Datasets:

RyokoExtra
/

TvTroper-Cleaned

Dataset card Viewer Files Files and versions Community

Split (1)

train · 540k rows

text stringlengths 28 457k	url stringlengths 44 118
Pandaing to the Audience - TV Tropes Who needs a caption when you can just look at his chubby widdle cheeks? Proof that not all Bears Are Bad News. Given the iconic status of pandas, it's not surprising that they turn up a lot in media, especially while looking cute. Apart from their striking black and white fur, the black spots around their eyes gives them an appealing sleepy look that seems to match their adorably clumsy behavior. Furthermore considering that they are often seen lounging about, peacefully eating plants instead of hunting, it makes them seem so innocent. In addition, they are one of the few animals who have a protruding bone in each paw that acts as an opposable thumb to grasp objects, giving their eating habits an appealingly human-like appearance. Keep in mind that eating bamboo requires a large amount of chewing. That round adorable face houses some powerful jaw muscles. As a side note, zoologists debated for years whether pandas were more closely related to bears or raccoons up until DNA stepped in to settle on "bear, albeit primitive". note : To be clear, this refers specifically to the giant panda. The much smaller red panda, which was for a long time believed to be a related species, is actually a musteloid, meaning it's more closely related to raccoons, skunks, and weasels. But even today, some people will still incorrectly call someone out if they refer to pandas as bears. Finally, just in case you're Too Dumb to Live, cute as they are...do not try to cuddle a real life panda. Seriously. Unless you're Shaq.◊ Pandas may look cute and cuddly, but they are still bears, and while not as dangerous and aggressive as other bear species, they are still very much capable of badly injuring you if they feel provoked or threatened. However when they are young and in a playful mood, just you try to resist them when they approach you with all their charm turned up full blast. More recent depictions of panda characters in popular culture seem to be subverting the usual "passive and cuddly" persona the panda has built up over the years by depicting them as any other sort of bear... Or at least one that somehow knows how to use Martial Arts. This could've been named "Everything's Better With Pandas", but the pun was too obvious. A Super-Trope to Fighting Panda, where pandas are portrayed as martial artists. Not to be confused with the controversial practiced of pandering — sorry, pandaing note : Pandas are native to China, you see. — to the Chinese audience by making films designed to pass through their censors and not get Banned in China; nor to be confused with pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections, or PANDAS for short, a hypothesis that a subset of children exists with rapid onset of obsessive-compulsive or neurological tic disorders. See also Yet Another Baby Panda and What Measure Is a Non-Cute? (one reason pandas get so much more attention than similarly endangered animals.) note : The IUCN upgraded the status of the giant panda from "endangered" to "vulnerable" in 2015. ## Examples: - Ranma ½ has a subversion in Genma Saotome, who frequently claims to be just a big cute panda, but really is a fat old human scam artist. - Even Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata got in on the action with Panda! Go Panda! - Panda Z Robot Panda Made of Win! - Azumanga Daioh: Concernin' pandas... is it black spots on white, or is it white spots on a black background? - May Chang from Fullmetal Alchemist has a pet midget panda (Shao May) which is frequently mistaken for an oddly-colored cat. - Said panda nearly bit off Yoki's arm at the elbow after he tried to steal from May Chang. Keep in mind that Shao May is a very small panda. - Panda, while he is a hamster, looks like his namesake in Hamtaro. - Gantz has an alien-hunting baby panda named Hoi Hoi. Not only does he function as the Team Pet after losing the Butter Dog, the thing proves that, although cute, it can still kick serious ass, gaining 40 points before disappearing somewhere. - Great Teacher Onizuka: Saejima is illegally importing giant pandas into Japan. Saejima tries to convince Onizuka that the pandas are really advanced robot toys. - China and Hong Kong from Hetalia: Axis Powers definitely love their panda companions. - In Excel♡Saga, Excel and Hyatt must escort the T10000, a robotic bomb designed to go off in downtown F-City. Hyatt suggests the robot is too obvious, so they end up disguising it as a panda. It works the wrong way, since it attracts more people. - In One Piece there is Pandaman - a recurring character inserted into backgrounds. And he is Badass◊. - Pandaikon from Nerima Daikon Brothers is not only the mascot of the team and occasional mastermind behind the day being saved, but he is also the object of desire of no less than two characters of a recurring cast of five. - Pandalian is an anime chock-full of pandas. - Pain in the rear or just plain adorable, Panda from Shirokuma Cafe is one of the most naturally depicted pandas outside of documentaries. - In Yakitate!! Japan, Mokoyama disguised himself as a panda for his second rematch with Azuma. He lost to Azuma, but he became a real panda. - Subverted in Naruto. While Pain has a panda summon, most wouldn't consider it even remotely cute, with several large piercings, Rinnegan eyes, and a frozen snarl showing triangular, saw-like teeth. - The ultimate subversion: Death Panda, in which the antagonist is a amoral, perverted, sick creature that indulges in three things: murder, rape and eating. And having a crush on it's archenemy. - The Jewelpet Rald. - The second season of Kemono Friends gives us Giant Panda, who has the habit of falling asleep at the drop of a hat (a reference to the lethargic behavior of real pandas). Just do not tick her off... - Kaede from Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai loves pandas, wears for the most time when she's onscreen a pajama which design is based on them and is happy when her brother visits the pandas in the zoo with her. \|\|But when her memories come back at the end of the story, she isn't interested in these animals anymore.\|\| - Shima Shima Tora no Shimajirō gives us Marurin/Mary-Lynn Sasaki, a panda cub who is introduced as soft-spoken, shy and carries around a plush teddy. - Panda from Jujutsu Kaisen is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: an intelligent, talking adult panda who also happens to be one of the protagonists' upperclassmen. - A double subversion in Hell's Angels: the hellish pandas are quite grotesque-looking for the most part, but the one who gets the most in the spotlight is the one who looks like a giant panda plush with huge claws and KISS-style facial markings. - Panda Khan, which was about a bunch of anthro Chinese pandas. The bad guy was the Lord of Death, who for some reason was the only human-looking character. Panda Kahn would later be included in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toyline from the 80's. - Usagi Yojimbo has Lord Noriyuki, a child-lord who is protected by Usagi's friend and comrade Tomoe Ame. - The Italian strips A Panda Piace... (Panda Likes...). The answer is a lot of silly things. - Wolverine was shocked to discover that his spirit guide animal is a talking panda. He naturally assumed it would be a wolverine. The panda retorts that wolverines are too busy being angry to be spirit animals. Logan insults the panda by calling it cuddly. Then the panda and Logan fight. The panda wins. - The minor Spider-Man villain Panda-Mania. - Warner Bros.' 1995 film The Amazing Panda Adventure - The Hug has Pandory, the sole animatronic character of Pandory's Pan Pizza Palace. \|\|However, he's really a subversion of this trope.\|\| - Pete Smalls Is Dead features several people disguised as pandas as seen in this clip. - Tropic Thunder qualifies, in that Tugg Speedman loves pandas and does conservation work for them. Since the film runs on Refuge in Audacity, he ends up accidentally killing one and later wears its head as a camouflage hat. The example is more accurately a subversion, since Tugg's reason for killing the panda is that it is ferociously attacking him and he is afraid of it. In fact, it's not even revealed that this fierce animal is a panda until after it's been killed. Tugg Speedman: I killed one, Rick... the thing I love most in the world. Rick Peck: A hooker. Oh Jesus, you killed a hooker! Tugg: No, a panda! Rick: Amanda? That's probably not even her real name. - The 2018 comedy film Show Dogs features a police dog going undercover to stop an animal smuggling scheme, with one of the animals being Ling-Li, a baby panda. - In Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, the first panda birth in the San Diego Zoo is Serious Business. (Almost) Truth in Television; people who live in San Diego are well aware that the local news stations do seem to love them some pandas. - Vince McCain from Fierce Creatures imported a (robot) panda to the zoo. It is later seen with an "out of order" sign. But again, we're reminded that real life pandas can be quite aggressive. When Vince walked into the Panda pen for the first time, the staff members were all terrified because they thought the panda was real and about to attack. - Bruce Coville's Book of... Aliens: I, Earthling features Ralph J. Bear, an adorable miniature panda who was created as part of a program to preserve the species (which is part of what prompted the Kwarkissians to make contact with Earth) and given to Jacob as a going-away present before he and his father moved to Kwarkiss. - The title of Lynne Truss' book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, is a reference to a joke on poor punctuation: A panda walks into a cafe and orders a sandwich. After the panda has eaten his meal, he takes out a gun and shoots several holes in the ceiling. As the panda begins to leave, the waiter cries out, "What was that for?" in regard to the shootings. The panda tosses a wildlife guide to the waiter. The waiter reads the guide, and it says, "Panda. Black-and-white mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves." - The Berenstain Bears New Neighbors deals with new neighbors, specifically Pandas. Fantastic Racism becomes this to Papa Bear while the others are okay with them. - The A to Z Mysteries series has The Panda Puzzle, in which the three protagonists search for a missing baby panda bear. - In Spirit Animals, we have Jhi the Panda, one of the fifteen Great Beasts and patron of the realm of Zhong. An Actual Pacifist with healing abilities, which causes some friction with her Action Girl Kung-Fu Kid partner Meilin. - ''Of Pandas and People'', a textbook in support of intelligent design, published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, received criticism from the evolutionists for its lack of scientific merit. - The song "The pandas must die" by Corky and the Juice Pigs is built on the shock value of contradicting this trope. - Tao, a former member of K-Pop Boy Band EXO, is known as 'panda' to the fans due to his under eye circles. - In 2015, Desiigner released a song called "Panda" on SoundCloud, which eventually found its way into the mainstream, leading it to chart at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The "Panda" in the song actually refers to a white BMW X-6 with tinted windows, which Desiigner thought "looks like a panda". - Ken Ashcorp has a cutesy, antropomorphic panda as the main focus of most of his songs' artwork, as well as his online avatar. - Funky Panda is a funk music channel which uses cute panda art to illustrate its music selection. - The panda issue of Zoobooks took a realistic approach to this trope. While it stressed the importance of conserving these cute creatures, it also reminded readers that Real Life pandas are capable of being dangerous if provoked. Their overview of panda anatomy revealed what a panda looks like underneath its skin-namely, that it has large fangs and claws. The caption of the diagram said that pandas in zoos frequently destroy their toys. - One of this issue's illustrations managed to subvert this trope and play it straight at the same time. An adorable baby panda was under attack by a group of wild dogs, but its Mama Bear had stepped in to protect it. She is coming down, fangs bared, right on top of one of the would-be predators. The caption indicates that a panda's jaws are capable of crushing bone as easily as bamboo. - In the 1980s there was Pandita, a luchador who wrestled in panda suit. He was unmasked in 2008 by Súper Pinocho but his two sons, El Hijo del Pandita and Pandita Jr continued his legacy, as well as FMW wrestler Flying Kid Ichihara, who had the alternate gimmick of Rei Pandita. - The Alianza Universal De Lucha Libre (AULL) promotion has Súper Panda, who was a 1x AULL Tag Team Champion. - Neo Women's Wrestling had a trio of Reina Panditas in 2005. - In Monterrey enterprises such as LLF there is El referí Mas Optimo del Planeta Oso Panda, as well as his sister, La Panda. - Subverted in The Men from the Ministry episode "Claws". The male panda Coco that's being shipped into the London Zoo is described by the zookeeper as being absolutely adorable, but once it gets accidentally transported to the General Assistance Department thanks to a misunderstanding, it proceeds to completely wreck the place and causes all sorts of trouble. - 3 Pandas is a puzzle Browser Game about three pandas of three different sizes trying to maneuver through their world, after being taken away from their home. - Panky the Panda: The Player Character is a panda named Panky who's on a quest to save his brother from the poacher who kidnapped him. - Tekken has a female panda character, named Panda. She's highly intelligent for a Panda, learned a bear-style martial arts and serves as the bodyguard of the resident Anime Chinese Girl, Xiaoyu (who's no slouch by herself, by the way). And has a hilarious relationship with a male grizzly bear, Kuma (he loves her, but she ignores him, then hilarity usually ensues.) - The Pandaren in Warcraft III. were originally just an April Fool's joke faction that people liked so much they ended up actually putting it in the game in some capacity with the Pandaren Brewmaster hero and Pandaren NPCs. Rumor had it, for quite some time, that they didn't appear in WoW due to sensibilities and marketing the game in China, in that China's national animal was originally depicted in the style of a Samurai, which is Japanese. They were made a playable race in the fourth Expansion Pack: Mists of Pandaria. Nevertheless, the fanbase is broken about it. very - And in the fangame Defense of the Ancients, there are two heroes based on the above Pandaren race: Mangix (Brewmaster) and Raijin Thunderkegg (Storm Spirit). They got less-Panda models when Dota 2 was released. Also originally, before making the jump to Dota 2, Kaolin (Earth Spirit) and Xin (Ember Spirit) used to have panda models too. - Two Pandarens from Warcraft get included Heroes of the Storm, one of them being veteran Chen Stormstout, and another one just push this trope further... how to do even more pandaing? Make the panda a young one and a girl. That's Li Li. (and surprisingly, Li Li was included first before Chen) - Pandas are notably absent in Guild Wars (in particular, the Far East Factions campaign) allegedly due to Chinese laws. There are a couple pandas in the game, but they have Gameplay Ally Immortality; pandas also exist as minipets. - That's no longer the case. As of the Beyond: Winds of Change storyline, it is now possible to acquire a panda as Ranger pet, and it can be temporarily killed in battle. - Zigzagged in the Sly Cooper series. In his first appearance, The Panda King was very much an aversion, thanks to his use of his skills as a fireworks artist to extort from the villages around his compound, as well as being a member of the gang that murdered Sly's dad and stole the Thievius Raccoonus and was an enemy to the Cooper Gang. In the third installment however, he undergoes a HeelFace Turn and is shown to be be still a bit grumpy, but has renounced violence and is generally good-natured and mellow, not to mention a VERY loving father...\|\|which leads to him becoming the Cooper Gang's Demolitions Expert, after Sly helps rescue his daughter.\|\| - Lao Jiu, a magical mini-panda, is Litchi Faye-Ling's mascot, pet, and hairclip in BlazBlue. Cute enough to distract one opponent, and fond of spending time in Litchi's Secret Compartment. - Pokémon: - Spinda are shaped like giant pandas, though their coloration is more akin to that of the raccoon-like red panda. - Pokémon X and Y finally give us a proper panda in Pancham and its evolution Pangoro. Subverted in that they're hardly cute (Pangoro definitely, Pancham by comparison to regular examples) and are Fighting-types, with Pangoro also being Dark-type and looking particularly intimidating. However, Pancham often fail to be intimidating and end up looking cute instead, and Pangoro happen to have little tolerance for those who bully the weak. In addition, their shiny◊coloration◊ makes them resemble Qinling pandas. - Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard has a blue-eyed panda as one of the four options for the Beast class. The other choices being a brown bear, a wolf, and a sabertoothed white tiger... which are all functionally the same. - Wii Fit features a game where you have to shift your body weight to head footballs. You to avoid flying boots- and panda costume heads. - The first stage of Jitsu Squad - a Training Level - is populated entirely by sentient, andromorphic pandas. They're tutors and teachers to the squad's members, giving them instructions on player controls and attacking functions. - In Digimon World DS, Pandamon (Monzaemon painted to look like a panda) is the only digimon in the game that you encounter at the end of a level that you WILL NOT FIGHT. EVER. Rather, he asks you some questions about Digimon that are insultingly easy to see if you're worthy of helping him with the question that perplexes him. Apparently, he couldn't get a multiple choice question, even though there are only two possible answers. - The Monster Rancher series has Mewnda, who is a hybrid of a Mew and a Pancho monster. It looks like a stuffed panda toy. Initially this seems kind of weird—Mew is a cat, and Pancho is a cute bug living in a giant pumpkin—but makes sense as a pun. Panda, Pancho. - Pankichi, the mascot character in Getter Love!! "Panda Love Unit" is the name of the group of girls involved in the game (not including Reika, of course). The game is set in a town called Panda Town (complete with Panda Burger, Panda Park, Panda Game Corner, etc.), Ayumi keeps a Pankichi doll at home, Reika gives you a Pankichi doll as a gift, and panda angels or devils appear when certain item cards are used or after a girl accepts or rejects an "I love you". Oh, and there's also a Chinese exchange student as one of the girls, and a Chinese restaurant on the map. China, native country of pandas, not likely a coincidence. - The French MMORPGs Dofus and Wakfu have the Pandawa class, a race of anthro pandas. Anthro Ninja Pandas that attack by getting drunk and setting parts of their body on fire. - CaptainGerBear's ChubPan is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, a chub panda. - Bamboo Pandamonium from Mega Man X8 chucks grenades and launches bamboo rockets (yes, really). You don't want him to hug or punch you; it does massive damage. - Overlord II has pandas, who are definitely not nice. Harm the bamboo they eat and you have several tons of angry panda rushing to rip you to pieces. Worst part? If you want to advance you must break down bamboo blocking your way. - Saints Row: The Third has pandas (or at least, cardboard cut-outs of pandas) displayed at Professor Genki's Super Ethical Reality Climax. Shooting those pandas is the only thing the show considers "unethical". That said, the city of Steelport is also implied to import panda meat and create hot dogs with them, which would subvert this trope. The Boss can even dress up as a panda in one of the DLCs, though whether this counts as a straight example depends on your personal opinion of the Boss. - The King of All Cosmos would "like to become an adorable panda in everyone's hearts and minds" in Katamari Damacy. - Also in We ♥ Katamari, there is a fan who requests many expensive items to be rolled up, so that they can buy strawberries and feed them to pandas, so that they'll become red pandas. - Teemo, a character from League of Legends, got a panda costume with a bamboo blowpipe. Annie also gets a costume where she turns her pet bear Tibbers into a panda, while wearing a panda-ish costume herself. All that the game lacks is a costume that turns champion Volibear into Volipanda. - The Kooma Panda in Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance]. They're the game's obligatory Smash Mook, and perhaps one of the most troublesome variants of it in the entire series, due to being surprisingly quick on its feet for its size and able to strike from quite a distance away. On the plus side, they can be your allies, too. - Curtis the Panda from Carnival Island. He later appeared as a minion in PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale. - Freedom Planet has The King of Shuigang (eventually murdered in the intro), General Gong, Prince Dail, Neera Li, and Spade. The last three however are bosses, and they can put up a fierce fight. - Two of the main character avatar choices in the Taichi Panda mobile app game include male and female panda warriors. - Tillman, Swanny and Skiles from Battle Bears are robot pandas. - In Spyro: Year of the Dragon, pandas are NPC's of some areas; they need Spyro's help or can help him in some way. There's even a giant balloon in the shape of a panda. ( Year of the Dragon is definitely the most Asian-esque game in the series, although Spyro and kin are still Western dragons.) - A Minecraft update added pandas, along with an entire "Bamboo Jungle" biome (and a hilly version) to house them. They come with various personalities—normal, lazy, worried, playful, aggressive, weak, and brown—but serve little purpose besides looking cute. If you're mean enough to kill one, you'll find that unlike most passive/neutral mobs, they drop no meat, only bamboo (easier to collect from the forest around them) and a tiny amount of experience. Their only semi-practical use is in farming slimeballs from baby panda sneezes. - In Grow RPG, \|\|there is a hidden solution where you can find a panda suit.\|\| - Super Panda Adventures: Fu is a panda knight out to save his planet, and the princess from invading alien robots. - In Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, pandas are among the pets a city can gift to another one. - In a Running Gag in PvP, Brent is mauled by The Office Panda... who also seems to be the mascot of a coffee chain: Panda Espresso. - Radioactive Panda has a giant (radioactive?) panda in it. No, really! Said panda is easily identified by their green eyes (or green welding goggles) and red scarf, and is frequently seen fixing things. Also knows how to fly spaceships. There are also miniature pandas which are used for emergency power. - Twisted Kaiju Theater once featured a Panda Z figure as Emo Panda, who also happened to pilot a panda mech. Though in a subversion, Emo Panda was really more whiney than cute. - The Boy has a dream about pandas in this Scary Go Round-strip. But it seems that he preferred the dream about the perpetual motion machine, he had before. - Commander Kitty has the Badass Adorable Spacer Nin Wah, a red panda. Her twitter account even has her gushing about Firefox's livestream of real red panda cubs. - Mountain Time has a panda bear that is adorably obsessed with receiving a lobotomy. - Mr. Lovenstein: "Thanks, Rock and Roll Panda!" - El Goonish Shive doesn't have any actual pandas, but it does have a strip dealing with the memetic cuteness of pandas. As a child, Ashley insisted on reading Ranma ½ on the grounds that, "It has a panda!" Her dad eventually relented on the grounds that, "It's not like it could warp your young mind too bad." - Google's autonomous problem-solving AI, CADIE, examined the whole internet and designed a personal site from mean variables. It was brightly coloured and flashed, and full of pictures of pandas. - Since CADIE has been revealed to be an April Fools' hoax, the page design must be a Google programmer's comment on this trope. - Horribly, horribly subverted by Snoofles in Forbiden Fruit: The Tempation of Edward Cullen - Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series has one baby panda in the cast. It plays card-games and has an Egyptian Pharaoh living in it's body... And is not actually a panda at all, but still, the trope's invoked. - The mascot for web-only Puzzles & Answers Magazine. Why? Well, the magazine goes by P&A from which its web address derives. - An anti-virus software called... Panda Security. It's actually pretty good. - Homestar Runner Pan-Pan, the 20X6 version of Pom Pom. - Inverted in Weebl's song, 'Cucumbers', where pandas are the cucumbers' enemy. They attack them with their feet. - Sneezing Panda - Flickr has an error screen contains a girl with a toy panda on a lead. - Monokuma the bard from the Deviantart Extended Universe is a very well-read panda. - In the "Medimoji" web video series by ZDoggMD, the panda emoji talks about the challenges that he faces as an ophthamologist. He also wasn't happy about being matched to Johns Hopkins, one of the most prestigious hospitals in the US, because of its location. (Apparently, people thought he was a foreign medical graduate, but he is not.) Panda: People confuse me with the optometrist. He's the guy who goes, "Number one, or number two?" I get to do all the fun stuff, like telling the patient, "I am so sorry, Mrs. Johnson, but you are going to go blind." - Vsauce has a video called "Why Are Things Cute?" The thumbnail image is a baby panda. - As suggested up top, this is most certainly not Truth in Television. Pandas are very ornery, even to each other. This is exactly why it's been particularly difficult to engage in captive breeding of pandas at zoos. That being said, things are looking up for the Giant Panda, which was upgraded from "endangered" to "vulnerable" by the IUCN in 2016. - Given this trope, and the giant panda's extremely low birth rate (especially in captivity), the births of cubs in zoos are always big news. Tragically though, such joyous news often ends up being too soon and is followed shortly thereafter by the very heartbreaking news of a cub's death, as panda cubs unfortunately have quite a high mortality rate (especially if it's twins; whichever cub is smaller will be rejected by the mother and often does not survive, even with intensive human care). - This tendency not to breed quickly is actually an evolutionary adaptation: The Giant Panda's natural habitat are mountainous regions where few things grow. The one thing there is an abundance of is bamboo. Unfortunately, due to large amounts of bamboo needed to sustain a single panda, this means that the natural environment can only support a small population. This isn't helped by habitat loss. - In 1936, Su-Lin, a giant panda cub was brought to the U.S. He was male, and named after Su-Lin Young, the sister-in-law of Quentin Young, Ruth Harkness's expedition partner. He was exhibited at the Brookfield Zoo near Chicago, which created a consumer desire for panda-related products. They tried to introduce him to Mei-Mei in the hopes that she would be his companion, but they fought with each other and had to be separated shortly afterwards. Sadly, Su-Lin died of pneumonia a few weeks after Mei-Mei's arrival. - In China, a giant panda named Pan Pan lived to the ripe old age of 31 (born in 1985 and died on December 28, 2016). His name means "hope" or "expectation", and he was believed to have sired over 130 descendants. note : The giant panda's average life span is 20 years in the wild and 30 years in captivity. - Wang Wang and Funi are a couple in a zoo in Australia, that have not successfully mated after even after being together for years. But during the 36-hour mating period each year, newscasters love to report on it because it combines Yet Another Baby Panda with Sex Sells. This newscast had a lot off double-entendres both intentional and unintentional with the newscasters loosing it, including a totally new definition for "Eats, shoots, and leaves." - Panda diplomacy. Essentially, one of China's primary methods of waving the olive branch to foreign nations is to give them pandas for their zoos. This goes all the way back to the 7th century, when Empress Wu Zetian sent two pandas to the Emperor of Japan. The most famous recent case is the panda diplomacy between China and the United States, whereby China provides pandas to the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C.. DC went positively gaga for the bears—not only are they a major attraction at the zoo (and one that even native Washingtonians will go to see), but they long appeared on the Washington Metro's paper farecards. - At the Beijing Zoo, Zhang Jiao was tossing a stuffed panda back and forth with his young son, which ended up in the enclosure of Gu Gu, a giant panda who had bitten a curious teenager and a drunken man. Zhang jumped into the enclosure to retrieve the stuffed toy, leading to a Bears Are Bad News moment when he was attacked by Gu Gu, who chewed up Zhang's leg; out of love and respect for China's national treasure, Zhang didn't fight back against Gu Gu. - The British police used to have patrol cars called pandas, logically enough because they were blue and white. Yeah, blue. Don't ask us. - When police cars were introduced they were black and white or black and blue. The former inspired the nickname and it stuck, even in areas which used blue ones. - The Mexican Federal Road Police cars are appropriately black and white, and called pandas as well. - Apparently the Chinese government didn't think that the live news coverage of the eclipse of 22 July 2009 was complete without pandas. See it all here. - Little Tai Shan the panda, now apparently Butterstick, from the Washington D.C. zoo. The idea behind the name is that the little panda was described as "the size of a stick of butter" when he was born; instantly, DC area bloggers struck up a campaign to name him Butterstick. The zookeepers went with Tai Shan instead, but Butterstick remains a popular nickname, even used in official materials. - A bullion coin is a type of coin made from a precious metal like gold or silver, used as a form of making small investments in that metal, and which sell for a price close to the spot price of the metal (and a markup for the minter or dealer to make a profit). Most of these coins have fairly boring, traditional designs, and they repeat the same design every year. China's bullion coins, however, have a different panda design on them each year, which has led to them being valued as collection items and thus commanding a higher premium over the value of the metal, compared to plainer bullion coins. - In January 2010, Mozilla Firefox started a website with live webcams on a pair of red panda cubs, in support of protecting them. - There's a shop in London that sells basically nothing but panda toys and panda themed items. - Former Hannah Montana star Emily Osment is a fan of pandas, at least judging from her Twitter posts and pictures. People who attend her concerts wear and/or send her panda merchandise regularly. - During "Panda Awareness Week" in early July, the folks at the Chengdu conservatory posted some videos of pandas, including this one of four pandas playing on a slide. - The PANDA group (People Against the NDAA) is a social activist group designed to fight the US law of indefinite detention (the ability of the president to arrest and detain or even kill any American civilian suspected of anti-government actions without due process) passed in the NDAA 2012. Certainly a noble fight and their name emulates a very cuddly animal. What's not to like? - Similarly, the logo of the World Wide Fund for Nature, an international non-government organization for wildlife preservation, is a cuddly panda. - Anarchopanda will give you hugs if you attend a protest in Montreal. - When the office of Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris, was open for visits during the European Heritage Days, a panda statuette was prominently displayed on the desk.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PandaingToTheAudience
Panty Shot - TV Tropes A specific variety of Fanservice, the Panty Shot is exactly what it sounds like: a gratuitous exposure of a female character's panties. This form of Fanservice tends to be uncomfortable (and incomprehensible) to the poor souls accustomed to underwear exposition of the Comedic Underwear Exposure variety. Often averted by using a Magic Skirt or Modesty Shorts.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PantyShots
Panspermia - TV Tropes Morty: I didn't know that there were bugs out in space. Rick: Well, what did you think, Morty? Life just developed on Earth by itself? Lots of people wonder about the origins of life on Earth. Were we placed here by a benevolent god? Did we arise out of a primeval soup of microbes? If the former is the case—well, why? And who? And how? And if it's the latter, how exactly did the vast chemical stew of hydrocarbons and proteins somehow get together and become self-replicating? And then how did those cute little squirmy germs grow and change and evolve enough to become, well, us? Some stories attempt to answer these questions. But others decide to skirt this touchy ontological issue entirely, by bringing into it a different element: Outer space. In other words, they propose that life on Earth is not of this earth. Panspermia (get your mind out of the gutter) is a scientific idea which proposes that life on Earth came to it from outer space, as aliens. This is a real scientific hypothesis, mind you. It's considered very unlikely, but not so much so that supporting it necessarily makes you a crackpot. (That Other Wiki, of course, has plenty of information.) This isn't the "Little Green Men"-style of alien, either. We're talking more along the lines of "cosmic pond scum hitching a ride in some water vapor in a comet." In fiction, panspermia (or exogenesis, which is similar but not identical) tends to gravitate toward the former, though—that aliens of some kind were actually the origin for life on Earth, or some other planet. In fiction, this idea tends to pop up in one of two forms: - Literal panspermia and/or exogenesis. Microbes from space landed on Earth (or another planet, in more sci-fi oriented settings), and evolved into the lifeforms that now populate that planet. This can be used both to get around the idea of having to answer how life arises in the first place, or as a justification for the similarities between life forms on very different planets. - "Alientelligent Design." Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, Precursors or Ancient Astronauts planted either the seeds for life or primitive multicellular lifeforms on a planet to begin with, and, depending on the type of alien, either left them to their own devices or "guided" their evolution in a large-scale Gambit Roulette. Frequently, this as used as part of a Reveal, and can lead to navel-gazing. Occasionally leads to Mars Needs Women, in cases of literal panspermia. See also Transplanted Humans, which is this trope in reverse (alien life coming from Earth); and Humanity Came From Space, which is only about the human species being extraterrestrial in origin. If a species exists on multiple planets without achieving spaceflight themselves and hasn't sufficiently differentiated it's Transplanted Aliens. It may be worth noting that while this theory may offer an explanation for how life got its start on Earth (and/or other relevant planets), it ultimately does not in and of itself answer the question how life arose wherever and whenever it did so for the first time. Due to its nature as part of The Reveal, examples for this trope are frequently full of spoilers. Be warned. ## Examples: - In Neon Genesis Evangelion, Humanity (indeed, all life on Earth), and Angels were both created by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who had a thing for spreading life all over the galaxy. It's All There in the Manual. - \|\|The progenitor of Earth-like life is a type of alien called a "Lilith," while the progenitor of Angel-like life is a type of alien called an "Adam." Many copies were spread throughout the known universe in order to seed life toward an unknown purpose.\|\| - \|\|Also, Earth was meant to be inhabited by Angels, but before they hatched from Adam, the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens screwed up and accidentally crash-landed Lilith on the planet, resulting in Adam's Lance of Longinus activating and putting him in stasis. Then came the Katsuragi expedition...\|\| - Life on Earth was manipulated by the Creators/Advent/Uranus in Guyver as part of their goals to create a powerful bio-weapons platform. Humanity was the end result, a base form that could be adapted into specialised combatants like Zoanoids and Zoalords. The experiment was aborted near completion when they gave a base level human one of the bio-armour units that worn by the Creators themselves and it turned out not only far more powerful than expected but completely immune to their telepathic control. - In Super Dimension Fortress Macross both humans and giant humanoid Zentradi are stated to be descended from an extraterrestrial race of precursors called the "Protoculture". Subsequent Macross series go on to imply that all intelligent humanoid species in the Milky Way are "Children of the Protoculture". - Pokémon are alleged to have come from somewhere in outer space...early on. This hypothesis from the first generation was quickly dropped in all subsequent generations, to the point that we eventually meet Pokemon that created the earth, the physical universe, and all of time and space. In other words, the series progressed from panspermia to intelligent design. Try to make sense of that. - In Andromeda Stories, earth is seeded with life when the twins Jimsa and Affle crash land and perish after escaping the destruction of their homeworld, located in the Andromeda galaxy. - Planet With: Earthlings, Siriusians, and Realians are all humans, but transplanted to different planets. There are also a few humans within the Nebula organization. - A 90's OVA called The E.Y.E.S. of Mars provides an interesting subversion by showing that life on Earth didn't originate from outer space, but human consciousness and sentience did. The last of Humanity (who migrated from the planet of Titan— itself destroyed and now the asteroid belt) lived in a domed city built in a crater on the inhospitable Martian surface. Years of rising tension over the increasingly worse air and water quality and confined spaces finally resulted in everyone going to war and ultimately destroying the dome, collapsing the structure into itself and exposing everyone to the unbreathable atmosphere. As a last ditch effort, the superpowered main characters transferred everyone's souls into the developing Homo primates that were just learning to walk upright. - * A "Great Prehistoric Civilization" that seeded all the Human Alien planets in the galaxy is occasionally mentioned in Tenchi Muyo!. The Tenchi Muyo! GXP novels reveal that the civilization originated millions of years ago on \|\|the Earth where Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure is set and that Tenchi's Earth isn't the original.\|\| - The Polish comic series from the 80s, Expedition told the story of how Sufficiently Advanced Aliens come to Earth and help apes evolve in their image, creating the basis for several religions and mythologies in the process. - DC Comics Presents #1-2 has an alien race whose Living Ships' exhaust was microscopic organisms that started life on both Krypton and Earth, among other planets. (This story has been reprinted because it's also a Superman/Flash race.) - One Authority story had the team face off against an alien life-form the size of the moon — "the closest thing to God" that had "planted" life millions of years ago. Subverted in that life on the planet didn't develop as it should have, leading to, among others, the rise of humanity. - The "Bolero" segment of Allegro non Troppo has an astronaut leave a coke bottle behind on a planet. Microbes then evolve into life on what turns out to be Earth. - The deleted "Neverwhere Land" segment from Heavy Metal would have had the Loc-Nar crashing on a nearby planet that turns out to be Earth and starting life after being Thrown Out the Airlock in the previous "Captain Sternn" short. - This was The Reveal of the science fiction movie Mission to Mars. - 2001: A Space Odyssey - The aliens didn't necessarily seed Earth, but most definitely influenced the evolution of mankind. - In the Mark Hamill film Laserhawk, aliens seeded life on Earth so they could come back millions of years later and harvest us for food. There is another race whose goal is to sabotage these seeding efforts. They attempt to do so on Earth but fail. - The opening scene of Prometheus shows an alien sacrificing himself in order to seed the earth with his DNA. At least, that's what we think was going on there. - In the Intelligent Design "documentary" Expelled, Ben Stein gets Richard Dawkins to concede it is theoretically possible that life on Earth could have originated by being seeded from life on other planets. The film treats this as some sort of coup for Intelligent Design, but a moment's reflection would clarify that this doesn't have any bearing on the question of how life itself first developed. - The backstory of the Lensman novels states that all life in Earth's galaxy (and I believe the Second Galaxy as well) came from Arisian spores. Mentor tells at least one Lensman that this is why he's offering the Lens to the Galactic Patrol — they're "family". - This appears to be the case in Dan Brown's Deception Point. \|\|It's actually a conspiracy to get NASA back up on its feet.\|\| - The Hainish stories by Ursula K. Le Guin used this trope for human and semi-human life, spread by the Precursors in the title. - The more scientific sort is a suggested origin of all life in the CoDominium universe (at least until The Mote in God's Eye introduces truly alien aliens.) - Animorphs: - The Ellimist (an extremely powerful Last of His Kind god-like being) seeded many planets with life during his war with his Evil Counterpart Crayak. This included custom-making the Pemalites and giving them a mission to spread life across the galaxy themselves. Crayak also created his own species—the Howlers. - Also, several Earth vegetables were apparently imported by crab people during the Cretaceous period. - This is alluded to — and it's all the more memorable because it comes out of freakin' nowhere (it's very against the grain of the overall tone of the novels)- in the Quintaglio Ascension trilogy. Turns out that there was a ridiculously powerful species that lived in the universe that existed before this one (stay with me), all but one died when the universe we know was formed, and that one last being seeded different planets with life forms — from Earth, which is the only planet where life formed naturally. Heady stuff. - Larry Niven has done this at least twice. In his Known Space future history, nearly all alien species evolved from food yeast grown to feed the Thrint and their subjects. Then, about 3 million years ago, a species called the Pak colonized the Earth and became Homo habilis. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reveals what Earth really is. It is implied though that no organism on Earth is older than a few million years, and all were likely brought in from other places. And, furthermore, humanity is \|\|the descendants of middle-men who crashed here 2 million years ago, completely unplanned by Earth's architects.\|\| - Discworld example: In Eric Rincewind drops a sandwich in a tide-pool and the narrator wonders what life would have been like with mustard rather than mayonnaise. - The Darkness from Michael Grant's Gone is an alien virus that was riding a meteorite when it crashed into Earth — specifically a nuclear plant, which caused it to rapidly mutate and somehow become a mind-devouring god-like being. - At the end of Last and First Men the solar system is about to be destroyed by increasing radiation from the sun. The Last Men devote their remaining time to sending out "the germs of life" on the solar wind. - This was part of The Reveal in H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness; it turns out that \|\|all Earthly life evolved from microbes that the Old Ones planted here. For food.\|\| - In Sergey Lukyanenko's A Lord from Planet Earth, it is common knowledge among Human Aliens (no Starfish Aliens) that life on all of their planers began with intentional panspermia by the mysterious Seeders, who also left behind numerous Lost Technology and temples on each planet (\|\|except for Earth\|\|). What they don't know is that the Seeders are, in fact, \|\|humans from the future, who need an army but do not have the time for a massive breeding program. They send autonomous seeder ships into distant past to spread life and leave behind carefully-selected pieces of technology to accelerate the development of these cultures. They also choose planets in unexplored systems in order to avoid any temporal paradox and ensure that their "children" are unable to get to Earth via conventional means before the time is right\|\|. - One of the novels in Mikhail Akhmanov's The History of the Galaxy series reveals that biological life in the galaxy (possibly, the Universe) is an unintentional side-effect of an Energy Being's attempts to survive. The being was "born" in the magnetic fields of a gas giant but foresaw that its homeworld would eventually die. In order to escape, it created artificial proto-plasmic semi-sentient creatures called Forerunners. They would travel through space and spread the Energy Being to other compatible gas giants. The Forerunners were themselves mostly energy, but parts of them were organic and composed of rudimentary DNA (how else do you program an organism to do something?). Over billions of years, the Forerunners spread through the galaxy and, possibly, beyond. Some of them died, and their remains ended up on planets, unintentionally starting the process of life. This, of course, raises more questions than it answers, such as how the Energy Being came to be, and how it was able to create a semi-biological organism. - Not Earth per se, but with all the life in that galaxy far, far away, the Star Wars Expanded Universe must use this trope. The precursors have definitely created the Corellian system, and a cluster of black holes known as the Maw. - It's actually that most sentient life colonised most of the habitable planets in the Galaxy for so long, people aren't completely sure of its origins, but Coruscant is suspected to be the homeworld of most Humans, along with most other Humanoid deviations. Most Planets do seem to have their own native species on them, so it's not COMPLETELY Panspermia. - The Celestials definitely made the Corellia System artificially, though the exact details of their influence, origins, and status as resident Sci-Fi Creator Gods are in question. - The Celestials \|\|are actually the first force users, or at least, members of the celestials were the first force users, the Father, the Daughter, and the Son. With the help of the Kilik Race, they created the Maw black hole cluster and Corellia in order to contain "The Mother," aka Aboleth.\|\| - This is raised as a possibility in Robert Charles Wilson's Spin by Jason Lawton, who theorizes that the Hypotheticals' slow migration throughout the galaxy for billions upon billions of years has resulted in unintentional seeding of habitable planets with life. Given that the Hypotheticals are fully capable of creating brand-new worlds capable of supporting life and full of "natural" resources, this is not unlikely. - Nancy Kress's Crossfire: This is (or at least is suggested to be) the reason why planets around nearby stars have DNA-based life. Which tends to make things easier for settlers. However, it's shown not to be universal when a plant-like, spacefaring alien species is encountered which is not DNA-based. - Isaac Asimov's Extraterrestrial Civilizations: - (Discussed Trope) Life on Earth was begun by spores traveling through the universe is the next theory advanced after spontaneous generation of life is discarded. It, in turn, is also discarded, because of the complications required for such microscopic life to both survive the trip to a second planet in a new solar system and the fact that it merely displaces "how does life originate?" to a different planet. - A footnote describes how Fred Hoyle has advanced the theory that comets, approaching close enough to Earth's orbit, are the source of viral pandemics. - Becky Chambers' To Be Taught, If Fortunate follows a group of astronauts ecologically surveying four planets in the twenty second century. Life is known to be common in this universe, but its origins are murky. On Earth, all cells have a chiral preference (left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars.) However because both types of amino acids and sugars occur evenly when whipped up in the lab, there are two possibilities: 1. Chiral preferences are a necessity for life or 2. Life originated from a meteorite slamming into Earth, which happened to have mostly left-handed amino acids. On their last planet, they discover single cellular life that has no chiral preference. Which means life uses whatever is on hand, and so life on Earth very probably originated from off-world ingredients. - In Timothy Zahn's The Cobra Trilogy, it's mentioned that almost all of the ecosystems in local space (including Earth) share similar biochemistry. The alien Troft theorize that this is due to these worlds being colonized by advanced spacefarers over a billion years ago, who were then wiped out by a chain of supernovas leaving behind only their bacteria to grow into the various species and worlds that arose later. It's mentioned as being very convenient for colonization when even in a new ecosystem you can probably find something edible; not so convenient is when the native predators realize that YOU are also edible. - Incandescence: DNA-based lifeforms have evolved on many planets thanks to collision ejecta spreading the replicators between star systems. There are also ten other panspermias of different kinds of replicators. All are believed to have originated between twenty and thirty thousand light years from the center of the galaxy. The discovery of a meteor containing DNA in the central bulge of stars is surprising news partly because conditions there are believed to be too hostile to support the development of a biosphere. - Stargate-verse: - The Ancients are a race of Advanced Ancient Humans that originated as a splinter faction of the Ori and emigrated to the Milky Way millions of years ago, using their technology to create life in human form in the Milky Way and Pegasus galaxies (on multiple planets in Pegasus, on Earth alone in the Milky Way; the Goa'uld started raiding Earth and creating slave colonies elsewhere way later). \|\|They also inadvertently created the Wraith in Pegasus and were driven out of the galaxy by them.\|\| The Ori appear to have done the same in their home galaxy, probably where the Ancients got the idea. - The Asgard appear to have evolved independently, though, despite the fact that their original form (seen only once) is very similar to that of the humans. It was the millennia of cloning that resulted in Clone Degeneration (apparently, keeping the original DNA on file is beyond a race of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens). - Star Trek: - Subverted in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Return to Tomorrow" when an alien, Sargon, says that the human race may have developed from a colony of his people. The ship's astrobiologist rejects that, citing that there is a vast amount of evidence showing that humans evolved independently on Earth. Spock, however, realizes that may actually fit with the origin of Vulcans. To be fair, it was something that Sargon's species tended to do, and he had no information whether Earth or Vulcan specifically were colonized in this way. - In the 6th season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase", it's revealed that the first starfaring species, which emerged 4 billion years ago, was so lonely that they seeded the entire Milky Way galaxy with a "genetic program" which would cause emerging life to, eventually, evolve into a form that physically resembled them. Since such a genetic program would likely herd all the different planets' developing genomes along the same narrow path, it actually makes sense that all humanoid species would be genetically similar enough to interbreed. - The Star Trek: Voyager episode "Year of Hell" establishes that life on several planets in the Krenim sector is the result of the same comet passing through their orbits in distant past. - Doctor Who: - The Time Lords were one of the earliest races to evolve, and they either seeded the universe with their genetic material or affected the fundamental properties of the universe itself, so it's not that Time Lords are humanoid, but humans are "Time Lord-oid". - "City of Death" says that life on Earth was accidentally started by an exploding Jagaroth ship. - Red Dwarf inverts this trope. Every single lifeform encountered, no matter how alien, is ultimately of Earthly origin. The first novelization even claims that it has been proven that no other life exists in the Universe, although exactly how you can prove this isn't clear. In the series XI episode "Krysis", the crew talk with the Universe itself, who backs this by expressing regret over only bothering to make one planet with life on it during its mid-life crisis. - In the final episode of Space: Above and Beyond it was revealed that the aliens evolved from Earth bacteria that was deposited on their moon through panspermia. - In perhaps its biggest predictive stretch, an episode of Life After People proposed that this could happen to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, which is believed to have water oceans. With no humans left to direct it, a deep-space probe crashes there and introduces Earth bacteria to these oceans, which gradually give rise to an entire complex aquatic biosphere. - Referenced in Babylon 5. An early episode states that the Centauri claimed at First Contact that they and humans had a common origin, but DNA testing by the humans proved they weren't related. Centauri Ambassador Londo Mollari blames this on a clerical error. - The Twilight Zone (1985): In "A Small Talent for War", the alien ambassador explains to the United Nations Security Council that Earth is one of several thousand planets that his people seeded with life and where they sped up evolution two million years ago. They have deemed the experiment on Earth to be a failure due to the small talent for war that humanity displays. \|\|The Security Council doesn't realize until the next day that the aliens breed warriors to fight for them across the galaxy and that humanity's talent for war is too small to be of any use to them.\|\| - On the Ayreon album 01011001, it is revealed that a technologically advanced race of fish aliens seeded a passing asteroid with their DNA, which then collided with earth—exterminating the dinosaurs already present there and allowing humans to flourish. They then directly tamper with human evolution and technological progress. - Implied in the Epic Rocking Nightwish song "The Greatest Show on Earth": From the stellar nursery Into a carbon feast - At the end of Firebringer, Chosen reveals herself to be a member of an alien race who seeded Earth Billions of years ago. - Seedship: One of the game over dialogues mentions the titular ship crashing into a planet and the bacteria and organic matter from the remains of the colonists leading to the creation of new life. - In Pokémon, all animal life on Earth, as well as the handful of known extraterrestrial ones, is descended from the Pokémon Mew who could potentially inhabit other areas of the universe as they have been shown to be capable of flying through the vacuum of space. - In Fossil Fighters, it is eventually revealed that \|\|multicellular organisms were created on Earth in order to be "guided in evolution" to recreate a lost race. Of course, things went wrong, creating humans instead of proper Lizard Folk.\|\| - And in the end, \|\|it turns out subverted: All the creatures the dinaurians planted died out. Humans and everything else evolved out of Earth's natural life forms after all.\|\| - Spore uses the proper definition of the theory. That is, alien bacteria hitching a ride on a rock to a different planet. This is the opening animation for the cell stage (the first stage). This was added to avoid answering the always difficult (and for now unanswerable) question of how life actually arose. And also to try to explain why all life in the universe is made of the same handful of parts. - Xenogears - life on the planet was created by \|\|an intergalactic war machine, to be harvested later for spare parts.\|\| - Though it does have some native life forms, as evidenced by Balthasar's paleontological studies. While their planet's fossil record goes back millions of years, no evidence of humans or related beings can be found any further back than ten thousand. - The Big Bad reveals this during his Hannibal Lecture at the end of X-COM: UFO Defense, in an attempt to convince humanity that they should work together. Since the aliens have spent the entire game trying to brutally subjugate and murder the human race, and the aliens have been observed studying humanity as if they had no idea about our species, the point is pretty easily disproven. And then your soldier blows him up. - The H'riak in Alien Legacy are a violent race whose goal is to seed the galaxy with violet life that attacks anything not related to the H'riak. The Centaurians and the Empiants are the two known examples of their work, and this is the reason why the Centaurians attacked Earth the moment they found it. The Empiants were, actually, a failed experiment at creating life that can survive in a gas giant. - Not life per se, but human evolution is this way in Chrono Trigger: "Grown like farm animals, waiting for the slaughter. All our history, all our art and science, all to serve the needs of that... beast." - In both the Pact and subsequent OG-verses of the Super Robot Wars metaseries, all life in the universe was actually created by an ancient lost civilization originating on Earth, handily justifying the numerous invading Human Aliens that appear as antagonists. Strangely, other continuities, such as Super Robot Wars Judgment feature Earth life being created by aliens, which they're going to have a hell of a time working into the OG-verse. - Mentioned after studying the body of a Reticulan as a proposed reason for their amazing similarity to human biology in UFO Aftermath. - In Halo, the Forerunners believed the Precursors, a hyper-advanced race originating outside of the Milky Way, were responsible for seeding lifeless planets and speeding up the evolutionary process on planets that already had life. - Confirmed in Silentium, Mythos and Warfleet. The Precursors explored the universe for billions of years and seeded countless galaxies with the building blocks of life and sped up the evolutionary processes of certain species. It may actually go further than that as Silentium heavily implies that the Precursors didn't just create life throughout the universe but that they created the universe itself. - In the Polycon mod for Escape Velocity: Nova, the Takari created the Polyconians to terraform worlds for Takari use, intending to later employ a "killswitch" virus to exterminate them. Unfortunately for them, some of the Polyconians survived, while the virus jumped species and wiped out the Takari instead. - Corpse of Discovery sees humanity accidentally seeding an alien world (that may or may not be Earth) after the death of several explorers cultivates new life. - Kolibri's backstory, explained in the manual, includes a shard of an advanced planet landing on Earth after the advanced planet exploded. This crystal begat all life on Earth, and in Kolibri's time sustains it. - All life on Sagan 4 originated from a single cell planted there by the Nauceans, placing it somewhere between literal panspermia and alientelligent design. In the Alpha timeline, \|\|panspermia occurred again later as microbes hitched a ride on the seeds of the orbit voltflora and were shot directly to Mason, Sagan 4's moon\|\|. - Serina was seeded with select species by "mysterious creators", who then left them to evolve without intervention. - Hamster's Paradise: The planet HP-02017 was a lifeless but tectonically active world terraformed by an advanced spacefaring humanity in an attempt to make a colony. The lifeforms chosen were mostly plants and invertebrates that would be beneficial to people such as food plants, pollinating insects and decomposing microorganisms. Only one vertebrate was placed on the world as a way to test its habitability before being officially settled, the chinese dwarf hamster. However, for reasons unknown they abandoned the world before they could go any further and never returned, leaving the hamsters to spread and evolve into the planet's dominant lifeforms. - According to the South Park episode "Cancelled", all life on Earth is one big intergalactic Reality Show, in which different species from other planets had been brought together for the amusement of the viewing public. - In the "Bolero" segment of Allegro non Troppo, life on a planet (maybe Earth, maybe not) evolves from the gunk at the bottom of an astronaut's discarded Coca-Cola bottle. - In Ben 10: Omniverse, it's revealed that the universe itself was created by a race of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens from the fifth dimension called the Contumelia, and all life in it arose from a race of unicellular aliens working with them called Slimebiotes. - Maury from Big Mouth claims that life in Earth started when a giant alien had sex with a hole in the ground. - It's possible life on Earth started that way, but as of right now there is no solid evidence of life anywhere else in the universe for that life to have come from. - It has been pointed out that if life on Earth did arrive this way, it still doesn't provide us any answers as to the origin of life - it just displaces where it originated from in the first place. A fairly convincing model of how the first cells might have formed on earth doesn't help. - While this may or may not happen with other life forms, it can happen with viruses. Well, for SARS, at least. - Invoking this trope via exploration, colonization, and eventual terraforming of other worlds is one of the explicit long-term goals of human space research. If there isn't already life out there, it'll be up to us to bring it.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Panspermia
Panel Game - TV Tropes ... but for once, let's put our heads down, and have an informative, popular, music-based quiz, without resorting to jokes— the coward's way out. A Panel Game or Panel Show is a variation on the Game Show in which celebrities and comedians compete in teams to win points. Panel games are a mainstay of British television, perhaps due to the continued UK popularity of radio entertainment, from which the format was adapted; or to accommodate lower UK production budgets. The games are a useful way for up-and-coming — or fast-descending — comedians to pay the bills. The celebrity contestants are usually paid an appearance fee, but there is rarely a prize as an incentive to win, although the contestants may still be highly competitive. The focus is on comedy; The Points Mean Nothing, and some shows feature a joke prize that is mundane ( Have I Got News for You), bizarre ( Shooting Stars), or non-existent ( I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue). Panel games feature a host who asks the questions and adjudicates, and often some of the panelists are regulars who appear every week. The host makes jokes between the rounds, of which there are up to six, some more gimmicky than others, including video clips and minigames. Not to be confused with Celebrity Specials of a Game Show, where the celeb accrues prize money and donates it to a charity of their choosing. ## Examples: - The one that is most familiar to American viewers is Whose Line Is It Anyway?, which had four comedians who would perform improv comedy to win points from host Clive Anderson (later replaced by Drew Carey for the somewhat-louder American version). - A long-running British panel show was Never Mind the Buzzcocks, which is based around music and generally features pop and rock stars as well as comedians. After most of the original cast started having other commitments, the show bounced back with a very successful format of rotating guest hosts and temporary team captains. Phill Jupitus has appeared in every episode but one, making him pretty much the face of the show. The show's initial final season was hosted by Rhod Gilbert, and the other team captain is Noel Fielding. After being cancelled in 2015, it was revived in 2021 with Greg Davies as the host with Daisy May Cooper and Jamali Maddix as the new team captains. - Another mainstay of British panel games is Have I Got News for You, a political and satirical panel game that generally attracts politicians, journalists, and businessmen as its panelists, as well as more politically-minded comedians. - A similar show is Mock the Week, basically Have I Got News For You meets Whose Line. - One of the oldest British panel games is A Question of Sport, which — since it typically features sportsmen — is generally regarded as more niche and less funny than its competitors (there were a lot of restrictions on how funny they could be when Princess Anne turned up). It's headed a bit more towards the comedic in recent years (ever since Sue Barker took over the chair), which meant that... - They Think It's All Over, also a sporting panel game but with more emphasis on the funny (each side had a regular sportsman, a regular comedian and one other random, usually a sportsman), was rendered slightly redundant. A change of panelists didn't kill the show; a change of hosts did. Rampantly most famous for the Feel The Sportsman round, where contestants were blindfolded and had to identify a sportsperson (or, in several cases, a team of sportspersons) by touch alone. - The format was taken to its logical conclusion in Shooting Stars which dispensed with rules, order and sense, and featured questions such as "True or False: Bill Cosby was the first-ever black man" (the answer was false; it was actually Sidney Poitier). It also featured dream sequences, sketches, and other distractions from the boring business of actually hosting a show. The guests are more of an afterthought than anything. - Subverted in Annually Retentive, a 2-for-1 Show which shows both a traditional panel game and the (fictional) behind-the-scenes backstabbing that happens behind it. As far as the celebrities are concerned, it's a 'proper' panel show, and only the host and captains act in the behind-the-scenes bits. - Wild N Out is an urban-themed improv comedy show. The players, who seem to be regulars with a single exception (the special celebrity guest), are divided into the Red Squad (led by host Nick Cannon) and the Black Squad (led by the special guest). They compete mostly for pride, as well as the opportunity to hold the pro wrestling-style "improv champion" belt. - This format was once common on North American prime time; the tone was more serious, although there was still some joking going on. The best known of these were CBS's To Tell the Truth, I've Got a Secret, and What's My Line? (all of which later went into syndication) and CBC's Front Page Challenge, which ran for 37 years (1958-95). - You could argue shows like Match Game and The Hollywood Squares (and their various knockoffs and Derivative Works, such as Break the Bank (1976), the 70s revivals of You Don't Say!, and Battlestars) are the result of the panel game and the game show getting drunk and doing it. - Australia also has its fair share of these, many differing from their British counterparts only so much as is necessary to avoid paying the BBC for the rights. - There have been two Never Mind the Buzzcocks-alikes. SBS's Rockwiz is considered the more musically credible; it has the feel of a stage show that just happens to be on TV, being filmed in an actual pub and with the scores displayed on cardboard placards. It is trumped in popularity by ABC's Spicks and Specks, which is closer to Buzzcocks in format but (being hosted by Adam Hills) with a more positive attitude and less likely to go Off the Rails. - Good News Week was originally a carbon copy of Have I Got News For You, but its political satire didn't survive the move to commercial television. After a ten year hiatus, the rebooted show focuses more on oddball stories, celebrity news and musical guests. - Also Australian is Talkin' 'bout Your Generation, hosted by Shaun Micallef and featuring comedians Baby Boomer Amanda Keller, Generation X Charlie Pickering, Generation Y Josh Thomas, and their celebrity guests, in an attempt to determine the superior generation. - QI, themed around general ~~knowledge~~ ignorance, has become one of the biggest. (And funniest.) Notable for having no captains but a regular panelist in Alan Davies, who acts as a foil to host Stephen Fry and keeps things from getting too serious. Fry left following Series M and it is now hosted by Sandi Toksvig with Alan remaining his regular panelist position. - You Have Been Watching, themed around television shows, hosted by Charlie Brooker. - 8 Out of 10 Cats, about statistics, hosted by Jimmy Carr, regular team captain Sean Lock (either of whom tend to be CMOF-worthy separately), relatively new team captain Jon Richardson, and the occasional somewhat thematic celebrity (such as Chris Hoy, after he won Olympic gold). - As of Series 22, the team captains are now Rob Beckett and Katherine Ryan though Sean ( until his death in 2021) and Jon are the team captains on the spinoff hybrid series 8 out of 10 Cats does Countdown with Jimmy also serving as the host. - Dave Gorman's Genius, which is also a radio show, involves more audience participation than usual: the general public mails suggestions which could improve the world (or are just funny), and the best ones get invited onto the show to defend their idea to a guest, who is in charge of deciding whether or not the idea is genius. Ideas that have been declared genius before include breeding an elephant that is small enough to be a house pet, helium filled bubble wrap to make parcels lighter and postage cheaper, and to make parliament discuss things under the rules of Just a Minute. - Would I Lie to You?, hosted in the first two seasons by Angus Deayton, currently hosted by Rob Brydon, with team captains Lee Mack and David Mitchell. Slightly more emphasis on the game part of panel game, the contestants read out a card that either contains an unlikely truth about themselves or a lie made up by the researchers of the show, and they have to defend it as true, while the other team prods them for additional facts and then says whether it's the truth, or a lie. (A video link explains it better than that description.) There are also various other rounds, such as each member of one team claiming to know a mystery guest. It's one of the best panel shows on today, with very little scripted material, lots of funny stories and plenty of good-natured ribbing. - The Bubble, hosted by David Mitchell isolates 3 celebrities in a country house for a week and shows them a variety of News Stories from the week, some real, some faked and the celebrities have to guess which is which. It's better seen than read about. Notable for the fact that while it's a BBC show they are banned from faking news from the BBC. Here's an interview about the program. - Ireland has The Panel which dispenses with the quiz format altogether, while still attempting to feel like a panel game show. It used to work, until Dara Ó Briain left. - The format is quite popular in the Netherlands, although not quite as mainstream as it is in the UK. Popular Dutch panel shows include: - Waku Waku, a classic charity show with a focus on wildlife trivia. Although it was extremely popular for quite a number of seasons, it was cancelled well over a decade ago. It's the one panel show that all others take their cues from. - Dit Was Het Nieuws (This Was The News), a carbon copy of Have I Got News for You. - The Mike And Thomas Show, a rapid, very musical show not unlike Shooting Stars. It consists of the two titular hosts basically just messing about in the guise of a gameshow. And two grand pianos. - Wie Ben Ik? (Who Am I?), a panel show based around celebrities trying to guess the object, character or concept they've been labeled as. The show made great use of its simplistic rules, letting the comedians run loose and never pretending to be more than it was, resulting in one of the most celebrated light entertainment shows in Dutch TV history. - New Zealand's local programme Seven Days follows this format, focusing on news stories that happened in the last week. The amount of points awarded per round tends to reference recent news stories, often at impressively different scales (Team one, you can have the number of women that claim to have slept with Tiger Woods; Team Two, you can have the cost of repairing Qantas' air fleet. Team Two wins!). - Figure It Out has four panelists try to figure out what a contestant's secret talent is before all three rounds are up. Being a Nickelodeon show, lots of slime is expected. - Sponk!, a Whose Line-esque show created for the Nickelodeon spin-off network Noggin. The show had two teams of actors perform improvisational sketches, which in this case would be voted on by the studio audience. - Bunk, an IFC mock-gameshow with a panel of 3 comedians competing at strange tasks to win strange prizes. - Comedy World Cup, hosted by David Tennant, which ran for only 7 episodes. In a twist of the normal formal, there were no regulars but four different teams that consisted of the same comedians. The teams were pitted against each other to answer questions regarding comedy history and trivia, and the winner would advance to the next level. - Comedy Central's @Midnight was a U.S., four-nights-a-week take on the concept themed around internet and pop culture. Although obscured by its use of elements associated with American quiz shows (consisting of three solo guests, some rounds played on buzzers, and a Final Jeopardy-like endgame played between the top two scorers... or all three if Chris Hardwick feels like it), it still carried all of the hallmarks of a British-style panel game (including a focus on rapidly-changing subjects and recurring segments, and points that wildly fluctuated on the host's whim). - Virtually Famous is another British panel show with the same format as the traditional ones, with the additional theme of things that are internet famous. - Animal Crack-Ups was a short-lived note : Read: One season, in the "kids aren't even watching" timeslot Saturday-morning game show on Creator/ABC in the mid-80s, in which celebrities answered trivia questions about animals with the winner getting a cash donation to the wildlife-based charity of their choice. - Nippon TV in Japan is the home of Shoten note : 笑点, which roughly translates as "Funnybone", a comedy panel show that's been running weekly since 1966. As with other similar shows, although the participants - always comedians - are scored, the goal is mainly to entertain rather than to win. Shoten keeps score in a unique way: participants sit on stacks of heavy cushions, each representing one point. This has spawned a popular Internet meme: "you get a cushion" note : 座布団一枚, used as a reply to particularly witty comments. - Have You Been Paying Attention? is an Australian Panel Game in a somewhat similar vein to the BBC's Have I Got News for You (though with a larger focus on the "quiz" side of things as the contestants actually score more than five points), Have You Been Paying Attention?, as its intro suggests, tests a group of five comedians/radio personalities on the week's events. - That's My Jam, hosted by Jimmy Fallon in 2021-22, has a large focus on karaoke-style singing in addition to trivia segments, and many of the celebrity guests are musicians. They "compete" in teams of two, but The Points Mean Nothing, the last round is worth more than the rest of the game combined, and the winning team receives only a pair of metal-plated boom-box trophies, with actual monetary prizes/donations being divided equally among contestants' chosen charities regardless of outcome. - I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue is a parody of the panel show genre (featuring many intentionally surreal rounds where scoring points would be completely impossible even if they tried) and has been broadcast with most of the original panelists since 1972. - The 99p Challenge is a radio panel show that offers up a prize of 99 pence (currently equivalent to US$50,000) to its winners. - American example: NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Not a pure panel game, as it also features segments in which listeners play to win an actual prize, but as the prize is an answering machine greeting from newscaster Carl Kasell, these are played for laughs as much as the ones with only the panelists. - More panelly American example: NPR's Says You! where a regular cast, consisting mostly of media writers and producers, plays a series of games dealing with trivia and English vocabulary. - Just a Minute, which, over the years, has placed more and more emphasis on joke-telling than on trying to speak for a minute without repetition, hesitation, or deviation, with the panel now generally composed of stand-up comedians (the original regulars included columnist Clement Freud and comic actors (but not stand-up comedians) Peter Jones, Derek Nimmo, and Kenneth Williams). Host Nicholas Parsons did insist that it was the contributions and not the point-scoring that is most important, but this has not stopped many panelists over the years from taking the "game" aspect very seriously. - The Unbelievable Truth, hosted by David Mitchell. The four guests give a lecture on a particular subject that is full of lies, except for five truths scattered throughout, and the others have to pick out the truths as they go. - The News Quiz, something of a radio counterpart to Have I Got News for You (which it predates by thirteen years). In its early years, it was a relatively straight panel game about the week's news, with the panel largely comprising journalists and politicians, but since around the mid-1990s there has been more emphasis on comedy. - The Museum of Curiosity, which has been described as a sister show to QI. Guests including comedians, scientists and explorers each "donate" something to the museum, explaining why it is significant. The "donations" can be literally anything from ordinary objects to cosmic events to abstract concepts. - A very early example would be Information Please, first broadcast in 1938. Particularly interesting in that the listening public was responsible for sending in the questions asked of the panel members, and they were the ones paid if the panelists got the answer wrong. - Fighting Talk, which airs every Saturday morning during the football season on BBC Five Live. More competitive than most examples, it features four panelists; usually sportspeople, comedians or journalists, discussing topical sporting news with points awarded for good punditry and passion as well as comedy. - So Wrong It's Right, another panel show hosted by Charlie Brooker. Comedians (including several regulars such as David Mitchell, Rob Brydon, Holly Walsh, and Lee Mack) compete to tell the "worst" stories, such as the worst thing that happened to them at a party or the worst idea for a restaurant. - Because News, a CBC radio panel game that first aired in 2015. - My Word!, long-running (1956-1988) BBC radio panel game with challenges based on language and wordplay. Best remembered for the final round, which was an excuse for team captains Frank Muir and Denis Norden to tell comic anecdotes ending in excruciating puns. - David Firth of Fat-Pie.com doesn't appear to much like panel shows, as displayed in a cartoon he made for Charlie Brooker's show Screenwipe that mocks the pre-written jokes many of them use. It also makes a few jabs at internet videos. See the cartoon here. - Caught Chatting is presented in this format. - Pappy's Flatshare Slamdown is a panel show released in Podcast format. - Citation Needed is Tom Scott's take on the format: He has a Wikipedia article pulled up, and three panelists (Chris Joel, Gary Brannan, and Matt Gray) who can't see the article and have to guess the details. Because all four of them are quite geeky and still intelligent, a lot of educational joking ensues. - Guest starring on a Panel Quiz Show is a way for your up-and-coming star/starlet to earn money (and fame) in Star Dream.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PanelGames
Trouser Space - TV Tropes Be grateful he was just in the leg. Ray Kowalski: You're empty handed. Fraser: Yes, but I am not empty trouser-ed. Some guy reaches right into his pants. Oh, God! He's pulling out — well the good news is that it's not that. The bad news is that it's still something you'd rather not see, or at the very least is something you wouldn't expect to see being carried around in one's trousers. Basically a Hammerspace spot where the sun don't shine. Can be Nightmare Fuel for some, usually for the characters watching more than the audience. Women can pull this trick too, with their own... implications about it. Also can be done whether it's pants or a skirt. When the Trouser Space region is explicitly the character's rectum, then that's an Ass Shove. When the item retrieved is a gun, then it's a Pants-Positive Safety, and may be part of an Extended Disarming. Not to be confused with Magic Pants, or, despite being the trouser version of Hammerspace, Hammerpants. Compare Victoria's Secret Compartment (the rough distaff equivalent), You Do NOT Want To Know, Treasure Chest Cavity. ## Examples: - In Cavewoman: Raptorella #2, Meriem produces a hand grenade she somehow had concealed in the bottom of her Fur Bikini. - In the first part of "The Tape" story, Hawkeye wound up stuffing his special "Amex Black" card (which has no credit limit) down the front of his pants. While interrogating him Madam Masque is disgusted to hear this and is the only one willing to reach in and get it \|\|especially since she's actually Clint's teenage sidekick Kate in disguise\|\|. - The infamous Panty Shot scene during "Collision" sees X-23 sticking a folded-up document in the waistband of her pants, flashing the top of her thong in the process. There's not an unsightly bulge to be seen, despite the fact her pants are practically painted on. - In Ynyr's The Cult of Dionysus, Nymphadora Tonks smuggles prison-escape tools in her "You-Know-What" into Azkaban to spring Harry, Hermione and Luna. She uses her shapeshifting abilities to alter the position of her inner organs to make more room down there (it looked still rather painful). Watching her removing the bag from this orifice gave Harry nightmares til his last day and Hermione vomited from this scene. - In My Lord Harry Potter Neville gets into a duel with the magical King of America which requires stripping down to their underwear for some unspecified reason. When the king tires of missing Neville with spells and starts shooting at him with a summoned gun, Neville pulls the Sword of Gryffindor out of his underpants. - The Loneliest Laundromat: Either this or Victoria's Secret Compartment is how Sonata gets money after stripping down for clothes launder. - Vow of Nudity: At the climax of one story, while hogtied and being held naked by her captors, Haara reveals she hid the Piscine Stone in her vagina due to a lack of other options. - In Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Baby Brent sticks the giant ceremonial scissors for the unveiling of Sardineland down the back of his pants. You can even see the handles stick out as he turns around. - In DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp Dijon makes off with Scrooge's money from his money bin by stuffing it in his pants. This includes a whole treasure chest full of money falling out of his pant leg and tripping Scrooge as he chases him. - This is Dijon's standard move for stealing treasure. He does it multiple times in the movie; the money bin incident is just the most notable because his pants are literally bulging with money at that point. - The Emperor's New Groove: Yzma hikes up her skirt, saying "I bet you weren't expecting... this!" Pacha and Kuzco are scared at first... and then realize she's just pulling out a vicious-looking dagger, and sigh in relief. - In the FernGully sequel, a circus performer pulls a fishing pole out of his pants to save his granddaughter. - At the end of We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story, Stubbs the Clown hands in his props when he resigns from Prof. Screweyes' circus, and starts pulling a bunch of random stuff out of his pants. Among the things were a host of traditional pranks like a joy buzzer and a fake Overly-Long Tongue, his backstage pass, his rabbit, the rabbit's back stage pass, "a few birds", a lucky whale tooth which was around his size, and "a giant clam that opens to reveal a mermaid holding the American flag and her normal brother Richard!" - In A Brother's Price Jerin keeps his lockpicks there. (Possibly also his Chastity Dagger, though he can remove that without too much indecency, apparently). - In Cops: Their Lives In Their Own Words an undercover policeman relates how he had a small automatic hidden in his jocks, and had to go fishing around for it while a hitman was blasting away at him. - In the Discworld novels, Nanny Ogg makes a habit of keeping her valuables in her knickers, causing her to turn away and emit all manner of strange twanging noises when she needs to retrieve something. - In Vladimir Mayakovsky's "My Soviet Passport" the character gets a passport out of his trousers. The original poem actually said "out of my wide trouser-legs". The contents of the trousers eventually became a subject for lots of Memetic Mutation in Russia. - Rogue Warrior. During an anti-terrorism exercise, one of Marcinko's men is captured and makes lewd comments while being searched by a female soldier, to discourage her from finding the gun hidden in his crotch. - Serpico. When Serpico is assigned to Vice, he faces the problem of hiding his firearm somewhere a prostitute can't detect when feeling him up as a potential client. So he hid a small automatic in his crotch, because if the hooker touched him there it was legally regarded as an overt sexual act and he could arrest her anyway. - A running gag in 'Allo 'Allo! was putting things down people's trousers to hide them. This included sausages, money, and rolled-up valuable paintings. - Also batteries, sticks of dynamite, rolled-up copies of valuable paintings, batteries disguised as sausages, sticks of dynamite disguised as sausages, valuable paintings and copies thereof rolled up and stored inside sausages, the same stored inside baguettes... are we getting the idea, here? - Played magnificently in an episode of All That, which featured Baggin' Saggin' Barry, a guy who could pull anything out of his comically oversized pants. When a similarly abilitied rival came into town, he was at first depressed. Then a Magical Negro told him to "reach down deep". The result? A Trouser Space contest with his rival, which he won by pulling out Abraham Lincoln. - His crowning moment came when he missed a flight at the airport because he spent too long failing to get through the metal detector with all that stuff... so he pulled out a plane. - In the Episode 6 of Al TV, during an interview with Ozzy Osbourne, "Weird Al" Yankovic recalls that it's just where he's put his bologna sandwich. - In an episode of Babylon 5, Sheridan is going to negotiate with a Mad Bomber and wants to keep a com line open with Garibaldi. He knows that his com link will be visible if it's on his hand as usual, and that the bomber will likely think of checking if he hides it in his shirt. So he drops it down his pants. It works great until he sits on it. - Gaius Baltar has done this in Battlestar Galactica. Played totally straight, even with a strip search. - Richie in Bottom fit a whole BBC camera in down there. There's plenty of space in my trousers sadly . - Broad City: - In "What a Wonderful World," a creepy guy who tricks Abbi and Ilana into cleaning his apartment in their underwear keeps his cell phone in his diaper. - Ilana stores weed in her vagina. - Casanova gets an Unsettling Gender-Reveal in more or less this way... \|\|when the young man who he was taking to bed appears to remove his own genitals and puts a prosthesis in Giacomo's hand. "Hmm. Mine doesn't do that."\|\| - The Doctor Who episode, "The Runaway Bride". Donna is forced to hang a lampshade on how The Doctor manages to carry around a large two-handed R/C controller complete with aerial in his trousers. - In the Drake & Josh episode "Alien Invasion", the boys get ready to pull a revenge prank on Megan, and Drake pulls the DVD needed for it out of his jeans. Josh: You put my copy of Alien Attack 2 down your pants?! Drake: So? Josh: So warm! - In a Season 3 episode of Due South, Fraser manages to smuggle files for Ray out of the police station by hiding them in the front of his trousers. Ray Kowalski: You're empty handed. Fraser: Yes, but I am not empty trouser-ed. - Possibly justified, the jodhpurs probably have enough space for it at least. - Late night comedian Craig Ferguson made this trope into a Running Gag on his show, first setting up the joke and then using a robotic sidekick named Geoffrey Peterson to deliver the punchline "In your pants!" - In The George Lopez Show episode, "George's house of Cards", after an argument over his refusal to give George the money he lost against him a few nights prior, Vic decides to give George the money at the end, only for George to discover that Vic literally keeps the money inside his pants. George reconsiders and instead asks Vic to write him a check, only to discover Vic keeps his checkbook in his pants as well. - In an episode of The Goodies, Tim is shown to be keeping all manner of things in his boxers, including a wad of cash and a Union Jack tea mug. - Guerrilla: Jas smuggles a container of glass shards into prison by hiding it inside her vagina. She's in quite visible discomfort on the way over. - Similarly, "In my pants!" became a running gag of Gilbert Gottfried's for a while on the remade The Hollywood Squares. - The crew from Hustle pull the same trick from The Sting on a drug dealer at the beginning of the third season. - MST3K: Torgo delivers a pizza to Doctor F. and Frank. He starts to get their complimentary 'crazy bread', reaching into his trousers before they holler "NO!!!" - NCIS. Abby, Ziva and Lee have to infiltrate an exclusive nightclub by posing as McGee's groupies. Ziva tells Lee to get a move on and she snaps back, "I don't know where your SIG is, but I'm having trouble walking." - The Night Of: Chandra agrees to help smuggle things in and out of jail for Naz so he can get Freddie's protection inside. She puts them inside of her vagina for this. - Bill on The Red Green Show is a master of this trope, constantly pulling things out of "storage space" in his overalls, up to and including a whole bicycle. - Bicycle, nothing! One time he retrieved an entire vaulting pole from out of there. - Then there was the one episode where he pulled an axe, a two-man saw, and a "powered" hacksaw out of his pants while attempting to cut down a tree (the last of which actually did the job. Go figure). - In the first episode of Wiseguy, The Mafia is surprised to see an Arms Dealer bring his woman to their meeting. As things go badly we see her casually unbuttoning her skirt (how she does this without attracting attention is not explained), then she somehow produces an Ingram MAC-10 and starts blazing away. Now admittedly the MAC-10 is quite small for an SMG, but it's still a large chunk of metal to be hiding between your legs while wearing a tight skirt. It's worth noting that this scene was based on a real-life arms deal in which the narrator noticed the women at the meeting were concealing firearms between their legs just from the way they sat down. - Since wrestling tights don't have pockets, wrestlers will frequently hide small weapons in the front of their trunks to hide them from the referee. Brass knuckles and bags of "salt" to blind the opponent are the most common, but other things have been done, a lot of props besides weapons in fact. When Chris Masters was doing his "Masterlock Challenge" (offering money to anybody who could break his Finishing Move) he would keep the cash he was offering (and at least once, a plane ticket) in his trunks. - When Chris Benoit stole Kurt Angle's Olympic medals, he kept them in the front of his tights. Partly for how much it annoyed Kurt Angle, partly for security (although Kurt did actually dive in for them once.) - At one point, Eric Young was holding onto an important videotape. In order to prevent someone from stealing it, he once wrestled an entire match with the large VHS tape stuck down the front of his tights (and it was as distractingly odd as it sounds.) - Sting has pulled his metal baseball bat out of his pants at times. It begs the question of how he was able to walk with it in. - Chris Angel's manager, El Maestro, does wear pants but "conceals" a particularly long stick on them that obviously can't fit in his pockets. Despite how long it takes to remove and replace after hitting Angel's opponents, the referee didn't catch on. - After Bullet Club forcibly shaved Ring of Honor World Champion Jay Lethal in 2016, their chosen challenger Adam Cole kept Lethal's formerly iconic braids in his tights. - At ECW As Good As It Gets, September 20, 1997, there was a mixed tag team match with Tommy Dreamer and Beulah McGillicutty vs. Rob Van Dam and his manager Bill Alfonso. Dreamer and RVD started the match, but, after RVD and his tag partner Sabu teamed up to send Dreamer through a table, and then RVD simply walked out on the match, the famous part of the match started. Beulah pulled a cookie sheet out of her sweatpants and blasted Fonzie with it, busting him open and causing him to lose 30% of his blood. Beulah eventually won the match for her team by pinning Fonzie with what Joey Styles called a "Beulahcanrana". Much like the Sting example above, it wasn't explained how she was able to walk with a cookie sheet in her pants. - In the Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition game, there is a way for a character to not only develop immunity to poison but actually absorb them for healing and stat boosts. On the Character Optimization forum at the Wizards of the Coast message boards, a character called the Trouserfang Dwarf was developed who got twinked this ability to the max and would walk around with his trousers full of the most venomous snakes he could buy and monstrously overpowered stats. - If anyone were to actually play this character, the suggested pre-combat threat was "Don't make me take off my pants". - A Blackadder reference could've worked too: "Mind, sir, or I shall take off me belt and, by thunder, me trousers'll fall down!" - The perk Natural Pocket in GURPS can represent this. To quote the rulebook, "Some interpretations have the potential to offend..." - Giants in Warhammer use random attacks in combat. At one point, these included "Stuff in Pants." The (very) unfortunate victim model was removed from the table permanently and counted as a casualty. - Trucy does it with her panties as a magic trick in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. Fortunately for the sanity of us all, they aren't panties that she actually wears. - In Creature Crunch, Wesley stores the items he collects (which he can eat to transform and eliminate his obstacles) inside his pants. - In Darkstalkers, Lord Raptor whips his guitar out of his pants (neck first) for his victory pose. - Played straight in another LucasArts adventure game — The Dig. Somewhat justified in that you're never carrying a great number of objects and none of them are particularly large — your shovel is a pocket shovel — but still beyond what anyone could realistically carry. Many of these same jokes make it into Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, as many of the LucasArts people from the MI series reconvened at Telltale. - Final Fantasy XIII: Most characters either have a weapon sheathe or their weapon Sticks to the Back. Hope, however, apparently stores his weapon (a large boomerang) down the back of his pants. - Lampshaded by Barney halfway through Heart of Evil, when he expresses concern over the fact that Percy might have accidently ejaculated on the Roasted Moose given to him at the beginning of the game. Later on, Barney himself yells in disgust after he apparently peed himself. It turns out that he had just spilled his glass of applejuice in his underpants. You stock up on the little food you can get during a war. - This trope is lampshaded Leisure Suit Larry 2: Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places) where Larry has to collect a 36-gallon trashcan-sized Grotesque Gulp soda. The narrator wonders how Larry's going to carry it with him... and then remembers that this is an adventure game and lets Larry just stuff the drink in his pocket. - Lampshaded in Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon. Luigi occasionally needs to take large items (often being half of Luigi's size) back to the Bunker. One time, when you're taking three of them back to a level, E. Gadd chuckles and says "It's a good thing you have such deep pockets in those overalls!" - All of the (bearded) freed prisoners in Metal Slug hide bonuses in their underwear. Including weapons. Is that a Super Grenade in your pocket. What makes it hilarious is the giant grin they give you as they shake the bonus out. The boxers are comically large and he manages to pull them out of his pants in one-piece and then put them back in easily. - Monkey Island: - When Johnny Cage wins a round in the original Mortal Kombat, where exactly does he pull his sunglasses from? - Pajama Sam, who seems to have plenty of space in the dropseat of his pajamas. - In Puyo Puyo Fever 2, Gogette pulls out a mysterious potion out of his pants in Raffina's HaraHara course. Raffina naturally rejects the potion out of disgust. - In The Saboteur, Sean Devlin is always seen pulling out his guns somewhere inside his torso or pants. - Miyamoto Musashi from Sengoku Basara keeps some sort of giant broom/sword/thing don't the front of his trousers, which he pulls out whenever it's time to really kick some butt. - In The Sims series of games, people pull anything from an engagement ring to garden tools from their pants. Can be made interesting if they are doing that while in their underwear, or naked if you have certain Game Mods installed. - At the end of Skullmonkeys, Klaymen pulls a potato out of his pants \|\|to plug the exhaust pipe of Evil Engine No. 9\|\|. - So uh, a spaceship crashed in my yard.: Mark suffers a Groin Attack from putting a jellyfish down his pants. Mark: Ow, the burning. - Lampshaded in the computer game Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon: You put the ladder in your pocket. Ouch! - And again in Space Quest VI, after trying to pick up a plank: Narrator: Bet you can't fit that thing in your pants. Guess I was wrong, it does fit. There must be plenty of spare room in there. - In Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, Strong Bad can store all sorts of things in his pants, including helium-filled balloons, a dozen dozen gelatin dessert packets, a large prop sword, and a bat hutch full of endangered bats. Strong Bad: Puttin' bat hutches in my pants, hope I don't get bit! - Tex Murphy pulls a 4-foot long bamboo pole out of his in The Pandora Directive. - Lampshaded in Thy Dungeonman 2; the title character is constantly putting stuff into his "roomy loin-cheese cloth". - All of The Walking Dead's protagonists seem to be able to store just about anything they need in their pants, from the realistic (a pistol) to the downright insane (a blowtorch). - When becoming Calamity Jane in Wild ARMs 3, Maya has a chain gun drop out of her skirt. - Yandere Simulator has Ayano Aishi able to carry around weapons and hide them even while naked. The developer hints that she keeps the weapons in her anus and vagina. - Lampshaded in Zork: Grand Inquisitor: From the beginning of the game, the player possesses a "permasuck machine" which is basically a canister vacuum. When he places it on the ground, Dalboz asks, "Just where were you keeping that?" - Console Wars: In the Daze Before Christmas episode, Anti-Claus is revealed to keep a bag of potato flakes in his pants. When Pat asks him why he keeps potato flakes in his pants, Anti-Claus tells him that he couldn't fit them in his pockets because they were filled with macaroni. - Lampshaded in Death Note: The Abridged Series (kpts4tv): Light: As for Misa's Death Note, I'll keep it in the only place I know it will be safe — my pants. Misa: Oh, it'll be safe there! Light doesn't even let me in his pants! Ryuk: You're not missing anything. - In Orion's Arm, young Siberoos can be carried in their mothers pants long after they outgrow the pouch - but mainly for special occasions such as birthdays. - There have been numerous stories on What the Fuck Is Wrong with You? about people having tried to steal things by shoving them down their pants. It's usually things like frozen meat, though it sometimes is much larger things like guitars... or chainsaws. - In 2016, a man was caught trying to smuggle exotic birds into the United States from Cuba by hiding them in his trousers. - Razor Ramon Hard Gay himself was once filmed visiting Harajuku to demand that the punk kids there do the right thing and call their dads on Father's Day... using a cell phone he drew suggestively from the front of his leather hotpants. - ZP Theart, former lead singer of DragonForce, tends to stuff his wireless microphone down the front of his pants whenever he needs his hands free onstage. - There is a video on YouTube (believed to be a "warning video" to highlight the dangers of letting teenagers wear baggy pants) that shows a teenager pulling an absolutely improbable amount of guns out of his pants... including a full-size shotgun. It first achieved notoriety when it was shown in Bowling for Columbine, long before jeans went from baggy to skinny (Fashion Marches On?). - A notorious design of some school uniforms in Australia included a change purse in the front of the shorts on the inside and no other pockets. - Jennifer McCarthy was arrested after threatening her boyfriend with a pistol she pulled from a very specific place. A place you could only reasonably hide a weapon while wearing only lingerie. - How a woman stole a tourist's Rolex watch	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PantySpace
Pantomime Animal - TV Tropes Nowhere did I describe it as a four-legged beast on loan from Panto-Horses-Are-Us. A traditional feature of British Pantomime occasionally also seen elsewhere, the Pantomime Animal is a non-talking animal played by a human actor wearing an animal suit. For obvious reasons this is most often seen on stage; the most common animal given this treatment in pantomime is a horse. Larger quadrupeds (such as horses) may require two actors. Children or dwarfs, on the other hand, may be needed to play smaller creatures. Though pantomime animals don't talk (at least, they're not supposed to talk), they may make appropriate animal noises on cue and often can dance as well — pantomime is a highly stylised, non-realistic theatrical form where Rule of Funny is the norm. Having a pantomime animal avoids all the hassle of working with real live animals — although sometimes real animals, usually ponies, appear briefly for the effect. "The back legs of a pantomime horse" is sometimes used as a byword for an uncomfortable, humiliating job, especially in a show-business context. After all, the actor in that role is invisible to the audience, has to spend all their time bent over and trusting their partner to lead, and has a job which involves keeping their face adjacent to someone else's backside. A sub-trope of Pantomime. See also People in Rubber Suits. In-Universe examples can overlap with Animal Disguise. A human version of this would be Totem Pole Trench; some inhuman versions include The Worm That Walks and Combining Mecha. ## Examples: ### In-universe examples - Wonder Woman #1: Diana and Etta wear a two-person baby elephant suit while trying to figure out what is killing some circus elephants. Their act almost works, but the other elephants treat them like something odd and they're figured out by the villains. - A The Far Side comic has two pantomime actors arguing. One (whose ass is a good three or four times wider than him) demands to know why he's always the rear end of the horse. - Loriot has a subversion - the pantomime horse doing all the impossible gags only possible by two pantomimes is played — by a horse. - MAD: Don Martin shows a bullfight. The bull in reality are two pantomimes. Of course, this is no gag and is exaggerated: the bullfighter is a bull in a bullfighter costume. - Pain and Panic briefly dressed up as a female Pegasus near the end of Hercules, with the two forming the individual halves of the Pegasus. - Those two do this sort of trick quite often. One time they attempted to do a huge lion, and ended up getting confused on who was doing which half. - The Hunchback of Notre Dame: One of the costumes worn at the Feast of Fools is a horse with two rear ends. - Shows up at the Mardi Gras party in The Princess and the Frog. - In Sherlock Gnomes, Sherlock and Juliet disguise themselves as a squirrel so they can move about a park in daylight. - In Trolls: World Tour, the two mercenary Yodeller Trolls dress up in this fashion to pose as a centaur-like Country Troll. - Played with in Snow White & the Huntsman. At one point when the dwarves are sneaking into the castle they walk on the other side of a horse that's between them and the guards. - The two rebels disguised as a cow in Top Secret!. One insists on playing the rear end, causing his compatriot to gripe, "Fine, be an asshole!" Ironically, the fake cow is really played by a real one with boots on. - Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen actually did this with an ice cream truck. - The Pink Panther has two police inspectors undercover in a zebra costume at the costume party meant to ensnare the Phantom. When the Phantom and his nephew make a break for it, they gallop down the street...while everyone else in the chase is in a car. - In The Bold Caballero, the Commandante holds a bullfight for Isabella's birthday. It at first appears to be a burlesque bullfight with a 'bull' consisting of two men in a costume. However, he later releases a real bull into the ring. The first thing it does is attack the fake bull. - Two Three Stooges shorts, "What's the Matador?" and its remake "Sappy Bullfighters," revolve around a gag identical to the one used in The Bold Caballero; Moe and Larry stage a comedy bullfight by dressing up in a costume, with Curly (Joe in the later short) acting as their matador, and end up facing off against the genuine article. - The Wolf mascot from A.N.T. Farm. - Call the Midwife: In the series 7 Christmas Episode, Trixie and Christopher appear as a pantomime cow when the much-delayed Christmas pantomime is finally stage. Trixie complains that she went to all the trouble of getting her hair done and a manicure when no one can see her. - Dad's Army: In "Operation Kilt", the platoon attempts to use a pantomime cow to sneak up on a highland regiment during a training exercise. Things do not according to plan when a bull takes an interest. - In a Dave Allen at Large sketch, a German POW camp guard searches the cargo and even the straw in an outgoing wagon thoroughly, to make sure there are no prisoners hiding inside. Not finding anyone, the guard waves the wagon through the gate, failing to notice that it's being pulled by a pantomime horse. - The Edison Twins: Tom spends an episode trying to find a horse for a football game as a subplot for an episode's story and finally has to make do with a pantomime horse costume with a partner at the end. - Father Brown: In "The Tree of Truth", Father Brown and Sid play the Daisy the Cow in the Christmas pantomime. - (ding-dong) Secretariat on WHO'S THAT AT THE DOOR?!? The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. - Parodied with the pantomime horses in Monty Python's Flying Circus. To say nothing of the pantomime Princess Margaret. - Buttercup the QI cow made an appearance at the beginning of the "Groovy" episode to help demonstrate the first question. Stephen: Never, ever in the history of show business has the phrase "Don't milk it, Luv," been more appropriate. - Dobbin the Pantomime Horse in 1980s BBC kids' show Rentaghost, supposedly an empty costume animated by a misfiring magic spell. - The music video for Sorry for Party Rocking by LMFAO features a pantomime zebra performing the Running Man. - SCP Foundation: SCP-1545, Larry the Loving Llama. Once people get inside the costume, they adopt the personality of Larry, and the person in the back starts dancing with the intention of entertaining people, never stopping until the people inside die or are forcefully removed. - Bob's Burgers: In "Two For Tina", Jimmy Jr. tries to impress Tina at one point by dressing up in a horse costume with his pal Zeke and singing a song about her. - Donald Duck and the Gorilla: Huey, Dewey and Louie put on a three-person gorilla suit (one controlling the head, one controlling the arms and one controlling the legs) to play a prank on Donald. - In the Classic Disney Short Moose Hunters, Donald and Goofy don a two-person moose costume (supposedly female, though it has antlers) to lure a male moose to Mickey. - The Doug episode "Doug's On Stage" has Doug Funnie and Roger Klotz having to play Grendle the brave horse in the Bluffington Founders' Day School Play, which of course they don't enjoy. - In the Family Guy episode "The Fat Guy Strangler," Peter skips out on his physical to go eat steaks with his friends. For no particular reason, he insists that he and Brian "fool" Lois by leaving the house dressed in a horse costume. Lois doesn't notice them wearing it, and Brian is very confused. - Looney Tunes: ### Examples of a real-in-universe creature being portrayed using this method: - Sesame Street has Mr. Snuffleupagus and Barkley the dog. - In the Doctor Who serial "Warriors of the Deep", the Myrka, a genetically engineered sea monster, is played by two guys note : in fact, the same two guys who played the horse in Rentaghost. When this came out it put the last nail in the coffin of taking the monster seriously in a costume approximating to a green pantomime horse. It... doesn't really work. Michael Grade would later screen footage of a scene involving the Myrka to justify his axing of the series. - Blake's 7: Bryan the Spider from "The Harvest of Kairos". The actor operated the Giant Spider by sitting in the costume backwards, operating the front legs with his feet. Unfortunately, this resulted in a very slow walk. - Some quadruped Ultra Series monsters are played by two people in a suit, such as Dodongo, Paragon, Brocken, Jumbo King and Zogu's second form. Occasionally suits that have the actors joined side-by-side appear too, with Pestar being the most notable example. - As noted, common in Pantomime. - The lion in Androcles and the Lion is played this way. - Traditionally, Nana the dog in Peter Pan. - Imogene the Spotted Calf, who replaced Toto in the original 1902 stage version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. No, really. - The elephant and rhinoceros costumes used in the Broadway musical version of The Lion King. - The theatre adaptation of War Horse, although it uses a more elaborate rig including a puppeteered head to avoid triggering the "pantomime animal = comedy" connection. - Rainbow the dog from the Skyline Gang, as well as various other animals. - George the horse in the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "I Had an Accident", who shows up at the end to ride into the sunset with the gorilla when SpongeBob questions how a gorilla is underwater in the first place.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PantomimeAnimal
Panty Thief - TV Tropes "What a haul, what a haul!" Mike: They don't even know what panties are, yet they feel compelled to raid them. Crow: Every male of every species has the biological urge to panty raid. An individual — almost always a pervert of some kind — who steals and collects women's (or girls') underwear, usually worn/used. Almost always presented as a reprehensible individual and usually an enemy of the hero, and just as frequently played for laughs. They can be divided into the Stalker with a Crush — who steals a specific person's underwear as part of a general stalking campaign—and the indiscriminate, compulsive underwear thief—who usually doesn't engage in more serious sexual offenses and is more likely to be treated as a comic figure. One might call such a character a "knicker nicker". Panty Thieves usually go about their business while wearing Stealth Clothes. An unintentional version is Kleptomaniac Hero Found Underwear; in this case, someone is trying to steal something else, and ends up with panties. An Impossible Thief may steal the panties that their victim is currently wearing, usually without even being noticed until the thief presents their trophy for all to see. Usually this is an anime trope (due to the fact that in Japan, clothes lines are predominant while the West uses dryers), but Western culture has independently produced the college prank of panty raiding (which has been out of fashion since the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the replacement of men's and women's dorms with co-ed dorms). Panty raids are usually perpetrated by groups of perverted young Frat Bro males, rather than just one guy. It's becoming less common for this trope to be played for pure comedy, due to society being less inclined to write it off as a prank and more inclined to view it as a form of sexual harassment. ## Examples: - The hamster Echiboo (which reportedly translates as "Perverted Fart") in the manga Aoi House, whenever he got the chance. - Assassination Classroom has an arc in which Koro-Sensai is framed as a compulsive Panty Thief and his class have to try to prove him innocent. (It ends up being one of the manga's most spectacular Mood Whiplash twists, as it turns out to be part of one of Shiro's elaborate and ruthless attempts to kill him, and the arc ends with Shiro committing an exceptionally brutal You Have Failed Me which many fans consider his Moral Event Horizon moment.) - The Stalker with a Crush Kuroko from A Certain Magical Index. It's only shown in the anime counterpart of the spin-off A Certain Scientific Railgun, though. On one occasion, she somehow stole Misaka's swimsuit from a locked container. While she IS a teleporter, it's not clear how she managed to get past the lock. A few minutes after revealing her theft of the swimsuit, Kuroko took the trope to its logical extreme: using her ability, she teleported Misaka's underwear right off of its owner. - The Elder does this at least once in Chrono Crusade, as part of his Dirty Old Man gag. - One Running Gag in Daily Lives of High School Boys is Tadakuni's sister's underwear kept being stolen by her brother and his two friends Hidenori and Yoshitake. Hidenori's older brother got in at some point as well. - In the Death Note Spin-Off novel The Los Angeles BB Murder Case, Ryuzaki (BB) raids a little girl's panty drawer. Making the scene even more inappropriate is that he's supposed to be examining her murder scene with Naomi. - Oolong from Dragon Ball is an offender. It was stated by Puar that he was kicked out of Shapeshifting School for stealing the teacher's panties. He even saves the day by stealing Emperor Pilaf's wish from Shenron; Oolong swoops in and wishes for "panties off a hot babe" to prevent Pilaf from wishing for world domination. - Shinji Kazama from Full Metal Panic! is forced to do this when some upperclassmen steal one of his possessions and ransom it for a pair of Kaname's panties. - In Gargoyle of the Yoshinagas, there's a scene in which Kaitou Hyakushiki literally steals the undies off of two people in front of a crowd. - Ghost Talker's Daydream: Mitsuru has made it a habit of breaking into Misaki's apartment and has repeatedly stolen all her underwear \|\|so he can sniff them.\|\| Then adds insult to injury, by leaving her money so she can buy more undies that he intends to steal, later... after she's had time to wear them. - Tomoki from Heaven's Lost Property. He frequently steals women's underwear. Sometimes he even wears stolen panties as a mask! - High School D×D: In one of the OVAs, the Occult Research Club faces against a former priest who steals women's underwear, which he uses for his experiments to create a Philosopher's Stone. He then transforms into an underwear monster capable of controlling women's bras and panties while they wear them. - In K, Misaki Yata fears looking like this when he goes to the school island to return a pair of panties Neko left at Bar HOMRA — and a side-story shows him getting caught as such by the campus cleaning robots, and enemy/love interest Saruhiko Fushimi has to get him out of trouble for it. How did she leave her panties at the bar? "That's what I want to know - no, wait, I definitely don't want to know!" - Koragashi of Kamen no Maid Guy can easily steal the panties off the entire female population of a high school without them noticing but doesn't do so for perverted reasons. Instead, he is trying to identify a suspicious person and the only clue he has are her unique panties. His partner, Fubuki, tells him that he didn't have to go to such extremes though and promptly punishes him via remote-controlled explosion. - Kazuma from KonoSuba is an odd case. His Steal skill is supposed to steal a random item from the target based on his Luck stat. However, when he tries it out for the first time on the girl who taught him the skill (with her consent), he ends up unintentionally stealing the panties she was wearing. As it turns out, his extremely high Luck stat means that when he targets women, he steals their panties almost every time. He (and everyone who knows him) soon comes to expect this result, pushing him into this trope. - A story in the first volume of Maboroshi Panty has Maboroshi Panty fight a man who is using a fishing pole to yank off women's panties. Maboroshi Panty herself ends up losing two pairs of panties to the criminal, both of them being the ones she wears over her private parts rather than as a mask. - In Macross Frontier, the one time Sheryl attends school with Ranka and Alto is memorable not just for her own interstellar celebrity, but because of her unstoppable rampage through the campus while going commando in a skirt. The culprit? A tiny, green, and adorable Ridiculously Cute Critter (\|\|a Vajra in larval form\|\|) that crawled into her laundry basket while she was showering, then started hopping about the campus with no regard for the pair of panties that had wrapped around it. The Idol Singer was lucky no paparazzi were nearby to capture the moment... Also of note is that the little guy is then pursued by — with three exceptions — the entire male population of the school, whose motivation appears to be acquiring said panties as a trophy rather than giving them back. - Maken-ki!: Martha Minerva is a rare and unusual female example, who has an obsession with other girls' breasts and panties. They're safe so long as she keeps her eyes closed. But, once she opens them, she can freely open and close \|\|dimensional gateways\|\| at will, which she uses to instantaneously steal other girls' panties while they're wearing them! Which is why Haruko, Inaho, and Azuki wound up spending chapters 22-24 without theirs. - Mazinger Angels features a Panty Thief who somehow manages to acquire a Mechanical Beast (Satan Claus P10) from Doctor Hell and employs the giant robot to commit the dastardly deed of stealing the underwear of all the women on the city to fill an Olympic pool and then swim in it. - Miyuki: Panties get stolen back and forth like it's their mission. In one chapter Yasujirou actually does a case where he is trying to bring justice to a panty thief. - Rudeus of Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation steals a pair of Roxy's unwashed panties before she leaves and forgets to return them. He protects them carefully, referring to them as the "Divine Artifact". At one point Rudeus is wearing a pair of panties on his head and a knight accuses him of stealing them from the captive princess. Rudeus takes offense as they are \|\|his wife's panties\|\|. - One of the "Orphans" in My-HiME is a lingerie thief. Hilarity Ensues when one of the victims is Natsuki, who has to go around panty-less. - Negima! Magister Negi Magi: - Chamo-kun, though only rarely. Notable in that he's an ermine, and not even a transformed human. He seems to want the panties to make a nest. His love of panties was really confirmed when \|\|his share of the Rainyday sisters's Lotus-Eater Machine has him dreaming that he swims in panties.\|\| - Jack Rakan deserves special mention. In one manga chapter, he ends up having to fight two girls. He Flash Steps behind them, flips up their skirts, and steals the panties off one of them before they knew what happened note : and the only reason that he didn't steal the panties off both of them is because one was Going Commando to begin with. Said panties end up being a crucial element in locating and defeating them. Then he does it again later... to ALL of Fate's minions simultaneously, then flips up their skirts repeatedly until they concede defeat (so he won't have to fight them). - Chamo's reputation as a Panty Thief was subverted in Negima!?: One chapter involves Negi chasing a small Panty Thief throughout Mahora academy, and many a reader expected it to be Chamo. \|\|It was a cat.\|\| - Onsokumaru in Ninja Nonsense, though he steals panties by proxy (dispatching Shinobu to do it under the premise of ninja training). - Penguin #1 from Penguindrum uses a fish rod to steal panties in episode 10. - Happôsai from Ranma ½ is the patron saint of all panty thieves. This Old Master even developed some martial art techniques around panty-thieving and peeping. Currently the trope image. - In The Seven Deadly Sins: - Meliodas feels up Elizabeth and somehow steals her panties. The fact he did allows him to Spot the Imposter later. - In OVA 1, Ban tries to swipe Elaine's, but the attempt fails since she isn't wearing any. - Shimoneta: - Applies to Gathered Fabric as a whole, since they engage in ero-terrorism as a ruse to indulge their fetish for stealing underwear. Their leader, White Peak, garbs himself in an entire bodysuit of white panties that have been sewn together and sips wine with another pair soaking in it. - Black Base is exact opposite, by having a preference for only stealing black panties and lingerie. But he also seems determined to share his interest by setting traps so the victims have to change clothing so he can steal them. Then leaves only black lingerie for the victims to wear afterward. - Time Stop Brave: Kuzuno Sekai's first on screen use of his ability to stop time is to steal Niña's panties off her body, while they were in different jail cells. After teasing her for wearing teddy bear panties, he returns them just as quickly. - One You're Under Arrest! story concerns a highly sophisticated Panty Thief — who strangely enough is a parody of Billy The Kid from The Silence of the Lambs: he is sewing a blanket out of the pants he steals, "and then it will be like I am sleeping with all the girls at once!". After the girls catch him, they break him of his habit by informing him that one of the pairs he stole belonged to a Wholesome Crossdresser on the anti-Chikan squad. - Zatch Bell! has a character named Momon, who looks like a cross between a rabbit and a monkey. When Kiyo meets him, he's holding a bra for some reason. When Momon meets the others, he spends countless attempts to see Tia's panties, and somehow manages to steal another pair from her house. Needless to say, Tia rages. - Booga in Tank Girl first met the title character when he tries to steal her knickers as part of a gang initiation. They've been together ever since. - In the Star Trek: Enterprise Parody Fic Farce Contact, the Suliban steal all female clothing on Enterprise, as part of an Evil Plan to make Starfleet switch to the miniskirts of the Original Series. - Friendship Is Magical Girls: Since Spike's powers run on lust, doing this is a great way of having a quick power-up. That being said, though, he seems to also do it just for the hell of it, such as when, during Rarity's first (pre-mahoushojou) fight alongside the team, he magically steals hers off her body while changing her outfit into a gi to fight in, something she doesn't realize until later. - Homura Akemi from Madoka Magica stealing poor Madoka's panties (among other forms of pervery) is a trope so prevalent in fan-art that it has its own pool on Danbooru. - The Rise of Darth Vulcan: Artful Dodger, Vulcan's apprentice, knows a spell to nab mares' underthings. Vulcan is more confused as to why such things even exist when most ponies go without any clothes whatsoever. - Vow of the King: For her own amusement, Yoruichi steals all of Soifon's panties and strings them up in the captain assembly hall just before a meeting. - The Stalker with a Crush protagonist of Body Double (1984) steals the underwear of the woman he's obsessed with, which doesn't help his case when the police find them on his person after she's murdered. - Drive a Crooked Road: Not exactly underwear, but when Eddie finds Barbara's handkerchief in her car while he is servicing it, he looks around furtively, then sniffs it and tucks it away in his pocket. Back home, he takes it out and lies on the bed smelling it. Of course, as their whole meeting was a Honey Trap, it is likely Barbara left it there for him to find deliberately. - In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of the first indications we get that Patrick is a bit of a creep is when he casually states he stole a pair of Clementine's panties while standing beside her (comatose) ex-boyfriend. - Following: When Cobb the Gentleman Thief steals a couple of pairs of panties from a woman's apartment, it comes off as him just being creepy. This however is subverted in the end when his true motivation is revealed: he stole the panties as part of a plot to frame his friend and partner-in-crime, the unnamed young man, for the murder of the woman. - In Happy Birthday to Me, Etienne sneaks into Ginny's bedroom and steals the panties she takes off when she goes to take a bath. He later reveals he is carrying them under his jersey during the dirt bike race. - Subverted in Internal Affairs (1990). The antagonist (a corrupt and manipulative police officer) beats up the protagonist (an Internal Affairs cop), claims to have slept with his wife and throws some panties in his face to taunt him. His wife is bewildered at the accusation and doesn't even understand why his husband is later brandishing a strange pair of panties at her. - One of the many pranks pulled by the Lambda-Lambda-Lambdas in Revenge of the Nerds. The actual raid, which is blatantly obvious (it's even kicked off by a Pi Delta Pi opening her shower curtain to reveal Lewis, who cheerfully announces "Panty raid!"), is actually a diversion while two more Tri-Lambs secretly install a spy camera in the Pis' changing room. - Valentine: Halfway through the film, \|\|the killer finds Kate's apartment door open; her neighbor Gary, who was hitting on her earlier, is inside trying on Kate's underwear. Gary tries to reason with the killer by saying it's Not What It Looks Like and that Gary himself is mentally ill (the term he uses is "not well"), but that doesn't dissuade the killer as he beats Gary to death with a running iron.\|\| - Akatsuki from Aesthetica of a Rogue Hero. He also steals brassieres off girls' wearers with no problem. - Macdonald Hall: Bruno and Boots frame their unwanted Boarding School roommates as these, with the full cooperation of some friends from the nearby girls' school. The Headmaster isn't fooled for an instant, so he has the roommates pretend to have been expelled to guilt-trip Bruno and Boots into fixing things. - "In the Middle of the Night" from the One Step Beyond album by Madness is about a sixty-three year old newsagent who just so happens to be an underwear thief, beginning his raids at 8pm. He sees his own picture in the newspaper and books it. - The title character from Pink Floyd's single "Arnold Layne", a transvestite whose primary pastime is stealing women's undergarments from washing lines and wearing them in secret. - P!nk's "Raise Your Glass" includes the line "Party crasher, panty snatcher." - The image accompanying the Dexterity skill in Avernum shows an Impossible Thief at work, swiping a woman's panties from under her full plate armor. - In Bully, our hero, Jimmy, does this for gym coach Mr. Burton. Slightly squicky, but overall, funny. - Vico doesn't actually steal any female undergarments in A Dance with Rogues, but he does show an unhealthy obsession with the player character's underwear. - One of the side-quests in Fable III involves stealing a pair of Reaver's underwear for one of his female fans. - During a flashback sequence in Final Fantasy VII, Cloud can sneak into Tifa's room and swipe her "orthopedic underwear" (in the Japanese version, they were "slightly-used" instead). Though it's uncertain if this actually happened or not, since the dialogue options after that are "It's true" and "Just kidding". \|\|Later on in the game, we discover that Cloud is an Unreliable Narrator. Assuming it actually happened, it's ambiguous as to whether this specific memory belongs to Cloud or Zack.\|\| - In GalGun Double Peace, there's a side mission to help a girl find out who stole her underwear. \|\|It turns out to have been a playful kitten\|\|. There's also a mission in one route to steal underwear from the girls' lockers. - In Golden Sun, snooping in Lady McCoy's wardrobe ends in Isaac apparently trying to steal her underwear. - Persona: - Persona 2* has Maya run into one of these while she's investigating the women's changing room at the gym. He runs off as soon as she notices him. Talking to Katsuya after this and choosing to tell him about the incident triggers a sequence where he runs off to chase the man down and beat him up off screen. - In Persona 4: Arena, Aigis foils an unusual airline hijacking, where the hijackers made no demands \|\|and was in fact a cover to steal an old prototype anti-Shadow weapon being transported on that flight\|\|. When her superior Mitsuru deduces that her luggage was the true target, Aigis immediately thinks Mitsuru's underwear was the target. - Planescape: Torment has a perverted wizard who turns himself into an armoire in the Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts so that women store their underthings inside him. "Good riddance, you wooden pervert" is the player character's last comment to him. - In a quest in The Sims Medieval one of the things your hero has to do in order to become a Guildsman is to raid the ship and steal panties from pirates. This actually makes sense in context, because the entire quest has been setting up Guild initiation as a frat rush. (Even the women pirates have disgusting panties. Then again, this is The Dung Ages.) - The M.U.G.E.N series, Panty Thief Mysteries, by chimukun is built around a group that steals panties. Interestingly it does not even contain one male perverted villain, in an all female cast. A 1 episode sequel titled A Setsuko Christmas Tale was later released, also with a case of a different panty thief. - In SomethingPositive, Davan apparently trained Choo Choo to do this. And then, after the incident with Kestrel, hired him out professionally. - 4chan: One of /tg/ joke characters is Jeanstealer — a genestealer with a jean fetish. - The Onion describes why panty raids are a poor idea at certain colleges. - SCP Foundation: When SCP-261, a magic vending machine, dispensed a package of edible underwear, the log simply notes "Items confiscated. Current whereabouts unknown." - Whateley Universe: - There's an entire story built around this trope, as a panty thief hits every girls' dorm on campus, one night at a time, finally getting spotted (but not caught). \|\|That's because it was Sun Wukong the Monkey King, one of the legendary Eight Immortal, the whole she-bang. When he steals yours panties, you just let him.\|\| - Mimeo's biographical story, "Mimeographic", mentions that the one attempt at a panty raid when he was a student at Whateley (in the mid-1960s) got thoroughly stomped by several of the tougher girls. - In one episode of American Dad!, Steve's best friend Snot tries stealing Hayley's panties and pays the violent price as a result as Hayley finds and beats the hell out of him and snatches them back in anger. - Codename: Kids Next Door* featured an episode with Numbahs 1 and 2 believing that the training bra belonging to Numbah 5's older sister is actually Battle Ready Armor. What starts out as a misunderstanding, after stealing and trying it, turns out to be real near the end. It has since been used by teen villains all series, both female and male, even though some still see their initial form to be ridiculous. - Inverted in a two-part episode of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero called "The Traitor", after a Critical Failure to the armor-treatment chemical, Lady Jaye catches a COBRA infantryman... and obviously, he leaves her with a souvenir! - In one episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, SpongeBob, Patrick and Mr. Krabs go on a "panty raid". It is near midnight, however, so Mr. Krabs does not realize until it is too late that the person they are stealing panties from is his own mother. - Black Bump, A Feca Demi-God in Wakfu, collects underwear from all over the World of Twelve. His explanation (if you can call that) is that underwear are the most intimate piece of clothing, and thus something akin to a "soul" of their owner. He has a whole temple where his collection is proudly exposed and stored. A rather rare example in that he collects from both males and females. However, he draws the line at children's underwear.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PantyThief
Pantomime - TV Tropes Where's your career? A pantomime (or "panto" for short) is a British and Irish genre of theatre. Pantos are fairy tale adaptations aimed at family audiences, full of slapstick comedy, songs, cross-dressing actors, subtle dirty jokes for the adults, regional shout-outs and single, double and even triple entendres galore. It's a soup of older genres, creating a composite genre which is traditionally played around Christmas even though the performances themselves typically aren't that festive and can be told at any time of the year. This is a very British tradition — which (like most such traditions) baffles Americans; America used to have a somewhat similar tradition in Vaudeville, minus the association with Christmas, but that died out around the turn of the twentieth century. It's also not to be confused with actually miming things (as in Enemy Mime or Mime and Music-Only Cartoon). In America, the two words have become synonyms, but east of the Atlantic they're very different - if you told a Briton someone was miming, they'd think Marcel Marceau, but if you told them someone was pantomiming, they'd picture a middle-aged man in drag! Also see Mummers, another closely-related British theatrical tradition. # The History of Pantomimes Pantomimes are usually based on a relatively small pool of basic stories, mostly fairy tales and other Public Domain media. These include: Pantomime began as a development of the Commedia dell'Arte or Harlequinade, in which the characters from that tradition were used as a Universal-Adaptor Cast to parody well-known stories. Victorian pantomimes often included a climactic "Transformation Scene", in which the characters were transformed into their Harlequinade analogues. This became increasingly perfunctory and was eventually abandoned as the pure Harlequinade died out and the characters became less recognisable to younger audience members. Pantos are traditionally Theatrical Productions, but quite a few have been recorded for Live-Action Television, such as The ITV Panto. They have also featured on BBC radio; the most famous being Black Cinderella II Goes East in 1978, which featured the cast of I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again and was co-produced by Douglas Adams. In the U.S., there's Lythgoe Family Panto, which combines the typical building blocks of British pantos with the aesthetics of a Jukebox Musical. # Traditional roles in Panto - The Dame, played by a middle-aged male actor in quite heroic quantities of dresses, makeup and enormous fake boobs. Often the most popular and publicised member of the cast, a Dame will often be a fixture in a particular theatre for decades. Usually the mother or aunt of the Principal Boy character (see below); in Cinderella two dames are often used to play the Ugly Sisters. - The Principal Boy. Sometimes the titular character, (eg, Jack or Aladdin), often a Straight Man to the Dame. The principal boy was traditionally played by a young female actor as if they had escaped from the pages of Enid Blyton (think "Bob" from Blackadder II). Traditionally slaps her thigh a lot. These days, professional pantomimes will often have a male Principal Boy (sometimes so they can hire a popular young soap actor/pop star to put on the poster). Though it's somewhat debatable whether the Principal Boy, when female, really counts as "cross-dressing"; she tends to wear a costume mainly composed of a leotard, fishnet tights, and high heels, and often looks significantly more feminine and sexy than the Principal Girl. This is down to the Parent Service roots of the character; in the nineteenth century, putting an attractive actress in a mock-medieval doublet and hose was the only way of showing off her legs without causing a massive scandal. - The Principal Girl, always young and full of wholesome charm. She will fall in love with the Principal Boy or the Prince Charming if she's the heroine. For added gender-bending hilarity, a boy may be cast in this role, but even with a girl it works. - The Villain: Dastardly Whiplash types straight out of Victorian melodrama. Black goatees, cloaks, canes, top hats, devilish laughs. They may be Grand Viziers, wizards, witches, pirate captains or stepmothers — whatever they are, they're always played with delicious relish and the part every actor wants. Green lighting is usually present, as is appearing in a cloud of smoke from stage left note : In a tradition dating back to medieval mystery plays, the villains enter from stage left, which used to symbolise hell, and the heroes from stage right ("heaven"). They're always openly and hilariously evil. Think Alan Rickman in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves or Gary Oldman in The Fifth Element, though these are both understated and subtle compared to a proper panto villain. Describing someone as a "pantomime villain" is an effective shorthand for saying they're cartoonishly, exultantly evil. - The Comedian: Usually, there will be another actor in a supporting role who plays the main comic relief. They are usually dense but good-natured and act as The Lancer to the hero or make up a comedic duo with the Dame. They're often a family member of one of the principals — the classic examples are Aladdin's panto-exclusive brother Wishy-washy or Cinderella's friend Buttons. Sometimes the role is merged with... - The Good Fairy: She's the Big Good. In a traditional panto she serves as the narrator and audience intermediary, who likes speaking in verse for whatever reason. If all hope is lost, she'll pull a Deus ex Machina, solving everything up with a fling of her magic wand. - The Pantomime Animal: Traditionally a horse played by two people, one at the front and the other at the back. Jokes about being the actor stuck playing the arse end of a horse are probably Older Than Radio. - The Chorus: No panto is complete without an all-singing, all-dancing troupe. Often there will be two of these troupes, one consisting of adults, the other of pre-adolescent children. Due to legal restrictions on the hours child actors are allowed to work, the latter will invariably be divided into at least two sub-groups. # Traditional tropes in Panto - Audience-Colouring Adaptation: Because many people know the stock pantomime stories primarily from panto rather than from the original sources, their knowledge of those plots may be slightly distorted. For example, many Britons probably assume that Aladdin's mother was always called "Widow Twankey" but that was originally a pantomime joke, based on the name of a cheap brand of China tea. Of course, this also happens in the other direction - if there is a Disney adaptation of a particular story, then songs, characters and plot details exclusive to that version frequently show up. - Audience Participation: Panto usually has No Fourth Wall and audience participation is a treasured part of the experience. The classics are: - The audience are expected to boo and hiss every time the villain appears onstage. - The villain will be stalking a hero around the stage, requiring the audience to holler "HE'S BEHIND YOU!" at the tops of their voices. Usually, the villain will duck behind cover as the hero exaggeratedly looks around, then looks back at the audience and says "Oh, no he isn't." The audience dutifully hollers "Oh, yes he is!" in response. This can go on for some time. This tends to happen whenever a panto actor appears anywhere in front of an audience: British audiences are prone to collectively getting into spontaneous "Oh no he isn't"/"Oh yes he is" routines with well-known panto actors even during talk shows, quiz shows, panel shows, and other shows utterly unrelated to panto. - Some productions go the extra mile and have the audience 'take part' in the final battle - the comedic characters will hand out massive sacks full of foam blocks to throw at the villain. Everyone gets a chance at this, even in theatres with an upper circle where the bulk of the foam will just gently glide down to the stalls. - Any good panto will leave a pause for the regular jokes. "I didn't come here to be insulted!" (pause) Audience member(s): "Where do you usually go?" If the audience doesn't say the necessary line another cast member will. - Big production - even the smallest amateur company will pull out all the stops for their pantomime. This is not a genre concerned with either realism or artistic minimalism. Sets are large and elaborate, the dame will usually have the most magnificent over-the-top dress (and change it every couple of scenes) and there is often a scene involving gunge, foam or other "messy" fun. Aladdin often features a scene in the Chinese laundry run by Widow Twankey, providing an excuse for filling the stage with suds. Or characters will randomly decide to do some baking, resulting in flour being thrown about. Elaborate lighting and abundant use of pyrotechnics abounds; the villains and other minor antagonists often enter from stage left to a barrage of green lighting and smoke, sometimes even with stage fireworks going off. Some theatres even employ strobe lights! During the Curtain Call, the already-elaborate costumes of the characters are replaced with the same, but outfitted in shiny gold, silver, electric blue and neon green. - Camp: To the average person in Britain or Ireland, if you wanted to define "camp", you would probably say "like a pantomime". Friendly gay jokes are a bit of a tradition in the panto, too. - Guest stars - a trope dating back to the late 19th Century in the UK, whereby if more than one major panto is running in a town, they will often compete for custom by playing one-upmanship with the quality of the cast. Once the realm of respected actors (and Sooty), this particular aspect took a bashing during The '80s and The '90s when soap actors, Wolf from Gladiators, reality TV stars and Frank Bruno all decided to get in on the act; fortunately, most theatres seem to be a little more discerning nowadays, but the occasional Big Brother contestant still slips through the cracks. This can be very lucrative work, which is why Australian soap actors decamp en masse to England in time for the season. Julian Clary, Christopher Biggins, BRIAN BLESSED and John Barrowman are guaranteed to be in panto every single year. We've even taken the liberty of getting a few actors from across the pond, including Henry Winkler, Dirk Benedict, David Hasselhoff (yes, really.) and Mr. T. In some productions, the guest stars can turn into the Spotlight-Stealing Squad, but only if they have the chops to hold the attention of a panto audience. - A more recent variant is the casting of an actor with impeccable dramatic credentials (such as Sir Ian McKellen note : One review concluded "...at least we can tell our grandchildren that we saw Mc Kellen's Twankey and it was huge") as a Dame or another minor character. - The Harlequinade: Although a full-blown Transformation Scene is only seen nowadays in self-conscious recreations of the early pantomime, the term is sometimes used to refer to a dialogue-free slapstick interlude. Sometimes this is replaced with a more serious mime or dance section. - Local and topical in-jokes. Some pantos have a script written specially each year. Others are available pre-written with [insert topical joke], [insert local joke], [insert name of celebrity famous for being fat] written in. Often jokes are at the expense of an area of the city known for being posh, or run-down; or a rivalry with a local town (see Springfield v Shelbyville). Sometimes (especially from the villain) they're just broadsides at the area in general. There will also be plenty of Actor Allusions, especially if the show has a notable Guest Star. - Innuendo. While Pantomimes are ostensibly aimed at children, much of the humour is composed of sexual innuendo intended to go over the children's heads. ("I do declare, the Prince's balls get larger every year!") Periphery Demographic features heavily here. It isn't unusual to find work outings booked to a Panto with nary a child to be seen. Frankly half the people there with kids have only dragged them along as cover. - The Intermission: Like most productions, most pantos have an intermission roughly halfway through, and it stays true to its Victorian roots. Sometimes, the minor cast may stay on stage to perform the shout outs - in addition, this is usually the time staff at the theatre come around to sell pots of ice cream, so it's definitely worth sticking around for. - Improv: You just can't work in panto if you're not prepared to improv occasionally. Where other productions might stop the show, panto just soldiers on. The Fairy Godmother's wand breaks? She gets another one from offstage and then claims that she always carries a spare. Need to cover an extra-long costume change or a technical hitch? Get the Dame to go out and ask the audience how they're doing. A child in the audience shouts something hilarious to the heroes that would derail the plot? Tell them the show can't end yet because people paid for their tickets! The Villain and the Dame actually trying to make the other corpse? Pretty normal. After all, panto runs are often fairly demanding (two or three shows a day for six weeks to two months), and the cast and crew need to let off steam somehow, so a little extra japery is usually allowed for as long as it doesn't disrupt the running of the show. (In many theatres, backstage pranks during panto constitute a whole secret tradition of their own.) - Shout Outs: Usually prior to the sing-along, during the interval or after the bows. Basically, someone in the cast (usually the Dame) takes the opportunity to read out the names of the groups in the audience. There's always a Scout troop, a primary or secondary school class, a Boys'/Girls' Brigade or a company outing in the audience; normally there's more than one. There's also often shoutouts to people at their very first panto (usually either little children or baffled foreign cousins - cue laughter from the audience and cast members joking that they must be having an interesting evening) and people who've been coming for decades. - The Singalong: Also called the Songsheet. After the resolution of the plot note : this is usually done by the Comedian and/or the Dame so the rest of the cast have time to put their posh frocks on for the final bow, the victorious heroes will teach the audience a song. Often the audience will be split in half and ordered to compete against each other. This virtually always ends with something along the lines of 'For the first time in Panto history, it's a draw' to avoid hurt feelings on either side. Often, a deeply embarrassed parent or two will be hauled onstage in order to demonstrate the latest dance craze for the rest of the audience to copy. - Sometimes they'll use material from other notable comedy acts, preferably older for the adults to recognise and the kids to enjoy. Such as Morecambe and Wise's version of "I'm Wishing" for any Snow White shows. - Sweeties: treats are often thrown into the audience from the stage at some point. Sadly, this tradition is being phased out in many places because of health and safety (to be fair, a fun-sized chocolate bar in the eye can be painful, and theatres would rather not be sued by irate punters). Some shows will have a variation — in Aladdin, the Widow Twankey might throw comically oversized laundry into the audience instead, or in The Little Mermaid, the auditorium might be filled with bubbles. It's behind you!	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Panto
Pantheon Sitcom - TV Tropes "Families are messy. Immortal families are eternally messy. Sometimes the best we can do is to remind each other that we're related for better or for worse... and try to keep the maiming and killing to a minimum." They're godlike, they're (usually) all related, and they're stuck together. Since they're so powerful that none of them can significantly hurt the others ( most of the time), the plot is mostly about their sibling squabbles and Big, Screwed-Up Family moments. ## Examples: - The Literals from Jack Of Fables. - Any story of The Mighty Thor taking place in Asgard will inevitably turn into one of these, not that he is safe from the trope anywhere else either. - The Endless from The Sandman (1989). - Starting in Wonder Woman (1987) the Olympians became much more prominent in Wonder Woman, and much more like their mythological counterparts (previously they'd been tied to other planets and not definitively "gods"). After Ares' separate abode was destroyed they're all stuck together on Olympus and while they really do not get along they usually avoid outright war with each other. Diana herself ties in as extended family given that Ares is her maternal grandfather. - The House of the Gods, Dunmanifestin, in Discworld, to the point where priests relay "revelations" that sound a hell of a lot like the plot of a soap opera. - Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time trilogy involves immortal, terribly jaded superhumans dealt with in this way. - The Greek gods in Everworld spend most of their time lounging around Mt. Olympus either partying or getting into sudden, violent arguments with each other so strong storms and whirlwinds suddenly appear from their anger. They keep this up even as the armies of a god-eating abomination are massing outside their house. - Robert Sheckley's Godhome features gods who are mostly retired until a mortal manages to accidentally phone them—which stirs up old family squabbles and jealousies. - Several of Tom Holt's novels: - Expecting Someone Taller has Wagner's version of the Germanic Gods as one big, messed-up family. - Odds and Gods has gods from multiple pantheons, mostly all living in a retirement home, and still all squabbling. - Diana Wynne Jones: - The main characters of The Game. \|\|Then again, they're all characters from Greek mythology, so...\|\| - Eight Days of Luke takes a similar approach to the Norse pantheon. - Archer's Goon covers an original pantheon. - The Azathanai in the Malazan Book of the Fallen are a rather quirky lot, and not all on the best of terms. It's especially obvious in Fall of Light, where K'rul and Skillen Droe meet several of their Azathanai brethren on their journey. Of special note is the meeting with Mael, who refuses to part the sea for their passage, because Skillen once polluted his seas to make a flying mountain without asking first. - The 1943 Belgian novel Malpertuis presents a peculiar version of it. The story starts out following a bourgeois extended family at the end of the 19th century going through fantastical and unexplained events, but the last chapters reveals that \|\|half of them are actually Greek gods trapped in human bodies by a 200-years old sorcerer.\|\| - Percy Jackson and the Olympians has hints of this going on in the background, whenever Percy deals with the Gods, who now have to live in the 21st century. For example, Hera and Zeus's marital squabbles are alluded to, Artemis and Apollo have Sibling Seniority Squabble going on, etc. The Trials of Apollo, which take place from the perspective of depowered god Apollo, mentions the myriad squabbles between the gods more frequently. - Esther Friesner's Temping Fate has gods and anthropomorphic personifications (e.g. the Fates) like this, with rebellious teenage demigods, curmudgeonly elder gods, and so on. - The royal court of The Chronicles of Amber pretty much qualifies. They're not gods per se, though they've convinced some shadow worlds they are... - Alexei Sviridov's Tolkien parody novel, The Zwirmarillion, portrays the Valar like this and even directly calls them "our favourite comedy characters" once. - In The Almighty Johnsons the Norse gods are greatly reduced in power and have moved to New Zealand. They can and do die, but then the god-spirit simply moves on to another descendant. Over the years since the original migration, the descendants of the gods (who are also incarnations of the gods) have lost track of each other, in part because gods (and goddesses) don't generally like each other very much. - Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess have many humorous episodes where the Greek gods are portrayed as this. - The Greek gods live amongst mortals as a dysfunctional family in the short-lived series Valentine. - Any number of old-school pantheons. Quite a lot of stories about the lesser gods in Hindu Mythology come down to "Asuras do something the Devas don't like. Wacky hijinks ensue. Sometimes the higher gods get involved. At the end, Indra learns An Aesop." - Norse Mythology: Loki makes a bet. Hilarity Ensues. Sometimes, he lost or risked something that belonged to another god (for example, in the origin of Sleipnir, where the other gods forced him to sabotage his opponent). - The Ten country from AkaSeka are populated by stand-ins for the Shinto pantheon, and these characters engage in comedic antics as well. - Kamigami no Asobi: a Crossover Cosmology featuring gods from various pantheons in high school! - Atrus and family from Myst. - The whole point of Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA- Buddhist deities with wacky personalities leading lives full of hijinks in a modern society with all its advancements, though still having serious adventures and battles against evil. - The inhabitants of Moriya Shrine in Touhou. - Hades often turns into this between runs through the Underworld, as Zagreus chats up, romances, or engages in Snark-to-Snark Combat with the various residents of the House of Hades between deaths, sometimes with the very gods who just killed him.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PantheonSitcom
