Discredited Trope

Socrates: Ya know, Calvin, that line has been used so many times now, it's not even mildly threatening anymore.
Andy: Yeah, it actually just took all the drama out. It's like having 555 for a phone number.

— Calvin & Hobbes: The Series, "Thunderstorm" (on I'm Your Worst Nightmare)

Tropes Are Tools, sure, but some have aged better than others.

Over the course of time, a trope may be overused, misused, opposed, made obsolete, out of fashion, subverted or deconstructed on many notable occasions, or just end up being widely disliked. Eventually, a trope may reach the point where it becomes one which no writer should dare use seriously outside of period pieces, though can still be played with in parody, satire, homage or pastiche. Often, if one of these is used straight, people will assume it's a Red Herring, and react with annoyance or disdain when it isn't.

In some cases, a trope may be discredited due to changes in our knowledge of history or science. Use of the trope in fiction may change to reflect this. See the Time Marches On index.

Notes:

Just because a trope is discredited does not necessarily mean it's not Truth in Television, or that it's necessarily a Dead Horse Trope.
This is not bad writing because the writing itself is bad, but because the writer doesn't know their audience. After all, Tropes Are Tools.
Just because a trope is not Truth in Television does not necessarily mean it is discredited.
Just because a trope is used a lot does not necessarily make it discredited. Take a glance at Overdosed Tropes, many of which are still popular and thriving, if you need any further proof of this.
Just because a trope falls in prominence does not make it discredited: it very well could have a niche that keeps it alive.
Just because a trope is discredited doesn’t mean it can’t be used at all. It can be parodied, subverted, deconstructed, etc. And in the appropriate context, can even still be played straight.
While a variant of the trope can be discredited, that doesn't mean the entire trope is. On the flip side: While the trope itself may be discredited, that doesn't mean all versions of the trope are.
A trope can be considered discredited in some parts of the world, but not in others, due to differing moral and philosophical attitudes among cultures. For instance, Stay in the Kitchen is outdated within Western liberal areas, but raises far fewer eyebrows in African and Asian countries, and some variant on such was widely-held throughout most of history even in the West.
A trope can be discredited in one medium while be not being discredited in other media.
A trope may be discredited by the creators but not by the fans and vice versa.

Omnipresent Tropes are immune to being discredited, mostly because those tropes are too natural to the medium of storytelling to ever be considered tired clichés.

Examples:

