Trope Idea Sounding Board

^^^^ Have you heard of the Real Life example exhibit where this is taken to an extreme? It was called 'Take the money and run'. [1]

Pathetic Bully: A bully or any other abuser is actually even weaker and lowly then their victims.

I'm surprised this isn't a trope yet.

Can you name some specific examples? That sounds like a narrower in-between of Paper Tiger and Boisterous Weakling.

And we have Nerdy Bully as well.

Bullying / Abuse isn't always physical, anyway.

One example is Alvin from ParaNorman is a bully dismissed by even his victims as pathethic.

You know, I just realized we somehow don't have Cute Girls Doing Cute Things as a trope on here when it's a staple genre in Japan. It's mentioned in Iyashikei but they're not the same thing — CGDGT is usually Iyashikei, but it doesn't have to be. I guess there's also the "entire series labeled moe" section on Moe but I don't like that that's relegated to a YMMV trope and I don't think all "moe" series are inherently CGDCT.

It also has a subtrope with no supertrope, Military Moe.

...*Sighs and creates a new sandbox*

Contact Warriors Gate if you want to proceed with such a project. I can say with some certainty that they'd be interested.

Oh how about reconstructed character archetype. As a new trope? It’s the inverse to deconstructed character archetype.

Since Law of Chromatic Superiority isn't a Palette Swap subtrope, and Underground Monkey just overlaps with Palette Swap, then:

A Palette Swap just for visual variation like Epic Battle Fantasy 1 or Shantae: Risky's Revenge's kid squids, would be a valid trope? Especially if I allow Mirror Match differentiation?

What does everyone think of making a trope about, when a work has some kind of Theme Table or otherwise has numbers assigned to either characters or things associated with characters (like the faction/place they are associated with it), the protagonist is very likely to be or belong to the largest number on the list? Though sometimes they might add an extra later on, they at least start out as the last. For example, The Locked Tomb where there are nine houses and the main characters are in the ninth, The Hunger Games where there are 12 extant districts and the main character is from the 12th though the thirteenth is later revealed to exist in secret, and some media I'm not that familiar with but am enough to know this applies, like 9, where there are nine characters given numbers for names/associated with numbers and the protagonist is naturally number 9, or Kingdom Hearts where there is an Organization XIII and the one that gets to be the protagonist of the game is the 13th member. Might be to give the impression of The Runt at the End and Underdogs Never Lose, or reflect a Rookie Red Ranger where they are the youngest or newest member.

Edited by molokai198 on Nov 18th 2023 at 4:38:50 AM

My post got lost on the previous page so I'm gonna repost here:

Want to see if this is a sound trope idea: basically a combination of Life-or-Death Question and Heads or Tails?, which decides whether a character will kill someone. Completely based on chance, and shows the character to be a remorseless psychopath who treats murder like a game, literally. The odds are usually also stacked high against a character (They'll probably get out fine though because Plot Armor). Examples can include a heads or tails decision in murdering someone, or a more unfair drawing an ace out of a pack of cards.

Thoughts?

Are there any more examples of this?

A fictional religious figure who comes to that position via an Expy of the Dalai Lama. It is a Reincarnated position, and the next reincarnation is identified at a young age via certain markers. The child is then brought to a monastery or similar, and raised there.

Literature

• The Tombs of Atuan: Arha is the High Priestess of the Nameless Ones. She describes the situation in a Ms. Exposition moment:
  Arha: At the death of the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, the ceremonies of burial and purification are completed within one month by the moon's calendar. After this certain of the Priestesses and Wardens of the Place of the Tombs go forth across the desert, among the towns and villages of Atuan, seeking and asking. They seek the girl-child who was born on the night of the Priestess's death. When they find such a child, they wait and they watch. The child must be sound of body and of mind, and as it grows it must not suffer from rickets nor the smallpox nor any deformity, nor become blind. If it reaches the age of five years unblemished, then it is known that the body of the child is indeed the new body of the Priestess who died. And the child is made known to the Godking in Awabath, and brought here to her Temple and instructed for a year. And at the year's end she is taken to the Hall of the Throne and her name is given back to those who are her Masters, the Nameless Ones: for she is the nameless one, the Priestess Ever Reborn.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: Aang is the Avatar — a reincarnated religious position. He was identified as such at a young age, and raised by Buddhist-style monks. Supplementary material says that Aang's parents gave him to the monks to raise after it was revealed he was the Avatar.

Edited by Eievie on Nov 18th 2023 at 7:55:36 AM

I was reading the trope Womanliness as Pathos, basically the discredited and old-fashioned idea that females or femininity only ever cause trouble, and I was thinking...

Shouldn't there be an opposite trope about stories where men and masculinity always cause trouble? It used to be extremely rare, but after the #Me Too! movement it's becoming slightly more common to have fiction where all men are, if not intentionally evil, always damaging to some degree. I'm not making a value judgment by the way, as these stories can still be good and interesting (I enjoyed both Never Rarely Sometimes Always and The Assistant, but they seems to fall a bit into this terrain).

There are even more examples in cases where young boys, non-straight, and non-white males may be partial exceptions, but all post-puberty, white, straight males are various degrees of trouble and/or unhelpfulness.

Edited by renenarciso2 on Nov 19th 2023 at 1:59:00 AM

Legacy of the Chosen lists reincarnation as a way it could happen and has your Avatar: The Last Airbender example as its image.

