Basic Trope: A culture regards what is normally seen as valuable items as worthless objects.
- Straight: Alice finds a bar of gold, but throws it away because she regards it as useless.
- Exaggerated: Alice finds a cave full of gold coins and other various treasures, but leaves without taking anything because she regards it as useless old stuff.
- Downplayed: Alice finds a £5 note on the ground, but decides that she has enough money as it is.
- Justified:
- Alice is from an alien planet where gold is so common that it really is worthless.
- Any given item only has as much worth as our need for it, and priorities can change rapidly in an emergency.
- Alice is the princess of Troperia and already has more wealth than she knows what to do with.
- Alice has been fooled by All That Glitters a few times too many.
- Alice recognized it as Chernobyl Gold from its Sickly Green Glow. It simply isn't safe to handle for at least another few decades.
- Inverted: Alice finds a used tissue and decides to sell it because she thinks it's incredibly valuable.
- Subverted: Alice finds a gold bar and throws it away, but she then decides it might be worth enough to buy her lunch, so she keeps it.
- Double Subverted: Then she looks at it and realises that it's gold, not a pencil.
- Parodied: Alice walks past a stack of gold bars, a pile of antique jewellery, and deeds to the entire country of Sweden, but decides that they probably aren't worth much anyway.
- Zig Zagged: Alice takes half the gold bars in a stack, because she thinks the other half is completely worthless.
- Averted: Alice finds a gold bar and picks it up.
- Enforced:
- "Let's show our audience that Alice is stupid!"
- Alternatively: "Let's show our audience Alice's culture has moved beyond petty things like Gold Fever."
- Lampshaded: "What's this, gold? What would I need that for?"
- Invoked: Bob makes sure Alice doesn't know the value of gold.
- Exploited: So that he can take all the gold she leaves lying on the floor.
- Defied: Alice makes sure she knows what valuable things she might find before setting out on her grand adventure.
- Discussed: "Y'know, a friend of mine once found gold and just left it there. Not nobility or anything, she was just an idiot."
- Conversed: "How does that character not know the value of gold? Was she living under a rock? Maybe one of those shiny yellow ones."
- Played for Drama:
- Alice is dying of thirst and the hole she dug to find water spews out oil. Alice goes Laughing Mad at the irony of (potentially) dying rich.
- Bob has a million dollars in his briefcase that he tries to bribe Alice with. For a variety of reasons (including maybe being hell-bent on revenge), Alice tells Bob that money is only a bunch of paper for all that is going to help him now.
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