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    Wicks for a potential Seasonal Rot check 

Troperiffic wick check:

This is a WIP wick check for Troperiffic. I probably won't give it its own page until the backlog on wick check clears out some more. (I also need to add a few more descriptive tags to some of the sorted examples.)

The running definition of the trope, as noted here, is "a work that unashamedly uses and plays with several tropes."

These wicks should be sorted into the following categories:

  1. Correct usage
  2. Misuse for "this work plays a lot of tropes straight"
  3. Gushing about "good" works
  4. Other misuse
  5. ZCEs
  6. Unsure

Other notes:

  • All potholes are bolded for emphasis, unless there's already similar markup in the original example.
  • When there are multiple wicks on a page, only use the first one.

Wicks:

    open/close all folders 

    Correct 
  1. Creator.Brandon Sanderson: As the rest of this page shows, Sanderson likes his fantasy tropes. He also likes doing things to them. A little light on context, but it shows that this writer likes both using and playing with tropes.

    Misused as "work uses lots of tropes" 
  1. Film.Barney Oldfields Race For A Life: This was one of the first — and one of the most straightforward — "railroad rescue" movies. From the work's description. It indicates that the work plays the tropes of the genre straight, implying that it doesn't play with them.
  2. Series.Human Target: From the soaring orchestral scoring, to the classic 1990's action tropes that pop up in every episode, to the obvious and typically blatantly unrealistic MacGuffins, the whole show is a rolling Homage to action thrillers of the 1990's. This suggests that the series plays many tropes straight.
  3. Film.Laser Mission: Even by the standards of 80's action flicks, Laser Mission ticks a lot of boxes. This suggests that the film uses a lot of tropes, but says nothing about whether it plays with them in any fashion.
  4. Film.Mean Girls: Mean Girls (2004) is a fairly trope-heavy comedy movie about a teen girl named Cady Heron who goes to a school that is dominated by a popular girl named Regina. This is the very first line of the work's description. It indicates that the work uses a lot of tropes with no word if they're played with to any significant degree.

    Gushing 
  1. GrowingTheBeard.Webcomics (1): Although Problem Sleuth was pretty funny when it started out, the gradual Art Shift, combined with the accumulation of parody Solve the Soup Cans puzzles (each more impenetrably complex than the last), strange characters, downright bizarre game mechanics, Lampshades, Chekhovs Guns and Crowning Moments eventually elevated the series to absurd levels of awesomeness by the time the Final Boss Battle rolled around.

    Other misuse 
  1. BrotherSisterIncest.Live Action Films: In Lemonade Joe, there is one Love Triangle drawn throughout the movie. Doug Badman is hopelessly in love with Tornado Lou, a Chanteuse and Soiled Dove who works for him. She doesn't reciprocate his feelings, but falls hard for the Ideal Hero Joe whose love she thinks will make her a better woman. He's a Celibate Hero and doesn't love her back. (Instead, he later falls in love with pure and innocent Winnifred Goodman.) At the end of this hilarious Troperiffic Cliché Storm of a movie, it's revealed that both Doug and Lou are Joe's Long Lost Siblings.
  2. YMMV.Sacred Seven: Cliché Storm, or Troperiffic if you prefer.
  3. Cracked.Tropes I To Z: How many of these 22 Awful Jokes, Cliches & Lines That Show Up In Every Movie can you identify?

    ZCEs 
  1. Film.The Brothers Grimm: Especially for Fairy Tale tropes.
  2. Literature.Discworld: Most likely the best example on the entire site. A commented-out ZCE that says nothing at all about how the series uses tropes.
  3. Characters.Eyeshield 21 The Pentagram, in Donald "Mr. Don" Oberman's folder: Right after Hiruma and Agon.
  4. YMMV.Freddie Wong: There's no example attached to this misplaced wick.
  5. Fanfic.Latias Journey: By the time the sequel rolls around, Ri2 is a confirmed troper.
    • And up until the sequel, just look at the percentage of this page coated in blue.
  6. Literature.The Light Princess: A commented-out ZCE with absolutely no explanatory text.
  7. Literature.Oracle Of Tao: Just look at this page.
  8. Characters.The Order Of The Stick Others, in the Mechane's folder: The Mechane and her crew clearly delight in their tropes. No surprise considering their captain.
  9. YMMV.The Simpsons S 27 E 5 Treehouse Of Horror XXVI, under Just Here for Godzilla: "Wanted: Dead, then Alive" is what more people remember than the other two shorts (one of which, ironically, is a parody of the Godzilla the trope mentions). The fact that "Wanted" is Troperiffic than the other two helps.
  10. ICarly.Tropes P To T: This is nothing more than a wick, without any elaboration whatsoever.
  11. PuellaMagiMadokaMagica.Tropes T To Z: Welcome to page four of the tropes; take note of the lovely scroll bar to your right.