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Tropes # to G

30 Minutes, or It's Free!: Domino's Pizza, the chain that started this, had it end up leading to a ton of bad publicity and several multi-million dollar lawsuits against the pizza chain after their drivers ended up driving recklessly so as to beat the time limit, causing fatal car crashes. After Domino's was forced to stop using the offer, the trope fell out of favor in fiction.
'90s Anti-Hero: While there are still plenty of dark superhero comics, the typical costume and characterization tropes in the '90s are considered laughable instead of cool, with several of the original characters either being retooled, or Put on a Bus. Except in Video Games, a medium where it seems to work better than comic books, though even in that medium this trope seems to be on a slow decline^note. Characters like Deadpool mercilessly parodying this type of character has also contributed to their loss of popularity.
Acquired Error at the Printer: Desktop publishing and the prevalence of color printers in homes and offices mean consumers are no longer at the mercy of commercial printing services and the plot-convenient mistakes they are prone to. In spirit, the trope still lives on in a niche of other types of "printing", such as cake decorators or sky writers getting the message wrong.
Adam and Eve Plot: Has become such an overused cliché in science fiction stories as early as the 1960s that it became impossible to take it seriously.
Adopt-a-Servant: It appears in period pieces but its popularity has vastly declined in contemporary media because it is no longer acceptable to adopt a child to work for you.
Adventurer Archaeologist: Given the increased controversy about ancient artifacts being forcibly uplifted from their native countries to be stored in foreign museums, this character archetype (at least when depicted heroically) is considered to be rather tone-deaf by today's standards. Certain characters such as Indiana Jones are still looked on fondly per the Grandfather Clause, but even his adventures are subject to more scrutiny than before.
Africa Is a Country: Due to a general increase in demand for quality in most works, lumping all of Africa together is rarely tolerated unless done so for the sake of ease rather than laziness.
Age-Gap Romance: While still common, the idea of an older man dating a young woman (traditionally the most common version of the trope) is no longer seen in a positive light by most people. An older man who dates young women is often viewed as immature, shallow, chauvinistic, predatory (especially if the woman is under 25), going through a mid-life crisis, or any combination of the above. Any young woman who dates an older man is automatically assumed to be a Gold Digger and/or suffering from daddy issues. Thus, modern uses in media will put greater emphasis into the problems the age disparity can cause, with the storylines depicting these relationships ending in an affair and/or a breakup more often than not. On the other hand, an older woman dating a younger man is less likely to be viewed as predatory in present day society, though the implications of such a relationship, such as the older woman being immature or the younger man looking for a Meal Ticket, may still be pointed out.
The Aggressive Drug Dealer: This is not how the majority of drug dealers operate in Real Life — primarily because most drug dealers who are not The Mentally Disturbed beyond common sense and reason or amped up on their own product want to do two things: make a profit and avoid arrests/investigation. Aggressive sales tactics aimed at kids would fail on both counts. Most Real Life dealers are well aware they are selling a highly illegal product and have some degree of discretion in doing so, and usually their customers are already sold on the product, since introductions usually happen between peers. The person most likely to give someone their first dose of a drug is not an aggressive "do it or else" dealer — it's a friend. This trope was much more plausible before the War on Drugs heated up in the '70s and (especially) the '80s, when (ironically) drug dealers were more discreet and police and the general public were not as savvy about them, sometimes believing that they peddled drugs for no other reason than that they were just plain evil.
Aliens Are Bastards: The depiction of aliens as mindless beasts or imperialist bastards has generally fallen out of use in favor of more civilized beings who can discuss the finer points of philosophy and provide a convenient canvas for the writer to paint his or her message onto. Even when they do want to kill and destroy, it's often from sophisticated reasons and motives that make sense to them, even if we wouldn't understand.
Always Chaotic Evil: This tends to be Subverted or Averted more often that not nowadays, as just having an entire race be evil because the author said so doesn't make much sense, unless there's a pretty good In-Universe justification, such as them being Made of Evil, or having some kind of Bizarre Alien Psychology that makes them unable to feel any "good" emotions like love or compassion. It also poses some philosophical problems, as if they have no choice but to be evil, it's not really their fault, so they can't be fairly be judged as evil in the first place.
All Gays Are Pedophiles: Formerly a widespread stereotype — and a major reason why homosexuality has been demonized for so long — no one with any credibility believes this anymore, to say nothing of the homophobic overtones.
Alliterative Name: It's been taken to the point of parody. It survives in the case of classic cartoons and comic books because of the Grandfather Clause, while in erotic media this is considered to be a plus and it's a good way to invoke Marilyn Monroe. Some people in Generation Y (a.k.a. Millennials) view alliterative names as "porn star names" and do everything they can to avoid them. It hasn't completely disappeared from contemporary media, however.
All Jews Are Cheapskates: Though not entirely gone from media, it is still considered an offensive anti-Semitic stereotype now, especially due to its usage in anti-Semitic propaganda (although self-deprecating works actually made by Jews can usually get away with it).
All Just a Dream: Having this suddenly happen at the end is too often abused as a Deus ex Machina / Stock Epileptic Tree. More contemporary uses of this trope will usually set the twist up in advance by making it pretty obvious that the world the character is in doesn't operate by real world logic.
All Muslims Are Arab: While this trope was, for obvious reasons, never played straight in works produced in the Arab or Muslim worlds, this trope is on its way out in Western countries. This is partly due to increased immigration of non-Arab Muslims to Western countries during the 21st century, and partly because Muslim creators and performers from non-Arab backgrounds such as African-American Mahershala Ali, Indian-American Hasan Minhaj and Pakistani-Canadian Iman Vellani^note are becoming more prominent in Western entertainment industries. Indeed, much of the works by such performers have been at least partially influenced by their personal experiences with both their Muslim faith and this trope. There's also the fact that a fairly sizable minority of Arabs are actually Jewish or Christian as well. While it is not completely a Dead Horse Trope in the Western world, some modern works such as Vellani's Ms Marvel have resorted to parodying or deconstructing this trope by having some White characters conflate Muslims with Arabs in-story to demonstrate how uninformed / bigoted they are.
All the Good Men Are Gay: Besides being insulting to straight men and women and reinforcing the also discredited Camp Gay stereotype, starting between the mid-to-late 10s, there's been a somewhat increasing focus on gay men being misogynistic towards women of all sexualities and identities, in some cases precisely because they think not being attracted to women gives them a pass in disrespecting them.
All Women Are Prudes: Since sexual attitudes have become more relaxed, nobody plays this straight outside of sitcoms.
Altar Diplomacy: In Real Life, the decline of both the number and the powers of monarchies^note, coupled with the rise of the United Nations and the European Union, during the 20th and 21st centuries have made it difficult (if not impossible) for remaining monarchical countries to use this trope^note. For this reason, modern royals (most notably Princes William and Harry) have been marrying "commoners" (from both their own countries and abroad), but out of genuine love for the partners themselves, and not out of tradition. In spite of these developments, this trope still lives on in Period Pieces, Fantasy and Space Opera settings, for obvious reasons.
Ambiguously Gay: With the rise of the LGBT community in the conscious of the masses, outright gay characters became much easier to depict in the late 2010s (especially in children's media). And with the Camp Gay stereotypes this trope promotes, this trope is very hard to invoke now. Things that used to be considered "gay stereotypes" are also now more accepted across all sexualities, such as close friendships between people of the same gender, men being emotionally sensitive, or women not being interested in romance or marriage.
Amnesiac Hero: While not out of favor in other mediums, in video games since the mid 2000s and on (mainly RPG games due to the Final Fantasy series, particularly the seventh entry, helping to popularize the trope), its become viewed as a very tired and played out story cliché.
Anal Probing: Still survives in some comedic settings or jokes, but the concept of The Grays or Little Green Men or other space aliens engaging in this practice has become so discredited that the only way to use it is in a parody or a subversion. It also has the Fridge Horror of being a rape joke, unless you are using the subversion of someone actively seeking it (Notably, the 2020 Destroy All Humans! remake, a deliberate parody of 50s culture, toned down the rape implication it had in one of its cutscenes of Crypto kidnapping a woman).
Anchovies Are Abhorrent: Anchovies were never that popular of a pizza topping and are rarely even available at pizzerias. Starting in The New '10s, pineapple became the go-to unpopular topping.
Anonymous Public Phone Call: Nowadays uncommon to come across, due to Technology Marches On, as public phones are now difficult to find. Additionally, the few remaining pay phones in modern countries are extremely likely to be under camera surveillance — combine this with the plethora of cameras in modern society they can very likely track you to and from your starting location and the pay phone making it very unlikely you'll actually be anonymous if you do this.
Anti-Role Model: Not the trope as a whole, but a specific image of it—the juvenile delinquent and gang member wearing leather jackets, hasn't been taken seriously since the late '80s/early '90s, since law abiding citizens are now allowed to wear leather jackets as well and it no longer carries the bad boy image that it once did.
Anvil on Head: A once ubiquitous cartoon gag popularized by late '40s and '50s slapstick cartoons (primarily the Road Runner shorts), it became so overused in cartoons imitating Looney Tunes-style comedy that it evolved into a cliché shorthand for cartoon violence as opposed to an exaggerated gag prop that could be effective when used in the right hands. Even as early as the '90s it was considered a trite cliché to use in cartoons, and when used today, it is never used straight, but used strictly in the context of parody and homages to the films that kicked off the cliché in the first place.
Appointment Television: This has been a discredited trope since at least 2007, even earlier if you want to count things like DVRs and TiVo (which came into force in the late 90s), which certainly helped contribute to this trope's demise. The nail in the coffin for this trope was the On-Demand boom; online streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Prime Video were omnipresent throughout much of The New '10s, with new players such as Disney+ also starting their own services. If you really want to get technical, buying whole seasons on DVD and Blu-ray has been an option since the 90s, services like iTunes just made things easier, meaning anyone can watch their favorite TV shows (or specific episodes) any time they want to. They are no longer at the mercy of the networks' schedules, and missing an episode is no longer The End of the World as We Know It (networks euphemistically dubbing repeats "Another chance to see" has also gone the way of the dodo). This trope does survive still when it comes to live events, most often sports or televised concerts, that are a breeding ground for Spoilers on social media or in conversations around the water cooler at work the next day. +1 Channels are also a safe haven, but that acts more like a time-sensitive safety net. In fiction, the only places where this trope survives are in Period Pieces set in the mid-2000s or earlier.
"Arabian Nights" Days: Much like its related Orientalist tropes All Muslims Are Arab and Mystical India, this trope is getting harder to play straight in Western countries due to the increasing popularity and profiles of Arab diaspora performers and creators. For obvious reasons, such creators have sought to present Arab countries in a more nuanced and culturally sensitive manner than previous Western depictions. There is also the fact that Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have become growing regional powers and growing markets for Hollywood productions in the 21st century, causing Hollywood to reconsider the stereotypical aspects of this trope.^note
Aren't You Going to Ravish Me?: As society is becoming increasingly aware of how serious and traumatizing sexual assault is, people are also beginning to understand that almost no woman would ever complain about not being raped by somebody. As such, straight instances of this trope are usually considered tasteless and offensive, and certainly not funny anymore.
Artistic License – Martial Arts: Thanks to the growing popularity of Mixed Martial Arts, Krav Maga as well as videos of actual street fights online, more people know what real fighting looks like and find the flashy, traditional Eastern martial arts to be Awesome, yet Impractical at best and Narm at worst, thus fictional violence is shifting more towards Boring, but Practical fight scenes. If you do see this type of fighting in modern fiction, it's only in parody, homage, or in works in which the characters have supernatural powers.
Asian Buck Teeth: A racist stereotype that gained prominent usage as anti-Japanese propaganda during WWII, especially in cartoons (similar to Asian Speekee Engrish) and existed for a few decades on. The stereotypes of Asians having comically-oversized buck teeth eventually died down by The '70s, and is now dead in the water today. The only time this pops up is during Asian works that use this to cross the line twice (for example, the character of Chin-Kee in American Born Chinese), it has been replaced by Animeland as the dominant Japanese stereotype.
Asian Store-Owner: Although it was once considered an inoffensive gag, nowadays such uses of this trope are considered wildly racist. Even characters who still fit this trope due to being around before it became to be viewed as such^noteSuch as Apu from The Simpsons tend to be hated for it.
Authentication by Newspaper: Has become discredited nowadays with the power of Photoshop and computers making it harder to verificate news stories. Newspapers have also gradually declined in importance and relevance, as have the tabloids known for fabrication.
Award-Bait Song: Has been slowly vanishing since its peak in The '90s. Revised rules in the Academy Awards have also ensured that they're no longer award bait. The only time you'll see unironic Award Bait Songs are in works that pay homage to the time when they were popular (Frozen for instance) and even then, the songs still face ridicule due to the overexposure.
Axes at School: Only in Western Animation aimed at children, due to the frequency of highly publicized school shootings in America making it a taboo subject for children in the eyes of parents.
Bait-and-Switch Lesbians: In the past, it was normal to give Homoerotic Subtext between two characters of the same gender without making them an Official Couple, because homosexuality was less accepted at the time and it was the closest writers could get to writing a gay couple. However, modern audiences see this as queerbaiting (the practice of drawing in and misleading viewers by teasing LGBT representation that doesn't materialize), which can come across as homophobic and behind-the-times since acceptance of homosexuality has increased. Accepted so much, in fact, that making the characters in question a gay couple while just outright saying that they're a couple is usually the safer option.
Barbaric Bully: Heightened school security in the post-Columbine era means that beating a kid up in a crowded school hallway usually comes with consequences. The advent of cyberbullying and an epidemic of bullying-related suicides have also proven that a good deal of bullying is psychological rather than physical (and that psychological bullying can be just as harmful as physical bullying). It is not discredited in British works due to Values Dissonance, and the fact that British society sees physical bullying as a major topical issue (if not as much as cyberbullying).
Beautiful All Along: Dead in the water nowadays. While there's still a clear standard of beauty in places like Hollywood, a lot of attention is being paid to several "Be Yourself" campaigns that denounces this line of thinking.
Bedsheet Ghost: A hopelessly outdated cliché of a ghostly appearance that is very difficult to play straight now, at least if you're trying to be scary; a Bedsheet Ghost can still work as a mournful, sympathetic figure though, and its close cousin, the robed ghost, can still work as a frightening character.
The Bermuda Triangle: No matter what anyone wants to say about Real Life ships and planes that have disappeared in the region, aliens, Cthulhu, dimensional portals, Atlantis, etc. are not behind any of it. The incidence of Real Life disappearances by planes and boats in the area is no higher than any other part of the ocean that has similar size, weather, and maritime traffic. Indeed, for the amount of traffic in the area, it's one of the safest waterways in the world; since 2014, the Triangle has had one of the lowest rates of disappearance by planes and boats.
Bewitched Amphibians: Currently, this has become a partially discredited and when faced with the stereotype, magic-users are more likely to irritably explain that turning people into frogs is impractical with so many other spells at hand. However, they're still quite likely to do it if it becomes convenient.
Big Anime Eyes: Though eyes in anime are usually still larger than they are in real life, the enormous sparkly eyes that took up half the face that were ubiquitous in the 90s and 2000s have become somewhat of an endangered species starting in the latter half of the new 10s. Nowadays you normally only see these kinds of facial proportions in kid-oriented anime, grandfathered franchises that started when these designs were the norm, and in the younger skewing shojo manga.
Big "NO!": Considered a source of Narm and camp instead of drama nowadays, but the right actor and the right context can sometimes still make this work. The same applies to any Big Word Shout.
Black Dude Dies First: It's been so relentlessly mocked and lampshaded that it's almost impossible for viewers to take such deaths seriously anymore. If it does happen, it will be a random, no-name extra who just happened to be black, while the named characters will usually have Plot Armor until later in the story. It's also got traits of Forgotten Trope, as the specific reasons why this trope arose (explained on its page) have steadily disappeared due to society changing.
Blackface: Formerly a staple of American Minstrel Shows and old cartoons, this racist depiction of black people has been so thoroughly discredited that using it in any form (straight, parody, or otherwise) will get the writer blasted for being politically incorrect without fail. Ever since the Civil Rights Movement, this trope has been etched into the public consciousness as a symbol of anti-black racism, and finding it funny today is a very easy way to spot someone who is racist and behind the times. It was still sometimes used as parody in mainstream works all the way up to the end of the Turn of the Millennium, usually as a misunderstanding and/or a way to elicit a Dude, Not Funny! reaction from other characters. However, a barrage of episode removals from streaming services of shows that did this, done in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd protests, was likely the final nail in the coffin for its depiction in most Western narrative media, parodied or otherwise. Also, even to this day, it consistently causes problems for exporters of Japanese media, which hasn't really caught on to the concept; same goes for preservationists of old cartoons, many of which that contain this imagery have been destroyed.
Blackface-Style Caricature, in the same line as Blackface, has frequently been removed and older works using it have often been altered or removed from publication.
"Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: The line is virtually stock dialogue now; as a trope it is at the very least discredited, since it's only used for laughs (or period flavor) these days.
Blowing Smoke Rings: Given smoking's well-known health risks, it is now firmly discredited.
Bondage Is Bad: While conservative and religious elements are still fighting a rearguard action, a good number of modern audience members feel that as long as a sexual act involves consenting adults, it's nobody else's business. Whatever the merits of the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise may or may not be^note, alternative sexual practices are now widely known and accepted by the general public.
Book Burning: Made obsolete in the past few decades as a useful form of censorship, with the advent of multiple ways of duplicating and spreading information electronically. Modern examples do occur, but their purpose is usually to communicate a political message or done as a publicity stunt. Ironically, the complete opposite of suppressing information.
Bold Inflation: In comic books. In the past, the editor will indicate to the letterer that he wants certain random words bolded, on the assumption that a reader will become bored by plain black text without any change to spice it up, but this has faded away. Though certain writers, such as Frank Miller, continue to use it as part of their Signature Style.
Bouncer: The classic image of the trope, a large, overly-muscular meathead is steadily becoming this as more and more places are hiring women and average-sized men, as the former can deal with drunk and aggressive women far more easily and with far fewer opportunities for lawsuits, while the latter group helps foster a friendlier, less hostile atmosphere, as well as being far less likely to attract the attention of aggressive drunk men intent on proving their machismo. Bouncers who do fit the "violent scumbag" stereotype will quickly find themselves unable to find employment at well-managed or upstanding establishments, as owners and heads of security from other establishments do talk to each other. If word gets around that you're a bad hire who causes many a headache for your employer, "you'll never work in this town again" may very well become reality. In locales where you have to be licensed to work as door security, this can escalate to "you’ll never work in this industry again" if you lose your license.
Bowdlerise: Discredited to a fair degree. The ability to release the uncensored version of almost anything via the internet/via DVD deleted scenes/via other means has made serious attempts to do this (outside of children's media and very religious/conservative locales) almost laughable, as everyone who wants to can easily find the "real" version. Ironically, now it's most commonly used for its original purpose; making "all ages" edits of content that can be made publicly available or shown on TV or YouTube, while anyone who wants the real thing can just go online. However, bowdlerizing still regularly occurs with explicit modern songs: there are often two versions released — the clean "radio edit" version, and the explicit original version. Of note is this situation within the North American anime industry: The 4Kids Entertainment dub of One Piece proved so unpopular that fansubs continued to be made after the show was licensed, and 4Kids willingly gave up the license to Funimation for an uncut release. Since then, only 4Kids's successor companies and Saban Entertainment have been bowdlerizing anime release, and even their shows are likely to have an uncut, subtitled version available.
Brain Fever: A Forgotten Trope, of an "illness" that existed before better understanding of the human brain and better imaging of the human brain. There are infections of the brain (encephalitis, meningitis, rabies), and there are psychological and physiological conditions (post-traumatic stress disorder, catatonic states, panic attacks) but all have different causes, different symptoms, and far different outcomes.
Braces of Orthodontic Overkill: Due to the rather blatant character attributes the headgear usually implies and orthodontic technology having improved significantly since the nineties, this is now more or less dead — possibly also because so many kids spend at least some of their adolescence wearing some kind of brace these days (and even adults have worn braces). It's rare to see such headgear now except for the sake of a one-off gag.
Brains Evil, Brawn Good: Intellectual characters are no longer portrayed as antagonistic (and much less as out-and-out evil) in modern works, while brute force is less regarded as a positive aspect.
Brainwashed: Is Truth in Television and does happen on a quite regular basis, but many means of doing so in fiction have been very discredited (hypnosis, drugs/a drug as sole means). Realistic portrayals focus on More than Mind Control, torture and other forms of abuse, and the Dirty Social Tricks, as that is how actual brainwashing is accomplished. However, it is still used in some plots concerning Church of Happyology. Still perfectly valid if accomplished through magic in a universe where magic explicitly exists.
Brats with Slingshots: Unlike the simple "bit of wood and an elastic band" types of yore, modern versions of catapults are capable of launching heavy stone or even metal projectiles at speeds capable of causing severe and potentially permanent injuries such as blinding someone, with enough force to smash glass and damage other materials. Showing children casually running around with, much less using, potentially lethal weapons of this nature is now seen as a grossly irresponsible story telling device.
Breaking and Bloodsucking: While a hallmark of the Classical Movie Vampire, it's fallen out of favor in modern times, as vampires are now far too hip and sexy to waste time skulking outside windows.
British Royal Guards: Never used for anything other than comedic effect, but nowadays the once-common gags involving a guard's effort to remain still under immense pressure have been replaced with ones where voluntary movement on the guard's part is observed, side-stepping more commonplace expectations.
Broken Record: Due to the advent of CDs, MP3s, and the like, which have largely supplanted actual records, this is now something of a dead metaphor. Also, modern vinyl records are now thicker (the usual 120-gram weight being replaced by 180-gram and heavier) to avoid this trope.
But Liquor Is Quicker: The increased awareness of date rape and what constitutes as such has all but killed this trope in the modern day. If this trope is used, it's usually played for drama or horror, as a woman being unable to properly consent while under the influence of alcohol makes the man look predatory and monstrous.
Button Mashing: While the usage of characters button mashing to show that they're amateur gamers still persists, the implementation of button mashing as a game mechanic has largely fallen out of favor, due to it being weighted towards players who are already seasoned at rapid pressing with little room for learning to improve. Smashing Survival still persists due to it mostly being in short bursts, but gameplay mechanics revolving around button mashing have generally stopped appearing after The New '10s.
Bury Your Gays: The bloodbath of queer characters in the 2015-2016 television season (particularity Lexa on The 100) has led to a significant number of LGBT (and ally) fans to call on writers to reject any future usage of this trope.
But Not Too White: Becoming increasingly less common in visual media, thanks to tanned skin no longer being the de facto beauty standard that it had been during the 90s and 00s, being overtaken by heavy make-up between women. Many new sex symbols in The New '10s, like Robert Pattinson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Zooey Deschanel and Christina Hendricks, have been fair-skinned celebrities, while those who still use tanning have been called out for putting on Brownface/Blackface. Still, among women who were young during the era where tanned skin was considered beautiful, tanning is still commonly done and pale skin is considered shameful, so the trope isn't completely dead yet.
The Calls Are Coming from Inside the House: Based on a myth about analog land lines (see the trope page), plus it's not that scary or unusual anymore with the omnipresence of cell phones.
Captured by Cannibals: Because of its racist implications, the trope has been completely abandoned.
Career Versus Family: Working moms are quite common, especially as the cost of raising children to adulthood increases.
Career Versus Man: It is entirely possible to have both; these days, a woman is not expected to give up her career when she gets married in most Western cultures.
Cat Up a Tree: Considered to be a very tired and cliché comedy trope these days. Generally speaking, if a household cat manages to climb up a tree, it most certainly will find a way down on its own. Calling the fire department or local hero to "save" them is only going to cause more problems if anything.
