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
...
I was going to comment this out but I need consensus to avoid a potential edit war. From Latino Is Brown:
- Abi-Maria Gomes from multiple seasons of Survivor is Brazilian, but is actually blonde. This actually made people doubt whether or not she was hispanic.
The comment out reason is: Hiding a example due to conflicting information. Since she being Brazilian means, by definition, that she is not hispanic. Don't have enough context to fix it.
The trope is Latino Is Brown and Brazilians are latino (but not hispanic), so the example should count. The example should just change the last word from "hispanic" to "latino"/"latina".
I thought sharks were my friends.
I was going through WhamEpisode.Gravity Falls, and the very first example is this:
- "The Hand That Rocks The Mabel": There is more than one journal, and Gideon has it in his possession.
For context, there are three journals throughout the series that contain in-depth information on the unknown. Dipper finds one in the very first episode, and it has a giant "3" on the front cover. In the episode mentioned above, Gideon pulls out an identical journal at the end, except this one has a "2". While the reveal that Gideon has a journal is certainly a wham moment, can we really say it's a big twist that multiple journals exist? They all have numbers on them, so it should be pretty obvious from the very beginning that there are more than one, especially since Dipper's was #3.
RIP KissAnime.
Can a series of books be in Doorstopper.Literature?
All of its entries seem to be single books?
But, the Fan Works version allows series...
Hmmm. there's this, in Literature:
Edited by Malady on Aug 30th 2019 at 5:27:11 AM
Disambig Needed: Help with those issues! tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13324299140A37493800&page=24#comment-576
The Arch-Douchebag
Here's an example from The Camp Half-Blood Series: Mortals page.
- Informed Flaw: Mrs. Chase is described as a Wicked Stepmother who doesn't want her biological children living with a "freak", but when she actually appears, she seems to be a perfectly normal, kind-hearted woman.
The person who describes Mrs. Chase as a wicked stepmother - Annabeth, that is - is explicitely called out on being an Unreliable Expositor and the main character mentally notes how her account doesn't seem to reflect reality. Said flaw isn't something the narrative presents as a fact, it's something a character says that turns out not to be true, at least not entirely. I don't think that's what the trope is about, but the way it's described is somewhat confusing, so I'm asking here.
Apathy is Death. Worse than Death, because at least a rotting corpse feeds beasts and insects.
Jack-o-lantern-in-the-box
Is Salem from RWBY an example of a Satanic Archetype? She was once a normal human being until she decided to turn against the gods when they refused to bring her lover back to life, and when that didn't work, she decided to turn humanity against the gods, leading to their first destruction. Now, she seeks to divide (the second version of) mankind and turn them against each other in order to ensure the destruction of the world. Does this description fit someone based off the Devil?
Ciao!
I was about to add this to Marvel Rising: Chasing Ghosts, since it seems to be in the spirit of the trope, but thought I'd run it by here first:
- Rocky Roll Call: A variant with the characters saying "You!" instead of each other's names, when Ghost-Spider, Exile, and the Secret Warriors all run into each other.
Ghost-Spider: Huh? [to Ms. Marvel] You?
Ms. Marvel & Inferno: [to Ghost-Spider] You!
Exile: [to Ms. Marvel] You.
Ms Marvel: [to Exile] You!
Patriot: [to Ghost-Spider] You?
Ghost-Spider: [to Patriot] You?
Squirrel Girl: [to Ghost-Spider] Hey, you!
@ DelphineTheDelphox: I'd just remove the part about there being multiple journals, like this:
- "The Hand That Rocks the Mabel": Gideon has one of the journals in his possession.
@ Pichu-kun: Agreed, seems like a straightforward fix to me.
Edited by Twiddler on Aug 30th 2019 at 1:48:21 AM
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
As written, that's a Zero-Context Example. How does Gideon having one of the Journals rock the plot?
I'm not sure if this is Happy Ending Override:
- Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island ended with the Baby Mario Bros. finally reunited and brought to their parents. Yoshi's New Island, released two decades later, reveals that the stork brought the baby Bros. to the wrong parents, and while correcting his mistake, the stork and baby Luigi are once again captured by Kamek while baby Mario ends up in the care of a new group of Yoshis. Cue Sequel Reset.
I thought sharks were my friends.
It's still an important wham moment because it means Gideon has access to a similar source of knowledge as Dipper.
Edited by DelphineTheDelphox on Aug 31st 2019 at 5:07:21 AM
RIP KissAnime.
The example should say it, then.
I was looking at some recent edits to The Pennyfarthing Effect and, while there's a bit of an overall issue with general examples, probably due to the nature of the trope, it seemed to me like the entirety of the Comic Books folder had the issue. There were five entries, three of which were so clearly general examples I deleted them outright because they didn't actually reference anything specific. The last two I'm unsure about and wanted to run by the thread.
- An early method for speech in comics was to simply print it as text underneath the comic panels. This lead to hybrid forms of wordless comic strips with dialogue (and often some narrative) underneath. Tom Poes is a well known example of this. One of the major innovations Hergé made with Tintin was to introduce speech balloons, inspired by the emerging trend in American comics, into Franco-Belgian comics.
- Early comic books didn't have ads within stories. A short story would take a few pages, end, then we'd get some ads, before a new story started. During The Silver Age of Comic Books, books started being advertised as "novel-length stories", which meant each segment was a "chapter", divided by ads. Later still, the chapter headings were removed, but a text in the lower-right corner of a page preceding ads assured the reader that the story would be "continued after the following page". It took a few more years before publishers decided that readers understood that the story didn't end abrubtly when an ad showed up.