Panthera Awesome - TV Tropes "I wanna be a lion. Yeah! Everybody wanna pass as cats." Let's face it: Cats are a huge part of the human experience. They make things cuter, they complement schemes to take over the world, their ears and tails are often added to the human form (and indeed, the feline face itself has long been described as vaguely humanoid in appearance), but there's another class of cat altogether. Ever since the first anthropoid was dragged off and eaten by a sabertooth, the large cats have invoked fear and awe in the hearts of humans. They've become the symbols of kings, empires, even gods and demons. Their pelts are gorgeous and carry with them a sense of awe. And, obviously, they have a profound impact on humans and the fiction they produce. See its Analysis page for ways this trope applies to specific cats. See Cool Cat for when this applies to regular cats. Regular cats and big cats like lions, tigers, or leopards and panthers (not a separate species, since panthers are merely black leopards) are an extremely popular choice as mounts or chariot pullers in fairy-tales and fantasy settings. See Horse of a Different Colour and Chariot Pulled by Cats. Lions also get their own page as the King of Beasts. Also note Our Gryphons Are Different, when big cats (specially lions) are mixed with other awe-inspiring creatures, the birds of prey. See Great White Feline for when this applies to big cats with white fur that are positioned as powerful, heroic, important or mysterious. Despite the popular name, the Tasmanian tiger (also called the Tasmanian wolf or thylacine) is not a cat, but a marsupial. Civets are also sometimes called "civet cats" despite belonging to an entirely separate family (although they do belong to the suborder Feliformia, making them at least somewhat related to cats). By the by, these are the animals that produce the famous "poop coffee." It is not, despite what some people think, cat poop coffee!). While this trope is about big cats, it should not be confused with Mega Neko, which is about cats that are exceptionally large for their species. Also not to be confused with the metal group Pantera, which is indeed awesome, but not feline. And a different sort of Panther, Tiger and Leopard found in Germany at various times comes under the heading of Tank Goodness. ## Examples Advertising Anime & Manga - Animal Land features several of these among its animal cast. They range from Kurokagi, a gigantic lynx, to lions the size of small skyscrapers. - From Cardcaptor Sakura, the true forms of Kerberos and Spinel Sun. - Byakko from Fushigi Yuugi. He is one of The Four Gods, and his animal form is a white tiger. Made even more awesome by the fact that his humanoid form is a white-haired Bishounen. - Doraemon: Nobita and the Island of Miracles ~Animal Adventure~: The titular island is a futuristic sanctuary for prehistoric animals, and one of it's many inhabitants is a massive sabre-toothed tiger. When Nobisuke accidentally ends up on said island, he fell off a cliff and had his fall broken when he lands on said tiger. Comic Books Fan Works - In the Discworld fanfic Whys and Weres, the werewolves of Überwald realise — belatedly — that they are not the only were-creatures on the Disc. For, from out of Darkest Howondaland, the Leopard Society has stirred and come to town. And when a werewolf meets were-leopards, never has the phrase "they fight like cat and dog" been more appropriate.... - In Fate of the Clans, Beast of Revelation is described as a gigantic seven-headed big cat with ten horns. - All the cat shifters in this series of paranormal themed Emergency! fics. Except maybe Chet, who people tend to laugh at because his fur is a patchwork of various cat coat patterns. - In Prehistoric Park Reimagined, a sizable number of prehistoric species of cat end up rescued from extinction to be put on display at the titular Extinct Animal Park. And amongst the many such species rescued, standout examples include Diego the smilodon fatalis (who proves himself quite the spirited fighter in two separate battles against Smokey the arctodus), Simba and Nala the cave lions (who prove the subject of great respect from their primary caretaker by virtue of being lions), and Eshe the American cheetah (who proves to be majestic and charismatic enough to form a strong bond of companionship with her own primary caretaker). - Realistic Pokémon: RJ's take on Arcanine has much more pronounced feline features than the canon version, being a tiger/lion/dog cross. Raikou is also depicted as a saber-toothed cat. Film - Burning Bright: The Bengal tiger John bought serves as the main antagonist for much of the film. - Similarly, although multiple animals appeared to converse with, the Eddie Murphy remake of Dr. Dolittle focused a great deal on a tiger and the movie's climax revolved around an operation to save his life, with the doctor's conversational talent critical to making this possible (first by identifying what was wrong with him, then being used to help soothe and calm him while he was being operated on). - In the 2011 movie We Bought a Zoo, although the movie is about the zoo in general, the animal that gets the lion's share of the story focus is tigers. A male lion also makes an appearance. Jaguars are also mentioned but they never showed up. Literature - Two of the guardian beasts in The Darkangel Trilogy: Pendarlon is a glowing ivory lion associated with the sun; Zambulon is a four-winged silver panther. Terralon and his consort, being respectively a gryphon and a sfinx, both partly qualify as well. - Alan Dean Foster's works: - In Kingdoms of Light a spell transforms a bird, a terrier, a snake and three cats into humans to return color to the drab Kingdom of Gowlands after it was taken over by an evil warlock and his goblin hordes. During the Final Battle all the animals transform into larger wild animal counterparts of their respective species. The bird turns into a firebird, the terrier into a large wolfdog, the snake into a reticulated python, and the three cats into a lion, a panther, and a leopard respectively. - The Journeys of the Catechist series has Ahlitah, a hybrid of lion and cheetah, who possesses his father's strength (the lion), and his mother's speed. He serves as The Snark Knight throughout the series, and The Big Guy for the first book. - Spellsinger doesn't have many feline characters appear, but among those which do many cats are Mooks for the bad guys: one, the sadistic Sasheem, is the first mate for Pirate Parrot Corroboc; and the heroic, badass, Dual Wielding Amazonian tigress with a Southern drawl, Roseroar, becomes a great ally to the hero of the series. - Fengshen Yanyi: Zhao Gongming shows his taoist prowess by facing two monstrous, gigantic tigers at once (one black and one orange), taming them both with just one extended finger and using the black tiger as his docile mount. Other eminent Immortals often use tigers or leopards as mounts. - The Honor Harrington series and its Young Adult spinoff Stephanie Harrington: - The hexapuma, a six-legged felinoid that only vaguely resembles Earth "big cats", and can grow up to three meters long, massing several hundred kilograms when mature. To the other six-legged felinoids, the Treecats, they're known as "Death Fangs", and with high-powered human rifles (civilian, anyway) can take several shots to kill. - Treecats themselves deserve an honourable mention here; they're not much larger than an Earth housecat, but they can do a remarkably good impression of a self-propelled buzzsaw if threatened. - Naturally, both Shere Khan (tiger) and Bagheera (melanistic leopard) of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (and all of their various adaptations) fit into this category. - Killer Species: The fourth and final book features the Swamp Cat, a hybrid of a Florida panther and a hyena (which may look like a canine species, but is genetically feline), intended to hunt and kill a single human. It doesn't succeed in this goal, but that's more through Emmet's ingenuity and other people coming to his aid than any weakness on the Swamp Cat's part. - Although, as the title indicates, it mostly focuses on lions, Lionboy also features other types, such as tigers and leopards. - In Moreau Series novel Forests of the Night and the sequel Fearful Symmetries the hero is Nohar Rajasthan, an 8-foot anthropomorphic tiger. - In the Obsidian & Blood trilogy, people born on the day of the Jaguar in the Aztec calendar can summon jaguar spirits. Most people can only manage insubstantial kittens, if that; but someone with enough training can summon a war-beast capable of splitting bone with its claws. - The early human protagonists of Quest for Fire face threats from many kinds of big cats once the titular fire is lost, most notably a giant lion (which is said to be more powerful than a rhino) and his mate, a tigress. - The moor cats of Shannara are a fictional species resembling the panther with the ability to blend into their surroundings. They are a match for most of the franchise's monsters, including the werebeasts and the Shadowen. - In A Song of Ice and Fire, numerous fictional species of great cat appear. Westeros has the shadowcat, an animal resembling our snow leopard, except striped like a tiger. Essos has the hrakkar, a lion-like steppe cat, presumably social, like the lion. - In Warrior Cats, the cats' mythology says that they're descended from a LionClan, TigerClan, and LeopardClan, and they have folk tales about these Clans (which Word of God says are just stories - the big-cat Clans did not actually exist). One big cat does actually make an appearance in the series — a mountain lion that preys on the local cats, who have dubbed him "Sharptooth". Live-Action TV - Big Cat Diaries focuses on the lives of three real big cat families each season — a cheetah family, a lion pride, and a leopard family. You get to see the real-life awesomeness of these cats in this show, although with just how hard it is to be a wild animal. - Kamen Rider: - Kamen Rider OOO has this as Kazari's Animal Motif, with Lion, Tora (Tiger), and Cheetah Core Medals. - Kamen Rider Zero-One has some cats included in its assortment of animal powers: Kamen Rider Valkyrie uses Rushing Cheetah as her default form, Zero-One has Flaming Tiger as an alternate powerset, and Dynamiting Lion is used by a Monster of the Week. - Kitty the black cat, one of the pets of The Munsters looks like a normal cat at first but he roars like a lion. Pretty Awesome. - Super Sentai (and by extension, Power Rangers) seasons that have any animal theme at all will have at least one big cat in the mix, unless the theme specifically excludes them ( Jetman is bird-themed, and there have been multiple dinosaur seasons). The one time that a general animal theme was used and there was no cat was Kakuranger/ MMPR Season 3. - Special notice goes to Gekiranger/ Jungle Fury, in which "big cats" were the de facto theme: the three core Rangers had tiger, cheetah, and jaguar powers, the Big Bad was a lion, and one mentor type Sha Fu/Master Mao is apparently a caracal. - Cats also make their way into the "mythical creature" seasons; as Dairanger/ MMPR Season 2 and Magiranger/ Mystic Force both have lions and the former also includes a white tiger. Even those that don't have cats have cat-like beasts: a griffin in Changeman and in MMPR Season 2 (which was Saban's attempt at localizing a Kirin) and a sphinx in Ohranger/ Zeo. - Even the dinosaur seasons may not be able to escape having a cat in their ranks. Zyuranger/ MMPR Season 1 and Ryusoulger/ Dino Fury each include a sabertooth tiger (though Ryusoulger claims that theirs is a reptilian version of a sabertooth called a "Tigersaurus"). - Wild New World features all the big cats that used to roam ice age North America; the iconic sabretooth ( Smilodon), its cousin the scimitar cat ( Homotherium), the American cheetah ( Miracinonyx), the Beringian cave lion ( Panthera spelaea), the giant American lion ( Panthera atrox), and the ice age jaguar ( Panthera onca augusta), the last of which kills a glyptodont by biting through its skull! There's also the still-living cougar, who was Overshadowed by Awesome back then. Music Pinball - The playfield for Atari's Middle Earth pinball is dotted with several exotic cats, all of which are large, fanged, and ferocious. Tabletop Games - Anima: Beyond Fantasy has Arturia, the white lion that was the companion of Zhorne Giovanni, the first Emperor and Dakku, a black panther in lots of steroids that's the companion of Lucanor Giovanni. - A fair number of units in BattleTech are named after big cats. They tend to be much more dangerous than their size implies. - Oddly enough, many examples share a very specific weight class—35 tons. This specific category includes light Battlemechs such as the Panther, the Puma (properly known as the Adder in Clan circles), the Cougar, the Ocelot, and the Jaguar. - There is also the larger Lynx medium Battlemech. - Tiger and Puma tanks. - Aircraft with Panthera family names include the Cheetah light fighter and Lion and Leopard DropShips. - An honourable mention must go to the infamous "Mad Cat," so named because the targeting computer of a Mechwarrior encountering them in battle for the first time couldn't decide if it was a Marauder or a Catapult and kept switching the letter code in the HUD between MAD and CAT. The nickname stuck. - Dungeons & Dragons: - The Rakasta, humanoid big cats who come in much the same types as Werewolf's Bastet. - Catfolk appear in both 3rd Edition and Pathfinder. They seem to be based roughly off of lions in the former, leopards in the latter. - Third Edition also featured numerous feline based prestige classes, usually centered around gaining the ability to transform into cats, gain catlike senses or other traits, or summon various types of felines. Or any combination of the above. - Cats of some size has been a potential animal companion since Third Edition. In 3.5 specific kinds could be picked at higher levels at the cost of not gaining the full animal companion levelling boost, in Pathfinder from level 1 druids can have big cats (representing the big big cats, like lions and tigers) or small cats (representing smaller big cats/not-strictly-big-cats-but-larger-than-housecats cats, like cheetahs and leopards) as animal companions (rangers, when they get their animal companions, are limited to small cats, but given even those end up roughly human-sized and terrifyingly strong, agile and armoured compared to their non-companion relatives...). - The Lyran Empire in Star Fleet Battles names all its ship models after species of big cats, e.g. the Tiger cruiser, Saber-Toothed Tiger mauler, Cheetah frigate... - Traveller: Played with, with the Aslan. The Aslan look like lions, however they are not even mammalian and act like many tribes of humans do. - The Bastet werecats from Werewolf: The Apocalypse. There are nine tribes, each based on folk depictions of the animals. Simba werelions style themselves as natural leaders, Swara werecheetahs are messengers, Khan weretigers are warriors and heavily involved with the Hengeyokai, Bagheera werepanthers/leopards are judges/justice-dealers, Pumonca werecougars are travellers, Qualmi werelinxes are mystics/riddle-lovers, the Ceilican are faerie-touched Eurasian wildcats, and the Bubasti are mysterious Egyptian black cats. Unfortunately, the Bastet as a whole are difficult for players to portray. They're solitary by nature except for the Simba and Khan, but only in the context of an African or Asian setting. And like other Changing Breeds, they're an ill fit for the social dynamic of a werewolf pack. This does not stop players with Special Snowflake Syndrome from insisting on playing one. - Yu-Gi-Oh!: - The Sylvan Morigami Alsei, which is a gigantic plant-like tiger. - Naturia Leodrake has the highest attack power among the Naturia, but has no effects whatsoever. It later becomes Leoh, Protector Beast of the Sacred Tree, who is enhanced with the armors worn by the "Constellar" and the "Evilswarm", respectively. Leoh is also a shortened version of "Leodrake". Gao is one Level higher than "Naturia Leodrake" and has 100 more ATK and DEF. - The very purple, very humanoid Panther Warrior is probably meant to be a melanistic leopard, but it's hard to say. It's a four-star monster with a fairly high attack rating, but one that comes at a price (requiring tributes every time it attacks). - Soul Tiger, a soul-eating ghost tiger, is a four-star monster with no attack power, but a very high defense rating of 2100 at no price. - Amazoness Tiger is another four-star tiger monster with the potential to balloon up to a beefy 2700 attack rating just by being around other Amazoness cards. Toys - Primal Rage's toyline had the, well, toyline only Slash Fang, a character who was supposed to show up in the cancelled sequel, and showed up in the novelization of the story. He's a giant two-legged sabretooth tiger, as his name implies. - Transformers. Every group of animal-based 'bots will have at least one cat in the mix, sometimes breaking the only-one-of-each-type rule that most such teams would be expected to have. (The original Predacons have a lion and a tiger, the early Maximals have a tiger and a cheetah). Even several series with mostly vehicle types tend to have a kitty as one of the few animal-based 'bots. Video Games - Age of Empires series: - Age of Empires III: The whole package of big cats appears with Asian Dynasties expansion. Jaguars, cougars, lions, tigers, white tigers, snow leopards and leopards, in the form of black panthers. They are all quite nasty to face, especially the ones available as trainable units. - ''Age Of Empires II: The Conquerors only has jaguars. And the elite unit of Aztec Civilization is Jaguar Warriors. - Bayonetta: The Umbra Witches can use the Beast Within to turn into felines so they can run faster. Bayonetta can turn into a panther, Jeanne into a lynx and Rosa into a tiger. - Bloody Roar went nuts with the were-felines as the series progressed. It started with Gado (lion) and Long (tiger), then introduced Shina (leopard), Shenlong (another tiger), and Uriko (Cat Girl). - The Elder Scrolls Online includes Senche cats native to Elsweyr and Valenwood. They come in several forms, including Senche-Tigers, Senche-Panthers, and Senche-Lions. While they are not related to the Cat Folk Khajiit, they are commonly found as Khajiit pets and guard animals. While other races see them as little better than wild animals, Khajiit are said to "sense an intelligence" in them that the other races do not. - With Everything Trying to Kill You in the Far Cry franchise, starting from the third game onward, that includes big cats. Far Cry 3 introduces leopards and tigers (not out of place in the vaguely Indonesian setting of the Rook Islands), along with a few mountain lions (which are out of place). Far Cry 4 keeps the tigers, but due to the Himalayan setting, replaces the leopards and pumas with clouded leopards and snow leopards. Far Cry Primal introduces prehistoric big cats, such as European jaguars, sabertooths, and cave lions, but they're considerably less dangerous towards Takkar, since he's The Beastmaster, and can tame them. And in Far Cry 5, you have a pet puma called Peaches who you can use against the Project at Eden's Gate. - Special points go to the white tiger who accompanies Kalinag in the Shangri-La missions in Far Cry 4, a mystical creature with Resurrective Immortality and a penchant for killing Rakshasas. - Coeurls in the Final Fantasy series tend to appear as large cats with long whiskers, and have a powerful psychic attack. - The Ronso, a Proud Warrior Race of tribal, one-horned big cats found in Final Fantasy X's Spira. - Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn have the Beast tribe laguz which consist of lions, tigers, and "domestic" cats, among other things. King Caineghis (lion), Skrimir ('nother lion), Giffca ( 'nother lion) and Ranulf (cat) are the most badass of the bunch. The backstory has the White Lion, Soan, who's halfbreed descendent is a recruitable Master Swordsman in both games. - The Shaolin Temple stage from Gang Wars have a Wolfpack Boss, a trio of tigers that attacks you from all sides. They can maul off plenty of health from your life meter if you're not careful. - Guild Wars has the charr, who are playable in Guild Wars 2. Also, they have horns. - Jitsu Squad have the boss, Frost, who's a white tiger-humanoid and one of the game's most powerful bosses, and rules the winter-themed Frosthaw Fortress level. He's also An Ice Person who uses his powers to antagonize the players. - All the Knights Of Valour games have panthers and lions as recurring enemies, usually appearing in forest environments and commanded by barbarian warriors. There is a stage in an enemy battleship where you can access a secret area... and end up in a room full of panthers you'll need to slay to escape. - While Polterkitty from Luigi's Mansion 3 is usually a ghostly housecat, she will transform into a large, dangerous panther-like monster whenever cornered. - Primal Rage's cancelled sequel was to have a giant sabretooth tiger amongst the pantheon of pre-historic gods, named Slash Fang. - The Warcraft series and its sequel MMO World of Warcraft - Large cats are particularly associated with night elves. Priestess of the Moon heroes and huntress units in Warcraft III rode Nightsaber note : Think of a black panther, but with a tiger instead of a leopard or jaguar, and sabre-toothed mounts, and these same animals became the racial mount for night elves in WoW. In addition, night elf hunter characters start with a nightsaber as their pet when they are first created. - Druids learn Cat Form early on the in the game, which is the form that allows them to deal melee damage. Night elf druids become panthers, trolls become tigers with tusks, and tauren and worgen become lions. - Lions feature heavily in the heraldry of the humans as well. Anduin Lothar, a legendary human warrior from the Kingdom of Stormwind, was called the "Lion of Azeroth," and a lion emblem is front-and-center on the crest of the Alliance, one of the two major playable factions. Many players have pointed out that this makes little sense, as no lions can be found on the Eastern Kingdoms, the continent where humans hail from. note : When asked about this, the devs' retort was that Uther Pendragon's crest had dragons on it, but there were none of those in England! - The Shado-Pan, an elite society of Pandaren warriors and monks introduced in Mists of Pandaria, use variously-colored tigers as mounts. Players can ride them as well upon reaching sufficient reputation with the faction. - Also introduced in Mists was Xuen the White Tiger, one of the four Celestials who watch over the continent of Pandaria. Xuen embodies the "warrior spirit" of Pandaria and especially the Pandaren. - Finally, many, many varieties of Cat exist for hunter characters to tame. They can be found all over the world, and some are unique in some fashion and highly sought after. - The Legion expansion introduces panther Wild God, note : An alternate name for the Ancients Ashamane. Her fangs form a pair of daggers which Feral Druids use as their artifact weapons, which alters their Cat Form to look like her. - The superboss in The World Ends with You, \|\|Sanae Hanekoma\|\| Panthera Cantus. His noise form is a Palette Swap of Tigris Cantus and Leo Cantus at the same time. Webcomics - One of the shapeshifting Beings in But I'm a Cat Person is normally a tiger. In spite of the usual one-species-only limit on its kind, it can also turn into certain related cats like a leopard and an Iberian lynx. (The reasons are only apparent if you study ancient Greek and Sanskrit.) - Panthera. It's about a bunch of teens with attitude who can use magic to transform into giant feral cats. - The Suburban Jungle: The star, Tiffany Tiger is a Siberian tiger. One of her coworkers, Dover, is a cheetah. The owner of the local watering hole is a lion. Tiffany's sister, Comfort, and Dover eventually get married and their daughter winds up getting her own comic. - TwoKinds: From the first page, this Furry Webcomic has featured a tiger Kiedran. Recently, it added a snow leopard barkeeper and her shy but adorable young daughter. Web Original Western Animation Real Life - Big cats, but especially the Lion, are amongst the most common devices in heraldry. - The German Army has gotten in on the trope via Theme Naming of their armored vehicles: Pumas and Panthers and Tigers, oh my. Leopard II tanks are the most modern in the series. (The whole "big cat" thing might have something to with the fact that the German word for armor in general is panzer...) There was also a Lynx light recon tank in Hitler's menagerie. This trope is somewhat subverted in that — seemingly having run out of cat names - the very largest tank fielded by the Germans, at way over 100 tons, was called the . Maus - Apple has codenamed every version of OS X from 10.0-10.8 after one of the big cats. xkcd even pointed out sabretooth tigers need to come next... but to everyone's disappointment, Apple decided to switch to names of places in California, starting with the Mavericks surfing area. It's a shame we're never going to get a Mac OS X Ocelot.◊ - Pitting lions and tigers against each other has been a common theme throughout history in both literature and real life, ranging from scholarly comparisons to actual arranged fights. - Lions are a favorite heraldic symbol competing with eagles in popularity. Some heraldic artists Take a Third Option and use a Gryphon which is after all both an eagle and a lion so to speak. Venice used the "Lion of St Mark" (a winged lion) as a national symbol and England uses a Lion. You would think naval power like England would prefer a shark or some other badass sea creature. No matter. - Related to the above, the Royal Coat of Arms of England has three lions, and those have represented the country or the UK everywhere, from coins of the pound sterling to several emblems of English national sports teams (such as the England football one - the English Premier League also had a a lion at their logo before a rebrand). - Big cats of all types are far and away some of the most popular mascots for universities and sports teams, owing to their popular image of awe and ferocity. Among the most common are Tigers (Princeton, RIT, LSU, for example), Panthers (Pittsburgh, Florida, Georgia State), Lions (Columbia, Penn State), and Wildcats (Arizona, Kentucky, Kansas State). Of course, these are just a few examples, and it would be impossible to list them all — and that's without even getting into any high school teams. - RIT in particular went the extra mile with this in the 1960s, by purchasing a live tiger whom they named Spirit note : short for Student Pride In RIT to care for and bring to sporting events as their athletics mascot. Sadly, he eventually had to be put down due to a rare bone disorder; today, he is immortalized in the form of a bronze statue in the center of the campus, overlooking the Quarter Mile. - Unusually badass Sherpas are honored with the title of "Tiger". - Whether it's positive or not, it's up to you: in Brazil, the nickname since 1979 for the income tax is "lion", originating from a campaign from the local IRS associating said tax with the animal. - The Aztecs had Jaguar Warriors. - Two of the Shaolin Animals are big cats, the Tiger (brute strength) and Leopard (agility/stealth). Actually, technically 3, if you count Snow Leopards (in addition to the main 5 animals). - Some models of car are named after big cats, such as the De Tomaso Pantera and the Sunbeam Tiger. Anime and Manga - In the old anime Beast Fighter, Shinichi Kuruma can transform into a mishmash of animals, a lion being one of them. - Leone in Akame ga Kill! wields the Imperial Arms "Animal King: Lionelle", which gives her lion-like features as well as enhanced physical strength. - Beast Wars II had Optimus Prime (Convoy in Japan) expy and white lion Lio Convoy leading that series' group of Maximals (Cybertrons). - Mila-Rose from Bleach. - Kerberos/Kero from Cardcaptor Sakura, specially in his true form. - Digimon: - Leonmichelle and Gaul from Dog Days. - Heinkel the Chimera in Fullmetal Alchemist transforms into a Lion/Human hybrid. - The lion's share of entries in the Brave Series have leonine features (almost always having a lion head somewhere), a fair amount turning into giant robot lions themselves. - Brave Exkaiser has the titular Exkaiser, who has a lion head on his chest in every form except for that of Dragon Kaiser. The lion head is also armed with fire breath and laser eyes. - The Brave Fighter of Legend Da-Garn has Ga-Orn, who turns into a lion. In robot mode, the lion head is his head, with face inside the jaw. He's armed with missile launchers in the shoulders called the G-Ballista, a machine gun called the G-Vulcan, and a laser cannon called the G-Cannon. The latter two can combine into the G-Buster, but Ga-Orn can't handle the recoil. - The Brave Express Might Gaine features Lio Bomber, who also turns into a bullet train and a lion. He combines with Bird Bomber and Dino Bomber to form Tri Bomber, Later on, Triceratops robot Horn Bomber joins the group, allowing them to form Battle Bomber. - The Brave of Gold Goldran has Kaiser, the lion companion of Leon. They combine to form Leon Kaiser, who, like Ga-Orn before him, uses the lion's head as a headpiece. He largely fights with the Kaiser Javelin, used for Finishing Move Great Punishment. - Brave Command Dagwon's Lian is an giant alien robot who turns into a sword and has a lion's face on the hilt/chest. He seeks revenge against Arch Seijin after he caused a Glacial Apocalypse on his homeworld, the Sword Planet, and upon finding out that Sargasso, where Arch Seijin is confined, just had a mass breakout and all of the prisoners are running roughshod on Earth, he travels there. Serves as an Equippable Ally to En in all of his powered-up forms. - GaoGaiGar in GaoGaiGar is made of a robotic lion named Galeon and other mecha. Pilot Gai Shishio's last name means "Lion King". - In GaoGaiGar FINAL Renais Kerdif Shishio, Gai's cousin, lacks a lion first name, but has the title of 'Lion Reine'. - GaoFighGar, the upgrade to GaoGaiGar in FINAL, lacks a lion head due to not having Galeon as a component. - Galeon returns later on in FINAL with a suite of robot animals to form Genesic GaoGaiGar. - Kimba the White Lion: Kitty's uncle Specklerex is a spotted Lion, most likely actually a Leopon (Leopard/Lion Hybrid). - Teika from Kyouran Kazoku Nikki. - Post-timeskip in Naruto, Hinata Hyuuga begins using an attack called Gentle Step: Twin Lion Fists, coating her fists in purple energy in the form of lion heads. She later upgrades it to Eight Trigrams Twin Lions Crumbling Attack. - Saint Seiya: - Leo Aioria wears the Leo Gold Cloth, based off the zodiac sign. His eyes and explosive personality are often compared to that of a lion, and he's nicnkamed "The Golden Lion". - His Expy ancestor from Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas Leo Regulus, as well as his Parental Substitute and former Leo Saint Ilias. - Season 3 of Shakugan no Shana had minor villain Purson, a man with a lion's head and a lion's roar. - In Shinzo, Kutal's Hyper Mode turns him from a fat cat into a powerful lion. Comic Books - Living in the savanna with a pride of lions is what turned Catman from a joke-villain into an incredible badass. - In Usagi Yojimbo, Usagi's sensei is a lion. It also features cat-ninja. His previous master also appeared to be a lion. Fan Works - George does a lion at one point in With Strings Attached to knock Aurion over while she's wielding the mind-controlling sword Brox's Kiss. He had intended to knock the sword from her grasp, but she kept hold of it. Being an Actual Pacifist and still fairly new at this shapeshifting stuff, he finds himself clueless as to what to do next, since he's obviously not going to chew her face off. At least his paws on her chest prevented her from screaming out an order to her minions. - Having learned his lesson, the next time he needs to do something like this (in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World), he becomes a gorilla, though this also proves problematic since he can't talk in this form and he desperately needs to tell Paul something. Film Literature - David in Animorphs acquired this morph and for a while displaced Jake as the only big cat in the group. They even had a big cat showdown \|\|where David nearly killed Jake when Jake's usual bite-the-neck tactic didn't work thanks to the mane.\|\| Later, James, the leader of the Auxiliary Animorphs, also had a Lion battle morph. - Born Free: book in 1960, film in 1966. A lioness, raised from a cub in captivity, is rehabilitated to life in the wild. In the late 50's the idea of rehabilitating captive animals for successful life in the wild was not widely accepted or attempted. The Adamsons may have been the first to try it. - One of the protagonists of Erin Hunter's Bravelands series is a lion named Fearless. He lives up to his name. - The Chronicles of Narnia: - In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "The Tower of the Elephant", the title tower has lions in the garden to guard it. - In Sarah A. Hoyt's Draw One in the Dark, Tom and Kyrie are aided by a mysterious lion, which they deduce has to be a shape-shifter, like them. - The Mummy Monster Game: In book 1, during the challenge for the final piece of Osiris's mummy, the third and final monster that tries to kill the player is the front legs and torso of an enormous lion, bigger than the Sphinx, which is initially mistaken for a cliffside due to its size. - Lions (called "Numa") appeared in several of Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan stories. - The Way of Kings (2021) is novel by Louise Searl about a pride of lions. They see themselves as the King of Beasts. - Zamba, the story of Dr. Ralph Helfer's tame lion who was his first and biggest example of successful affection training, and a star of numerous TV commercials and movies in the 60s and 70s. Live-Action TV - The house pet of The Addams Family is an adult lion. For them is like a kitty and he behaves as such. But for the unfortunate visitants is very often the reason why they end running scared out of the property Benny Hill style. - Old Tokusatsu show Kaiketsu Lion-Maru, whereas the protagonist is a mystical swordsman named Shishimaru who can turn into an even more fearsome swordsman with the head of a lion, called 'Lion-maru'. - Super Sentai and Power Rangers tend to include a lot of big cats in their series, and a large majority of them are lions. See the entry in King of Beasts for details. - Ultraman Leo, complete with the theme song verse "The eye of the lion is shining" and a lion's head (it roars in Episode 2) standing in for Leo's home planet in the L-77 nebula. Music - Beckah Shae's song "Lioness" uses lionesses' grace and strength as a metaphor for empowerment. - Xandria's song "The Lioness" describes a lioness hunting in the desert — from the perspective of her prey. - Counting Crows' song "Mr. Jones" contains the lyrics "I want to be a lion / We all want to pass as cats." - Annihilator's song "King of the Kill" viscerally describes an apex predator prowling the jungle at night. Jeff Waters said in an interview that he and John Bates wrote the song to be about a lioness on the hunt, but decided against calling it "Queen of the Kill" because it "sounded like something from The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack." - Commander Meouch of Tupper Ware Remix Party is a humanoid lion who can play the bass like no other. Mythology - One of Hercules's Twelve Labors is killing the powerful Nemean lion that's apparently invulnerable. When no weapon seemed to harm it, he choked the lion to death. Then, he used its own broken off claw to skin it, and wore the pelt as armour. - The Greek goddess Rhea is sometimes shown riding a chariot drawn by lions. - David, in The Bible, bragged to Goliath about killing lions with his sling and staff as a shepherd. - Ancient Egypt admired and feared the strength of the lion. As such, many of their deities are depicted as leonine. - Some of the most famous are the goddesses Sekhmet ("the powerful one") and Bastet (though she became more associated with housecats starting in the Late Period). - Sphinxes — lions with human, ram, or hawk heads — are associated with divine power like that of Horus (especially in the case of hawk-headed sphinxes) and of the aforementioned Sekhmet. Pharaohs were often depicted as sphinxes; for example, the famous [1] is widely believed to feature Khafra's face. - The demon Ammit, which ate the hearts of people who were judged to be sinful, had the body and head of a lion, but the jaws of a crocodile and the hind legs of a hippo. Because those were the three most dangerous animals the Egyptians knew. - The god Maahes ("he who is true beside her", "one who can see in front"), whom many scholars believe was a foreign deity (specifically from Nubia and the Western Desert) who was later added to the pantheon, is depicted as a lion-headed man and is usually styled as the son of whichever deity was considered chief at the time (Ra or Ptah) and either Bast or Sekhmet. A god of war and weather, he was called upon to fight the serpent Apep during Ra's nightly voyage; he was also considered the protector of the innocent and the slayer/devourer of the guilty, in a more good-aligned mirror of Ammit, and as such also had the titles Lord of Slaughter and Wielder of the Knife. - The Asian Lion Dogs found all throughout eastern Asia as statues or grotesques (variously known as Shishi, Haetae, Chinthe, and Shisa). They were thought to bring about good fortune and drive away evil spirits, and, most importantly, looked completely badass. Professional Wrestling Sports Tabletop Games - Wemics, the tribal liontaurs of Dungeons & Dragons. - Kings of War has Basilean Grand Master Gnaeus, who rides on a lion. - The White Lions are chariots used by the High Elves of Warhammer, drawn by (you guessed it) white lions. Theatre Video Games - Leonyx, from Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2, is a colossal, humanoid lion that dualwields swords. He is also one of the strongest monsters in the game. He's Leomon on steroids. - In The Elder Scrolls series background lore, werelions are a type of were-creature most commonly found in Elsweyr, Black Marsh, and Cyrodiil. They've yet to make an appearance in-series, however. - The Piraeus Lion from God of War: Ghost of Sparta, a really big lion with a bloodstained mane and old weapons lodged in its skin. A cowardly acolyte of Ares who refused to accept Kratos as his replacement sets the Lion on the Sociopathic Hero. Kratos being Kratos, the Lion eventually loses. - Leongar from Kirby and the Forgotten Land is a humongous lion who serves as the Beast Pack's leader, and he puts up a fierce fight with the titular pink puffball upon encountering him in Lab Discovera. - Slash Beast from Mega Man X4 has a lion design despite his name. His Japanese name (Slash Beastleo) shows it, though. - From Mega Man ZX, Fistleo the Predatoroid. He even gets a fire mane when he powers up to fight. - The "Garu" breed introduced in Monster Rancher 4 is a humanoid lion. - Jax's Animality in Mortal Kombat 3, a lion. - Pokémon: - The Growlithe family are inspired by guardian lions/foo dogs. - Entei has characteristics of lions. - The Shinx family are lions with elements of Egyptian sphinxes. - The Litleo family is another candidate most notably Pyroar. - Solgaleo is a giant white lion with a sun motif. - Liontaurs, the official race of the land of Tarna in Quest for Glory III. Most of them are badass warriors or mages and obsessed with honor and glory. One of the main characters of the game is Rakeesh the paladin, who is a sort of mentor to the hero. - Spelling Jungle: One of the four deadly animals in Spelling Jungle, lions guard their den fiercely and charge Wali if he gets too close, but retreat when he gets far enough away. - In freeware video game Stranded, you could encounter lions in the deserted island where you are marooned. - That One Boss from The World Ends with You, Sho Minamimoto as Leo Cantus. Webcomics - Unsounded: The ancient Gefendur invaders of Tain rode giant lions more intelligent than those in our own world. After lions were used to hunt down and tear apart the traitor twice over Ssael the nascent religious cult he was building used them as a symbol of being freed from an imperfect body, and the Gefendur started slaughtering their lions, in their fervor eventually killing off not only all the lions but every cat in Kasslyne. Thus cats are extinct by the time the story starts. Web Original - SCP-1732. Apparently, the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus was in actuality a sentient talking lion...who took a decidedly hands-on (paws-on?) approach to Christian dissidents. Western Animation - Tangath Toborn of Chaotic. - Kalus from Hot Wheels: Battle Force 5. - Lambert the Sheepish Lion wherein Lambert was mistakenly delivered to a flock of sheep by a confused stork and grows up thinking himself to be a funny-looking sheep until the day when he saves the flock from a wolf. - Since The Lion King has lions as most of the cast, they would qualify. Protagonist Simba, antagonist Scar, love interest Nala, mentor figure Mufasa, the list goes on. - Steven Universe has his Lion (that's his name), a mysterious, silent, magical lion that Steven found in the desert. Lion seems to have all sorts of powers, like a pocket storage dimension in his mane, can unleash sonic roars, Walk on Water, open portals to places by roaring, and is implied to have been linked to Steven's mother (an alien who gave up her physical form to have him, and passed her magical gem to him, making him half-human). The fact that Lion's fur is pink contributes to this idea. - In ThunderCats (1985) and its reboot ThunderCats (2011), young protagonist King Lion-O is, respectively a Little Bit Beastly or Beastfolk member of a race of Catfolk where Lions have right to rule as King of Beasts. - Transformers: Generation 1: - Razorclaw, the leader of the Predacons - Steeljaw, the Recordabot - Weebl & Bob: "Where can you see lions? Only in Kenya! Come to Kenya, we've got lions!" Advertising - Tony the Tiger, longtime mascot for Kellogg's Frosted Flakes cereal. ("They're grrrrrreat!") - Esso gas stations (the forerunner to today's Exxon Mobil) had a popular advertising campaign in the '60s featuring a cartoon tiger and the slogan, "Put a tiger in your tank." They even gave out little (fake) tiger tails to attach to the back of your car. Anime and Manga - Tigrerra from the first Bakugan season. - Blue Exorcist's mangaka has drawn the titular main character Rin as a tiger and in general he seems to have a lot of cat traits added to him. As a bonus, Rin uses Blue Flames as part of his status as the resident Anti-Anti-Christ...which is hilarious when compared to the current trope image. - Atsushi Nakajima, the main protagonist of Bungo Stray Dogs. He can transform into a white tiger or change his limbs into that of a tiger to give himself enhanced strength, speed and agility in human form. He also possesses a very powerful Healing Factor. - In Brave Police J-Decker, the Build Team combine to form Build Tiger and Super Build Tiger, who has a tiger's head on his chest. This was added to the Build Team's designs because the man who oversaw their development thought it would look cool. - Tama from Hayate the Combat Butler, an African white tiger. Possibly North Eastern Africa, in the land bordering Eurasia. While still far removed from their normal habitats, hunting for food and being driven away by man could account for the journey and explain why he was found orphaned (parents killed, finally, after being driven so far South). - Naruto: Might Guy uses a move called Afternoon Tiger to defeat Kisame, which is a taijutsu move that fires a massive pressure bullet in the shape of a tiger's head. - Similarly there's the Byakko from Onmyo Taisenki, Kogenta and Rangetsu (a white and black tiger respectively, though Rangetsu has white stripes instead). - In Ranma 1/2 one of Gosunkugi's cunning plans to expose Ranma's fear of cats was to set a tiger on him. There is also the character of Lime who is descended from Tigers (on his mother's side). - Ryo Sanada from Yoroiden Samurai Troopers (Ronin Warriors) has Byakuen aka White Blaze, his white tiger pet. - Dr. Gein from Saber Marionette J To X has a trio of robot marionettes based off The Four Gods, with Byakko (an humanoid white tiger) being one of them. - Saint Seiya has the Libra Saint Dohko, who is represented by a tiger motif and has even a tiger tattoo on his back. Since he's the teacher of Dragon Shiryu, this is meant as a symbol of balance. From Anime Filler there's Ohko, Shiryu's rival, created to display the same premise (predating Dohko's revelation of his tiger motif). - Kotetsu T. Kaburagi from Tiger & Bunny has tigers as his Animal Motif. His name has the kanji for tiger in it; his superhero persona is Wild Tiger; the scriptwriter has stated that he had the tiger of the Chinese zodiac in mind when he wrote his character; he even has a tiger cellphone background. - Aileen Rao in Yu-Gi-Oh! Season 0 has a pet tiger, to which she threatens to kill Anzu if Yugi loses to her in Raijinhai. - The tiger-demon Byakko from the early YuYu Hakusho arcs. Comic Books - Greer Grant-Nelson aka Tigra of The Avengers. Originally she started out as a superhero called the Cat but then was transformed into a tiger-like werecreature by the Cat People. - The obscure Silver Age DC hero, Desmond Farr aka Tiger-Man, a sometimes-associate of Guy Gardner. Originally one of a pair of twins with a Synchronized Psychic Link, he ends up becoming a tiger after ingesting a special potion, in order to track down his twin who has lost his mind to the same potion. Eventually, after both are cured, the Psychic Link is broken, and his twin dies in a later incident, Desmond somehow inherits his brother's tiger powers and becomes one permanently. - Artemis Crock a minor villain for the Justice Society of America uses the alias Tigress. - Mr. Tawky Tawny in the Shazam! franchise. He's an urbane and well mannered humanoid tiger who chooses to live in Human society. That said, if he is forced to fight, then he is deadly in combat with his strength, fangs and claws. - Bronze Tiger a member of the Suicide Squad is a ferocious and highly-trained martial artist who wears a tiger mask and has bested Batman in hand-to-hand combat. - Those who wear the mantle of the White Tiger are avatars of an ancient white tiger god. - Wonder Woman (1942): Tigra Tropica is a villain who has tamed herself a bunch of tigers, and rides one. Fan Works Film - Rajah, in Aladdin (spin-offs included), although he acts more like an oversized housecat. Tigers don't live in the Middle East today, but there was once a subspecies of tiger called the Caspian tiger, which was found as far west as Turkey and Iraq. It is unlikely that the filmmakers knew this, and most fans generally assume Jasmine must have bought him as a pet at some point (although that may still have been the case). - Army of the Dead has a zombie tiger. - The Chronicles of Narnia film series: - The Hangover has four drunken guys dealing with, among other problems, a tiger in their hotel suite, and how to get it back to its owner in one piece. - Tigress, the most fearsome of the Furious Five, in Kung Fu Panda. - Marilyn Monroe wears a spangly tiger-striped gown during the "piano fantasy" scene in The Seven Year Itch. It's very stylized (the black stripes look a lot like lightning bolts). - Two Brothers is about the adventures of two tigers in 1920's French Indochina. Literature - Animorphs: Jake's preferred battle morph, and the only big cat in the main team. - William Blake's Tiger is awesome indeed. - In The Jungle Book, Shere Khan is a Bengal tiger that was born with a withered leg, thus lacking the "fearful symmetry" of Blake's Tyger. He regards himself as the lord of tigers (apparently the meaning of his name) but is really a coward and a bully. He's still a dangerous and scary man-eating tiger and proves to be quite cunning and manipulative. He also frequently undergoes Adaptational Badass in most adaptations. - The central dilemma of Frank Stockton's short story "The Lady, or the Tiger?" hinges on which fate a princess sends her lover to — a beautiful woman who will become his wife or a savage tiger who will tear him apart. This particular tiger is exceptionally fierce, so death is certain... but she hates the other woman to the point where the tiger might be preferable. - The Land of Oz cast includes the Hungry Tiger, a companion to the Cowardly Lion, who is quite certain he would love the taste of fat little babies - but his conscience won't allow him to actually eat one. - Life of Pi is mostly "a boy stranded on a boat with a Bengal Tiger named Richard Parker." Said tiger is mostly done through computer graphics in The Film of the Book. - The second Winnie the Pooh book, The House at Pooh Corner, introduced Tigger, who is not vicious at all, but overly enthusiastic and, like Hobbes, fond of pouncing on those he likes. The fabled Jagular are not so friendly, though they are never actually seen. Live-Action TV Music - "Hunting Tigers Out in Indiah", a venerable music hall song covered by The Bonzo Dog Band. - Jonathan Young: In "Army of Tigers", Jonathan describes his plan to defeat the sun with an army of tigers. Mythology Newspaper Comics - In Calvin and Hobbes, Hobbes is Calvin's best friend, but has no reservations about stalking and pouncing him. Professional Wrestling Sports - The Detroit Tigers baseball team and the Cincinnati Bengals football team. - Many schools, especially in the U.S., tend to have tigers for mascots. Two Southeastern Conference schools, Auburn University and LSU (Louisiana State University), are probably the best-known examples. - The UANL Tigers soccer team from Monterrey, Mexico. - The Richmond Tigers of Australian rules football. - Leicester Tigers, a noted English rugby union club. Tabletop Games - Dungeons & Dragons: - Weretigers, which are the second most powerful lycanthropes, but generally neutral, meaning they're more interested in being left alone. - Rakshasas (loosely based on demons from Hindu myth) are ever-reincarnating fiends that resemble humanoid tigers. Video Games - Altered Beast has the protagonist becoming a weretiger in one level. - The "Woren/Furen" clan from Breath of Fire is a race of tigermen. In terms of individuals, we have Katt, Tiga ( Breath of Fire II), Rei ( Breath of Fire III) and Cray ( Breath of Fire IV). - Cannon Dancer has a tiger mook appear in two stages. - In the Rajas of India DLC pack for Crusader Kings II, Indian rulers can organize tiger hunts. Killing one yourself nets you a nice prestige bonus. At the same time, it's possible for the tiger to turn the tables on the hunter and make you into its prey instead. - Dark Souls II's third Downloadable Content has Aava the King's Pet, who is a gigantic tiger coated in ice, can cast powerful ice-related spells, and is initially invisible, meaning you won't know what is causing those roars until you undo its invisibility. Later in the same DLC, you can also meet Lud and Zallen, two massive tigers coated in darkness with similar casting powers as Aava and the added bonus of wreathing themselves in darkness once their health goes down. - Snowflake, the zombie-slaying tiger in Dead Rising 2. - Evil Islands: Tigers appear in both of the two first islands. - The boss Fenrir in Final Fantasy XII appears as a large Behemoth-type enemy with the head and fur of a white tiger (in spite of being named after a giant wolf). - Jagged Alliance 2 features Bloodclaws, huge wildcats roughly double the size of a normal tiger. Some characters shout "Tiger!" when they see one approaching. They are mostly encountered in wilderness sectors as well as in a arena of some sort, where they can be released from their cages. Bloodclaws, despite only being able to attack in close combat, are very dangerous enemies even for well-armed mercenaries. They are fast and take multiple hits to kill. Loading hollow-point ammunition is strongly advised. - Neon Tiger from Mega Man X3. - Man-eating tigers stalk the heroes in some levels of the twelfth installment of New Yankee in King Arthur's Court. - Ōkami has Gekigami, the lightning-god, who is an enormous white tiger. There are also smaller (though still larger than Amaterasu) orange tigers found in various areas. - Growlithe, Arcanine, and Electabuzz from Pokémon have traits of tigers. The Legendary Pokemon Raikou is an actual tiger with traits of saber tooth cats. - Litten's final evolution, Incineroar is a humanoid tiger/wrestler. - Solatorobo: Cool Old Guy Québec is a tiger. Though he uses a cane, he's still quite capable of kicking ass. - Spelling Jungle: One of the four deadly animals in Spelling Jungle, tigers follow Wali's movements after they see him and mimic them if he's close enough. - In the Star Ocean series, Highlanders, native to the planet Roak, are said to have evolved from tigers, and have a similar genetic relationship to their Felpool cousins that Neanderthals had to humans. - In Super Mario 3D World, \|\|Bowser gets his own Cat Power-Up form with the appearance of a tiger\|\|. - Super Robot Wars already had an example of this in KoOhKi, a badass tiger and one half of the Guardian Beast machines that form RyuKoOh, but one of the more recent games further introduced KyuukiOh, who is ALSO a very big and badass tiger monster. See him in action yourself. - Kotaro, the pet of Byakko and boss in Ayame's storyline in Tenchu 2. - Shou Toramaru of Touhou Project has a tiger motif, and fanart often shows her accompanied by a very large tiger. - The Puzzle Boss from The World Ends with You, Mitsuki Konishi as Tigris Cantus. - Yakuza 2: Kiryu fights two tigers unleashed by the villainous Sengoku while Kiryu is trying to rescue Haruka from the man. The fight ends with Kiryu knocking the last one head over paws with a Tiger Drop. Webcomics Web Original Western Animation - Animaniacs for some reason actually featured tigers living in Africa. - Tigatron from Beast Wars. - Rath of Ben 10: Alien Force is an alien called an Apoplexian who looks like a humanoid tiger, speaks with all the hamminess of a wrestler, and has the muscle to match. - Captain Planet and the Planeteers: In "Beast of the Temple", the Planeteers have been sent to Thailand. While Nuo, one of the locals, is guiding the team through the country, Wheeler encounters a tiger. Luckily, it's not interested in him, but he's a bit shaken and Kwame teases him about letting the "pussycat" scare him. - Jay Ward created Crusader Rabbit, a very early TV cartoon series; a sort-of proto Rocky the Squirrel, and sidekick Rags the Tiger, his Bullwinkle. - In Defenders of the Earth, The Phantom could call upon "the power of ten tigers" to fight evil. - A tiger can be seen hugging the nephews near the end of the DuckTales (1987) opening theme. - A family of tigers appear as background characters in Dumbo. - The Goofy animated short Tiger Trouble. - The Jonny Quest TOS episode "Riddle of the Gold" had a tiger hunt, where the hunters became the hunted. - Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures: A monstrous, scary, and dangerous beast is loose in the city... no, it's just a misplaced white tiger loose in the sewers, frightened and running, but no less dangerous. \|\|They manage to un-misplace it safely.\|\| - Cool Cat, a late-'60s Looney Tunes character who should in no way be mistaken for the Pink Panther. - One of the animals Mad Madam Mim turns into during the Wizard Duel from The Sword in the Stone is a pink tiger with purple stripes (the tail eventually becomes part of that of a rattlesnake). - Tygra from ThunderCats (1985) and ThunderCats (2011) is a Catfolk Tiger, as is Bengali, a White Tiger. - Rampage, the Predacon from Transformers: Generation 1 (not to be confused with the Beast Wars Predacon Crab of the same name). - Uncle Grandpa has Giant Realistic Flying Tiger. Anime and Manga - In One Piece, a Jaguar Mink named Pedro fights alongside the Straw Hats during the Whole Cake Island arc. - One episode of Pet Shop of Horrors featured a jaguar, in an episode about an underground South American terror cell seeking to overthrow the current regime and restore the glory of their ancient civilization. Complete with the ancient religion, which is where the jaguar came in: she was attached to the family of the cell's charismatic leader. At one point she fell out of a helicopter, and D jumped after her; they were rescued mid-air by a condor... yeah. - Chocolove (aka Joco) McDonnell in Shaman King has a jaguar spirit named Mic. Comics Fan Works - A jaguar makes a brief appearance in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World. It breaks a lot of teeth when it tries to bite Nigh-Invulnerable Paul, which makes him feel terribly guilty. After it runs off, Spectrem does NOT endear himself to Paul or George when he talks about how he would have mounted the jaguar's pelt on his wall. Film - A black she-jaguar becomes the unlikely savior of a fleeing slave in Mel Gibson's jungle thriller Apocalypto. - Black jaguars were seen chasing Kuzco in The Emperor's New Groove. - In Hellboy (2019), Ben Daimio can transform into a were-jaguar under extreme duress. The transformation appears to be quite painful. - In Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, the main characters must return the jewel to the Jaguar Shrine in order to finish and leave the game, only to find it being protected by actual jaguars. - In Jungle Cruise, Frank has a pet jaguar named Proxima. He exploits her awesomeness by training her to fake fights to make him look badass. \|\|Previous pets of his include a cougar, a black jaguar, and an ocelot.\|\| - A 400lb white jaguar let loose on a cargo ship is one of the antagonists in Primal. - In The Road to El Dorado, Tzekel Kan controls a giant jaguar statue to terrorize the city. Literature - The Animorphs minus Tobias, still unable to morph at the time, used jaguar morphs in "The Forgotten" but they were never used again because they were sario rip morphs and unusable afterward. Live-Action TV - In The Sentinel, Jim occasionally sees his spirit animal, a black jaguar. A two-part episode shows his Evil Counterpart's spirit animal, a spotted panther. - CSI: NY: In a recurring role, Nelly portrays Terence Davis, a former drug dealer turned night club owner, who keeps his pet jaguar on the premises. He tells the detectives that she's a bigger draw to the club than he is. Music - For the cover of a The Rolling Stones album, a photographer planned on having Mick Jagger sitting in a convertible with a jaguar. This proved to be EXTREMELY dangerous, so they had to build a partition out of fiber glass to keep Mick (or maybe the jaguar?) safe. While this was happening, the photographer took a photo of the jaguar's face, then drew on his viewfinder where the jaguar's eyes and nose were. Then he took some shots of Mick on the same frame of the roll as he did the Jaguar. This is the result. This was before photoshop. Sports - The Jacksonville Jaguars football team. - In Rugby Union, a jaguar appears on the crest of Argentina's national federation. However, the country's national team is nicknamed Los Pumas instead of Los Jaguares. - The Jaguares name (without the article Los) is now attached to Argentina's Super Rugby franchise, which began play in 2016. Video Games - The main character is guided by a talking jaguar in The Amazon Trail. It intervenes to scare off two conquistadores that have cornered you (if you didn't take the other option, tricking them into eating a powerful laxative). - Curse of the Dead Gods features T'amok the Jaguar God, who also has associations with fire and strength. He boosts your constitution attribute and \|\|heals you if you donate enough money to him in the Tomb\|\|, but you'll also have to face off against Infernal Jaguars, some of his servants. The \|\|Physical God version of him that has been corrupted by X'belz'aloc\|\|, the Dark Avatar of the Jaguar, is a half-man half-jaguar monstrosity that hits very hard, fights like a pro wrestler and constantly bursts into flames. - Maplestory's Wild Hunter class lets you ride one while shooting all sorts of arrows and artillery. If you decide to get off, you can also have it attack while you shoot from a safe distance. If NPC Blackjack is any indication, they also talk. - Kung Lao's Animality in Mortal Kombat 3. In Mortal Kombat 11, Kotal Kahn can turn into a black jaguar for some of his attacks, and one of his fatalities. - In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, jaguars are a common enemy that Lara has to defend herself from, in addition to moray eels when she's underwater. - King and Armor King from Tekken both use jaguar masks and speak exclusively through roars. Webcomics Web Video - TierZoo ranks the jaguar as S-tier. Western Animation Real Life - The Jaguar sports car (usually pronounced Jag-u-ar in the commercials). - The Jaguar knights ( ocelotl in Nahuatl) themselves, especially since they are meant to evoke the image of the jaguar god Tezcatlipoca himself. - The SEPECAT Jaguar Anglo-French attack aircraft, still in use today by the Indian Air Force. Can carry nukes, but is more commonly seen with conventional munitions. Anime and Manga - Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid: The people of Shutra often kept snow leopards as pets and considered them to be excellent guards. Einhart (a direct descendant of the last king of Shutra) has a snow leopard kitten device. - One Piece's Rob Lucci can transform into a half leopard or full leopard. Card Games - One of the errands in Ninja Burger is walking the store's pet leopard. Why your store has a pet leopard is never explained. Fan Works Film - Bringing Up Baby is a comedy starring Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and a leopard. There are actually two leopards in the story - the first is Baby, who is a tame leopard that David and Susan have to take care of. The second is one that escapes from a zoo around the same time that Baby runs off the grounds of Susan's Aunt Elizabeth's property. Hilarity Ensues, especially when Susan somehow manages to wrangle the wild leopard thinking it's Baby. - Kung Fu Panda: - Tai Lung, the Big Bad in the first movie, is a snow leopard. - The Wu Sisters are clouded leopards. - Luchino Visconti's film of The Leopard; see more under Literature. - Rugrats Go Wild!. "I'm Siri, the clouded leopard." And quite the antagonist too. Her and Spike's point/counterpoint song is awesome. - Sabor, from Disney's Tarzan and, subsequently, Kingdom Hearts. - Fabienne Growley, the snow leopard news anchor in Zootopia. Literature - The presence of tame Leopards were a big factor in the belief that the man in the mountain had access to heaven in The Alamut. It's only later pointed out that this isn't particularly heavenly and it's only the viewers inexperience that makes it seem so. - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo, named for the Salina family's coat of arms. Although the English-language translation renders the title as The Leopard, "serval" would be more accurate. - Stelmaria, the snow leopard daemon of Lord Asriel in His Dark Materials. - Leopards bear the standard and crown of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. They are also seen fighting in his army against the White Witch. - In The Jungle Book, Bagheera the black leopard was born in captivity but escaped into the jungle, becoming one of its most feared and respected predators. His cunning and bravery make him one of the best teachers a young man-cub could ever want. - In Lynda Robinson's ancient Egyptian mysteries, King Tutankhamun is often accompanied by Sa, a black leopard, as a protector. - Uraza of Spirit Animals. One of the fifteen Great Beasts, and patron of the realm of Nilo. Live-Action TV - Newsanchor Wendy Riger often wore this leopard print blouse on the air throughout The '90s. Sports - They're not as commonly used as mascots among U.S. colleges as other big cats, but a few can be found, most notably Pennsylvania's Lafayette College. - In rugby union, the Leopards Rugby Union represents most of South Africa's North West province. The senior team competes in the Currie Cup, the country's main domestic competition. Video Games Web Animation Webcomics - In Off-White, a malevolent snow leopard causes trouble for a group of sledders. Western Animation - The Legend of Tarzan has Queen La, a human sorceress with Leopard motifs, and her Leopardman minions. Real Life - Jayne Mansfield probably did more than any other celebrity to make leopards sexy, thanks to the leopard-spotted bikini she began wearing in public semi-regularly in the late 1950s. - Bodybuilder Angelo Siciliano — whom you probably know better as "Charles Atlas" — also was famous for wearing leopard-print bikini briefs. - The Leopard series of tanks, made by (West, later Federal) Germany. Both the Leopard 1 and 2 were highly successful tanks and were arguably the symbol of NATO in Europe. Anime and Manga - Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez from Bleach. His Zanpakutou name is 'Pantera', thus he turns into a bipedal panther-like humanoid. He gets black hands and feet, but the rest of his new form is standard Hollow white. - Cardcaptor Sakura: Spinel Sun's true form is a panther with blue butterfly wings. He is the Darker and Edgier Expy of Kero. - Pantherlily from Fairy Tail is an Exceed (a race of magic-using cats) that looks more like a humanoid panther than a bipedal cat like the rest of his kind. - In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha The Movie 1st, instead of turning into an ordinary Mega Neko, the little kitty that encounters a Jewel Seed instead turns into a giant, demonic, black panther, with white markings, bony protrusions, and large bat wings. Comic Books - Black panthers inspired Marvel Comics' Black Panther and The Black Panther Party (separately). - Black panthers are a recurring motif in Diabolik: - When Eva Kant first appears it's stated her husband was killed in a hunting accident, with George Caron accusing her of setting the whole thing up. It's later explained that, even if Eva did want her husband dead (she had only married him to have the Kant last name: he was her uncle who had murdered her mother and sent her to an Orphanage of Fear taking advantage her parents had not married, and when they met years later and he didn't recognize her she manipulated him into marrying her-and revealed her true identity before they could consume the marriage), it was a genuine accident. - When the title character's Origin Story is finally revealed, Diabolik explains he's named after a terrifying panther named Diabolik due it being just that fearsome ("Diabolik" being derived from "diabolico", meaning "devilish" in Italian) that King, his father figure, killed after a long struggle and had stuffed. When the then-nameless Diabolik realized King was about to kill him and struck first, the dying King compared him to the panther, and the boy decided to take Diabolik's name. - "Eva Kant: When Diabolik Wasn't There" shows the exact circumstances of lord Anthony Kant's death: \|\|he had decided to take advantage of their fights about his love for hunting and her love for animals by making it look like she had tried to free the panther he wanted to hunt but was mauled by it, but Eva managed to free herself and found that the panther liked her, accidentally setting it on Anthony\|\|. Insisting it was a complete accident is her private joke she'll never explain to anyone. - After first coming to Clerville, Diabolik met the local boss of all bosses Natasha Morgan and became her apprentice and lover, and when she retired he left her a bracelet decorated with a panther head. \|\|Years later he realizes she was the one who brought down a plane in his name because one of the bodies was wearing the bracelet\|\|. - In "Diabolik's Treasure" it's revealed that Diabolik didn't took the panther's name but the panther's stuffed body too, and included it in his treasure, composed by stolen pieces that have a particular meaning for him. \|\|By the end of the story the panther is the only part of the treasure still in his hands, as some of his former victims stole everything else, most of the pieces were destroyed in the explosion that killed the ringleader, and Diabolik decided to let the others be and keep what they took\|\|. - Diabolik the stuffed panther also appears in the DK Alternate Continuity. One of the first signs that DK is very different from his main continuity counterpart is when \|\|he has to destroy the hideout where he was keeping the panther and doesn't bother to move it somewhere else before he sets off the incendiary bombs\|\|. - The animated adaptation is named "Diabolik: Track of the Panther". - In the reboot Sheena, Queen of the Jungle starting in 2007, Sheena had a panther ally named Yagua who battled alongside and occasionally even acted as a mount for her. - Pantha, a friend and ally of Vampirella, can shapeshift into a black panther. Film - The 1942 horror classic Cat People is about a Serbian woman who fears that whenever she gets jealous or sexually aroused, she will turn into a black panther and attack her loved ones. The first scene in the movie is the woman at a zoo, sketching a picture of a black panther. - As with their Comic Book counterparts, the Marvel Cinematic Universe's take on the Black Panthers have powers and appearances based on the cats. Literature - Ronan from Philippa Ballantine's Digital Magic has the Code Name "Panther" because he spends a lot of time in the form of a black panther. \|\|Turns out he's Puck from the first book, Chasing the Bard; the panther was one of his favorite forms.\|\| - "The Eyes of the Panther" features two members (father and daughter) a family of were-panthers whose pelts are described as being black. - Mindstar Rising by Peter F. Hamilton. The Big Fancy House where Julia Evans lives is guarded by gene-tailored sentinel panthers. When the house security system goes into Lock Down, the protagonists have to fight their way past them. - In The Moomins, the Hobgoblin rides a flying black panther. The panther gets a few lines in the TV series. - In O.G.P.U Prison, by Sven Hassel. Porta adopts a black panther called Ulrich, and there's a Running Gag of it giving heart attacks to everyone it meets. Ulrich is actually quite friendly and just wants to play with them, but they don't know that. Live-Action TV - In the Angel episode "Home", a black panther represents Wolfram and Hart's senior partners in the white room. - Charmed (1998)'s first season villain, Hannah Webster, had the power to transform into a black panther, and she was intending to do so to attack the powerless Charmed Ones. - On Merlin, the Lady of the Lake is cursed to turn into a massive winged panther every night. Music Tabletop Games - Drizzt Do'Urden of the Forgotten Realms Dungeons & Dragons setting has a magical pet panther named Guenhwyvar — or, to be more precise, the magical pet panther. She's the divine conceptual embodiment of the panther from the realm of the nature-goddess Mielikki, and is twice the size of the 'real' animal, highly intelligent, and unkillable on the material plane — lethal damage will simply result in temporary banishment back to Mielikki's domain. Needless to say, befriending her was a tremendous stroke of luck for the young Drizzt. - In D&D as a whole, there's the Displacer Beast, a panther with tentacles on its shoulders and six limbs. Most notable for being hard to hit, because it's actually several feet away from where you think it is. - There is also the massive black panther which Kelemvor of the Avatar Trilogy, now god of the dead, transformed into as a result of his Hereditary Curse. - Urik von Kharkov, one of the darklords of Ravenloft, is a vampire who shapeshifts into a panther form rather than a wolf form, and has other panther-like qualities. \|\|That's because he actually started out as a panther, but was transformed into a human by magic, then later became one of the undead.\|\| - Kings of War features Basilean panther cavalry. - Numenera has the Sarrak, which appears to be a panther with a sphere of energy for a head and mind control abilities. Video Games - Brütal Legend features ridable black panthers with Eye Beams. They're actually the most normal species in the game's setting. - Chronos "Evil" Lait from classic video game Golden Axe 3, the most powerful character in the game, mainly due to his super move in which he lunges across the screen in an unstoppable and unblockable attack. - Hero of Sparta, like the name states, is based on Greek myths. And has the Nemean Lion from the myths as a powerful enemy. - The Russian Boss from Hotline Miami has a pair of panthers guarding his penthouse office, and Jacket must defeat them using only a trophy as a melee weapon. - Black Orchid from Killer Instinct can morph into a panther for some of her special attacks. - The King of Fighters: - Rugal Bernstein has a pet panther named Rodem which appears with him on occasion, and some comics also give him a very loose leopard motif. Similarly, fellow boss (Original) Zero has a genetically engineered black lion pet named Glaugan that also assists him in battle as a striker. - Rugal's children, Adel and Rose, have a pet panther kitten. Presumably it's Rodem's baby. - Panther Flauclaws from Mega Man Zero 2. - Monster Hunter: Nargacuga, of Freedom Unite fame, is a black beaked Wyvern with a catlike face and claws. It's a ferocious monster that attacks with lightning-fast pounces and launching spikes from its tail; its eyes turn bright red when it's angry. Portable 3rd introduces a green-colored subspecies that is more agile in battle, and its eyes glow orange when it's angre. 3 Ultimate adds the Lucent rare species in G Rank, whose silver fur allows it to turn invisible and throw venomous thorns from its tail. - In Quest for Glory I, monsters called Cheetaurs roam the forests at night, which actually are more like huge panther-creatures. There's also the cute little kitty owned by the old lady in town, that turns into a giant panther if you try to harm its owner. - Awilix from Smite has her pet Zuku. He can become a jaguar, however, with her Blood Moon skin. - Panther Caroso of the Star Wolf Team from Star Fox. - Eugene Gallardo from Tales of Rebirth is a Gajuma in form of a Black Panther. And he is the token Cool Old Guy. And badass. - Them's Fightin' Herds has large panther enemies made of shadow, which the game calls Flopsie. Webcomics - Looking for Group has Sooba, Cale's black panther which appears to be almost sentient. - Out of This World has the black panther-like Shadow Beast that chases Lester in the first stage. Western Animation - Attacat from Chaotic. - Data Seven from Cybersix. - In Defenders of the Earth, The Phantom's daughter Jedda had a pet black panther named Keisha. - * He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983): Panthor, a giant black panther ridden by Skeletor, was the Evil Counterpart of He-Man's companion Battlecat. - The Jonny Quest TOS episode "Pursuit of the Po-Ho" had a magnificent black panther snarling as Dr. Quest performed his God Guise act. It was also featured in the opening credits. - The Legend of Tarzan has Nuru and Sheetah, who have taken the place of the long-dead Sabor. - The Pink Panther is this, except he's pink instead of black. - She-Ra: Princess of Power has antagonist Catra, who's able to use her mask to transform into a purple panther with Super Strength. - An episode of The Simpsons has ex-con Jack Crowley (voice of Michael Keaton) painting a mural for Springfield Elementary showing a Xena-like female warrior riding on what appears to be a panther (it's actually a puma, the school mascot, but it sure looks like a panther). The kids love it, but Principal Skinner is disgusted: "The female form has no place in art!" - In Disney's TaleSpin, Shere Khan's pilots are all black panthers (and obvious clones of Bagheera). - Panthro from ThunderCats (1985) and ThunderCats (2011) is a Catfolk Black Panther. - Whether Ravage from Transformers is a jaguar or a panther depends on who's writing... in Japan, his name is Jaguar but in a manga he sometimes masquerades as a human called the "Black Panther Man!" Real Life - Panthers are actually melanistic leopards or jaguars. The name originally applied only to black leopards, but in common usage these days can mean any large black cat. Black mountain lions are a popular subject of urban legend, but have never been confirmed to exist. As members of the genus Panthera, melanistic lions or tigers would also count as black panthers, though reports of such specimens are questionable at best. - The Black Panther Party For Self Defence, which took its memorable signature animal from an area high school football team. - The Carolina Panthers football team. Advertising - The Most Interesting Man in the World seems to keep one as a pet in one Dos Equis ad. - Ford Motor Company perched one atop their dealership sign logo back when they were still building the Cougar. Comic Books Film - The Big Cat (1949), the trials of life in rural Utah during the 1930s is complicated when the drought putting pressture on ranchers and farmers drives an aggressive cougar down from the highlands. - Return of the Big Cat (1974), no relation to the 1949 film. The older brother in a fronteir family in the 1890s swears revenge on a cougar that terrified his little sister so badly she was rendered mute. - Disney's Charlie the Lonesome Cougar has an orphaned cub raised by a worker at a logging company. After several misadventures and living in the wild for a time, Charlie is released into a game reserve and meets a female cougar in a happy ending. - Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey has a mountain lion chase Shadow and Chance midway through the movie. - The Pumaman. "He flies like a moron..." - Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby: Ricky Bobby's outlaw deadbeat dad Reese comes back into Ricky's life to help Ricky regain his confidence as a NASCAR driver by putting him through Training from Hell. Part of this involved making Ricky drive Reese's 1969 Chevrolet Chevelle with a live cougar riding shotgun. Ricky is terrified at first, but he later overcomes his fears and tames the cougar in the process, naming her Karen. - Who's That Girl has a rare cougar (a Patagonian Puma concolor) that Louden Trott has to deliver to a Mr. Bell, whom Nikki Finn takes a liking to and tames, calling him "Murray". It even comes to Nikki's rescue a few times, and at the end of the movie chases after her bus with his mate. Folklore - Before taming his horse, Widow-Maker, Pecos Bill rode one of these. Literature - Power: The panther is incredibly important to the people in the story, especially the Taiga Clan, who consider the panther to be their older sister and revere it. Omishto is fascinated when she sees one, describing it as beautiful and calm, even while being hunted. Interestingly, the panther discussed is described as golden, making it more likely a puma. (Pumas found in Florida are known as Florida panthers, but the "Florida" is important here — without it, you're talking about a melanistic leopard/jaguar). Live-Action TV Newspaper Comics - In Peanuts, Snoopy once pretended to be one, and pounce on its victim. (The last step did not work well.) Sports - The Florida Panthers hockey team. - The Argentina national Rugby Union team is nicknamed Los Pumas, despite a jaguar appearing on their crest. Apparently, when the team visited South Africa in the 1960s, a local reporter mistook the jaguar for a puma, and the (mistaken) nickname stuck. - Many U.S. schools are nicknamed after this animal, in one form or another. Notable examples are Brigham Young University, better known as BYU (Cougars), the University of Houston (Cougars), Pennsylvania State University (Nittany Lions), the University of Pittsburgh (Panthers), the University of Vermont (Catamounts), and Washington State University (Cougars). - The UNAM Pumas soccer team from Mexico City. - The Olney Cougars softball team. Video Games - Nidalee from League of Legends was raised by cougars and trained by them to be a warrior of the jungle, and can even transform into one. - Pokémon: - Despite its name, the Persian has more in common with these than actual Persians. - Absol, debuted in Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, has its traits drawn from and is partially inspired by cougars. - Mountain lions are used as the main mooks in Stage 2 of Prehistorik Man, with a spotted one being the one Sam is looking for. - In Psychonauts, Camp Whispering Rock had pyrokinesis using cougars that could set you ablaze from a distance. - Red Dead Redemption: Western Animation Advertising Anime and Manga Comic Books Film - Duma, from the movie with the same name. - Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle features a scene where Harold and Kumar encounter an escaped cheetah. Then they get STONED with it. Then ride it. - A cheetah appears as a background character in The Lion King. - The Walden Media film version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe had cheetahs in Aslan's army. - The Wild Thornberrys Movie: Tally, the cheetah cub whom Eliza spends most of the movie trying to rescue. There's also his mother, Akela. She has a history with Eliza, and when the Blackburns kidnap her son, she charges to his rescue (though sadly, her efforts are in vain). Literature - Animorphs The Weakness had cheetah morphs. - One Torenthi ambassador makes his first appearance at Kelson's court with his pet hunting cheetah draped across his back (and the back of his horse) impersonating a cape. - Pern's southern continent is home to large feline predators, which apparently derive from semidomesticated cheetahs released by the original colonists. As Pern's native terrestrial predators had mostly been wiped out by Thread, these cats had no competitors and could afford to evolve a greater body size. Live-Action TV - The Cheetah People from the Doctor Who story "Survival". Sports - The Free State Rugby Union, representing the South African province of the same name, calls both of its primary teams — the Super Rugby side for which it provides most of the players, and the senior provincial side that competes in the domestic Currie Cup — the Cheetahs. Theme Parks - Cheetah Hunt at Busch Gardens Tampa is a thrilling high-speed roller coaster naturally themed around cheetahs. Video Games - Action 52 was supposed to be a launch pad for a new series, the Cheetahmen. As there was never any Cheetahmen franchise, it's not hard to guess how well that went. - Kung Lao's Animality in Mortal Kombat 3 is a cheetah. - In Pharaoh, it's possible to improve your status in the kingdom by sending dimplomatic gifts (read: Bribing Your Way to Victory), cheetahs being among the high-end choices - The Eeveelution Jolteon and the Legendary Pokémon Suicune from Pokémon share many traits with cheetahs. The Electric-type Jolteon even has speeds comparable to cheetahs. - In Solatorobo, Cassis the racer with a slight resemblance to Kamina is a cheetah. - In Spyro the Dragon one of Spyro's allies, introduced in Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage!, is a fast-talking, bow-shooting Bad Butt cheetah named Hunter. Western Animation Real Life - In medieval Persia and India, tame cheetahs were status symbols, the equivalents of fast sports cars today. Kings, emperors, princes, and high-ranking officials would keep cheetahs to hunt gazelles and deer. The Persians even taught cheetahs to ride on horseback behind their trainers until they got close enough to their prey. At one point, Mughal princes would keep hundreds or even thousands of hunting cheetahs and the fastest cheetah of all would be treated like royalty herself and carried to the hunting grounds upon an elephant with musicians and trumpeters announcing her arrival, while the less successful cheetahs would be kept hungry in order to make them more competitive. Unfortunately, since it's so bloody difficult to breed cheetahs in captivity, this cheetah-hoarding contributed to the species' extinction in India, and nearly destroyed Iran's population. Comics - Bubastis, Adrian Veidt's lynx-like creature in Watchmen. Film - A constellation shaped like a grinning bobcat's face appears briefly during the song "Colors of the Wind" from Pocahontas. Sports - The Charlotte Bobcats basketball team, until they became the Charlotte Hornets in 2014. - Many U.S. schools with the nickname "Wildcats", with some of the more notable examples being the University of Arizona and University of Kentucky. It's such a common name that we have a page just for this phenomenon. Video Games - Bubsy the Bobcat. - Big Bad (actually, The Dragon) Lynx from Chrono Cross. - Wild Jango from Mega Man X: Command Mission. - UnReal World features the Lynx at top of the food chain. It is incredibly agile, resilient enough to shrug off a couple of arrows before approaching the hunter. It can kill an average person (including you, the protagonist) with a single blow, posing as a serious threat in a world where death is permanent. It is no surprise that Lynx fur is the most prized commodity by foreign merchants. It has been somewhat toned down in the more recent versions of the game, though. Webcomics - Stand Still, Stay Silent: Lalli's luonto is a lynx, which is quite appropriate as his behaviour was already quite cat-like before this was revealed. Western Animation Comic Books - In the early translations of X-Men comics into French, Wolverine's name was changed to Serval (the wolverine is called "glutton" in French — it's also an alternative English name). Ironically, the name Serval actually makes more sense, given the character's retractile claws, which servals have and wolverines lack! Literature - In P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath, heroine Jame has a hunting-cat, Jorin, as a Bond Creature. He's identified as an "ounce", which is in modern times generally associated with the snow leopard ( Panthera uncia), but the author has clarified that she means the older definition of that word, which applied to any spotted wild cat, and he's actually supposed to look like a serval. Jorin is blind from birth, but manages to see through the mind-link, borrowing his mistress' vision. Anime and Manga - Sakaki adopts an Iriomote yamaneko (or possibly vice versa) near the end of Azumanga Daioh. - Played with in Tokyo Mew Mew. While Mew Ichigo's cat features technically come from the Iriomote yamaneko, a highly endangered mountain cat, this only matters to the actual story. Once she gains Shapeshifting (sort of) to transform into an animal, however, it seems to be a generic housecat. Granted, real Iriomote cats are about the size of a housecat and could easily be mistaken as one, especially if one didn't expect to see an endangered wildcat... Literature - The Moon of Gomrath: The palugs are a pack of what might be related to the native wildcat of the British Isles, but are larger, have a greater pack intelligence, and something of the sabre-toothed about them. Video Games - Venture Kid: The first boss of the game is a giant orange bobcat with no stripes... that attacks by throwing bouncing balls of fire(?). Anime and Manga - Sabertooths naturally appear in Cage of Eden as one of the many, many hazards of the island. There's also a mutant "chimera", which looks like a three-headed sabertooth with human arms and scales on its back. - SaberLeomon of the Digimon franchise, who was actually the Mega-level form of the lion-based Digimon Leomon in Digimon Adventure. - One Piece has Who's-Who, a high-ranking member of the Beast Pirates who ate an Ancient Zoan of the Cat-Cat family which allows him to transform into a massive sabertooth tiger or a large sabertooth man in his hybrid form. - In the third Rebuild of Evangelion movie, EVA Unit 02 gets a sabertooth cat Beast Mode to go with Asuka's already-present cat motif. - The motif of the sacred robes/armors used by the twins Cid and Bud in Saint Seiya are inspired by saber-toothed cats. Comic Books - Zabu, pet/companion of Marvel Comics' character Ka-Zar. - The Transformers (Marvel): Catilla was an Autobot Pretender. He was a robot that turned into a mechanical sabertooth cat, with a Pretender shell that looked like an organic sabertooth cat. Film - Diego, the resident badass of the Ice Age series. - Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger features a giant Smilodon as the guardian of the shrine the heroes are searching for. It's initially found frozen in ice, but is freed when the evil sorceress Zenobia transfers her spirit into its body before doing battle with a giant Frazetta Man. Literature - The Book of the Named features a race of intelligent prehistoric cats called the Named, and their unintelligent counterparts, the Unnamed. They are not sabre-toothed, but in the second book, Clan Ground, they meet one individual, Orange-Eyes (later Shongshar) who is. - Conan the Barbarian: In "Beyond the Black River", Zogar summons a sabre-toothed tiger. Which happens to be prehistoric even in Conan's time, adding to the horror for the prisoners. - Lionboy by Zizou Corder stars a number of felines, ranging from domestic cats to the leopard who gives the eponymous protagonist his ability to speak fluent Cat (and learns how to speak fluent Human!) through a blood exchange to the tigers of real life cat trainer Mabel Stark to a whole pride of lions he rescues from a circus and returns to Africa, but the most startling and audacious example is the cat eventually named Primo: a humongous sabretoothed cat created by the resident evil Mega-Corp through genetic engineering as part of their experiments to use cat allergies and the medication to treat them to monopolize the economy. Contrary to his appearance, though, he acts only as a very sad character, being the Last of His Kind and, at one point, manipulated into appearing as the Lion of St. Mark so as to prop up the crumbling rule of the Doge of Venice. - Star Wars: The Expanded Universe has "tusk-cats", giant saber-toothed felines used as mounts by the people of Naboo, as well as for herding livestock and guarding estates. Live-Action TV - The Smilodon Dopant from Kamen Rider Double blurs the line between this and Mega Neko by virtue of its user being a cat. - The motif of Tiger Ranger Boi and his American counterparts the Yellow Mighty Morphin Power Ranger Trini and later her successor Aisha. Naturally, this extends to their mecha, Guardian Beast SaberTiger / Sabertooth Tiger Dinozord. Somewhat dodged by Towa with the claim that Kishiryu TigerLance is based on a dinosaur that happens to look like a reptilian smilodon, though their own counterparts Izzy and the Tiger Claw Zord go back to playing it straight. - Appeared as the threat of the week in one episode of Primeval. - Featured prominently in BBC's Walking with Beasts, and the sequel Prehistoric Park. In the latter the narrator incorrectly informs us that the sabre teeth are "enlarged incisors" (they're actually canines). Sports Tabletop Games - Ogres in Warhammer capture and tame Sabertusks (the teeth are on the lower jaw). The Mournfangs are big enough for ogres to ride. - Warhammer 40,000 has a Carnodon, a vicious lion-maned creature with huge fangs. Video Games - Great Sabrecats are a staple monster of the Dragon Quest series, but can also be befriended in a few of them. Saber, a Great Sabrecat cub is the first monster to join you in Dragon Quest V, and the reward for a sidequest in Dragon Quest VIII is a bell that summons a sabrecat for your character to ride on, multiplying your movement speed on the world map tenfold (said sabrecat is also part of a rather sad subplot with his former master). - Drakensang 2: the Zanth Demoness fought inside the Bosparanian Ruins acts as the Disc-One Final Boss of the game and takes the appearence of a massive sabertooth tiger with a humanoid body made of greenish-white light. The appearence of Kazak in the expansion implies that it's common for demons to look like beastmen. - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Sabre Cats (both the normal brown variety and the tougher Snowy Sabre Cats) can be found in the wilds of Skyrim... if they don't find you first. - Final Fantasy XI: - Sabertooth tigers (in-game they're just called tigers) are regular enemies of various levels. For their level, they're stronger than many other monster types, as they have strong attacks, their Roar attack causes paralysis, and they're too fast to effectively run away from. - One of the Shinjin notorious monsters you fight in "Sky," Byakko, is a unique color scheme and larger model of the typical sabertooth tiger enemies. Of the four Shinjin, Byakko is usually regarded as the toughest to fight, due to him having Roar, aggravatingly high evasion, and his Claw Cyclone being able to one-shot everything that isn't a tank. - Saber-toothed tigers are mobs in Hytale. They hunt in packs, crawling their way through undergrowth to ambush their target. Just remember — they're as likely to use that tactic on you as they are with their prey animals, so it's best to keep an eye out. - The Barioth of the Monster Hunter series is a snow-white Wyvern with the claws, face, and one assumes mannerisms of a Saber-toothed cat. It typically lives in frigid areas, from the Tundra of Monster Hunter Tri to the Hoarfrost Reach of Monster Hunter: World: Iceborne. There is also a reddish subspecies called the Sand Barioth that lives in deserts. - Pokémon Gold and Silver: Raikou, one of the Legendary Beast Pokémon. - The Option B Assist Character in Strider is a saber-toothed tiger robot (or robo-panther, as its known in English...) - Titan Quest: Act III features Sabertooth Lions encountered on the Iranian mountains on your way to China: sometimes they act as wild beasts, other times they're tamed and rode by Neanderthals. Webcomics Western Animation	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PantheraAwesome
Pantsless Males, Fully-Dressed Females - TV Tropes "You know a character is female in Sonic if they use clothing. Males have nothing to hide, literally." A variant of Appropriate Animal Attire where, in a setting populated by Funny Animals or other non-human species, the only characters present who appear as either Accessory-Wearing Cartoon Animals or Half-Dressed Cartoon Animals are male characters, whereas female characters — barefoot or not — always wear a full outfit that covers all the essentials. It's very easy to see where this trope comes from; we are used to men having less of their bodies to hide, and we expect women to cover up more in comparison. Thus, its presence in a work is often a deliberate attempt to better distinguish both sexes by emulating our own gendered standards of modesty note : Hence why "naked" male characters who are portrayed posing as the opposite sex will always conform to this design scheme; if Bugs Bunny only wore a pink bow on his head for his iconic crossdressing shenanigans, the act simply wouldn't be as convincing to the audience than if he put on a full dress instead, or it may be simply a projection of said standards, with the artist feeling more comfortable with having female characters dress "appropriately" even when there is No Nudity Taboo in the work's setting. It may also be a reflection of society's expectations of men as being the wilder and more "savage" sex — hence the male characters' lack of clothing — and women as being the more civilized and "refined" sex — hence the greater amount of clothing in the female characters' designs. In general, the trope serves to bring a greater sense of familiarity to such fantastic settings, while still allowing the work to claim that the characters are not human and thus do not share our ideas of decency (or indecency). This also applies to audience reactions towards the work in question; seeing a male Funny Animal appearing pantsless or clothesless alongside a fully-dressed female counterpart (or even other fully-dressed males) usually isn't at all weird to us, because we tend to interpret it as being analogous to a man walking around shirtless. But it can be jarring to see a female Funny Animal shown "naked" in a work where full outfits are the norm for gals, and especially alongside a male counterpart who is more clothed in comparison. Most of the time, however, the trope serves to address the potential issues of featuring Humanoid Female Animals in a work where accessory-wearing or half-dressed characters are common, and these two tropes indeed go hand-in-hand for obvious reasons. Males are often portrayed as humanized animals, with less anthropomorphized designs and a general lack of explicit Secondary Sexual Characteristics which allow for looser standards of clothing; meanwhile, females tend to be depicted as animalized humans, being given physical traits such as womanly figures and breasts (or at least the vague suggestion of breasts). In this case, it would be more problematic and risqué for a sufficiently curvy female character to not be depicted as a Fully-Dressed Cartoon Animal, and even the lack of explicit attributes may not be enough to excuse this in the eyes of the audience or the Media Watchdogs. note : Our reactions are also codified to a certain extent by expectations of a female character wearing something that covers at the very least her bottom half where breasts aren't a concern, due to silent through golden age animation setting that bar through a certain pair of mice. In any case, expect this trope to be treated as an unspoken rule from a Doylist standpoint. Due to the Law of Conservation of Detail , exactly why female characters are exempt from the tropes that commonly justify the male characters' "nudity" In-Universe — such as Fur Is Clothing — is usually left unexplained outside of Fan Wank. Don't expect any explanation for the guys' blatant lack of modesty compared to the gals, either. If the trope ever gets lampshaded in a work, it's usually but not always the latter scenario that gets poked fun at. Subtrope of Appropriate Animal Attire. See also Tertiary Sexual Characteristics, Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal, and Humanoid Female Animal. ## Examples: - Fairy Tail: Happy is a male cat-like being known as an Exceed who only wears a satchel around his neck, while his Distaff Counterpart Carla is always fully clothed. Later subverted, as the Edolas arc shows that Happy is practically a streaker even compared to other male Exceed. - Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Wolffy the wolf wears only an orange bandana and a beret with a matching color. Compare that to his wife, Wolnie, who wears a red, black, and white coat that goes down to her feet. - For most of its run, character designs in Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) didn't follow this trope as rigidly as the game series; the latter always featured fully clothed females, with males wearing only gloves and shoes barring certain characters like Charmy, but the cartoon that the the comic was originally based on didn't follow a strict dress code for either gender at the time. Not only did some male characters wear more than simple shoes and gloves, but quite a handful of females could be seen wearing just as little, if not half-dressed, as the guys typically wear in the games. Towards the end of the comic's run, a Cosmic Retcon redesigned all of the Canon Foreigners from the original cartoon to resemble the style of the modern game series, with all females wearing complete outfits once again, while the males only wear shoes and gloves. - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (IDW): Averted by Alopex, a mutant arctic fox, who only wears a sarashi over her bust. Granted she's so fluffy that you can't make out any fine details. - Tom Poes: Olivier B. Bommel wears a coat, but no pants. His love interest, Doddeltje, wears a 19th century style dress and bonnet. - Of Mice and Mayhem: The webcomic plays with the way Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers itself handles this trope. - Satirized in the Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) one-shot fic Princess Sally's Revolution, written by Pony POV Series author alexwarlorn. After a disgruntled Sally Acorn unleashes a mass brainwashing event in an attempt to defy this trope on a grand scale, many of the male characters are left flustered and/or utterly bewildered by their female peers suddenly walking around in the buff for no explained reason, despite most of them wearing nothing but shoes and gloves themselves. The gals, having unknowingly adopted Sally's attitude towards clothing as a result of the brainwashing, aren't bothered by their state of nudity in the slightest, and respond to the guys' protests by pointing out the double standard. Sonic: Amy! You're not wearing your dress? Sonic: And you're hugging me! Amy: So? Tails hugs you without wearing a dress. Sonic: Tails is a guy! Amy: Yeah so? Sonic: Girls wear dresses! Amy: Says who? Sonic: I mean girls wear clothes! Amy: I am wearing clothes. As much as you! - Justified in What are Clothes for on Mobius?, where Cream The Rabbit asks Sally Acorn (after her mother Vanilla avoids the subject) why Mobian girls wear clothes and boys don't. Sally gives 3 reasons: because the clothes are beautiful, because they convey a behavioral message and also because of sheer male oppression. Defied by Cream, who decides to walk around the city without clothes, and also sleep naked (but without completely renouncing to clothes). Vanilla thinks it's weird at first, but later gives Cream her full support. \|\|In the end, it's revealed that Vanilla always swims naked in the river at night, while Cream sleeps at home.\|\| - Most of the female Robin Hood (1973) characters are fully dressed and most of the male characters are pantsless. - The male aliens in Planet 51 are pantsless but the female ones are fully dressed, barring shoes. - Once Upon a Forest: Russell is the only male character who wears pants but no shirt. Abigail wears tomboyish overalls while Michelle wears a little dress. - A human example in Tarzan: Jane wears a dress while Tarzan wears only a loincloth (although at the end, Jane is wearing a bikini; also Tarzan briefly wears his deceased father's full suit of clothes when he prepares to go to England with Jane). - Inverted in The Rescuers where Miss Bianca actually wears less clothing than Bernard. - Inverted in the first segment of Fun and Fancy Free: Bongo wears a shirt, bowtie, and hat, but without pants, and Lulubelle wears nothing but a flower on her head. - Inverted with Chicken Little where the title character wears all clothing while Abby wears only a shirt, á la Donald Duck. Most of the Male Characters in the 2005 movie wear full clothes but no shoes. - In Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Peter just wears a blue jacket (and loses even that). His mother wears a dress and an apron. His sisters, however, avert the trope by just wearing shawls. - Averted by The Moomins - two of the three female main characters (Moominmamma and the Snork Maiden, the third being the humanoid Little My) are routinely naked. - Inverted by the magically engineered genets in The Blood Ladders Trilogy, which are all female because "male parts would break up their outlines", and they don't need clothes do they? \|\|When Kelu is turned into a male he comments that he needs pants.\|\| - A rare human example occurs in Robert E. Howard's Queen of the Black Coast: Bêlit is the only female in her pirate crew and the only who doesn't go Full-Frontal Assault, even if she still wears just a loincloth. - In the Frances the Badger series, Frances's father goes naked, while her mother usually wears a dress, though sometimes just a skirt. Averted with Frances and other little girl badgers, however, who usually go naked and only wear dresses to school or to parties. - In the Sly Cooper games, most of the male characters are routinely pantsless, but almost all the female characters are fully dressed. The exceptions are Mz. Ruby in the first game, an alligator who only wears a pink tank-top with no pants, The Contessa from the second game, who's a spider-centaur-thing with no humanoid legs, and Miss Decibel in the fourth game, an elephant who only wears an open fur coat. - Sonic the Hedgehog: Jari-Thure : You underestimate the dangers of this land . How come you have gloves on but nothing else? You some kind of weirdo? - Sonic Forces features the only exception to the rule in the form of the Avatar. Thanks to Character Customization and the wide assortment of unlockable clothing, shoes, and other accessories, it's actually possible to have custom characters of both genders invert the trope despite initially playing it straight with their default outfits. The female Avatar in particular can achieve this without having to resort to Nude-Colored Clothes by equipping certain body textures such as fur patterns, which cause her otherwise mandatory bodysuit — also a texture — to vanish upon being equipped. - Zigzagged in the third Spyro the Dragon game, Spyro: Year of The Dragon, Hunter the cheetah wears nothing at all, whereas Bianca the rabbit wears an entire robe. However, it does have notable exceptions with Sheila the Kangaroo and the Sorceress, who are both Accessory Wearing Cartoon Animals. - Crash Bandicoot's title character is half-dressed from the waist up, along with most male animal characters barring Ripper Roo (who wears a straitjacket as nothing else). Coco and Tawna, the two female animal characters, are fully clothed from neck to toe. - Played straight in the Donkey Kong games, at least with Donkey and Candy Kong. DK wears nothing but a tie, while Candy wears a normal amount of clothes by human standards (well, "normal" might be pushing it a little, but she's covering the essentials). Averted with Dixie Kong, who wears as much clothes as Diddy does; a hat and shirt, but no pants. - While Pokémon don't actually wear clothing, and the ones mentioned can be either gender, both of the Fire-type starters introduced in the 3DS Pokémon generations seem to be a play on this. Gen 6's Delphox is a feminine-looking Pokémon and the fur of most of its body is red and designed like a robe, giving it a Fully-Dressed Cartoon Animal look. Meanwhile, Gen 7's Incineroar is a masculine-looking Pokémon and its torso is colored gray and resembles a wrestler tank top, while its head is black on top and red on bottom, resembling a wrestler's mask. The rest of its body is red with some black stripes, making it look like a Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal. - The Koopa Troopas in most of the Super Mario Bros. games are generally "clothed" if one counts their shells as clothing. Super Mario World, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, and Paper Mario do show Koopa Troopas without their shells, where it's revealed they're wearing just a T-shirt underneath and lack pants. While the T-shirt rule applies to the males, the rare females that do appear in the games are never seen without their shells. - In Star Fox Adventures — part of a franchise full of Funny Animals — Krystal and Fox McCloud◊ are a rare case of "Fully Dressed Males, Pantless Females". Fox is fully dressed from helmet to shoes, while Krystal doesn't wear very much at all: just a bra, a loincloth and sandals, with nothing beneath the loincloth. At the end of the game, Krystal joined Fox's team and started to be fully clothed like everyone else, though her clothes tend to be tight Future Spandex. - So This Is Basically...: In an episode covering Sonic the Hedgehog, Brendan hangs a lampshade on the series's strict adherence to females being fully dressed while males are barely dressed, theorizing that this is because everyone has to cover up the sexiest part of the body: the toe. - Inverted in Happy Tree Friends as Lammy is the only female character who wears clothes, and just a sweater at that, while Russell and Disco Bear are Fully-Dressed Males. Even then, these guys are outliers since the majority of the main characters (both male and female) either wear accessories only or are half-dressed. - In Ozy and Millie, Ozy wears a top hat and vest as his default outfit, while Millie's is overalls (albeit without a shirt). Averted with the secondary and minor characters, where there's little to no correlation between amount of clothing and gender. Though whenever Ozy is shaved he has to wear pants, was actually the subject of one mini-arc. And there are numerous occasions where Millie dances naked in the rain. - Dork Tower: Susan, a female muskrat and Carson's long-absent college sweetheart, lampshades the prevalence of this trope among their species during their first meeting in years. Once pointed out to him, Carson promptly realizes this and panics at his state of undress. Carson: There were so many questions I've had since you left! Susan: Like, why do girl muskrats get to wear clothes, but boy muskrats walk around starkers? Carson: No , like... wait, what? AIEEEEEEEEE! - Inverted in Dragon City where male dragons usually wear a loincloth or shorts, but females are almost always stark naked. Partially justified as their genitals are differently arrayed (and Non-Mammal Mammaries was initially completely averted). - This trope is mocked at least twice in Nerf NOW!!, particularly in the case of Sonic The Hedgehog: - Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Averted since some of the characters (including the females) aren't fully clothed except for a few occasions. For instance, Lucy wore nothing but her bow most of the time, but when she was experiencing some girl issues, she came to school fully clothed. - Looney Tunes: - Bugs Bunny is usually clothed in nothing but his fur coat and White Gloves unless he's pulling one of his famous crossdressing shenanigans; Lola Bunny, making her debut in the 1990s, is never seen wearing anything less than a full outfit. The same generally tends to apply with other characters and their respective love interests/Distaff Counterparts, such as with Daffy Duck and Tina Russo, as well as Porky Pig and Petunia Pig. - In an classic cartoon, Hare Splitter, Bugs and his romantic rival only wear gloves, while Daisy, their love interest, is in sweater and skirt. What's more, she lives in an above-ground bungalow, and they live in holes in the ground. Perhaps she just has more style. - Inverted with Penelope Pussycat and Speedy Gonzales. - Tiny Toon Adventures plays this straight with Buster and Babs Bunny, the former wearing just a shirt without pants and the latter wearing a blouse and skirt. The other Funny Animals avert this, however; Shirley McLoon doesn't wear pants, while Fifi La Fume is completely nude barring her accessories. - Camp Lazlo: - This plays straight as some of the Bean Scouts (like Edward, Chip, Skip and Samson) wear no pants, while the Squirrel Scouts are fully clothed, though wear nothing under their skirts. - This also inverts the trope as Lazlo, Raj, Clam and some other Bean Scouts, as well as Scoutmaster Lumpus and Slinkman are fully clothed, while Jane Doe wears nothing below the waist. - In Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, all the male rangers wear shirts but no pants - Chip doesn't even have a shirt, just a coat. Gadget wears a full jumpsuit. While this is partly justified normally since she's a mechanic, even when the Rangers wear something other than their usual outfits, Gadget is always fully clothed. This is lampshaded in the episode A Fly in the Ointment, where Nimnul's invention swaps Gadget and Dale's heads. Once she realizes what just happened, a visibly uncomfortable Gadget — trying to pull the bottom of Dale's shirt below her waist — remarks "It's kinda breezy in here, isn't it?" and quickly improvises a skirt for herself. - One Robot Chicken skit parodies the trope; in a Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers skit, Gadget decides to simply walk around with just her jumpsuit top (all the while she flaunts her bare curves as Sexophone music plays), pointing out the Double Standard when Chip gawks at her lack of pants. All of her male friends then feel a sudden urge to quickly leave the room, much to Gadget's confusion. - In the movie and most episodes of season 5 of Oggy and the Cockroaches where the humanoid animal characters get to have clothing other than their own fur, Oggy, Jack, Bob and various other male animals are often seen pantsless, whereas Olivia is usually fully clothed in a dress. - In The Backyardigans, all the male characters except Austin are wearing less clothing (Tyrone is pantless and Pablo is almost completely naked) than the female characters (Tasha and Uniqua), who are more or less fully dressed. All five of them do seem to at least dress themselves up more during the episode while playing pretend. - Rebecca and Molly Cunningham from TaleSpin are fully dressed (except for being Barefoot Cartoon Animals), but Kit Cloudkicker and Baloo are pantsless. Averted in that most male characters in the show are fully dressed. - Mickey and Minnie Mouse follow this trope in more modern appearances like in Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, where Mickey remains shirtless but Minnie is wearing a full dress. In the Classic Disney Shorts, however, Minnie was every bit as shirtless as Mickey. She reverted to this look for most of the shorts produced for Mickey Mouse Works, and generally anything that apes the Inkblot style of the black-and-white shorts. This is only in regards to their "classic" looks; they're fully dressed in every other costume. - Their friends Goofy, Donald, and Daisy Duck seem to apply this trope more often, as Donald Duck reamins pantsless while Goofy is fully-dressed (except in the Mickey Mouse (2013) TV series, where he is seen pantsless, too). However, depending on the situations, Daisy can either be as pantsless as Donald or wear any kind of dress to contrast him. - On T.U.F.F. Puppy, Kitty Katswell is fully clothed, but Dudley Puppy wears only a shirt. However, this trope seems to change Depending on the Writer. Whenever they're at a pool or beach setting, Dudley will put on shorts and Kitty will wear a swimsuit but there was also an episode that called for them to shave off their fur, with Kitty shaving hers into the shape of a one-piece swimsuit while Dudley shaved his into a bikini, meaning that the two of them were still technically nude. - Averted with Mrs. Puff in Spongebob Squarepants, whose underside is always visible because she wears a skirt with no pants. - Squidward is the only male who doesn't wear pants, and this is often lampshaded. - Played with in Regular Show. Mordecai and Rigby are naked, while their respective love insterests Margaret and Eileen are fully clothed, but the reason the former pair go out like that is revealed to be because Rigby started a naked trend as a child and all his friends followed suit. - Minor reversal in Darkwing Duck; while most of the women follow suit with this (Morgana, Binky, Sarah Bellum all full; Darkwing, Honker without), Gosalyn herself is as dressed as her father (plus shoes), while Launchpad is fully dressed including boots. - Zigzagged in DuckTales (1987): - Webby Vanderquack the female duckling is as half-dressed without pants or a skirt as Scrooge McDuck's nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie are. - Mrs. Beakley dresses in a full outfit with shoes while Scrooge dresses only in a half outfit with spats and without pants. - Launchpad McQuack and Gyro Gearloose dress in full outfits with shoes however. - Downplayed as Cindy Bear is a Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal, whereas both Yogi Bear and Boo Boo are Accessory-Wearing Cartoon Animals (though you could make a case for Cindy's tutu being too insubstantial to be considered anything but an accessory). - * Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood. Daniel Tiger and his dad wear sweaters and shoes without pants, but his mom wears pants along with her shirt and shoes. Margaret, his baby sister, wears a full onesie. - The Adventures of Puss in Boots* features Accessory-Wearing Cartoon Animal male cat Puss in Boots, who only wears a hat and his trademark boots and Fully-Dressed Cartoon Animal female cat Dulcinea, who wears a long dress with sleeves and boots. - Inverted in the Courage the Cowardly Dog episode, "Heads of Beef." The male pig, Jean Bon, wears a full outfit with pants, while his wife wears a dress without any panties. - Gumby: When Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffed the episode "Robot Rumpus" the fact that Gumby and his father appear nude, while Gumby's mother appears fully dressed, is pointed out. - Like their main game counterparts, the male main characters in Sonic Boom usually wear only a shirt at best while the girls wear full outfits. This is lampshaded in one episode when Amy makes a bet that the loser must do the winner's laundry for a month and Sonic points out that it's unfair since he and Knuckles almost never wear clothes. Most male characters tend to follow the same pattern, though full outfits do show up on special occasions. - The Amazing World of Gumball: On top of some Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism, the Wilson family have Jackie and Rachel fully clothed while Harold and Tobias only wear accessories (Harold has a tie, Tobias a sweatband). Otherwise, male and female characters alike wear similar amounts of clothing—most commonly all or nothing. - Pound Puppies (1980s) and its movie both follow this trope to a T, with males wearing nothing below the waist while females all wear skirts, though nothing underneath. The 2010 remake, however, averts it by virtue of the entire cast being Talking Animals at the "Animal" end of the Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism. - Downplayed with Woody Woodpecker since the 1999-2002 series. Woody still only has white gloves for clothing, but his girlfrind and Distaff Counterpart Winnie is changed from being fully dressed with shirt, pants, and shoes to wearing a simple skirt with nothing above the waist. The same applies to Woody's nephew and niece, Knothead and Splinter respectively. - Over the Garden Wall: - The Bear Who Slept Through Christmas: The male bears like protagonist Ted E. Bear are shown wearing jackets, vets, hats, ties, etc but no pants. Females like Patti Bear are completely dressed. - Work It Out Wombats!: Zig-zagged. Almost none of the characters wear pants, and that includes the girls and women. The only characters that wear pants are the crab family; they all wear overalls.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PantslessMalesFullyDressedFemales
Paper Cutting - TV Tropes The act of making a very fine incision upon someone with an attack that cannot even remotely believably do such a thing, usually incorporating elements of Ludicrous Mêlée Accuracy or Improbable Aiming Skills. Though paper cutting is usually just the leading cause for the third item of Standard Bleeding Spots, used to maintain tension in a long battle or uphold realism when Hit Points are in play, it can also effectively drive home a point about the character on either end of the attack: - If the character who receives a papercut does not flinch or generally carries on with his or her business, it is a very good indication of his or her badassery. - If the character who receives a papercut flinches or stops dead in his or her tracks, chances are the attack was a mere warning shot by the true badass to make the recipient stop whatever he or she was going to do. - Papercuts also trigger almost every Minor Injury Overreaction. Paper cutting is done with equal yet ever improbable frequency both with actual bladed weapons such as swords and knives and with bullets and magic projectiles. Never mind what properties have been attributed to the latter and that a bullet passing right by the skin would more likely burn and bruise it than cut it with surgical precision. It should also be noted that it has recently become fashionable for paper cutting attacks to take some hair with them when aimed at the face. A subtrope of Could Have Been Messy. Highly pervasive in shonen series, though thanks to the Rule of Cool, it has surfaced in nearly every form of fictional violence. A leading cause of Rugged Scars. Frequently seen with attacks that use Petal Power, Feather Flechettes or a Death Dealer's projectiles. If the combatant actually used paper as the weapon in question, see Paper Master. Compare First Blood. Compare Clean Cut. ## Examples: - Berserk: Guts' Single-Stroke Battle with Serpico in the Chapter of the Binding Chain has Serpico end up with the front of his boot torn open because he narrowly avoided Guts' Dragon Slayer by jumping, while Guts finds that he received a very thin, shallow cut on the cheek from Serpico's saber. Guts, impressed at how Serpico almost got him, licks the blood that flows from the cut and says "Nice draw style". - In one of the Attack on Titan OVA's, Eren's group gets attacked by bandits. He fights back against a guy with a gun, and the others try to escape. The gun fires, just grazing Jean's cheek, causing him to freeze in shock over how close the bullet was to killing him. - Though Dragon Ball Z has paper cutting occur on innumerable occasions, it is mostly of the cookie-cutter Standard Bleeding Spots variety. One memorable subversion: When Super Saiyan 3 Goku tosses a provocative little Ki ball past Super Buu, the audience expects a paper cut - but instead the tiny ball rips a horrible gash on Super Buu's face, revealing all manner of alien anatomy. Gross. - This may have something to do with the Buus being Made of Plasticine. - There is another subversion when Vegetto punched the air to cut Superbuu's cheek. Instead of a neat, surgical precission cut, it leaves a very noticeable and wide gash that reveals the flesh below it. (If it can even be called flesh, that is) - In Hellsing, Alucard underlines his badassery by not showing an ounce of effect after the Dandy Man played it straight with a razor-sharp playing card thrown by his cheek. Although this is subverted in that the wound in question is apparently magical and will not stop bleeding, leading to Alucard later pausing to rest over a large pool of his blood. - Averted in Hellsing: when the Captain gives an assassin nun a warning shot, he doesn't care to carefully aim it so as to only papercut (or just not shoot at her in general) - he shoots right through her mouth. It's okay though, he tosses her a first aid kit afterward. - For vampires in fiction in general, no excuse is too little to get a vampire's cheek cut open so it can take a provocative lick of his own blood. This practically qualifies as a trope of its own. - In Samurai Champloo, after being deprived of his sword, Mugen is still able to provide a very fine cut across an opponent's cheek with a roundhouse kick. He's just that badass. - The metal on the bottom of his geta sandals certainly helped. - In Ranma ½, during their first battle, Ryoga strikes at Ranma with an open-handed punch, which results in a Paper Cutting wound on Ranma's cheek. This indicates both Ryoga's incredible strength (especially considering he missed Ranma with the strike in question) and Ranma's badassery, since he didn't seem to think much of it and proceeded to soundly thump Ryoga. - Much later on, Ranma does the same to Shinnosuke during a Single-Stroke Battle, and gets a small tear in his clothes in return. Particularly impressive in that Ranma had punched at Shinnosuke's face, and while the latter does get a small but consistent bruise in the manga, he gets a papercut in the anime. - In the Cowboy Bebop episode "Sympathy for the Devil", Spike takes a paper-cut bullet to the cheek, without flinching, and proceeds to shoot his target. - During the non-canon Christian Arc of Rurouni Kenshin, Sanosuke learns a martial arts move that allows him to paper cut an opponent if his punches miss within a small margin. - In Fushigi Yuugi, during the fight between Tasuki and Tamahome, Tasuki stabs at Tamahome with a relatively blunt instrument. Tamahome's face is completely unscathed, but as he turns away, the very thin headband he was wearing splits apart. - The gang fight in Episode 4, where after getting a Paper Cut, Tamahome does this: bleeds; glares; kicks ass - Black Cat's Train Hartnet receives one of these in the first volume from an old friend from Chronos. It doesn't seem to do much except piss him off. - Happens quite often in One Piece. - Bleach does this all the time. The attack that caused that cut was probably powerful enough to destroy a building. - Negima! Magister Negi Magi does this occasionally. The most straightforward example is probably the training exercise where Asuna does this to Evangeline using a Paper Fan of Doom. Eva is disturbingly blissed-out by this, and encases Asuna in a block of ice as a response. - Baccano! does this during the fight between Ladd and Graham. Ladd fires his shotgun at Graham and Graham deflects the bullet back at Ladd with his giant wrench, causing it to graze Ladd's cheek. - The Season 1 Final Battle from the Sengoku Basara anime has Nobunaga inflict a shallow cut on Yukimura's cheek...with his cape. - In the Bloody Angel manga, Mitsunari suffers this after narrowly dodging a bullet from Magoichi. - Pride does this to Lieutenant Hawkeye in Fullmetal Alchemist using his shadows. - In Fairy Tail Scarlet and Knightwalker do this to each other and it becomes a plot point later. - When Haru and Lucia finally throw down in Rave Master, this is the first bit of damage done to Lucia. - Holyland: This being done to King in chapter 174 convinces him to get serious. - Happens quite a lot in Fist of the North Star, mostly of the 'Shoulder Clothing Damage' or 'Cheek Papercut' varieties. The latter usually gets followed up by the recipient of the wound (usually Kenshiro) taking a finger to the cut and then licking blood from it. - Samurai Deeper Kyo: parodied when Bikara shows up in front of the heroes while Kyo is deep asleep but reassures them, while toying with a twig, that he won't attack them while Kyo is sleeping... he then accidentally gives himself a papercut on his face with said twig and freaks out, attacking Yuya and Sasuke. - Occurs during the final battle of Sword of the Stranger, twice in the same battle- with Luo-Lang \|\|managing to nick Nanashi's leg\|\|, while Nanashi \|\|scores a classic delayed cheek-cut moments later\|\|. It gets messier after that, though. - Happens to Dilandau in The Vision of Escaflowne, courtesy of Van's sword. To say that this angers Dilandau is a huge Understatement, especially as it does scar over, but it really was just a scratch. The only reason it scars over is that Dilandau kept picking at it. - The Powerpuff Girls story "Eenie Meanie Mini Mojo" (DC runs issue #33) has Bubbles making cut-out paper dolls at the Pokey Oaks kindergarten playground. When Mojo Jojo tries to intervene, he suffers a paper cut. - Star Wars: Republic reveals that the thin scar across Anakin Skywalker's eyebrow comes from a lightsaber duel. Asajj Ventress makes the surface cut instead of a killing blow to flaunt her perceived superiority as a duelist — which apparently enables her to leave razorlike slashes with an inch-thick energy blade. - In Turning Red, given the massive size of Ming's panda form it is implied that she did this to Grandma Wu to cause the scar above her eye. - In the Season Four finale of Arrow, Oliver does this do Damien Darhk with one of his arrows to taunt him, right before they engage in melee combat. - Cowboy Bebop (2021). In "Dog Star Swing", Spike puts Vicious in the sights of a sniper rifle but doesnt fire until he gets inside his bulletproof car, firing a shot that stars the glass, sending a splinter of glass flying into Vicious' cheek. - A variant in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: near the end of the first "execution" cutscene, where Monokuma demonstrates his power by \|\|gunning down Monomi\|\|, a single ricochet leaves a cut on protagonist Hajime Hinata's cheek in exactly this fashion, underscoring just how real the stakes are. - Played with in Final Fantasy IX, where the papercut effect is not deliberate from the point of the attacker, but rather to emphasize powerful magical defenses of the target. The great dragon Bahamut fires his breath weapon at Kuja, just one, normal-sized, not very manly wizard who should by all accounts be squishy. A whole war fleet is firing cannons at the same guy. The results? Ow, a paper cut. - Meet the Spy has the eponymous class pull one of these on the Sniper with his butterfly knife. Then he just stabs him in the back. - One scene in Resident Evil 4's "Separate Ways" DLC show Ada lying on a sacrificial altar of some sort while cultists speak an incantation. One cultist, wielding a two-handed axe, swings it to kill Ada, but she wakes up and vaults herself off the table. Although she escapes death, she receives a small cut on her thigh from the axe. - One of the bad endings in School Days has Sekai receive one of these from a saw, only for the cut to start spurting out High-Pressure Blood once she reacts to it. - Shadow Hearts: Covenant: At the end of the first disc \|\|Special Agent Kato\|\| attacks Yuri with a magic charge as a warning not to interfere with \|\|Kato taking in a defeated Nicolai, to use him in his superiors' schemes\|\|. The attacks leaves a bloody scratch, but Yuri ignores it and prepares to fight, before the enemy leaves anyway. - If Clementine stays in Wellington at the end of The Walking Dead: Season Two, she will have a scar on her cheek when you meet her again in A New Frontier. A flashback in the first episode will explain that this is something she sustained from \|\|a bullet that grazed her while she was fleeing from Wellington, the stronghold having been overtaken by a rival group\|\|. - In the first chapter of Angel Down Bernard uses his mark ability to redirect Ariel's bullet to scratch her along the cheek. - In Survival of the Fittest version three, Maxie Dasai gets hit in the face by an arrow and comes away with a minor wound across her cheek, somehow managing to avoid any serious harm. (By luck, rather than skill, the archer, Renee Valenti, had been trying to kill Maxie).	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PaperCutting
Papa Wolf - TV Tropes Mercenary: What, you gonna kill me with a tranq gun? Quinn: You took my kid, so yeah. Paternal instinct can transform a Bumbling Dad into an Action Dad. If someone threatens his kids they will soon wish they'd never come within a mile of them. This is because fathers are expected to take care of their family and this naturally extends to keeping them safe. Such occasions serve as a way for a father to prove his worthiness—see A Real Man Is a Killer. Expect his children to have a newfound respect for their father and for them to brag that My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad. If their relationship was previously strained expect it to improve. Often Papa Wolf incidents serve as a way to reveal that a Non-Action Guy is really a Retired Badass or a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass (or even a Retired Monster). In contrast to a Boyfriend-Blocking Dad (who sometimes thinks he's this; there is no overlap between them), a Papa Wolf is always portrayed heroically because the latter is defending their kids from genuine threats instead of imagined ones. A Team Dad may display a streak of this, but the Papa is more likely to be related to his children by blood or through formal adoption, and the children tend to be younger, which may be part of why the Papa Wolf is more oriented toward protecting them rather than training them to defend themselves. However even completely grown children can summon this response in the face of crisis because they are still his children no matter how old or strong they get. This is the Spear Counterpart to Mama Bear. When Mama Bear and Papa Wolf team up, no force on earth can stop them. Subtrope of Beware the Nice Ones. See also A Father to His Men and Family Man. Combining this with Disproportionate Retribution can lead to a Knight Templar Parent. If the guy is a teacher instead, he's a Badass Teacher. If the guy doing this is a sibling/cousin, you get Big Brother Instinct. Inversely, see Parents in Distress for the kids rescuing the dad. Evil characters can use this too; after all, Even Evil Has Loved Ones. A subtrope of the Papa Wolf is the Badass and Child Duo, where an adult male badass takes it upon himself to protect an orphaned, unrelated young child. See also Cub Cues Protective Parent for examples from the animal kingdom, which might include a literal wolf. Remember when adding examples that this is Always Male. The female equivalent is Mama Bear, so all Distaff Counterparts should be placed there. When Mama Bear and Papa Wolf team up, it's a Battle Couple and all pairs should be placed there. Parents in Distress is the inversion, when Papa needs to be bailed out by the kids, and Extremely Protective Child is when the child exhibits this kind of general protectiveness over one or both of their parents. Also, note that this is not the trope for being protective of one's friends, unless of course it is something like an Intergenerational Friendship. In that case, it is okay. Otherwise, don't do it. Tropes about helping friends should go to A Friend in Need, The Power of Friendship etc. ## Examples subpages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other examples: - In Happy Heroes, despite knowing that the Supermen can protect themselves, Doctor H., their nonbiological father, can still act overprotective of them from time to time. For instance, in the Season 1 finale, he jumps between them and a giant robot... while injured. - You don't want to mess with Dick Tracy's kids. You really don't. - Popeye is fiercely protective of his adopted son, Swee'pea, but having been raised, by Popeye, Swee'pea can easily hold his own in a fight despite only being an infant. - Occurs in WHO dunnit (1995) with \|\|Butler, who is secretly Victoria's father Walter.\|\| When he overhears her husband threaten her (because he caught her plotting to kill him), he sabotages the brakes of the car and causes him to die in an auto accident. - In Love Never Dies, after Christine sings the title song, she discovers her son Gustave is missing. Needless to say, his father is livid. He is ready to use every bit of his influence to stop \|\|Raoul de Chagny\|\| from leaving Coney Island, and to manhandle and/or murder \|\|the Girys\|\| to get back his son. - In Macbeth, Macduffs response to having his family slaughtered is (after weeping his eyes out) to murder the bitch that ordered the killings. - Deconstructed in Matilda, as the Escapologist is so enraged at the Acrobat's sister's abuse of his daughter that once he discovers it, he goes to confront her himself. Unfortunately she is a former world-class Olympic champion and is heavily implied to have murdered him, leaving \|\|Jenny\|\| with nobody to protect her from her aunt's wrath. - After Romeo fatally stabs Tybalt in "Romeo and Juliet", Lord Montague defends his doing so because Tybalt had killed Mercutio. - In Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Judge Turpin's mistreatment of Johanna is half of Sweeney's motivation to go on a murdering rampage (the other half being, of course, what the bastard did to his wife Lucy after transporting him for life). - In The Tempest, Prospero could be considered one in his fierce protectiveness of Miranda. - Captain Walker in the 1993 musical of Tommy. And he's not very happy when he discovers his wife and son with her new jerkass lover on her 21st birthday! - In Rigoletto, after the title character's daughter Gilda is kidnapped by the courters and handed over to the lecherous Duke, Rigoletto threatens to kill them all with his bare hands unless they give her back to him. After Gilda emerges from the Duke's bedroom without her virginity, Rigoletto secretly arranges to have the Duke murdered by the hit man Sparafucile. \|\|Tragically, it backfires, as Gilda loves the Duke and performs a Heroic Sacrifice to save him.\|\| - Pop from Happy Tree Friends is usually really bad at being a father despite his good intentions, and actually gets his son killed more often than not. However, the few times he actually notices Cub is in danger, he will stop at nothing to save him, like when he successfully fends off a rabid dog in "Doggone It". - In If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, the Emperor is very happy with the news that he has biological children. When he finds out what happened to them, though, Warp storms abound over perpetrators' heads. - Homestar Runner: Strong Mad gets like this when his best friend (nephew? pet?), The Cheat, is physically abused. - Revenge Films: Claire was being assaulted by her stepfather, the bus driver. Her mother Penny called her biological father Jake, who rushed to the scene and oversped to the point where he was stopped by the police. When Jake told the police officer about the situation, they both went to stop the stepfather from assaulting Claire. Jake gave the bus driver a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, to the point where the police officer had to restrain him. - RWBY: Qrow is Yang's maternal uncle but he loves Yang's half-sister Ruby just as much as Yang. Nothing stands between him and his nieces: he rescues Yang and Ruby from a hoard of Grimm when they were young children and he spends Volume 4 secretly following Ruby's group through the wilds of Anima, killing any Grimm that get too close. He only reveals his presence when Ruby's group find themselves fighting the vastly superior Tyrian, charging in to protect Ruby from being seriously injured. \|\|When the fourteen-year old Oscar locates Qrow in Volume 5 to reveal he's Ozpin's new reincarnation, it means that Ozpin's vast abilities are limited by Oscar's young, untrained body. When Hazel tries to kill Oscar for being the new host of the man he blames for his sister's death, Qrow's Undying Loyalty to Ozpin combines with his instinct for protecting children; he throws himself in harm's way over and over again to prevent Oscar's death, only stopping once he's too badly injured to fight any more.\|\| - Wash in Red vs. Blue becomes fiercely protective of the Reds and Blues. He pulls a gun on Carolina when the latter threatened to shoot Tucker. He went out of his way to rescue Donut from an attacking Tex robot, perhaps as a way to make up for \|\|shooting Donut earlier\|\|. He performed a Heroic Sacrifice, ordering Freckles to collapse a cave to give Tucker, Caboose, Simmons and Grif enough time to escape despite knowing he will be trapped on the other side with the attacking Feds. He stepped in front of Sarge, Donut and Lopez when Locus appeared, readying his gun. - Dreamscape: Liz is fiercely protective of Dylan, and will dish out a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to anyone who harms him. - Camp Camp: David may be a nice and friendly guy, but threatening any of his charges is a bad idea. \|\|When Daniel pulled a knife on Max, he immediately tackled the guy to the ground.\|\| - Helluva Boss: Under no circumstances should you even think about hurting Prince Stolas' daughter Octavia. Or else.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PapaWolf
Pants-Positive Safety - TV Tropes Mitch Henessey [singing]: Putting the keys in my left pocket. Hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm. Gun in the right-hand side. Samantha Caine: It makes a bulge, people can see. Mitch: Ya want me to stick it in my pants and shoot my damn dick off? Sam: Now you're a sharpshooter? When a character stores or conceals a weapon, typically a gun, in a place that is not suited for such a purpose, typically the waistband or sometimes pants pocket. There, or loose in a civilian briefcase. Anywhere but a holster. Often as not, the safety isn't on and the gun is loaded, too. Perhaps it's another source of the term "going off half-cocked". Although aversions aren't uncommon, the weapons rarely fall down the pants leg (provided you are wearing a belt or pants at least as sturdy as blue jeans), and only occasionally will the weapon accidentally discharge and injure someone in an intimate place. As of the 1950s, the actions of firearms sold to civilians are required to be "drop-safe", so the not going off part is Truth in Television. Even when the weapon is drawn suddenly, like for combat, and leaves the pants with the user's finger on the trigger, it typically only happens for comedic purposes. Because what's funnier than someone shooting themselves in the foot? That's right. Subtrope of Artistic License Gun Safety. See also I Just Shot Marvin in the Face, Hidden Weapons, Trouser Space, Unorthodox Holstering, and Victoria's Secret Compartment. May be combined with Phallic Weapon. ## Examples: - The front of his astoundingly tight leather pants is the favourite holster for Mello of Death Note. - On multiple occasions in Heat Guy J, Clair has produced (variously) a gun or hand grenades or an icepick from his pockets. (And, like Heero mentioned above, one would never guess that Clair has anything stored in his pockets, let alone guns, grenades, and the like!) - In the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, Edward Elric spends an entire arc with a borrowed handgun shoved into the back of his belt. There are no mishaps, \|\|although it's so clotted with blood by the time he gets out of Gluttony's stomach-dimension that Hawkeye has to take it apart completely and clean it. In retrospect, this may at least have helped prevent misfires.\|\| - Amuro in the original Mobile Suit Gundam keeps his gun in the front waistband of his jeans with his finger on the trigger, even earning the admiration of a veteran enemy soldier who really should know better. Once he gets over being 15 and having barely touched a gun, he back-carries in a holster for the next two productions. - Heero in Mobile Suit Gundam Wing usually keeps a pistol tucked into the back of his bicycle shorts. Oddly, although the top half is often visible, the barrel rarely makes a visible bulge in the tight material. - Jun spends a few episodes of Bokurano with \|\|his mother's\|\| pistol stashed in the back of his pants. Justified in that he doesn't exactly have anywhere else to keep it. - In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind, Mista keeps his revolver down the front of his pants. - In Anansi Boys, Grahame Coats keeps a number of unsheathed knives in his belt. \|\|He eventually gets a Groin Attack, falls down, stabs himself, and bleeds out.\|\| - In Another Fine Myth, when Skeeve is cornered by muggers at the Bazaar, he reaches for the knife tucked into his belt, and it slips down the back of his pants. Luckily, he's still got his magic and his new pet dragon to even the odds. - Almost gets Waxahachie Smith killed in Cure the Texas Fever by J.T. Edson. While in Chicago, Smith is unable to carry his revolver in a fast-draw holster the way he normally does, so he sticks it in the back of pants under his jacket. When attacked, his reflexes cause him to reach for the holster he is no longer wearing. - Battle Royale: Some of the students with guns end up sticking them into the waistbands of their skirt or pants, often without even putting the safety on. However, this is a measured risk in a situation where easy access to a gun is often the difference between life and death. - The Dark Tower - Roland Deschain is kept from shooting \|\|Marten/Walter/Flagg\|\| when the Ruger he kept in his waistband catches by its front sight on his belt buckle. - Eddie Dean also makes use of the trope, stuffing one of Roland's revolvers down his pants as he and Susannah try to escape from a band of Pubes in The Waste Lands. Lampshaded, as the narration describes Eddie as "feeling like a cut-rate Superman" as he tries to manage both the gun and his underwear while dodging a dozen or so armed lunatics at a dead run with a bilateral amputee riding on his shoulders. - The Dresden Files: Harry Dresden once had to warn Billy the werewolf that keeping a gun in your pants pocket is a good way to sing soprano. Billy was smart about this and had already emptied the gun of any bullets. - Invoked in The Fifth Elephant, where Vimes reflects that while a "springgonne" could be concealed in your trousers, you'd need nerves of steel. And possibly other parts of steel as well. - In Fifty Shades Freed, Ana Steele, who is preparing to go to the bank \|\|and get some money to ransom her sister-in-law Mia\|\|, shoves a loaded handgun into the back of her jeans—despite having stated repeatedly that this type of gun has no safety catch to prevent it from going off and despite knowing that she's pregnant. Although there have been numerous setups throughout the series establishing how dangerous guns can be if treated carelessly, which might lead the reader to conclude that Ana will be injured by the gun, nothing of the sort happens. - In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry gets yelled at by Mad-Eye Moody for storing his wand in the back pocket of his jeans. - In the Horatio Hornblower series, it's fairly standard for Horatio et al. to shove a pistol through the waistband largely because there's nowhere else to put it. Lampshaded in one Midshipman story, when Horatio only just remembers to put his gun on half-cock before doing so. - James Bond: - Commented on in Icebreaker. Bond remembers that his instructor told him to store the gun in his pants so that its barrel is sideways, not pointing down his leg. - In Win, Lose or Die Bond also remembers the instructor's warning that doing this improperly could result in what the instructor called " testicide". Yikes. - Patriot Games, by Tom Clancy, features Jack Ryan absentmindedly shoving a loaded handgun down his waistband, with the safety off and the hammer cocked. note : As in an inadvertent bump would be all that was needed to set it off, ending his line at Sally and Jack Jr. Gunny Breckenridge takes the gun out, puts the safety on, and gives it back. - In the Riftwar Cycle novel Silverthorn, Jimmy stores a looted dagger this way and ends up with a nasty gut wound later on because of it. - In the Sabina Kane series Sabina typically keeps her sidearm stuck through her back waistband. It should've occurred to her that this is not smart, considering that the apple cider rounds she uses make vampires like her explode, \|\|but she turns out later to be immune to apples because of her mage half\|\|. - In Silicon Wolfpack, Murgatroyd carries his pistol in his waistband with an empty chamber for safety reasons. - In the Heroes "R" Us series Soldiers of Barrabas a CIA man notices that one of the men kidnapping him has a cocked Colt .45 with the grip safety taped down shoved in the front of his pants. He later gets kicked in the crotch, causing the gun to discharge with inevitable consequences. - Star Wars Legends: - Star Wars: Allegiance has Han Solo's blaster confiscated by the Hand of Judgment. A chapter or so later Luke gives him a tiny hold-out blaster. When they confront the Hand of Judgment again and Han doesn't feel like shooting, largely because he's outnumbered by stormtroopers who have much bigger blasters, he starts to slip the hold-out into the usual holster but realizes that it would get lost in there and he'd have to fumble for it, so it goes into his waistband. - Another book mentions in the narrative that gang-bangers, in an effort to look macho, will sometimes modify their blaster pistols to be deliberately unsafe by doing things like removing the trigger-guard—and how much of a Too Dumb to Live move this is, especially since many of them carry their guns in their waistband instead of a holster. - The Takers by Jerry Ahern. Gun writer Jeff Culhane tells his girlfriend, reporter M. F. Mulrooney, that their latest adventure might be somewhat dangerous. She replies, "Hey, I'm prepared" and then takes a minute rummaging through her huge purse for her .38 pistol. Culhane replies, "Yeah, and I like that quick draw too." - John D. MacDonald's recurring character Travis McGee mentions in one book that he actually has a pair of pants with a spring-release holster hidden in the right front pocket. - In Jon Steele's non-fiction War Junkie, he's covering a war in Georgia and encounters a militiaman with an RPG warhead stuffed down the front of his pants. The soldier smirks at the sight of Steele's camera, and the others agree that the soldier's "explosive erection" means that "his is definitely bigger". - Trope Namer is the perk Pants Positive Safety in the High Tech supplement of GURPS. Any character without the perk gets hit with detailed rules for accidental discharge. - In The Last of Us, both Joel and Ellie carry their pistols loose in the waistband of their jeans. Joel can craft holsters enabling him to carry extra combat-ready pistols, but his waistband remains the spot for his primary handgun. - Takaya in Persona 3 keeps his revolver slung in his belt, pointed right at his crotch. Which makes little sense, as guns are illegal in Japan, and you'd think someone would notice whenever he's not walking around in the Dark Hour. - In Red Dead Redemption Irish walks around with his gun in the front of his pants, pointing directly at his crotch. \|\|It is later revealed in the last newspaper that Irish died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound while drunk. One can only guess where he shot himself\|\|. The real funny thing is that the single-action revolvers in that time period still lacked much in the way of safeties, so that was actually fairly normal. Cowboys would open the loading gate on their revolvers and stick it in their pants, for example. The only way to shoot yourself is if you carried it around with all six rounds loaded and the hammer over a loaded chamber, which was a huge no-no at the time. - Zaveid from Tales of Zestiria uses the back of his pants to store his gun. - Trails of Cold Steel IV: For Musse's Limit Break "Pentashot," she produces a pistol from under her skirt. - In The Walking Dead, game characters store loaded firearms in the waistbands of their pants on a routine basis. - In Spirit Hunter: NG, when facing off against the spirit Kubitarou, Seiji brings along an automatic pistol that he keeps tucked in the back of his pants. He modified it with a special safety that only he can turn off, so that at least alleviates some of the inherent danger of stowing a gun that way. - Defied in Episode 2 of Dr. Havoc's Diary; Dr. Havoc insists that if he were to store a ballpoint pen gun in his shirt pocket, he'd shoot his nipple off. - In Pay Me, Bug!, the protagonist does this during his escape from \|\|the hospital on Tyrelos Station\|\|. He didn't have the chance to steal the holster when he stole the gun, so there's really no place else to put it. - This article. Try not to snicker at the description of the incident as an "accidental discharge". - NFL player Plaxico Burress famously shot himself in the leg after storing his unregistered gun in the waistband of his sweatpants. It slipped down his pants leg and he accidentally pulled the trigger when trying to catch it. He was in a crowded New York nightclub and he didn't notice he'd shot himself until he could feel the blood a few minutes after. He even ended up spending a year in jail for carrying a concealed firearm without a permit. - An officer of the Polish Anti-Corruption Bureau shot himself in the ass with his service pistol, because he carried it in the back of his pants instead of a holster. - According to one story on 4chan, a thug walked up to a guy and tried to rob him. When the guy asked "with what?" the thug pulled up his shirt and showed him the gun in his waistband. The victim simply reached for it, pulled the trigger, and left the thug screaming as he walked off. - This dude tried to shoot somebody, missed, and then accidentally shot himself while putting his gun back in his pants. - Wild Bill Hickok, in his famous duel with Davis Tutt (which helped solidify the image of the Wild West Quick Draw), apparently invoked this. While warning/threatening Tutt, Hickok cocked his pistol, then shoved it back into his waistband. - There was a guy who went to see The Bourne Legacy not long after the infamous theater shooting in Colorado. He decided to carry his pistol in the back of his pants. The gun went off, putting a bullet in his ass. He apologised to everybody else and then drove himself to the hospital. - A shooter at the North Harris campus of Lone Star College in Houston attempted to put his gun in the back of his pants after trying to use it to settle an argument. Predictably, it discharged. - The book "The World's Dumbest Criminals" tells a story of a man who robbed a bank with a sawed-off antique shotgun that had no trigger guard. Upon getting his money, he then shoved the barrel in his pants as he prepared to leave. And then the trigger caught on his waistband. - A man in Plano, Texas got shot by his dog when he left his gun in his pants and picked up the dog, causing it to accidentally put a paw on the trigger. Fortunately, the bullet went straight through his thigh without hitting anything major, and the local police department used the incident to educate the populace on basic gun safety.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PantsPositiveSafety
