Basic Trope:
- Straight:
- A witch casts a spell on Alice forcing her to dance.
- Alice creates a device that makes her dance.
- Alice comes into possession of a pair of shoes that make her feet dance.
- Exaggerated:
- The spell makes Alice dance to she drops dead.
- The spell can make paraplegic, comatose or even dead people dance under its influence.
- Downplayed:
- The spell forces Alice to constantly move her hands and feet.
- The device greatly improves Alice’s coordination.
- Justified: The device was made by an aspiring dancer.
- Inverted: The device is designed to make Alice stop dancing instead of the other way around.
- Subverted: Alice uses the device thinking that it will make her dance, but in reality, it was just her own skill the entire time and the device was turned off.
- Double Subverted: At the end of the story's resolution, it's revealed that the device still somewhat works during The Stinger.
- Parodied: To win the dance competition, Alice buys a dance ray and rigs it to zap her mid-performance so she can dance perfectly. It works, but due to it being made from a prototype of The Nudifier, also strips Alice naked. Due to the dance ray’s effect, she is unable to run away or cover herself up and has to keep dancing in front of the bemused audience. On the bright side, she still ultimately wins.
- Zig-Zagged: ???
- Averted: Alice casts a magic spell on herself to make her dance continuously but she never seems any worse for wear from it and despite the spell's function, she can stop at any time.
- Enforced: "?"
- Lampshaded: "?"
- Invoked: While Alice is setting herself up for the dance competition, her rival remembers several occasions in stories in which the protagonist humiliates themselves once subjected to this trope, and decides to make a pair of robot shoes to invoke this and sabotage her so she wins instead.
- Exploited: To win the dance competition, Alice buys a dance ray and rigs it to zap her mid-performance so she can dance perfectly.
- Defied: Alice sees a fancy pair of magic shoes she is told can make her dance perfectly until she drops. Knowing the numerous fairy tales where this is too good to be true, she passes up on the offer.
- Discussed: Alice is being shown a device that is supposed to make her a better dancer and questions if it would go haywire and make her dance uncontrollably instead. Her inventor friend assures her that this only happens in cartoons.
- Conversed: "?"
- Implied: Alice is seen twitching her face and grimacing as she dances.
- Played for Laughs: Alice is made to do several dated and humiliating dances like The Macarena.
- Played for Drama: Alice needs to stop a villain from taking over the world, but she is affected by her power which renders her unable to do anything but dance helplessly. The fate of the world depends on her snapping out of this, and her adversary comes dangerously close to fulfilling their wishes because of this.
- Played for Horror:
- Alice, who was an abusive ballet instructor who abused and pimped out her students, spends Hell dancing for eternity, begging for death that would never come to free her from her exhaustion.
- Alice is forced to dance until she drops dead from exhaustion or dehydration.
Back to Involuntary Dance
