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. We don't discuss Complete Monster or Magnificent Bastard examples; please don't bring them up.
Edited by SeptimusHeap on Jul 17th 2025 at 8:59:01 PM
I put Moral Dissonance in Tropes Needing TRS under Complaining.
BTW, I checked the YMMV page of that movie, and found this entry tacked on under Les Yay:
- This increased after Maria's offscreen death from cancer in WandaVision, with many fans suspecting that with that show already in the planning stages when this film was being made, they decided to not make Carol and Maria an explicit couple to avoid a case of Bury Your Gays, something Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. had already done itself.
How the death of the character involved in a ship adds fuel to Les Yay, I don't really understand, and this seems to be natter anyway. Should it be cut?
Edited by Adept on Feb 26th 2021 at 2:12:30 AM
The idea that they didn't become a canon couple because the writers wanted to avoid Bury Your Gays is a ridiculous notion. Disney just doesn't like to take the risk of explicit LGBT characters. If anything, setting up a couple with a lot of Les Yay and then killing one of them off without confirming anything looks worse than if they'd been explicit. So I agree it should be cut cuz it doesn't make much sense.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.On the Characters.Steven Universe Pink Diamond
- Ambiguous Disorder: Pink Diamond exhibited many symptoms of histrionic personality disorder, such as excessive emotionality, little patience, being highly attention-seeking, and a tendency to make very rash decisions with little thought behind them. She is also implied to have seduced a great deal of humans over her lifetime as Rose Quartz.
At the very least, is the last part necessary?
Is it me or does this example from Freaky Friday (2003) seem to be arguing with itself?:
- In Name Only: A girl named Anna and her mother who don't understand each other very well both switch bodies one Friday morning and get a better understanding of each other's lives and become closer, and... that's about all this movie has in common with the original film or the book (though it does share a few other basic concepts, like the daughter's friends being weird out by the adult behavior the mom exhibits in the daughter's body, the daughter learning that the brother really likes her a lot, and the boyfriend falling in love with the daughter in the mother's body). However, it's not a bad film, and critics praised it for not directly rehashing its 20+-year-old predecessor. The lack of similarities didn't stop publishers of the book from slapping a photo of Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis on reprints' covers, though.
On the Cookie Run character pages, there are a lot of examples of characters' Gatcha rarity being downgraded between LINE and Ovenbreak, or between Ovenbreak and the RPG spinoff Kingdom being troped as Adaptational Wimp. Does this count, given it's solely a gameplay thing, and Ovenbreak and Kingdom are different genres where it's hard to objectively compare power levels?
HAPPY HALLOWEEN FOR MARIASo... this is question asking about multiple examples on the Genre Deconstruction page of the wiki:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/DeconstructionFic/CitadelOfTheHeart
I already removed some for not being deconstructions after asking around, and I honestly wonder how many more not-deconstructions are there
Could someone more experienced with the term please help?
A lot of this reads less like a deconstruction and more like "a fanfic plays things slightly more realistic than the source material." If you want further guidance maybe check the Not a Deconstruction page.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.Is Juxtaposed Halves Shot flexible enough to count this poster
◊? (human side vs. sea creature side) I'd usually say yes but the description seems to focus on "half of face".
The description says "face or body" so I think it counts.
It's hard for me to say when I don't know how deep the fic delves into these subjects or how they're even portrayed in the source material, but one that doesn't sound like a deconstruction is the Pidgey thing. That's just something being slightly more realistic than usual. Surprisingly Realistic Outcome might also be helpful here for the one-off gags related to something being more realistic than expected.
Edited by mightymewtron on Feb 25th 2021 at 6:48:26 AM
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.Not My Lucky Day has an example which seems to be complaining about a character more than it talks about how they qualify as an example:
- One Disney Ducks comic by Keno Don Rosa, "The Sign of the Triple Distelfink", reveals that Born Lucky Gladstone Gander's birthday is the one day of every year when he's unlucky. Unfortunately for many readers, the story ends with the discovery that the titular magical symbol, which is what gives Gladstone all of his infamous luck, was flawed when created, and it's fixed, meaning this one chink in Gladstone's armor is gone. It's not a very popular story for that reason.
Can it be rewritten to fit the trope, or should it be cut outright?
Another entry on Mainstream Obscurity which seems like mis-use:
- Queen suffers a similar case. Bohemian Rhapsody (a song most people know at least a few lines of) was voted the UK's "favorite hit of all time", the music video is referenced constantly, and according to The Other Wiki their albums have spent twenty-six cumulative weeks on UK album charts. All that said, other than Bohemian Rhapsody, We Are the Champions, and We Will Rock you, most people would be hard-pressed to name another Queen song, let alone one of their albums or any member of the band besides Freddie Mercury. (Even this is because of his death in 1991, and even then those alive and old enough to remember it are in their 40's now.)
- This is much more the case in America than the rest of the world, as Queen's popularity in the US dipped in the early 1980s and never really came back until Mercury's death in 1991.