Public Domain Artifact - TV Tropes A famous, often completely mythical, conveniently uncopyrighted-yet-instantly-recognizable item, pulled from the realms of history, literature, or legend (if not all three). Examples of this trope pop up frequently, and have occurred in any number of genres — comedy, drama, science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, you name it. They can be spotted in cultures from the East to the West — and some date back surprisingly far. Some cultures have favorite items to use, such as the Holy Grail for the West or the Ame-no-Murakumo for Japan, but with modern globalization trends, we're seeing more and more stories pulling from others' usual lists — such as Japanese media like Neon Genesis Evangelion using the Lance of Longinus (a fabled item involved in the Crucifixion of Jesus). It can be a weapon, a MacGuffin, or hell, maybe both if it's a mystical doomsday device. Sometimes the trope shows up as Imported Alien Phlebotinum (seen often, for example, in Stargate SG-1), sometimes it's a mystical object, and occasionally it's both. Sometimes startling revelations are to be had about the object, sometimes it's straight out of the legends, heck, maybe it's even reconstructed from the original's spare parts. Regardless of its distinguishing features in the story, though, what makes it a Public Domain Artifact is its origin as an item from the collective myths of man, with all their familiar symbols. There's honestly no telling how long this trope has been around; while nowadays it's often used partly to avoid copyright infringement, it's been around much longer than the concept of copyright. Many authors (ancient and modern alike) have used these for the mythos attached to them, or simply because it's easier than inventing something out of whole cloth; if an author puts a supposedly mythical sword in their work, it needs to be supported, but when you hear "Excalibur," it doesn't take any explanation to understand how important it is. See the example of Durandal below, Sword of Hector... then Roland... then reforged for Ogier the Dane. Later authors namedropped former heroes to make their mystical artifacts even more mystical, making this Older Than Feudalism. In a series set in another world, these may appear, but under different names. They often function as a Plot Coupon; sometimes even entire sets of such artifacts will be used like this, leading to Gotta Collect Them All. In modern series, many of these items are made of low-grade unobtainium, especially if magic is downplayed or completely absent. There's about a one-in-three chance that Hitler either had it or was searching for it. As the book Angels of Light and Darkness put it: "If Hitler had half of what they say he had, he would have won the war." May be related to Alternate Landmark History. Frequently involved with an Historical In-Joke or instance of Been There, Shaped History. If weapons, they are almost certainly Named Weapons and examples of Stock Weapon Names. See also: Stock Unsolved Mysteries, particularly for items with alleged connections to historical figures or events (especially with religious figures such as Jesus or the Buddha). ## Artifacts with their own pages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other examples ### Arabian The Magic Lamp/Bottle — sure to contain a djinni that will grant wishes to the holder, usually with a weird or sadistic twist, inspired by of course, Aladdin's lamp. Ironically, the original point of this trope was that the magician who trapped the djinni (who are really good at magic) would have had to have been extremely powerful to do so, and the djinni would be so happy to be freed they would use their magic to reward the holder. Anime & Manga - Magic Knight Rayearth: The country of Chizeta is inspired by the Arabian Nights motif, so of course it includes these. Turns out that the djinn's starship has the shape of an oil lamp, and of course two djinn could be commanded to appear from the spout when needed. - Magi: Labyrinth of Magic: Anyone who captures a dungeon gets a djinn to serve them. The djinn need not be put into a bottle, however, it can be bound to any metal item in its master's possession. Comics - De Rode Ridder: The focal point of the album De Lamp van Aladdin. note : Aladdin's Lamp Here the genie is female and takes a liking to Johan, vowing to keep him safe from all harm from now on. Johan is none too pleased to be locked in a gilded cage though. Fan Works Literature - Enchanted Forest Chronicles: Done comedically in Dealing with Dragons, in which Cimorene discovers (through the bumbling of her Disposable Fiancé, Prince Therandil) that Kazul has a bottle with a djinn in it in one of her treasure rooms. Due to the djinn having sworn an oath to kill anyone who let him out after a certain amount of time, he tries to claim he has to kill them... except it turns out they let him out too early, during the time when he'd instead give three wishes to anyone who let him out. He ends up giving them one wish each in thanks for Cimorene's advice to go back into the jar until his time's up (by which point both she and Therendil will be dead of old age anyway) before going back in. Live-Action TV Tabletop RPG - Dungeons & Dragons this time is closest to the source: in Al-Qadim very powerful sha'ir can make and use genie traps, but even for them this act is rarely conducive to long happy life. - Magic: The Gathering: Video Games - AdventureQuest: Magic lamps house djinns, which can be summoned to deal damage. - The Lucky Lamp is a melee item. (As in, the player bludgeons the opponent with it.) - The Infernal Djinn Lamp is a misc. item that summons an Infernal Djinn as a guest, which seeks between Fire and Darkness damage, whichever the opponent is weaker to. - Animal Crossing: Aside from having Genie lamps as decorative items, some games allow you to rub the lamp and summon a ghost wearing a turban, who will rid your town of weeds. - Nethack has lamps. You can apply the lamp to turn it on or off. Regular oil lamps will run out after a while, but magic ones won't, and may summon a djinni, who may be friendly, neutral, or hostile. - Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire: Introduced in Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire is an item known as the Prison Bottle. It allows the mythical Pokemon Hoopa to transform into its unbound form and become stronger and much larger. - Sonic Storybook Series: Sonic and the Secret Rings uses both the lamp and the ring from the Arabian Nights story. However, the genie is the bad guy and Sonic's forced to reseal him away. Webcomics - Last Res0rt uses this with Sedja, an Efreet who willingly lives in a bottle worn around Adharia's neck. ### British, French and Irish Durandal or Durendal — Sword of the Hero Roland, knight of Charlemagne, as well as Hector of Troy. In one famous anecdote, Roland (fearing capture by the Saracens) attempted to destroy Durandal by smashing it against a cliff, only for the cliff to be split in half while the sword was left unharmed. This leads to it often being depicted as The Big Guy of legendary swords - a holy weapon, but focused exclusively on brute force (which may or may not include being a BFS). Other stories tell that he protected the sword by throwing it into a "poisoned stream", which in fiction occasionally results in it having a "Darkness" element or associations with evil or insanity. Anime & Manga Comics - De Rode Ridder: Durandal is the focal point of the album De Zeekoning, note : The Sea King but he loses it in the end and it isn't seen again in the series. - The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Durandal is Excalibur, having been stolen by Orlando/Roland and renamed to not arouse suspicion (because even he knows it was kind of a dick thing to do). Literature - The Dresden Files: The holy sword Esperacchius, the Sword of Hope, is Durandal, albeit reforged to look like a cavalry saber. Like the previous example above, it also has one of the Nails of the True Cross worked into it. - The Elric Saga: Durandal becomes a manifestation of the Black Sword and Roland an incarnation of the Eternal Champion. - The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel: Durendal is the elemental sword of Earth. Live-Action TV - Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger: A duplicate of Durandal is forged for Dora Knight. The process requires some of the hammering to be done by a child whose birthday it is (Bandora had him kidnapped, of course), which becomes important later because the sword can't harm its maker. The sword is incredibly powerful, able to damage the Zyurangers' Legendary Weapons and even the sword of their god Humongous Mecha. Tabletop Games - Future Card Buddyfight has a card named Immortal Sword, Durandal. It has two notable properties: it cannot be damaged by normal means, and it a Sentient Weapon. In fact, because it's alive, it's the only weapon that may be used as your Buddy. - Yu-Gi-Oh! has a monster called "Artifact Durandal". Video Games - Marathon: Durandal is one of three AIs on the titular ship. Marathon's Spiritual Successor Halo features an AI named Cortana. - Fire Emblem: In the Elibe canon, Durandal is the absolutely enormous sword used by the legendary hero Roland in the Scouring. In Binding Blade it serves as the Infinity +1 Sword and can be used by any sufficiently skilled swordsman, while in Blazing Blade it's a Sword of Plot Advancement usable by Eliwood in the final battle. Rather amusingly, his best friend and fellow member of the protagonist Power Trio happens to be named Hector (who gets an axe called Armads as his legendary weapon, named after Almace, the sword of Archbishop and Church Militant Tilpin/Tulpin/Durban, one of Charlemagne's Twelve Peers alongside Roland. Fittingly, in-universe, the legendary hero who previously wielded it was named Durban). - Fate/stay night: Durandal gets a brief mention, and is one of the weapons in Gilgamesh's Gate of Babylon. According to its profile, it was given to Roland by an Archangel, which makes you wonder how Gilgamesh has a protoversion of it... Additionally, Fate/Grand Order features Hector of Troy with Durindana, the sword/spear which eventually became Durandal, and later Roland himself shows up wielding Durandal. - Final Fantasy XII has this as the strongest one-handed sword available for equipment. Ub Final Fantasy XIII, the Durandal is a gunblade with above-average stats, but prevents the character using it from staggering enemies. - Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean: Durandal is the strongest Light-element sword magnus in the game, even ahead of the Sword of the Heavens. - In Freedom Wars, the Caliburn's fire variant is called Durendal, which is crafted from Dionaea-Class Abductor parts. - In Front Mission 4, the research company the heroes work for is called Durandal. - In Final Fantasy Legend III one of the Mystic Swords that can harm the Masters is Durend. - You get this sword by supporting the French forces in Bladestorm: The Hundred Years War. - In Xenosaga, the Durandal is also a spaceship. - In Ogre Battle 64 and Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis, Durandel shows up, in these iterations it is one of the four "Arcane Instrument of Bane". - Durandal is a boss Mon in Folklore. It's a dragon with neon-blue gecko feet. It's also found in Hell, causes absurd damage once fully upgraded, and its backstory refers to it as an indestructible sword worthy of a hero, but that would spark wars if it really existed. - F/A-18 Hornet features the Durandal anti-runway bomb mentioned below. - Durandal is a character in the backstory of Tales of Innocence, the legendary blade of the god Asura. One of the main characters, Spada, is the reincarnation of said sword. - Durandal is available as a card in Shadowverse called Durandal the Incorruptible. It is summoned whenever Roland enter the playing-field. - While never actually found in the game, it is the end goal of the King to find it in Life Goes On. - In Honkai Impact 3rd, Durandal is the code name of the S-rank Valkyrie Bianca Ataegina, one of the most powerful Valkyries in the Schicksal organization. While her default weapon is a lance, its design allows her to wield it like a sword, and she wears a battlesuit called Bright Knight: Excelsis that allows her to summon two large robot assistants, one wielding a huge sword and one wielding an equally large shield. Real Life - The Matra Durandal, a French anti-runway penetration bomb, designed to destroy airport and airfield runways. Aro(u) ndight, which may or may not have been Lancelot's sword. Anime and Manga - Fate/Zero: \|\|Servant Berserker\|\| is revealed to hold the sword Arondight. It was formerly a holy sword, similar to Excalibur, but after his betrayal, Arondight became a demonic sword. - Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny: Arondight is the name of the Destiny Gundam's Anti-Ship Sword. Like how Excalibur belonged to Shiin Asuka when he was the hero, when he was shunted into antagonist mode by Kira Yamato's return, he was given this to hammer in that fact. Video Games - Fate/Grand Order has Lancelot wielding Arondight when summoned as a Saber. His Noble Phantasm involves overcharging Arondight akin to a Broken Phantasm, but since Arondight can't be broken, Lancelot never has to suffer the downside of the technique. - Fire Emblem: IN the Tellius canon, Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn, a magic sword of the same name acts as an Infinity +1 Sword, wielded by the Black Knight. That said, it was given an unusual alternative spelling: Alondite. Originally, "Alondite" was actually the name of Ike's initial weapon in the Japanese version of the second game in the duology, which got switched with "Ettard" (which wasn't the name of a sword in Arthurian legend, but the woman who fell in love with Sir Gawain, \|\|which happens to be the real name of Ike's father Greil\|\|), the original name of The Black Knight's sword, due to a translation mishap - Sonic and the Black Knight: Sir Lancelot, represented by Shadow the Hedgehog, uses Arondight as his starting sword. Fitting Shadow's '90s Anti-Hero style, this Arondight is a black falchion held in a Reverse Grip. Amusingly, the game notes that it never loses its edge. Lancelot also wields Arodnight in Sonic Dash and Sonic Forces: Speed Battle. - The Witcher: Aerondight is one of the best silver swords of the first game. Geralt can gain the sword after \|\|Completing a series of quests in act 4 to The Lady of The Lake's liking\|\|. It returns in the Blood and Wine DLC of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, where Geralt gets it back provided that he's made decisions that have upheld the five chivalric virtues of a knight. Less frequently, you will see other legendary Western swords such as Cortana (which actually exists as part of the Regalia of Great Britain), or Joyeuse, the sword of Charlemagne (and part of the French royal regalia). Anime & Manga - A Certain Magical Index: The Knight Leader uses Hrunting, which he reanalyzed and recreated in order to create new spells based on its creation. The Curtana also makes an appearance as a sword that can grant the blessing of Archangel Michael to the people within England. However, the sword that the Queen possesses is only a replica, and holds a mere 20% of the original's power. - Fate/stay night does this to ridiculous extremes, what with all myths being true, so not only were there Excalibur, Caliburn, Durandal, and Gram (and plausibly, everything else), there's also that minor event known as the Holy Grail War — it's not the actual Holy Grail though. - Taking it even further than that is the character Gilgamesh, whose ability is basically that he owns the originals of every Public Domain Artifact ever. Though theoretically he only has the originals if they were of Earthly origin, as fits his legend of traveling the Earth and gathering all of its treasures. This is why he doesn't have a prototype Excalibur in his arsenal, as Fate canon has it being forged in Avalon by the Fae. - Of course, Gilgamesh himself is a Public Domain Character. Literature Tabletop Games - Dungeons & Dragons: The Dragon article "Relics of Myth" has Julius Cesaer's sword Crocea Mors as an epic-level artifact, an intelligent +6 vorpal keen wounding short sword of lawful power, which also inflicts disease and radiates a blinding light, amonst other powers. It's also possibly Excalibur. Myths and Legends - Any one of Beowulf's swords can be used for this, particularly Nægling and Hrunting. Video Games - Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and all the portable 2D Castlevanias that follow it. You can find a huge amount of named armor, swords and artifacts — from Joyeuse to the Masamune to Death's Scythe. The most powerful sword in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, the Claimh Solais, apparently comes from Irish mythology... odd for a Japanese game about vampires. - Final Fantasy loves to include the Joyeuse every now and then in its games, making it a Royal Rapier in every incarnation: - Final Fantasy XI: - The Joyeuse is dropped by Charybdis, which respawns every 8 to 12 hours. The sword was a very powerful weapon in its time, being a level 70 weapon that would occasionally attack twice, allowing fast TP building. It was also a favorite weapon for Red Mage players, and one of the best weapon to solo with. - Final Fantasy XI also includes Caladbolg and Ochain, respectively a sword and a shield wielded by two major figures of the Ulster Cycle; Tizona and Colada, swords wielded by El Cid; Murgleis, wielded by the stepfather of Roland in The Song of Roland; Burtgang, a sword from the Dietrich Cycle; and Rhongomiant, the little-known personal spear of King Arthur. - Final Fantasy XII: The sword wielded by Larsa Ferrinas Solidor is the Joyeuse. - Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy Tactics A2: The Joyeuse is a mid to high-tiers rapier. The Lia Fáil, Tara The Four Treasures of Ireland: the Spear of Lugh, said to be impossible to overcome, the Cauldron of Dagda, which was said to never empty of food for those who needed it, the Sword of Light (Claíomh Solais) note : Pronounced Khleev Sullish , which "put to flight every ignorance" with its shine, and the Stone of Destiny (Lia Fáil), which cried when put under the feet of the man who truly ruled Ireland — which pretty much fulfill the same role as the Treasures of Amaterasu do, but for a Western audience. They are sometimes matched up with the four western elements. The Cauldron is often identified with the Holy Grail but it also gets mixed up with the Cauldron of Cerridwen from Welsh mythology and the Black Cauldron. The Spear gets identified with the Spear of Destiny, and sometimes gets confused with the Gae Bolg. The Stone is sometimes said to be the Stone of Scone, once part of the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey but now housed in Edinburgh Castle but a few less-reliable sources say it's the Blarney stone in Ireland. There's also a standing stone in County Meath called the Lia Fáil. There's a legend that the Blarney Stone and Stone of Scone are both half the original Stone, although the Irish stone is bluestone, and the Scottish one is red sandstone. Anime and Manga Comics - Indiana Jones and the Spear of Destiny reveals that the Spear of Destiny and the Spear of Lugh are one and the same. Literature - Discworld: The coronation of the dwarves in Uberwald takes place with the new Underking sitting on the Scone of Stone. - Everworld: They belong to the dragon Nidhoggr, who acquired them after Dagda was eaten by Ka Anor. They're stolen by the fairies and serve as a MacGuffin that the heroes have to get back. Nidhoggr's favorite seems to be the Cauldron, which ironically was the one the fairies were most willing to part with. (Apparently all it makes is corn beef and cabbage.) - The Wheel of Time: These four artifacts, when conflated with the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King, also appear in new incarnations: the Cauldron is the Bowl of the Winds, the Spear is Mat's ashandarei, the Sword is Callandor, and the Crown (in place of the Stone) is the Crown of Swords. - Young Wizards: The Four Great Treasures show up in the fourth novel, A Wizard Abroad. Claíomh Solais is replaced by yet another legendary sword, Fragarach. Tabletop Games - Dungeons & Dragons: The Stone of Destiny is included in the Dragon article "Relics of Myth" as an epic-level artifact. Or rather, two epic-level artifacts. A character who stands on the Stone of Scone for a round while a command word is uttered gets a permenant +1 bonus to Sense Motive checks. If the character has the Leadership feat, this is +10, and Epic Leadership or Epic Commander gives +20 and +30 respectively. (The assumption seems to be that a monarch would have at least the first of these.) The Blarney Stone gives the bonus when kissed for a full round, and it's to Bluff checks, balancing out the effect of the Stone of Scone if the monarchs of Scotland and Ireland are different people. Video Games - AdventureQuest: The Celtic Mastercraft set uses these items. The Claimh Solais, Spear of Lugh, and Lia Fa'il are the highest-level weapons for Melee, Ranged, and Magic damage, respectively, while Coire Dagdae is the set's misc. item. - Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow: The strongest sword is the Claimh Solais. It's nerfed in the sequel, 'Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow''. - The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel: Claíomh Solais is an Art, though it doesn't take the form of a sword. Instead, it appears as a giant metal arm that reaches through a portal above the battlefield before blasting its target with a massive laser beam. - Ogre Battle 64 features Clamioth Solias as "Clau Solias", a weapon wielded by Prince Yumil. Dagda also gets a reference, though it the form of a hammer. Finally, the Lia Fail appears, as a doll. - Rhiannon Curse Of The Four Branches: Their approximate Welsh equivalents (or at least symbols thereof) are among the objects of an extended Fetch Quest. - Shin Megami Tensei: - Shin Megami Tensei IV: The Fair Folk, or Tuatha de Danann, desperately seek to retake Dagda's Cauldron from the angels (who believe it to be the Holy Grail) to revoke their status as a Dying Race. Even though they manage to get it, they still need Lady Danu to reactivate it. - Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse: Near the end of the game, Dagda himself gives the protagonist Nanashi the Stone of Destiny, an item that allows him to relearn his ultimate skill at any time. - Tales of Vesperia: Near the end, there's a scene in the Lower Quarter where Yuri gets Claíomh Solais. Stonehenge is a real place, but it gets ascribed all sorts of mystic powers in fiction, note : Of the many theories on its purpose, one of the most widely believed is that it was used to tell what time of year it is. That's right, it's a calendar ! To be honest, keeping track of the seasons was incredibly important in the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural ones. as well as by some Real Life Pagan groups. Nor is it the only Circle of Standing Stones in Britain, much less the world. There's one, also of unknown origin, in Michigan. Stone circles seem to have been popular with everybody's ancestors. This isn't just a British/Irish trope. Anime & Manga Film - The Pumaman uses Stonehenge as where the alien Aztec gods drop their mind-control mask in the beginning and where they pick it back up at the end. - Transformers: The Last Knight: Stonehenge was assembled by the Knights of Cybertron, to mark the place where \|\|Unicron's spark can be drained to restore Cybertron\|\|. Literature - Angus The First Warrior has Gaoth Cerridwen, the Sword in the Stone, being forged by Druids on the Stonehenge using a nail of Jesus' cross melted with the metals. - History of the Kings of Britain claims that Stonehenge was built by giants from "mystical stones" brought "from the farthest coast of Africa". The stones were magical so that water poured over them acquired healing power, and the giants used to cure all kinds of sicknesses by bathing in such water. It was situated on a mountain top in Ireland, until it was brought to Britain by Uther Pendragon and Merlin and reerected in the exact same shape, so it would keep its mystical powers. This narrative seems to suggest the stones still have the power to heal, only nobody can remember which stone cures which sickness. - Outlander: The Stonehenge and all the other stone circles are markers for locations where certain people may (painfully) be transported through time. Live-Action TV - Doctor Who: In the first part of the season 5 finale, "The Pandorica Opens", Stonehenge is \|\|the location of the Pandorica\|\|. It also mentioned much earlier in "The Time Meddler", where a Time Lord, the Monk, claims to have used anti-grav machines to help the construction of it. - Tracker has a mention of Stonehenge among the things that Cole's species helped humans build. - Xena: Warrior Princess: Stonehenge is formed out of the ruins of a Temple of Dahak, the building having crumbled after Gabrielle is impregnated with his demonic child. Pinball - Golden Logres: Appears on the "Camelot" table; it is where Sir Bedivere first gets his quest to reunite the Knights of the Round. Tabletop Games - Dungeons & Dragons: Appears in the Dragon article "Relics of Myth" as an epic-level artifact, with powers based on the standing stones in the Masters of the Wild sourcebook, only More So, with each stone allowing a druid to apply Enlarge Spell, Extend Spell and Intensify Spell to a specific spell ("normal" standing stones only Empower Spell, rather than Intensify). The article also features other notable stone circles as having similar effects on other spells. Video Games - Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies plays this well in the form of a superweapon named Stonehenge. It consists of several massive railguns, arranged in a circle, that are armed with anti-air burst missiles that destroy everything 2000 ft. above the ground. - Civilization: Stonehenge is a wonder of the world in IV and V. - Dark Chronicle had Kazarov Stonehenge where a Chrono Union - a merging of 2 times at a specific location could take place. Which was necessary to bring Paznos to the present given it was in the future. - EarthBound (1994): Stonehenge appears as a subarea of Winters. Alien invaders decide to set up a base underneath it. - Space Invaders Get Even: There's at least one Stonehenge in every level. Landing in one fully refills your time/health bar and invader supply, but resets your score multiplier back to 1. - Ultima: The standing stone circles are gates that permit rapid travel between the cities of virtue. The Avatar originally came to Britannia via a matching stone circle on Earth that may or may not have been the original Stonehenge. Western Animation - Beast Wars: A structure resembling Stonehenge appears in one episode as an alien beacon. (Note that while it resembles Stonehenge, there's some very obvious differences). - Filmation's Ghostbusters again. This time, it was the hiding place for one of the "stones from the future"; Sir Trance-a-Lot used his magic to bring the stones to life (complete with faces and arms, no less!) to distract the Ghostbusters. - Jackie Chan Adventures: One episode is about trying to keep someone from using Stonehenge as a weapon. \|\|It turns out to be an alien signaling device, but the aliens don't show up until everyone leaves.\|\| - Legend of the Three Caballeros: In "Stonehenge Your Bets", it's a gateway to Goblin Town. The Seven League Boots, from English lore. They're boots that let you walk seven leagues in a single step. Explanation : For those who don't get it, back in the time where this was popular, "seven leagues" was the distance said that a man could walk in a day. As a league usually equals ~3 miles, being able to travel ~21 miles in a single step is an impressive feat . Often used in video games as Sprint Shoes . Comic Books Fan Works Literature - Known on the Disc to cause severe groin sprain without proper precautions. - Worn by the Mercenary in The Bartimaeus Trilogy. If used by the untrained, can lead to unfortunate side effects... namely, the person wearing the boots is torn in half due to one leg suddenly moving forward seven leagues.... - Isaac Asimov in Magic calculated that you could probably run around some of the other planets in our solar system and back again, just by holding your breath in outer space and wearing a pair of a certain kind of Seven League Boots (which aren't really Exactly What It Says on the Tin). Also, you'd leave Earth's atmosphere in three steps if you walked in a tangent line, making them a severe case of Blessed with Suck. - In this case, it's the acceleration rather than the speed that's constant, making distance traveled proportional to time squared. Zelazny used a similar concept in one of his own novels, except there it was a magical horse instead of boots; he explicitly stated that with a long enough run-up the horse could circumnavigate the universe in a single stride. - Elizabeth Bear had Christopher Marlowe enchant some regular boots into seven league boots in Whiskey and Water. - Utilized by Sophie in Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle. In this version you go seven leagues for each pair of steps. If you only want to go three and a half leagues, you put on just one boot. - In The Midnight Folk, the witches have one-league boots, seven-league boots and forty-nine league boots (the last have to be screwed to the floor when not in use). - In Out Of Oz, Mr Boss asks Little Daffy if she can make him a pair to get them into the quadling jungle more quickly. Brrr the Lion says he'd need two pairs but would settle for a seven league settee. - In The Magician's Land, Professor Mayakorvsky shows Quentin Seven Thousand League Boots among several other magical inventions. - In Peter Schlemihl The Shadowless Man, Schlemihl, in exile once his condition is revealed and he has lost his position and fortune, finds casually a pair of boots which happen to have these properties. In spite of how prodigious the finding is, he manages to be unhappy about it, because given the disposition of certain countries and islands, he would never be able to visit them due to the length of his stride. He finds that he can wear wooden shoes over the boots if he wants to avoid jumping around without taking the boots off. Video Games Western Animation Airgetláṁ (Irish for "silver hand") was an epithet of Nuaḋa, mythical king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, who lost his right arm in battle and wore a prosthetic crafted from silver until it could be restored. In fiction it is often treated as the name of the prosthetic itself, which may alternately appear as a gauntlet . Expect Silver Has Mystic Powers to be in full effect. Anime & Manga - In Legend of the Galactic Heroes it appears as the name of a battleship under the command of Edwin Fischer. - Symphogear: Serena's (later Maria's) Symphogear armor was created from the Airgetlam, having a white colour scheme and being bulkier on the left arm. While not the most powerful it's extremely versatile, capable of creating knives, Whip Swords, Deflector Shields and a Wave-Motion Gun, and is also capable of stabilising Relic energies (which has been used on itself to reduce the stress on its wearer, on the living Relic Nephilim to pacify it, and on Gungnir to assist in controlling its larger-scale Combined Energy Attacks). Unlike most artefacts which appear in the series, "Airgetlam" is officially just a codename for a Relic which has never been identified, as the arm was discovered in Iraq with no records and nothing connecting it to Ireland beyond its appearance. \|\|It later turns out to be the severed arm of the Sumerian god Enki, which was petrified along with a portion of his battle armour.\|\| Literature - Inheritance Cycle: Dragon Riders are often referred to by the title "argetlam", in reference to the silvery mark which appears on someone's hand when they bond with a dragon. - Re:Monster: After losing his left arm in battle, Rou is gifted the magical Airgetlam to replace it. Video Game Anime & Manga - Symphogear has the Daurdabla (also known as the Uaithne) - the harp of The Dagda. It features as the relic backing Carol Malus Dienheim's Faust Robe. Literature - In Clubland Heroes, the Splendid Six are said to have King Arthur's original round table in their meeting room, having recovered it on one of their earlier adventures. ### Egyptian A scene from the Huefner papyrus, one of the more well-known copies of the Book of the Dead. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, a written set of spells designed to help a deceased person's spirit survive the trials of the afterlife, has seen occasional use. Anime & Manga - Overlord (2012): Momonga used a copy to turn his Yggdrasil character from a Skeleton Mage into an Elder Lich. Film - The Mummy (1999): The Book of the Dead appears along with the Book of Life. One gives life to the dead, one gives death to the living. When Evie and company use the latter book on Imhotep, his immortality is taken away, rendering him mortal. Literature - The Kane Chronicles: The Book of the Dead is used as a map to navigate the Duat and reach The Land of The Dead. - The Magic Treehouse: In an early adventure, Jack and Annie help an Egyptian queen's ghost find the copy she was buried with in order to help her pass on. Video Games - The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind has two in-game books which parody the style of the Book of the Dead — The Book of Life and Service and The Book of Rest and Endings. Primarily found in Dunmeri ancestral tombs, they contain incantations to, respectively, bind the spirits of the dead to the service of the speaker and put spirits to rest. - Fable II: Parodied with the Norminomicon, the Book of the Extremely Dead. - La-Mulana: The Book of the Dead is an item that protects against the Anubis enemies that guard it. - NetHack: The Book of the Dead is a vital MacGuffin. Which is funny, considering how widely available it is in Real Life. The mask of Tutankhamun has become the face of ancient Egypt. As such, expect explorers to come across a similar looking object. Anime & Manga - Lupin III: Lupin steals the mask in one episode of the second series and decides to wear it as a joke. He promptly becomes hypnotized by it into believing he is Tutankhamun, leading both his own gang and his rival Zenigata on a wild chase to catch and remove the mask from him before he goes nuts for good. Comic Books - Batman: Circe, former partner of Black Mask (i.e. not the Wonder Woman villainess), offers to use a replica of this, allegedly belonging to the pharaoh Ankh-Es-Anon, to "heal" Two-Face's broken psyche. It appears to work at first, and even seems to repair his face, but then he rips off the skin to reveal a totally scarred face, declaring he's seen through Circe's trick — there is no such pharaoh, after all. However, half of said scars turn out to be makeup, but it appears the events of the story have sent Harvey's psyche off the deep end (more so than usual). And the whole thing was Batman's plan. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero. Live-Action Television - Stargate SG-1: Early seasons feature a panning shot of a similar mask as the title sequence. Video Games - Animal Crossing: The mask can be bought from the Able Sisters shop; in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, it can also be hand-crafted using five gold nuggets. Wearing it, however, brings bad luck to your character. - The Cave: The Adventurer's object of desire is the burial mask. Western Animation ### European Middle Ages and Renaissance - The Voynich Manuscript, an untranslated medieval manuscript of a seemingly occult nature, sometimes appears in fiction as a Tome of Eldritch Lore. A list of some works featuring it can be found here. - The Pied Piper's flute usually appears in that character's possession in stories or plays, but turns up on its own (as the Pipes of the Sewers) in the Dungeons & Dragons RPG. - The Just Judges is a painting that once formed part of the legendary Ghent Altarpiece. In 1934 the panel was stolen and never recovered. Albert Camus' The Fall finds The Just Judges in the possession of the nefarious Jean-Baptiste Clamence who draws inspiration from it for his questionable occupation of "judge-penitent." It makes a cameo in season 3 of Arrow in the possession of Ra's Al-Ghul. - The Cellini Salt Cellar features prominently in Lois McMaster Bujold's Historical Fantasy novel The Spirit Ring. (Or at least its physical form does; in the novel the saltcellar is the work of Prospero Beneforte, an Expy of Benvenuto Cellini who is not only a goldsmith and sculptor, but an openly acknowledged mage, and the saltcellar itself has magical powers.) An Expy of Cellini's Perseus with the Head of Medusa plays an even more important role in the novel's finale, when it temporarily becomes a Living Statue (while glowing red-hot) and fights the villains. ### Finnish The Sampo from the The Kalevala , which is especially versatile as it is never explicitly established what it actually is . It seems to be a machine or device used to produce whatever is demanded; we see it churning out gold and salt at two separate points in the legend. Some versions had it as a World Tree . Comic Books - Don Rosa, touched by the appreciation of his Finnish fans, wrote an adventure featuring Scrooge McDuck hunting down the pieces of the Sampo, here a device capable of creating wheat, salt and gold, and rebuilding it. Of course, his greed gets the better of him, and ultimately he is nearly taken by the artifact's divine builder to the heavens. He is offered the choice to go with it, but realizes he's not ready to leave his life behind and agrees to let the Sampo go. At the end, his reward is the Sampo's crank. Fanfic - Under the Northern Lights: The Sampo occurs as a myth somewhat similar to the original one. While it is often called a mill, noone knows exactly what it was today, but it had the power to break a famine. \|\|Princess Luna reveals it as a wishing machine used by the "gods" to create the world, by transporting things or even abstract concepts to the user. It was cursed by Discord as a prank so that it always steals the things you get with a wish.\|\| Literature - Emil Petaja wrote a series of stories based on the Kalevala. I believe The Star Mill relates to the Sampo. Live-Action TV - The Sampo was a major plot point in the featured film from the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode The Day the Earth Froze. Again, the artifact is continuously mentioned, and even used, without it ever being explained just what the hell it's supposed to be, leading the Satellite of Love crew to have endless fun with the concept, culminating in a fan contest asking people to send in their own ideas of what a "sampo" is. The winner: a photo of a small TV set with the brand name "Sampo" showing a frame of MST3K. Video Game - In Noita, \|\|this item drops from the final boss and is required to complete the Work and trigger an ending\|\|. Its name changes depending on \|\|how many Orbs of True Knowledge you're holding\|\|. There's 15 names and only one of them is actually called "Sampo". The game files confirm it's what it's supposed to be. Web Original - A version of the Sampo can be seen in SCP-294, a vending machine with a keyboard for entering requests. It can only dispense items in liquid form, but it can produce anything that exists in the universe, even abstract concepts such as 'music' or 'my life story'. Its only limitation is that it, like in the fanfic section above, must steal the materials from somewhere else (i.e. from a nearby container of bleach if 'bleach' is requested, organic material from someone the requester knows as Joe if 'a cup of joe' is requested...). - Ukonvasara, legendary lightning-creating hammer of Finnish thunder god Ukko—known also as Ukonkirves, or Ukko's Axe—is the Empyrean Great Axe for Warriors in Final Fantasy XI. ### Graeco-Roman The Fountain of Youth, which differs from most of the other artifacts on this page in that it can't be transported from place to place. Nevertheless, just about every fantasy story that runs long enough will eventually address it. Historical explorer, Juan Ponce de León went looking for it and instead got famous for exploring Florida. Comics - It's only natural for Man-Thing to stumble across it in his home in the Florida swamps (and some conquistadors along with it). - The Fountain used to be somewhere around Florida in the DC Universe, and granted genius-level intellect and omnilingualism to Detective Chimp. However, when the Spectre went mad without Jim Corrigan, he decided all magic was evil; one of the first things he did after the revelation was to boil away the fountain's waters. - In a story from the comic book tie-in with the late 1980s Superboy TV series, the Fountain of Youth turns out to be a lie, and Ponce de León was actually cursed with youthful immortality until he was killed by a powerful rich person seeking the legendary fountain. - In one Carl Barks story from the Disney Ducks Comic Universe, Scrooge McDuck stumbled upon the Fountain of Youth (and a pair of young men who were actually stranded conquistadores) while scouting for property in Florida. Unfortunately, the fountain was destroyed by a construction crew before Scrooge could call them off. - Wonder Woman (1942): In the Golden Age part of becoming an Amazon was to drink from the Fountain of Youth on Paradise Island, which in turn made the drinker stop aging and be immortal while on the island. Film - The Fountain. In a subversion, there is no literal fountain that is being sought by either of the three versions of Tom, but a magical tree. - Showed itself in the third Librarian movie. - Pirates of the Caribbean: - At World's End ends with Barbossa going off to find it... only Barbossa discovers Jack has stolen the map to guide them there. - And the fourth movie On Stranger Tides features Jack and Barbossa teaming up to find it... and fight Blackbeard. Literature - Terry Pratchett spoofed Ponce de Leon in Discworld with Ponce de Quirm, who spent his whole life exploring foreign countries because people made fun of his name. The Fountain granted him youth, but \|\|also granted it to the strong, healthy dysentery bacteria that killed him.\|\| - Who says the fountain of Youth can't be elsewhere? There are hand-wavium FoYs in Demon, the third book in John Varley's Gaea Trilogy, which is set in a (huge) creature (essentially a sentient, living space station) orbiting Saturn. - The Fountain appears memorably in Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides. - Xanth also has the fountain of Youth. Since Xanth is basically Florida in a fantasy environment, the author claims that the two fountains are in the same place (in Xanth, Earth, and Mundania). Live-Action TV - In Charmed (1998), the Fountain of Youth was like a normal fountain in a city only underground and could be accessed using a magical grail. It was located in San Francisco in a cave. - In Power Rangers Zeo, after Billy begins suffering from rapid aging, he has to go to Aquitar in order to drink from that planet's Fountain of Youth. He has to drink it fresh from the source, because otherwise it isn't strong enough. He decides to stay on Aquitar after being restored because he falls in love with an Aquitian scientist named Cestria. - In season seven of Stargate SG-1, Daniel goes searching for the Fountain of Youth, or, more specifically, a powerful Ancient healing device capable of, besides healing, reviving the dead and extending life. Its effects came to anyone who was near it when it was on. It was hidden in a temple near a waterfall, thus originating the "Fountain of Youth" myth. Tabletop RPG - An artifact card in the Magic: The Gathering, The Dark expansion, which also popped up in the book based on it. It's randomly located in some village. The main character hides in it from some goblins and so unwittingly gains immortality. Humorously, the card's flavor text explains why no one else ever discovered its true nature. No one wants to drink from a fountain where (now immortal) pigeons bathe. - Leonization, a rejuvenation procedure in Shadowrun, is named after Ponce de Leon. Video Games - The campaign of Age of Empires III is about three generations of people keeping it out of the wrong hands. Hell, you even get to blow it up at one point. - The videogame Colonization lets you discover it and get a bonus. Amusingly, it doesn't limit how many times you can discover it, so a player who explores thoroughly can find dozens of Fountains of Youth scattered all over the Americas. - The entire thing can be stolen and relocated to your secret lair in Evil Genius 2. - Rogue Legacy: The "cure for all ills" the prince was searching for in his journal pages turns out to be this. Which is given foreshadowing, as each of the bosses have a name related to the fountain of youth. - Civilization V features the Fountain as a Natural Wonder. If it's claimed by a city, it gives +10 Happiness to the owner of the city, and any military units that move next to the Fountain permanently gain the ability to heal twice their usual speed. - Some Might and Magic games have it. Usually it is indistinguishable from regular fountains, however it removes all magically-induced aging. In VI it is incredibly handy considering one of best spells of Light Magic ages caster by 10 years, some nasty creatures can also age party members, age in this game does affect stats and only other way to cure aging comes in form of potion that permanently drops your stats. However, it is located in zone with high-level monsters, so it is inaccessible for quite some time. Webcomics Western Animation - Appears in an episode of Ben 10. The guy who guarded it probably should've known better than to keep a supply of its water in a carnival dunking booth, even if it was out of order. - This was the objective in a Codename: Kids Next Door episode, in which the Fountain was hidden in a cave beneath an elementary school. A girl who'd used it to remain young for generations had connected its runoff to a drinking fountain inside the school, with a permanent "out of order" sign. - The DuckTales (1987)-episode "Sweet Duck Of Youth" sees Scrooge, Launchpad and his nephews searching for the Fountain after Scrooge gets reminded how old he is on his birthday. They find the Fountain with the help of an eldery man who searched the Fountain for 30 years. It turns out the water doesn't make one younger, but only the reflection of said person. Scrooge learns his lesson to accept his age and spends a world trip to the man who wasted half his life to find the Fountain. - The Fountain was the focus of the DuckTales (2017) episode "The Forbidden Fountain of the Foreverglades!" Scrooge and Webby race Goldie to the fountain, though Scrooge and Goldie are turned into teenagers, apparently due to the waters leaking into nearby rivers. \|\|It turns out the true cause was drinking water from a nearby hotel. Ponce de León had drained the fountain into said hotel, as the waters actually transfer youth instead of just granting it, so he set about stealing youth from teens on spring break via his pool.\|\| - An episode of I Am Weasel featured the eponymous character and I. R. Baboon as Spanish conquistadores tasked by the King of Spain with finding the whereabouts of The Red Guy as Pantless de León who went to find the Fountain of Youth in America decades ago and was never heard from again. After arriving to a 20th century America, they find de león guarding a drinking fountain in a park, which he claims to be the real deal because it has a "Youth" sign next to it. As I. R. drinks from the fountain. Weasel points out it's because there's nearby fountain with a "Adult" sign next to it. Realizing the mistake, Pantless de León agrees to return to Spain. While returning, Fridge Logic kicks in as I. M. Weasel wonders why Pantless hasn't aged a bit despite being in America for several years. Cue to Pantless and Baboon having been turned into babies. A lost city that sank under the sea. Anime & Manga Comics Literature - In Dinotopia, Poseidos is thought to be Atlantis. It was an island with an advanced society that sank into the sea. Atlantis in the myths was said to belong to Poseidon, and things got garbled. - In Neverwhere, Islington the angel shares some wine from Atlantis with visitors, and mentions having known and watched over the city before it sank. \|\|Which is true, because Islington is the one who sank it.\|\| Live-Action TV - Doctor Who had several depictions of Atlantis over the years: one was in the Second Doctor serial The Underwater Menace, and the other was the Third Doctor serial The Time Monster. - The Lost City of Atlantis itself, as seen in Stargate Atlantis, where it had been moved to another galaxy, submerged, resurfaced in the first episode, then moved to another planet. - Atlantis obviously, though at this point it hasn't been submerged. Pinball Tabletop Games - The Yu-Gi-Oh! card game features Altantis in the form of a card called "A Legendary Ocean". "Atlantean" monsters also exist as an archetype of city-dwelling sea serpents. - In Rifts, Atlantis was thrown into a pocket dimension after experiments by the ancient Atlanteans Went Horribly Wrong. The Coming of the Rifts caused Atlantis to return, which raised the sea level around the globe. Obviously, the original inhabitants are long since gone, and Atlantis is now the domain of an Eldritch Abomination and his thousands of slaves. Theatre Video Games - Age of Mythology set its campaign in Atlantis. - Trident from Eternal Champions fought for Atlantis against the Romans for a share of land. Following his death, his people were forced to live underwater. - The Atlanteans built a time travel machine in Ecco the Dolphin and used it to escape to the past after several wars with the Vortex. Ecco uses the machine during the first two games. - In God of War: Ghost of Sparta, Kratos inadvertently sinks Atlantis searching for his brother. Despite being a pretty large moment in the game, it is only referenced one other time. While battling \|\|Poseidon in God of War III, he will sometimes say, "Atlantis will be avenged!"\|\| - Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is about the titular character searching for Atlantis before the Nazis can find it and use its secrets. Indy makes use of various Atlantean artifacts powered by beads of orichalcum. Naturally, orichalcum originally comes from Atlantis. Webcomics - In It's Walky!, Atlantis was an ancient Martian outpost, from which various people such as the Head Alien and SEMME steals technology. Western Animation - Atlantis: The Lost Empire accidentally subverted this trope. The heroes are able to find Atlantis because they got their hands on both the Shepherd's Journal (a road map to the place) and a linguist who was able to actually read it. In the DVD voiceovers, the creators mentioned several responses from viewers congratulating them for actually using the Shepherd's Journal for extra authenticity. Ironically, the legend of the Shepherd's Journal begins and ends with Disney's Atlantis — there was no such artifact, legendary or otherwise. - Name-checked in DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp in the form of Genie's account of its destruction: it was the resort getaway of its time until Merlock couldn't get a reservation. The rest is history. A box that was given to a girl named Pandora, and that she was told to never open . Obviously she opened it, and within it were all the horrors and woes of life, now unleashed upon the earth. She was made as curious as she was beautiful by Zeus as punishment to humanity - his plan worked. Anime & Manga - In Saint Seiya, Pandora's box contained Hypnos and Thanatos, Hades' servants, where they had been initially sealed by Athena after the end of the war in the Age of Myth. Pandora, of course, released them in modern times. - Haunted Junction has the protagonist open it by accident. It wakes him up a bit. - The box shows up in Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA. \|\|It turns out to the Cube used by the Ainsworth family, and is correctly called a Pithos. In a departure from the original myth, in an alternate reality, Pandora didn't open the box and has let it stay closed for its entire existence - but for reasons unknown, not unleashing its contents unto the world has caused that world to slowly die, thus the Pithos' contents are the story's biggest mystery. Darius Ainsworth's entire plan relies on using his '"daughter" Erika (actually Pandora herself) to open it and save Humanity; she is unable to die until it is open, and works with Darius in order to finally die.\|\| Comics - The box (as an urn) is the major lynchpin of the Project Superpowers comic book series. - They've done the research; Pandora was originally given an urn, not a box. It wasn't until Erasmus of Rotterdam miscopied πίθος ("urn") as πύχις ("box") in the 16th century CE - some scholars speculate that he was confusing Pandora and Psyche, who was associated with a box - that Pandora became associated with a box rather than an urn. - In the New 52, Pandora's Box was a skull-shaped item that could only be opened by the person with the most evil heart. \|\|It turned out to be a gate to Earth 3.\|\| Fan Works - Pandora is the Goddess of Imagination in the Pony POV Series, and multiple ones exist. Some are used to imprison her creations that got too far out of hand, and others contain essence given to her by other Gods for use in creating stories. The two that have ended up on Equus, however, definitely ended badly: the first one contained dark magic, and released it into the world when Morning Star, resulting in the creation of Hydia's clan, numerous monsters, and \|\|Lord Tirek himself\|\|. The other was the prison of \|\|the entity that would become General-Admiral Makarov.\|\| Film Literature - In The Last Olympian, Prometheus gives Percy the urn of Pandora and tells him that if he opens it, he will free Hope and so surrender. It turns out to be a Clingy MacGuffin — it keeps showing up after being locked in a safe. Percy finally hands it to Hestia, who can keep it safe. - In Night Mare, Magician Humphrey, in preparing some of the defensive spells he expects will be needed during the invasion that forms the background of the story, turns out to have a box he took "from a very foolish young girl", without saying what it contains- except that it's dangerous. When Mare Imbri, near the end of the book, feels like she has nothing left to lose and, in preparing for a desperation attack, opens the box... releases the Hope trapped inside, and gains the determination/courage to perform the attack that ends the war. - Rosemary Wells covered the myth with her Max and Ruby characters in Max and Ruby's First Greek Myth: Pandora's Box. - The "Mythic Misadventures" series focuses on a teenage version of Pandora having to hunt down all the evils she released and put them back inside the box. Live-Action TV - Pandora's Box also showed up in a last season episode of Charmed (1998), with a superpowered Guardian (named "Hope") who was to protect it so that demons (or anyone really) would not be able to open it and release the ills within. Naturally said Guardian knew nothing about all this and had to go through a (relatively short) How Do I Shot Web? bit before she could save the world. Interestingly, since the Box had already been opened long ago to originally release its contents, doing so now merely intensified the bad traits of humanity—which, aside from the obvious negative consequences, helped to tilt the balance of power toward evil. - In Doctor Who, the Pandorica plays with the general concept of the trope; the device itself is based upon the legend of Pandora's Box (Amy's favorite story). It was made to hold the worst nightmare the Universe has ever seen (the Doctor), but, in its own strange way, it ended up containing Hope as well. - Shows up in season 3 of Once Upon a Time as an item that can entrap even the most powerful magical beings. Mr. Gold uses it to trap Peter Pan \|\|actually Henry in Pan's body\|\|. Before that, he was briefly trapped in it himself. - Pandora's Box is in Warehouse 13. - "Empty, of course." As of Season 4, the box was retconned to traditionally contain Hope, \|\|which was destroyed in the explosion of the Warehouse. Fixed when the Reset Button was pushed\|\|. - Appears in Atlantis. Jason is sent to the Underworld to fetch it in return for his friend's safety, only to realize that it's too dangerous to give to anyone else. He has a copy made, but unfortunately Medusa finds the real thing, opens it, and ends up with her legendary snake hair. - One of the installments of Between the Lions was titled "Pandora's Box" and covered this story. - In Kamen Rider Build, Pandora's Box is a cube found during a Mars expedition. Just the act of touching the Box while it was closed caused a World-Wrecking Wave that balkanized Japan into three regions divided by massive walls spitting out clouds of Nebula Gas, and drove the leaders of those regions mad with an instinctive urge to possess and open the Box. Actually opening the Box is how the Once-Green Mars became the barren rock it is today. \|\|It also contains the spirit of an alien from beyond our solar system, who used the power of the Box to destroy Martian civilization and plans to do the same to Earth.\|\| In this case it's simply named after the mythical Pandora's Box and nobody ever suggests that it's the same one. - Pandora's Box was one of many MacGuffins in GoGo Sentai Boukenger; once emptied of its contents, Arch Priest Gajah transformed the artifact into the final Monster of the Week: Desperado. Radio - In an episode of "The Story Lady," a parody of children's programming, Pandora's box turns out to contain ". . . a whole lot of funny-looking cigarettes with no brand name on them." Video Games - Opening Pandora's Box is what triggered the ongoing Age of Heroes in City of Heroes' backstory. - Can be stolen and put on display in the lair in Evil Genius 2. Somewhat interestingly, the Villain Protagonist actually steals it specifically to make sure it's never opened. - It also played a huge role in the mythology-themed God of War series. - Legendary: The Box has its master thief protagonist being hired to steal Pandora's Box and accidentally opening it, thereby freeing a horde of vicious monsters upon the world. - In King's Quest IV, retrieving Pandora's Box is one of the tasks Rosella must complete to win the game. - In Final Fantasy VI, Banon tells Terra the story of Pandora's Box. He tells her that once when people were pure and innocent, there was a box they were told never to open. One man did, releasing all of the world's evils: envy, greed, pride, violence and control. The only thing left in the box was a single ray of light: hope. He then tells her that she is that ray of light, the Resistance's only hope. - Zombies Ate My Neighbors includes it as a special item that releases fireballs which chase down and wipe out all enemies in the screen. Web Original Western Animation - An episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy centers around the pandemonium of Pandora's lunchbox being opened. - The Box Ghost gets his Day in the Limelight with this in Danny Phantom. - In the Class of the Titans episode "Little Box of Horrors", opening the box releases two characters, the Seeper (the Monster of the Week) and Hope. - The Powerpuff Girls (2016) did this when Blossom accidentally opens it while cleaning (it was in the Professor's possession for some reason). Hope was likewise inside it too but became too distracted by toys to be of any use (directly anyway). - The Dungeons & Dragons (1983) episode "The Box" centers around the similar Zandora's Box, which acts as a portal to other dimensions depending on where it's opened. The kids actually make it home, but Venger follows them; his magic still works there, but theirs doesn't, so they have to leave again so he'll chase their items and leave Earth alone. He's tricked into going through another portal, but they can't use theirs again, as it was tied to a bridge that collapsed. - In an episode of American Dragon: Jake Long, its revealed that evil wizard Eli Pandarus is a direct descendant of Pandora, and the code to unlock the box had been passed down through his family for generations. The code is so complex that only one person was able to solve it; Spud. The Golden Fleece, really more of a very, very shiny MacGuffin than anything else. Its actual power was as a magical sleep aid; invoking a god or hero and then sleeping on the Golden Fleece would provide clarity and prophetic powers to one's dreams. note : This is a practice often engaged in by followers of hero cults in the ancient Greco-Roman and Mediterranean cultures. A person would go to the tomb or grave of an ancestor or famous person, pray for something, and then sleep there. Any dreams the petitioner had when doing this would be taken as guidance in response to that prayer. Comic Books - In "The Golden Fleecing" by Carl Barks, Uncle Scrooge and company had to face harpies and a dragon to recover the Golden Fleece. - Wonder Woman (1987): Diana retrieves a cut of the fleece during an astral projection which is then used to help heel burn victims in a hospital. Film Literature - The Golden Fleece was lost after the fall of the Roman Empire in Level Up Hero. \|\|Sam have to find the fleece in order to cure Thunder of the Blight.\|\| - The Golden Fleece is actively used in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. It has healing properties and certain power over Nature. In the second book, Sea of Monsters, Percy and his friends go on an Argonauts-inspired quest to look for the Fleece in order to heal Thalia's tree (a tree that guards the borders of Camp Half-Blood against monsters), which has been poisoned by the Big Bad. \|\|On healing the tree, the Fleece also brings Thalia herself, Zeus's daughter, back to life.\|\| Live-Action TV - Gene London on Cartoon Corners/The Gene London Show possessed the Golden Fleece and could make wishes on it. Video Games - In the Assassin's Creed series, the Golden Fleece is an artifact left behind by Those Who Came Before and is also known as the Shroud of Turin. It is advanced technology with incredible healing abilities and the power to temporarily animate the dead. - In Fate/stay night Caster has this and can even summon the awesome dragon associated with it with a spell. Unfortunately, she doesn't know the spell that lets her control the dragon, so she refrains from doing so since it would effectively be a destructive attack dog just as likely to try and kill her. - When Jason himself appears in Fate/Grand Order, the Fleece manifests as one of his skills, allowing him to heal himself or an ally. - You can pick this up from Jason in God of War II, allowing you to counterattack enemies. - Runescape: You require Golden Fleece to make a magic harp. - It is the object of Jason's quest in Rise of the Argonauts. As with Assassins Creed it's a source of vital energy capable of resurrecting the dead, as well as being as the strongest set of armor in the game. - Titan Quest: The actual golden fleece cannot be found, but the player can find relics imbued with its essence, which, when used to enchant armor, lowers the Mana it takes to cast skills and increases armor effectiveness. Western Animation - The Smurfs: In episode "The Smurfs Odyssey", the Smurfs help Zeus's son Hermes complete his journey to get the Golden Fleece on Gorgon Island in order to prove himself worthy of godhood. - An episode of Hercules: The Animated Series had Herc join Jason and his Argonauts on a lifelong quest for the fleece, rumored to have a grab bag of miraculous powers. When they do find it, they're disappointed to find it only grants flight to whatever it touches, which Hercules and a number of his friends are already capable of through their own means. This overlooks both that flight is still uncommon to the general public, and that the fleece can be used to make Jason's whole ship fly. A magical ring described in Plato 's The Republic which grants its wearer the ability to become invisible at will. Literature - Arabian Nights and Days, a sequel and companion piece to One Thousand and One Nights includes an invisibility ring as a sub-plot. - The Invisible Man is a more modern retelling of the tale of the ring. - The most evident ability conferred by the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings is invisibility. Considering how well-read Tolkien was, it's probably where he got the idea in the first place. - Reveries of a Solitary Walker by Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentions the ring and cites how he would use it himself. Video Games - Enchanted rings which confer Invisibility (and the closely related Chameleon effect) are quite popular throughout The Elder Scrolls series. Most famous is the legendary Ring of the Khajiit, allegedly stolen from the arm of a Daedric Prince. While it's exact abilities vary between games, it typically grants its wearer invisibility and increased movement speed. - In Supergirl's Three Super Girl-Friends, Kara unearths Achilles' helmet. - In Final Fantasy XI, the Aegis shield (Zeus's shield, occasionally on loan to Athena, in the mythology) is the Relic shield for Paladins. - Additionally, Aeneas, Marsyas, and Terpsichore—respectively, the Aeonic dagger for Thieves, Bards, and Dancers; the Aeonic flute for Bards; and the Mythic Dagger for Dancers—are named for figures in Greek and Roman mythology. ### Japanese Japan has the Treasures of Amaterasu, aka the "Imperial Regalia of Japan": the sword Kusanagi no Tsurugi , also known as Ama no Murakumo no Tsurugi , the mirror Yata no Kagami , and the necklace Yasakani no Magatama . All three reputedly actually exist, and are stored in three different temples. However, they have never been shown in public and some may be copies of lost or stolen originals. Interestingly, the Kusanagi is rarely actually depicted in the straight, double-edged, longsword-like style and bronze composition it probably should be (as that's literally what "tsurugi" means), but often as a katana . The Magatama is often represented by its signature comma-shaped beads rather than the whole necklace. The Kusanagi was found in the tail of the Orochi after its death. Sometimes Hihi'irokane is described as being used in the regalia's construction. Anime & Manga - The blue seeds from Blue Seed are the souls of the Aragami are single magatamas, one of the main characters is named Kusanagi Mamoru, and there is a villain named Murakumo \|\|who is actually Yamata no Orochi\|\|. - Ghost in the Shell's protagonist, Motoko Kusanagi, is named after the sword. (It sounds roughly as natural to a Japanese speaker as "Jane Excalibur" would sound to an English speaker... which is probably why Masamune Shirow lampshaded it with a comment in his narration about it being "obviously a pseudonym".) In-Universe, it actually is a pseudonym. In every version of the series where her backstory is described, her birth name was either never given to her in the first place, or all records of her family were lost to her. - The necklace used to give the titular Inuyasha the "sit!" command resembles the full Yasakani no Magatama. - Additionally, in Inuyasha The Movie Swords Of An Honorable Ruler, some comedy is generated by Kagome's grandfather's misreading of the kanji on the sheath of the evil Empathic Weapon Sou'unga, which causes him to believe that it is the real Kusanagi no Tsurugi. - Inuyasha's own weapon happens to come from the body of a monster and is able to control the wind, one too many similarities to the Kusanagi. - Destiny of the Shrine Maiden postulates that Ama No Murakumo is actually two swords. And a Humongous Mecha, for an even count. - Its spin-off series Shattered Angels has Kaon, the reincarnation of Destiny's Chikane, actually become Ama no Murakumo, though a very scaled down version of that one. - Orochimaru of Naruto somehow has the Kusanagi (which the dub calls "The Grass Long Sword" and it literally means "Grass-cutting Sword") and stores it in his throat of all places, presumably because he is indirectly named after the legendary serpent Orochi, in whose body the Kusanagi supposedly originated. Though it's a katana in the manga, it is shown accurately as a straight blade in the anime, but also possesses the ability to extend and glows for some reason. \|\|The Mirror is held by a spirit that Itachi creates with a Dangerous Forbidden Technique that deflects all attacks... and ends up killing him\|\|. The Sage of the Six Paths wears a necklace that looks the Magatama, though it doesn't appear to be of any significance. - Later revealed that \|\|all three users of the Dangerous Forbidden Technique mentioned above (Sasuke, Itachi, and Madara) all have a related attack that takes on the appearance of the Magatama. Sasuke merely generates fiery beads, while Itachi and Madara actually wield them in a massive necklace\|\|. - In Sailor Moon, all three treasures became the primary weapons of Sailor Uranus ("Space Sword", based on the Kusanagi), Sailor Neptune (the Mirror), and Sailor Pluto (the necklace, or the jewel from it at any rate, which became the Garnet Orb on her staff). The items are so powerful in combination that — bizarrely enough — they can call into existence another Public Domain Artifact on this page: the Holy Grail. Which is, of course, really just another excuse to add another transformation sequence/fancy outfit/power-up for Sailor Moon, who is (appropriately enough) the Messianic Archetype of the series. - In Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle Kusanagi is Demon King Twilight's strongest weapon that constantly shines like the Sun which he decided to keep in the Forest of Sacred Treasure. Princess, having her biological clock be messed up due to lack of natural sunlight in the Demon Castle, goes to the forest to retrieve Kusanagi so that she use it as a light source to wake up properly each day. Oddly enough, the anime adaptation redesigns the sword to be more of a traditional fantasy sword and renames it to be the "Sword of Valor". - In the Mobile Suit Gundam SEED series, two of Orb's great weapons are named after the mystical weapons: the space battleship Kusanagi and the anti-beam reflecting armor Yata no Kagami. Appropriate enough given that despite being a South Pacific island with a largely Caucasian population, Orb is treated as an obvious Expy of Japan. - The Galactic Imperial Family of Space Pirate Mito has the full set: a sword (in the form of a spaceship that can be swung like a giant blade), magatama, and mirror. The latter two are rather more mystical and are used to do things with spirits. - In YuYu Hakusho, Kurama and Hiei first appear as thieves who stole the three treasures from King Enma's palace along with Goki. The Sword has the power to turn living organisms it has cut into demons, the Mirror can grant the user one wish on a full moon in exchange for their life, and the Jewel has the ability to suck human souls out of their bodies and store them. Hiei uses the Sword to create demon minions, Goki uses the Jewel (which is not a necklace or in the shape a tama) to store and eat human souls, and Kurama uses the Mirror to heal his human mother Shiori (but with Yusuke's help, he doesn't die for it). Comic Books - The comic Usagi Yojimbo devotes two whole story arcs to the rediscovery and delivery for safekeeping of Kusanagi no Tsurugi. The focus is more on how the sword could be used to rally people to overthrow the shogunate and restore the emperor, but despite this the Grasscutter has some supernatural power - the evil Jei can't corrupt the blade as he does all others he wields and it's the only thing to actually kill him. \|\|Okay, so it didn't stick, at least it did better then most.\|\| - Notably, the sword is also correctly depicted as double-edged, straight blade. Stan Sakai is famous for showing his work, with a few paragraphs on his research always included in the letters section too. - Also in the fourth color special Usagi is forced to recreate the incident that gave the sword the Grasscutter name - a group attacking Usagi sets the grass around him on fire and he slashes the grass around him to create a safe area from the fire. - In Elric: The Balance Lost, Kusanagi is equivalent to the Stormbringer in Eric Beck's universe. It is depicted as a black blade with a red jewel in the hilt. - Groo the Wanderer: The "Sword's of Groo" story tells how Groo gained his swords and the backstory of the blades seems to be partially based on the Kusanagi no Tsurugi. The swords were forged by the Japanese-themed gods and served as part of the regalia of the emperor of a Japanese-themed culture. Considering Stan Sakai served as letterer on the Groo comics and is a friend of Sergio Aragonés, Sergio would be more then likely to know about the Kusanagi no Tsurugi. Fanfiction - Shadows Awakening: The regalia were stolen and corrupted long ago by the Dark Champion of the Shadowkhan (the ones on public display are explained as being duplicates made to hide the fact), and were scattered and hidden when he was defeated. Together, they can open a portal to the Forge of Shadows, the place where the Shadowkhan were originally created, but they seem to have individual powers as well. At the very least, the Kusanagi possesses the person wielding it, turning them into a mindless berserker. - The Yata no Kagami, now the Mirror of Despair, puts \|\|Tohru\|\| into a coma when he looks into it, trapping him in a vision of a Bad Future until Uncle is able to wake him up. - The Jewel can be used to bring a person's darkest thoughts and self-doubts to life as shadow doppelgangers of themselves. They can't cause physical harm, but the emotional damage can be just as bad. - Kamen Rider Showa has the hero gaining thinly-veiled analogues of these treasures (a magical sword, gem, and mirror), each of which bestow him new powers because of the supernatural being within them. Literature - Accel World: Discussed in book 19. While in an area based on the Imperial Palace which contains three powerful items, the cast note that a Regalia theme would be obvious, but that the two known items are a sword (The Infinity)... and a suit of armour (The Destiny), which don't seem to fit. Graphite Edge explains that this is because they only saw The Destiny's appearance after it was corrupted into The Disaster; in its original state it had an appropriate mirror-like sheen. He also adds that currently the Sword and Mirror in the real Imperial Palace are replicas, with the Magatama being the only item that hasn't been moved to a shrine elsewhere in the country, which might be why its Brain Burst counterpart is so much harder to reach than the others. - In L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero's Daughter, the sword is one of many that the Prosperos has. - The Dresden Files: the holy sword Fidelacchius, the Sword of Faith, is implied and later confirmed to be the Kusanagi. It being a katana (or more precisely, a sword cane with a katana blade) is Justified by it having been reforged in the past. \|\|It's remade into a lightsaber in Skin Game.\|\| - Campione! has Ena possessing the Ama no Murakamo, at least until she draws too heavily on its power and needs to be rescued from it as it awakens as a Rogue God. In the anime it is absorbed by \|\|Metis\|\| but in the novels it is defeated by the appropriately named Kusanagi Godou and becomes the source of his second divine Authority (to absorb and redirect magical energy). - The YA urban fantasy trilogy "Sword, Mirror, Jewel" is based on the Imperial Regalia, and the books reveal that each item is a weapon constructed by an incredibly ancient and advanced alien race. A ragtag bunch of teenagers have to prevent them being stolen and used in a war between Yokai. - Kusunagi is the titular blade in the Emberverse novel The Desert and the Blade. \|\|The story reveals that Kusunagi was purchased illegally by an American GI in the aftermath of World War II and ended up in North America. Kusunagi has powers similar to those of the Sword of the Lady which figured prominently in earlier books in the series. However, it can only be wielded by a legitimate heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne.\|\| Unlike many depictions, Kusunagi is depicted in a form appropriate to its era in Japanese history. - The early 80s interactive book Blade of the Young Samurai used a series of magical treasures based on these as its Plot Coupons. There's the crystal sword Kusanagi (as a katana), the Gem of Seeing and the Mirror of Omikami. Tabletop Games - Yu-Gi-Oh!: Several of the Bujinji monsters appear to be based on the ten treasures known as the Tokusa no Kandakara ("10 varieties of the god's treasure") which are enshrined at Isonokami Shrine. The supporting trap cards also reference the Magatama and Sword. Video Games - The Magatama is used extensively in the Ace Attorney games, purported to have the power to read people's minds (or at least see when they're hiding things). - One of the Mastercraft sets in AdventureQuest is the Japan-themed Fujin set, found at the end of the Bridge to the Sky. The Imperial Regalia appear as endgame bonus items after the final boss is beaten. - The Kusanagi Sword, uniquely, has an Always Accurate Attack, with the tradeoff of doing lower damage. - The Yata Mirror reflects some damage back to the opponent if it blocks an attack. - The Yasakani Jewel increases Dexterity, Charisma, wind resistance, and healing. - The Full Set Bonus for the regalia increases combat defense and provides a small amount of Gradual Regeneration. - In the doujin game Akatsuki Blitzkampf, the Big Bad Murakumo is named after the Ame-no-Murakumo. Subverted in that he doesn't have the sword as his weapon of choice. - Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean has functional expies of the Regalia in the form of three Sacred Artifacts - Ocean Mirror, Earth Sphere, and Sword of the Heavens. Curiously, Kusanagi Blade itself also shows up in both Eternal Wings and Origins. It's the strongest Fire-elemental attack Magnus in the former, and powerful, but not nearly the best Fire equipment in the latter. - The Treasures' symbolism plays a key role in BlazBlue's plot. Amaterasu itself is, for lack of a better word, God, and Kusanagi is a living weapon \|\|whose sole purpose is to destroy Amaterasu\|\|. Also, here the Murakumo refers to thirteen Robot Girls that were specifically created by the NOL to traverse and guard the Boundary. The Kusanagi also has a Distortion Drive called "Yata no Kagami" which fires a Frickin' Laser Beam Spam in all directions, while the Susanoo Unit has a continually regenerating Magatama guage instead of a Heat guage like everyone else. In Central Fiction \|\|it's revealed that The Imperator's crown is actually the Yasakani no Magatama. Given that The Imperator is actually Izanami, the Goddess of Death, it's probably a bad thing that she's the one who wields it\|\|. Central Fiction also incorporates the Hihi'irokane as a mystical weapon - specifically, a Soul-Cutting Blade. - In Dark Chronicle, you can equip Monica with the Ame-no-Murakumo. The game hints at the idea it might be a fake. - Fate Series - The mirror carried by the playable Caster/Tamamo-no-Mae in Fate/EXTRA is revealed to be Yata-no-Kagami, or at least the mirror what was later known as such. - Fate/Grand Order: In addition to Tamamo-no-Mae showing up with the mirror, the "Naraka Mandala, Heian-kyo" chapter introduces \|\|Ibuki-Douji, the Superpowered Evil Side of Shuten-Douji and the daughter of the Yamata-no-Orochi who wields both the Kusanagi (which is depicted as a blue-green straight longsword) and the Magamata (depicted as a full necklace of blue-green comma-beads).\|\| - In Final Fantasy XI, the "Amanomurakumo" is the Relic 'Great Katana' (two-handed katanas distinct from the one-handed ones Ninja use that more resemble wakizashi) that Samurai can equip. Interestingly, its model isn't similar to that of most Great Katana (which is the usual long, curved, single-edged blade usually associated with katanas), but a likely more accurate model of a straight, double-edged blade. - The three treasures show up in Final Fantasy XIV, where they're pieces of the Kojin's chosen Primal, Susano. Bringing all three together results in the Lord of the Revel challenging the Warrior of Light to a fight, mostly for fun. - Freedom Wars: The Kusanagi makes an appearance in this game not as a sword but as a flamethrower instead. The Kusanagi is an electro variant of the normally fire-elemented Aldering, upgraded with Ramosa-Class Abductor parts. - In Genpei Tōma Den, you need to find all three of the Regalia hidden in the levels, or Yoritomo cannot be killed. This was carried over when the characters from this game appeared in Namco × Capcom. - The original Golden Sun has an unused light blade called "Kusanagi", but in The Lost Age its graphics have been reused for a sword called Masamune. - Each of the protagonists in Kamiko is bestowed one of the Imperial Regalia at the beginning of the game to use as their weapon. Yamato fights with the Blade of Kusanagi, Uzume uses the Magatama of Yasakani as an arrowhead for her arrows, and Hinome uses the Mirror of Yata as a Precision-Guided Boomerang. - Though the artifacts themselves don't appear, certain characters from The King of Fighters are named for them: Kyo Kusanagi, and Iori Yagami (former clan name: Yasakani). Chizuru Kagura is not named for her artifact (though her clansmen used to refer themselves as the Yata clan), but has been shown to be a vessel for the Yata Mirror. - They do, however, appear in the live-action movie. - In The King of Fighters: KYO, the Yata Mirror does appear. Chizuru can use it as a normal Magic Mirror, watching over \|\|Iori and Kyo's Battle in the Rain\|\| when she's not there. - In the OP of KOF XIII, a short sequence around 0:20 shows Chizuru, Iori and Kyo floating nude in a void alongside the game's rendition of the Amaterasu Treasures. ( Heavy spoilers, obviously.) As a Genius Bonus, Kyo's Kusanagi no Tsurugi is represented as a katana, but as the double-edged longsword it should be. not - Similar to the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG example above, a group known as the Ten Sacred Treasures are included in the GBA-exclusive EX series, consisting of Moe Habana (Yatsuka no Tsurugi), Reiji Oogami (Hetsu Kagami), Jun Kagami (treasure unknown), Miu Kurosaki (treasure unknown), and Sinobu Amou (Makaru Kaeshi no Tama). In a peculiar move, Kyo, Iori, and Chizuru are counted as part of the Ten note : the Yagami Team's story in EX2 has Jun state that there are six of the Ten present when Iori, Jun, and Miu face Kyo, Moe, and Reiji, even though the Three Sacred Treasures are not the same artifacts (and, in fact, are likely the source that the legend of the Ten Sacred Treasures is derived from), meaning that three of the actual ten treasures don't exist in the KOF verse. - The three Plot Coupons of The Legend of Dragoon which \|\|were created to destroy three corresponding Wingly seals which keep the God of Destruction's flesh in the sky as the Moon That Never Sets\|\| are based on the Imperial Regalia. - Moe! Ninja Girls has the protagonist's sword, the Kamuy, resonate with a Magatama-shaped gem called the Izumo. Later, the Yata no Kagami appears as itself, and the three items together are referred to as the "three sacred treasures" in-universe. - Kusanagi no Tsurugi (labeled here as Kusanagi Tsurugi), and the Yasakini Magatama appear in Nioh as an equippable Sword, and Accessory respectively. Despite the presence of these two, Yata no Kagami seems strangely absent. - The Yata Mirror was added as another Accessory in a later update, as well as the "Holy Trintity" achievement for equipping all three items at the same time. - As you would expect for a game starring Amaterasu, Ōkami and its sequel Ōkamiden features the three relics as your three weapon options— a mirror, a sword, and a "rosary" of beads worn around the neck. - More interesting still, the first and final swords you receive are won by defeating Orochi. And the two most powerful Rosaries look like the Yasakani no Magatama. - Also note, this is one of the rare examples where all the blades are double-edged straight swords (albeit a lot larger and wider than average) that match the "ancient (read: pre-katana) Japan" aesthetic. - The Kusanagi is mentioned as apparently having been stolen in Onmyōji, but that's all we get to know about it. - Though not actually the weapons themselves, Uxie, Mesprit and Azelf of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl are themed after the Regalia (Uxie is the mirror, Mesprit is the Magatama, and Azelf is the sword). - The sword, mirror, and "proof of royalty" in Ruin Explorers. - In the game SaGa Frontier, these three items (a sword, shield, and necklace respectively) can be found in Sei's Tomb in Shrike. Players can choose to keep these items, which are medium-powerful in their own right, or put them on particular pedestals to open the way to the undead King Sei (who promptly attacks the grave robbers). On defeating him, you can either have him give you the Kusanagi (which is significantly stronger than the Murakumo you used to get into his tomb) or recruit him (in which case he has the Kusanagi as a special attack). - Another notable example occurs in the first two Sakura Wars games, in which they are called the "Majinki" (meaning "Demon God Weapons"). They can grant whoever uses them the power of a god... or a demon. They are stolen and used by the Big Bad in the first game, and are destroyed in the second game to prevent the second game's Big Bad from doing likewise. - They also allow someone from the Shinguji bloodline to banish the Kouma Demons at the cost of their life... which also plays into Oogami's decision to destroy them, as Sakura does consider their use — like her father Kazuma did in the first war. - Shadow Hearts: Covenant's final boss is Susano-o, the Japanese god of storms, who is aided by the three treasures who can act on their own and join him in combo attacks. - The Shall We Date? games Destiny Ninja and Destiny Ninja 2 involve descendants of Princess Kushinada who protect the regalia. Notably, in Destiny Ninja 2 the main character uses the Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven to purify the four seasons. - All three Regalia must be reclaimed from powerful foreign demons attempting to establish strongholds in Tokyo shrines to release Amaterasu in Shin Megami Tensei IV. - In Shin Megami Tensei Liberation: Dx2, the three regalia serve as powerup items for your demons: The Kusanagi Sword helps to level up your demons, the Yasakani Magatama helps the demons learn or upgrade skills, and the Yata Mirror increases their level cap. - The Blue Moon Crystal in Skies of Arcadia, which is also a sacred artifact for the nation of Yafutoma, just happens to be magatama-shaped. - Amaterasu as she appears in Smite utilizes all the Imperial Regalia. The Yasakani no Magatama is used to initiate an aura that boosts offense or speed of surrounding allies while she gets a small period of self-healing. The Yata no Kagami is used to generate a shield that decreases damage to her while building up a charge that can be shot back to the enemy for more damage the more she has been hit beforehand. And she's basically using her Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi to either hack and slash her enemies, or placing a damage-increasing debuff on them, silencing them or her ultimate wide strikes. - Kusanagi appears in the old Sega Master System title Spellcaster, and remarkably is actually depicted as having a straight blade. Perhaps because it's only used at certain points to advance the plot. - In Super Robot Wars Alpha 2, Kukuru pilots the Magalga, who is The Rival to one of the four protagonists in the game. The names of the Magalga's attacks are based on the Imperial Regalia. - Tales of Symphonia: You get Yata Mirror, Yasakani Jewel and Kusanagi Blade as drops from the Sword Dancer, in this order, one item per battle. The former prevents all status ailments, the middle gives HP and TP regeneration, and the latter in the most powerful dual blade (yes, it's two swords here) weapon in the game. - Touhou Project: Keine Kamishirasawa has a set of spell cards called "Three Sacred Treasures." Depending on difficulty, what follows will be the Sword (Kusanagi, on easy), the Orb (Magatama, on normal), or the Mirror (Yata-no-Kagami, on hard). On Lunatic, it will instead say "Three Sacred Treasures - Country." - Also Rinnosuke owns the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, according to the Curiosities of Lotus Asia stories. (He got it from Marisa, who'd unknowingly found it as a kid and kept it in a pile of scrap metal.) - The fangame Riverbed Soul Savers also features the three treasures, each owned by the bosses of the 4th, 5th and 6th stages respectively. Suitenguu no Himemiko was busy looking for the Kusanagi, using a fake in the 4th stage that looks more like a western sword in design, until she eventually finds the real one by the time she reappears at the midboss of stage 6. Takenouchi no Tarumi essentially is the magatama, being a tsukugami born from the jewel. And Yamatoyo no Momohime, the last boss, is in possession of the mirror. Each of the treasures are used heavily in their Spell cards. And the Extra boss is Yamato no Yato, a piece of Orochi who's trying to reclaim the Kusangi, and has a final spell card that uses mockeries of the three treasures. - In World of Warcraft the Grasscutter is yours for only 60 Badges of Heroism! (Note: It's an off-hand weapon.) Historically, Muramasa and Masamune were popular, highly skilled swordsmiths. According to legend, however, they were incredibly skilled swordsmiths that made swords ideal to perform and avert cutting, respectively. As the techniques of both craftsmen died with them, and the specific qualities of their works have yet to be reproduced, surviving pieces have become legendary to the point of magical. These days, many works assign the names Masamune and/or Muramasa to the swords themselves; depending on context, this can imply the sword was forged by that swordsmith (like a Stradivarius violin, a Rembrandt painting, or a Glock handgun), or it can just mean the creator thought the name was cool and liked the associations it had. Anime & Manga - In the Zanpakutou Unknown Tales filler arc of the Bleach anime, we are introduced to a character named Muramasa, who has the power of making the Shinigami's swords materialize in their true form, and who's controlling them into rebelling against their respective Shinigami. \|\|Turns out, Muramasa is a Shinigami's sword, as well.\|\| - Hayate the Combat Butler has the sword correctly named as a creation of Masamune, though it is a wooden sword. It isn't given a specific name on its own, just called Wooden Masamune. - In Samurai Pizza Cats, Speedy Cerviche's Magical Ginzu Sword is called the Masamasa, a reference to Masamune, in the original Japanese version. Similarly, in the episode "Gone With the Ginzu", Bad Bird's cloned Ginzu Sword is called the Muramura, a reference to Muramasa. - In Soul Eater, Tsubaki's older brother is named Masamune, and has incredible powers beyond turning into a sword. However, he's probably not the real Masamune, or else he'd be over 600 years old. - The one-shot manga Tsukumono by Watano Yuka is set in an antique shop where the merchandise has come to life as tsukumogami. The shop's most valuable item, a Muramasa sword, is never placed on display because its rowdy spirit promises to murder anyone who touches it... but in truth it only acts this way because all its wielders have either died or turned into bloodthirsty monsters, and it doesn't want to see that happen again. Comics - Katana, from Batman and the Outsiders, wields a sword made by Muramasa- who was described as being mad; the sword itself steals the souls of those it kills. - In Wolverine, Muramasa is a mad immortal who can create powerful weapons by imbuing them with a portion of someone's soul. These are known to include: Fanfiction - In Cyberpunk: Another Daybreak, Honjo Masamune is a katana forged by the legendary blacksmith Masamune and an artifact worthy of being called a national treasure. After stumbling upon it on an assignment, V uses it to cut this way through more then fifty chromed-up men in a shootout without chipping despite the blade being nearly eight centuries old at that point. It's so cool that V is worried that the fiercely patriotic Saburo Arasaka would have V's head for using it as a meat cleaver. - All of the blades of Muramasa and Masamune are present in Harry and the Shipgirls, all having become Tsukumogami due to how long they've existed. - Special mention goes to Juuchi Yosamu, Muramasa's Magnum Opus, who is the Potter Honor Blade specifically because they're the only ones capable of being immune to the Unstoppable Rage that anyone else who wields her succumbs to. - The Honjo Masamune shows up in Son of the Western Sea in Percy's possession, having found it after slaying the Yamata no Orochi to save Ryuujin's daughter. The last person to have possession of the weapon after World War 2 was eaten by Orochi, explaining why it turned up in the giant serpent's stomach. The sword itself is made from the Shinto pantheon's Jewel Steel, and Tsukuyomi enchants the sheath so only Percy can draw it until he dies. Film - The first Highlander film. Ramirez's katana — and subsequently, Connor's katana — was made by Masamune, making them one of the only works to get the whole swordsmith/sword name thing right. However, Ramirez claims that he was given the sword after marrying Masamune's daughter in 543 A.D., which puts Masamune's existence about 800 years earlier than in reality. Connor's love interest Brenda lampshades this by referring to the sword as being "like finding a 747 before the Wright Brothers". Literature - Emberverse has the Japanese empress's blade, forged by either Masamune or one of his students according to legend. Live-Action TV - Forever (2014): At the end of the "Pilot" episode, Jo says they have a case involving the Honjo Masamune that famously went missing at the end of WWII and was apparently found "sticking out of some guy's chest on 32nd and Park". The investigation is not depicted on-screen. - In an early episode of Highlander, Duncan comes across a katana that is said to be a Masamune. He gives it to a woman who is a new Immortal. Later it turns out she's not a new Immortal at all, and she and Duncan end up fighting, his dragon-head katana against the Masamune. - Warehouse 13: The version of the Honjo Masamune featured in "Implosion" (the original sword, not Artie's copy) is so finely balanced and aligned that light bends around it, rendering its wielder invisible. Tabletop Games - Shadowrun: Dunkelzahn possessed an ancestral katana forged by Masamune, which he left to Toshiro Mitsuhama, President and CEO of the Mitsuhama Mega-Corp. Video Games - Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean has the Muramasa as the strongest Darkness-element sword. It also carries a 5% chance of inflicting instant death on anything not immune to it. - The Castlevania series includes swords with each name. - Chrono Trigger features two characters named "Masa" and "Mune", who combine to create a big windblowy boss called "Masamune"; they're actually the spirits of the sword Masamune. Oddly enough, in the original Japanese they had nothing to do with the Masamune; they were "Grand" and "Leon", and the sword's name was (wait for it) GrandLeon (which makes a bit more sense, as the "Masamune" in the game is a European-style cruciform sword and not a katana). - The Masamune returns in Chrono Cross, having been corrupted at some point between the games \|\|since it was created with a piece of Lavos.\|\| After going on a quest, Masa and Mune's sister Doreen merges with them to transform the Masamune into the Mastermune (aka Grandream), Serge's ultimate weapon. - In Fate/Grand Order, Muramasa appears as a summonable Saber-class Servant inhabiting the body of the similarly wrought-iron Shirou Emiya. In contrast to his devilish reputation, Muramasa is a crotchety, but ultimately well-meaning old man whose attempts to create swords on the level of the divine have all resulted in demonic weaponry one step below them. During the events of Shimousa, one of his Demonic Swords, Myoujingiri Muramasa, is taken up by Musashi to do battle against the Seven Heroic Spirit Swordmasters, who are otherwise unkillable. Later, Muramasa is summoned again \|\|by the Foreign God\|\| and ends up joining in the creation of a new Excalibur \|\|using his own body as the core\|\|. - Several Final Fantasy games, starting with the first one, have swords by these names (Auron's ultimate weapon comes to mind, as well as one of Edge's); however, the most (in)famous example is certainly Sephiroth's, an extra-long no-dachi that he uses as his weapon of choice. - The Muramasa is the name of the sword occasionally found in barrels and such in Final Fight. Sodom wields swords called "Muramasa" and "Masamune". - In Golden Sun, the Muramasa is an Evil Weapon, which curses you when you wield it, but has extremely high attack power. The Masamune is one of the few weapons with more attack power than that which isn't cursed. - Mabinogi has several types of Japanese-style swords available; the most powerful of which are the Muramasa and Masamune swords (1-handed and 2-handed, respectively). They are not unique, so are most likely named after their creators (the game is not entirely clear on that; however). They are not available in shops or as drops; but can only be acquired from the cash shop or as special event drops. - The Muramasa is featured in Mega Man Battle Network as a sword attack that does damage equal to the HP the user has lost. After two untainted appearances, it was labelled as a "Dark Chip", imposing limitations and/or penalties with its use. - Jetstream Sam from Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance has a high-frequency sword called the "Murasama". It's implied the name got messed up in translation. And since the quality of a high-frequency blade depends on the quality of the sword it was made from, and the sword is very high quality, it is a very sharp, very strong red blade \|\|and turns out to be the only one that can damage Senator Armstrong at all.\|\| - Muramasa: The Demon Blade has the swordsman Muramasa forge several swords. As such, the Muramasa is a type of sword instead of one specific sword. - NetHack features the Tsurugi of Muramasa as the Samurai's quest artifact. Advantages include a chance to One-Hit Kill anything up to about human-sized via bisection (if that chance comes up against anything larger, like a dragon, it'll do double damage instead). Its main disadvantage is that it's two-handed, which can be bad news if it gets cursed. - Persona 2: Eternal Punishment features a skill called "Muramasa Sword", which deals some damage and seals away use of Personas for several turns. That skill is a renamed version of "Longinus Spear" which appeared in the previous game. - Two "two-handed-sword" class weapons named Muramasa and Masamune are found in Ragnarok Online. The former raises its user's critical rate, but has a chance to curse its user, and the latter is more powerful and raises dodge rate, but reduces its user's defence to 1/3. - Soul Calibur III at least has an unlockable weapon for Japanese Ronin Mitsurugi: the Masamune. - Tales of Symphonia has them and at least has flavor text saying they are named after the swordsmiths. - Terraria has a Muramasa that is extremely fast, swings constantly when you hold down the attack button, and can only be found in a dungeon. It is also used the craft the strongest pre-hardmode sword. - Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge to Wizardry 8 feature "Muramasa Blade" as one of the most powerful weapons in the game, usable only by the samurai class. Murasame-maru, also known simply as Murasame ("Autumn Shower"), is a weapon from the 19th-century novel Nansō Satomi Hakkenden , usually depicted as a heavy katana or nodachi. In keeping with its appearance there, it is sometimes given water-based powers or a connection to dogs. In other depictions it feeds on the life force of enemies and/or its wielder . Sometimes Murasame is just a very well-made sword, and may even be a newer weapon that its smith named after the original. Note that characters named Murasame may instead be a reference to one of the protagonists of the noh play Matsukaze. Anime & Manga - In Akame ga Kill!, "One-Cut Killer: Murasame", Akame's primary weapon, is a weapon imbued with a deadly poison which can stop its target's heart. It also comes with a Dangerous Forbidden Technique called Little War Horn, which channels the weapon's poison into its wielder to act as a performance-enhancing drug. - In Bastard!! (1988), Murasame appears as the main weapon of Ninja Master Gara, which can shoot blades of Razor Wind fueled by the wielder's Life Energy. By sacrificing all of their energy to the sword, it is capable of unleashing an incredibly powerful Suicide Attack. - In Hakkenden: Eight Dogs of the East, a loose adaptation of Nansou Satomi Hakkenden, Murasame is a sword described as "the blade of life" and said to have the power to "tear through all magic, make all spirits cower and subdue everything formless on earth". It can also summon rain and turn into a talking crow. Video Games - A recurring weapon in the Final Fantasy series. Typically it's one of the stronger katana-type weapons in the game, falling below the Masamune and/or Muramasa in sheer damage output, but sometimes with extra powers such as dealing water-elemental damage or allowing the user to cast Protect. Some incarnations treat it as a demonic sword, interpreting "shower" to mean it drives its wielder to leave showers of blood in their wake. - In Freedom Wars, the Murasame Mk.9 is a technologically-advanced kukri crafted by Master-X-Peace, which serves as one of The Sinner's Starter Equipment alongside with the EZ Katze. - Appears in the Soul Series as a weapon equippable by Mitsurugi, which slowly drains his health in exchange for boosting the power of his attacks and allowing them to absorb health from his opponent. 108 beads . This is essentially the Buddhist equivalent of a rosary/crucifix. Appears a lot in video games. Anime & Manga - The titular character of Hell Teacher Nube carries one such rosary as one of the most vital parts of his exorcism arsenal, either to erect barriers against the supernatural or to channel his own spiritual powers. - In Saint Seiya, there are 108 Specters of Hades. Gold Saint Virgo Shaka has a rosary with 108 beads as well, and when the Specters invade Sanctuary, he terrifies them by pointing out how each bead that goes dark represents a defeated Specter... and most of the rosary has gone dark by then, thanks to the efforts of Athena's Saints. - In Shaman King, Anna has 1080 beads, which are ten times as powerful. Video Games - There are 100 individual stray beads to collect in Ōkami. If you get them all, you receive a powerup in New Game Plus that makes you invincible. The other 8 beads are the Satome Power Orbs. In The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter the title character is approached by princely suitors and she provides them with five Impossible Tasks , the recovery of certain mystical treasures. The five artifacts were the stone begging bowl of Buddha of India, a jeweled branch from the island of Hourai, the pelt of the fire-rat from China, a colored jewel from a dragon's neck, and a cowrie which was born from swallows. Though some of the more clever suitors attempt to pass off normal items as the fantastic ones in question, all of the suitors are rebuffed. Anime & Manga - Inuyasha wears a robe made from the pelt of the fire-rat. Not only is it fireproof but humans (Kagome) have actually survived the lack of oxygen and extreme temperatures while donning it and immersed in flames. In Inuyasha The Movie The Castle Beyond The Looking Glass, the villains are regathering the five treasures and Inuyasha gets involved when they try to steal his robe. - In the chapter of Sgt. Frog where they celebrate Natsumi's birthday, a severely wounded Giroro shows up late to the party with "cosmic" versions of the five treasures from the legend of Kaguya-hime, which he claims he just happened to have lying around. - Kaguya-sama: Love Is War uses this as Theme Naming. All of the members of the student council are named after the princes in the story -barring Kaguya herself-, and several supporting character (who have at least some connection to them) are named after the items the were tasked with finding. Literature - The Practical Princess references this when the titular princess is likewise trying to dissuade an unwanted suitor - she requests the fireproof robe, then the jewelled branch and rejects him for bringing fakes. (He kidnaps her instead before she can carry on to more of the requests, and the story ends as a Gender Flipped Rapunzel.) Video Games - In Touhou Project the whole story of Kaguya-Hime turns out to be completely true: not only is there the moon princess herself living in Gensokyo but she also possesses all five of the artifacts from her impossible tasks. (It's how she beat her suitors: ask for things you already have but no one else knows you have.) She is most commonly depicted holding the branch of Hourai, which, in-universe, is a plant that exists on the pure lunar surface and only blooms/bejewels when exposed to the impurity of the Earth. - In a later game, she devises four new impossible requests, to theme a few new attacks around. These include ilmenite harvested from the moon, a new elemental metal called "Mysterium", a seamless (harvested from one impossibly huge piece of wood) wooden plank that can be used as the ceiling of the buddhist temple Kinkaku-ji, and the Red Stone of Aja. - Hourai is mentioned quite a few times in Touhou: - The elixir of immortality, formally the Hourai Elixir, is an accursed MacGuffin from the back story of the Lunarian residents. Its creation and consumption was the catalyst of Kaguya's exile. - Fujiwara no Mokou, a human turned immortal thanks to the Hourai Elixir, has a spellcard named "Hourai Doll" and "Hourai 'Fujiyama Volcano'." The latter is probably a reference to a Chinese alchemist who was quested by the emperor to find Hourai ("Penglai" in Chinese) and found Japan instead, but also has character back story implications, and the former has nothing to do with Alice. Oh, and she's also the daughter of one of the suitors, and is not happy that Kaguya humiliated her dad. - Hourai is the second of Alice's two most popular dolls and is the subject of her spellcard "Curse 'Hanged Hourai Dolls'". In this case, the name is meant to indicate the location as all of Alice's dolls are named after cities or countries. - Appears many times in the form of an optional companion searching for them in the sea quests in Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City. - Fate/Grand Order: - During the "Sparrow's Inn Daily Report - Records of the Enma-tei's Prosperity" event, the titular inn is suffering from a severe debt due to the incident 500 years prior when a bamboo cutter was staying at the inn only to have five priceless heirlooms stolen from his room. Since the thief nor the treasures were never found, the bamboo cutter now takes out a yearly payment from Beni-Enma and this year it's reached the point where she can't hope to even pay the interest. Chaldea decides to find replacements for these heirlooms by inviting the many Heroic Spirits they've befriended or become acquainted with to the inn. - The Jeweled Branch from Hourai is owned by the Elemental Yu Mei-ren, who arrived to receive a long-needed deep-tissue massage \|\|in preparation for reluctantly joining forces with Chaldea as a summoned Servant\|\|. She makes a deal with Fionn mac Cumhaill that if he can provide someone who can fix her aches, she'll give him anything he wants. - The fire rat robe (or rather something very close to it) is owned by Elisabeth Bathory, who arrived to do a rock concert inappropriate Japanese clothing. They manage to get a piece of it off of her after they fight (because she nearly destroyed the entertainment hall with the force of her voice despite the sparrows all enjoying the chaos) and convince her to do it outside by the hot springs. - The dragon's colored jewel is obtained from creating and defeating a Shadow Servant of Kiyohime. The real Kiyohime is unamused with Archer of Inferno for doing this, considering the fake ran around abducting other guests via Swallowed Whole and she nearly got into hot water with Beni-Enma in a case of Mistaken Identity. - The stone begging bowl of the Buddha is obtained from Xuanzang Sanzang, who fights the party to test if they're strong enough to hold on to it (literally, because it's much heavier than it looks). - The swallow cowry is held by Sasaki Kojiro, resident swallow-killer, who gives it up without a struggle. He points out that these treasures are the very same ones from the story and notes it's odd that this bamboo cutter, who claims to have had all of these items, possessed them when the suitors of the story failed to obtain one. - As it turns out, \|\|Fionn confirms the Bamboo Cutter was lying through his teeth; he never had the treasures and instead only an empty pouch that he never allowed Beni-Enma to see into before the apparent theft. His true goal was to take the inn and collaberated with three other long-term guests: a monkey, a snake, and a tiger, to do so. When conned into revealing he lied, it turns out the "bamboo cutter" and the three other guests were in reality all part of the Youkai Nue, who wanted to ruin Beni-Enma for his own amusement.\|\| Shake shake shake, shake for booty The Uchide no Kozuchi (literally "tap-appear mallet") is a golden mallet that produces various effects when swung (most commonly Sizeshifting and creating riches ), associated with Oni and/or the wealth god Daikokuten . Literature - Issun-boushi ("One-Inch Boy") found the mallet after defeating an Oni, using it to gain great riches (and in later versions of the story, to grow to human size). - Momotarō features the mallet as among the treasures Momotaro retrieves from Oni Island. - The Tale of the Heike features an anecdote of a priest with a torch being mistaken for an Oni wielding the mallet. Live-Action TV Tabletop Games - Yu-Gi-Oh! features a winged version of the mallet as a Spell Card (localised as "Magical Mallet"); its effect lets a player shuffle any number of cards from their hand into their deck, then draw the same number of cards. Video Games - Ōkami features the "Lucky Mallet" as an apparently sentient item that leads the player around, and can appear and disappear as needed. Despite Issun-boushi himself being Ammy's Fairy Companion, it's never used to make him larger but rather to shrink Ammy to his size. - Touhou Project: - In Touhou Kishinjou ~ Double Dealing Character, the "Miracle Mallet" is an oni tool which can grant the wishes of an inchling wielder, but the oni who made it enchanted the thing so it would only grant wishes that either benefit the oni or ruin the wielder; besides, it has a finite amount of energy, which can be exhausted fairly quickly. While Issun-boushi saw the dangers of the mallet and used it only to increase his own size, his descendants became greedy and abused its power, eventually leading them to become trapped in "a land of oni". The Big Bad, Shinmyoumaru, is largely ignorant of all this, being tricked into "standing up for the little guy" by using her people's forbidden mallet to make weak youkai more aggressive and to bring objects to life. Interestingly, the mallet was edited out of Shinmyoumaru's silhouette on the cover for being too recognizable. - In the Gaiden Game Danmaku Amanojaku ~ Impossible Spell Card, one of Seija's items is a Miracle Mallet replica which can be equipped as a main item for a powerful melee attack, or as a sub-item to power up her main item's effects. A non-canon special edition of the game, Gold Rush, gives Seija the actual Miracle Mallet, which transforms enemy bullets into gold coins. One of the national treasures of Japan, the Seven-Branched Sword (Japanese: Nanatsusaya no Tachi / Shichishito ) is an ancient ceremonial sword, possibly originating in Korea, with three smaller blades on each side projecting from its main blade. It is now stored in a shrine and not shown to the public. Several examples of the Oddly Shaped Sword trope tend to take influence from this treasure. Anime & Manga - Ga-Rei: \|\|The resurrected Yomi (Izumi)\|\| is able to materialize one out of thin air, \|\|having lost the Shishiou.\|\| Live-Action TV Video Games - Appears as the Seven Bladed Sword in Castlevania: Curse of Darkness, through the combination of—you guessed it—seven separate and distinct swords. It appears as a slightly purples hued blade with three pronged blades on either side of the main one, and is one of the few weapons that deals dark damage. - The Seven Branch Sword shows up as a "terminal" weapon in Dark Chronicle. - The Dark Dragon Blade in Ninja Gaiden is styled after this weapon. - In Ōkami the Seven-Branched Sword appears repeatedly through the game, as both a decoration and a weapon. Every time it appears, Amaterasu is able to use it as a lightning rod via Thunderstorm, with this use being necessary for solving various puzzles and even \|\|defeating Ninetails\|\|. Additionally, Amaterasu is able to buy the Seven Strike, an equippable weapon designed after the legendary blade, from a weapons dealer in Sei'an City. - The Shichishito features in the second case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trials and Tribulations. It comes back as the murder weapon in the final case \|\|(Or rather the assumed murder weapon. The actual weapon was the victim's Sword Cane)\|\|. - In Final Fantasy Legend II, the Seven-Pronged Sword can deliver up to seven hits in a single swing, but can only be used seven times. - In SaGa Frontier, it's used by Hell's Lord. - In Samurai Warriors, Kenshin Uesugi uses a seven-branched sword as his weapon. - Throughout the Shin Megami Tensei franchise (with the exception of Persona 4), the storm god Susano'o carries this sword, and is usually depicted as sitting on the ground while leaning on it. - Two versions of it exist in Soul Series: Ivy has a Whip Sword variant called Kaleidoscope, while Siegfried in the first game can wield the normal variety: it has low damage and durability but rapidly recovers the weapon gauge, allowing him to spam his Critical Edge liberally. - In the Tenchu series, the Shichishito is Mei-Oh's primary weapon. - In Fire Emblem: Awakening, Yen'fey carries a seven-branched sword called Amatsu. - As does Kusanagi above a likeness appears in the old game Spellcaster. As with Kusanagi, however, it's only used to advance the plot at certain locations. - The hero of the NES game Demon Sword reassembles a legendary weapon that looks just like this over the course of the game. - A gigantic, spectral version is wielded by the Divine Dragon in its climactic boss fight in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. In keeping with the sword's Korean origins, the Divine Dragon is said to have come from a foreign land to the west. - In Nioh 2, the Seven-Branched Sword is a Sword of Plot Advancement called the Sohayamaru. It was shattered in the past, and reforging it is necessary to defeat the Big Bad. The Futsu-no-Mitama no Tsurugi is described as a divine sword used by the storm god Takemikazuchi, and later lent to Japan's first emperor Jinmu, said to have played an important role in the founding of the nation. A weapon by that name has historically been enshrined as a patron deity of the Mononobe clan, though currently at least two shrines possess swords which they claim to be the original (one of which is considered a national treasure). Anime & Manga - In Shaman King, the Futsu-no-Mitama (referred to as "The Antiquity" in the anime dub) is given to Yoh partway through the story, after which he can achieve a stronger Oversoul by holding his first medium (the katana Harusame) in his right hand and the Futsu-no-Mitama in his left. It is depicted as a short, leaf-shaped blade carved from red stone (possibly Hihi'irokane). Video Games - Nioh: Futsunomitama appears as an equippable sword. - Futsu-no-Mitama has been a recurring weapon in the Final Fantasy series starting with Final Fantasy XI, where some translations render its name as "Odinblade". - Shin Megami Tensei features the Futsu no Mitama as both a weapon and a Persona. Anime & Manga Video Games - Final Fantasy: Dojikiri Yasutsuna (sometimes shortened to just "Yasutsuna") and Yoichinoyumi—weapons used by legendary Samurai—appear in multiple Final Fantasy games, including XI. ### Jewish The Ark of the Covenant contains the original tablets on which the Ten Commandments were first written, as well as possibly a few other items. Biblical passages describe many magical effects caused by the Ark. Film - Raiders of the Lost Ark uses it as the MacGuffin. It proves too dangerous to actually use, though, turning the whole film into a "Shaggy Dog" Story. You didn't think God was going to just let the Nazis use His ark to take over the world, did you? - In The Librarian: Quest for the Spear, it is one of the first artifacts that Flynn sees in the Library. He's more than a little amazed when he's told it's not a replica. Literature - The plot of Alpha and Omega is kicked off by the discovery of the Ark beneath the Temple Mount. - In The Fourth Realm, the Ark of the Covenant is kept in a church in Ethiopia (as has been speculated in real life) and contains a gateway that non-Travelers can use to journey to the other Realms. - The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn: The titular treasure is actually a small golden statue, one of the two golden cherubim on the cover of the Ark of the Covenant, which Alpheus Winterborn brought home with him after finding the Ark itself - the rest of the Ark was buried in a cave-in soon after its discovery (a previous cave-in had opened a path that led to its resting place). Live-Action Television - While never actually referred to as such, the Ark appears in the Xena: Warrior Princess episode, "The Royal Couple of Thieves". After a weapons dealer steals it, Xena and company go undercover as warlords to infiltrate the auction for the Ark and retrieve it for the Israelites. - In season 6 of Supernatural, Sam convinces Castiel to come down to Earth by claiming they found a gold box that Nazis were after and it melted someone's face off, then calls him an idiot for falling for the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark. However, in season 11 a piece of the Ark actually appears as a 'Hand of God' - an object touched by God himself which possesses a portion of His power. - One episode of Mythbusters had the team investigate the "Baghdad Batteries", supposed ancient batteries used by the Babylonians. One of the tests used a recreation of the Ark as a means of testing spiritual resolve. It was assumed plausible, though they believed that the batteries had too weak of a charge to actually do anything and if they did feel it, they would think it to be a divine action because of the lack of understanding of electricity. Video Games - In the original Tomb Raider, the tutorial level takes place in Croft Manor. Lara asks the player to pardon all the crates she has strewn about the place. Sitting in front of the crates is the Ark. Given the crates present, one might suspect how she came to possess it. - The Ark is what kicks off the plot for Giga Wing 2. - Shows up in the Monks and Mystics DLC of Crusader Kings II, in the possession of the Jewish Duke of Axum. note : There is an Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Axum that does claim to possess the Ark, and the claim that the Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia possessed the Ark dates back to at least the 14th century - The Ark is one of the Noble Phantasms of David (as in the David) in Fate/Grand Order. It has the power to One-Hit Kill anyone who touches it without permission, and is potent enough to \|\|bypass Heracles' God Hand, instantly taking all twelve of his lives\|\|. Getting that to work requires David to get someone to actually touch the Ark though, so it's generally pretty useless as a weapon and can't be used against enemies in gameplay. The Ark does however become David's Bond Level 10 Craft Essence, and equipping it gives him a 10% chance to instantly kill a target on hit. - Shows up as stealable loot and can be used to decorate your avatar's lair in Evil Genius. Seemingly as a nod to the famous movie scene, the radio announcement of its theft warns whoever finds it not to open it. Since you play the villain, that's probably good advice. - This is the ultimate prize in the early point-and-click game The Riddle Of The Sphinx, and reappears as one of a whole series of mystical macguffins required to save the world at the end of the sequel, The Omega Stone. - In Serious Sam 4, the Holy Grail is said to be contained within the Ark of the Covenant, which itself turns out to be hidden inside a small church in Carcassonne, France. Revealing the ark requires Father Mikhail to solve a few riddles, like inverting a cross and blinding an angel statue. \|\|Unfortunately, Father Mikhail's hunch that the ark was really sealing away something evil turns out to be correct.\|\| Tabletop Games - In the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game, the "Gold Sarcophagus" is a spell that delays, then forces the draw of a card, possibly opening up a box of worms or setting up anything given enough foresight. This card could alternatively be considered a Pandora's Box analogue. The symbol on the signet ring of the Israelite King Solomon (he of Judgment of Solomon fame) which served as a precursor to the Star of David in Jewish symbology. It is said to have the power to seal and/or bind demons (either trapping them or putting them to work in God's name). Comic Books - B.P.R.D.: The Universal Machine: Kate is held captive by an immortal marquis who controls a group of demons because he wears Solomons ring. She defeats the marquis by cutting off his fingers and breaking the ring, allowing the freed demons to take vengeance for their enslavement. Literature Video Games - The Golem of Jewish folklore straddles the line between this trope and Public Domain Character, depending on how self-motivated it seems in any given story. ### Christian Pretty much anything Jesus is reputed to have ever touched, ever. The hair, blood, nails, and foreskin of Christ apply as well. The last one is mostly used in parodies of Christianity these days, though. Also, Mary's milk and the bones of saints. Folklore - In The Song of Roland, the Durandal is said to contain numerous artefacts in this vein embedded in its hilt. Film Literature - The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn: In the first sequel The Dark Secret of Weatherend, the book's villain comes into contact with a glass vial that had been kept in his "father"'s tomb. The vial reacts violently when the villain touches it, and both are utterly vaporized; Emerson Eells later explains that the vial was actually the Blood of Hailes, a relic from Hailes Abbey said to contain some of the blood of Jesus Himself. Live-Action TV - In Legends of Tomorrow, the Legends decide that one way to permanently keep the Spear of Destiny out of the hands of the Legion of Doom is to find the blood of Christ. (the Spear was empowered when it pierced Christ, impregnating it with his blood, so the Legends reasoned that the blood can also rob the Spear of its power, allowing them to destroy it.) Video Games - A number of these show up in Crusader Kings II, if you have the "Monks and Mystics" DLC. The fingers of St.John and of generic saints are somewhat common, while the Pope starts out with the bones of Saint Peter. And the foreskin of Christ does indeed show up. The Holy Grail: The cup which Jesus Christ supposedly drank from at the Last Supper and/or the cup used by Joseph of Arimathea to capture the blood of Christ at the crucifixion. First popularized by Arthurian legend , and used absolutely everywhere since, from Monty Python movies to Indiana Jones . The Grail legend combines Celtic and Christian elements; it should be noted that the idea that it is identical with the cup from which Jesus drank arose over time and took centuries to gain universal acceptance. In many earlier versions it is also described as a bowl or a stone. Anime & Manga - As previously mentioned in Sailor Moon it is the Holy Grail that transforms Sailor Moon into Super Sailor Moon. That being said it may not be the Holy Grail as in the manga, and the videogame Sailor Moon: Another Story, there's two of them - Sailor Chibi Moon has one as well. - The Holy Grail is one of the three Holy Relics in High School D×D and allows the user to regenerate and resurrect the dead. Comic Books - Also the Graphic Novel Camelot 3000, in which the Grail transforms a mutated Knight back into human form, and then, when stolen by Mordred and merged into a suit of armor, creates an armor that instantly heals any and all damage, no matter how fatal. Not that it really did Mordred that much good... - The Invisibles features the Black Grail, which caught the blood and excreta of Judas when he hanged himself. It bestows ignorance, rather than the enlightenment of the normal grail. - Played for laughs in Don Rosa's A Letter from Home, where Scrooge McDuck finds a vault containing the treasure of the Knights Templar, and Donald ends up beaning the bad guy with what turns out to be the Holy Grail. - Appears in the De Rode Ridder albums Montsalvat and De Graalkoning note : The Grail King, including a retelling of Lancelot's quest for it (by Lancelot himself, who is Johan's best friend in the series). Fan Works - In A Force of Four, the Holy Grail is used by the villains to banish all magically-powered heroes from the planet. Film - In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, this is the 2nd item that the Nazis are trying to find. In an interesting take on this artifact, the grail isn't a golden cup with jewels encrusted on the sides as one may imagine, but an ordinary, relatively plain looking cup note : albeit one that, fitting the dignity of a cup that held Christ's blood, is gilded on the inside. An interesting caveat is that the grail is hidden amongst many other cups, and if you choose the wrong one, instead of eternal life, you'll die very quickly instead. And on top of that, you can't leave the area where the grail is, or you lose the eternal life part and become mortal again. This explains why the knight in the cave, while very old, is still alive, while his contemporary brethren who left the area have long passed on. - Elsa Schneider attempts to leave with the grail, but she steps on the Great Seal, which sets off an earthquake trap meant to keep anyone from taking it. During the chaos, the grail falls on a small ledge and Elsa, dangling from Indys arms, desperately reaches for it, but her hand comes up inches short. Her attempt to recover the grail fails and she falls to her death. Indiana tries reaching as well, and nearly follows her fate, but his dad convinces him to let it go. In the end, the grail is lost forever. - Monty Python and the Holy Grail is (obviously) a parody of Arthurian legend relating to the quest to recover the Holy Grail. They never actually manage to claim it or even see it other than in a vision from God, and the castle where it supposedly can be found is already occupied by French knights. Literature - In Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval, the Story of the Grail, the work which invented the artifact, it is described as a dish to serve fish (it's the original medieval meaning of the world). The protagonist, Perceval, finds himself in the court of a maimed king, where he witnesses an enigmatic procession featuring a grail (note the absence of capital letter) and a spear which tip is bleeding. It is latter strongly implied in-universe that the scene was very important, but its supposed original meaning is lost to the ages because the book is unfinished. The actual myth of the Holy Grail was born from continuators of the original story (and the bleeding spear was interpreted as the Spear of Destiny.) - Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival is the Trope Codifier, in which Parzival, destined to be its keeper, is initially found unworthy to guard it, before embarking on a spiritual struggle to find it. In Wolfram's telling, the Grail is a (precious) stone or "thing", but its true importance lies in how it sustains the community around it. It has a number of useful properties, it can provide you with food and transmit messages; a chaste virgin may lift it on her own, but a sinner cannot, no matter how physically strong he is. - The quest for the Grail plays a huge part in Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. - And then there is, of course, Dan Brown who, in his book The Da Vinci Code, stated the Holy Grail is... well, let's say it's not exactly a cup. He was by no means the one who initially came up with this idea, but he was certainly the one who took it to mainly pop-cultured masses. - In The Forever King by Molly Cochran and Warren Murphy, the Grail is a cup fashioned out of a stone that fell from the heavens, many years before the birth of Christ. Its association with Jesus is only coincidental, and He is not the source of its powers (nor, though the villain initially smugly assumes so, is it the source of His). - While the actual Grail does not appear in The Dark is Rising, a replica of it "the last trust of Logres, the grail made in the fashion of the Holy Grail, that told upon its sides all the true story of Arthur soon to be misted in men's minds" plays a key role in the first and third books. It is inscribed with a major prophecy that plays into the plots of the last two books. - Spoofed in Grailblazers by Tom Holt, where the Grail is a bowl that was used at the Last Supper, which was miraculously transformed into Tupperware. - Inverted in the second Nightside book by Simon R. Green with the MacGuffin being the Unholy Grail — the cup Judas drank from. - This comes up in Peter David's Knight Life trilogy - the Grail is still in the keeping of Percival, the knight tasked with finding it. \|\|Turns out it's magical from catching the blood of the Unicorn King, back when Merlin was a young man. It became linked up with Jesus when he drank from it.\|\| - In Harry Harrison's The Hammer and the Cross series, the word 'Grail' turns out to be a corruption of 'graduale', Latin for 'ladder', and refers to the ladder which Joseph of Arimathea used to take Jesus down from the Cross and as a stretcher to bear him away. King and Emperor, the third book, has the titular King and Emperor both seeking the Grail where it is hidden by the Gnostics. - The Grail is the main object of The Dresden Files book Skin Game, where it's been secured in a vault belonging to Hades since antiquity. The book describes the Grail realistically, as a small, unremarkable clay cup that nevertheless gives Harry massive supernatural vibes when he touches it. Found along with the Grail are the placard from the True Cross, the Crown of Thorns, the Lance of Longinus, and Christ's actual burial cloth ( not the Shroud of Turin, which is fake in-Verse). - In "Stealing God", part of The Confessions of Peter Crossman series, the Holy Grail is Hidden in Plain Sight, with the Knights Templar keeping an eye on it. Part of the reason it's so hard to find is that all the stories about it being a cup or a dish are wrong (and the Templars have encouraged them to keep people off the scent); Wolfram von Eschenbach's description is said to have been closest to what it actually looks like. - P.N. Elrod and Nigel Bennett wrote a trilogy of books that combined Arthurian legend and vampires. The Grail also had significance in the pagan/Druid stuff Sabra was part of. Both Richard Dunn, the vampire who served as Lancelot, and an evil vampire are searching for it because their kind isnt immortal and the eventually becomes locked in a beast form. Only drinking from the Grail can stop it and Richard is desperate to save Sabra, who's getting close to getting locked in beast mode herself. - The Holy Grail is mentioned in Canto X of The Faerie Queene's second book. Said book is an account of Britain's ancient history and it references the legend that the grail was brought to Britain by St. Joseph (a tale of central importance to Arthurian Legend). Live-Action TV - A major part of the plot in Stargate SG-1's tenth season is the Sangraal, also known as the Holy Grail. As Daniel points out, the original Arthurian legend doesn't have anything do do with Christ (as that part was added in later), and the Holy Grail is depicted in multiple ways, including "a stone that fell from the heavens". This is what they need to find, as it's actually a weapon created by Merlin, who is actually a Sufficiently Advanced Alien, and this weapon is the only thing capable of destroying their enemy. - One of the main objects Scott Wolter searches for on America Unearthed. - Once Upon a Time: Season 5 reveals that the Grail is the source of most of the magic in the setting, good and evil. Merlin found it thousands of years ago, and drinking from it granted him immortality and gave him his vast magical powers, and he later melted it down and reforged it into Excalibur in an attempt to render himself mortal again. Unfortunately, before he could do that, \|\|Nimue selfishly drank from it to gain magic and immortality as well, so that she could take revenge on the warlord Vortigen for destroying her village. Her killing of him subsequently corrupted the Grail's magic within her, turning her into the first Dark One.\|\| - In Kaamelott, King Arthur's dedication to find the Grail is met with perplexity by his knights (who still can't decide if it is supposed to be a cup, a candescent stone or a Mason jar). - Warehouse 13: The cup is mentioned by name in "Age Before Beauty" and implied to be real. It's alluded to again in "The Ones You Love" when Mrs. Frederick tells a Vatican priest that their cup is in the Warehouse and safe, if slightly dented. - Blood of the Templars subverts it by revealing the Grail as Jesus's bloodline a la The Da Vinci Code. That said, there is a physical Grail in this film, only that it is basically a mass of blood. Music Pinball - The ultimate goal of Crystal Caliburn is to assemble the Knights of the Round and retrieve the Holy Grail. - It serves a similar role in Golden Logres; returning the Grail to Camelot resurrects King Arthur and grants eternal prosperity to Logres. Tabletop Games - In the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game, the "Forbidden Chalice" is a spell that temporarily strengthens the user, but removes any ability the monster may have for the remainder of the turn. This can be used to get around pesky negative effects temporarily. - GURPS Magical Items 3 features "God's Cup" which is the Holy Grail interpreted for the GURPS Goblins setting. It has the same origin, and is a golden chalice which can heal any ill ... if the user is suitably Godly. An unworthy user instead receives a Bolt of Divine Retribution. Naturally, this includes most goblins. Theatre - Spamalot is the stage adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, so the Grail is naturally here. Unlike the movie, \|\|it is found under one of the seats of the venue the show is being performed at\|\|. Video Games - In Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean, Holy Grail is an incredibly weak healing item, but one with a 2 in 3 chance of working even on a downed ally. Furthermore, using it in combination with most wine-based magnus allows you to create the Sacred Wine item, which is a fairly decent healing item and one of the most easily acquired ones with a 100% chance of working on a downed ally. - Fate/Grand Order revolves around multiple Holy Grails scattered throughout time, which much like Fate/stay night are once again not the original but rather creations of the villain. Several other characters in the story, particularly the wealthy ones, even have Holy Grails of their own, gained not from the villain's machinations but rather from their own historical exploits. - In Persona 5, the Holy Grail is the Treasure of Mementos, and represents the apathetic masses' desire for a great leader like Arthur to "save" them from The Evils of Free Will. \|\|It's actually the first form of Yaldabaoth, God of Control, Big Bad and Final Boss of the game.\|\| - Romancing SaGa 3 had the Holy Grail which once held the Holy King's blood. Ironically, it is in the hands of a vampire. - Serious Sam: - In the last two levels of Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, Sam needs to find the Holy Grail to access a Sirian spaceship so he can leave Earth and confront the Evil Overlord Mental back on Planet Sirius. But before he can get to it, one of Mental's servants reaches it first and takes it to the Church of Sacred Blood somewhere in Eastern Europe. While the forces of evil can't actually do anything with it, they can keep it away from Sam. - The plot of Serious Sam 4 revolves around the Earth Defense Force trying to find the location of the Holy Grail, which they believe to actually be an alien artifact, to use it against Mental's armies and turn the tides of war in their favor. Most of the game is spent following the Alien Artifact Acquisition team on their journey to obtain the Holy Grail with the guidance of Badass Preacher Father Mikhail. \|\|Unfortunately, it turns out what they were seeking was not the Holy Grail at all, but rather an Artifact of Doom that the A.A.A.'s superior officer General Brand takes for himself, intending to hand it over to Mental and gain a position in the winning team.\|\| - The Holy Grail in Treasure of the Rudra is a sealing receptacle which holds a netherworld spirit in it. It's considered "Holy" since it repels monsters. - Heroes of Might and Magic uses the Grail as side objective (and sometimes the win condition of certain maps). It varies between games, but typically it works by consulting special structures that reveal puzzle pieces, eventually showing where the Grail is buried. Finding it allows the player to build an insanely powerful structure in the town they take it to. - A possible artifact that can be found (or looted from its previous owner) in Crusader Kings II. - Soul Sacrifice has the Sacred Chalice, which was renamed from the Holy Grail to avoid tension in Europe where Arthurian legend is still pretty important. The Chalice appears before individuals who have crossed the Despair Event Horizon and offers to make their wish come true. Should they accept, the chalice will take a sacrifice from them and transform them into a horrifically-mutated mockery of their wish: an Archfiend. Yeaaaaah, turns out the Chalice is the creation of the resident God of Evil meant to sow chaos, greed and destruction. - Hidden Expedition: A King's Line is centered around the search for King Arthur's tomb, and the Holy Grail factors into this, with the game positing that Arthur was in fact successful in his quest to find it. \|\|The player unearths it in a magnficent chamber beneath Mount Snowdon in Wales.\|\| Visual Novels - Fate/stay night revolves around Emiya Shirou, an Inept Mage with self-destructive levels of Chronic Hero Syndrome, stumbling into the fifth iteration of his city's secret "Holy Grail War" - a ritual which calls out to the spirits of legendary heroes with unresolved wishes, binding them to local mages as Familiars with the promise that once only one Heroic Spirit remains, the Holy Grail will manifest to grant any wish. The Grail War was originally conceived as a simple sham, where pre-arranged Masters would lure in Heroic Spirits and then immediately command them to kill themselves to power the Grail. However, every War has gone Off the Rails due to in-fighting before the Grail could be claimed, with Shirou eventually learning that his own father ended the last War by destroying the Grail's manifestation before it could be used. It turns out that \|\|someone in the Third War, attempting to summon a God of Evil in order to steamroll the competition, accidentally inserted a wish to "Embody All the Evils of the World" into the Grail, turning it into a Jackass Genie overflowing with corruptive "mud". All three arcs of the novel end with the heroes discovering this and deciding to destroy the Grail\|\|. - It's explicitly stated that this Holy Grail is not the genuine article that received the blood of Christ, nor the chalice that Galahad claimed, but rather a replica of both formed from alchemy (beginning life as a human-like Homunculus whose heart absorbs the defeated Servants to transform into the cup). However, the Church routinely investigates any artifact which claims to be the Holy Grail, and even if this one isn't the real thing, its power is close enough to the original that they appoint a priest to Fuyuki City to monitor and supervise the Grail War. Webcomics Fragments of the True Cross — that is, the one on which Christ was crucified. This one pops up pretty often in real life as well as in fiction — many congregations around the world possess fragments, usually no more than a single splinter, of an artifact discovered in the 4th century said to be the relic. The miniature chapel of the fairy tale castle at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, a priceless dollhouse filled with precious and historic furnishings, contains a reliquary with an alleged True Cross fragment. There's a common joke that there are enough fragments of the True Cross to rebuild Noah's Ark, but Rohault de Fleury, a 19thC French scholar, measured the total volume of all claimed fragments of the True Cross and found they added up to 0.004 cubic meters; his estimate was that the whole cross would have been 0.178 cubic meters. (This was published in Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion , 1870.). Anime and Manga Comic Books - Hellboy: The titular character's massive handgun, "The Samaritan", is said to have a grip made of fragments of the cross. - Doctor Doom was revealed to have splinters of the True Cross in his armour in the Captain Britain and MI13 series, just in case he'd run into Dracula one day. - In the continuity of Vampirella, giving a vampire a scratch with a fragment of the True Cross, even if it is a wound a normal human would ignore, causes the monster to explode. Literature - In John Bellairs' Johnny Dixon series of novels, the heroes' greatest weapon against the forces of darkness is a small cross, worn on a necklace by a priest, containing two splinters of the True Cross. Unfortunately, it's lost in The Secret of the Underground Room when Masterman breaks the chain that Johnny wears it on, and he realizes later that he'd forgotten to grab it from the floor and so left it in the underground room. - In The Dresden Files novel Skin Game, Harry finds the placard from the Cross in a vault belonging to Hades, along with the Holy Grail, Crown of Thorns, Lance of Longinus, and Shroud of Turin. Two books later in Battle Ground, with Chicago facing impending invasion by an army of monsters, he uses the placard to turn Mac's Pub into a mystically protected safe haven; as Harry puts it, with it in place an attacker would have to kill Mac before they could harm anyone else. - The book El último Catón has its initial mystery being around the strange robbery of all the fragments of the Cross spread around the world. \|\|It turns out to be a hidden sect of Christianity that once protected the Cross and is bent on restoring it.\|\| Webcomics - The webcomic The Adventures of Dr. McNinja features a selection of anti ghost wizard weapons, including a staff carved from the True Cross. - The webcomic Clan of the Cats has a stake made from the True Cross as the only way to permanently kill Dracula. Which is, admittedly, a pretty good way. - Like the source material above, Anderson produces Helena's Nail in And Shine Heaven Now. However, in this story he stabs \|\|the I-Jin of Jeeves\|\| with it instead and gets sliced too badly to regenerate in return. "It's a relic salvaged from the cross, and, aye, I do mean that cross. I could have used it on myself. Could have submitted myself to a power that passes understanding. But I'm a priest. You? You're unholy. And the Lord separates the sheep from the goats. Congratulations. You've just been Deus ex Machina 'd. Western Animation - Spoofed in the "Homie The Clown" episode of The Simpsons, where after a bullet meant for Homer strikes Ned Flanders in the Bible, a second round knocks him over, and he gets up again, relieved that he was wearing "an extra large piece of the True Cross today." - Guitarist Skwisgaar Skwigelf from the band Dethklok from Metalocalypse explains that one of the guitars he designed and created is made of the one True Cross, and bassist William Murderface notes that they'll probably get letters from offended religious fanatics, which causes Skwisgaar to quip "Who could be offended by the most religious instrument ever?" Other - The Flying Dutchman is about a man traveling with a piece of the cross to be able to return it to his father who has been haunting the oceans since he died at sea. - A supposed True Cross fragment is incorporated into the decor of the Fairy Castle dollhouse at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Nails that punctured Jesus in the Crucifixion are seemingly less common (God's Hooks, sometimes corrupted into gadzooks), oddly enough, but not unknown, let alone in fiction: they've appeared in at least one really popular series of fantasy novels. The Dresden Files pretty early on introduces the concept of the Knights of the Cross, a trio of men who each have a sword imbued with magical anti-evil powers thanks (supposedly) to having one of the ancient Jesus nails worked into the hilt. Of course, the series also has a pretty firm (and in this context, even slightly subversive) "faith in something gives it power " rule , so there's no real way to tell if they're actually from the Crucifixion or not. In a double whammy, one of said swords might be Excalibur . A few surviving artifacts reputed to contain nails of the True Cross still exist. The Iron Crown of the Lombards (which was seized by Charlemagne when he defeated that Northern Italian state) is reputed to incorporate such a nail; however, modern testing shows that the crown contains no iron and the silvery band reputed to be the nail was, erm, silver. That said, a review of medieval sources suggest that the crown was made to support a single arch—since lost—which was in fact made of iron, and that might have been the source of the legend. Similarly, the Spear of Destiny in Vienna (cited elsewhere on this page) also incorporates an alleged nail of the Crucifixion. The Vienna spear◊ consists of a simple spear wrapped in a ridiculous amount of bling (including the supposed True Cross nail). The spear that was supposed to have pierced Christ's side is the core; the nail and everything else would have been added later. Anime and Manga - In the Hellsing manga Alexander Anderson uses in his final fight with Alucard one of the Vatican's most important relics, "Helena's Nail", to turn himself into a inhuman monster. According to Catholic tradition, Helena of Constantinople, mother of Emperor Constantine I, was the discoverer of the remains of the True Cross. She is said to have affixed at least one nail to the bridle of her son's horse to give him protection in battle. Comics - In the De Rode Ridder album De Ijzeren Kroon note : The Iron Crown, there turn out to be three copies of the Iron Crown of the Lombards, each made with one of the three nails (two for his hands, one for both feet). In the end Merlin magically combines the three into one, which then gives Johan enough holy power to take on the demon Baalfemort (which he could barely scratch before) on equal terms. Film - In Fright Night (2011), Peter Vincent's collection of arcane relics contains a Crucifixion nail. Stabbing a vampire in the heart with one is described as an "old school" way of killing their kind. \|\|Nobody ever gets to a chance to use it.\|\| - In Luther (2003), Joseph Fiennes' portrayal of Martin Luther makes reference to these by joking to some theological students that Rome has enough of these nails from the holy cross to shoe every horse in Saxony. Literature - Variation on the nails legend: in Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series, reference is made to how the nails were fashioned. When the time came for Jesus to be crucified, the Roman soldiers needed to have nails made, but no one would make them once they found out who was to be crucified with them. After several fruitless attempts, the Roman soldiers finally wised up and didn't tell the next forger who the nails were for—until he had made three nails and was working on the fourth. Once he found out, he then refused to finish the last nail. The soldiers took the completed three, thus supposedly explaining why Jesus had his feet nailed together instead of separately—while the blacksmith and his family were forced to flee from terrible, nightmare visions of the unfinished nail following them everywhere they went. The forger was Roma... thus explaining why their people wander to this day. Considering the author got everything right about the origin of "Gypsy" and their being native to India, and that their depiction was both sympathetic and working hard to overturn a lot of stereotypes, these little lapses can be forgiven. Besides, it was a pretty good (albeit entirely fictional?) legend. - It does bring up the question of why the Roman judicial court wouldn't have entire bushels full of nails already, given how common crucifixion was. (Although most crucifixions were done with rope, nails weren't that uncommon.) Or why they didn't simply buy or commandeer some from a construction project, given how Herod had been upgrading Jerusalem's infrastructure for years. - The nails are used as the ultimate weakness to defeat Satan in Magnus. - In The Dresden Files, as mentioned above, the swords of the three Knights of the Cross have the Nails worked into the hilt. In Peace Talks, Harry, Butters, and Sanya work out that, as a counterpart to the Fallen Angels in Judas's thirty pieces of silver, each nail \|\|contains a faithful angel of God. When the Knights on occasion seem to act as mouthpieces of a higher power, it's these angels that are speaking through them\|\|. - In John Bellairs' Lewis Barnevelt series of novels, The Vengeance of the Witch-finder sees Lewis discover the Amulet of Constantine, a glass tube on a chain which contains one of the Nails of the True Cross. After Lewis's uncle Jonathan uses it once to banish an evil spirit, he gladly entrusts it to his neighbor Mrs. Zimmerman, who specializes in such talismans and is more skilled with magic than him. Live-Action Television - These make a heavily implied appearance in Whitechapel in which an elderly woman (also heavily implied to be Lucifer given her name is Louise Iver) uses large nails to puncture holes in the police station's plumbing, leading to water/electricity damage and a successful attempt at messing with the team's heads. When Miles finds them, he asks others if they look familiar... Video Games - The Binding of Isaac features The Nail, an active item that transforms Isaac into a demon on use. Considering the tone and content of the game, it's strongly implied to be this. - Afterbirth added a passive item called 8 Inch Nails, which may also relate. - In Crusader Kings II, the Emperor of Byzantium starts out with a nail, so long as you have the "Monks and Mystics" DLC. And if you're not the Emperor, you can always try and loot Constantinople for it. Oddly, in the games files, it is labelled as a fragment of the True Cross, rather than as a nail. The Shroud of Turin, unsurprisingly, has also appeared at least a time or two in fiction of recent years, usually with the implication that it has enormous mystical power. Test results that date it to the late Middle Ages are generally ignored . Similarly, there's Veronica's Veil — a cloth that the eponymous Veronica wiped Jesus' brow with as he was marched to Golgotha, and which was imprinted with his image. Some scholars believe the Veil may have been the Shroud of Turin, just folded so only the image of the face appeared. There's been a good bit of back and forth about whether the initial tests were biased (see the "chemical properties of the sample site" under the "Analysis of the Shroud" ) that often runs smack into the critics themselves having their own biases, with the interpretation of some of the science (not the actual science) being read either way in the debate. Anime & Manga - Appeared in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS in the form of the Holy Shroud of the Saint King, the figure of worship of the Belkan Saint Church. While it had no powers of its own, it was used to retrieve blood samples of the Saint King and create a clone of her. - A Certain Magical Index's titular character, Index, claims her outfit, the Walking Church, is an accurate replica of the Shroud, and is of Pope-class hardness, able to deflect physical, magical, and psychic attacks. Well, it was, until Touma's Imagine Breaker touched it and it fell apart. Comics - It's the central object in Doug TenNapel's graphic novel Creature Tech, in which the Shroud actually has the power to instantly heal anything, even bringing things back from the dead, such as \|\|GIANT SPACE EELS.\|\| - Appears in the Wild Cards novel Death Draws Five, in which the Shoud is stolen and \|\|given to an ace with the power to speak with the dead, in order that she might summon up Jesus and have him give instructions as to what to do to bring about the Apocalypse.\|\| - The shroud is the central focus of the De Rode Ridder album De Sluier van Wuustwezel note : The Shroud of Wuustwezel. - In Batman: The Adventures Continue, a continuation of the DC Animated Universe, Batman and Azrael team up to find the Shawl of Magdalene, a artifact revered by the Church of St. Dumas and said to hold healing powers. Catwoman stole it for the Penguin to deliver to a mysterious benefactor. \|\|Said benefactor ends up being Mr. Freeze, who wanted to use it to save Nora Fries, who ended up dying a few years after the events of Batman And Mr Freeze Sub Zero Freeze is unable to use it to revive Nora, but Batman saves Azrael with it\|\|. - Supposedly used in the comic miniseries Punk Rock Jesus to create a Clone Jesus, similar to the Christ Clone Trilogy example below. \|\|It turns out that "Chris" really is a clone, but not of Jesus.\|\| Literature - In The Dresden Files (somewhat unsurprisingly) the entirety of Death Masks is centered on the theft of the Shroud of Turin, in which it's heavily implied (and occasionally all but outright explicitly stated) that said Shroud has some crazy mystical strength owing to many years of being an object of faith. Interestingly, the usual assumption that it could heal (as is a common assumption with pretty much anything that ever touched so much as Jesus' toenail clippings) is addressed, but the book in question leaves it open as to whether or not it actually can heal to the level hoped for. It does, however, hold up improbably well despite taking a beating (and a soaking followed by a pulling), and it may or may not have contributed to a fight, if you don't believe in coincidence. Oh, and it was about to be used as part of a mystical doomsday plot at one point, too... need I go on? - For all of this, the jury actually stays out on whether the thing really ever came within a thousand miles or years of touching Jesus. In fact, Harry (as both protagonist and narrator) comes down on the side of "probably not." It turns out, though, that when millions of people in the Dresdenverse venerate something as an artifact of power, they literally can't be wrong. - Harry finds the real Shroud in Skin Game in a vault belonging to Hades, along with the Holy Grail, the placard from the True Cross, Crown of Thorns, and Lance of Longinus. He notes that it seems a lot frailer than the one he encountered before and surmises that that one was a replica made by the Church. It's speculated that the one he saw earlier still had power because people thought it was the real one; as such it gained some measure of the power it was believed to have had. - In the first book of the Christ Clone Trilogy, Professor Harry Goodman discovered that living cells that came from Jesus' own body were preserved on the Shroud of Turin, and so used the cells to create a Clone Jesus, his supposed "grandnephew" Christopher. Live-Action TV Tabletop Games - The Yu-Gi-Oh! card game features this as "Forbidden Dress" ("dress" here simply meaning "clothing"). Video Games - In Assassin's Creed, the Shroud is actually an artifact left behind by the First Civilization, and is an advanced piece of technology that has miraculous healing abilities. - It's the main artifact both sides are looking for in Assassin's Creed Syndicate after the first Shroud, which contained the Isu Consus inside it, was destroyed during an Assassin raid. It can't outright bring the dead back, but only from outright fatal wounds. The only way Dr. Alvaro Gramatica and Violet Da Costa could speak to Consus was to shoot the one wearing the Shroud in the head. The finale reveals that there's a second Shroud buried under Westminster Palace in London where it's fought for in two different eras: The first time between twins Jacob and Evie Frye and the Templar Grandmaster Crawford Starrick. The second time in modern day with Galina, Shawn and Rebecca against Sigma Team. The Templars win and grab the Shroud. - Shows up in the "Monks and Mystics" DLC of Crusader Kings II The Crown of Thorns has occasionally popped up too. Supposedly worn by Jesus during and prior to the Crucifixion, it's often said to have the power to defy death. Or maybe it's just a really good helmet that saps your HP . Comic Books - DC Comics also has the Crown Of Horns (obviously a play of words) that allows its user to rule Hell. - Spoofed in Sturmtruppen: when the trooper "Messiah" Heinz started driving the officers mad with a mystic crisis that made him believe he was Jesus (and somehow had the powers to back it up, but, obviously, not the brains to use them well), Musolesi offered to take care of him for thirty Reichsmarks (struck in silver, of course), and as part of the preparations to nail him to a cross he has Heinz try out crowns of barbed wire to see which one fits. The crown reappears with a cross, a hammer and nails in Musolesi's hands when he's finally ready to nail Heinz... Right after the mystic crisis has worn off. Literature - In The Dresden Files book Skin Game, Harry finds it in a vault belonging to Hades, along with the Holy Grail, placard from the True Cross, Lance of Longinus, and Shroud of Turin. Tabletop Games - In Chrononauts, you yourself may travel back in time to 33 AD, and steal it from You-Know-Who, to aid in your Mission as a Time Traveler, or perhaps to simply sell off as a Biblical Relic to gain a bonus card when given the opportunity to Sell an Artifact. - While the explicit Crown of Thorns doesn't appear in Pathfinder, the Thorncrown of Iomedae is clearly inspired by and based off of it. Video Games - Crypt Of The Necrodancer has the Crown of Thorns as an equippable item. Picking it up damages you, but also heals half a heart for each ten (or fewer, if you also have a Blood weapon equipped) enemies killed. - The Binding of Isaac has a passive item called Blood of the Martyr, which visually looks like the Crown of Thorns. - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has a similar one, called the Jagged Crown. It even has a quest related to finding it! - Shows up in the "Monks and Mystics" DLC of Crusader Kings II, and is one of the artifacts that not only spawns at the start of the game, but spawns in a different area depending on what year the game starts in (Pre-1066, it's in the possession of the Count of Jerusalem, post-1066 but pre-1238, it's in the possession of the Byzantine Emperor, and post-1238 it's in the possession of the King of France). - The Final Fantasy games often contain this rare item that can be equipped as a helmet, often changed in translation to "Thornlet" to avoid controversy. It gives a character maximum protection against attacks, but inflicts a status ailment that constantly drains their HP (as if they were wounded and bleeding). Webcomics The Lazarus Bowl: the words of Christ used to raise Lazarus from the dead, recorded in the grooves of a pot being thrown at the time. Used in The X-Files , and the concept was used on CSI . Debunked (alas) by the MythBusters . The thirty pieces of silver with which Judas Iscariot was paid to betray Jesus to the Sanhedrin, leading to his arrest and his execution by the Romans. Comic Books - One of these shekels is the central MacGuffin of The Judas Coin by Walt Simonson, which ends up in the hands of various DC characters throughout the ages, including Two-Face, for example. - Spoofed in Sturmtruppen: when trooper "Messiah" Heinz had a mystic crisis that made him believe he was Jesus (and somehow gave him the powers to back it up, but not the brains to use them well), Musolesi initially installs him as his Pope and manipulates him to make money, but the moment the officers say they'd be willing to pay to get rid of him before he drove them mad Musolesi offers to do the job for thirty Reichmarks (struck in silver, of course). - In the New 52 timeline, the Council of Wizards and the Voice punished Judas Iscariot for his betrayal by making him the Phantom Stranger. He had the coins hung around his neck, where they would be impossible to remove until he completed his penance for the Voice. - A Ghost Rider story was about a conspiracy to use the silver pieces, which were cursed with immense evil by their circumstances, to forge unholy silver bullets powerful enough to disrupt the balance of power between Heaven and Hell. Fan Works - In Marcus S Lazarus's crossover fanfic The Coven of Reformed Supernaturals, the thirty pieces are revealed to have been forged into a set of silver knuckledusters that fell into the hands of John Constantine sometime after he defeated the archangel Gabriel; they're highly effective against anything naturally good. He uses them to kill \|\|the Elder Gideon, who is trying to kill Leo and Piper's infant son Wyatt, the Elder believing that the child's power will lead him to ultimately turn evil\|\|. Film - In The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice, they had been forged into a silver equivalent to the Holy Grail for vampires. - In The Brass Teapot it is implied that the titular artifact contains silver from the coins. The Teapots powers are associated with greed and pain. - One of the coins appears as the MacGuffin in Death Grip. Literature - The Dresden Files: Each of the thirty pieces contains a fallen angel, the lot of whom are collectively referred to as the Knights of the Blackened Denarius (or as Harry calls them, the Nickelheads). While the Knights of the Cross and their allies do their best to recover the coins and keep them away from evil, several that were known to be in the hands of the Church are later shown to be back in the hands of the Denarians, something the Denarian leader attributes to the fact that the Fallen cannot be contained by mere mortals; however, two have since been left in the vault of the Greek god Hades. - In The Last Coin, by James Blaylock, the Big Bad is collecting the 30 coins to fulfill his vile schemes. He's up to 29 at the beginning of the book and close to the last one. - In Kathryn Smith's Brotherhood Of Blood romance novel series, the 30 pieces of silver were impregnated with Lilith's spirit and passed from man to man, the most famous being Judas, and eventually melted into a cup, the Blood Grail, which turns anyone who drinks from it into a vampire. This goes badly for the guys who find it thinking it's the other Grail. - Lamb: The Gospel According To Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal: Biff took the silver pieces from Judas after hanging him from a tree for his betrayal and buried them nearby before killing himself out of grief over Jesus' death. When the angel Raziel resurrects Biff at the start of the book they dig up the pieces and sell them to pay for their plane tickets to America. Live-Action TV - On Sleepy Hollow, the 30 pieces of silver are revealed to be cursed to cause whoever touches them to betray the thing most dear to them. It is explicitly stated that this is what caused Benedict Arnold to defect to the British during the American Revolution. Tabletop Games - Featured (as 30 pieces of black metal; the background history - being given in exchange for Abel, the game's equivalent of Jesus to Iscariote (yes, it's named so) - being the same) in Anima: Beyond Fantasy as one of the most important artifacts of the game's setting, being actually superadvanced minicomputers that, basically, help someone to develop advanced technology. - Figure into the origin of the Coin Collector, one of the top leaders of the evil group DEMON, in Champions. He took part in a satanic ritual where he was transported to Hell and met Judas himself, who handed over the silver pieces, which cemented the Coin Collector as a servant of ultimate evil. Video Games - The 30 Pieces of Silver also show up as items to search for in Dante's Inferno. Each 5 collected gets the hero a power-up. Webcomics - In Thunderstruck, Judas Iscariot is the progenitor of all vampires, his condition being the result of a curse put on him due to his traitorous intentions as he drank of the blood of Christ at the Last Supper. The thirty pieces of silver became a talisman holding absolute power over his soul; whoever possesses the silver pieces has total control over Judas (but only if they have all 30). - The noose with which Judas Iscariot hanged himself also shows up in The Dresden Files. (It's worn as a Noose Necktie by the bearer of one of the 30 coins mentioned above.) The noose protects its bearer from everything \|\|except the noose itself.