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General
- Crosses the Line Twice: Several scenes, noticably Wade Wilson's rampage and Carson Baye's death.
- Fan Nickname: Tons. 'Bocelot' (Bobby Jacks), 'BCarv' (Bryant Carver), 'Captain America' (Tyler Blake)
- 'The Terrific Three' for Kaige, Rice, and McLocke.
- Sometimes used to differentiate characters with the same name: Happy!Nick (Nick LeMonde) and Sad!Nick (Nick Reid), and Sarax (Sarah Xu), STan (Sarah Tan) and Seizure Girl (Sarah Atwell) being the main examples.
- "SCDos" Is the preferred name for Second Chances 2 among the handlers. A hypothetical Virtua sequel has been dubbed Vir2ua.
- LGBT Fanbase: A lot of site members fit this, and it has been noted that character demographics tend to skew on the more diverse side (even if the characters are supposed to come from areas where things are more conservative).
- Moment of Awesome: Most characters will get one at some point. Some of the better examples can be found on the relevant page.
- Narm: Due to the written medium, a poorly placed typo or the like can utterly ruin a scene's mood. Also, the gore in some scenes is so hilariously over the top and childish (not to mention some of the one-liners...), that it's almost impossible to take seriously. On the other hand...
- Nightmare Fuel: ...some scenes use gore in a skilled enough manner to give the reader a serious case of the willies. Now has its own page.
- Obvious Judas: When the phrase "pre-made player" is used, this trope is what handlers are referring to. Generally it means that a character is obviously going to play just from a casual read-through of their profile. Such traits include any mixture of Dark and Troubled Past, excellent manipulation skills, prior experience with weapons and/or martial arts, mental instability, or outright sociopathy. While more common in earlier versions, the site's staff has made an effort to avert this during profile submissions by asking characters with these traits to be rewritten, if not denied outright.
- Paranoia Fuel: It's all too easy to start applying the mindsets of characters to your own classmates.
- Spoiled by the Format: It's notoriously difficult to follow SOTF reading a version after the fact usually requires going by character, and the site's wiki has a full list of their threads. If the topic you're reading is the last one listed as featuring that character, it's not too hard to draw a conclusion about their fate.
- Actively participating in the game also requires reading the announcements, which in character tell the students what is happening and out of character tell participants who is due to die. Since handlers have to read this part or else fail to discover that their own character might be on the chopping block, they will immediately be spoiled on the imminent deaths of the half dozen or so characters rolled
- Tear Jerker: Several, although given the premise, that isn't really surprising.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: A typical version features a large, fully fleshed-out cast. Death order is decided by random chance. As a result, you're going to end up feeling this way about at least one character.
- Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: It can be a little hard to care when you know all but one person's going to die, that person will be a shell of their former selves, and Danya or his successors will inevitably win in the end (even if it doesn't look like it).
- Vindicated by History: Some characters from early versions who were quickly forgotten were praised upon being re-discovered by the handlers. Examples of this include Jeremy Torres from v1 and Huy Tran from v2.
- The Woobie: It's to be expected, given the premise. Most characters go through a round of cutie or haughty-breaking, and the more sympathetic ones tend to be some variant of this.
Version 1
- Cargo Ship: Kouji Ginsenshi and his soup.
- Ensemble Dark Horse: Heather Pendergrast, Jeremy Torres, Lyndi Thibodeaux and Fred and Glenn Hughes.
- Memetic Mutation: "And then Minase died of aids"
- Kouji Ginsenshi is forever associated with soup thanks to one memorable scene.
- Moral Event Horizon: Cody Jensen raping and murdering Madelaine Shirohara, and then accidentally killing Amanda Jones.
Version 2
- Cargo Ship: Burton Harris ( Actually Ken Lawson.)'s obsession with weed crosses into this territory.
- Designated Villain: Nicole Carter-Madison. Her son Damien's story attempts to paint her as an awful mother, but most handlers disagree. Of course, Damien isn't exactly a reliable narrator in the first place.
- Ensemble Dark Horse: CJ the hook-handed janitor from Bathurst High. After being forgotten for a long time, he was immediately embraced by the handlers during a revisit of v2.
- Nicole Carter-Madison, the mother of Damien Carter-Madison, has also received a resurgence in popularity. Most handlers consider her to be a good, albeit overprotective mom who deserved better treatment from her son.
- Memetic Badass: Huy Tran is jokingly referred to as "The Savior of v2" for killing Sam Sorenson.
- Bryan Calvert, not only for his time on-island that often resembled an action movie, but for being arguably the best-written character in v2. To date, he is still considered one of the site's best winners.
