Basic Trope: A sad character shouts out the word "why?".
- Straight: When Alice's car gets destroyed in an explosion, she shouts "Why?!" to the sky while crying.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice spends a ridiculously long time (few hours, all day, few days etc) shouting "Why?!"
- Alice's "WHY??!!!!!!" is so loud it can literally be heard in the next state, city, country, or even all around the world.
- Whenever something even remotely bad happens, Alice (or everybody) will shout "Why?!"
- Alice shouts out several big "Why?!"'s in a row.
- Alice shouts "Why?!" not only when she's sad but when she's curious about why something happened.
- "Why" is the only word Alice speaks-or rather, screams.
- Downplayed: Alice raises her voice slightly on her "Why?!"
- Inverted:
- Alice whispers "Why?" when she's sad.
- Alice shouts "BECAUSE!!" when she's happy.
- Subverted: Alices shouts "Why?"... then realizes/remembers the answer.
- Double Subverted: ... only to forget it again.
- Parodied: Alice is seen shouting "Why?!" and Bob thinks it's because she's sad, but really she just wants to know why the sky is blue.
- Zigzagged: Bob can't make out if Alice was shouting "Why", "Aye", "Eye" or some other homophone.
- Averted: Alice doesn't shout why.
- Enforced: We need to tell the viewers how much of a Large Ham Alice is without Narrating the Obvious!
- Invoked: Carlos, who's the Big Bad, makes something bad happen for no good reason.
- Lampshaded: "You know perfectly well why it happened, Alice, your car was in the building that exploded and that's why it got destroyed.
- Exploited: Alice is undercover. Carlos knows this, but doesn't know which person Alice is. So, he makes something bad happen. He knows that Alice is the only person who will scream "WHY!?!?"
- Defied: Alice refuses to say "Why".
- Discussed: "How come we shout 'why' when we're sad?"
- Conversed: "What's with that thing where the character shouts why?"
- Deconstructed: Alice strains her throat shouting "Why?!"
- Reconstructed: She shouts it loud, but not loud enough to strain her throat.
- Played for Laughs:
- Alice says "Why?!" when she drops her ice cream cone.
- Alice cries out "Why?!" but instead of tragedy, it's instead more of "Why the fuck did you do that?!" because Bob did something so completely out of left field that it genuinely left her dumbfounded.
- Played for Drama: Alice shouts "Why?!" after something very angsty happens like Bob dies or she has a My God, What Have I Done?
Back to Big "WHY?!"
