Basic Trope: Characters must journey to ensure an authority figure learns something
- Straight: Characters learn that Tom is about to betray King Jack, and cross mountains in winter to bring the news to King Jack.
- Exaggerated:
- Characters learn of something and make a forty-page PowerPoint presentation which goes into exhaustive, boring detail. The authority figure falls asleep before the end of it.
- Characters trek through the forest and many other dangerous terrains, such that it would have been easier to cope with the original problem.
- Downplayed: Two young children make a journey across the playground to tell the teacher that the school bully is calling kids names.
- Justified: The something is far beyond their ability to cope with, but the authority figure can handle it.
- Inverted: Characters must keep news from getting out.
- Subverted: The thing should happen, and the authority figure is actually the villain who will stop it.
- Double Subverted: But just because he's a villain doesn't mean his judgement of this is wrong; unleashing a plague to remove even a bad king will be worse than the king himself.
- Parodied:
- They get back to find dozens of characters thronging the authority figure with the news.
- Characters learn Tom thinks King Jack's robes look ugly, and travel across several different Unholy Grounds, Eldritch Locations, and crappy mini-malls to deliver this information to King Jack. He then sends off the characters to tell Tom his hair looks stupid.
- Zig Zagged: Jack brings news to Jill who sends him off to Charlie, who himself runs off to tell Agatha, who sends for Jack to send him to Dave — who may, actually, do something.
- Averted: The characters can and do cope with any problems they face.
- Enforced:
- "We can't show kids fighting this! It's too dangerous."
- Today's episode of History Of Sport focuses on the origin of marathons.
- Lampshaded: "We're going to have to get this news to King Jack, no matter how far away he is from us!"
- Invoked: "It doesn't matter that we can't fight the Evil Overlord, we have to bring the news back."
- Exploited: The Big Bad enacts his plan while the heroes are journeying.
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: "Do you ever feel more like the paparazzi than a crusading hero in this kingdom?"
- Conversed: "All they're going to bring back this time will amount to an article on page 5 of the Royal Herald."
- Deconstructed: Characters discover that, despite how difficult it was to bring back news, the situation is no better off with the authority figure having knowledge than without it. Possibly worse.
- Reconstructed: But they realize that sometimes it does make things better, and they have to do the best they can without knowing in advance which it will be.
- Plotted A Good Waste: The entire plot is the grueling, terrifying journey through unimaginable horror to get the message to base.
Back to Bring News Back