- Queen suffers a similar case. Bohemian Rhapsody (a song most people know at least a few lines of) was voted the UK's "favorite hit of all time", the music video is referenced constantly, and according to The Other Wiki their albums have spent twenty-six cumulative weeks on UK album charts. All that said, other than Bohemian Rhapsody, We Are the Champions, and We Will Rock you, most people would be hard-pressed to name another Queen song, let alone one of their albums or any member of the band besides Freddie Mercury. (Even this is because of his death in 1991, and even then those alive and old enough to remember it are in their 40's now.)
This isn't true at all. Queen remain beloved by millions of people around the world. The Bohemian Rhapsody movie about the band grossed over $900 million worldwide
and was nominated for several Oscars. Their recent "Rhapsody" Tour with Adam Lambert had them selling out (or close to it
arenas all over the world. The videos for songs such as "Somebody to Love"
"Don't Stop Me Now
, and "Crazy Little Thing Called Love"
have well over 100 million views on Youtube, to say nothing of the over one billion views on "Bohemian Rhapsody"
. Even the videos for "deeper" tracks like, say, "Seaside Rendezvous"
or "Sail Away Sweet Sister"
have more than a million hits. And they have nearly 35 million
monthly listeners on Spotify.
Edited by HaydenM2001 on Feb 25th 2021 at 12:41:06 PM
I'm no Queen expert, but even I know that "Somebody to Love" and "Don't Stop Me Now" are still wildly popular even in the USA.
Plus, not only was that Queen movie very popular, people criticized it for being inaccurate, because there are enough Queen fans who know the nitty gritty details of the band to recognize Artistic License – History.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.Blob, from Ultimate X-Men, killed the Wasp. When his lover Henry Pym discovers that, he immediately kills him. Does it count as Hoist by His Own Petard?
Ultimate Secret Wars![]()
![]()
This is actually an elaborate ZCE with wrong formatting that is also factually wrong. There are many bands that are only popular for few of their songs (and Queen shouldn't be one of them) but the example misses the Pop-Cultural Osmosis part. The part you quoted appears at subsubbullet level and is written as natter.
The Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire section on Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire has this for The Last of These Is Not Like the Others:
A meta example - out of all of the remakes, Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire are the only ones that aren't bundled with anything, the titles aren't written in CamelCase and the most recently introduced Eeveelution is obtainable along with the location-based evolutions.
The second point is no longer accurate, as the names of the Diamond and Pearl remakes are also properly spaced. It's too early to tell if the other two points still hold up, though. Advice on how to fix this example?
Cave Johnson, we're done here.It's not the last item now that there are other remakes, so it's misuse no matter what.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.A troper recently added a trope entry that seems like misuse. Specifically, does Downer Ending apply to real life examples?
I Need To Get Off Of This Site
added an entry to the Fryderyk Chopin page referencing the composers slow decline and death from what was probably tuberculosis as an example of this. I’m skeptical.
Link:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/article_history.php?article=Music.FryderykChopin
Edited by BoltDMC on Feb 26th 2021 at 4:09:29 AM
Downer Ending seems like one of those tropes that should be No Real Life if it isn't already.
Jawbreakers on sale for 99¢That is purely a narrative trope and cannot apply in real life.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I found these on YMMV.Network:
- Award Snub:
- A few critics considered it deserved Best Picture more than Rocky.
- Inversely, Beatrice Straight's Best Supporting Actress award is somewhat controversial now. Most everyone agrees it's a powerful performance, but for an actress who didn't do much film work (mainly stage and television) to win for what amounted to an extended walk-on role over two iconic performances (Piper Laurie in Carrie and Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver) looks very odd, though those two not winning are understandable (Laurie falling victim to the Horror Ghetto, and the Academy not wanting to give an award to a portrayal of a 12-year-old prostitute). With the previous year's Supporting Actress winner Lee Grant nominated again, it effectively made it a two-person race between Straight and Jane Alexander for a similarly-small role in All the President's Men.
Are these examples? I thought Award Snub was for when something doesn't get nominated, but fans felt like it should have been. Not just should have won, but didn't. Plus the second one seems to argue with itself a bit. However, I don't really know this trope that well, so I could be wrong.
Edited by Bullman on Feb 26th 2021 at 8:04:44 AM
Fan-Preferred Couple cleanup threadAward Snub covers "should have won, but didn't", but those are bad examples. The first one fails to give any context other than saying "some people thought", which are classic weasel words. The second one contradicts itself by talking about someone who did win an award but people later thought they shouldn't. That's too vague.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Yeah. I honestly don't think I would ever know what a good use of Moral Dissonance would be enough to add it to a page, but at this point I'm pretty comfortable knowing that this isn't an example. Cutting it and citing this thread.
It really does seem to be a dumping ground for complaints a la hypocrite which certainly has valid uses, but generally I see get used for complaining about characters.
Edited by Larkmarn on Feb 25th 2021 at 9:14:29 AM
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.