Basic Trope: A character writes in a more unusual medium than ink.
- Straight:
- Alice finds Bob's dying words scrawled on the wall in blood.
- Blood Mage Bob, a user of Blood Magic, writes a letter in blood.
- Exaggerated: Bob wrote a lengthy essay in blood.
- Downplayed:
- Bob writes a word in tomato sauce.
- Bob scratches a message into the wall with his fingernails.
- Justified:
- Bob had crucial information to share and no other method at hand of preserving it.
- It's part of a dying curse, and scrawling runes in blood is the most important cantrip within the ritual.
- Blood Mage Bob finds using his blood to be cheaper than buying pens. It's also cooler.
- Inverted:
- Due to a magical accident involving a small squid and a book of elves in bikinis, Bob has ink for blood and writes with it when dying.
- Bob uses pens and pencils for crazy purposes.
- Subverted: The "blood" turns out to be ink from Bob's red pen.
- Double Subverted: And the pen is red because it was filled with blood.
- Parodied:
- Bob's bloody message is something as inconsequential as his shopping list. And there was a pen right next to him.
- Bob literally writes "Couldn't find a pen."
- Bob's message is written in an unpleasant bodily secretion, like snot!
- Zig Zagged: The message jumps repeatedly between writing in blood and ink.
- Averted: Bob had a pen and used it.
- Enforced: "We need to up the shock value of Bob's death."
- Lampshaded:
- "Yes, I am writing this in blood."
- "Blood magic has more uses than killing, you know."
- Invoked: Bob is trying to creep out Alice, so he opens a vein and writes bloodily on the wall.
- Exploited: Detective Alice uses the blood sample conveniently placed on the wall and finds it isn't Bob's, allowing her to deduce he faked his death.
- Defied: Bob is badly wounded, but he takes the time to find a conventional pen and paper.
- Discussed: "...and on the wall by his corpse, there was a message written in blood."
- Conversed: "If more characters carried pens in their shirt pockets, this sort of thing wouldn't happen."
- Deconstructed: Bob died of blood loss before he could finish writing the message.
- Reconstructed: But it still gets the point across.
- Played for Laughs:
- Instead of blood like the majority of the examples, the medium is something Lighter and Softer that seems rather silly.
- The failure to use a pen makes the character seem rather inefficient and unprofessional. Like a college student who hands in his graduate thesis, written in crayon. Or a newspaper columnist who hands a column in to her boss, written in eyeliner.
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