Basic Trope: A woman is Delicate and Sickly, and the illness is said to be very serious, if not terminal, but she looks perfectly healthy if a bit pale, and she's generally still physically able.
- Straight: Alice is said to have an ambiguous Convenient Terminal Illness, but despite her Incurable Cough of Death, occasional complaints about feeling bad, and occasional fainting spells, she doesn't look feverish and is still just as active and coordinated as ever.
- Exaggerated: Alice is said to have the worst disease in the world, but she looks and acts a hundred percent healthy and her only "symptom" is occasional complaints about being under the weather.
- Justified:
- It's a made-up disease which doesn't act like regular illnesses.
- Alice has some sort of superpowers.
- Only the secondary symptoms are visible to the naked eye, whereas the primary symptoms require surgical investigation, if not autopsy.
- Downplayed: Alice is said to have a serious case of the flu, but it acts more like a cold.
- Inverted: Alice is said to be healthy, but she looks very sick.
- Gender Inverted: Bob is said to have a Convenient Terminal Illness but despite his Incurable Cough of Death, fainting spells, and moodiness, he seems perfectly fine.
- Subverted:
- Alice starts getting weaker and more feverish-looking.
- It turns out Alice just had epilepsy and a cold.
- Alice seems healthy mostly from keeping up appearances. Behind closed doors she promptly displays the hidden the gross and disturbing real life symptoms, such as coughing up blood.
- Double Subverted:
- But that was only a temporary "blip."
- Then, Carol is diagnosed with leukemia and shows no symptoms.
- Parodied: Characters look up Alice's ailment in a medical book, which reads: "Victorian Novel Virus: Symptoms include coughing, fainting, and complaining but literally nothing else, leads to death, usually only targets women."
- Averted:
- Alice experiences normal symptoms.
- Alice doesn't get sick.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice's symptoms are sometimes that of a serious illness, sometimes that of flu, sometimes that of a cold, and sometimes nonexistent. On top of that, Bob, The Medic, sometimes acts like the disease is terminal, sometimes acts like it's serious but not terminal, and sometimes acts like it's just a cold.
- Enforced: The disease Alice gets has throwing up or other gross symptoms and the writers didn't want to squick out the audience. Additionally, they need Alice to be physically able as she's the only one who possesses a particular physical skill that's needed for the plot. However, they decided they needed a serious illness to add drama, and they pulled out Alice's name from a hat.
- Lampshaded: "Really? She doesn't seem that ill to me."
- Invoked: Dr. Psycho creates a deadly illness that doesn't seem to hurt people so that victims won't notice until it's too late.
- Exploited: Alice can do whatever she wants before she dies because she's still physically able.
- Defied: Alice stays away from situations where she's likely to be exposed to this disease.
- Discussed: "What's the chances of getting a terminal disease that doesn't affect your appearance or physical ability?"
- Conversed: "If it weren't for the fact that the writers are rubbing it in, I'd forget that Alice was sick."
- Implied: Alice dies and Bob says she had a serious illness, but she seemed fine before.
- Deconstructed: ???
- Reconstructed: ???
- Played for Laughs: The other characters think Alice has a terminal illness after reading a Victorian novel because she as a dry throat from pollen and is also epileptic. However, we know Alice was fine from the start.
- Played for Drama: Well, she is meant to be dying.
Back to Victorian Novel Disease.
