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openAging in fits and starts
A character has the ability to access a state where they do not age. However, this state limits them in other ways, forcing them to temporarily become mortal every so often. As such, they are able to emulate being Long-Lived, but will eventually either die or find themselves forced into their limited immortal state forever.
Examples:
- The Winter Soldier in both the original comics and the movie adaptation, who was cryogenically frozen for most of the 20th century, but spent enough time unfrozen to have noticeably aged between World War 2 and the modern day.
- Albert in Discworld, whose aging is arrested as long as he remains in Death's realm, but ages whenever he travels to the Discworld. When he first became immortal, he only had three months of lifespan left.
Edited by phalanxresolved There is nothing we can do
Is there a trope for a character with a dying loved one, and is begging every doctor or wizard nearby to help them to cure them, but everyone tells him that there is no hope left now and that the person will die?
Edited by ElBuenCuateopenLoyal to any person who possesses a certain quality
A certain character prefers to/is supernaturally compelled to fight on the side of someone who possesses an abundance of a certain quality. If the quality is "power", it's I Fight for the Strongest Side!, but is there a more general trope?
Examples:
- Tretij Rebenok in Metal Gear Solid V is forced by his psychic powers to be loyal to whoever possesses the most hate in their heart.
- According to the Animalistic Abomination page, the Red Bull from The Last Unicorn is "bound to serve anyone who is utterly without fear". (I haven't seen the movie or read the book, though, and other sources about them don't make this claim, so this might not be true.)
openNon-supernatural person looks like a Humanoid Abomination due to the bias of the viewpoint character
A normal person is depicted with an inhuman appearance or traits, but there's nothing Ambiguously Human about them - It's just a stylistic choice to represent the viewpoint character's perspective on them.
Now that I think about it, most of the examples I had in mind were about the perspectives of animals on humans, which would obviously be covered by Humans Are Cthulhu. However, there's one example that wouldn't fit: In The Secret of Kells, the Vikings are depicted as shadowy, demonic beings who speak a Black Speech, because that's how 9th-century Irish monks would have viewed Scandinavian raiders.
The other trope that might fit is Through the Eyes of Madness, but that doesn't really apply since there's no actual hallucinating or mental illness involved.
Edited by phalanxopenTemporary Logic Adoption
Using a character's logic against themselves to "defeat" them.
Bob is talking to Alice. Alice only listens to people who do extreme things. So to make Alice drop this way of thinking, Bob does something so extreme that it makes her uncomfortable and she either sees the error of her ways and drops that way of thinking, or she listens to him (or both). This doesn't mean that Bob now thinks like she does, however, as it was only a temporary thought-process adoption.
Edited by KingOfStickersopenFear motivation
A villain whose principle motivation isn't killing, harming, or stealing from anyone - what they want most in life is to scare people. The standard motivation of the Friendly Ghost, and works well if you have I Know What You Fear powers. Usually this kind of character is a Harmless Villain, but there are exceptions. (e.g. the Batman villain Scarecrow.)
openTF2 Tropes
I'm looking for a trope for a pair of situations involving Team Fortress 2:
- Real!Engie: That Engineer is a Spy!
- Fake!Engie: Heck yeah!
- Real!Engie: ...Alrighty then.
- The real Engie goes back to working on their sentry like nothing ever happened, while the Spy!Engie stands nearby with nary a sapper in sight.
- BLU Scout: That freakin' Pyro's a spy!
- The Pyro looks at the Scout, then shoots him in the face, revealing him to be a RED Spy.
- [Beat]
- RED Engie: ...Well now I've seen everything.
- Explanation: The Pyro was actually a RED Spy disguised as a BLU Spy, which in turn automatically disguised as a RED Pyro. As a result, the Engineer saw a RED Spy disguised as a BLU Spy, the Scout saw a BLU Spy disguised as a RED Pyro, while spectators simply saw a RED Pyro. What happened was that the scout tried to rat out the Spy for the fun of it, but got more than he bargained for as a result.
openUnbreakable Haughtiness
A character whose ego is completely immune to any deflating, sort of like a No-Sell to verbal attacks. Can be all the more jarring when done by a villainous character since there's a sense of Karma Houdini.
