The TVTropes Trope Finder is where you can come to ask questions like "Do we have this one?" and "What's the trope about...?" Trying to rediscover a long lost show or other medium but need a little help? Head to Media Finder and try your luck there. Want to propose a new trope? You should be over at You Know, That Thing Where.
Find a Trope:
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 Chabal2openComposite People Western Animation
There's this oddly specific trope I'm trying to find the name of. The closest match is Uncanny Valley and Marionette Movement, but it's common enough to be its own subcategory. It's this cut-out style of animation in which animators use photos of real people (along with specific facial features and body poses from other photos), cuts them out, and mix-and-matches them like a collage of sorts. They will take different eyes and mouths and such and paste them over a "base" photo to give the illusion of talking. It has this really creepy effect where the "base" body will stay frozen in place, but the facial features move very abruptly and with no transition. Same applies to body parts and physical movements. Here are some examples of what I'm talking about:
Wonka on Acid by Brandon Rogers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubxwWkhA2-E The Jabberwocky by Brandon Rogers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYxrE3kM0A Nosferatu scene from Spongebob: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFlJus0v2kM Angela Anaconda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTbPAmVzlpM Subconscious Password: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OCGTu_bkbg
openRole Reversal backfire
In some dark corner of the woods, an old (-ish) witch likes to spend her free-time doing things to young girls that can only be described in an h-doujin. When checking her traps, she finds out that she'd caught a different kind of "trap" in one of them. One conversation later, and her "vicitm" manages to convince her to play the victim instead - basically Swapped Roles - due to her being no different than her own victims in terms of appearance, on top of getting a once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience the "pleasure" she subjects her victims to. After a night of pleasure and torment (some consensual, some not), she wakes up the next morning to find that she is now a legitimate prisoner in her own dungeon. What happens next must be left unsaid, but the gist is that she basically fell for two different kinds of "trap" within the same day, and is now having to answer for what she'd done to the other girls, on top of having those same things being done to her the previous night.
Edited by GofastmikeopenAudience reaction: the dissonance between a work's success and its pop-culture impact
It's been sort of a meme lately that nobody can remember much about Avatar despite it being literally the most successful film of all time, and I feel like there's a reaction this can be filed under. Other than Memetic Mutation, I mean.
openAttack jump on back
Can't find the trope or draft about an attack by jumping on the back of your target.
openMid episode theme repeat Live Action TV
Is there a trope for when an episode of a show recreates a different version of the introduction mid-episode for a plot reason or as a transition change?
I'm asking for my brother, so I don't know/remember the exact context of these, but he's seen it in My Name Is Earl and Community.
Two I remember better:
- An episode of How I Met Your Mother where, after Barney declares himself the leader of the gang, Barney sings the theme song with lyrics related to being the new leader.
- An episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, where Rebecca's Stalker with a Crush Trent sings the theme song (which for that season was justifying her also being a Stalker with a Crush).
openHeaven Is Kinky
Do we have a trope for this? The heaven in Helltaker has been implied to have a military fetish, and the heaven of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt is also hinted at being quite kinky in terms of lots of lingerie being involved with it.
Edited by KingOfStickersopenPerson mistakes animal/baby for a toy
A common trope in some shows is that a person, usually a young kid, will see an animal or a baby and take it home with them thinking it's a toy or doll. Do we have this trope?
openWriters resorting to an action when they can't figure out what to do (trivia)
This is listed under Executive Meddling on Trivia.Sonic The Comic:
- During a fan made series of videos detailing the history of Super Sonic, the creator of the videos had an opportunity to meet with some of the writers for the comic and asked why Super was given amnesia in Issue 100. The writers explained they did so because all of them were having trouble figuring out how to write around such a powerful character.
This doesn't fit Executive Meddling however, so I'm wondering if we have a different trope for what this is describing.
Edited by Crossover-EnthusiastopenBuilding Blocks Of The Universe
The common (fictional) element that makes up a universe in a work.
For example, the The LEGO Movie universe is literally made up of legos.
Edited by KingOfStickersopenSex before death
Someone knows they're going to die, so they decide to be intimate with someone before it happens.
openmagically replenishing food/drink
Food/drink that replenishes itself after it's consumed.
Edited by TwiddleropenDevolves to Lazers Anime
The longer a show with a ki/life energy/whatever system goes on, the more likely it is for the fighting to break down into hurling flashy energy attacks at each other due to power creep.
openModern Stasis, but for people?
So I've been playing through The Last of Us Part 2, and noticed something: Ellie and Dina's behaviors, outlooks on life, priorities, etc. are too much like current day teenagers'. They're supposed to have grown up in a world very much different from our own, but the way they act don't support that. This was actually highlighted in the first game, when Ellie found the diary of a pre-outbreak teen. She can't comprehend how the girl would have time to think about anything but immediate survival.
I've searched the site, and the closest trope that would describe this out-of-place feel is Modern Stasis. But it's only used for the world at large (more specifically, the technology), not for people. Is there any trope for that?
Do we have an index of all the tropes commonly found in sitcoms?