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openSame status of all Love Triangle members
Season one's Big Bad is a mob boss. Season two's Big Bad is his wife. Season three's Big Bad is the mob boss' brother who is in love with his brother's wife. As you can see, all three are Sibling Triangle.
Edited by FuladeopenDramatic comparison
Very common in drama series and films, this is when characters describe a situation by a very different and dramatic comparison, for example in Dead Like Me Joy describes her relationship with her daughter as "rats in electric cages and everytime we talk the cage shocks us". In Real Life, no one talks like this, but I'm wondering which trope this is? Couldn't find anything on Rule of Drama
Edited by freygrilledcheeseopenSelling the dream
Is there a trope for someone in a creative job (actor, writer, director, etc.) who knowingly and deliberately makes unrealistic works/claim the Kayfabe is true without believing in it, viewing it as the audience's job to tell fiction from reality?
For instance, a writer who frequently makes use of All Girls Want Bad Boys that ends happily in their books, whose widely-read/adapted works are directly linked/blamed for an increase in drug use, prostitution, marrying domestic abusers, etc. among young women who read them. Their response to those claims is along the lines of "I cater to people's fantasies, if they're dumb enough to think that's how it happens in reality it's on them".
openA character who is a desperate cynic.
Desperate and depressive cynic Hermann almost daily conducts internal monologues about what kind of people around him are bastards, and what kind of bastard he is. Unfortunately, he's right. Absolutely right. Absolutely any and all the characters in the series are either bastards, or idiots, or cowards, or weaklings, but no one ever does anything with good intentions. Desperate because of the lack least one more or less kind person on earth, Hermann does not know where to go and do, either to arrange an apocalypse or to go to the next world himself, since being good in his universe does not just suck, nightmare.
Edited by FidoropenMurderer reveals themselves by failing to keep up appearances
After committing the crime, the perpetrator changes their behaviour in a way that only makes sense if they knew about the crime, even though they shouldn't have known about it yet unless they were the perpetrator, which is what tips off investigators.
A fictional example, used in riddles and the like, is a victim discovered by the mailman on a Thursday. The police find various pieces of mail, some bottles of warm milk, and a daily newspaper from Monday. The newspaper carrier is immediately suspicious, because unless they knew the victim had died, they had no reason to stop delivering the daily paper after Monday.
A real life example, which I saw on Forensic Files, is one where the murderer had been obsessively calling the victim multiple times a day for several days, but then suddenly stopped calling her after he killed her. He knew she was dead, so he didn't bother to keep calling; but her death hadn't been discovered by anyone else yet, so the fact that he knew she was dead indicated he was the murderer. He either didn't know or it didn't occur to him that the police would be able to review his phone records.
In my own mind I call this phenomenon "My Work Here Is Done" (the murderer knows they can stop doing something that was for the victim's benefit, and it doesn't occur to them that they still need to keep up appearances), but I don't know what it's called on TV Tropes, or if it even has a page at all. It feels related to I Never Said It Was Poison, but it's not quite the same thing.
Edited by NoriMoriopenCrime Unveils Societal Racism
I was looking on amazon for various books that were recommended on Facebook and I noticed this trope cropping up a lot on said books, usually of the literary/historical fiction type. The story centers around a crime being committed, usually a murder, and the society in which it happens turns against a non-white person who they blame for it, leading to the story exploring themes of racism and how it is pervasive in that society.
open literary allusion name
Is there an equivalent of Literary Allusion Title for character names? Like e.g. the Marvel supervillains Mr. Hyde and Sauron, who are named after characters in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Lord of the Rings respectively?
openJust some guy
The secretive villain of the week has been caught, the reveal is about to happen... and the villain is just some guy none of the main cast know.
I know this happens in Scooby Doo at least once (I think it's someone related to a museum curator?), and I'm pretty sure it has a trope page.
openI thought I was the only one (or the last one)/ I thought I was insane
It's 1970 and Alice is a Star Trek fan, watching it in syndication on her local tv station. She's written a few fanfiction stories or original scripts but is convinced that it is more or less insane to do such a thing. She knows no one else who does this and is ashamed to show them to other local fans. Then she gets hold of Joan Winston and Jacqueline Lichtenberg's "Star Trek Lives" and finds out that lots of people write fanfiction. She says "I thought I was the only one."
A little alien girl arrives from outer space with her family, but they are murdered and she is adopted by earth people. She has psychic abilities but conceals them since she thinks she is the very last one.
openA character writes a letter to a deceased loved one
A character describes events in their life in a letter/voiceover addressed to a close person who is either dead or otherwise unable to ever receive the message, with an understanding that this is done because the character still has an emotional connection to them/can't let go.
openKindly caretaker of children
A kind, caring adult at an orphanage who looks out for the children. Possibly the one good person at the Orphanage of Fear
openIt begins on the climax and the rest explains it
When a piece begins at the climax with no explanation at all and the rest of the series explains how everything got to where it started. Most of the time, when the series finally gets back to the climax, the scene continues, and the driving question/motivation gets answered/achieved.
openSwear Word Name Punishment Videogame
Very unsure of what this is called. Basically, in some video games where you are asked for a name, if you put in a curse word or something raunchy, the game will not only not allow it, but also have one of the characters of the game scold the Player for trying to put in a dirty name.
I definitely know this is the case with a Gameshow game on CD-ROM & I feel like at least one Edutainment game does this, too, but even though the name of the Trope should be easy, I struggle more with finding the right name than I'm supposed to.
openA character who become very dangerous and invincible in rage?
Evules, after the failure of his plan, falls into such a murderously psychotic, uncontrollable rampage that he single-handedly demolishes left and right special forces squad that came to arrest him, and then catches and attaches the Cruel and Unusual Death of Bob and Charlie.
Edited by FidoropenHorror movie dogs always die Film
Is there a trope for when dogs (and other animals sometimes) die in horror films? It's a really common occurrence in horror movies.
openBelieved The White Lie
Bob invites Alice to his violin recital. She doesn't want to go but doesn't want to say "Bob, your violin skills suck", so she tells him she's babysitting a kid that night.
The next time Bob invites Alice, he mentions she can bring the kid along as it's completely child-safe, evidently believing the problem was the kid and not his being a Dreadful Musician.
Edited by Chabal2openGibberish Newspaper
In movies, tv, or games, some documents or newspapers are actually be made up of nonsense gibberish, like sample text in documents that are preformatted. This is likely due to the paper/document just being a prop and not meant to be inspected closely.
It's not Left It In or Permanent Placeholder because those tropes require the sample text be intended to be replaced with real text. This is just using sample text as a shortcut or because producers/prop artists didn't have time or budget to make the real thing.
openCharacters complaining about your greedy behavior Videogame
In Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, if one of the players greedily grabs any ammo that can be found or uses a medicae station's limited uses to heal minor injuries, one of the other Player Characters will complain about your selfish behavior.
A character dies, and the same work, not a prequel, only reveals their backstory after that