I added Hergé and Tintin to the first entry and tweaked it a little, but still not sure if that's enough.
Edited by sgamer82 on Aug 31st 2019 at 12:05:25 PM
Found this on Pokémon Masters
- Ascended Meme: Players quickly took notice of Rosa's thinking pose, quick to compare it to the "Hit or Miss" Tiktok meme. The developers noticed too.
Rosa: In a sync battle, your Pokemon's attack can usually either hit or miss, but I guess some attacks never miss, huh?
I'm getting mixed results from other sources, some people are saying the image is edited in photoshop. Image here.
he/him | Image Pickin' regular
Not sure about this example on The Amazing World of Gumball S1E31 "The Car":
- Skewed Priorities: Anais cares way more about the Daisy the Donkey show than about her mother's situations and concerns (like being tired from working and crashing Mr. Robinson's car.)
This is actually pretty understandable since Anais, while a Child Prodigy, is still a four-year-old girl, and her mother did promise to take her to the show.
Keet cleanup
Berserk Button: misusing Nightmare Fuel
Ascended Meme is specifically about memes originating from the fandom becoming official. "Hit or Miss" comes from Tik Tok, so Pokemon referencing it would be a Shout-Out at most if the image is undoctored.
Edited by Zuxtron on Aug 31st 2019 at 7:31:21 AM
So say, Bob has a Split Personality called "Robert". Robert, while not evil and has similar goals/desires as Bob, is much less inhibited and more ruthless than Bob. If Bob doesn't want to do something because it'll look bad, Robert would do it, and even suggest Bob to go with it.
Would Robert be a Poisonous Friend?
We can never truly eradicate the coronavirus, but we can suppress its threat like influenza
Does a character need conventional powers for it to count as a Deus Exit Machina or can it also involve anyone in a position of power in a group that when taken out temporarily would make things harder for the heroes without their guidance? I was hoping someone could clear up the grey area on that for me because I was thinking of adding this trope to the Wonder Pets! page.
Thomas fans needed! Come join me in the the show's cleanup thread!
From YMMV.Avengers Endgame:
- Unnecessary Makeover: Carol's new haircut after the Time Skip received a mixed reception, even among people who liked her with that 'do in the comics (which is itself very controversial). She's even mocked for it by Rocket at one point.
According to the description, the trope is for when a work depicts a character's change as an improvement, but the audience doesn't. Since in this example, the work doesn't seem to do so, I'm not sure it qualifies.
Yeah, apart from Rocket cracking that one joke, it has no narrative focus whatsoever. It's just a different haircut. Not an example, sounds like someone just wanted to complain about it.
"can it also involve anyone in a position of power in a group that when taken out temporarily would make things harder for the heroes without their guidance?"
Oh, it definitely can.
We can never truly eradicate the coronavirus, but we can suppress its threat like influenza
he/him | Image Pickin' regular
I don't understand this example on FunnyAneurysmMoment.Music; this sounds like it could be any war:
- The Final Cut by Pink Floyd is both disturbingly prophetic and harrowing to listen to. Granted, the album was protesting the 1982 invasion of The Falkland Islands by the UK, but the track "Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert" features Roger Waters screaming, "Hey! Get your filthy hands off my desert!", followed shortly by the sound of an airplane flying over and an explosion.
All the Elemental Powers subtropes like Making a Splash, Blow You Away, etc.
Need Elemental Powers basis, so some guy wielding a taser, doesn't count, unless they've got a bigger Electricity theme, like Astonishingly Appropriate Appearance or something?
Is wielding a taser, any trope we have?
Characters.Yandere Simulator Other Characters:
- Shock and Awe: First shown in YandereDev's Let's Examine Persona series of videos, where he is seen in concept art wielding an X-26 Taser. Sure enough, when he was introduced into the game several months later, he has that taser on him and will use it on Ayano without hesitation.
I'm helping!
If a bad guy is currently possessing your friend, is the whole "you could kill him but your friend will die too" thing a Sadistic Choice? The bad guy in question says "make your choice and live with it" when he points this out, but I feel like that might be misleading.
Trouble Cube continues to be a general-purpose forum for those who desire such a thing.
YMMV.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic S 9 E 18 She Talks To Angel
- Hilarious in Hindsight: In "[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic S5 E13 "Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?" Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep", Fluttershy dreams of "being the pet" one day. Clearly she didn't expect it like this.
I've seen other Hilarious in Hindsight example cut because it goes under the work that Hilarious in Hindsight as opposed to the one that makes it so. Is that the case (ditto for Harsher in Hindsight and "Funny Aneurysm" Moment)? Is there a scenario where it should go under the work causing it (like it not causing in hindsight to a specific moment or work, or cross-media)? What about Tough Act to Follow?
Edited by Ferot_Dreadnaught on Sep 1st 2019 at 12:17:02 PM
Can Viewer Species Confusion be used in universe and out for a character who jas animal ears but its confusing which animal ears?
In Honkai Impact 3rd, a character call Mae has fox ears. However, they look like bunny ears and one event someone call her donkey ears.
Edited by WhirlRX on Sep 1st 2019 at 3:44:48 PM
On WhatDoYouMeanItsNotForKids.Star Trek, Troi is potholed to Token Evil Teammate. Is that really an example?
For every low there is a high.