Trope Idea Sounding Board

How about "The American Nightmare" as a title?

Lecherous Boss, a common occupational hazard for working women in older comedies, has somehow been overlooked as a trope.

Well, you'll have a few examples since even our search finds that phrase "Lecherous Boss" on the wiki repeatedly.

I'm a bit surprised that we don't have Sexual Harassment As Comedy but I wonder if people would find it already covered by Black Comedy Rape. I do feel it's distinct enough, much like Suicide as Comedy and Death as Comedy are different concepts.

Feels distinct enough, though you'd have to separate it from things like the various tropes about perverts.

Toying with the idea of a "ghostly object" draft. The general idea is for when inanimate, soulless items are capable of having ghostly forms that ghosts can interact with. Distinct from the concepts of a ghost haunting an item or merely moving around physical objects, it's a completely mundane item that has the properties of a ghost so that the ghost can use it. I already have three examples, just bringing it here before making a draft to see if there are any last minute thoughts about the concept. Here are the ones I have:

• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: It's established at one point that Nearly Headless Nick and other ghosts are capable of writing and sending letters to each other. The letters are on a certain translucent paper, which implies that it's ghost paper.
• Neopets: There are ghost variations of several objects. While many are just given a light blue coloring and made to look spooky, others have flavor text that imply or confirm that the items are somehow "dead". For example, all of the Ghost Lupe's weapons and armor are equippable items that supposedly died with him, the "ghostly gift" asks if there's a "dead gift" somewhere, and there are ghost food items that run the gamut from floating around to being completely invisible.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "The Curse of Bikini Bottom", a few "ghostly" items are shown. The Flying Dutchman has ghostly versions of his wardrobe, including the clothes he died in. SpongeBob has to turn his spatula into a ghost spatula in order to flip patties, but it unfortunately just phases through them since it too is incorporeal.

That seems like a trope, and I've got one more example for you.

• In Spare Keys for Strange Doors, destroyed items leave a ghostly echo that normally disappears quickly, but can last a bit longer if claimed by a ghost. The main characters deliberately destroy a plate of food when they have a ghost over for dinner.

Can I make a trope like Stylish Sunhats but with bonnets, e.g. "Beautiful Bonnets"?

Hmm. More so that beauty as a concept, I could see bonnets serving as a sign of femininity, demureness, or traditionalism. They kind of thing you'd see worn by a sort of respectable country goodwife or proper Victorian lady sort of character.

Edited by Theriocephalus on Apr 9th 2024 at 4:28:42 AM

Would a trope about people being punished by having something confiscated work, or is that something we already have? Fun-Hating Confiscating Adult would be a related trope of course.

Edited by HoloMew151 on Apr 10th 2024 at 11:31:18 AM

With the sucess of the the Denis Villeneuve adaptation of Dune, and the impact the franchise as whole has, shouldn't it exist a dedicated Stock Shout-Outs or Stock Parodies trope page for it? The Referenced by.../Dune page already feels like it could turned into one with ease.

I'm just asking for opinion here, I'm not sure how proceed for this subject.

We tend to frown upon tropes that boil down to “Shout-Out to this fictional work”, given that they fail to be more than the sum of their parts. Shout-Out to Shakespeare was seemingly a separate item before becoming a redirect to ReferencedBy.William Shakespeare, and we supposedly used to have “Good Grief, Another Peanuts Shout-Out!” as well.

Stock Shout-Outs has plenty of tropes listed under it, of course, but a majority of those involve more specific homages, such as to an iconic shot or storyline. I’m not convinced ReferencedBy.Dune has the potential to become independent, given that the examples reference all different elements of the story; there’s no specific aspect that consistently receives Shout-Outs in fiction.

Edited by jandn2014 on Apr 10th 2024 at 3:14:52 PM

At the very least, Sand Worm is its own trope, and that's the main thing I know from Dune as someone who's only seen parodies (that and the "spice" stuff).

A while back I had an idea for what I called "Escalating Sadism", basically for when the villains gradually increase their evil until they're basically the worst they could possibly be. It often happens with acts directed at individual victims, so it's cruelty on a more personal and direct level. My issue is that most of the examples I know would actually be real life since this sort of thing happens in a lot of true crime cases. I do know a few fictional ones, but I guess my question is, does this seem common enough in fiction or is it more specifically just a real life thing abusers do?

