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:
opentropes for tv show nobody wants this
- impossibly perfect boyfriend for noah? i couldn't find anyhing resembling a perfect boyfriend from a scan of the love interests page.
- Rebecca wants so bad to be "rabbi's wife" that the character never thinks of her own identity in a relationship. is that satelliteloveinterest?
- the critics complained that the women were too harpy and naggy, so i think a case can be made that Esther got flanderized in season 2. is this author's saving throw? it's clear that they responded to feedback and made Esther go through some changes to reflect that criticism
- What do you call the feeling by season 1's finale that Morgan and Sasha firmly can't be without upsetting several values of the audience about infidelity and the value of Sasha's marriage to Ester? It felt like a very values-enforced safeguard to keeping them platonic besties. I'm not saying that's not the same in S2, but for a while the show veered that way, and that's worth calling a trope
- in one scene Morgan and Sasha are posing as a couple or acting like it at an apple store. i wonder if that's some sort of nod to fan shipping, even though they're not an actual couple in that scene. it enables the fans to see them act as a couple which fulfills some sort of desire by the shippers. what's that called?
- Morgan is more of a boy's name and Sasha iss more of a girl's name. would this be some sort of symbolism that they were both carelessly named and the lesser sibling? symbolic names trope or under fridge?
openAnnoyingly Depressed
A character whose guilt and depression causes other people to be annoyed, which makes the character feel guilty and depressed, causing other people to be annoyed, causing the character to feel guilty and depressed, which [etc.].
Either side can be portrayed as in the right: either the character is The Woobie surrounded by All of the Other Reindeer, or the character is a whiny self-centered Manchild who needs to stop killing the mood and the other people are right to cut the character out of their lives.
openToiletry Chemistry?
Mixing household chemicals to create some concoction. I thought of "doing it for the fun of it" examples - as in The Fixies' episode "The Toothbrush"
where Tom is pretending to be a mad scientist in the bathroom - but then I remembered George's Marvellous Medicine, George intended to poison his grandma but accidentally made a functional shrinking serum. I couldn't find a close enough trope on the latter's page, and I feel like this has happened more times than these two examples.
openNo-Longer Dangerous Task
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.
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
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.

This is mentioned in Barely Lethal: When Megan realizes she has feelings for Roger, she approaches him at prom, reasoning that it always works out in the movies. Is there a trope for what she's referencing?