Basic Trope: A character learns a seemingly innocuous skill that they later end up using in an awesome fashion.
- Straight: Alice learns how to be a ballerina while traveling the world to gain experience for a major job interview. In the end, that ballerina skill gets her the job.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice learns how to balance a checkbook. In the end, she's the only one given a major job offer because she knows how to do exactly that.
- Alice learns fifty digits of pi. She ends up using it as a chant to ward off a Vengeful Ghost before it kills everyone in Trope City, and it actually works!
- Downplayed: Alice takes up a more advanced Information Technology course, and she gets the job since she had more education in how to work with computers than the other applicants.
- Justified: Skills can come into play in different fashions. You never know when what you're learning will come in handy.
- Inverted:
- Alice learns an awesome skill like flying a plane - but only uses it for its most obvious applications.
- After doing something awesome, Alice is unable to successfully do it again.
- It's Alice's lack of knowledge of a skill (or how to apply her skill in a certain specific way) that is the Chekhov's Gun.
- Alice brought along a Chekhov's Gun because she's the one with the knowledge to use it, but it's her friend Carl (who has no damn clue of what he's doing but he had to do something) that makes perfect use of it.
- Subverted:
- Alice learns a skill. Later, she tries to use the skill, but fails.
- Alice suggests the use of the skills to try to solve the problem at hand, but is shot down by everybody else. She decides not to insist.
- Double Subverted:
- But even later on, she tries again and succeeds.
- Later on, she just grabs whatever she needs for the skill, rushes in Leeroy Jenkins-style... and succeeds.
- Parodied:
- Alice learns an incredibly useful skill that everyone should know, like riding a bike. Everyone treats The Reveal that she knows how to do this like an amazing thing.
- Alice learns a skill considered incredibly stupid, such as yo-yo tricks or the trivia of the latest show to become Take That! fuel in modern pop culture, and this is what saves the day. For further parody points, the fact this saves the day does not says much about the villains' intelligence, either.
- Zig Zagged: Alice takes a class that teaches her a wide variety of skills. Some of them are later put to use, others aren't.
- Averted: The skill never comes up.
- Enforced: "So we need to reward the viewers that are paying attention. Let's have this ballerina lesson she goes to end up being vital later on".
- Lampshaded: "You need a ballerina? How lucky".
- Invoked: The people who posted the job wanted someone well-rounded.
- Exploited: Jim set up a trap for Alice that catches her because she tried to use ballet to dodge it.
- Defied: "I don't care if you're a ballerina. What can you do for this company?"
- Discussed: "Employers always have their quirks. I'm sure my ballet skills will be needed at some point".
- Conversed: "Lets see, she learned sniping, military tactics, subterfuge, interrogation technique, and ballet. Guess which one she'll need to use at the climax".
- Deconstructed: Alice lucked out that time, but some of her skills end up being useless.
- Reconstructed: Until she finds uses for them as well.
Back to Chekhov's Skill. In 5 years, perhaps reading this page will save your life. Or ruin it.
