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openTemplate Monster
A game trope where infectious creatures (zombies, werewolves, vampires...) don't necessarily turn the victim into another of their kind, but rather turn them into a third type with traits of both. Not always done since it's a pain to program/design/model as many [template] creatures as there are creatures, especially in older games.
e.g. instead of
- zombie bites dwarf -> 2 zombies
you'd have
- zombie bites dwarf -> zombie + dwarf zombie (tougher and stronger than the progenitor zombie, but also more vulnerable to fire due to the beard)
openIn a hurry, but stops for a tiny thing
For example, when Mr. Bean is late for the dentist, he rushes outside, then returns to tuck his teddy bear back into bed.
openThird-Person To Second-Person
Alice refers to Bob in the third person even when speaking face-to-face to Bob. Usually Bob is of much higher rank and Alice only uses the rank, e.g. "His Grace" rather than "Your Grace".
As in, "What time will His Grace require breakfast", "If His Grace will follow me", "His Grace is summoned before the King", etc. even when there's no one else in the room.
openEven Satan Has Standards
Someone’s sin for going to Hell is so bad that it even disgusts Satan
openBroadcast Version of Newspaper Backstory? Videogame
I’m looking for a version of Newspaper Backstory where the exposition is given by a television news reporter, not a newspaper. Like a reporter in episode one of Dispatch explaining the history of the superhero Mecha Man.
openLustful Look
The Interplay of Sex and Violence counterpart to Death Glare, one character gives another a look that goes straight to their groin and turns them into All Men Are Perverts / All Women Are Lustful.
Basically this quote, in which a naked woman gives a man such a look that it turns him into a murderer and traitor.
- Nyssia made a sign for Gyges to come forth from his retreat; and laying her finger upon the breast of the victim, she directed upon her accomplice a look so humid, so lustrous, so weighty with languishment, so replete with intoxicating promise, that Gyges, maddened and fascinated, sprang from his hiding-place like the tiger from the summit of the rock where it has been crouching, traversed the chamber at a bound, and plunged the Bactrian poniard up to the very hilt in the heart of the descendant of Hercules.
openPositive version of Terrible Trio
I've got a trio of D&D characters that I called the "Terrible Trio" due to them being a close-knit group of Artful Dodgers with a penchant for mischief. However, I recently discovered that the actual Terrible Trio trope is completely different from how I envisioned them; as the trope is about a domineering villain(ess) with two henchmen, whereas my characters are heroic (well, Neutral Good) street kids who treat each other as equals.
What I'd like to know is if there's another trope that better fits my characters.
Edited by GofastmikeopenSchool lessons below their grade
School is an important setting in childrens books and TV shows, but unless it's for a Checkovs Skill, the contents of the classes are usually left out. Usually.
If a writer chooses to give a brief glimpse into a subject, they most often shoot too low. Older teens will end up with topics that should be part of fifth or sixth grade, twelve year olds solve stuff at elementary school level, and anything below there is learning the alphabet and basic addition.
Above all, this is of course a case of Viewers Are Morons, and possibly Small Reference Pools as well, but maybe we got something more specific? I had a quick look at the School Tropes, but found nothing of the kind.
Edited by JerryopenPowered By Fear?
A character's trapped in a room by a barricaded door. They're afraid, but then when spooked by something, like something chasing them or something like a spider, they let out a bloodcurdling scream of TERROR and bust down the door to run away from something? Is this a trope? When a character suddenly gets a bout of strength from fear, sorta like berserking with fear instead of anger
resolved The battle gets easier as it goes on Videogame
A less challenging, but more realistic gameplay mechanic - an enemy or level starts out being really tough, but, the more you beat it, the easier it gets to beat it even more.
For instance, in a fighting game, hitting an enemy hard early on will make it get dizzy, which makes it easier to hit it, and so on. In a strategy game, attacking an enemy will make it lose resources and the ability to collect resources, until in the end you're just mopping up the last remnants of it. Or, even in a Shoot 'em Up, the boss starts would with dozens of guns, but as you destroy each gun, the fight gets easier, until in the end it's only one pathetic little core shooting an easy-to-dodge bullet.
openToo Story Aware
The protagonist (often but not always a chosen one), says, 'this is a story, this is MY story, so I should be able to skip a step or two' (Or 'I can do this without loss or consequence because I have to win') and it backfires terribly. Often portrayed as cockiness.
openSoul harvesting
In this trope, the aliens are without a soul, and are looking to merge with humans in place of A.I.s disguised as transhumanism to take control of their soul. In this way, it's like a Demonic Possession and And I Must Scream combined.
Edited by luigirovattiopenAPP The same but shorter Anime
Is there a trope for when a cartoon character's child design (or toddler/younger child if they are still a child) is basically the same design or their older self but shorter? It can also be like they have the same hairstyle and clothing but with minimal differences like a tooth missing??
openGiving Up the Immature Dream
Is there a Coming of Age Story trope in which a character, for the purpose of Character Development, decides to abandon an ideal, belief, or fantasy from their childhood, on the basis that it's childish and no longer helps them as it once did? I'm usually thinking about this in the context of a whimsical world that is revealed (or implied) to be Fantasy All Along, especially if used as a coping mechanism against trauma. However, I feel like it could also apply to beliefs or attitudes inherited from their parents (compare Crisis of Faith, or in a subversion, Turn to Religion) or traditions like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. The fantasy could be a useful lie that helps the children cope, but becomes harmful or foolish as one grows up. Could also be Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!. Blurs the line between Growing Up Sucks and Not Growing Up Sucks. Distinct from Innocence Lost, since I'm not talking about a tragic event sparking the disillusionment from the childlike innocence.