Catholic School Girls Rule: On its way to being this in the USA as it's now seen as part of the "once common but no longer generally required" subtrope of Stock Costume Traits, since many real Catholic schools have changed their uniforms to unisex khakis and polo shirts, especially as more schools realize that what looks pure and innocent on a 9-year-old takes on a different context (whether intentional or not is irrelevant) when worn by a 17-year-old after the "summer growth spurt". The large number of scandals involving sexual abuse in the Catholic church may have also contributed to the sexualization of Catholic school uniforms becoming less palatable. Again, locale-dependent though: in places like the UK or Australia, where almost all schools (not just Catholic ones) have school uniforms, this trope still very much exists.
Catch Your Death of Cold: Better understanding of viruses, the human immune system and disease vectors have largely overcome this old-wives' tale in Western media, though it's still alive and well in Japanese and possibly other East Asian media.
Caustic Critic: While comically scathing reviews of bad media is still alive and well, the “Angry Reviewer” sub-trope that was popularized by the Angry Video Game Nerd in the mid-to-late 2000s has fallen off sharply in popularity since the mid 2010s due to oversaturation from a glut of poor quality AVGN clones and changing preferences for more professional methods of review. The only creator that really plays it straight is the aforementioned AVGN due to Grandfather Clause and newer attempts to play it straight are met with scorn.
Cement Shoes: It's much more efficient (from a filming, story, and economical perspective) to have the crooks just shoot the guy or bash his head in and go on their way. The victim being suddenly shot also has more shock value.
Circassian Beauty: Due to being a product of its time regarding refuted racial theories since race is no indicator of one's physical beauty.
Chained to a Railway: Was possibly considered a banal cliché as early as the early 1900s—by the time this was first done in film for the 1913 comedy Barney Oldfield's Race for a Life, it was already a subject for parody. The only reason people even remember the trope is because of how often it was parodied in the first place.
Charity Motivation Song: Though a popular trope in the 80s, it became ripe for parody almost as soon as it became popular, making this trope much more difficult to use seriously. Major controversies surrounding big benefit concerts since the Turn of the Millennium have not helped matters, as the two are strongly linked in the public mind due to the original Band Aid song and subsequent Live Aid concerts. After Live Earth, a concert dedicated to environmental causes, was almost universally criticised for its ridiculous carbon footprint, the idea of charity songs with dozens of participating artists and massive charity concerts fell heavily out of favour due to public cynicism about the artists’ and organisers’ motivations. Since then, any charity songs and concerts have been much smaller scale and lower key, often to benefit one single issue charity, a venue or to assist someone in the industry suffering hardship.
Cheating with the Milkman: It's been a long time since it was common for only the husband in a married couple to go to work, while the wife did chores alone in the house. More recently, the opposite has started happening — among white-collar jobs, working from home has been normalised, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, and so many married/co-habiting couples have found themselves working in adjacent rooms. Either way, the opportunity for a bored housewife to have affairs with passing tradesmen isn't really a feature of modern society.
Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys: The 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris (mainly the November 13th ones, although the Charlie Hebdo attack in January had an effect too) have made this too offensive for most works, though it was already on the way out due to the American withdrawal in the Middle East, with the French (whose refusal to support the U.S. in Iraq led to the popularization of the phrase) having the last laugh. Furthermore, France has one of the biggest modern militaries (being the military backbone of the whole European Union) with a long-standing military tradition, so one could hardly call the country cowardly anymore. France also has the third largest confirmed^note number of nuclear weapons. The only people who can use this trope are the English and French, as both countries have a mutual "hatred" for one another, and that is in jest, and nobody on either side of the English channel takes it seriously.
Chickenpox Episode: Lost most of its relevance when a vaccine for chicken pox became widely available. While the disease does still exist, it's no longer just taken as inevitable that every child is going to get it.
Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs: Modern children's cereals are made with much more of an eye towards nutrition, thanks to backlash regarding marketing junk food to kids during the late '90s and early 2000s. Many European and Latin American countries have banned most (if not all) kid-targeted marketing for products deemed unhealthy.
The Chosen One: Has largely fallen out of favor due to how overused and cliché it is. One of the few ways to still use this trope so modern audiences accept it is to point out how much It Sucks to Be the Chosen One. The LEGO Movie in particular plays with, parodies, and deconstructs and then reconstructs this trope to kingdom come while not taking itself seriously in the slightest.
Chucking Chalk: A discredited trope in real life, at least in Western education systems. A teacher throwing things at his pupils is likely to find himself out of a job in short order. The fact that most classrooms nowadays use dry-erase boards or computerized screens instead of chalkboards is also a factor.
Circumcision Angst: This trope has been in decline in recent years, likely as American circumcision rates are also in decline. If anything, an inverse trope is starting to appear, where men from cultures that do circumcise suddenly find themselves in cultures that don't, and receive the requisite stares from their peers.
Class Pet: Fewer and fewer schools still use class pets (other than fish) due to budget issues, it being a potential health hazard for the student, and it being deemed unsuitable for the pet. Most modern instances of class pets in media are jokes about the pet dying or being accidentally let loose.
Clip Show: Outside of Edutainment, documentaries, and Police Procedural shows (where it's used as a Framing Device), the clip show is less likely to be played straight these days, as the rise of streaming services made it harder to justify making this sort of episode filler, and began to go out of fashion in the early 2010s as a result. In anime, it's still used, but most uses tend to be for parody or Played for Laughs now.
Code Name: Has started going out of fashion, as evidenced by the fact that Comic-Book Movies Don't Use Codenames, but it still remains popular in Spy Fiction. Superhero comics continue to use it as a staple of the genre.
Collision Damage: Considered an outdated video game cliché, with many modern platform games discarding it due to improved technology allowing different and intricate enemy attack animations. It's still used due to Grandfather Clause by the older game franchises, and if modern non-Retraux games ever do use it, it's usually done by coating the enemies in something harmful like spikes, fire, electricity, ice, or poison to justify the contact damage. Even the Super Mario Bros. series that popularized the trope in the first place, has opted to play an attack animation whenever you get hit in Super Mario Bros. Wonder, downplaying it.
Color Character: Much like the Alliterative Name trope, it has become a lot rarer to see this trope being played straight in superhero comics for recently-created characters due to how such names have largely been seen as rather campy to modern readers. The only characters who can get away with this trope are Golden and Silver Age characters who were created when such names were still acceptable, or legacy versions of such (in the case of more modern creations).
- Related to this, introducing a Black character nowadays named "Black x" would be unthinkable, with the only examples still keeping such names being those who were created when that was acceptable (e.g., Black Panther and Black Lightning). In fact, the reason why such earlier characters can keep being called "Black x" nowadays at all is because they were among the first Black characters in comics who were not written as stereotypes (as well as the fact that they were among the first Black superheroes to headline their own comic book series), making them too culturally significant to rename.
Commercial Break Cliffhanger: This trope was already considered to be an overused and tired cliché on television, particularly in the live-action game and reality show genres, but it's particularly fallen on the wayside in the modern day as most TV shows made the jump to streaming, thus making this trope useless. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is about the only show deliberately using the trope these days.
Commercial Switcheroo: The whole "only works once" concept mentioned on its page has helped to kill this trope, as once you've seen a commercial using this trope, you know what the real product being advertised is. Even the trope's most-well known user, Energizer (whose Energizer Bunny campaign was once the Trope Namer), doesn't use it anymore. Nowadays its only real use is in commercials that are explicitly intended to only be shown once, like Super Bowl commercials or content reveal trailers; the trope is next-to-extinct for ads that air repeatedly.
Comically Cross-Eyed: In Real Life, strabismus is a serious condition, and therefore poking fun at cross-eyed people is no longer considered politically-correct nowadays. It only survives in the occasional cartoon and comic strip.
Coincidental Broadcast: While rolling 24-hour news makes this plausible for major events, it's generally seen as lazy plotting, especially if the incident isn't newsworthy enough for a national broadcast.
Coin-on-a-String Trick: This hasn't worked on any machine that accepts coins since the 1980s. Modern vending machines and arcade games come with either devices that cut strings or one-way ratchets, both of which are designed to prevent this very thing from happening.
Computer Equals Monitor: The sheer ubiquity of computers, plus the widespread use of laptops and tabltes, means nearly everyone knows that the computer and the monitor are two different pieces of hardware. Most computers nowadays tend to have the CPU built into the monitor anyway.
Construction Catcalls: Discredited in Real Life due to raising awareness of the reality of sexual harassment and the different movements. Thanks to strict corporate policies against this behaviour, and certain jurisdictions making it illegal outright, construction workers trying this in real life are likely to be fired, possibly arrested and charged and potentially blacklisted from the entire industry. Writers who play this trope straight without including these sort of consequences are likely to be lambasted for perpetuating the idea that such behaviour is acceptable in the modern day and age, unless they are writing a Period Piece.
Corporal Punishment: Widely frowned upon in the 21st Century and far more likely to land you a comfy spot in jail. Using beatings to discipline children, along with yelling at them, has not been proven to improve child behavior. If anything, there are far more examples of beatings doing next to nothing but making the problems worsen, and creating far reaching issues for the child that carry into into their adult years. Generations believed to be raised on Corporal Punishment (Baby Boomers, Gen X'ers, and Early Millenials) are pointed to as prime evidence of beatings being a mostly ineffective means of parenting, as the problems those generations face have not changed, and in some areas, just get worse with each generation. The trope today is more likely to be relentlessly mocked in parodies and the Hilariously Abusive Childhood.
Crazy Homeless People: Thanks to increasing homelessness and greater awareness about the importance of mental health, including the understanding that mental illness is more often a symptom of homelessness and not a cause of it, this trope is on its way to getting discredited.
Credit Card Destruction: At one time when credit cards were processed by paper, a merchant might confiscate and destroy a stolen/blocked/maxed-out credit card in order to stop the person using the card from using it anywhere else. Electronic payments have made this unnecessary; a card that is no longer valid just won't work.
Credit Card Plot: Discredited for adult characters unless they're incredibly air-headed, although it is still relatively common with teenage and pre-teen characters. In general, the trope is that the credit card is given for emergencies only, only for one of the characters to regard a close-out sale at the mall as an emergency.
Creepy Crossdresser: With much wider awareness and acceptance of trans issues amongst audiences, playing this trope straight is likely to get the creator of the work lambasted to all hell for their lack of sensitivity and understanding about this activity. A Police Procedural involving a Serial Killer or other criminal who dresses like this to carry out their activities or a work set in a fantasy 'verse which someone doesn't understand Earth conventions are perhaps the only uses of it being played straight.
Cure Your Gays: Now that people are much more accepting of different sexualities and how it's understood that "conversion therapy" and other attempts to "cure" non-heterosexual orientations are at best worthless, useless and fradulent, but at worst it can be dangerous to a person's life and health (both physical and mental). Most of the time, if this trope is in play it's usually treated in an unflattering way, but playing this trope straight today is seen as backward and offensive. Doesn't stop some religious groups from continuing to try it, though.
Cut-and-Paste Note: In modern fiction, due to the prevalence of more convenient and harder-to-trace forms of anonymous communication. If used in any sort of forensic drama, you can bet the CSIs will admonish the culprit as an amateur and get damning evidence off the note.
Cut Phone Lines: Largely discredited in any story set after the widespread adoption of cell/mobile phones and VoIP. Has largely been replaced by Cell Phones Are Useless in modern works.
Dark Age of Supernames: Nobody takes them seriously anymore, so any use of those names comes off as laughable instead of cool.
Darkest Africa: In many modern stories, quite a bit of finagling or handwaving is required to get the "traditional" level of isolation, bringing it into discredited trope territory.
Dastardly Whiplash: A cardboard stereotype, clear-cut villain used in vaudeville and stage melodramas^note that got so ridiculously overused, that it became impossible to take seriously, and thus became extremely ripe for parody in cartoons. As such, this trope has almost never been played straight since, and when it does occasionally pop up, it's used as fodder for a quick villain gag or for sheer camp value (e.g. Dick Dastardly from Wacky Races, Snidely Whiplash from Dudley Do-Right, Oil Can Harry from Mighty Mouse)—in fact, the reason people even remember this trope is often because of how often the cliché has been parodied.
Dead Pet Sketch: Except in parodies (including, ironically enough, sketch comedies) where they're not taken seriously. The increase in awareness of how strong human-animal attachments are and how devastating a pet's death can be (often on-par with losing a human friend) also made straightforward takes on this trope look needlessly cruel.
Declarative Finger: Often used by the authors to imply that the character doing so is just trying to come across as profound, which in turn is used to imply that the character is actually saying something NON-profound.
A Degree in Useless: So many young people have gone to college that job markets are saturated (and the needs of job markets change quickly), and economic policies such as automation and offshoring have rendered many occupations either highly competitive, if not entirely obsolete. So no major is guaranteed meaningful work. This is being seen all across the board, not just in humanities fields.
Depraved Bisexual: Suggesting that someone is prone to sociopathy due to their sexual preferences looks very dubious to modern audiences. These days it's more likely to be Played for Laughs by using the Extreme Omnisexual trope but even that is falling out of favor due to the implications that bisexuals are lust-crazed idiots with no self-control.
Diet Episode: Not only has it been overused to the point of cliché (especially in sitcoms and children's shows), but most characters that go on the diets are a little pudgy at worst, resulting in audiences criticizing this trope for promoting Hollywood Thin as a must in order to be happy and healthy. With the rising obesity rates in the real world, many health experts are realizing that healthy, sustainable weight loss isn't as cut and dry as "eat less, move more" (Genetics, illnesses and hormone imbalances also play a part in a person's weight, and these things aren't always easy to overcome) and are embracing the "body acceptance" movement as an alternative to yo-yo dieting. Thus, straight uses of this trope are widely discouraged nowadays, at least when it comes to dieting solely to look better rather than improve health overall.
Difficulty by Region: Was primarily an Enforced Trope in the third and fourth generations of console gaming, as Japanese developers made international versions of their games more difficult to capitalize on the rental markets in those regions; higher difficulty means more time spent on the game, meaning more revenue for rental businesses. This died out not only with the death of local rental stores in favor of streaming services, but also The Internet making the differences between regional versions — and the motives behind them — more apparent. Over time, examples became less common and more incidental, including renamed difficulty settings, bug fixes, and Anti-Frustration Features; by the time game patches became commonplace, these became universal to all regional versions. Playing this straight to the extent of games such as The Adventures of Bayou Billy will upset either casual or hardcore players looking for an unadulterated gameplay experience, and they'll likely find a way to play the original versions anyway.
Digital Piracy Is Evil: Very rarely played straight today, and steadily being replaced with Digital Piracy Is Okay. The creation of the Internet, Technology Marches On, and a multitude of other factors (creators are gone, dead formats, region-locking, licensing issues, etc.) have made countless works disappear or rendered inaccessible, creating multitudes of Abandonware that can only be experienced via Keep Circulating the Tapes. For games in particular, and especially older and obscure video games from the 80s and 90s, emulation is the only way these works can still reach a new audience. Some game companies, like Square Enix, have noted this, as most of the source codes for their older games are outright gone, ruining preservation efforts and emphasizing the value of remakes and emulation. Values Dissonance causes emulation and piracy to still be frowned upon (especially if the game being pirated has just released), but it's no longer a prevailing attitude among creators and consumers.
Dinner with the Boss: Discredited around The '70s to The '80s in The United States and the UK. Most if not all work-related/work-networking parties/meetings/similar, anywhere in the world, are at restaurants, bars, or other public event locations, or held at the house of the boss/senior staff rather than rank-and-file employees. In Europe and Japan (as well as Latin America and most of Asia) this was how things were all along for the most part.
Dirty Communists: After the end of the Cold War, caricaturing and exaggerating the evils of or portraying the Soviet Union and/or Communists/Socialists as doing their actions For the Evulz fell to the wayside — if socialists are going to be the bad guys they are more likely going to be misguided idealists or In Name Only tinpot dictators. It doesn't help that the few Communist regimes, with the exception of Cuba, are Asian countries ^noteChina, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam), making it difficult to use villains from those countries without playing into the Yellow Peril trope. Make the Bear Angry Again is still in play, however, especially after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin.
Dirty Foreigner: Seen as xenophobic now, and is most often used today in subversion, as a quick and easy way to tell that a character has a prejudice against another group, and that character is usually painted in a negative light.
Disaster Movies involving airplanes — since Airplane! came out, no-one could possibly take one seriously. One contemporary airplane disaster movie tried to play itself straight for the first part of its production process — then someone realized there were snakes on the plane... The discredited status is averted with true story ones or at least Very Loosely Based on a True Story aviation disaster content and documentaries: movies such as Sully have succeeded, and series such as Mayday and YouTube pilot and disaster investigation channels have definite fan followings as of the 2020s.
Disco Sucks: Younger generations have grown up with no memory of disco or their parents' hatred of it; thus, they look at the genre on its own merits and the rise of Eurodisco and Ibiza club culture helped make this trope less common. In addition, artists from The New '20s like Lizzo have released disco-inspired songs of their own. Furthermore, historians and scholars have argued that racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia helped fuel the anti-disco backlash, to the extent where the legitimate factors that fueled it (namely the overexposure) have since been outweighed by the more bigoted elements.
Diseased Name: There was once a whole genre of jokes/Urban Legends wherein a Funny Foreigner, hillbilly or black person would punch above their presumed intellectual weight and give their child a name like Eczema. For many obvious reasons, this would never fly in contemporary society. Although, the Upper-Class Twit variation (e.g. Pneumonia Vanderfeller) is still perfectly acceptable, if uncommon.
Disgusting Vegetarian Food: Since the late 2010s, there has been a rise in both the consumer demand and production of meat substitutes and plant-based products in mainstream retailers and groceries. As a result, this trope has been getting harder to play straight without coming across as insensitive.
Dish Dash: There's a discredited variation of it; when someone is showing off their skills at keeping dishes balanced atop spinning sticks. It used to be popular in variety shows, but both the trope and the genre have disappeared for over 40 years.
Divorce Assets Conflict: Still occasionally happens, but with most couples (especially those where large amounts of wealth are involved on one or both sides) having legally binding prenuptial agreements, far less likely to happen in Real Life post The '90s, and therefore much less realistic without some explanation as to why there was no prenup.
Divorce Requires Death: In Western society, at least, it doesn't.
Does This Make Me Look Fat?:
- You see this every day, so it's not really a plot device.
- There's also the common variant of the trope, "Does this make my butt look big?". Because of evolving beauty standards in the 21st century, the implication that a woman has a big butt is a lot less likely to be considered an insult than it once was, with many even considering it a compliment.
Dogged Nice Guy: More likely to be shown as being at best someone who Wants a Prize for Basic Decency and at worst a Stalker with a Crush than as being genuinely nice or worthy of a relationship with their crush.
Domestic Appliance Disaster: Modern appliances are not that prone to derail any more, they have auto shut-offs the most often. That said, if you wish to use this trope for dramatic effect rather than comedic, space heaters, turkey fryers, and damaged pressure cookers are notorious for fire/explosion hazards, and anything electrical with a male-male adapter connection is both a fire *and* shock hazard.
Dramatic Pause: The Sting variation of it is no longer taken seriously, although subtle variations can still be effective.
Dramatic Slip: It can happen, but this is nowhere near as prevalent in real life as it is in media. It's also largely seen as a cheap way to introduce a plot-point or create drama.
Driver of a Black Cab: This is heading for discredited status in modern times, as London has one of the highest ratios of ethnic minorities to white people in the whole country and it's much easier to be prejudiced against an abstract concept than against people you've actually met. Many London cabbies are also now immigrants.
Drowning My Sorrows: The variant where someone gets an entire bottle of hard liquor to themselves in any modern bar or tavern in the US is officially against modern ABC laws and likely won't happen unless the bartender is willing to flout such laws and lose his/her job, as well as the bar's licensing. A more believable version involves the bartender buying the bottle at a store or ordering bottle service for a nonexistent party.
Drunken Montage: Except when it's Played for Laughs.
Dub-Induced Plotline Change: With the anime boom of the late 90s and 2000s and the infamous 4Kids Entertainment version of One Piece being a notorious flop (Notably, fansubs of the series continued to be distributed when the dub was being made, when usually, licensed series are taken down as sort of a "gentlemen's clause") straight-up English dubs became the norm for foreign media. Plus the rise of the internet makes it easier to both get one's hands on the unaltered original and look up the necessary information needed to understand stuff like cultural references. Power Rangers only gets away with this because it's always done this.
Dumb Dinos: This trope is generally associated with older works and is becoming increasingly rare after the Dinosaur Renaissance revamped the popular image of dinosaurs, but it does still occasionally pop up every now and again. These days, however, it's far more likely to be Played for Laughs as opposed to serious fiction.
Dying Dream: Too often abused as a Deus ex Machina or Sudden Downer Ending.
Ear Trumpet: It's still used as a trope in works set before the 20th century, but you're not gonna see Ear Trumpets in any work after that time period, and even then, their use is largely relegated to being an easy I Can't Hear You gag. In real life, by the mid-20th century, the last manufacturer of ear trumpets had died out, being replaced by hearing aids of vary degrees of technical quality.
Easy-Mode Mockery: Modern gaming's increased focus on appealing to a broader audience, and the rise of casual gamers across all platforms has discouraged game developers from implementing genuine mocking uses. However, serious penalties for using easy modes in games centered around player skill (such as less XP gained on lower difficulties) are not considered objectionable.
Elevator Conference: After the 80s, elevators no longer contained passenger-operated emergency stop buttons. This is because there are virtually no situations where the occupants of an elevator car would benefit by stopping the unit between floors, and the buttons were mostly misused for this very trope's purpose. In modern times, elevators also typically contain a security camera, preventing them from being the private haven they once were.
Elvis Lives: In any work written after 2015, Elvis Presley would be over eighty years old, meaning that if he's not dead, it's likely that he will be soon. You're more likely to see this used straight with someone more recently deceased like Michael Jackson, Tupac Shakur or Stevie Ray Vaughan among many others. The same logic is also why Elvis Has Left the Planet, a related trope, is discredited as well.
Electrified Bathtub: Building codes in the western world have gotten rid of regular sockets for appliances in bathrooms, specifically to avert this trope. They were replaced with Ground Fault Circuit Interrupters (GFCI's) that closely monitor the voltage of the plugged in appliance and then it cuts the power if it detects a short or irregularity in the circuit. It's still possible for this trope to work in Real Life, but it's rare to the point of being discredited.
Embarrassing Tattoo: This is slowly becoming a Discredited Trope for four reasons: It's becoming increasingly easy and reliable to remove tattoos or come up with cover-up designs, and tattoos (and piercings for that matter) are considerably more mainstream than they were before the mid-1990s, leading people to become savvy and avoid this trope. Also, large tattoos are expensive and require multiple sessions to complete; and no self-respecting tattoo parlor will serve anyone who is clearly under the influence of drugs or alcohol^note, nor would they serve minors without a parent present and in many locales it’s also flat out illegal to tattoo a minor regardless of parental permission (except for medical tattoos).
Epileptic Flashing Lights: Older video games often employed flashing screen effects because color-cycling demands so little processing power. Advances in graphics technology discredited this excuse, and increased awareness of epilepsy and general photosensitivity has led to flashing light effects becoming more heavily scrutinized to the point where they're now considered bad form to use (the change in attitude was best exemplified by Incredibles 2 coming under fire for prominently featuring strobe lights, forcing Pixar to tone it down for later screenings, TV broadcasts, and home media releases). Additionally, toning down flashing lights or patterns that could trigger seizures has become one of the few alterations routinely made to classic games in official emulated re-releases such as on the Virtual Console.
- The infamous Porygon incident from Pokémon: The Original Series helped discredit its use in anime as well, with many recuts of older anime darkening the screen whenever it appears, and many modern shows including a disclaimer not to sit too close to the TV and have the lights in the room turned on as you watch.
- It's worth mentioning that you will occasionally see this still present in some classic game releases, as well as Retraux games and demo carts, but among consciencious game developers, not including either a Content Warning or an option to turn them off outright is frowned upon.

