Basic Trope: Characters are unknowingly fed human flesh.
- Straight: Alice serves Bob shepherd's pie...made with actual shepherd. Bob, none the wiser, enjoys every bite and licks his plate clean.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice owns a restaurant, and every non-vegetarian dish on the menu includes some human flesh.
- Alice slices off Bob's penis and gives it to him to eat later, telling him it's sausage.
- Every item in Alice's bakery is made from powdered human bones, and she makes "fee fi fo fum" jokes as a Sarcastic Confession.
- Downplayed:
- Alice feeds ground-up human flesh to her dog.
- Alice disposes of corpses in her vegetable garden, and cannibalism is purely metaphorical.
- Justified: Human flesh really does resemble pork or other "mundane" meat, so one could be told that the meat they're eating is pork and they wouldn't know the difference.
- Inverted: Alice serves Bob a pork chop, and tells him it's human flesh.
- Subverted: The shepherd's pie has no shepherd in it.
- Double Subverted: It does have a little bit of ground up plumber, however.
- Parodied: Alice puts out a cookbook full of secret human recipes.
- Zig Zagged: Alice uses different types of meat for her foods, depending on what's available and what the dish is. Sometimes it's beef, sometimes pork, sometimes chicken, sometimes tofu (or other meat substitute), and sometimes human flesh.
- Averted:
- Alice doesn't cook In-Universe.
- Alice doesn't use human flesh in any of her cooking.
- Bob and Alice are both cannibals, so there's no reason to lie.
- Enforced: There has been a recent high-profile food safety scandal, and the producers want to cash in with an exaggerated example.
- Lampshaded:
- "If you can't find Long Pork, regular pork is fine."
- "Dammit. Long pork. I should've figured it out sooner."
- Implied: After accidentally murdering someone, Alice worries about how to dispose of the body. Later Bob remarks that Alice's dish tastes of gamey pork.
- Invoked: Alice finds out that Bob has been cheating on her with Carol, and wants to make both of them suffer. She begins to fantasize about killing Carol, butchering her, and then secretly Force Feeding her to Bob.
- Exploited: Alice wants to get Bob kicked out of his religious community, so she forces him to commit a grave sin.
- Defied: Alice doesn't want to go to Prison, so she doesn't kill Carol or feed her to Bob.
- Untwisted: Alice serves Bob a veggie burger, that turns out to be Manufactured by Soylent Green.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Alice serves Bob shepherd's pie...made with actual shepherd. Bob eats the pie, only to later die of food poisoning. Alice is then wanted worldwide for her deliberate murder of Bob.
- Reconstructed: Alice doesn't care. Her only satisfaction comes from feeding others shepherd pies...made with actual shepherd...out of greed.
Back to The Secret of Long Pork Pies.