\|\| - \|\|The Dragon of the Grand Canal\|\| in The Magician King boasts of a vast collection of magical artifacts, including both the Lance of Longinus and the noose that hanged Judas. ### Norse Any weapon ever used or made by a god — especially the Norse mythological weapons Gungnir (Odin's spear) and especially Mjollnir (Thor's hammer). Mjollnir is actually spelled/pronounced "Mjöllnir". The sound ö is usually unpronounceable to native English speakers. It's somewhat similar to the "heu" in French (like heure). "Myol'neer" (with short o) is pretty close, though. Speak the word heard or girl (the 3: sound) and you will be pretty close. Occasionally you will see Gram — the sword of Siegfried, used to kill the dragon Fafnir. This sword has also been referred to as Balmung and Nothung. Ragnarok is also a common name for swords in RPGs, and there's also Lævateinn, the Flaming Sword of Surtr. Anime & Manga - Bayloupe of New Light from A Certain Magical Index condenses Thor's weapons into a pair of gloves, allowing her to use all of Thor's weapons. - Marian wielded Dáinsleif, or at least a replica of it, at one point. It is said to trigger Ragnarok if it is ever fully unsheathed, and most people drop dead out of pure terror if even a small amount of the blade is revealed. - Brunhilde Eiktobel created a replica of Gungnir, though this was later destroyed. Othinus, a Magic God, wants to create the real Gungnir, not a replica like most of the magical items in the series. - Look at any work by Kosuke Fujishima, Ah! My Goddess being most prevalent. - Used in Bastard!! (1988) by the Seraphim: Uriel has Gungnir (which is also said to never miss its target) and Michael has the Flaming Sword Laevatainn. - Digimon Tamers: Most of Dukemon's arsenal consists of weapons named after legendary weapons of Norse mythology. In his base form he wields a lance called Gram, and as Crimson Mode he wields dual energy weapons named Blutgang and Gungnir. In expanded universe material, his Evil Counterpart Palette Swap ChaosDukemon instead calls his lance Balmung. - Full Metal Panic! features the ARX-8 Laevatein, designed to \|\|replace the destroyed Arbalest as Sousuke's Lambda-enabled AS\|\|. - Laevatein is the name of Signum's Intelligent Device from the Lyrical Nanoha series, though it's also been called Levantine. - Once again with Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, this time it was an EMP weapon developed by ZAFT and used to disable the Earth Alliance's first run Strike Daggers and take out Porta Panama's Mass Driver. - Marie Mjolnir from Soul Eater is a Death Scythe whose weapon form is either a hammer or a tonfa. - Symphogear: - Fragments of Gungnir were used to create the Symphogears worn by Kanade, Hibiki and Maria. Its weapon is, what else, but a spear. Except when used by Hibiki, who cannot manifest a weapon and instead uses Bajiquan moves to "strike like a spear". - Chris's Symphogear is supposedly based on Ichaival, the bow of the Norse god Ullr. Except that this was a research failure on the part of the writers, as Ichaival actually originated as the bow of a character named Ullr in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War (where it's usually transliterated as "Yewfelle"). - The cursed sword Dáinsleif appears in season 3, where its fragments are used to create the Ignite Module - a Symphogear upgrade which allows the armour's wearer to enter a spiky black Super Mode by forcibly activating its berserker state and then taking control of its power. - Mjöllnir shows up in the videogame spinoff Symphogear XDU, where it fuses with Hibiki's Gungnir to grant her a more powerful form with control over lightning. Its Finishing Move, Unlimited Beat, follows the Once a Season tradition of being an ultimate attack named after the opening theme. - Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds features several of these as support cards for the Nordic and Aesir cards used by Team Rangorok. The manga version references Gram in the form of a Blackwing monster. - Nasuverse - Gungnir is mentioned in passing in Fate/stay night as similar to how Servant Lancer's Gae Bolg works as a throwing spear. - Saber of Black from Fate/Apocrypha wields Balmung, as his true identity is Siegfried. Like Excalibur listed above, he can use it as a Wave Motion Sword. - Gram is stated to be the strongest demonic sword, being the antithesis and equal to Excalibur, although this is never actually shown. Like in mythology, it's the sword of Sigurd, who is a completely different person from Siegfried in this universe. Naturally, Gilgamesh also has a copy of it in his Gate of Babylon. - Mjolnir is wielded by Beatrice Flowerchild in Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA since she possesses the Berserker class card connected to Thor. The hammer is roughly three times her size and requires her to enlarge her entire arm just to hold it. \|\|Mjolnir turns out to be a massive Red Herring for this Berserker's True Name - rather than being derived from Thor, the card is instead derived from Magni, one of Thor's sons who inherited the hammer after his father's death during Ragnarok.\|\| - In The Epic of Zektbach, Nox Catorce's sword is called Tyrfing, after a cursed sword of Norse mythology. - Record of Ragnarok depicts Mjolnir as a Living Weapon that's larger than Thor himself. Comics - It appears in Marvel Comics' The Mighty Thor. This version can only be used by "one who is worthy" of the power of Thor. It's a dual-purpose enchantment by Odin to both make sure that power doesn't fall into the wrong hands, but also to make sure that there is a Thor who will act like Thor once Ragnarok comes around. Thus, Captain America could lift it, but not Superman (except with Thor's permission, in JLA/Avengers), because Superman isn't worthy to lift Mjölnir because he's actually a little too heroic. A proper Thor needs to think like a warrior when the situation calls for it, which means being just a little bit more willing to use lethal force when necessary. That's no slight on Superman, it just means that Superman would make a poor viking, which is as it should be. Other Marvel/DC crossovers have shown that Wonder Woman does meet Odin's definition of worthiness. - Also Marvel: in Loki: Agent of Asgard Loki has Gram, which even in this universe belonged to Sigurd and was used to kill a dragon, but has truth revealing powers and truly ridiculously complex origin story. Less surprisingly Loki also owns Laevateinn, which they apparently always had but never used before. According to Sigurd because it sucks beginning with its name ('damage twig'), maybe it's true, but maybe Loki just didn't want people to insult their Ancestral Weapon. - The hammer is of course the focal point in the De Rode Ridder album De Hamer van Thor note : Thor's Hammer. Both Mjollnir and Gungnir also make an appearance in the album De Walkure note : The Valkyrie, where they are wielded by their original owners. The album Doodsbrenger note : Deathbringer briefly shows how Mjollnir was originally forged (from mithril, according to the story!), but instead focusses on the sword Deathbringer, which was forged at the same time but ended up hidden on Midgard, where it was eventually found by the album's main villain. Fanfiction - My Little Avengers: Naturally, Big Mac uses Mjolnir to transform into Thor. Gungir also shows up later in the story \|\|in Trixie's possession\|\|. - Child of the Storm has Mjolnir and Gungnir, is in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well as Laevateinn - which, here, is a wand, which contained embers of the Phoenix force. Or at least, it used to be. Currently, drained, it's pretending to be a phoenix feather, and has since served as \|\|a container for Harry's mind, and a container for a Dark Phoenix's worth of power\|\|. What it actually is and where it came from is up for speculation, but it's hinted that it might actually be \|\|the Twilight Sword, or a fragment of it.\|\| Film - One of the ships in The Matrix was technically called Mjolnir, but everybody called it "The Hammer". Probably because, as the special features on the Revolutions DVD demonstrate, nobody involved in the production could figure out how to pronounce it. - Additionally, there's Theme Naming in the Mjollnir's crew members: all of them were named after guns, except the medic (who was named after a magazine) and the captain (who was named after Stephen King's gunslinger). Which fits this theme more, an unpronounceable Norse weapon or the thing that strikes off a cartridge? - Mjolnir and Gungnir feature repeatedly in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Thor. One of the regular human characters refers to it as "Myew-myew". Literature Live-Action TV - Mjolnir showed up on First Wave as an alien portal-making thingy. - Power Rangers: - An oddly Japanese-looking Mjolnir shows up in Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, as a Cultural Translation of a Boukenger storyline involving the Conjuring Mallet above; in addition to its Sizeshifter powers from the stock footage, Thor is shown using it to create blasts of lightning. There's also the Spear of Neptune, although Neptune himself is not encountered. - All the more interesting since one of the villains seven seasons earlier ( Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue) was a demon named Loki (pronounced "lokai," though), and King/Lord Neptune himself appeared in that same season. How Overdrive's long-abandoned city of Atlantis squares with Power Rangers Time Force's ancillary materials placing Atlantis in the South China Sea is unknown.. - This is really common in the various Stargate SG-1 series. Thor's Hammer included. These are usually Imported Alien Phlebotinum of some sort. - Supernatural: Mjölnir is auctioned off in the episode "What's Up Tiger Mommy?" by Plutus, the Greek God of Greed. When Sam manages to get his hands on it, he is able to strike down gods. Tabletop Games - Yu-Gi-Oh!: Some of the support cards for Aesir and Nordic decks include Norse mythological weapons, including Gungir. As was the Gram Blackwing monster. Balmung is also referenced in a monster name. - In Dungeons & Dragons, the Hammer of Thunderbolts is an enchanted warhammer that, depending on edition is either an outright artifact or the next best thing to it and is always a blatant name-changed version of Mjolnir. Mjolnir itself shows up as, what else, Thor's weapon of choice in Dieties and Demigods. Video Games - In Breath of Fire IV, one of the combination magics is named after this. - Gram is a sword found in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, described as being a dragon-slaying weapon. - Dragalia Lost has the whole set of Norse artifacts be an Infinity +1 Sword to Fire characters, tokens for earned by fighting against the Wind Agito, Volk. - Unsurprisingly, Mjolnir shows up in EVE Online. Mjolnir Torpedos deal EM damage to a target. Though it is primarily a Caldari weapon and most Norse named ships are Minmatar... However, perfectly acceptable for an Icelandic company. - Gungnir has it as its plot weapon. Unsurprisingly. - Yet another Halo example: the MJOLNIR Powered Armor worn by the Master Chief and other Spartan Super Soldiers. - Also, the Spartan Laser, which has the designation of M6 G/GNR, and was developed as part of Project GUNGNIR, providing a suit of MJOLNIR Powered Armor of the same name. - Gungnir, Mjolnir, and Laevateinn show up often in the Final Fantasy series. - In Final Fantasy XI the Mjollnir is the relic weapon for White Mages, of all jobs. Gungnir is the relic weapon for Dragoons, which lets you use the weapons skill "Geirskögul," which was a Valkyrie in Norse Mythology. Ragnarok was the Great Sword relic weapon, usable by Warriors, Paladins, and Dark Knights. The Bard's relic musical instrument was the Heimdall's Gjallarhorn. A Black Mage's mythic weapon was Laevateinn, a more obscure Norse artifact. FFXI kind of loves this trope. - In Final Fantasy XIV, the Gae Bolg is a relic weapon Level 50 Dragoons obtain. - Fire Emblem: - In Fire Emblem's Jugdral canon ( Genealogy of the Holy War and Thracia 776), quite a few of the weapons of the Twelve Crusaders are named for weapons from Norse mythology - the Tyrhung (Tyrfing), Balmunc (Balmung), Gungnir, Mystletainn (Mistleteinn) and Thor Hammer (Mjöllnir). - Several of these aforementioned weapons reappear in Fire Emblem: Awakening, \|\|set in the Jugdral canon's Distant Future\|\|, generally in the hands of \|\|Aversa's Dreadlords\|\|. - Many of the characters introduced in Book 2 of Fire Emblem Heroes take their names from Norse mythology. Relevant to this specific trope is Laevatein, who wields a weapon named after herself. - Blutgang makes an appearance in Fire Emblem: Three Houses as a Sacred Relic associated with Maurice's Crest. - In Freedom Wars, Gungnir is the name of the fire version of the Holy Lance, which is upgraded with Dionaea-Class Abductor parts. - Magicka: Weapons like Mjölner, Gungnir and Gram can be picked up and used in game. As a bonus, Gram kills the boss Fafnir in one hit. - Mjollnir, Gram, Balmung, Nothung, Gungir and Laevateinn all appear in Ogre Battle 64 as randomly-dropped weapons. None are plot relevant. The other games of the series feature some or all of them as well. - In Persona 3, fusing the Personas Odin, Thor, or Surtr with any Nihil Weapon would yield their respective spear, hammer, and sword. Likewise, in Persona 5, Odin and Thor can be turned into their respective weapons through Electric Chair execution. - Since Thor appears in Smite, he naturally carries his Mjolnir around and has been using it more than his title, God of Thunder, imply. - Tales of Phantasia has a weapon named Gungnir. - The Gungnir in Terraria is a giant golden spear with a red gem in the spear head. Before an update changed its crafting recipes, it was made with three other spears and can kill pre-hardmode bosses in seconds. - Mjolnir is the focus of Tomb Raider: Underworld, which is the sequel to Legend. Just like Legend, the mystical "weapon" turns out to be \|\|a key to enter Helheim\|\|. Wherein the Big Bad is attempting to wield Jormungandr, \|\|a gigantic ancient machine that will bring about Ragnarok\|\| - Touhou Project features the vampiric Scarlet siblings, each with a potent magical weapon out of Norse mythology. Remilia has Gungnir, which in-game can be used to fire an energy spear of danmaku, while her younger sister Flandre has Lævateinn, the "Wounding Wand of Loki," which functions as a Flaming Sword. It's unclear if these are the Gungnir and Lævateinn or if "the young descendent of Tepes" note : Being among the few Touhou characters to have exact ages specified, Remilia and Flandre are actually too old to be distant descendants of Dracula like Remilia claims. They're actually within the right age range to be his daughters, though presumably Remilia thinks that would be too outlandish a lie to be believed. is exaggerating her supernatural clout again. - Golden Sun: - Ragnarok is a Venus-aligned spell that appears in all games and conjures a giant sword to impale one enemy. - Lævateinn (or Levatine, as it's spelled in the game) is a greatsword that can be forged from mythril silver. It has a massive red blade and it can unleash Radiant Fire, an armor piercing explosion. - Can be found in the "Monks and Mystics" DLC of Crusader Kings II, but can only be used by followers of the Norse religion. - In God of War (PS4), the smiths who forged Mjolnir, Brok and Sindri, are supporting characters who aid Kratos and Atreus by providing crafting services. They are deeply ashamed of forging Mjolnir since Thor used it to slay countless Giants. Thor's sons Magni and Modi are in fierce competition with each other over the right to inherit the hammer. \|\|The hammer itself finally made an appearance in The Stinger when Thor appears in front of Kratos house in Atreus's dream.\|\| - As AdventureQuest has an equipment set themed after Norse Mythology, Mjollnir naturally shows up as one of the weapons in the set. It is an Energy-element hammer that can either be swung or thrown. The Full Set Bonus of the set grants Mjollnir a x20% damage to any opponent that uses Strength. - Titan Quest has an entire expansion pack dedicated to Celtic and Norse mythology. The player character fights against the Norse Gods themselves when under Loki's ruse. Not only will they use items like Gungnir and Brisingamen against the player, but the player can also find such items as rare drops. - Mjölnir naturally is a hammer that does loads of Lightning and Electrical Burn damage, and even has a special Chain Lightning attack. - Gungnir is a spear that specializes in Elemental (magical) damage, while most spears are only physical. - Gram is a powerful sword that rarely does lots of Piercing and Bleeding damage, and it gives bonus damage against certain bosses in the game. - Lævateinn is the the Flaming Sword. It deals Fire and Burn damage in addition to physical damage, and increases Fire and Burn damage, increases Fire and Freeze resistance, and increases the power of skills in the Earth mastery. - Tyrfing shows up as a powerful physical sword. It gives a whopping +40% attack speed and 20% chance of +100% total damage (not just one damage type, unlike other weapons), among other bonuses. Attacking with it sends out projectiles that curse the enemy with Fumble and Impaired Aim. - Enchanting a weapon with the Essence of Donar's Hammer with it gives it a chance to stun, as well as deal extra damage and receive less damage against Giants. - Heroine's Quest is based on Nordic mythology, and fittingly contains the swords Balmung (a Flaming Sword and drawn from a tree), Gram (given to you when asked to defeat Fafnir), and Tyrfing (owned by the former guild leader). It even has a cat's footfall, one of the traditional components of the leash that binds the world-destroying ur-wolf, Fenrir. - Quake's Expansion Pack Scourge of Armagon features the Mjolnir as a melee weapon. It's a hammer that uses Thunderbolt/Plasma Gun's cells in order to deal a Chain Lightning Area of Effect attack. (Manual): This is THORs War Hammer. Electrical by nature, when hammered to the floor it sends out a scattered electrical force along the ground. An ear-piercing clap of thunder will sound when the opponent is struck. The electrical current can spread from one opponent to the next. - In Honkai Impact 3rd, Mjolnir is the name of a pair of pistols that can be wielded by Kiana and Kallen Kaslana. They have a special ability that allows a large energy-based version to be slammed down on enemies like a Pistol Whip, alluding to the hammer theme. - While it's not outright Mjolnir, Raiden owning a giant war hammer that he makes use of in Mortal Kombat 4 and keeps it ontop of his Sky Temple as a lightning rod in Mortal Kombat: Deception. Is definitely a reference to Mjolnir considering both are giant hammers used by gods of thunder. Webcomics - In The Specialists, Balmung - Ginger's Bread: Ryan and Kelly once gave Ginger a taser-shaped like Mjölnir as a birthday present. At first she was annoyed that they were persisting with the joke that her (very Swedish) dad is Thor, but then she decided it was a pretty cool weapon. - The Order of the Stick: Durkon starts using a Hammer of Thunderbolts near the end of the story arc "Utterly Dwarved". It's coruscated in white lightning whenever he swings or throws it. Western Animation - In Atlantis: Milo's Return, Gungnir is the artifact the third leg focuses on. It is in fact of Atlantean origin. A crazed shipwright named Eric Helstrom, under the delusion he was Odin, stole it from Mr. Whitmore's collection and attempts to use it to cause Ragnarok. He is prevented from doing so and the spear is instead used to raise Atlantis back above the surface of the ocean. - In the last episode aired of James Bond Jr., a pirate villain seeks and finds Thor's hammer. - An early episode of Mighty Max had his bodyguard wielding Thor's hammer. Again, because he'd originally wielded it thousands of years ago when his exploits inspired the legends about Thor. Made famous by Richard Wagner's famous opera, The Ring of the Nibelung , the Ring grants the power to rule the world, and is desired even by the gods, but it bears a curse—anyone wishing to use it must renounce love forever. The Tarnhelm (also made famous by the opera) is a helmet that gives the powers of invisibility, shapeshifting, and teleportation. - Tom Holt's Expecting Someone Taller has hapless clerk Malcolm Fisher receiving the Ring and the Tarnhelm from a badger he runs over one night, who turns out to be Ingolf, brother of Fafnir. - Yu-Gi-Oh! features the ring as one of Sigfried's cards. - The aforementioned Heroine's Quest also has the ring, which causes almost everybody to dislike you, and is a Clingy Macguffin to the point that after restarting the game you'll still have it. ### Other H. P. Lovecraft invented the Necronomicon , which has since appeared in tons of fictional works, not limited to the Cthulhu Mythos . Probably the most famous of these are the Evil Dead movies, which gave a striking visual look to the book. This version of the book has since been visually referenced in many places where there was a need to show an evil book. In a case of Defictionalization / Fan Dumb , there are many forgeries of the Necronomicon . Anime and Manga Comics - The Darkhold is Marvel Comics analog of the Necronomicon. The Darkhold started out as a set of scrolls written in Antedeluvian times, referenced in their Conan the Barbarian adaptations. - Felix Faust is sometimes seen reading from the Necronomicon. When reading the literature of Tartarus in Justice League Unlimited he refers to dark tomes that make the Necronomicon look like a children's book. - The book appears in two albums of De Rode Ridder, Necronomicon and De Boeienkoning note : The Escape Artist. It is displayed as a source of phenomenal magical power and in both cases Johan needed serious help to deal with its current owner. The first time he was aided by the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, and the second time he was aided by The Grim Reaper. The book is still at large in Johan's world, searching for a new owner... Film Literature - P.C.Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath has a Necronomicon-analogue in "The Book Bound In Pale Leather", one of several mythic treasures ( or curses) of the Kencyr. The Book can be bruised if mishandled, and contains rune spells of such power that numerous priests went mad simply writing them down to make The Book. - Terry Pratchett's Discworld version is the infamous and feared Necrotelicomnicon, the Book of Communicating with the Dead Long Distance. - Christopher Pike made the Necronomicon into the Satanic Bible. There actually is a book called The Satanic Bible, by Anton La Vey, but it's not the Necronomicon either. - One of the Defictionalization instances was published as a mass market paperback authored by someone only known as "Simon". Inexpensive copies litter many finer used book shops at a bargain price. - In Lifeblood, Jack meets a bookseller who owns and closely guards one of these forgeries, and doesn't have the heart to tell the guy he's been suckered into buying a worthless knockoff. - Mentioned in the The Dresden Files. The White Counsel were the ones who had it published, in order to dilute the rituals' power. Rituals in The Dresden Files are like the water in your house: the more people who are trying to use it at once, the less each person gets. - In Stephen King's short story "I Know What You Need" (contained in Night Shift), Ed Hamner Jr. is the proud owner of a copy (though we're not told if it's the actual book). - In the Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. series, the spilling of virgin's blood on a 1st edition Necronomicon during a rare celestial conjunction is what kicked off the Big Uneasy and unleashed all manner of monsters into the modern world. A homely middle-aged librarian/witch's blood, shed via a paper cut, but it counts. - John Hodgman's Complete World Knowledge trilogy has the Americanomicon, held by the Secret World Government at Yale University, which predicts the entire history of the United States all the way up until the year 2012, when Ragnarok happens. Pinball Video Games - In Wizard101, we have the Krokonomicon, a magic book from the world of Krokotopia. - This appears in Golden Sun, but changed in the English translation to "Tomegathericon". - The Necrotelicomnicon also shows up in Kingdom of Loathing. - Guess what happens if you mess around with the Necrophilicon in Quest for Glory IV. - In King's Quest VI, the Big Bad's name is Abdul Alhazred, and The Kings Quest Companion runs with the idea that he really is that universe's version of the Lovecraftian author and thus wrote a version of the Necronomicon within the KQ universe. - Parodied in Team Fortress 2 with the "Bombinomicon", a Necronomicon offshoot originally sold for $6,66, whose teeth clench a Cartoon Bomb and who is a Motor Mouth to boot. Can also be worn as a badge, causing the wearer to spectacularly explode when killed. - In Demonbane, the Necronomicon is one of the main characters, and appears in the form of a young girl who usually goes by "Al Azif", shortened from Kitab al-Azif, the book's Arabic title. The reason it appears as a girl is said to be because the most powerful magic books are so potent that they generate a human body and soul for themselves. A number of other magical tomes from the Mythos also make appearances, though Al Azif is said to be the most powerful of all. - In The Binding of Isaac, The Necronomicon is an active item that deals massive damage to all enemies in your current room. It also has two missing pages, one being a passive item and the other being a trinket, both with similar (but more conditional) room-clearing powers. - Shows up in Crusader Kings II as part of one event path of the Learning focus. With "Monks and Mystics" installed, it becomes a proper artifact. - In Spelunky, you can find the Necronomicon inside the City of Gold, guarded by Anubis II, and it's got an Evil Dead-esque face on it. It's almost definitely required to \|\|find where in Olmec's lair the door to Hell is, by checking how the face is moving\|\|. - AdventureQuest has two parodies of this item: - The Necromoron is an abridged version of the Necronomicon, and it increases Darkness resistance and gives bonus damage against undead. - The Nekonomicon is a Lolcat version of the Necronomicon, which foretells a "cuddly apocalypse" where "The Old One" is a cat. It increases magic defense, and opening the book unleashes a magic spell that overloads its target with cuteness. - In Persona 5, Futaba Sakura's Persona is called Necronomicon, represented as a green UFO. - Dark Seed II features the Necronomicon in the secret room in Paul Cooper's house. Apparently it was involved in some way in his group's communions with the Dark World. - In Over Cooked 2, King Onion uses the Om Nom Nomicon to summon the Un Bread. Really it's more of an Excuse Plot than anything else. Web Animation - RWBY Chibi has a brief gag where Ruby reads from the Necronomicon during a "Reading is Fun!" PSA. The book is designed to look like its Evil Dead counterpart. Webcomics Western Animation - The South Park Cthulhu trilogy featured the Necronomicon, of course. - The Springfield Republicans in The Simpsons read from the Necronomicon during their meetings. - The Owl House: Shows up as a background gag in "Lost in Language" when Luz visits the library of the Boiling Isle. The fact it's located in the kid's corner indicates that, in the Demon Realm, the Necronomicon is nothing more than a children's picture book. Other - Artist H. R. Giger named two famous collections of artwork and autobiography after the Necronomicon. Another more recent artifact; the Holy Hand Grenade from Monty Python and the Holy Grail , despite being a literal throw away gag. Note that this is actually a Copyrighted Artifact, being roughly a century yet (copyright is loooong these days) from falling into the public domain. Anime & Manga - The Blasphemous Grenade in Nyaruko: Crawling with Love! probably counts. - In chapter 10 of the Touhou Project manga Inaba of the Moon & Inaba of the Earth, Hieda no Akyuu asks resident Moon Rabbit Reisen if it is true that youkai rabbits are weak to holy hand grenades, such as the "HHG of Aunty Ock". Film - Ready Player One (2018): After finding the First Key, Parzival buys the Holy Hand Grenade. \|\|Comes in useful to deal with a large bunch of Sixers standing between him and the end goal.\|\| Tabletop Games - The Black Templars from Warhammer 40,000 have a unique piece of wargear called the Holy Orbs of Antioch, which always wounds on a 2+. Video Games - Could be obtained in Fallout 2 in a special encounter involving five knights in Power Armor fighting a rat. In Fallout: New Vegas, you can get a slight variation with the Wild Wasteland trait, the Holy Frag Grenade. - The Holy Bomb spell in Noita. There's an Emerald Tablet which quotes the scene in verbatim. \|\|There's also the secret Giga Holy Bomb.\|\| - Appears as one of the higher tier weapons in Worms. It even lets out an angelic chorus before it explodes. - One is a findable magic item in the ASCII graphics-based Omega RPG. - Nowadays we have U.F.O.s, Area 51 and The Greys, which seem to qualify as the latest Public Domain Artifacts. - Or, as the quote from Angels of Light and Darkness states, half of what they say was owned by Hitler. - Fables seems to be extremely fond of this trope — which considering it also uses public domain ''characters'' as the primary basis for its main cast (even relatively obscure ones like Rose Red), should probably not surprise anyone in the least. Public Domain Artifacts in the series include the fountain of youth (which the fables drink from yearly to remain ageless), the magic beans (from which come magic beanstalks, of course), the Vorpal Sword (as described in Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" poem... no, really genuinely as described in the poem, including an accompanying "snicker-snack!" sound effect...), the Witching Cloak, the magic barleycorns that Tom Thumb's bride was supposed to have grown from, Boy Blue's horn, a magic lamp, several magic carpets a la Aladdin, and... really countless such objects, actually. Even Santa's "Naughty and Nice" lists make a brief appearance. - There are some artifacts which are associated with Santa, but occasionally show up without him. Usually his bag (ascribed mystical properties of producing whatever is desired) and his sleigh (or some other fantastic method of transportation). - The Go Board that Honinbo Shusaku spilled blood on when he died, which housed Sai's spirit in Hikaru no Go. - Native American Mythology of the Great Plains has the sacred buffalo calf pipe (Lakota), seven arrows (Cheyenne), medicine wheels (across the plains), and ghost shirts (across the plains). Also, anything reputed to have been touched by a famous Native American. New Age groups tend to love to claim false artifacts. Arrowheads are popular pieces as well. - Lemuria and Mu. Mu is a mistranslation of a Mayan codex. Lemuria was a land bridge by Ernst Häckel to explain similarities in the ecosystems of Madagascar, India, and Australia before plate tectonics. - Some public domain literary characters' associated items have attained this status, such as Dr. Jekyll's Hyde-transformation elixir or Dorian Gray's youth-sustaining portrait. - In L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero's Daughter, there are more public domain artifacts per square inch in the Prosperos' mansion than anywhere else. Several are mentioned above. But they were collecting them. - The eponymous Xiovias from the work of the same title. - Any phenomenon that science has no definite explanation for - examples include the stone spheres in Costa Rica. This overlaps with Beethoven Was an Alien Spy. - To summarise several prior comments, for a series as heavily saturated in world mythologies as Shin Megami Tensei, it should be unsurprising that this would show up. Just in the Persona sub-series, there exist Mjölnir, Gungnir, Balmung, Laevateinn (Norse), Gae Bolg, Caladbolg (Irish/Celtic), the totsuka-no-tsurugi, and several famous katanas (Japan). Several weapons are also named after gods or mythological figures; Chie from Persona 4 has access to the Moses Sandals and a pair of boots named Sleipnir, after Odin's eight-legged horse. - The Amber Room, and by extension, the rest of the so far unrecovered Nazi loot from all over Europe. The location of the Amber Room specifically is one of the most popular Stock Unsolved Mysteries throughout Central and Eastern Europe. - Hergé didn't have to travel very far to find the model for the "Arumbaya Fetish" that serves as the MacGuffin of The Broken Ear. It is a pre-Columbian wooden statue in the collection of the Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels, though it has two intact ears, which in Hergé's story happens to be how Tintin distiguishes the replica substituted for it.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PandorasBox
Pants-Pulling Prank - TV Tropes [Abed pulls Troy's pants down. Everyone laughs.] Troy: [indignant] What the hell!? Abed: "Pantsing" someone was on my list. It would've been better if you were wearing the standard giant-hearts-on-underwear, but I'll take it. Troy: Oh, yeah? Well I hope getting pantsed is on your list! [He yanks Abed's pants down. Everyone laughs more as they see Abed is sporting Goofy Print Underwear with red hearts.] Abed: [grinning] It is! One of many Practical Joke tropes, this one involves pulling someone's pants down to expose their underpants (also known as "pantsing"). Usually from behind. If only the outerwear comes off, it results in Comedic Underwear Exposure as everyone sees the pantsed character's Uncool Undies or Goofy Print Underwear. If the character realizes they are completely exposed (maybe because they were Going Commando) expect a Naked Freak-Out as they fumble to cover themself or pull their pants back on. Compare Mooning, where a character deliberately exposes their own bottom, and Joke of the Butt, where bottoms are intrinsically funny. Compare Shameful Strip, Stripping Snag, and Wedgie. In general, Don't Try This at Home. This prank can lead to accusations of sexual harassment and/or indecent exposure, or simply a case of Dude, Not Funny! Leave it to fiction. ## Examples: - Dragon Ball: During a tournament fight, Goku swipes Tien's belt at super speed, causing Tien's pants to fall and embarrassing him. - Fairy Tail: - In OVA 5, The Exciting Ryuzetsu Land, Mirajane has her top ripped off by Jenny Realight, and in retaliation, Mirajane pulls down Jenny's bikini bottom. - During the Oracion Seis Arc, Erza takes Lucy's belt causing her skirt to fall down in front of everyone much to her embarrassment and anger towards the Blue Pegasus boys ogling her. - In Pokémon, Sabrina's father psychically pulls Ash's pants down. - The Akala Island Treasure Hunt in the Sun and Moon series has a goofy Stoutland guide try to pull off Ash's shorts before the Treasure Hunt begins. - Idiot Hero Goggles pantses Rider when he meets him in Splatoon. - In the second episode of Yo-kai Watch Jam - Yo-kai Academy Y: Close Encounters of the N Kind, Koma Sandayu pantses Tamada Mataro, who is wearing briefs with a froggy print. - Justice Riders has Kid Flash stop some outlaws by using his super speed to pull their pants down. - In the autobiographical graphic novel Smile (Raina Telgemeier) (Published September, 2010) by Raina Telgemeier, Raina breaks up with her group of "friends" when one of them pulls her skirt down in the school cafeteria. - In Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet the Wolfman, Theodore, who had developed a meaner streak than usual as a result of \|\|being bitten by the Wolfman\|\|, pulls down Alvin and Simon pants on the opening night of their drama teacher's Jekyll and Hyde play, which results in the audience seeing Alvin and Simon in their underwear when the curtains open. - The film "American Shaolin:King Of The Kickboxers 2", contains 2 examples of this, both of which set the plot in motion: - During a kickboxing exhibition match, the film's antagonist, Trevor Gotitall, is fighting another kickboxer when the other kickboxer's pants unexpectedly fall down (presumably because they are not tied properly), revealing his blue briefs to everyone in the room. As the man sheepishly tries to pull up his pants, Trevor is able to take advantage of his embarrassment and knock him to the floor. Trevor and his trainers realize that humiliating your opponent is an effective way to beat him mentally as well as physically. - In the next scene, Trevor is competing in a kickboxing tournament, and goes up against a young man named Drew Carson, who will become the film's protagonist. Midway through their fight, Trevor yanks Drew's belt off and let's Drew's pants fall to the floor, leaving Drew standing in his tighty-whities. Trevor then yanks Drew's pants from around his ankles, sending Drew flying across the ring and leaving him pants-less and humiliated in front of the large crowd of spectators, who roar with laughter at the sight of Drew in his tighty-whities. This embarrassing experience is what leads Drew to decide to go to China and learn the Shaolin form of fighting. - During a flashback at the start of Anger Management, a bully pulls down Dave's gym shorts and underwear in front of his childhood crush Sara, embarrassing him in front of an extremely crowded and busy neighborhood who make fun of his Teeny Weenie. This proves to become a traumatic memory to Dave's self-esteem, setting the stage for the rest of the film's events. - In Cheaper by the Dozen 2, Nigel is pantsed by Kyle after the Bakers' are accused of not having enough discipline. - Girl House: This turns out to be the killer's Freudian Excuse. As a child, two girls pantsed him and made fun of his Teeny Weenie and he developed a hatred for women growing up. - In High School U.S.A., a pair of girls are determined to get a photo of the butt of the Big Man on Campus Beau Middleton. One attempt involves trying to pull down his pants in the haunted house at the school fair. However, they accidentally pull down the pants of the fat nerd and photo his butt. At the end of the movie. Beau gets pantsed by a robot (It Makes Sense in Context) and the girls get their photo. - In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry in his invisibility cloak pantses Goyle. - One Deleted Scene from Home Alone features Uncle Frank pantsing Kevin. - During his third Villain Song, Mean Green Mother From Outer Space, Audrey II plays around with Seymour throughout it, one method of which is yanking down his pants while he's raising an ax to cut him. - In Munchie, the title character (a creature with magical powers) casts a spell to pants a bully while the bully performs a scene from "Romeo and Juliet" onstage at a school assembly, leaving the bully in his boxer shorts in front of the entire school. Everyone in the audience, as well as the girl playing Juliet (whom the bully has a crush on) all laugh hysterically at him. - In Meatballs II, after Flash wins the boxing match, his opponent pants him while Flash his celebrating. - A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge: After Jesse beats Grady during a game of baseball, Grady pulls down Jesse's pants. Another girl comments with approval on his rear. - Space Jam shows Sylvester the cat use a fishing rod to completely yank away orange Monstar Pound's athletic shorts during the second half of the Ultimate Game. Pound is apparently Going Commando, as he's shown denuded from the waist down, and resorts to sitting on the court with his jersey pulled down in embarrassment. "Nice butt!" Canon Foreigner Lola Bunny comments. - At one point in The Nanny Diaries, Annie challenges Grayer to a race, only for him to pants her in order to get a head start. - The opening scene of Weird Science sees this happen to Gary and Wyatt, being pantsed by their bullies in the gym, in front of all the girls. - In Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Third Wheel, Greg mentions that kids would try to pants each other in his gym class. When Vice Principal Roy has a meeting with the students to try and put a stop to it, some kid hides in the bleachers and pulls his pants down. The same kid, who was dubbed "The Mad Pantser", also pulls down Rowley's pants during the Valentine's dance. The Mad Pantser never gets caught. - In the Goosebumps book Revenge R Us, Micah Brill tries to humiliate his sister Wade by wearing her underwear on his head... which he then escalates to pouncing on Wade and trying to rip off her pants to show her friends what underwear she's currently wearing. - In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, its revealed that the 15 year old James Potter used magic to do this to the 15 year old Severus Snape when he stripped Snape half-naked, force-fed him soap and may or may not have also taken Snapes underpants off in front of huge numbers of people. Harry doesnt take the revelation well. - Book 2 of The Terrible Two involves trying to pull one of these on the new principal, who wears suspenders and a belt to ensure his pants stay up. - Done twice as a challenge in Impractical Jokers, where the Jokers have to get a stranger to untangle earbud cords before a special guest walks over and pulls down their pants. The first time featured Bully Ray, Tommy Dreamer, Velvet Sky, and Luke, a child from a previous challenge. The second, filmed in Hollywood, starred Jay and Silent Bob for three Jokers; the recently fired Rob Emmer went during Sal's turn and pleaded for his job while pitifully pantsing. - In one Kenan & Kel episode, Kel accidentally pulls Kenan's pants off while trying to get him out of a fence. - Malcolm does this to Reese in the Malcolm in the Middle episode "Water Park". - MASH: In "Bottoms Up", Hawkeye pantses Charles during an OR session. Unfortunately for Hawkeye, nobody finds it funny. It becomes a Once Done, Never Forgotten moment, brought up in several subsequent episodes, including the series finale. - Mortified: In "Taylor Turns Bad", Layla convinces the grounded Taylor to sneak out, then secretly pulls Taylor's jeans off leaving her in a skirt top, her underwear and even bigger trouble with her parents. - Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide, in "Guide to Embarrassment" the school bully Loomer and nearly a dozen other kids have a contest to see who can pants Cookie the most times in one day. Cookie eventually gets around this by wearing a janitors uniform. - 7th Heaven: On her first day of high school, Ruthie pulls Martin's pants down and is immediately suspended for it. - Numerous times on The Suite Life of Zack & Cody. Once Zack to get him and Cody on a game show. One time Cody pantsed Zack to keep him from stealing. - That '70s Show: - In "Donna's Panties", While playing basketball Eric pulls down Donna's sweatpants revealing her granny panties, the rest of the episode revolves around Eric handling this inappropriately. - In "Misfire", during a dream sequence, Kelso pulls down Jackie's pants annoying her more than embarrassing her. - In an Episode of Friends, during a football game Ross pulls down Monica's sweatpants to stop her from catching a ball, she chases after him trying to hide her boyshorts. - The Wonder Years* - In "Loosiers", one of the students has their gym shorts pulled down during a basketball game, exposing his tighty-whitey briefs while Kevin and Paul laugh. - A servant pulls down the pants of a general in XTC's video for Generals And Majors while the general is pointing to a world map on the wall. The victim doesn't seem to notice, being preoccupied with global conquest. Viewable on YouTube at the 2:35 mark: [1]. - Happens in the Self-Deprecation video for Skee Lo's song "I Wish" when a humiliating failure a playing basketball due to his lack of height culminates in him being pantsed by another player - [2] - In Nickelodeon Clickamajigs "Bully the Bully" one of the things you can do to the bully is remove his buckle. It will cause him to turn flushed after being pantsed. - Happy Tree Friends: In "Gems the Breaks", Lifty and Shifty pull down Splendid's hazmat pants to expose him to the Krypto-Nut. - At the beginning of the Shut Up! Cartoons Smosh Babies episode "The Great Big Wheel Race", Ian and Anthony pull Lenny's pants down to make him look stupid in front of Penny. Lenny catches them before they can run away, and asks them if they're trying to kiss his butt. - Strong Bad Email: In "senior prom", Strong Bad crashes the prom with a device that will remove everyone's pants. Only after activating it does Strong Bad realize he's the only one wearing pants. - Abel Rewanz from Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures yanks the pants off Daniel Ti'fiona, seeking Daniel's clan marking. Abel finds one in strip #550, and remarks that it strongly resembles a hot-iron branding. This completes a Brick Joke with strip #63, which the creator thoughtfully footnotes. For the record, Dan's clan mark is on his right shoulder, not on his furry butt. - Whateley Universe: In The Road to Whateley (Part 3): The Short Goon popped a power leap to head them off before they could get to the alley. He spun around, crouched and started glowing with ominous power. " Onnnneee... Twooo... Thr—HEY!" the shrimp yipped as Nick picked him up, completely ignoring the scary, scary power buildup and pantsed him, then flung him into a convenient and open dumpster. - In two separate clips released by "Barstool Sports," the "Pardon My Take" intern Billy Football has the back half of his pants ripped off: - The first clip occurs while the crew is in Las Vegas, and leaves Billy's red and black trunks (short boxer-briefs) on display, while Billy insists that the ripped pants were the only ones he brought with him to Vegas. - The second clip happens in the Barstool Sports office. Here, Billy is wearing khakis, the back half of which are again torn off. Billy is mockingly asked if he's wearing tighty-whities. Despite his insistence that they are boxer-briefs (and his attempts to stretch the underwear down his leg to make them appear longer than they are) he is clearly wearing white briefs with a spotted pattern. - In Jenna Marbles's video "I'm Dog Stairs For Halloween" Julien does this to her, much to her ire and she (jokingly) tells him to move out. Later, she gets back at him by pantsing him. Jenna: My butt's out when you pants me, now how does it feel?! [pulls down Julien's pants]] Julien: Ha ha, I am naked . - The Angry Beavers episode "Spooky Spoots" had Norb and Daggett pull down the pants of Scientist #1. - In the Adventure Time episode "Who Would Win," Jake pantses Finn during their fight; which proves to be useful advice from a car salesman spirit in defeating the monster terrorizing the village. Jake then tells Finn to pull his pants up before they fight the monster again. - Archie's Weird Mysteries, "Invisible Archie": In a final attempt to embarrass Robbie, the jock who's been distracting Betty and Veronica, Reggie pulls down his pants in front of the audience. This prank actually works. However, Reggie performs it oblivious to his becoming visible again. Able to see his tormentor, Robbie beats the stuffing out of him in retaliation. - In Big Mouth episode "Steve the Virgin", this happens multiple times throughout the episode due to President Trump declaring it National Pantsing Week. Oddly, Played for Laughs in a series that usually takes sexual harassment seriously. - Every camper was on the receiving end in the Camp Lazlo episode "All Campers Pull Pants" What's particularly bizarre is that in most of the episodes of the series, most of the campers don't wear pants (or underwear, for that matter). - In a flashback in the Family Guy episode, "The Tan Aquatic With Steve Zissou", Peter's childhood bully, Randy Fulcher pantses Peter twice, then pulls Peter's pants up when Peter tries to use the urinal. - In the crossover special between The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy and Codename: Kids Next Door, "The Grim Adventures of the KND", Harold pantses the Mandy Reaper so their attacks will work, showing off pink flower underwear similar to Mandy's normal dress. - One episode of Horrid Henry has the title character pants three boys at school then try to avoid being pantsed in retaliation when his mom makes Henry wear bloomers his aunt sent him. - An accidental version in Jacob Two-Two. Buford falls when climbing a rope and grabs onto Jacob's pants and his weight causes poor Jacob's pants to rip off in front of everyone. - The Johnny Bravo episode "Get Stinky" shows a slide show in the beginning of some of the pranks Stinky Brownstein played on Johnny when they were kids, one of them consisting of her pantsing him. Stinky does it to Johnny again at the end of the episode after \|\|she reveals that she was only pretending to love Johnny as yet another dirty trick.\|\| - In Season 1 of Kablam, the "Surprising Shorts" segment would always begin with June pantsing Henry revealing his Goofy Print Underwear. - The Loud House: - The montage of pranks Lincoln suffers from a bully (who is later revealed to be Ronnie Anne) in the beginning of "Heavy Meddle" includes a scene where his pants are pulled down while he's at his locker. - In "One of the Boys", Lincoln gets transported to an alternate universe where all his sisters are male, their personalities change dramatically and they relentlessly bully him. The one whose personality is the same no matter their gender is Lynn; both Lynn and her male counterpart pants Lincoln in the episode. - In "City Slickers," one of Lincoln's concerns about visiting Ronnie Anne in her new home in Great Lakes City is that she'll depants him on the Jumbotron in the city. It doesn't happen, as Ronnie Anne merely settles for depantsing Lincoln in a less crowded place and leaving him with a photograph of it as a souvenir. - The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In the episode "The Boys are Back in Town", the girls do this to Brick. And either he wasn't wearing any underpants, or they pulled them down along with his pants, since the act exposes his bare butt. - In the Rick and Morty episode "Total Rickall", one of the memories that makes Morty realize Rick isn't a parasite is a memory of him pantsing Morty in front of two girls at school. - Sanjay and Craig: In an episode called Depants Tag, everyone goes around town removing each other's pants until there is only one left standing. Many characters are caught wearing Goofy Print Underwear. - The Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get A Clue! episode "The Many Faces of Evil" had the show's main villain Dr. Phibes attempt to clone himself and his clones all have bizarre quirks. One of the Phibes clones was a prankster who pantses the original Dr. Phibes. - The Simpsons: - In "Bart of Darkness", Martin Prince's pool bursts open from too many people in it, leaving him standing alone. To add insult to injury, Nelson pulls down his trunks, leaving him naked. This was also a Brick Joke from the beginning of the episode, where he brags about wearing 17 layers in the Poolmobile... that are promptly stripped off by the other swimmers. Cue Martin saying, "I brought this on myself." - In "22 Short Films About Springfield", Nelson points and laughs at a very tall man driving a compact car. The angry man gets out of the car and chases him down, then gives him a taste of his own medicine by pulling down his pants and forcing him to march through the center of town in his underwear, telling everybody they pass to point and laugh at him. - Total Drama: - Heather and Gwen are paired up for the rock climbing challenge in "Who Can You Trust?". Gwen climbs, Heather secures her. While preparing Gwen's harness, Heather adds an extra rope with which she can tear off Gwen's skirt at a time of her choosing, which happens to be when Gwen's about halfway up the cliff and can't do anything to protect her modesty. After initial unease, Gwen decides to tough it out and keep climbing, winning not just by determination but also because her opponent, DJ, lost focus trying to look away. - In "Total Drama Drama Drama Drama Island", Noah taunts Duncan when Courtney leaves him behind to make a clean escape with the money. He also comes unwisely close to the bully, so Duncan retaliates by not just pulling his pants down, but by stealing them wholesale. It takes a while before Noah has the time to fetch a new pair. - During the challenge to build a Franken-Chris in "One Flu Over the Cuckoos", Duncan pulls down Harold's pants with the Franken-hand he gets thrown to him by Heather. Leshawna comes to Harold's defense. - Harold gets voted off in "2008: A Space Owen" and as he walks to the Lame-o-sine, Duncan tells him to hurry up and calls him "Doris", Harold's loathed middle name. With nothing more to lose, Harold runs back and pulls down his long-suffered bully's pants. Duncan acknowledges he deserved that. - The Wander over Yonder episode "The Brainstorm" has Peepers proposing plans to conquer a planet and Lord Hater shooting his suggestions down by addressing a way Wander and Sylvia might ruin the plan. One possibility Lord Hater brings up is the Watchdogs being incapacitated by Sylvia pantsing them. - What's with Andy?, episode "101 Underpants", Andy as revenge for getting laughed at when his pants fell down, plans to pants everyone at school with special belts that fall off when they're posing for a school picture. When he finds out that Lori is wearing one of the belts, he tries to "save her pants". - In the Xiaolin Showdown premiere Raimundo does this to Omi and Omi does it to Jack. The latter allows him to win the Xiaolin Showdown. - In "The Shard of Lightning," Jack and his robotic double depants Omi again as one of the pranks they pull with the titular artifact.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PantsPullingPrank
Paper Fan of Doom - TV Tropes It's just an ordinary, if large, paper fan — accordion-pleated white paper, taped at one end to form a handle, but some characters wield them the way others do the dreaded Hyperspace Mallet, and get much the same results — the unfortunate target usually goes rolling down the street from the force of the blow. Sometimes used as a symbol of dubious authority, the paper fan (or harisen in Japanese) has roots in the Japanese equivalent of vaudeville comedy, particularly of the slapstick variety — and like an actual slap stick it makes a lot of noise with little real hurt. It is the tool of a tsukkomi, or "straight man", of a standard two-man comedy team in a kind of routine common to the Kansai region called manzai; it's used to upbraid the other member of the team (the buffoonish boke) when he says or does something foolish. Naturally, this has been carried right over into anime and, being a tradition stemming from the Kansai region, it should be noted that, usually, either the wielder or the target are The Idiot from Osaka. This may go back even further though, since fans with sharpened metal ribs were allegedly used as weapons of war and assassination, being particularly suited to the latter due to ease of disguise. (In fact; there are arts about using fans, as well as fans made for weapons). For such weapons, see Combat Hand Fan, though these two tropes can overlap. A similar western version is the archetypal rolled up newspaper. Compare Dope Slap. If the paper fan is used as an actual weapon, see Combat Hand Fan. Has nothing to do with the dangers of fans with exposed rotating blades. ## Examples - Haruko in AIR uses one to reinforce that she likes to be called by her first name. - Uraha also uses one in the feudal arc. - In Attack on Titan: Junior High Levi wields paper fans instead of blades. - In Blue Exorcist's Anime, during an early filler episode, Rin briefly suddenly has one in his hands to whack his brother Yukio for being an idiot and ultimately being responsible for the current problem re demon that runs the dorm's kitchen is trying to cook a bunch of girls who, through a misunderstanding, smashed some bento he made with Rin. - Inagawa Yuu from Comic Party is also a fan-wielder. And similar to Tomoko above, she also weaponizes it in Party's Breaker: The Queen Of Heart 2001, and later when she appears as an Assist Character in Aquapazza. - The third Crayo N Shin Chan movvie, Crayon Shin-chan: Unkokusai's Ambitionhave the Nohara family traveling back to Feudal Era Japan to battle the titular villain, Lord Unkokusai, whose sole weakness is a sacred giant paper fan. - Daitarn 3 carries two of these. Note that Daitarn 3 is actually a Humongous Mecha. - And Daitarn uses them for defense. Which may or may not be more outlandish. - In Super Robot Wars, Daitarn 3 can use said paper fan to either block attacks in defense by opening the fan, or use it like a sword to block sword attacks and missiles. Note that Daitain already has a pair of swords and it still uses the paper fan like this. - Rahzel uses one against \|\|the other\|\| Alzeid when he comes to her school and gets in a fight with Fay in Dazzle. - In episode 18 of Excel♡Saga, Sumiyoshi's secret weapon as part of the Municipal Force Daitenzin is a harisen, called the "Giga Paper Fan" in the dub by ADV Films. - Suzuna from Eyeshield 21 used a fan twice in one episode on her brother. Well, he's an idiot, why shouldn't she? - In Full Metal Panic!!, Kaname acquires a paper fan from episode 8 and onward, and relentlessly whacks Sousuke with it in order to teach him how to be a civilized civilian. - Her use of said paper fan becomes much more frequent in Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu. And boy does Sousuke start to fear it; on one occasion, the mere sight of it was enough to shut him up. - In Genshiken, Saki Kasukabe's frequent role as the tsukkomi to the rest of the group's boke is lampshaded when the group makes her a paper fan. - In Haré+Guu, Guu produces a fan and pummels Wadi for his incessant laughing, then swings it threateningly like a baseball bat. - Sakuya Aizawa from Hayate the Combat Butler doesn't just wield an ordinary paper fan — it's a telescoping one that can be reduced to the size of a golf ball and stowed in her pocket. - In Inuyasha, Kagura the Wind Sorceress uses a fan to assist her in summoning her various wind magics. - In Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, Ishigami makes fun of Kaguya and Fujiwara's breasts (nonexistant and comically large respectively, in his opinion)...while the girls are standing right behind him. Fujiwara responds by crafting a paper fan on the spot, then furiously whacking Ishigami upside the head until she's out of breath. - Mei Mer's mother in K.O. Beast uses a Paper Fan of Doom as a greeting. - During an episode of K-On!, Yui and Azusa perform a Boke and Tsukkomi Routine before a show with just the two of them. Azusa, as the tsukkomi, "corrects" Yui's blunders as the boke with a large fan. - Rika uses one sometimes in Kuroko's Basketball. - Used and referred to by name often in Love Lab, with most subtitles translating it as "a slapstick". The very shy and clumsy Suzune Tanahashi comments that her only real talent is to make these very fast, and almost every character gets the fans from her. - Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha INNOCENT gives us Alicia and her Paper Fan Smash, where she transforms her Magic Wand into a paper fan to smack a target hella far. - Arumi from Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi beats Sasshi mercilessly with her paper fan, but then, Sasshi's a moron. - Hidaka Azumi from Mirumo de Pon! also use one to beat up her fairy Yatch. - Naruto: - Temari's attacks are all centered around the giant fan she carries. - And now there's a slightly more literal version called Bashosen. Powerful, but it takes a heavy toll on whoever uses it, I.E. Chakra Drain. (Tenten is the last one seen holding it. Make of that what you will.) - Negima! Magister Negi Magi: - Asuna has a ridiculously enormous harisen as her magical weapon, which dispels summoned enemies in addition to packing a comedic wallop. It can turn into a BFS when things get serious. - In a lighter vein, Chao and Setsuna evoke the manzai routine twice (complete with harisen) during the Mahora Festival arc, when Chao tries to explain that she's a Martian. - Nodame Cantabile has Etou Kouzou, one of the teachers, carry one of these around at all times to the point where he is referred to as Harisen-sensei by the students. \|\|He later gives up his harisen in order to get Nodame to come to her lessons, however\|\|. - Pictured is Senoo Aiko from Ojamajo Doremi. - Kanou uses this to reign in Kaoruko when the otaku gets a little too flamboyant in Okane ga Nai. - Kuromi from Onegai My Melody loves to smack Baku with her fan. Some people compare them to a comedy duo. In one episode, Baku gives her a golden fan for her birthday and she vents her rage on him through it. - The women of the Rainsworth House in PandoraHearts are fond of this. Break frequently makes himself available for Sharon to practice on. - In one episode of Pokémon ("The Purr-fect Hero"), Misty convinces the boys to do what she wants by beating them with a fan. Jessie has also been known to use a fan on her Team Rocket partners. - In another episode called "The Tower of Terror," a Gengar also uses a paper fan to hit Ash in the back of the head. Said Gengar does the same to his buddy Haunter in the face. Both actions were learned from a late-night slapstick comedy TV show. - Played with a bit in Princess Tutu: Ahiru (or Duck, whatever) blocks a sword with a fan. - As it's a common tool in rakugo already, Rakugo Tennyo Oyui has Enchou and Yui using a precise, strong paper fan that, if given significant height, can let Yui slice through a black dragon. - Ranma from Ranma ½ countered a punch from Happosai with a paper fan and used a fan to blow powder/incense back into peoples faces. - In perhaps the deadliest example of the harisen, Anita King from R.O.D the TV (the TV sequel to Read or Die) uses one much of the time. This coupled with Anita being a Paper User and her own not-inconsiderable strength means each hit with the fan can carry the force of a sledgehammer, or, at least, a lil harder than a normal paper fan, when the target isn't an enemy, but her ditz of a sister, who blew the food money on books. - The priest Genjou Sanzo in Saiyuki exercises his moral and scholastic authority over Son Goku by hitting him with a fan. Gojyo's not exactly exempt, either. - Lampshaded in the sixth episode when Gojyo, faced with the wrath of the fan, exclaims "where did that paper fan come from, anyway"? - The primary weapon of Sanada Yukimura in Samurai Girls. In her Master Samurai form, it even has wind powers. - Mai Otsuka from School Rumble. - In Slam Dunk, Ayako the manager girl usually smacks Sakuragi, his friends and/or Miyagi with her paper fan. - In the first episode of Strawberry Marshmallow when the girls are making a birthday present for Nobue the one who falls asleep gets hit with a paper fan (they even keep a tally of paper fan hits). Also, in the Encore OVA Miu's Ironic Hell involves making a fool of herself and not getting hit by a paper fan for it. - Kosuzu Sakurazaki/Tanpopo of Dokkoida?! is a cute little schoolgirl/alien mission controller who wields a mean paper fan. - Hoshina Tomoko from To Heart carries a paper fan. And she actually weaponizes it in The Queen of Heart. - Eva from Umineko: When They Cry puts the "doom" in Paper Fan of Doom. Especially in the manga. - The paper fan is the usual weapon of the Karasu-tengu who guard the Zashiki Warashi in both the manga and anime ×××HOLiC. - Yuzu Hiragi's main shtick in Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V. Even her own father isn't safe. Her other target is Yuya, and since she primarily dishes out this punishment when someone's being stupid, and her father and Yuya are a Bumbling Dad and Idiot Hero respectively, this happens frequently. \|\|It ends up being an important plot point. After Yuzu is Ret-Gone, her father sees the fan and is able to remember his daughter.\|\| - Mulan uses an ordinary fan to disarm the villain in their final showdown. - An incredibly rare non-anime example: In Tamora Pierce's Protector of the Small, the Yamani women of the warrior class use shukusen, the delicate, deadly Japanese "war fans". Said women carry these fans when they feel endangered but can't carry a weapon openly. They are silk with razor-sharp steel ribs, are much heavier than they look, and can slice fingers like sausage - -as Neal finds out when he interrupts a game of fan toss. (Luckily it doesn't end in Fingore, but Lady Yukimi demonstrates its cutting power on a tent pole to demonstrate what could have happened.) Queen Thayet immediately requests one for herself. Ilane also used to whack her children with a normal fan when they didn't cooperate with healers. - In Eric van Lustbader's Sunset Warrior Series, Ronin's mentor \|\|and ultimately Big Bad\|\| the Salamander is a master of using the fan as a weapon. Though the fans he uses are more like the War Fans in the real life section than simple origami. - In Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahende's Year 2000 Endurance Tag batsu game, one of the punishments the guys were chased with was a large, black paper fan. This all culminated at the end of the game with an entire mob of punishers going after the guys with fans. - Retsu from Juken Sentai Gekiranger uses dual bat-themed fans that can inflict pain and deflect energy beams. He can also fly with them. Considering he got this by dancing with a giant bat, it's not entirely surprising. - Natsumi produces one of these against Tsukasa in the File 17 of the Net Movie Spinoff of Kamen Rider Decade's movie. (It helps that the Net Movies in general are purely for comedic purpose to begin with.) Daiki then somehow gets a hand on it a few seconds later to whack Yuusuke with it. - Gotou uses one on a completely lovestruck Eiji in #24 of Kamen Rider OOO, although the attempt of knocking sense back into Eiji doesn't work. - "Sailor Luna" from Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon (the live-action version of Sailor Moon) used a wand that transformed into a harisen as her primary weapon. She also turns it into a golden fan and once, a butterfly net. She uses it as a wand more often as that's the only she can use her only magical attack, Luna Sucre Candy. - Mako/ShinkenPink from Samurai Sentai Shinkenger, whose weapon is the Heaven Fan. It may be a fan, but it's no less effective than any other weaponry on the team. - Even better is Kaoru Shiba's fan; she's never seen actually using it as a fan. Instead, she only uses it to emphasize when her personal aide needs to shut up. - Eventually he learns to dodge her Paper Fan of Doom. The result? The Kuroko give her an even bigger one. Hits from the previous one shut her aide up by leaving him in pain; this one shut him up by knocking him out cold. - Same goes for Mako's counterpart Mia from Power Rangers Samurai. - Fan Geisha from Battle Realms use these, obviously. - In Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, the character Nina is able to use a weapon called Chopper that can be found in a bonus area. Note that Nina is a Squishy Wizard that mainly uses wands with spells. The Chopper increases her physical attack stat far higher than any other weapon and the only spell that it has is a physical attack that does decent damage to enemies. - The principal weapon of Ichisumi in Double Dragon Neon. - In Dynasty Warriors and Warriors Orochi the two Qiao sisters, Da and Xiao, take out entire armies with their twin paper fans note : It takes a close examination, but the edges are tipped with metal, which is what they use to fight. Strategists Sima Yi and Zhuge Liang use big feathered fans that shoot Frickin' Laser Beams. Sima Yi trades his in for Razor Floss and claws in DW6 but gets it back in 7, also where Zhuge Dan takes up the family tradition with a feathered fan of his own. Of course, they are actually incredibly weak weapons though by 7 the feathered fan users can summon lightning as part of their repertoire and attack more by blowing gusts of wind at their opponents than simply whacking them. - Mai Shiranui from Fatal Fury and The King of Fighters uses paper fans as both melee and ranged weapons. - LeBlanc, the semi-comic-relief villain from Final Fantasy X-2 uses a metallic version of the fan for both tsukkomi and as a weapon. - God Hand has these as weapons Gene can pick up, but they aren't that strong compared to, say, a hammer or big club. - Twin paper fans are the preferred weapon of Anji Mito from Guilty Gear. These aren't just fans, however; they're actually from the same set of quasi-magical weaponry as Sol and Ky's swords. Thus their ability to grow to immense sizes, conjure up Ki Manipulation, and many other things that normal fans can't do. - Papillon of La Pucelle wields a paper fan as her main weapon and can do pretty good damage with it. This being Nippon Ichi, 'pretty good damage' means 'nearly unlimited with enough grinding.' - In The Last Blade videogames, Lee Rekka uses a folding fan as his weapon, though he uses it very rarely, preferring fiery kicks. - One of Zero's weapons in Mega Man X8 is the B Fan, a pair of harisen which can deflect enemy attacks. - Auto, one of Dr. Light's helper robots in the classic series, holds out a paper fan when doing his "battle pose". If he actually uses the fan in combat, we never see it. - In the Mega Man Battle Network series, the Wind Rack chip makes Mega Man attack with a Paper Fan. It hits a whole column and knocks enemies back. - In Mortal Kombat, Kitana uses fans as her weapons. They appeared to just be paper fans in MKII, but in more recent versions they strongly resemble Japanese war fans, most likely tessen. She can decapitate people with them. - In Mother 3, a whack to the head with the Paper Fan item can cure a party member's Confusion status effect. - Hilariously enough, Oda Nobunaga from Sengoku Basara, one of the baddest and most feared badasses has a paper fan (like the one in the image) as his Joke Weapon. - In the original Paper Mario, Lady Bow uses a pink fan to slap her opponents. Her attacks include the normal "Smack" and the powerful "Fan Smack." - Persona: - In Persona 4, Yukiko Amagi makes use of these. Oddly, she throws them at enemies rather than the typical smacking. - In Persona 4: Arena, Teddie smacks foes with a paper fan when he grabs them. - In Persona 5 a party member whose Confidant is at least at Rank 6 can cure a teammate's status aliment by grabbing a paper fan out of nowhere and slapping them with it. - Kururu from Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure uses a paper fan as a weapon. - In the Samurai Shodown games, Kyoshiro Senryou uses a fan for light close range attacks. Oh, and also as a flaming projectile. - In Samurai Warriors and Warriors Orochi the Bishōnen Mitsunari Ishida, who wields a paper fan, happens to be a rather snarky and sarcastic fellow. Also, Takeda Shingen uses gunbai fans. - Jet the Hawk of the Sonic Riders games uses a feathered variation of this to speed up as well as harm enemies. - Princess Peach uses a fan in Super Mario RPG. - Each of the Elemental Lords in Super Robot Wars (the best known of which is Masaki Andoh's Cybuster) has a familiar, and with that familiar comes the ability to release it in battle (called "High Familiar"). The familiars of the Elemental Lord of Earth Zamzeed are three... platypus things... and when released for High Familiar, two of them smash the enemy as normal, and the third finishes by clobbering the target with a metal harisen. - In Spin-Off Super Robot Taisen: OG Saga: Endless Frontier, character Suzuka uses folding fans. She primarily uses them as an unusual control scheme for her not-so-Humongous Mecha, but in at least one of her skills, she actually uses them to attack directly. - The Super Smash Bros. games feature the paper fan as a weapon. It does measly damage and no knockback, but its attack speed is so high that one can whack an opponent with it infinitely to rack up their damage up extremely quickly. Plus, it has high knockback when thrown and always sends the target upward, so it's very easy to just whack an enemy for half a minute with no escape then throw the fan at them for an easy kill. This is known as "fantrapping". The fan can also instantly break an opponent's shield if used as a smash attack and the shield will break no matter how charged it is. Alas, it was removed in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U. - Super Smash Bros. Ultimate features Banjo & Kazooie and during Masahiro Sakurai's gameplay demonstration of them, he introduced their side smash known in Japan as "Harisen Kazooie" which in the West is known as "Breegull Bash". Banjo slams Kazooie to the ground to hit opponents and the move in Japan is meant to simulate smacking people around with a paper fan. - The Paper Fan is one of Lloyd Irving's most powerful weapons in Tales of Symphonia and is only attainable after an extremely expensive sidequest that spans half the game. - A few characters from the Touhou Project series use fans as their weapons, but primarily Yukari Yakumo and Yuyuko Saigyouji. The latter goes so far as to have a BFF behind her when she uses her strongest spellcards in Perfect Cherry Blossom. - It's not just PCB. She busts that fan out \|\|on one spellcard on Hard or Lunatic in Ten Desires, as the stage 1 boss.\|\| - Yukari just slaps people with it in the fighting games. - Hata no Kokoro also wields fans, but is a lot more flashy about it. - Watatsuki no Toyohime. She wields a fan that, according to herself, can vaporize a whole forest to atomic level with a single sweep of it. However, noone was able to confirm this, as she still hasn't used it. - In Yie Ar Kung-Fu (1985), the opponent Fan, one of the first females in fighting game history, constantly throws deadly fans at the player. - Karin-dou 4koma: The punishment for laughing during the No Laughing Game is getting smacked in the ass by "Smacking-kun", an enchanted paper fan that deals no damage but makes a loud sound and causes great pain. - Mondine, the matriarch of the Glady family in La Famille Glady, has a magic fan that can actually teleport you through the world when she smacks her terraquean globe with it. - The Skunk Fu! episode "The Art of the Fan-Fan" has this in spades.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PaperFanOfDoom
Paper Master - TV Tropes You're about to get reamed. "My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall." Paper doesn't seem like it would make too great a weapon. Yeah, a paper cut might sting for a while, and a rolled-up newspaper could possibly slay seven flies with one blow, and it could certainly cover a rock, but nobody kids themselves that a sheet of paper is going to be useful in a real fight. Even the dreaded Paper Fan of Doom has much more bang than bite. Sounds like a pretty lame power, right? Not quite. There are actually a fair number of characters in fiction that use paper in battle very effectively. These characters have near-Elemental Powers to control or even transform into paper, and usually can create a vast number of weapons only limited by their imagination and paper folding skills. Often when this happens, the paper itself seems to take on the qualities of said weapon (i.e. a paper spear piercing someone like a spear made of steel, instead of crumpling up). These characters are often weak to water and fire (or anything that will soak or burn their paper), but not always, especially when the writer wants to show just how powerful they are. A piece of paper in the hands of a paper master can block bullets fired almost point blank without a scratch, a dome made out of their paper can protect one from a falling jet aircraft, and a paper card thrown by one often spells death. Can be a subset of Green Thumb (as paper is mainly made from wood), although more often than not, this power stands by its own. Be very careful, dear reader, when confronting these characters in offices, libraries, bookstores, newspaper stands, banknote mints, or paper mills. And heavens help you if one such opponent is also a Badass Bureaucrat. Popular in anime as origami (the art of paper folding) is a big tradition in Japan. In a sense, this trope is Older Than Steam at the least: according to legend, a true master of origami can unlock the secrets of creation. Also, in the Chinese and Japanese culture, paper talismans with supernatural powers are common. In Onmyōdō, an Onmyōji uses Shikigami, which are often depicted as little paper men/creatures following orders of the Onmyōji. Also "gami" can mean god 「神」, but is a homophone of paper 「紙」. Sub-Trope of Art Attacker and Single Substance Manipulation. Overlaps with Death Dealer, someone who favors laminated rectangular paper, aka playing cards. Compare Feather Flechettes and Paper People. Not to be confused with Paper Cutting or Black Belt in Origami. ## Examples: - Read or Die and R.O.D the TV, the trope-namer and the source of the picture above: Yomiko Readman and the Paper Sisters, are examples of what apparently is the most common type of superhero in their universe. In the manga, Yomiko, remembering her dead master(and lover)'s words, can control her paper to be immune to fire. In the novel, Ziggy Stardust of the Science division made various paper for her to use, like black paper with explosives that can explode at her will and highly water resistant paper that can lessen her weakness against water(and also stand on top of water with pieces of paper). Overlaps with Personality Powers, in that being a Paper Master goes hand in hand with being a bibliophile... which also brings Blessed with Suck into the mix, in that this bibliophilia often extends to life-wrecking extremes. - Saicho of Flame of Recca, a fighter who can manipulate papers to act like weapons much like the Read or Die characters that he predates by a few years. For example, he can make a paper sword that's harder than steel. - Hunter × Hunter: - Kalluto, the youngest sibling of lead character Killua. He uses a paper fan as a bladed weapon, administers the Death of a Thousand Cuts with confetti, and eavesdrops on people using paper dolls of them once they've got a bit of his paper on them. And he's a lethal assassin. - One of abilities of Nen is the ability to strengthen objects, including paper. At one point Wing tears a page out of a book, strengthens it with Nen, and hurls it at a wall, neatly slicing a metal soda can that was in the way. Also, at various points in the anime, Hisoka tends to do the same with playing cards. - In Inuyasha, Byakuya uses an origami crane as his mode of flight transport. He also uses origami lotus flowers as a focus for his illusions. These illusions are so good they can fight on his behalf. However, if they receive what would be a killing blow, they revert back to an origami lotus flower thereby revealing the illusion and also the real location of the real Byakuya. - Onmyōdō, via Shikigami or Ofuda, is very powerful in the Negima! Magister Negi Magi universe. Setsuna is a notable heroic user. - Konan from Naruto, the lone female member of Akatsuki. She's made it into such things as wings, fake tree camouflage from papier-mache, and is capable of both turning into paper and making a copy of herself out of paper which she can control from a remote location (though she/it can apparently be prevented from moving if something sticks to it, like oil). This also includes the paper explosives that are a mainstay of the series. Her ultimate attack involves controlling 600 billion of those paper explosives to create 10 minutes of nonstop explosions. - Sailor Mars from Sailor Moon uses an Asian Rune Chant and ofuda-throwing with "Akuryō Taisan!" (literally Evil Spirits, Begone!") to kill monsters. In Sailor Moon R: The Movie, an enormous spiral of ofuda used as a weapon (which, concidentally, is what the same attack does in the live-action version). - Keisei in Corpse Princess has displayed the ability to turn a scroll of Buddhist scripture into a magical staff. - Aono in Sola can control paper. - \|\|Curren Huckebein\|\| of Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force has this as her weapon of choice. She introduces herself by having the tome she carries create a paper storm that slices up and critically injures \|\|Vita and Erio\|\|. - In Natsume's Book of Friends, the Natori's often commonly uses them for his exorcism as the Natori clan specializes in this. - Jojos Bizarre Adventure: - Diamond is Unbreakable has Terunosuke Miyamoto, who's Stand, Enigma, allows him to turn people into paper, as long as they first perform a Character Tic they perform when they're afraid. He can also turn objects into paper, storing them for a later use, such as food, a gun, a taxi, scorpions, pure electricity, and a paper shedder. - Tsurugi Higashikata from JoJolion has the Stand Paper Moon King, which gives \|\|him\|\| power over origami creations. It imbues Tsurugi's origami with their "real world" counterparts abilities: a fortune teller reads minds and tells the future, a frog hops, a cicada flies, a car drives around, bananas make someone slip and fall. Paper Moon King even allows Tsurugi to turn things like cellphones into origami creations. However, the Stand's true power \|\|is to steal the target's ability to recognize people and objects for what they really are, particularly if they're looking for someone or something in particular. Tsurugi has used the Stand to make two people see every other person as having the same distorted face, make all signs and labels say the same name, make a pile of leaves all look like origami frogs, and make every city bus look like his own father to a man chasing him down.\|\| - Later in JoJolion we're introduced to Tamaki Damo, who tortures people with folded up banknotes. However, this isn't a Stand power. It's just his preferred method after his Stand Vitamin C \|\|melts his victims' bodies into puddles of human-shaped goo. The relatively sharp edge of the folded paper slices through their already soft bodies like a hot knife through butter, severing limbs and injuring internal organs. Oh, and they still feel pain.\|\| - In A Certain Scientific Accelerator, Naru wields weapons and wears clothing made of paper. She can make paper soft as silk, harder than steel, or explode like a bomb at will. - In Ninja Slayer, Yamoto Koki uses origami to fight. - In Spirited Away, Haku the dragon is attacked and hurt by what appear to be enchanted paper people. - Kaede of Lapis Re:LiGHTs uses enchanted paper dolls as her primary forms of attack against Magical Monsters. She can also enlarge them so she can ride on them though it requires constant concentration. - Stalker with a Crush Paperdoll: compressed the bodies of those she envelops and administers lethal papercuts strong enough to slice through Spider-Man's webbing. - Marvel Comics' Thin Man has the ability to flatten himself razor-thin, in addition to Rubber Man powers. Again, razor thin. And he's a sadistic, bitter old man. And a good guy. - Gambit's real power is his ability to force small objects to explode by "charging" them, converting their potential energy into kinetic energy. His favorite tool is playing cards and the impossible things he can do with them sometimes evoke this trope - The Flash: Villain Papercut's power is to control paper, \|\|though his actual power is controlling wood. It's just easier for him to manipulate paper.\|\| He primarily uses his power to make razor-sharp paper shurikens. - Batman and The Creeper once battled a foe called the Origami Man who controlled paper: killing people by blasting rolled paper through the victim like a hurricane blasts straw through a plank. - Burka Avenger is a good example, since the eponymous heroine uses books and pencils as weapons in her martial arts. - The Bolt Chronicles: - While scolding Bolt for his bad behavior in "The Coffee Shop," Penny threatens to spank the dog with a rolled-up newspaper if he continues to misbehave. It's an empty threat, as it's stated that she has never hit Bolt — but it has kept him in line in the past. - In "The Party," Leonard the poodle dashes for the bedroom to avoid what he expects will be a spanking with a rolled up newspaper from his owner when he is caught playing loud music. Leonard: Hide, hide, hide, hide, hide! I gotta hide before he catches me and whacks me with a newspaper! Outta my way, cat! - In The MLP Loops, Ivory Scroll becomes this after a run in the Naruto universe, as befits her nature as a Badass Bureaucrat. She also takes the time to learn explosive runes. - Teri in Terix Gumball In Between Worlds [1] she can manipulate paper by simply touching it.She is able to make a living paper Hawk,Scorpion,Lion,F-18 etc. - Lexi in Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail is a book who can deattach his pages to create a humanoid figure. He can then use those papers to move around to dodge attacks or folds them to form weapons like blades and whips. He's even capable of shapeshifting into creatures like a gryphon and transform the papers to form suitable clothes and hair if need be. - In ⫚ - His Daughters, The Miracles of the family, Elizabeth's gift is the ability to bring paper creations to life. - In Kubo and the Two Strings, Kubo's main use of his Magic Music is using origami paper to tell stories to his village, but later creating things like a boat while on his quest. Uniquely, the power works on dead leaves and wood, implicitly because that's essentially what paper is after all. - Cast a Deadly Spell. Tugwell uses a spell to slice a man to death with a whirlwind of cut-up pieces of newspaper. - At one point in We Are the Night, Charlotte slices a man's throat with a page torn from a book. - Some wuxia movies have villains that masters the art of using literally anything as weapons... including paper. In The Imperial Swordsman and The Magic Blade, the final battle have the main villain (or at least an Elite Mook lackey) attempting to rough up the heroes using pages from books, which can embed into wood and slice through flesh. - The main character of the appropriately titled book Paper Mage is...well...a paper mage; a young Chinese woman who has the ability to summon guardians by using origami. - In one of the books of "The Adventures of Samurai Cat," Tomokato (the eponymous samurai cat) faces off against another cat named "Origami Ito" (a pun on the name of the protagonist of "Lone Wolf and Cub.") Origami Ito has a huge roll of paper which he can fold into weapons, walls, soldiers, and tanks, which come to life to attack his enemy. - In Harry Connolly's Twenty Palaces book series, the main character uses a spell to create a "ghost knife" which is basically a laminated piece of notebook paper with some magical symbols written on it in marker. It is supposed to be able to cut "ghosts, magic, and dead things," but the definition of "dead things" is broad enough to include any inanimate object, and in this universe, every living thing has a soul or spirit that qualifies as a kind of ghost. Add in the ability of the ghost knife to respond to its owner's will by flying wherever the creator mentally directs it, and you have a weapon that cuts through doors and bullets, leaves any living opponent exhausted and weak by injuring its soul, and destroys your enemies' magic, giving you a perfect all-purpose (mostly)nonlethal weapon that fits in your pocket. Even when someone else grabs it, the creator can will it to fly through the opponent's hand and back to the creator, leaving the enemy soul-drained in the process. The protagonist can even use it to slice up meat, and it's safe to rinse, as it's laminated. - Lazy Dragon, a character from the Wild Cards universe, can create and then "possess" animals. He needs some kind of symbolic image of the animal to do it, and usually finds it most practical to make little origami tigers or snakes or birds or whatever, since he has easy access to paper and origami needs no tools. - Though not strictly a version of this trope Ghostweight by Yoon Ha Lee is worth mentioning here, set in an interstellar empire with strong Asiatic influences. The protagonist steals a mercenary 'kite' spacecraft, a Drone Deployer whose drones take the form of origami shapes that unfold into the required weaponry. - The main character from Robin McKinley's Shadows is into origami \|\|and discovers she can use it to perform magic.\|\| - The Paper Magician series by Charlie N. Holmberg takes place in a world where mages can bond to man-made substances and perform magic with them. The main character, as one might guess, is apprenticed to a magician bonded to paper, and over the course of the series learns paper magic (known as Folding) herself. - The madwoman of The Girl Who Drank the Moon learns to transmute materials during her confinement. She uses this power to manufacture paper and then fold into various origami birds, which then become animate. The flock are dangerous attackers and coordinate to fly the madwoman out of prison. - The Adventures of Pete & Pete: "Farewell, My Little Viking" featured the appropriately named bully "Paper Cut", who was a master of making dangerous origami figures and threatened to use them on anyone who dared throw scissors against him in a game of RockPaperScissors. - Tsuruhime (the White Ranger) in Ninja Sentai Kakuranger. One of her attacks is a storm of paper cranes. This attack is occasionally replicated at a larger scale by the first Humongous Mecha of the series, Muteki Shogun (Invincible General). - In Exalted, the Dreaming Pearl Courtesan Style has a technique that allows you to turn paper fans into sharp and deadly weapons. - In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the Kitsune werefoxes have a set of Gifts that utilize Ju-fu, or paper magic, using a combination of origami and calligraphy to make single-use magical items out of (preferably) natural paper. - In Pathfinder, the Scroll Master wizard archetype lets you turn a magic scroll into a slashing weapon or a shield; the Living Grimoire inquisitor archetype lets you turn a holy book into a bludgeoning weapon; and the Tome Eater occultist archetype lets you regain power from eating written text. - Action Taimanin: Mai Nanase specializes in the Paper Spirit ninja art, allowing her to put particles into pieces of paper and make use of them as the situation demands, such as snaring enemies, transforming them into blades or explosives or create sentient origamis. - Runescape has Lexicus Runewright, who summons magical books that attack with all three types of combat, shoot magical pages out of his Spell Book to attack players, and summons books that explode for incredibly heavy damage (enough to oneshot people under 500HP). - The Shin Megami Tensei games have two actual mythological examples: Shikigami and Shiki-Ouji, demons conjured into paper slips. - Sketch Turner, the comic book artist sucked into his own creation in Comix Zone, can tear a chunk out of the comic page he's fighting on and turn it into a lethal projectile by folding it into a paper airplane. His pet rat, Roadkill, scratches at panel borders to reveal weapons and power-ups. The villain of Sketch's comic, Mortus, draws monsters to attack him. - One Piece - Great Hidden Treasure of the Nanatsu Islands has a villain who ate a Logia-type Devil Fruit, called the Pasa-Pasa no Mi or the Paper-Paper Fruit, that granted him power over paper. Simon used this ability in various ways such as flight, cutting attacks, elemental attacks such as electricity and poison, and the power to heal himself. Given how Devil Fruits are only limited by the strength, skill, and creativity of the user, it's no wonder why Oda relegated such a versatile power to non-canon status. - Kōmokuten from Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA- fights with an open scroll. - In Paper Mario, the characters are absolutely flat, and as a result almost every power-up Mario gets includes origami-ing himself. - Melody, one of the Portrait Ghosts from Luigi's Mansion, attacks with sheet music. - Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 has Phoenix Wright. Most of his attacks involve paper and documents. His "Break the Witness" attack (an upgraded version of "Press the Witness" and only available in Turnabout Mode), where he walks forward while emphatically smacking some papers, can do insane amounts of damage, and if used as an assist it becomes an Invulnerable Attack. - In the Super Smash Bros. series, the paper fan is one of the most dangerous items because it can be used rapid-fire on the opponent without giving them a chance to break away, along with having a shield-breaking attack and absurd effectiveness when thrown. - inFAMOUS: Second Son has Celia Penderghast, a conduit who has the power to control paper and is the driving force behind the Paper Trail DLC. She can transform into paper, use it as a weapon, and create deceptively strong armor by using mechanical compound force. - Lailah from Tales of Zestiria uses paper as her weapon. She fights by scattering the sheets around her and then lighting them on fire. - Minagi Tohno from Eternal Fighter Zero fights with rice tickets, whether by throwing them like shurikens, or striking directly; referencing how she likes carrying dozens of rice tickets with her in AIR. - In the later games of the Azada series, Titus appears in a cloud of paper scraps when he teleports into a realm. - So Sorry of Undertale throws balled up pieces of drawing paper at you, causing damage unintentionally. - The v2 update of Epic Battle Fantasy 5 introduces Origami Wraith and Origami Dragon, which have actual paper-based (though actually non-elemental) attacks even called Paper Storm and Paper Blade respectively. The former is even accessible to the player as a follow-up to a specific weapon's basic attack. Then there is a new Limit Break for girls only consisting of them being drawn and having dancing sketch on a paper, which somehow raises some of stats of entire party. Finally, there is an entire boss rush drawn on a page of paper, and all their attacks are drawn on that list as well ... except for pencil that comes down at you randomly and does some damage to you. Yeah. - Deckard Cain in Heroes of the Storm, as a Mythology Gag to an April Fool's video for Diablo 3, has the "Lorenado" as one of his ultimate abilities, creating a whirlwind of tome pages. - The Tactician class from Xenoblade Chronicles 3 utilises origami called Mondo as Attack Drones. Taion, who is the original character with this class, gains an Ouroboros form that allows him to use his Mondo to create illusions and use them as explosives. - The Millwall brick, a club made out of newspaper. - Discovery Channel had a convict mentioning the combat potential of newspapers folded and/or rolled up tightly enough... Spears... Hammers... keep in mind that paper used to be wood, and only its thinness and flexibility separates it from that mechanically. High density cardboard (which tightly enough rolled newspaper could approximate) doesn't hold a candle to steel for ability to apply bludgeoning force, but it is a lot better than bare hands for reach. - Policemen have been been caught using phone books to beat confessions out of suspects. Not only is it seriously painful, but it's also likely to not cause injury or leave marks which makes it difficult to prove. - The History Channel had an episode of Ancient Discoveries that tested the validity of paper armor from ancient China. The paper armor they created was able to completely stop a crossbow bolt from 20 meters. - MythBusters found that pykrete made from newspaper pulp actually performed significantly better than the "classic" recipe made from sawdust. There was also an episode examining prison weaponry where a newspaper crossbow was made — not much penetrating power, but could be fired accurately enough to kill anyway. - If you work in a paper mill, paper cuts can get serious. A ten metre square of freshly cut card has both a serious cutting edge, and enough weight behind it, to take of somebody's arm if it drops edge-on. - Paper is often shipped from the mill in rolls that can weigh several tons each. If one of these gets rolling they can crush anyone and anything in their path. - In general, there is a reason why papercuts are painful. They may look like nothing, but they are often deeper than you would think.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PaperMaster
Paper People - TV Tropes "Being paper thin, I'll just slip in quietly through the crack in the door! Hahahahahaha! " This is when a character is quite literally paper-thin, as if they were a paper cutout. This can also apply to normally three-dimensional characters who have been flattened as a result of, say, a 300-pound weight being dropped on them. Not to be confused with Flat Character. ## Examples: - The "flattening iron" of Doraemon can turn objects and people paper-thin and -light (in case of people, it seems the iron also makes them unconscious while being flat), making them easy to be moved, rolled and stored. By spraying water on the flattened objects, they can be turned back into their original shapes and weight. - In episode 35a of Jewelpet: Magical Change, a side-effect brought on by Sakutaro's Cool Watches is that the humanized Jewelpets become paper thin. \|\|It escalates to them being unable to move at all a minute or so later.\|\| - In Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Diamond Is Unbreakable, Terunosuke Miyamoto's stand, Enigma, allows him to turn both objects and people into paper. - In Kill la Kill, the deceptively powerful and vicious Nui Harime, a model of Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon who sports a pink frilly attire and parasol, often Art Shifts into appearing to be a paper cut-out. Specifically, whenever she escapes a hail of blows from even the quickest and most powerful of the characters in the over-the-top narrative, she appears as a paper person rotating around her vertical access, giving the appearance that she is forever being blown away just out of the reach of the in-rushing attacks. - Edgeshot, a Pro Hero in My Hero Academia, is able to do this thanks to his Quirk, allowing him to pass through tight spaces and compress himself so tightly that he can attack faster than the speed of sound. - In chapter 12 of Nurse Hitomi's Monster Infirmary, Usui becomes one of these when a giant falls on her. \|\|It also turns her into a Fourth-Wall Observer.\|\| - In Tamagotchi: Happiest Story in the Universe!, the various Tamagotchis on Tamagotchi Planet are flattened into literal walking pieces of paper as a result of Kikitchi deciding to visit "The World's Happiest Story" and causing Tamagotchi Planet to slowly turn into a storybook. - Many artists enjoy making paper children, which, while not quite as alive as most examples of this trope, are photographed so as to appear to be interacting with the otherwise-three-dimensional world. - Happy Heroes: In Season 8 episode 5, Huo Haha afflicts the Supermen with different magic spells, and Smart S. looks normal until he turns around and reveals he was turned flat. - Lamput: In "Shape Shift", Lamput gets the docs to transform into a flat sheet resembling a crosswalk, getting them walked on by multiple people crossing the street at once. A few seconds later, it skips to nighttime where they shapeshift out of that form, revealing those people left them flattened. - In episode 61 of Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf, Wolffy sings a magic song to flatten himself, allowing him to squeeze through the gate to Goat Village easily. - In the Simple Samosa episode "Spa Wars", Iddiyappam Appa, the owner of Appa Spa, chases after Samosa when he steals the remote control for all the spa equipment. Samosa uses the remote to squash Appa flat with one of the pieces of spa equipment, causing him to emerge completely flat and remain so for a few seconds before promptly reinflating himself back to normal. - Flat Man of the Great Lakes Avengers. Apparently he has a 3D form, but his Rubber Man powers only work while flat so he only switches to that when he absolutely needs to. - One robber / rapist crushed by a millstone in a story by Wilhelm Busch. Other than typical for this trope, he doesn't exactly revert. - Two minor characters in Flaming Carrot got turned into "one-dimensional (sic) cartoon characters" by alien invaders, and folded up and stuffed under a rock. "Well, at least you can park in handicapped spaces now..." - Mortadelo y Filemón does this on a normal basis. A couple of times, it is an actual invention by Professor Bacterio that allows them to be paper thin so that they can infiltrate some place. - Minor Legion of Super-Heroes foe Ronn-Karr has the ability to flatten his body to be two-dimensional. He is not much of a threat. - From Franco-Belgian Comics, Les Krostons feature three evil gnomes originating from a comic book, who have the power to shift from 3-D to 2-D at will. - The Golden Age Timely/Marvel superhero the Thin Man was an elastic-bodied fellow who always took this form. - Spider-Man: Piper Dali got caught in her father's experiment with dimensions and ended up flattened. Becoming the villainess called Paper Doll, she's capable of camouflaging herself as she stalks an actor she developed an obsessive crush on and kills any critics by flattening them to death. Because she's flat she's also razor sharp, and thus can easily slash away Spidey's webbing. She notably has to take careful breaths. - One anthology story had a man develop a pill that allows him to flatten himself, which he planned to use to commit robberies. He can only remain flat for so long before it becomes fatal, so he prepared an antidote in advance. Unfortunately, the antidote is also in pill form, which he realizes to late he can't take in his flattened state, leaving him in tortured suspense as he watches the clock ticking down past his limit. - In the Tim Burton version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Mike Teavee \|\|gets shrunken by the television transportation system\|\| and then has to be \|\|re-stretched by a taffy puller\|\| leaving him very tall but nowhere near average girth. - What do you get when you run the Dynamic Duo over with a steamroller? Flatman and Ribbon. - A Wrinkle in Time: Meg is briefly transported to a two-dimensional world, where she can't breathe ("a paper doll cannot gasp"), and her heart can't pump blood properly ("a knife-like, sideways beat"). It was, Mrs. Which explains, an oversight on her part (apparently she and her two companions were perfectly comfortable there). It's implied that they were paying a brief visit to the above-mentioned Flatland. - Discworld: In Pyramids, one of Ptaclusp's sons accidentally becomes this trope due to the twisting of dimensions by the grossly-oversized Great Pyramid. He also tends to drift horizontally at a steady rate, as the "fourth dimension" of Time now runs that way for him. - The Beautiful Culpeppers is a children's book about a family of paper dolls owned by a little girl. They also have a 2-D paper house, which is tacked to a wall; they can go inside it, but we never get any details about what it's like in there. - One of the many random villages and kingdoms in Oz is a walled kingdom where a little girl uses magic paper provided by Glinda to make living paper dolls. The city is walled and enchanted to keep out disruptive weather conditions and sudden gusts of air from things like sneezing and moving too fast are prohibited. Dorothy visits it with her Aunt and Uncle, whose bumbling accidentally blows the whole place down. - Cool Kids Table: Papyrus from The Chimera Program arc can turn himself completely flat and fold himself into a variety of shapes. He can also fold his arms into blades to attack people. - Dungeons & Dragons: - Second Edition has the duo-dimension spell, which lets a character use this trope. The follow-up spell duo-dimensional blade gives you a blade that has been Sharpened to a Single Atom. The latter power appeared in later editions as well. - Planescape introduced the moignos, basically living mathematical equations that appear as two-dimensional strings of numbers and symbols that teleport around the Clockwork Nirvana of Mechanus. The modrons use them as living calculators to help Mechanus run smoothly, though the bulk of the moignos' processing power is devoted to determining the exact value of pi. - Grimm has the flat folk — people who were crushed under the falling Beanstalk but weren't killed by it, and were squashed into two-dimensionality. Well, physical two-dimensionality. Humans native to the Grimm Lands are always two-dimensional in the literary sense. - In the Savage Worlds setting Wonderland No More by Triple Ace Games one of the player-character races is a Playing Card. It is an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland setting, after all. They have the ability to "turn sideways" against an opponent, giving that opponent a penalty to hit them in combat. They can also slip under doors and such. - Super Smash Bros.: - Mr. Game & Watch takes the original Game & Watch style and goes with it. He's a completely 2-dimensional character, though he's actually a 3D model made to look 2D. - On certain stages, all characters have the same flattening effect applied to them, those being: all incarnations of Flat Zone, Hanenbow, Mute City SNES, PAC-LAND, Duck Hunt note : Only in For Wii U/3DS; its reappearance in Ultimate changes this to just having the illusion described following, and Super Mario Maker. The same applies to their Omega and Battlefield forms, which unfortunately means those specific ones are not allowed in tournaments because the 2D effect makes hit boxes work differently. Some other stages, such as Dream Land GB, use the camera angle to imitate this effect without actually having it. - Two Point Hospital: One of the comical diseases, "Flat Packed", has patients arrive looking like they're made out of a flat sheet of corrugated cardboard. They will occasionally fold themselves up into a ball and float around like paper. - Book Of Demons is set in Paperverse, where the world and all of its inhabitants are paper cutouts because it all take place inside a book. - Several strangers from Goodbye Strangers have flat bodies. The satsumon appear to be a living Chalk Outline and the socioponzy appears to be a giant sheet of paper cut into the vague shape of a stranger. There is enough of them for "Flat" to be one of the types in the Pokémon-like Zeroworld game. The same setting also has the Animalarians and Alphabetarians which look like childish drawings of animals and living letters respectively, but those are only a small projection of very abstract higher dimensional beings. - This Whole Movie is built off this trope. - One episode of The Sonic Amigos has Mario, Sonic, Knuckles and Rayman get turned to paper as a result of one of Eggman's evil schemes. - Flatworms: They are what they say they are. Also: for a substantial proportion of them (the planarians, at minimum), cutting them up just gives you as many worms as pieces. - Ediacaran biota: So far as we can tell from the limited fossil record, these were also thin. Note that some believe that some Ediacarans were (at minimum) proto-mollusks, proto-echinoderms, and proto-chordates, and were thus more substantial. - Trichoplax adhaerens, one of only four members of the phylum Placozoa. These organisms are completely flat, composed of about three layers of cells. - Plane trees. More generally, the practice of espaliering, which trains trees to grow in a flat pattern. - Dolophones Conifera aka the Wrap-around spider is capable of flattening itself to wrap around branches to camouflage itself. Horace: It's like we're cartoons! How horrible!	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PaperPeople
Paparazzi - TV Tropes "You cannot hope to bribe or twist, Thank God, the British journalist. But seeing what the man will do, Unbribed, there's no occasion to." — Humbert Wolfe This is a staple of any work of fiction dealing with celebrities — especially those aiming to show Celebrity Is Overrated. The characters will inevitably have to deal with media-folk who are looking for a story to sell at some point, no matter how it affects the lives of the story's subjects, or what laws the paparazzi break in the process of getting the story. This can be considered the Jerkass flipside or Evil Counterpart to the Intrepid Reporter. Particularly bad ones fall under Immoral Journalist. Rich source of Paranoia Fuel. The paparazzi are Acceptable Targets and may well be victims of a Take That!. Typically they are working for a Strawman News Media outlet. "Papped" has become a verb for being photographed by these people. Compare Tabloid Melodrama, which often overlaps, and Groupie Brigade when the invasion comes from fans. Also compare Media Scrum. For some reason, most people who do this wear a Press Hat. Grammatical note: technically "paparazzi" is the plural and the singular is "paparazzo", but in English "paparazzi" is often used as a singular. ## Examples: - This Heineken ad for the 2005 Super Bowl features Brad Pitt being chased by a gigantic horde of paparazzi as soon as he leaves his apartment, even when he's simply going to a convenience store to buy some beer. The ad implies that this is a regular occurence, as Brad casually ignores the hundreds of paparazzi obssesively trying to photograph him and is even shown to be friendly with a few of them, referring to one by name. - In Assassination Classroom, all of Class 1-E is swarmed by paparazzi when Koro-Sensei is blocked inside the school. The class tries to explain Koro's innocence only for the media to immediately dodge certain questions and statements and start twisting their words around to make the story "juicier" for everyone watching. They are soon chased away by Karasuma and his men, who end up having to keep the crowd at bay while the students remain at the school \|\|to mourn over the death of their teacher.\|\| During their graduation ceremony, they are once again bombarded by the media. Fortunately, the Big 5 of Class 1-A come in and shield them from the oncoming paparazzi as they escort them towards the bus and away from school. - Kaiju Girl Caramelise: After Arata Minami gets kissed by Kuroe in her Harugon form, he gets followed at a distance by various media types trying to get pictures of and interviews with the "Kaiju Prince". To avoid being recognized in public, he starts wearing a face mask whenever he's anywhere other than his home or school. He also reluctantly suggests to Kuroe that they stay away from each other in public until the story dies down so that she won't also get harassed by the paparazzi. - In Full Moon, Mitsuki has to evade a reporter who could expose her secret. - The main characters in the Boys' Love series Haru wo Daiteita are both television and movie actors who constantly weather the Tabloid Melodrama, and are chased by "freelance journalist" Urushizake on his motor scooter. - Hajime Shibata's ex boss Inagaki in Hell Girl was a paparazzo. He ends up sent to Hell by one of his victims, a young man whom he framed alongside his Disappeared Dad. - In Nana, Nana and Ren's relationship is exposed, leading to a media frenzy. Yasu decks one of them. - In Digimon Data Squad, Yoshino gets pursued down the street when she's linked with a pop singer. - Blassreiter likes to portray all news media as swarming, sensationalist vultures whenever the Demoniacs ( especially Gerd) is involved. It gets to the point where it seems like the XAT's job is half dealing with the Demoniacs and half dealing with the seemingly omnipresent news choppers and vans. - The Idolmaster - A Paparazzo is hired by Kuroi to dig up dirt on the 765PRO Idols. - In Case Closed, a really annoying paparazzo named Hirokazu Kajiya shows up when Ran, Sonoko, Conan, and Subaru show up to a concert hall to meet up with a popular singer. Then, the singer appears dead... \|\|But the paparazzo isn't the killer: the singer has been Driven to Suicide for a totally unrelated reason.\|\| - Hyraxx De Mofiti from Buck Godot probably counts. She's a tabloid journalist that at first keeps chasing after Buck in order to find answers for such questions as what colour of clothes does the resident Sufficiently Advanced Alien wears and whther or not the space station is haunted by Elvis. Later on she ends up helping Buck by digging up some information he needs, tho. - Spider-Man: - Peter Parker. Yes, he has been this. In his first meeting with Doctor Octopus he catches the man holding some hospital staff hostage. All fine and well...but the only reason Peter was at that hospital in the first place was that the police and the hospital had refused to let the press in to take photos of Octopus, who at the time was little more than the victim of a horrible lab accident. In other words, Peter broke into a hospital to secretly take pictures of an injured man. He's totally nonchalant about it too and made a remark along the lines of "I've never heard of a hospital keeping people out" with regards to his plan to sneak in. - He once had to deal with a rather vile and self-admitted paparazzi (and the biggest slimeball you'd ever meet) named Nick Katzenburg, a Fat Slob with absolutely no morals, who gained a high position at the Daily Bugle because J. Jonah Jameson had been replaced by the Chameleon, making the Bugle's attacks against Spider-Man into outright slander. When the real Jonah returned, Nick's claws were clipped a little, due to Jonah having some morals as a newsman, and then severely grounded when Thomas Fireheart became the owner in a hostile takeover, turning the Bugle's coverage towards him positive in order to repay a debt he felt he owed (which, sadly, was just as biased, only in reverse). Nick's slanderous ways finally came to a head when he took incriminating pictures of the Rose and published them with Peter Parker's name to protect himself; once the truth came out, he was the target of both the underworld and the police, and an attempt on his life led to a heart attack and his eventual death from lung cancer. - Part of Betty Brant's Adaptational Jerkass in Ultimate Spider-Man involved her being nothing but this. She wanted to just get famous and when Kraven first appeared, she was supposed to report on him, but ending up sleeping with him, costing the Bugle points in its reputation. Even after this, she came trying to get stories, even at the expense of her co-workers \|\|and was about to (incorrect) out Jefferson Morales as the second Spider-Man before she's killed, not caring about the damage she'd done to his family or even bothering to confirm if she was right.\|\| - The world of Plutona treats superheroes like celebrities, with photographers, journalists, and amateur capespotters stalking their every move. Ray's plan on discovering Plutona is to take photos and sell them to the media. - Red Robin: When a panicking Tam Fox tells Vicky Vale that she's engaged to Tim when Vicky starts questioning her about the Waynes' secret, and making it clear she basically already knows they're the Batfamily despite Tam's protests, Tam and Tim are hounded by paparazzi wanting to cover the romance between members of two of Gotham's most respected families. They peter off a bit after Tim reveals the engagement isn't real. - In the Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi story "Strike A Pose" (DC issue #3), the girls don't know a moment's peace because of some paparazzi who pester them even when they're at home in their bus, taking embarrassing shots of them. The only way to get rid of them is to pose politely and smile for the shots, which render them quite worthless since they're not embarrassing and scandalous. - The Ultimates: The hospital were Jan was being treated after Pym's murder attempt started to get filled by this people, so Nick ordered to take her back to the Triskelion. - The Punisher: A non-celebrity version with Chuck Self, a smarmy journalist using Soap (Frank's informant on the police force) as a hostage in order to follow him on a night of killing criminals, hiring two thugs to kill Soap if they don't get a text from him every hour. He very quickly finds out he's in too deep, and after getting shot in the hand, the ass, and losing his tongue, he ends up in a woodchipper feet-first when it turns on (none of which were even Frank's doing). - Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): Thor and Monster X's presence at Mothra's shrine in the Yunnan Rainforest draws multiple human paparazzi who observe and attempt to document them from afar, including Steve Irwin. - The plot of LadyBugOut is kicked off when Alya posts a picture of Ladybug and Chat Noir kissing while their memories were wiped away by Oblivio. She did so over Ladybug's objections, and refused to disclose the circumstances behind it. When challenged about this, Alya insists that she didn't do anything wrong, and that this was simply the price Ladybug had to pay for being a public figure. The incident spurs Marinette to start her own blog as Ladybug in order to set the record straight, and Alya's reputation tanks once the public realizes she's more than happy to lie to them for the sake of a 'scoop'. - In The AFR Universe, Hifiumi Togo is frequently hounded by shutterbugs due to her past as the idol shoji player and the scandal \|\|of her mother rigging the matches in her favor\|\|. Twice she has been caught on camera with Ryuji, sprouting a new tabloid article about what kind of double life she must be living for associating with a Japanese Delinquent like him. - The Simpsons: Team L.A.S.H.: As a celebrity, Liv has several run-ins with these, including in the Title Sequence. - One of the main instigators of conflict in The Birdcage is a paparazzo who continually stalks Kevin Keely in an attempt to be the first to get a shot of him in a compromising situation after his business partner is caught having died while spending the night with an underaged, black prostitute. He does things from paying off Keeley's driver to lead him to where the Keeleys are headed all the way to removing a message from Val telling his birth mother not to come up in hopes it will spark controversy. - And You Thought Your Parents Were Weird!: After reporter Alice hears about Josh and Max's secret robot, she pursues the story to the point of breaking and entering and airing footage obtained from shooting through house windows. - In Batman Begins photographers are seen trying to get around a wall of cops so they can get a picture of young Bruce Wayne alone in the police station after his parents were murdered. - Played with in the made-for-TV movie, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. A self-proclaimed televangelist targets the titular whorehouse that has been in the town for generations and presumably not broken any laws or caused any problems, according to the sheriff, played by Burt Reynolds. Said televangelist eventually takes a film crew there in the middle of the night, breaks a padlock on the fence marking the boundary to the property and then has his cameraman turn on the camera, once the gate is open, to make it look like he's invited. He then proceeds to take his film crew storming through the small mansion, rousing numerous prostitutes and clients, making all their faces public to shame them, and rake in the ratings. The sheriff retaliates by visiting his studio, and then, just out of camera frame, ripping off the televangilist's wig, and decking him right into the camera shot of the singing choir and then calmly walking over his prone form, making it look like he just arrived on the scene before leaving. - In The Circle, the paparazzi are rabid social media junkies with their phones and drones and Mercer becomes an Internet celebrity (although a rather infamous one when his lamp made of deer antlers is shown online) who gets hounded into a reunion with his friend Mae due to the testing of a new program by the titular social media network, and gets killed by the persistent hounding. - TV reporter Richard Thornburg in Die Hard and Die Hard 2, whose actions cause much grief for the McClane family. You'd think he'd have learned his lesson after interfering with the Ghostbusters - The word "paparazzi" comes from the character Paparazzo in Federico Fellini's film La Dolce Vita. It literally means "mosquito", which is rather apt... - In Five Star Final, all the reporters at the Gazette, a sleazy tabloid that is digging up an old murder scandal and ruining the lives of Nancy Townsend and her husband Walter. Isopod dresses as a minister in order to gain entrance into the Townsend home and trick them into an interview. Kitty and her photographer climb through a window, and when they find the bodies of the driven-to-suicide Townsends, Kitty tells the photographer to get pictures. - A Hard Day's Night deals with this during the press conference scene. At one point, a photographer fills a reel of film with George Harrison making faces into the camera. - In preparation for starring in and directing Interview, Steve Buscemi spent some time disguised as a paparazzo. - The film Spice World includes a paparazzo that stalks the Spice Girls, trying to get some story out of them. He apparently has superpowers that include being able to travel through the plumbing and emerge out of a toilet. However, he still fails to get anything until near the end, where he \|\|gets pictures of the Spice Girls' friend after childbirth, prompting the girls to chase him down. Once they catch him, he becomes a whimpering moron (something they actually comment on).\|\| - Rita Skeeter from Harry Potter. Though technically she's not a photographer herself, the rest of her characterization fits and she generally strings one (named "Bozo") along with her. - In The Truth William De Worde and his flock are intrepid reporters. In the other books they are often portrayed as this to the main characters. - James Herbert's novel Creed is about a paparazzo stumbling upon a satanic cult. - Nearly all the media in Rewind (Terry England) is portrayed like this, as they obsess over the seventeen Rewound children to the point of being Strawmen Newcrews. Starts with ABC and NBC reporters cussing each other out while fighting for a good position to film from, and just goes downhill from there. - Hallis Saper, a documentarian in Starfighters of Adumar, is mentioned to have gotten her start in "sludgenews", Star Wars' equivalent. It did teach her some valuable lessons. - In Death: Just about every reporter, except for Nadine Furst, is this. - Carl Hiaasen's Star Island has celebrity/paparazzi interaction, with a pop-star celebrity (and her double) and one obsessed paparazzo as the main plot. - The Honor Harrington series features paparazzi in a few novels. They're the only foe Honor is afraid to face. If the paparazzi are after her, she usually just stays aboard her ship. - In War of Honor, her political enemies use the paparazzi to suggest that Honor is having an affair with Admiral White Haven, who is married (and to one of the nation's most beloved celebrities, no less). She isn't, but she and White Haven are in love by that point. After Honor and White Haven do initiate an affair in the next novel, At All Costs, and Honor gets pregnant, the paparazzi find out. In one scene, some suggest alternate candidates for the father of Honor's son, including White Haven's brother (the current Prime Minister) and Protector Benjamin Mayhew of Grayson (who is easily the least likely person in the entire Honorverse to ever have an extramarital affair). - Averted for the Graysons. While Grayson has freedom of the press, their conservative culture just wouldn't tolerate that sort of intrusion into someone's private affairs. - Digger Downs in Wild Cards. He works for the Aces magazine, which is a tabloid exposing the private life of people with superpowers. He is a really unpleasant guy which will do everything to write a paper, but he is more a nuisance than a really evil person. He sometimes even does real journalism. - In Feed, Georgia mentions having done some time among paparazzi groups when she and Shaun needed the extra income. She points out that in her world, this was also professionally useful to her by accustoming her to being in large groups of people, which is something most people in her post-Zombie Apocalypse world simply don't do but that a working reporter needs to be able to cope with. - Through Alien Eyes has the first alien representatives coming to Earth, so naturally the media is quite interested. Ukatonen is deeply offended when he's interrupted in a garden he uses to relax after a hard day. - The entitled Wendell Green of Black House spends much of his time undermining police efforts to catch The Fisherman in order to get shots of the murder victims. Perhaps his lowest moment comes when he attempts to re-incite a defused lynch mob so he can report on the innocent man they were about to hang. - Esther Diamond: Al Tarr in Vamparazzi is a profile writer, but the deliberately-sensationalist direction his profiles actually take cements him as this. - Britney Spears - "Piece of Me" is about the scrutiny of Britney's private life, largely thanks to the paparazzi. - Brooke Hogan - "About Us" - Xzibit laments "sellout rappers" encouraging media attention and scrutiny in his 1996 breakout song "Paparazzi". - Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" has some picture-taking lyrics ("Got my flash on it's true, need that picture of you"), but is more about stalking fans. - Lindsay Lohan - "Rumors" is about how when she goes to a nightclub anticipating that the paparazzi are "probably gonna write what you didn't see". It was originally written for Britney Spears. - "Dirty Laundry" (Eagles) predates popular use of the term, but is a screaming Take That! to the callous, superficial, and sensationalistic hack journalism that keeps paparazzi in business. - "Weird Al" Yankovic's "TMZ" starts out as a song about how paparazzi harass celebrities, then halfway through changes to pointing out that a number of things that celebrities do in view of the press are really stupid. - Jay Chou's "Besieged From All Sides" note : 四面楚歌 is a thinly-veiled Take That! on the paparazzi, who are portrayed as dogs in the song. - While we're at it, Pretenders - "Jealous Dogs" - The KISS band members in the Unmasked cover comic get harassed by a single photographer who wants to see them without their masks on — which at the time was part of the band's mystique. His efforts get foiled time and again, until he forces them to do so in concert. Of course, The Reveal turns out to be rather comical! - Adam Ant's "Goody Two Shoes" was an expression of annoyance towards privacy-invading journalists. - Delta Goodrem: - Hypocrisy - "Destroyed" (possibly - in any case he gives fame the finger) - Queen's "Scandal" was written about how the British tabloids were trying to pry into the private lives of Freddie Mercury (as he was secretly suffering from HIV/AIDS) and Brian May (over his divorce and subsequent marriage to Anita Dobson). - Michael Jackson: - The music video for "Leave Me Alone" (the song itself isn't actually about the media). Other songs reflecting on or inspired by his relationship with the media include "Scream", "D.S.", and "Stranger in Moscow" ( HIStory), "Privacy" ( Invincible), and "Breaking News" ( Michael, the posthumously assembled album). - In the video for Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean", a paparazzo dressed in a Conspicuous Trenchcoat and Sinister Shades follows Jackson around trying to get a shot of him with the mysterious Billie Jean. - In the video for Naked Eyes' "Always Something There to Remind Me," a famous celebrity that is married at the start of the video gets harassed by photographers everywhere she goes in public, even when she gets divorced. - While the Britney Spears song "Everytime" is not about this, the video depicts Britney and her boyfriend being hounded by the paparazzi when trying to go to their hotel room. At one point, the boyfriend tries to fend them off by literally grabbing a stack of magazines and throwing them. It then shows one photographer leering at him, obviously delighted at capturing a picture of it. - The music video for Miley Cyrus' "Fly On The Wall" shows her hanging out with a boy until a full moon transforms him into an obsessive paparazzo. The rest of the video sees her running from a group of paparazzi hunting her down until the same boy picks her up, secretly recording her ensuing rant about the night's events for a celebrity gossip site. The song itself, while very much applicable to the paparazzi, has lyrics that imply it's about a Stalker with a Crush instead. - IWA Puerto Rico tag team partners, as well as the men tasked with interviewing the other wrestlers, Stephano and Paparazzi. Stephy continued the wrestler/reporter role in the World Wrestling League after IWA PR shutdown. - The former TNA tag team Paparazzi Productions, consisting of Alex Shelley, Johnny Devine, a cheap digital camcorder and a complete lack of shame. - MNM in WWE had their own personal paparazzi who would snap photos of them as they walked to the ring and sometimes stick around to take pictures of their matches as well. This was dropped for Joey Mercury while he was fired and Melina once she turned Face, while Johnny Nitro stopped it shortly after becoming John Morrison. Well, Melina really dropped it once Rosa Mendes infiltrated them. - The Muppet Show briefly features one of these, Fleet Scribbler, but the producers found him to be so annoying that he was ditched as quickly as possible. - Diana: The Musical: Charles and Diana are frequently hounded by paparazzi. "Snap (Click)" is about the tabloid paps, who sing about how they're a public service even if they rudely and greedily violate privacy. - Cirque du Soleil's jukebox circus Michael Jackson ONE has the evil Tabloid Junkies and a scenery piece called the Paparazzi Monster serving as the primary antagonists. The former are Red and Black and Evil All Over, wear trenchcoats, and even harass the audience during the preshow. - Tamagotchi: His name being a pun on "paparazzi" and all, Paparatchi loves taking photos in general, but especially celebrities. - Aya Shameimaru, the tengu Intrepid Reporter of the Touhou setting is often portrayed in Fanon as a Paparazza. It seems to extend to canon in Double Spoiler, where Reimu reveals she's developed several spellcards specifically to counter the camera. - In the Mass Effect series: - Scott Pilgrim: Paparazzi are common enemies in the second stage. They are as annoying as their real life counterparts due to the jerks' ability to stun lock you, allowing other mooks to gang upon you. - In Alan Wake, the titular character once punched a paparazzo. - In The Sims 3, if your Sim becomes a high-level celebrity, paparazzi will flock to his or her house. In some cases, they can actually enter the houses without being invited if you don't sufficiently protect the door, and evicting them requires cheats; otherwise, they'll only leave when they're good and ready to (only to return later). - Paparazzi have been a feature of The Sims since the first game, with the Superstar expansion pack. They've recently returned with The Sims 4 Get Famous. - The first BioShock game features a minor character simply called Paparazzi (technically grammatically incorrect, since there's only one of him). His one Audio Diary can be found next to what is presumably his body, next to a camera pointed at Frank Fontaine's window. There's not much information on who he was or how he died, but considering who he was spying on... - In Data Age's Journey Escape for the Atari 2600, photographers that resemble flashing cameras must be avoided at all costs, as running into them causes you to lose cash. - Ace Attorney: After her experiences with "real ghosts" at Kurain Temple, Lotta Hart switches to celebrity photography. - Subverted in Double Homework with \|\|Daniela. While she is taking pictures of the protagonist wherever he goes, she isnt from the press. Her pictures are for a scientific experiment instead.\|\| - Since Scandal in the Spotlight centers around the insanely popular Boy Band Revance, paparazzi are an inevitable concern. The guys are pretty well accustomed to dealing with the media and managing their PR, so the protagonist ends up worrying about being caught by paparazzi more than any of her prospective boyfriends do, but there are a few incidents which prove that her worries are not entirely unfounded. - In Complicated Ness Ozzie and Ness come home to find the paparazzi swarming the entrance to their apartment. - In Kevin & Kell Fiona does some training as a paparazzi for a school assignment. Trained by a vulture, no less. - The main character of NEXT!!! Sound of the Future starts the story as a paparazzi who secretly photographs famous idols to sell their pictures to the press. She took up her profession after failing to become an Idol Singer herself, although after losing her camera in the first chapter she considers trying to be an idol again since she needs a new way to make money. - The final arc of The Suburban Jungle has Tiffany and her friends harassed by "ninja-razzi" who turn out to be working for the producer of the movie she's starring in, trying to manufacture drama to sell to the tabloids. - Whateley Universe: Peeper, one of the students at Whateley Academy, is trying to become one. While he styles himself as an attack journalist for a legitimate (if school-run) radio show, he is in actuality a coward and a weapons-grade pervert who harasses every one of the (many) superhumanly attractive female students, then flees when they threaten him, leaving his Beleaguered Assistant Greasy to take the fall for him. The revelation that his super-power is X-Ray Vision didn't help his reputation any. - In the Hat Films series Hat Pack, Colin the journalist is described as working for a "shitty tabloid" and pursuing useless stories. - The video "The Forgotten Legacy of Brittany Murphy" pinpoints the paparazzi's obsession with making up stories about Brittany Murphy as having a direct hand in her career setbacks in the mid-2000s - with gossip columnists insisting that her Genki Girl personality was from a cocaine addiction, and she was "difficult" to work with. One incident is described where the actress was swarmed by paparazzi, and refused an interview from one reporter by saying "your magazine hurt my life", before back-tracking out of fear of what story would be printed. The paparazzi's obsession with the 'coke addict' narrative even led to years of rumour that her death in 2009 was from a drug overdose, when it was actually pneumonia that she had put off getting treatment for out of fear of what the paparazzi might print if she were seen going to a doctor. - Futurama: Bender was once given the opportunity to do this. He had his reservations until learning that not only did he not need to pay, he would be paid. - After Fluttershy of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic became a famous model in "Green Isn't Your Color", these started hounding her wherever she went. - Aaahh!!! Real Monsters: A paparazzo named Exposa once 'flashed' Ickis, snapping his picture and attempting to reveal the existence of monsters with a front-page headline. - The Simpsons: Homer Simpson briefly took this gig, and takes photos of Springfield's celebrities at their worst. The celebrities fought back and hired another paparazzo to take embarrassing pictures of Homer. Homer retaliates by taking more picture of them all in a night club doing some more celebrity excesses, but he will not publish the photos if the celebrities would do some generous acts for a change. - Batman Beyond: In "Sneak Peek", gossip-show host Ian Peek obtains a device that lets him walk through walls, and uses it to root out and broadcast celebrity secrets. He goes so far as to expose a police witness against organized crime, and would have exposed Bruce and Terry if his Power Incontinence hadn't done him in. - My Dad the Rock Star had a recurring one named Scoop, who has a personal hatred of Rock Zilla and his family due to an unpleasant first encounter between Rock and him. - Total Drama's Celebrity Manhunt special introduces the hosts of the eponymous Show Within a Show, Blaineley and Josh, a pair of gossip-hounds who rival Chris McLean in sleaziness and shamelessness and are obsessed with the lives of the Total Drama contestants and trying to dig up dirt or stir doo-doo around them. Blaineley later appeared in World Tour as an Aftermath co-host, continuing to pull the same stunts as she did before. Geoff eventually gets fed up with her and has her taken to the show itself, where she gets eliminated after two episodes and injured. - Kim Possible: In her debut episode, villainous heiress Camille Leon is constantly followed around by a number of photographers who usually have to be forcibly removed by security guards. Being an Attention Whore, she always stops to pose for them — which helps Kim realize she must be the culprit, since she's going out of her way to get caught on security cameras disguised as someone else. - The pioneer of the method was Ron Galella, who had a rough deal: Marlon Brando broke his jaw and knocked out four of his teeth, Brigitte Bardot enlisted some friends to soak him with a hose, and Richard Burton's bodyguards beat him up and had him tossed in a Mexican jail. - The paparazzi were involved in the deaths of Princess Diana and her then-boyfriend Dodi Al-Fayed, being a factor in the occurrence of the fatal crash — according to the official inquest, anyway. - It deserves noting that, at least in the US, there are no prerequisites (such as background checks or training) to becoming a member of the paparazzi. All you need is a camera and connections to sell the photos - and the fewer qualms you have about doing borderline illegal/immoral actions to get said shots, the more profitable your career becomes. - Marilyn Manson's interactions with them tend to be varied (ranging from deer-in-headlights terror in reaction to a nymphomaniac independent one suggesting he should piss in Twiggy's ass to joking with them), but the crowning achievement in paparazzi idiocy was the time they confused him with Michael Jackson... after Jackson's death. He was completely dumbfounded by the stupidity. - When Kylie Minogue returned to Australia for breast cancer treatment, media and fans began to congregate outside the Minogue residence in Melbourne, prompting Victorian premier Steve Bracks to warn the media against breaching Australian privacy laws. - Pierce Brosnan (of James Bond fame) and his family were hounded by a photographer. Feeling that enough was enough, he walloped the fellow. That'll teach him not to mess with James Bond. - Another rare heroic case, though not at first. While not a photographer, 1930s nigh universally maligned celebrity reporter Walt Winchell stunned the US by taking on his publisher, William Randolph Hearst, then using his precious little radio time to do something almost no other reporter had done... speak out against the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler. - Once, Buzz Aldrin and his daughter were being stalked by a reporter who claimed that the moon landings were faked. Aldrin was polite at first, but when the reporter started calling him a liar, Aldrin punched him in the face. Mind you, he was 72 years old at the time. And it's on YouTube! - Not only the pap was bitching Buzz out, but he was pretty unpleasant towards Buzz's daughter. That would teach him. - Muriel "Fili" Houttemann got two of these to photograph her cavorting naked with Daniel Ducruet, the then-husband of Princess Stephanie Grimaldi. - A paparazzo once decided it would be a brilliant idea to sneak into Bruce Lee's backyard to try and get shots of him. Unfortunately, his kids Shannon and Brandon were in the yard at the time, and he terrified them; a very angry Lee kicked the man with such force, it knocked him out instantly and may have killed him if Lee's foot was a bit more to the side. - Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame has allegedly been trolling Paparazzi by wearing the same clothes, making their pictures unpublishable, as they can't be proven to be recent. - Jennifer Aniston did something similar. She would leave the house wearing a distinctive set of orange cargo pants, so that all photos of her would look identical and therefore unusable. - Sean Penn reportedly once caught a paparazzo hiding in his hotel room and proceeded to dangle him from his ninth floor balcony. - Those pictures of celebrities making obscene gestures and such, many aren't being rude so much as devaluing any picture of them because more mainstream outlets won't run them. - Kristen Stewart in particular has a tendency to flip the bird when she sees strangers with cameras. - Similarly, the famous picture of Einstein sticking his tongue out was him being upset by the photographer interrupting a get-together, only to have the picture become iconic. - Amy Adams was not prepared for the attention that was thrust on her after her Star-Making Role in Enchanted - claiming that photographers were following her into her apartment building and chasing her up the stairs. - Rose McGowan in her autobiography describes the paparazzi in the early 2000s as the worst - as suddenly "every stranger with a phone became a potential informant" and the lack of social media made it harder to defend oneself if rumors or out of context pictures were published. - Groups of South Korean reporters tend to follow idols and wait for them in airports when they are traveling for a schedule, snapping endless photos of them at near and close distances. Korea Dispatch, an online media outlet infamous in the Kpop scene for having paparazzi who specialize in catching celebrities going on secret dates and reporting rumors to the point where Korean stars sometimes make Take That! jokes about Dispatch. - Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield have weaponized the paparazzi by holding up signs telling people to pay less attention to them, and more to important social issues, suggesting charitable organizations they should check out.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Paparazzi
Panty Thief - TV Tropes "What a haul, what a haul!" Mike: They don't even know what panties are, yet they feel compelled to raid them. Crow: Every male of every species has the biological urge to panty raid. An individual — almost always a pervert of some kind — who steals and collects women's (or girls') underwear, usually worn/used. Almost always presented as a reprehensible individual and usually an enemy of the hero, and just as frequently played for laughs. They can be divided into the Stalker with a Crush — who steals a specific person's underwear as part of a general stalking campaign—and the indiscriminate, compulsive underwear thief—who usually doesn't engage in more serious sexual offenses and is more likely to be treated as a comic figure. One might call such a character a "knicker nicker". Panty Thieves usually go about their business while wearing Stealth Clothes. An unintentional version is Kleptomaniac Hero Found Underwear; in this case, someone is trying to steal something else, and ends up with panties. An Impossible Thief may steal the panties that their victim is currently wearing, usually without even being noticed until the thief presents their trophy for all to see. Usually this is an anime trope (due to the fact that in Japan, clothes lines are predominant while the West uses dryers), but Western culture has independently produced the college prank of panty raiding (which has been out of fashion since the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the replacement of men's and women's dorms with co-ed dorms). Panty raids are usually perpetrated by groups of perverted young Frat Bro males, rather than just one guy. It's becoming less common for this trope to be played for pure comedy, due to society being less inclined to write it off as a prank and more inclined to view it as a form of sexual harassment. ## Examples: - The hamster Echiboo (which reportedly translates as "Perverted Fart") in the manga Aoi House, whenever he got the chance. - Assassination Classroom has an arc in which Koro-Sensai is framed as a compulsive Panty Thief and his class have to try to prove him innocent. (It ends up being one of the manga's most spectacular Mood Whiplash twists, as it turns out to be part of one of Shiro's elaborate and ruthless attempts to kill him, and the arc ends with Shiro committing an exceptionally brutal You Have Failed Me which many fans consider his Moral Event Horizon moment.) - The Stalker with a Crush Kuroko from A Certain Magical Index. It's only shown in the anime counterpart of the spin-off A Certain Scientific Railgun, though. On one occasion, she somehow stole Misaka's swimsuit from a locked container. While she IS a teleporter, it's not clear how she managed to get past the lock. A few minutes after revealing her theft of the swimsuit, Kuroko took the trope to its logical extreme: using her ability, she teleported Misaka's underwear right off of its owner. - The Elder does this at least once in Chrono Crusade, as part of his Dirty Old Man gag. - One Running Gag in Daily Lives of High School Boys is Tadakuni's sister's underwear kept being stolen by her brother and his two friends Hidenori and Yoshitake. Hidenori's older brother got in at some point as well. - In the Death Note Spin-Off novel The Los Angeles BB Murder Case, Ryuzaki (BB) raids a little girl's panty drawer. Making the scene even more inappropriate is that he's supposed to be examining her murder scene with Naomi. - Oolong from Dragon Ball is an offender. It was stated by Puar that he was kicked out of Shapeshifting School for stealing the teacher's panties. He even saves the day by stealing Emperor Pilaf's wish from Shenron; Oolong swoops in and wishes for "panties off a hot babe" to prevent Pilaf from wishing for world domination. - Shinji Kazama from Full Metal Panic! is forced to do this when some upperclassmen steal one of his possessions and ransom it for a pair of Kaname's panties. - In Gargoyle of the Yoshinagas, there's a scene in which Kaitou Hyakushiki literally steals the undies off of two people in front of a crowd. - Ghost Talker's Daydream: Mitsuru has made it a habit of breaking into Misaki's apartment and has repeatedly stolen all her underwear \|\|so he can sniff them.\|\| Then adds insult to injury, by leaving her money so she can buy more undies that he intends to steal, later... after she's had time to wear them. - Tomoki from Heaven's Lost Property. He frequently steals women's underwear. Sometimes he even wears stolen panties as a mask! - High School D×D: In one of the OVAs, the Occult Research Club faces against a former priest who steals women's underwear, which he uses for his experiments to create a Philosopher's Stone. He then transforms into an underwear monster capable of controlling women's bras and panties while they wear them. - In K, Misaki Yata fears looking like this when he goes to the school island to return a pair of panties Neko left at Bar HOMRA — and a side-story shows him getting caught as such by the campus cleaning robots, and enemy/love interest Saruhiko Fushimi has to get him out of trouble for it. How did she leave her panties at the bar? "That's what I want to know - no, wait, I definitely don't want to know!" - Koragashi of Kamen no Maid Guy can easily steal the panties off the entire female population of a high school without them noticing but doesn't do so for perverted reasons. Instead, he is trying to identify a suspicious person and the only clue he has are her unique panties. His partner, Fubuki, tells him that he didn't have to go to such extremes though and promptly punishes him via remote-controlled explosion. - Kazuma from KonoSuba is an odd case. His Steal skill is supposed to steal a random item from the target based on his Luck stat. However, when he tries it out for the first time on the girl who taught him the skill (with her consent), he ends up unintentionally stealing the panties she was wearing. As it turns out, his extremely high Luck stat means that when he targets women, he steals their panties almost every time. He (and everyone who knows him) soon comes to expect this result, pushing him into this trope. - A story in the first volume of Maboroshi Panty has Maboroshi Panty fight a man who is using a fishing pole to yank off women's panties. Maboroshi Panty herself ends up losing two pairs of panties to the criminal, both of them being the ones she wears over her private parts rather than as a mask. - In Macross Frontier, the one time Sheryl attends school with Ranka and Alto is memorable not just for her own interstellar celebrity, but because of her unstoppable rampage through the campus while going commando in a skirt. The culprit? A tiny, green, and adorable Ridiculously Cute Critter (\|\|a Vajra in larval form\|\|) that crawled into her laundry basket while she was showering, then started hopping about the campus with no regard for the pair of panties that had wrapped around it. The Idol Singer was lucky no paparazzi were nearby to capture the moment... Also of note is that the little guy is then pursued by — with three exceptions — the entire male population of the school, whose motivation appears to be acquiring said panties as a trophy rather than giving them back. - Maken-ki!: Martha Minerva is a rare and unusual female example, who has an obsession with other girls' breasts and panties. They're safe so long as she keeps her eyes closed. But, once she opens them, she can freely open and close \|\|dimensional gateways\|\| at will, which she uses to instantaneously steal other girls' panties while they're wearing them! Which is why Haruko, Inaho, and Azuki wound up spending chapters 22-24 without theirs. - Mazinger Angels features a Panty Thief who somehow manages to acquire a Mechanical Beast (Satan Claus P10) from Doctor Hell and employs the giant robot to commit the dastardly deed of stealing the underwear of all the women on the city to fill an Olympic pool and then swim in it. - Miyuki: Panties get stolen back and forth like it's their mission. In one chapter Yasujirou actually does a case where he is trying to bring justice to a panty thief. - Rudeus of Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation steals a pair of Roxy's unwashed panties before she leaves and forgets to return them. He protects them carefully, referring to them as the "Divine Artifact". At one point Rudeus is wearing a pair of panties on his head and a knight accuses him of stealing them from the captive princess. Rudeus takes offense as they are \|\|his wife's panties\|\|. - One of the "Orphans" in My-HiME is a lingerie thief. Hilarity Ensues when one of the victims is Natsuki, who has to go around panty-less. - Negima! Magister Negi Magi: - Chamo-kun, though only rarely. Notable in that he's an ermine, and not even a transformed human. He seems to want the panties to make a nest. His love of panties was really confirmed when \|\|his share of the Rainyday sisters's Lotus-Eater Machine has him dreaming that he swims in panties.\|\| - Jack Rakan deserves special mention. In one manga chapter, he ends up having to fight two girls. He Flash Steps behind them, flips up their skirts, and steals the panties off one of them before they knew what happened note : and the only reason that he didn't steal the panties off both of them is because one was Going Commando to begin with. Said panties end up being a crucial element in locating and defeating them. Then he does it again later... to ALL of Fate's minions simultaneously, then flips up their skirts repeatedly until they concede defeat (so he won't have to fight them). - Chamo's reputation as a Panty Thief was subverted in Negima!?: One chapter involves Negi chasing a small Panty Thief throughout Mahora academy, and many a reader expected it to be Chamo. \|\|It was a cat.\|\| - Onsokumaru in Ninja Nonsense, though he steals panties by proxy (dispatching Shinobu to do it under the premise of ninja training). - Penguin #1 from Penguindrum uses a fish rod to steal panties in episode 10. - Happôsai from Ranma ½ is the patron saint of all panty thieves. This Old Master even developed some martial art techniques around panty-thieving and peeping. Currently the trope image. - In The Seven Deadly Sins: - Meliodas feels up Elizabeth and somehow steals her panties. The fact he did allows him to Spot the Imposter later. - In OVA 1, Ban tries to swipe Elaine's, but the attempt fails since she isn't wearing any. - Shimoneta: - Applies to Gathered Fabric as a whole, since they engage in ero-terrorism as a ruse to indulge their fetish for stealing underwear. Their leader, White Peak, garbs himself in an entire bodysuit of white panties that have been sewn together and sips wine with another pair soaking in it. - Black Base is exact opposite, by having a preference for only stealing black panties and lingerie. But he also seems determined to share his interest by setting traps so the victims have to change clothing so he can steal them. Then leaves only black lingerie for the victims to wear afterward. - Time Stop Brave: Kuzuno Sekai's first on screen use of his ability to stop time is to steal Niña's panties off her body, while they were in different jail cells. After teasing her for wearing teddy bear panties, he returns them just as quickly. - One You're Under Arrest! story concerns a highly sophisticated Panty Thief — who strangely enough is a parody of Billy The Kid from The Silence of the Lambs: he is sewing a blanket out of the pants he steals, "and then it will be like I am sleeping with all the girls at once!". After the girls catch him, they break him of his habit by informing him that one of the pairs he stole belonged to a Wholesome Crossdresser on the anti-Chikan squad. - Zatch Bell! has a character named Momon, who looks like a cross between a rabbit and a monkey. When Kiyo meets him, he's holding a bra for some reason. When Momon meets the others, he spends countless attempts to see Tia's panties, and somehow manages to steal another pair from her house. Needless to say, Tia rages. - Booga in Tank Girl first met the title character when he tries to steal her knickers as part of a gang initiation. They've been together ever since. - In the Star Trek: Enterprise Parody Fic Farce Contact, the Suliban steal all female clothing on Enterprise, as part of an Evil Plan to make Starfleet switch to the miniskirts of the Original Series. - Friendship Is Magical Girls: Since Spike's powers run on lust, doing this is a great way of having a quick power-up. That being said, though, he seems to also do it just for the hell of it, such as when, during Rarity's first (pre-mahoushojou) fight alongside the team, he magically steals hers off her body while changing her outfit into a gi to fight in, something she doesn't realize until later. - Homura Akemi from Madoka Magica stealing poor Madoka's panties (among other forms of pervery) is a trope so prevalent in fan-art that it has its own pool on Danbooru. - The Rise of Darth Vulcan: Artful Dodger, Vulcan's apprentice, knows a spell to nab mares' underthings. Vulcan is more confused as to why such things even exist when most ponies go without any clothes whatsoever. - Vow of the King: For her own amusement, Yoruichi steals all of Soifon's panties and strings them up in the captain assembly hall just before a meeting. - The Stalker with a Crush protagonist of Body Double (1984) steals the underwear of the woman he's obsessed with, which doesn't help his case when the police find them on his person after she's murdered. - Drive a Crooked Road: Not exactly underwear, but when Eddie finds Barbara's handkerchief in her car while he is servicing it, he looks around furtively, then sniffs it and tucks it away in his pocket. Back home, he takes it out and lies on the bed smelling it. Of course, as their whole meeting was a Honey Trap, it is likely Barbara left it there for him to find deliberately. - In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of the first indications we get that Patrick is a bit of a creep is when he casually states he stole a pair of Clementine's panties while standing beside her (comatose) ex-boyfriend. - Following: When Cobb the Gentleman Thief steals a couple of pairs of panties from a woman's apartment, it comes off as him just being creepy. This however is subverted in the end when his true motivation is revealed: he stole the panties as part of a plot to frame his friend and partner-in-crime, the unnamed young man, for the murder of the woman. - In Happy Birthday to Me, Etienne sneaks into Ginny's bedroom and steals the panties she takes off when she goes to take a bath. He later reveals he is carrying them under his jersey during the dirt bike race. - Subverted in Internal Affairs (1990). The antagonist (a corrupt and manipulative police officer) beats up the protagonist (an Internal Affairs cop), claims to have slept with his wife and throws some panties in his face to taunt him. His wife is bewildered at the accusation and doesn't even understand why his husband is later brandishing a strange pair of panties at her. - One of the many pranks pulled by the Lambda-Lambda-Lambdas in Revenge of the Nerds. The actual raid, which is blatantly obvious (it's even kicked off by a Pi Delta Pi opening her shower curtain to reveal Lewis, who cheerfully announces "Panty raid!"), is actually a diversion while two more Tri-Lambs secretly install a spy camera in the Pis' changing room. - Valentine: Halfway through the film, \|\|the killer finds Kate's apartment door open; her neighbor Gary, who was hitting on her earlier, is inside trying on Kate's underwear. Gary tries to reason with the killer by saying it's Not What It Looks Like and that Gary himself is mentally ill (the term he uses is "not well"), but that doesn't dissuade the killer as he beats Gary to death with a running iron.\|\| - Akatsuki from Aesthetica of a Rogue Hero. He also steals brassieres off girls' wearers with no problem. - Macdonald Hall: Bruno and Boots frame their unwanted Boarding School roommates as these, with the full cooperation of some friends from the nearby girls' school. The Headmaster isn't fooled for an instant, so he has the roommates pretend to have been expelled to guilt-trip Bruno and Boots into fixing things. - "In the Middle of the Night" from the One Step Beyond album by Madness is about a sixty-three year old newsagent who just so happens to be an underwear thief, beginning his raids at 8pm. He sees his own picture in the newspaper and books it. - The title character from Pink Floyd's single "Arnold Layne", a transvestite whose primary pastime is stealing women's undergarments from washing lines and wearing them in secret. - P!nk's "Raise Your Glass" includes the line "Party crasher, panty snatcher." - The image accompanying the Dexterity skill in Avernum shows an Impossible Thief at work, swiping a woman's panties from under her full plate armor. - In Bully, our hero, Jimmy, does this for gym coach Mr. Burton. Slightly squicky, but overall, funny. - Vico doesn't actually steal any female undergarments in A Dance with Rogues, but he does show an unhealthy obsession with the player character's underwear. - One of the side-quests in Fable III involves stealing a pair of Reaver's underwear for one of his female fans. - During a flashback sequence in Final Fantasy VII, Cloud can sneak into Tifa's room and swipe her "orthopedic underwear" (in the Japanese version, they were "slightly-used" instead). Though it's uncertain if this actually happened or not, since the dialogue options after that are "It's true" and "Just kidding". \|\|Later on in the game, we discover that Cloud is an Unreliable Narrator. Assuming it actually happened, it's ambiguous as to whether this specific memory belongs to Cloud or Zack.\|\| - In GalGun Double Peace, there's a side mission to help a girl find out who stole her underwear. \|\|It turns out to have been a playful kitten\|\|. There's also a mission in one route to steal underwear from the girls' lockers. - In Golden Sun, snooping in Lady McCoy's wardrobe ends in Isaac apparently trying to steal her underwear. - Persona: - Persona 2* has Maya run into one of these while she's investigating the women's changing room at the gym. He runs off as soon as she notices him. Talking to Katsuya after this and choosing to tell him about the incident triggers a sequence where he runs off to chase the man down and beat him up off screen. - In Persona 4: Arena, Aigis foils an unusual airline hijacking, where the hijackers made no demands \|\|and was in fact a cover to steal an old prototype anti-Shadow weapon being transported on that flight\|\|. When her superior Mitsuru deduces that her luggage was the true target, Aigis immediately thinks Mitsuru's underwear was the target. - Planescape: Torment has a perverted wizard who turns himself into an armoire in the Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts so that women store their underthings inside him. "Good riddance, you wooden pervert" is the player character's last comment to him. - In a quest in The Sims Medieval one of the things your hero has to do in order to become a Guildsman is to raid the ship and steal panties from pirates. This actually makes sense in context, because the entire quest has been setting up Guild initiation as a frat rush. (Even the women pirates have disgusting panties. Then again, this is The Dung Ages.) - The M.U.G.E.N series, Panty Thief Mysteries, by chimukun is built around a group that steals panties. Interestingly it does not even contain one male perverted villain, in an all female cast. A 1 episode sequel titled A Setsuko Christmas Tale was later released, also with a case of a different panty thief. - In SomethingPositive, Davan apparently trained Choo Choo to do this. And then, after the incident with Kestrel, hired him out professionally. - 4chan: One of /tg/ joke characters is Jeanstealer — a genestealer with a jean fetish. - The Onion describes why panty raids are a poor idea at certain colleges. - SCP Foundation: When SCP-261, a magic vending machine, dispensed a package of edible underwear, the log simply notes "Items confiscated. Current whereabouts unknown." - Whateley Universe: - There's an entire story built around this trope, as a panty thief hits every girls' dorm on campus, one night at a time, finally getting spotted (but not caught). \|\|That's because it was Sun Wukong the Monkey King, one of the legendary Eight Immortal, the whole she-bang. When he steals yours panties, you just let him.\|\| - Mimeo's biographical story, "Mimeographic", mentions that the one attempt at a panty raid when he was a student at Whateley (in the mid-1960s) got thoroughly stomped by several of the tougher girls. - In one episode of American Dad!, Steve's best friend Snot tries stealing Hayley's panties and pays the violent price as a result as Hayley finds and beats the hell out of him and snatches them back in anger. - Codename: Kids Next Door* featured an episode with Numbahs 1 and 2 believing that the training bra belonging to Numbah 5's older sister is actually Battle Ready Armor. What starts out as a misunderstanding, after stealing and trying it, turns out to be real near the end. It has since been used by teen villains all series, both female and male, even though some still see their initial form to be ridiculous. - Inverted in a two-part episode of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero called "The Traitor", after a Critical Failure to the armor-treatment chemical, Lady Jaye catches a COBRA infantryman... and obviously, he leaves her with a souvenir! - In one episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, SpongeBob, Patrick and Mr. Krabs go on a "panty raid". It is near midnight, however, so Mr. Krabs does not realize until it is too late that the person they are stealing panties from is his own mother. - Black Bump, A Feca Demi-God in Wakfu, collects underwear from all over the World of Twelve. His explanation (if you can call that) is that underwear are the most intimate piece of clothing, and thus something akin to a "soul" of their owner. He has a whole temple where his collection is proudly exposed and stored. A rather rare example in that he collects from both males and females. However, he draws the line at children's underwear.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PantyThieves