Ermine Cape Effect: With royalty becoming less distant these days, this is largely becoming discredited, save for nations that still have absolute monarchies.
Escort Mission: Originally a stock video game challenge, they've all but disappeared in the 2010s and onwards, thanks to creators realizing that players find them infuriating rather than fun. Generally the only way you'll see something like this in a game post-2010 is in more experimental/narrative-based games, where the focus is less on challenging the player and more on making the player care about the character being escorted (see The Last of Us, BioShock Infinite or The Walking Dead).
Every Car Is a Pinto: If the massive numbers of parodies (such as cars exploding after the slightest dent, or things that couldn't possibly explode such as bicycles or trees blowing up in a collision) and Lampshade Hangings in recent years is any indication, this is on its way to being this, especially after MythBusters debunked it. However, there are still plenty of people who believe this trope is true, leading to well-meaning bystanders pulling accident victims out of cars and causing further harm.
"Everybody Laughs" Ending: It's been rapidly becoming this since at least the mid-nineties, and is rarely played straight anymore, except in Parody works.
Everybody Smokes: The global smoking rate (as measured by admitted daily smokers) as of The New '10s rests around 25 to 30 percent, with a far lower percentage (around 20 to 25 percent) in most Western First World nations, due to aggressive education campaigns about the dangers of tobacco, stricter regulation of its use and sale and promotion, and free or low-cost quitting assistance for smokers, and more recently the emergence of electronic cigs. Some populations (and some nations/regions/cities) have larger percentages of smokers, but the trope is entirely discredited anywhere outside of those specific exceptions since The '90s. It still shows up in period pieces, but even then modern attitudes towards smoking have caused a decline in those kind of depictions.
Express Lane Limit: Express lanes in grocery stores are nowadays mostly replaced by self-checkout.
Extreme Sports Plot: After the extreme sports fad of the '90s and early 2000s died out, this stopped being able to draw in large audiences. Many of these sports could also just be watched on actual sports channels, without all the filler. Sports-based plots now need other aspects to attract viewers.
Face on a Milk Carton: At this point, it has been parodied countless times and has entered the collective subconscious to the point that while people may not have actually seen an actual one in their lifetime, they still recognize it. In real life, it has been replaced by the Amber Alert system and social media postings.
Fairy Companion: Overused to the point of being considered a cliché in video games.
Fairy Godmother: This is rarely used seriously in modern stories, often seen as a trite character archetype or a Deus ex Machina, usually associated with the most archaic parts of Fairy Tales (even though this trope is a lot more recent than most of those stories, and in fact very rare in fairy tales collected by folklorists; most Cinderella variants have her aided by her dead mother, or, in such variants as Catskin and Cap o'Rushes, by nothing but her own wits and some advice). It's still often used, simply because it's just so useful that writers can't resist it, although they often disguise the fairy godmother as something else and play it for comedy.
Fake Interactivity: Since Doc McStuffins and PAW Patrol gained popularity in The New '10s, and with the increasing use of smart devices for edutainment, this trope is losing favor to simple stories with An Aesop in preschool entertainment.
Family Relationship Switcheroo: The "passing a teen mom off as an older sister" version of this trope is not really used anymore, since premarital sex and childrearing out-of-wedlock has become more accepted in the real world.
Filler: While still present in animation, in anime, it's been discredited and replaced with 12-Episode Anime. The anime adaptation of My Hero Academia was the nail in the coffin on the trend of continuous anime adaptations of shonen manga. Prior to it, long-runners like Naruto and Bleach were aired non-stop. And while it kept the franchises always visible, the quality was never consistent, and frequent filler arcs caused by not wanting to overtake the manga(Naruto's pre-Shippuden Filler Arc being a notorious offender, having been blamed for causing Toonami's initial shutdown). My Hero Academia, in contrast, took a seasonal approach, adapting a group of arcs once a year and releasing it as a season, all-but eliminating filler and providing much better pacing and animation quality. The format was also better suited for binge-watching, which had become popular by the time the anime came out, and subsequent big shonen titles like Jujutsu Kaisen and Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba all followed this format, while the former trend of adapting was left behind.
Fireballs: While its use by popular luchadores such as El Mega Triple Campeón de AAA Mesías helped them retain popularity in the Latin American and Caribbean regions, this stunt became shunned in most regions where it was once common thanks to an infamous botch during a Hulk Hogan/Ultimate Warrior match at WCW Halloween Havoc where instead of hitting Warrior, Hogan burnt his own eyebrows and mustache. And while Mesías plays a part in keeping them alive elsewhere, his competent use of fireballs in the United States still got Wrestling Society X cancelled by MTV. However, fireballs in non-wrestling contexts are still used today.
Flashback Stares: Outside of comedies this is rarely used purely because it looks so silly, breaking any dramatic tension.
Fleeting Demographic Rule: These days, continuity is the name of the game, and people will notice when plotlines repeat. It's also now possible for people to see older iterations of your franchise online, even if they otherwise wouldn't, so they can see exactly how many times a particular plot thread has been used. All of this goes double if your franchise has a large Periphery Demographic or becomes subject to a Popularity Polynomial. Repeating plotlines is generally excusable if a series has undergone a Continuity Reboot or if it's part of a Thematic Series.
Flirtatious Smack on the Ass: This is considered to be a form of sexual harassment in the modern day, and as such is rarely used as an affectionate gesture in casual settings anymore. People who do use it in a public environment are often seen as creeps who don't respect women, and the person who received the smack is rarely seen enjoying it. However, the trope is slightly more accepted if it's done between two people who are already dating, where consent is implied between partners.
Floating Platforms: Floating platforms are quickly becoming this in video games. Game developers are now opting for ways to make them seem more realistic to preserve immersion, such as attaching them to the surrounding terrain, replacing them with more plausible substances (within its universe such as Green Rocks or Solid Clouds) or making up excuses (see: Flight) as to why they're just hovering there. They are still often found in 2-D platformers, however, due to the difficulty of designing compelling stages without floating landmasses, as well as in Long-Runners which had them from the start and wouldn't be the same without them.
Fluffy Cloud Heaven: Nowadays the use of this depiction is usually meant as satire. The exceptions almost invariably treat the depiction as a simple visual short-hand. This is often replaced with the more terrestrial Level in the Clouds with Solid Clouds.
Flushing Toilet, Screaming Shower: Becoming one because newer buildings are designed with this trope in mind so it's harder to pull off.
Follow That Car: These days unless you find a taxi driver who's always wanted to do this you're likely to be refused outright as few drivers want to risk themselves, their jobs or their cars on something of questionable safety and legality.
Foot Popping: Somewhat discredited nowadays, and mostly crops up in parody (though the alert viewer will still sometimes see it played straight, mainly in romantic comedies), as often a man will do this to emphasize his effeminate side, or both people will do it at once.
Foreign-Looking Font: Quite a few of them are seen as racist. Chop Suey, Lithos, German Gothic and Neuland all are seen as racist or at least racialized, for example, especially when used in certain contexts or to make something seem "exotic". Not wholly discredited, however, as restaurants may use them for their names to promote what kind of food they sell, and newer examples still appear on font websites regularly.
Frankenstein's Monster: The "standard" appearance of the monster (popularized by the 1931 film adaptation), usually consisted of a square head, greenish skin, enormous proportions, a scarred or stitched forehead, and bolts (actually electrodes) on either side of the neck (To contrast, the most monstrous features of the novel's creature were his proportions, his deathly pale skin, and his jaundiced, soulless eyes). This is no longer taken as a serious depiction of the monster now, with more modern interpretations going for the novel's vision.
A Foggy Day in London Town: Enviromental regulations passed since the 1950s have significantly cut down on the amount of "fog" (actually smog) in London, and today this trope is typically only seen in period pieces.
Formal Full Array of Cutlery: Starting from outside utensils and "working your way in" as something to be explained to anyone who hadn't dined with gentry/royalty before. Common enough that it's often met with sarcasm.
Free Prize at the Bottom: Because of the choking hazards associated with small toys and backlash against the practice promoting unhealthy eating habits to children, cereal companies have steadily stopped including prizes in cereal boxes. In the 2000s, prizes were usually separately packaged items that would not pose a choking hazard, such as CD-ROMs; later on, this would be replaced by a link to a website, or a code that can be scanned on a mobile device.
Free-Range Children: Kids and teens today are much more closely supervised than the kids and teens of a generation or two ago, for better or for worse. In some jurisdictions, they aren't even allowed to legally be in their own backyards (with the parent/guardian peeking at them from the kitchen window every now and then) without that parent/guardian being charged with neglect or child abandonment. However starting in The New '10s there has been a concerted effort to push back against this and allow children and teens more (age appropriate) freedom as research has shown that overprotecting them is quite harmful in the longer term.
Free the Frogs: A cliché that just doesn't work anymore, since the frogs (and other animals for dissection) always come pre-killed. And even if they weren't, teachers are required to provide alternatives to students who don't want to dissect and are gradually phasing out dissection for the exact reason this trope arose; a lot of people are really squicked out by doing it. Many schools that still do dissections often use virtual replicas, and you can find many, many apps that teach anatomy without having to deal with the real thing.
Funny Animal: The trope is still active in other ways, but the classic form of it, used with rubberhose cartoon characters like Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse, has fallen to the wayside in mainstream works, usually being seen as an old-fashioned cartoon style or solely as kids' fodder. The trope is still used with revivals of classic series or homages to those kind of cartoons, but rarely anywhere else. In comic books, where it was once one of the headlining genres, it is almost completely dead outside of webcomics.
Funny Foreigner: It's pretty hard to play this one straight, because of its racist and/or xenophobic undertones.
Garbage Wrestler: After the large amounts of injuries, long-term health problems and premature deaths resulting from this style of pro wrestling and the bad press that accompanied it, mainstream promotions have worked towards eliminating it entirely. In the mid-to-late 2000s, WWE began to shift its product back to the more family-oriented style they had prior to the Attitude Era and banned blading (drawing blood from oneself via a concealed blade), weapon attacks to the head and any move that may cause severe head trauma from their shows. The wrestling fanbase is much smarter and more refined than they used to be and would rather see actual wrestlers put on an athletic spectacle instead of glorified stuntmen falling off a 20-foot balcony through flaming, barbed-wire covered tables. True hardcore wrestlers only exist in indy feds and rarely make it to the next level without both toning down the violence and incorporating actual wrestling into their arsenal. That being said, it’s mostly still alive and well in Japan, where wrestling is known to be extreme.
Gay Aesop: Discredited in Western media outside of children’s media, since gay characters are now relatively prevalent (compared to previous decades).
Gay Romantic Phase: More so in the West than Japan, but the idea that being in love with someone of the same gender is just a phase that someone is going through has largely come to be seen as a homophobic denial of who the gay/bi person really is and is almost never played straight these days.
Getting Suspended Is Awesome: Schools have come to realize that the kind of students who would do things that could get them suspended wouldn't see out-of-school suspensions as a punishment. So now, schools opt for detentions, in-school suspensions, and other punishments for all but the most severe misbehaviour.
Ghost Butler: In yesteryear, this was a standard feature of horror films — to show just how spooky the Haunted House was. It was used to the point where you are more likely to see it parodied than used straight. It's still common in video games, particularly to trap the player in a Boss Room.
G.I.R.L.: Much like There Are No Girls on the Internet, the increase of the internet to the general population in the 2000s and the rise of social media makes it far more likely the girl you are talking to online is actually a girl. This also isn't getting into attempting to apply this trope to transgender people, as the rising awareness of the LGBTQ+ community in the 2010s have made it much more likely that you'll get labeled as transphobic nowadays if you attempt to accuse a person of this trope in the modern age.
Girls Have Cooties: Unless you are aiming at a VERY young audience, using this trope will make you a laughing-stock, and even when shown, it's generally to teach An Aesop about how it's not true at all.
GIS Syndrome: Always mocked, Played for Laughs, or derided as lazy. Some webcomics like Homestuck, Twisted Kaiju Theater, or Alien Loves Predator can get away with it, but only because of the Grandfather Clause and simple practicality issues.
Give Geeks a Chance: Due to modern-day attitudes towards relationships, it's harder to take seriously anymore. If it is used, expect An Aesop as well. The mainstreaming of nerd culture such as The Big Bang Theory has rendered it more or less obsolete, as there's no longer anything especially remarkable about a self-proclaimed "nerd" having a fulfilling love life.
Going by the Matchbook: Nobody lights cigarettes, cigars, joints, or bongs with matches in the modern day. Besides, you rarely see people smoking in media anymore anyway. A modern writer can still use this trope with a little imagination, though; a branded lighter would be the obvious choice, but pens or business cards could work, too.
Good Hurts Evil: An old and discredited trope, with some exceptions. It's largely been absorbed by the Smite Evil trope. It's an interesting cultural study; people no longer think that Good, itself, is invincible, but used correctly it can really kick ass! If it is used in modern works, it's usually in ones centered squarely on the Idealistic side of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, or where the baddies ARE shadows/darkness and thus are Weakened by the Light. It's often utilized alongside Only the Pure of Heart.
Gorgeous George: Obvious homophobia aside, merely being Ambiguously Gay isn't enough for today's pro wrestlers to get heat, though it still shows up on occasion.
Gotta Catch Them All: In 3D platformers, the Collect-a-Thon format completely fell out of favor in the early 2000s due to how over saturated and cliché it became (and games like Donkey Kong 64 going way overboard with the collecting aspect, turning people off the already tired trend as a result). It often got overused in lazily designed platformer games, particularly licensed ones, helping send the trend to an early grave. Even the Mario games, which kicked off the trend in the first place with Super Mario 64, moved on to more standard platforming as of Super Mario 3D World. This trope however seems to be heading in the opposite direction in recent years as nostalgia for these kinds of games have been on the rise, as games like Super Mario Odyssey and A Hat in Time have been released to critical praise, while Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon have both gotten trilogy remakes that have also been warmly received. However, these these kinds of platformers also tend to focus more on movement options than the collectables themselves. Yooka-Laylee attempted to be a more deliberate throwback to those kind of games with a greater focus on collectables than anything else, with middling results.
Gratuitous Animal Sidekick: This became such an overused cliché in feature animation like Disney and its imitators (especially in the 90s) and kids cartoons of the 70s and 80s, and such an obvious way of pandering to kids and hocking toys, that it's considered impossible to take seriously now. It's quite rare to find examples of it in contemporary works and it's very rarely used in mainstream films now (there are exceptions like Tangled, but the side-kick in question only had a very small role and gets a pass due to it being an ode to an old Disney tradition).
Greedy Jew: This is an old, old anti-Semitic stereotype that has fallen out of favor after being used (along with other anti-Semitic stereotypes and canards) as a justification for The Holocaust. However, the stereotype that All Jews Are Cheapskates still remains.
Gross-Out Show: Overexposure of this in the 90s and 2000s lead to many rejecting this style of comedy. Nowadays, most people find gross-out humor to be juvenile at best and genuinely disgusting at worst. Not helped by works that place a greater emphasis on funny dialogue and/or Surreal Humor that became prevalent in The New '10s and The New '20s. Secret Mountain Fort Awesome in particular failed so badly that grossout shows started to die out.

