Do you have trouble remembering the difference between Deathbringer the Adorable and Fluffy the Terrible?
Do you have trouble recognizing when you've written a Zero-Context Example?
Not sure if you really have a Badass Bookworm or just a guy who likes to read?
Well, this is the thread for you. We're here to help you will all the finer points of example writing. If you have any questions, we can answer them. Don't be afraid. We don't bite. We all just want to make the wiki a better place for everyone.
Useful Tips:
- Make sure that the example makes sense to both people who don't know the work AND don't know the trope.
- Wrong: The Mentor: Kevin is this to Bob in the first episode.
- Right: The Mentor: Kevin takes Bob under his wing in the first episode and teaches him the ropes of being a were-chinchilla.
- Never just put the trope title and leave it at that.
- Wrong: Badass Adorable
- Right: Badass Adorable: Xavier, the group's cute little mascot, defeats three raging elephants with both hands tied behind his back using only an uncooked spaghetti noodle.
- When is normally far less important than How.
- A character name is not an explanation.
- Wrong: Full Moon Silhouette: Diana
- Right: Full Moon Silhouette: At the end of her transformation sequence into Moon Princess Misty, Diana is shown flying across the full moon riding a rutabaga.
Other Resources:
For best results, please include why you think an example is iffy in your first post.
Also, many oft-misused tropes/topics have their own threads, such as Surprisingly Realistic Outcome (here
) and Fan-Preferred Couple (here). Tropers are better able to give feedback on examples you bring up to specific threads.
For cleaning up examples of Complete Monster and Magnificent Bastard, you must use their dedicated threads: Complete Monster Cleanup, Magnificent Bastard Cleanup.
Edited by Synchronicity on Sep 18th 2023 at 11:42:55 AM
Do any of these count as Snail Mail?
The first is unlikely but I'll ask anyway. A man writes a letter to his mentor, knowing he won't read it for six months. This seems more to do with his old mentor being busy than the postal service being slow.
The second is after the guy finally reads the latter several volumes later. This results in another letter being sent but due to wars going on, it has to wait until a capital ship is finished to deliver it. I don't know how long that took but it doesn't seem like the reply to that one took very long.
The third is unrelated but still in the same story. A ship containing mail, including personal letters and packages to soldiers, is stolen during transport and never arrives.
Working on The Fallen World
(she/her)
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Sounds like an example to me from a quick glance.
I am leaning on these instances not being an example of Snail Mail because the slowness of the letters isn't emphasized, and as you said yourself; there are other reasons why the mail couldn't arrive in time.
Is this My Car Hates Me or Plot-Driven Breakdown? I am leaning on the latter but I am not completely sure.
- Midnight Puppeteer: The plot begins when the car Mayo and and her father, Sohta are driving suddenly breaks down in the middle of the road. This causes Sohta to go into an abandoned mansion in the woods to get help. When he fails to show up after 30 minutes, Mayo decides to go into the mansion to look for him.
I think the princess did give some explanation as to why it took the mail so long when she showed up but I can't remember the wording or what chapter that was. The woman getting the letter wasn't expecting it though.
Seems more like Plot-Driven Breakdown if that is what kick start the plot.
Working on The Fallen World
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Ivanovna was a vindictive, merciless, blood-thirsty Zaftran colonel, delighted at slaughtering her enemies with her Zhuk mobile weapon. It's also notable that Ivanovna was the only Zaftran character to be referred to by their middle name. It's possible that her fellow Zaftrans explicitly chose to address her this way to refer to her brutality towards enemies.
Does it really count as an example? I mean, the name Ivan doesn't have any ominous meaning on its own - it's just a version of John. It can only be seen as scary because it's Russian, but the character is already Russian, so does it really add anything? She just has a stereotypical Russian "middle name" (actually a patronymic, but whatever).
I don’t see any reason why Ivan would be an inherently evil sounding name, I'd cut it.
Withdrawn.
Edited by stankykong on Apr 29th 2024 at 3:06:22 PM
I think that's the job of the ROCEJ thread, not this one.
Does it count as Unspoken Plan Guarantee if we are never actually told what the plan is?
Upon realizing where they are, two members of the group come up with some sort of plan or agreement with a look and a nod. What this was about was hidden from the POV character. The plan seems to have been to steal the core, which is all kinds of forbidden but also comes with a massive payday. The team leader only makes his intent to steal the core known after his co-conspirator is killed by the core's guardian. Killing the guardian and everything else they did up to that point is considered legal and normal all things considered but he had to tell the surviving members of the group his reasoning for taking the core after he already had it in his hand. I assumed the other guy would have backed him up on the matter and they had agreed to do this in advance.
Aside from that, the POV character also came up with her own plan after she noticed the leader was acting strange. She never made clear to the reader or anyone else what she was planning until she had done it, though a savvy enough reader could guess the plan given the context clues.
