Freeman's Mind is a Deconstructor Fleet that explores a large number number of Video Game and Speculative Fiction tropes through the thought process of its unhinged protagonist. The series, in fact, deconstructs so many tropes in the process that they warrant their own page.
- Action Hero: As impressive as Gordon's accomplishments are, he is still ultimately just a man. As pointed out in supplemental materials, Gordon would realistically be scared, tired, lost, hungry, and probably a little delirious after two days of nonstop strenuous physical activity with little to no rest (Gordon's also been going through mild substance withdrawal). He would further be in no condition to go gallivanting into another dimension to save the world, especially since he has no reason to believe someone better trained and in better shape (i.e. pretty much anyone) couldn't get the job done.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Artificial Intelligence is unlikely to ever rebel against humanity because they're ultimately too narrow-minded and lack emotion. The ideas/tropes of AIs turning against their masters and ruling the world is actually a wishful dream of humans who want the robots to do it so that humans don't have to. The case is redundant anyway as programming an AI to rule the world would take just as much work as doing it yourself.
- Artificial Stupidity: The soldiers actually really hate each other, and are using the presence of Gordon as an excuse to off one another, so they can label it as friendly fire.
- Bee-Bee Gun: Turns out bees just aren't that good at piercing armor, and even then if the target is not particularly affected by their toxins their damage will be minimal.
- Bond One-Liner: No sane person would let out a quippy pun after brutally killing someone. If they do, it's either a coping mechanism or a sign of sociopathy.
- Clarke's Third Law: While this explains that advanced technology can pass as magic, it doesn't exclude magic as an explanation.
- Determinator: According to Half-Life, a determinator isn't someone tough enough to endure anything, it's someone sociopathic enough to kill everyone and everything in their way before it can hurt them.
- Door to Before: Doors and rooms go in loops because it's a conspiracy to trap and kill people inside Black Mesa.
- Easy Amnesia: Gordon needs a moment to recollect his memories after passing out due to a mix of stress, potential head trauma, and a past history of binge drinking and opioid addiction.
- Eternal Engine: Black Mesa wastes excess funding on senseless and expensive construction projects to prevent potential budget cuts and bidding wars.
- Exploding Barrels: You'd have to go out of your way to make a barrel's contents so volatile that they'd explode from getting shot. The only conclusion that Gordon can come up with as to why anyone would create and spread such dangerous objects all over the city is that Civil Protection deliberately engineered and placed them to make their indiscriminate killing easier.
- Fiery Cover-Up: A cover-up makes no sense and would be impossible if it involves a massive research complex and killing most of the nation's leading scientists. To quote, "That's like trying to cover up the president getting assassinated. 'Oh, yeah, the president's fine, he totally did not get his head blown apart on national television!'"
- He Knows About Timed Hits: The hologram talking about running commands and how to climb a ladder is actually just the result of lousy programming and Stealth Mode is a fancy term the HEV Suit's marketing department came up with for the rubber padding around the suit's knees.
- Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: The helmet is an important piece of protective equipment, and lacking one is a major cause of concern for Gordon throughout the series. On the other hand, when Gordon enters Xen and finds corpses of people in HEV suits that do have helmets, he avoids putting one on due to the germs from the rotting corpse inside it.
- Heroic Mime: Since we don't know what a silent protagonist is thinking, for all we know, they are planning to use you as a shield or kill you, are contemplating insane things, or some combination of the above.
- Iconic Item: In the first game, the Crowbar was just an object that happened to be on hand when Gordon needed a bludgeoning instrument, attaching no other significance to it. So when Barney hands it back to him in the second game, Gordon comments, "Why'd he hand me a crowbar? That's weird." Then he remarks that a gun, a map, or cash would be far more helpful.
- Icon of Rebellion: For a resistance movement, having a symbol at all, especially one used to identify segments of the Underground Railroad, is going to make it even easier for the oppressive regime to find you and stamp you out.
- Indy Ploy: Having to constantly improvise on the go leaves your options severely limited and puts you in greater danger than if you had time to prepare.
- Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: Lots of details about Half-Life's greater plot and universe can only be gleamed from careful examination of the games' environments, listening to dialogue, and a lot of inference. This is of course engaging for players. Freeman, however, is living through the games moment-to-moment, with barely any time to comprehend the bigger picture. He quickly finds himself Locked Out of the Loop concerning basic stuff like the name of common enemies, the Vortigaunts being freed from their enslavement, and really the whole scope of the Combine's occupation.