Tropes H to M

Happily Ever After: Varies between being considered a discredited trope and an Undead Horse Trope. It is frequently subject to parody, and frequently avoided in favor of a more bittersweet Twist Ending.
Hassle-Free Hotwire: On the way to being this, as more and more cars either incorporate a necessary processor into the key itself, or require the key fob to be present before they'll start.
Henpecked Husband: Now that Domestic Abuse is known as a problem that can affect persons of any gender, this type of relationship is seen as either unrealistic or horrifying. Still occasionally crops up in sitcoms, but rarely elsewhere. Not discredited in anime and manga due to Values Dissonance.
Hide Your Lesbians: With a higher acceptance of homosexuality since the 90s, more celebrities will express their choices even though "closeting" is likely still around. In the early 2010s, movie and TV studios began to self-impose representation quotas for homosexual characters, gradually ending their invisibility on mainstream media, although not without controversy, as LGBT groups complained early on over the characters often being extras and/or background characters.
High School Rocks: Despite being a popular trope beginning in the 70s, and continuing on into the 90s (particularly in kid shows), it's rarely played straight anymore. Now that shows like Freaks and Geeks and My So-Called Life, and movies like Superbad and (to a lesser extent) Dazed and Confused, have subverted it into oblivion, it's almost impossible to take this trope seriously anymore. Waterloo Road is the show that made it become this way. Still omnipresent in East Asian media.
Hijacked by Ganon: While still a valid trope in other mediums, in video games, this has become such an overused and trite way of attempting a shocking plot twist (with the trope naming The Legend of Zelda and Mega Man series, as well its follow ups such as Mega Man X which likewise abused the trope ad nauseam, being by far the most infamous abusers of this) that it's no longer considered even mildly surprising to use it in contemporary games. Modern games usually avoid the trope, save in series where it's practically expected (such as the aforementioned Mega Man), and either play the villains straight, subvert the twist or play the cliché for laughs.
Hillbilly Horrors: Has fallen out of favor due to the inherently problematic elements surrounding it, with some comparing it to Blackface in terms of being an unfounded stereotype used to make people living in cities and the suburbs feel better about themselves. In recent years many people in Appalachia and the Deep South have reclaimed slurs like "redneck" and "hill-billy". They're now worn as badges of honor. Indeed, many people in West Virginia and Kentucky regard these terms as falling under N-Word Privileges, but still, it's best to proceed with caution and be aware of who and where one is writing about.
His and Hers: Almost always parodied nowadays.
Hollow Earth: The straight form of it used in old science fiction stories (such as Journey to the Center of the Earth) has been scientifically discredited for centuries and is never used in serious science fiction anymore. Variations of it survive, such as the Dyson Sphere, but only in a purely fictional context.
Hollywood Thin: On its way to becoming this, thanks to increasing backlash against media that pressures women and men to be as thin/buff as possible. Hollywood in particular is facing anger over these issues. According to some, this trope might cause viewers to develop eating disorders. Ironically, its deliberate opposite, Real Women Have Curves, may not be far behind it, as it's also receiving backlash for promoting the unhealthy ideas that people who are thin are somehow inferior to those who aren't.
Honest Corporate Executive: There are many reports and horror stories of big name corporations having terrible working conditions and low wages for their employees (particularly in places such as Amazon). Despite this, the executives in charge of those corporations have done little, if anything, to improve these problems. And with an increasing number of people (especially those in Generations Y and Z) not only questioning the integrity of any and all business executives but even losing faith in capitalism altogether, it's incredibly rare to see this trope played straight after the latter half of The New '10s, save for grandfathered cases such as Bruce Wayne or Scrooge McDuck; and even they may skirt the line every so often and are erronously assumed by non-fans to be straight Corrupt Corporate Executives.
Honest John's Dealership: Most car dealerships today are run through company-certified distributors of their cars, rather than used car lots run by corrupt Honest Johns. Even if you do find one, "lemon laws" and the rise of social media will make it very unlikely for someone who openly tries cheating their customers out of money to be in business very long.
Honking Arriving Car: Nowadays, drivers are more likely to call or text their passenger on through mobile phones when they arrive. It's widely considered bad etiquette for a driver to use a car horn in these kinds of situations, and many towns or regions may also have noise ordinances that prohibit stationary vehicles from sounding horns. Plus, horns might not be heard in modern houses with good insulation.
Honor Thy Abuser: Needless to say, abuse of any kind is a horrific thing for someone to go through, so instances of someone coming around to forgive their abuser is likely to be derided as being tone-deaf nowadays.
Housewife: Has become discredited in most first world countries. The feminist movement in the second half of the 20th century led to more women shunning the life of a homemaker and entering the workforce. That combined with the cost of living increasing to the point where a single income is no longer enough to support a family (unless one is really wealthy), stay-at-home housewives have mostly become a thing of the past. And aside from a few Long Runners such as The Simpsons, Family Guy and American Dad!, all of which can get away with it because of the Grandfather Clause (and even those shows will have the occasional episode where the wives will get jobs or side hustles to make extra money), no one plays it straight anymore outside of period pieces. Even in cases where the husband does make enough money that his wife doesn't have to work, don't expect her to be cooking, cleaning, or taking care of kids; she's more likely going to be depicted as a lazy Gold Digger.
Hummer Dinger: It became this when the one-two punch of the mid-to-late 2000s gas crisis and the early 2010s economic crisis hit the SUV market hard, even in the United States. Additionally, the Hummer brand was shut down in 2010, and the 2022 revival of the Hummer nameplate is all-electric, averting its own trope.
Hysterical Woman: Not only a Double Standard, but a tired cliché.
I Broke a Nail: This is mostly discredited nowadays. Most Writers Are Male, with short-clipped nails that rarely if ever get broken. As a result, it took a long time for women to get across that broken nails hurt, and that is usually why they're crying. When nails break, they tend to take a bit of skin with them... a bit of skin that has a cluster of nerves within. Then there's bleeding and the risk of infection so while it's not life-threatening, it's still a legit nuisance. Nowadays, it's used more as a joke than anything.
I Can Explain: The line is rarely played straight nowadays. And considering the number of times it's been parodied/subverted, it's well on its way to becoming a Dead Horse Trope. As such, a common subversion is for the character in question to deliver this line... then resignedly admit that no, actually they can't explain it.
I Can See My House from Here: Hardly ever played straight anymore.
If It's You, It's Okay: Discredited in slash fiction due to a specific use of it (i.e. "We're Not Gay, We Just Love Each Other") being perceived as having homophobic undertones.
I'll Tell You When I've Had Enough!: This trope has as many parodies, usually involving someone Drunk on Milk or drinking an absurdly small amount, as straight uses, making it hard to use seriously anymore.
I'm Your Worst Nightmare: Such a cliché stock phrase that parodies far outnumber straight uses. Actually, the page quote refers to this specific trope.
In a World…: The film trailer blurb immortalized by the late Don LaFontaine hasn't been used seriously since 2012, partly due to his death in 2008, partly due to it being ripe for parody (and still is), and partly because trailers started to use voices from the film itself, and rely on text cards to do the narration instead of a deep booming voice.
Innocent Innuendo: These days, audience reactions tend not to be "whoa, are they doing it?", but "okay, what's really going on?"
Incredibly Conspicuous Drag: Increasingly falling out of favor due to discomfort with its use by transphobes to mock trans people for not passing. Actual Drag Queens, meanwhile, are rarely intended to be seriously mistaken for the opposite gender anyway, and use the trope mainly for camp value or to make a statement critiquing gender expectations.
Incriminating Indifference: This trope has been around on television so long that these days the subversion is at least as common as the trope: the "non-emotional" person at the scene makes for an excellent red herring for the first half-hour of a crime procedural, but is rarely the true killer because that would be too easy. You can expect the truly guilty person to have had the wet-works on full blast, just as expected, if only to throw off suspicion.
Inheritance Murder: Now becoming this; it's rare to find a murder mystery where the inheritor actually turns out to be the murderer, although it's very common nowadays to find it subverted with the inheritor being a prime suspect who turns out to be innocent.
Insane Equals Violent: Studies have shown that people with mental illnesses are more likely to be the victims of violence, not the perpetrators. Writers are also leaning towards more interesting motives for violence, as simply declaring that the villain is crazy can come off as lazy writing. Still lingering a bit in the horror genre, but largely only due to the Grandfather Clause or homages to earlier works that used this trope.
Inspirationally Disadvantaged: This has fallen on the wayside in recent years, as people are becoming aware that trying to play this trope straight comes across as exploiting or otherwise objectifying disabled people for a non-disabled person to be "inspired" by, while almost never doing anything to change the systems that make life so difficult for the disabled in the first place. In addition, it's also encouraged many people to refer to any disabled character with the trope name, regardless of how they're actually portrayed.
Interchangeable Asian Cultures: Falling out of favor because of Western audiences becoming more knowledgeable about Asian cultures and their differences (thanks to the internet and Asian cuisines like sushi becoming more mainstream) and Asian people demanding a more respectful representation in media. Nowadays, the trope is used to portray a character as ignorant at best and racist at worst.
Intergenerational Friendship: Not discredited as a whole, but this type of relationship between an adult and a minor (especially if it's between a grown man and an underage girl) now tends to be viewed as the adult "grooming" the child for sex, even if that's not the case.
Invention Pretension: Likely to be discredited now (at least in works set in the present day), since two minutes on The Other Wiki is usually sufficient to debunk such a claim.
I Read It for the Articles: This is almost never used from The New '10s onward; the Internet has plenty of adult material for people to find at their fingertips (and no person is going to be talking about what porn they watched in polite conversation anytime soon), and any film or TV Show with a sexually explicit scene or two are not inherently judged in the same way in a conversation. Whats more, many of the modern examples are either subversions, a period piece when magazines were in vogue (or made before the internet took off to begin with), or the trope is being applied to a robot or alien interested in non-human..er.."adult interest" magazines.
Is There a Doctor in the House?: Now, someone would just ask someone to call Emergency Services. Especially since, due to Crippling Overspecialization, a doctor present might not even be able to help in any meaningful way, e.g. a psychiatrist or a dentist won't likely be able to do any more for someone having a heart attack or who just got hurt in an accident than a non-doctor would. Even a proper medical doctor tends not to bring his drugs and instruments when going out to dinner; if someone had a heart attack, they couldn't do more than administer CPR, which ordinary folks can do with training.
It's Quiet… Too Quiet: Still applicable in a few very rare instances (tornadoes, total loss of power), but most people in those circumstances are probably more Oh, Crap! than "it's too quiet..."
"I Want" Song: In Western Animation, at least. Disney and its competitors milked the Broadway musical cartoon formula for all it was worth in the late 80s and 90s, with some of these films having song numbers like these shoehorned into them for the sake of having them (e.g. Tom and Jerry: The Movie, The Thief and the Cobbler and Quest for Camelot), which resulted in this trope becoming a red flag that the audience was about to watch yet another cliché musical story, and thus keep them from engaging with the characters or events—even as early as the mid 90s, Pixar had the foresight to realize the trope was heading in this direction, so their first films and everything after, such as Toy Story, intentionally avoided having the characters sing their motivations, or even sing at all, in order to distinguish it from those films. To put it in perspective, Toy Story was released in the same year as Disney's latest big feature Pocahontas—both did well at the box office, but Toy Story was lauded as a revolution in not only its CGI technique but for its non-standard storytelling, while Pocahontas was critically chided for falling back on this trope and other tired musical cartoon formulas. By the time companies like DreamWorks Animation began moving on from (and in the case of Shrek, even outright mocking) this kind of storytelling in the early 2000s, the trope had completely fallen out of favor, to the point not even live-action films wanted to do original songs any more. Only in recent years, with enough nostalgia for the era precedent, have works like The Princess and the Frog, Tangled and Frozen been able to non-ironically use it — but even then, it's only under the fact that these films are intentional homages to the Disney films of that time, so the trope and its accompanying genre are unlikely to become prominent again in the feature animation market. However, things are becoming complicated again, with musical television series unironically using this sort of song, popularized by Glee and sustained by shows like Phineas and Ferb and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, to the point that the Emmy Awards now have a musical category.
Japandering: In the Internet age, it's all too easy for these sort of ads to be leaked onto YouTube or other sites. Some even go viral.
Japan Takes Over the World: After Japan suffered an economic crash in the early 90s, few people are worried about them taking over the world; the go-to trope about an East Asian country conquering the world is now China Takes Over the World instead.
Jerk Jock: Due to physical bullying in schools being taken much more seriously now than in previous decades, these types of bullies have all but vanished in the modern day. The decreasing popularity of school sports in favor of other extracurricular activities, combined with the rise of cyberbullying in today's culture also makes it significantly harder to take these types of characters seriously anymore.
Jiggle Show: In the modern age of high-speed internet and premium cable, anybody with an internet connection can discreetly watch or download pornography, and plenty of premium cable shows feature explicit sex and nudity. While plenty of modern shows are Best Known for the Fanservice, nobody would seriously make a whole network TV show just to let viewers ogle scantily clad actors, and few viewers would voluntarily watch a whole half-hour of TV just for a few moments of PG-rated Fanservice.
Jive Turkey: Thankfully, this is now discredited in real life. Unfortunately, it proves to be quite the resilient Undead Horse Trope and is still actively used in sitcoms and kid shows. It's also an Evolving Trope, as characters are more likely to use African-American Vernacular English these days.
Jump Scare: Due to its severe overuse in horror games from the early-to-mid 2010s, jump scares quickly became a mockery online for being a cheap, low-effort and poor quality scare tactic that rarely frightens seasoned players anymore, especially if it's the primary source of scariness in a game. Sometimes the trope is accepted if the jump scare ends up being effective, but it's still not nearly as popular as it used to be. Not discredited in other media, however.
Karmic Rape: Only in a select very few situations is this not thoroughly discredited (e.g. those who are rapists themselves, especially child molesters), and even there it is extremely questionable. It is also more common in manga and anime than western works, due to cultural differences.
Kid Sidekick: While very popular during the Golden and Silver Age of Comics, nowadays it's rarely used because kid sidekicks tend to become both The Scrappy and The Load. There's also the desire to avoid the implied moral that it's alright to put kids in mortal danger. For grandfathered examples like Robin or Bucky Barnes, the trope is either justified by having the kid putting themselves on the streets and the older hero is their mentor/guardian keeping them from getting badly hurt, or deconstructed by having the kid be a ruthless Child Soldier completely unlike the flashy Tagalong Kid expected. Spider-Man's debut in the '60s began to spell the end for the trope being played straight, as it popularized the concept of the kid being the main superhero themselves. A number of former sidekicks like Wally West and Bucky Barnes have since become adults and taken the title of their former mentor.
Killer Gorilla: The trope fell out of favor around the '90s, when new information came to light that gorillas (and orangutans) are usually benign, gentle creatures in the wild, as opposed to their staple depiction as belligerent, pugnacious beasts. The biggest sign that it was done for was when Disney's Tarzan adaptation changed the fictional Mangani of the original novels to gorillas to reflect how science has marched on. Unfortunately, this trope is still very much Truth in Television with chimpanzees, especially after a nasty incident where a pet chimp gnawed the face off of his owner's friend.
Kiss of Life: Due to concerns about germs, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is no longer recommended. Nowadays, they'll simply do chest compressions until EMS arrives, or will use a bag-valve mask to deliver air if one is on hand.
Land Down Under: This trope, very popular for a time in the United States and other countries (especially in The '90s), was quickly parodied to death (notably on The Simpsons and by Australians themselves) and, like most national stereotypes, tends to annoy or even offend actual Aussies when played straight. As Australia has become increasingly multicultural and more urban-centered since the start of the 21st century, nowadays it's almost never taken seriously, beyond the related Australian Wildlife trope.
Laugh Track: This has mostly been ditched in modern-day sitcoms (as codified by Malcolm in the Middle in America), mostly spurred on by an audience shift in which people prefer to find the shows funny naturally, rather than being prompted to laugh by canned laughter. Sitcoms with studio audiences, however, are still around (especially in British sitcoms), as at least people give the concession that real people were there at the recordings, so the jokes must be funny on some level, rather than the laughter being added later in post to provoke that response. In a similar vein, the use of sound effects or music to "stand in" for the laughs was also popular in the 2000s, but fell into disuse by the 2010s, as television comedies began turning gradually towards more distasteful or dramatic situations. Finally, not using laugh tracks allowed many shows to be more creative with the style and pacing of their humor.
Leprechaun: Only in Ireland itself though, not in America or elsewhere.
Leet Lingo: An old internet fad that consisted of replacing letters with numbers and symbols, this trope died out in the late 2000s. It's occasionally used for names or titles, but nowadays most people online tend to use much shorter chatspeak terms that are easier to type out and read.
Little Did I Know: Since it's a way to invoke foreshadowing without any actual foreshadowing, it's become discredited.
Little Green Men: The Grays have made them obsolete. They're still used for comedic or cute alien characters, though.
Love at First Sight: Usually ends with finding out the object isn't really the right person for you after all, nowadays. Modern audiences also tend to favor romances with more buildup and development.
Lover's Ledge: It's becoming this as Art Deco/Modernist buildings are replaced by Neomodern Glass Towers with no ledges and windows that don't open.
Love Potion: Generally recognized as a form of Date Rape if marriage/sexual contact results from its use. Still acceptable in works for kids, where anything beyond (and sometimes including) kissing is a non-issue.
Luke, I Am Your Father: While the trope itself is still alive and kicking despite the parodies,^note any permutation of the actual line ("No. I am your father.") is impossible to take seriously now due to how well known the twist is now, even for newcomers of Star Wars — that the scene now draws applauses from the audience instead of shock isn't helping. Even in comedy, it's now considered a bottom-of-the-barrel joke to reference it. This can be magnified a hundredfold if the reader's name happens to be "Luke".
Macho Disaster Expedition: The inherent sexism against both genders when using this trope — namely, that men are incompetent, misogynistic, self-centered morons who will never take a woman's advice, and that women are naturally better at keeping house, even if it's in the middle of the wilderness — have made using this trope uncomfortable.
Magical Romani: It's not completely dead but it's not frequently played straight due to its stereotypical nature.
Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: A trope limited to historical settings nowadays, as Daddy DNA Test has rendered it irrelevant. (Unless the potential father is one of a pair of identical twins or clones, or testing is impossible for some reason.)
Man in a Bikini: It is still played straight, but one use of it is discredited: It is no longer used as a source of comedy nowadays — it last happened in 2000s-era Teen Idol shows like Hannah Montana and iCarly. Its main usage nowadays is for Very Special Episodes or to promote An Aesop on tolerating cross-dressers.
Marijuana Is LSD: Nowadays, most people are aware that the effects of marijuana do not include increasingly violent behavior or hallucinatory experiences. Smoking marijuana is also much more acceptable in today's society, and is even used for medical purposes on occasion.
Mars Needs Women: Discredited in the "They're invading, and they want our women!" sense, but not in the more general "non-humanoid character attracted to a girl" sense.
Mars and Venus Gender Contrast: Not played straight except in some romantic comedies, and even in those cases it's considered by most to be a tired cliché.
Mascot: Mascots were almost mandatory in the early days of advertising on radio and television, but are far less common today, probably because of the growing sophistication (or cynicism if you prefer) of the audience coupled with the perception that they are, really, rather silly, especially after the "edgy" treatment many of them got in the 1990s. Outside of advertising aimed at children and/or breakfast foods, a Mascot in a modern commercial is as likely to be a subversion as not. An exception would be Japan, where every brand has a cute mascot.
Mascot with Attitude: Started with copycats of the Trope Codifier, Sonic the Hedgehog. Between Sonic's own decline in popularity during the Sega Saturn era, and the number of mediocre to terrible examples souring peoples opinion of this trope (most infamously Awesome Possum... Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt and Bubsy), the trope's death solidified rather easily. While Sonic regained some of his popularity by the early 2000s, this trope never truly revived and at the moment Sonic is the only prominent example of this trope still around, due to him being the template for it in the first place.
Master Computer: Complicated example. While the idea of a single computer with so much influence feels quaint in the age of networks and multiple redundant systems, the software industry called Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is built around a very similar idea (i.e. one or more entire data centers rather than a single unit). Plus, the fears that spawned the trope — namely the fear of society becoming excessively computerized, with more and more influence being handed over to machines and AI — are still very much around, and perhaps with good reason.
Mattress-Tag Gag: These tags have contained language since the 60s that make it clear that it is the retailer (not the consumer) who is prohibited from removing these tags. Still used for cheap throw-away gags on occasion.
Mayan Doomsday: December 21, 2012 is in the past now. It's hard to imagine any new works taking this trope seriously with that in mind.
Mega Meal Challenge: While the odd restaurant still does this, fiction doesn't portray it at all anymore. This is due to a large number of supposed "winners" of these types of contests having friends that work at the restaurants comp their meals, despite failing the challenges. The idea is seen as rather gluttonous these days, aside from a few Refuge in Audacity establishments such as the Heart Attack Grill. With the health-conscious focus on food since the late 2000s, most eateries don't want to suggest their dishes are that unhealthy.
Medley Overture: With theatre orchestras getting smaller (if not outright replaced by pre-recorded music in most cases), and audiences and directors more impatient for shows to start, full-scale overtures have been relegated mostly to opera, revivals of classic shows and throwbacks set in the 1920s or 1930s.
Men Can't Keep House: While it still comes up in comedies every now and then, the rise of women working outside of the house and pursuing their careers in many countries led to splitting the duties evenly (which meant more parents started teaching their sons how to do household duties) becoming the norm.
Men Don't Cry: Since it's now more socially acceptable for men to cry in the face of traumatic or difficult events, this trope rarely comes up in modern works.
Mid-Review Sketch Show: A structure and style of video review codified by The Angry Video Game Nerd. Since most internet reviewers of the time took major influence from his videos, they too also included the same kind of sketches. These quickly evolved from extended cutaways to elaborate and sometimes dense overarching plotlines, and were standard of internet reviews from the late 2000s to the mid-2010s. However, as many viewers became worn out with the format, feeling it took away from the review content, they pushed away from this style and more analytic, essay-like channels started to gain in popularity. The phasing out of the sketch show also happened around the time the Caustic Critic heavily associated with it became discredited as well, and a number of creators have adjusted their content to match this. It has gotten to the point where the Nerd, who originated the format, has all but completely abandoned it, in his more modern videos. The only major internet shows who use it anymore are The Nostalgia Critic and Atop the Fourth Wall because of the Grandfather Clause. Newer channels who attempt this, like Scott The Woz, try to downplay this, as they only this trope in a fraction of their videos and intentionally try to separate the review and sketch content as their own entities.
Mighty Whitey: While this trope is not quite dead, for reasons explained on the trope page, Mighty Whitey is well on its way out due to the obvious, uncomfortable racial overtones it engenders. Expect most modern variants to be either a deconstruction or a subversion; alternatively, if it's played straight, expect this trope to be a major source of criticism for the piece in question.
Milking the Giant Cow: An artifact of stage acting, with the intent that granny in the back-row could see what was going on, now seen as incredibly unrealistic and generally deprecated amongst modern actors.
Millennium Bug: The year 2000 passed long ago; needless to say, the apocalypse didn't happen. Back in the late 90s, this was often used as a semi-plausible doomsday cause in fiction, at least for anyone that either didn't know how computers work or was looking for an excuse to bash them. Nowadays, it's only ever brought up to mock people for being so stupid as to get in a panic over the thing, like other attempts to predict the apocalypse.
Monster Closet: In first-person shooters. Present in shooters from the mid 1990s to the early 2000s but mainly replaced by offscreen or onscreen spawning. Less realistic and over the top first-person shooters can still play it straight.
Monster Whale: Since The '70s — and more specifically, the release of Songs of the Humpback Whale — the popular image of whales is as gentle giants, with even Giant Squid-hunting sperm whales now generally thought of as more noble and majestic than monstrous.
Movie Superheroes Wear Black: The highly-successful Marvel Cinematic Universe showed the world that brightly colored spandex superhero costumes can work on film, as long as they're sufficiently redesigned to maximize practicality and visual appeal to not be as gaudy as the comics. As an example, Mysterio was mocked even by comic book nerds for his weird outfit in the comics; when Spiderman Far From Home featured him, they made it look good, in part by muting the colors and justifying the bowl on his head as a quasi-helmet. Even the later films in the X-Men Film Series (one of the main Trope Codifiers) de-emphasized it, possibly thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe's influence; X-Men: First Class, for example, has the first X-Men wearing bright yellow, X-Men: Days of Future Past has Magneto wearing red, and X-Men: Apocalypse has Psylocke wearing her classic purple costume.
Ms. Red Ink: These days, women are likely (or at least expected) to know at least the bare minimum about personal finance, and many have their own money to spend instead of relying on a husband or boyfriend.
Murderous Malfunctioning Machine: Considered a trite relic of old science fiction B-movies, and is almost never used seriously in live action movies now. It still pops up for camp value in cartoons, though.
Murder Simulators: Scientific evidence and studies into the minds and motives of mass shooters since the 90s have thoroughly discredited the idea that video games cause violence, with pundits who push this idea (Jack Thompson being perhaps the most infamous example) now being seen as laughing stocks. On one side, you have games like Hatred, which is about killing innocent people en masse that was met with scathing reception from gamers, ranging from mockery for being overly edgy at best, to outright backlash for its premise at worst. And then you have the Hitman series, an actual murder simulator (as in, you control a paid assassin for hire) that encourages stealth gameplay to kill the specific mark, frequently allowing you to do so in unique and interesting ways, which has never been implicated in real-life killings.
My Biological Clock Is Ticking: It is now known that healthy pregnancies later in life are much more common than previously thought, especially with such things as IVF, egg donors, and surrogates (and even, in many cases, without relying on any of those things). The idea that 35 is the age at which fertility naturally declines is now known to be from 400-year-old census data. Furthermore, while eggs do age as their owner ages, the risk of a live birth with a birth defect only increases from 0.5% to 1%. Additionally, having children is now seen by most of Western society as personal choice, not an obligation or duty.
Mysterious Antarctica: Science Marches On, and the versions of this trope based on the idea of civilizations on Antarctica are just as discredited as the presence of civilizations on the very definitely inhospitable Mars and Venus as portrayed in many an early Planetary Romance.
Mystical India: Becoming one these days, at least in Europe and North America, where a notable percentage of the Indian population can and will call works set in India out on any inaccuracies.

