Basic Trope: A fictional Middle-Eastern setting.
- Straight: Tropestan is located in a desert environment, with lots of Middle-Eastern sounding music and is a primarily Muslim country.
- Exaggerated:
- Tropestan is full of Arab Oil Sheikh men and Sultry Belly Dancer women, and there's lots of camels, hummus, falafels, hookahs, and coffee.
- Alternatively, Tropestan is a Crapsack World where it's Honor Before Reason, full of terrorists and abused women covered from head to toe. Also, gays are banned and killed but you can marry up to four wives.
- Downplayed:
- Tropestan people dress up for tourists but aren't much different otherwise.
- Tropestan does something that isn't associated with the Qurac trope such as being majority Christian or Buddhist, or being in a temperate climate, or has not a drop of oil in it, but otherwise does everything else stereotypical.
- Or, this Tropestan setting is subtle enough that some people are acutally convinced it's a real place.
- Justified: The setting is the Middle East, and Tropestan is a copy of a real-life Middle Eastern country.
- Inverted: Tropestan is blatantly part of Eagleland.
- Subverted:
- Tropestan seems to have absorbed a lot of Western culture.
- Tropestan turns out to be something like Opa-Lacka, Florida where architecture and some cultural spots only look Middle Eastern, but the nation is entirely run by non Middle Eastern people who just liked the aesthetic but don't really engage in any of the traditional culture.
- Double Subverted:
- But it still has a rich Middle-Eastern type culture with lots of traditions of that culture.
- The Foreign Culture Fetish end up Arabizing themselves anyway, much to the confusion of the actual Middle Eastern People.
- Parodied:
- Every street corner has a palace in it with a decadent Sultan, an Evil Vizier and a Harem with lots of Eunechs to guard them. Everybody around is a bloodthirsty terrorist, and foams at the mouth at seeing a woman even peeking out the window. Oil is also the official drink.
- It's not Tropestan it's something ridiculous like Tropitropitropitropistanstan.
- Zig Zagged: Sometimes Tropestan is portrayed this way, other times not.
- Averted: Tropestan's culture is more like that of America, Europe, East Asia, etc, it just happens to be set in the Middle East.
- Enforced: "We need to portray the Middle East in a way familiar to Westerners."
- Lampshaded: "Sounds like it's in the Middle East."
- Invoked: Alice and Bob are lost in the desert, and find themselves helped out by an Arab Oil Sheikh with an impressive harem of beautiful women.
- Exploited: Tropestan has no oil and needs some way to make money, Hollywood is looking for a location to shoot in.
- Defied: Over time, Tropestan has become a very secular country, and taken in a lot of outside influence. Any Middle-Eastern type traditions and culture it had are a thing of the past.
- Discussed: "I hear Tropestan is a nice place..."
- Conversed: "Why is the Middle East either a paradise of belly-dancers and camels or a Crapsack World of crazy terrorists?"
- Deconstructed: the audience is led to understand that they are seeing Tropestan through the eyes of an Orientalist Unreliable Narrator.
- Reconstructed: The writers have Shown Their Work, and the setting is portrayed like a real Middle-Eastern country.
- Played For Laughs: The Western characters commit hilarious cultural gaffes because of their misconceptions about the country.
- Played For Drama: The Western characters misunderstand the culture with devastating results.
Back to Qurac