Working on The Fallen World
Lost in Space
Unspoken Plan Guarantee is a trope by contradiction. It is the logical inverse of "If you tell us [the audience] the plan, it will not go as expected." The reasoning here is that, if we know what to expect, and everything works out, it would be boring/anticlimactic. However, if we don't know what's about to happen, we can be still be surprised even if it works perfectly.
If the plan is not revealed to other characters in the story, that's a completely different trope. Well, I suppose you could mess around by having the audience surrogate/POV character be locked out of the loop, but that gets into Playing with a Trope.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 29th 2024 at 2:49:50 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Konstruktor
Found this on Primal Scene. Weblinks Are Not Examples aside, does this count as an example of that trope? The video linked depicts an adult man receiving photographs of a spy having sex with the man's mother. At the end, the man drops his disguise, revealing that he's actually the spy in said photographs.
- A variant (photographs taken at the time by a third party, seen after the event) occurs in Meet The Spy... Sort of. It's probably quicker to watch than to try and explain.
Am I a weirdo?
That's absolutely zero context.
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
How strict / severe does No Woman's Land have to be?
I'm trying to find a trope for Blade of the Moon Princess that describes the misogynistic attitudes of the Matsu clan; essentially the women of the family are unwanted due to being thought to bring misfortune. The current emperor is even demanding monthly Virgin Sacrifices, with his own daughter being the next potential victim when the story starts. In the world proper we also see one villain plotting to sell village women into slavery and evil soldiers rounding up all the women and female children of the village and willingly preparing to kill them, some even physically abusing them.
But it's certainly not to the levels where every single woman in the setting is constantly being abused. It's mostly a pattern of misogyny by the villains, and there are a handful of female characters who aren't shown to be subject to such treatments.
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
Shadow Ranger
From Shimeji Simulation:
- Spiritual Antithesis: While the manga is superficially similar to its Stealth Prequel and Spiritual Predecessor Girls' Last Tour (who both have a Foil duo lead, are Slice of Life, are written by Tsukumizu, are a Deconstruction of its core themes and are principally focused on existentialism), both works are different in style, execution, setting and tone, as well as its themes and how they tackle existentialism as its theme.
- Girls' Last Tour is a manga about Chito and Yuuri travelling across a futuristic megacity After the End that is devoid of natural environment, where both of them have a very specific end goal. Shimeji Simulation by contrast is a manga about Shijima and Majime in an idyllic Thriving Ghost Town that is alive and well, with both of them not having had a specific end goal in mind.
- Both stories are a Genre Deconstruction, but they deconstruct specific genres. Girls' Last Tour deconstructs the post-apocalyptic adventure genre, as to how the story nails the point regarding adventurous life in a dead world, as well as the potential consequences of doing so. Shimeji Simulation deconstructs most of the Iyashikei genre's elements, particularly how Heartwarming Moments are often not as heartwarming as it seems and how nihilism often takes the centre stage.
- Girls' Last Tour's world was destroyed by a Robot War, which has been dead and has remained that way; it also frequently snows for the bulk of the story. By contrast, Shimeji Simulation is a world that is alive and warm, but is simply a Deconstructed version of a Utopia, where it is all a simulated reality that is under the watchful eyes of the Gardener.
- Girls' Last Tour's Chito and Yuuri are mainly driven by their desire to reach the highest layer in their hopes of finding new life, but their journey has no far-reaching consequences throughout the story. On the other hand, Shimeji Simulation has Shijima and Majime befriending each other and later realise that their world is not what it seems to be, where there are far-reaching consequences to the whole world as the story goes on.
- Girls' Last Tour focuses heavily on classical Nihilism and the meaning of life in Nietzschean terms, where despite the world around Cihto and Yuuri and the life they live in being bleak in nature, both of them still find closeness and enjoyment in their journey who only experience scraps of life in the past. By contrast, Shimeji Simulation focuses on the philosophical boundaries between people and the meaning of individuality in relationships, where closeness between one another is treated as an existential fear, which plays heavily into the manga's plot due to Shijima's inherent fear of being close to Majime, who dreads about herself "changing" when she is to be merged by her.
- Girls' Last Tour has Chito and Yuuri basically having nothing and have to find items across the megacity to survive during their long journey, often having simple pleasures. In Shimeji Simulation, Shijima and Majime have everything in their disposal, more so after they gain Reality Warping powers, thus allowing them to materialise everything out of thin air.
Tobias/TJ (He/Him)
Does It Never Gets Any Easier have to be specifically about how it's difficult to deal with death, even when someone experiences it all the time?
The description seems to just refer to death, but there are a few examples about other cases where it's stated to still be difficult to keep experiencing something that has little/nothing to do with death.
I'm asking because I've been working on making a page for the album Sea Change by Beck. Here's my current writeup for an example, based on one of the songs on the album:
- It Never Gets Any Easier: "End of the Day" mentions a variant of the trope when it concerns the emotions that come with a break-up, stating that though the singer has been through the pain before, it still hurts to go through it and the awareness that things will eventually get better doesn't provide much comfort:
It's nothing that I haven't seen before,
But it still kills me like it did before.