Papa Wolf - TV Tropes Mercenary: What, you gonna kill me with a tranq gun? Quinn: You took my kid, so yeah. Paternal instinct can transform a Bumbling Dad into an Action Dad. If someone threatens his kids they will soon wish they'd never come within a mile of them. This is because fathers are expected to take care of their family and this naturally extends to keeping them safe. Such occasions serve as a way for a father to prove his worthiness—see A Real Man Is a Killer. Expect his children to have a newfound respect for their father and for them to brag that My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad. If their relationship was previously strained expect it to improve. Often Papa Wolf incidents serve as a way to reveal that a Non-Action Guy is really a Retired Badass or a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass (or even a Retired Monster). In contrast to a Boyfriend-Blocking Dad (who sometimes thinks he's this; there is no overlap between them), a Papa Wolf is always portrayed heroically because the latter is defending their kids from genuine threats instead of imagined ones. A Team Dad may display a streak of this, but the Papa is more likely to be related to his children by blood or through formal adoption, and the children tend to be younger, which may be part of why the Papa Wolf is more oriented toward protecting them rather than training them to defend themselves. However even completely grown children can summon this response in the face of crisis because they are still his children no matter how old or strong they get. This is the Spear Counterpart to Mama Bear. When Mama Bear and Papa Wolf team up, no force on earth can stop them. Subtrope of Beware the Nice Ones. See also A Father to His Men and Family Man. Combining this with Disproportionate Retribution can lead to a Knight Templar Parent. If the guy is a teacher instead, he's a Badass Teacher. If the guy doing this is a sibling/cousin, you get Big Brother Instinct. Inversely, see Parents in Distress for the kids rescuing the dad. Evil characters can use this too; after all, Even Evil Has Loved Ones. A subtrope of the Papa Wolf is the Badass and Child Duo, where an adult male badass takes it upon himself to protect an orphaned, unrelated young child. See also Cub Cues Protective Parent for examples from the animal kingdom, which might include a literal wolf. Remember when adding examples that this is Always Male. The female equivalent is Mama Bear, so all Distaff Counterparts should be placed there. When Mama Bear and Papa Wolf team up, it's a Battle Couple and all pairs should be placed there. Parents in Distress is the inversion, when Papa needs to be bailed out by the kids, and Extremely Protective Child is when the child exhibits this kind of general protectiveness over one or both of their parents. Also, note that this is not the trope for being protective of one's friends, unless of course it is something like an Intergenerational Friendship. In that case, it is okay. Otherwise, don't do it. Tropes about helping friends should go to A Friend in Need, The Power of Friendship etc. ## Examples subpages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other examples: - In Happy Heroes, despite knowing that the Supermen can protect themselves, Doctor H., their nonbiological father, can still act overprotective of them from time to time. For instance, in the Season 1 finale, he jumps between them and a giant robot... while injured. - You don't want to mess with Dick Tracy's kids. You really don't. - Popeye is fiercely protective of his adopted son, Swee'pea, but having been raised, by Popeye, Swee'pea can easily hold his own in a fight despite only being an infant. - Occurs in WHO dunnit (1995) with \|\|Butler, who is secretly Victoria's father Walter.\|\| When he overhears her husband threaten her (because he caught her plotting to kill him), he sabotages the brakes of the car and causes him to die in an auto accident. - In Love Never Dies, after Christine sings the title song, she discovers her son Gustave is missing. Needless to say, his father is livid. He is ready to use every bit of his influence to stop \|\|Raoul de Chagny\|\| from leaving Coney Island, and to manhandle and/or murder \|\|the Girys\|\| to get back his son. - In Macbeth, Macduffs response to having his family slaughtered is (after weeping his eyes out) to murder the bitch that ordered the killings. - Deconstructed in Matilda, as the Escapologist is so enraged at the Acrobat's sister's abuse of his daughter that once he discovers it, he goes to confront her himself. Unfortunately she is a former world-class Olympic champion and is heavily implied to have murdered him, leaving \|\|Jenny\|\| with nobody to protect her from her aunt's wrath. - After Romeo fatally stabs Tybalt in "Romeo and Juliet", Lord Montague defends his doing so because Tybalt had killed Mercutio. - In Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Judge Turpin's mistreatment of Johanna is half of Sweeney's motivation to go on a murdering rampage (the other half being, of course, what the bastard did to his wife Lucy after transporting him for life). - In The Tempest, Prospero could be considered one in his fierce protectiveness of Miranda. - Captain Walker in the 1993 musical of Tommy. And he's not very happy when he discovers his wife and son with her new jerkass lover on her 21st birthday! - In Rigoletto, after the title character's daughter Gilda is kidnapped by the courters and handed over to the lecherous Duke, Rigoletto threatens to kill them all with his bare hands unless they give her back to him. After Gilda emerges from the Duke's bedroom without her virginity, Rigoletto secretly arranges to have the Duke murdered by the hit man Sparafucile. \|\|Tragically, it backfires, as Gilda loves the Duke and performs a Heroic Sacrifice to save him.\|\| - Pop from Happy Tree Friends is usually really bad at being a father despite his good intentions, and actually gets his son killed more often than not. However, the few times he actually notices Cub is in danger, he will stop at nothing to save him, like when he successfully fends off a rabid dog in "Doggone It". - In If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, the Emperor is very happy with the news that he has biological children. When he finds out what happened to them, though, Warp storms abound over perpetrators' heads. - Homestar Runner: Strong Mad gets like this when his best friend (nephew? pet?), The Cheat, is physically abused. - Revenge Films: Claire was being assaulted by her stepfather, the bus driver. Her mother Penny called her biological father Jake, who rushed to the scene and oversped to the point where he was stopped by the police. When Jake told the police officer about the situation, they both went to stop the stepfather from assaulting Claire. Jake gave the bus driver a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, to the point where the police officer had to restrain him. - RWBY: Qrow is Yang's maternal uncle but he loves Yang's half-sister Ruby just as much as Yang. Nothing stands between him and his nieces: he rescues Yang and Ruby from a hoard of Grimm when they were young children and he spends Volume 4 secretly following Ruby's group through the wilds of Anima, killing any Grimm that get too close. He only reveals his presence when Ruby's group find themselves fighting the vastly superior Tyrian, charging in to protect Ruby from being seriously injured. \|\|When the fourteen-year old Oscar locates Qrow in Volume 5 to reveal he's Ozpin's new reincarnation, it means that Ozpin's vast abilities are limited by Oscar's young, untrained body. When Hazel tries to kill Oscar for being the new host of the man he blames for his sister's death, Qrow's Undying Loyalty to Ozpin combines with his instinct for protecting children; he throws himself in harm's way over and over again to prevent Oscar's death, only stopping once he's too badly injured to fight any more.\|\| - Wash in Red vs. Blue becomes fiercely protective of the Reds and Blues. He pulls a gun on Carolina when the latter threatened to shoot Tucker. He went out of his way to rescue Donut from an attacking Tex robot, perhaps as a way to make up for \|\|shooting Donut earlier\|\|. He performed a Heroic Sacrifice, ordering Freckles to collapse a cave to give Tucker, Caboose, Simmons and Grif enough time to escape despite knowing he will be trapped on the other side with the attacking Feds. He stepped in front of Sarge, Donut and Lopez when Locus appeared, readying his gun. - Dreamscape: Liz is fiercely protective of Dylan, and will dish out a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to anyone who harms him. - Camp Camp: David may be a nice and friendly guy, but threatening any of his charges is a bad idea. \|\|When Daniel pulled a knife on Max, he immediately tackled the guy to the ground.\|\| - Helluva Boss: Under no circumstances should you even think about hurting Prince Stolas' daughter Octavia. Or else.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PapaWolves
Rump Roast - TV Tropes Hey! Whats cookin? You are stupid! "My biscuits are burning! Fire in the hatch! Great horny toads, that smarts!" In slapstick and/or cartoony works, if someone is going to be on fire, chances are this fire is going to be very brief, and within that, chances that it's going to be isolated to their rear ends. Expect them to be launched skyward at an alarming rate. It will usually be put out by the victim sitting down in the nearest body of water and breathing a sigh of relief. Often used in games as a comical player death, but often used in artwork or animation as a precursor to exposure or any other humiliating mishap. Example being of a character trying to act cool just after getting burned only to turn around and reveal their pants have burnt up enough to expose their butt. See also Literal Ass-Kicking. Compare Farts on Fire and Pain to the Ass. Subtrope of Amusing Injuries and Joke of the Butt; sister trope to Thumbtack on the Chair, Shot in the Ass, and Butt Biter. Not to be confused with Toasted Buns, which refers to why placing a jet pack exhaust near someone's rear end would CAUSE a rump roast. ## Examples: - Goku suffers this as child in Dragon Ball in the episode 'Mark of the Demon'. - Dragon Ball Z: - This happened to Goku during the first episode of his fight with Freeza, after Freeza opened up a hole through Namek's crust causing lava to spew around the battlefield. Even though Goku can fly. Of course, this part was filler. - Goku also gets his buns cooked when he fights Princess Snake, as well as when he and Vegeta are escaping Buu's body. - This happens to Fairy Tail's Gray Fullbuster in the second OVA when he sits on a hot rock Natsu had placed upon his chair. - The opening of Fate/Grand Carnival has Gilgamesh as Gorgeous P. suffer this after flirting too much with a less-than-amused Jeanne D'Arc Alter. - This happens to Onizuka in Episode 23 of Great Teacher Onizuka entitled Superstition when he stands too close to a box of burning chain letters - Also by Ken Akamatsu, Keitaro of Love Hina suffers one, as does Shinobu later on when she activates a pair of rocket-propelled panties. - Anya, shortly after her Attack Hello in Negima! Magister Negi Magi. - This happens to Luffy in episode 160 of One Piece after Satori invokes this trope during their first ordeal. - Made even funnier by the fact that he uses a Pain-Powered Leap to put it out after jumping into the jaws of a sky shark. - Ash Ketchum, in the Pokémon episode "Charizard's Burning Ambition". - Also happens to Team Rocket at the end of the episode "Hour of the Houndour", trying to duck underneath a Houndour's Flamethrower attack. - Rockruff is forced to tearfully put out its tail while training with Turtonator in "Rocking Clawmark Hill!". - In one episode of Transformers: Cybertron, Scourge sets Thundercracker's butt on fire. It's hilarious. - GG Bond: In the first episode of Season 12, Phoebe stops a wolf thief by using a fire attack on him that causes his bottom to burn. The wolf promptly falls to the ground and rolls around to put out the flame. - In a Smurfs one-page gag story, as the Smurfs are all getting excited over the presents they received from Santa, Chilly Smurf ponders why he received a pair of Santa pants with a hole burned in the seat while standing next to a roaring fireplace. - The Lion King (1994): Zazu is captured by the hyenas and shoved into a geyser dubbed "the birdie boiler" during our heroes' first encounter with them, launching him through the air like a rocket. "No! Not the birdie boiler!" - Mickey's Once Upon a Christmas: - Mulan: - The matchmaker accidentally sits on coals and starts running around with her dress on fire. Then Mulan adds oxygen to the fire by trying to put it out with her fan. - During training, Yao gets his butt set on fire by a stray flaming arrow. Also counts as Shot in the Ass. - This occurs in 101 Dalmatians when Horace is knocked rear-first into a roaring fireplace by Perdita. - In The Rescuers, Orville's tail feathers catch fire when Snoops sends flares up in the air to find Penny. This results in Orville having to make a crash landing in Devil's Bayou, and Bernard and Bianca having to descend with a parasol. - The Sponge Bob Square Pants Movie features Mr. Krabs experiencing one after being shot by Neptune. Krabs: runs with his butt on fire Me pants are on fire!! exits screen, returns only wearing underwear Me underwear's on fire!! exits again and returns naked and fully engulfed in flames I'M ON FIIRE!!! - Toy Story 2 had a clip of an old Show Within a Show segment when Prospector Pete tries to extinguish a lit dynamite fuse by sitting on it, then jumps up and exclaims "my biscuits are burnin'" in a Shout-Out to Yosemite Sam. - The barfight scene from The Boondock Saints ends with the Russian mobster Ivan Checkov getting his ass set on fire by Connor and Murphy. This pisses Checkov off enough to get his buddy and pay a visit to their apartment with Desert Eagles and handcuffs, setting up the first major killing of the movie. - Near the end of Dennis the Menace, Dennis meets up with Switchblade Sam when he runs away from Mr. Wilson after the latter gives him a "The Reason You Suck" Speech for ruining his garden party while trying to tell him that he's been robbed. When Dennis sets up the campfire, one of the cinders accidentally falls down Sam's pants, lighting them on fire. Later in the film, when Sam becomes tired after Dennis feeds him an entire can of beans, Dennis puts a blanket over him, which catches fire due to being too close to the campfire. Both times, Sam puts out the fire by jumping in the river. - This happens to Jackie Chan's character in Drunken Master. - Future Cops: This happens to Ah Sing in the final battle, when the General reveals his ability to breath fire and tries to incinerate the heroes. Ah Sing gets it in the butt, and for some inexplicable reason the camera needs to close-up on Simon Yam's exposed ass. - In The Hazing, Doug shoves the Tome of Eldritch Lore he stole from Professor Kapps down the back of his pants. When the dying Kapps activates the power of the book, it heats up, causing Doug to burn his ass and shriek. - James Bond - Octopussy. During the fight in an Indian marketplace, Bond has to flee across a pit of firewalking coals. Then a knife-wielding goon attacks, so Bond knocks him back onto the coals. Being more of a wuss than our hero, the goon runs off yelping in pain from his smoldering ass. - During the sauna room fight in Goldeneye, Xenia Onatopp gets her buns steamed when Bond slams her cheeks first into a hot radiator. - A Kid From Tibet has this occuring to Wong La when he accidentally landed butt-first on a campfire. He then runs about shouting "My butt is on fire!", as if the audience couldn't tell. - Laurel and Hardy: Ollie has his bum set on fire by Charlie Hall in Them Thar Hills. - Legend (1985). Blix uses the unicorn horn to set Blunder's (one of the other goblin's) butt on fire. - In Looney Tunes: Back in Action, the main characters set up camp in the desert and Daffy burns his tail on their campfire. - In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, this is not actually depicted but gets recited by Robin's minstrel in "Brave Sir Robin" as one of the many deaths and tortures he is definitely not afraid of. - The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor has this happening to Jonathon after lighting a giant firework they were trying to shoot the mummy of the day with. - The Muppet Christmas Carol: Gonzo accidentally ignites Rizzo's tail while lighting a lamp. Rizzo: Hey, hey hey! Light the lamp, not the rat! Light the lamp, not the rat! - In National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Uncle Lewis lights his cigar, unknowingly sets fire to the Christmas tree, then turns around to reveal that his toupee and the seat of his pants are also on fire. - In The Pit and the Pendulum (1991), the Inquisition attempts to torture Antonio by strapping him to a metal chair and lighting a fire under it. Antonio resists the torture and even laughs at how feeble it is. note : Possibly Justified as Antonio is a baker and so is used to being in cramped, hot spaces. Assuming there is something wrong with the chair, Gomez unstraps to Antonio to examine it. Antonio immediately makes a break for freedom, shoving the captain of the guards into the chair as he does so. The captain immediately leaps to his feet; clutching his buttocks and yelping in pain. - Revenge of the Pink Panther. When the Hong Kong fireworks factory starts exploding, crime boss Philippe Douvier ducks under a table and is surprised when his former mistress Simone, whom he tried to have murdered back in France, joins him. Douvier: Simone?! What the hell are you doing here?! Simone: I'm waiting for the firecrackers to go off. Douvier: What firecrackers? Simone: The ones I just stuck in your pants. (Douvier screams in agony and runs off yelping) - The Three Stooges would occasionally torch each other this way. - In The Toxic Avenger, the eponymous avenger has his revenge on Wanda Zilch, one of the villainous gang members who caused him to transform into a monster, by ambushing her in the sauna and toasting her buns on the sauna rocks (offscreen). Extended editions of the movie show her among the few criminals to survive the Avenger's rampage, albeit with serious damage to her bottom. - Valley of the Fangs have this happening to Hu-San, the hero's sidekick, during the fammhouse battle, when Hu accidentally sat down on a burning stove during a fight. He spends the next entire minute running all over the place with his ass burning, leaving the hero fighting all alone, until he finds a water trough to sit in. - This happens to Kirk Douglas in The Villain. - Yosemite Sam in Who Framed Roger Rabbit: "My biscuits are burnin'!" - Another Who Framed Roger Rabbit example: In the "Somethin's Cookin'" short that starts off the movie, Roger is trapped in an oven set to "Volcano Heat". After he becomes "Well Done", he shoots out of the oven with his behind on fire and runs around the kitchen in circles leaving a trail of smoke. - In The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, this happens to Miss Slighcarp near the end of the film when she falls backwards into the fireplace. - Alma Gêmea has Vittorio sitting Olivia down on the stove during their makeout session, setting her dress on fire and burning her ass. - An episode of El Chavo del ocho had Don Ramón trying to prepare a glue on a stove. At the end, he was knocked onto the stove and forced to stay sitting on it by an angry Professor Jirafales. - In a Horrible Histories sketch, a Victorian man's trousers have caught fire. The funny part isn't only that his bottom is on fire, it's that any of the words another Victorian man is trying to use to inform him of this, even "trousers" and "legs", are considered too rude, so all the man who's on fire is doing is reprimanding the other man for his language. At the end, he finally realizes what's happening and yells "My trousers! My legs! My BOTTOM!" - In the L.A. Law episode "Smoke Gets in Your Thighs," Murray Melman (Roxanne's father, played by the late Vincent Gardenia) is hired by McKenzie-Brackman to paint the office's bathroom. After he's finished, he unwisely pours a bucket of thinner down the toilet. Douglas comes in, compliments Murray's work, sits down on the john, lights up a cigar....and Hilarity Ensues. Murray adds insult to injury when he visits Douglas in the burn unit and tries to lighten things up by telling jokes like, "You didn't blow your top....you blew your bottom!" - In the Shining Time Station episode, "Mr. Conductor's Fourth of July", Billy catches a rabbit in a trap he set in his garden and plans to set him free. Before he does, he tells the children a very old story about a rabbit who set a trap and caught the Sun in it. When the rabbit set the Sun free, he got too close to it and it singed the fur on his tail, which is why all rabbits have short tails. - At the end of an episode of The Woodwrights Shop featuring Williamsburg blacksmiths, one of them gets Roy Underhill in the rear end with one of his tools... which had just been sitting in a fire moments before. - In The Stringini Bros' song "Dora No More", one of the deaths involves Dora shaking her rear over an active volcano. Unsurprisingly, she catches fire and falls right in. - Mr. Bungle's "My Ass Is on Fire". - In Aggressors of Dark Kombat, there's a Molotov cocktail. If you throw it and you or your opponent steps on it, you'll be hopping around with your rear on fire. - Ape Escape 3 has this happen to both the boy and girl protagonists. This can happen from many different situations, but all with the same effect of leaping into the air while taking damage and trailing smoke from behind. They can both suffer a rump roast from lava, fire, hot water in the hot springs, freezing ice, and will also go through the same damage animation getting stabbed in the butt by spikes. - The platform game Baby Jo: If your baby loses all her health in a fire, she launches screaming to the sky with her diaper on fire. - When you let the fire imps in Conker's Bad Fur Day touch you, Conker's tail will catch on fire for a few seconds. - Same for Crash Bandicoot in Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped. - It happens in Digimon Battle Spirits. If you get hit with the fire throw items or get hit by Impmon's fireballs, you'll get your rear set on fire. - Same for Donkey Kong in Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. - Getting hit by fireballs in Eryi's Action will cause Eryi to get her butt burned, during her death animation. - This is shown happening to Meg in the background of the cover art for the Family Guy Video Game. (It even says across the bottom: "It's too HOT for TV!") - Final Fantasy VII did this early in the game; after blowing up one of the Mako reactors, AVALANCHE makes a speedy exit. The other members make decent exits, but Wedge comically runs out with his ass on fire, trying to put it out. - In A Hat in Time, falling in lava or getting burned by fire causes Hat Kid to bounce upwards with her butt on fire, all while taking damage and trailing smoke. - The Flash game Kamikaze Pigs has a late-game upgrade named after this trope. It causes the pants of parachuting fighter pilots to explode on contact with the ground. - In Kingdom Hearts, hitting Captain Hook with fire will give him a case of this. While he's weak against it, it's actually not a very good idea, as he runs around so quickly that hitting him becomes a chore, and he'll damage anyone he collides with. It becomes more viable in the future games he's fought in, as he frantically hops up and down in place instead. - Also, one fire spell you can use in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories has the description 'Donald flubs a fire spell'. When you use that spell, Donald came running around with his rear literally on fire, damaging enemies he touches. - The Meow Wow and the various Kyroo dream eaters in Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] will suffer a brief case of this if they get hit with a fire attack, leaving them open to further abuse. This predictably presents issues for them if they go up against dream eaters like the Ryu Dragon that use the fire element in almost all of their attacks. - And now Sora himself gets to suffer from it in Kingdom Hearts III if he comes to contact with any type of fire. - In Legend of Kay, Kay will be running around with his tail on fire for a short time when he is hit by the dragon's fire. - From The Legend of Zelda series: - Some flame attacks in The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap would do this to Link and force him to run around at top speed. - Falling into lava in The Wind Waker, A Link Between Worlds, and Skyward Sword will have Link react this way. The last is particularly hilarious since Skyward Sword has a much more serious Link compared to the others. - Jumping into lava without the Goron Locket in Cadence of Hyrule will lead to this and this time other characters like Zelda, Cadence or Impa can get their butts burned as well. - In The LEGO Ninjago Movie Videogame, hitting an enemy with Fire Spinjitzu will set their rear on fire. - Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle has this apply to any Burned entities, complete with running around aimlessly with their cans on fire; if they touch any other combatant at this time, the fire spreads, potentially leading to everyone on the field getting a dose of this. Funnily enough, both this and Harmless Freezing can be applied at once, as the Freeze status is restricted to encasing the victim's head in ice. - While only in the manual, Samus gets her butt on fire in the official art for the original Metroid. While this is an increasingly common gag in Nintendo games, Samus may very well be the first instance of a Nintendo character getting her butt burned. - The "burnt" condition in Miitopia inflicts this to the Miis. - Peppino from Pizza Tower gets his butt on fire when touching boiling pizza sauce. - Happens to the Dark Prince/Satan in Puyo Puyo Sun after his Motive Rant of wanting to grow the sun to create an endless summer outrages Arle, leading her to nail him in the rump with a fire spell. - Radiata Stories has a status effect called Blazed. Your rear will be on fire and you'll take minor damage similar to poison. - In most of the Ratchet & Clank games, if you fall into lava you'll shoot out with your butt on fire. - In The Secret of Monkey Island, when Guybrush \|\|launches himself out of a cannon to reach Monkey Island from his ship\|\|, he lands with his butt on fire. Herman Toothrot wanders by and remarks idly, "By the way, you might want to think about putting that fire out. Somebody could be hurt." - Sly Cooper: With the titular character, with the tail instead of the "butt". - While Sly suffers from this in the trilogy, all playable characters can catch their butts on fire in Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time surprisingly, even Carmelita. - Spyro does this to some enemies on the original Spyro the Dragon. They are armored in front, but you can have Spyro toast them from behind. They'll go running off holding their bottoms and making Spyro catch up to flame them again for the kill. - This is how Spyro himself reacts to touching lava from the second game onwards. - In A Hero's Tail, this is how you defeat Gnasty Gnorc. When his weapon gets stuck in the ground and he stops to focus on pulling it out, Spyro runs up and flames his behind, causing him to jump and grab his bottom. You can also charge his behind, but it's very precise and you may run out of time, so most players simply flame him. - In the Cloud Temples level of Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage!, a Wizard sets some trolls on fire, causing them to either run around or jump in place. - When Fox is exposed to fire in Star Fox Adventures, his tail will burn for a few seconds. - Super Mario Bros.: - If Mario touches lava in the New Super Mario Bros. (as well as New Super Mario Bros 2, New Super Mario Bros. Wii and New Super Mario Bros. U Bros., which is also a One-Hit Kill), Super Mario 64, Super Mario RPG, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Odyssey titles, he grabs his now-smoking butt and yelps in pain. He sometimes leaps into the air comically when it happens too. However, he will not do this when he visits Corona Mountain in Sunshine, as falling into that lava is instant death. - Touching the lava or a Fire Bar in Paper Mario 64 and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door not only takes away one hit point, it also sends Mario back where he started. - Also in The Thousand Year Door, if Mario is at one hit point left and he touches anything fiery, it's Game Over. As for Bowser, during the Chapter 6-7 interlude where he traverses a platformer castle level based on the castle levels of the very first Super Mario Bros. game, touching the lava sends him back where he started, though he carries infinite life. - In Galaxy, the boss fights against Bowser give him a taste of this too, with the sequence requiring Mario to get Bowser to stomp on panels of glass which then crack and expose lava, causing Bowser to burn his tail and run desperately around waiting for it to cool down, making him vulernable to a spin attack by Mario. - Super Mario 64: If Mario gets stuck under the rolling log or the tilting platforms in Lethal Lava Land, the moving platforms in "Bowser in the Fire Sea", or the ramp to the Ice Bully in Snowman's Land, the sound he makes when his butt is on fire plays in a rather distorted and rapid manner even during the Bowser laugh fade-out. While it's technically a glitch, it still sounds creepy. - This also happens to Yoshi in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island if he falls into lava. - Taken to the extreme in Mario vs. Donkey Kong, where touching lava causes Mario's entire body to light on fire, even charring him when he touches solid ground! - In Mario Sports Mix, if you get burned by a Podoboo or Bowser's special ability, this will happen. - In Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, hitting a fire obstacle, getting hit by Mario or Luigi's fireballs or the Thunderbolt will cause the character on the back of the Kart to get their behind lit on fire and unable to use any item they're holding while they put it out. - One of the moves in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga involves Mario setting Luigi's pants on fire to dash at high speeds. In the sequels, the Burn status effect prevents the affected bro from jumping he's too busy trying to put out the seat of his trousers. - Fire Wario of Wario Land series, before being completely engulfed in flames. - This is also what happens to Mario in the fangame Super Mario 63 when he touches lava or fire. - Mario Party loves this trope, with Mario, Peach and company frequently suffering from this countless times in every game. Notable examples include the Lava Bubble capsule in Mario Party 5, which has the characters intentionally inflict this on themselves to advance 10 spaces; and Bowser's Peculiar Peak in Mario Party: Island Tour, a board that forces everyone to run around with their butts on fire, every single turn. - Interestingly enough, touching Grimy Water in Super Mario 3D Land or Super Mario 3D World causes this, but with purple fire. - In the New Super Mario Bros. games, hitting a Prickly Goomba with a fireball will cause their shell to explode and the Goomba inside to shoot out with its butt on fire. - Getting hit by Mario's Hyper Strike in Mario Strikers Battle League will cause Wario, DK and Daisy to run or in Daisy's case, frantically hop around the field, with their butts on fire. Boom Boom also suffers this, when he fails to block said Hyper Strike. - In part 11 of Minecraft For Noobs, after burning a pile of hoes he bought out of frustration, Basya has an ember from the flame burn his ass, sending hum scooting all the way up to his treehouse. - The website PolitiFact has "pants on fire" as their highest level of political bullshit, meaning that it's absolutely not true. - The entire point of this Just For Laughs prank. - This Reeves and Mortimer sketch. - IGSRJ's review of Super Mario Bros. 3 shows Mario jumping and getting hit from below with a Podoboo (jumping fireball) and shrinking, and IGSRJ commenting, "Did I mention that Mario has a hot ass? Sorry, I know the joke was bad. I apologize." - In American Dragon: Jake Long, Trixie and Spud are pretending to be a dragon and both are able to produce fire from the mouth. Trixie is in the front and Spud is at the end when they count down Spud follows fire which due to him being behind Trixie, causes her butt to set on fire. - Animaniacs (1993): In the Pinky and the Brain short, "When Mice Ruled the Earth", Brain's tail catches fire when Pinky creates fire. Brain then runs to a lake to douse the fire. - The "Git Along Lil' Duckie" episode of Baby Huey ends with the fox leaping into a water trough after getting lassoed onto a branding iron, the original episode even had him stand up to reveal the words "The End" on his rear. - Bozo: The World's Most Famous Clown: Bozo the Clown does this as well to a sheep-stealing wolf in "Sheep Thief Grief". - Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: "A Case of Stage Blight" begins with the Rescue Rangers going to an opera theater. Zipper sits too close to a spotlight and the heat sets his butt on fire. Monterey: Heh heh! Can't stand being in the spotlight, eh, Zip? - Classic Disney Shorts - Building a Building features Mickey as a steam-shovel engineer facing off against Pete, his boss. At one point, Minnie dumps a basket of hot rivets down the back of Pete's pants. - In "The Whalers", Goofy's pants catch fire after he strikes a match on them. He tries to douse the flames by sitting on a pail of water, but sits on a keg of gunpowder instead. - Also happens to Mickey Mouse in "Mickey's Orphans" when a baby kitten puts a piece of hot coal in Mickey's shorts. - In the 1937 short Hawaiian Holiday, at one point Donald Duck starts dancing with a grass skirt, so naturally when he dances too close to their campfire, it sets his butt on fire, forcing him to make a run for it towards a pool to put it out. - In Chef Donald, Donald decides to cook some waffles after hearing a recipe for it on the radio. However, he accidentally pours in a bottle of rubber cement instead of baking powder, resulting in a sticky mess that gives him grief throughout the short. At one point, when he tries to get the sticky mess into the waffle iron, he accidentally backs into the waffle iron, which closes on his tail feathers and cooks them. - In "Bearly Asleep", Humphrey The Bear sneaks into Donald's cabin so he can hibernate in Donald's bed. When Donald finds out, he places his oil lamp under the bed, resulting in Humphrey's butt being torched. - Codename: Kids Next Door: In "Operation H.O.T.S.T.U.F.F.", Numbuh 3, sick of her father leaving the house cold, turns up the thermostat, turning it into a volcano ready to blow. As Numbuhs 1, 2 and 5 enter her house to try and turn down the thermostat before it erupts, Numbuh 1 gets his butt set on fire. Numbuh 1: Hey, who's cooking hamburgers? Numbuh 5: I don't know about hamburgers, but your buns are burning! - The Darkwing Duck episode "Can't Bayou Love" has Darkwing's rear get set on fire by a candle. - Happens to Chris in Dan Vs. episode "Stupidity". - The Dick Tracy Show: Happens to Sketch Paree and the Mole in "The Casbah Express." Joe Jitsu, aboard the Express, plucks the two villains from their handcar and tosses them into the engine's smokestack. They emerge from the furnace with their tails a-blazin'. - Snotlout Jorgenson in Dragons: Riders of Berk rides a Monstrous Nightmare, a species of dragon known for coating itself in its flammable saliva and then setting itself on fire. The jokes practically write themselves. - This happens to the bald guy at the end of one episode of Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids. - In Here Comes the Grump, the Grump gets Toasted Buns occasionally as a form of Amusing Injuries. - Hero108: In the episode Baboon Castle, Mystique Sonia gets her butt burned in a ring of fire during a top spinning challenge. Another baboon suffers the same fate shortly after. - In a House of Mouse episode, Mortimer is posing as a food critic and tries to get people fired. Lumiere's response is to say "No, it is you who will be fired" and uses his candles to set Mortimer's rear ablaze. - In "Pete's House of Villains" Pete is on the receiving end of this with the exact same "no, you will be fired" line after getting annoyed with the other villains' work and trying to fire them. - Hoze Houndz: In "The Hound Who Loved Me", Fontaine and James Bone go down Otamoffy's chimney, and fly out with the seats of their pants both on fire. - Jackie is shot in the behind with lasers by a pig in Jackie Chan Adventures episode 'When Pigs Fly' - Alexandra in the 1970s cartoon Josie and the Pussycats suffers this in the season 2 episode "The Four-Eyed Dragon of Cygnon", when she sits on a malfunctioning control panel, setting her rear aflame. - Looney Tunes: - The now-rare cartoon "Mississippi Hare" has a sequence late in that short where Colonel Shuffle suffers this after chasing Bugs Bunny into a boiler on a riverboat ("YIPE!"). - This happens in "The Oily American", but it takes the wealthy Native American protagonist a few seconds to realize it: - Happens to Wile E. Coyote quite a few times: - In "Zoom and Bored", in one of the most surreal scenes on Looney Tunes (the wall scene). - In "Soup Or Sonic," Wile E. survives a rocket ride apparently unscathed, so he turns around and walks away - revealing a small flame on his tail. He walks over a hill and out of sight, and then jumps up from the pain. - Daffy Duck suffers this from time to time, too: - In "Dime to Retire", where he plays the role of a sleazy motel manager where he offers 10 cents per night for the rooms, but scams his customers out of hundreds of dollars by putting annoying animals in their rooms so he can then remove them. Porky stays at his hotel and is bilked out of a total of $779, and then, not wanting the cycle to continue, leaves without paying the 10 cents for the room, at which point Daffy confiscates his bags. Porky obliges, because he is revealed to be a traveling gunpowder salesman, who sets off his wares via his car intentionally backfiring and lighting the Powder Trail leaking from his briefcases, which then destroys the hotel. Daffy closes the hotel for repairs, and then runs away yelping in pain due to his tailfeathers being on fire from the blast. - Martin Mystery suffers this in the episode "Mystery of the Hole Creature". - The Mixels episode "Hot Lava Shower" has this befall Krader after he sits on his toilet, which has been superheated thanks to a lava clog traveling through the pipe system (Teslo burns his mouth thanks to the same clog). When he and Teslo go to complain about it to Vulk, he treats them to ice cream to help...which culminates into Krader sticking multiple ice cream cones on his rear. - The Monster Farm episode "State of Reunion" had Zombeef get her butt set on fire after landing backside-first onto a table that Goatasarus Rex had breathed fire at. - OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes: In "You're Everybody's Sidekick", the Alley Teens trick K.O. into getting his butt burned by lava for their own amusement. Drupe adds insult to injury by whipping K.O. with vines, while Red Action posts a video of it on social media. - In the Pixie & Dixie short "Cousin Tex", the visiting mouse does this to Mr. Jinks with his branding iron. - Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: In "Mystery Mask Mix-Up", Scooby and Shaggy are captured and tied up back-to-back by Zen Tuo and left to die in a storeroom filled with fireworks. When Scooby and Shaggy put out the fuse with their butts, they end up getting burned, and while hopping around the temple in pain during their escape, they unwittingly land on the arms of a statue that is actually the door to the secret room where the ghosts had Daphne, Fred and Velma locked in (the latter two trying to rescue the former, who was kidnapped by the ghosts so they could retrieve Zen Tuo's mask). After Shaggy and Scooby land on the statue's arms, they open the door, freeing their friends. Shaggy: Don't you know it's illegal to shoot off fireworks and wreck a storeroom!? Zen Tuo: We will build a new storeroom! ( locks the tied up Shaggy and Scooby in) Shaggy: Like, who's going to build a new us?! - The Simpsons: - In "Brother's Little Helper", Ned (unconvincingly) tries to smoke while playing a hippie during a fire safety play and sets his pants ablaze. Ned: Sorry to break character, but these stunt pants are getting mighty toasty! Maude: Uh, roll, Neddy, roll! Ned ( starts to roll on the ground) It's not working! It just spreads the flames! - In "Hungry, Hungry Homer", the executives at Duff Beer try to discredit Homer as he's protesting against their plan to move the Springfield Isotopes to Albequerque: "Are you saying Homer Simpson is a liar?" "Well, we do have this footage of him with his pants on fire." - One Couch Gag involved the family with fire on their behinds running to the couch with water to get it extinguished. - In "How I Spent My Strummer Vacation", the rock stars go berserk and chase Homer around in a giant red vehicle shaped like Satan's head, pushing a button that causes flames to shoot out from the devil's mouth and burn Homer's buns. Once they've come to their senses, the musicians apologize to Homer and offer him the vehicle as a gift - and he uses it to burn off Principal Skinner's clothes, leaving him in only his Goofy Print Underwear and frantically trying to cover himself. - The cave child Grog got toasted tooties in The Smurfs (1981) episode "Lost in the Ages". And occasionally, Azrael's tail would catch on fire from some of Gargamel's experiments. - In one of the trailers for The Smurfs (2021), Gargamel gets his butt singed by the robotic nanny Smurf's laser beam. - Tex Avery MGM Cartoons: - At the end of The Three Little Pigs, the Big Bad Wolf, after realizing that he cannot blow down the house of bricks, actually decides to climb down the chimney as a last-minute attempt to kill and eat the pigs, only to end up landing inside a pot of boiling water and jumping out and running away. - This was a regular gag on Tom and Jerry, usually causing Tom to jump high in the air and do his Stock Scream. (The page image is taken from "The Mouse That Comes to Dinner".) - In one episode of Total Drama Island, Duncan, DJ, and Geoff play pranks on Harold because he's been leaving his underwear around the cabin. One prank involves dousing a pair of undies with hot sauce. When changing into them, it takes Harold two seconds to feel a slight sting. Harold: ...My biscuits are burning!! - Transformers: - Happens to both Reekon and Mortdredd in the Visionaries episode "The Overthrow of Merklynn". Mortdredd attempts to retrieve a spellbook which is guarded by a short-tempered dragon, only to emerge moments later with his backside on fire, having been "unable to reach the book". Reekon manages to distract the dragon long enough to retrieve the book, but still gets flamed on his way out.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PantsOnFire
"Pan Up to the Sky" Ending "If you don't know what to do next, slowly pan the camera and shoot the sky..." A camera trick used at the end of an episode or movie, wherein the view pans up to the sky upon conclusion of a story arc. The characters usually look up along with the viewer, too, or are implied to. The sky is a powerful symbol in itself. Here are just a few uses: Compare Grasp the Sun, Flyaway Shot and Fly-at-the-Camera Ending. Contrast Ending by Ascending, when a character does this instead of the camera, and "Pan from the Sky" Beginning. Has nothing to do with holding a frying pan in the air. ## Examples: - Invoked in Yu-Gi-Oh! right after the final duel concludes and the characters are left in the desert, with the camera rising to the sky. However, this isn't the actual final scene, but the 4Kids Entertainment dub pulls another whammy and cuts out the last moments of the last episode. Gee, thanks. - Bleach uses the clear blue sky version at the end of the Arrancar arc. - The anime of Death Note ends with panning up to a night sky and crescent moon. - The Girl Who Leapt Through Time ends this way, though there is another quick scene on the baseball pitch after that. - In the ending of Your Name, the scene pans up to a blue sky with bright clouds right after Taki and Mitsuha finally find each other again, break into Tears of Joy and asking each other's name 5 years (8 for Mitsuha) after the comet flew by and both of them forgot about each other. - Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid does the blue sky version as Kobyashi takes Tohru and Kanna to meet her parents. - The first opening for Saiyuki, For Real, ends with a pan up to the sky, with the lower half of the shot showing their destination, Gyumaou's castle in the West. - Most Pokémon: The Series episodes end this way. - Coco: The very last shot of the movie pans up from Miguel to a shot of the banner from the beginning framed against fireworks lighting up the sky. - Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch ends this way with a starry night sky, while a star twinkles to prove Lilo's mother would be proud of her. - The Princess and the Frog, like Spirit, begins with an inversion, staring on a shot of the Evening Star, then panning down to the streets of New Orleans; the end plays it straight, panning up from Tiana and Naveen dancing to the Evening Star and Ray the firefly, now a star himself in the night sky. - Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron begins by inverting this, showing a beautiful blue sky filled with horse-shaped clouds before panning down across the landscape and coming to Spirit's racing herd. At the end of the film, the trope is then played straight, as after Spirit returns home to lead the herd, the camera pans back up to the same sky. - Toy Story 3 ends with a pan up to the blue sky, calling back to the first movie's opening with a shot of the sky, with clouds that look like those on the wallpaper in Andy's room. - In Turning Red, when Mei and Ming close up the temple for the day there is a pan up from them to the sky. - After everyone goes in for a group hug near the end of Bad Times at the Battle Royale, the camera pans up to the clouds before the credits roll. - Ballad of a Soldier, which establishes in the opening scene that the young soldier protagonist will be killed in combat at some point after the movie's time frame, pans up to the sky at the end as the voiceover muses that he could have done many things with his life if he'd lived, but in the end will be remembered as a Russian soldier. - The final scene of Battle of Britain shows the sky over England, which has a few clouds in it, but after months of struggle against the Luftwaffe, finally has no German planes. - City of Ember ends with the sun rising into a bright blue sky, which is especially meaningful because the characters have spent their entire lives living in an underground city, never knowing there was anything different or that there was such a thing as the sun or sky. - Easy A begins and ends this way, with the Screen Gems logo. - Most of the Harry Potter films end this way. - The Nativity Story ends with the sun and clouds on a bright day. - The final shot of Ophelia pans up from Ophelia and her daughter walking across a hill to a flock of birds soaring across the sky, symbolizing that Ophelia has found freedom and happiness. - At the end of The Professional the camera zooms up from Mathilda onto the skyline of New York. - In Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, the camera pans up from the closed door to the sky, giving us a "Continue?" and countdown, evoking arcade games. At zero, the credits begin. - You've Got Mail pans up to a bright, clear sky at the end. - In the end of Arthur C. Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God, the protagonists look up at the sky and see the stars going out one by one. - Sergey Lukyanenko's Seekers of the Sky duology ends with the protagonist Ilmar looking up while atop Tel Megiddo, having just refused to follow Marcus as one of his apostles, claiming that Marcus is not second coming of The Messiah and believing that, as before, there must be one dissenter. - Togetherly Long: In order to convey this effect in a written work, the story mentions various creatures at different elevations that might hear the lines of dialogue of two characters that are talking to each other as the scene ends, and it mentions how the conversation would sound fainter and fainter to successively higher creatures. - This shot was used at the end of every episode of The Twilight Zone (1959). - This is used in the final episode of The Fades, which functions as a Sequel Hook by showing that the sky has turned blood-red. - This was used going into a commercial in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The City On The Edge Of Forever." Inexplicably, the stars in the sky change to a different pattern 2 seconds before the commercial break. - A starry night sky is used at end of the first season of True Detective to illustrate Rust's belief that although the dark may be greater, the light is winning. - A lot of reality TV shows make use of this for at least some episodes. It works because the "universe" of reality television is not bound within a contained space like a studio set or a piece of paper. - Several endings of Tsukihime contain this (Akiha True, Hisui True, and Hisui Good, possibly others), as well as the Epilogue. - The nighttime and shooting star * : actually pieces of Ragnarok version of this is part of Mega Man Zero 4's ending. - Wild ARMs ends in this manner, complete with all three protagonists looking up to the sky. - The nighttime version of this is the final shot of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)'s ending. - The Golden Ending of The Reconstruction ends with the camera panning up into the night sky. - The ending of Super Mario Galaxy 2 (first time only) ends with a shot of a blue comet streaking across the night sky. Further completions of the final Bowser level results in a green comet in the ending. - A few of the endings of The Legend of Zelda end like this. Specifically, Link's Awakening (with the Wind Fish flying away), The Wind Waker, Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, and Skyward Sword. - Both Kirby Super Star and Kirby's Return to Dream Land end with a long pan across the blue sky (and eventually into space). - The true ending of Date Warp - The Cut Scene animation created for the PS version of Chrono Trigger does this twice in the perfect ending—once after Chrono and Marle's wedding when she throws the bouquet, and again after Lucca finds baby Kid (Schala's clone from Chrono Cross). - Chrono Cross itself also has this in its perfect ending—after you free Schala from the Time Devourer and the two worlds are reunited and restored, but before the end credits roll, Serge ends up back on Opassa Beach with Leena right when he passed out at the start of the game, and as he's asking about things he wasn't supposed to remember from his adventures, you get the pan. - Shantae: Risky's Revenge ends with a long pan up to the blue sky after the mayor reinstates her as the Guardian of Scuttle Town and her friends promise to help her get accustomed to her new life as a human. - The Freedom ending of The Stanley Parable concludes this way. - Tears to Tiara 2 ends with a sunrise to mark the return of the Golden Age - Final Fantasy X-2's Normal ending involves Yuna crouching atop the airship Celsius, shouting to Brother to fly higher and faster, before panning out into the blue sky ahead of her (while her voiceover narration speaks of continuing to be a sphere hunter, living life to the fullest, and thanking Tidus for making it possible because "it all began when I saw this sphere of you"). - Dawn of War: Dark Crusade's Eldar stronghold ends with the Avatar dead and Taldeer telling her surviving troops to flee. Then, as it was her vision who led them to their deaths, she runs down the ramp into the player's army as the camera pans slowly upwards... Occasionally turns into Narm when a strong blow sends her cartwheeling back up the ramp when the camera hasn't gone all the way up yet. - Eternal Sonata combines this with the Kissing Discretion Shot by panning up to the blue sky with puffy white clouds as Allegretto and Polka embrace and then share their first kiss. - Medal of Honor: Vanguard combines this with Off-into-the-Distance Ending as the last shot has the camera pan up to the sky to reveal allied forces parachuting in as Garrett and Slauson running off into the distance. - Spirits of Anglerwood Forest: The game ends with Edgar entering his house again, then the camera pans past the trees to the horizon. - Yakuza 3 ends with a quick pan to the sky after Kiryu is stabbed by Hamazaki and bleeds out in the streets of Kamurocho. Fortunately, The Stinger shows he survived. - Freedom Planet 2 ends with a shot of a clear blue sky after Lilac sets off to find Merga or Carol, Milla and Neera Li looking up to the sky wondering on when she'll be back. In the latter case, it gets interrupted with Milla jokingly discussing her plan to conquer the world due to her being revealed as an alien. - The final episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender did this after a shot of The Big Damn Kiss between Aang and Katara. - The final episode of the sequel series The Legend of Korra has a pan up to the sky directly over the new Spirit Portal after the final scene of Korra and Asami becoming a couple. - G.I. Joe: The Movie ends with a pan up to the night sky as the last of Cobra-La's mutation spores burn up in the atmosphere. - The Heathcliff & the Catillac Cats episode "Life Saver" ends this way. - The 1972 CBS/DePatie-Freleng Enterprises adaptation of The Lorax ends with the camera panning up from the Once-ler's house to a clearing in the smoggy skies. - Recess: School's Out ends this way with a clear blue sky. - King of the Hill's intended Grand Finale "To Sirloin With Love". - She-Ra and the Princesses of Power ends this way as the Best Friends Squad decide to have one last adventure together to bring the magic back to the universe after Horde Prime's defeat. - How "Suspended Animation, Part 1" from the 2020 reboot of Animaniacs ends after Yakko, Wakko, and Dot finish "Catch-Up" with a final shot of the Warner Bros. Studio as fireworks light up, welcoming home the Warners. - VeggieTales does this at the end of the episode "The Toy That Saved Christmas", complete with Junior singing "Away in a Manger". - Tamagotchi Video Adventures: Inverted at the beginning of the video, with the frame panning down to the surface of Tamagotchi Planet as the Bandai logo and opening titles appear on-screen. Played straight twice later on - the first time is at the end of the main cartoon segment with the frame panning up as Cosmotchi and the Tamagotchis ride a car proposed as a museum exhibit into space; the second time is at the end of the video after the credits, with the footage of the Tamagotchis riding the car being reused.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PanUpToTheSkyEnding
Paper Talisman - TV Tropes These paper tags, also known as "ofuda", are used in Shinto and Onmyōdō for purification and exorcisms or as wards. They are sometimes used with Shide, and most commonly at Shinto Shrines or by Miko. Taoists also use a version of the tags called Fu. In Buddhism and Hinduism they are called Sutras. In Korean shamanism they are known as Pujok. The western equivalent would be a conspicuously-placed rosary or crucifix, although it was common practice in the Middle Ages to use thin parchment prayer scrolls and wax seals in a similar fashion. In Anime and Manga they can do anything, even explode. If in the form of a card, a Death Dealer may use these. Compare with Paper Master, a form of Functional Magic that uses paper. ## Examples: - Ai Yori Aoshi - Taeko the Nightmare Fetishist papers the entire house with both types of wards when rumors of a ghost pop up. - Dragon Ball: The Mafuba (Evil Containment Wave) lets one use any mundane container — even an electric rice cooker — to seal away an opponent. In the Piccolo Jr. Saga of the original series, Kami gets around this by simply writing the kanji for the technique on the jar itself (though the fact that he's God probably helps), while in the Future Trunks Saga of Dragon Ball Super, the technique would have defeated an immortal enemy if Goku hadn't forgotten the ofuda note : In the manga he accidentally grabbed one of Master Roshi's coupons for a naughty cabaret shows instead; in the anime he forgets it completely. - Sailor Moon - Rei, a miko as well as a Magical Girl, uses these to complement her magic. They have effects such as dispelling a petrifying venom, immobilizing the Monster of the Week, and making Jadeite's possessed planes chase him instead of the Senshi. Mostly used for immobilization so Usagi can attack, though. Noteably the only Senshi attack not tied to her transformed state (though it's given stock footage anyways). In the anime she combines it with her actual Senshi powers to create the Fire Soul Bird attack, while in the Manga, Minako gets to use the attack during a side story that involved Rei getting possessed. One of the movies lets her use it against dozens of possessed humans at once, complete with her apparently summoning dozens of the Ofudas in a fancy non-stock footage attack, while not transformed. - Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei: - Negima! Magister Negi Magi: - Setsuna is known to use ofuda, and once used them to protect the hotel from Onmyōdō Shikigami note : paper demons during the Kyoto arc. - Mana also uses a teleportation Sutra vs Kaede during the Festival Arc, apparently they cost 800,000 yen each (Single Use). - Kaede herself uses these in one of her stronger attacks. She throws Fuuma Shuriken (smaller than that one, though) to wrap chains around her opponent. Chains with ofuda dangling from the links. If you've seen the series below, you know what comes next... - Naruto - Exploding paper tags can be used as mines, time bombs, or even grenades (if tied to a kunai and thrown). One infamous ninja even attaches them to his sword, and the resident Paper Master uses them to great effect. Additionally, binding talismans show up every now and again, such as those worn by Ao and the First Hokage's wife, Mito, as well as the seals used to take control of the people summoned with Impure World Resurrection (Edo Tensei in the Japanese). - In the Pokémon: The Series anime, some characters use these to repel ghost Pokémon. - Marron in Sorcerer Hunters uses these to case his spells. - Several mages/priest in Clamp's X/1999, most notably Subaru and Seishiro. - Den-noh Coil uses these as "metatags", to modify virtual objects. - Inuyasha. Buddhist monk Miroku often uses sutras as weapons against demons. - They pop up from time to time in Ghost Hunt - both the Miko and the Buddhist Monk of the team can make them. They're usually used to create barriers against evil spirits, or contain and redirect same. - Kyouko from Ga-Rei uses these to summon Shikigami. - Jun Tao uses Chinese jufu talismans to control her guardian zombie, Lee Bailong, in Shaman King. - In Rental Magica, meets Death Dealer. Because Onmyōdō adepts can be that badass too. - Harukanaru Toki No Naka De's onmyoji Abe no Yasuaki and Abe no Yasutsugu use these; the effect varies from creating energy shields to exorcism to just plain stopping some annoying Sleep-Mode Size'd youkai from following them around. - In Black Cat, Shiki (ambiguously an AU Onmyoji) uses these with his/her Tao. - The medicine peddler in Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales and Mononoke throws out an absurd amount from his defensive arsenal against demons. - In Digimon Tamers, Taomon has a (once-used) attack that fires a thousand of the things (the explody variety) at her opponent. - These are used occasionally in Ranma ½ most noticeably in the story arc with the Oni. - Yamigumo Nami, the resident Miko of Silent Möbius uses ofuda along with holy water to do magic, ranging from barriers to putting down lesser monsters. - Syaoran uses these in Cardcaptor Sakura, both to defeat Clow Cards and (once) to set Touya's jacket on fire. - In Bloody Cross, Hinata uses paper talismans in most of his spells. - Yui Lee from Vampire Princess Miyu. - In YuYu Hakusho, the bandages that cover Mukuro's face have ofudas all over them. - These keep vampires away in Shiki. At one point they're all over Natsuno's room. - Nanami uses them in Kamisama Kiss, first to do things like make plants bloom or send messages to other people. She gets more creative with them as the series progresses, even using one concerning Traffic Safety to kill a couple of demonic thugs chasing her. - In Natsume's Book of Friends, paper tailsman are commonly used in exorcism on youkai (and sometimes humans). While exorcists are the common user of them, the Natori clan even specializes in this art, ayakashi can also use them on other youkai. - Exorcists, monks and other humans in Natsume's Book of Friends use paper talismans to seal and otherwise affect and interact with youkai, gods and spirits. - Yurie of Kamichu! makes very little use of ofuda, which is kind of surprising given that it's virtually the only use of her power that doesn't put her into an exhausted sleep while getting very powerful results. A full episode is devoted to her improving her handwriting by studying with the boy she loves, Kenji, which results in her writing absolutely no ofuda (though one of Kenji's is later empowered.) - Tokyo Ravens: Used by everyone as the magic system is based on Onmyōdō. - In each of the first three parts of 3×3 Eyes, paper talismans play an important role: - In the first part: while promising of capturing the "moster" haunting Huang's villa Ling Ling offers a huge demon-repelling talisman for protection, causing all the presents (who are all supernatural beings of sort, unknown to her) to become scared and step back. Later on Ju use a paper talisman to bind Pai. Said talisman is later used to finish him off. - In the second part: Zhou Gui can use paper talismans to cast magic, called "Soul Cutting Dragon" (Zhang Ling Long) and "Soul Freezing Dragon" (Dong Ling Long). He usually carries the blank papers and a pen with him. - In the third part: Huang Shun Li/Xun Gui plans to summon a soul-eating monster called Quan for her plans, and it's said that 108 sacred talismans are required to make him manifest in a physical form. Said talismans also shields him from other magic, \|\|but also make him easy to burn.\|\| - For the rest of the series, paper talismans are commonly employed as demon-killing or demon-repelling tools by taoists and sorcerers, as Hasrath Hahn or Steve Long, most notably to \|\|protect the world-wide communication system from Shiva's soul-harvesting spell.\|\| - The first member of the Juttenkun to appear in Soul Hunter is Yotenkun, whose spacial Paopei Rakkonjin consist in a vast, cilindrical space full of massive paper charms of varying size, from which he can fire soul-reaping beams of light. Even outside of his Paopei, he can summon the "Rakkon Talismans" to blow things up, a technique that is later copied by Yozen. - The Onmyoji of Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan use this of course. They have various uses, including crafting Shikigami to fight. Yura, the resident Child Prodigy, can summon up to four shikigami at her first appearance. - The youkai killer and exorcist Hyo from Ushio and Tora frequently employs paper charms along with his roped darts. \|\|During his final duel with his nemesis Guren, it's revealed that he managed to put Ofuda charms even inside his own body, like the arm Guren just ate, which are then used to kill the rogue Azafuse from the inside out.\|\| - Deadpool's enemy T-Ray used pieces of paper with Japanese-looking writing on them to achieve various magical effects. They may have been Ofuda. - The heroine of D-War covers the inside of her house with these after she discovers that her birthmark cum tattoo is glowing. It doesn't actually make that much more sense in context. - The morticians in the Chinese Vampire movie Mr. Vampire can paralyze the jiangshi when they attach these to the creatures' foreheads. - These have a particularly funny use in the first A Chinese Ghost Story movie. The unlucky protagonist, having gotten his clothes soaked, accidentally backs into a stall selling these, ending up with six of them stuck to his back (and the inscriptions remaining after the angry shopkeeper peels them off, resulting in another dunking later). - The onmyouji Abe no Seimei uses several varities of these through both Onmyōji films to perform various spells. - Fengshen Yanyi: taoists Immortals can use enchanted paper talismans applied to people to protect them or to invoke various effects. Taiyi Zhenren possess a set of talismans which he uses to turn Nezha invisible, while the sage Jiuliusun owns a set of talismans that can transmute the earth into solid steel, used to counter the magic technique of his disciple Tuxingsun (who can move underground freely). Jiang Ziya also makes use of demon-repelling talismans in a few occasions, such as applying them to the Jade Pipa Spirit's human disguise to keep her from running away and applying them to peach wood columns to set up a trap for the Gao Brothers, the tree spirits. - Though it takes place in a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of Japan, paper talismans in Spirit Hunters are primarily used by Tao priestess Kitsune Sura, who can erect magical barriers that block spirits with them - In The Girl from the Well, while trapped in heavily haunted Aitou village during The Suffering, Kagura uses ofuda to ward rooms against intrusion by the hostile ghosts. - The Witch of Knightcharm: Rebecca, an elite witch from an evil Wizarding School, uses these. Hers are powerful enough that she can blow up strong magical shields simply by slapping a single paper charm onto them. - Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition supplement Oriental Adventures: Oriental magic items include four Charms of Protection (from disease, fire, spirits and theft). They are made of yellow or red paper with inked inscriptions involving supplications or threats toward various deities. They protect any building they are attached to. - Exalted: - Several Charms of the Sidereal Exalted require the preparation of Prayer Strips, which are then used up by the activation of the Charm. - Venus, the Maiden of Serenity, is also often accompanied by floating wisps of paper. When she cares to fight, she typically uses them as weapons. - In the Hyper Asian Fantasy Tenra Bansho ZERO, the onmyouji use to summon/create there shikigami servants. - The Purity Seals preferred by the Imperium of Man in Warhammer 40,000 are essentially the Western version from the page description, a strip of parchment inscribed with a benediction of some kind, and affixed with wax. - The Convenience Store: A woman in a Little Black Dress gives you a protection talisman one night. On another, you find a whole bunch of these that you can use to exorcise a small shed, allowing you to go inside it. - Dynasty Warriors: - Zuo Ci a Taoist uses 6 tags as his weapon which he swings in a line or dance around him. - Starting in Samurai Warriors 2, Kanetsugu Naoe's weapon is a sword and a handful of spell-tags, which he mostly seem to use to shoot Frickin' Laser Beams... - Endless Nightmare: Curse have you playing as a badasss Taoist warrior-priest, and you can fire flaming paper talismans with inscriptions on them as ranged attacks. You also have a finishing move that allows you to execute zombies instantly, by pasting a Taoist talisman on them causing the undead to burn up. - EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce: Fei attacks enemies by striking them with ofuda, as befitting a Taoist spiritual mage. The Jiangshi raised by Master Wu also wear these over their faces, as is natural for them. - These are a major gameplay mechanic in Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja. Talismans can be used directly to cast spells or stuck onto equipment to customize it. - These are... pretty common in Touhou Project. Reimu and Sanae, the resident Miko, are the most strongly associated with them, but they get used by a fair number of bosses and even some generic fairies. - Reimu's Ofuda are unusual in that, rather than any kind of spiritual message, the writing on them is 大入 ("ooiri"), a phrase written on red and white envelopes of money given as gifts or bonuses. It's been suggested that she does this to trick youkai into approaching them, or it could be taken as another sign of Reimu's own money-hungry personality. - Several characters have ofuda as parts of their outfits: Mokou has them attached to her pants (possibly to make the pants fireproof), Yoshika has one on her hat (as a magically-raised zombie/Chinese Vampire), and Tojiko has her dress adorned with them (for no apparent reason). Shion can be mistaken for having them randomly plastered all over her clothing, but those are actually debt notices. - The Kiki Kai Kai series has the main protagonist Sayo-chan, a miko who uses ofuda as ranged weapons and an oharai stick as a melee weapon. - The Legend of Zelda: - In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, upon entering the Arbiter's Grounds miniboss room, you see a huge, ominous sword tied down with a bunch of ropes with papers hanging on them. Every single gamer, viewer and troper instinct screams at you not to remove the seals, and indeed, viewing the sword with wolf senses shows an otherwise invisible demonic spirit kneeling, gripping the sword, and patiently waiting for some fool to show up and release it. As if it wasn't obvious, you gotta be that fool. - The Yiga Ninja of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild leave behind a flurry of red paper talismans along with a cloud of smoke when they teleport around or remove their disguises. \|\|The Sheikah Monk Maz Koshia\|\| also makes use of them, as does Impa in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. - Onmyōji (2016), of course, but it seems that Seimei is the one using them most frequently, tossing them around in most of his skills. And then there's the Summoning feature, which is basically a game of lottery in which you draw weird shapes on talismans before sending them off into the summoning circle, hoping to acquire a shikigami of high rarity. - The Fatal Frame series uses these to keep certain doors sealed until you find and photograph a specific item or ghost to remove the ofuda (in the third game, they're shaped like people), effectively similar to finally finding the proper "key" to "unlock" its door in order to make progress. - In Dungeon Fighter Online the Exorcist subclass uses several different paper talismans with various effects, such as Holy, Red Phoenix, Suppression, and Lightning amulets. - The Shin Megami Tensei and Persona games have them as the result of casting Hama spells, One-Hit KO light-type spells. - Nu-13 and Mu-12 from BlazBlue both have several red talismans hanging from their cloaks. They don't seem to do anything special, though, and disappear along with the cloaks as soon as they get into their battle armor. - They appear in Corpse Party on a few doors to prevent you from going in until you find a way to break them. - Sheena from Tales of Symphonia uses these to summon creatures, and...apparently to punch as well, as she never puts them away during combat. - These are used by Lailah in Tales of Zestiria and Laphicet in its distant prequel Tales of Berseria in the same way. Magilou in Tales of Berseria also uses a single one as her weapon and it stretches and retracts. - Paranormal HK have you collecting taoist paper talismans to exorcise the ghost possessing your friend, Kathy, to retrieve her. In the last stage, you managed to escape the haunted Kowloon Walled City on a car whose hood is plastered with those charms - ghosts hit by surfaces with the charms simply Disappears into Light on contact. - In Perfect World, the basic fire spell for the wizard class is essentially throwing a burning paper talisman against a target. - The second case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Dual Destinies takes place in a remote village whose culture is centered around fear of the Youkai. One of the characters you meet is Jinxie Tenma, who uses talismans everywhere to ward off anything she believes will invite the Youkai (including Apollo himself, whom she mistakes for a demon, as well as on herself). - The Platform Game Youkai Yashiki has the player collect five paper talismans for a key on each level. - In Fate/EXTRA, Caster uses her Curse-type skills by throwing talismans with different inscriptions on them at her opponent. - Diablo II had several types of "charms" - items that, in most cases, looked like pieces of parchment with some artwork on them. Keeping them in your inventory would yield some bonuses. - In The Secret World, certain enemies in Tokyo can't be permanently destroyed by even your strongest attacks unless you make proper use of an ofuda. - Darkstalkers: Lei-Lei uses the Taoist variant since she's a jiangshi. - Pokémon: - The Mythical Pokémon Jirachi, who is said to have the power to fulfill wishes, has three paper tags attached to its head. - The Cleanse Tag and Spell Tag held items, which reduce the encounter rate of wild Pokémon and boost the power of Ghost-type moves respectively. - Channelers in Pokémon Red and Blue as well as its remakes can be seen with paper charms as well. - In the Puyo Puyo games, Cute Ghost Girl Yu gets a paper talisman placed on her head in her damage animations. - Qiqi of Genshin Impact, being a Chinese Vampire and an Undead Child, sports one of these attached to her hat, dangling in front of and partially covering up her face. - Dark Cloud features these in the form of preventing the game's status effects. They were localised as "Amulets" - which caused some people to wonder why they would eventually "rip". Its Sequel also brought them back, but they were still called "Amulet". - Magical Border Patrol: Jake Harrier uses them to banish Spirits, although he can apparently use them for other things.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PaperTalisman
Parachute in a Tree - TV Tropes Ste.-Mere-Eglise, Normandy, 1944. A character ejects or leaps from a plane overhead with a parachute. Before they hit the ground, they pull their parachute and fall slowly to the ground. All is well: soon they'll be safe and sound on the ground. ...If it weren't for that pesky breeze pushing them over towards that cluster of trees. Instead of landing on their feet, the character's parachute snags in the branches and he becomes stuck, dangling helplessly in the air. If the fall isn't particularly high, the character may try to cut themselves down. Otherwise, they will probably need someone else's help to get down. This trope covers any situation in which a parachute or similar object snags on something and leaves the owner dangling in the air. It doesn't have to be a tree, it can be a tower, lamppost, cables, or anything else that a parachute could snag on. This trope is very much Truth in Television both in military parachuting and recreational skydiving, and surviving such a situation is a mandatory part of training. Pilots are equipped with hooked knives for slicing through their parachute cords if this becomes a problem, and some military parachutes have releasable extended lines so that you can reach the ground if you are too high up to get down or risk a fall. In recreational skydiving it is usually better to hang on the harness and wait for help rather than to try to get yourself loose (and risk falling uncontrolled on the ground). See also Improvised Parachute and Puny Parachute. Rarely used in conjunction with a Parasol Parachute or Parachute Petticoat. ## Examples - Seen in this spot for Yardley Black Label aftershave, featuring Monkees Mike Nesmith and the late Davy Jones note : Yardley was one main sponsor of the show along with Kellogg's as two parachuters. This product is what gets the less-fortunate Davy the kiss. - A coffee shop commercial includes an unlucky woman's parachute becoming entangled in the only tree in a large field. - In the first episode of Madlax, the title character paradrops into the middle of a jungle and, unsurprisingly, gets stuck on a tree. Instead of dangling there, however, she simply unstraps herself and lands gracefully on the ground. - Happens a few times in Buck Danny. - And in the Commando comics, usually involving an evil German soldier who finds our hero in such a helpless state and is about to shoot him, until a third party pulls a Big Damn Heroes. - Blair Williams from Terminator Salvation is introduced dangling from a derelict pylon by her parachute. She tries to cut herself free, despite the large drop, but Marcus Wright grabs her before she can fall from her harness. - In The Crazies (2010) they find the long-dead skeletal remains of a pilot who had this problem after ejecting. - The Longest Day includes a scene where a paratrooper becomes snagged on a French church spire. This incident is based on one from the real world. - Also when another US paratrooper gets stuck in an actual tree and, unable to free himself in time, ends up getting separated from the rest of his unit. - In the prologue of Jurassic Park III, Ben and Eric are parasailing note : a parasail looks like a rectangular parachute, but the canopy is wider and gives more lift, allowing it to be steered better and stay aloft longer near Isla Sorna when they lose their towboat and have to land on the island. Later when the main group arrives on the island, they find the parasail dangling from a tree with Ben's half-eaten body still attached to it. The parasail is more or less intact, so Billy packs it up and takes it with him. Billy later uses it to rescue Eric from a flock of Pteranodons, and gets caught on a cliffside for his trouble. He manages to cut himself down and fall into the river, but can't make it to shore before being \|\|nearly\|\| eaten. - Played very straight in the World War 2 film Flying Leathernecks: an American pilot has to bail out of his fighter over Guadalcanal because he ran out of fuel. His parachute snags in a tree just as a Japanese patrol is passing by on the ground below, and they promptly shoot him dead. - In Force 10 from Navarone, this happens to Corporal Miller during a parachute drop over Yugoslavia. A German soldier nearly shoots him before he is saved by Sergeant Weaver. - This is how the other characters encounter Edwin, the doctor, in Predators. - This happens to an unlucky 00 agent in the opening sequence of The Living Daylights. - A fatal example of this occurs in The Bridge on the River Kwai, where a squad members land in a forest where he hangs himself. - In The Dirty Dozen, Jiminez breaks his neck this way during a drop in France. - Happens to Topper Harley early in Hot Shots! Part Deux. He proceeds to cut himself free... with a chainsaw knife. - In That Man from Rio, the hero has to ditch a plane over the Amazon jungle and parachutes down - getting stuck in a tree and dangling just above a hungry crocodile in the swamp. - Ashford from Operation: Dumbo Drop gets caught in a tree after everyone else lands safely. This, however, helps set up his Big Damn Heroes moment. - An unlucky wind change in George of the Jungle resulted in a skydiver getting his parachute entangled in the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Lucky for him, George was there to swing to the rescue. - On his first parachute jump into German-occupied Norway, Max Manus ends up hanging upside down from a tree. Fortunately his friend Gregers lands nearby and helps him down. - In Scarecrows, Bert doublecrosses the rest of the gang and bails out of the plane with $3.5 million in stolen loot. However, he misjudges his landing and winds up hanging from a tree with the cash on the ground in the creepy old farm. And that's where his problems really start. - Firestorm (1998): When Jesse jumps out of Andy's chopper to rescue Jennifer and the (fake) firefighters, his chute gets caught up between two trees. He has to cut it loose in order to drop to the ground. - In ABCs of Death 2, the Israeli soldier starts the segment "F \|\|is for Falling\|\|" hanging from a tree by her parachute. - Bret King Mysteries: In The Mystery of Blizzard Mesa, Bret and Ace parachute out of a plane above the villains' hideout and Bret gets his chute caught in some tree branches twenty feet above the ground. He narrowly avoids being shot by the villains once they see him stuck there. - The 'monster' in Lord of the Flies is actually a dead parachuter hanging from the trees. - Flight of the Intruder: \|\|Jake Grafton\|\| not only ends up hanging from a tree after ejecting, but has the further indignity to somehow end up hanging from his parachute upside down. Fortunately, he was hanging only a foot or so off the ground. - World War Z: One of \|\|Colonel Christina Eliopolis's\|\| crew mates after the crash. Found, being eaten. - In The Drew Carey Show Tim Allen (As Himself) gets stuck in the tree in Drew's back yard after a failed parachute publicity stunt. Drew doesn't cut him down since the idea of having a celebrity stuck in your tree is funnier than letting him leave. - The Dad's Army episode "Time On My Hands" centres on the characters' efforts to pull down a German pilot whose parachute is caught on the town clock. - In The A-Team episode "One More Time," Amy's parachute is caught in a tree, leaving her dangling in her harness. - In one episode of The Young Ones, after moving into a new house, Mike discovers Buddy Holly, still alive and guitar in hand, hanging from a parachute in one of the rooms. He has apparently been there since 1959 (23 yeas at that point). Mike tries to capitalise on the songs Buddy has thought up since then only for the parachute to give way and Holly fall screaming through the floor. - Full House: When Jesse goes skydiving, his parachute gets stuck in a tree, causing him to be late to his own wedding. - In an episode of Foyle's War, a German WWII flier who is found hanging in a tree from his parachute after a plane crash is involved in a murder taking place at the same time. Played with in the sense that \|\|the soldier did not in fact land with the parachute. He was transported in by a submarine and then hung himself up in the tree to make it look like he had been in the plane.\|\| - In an episode of Father Ted, during a flight emergency, Jack takes the plane's two parachutes and attaches the second one to the drinks trolley. As the credits roll, we see Jack and the trolley both stuck in the tree, with Jack vainly trying to reach it. - In Band of Brothers the men of Easy Company find a dead paratrooper caught in a tree. - This happens to Will and the father of Will's girlfriend of the week in an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. They manage to knock each other down. - General Hospital: Lois jumps out of a moving plane and ends up in such a situation. Fortunately, she had a cellular. - Bonus points for making a "hanging around" reference and whistling away waiting to be unhooked. - CSI: Miami: In "Terminal Velocity", a skydiver is killed when his parachute is tampered with. His diving partner ends up dangling from a tree after he tries to save him. Horatio and Tripp interview him while he is still hanging from the tree. - The central point of an immunity challenge in Survivor: Borneo. - Happens once in Emergency!, and she didn't want the firemen to damage it getting her out. Someone pops her reserve chute, and she complains about the repacking fee. - Lost: - Naomi is introduced this way after her helicopter got into trouble flying over the island through a storm forcing her to jump out. Her parachute got caught on a tree and she was injured by one of the branches, requiring a rescue from some of the main cast. - The following season Charlotte Lewis is introduced having also jumped out of a helicopter under similar circumstances to Naomi. In an extra stroke of bad luck Charlotte is left hanging upside-down and over a river which at least gives her a slightly softer landing than hitting the ground. - Brian Eno's song 'Mother Whale Eyeless' includes the line "Parachutes caught on steeples." - Happens several times during the D-Day drop in the first two Brothers in Arms titles, ranging from getting killed by German fire upon getting their chutes snagged, or dying from injuries related to the jump. Both Hartsock and Baker witness several of these happening, with the latter ending up in this situation himself, only surviving thanks to Doyle's arrival. - In Emergency! 3, you have to rescue a radioactively contaminated military pilot after he parachuted out of a crashing experimental nuclear fighter jet and his chute got impaled on a nearby church spire. - This happens to one of the first-dropped troopers accompanying you in the first Call of Duty. He's shot and killed by Germans before you actually reach him. - There's a Funny Background Event in Modern Warfare 2 involving this trope. During the mission "Wolverines!", you and your buddies come across a Russian paratrooper that has befallen this fate on a streetlight. - Medal of Honor: - In Level 3-1 of Medal of Honor: Frontline, an Allied paratrooper is hung up on a windmill and killed by machine gun fire. - In the mission 'Scavengers' in Medal of Honor: Vanguard, the Bazooka Operator is found caught in a tree, the player also gets to cut him down. - Medal of Honor: Allied Assault's Spearhead Expansion Pack has Parachute In A House, as Barnes ends up breaking through the roof of a barn and gets trapped several feet over the floor, all the while German troops are patrolling the area outside the barn. In Breakthrough, a similar scenario happens, with Baker's glider crash landing into a tree and Baker himself having to cut himself free from his seat, with Italian troops patrolling near the crash site. - A parachute on a fence, sans passenger, is how Solid Snake can learn that Liquid is alive after his helicopter was blown up in Metal Gear Solid. Snake believes it was left there intentionally as a coded threat by Liquid. - Metal Slug Code J have you meeting Fio in the game for the first time, as she's stuck in a tall tree after a botched paradrop. You're interrupted by a helicopter boss before you can free her, and once the boss is defeated it then crashes into the base of said tree, the resulting explosion causing poor Fio to literally fly out of her chute and landing a few hundred meters away (it's an Amusing Injuries moment however, she looks more embarrassed than actually hurt). - Nathan Drake lands like this in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. In front of a statue with a sword in his face. - This is how one first arrives in Sholazar Basin in World of Warcraft. That is, the pilot of the aircraft you're in ends up like this. Somehow, you miss the trees and land safely on the ground. - Corpses of paratroopers hanging from trees are frequently found in the "Swamp Fever" campaign of Left 4 Dead 2. Upgraded weapons, medical supplies and grenades can be found on their bodies. - In the old Atari 2600 Raiders of the Lost Ark game, the well of souls was found behind a cave under a cliff-side tree branch. Getting into the cave involved snagging your parachute on the branch (which would cause you to slide in). - Fallout 3: Early on in the Operation: Anchorage DLC, you see a snagged paratrooper get gunned down by Chinese troops. In Point Lookout, you find a parachute in a tree above the skeleton of the pilot, adjacent to his crashed plane that contains an Apocalyptic Log in the black box. - At the beginning Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, Carnby gets snagged in a tree while landing on Shadow Island. - Happens to Larry in Leisure Suit Larry 2: Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places), when parachuting down to Nontoonyt Island. Your only way out is if you thought to bring along a knife. If you didn't, the game becomes Unwinnable as you're stuck hanging there. - This is how the Lost Pilot Zombies in Plants Vs Zombies 2 attack your lawn. They drop down hanging from a parachute caught onto a tree, and start eating the plant on that space before they're eventually "freed". Using a Blover when they're hanging causes them to free themselves immediately, instead of instantly killing them unlike most Airborne Mooks. - Game & Watch: Parachute's Game B has the right string of skydivers possibly meeting this fate. - Happy Tree Friends: In "Wingin' It", when Mime falls out of a plane, the skin on his face comes lose and functions as a parachute. He gets caught up in a tree and has the cut off his skin to get free. - Happens a couple of times in the Street Fighter cartoon to provide a moment of humor. First Guile gets caught and Blanka teases him, and then the situation is reversed a few episodes later. - Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Non-Action Guy Dr. Canus ends up dangling from a tree when he bails out of the Batplane in "Last Bat on Earth!". - The Loud House: In The Old and the Restless, Pop-Pop ends up in a tree after a parachute jump. Lincoln helps him down. - During D-Day, a paratrooper named John Steele became snagged on the church spire at Ste.-Mère-Eglise and played dead for two hours before being cut down and taken prisoner by the Germans. This was depicted in the movie The Longest Day as listed above. The church still has a monument to him and the other paratroopers, in the form of a statue of a paratrooper dangling from the spire, as well as stained glass windows depicting Virgin Mary and the paratroopers. note : Which also sounds like a great name for a band. - One history of the SAS Regiment related an anecdote from World War II, about a trooper who got scattered away from the drop zone due to bad weather and landed in an orchard. Unable to see anything in the dark, and unwilling to risk injuring himself in a fall by cutting himself loose, he patiently waited for dawn, only for first light to reveal his feet were half a foot above the ground. - Also during World War II, when the British Airborne Division was new and still trying to hash out their methods, the top brass were not impressed when half the troops had to be rescued from trees by the local fire brigade after a parachuting demonstration. - Another example occurred during World War II with famed French resistance spy Nancy Wake, whose parachute got tangled in a tree when she landed in the Auvergne province of France. When the resistance leader found her, he remarked, "I hope that all the trees in France bear such beautiful fruit this year." Her response? "Don't give me that French shit." - During the "Malayan Emergency" campaign in The '50s Special Air Service actually practiced "tree jumping" deliberately - which was often inevitable, as four fifths of the Malay Peninsula is covered by jungle and helicopters of the era were limited in numbers and carrying capacity. Each trooper was issued with an extra length of rope to climb down the tree after his landing. Injuries still happened quite often and with increased number of helicopters tree jumping was gradually discontinued. - Postwar, smoke jumpers (paratroop firemen) would carry ropes to let themselves down out of trees (which they would often aim for; getting snagged in a pine isn't bad if you have a face mask and probably softer than whatever open ground is available).	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParachuteInATree
Skydiving Tropes - TV Tropes This index is for tropes related to skydiving and parachutes. Tropes <!—index—> Chute Sabotage Hammerspace Parachute Hollywood Skydiving Improvised Parachute Inconvenient Parachute Deployment It's Raining Men Parachute in a Tree Parachute Petticoat Parasol Parachute Puny Parachute Variable Terminal Velocity Wrong Parachute Gag Useful Notes: Skydiving <!—/index—>	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParachuteIndex
Paper-Thin Disguise - TV Tropes "Mr. Burns, it was naïve of you to think I'd mistake this town's most prominent 104-year-old man for one of my elementary school students." A disguise that is so "thin" that the audience can immediately recognize who the person behind the "mask" actually is. Note that this doesn't require an actual mask; the character may have merely styled their hair differently, added glasses, or changed into a different outfit. Regardless of exactly what was used for the disguise, the identity of the character is completely clear, usually before they remove it, and sometimes other characters can see through it as well. Any character who is fooled is likely a Horrible Judge of Character; the egregiousness of their misjudgment depends on the disguise. Several external factors influence this trope. If the big-name Special Guest is going to spend most of the episode or film wearing a disguise, then you'd want it to be "thin" enough for audiences to identify the actor before The Reveal. If the character frequently wears disguises, then it may be a stylistic choice to reassure the audience as to the identity of the character. This is more common in media aimed at younger audiences, but is also common enough for Master of Disguise characters so that the audience isn't constantly guessing as to which character is "really" in disguise. The trope is still an important dramatic convention in live theatre and opera productions — where a really good disguise would render the character unidentifiable from the cheap seats, and be beyond the scope of the prop budget to boot — but is usually employed along with some kind of nod to the audience acknowledging the absurdity. Internal story factors also apply. If the disguised character is supposed to be foolish, wearing a bad disguise provides plenty of opportunity for comedy, particularly if other characters aren't fooled any more than the audience. A character who can't identify someone just because they added sunglasses to their ensemble is another way to mock disguises as well as genre conventions. Classic examples of "bad disguises" are the following (tropes are linked based on their overlap, not subtrope status): - Wearing a face-obscuring cloak or hat over the character's standard outfit. - Wearing a Groucho Marx glasses-and-mustache prop. - Putting on or taking off glasses/sunglasses. - Changing out of a Limited Wardrobe, especially into a uniformed service, such as police officers or package delivery employees. If the disguise is improved (such as by combining two or more "thin" details and changing your voice), you get an example of Wig, Dress, Accent, where the inability of the other characters to identify the disguised character becomes much more reasonable. In order to qualify as a Paper-Thin Disguise, there must be at least one obviously clear element of the character underneath. However, the probability that other characters are fooled by this disguise is just as fluid as with other disguise tropes. It's becoming a bit common nowadays to subvert this trope by fooling the viewers instead, showing what seems to be a terrible disguise, but then it's revealed that it isn't, you thought that Bob was badly disguised as an old man, but then Bob in regular clothes appears next to that old man that looks like him. Compare with Clark Kenting (a subtrope where the disguise is used over a long period of time and remains effective despite that) and Newspaper-Thin Disguise (where a book, magazine, or similar is used to hide a character's face). Supertrope to Easy Impersonation, and a subtrope of Blatant Lies. May lead to a Captain Obvious Reveal. Contrast with the vast majority of other Disguise Tropes. ## Example Subpages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other Examples: - BoBoiBoy: Throughout the series, Adu Du and Probe (respectively a green-skinned cube-headed alien and a purple robot) have tried to pass themselves as regular humans multiple times just by wearing human accessories. It's usually averted as the heroes easily recognize them, but there are times when it is played straight: - In the 5th episode, Gopal and Tok Aba mistake them for their rice-selling friend and her son, even buying the "prosthetic" excuse for Probe's robot arm. Yaya, on the other hand, immediately recognized them from behind. - When Adu Du tried to enter BoBoiBoy's class as part of one of his schemes, Papa Zola only recognized him after BoBoiBoy took off his glasses. - In Boonie Bears, the bears often wear disguises so that Logger Vick won't be able to recognize them, and they tend to work despite the fact that those are very obviously just bears in snazzy or flimsy outfits. - The late Linda Smith had a routine complaining about the use of this trope in opera: "Someone puts on a big hat and suddenly no-one can recognize them, even people who they've been talking to for half an hour. If that worked in real life, the witness protection program would consist of a selection of headgear." - There are plenty of Russian jokes about that, some of them dealing with Stierlitz, the main character of the Soviet TV series Seventeen Moments of Spring: - Stierlitz was indistinguishable from the locals, but there was something subtly different about him compared to the Germans: maybe it was his military bearing, or the Hero of the Soviet Union star on his chest, or the parachute dragging behind him... - ...No one had a clue that Stierlitz was lying motionless on the window sill, disguised as a cigarette butt. - "Comrade Captain, I made use of the special disguise technique you've developed. I disguised myself as a tree stump. I was sitting there and wondering what sort of an idiot would buy this trick. Then a young couple sits down on me. I bore it. They were chatting. I bore that too. Kissing. I bore even that! Then they started... you know. I bore that as well like a true soldier. But when that bastard started carving the word "love" on my butt, I couldn't bear any longer! - The AU Harry Potter series Adam Winters series features 'Adam Winters', a fake identity created when Pettigrew abducted Harry after Voldemort's death and placed him under various disguise charms. As a result, when 'Adam' goes to Hogwarts, he is basically Harry with a different hair and eye-colour, spared recognition for so long because nobody was actually looking for any similarity between him and the Potters as it was assumed all three died in Voldemort's attack, although \|\|after the disguise charms are broken, Dumbledore also provides Adam with different glasses to wear as 'Harry' in order to better distinguish the two\|\|. - Whenever the All Guardsmen Party tries to use disguises. - Mostly because when they wear civilian clothes, they just look like guardsmen wearing civilian clothes. It doesn't help that they hide their lasguns under their disguises. This produces a rather obvious rifle-shaped bulge, which gets them in trouble with security when they try to get into a bank. On top of that, they have to contend with Nubby trying to steal pretty much everything in sight. - They even pass this on to their students when asked to train up new Interrogators. "We watched, tears in our eyes, as they practically marched onto the scene, looking exactly like a bunch of guardsmen trying unsuccessfully to look like civvies." - Bane Johns disguises himself as a deserting Guardsmen by throwing on a greatcloak, impressive false mustache, and impressively insulting fake accent. However he fails to hide his Inquisition-issue armor or pistols and leaves his Inquisitorial Rosette in plain view. Sarge tries to fix the disguise only for Bane to pull the rosette out again. - After a visit to the Tau Empire border, the party acquires some xeno plasma guns which Tink tries to disguise as lasguns. Tries being the operative word as apparently the only reason they aren't killed for tech heresy is Jim and Hannah running interference with the senior Tech Priests. - Also from the Tau visit they pick up Spot the Wonder Drone. Tink tries to disguise it as a servitor skull by covering it with grox skins and a few spare skulls. The accompanying illustration depicts this as the obviously Tau drone with a skull duct-taped to the top, a jawbone hanging from wires on the bottom, and holding scrolls reading "PLEASE IGNORE" and "COMPLETELY NORMAL SERVITOR SKULL". - The Rizzoli & Isles Western AU fic Calamity Jane Meets Doctor Isles sees Jane disguising herself as male outlaw Jake Wyatt in the latter half of the 1800s, but once characters get past the masculine clothing, Jake Wyatt is just Jane with a fake moustache and wrappings around her chest, as well as socks down the front of her trousers. - In the Calvin at Camp episode "The New Kid," Larry Koopa infiltrates the camp while wearing nothing but a Mickey Mouse hat. - Par for the course in Common Sense where Meowth can oftentimes pass for human by putting on a disguise since he can talk and walk upright, despite the fact that he's around two feet tall on his hindlegs. At the very least, he makes sure to cover his feline attributes anytime he does so, though his methods leave something to be desired. - Zigzagged in most works by Coeur Al'Aran. Blake's disguise of wearing a bow over her cat ears, but otherwise keeping the exact same appearance and name never fools anyone for long. - On the other hand, Jaune dressed as Blake in A Rabbit among Wolves fools Ruby even though he's roughly half a foot taller than Blake. - Similarly in Relic Of The Future, Ozpin decides it's probably coincidence that Jaune Ashari is almost identical to Nicholas Arc, figuring the two are probably distantly related at best. - The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic/ Digimon Adventure 02 crossover Digital Harmony has the Digidestined trying to pass the Mane Five off on Earth by saying that they're Digimon. Of course, in the wake of MaloMyotismon's defeat in the 02 finale, the human world is becoming more and more aware of Digimon, so their families tend to buy it. - In Doctor in the Underworld, when the Doctor infiltrates Ordghaz Manor to learn more about the vampire/lycan war, Selene gives him a coat belonging to one of her deceased Death Dealer allies so that he can accompany her to the library, but acknowledges that he will only pass for a Death Dealer under casual inspection. - Used a lot in A Dream. Apparently, putting on sunglasses makes you completely invisible. Ponies are generally bad at seeing through disguises. - A very minor example in the Animorphs fic The Escape; after the Animorphs free Tom and fake his death on their first trip to the Yeerk pool, Tom lets his hair grow out while living in the basement. The reasoning is that, if anyone sees him through a window while he's upstairs brushing his teeth or generally anything that would require him to leave the basement, the distance and new haircut will make him look just enough like Jake that nobody will realise he's someone else. - In Fate Genesis, when forced to confront Eggman in public, Saber takes a Kamen Rider mask from the high school's drama club and wears along with her normal battle dress to protect her identity. Notably, this only fools those who don't already know Saber is a Servant. - Justified in Fist of the Moon. Usually the senshi have disguise fields protecting their identities that are so powerful you cannot remember their faces while staring straight at them. but people with high levels of Silver Energy are somewhat immune, so Ranma and Akane see through them without even realizing it's supposed to be a disguise. - For the Glory of Irk: - Averted for once with Zim's disguise after Skoodge upgrades it to a hologram like his own, so they actually pass for human. - Played straight and for laughs when Skoodge "proves" that he and Zim were simply on Earth on vacation by just having the two of them wear Hawaiian shirts when they attend the Syndicate trial. To Dib's utter shock, this works. - Played straight when the Tallest come to Earth and use disguises much like Zim's original one. - The Forever Captain series: Steve wears glasses with plain lenses and parts his hair on the opposite side in his identity as Grant Carter. Peggy teases him by saying he might as well, seeing as he's basically "pretending he's not Superman." - In Friendship is Witchcraft, Sweetie Belle is a robot who looks indistinguishable from a normal pony... but speaks stilted words in a heavily synthesized voice. No one suspects her true nature, least of all Sweetie Belle herself. - Discussed in Harry Potter and the Ice Princess, when Harry wonders how Elsa can get around using public transport when she's royalty. As Elsa explains, few countries know the names of every member of their royal families, and in Elsa's case she's further aided by the benefit that she hasn't been officially introduced to her people yet and so few people outside of her family know who she is. - In the one-shot Hiding in Plain Sight, Harry Potter gets Lasik eye surgery and becomes completely unrecognizable to the pureblood wizards at Hogwarts without his trademark glasses. Then the Aurors try to recreate 21 Jump Street at Hogwarts. The Muggleborn have absolutely no trouble recognizing the incredibly out-of-place "first-year students". - The Hannah Montana fic Higher Power has Lilly make it clear to 'Hannah' when they meet backstage that she can see through the Hannah disguise when her best friend is right in front of her, even if it's easier to buy the deception when watching Hannah on TV or at a distance at a concert. - Hivefled: in one of the less grimdark scenes, the four trolls with the smallest and thus most easily-concealed horns dress up as humans to go food shopping. Not only are they wearing hats and gloves in June and concealing their grey skin only with face-paint, but John only just manages to stop them talking about eating babies in public. - In I Against I, Me Against You, Church and the Blues try to pass Twilight Sparkle off as a dog when passing through a military checkpoint. Surprisingly, it works, but the UNSC doesn't let front line personnel keep pets and confiscates Twilight. \|\|Wyoming, however, is not fooled.\|\| - Infinity Crisis: - Several times in the various sequels, when characters from other Earths wind up on Earth-38, they're shocked that Supergirl is able to hide her Secret Identity with just glasses and a different hairdo. When Captain Marvel ends up visiting, she's equally shocked that no one recognizes her outside her uniform, despite lacking a mask of any kind. - When Squirrel Girl is introduced, she's surprised that the Defenders are able to track her down in her civilian identity. As an exasperated Jessica Jones points out, she makes no effort to hide her face when in costume, or the fact that she has a giant squirrel tail even when out of costume. - In Women of Wonder, the Earth-1992 Wonder Woman sees the Earth-76 Diana Prince do her "spin transformation" into Wonder Woman and openly notes "I am never mocking Clark for the glasses again." - Invader Zim: A Bad Thing Never Ends: As in canon, Zim is fond of these in the form of simple things like contacts, fake beards, wigs and hats, which somehow always fools everyone except Dib and Gaz. He forces his new Irken minions to wear similarly bad ones as well, with a particularly bad case for the Announcer, who gets nothing more than a pair of Groucho glasses, which somehow still works. - A large degree of Kirby fanfiction gives Kirby the ability to become completely indistinguishable from whoever he's taken the power/costume of, despite the obvious size differences. - Kyon manages to call Tsuruya and make her think he was his uncle Kintaro in Kyon: Big Damn Hero, even though he sounded identical to normal. He was sleeping in the same room as her at that point, though. - According to Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami, a naked woman can pass for a man merely by having a tattoo that reads "IM A DUDE". - Zigzagged throughout Like One Sundered Star, where superhero identities are Paper Thin Disguises when they have any efficacy at all. Karkat and John are the only ones who DON'T immediately ID each other as Heir and Hemogoblin out of costume. Dave and Bro barely even give lip service to the trope, removing their shades while "on duty" but making no other effort to conceal their faces. \|\|Kanaya has to drastically redesign Rose's Seer of Light costume into a real disguise after her Superpowered Evil Side rampages through New York unmasked.\|\| - Averted in Make a Plan. Ron and Draco's attempt to obtain liquor in the Hogshead by wearing funny hats and fake beards and claiming to be dwarves fooled no one. What makes it even funnier is that their fathers tried exactly the same thing. - Mega Man: Defender of the Human Race has Wily's "Mr. X" outfit; possibly even worse is ProtoMan's alias, "Pro T. Mann." - In Memento Vivere, a Final Fantasy X fanfiction, Rikku's "goggles will do it" theory in Luca. - The MLP Loops: One Loop has Starlight Glimmer travelling back in time to around "Applebuck Season" and trying to pass herself off as Applejack. Twilight sees through it in an instant, but that's not difficult when Starlight's not bothered to hide her horn, or her different eye-color, her Cutie Mark, and the paint on her coat is running (also, her attempt at imitating Applejack's accent is eye-wateringly awful). It turns out Applejack hasn't even been incapacitated, and had actually told Starlight not to even bother trying. - The incredibly useless Invisibility Cloak in My Immortal: people can see the cloak when it is in use, so basically the users are walking around with a regular cloak over their heads. - Just like in canon, we see a lot of this in The New Adventures of Invader Zim. Not only does Zim continue to get by with just a wig and contacts, but Skoodge has the same setup, while Norlock does the same but with Groucho glasses in place of the contacts. When Nyx joins in Season 2, she wears another variant on the wig/contact combo; by this point, Dib is wondering why he even bothers to expose the lousy disguises. - Ruby Pair, by the same author, likewise continues Zim's canonical use of this trope. He even forces Tenn to abandon a perfect holographic human disguise in favor of a wig and contacts like his, to her anger. - In Nobody Dies, in order to pacify a rampaging A.I. based on Fallout 3, Gendo tricks it into thinking he's Abraham Lincoln simply by wearing a top hat. It probably helped that he already had the beard. - Invoked in the Charmed (1998) fanfic Once and Future Witches, when the Charmed Ones of 2007 go back to 1999. At one point, 2007 Piper is spotted by her 1999 boyfriend Dan Gordon; stuck for any better ideas to explain how she looks older, she claims that she's just wearing her hair differently. - In the Descendants series Package Deal, at one point Ben, Mal and Evie visit a carnival in "disguises" that are basically just dyed hair and Ben wearing something other than his usual suits, but the kingdom is so used to seeing Ben in his usual attire that they genuinely don't recognise him. - Palpatine is the Worst: When Darth Sidious checks in on the clones after issuing Order 66, he discovers that they've used Loophole Abuse to avoid following his orders. All of their Jedi generals are standing right next to them in plain sight, while only making minimal efforts to disguise themselves (or none at all) as the clones snarkily insist that hes mistaking innocent bystanders for Jedi and that they did execute Order 66. Sidious isnt fooled in the least, and the clones aren't putting much effort into fooling him, while several of the Jedi can't keep from laughing. "Of course this isn't General Secura, my Lord," Commander Bly said, gesturing to his side. "General Secura doesn't have a mustache." Sidious glanced incredulously between the clone and the twi'lek beside him, whose ridiculous set of spectacles, peach nose that stuck out from her natural blue tone, and yes, dark mustache did nothing to hide her identity. "Twi'leks do not have mustaches! he snarled back. "She has a condition," Bly said, unperturbed. - In The Parselmouth of Gryffindor, Luna Lovegood thinks that wearing a pillowcase (and nothing else) and speaking in broken English is all it takes for House-Elves to confuse her for one of their own. A mortified Hermione quickly talks her out of it. Later on, Sirius, while Faking the Dead, creates the alias of "Jester White", for which he wears glasses and a false beard. AND IT WORKS. Also, apparently, Dracula was one of Hogwarts's many evil Defence Professors a few years before the story begins. His alias? Professor Vladimir Alucard, who chalked up his sunlight-intolerance to a "rare skin condition". - Penny Saves Paldea: Discussed in Penny's book, which has a chapter about people who are unable to recognize that the Masked Royal from Pokémon Sun and Moon is just Professor Kukui in a mask and without his jacket. In the games in question, it's incredibly obvious that the two are only treated as different people to preserve kayfabe, to the point that the eleven-year-old protagonist has the option to outright ask "Professor Kukui?" when they first meet the Masked Royal. - Subverted in Queen of Diamonds, as Genie explicitly confirms that 'Prince Ali' includes a subtle spell to stop anyone recognising Aladdin if they already knew him, to the extent that \|\|Jasmine only recognises 'Prince Ali' when he explicitly chooses to let her recognise him, although Jafar realises the truth when he sees the lamp\|\|. - RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse: The story "An Early Reunion" has a scene with several Celestia imposters. Some of them aren't even the right tribe, the right build (admittedly, a difficult prospect for most ponies), and in one particular case is the wrong gender. While some of them do have the justification of being insane or misled, there's the fact that the non-insane and stupid are trying to claim to be Luna's sister to Luna herself. And oh, boy is she pissed at this. Meanwhile, everypony Cadence meets thinks she's pulling this, since she thinks she's Celestia reborn, but isn't going around threatening to burn everything that annoys her. - In The Road to be a Pokemon Master, Ash, Gary and Serena steal some Team Rocket uniforms to infiltrate Silph Co. \|\|And the Rockets see right through their disguises since they don't conceal the fact that they're still children, while every other Rocket is an adult.\|\| - Sailor Moon Abridged pokes fun at the fact that the title character never wears a mask but is never recognized in her superhero form. For example, in one episode, when Tuxedo Mask (actually Nephirite) sends letters to find Sailor Moon and the title character gets one, Luna questions how he found her and offers an idea. Luna: It's probably because your hair is pretty... unique and you don't wear a mask. - In Sora's Adventure in Rogueport Remake: - Princess Peach disguises herself as Thunderbolt (a brainwashed Lightning) for the adventure in Twilight Town and despite being thinner, daintier and still wearing her perfume manages to fool everybody, though Beldum does question her appearance and Mario realizes who it was after the Shadow Sirens are beaten. - When Lord Crump and Lightning disguise themselves as Four-Eyes and Storm Cloud, Sora, Bea and Aerith aren't fooled and during the Ember attack in Chapter 23, when Storm Cloud tells Sora to "Keep focused", Sora responds with "Yeah, you got it... Thunderbolt". The latter fakes surprise. - Tealove's Steamy Adventure exaggerates it for laughs. Big Tiny Little tries to impersonate Colt Skylark in order to gain Tealove and Snowcatcher's confidence. He looks and acts nothing like Skylark, he doesn't wear any disguise, and he doesn't get that Skylark was never a friend of Tealove or Snowcatcher in the first place. He doesn't fool anyone—the others just get tired of arguing with him. Snowcatcher trailed off as a short, fat unicorn waddled up to the group. "Who are you?" "Who, me?" he said. "Don'tcha remembers me? [...] Don'tcha remembers yer old pal, Colt Skylark?" Snowcatcher groaned and placed a hoof to her forehead. "First of all, you look and sound nothing like Mr. Skylark. Second, he's not an 'old friend' — he's a random pony with a suspicious backstory who we've known for less than an hour." "So you don't remembers yer old friend. Snowcatcher, that hurts me, right here it does." He placed a hoof over his heart. - This Bites!: - In Chapter 38, like in canon, Usopp disguises himself as Sniper King before the raid on Enies Lobby. This time however, Cross, Leo and Donny easily see through his disguise, and when Cross grabs Usopp and demands to know what he's doing, Usopp (they're both whispering) admits he was scared because they're going to be raiding Enies Lobby, one of the worst places for a pirate to be so he made up the disguise to be brave. Cross then tricks "Sniper King" into admitting why he was there (Usopp ran away and asked him to take Usopp's spot), Luffy pounds Usopp and then the Long-Nose Sniper whips off his disguise and fully reveals why he came up with his disguise. \|\|This does mean that Usopp doesn't give Luffy his Heroic Second Wind against Lucci, but Cross and Soundbite use the SBS to get Luffy to hear all the pirates cheering for Luffy including Gol D. Roger.\|\| - In Chapter 46, when the Straw Hats come to pick up Merry from the Shipgirl's base, they show up in a three-masted broadside sloop-of-war that they painted deep blue-grey and painted a seagull and the word MARINE on the sails and is incredibly rough shape. Blows up in their faces when one of the girls (probably Vivi) points out how the shipgirls are never gonna buy it which is proven true when Kongo laughs her head off and says that she doesn't know who the Straw Hats think they are but they shouldn't have picked the US Marines to impersonate. Kongo says their ship doesn't look like an amphibious assault ship to her. Usopp tries to keep the disguise up by claiming that it's a top-secret ship but Cross interrupts him telling him that their cover's already blown and he doesn't know how but it's not the One Piece marines they're dealing with. - Tidal waves plays this for laughs when Gabriel notices that Marinette wears her hair in the same style of pigtails as Ladybug. He lures her into a trap through a pastry order, but is thrown off when she shows up wearing a mustache. Marinette herself is equally flummoxed when Hawkmoth himself appears, then cuts off his own Evil Gloating once he gets a better look, apologizes to 'him' for the mix-up and pays for the pastries. Gabriel spends the rest of the work confused about her gender identity. - Top of the Line (Editor-Bug): The Role Swap Plot in Trading Dismay is enabled just by Zim stealing Tenn's eyelashes and rearranging his antennae into the curly shape of hers, while she straightens hers out to match his. \|\|While GIR and Skoodge are tricked, it turns out at the end that Tak wasn't, and just played along to have an excuse to boss Zim around.\|\| - In The Treasure of Eyja Nott - a Modern AU of How to Train Your Dragon based on The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)- Hiccup's 'disguise' after his years in prison is primarily his dark sunglasses; while he has grown a beard, it's a fairly basic one, but his eyes are too distinctive for him to be sure he wouldn't be recognised if his enemies saw them, even with the advantage that most of the people he's trying to deceive think he's been dead for over a decade. - Ultra Fast Pony: in "Utter Lunacy", Spike the dragon successfully disguises himself by wearing a dragon costume (one which doesn't even cover his face) and speaking with a different accent. The only time he comes close to getting caught is when he briefly switches back to his normal accent. - In The Unbroken Saviour Dumbledore wears a fake nose, a hat with ostrich feathers and one of his usual outlandish robes in an attempt to be inconspicuous. However, the outfit succeeds due to each of the elephants on the robe having an individual Notice-Me-Not charm cast on them. - Justified in The Unexpected Rookie. While in the world of Cars, the Autobots need to keep a low profile while looking out for Decepticons. Fortunately, in this world they don't need to do much to disguise themselves except transform into their vehicle modes and use holographic eyes and mouths. None of the cars realize they're robots in disguise until they transform. - In Unity, this is brought up when Honey Lemon learns that Susan's Ginormica, as she asks how she didn't recognise Susan when Ginormica doesn't wear a mask, Susan observing that it's surprisingly easy to blend in when people expect you to be ten times taller. - In Vapors there is an international, kunoichi-only summit to discuss dealing with the Akatsuki. The Dragon Konan doesn't even bother with a disguise, she walks in with her real face and name as the representative from Rain, because no one except Aiko knows who the leaders of Akatsuki are, and she can't tell. - In A Very Potter Musical it's lampshaded multiple times: - Harry's Invisibility cloak, which barely covers the group's shoulders and yet it seems only Dumbledore knows they're there. - Dumbledore's (extra) beard when hiding from the Death Eaters searching for him. - And, of course, Quirrel and his magically sneezing turban. - Wander over Foster's AU One-Shot ( Wander over Yonder, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends): Bloo's "investor disguise" consists of his typical enormous coat and sunglasses. - In Welcome To The Family Light Yagami determines that not even the genii of Wammy's House can withstand the mighty stealth powers of the "magic hoodie" that somehow renders him unrecognizable whenever he goes out to do nefarious things. - Played for Laughs in Yamujiburo's Pokémon fan-art where Jessie begins dating Ash's mother Delia. Ash doesn't initially recognize Jessie when introduced to his new step-mom. - Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series: - Despite hiding his face and body well, Bandit Keith still frequently uses his catchphrase (...in America!) while disguised, and still uses the same deck (but to be fair, seeing as how he was a regional champion, it could have easily been Netdecked to hell and back). - Averted in the anime, as Yugi's smart enough to figure out who it is from the deck theme. However, it's played straight a few arcs later when Yugi's grandfather enters the KC Grand Prix and duels Joey... the only one who didn't see through his disguise. - Played straight with "Malik Blishtar". - "Judy in Disguise (With Glasses)" was a hit song for the Louisiana-based John Fred and His Playboy Band in early 1968. The song was a parody of The Beatles' hit, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". - The Lonely Island song "Two Worlds Collide" features Andy Samberg singing about his love for country singer Reba McEntire. "Reba" is played by SNL cast member Kenan Thompson, who is actually an ordinary guy (who fully admits to being a man) who found a red wig in the dumpster, put it on, and somehow convinced Samberg that "she" is the real deal. The extremely graphic song describes all of their sexual escapades (with Thompson frequently mentioning his penis), but Samberg is none the wiser because of the wig. - The members of Pink Floyd would sometimes mingle with the audience for drinks during the intermissions for their shows, with no disguise other than leaving their instruments behind. They were almost never identified as the people who had previously been performing under a spotlight right in front of them. Of course, all four of them were pretty unremarkable-looking and they tended to stay out of the public eye, but still... - In the music video for "Paparazzi," Lady Gaga first appears as a platinum-blonde woman wearing outlandish outfits. After an attempted murder by her boyfriend, she seeks revenge by coming back into his life and killing him and the entire staff of his mansion. To do this, she dons the brilliant disguise of...platinum blonde hair and an outlandish outfit. Of course, this could be deliberate, as the video seems to be an attack on the public who eagerly cast away old stars to embrace newer, similar ones. - The music video for SoulDecision's "Ooh It's Kinda Crazy" involves a scene where two band members try disguising themselves as mechanics to walk through a crowd of crazy fangirls, wearing blue jumpsuits, caps, glasses and fake mustaches that match their hair color. Naturally, one of the girls in the crowd isn't fooled by their disguises, and calls them out. - My Beloved Mother has the protagonist Sinbell infiltrating a penal colony full of robots near the end while wearing a jacket and motorcycle helmet. Which none of the guards (all humans) noticed him to be human. In all fairness, there are literally hundreds of robots around the area, and Sinbell doesn't stick out the crowd as much. - The Achilleid: The dress Achilles wears does nothing to hide the fact that he's built like an ox and taller than any girl his age. The only excuse for why he isn't immediately found out is that a goddess made the disguise, and even then, Ulysses immediately sees through the disguise anyway. - Dice Funk: Rinaldo concocts an entire alter ego, only for it to immediately fall apart under the slightest bit of scrutiny. Leon: I'm Filet Mignon from Pottsylvania! - Tomlane Belaroth in Hello, from the Magic Tavern is such a good actor the he can impersonate a series of bats by simply waving his hands and saying "I'm a series of bats". This fools everybody except Arnie. - In one episode of the The John Dredge Nothing To Do With Anything Show, regular character Derek Dalek tries passing himself off as Derek Dolak - but not very successfully, because even John grows suspicious: John: I must say, you rather remind me of someone. Derek: Well, I am well known locally. John: Your telescopic manipulator arm in particular looks familiar. Derek: What? This little thing? ( boing) John: Yes. Derek: It's just there for show, John! JUST! THERE!! FOR!! SHOW!!! [exterminates a tree] - One episode of Mission to Zyxx sees the crew land on a planet that hasn't discovered space travel yet so they're forced to disguise their alien appearances. Everyone puts in an effort except hulking Dar, who only wears a fake beard. - Tellie from Sequinox gets put in a hotdog costume on Halloween by Vivaldi, and thinks that by that logic it wouldn't be recognized and could go to the school. Yuki quickly shoves it in her bag on account of, y'know, it's still a talking space fox. When the girls tell it to act more like a dog, it just says "bark bark bark". - The Thrilling Adventure Hour: - On certain "Sparks Nevada, Marshal on Mars" segments we encounter Jib Janeen, an alien shapeshifter. Although Jib Janeen is always voiced by Paul F. Tompkins and speaks in the same goofy, high pitched tone regardless of who he's impersonating, the other characters are always completely fooled by the impersonation. - "Desdemona Hughes, Diva Detective" features former actress Desdemona Hughes adopting various disguises to solve murders. The disguises are apparently legitimately good and, unlike Jib Janeen, Desdemona alters her voice to suit her impersonations. She also makes a very conspicuous show of leaving right before assuming a new disguise and the disguise is often of someone or something completely random and unrelated to the current situation. Nobody is ever suspicious for long and are always surprised at the actual reveal. - It's a standard part of any Charlie Brown from Outta Town storyline. - André the Giant: In the spring of 1986 (following his WrestleMania 2 battle royal victory), Andre requested time off to go on a tour of Japan, heal from legitimate injuries, and begin filming scenes from a movie he was hired to star in, The Princess Bride. At the time, he was engaged in a 3-year-old feud with Big John Studd over whom was the true giant of wrestling, and a storyline was contrived to have Andre "miss" several high-profile tag-team matches (with a partner of his choice) against Studd and King Kong Bundy. Eventually, at Bobby Heenan's behest, WWF president Jack Tunney "suspended" Andre. Later in the summer of 1986, a masked wrestler, identifying himself as the "Giant Machine" appeared, targeting along with other masked "Machine" wrestlers Studd and Bundy. The villains insisted that the Giant Machine was in fact Andre. They were right, except they were unable to mask Andre to prove his true identity (much to the delight of fans), and the WWF's lead announcers, usually Vince McMahon, Gorilla Monsoon, or Bruno Sammartino, speculated that the "Giant Machine" might be one of several famous Japanese wrestlers. - Indeed, Bundy and Studd never were able to prove their case to the fans, which had they succeeded Andre would have been "fired" (for circumventing Tunney's suspension). However, the storyline was always left open so that if Andre's health forced his retirement, the "Giant Machine" would have been unmasked. However, Andre's health held up enough and after finishing filming of The Princess Bride and concluding his Japanese tour he was "reinstated" ... and a heel turn later that led to his famous WrestleMania III match with Hulk Hogan etched his name in history. - At the height of the Bundy/Studd-Machines feud, Heenan introduced his own stable of "masked" wrestlers during a segment of "The Flower Shop" with Adrian Adonis. It was obviously Studd and Bundy wearing paper masks, and they quickly revealed themselves to scornfully mock Andre. - John Cena was storyline fired from WWE following Survivor Series 2010, but didn't actually leave the company (since he's kind of the biggest money-making machine WWE has at the moment). In his place at house shows, WWE trotted out Juan Cena, until he was "re-hired". - Hulk Hogan's Mr. America disguise came about after he was "fired" in 2003. When he left the company, footage appeared revealing that Hogan took off his mask after a match. - In TNA, what disguise did Sting wear when he attacked Rob Van Dam from the crowd? A Sting mask. - Delirious tried to do CM Punk's steal an audience member's clothing and hide in the crowd trick but his mask and the tassels hanging off of it stuck out like a sore thumb. Daizee Haze has also worn some disguises in her efforts to aid Delirious...with mixed results. - Kane's "imposter". In 2006, Kane feuded with an imposter who was wearing his old mask (but didn't look anything at all like him otherwise) who beat the actual Kane several times using his old moves. While it was obvious to fans who was who, nobody affiliated with the actual WWE could tell them apart. (Probably why they were content to drop the storyline without even revealing who he was after Kane did kick the phony's ass.) - In the Cloris Leachman episode of The Muppet Show, pigs take over the show and fill all the roles. Cloris comes out on stage while "Kermit the Pig" is making an introduction and states her belief that he's not Kermit the Frog, despite being green (not easy for a pig) and having the collar. What changes her mind? "Ribbit!" He didn't even have to hide his ears or snout. Though given Cloris later saves the show, she evidently saw through the disguise at some point. - Usually averted whenever it happens on Sesame Street, when other characters see through the paper-thin disguises. Justified as it is an educational show for children. Some examples include: - In one sketch, Ernie gets a disguise kit and uses it to fool Bert, who is not fooled at all, especially since Ernie left his pirate beard on when he dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood. However, when a wolf shows up, Bert thinks it is Ernie. - In another sketch, Cookie Monster dresses as "The Cookie Bunny", and "corrects" Ernie whenever he refers to Cookie as Cookie Monster. - In a street scene of one episode, Big Bird and Alan bake birdseed cookies for Granny Bird. When Cookie Monster finds out, he dresses as Granny Bird. Big Bird and Alan know that it's Cookie Monster all along but play along with it. - In another episode, Abby thinks Oscar might really be a prince and wants to kiss him, which Oscar wants to avoid. At one point Oscar dons a disguise (Groucho Marx glasses) which doesn't work. - One "Word of the Day" sketch features Jack Black and Elmo defining the word "disguise," so as might be expected, Paper-Thin Disguises came into play. Jack claims to be a "master of disguise," and tries to prove it by putting on various outfits to conceal his identity. The first is a large sombrero and a pair of sunglasses; the second is a rainbow clown wig and...another pair of sunglasses. Elmo instantly sees through both disguises, which makes Jack sad. He leaves, and a few moments later, a Muppet chicken enters. In a subversion of the trope, Elmo asks if the chicken has seen Jack Black...three guesses as to who the chicken really is. - In the "Smart Cookies" segments introduced in the 46th season, The Crumb, a villainous chef, is always able to fool Cookie Monster with these kinds of disguises. - In an episode of The Furchester, "Don't Eat the Guest", a talking cookie comes to the hotel, on a day when the hotel is out of cookies. In an attempt to keep Cookie Monster from eating the guest, the staff puts a fake mustache on him so Cookie won't know that he's a cookie. Sort of works, though Cookie Monster does say that he thought it was a cookie at first ("But whoever heard of cookie with mustache?"). - In a viral video, Abby looks for Elmo, who disguises himself wearing only a pair of Groucho Marx glasses. She is actually fooled, even when Elmo says "Elmo hasn't seen your friend Elmo anywhere". - In one sketch, Bert accuses Ernie of stealing a plate of cookies he was saving for himself. Ernie loves cookies and has been known to trick Bert out of his desserts, but swears that he's innocent in this case. Bert argues that he saw someone in a red-and-blue striped sweater with a tuft of black hair laughing in Ernie's distinctive "Khee-hee-hee" manner, which proves he must be the crook...and that's when Cookie Monster enters, wearing a sweater that looks like Ernie's and a small black wig, to help himself to another dish of sweets. This was apparently enough to fool Bert, despite the fact that Cookie Monster is, you know, a fuzzy blue monster. - In the episode where The Count has a ceremony to receive the noble prize for counting, The Count is late showing up, and the rules state that the winners must receive their prize in person, so Alan, Telly, and Elmo all dress as The Count in an attempt to get him to have his award. The judges rightfully don't think they look enough like The Count, but go along with it anyway, not learning the truth until each one confesses/gets exposed as imposters (only done after they fail to do the counting challenge or fail to make thunder and lightning). - In the New Year's special Sesame Street Stays Up Late Telly dons an ill-fitting fake beard, sunglasses, a fedora and trenchcoat and claims to be an agent from the U.S. Department of Celebrations and Parties under the impression that stopping the New Year's Eve party would stop the new year from coming. While the kids believe him until he gets his beard caught in his briefcase, Gina is visibly not fooled. - Tales of the Tinkerdee: The audience won't be fooled by Taminella the witch simply putting on a wig, a false beard, or a hat. But the other characters seem taken in by her disguises, with a partial exception of the king noting that a "sculpture" of the princess looks more like the princess than she does while Taminella is impersonating the princess. - Pip Bin of Bleak Expectations is always fooled by his nemesis Mr Gently Benevolent's disguises, though they're always comically thin and he's prone to slipping back into his accent, saying his evil internal monologue out loud. Pip: Mr Benevolent! How did you fool me for so long? Mr Benevolent: Do you know, I genuinely have no idea. - Taken to extremes in one episode where Pip Bin's sister (at that point Mr. Benevolent's 'saucy evil consort') blows the disguise in seconds. Twice. He still doesn't catch on. - And then there's Miss Talula Really-Obvious-Fake I-Can't-Believe-You-Haven't-Noticed Not-A-Man. "She" is still Mister Benevolent, and he manages to fool Pip Bin long enough to get married. Even after Benevolent drops the act, Pip still believes Talula was real. - Pip and one of his sisters get in on the act too. They escape from their respective boarding schools with the aid of their aunt by dressing up as a rabbit, famous British Admiral Lord Nelson (several years after his death) and... a grandfather clock. When someone spots them and questions the walking grandfather clock his sister merely says "bong bong bong" and the question is dropped. Nun: Good evening to ya, Admiral Nelson. Nice to see you alive again. - In Fellowship of the Raven, the party at one point had to disguise their dragonborn member Glaedr when they had to return to the town of Vallaki both due to non-humans being very uncommon in Barovia and them still being fugitives there. The first attempt from Muriel was of this type, amounting to Groucho Marx glasses on what was still obviously a humanoid dragon, but after some assistance from her boyfriend Ivan the second attempt was actually pretty convincing. - Scary News out of Tokyo-3: Anyone with any knowledge of Neon Genesis Evangelion should be able to guess immediately who's hiding behind the transparent handle of "ZeroGirl00" — she's one of several characters with inside knowledge of NERV, and she has a tendency to talk about the Pilots in I Have This Friend fashion. Unfortunately, none of the other characters are in a position to figure out the truth until she finally comes out and admits it. - In We Are All Pokémon Trainers, Lenore (Fool's Hydreigon) and Ammy (Umbra's Volcarona) use these to get their own Trainer's Licenses — they wore fake moustaches and trenchcoats. Lenore's case is more notable, because while Ammy was wearing a Pokémon-to-Human armband, Lenore wore the disguise as a Hydreigon. - The example game for the default version of Goblin Quest has the players try to steal a prize-winning bear by infiltrating a bear show using a crudely-made mechanical bear costume. The artwork shows various goblins sticking out of the mechanical bear, which itself has a sign on the front saying, "yes im baer". - It's not unusual for disguises to seem paper-thin on stage, a dramatic convention to make allowance for limited props and budget. Willing Suspension of Disbelief is encouraged in this scenario. - In many stagings of As You Like It, Rosalind's "Ganymede" disguise is portrayed as this. In these versions, Orlando recognizes her at once, she realizes as much, and their subsequent "tutoring" scenes together become coy, humorous flirtations between the pair, who through role-playing can be frank with each other in ways a young couple of the time ordinarily couldn't. - In Holy Musical B@man!, Alfred is fired by Bruce, later returning as "O'Malley the Irish Butler" who is just Alfred wearing a hat and a ginger beard. - In Ken Ludwig's Lend Me a Tenor, the theater manager's assistant Max disguises himself as the visiting tenor Tito Merelli after Tito is found dead in his hotel room. This works on the opera's audience, as they have never seen the real Tito and won't know the difference. However, Tito's Not Quite Dead, and is running around Cleveland in the same costume Max is wearing (Tito brought two identical costumes). Saunders, the manager, runs into Tito several times without realizing the costumed tenor is not Max, despite Max and Tito, even in costume, looking nothing alike. - In Love's Labour's Lost, Boyet discovers that King Ferdenand and his gentleman will serenade the French Princess and her ladies in disguise as Russians. The ladies therefore know which is which, and pull off their own masked stunt to misdirect each man to the wrong lady—but they also back this up by swapping the romantic tokens the gentlemen gave them. - Much Ado About Nothing: At the masked ball for Don Pedro and his men. Ursula recognizes Antonio by his wit and head-waggling. Pedro pretends to be his protege, Claudio, in order to woo Hero for him. Hero was informed of Claudio's intent by her father, so she knows that the masked man is one of them and speaks accordingly. Don John's henchman recognizes Claudio by his bearing and Don John pretends to take Claudio for Benedick in order to trick him. The only man whose disguise might have worked is Benedick, and he hears an earful of insults from Beatrice for his trouble. - This was the main gimmick for the short-lived late 80's Purr-Tenders toy line: fluffy plush cats wearing fake ears and muzzles so they could pass as 'exotic' animals like dogs and mice. (The fact that they could all communicate with humans and came in pink and purple apparently didn't make them exotic enough.) Somehow, the disguises worked... until they started purring. - Ace Attorney: - In Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, Apollo never notices the uncanny resemblance between the picture on the wall \|\|at the Wright and Co Offices\|\| and the victim \|\|of his first case\|\| (not even noting familiarity) even when the only difference is a goatee. On the other hand, Phoenix notices from the first meeting. The player, on the other hand, stands a chance of noticing at first glance, even without color. - Furio Tigre kills somebody and then disguises himself as Phoenix Wright in order to "defend" the person he framed for the murder. This "disguise" consists of a suit, a fake attorney's badge (made of cardboard), and loudly proclaiming himself to be Phoenix Wright. It works despite Furio having bright orange skin and a very noticeable Bronx accent, and every major player in the case knowing Phoenix personally on top of that. All because he has the exact same spiky hairdo. The defendant mentions that everyone in the courtroom had "big question marks on their faces" when "Phoenix" made his appearance, but every time someone tried to point this out, Furio literally roared them into silence. Even more bizarrely, the disguise is apparently good enough to fool the player — the first you see of Furio Tigre is in the chapter intro where "Phoenix" loses the case... and he's rendered as completely indistinguishable from the real Phoenix. The skin colour can be explained away as being a fake spray tan that Furio just didn't put on that day, but it's pretty much stated that he made no attempt whatsoever to hide the accent. - Trials and Tribulations subverts this with \|\|Dahlia Hawthorne\|\| when she appears to turn up in "Bridge to the Turnabout" with a different hair colour and nun's garments (retaining the same hairstyle and mannerisms, thus the Paper Thin Disguise). The subversion? \|\|It's actually her twin sister.\|\| - Trials and Tribulations, the one difference between Godot and \|\|Diego Armando\|\| is basically a pallet swap and a face visor. - "Director Hotti" in Justice for All is a mental patient at the Hotti Clinic who habitually steals the director's lab coat and uses it to try and pass himself off as the director, ignoring the fact that the ID badge pinned to the front of the coat has the real director's picture on it. He appears again in Apollo Justice as "Director Hickfield" of the Hickfield Clinic. Evidently the Hotti Clinic staff got sick of his bullshit and passed him off to another clinic to get rid of him. That, or the real Director Hotti quit in order to get away from him. - Dual Destinies has "The Amazing Nine-Tails", a famous masked wrestler. Players groan at how long it takes for the characters to figure out that he's obviously Rex Kyubi, \|\|and are then blindsided when it's revealed that he's actually Damian Tenma.\|\| - A bit of a Double Subversion with the disguises used by Shelley de Killer, especially his disguise in Investigations 2. While he has an extremely unique face (stitches right down the middle) that he never covers up, the fact there's very few people in-game who know what he looks like means he doesn't really need to put much effort into concealing his identity... and then you realize he's wearing the signature logo of his Calling Card right there, making it loop right back to paper-thin. - At the end of Butterfly Soup, Noelle and Akarsha use these while spying on Diya and Min's first date. - In CLANNAD, Akio disguises himself as a rapper at one point. His daughter can't recognize him. In the visual novel, he just put on a pair of sunglasses and it somehow works. - Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: The only reason that \|\|Mukuro is able to pass herself off as Junko\|\| is because none of the cast have met either one of them before (\|\|well, technically they have, but they had their memories wiped afterwards\|\|), and even then, Makoto immediately notices that \|\|"Junko" doesn't resemble her magazine covers very closely, to which she gives the excuse that those covers have been photoshopped to hell and back\|\|. The flimsiness of the disguise is even more blatant in the bonus School Mode, where it quickly becomes evident \|\|Mukuro is really bad at staying in character, as she continually makes references to things like knife-throwing, running away from home, and owning a ghillie suit, even though she's supposed to be playing the role of a fashionista\|\|. - In Halloween Otome, it's downplayed (especially in the case of The Count), but Emma and Mr. Bandages hair (in length/style and colour, respectively) are striking enough that Emma should have recognized one of the guys, or vice versa. - Katawa Shoujo parodies this to demonstrate just how detached from reality Kenji really is. During one of their encounters, Kenji mentions that he's going to the store and Hisao, well acquainted with his paranoia at this point, sarcastically asks if it's safe for him to go outside. Kenji, immune to sarcasm, counters that he's safely disguised because he has a hat. (Bonus points: he's not even wearing a hat.) - Little Busters! has Mask the Saito, a mysterious masked man that appears and starts challenging people if, after being returned to the bottom of the battle rankings early on, you can make you way up to the top again. At first glance, it isn't obvious who it is, but as soon as he starts talking it's very clearly Kyousuke's voice. If you lose to him, he doesn't even bother to keep up the charade, turning around and walking off (revealing distinctive red/brown hair) while throwing the mask away. Riki is faintly bemused by the entire thing, but plays along. - Majikoi! Love Me Seriously! has Ms. Kishido. The only different thing she's wearing is the mask. This might have worked had she not been a blonde-haired, blue-eyed foreigner in Japan with her equally distinctive not-disguise-wearing protector along with her. A few people are actually fooled, though. - In Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors' "Safe" ending, \|\|Junpei claims to be Santa who switched clothes with the real Junpei, with no actual effort put into the disguise beyond that. It's incredibly obvious to everyone that he's lying, even to the person he was supposedly trying to fool. But he wasn't actually trying to fool anyone. The reason why it was obvious to everyone was what was important to him. While 99% of people would simply say he doesn't look anything like Santa, Ace instead says he can't be Santa because they just opened Door 3 with a combination that wouldn't work if he was Santa, accidentally outing himself as having prosopagnosia (face blindness), and thus as the likely killer of Snake... or rather, the man who the killer thought was Snake because he was wearing Snake's clothes, meaning the killer couldn't recognize him by his face\|\|. - Chris in Princess Waltz. How obvious is it? Before The Reveal, knowing how bad a job she's doing acting, Chris asks in a roundabout way if Arata is sure he doesn't suspect her of anything. And barely refrains from mentioning what: Being a girl. It gets worse. He walks in on her with no disguise (bath) and still doesn't get it. All the yaoi fangirls in the class Squee... - In Spirit Hunter: NG, Akira points out that, despite Kaoru's desire to keep her Momo identity a secret, she goes out in the same distinctive gothic clothes regardless of whether she's Momo or Kaoru. Her only defence is that she loves the style too much to not wear it in her everyday life. - ASDF Movie 8 has a cow pretending to be a man. Its disguise consists of a baseball caps and a skateboard. - At one point in Vinesauce's The Blue Shell Incident, Mario is able to elude Luigi with the clever disguise of a hand with glasses on it, claiming to be Handio. Luigi is fooled, but not for long. - Bowser's Kingdom: - Steve as a Shy guy in Episode 2. - Hal and Jeff as Luigi and Mario, respectively in The Movie. - The Cyanide & Happiness Show has John Battman, a Batman Parody whose "secret identity", Broots Waymb, is still wearing his superhero costume (albeit with the cowl pulled down and a baggy, unzipped jacket worn over the tights). He also keeps delivering Blatant Lies that all but state him and Battman are the same person. - FreedomToons: After Dave Rubin's guests vow never to come back because he's too agreeable, he instead decides to interview Rave Dubin, a webshow host who is very... agreeable. And wears glasses. - Happy Tree Friends: In "Don't Yank My Chain!", Lifty and Shifty disguise themselves with the Mole's sweater and glasses and Handy's helmet and tool belt, respectively. Lumpy is fooled by their disguises, despite all of them having different colored fur. - Homestar Runner: - Bubs' alter ego, The Thnikkaman, consists of him wearing sunshades and a piece of paper reading "TH" taped to his chest. And on a couple occasions he momentarily removes the shades. Only Homestar, The Ditz, ever sees through the disguise. - As part of the annual Strong Sad Lookalike Contest, the Cheat dresses up as Strong Sad's left foot by sitting in a paper bag that had an elephant foot crudely drawn on it. Nobody else's costume is particularly convincing either (except for \|\|Homsar, who was disqualified because Coach Z thought he actually was Strong Sad\|\|), but the Cheat has somehow won the contest three years in a row this way. - Also applies to Strong Bad's attempt to use a stunt double in the Dangeresque trilogy. The stunt double in question is clearly Strong Sad, and the terrible editing does not help. - And then there's Homestar's The Cheat disguise, which is more extensive than most of the above - painting himself yellow with spots, adding a tuft to his head, walking on his knees, and saying "meh" a lot. It's about as good a Cheat disguise as someone with Homestar's looks could possibly manage... but considering the Cheat is a third Homestar's height and significantly plumper and has no legs (while Homestar has no arms), it's still a very long way from convincing. It fooled Strong Mad, though. - In the Cheat Commandos cartoon "Shopping for Danger!", Fightgar disguises himself as an old lady by putting on a wig and glasses and squinting his eyes. It's one thing for him to not shave his Perma-Stubble, it's another for him to not remove his Badass Bandolier. The Blue Lasers are completely fooled. - Karekore The Half Blood: When a human boy dated Hisame, Kagechiyo and Cidy spied on them with disguises that barely changed their appearances. Hisame even recognized them on the spot. - Monsterbox: When the store owner refuses to sell the little girl a birdhouse for her monster, she puts a fake beak on the monsters nose and ties feather to the monster's arms and head. The store owner sees right through the ruse, but decides to sell her a birdhouse anyway. - In Episode 22 of The Most Popular Girls in School, Ashley Katchadorian disguises (read: tries to) herself with... sunglasses, and a trenchcoat. Atchison's Taylor called her "a lesbian Inspector Gadget". - During the "Curse of Strahd" playthrough on Puffin Forest the characters assassinate a guard captain with Garo saying they need disguises. While Garo and Gouda have reasonable outfits, the one-armed lizard folk Boshack just wears a potato sack on his head while Krusk refuses a disguise on the basis that trickery is for "lowlifes". They only get away with it thanks to nobody being out at that hour... and then Gouda wears her murder disguise in public the next day. - Blake Belladonna of RWBY wears a bow on her head to disguise her true nature as a Faunus, or more specifically, to hide the cat ears perched atop her head. From a meta perspective, seeing as hints to this were dropped heavily, when she accidentally blurted it near the end of the penultimate episode of the first season, almost no viewers were surprised. It was actually lampshaded the very next episode: Yang: We're looking for our friend, Blake. Penny: Oh! You mean the Faunus girl! Ruby: Wait... How did you know that? Penny: [points to the top of her head] Uhhh, the cat ears? Yang: Cat ears!? She wears a... [dawning realization] Bow... [the girls all stand around awkwardly as a tumbleweed rolls by] Ruby: She does like tuna a lot. - In Season 8 of Sonic for Hire, after Earthworm Jim accidentally kills Morty, he takes up Morty's decapitated body (similar to how he wears his super suit) with a wig but doesn't bother to hide his obvious worm head. Sonic and Tails fail to notice anything off. Even when Jim tries to explain to Eggman that he's not Morty, Eggman doesn't buy what "Morty" says cause he claims to know Jim before tossing him out the window. - The Weebl's Stuff cartoon "Scampi" is a list of things that the narrator has seen that are "often in disguise". None of the disguises are very convincing, which include a hamster wearing bunny ears, the planet Earth with a big sign reading "MARS" on it, Shakespeare dressed as a party clown, and a map of Malaysia with Kuala Lumpur's name scratched out and replaced with the obviously hand-written word "France". - In Battle for Dream Island Again, a running gag is for several characters to pretend to be a tree and make swishing sounds. This is done by placing Gelatin on top of their heads, sometimes having him having an uncomfortable expression as he's covering Match's hair. This gag also returns in BFB 30	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PaperThinDisguise
