Birds and Flowers of Four Seasons (1917), Araki Jippo
Tropes pertaining to seasons, yearly climate cycles and how these may work oddly for narrative and setting purposes.
Compare Holiday Tropes, as the seasonal nature of holidays means that the two concepts tend to be closely associated in fiction.
Not to be confused with Seasons, which lists tropes pertaining to the seasons and story arcs of television shows and cartoons.
Tropes:
Related:
- Bizarre Seasons: The seasons work in very odd ways.
- Cherry Blossoms: These are often used to symbolize spring.
- Cicadian Rhythm: Do you hear cicadas? It must be summer, then.
- Cold Snap: A wintery or cold-themed episode in a series that normally sticks to mild weather.
- Dreaming of a White Christmas: It always snows when it's Christmas.
- Endless Winter: An unnatural winter that never ends.
- Four-Seasons Level: A video game level whose main gimmick is that it alternates through the various seasons.
- Forest of Perpetual Autumn: A forested area that's eternally stuck in autumn.
- Heat Wave: A wave of crushing, unbearable heat.
- Indian Summer: A period of unseasonable warmth.
- It's Always Spring: A setting exists in the same constant, nondescript green-and-pleasant season unless a specific installment's plot requires otherwise.
- Jack Frost: The Anthropomorphic Personification of winter.
- Kigo: Specific words or phrases traditionally used in Japanese poetry to evoke one of the four seasons.
- Out of Holiday Episode: A work is released in a different season than when it's set.
- Seasonal Baggage: The motifs associated with the four seasons — flowers and songbirds for spring, colorful leaves for autumn, etcetera.
- Single-Season Country: A country is depicted as being perpetually stuck on one specific season, such as always being cold in Canada and Russia or always being warm in Mexico and Australia.
- Spring Is Late: Spring is late in coming, and this is a very bad thing.
- Summer Campy: Every summer, preteens can count on being shipped off to the most boring, badly run and/or plain awful summer camp that can be found.
- Summer Romance: Love blooms in the summer months.
- Summer School Sucks: School during summer break is portrayed negatively.
- Winter of Starvation: Characters become desperate for food during the winter, and may be driven to doing immoral things to survive.
- Winter Warfare: War Is Hell to begin with, but war in the wintertime is a special kind of awful.
