Bob is not allowed to post on "Things Bob is not allowed to do on TV Tropes"
—The First Ever Rule in the List
Things Bob is not Allowed to do on TV Tropes
is a forum game hosted on, you guessed it, This Very Wiki. In a similar vein to Skippy's List and Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG it is a collaborative effort anyone can contribute too dedicated to chronicling the various things resident Cloudcuckoolander/Diabolical Mastermind Bob (of Alice and Bob fame) is forbidden from doing on TV Tropes (later Trope Co.). Bob's offenses can range from mundane to fantastical to completely over-the-top.
Suffering through this chaos is a colorful cast including TV Tropes Mainstays, Author Avatars, Pop-Culture Icons, and Wholly Original Characters. Some are dedicated to stopping Bob, some are almost as bad as him, and some are just swept away in the madness. All are unique in their own way.
The game has inspired two spin-off games, Trope Co. Incident Reports and TropeCo Reviver Machine Test Facility.
Bob is not allowed to list Tropes:
- Aerith and Bob: Quite literally. While Bob and most recurring background characters have fairly normal names, Author Avatars will usually use the screenname of the Troper they represent.
- Actually Pretty Funny: One thing Bob is allowed to do is make Youtube Poop using the security footage, for exactly this reason.
- Affectionate Gesture to the Head: Several people attempt to do this to BackSet as a Braixen. Despite banning them it's implied he actually enjoys them.
- Antagonist Title: Bob is undeniably the antagonist of the list (whether he's evil or just dim depends on who's writing the entry, the weather outside, the time of day, whatever piece of fiction they are currently obsessing over, and how they're feeling at that particular moment) and his name is in the title.
- Author Avatar: Since the list is written from an in-universe perspective, every person who contributes has an Author Avatar by default. While many are simply fictionalized versions of the Troper they represent, others have grown beyond their writer and gained histories, interests, and personalities all their own.
- Ban on Magic: Bob is very explicitly banned from doing magic of any sort. This does not stop him from doing magic on the regular.
- Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: Bob once asked the Shoggoth to make a burrito so spicy not even the latter could eat it, and it obliged. The Dripster then thought it was a good idea to try and eat said burrito.
- Building of Adventure: Most of the antics in the list and its spin-offs takes place within the Trope Co. office building, which has plenty of wacky and sometimes outright deadly features including a Giant Spider Breeding Lab and a portal to a Seussian Wonderland/Hellscape in the All-Gender Bathroom.
- Christmas Creep: Bob has been banned from defrosting Mariah Carey as soon as Halloween is over. Doesn't exactly stop the higher-ups at Trope Co. from doing exactly that.
- Cloudcuckoolander: While Bob's actions have been portrayed as coming anywhere from mere ignorance to outright malicious intent, they consistently result from Bob being... not quite all there.
- Comedic Sociopathy: Much of the game's comedy comes from the hilariously terrible things Bob does as well as the hilariously terrible things people do to Bob.
- Cosmic Retcon: One of the Bobs pressed a Reset Button, whcih caused the timeline to reset to before he had split into four.
- Crazy Workplace: The story involves everyone at Trope Co. trying to keep Bob (of Alice and Bob fame) from committing insane shennanegans. This is such a time-sink that most of them have forgotten their actual jobs. While 90% of employees are normal people, employees also include anthropomorphic cats, robots, sentient polygons, and no less than three demons. The building contains a meth lab-come-brewery adjacent to the employee breakroom/video game arcade and a giant spider breeding ground, and is made up of Alien Geometries (including a portal to a full-blown World of Weirdness in the all-gender bathroom).
- Depending on the Writer: The actions and dispositions of the various Non-Author Avatar characters changes frequently depending on who's making the rule. It is not uncommon to see one post where Bob is told off for being an idiot and another where Bob is reprimanded for being an evil genius.
- Do Not Adjust Your Set: Somehow, Bob managed to hijack Nickelodeon and then other channels to play gory scenes from the Saw movies and Cannibal Holocaust.
- Eldritch Abomination: While several have appeared throughout the game the most notable is a recurring Shoggoth which started as Bob's pet before essentially being adopted by the whole office.
- Eldritch Location: The Beige Meeting Room. What exactly is in it is never specified, but Bob has been banned from involving it in his antics numerous times and the room turned a massive quantity of durians into a monster when they were put inside it.
