Basic Trope: A giant serpentine creature that travels underground and is a real menace when it erupts out.
- Straight: Alice and Bob when crossing the desert run afoul of Trope-Halad, a blue whale-sized worm that travels underneath the earth and emerges periodically to hunt anything on the surface.
- Exaggerated: Trope-Halad is so big he is the desert.
- Downplayed: The Trope-Halad is a species of fairly large worm a few metres long, and while fairly dangerous, it can be repelled if you know what to do.
- Justified: Alice and Bob are in an alien desert, so it's not implausible that they would find unique alien creatures, especially something of simple shape like a big worm.
- Inverted: Alice and Bob are crossing the tundra, and run afoul a Snow Trope-Halad.
- Subverted: Trope-Halad is just a mirage.
- Double Subverted: A mirage caused by toxic gases emitted by the real Trope-Halad.
- Parodied: Big and dangerous as it may be, Trope-Halad is merely the prey of an even more enormous bird - not even a bird of prey, but a bird that's basically just a very big robin.
- Lampshaded:
- Invoked: Trope-Halad is the result of a scientific experiment dedicated to creating soil-fertilizing worms that can live in the desert. Needless to say, it has Gone Horribly Wrong.
- Exploited: Turns out the government actually wanted a giant bioweapon beast for desert warfare, in which case the experiment has Gone Horribly Right instead.
- Defied:
- "Huge worms that live in barren wastes? Dont be riduculous. Those are just myths."
- "We don't care what you scientists say, we are not funding projects involving giant worms".