Paparazzi - TV Tropes "You cannot hope to bribe or twist, Thank God, the British journalist. But seeing what the man will do, Unbribed, there's no occasion to." — Humbert Wolfe This is a staple of any work of fiction dealing with celebrities — especially those aiming to show Celebrity Is Overrated. The characters will inevitably have to deal with media-folk who are looking for a story to sell at some point, no matter how it affects the lives of the story's subjects, or what laws the paparazzi break in the process of getting the story. This can be considered the Jerkass flipside or Evil Counterpart to the Intrepid Reporter. Particularly bad ones fall under Immoral Journalist. Rich source of Paranoia Fuel. The paparazzi are Acceptable Targets and may well be victims of a Take That!. Typically they are working for a Strawman News Media outlet. "Papped" has become a verb for being photographed by these people. Compare Tabloid Melodrama, which often overlaps, and Groupie Brigade when the invasion comes from fans. Also compare Media Scrum. For some reason, most people who do this wear a Press Hat. Grammatical note: technically "paparazzi" is the plural and the singular is "paparazzo", but in English "paparazzi" is often used as a singular. ## Examples: - This Heineken ad for the 2005 Super Bowl features Brad Pitt being chased by a gigantic horde of paparazzi as soon as he leaves his apartment, even when he's simply going to a convenience store to buy some beer. The ad implies that this is a regular occurence, as Brad casually ignores the hundreds of paparazzi obssesively trying to photograph him and is even shown to be friendly with a few of them, referring to one by name. - In Assassination Classroom, all of Class 1-E is swarmed by paparazzi when Koro-Sensei is blocked inside the school. The class tries to explain Koro's innocence only for the media to immediately dodge certain questions and statements and start twisting their words around to make the story "juicier" for everyone watching. They are soon chased away by Karasuma and his men, who end up having to keep the crowd at bay while the students remain at the school \|\|to mourn over the death of their teacher.\|\| During their graduation ceremony, they are once again bombarded by the media. Fortunately, the Big 5 of Class 1-A come in and shield them from the oncoming paparazzi as they escort them towards the bus and away from school. - Kaiju Girl Caramelise: After Arata Minami gets kissed by Kuroe in her Harugon form, he gets followed at a distance by various media types trying to get pictures of and interviews with the "Kaiju Prince". To avoid being recognized in public, he starts wearing a face mask whenever he's anywhere other than his home or school. He also reluctantly suggests to Kuroe that they stay away from each other in public until the story dies down so that she won't also get harassed by the paparazzi. - In Full Moon, Mitsuki has to evade a reporter who could expose her secret. - The main characters in the Boys' Love series Haru wo Daiteita are both television and movie actors who constantly weather the Tabloid Melodrama, and are chased by "freelance journalist" Urushizake on his motor scooter. - Hajime Shibata's ex boss Inagaki in Hell Girl was a paparazzo. He ends up sent to Hell by one of his victims, a young man whom he framed alongside his Disappeared Dad. - In Nana, Nana and Ren's relationship is exposed, leading to a media frenzy. Yasu decks one of them. - In Digimon Data Squad, Yoshino gets pursued down the street when she's linked with a pop singer. - Blassreiter likes to portray all news media as swarming, sensationalist vultures whenever the Demoniacs ( especially Gerd) is involved. It gets to the point where it seems like the XAT's job is half dealing with the Demoniacs and half dealing with the seemingly omnipresent news choppers and vans. - The Idolmaster - A Paparazzo is hired by Kuroi to dig up dirt on the 765PRO Idols. - In Case Closed, a really annoying paparazzo named Hirokazu Kajiya shows up when Ran, Sonoko, Conan, and Subaru show up to a concert hall to meet up with a popular singer. Then, the singer appears dead... \|\|But the paparazzo isn't the killer: the singer has been Driven to Suicide for a totally unrelated reason.\|\| - Hyraxx De Mofiti from Buck Godot probably counts. She's a tabloid journalist that at first keeps chasing after Buck in order to find answers for such questions as what colour of clothes does the resident Sufficiently Advanced Alien wears and whther or not the space station is haunted by Elvis. Later on she ends up helping Buck by digging up some information he needs, tho. - Spider-Man: - Peter Parker. Yes, he has been this. In his first meeting with Doctor Octopus he catches the man holding some hospital staff hostage. All fine and well...but the only reason Peter was at that hospital in the first place was that the police and the hospital had refused to let the press in to take photos of Octopus, who at the time was little more than the victim of a horrible lab accident. In other words, Peter broke into a hospital to secretly take pictures of an injured man. He's totally nonchalant about it too and made a remark along the lines of "I've never heard of a hospital keeping people out" with regards to his plan to sneak in. - He once had to deal with a rather vile and self-admitted paparazzi (and the biggest slimeball you'd ever meet) named Nick Katzenburg, a Fat Slob with absolutely no morals, who gained a high position at the Daily Bugle because J. Jonah Jameson had been replaced by the Chameleon, making the Bugle's attacks against Spider-Man into outright slander. When the real Jonah returned, Nick's claws were clipped a little, due to Jonah having some morals as a newsman, and then severely grounded when Thomas Fireheart became the owner in a hostile takeover, turning the Bugle's coverage towards him positive in order to repay a debt he felt he owed (which, sadly, was just as biased, only in reverse). Nick's slanderous ways finally came to a head when he took incriminating pictures of the Rose and published them with Peter Parker's name to protect himself; once the truth came out, he was the target of both the underworld and the police, and an attempt on his life led to a heart attack and his eventual death from lung cancer. - Part of Betty Brant's Adaptational Jerkass in Ultimate Spider-Man involved her being nothing but this. She wanted to just get famous and when Kraven first appeared, she was supposed to report on him, but ending up sleeping with him, costing the Bugle points in its reputation. Even after this, she came trying to get stories, even at the expense of her co-workers \|\|and was about to (incorrect) out Jefferson Morales as the second Spider-Man before she's killed, not caring about the damage she'd done to his family or even bothering to confirm if she was right.\|\| - The world of Plutona treats superheroes like celebrities, with photographers, journalists, and amateur capespotters stalking their every move. Ray's plan on discovering Plutona is to take photos and sell them to the media. - Red Robin: When a panicking Tam Fox tells Vicky Vale that she's engaged to Tim when Vicky starts questioning her about the Waynes' secret, and making it clear she basically already knows they're the Batfamily despite Tam's protests, Tam and Tim are hounded by paparazzi wanting to cover the romance between members of two of Gotham's most respected families. They peter off a bit after Tim reveals the engagement isn't real. - In the Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi story "Strike A Pose" (DC issue #3), the girls don't know a moment's peace because of some paparazzi who pester them even when they're at home in their bus, taking embarrassing shots of them. The only way to get rid of them is to pose politely and smile for the shots, which render them quite worthless since they're not embarrassing and scandalous. - The Ultimates: The hospital were Jan was being treated after Pym's murder attempt started to get filled by this people, so Nick ordered to take her back to the Triskelion. - The Punisher: A non-celebrity version with Chuck Self, a smarmy journalist using Soap (Frank's informant on the police force) as a hostage in order to follow him on a night of killing criminals, hiring two thugs to kill Soap if they don't get a text from him every hour. He very quickly finds out he's in too deep, and after getting shot in the hand, the ass, and losing his tongue, he ends up in a woodchipper feet-first when it turns on (none of which were even Frank's doing). - Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): Thor and Monster X's presence at Mothra's shrine in the Yunnan Rainforest draws multiple human paparazzi who observe and attempt to document them from afar, including Steve Irwin. - The plot of LadyBugOut is kicked off when Alya posts a picture of Ladybug and Chat Noir kissing while their memories were wiped away by Oblivio. She did so over Ladybug's objections, and refused to disclose the circumstances behind it. When challenged about this, Alya insists that she didn't do anything wrong, and that this was simply the price Ladybug had to pay for being a public figure. The incident spurs Marinette to start her own blog as Ladybug in order to set the record straight, and Alya's reputation tanks once the public realizes she's more than happy to lie to them for the sake of a 'scoop'. - In The AFR Universe, Hifiumi Togo is frequently hounded by shutterbugs due to her past as the idol shoji player and the scandal \|\|of her mother rigging the matches in her favor\|\|. Twice she has been caught on camera with Ryuji, sprouting a new tabloid article about what kind of double life she must be living for associating with a Japanese Delinquent like him. - The Simpsons: Team L.A.S.H.: As a celebrity, Liv has several run-ins with these, including in the Title Sequence. - One of the main instigators of conflict in The Birdcage is a paparazzo who continually stalks Kevin Keely in an attempt to be the first to get a shot of him in a compromising situation after his business partner is caught having died while spending the night with an underaged, black prostitute. He does things from paying off Keeley's driver to lead him to where the Keeleys are headed all the way to removing a message from Val telling his birth mother not to come up in hopes it will spark controversy. - And You Thought Your Parents Were Weird!: After reporter Alice hears about Josh and Max's secret robot, she pursues the story to the point of breaking and entering and airing footage obtained from shooting through house windows. - In Batman Begins photographers are seen trying to get around a wall of cops so they can get a picture of young Bruce Wayne alone in the police station after his parents were murdered. - Played with in the made-for-TV movie, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. A self-proclaimed televangelist targets the titular whorehouse that has been in the town for generations and presumably not broken any laws or caused any problems, according to the sheriff, played by Burt Reynolds. Said televangelist eventually takes a film crew there in the middle of the night, breaks a padlock on the fence marking the boundary to the property and then has his cameraman turn on the camera, once the gate is open, to make it look like he's invited. He then proceeds to take his film crew storming through the small mansion, rousing numerous prostitutes and clients, making all their faces public to shame them, and rake in the ratings. The sheriff retaliates by visiting his studio, and then, just out of camera frame, ripping off the televangilist's wig, and decking him right into the camera shot of the singing choir and then calmly walking over his prone form, making it look like he just arrived on the scene before leaving. - In The Circle, the paparazzi are rabid social media junkies with their phones and drones and Mercer becomes an Internet celebrity (although a rather infamous one when his lamp made of deer antlers is shown online) who gets hounded into a reunion with his friend Mae due to the testing of a new program by the titular social media network, and gets killed by the persistent hounding. - TV reporter Richard Thornburg in Die Hard and Die Hard 2, whose actions cause much grief for the McClane family. You'd think he'd have learned his lesson after interfering with the Ghostbusters - The word "paparazzi" comes from the character Paparazzo in Federico Fellini's film La Dolce Vita. It literally means "mosquito", which is rather apt... - In Five Star Final, all the reporters at the Gazette, a sleazy tabloid that is digging up an old murder scandal and ruining the lives of Nancy Townsend and her husband Walter. Isopod dresses as a minister in order to gain entrance into the Townsend home and trick them into an interview. Kitty and her photographer climb through a window, and when they find the bodies of the driven-to-suicide Townsends, Kitty tells the photographer to get pictures. - A Hard Day's Night deals with this during the press conference scene. At one point, a photographer fills a reel of film with George Harrison making faces into the camera. - In preparation for starring in and directing Interview, Steve Buscemi spent some time disguised as a paparazzo. - The film Spice World includes a paparazzo that stalks the Spice Girls, trying to get some story out of them. He apparently has superpowers that include being able to travel through the plumbing and emerge out of a toilet. However, he still fails to get anything until near the end, where he \|\|gets pictures of the Spice Girls' friend after childbirth, prompting the girls to chase him down. Once they catch him, he becomes a whimpering moron (something they actually comment on).\|\| - Rita Skeeter from Harry Potter. Though technically she's not a photographer herself, the rest of her characterization fits and she generally strings one (named "Bozo") along with her. - In The Truth William De Worde and his flock are intrepid reporters. In the other books they are often portrayed as this to the main characters. - James Herbert's novel Creed is about a paparazzo stumbling upon a satanic cult. - Nearly all the media in Rewind (Terry England) is portrayed like this, as they obsess over the seventeen Rewound children to the point of being Strawmen Newcrews. Starts with ABC and NBC reporters cussing each other out while fighting for a good position to film from, and just goes downhill from there. - Hallis Saper, a documentarian in Starfighters of Adumar, is mentioned to have gotten her start in "sludgenews", Star Wars' equivalent. It did teach her some valuable lessons. - In Death: Just about every reporter, except for Nadine Furst, is this. - Carl Hiaasen's Star Island has celebrity/paparazzi interaction, with a pop-star celebrity (and her double) and one obsessed paparazzo as the main plot. - The Honor Harrington series features paparazzi in a few novels. They're the only foe Honor is afraid to face. If the paparazzi are after her, she usually just stays aboard her ship. - In War of Honor, her political enemies use the paparazzi to suggest that Honor is having an affair with Admiral White Haven, who is married (and to one of the nation's most beloved celebrities, no less). She isn't, but she and White Haven are in love by that point. After Honor and White Haven do initiate an affair in the next novel, At All Costs, and Honor gets pregnant, the paparazzi find out. In one scene, some suggest alternate candidates for the father of Honor's son, including White Haven's brother (the current Prime Minister) and Protector Benjamin Mayhew of Grayson (who is easily the least likely person in the entire Honorverse to ever have an extramarital affair). - Averted for the Graysons. While Grayson has freedom of the press, their conservative culture just wouldn't tolerate that sort of intrusion into someone's private affairs. - Digger Downs in Wild Cards. He works for the Aces magazine, which is a tabloid exposing the private life of people with superpowers. He is a really unpleasant guy which will do everything to write a paper, but he is more a nuisance than a really evil person. He sometimes even does real journalism. - In Feed, Georgia mentions having done some time among paparazzi groups when she and Shaun needed the extra income. She points out that in her world, this was also professionally useful to her by accustoming her to being in large groups of people, which is something most people in her post-Zombie Apocalypse world simply don't do but that a working reporter needs to be able to cope with. - Through Alien Eyes has the first alien representatives coming to Earth, so naturally the media is quite interested. Ukatonen is deeply offended when he's interrupted in a garden he uses to relax after a hard day. - The entitled Wendell Green of Black House spends much of his time undermining police efforts to catch The Fisherman in order to get shots of the murder victims. Perhaps his lowest moment comes when he attempts to re-incite a defused lynch mob so he can report on the innocent man they were about to hang. - Esther Diamond: Al Tarr in Vamparazzi is a profile writer, but the deliberately-sensationalist direction his profiles actually take cements him as this. - Britney Spears - "Piece of Me" is about the scrutiny of Britney's private life, largely thanks to the paparazzi. - Brooke Hogan - "About Us" - Xzibit laments "sellout rappers" encouraging media attention and scrutiny in his 1996 breakout song "Paparazzi". - Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" has some picture-taking lyrics ("Got my flash on it's true, need that picture of you"), but is more about stalking fans. - Lindsay Lohan - "Rumors" is about how when she goes to a nightclub anticipating that the paparazzi are "probably gonna write what you didn't see". It was originally written for Britney Spears. - "Dirty Laundry" (Eagles) predates popular use of the term, but is a screaming Take That! to the callous, superficial, and sensationalistic hack journalism that keeps paparazzi in business. - "Weird Al" Yankovic's "TMZ" starts out as a song about how paparazzi harass celebrities, then halfway through changes to pointing out that a number of things that celebrities do in view of the press are really stupid. - Jay Chou's "Besieged From All Sides" note : 四面楚歌 is a thinly-veiled Take That! on the paparazzi, who are portrayed as dogs in the song. - While we're at it, Pretenders - "Jealous Dogs" - The KISS band members in the Unmasked cover comic get harassed by a single photographer who wants to see them without their masks on — which at the time was part of the band's mystique. His efforts get foiled time and again, until he forces them to do so in concert. Of course, The Reveal turns out to be rather comical! - Adam Ant's "Goody Two Shoes" was an expression of annoyance towards privacy-invading journalists. - Delta Goodrem: - Hypocrisy - "Destroyed" (possibly - in any case he gives fame the finger) - Queen's "Scandal" was written about how the British tabloids were trying to pry into the private lives of Freddie Mercury (as he was secretly suffering from HIV/AIDS) and Brian May (over his divorce and subsequent marriage to Anita Dobson). - Michael Jackson: - The music video for "Leave Me Alone" (the song itself isn't actually about the media). Other songs reflecting on or inspired by his relationship with the media include "Scream", "D.S.", and "Stranger in Moscow" ( HIStory), "Privacy" ( Invincible), and "Breaking News" ( Michael, the posthumously assembled album). - In the video for Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean", a paparazzo dressed in a Conspicuous Trenchcoat and Sinister Shades follows Jackson around trying to get a shot of him with the mysterious Billie Jean. - In the video for Naked Eyes' "Always Something There to Remind Me," a famous celebrity that is married at the start of the video gets harassed by photographers everywhere she goes in public, even when she gets divorced. - While the Britney Spears song "Everytime" is not about this, the video depicts Britney and her boyfriend being hounded by the paparazzi when trying to go to their hotel room. At one point, the boyfriend tries to fend them off by literally grabbing a stack of magazines and throwing them. It then shows one photographer leering at him, obviously delighted at capturing a picture of it. - The music video for Miley Cyrus' "Fly On The Wall" shows her hanging out with a boy until a full moon transforms him into an obsessive paparazzo. The rest of the video sees her running from a group of paparazzi hunting her down until the same boy picks her up, secretly recording her ensuing rant about the night's events for a celebrity gossip site. The song itself, while very much applicable to the paparazzi, has lyrics that imply it's about a Stalker with a Crush instead. - IWA Puerto Rico tag team partners, as well as the men tasked with interviewing the other wrestlers, Stephano and Paparazzi. Stephy continued the wrestler/reporter role in the World Wrestling League after IWA PR shutdown. - The former TNA tag team Paparazzi Productions, consisting of Alex Shelley, Johnny Devine, a cheap digital camcorder and a complete lack of shame. - MNM in WWE had their own personal paparazzi who would snap photos of them as they walked to the ring and sometimes stick around to take pictures of their matches as well. This was dropped for Joey Mercury while he was fired and Melina once she turned Face, while Johnny Nitro stopped it shortly after becoming John Morrison. Well, Melina really dropped it once Rosa Mendes infiltrated them. - The Muppet Show briefly features one of these, Fleet Scribbler, but the producers found him to be so annoying that he was ditched as quickly as possible. - Diana: The Musical: Charles and Diana are frequently hounded by paparazzi. "Snap (Click)" is about the tabloid paps, who sing about how they're a public service even if they rudely and greedily violate privacy. - Cirque du Soleil's jukebox circus Michael Jackson ONE has the evil Tabloid Junkies and a scenery piece called the Paparazzi Monster serving as the primary antagonists. The former are Red and Black and Evil All Over, wear trenchcoats, and even harass the audience during the preshow. - Tamagotchi: His name being a pun on "paparazzi" and all, Paparatchi loves taking photos in general, but especially celebrities. - Aya Shameimaru, the tengu Intrepid Reporter of the Touhou setting is often portrayed in Fanon as a Paparazza. It seems to extend to canon in Double Spoiler, where Reimu reveals she's developed several spellcards specifically to counter the camera. - In the Mass Effect series: - Scott Pilgrim: Paparazzi are common enemies in the second stage. They are as annoying as their real life counterparts due to the jerks' ability to stun lock you, allowing other mooks to gang upon you. - In Alan Wake, the titular character once punched a paparazzo. - In The Sims 3, if your Sim becomes a high-level celebrity, paparazzi will flock to his or her house. In some cases, they can actually enter the houses without being invited if you don't sufficiently protect the door, and evicting them requires cheats; otherwise, they'll only leave when they're good and ready to (only to return later). - Paparazzi have been a feature of The Sims since the first game, with the Superstar expansion pack. They've recently returned with The Sims 4 Get Famous. - The first BioShock game features a minor character simply called Paparazzi (technically grammatically incorrect, since there's only one of him). His one Audio Diary can be found next to what is presumably his body, next to a camera pointed at Frank Fontaine's window. There's not much information on who he was or how he died, but considering who he was spying on... - In Data Age's Journey Escape for the Atari 2600, photographers that resemble flashing cameras must be avoided at all costs, as running into them causes you to lose cash. - Ace Attorney: After her experiences with "real ghosts" at Kurain Temple, Lotta Hart switches to celebrity photography. - Subverted in Double Homework with \|\|Daniela. While she is taking pictures of the protagonist wherever he goes, she isnt from the press. Her pictures are for a scientific experiment instead.\|\| - Since Scandal in the Spotlight centers around the insanely popular Boy Band Revance, paparazzi are an inevitable concern. The guys are pretty well accustomed to dealing with the media and managing their PR, so the protagonist ends up worrying about being caught by paparazzi more than any of her prospective boyfriends do, but there are a few incidents which prove that her worries are not entirely unfounded. - In Complicated Ness Ozzie and Ness come home to find the paparazzi swarming the entrance to their apartment. - In Kevin & Kell Fiona does some training as a paparazzi for a school assignment. Trained by a vulture, no less. - The main character of NEXT!!! Sound of the Future starts the story as a paparazzi who secretly photographs famous idols to sell their pictures to the press. She took up her profession after failing to become an Idol Singer herself, although after losing her camera in the first chapter she considers trying to be an idol again since she needs a new way to make money. - The final arc of The Suburban Jungle has Tiffany and her friends harassed by "ninja-razzi" who turn out to be working for the producer of the movie she's starring in, trying to manufacture drama to sell to the tabloids. - Whateley Universe: Peeper, one of the students at Whateley Academy, is trying to become one. While he styles himself as an attack journalist for a legitimate (if school-run) radio show, he is in actuality a coward and a weapons-grade pervert who harasses every one of the (many) superhumanly attractive female students, then flees when they threaten him, leaving his Beleaguered Assistant Greasy to take the fall for him. The revelation that his super-power is X-Ray Vision didn't help his reputation any. - In the Hat Films series Hat Pack, Colin the journalist is described as working for a "shitty tabloid" and pursuing useless stories. - The video "The Forgotten Legacy of Brittany Murphy" pinpoints the paparazzi's obsession with making up stories about Brittany Murphy as having a direct hand in her career setbacks in the mid-2000s - with gossip columnists insisting that her Genki Girl personality was from a cocaine addiction, and she was "difficult" to work with. One incident is described where the actress was swarmed by paparazzi, and refused an interview from one reporter by saying "your magazine hurt my life", before back-tracking out of fear of what story would be printed. The paparazzi's obsession with the 'coke addict' narrative even led to years of rumour that her death in 2009 was from a drug overdose, when it was actually pneumonia that she had put off getting treatment for out of fear of what the paparazzi might print if she were seen going to a doctor. - Futurama: Bender was once given the opportunity to do this. He had his reservations until learning that not only did he not need to pay, he would be paid. - After Fluttershy of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic became a famous model in "Green Isn't Your Color", these started hounding her wherever she went. - Aaahh!!! Real Monsters: A paparazzo named Exposa once 'flashed' Ickis, snapping his picture and attempting to reveal the existence of monsters with a front-page headline. - The Simpsons: Homer Simpson briefly took this gig, and takes photos of Springfield's celebrities at their worst. The celebrities fought back and hired another paparazzo to take embarrassing pictures of Homer. Homer retaliates by taking more picture of them all in a night club doing some more celebrity excesses, but he will not publish the photos if the celebrities would do some generous acts for a change. - Batman Beyond: In "Sneak Peek", gossip-show host Ian Peek obtains a device that lets him walk through walls, and uses it to root out and broadcast celebrity secrets. He goes so far as to expose a police witness against organized crime, and would have exposed Bruce and Terry if his Power Incontinence hadn't done him in. - My Dad the Rock Star had a recurring one named Scoop, who has a personal hatred of Rock Zilla and his family due to an unpleasant first encounter between Rock and him. - Total Drama's Celebrity Manhunt special introduces the hosts of the eponymous Show Within a Show, Blaineley and Josh, a pair of gossip-hounds who rival Chris McLean in sleaziness and shamelessness and are obsessed with the lives of the Total Drama contestants and trying to dig up dirt or stir doo-doo around them. Blaineley later appeared in World Tour as an Aftermath co-host, continuing to pull the same stunts as she did before. Geoff eventually gets fed up with her and has her taken to the show itself, where she gets eliminated after two episodes and injured. - Kim Possible: In her debut episode, villainous heiress Camille Leon is constantly followed around by a number of photographers who usually have to be forcibly removed by security guards. Being an Attention Whore, she always stops to pose for them — which helps Kim realize she must be the culprit, since she's going out of her way to get caught on security cameras disguised as someone else. - The pioneer of the method was Ron Galella, who had a rough deal: Marlon Brando broke his jaw and knocked out four of his teeth, Brigitte Bardot enlisted some friends to soak him with a hose, and Richard Burton's bodyguards beat him up and had him tossed in a Mexican jail. - The paparazzi were involved in the deaths of Princess Diana and her then-boyfriend Dodi Al-Fayed, being a factor in the occurrence of the fatal crash — according to the official inquest, anyway. - It deserves noting that, at least in the US, there are no prerequisites (such as background checks or training) to becoming a member of the paparazzi. All you need is a camera and connections to sell the photos - and the fewer qualms you have about doing borderline illegal/immoral actions to get said shots, the more profitable your career becomes. - Marilyn Manson's interactions with them tend to be varied (ranging from deer-in-headlights terror in reaction to a nymphomaniac independent one suggesting he should piss in Twiggy's ass to joking with them), but the crowning achievement in paparazzi idiocy was the time they confused him with Michael Jackson... after Jackson's death. He was completely dumbfounded by the stupidity. - When Kylie Minogue returned to Australia for breast cancer treatment, media and fans began to congregate outside the Minogue residence in Melbourne, prompting Victorian premier Steve Bracks to warn the media against breaching Australian privacy laws. - Pierce Brosnan (of James Bond fame) and his family were hounded by a photographer. Feeling that enough was enough, he walloped the fellow. That'll teach him not to mess with James Bond. - Another rare heroic case, though not at first. While not a photographer, 1930s nigh universally maligned celebrity reporter Walt Winchell stunned the US by taking on his publisher, William Randolph Hearst, then using his precious little radio time to do something almost no other reporter had done... speak out against the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler. - Once, Buzz Aldrin and his daughter were being stalked by a reporter who claimed that the moon landings were faked. Aldrin was polite at first, but when the reporter started calling him a liar, Aldrin punched him in the face. Mind you, he was 72 years old at the time. And it's on YouTube! - Not only the pap was bitching Buzz out, but he was pretty unpleasant towards Buzz's daughter. That would teach him. - Muriel "Fili" Houttemann got two of these to photograph her cavorting naked with Daniel Ducruet, the then-husband of Princess Stephanie Grimaldi. - A paparazzo once decided it would be a brilliant idea to sneak into Bruce Lee's backyard to try and get shots of him. Unfortunately, his kids Shannon and Brandon were in the yard at the time, and he terrified them; a very angry Lee kicked the man with such force, it knocked him out instantly and may have killed him if Lee's foot was a bit more to the side. - Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame has allegedly been trolling Paparazzi by wearing the same clothes, making their pictures unpublishable, as they can't be proven to be recent. - Jennifer Aniston did something similar. She would leave the house wearing a distinctive set of orange cargo pants, so that all photos of her would look identical and therefore unusable. - Sean Penn reportedly once caught a paparazzo hiding in his hotel room and proceeded to dangle him from his ninth floor balcony. - Those pictures of celebrities making obscene gestures and such, many aren't being rude so much as devaluing any picture of them because more mainstream outlets won't run them. - Kristen Stewart in particular has a tendency to flip the bird when she sees strangers with cameras. - Similarly, the famous picture of Einstein sticking his tongue out was him being upset by the photographer interrupting a get-together, only to have the picture become iconic. - Amy Adams was not prepared for the attention that was thrust on her after her Star-Making Role in Enchanted - claiming that photographers were following her into her apartment building and chasing her up the stairs. - Rose McGowan in her autobiography describes the paparazzi in the early 2000s as the worst - as suddenly "every stranger with a phone became a potential informant" and the lack of social media made it harder to defend oneself if rumors or out of context pictures were published. - Groups of South Korean reporters tend to follow idols and wait for them in airports when they are traveling for a schedule, snapping endless photos of them at near and close distances. Korea Dispatch, an online media outlet infamous in the Kpop scene for having paparazzi who specialize in catching celebrities going on secret dates and reporting rumors to the point where Korean stars sometimes make Take That! jokes about Dispatch. - Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield have weaponized the paparazzi by holding up signs telling people to pay less attention to them, and more to important social issues, suggesting charitable organizations they should check out.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Paparazzo
Paper Destruction of Anger - TV Tropes This trope describes a situation when a character destroys a piece of paper in either hot or cold anger. When we get angry, furious, seething, exasperated, enraged, infuriated,... it feels so good to destroy something. Best if it is something that angered us in the first place. A character who gets angry with someone or because of something can furiously tear a piece of paper into little pieces, or crumple the paper out of anger to vent the frustration. The paper ball can be thrown away, the pieces can be tossed on the ground, or tossed into fire and burned for good. However, characters can also destroy a piece of paper in 'cold anger', which means their action is calculated and well-thought out, and the person is actually in complete control of their emotions. For example, they might do so to show off their superiority and that they are on top of things, or to emphasise that the document is not worth any attention and can be disregarded. The trope can come about in various scenarios. Writers suffering from the Writer's Block are likely to destroy their good-for-nothing drafts and vain attempts. Students obsessed with their marks may wreck their test marked A minus. Someone who's reading a bad news (for them) in a newspaper might tear it up afterward. Someone who got dumped or cheated on might destroy photos or letters from their (soon-to-be) ex. Characters working a Soul-Crushing Desk Job might crumple annoying reports and start playing Wastebasket Ball. Or the character can rip up an unfair contract, hoping to make it null and void. If the character is freakishly strong and absolutely furious, they might tear a whole book in half. If they can control fire, they might even burn it. Some might even eat the paper instead. It can be a part of Anger Montage and it can be combined with its sister tropes like Agitated Item Stomping, Desk Sweep of Rage, Flipping the Table, A Glass in the Hand, Tantrum Throwing, Stab the Picture, and others. Percussive Therapy is the Supertrope of this (dealing with anger by hitting, kicking or destroying things). Break-Up Bonfire is a related trope when a character who recently broke up burns pictures and letters from their ex (or gifts and other mementos of the relationship). ## Examples: - KonoSuba: Kazuma spends an episode being harassed by members of the Axis Cult, but eventually gets a break when he encounters an innocent little girl who thanks him for helping her when she trips and falls. Out of gratitude, she asks Kazuma to write his name down for her on a signup sheet for the Cult. The revelation is enough for Kazuma to rip the signup sheet into shreds. - Spy X Family: In the first episode/chapter, Twilight furiously tears a newspaper in two when he finds out what his new mission entails. - Yu-Gi-Oh!: - Seto Kaiba defeats Yugi's grandfather in a duel and wins his Blue-Eyes White Dragon. Since Kaiba already has three of them and the rules say you can only have three of a card in a deck, he rips it in half. - Yami Yugi defeats the unnamed Rare Hunter who uses Exodia and inspects his cards, discovering all his cards are counterfeit (in the English dub, his cards are instead marked with ink so he'll know what he will draw). Yami Yugi gets pissed off and tears the cards to shreds. - Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: In a flashback in Episode 80, a spoiled Obelisk Blue student loses a duel. He blames his loss on his card Doll Chimera and rips it up. - Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds: When Z-One concluded that humanity is too wicked to be saved, he angrily crushes the Shooting Star Dragon card in his hand. - Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V: Yusho Sakaki defeats Edo Phoenix in a duel, then offers him friendship and a copy of his favorite card, Smile World. Pissed, Edo rips the Smile World in half and dedicates his life to destroying him. - Wonder Woman Vol 1: As she sees how little attention she's getting as presenter while Priscilla Rich is introducing Wonder Woman's act at a charity performance she crushes her notes in her hand. Her next act is to secretly sabotage Wonder Woman's act in a murder attempt. - Codex Equus: Moon Ray Vaughoof once got into an incident in his youth that involved him and his bandmates getting stranded in Maressissippi by Ham Hock, ZZ Top's manager, with no way to go back to Lonestar. To make matters worse, Ham Hock had the gall to demand reimbursement from Moon Ray for equipment expenses. Moon Ray was so angry that once everyone finally made it back, he tore up the contract he signed with Ham Hock and left. - The Night Unfurls: Having a dislike for paperwork, Kyril does this sometimes with irritation. The one time he does this with Tranquil Fury is where he has enough of \|\|a spreading rumour claiming he slept with Maia\|\|. Cue the feeble piece of parchment on his table being crumpled into a ball and thrown into the fireplace in a sudden motion. - 101 Dalmatians: After Roger makes it clear to Cruella that he and Anita are not selling their puppies, Cruella angrily tears up the check she had written and throws the pieces over Roger. - Lilo & Stitch: From his jail cell, Jumba reads a newspaper announcing his incarceration. He gets so angry that he not only tears the newspaper to shreds, but also stuffs the pieces in his mouth, only stopping on the last piece when the Grand Councilwoman and Pleakley walk in. - Shark Tale: Oscar foolishly bets Sykes' $5,000 on a race seahorse named Lucky Day. When Sykes finds out, he furiously snatches the betting slip from Oscar, but decides to watch the race with Oscar to ensure the horse wins. Just when it seems Lucky Day is going to win, he literally trips just short the finish line and loses the race, costing all the money Oscar bet. Sykes seethes with fury and tears up the betting slip into tiny pieces. And then the situation gets From Bad to Worse for poor Oscar. - Tarzan: Clayton wants Tarzan to take him to the gorillas, pointing at a picture of one. Tarzan is more interested in wooing Jane, so Clayton tears up the picture in a fit of rage. - Turning Red: When Abby discovers that \|\|she got Toronto mixed up with Toledo while reading the 4Town schedule, and that 4Town is coming to Toronto on the same night as Mei's panda sealing ritual\|\|, she rips the flyer to pieces while shouting angrily in Korean. - In Anazapta (aka Black Plague), Lady Matilda Mellerby is given a Scarpia Ultimatum by a bishop that if she doesn't pay her debts in ten days, she has to pleasure him in 47 different ways, as depicted in the erotic parchments he makes a point of sending her as the days count down. Matilda is shown burning the parchments as she receives them. Ironically she's played by Lena Headey, who'll do this trope with less justification in Game of Thrones. - Jane Austen in Becoming Jane tears two pages of her writing in frustration, and then she throws the pieces into fire after Tom Lefroy slighted her art after she was reading for her family and friends. - Chushingura: 51 ronin are waiting to make an attack on Lord Kira's compound in order to behead him and avenge the honor of their late master, Lord Asano. Only they're The 47 Ronin, not 51, because they get a last-second message from four of their number that they won't be coming. One of the older samurai rips it into pieces in a fit of anger, and then burns the pieces in a candle flame for good measure. - Cosy Dens: Mr. Sebek tears his son Michal's poster of Mick Jagger into small pieces, crumples it and then throws the crumpled pieces on the ground. He hates everything Western and hippie-like. Michal made his sister to put it on their father's noticeboard on purpose to tick him off. Mr. Sebek was already in a bad mood because he's hungover, but the poster got under his skin real bad. - Emma. (2020): - Harriet wants to burn her portrait and its elaborate picture frame in anger after she hears that Mr Elton never loved her and meant to marry Emma. Emma drew the picture while she was convinced that Mr Elton is in love with Harriet. Emma actually stops Harriet and persuades her to save the picture itself, but doesn't mind her burning the frame which was commissioned by Mr Elton. - Harriet spontaneously throws a book with Mr Elton's transcribed sermons from Emma's carriage into the river. Because Emma told her she had had enough of her moping and talking about Mr Elton and Harriet wants to show her grand friend that she understands and that she no longer cares for him. - Harriet: Mister Brodess does not take kindly to his slaves approaching him with a letter from a lawyer, proving that half of them should have been legally freed years ago. - Lemonade Joe: Hogo Fogo tears a piece of paper (advertisement for Kolaloka) with his signature in small pieces with gusto and tosses them on the ground. He's angry he had to sign it and beyond happy he could destroy it. Joe made him sign the advertisement when he defeated him and held him at gunpoint. To sign advertisement for a soft drink beverage is an insult to Hogo Fogo who had to compromise his honour of a Card-Carrying Villain, and his brother's honour whose business relies on Trigger Whisky. - In Mary Poppins, Mr. Banks drafts an advertisement for a nanny to put in the newspaper. His kids also draft an advertisement for a nanny. When Mr. Banks finds out that the kids' ideas of what traits the nanny should have are completely opposite to the traits he thinks the nanny should have, he tears up the kids' draft in disdain and tosses the bits into the (extinct) chimney. Unbeknown to him, the pieces then travel up the chimney and out into the air. When Mary Poppins arrives the next day, Mr. Banks is shocked to find her holding the letter in her hands, magically reassembled. - The Messenger (2017): In the opening montage, a man unhappy with the date his envelope has on it first rips it to shreds while uttering a Rapid-Fire "No!" and then throws the pieces in the Messengers face. - Spider-Man: No Way Home: When MJ and Ned receive letters saying they've been rejected from the university MIT, MJ rips her letter up and walks out. Ned imitates her, then has to hastily collect the pieces because he didn't show the letter to his parents yet. - To All the Boys I've Loved Before: - Lara Jean and Peter have a contract for their Fake Relationship. She tears the contract in small pieces and crumples it when she's angry with him. - Lara Jean's best friend Christine tears down and crumples a printed screen grab of Jean and Peter' sex video that someone put on Lara Jean's locker. (They did not actually had sex, they just made out in a hot tub.) - In the film 12 Angry Men, Juror #3 rips up a photo of himself with his son during his breakdown and then he finally votes not guilty. He was voting "guilty" simply because of the bad relationship he has with his estranged son, not because of the facts. - Adrian Mole: - In Growing Pains: When a solicitor's letter arrives from Adrian's mother's former lover, Adrian's father tears it up. Adrian later retrieves the pieces and sticks them together. - In Wilderness Years: Adrian does this to a letter from a publisher rejecting his manuscript. - He also tears up a letter from the bank in Weapons of Mass Destruction, before throwing the pieces into the canal. Later, a police officer accuses him of littering, when the pieces have been retrieved. - The Famous Five: In Five Go to Smuggler's Top, Uncle Quentin tears up a written proposal from his enemy, before throwing the pieces in his face, saying "I don't deal with madmen, nor with rogues, Mr Barling!". - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: When Ron receives a letter from his pompous brother Percy, congratulating him on becoming a prefect and advising him to stay away from Harry, whom Percy's bosses at the Ministry of Magic are currently trying to discredit, Ron furiously tears the letter in half three times while insulting Percy in a manner similar to Punctuated Pounding. "He is —" Ron said jerkily, tearing Percy's letter in half, "the world's" — he tore it into quarters — "biggest" — he tore it into eighths — "git." He threw the pieces into the fire. - Little Women: Amy burns Jo's manuscript in anger to punish her for not wanting to take her to see a play with Meg and Laurie. Jo worked on her stories for years, she copied them and destroyed the old drafts. - Lolita: Humbert Humbert destroys his wife Charlotte's letter which she wrote shortly after she found out about his obsession with her teenage daughter, Dolores. He's in a state of shock and strange relief because Charlotte has just died in a freak car accident, but angered that she wrote the letter intending to leave him/report him, which would have separated Dolores from him and landed him in huge trouble. Later he tries to put the pieces together because he wants to know what was in the letter. - Matilda: Fed up with Matilda having her nose in a book all the time, Mr Wormwood spitefully tears up the book she is reading. - Mr. Men: Mr. Grumpy's Establishing Character Moment has him tear all the pages out of a book in an unprovoked fit of anger. At the end of the story, he only tears one page out a book instead of all the pages. - Dave Barry, in "Into the Round File," reads a selection of junk mail addressed to him. Each letter is interrupted as he tosses it into the wastebasket, which produces an imagined scream. One fundraising message from a Greedy Televangelist receives a less merciful demise: Dear Brother Barry: As you are no doubt aware, the Reverend Bud Albumen didn't develop one of the fastest-growing evangelical organizations in south central Kentucky just by accident. He developed it by building really top-notch studio facilities. But these facilities cost money, which is why the Lord told the Reverend Albumen to tell you to send in a Love Offering of $13.50 per member of your household, or a special rate of $6.75, which is a 50 percent discount, for children under ten. Just as soon as the Reverend Albumen receives your Love Offering, he will ask the Lord not to bring disease and suffering and mud slides to your home, but remember, he can't do this until he receives your No! Not the scissors! Please don't—aaarrrgggh - In Billions episode "The Deal", Chuck wants to buy Axe off with a big cheque, but the latter crumples it up and throws it at Chuck. Watch the scene here. - Brooklyn Nine-Nine: - "Old School": The detectives blow up Brogan's book with a bomb-disposal robot. It's a book which Jake loved from childhood, but Jake got furious at Brogan for calling Captain Holt 'homo', so he's done with Brogan, the book and everything it stands for. - "Skyfire Cycle": At the end of the episode, Terry tears a Doorstopper of a book in half because he gets exasperated by its author whom he idolised almost his whole life but who turns out to be a jerk. - Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, "The Campaign": Myra decides to quit Hank's saloon, so she rips her contract with Hank in half when he refuses to let her go. - In Emma (2009), Frank Churchill angrily crumples a letter from his aunt which cuts short his visit in Highbury just before the ball. - ER. Carol starts to write up a nurse for an error that she made (icing a patient's football instead of his severed foot, leaving surgeons unable to reattach it) when the woman grabs the paper and rips it half, throwing the pieces in the air, declaring, "I quit!" - Game of Thrones: - Before King Robert dies, he dictates his will to his Hand, Lord Eddard "Ned" Stark. Widowed queen Cersei rips it in pieces in front of the whole court and tosses it on the ground. She then orders to have Ned arrested because Ned found out that Cersei's son Joffrey is not Robert's true heir. - At a small council meeting, Cersei reads aloud Robb Stark's peace terms and then she tears the document up. Her brother Tyrion, acting Hand of the King, sarcastically compliments her that she perfected the art of tearing up papers. - Balon Greyjoy coldly throws a letter from Robb Stark, delivered by his son Theon, into fire. Balon has no desire to be Robb Stark's ally against the Lannisters. Instead, he means to raid the coast of the North controlled by Starks. - As his wedding present to his nephew and king, Tyrion gives Joffrey a copy of the illuminated Lives of Four Kings, a book that is incredibly rare and priceless. Tywin Lannister gives his grandson a Valyrian steel sword; Joffrey, being the little shit that he is, loses it and immediately uses the blade to destroy the precious book and smashes it to shreds. One of the reasons is Joffrey's hatred for Tyrion. - Girls: In "Female Author", Jessa relieves herself between two parked cars on a New York street when she can't find a bathroom. A police officer in a passing car spots her and gives her a ticket for public urination which she rips up, resulting in more serious charges against her and Adam. - How I Met Your Mother: In the promo material/DVD extra set between seasons 2 and 3, Marshall and Lily spend their honeymoon in Scotland. Lily is excited to be there and wants to enjoy her time in Scotland to the fullest, but Marshall only wants to sit by Loch Ness and search for Nessie. Lily bears with him and says she's happy as long as she knows they are going to see A Midsummer Night's Dream in Edinburgh on Thursday... Later she angrily tears the tickets in pieces because Marshall refuses to leave his spot. - The Sandman (2022). Richard Madoc is holding Calliope, one of the ancient Muses, prisoner to force her to give him ideas for his novels. He catches her writing a letter to Morpheus, calling on the Lord of Dreams to free her. Madoc rips the paper up, throws the pieces in the fire and declares that she is his and no one, not even the Lord of Dreams, can take her from him. We then see a puff of smoke rising up from the fireplace's chimney... - Vikings: Rollo (of Viking origin) has a lesson of Old French at court in Paris. The lesson doesn't go well at all. Rollo gets increasingly fluent in Angrish resembling Old French, and then it just escalates to tearing a book page in tiny pieces and crumpling it, flipping his own table, grabbing his teacher by the collar, flinging said teacher across the room, knocking down a chair and storming out of the room. - Wives and Daughters: Cynthia coldly but somewhat hastily throws a note in which Mr Preston asks her to dance with him at the ball into fire. She also says she won't dance with him and tells Molly she must't either. - The X-Files, "Bad Blood": Agent Mulder tries to write a report, but he ends up crinkling up the piece of paper. He throws it across the room and tries to hit the trash can. He misses. He proceeds to kick the can as if he was trying to destroy it. He's on edge because he stabbed a teenager with a wooden stake but he was drugged and convinced that the teen was a vampire. - Young Sheldon: In "An Introduction to Engineering and a Glob of Hair Gel", Boucher keeps tearing up Sheldon's paper whenever he brings it to him because he's doing it wrong, and won't even let him know why it's wrong. At one point, Boucher simply hands Sheldon the paper so he would tear it himself. - In Ghostbusters: The Video Game, when the team returns to the Sedgewick Hotel, Egon shreds the order left by Peck/PCOC when he learns that it refers to them by name. - In one of the game paths of Ripper, Vincent Magnotta shows you a photo accusing Joey Falconetti of being the titular killer. When you scan it to prove it's fake, Magnotta tears up the picture in rage while begrudgingly releasing Falconetti. - Moshi Monsters: During the "Merry Twistmas" song, Santa is asking the characters what they want for Twistmas (their equivalent of Christmas) and they respond in their language. For some reason, Katsuma looks a bit ticked off and he's ripping a piece of paper, but it's never revealed why. - Futurama, "Luck of the Fryrish": Fry angrily tears his ticket when his horse doesn't win the race and he loses the money he bet. - Bugs Bunny from The Looney Tunes Show, jittery from the effects of caffeine, accuses his physician, Doctor Weisberg, of not being a real doctor. Pulling the doctor's diploma off the wall, Bugs reads it, and cries: "Syracuse? That's a basketball school!" Bugs breaks the frame open, then halves the diploma. Doctor Weisberg calmly explains his diagnosis, at which Bugs cools down, and hands the wrecked diploma to his doctor. "You can probably tape this." - The Simpsons: - In "Selma's Choice", The family stops at a diner on their way to Aunt Gladys' funeral. Homer keeps failing to solve a maze on a placemat, so he keeps crumpling them in anger and tossing them on the floor. - In "Lisa on Ice", Lisa receives an academic alert that's she's failing gym. She angrily crumples up the alert and hurls it at a trash can, but airballs it by several feet. - In "The Old Man and the Lisa", Lisa coldly tears the check from Mr. Burns in half because the money was made immorally and destroyed a chunk of sea life. - In "Burns, Baby Burns", Chief Wiggum crumples a piece of paper with a tracked phone number which Eddie hands him and then throws it into fire. He thinks it's fake because it starts with 555. - In "White Christmas Blues", Lisa catches Bart burning a book which she got him for Christmas. He's angry because she knew he wouldn't like such a gift. - In the South Park episode "Red Hot Catholic Love", Father Maxi has retrieved the Holy Document of Vatican Law, hidden away in the catacombs of the Vatican so it couldn't be changed (resulting in him having to traverse a Death Course portrayed as a game of Pitfall!); he needs the document so they can change it to stop all priests from molesting children. In anger at the idiocy and insanity around him (the Vatican higher-ups had just summoned the "Queen Spider'' to consult about changing it, and the spider denied it), Maxi calls out everyone else on their bullcrap and declares "To hell with the Holy Document of Vatican Law!" and tears the ancient scroll in half. The entire building then somehow begins to collapse in on itself; apparently the Holy Document was also a load-bearing document. - In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "The Smoking Peanut", SpongeBob tries to confess to Sandy that he's the one who made the giant clam Clamu cry, but Sandy is so angry about it she tears a phone book in half while taking about finding the culprit, so SpongeBob decides to drop it. - Tom and Jerry: - In the animated short "Mouse Trouble", after all of Tom's attempts to catch Jerry per the book's instructions ended in failure culminating in him accidentally swallowing a toy mouse, Tom goes insane and tears down the whole book in anger before planting loads of explosives into the hole just to kill the mouse. - In "The Million Dollar Cat", after Tom inherits millions of dollars, Jerry keeps showing him the telegram that points out that he will lose everything if he harms another living thing, "even a mouse" in order to do whatever he wants. Eventually, Tom has enough of the mouse's antics and tears up the telegram, then stuffs the portion that reads "EVEN A MOUSE" down Jerry's throat. - In "The Truce Hurts", Tom, Jerry and Spike (or Butch, as he is known as here) are fed up with fighting and decide that they should get along instead. So they write up a peace treaty where they agree to coexist in peace and become friends. Unfortunately, when they get their hands on a steak, they can't decide how to divide it between them, and they end up losing the steak in a storm drain. This causes them to get so upset at one another that Spike tears up the treaty in anger, and the short ends as it began: with them fighting. - In the first episode of Total Drama, when Gwen sees the crappy summer camp she's staying at, she says she didn't sign up for it, but Chris pulls out a contract and reminds her that she signed it. She tears it up and throws it in the water, but Chris pulls out another one. When she tries to leave, he smugly points out that she can't, because her boat just left. - Spider-Man: The Animated Series: In symbolism closer to Stab the Picture Eddie Brock/\|\|Venom\|\| crumples a picture of Spider-Man while giving a revenge soliloquy	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PaperDestructionOfAnger
Papa Wolf - TV Tropes Mercenary: What, you gonna kill me with a tranq gun? Quinn: You took my kid, so yeah. Paternal instinct can transform a Bumbling Dad into an Action Dad. If someone threatens his kids they will soon wish they'd never come within a mile of them. This is because fathers are expected to take care of their family and this naturally extends to keeping them safe. Such occasions serve as a way for a father to prove his worthiness—see A Real Man Is a Killer. Expect his children to have a newfound respect for their father and for them to brag that My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad. If their relationship was previously strained expect it to improve. Often Papa Wolf incidents serve as a way to reveal that a Non-Action Guy is really a Retired Badass or a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass (or even a Retired Monster). In contrast to a Boyfriend-Blocking Dad (who sometimes thinks he's this; there is no overlap between them), a Papa Wolf is always portrayed heroically because the latter is defending their kids from genuine threats instead of imagined ones. A Team Dad may display a streak of this, but the Papa is more likely to be related to his children by blood or through formal adoption, and the children tend to be younger, which may be part of why the Papa Wolf is more oriented toward protecting them rather than training them to defend themselves. However even completely grown children can summon this response in the face of crisis because they are still his children no matter how old or strong they get. This is the Spear Counterpart to Mama Bear. When Mama Bear and Papa Wolf team up, no force on earth can stop them. Subtrope of Beware the Nice Ones. See also A Father to His Men and Family Man. Combining this with Disproportionate Retribution can lead to a Knight Templar Parent. If the guy is a teacher instead, he's a Badass Teacher. If the guy doing this is a sibling/cousin, you get Big Brother Instinct. Inversely, see Parents in Distress for the kids rescuing the dad. Evil characters can use this too; after all, Even Evil Has Loved Ones. A subtrope of the Papa Wolf is the Badass and Child Duo, where an adult male badass takes it upon himself to protect an orphaned, unrelated young child. See also Cub Cues Protective Parent for examples from the animal kingdom, which might include a literal wolf. Remember when adding examples that this is Always Male. The female equivalent is Mama Bear, so all Distaff Counterparts should be placed there. When Mama Bear and Papa Wolf team up, it's a Battle Couple and all pairs should be placed there. Parents in Distress is the inversion, when Papa needs to be bailed out by the kids, and Extremely Protective Child is when the child exhibits this kind of general protectiveness over one or both of their parents. Also, note that this is not the trope for being protective of one's friends, unless of course it is something like an Intergenerational Friendship. In that case, it is okay. Otherwise, don't do it. Tropes about helping friends should go to A Friend in Need, The Power of Friendship etc. ## Examples subpages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other examples: - In Happy Heroes, despite knowing that the Supermen can protect themselves, Doctor H., their nonbiological father, can still act overprotective of them from time to time. For instance, in the Season 1 finale, he jumps between them and a giant robot... while injured. - You don't want to mess with Dick Tracy's kids. You really don't. - Popeye is fiercely protective of his adopted son, Swee'pea, but having been raised, by Popeye, Swee'pea can easily hold his own in a fight despite only being an infant. - Occurs in WHO dunnit (1995) with \|\|Butler, who is secretly Victoria's father Walter.\|\| When he overhears her husband threaten her (because he caught her plotting to kill him), he sabotages the brakes of the car and causes him to die in an auto accident. - In Love Never Dies, after Christine sings the title song, she discovers her son Gustave is missing. Needless to say, his father is livid. He is ready to use every bit of his influence to stop \|\|Raoul de Chagny\|\| from leaving Coney Island, and to manhandle and/or murder \|\|the Girys\|\| to get back his son. - In Macbeth, Macduffs response to having his family slaughtered is (after weeping his eyes out) to murder the bitch that ordered the killings. - Deconstructed in Matilda, as the Escapologist is so enraged at the Acrobat's sister's abuse of his daughter that once he discovers it, he goes to confront her himself. Unfortunately she is a former world-class Olympic champion and is heavily implied to have murdered him, leaving \|\|Jenny\|\| with nobody to protect her from her aunt's wrath. - After Romeo fatally stabs Tybalt in "Romeo and Juliet", Lord Montague defends his doing so because Tybalt had killed Mercutio. - In Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Judge Turpin's mistreatment of Johanna is half of Sweeney's motivation to go on a murdering rampage (the other half being, of course, what the bastard did to his wife Lucy after transporting him for life). - In The Tempest, Prospero could be considered one in his fierce protectiveness of Miranda. - Captain Walker in the 1993 musical of Tommy. And he's not very happy when he discovers his wife and son with her new jerkass lover on her 21st birthday! - In Rigoletto, after the title character's daughter Gilda is kidnapped by the courters and handed over to the lecherous Duke, Rigoletto threatens to kill them all with his bare hands unless they give her back to him. After Gilda emerges from the Duke's bedroom without her virginity, Rigoletto secretly arranges to have the Duke murdered by the hit man Sparafucile. \|\|Tragically, it backfires, as Gilda loves the Duke and performs a Heroic Sacrifice to save him.\|\| - Pop from Happy Tree Friends is usually really bad at being a father despite his good intentions, and actually gets his son killed more often than not. However, the few times he actually notices Cub is in danger, he will stop at nothing to save him, like when he successfully fends off a rabid dog in "Doggone It". - In If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, the Emperor is very happy with the news that he has biological children. When he finds out what happened to them, though, Warp storms abound over perpetrators' heads. - Homestar Runner: Strong Mad gets like this when his best friend (nephew? pet?), The Cheat, is physically abused. - Revenge Films: Claire was being assaulted by her stepfather, the bus driver. Her mother Penny called her biological father Jake, who rushed to the scene and oversped to the point where he was stopped by the police. When Jake told the police officer about the situation, they both went to stop the stepfather from assaulting Claire. Jake gave the bus driver a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, to the point where the police officer had to restrain him. - RWBY: Qrow is Yang's maternal uncle but he loves Yang's half-sister Ruby just as much as Yang. Nothing stands between him and his nieces: he rescues Yang and Ruby from a hoard of Grimm when they were young children and he spends Volume 4 secretly following Ruby's group through the wilds of Anima, killing any Grimm that get too close. He only reveals his presence when Ruby's group find themselves fighting the vastly superior Tyrian, charging in to protect Ruby from being seriously injured. \|\|When the fourteen-year old Oscar locates Qrow in Volume 5 to reveal he's Ozpin's new reincarnation, it means that Ozpin's vast abilities are limited by Oscar's young, untrained body. When Hazel tries to kill Oscar for being the new host of the man he blames for his sister's death, Qrow's Undying Loyalty to Ozpin combines with his instinct for protecting children; he throws himself in harm's way over and over again to prevent Oscar's death, only stopping once he's too badly injured to fight any more.\|\| - Wash in Red vs. Blue becomes fiercely protective of the Reds and Blues. He pulls a gun on Carolina when the latter threatened to shoot Tucker. He went out of his way to rescue Donut from an attacking Tex robot, perhaps as a way to make up for \|\|shooting Donut earlier\|\|. He performed a Heroic Sacrifice, ordering Freckles to collapse a cave to give Tucker, Caboose, Simmons and Grif enough time to escape despite knowing he will be trapped on the other side with the attacking Feds. He stepped in front of Sarge, Donut and Lopez when Locus appeared, readying his gun. - Dreamscape: Liz is fiercely protective of Dylan, and will dish out a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to anyone who harms him. - Camp Camp: David may be a nice and friendly guy, but threatening any of his charges is a bad idea. \|\|When Daniel pulled a knife on Max, he immediately tackled the guy to the ground.\|\| - Helluva Boss: Under no circumstances should you even think about hurting Prince Stolas' daughter Octavia. Or else.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PapaBear
Paradox - TV Tropes Paradox might refer to: If an internal link led you here, please change it to point to the specific article. Thanks!	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Paradox
Paper Key-Retrieval Trick - TV Tropes "I've spent this whole night looking for a door I can open by sliding a newspaper underneath and poking the key out of the other side of the keyhole so that it falls on the newspaper. Every computer game character gets to do that except ME. It isn't fair." A standard trick of the Locked Room Mystery, in which a key must be retrieved from the other side of a locked door. Fortunately, someone left the key in the old-fashioned lock, from which the key can be dislodged with a handy slender tool (icepick, wire, knitting needle), to be caught on a piece of paper slid under the ill-fitting door. Modern locks are constructed to prevent this, and modern doors' thresholds seldom have sufficient space to do it. Many doorseven in really old houses, depending on architecturealso have door frames, which make this an outright impossibility. It's also possible for the key to bounce off the paper. Therefore, it's normally used only in period pieces, or stories set in older houses that haven't been renovated in ages. It is rarely (if ever) mentioned that this trick is only possible if the key happens to be the right way up in the lock, enabling it to be pushed out. Probably the best-known subtrope of the Lock and Key Puzzle, and a classic Stock Puzzle. ## Examples: - Played with in Alone, where Jess attempts to escape from the basement with this, but the key is stuck in the lock. She notices a bare nail sticking out of a wooden post, pries it out, and uses it to poke the key loose and catch it with her sweatshirt. - Used by the faerie creatures in Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. Unusually, this example shows the key landing on some drawing paper from the locked side of the door, so the creatures themselves can stay hidden from the audience until a later Jump Scare. - In Heroic Trio, two of the protagonists are locked in a storage closet in a hospital as an Ax-Crazy killer sneaks off the maternity ward to kill babies. They managed to hit the door hard enough to dislodge the key on the other side and slip a hand under the door to get it. This scene is an odd 20 Minutes into the Future example. - In The Window, Tommy manages to unlock the door to his room by pushing the key out the other side and then snatching it with a hanger underneath the door. - In The Baker Street Irregulars by Terrance Dicks (about a group of modern-day Sherlock Holmes fans who solve crimes), a Snooping Little Kid is locked in a room by a suspect, and uses this method only to find someone standing guard outside the door watching the entire process. Fortunately they find it Actually Pretty Funny and let him escape. - Bod escapes from the back room of the antique shop this way in The Graveyard Book. - Moist tries this in Making Money (he would, being a mostly reformed criminal) but it doesn't work. - Mary Russell: Holmes does this to gain access to Mary's locked bedroom in A Monstrous Regiment of Women. - The protagonist of The Ocean at the End of the Lane does this to get out of his bedroom after the Babysitter from Hell locks him in. - Most Enid Blyton series include this at least once, especially The Secret Seven and The Famous Five. - In The Unadulterated Cat by Terry Pratchett, Sir Terry describes doing this to rescue next-door's gerbils from his cat, based on a vague memory of a "beat the burglar" piece in The Eagle, and being amazed when it actually worked. - In the fourth Zork book, Conquest at Quendor, this is used to get the key to unlock the room where the Helm of Zork is kept. Except, they use a doormat. It's this choice or: Go for the glass transom, \|\|breaking it and setting off a bunch of traps (including robots)\|\|; use a shrinking spell \|\|and get spotted by rats\|\|; or try blowing the door open \|\|and sending the entire place down.\|\| - In The Borrowers, six-inch tall Arrietty tells a human-sized boy to push the key out of the lock, after he has been locked in the nursery by Mrs Driver. Arrietty then pushes the key under the door to him. - Colditz After finding the door locked and the window barred, Dick Player easily manages to bring the key to his side of the door using method. [1] - The Coroner: Done by the family of the Victim of the Week to enter the room where the murder has occurred at the start of "Napoleon's Violin". In this case, it is an old, un-renovated stately home, so old locks and large gaps under the door are justified. - Dead Man's Gun: In "Death Warrant", Pike gains access to Joe Rule's hotel room by sliding a "Wanted!" Poster under the door and using his dagger to poke the key out of the lock on to the poster and drawing it back under door. - Doctor Who: - Used perfectly straight in the classic episode "The Talons of Weng-Chiang". Bizarrely, the British Board of Film Classification objected to this scene when they vetted the VHS release, on the grounds that it was teaching children criminal skills. The director pointed out that the concept was used by Enid Blyton, and his own experience was that it didn't even work, so the BBFC relented. - Used again in "The Woman Who Lived", set in the 1600s. The Doctor was going to sonic the lock open, but Ashildr beat him to the punch. Using one of her own Wanted Posters, no less. - Father Brown. Father Brown faces a locked door and asks for a hatpin: as an antique model, the key was left in the keyhole on the far side of the door, and he's able to poke it out and pull it under the door on a sheet of paper. Mrs. McCarthy looks slightly disappointed, apparently assuming he was going to use a Hairpin Lockpick. - Get Smart: Maxwell attempts this in "The Return of the Ancient Mariner", but because he's in a comedy series (and also incompetent) the key falls off and ends up on the floor outside. - Happy Days: Richie, Potsie and Ralph are locked in the hall closet by a burglar robbing the Cunningham house, and use this to get out. - The title character of MacGyver has done this on several occasions. - An expanded version is used in an episode of The Mentalist: Not only does Jane retrieve the key this way, but he pulls it back into the keyhole from outside the door using fishing line. - The Odd Couple: Oscar does this when he's locked in the closet for some reason. - Used in Alone in the Dark 2 by Carnby to get into the underground wine cellar. - Adventure game Bargon Attack has the protagonist have to do this at some point... the kicker is that he will refuse to use a newspaper for this, because it is "too easy" a solution and that he should find a better option. So instead, he has to use two pamphlets together to slide under the door. - One escape from the Botanica casual game series uses this method. Paper isn't necessary, as the key falls on a floor mat already protruding under the ( very ill-fitting) door. - You do this while playing as Nico on the second visit to the murdered hacker's apartment in Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon using her pencil and a handy nearby newspaper (the first time you climbed onto the balcony and opened the latch on a window with her press ID card). - This is one of the first puzzles in the Crimson Room series of You Wake Up in a Room Flash games. However, unlocking that door only lets you into another locked room, this one more secure. - Played straight in * Dark Fall The Journal. - One of the least-original challenges in Escape the Museum* is this. - The trope was discussed in a magazine article promoting Full Throttle, by comparing how that game's protagonist, Ben, would open a locked door using a sandwich compared to Bernard Bernoulli from the Maniac Mansion games. Bernard would disassemble the sandwich to use the lettuce and toothpick, according to the trope. Ben would simply eat the sandwich and kick the door in. - Used in Hugo II: Whodunit? to have Hugo escape a locked laundry. The review of the game in PC Gamer's "Saturday Crapshoot" has the reviewer breaking into a raging rant about how cliché and unrealistic this puzzle is. - Discussed in Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards Reloaded, as seen in the page quote. Note that the door Larry was talking about was a sliding door, so it wouldn't have worked anyway. - Shows up in The Mystery of the Druids, but with an added realistic touch: the gap beneath the door is too narrow for the key to fit through, so Halligan has to remove the floor tile beneath the lock to make the trick work. - One of the early puzzles in Mystery of Time and Space. - Subverted in the second Nightmare Realm hidden object game, as the key falls through a crack in the floor while it's being drawn under the door. - In the French adventure game Le Passager Du Temps, this is the very first puzzle you encounter: Entering the house you start in front of. - This is used to get into one room fairly late in Penumbra: Overture, though bizarrely the room it's done in seems relatively modern. - Optional in Phantasmagoria to get into the attic. If you forget to put the paper down, you can just use the fireplace poker to retrieve the key, instead. - This is one of two ways to get into the murder room in Post Mortem (2002). The other involves regular lock-picking. - Played straight with a newspaper and screwdriver in the bonus game for Redemption Cemetery: Embodiment of Evil. - Escape from the very first room in the IHOG Sacra Terra Angelic Night is achieved via this method. - Subverted in Scratches, in which the key lands on the paper but is too large to fit under the door. Michael even lampshades the trope as that happens. - If Valdo gets captured trying to move around Cloux Manor in the final act of Secrets of da Vinci: The Forbidden Manuscript, he has to utilize this to get out of his locked bedroom. The game makes a point of hiding a sheet of paper in the room for him to use in case there isn't one in his inventory. - Another IHOG example appears in Shiver: Vanishing Hitchhiker as the means of escape from the hospital's morgue. - Used as the solution to a puzzle in Simon the Sorcerer, when Simon finds himself locked inside a pantry. - There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension: One of the ways the narrator tries to stop you from playing the game is by materializing a locked door. After he lets slip that the key is still in the lock on his side, you use this trick- using a French flag (the icon for the French language version) as the paper. - Used with no modification in Zork II. - This shows up in prison with Zork: Grand Inquisitor. Though the genre savvy jailors didn't include a lock on your cell door, so you need first to cast a spell to create the lock and the key in the first place...	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PaperKeyRetrievalTrick
Paper Tropes - TV Tropes This picture will give you bad reams. Index for paper stuff: letters, documents, contracts, reports, homework, notes, messages, notebooks, posters, newspapers, toilet paper and so on, and various related plots. Compare Bookish Tropes, Box Tropes, Mail and Delivery Tropes and Photography and Illustration. See also Writing And Drawing Index. Badass on Paper, Paper Cutting, Paper People and Paper Tiger are unrelated. <!—index—> ## Art, crafting, creating and stuff made of paper ## Contracts and documents ## Letters and messages ## Newspapers ## Paper bags ## Posters ## Toilet paper ## Written assignments and homework - Completely Off-Topic Report: A student is asked to write a paper, but somehow has it written on a subject that has nothing to do with the topic that was assigned. - A Dog Ate My Homework: A student who neglected to do their homework (frequently something written on paper) avoids getting in trouble by claiming their dog ate the homework. - Homework Slave: Bullying someone else into doing your homework for you. - Writing Lines: The lines can be assigned to be written into a notebook/piece of paper. ## Other <!—/index—>	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PaperTropes
Parabolic Power Curve - TV Tropes A design flaw that shows up mainly in RPGs, but also in other games where the main characters' abilities are supposed to improve over time. The Parabolic Power Curve is a situation where, beyond a certain point, increasing your character's power actually makes him less effective. Not Crippling Overspecialization, nor the milder situation where characters simply stop getting more powerful at a certain point. This is a situation where a character that should, on paper, be less powerful actually has an easier time with a given challenge. Often shows up when a game uses elements of Dynamic Difficulty, such as scaled encounters, but doesn't get the balance right. Occasionally a designer will put this in a game deliberately, as a kind of Anti-Grinding, but this is not wise as it tends to infuriate the players - especially if they've gotten so powerful that the game has become Unwinnable. Sometimes this can be defused by advertising it as a feature, but not always. In games where the level and difficulty caps are changed through updates, the parabolic curve may become a sine curve instead, with one parabola for each interval between caps. Contrast Elite Tweak. Compare Empty Levels, where it's all downhill from the start, and Low-Level Advantage, where while gaining levels does make your character stronger, there are still benefits to staying low-leveled. Unrelated to Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards, which is about a parabola opening upward rather than downward... though the experience of playing a fighter in a game geared to scale its difficulty alongside quadratic wizard growth can sometimes result in this. If the Parabolic Curve is applied to specific stats rather than leveling as a whole, it's Diminishing Returns for Balance. ## Examples: - While it isn't completely fatal, larger bombs and faster fuses can make it very difficult to avoid killing yourself in Bomberman. - Shmups with speed power-ups. One or two are usually necessary to dodge maneuver properly. Some, however, allow you to stack speed-ups far past the point when your ship handles with any sort of controllability. (The Gradius series is a prime example; though a few games have a method to speed down, they either cost many more power chips than to speed up or are only accessible at maximum speed.) - In the Fighting Fantasy books, players have to determine Skill, Stamina, and Luck scores at the beginning. Normally, the higher these are, the better. In Magehunter, however, due to body-switching, it's an advantage to start with the lowest Skill and Stamina scores possible. - In Black Vein Prophecy, you need to fail the first luck check, or you're doomed to wander through the book without a hope of beating it. If you rolled a 6 for your luck (the maximum), it is literally impossible to win. - Justified in many Paradox games like Europa Universalis or Stellaris where growing your nation bigger and bigger won't give the benefits of a stronger economy and a larger manpower, instead it will cause instability due to overextension, non accepted cultures in the realm, separatism, nationalism in newly conquered provinces and state maintenance for non integrated territories. Expect negative random events to trigger often, revolts and even nearby countries form coalitions against you. All of these mechanics are intended to prevent the player from blobbing too easily and snowballing. Often you better keep into your area and grow tall while developing colonies, trade, infrastructures and diplomatic ties instead. - In the ultimate difficulty of Phantasy Star Online, the temporary invincibility after being hit is taken away unless you get completely knocked over. Thus, it's only possible to survive some attacks until your defense gets high enough. - World of Warcraft uses this intentionally. Stats granted by items (in particular, ratings that convert to a percentage increase in effectiveness like armor, critical strike chance, dodge chance, etc.) lose relative power as characters level up, encouraging players to seek better gear. This was actually done to avoid the problem of Power Creep where, given a logical progression of gear at higher levels, players would eventually be running around with 100% crit, haste, dodge, etc., severely breaking game balance. - One side-effect of this is that items and enchants converted from the old rating system could be absurdly overpowered in the hands of low-level characters—thus spawning a whole culture around twinking characters for battleground play. (Ironically, this made it so hard for normally leveling characters to compete in PvP that Blizzard eventually created a new bracket just for twinks.) - A variant of this situation occurred with Rage-based tanks (Warriors and Feral Druids), who count on being hit to generate power for their own attacks. With sufficient gear levels, these characters would get hit so seldom that they could not earn enough Rage to generate threat. Again, Blizzard addressed the issue by adding talents and skills that generate Rage (or Mana/RP for Paladins and Death Knights, respectively) when an attack is avoided. - Baldur's Gate 2: the Flail of Ages +3 is one of the best weapons in Shadows of Amn and you can upgrade it during Throne of Bhaal with two additional heads to become a +5 weapon with additional fire, cold, acid, electric and magic damage. Problem is, after the final upgrade, the weapon also grants a free action status, which is basically useless against enemies by the end of the game (since they won't cast spells like entanglement or web, while you might be immune to hold or paralysis through many other means), but also prevents you to get the benefits of a haste spell or the boots of speed, which is crippling and annoying. To make matters worse, a programming glitch with the fully upgraded version of the weapon in the Enhanced Edition caused the game to check if a monster had immunity to fire, cold, acid, electric, or poison damage and apply that immunity to all the weapon's elemental damage instead of just the damage of that type. Since virtually everything in Throne of Bhall had immunity to at least one of those damage types, it meant that the weapon would rarely be able to deal any of its elemental damage. - The Elder Scrolls: - Present in Oblivion. Due to the game's flawed Level Scaling system, it is very easy to stumble into Empty Levels. Enemies level scale based purely on your level, but your actual strength in combat involves many factors besides just level (health gain per level, attributes, equipment, and skills). As such, leveling up with too many non-combat skills is likely to result in an insignificant bonus to your abilities, but all enemies still increase in strength. Even if you've been careful in your leveling, damage caps at a certain point while health does not, meaning high-level fights become increasingly drawn-out with even standard foes becoming damage sponges without providing much challenge. While being a full blown Min-Maxing Munchkin is only necessary if you want to max out every single attribute, you're best served incorporating elements of it in order to avoid falling on the wrong side of the curve. Further, even if you level up effectively, most friendly NPCs do not (and/or have low-level equipment even at the highest levels), making Escort Missions with non-essential NPCs very difficult as your allies get torn apart in seconds by enemies scaled to your level. This is particularly blatant in a quest where you protect (what's left of) the city of Kvatch. If you do this quest early on, as the game expects you to, the City Guards fighting alongside you are apparently being terrorized by the goblin-like Scamps, who don't do much besides fling slow-moving, weak fireballs. Postpone it until you're level 20 or so and the guards' reaction will finally look appropriate, now that they are facing humanoid crocodiles, magma golems, and demonic sorcerers. - Skyrim borrows the Level Scaling system from TES's Fallout sister series which helps to Downplay this trope especially when compared to Oblivion. Most enemies simply get replaced by tougher variants in high-level areas, and while some do directly scale with player level the curve is now a lot less exponential with many enemy types having a level bracket with a minimum and maximum level (i.e. Sabre Cats have a minimum of lvl 5 and a maximum of lvl 11). Random loot also scales, as do many pieces of unique equipment (which makes it advantageous to wait to collect some of them, lest they become less useful later on). It is still possible to grind non-combat skills and end up facing very difficult opponents relative to one's combat ability, although almost every skill has some combat utility if applied with creativity. Failing that, dungeons are locked to the level you were at when you first entered, so if you do find an area too difficult you can simply leave and come back later when you're more powerful, meaning the game never becomes straight-up unwinnable. Though, due to how magic works in this game (doing a set amount of damage and having very little in the way to squeeze out more damage), spell slingers can find themselves being outmatched by tougher and tougher foes while doing the same damage they were doing levels ago. - Fallout 3 does it as well. While completing quests gives you better and better perks, to the point that a BB gun in the hands of a level 30 character is better than a minigun in the hands of a level 5, enemy health scales much faster and much farther than the increased damage you can do even with the best perks and weaponry. The major changeover starts to occur around the time Super Mutant Brutes replace most of the normal Super Mutants. After that, enemies with sky-high health become bog-standard. Some people build specialty characters who can still waste them, but this is difficult and takes a lot of knowledge of the game and usually just the right gear and tactics. - It gets even worse if you have the Broken Steel DLC installed. Once you pass level 15, some new monsters start showing up (Albino Rad Scorpion, Feral Ghoul Reaver, Super Mutant Overlord, etc...) who are much tougher and stronger than anything that came before them, with the sole exception of the Super Mutant Behemoth. Unlike the Behemoths however, these Nuclear Mutants respawn and these monsters are tough for a level 30 character (someone who hit the level cap), let alone a level 15 player, and the Overlords are given an additional 35 points of damage with their Tri-Beam Lasers. - Then there's Point Lookout, whose Swampfolk and Tribals not only have the highest HP and DR of any human enemies despite their lack of armor, but their weapons are haxed to deal unblockable damage bonuses much like the Broken Steel Overlords. What's worse Point Lookout Tribals and Swampfolk carry double-barrel shotguns that do +35 damage per pellet for a total of 400 hit points if all 9 pellets hit. Yippee. - Fallout: New Vegas tones down the level scaling in the base game, but uses a "sine power curve" with the DLC's, each of which raises the level cap by 5, and scales up the enemies every 10 levels or so. - Final Fantasy VIII is another famous example. Your characters had levels and increasing them gave you slight bonuses to stats, but the enemies were scaled and got powerful much faster than the player. The player was supposed to use the Junction system - which provides a much better time to earnings ratio - to increase their own power, but obsessive grinders often didn't realize until it was too late. - Those who understood the junction system well had little difficulty beating the game at the party's starting level. - Geneforge 3 gives the player canisters that can increase his attributes, but using too many makes him suffer violent mood swings. Although this doesn't make the game unwinnable, eventually the player will not be able to take certain quests due to the character flying off the handle and attacking the quest givers. What makes this all the more annoying is the fact that the player was warned of this in the previous two Geneforge games, but due to Gameplay and Story Segregation nothing significant ever came of it. So when the warnings show up here for the third time, the player is likely to disregard them until past the point of no return. - Geneforge 2 did have a few encounters that forced the PC into fights if they had used too many canisters. - In all games after the first, it will affect the ending. It's really hard to do a no-canister game, but it will make some bittersweet or even good endings better. In game 1, however, the game assumes you used canisters heavily, even if you used none at all. - The US and EU releases of RPG The 7th Saga altered level-up stat gains waaay downward, resulting in lots of Forced Level-Grinding. It also had boss battles with other characters at the same level as yours—but with the old stat gain formula. If you leveled up too far, their stats would outmatch yours to an unbeatable degree. - Final Fantasy VII has a multi-layered version of this: Sephiroth's stats during the final fight are determined by a number of flags activated by the player. The more of these flags activated, the stronger he becomes. Gaining levels above level 90 are among these flags, as are defeating either or both Ruby and Emerald Weapon, acquiring Knights Of The Round, acquiring each character's best weapon, and a couple other possibilities. Note that the fight is still fairly easy if you've achieved any of the above. - Due to a glitch, this can happen to seriously overleveled characters in Phantasy Star IV. Once a character's level gets a few levels away from 100, their stats begin to drop sharply and they lose skills. This isn't an issue in normal play, however; you can beat the game at around level 45-50, and the experience required to get that high of a level is so massive that it takes very deliberate effort to get that high (XP requirements for a single level up when in the 90s range are more than the total XP need to be able to beat the game). - The web RPG DragonFable recently had to rebalance their entire battle scaling system because fights at high levels were getting so tedious people would get bored trying to get through quests where every one of the 10 or 15 battles took 2 minutes to finish. It's been fixed now, though. - Mass Effect: Andromeda has this issue. The game's effective level cap is 132; however, all of your stats and gear are maxed out at level 80, so enemies keep getting stronger while you're stuck with a bunch of Empty Levels. - Civilization: to prevent cheap strategies like founding hundreds of cities to grow wider and wider and simply submerge your rivals through sheer numbers, mechanics like corruption, inefficiency, health were gradually introduced to justify this trope when you build too many cities. You might think that creating an additional city in that fertile area with plenty of strategic resources might be a turning point for your faction, only to see unhappiness suddenly increase through all your dominions, possibly leading to revolts, decreased income and slowed production. It is not uncommon to see players reason if taking the hit and founding the city anyway or renouncing to those resources because its society is on the verge of collapse. - The same for the maintenance cost of units and buildings. One in excess and you might end up in bankrupcy, thus sometimes you even have to avoid building structures that would be otherwise beneficial to your empires. A little more corruption or unhappiness because you didn't build tribunals and temples in all your cities might not be worth the income drain that could force you to disband precious defensive units when your warmongering neighbour is hostile... - Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which is a spiritual successor to Civilization II and thus inherits all the above limits, introduces alien life: expanding too much your production might also trigger the sentient biosphere of the planet into considering your presence as too detrimental for the environment. That is, starting a planetary "immune reaction" with xenofungus growing and mind worm boils popping up next to your bases. Unless you master technologies and social civics that allow you to exploit the native life, you might find yourself seeing all your developed tiles being destroyed by the fungus growing, your units getting mauled, your pops killed and structures disabled by a mind worm attack. - The Fire Emblem games and many of their cousins, some of the units have this problem. You can eventually build some of your characters to the point where they can one-round most enemies easily, at which point they become nearly impossible to keep alive. What happens is, an enemy will move into position and attack. He'll get blown away on the counterattack, but the character will still take some damage. Once the attacker dies, the space he currently occupied is now free and another enemy will move into it, swing for some damage, die on the counterattack, etc. Repeat six or seven times a turn and many characters, particularly the more glass cannon sorts, can end up dead. It is particularly obnoxious with mages, who can easily kill many melee units (due to their low resistances) but having low defense against physical attacks themselves, can easily put themselves in this situation. Some very powerful units, however, either have so many hit points, such high defenses, or are so likely to dodge that they annihilate groups of enemies single-handedly. - Ditto Battle for Wesnoth. Paladins vs. walking corpses and magi vs. almost anything are particularly poignant examples. - In the strategy RPG Ogre Battle, your units get universally more powerful with levels, however a crucial element of the game is keeping the populace's faith in you. If you defeat enemy units with higher-level units, that faith goes down because you look like a bully, so other characters help you out less along the way. This was meant to encourage players to level less, but it didn't work because the players instead identified and exploited loopholes in the system. - Ogre Battle 64 also had one nasty problem with leveling. Dragons are particularly powerful enemies, and in order to get several powerful magical crests, you've got to defeat two dragons, and a dragon tamer (strengthens dragons) in a random battle in a certain place. If you don't do the battle early enough, the dragons are all extremely strong. Smart players would bring a strong multi-attacker, and two Pumpkin Heads (HP Halving attacks), but those are late game enemies, and only available by recruiting a special character. - Final Fantasy Tactics sort of falls under this trope. While Level Grinding would allow you to easily win the normal missions, which all have a preset difficulty, it would actually make random battles far more difficult. This is because the enemies in Random Encounters scaled to match both your level and the equipment you're supposed to have at that level. Players that overleveled would find themselves in the frustrating position of either having to save before around the overworld map and hoping not to get into a random battle, or training their characters in the thief class and stealing stronger gear from the few human enemies they encounter (a very tedious task, and quite difficult, considering how weak thieves are). ## Non-video-game examples: - Kinda happens in Dragon Ball Z, surprisingly enough. During their time in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, Goku and Gohan learn to remain in their Super Saiyan forms either indefinitely, or for days at a time. While this is useful for fighting, as it saves them the time and energy required to transform, it leaves them too strong for normal household stuff. For example, they tend to accidentally crush mugs when they try to have something to drink. After the Cell arc ends, they stop using Super Saiyan as default, though they can still maintain it outside of a fight if they choose. High-school was awkward enough for Gohan as it was; bright gold hair would've only made things worse. - As with the Dragon Ball Z, example above, this happens in an episode of Charmed where Paige magically grants Morris invincibility in which to stop a hostage situation. Unfortunately for him he can't turn it off and as the episode goes on Morris gets stronger and stronger, first he is impervious to bullets, then he starts pulling car doors off of his police car, then he accidentally tosses a criminal with his superstrength. At the end of the episode he sits in his wrecked office calling Paige and wishing for her to take it back. Then he crushes his phone in his hand. - Partially averted in GURPS, all skill rolls are made by rolling 3 six-sided dice and comparing the total to the skill level—a roll lower than or equal to the skill level succeeds, but a roll of 18 is always a failure, so there appears little benefit in increasing any skill over the level of 17. However, there are at least three aversions to this in the rules: - Because difficulty modifiers are applied to the skill, a skill above 17 gives a greater chance of success because the effective skill level will still be higher (e.g. if your skill is 20 and the modifier is -3, you have an effective skill of 17, the same as if your skill was 17 and there was no modifier). - In some circumstances, two characters may make directly opposed skill rolls—in such cases, higher skill is always an advantage. - Increasing the skill level of any spell above 17 will lead to decreased requirements for casting that spell, which can be useful in difficult circumstances. - Zig-zagged in Dungeons & Dragons 3.0, 3.5, and Pathfinder. - Spellcasters were subject to Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards, and as such they just got better. However, the math of skill checks and saves broke down so that at high levels, saves meant to challenge characters who were good at the save simply blew away characters who were bad at those saves. Likewise, eating a high-level monster's Full Attack when you were a Squishy Wizard usually made you very, very dead. As a result, at low level, characters could drop to a single unlucky hit or blown save. At mid-level, characters could contend with occasional bad luck and had a host of abilities, leading to them reliably outclassing their enemies. At high level, Rocket-Tag Gameplay ensues and the nice cushion mid-level characters enjoyed against their enemies was gone. It wasn't that mid-level characters were stronger; they were objectively weaker. However, enemies and spells scaled in such a wonky way that mid-level characters were far less likely to be stomped flat by one attack or one failed save than any other characters. In other words: Linear Defence, Quadratic Attack. - The Truenamer in particular got hit with this hard (though it was a class with so many mechanical issues it was nearly unusable). In order to use your magic on someone, you need to beat them with a Truespeak check. Unfortunately, the difficulty of affecting an enemy as it goes up in level increases literally twice as fast as your Truespeak skill. Unless your DM allows custom magic items or other houseruled bonuses, it becomes functionally impossible to use Truespeak on anyone at high levels.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParabolicPowerCurve
Paper Tiger - TV Tropes "In appearance, it is very powerful, but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of. It is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain." Subtrope of More than Meets the Eye. A character is not as tough as their physical appearance and/or personality suggests. Basically the opposite of Hidden Badass, though they can and oftentimes do go the route of the Cowardly Lion or the Cornered Rattlesnake. "Paper tiger" is a literal English translation of a Chinese phrase, meaning something that seems as threatening as a tiger, but in reality is harmless. This Chinese colloquialism is similar to the English phrase "its bark is worse than its bite". Which is not always a good thing. The phrase is an ancient one in Chinese culture, but sources differ as to when it entered the English vocabulary. It is found translated to English as early as 1836, in a work by John Francis Davis. ## This usually falls under the following subtropes: <!—index—> <!—/index—> Compare with Feet of Clay, which is when they purposely claim to be more badass than they are. Contrast this to Badass on Paper, where the character isn't very impressive in person but actually performed all the impressive feats that are the basis for his or her reputation, Mugging the Monster for the complete opposite (finding that a weak-looking individual is much more dangerous than they seem) and The Worf Effect, as it seems that this applies to the Worf him/herself in context, whereas The Worf Effect refers to the over-arching phenomenon of "stock 'tough' character handed ass by tougher one." ## Other examples: - The Military Police Brigade in Attack on Titan only accept the top ten recruits of each trainee class so their members are inherently the best and brightest the military has to offer. But their tendency to neglect their training and serious duties has left them the least capable branch and Jean noted when \|\|on a mission to save the captured Eren that its members are easily devoured\|\|. In comparison, the Survey Corps and the Garrison are more experienced and prepared to fight Titans. - Dragon Ball - In the English Funimation dub, Super Buu calls Vegito exactly this during their fight. He is very much mistaken though. - Zigzagged with Mark Satan/Hercule. For an ordinary human, he is quite skilled. However, he is horribly weak compared to the monsters in Z. That doesn't stop him from boasting about his strength and challenging the likes of Cell and Buu, both beings so powerful that they can kill him without even looking at him. Satan is also dismissive of the previous champion, Goku, calling him a paper tiger more or less. Still, Mr. Satan has the heart of a true hero, if nothing else. - In the original Dragon Ball, Oolong is this in his first appearance. He uses his transformation magic to intimidate people, but as he himself notes using transformation magic to become a powerful monster doesn't give you the abilities of that monster. - Zoonama pulled the same trick in Dragon Ball GT, intimidating a nearby town by claiming he could cause earthquakes when in reality he only had the ability to predict them. - Raijuta Isurugi from Rurouni Kenshin boasts all the time about his skills at kenjutsu, and how it should always be a murderous technique. In the end, he's revealed to be a phony Sore Loser who never actually killed someone. - In Final Fantasy: Lost Stranger, Cindy makes a show of talking down to the heroes and mocking them while refusing to move from her spot \|\|at the top of the Mysidian Royal Cathedral after stealing Invis and Reflect. While this makes her seem absolutely confident in her abilities to the point that she doesn't lift a finger against the heroes, Shogo correctly deduces that she cares for her sisters far too much to simply watch them get hurt after he counters their Reflect with his Mirror Mail. He then concludes that she's standing up there alone because she can't move, lest she dispel Reflect because of how much effort it takes to cast and maintain.\|\| - In Gundam Build Fighters Try, the Gundam Tryon 3, a Double Zeta Gundam made up to be like a Super Robot, was declared this by its first opponent in the Gunpla Battle Nationals. It easily proved it wasn't. - In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Dio Brando starts off as this before using the Stone Mask. As a kid, he often beat up Jonathan and humiliated him, but Jonathan was too timid to stand up to him. The final straw was when Dio kissed his girlfriend, Erina, and then attacked her for immediately washing her mouth out with a muddy puddle. When Jonathan found out, he finally fought back and made Dio cry. After the Stone Mask turned him into a vampire, though, this is averted, with extreme prejudice. - Telence T. D'Arby from Part 3 is revealed to be this compared to his brother Daniel. Both have the power to steal people's souls if they defeat them in a game, but the former also has the ability to read the opponent's mind by asking yes-or-no questions. However, when the heroes managed to circumvent their tactics, Daniel just kept playing and tried different tactics, while Telence became so demoralized that his Stand automatically released the soul that he captured. - D an G from Part 6 is introduced as a tough-looking prisoner with a calm, analytical mind laser-focused on his goal to assassinate Jolyne. All this goes out of the window when he falls for Anasui's trap and gets his left arm impaled by Guccio's ribs, turning him into a snivelling wreck crying out for his mother. He proceeds to spend the rest of the arc unconscious while his Automatic Stand Yo-Yo Ma does the fighting for him. - Medabots features Banisher. Looks badass, sounds badass, decked out with cool weapons, and in general gives off an Implacable Man vibe. Too bad his weapons and tactics are expressly designed for counterattacks only, not to mention his armor being next to useless. In their first battle, Metabee ends up taking him down with a single shot, as Banisher had to wait for Metabee to make the first move and didn't expect him to have such a strong gun. - One Piece: - Bellamy the Hyena bullies other pirates on the island of Jaya and has spring-based powers with enough concussive force to destroy buildings. Protagonist Monkey D. Luffy and his first mate Roronoa Zoro let themselves get beat up by Bellamy, under the idea that he has not wronged them. Once he does, however, Luffy challenges him, and Bellamy gets stopped cold with a single punch. While Bellamy was strong, Luffy and Zoro were way out of his league, and he ignored all evidence to the contrary. This includes finding both Luffy and Zoro's wanted posters, and then immediately dismissing them as fakes, despite the fact that their bounties were both much higher than his own. - The fake Straw Hats, who talk a good game while nobody sees through their ruse, but when it comes time to back up all that talk, they fall apart even faster than the crews they'd hoodwinked; Luffy knocks out all but one of them with a single Conqueror's Haki punch. - Judge Vinsmoke, ruler of Germa 66 and \|\|Sanji's father\|\|, constantly boasts about himself and his family's power while spouting his Social Darwinist ideals... until his own back ends up against the wall, at which point he turns into a blubbering loser begging for somebody to save him. And when Sanji fights him, the mighty and unstoppable Judge has to cheat outrageously to win, including using Human Shields. To really put how weak he is in perspective, he lives in a World of Badass where countless people are capable of superhuman feats through pure strength and skill.... and yet for all his boasting, he relies entirely on an advanced suit to do anything close to being impressive. - One-Punch Man: King, the fourth-strongest hero (his rank was given on the basis of singlehandedly defeating several high-tier enemies), an unflappable giant who only needs to show up to terrify lesser monsters with his Death Glare (augmented by a triple scar over his eye) and Badass Arm-Fold, assuming they didn't hear the unceasing pounding of the King Engine and run away. His Power Level caused the recording device to fail (like Saitama's and a nonpowered guy). On top of all that, he's an awesome gamer, once defeating 30 opponents in a row including a former pro gamer. \|\|He's a completely normal person who simply happened to be nearby when Saitama destroyed said high-tier enemies and was thought to be the winner (as Saitama hadn't registered with the Hero Association yet). His frozen expression comes from it being the only way he can prevent himself from displaying the pants-wetting terror he feels, keeps his arms crossed because he doesn't know what to do with them, and the "King Engine" is just his unusually-loud heartbeat (in the anime, represented by big drums), which is always beating in panic because he's well aware of how easily he could be found out. The power-measuring device fails when the levels are too high and too low, the designer just misattributed the cause in his and Saitama's case. He is legitimately a very good gamer though (as he spends his free time doing nothing but playing), and has at least enough courage to agree to bait a monster into attacking him (with Saitama in ambush).\|\| - Pokémon: The Series: Team Rocket are brash and confident and often show up with an imposing Humongous Mecha or device, but are easily seen off by children. Butch and Cassidy give an air of greater competence and their schemes tends to be harder to uncover, but once they engage in battle they go down quickly and easily. The anime team Plasma appears threatening, but even Jessie and James could tear through a squad of their mooks, and Ghesistis went down without a fight. Team Skull talk a big game but are no threat to even a half decent pokemon trainer, like their game counterparts. - Rebuild World: Discussed. - Sibea, the slum lord who Akira kills in self-defense near the beginning and installs Sheryl to replace, is noted by public opinion to have been this, only good for waving guns around, in comparison with the very deadly and ruthless Akira who quickly becomes The Dreaded in his place. - A while later a Knowledge Broker spreads rumors that Akira is this for letting himself get pickpocketed. This torments him and drives him as a Slave to PR to get revenge on said pickpocket. When this rumor causes some hunters to think Akira guarding Sheryl's relic shop means its easy pickings for robbery, Akira defeating them ends the rumor. - We eventually find out that a certain character has been this. \|\|The Rival Katsuya. In Akiras final showdown with him, Akira is exhausted with one arm blown off, and no support from Alpha, while Katsuya has a squad at his back, and Akira still wins. The reason people thought Katsuya was strong was his unconscious More than Mind Control from being an Old World Connector.\|\| - Sword Art Online: Nobuyuki Sugou talks a big game and boasts of his so-called godhood, but for all of his bravado, he sucks at combat and has nothing but his Game Master privileges to keep up with Kirito. Best shown when Kirito pulls off his Heroic Second Wind and uses Kayaba's ID to strip Oberon of them; he summons Excalibur, the Infinity +1 Sword of the game, and gives it to Sugou before taking up his own sword. Even with the strongest weapon in the game, Sugou is no match for Kirito in a straight fight, fails to land a single hit, and goes down in a matter of seconds, and due to Kirito disabling his Amusphere's pain inhibitors, he suffered permanent damage in real life. It happens again in real-life, where he goes from smugly gloating about how he's going to kill Kirito and continue his research to bawling his eyes out and wetting his pants the minute Kirito turns the tables on him again. - That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: Downplayed by Demon Lord Clayman. He's not weak by any measure, but compared to the other Demon Lords he's nothing special power-wise and even one of the weakest, mostly relying on his cunning and manipulations to be a threat. And despite having an intimidating-looking One-Winged Angel form, \|\|he's acknowledged as the weakest of the Moderate Clown Troupe that was chosen to be the Demon Lord candidate for said smarts rather than power, with this even being something of a complex for him since monsters are such firm believers of Asskicking Leads to Leadership.\|\| - In episode 133 of the 1981 Animated Adaptation of Urusei Yatsura, Ryoko Mendou inadvertently nominates herself as the pilot of the Octopussy, a suit of Powered Armor that is reputedly the ultimate weapon of the Mendou family. Then she discovers the suit has neither Super Strength nor mounted weaponry, and is about as durable as tinfoil. Even the jetpack doesn't work. Cue Ryoko running for her life as the Mizunokoji army chases after her, intent of defeating the "ultimate weapon". - The Seven-Faced Widow in Big Trouble in Little China is a Phony Psychic who turns out to have very little power at all, certainly far less than people believe. She has managed to kill or drive mad numerous opponents in her time, but only because they were all too scared to challenge her directly, instead steering clear so she could manipulate and destroy them from afar. When Jack does challenge her directly she proves unable to accomplish much of anything at all. - In one of the last storylines of Hitman (1993), Tommy finds himself being targeted by a skilled gunman who's the son of a master assassin who was the only man Tommy truly feared and who he defeated by just sheer luck. Tommy sees the kid on video at gun ranges, not even looking at the targets yet hitting the bulls-eye every time and knows he's in trouble. In a big battle, the kid gets the drop on Tommy, gun pointed at his head, absolutely no way he can miss, smirking as he pulls the trigger... Click. He's forgotten to remove the safety. It hits Tommy that this guy was only shown firing at paper targets and the reality is that he's never shot a real person in his life and was using his father's fame to make himself look more fearsome. Tommy just grins as he empties his own clip in the punk's face. - The Avengers (Jonathan Hickman): The Builders ultimately prove to be this. Despite their extremely advanced technology, physically they're quite weak and rely on their Alephs and Gardeners to fight actual enemies. This is highlighted by what happens when the Avengers personally meet one for the first time; after he goes on an arrogant rant about how superior his kind are and how humanity deserves to die, Thor casually kills the Builder with two hits and the Avengers proceed to easily rip apart the ships and soldiers that accompanied him. - God is portrayed this way on Preacher. He's meant to be a parody of the wrathful God of the Old Testament, the one that will condemn you to an eternity of suffering if you defy His holy word. He attempts to do this but all His bravado and arrogance vanish as soon as the person facing Him doesn't buy his threats. The best example of this occurs in His last appearance \|\|when He returns to Heaven and finds the entire Heavenly Host murdered by the Saint of Killers. God's attempts to intimidate the Saint stop immediately when He finds Himself looking into the barrel of the Saint's revolver. Gods tries to plead, saying that He will restore the Saint's family if He's allowed to sit upon His throne once again. The Saint chooses "rest" instead and fires, killing God. He then takes his rest upon God's empty throne.\|\| - The Ultimates: Ultimate Abomination looks tougher and meaner than the silly original Abomination with his Ear Fins, but ends up folding to the Hulk like a cheap paper plate. - In A White Knight in Bayville, Mystique turns into "The Thing with Teeth" while fighting Xander. But while it's great for scaring her minions, Xander is an experienced demon hunter and punches her in its weak point, causing Mystique to collapse in pain. - While facing several Naruto-like creatures (born of a genjutsu bringing people's worst fears to life) in Black Flames Dance in the Wind: Rise of Naruto, Naruto's female clone Akiko outright calls them Paper Tigers once she realizes that since they're born of civilians fear of Naruto (who know nothing of what he's capable of), said creatures simply fight like drunken civilians. - Lex Luthor uses this trope by name in A Spark of Genius when describing the new superpower Romania, claiming its leader The Leviathan won't act against Krasnia just for knocking down some of its defensive towers. He's wrong (Romania conquers Krasnia within an hour of their attack) but he was also likely just trying to pacify the rebels he was dealing with. - Downplayed in Fate/Starry Night. Ritsuka summons a Shadow Servant of Scáthach when he is about to get speared through the chest by Lancer. The sight of his mentor freezes the Child of Light in his tracks, especially since she's dual-wielding Gáe Bolgs. But he quickly realizes that this construct lacks the overwhelming bloodlust of his mentor, and while it puts up a fight against him, Cú dispatches it relatively easily. - In All the Roofs of Uncertainty Jason mentally compares Rourdan deciding to ignore the obvious threatening tension between himself and Batman and walk past them to do her job to treating them like paper tigers. - In Pokémon Reset Bloodlines, The Sensational Sisters' strongest team is actually extremely weak due to months of inactivity. Despite containing the likes of Cloyster, Poliwrath, and Kingdra, Ash considers it more of a challenging second gym battle than an eighth gym battle like it's supposed to be - In For Love of Magic, when Harry's girlfriends (Tonks, Luna, and Fleur) face Bellatrix in combat, they realize that she's not nearly as dangerous as she's portrayed. While Bellatrix is remarkably fast, her reputation as Voldemort's most dangerous follower is due to her cruelty rather than her power or skill. As a result, the three take her out without much trouble. - The Devil's in the details: When pitted against the Murdock Family and its honorary members, Nick Fury tends to be more bark than bite, either being grossly outmatched by them in certain categories or just generally falling into bad luck. - In "Returning Home", Nick tranquilizes Ned and threatens Peter's class when they keep getting interrupted. Having none of it, Peter threatens to beat Nick within an inch of his life if he acts on it. Nick then finally admits that he needs Peter more than Peter needs him. - In "Pear Shaped", Nick tries having Matt Murdock kidnapped in order to have him convince the other Defenders to join the initiative. Unfortunately, they tranquilized him with insulin, the dosage nearly putting him in a coma. He was so embarrassed that he dumped Matt at a Jersey hospital. - In "Bar Flies", they kidnap Foggy to convince Matt to help them find the other Infinity Stones. Having known about their failed attempt at kidnapping Matt, he essentially intimidates them into letting him go by listing the sheer number of criminal offenses he can have them put away with, not to mention the fact that all this would do is piss Matt off more. - In "Office Work", Nick tries kidnapping Karen for the same reason (despite warning that he is even less likely to succeed with her by Foggy), only for her to beat the kidnappers' faces in as soon as she regains consciousness. She doesn't even tell her coworkers where she was that day, instead cashing in her vacation days. - In Honoka's Bizarre Adventure, when Honoka and the others offer Nico to join µ's and become the idols she dreamed to be, Nico's sentient Stand Circus refuses as she doesn't want Nico to betrayed like in her First Year, and only considering when Honoka offers to battle with her Stand All Star to prove her determination. Despite Circus's boast of how strong she is, her long range whip (which feels like light stings on All Star), and how versatile her attention control is, once Honoka figures out her ability she takes Circus down in a single punch. Regardless, Honoka was able to prove her determination to become an idol to both Nico and Circus, letting Nico join as their seventh member. - In American History X, Cameron plays the part of a tough, experienced Nazi leader, but Derek learns that he \|\|snitched on two of his men to cut a stint in prison to two months\|\|. When he threatens to turn Derek's younger brother into a hardened white supremacist, he goes down from one punch from the older sibling. A deleted scene has him scorning a black man for dating a white girl from the safety of his seat, but getting beaten up by gangbangers almost as soon as he leaves the restaurant he was in. - The nihilists in The Big Lebowski. Despite them appearing dangerous, threatening to cut off the Dude's "johnson" and cutting off a toe, they're completely useless in an actual fight, with Walter taking out all three of them effortlessly. \|\|They never even performed any of the ruthless crimes they claimed\|\|. - Deliverance: Lewis is an outdoorsman who keeps talking about the inevitable fall of society and how he'll be prepared for it, but it's clear he's nowhere near as good a survivalist as he fancies himself to be, taking his friends out canoeing on the river without checking if it was safe first and even after being warned by a local that it was dangerous. Indeed, he becomes completely useless after he ends up breaking his leg, leaving Ed, who has some experience in the outdoors but isn't as obsessed with it as Lewis, to take care of the rest of the group and proving himself to be far more capable than Lewis. - The Great Silence: While the bandit Miguel is a well-meaning tragic victim, he is also a blusterer without much real fight in him. He is introduced shooting the last of some bounty hunters Silence shot it out with, only to be told that the man's injuries would have kept him from hurting Silence anyway. Then, Miguel makes a speech about how miserable hiding in the mountains is and how the bandits are former soldiers who should fight the bounty hunters themselves, but when this gets little supports, he decides to turn himself in rather than fight or stay hiding. And when the men he turns himself in to prepare to kill him, he tries to run rather than fight back. - It (2017): - In Let the Right One In, Conny (or "Kenny" in the American remake) sadistically torments Oskar ("Owen" in the remake), and on some occasions, threatens him with murder. However, when Oskar fights back by smacking him with a rod, he cries like a little kid and resorts to having his older brother fight his battles for him. - The Magnificent Seven (2016): - the goons working for Bartholomew Bogue are shown to be much less dangerous than they seem, this is summed up best by Sam Chisolm. "Blackstone detective agents. Cowards. Now, Blackstones are good, union busting, back-shooting homesteaders and women, but you put 'em up against some real men, men that know what they're doing..." - A more specific example is Mr. Denali, Bogue's Native American henchman who seems to be an intimidating badass but only kills two people, an fleeing woman, and \|\|Jack Horne who had just given his guns to someone else\|\|. Ultimately when he fights Red Harvest \|\|he's killed with next to no effort\|\|. - In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the press corps call Jefferson Smith a "paper tiger" to his face, telling him that he was only appointed to fill a seat in the Senate and vote the way Senator Payne wants him to, which chafes the idealistic young senator. - In The Naked Gun, one of the members of the council of evil calls America "a paper tiger." - The eponymous Paper Tiger, where the boastful British private tutor Walter Bradbury \|\|loses his cool and is ultimately, extremely humiliated, but finally redeems himself in the eyes of his student Koichi Kagoyama when, faced with immense danger that would cripple anyone with fear, his innate courage begins to shine to his own disbelief\|\|. - In The Paper Tigers, the Three Tigers are this by the events of the movie. While they were the best in their prime, by the time the movie begins, they are all middle-aged, out of practice, and out of shape. Danny has become afraid of confrontation and has trouble focusing, Hing has gained weight and has a leg injury, and while Jim is the most physically capable, his skill has atrophied. - The Shawshank Redemption: Byron Hadley is an abusive prison guard who beats a helpless, terrified inmate to death. \|\|However, when he was dragged off to prison for his crimes, he apparently broke down and cried\|\|. - The Federation's military in Starship Troopers is brutally xenophobic and gung-ho but also spectacularly incompetent. Their first assault on Klendathu turns into a panicked rout after only a few casualties. - Captain Phasma in Star Wars is physically imposing at six foot three and clad in shiny chrome, wears a Badass Cape, and talks like a menacing villain in a cold, calculating and threatening way, but that's where her toughness ends. When captured in The Force Awakens she folds like a wet rag and yields to all her capturers' demands after only a few hollow threats and ends up thrown into the trash, and in The Last Jedi she puts up a brief fight but still goes down rather easily to Finn who at this point has learned she's nothing special and looks down on her with disdain. Her standing in the open taking potshots with her armor shrugging off a direct hit from Rose's blaster also implies the only real reason she has any success in battles is her armor is too damned tough to penetrate with blasters rather than owing to any combat skills on her part. She gets some moments in the Expanded Universe, but in the films, she's ultimately revealed to really be nothing more than a bully who talks a game she can't back up. - The house robots from Robot Wars were imposing in stature, had fearsome designs, and were hyped up as terrifyingly powerful death machines. However, not all of them were all that much more powerful than the average contestant: - In A Song of Ice and Fire, the King of the Seven Kingdoms is the ruler of the entire Westerosi continent (the size of South America) on paper. In practice, however, the king only directly controls one kingdom, with the other eight (The Seven Kingdoms actually consist of nine realms) being ruled by semi-independent nobles known as Lord Paramounts who have just as many warriors as the King individually. The only thing keeping the King in power is the personal loyalty of the Lords, and as soon as several of them decide that he has to go (or just refuse to help him), his position immediately becomes threatened. This happens twice throughout the course of the main series, first with Robert's Rebellion and second with the War of Five Kings. In both of these cases, the ruling king pisses off a minority of Lords (Aerys pissed off three Lord Paramounts at once, while Joffrey pisses off the Starks and the Tully initially), which then balloons out of control as the other Lords either declare neutrality (as is the case with the Lannisters and the Greyjoys for most of the first war and Lysa Arryn during the second war), thus allowing the rebels to stand a chance, or use the chaos to make a power grab for themselves (as is the case with Renly and Balon Greyjoy during the second war), causing the King and his few supporters to be left isolated against several hostile alliances. Even King Joffrey, who technically all but wins the War of Five Kings (\|\|Balon is actually the last one standing, but he's in no shape to actually fight Joffrey had the latter survived\|\|), only manages to do so with the heavy support of his grandfather Lord Paramount Tywin (who in turn can insult him to his face because he knows his grandson is powerless without him). - In Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, \|\|the Wozzle, supposedly a powerful monster, keeps the residents of Waka-waka in line through fear alone. When Leonard and Alan investigate they find that the worst thing it has ever done is kick someone in the bottom.\|\| - Harry Potter: - Dudley pretends to be tough in front of his friends, but when they're not around, he throws temper tantrums when he doesn't get his way. By Order of the Phoenix, he gains quite a bit of muscle after having to go on a diet, but he uses it to beat up little kids. - Draco Malfoy is shown to be this. He is easily bested in fist fights by Hermione and tried to have Buckbeak executed for scratching him. It gets Played for Drama in Half-Blood Prince when he is ordered to \|\|kill Dumbledore\|\|, but he has cold feet and starts crying. - Honor Harrington: The Solarian League is the biggest, richest star nation in the galaxy, with the biggest navy... but the League is so feared that its navy hasn't fought a proper war in centuries at the beginning of the series, and so when it goes up against Manticore and Haven, two countries that have been fighting a Lensman Arms Race against each other in addition to their actual war, curb-stomping ensues. - Similar to the Honor Harrington example above, Legend of the Galactic Heroes has a few examples: - The United Earth Government had a massive Space Force that seemed uncontested and allowed the home planet of humanity to reign its colonies. However, the Earth military was horribly corrupt since its establishment, and humanity never fought a war in a long time that they only defeated the rebelling colonial army in an underhanded preemptive strike before it reached space. Once the colonies managed to actually rise from their predicament, the military showed more of their flaws, starting with ugly infighting happening constantly to the point their entire fleets destroyed each other more than their colonial enemies. By the time the colonies got a working space fleet of their own, the Earth military imploded where they could not even hold the asteroid belt before the home world was pillaged. - The Lippstadt League during the Imperial Civil War was also this, which drastically outnumbered Reinhard and wielded the Geirsbeeg Fortress, a moon-sized space station rivaled only by Iserlohn. However, their leadership was full of backstabbing nobles who only gained their ranks through nepotism without any achievements in the war with the Alliance, and spent their lives either in pleasure or trying to kill Reinhard and his loved ones through underhanded means. Reinhard sticks it to them repeatedly as they collapse drastically with every idiotic move they make, from shooting their own ships to nuking planets into inhospitable rocks that demoralizes their forces. The civil war lasts only three episodes as a result, with Reinhard gaining far more than he had lost. \|\|Almost, that is.\|\| - Andor: For all her smugness, bullying, and willingness to order violence against civilians and enemies, when Deedra ends up actually in the field herself during the riot it swiftly becomes apparent that she's never actually been in a fight and is in fact a complete coward; her "contribution" to the battle is waving her blaster around ineptly while shaking crazily (apparently having a panic attack), then getting knocked down by a small rock to the head and nearly beaten to death by the same townsfolk she had been abusing, forcing \|\|Karn\|\| of all people to intercede and pull her to safety. - Kyler of Cobra Kai. He's not a terrible fighter, being adequately talented at wrestling, Cobra Kai, and even some Miyagi-Do techniques, but he is WAY weaker than he likes to think he is and has, in fact, lost every even fight he's ever been in. The only time he manages to scrape out a win is when he has back-up from his buddies or his opponent is injured, and even then he loses more often than he wins. Hawk outright calls him out on this during his "The Reason You Suck" Speech in Season 5... before promptly kicking his ass even in spite of Kyler having two other Cobra Kais at his back. Hawk: You know what? That's life. You win some, you lose some, but you gotta move on. You never did. You're still pulling the same old bully act as always. Even though everyone you bullied has kicked your ass by now. Demetri: I haven't! Hawk: You'll get your turn. Kyler's too stupid to ever learn his lesson. - The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: Despite putting up an image of a tough guy from the hood, Will gets his ass handed to him quite often throughout the show. He even got knocked out by Carlton once while the latter had his hands glued to his head and on two occasions Geoffrey was able to physically overpower him. - Survivor: - Osten Taylor from Pearl Islands was a buff bodybuilder who had absolutely no idea how to rough it out in nature, almost drowned in a challenge, became convinced that a pelican was out to get him, and ended up being the first contestant to quit Survivor. - Crystal Cox in Gabon, the six-foot-three Olympic gold medalist who had one of the single worst athletic performances in the series, culminating in her missing a slam dunk on a basketball hoop that's shorter than she is. - NBCs One World: ex-delinquent Jane ended up feeling this way. Normally strong, tough, streetwise, with a smart mouth, a camping trip with their guardian and the other girls brought out a side of her she never really expected: being terrified of puny little creatures and insects of the woods. - Netflix's Stranger Things has Angela, a girl who ruthlessly bullies El, but cannot take what she dishes out. When El smashes her face with a roller skate, Angela loses her smug demeanor and collapses into tears. - The Ultimate Fighter: Occasionally a fighter will look very formidable in the gym, or at least talk a good game, only for him to completely underperform during his fight. - Victorious: Jade constantly tries to appear tough and hardcore. She has no problem pushing other people around. However, whenever there's real danger, she either bolts or bluffs. - Power Rangers Every seasons mooks might appear threatning but after the first few episodes they'll be little more than a speedbump, even when the rangers are unmorphed. Some monsters put up better fights than others, espeically if lots of other events happen in an episode. Lord Zedd's later monsters were often defeated in one Zord attack. - In the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition module Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, there's an NPC who, if he's killed when first encountered, can later be encountered in Hell after he's been transformed into a high-ranking type of Devil. However, if the players attack him he won't actually put up any fight at all due to being an abject coward, even though a Devil of his type would ordinarily be an extremely dangerous opponent. - Paranoia supplement Acute Paranoia, adventure "The Harder They Clone". The doorman at a nightclub looks like a character in The Road Warrior: huge, black leather tunic, rippling muscles, and scars. It turns out the PCs can easily kill him since he's unarmed and unarmored. - In Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, UPEO itself is regarded as one of these, especially highlighted in the mission "Paper Tiger". To further push the point, their planes are obsolete hand-me-downs from both General Resource and Neucom, which are the only things making them anywhere near a relevant military force that can keep the two corporations in check. - Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown: 444th Squadron was intended to be one of these, but became a victim of its own success. Originally just a couple of old hangars with the rust painted over and a single runway painted on the ground, intended to fool the Eruseans into thinking it was an active airbase. Then the Eruseans took the bait, and 444th got more and more resources to maintain the illusion, until it was cheaper and easier to turn 444th into an active squadron than faking it. - The Dahl Corporation from the Borderlands franchise has a militaristic theme and aggressive marketing campaign that is contrasted by their nasty habit of turning tail the second anything goes even slightly wrong with any of their business ventures, leaving behind their soldiers and war material in their haste to retreat. Their cowardice plays a big role in the backstory of Pandora and Elpis, due to Dahl abandoning their civilian workforce and the huge amount of convict labor they brought to Pandora and Elpis, resulting in the omnipresent Bandits found on either planetary body. - In Bug Fables, Wasp King's right-hand man General Ultimax is a big bulky hornet, who looks stronger and more intimidating than his wasp soldiers. However, he's actually a cowardly wimp who, without troops or tank to support him, goes down fast, and his only method of direct attacking is a barrage of slaps which can be easily blocked for no damage. - It's pretty clear Teyrn Loghain Mac Tir in Dragon Age: Origins is not the political powerhouse he might portray himself as. Highever is openly rioting against him, Redcliffe and nearly the entire Bannorn is warring against him, and according to Bodahn, the Darkspawn burn down Gwaren, his own fief, leaving him with Denerim under his military occupation and Amaranthine, which Dragon Age: Origins Awakening reveals was increasingly divided because of what Arl Howe did. Actually losing to him at the Landsmeet pretty much requires the Warden to actively avoid the political sidequests, or for them to go out of their way to be a jerk to people they're trying to win over. - Drakath from DragonFable looks and sounds tough, with a cool cape, neat sword, and quickly established rivalry with the player character. After an introduction fight, he proceeds to spend the rest of the story arc constantly being embarrassed, outwitted, terrified, and handily defeated. Even his boss Sepulchure regularly screws with him. \|\|Does a 180 and becomes a Knight of Cerebus after fusing with the Ultimate Orb and becoming a giant dragon of darkness.\|\| - Sir Prancelot of Scufflewick from Drakensang: he wears full plate armor, has a cool winged helmet, and wields a large two-handed sword. He's also a complete wimp who won't admit his failures and runs away from goblins. - Behemoths in Final Fantasy XIII look threatening when first encountered, with their large size and 20,000 hit points. They turn out to be easy to stagger, and it is also easy to perform sneak attacks on them. - Several weapons with high stats also grant passives (called Paper Tiger and Silk Tiger, no less) that lower the equipped character's max HP. - The Warm-Up Boss of Gundam Breaker 3 is Tiger, piloting what can only be described as a Zeonic chimera. Most fans know that the appearance of larger Zeon mobile suits is a bit of an 'Oh, Crap!' moment, especially if you realize that its base frame is a Sazabi. He talks a big game and tries to intimidate you while fighting, but as it turns out he's really just a seal-clubber who picks on newbies for easy wins. Misa even calls him out on this and offers to face him, but he shows his yellow streak and refuses to fight her — and after seeing how his big, slow mobile suit and its telegraphed, easily avoidable attacks has a hard time against your Mook Mobile Starter Equipment, it's not hard to see why he's a coward who won't face an opponent with even the slightest hint of experience. He promptly disappears from the story after you kick his ass, being far too spineless to even consider a rematch. - In No Straight Roads, DK West is a smart, charismatic, and hardworking fellow who folds and flees when his self-image is threatened. Also exemplified in his boss fight, as the shadow puppet he conjures is a giant, sinister-looking bull shadow that can't hurt you at all, even if you miss its weak point, and curls up into a ball when damaged enough. - The second Monarch in Persona 5 Strikers is author Ango Natsume. He is famous in Sendai for his best selling light novel "Prince of Nightmares", which features an Isekai Demon King as the Villain Protagonist. In the Metaverse, Ango's Jail follows the plot of his book and his Shadow takes the role of the imposing Demon King whose "final form" is a gargantuan golden Dragon Knight. As the battle goes on though, the boss' armor is destroyed, showing him to be a rather skinny dragon whose wings are made out of papier-mâché. After Shadow Natsume's defeat, it's revealed the reason of why he didn't move at all during his previous face-off with the Phantom Thieves is because his armor is actually just a cardboard cutout. With the gig up, Shadow Natsume finally breaks down, admitting he's a shameless plagiarist who made his Cliché Storm of a novel out of a mishmash of quotes from other books and video games and used the Metaverse to brainwash people into loving his work. - In Pokémon Sword and Shield, one potential Pokemon that can appear in Max Raid Battles is Shedinja. Dynamax Shedinja starts off the battle by putting up an eight-bar barrier, the largest barrier any Raid Boss in the game has (even more than Dynamax Mewtwo when it was around)... but even as a Max Raid Boss, one hit is enough to take Shedinja out. - As for the franchise as a whole, Onix fits squarely in this trope. It is one of the largest Pokémon, and has an imposing appearance and sky-high Defense stat. However, all of its other stats are horrible (except for its speed, which is passable but nothing to write home about), so it can't do much damage and any competent Grass or Water-type can brush it under the rug. - Most villain team mooks despite their numbers, outfits and themes tend to pose little to no threat or challenge to the player (invariably a child just starting their journey) or pretty much any half way competent trainer, and can only get anything done through either its admins, legendary pokemon or overwhelming numbers. Team Skull in universe are noted to be an annoyance filled with weak trainers, despite their threatening demeanor. - Star Control 3: K'tang are funny. Without their titans, they're even MORE cowardly than the freaking spathi! - In Subnautica: Below Zero, this is the gimmick of the Cryptosuchus. This marine predator resembles an armored, paddle-footed dinosaur, its fearsome roars can be heard at an unnerving distance, and whenever it spots a potential meal or threat, it goes into a frenzy of snapping jaws. But the instant it faces any resistance, it turns tail and swims away, so you can fend one off with a nick from your basic survival knife. - From Tales of Monkey Island, Bugeye is a bald, tattooed pirate who disrespects the main character and generally talks tough. But once you need to get information out of him, you find that the slightest bit of pressure will make him squeal. - The Greenskins in Total War: Warhammer are Blood Knights to the extreme and have generally great combat stats but their leadership is generally awful, meaning that they will turn and run when the scrap doesn't go well. Fighting might be fun but losing sure isn't, and they are not a species widely known for their discipline or martial training. As such, they are a common threat in the game, but weathering the Greenskins' initial charge typically means you've won half the battle already. - The Warriors of Chaos also have a problem with low leadership and mass routs (or at least the underlings do), ironic as they are such a powerful and terrifying force. Justified in that the Warriors of Chaos are utterly individualistic and each warrior in a Chaos horde is only out for their own individual glory; a Chaos warlord can only bring these warriors together under him by convincing them he is favoured by the Dark Gods, and if he is killed in battle then the warriors under him take it as a sign that they have offended the fickle gods somehow and their convictions melt away like snow in midsummer. - The Nali of Unreal are 7 feet tall, have four arms, and are quite muscular. They are also completely incapable of fighting and get easily destroyed by anything that attacks them. - In We Happy Few, while breaking into the military camp, Arthur jumps onto one of the tanks the Germans left behind... \|\|and crashes straight through it. Turns out the tanks are made of papier-mâché, and that the Wellies sacrificing their children to the Germans to avoid their wrath was All for Nothing.\|\| - hololive: V-tuber Calliope Mori is The Grim Reaper (technically an apprentice under The Grim Reaper, but still). She likes to wear a leather cape with Spikes of Villainy all over, carries a massive scythe, typically tries to put up a tough front, and her debut rap is a profanity-laden piece about how much she loves killing people. She is also preciously awkward, is plagued by self-esteem issues, succumbs to Cuteness Proximity over cats, gets flustered to the point of near-tears when she receives high donations, doesn't know how kazoos work, has technology go to hell in a handbasket around her, and, almost insultingly, tends to be the first to die when the group plays multiplayer games. Calli: What can I say, I'm attracted to death. Death and me are meant to be, listen. Either I'm killing folks or I'm getting killed. I'm in a dedicated relationship with death, I am. - Jaiden Animations: In her Pokémon HeartGold/SoulSilver Nuzlocke, Jaiden and Alpharad are absolutely scared of their rival, Jan/Pokémon Challenges, wiping out their entire team, especially in the Burned Tower where he has a Mew, but he ends up being a pushover in every battle they face him in. \|\|Subverted in his last appearance, where he manages to kill their Charizard-Donphan pair.\|\| - El Goonish Shive: \|\|As a result of her heritage as a descendant of Pandora,\|\| Diane has an innate affinity for spells related to magical weapons, the bane of aberrations. However, she has yet to be given a Power Tattoo, and thus does not currently have any spells. When Nanase expresses fear that Diane's affinity will make her a target for aberrations seeking to eliminate a potential threat, Mr. Verres points out that while most aberrations get spells to detect those with an affinity for weapon-summoning, only a few can tell the difference between the potential for an affinity and the ability to cast spells relating to it. The rest will steer clear of Diane since they have no way of knowing that she isn't actually a threat to them yet. - In Minion, Count Antonie's vampiric powers make it nigh-impossible to kill him...but merely beating him up is dead easy. - King of One-Punch Man fame. In addition to inadvertently taking credit for the actions of the protagonist (meaning people think he can kill giant monsters with one punch), his always stoic expression and Rugged Scar make him so intimidating that not even the S-ranked heroes dare to get on his bad side. But really he's just a powerless Otaku who's scared out of his wits. - The Sanity Circus: Steven is one of a race seemingly created to combat the Scarecrows, and after the skill shown by Luther already it seems that he is just as talented himself. He certainly has no trouble painting himself as the best thing under the Sun. However, when he finally comes face-to-face with Posey, he freezes on the spot before turning and running for his life, abandoning Fletch and Attley. - DEATH BATTLE!; this is one of the deciding factors in determining a victor in "Hercule Satan vs. Dan Hibiki" (released after the One-Minute Melee example below). \|\|Despite both men being way out of their league in their respective canons, Mr. Satan can actually back up his talk as he's strong enough to pull four tour buses, punch through the side of one and tear three phonebooks in half in addition to being a legitimate World Tournament Champion who can to the untrained eye move fast enough to vanish from sight. Dan, however, cannot back up his talk as all of his attacks are pathetically weak and his one canonical win — against Sagat — was done out of pity to prevent him from continuing his suicidal Roaring Rampage of Revenge.\|\| - In Dragon Ball Z Abridged, when Vegeta and Freeza start fighting, the latter scoffs at the former's power, claiming that it was "a paper tiger against a storm". - Played for laughs in 1 Minute Melee where Joke Characters Hercule/Mr. Satan from Dragon Ball Z and Dan Hibiki from Street Fighter get into a confrontation. Both are unsure if they could take the other guy, but both also don't want to have to back down and have their reputation destroyed. The result is two paper tigers egging each other on and trying to out-bluff each other until they have no choice but to fight it out. Enjoy. - In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Hakoda tries to pick a fight with a tough-looking prison inmate by shoving him, but instead of fighting back, the inmate says "that hurt my feelings!" Averted a few minutes later when someone starts a prison riot, causing that same inmate to scream "Forget controlling my anger!" and rush out to fight with everybody else. - Referenced in Carmen Sandiego: In "The Chasing Paper Caper", during their first fight, Paper Star calls Carmen a "paper tiger" (as one of many paper-related puns used in the episode). In subsequent fights, Carmen proves more than capable of taking Paper Star on. - Dave from Dave the Barbarian. As the Theme Song states, he's "huge, but a wimp". - Johnny Bravo. He's a pretty muscular-looking guy but he's always getting beaten up by the women he flirts with. Which is especially weird considering in the very first episode he was able to successfully wrestle A CROCODILE! Though, in fairness, just because he doesn't fight back doesn't mean he can't. After all, Johnny's not an asshole (to that degree at least). - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Bulk Biceps. He's surprisingly sensitive, in spite of his brawny physique; In "Rainbow Falls", he starts crying after Fluttershy accidentally hit him in the face with a horseshoe. - Major Man from The Powerpuff Girls (1998). He's hugely muscular and has all the standard superpowers, but he's also a super fraud who uses Engineered Heroics to win over the citizens of Townsville. As such, he's reduced to a quivering wreck when put against a real threat that he didn't orchestrate. - Tiger in Skunk Fu!. Formerly a powerful warrior, after losing to Dragon, he's become a cowering wimp. - The Simpsons: Bart develops a crush on his new next-door neighbor Laura Powers. However, she instead falls for the bully Jimbo Jones. Bart sends a knife-wielding Moe Syzslak after Jimbo, who tearfully begs for his life, prompting Laura to break up with him, having exposed himself as a weakling. - Eric Cartman is likely South Park's biggest bully, but when the chips are down, is incapable of defending himself. He crumbles when someone pokes at his insecurities, and as Kyle often demonstrates, all it takes is one hit to get him crying for his meem. - In Jackie Chan Adventures Tohru calls Hak Foo this in the laters debut apperance but is Instantly Proven Wrong . However the trio of dark hand mooks have a menacing front but go down quickly, even when enhanced into Dark Chi Warriors. - The Pontiac Fiero is a prime example, with exotic and stylish bodywork reminiscent of an American Ferrari, but The '80s smog regulation made it slow as molasses and it used the same suspension setup from GM's land yachts. It became the base for hundreds of kit cars to make it look like an actual Ferrari or other exotics, but more often than not leaves the mechanics completely unchanged. On the plus side, it's just as realistically "reliable" as a Ferrari thanks to the car's notorious reliability issues such as spontaneously bursting into flames. - Some harmless animals superficially resemble dangerous animals; this is known to biologists as "Batesian mimicry". - Many stingless insects, including various flies and even a species of moth, look a lot like wasps or bees. - Some flies, moths, and jumping spiders look like jumping spiders. - The milksnake has a red, black, and yellow pattern that's similar to the highly venomous coral snake, but the milksnake itself is harmless to people. There's even a saying that goes with this: "Red touches yellow, kills a fellow; red touches black, you're okay, jack." Please be aware that this phrase only applies to species native to the US and Canada. In Central and South America, the different coral and milksnake species are much harder to tell apart. This trope also only applies to kingsnakes with regard to their danger (or lack thereof) to humans and potential predators. When it comes to other snakes, the kingsnake is much more dangerous than the coral snake; their name comes from the fact that they eat all other snake species within their habitat (including both coral snakes and rattlesnakes; the kingsnake is immune to their venom). - The Hognose snake will imitate a cobra when threatened, but if that fails it will immediately resort to playing dead. - Sandra Felton, who founded the Messies Anonymous resources for people struggling with extreme disorganization, used this expression to describe a dresser in her house that hadn't been cleaned out in years. Now she was afraid to tackle it, worrying about what she might find. What kind of horrible "keep it or toss it" decisions would she have to make? She sweated it out for a while, then finally worked up the courage to take a look. "It turned out to be a paper tiger." - "Quaker Guns" are fake cannons or guns made out of cut logs or broom handles. The intent is to intimidate a hostile attacker or defender through deception into delaying their attack, not attacking at all, or surrendering without a fight. - World War 2's Ghost Army. It was a fake US army group, entirely staffed by Hollywood actors, architects, and artists, all dedicated to convincing the Nazis that the D-Day invasion would hit Pas De Calais at a different time than the Allies actually planned to hit Normandy. To this end, the Ghost Army built "planes" out of plywood, empty bunkers, and literal balloon tanks. They put these fake forces around totally empty headquarters that broadcasted a constant stream of nonsense over their radios. King George VI made an official inspection visit, where he made a show of inspecting these fake forces and real soldiers bussed in for the visit, which was then broadcasted through the world via daily newsreels. From German spy plane photos, these objects appeared to be real planes and tanks, convincing the Germans to focus their defense efforts away from the real landing target, Normandy. - For decades, Syria's air defence systems were lauded as one of the most advanced in the Middle East. Even during The Arab Spring and the subsequent civil war that decimated the army, the air defence forces were still feared. This reputation started to dissipate after the systems proved themselves woefully inadequate against the increasing number of Israeli airstrikes in the country that targeted Iranian assets, culminating in a 2018 incident when the Syrian Air Defence shot down a Russian surveillance plane. Although the systems received upgrades after this incident, the performance has not really improved and the reputation took on a downright comedic turn when the air defence forces accidentally bombed Cyprus in 2019. - The Afghan National Army was generally bigged-up in reports as an army as strong as any, with modern weaponry, a viable air force, and 180,000 soldiers with more in various security forces. However, the actual size of the army was vastly exaggerated, due to the presence of "ghost soldiers" (soldiers who have been killed, deserted, or are otherwise rendered unable to fight, but are still listed as active so that their officers can pocket their paychecks), the air force was heavily reliant on American support to function, and a lot of equipment, due to Americans not wanting to leave advanced weapons in a place where insurgents could seize them, was Cold War-era at best. Individual troops also often had little real loyalty to the actual government, perceiving them as merely the biggest fish in the pond, and were poorly trained, ill-supplied, and ill-led. High attrition rates (it's estimated that around 10-20% were lost every year) and a very corrupt leadership wreaked havoc on morale and cohesion, and this wasn't helped by the actual competent troops being sequestered off in the Commando Corps, which, though far better, were too small to conduct large-scale armed actions without being bled dry. Nearly all reports omitted or downplayed these facts, due to the idea that admitting the real state of the army would reflect poorly on all involved. Consequently, after the US began pulling out in 2021 and left the army to fight on their own, the government loudly boasted that they would earn a sure victory, and even the more cynical often predicted they would be able to hold out against the Taliban's May offensive for at least a year or two; instead, they crumbled in under four months, with many divisions surrendering without a fight. - The Iraqi Army, in the run-up to the The Gulf War, was considered a formidable force, being the fourth-largest army in the world, heavily equipped and battle-tested after eight years of war with Iran. However, unbeknownst to Western observers, the Iraqi Army was riddled with problems. Much of their equipment was obsolescent in comparison to the Coalition militaries and the multinational sourcing of the equipment note : Bought from any supplier Iraq could get during the previous war. complicated supply and maintenance, leading to availability problems. Worse than the equipment deficiencies, however, were the human deficiencies. Most of Iraq's large army consisted of conscripts with little equipment, worse training, and absolutely no desire to be there. And even their best formations shared with the conscripts a complete lack of what Coalition militaries called "basic soldiering skills", most notably any sort of initiative whatsoever. The result was that, once the ground phase of the war began, the conscripts folded like tissue paper in the face of Coalition attacks and elite units like the Republican Guard died where they stood, having done almost nothing to even slow the Coalition. - Iraq's air defense system was devoted significant attention after the experience over Vietnam, with Baghdad in particular being on paper far better defended than Hanoi. In practice, however, the Iraqi system was badly over-centralized, making it overly easy for American F-117 strike aircraft to decapitate the entire system in the opening phases of the air campaign. It also meant that Iraqi SAM and anti-aircraft operators were completely unable to shoot accurately without centralized control, whereas the Serbians several years later were able to keep being a nuisance. And finally, lack of experience with dealing with strike packages the size of the ones the US Air Force could field often meant the network was paralyzed just from the sheer number of aircraft flying in a sort of accidental DDOS. - Also devoted significant attention were Iraq's fleet of T-72 tanks, which in Soviet hands were capable machines capable of taking on the latest Western tanks. However, Iraq's T-72s were not Soviet T-72s, being downgraded in capability upon export - and more importantly, manned and led by Iraqi troops that, as already mentioned, were not skilled enough to make proper use of them. As a result, Coalition tanks and American Bradley cavalry fighting vehicles tore through them with few losses. - Iraq had the sixth largest air force in the world prior to The Gulf War, with over 750 fixed-wing combat aircrafts. Many of these aircrafts were however old and outdated, leaving only 170 aircrafts (MiG-29 and Mirage F1) comparable to Coalition aircraft. The pilots flying the planes were also considered worse than their Western counterparts, with only one-third of all Iraqi pilots meeting the standards of Western pilots (for example, Iraqi Mirage pilots trained in France had a failure rate of 80 %, but those who failed were still qualified to fly upon return to Iraq). The end results were 36 Iraqi aircraft shot down in aerial combat, 68 fixed-wing aircraft and 13 helicopters destroyed on the ground, and between 115 to 140 Iraqi aircraft fleeing to Iran. - As noted in The Guns of August, the Austrian navy leading into World War I looked fearsome on paper but proved to be this. Based at Pola at the head of the Adriatic, it boasted eight capital ships including two new dreadnaught-class warships plus the expected complement of support craft, but its leadership and crews were unprepared for war and proved inactive, freeing the British Mediterranean fleet to focus on the German naval threat in those waters. - The Russian military came across as much weaker than expected during the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022. - Despite spending billions on modernization efforts and using propaganda to show an effective fighting force, most of the Russian military quickly proved to be ineffective. While the Russian Army's vehicles seemed formidable in military parades, in combat they broke down, got stuck in mud, were destroyed by Western weapons, or were stolen by the Ukrainians (most infamously by civilian farmers riding on their tractors) to be used against the Russians. The Russian Navy failed to secure vital coasts and lost their flagship Moskva to Ukrainian missiles despite it allegedly sporting advanced defense systems. The Russian Air Force couldn't achieve air superiority and lost scores of their modern aircraft like the Su-35 fighter jet and Ka-52 attack helicopter. The allegedly elite Airborne Forces (VDV), who channeled a strongman image through special holidays and physical combat shows, failed in all their objectives and suffered heavy casualties including the loss of Major General Andrei Sukhovetsky. Most damningly, all advantages the Russian military had were thrown away due to massive logistical problems, low morale, and baffling tactical and strategical blunders; Russian logistics were especially embarrassing with the revelation that the military had civilian tires that deflated after about 10 km, obsolete night vision devices and even rations expired in 2015. As a result, the Russian military's carefully cultivated image, built off the Soviet era and further raised through decades of propaganda, took inconceivable amounts of damage. - Despite their spectacular victories against Napoleon and Hitler, which created an image of the country being nigh-unbeatable, Russia has generally performed poorly in wars of aggression against far weaker opponents. They lost to Japan in 1905, which was the first major defeat of a European power by an Asian nation. They lost to Imperial Germany in World War I, with their defeat triggering a revolution and civil war. They failed to conquer Poland and Estonia after their independence. They technically won against Finland in 1939, but suffered five times as many casualties. The first two years of the Eastern Front in World War II included a slew of heavy losses and failed counterattacks, which were overshadowed by their ultimate victory in 1945 (and even then, they were fighting as part of a coalition with Britain and the United States, receiving vast amounts of supplies from the latter). Then of course they had their ten year long war in Afghanistan, which was a humiliating war of attrition. Following the collapse of the USSR, what was expected to be a quick campaign in Chechnya ended up as a long, bloody insurgency. The core problems of the Russian military — including incompetent officers, deep levels of corruption, outdated ideas about warfare, poor logistics and communications, suicidal overconfidence within the political leadership, low discipline, and nonexistent morale among conscripts — remain unresolved since at least the Crimean War in the 19th Century. - The specific term "Paper Tiger" is often used to describe the Roman Empire over its last two centuries or so. Rome managed to survive for a long time by relying on its reputation from the days of the Republic and the early empire (when the Romans were a quite real tiger) — external enemies remembered what happened to Carthage and Corinth, and gave the empire a wide berth. Once the various barbarian tribes and the Parthians/Persians began sniffing out the weakness of the empire in the third and fourth centuries, however, things started going downhill. The Romans, to their credit, were mostly able to recover from the hammer blows they were dealt during the third century and strike back with reasonable effectiveness, but at a certain point they just exhausted all of their resources. By the time the Western Empire fell in the mid-fifth century, the barbarian tribes were essentially able to do whatever they wanted in Roman territory, up to and including effortlessly deposing Emperors.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PaperTiger
