Basic Trope: A desert with swords (or lances, or axes) sticking in the ground by their blades.
- Straight: The Forlorn Plains, a barren field with lots and lots of swords sticking to the ground. A grim reminder of the monumental clash that was Battle of Seven Banners.
- Exaggerated: The Forlorn Plains stretch for miles upon miles, with swords as far as the eyes can see. Battle of Seven Banners involved more than five hundred thousands combatant.
- Downplayed: There are a few swords stuck in the middle of The Forlorn Plains.
- Justified: There is a custom to bury warriors where they fell with their swords as gravestones. Naturally, Field of Blades mark places where great battles occured.
- The site was created by a Storm of Blades attack from a large battle long ago.
- Inverted: A meadow where flowers grow and rabbits play.
- Subverted: It looks like a Field of Blades from afar, but when you get close to it, it's just a graveyard where the headstones are shaped like blades.
- Double Subverted: However, considering that the people here are giants who hurl massive boulders in battle, the spirit is the same.
- Parodied: A Field of Improbable Weapons, such as frying pans, rolling pins, parasols, and books.
- Zig Zagged: The main characters aren't sure whether the rusting metals jutting out of the grounds are swords, or something else.
- Averted: Despite the prominence of warrior culture and the many battles on the land, there are no Field of Blades.
- Enforced: By combining barren desert and forgotten swords, the author is illustrating how everybody loses in war.
- Lampshaded: "I can make good use of those blades sticking around." "Hell no, you're going to disturb the dead."
- Invoked: A king, who was never much of a warrior in life, ordered that his royal burial ground to be adorned with blades sticking to the ground so he can join his ancestors in the warrior heaven.
- Exploited: Someone pulls one of the swords out of the ground and uses it to fight.
- Defied:
- A traveling monk pulls out the swords and replaces them with gravestones, so that the warriors can rest in peace.
- A blacksmith pulls out the swords to melt them into new swords. Either he's desperate for resources, or because he believes that those swords crave battle.
- Discussed: "This was where the battle of the Forlorn Plains took place. I can see the warriors' old swords."
- Conversed: "Could the author make it more obvious that this is a sacred warground?"
- Deconstructed: The blades rust and some eventually disintegrate. The debris makes any flora unable to regrow. After rains, metal dissolves into the water, creating a toxic mire. The area doesn't resemble a field of swords, even know in places there are still blades stuck in the ground.
- Reconstructed: Barrens like those created by fields of swords become a cultural monument, and eventually become more symbolic than intact swords littering the area. It becomes taboo to dig out the sword fragments from the earth. The sludge is collected by blacksmiths and the water evaporated away to leave only building material.
Travel back to Field of Blades, and be careful of lockjaw on the way.
