The White King: I only wish I had such eyes. To see Nobody! And at that distance too!
Tropes have exceptions. Sometimes, a writer uses a situation that seems indelibly married to a trope, but the trope never appears. It's not a Subverted Trope, because the trope is never hinted. Nor is it a Lampshade Hanging, a Discussed Trope, or Conversational Troping, because the trope isn't talked about. Nor is it a Defied Trope because the trope is never acknowledged and avoided by the characters. The trope just isn't there.
That is the core meaning of "averted". The writer just went past the trope. They ignored it, they forgot it existed, or it wasn't even a trope at all in their culture.
Aversions should almost never be listed on trope pages, as they're almost always completely meaningless. Generally, only nigh Omnipresent Tropes, Acceptable Breaks from Reality or No Straight Examples, Please! tropes should have aversions listed as examples. If a work simply doesn't use a trope, it is by definition not an example of the trope.
Example of the difference between subverting, defying, and averting a trope:
Take the trope Incredibly Obvious Bug. The trope is that listening and tracking devices are huge and obvious with blinking lights, instead of being small, stealthy, and hidden.
- Played straight: A villain plants an Incredibly Obvious Bug on a chair. Despite the green flashing light and periodic beep, the hero does not notice it.
- Subverted: A villain plants an Incredibly Obvious Bug on a chair. The hero finds it and throws it out, muttering, "Does he think I'm blind?"
- Double Subverted: A villain plants an Incredibly Obvious Bug on a chair. The hero finds it and throws it out. Then it turns out it was just a decoy and the real bug, better hidden but still much more obvious than a realistic one, goes unnoticed. Or, if double subverted for laughs, the bug that the hero ignores is significantly larger and flashier than the decoy and even more poorly hidden.
- Defied: A villain plants an Incredibly Obvious Bug on a chair. He sees this and realizes the hero will find the bug, so he gets rid of it and plants a smaller, more camouflaged bug on the chair.
- Downplayed: A villain plants a small, camouflaged bug on a chair. Despite the fact that the disguise would have been sufficient to fool the average viewer, our series revolves around professional detectives who are Genre Savvy and Crazy-Prepared and easily find the bug anyway, because it's only incredibly obvious relative to the league it's playing in.
- Averted: A villain plants a small, camouflaged bug on a chair. It goes undetected by the hero. Alternatively, the villain doesn't plant a bug at all. The trope never comes into play.
If a trope was never averted in the past but is commonly averted now, you may have an Evolving Trope, Cyclic Trope, or Forgotten Trope.
Even though There Is no Such Thing as Notability, averting is generally not an example for mentioning on a trope page, except for tropes that are so common that the list of aversions is actually shorter, such as Limited Wardrobe. The reason is that different people have different expectations. For example, say there is an action movie that does not have a single instance of Stuff Blowing Up. Just because you expect it does not mean that it was subverted or used in any manner. If it was not used, then it is not an example. We don't want to have to scroll through examples like:
- Space Is Noisy: Averted in Harry Potter, where nothing like this ever happens.
On the other hand, Space Is Noisy is so incredibly common in science fiction (especially TV and film) that a work that manages to avoid it is worth mentioning.
So aversions worth mentioning will generally follow this pattern: A super-majority of works that have element A will also have trope A, but work W has element A without trope A. If the number of aversions on a tropes page consist of at least a third of the examples, perhaps averting the trope isn't as notable as initially thought.
Remember — just because a trope does not come into play doesn't make it averted. It is when you would very much expect the trope in a work but despite there being plenty of opportunity for it, it is never used. Many tropes have an inverse of themselves — if the inverse is applicable instead, then it's just a different trope being used.
Using words like averted hard, brutally averted, and other such intensifiers is considered Word Cruft, and thus should be brutally averted hard.
On some occasions, an averted trope is basically in-between the straight and the inverted trope. This doesn't count as downplay as long as the trope isn't there.
See Playing with a Trope for a comparison with the ways that a trope can actually be used.
