inside of them. Madame Alice winds up fleeing as soon as she finds out about it.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
If you pass this way, towards Wax Museum Morgue, you'll see the newest part of our collection...