- Facial Horror: Bob’s Flareon, Ember, had a bad habit of burning people’s faces off.
- From Bad to Worse:
- The Battle for the Breakroom got so bad that an actual Reset Button had to be pressed.
- Bob was told to shut down a rave taking place in Server Room #3. Somehow, this led to it becoming, first a strip club, then a bordello.
- Gargle Blaster: Bob brews kombucha (fermented tea) that's 150 proof. Kombucha isn't supposed to have any alcohol at all.
- Hated by All: Part of the main conceit of the game is that absolutely nobody likes Bob, with his constant antics causing terrible things to happen to everyone involved by and getting in the way of doing actual work.
- Heel–Face Turn: Over the course of the list the Succubus and Incubus both slowly become forces for good, going from assisting Bob with his antics to reluctantly assisting Bob with his antics to assisting in stopping/fixing his antics.
- Mad Scientist: Bob, particularly in his smarter portrayals, is a science whiz and creates all sorts of crazy inventions, mostly to the detriment of those around him. Early on he was banned from using Science Equipment of any sort but he just keeps doing it.
- The Multiverse: One recurring gadget is a Portal Gun that allows the user to travel the Multiverse (mostly consisting of various settings from pop-culture). It is destroyed in its first appearance but is later reassembled. Bob also uses a Stepper machine and a Continua Drive for his multiversal shennanigans.
- Noodle Incident: Most of the rules in the list were implemented in the aftermath of one of these, excluding the many present in the backstories of other employees.
- Not the Intended Use: The office maintains a pumpkin chucker (a trebuchet used to fling pumpkins competitively) which gets used for everything but, including trash disposal, assisted takeoff of flight-capable characters, and satellite deployment.
- Obliquely Obfuscated Occupation: It's unclear what, exactly, Trope Co. does. It's implied to involve Tropes but other than that any hint towards it's purpose is wildly disconnected.
- Out of Focus: The original characters were pushed heavily at the time of their creation but (barring some early ones like the Succubus and Incubus) eventually took a back seat to the Author Avatars and Licensed Characters, only occasionally appearing and not having any sort of ongoing story arcs (at least, what passes for story arcs in this game).
- Red Shirt: The interns act as this, usually being killed in some manner by Bob's antics.
- Reference Overdosed: Basically every other post contains a reference to some Franchise or other from Waxing Lyrical to visiting locations to outright including characters as part of the main cast.
- Robot Me: Bob once created a robot version of himself to get out of a HR intervention. Robo-Bob turned out to be a Nice Guy (and later Butt-Monkey), however.
- Rule of Funny: The list pretty much exclusively runs on this and the world and characters frequently change depending on what would be funniest at any given moment.
- Running Gag: Quite a few. An incomplete list:
- Sending Bob to the Gulag.
- "[Historical Figure or Fictional Character] is not a good role model."
- "Bob is not allowed to watch/play/read [Work] on the grounds that it gives him ideas."
- Satiating Sandwich: Bob has exactly one talent: making philly cheese steak sandwiches, and once hijacked a food truck to go all the way to Philidelphia to learn how to make them right.
- Screw Yourself: Bob is explicitly banned from doing this... so of course he proceeded to do it anyways after he was split into four versions of himself.
- Succubi and Incubi: Two recurring characters are a Succubus and Incubus summoned by Bob on two separate occasions. Both start off causing problems alongside Bob before doing a Heel–Face Turn. Whatever bargain Bob struck with them for their servitude, company policy states that he has to pay them an earthly minimum wage on top of it.
- Uninstallment: Rule #3274, which apparently regarded the "Fork Incident" before Bob somehow stole it from the list.
- Waxing Lyrical: Some rules are references to song lyrics or titles, such as this one namedropping the titles/choruses of various Boss Themes from Sonic Frontiers.
- Weird Crossover: The game is frequently used as an excuse for Tropers to put their favorite characters in, resulting in such wacky things as Sothis, Malenia (Blade of Miquella), a Shoggoth, an Imperial Inquisitor, and Slobs all coexisting in the same universe.
- Work Com: The main setting is stated to be an Office Building and a lot of the comedy that isn't references comes from Bob being a terrible employee.
- You, Get Me Coffee: Bob can barely be trusted to do even that.