    Unsorted 
  1. CriticalDissonance.Live Action TV: The Witcher (2019) met mixed reviews from critics, with many comparing it unfavorably to the early seasons of Game of Thrones and saying that it didn't do much to keep viewers unfamiliar with the source material from getting confused — a problem that didn't affect fans of the books or the games, who made it Netflix's highest-rated show on IMDb and gave it an audience Tomatometer of 93%. This article by Kaila Hale-Stern for The Mary Sue points to another possible reason for the dissonance, which is how unashamed it is of its High Fantasy trappings even at risk of sliding into camp, often feeling like a big-budget version of the fantasy adventure shows of The '90s like Xena: Warrior Princess — something that would rub professional critics the wrong way, but which the average viewer would have a blast with.
  2. Creator.Kim Newman: Newman is a long-time friend of Neil Gaiman; they collaborated on the hilarious and troperiffic non-fiction book Ghastly Beyond Belief, a collection of science fiction and fantasy quotations with plenty of snarky asides by Newman and Gaiman, back when they were both struggling journalists, and have made cameos in each others' work (Newman appears, in his other job as a film reviewer, in Gaiman's horror story "Calliope").
  3. RealityEnsues.Fanfic A Through H: Frequently Played With in Hunting the Unicornlots of tropes show up naturally, but everyone who actively tries to invoke a trope will end up just failing at best, or running into consequences at worst. Most notable is Blaine's past attempt to invoke Sex Equals Love, which... didn't work. Another case is where Blaine hits his head during a kidnapping and the Easy Amnesia/Tap on the Head tropes are very much averted. Namely, that the normally-sensible Blaine devolves into asking Kurt the same questions every few minutes, becomes terrified of falling asleep, and has headaches that he futilely tries to explain as strange-colored wind. He later tries to reason with his kidnapper, and ends up watching him try to strangle Kurt.
  4. VideoGame.Gotcha Force: The designs of the borgs are heavily Troperiffic, taking inspiration from a variety of sources and distilling all the delicious tropes into one package, ranging from ninjas, cowboys, samurai, knights, tanks, mecha infantry, transforming mecha, jet planes, dark monsters, tokusatsu heroes, and so much more!
  5. XMeetsY.Anime And Manga Shows: Promare is Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill meets Fire Force.
  6. Fanfic.Love At First Sight Harry Potter: This may not seem like a particularly big tropes page, but it is big for a work that's four words long.
  7. Fanfic.Anthropology, under Genre Savvy: Thomas, who can tell that Lyra's lyre necklace is important simply from the fact that she got it from Celestia, as he is a writer of Troperiffic fantasy.
  8. DinoAttackRPG.Tropes S To Z: Especially in Dino Attack: At War's End, in which tropes such as Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe and Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking are actually called out by name.
  9. ComicBook.Druuna: While the erotic content is an integral part of the comic, it's pretty Troperiffic as well.
  10. Characters.Avengers Assemble Others, under the Impossible Man's folder: Of course, otherwise it wouldn't be the Impossible Man. He somehow merges a fight between heroes and villains with a sitcom, and then recreates the climax of the Avengers film.
  11. CerebusSyndrome.Video Games: Knights of the Old Republic was a pure, distilled Troperiffic throwback to the Star Wars Classic Trilogy with a BioWare sense of character and story. The second, farmed out to Obsidian, was Planescape: Torment with lightsabers, and pulled ruthless deconstruction on everything from RPG mechanics to the very idea of morality in an uncaring universe. The third game, Star Wars: The Old Republic shoots for some Reconstruction, but the backdrop is a Forever War with the Republic and the Empire at a hopeless, blood-drenched stalemate. Worse is that the Sith are just as crazy as ever (including the Emperor who doesn't give a gizka's rear end about his own Empire, and wants to destroy everything in the universe but himself), and the Republic is suffering a severe case of He Who Fights Monsters and Do Unto Others Before They Do Unto Us. Finding the protagonist from the first game brutalized and insane after 300 years of being the Emperor's favorite "toy" seals it.
  12. What a Senseless Waste of Human Life: Dec wails exactly the trope name over Ant's body in an episode of Chums, after accidentally shooting him. Three times. (He got better.)
  13. Tailor-Made Prison (third-level sub-bullet): Pathfinder ups the ante with the high-level spell binding, which throws in a number of relevant tropes: the caster can make the binding ritual more reliable by having additional casters as assistants, and the effect comes in six different flavours, including physically binding the target to one location, sending it into a decades-long sleep, permanently banishing it to a separate plane of existence, or sealing it inside some small object.
  14. Washington D.C. Invasion: In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, the first Soviet mission has you destroying the Pentagon. This contradicts the Allied (canon) side, where you actually have to defend and attack with a lot more than just basic grunts. Naturally, RA2 was when the series started to get campy and Troperiffic, so the triteness of the premise can be excused. The eighth Soviet mission involves attacking General Vladimir's base near and capturing the White House.
