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openMix-and-match idiom
A comedy trope where a character mixes or confuses two idiomatic expressions, like "it's the straw that broke the camel's nose"…
openGetting him drunk before killing him
Someone wants a character dead, but knows they can be hard to kill for whatever reason. So they decide that before they kill them, they need to get them drunk, that way they won't be able to fight back. Examples include All Dogs Go To Heaven via Carface getting Charlie drunk before hitting him with a car and A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones via the Red Wedding, so Robb's army can't fight back.
openClimbing the Ladder to the Top Film
Is there a trope describing the process of starting with a street level criminal Mooks and following leads all the way to the top of the organization?
In Payback, Porter wants his money back. He starts with the small fry and obtains the name of each successive link up the ladder to the top. The Big Bad who can give him his cash.
In Deadpool, Wade follows a similar process to find and take revenge on the man who tortured him into mutant anti-hero status.
Much of the action of the film involves the ways the main character goes about beating or tricking the information out of each successive rung in the ladder.
Definitely part of Man on Fire, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. I think it must be a staple of investigation plots where the target is either name or location unknown.
Edited by trooper8openHollywood Reindeer
Is there a trope that covers the tendency of a lot of media (particularly those based off of Rudolph) to portray Santa's reindeer as resembling white-tailed deer rather than actual reindeer?
openFifties Sue Film
Is there a trope for the naming convention of teenage girls in works set during the 1950ies being called "Something-Sue", like, Peggy Sue, Betty Sue, Mary Sue, and so on?
openAsk yourself how they got to be old men.
A group of characters are about to face one or more Badass Grandpas or no-longer Retired Badasses. A naive person makes a confident remark on the lines of "they're just old men", whereupon a more thoughtful member of the group replies "Ask yourself how they got to be old men". Probably not common enough to be a trope, but I'm looking for the origin of the exchange. I've definitely seen it in the Discworld novel Interesting Times (1994), and the film Once Upon a Texas Train (1988). Can anybody recall an older example?
openSlogans Plastered Everywhere
Do we have this one? Common dystopian trope: every which way you look there's billboards, buildings, etc. with "patriotic", pro-ruling-party slogans plastered/painted/carved on them. Appears in Nineteen Eighty-Four and its adaptations. Can also be seen in the real world; North Korea is the best current example. Got this idea while watching Memories and noticing "NO CONQUEST WITHOUT LABOR" written practically everywhere in the "Cannon Fodder" segment.
open"No Jury Would Convict Me!"
A comedy trope where one character attempts to kill or severely injure another (but there's no doubt that they'll fail, it's still a comedy) in reaction to something the second one did, with a line like "I'm going to kill him and no jury would convict me!/and I'll be rewarded for it!". The motive is usually the second character having done something the audience agrees is wrong, if not exactly deserving of immediate death (a very bad pun, acting as The Millstone, being particularly stupid, etc.).
openGoing for the source
So the Hero decides that if the bad guys are going to keep sending mooks at him, he's just going to kill the one in charge and get done with it, and proceeds to do it. What is this trope?
openFriendless Insult
Is there any specific trope for when a character insults another by saying they have no friends, or that nobody likes them, or what have you? It's a particularly cruel thing to say so I'm wondering if we have anything that could cover the concept.
openHypnosis Episode
An episode where a character becomes hypnotised or brainwashed, sometimes into being evil.
openEnjoy the Let's Play, Skip the Game
A concept I'm looking for that's not quite Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game, where people enjoy a game mainly for seeing the reactions of let's players rather than the qualities of the game itself. Honest Trailers put this concept best in their trailer for Five Nights at Freddy's where they described it as "the horror game sensation, that no one enjoys playing, but everyone loves watching other people play".
openThe same ability affects player characters and NPCs differently
Is there a trope for a game where a ability causes a different effect depending on whether it's used on a player character or an NPC?
For example, in Horizon Zero Dawn, Corruption attacks cause enemy machines and humans to go berserk and attack their allies, but against main character Aloy they just act like video game poison and cause health damage over time.
open"All I can do... is trust them!"
So there's this action series and a team of usually two guys and a girl... And people always keep talking about how the girl is training a lot and she improved... but in reality she didn't at all. She keeps standing in the back doing nothing in battles as usual. I remember this trope had a quote from Sakura (from Naruto) and she talked about how she thought she had improved but she realized she didn't. It ended with "All I can do... is trust them!".
open"Let's try it!"
There' a team of characters. A really big team, like more than five or six. In this team, only two or three characters are actually doing something to resolve the conflict... Usually the leader of the team and the protagonist. Like... the others just stay behind being themselves, being "part of the team" or in silence agreeing with everything the protagonist says... or doing nothing at all. Let's suppose the protagonist says he had an idea like "let's go to that cave, because of whatever reasons" and everybody just says a bunch of characterized lines agreeing or not with the idea without really doing anything important at all??
Like "I think this idea might work...", "Let's try it", "We got nothing to lose anyway", "Yeah, sure!", "What a wonderful idea, darling!","Do you think this is a good idea?", "If we don't try it out... we'll never know."
I think it's because it reaches a point where the team is so big that there really is nothing left for some characters to do you know.
Edited by dreamer_drmropenWhat trope would this be?
Someone asks person A to kill person B in exchange for person C. Person A kills Person C themselves to emphasize how much they care for person B and will protect them.
openReason As Religion
A situation where a religious ritual is discovered to actually disguise a scientific process.
For example, a religion in a Medieval European Fantasy are known for their rites involving boiling water to remove the demons of pestilence from it (actually killing the bacteria in it), adding a sacrifice of wood when smelting iron (actually making steel), rubbing cats to produce shocks (static electricity), etc. It turns out the religion's founder was a modern scientist trapped in the world and attempted to sow the seeds of modern science by having them repeated not as abstract concepts but rituals, in the hopes that they would be built on and not forgotten.
Edited by Chabal2
A type of Scene Transition. When a falling drop of liquid (often water, sometimes a tear) is shown hitting the ground or another body of liquid, causing ripples to spread, upon which the ripples slowly expand or fade into the next scene.
An example can be seen here at about the 2:29 mark.