Related:
Tropes about tropes. It is easy to get this confused with a category for tropes that share some commonality or are tropes that are particularly universal. That's not what this is about. It is about how tropes come into existence, live, mutate, evolve, and die.
open/close all folders
Audience Reactions to tropes
- Favorite Trope: Tropes that the author or audience can't get enough of!
- Newer Than They Think: This isn't as old as most people think it is.
- Older Than They Think: This has been around far longer than you think.
- Pet-Peeve Trope: Tropes that piss off the audience.
- Trope Enjoyment Loophole: When (and perhaps why) something that's a Pet-Peeve Trope doesn't piss somebody off, or the inverse.
- Trope Telegraphing: "I know exactly what will happen next because of this trope."
Perceptions of tropes
- Spoilered Rotten: Tropes that are spoilers by default.
- Tropes Hidden from Audience: Tropes that creators usually do not want audiences to know about or recognize.
Stages of tropes' life cycles
- Characteristic Trope: Trope becomes discredited due to audience associating it with a certain show.
- Cyclic Trope: The trope alternates between being played straight and discredited.
- Dead Horse Trope: Not only is the trope discredited, but the parodies, subversions, etc. are more common and well-known than straight use ever was.
- Dead Unicorn Trope: The so-called Dead Horse Trope was never used seriously to begin with.
- Discredited Trope: A trope that no one plays straight anymore, lest they face ridicule.
- Evolving Trope: The trope evolves after a period of disuse and become relevant again.
- Forgotten Trope: A trope that no one uses at all anymore.
- Trope Breaker: Something that renders a trope useless.
- Trope Codifier: One example stands out as the template that many other examples follow.
- Trope Makers: The first unambiguous examples of tropes.
- Unbuilt Trope: Trope deconstructed before it was even constructed.
- Undead Horse Trope: The trope is constantly played with or scoffed at, but still sees enough straight use to avoid becoming a Dead Horse Trope.
- Ur-Example: The oldest known example of any given trope.
Trope presence
- Omnipresent Tropes: Tropes that are present in pretty much all fiction, usually by necessity.
- Overdosed Tropes: Tropes that are present in nearly all media, but not by necessity.
- Troperiffic: Work uses a lot of different tropes.
- Tropes in Aggregate: Meta-tropes that become apparent when looking at the whole genre or fiction in general.
Trope relationships
- Sister Trope: Tropes that share similar ideas.
- Sub-Trope: Specific variant of one trope is common enough to become its own trope.
- Super-Trope: The broader category that multiple tropes fall under.
Variations on a trope
- Gender-Inverted Trope: Trope specific to one gender is used with the other in mind.
- Intended Audience Reaction: When an Audience Reaction is intentionally invoked by the authors or creators.
- Tropes Are Flexible: Tropes have far more room and variation than some would think.
- Tropes Are Tools: Tropes are not bad, nor good. Just devices used to entertain.
