Basic Trope: The MacGuffin is either irremovably attached to a character, or always within their presence, much to their annoyance.
- Straight:
- Sir Bob Tropesalot picks up The Sword of Plot Advancement and cannot release it.
- Sir Bob Tropesalot throws The Sword of Plot Advancement away from him, and it boomerangs/teleports back to him.
- Exaggerated: The Sword of Plot Advancement was picked up by Sir Bob Tropesalot, who stabbed the Evil Overlord with it, but he cannot unsheath it from his corpse because the Sword clings to anyone who makes physical contact with it. Lady Alice tries to help unstick the sword from Sir Bob and she too becomes glued to it.
- Downplayed: The Sword of Plot Advancement is only clingy for an hour, after which Sir Bob can remove it from his grasp.
- Justified:
- The Wizard who forged the Sword of Plot Advancement wanted it to not be so easily taken away from Sir Bob.
- The Sword is an Empathic Weapon and hails a Bad Future where the hero refused to use it, causing a calamity. In this timeline, its refusal to leave Bob's side is a sign of it wanting desperately to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
- Justified/Exaggerated: The Wizard who forged the Sword of Plot Advancement did it as a practical joke.
- Inverted: The Sword of Plot Advancement evades the grasp of anyone who tries to touch it.
- Subverted: Alice puts on a Transformation Trinket that turns her into a Magical Girl Warrior, but she finds that she cannot remove it from her neck. After days of lamenting, Bob easily takes the necklace from her. Turns out that one of the rules of the trinket is that although anyone can put it on, they need to have someone else remove it for them.
- Double Subverted: After the necklace is removed, she can still turn into a Magical Girl Warrior because now the power is inside of her.
- Parodied: The Sword of Plot Advancement is a Clingy Jealous MacGuffin that follows Sir Bob around and throws a fit if he tries to fight the Evil Overlord with any other weapon besides herself.
- Zig Zagged: The Sword only clings to Bob's hand for a few days to advance the plot, then falls off, and can be used or discarded normally—until the next time the plot needs to be advanced, at which point it becomes clingy again. This goes on for the entire series, at one point even jumping over to the Evil Overlord to force him to advance the plot.
- Averted: The Sword of Plot Advancement lets whoever touches it and doesn’t cling to anyone.
- Enforced: With all he's going through, Bob keeping the Sword would kill the Willing Suspension of Disbelief, so the creator makes it clingy to explain how it's possible.
- Lampshaded:Alice: "Perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to grasp the Sword of Plot Advancement with both hands."
Sir Bob: "Shut up, M’lady." - Invoked: The wizard, not willing the villain to get the Sword of Plot Advancement, curses it to be clingy and leads Bob to it.
- Exploited:
- The villain tricks Bob into grabbing the sword so that he couldn't catch falling Alice.
- A trinket can't even be removed by destroying it, so Bob exploits this by using it to block an otherwise lethal attack.
- Defied: Knowing that Sword of Plot Advancement is clingy, Bob refuses to touch it and opts for something weaker, but removable instead.
- Discussed: "But what if you can't get rid of it?"
- Conversed: "So the entire show was basically about Bob trying to unglue the Sword of Plot Advancement from his hands".
- Implied: Bob is never seen without Sword of Plot Advancement, even after he loses it a few times in fight and has no way or time to retrieve it.
- Played For Laughs:
- We get a montage of Bob trying to get rid of the sword, from Alice ripping him from his grasp and failing to Bob flailing his hand around, shouting "let me go, let me go!"
- We see Bob trying to go about his day with the sword stuck to him, making life very inconvenient.
- Played For Drama: The macguffin in question has bonded itself to the character in question; its removal is possible, but basically the same as removing an organ, or a limb. In short, painful. Very painful...
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