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In times of crisis or nigh-apocalypse, ill-prepared civilians are often handed over fire weapons by military agents, and usually they end up pulling through and/or even saving the day.
Does this trope exist?
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What is the name of the trope for when an actor is contracted to appear for so many episodes, but some of those episodes aren't written with them in mind, so they only appear in one scene that could easily be cut out and they leave again for the rest of the episode?
I'm thinking of Angel and Spike in Buffy. After Angel became evil again in season 2, some of the later episodes had him show up just to threaten her, and Spike, around season 5, would appear just so we could see him obsess over Buffy.
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This one I've seen all throughout sitcom history. Hope I can get the wording right.. You've got two people. One person is annoying the other usually, though they could just be taking it casually. The second person then starts getting them to either act or start talking about something that the main character gets into at first, but then suddenly realizes how stupid the situation is and usually bursts out with "Oh what am I doing!?", or something like this.
I've luckily got an example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiljoS4ChOk
Skip to 2:45
It's such a cliche moment in sitcoms, it's gotta have a trope.
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Theres a big bad for a season of a cop show any type, and your sitting on the couch wondering, What makes this guy so special? these guys catch serial killers/thievs etc for a living and thier very good at it! so why can't they catch this guy?!
a trope about why the villain of an entire season in a cop show seems impossible to catch even though he isn't as that different from other killers who are caught in one episode. It's about how on a cop show, the Rule Of Drama dictates that the Big Bad of a season must be Badass, for no other reason than to prolong the hunt for his capture, and make a final confrontation more dramatic, to the point where he seems above the average psychopath, when in reality he's not really that different from the Axe Crazy Murderer the Hero arrested in one episode three weeks ago.
usually a villain like this has some kind of connection to the hero or some other member of the band. maybe he killed one of the band off for real, or maybe he's the one blotch on the Always Gets His Man record of the hero, or something else. Or sometimes he just comes out of nowhere!
this has to be an ordinary criminal. If He's had special training, or is a world class criminal that no one can seem to catch, or is backed up by an organization equal to the investigative agency, this trope is averted
Ex: Nate Haskell, from season 11 of the original CSI
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You're watching an episode of the kind of show that has an ongoing, (mulitple-)season-spanning storyline, and a lot of stand-alone episodes. You're relaxing, thinking this is one of the standalone episodes, surfing the net, not quite paying attention...
And then it all goes BOOM, as the standalone episode is revealed to be a large-ass mythology episode, with answers, new characters and questions, shit going down, the status quo changing, etc.
I, however, can't for the life of me remember what the trope is called. Help?
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New doctor who last week and thought of a trope and I cant think of what it would be on here, but it must exist. Basically when the characters are in a room with a major historical thing, but they ignore that for whatever it is they were doing in the first place.
Closest I could come was Completely Missing The Point
Edited by lonesharkxopenNo Title Live Action TV
This is related to Special Effects Failure and is a form of Suspension of Disbelief, but I'm not sure it's a trope in and of itself. It's when actors pretend a set is a lot more than it really is, but the viewer can see the shortcomings. For example, characters will act like a chasm is insurmountable without devising some Bamboo Technology solution, but the viewer can tell that they could easily hop over it. Or when characters act like they've gotten separated and lost in a cavernous disintegrating cathedral, but you can tell the set's no bigger than a two-car garage.
Early Doctor Who practically ran on this trope, but perusing its page gets me nowhere due to the Trope Overload.
Edited by FloydPinkertonopenNo Title Live Action TV
Is there a trope for women being catty toward each other? Like Cat Fight if it were limited to verbal sparring?
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I've been thinking about something I see on Crime and Punishment shows a lot, where the cops pick up a guy during a murder investigation on something else, drugs, grifting, something, and to get the guy to talk, they say (almost invariably) "Hey, we're Homicide, we don't care about [unrelated crime], we're trying to solve a murder!" Sometimes they suggest that they can make the unrelated charges go away, or suggest that they'll try to hang the murder on the guy, but usually it seems like they're trying to put the guy at his ease, since if he thinks he's on the hook for [unrelated crime] he won't open up with info about the murder. And I don't think I've ever seen this guy turn out to be the murderer.
Anyone know what that's called?
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Hello, first time caller.
Is there an existing comedy trope for what I think of as 'false pride or vanity', for example, a character explains to a person outside their group/community that they might not have much material possessions but they have their pride, and immediately following this something will happen to show them up as having no dignity, to give an extreme example their trousers will fall down.
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A character whose profession is their character, in the sense that they do the same thing in their spare time, as if the writers can't conceive of a scene with that character that doesn't relate to their profession. Like say there's a character who's a mechanic by trade, and when he's shown on his day off he's fixing his own car. What is that trope called?
