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.
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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The historical reference in question is thus a school of thought and not a particular person.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
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
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
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 91.45.10.48openNo Title Literature
A character does an Internet search on supernatural creature (usually a teen girl searching for info about what species the hot guy in her school might be)... shows in a lot in bad YA fiction -Twilight, Fallen, Hush Hush, etc.
openNo Title Literature
Back Turned to the Audience
I'm looking for a trope where there's an image where several characters are shown, but one character has their back turned to the reader for the purpose of foreshadowing.
openNo Title Literature
What's it called when a character gives a press conference and they feel like they've supported their cause but then the media takes it and paints them as a horrible, evil person? The specific example I'm thinking of is from Little Brother, when M1k3y gives the press conference and the headlines afterwards are:
- XNET LEADER: I COULD GET METAL ONTO AN AIRPLANE
- DHS DOESN'T HAVE MY CONSENT TO GOVERN
- XNET KIDS: USA OUT OF SAN FRANCISCO
openNo Title Literature
You have two groups of people who are separated by differences that to an outside, objective observer are totally arbitrary (e.g. one group is red, the other blue), but which both groups are convinced opposes them entirely and eternally, even though they're really identical. It's a parody of partisanship and group identity.
I'm specifically trying to remember a specific literary/proverbial example of "black x and white x," where x is some nonsense name that isn't coming to me. It's driving me nuts.
openNo Title Literature
I'm not sure if this is something that would already be listed as a trope, but it feels like it. In the book Sophies World, there are several instances where Alberto tells Sophie about a person from history and each time it's a woman, and Sophie is convinced that that's why she can't find entries on any of them in her encyclopedia. The trope in this would be either something about how women are insignificant [which struck me as a possible title], or another possible trope could be a situation in which you look through an encyclopedia or other reference work and it seems to have everything except what you're looking for. So are either of these existing tropes?

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?