Paperworkaholic - TV Tropes When you need forms filled out in triplicate and filed in a very particular way, the Paperworkaholic is your man. Not only because he's especially adept at crossing t's and dotting i's, but also because he genuinely enjoys doing so. A paperworkaholic is never happier than when sitting before a stack of files and folders that need to be taken care of and is your greatest ally when face to face with a Vast Bureaucracy. The Paperworkaholic can crossover into many bureaucrat tropes. See Badass Bureaucrat for times when their skills are put to impressive use. They might be an Obstructive Bureaucrat depending on just how seriously or literally they take their position. Being a Paperworkaholic may not necessarily prevent someone from being a Corrupt Bureaucrat. The opportunities for such may even be part of what they like about the bureaucracy. Their love of the job usually means that they will not be a Beleaguered Bureaucrat unless they happen to be having a particularly bad day. Most Desk Jockeys would prefer to be back in the action, though a few may come to prefer their position behind a desk. The Paperworkaholic is most likely a Clerk as well. ## Examples: - Peter P. Peterson, Soulsearchers and Company's accountant, is an absolute whiz with paperwork, and, at times, it seems this is the only thing keeping the company afloat. - Ultra Magnus, from The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, enjoys nothing more than ensuring every schedule, complaint, work order, and other assorted paperwork is properly sorted and filed away. His idea of an Autobot initiation is a glorified user agreement license. - Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is already organized to a borderline-neurotic degree. So it isn't much of an exaggeration when fan works depict her really enjoying her paperwork. - In Secretary, Lee applies for a job as E. Edward Grey's secretary. At her job interview, Grey explains that the job consists of typewriting, filing, etc., and warns her that "it's very dull work". Lee replies "I like dull work". - Mr. Crispin Horsefry in the Sky adaptation of Going Postal. In the book, he's just a somewhat dense lackey to the main villain. In contrast, in the TV film, he's obsessed with balancing numbers, to the point that he keeps detailed notes of his company's illegal deals. When the villain finds out about this, he's so incensed he kills him and tries to burn the records. Nevertheless, the books are rescued and used to oust the corrupt board members. - In The Tick (2016), Arthur is treated like this. To the point of nearly getting a date with a girl based on their mutual love for paperwork. - Parks and Recreation: The series' resident Butt-Monkey Garry "Jerry" Gergich loves the tedium of looking through and organizing paperwork. He can pack up and lick envelopes for mailing out for hours on end, is quite astute at finding small and seemingly unnoticed things in the fine print, and is a member of a big notary stamp club. - In Game Informer magazine's "Game Infarcer" April Fools prank, they had a parody reviewer who listed, among his list of favorite games, "Microsoft Word" and "Paperwork." Listed among his dislikes? "Fun." - In My Magical Divorce Bureau, the protagonist enjoys working in an office and mentions their love of paperwork (something which they seem to think is universal). In the morning, the protagonist greets their (empty) office aloud, wondering "what excitement you will have for me today". - Sweetheart in Skin Horse. No matter how ridiculous or dangerous the situation, as soon as she realises it requires forms to be completed (in quadruplicate!) her tail starts wagging. - Sparks Nevada, The Thrilling Adventure Hour's Marshal on Mars, will frequently say without irony that the paperwork is his favorite part of the job. He avoids doing it right before a date only because he knows he'll just get sucked into it. During a period towards the end of the series when the Red Plains Rider is marshal, he scoffs when she complains about paperwork. - Futurama: This is Hermes Conrad's primary character trait. Working for the Central Bureaucracy, he loves filling out paperwork. He even has a song about it: We didn't choose to be bureaucrats No, that's what Almighty Jah made us We'd treat people like swine and make them stand in line Even if nobody paid us They say the world looks down on the bureaucrats They say we're anal, compulsive, and weird But when push comes to shove you gotta do what you love Even if it's not a good idea! - Hilda: Elves are a whole race of this, as their entire society is built on paperwork. Even to the point that they are invisible to anyone who has not filled out the proper paperwork first. In the season 1 episode "The Tide Mice", Alfur is thus Hilda and Frida's best chance at finding a way to reverse the tide mice spell Hilda used. - Menlo from Recess spends all of his free time—even recess period—in the school office, filing and organizing to his heart's content. He genuinely enjoys the job, even inviting Miss Lemon, the school secretary, to his birthday party in one episode (and to her credit, she goes!). The episode "Principal for a Day" reveals that Menlo was originally a hellion who loved causing trouble; Miss Finster and Principal Prickly rigged the titular contest to mold him into a mini-bureaucrat instead. - Parodied in an early episode of Rugrats. The main four were playing "work" and imagined a lot of fun activities that included "Paperwork", which was Phil and Lil shredding paper with a lawn mower. Chuckie even says that his dad Chaz "pushes paper" for a living, which they imagine to be running around pushing stacks of paper with brooms. Interestingly, later episodes would prove that Chaz actually is a bureaucrat of some kind, and furthermore that he genuinely enjoys the work.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Paperworkaholic
Parallel Parking - TV Tropes Parallel Parking is one of the most difficult things to do when you're driving. This is something that will get almost anybody nervous, especially during a Driving Test, and would try avoiding. That, or somehow a character can pull off something daring and spectacular doing it. Less skilled drivers will usually bump into the cars in front of and/or behind the spot they're either entering or leaving. ## Examples: - There's a Mentos commercial where some jerk pulls into an open parking spot right when our heroine wants to leave, sandwiching her in. Cue a Mentos and a bright idea; she recruits the help of some beefy construction workers to pick up her car and ease it out. This was also parodied in the Foo Fighters music video for "Big Me". - A 21st Century Insurance ad has the recurring guy in the ads use one car to deliberately ram two others while parallel parking as the narrator talks about the comparisons in the cost to repair them. - Some car ads nowadays will show a car parallel parking itself as a selling point. - The Blues Brothers: Elwood J. Blues has to be one of the best in history. Able to do an e-brake slide into any spot. - Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls: Li~ike a glove! - After Annie parks in Annie Hall: Alvy: Don't worry. We can walk to the curb from here. - Using chi powers to parallel park is one of the things Sing wants to promote in Shaolin Soccer. - The bodyguard Tyrone in Snatch., who'd earlier been talked up as a great driver, smashes hard into a van (ironically containing the guy his bosses are looking for) while backing into a space "big enough for a jumbo jet." "It was at a funny angle." "It's behind you, Tyrone! When you back up, things come from behind you!" - Bonnie and Clyde—while the title characters rob a bank, their driver C.W. Moss parallel parks down the street and has trouble getting out as they make their getaway. This gives one of the bank tellers enough time to jump on the car's running board, and when Clyde shoots him he becomes the first murder victim of their crime spree. - One time on The Late Show With David Letterman they had a remote camera watching some 16-year-olds take their driving test. The parallel parking was particularly bad. For that matter, a semi-recurring segment is having interns parallel park outside the Ed Sullivan Theater. - Mystery Science Theater 3000: During the traffic safety film "X" Marks the Spot, an early scene has a Match Cut of a car fading into a narrow gap between two cars parked curbside. Tom Servo remarks, "Ah, parallel universe parking." The car's driver has to leave the space the old-fashioned way — as Crow puts it, "He uses the Braille system". - A Tosh.0 bit had various stereotypical poor drivers (Asian woman, 15-year-old girl with her learner's permit, etc) try to parallel park a massive Hummer. The only one who succeeded was the girl. - Reese's driving test in Malcolm in the Middle frustrates him to the point that it turns into a low-speed police chase, which continues for hours until he's nearly out of gas, at which point he leads the Lemming Cops round the entire test run, acing every obstacle and finishing with an inch-perfect parallel park. What do you mean it's not awesome? - In 7th Heaven, Mary couldn't parallel park during the driving test. She resorted to a crying routing on the evaluator to get the license. - On Seinfeld, George actually claims to be really good at parallel parking, he just didn't count on another guy trying to drive into the space front first while he was backing up. A massive, all-night argument begins between the two drivers over whether front-first parallel parking is acceptable in the civilized world. - Also this gem with Kramer's Impala in a tight space. - Top Gear: - One episode involved James May and Jeremy Clarkson driving huge classic cars around London to showcase how fantastic (read: impractical) these cars are in the modern day. One of the producer's challenges involved parallel parking in downtown London, which, as it turns out, was impossible for the cars to do as they are, in fact, longer than the parking spaces themselves. - Another episode had them trying to determine how practical Italian Supercars are in London (see above), the parking test being made even more difficult by the cars' poor rearward visibility and the hosts secretly pushing the other cars closer together to make the task impossible. - Yet another segment involved demonstrating the automatic parking system fitted to a car only for it to miss the other cars and hit the wall behind them. After two failed attempts Richard Hammond, who was in the car operating the system, realised he'd accidentally set up the system incorrectly and placed the target area on the wall instead of in the gap between cars. One quick adjustment later the car parked istelf perfectly. - Every season of Canada's Worst Driver has a parallel parking challenge, but the most extreme may well have been in Season 2. It required the nominees to reverse a Winnebago over a hundred metres uphill, then park between a Mercedes and a BMW. At least two nominees parked perfectly. Others... well, see the show's title. - MythBusters tried to determine whether men or women were better drivers, and one of the tests was parallel parking (It was a statistical draw, although women tended to either easily place the car precisely or panic and mess up, while men tended to place the car at a "good enough" point and thus showed less deviation from the mean. - This video, from Halo 3. Really, it's possible in any video game that lets you control the vehicles to a similar degree. - In one Disney short Two-Gun Goofy, Pete rides into a Western town and parallel parks his horse, bumping into those in front and behind him. - In the House of Mouse episode "Dining Goofy", Goofy took parallel parking literally and stacked various cars on top of each other (including Cinderella's coach, Herbie, and a lightcycle. - A Looney Tunes short titled "Wild Wife" had the housewife protagonist speedily hit the parked cars in front and back of her twice apiece. This is probably a "woman driver" joke. - Doug's sister Judy once failed to get her driver's license after failing to correctly parallel park. She finally got it right at the end when most of her concentration was on chewing Doug out for having promised she would drive him and Patti somewhere, which was why he needed her to pass in the first place. - Futurama: - The first episode has Leela saying that she can fly the ship, as long as she isn't asked to parallel park. - In one episode, Amy complains that she is useless at parallel parking, and then easily drives in since hovercars can just move sideways. She then suddenly moves forwards and back to hit the two cars anyway. Hey, she said she was bad at it. - Phineas and Ferb: one episode focuses on Candace practicing this... with monster trucks. - Also comes up in a later episode when Candace is practicing driving with her mom. Candace's neuroses over her brothers, and later some unintended interference from Doofenshmirtz, ends up resulting in her becoming a textbook example of Drives Like Crazy. However, even Candace's mom had to admit that Candace really had parallel parking down. - Pixar Popcorn: The Western Animation/Cars short "Unparalleled Parking" features the residents of Radiator Springs trying to parallel park. - We Bare Bears: In "Road Trip", it's revealed one of the few things Ice Bear isn't good at is parallel parking.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParallelParking
Parallel Porn Titles - TV Tropes Pants may travel, but sex apparently doesn't. "Hmm. You know, curiously enough, the X-rated version had the same name." Virtually every popular mainstream movie or TV show will have its title and the rudiments of its plot morphed into a porn video. This fact of adult entertainment is even more certain than death and taxes. It's mandated pursuant to the provisions of Rule 34. The porn industry really only has one product to sell. That's graphic depictions of people having sex. Naturally this makes things very competitive with each production company looking for an edge in the marketplace. The gay porn industry has its members always trying to stick out, while the straight porn industry is always trying to find a niche to squeeze into. So much like Hollywood itself, it exploits that which is already successful. There are entire web sites dedicated to listing actual porn ripoffs of popular media — most of them Not Safe for Work, naturally. And, most of the time, the only connection to the original work is the title. Parody porn, by and large, was most popular during the late 70s into the 80s, when porn required a visit to an adult 'theater' or 'bookstore,' and so places to show movies were limited. With the advent of home video and the Internet, most porn does not bother with such niceties as plot, and instead has titles consisting of any of the following: (Race) (Sexual Orientation) (Other Defining Characteristic of Participants) (Optional Fetishes) ( Acts Performed) (Number In Series), the only fixed order generally being the number. For example, Interracial MILF Gangbang 14. However, those titles rarely lend themselves to humor and aren't much fun to talk about. Some major studios note : We're not going to name them; look for yourself if you're interested and even VR sites started producing porn parodies in greater numbers in the 2010s, although it's still a niche compared to the Porn Without Plot they mainly distribute. This coincided with the rise of Superhero movies and other sci-fi and fantasy genre works like Game of Thrones. As of 2023, basically any mainstream work can expect to get this treatment, making it a Popularity Polynomial. If it's a really popular property, different studios will even start competing to release their own parodies. It's also a common game to take normal media titles and see how many porn titles they can be twisted into. Curiously, part of the porn industry's actually started to make higher-budget, better-made parodies, which recreate the works they spoof with careful attention to detail... but tend to reject parody titles and simply add a simple "This Ain't" prefix or "A XXX Parody" suffix to the original title. See also Rule 34. Just for Pun in action. Rule of Funny is also involved; why have a potentially squicky actual porn title when you could have one of these and get a small laugh? Compare The Mockbuster, which usually lacks the naughty bits. See Porn Names for the pornification of the actors' names. Also see Euphemistic Names for general media. - In Transmetropolitan, Spider Jerusalem's enemies try to make people stop taking him seriously by putting out a porn flick called I Hump It Here (the title of his column being "I Hate It Here"). Technically that wasn't his enemies, just all kinds of opportunists flocking to the money-making machine - after Spider's assistant Yelena sold them license to use his name and likeness. Spider wasn't amused. - Garth Ennis loves these. In both Chronicles of Wormwood and Kev there is a scene with a lot of porn videos on display with such titles as The Hunt for Red Cocktober, Starsky and Crotch, Baredevil, and so on. - In a comic by Michael Kupperman, an old man grants a boy special powers when he says SKREWPA, which is an acronym... - Silex and the City has primitive porno films titled Diplodocul ("Diplodocass") and La famille Pierrafuck ("The Fuckstones"). - National Lampoon Films: - Sex Criminals has a scene involving an in-universe porn movie (one of the films that a character starred in) called The Licked + The Divine, which is a porn version of the real-world comic The Wicked + The Divine. Things got even more metafictional when the "remix" issue of The Wicked + The Divine used panels from the Sex Criminals scene to depict \|\|Woden hiring sex workers to act as lookalikes for the female Pantheon members\|\|. - In Cavewoman: It's a Girl's Life, Carrie shows Meriem and Mona a porno called Greased at their Slumber Party. Afterwards, Mona comments "I'll never think about 'hand jive' the same way again". - Referenced in Back to the Future. One of the movies playing at the porno theater in the rundown town square of 1985 is titled Orgy, American Style, a title parody of the TV anthology series Love, American Style. On the DVD's audio commentary, Bob Gale stated that he was unsure whether there was an actual movie with that title, but said there probably was. There is. - RiffTrax: - For The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), Mike speculates that the porn version is called The Thighland of Dr. More-O. - In the one for Batman & Robin, Mike is quick to ask Kevin if he's sure he didn't accidentally rent " Buttman and Robin" during the Lock-and-Load Montage at the beginning of the movie. Kevin reassures him that there's no way he'd make that mistake a third time. - In Dirty Work, the protagonists work at a movie theater and get revenge on their abusive manager by replacing Men in Black with the creatively named Men In Black Who Like To Have Sex With Each Other. Screen Voice # 1: Look! An alien! Screen Voice # 2: Yeah. We'd better have sex with each other. Screen Voice # 1: Hey! This alien looks just like a hot guy! Screen Voice # 2: You're right. We'd better have sex with him. - Lessee... In Black Men - was that so hard? - On one episode of The Drew Carey Show, Drew's dad accidentally rents gay porn for Oswald's bachelor party... the title? Men in Back. - That Ben Stiller film The Heartbreak Kid (2007) where he had to give Carlos Mencia's character a nudie vid titled Remember the Tight Ones. - Inverted with South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut which took its name from John Bobbit's porn film. - In Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Zack meets a guy at a party, and learns that he's an actor: Zack: Look at you! Anything I've seen? What movies? Brandon: Oh, all sorts of movies with all-male casts. Zack: All-male casts? Like " Glengarry Glen Ross "? Like that? Brandon: Like Glen and Gary Suck Ross's Meaty Cock and Drop Their Hairy Nuts in His Eager Mouth. Zack: ...is that like a sequel ? Brandon: Sort of. A reimagining . - Then there's their decision to call their own film Star Whores... - Everyone is a bit weirded out by Delaney's vehement insistence that the final movie in their trilogy must be called Revenge of the Shit: The All-Anal Finale. - The Auteur is a pastiche of both obsessive and unstable auteurs and these. Pornographic film producer/director Arturo Domingo — roughly equal parts Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog, and Gerard Damiano — is an uncompromising artist whose penetrating vision has resulted in such masterpieces of erotic filmmaking as Five Easy Nieces, Requiem for a Wet Dream and Dyke Club. During the filming of his seminal masterwork * Full Metal Jackoff* (actually a parody of Apocalypse Now), problems with filming, strained relations with his wife, and Executive Meddling cause a breakdown. He attempts to rise back to prominence with his most ambitious and epic project to date: Gang Bangs of New York. - Cecil B. Demented: " Some Kind of Happiness? I've already filmed it. Only my version is called Some Kind of Horniness." - In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, the films in the protagonist's Porn Stash have titles such as School of Cock. Which actually does exist, to absolutely no one's surprise. - This iPhone auto-correct failure corrected Puss in Boots to Pussy 'n Butts, which commenters noted would be a great porno version of the movie (the other option, Pus in Butts, not so much.). Other porno-sounding autocorrects include The Cunt of Monte Cristo and Panty of the Apes. - Tromeo and Juliet has a Porn Stash going after other Shakespeare plays with Et Tu, Blow Job, The Merchant of Penis, As You Lick It, and Much To Do About Humping. This last, interestingly, has substituted a different sexual innuendo for the one that was already in the title of the original. - A Serbian Film has a few, given the protagonist is a former porn star. Acockalypse Now, Hanniballs Rising, Rumble in the Cocks, Penis From Heaven, Top Crotch, Cock of Duty note : the last one's not even a movie!... - Stan Helsing has a ton of punny porn titles as the eponymous Stan is a video store clerk. - In the short film Tomorrow Calling (an adaptation of The Gernsback Continuum by William Gibson), the protagonist is watching porn as Psychic Static. However he rejects one titled Cream Me Up, Spotty (with a cover showing a space babe and a Dalmatian in Fishbowl Helmets.) - Miss Congeniality: The original Miss New Jersey has to step aside as it turns out she'd appeared in a movie called Arma-get-it-on before entering the pageant. - 40 Days and 40 Nights has "In Diana Jones and the Temple of Poon". - In Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem, a character called Harvey Simworth gets a passing mention. He's a pornographic writer who tailors classical fairy tales and novels this way. Among his achievements there is Ali Baba and the Forty Perverts and the "Sex-life" series which include such titles as Sex-life of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Sex-life of Hansel and Gretel and Sex-life of Alice in Wonderland. - Little Green Men has the Yearning Channel, which shows pornographic movies such as Space Bimbos from Planet Lust twenty-four hours a day. - In Porno (sequel to Trainspotting) a group of people are making a pornography film simply to prove they can. The title of the film is Seven Rides for Seven Brothers, spoofing Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. - Snuff, by Chuck Palahniuk, includes an absolute hurricane of parallel porn titles. In other words, a Hurricane of Porns. - The Brian & Jill Show has this whenever porn film critic Sir Phalluster Slideright III makes an appearance. The first time started with Ben & Jerry flavors ("Pop My Cherry Garcia", "Peanut Butter Double D-Cup") and moving on to actual movie titles ("Beaverly Hills Cop", "Men in Black Men" and "Indiana Joan and the Black Hole of Manboo"). - On one episode of House to Astonish, Paul O'Brien proposes a porn comic called X-Stonishing Ass Men. He hasn't worked out the details beyond that. - An episode of Think the Unthinkable had Sophie going through Jed's DVD collection. As well as another sighting of Good Will Humping, she correctly surmises that his version of Free Willy isn't about a whale. - An Australian skit spoofing the Reverend Fred Nile had him entering a video store to make sure they weren't selling anything dirty. A senior citizen with bad eyesight slowly reads out the titles of the movies she's picked off the shelves. As they appear to be family comedies they all get Nile's approval and he leaves. The store owner then rings up the titles which turn out to be porn movies, e.g. Herbie Goes Bananas was actually Herpies Goes Bananas. - The Leisure Suit Larry games often parody this. Magna Cum Laude is especially full of them - between the porn section of the local video rental store and the nearby adult theater, there are dozens of parody porn titles used as throwaway jokes. Some of the better ones: Lawrence of My Labia, The Rodfather (created by Francis Ford Gropella), Bukkake To The Future, Close Encounters of the Behind, Schindler's Fist, Anal-yze This, and Terms of Enrearment. That last one actually holds special significance to Larry, and ends up being the springboard for a hilarious post-ending conversation mini-game. - The Last of Us Part 2 has a gag involving Ellie coming across a copy of Smash Brandis Cooch, which is an obvious reference to Crash Bandicoot, which Naughty Dog also created. Funnily enough, Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time would be announced and released later that year. - Grand Theft Auto: - In inFAMOUS 2, one can find Parallel Porn Titles of various games found on the marquee of the theater, such as Assassin's Need (LoveToo), Hey, Low Reach, Epic Hickey and others. - In Sensible Erection RPG, a large part of the game mechanic centers around finding porn. All of them have interesting titles, like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Poon. - Fallout 2 had a few features, straight from the Golden Globes Porn Studio in Reno (some already having been used before), including a couple of puns on the series itself; Vault Sexteen (Vault Sixteen) and Pullout: A Post Nuclear Boogaloo ( Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game). - While the PC version of Duke Nukem 3D had the Million Dollar Theater playing the infamous Attack of the Bleached-Blonde Biker Bimbos, accompanied by a dancing woman on the movie screen, the N64 equivalent had the more subtle parody title Uranus Attacks. (Playing into Nintendo's extreme censorship towards the game, the movie screen now only displays a spaceship.) - A Cutaway Gag mini-game in the Family Guy game has Brian burying a copy of The Blair Fist Project, starring Quagmire. - BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea features an adult bookstore, where there is an erotic novel titled, "Big Daddy". - Word of God says that a cut line of dialogue from a mission in the FreeSpace 2 mod Wing Commander Saga had a reference to Wing Come-At-Her III: Heart of the Muff Diver. - A "Binjpipe Bonus" in the credits of You Don't Know Jack Full Stream features a writer named Brittany saying she wanted to make a Dis Or Dat where the choices were either " Schoolhouse Rock! song about numbers" or "Porno". She didn't write it because she got too scared to search for porn titles. Brittany: Apparently, typing "Only porn titles, please, don't show me porn" in the search engine doesn't work. It still shows you a lot of porn. - At the start of Stay Tooned!, one of the channels on the TV advertises "The XXX Files: The Naked Truth is out there". Yes, this trope is played completely straight in a kids' game. - Bad Gods' webcomic Capybara Brothers has an example of the porn title game. - Foster Hearst of Scandal Sheet finds he has a gift for generating Parallel Porn Titles in his first job after graduation. Diddle Her on the Roof indeed... - SomethingPositive* had a Crossover with Scandal Sheet where Aubrey and Foster discussed the possibility of a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory parody, titled Willy Wanker and the Fudge Factory. Then they found out it had already been done. - Willy Wanker and the Chocolate Factory appears in Max and Paddy's Road to Nowhere as the porn film Paddy decides to act in to get a bit of extra money. He doesn't find out until too late that it's gay porn. - Ménage à 3: The first to be mentioned was Perry Hotter Part 16: The Wizard's Staff. Later, when readers learned more about the past career of ex-porn-star character Amber and her friend Chanelle, their work turned out to include a number of parodies; Boobarella (September 29, 2012, NSFW), Elizabeth & Veronique, Sabrina the Barely Legal Witch, and Kim Pussyble and Spank Her, She's French-Canadian (November 13, 2012, NSFW). It's possible that these two characters specialised in that part of the business, or that the very geeky character Gary fixated on porn parodies of geeky subjects — but more likely, those titles just made good jokes in strips that happened to be about porn. - A few in Cracked: - Name That Porno is a collection of those. - Something Awful.com once had a Photoshop contest where people altered the titles and cover art for Harry Potter novels, including "Hairy Pooter and the Chamber of Secretions." - They also had two "Porn Versions of Classic Films" contests. - In the Gorillaz interactive online game Plastic Beach, the player can ask 2D if he's bored and 2D informs the player that he has movies to watch. Some of the titles he lists are this trope. He describes them as "a bit random, but very, very, very watchable." - WikiPorno's Best Porn Movie Names page has a whole bunch of these, and it's incomplete. They don't even have the entire Star Whores series listed. - SF Debris: In the review for the Firefly episode "Out of Gas", Chuck makes a comment on Wash's Porn Stache. He also rattles off porn title versions of other Joss Whedon shows: Buffy the Vampire Layer, Dr. Horrible's Super-Long Dong, and Sex-Doll House. - Uncyclopedia have a comprehensive list that you'll probably spend a whole day chuckling over. Behold, Porno Titles That Should Exist, But Don't. - The web series Watch Blue Movies is about a porn studio that specialises in making these kinds of films. You've got G.I. Ho, The Porn Identity, Forrest Hump and so on. The first episode is about a porn parody of The Dark Knight, but no title is given. - The Nostalgia Critic: - In one Black Nerd Comedy video, Andre pretended to be Reggie Fils-Aime and announced that Nintendo was bringing porn to the Wii U, including PokeMeMon, Donkey Dong, Dikmin, Barely Legal Icarus, Wario Hard Ware, Pilotwangs, Kirby Eats Yoshi, StarFux and Raper Mario, among others. My body is ready. - The Cinema Snob, a parody of pretentious film critics, frequently finds himself reviewing this sort of movie. - A particularly notorious (and lazily-named) example is E.T. the Porno, which the Snobs' actor Brad Jones found hilarious enough that he did an April Fools' sketch about remaking it, where his character- who is producer, actor and director- eventually admits that he the only scene he actually wanted to film was himself as E.T. doing a sex scene. - In their crossover review of Tromeo and Juliet, The Cinema Snob is far from impressed with these in that movie , while Oancitizen has some suggestions of his own. - He also came up with Dr. Buttlove, or How I Learned To Stop Clenching And Love The Plug and Dick Jewell. - As Jones is famously not a fan of generic porno names like the aforementioned This Aint the Smurfs XXX or Spider-Man XXX: A Porn Parody, he tends to give such films a new Punny Name title for Cinema Snob episodes; in the case of the aforementioned titles, The Smuffs and Spanker-Man. In the case of Sex & the City: The Original XXX Parody, he gave it the bogus title Sex and the City 3. - In online sketch comedy group LoadingReadyRun's video 'Format War', Graham HAS to have Sweeney Knobs: Demon Boner of Boob Street on Blu-ray, to get a feel for the story they're going for. He also can't wait for 300...People Having Sex to come out. Matt is sure Blu-ray will fail and Graham will have to get another copy of The Spiderwank Chronicles. - When SF Debris did a review on the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Evolution", he tries to play a clip of Field of Dreams, but can't find any footage, so he has to make due with Field of Wet Dreams. He also recommends other porn parodies of James Earl Jones films, namely The Empire's Got Back and The Hunt for Ms. October.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParallelPornTitle
Paradise - TV Tropes Paradise may refer to: For "Paradise" as a fictional setting, see the Settings index. If an internal link led you here, please correct it to point to the right page.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Paradise
TV Tropes Glossary / Administrivia - TV Tropes Like a lot of things relating to specific fields of knowledge, we have acquired some terms and idioms particular to this site. This page is to give you a quick overview of their meanings. Compare Tropes of Legend, Canonical List of Subtle Trope Distinctions, What Page Types Mean. See also Welcome to TV Tropes, Text-Formatting Rules, Page Templates. ## Some definitions: ### # - The 5P (Place for Purging Porn and Pedo-Pandering): A group of five tropers formerly responsible for reviewing potential violations of The Content Policy, before such reviews were deferred to the general public in 2022. - The 5T Incident (The Time when TLP Trolled Terribly): The chain of events involving two Trope Launch Pad drafts in 2020, provoking an unprecedented amount of trollposting. Is considered a black mark for the website and the discussion of it is strictly discouraged. The main point is that it led to mass suspensions, the ban on references to it outside the forums, a complete overhaul of TLP Guidelines, and strict moderation of activities in TLP. ### A - Administrivia: Articles concerning the policies and standards of the wiki, providing instructions, or maintaining lists for cleanup efforts. - Agenda-based troper: A troper who frequently makes edits to further an agenda, which could be anything from shipping to politics. In extreme cases, they only edit to further this agenda. Being an agenda-based troper is frowned upon, since they tend to violate site policies. - Alice and Bob: Two hypothetical characters used to illustrate a concept. They and various other such characters can often be found on a trope's Playing With page. - Appeal: A request by a suspended user to have their privileges restored, done in this forum thread. See What to Do If You Are Suspended for more details. - Article: Loosely, any wiki page. More formally, a wiki page that contains the definition of a work, trope, creator, franchise, or other concept. Articles may have subpages containing various types of content. See also Main Page. - Ask The Tropers: A wiki discussion board (see Query) used to ask general questions of tropers and moderators. This is a good place to bring up problems with articles or with other tropers. - AssCaps: The AC: text effect that makes text bold and be shown on a separate line, similarly to headers. - Audience Reaction: While most tropes are objectively present in a work, and some generate debate about the degree to which they are present, Audience Reactions exist mostly in the minds of the audience. They do not get listed on the main page of a work article, but rather its YMMV subpage. - Averted or an aversion: A form of Playing with a Trope, a trope is averted when the audience expects it to happen (due to genre conventions or the like), but it doesn't. Examples of aversions should only be listed for Omnipresent Tropes. ### B - Badge of Honour or Badge of Honor: If a trope or YMMV item is being used as a "badge of honour", that means that it attracts misuse due to people adding it to works it doesn't really apply to because they think it makes the work look good. - Ban: Usually synonymous with suspension, but informally used to indicate a permanent, rather than temporary condition. - Ban evasion: The act of making a new account to get round a suspension. This is not allowed and will result in both the new account and the account that was suspended being permanently banned. The correct procedure if you get a suspension notice is to talk it over in this thread and prove you won't repeat the mistakes which led to the suspension. - Banner: The disclaimer on top of the Trivia, YMMV and Flame Bait articles indicating them as such. Can informally refer to handwritten notices with the header markup. - Big Green Banner: Since this joke, as a Running Gag, tropers propose making the header of Ask The Tropers page green after Hulk, since it contains instructions like using Trope Finder and not Ask The Tropers for finding tropes, and new tropers not doing so can be a pet peeve. - Blank Launch (mislaunch): Under older versions of Trope Launch Pad, an unskilled attempt to launch a trope could result in a red link instead of a trope and remove the draft from the list. Nowadays, TLP is much more streamlined, and mistakes like this are much less likely. Still, always learn the basics before you try to launch. - Blue Link: A working link to a wiki page. Bluelinks may be Wiki Words or Potholes. Compare Red Link and Green Link. "Blue Linked" simply means that one valid trope or work is linked to another. Stringing these together can make you see blue. - Blue Shifting: A link to an existing entry is in blue, and a link to a non-existing one in red. If a particularly interesting item is linked a lot, and yet no one actually creates the page to go with it, the text remains red. Then someone does create the page, and the resulting change in colour scheme makes the world feel slightly better. This is an allusion to a particular instance of the Doppler effect in physics. - Bomb: The name of the downvote option at the Trope Launch Pad to indicate disagreement with the trope draft to be launched. This should not be confused with a "Dislike" button. - Bounce: A moderator action; this is the ban method of last resort. A bounced account cannot log in and its IP address(es) may be blocked from creating new accounts. The term comes from the original functionality of the bounce, which redirected users to Google. ### C - CamelCase: The usual way of creating Wiki Words onsite, achieved by removing the spaces between two or more words, e.g. CamelCase. - Canon: What the creator or owner of a work says happens in the story and/or setting. It's the Word of God about the work. See also Continuity, Discontinuity, Fanon, Negative Continuity, Reboot, Retcon. - Chairs: Short for "People Sit on Chairs", an apparent pattern in media that doesn't qualify as a trope due to being a coincidence with no interesting meaning. Synonyms include "chairsy" and "PSOC" (an initialism for People Sit on Chairs). - Circular Redirect: A redirect created by making a page redirect to itself, or to a page that redirects to itself, or making two pages redirect to each other. This functionality is no longer supported by the wiki's software; attempting to make one will prevent such a redirect from being made. Before the wiki software prevented their creation, it was strictly forbidden due to technical concerns, but modern browsers now display errors instead of breaking. - Clean-up: Editing an article to remove anything that shouldn't be on the page per TV Tropes policy. There are several topics in the forums dedicated to the various types of clean-up that might be required. - Clueless Contributor: An editor who adds their content without regard for formatting or proper grammar. - Comment: Text that is only visible in the editor, thanks to being preceded with '%%'. Comments are mainly used to hide editing instructions so that users browsing the wiki won't see them. They are also used to hide Zero Context Examples so that editors will be motivated to expand them. It is against site policy, however, to use comments to add a hidden placeholder for a future example — if you can't add a full-context example yet, wait until you can. Hiding something with comment markup is referred to on-wiki as "commenting [it] out". - Compare and Contrast: A short list at the end of descriptions to note Sister Tropes and/or Opposite Tropes to the trope being described. - Composite Trope: A trope article that incorporates multiple variations or "types" that are explicitly described. We discourage these because they lead to a problem that we call Type Labels Are Not Examples. - Consensus: The process by which the troper body arrives at decisions. Unless there is an overriding policy or formal system involved (see Trope Repair Shop, Image Pickin'), such decisions are determined by majority vote of participating tropers. See Crowner for one way to establish consensus. - The Content Policy: The set of guidelines that we use to determine whether a work is too pornographic or otherwise objectionable to describe on the wiki. - Context: The explanation or description of how a trope example is used. See Zero-Context Example for why we insist on it. A trope example without context is not useful to readers. - Continuity: The sequence of events, characters, and settings that is presented by a work. It's what's actually on the page/screen/etc. - Continuity Reboot: When a franchise's continuity is reset and started over, often to clean up years upon years of tangled continuity and give fresh audiences a chance to get into a franchise without having to deal with all of the baggage. - Courtesy Link: A link to an article that you are discussing, provided so your fellow tropers can easily get to it without having to search or browse the wiki. Image Pickin' and Trope Repair Shop require these when making a new topic. - Creator: Someone who participates in the creation of a work. On TV Tropes, these include writers, directors, producers, artists, actors, musicians, bands, companies, and so on. - Crosswicking: Adding a trope example to a work's page and vice versa. - Crowner: The site's voting system, most frequently used to decide on a Trope Repair Shop or Image Pickin' action. A crowner is typically decided by the highest ratio of upvotes to downvotes, as long as the winning option has a positive vote count. The name comes from its original purpose, which was to let users decide which Crowning Moment was the most awesome. This became an Artifact Title once that trope was renamed. - Curly Brackets: {{ }} The way to make single-word titles WikiWord (for example, Macbeth), or a way to make larger wiki words and control the spacing. Compare CamelCase. See Text-Formatting Rules for how to implement them. - Custom Title: You can request these for any article to change how the title is displayed in wicks and the page header. These are usually done to add punctuation, leading numerals, or diacritics to plain-text titles. For example, "Pokémon" is not a valid WikiWord, so the article is created at "Pokemon" and then given a custom title. - Cut: Used to describe content that has been removed from the wiki, or the act of removing said content. During discussions on whether to remove content, other "destructive" words like "Axe" or "Scissor" can equivalently be used for humor. See Nuke for more serious cases. - Cut List: Where articles are proposed for deletion. While any troper may propose a cut, only moderators can execute them. There is an opportunity to contest the cut request and provide comments for or against. ### D - Darth Wiki: The Dark Side of TV Tropes, containing material that is either inappropriately silly or too negative to live in the main part of the wiki. Unpublished Works also go here. Contrast Sugar Wiki. - Deconstructed or a deconstruction: A form of Playing with a Trope, a trope is deconstructed when it is used in a way that demonstrates its realistic consequences or assumptions, or explaining how it could even come to pass. - Defied: A form of Playing with a Trope, a trope is defied when a character in a work is aware that it is about to occur In-Universe and takes steps to avert it or otherwise avoid playing it straight. - Derivative Work: A work that is based on, adapted from, a sequel to, licensed from, or otherwise derived from another work. Fan fiction is a derivative work by definition. See Original Work. - "Describe Topic Here": Non-existing wiki articles used to display the text "Describe <title> here", which led to a lot of in-jokes and memes. The wiki software no longer does this, making the meme anachronistic and increasingly stale. - Description: The part of a page describing what the page is about. Usually it's defining a trope or describing a work. Often comes in different forms, such as Self-Demonstrating Article or Example as a Thesis. - Dewicking: Removing a link (wick) to a page, turning it into normal text if not replacing or deleting it altogether. Frequent causes for dewicks being needed include pages being renamed, cut, misused, potholed gratuitously, or not existing in the first place. - Disambiguation (or disambig): A type of page that links a commonly used term to the various articles that share it. Note that a disambiguation page is automatically displayed if you visit a non-existent page whose title exists in one or more other namespaces. Disambiguation pages are identified with Green Links, and such links should be replaced with ones pointing to the specific article that is being referenced. - Discard: An action at Trope Launch Pad to hide a trope draft from the main list, the opposite of launching. Can be done if the draft violates a policy, lacks support with no sign of recovery, not a trope page and TLP is used for a review or by the sponsor's decision. Discarded drafts are still functional in their own section of the TLP and can be restored if needed. - Discontinuity: When something in a work's continuity is considered not to be in canon — it exists as part of the work, but in relation to the work's other parts, it's dismissed as something that didn't really happen. When the creator of a work decides that something is not in canon (example: The Star Wars Holiday Special), you get Canon Discontinuity. When the fans decide that something in continuity did not happen because they don't like it ( Bioshock 2), you get Fanon Discontinuity. - Discussed: A form of Playing with a Trope, a trope is discussed when it is talked about In-Universe by characters for whom it is relevant to their current situation. - Discussion: All wiki articles have a Discussion page where threaded conversations may be conducted, usually about the content and presentation of the article. It's like a mini-forum attached to each article. Compare with Wikimedia "talk" pages. - Dogpiling: When many tropers toss bombs at a TLP draft, usually without commenting on the draft (except perhaps to say that they're tossing a bomb). While not strictly against the rules, this practice is frowned upon, since it often leads to the draft becoming unsalvageable and is seen as rude. - Don't be a dick: Our Rule Zero. If you engage in behavior that makes other users' lives unpleasant, you are subject to being suspended or banned even if you are technically following our rules. - Drama Importation: Editing the wiki or posting on TV Tropes forums with the intent to influence private disputes happening on another site. Doing so is grounds for suspension. The same applies to Drama Exportation, using other sites to influence matters occurring here. This post goes into further detail. - Drive-By Updater: An editor who makes one, maybe two, edits and then disappears into oblivion. In many cases, this is a passing browser who spots an obvious mistake to fix. ### E - Edit Reason: The input box at the bottom of the article editing window. Describe why you made the edit there. This is required any time you delete something. - Edit War: When you contest a change to an article by editing the article back to the way you preferred it. Talk it out first, then go with the consensus. Edit warring is grounds for suspension. - Effort Post: On the forums, this type of post is used to propose a candidate for a trope or an action to be taken on an article. The poster is expected to do the work ("effort") to make a detailed and unambiguous case for the proposal. - Enforced: A form of Playing with a Trope, a trope is enforced when it has to be included in a work for reasons beyond the creator's control such as Executive Meddling. - Example: Items listed after a page description. The examples are usually two kinds: - If the page is a trope, the examples are the works where the trope shows up. These usually start with "Examples:" in a banner at the top of the list and are sorted by medium. Media that acquire a large number of examples may be moved to their own subpages, whose links are provided in an indexed list separate from the other examples on the page. - If the page is a work/person, the examples are the different tropes that show up in that work. These usually start with "Provides examples of:" (or some variation) in a banner at the top of the list. - Example Sectionectomy: The process and result of removing all examples from a trope (or more rarely, a work) article. - Expanded Universe: Licensed derivative works that are distinct from a franchise's main story or setting and may or may not be canonical. - External Link: A link to a page outside of tvtropes.org. Example: https://google.com. Note that links within tvtropes.org that do not use the WikiWord markup style will appear external even though they are not. ### F - Fancruft: A derogatory term which originated in The Other Wiki. To quote the article over there, calling something fancruft is implying that "it is of importance only to a small population of enthusiastic fans of the subject in question." - Fan Fiction or Fanfic: An unlicensed derivative work using characters, settings, or plots from an original work without the permission of the IP holder. - Fanon: What fans of a work claim happens in the story and/or setting, regardless of what the author says. - Fan Wank: A pejorative term for the tendency of fans to make up whole bodies of Fanon that have little or no relationship to what actually occurs in a work. - Faux-Red Link (Fake Red Link): A link which shows up as a Red Link even though the page exists (even as a redirect or a disambiguation). Done to discourage sinkholes. Faux-redlinks are always locked and are not edited. A list of them can be found in the Permanent Red Link Club. - Fetish Fuel: A discontinued area of the wiki where tropers could list examples of things that turned them on. Removed for not being Family Friendly. - First Come, First Served: A rule designed to prevent edit wars between users of American English and users of Commonwealth English. It also applies to any grammar rules, spellings, punctuation, translations, names, word choices, entries, page formatting, and etc., when the alternatives are equally valid. Unless there's a clear problem with the writing, tropers shouldn't use personal beliefs to "correct" it and should instead seek consensus. - Flame Bait: An article describing a concept that is so controversial or prone to argument that no examples of it are permitted. - Folder: A system for categorizing examples within an article, letting the reader expand each category as desired. - Folderize: To convert AC's or headers into folders. - Franchise: In TV Tropes parlance, when a work is adapted or remade across three or more mediums, an article may be created in the Franchise namespace to help tell them apart. A Franchise article is a form of disambiguation. ### G - Gender Inverted: A form of Playing with a Trope, a trope is gender inverted if it is applied to males when it normally applies to females, or vice versa. Note that a trope can only be gender inverted if it is Always Male or Always Female. - Ghost Wick: A wick on an article that doesn't exist. This is usually caused by an article on which mod/admin deletions occurred that still believes the wick exists due to a database error. - Gingerbread: The fancy bits of the TV Tropes Forum including avatars, signature lines, and so on. Gingerbread is turned on by default; if you are known, you can switch it on and off via your profile page. - Google Incident: An incident which led to the creation of the content policy, during which Google stopped advertising on TV Tropes because some of the content was NSFW. There was also a second Google Incident, when they temporarily pulled the ads again because of the Naughty Tentacles page. - Grandfathered in: If something has been grandfathered in, that means the Grandfather Clause applies to it— we wouldn't allow it now, but it remains because it's too ingrained in the site to get rid of. For instance, The Scrappy wouldn't fly today as it's very negative and named after a character, but it's a large part of the site, so it stays. - Great Crash: An incident in which a lot of the site's data was lost due to a server crash. - Green Link: A working link to a disambiguation page. Compare Blue Link and Red Link. Disambiguation pages can't have links anywhere on the site except for archive pages and the Ambiguity Index so they are colored green so that they can be differentiated from blue links. Blue links used to appear as green in Night Vision mode so older references to the term might be referring to those links. ### H - Hard Split: When a lengthy article or an article describing more than one work is broken up into subpages or individual work articles. - Hat: The name of the upvote option at the Trope Launch Pad to indicate support for the trope draft to be launched. This should not be confused with a "Like" button. - Hatpuppet: Derived from " sockpuppet", this is an account used specifically for the purpose of adding hats to a Trope Launch Pad proposal in an effort to make it look like it has more launch support than it really does. Doing this or soliciting it will get you permanently banned. - Headscratchers: A place on the Wiki where questions about a work, including answers to potential Plot Holes and inconsistencies, can be answered. Formerly known as It Just Bugs Me. - Hedge Trimmer: Editors who clean out clutter and other dirtiness from the wiki, such as Word Cruft and Conversation in the Main Page. - Help with English: A forum topic where tropers who need or want assistance with English grammar, spelling, or general proofreading may request it from other tropers. If a troper is suspended for persistent problems with spelling, punctuation and grammar, they will be asked to run their proposed edits through this thread until their writing improves to the point where it no longer requires correction. - Hindsight trope: A YMMV article where the audience reaction is related to something that occurs in hindsight. The hindsight tropes include any article with "in Hindsight" in its title (e.g. Hilarious in Hindsight). - History Page: All wiki articles have a history view where you can see all changes made along with the edit reason(s), if any. Make a habit of looking at this, especially if something you added got changed or removed. Failing to do this often leads to edit wars. - Holler: An option with forum posts to send a message to the mod team to get their attention. Should be used when necessary, such as reporting misbehavior, renaming threads or creating crowners. Named after Holler Button. - Hot Off The Press: Describes an example or article that is breathlessly created to capture a recent bit of news/gossip or an internet controversy. As Examples Are Not Recent, we encourage patience and prudence. Most of these things are transient and very few of them are relevant to tropes. See also the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment. ### I - I Am Not Making This Up: A wiki in-joke wherein tropers would add a disclaimer to any statement or situation that they felt was incredible or silly. It got out of control and had to be pruned with extreme prejudice. See "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer for the In-Universe version. - Image Pickin': Where article images are discussed. If you want to change (or remove) an existing image, go here. You don't have to go here to add an image to a page without one—unless it has a comment saying that it was removed by Image Pickin'—but it's recommended nonetheless. - Implied: A form of Playing with a Trope, a trope is implied when it is not explicitly present in a work but is suggested to have occurred offscreen. - Index: The organizational system for articles. See How Indexing Works to learn how to make it work. - Informal Wiki: A term we use to describe the attitude of this site in relation to editors. It doesn't mean we don't have rules and procedures for editing pages, but they are far fewer than other sites. - In-Universe: A distinction used to separate tropes that are employed by a work directly within itself from tropes that occur in the context surrounding a work, such as Audience Reactions. It is most often employed as a tag to indicate that a YMMV, Audience Reaction, or Trivia trope is used or cited within a work. - Inverted: A form of Playing with a Trope, a trope is inverted when a work reverses one or more of its key elements. ### J - Jossed: Named after Joss Whedon, this refers to any time when Canon or Word of God officially quashes a popular Fanon theory. Whedon is infamous for doing this deliberately in response to his fans' more outlandish ideas. Seen frequently on Wild Mass Guessing pages. - Just a Face and a Caption: An image added to a trope page with no indication of how it fits that trope apart from the accompanying caption, if any. Basically the image equivalent of a Zero-Context Example. Often caused by fans assuming that because they know the image is an example of the trope everyone else will automatically understand it even without context. - Just for Fun: We get silly from time to time and write articles that are intended to entertain rather than document. We collect those under the "Just for Fun" umbrella. - Justified: A form of Playing with a Trope, a trope is justified if there is an In-Universe reason for its inclusion in a work. ### K - Known: Being logged in here. ### L - Lampshade Hanging: See our logo? It has a lampshade on it. This refers to the concept of authors calling out their use of tropes within their own works. - Launch: The process of making a new page. Tropes should go through Trope Launch Pad before being launched; Work Pages Are a Free Launch. - Locked Page: A wiki page that cannot be edited (other than by moderators). See Locked Pages for a partial list of these along with the reasons. If you want to request edits to a locked page, or request that a page be locked or unlocked, use this forum thread. ### M - Main: The default namespace, where you will find trope descriptions and examples. - Main Page: The primary page for a wiki article. For Tropes, this is in the Main namespace. For works, this is in the appropriate medium namespace. - May As Well Be a Page Quote: Images that have a trope discussed without clearly showing it, like Wall of Text and Talking Heads. These aren't considered good images and it's encouraged to find something more of Show, Don't Tell. - Meatpuppet: A person who edits or posts at the instigation of another person, typically to evade a ban or disguise an edit war. A variation on a sockpuppet. Meatpuppetry in these cases is grounds for suspension. - Medium: The format a work is presented in (for example: film, comic book, radio, etc.). Examples in trope pages are sorted by medium. - Meme, or Memetic Mutation: Memes are defined formally as "units of cultural information". Informally, they mean fandom in-jokes, words or phrases that become popular due to their cultural context, Image Macros, and such. A Memetic Mutation occurs when a meme spawned in or around a work becomes popular in and of itself, to the point where its original meaning becomes obscured. Please don't make trope articles about memes, as they are transient and usually devolve into lists of places the meme was used. - Mini-modding or backseat modding: When someone who isn't a moderator attempts to assert authority in areas they do not have authority over, such as making threats regarding something that only mods have authority over, calling for someone to be suspended (or alternatively, telling someone that they will be suspended) despite only the moderators being able to make that decision, or threatening to get a moderator involved in an argument. - Misuse: An example which doesn't fit the trope's parameters as laid out in its article. This is commonly caused by a trope's definition being too broad or too narrow, or by the trope's name failing to convey precisely what the trope is about. Tropes which suffer from persistent misuse are liable to end up in the Trope Repair Shop. - Moderator: The unpaid volunteers who keep the peace, arbitrate disputes, and handle bans. When you see a "mod" or "moderator" tag next to someone's contribution, pay attention, especially if said contribution is a forum post with a pinkish background. - Mod hat: If a moderator is wearing their "mod hat", this means that they are speaking "as" a moderator, and thus disregarding what they said could lead to warnings or punishment. Conversely, if a moderator is not wearing their "mod hat", they're just speaking as a regular troper, and thus people can disregard what they're saying without fear of any potential consequence. Named after a function of some mods having two active profile pictures, the second showing in mod posts. ### N - Namespace: This is the part of a page URL before the last slash. The TV Tropes default namespace is Main/. We have other namespaces for media (ex. Film/), sub-pages (ex. Analysis/), and trope pages (ex. NightmareFuel/). - Natter: Conversation in the Main Page. This is frowned upon, as it is generally distracting and unfunny. The only wiki articles that allow conversational editing are Headscratchers and Wild Mass Guessing. All other conversation should take place in the article's Discussion page. - Negative Continuity: When there is no consistent sequence of events between parts of a story. Things that happen in one episode may not affect future episodes despite the fact that they should logically do so. (Example: In Episode 4, the city is destroyed. In Episode 5, it's back, with no sign of anything ever having been wrong, and nobody brings the issue up.) - Ninja: To "ninja" someone on the forums, ATT, or similar is to say something that they were planning on saying. This is so common that the forums have a ninja emoji that tropers use when they get ninja'd. Additionally, "ninja-launching" can be used as a synonym for either rogue launching or stealth launching. - No-pic list or No pics list: The list of tropes whose pages are banned from having images due to being inherently hard to illustrate or NSFW. The full list is seen on Image Pickin' Special Cases. - No Recent Examples, Please!: Notice that something (a work or a real-life event) may not be added as an example of a trope until a specified length of time has passed since the work was released or the event occurred. - No Real Life Examples, Please!: Notice that examples from Real Life are not to be added to a page. There are several reasons for this. The page might be about something that has Unfortunate Implications or would be considered an invasion of privacy. It might be so common in Real Life that such examples aren't worth noting. Or it might be impossible for such a thing to happen outside of a fictional setting. - Notability: An odd one, in that we apply the definition used by Wikipedia, but are against it. We don't require a work to meet any standards of notability. As long as the work is published, and the page for it doesn't cover content that crosses certain lines, that page stays here. - Notifier or notification: A predefined PM message that can be sent to any troper from the article history page through the Issue Helper function, informing them of a common error that they are making. Notifiers are tracked, so moderators can see if someone's been making recurring errors. Previously called "natter-fy", short for "Natter Notify". - "Not to be confused with": A disclaimer in descriptions to list any tropes (or works) that have similar names to the current article, but are in no other way related. - Nuke: Colloquially, to delete something. Most often used emphatically, to indicate that the thing being deleted is a serious violation of policy or is otherwise very wrong. At Trope Launch Pad discarded drafts are also called nuked. Derived from the Memetic Mutation in Aliens: "Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." - Null Edit: Opening the edit screen and saving the page without making any changes. These have several uses, like leaving a message in an edit reason, updating an index, or making a link blue. Sometimes they happen accidentally. ### O - One-handed troping: Writing on the wiki that was added mainly or solely to gush about something or somebody the editor found hot. So named for the idea that the user only typed it with one hand since the other one was... in use. This is not allowed, as it violates our No Lewdness, No Prudishness policy. - Original Work: A work whose copyright is (or was) wholly owned by its creator: it is not derived from a work by a different creator, licensed from a different creator, etc. note : This is, of course, without getting into the question of whether any work is truly original. See Derivative Work. ### P - Page Blanking: Removing most or all the content of an article while editing it. If you want to delete the article, use the Cut List instead. Unwarranted page blanking is grounds for suspension. - Page Ownership: A type of wonk where a troper discourages edits on a page they'd disagree with by means besides, but not excluding, Edit War, most commonly for pages they've created or are invested in. This is not an acceptable behavior, as This Is a Wiki. - Pagetopper: The first post on the page of a forum thread with more than one page. Generally used in the context of a post that was responding to the post directly before it (i.e., the last post on the previous page), but requires readers to go back a page to read what was responded to unless a direct quote is provided. The context issues may result in the post being edited to directly quote the post it was responding to. - Paging (also called Pinging): On the forums, using a special kind of markup to send a message to a user that you are inviting them to participate in a conversation. To page someone, put the tilde character '~' in front of the shortcut to their troper page (e.g., @/TroperName or @/{{Troper}}). - Parabombing: This is the practice of slapping parentheses around some text and then dropping it into the middle of an existing paragraph. People usually form paragraphs to deal with a particular rhetorical need. If the new material doesn't meet the rhetorical need, it probably doesn't go there. The parentheses don't change that. The cool thing about parabombing is that the parentheses make deletion particularly easy. The text to delete is already demarcated by parentheses. - Partial Context Example: An example entry that provides some, but not all, of the necessary context. For instance, if there was an example of Celibate Eccentric Genius that read, "Alice never goes on any dates and once stated that she never saw the point of it", this would be a Partial Context Example, since it explains the "celibate" part, but not the "eccentric genius" part. - Played Straight: A form of Playing with a Trope — or rather, not playing with it; a trope is played straight when a work uses it as described in its article with no aversions, subversions, or anything else of that nature. Because of this, examples are only explicitly noted as "played straight" in contrast to those that are actively played with. - Played With: Not all uses of a trope are straightforward. A trope is played with when it has some kind of twist to it. When you hear the terms " Averted", " Subverted", and so on, this is what's being referred to. - Popcorn Posting or popcorning: Derived from the trope Pass the Popcorn, this is when people post on a discussion like audience members watching a show rather than by helping to advance it. We discourage this. - Pothole: A WikiWord embedded in text, known as a piped link over on That Other Wiki. We like potholes here at TV Tropes. See also Sinkhole. - Primary Link: The first link on a bulleted line. The primary link is what gets indexed (on index pages) and is generally what people look at first to figure out what the line is about. You should never pothole a primary link. Compare secondary link. - Private Message, aka PM: A system that allows you to send messages to other tropers that are not publicly visible. You may access this system via the context menu or directly, here. Please note that moderators may view your PMs at any time, and sharing PMs publicly without the other party's permission may be grounds for suspension. - Proxy: Software or hardware that conceals the origin point of an Internet connection. Please note that, while anonymizing proxies have legitimate uses in avoiding certain kinds of censorship, we don't like proxies here because they are often used for ban evasion. - Ptitle: Punctuated Title. In the past, all titles containing non-alphanumeric characters other than hyphens, or starting with a number (e.g. 300) used to be ptitles. Ptitles couldn't be linked to with Wiki Words, and could only be created with special markup. They were phased out with the advent of The Ptitle Replacement System; now we use custom titles instead, and the only remaining ptitles are redirects, preserved in order to avoid breaking inbound links. - Pull: A vote at Image Pickin' to remove the image from the page, while leaving the opportunity for another image to replace it later. Can also be called No Pic if replacement suggestions are not favorable. Pages that have their images pulled have a commented tag that forbids adding a new image without a discussion. ### Q ### R - Real Life: That weird place outside the Internet where stuff that is not fictional happens. We try to avoid troping real people and things. See Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment for more information about this. - Real Person Troping: Refers to using wiki pages to describe non-Trivia facts about real life people, like Personal Appearance Tropes and Characterization Tropes. By definition, Trope is what authors use to build a narrative, meaning it's inappropriate to use tropes for a person who isn't a character or in-character. Web Video, Non-Fiction and Real Life examples should especially be careful to not mix life and work. See Creator Page Guidelines. - Redirect: A type of article that redirects, or sends your browser to another page. There is a special markup used to make these. Do not ask the mods to make redirects to works or creator articles in the Main namespace. - Red Link: A link to a page that doesn't exist, whether it hasn't been made or once existed but has been cut. Occasionally a Faux- or Fake Red Link, where the page does exist but had its color changed to discourage linking to it. Compare Blue Link and Green Link. - Red Paint Argument: A term used to describe far-fetched misinterpretations of potential page images, e.g. claiming blood in an image could be mistaken for red paint. - Referral Count: The number of times a page has brought new users onto the site. You can view the referral count by clicking the "Related" button at the top of the page. The referral count is sometimes called the number of inbound links (inbounds). - Release: Used by moderators to refer to the removal of some or all of the restrictions on a suspended account following an appeal via this thread. In order for the account to be released, its owner must show a clear understanding of what they did wrong, why it was wrong and what they should do in future. - Repair, Don't Respond: Instruction to tropers who find an entry which is inaccurate or incomplete, doesn't fit the trope's definition, etc to edit or delete the existing entry, rather than pointing out the problems with it in a new entry. - Retcon: Short for "retroactive continuity", this is when the creator(s) of a work change details of the work's canon and/or continuity, often without acknowledgment. For example, if Bob is 20 when a series starts, but in the next season everyone says he's 30, while no such time has passed for other characters, Bob's age has been "retconned". - Revert: To change an article back to a prior state, removing edits made in the interim. Reversions may be done manually (see edit war) or via an automated tool accessible only to moderators. - Rogue Launch: When a troper launches a draft from the Trope Launch Pad despite not being the current sponsor. This is not allowed and may result in a suspension. ### S - Salt: Informally, to cut a wiki page and lock it so it cannot be created. Refers to the ancient warfare practice of "salting the earth", preventing new crops from growing. Examples of salted pages, and the reason for their darlings, are listed in the Permanent Red Link Club. - Sandbox: A namespace for temporary articles, used to create drafts, manage rewriting/cleanup efforts, and experiment with markup. - Sandwich posting: When one person posts on the forums, a second troper posts, and then the first one posts again. On Forum Games this is frowned upon, but it is generally seen as acceptable on non-game forums. - Secondary Link: Any links beyond the first on a bulleted line. These will not be indexed and may often be potholed to flow better. Compare primary link. - Self Demonstrating: A style of writing that attempts to demonstrate the concept illustrated, as opposed to just describing it. Because these can easily become incoherent, difficult to read, or just plain weird, we ask that you first write an ordinary version, and then put the silly bits in the SelfDemonstrating/ namespace. - Serial Tweaker: A style of editing where someone makes a long series of minor edits to the same page, typically to resolve an issue with one of their own edits. It can fill the page history up with tiny edits and is thus considered undesirable. - Shoehorn: Another term for misuse, where the example is warped to try and fit the trope. - Sinkhole: Like a pothole, but where the linked article is irrelevant or only tangentially relevant to the context in which it occurs. Alternatively, it may be relevant, but is formatted in a way that a reader can't easily tell where it will lead to. Either way, we don't like these. - Skullfucker: This tool could delete every single post a user had made in a topic, leaving no trace of it (unlike the Troll Post, which left blank posts behind.) It was one of the earliest moderation tools (along with the Thump). Later replaced with the Troll Post, which itself was discontinued in favor of simply thumping posts, because it had a tendency to break the post numbers in a thread. - Sliding Scale: A type of composite trope that grades examples on a scale rather than cleanly dividing them into buckets. Discouraged for the same reasons as composite tropes. - Snip snip: A phrase used on the Trope Repair Shop, indicating an opinion that the page under discussion ought to be cut. Usually used to imply the page is blatantly cut-worthy. - Snowclone: A phrase that's derived from an existing one with only some small tweaks; which originated outside this wiki and derives from people modifying "Eskimos have 50 words for snow" into various "[Culture] has [number] words for [subject]". On TV Tropes, the term is usually applied to trope titles; and using them is generally frowned upon since ripping off an existing phrase can obscure what the trope is really about and lead to misuse. - Sockfarm: Refers to the practice of creating multiple sockpuppet accounts, most commonly to ban evade, but also sees use for manipulating votes in crowners and the Trope Launch Pad hat/bomb system. For the ban evasion case, many tend to be inactive until the user behind one of the accounts is caught and bounced, and will immediately switch to another once that happens. - Sockpuppet, or sock: An additional account made by the same person. Named for the practice of using a puppet and acting like it is a separate person. Sockpuppets are allowed on the forums when they are part of games or roleplays. On the wiki, they are frowned upon as they often signal a ban evader. When adjudicating a ban, moderators will search for sockpuppets and apply the same action(s) to any found. - Soft Split: When an article about a series of works or a composite trope is visually organized by dividing it into sections for each of its parts. An article that is still too long or cluttered after doing this may be hard split. - SpaghEddie: A Portmanteau of "spaghetti code" and Fast Eddie. Used as a snark towards various site's bugs that have remained since the early versions of the website. - Special character: A symbol that cannot be typed on a keyboard, such as a Yen sign or a macron. Trying to type these in the TLP will result in the character turning into a string of gibberish. - Sponsor: The person in charge of editing a draft in the Trope Launch Pad. Usually the person who made the draft, but if the draft is put Up For Grabs, then another troper can adopt the draft and become its new sponsor. - Stealth Launch: When the sponsor of a draft in the Trope Launch Pad launches it without prior warning. This is frowned upon as it doesn't give other tropers much time for last-minute criticisms. - Stinger: The optional section at the end of an article that contains a joke as a reward for reading. Named after The Stinger. - Subpage: Any wiki article that is "attached" to another article, containing a subset of that article's content or segregating certain types of activities. For example, Film.Jaws is a main page. YMMV.Jaws is a subpage, containing YMMV tropes for that work. - Subverted or a subversion: A form of Playing with a Trope, a trope is subverted when a work indicates that it will be using that trope, but then avoids it at the last minute. - Sugar Wiki: The "sugary sweet" part of TV Tropes, containing all the content that's so positive and cheerful that we just can't stand to have it in the main site. - Suspension: A moderator action that removes access to one or more functional areas of the site. If you receive one, visit What to Do If You Are Suspended to find out what to do next. Failure to respond to a suspension may cause your account to be bounced. ### T - Tag or Flag may refer to either of these: - An icon that appears automatically when Trivia, YMMV or Flame Bait items are in a work page. Per What Goes Where on the Wiki, these belong only to their respective namespaces, unless they're Invoked. Per Creator Page Guidelines, Trivia and YMMV items instead still stay at main pages. - A moderator comment on pages that protects the image with Image Pickin' rules. - A "mod" or "admin" label next to the staff's username. - A modifying markup, like [Spoiler] or [Invoked]. - This Example is an Example: The use of phrases such as "X does/has/is this" in an example. By itself, this is a Zero-Context Example as it doesn't make it clear what "this" is or how it is used in the work. If you add context after "X does/has/is this", it becomes Word Cruft. Therefore, such phrasing should be avoided in favour of writing examples in a way which gives the necessary context, but avoids pointlessly stating that they are examples. - This Troper: The discouraged practice of referring to oneself in the third person while editing the wiki, as a form of verbal tic/in-joke. Do not use first-person writing, including "This Troper", anywhere on the wiki (save for specific designated areas). The articles aren't about you; they are about the subject. - Thump: The primary disciplinary tool on the forums. Moderators may "thump" a post, hiding it from public view and generating a PM to the poster. Thumps come in various types depending on the problem. - Trivia: Some tropes are objectively present in a work, and some are a matter of audience interpretation. Trivia, by contrast, is found in the external context of a work. How it is received, similarities between it and other works, casting decisions, what the actors were up to on and off set — all these little tidbits of information belong on a work's Trivia subpage. (As Creator pages are inherently concerned with trivia, they don't require a subpage for it.) - Troll Post: A tool reserved for extreme situations in which moderators would delete all posts by a user in a forum topic. The tool has been discontinued in favor of simply using thumps, but this is the smoking debris left behind when the tool was still in use. - Tropable or tropeworthy: Able to be correctly described as a trope. These terms are commonly seen on the Trope Launch Pad and Trope Repair Shop, asking whether something is truly a trope, or if it's actually YMMV, People Sit on Chairs, Too Rare to Trope, etc. For more information, see Is This Tropable?. - Trope: A common convention or device in media. These are not the actual literary definition of a trope, and should not be confused with it. This is just an informal definition we use for this site. - Trope Finder: A wiki discussion board (see Query) used to ask if we have a trope or what trope a particular example fits. - Trope Launch Pad: The place where drafts for new tropes and other articles can be proposed (TLP is only mandatory for tropes, however). There you can discuss if a trope is a proper trope, how to best define it, and get some examples if you don't have enough. Formerly known as You Know That Thing Where, or YKTTW. - Troper: Anyone who contributes to this site. To get listed in Contributors, you may create an article for yourself in the Tropers namespace. - Troper Critical Mass: Many tropers going online to add to a show, trope or other wiki page. - Troper Page: A personal wiki article where you can describe yourself, your interests, articles you contribute to, and so on. It lives in the Tropers namespace and only you can edit the article matching your handle. - Troper's Block: When a troper is unable to think of something that was just on the tip of their tongue, afflicting a normally productive Trope Launch Pad session in any number of ghastly drains upon the brain. - Troper Tales: A long-gone wiki project involving recounting users' personal experiences of tropes. We discarded it because it was generating vast amounts of ridicule and not a few major problems. Sometimes people still post anecdotes on discussion pages; these are also Troper Tales and are not generally appropriate. - Troper Wall: A non-standard namespace (TroperWall/) that some tropers use as a social media space so their friends can write them messages. - Troping: The act of discovering and documenting tropes in media. It's a neologism that we created and we're very proud of it. - Trope Repair Shop: A subforum where articles that need help, for whatever reason, are discussed and the appropriate action decided, usually by vote (see crowner). ### U - Unilateral editing: As you might've gathered from the prefix "uni-", meaning "one", this refers to a single troper taking it upon themself to make large scale changes to the wiki without discussing it with other tropers. No matter how strongly you feel about something, do not make unilateral changes to the wiki. Instead, bring the issue up in Ask The Tropers or the forums, get consensus and go by whatever the majority decides. - Unpublished Work: An article for a work that is not available to the public, either because it's still being created or because it's available only for private audiences. Such an article goes in the Darth Wiki namespace, is indexed in Unpublished Works, and is generally not to be wicked anywhere outside of Darth Wiki. - Up for Grabs: A notice put on a draft in the Trope Launch Pad to indicate that the original sponsor is no longer editing it, either due to their own decision or because they have not been active on the draft for 2 months. Another troper can take ownership of the draft if it clearly meets these standards. - Useful Notes: An article providing documentary information about a Real Life topic with the intention of helping authors write about it accurately. ### W - Wall of Text: An entry which is excessively long. This is commonly caused by tropers adding details which are not directly relevant to the trope in question. A clean-up thread for such entries can be found here. - Wick: A link on this site to another page on this site. This is useful for generating Wiki Magic. You can see the number of wicks by clicking the "Related to" button at the top of the page. - Wild Mass Guessing (aka "WMG"): A part of the wiki (found in the WMG namespace) where tropers can go wild with guesses and speculations about their favorite works. More generally, the process of doing such speculating. - Wild West: A (usually derogatory) nickname for the early days of the site. Typically refers to a time when users didn't need to get known, tropes were not separate from YMMV and Trivia, there were no namespaces, and most site policies didn't exist. - Wiki Curator: A type of wiki contributor who maintains articles, researches them, sorts out their indexes, etc. - Wiki Magic: The process by which, in a few hours, a weak page can be turned into a valid entry with enough examples to satisfy those who petitioned for its deletion. See Pages Needing Wiki Magic for an index of pages needing wiki magic. - Wikisize: The 350p width. Images are automatically downscaled to this size both when using the wiki's Upload Image and when they are displayed on page, which is important to consider when suggesting an image. - WikiWord: The most common way of forming a wick. Can be made using CamelCase, if the title has multiple words, or curly brackets if it is a single-word title. - Word Cruft: Basically refers to the use of words and phrases which, while common in rhetoric and frequently used to inflate school assignments to a required length, are essentially unnecessary due to the fact that they pretty much don't add anything useful to an entry and to be fair can as a rule be cut without particularly affecting the fundamental underlying meaning of the text. note : Or rather: refers to words which add nothing useful to an entry. - Word of God: Official statements by the creator(s) of a work about the work's canon. Used on this wiki as one would generally use citations on a site like Wikipedia, except less formally. - Work: Any creative effort in any medium. All of them use tropes. - Work Page: A page that briefly describes a work and lists all the tropes it uses. Work Pages Are a Free Launch because There Is no Such Thing as Notability. - Writeup: An entry for an approved Complete Monster or Magnificent Bastard, summarizing the character in question and their notable actions. Writeups are almost always more formal in tone than a typical entry. ### Y - Yard or Yarding: Shorthand for sending a trope cut by the Trope Repair Shop to the Trope Idea Salvage Yard. - You Know That Show: A wiki discussion board (see Query) where you can ask fellow tropers for help identifying a work whose name you can't remember. - You Know That Thing Where: The old name for Trope Launch Pad (mentioned above). - Your Mileage May Vary (aka "YMMV"): Most tropes are deliberate choices of those making a work; they either occur or they do not. note : or they are played with in some way Tropes designated as YMMV are not always objectively present; rather, people tend to argue about whether they occur and/or the degree to which they occur. They do not get listed on the main page of a work article, but rather its YMMV subpage. See also Audience Reactions. ### Z - Zapped: Deleted, without discussion. This is a wiki term used for the action taken to relieve the wiki of text that is clearly outside the boundaries of civil discourse or outside the bounds that the community has agreed to set. Lines, or even whole articles, will be zapped when they are natter, except in those few areas of the wiki (such as Headscratchers) where natter is tolerated, even enjoyed. Ad hominem attacks, statements directed against a person rather than against an argument, will also likely be zapped. This may also result in banning, for such an attacker. - Zero-Context Example: An example that isn't fleshed out to give context to the trope and how it is portrayed in a work. We don't like these, and we will comment them out if not elaborated on. - Zig-Zagged: A form of Playing with a Trope, a trope is zig-zagged when it is played with in such a way that it is impossible to categorise it under any other heading such as being triple subverted, or being both inverted and played straight. ## Initialisms expanded: - ATT: Ask The Tropers. The catch-all query area for vandal reports, quick questions, and other stuff. - BUPKIS: Blank Until (a) Pretty Kickass Image Suggested (or Suggestion). A stock phrase found in Image Pickin', used for trope pages whose concepts are hard to picture and are to be left without an image pending a really good suggestion being found/created. See also KUBIS. - CCW: Clear, Concise, Witty; a policy which says that you should strive for conciseness so long as it doesn't get in the way of clarity, and wit shouldn't get in the way of either. - CM: Complete Monster; a completely-evil villain. This trope has a perpetual cleanup thread to prevent edit warring and misuse. - CMOA, CMOF, and CMOH: Crowning Moment of Awesome, Crowning Moment Of Funny, and Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming, respectively. CMOA/CMOF/CMOH are still widely used terms, but officially the pages have lost their "crowning" titles (which named crowners) after finding a crowning moment of anything proved impossible. - EB: Edit Banned, tropers who are suspended from editing the wiki, but may still have other privileges. Can also refer to the Ban Appeal thread. - EP: Effort post - FF: Fetish Fuel - GCPTR: Getting Crap Past the Radar. This trope has had to go through so many discussions that its initialism is well-established, unlike most tropes (which therefore aren't listed here). - JAFAAC: Just a Face and a Caption - JFF: Just for Fun - IANMTU: I Am Not Making This Up - IP: - An Internet Protocol address. A string of numbers identifying your computer. - Image Pickin'. A forum for choosing images and other such items. - IUEO: In-Universe Examples Only - KUBIS: Keep Until Better Image Suggested (or Suggestion). A stock phrase found in Image Pickin' used for pages whose pics are good enough to keep pending a better image being found. See also BUPKIS. - MB: Magnificent Bastard; a villain or Anti-Hero who is nonetheless a charming schemer (sometimes referred to as a Magnificent Bitch if female). This trope, like Complete Monster, has a perpetual cleanup thread to prevent misuse and infighting. - MICT: The Moments Images Cleanup Thread, a thread at Image Pickin' for pulling low-quality or unillustrative images from Awesome/, AwesomeMusic/, Funny/, Heartwarming/, NightmareFuel/, Shocking/, and TearJerker/ pages. - NF, ANF, HONF, and NFU: Nightmare Fuel and its variations Accidental Nightmare Fuel, High Octane Nightmare Fuel, and Nightmare Fuel Unleaded, respectively. Pages about scary stuff. The latter two names refer to the same concept ("Unleaded" was renamed as "High Octane"), and are no longer used since that concept ("Nightmare Fuel but worse") was deemed unnecessary and merged into regular Nightmare Fuel. - NOPE: No On-Page Examples - NREP: No Recent Examples, Please! - NRLEP: No Real Life Examples, Please! - PM: Private Message (Or DM for Direct Message) - P5 Another name for the 5P. - PCE: Partial-Context Example - PRLC: Permanent Red Link Club - PSOC: People Sit on Chairs - ROCEJ: The Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment, our holy grail of policies. Put simply: don't pick fights or make edits that will invite them. - SBIG: So Bad, It's Good - SBIH: So Bad, It's Horrible - SD: Self-Demonstrating - TLP: Trope Launch Pad. The place to propose new tropes, as mentioned in the list above. - TRS: The Trope Repair Shop. A forum for renaming, removing, and otherwise reforming or refining tropes. - TT: Troper Tale(s) - TVT: TV Tropes - UFG: Up for Grabs - UST: Unresolved Sexual Tension - WMG: Wild Mass Guessing. See its entry in the first list. - YKTS: You Know That Show. A discussion area in which you may ask about a work you can remember but don't know the title of. - YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary. See its entry in the first list. - YKTTW: You Know, That Thing Where.... The old name for Trope Launch Pad, changed to make things a bit clearer. - ZCE: Zero-Context Example. An entry on a trope or work page which just lists a trope link or work name without explaining how the trope is used.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Parabombing
Merged Reality - TV Tropes "It's true! We all live on the same Earth now. Our Earths must have merged when we helped [him] reboot the universe." In stories involving multiple alternate universes, timelines, or dimensions, one possible plotline has all of them merge or collapse into a single reality that exhibits (hopefully the best) features of each one. This can be a way to Save Both Worlds when used for the ending of a work, for if all of these worlds are headed to nothing short of disaster, the only choice may be to put them back a different way. This isn't always the reason, though. Sometimes it's the villain, rather than the heroes, trying to pull this off for some sort of personal goal; in this case, it's probably not an Ending Trope, since the protagonists naturally want to prevent or reverse this. Other times all the danger has already passed and the day has been saved, with the merging of realities serving as a bonus reward to the protagonists who were about to angst that saving the day also meant being unable to see their new friends ever again. This may be the best ending to hope for When Dimensions Collide. In any case, expect all the questions that you'd probably have following such an event, from the Culture Clash of different worlds now having to coexist to the logistics of how they can even coexist (did the universe double in size or...), to be glossed over or only mentioned in passing outside of stories where the characters want to prevent this trope. For making a world from scratch, see Worldbuilding. Sister Trope to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, which deals with changing events in the past in the hope that things turn out better. See also Fusion Dance for when two characters merge together. Crossover Alternate Universe occurs when 2 or more works in a crossover are fused into a single verse. As this can be an Ending Trope, beware of spoilers! ## Examples: - Berserk: The climax of the Falcon of the Millennium Empire arc results in this. When the Skull Knight tries to attack Griffith/Femto with his space-cutting attack, Griffith, having known he would try it, manipulates the attack so it instead strikes the face of the Apostle Ganishka; as Ganishka had descended into deepest parts of the Astral Plane twice, the attack caused a chain reaction that opens a fissure into the Astral Plane. The end result: the Astral Plane merges with the physical world and all mythical creatures and fell entities, including the rest of the God Hand, fully manifest in the physical world, turning what was already a Crapsack World into a literal Hell on Earth. - In Bleach, the Human World, Soul Society and Hueco Mundo were originally one chaotic world where the concept of Death did not exist; people simply existed. Then the Soul King showed up and, in an attempt to make existence more bearable after annihilating Hollows only made things worse, split the world into the three realms, separating life and death and creating the cycle of reincarnation. The ultimate goal of Yhwach is revealed to be the merger of all three realms back into one \|\|in order to cheat death for all eternity\|\|. When \|\|killing the Soul King, who serves as the linchpin holding the realms together,\|\| proves insufficient, he decides to \|\|absorb the Soul King and use his power to merge the realms manually\|\|, dubbing his new world "Wahrwelt". note : True World in German - Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure: After the Big Bad is defeated, the hero Kazuki Yotsuga is forced to sacrifice his Humongous Mecha in order to Save Both Worlds — except that Mitsuki Sanada leans on the wrong lever just beforehand, causing all of the named characters find themselves in a Merged Reality, unlike either of the realities of the story, but preserving all of the unique memories and characters from both of its parents. (For example, both Mitsuki Sanada and her cousin-slash-alternate self Mitsuki Rara both coexist within the new reality and its new history.) - In the manga Mugen Densetsu Takamagahara: Dream Saga, awakening Amaterasu is meant to restore both worlds to their original, unpolluted glory. However, the ending offers the idea that Making a Better World isn't always better: \|\|the team learns that the original two worlds have to be destroyed and their populations killed. They resolve to Save Both Worlds instead of make new ones.\|\| - The objective of the villain in Noein is to converge the infinite possible universes into one world, which he thinks would be free from suffering. It also comes at the cost of all individuality ceasing to exist. - Inverted in Super Dimension Century Orguss. The protagonist's actions have caused a Merged Reality, it's wreaking havoc, and it becomes his and others' job to undo the damage and split all the realities and timelines back up. - Used mildly in the Shara/Shura arc of Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-. In this case, the main characters don't even realize they are time traveling, but their actions do result in friendlier interactions in the original world. Not that there aren't consequences.... - The climaxes of Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!, Infinite Crisis, Flashpoint... DC Comics seems to be in a habit of doing this every decade or so. - For a particular case in point, The DCU character Superboy-Prime wants to bring back his world, the "perfect" world... and he's willing to blow up every other world in existence to do it. Moreover, he has no problem killing anyone who gets in his way (or anyone who doesn't), because he judges them to be "stupid" versions of people who'd exist on his world. Yes, to some extent, he is a superpowered avatar of fanboy rage. Fittingly, he eventually gets reduced to \|\|an internet troll.\|\| - It happens with the DC, WildStorm and (sorta) Vertigo universes at the end of Flashpoint. After the Flash is revealed to have accidentally broken the timeline, leading to events in Flashpoint, Pandora merges the three universes together to fix the problem. (why she can't simply undo the damage and has to merge in the other universes is not explained) This leads directly to the DC reboot and the New 52, with some Wildstorm and Vertigo characters and concepts being added to the DCU. - Marvel's Earth X trilogy: Mephisto is continually tempting people to change history for this purpose, when in fact it creates alternate universes — so even if the new universe is better, the old one is still there and just as terrible as before. Meanwhile the Elders of the Universe are trying to put all these alternate universes back together to recreate the original — and never mind that this involves the effective death of trillions of people native to the new universes. - A Marvel Comics storyline had the Fantastic Four aiding their enemy-turned-ally Amazon Thundra to merge her Lady Land Alternate Future of "Femizonia" with the misogynistic world of Machus to form a composite future of (theoretical) equality between the sexes. The men and women still fight each other constantly with deadly weapons, but Reed Richards just Handwaves that as the Proud Warrior Race version of Slap-Slap-Kiss. Naturally, Thundra finds this world boring and seeks out another version of Old Femizonia to settle in. - Secret Wars (2015) is more or less Marvel's version of Crisis on Infinite Earths, and culminates in the merger of every single dimension in the Marvel Multiverse into... well first into Battleworld from which the All-New, All-Different Marvel arises at the end of the event, the most prominent being Earth-616 (Mainstream Marvel) and Earth-1610 (Ultimate Marvel). - The DC and Marvel multiverses briefly merge together into the Amalgam Universe in DC vs Marvel. Years later they are merged again (but not creating the Amalgam universe) in the JLA/Avengers crossover. Years earlier, a different sort of merged reality had been mentioned on both sides as the explanation for the crossovers that just acted as if both the DC and Marvel characters had always been on the same Earth: rather than an actual event merging the two, there's simply Earths in both multiverses where both sets of characters and events are canon. - Sonic the Hedgehog: - In Sonic the Comic, during the Shanazar arc, Sonic and Robotnik are shrunk down and sent to Shanazar, a sub-atomic universe with an "Arabian Nights" Days flair. Near the end of said arc, Robotnik creates a Dimension Blender device, intending to use it to enlarge Shanazar until it occupied the same space as Mobius, merging the two planets together, with Robotnik planning to retake control of Mobius in the ensuing chaos. However, Robotnik's plan backfires when Mobius and Shanazar fuse together without any ill effects; instead, new Zones are added to the planet and portals to various worlds and dimensions on Mobius, including various points in time in Earth's history, are opened. - The end result of the Sonic the Hedgehog/Mega Man: Worlds Collide Crisis Crossover's ending towards Sonic's World in Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics). Thanks to Eggman's mucking, Sonic's World is now one part "Mobius Prime" and one part "Mobius Genesis", resulting in a blending of game and SatAM elements, among other cosmic retcons (Eggman's main base being the Metropolis Zone, Knothole being situated in the Wood Zone, Mobotropolis now in Westside Island...). - The third Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover centers on Krang acquiring DC tech and using it to merge the Turtles' universe with the DC Universe to create a reality he could control at will. In the merged universe, Batman was raised alongside the Turtles by Splinter, Casey Jones is a GCPD officer, and both Batman and the Turtles' Rogues Gallery have been melded together (the Foot Clan with The Joker's gang, for example). - Wonder Woman: Odyssey ends on a downplayed example. While Odyssey!Diana merges back with the prior timeline's Wonder Woman, the only parts of the Odyssey reality to carry over are her new outfit and her memories of the temporarily altered timeline. The rest of the original reality appears unchanged... just in time for Flashpoint to destroy it. - In Worlds Collide (1994), Big Bad Rift decides to try this on a smaller scale, merging Metropolis with Dakota. It ends messily with the merged cities just being devastated (even further in Metropolis' case due to The Fall of Metropolis event). - In DC/RWBY, \|\|What Team RWBY believes is a Reality Bleed going on when aspects of Remnant begin merging with Earth-0 ends up being this as Gotham City begins rejecting natural resources for Dust, people begin developing Semblances... and, oh yeah, the Joker fuses with the Nuckalevee\|\|. - Everyone's theory on the Day of Unity in The Amazing Spider-Luz in: Across the Owl-Verse! seems to be that it means merging the Human Realm and the Demon Realm. - Played with in Digimon: Children of Time. It's explained that the different versions of the Digital World as seen in Adventure/ Adventure 02, Tamers, Frontier, and Data Squad were all once one composite world, but were broken apart when the original DigiDestined defeated the darkness present during that time. After Tai, Davis, Takato, Takuya, and Marcus' respective groups saved each one, they have since merged back together into a single world. - In A New World, Yukari Yakumo successfully achieves \|\|the fusion of the worlds of technology and magic, with the added bonus of giving all youkai independence from human thought.\|\| She's been dead for three hundred years and was still able to trick everyone in both Gensokyo and Luna into executing her plan to the letter. - Out of the Corner of the Eye kicks off with this, as the Outer Gods/Great Old Ones discover the Jackie Chan Adventures universe and superimpose their own on top of it. This causes them, and everything related to them, to be retroactively inserted into the JCA timeline. - The author uses the same concept in another story; as Shendu is being resealed at the end of the Demon World story, he chooses to spitefully destroy the Book of Ages, triggering a Time Crash. Jade desperately scribbles onto a remaining fragment of the Book that they all survive, which it interprets by fusing the remnants of their universe with the W.I.T.C.H. universe, retroactively making the JCA characters part of its history. - Earth's Alien History: \|\|It turns out the whole timeline only exists because the Time Lords are combining universes in order to give humanity enough challenges that they'll evolve into the perfect warriors needed to help defeat the Daleks and win the Time War.\|\| - We Are All Pokémon Trainers: - During the Unova-2 Arc, the J-Team has to stop the Waking and Dream Worlds from fusing together. - The ultimate goal of the Mobius Society in the Entralink Arc is to fuse every universe into a single one. - The story of Blood on the Hands of a Healer occurs in the first place is due to ''Kamen Rider Chronicle's activation turning the world itself part-fictional, and thus, allowing the Military Uniform Princess to bring over fictional characters from various In-Universe pop cultures. - The now-defunct Omniverse Fan Fic Site features the DC, Marvel, Image and WildStorm universes merge as one large Shared Universe, which was the result of the embodiment of each universe note : DC and Marvel's are the Brothers from Marvel Versus DC named De'Cee and Mar'Vell, while Image and WildStorm are given female embodiments named Im'Age and Aegis. having a "cosmic orgy", leading to the birth of the Omniverse. Certain characters (Death, Merlin, Gods of myth, etc.) were combined with their alternate counterparts, thanks to Access' (now called Existence, the guardian of the Omniverse) power to fuse people with help from the Living Tribunal. - Of Gemstones and Watches: The world of Remnant and the world of Ben 10 have merged into a single world. - There Was Once an Avenger From Krypton: - According to Ford and Eda, the Boiling Isles are the result of the remains of a dimension that was either externally destroyed or internally collapsed drawing in and mixing with the leftovers of other similarly destroyed dimensions. - It turns out that \|\|the whole series setting is one — Doctor Doom and his timeline's Reed Richards have been using Cosmic Retcons to add elements from other universes into what was originally the canon MCU, all for the sake of making an Earth that can fight off Thanos with minimal damage\|\|. - It's revealed this is the origins of the Demi-Humans in Hope of the Shield Hero: \|\|Ren Amaki: the current Sword Hero discovered writings hidden underneath the Three Heroes Church which detailed that Humanity first encountered Beastmen, Demi-Humans, The Shield and Bow Heroes and several other Vassal Heroes after their world had merged with this one. Because of the newcomers Rapid Aging brought about whenever they leveled up, The Humans were afraid that the newcomers would eventually outpace Humans and eventually drive Humanity to extinction; so they committed themselves to destroying the Demi-Humans first. They managed to commit their own Spear and Sword Heroes to the task of exterminating the Demi-Humans, and eventually managed to turn The Bow Hero to their side as well. However The Shield Hero remained steadfast to his people, and eventually helped the Beastmen and Demi-Humans to establish their own lands in this new world that would eventually become The Kingdom of Siltvelt.\|\| - In Super Mario Bros. (1993), the asteroid that apparently killed the dinosaurs actually split our reality into two. King Koopa wants to remerge them because the other universe has a major resource shortage and he wants our world's. - Averted in Animorphs. When the kids travel back in time to stop Visser 4 from messing with history, they consider using the Time Matrix to change history for the better. However, they hit the Reset Button by accident and put everything back the way it was (minus one host body for Visser 4). - Although there was a sort of Merged Reality when Elfangor and Visser Three both activated the Time Matrix in The Andalite Chronicles. - Piers Anthony's Apprentice Adept series eventually merges the two worlds of Phaze and Proton into one; as the characters are explicitly paired across both worlds (mirror-universe twin kinda thing), each pair merges into one being, and each pair has to time-share their body. Substantially easier for the heroes than for the villains, since heroes are used to putting the needs of others on par with or ahead of their own. Given that Phaze is a medieval fantasy world and Proton is a futuristic sci-fi world, this leads to a merger between an alien and a unicorn, and between a cyborg and a harpy, among other things. - Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci: Witch Week ends this way, with the merging character explaining to the cast that they will all melt quietly into the people they really are in the other world. Since they're probably going to be burned as witches otherwise, this sounds quite appealing. ("Probably" in context means "if the world isn't destroyed first", which is what will happen if their world \|\|(which was not supposed to exist)\|\| isn't merged with the other one.) - Doctor Who Expanded Universe: An unintentional example in the Missing Adventures book Millennial Rites: a rich industrialist begins preparing some sort of massive summon. Former companion Anne Travers is deathly afraid he'll try to summon the Great Intelligence, so at the pivotal point she casts a specific counterspell designed to banish it. However, it turns out the Intelligence wasn't the entity being summoned, and instead the crashing spells create the Great Kingdom, a mad version of Central London vibrating between the rules of the current Universe, the one that preceded it and the one following it. - Jack Williamson's Legion of Time is one of the earliest novels in which this trope appears as a (somewhat illogical) happy surprise ending. The alternative futures of Utopian Jonbar and Dystopian Gyronchi fight for existence. \|\|The hero struggles to bring about Jonbar's future, but somehow his efforts cause a fusion of the two futures, with the best features of each - including a fusion of the two women in them he loves, good girl Lethonee and bad girl Sorainya.\|\| - Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. The plot is rather complicated, but suffice it to say it emerges that \|\|our own timeline is the product of interference from another timeline, in which the Tlaxcalans of Central America conquered Europe and possibly the world. (The author does an excellent job of making it sound plausible). The people of that timeline viewed the Tlaxcalan invasion as the greatest catastrophe in human history, and so they altered their own timeline, by motivating Christopher Columbus to sail west (with a holographic God). Of course, in the story our own timeline appears to be headed for human extinction, so the characters make their own alteration, preventing both the Central American and European civilisations from wiping each other out. They are apparently more successful than the original alterers.\|\| - This is because \|\|the protagonists have realized that the reason the original "interventionists" failed was because they made a single alteration and didn't see it through. Instead of sending a holo-recording, they decide to send three people with a plan for each. One's job is to destroy Columbus's ships and die in the process, preventing him from returning to Europe. Another, a native Mayan, has to unify the Central American peoples and teach them a milder version of Christianity. The third, an African female, has to teach Columbus the error of his ways and, along with him, unify and educate the peoples of the Caribbean islands in the same manner as her partner. The end result is that, when the ocean-going ships from the new American confederation arrive to Europe, they do so as equals. This prevents the world dominated by either the Europeans or the Native Americans. No direct explanation is given for the lack of an ecological catastrophe in this version of history\|\|. - A more malicious example nearly happens in the Rod Allbright Alien Adventures; BKR and Smorkus Flinders planned to merge Dimension X with Dimension Q, the dimension Earth is in, thus creating a composite universe where everyone would be subject to Dimension X's Reality Quakes and potentially be driven insane. It's outright stated that BKR is doing so purely For the Evulz, despite the fact that he will be affected just like everyone else. - Arrowverse: - This is what essentially would have happened if Buffy hadn't stopped Glory in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It would have been only temporary, though, but apocalyptically devastating. - Doctor Who: At the end of "Father's Day", after Rose saved her father from his death and accidentally dooms the timeline, eventually forcing him to make a Heroic Sacrifice, the timeline has been restored, but the exact circumstances of Pete's death have been altered: it's no longer a hit-and-run, the location was different, and grown-up Rose was there with him when he died. - In Fringe, due to the activation of \|\|the Vacuum by Peter, a bridge is created between both the Prime and Alternate universe, preventing them from further collapse. This allows both universe's team to have the time to try and solve the problem.\|\| Before this, the dimensions bridging was a disaster. Body Horror as people were TeleFragged with alternates who were standing in sorta-but-not-exactly the same spot. The side effect of merging the universes is that Peter is RetGoned for several episodes until he manages to force his way back into existence. - Kamen Rider: - In Kamen Rider Build, this ends up being the heroes' ultimate plan to save the world. \|\|They combine their Earth with the Earth from a parallel universe (implied to be the main Kamen Rider universe (if such a thing exists, with the franchise's Schizo Continuity)) where the series' events never happened, using the Big Bad as fuel to ensure he doesn't exist in the resulting world. Most of the characters end up merging with their parallel counterparts in the new world, who don't remember anything that happened. Sento and Ryuga, however, because of how fundamentally they were altered, end up as anomalies who do remember the show's events and actually coexist with their parallel counterparts. This makes for a Bittersweet Ending, though: our two heroes end up alone, with no place in a new world where versions of them who never experienced the series' events are back where they belong. However, post-series team-up stuff will have the other characters' memories restored. ...Just in time for the Zi-O series to shake things up even more, leaving the Build characters' status unclear.\|\| - Build's successor Kamen Rider Zi-O had a more malicious example due to the various time paradoxes that occurred throughout the show, time is slowly breaking down. \|\|By the final arc, reality has broken down so much that the various alternative Kamen Rider worlds have fused together, which creates chaos as the various enemies of those worlds are running free without their respective Riders to stop them. This is revealed to be part of the Big Bad's plan to destroy the resulting fused world to save his own\|\|. - On Sliders, the Big Bad of the last season tried to do this, experimenting by first merging people from different universes together. - In the finale of Once Upon a Time, \|\|Regina casts a Curse which brings all the magical realms to be merged in Storybrook where every fairy tale character can be together and live in peace. Regina is then elected as the ruler.\|\| - In Teen Wolf, The Wild Hunt abducts people and imprisons them in their dimension which is an eerie train station. The villain Garrett Douglas successfully merges their dimension with the real world causing train tracks appearing all over Beacon Hill. - Magic: The Gathering had the artificial plane of Rath, created parallel to the primary plane of Dominaria as a staging world for an invasion, with only a thin interdimensional boundary between the two. For awhile creatures and entire regions could be lost in the boundary between worlds, pulling them from Dominaria to Rath, but finally in the aptly named "Invasion" set, the primary attack was initiated by the "Rathi overlay" merging Rath into Dominaria, carrying all the invasion forces along with the plane itself in one massive event. - In 11eyes, Kakeru comes to the realization late in the game that every one of the chosen ones was drawn from another, slightly different reality, since memories and information don't match up. Everyone worries that \|\|they have to die because of Liselotte's soul in them and\|\| when the battle is finished, they won't be able to see each other again. \|\|Kukuri heals the world back to normal.\|\| Everyone ends up staying together in the same world, a composite of all of theirs. They'd become such a tight group of True Companions that it would be too cruel to split them apart. - In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, this turns out to be the main motive of the Big Bad, King Radical. \|\|His homeworld, the Radical Lands, were drained of Life Energy by Sparklelord and gradually dying. He escaped to an Alternate Universe, the Dr.'s world, which is a cross between our mundane world and the awesomeness of the Radical Lands. In order to save his own world, he manipulated a time portal to start merging the worlds together in order to save his people. Why is this wrong? Because the process would make every Radical Lander take the place of a normal person from Doc's world, effectively forcing them out of existence, which would ultimately kill billions. But by the Blue-and-Orange Morality of King Radical, there is nothing wrong with this because native radical residents would be spared, and boring people don't deserve to live anyway\|\|. - In Supernormal Step, \|\|in ancient times, Fiona's mundane world and the Supernormalverse were one and the same. To prevent magic from going out of control and causing The End of the World as We Know It, a witch separated everything magical away from the main universe into a pocket dimension of its own, resulting in The Magic Goes Away for the main universe. In chapter 22, the Big Bad manages to overload the spell that separated the two worlds, causing the pocket dimension to collapse back into the main universe. The result is a massive, worldwide catastrophe as buildings from the pocket dimension end up in the same spots as buildings in the main universe. The fact that this also causes The Magic Comes Back makes the resulting chaos even greater.\|\| - In Star vs. the Forces of Evil, the dimensions of Mewni, Earth, and possibly others merge after \|\|the destruction of all magic\|\| in the Grand Finale. - In the final episode of Fangbone!, the Big Bad Venomous Drool uses a powerful artifact called The World Chain to merge Earth and Skullbania into a single reality so he can cross over without losing his powers. - In the Rick and Morty episode, "The Vat of Acid Episode", Morty is given a device that lets him save in real-time and reload back to that save point. Morty then later learns that all his Save Scumming was actually just him killing and replacing another Morty from a different yet near-identical dimension. In an attempt to fix this, he has Rick merge these timelines into a single reality so that none of the other Mortys were killed. Unfortunately, Morty had caused all kinds of havoc in the other dimensions as he was under the impression that he could suffer no consequences for his actions through the do-over device. So by merging the realities together, all the people he pissed off show up outside his house to exact revenge. Morty is thus forced to follow Rick's fake Acid Pool plan, which he saw as a dumb idea, just to get them off his back. - The Owl House: It is revealed in the second season that Emperor Belos's grand scheme is to use Eda's Portal Door and the Fantastic Caste System he has spent decades building to perform an absolutely massive spell called "the Day of Unity" which will merge the Boiling Isles and Earth into a single dimension, an event that will dispel the Wild Magic that underpins the Boiling Isles. \|\|However, that wasn't his plan at all. What Belos really wants is to kill everyone on the Boiling Isles and simply move to Earth himself, because he was Human All Along.\|\|	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParallelUniverseMerge
Palm Bloodletting - TV Tropes "Why do they always cut the palm? Hurts like a bitch..." When magic spells call for blood, where do you cut? Right across your palm, of course. Because there certainly aren't any sensitive muscles or tendons there. Not an area packed full of pain receptors or anything. Plus, it heals super-fast, and you rarely use your hand anyway, right? Especially in the upcoming boss battle. The main out-of-character reason for this trope is basically that it's the easiest kind of wound to fake. - One can hide a packet of fake blood in one's hand to cut — and if one needs a lot of blood, one can hide the tubing up their sleeve. - If one needs a close-up, a cut in the palm of a latex glove is easier to fake than a cut on the back or finger. - If one needs to avoid close-ups, it's easier to keep the palm of one's hand out of view of the camera than the back or a finger. Aside from all that, one has to consider the gravitas of the scene. Are there more practical body parts to nick for a bit of blood? Absolutely. Would it look nearly as dramatic or badass holding those body parts over some mystical chalice? Probably not. Often used when two people become Blood Brothers. Also see Impaled Palm. See sister tropes Blood Magic and Paper Cutting. ## Examples: - In Attack on Titan, Eren does this by biting into his palm, in order to \|\|transform into a titan\|\|. This is eventually further expounded later on in the story. - In Naruto, people who need their own blood to cast jutsu will often cut/bite their fingertips instead. - In Princess Tutu, Fakir revives Mytho's Cool Sword by cutting his hand, and pouring the blood from the wound into a fountain, and reciting a spell in Gratuitous German while dipping the blade into the bloody water. - Subverted in Runaways. Nico's spell casting is done through The Staff Of One, which only emerges from her soul when blood is shed. The first time she actively attempts to summon it, she tries this. And she hates it. She would go on to come up with creative ways to shed blood that didn't involve cutting, from averting No Periods, Period to brushing her teeth until her gums bled. - In Death: The Time of Your Life, blood from a cut palm is used to power a spell to send the characters to the land of the dead and come back alive. - No less than three times in Heart of Ashes, a palm is cut and blood dropped on someone else during a magic ritual. In the first chapter, Fankil does this to resurrect the recently perished Kathryn. In the same chapter, Andraya does this to awaken from deathlike coma Smaug (who has recently survived his canon death and transformed into a man) at the cost of her fertility. The third time occurs during the climax when Fankil tries to fulfill the purpose he resurrected Kathryn for: \|\|locating the Door of Night through her influenced vision so that he can free his father Morgoth from the void\|\|. - The Ultimate Evil: - When Shendu is bound to his Other Valerie Payne in the rewritten reality, they slash each other's left palm and drink each other's blood. Their union leaves for them both a permanent scar on the slashed palm that endures the restoration of reality. - In the sequel, \|\|Hsi Wu\|\| uses his claw to cut out a piece from his right palm and sends it into \|\|Jade\|\| in order to merge with her. - Drago uses his talon at one point to pierce his palm in order to use his blood in a spell. - In The 100 fic Twisted Steel, it is noted that traditionally swearing in a new member of a clan in Triku culture would involve the new member cutting their palm as a way of showing that they would be willing to shed blood for their clan. Since Clarke lost both her arms in an accident on the Ark and has a pair of Artificial Limbs instead, she and Anya decide that they can do the usual ritual using shoulders instead (Clarke's left arm was completely severed while her right was only severed at the forearm), due to the unconventional circumstances. - The Road to El Dorado: The wicked high priest Tzekel-Kan slices his palm to smear blood upon a stone relief of one of the two founding gods of El Dorado. He does this to emphasize that he has seen through Tulio and Miguel's masquerade. "Gods. Don't. Bleed." - In the film The Brother from Another Planet, the protagonist uses a shard of glass to cut his palm in order to use his blood to write a message on a graffiti-covered wall. However, it's no big deal to him, as he is an alien who heals easily and quickly. - Done in Deep Blue Sea when blood is needed to attract the sharks' attention. - In The Hangover, Alan tries this to start a blood pact, freaking out everyone else. - In Hellraiser, Larry cuts his hand on a nail and drips blood on the attic floor. Underneath lie the hidden remnants of Frank's body which the blood partially restores back to life and consciousness. - The Client does this to both himself and Jay in Kill List while Jay is signing a contract. - In the extended version of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers one of the Wild Men of Dunland swears fealty to Saruman. When asked to prove it, he slices his palm open and says that they will die for Saruman. - In National Treasure, Ben cuts his palm then presses it to the handle of the carved pipe they've found, so they can press the bloody pipe on a piece of paper and see what the words on it are. He couldn't find ink in the arctic. - Done twice in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, when blood is needed to break the curse. The first time, Barbossa does it to Elizabeth. Will does it to himself the second time, having to hurry things along before \|\|Barbossa killed either Elizabeth or Jack, who had just done it himself before throwing the medallion to Will\|\|. - In Practical Magic, Sally and Gillian slice their palms and clasp hands to cure Gillian's Demonic Possession. It also conveniently works as a Curse Escape Clause. - Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves has Robin slice open his palm during his oath to avenge his father, then he wraps it with a rag and continues battling for the rest of the film seemingly without pain or disability. - At the beginning of Rob Roy Rob Roy is challenged to a friendly duel to the first cut but doesn't feel like participating, so he purposely slices his palm on the other guy's sword in order to lose. This becomes a Chekhov's Gun when in the climactic duel he grabs the other guy's sword with his bare hand in order to take it out of play. - In Star Trek: Nemesis, Shinzon cuts open his palm to provide a blood sample for our heroes. It reveals that he's a clone of Captain Picard. - Angel: Darla cuts her palm when a shaman needs a blood sample for a spell after he is reluctant to do it to her. - Done at least twice in Babylon 5, by Narn. Once by G'Kar to make a point to Vir, once by Ta'Lon to satisfy a tradition that his sword must draw blood before being sheathed again. Seems to be a Narn thing. - Boardwalk Empire. Season 5 has Charlie "Lucky" Luciano's Mafia initiation. - Game of Thrones. - Beric Dondarrion does this before challenging Sandor Clegane to Trial by Combat, which seems a foolish thing to do until it causes his sword to burst into flame due to implied Blood Magic. Sandor as it happens is terrified of fire. - Xaro Xhoan Daxos cuts his hand and shows the blood as part of his oath to stand for Daenerys and her people. \|\|He's lying.\|\| - Averted when a teenaged Cersei Lannister consults a witch — she cuts her thumb for the required Blood Magic. - House of the Dragon: When they marry in Targaryen tradition, Daemon and Rhaenyra cut their palms before holding each other's hands (and they also cut the central tubercle of each other's lips and make a blood mark on each other's foreheads). - Krypton has Superman's grandfather, Seg-El, opening his grandfather's Fortress of Solitude on Krypton using the blood of an El. It forms the familiar sigil of the House of El. - In an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Goren cuts his hand in order to show a suspect is too squeamish about blood to have committed a very bloody crime. - In one episode of Lie to Me, Cal slices open his hand to show that the guy they are interviewing has a phobia to blood. - The Magicians episode "Divine Elimination": Margo slices open Elliot's palm to summon Ember using a blood-stone. - Star Trek: The Original Series episode "A Private Little War". When Nona uses the Mahko root to heal Kirk, her husband Tyree cuts her hand first so that her blood joins with the root before it's applied to Kirk's wound. - Supernatural uses this frequently, often to prove that someone is human by showing that they don't have Alien Blood or react to various Kryptonite Factors. Season 3 Episode 9 Malleus Maleficarum has a witch slicing her hand open in the first few minutes. - Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine establish this as a Klingon habit. If they're putting on any kind of ceremony, it's a safe bet that shedding some blood this way is going to be part of it. - V (1983) had a scene where someone approaching La Résistance for help did this to prove they were not a Visitor. - The Blue Öyster Cult song "Unknown Tongues" is about a Catholic schoolgirl called Margaret, who lies in bed at night contemplating the mysteries of Glossolalia and the Holy Stigmata (i.e.: the voices in her head tell her to self-harm with a razor blade): And then she took/Her father's razor; And watched it cut into her palm; She put her hand up to her mouth To taste the blood, so holy and warm.... - Ghost's song "Con Clavi Con Dio" includes this as a description of a cult worshipping Satan. Our conjuration sings infernal psalms And smear the smudge in bleeding palms - S. J. Tucker's song "Valkyrie Daughter" has this when the soldier makes his deal with the goddess Hel to forfeit his place in Valhalla so that his daughter can go from Niflheim to Valhalla and become a Valkyrie. The soldier's eyes clouded... But he cut his own palm, And signed all his honor away. - Call of Cthulhu campaign Spawn of Azathoth. During a Cthulhu Mythos ritual each participant must cut the palm of his hand and smear the blood over a severed hand, which animates and acts like the planchette of an Ouija board to point out symbols and provide a message. - Dungeons & Dragons. In module CM1 "Test of the Warlords", the PC's can participate in the ritual of blood sharing with a barbarian chief. They do so by cutting their palms and clasping hands, thus mixing their blood. - GURPS Illuminati. The sidebar titled "Blood Samples" describes Illuminati initiation procedures that require using the applicant's blood, such as signing a contract, filling a chalice, etc. The accompanying illustration shows a knife cutting the palm of a person's hand. - You're going to be doing a lot of this in Curse of the Dead Gods, especially on more challenging explorations where \|\|you need a ton of gold for the endgame to pay off the Gods of Wonder.\|\| Each time you do it, you accumulate more and more corruption, until your hand is glowing bright pink and emitting smoke from all the curses you've got on you. - Averted in Dawn of War: Soulstorm. Where most units capture points by standing at attention/prayer, the Dark Eldar slash their wrists and hold the bleeding hand up in salute. - In Destiny 2: Season of the Chosen, this is used as part of a ritual, but not a magical one. \|\|As part of an armistice between Empress Caiatl's Cabal and the Guardians, there is meant to be this between Caiatl and Commander Zavala (on behalf of the Guardians), a symbolic gesture, "Let this be the last blood spilt between our people." It only gets as far as Caiatl doing her half before conspirators attempt to assassinate Zavala.\|\| - In Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, Vergil uses his katana Yamato to slash his palm as a part of the Blood Magic ceremony to break the spell on the Temen-ni-gru tower. In his case, it's doubtful the wound slows him down because he has an innate Healing Factor. - In Diablo II, The Necromancer has a Curse spell called "Life Tap." According to Flavour Text in the guidebook, he slits his palms to allow Life Energy to flow through them. - In the teaser trailer for Diablo IV, the doorway to the room where \|\|Lilith is summoned\|\| is opened by a trigger that requires blood from three people to activate; the blood is given by the people slapping their palms onto small spikes on the floor. - In the game proper, there are multiple scenes where blood is required for a ritual and your character or an NPC cuts their palm. - In Dragon Age: Origins, Blood Magic always has the somatic component of cutting the palm. By stabbing it with a dagger. - In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, at one point a door needs to be opened with the blood of the Dragonborn. They cut the palm of their hand to do so. - An unintentional version happens in the Dawnguard DLC: The Dragonborn investigates an ancient tomb and, when s/he presses what looks like a button, a spike pops up and pierces their hand, allowing them to open the blood seal keeping Serana entombed. - The native ceremonies in GreedFall require someone to cut their palm in order to forge a bond with nature and speak to the spirits of the island. - Mortal Kombat X newcomer Kotal Kahn enters into matches by ritualistically slashing his palm on a sacred, Elder God-empowered blade to grant him their strength. He will make good, immediate use of it. - In Star Wars: The Old Republic, during the arc of the Sith Inquisitor's story where they're looking for force ghosts to absorb with a ritual, choosing the light-sided option of finishing the ritual with a blood sacrifice has the Inquisitor do this. - The Dragon Prince: The mage Viren is highly implied to have done this as part of a spell, as instructed by the mysterious elf Aaravos.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PalmBloodletting
