When it comes to characters who have a gift for sliding through small passageways and narrow gaps, they all have one distinct weakness that doesn't crop up often unless they're very careless. Regardless of whether their gift is due to a small size, a narrow frame, an unusually flexible physique, or perhaps even the ability to shrink or melt, they all have to be careful where they step.
A gap between floorboards, a crack in the road, a badly placed grate, a plughole left open at the wrong time, and suddenly the character can find themselves literally going down the tubes. Expect adventures in sewers or cellars to follow, much to the annoyance of the character.
A possible difficulty experienced by the Compact Infiltrator, the Incredible Shrinking Man, the Sizeshifter, the Blob Monster, or characters on the receiving end of Harmless Liquefaction.
Usually, this is Played for Laughs and rarely results in serious injury...but not always.
Contrast Ghosts Abhor a Vacuum, the ghost-exclusive variant of this trope.
Examples:
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Advertising
- This campaign ad
by Hong Kong PHAB Association shows a tiny person in a wheelchair sitting at a massive (to them) gap between the train and the platform, with the text "To you, it's just a small gap...", emphasizing that what may not seem like a safety hazard or obstacle to an able-bodied person may be one to a disabled person.
Comic Books
- The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror: In "Sideshow Blob," Bob's transformation into a homicidal Blob Monster finally backfires on him when Bart puts the Kwik-E-Mart's squishee machine into reverse while he's right next to it. Because Bob is essentially the same consistency as a squishee, the machine vacuums him up through its nozzle—and because there's too much of him to be contained inside, the machine promptly explodes, splattering Bob all over the store. Unfortunately, this trope also works in Bob's favour when the police lose track of a piece of him during the cleanup, resulting in it falling down a sewerage grate and eventually being funneled into a nice warm place where Bob can regenerate into another blob monster: Mt Splashmore...
Comic Strips
- Calvin and Hobbes: In one strip, Calvin's bubble bath tries to drown him, only to be defeated when Calvin pulls the plug, resulting in the monster being sucked down the drain with the rest of the water.
Films — Animated
- Donald's Happy Birthday: At the end of the short, upon realizing he made his nephews smoke an entire box of cigars for nothing, Donald shrinks in embarrassment until he's small enough to fall through a knothole in the wooden floor.
- Little 'Tinker: in this Tex Avery cartoon, a skunk disguises himself as Frank Sinatra. Like many cartoons about Sinatra in the forties, there are a lot of jokes about how rail-thin he was, which includes falling through a knothole on the stage.
- Monsters, Inc.: Early in the film, one of the monsters encountered on Sully's morning walk to work is a Blob Monster who makes the mistake of crossing a sewer grate—only to immediately ooze right through it, leaving only his hat, eyes, and teeth behind.
Films — Live-Action
- Ant-Man: Not long after discovering the suit's powers and shrinking himself down to the size of an ant, Scott Lang ends up not only falling through a crack in his bathroom floor but also getting accidentally kicked through an air vent grating.
- Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: Downplayed; among the many challenges faced by Russ, Ron, Amy, and Nick after they shrink is the fact that the cracks between the attic floorboards are now so big to them that they have to leap over them (though they avoid actually falling in).
Literature
- The Gashlycrumb Tinies: Downplayed. Una, a rather small child, is shown to have died after slipping down a drain in the street.
- Give Yourself Goosebumps: In Beware of the Purple Peanut Butter, should you end up eating the purple peanut butter, you will end up progressively shrinking until you're mistaken for a bug by your aunt and thrown into the sink—where you're promptly washed down the plughole.
- A picture book by Carolyn Sollman used this trope metaphorically to showcase kids losing interest in school, wherein they shrank so small they literally slipped through the cracks.
Live-Action TV
- Doom Patrol (2019): In "Therapy Patrol", Rita Farr's emotional turmoil results in her losing control of her powers and accidentally melting through a heating grate in the floor as she walks over it. With nobody around to help her, she oozes all the way through the ducts, out of the mansion's (inactive) furnace, and into the basement, where she spends the next few minutes as a Blob Monster struggling to put herself back together. After coming to an epiphany, Rita is able to force herself into a human form, find some replacement clothes, and climb back upstairs... only to lose control and go down the drain all over again. When she next appears, she's using a wheelchair to avoid any further accidental spills.
Video Games
- Splatoon: The playable characters of the series are humanoid molluscs who have the ability to switch between a more humanoid form and a squid/octopus form at will. Said mollusc form can swim through ink rapidly and phase through grates—requiring some amount of care if said grates are positioned over water, which dissolves them in seconds.
Web Video
- In the Drumsy video "Scottish Girl Ruins Anime", the group visits the world of My Hero Academia where they meet a group of heroes who all have the quirk of being paper-thin. Naturally, this comes with drawbacks, including one group member falling through a crack in the ground.
Western Animation
- Arthur: In "DW's Name Game," an Imagine Spot features DW accidentally melting Arthur into a puddle, whereupon he oozes down the drain. DW is able to catch his face in her Mary Moo Cow cup before it drips away, but the rest is apparently lost forever, much to the horror of both Arthur and DW.
- In the beginning of the Betty Boop cartoon "Betty Boop's Museum", as Koko the Clown is trying to flag down customers for his tour bus, a skinny man walking towards him ends up falling through a sewer grate.
- Family Guy:
- "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Bucks" portrays supermodel Kate Moss as so incredibly thin that she can get sucked out by the draft near an open window, caught up in the brushes of a passing street sweeper, and fall through the tiniest cracks in a wooden floor.
Kate Moss: Whoops, a crack in the floor! [vanishes]
- In the "Family Guy Viewer Mail #1" segment "No Bones About It," Peter gets three wishes from a genie, and after getting on the bad side of a commuter who threatens to break his bones, blows the last one on a wish to have no bones to break. Now a Blob Monster, Peter quickly discovers he can't ride an escalator without getting dragged underneath it. Later, horribly depressed by all the downsides of his condition, he pulls the plug in his bath and literally goes down the drain. He's so fluid that he ends up going all the way through the sewers intact, eventually winding up in Hollywood.
- "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Bucks" portrays supermodel Kate Moss as so incredibly thin that she can get sucked out by the draft near an open window, caught up in the brushes of a passing street sweeper, and fall through the tiniest cracks in a wooden floor.
- Rick and Morty: In "Pickle Rick", Rick Sanchez turns himself into a pickle in order to avoid family therapy... only for his bad behavior to backfire when he ends up rolling out of his garage and into the gutter, where the rain washes him into the sewers—resulting in a bizarre adventure in which he ends up turning rats into a suit of bio-organic Powered Armor.