  15. WMG.Glitter Force: The reason is that many anime viewers last year just watched the deconstruction Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which picked apart many essential Magical Girl tropes. Thus, this year Toei will do what Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann did for the Humongous Mecha genre and make Smile Pretty Cure more Troperiffic than any of their past seasons.
  16. Chained to a Railway: The 1947 The Perils of Pauline film — actually a musical biopic about actress Pearl White — played this trope straight in a Death Trap montage. The film was Very Loosely Based on a True Story, and arguably more of a Troperiffic homage to adventure serials in general than a direct copy of the original work.
  17. Music.Ludo: One review of You're Awful, I Love You pointed out that Andrew (who writes most of the lyrics) seems to write from the point of view of someone who learned everything they know about relationships from watching TV (if anyone recognizes this and knows a link to the review, please provide)
  18. VideoGame.League Of Legends, under Magical Girl: The Star Guardian skin line invokes this. Their promotional website absolutely revels in being a blatant homage to Japanese Magical Girl Tropes, with its own Troperiffic side-lore and character profiles.
  19. WesternAnimation.Toy Story 1, under Lantern Jaw of Justice: Buzz Lightyear sports one quite intentionally.
  20. Earth-Shattering Kaboom, on Stellaris: The iconic (though not only possible) armament of Colossus ships in the Apocalypse expansion is a weapon capable of turning an entire planet into a debris field. Using such a weapon on an occupied planet will infuriate basically every other empire in the galaxy (unless the target is a Crisis Faction) and the weapon is generally considered Awesome, but Impractical compared to the Neutron Sweep, but Stellaris is such a troperiffic game that it was pretty much necessary for a war-focused DLC to provide the option. Try using it on a Holy World for extra fun!
  21. Ruins of the Modern Age: A half-submerged Statue of Liberty appears in the music video for "Knights of Cydonia" by Muse, along with every other sci-fi and western trope in the universe. The video for "Sing For Absolution", also by Muse, featured a ruined and burnt-out After the End future cityscape dominated by the ruins of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament.
  22. SouthPark.Tropes R To V: South Park is famous for skewering tropes just as much as virtually everything else in existence. Pick any episode and you'll probably find five tropes that haven't been added to this page in it.
  23. Just Hit Him: Happens a few times in Soon I Will Be Invincible, such as when CoreFire throws Dr. Impossible around instead of finishing him before the Doctor can activate his weapon. It's that kind of book.
  24. NeedsMoreLove.Fan Works: Oblivion (Gabriel Seraph), an in-progress multi-part Kingdom Hearts AU fic taking the members of Organization XIII and putting them into the real world, in a fictional Northern California suburb (implied to be in the Bay Area.) The story focuses on Tim Nemo (Demyx in all but name), whose father Ansem is trying to activate something called the "In-Between" in a secret underground lab. It's also very Troperiffic and very fun to read (with each "episode" divided into nine chapters, and a great deal of cliffhanger endings between chapters and episodes), not to mention much better than one would expect for FanFiction.Net - and yet it's only gotten two reviews so far. Four episodes have been completed ("The New Kid," "Both Sides of the Story," "Everybody Hates Windmills," and "Frozen Pride"), with a fifth story, "Shake, Rattle, and Roll Over the Edge," having two chapters completed.
  25. Film.Hatchet: The page has three wicks total, two in the description and a ZCE in the actual trope page. The relevant lines from the description are copied below:
  26. YMMV.Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines, under Hilarious in Hindsight: One of "The Deb Of Night's" commercials is for a Troperiffic horrible action movie, apparently entitled simple "See It, Because It's A Movie, And All Your Friends Are Going." The commercial ends with "In theaters Friday, and on DVD in three months." While this was an astonishingly fast turn-around time for theatrical films when the game was released, nowadays, films are available on DVD and Blu-Ray around that timeframe.
  27. Literature.The Boy Who Couldnt Sleep And Never Had To: TimeBlaze: An EVILution. The boys repeatedly mention how they plan to "change the way people think about" various tropes.
  28. Recap.Doctor Who S 34 E 3 Robot Of Sherwood: Attempts to do for Robin Hood clichés what "The Curse of the Black Spot" did for pirate clichés. There's the fight on the bridge, the Merry Men, arrow splitting at a contest, witty banter, an evil sheriff oppressing the locals, etc.
  29. VideoGame.Castle Of Magic: In contrast to many of Gameloft's other works, Castle of Magic is more of an Affectionate Parody/Homage to the bright, colorful 2D platformers of the 90's than a riff on any one particular work. Although it contains many prominent notes from Super Mario Bros. and its family of games, it also has numerous Shout Outs and mechanical "borrowings" to and from other classic games, The resulting game plays like a mad mishmash of Super Mario Bros., Sonic the Hedgehog, Solomans Key, and every other platformer under the sun. It's extremely Troperiffic overall. This is from the description.
  30. The Wall Around the World: Dungeons & Dragons, as always: This pothole is only a heading for the rest of the game's examples.

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