In The Shepherds Crown, the overbearing and ignorant Mrs. Earwig is unaffected by the fairy's glamor (which makes normal people feel insignificant). It's suggested she's lacking something, like perhaps empathy.
Edited by Chabal2openCome Here Boy Live Action TV
Is there a trope for when two+ characters start treating one character like their a dog, with each person saying things like "Here boy!" or "C'mon, c'mere!" condescendingly to see which person they're loyal to? With the recipient of these remarks almost never acknowledging or realizing that they're being spoken to like an animal and always starting to go towards the most recent person who called to them before switching upon another person calling. Often times treats are involved, but usually it's just people calling. Who the final "loyalty" recipient is, might not be made clear due to a cut-away to another plot, or the scene may play out to full conclusion if that person's trust/opinion/loyalty proving is the climax of one of the plots.
I'm sure this is a specific trope nearly everyone is familiar with, I think it's most common in live action TV, but it happens in animation nearly as regularly and occasionally in film as well.
openTwo Tropes
These are actually a pair of tropes I'd previously posted a good while ago, but had both died out without a conclusion, and it was too late to just bump them.note Plus, I can add new info to either of them without causing the kinds of strife that invariably results from making edits to a dead thread."
Long version: The military is trying to develop some kind of man-portable railgun/sniper rifle hybrid. Tiny problem, the secondary fire - normally used to overcharge the capacitors for a more powerful shot - instead causes the gun to explode, invariably killing the wielder. Later on, they find out that the Overcharge can instead be retooled into a defensive energy pulse similar to the Perimeter Defense System from Subnautica: An EMP with enough "oomph" to affect both living and robotic enemies alike. Which also removes the need for a sidearm since the localized, omni-directional energy pulse is revealed to be more effective than a standard-issue pistol.
Long Version Whenever some new piece of alien technology crash-lands on earth, or a previously undiscovered crystal with supernatural abilities is unearthed, or a random person winds up in the wrong place at the right time and gets superpowers from the result, the first thing that usually happens is that the military will declare it "theirs" (and it's always an "it") like a bunch of five-year-olds, and try to find a way to turn it into a weapon, or some way to make an existing weapon better, or a way to make their existing weapons easier to use, and will only release it to the "civilians" when it's determined that it has no value as a military asset. If at all.
Using the crystal as an example: Say some random third-world mining company that couldn't possibly dig up anything of value stumbles across a cave in a mountain that contains a bunch of previously undiscovered crystals that somehow hold more energy in a fist-sized chunk than the entire NYC power grid. The moment they make their discovery public, the military buys out the company under the guise of an "investor", calls their "discovery" a hoax and kicks them out, then fences off the whole area, declares it a military site, and turns the entire mountain into a crater with bilion-dollar strip-mining equipment in an attempt to get every last one of the not-actually-fake crystals that they can get their hands on. After which point the following happens, usually in this order:
- First off, can the crystals be used in a weapon with a yield similar to a nuke?
- Failing that, can they be used at any point in the process that would make a conventional nuke more powerful?
- If not, can they be used in any way to make a nuke better?
- If they can't be used for nukes, can they be used to make any sort of weapon better?
- If they can't be weaponized in any way, can they be used to make the usage of a weapon (EG, a nuke) easier?
- If they can't be used for anything even remotely weapon-related, can they be used in a way that would make any form of combat easier?
- If they can't be used in any way that would give your guys an edge in battle, send them to RnD and get them to find some way that can make their guys better than the other ones.
- If there's no way for them to be used in anything even remotely related to the military, hand them off to a less private organization (EG, DARPA) and tell them to try their hand at it.