The only example I can think of is from a character who isn't a villain, but was deliberately written to keep topping himself in terrible acts. "Sadism" might not be the right word for it though.

Yeah, that's not really exactly what I'm going for. I honestly got re-inspired by a story discussed on the CM thread today. Short summary is that a girl comes back whenever she dies and some bullies decide to kill her over and over for fun. They start out already cruel but their methods and attitudes get worse and worse, until they're doing things like burning her alive, stalking her neighborhood, and then finally plotting to leave her chained up at the bottom of the lake indefinitely. It's that sort of "starts out small and basic and then gradually gets nastier and nastier once they get a taste for it". Kinda like they're testing the limits and realizing that they can do worse, and so they do.

I feel like there's a movie where this sort of thing happens to a murder victim. But other than that it's definitely just something I've noticed in a lot of real life crimes, which obviously makes me hesitant to go for it.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 10th 2024 at 10:10:28 AM

'World Map' Gag

A character, after being asked if he/she packed a map during a hiking / camping etc. trip, confidently replies "Of course!" and pulls it out. Alas, it's a World Map...

Saw this gag on Doraemon and Old Master Q, and I'm sure this was on some random cartoons as well... not going to consult Trope Finder, 100% sure we didn't have this

I feel it may have potential if it's expanded to "wrong map" gags in general, not just world maps.

• Metaphorical Darkness: The work uses negative emotions as one of its central themes in allegorical way.

@WarJay77: One of Orson Scott Card's darker short stories, called "A Thousand Deaths", fits that description perfectly. The setting is a future USA that's been conquered by the Soviet Union. Political dissidents who want to return to freedom are sentenced to death. But they wear a brain recorder during the execution, so they can be revived as a clone with the same mind and memories — including the memory of dying. The prisoner gets killed over and over this way, using progressively more painful and horrifying methods, until he or she breaks and agrees to reform and become a good little citizen.

Edited by walking-wolf on Apr 14th 2024 at 8:09:36 AM

Yeah, that sounds like it'd fit. And I'm sure there's plenty of abuse-related works that explore this since it's a common tactic.

Just thought of another example. The 1956 film of Moby Dick: Queequeg is casting the bones and sees his death in them, so he just sits down and waits for death. Doesn't eat, doesn't sleep, just sits. A couple of the Pequod's other sailors want to see what it would take to bring him out of it, so they start poking him — first with a finger, then with a dagger. They're about to start seriously carving him up when Ishmael stops them.

Oh, yup, totally.

A while ago, someone suggested a trope called Vaping Is Lame. I have an example.

• Family Guy: In Dead Dog Walking, Chris takes up vaping. Lois tries to forbid him from vaping, only for Chris to catch her smoking. She defends herself by saying vaping makes Chris looks like a douchebag, even showing him a picture of him vaping. Seeing how lame he looks while vaping is what gets Chris to give up this habit.

Before I submit this to the Trope Launch Pad, I’m going to come here to see if you guys think this is tropeworthy. I can’t find it anywhere (yes, I checked the most likely indices), so I think it’s time someone (that being me) proposed it.

WIP title: Espanish

Basically, it’s whenever a Spanish-speaking character puts the letter E in front of consonant clusters starting with “S”.

I can think of only two examples right now, but I am confident that more exist.

• The Casagrandes Movie - Upon arriving in Mexico, the mercado van lands on top of a giant cactus called "Señor Espikey".
• Dhar Mann - At the beginning of "Immigrant SHAMED FOR Her ENGLISH", Andrea Espada, originally from Colombia, is criticized for pronouncing "school" as "eschool".

Edited by BlankBlankness on Apr 14th 2024 at 11:42:47 AM

Note that this linguistic phenomenon also happened with another Romance language: French.

Unlike Spanish, many French words that later had the "e" added have the consonant immediately following it omitted and the initial "e" becomes "ê" with the circumflex to reflect the fact that there used to be a consonant following it.

For example, the French word "être" (to be) comes from the Latin word "esse." In Old French, it was spelled "estre." The "s" was eventually dropped in pronunciation, and the circumflex was added to show the vowel sound change, resulting in the modern spelling "être." "Être" is a cognate of the Spanish "ser."

There are some French words that begin with "é" and also had the "s" omitted in the word's history such as "état" (state), "étrange" (strange), and "école" (school).

Thus, the proposed Espanish trope can also include French examples.

Edited by Nen_desharu on Apr 14th 2024 at 12:56:20 PM