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 the Trope Launch Pad.
Find a Trope:
openNo Title Literature
It's a book I read about a carnival that if you go there you have to ride seven rides before midnight or you become one with the carnival. It has a guy getting ready to go off to college and has to now face his fear as he rides each ride. Can't think of the name does anyone know of it?
openNo Title Literature
Ok I am trying to recall an older young adult novel. It is about village or an old kingdom tucked away in a valley. The people have forgotten about war. A couple of them one day discover they are going to be invaded by some odd cave dwelling agressors who subsist on mushrooms. The mushrooms that they eat also serve as medicine. The village/kingdom has to relearn the art of war.
The book has sveral drawings that give additional details to the story.
This is as much as I can recall about the book.
Edited by TuefelHundenIVopenNo Title Literature
What's the trope for when two similar looking, but entirely different items are confused for each other? For example, in Snuff, Vimes gets hold of a container meant to hold bodily excretions such as snot. It looks very similar to a snuff container he owns, and although it doesn't happen, he lampshades the possibility of mixing them up in an internal monologue.
openNo Title Literature
I'm not sure which kind of Double Meaning (or Stealth Pun?) this little gem is. Shadow Run 4ed "Corporate Guide" sourcebook includes a leaflet for new Aztechnology (known for a sick love for altars and obsidian knives) corporate citizens. It ends with the following: "Bienvenidos a Aztecnología! Where your hard work, devotion, and sacrifice helps ensure a brighter future for us all!" Where would it be correct to place this one?
openNo Title Literature
I'm looking for a trope that's somewhere between Translation Convention and an Infodump - where a missive and/or insert from another medium is included within either the narrative or main body of text. Does it already exist?
openNo Title Literature
I'm sure there's a trope for this. In Snuff, Nobby says something positive about a goblin girl that most people would say with irony, but he says it with sincerity.
Edited by FearmongeropenNo Title Literature
I found an example in Literature, but could be anywhere. This is a Military Trope. The young, dashing commander officer of a unit is called in by his superior with regards to an action he made during his last engagement. It was an unorthodox move that put his men at risk, but it ended the battle with minimal loss of life. After a severe dressing down, the young commander is actually promoted for his actions.
There is an example in The Mote In Gods Eye, but I've Seen It A Million Times. Any ideas?
openNo Title Literature
A female character repeatedly and willingly has sex with a male character with no birth control whatsoever, gets pregnant, yet is extremely shocked when she is pregnant. Is there a trope for this?
openNo Title Literature
I'm looking for something like a Shout-Out to a real world historical group, not a character. I'm not sure what trope fits best.
The example in question is the jeune école school from the Honor Harrington series. They are based on the real-world, French Jeune École school of naval warfare which advocated the use of small, explosive-shell firing craft to take out much larger warships. In the first book, Honor is given a light cruiser with a similarly unstoppable but semi-suicidal to use weapons mix.
The historical reference in question is thus a school of thought and not a particular person. There's got to be something better than Shout-Out since that's more pop culture oriented, and the jeune école is an important faction in the story rather than a tossed off reference.
openNo Title Literature
Is there a trope for a title taken from a book that gets its title from a book that exists within its story? The King In Yellow is the oldest example I can think of. The Manual Of Detection, The Way Of Kings and The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy are a few more recent ones.
This doesn't have to apply to books specifically, but I don't know of other examples right now.
Edited by ZaklogtheGreatopenNo Title Literature
I think it must've been a comic, and the cover of it was yellow. There was an intro where this group of people duke it out, and then it takes a step back from the action to show that they were actually sperm. Then the comic starts for real.
openNo Title Literature
There was an author on here; I can't recall his name, but he was famous for rambling sentences and stuff. Can someone point me in the right direction?
openNo Title Literature
You find a cliffhanger in the first 100 pages of a book but given the Doorstop nature of the work you can predict that this is something that will be overcome by the protagonist(s). By the same token you could estimate the severity of the outcome of a challenge to the latter by how deep it is into the story. My own guess is that it's some weird mix of Genre Savvy, Medium Awareness, and Paratext, exercised by the audience instead of the protagonists. Someone I've discussed this with likens it to the Status Quo Is God nature of some series such as Star Trek. Looking at it in another perspective it may simply be a property of narratives themselves in that the stakes for the protagonists only get higher as the story progresses.