- If not even they can do anything with it, the process repeats on down the line until some long-forgotten sample finally reaches a backwater techie that somehow makes a device that can let people use the crystals for their originally-proposed purpose: A battery-like energy source with enough output to power a major city for an indefinitely long period.
And even then, there's no guarantee that the government-funded black-site corporations won't try to "confiscate" the techie's stuff and use it to make military-grade versions of these batteries in order to go back up the line until they finally find some nuke-related use for something that's obviously not meant to be used as a weapon.
openVideo Game Open Door Policy Videogame
Is there a trope for how in certain video games (i.e. most of the Final Fantasy games), etc., you can simply walk in to anyone's home and they generally won't be the least bit concerned about it and will often chat happily with you?
openClones and look alikes acceptable victory and takeover
It's okay and acceptable for viewers that the original characters are defeated and killed and mostly,get replaced,by someone who looks and who is exactly like them,because it's okay it's like nothing changed
-like an episode in Teen Titans Go!where they try to observe their superpositions but they got observed instead and disappeared(turned into a single possibility)
-like the episode in Uncle Grandpa,where they tried to open a box,they can't open the box,that's why they got very mad and fought,they opened the box,they found themselves,and those versions stuffed them inside the Box
-in Ok K.O let's be heroes,Darrel get's replaced by a new one after he is burned because he failed.
Edited by JonerpopenRelic hunter
I might just be searching it wrong or misread a trope but what would someone be if they scoured places for relics to get rich?
My most immediate example is the vault hunters from Borderlands
openCanyon/rock level? Videogame
I know we already have Death Mountain, but do we have a trope for rocky levels that don't take place in deserts, on mountains, or underground? I'm mainly doing this so I can describe what type of setting Forte from Meteos has.
Edited by Bismuth83openSaved By Obscurity
A historical character known to have died (according to historical sources) is revealed to have survived, but lived out the rest of their life in complete obscurity (if thanks to time-travel, usually to ensure a Close-Enough Timeline).
In this case, the time-traveling heroes save Joan Of Arc from being burned at the stake by replacing her with the Big Bad (who's been drugged and looks close enough Joan to pass for her), then dropping Joan off at her hometown and warning her that she'll have to wait out the rest of her life in obscurity.
Edited by Chabal2openSnooty Barista
Seems like a widespread personality trope of the barista, even/especially in chain coffee shops, to be an incredible snob who think everyone who comes through the door is beneath them, constantly talk about their college education and the screenplay or poetry they're working on and expect them to overreact when a character asks for "just coffee". Piercings and anachronistic facial hair optional.
Do we have a trope like that anywhere?
openRegarding RWBY Web Original
In RWBY, the heroes fight the Grimm upon their arrival in Atlas at the beginning of Volume 7. However, they are arrested for illegally entering Atlas using a stolen ship, ditching said ship in Mantle against orders from the Atlesian higher-ups and illegally engaging in battle. And despite Qrow holding a valid huntsman license, Teams RWBY, JNR and Oscar don't have any licenses to become huntsmen since their training was incomplete.
Which trope best covers this particular entry?
Edited by gjjones
Do we have a Ridiculously Successful Rival? Somebody who our hero is compared to, and they simply have no chance to succeed. The'll always be out-shined. Though they may be pretty successful or worthy people, but they just can't compare.
Examples:
- Tahani's sister Kamilah is the youngest person to ever graduate from Oxford University, world-class painter, sculptor, social activist, iconoclast, Olympic archer and gold medalist, Grammy award-winning musician, youngest person ever inducted into the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame, BAFTA award-winning documentarian, and person voted "Most Likely to Be Banksy".
- Jane is an average girl, pretty and kind who works as a Private Tutor. Then she meets Blanche who is seemingly perfect. She's from a wealthy family, but also a self-made businesswoman who has her own advertising company. She graduated from Harvard with degree in Business. She advocates equal opportunities for women and funds a scholarship for innovative women. She's a successful top model and a trained dancer, and she guest-starred in a Vampire show. She designed her own line of vodka.
Edited by XFllo