Basic Trope: A stork brings babies.
- Straight: A stork delivers a baby to a couple.
- Exaggerated: Storks bring babies to anything that can reproduce.
- Downplayed:
- Storks don't actually deliver babies, but are still associated with pregnancy/childbirth.note
- The couple does actually go through the right process of baby-making, though a stork eventually brings a baby to them.
- Justified: The storks work somewhere that creates babies and brings them to people.
- Inverted:
- Circling Vultures: Birds associated with death rather than birth.
- A stork kidnaps a baby.
- A baby brings storks.
- Subverted:
- The stork comes with a package instead.
- The blanket carried by the stork is empty.
- A pelican is carrying the baby.
- The inflatable 'stork' merely symbolizes the baby's arrival.
- Double Subverted:
- ...but the baby is in the package.
- Parodied:
- A stork arrives at a woman's house, only to announce that they're going to make the baby together.
- A Funny Animal stork works in a maternity/delivery ward.
- Zig-Zagged:
- The stork comes with a package, but the package has a baby, and the baby is a doll, but it turns out to be a baby wearing a doll's head.
- Storks are associated with incarnation in general, not just birth or death.
- Averted:
- Nobody ever gives birth in any way.
- Anyone who does give birth does so realistically, or in another way.
- Enforced: "We need these characters to have a kid, but this is a work aimed at families, so we can't have them actually have sex or give birth. G-Rated Sex wouldn't work, how about we just have the stork deliver the baby instead?"
- Lampshaded: "Look honey, the stork just came with our baby!"
- Invoked: The couple calls the stork.
- Exploited: Because storks bring babies to people, even couples that are unable to reproduce (such as same-sex couples or infertile people) can have their own children.
- Defied: Someone cancels the stork's delivery.
- Discussed: "Where do babies come from?" "Often, a stork brings them."
- Conversed: "Why is it storks that are associated with bringing babies? Why not any other bird?"
- Implied: The couple's first child sees a white bird in the distance, and the couple shows their baby.
- Deconstructed: Delivering babies this way would be a risky job, as you have to watch out for hunters and not drop the baby too soon.
- Reconstructed: Hunting storks is completely illegal, and a secret organisation shows the storks how to fly safely while giving them directions.
- Played for Laughs: The delivered baby dances when the stork comes.
- Played for Drama:
- The baby has to live with permanent injury after the stork drops it a few feet too high.
- The antagonist is a notorious stork hunter, and the storks have to defeat him somehow.
- The stork that carried the baby misses it deeply while not having many years left to live.
- Played for Horror: The baby dies brutally when the stork drops it in the air, then the stork is shredded to bits by an airplane. Or both.
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