Would it fit the trope? If not, is there a better trope that it could fit under?
Cold turkey's getting stale. Tonight I'm eating crow.
I thought about it quite a bit and given that the emperor is big into it I have to assume a large part of the culture has adapted to it. Even if it doesn't victimize 100% of the women if it is a sizeable chunk then it counts unless it is just the new emperor and everyone only goes along with his monthly sacrifices to avoid his wrath. I haven't read it myself, so I have no idea.
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
The sacrifices were part of the culture, but the monthly mandate is a new thing.
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
Last Request's description seems to indicate the request to be spoken to an actual person to count, but is it really required, like the example below?
- Last Request: On his deathbed and ravaged by illness on the Wuzhang Plains, Kongming makes a wish that in his next life, he'd get to lead a peaceful life free from war. It gets granted, though it results in him getting reincarnated in the 21st century in Tokyo, Japan.
Then it likely counts.
Personally I'm against it but it is a bit of a gray area. Typically, the last request is a final mercy or something that impacts the surviving characters. I also wouldn't count it when it grants the character in question a new lease on life, opening the door for more requests. I am willing to still count if the character is resurrected for unrelated reasons.
Working on The Fallen World
The example in question removed.
Shadow Ranger
Hey guys. I asked this question before in a wrong forum but this is about The Penthouse: War in Life. But do you think the character of Joo Seo-Kyung would be an example of Like Father, Like Daughter because before she realised the truth, she was slowly becoming more and more like her father the Big Bad Joo Dan-Tae due to her Sanity Slippage where she nearly became a manipulative bully turned murderous and corrupt mafia queen. This was also due to how Dan Tae treated her and Seok Hoon.
Enemy Scan: Does this still fit even though it's not for enemies?
- Numbers: When Jem looks into a person's eyes, she sees a number unique to that person, their exact date of death.
Or these "boy seems numbers over people / girls"?
Edited by Malady on Apr 30th 2024 at 7:55:04 AM
Disambig Needed: Help with those issues! tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13324299140A37493800&page=24#comment-576
A few months ago, Biohazard 2035 posted this entry to "The Lion Guard's" fridge page, where they made it clear that they have a rather bleak view of the show's premise.
They also posted these two entries to the show's main page and YMMV page, which are the ones that I'm sharing here for a second (and third) opinion.
- Abusive Parents: Downplayed, as this is a kids show and Simba is not particularly cruel to his children. That being said, he is still thrusting a massive responsibility onto his youngest son when he is only a child, without properly preparing him beforehand. Said responsibility, leading the Lion Guard, also involves Kion having to be placed in many, many dangerous and often life-threatening situations that Kiara herself is otherwise kept away from. That being said, he is otherwise a decent parent to his children.
- Never Live It Down: For some, the fact Simba is making or at least letting his younger son serve as a leader of Lion Guard in the first place brings accusations of Simba forcing his son to be a Child Soldier and has earned Simba the reputation as a borderline *Abusive Parent who cares little about his son's safety, despite how protective he is shown to be of his older daughter. This accusation is not helped by the fact he effectively made Kion start leading the guard right after he showed the mark, the guard being composed mostly of children, as well as the Lion Guard's job being constantly shown to be both a massive responsibility and involves the guard being involved in all sorts of dangerous situations. To say nothing of the fact how Kiara, Simba's eldest child, is being given lessons and training before she is allowed to take the throne while her younger brother, almost paradoxically, is having to fulfill a complex and dangerous role when he is only a cub with no preparation beforehand.
Both of these entries feel pretty shoehorned. An important bit of context here is that throughout the early episodes, Simba is very reluctant to let Kion take up the role of leader of the Lion Guard, because he doesn't think he's ready for that kind of responsibility yet. It's Kion who repeatedly insists that he can rise to the task, and wants to prove himself as a productive member of the royal family, like his sister.
Even if you think Simba letting his son become a Kid Hero is enough for him to fit the criteria for an abusive parent (which the show never portrays him as), saying that Simba made Kion take on the job or that he didn't care about Kion's wellbeing at all is painting a pretty dishonest picture of Simba’s character.
Am I a weirdo?
Definitely cut the Abusive Parents example as it's misuse. I know nothing of the work's fandom, so I can't speak to the Never Live It Down example.
Bumping my thing for The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh being Loose Canon to the DisneyToon era because in Pooh's Heffalump Movie, Roo doesn't know what a Heffalump is despite appearing in The Great Honey Pot Robbery alongside Stan and Heff (Heffalump and Woozle in the flesh and Pooh's Heffalump Halloween Movie using the Boo to You! special for the bulk of it but Roo tells Lumpy the special took place before Kanga and Roo moved to the Hundred Acre Wood.
Hi!