- Memetic Mutation: Any mention of weed will immediately be linked to Burton Harris and vice versa.
- Sophomore Slump: v2 is widely considered to be the worst of the main versions due to severe inactivity issues, very uneven quality with the average leaning towards poor, and a large amount of unlikable and gimmicky characters.
Version 3
- Alas, Poor Scrappy: The death of Liam Black was considered to be well-written, and genuinely saddening, in spite of the fact that the character was extremely unpopular whilst alive.
- Memetic Badass: Bobby Jacks, who in-game managed to headshot a student from behind without looking at them. This led to tales of Bobby ricocheting bullets Revolver Ocelot-style (which led to the nickname Bocelot), killing students from several threads away, and firing his gun in v3 and killing a student in v4.
Version 4
- Base-Breaking Character: Maxwell Lombardi. He's either hated for being cliche and over the top, or loved for those exact same reasons.
- Liam Brooks, full stop. Same reasoning as above post-breakdown. He's either seen as an effective Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds or an over the top villain running on a Gimmick.
- Designated Hero: Peter Siu is intended to be seen as a heroic character, but he would abruptly kill people for poorly defined reasons. One memorable moment occurred when a girl expressed her desire to find and work with Liz Polanski, and Peter's response was to kill her then and there, in front of her boyfriend, no less. And then he expected said boyfriend to be okay with it!
- Ensemble Dark Horse: Mr. Kwong. It's very unusual for a non-student to get much attention (either in or out of character), but you'd be hard pressed to find a handler that doesn't like him.
- Memetic Mutation: Nick LeMonde's Hunga Munga went on to become one of the most mentioned weapons in SOTF, due to its silly name and bizarre appearance. It lead to it being reused in future versions.
- Moe: Sierra Manning, a cute emotional girl whose cuteness is only amplified by her lisp.
- This trope could also easily explain why Orn "Dutchy" Ayers is so popular on the board. Dutchy is an Icelandic, free-loving comic book nerd who watches soccer and cries Tender Tears over the plight of third-world countries among other things. Add in his in-game posts, which makes many handlers see him as The Woobie, and his habit of wearing a Pointless Band-Aid over his nose, and you have a character who most of the board adores. Which makes his mental scarring and subsequent death all that more painful.
- Moral Event Horizon: Sarah Atwell's slow, calculated torture of Eve Walker-Luther.
- Alex White's Cold-Blooded Torture of Rosa Fiametta. It's not helped by it being written similarly to a rape scene. At all.
- Portmanteau Couple Name: The broship of Liam "Brook" Brooks and Jason Harris is generally referred to as "Brason", while Garry Villette and Saul Fetteralf are commonly referred to as either "Garul" or "Gaul".
- Sarah Xu and Reiko Ishida, who are often called "Sareiko" when mentioned together.
Version 5
- Base-Breaking Character: Gavin Hunter is either an interesting concept with flawed execution or an affront to the whole site, depending on who you ask. It doesn't help that his handler Rage Quit the site after his escape attempt failed.
Version 6
- Base-Breaking Character:
- Jerry Fury as a parody of early SOTF can either be seen as a hilarious take on old character tropes and attitudes or an unfunny character that falls into the trappings of those very same tropes.
- Isabel Ramirez is intended to be a throwback to V3 style Sadists, which makes her polarizing on premise. She tends to be considered either a great homage to killers from the earlier versions while being an illustration of how to do such tropes correctly, or making the same mistakes that made those characters less than interesting in the first place by being over the top with her bloodthirsty characterization.
- Ensemble Dark Horse: Josie Knight, a new terrorist in V6, quickly became a favourite due to her high tier snark. Another new terrorist, Boris Petrikov, gained popularity due to his more Punch-Clock Villain attitude and general "sad dad" demeanor.
- Les Yay: Georgia Lee Day and Fiyori Senay are antagonistic towards each other throughout pregame and the main game itself, but they also have several intimate interactions. Georgia Lee even dies in Fiyori's arms moments after Fiyori declares her hatred of her.
- Moral Event Horizon: Isabel Ramirez torturing an already-injured Conrad Harrod to death, reflecting on how much she is enjoying it the whole while. She goes on to do this to other people as well.
- Running Gag: People misspelling or mispronouncing Alvaro Vacanti's name, both in-universe and OOC.
Version 7
- Ho Yay: Darlene Silva has an unexpected moment of this when her travelling companion Jonah Heartgrave accomplishes their group's goal of finding his prom date Arizona Butler. She starts openly blushing as she catches herself thinking about Arizona's butt.