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I've seen this enough that I'm sure it must be a well-documented trope. I'll call it "Lonely Ladder" for now. The example I'm thinking of comes from the series John Doe, in the episode "Idaho". Without going into too much detail, a fake past life has been constructed for the amnesiac main character. Part of this Truman Show-esque setup is a kindly old couple posing as a friend of his family in this past life (probably at least one trope of its own, there). He visits with them in their home for a while, then leaves. Some time later, he realizes it was a setup and returns to the house, which is now completely bare. It's stripped to the walls and floorboards, not a speck of debris anywhere.... except over his shoulder we see one ladder supposedly left by the workmen in their hasty bug-out. It's obviously meant to convey a sense of some hurried and secret work having been recently done, but its so commonly used and the ladder always looks out of place in an otherwise perfectly cleaned out space. Who leaves a ladder, of all things, behind? Is this already a trope?
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I propose a trope, possibly named Black Leather Attitude, in which a character changes wardrobe into something butch, black, and leather in order to indicate the He/She Is Serious. Fo' Reals. This popped into my mind when watching the most recent couple of episodes of True Blood. Both Bill, who had been dressing like a Corporate Shark and Martonia, who as Marnie dressed like a Pagan Hippy (because she was one) changed into black leather coats before making their big moves.
Badass Longcoat doesn't fit because it's not a specific piece of clothing, and also, it doesn't mean they will be badass. They may fail horribly. But they are putting on the butch to show they Mean Business. It's not Dress Coded for Your Convenience because it involves a change from the character's usual wardrobe (possibly an almost-comical one). Possibly there's one that I missed. Thoughts? Examples?
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I'm trying to find a trope for this fairly common situation: Person A is reading a magazine or newspaper, finds something interesting, excitedly says "Hey, look at this!", and hands it to person B. Person B looks at it and reads the title of something else on the page (usually something strange or inappropriate), and doesn't understand why person A wanted to show it to them.
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Is there a trope for the following character constellation? An eccentric and off-putting genius/expert partners up with a sidekick who is more down-to-earth and has to constantly excuse or shrug off the protagonist's weirdness. It's fairly common in crime procedurals. Off the top of my head: Life, Lie to Me, Bones, The Mentalist, Sherlock, The Dresden Files, New Amsterdam, Touching Evil (US), arguably Castle, arguably Pushing Daisies, possibly Raines (my memory is a bit fuzzy on that one).
The primary protagonist is usually male (in all above examples except for Bones) and an outsider, the sidekick/partner often female and an actual member of the police force. The sidekick can be The Watson, but doesn't have to be, just like the protagonist often, but not always, is a Defective Detective. Odd Couple and Opposites Attract don't seem to me to reflect that unbalanced dynamic, where one character is perfectly normal and well-adjusted.
Edited by tulipclaymoreopenNo Title Live Action TV
Do We Have This One? If not I'm going to start a new trope for it.
In the "early days" of television, when there wasn't a signal on your set, or it was tuned slightly off the correct channel, you would see an effect called "snow", which was basically just random noise translated visually.
With the advent of cable television, a different sort of artifact appeared, when the signal wasn't coming in clear or was broken up. There would be rectangular blocks dispersed randomly throughout the picture, and the image would freeze momentarily.
Edited by JonnyBopenNo Title Live Action TV
hey everyone. The front doors of people who are dead are often open or ajar even for no reason whatosever, like a suicide. Is there a trope for this? Cause if not there definitely should be, I can think of half a dozen examples off the top of my head.
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I'm wondering if there is a trope in which a show has a formula and one of the characters notices, one episode, that the formula is not being followed. The two examples I can think of have that character confronting the other characters and learning that things are not what they should be. The examples are (1) the Quantum Leap episode "The Boogeyman," and (2) the House episode "No Reason." Others may exist as well.
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"I'm Also Executive Producer": Lead actor of your show is getting a lot of acclaim. In order to keep him on board and not jump ship for a movie career or something, more and more creative control is given to the actor at each contract negotiation. Suddenly the focus of your show goes from an ensemble to focus almost entirely on the lead character. Said character suddenly becomes a paragon of virtue, practically a saint, and the other characters are reduced to being weak-willed or strawmen for the lead to triumph over. Often times an exodus of crew and supporting cast that wouldn't get with the program occurs. Examples: M*A*S*H=Alan Alda, Little House on the Prairie=Michael Landon, Andromeda=Kevin Sorbo

I've cruised the list of Tropes and I couldn't find anything remotely related to this trope I noticed in a couple of shows, and I couldn't find any allusions to it on the pages of those receptive shows.
This trope is something like "Gender Misdirection". I happens when an unseen character is referred to by a male noun that misleads the viewers into thinking the character has to be a man, only to be shocked when they find out it's a woman. This happened in Prison Break, in early episodes when they alluded to the Vice-President, who later turns out to be Caroline and in Alias, in which Irina was referred to as "The Man". These are two on top of my head. I'm sure there are more. Is there already a trope for this?
Edited by Troper2011