The TVTropes Trope Finder is where you can come to ask questions like "Do we have this one?" and "What's the trope about...?" Trying to rediscover a long lost show or other medium but need a little help? Head to You Know That Show and try your luck there. Want to propose a new trope? You should be over at You Know, That Thing Where.
Find a Trope:
Reverse-cyborg
Example:
"After Commander Alice's ship crash lands into another planet, her enforcer droid is critically damaged. With no spare parts for repair, Commander Alice uses the body parts and biomass from various denizens of the planet to patch up her enforcer droid. Thus, Alice's enforcer droid becomes a reverse-cyborg - a robotic being with organic parts."
Action Cheerleader
Is there a trope for the type of character that is a cheerleader and also involved with a lot of action? Think Kim Possible, Juliet Starling, Sabrina Spellman, etc.
Overzealous Shipper on Deck
Basically a trope that's more basic than Shipper with an Agenda: a character wants to see their ship sail so bad that they have zero regard for what the people in said ship feel about it.
(A little like Control Freak but more specific.)
Overly long bathroom trip
When a character spends an impossibly long amount of time in the bathroom, much longer than is natural, like two hours or longer.
Sick while filming?
Is there a trivia trope for when actors are or fall ill during filming, often effecting production?
An extreme example would be Raul Julia going through chemo while filming Street Fighter: The Movie. Or the production crew getting food poisoning during Raiders of the Lost Ark, or the gastrointestinal issues that happened on The Dick Van Dyke Show when the cast and crew ate too many walnuts during the production of an episode.
CapitalFocusCountry
A fictional country is shown to have vast territores, but nothing outside the palace/capital is known.
Lensman Arms Race compressed into a single Chase Scene Western Animation
Is there a trope for when enemies chase each other back and forth across the screen because the pursuee grabbed a bigger stick offscreen and became the pursuer each time the chase reached the edge of the screen?
Trope in the 1990 TMNT film Film
In the first half of the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film, there's a scene where April O'Neil (as played by Judith Hoag) wakes up from being knocked out by the Foot and, upon seeing Splinter and the Turtles for the first time, shrieks and says "Oh, my god. Oh, my god. I'm dead. I'm dead, aren't I?".
Which trope fits the above description?
Edited by gjjonesDoesn't get the obvious punchline
There's a joke in Scrubs where JD overhears an intern calling Turk "Dr. Jerk". Turk then says, "You should hear what they call Dr. Mickhead." After a beat, JD asks what the interns call Dr. Mickhead. The joke is, it should be fairly obvious what the nickname for Dr. Mickhead is.
AI computer system that runs the infrastructure
Some sci-fi works feature what are effectively if not explicitly artificially-intelligent supercomputer systems — of the stationary kind, to be clear, thus ruling out mobile robots — that are tasked with running the infrastructure of a facility or even an entire city, and occasionally double as Mission Control for the protagonist.
Examples:
- Doom (2016): VEGA is an AI installed on a massive data processing center within the Mars research facility, which it operates in addition to supporting the player as Mission Control after they make their first visit.
- The manga Hotel features an artificially-intelligent supercomputer system named Louis Armstrong who is the caretaker of a gigantic facility in Antarctica designed to preserve a genome bank of every species on modern Earth (sans that of humanity) against the apocalyptic conditions that the planet would experience over the course of the story's time frame (several millions of years, to be specific). Louis doesn't simply run the facility, he continuously adapts to the changing conditions, including more than a few unforeseen events, and the challenges that they pose to his mission, repairing damage, expanding the facility and modifying existing components as best as he could.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Magi is a system of three artificially intelligent supercomputers that work in concert to run a wide assortment of Nerv HQ's electronic systems in the background, practically the entirety of Tokyo-3's municipal infrastructure (including secretly manipulating election results), processing data, running simulations and providing feedback on proposed plans (typically evaluating their odds of success and failure).
Is there a trope for this AI character type? Or for the situation of having most if not all of your essential infrastructure be run and controlled by an AI?