Edited by DracontesopenNo Title Literature
Is there a trope for when a character is referred to, more than once or twice, in a work of fiction, but then never appears?Not in the case of a Living MacGuffin, like Godot in Waiting for Godot, but a character that may or may not have direct impact on the plot. They just never show up. I have two examples I know of:
In Shakespeare's Richard II, the Earl of Wiltshire is mentioned numerous times by various characters as being one of Richard's supporters. However, he never appears onstage, even though he's important enough for the play to tell us he's been executed, and everyone was very sad about it.
In Simon R. Green's Nightside books, characters that figured into earlier books, or appear in later ones, are often referred to as if we should know who they are, even though the manner in which the books were published doesn't always make it seem like they were meant to be read in a particular order (which is supported by sometimes strange inconsistencies and contradictions between books). Two characters in particular that fall victim to this are Razor Eddie and Suzie Shooter.
I'm thinking of situations where this isn't played for comedic effect, but is just sort of a cryptic offscreen reference. I know my examples fall under Continuity Lockout, to a point (though the Richard II one would be such because the audiences of the time would have understood the importance of Wiltshire, making this a 400 year old example of the trope). Any thoughts?
openNo Title Literature
This is a style of narrative where the POV character will switch to being some random, useless NPC or redshirt for a scene and we'll see the protags from their perspective. I think it only happens in third person limited stories; it's similar to switching perspectives in a 1st person story but less dramatic. It happens a lot in Garth Nix's Old Kingdom trilogy and also in Snow Crash.
For example, there are couple of sections in Snow Crash where the POV character switches to one of the "ratthings"; the style changes dramatically because it's describing stuff that happens from the perspective of what is, for all intents and purposes, a dog. Instead of referring to protag Y.T. as Y.T., the dog calls her "the nice girl who loved him". It also happens when Hiro goes in to buy a motorcycle, we see everything from the salesman's POV instead of Hiro's, so we see what the salesman thinks of Hiro.
It happens a lot in the Old Kingdom trilogy with the people along the wall; you get a short introduction to Permitter Guard #914 and what he's up to before the heroes actually show up in the scene and something plotty happens.
It seems possible that this might have a term in literary analysis or it might have a trope page.
openNo Title Literature
In the guidelines for submissions
for the Sixteen Thirty Two series, Eric Flint has a fairly epic rant about some of the themes that he is not permitting in canon stories:
- One point in particular: I have gotten extremely hardnosed about the way in which people use American characters in their stories (so-called "up-timers"). That's because I began discovering that my small and realistically portrayed coal mining town of 3,500 people was being willy-nilly transformed into a "town" with a population of something like 20,000 people-half of whom were Navy SEALs who just happened to be in town at the Ring of Fire, half of whom were rocket scientists (ibid), half of whom were brain surgeons (ibid), half of whom had a personal library the size of the Library of Congress, half of whom . . .
...I'm fairly sure that there's some meta-trope for this, or should be. I've been considering Mary Sue/Marty Stu, Fanfic Chop Suey ... any suggestions, comments, criticisms?
Edited by RobinZimmopenNo Title Literature
Is there trope for when a person shoots an object of immense energy to release it like a bomb like how Jon Stewart shot a lantern battery in Blackest Night?
openNo Title Literature
What's it called when a piece of writing uses something that would commonly be a noun/adjective as a verb? Calvin And Hobbes has a strip about it where Calvin says "I like to verb nouns" and explains the meaning of it to Hobbes; it also shows up in Light And Dark The Adventures Of Dark Yagami ("Light evilled", "she is at home with Mia lesbianing", "all sexing"). The first example uses it for humor, and though the second example is probably a Troll Fic, it comes off at first as simple misuse.
openNo Title Literature
Im SURE i've seen this: the tendancy of some books to use any word other than "said" whenever possible, such as, "he exclaimed, she questioned, he responded, ect." Anyone know?
(also, is there a trope for threats which aren't very threatining? Im thinking specificly of Tip from Skin Horse threatnig to "sleep with lots and lots of hot women!" if Artie refused to talk to him)
Edited by 91.45.10.48

Is there a trope about a person breaking the rules of behavior or etiquette while in a supernatural place/magical land and being punished for it?
Like Food Chains, but in a broader sense.