I had an idea that may or may not be valid and I'd like to see if a 3rd example exists somewhere as well. It's basically "Friends Know Their Friends" or "Friends Know Everything" — neither title I'm sold on yet, but I won't worry about titles until the concept is approved. The idea here is that best friends know everything about each-other, and can often reveal embarrassing or personal anecdotes to prove this (while also revealing info that the audience would've never known about otherwise).

My two examples are:

• iCarly: In the Christmas Episode, Carly accidentally wishes that Spencer was normal, which changes her life drastically. She seeks out Sam, who in this universe is in juvie, and convinces her that they're best friends by rattling off various secrets about Sam she'd otherwise have no reason to know — such as her mother having a tattoo of a foot on her foot.

• House of Anubis: Joy is shocked to learn Patricia never kissed anyone before Eddie, because she knows everything else about her. To demonstrate she brings up Patricia's imaginary dog, Sniffles — and one Death Glare later, agrees that the dog was invisible, not imaginary.

Raid Something Only They Would Say, Imposter Forgot One Detail and other such tropes? It's too easy for there not to be a third somewhere.

Yeah, that's similar but so far my examples focus on the general idea of "reminding a friend what you know about them and delivering info the audience at the same time", with the context making it clear that the friend knows even the embarrassing or strange stuff.

Edited by WarJay77 on Nov 19th 2023 at 2:14:58 PM

I'm working on a trope here https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/discussion.php?id=tmrnrl3cwyo1i8t8fz745bfu#edit

I started out with one trope, but as it went along I'm increasingly thinking it's two: One is foreshadowing, the other is Chekov's — similar but not quite the same thing. I tried asking for people's feedback on that idea on the page, but I'm not getting it, so now I'm asking here.

The Shrek example on Anaphora?

• In Shrek Forever After, after accidentally wishing he had never been born, Shrek has to convince Fiona that she's his true love. He does so by telling her everything he knows about her:
  Shrek: I know you sing so beautifully that birds explode. I know that when you sign your name, you put a heart over the i. I know that when you see a shooting star you cross your fingers on both hands, squinch up your nose, and you make a wish, I know that you don't like the covers wrapped around your feet, and I know that you sleep by candlelight because every time you close your eyes, you're afraid you're going to wake up back in that tower.

On that note, would "dotting i with a Heart Symbol", or a generalization to "unique dotting", be a characterization trope of femininity or something?

Say It with Hearts seems to hold an example, and River City Girls uses it, as a type of Cardiovascular Love? Although it might just be the last?

Edited by Malady on Nov 19th 2023 at 5:57:41 AM

Much more dramatic than the other two examples, but yeah that'd probably count.

There was a TLP recently for "characterization by handwriting" which probably includes that.

So a pitch from a few months ago I considered writing up for the TLP and then forgot about (even though War Jay pitched in a bit to signify that it was possibly a thing haha), mostly because it's really tricky to summarize: a signifier of mental-only version of Year Inside, Hour Outside. The trope would specifically refer to some kind of sign that a lengthy flashback or other inner thought has taken place in a disproportionately tiny moment of "real"-time.

A few examples of what I mean from this (bold to focus on the signal that identifies the mental/in-person time discrepancy):

• The Human Target (2021): there's an issue where the Christopher Chance (a detective) and Martian Manhunter (the latter is psychic) are on the surface having a casual dinner, but the latter is invoking a psychic attack on Chance that forces him into a menagerie of various flashbacks and personal revelations. The bulk of the issue consists of these mental flashbacks, but it's book-ended by the image of Chance passing the salt, implying that the entire crazy psychic duel they experienced took place in less than a second in real time.
• Knives Out: when Benoit is interrogating Marta, the camera dramatically focuses in on him flipping a coin into the air before the film enters a long and important flashback from Marta's POV. When the flashback ends, the film returns to the interrogation with the coin falling and Benoit finally catching it before Marta gives her answer, highlighting that she flashed back to the whole thing within the time of the single coin flip.
• Doctor Who: Exaggerated in "Heaven Sent". Twelve is forced to explore a bizarre, ever-changing castle while being chased by monsters trying to kill him. At several points, when he's on the cusp of death, we see him retreat into a mental TARDIS where he's working out his problems. One such case occurs while he's falling out of a tall tower into a lake far below, in which he even acknowledges that the fall itself will only take a few seconds and makes it clear to the audience that this is all his accelerated thoughts at work. It's eventually revealed that this is a "Groundhog Day" Loop he was stuck in for billions of years, meaning that he had to repeat this process billions of times over due to forgetting what happened after each death.

I think there is a viable trope concept here as this is a thing I do believe happens a lot, but I'm kinda struggling to articulate this in a condensed, easily-to-understand way, and think it probably could be honed down more to make it easier to identify other specific examples of such in media.

Edited by number9robotic on Nov 19th 2023 at 7:30:42 AM

Could "The Answer" from The Good Place also fit? The framing device is a slow motion scene of Michael about to wake Chidi up, while the bulk of the episode displays the life experiences Chidi remembers during that brief time.

- It launched, actually! Handwriting as Characterization

Although, I'm not sure whether I can say River City Girls's title counts, as it's not a character writing it.

Edited by Malady on Nov 19th 2023 at 7:42:02 AM