Tropes N to S

Naïve Everygirl: This character is mostly discredited on Western TV nowadays but was popular before the 1990s; only the most idealistic shows on the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism have one nowadays. But in film and "young adult" fiction, she is inescapable and they are frequent protagonists of Shoujo stories written by women.
The Natives Are Restless: This isn't the age of colonialism anymore. It still pops up in fantasy and science fiction settings where colonialism can exist, but even then, it's more likely to be used for humour.
Nazi Grandpa: Since the remaining Real Life examples of this trope are in their nineties at their youngest, it's becoming harder to play this trope straight in modern works outside of Period Pieces, causing straight examples to be replaced by those offspring "raised in the faith".
Nazi Hunter: Becoming this nowadays, as anyone who served in World War II gets too long in the tooth to be anything other than a Nazi Grandpa (which is also on its way out), or dead. And the generation that would have been old enough to be movers and shakers in the Nazi party would now be centenarians. Finally, the end of the Cold War dramatically expanded the choice of stock villains. However, there are Neo-Nazi hunters in Real Life, who are dedicated to making life Hell for anyone they suspect of being a Neo-Nazi or sympathizer.
Negative Continuity: This was typical for TV cartoons prior to the rise of streaming. Nowadays, continuity is the name of the game, and even SpongeBob SquarePants has Sequel Episodes now.
Never Say "Die": As news coverage of events becomes commonplace and violent deaths become more common, fewer children and teen shows on TV have shied away from the themes of death that isn't a Very Special Episode, especially as educational facilities have sadly become recurrent targets of school shootings and terrorist incidents in the U.S.
Nice Guys Finish Last: Assuming women are more attracted to abusive spouses has been seen as horribly sexist since the 2010s. Many works actually subvert it by pointing out that a Single Woman Seeks Good Man. As such, no man should feel entitled to any sexual/romantic favors from the woman who falls in love with him.
No Can Opener: Hoarding canned items for emergencies but forgetting the can-opener. It was relevant when cans were made of metals sturdier than tin —tin cans can be cracked open using a knife or a spoon. The pop-top design was then created to make the whole process easier, so can openers may not be needed.
No More for Me: As one of those "old-fashioned" comedy gags, it's rarely played straight nowadays, especially since alcohol doesn't cause those kinds of hallucinations. It may be a throwback to the time of Prohibition, when poorly-synthesized bathtub gin could cause brain damage and blindness.
Noble Confederate Soldier: As the Lost Cause myth has become largely discredited in America, the idea of a "noble Southern soldier" honorably fighting to preserve his homeland has become equally discredited.
Nostalgia Ain't Like It Used to Be: Over-romantic depictions of the past fell out of favor in the 1990s because of its being overused in the '70s and '80s as well as concerns about sexist and racist overtones. Nowadays, "traditional" nostalgia is seen as something rather undesirable, and is better regarded to acknowledge the depicted era's negative aspects along with its positive ones, or to highlight the era's kitschier elements.
Not Allowed to Grow Up: Still largely used and accepted in animation, comics, and video games, but discredited in live-action media, since there is no way to stop living, breathing people from aging. Attempts to make live young actors look and act younger have proven to be psychologically damaging, as seen with Anissa Jones on Family Affair, who died of a drug overdose five years after the series ended.
Not Like Other Girls: Not only seen as an overused cliché, but as the trope page points out, both male and female versions come off as sexist or awkward if done poorly. Also, overlapping with Samus Is a Girl, girls doing tomboyish things is no longer seen as subversive or unusual. If you see it nowadays, it will likely be a subversion or used to depict the character saying it as a jerk.
Officer O'Hara: There are still Irish-American cops in entertainment, but they tend to be less stereotypical. The whimsy and the just-off-the-boat accent tend to only be used straight in Historical Fiction these days.
Old Maid: It's not quite gone from consciousness, but it is decreasing in prominence in the developed world, thanks to changing attitudes about the role of women in society, changing attitudes about marriage and its role, increased education for girls, and a subsequent increase in the age of first marriage.
On the Next: Used to be fairly common on television, but began getting phased out in recent years, particularly as streaming has made it easier to just jump to the next episode of a series without having to wait or be further enticed. The fact that upcoming episode previews often had issues with spoiling what happens next likely didn't help this trope's longevity.
One Password Attempt Ever: This is very rarely played straight in fiction or real-life, and for the former, it's often only used in comedic settings. Thankfully, reality is much more forgiving, as evidenced by the common sight of any website with a login system having a "Forgot Password" option. 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication) is the closest to this trope in real life (as it asks for what you know and what you have), and even that has fallbacks in the form of generated offline codes. Even high security system manufacturers design with having failsafe's and fall-back systems in mind, in the case of the unexpected.
Once-Green Mars: Stories where Mars had a thriving civilization are getting to be this these days due to real-life Martian probing finding little or no archeological evidence. The theorized reasons why Mars isn't thriving like Earth now has a lot to do with its significantly lower gravity being unable to hold in an atmosphere with enough air pressure to keep liquid water from evaporating away, coupled with a rapidly-weakened magnetic field unable to block solar wind and coronal mass ejections (further stripping the atmosphere), or any ozone layer to protect it from deadly solar radiation; a slow environmental death of natural consequences. However, in the past before space probes, astronomers only had their telescopes and their imaginations pointed at Mars, giving plenty of room to think up entire alien civilizations living on it.
Open-Minded Parent: Shifting attitudes towards many issues and the fact the Teens Are Monsters trope has fell into disuse have made this more of a rule rather than an exception (to the point of competing with the Bumbling Dad as the most popular "father figure" trope). The presence of an overtly-tolerant parent is now more often than not spoofed by showing them being oblivious to their kids' unrealistically dangerous/unusual actions or attitudes, which ironically was not the trope's original intent.
Opening Narration: During the Title Sequence, this usually gave the premise of the series. Today, writers prefer not to waste time explaining the basics every week (especially given the existence of shorter running times —about 45 minutes per hour — and that many shows are sourced from well-known works). It's still played straight in some Medical Drama or Police Procedural series, occasionally in sci-fi, and also used in some comedies (How I Met Your Mother, Malcolm in the Middle, Scrubs...).
Opening Scroll: Today, the general stance is that you should just Show, Don't Tell. May occasionally pop up as an homage to one of the most famous examples (and even that was a homage). Star Wars is the only series that can still regularly get away with it because it's the one most people think of; when Rogue One didn't include an opening crawl, it was seen as bizarre for the series.
Oral Fixation: Not as a whole, but specifically the variant used as shorthand for a particularly childish or immature character. This is yet another of Freud's ideas that has since been discredited by modern psychologists, although it was very well known and widely accepted in its day. It also qualifies as a Forgotten Trope.
Orphanage of Fear: There are several countries where orphanages still exist, however in much of the world (such as America) orphanages have been closed for decades and have since been replaced with the foster care system. Despite this, Foster Kids appear relatively rarely in fiction and works still prefer to just use the ol' orphanage trope instead.
Out of the Closet, Into the Fire: Much like Bury Your Gays, the bloodbath of queer characters in the 2015-2016 television season led to a significant number of LGBT rights activists to call on writers to reject any future usage of this trope.
Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Very common in The Golden Age of Science Fiction, but hardly ever played straight in newer works for a range of reasons: the science fiction genre becoming more mainstream, the decline in people's previous faith in science, the general backlash against the ideas that religion is something humanity even can outgrow (since the majority of humanity is still religious to some extent), or that religion and science are mutually exclusive, and so on. In fact, Star Wars, which is easily the most popular science fiction franchise of all time, not only embraces religion, but is based almost entirely around it (albeit a fictional, demonstrably true in-universe one).
Overt Operative: An obsolete version of this is the supposedly-inconspicuous trench-coat, fedora and shades, which most Genre Savvy modern audiences would describe straight away as "a spy outfit".
Overtook the Manga: These days, anime based on manga either adapts a completed manga or takes the seasonal approach of adapting a group of arcs to a season, removing the need for filler.
Pac Man Fever: As video game culture has become much more mainstream than it has in the past, the trope has fallen out of favor with media, especially on the internet, as portraying video games as if they never left the 1980s, with 8-bit sprites and stock Arcade Sounds, tends to show just how out of touch the writer is with the medium, especially considering many contemporary games push for strong, borderline live-action realism and blockbuster-level cinematics. It has largely been replaced by Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000 thanks to Moral Guardians.
Parental Favoritism: The Biological Vs. Adoption variation of it. It hardly needs mentioning that dozens of fairy tales (notably "Cinderella") involve stepchildren mistreated by their parents in favor of their biological children. This is a discredited trope today; more commonly, you have an adopted child who suffers some perceived slight from their stepparent and must be reassured that they are loved just as much as the parent's natural children. But it still does show up occasionally...
Parlor Games: Nowadays, it's either used to show how boring or geeky the people playing are (an ironic twist on the parlor game/video game rivalry), or it's used as an actual Plot Device.
The Permanent Record: While transcripts do exist, the threat really does not mean much.
Phone-Trace Race: Still used on occasion, but with caller ID, the popularity of shows like 24 which have mostly ditched this trope, and a general paranoia about Google and Facebook tracking your every move, writers nowadays tend to err on the side of the FBI/NSA/CIA being too good at tracking your every move.
Pie-Eyed: A long out-dated, cliché way of drawing cartoon eyes from the 1920s and 1930s that is considered very tacky to use in contemporary works. The only newer works that use it tend to be nostalgic throwbacks to those old cartoons such as Cuphead, or revivals of shows that used this kind of drawing in the first place, such as Mickey Mouse (2013) or DuckTales (2017).
Playful Hacker: The rise of hacktivism and cyberterrorism in the 2010s and allegations about state-backed hackers interfering with various elections has helped shatter the public perception of hackers as harmless pranksters. These days, law enforcement agencies tend to treat them as a much greater threat than before.
Playing Doctor: Heightened awareness of child sexualization and sexual abuse have made it harder to sell the idea of children showing each other their genitals as something cute and innocent, hence why most modern examples are parodies or subversions that don't actually have the kids get naked.
Plays Great Ethnics: Due to increased demands for diversity and authenticity in film and TV, it's getting harder for studios to get away with playing this trope straight without accusations of cultural appropriation (if not Blackface, Brownface, and / or Yellowface). These changing attitudes have prompted studios to cast actors of color to play corresponding roles instead. That said, having Anglo actors playing other Western nationalities is still common and accepted by general audiences.
Pocket Dial: Was killed off by the advent of smartphones that do away with physical buttons aside from those for volume control and power in favor of touchscreens that cover the entire face of the phone. Said touchscreens are capacitive, and as such require contact with a living human's skin or specialized styluses to operate; the fabric of clothing pockets is often thick enough that it will prevent accidental input. Furthermore, these touchscreens will not register any input as long as the phone is in sleep mode, making it further unlikely that you'll butt-dial someone.
Pocket Protector: While it may have worked in the days when guns were extremely under-powered (relatively speaking), these days the life-saved-by-sentimental-object trope is discredited; it's rare to find a 21st-century example that plays it straight. Most real-world examples of the trope also involve ricochets, spent bullets, shrapnel or other low-velocity projectiles; it's a very lucky break when the round is moving slow enough to be stopped by anything so small and thin as what you can fit in a pocket.
Poisoned Chalice Switcheroo: More often parodied (or made fun of) than played straight these days.
Politically Incorrect Hero: The trope has become increasingly discredited given modern social attitudes regarding discrimination, and in contrast the use of politically-incorrect characters as the bad guys is now the rule (and for that matter, only on works aimed at mature audiences, killing off the Racist Grandma trope in the process), often to demonstrate how rotten they are. Historical fiction is one of the few places this trope will still be used, because given the nature of the genre, it depends on Deliberate Values Dissonance. It makes more sense for a character from a past society to express views that align with that society's values, even if the values of that society would be interpreted by modern viewers as politically incorrect.
"Pop!" Goes the Human: Largely discredited, as it was mostly born from an Urban Legend that eating too much would make a person explode, then evolved to other forms of humans popping from overfilling. However it is still sometimes used in works that are not going for realism, and is a timeless favourite as a Scare 'Em Straight cautionary tale against Gluttony. Also favored in comedy, for the logical reason that it mixes Stuff Blowing Up with Vulgar Humor.
Poor Man's Porn: The Internet Is for Porn, so you don't need to settle for the Victoria's Secret catalog anymore. However, this is still alive in where Internet censorship is commonplace, and where pornography is frowned upon or even illegal.
Porn with Plot: At least in terms of serious live-action porn; creators have realized that people watching porn are generally just looking to enjoy the sex scene, not spend an hour or two getting attached to characters before anything sexy happens. If porn bothers having a plot nowadays, it will be a bare-minimum Excuse Plot or a goofy porn parody that doesn't take itself seriously, merely aiming to give the audience a chuckle between scenes. Not quite discredited in hentai and written erotica. Also coming back into fashion from the opposite end, as explicit sex in material that's not marketed as porn (especially in video games) is becoming more common.
Porn Stache: An increasing association of it with porn stars, along with a general decline in the popularity of facial hair in the '90s-2000s, makes it difficult for modern viewers to take such characters seriously. Even after facial hair had resurgence in popularity starting in the 2010s, very few men with facial hair sport just a mustache nowadays, with most choosing full beards or goatees.
Pounds Are Animal Prisons: Fortunately becoming this with animal welfare groups (not the Animal Wrongs Group) making the plight of abandoned and abused animals more well-known, though it may have originated from the Forgotten Trope of the Diabolical Dog Catcher (especially in areas where pet ownership required an official license).
Prank Call: This began to die off in the late-1990s when caller ID first began to show up, and the ubiquity of it in every phone from the mid-2000s onward killed it completely. Any attempts at a character in fiction trying this as a prank is usually done to show how behind-the-times they are.
Predatory Prostitute: Heightened awareness of the discrimination sex workers face in their line of work has made villainous portrayals of prostitution significantly less popular in The New '20s. These days, negative portrayals of sex work tend to focus more on the circumstances that cause the character to turn to sex work for survival on the streets, if it's framed in a negative way at all.
Present-Day Past: TV shows or films allegedly set in a past era (typically only a few decades past) would often have Anachronism Stew due to the need to also be relevant to the audience of the present. This often popped up in children's shows where the story was set far enough back for their parents to still be youngsters but still occasionally featuring elements that clearly were not around then. This is not limited to political correctness along with other modern values and attitudes that were not characteristic of that period. In such works, one could possibly find unironic greasers playing video games without noticing the difference between The '50s and The '80s (or anytime after the 80s). In the present day, authenticity is an important factor of any period works, unless it is meant to be a fantasy.
Princess Classic: The trope is still used, but it's very rarely used in its straight form or used seriously outside of children's works.
Pro Wrestling Is Real: Only played straight in animation and video games^note, definitely discredited in live-action. Everyone knows and accepts that pro wrestling is staged, and to say otherwise is considered to be insulting the audience's intelligence. The vast majority of wrestling-related TV shows and movies that come out these days (such as The Wrestler, shoot interviews, most WWE Documentaries and the Netflix-exclusive GLOW series) portray Kayfabe realistically.
Prolonged Prologue: Often seen in fantasy novels. They give a lot of backstory on a world that the reader hasn't read enough of to care about yet. Most publishers say Show, Don't Tell and let the reader learn about the world through the eyes of the characters.
Proverbial Wisdom: This is often seen as a discredited trope in Western culture: the excessive use of proverbs is considered trite and cliché, typical for elderly people and those who want to seem more thoughtful than they are. Conversely, it is very frequently employed in Eastern culture. In it, proverbs are often cryptic in their meaning and serve as "thought exercises" to make a person think "outside of the box" (Zen koans being the best known example).
Puzzling Platypus: For quite a long time, platypuses would often be used in fiction as an example of an obscure animal. However, their popularity has now grown to the point that they are familiar to most people, chiefly thanks to Phineas and Ferb, and can no longer be considered obscure.
Queer People Are Funny: With more people (especially in Western countries) treating the LGBTA+ community as everyday people, treating their sole existence as a punchline for the "normal" people will make you come off as making a tasteless gag, to say nothing of making it harder for LGBTA+ people to be taken seriously.
Quicksand Sucks: Some terrain does do this in Real Life — the squickiest example is liquid manure, but snow in an avalanche and grain (as in a grain bin) are also notorious for "swallowing up" and killing people who unfortunately fall onto it. You actually have far more of a chance surviving quicksand than either liquid manure, an avalanche, or grain — because all three of the latter are far easier to sink into beyond the point of saving oneself. Video games, however, can still play this trope straight as an environmental hazard.
Radiation-Induced Superpowers: A combination of being one of the most cliché ways of getting superpowers along with knowledge of the horrifying effects of nuclear radiation in real life becoming more commonplace is sending this trope packing. It has largely been replaced by Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke, save for grandfathered examples such as Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk.
Random Encounters: Originally required by technical limitations, but rarely seen now that consoles have the power to render enemies in the overworld. Only franchises that used it from the start such as Pokémon or Dragon Quest (and even those are starting to move away from this), or intentional throwbacks to older RPGs such as Octopath Traveler, still use it.
Rap Is Crap: Similar to Disco Sucks, younger generations have grown up with hip-hop as a mainstream genre of music and largely afford it the same level of respectability they do with pop, rock, jazz and other genres. Its critical appraisal has improved, too, with a greater respect for the role of hip-hop in Black culture in the US in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Straight uses of this trope have grown rarer, with people who hate rap largely portrayed as being extremely old-fashioned at best and a straight-up racist at worst.
Rape and Switch: The implications of the trope (e.g. either that gay people can be made straight via rape, OR that LGBTQ people "recruit" by sexual abuse and rape, or in some cases both), as well as greater understanding have made this trope very discredited and disfavored in most works made beginning in The New '10s. The only place it remains is in (usually less well-written) Fan Fic, where the "victim falls for rapist" variant of it will make appearances.
Rape Portrayed as Redemption: Absolutely discredited (and many of its past depictions have tied into the Rape and Switch trope, which really has not made them age well). The only way this could be played with any kind of sensitivity toward the victims of rape or in anything but the darkest of Black Comedy is a variant with the rapist seeing rape as the "rock bottom moment" of their life and being Driven to Suicide or becoming The Atoner or something similar.
Rated M for Manly: Generally seen as too cheesy, stereotypical, and over-the-top to take seriously anymore. If you see it now, it'll be done as a subversion (the manly characters turning out to actually be cowards, wimps or liars) or an Affectionate Parody (amplifying the manliness and making it as silly as possible). Not entirely discredited though, as some people would still prefer stereotypically masculine and tough guys because they think it's funny, or because they genuinely preferred them over the more reserved, "weak" men.
Real Women Don't Wear Dresses: While for decades it appeared that a woman had to relinquish her femininity to be taken seriously, the 2010s saw a massive backlash against the "man-ification" of women (particularly in the case of hyper-masculine action girls in films and video games). On the other hand, however, this trend of idealized femininity (which in exaggerated cases, makes women devoid of humanity, flawless, and absolutely perfect) is considered to have become the new gender role for women at worst, and considered Straw Feminist at best. It also never completely caught on among demographics and cultures in which the Proper Lady archetype is less prevalent.
Real Women Have Curves: Though once touted as an empowering alternative to Hollywood Thin, the trope is now facing quite a bit of backlash for implying that being skinny isn't "real." Some people (particularly those in the fitness community) have even accused it of encouraging obesity (i.e. "I'm not fat, I'm curvy!"). As multiple writers have pointed out, replacing one beauty standard with another isn't exactly progress. As a result, the trope far less likely to be played straight than it once was.
Recap Episode: In the age of streaming and digital distribution, devoting an entire episode to explaining the events of previous episodes is quite unnecessary, and is likely to frustrate viewers if done today.
Recycled Trailer Music: Made obsolete in The New '10s as movie studios are more likely to use stock production music for their trailers since the licensing to use excerpts from another movie's soundtrack is a lot more expensive.
Red-and-White Comedy Poster: Very common in the Turn of the Millennium, but rarely seen in The New '10s, due to an association with movies that are utter crap.
Red Scare: Formerly a common villain source for Big Bad or henchmen villains in the Spy Drama, it's now a Discredited Trope since the end of the Cold War, although an even more Eastern revival of sorts is possible. Instead, rogue former Soviet scientists tend to be in vogue in the role of the Mad Scientist who works for the Big Bad, as well as The Mafiya. This trope may come into effect if the story is a Period Piece set during the Cold War however.