Examples:
- Puff the Magic Dragon: "Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys" - Jackie Paper has grown up, and never comes back to visit Puff, implying his friendship with Puff had outlasted its usefulness.
- Paramore - Brand New Eyes - "Brick By Boring Brick": the girl is told to "bury the castle" (her imaginary fantasy world), which had gone beyond its mere role as a coping mechanism ("you built up a world of magic because your real life is tragic") and become very harmful ("the angles are all wrong, now she's ripping wings off of butterflies"; "it was a trick"), so the speaker offers to help her abandon the dream.
- Twenty One Pilots - Vessel - "Migraine": the speaker imagines in his mind a vision of a dangerous island; his mind is no longer composed of "green gardens," but "suicidal crazed lions." So he decides to take his imagination down - "I begin to assemble what weapons I can find/'Cause sometimes to stay alive you gotta kill your mind"
- Rene Descartes "Meditations on First Philosophy": “Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.”
- C. S. Lewis: From "Surprised by Joy": "Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring." (Lewis' Joy is a nostalgic yearning for something out of your reach. The object, in Lewis' case, was God, so he moved beyond what he called his "chronological snobbery" and atheism and into theism, becoming "a converted Pagan" among "apostate Puritans"). The same text also says, "I do not think the resemblance between the Christian and the merely imaginative experience is accidental," even though one does not lead to the other - but they have resemblances, and one experience can precede the other, without direct causation.
- Subverted in The Last Battle - Susan Pevensie is the only one among the children to not return to Narnia, believing it to be a childish fantasy, and acting more "grown-up" than she really is. Of course, Narnia really does exist, so this is more of a criticism
- Discussed in Pan's Labyrinth: Ofelia's mother Carmen tells her, "As you get older, you'll see that life isn't like your fairy tales. The world is a cruel place." Also, although Word of God says the fairy-tale labyrinth is real, it's a common fan interpretation that the labyrinth was Fantasy All Along as a way for Ofelia to cope.
- Book of Corinthians: In 1 Cor 13:11 - "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put aside childish things." This is speaking of the lesser nature of God's revelation when one is a child, compared to the fullness of God's revelation through Jesus Christ as one matures. These childish things aren't portrayed as bad - see 1 Cor 3:2, where Paul tells believers that he's feeding them spiritual milk because they're not ready for solid food. But they have to be put away with when one comes of age.
openWe come to you
So, you have a problem that only a detective can solve, but you haven't yet thought of hiring a detective, not to worry, the detective has found out about your predicament and come to you, asking if you'd like to hire them.
A more specific example is the Leverage crew. A lot of their clients are people they found out about through Hardison (their resident hacker) trawling the web rather than those people coming to them (since openly advertising yourself when you're a group of thieves tends to draw attention from law enforcement).
openChildish Hedonism
An adult character's idea of hedonism is more or less a kid's ideal day, though they're not necessarily a Manchild.
e.g. watching cartoons in pajamas while eating sugary cereal, eating ice cream by the gallon, staying up all night to play videogames, pizza and mac&cheese for lunch, etc.
openUndiscovered Public Domain Work MacGuffin
The MacGuffin of a work is an undiscovered (that was lost or never existed in reality) work of a long-dead artist or author: an Edgar Allan Poe detective story, a Shakespeare play, Mozart masses, Picasso painting, etc. Usually destroyed or lost for good at the end.
openTrading your life for someone else's free will
A Heroic Sacrifice which has the specific effect of removing Mind Control from the person who killed you in the last moments before you freed them.
I can think of two examples:
- Black Widow (2021): Yelena's first scene has her and other Widows trailing Oksana, a liberated Widow who has made off with a counteragent that neutralises the drugs which make Widows unable to resist following any orders they're given. Yelena fatally stabs Oksana before the latter exposes her to the counteragent, before dying in her arms.
- StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void: All Protoss of the Daaelam come under the control of Amon via their connection to the Khala. Artanis, the leader of Daaelam, is also under under this control. His friend Zeratul, a Nerazim Protoss who is immune to Amon's control by virtue of severed nerve cords, fights Artanis with the goal of severing his nerve cords. Zeratul succeeds, but not before being mortally wounded by Artanis, and the latter vow to free the rest of their people in turn.
Is there a spot for this?

Is there a trope where a task is considered morally good because it's hard or dangerous, and then someone invents a way to take out the hardship/risk?
- In Discworld, dwarves had a kind of social caste who were entrusted with going into the mines to find pockets of minedamp alone and in the utter dark with only a cricket to detect it, then set it on fire from a hopefully-safe distance. The mysticism attached to such a dangerous profession turned them into a kind of priest caste, and then one day someone invented a lantern that changes the flame's color when it hits damp without setting it on fire, greatly reducing the risk and making the profession obsolete.
- In The Order Of The Stick, the Lawful Good
afterlife involves climbing an endless mountain, stopping at the level of enlightenment you feel satisfied with until you get bored and climb again. There were plans for an escalator but monks complained it made it too easy.
- There was a French comic where a community of medieval monks were split on the addition of an irrigation system, both sides arguing that it would make their lives easier.
Edited by Chabal2