Edited by MarqFJATechnological stagnation/regression
Is there a trope for when a society suffers stagnation or even regression of its technology base? Prime example being Warhammer 40,000's Imperium of Man, which had enjoyed a brief period of slow technological recovery after the apocalyptic Dark Age of Technology, only for a massive Civil War to more or less permanently cripple it so that not only did it lose significant swaths of its scientific knowledge and technology, but slowly lose more and more of both over the course of the next 10 millennia to all sorts of causes.
I'm sure that there more examples can be found in After the End, but this is all that I can think of off the top of my head.
FWIW, I doubt that Lost Technology covers this, because 1) it's specifically about incredibly advanced technology made by Precursors that is found later, rather than the tech regression/loss itself, and 2) the society that made the tech doesn't have to be ancestral to the one that finds it (e.g. it can be made by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens and then found by Future Primitive humans).
Turkey Chase
Would chasing a turkey or a different animal count as a Chase Scene or something else like that?
Promise before details
Alice asks Bob if he'll promise her something. He swears — yes, anything. Then Alice tells him the details: something Bob would be reluctant about. But Bob already I Gave My Word, and he's someone who values being true to your word, so he's trapped. Is this just a Rash Promise or is there a specific subtrope for this?
Edited by EievieA signifier to contextualize "outside" time around "inner" character thoughts.
I'm reading The Human Target (2021), and there's an issue where the main character (Christopher Chance) and Martian Manhunter (the latter is psychic) are on the surface having a casual dinner, but the latter is invoking a Battle in the Center of the Mind that leads to Chance processing a lot of different thoughts. The comic is punctuated/book-ended by the image of Chance passing the salt, implying that the entire crazy psychic duel they experienced for the issue took place in less than a second in real time.
I remember seeing a similar thing in Knives Out, where when Benoit is interrogating Marta, the camera dramatically focuses in on him flipping a coin into the air before entering a long and important flashback from Marta's POV. When the flashback ends, the scene returns to the coin falling and Benoit finally catching it before Marta gives her answer, highlighting that she flashed back to the whole thing within the time of the single coin flip.
It's a neat trope, but I'm not sure if it's a thing or not. Closest I can think of is Year Inside, Hour Outside, and I'm not sure if that fully counts since that trope is usually about being in a different room or dimension, not necessarily someone's thought; plus I'm thinking about the object/action that gives the discrepancy context (in this case, the passing of the salt shaker and the coin flip).
Edited by number9roboticVideo blackmail
Character A has a video of Character B on their phone that they threaten to send out into the world if Character B doesn't do what they want.
Examples include the Season 2 finale of The Boys (2019) with Maeve threatening to send out footage of the airplane, the midpoint of Parasite (2019) with the video of the Kims saying their real identities, and the recent film Sanctuary where Rebecca threatens to reveal what she and Hal do in private.
Edited by MakeMineMediaFairy foster mother
A fairy lady "who had cared for him in his infancy", who gifted him a magic ring, who he thinks will "aid and succour him" if he calls upon her. Is that more Fairy Godmother or Raised by the Supernatural?
IdiotBall minus the OOC part
A character is an idiot and their stupid mistake fuels the plot. But this isn't out of character for them — the character is known to be stupid or incompetent or what have you.
The right villain ensemble for the Seven Barian Emperors Anime
In the Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL, the Seven Barian Emperors serve as the main villains for the second half of the series and they are also the Greater-Scope Villain of the first half.
I'm trying to figure out what the right villain ensemble trope fits for them. Quirky Miniboss Squad doesn't fit, since they aren't Elite Mooks, but the actual main villains and they don't just disappear after losing once (at least before the series' climax). Psycho Rangers doesn't work because not only do they vastly outnumber the main heroes of three, two of the seven villains are heroes-turned villains, including one of the three main heroes, which makes it seven vs two. It also doesn't help that The Starscream of the Seven Barian Emperors turns against his own team, leading to an internal team conflict that leads to big losses for their group.
Legion of Doom doesn't fit either. Apart from two Face–Heel Turn characters, the group itself isn't comprised of past villains.
It should be noted that there's another Greater-Scope Villain who is responsible for their villainy and tragic backstories, but he's mostly inactive before the climax near the end of the series.