Relationship Revolving Door: While it was once viewed in as a breath of fresh air when the show that made it famous debuted, years of this trope's use afterwards has caused it to be viewed as one of the ways to not write a relationship by most new media, being nothing more than a cheap excuse to cause drama when it isn't needed, and often involving characters clutching the Idiot Ball, Jerkass Ball, and Conflict Ball, often all at the same time. Ironically, the single-targeted types of relationships the trope was once viewed as a breath of fresh air from are now considered more original (and realistic) than this trope, and are considered one of the better ways to write a relationship.
Repeat Cut: Discredited in live-action works. This technique was overused in the late Eighties and early Nineties, when it seemed like everything exploded three times if it exploded at all. Now it tends to be used in parodies rather than serious works. Straight examples are still commonly seen in anime and video games.
Retro Rocket: As time has gone by, it has become painfully apparent that the space program is unlikely to be significantly influenced by aesthetic sensibility. The two primary reasons for this are conservation of launch mass preventing spacecraft from bearing any components that serve form over function, and the fact that once you break out of the atmosphere, any shape will do as long as the thrusters are aligned correctly. (A Space Plane would still require an aerodynamic shape.) Thus, as understanding of what it actually takes to get into space became more commonplace, the "rocket ship" gradually became discredited due to Zeerust and is now usually found solely in parodies or homages to classic sci-fi. It may not be completely discredited, though, if the Space "X" Starship is any indication.
Returning the Handkerchief: The prevalence of simple paper tissues in modern society — especially Japan, contributes to this trope being discredited these days; if a literal handkerchief does appear in the story, the setup is likely to be parodied or not played entirely straight.
Revenge of the Sequel: An overused stock sequel title, especially for horror movies. It's still being used, but parodies are increasingly common as well.
Ridiculously Loud Commercial: While still prevalant as a trope itself due to writers and audience members still being able to remember obnoxiously loud adverts on TV, the volume of ads has been heavily regulated since 2008 in the UK, and other countries followed suit over the years, making this trope outdated by more than a decade of law and advertising practices.
Ring Around the Collar: The advent of digital animation has rendered this obsolete, used mostly as a tribute to the classics — although, the equivalent is still utilised in 3D animation for digital games — characters are built out of multiple, non-connected models, with things like collars, watches, and the like, being used to hide the seams, akin to traditional 2D.
Rise of Zitboy: The fact that "puberty = acne" has been understood for a while now makes it hard for a teenager freaking out about getting zits to be seen as a huge source of drama. It can still be used in works aimed at teenagers or set in high school, but it gets downplayed even there in favor of an "everyone goes through this" aesop.
Robo Speak: As modern computers get better at duplicating and mimicking sounds, including speech — and the average person grows more familiar with that technology in his day-to-day life — the public at large seems to be accepting the notion that you could create a robot that doesn't sound like a sedated Darth Vader.
Rock Bottom: Considered trite now, and frequently subverted or parodied in newer works. Someone saying "at least it can't get any worse" usually has someone lampshade immediately how those words might as well be trouble's ringtone.
Rockers Smash Guitars: Most live instruments are made strong enough to resist being completely obliterated onstage, so this trope rarely is seen both in fiction and in Real Life nowadays. The fact that destroying your own equipment tends to be really expensive, often derails performances and is generally just a stupid thing to do further discourages modern musicians from doing this.
The Runaway: The Circus Brat variant of it, since circuses are much more niche now than they have been in the past and are much more regulated now.
Sadist Show: At least for media at kids. As overexposure of this in the late 90s and much of the 2000s started taking the shine off it. Nowadays, most people find shows with constantly miserable casts to be rather cringeworthy and even childish, especially with more wholesome and (ironically) sophisticated kid's media coming into prevalence in The New '10s and The New '20s. Modern shows aimed at adults, however, such as It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia are able to get away with this trope, somewhat due to Grandfather Clause, but also due to how hilariously unlikable the main characters are.
Said Bookism: These days, it's often considered a hallmark of amateur or inexperienced writers.
Samus Is a Girl: Overused and now the revelation that a girl can be as strong and badass as men is no longer subversive. That said, it's only discredited if it's treated as a big reveal.
Sand In My Eyes: Nowadays it's just as likely to be used to evoke pity for the character's inability to express his emotions honestly as it is to portray them as strong and stoic. That's assuming it's not being outright mocked.
Santa Claus Tropes: Santa has become such a commercial icon of Christmas, and as such over-exposed via countless Christmas specials and merchandise, that it is impossible to play any classic trope related to him straight now (unless you're telling one of the old stories, which get a pass due to the Grandfather Claus, or telling a story for very young children—and even stories for the latter tend to give wry twists on the tales these days). Even then, the character still runs into Undead Horse Trope territory—Santa is just so iconic and so firmly rooted into the public consciousness by sheer inertia that people can't help but keep using him for stories, even if it means poking fun at or rationalizing the cliches and impossible feats surrounding the character.
Sassy Black Woman: This characterisation is fast becoming clichéd and is seen as lazy writing by many viewers who want to see minority characters given as much depth, individuality and nuance as white characters are permitted. When the first trailer for Ghostbusters (2016) made Patty Tolan appear to be one of these (the character in the film proper was far more nuanced, the trailer had only cherry-picked her loudest moments), people were not pleased.
Saturday-Morning Cartoon: Was already on a steady downfall thanks to the creations of dedicated networks like Cartoon Network, but the practice of running brand-new episodes of cartoons on weekday prime-time and the rise of video-on-demand systems like Netflix ended up putting the final nail in the coffin for this format.
The Savage Indian: Considered to be a horribly outdated stereotype, and thus is rarely used in the modern day. It's still pops up sometimes but has mostly been replaced by the Noble Savage and the Magical Native American.
Save Our Students: Done so often as Oscar Bait that it became an intolerable cliché, coupled with an infamous episode of South Park that mocked and deconstructed the concept so thoroughly that nobody was able to take it seriously anymore without a torrent of people saying "How do I reach deez keeds?".
School Is for Losers: The "drop-out tycoon" variation of this trope has become discredited since at least the mid-2010s. As many have realized that it's usually only those with a lot of intelligence, connections, charisma, and, of course, luck, that can dodge a formal education and become successful (as lampshaded in The Simpsons, years later it named this very trope).
School Sport Uniform: Or at least, the bloomer half is discredited. Bloomers steadily disappeared from Japanese schools from the mid-90s to the early 2000s, replaced by unisex shorts, due to modesty concerns and an increasing tide of complaints from students and parents alike. Since the mid-2000s, straight examples have been increasingly rare in mainstream Japanese media, relegated to either elementary school characters or specifically noted to be rare and fetishy. Straight examples continue to exist in Ecchi and Hentai and are unlikely to go away any time soon.
The Scream: Almost universally Played for Laughs nowadays. In modern media, a Big "NO!" is preferred, or, if the media's classification allows for it, an Atomic F-Bomb or Cluster F-Bomb.
Screamer Prank: Screamers have received two major blows over the Internet's history. Initially, when flash movies and games were still the norm, there were no clear distinctions between screamers and legitimate pages, creating a minefield for fearful site goers; this meant less traffic for sites like FunnyJunk and WinterWorld. Later, with the advent of video over flash files, viewers were able to scroll to the end of the video to see if any suspicions were confirmed, removing all suspense and defeating the purpose of screamers. They have since been replaced by the trap video, which puts the scare at the beginning of the video, and aims not to make individuals jump, but to cause outrage or confusion within specific audiences. Furthermore, they were overshadowed by Rickrolls as the Internet's prank of choice, and in addition, it's become far less common than its cousin the Jumpscare nowadays.
Screens Are Cameras: As video calling capability becomes built into smartphones and computers that are in the hands of every consumer, viewers have to come to expect that a video call requires cameras to capture the image of a character's conversational partner.
Screen Shake: Shaking the screen in live-action media is almost discredited thanks to the fact that it's ugly and not believable. Nowadays, live-action sets can be put on a platform that shakes the entire thing, giving a renewed sense of realism to falling on your arse. However, this technique remains popular in animation and video games. If the controller supports vibration-feedback, expect it to shake too.
Second Law of Gender-Bending: As transgender awareness has increased over the years, playing this trope straight nowadays usually leads to massive backlash as having a character’s gender identity change after a Gender Bender encourages the wrong idea that sex and gender are the same thing.
Self-Abuse: A horribly-outdated idea based on old-wives' tales and religious beliefs that started dying out after the sexual revolution of The '70s.
Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: Seems to have more-or-less fallen by the wayside. This is probably due mostly to the vast number of drug-related deaths and rehab stints among various rock musicians in the '60s, '70s and '80s (Jimi Hendrix, Nikki Sixx, Ozzy Osbourne, etc.). However, other factors include the extensive anti-drug campaigning of the '80s, the AIDS scare mostly rendering the concept of "Free Love" obsolete, and the rise of rock-pop in the '80s and the Grunge movement of the early '90s shifting the focus of rock away from glorified sex and drug use, while the "nice guy" personas of 2010s-era Indie Rock artists has rendered the whole idea of "all rockers are bad boys" as laughable. Granted, sex and drugs still exist in the music business. But most of the musicians who engage in such activities, at least in Western mainstream pop and country music, are far more secretive and openly ambivalent towards them than before. On the other hand, EDM and related festival culture is fairly open about it, as are some sections of Hip-Hop and rap, "outlaw" country, and underground music of various sorts. Japanese Visual Kei keeps things more secretive, but Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll is still a frequent trope there if you look beyond the "official", and alcohol abuse and smoking are quite open there.
Sex Equals Love: Because most people have realized it doesn't in quite a few cases. Also carries some problematic undertones regarding forced sex/sexual assault/rape.
Sex Sells: The idea of using sex as a selling point disappeared in Western media (particularly in English-speaking countries) during the 2010s, given the increasing demand for more socially positive archetypes. In a matter of a few years, such selling points as the Formula One's "grid girls" and the Reef beach pageants were no more, while mainstream fashion adopted more conservative outfits. The same applies for comic books and video games, whose heroines were infamous for their skimpy clothes.
Shotgun Wedding: A combination of greater availability of contraception and a reduced stigma of single motherhood make this trope seem very dated today. If a woman does get pregnant, a couple doesn't have to get married, but the father is expected to provide some form of support.
Shrink Ray: Due to later research revealing that these types of ray guns are impossible to create due to the law of conservation of matter, this is now limited to more-or-less humorous or at least non-serious works.
Shoe Shine, Mister?: On its way to being discredited in first world countries. While shoe-shine stands still exist today, they're not that ubiquitous anymore as shoes have been mostly replaced by sneakers except for formal wear (and the people shining the shoes are adults, anyway). The trope very rarely appears in contemporary media, usually being relegated to period piece works at best.
Skeleton Key Card: This doesn't work anymore. Lock makers figured out ways to stop it on the few doors it worked on in the first place, and dead bolt locks were always immune to it.
Skintone Sclerae: The signature look of a lot of older animated cartoons, especially Hanna-Barbera. It also showed up in Franco-Belgian comics such as Tintin. Today, it is considered a relic of the past where economy of materials and time often influenced choices in character design. In animation, it saved money on white paint. Overall, it also saved time in not having to deal with the details of the sclera where it can be time consuming to paint around the irises and have the slcera appropriately change shape with facial expressions. Digital methods of cartooning have made these limitations somewhat moot. Tradition may still have it used with some characters historically associated with the art style (e.g., Scooby-Doo), but outside of that, it has become rare and many other older cartoon characters have been re-imagined with white sclerae.
Slow-Loading Internet Image: A victim of Technology Marches On; most internet connections these days are more than capable of handling adequately-sized images. A more modern equivalent is slow or choppy video buffering, which is still very much an issue for most, especially those with a mobile data plan only.
Slow "NO!": Like with Big "NO!", it's considered a large source of Narm, and parodies far outnumber straight uses of it these days.
Slurpasaur: Nowadays, even low-budget movies have the ability to make monsters using either CGI or animatronics. This means real animals don't have to substitute.
Smoking Is Cool: Changing attitudes towards smoking have deemed these tropes in bad taste, if not outright dangerous for the impressionable. Modern examples that play these straight are met with fierce criticism.
Smoking Is Glamorous: Similar to the Smoking Is Cool trope, attitudes have changed about the effects of smoking, and studies have shown that smoking cigarettes has the opposite effect of making one look more glamorous. Cigars and pipes are still seen as quite sophisticated however.
Some of My Best Friends Are X: Because using it is the equivalent of having the character wear a shirt saying "HEY I'M A BIGOT," along with an added Ku Klux Klan hood and jackboots for flair — you've instantly made him/her a Politically Incorrect Villain even if you don't wish to have done so.
Song Fic: Increasingly considered bad writing due to copyright issues, reliance on an audio medium in text-based stories, and song lyrics breaking narrative flow.
Soviet Superscience: Unless Played for Laughs or a clear Alternate History, this trope almost never appears post-1991. Even including those, examples of modern day Russia creating some breakthrough prototype superweapon could probably be counted with one hand.
Speed Stripes: Though still a staple of manga, the variation where the entire background is turned into speed stripes is rarely seen in modern anime due to digital techniques and CGI making background animation far less time consuming, so there's little need for such a shortcut.
Spies In a Van: While the trope as a whole isn't discredited, one specific use of it is; it's no longer used as a serious situation (except in police documentaries such as Police, Camera, Action!, Road Wars etc.). Not only have things like drones and wire taps made this an obsolete and less believable method of spying, but the image of a pair of sinister, well-trained spies crouching in a beat-up van tends to be really goofy. When it does appear in serious works, it will likely be used for brief comic relief and nothing more. Still used in comedic stories, since there you're probably not meant to take the spies seriously anyways.
Stalking Mission: These missions started to get phased out in games near the end of The New '10s. Not only do players consistently find them tedious due to the slow gameplay pace, but also were prone to a lot of trial-and-error, putting it on the same wavelength as to why the Escort Mission isn't well liked in games. Similarly, developers realized these kinds of missions left players frustrated and were consistently seen as a slog or unnecessary, and stopped adding them.
Standard Fantasy Setting: Though there are several Long-Runners that will continue to print money from it until the apocalypse, new fantasy games and novels can't get away with playing "Elves 'n Wizards in Medieval Stasis" straight anymore. Not discredited in Asian media, but the Standard Japanese Fantasy Setting is the more common Eastern implementation of the setting. It's also making a comeback in Western fantasy in The New '20s, but is often heavily influenced by LitRPG, Standard Japanese Fantasy Setting and Spirit Cultivation Genre elements.
Standard Hero Reward: Now widely seen as sexist against women, for having a woman be an "object" to be rewarded. If you play this straight outside of Historical Fiction or one of the grandfathered-in examples (and even those sometimes), you can expect very harsh criticism.
Standing in the Hall: Parodied in some Japanese works still, but not used in Real Life as much. In western countries, similar variants aren't used due to kids taking it as an opportunity to wander around the halls.
Status Quo Is God: These days, continuity is the name of the game, and people will notice when characters don't develop and a story doesn't move forward. In the age of streaming and digital distribution, viewers are far more likely to watch any given show in order than in random episodes on TV.
Stereotypical South Asian English: Since the 2000s, South Asian actors and writers have become more common in Hollywood, and therefore South Asian characters will be less likely to exaggerate their speech.
Stern Nun: For one thing, many teachers at modern Catholic schools are laypeople, not nuns. For another thing, after the advent of the Self-Esteem Movement of The '70s, parents would be all up in arms if a teacher (whether a nun or a layperson) meted out those kinds of punishments. (Nuns also haven't worn those starchy white wimples since the 1970s at the latest, but you'll still occasionally see them, usually for humor.)
Stigmatic Pregnancy Euphemism: Considering the much more widespread acceptance of single parenthood and having children out of wedlock, stigmatizing or chastising a character for having a baby outside of marriage can only be done with rather specific restricting settings. This is more obvious in soap operas produced in South America, since single motherhood and absent fathers are so widespread there that few people can understand the drama in that.
Stoners Are Funny: With changing views, the traditional depiction of marijuana users as bumbling burnouts has been phased out in favor of portraying them as perfectly normal people, even having above-average intelligence, although still rather forgetful.
Storefront Television Display: Nowadays, electronic stores have the TVs locked up or in the back to prevent theft and therefore not in the storefront for everybody to watch. Plus, the trope is normally used as a way to provide movies or news on-the-go, which is now easy to accomplish with smartphones.
Strapped to an Operating Table: Never played straight in contemporary works. It's usually used for camp and humor instead.
Strolling on Jupiter: It is now widely accepted that the largest planets in the solar system have nothing like a solid surface one could stand on.
Stuffed into a Locker: Generally considered way too cliché to be taken seriously, and completely unrealistic: most public school lockers are way too narrow for someone to fit in. Even if it were possible to stuff someone in a locker, violence in schools is generally taken much more seriously today than it once was, and forcibly stuffing someone in a locker is much more likely to be treated as assault.
Stupidest Thing I've Ever Heard: On The Internet, it's become so overused that it's turning into the I'm Your Worst Nightmare of insults.
Subliminal Seduction: The initial claims have long since been discredited. Later, better-documented studies have revealed that there is a slight psychological effect, but the results are so minimal that existing preferences will completely overwhelm it.
Such a Phony: A staple of sitcoms from the 1980s and early 1990s, but constant reuse has robbed the joke of its sting. You can still see it on contemporary shows, but the better written ones try to avoid or play with it.
Suddenly Ethnicity: In these melting-pot days it is on the way to being discredited.
Suicide as Comedy: Suicide is not funny. Considering the increased awareness and publicization of suicide in the last decade or two, it's impossible to play suicide for laughs without causing massive outcry.
Suicide, Not Murder: Something of a discredited trope nowadays, as most life insurance companies will pay out for suicides, though sometimes not as much as with a murder, or after a 1-2 year cooling off period. May still occur when the victim tries to frame the person(s) they feel are responsible for the circumstances that drove them to suicide.
Sugar Causes Hyperactivity: Studies done by scientists and researchers have completely discredited it in real life, where they came to the conclusion that there's no correlation of sugar causing hyperactivity. Eating sugary foods can affect a child's behavior and physical health, but it does not make them hyperactive. The myth persists among parents because junk food tends to be the thing eaten at parties, often a special occasion, where kids will want to play more than usual with their friends, and that means they'll do a lot more running about. Still Played Straight in Video Games often as a form of Hyperactive Metabolism or as a Power-Up granting Super-Speed, with Anime and Western Animation also similarly using it to show kids running really fast.
Super Couple: Now on its way to becoming discredited as audiences eventually tired of seeing their favorite supercouples getting married for the fourth time and were Genre Savvy enough to know that as long as both characters of a pairing remained on the show, then any break-up would not be permanent. The rise of internet messageboards in the 1990s provided an outlet for fans of alternative pairings. These pairings often become more popular than the show's Official Couple, resulting in a lot of Ship-to-Ship Combat. Soap writers today usually prefer to use this to their advantage and even those pairings that were once thought untouchable (even the aforementioned Luke and Laura) are not immune from this. One area where the trope is still going strong, however, is with same-sex couples, as they tend to automatically get showered with attention simply due to their ground-breaking nature.
Superhero Packing Heat: Become so strongly associated with the '90s Anti-Hero, that it fell out of favor right alongside it. Certain characters like The Punisher, Deadpool, and Spawn can still get away with it due to the Grandfather Clause. It can also still happen if the hero in question is something like a police officer (like Savage Dragon) or a secret agent (like Black Widow).
Superheroes Wear Capes: Time was when every other superhero had a cape. These days, capes are considered to be impractical if not dangerous (see the fate of Dollar Bill in Watchmen or Edna Mode's speech about cape-related mishaps in The Incredibles). You'll still see capes on plenty of DC heroes such as the Superman family and the Bat family, but mostly because of the Grandfather Clause. Aside from Doctor Strange, The Vision, Thor, and the supervillains Magneto and Doctor Doom, Marvel has very few characters who wear capes.
Surprise Car Crash: The malicious variant of the trope, due to how comically impractical this trope as a means of assassination would be in reality (what with the ridiculous amounts of advance planning, perfect timing, and sheer luck required to pull it off with any degree of success).
Sweat Drop: The exaggerated version of this is practically discredited outside of comedy; most shows nowadays use much smaller, more modest sweatdrops instead.
Sweeps Week Lesbian Kiss: Since the mid-2000s, the lesbian sweeps kiss seems to be getting increasingly diminishing returns in the ratings. The LGBT community is no longer desperate for whatever non-negative representation they can get, and critics are no longer impressed by a showrunner's "bravery" by including it. Further, when you can see far more bizarre things on YouTube (to say nothing of other corners of the Web), and far more extreme or daring things on non-network television, the trope is clearly becoming this.