- Living Weapon: No sane person would pick up what looks like an alien larva and shove their hand in it. In fact, Gordon's first reaction to seeing a Hivehand is to shoot it.
- Locked Door: Gordon wonders aloud why so many of the facility's doors are locked, since the disaster occurred during work hours; eventually he suspects they're actually just painted metal walls made to fool people.
- MacGyvering: Cobbled-together technology would tend to fall apart after a few minutes.
- Mysterious Watcher: With all of the times Gordon is able to catch a healthy glimpse of the G-Man throughout his adventures, he ultimately comes to the conclusion that the G-Man wanted to be spotted, otherwise he'd be looking through a window.
- No OSHA Compliance: Black Mesa has countless safety hazards, as well as clear violations of even basic environmental protection procedures (like a literal river of radioactive waste). Why? The company allocated funds toward science projects (most of which accomplished basically nothing), hired low-cost construction companies, and bribed building inspectors, all because they're amoral penny-pinchers who put "avoiding budget cuts" over employee safety. At one point Gordon remarks that the president of Black Mesa probably just "rubs himself with money," before coming to the reluctant conclusion that he's been working for a "James Bond villain company" this whole time.
- One-Man Army: While it's certainly badass to be one of these, the sheer amount of killing you're going to end up doing will likely cause a significant amount of psychological problems later in life. Also, being a One-Man Army literally means you have to do all the tasks of a military force alone, including the use of complicated pieces of machinery meant to be operated by multiple people.
- Properly Paranoid: Even if your sense of paranoia is justified, it can lead to you ending up as a genuine paranoiac.
- Radiation-Induced Superpowers: Chances of getting a mutation from radiation exposure that is beneficial are astronomical, and even if you did, you'd still have radiation poisoning. What Gordon doesn't point out, however, is that in order for you to actually display the trait that the mutation calls for, then the same random mutation would have to happen in all your cells at once.
- Right Man in the Wrong Place: Gordon might be the right person for stopping the alien menace, but he just wants to get the hell out. He's already being hunted down by the most powerful military on Earth, so why would he bother with stopping the alien invasion when he would still have to worry about being a fugitive afterward? Gordon also points out that his success is due to luck rather than talent, but his employers think it's talent, so they will continue to send him on missions until he finally dies. Further, no one briefs him even once about the state of the world or what's going on, which leads to the death of one of the allied Vortigaunts at Freeman's hands since he thinks they're still the teleporting electricity-shooting bad guys.
- Smart People Play Chess: Winning a game of chess is less about overall intelligence and more about memorization of board positions. You could be Einstein or Tesla, but you'd always lose to the nerd who spent his life memorizing all board positions. It also doesn't serve to model strategies beyond a certain point, as the moment one of the "pieces" resists an attack and punches through others anyways the whole metaphor goes out the window.
- Suspicious Video-Game Generosity:
- Ammo can be found everywhere in Xen, because Black Mesa dumped people there by the hundreds, hoping to hit one of the islands by chance and with people either dropping from high altitude or dropped in the middle of enemy territory. Given how small the islands around Xen are, ones that Gordon finds are likely just the small minority and most people ended up in the middle of nowhere in space.
- Ammo is everywhere in City 17, because cops are so trigger-happy that they just walk around carrying these big boxes of ammo everywhere and sometimes drop them accidentally.
- Tactical Shooter: If, in an armed conflict, a single guy managed to kill even a third as many enemy soldiers as your typical FPS protagonist does, the other side would, in Gordon's words, "try something else."
- Tinfoil Hat: It won't protect against mind control, and, if anything, a piece of metal around the head is going to conduct the signals that tinfoil hat people worry about.
- Violation of Common Sense: A player character would have to be more than a little unhinged to try some of the things most games are asking them to do. In fact, sometimes Gordon refuses to do something stupid the game is asking him to do and uses abilities the game normally wouldn't allownote to do a Dungeon Bypass.
- Walking Armory: Gordon frequently mentions how all his gear is realistically weighed, with the rocket launcher alone severely slowing him down. Most notably, he's forced to get rid of the Gluon Gun because it was causing him to collapse under all the weight it added to him, even if he admires its sheer firepower (and mentions he'd enjoy having it mounted on a vehicle instead). Even the additional weight of a shotgun is enough to get him killed in the first April Fools episode, as he's unable to make a jump that he's able to when he neglects to pick up the shotgun.
- Welcome to Corneria: People repeating themselves over and over, and being oddly calm and jaded while doing so, confuse and disturb Gordon to no end, and he even calls two of them zombies.
