Basic Trope: An installment in a franchise or work that's wackier and less grounded in reality.
- Straight: The show Tropers is mostly a realistic drama, but it has a spin-off (or later seasons) that focuses more on comedy with implausible scenarios.
- Exaggerated: Tropers starts off as a hardcore, depressing live-action drama, then turns into a Deranged Animation cartoon with huge amounts of Surreal Humor and No Fourth Wall.
- Downplayed:
- Tropers isn't necessarily a drama, but tends to have a fairly serious tone and stays mostly grounded. Its later seasons have a higher number of comic relief moments and Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane elements.
- Tropers was already a pretty silly show to begin with, so while the tone does gets increasingly comedic and over-the-top in the later seasons, it is only really noticeable when you watch it back to back.
- Justified:
- The show is about Bob's gradual descent into delusion and mental illness, shown from his point of view. As his mental state deteriorates, his hallucinations get more and more surreal while his grip on reality loosens.
- Tropers starts off with a serious plotline. Once the serious arc has ended, the stakes are lower, so the show gets Lighter and Softer and allows for some more comical moments to occur.
- Inverted: Tropers starts off as a wacky comedy, but later seasons are much more grounded.
- Subverted: Tropers' latest season is much wackier for a few episodes, until it's revealed that the main character is in a coma and the craziness is due to it being All Just a Dream. Things go back to normal once he wakes up.
- Double Subverted: ...until it starts getting wacky again.
- Parodied: ???
- Zig Zagged: The show's tone is all over the place, with some episodes being played 100% straight, some being pure farce, and some starting as one and ending as another.
- Averted: There is no tone change.
- Enforced:
- The writers of Tropers believe that Too Bleak, Stopped Caring is in effect, and that making the work more comical might draw in some more viewers.
- The network is (incompetently) trying to fix the loss of profit caused by them screwing the creator out of his claim on the show.
- Lampshaded: "We used to be more dramatic than this. I wonder what happened."
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: "One time we killed the bad guy, but now all we have to do is throw a pie at his face. That's interesting."
- Conversed: "Why do some works get more comedic over time?"
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