Tropes T to Z

Taking the Veil: The "Immured" variant of it fell aside by the end of the Victorian era.
Technicolor Science: On the verge of becoming this thanks to the fact that much of the lab equipment that this trope depends on is either becoming outdated or less important in modern laboratories. Glass test tubes are being replaced by eppendorf centrifuges, plastic wellplates, or other plastic disposable equipment where tests can be done with only microliters of samples and chemicals. Complex glassware apparatus setups that look like Mad Scientist Laboratory equipment have already gone the way of the dodo. The functions of those apparatus' are now either obsolete or accomplished using miniaturized and simpler equipment.
Teens Are Monsters: At least, the more "rebellious" teenagers in sitcoms that seem to only exist to make their parents miserable tend to be headed this way. Writers seem to be taking note of how hormones don't always turn a child into a raging monster who disagrees with their parents over everything, especially if it goes against everything the character has shown before. Additionally, most writers are also beginning to take note of how, instead of viewing them as kids going through a sensitive time in their lives, most viewers would rather beat most of these character types over the head with a lead pipe more than anything else. That said, Exaggerated, Played for Laughs versions of this trope do still pop up from time to time in most media.
Teens Love Shopping: As more and more shopping malls (or the stores within them) give way to online shopping (which has led to many mall buildings to close down), fewer teens are going to the mall anymore. Also, teens and tweens today are much more closely supervised than the teens and tweens of a generation or two ago, so they might not have a chance to go walking around the mall and getting into wacky hijinks anyway.
Text Parser: Although Interactive Fiction games are still being written by hobbyists, parser games haven't been commercially viable since The '90s. Most modern day Adventure Games usually either use Point-and-Click mechanics, or an Action Bar. Text Parsers are often considered confusing, and don't work well on systems that have no keyboards.
That Reminds Me of a Song: Modern musicals, at least in theatre, are specifically not supposed to play this one straight anymore, though there's still a chance a song of this nature may end up as a Breakaway Pop Hit.
The Theme Park Version: The rise of the Internet made oversimplified/stereotypical renditions of certain places or eras less believable. The trope survives thanks to actual theme park attractions.
Therapy Is for the Weak: Therapy is no longer as stigmatized as it once was, so this trope is less likely to be played straight in modern media. Only further assisted by the increased media attention on mass shooters, terrorists, and people Driven to Suicide. In fact, people in need of psychological help who actively resist therapy are strongly urged to seek it, and those who have tried it and said it didn't work out are encouraged to keep searching for another therapist that might be better suited to treat them.
There Are No Girls on the Internet: During the early years of the 'net, most sites would deal with news, tech, learning and videogames. The online population however, has reflected real-world gender distributions more accurately since 2001 or so, when chatrooms became popular (and controversial) and mobile data plans became commonplace. The rise of social media during the mid-late 2000s only killed off that notion.
Third-Person Person: One specific example would be doing so as a manifestation of narcissism and self-centeredness. Studies actually show that people who have a habit of speaking in the third person are generally less egocentric, possess more wisdom, and are more capable of understanding the perspectives of others. In real life, someone who regularly uses third person in everyday conversations is likely to be doing it for fun and self-irony, and sometimes also to be mildly eccentric.
This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: Overused to the point of being discredited. You're as likely as not to see the word "bitch" thrown in a sentence just to be funny, even though there is no other reason to emphasize a point this way.
Timmy in a Well: Parodied to the point of being a Discredited Trope by now, maybe even a Dead Horse Trope. Just the classic phrase is common sarcasm for when someone has no idea what is being non-verbally communicated. ^note
Tin-Can Telephone: Thanks to the internet and mobile phones being cheap enough that even children have them, this is a sadly disappearing relic. Even before this, cheap walkie talkie sets had largely supplanted them.
Toast of Tardiness: Discredited in anime and manga due to rampant overuse. In The New '10s, Japanese "How to Become a Shoujo Manga-ka" books advised readers against using this trope, and manga from around the same time even began lampshading how much of a cliché this is.
Toilet Humour: Largely considered juvenile and cringeworthy these days, even though it was one of the most popular forms of comedy in the 1990s to 2000s. Nowadays, most shows tend to rely on character-based jokes and Black Comedy if the show is dark enough, with most modern examples being met with scorn.
Toll Booth Antics: Toll roads adopting electronic payment systems don't require the car to stop anymore. However, it's still played straight in Period Piece works or rural toll-road settings, where there are smaller populations and it's more sparsely populated, so you'll probably see men on horseback paying toll fees, or a fantasy version of this trope but it's Played for Laughs now. But it's also common in scenarios involving border patrols though, so not entirely discredited.
Tomboyish Ponytail: While ponytails are still fairly popular among tomboys, during The New '10s, they lost their tomboyish connotations and began to be associated with cheerleaders and glamorous celebrities like Ariana Grande. High ponytails are now far more popular among Girly Girl types.
Tonto Talk: Due to the racist nature of it, you'll never see this being played straight in contemporary media, and it only occasionally pops up for gags that subvert it. Another factor that has helped discredit this trope is the fact that many modern Native Americans have become integrated by not only living in both urban/suburban areas and reservations, but going to university (both of which would bring Natives into greater contact with non-indigenous Americans who speak English as a first language), as such developments have undermined the "isolated, primitive Native American" stereotype that birthed this trope in the first place.
Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Using this trope nowadays usually results in criticism due to it being overused, cheap, and implying that life is suffering and being a good person will get you killed.
Too Smart for Strangers: Aesops about the inherent dangers of kids talking to strangers were huge in the late 1980s to early 2000s, but due to changing attitudes (coupled with the discovery that the majority of abuse and kidnappings come from people that the victims know personally) it's rarely played straight. It briefly gained new life regarding meeting strangers online, but is unlikely to ever reach the same hysteria it created before.
Torture Always Works: These days, people are more aware that torture is actually one of the worst ways to interrogate someone, as the the victim is more likely to say anything to get the pain to stop rather than give accurate or useful information. As such, most modern works that have torture tend to emphasize the punishing and/or sadistic aspects of it instead.
Totally Radical: Constantly changing vernacular in the last two decades, and some idioms being incomprehensible outside a specific culture, have made this too hard to take seriously. It also comes off as a desperate attempt from older works to seem hip.
Touch of the Monster: Has fallen out of favor in the mainstream, but it still appears in niche works.
Trademark Favorite Food: Not discredited as a whole, but a specific variation of it — when a character exhibits an obsession for food that corresponds with a stereotype for his race or culture (such as fried chicken and/or watermelons with African Americans) — is likely to get the writer into hot water if played straight due to implications of racism.
Tragic AIDS Story: Thanks to advances in medicine, HIV is no longer the death sentence it was back in The '80s, at least in developed countries. Most of the time, it can be managed with medications, and rarely progresses into AIDS. In fact, it may even be nearing curable.
Trapped by Gambling Debts: Discredited in spy stories, but still used elsewhere.
Trauma Inn: This is quickly becoming discredited, as modern RPGs are steadily replacing the Trauma Inn with automatic healing at save points. When an inn actually appears in a game with save point recovery, it's either there for a plot event, or it's just decorative scenery.
Trojan Gauntlet: In most places, changing sexual mores, the advent of HIV/AIDS and Technology Marches On (condoms are no longer behind the counter, self-service checkouts) have rendered this trope a thing of the past.
Two Gamers on a Couch: Once an extremely popular format for webcomics, now mocked and derided as lazy, unoriginal, and boring after the internet was glutted with poor imitations of the good ones. A few webcomics that use this are still going strong, but only thanks to the Grandfather Clause and even the codifiers of the trope have distanced themselves from it. This applies only to webcomics that use this trope; non-comic examples like Game Grumps fare much better in the long-term.
Tyrannical Town Tycoon: The growth of MegaCorps across the United States has largely made this trope harder to play straight in modern works. The reason for this is that many of these corporations are not only driving out the local businesses that had historically been the main resources of such tycoons to begin with, but that such MegaCorps are owned by wealthy businesspeople who may not even reside in such small communities. However, these changing circumstances do not preclude PeriodPieces set in the 19th and early 20th centuries from playing this trope straight, as those time periods were when the Tyrannical Town Tycoon was still relevant in small-town American life.
Uncle Pennybags: Much like the Honest Corporate Executive trope, it has been getting harder to see straight examples of this trope since the middle of The New '10s, largely due to growing antipathy towards the wealthy. Likewise, there have been concerns that high-income individuals use their wealth on themselves and not for the betterment of humanity, to the point where this has even affected the Wealthy Philanthropist trope as well.
Underwear of Power: In Super Hero comics, the underwear (actually trunks) over your tights variety was widely influenced by the "strongman" character, common on the circuses of the early 20th century, though it has fallen out of use as a garment in real life due to recent innovations of elastic fibers such as spandex, which prevented tearing of their costumes while performing their stunts. Superman and Batman both ditched theirs for a period in the 2010s, but fans didn't take kindly to the change due to how they have worn such trunks since their creations, and they were eventually brought back.
Unions Suck: While not perfect, their decline in America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has shown that unions were the main line of defense regarding poorly treated workers. This has made anti-union messages increasingly unpopular in The New '20s. Furthermore, people have begun to realize that much of anti-union propaganda tends to come from the overly wealthy business executives who are refusing to pay their workers in the first place, meaning that anti-union messages only plays right into their hands.
- There is also the point that as much of the power that unions had up until the 1980s has been weakened or removed by politicians like Reagan & Thatcher, the union actitivies that annoyed/upset so many people either no longer exist or are not anything like as effective, making their portrayal dated.
Unrequited Tragic Maiden: This is starting to become either discredited as romantic portrayals of females become less dependent on the male characters, or a Deconstructed Trope to showcase a point-of-view of it being an unrealistic idea of romantic love.
Unscrewed Salt Shaker: The combination of being a total cliché and the harsh effect of ruining someone's entire meal for a cheap laugh means this prank usually doesn't get a very good reception, unless the target is particularly unpopular.
Unsettling Gender-Reveal: As trans awareness has risen this now comes across as blatantly prejudiced. Playing this trope straight will usually get the writer into hot water due to the still-dangerous aspects of this trope in Real Life.
Unwanted Glasses Plot: This has become irrelevant in recent years due to the wide acceptance of glasses, to the point some people actually buy Purely Aesthetic Glasses just for the look. And with the increased recognition of glasses fetishism, you're more likely to see someone use their glasses as a selling point when flirting than take them off.
Unwinnable by Design: Used to be a staple of the adventure game genre, particularly if Sierra was at the helm. These days, almost no games are cruel enough to still use it as a mechanic.
Urban Legend of Zelda: Because of the fact that it's becoming increasingly easier and quicker to dump a game's ROM, put it on a PC, analyze and disassemble its code, and post the findings on the Internet, these days any attempt to make a schoolyard myth about games will likely get you laughed at. A trip to a site such as The Cutting Room Floor is all it takes to confirm what is or isn't hidden within a game.
Vampires Hate Garlic: Considered a dated, cliche vampire weakness. When it pops up today, it's either subverted (in newer works, vampires often demonstrate, contrary to superstition, that they can eat garlic for lunch) or played for laughs (in certain works, a nod is made to the tradition by making one certain vampire allergic to garlic).
Venus Is Wet: A case of the science involved becoming more accurate. The clouds on Venus are made of sulfuric acid, the atmosphere is largely carbon dioxide, and due to the resulting greenhouse effect, the temperature at the planet's dry and barren surface is roughly 900 degrees Fahrenheit (480°C). Any attempt to portray Venus as a lush wonderland would get you mocked immediately. The only exception is works involving terraforming.
Very Special Episode: As the tackling of serious issues became commonplace for comedy shows of the 2010s (unless for those engaging in Cringe Comedy), this trope became rather pointless.
The use of Video-Game Lives has widely fallen out of favor in recent times, with many modern games and platform games having done away with them, thanks to the widespread use of checkpoints, save files and the introduction of Auto-Save. The fact that a player can continue from the spot they previously left off renders lives rather redundant. If Video-Game Lives are ever used, it is done by long running older game franchises, or rendered meaningless as a parody in Platform Hell games.
Viewers Are Morons: Most showrunners are aware that their viewers have an idea what's going on. Also, the rise of Internet and higher interest for knowledge has turned the trope upside-down.
Virgin in a White Dress: Nowadays, Western women are free to have sex lives before marriage (although it may be frowned upon in some circles), and free to choose what color dress they wear. It's entirely possible (even likely) that a modern bride wearing a white dress might not be a virgin or might only be a Technical Virgin. In addition, remarried brides are still allowed to wear white if they choose to. Another reason of why this is discredited is the fact that white lost its connotations of purity and became simply the color associated with new beginnings, including but not limited to marriages, that's why most wedding decorations are either white or in any other very light color such as cream. (Gold/white and silver/white are extremely popular)
Wakeup Makeup: Not taken seriously in live action anymore, but still played straight in animation.
Warm Place, Warm Lighting: This has come under scrutiny and been mocked in recent years, due to Hollywood's unfortunate tendency to negatively stereotype foreign countries as crime-ridden hellholes when using this trope, primarily in places such as India, the Middle East, North Africa, Mexico or Egypt. Most people who live in those countries will tell you that the skies are not shades of yellow or orange during the day in real life, thus making the usage of this trope seem even more ridiculous.
Washy Watchy: This is a fairly discredited but can still occasionally be seen at laundromats in Real Life. On the other hand, it's a bit of a Coconut Effect in the way that clear-front washing-machines are not very common in laundromats portrayed in popular media, as the machines are usually much newer (anyway, why would a laundromat owner upgrade when their '80s/'90s machines work fine?).
We Will Not Use Photoshop in the Future: In an age where Photoshop and other digital tools are commonplace in society and people are becoming much more familiar with digital manipulation and its hallmarks, this trope is quite hard to pull off convincingly in contemporary works.
What Are Records?: Most kids are not as clueless about old technology as we think they are. It also helps that vinyl records have undergone a recent resurgence in popularity. The notional person with a large collection of classic rock LPs is just as likely to be a twenty-something hipster as an aging Baby Boomer. And while this trope becomes less often used, its reverse trope is becoming more and more popular. With vinyl's Popularity Polynomial and the rise of streaming, kids in the future will likely ask "What are CDs?" instead.
Where da White Women At?: The problematic nature of this trope as well as the declining prominence of "glam rap" has turned a stock gag in 2000s-era comedies into a source of parody.
White Dude, Black Dude: This was an extremely popular routine during the late '70s and early '80s, being part of the "Blaxploitation" movement that sought to reclaim supposedly negative stereotypes as positive. Nowadays, however, it's only ever done ironically, as an influx of less-talented comedians using it led to focus on its rather racist undertones and general lack of creativity. It didn't really help that Black comedians were the only people able to pull it off without looking like gigantic racists.
White Man's Burden: Increasingly difficult to play straight without being mocked thanks to its racist overtones.
Who Wants to Be "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?": Flashy big-money game shows died off throughout the first decade of the 21st century, due in part to an oversaturation of the genre and the rise of reality TV. Once game shows started becoming popular again in The New '10s, they tended to be more straightforward, and less flashy and lavish. The dealbreaker was most likely Deal or No Deal, which started off hotly but quickly lapsed into self-parody and suffered massive overexposure.
Why We Are Bummed Communism Fell: With the worsening of relations between Russia and the west in The New '10s and The New '20s (especially with Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, plus improved Russian ties with China (something that was a nightmare scenario for the west during the Cold War), this trope is rarely played straight anymore. The allegiances of the Cold War are still in function, there just isn't the same level of ideology involved that there was during the original run.
Wild Samoan: Obvious Values Dissonance make this discredited now. Not even the Trope Namer plays it straight anymore.
Wild Teen Party: Teenagers today don't party nearly as hard as they used to in previous decades, as most of them understand how disastrous and/or dangerous large uncontrolled parties at a person’s house can get. If they do decide to act out for fun, it’s usually done at a public place such as a bar or club, with get-togethers at a friend's place usually consisting of smaller and more relaxed events that are safer for everyone involved.
With This Ring: A specific variation of it (a woman is washing the dishes without her yellow rubber gloves on, and the wedding ring goes down the drain. Cue panicked call to the plumber.) is no longer taken seriously.
Womanliness as Pathos: A narrative idea that the presence of a woman or femininity in general inherently cause drama or intense feelings. In the past, it was common to blatantly use the trope and outright say that women were "trouble", to tell a woman to stay somewhere safe while the men handled things, to make a Celibate Hero who shunned women wholesale for being "distractions", and to portray women as obstacles which justified these reactions. These days, such overt characters and portrayals of women are mostly avoided, outside of situations Played for Laughs.
Wolf Whistle: Similar to Construction Catcalls mentioned earlier, this trope is no longer used in fiction or Real Life due to the harassing nature of it. If a man does use the wolf whistle in a modern-day work, it’s usually to show how pathetic, perverted or behind-the-times he is, and is likely to be rebuked by the woman in question.
Women Drivers: The idea of women being dangerously poor drivers for laughs is now seen as a tired comedic stereotype, and very sexist on top of that. In addition, while this trope originated when automobiles were more of a novelty, driving a car is now pretty much mandatory in the United States. Thus, it makes less sense for 50% of the population to be bad at driving if everyone is pressured into learning how. Nowadays, if the trope does show up, the joke is usually about the driving itself, rather than the sex of the driver.
Wouldn't Hit a Girl: As gender roles have changed over the years, with more women demonstrating their capability in holding their own in a fight, the stigma of hitting a woman in a combat situation has more-or-less disappeared. These days, this trope is mostly Played for Laughs if it's ever brought up at all.
Wraparound Background: Rarely used in contemporary animation, since it's considered such an obvious (and cheesy) cost-cutting trick. The technique is generally inapplicable to CGI as well (although it is used for Mind Screw purposes still, such as in the Mad Hatter boss fight in Batman: Arkham City), which further cuts off its use in newer works. Additionally, the trope survives in video games, as during sequences with scrolling backgrounds, it's required as an Acceptable Break from Reality, as due to video games being an interactive medium, the background can go on scrolling forever, and developers are unable to create an endless background without this trope.
Wrestling Doesn't Pay: These types of gimmicks are usually derided for being corny and lazy characterization following their overuse in the New Generation Era. Even WWE themselves will mock their past usage of this trope in modern documentaries. They still show up from time to time, but the wrestlers using these gimmicks never make it past jobber status unless the second profession is one that the wrestler has actually done in Real Life (such as John "Bradshaw" Layfield's rich stock-trader gimmick or Michelle McCool's Hot Teacher gimmick) and it doesn't define their character. The Real life variant of this trope is sadly still played straight.
Writer's Block Montage: Seen as a tired cliché, especially ones that involve a typewriter and writers smoking and drinking coffee.
Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: The specific "mystery box" variation beloved by J. J. Abrams has come under increasing scrutiny and criticism, especially his argument that a cool mystery is always more interesting than its solution. When Lost was riding high, it was common for people to describe Abrams as a genius and insist that only the feeling of a mystery mattered, rather than having any kind of actual satisfying answer involved. After the decades of media that followed trying to ape its success fell victim to aimless Jigsaw Puzzle Plots and The Chris Carter Effect, much of it helmed by Abrams himself and potentially including the divisive conclusion to Lost depending on who you ask, it's now much more common for people to instead argue more forcefully that having enough substance under the style to make actually solving the mystery a satisfactory challenge or having a blueprint for the story with a beginning, middle, and end from the very beginning are generally superior to muddling along, throwing out whatever plot hooks or random ideas feel cool in the moment and hoping you'll come up with something down the road, while abnegating responsibility by insisting that a satisfying answer to a mystery is a contradiction in terms.
Writing Lines: Has been disappearing both in modern works of fiction and Real Life, as some teachers have questioned the effectiveness of writing (which is obviously a major aspect of any curriculum) as a punishment. However, The Simpsons is one of the few series that can get away with it due to them using the trope when it was still commonplace, and even they have acknowledged the trope's outdated aspects.
Old magic tricks like the Disappearing Box and Saw a Woman in Half are best not done in their straight form these days, as everyone's seen them dozens of times and probably knows how those tricks are done.
In modern chase scenes the Fruit Cart, Sheet of Glass, and Baby Carriage are only included with at least a wink — for serious chases something else that will go splat is used.
Yellow Peril: When played seriously, with no mitigating factors (e.g. being Historical Fiction set in World War II with Imperial Japan as an enemy), this is grotesquely racist in almost all cases. A portrayal of North Korea might be able to step close to the trope, but even there, focusing on the race/racial attributes as a large part of the villainy rather than internal genocide and repression is obviously going to come off as racist. ^note Characters who once fit this archetype, such as The Mandarin or Shang Tsung, have undergone significant character evolution to either remove or downplay the more offensive aspects of them.
Yellow Snow: Considered such a lowbrow, juvenile gag, that it's only used as a bottom of the barrel gag for kids' shows at best, and never used in adult comedy.
You All Meet in an Inn: While the trope is Older Than Print and used in the works of greats like Geoffrey Chaucer, it has become a cliché that should be avoided due to overuse. Actually starting an adventure with the words "So, you all meet in an inn..." may be seen as roleplaying's equivalent to "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night..." Thus, a lot of sources advise against using it, and give pointers on how to avoid it. The 3rd Edition Dungeon Master's Guide for Dungeons & Dragons, in a list of ways to bring a party together, dubs this "The Cliche". David Morgan-Mar, of Irregular Webcomic! and Darths & Droids fame, provides a list of less overused ways to start an adventure, as do the folks at the dice of doom blog.
You Must Be This Tall to Ride: Its prevalence in real life and general overuse of the zany kid shenanigans to work around it has turned a stock trope of kids' media into a near cliché.
You Wouldn't Hit a Guy with Glasses: Glasses nowadays are designed to be harder to break, so they're less of a barrier for hitting someone. Hold My Glasses is becoming a much more common alternative.

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