Paradiegetic Gameplay - TV Tropes Paradiegetic (noun): From Greek πέρα para- meaning "Beyond" and diegetic meaning "The confines of the medium". Most games you can beat without having to get up from your chair, provided you don't need to use the bathroom. Sometimes, though, a puzzle's solution involves something that isn't in the game itself, and beating it will require you to do something that isn't just pressing buttons on your keyboard or controller. Maybe it involves a phone number you have to call, or you need to fiddle with the date and time in Windows settings, or press the "eject" button on your CD drive. This is where this trope comes in. These types of puzzles may lead to Guide Dang It! since most people often don't expect this sort of gameplay. It's also a risky idea if the puzzle involves something externally hosted, such as a website to visit or a phone number to call: once the website goes offline or the phone number stops working (and they will, eventually), the game may become hard or impossible to finish without looking up a guide. Sometimes these types of puzzles are done as a form of Copy Protection, having Feelies bundled with a physical copy of the game with an answer to a puzzle to prevent those who downloaded the game on the Internet to solve it and continue. Extrinsic Go-First Rule is a subtrope. See also Breaking the Fourth Wall and Logging onto the Fourth Wall, which is similar however is simply Played for Laughs or as an Easter Egg. Also see Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay and Unexpected Gameplay Change. The Other Wiki calls it a pervasive game. ## Examples: - X-Men (1993) requires you to perform a soft reset on the console before you can enter the final level. - inFAMOUS: Second Son had the Paper Trail series of missions, where you would find clues in game that you would then need to solve through a special website by linking your PlayStation Network ID to it. However, as of December 2018, the website has become defunct, but the developers rolled out an update that allowed players to finish the campaign without it. - The Legend of Zelda: - The Legend of Zelda: In the Famicom Disk System version, the pol's voice enemy is killed by yelling in the microphone in the Famicom's second controller. Each Japanese rerelease changes it so pol's voice can be killed with a different method, such as pressing Select 4 times in the GBA version, or pressing L and R to virtually "switch" to the second controller and yell into the 3DS's microphone in the 3DS version. In all English releases, including the NES version, the enemy is instead weak to arrows, as the NES does not have a microphone. - The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass: - At one point you're required to transfer a seal on the top screen to its corresponding location on the map on your lower screen by closing your Nintendo DS and reopening it. - Pol's voices return as enemies, and can be stunned by blowing in the DS' microphone. - StarTropics: To obtain the secret code, you're supposed to make the invisible ink on one of the game's Feelies appear. Good luck if you rented the game or bought a used copy. In the Virtual Console release, which lacks physical packaging (due to it being a digital download), the effect is instead replicated by having the digital manual contain a page where the player can simulate the invisible ink puzzle. The code is 747, if you're wondering. - In Another Code, you have to press two maps together, one on the top screen and one on the bottom screen. To do so, you have to close and open the DS. - In Hotel Dusk: Room 215, you need to close and open the DS to flip over a completed puzzle for to see some important text written on the back of it. - The manual for Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis action game warns you that the roulette tables in Monte Carlo are rigged, and hints that you need to do something to "beat the system". The expected solution? See what number came up, then reload the game and bet on that number. - One late game puzzle in Last Window involves retrieving a key from a music box. The DS essentially acts as the lid and the interior of the box, which turns off when the two halves are sufficiently closed. The trick is using this at just the right time in order to pop out a key when the internal mechanisms are aligned in such a way as to let it out, which is assigned to one of the shoulder buttons. - In Memoriam/ Missing: Since January contained alternate reality elements such as in-game emails and a lot of information you were supposed to websearch for on the real internet in order to find answers to the game puzzles. Of course, shortly after the game came out, most search results would turn up walkthroughs faster than they would the websites that were intended to contain the answers. - OneShot: Several puzzles require the player to interact with either the game window or the files in the game's Document folder in order to progress. \|\|In the 2016 Re-Release, navigating the maze in the Tower requires opening a program placed into the Documents folder by the Author and correctly overlaying the notes it generates over the game window so that it points to where Niko needs to go next.\|\| - Simon the Sorcerer: At the end, you find a computer where you are supposed to insert a CD. However, within the game you cannot interact with the computer to open its CD drive. The solution is to open this on your own physical computer. Unfortunately, some computer setups do not send the signal the game looks for when opening the CD drive, thus making the game Unintentionally Unwinnable. - Thimbleweed Park: To solve the last puzzle, the player is cryptically hinted at to \|\|go online and watch the kickstarter video for the game\|\|. - Boktai: The cartridge has a special sensor on it that detects the amount of ambient light. In order to keep your vampire-killing weapons charged up with sunlight, you have to play in the sunlight sometimes but not all the time, as the designers didn't want players getting heatstroke. - Monster Rancher: In the PlayStation games, Monsters are created from "saucer stones". In-game, these are artifacts from which the monsters are generated in a lab; out of game, the player has to put a different CD or game disc into the PlayStation, which generates the monster's stats from its subcode data. Later games in the line add different input methods, like the DS microphone and touchscreen. - Pokémon: - Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire: The infamous puzzle to get all three of the legendary titans has a lot of this. In addition to needing very specific Pokémon, which have to be in specific places in your party, you need to be able to read Braille to follow the clues in each of the chambers. - Pokémon X and Y onwards: In order for Inkay to evolve into Malamar, the player needs to hold the game console upside down when it levels up. - One sidequest in Pokémon Legends: Arceus revolves around "The Sea's Legend", a myth detailing a specific sequence of actions required to \|\|be allowed to meet a Manaphy\|\|. Thing is, the details are unclear as the book has been mostly lost to history and at the time, no one knows where to find a good copy. How do you get access to it? It's in a library in Brilliant Diamond And Shining Pearl, the game Legends is a Prequel to. - The World Ends with You: The game features full usage of all the DS's capabilities, including its hardware. Some Reapers—the game's quest-givers—require the player to use only certain types of Pins to progress, such as defeating a noise with only Shout pins, which uses the DS's microphone. The trope comes into full effect when encountering a unique variant of the Pig Noise that sleeps at the beginning of the battle, requiring the player to close the DS and open it again in order to "wake" it up. - The Stanley Parable: One of the achievements requires you to not play the game for five years. Another requires you to leave the game on all day on a Tuesday. - Doom³: - There are two "promotional storage cabinets" in the game (containing powerful weapons), from the fictional company Martian Buddy. To find the code to open these cabinets, you had to visit the actual website www.martianbuddy.com in your browser, which was hinted at by the in-game spam e-mails found in certain PDAs. Today the website is long offline. - Resurrection of Evil contains another Martian Buddy locker, which likewise requires a code. This time, you need to complete an arcade machine mini-game, which will give you the URL to a martianbuddy.com subpage where the code can be found. - The Secret World is so loaded with these that they gave you a working in-game web browser. You may have to look up the ISBNs of fictional books, type a handwritten note in Romanian into Google Translate (unless you already speak it), look up the sheet music to a medieval song, or consult a specific Bible verse. - Achievement Unlocked: In Achievement Unlocked 2, one set of achievements require access to a special coffee-related area, only able to be reached by opening two windows of the game simultaneously, with the second one leading you to the coffee area. - Fez: You have to use a smartphone with a QR code reader to solve certain puzzles. - Karoshi: One level in Karoshi 2 involves putting a music CD into your CD tray so that an in-game radio would push the crate towards you. - Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble had Waggle before waggle was a thing. Instead of controlling Kirby with the gamepad, you had to physically tilt the console to get him to roll in the correct direction (powered by a sensor in the cartridge itself). - This Is the Only Level: One stage requires you to refresh the page or window you're playing the game on in order to open the gate that lets you pass the level. - Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors: The Nintendo DS version has an upside-down Sudoku puzzle that requires you to turn your DS upside down. \|\|Throughout the game, the top screen represents Junpei's perspective and the bottom represents Akane, who is the actual protagonist. Turning the DS indicates that you are temporarily taking control of Junpei so that he can solve the puzzle.\|\| - Shadowmatic: The solution to last level requires the player to scan a QR code that is the solution to the penultimate level, which leads to a website that gives a hint. - System's Twilight: The final puzzle is to reboot the system, which is solved by \|\|quitting the game and then reopening it\|\|. - The Talos Principle: One puzzle presents you with a non-interactive QR code that can only be read by scanning it with an external device, like a smartphone or the like. This gives you \|\|an ASCII code sequence that you need to run through an external converter\|\| in order to make sense of, and then you can finally attempt to solve the puzzle proper. - Merry Gear Solid: Two bosses in the second game — the Milkman and the Postman — are beaten by, respectively, setting your computer clock forward by a week, and dragging a file from the game's directory into the game window. - Metal Gear: - The first Metal Gear Solid has you get a person's contact frequency from the back of the CD case. Additionally, Psycho Mantis hijacks your controller input and thus can read your actions, so you have to move the controller to a different port. - In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, you can "kill" the End by saving the game and then waiting for one real-life week (or, more commonly, fiddling with your system's date). When you load your game, the End will be dead from old age. - Short indie game Moirai has this as the entire premise. Partway through the game, on your way into the mine, you run into a strange man in bloodstained overalls with a knife. You can ask him questions and then choose whether to kill or spare him. \|\|At the end, on your way out of the mine, you run into the same guy — but with clean overalls - who asks you the same questions. As it turns out, the answers from the first guy you met were the answers the last player gave to those questions. The game then asks for your e-mail address to tell you whether the next player kills or spares you.\|\| - Doki Doki Literature Club!: The game's climax — so you have been warned, it's a spoiler to more than just a puzzle... \|\|Monika has trapped you in a room with her indefinitely for nefarious purposes. The game interface isn't allowing you to say or do anything. She won't let you save, load, or start a new game either. You can quit the game, but it will only return to the same scene with Monika when restarted. The only thing you can do to get ahead? Delete Monika's character file from the game directory.\|\| The Updated Re-release only simulates Paradiegetic Gameplay here, because it's available on different platforms and thus \|\|has to have its own simulated file management system that kind of has an in-story explanation\|\| to let you do this. - Save the Date (Paper Dino) will always result in a bad ending unless \|\|you edit one of the game files to make yourself a "hacker"\|\|. - In the Room Escape Game Crimson Room, at one point you find a note with an URL. When visited in your browser, the URL would lead to a page containing the words "Takagism since 1994", hinting at the combination ("1994") to a hidden safe. Today the webpage is long offline, so the game can't be finished without checking a walkthrough (unless you feel like checking all the 10000 possible combinations). - Adobe Flash game I Don't Even Game is a surreal adventure. At one point, you're blocked by a gate, and told to visit a URL to progress. This leads to a separate Flash puzzle, which gives you a very long code you need to enter. The original URL is down, but you can still Google the code to find out what it is. - This Is the Only Level: Several stages require going to the credits or refreshing the page in order to continue. - OFF: In Zone 3, the solution to the controller puzzle cannot be found anywhere within the game. You can give Zacharie the Music Box in exchange for a hint regarding the answer's whereabouts, to which he'll tell you to open the game's folder and look at the Read Me file carefully. The code is listed as a bunch of controller inputs with no context whatsoever. - Zork Zero consists half of Stock Puzzles and half of this as a form of Copy Protection. The solution to puzzle after puzzle was simply to pull a specific bit of trivia out of the game's Feelies and type it in. This was especially disappointing since many of the tasks that seemed to be clever puzzles, like finally getting to play Double Fanucci, had their only solutions printed in the documentation. - Duck Amuck: Closing the Nintendo DS while playing the Licensed Game would result in Daffy shouting at you about a monster. Opening it up would begin a minigame where you close the DS again and use the L and R buttons to help Daffy chase after the beast (who turns out to be Gossamer). Arbitrarily, you could only try this once per day; after that it would go into Sleep Mode as normal. - In Who Framed Roger Rabbit there's a 1-800 number that you could call for assistance from Jessica. There's no telephone in the game though, and you're supposed to actually call the number using a landline or cell to get a prerecorded message containing gameplay advice. The number, of course, now connects to something completely different. - Takeshi's Challenge involves singing Japanese karaoke three times, in addition to a treasure-map puzzle where the player is either supposed to let the game sit out for at least five minutes (but no more than ten) after soaking the map in water or leave the game sitting for an hour to let the map sit in the sun. - Imscared has a segment with you at an empty train station with a ticket machine, a timetable with three timestamps, and a clock displaying your system time. In order to progress, you have to alter your system time to one of the timestamps so that you can get a ticket from the ticket machine. - Escape Tales: Puzzle cards in the game require using a webapp to verify that they're solved. On success, the webapp directs you to a paragraph in the book. - Exit The Game: While most of the game's puzzles make use of the cards, booklet, and various Feelies included in the box, there's almost always one puzzle in each game that somehow makes use of \|\|the box itself\|\|. Other puzzles will often make other clever uses of unexpected parts of the game. - Munchkin features the Munchkin resurrection cookie; eating it after your character dies can bring them back to life and undo any side effects of fighting a monster. Sadly, because you need to actually physically eat a cookie to use it, you can only use it once. Make that use count!	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParadiegeticGameplay
Heaven Seeker - TV Tropes "There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth." The character believes in a very desirable life after death. This may or may not motivate them to do great deeds, including Heroic Sacrifice and becoming The Soulsaver. The motivation can be egocentric, limited to personally getting there. Or it can be altruistic, trying to help others to reach the same ultimate goal. Even if the desire for heaven is completely selfish at heart, the character is likely to behave well: Depending on what faith they follow they might think either that it increases their chances to get there, or simply that it is what The Powers That Be want. See also Enlightened Self-Interest. However, good behavior can have a touch of Blue-and-Orange Morality, since the character's good deeds are likely to be focused on helping people follow whatever path they think leads to paradise, rather than helping people in this life. Depending on the setting, the afterlife might be real and rightly understood, miscomprehended, symbolic, or a pure windmill. If the character starts using abhorrent methods, such as torturing/murdering "heretics", their methods make them a Soul-Saving Crusader if the behavior is justified within the setting and a Knight Templar if it is not. Although some afterlife inspired by the Abrahamic heaven is the most common in western media, this trope can also include a quest for Nirvana or whatever. The core is that the final goal lies after death. Contrast Hell Seeker and Refusing Paradise. And see Utopia Justifies the Means, where the character decides to create heaven, rather than to go there. ## Examples - Izaya Orihara of Durarara!! intends to create a Ragnarok of his own design in order to reach Valhalla. - In Haibane Renmei, \|\|Reki\|\| ultimately confesses to Rakka that this is her motivation for being kind to everyone. It's never confirmed, but it's heavily implied, that the Haibane's "Day of Flight" involves some sort of afterlife. She is one of the few Haibane who can't undergo her Day of Flight due \|\|to being stuck in a Circle of Sin\|\|. - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean and the dubiously canon Over Heaven establish DIO as this. His plan in Stardust Crusaders was only a small part of his ultimate goal of achieving "Heaven." To DIO, Heaven is not the afterlife, but rather a hypothetical state of reality in which everyone is made aware of their fate and live accordingly without worry or concern. DIO developed a complicated process to achieve this state and after his defeat to the Joestars left the task to his protégé, the priest Enrico Pucci. - In Chick Tracts, all good characters are Heaven Seekers. Most of them are also The Soulsavers, capable of Easy Evangelism and easy Epiphany Therapy. - Disturbingly subverted in Sin City where the Serial Killer cannibal Kevin believed that eating people brought him closer to Heaven. - Wanted: The backstory for the supervillain Mr. Rictus is that he dedicated his life to religion in the hopes of being rewarded with Heaven. However, after an accident that caused him to be clinically dead for a minute, he realized that there was no afterlife. Then he became a Straw Nihilist who indulges every sadistic whim he has. - In Pony POV Series, Dark World Applejack becomes this following her redemption from being one of Discord's brainwashed Co-Dragons. She admits she wasn't a religious pony before, but now she has a very good reason to seek it out: her family is waiting there for her, something she now decidedly knows after meeting and having a conversation with Elysium and Apple Bloom's soul. - Shirou in The Hill of Swords can be viewed like this, though the afterlife he's seeking is not the typical Fluffy Cloud Heaven - he's trying to establish himself as a big enough hero to be taken to the Throne Of Heroes upon his death so that he can reunite with Saber there. \|\|The last chapter indicates he succeeded\|\|. - The Bible, with Jesus and most of his followers. - In The Chronicles of Narnia, most good people simply seek ~~Jesus~~ Aslan, and in book 7, they get to heaven as a side effect of that. In the third book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, however, Reepicheep is actively seeking out what turns out to be this afterlife. It's ambiguous as to whether he knows or not that the thing he's seeking is actually heaven. And regarding The Last Battle, C. S. Lewis stated that \|\|Susan\|\| would probably seek out heaven on her own after her family died and went there. - Robert A. Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice centers on a man who believes the Rapture is at hand. He spends the book navigating the bizarre experiences that test his own faith while trying desperately to save the soul of his Pagan love interest before Armageddon kicks in. - In the Gentleman Bastard series, the Jeremite Redeemers are a group of religious fanatics who act as "living sacrifices", fighting to the death against anyone who threatens them. Any Redeemer who falls in battle is considered fast-tracked to the gods' side; consequently, they don't receive any Due to the Dead, since praying on their behalf would be superfluous. - Merkabah Rider: Literally. The Rider's astral form is capable of traveling to Heaven, but he was denied an audience with God. In one episode, the Rider recalls that it was common for astral travelers to give up on the material world because they knew, objectively, that they were going to Heaven. - Mermaid (2011): Merfolk are The Soulless, but most of them consider themselves better off than humans because they live for 300 years and gracefully dissolve into foam instead of rotting. But Lenia hates the thought of her mind and memories disappearing when she dies. She wants a human soul so she can live forever in Heaven. As in the original story, this is part of what leads her to transform into a human. - As a result of his many mistakes as a cat and leader in Warrior Cats, \|\|Onestar\|\| has this shortly before his death \|\|killing his son Darktail\|\|, worrying if he'll end up in Starclan or the cat equivalent of hell. \|\|He ends up in Starclan after his death\|\|. - Dana Gray from the Fringe episode "Stowaway" is both this and a Death Seeker, attempting to go along with other dying people so she can rejoin her husband and children. - Kryten the mechanoid in Red Dwarf is programmed to believe in Silicone Heaven as his eternal reward for serving humans. - Late in Kamen Rider Kiva, Rook (The Brute of the Fangire's rulers) abruptly decides that he wants to go to Heaven and starts doing good deeds. Despite how it may sound, this isn't portrayed as an attempted HeelFace Turn but simply another of the "games" Rook devises to stave off boredom. Either way, the heroes are far from receptive to this attitude, since Rook has committed genocide of several races. - Deconstructed in The Good Place with the character Doug Forcett. After getting high on magic mushrooms as a teenager, Doug accidentally figured out the truth about how the afterlife works and became committed to doing as much good in the world as possible before he dies. Unfortunately, the ridiculous standards of the points system and how it counts every action one commits on Earth has made him terrified of doing anything that could jeopardize his chances of getting into the Good Place, turning him into an Extreme Doormat and "happiness pump" who drives himself to uncomfortable extremes of goodness at the expense of his own happiness and general well-being. \|\|When they learn that even Doug isn't earning enough points to get in - and then that neither has anyone else in 521 years - they realize the system is completely broken.\|\| - Star Trek: This is central to Klingon culture. One gets into Sto-vo-kor, their version of Valhalla, via an honorable death. Dying in the line of duty is good, and there are other paths such as ritual suicide under certain circumstances, but the ideal is to die in glorious battle, taking many enemies along in the process. Thus Klingons seek any and all chances to fight, hoping for a good battle to be the one that finally gets them. - In Clawfinger's "Final Stand", the singer firmly believes in an unspecified religion and dreams of dying a noble death so he'll get to Paradise quickly. See the quotes page. - "Last Kiss" by the Cavaliers has a man saying he has to be good, so he can be in Heaven with his deceased girlfriend. - Parodied in Swedish band Wilmer X's song "Have You Seen My Angel?" where the singer's girlfriend dies in a motorcycle accident and he vows to live the best life he possibly can to eventually join her in heaven ... Until he finds out that she was an absolutely awful person behind his back, and calmly decides to "drink, fight and live like a pig" so he can join her in Hell instead. - All recent editions of Dungeons & Dragons (probably almost all the way back to the first edition) are designed so that a Good player character can easily be designed to desire a heroic death and subsequent eternal reward in paradise. Scarred Lands even has a holy spell that makes this inevitable: The spell, called "Hero's Death", makes the hero more powerful, but will inevitably kill him at the end of the duration if he's not already dead by then. The spell can only be cast on a Good person who fully comprehends that it will mean his death as well as making resurrection impossible. The only benefit for the hero is that his last stand will secure his place in Paradise. - In Vampire: The Masquerade, the Kindred who sought Golconda were kinda this. Since they are already dead and eternally damned, they cannot really go to any paradise after their final death (not that anything like that is known to exist in this Crapsack World, anyway), but Golconda was said to be a state of eternal bliss wherein the vampire is freed of most of their curses. - The culture of Amonkhet in Magic: The Gathering. The entire society is built around pursuing a place of honour in the afterlife - most citizens strive to complete the Five Trials to earn a favoured position there, while a few are kept back by one of the gods to serve as a vizier (with an honoured death as the ultimate reward). Any who aren't this trope are cast out into the desert, which is a blasted wasteland where even death is no release. \|\|The discovery that their entire belief system was a Path of Inspiration set up to make a self-maintaining super-zombie factory for Nicol Bolas was...somewhat hard on them.\|\| - Before the creation of the world of The Order of the Stick, a bet made between the Northern gods Loki and his daughter Hel granted the latter domain over the souls of all dwarves who die without honour, while all others get sent to the afterlife associated with their respective god (usually Thor). As a result, dwarven society was built around the idea that dying with honour was paramount, to the point of Deliberate Values Dissonance with the other races. - This is the reason why Stan from American Dad! ruins the life of his atheist best friend (thinking that if his life becomes miserable enough he will turn to Christianity); they had a lot in common and Stan thought that him being an atheist would prevent him going to heaven, so they wouldn't be able to spend eternity together. - In Episode 92 of Kaeloo, Stumpy challenges Death so he can go to Paradise, which Kaeloo tells him is full of his Trademark Favorite Food, acorns. \|\|In the end, he commits suicide to get there, but since suicide is a sin, he winds up in Hell.\|\| - In the Samurai Jack episode "Jack and the Lava Monster", the titular monster is actually a viking warrior who was cursed by Aku and sealed inside a mountain, denying him death in battle and entry into Valhalla with the rest of his people. He goads Jack into fighting him so he can finally be defeated honorably and pass on. - Mother Teresa. Some consider her a saint whose deeds were great regardless of whether her faith was correct or not, while others have reported that she made no secret that she considered the souls of those she helped the only important thing and encouraged poor people to embrace their poverty. She felt that suffering would bring people closer to Jesus. - Pretty much all Christians and Muslims want themselves and everyone else to go to Heaven. This is quite unproblematic if you believe that only Heaven is an actual place while Hell is the absence of God, and if you believe that God will let all decent people into Heaven whether they are Christian/Muslim or not. It becomes more problematic if you believe for example that only Christians go to Heaven while everyone else will suffer forever in Hell. Then, of course, you think that people ought to know what's at stake and make an informed decision about their eternal destiny, then of course you don't "hide your light under a bushel". Instead, you want to make sure that everyone changes their beliefs and way of life so that they will think, feel, believe and act in the same ways as you do, so they can go to Heaven with you instead of suffering forever for not being like you. Of course, it's best to figure out how to evangelize without offending and alienating half the people you interact with. Though realistically, you can't avoid offending everybody except by keeping your mouth shut... which is like having the cure to cancer and not telling people about it because some people won't believe you. - Of course, adherents of other religions want to go to Heaven as well. Those who believe in the ancient Norse Pantheon (the one with Odin and Thor, and yes, there are several religious organizations for people who follow that faith) have Valhalla, and so on. - Averted in many forms of Buddhism: they believe that Heaven and Hell exist, but are dead ends. Going to Heaven is nice, but will use up your good karma and eventually you will reincarnate anyway. Only Nirvana gives lasting salvation. - In the early days of Christianity, there was a sect that would threaten passersby with murder... unless said passersby would kill them. The idea was that Heaven is the only place worth being, but suicide's a sin (they didn't think murder threats were though, apparently). - The Greek Orthodox saint Demetrius the Neomartyr was definitely one of these. Once a Christian barber living in Tripoli (the Greek city, not the Libyan capital) in the times of the Ottoman Empire, he converted to Islam for some time, but then recanted, fell into a deep depression, and decided that he could only atone via martyrdom. The abbot of a monastery he was living in tried to dissuade him, but to no avail. From then on, Demetrius did all he could to pretty much shout at the Muslim Ottoman locals "I'm a Christian! I apostatized from Islam! Execute me already, please!" A Turkish friend he had in the local police even tried to falsify his confession to a Tripoli judge, only for Demetrius to realize it and insist that he wanted to die and go to Heaven. He finally got his wish and was beheaded.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParadiseSeeker
Paradise Planet - TV Tropes Sometimes the most important planet that you conquer is the one you can relax on after everything. Hoshi: It's a beautiful day. Risian: [laughs] You've obviously never been to Risa before. Hoshi: How could you tell? Risian: Every day is beautiful here. A planet near-universally regarded as an ideal place to live and a beautiful place to visit: fresh air, bountiful soil, friendly people, vibrant culture and a peaceful atmosphere, this is a close to heaven as you're likely to find in a Sci-Fi setting without getting a Lotus-Eater Machine or an Artificial Afterlife involved, to the point that it can qualify as The Promised Land if it's the end destination of the story. A key aspect of these worlds is natural beauty, so City Planets are usually not eligible for consideration, as are desert planets. Other than that, the biomes of Paradise Worlds are only limited by the imagination: they can be grassland, forest, ocean, natural or terraformed or some alien combination of the above. Expect to see a Shining City with Crystal Spires and Togas if urban settings feature alongside nature; if it's more sparsely populated, expect to see Arcadia, or even the Ghibli Hills. If enough tourists come to visit and enough vice is on offer, this may also be classified as a Pleasure Planet. Be warned, however: one of these may very well turn out to be a Crapsaccharine World. At other times, though, there may be no downsides at all, and this planet might be every bit the paradise it seems to be, enough to qualify as a Utopia. All the same, best hope nobody tries to blow it up... Compare and contrast Death World. ## Examples: - Wonder Woman Vol 1: Desira's Venus is a planetary paradise, with abundant riches, lush forests and a population that will willingly deliver themselves to their luxurious prison should they break the law somehow. When Desira offers to take some earth criminals in her prison their viciousness, escape and attempt to take over surprise her and her people, and Diana ends up taking them back to earth for their incarceration. - In the Teen Titans (2003) fanfic Transition, Jinx and Ravens storyline involves being stranded on one of these: lush, verdant and thoroughly idyllic, the only problem is the fact that the planet is completely deserted... or so it appears. - Marvel Cinematic Universe: - "The Garden"/ Planet 0259-S, featured in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. An idyllic Arcadia-style paradise, Thanos's farm is the only settlement on the whole planet. - Ego's planet in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. A peaceful world of lush green cliffs, tranquil waterfalls and strange multicolored bubbles that float through the air, the only building is Ego's vast garden palace. \|\|As it turns out, the planet is actually Ego's real body, and it's very much a Crapsaccharine World given Ego's secret plans to assimilate the universe. It becomes more barren and Death World-like the angrier he gets.\|\| - Star Trek: Insurrection takes place on one of these, an unblemished forest planet where the only community is agrarian in nature, and even that looks uncannily pristine. \|\|Also, the fact that its solar system is essentially an active source of the Fountain of Youth only makes it more desirable\|\|. Even the posters refer to it as "paradise." - Star Wars features a few of these: - Alderaan was largely proclaimed to be one of these before the Empire blew it up in A New Hope. Works such as The Illustrated Star Wars Universe confirm this, portraying it as a mixture of lush grasslands and spectacular mountain ranges, complete with gleaming eco-friendly cities and a refined, diplomatic culture. - The forest moon of Endor appears to be one of these, particularly by the end of Return of the Jedi, consisting mainly of tranquil forests and villages of cuddly Ewoks. However, The Illustrated Star Wars Universe reveals that it's not without its share of extremely dangerous wildlife, and the forests aren't global in fact, a sizable desert exists on the planet. - Naboo of The Phantom Menace is presented as being rich in natural beauty, featuring lush swamps, rolling grasslands, deep mysterious oceans, picturesque lake districts and a vast array of fascinating wildlife. For good measure, the cities of both the Naboo and the Gungans are prime sources of Scenery Porn, the former emphasizing grand stucco domes and wide sunlit boulevards, the latter making use of underwater structures made of luminescent bubbles. - Sorgan of The Mandalorian is a a remote and very undeveloped Arcadia forest world. So much so it does not have a spaceport anything that can be considered a major urban center. It's mostly beneath notice of even criminals and people seem to like it there. - Isaac Asimov and Janet Asimov's Norby and the Queen's Necklace: In one time-track, this planet is named I-13 and is barren, tyrannical, and hostile to the protagonists. In the other time-track (the "true" timeline), the planet is well-terraformed, beautiful, with many children playing and a museum that is friendly to all visitors, even those illegal time travellers. - The planet Thrrrppp from Colony. Of all the planets found by the Willflower, it's the only one that offers the colonists a perfect chance for long-term survival: lush, hospitable and inviting, it has everything needed to house and rebuild the human race. Apart from the name bestowed upon it by the scuzzy teenage captain, the only downside is that the planet completely unreachable thanks to the current state of the Willflower. \|\|The story ends with the colonists finally reaching it.\|\| - In Dune, House Atreides' home planet of Caladan is considered one of these. An ocean world, it offers a vast stock of natural beauty and happy memories for Paul; it also serves as an effective contrast to the villainous House Harkonnen's home world of Giedi Prime. However, Paul later claims the habitability of Caladan made House Atreides complacent and unprepared for the betrayals they'd face on Arrakis. - As with canon, Star Wars Legends has several: - Bimmisaari; a temperate jungle world known for its mobile plantlife, it's inhabited by the Bimms, a pacifistic race of small, furry humanoids with a strong emphasis on preserving the natural environment of their world. All told, the only real downside of the place is the fact that Bimms are also a Proud Merchant Race who consider bargaining a fine art, and their insistence on haggling over every purchase can make them a frustrating to deal with. - Chandrila, the home world of Mon Mothma. A peaceful rural world often compared to Alderaan, even its small cities are known for their large gardens and state parks; plus, the culture has a particular focus on the right to debate political opinions without fear of reprisal. - Drall, a quiet world of meadows and forests found in the Corellian System. Home to another race of small furry beings this time the rodent-like Drall it's known for a very lawful, peaceful society; in fact, it's so peaceful that very little of note happened until Anakin Solo and Centerpoint Station arrived on its doorstep. - Ithor. Ithorians are commonly known as a highly spiritual people with strong traditions of pacifism and environmental preservation, and their planet reflects this: having recognized the negative impact of permanent settlements, they now live in vast floating cities high above Ithor's rainforests. Given the beauty of the landscape and the welcoming culture of the natives, the planet has become a very popular tourist destination, particularly for honeymooners. - Subverted in the case of Khomm; a grassland planet of plains and hills, it doesn't experience storms or seasonal changes, and the cities are uniformly clean, efficient, and peaceful. However, Khommites prize conformity and continuity above all else, and innovation is a foreign concept to most of this cloned species. As a result, outsiders find Khomm unbearably boring. - Lao-Mon AKA Sh'shuun is a lush jungle world that's remained pristine despite being home to a fairly advanced civilization. Of course, given that said civilization belongs to the Shi'ido, a notoriously shy race of shapeshifters, it's perhaps no surprise that they've done their best to avoid leaving their mark on the environment for fear of discovery. Indeed, the only reason why Lao-Mon hasn't been settled is because of its remoteness... and the fact that the Shi'ido are in the habit of faking monster attacks to get rid of unwanted guests. - Starship Troopers has an unusual example with Sanctuary, the Terran Federation's hidden backup homeworld. It's very Earthlike, but its' sun produces less radiation than Sol so the native life has had fewer opportunities to mutate and simply cannot compete with imported Earth organisms. On the plus side, that means less skin cancer for the colonists. - Alien Worlds (2020): Eden is a planet ideal for life, warmed by a pair of binary stars that foster the growth of lush forests that in turn fill the air with oxygen, allowing for the existence of extremely varied and energetic animal life. However, this also makes Eden a dangerous place, as this riotous growth of living beings means that its forests are also filled with deadly predators and parasites. - Doctor Who: - The Eye Of Orion, as featured in "The Five Doctors"; the Arcadia-style scenery is pleasant enough, but the real draw of the planet is the fact that it's constantly bombarded with positive ions, encouraging a sense of peace and relaxation in visitors. Consequently, it's known as one of the most tranquil places in the universe. - New Earth, in the episode of the same name; one of the many worlds humans adopted following the destruction of Earth in the year Five Billion, it's a mixture of gleaming hyper-advanced cities and rolling meadows of Applegrass. \|\|The next time we visit it, a virus has wiped out most of the population, leaving only the inhabitants of New New York's undercity and motorway.\|\| - In "Utopia", the eponymous world is said to be one of these: supposedly a paradise where humanity can somehow survive the end of the universe, it's said that "the skies are made of diamonds." As such, everyone with the means to do so is heading there, aided by a signal sent by the Science Foundation to lead humanity to salvation. \|\|And then it turns out that the signal leads to just another dead world. In desperation, the survivors resort to desperate attempts to keep themselves alive, and by the time the Master visits, "Utopia" has become a Nightmarish Factory where human beings are converted into the Toclafane.\|\| - Farscape: The Royal Planet. The capital world of the Sebacean Breakaway Colonies, it's a beautiful world of gleaming cities, elegant gardens and scenic cliffs, along with a great deal of bars and clubs; as Rygel puts it, the inhabitants enjoy their freedom from the Peacekeepers a little too much. Even Crichton considers it a wonderful place... up until he falls foul of the politics and ends up as a pawn in the Succession Crisis. - Firefly: Many of the wealthy central planets appear to be this trope (at least on the surface); generally, the more similar a planet's environment is to Earth, the more desirable that planet is. - Red Dwarf: In "Rimmerworld", Rimmer manages to create one of these with some scavenged terraforming rockets, transforming a barren desert world into a verdant garden paradise. He immediately acknowledges that the newly-dubbed Rimmerworld would be the perfect place for him to live until the Starbug crew pick him up, except for the lack of female company... paving the way for him to screw the whole thing up with a very ill-advised attempt at cloning. - Star Trek: - The Twilight Zone (1985): In "The Wall", Major Alex McAndrews travels through the Gate and discovers that it leads to a peaceful, agrarian society. Its leader Baret tells him that there is no hatred, poverty or violence, no possessions to steal, no religion save the sancity of life and no law save kindness to one another. Captain Henry Kincaid compares it to Heaven and the Garden of Eden. 2nd Lieutenant Emilio Perez, who specializes in astronavigation, has determined that it is nowhere near Earth. - The Vietnamese Cao Dai religion believes that there are 72 inhabited planets (and that Earth is ranked 68th); presumably, planets in the top ten would be close to Paradise Planet status. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978) mentions the planet Bethselamin has been renowned for its natural beauty, drawing in millions of tourists every year. Unfortunately, all this tourist activity has had a negative effect on the local environment over the years; by now, the local government is so concerned over the cumulative erosion of so many tourists every year, that any net imbalance between the amount a visitor eats and excretes while planetside is surgically removed from the visitor's body weight when they leave. In other words, any time you go to the toilet there, it is vitally important to get a receipt. - Warhammer 40,000 features the Trope Namer: also known as Garden Worlds or Pleasure Worlds, planets classified as Paradise Worlds are set aside to pamper the Imperium's elite as far away from the front lines as possible. A key aspect of these planets is that, though they feature great sources of art, music, gourmet food and and entertainment, they also exhibit remarkable natural beauty that the local governments take great pains to preserve. Of course, given the nature of the overall setting, it's not unknown for Slaaneshi cults to spring up on Paradise Worlds... - Planet Gaia from Freelancer is a tropical paradise a rich, green world of plants and animals the likes of which have not been found anywhere else in the Sirius Sector, with an environment compared to that of Earth 200 million years ago. It is currently under the control of Cambridge Research Institute, which seeks to create a genetic catalogue of all Gaia's native species, though a small number of tourist visas are available to guests of the nearby Orbital Luxury Liner Shetland. Unfortunately, rumors of the aphrodisiac qualities of certain animals have generated a prevalent poaching industry, and Gaia's tourism industry can sometimes create misplaced sympathy for the Gaian Eco Terrorists. - Knights of the Old Republic - Dantooine; as the first world you visit after leaving Taris, its rolling grasslands and Arcadia-style farms serve as an effective contrast to the urban decay of the opening stages of the game. For good measure, there's a Jedi enclave here, making Dantooine something of an island of safety in the increasingly dangerous galaxy. However, there's still a few stings in the tail: Mandalorian raiders are menacing the farms, a rogue Jedi has turned the Kath hounds hostile, and it's not unknown for feuds between farmers to turn violent. \|\|The Sith attack the place halfway through the game, destroying the enclave and leaving most of the farms in shambles.\|\| - Manaan, a stunningly beautiful ocean world; thanks to the native Selkath's environmentalism, it's been kept in pristine condition, and the only settlement above water is Ahto City. Manaan is also the galaxy's only source of Kolto, a powerful healing agent, allowing the Selkath to not only remain neutral in the war between the Republic and the Sith but also enforce a very strict Truce Zone on the planet. It's possible to screw all this up by poisoning the source of the Kolto. It also gets screwed over in canon; Manaan was a Terminally Dependent Society as a result of their kolto exports and once the more potent alternative bacta became mainstream their petition to join The Republic was ignored and their civilization collapsed. By the time of The Empire, they were reduced to a bunch of primal savages that were easily enslaved by Darth Sidious. - According to Carth, Telos IV used to be one of these... before the Sith bombed it barren. During the events of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, reconstruction efforts are underway and Ithorian ecologists have already begun rebuilding its natural beauty despite obstruction from Czerka Corp. Depending on who you side with, Telos can ultimately be reduced to a machine world, or it can be restored to its former glory. - Mass Effect: - Thee human colony of Eden Prime was one of these, a peaceable Arcadia where nothing much happened until a Prothean beacon was unearthed by an archaeological dig. By the time you get there, it's been attacked and ruined by Saren. - The same goes for Elysium, being described as an "alpine paradise" perfect for humans. Unfortunately, it's also seen its share of pirate attacks over the years and can actually form the basis of Commander Shepard's past if the "War Hero" backstory is chosen. - Bekenstein, a human colony in a more established region of Citadel Space; known for its pleasant climate, good weather and panoramic vistas, it rose to prominence as a manufacturer for the luxury goods market, and since then has become the planetary equivalent of a gated community: exclusive, expensive, and very, very white collar. It's also extremely ruthless as well, and some of the billionaires that live here are engaged in some rather shady business hence why you and Kasumi attempt to burglarize one of them. - Horizon, yet another human colony world, features verdant forests, benign microorganisms, abundant water, and fertile soil making it very attractive for pioneers hoping to escape from the strictures of Citadel Space. Unfortunately, it's exposed to the same dangers as every other human colony outside Citadel governance: it's attacked by the Collectors in Mass Effect 2 and almost depopulated. In Mass Effect 3, it becomes quite well-known as the site of Sanctuary, a facility built to house refugees fleeing the Reapers... \|\|up until it's revealed that the whole thing is a Cerberus-run research facility, and anyone hoping to find shelter at Sanctuary ended up being funneled into Henry Lawson's experiments.\|\| - Though the player doesn't land on it, Nevos is a popular tourist destination due to being largely undeveloped, which also makes it a popular spot for corporate research of questionable legality. - In Mass Effect: Andromeda Habitat 7, which was originally meant to be the human homeworld, was supposed to be a tropical paradise perfect for human civilization. However, by the time the human colonists arrive 600 years later, the planet's ecosystem and atmosphere have been destroyed, almost beyond repair. The other "Golden Worlds" sought by other colonists fared slightly better or worse, depending on the example. - Aya is the largest city of the angara race, and the only safe place they have left after the Kett invaded most of their worlds and the Scourge destroyed the rest. It's a lush world with beautiful landscape, whose population is determined by a regular lottery; lottery winners are allowed to live on Aya for a set time, before they must leave and allow another angara to take their place to live in relative peace. It's so important to them that several angara give up their spots so that humans and other races from the Milky Way can live on angara and create peaceful relations, knowing that they may never get another chance. - The main port and trading post on the planet Elaaden (a harsh desert world with lethal levels of heat where the krogan have settled) is named Paradise. When asked about it, a krogan says "Paradise is different for a krogan." - Privateer 2: The Darkening: - Bex is known as a peaceful, laid-back Arcadia with little in the way of conflict, and renowned for producing some of the best liquors in the Tri-System. In fact, the only real downside to this place is that it's a spawning ground for some rather bizarre fringe religions. For this reason, it's considered kind of dull by thrill-seeking privateer types, but the trade is well worthwhile. - Janus IV is a tropical paradise: warm, verdant, sunny, and featuring some of the most opulent architecture in the galaxy, it's made possible only through terraforming. Known as "the playpen of the gods" for the fact that it's home to numerous politicians, executives, celebrities and crime lords, it's unfortunately also the home of the Tri-System's most expensive real estate. Living here costs a mint, and visitors are advised to be very careful about their purchases, as the debt collection agencies are authorized to sell the organs of anyone unable to pay up. - No Man's Sky has a category of planets explicitly called this. They're often the safest of all planet types, with next to no Sentinels, a lack of harmful plants or animals, and very little environmental hazards. They also tend to be full of Scenery Porn, making them perfect to make cool bases on or just wander around admiring the surroundings. - Star Ocean: Till the End of Time begins on Hyda IV, which is described as being abundant in natural beauty and lacking dangerous animals. The protagonist is on a family vacation on the planet's largest resort. - Stellaris - Gaia worlds are 100% inhabitable to all species: normally species only find their own homeworlds and megastructures to be that inhabitable, and even other planets of the same class are only 80%. Unfortunately, Gaia worlds are also incredibly rare and if a Holy Guardians Fallen Empire spawns in the galaxy, they designate four Gaia worlds as holy planets and get very angry if another empire colonizes them. - By contrast, Rogue Servitors make their planets perfectly hospitable to their organic charges in order to ensure maximum happiness. The zenith of this goal is the Organic Paradise, an AI-controlled biome specifically designed to satisfy all the needs and wants a sapient being could ever possess... except for self-determination. - Any non-gestalt empire can create "Resort Worlds" that have massive immigration pull and increase amenities throughout the empire but can't have districts, thus at least half the population tends to be unemployed.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParadisePlanet
Paranoiac - TV Tropes Paranoiac may refer to: If an internal link led you here, please change it to point to the specific article. Thanks!	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Paranoiac
Parachute Petticoat - TV Tropes Falling is a very unladylike activity on the whole. There's lots of tumbling and screaming, your hair and clothes get ruined, and there's the danger people below may see your underwear. This trope offers an alternative for the more ladylike and feminine of tumblers, especially Princess characters with a Pimped-Out Dress. Basically, a character's dress or skirt flares out in mid-air, forming a parachute shape and somehow slowing their descent. The thicker and more layered the material the better. Don't worry about terminal velocities and drag coefficients (see Puny Parachute); the laws of physics tend to give way to the opportunity to see a slightly comical petticoat exposure. Incredibly, this trope is somewhat a Truth in Television. Hoop skirts (crinolines) did have a tendency to catch airstream and act like a drogue chute. There are cases of women on piers that were swept up by a gust of wind and carried out to sea. It was also a bad idea to hang around cliffs or tall buildings in this sort of contraption. Often a form of Improvised Parachute, but just as often it's accidental. Compare Parasol Parachute (often found on similar sorts of characters). ## Examples: - Played with in Macross Delta. The members of Walkure routinely end up falling, particularly during the final battle. Their fancy idol outfits do a lot to break their fall long enough for rescue to arrive......because their skirts are rigged with tiny thrusters that function as an emergency parachute. It creates the illusion of this trope since the devices are hidden underneath and flare the skirts out further. - This happens to Miyuki when she is falling in the second part of Miyuki-chan in Wonderland. Miyuki's skirt billows out like a parachute after she holds it down, causing her to rock back and forth for a few moments before falling fast again. - Zia in the The Mysterious Cities of Gold episode, "Back To Barcelona Part 2". Her dress spreads out briefly when she drops down from a tree. - Cosmo◊ in Sonic X is a no brainer. Because she is a plant, this makes it a unique one. - Jet Dream: In one story, Marlene's dress billows out into a "Tunic Chute" to save her from falling off a cliff to her death. Technically not "improvised," but a piece of spy gear designed for the purpose. It's a pretty goofy design, though, and one of the less "ladylike" examples, as just about any angle other than that chosen by the artist would give Marlene "full exposure." See Marlene's Tunic Chute in all its glory◊. - A Lilo & Stitch comic from Disney Adventures' Comic Zone has the characters playing with "jump jelly," goop that acts as a super-trampoline if charged with electricity. When Pleakley tries it, he wears one of Nani's dresses as a safety precaution. Stitch turns the electricity up and Pleakley bounces extra-high, using the dress as a parachute to float back down with. - Suske en Wiske: In the story "De Kaartendans", this happens to Wiske when she dresses up in an 18th-century dress, but accidentally trips over it and tumbles out the window. She makes a safe landing outside, and even remarks that this must be how the parachute was originally invented. - The falling scene as Alice falls down the rabbit hole as her dress balloons out like a parachute which causes her to float in Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland (seen here). This trope is used to explain why she falls slowly enough to look around her and ruminate on the whole situation, which in the book goes unexplained. - It was also used for Brooke Shields's guest appearance on The Muppet Show where she sang as Alice falling down the rabbit hole. - It also happened in the 1988 Burbank Films Australia version. - In Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas, Belle's dress balloons out for a very brief moment to slow her descent during "Stories". That said, Belle's dress acting as a parachute was only part of a storybook-like sequence and Belle does not actually float down with her dress in the movie's main story. - In Walt Disney's Peter Pan, Wendy Darling's blue nightgown balloons out for a moment despite having no petticoats as she lands on the Big Ben's hand during "You Can Fly"!. - During the boxing match at the end of The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin, one of the fighters is slammed into the crowd with such force that one of the saloon girls is catapulted skyward, only to drift back down. (Then again, since she was dancing the cancan earlier, we'd already seen her petti's...). Also, an animated sequence of Arabella Flagg lands safely after getting off the boat. - Happens in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, when the Baroness is launched into the air from Chitty's Ejection Seat with her dress ballooning out to slow down her fall. It only stops being a parachute when her husband shoots her dress. - In Angels and Demons, Robert Langdon has to bail out of a helicopter over Rome and uses his sport coat to slow himself enough to not die by landing in the nearby river. - One of the reasons Mistborn avoid dresses is the tendency to do this when they're Roof Hopping. - Happens in the novel Superfolks by Robert Mayer, with the added revelation that the lady in question wasn't wearing underwear. - In the first episode of Jack of All Trades, Jack rescues President Jefferson's niece from a French fort in Canada. To escape the fort, Jack and the girl jump off a high cliff. They are saved because Jack grabs on to her feet and her dress billows out to form a parachute showing her bloomers(Jack also gets an excellent view of her petticoats.) - Classical Mythology: Heracles raided the kingdom of Oechalia to seek revenge for King Eurytus refusing to give him his daughter Princess Iole even after he won an Engagement Challenge. After Heracles killed her father and brothers, Iole tried to escape by jumping from the city wall. Her dress acted as a parachute so she landed safely. Alas, Heracles caught up to her and claimed her as a concubine. - Alice of American McGee's Alice uses her dress as a parachute to ride steam. - And in the sequel, three of her four possible jumps involve this trope as a way to cross long distances. - Rachel Alucard in BlazBlue. Ironically, although she wields an umbrella (a cat which turns into one, no less), she doesn't often use a Parasol Parachute, except in her intro poses and a special animation if you hold the strong attack button in the air (there's basically no advantage to using it, though, so you'll rarely ever see it.) - Princess Peach◊ in Super Mario Bros. 2 uses this to hover in the air and make long jumps, with it since becoming a signature ability of the character that has appeared regularly, most notably in Super Mario 3D World (where she can do it even without a dress) and the Super Smash Bros. series. In the latter, it's implied that this is a magic ability (note the sparklies around her dress when she does it). Other times, she just uses her parasol. - Toadette's "Super Crown" which transforms her into a Princess Peach lookalike named Peachette in New Super Mario Bros. U can use this to slow and control descents after being hit up. - In Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope, while not a gameplay feature, Peach's dress does this again in the cut-scene after uncorking Terra Flora's water volcano. - In Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga \|\|after the Mario Bros. trick Bowletta by having Luigi use a spare dress of Princess Peach to disguise himself as her, after being kidnapped to her airborne Koopa Cruiser, Luigi makes his escape by using the dress as a parachute.\|\| - Beatrice can pull this maneuver off in Umineko: Golden Fantasia, making it handy for avoiding further punishment. - Alice parachutes with her dress in Disney Infinity. - This happens to Alice in the Game Boy Color game Alice in Wonderland and in the Nintendo 3DS game Disney Magical World 2. - This happens in the Game Boy Advance game Disney Princess to 4 princesses Snow White, Belle, Aurora (as Briar Rose), and Cinderella after they drop down from a distance. - Electric Wonderland: Shroomy's dress acts as one after she jumps out of a window in "The Search For Parker," but it collapses after Aerynn grabs her. - In the Classic Disney Short "Plane Crazy", Minnie Mouse's bloomers deploy like a parachute. - It happened to Ortensia in the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit short "Oh What a Knight". - Baby Piggy in Muppet Babies (1984), as she told her version of the Lewis Carroll story, had this happen to her own Alice character, her dress taking a parachute-like means as she fell down a rabbit-, er, I mean tadpole-hole. - In Jem, one of the Misfits videos "Lovesick" had Pizzazz do a parachute petticoat. - At the end of the Kim Possible half-episode "Rufus in Show" Kim presses a button so her spy suit becomes a dress to serve this function, and is motorized compared to all the others. - Rugrats had Chuckie and Phil try this while wearing dresses for the first time. It actually worked for a second. - The Backyardigans, in the episode Breakout!, Uniqua and Tasha as the princesses trying to escape from the castle, in one part, the two fly out of a ceiling window and they deploy their dresses as parachutes the float down safely. - Animaniacs did this is one Mindy & Buttons cartoon which spoofed Alice in Wonderland. - A male variation: the Looney Tunes short "Injun Trouble" has Sloppy Moe's suspenders serving as a parachute. - This happens in some Terrytoons shorts. - This happens to Olive Oyl while wearing a wedding dress in an episode of Popeye & Son. - Princess Gwendolyn from Gawayn in "The Way We Used To Be, Part 1". After a horse pulling a cart comes to a halt, she, Sir Roderick, Elspeth, William, and Xiao Long are launched into the air. Princess Gwendolyn's dress gets an updraft, revealing her pink undies and breaking her fall before she slowly descends safely. - In The Twisted Talesof Felix The Cat episode, "Felix Breaks The Bank" when Candy is falling quickly, she comes to an abrupt stop for a moment, as a sudden draft up her skirt causes it to billow like a parachute. She manages to keep her skirt from rising any higher, as she looks at the camera and audience, giggles coyly and descends slowly, and safely. - Molly Coddle in the Bump in the Night episode, "Party Poopers". While she and Mr. Bumpy are falling, her dress suddenly puffs up and becomes longer, as Mr. Bumpy holds on to her leg and they descend, and land, safely. - This happens to Alice in the 1981-1982 Russian animated shorts when she falls down the rabbit hole and when she jumps downstairs from the Looking Glass. - The Alice in Hanna-Barbera's 1966 special Alice In Wonderland, or: What's a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This? effects this even though she's in a dress a normal little girl in 1966 would wear. Here she's holding her skirt and slip down as she slowly descends the rabbit hole, only billowing up from the rear. - In the Pucca, episode "Chef-Napped!", when Pucca and Garu are falling down a trap door, Pucca's dress billows like a parachute, causing her to float safely. - Beauty and the Beast (1934) has a variant where the pajama-clad little girl has her descent slowed down by having her dropseat function as a parachute, exposing her bottom in the process. - Elena of Avalor In the episode "Heart of the Jaguar" Princess Isabel was shrunken by her cowardice and fell through a trap hole set by the jaguar when attempting to trade the heart of the jaguar for the crown jewel, her skirt acts as a parachute during the fall, slowing her descent. - Mickey and the Roadster Racers In the episode "Sittin' Kitty", when Minnie and Daisy are thrown off the branch and sent falling, Minnie uses her skirt as a parachute. - The cage crinoline of the mid-1850s and the 1860s. Prior to the crinoline, big skirts were supported by several layers of petticoats, which were hot and heavy for the wearer and would become floppy over time. The crinoline would alleviate these problems, yet the caveat would be that the skirts would be picked up by heavy winds due to the lightweightedness, exposing their bloomers, and the wide, sturdy frame of the cage would be a hassle for narrow doorways. - Widely believed to have saved Sarah Ann Henley's life. On 8 May 1885, Henley attempted to commit suicide by jumping off the deck of the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, and thanks to a combination of strong updrafts of wind slowing her fall, as well as the soft silt and sand on the shore exposed by low tide, she survived the fall of over 75 metres from the bridge to the Bristol side of the River Avon.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParachutePetticoat
Paranoia Gambit - TV Tropes Jason's finest 12 hours. "The more employees you have, the more you have to worry about them. Deliver some vague threats and a few hundred bucks to a security guard. If he's honest he'll tell his boss, who then wonders who wasn't * so honest. For the cost of a nice dinner, you can get a whole security team canned."* Alice tells Bob that she will "get him". Bob freaks out and goes to great lengths to avoid falling victim to her plans. In the end, it turns out that Alice wasn't going to do anything to him and that her whole plan was to just sit back and let his paranoia make him do stupid things to himself. A variation commonly occurs where the gambit is not intentional, and Alice admits that she actually was going to do something to him, but everything Bob did to himself was much better than what she had planned. This is usually a case of Restrained Revenge, although it can also be a practical joke with no prior provocation. It may overlap with Self-Fulfilling Prophecy when paranoia of a specific event (even if it's unlikely) causes said event to occur. The nastier versions may overlap with Fright Deathtrap. Since it relies on the mark's paranoia, it resembles a Batman Gambit. Compare Confound Them with Kindness, where Alice acts nicely towards Bob after the fact to confuse him. Often this relies on making something innocent look like Shmuck Bait. Also compare Kansas City Shuffle, where the target's attempts to outmaneuver a con set him up for the real con. Also #20 of The Thirty-Six Stratagems. Compare and contrast with Properly Paranoid and Improperly Paranoid. ## Examples: <!—index—> <!—/index—> - Non-Stop: The bad guy frames Marks as the hijacker and counts on him unwittingly acting like he is hijacking the plane \|\|because he wants to expose the incompetence of the air marshals and American security in general. It works better than expected when the passengers turn on him\|\|. - In The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe, the head of the French secret service pulls one of these on his Starscream number two, by convincing him that a completely random stranger, the titular blond, is in fact a top agent who will 'deal with him'. This causes the number two to get increasingly paranoid, and eventually results in \|\|him dying\|\|. - The same plot device is the basis of the American remake The Man with One Red Shoe, between the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and his ambitious, backstabbing subordinate. - In Cricket, since one of the first things batsmen are taught is "know exactly where every fielder is at all times", some bowlers and captains will occasionally direct fielders to move by small amounts, not because the movement puts them in a more effective position, but simply to create doubt in the batsman's mind and make him think the bowler has some cunning plan. - In the National Football League, the intent of pre-snap movement by the defense is to cause this in the opposing quarterback. Unlike the offense who must remain "set" for a full second prior to snapping the ball (with the exception of one legal "man in motion" who can be moving as long as it isn't toward the line of scrimmage), defenders can move however they please. Most often, the "back seven" (a combination of linebackers, corners, and safeties) will creep closer to the line of scrimmage, potentially tricking the quarterback into thinking they're going to blitz. If successful, the QB may adjust his protections to defenders who aren't actually blitzing, allowing the actual pass rushers to get through. They may also trick the QB into throwing the ball to an earlier, typically less aggressive read, trying to get it out of his hands more quickly to avoid a sack. Peyton Manning was one of the all time greats at avoiding this, reading the defense before the snap (even if they tried to move and throw him off) then targeting the defense's weak spot. - Paranoia: Friend Gamemaster is encouraged to occasionally roll dice for no particular reason and smirk, or pass a note to a PC that just says "Act like this note says something important". (Or better yet, "Roll _____ and tell me the result", because then they're in the dark too.) - Early in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, it will give you the helpful hint of how to hide from monsters. There are no monsters for quite a while. Not that you'd know that. The game in general does this so well, minor sounds can get you to scream just because the tension is that high and you're that paranoid. - In The Elder Scrolls series, one of the myths surrounding Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness, has a wizard come to him asking for power. Sheogorath says he can have it, if Sheogorath fails to drive the wizard insane within three days. The fear drives said wizard completely bonkers even though Sheogorath hadn't actually bothered doing anything. - VGA Planets: If you're controlling a faction that has cloaking technology, having your ships pop into view in an enemy's territory can cause them to panic and waste time and resources, even if you don't actually have the ships do anything. - You Don't Know Jack, starting in volume 3, has a category known as Impossible Questions, mind-bendingly difficult questions which are worth a game-breaking $20,000 to whoever can get one right (or a game-breaking loss of $20,000 for whoever gets one wrong.) One of the Impossible Questions is from a category called "It's a Dog!" The question is "What has four legs, barks, and is a common household pet?" Awkward silence from the contestants. (The answer really is "a dog.") - In RWBY, a number of villains have played on General Ironwood's fears and Control Freak tendencies to manipulate him into traps. The clearest example, however, comes in Volume 7's "Gravity": \|\|After Ironwood manages to undermine the villains' plans for once by telling the truth and uniting Atlas and Mantle, Cinder leaves a chess piece on his desk as a taunt. He takes this as sign that he was playing right into Salem's hands and reverses his plans, turns on the heroes, and tries to abandon Mantle, effectively destroying all of his resources in the process and leaving Atlas ripe for the taking.\|\| - SCP Foundation: Dr. Clef is very fond of these. - In a more mundane example of this trope, someone (who has ended up on a repository of IRC quotes) has claimed that he saw some man in a delivery van parked on a parking spot reserved for handicapped students. So he simply slipped a note on the windshield saying he was "sorry for scratching the paint job" and has happened to catch the man scanning his van for half an hour looking for the nonexistent scratch. - In Unreal Estate, Kisei does this to \|\|the man who had her father killed, promising to come back and kill him on a Wednesday. "Maybe next week, maybe 20 years from now." She has no intention of coming back\|\|. - Bomb threats in general do this. Some terrorist groups sometimes report the bombs they planted - in vague terms. Evacuation of a large public place and related panic (especially if the threat turned out to be real) causes plenty of terror, even without killing civilians or even using any bombs. Killing civilians is bad PR. Disrupting business and operations by forcing them to evacuate is still quite effective. If you are a right bastard, you can do this enough times with fake threats to invoke Crying Wolf, and then hit them with a real bomb. See also: The University of Pittsburgh Bomb Threat Saga of Spring 2012. Nearly 150 bomb threats over the course of about a month. It cost the university thousands and thousands of dollars for each evacuation, and the bomber was never even on the same continent. - The concept of the "Panopticon" prison is founded on this. A clever circular design allows direct, line-of-sight observation of any prisoner cell from a central observation tower without the inmates being able to tell which cell the guards might be looking at. Without being able to tell which cells are currently under observation, or even how many guards are doing the observing, inmates must assume they are under observation and behave themselves. The effect still works even if the observation tower is unoccupied, so long as the inmates believe that it is. Of course, this only works if the prisoners actually care that somebody's watching them; as soon as it gets a prisoner who's willing to do stuff For the Evulz whether somebody's watching them or not, the whole system falls apart. - George Clooney (who has a reputation for pulling pranks on his co-stars) once did this to Brad Pitt. During the filming of Ocean's Twelve, a production staff member managed to get a key to Pitt's house and offered it to Clooney; this was after he had pranked Pitt several times during Ocean's Eleven. Clooney told the staff member to just tell Pitt that he had given the key to him. Pitt spent hours every night going through his house to see if Clooney had snuck in and done something. - Fascist Italy's OVRA may have been this trope, enacted by Benito Mussolini drawing on his experience as a journalist. As far as anyone knew back in the day it was a scaringly efficient Secret Police and anyone could have been a member-but there's no evidence it actually existed beyond a name that sounds suspiciously like "piovra" (meaning "octopus" in Italian) and served as anything more than this and a distraction for the regular police to do the actual job, and it never officially existed. - This story about a guy who got his revenge on his ex-girlfriend, two years later and during her wedding day, no less. The woman not only cheated on and stole a bunch of money from him, but after she got caught and dumped, she trashed his White Chevy Monte Carlo (four flat tires, a smashed windshield, and a can of red paint had been poured over it). So, as the wedding day approached, he sent her a letter with a cryptic message: a photo of a Monte Carlo, a wedding dress, and a packet of ketchup, along with a sheet of paper with three words: "Red on White", as if threatening to get her dress stained in red, and reinforced her paranoia by sending her some red items anonymously. As it turned out, all he wanted was for her to become a Bridezilla during her wedding, paranoid over the imminent ambush (that never came), and getting her exposed as how she really was in front of everyone. - After Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago property was searched by the FBI in August 2022, the Lincoln Project ran an ad designed to get under his skin, asking who provided the evidence that led to the search warrant and suggesting that various Trump family members and associates might have been The Stool Pigeon.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParanoiaGambit
Parallel Conflict Sequence - TV Tropes Many fight sequences in a work of media involve the simple dynamic of a single hero or team of heroes against an enemy. On certain some occasions, fights may be considerably more complex, consisting of multiple separate smaller conflicts combining to form a larger battle. Often used during a final or climactic battle, these smaller conflicts may take place in entirely different locations, or may simply involve separate characters in individual conflicts. It may be used to add more tension, to break down a large battle into smaller, more manageable conflicts, or to allow characters to resolve a personal subplot at the same time as the main plot. See also Big Badass Battle Sequence and Two Lines, No Waiting, both of which may incorporate this trope. Compare Sequential Boss and Multi-Stage Battle. ## Examples - Fairy Tail - At the end of the war with Phantom Lord, most of the guild are fighting Jose's shades on the shore while Natsu and a few others take out the Element Four and Gajeel and then while Makarov takes on Jose. - On Tenrou Island, various members of Fairy Tail are fighting each of the Seven Kin of Purgatory simultaneously all over the island. - The final day of the Grand Magic Games involves a free-for-all between all of the teams with every team member participating. Some fights happen one at a time, but some occur simultaneously across the city and the scene goes back and forth between them. - At the end of the Tartaros arc, \|\|Igneel battles Acnologia\|\| while Natsu battles Mard Geer. - Happens a lot in One Piece whenever the Straw Hat Pirates start fighting the Arc Villains. Each of the crew will fight someone from the opposition and the scene will often jump from one crewmate's fight to another's. - Played with in the Dressrosa and Wano arcs: For the former, half the Straw Hats exit the story, so most of the fights scene focus on those that were in the gladiator match. For the latter, while the crew is all accounted for in this arc, they share fight scene time with their Red Scabbards whom they're allied with. - Happens in Yu-Gi-Oh! when Yami duels Weevil while Joey duels Rex. Both heroes win. - Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds - The duels between Akiza vs. Misty and Carly vs. Sayer occur simultaneously. - And a season later, when Primo unleashes an army of turbo-dueling robots on the city, multiple parallel conflicts occur as part of one Big Badass Battle Sequence. - In Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, multiple duels involving main characters often occur simultaneously during the Arc League Tournament. - Tokyo Ghoul uses this trope frequently, particularly during major combat operations launched by the CCG. The scene not only switches between various groups of humans and ghouls fighting, but often changes which side is the Sympathetic P.O.V.. - The entire Commencement Arc in Catch Your Breath is this. The story jumps between the main character and her allies as they fight across town, battling giant monsters \|\|and trying to stop the Zetsu clone army before the Nine-Tailed Fox is let loose on Konoha.\|\| - Tomica Hero Rescue Pups loves this, switching between members of the Paw Patrol and Rescue Force as they split up to fight Neo Terror's super droids and extreme disasters simultaneously. - Child of the Storm: - While the Avengers, Excalibur, MI13, and the British military are fighting the army of demons and undead which Gravemoss unleashed on London, Gravemoss himself is at the same time being confronted in his lair underneath Paris by Harry Dresden, Agent Ward, and Sif. - The Final Battle of the story starts as one of these. While the Shadow Initiative assaults HYDRA's London headquarters from the outside, Harry's team sneaks in and fights their way through internal defenses in order to rescue \|\|the captured Avengers\|\|. Of course, once that mission is complete, the interior fight joins the exterior one, turning it into a single sprawling Big Badass Battle Sequence. - The Bloody Hell arc of the sequel, Ghosts of the Past, contains two separate storylines which climax simultaneously. So, you have Dresden, Wanda Maximoff, Magneto, and the Wardens fighting Voldemort, Selene, and the Heirs of Kemmler in Chicago at the same time that Harry (Potter) and a small group of his friends and allies are facing off with the leadership of the Grey Court of Vampires in New York. - Happens quite a few times in Star Wars, particularly during the final lightsaber fights. Sometimes combine into a Big Badass Battle Sequence. - In The Phantom Menace, there are four separate events happening during The Climax, each with its own plot relevance: The Gungans vs the Separatists Droid Army, Anakin helping against the Separatist Blockade, Padame and her group against some ground forces and Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan vs Darth Maul. - And for a more straightforward example, there are two more or less simultaneous lightsaber fights during the Final Battle in Revenge of the Sith between Yoda and Palpatine and Obi-Wan vs Anakin/Darth Vader. - The Battle of Endor in Return of the Jedi took place on three fronts: the ground battle to destroy the second Death Star's shield generator, the space battle to destroy the DS II itself, and the lightsaber battle between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. - The Force Awakens has Han and his team rescuing Rey and sabotaging Starkiller Base while Poe Dameron leads La Résistance in attacking it from space. - Rogue One has the ground battle on Scarif led by Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso, and the space battle in orbit commanded by Admiral Raddus. - The Rise of Skywalker has the main Battle of Exegol, with the ragtag fleets of the Resistance and their allies facing off in the sky with the First Order's armada, while at the same time Rey is on the surface confronting \|\|the resurrected Palpatine\|\|. - Godzilla: - The human protagonists have a huge fist fight with the Xilian leader and his cronies in the Xilian mothership at the same time as a huge battle happening outside involving Mothra and Godzilla against Monster X and Gigan in Godzilla: Final Wars. It even lampshades this trope by showing The Hero pummeling the Xilian leader in front of a huge screen showing Godzilla pummeling Monster X at the exact same moment! - While Godzilla faces-off against the MUTOs in Godzilla (2014), military troops are sent into the city to destroy the MUTOs' nest and to remove the missile from the city. - Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): A minor case during the Final Battle. Whilst Godzilla and Ghidorah are duking it out, their respective sidekicks Rodan and Mothra engages in their own battle across Boston, although it's shorter-lived than the main battle. - Marvel Cinematic Universe'': - Iron Man 2: In a hilarious scene, Happy Hogan takes on one security guard and struggles the whole time while Black Widow effortlessly takes down all the others in the building. When he finally wins, he looks up and is shocked to see all the other knocked-out guards. - Happens a couple of times in The Avengers, with the first time being the downed helicarrier scene when Thor fights Hulk, Black Widow fights Hawkeye, and Iron Man and Captain America try to get the broken propeller back to full function. It is displayed briefly during the Final Battle as well when Loki is fought by Thor (and later Hulk in a Curbstomp Battle) while the other Avengers fight the Chitauri army. - Captain America: The Winter Soldier: The Climax is HUGE, involving a multitude of separate fights occurring simultaneously along with other conflicts going-on as well. - Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) utilizes this trope during the Final Battle. While the air-based ship battle was going on, a multitude of ground-based physical fights were happening as well, and there were quite a few! - Is seen briefly in Pacific Rim. - The first instance is seen during the massive Hong Kong Bay fight: Right after Leatherback entered the scene and started tearing apart Cherno Alpha, Otachi swam away to confront Striker Eureka briefly before retreating into the city. - During the Final Battle at the entrance of the Breach, Raiju and Scunner distract Gipsy Danger while Slattern attacks Striker. - X-Men: Days of Future Past: Charles, Beast and Logan take on Magneto at the same time as the huge showdown with the Sentinels is happening in the future. - The final fight scene in Cradle 2 the Grave. - Underworld (2003): - Evolution ends with Selene vs Marcus and Michael vs William. - Rise of the Lycans ends with Lucien vs Viktor while a large scale battle between Vampires and Lycans rages outside. - Awakening ends with Selene vs Quint, Eve vs Jacob, and David and Sebastian vs several mooks. - Blood Wars ends with Selene vs Marius and David vs Semira while a large scale battle between Vampires and Lycans rages outside. - In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014), while the Turtles face off against Shredder on top of Sacks tower, April and Vern face off against \|\|Sacks\|\| in the lab. In the sequel, while the Turtles battle Krang, April, Vern, and Casey fight Bebop, Rocksteady, and Karai. - Mission: Impossible Film Series: - In Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol, the climax has Ethan going after Hendricks and the briefcase while Benji, Brandt, and Carter try to restore power to the broadcast station in order to activate the override codes, with Brandt getting into a fight with Wistrom in the process. - Mission: Impossible Fallout ends with Ethan chasing after \|\|Walker\|\| and the detonator in a helicopter before fighting him on the edge of a very high cliff, Ilsa and Benji fighting Lane in a cabin, and Luther and Julia trying to defuse one of the bombs at the medical camp. - In the second book of The Witchlands, the three plot threads all reach their climactic battles at the same time, and the narrative jumps between them. - In Paper Mario 64, the Final Battle, which takes place on top of a floating platform, has Peach and Twink fighting Kammy Koopa (who is The Dragon to Bowser) while Mario and his partners face off against Bowser himself. - Sonic Chronicles has two concurrent boss battles between the party (split into two) and a pair of Emerl clones. You have to win one of the battles because the other takes place underwater and is thus unwinnable until the water is drained (along with more obvious issues, like drowning). - The battle of Onderon in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords takes place simultaneously on Onderon itself and its moon Dxun, with the Exile landing on Onderon with one half of the Player Party, while on Dxun, a chosen Non-Player Companion leads the other half on a mission to sabotage the Sith forces. - During the Final Battle of Dragon Age: Origins, as the player approaches the Final Boss, he is suddenly given control over the remainder of the party, whom he left at the \|\|Denerim\|\| gates, where a particularly large group of Darkspawn tries to break through. These events are assumed to take place simultaneously. - Metal Gear Solid 4 has section where the screen splits vertically. The player controls Snake as he fends off a horde of GEKKO on the left side of the split, while Vamp and Raiden duel again on the right side. - Paranatural: In chapter 5, the Activity Club members simultaneously face off against different opponents in different parts of the school, the comic cutting back and forth between them. Max faces off against the bat spirit, Isaac faces off against Mr. Garcia, Ed teams up with Johnny and RJ to face off against Mr. Starchman, and Isabel must sneak out of Ms. Baxter's office without getting caught by her. - Weak Hero: - In the Hyeongshin arc, Forrest deliberately splits up the main party and forces them into a series of smaller conflicts: Gerard versus a group of Hyeongshin mooks, Ben versus Robin, Alex and Teddy versus Forrest, and Grey, Rowan, and Eugene squaring off against Grape and his troops. Gerard eventually reconvenes with Grey's group while Ben defeats Robin and rushes off to help Alex, leading to two climactic fights against the split Hyeongshin faction. - Donald and the other Union heads position their mooks to intercept Cheongang members while they personally head off to the Octagon where the heads of Cheongang await. This leads to two separate, parallel battles: the large, messy scuffle on the streets, and then the personal beatdowns between the gang leaders. - Amphibia: During the climatic fight sequence of "All In", the action is split between Anne's Rooftop Confrontation with Andras and Sasha and Grime's fight with Darcy onboard the villains' Ominous Floating Castle. - Avatar: The Last Airbender: - At the end of Book 2, there's a double battle of Zuko and Azula vs. Aang and Katara while Toph and Sokka are protecting the capital from Mai and Ty Lee. The good guys only win in the less important venue. - At the end of season 3, there are four venues. A two on one Zuko and Katara vs Azula for control of the Fire Nation, The White Lotus vs the Fire Nation army for control of the Ba Sing Se, Sokka, Suki, and Toph vs the Fire Nation Air Force to stop the destruction of the Earth Kingdom, and Aang vs Ozai for the fate of the world. - The Legend of Korra: - Book 3's climax is settled with Korra vs Zaheer and Mako and Bolin vs Ming-Hua and Ghazan. Korra was poisoned with mercury before her battle with Zaheer resulting in several airbenders having to help by conjuring up a giant tornado. Meanwhile Bolin learns Lavabending after Ghazan brought the "house" down in a Taking You with Me moment. - "The Last Stand" also works out like this. With Korra, Bolin, Mako, Lin and Suyin getting inside the Colossus, Mako and Bolin try to take out the power source, the Bei Fongs try to disarm the mech's WMD Arm Cannon, and Korra goes for Kuvira herself. \|\|Mako and Bolin succeed, but with Mako's arm severely burned in the process. The cannon is disarmed, but Kuvira opted to do the disarming literally, taking Lin and Su out of the fight early and Korra wins her battle with Kuvira after an unexpected trip to the Spirit Realm.\|\|	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParallelConflictSequence
Paragon - TV Tropes Paragon may refer to: If a direct wick has led you here, please correct the link so that it points to the corresponding article.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Paragon
Paranormal Episode - TV Tropes "Terrific. Trust you two to have a dyslexic ghost. It's just about your mark, isn't it? A ghost with learning difficulties!" Say you have this show which has been airing for a while. The show may take some liberties with the rules of reality, but for the most part it takes place in the "real" world at the present day. Then you spontaneously get one episode that deals with the Paranormal. Maybe you get a Psychic who shows up and makes creepily accurate predictions, only to vanish and have the writers make you wonder if he was the real deal or a fraud? Maybe an opponent shows supernatural powers. Whatever it is, expect this to last the rest of the episode and never be mentioned again once the episode is over. Almost inevitably, the viewer will be left to wonder if it was Real After All, or an elaborate scam played on the main characters. Expect the main cast to be divided on the issue, with some believing it is true, while others insisting there must be a rational explanation. A variation can be a show with no scifi elements suddenly dealing with the appearance of aliens, time travel or interstellar travel. Supertrope to Cryptid Episode. Contrast Mundanger, which is when a normally the characters in a fantasy or sci-fi series are faced with a more "realistic" threat. ## Examples: - Patlabor is, at its heart, a Slice of Life, Cop Show/Police Procedural, with Humongous Mecha. But, during the 27th episode of the TV series, the SVU2 encounter ghosts, while holding indoor training execrcises in an abandoned building. It turns out that the ghosts were \|\|the spirits of earthquake victims, who once lived there. Their spirits couldn't rest because of an undiscovered burial site, which contained the remains of slain samurai, directly beneath the building SVU2 was training in\|\|. The spirits were lain to rest, once it was discovered, and rites were performed on the site. - Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex has no fantasy aspects at all, except for the 2nd Gig episode "Kusanagi's Labyrinth - AFFECTION". Major Kusunagi finds herself cut off from outside contact and seemingly alone in an empty city. She finds The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday: a store that somehow has stored memories and cyberbodies from her own past. The owner who tells her a story very similar to what happened to her when she was a child. \|\|Subverted thoroughly — the shop is perfectly normal, and the cyborg bodies are those she and Kuze had as children.\|\| - Cowboy Bebop lacks explicitly supernatural elements except for the episode "Pierrot le Fou", when Spike finds himself facing off against a Psychopathic Manchild assassin with psychic abilities including flying and a force field that makes him immune to bullets. - Pokémon: The Original Series is technically a fantasy series, but normally lacks any supernatural aspects other than the Pokémon themselves. However, the episode "Ghost of Maiden's Peak" features a real ghost — not a Ghost-type Pokémon, the actual spirit of a dead person. The episode "Hocus Pokémon" likewise features a real witch, as opposed to a person with powers related to Psychic Pokémon (i.e., Sabrina). - The Bolt Chronicles: Or paranormal story in the series. Much of "The Spaceship" depicts Rhino's interaction with a pair of aliens who beam him aboard their Flying Saucer. - Even James Bond had a run of this in Live and Let Die where he faces off with a henchmen claimed to be Baron Samedi. He's seemingly killed, but shown alive at the end of the film, hinting he may have been the genuine article. - Dogma is the only movie in The View Askewniverse to feature fallen angels, God, etc. - Ghosts is the only 87th Precinct novel to feature supernatural, and with Det. Steve Carella seemingly being saved by a ghost. It was generally not well received by the fans. - The Creeping Man was the only Sherlock Holmes story to feature genuinely (not just mistaken-for) supernatural events. In the story, a man becomes young again through the use of a monkey testicle serum. However, his features are twisted beyond recognition. It's somewhat ridiculed by fans due to the supernatural aspect of the story (he turns into an ape-man? Really? That's the solution to the mystery?). - Our Miss Brooks: "Music Box Revue" sees Miss Brooks purchase a magic music box that can only be heard by people in the proper Christmas spirit. - My Three Sons: In the episode "Coincidence." After wishing that he'd have had three girls instead of boys, Steve gives a ride to a mysterious hitchhiker visible only to himself. In a unknown neighborhood on the other side of town, Steve's car breaks down and he seeks help at a house with a widow, her mother-in-law and her three daughters - the distaff counterparts of his family, down to being the same age with similar names. - Mama's Family: In "My Mama, Myself", Mama is haunted by the spirit of her late mother after she considers selling a family heirloom. - It happens in Petticoat Junction. "The Curse of Chester W. Farnsworth" sees the ghost of Chester W. Farnsworth haunt the Shady Rest. Many years before, Chester Farnsworth was a dashing young salesman, and a daring towel thief. Having stolen the towel in his room, Farnsworth left on a dark and stormy night never to be seen alive again. But his spirit has been forced to return the purloined towels before he'll be admitted into heaven. The Shady Rest Hotel is Farnsworth's last stop . . . . - Baywatch: In "Coronado del Soul" Summer is possessed (and perhaps more in a case of very Questionable Consent?) by a ghost at a haunted hotel, establishing the supernatural in the Baywatch universe for the first time. The spinoff series 'Baywatch Nights' would take this to a whole new level. - Bonanza: In "Twilight Town", Little Joe's horse is stolen and he stumbles, more dead than alive, into Martensville. At first a ghost-town, he wakes up to find it inhabited. The inhabitants are, in fact, the long cursed souls of the townspeople who stood by as the sheriff was murdered trying to stand up to a gang of outlaws using the town as their base. They're waiting for someone to arrive to take the job of sheriff, lead them in a fight against the outlaws, and break the curse . . . . - Wagon Train: "Little Girl Lost". Eight year old Robin Mercy Rossiter was a member of the Donner Party, and passed away on Christmas eve over twenty years previous. She is heard sobbing over several nights. Charlie Wooster and Barney West see her; Charlie tries to find a way to make her realize she has passed away so she can join her mother in heaven. Counts as a Tearjerker, but has a truly crowning moment of heartwarming at the end. - Matlock: "The Ghost" sees the ghost of a murder victim ask Matlock to defend his widow from murder charges and find his real killer. - Diagnosis: Murder: \|\|"The Bela Lugosi Blues" has a real female vampire as the murderess behind a string of killings. She's in cahoots with a mortal villain. He gets the money from her crimes. She gets the blood, and help getting a new ID papers (her last passport expired in 1938).\|\| - CSI: - Had an episode with a psychic helping the CSIs. He died before we could find out if he was a fraud, though all his predictions did come true. - A second episode involving a psychic had her predicting the specific place where a body had been disposed of (which spooked the murderer enough that he got rid of her to try to prevent discovery)... although in reality she had been giving off some New Age "the victim is resting in peace" advice and it turned out that the Heaven she was describing and the neighborhood had similar names. Grissom chalks it up to uncanny coincidence and collective delusion, but still laments that a woman died as a result. - "Toe Tags", which had the stories told from the corpses' perspective, like they were ghosts. - "Go To Hell": The Monster of the Week is a psychotic teenager that kills her parents... but the episode leaves it open whether or not the fact that her parents believed she was possessed by a demon was just their delusion because they couldn't confront her being so vile, or an actual thing. - CSI: NY - Mac going into the Afterlife Antechamber in "Near Death", seeing and conversing with his late wife. - "Time's Up" had the team dealing with the death of an apparent time traveller. It turned out that the man's "traveling device" was just a useless hodgepodge collection of computer parts and his apparent capacity to see the future was just some childhood brain injury having turned him into a game theory hyper-savant... but he was able to predict the time that his murderer would get himself killed (accidentally, by trying to use the "time machine" and fatally electrocuting himself) down to the minute, which he left behind as a Dying Clue. - Mystery Diners normally investigates fraud and dishonesty in the restaurant trade. There is an episode note : S5/10 Mazi's Taverna, Seattle where the employees are exploiting the fact their building is allegedly haunted, in order to run unofficial and profitable after-hours ghost tours (and also to take advantage of their employer being superstitious and believing it. He's too terrified to investigate properly, which allows them even more scope for taking the piss.). Inevitably, a TV show which investigates fraud and dishonesty among restaurant staff turns up more "hard evidence" for the building being haunted, than an entire series run of those haunted house shows shot in murky green light. note : The caveat is that of course the viewer has to take it on trust that what they see hasn't been manipulated and edited to make a better story They even have a far more plausible and telegenic medium on MD's own staff, which is convenient. - NUMB3RS gave us a couple of examples with Simon Kraft, a supposed psychic and former CIA spook who assisted the team while butting heads with everyone because how he is Creepy Good. His initial appearance had him butt heads with the skeptical Charlie and to test his skill, undergo a card test to guess the suit of cards of a playing deck. Simon gets every single one of the fifty two cards wrong... which Charlie quickly realizes that it's the same probablity of getting them all right. He initially leaves the case in frustration, but Simon's lingering words have him come back since the case is more important than their debacle. His predictions are all pretty damn correct. - Simon Kraft returns in a Chinatown centric episode, where he finds the Eppes family home and predicts a murder with his drawings. He teams up with the FBI after being let go. His drawings remain accurate in finding bodies and he also discovers another corpse. However, he ultimately died in filming a kidnapping (due to trying to pitch a show idea called "Simon Says") and getting run over by the vehicle belonging to the criminal. - Magnum, P.I.: - The episode "Rapture". Magnum sees the ghost of a young boy, leading him to investigate the boy's death. - Another had Thomas in an extended Near-Death Experience after he got shot and seriously wounded. This almost was the Series Finale until the series got renewed at the last minute. - Friends had an episode where Phoebe says she has been possessed by the ghost of an old woman, who will only leave her body after she has seen "everything". The ghost apparently leaves her body after Phoebe goes to Carol and Susan's lesbian wedding. - In an episode of Night Court Harry used his magic hobby to convince another character that he was exorcising some evil spirits, at one point using a book gimmicked to shoot flames when you open it. After it's all over, Art (the janitor) comes in saying "sorry I'm late" and gives Harry the prop burning book. So... what was up with that other book? - The Suite Life of Zack & Cody had a "ghost" episode involving a supposedly haunted room. Zack ends up trapped in the room after his friends are all "taken" by the ghost. He backs up against a picture of a woman, which suddenly comes to life. Of course, it's a trick, pulled off with some Rube Goldberg-like gadgets. Curiously, no one mentions the picture when explaining how they did it all. At the conclusion of the episode, a woman who looks just like the one in the picture speaks to Zack... then walks back into the frame and disappears. - Bones: - The Gravedigger trapped Booth in an old submarine and he saw his late friend, Parker. Booth was later revealed to have been suffering brain-tumor caused hallucinations during that time, but Brennan seemed to see him too at one point. - The Ghost in the Machine had what was implied to be a victim watching the case from inside the bodys skull. Everyone kept denying it was real but still talked to him a lot - The Shot in the Dark had Brennan seeing her dead mother and insisting she was hallucinating. - The Psychic in the Soup probably counts. Angelas psychic friend Avalon was convinced she was communicating with Sweets. The clue of drive thumb was realized to be a thumb drive in his car, on which his book was stored before he died. Theres also Christine and her imaginary friend Buddy and the hints it may or may not have actually been Sweets and not so imaginary at all. - In one of the strangest examples of all time, Body of Proof introduced us to one of those stridently religious families that only exist in screenwriters' imaginations. Two of the girls evidently were demon possessed. One died of self-inflicted wounds while another began experiencing the same symptoms, including the use of similar special effects as those used in demon-possession movies, like impossible, inhuman facial and neck movements. Each one was given a BS "scientific" explanation, except one. In one scene, while in the throes of "possession", the second girl, who has never met medical examiner Megan Hunt and is significantly younger than she, looks at her and says something her father used to say when Hunt was a child. Near the end of the episode, after supposedly being cured, the same girl says another of Hunt's father's phrases in a deeper voice. - Castle dives into this from time to time. - One episode had them investigate the death of a ghost hunter in a supposed haunted house. Another episode presented the possibility of aliens, including what might have been an abduction. Castle is the Mulder while Beckett is the Scully, and usually all of the elements are explained by the end. However, one element will be left hanging with the hint that it just might have been Real After All. - Another episode featured a guy claiming to be a time traveler who was heavily implied to be real. Yet another one had Castle go to an Alternate Universe where he never met Beckett. - An episode of Rookie Blue had a man claiming to be a psychic help the cops find a kidnapped witness. In the end the cops conclude that it was just a clever scheme to provide them with evidence against a mob boss. Since the cops are not gonna call the 'psychic' as a witness in court, the mob boss will not find out where the evidence really came from. However, the man made quite a few predictions that come true including one that is fulfilled a couple episodes later in a very unexpected and tragic way. \|\|A wedding is called off not because the bride has cold feet but because the groom is killed.\|\| - Quantum Leap is generally fairly grounded once you accept the Time Travel premise. Except for when it isn't, like: - "The Boogieman". The episode apparently has Sam going up against the Devil himself. However, it might have been All Just a Dream. - "The Curse of Ptah-Hotep". The episode where a mummy rises from its grave (off camera but witnessed by Al) and murders the villain of the episode - "Star Light, Star Bright". The episode where the man Sam is helping goes off with Aliens in a real UFO at the end. - "A Portrait for Torian". Sam struggles to stop a young widow drowning herself in order to rejoin her dead husband who perished in the same lake, thinking she hears his voice calling to her. He is obstructed in his quest by her stern and enigmatic housekeeper and when the husband's body is eventually recovered from the water it is found alongside two other corpses, one of them the housekeeper whom we now see fade away as she had been Dead All Along. - JAG: - In "Ghost Ship", Harm and Mac are saved from a fire \|\|by a real ghost.\|\| - "Psychic Warrior" deals with psychic phenomena. - The Wild Wild West episode "The Night of the Man-Eating House". Jim and Artie must deal with a haunted house. Again, the end makes it possible that it was All Just a Dream... or was it? - Green Acres: - The episode "The Ballad Of Molly Turgiss" deals with Oliver trying to get the denizens of Hooterville to tell him about the legend of the eponymous ghost woman. Every time Molly's name is mentioned, strange things happen, such as things getting thrown through the air, pickle barrels falling apart, Mr. Haney's truck starting up on its own, etc. \|\|In the end, Molly promises not to do those things anymore after Lisa has a talk with her and makes her beautiful, though she does manage to break the promise for a few seconds by smashing Oliver's guitar over his head because she doesnt like the song that he wrote about her.\|\| - Another episode, "The Saucer Season," involves Eb apparently having interacted with some aliens. He subsequently becomes a celebrity because of it, much to Oliver's chagrin. However, when an air force lieutenant tries interviewing Eb about his encounter, Eb's attempts to tell the lieutenant about what he saw are censored by having him say "Bleep" repeatedly, keeping the facts in the dark. - Of all shows, The Waltons had an episode about one of the kids being haunted by a poltergeist. It was the seventies, after all. - Mad About You had an incident like this where the place the couple met, had burned down. As the episode goes on, the pair start to forget about each other for an unexplained reason. - Mork & Mindy was pretty wild to begin with, but there was the episode where Mork declares Mindy's death mother's house is haunted. Near the middle of the episode, it begins to look like it's just their burnt-out hippie friend Exedor, hiding in the house and making weird noises. After Mork and Mindy sigh with relief... the house comes to life and horrible voices scream at them. - On Perfect Strangers there was an episode where Larry and Balki discover a ghost in their new house. There was also an episode where Balki turned out to be an alien, but in that case it was All Just a Dream. - The X-Files: - Inverted in the episode "Irresistible". In a show where every other episode revolves around paranormal weirdness, this is the gritty realistic one with zero fantastic elements — and one of the creepiest episodes overall. - Played with in the episode "X-Cops", in which an In-Universe episode of COPS (1989) showcases a chaotic night in the life of various LAPD officers who run into Mulder and Scully investigating an entity that kills by manifesting your mortal fears. - On Murdoch Mysteries these come up from time to time: - In "Elementary, My Dear Murdoch", Arthur Conan Doyle is in Toronto to give a talk on spiritualism and invites Murdoch to meet a psychic Doyle finds compelling. Some of the psychic's information has a mundane explanation, but Murdoch is troubled to think she knows intimate personal details about his dead fiancée. - The psychic returns in "Bad Medicine" and goes undercover at a hospital-cum-institute that studies people with unusual brain conditions. There's another seance to attempt contact with a young woman patient who died some years previously, and the psychic is troubled by a vision of Murdoch's impending death. - "The Curse of Beaton Manor" revolves around a wealthy family with a history of early deaths. Some of the servants report hearing ghostly sounds and seeing an apparition of a deceased illegitimate half-brother. - In "The Ghost of Queen's Park", a local politician falls to his death at the provincial parliament building, and the night watchman swears a ghost is responsible. Other workers in the building also report seeing a ghost, and Crabtree is keen to follow the ghostly line of inquiry. - Honey, I Shrunk the Kids had a number of them. This was around the same time that shows centering on the supernatural were popular, so it's likely that Executive Meddling was involved. - Even The Guiding Light had one of these, with a character getting superpowers from a freak accident involving Halloween decorations. - Zoey 101 has the episode 'The Curse of PCA' in which Zoey and her friends end up disturbing the spirit of a former PCA student due to Logan stealing a necklace that used to belong to said student. It should be noted that there's no "Scooby-Doo" Hoax for this example, noteworthy considering the show is set firmly in reality. - The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries has two such episodes: The House On Possessed Hill dealing with a young psychic hunted by her neighbors, and Voodoo Doll, which presents stage magic as evidence of the Big Bad's real supernatural powers. A third episode, The Hardy Boys & Nancy Drew Meet Dracula, may count as well, though the supernatural aspect is met with skepticism, is suspected of being only due to the Big Bad's delusions, and when shown to be real at the very end, is only seen by Joe Hardy. - In the Knots Landing Season Three episode "The Three Sisters", the women of Seaview Circle visit a supposedly haunted house. - Full House: In "Our First Christmas Special", the only rational explanation is that Stephanie really met Santa Claus at the end. - Logan's Run: In "Night Visitors", Logan, Jessica and Rem discovered a house haunted by three ghosts, Gavin, Marianne and Barton, who worship Satan. - Criminal Minds: - Several episodes include characters interacting with the dead while undergoing their own near-death experiences. - In the Season 4 episode "Cold Comfort," a psychic hired by the victim's mother appears to demonstrate genuine psychic abilities. - Birds of a Feather had an episode where the girls must deal with a VHS player inhabited by the spirit of an elderly woman. - Kaamelott is set in 5th century Europe where magic exists but not widespread. One or two episodes deal with aliens or space travel (including one time where Perceval ends up on Tatooine and takes Obi-Wan's lightsaber, but Arthur sends it back as he doesn't think it's necessary to have two Excaliburs). - Arthur: Francine & Muffy plan to scare Arthur, Buster, Binky and the Brain at a "Scare-Your-Pants-Off" themed party. Arthur et al. plan to do the same to Francine & Muffy. But both groups get scared by what is apparently a real ghost. Some other episodes hint that Buster's conspiracy theories about aliens are true, such as in "D.W.'s Snow Mystery", where The Stinger shows that aliens stole the snowball. - The alien invasion variation is apparently the plot point of the Mr. Bogus episode "The Bogus Invasion". - The My Little Pony Tales episode "Up, Up, and Away", notable for being the only episode featuring unicorn ponies - who were otherwise absent from the show as this iteration had removed most fantastic elements. - The Flintstones had a handful of such episodes, such as the time they traveled to the present day on the world's first Time Machine, or when aliens cloned Fred as part of an invasion plot. Then in the sixth season they introduced the Great Gazoo, and every episode became this. - This happens a few times in The Boondocks: - "Stinkmeaner Strikes Back" featured the ghost of Colonel Stinkmeaner rising out of Hell, and then possessing Tom Dubois. - "I Dream of Siri" is about the Siri app on Robert's iPhone going rogue. - "Stinkmeaner: Begun the Clone War Has" involves the clone of Stinkmeaner harassing Robert Freeman. - Hey Arnold! had several of these, often ending with the ghost legend turning out to be Real After All. - Even ignoring the Treehouse Of Horror episodes, The Simpsons had some episodes about them in the future. Many other episodes feature supernatural stuff, but usually only quickly as a joke. Lampshaded in "The Man Who Came To Be Dinner", a regular episode featuring Kang and Kodos. Upon seeing them, Homer protests by saying, "Hey! It's not Halloween!". - Daria, despite mostly being a satirical take on the 90s, had a Bizarro Episode where the title character met "holiday spirits" who came to town through an interdimensional wormhole. Bonus points go to "A Tree Grows in Lawndale" and "Legends of the Mall," both of which have an ending shot hinting at supernatural occurrences. - Dexter's Laboratory, while not grounded in actual science or realism by any stretch, had one episode dedicated to the unhappy ghost of a deceased goldfish exacting revenge on his former owners. The episode becomes a Ghostbusters parody as the characters combat the ghost's efforts to abduct their souls into the great beyond. This is the sole instance of ghosts, souls, or the afterlife being addressed in the show, though supernatural elements such as kaiju and other modern fantasy elements are common. - Similar to the above - Codename: Kids Next Door had "Operation: G.H.O.S.T.", with the deceased this time being a hamster. - PAW Patrol: Aside from the main characters being talking dogs, most of the show is pretty mundane: a rescue team solving problems in a small seaside town. If the show wants to deal with a more fantastical plot they tend to take the All Just a Dream approach. The episode "Pups Save A Mer-Pup", however, involved real mermaid/dog hybrids. - The Kaeloo episode "Let's Play Paranormal Stuff" has the main four hold a séance to contact spirits. \|\|Quack Quack winds up possessed.\|\|	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParanormalEpisode
Paranormal Gambling Advantage - TV Tropes "I recall that Master Giiett once remarked that an individual skilled in the force could make a comfortable living as a gambler..." By definition, gambling is an uncertain enterprise. There are odds you can calculate and factors you can consider in the outcome, to be sure. But assuming you don't have insider intel on a rigged event, there's no guarantee that you'll be a winner in betting or gambling. Meaning that it's an unreliable way to make money. If you have Psychic Powers or some other way of telling the future, however, the equation changes. In theory, then, you can increase your winnings to your heart's desire. Alternately, you might have a magical gift, superpower, or arcane bit of technology that can bring the same result. Winds of Destiny, Change! may come into play as a talent of the character. The ability to sense deception or emotional states may come into play in games where bluffing is a key component. In practice, things are more complicated, especially if the author wants to deliver An Aesop about how cheaters never prosper. A character who uses their abilities to make just enough money to get by might do better in the long run. A sub-trope of Mundane Utility, in that gambling in itself is a common activity in Real Life. Compare to Muggle Sports, Super Athletes, where people use superpowers in games of physical skill rather than luck and probability. Related to Compound-Interest Time Travel Gambit, which uses similar inside knowledge for savings and investments. Compare Born Lucky, in which a character always wins at gambling because they were, well, born lucky # Examples: ## Foresight/vision examples - Bungo Stray Dogs: Ace and Fyodor are locked in a room and play a game of 'higher or lower'. Fyodor wins after guessing every single card correctly, and the executive remembers hearing Fyodor say he can trap people in his mind, causing Ace to realize that is how the other man won so decisively. \|\|Subverted, since it was part of a ruse to make Ace think they were in a mental world, and Fyodor simply memorized the backs of the cards\|\|. - In Dropkick on My Devil, Jashin-chan is able to roll whatever number she wants on a die. Upon seeing it her summoner/roommate Yurine thinks to herself that such a power could make a lot of money, but Jashin-chan herself is too dumb to realize it, despite frequently gambling all her money away on pachinko machines. - Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin: As a child, Lalah was used by a group of crooks for her Psychic Powers to help them cheat at casinos. At a roulette table, Lalah traces the correct numbers on the gambler's back to let him win his bets. Eventually, she gets fed up and starts tracing the wrong numbers to make the gambler lose all his money. The next time Lalah is seen, she has a large bruise on the side of her face. - In an early episode of Sailor Moon, Rei used her psychic power to cheat at a lottery and win the grand prize, a pair of cruise tickets. - Yu-Gi-Oh!: - Pegasus cheats at Duel Monsters by reading his opponent's mind. Yugi and Yami, two souls in one body, beat him by switching out every turn, preventing him from guessing their strategy. - Ishizu cheats at Duel Monsters by seeing the future. Kaiba beats her by defying her predicted victory. - One issue of Daredevil establishes that many casinos employ low-level psychics to scan customers and make sure they don't have powers. One casino rigs their major poker tournaments by hiring a psychic who can read other player's minds to see their cards. Fortunately Daredevil is immune because he can't see his cards, and plays by using his Super Senses to read when other people are bluffing, in another example of this trope. Unfortunately, to maintain his cover, he can't let the psychic know that he's blind, and he ends up fighting the psychic in a Battle in the Center of the Mind. - Spider-Man: - Spectacular Spider-Man Volume 2, #21 shows Peter using his Spider-Sense to win in an annual superhero poker game for charity. - In one storyline, a dying Peter considers using his spider sense to make a fortune in Las Vegas. - The Chameleon Conspiracy: Jamie Tolentino has been using the Clairvoyant computer to win games at The Palace. He made sure to lose just enough games so as not to draw attention to himself and reveal his advantage. Unfortunately, the computer has been running low on power and Jamie's very real losses have resulted in him being in debt to Chance, who knows about the Clairvoyant. - In Wolverine and the X-Men (Marvel Comics) the Jean Grey School needs a some quick funds to keep the school running, so Logan forces the telepathic Quentin Quire accompany him to what's basically an intergalactic Las Vegas. Such a place safeguards against cheating by using a telepath detecting, which soiled itself before dying when it detected Quentin, who is Omega level. - The Far Side: One strip has Lois Lane tell Superman they're playing cards with the neighbors that week, and if Clark doesn't use his X-Ray Vision they won't bring the kryptonite. - In the MLP fanfic Gambling Foals, Pinkie Pie uses her 'Pinkie Sense' to win money on a gambling wheel. (She doesn't last long before being escorted to the owners.) - A Discworld fic by A.A. Pessimal sees a luckless addicted gambler have an epiphany. He has heard that the goddess, She Who Cannot Be Named, known as the Lady, is capricious. If called by name, she brings misfortune and doom - the opposite quality to the one she is invoked for. He takes the logic a step further. For every God there is an Oh God, an Anti-God. The Discworld runs on opposites. Therefore there must also be a goddess of Ill-Fortune and Bad luck out there. If... The Lady... brings bad luck when her true name is invoked. Then The Other Lady must logically be constrained to give good fortune and good luck when invoked. the Gambler discovers She is called Anutrof. It works. Placing trust in the goddess Anutrof brings unfailing good luck. Right up to the day when she manifests in person. - How Kaiba realizes that Joey's ghost is not a hallucination in Being Dead Ain't Easy. Kaiba is the only living person who can see Joey's ghost, and since he recently witnessed Joey's sudden and violent death protecting Kaiba, he chalks up Joey's hauntings as hallucinations. It's only when Kaiba plays a game of Duel Monsters and Joey accurately tells Kaiba his opponent's hand does he acknowledge that something supernatural is going on. - In Back to the Future Part II, Biff Tannen steals Doc Brown's DeLorean and delivers a sports almanac from the future to his younger self, creating a new timeline where Biff becomes an all-powerful billionaire. Also counts as Time Travel for Fun and Profit. - Dreamscape. Alex Gardner uses his psychic abilities to make money by betting on horse races. - In 2007's Next, Chris Johnson uses his ability to see the future to work as a psychic and to win big in the casinos he frequents and works in, as well as to avoid the security team when he has a vision of being detained for cheating. - In Blackbeard's Ghost, Blackbeard helps Steve gamble at a roulette table by moving the ball to the number he picks. - In X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, the protagonist uses his abilities to clean up at the blackjack table. Turns out it's easy to win if you always know what card is next. However, he's far too obvious (to the point of calling out the next card before it's flipped) and he gets kicked out by security. - * 7 Days (1998). Frank has a gambling addiction so tries to cash in on his backstepping through time. The problem is whenever he backsteps he creates a new timeline so whatever game he's betting on might not turn out the way he remembered. - Babylon 5: Under Psi Corps rules, human telepaths are expressly forbidden from any form of gambling, for precisely this reason. A fifth-season episode notes that, as a result, those who break the rule turn out not to be very good* at it: being able to read your opponent's mind only helps so much when you lack the necessary knowledge and experience. \|\|Unless you're powerful enough to rip the knowledge out of an experienced gambler's brain.\|\| - Bewitched: Samantha transforms an escaped racehorse into a woman named Dolly. This proves to be a troublesome spell when the humanized Dolly begins giving "inside" race tips to Darrin's friend, Gus Walters, who desperately needs money to finance a new invention. - In one episode of Charmed (1998), Phoebe accidentally transfers her powers to one of her neighbors, who promptly decides to use the power of premonition to cheat at casinos. - Chuckle Vision: Defied. In "Tomorrows News" the brothers' exploits to gather newspapers for recycling somehow results in them gaining a copy of tomorrow's newspaper. Upon realising that it's genuine, Paul immediately tries to look up the football results to place a series of bets and win a lot of money. Barry, however, argues he can't do that. Paul agrees, as he's thinking too small scale, and instead looks for the lottery results. Barry, however, manages to prevent him, insisting they should use the information to warn people in advance. - Day Break (2006): When Hopper takes Rita to Las Vegas, he uses the "Groundhog Day" Loop to predict the results of that day's football match and wins enough to afford the presidential suite. - Deep Space Nine. In "Visionary", Chief O'Brien finds himself traveling five hours into the future at random intervals, so Quark tries to convince him to take a peek at the Dabo wheel while he's in the future. O'Brien is exasperated at his Skewed Priorities, but at the end of the episode he can't help trolling Quark by telling him the wheel's going to hit Dabo a second before it does. - Doctor Who: Carmen, a side character who features in "Planet of the Dead", possess very low-level psychic abilities, allowing her to occasionally see glimpses of the future. Her powers are not advanced enough to be used proactively and mostly exist outside her control. However, she is able to use them to win ten pounds on the lottery, specifically every single lottery she enters. She and her husband play twice a week. - Early Edition: Hero Gary Hobson receives tomorrow's edition of The Chicago Sun-Times a day early. He mostly uses it for altruistic purposes, but sometimes if he's short of cash he'll place a bet at the track. His friend Chuck Fishman urges him to exploit it more, but Gary sees it as an abuse. - Farscape. This backfires badly on Chiana when she uses her newly-developed ability to slow down time for this trope. Chiana: There's a—there's a cheat-proof game at the casinos. A mercury droplet; it bounces off an ion stream. And there's a thousand different outcomes. John: You won. - The Flash (1990): One episode centers around a gynoid who escapes from a lab. She's found by a hobo who takes her to an illegal gambling house where she cleans up on several rounds of poker because she can see through the cards. Of course, this backfires when she's asked how she's doing so well and she simply admits to what she can do, causing the managers to attack her and the guy she was with. - The Device family in Good Omens is incredibly wealthy thanks to their ancestor Agnes Nutter, a witch who could see the future. Agnes left them a book of accurate but strange predictions, including "an apple no man can eat" as a sign to invest money. Translated, it means, "buy stocks in Apple". - In Happy!, Nick uses Lucky to help him win a card game by reading him other peoples' hands. - Heroes: While visiting a Las Vegas casino with Ando, Hiro uses his time manipulation abilities to count cards at the poker table. Surprisingly Realistic Outcome when management confronts them. They don't know exactly what Hiro did, but they have a clear idea that he was cheating, and that entitles them to take back his winnings. - I Dream of Jeannie: In "Tomorrow Is Not Another Day", upon trying to fetch the morning paper Jeannie accidentally summons a paper from the next day. The subplot involves Roger attempting to capitalise on this by using it to bet on races he knows the outcome to. Tony, however, considers this too much of an unfair advantage and manages to sabotage him by having Jeannie change the result of the race, then waiting till Roger has torn up his betting slip to change it back so that no one who gambled legitimately will lose out. - Lois & Clark: Subverted. In one early episode, Clark gets unwittingly roped in Perry White's after work poker game with his co-workers. Having never played before and doing badly, he gets tempted to use his X-Ray Vision to spy on the others' cards. Quite by coincidence as the conversation had been about Superman, Jimmy mentions how great it would be if he could come play with them, only for another co-worker to point out he could do just what Clark is about to attempt, only for Perry to dismiss it stating Superman is too honest to resort to cheating, causing a Clark to sheepishly stop before he gets to see anything. - Manimal: In "Breath of the Dragon" whilst investigating a gangster operating out of China Town who runs a series of rigged card games, Dr. Jonathan Chase joins in one game and manages to use his heightened senses to count the cards, allowing him to beat the racket. The visor allows him to look at people's cards while playing poker, but he always looks away to avoid cheating. - Married... with Children: In "You Gotta Know When to Fold 'Em", Kelly demonstrates an ability to predict what number will show up on a roulette table multiple times. When Al pressures her before making his one bet, she blows it. - * Odyssey 5. Kurt Mendel tries to cash in on their Mental Time Travel by betting big on a football game, only it turns out differently from how he remembered. He speculates afterwards that one of the football players heard of the big bet and this put enough stress on him to negatively affect his performance. - Stargate Atlantis: In the Alternate Reality Episode "Vegas", a Wraith is hiding on Earth using prosthetics to appear human and gathering funds by playing poker. Since Wraith are a highly telepathic species, he always wins. McKay points out that it's also less risky than to rob a bank since the Wraith is specifically trying to avoid detection. - Defied by Geordi in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He's blind, so he uses a high-tech VISOR that makes him able to "see" and also gives him the ability to see in different light spectrums. But he doesn't use it during the weekly senior officer's poker game, though he admits he will peek after* the hand is over from time to time. Geordi: Maybe next time you should bring a deck that's not transparent to infrared light. - Also defied by Data. The episode "Cause and Effect" shows that he's fully capable of stacking a poker deck without anyone noticing he's done it, though he never (intentionally) does it in games played with his fellow crewmates. - Supernatural: - In "Time After Time" whilst hunting Chronos the Greek god of Time, who has made a life for himself in 1944, it turns out the god is paying for his lifestyle by using his precognition powers to bet on races he knows the outcomes to. Dean even refers to it as "using the Biff strategy." - Defied by the warlock Patrick in "The Curious Case of Dean Winchester". He plays with people for years and not money and usually wins. Sam speculates he's simply reading people's minds, but Patrick denies it, stating there wouldn't be any fun in that. He's just become that good at it due to his centuries of experience. - That's So Raven: At the beginning of "A Goat's Tale", Raven uses her psychic powers to win concert tickets over the radio. Chelsea: Aw, man! Come on! Do you have to be, like, a psychic to win these contests?! Raven: CALLER NUMBER TEN IN THE HIZZOUSE! - Tru Calling: When Jack finds himself in a "Groundhog Day" Loop he uses his knowledge of the future to win money gambling. He uses this ability to compensate for his lack of employment and to ingratiate himself with Tru's brother. - The Twilight Zone (1959): In "A Most Unusual Camera", a camera lets the protagonists win betting on horse races, but all three of them are dead by the end of the episode. - Attempted in Season 2 of The Umbrella Academy (2019). Klaus, who can see ghosts, tries to cheat at poker by having Ben, a ghost, tell him what the other players are holding. Unfortunately for him, Ben decides it would be funnier to make Klaus lose. - Zigzagged in the Worzel Gummidge episode "Worzel's Wager". The Crow Man tells Worzel not to gamble, but Worzel calls him a Hypocrite because the Crow Man himself bet money that there'd be snow on the town hall roof on Christmas. The Crow Man says that he knows that there will be snow there on Christmas, so it doesn't count as gambling. It's unclear if that's true though, and if it is, it's unclear how he knows, since he's very mysterious and has very vaguely-defined powers. - The Hold Steady's song "Chips Ahoy!" is written from the POV of the concerned boyfriend of a girl who uses her psychic powers to pick winning horses. The song was partly inspired by "The Rocking-Horse Winner" and the title is the name of one of the horses. - A spoof of the Spider-Man movies in MAD magazine had his Spider-Sense getting him kicked out of every casino in Atlantic City. - One sketch on John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme is a Fractured Fairy Tale, in which the Evil Queen from Snow White is told by her chancellor that she's wasting the magic mirror, and they can use it to build up the kingdom's finances. His first go is a horse race, but he quickly moves on to the stock market. - Changeling: The Lost: The Goblin Contract "Trading Luck for Fate" tells the user the outcome of a random event, up to 1-in-100 odds or enough to win $50, in exchange for equal bad luck later; the usual Glamour cost is waived if it's used to win at gambling. "Good and Bad Luck" can predict 1-in-10 000 odds or win $5 000, in exchange for a major Critical Failure. - GURPS Magical Items 3 includes Arkwright's Inversion Glasses, which show you the opposite side of whatever you look at through them. Their main purpose is to see other people's cards. Arkwright himself was killed after forgetting he was wearing them and dealing an entire poker hand face up. - At one point in Illusion of Gaia, Will needs to play a Russian Roulette-style Drinking Game involving five wine glasses, one of which is poisoned. Due to his Psychic Powers, Will always knows which glasses are safe to drink from. His opponent is a terminally ill Death Seeker who is only playing the game in order to leave his winnings to his family; when there's only one glass remaining, he drinks it anyway. - I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: A one-time event has Rex offer to wager Kudos, the setting's currency, in a card game. It's possible for the Groundhog Peggy Sue mechanic to kick in during that event and remind the player which move will win the game during a key choice. - In Katana ZERO, there's a bouncer in a casino that won't move out of the way unless you bribe him with a large sum of money. You can either force your way through him or use your powerful precognition to win a couple of games of roulette to get the cash you need. - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: The Treasure Chest Shop houses a minigame where you must progress through a series of five rooms, each of which contain two treasure chests. If you successfully pick the correct chest five times in a row, you will be awarded a Piece of Heart. Essentially, it is a Luck-Based Mission; however, you can come back once you've obtained the Lens of Truth, which allows you to see through an illusion or a treasure chest. In-game rumor has it that it is against the rules to use glasses at the shop. - In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Link replays the same three days over and over. The lottery in Clock Town will always have the same winning numbers, so Link can keep winning. - Subverted in Sam & Max Save the World. In the third episode, "The Mole, the Mob, and the Meatball," Sam must beat Leonard Steakcharmer in Indian Poker to win the money needed to buy a "listening device". Players can only see their opponent's card and must bet on if their own card is higher, and Leonard will always bet only if his card actually is higher, claiming he has a sixth sense. \|\|In actuality, he can see his card reflected in the nose of one of the clowns decorating the casino. Upon realizing it, Sam can use it to his advantage.\|\| - In Fate/hollow ataraxia, Child Gil uses his Noble Phantasm, Sha Nagba Imuru, which lets him see perfectly into the future and know all of the steps to reach the best outcome, to cheat at cards. - Avatar: The Last Airbender: In "The Runaway", a gambler convinces Fire Nation citizens to play a game in which they must guess which of three shells contains a pebble. However, Toph's ability to sense vibrations through the ground via earthbending lets her deduce that the con artist actually hides the pebble inside his sleeve whenever he shuffles the shells. When she agrees to participate, she uses her earthbending powers to knock the stone back inside her chosen shell, thus ensuring her victory. - Futurama: In "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back", Bender cheats at poker by wearing a pair of x-ray specs. However, he gives himself away when he mentions that one of the players has a tapeworm. ## Outcome manipulation examples - Happens twice in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders: In a battle of wits between Daniel J. D'Arby, whose Stand Osiris steals people's souls after they admit defeat in their heart which he uses to great effect in various gambling games, and hero Jotaro Kujo, whose Stand Star Platinum moves faster than the eye can see, D'Arby believes he has Jotaro on the ropes after having a blackmailed bystander intentionally deal Jotaro a bad hand in a game of poker while knowing he has a winning hand himself. However, Jotaro never looks at his cards and constantly uses Star Platinum's abilities for mundane tasks while he constantly ups the ante, leading D'Arby to believe Jotaro has used Star Platinum to out cheat him by switching all his cards around to a winning hand despite knowing that his opponent cheating would mean they automatically forfeit their soul through Osiris. D'Arby ultimately goes catatonic and all his victims are freed, \|\|without learning that Jotaro was bluffing the entire time and never bothered to look at his hand as he knew D'Arby had cheated from the start and one look at the bad hand would have meant instant defeat, making all of this an aversion.\|\| - A later encounter with D'Arby's younger brother Telence T. D'Arby follows a similar path, with Telence's Stand Atum having similar abilities to Osiris, but Atum also has mind-reading abilities so long as it follows a yes or no question. Telence's preferred games are video games, where the outcome can't readily be modified by cheating or Stand abilities, so he instead cheats by reading the other player's mind to outfox them at the game. \|\|He meets his end when playing a game against Jotaro whose mind doesn't match what is happening in the game. Jotaro has figured out Telence's mind-reading abilities and has coordinated with his grandfather Joseph Joestar to cheat by having Joseph play the game for him through his Stand Hermit Purple's vines.\|\| - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable: Hero Josuke Higashikata, having befriended the mysterious Mikitaka Hazekura who claim to be an alien with Voluntary Shapeshifter abilities, asks Mikitaka to assume the shape of three dice. The two new friends then play dice with Rohan Kishibe in order to cheat some free cash out of him. - Yami Yugi from Yu-Gi-Oh! has this as an explicit power. Even before the franchise became absorbed by the card game, Yami Yugi had the ability to pull out miracle moves to swing the game in his favor even when all hope seemed lost. He's only lost three times in the series, and only one of those were counted as legitimate. In general, The Magic Poker Equation is something of an implicit law. - When Bakura and Yami are playing Monster World, Bakura spins the dice to increase his chances of getting critical hits. When Yami catches on, they agree to ban dice spinning, but Bakura decides to use dice with souls of his defeated enemies instead, trying to get the same result without Yami noticing. Unfortunately for him, Ryou interferes and causes him to get the worst possible roll. - Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: - Judai, like Yugi before him, is noted to be preternaturally lucky with his draws, to the point that a one-off opponent specifically designed his deck with the intent of screwing with his ability to defy the odds. - One-off baddie Ikkaku is noted to have gained the ability to stack his deck through a Deal with the Devil, which he uses primarily to make the effect of the normally Awesome, but Impractical Slash Draw a surefire thing. - Saiou plays an Arcana Force deck, where all the cards have a coin toss effect; typically, heads gets a pretty good effect, tails gets a useless or outright detrimental effect. However, in most of his duels, he gets the good effect, and even when he gets the bad effect, it's usually one that he can exploit somehow. Though he does have some foresight powers, it's implied to be a Winds of Destiny, Change! deal, since whenever he doesn't have his powers active, his luck tends to immediately turn to absolute crap. - Yuma from Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL is able to outright create cards on the fly with his Shining Draw ability, letting him have the perfect counter to whatever situation he finds himself in. - In one Star Wars Legends comic series, a Jedi who survives Order 66 comments on how his master once commented that someone who could use the Force could become very rich in gambling, and he intends to do just that and then go deep into hiding. - Fallen Jedi Lycan demonstrates this advantage in the Nomad series of Star Wars Tales. Except he's not subtle at all with his cheating, winning thirteen times in a row and then causing both dice to land on edge in the middle of the table when betting his winnings against a starship. The bouncers take notice, promising to give Lycan an "electric barbecue" before handing what's left of him over to the annoyed gamblers. Unfortunately, Lycan doesn't give them the chance and calmly demonstrates how easily he could kill with The Force. Everyone in the casino, barring one croupier, ends up dead. - In the Beetlejuice comics, Lydia and Beetlejuice overhear her father saying something which makes it sound like her family will have to move away from her house (and consequently, the ghost who haunts it). So she enters the Neitherworld lottery in order to win enough money to buy the house from the bank, and Beetlejuice uses his shady Neitherworld connections to ensure that she has the winning ticket. - Shadow Balance posits that Jounouchi's good luck is because a latent Shadow Magic user. The heroes only notice when he plays pachinko and wins every round (which gets him kicked out), but in hindsight, Bakura points out that the only times he played a gambling card and lost was when he was facing another Shadow Magic user. - In this Golden Sun 4-Koma, Garet and Isaac attempt to cheat at dice using the Move Psyenergy. The ref notices and declares the win invalid. - Justice League Dark: Abnegazar uses magic during his poker match against Constantine to turn his own hand into a straight flush. After both players bet their most valuable possessions, Constantine smirks and uses his own powers to turn Abnegazar's hand into junk, winning the match. - Highlander III: The Sorcerer: The Magic Knight Kane turns the tables on a duo of card hustlers by turning their entire deck into winning cards. - The Phantom Menace: In a bet with Watto, Qui-Gon Jinn uses the Force to make a die roll the result he wants. To be fair, the game was already rigged in Watto's favor. - X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Chris Bradley hosts a carnival game in which participants have three chances to make a lightbulb go off. A woman tries turning off the switch, disconnecting the wires, and removing the lightbulb from its socket, but fails and storms away furiously after losing her money. As it's revealed later, Chris is a technopath and can mentally generate electricity to ensure the lightbulb never goes out. - The plot of Deathworld starts because the Pyrrans don't have enough money for a weapons shipment, so they make a deal with the protagonist, Jason, who uses his weak telekinetic abilities to cheat in casinos. - Fritz Leiber's short story "Gonna Roll the Bones" in Dangerous Visions, is about a character who has some kind of extraordinary ability to throw things in a perfect way, notably to get whatever dice roll he wants. - In Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, Bell's "Luck" Development Ability that he selected upon becoming Level 2 greatly improves his already impressive luck. The first time he visits Orario's casinos, he repeatedly wins at roulette even while betting on a single number, quickly multiplying his initial earnings by more than 10,000 times. - Lord of Mysteries: Councilor Ricciardo, a demigod of the wheel of fortune pathway and high ranking member of a secret organization, doesn't have any money to pay the protagonist. Instead, he transfers luck to win the corresponding amount in a casino. On another occasion, the light novel features three demigods of different pathways competing in a card game while exploiting their special abilities of bribing, intimidation, and puppeteering. - Sterren from The Unwilling Warlord was apprenticed to a warlock for a few days before being kicked out due to complete lack of talent. All he had left was a bit of unconscious telekinetic ability which gives him an edge when playing dice. - The Wheel of Time: Mat has magically enhanced luck that generally makes games of chance very profitable. By the middle of the series, he has to start looking for strangers who don't know his reputation, as his luck becomes strong enough to override an opponent's loaded dice. - In the Forgotten Realms short story "Games of Chance" by Elaine Cunningham, Elaith Craulnober's casino is visited by an inventor who has a device that alters probability. It does not end well for him. - The Almighty Johnsons: Mike Johnson being the incarnation of Ullr, the Norse God of Skill, Hunt and Duel, has his powers manifest like this. If he can get the other party to agree even tangibly to any form of competition (even a fight if he words it correctly), he's utterly invincible (it only applies to competitions he personally participates in, thus doesn't apply other activities like horse racing). Even if he wants to lose it will end in his favour. Mike likewise struggles with addiction to gambling, specifically as he knows he can't lose, he has a habit of getting extremely antagonistic and cocky during the games (often angering his opponents). It's implied this coupled with him betting often against unsavoury and likely-to-be-violent individuals is a subconscious manifestation of his guilt at cheating. - Jessica Jones (2015): In a game of poker, Killgrave uses his Compelling Voice powers to make everyone at the table go all in and then everyone but him fold, letting him win over a million dollars with an absolutely abysmal hand. He could have just forced them to give him the money straight up, but he prefers doing little extra Kick the Dog actions like that because he's just that petty. - Discussed frequently on MASH* in regards to Father Mulcahy. He attributes (with others jokingly bemoaning) his more-often-than-not success at gambling ventures to the power of the Christian God. Whether or not he seriously believes that God is helping him is debatable. - Generally defied by Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation. - The episode "Cause and Effect" shows that in most cases he deliberately avoids stacking the poker deck, even to his own disadvantage, but the final segment of the episode shows that he's entirely capable of doing so. - "The Royale" shows that he's also good at craps, by way of using his Super Strength to subtly alter the dice to fall in his favor. - The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "The Prime Mover". A man with telekinesis is used by a professional gambler to win big at dice games and roulette in Las Vegas. - The Twilight Zone (2002): In the episode "Rewind", a compulsive gambler gets his hands on a magical tape recorder capable of rewinding time and decides to use it to gain a fortune in a casino through Save Scumming his way through the games. The Karmic Twist Ending, however, ends with the house still winning it all because they have a magical rewinder of their own, which they use to undo the player's winnings and then destroy both the player's recorder and his hands before kicking him out. - Red Panda Adventures: Rookie superhero Doctor Improbable is a physicist by trade and gambler by nature. When he gained his power to make events more likely to happen the more improbable they are, he discovered that the longer the odds of the bets he made, the more they were a sure thing. This worked until he realized that the odds were dependent on his own perception of them. Once he had enough confidence in his powers that he knew the bets were guaranteed wins, his "Improbability Factor" worked against him and turned gambling back into a gamble. From there, he took up a profession in which he was certain to fail and die, superheroics, and has done pretty well since. His spotlight episode, "The Doctor Is In", reveals that Doctor Improbable's powers are not, in fact, Winds of Destiny, Change!, but standard Reality Warping that affects his surroundings based on his own fear or confidence levels. - Escape Lala 2 has a slot machine in the pirate ship. You need to win it to progress, but you can't seem to get lucky enough to win on your own. Fortunately, you can obtain a Luck Spell that makes the slot machine land on three of the same picture so that you win. - Mass Effect mentions in the Codex that biotics sometimes abuse their powers, such as cheating at roulette. - Danganronpa - Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, part of Celeste's talent as the Ultimate Gambler is being Born Lucky, but in a manner specific to games of chance. Her talent never becomes plot-important because of its narrow scope; unlike the Ultimate Lucky Students, her luck is average outside of the narrow scope of gambling games. Manipulating the events of the Killing Game is beyond her talent. - Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: As the Ultimate Lucky Student, Nagito naturally has an edge when it comes to anything relying on chance. He uses this to purposely pick the losing lot so he could clean the space for his class's party \|\|to set up his murder plot\|\| and successfully play Russian roulette with five out of six chambers loaded. Finally, \|\|he relies on his luck to have The Mole unknowingly kill him and make it impossible to determine which student was actually responsible for the murder with one hundred percent certainty\|\|. - Downplayed example in RWBY. Qrow plays cards with Clover and consistently loses as his Semblance grants him bad luck while Clover's grants him good luck, giving Clover a much greater advantage. Fortunately, the two didn't appear to be betting anything and it was just a friendly game. - While he's not exactly paranormal, Kitten the genetically enhanced superhuman from If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device rigs a coin toss by shooting the coin in midair. - In Darths & Droids, the Jedi have a "Force Manipulation Re-roll" ability, which they can use to re-roll one die per day (that is, the real-life dice they are playing the game with). When the Watto scene comes up (see the Film folder), Jim misunderstands the rule as referring to in-universe dice, and when the GM corrects him, decides he'll re-roll the die the GM rolled to determine the result of the in-universe one. The GM can't refuse, as it would be admitting that he rigged the outcome by not actually rolling a die at all. - In Arthur, King of Time and Space, Lancelot cannot lose any contest due to having God's favor. In the Western arc, Arthur sees him playing poker and is surprised that a religious man like him is gambling, and Guenevere replies that, for Lancelot, it's not a gamble. - The Transformers: Mechanical Lifeform Smokescreen has a built-in wire that overrides non-sentient machinery. He manipulates a slot machine to his benefit and lets it all ride on one last bet. But one of the casino workers notices his wire and pulls it loose. ## Mixed and unsorted examples - A Game of Cat and Cat: Jun Kurosu of Persona 2 is a Persona User, someone with the power to summon a Guardian Entity that is Invisible to Normals. His boss chides him for using it to cheat at cards with a coworker (mistakenly calling it a Stand). - Thorax uses his ability to sense emotions in games of poker to detect the other players' moods, make a guess at their hand, and decide the best course of action in The Amulet Job. He still needs to throw a round every now and then so the other players don't think he's cheating. - In one of the earlier Star Wars Expanded Universe novels, the search for potential Jedi for Luke to train included searching for strangely lucky gamblers, reasoning that this could be the result of either unconscious Force influence or premonition. The most promising such example that they actually investigate turns out to be a dud: the "unusually lucky" gambler with a record of winning very large bets simply turns out to have a way to cheat. - Too Many Magicians features both prescience and outcome manipulation: Lord Ashley has an intermittent ability to see a few seconds into the future, which can be very useful when playing roulette. Then he starts gambling in a casino with a magician on staff using telekinesis to ensure the ball always lands on a number other than the one he wagered on, resulting in Lord Ashley ending up Trapped by Gambling Debts. Other stories in the same series mention that most magicians don't gamble at all except with very close friends, because if they win, it's almost certain that somebody will accuse them of using this trope whether they are or not. - A weird example from an episode of Choujin Sentai Jetman — the Monster of the Week turned the Jetman minus Gai into little figurines, and Gai would only get them back if he won against Grey in a game of roulette. To win the Absurdly High-Stakes Game against Grey's built-in computer, Gai ends up using Tetra Boy to tilt the casino! - Twin Peaks: In "The Return", after Agent Cooper returns from the Black Lodge into the material world, he wanders into a casino and sees supernatural omens indicating which slot machine is primed for a super-jackpot. It's a bit unclear if it's simply foresight or if the machines are being deliberately reprogrammed by his friends from the other side, since he ends up winning about 50 times in a row. More realistically, the casino's owners immediately fire the manager because he didn't kick him out before he walked off with millions of dollars and later attempt to murder Cooper. Even if they can't prove he's cheating, the odds of his winning streak are so unbelievable that they damn well know he did. - Mage: The Ascension: There are three effects for gambling, and all rely on the Entropy Sphere. The first rank is automatic probability calculation (such as the odds of winning a poker hand). The second rank, combined with rank 2 Time, allows the user to foresee the most likely event. The third rank of Entropy allows a Mage to just make the machine give them a winning result. - Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney: Part of Phoenix's secret to being an undefeated poker player (aside from being incredible at bluffing) is that his adopted daughter Trucy is a Gramarye, and has the Gramarye family trait of being hyper-aware of peoples' tells (not exactly paranormal, but still a superpower of sorts since only Gramaryes can do it); if Phoenix ever faced someone he was unsure he could beat, he'd invite Trucy to watch his games, and she'd communicate to him how his opponent was feeling, allowing him to unerringly tell what kind of hand they had. - Any player who takes advantage of Save Scumming while gambling is technically altering the space-time continuum to maximize profit. - An interesting and meta/borderline 4th wall breaking Defiance of this trope occurs in Fallout: New Vegas where loading disables gambling for 60 seconds as the casino takes anti-cheating measures (if it's a roulette table, the croupier checks the wheel for bias. If it's blackjack the dealer breaks out a new deck of cards and shuffles it, if it's a slot machine it "resets" itself). - Genocide Man: During a Poker match aboard a ship they're using for travel, Giri uses her Empathic powers to be as misleading as possible to the other players, leading them to make or withdraw bets nearly at her will. She even beats Jacob, who has plenty of experience and one of the best Poker faces in existence. - Sev Space: - One cartoon has Wolverine asking Professor X how he can afford all the X-Men's equipment. Professor X replies, "Let's just say they don't let me into Vegas anymore." - Another cartoon has the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew asking Picard why he doesn't join their poker games. Picard's reply: "Why don't I play poker with a telepath? Oh, there's a puzzler!" - In the Futurama movie Into the Wild Green Yonder Fry uses his newfound telepathy to cheat at a poker tournament, while Bender loads up on lucky charms (most notably, the Donbot's lucky robot's foot). In the last hand, Bender wins by not looking at his hand, which turns out to be all four kings plus a coaster labeled "King of Beers" that got shuffled into the deck by accident, beating Fry's four aces.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParanormalGamblingAdvantage
Paradox Person - TV Tropes "You were never supposed to live. Took all of Nyx's strength to circumvent what should have been a certainty. Now you cannot stay dead. Such is the wry humor of the Fates." — Hades to Zagreus, Hades There are certain people who have been brought into the world that seem to defy it by their existence alone. They don't exist within the natural order and often weren't planned by any of the Powers That Be that keep cosmic order. This might be because they weren't meant to be here in the first place or aren't truly here. Their otherness is a characteristic trait, but not holding a right to this world doesn't necessarily make them harmful. A subtrope of Liminal Being. For the more dangerous variants that are of the grotesque and harmful kind, see Eldritch Abomination or Eldritch Location. Compare Ret-Gone, which might be the state these characters enter. They're almost guaranteed to be Immune to Fate. When this occurs as a result of game programming rather than storytelling, you have a Glitch Entity. When a character bears a contradiction or paradox in their own identity, rather than with respect to the world, that's Oxymoronic Being. ## Examples: - It's noted in Attack on Titan that the Titans break every known law of physics. They are lightweight enough to allow their massive bodies to move and yet still have enough mass to rip through solid structures, their Healing Factor is supported by a bottomless reserve of organic material and energy as long as their weakpoint isn't targeted, and despite eating humans whenever possible, they don't get any nutrition out of it. That said, they're still very much killable with the right tools \|\|to the point In-Universe it's pointed out the latest technological advances (roughly WWI-era) are rapidly rendering the Titans obsolete as military assets and will only continue to do so as things continue\|\| with an ease much more manageable than many others on this page. \|\|Unsurprisingly, they're a supernatural existence derived from an Eldritch Abomination that bonded to a human.\|\| - At the end of Bleach: Memories of Nobody, Rukia tells Ichigo about their friend Senna, who was really just a \|\|person called Memory Rosary holding different memories of "Blanks" and was only created because so many blanks lost their memories.\|\| Rukia: One can't remember something that shouldn't have existed in the first place. - Dragon Ball Super: Goku Black's entire existence is paradoxical. Dragon Ball utilizes Alternate Timelines, so that any changes made in the past create a new timeline and leave the original future untouched. That is until Super introduces Time Rings allowing "acausal time travel" that do not create new timelines. Goku Black was created as the result of \|\|Present Zamasu using the Super Dragon Balls to steal the body of Goku, before traveling to the future. However, while Beerus takes the liberty of destroying Zamasu in the present, Goku Black still exists in the future. Black explains wearing the Time Ring allows him to evade being erased from existence and preserve his own history. It gets even more complicated in Episode 67, where it's revealed Beerus' actions did create a Time Ring (and by extension a new timeline) after all\|\|. - \|\|Ao Fukai\|\| at the end of Eureka Seven AO due to \|\|the final use of the Quartz Gun possibly erasing him from history\|\|. - By definition, Servants in Fate/Zero and Fate/stay night. They are the souls of heroes of mythical past given body to exist in this world. Since dead people are supposed to stay dead, the world will try to crush this contradiction, which means that Servants disappear if they aren't channeled with Mana. \|\|Except those who get doused by the corrupted Grail's mud and consequently gain a physical body, like Gilgamesh (who, atypically, has enough of a colossal ego to resist the actual corruptive effects of such a transformation).\|\| - Doubly so with Assassin, a Servant summoned by a Servant from a spirit who never existed. - Jack Rakan in Negima! Magister Negi Magi is a character of this type, though it's explained he just did ridiculous amounts of hard work. He even comes Back from the Dead with willpower alone. Chisame: Weren't you meant to be a freaking broken character with infinite cheats...? \|\|[said after Rakan disappears completely to Cosmo Entelecheia]\|\| - Homura Akemi in the end of Puella Magi Madoka Magica. \|\|She was once a normal human being (in her universe's first flow). But after continuous alterations to the universe's fabric, because of the nature of her success, everything that motivated her or developed her character never happened, which changes the nature of her magic. However, she still remembers the original circumstances even if no one else does\|\|. - That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, at the end of the Web Novel, \|\|Rimuru Tempest reaches this point after becoming the World's Strongest Man and a full-on Physical God, able to alter the past at will without compromising his own existence or the world resulting from his actions. He's able to Time Travel to the point where his past self Satoru Mikami is fatally stabbed, stops the incident, and can completely get away with it to let his old self live a happy life without causing a massive Grandfather Paradox.\|\| - Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- and its sister series ×××HOLiC have one of the most convoluted examples in manga, with both \|\|Original!Syaoran\|\| and \|\|Watanuki, his time travel duplicate\|\| who were born out of a wish to keep a certain person alive. Much of ×××HOLiC is eventually revealed to be an attempt to anchor that character to reality so they won't disappear when the paradox eventually catches up. \|\|Watanuki's\|\| ability to attract spirits is eventually revealed to be a subconscious wish to die because of their nature. - Long before Doctor Who returned to television, Big Finish Doctor Who had varios examples of this. - The Eighth Doctor's companion Charlotte Pollard was a literal paradox person. When the Doctor saves her from the R101 where she was supposed to die, she becomes a living paradox and gateway for anti-time, meaning history starts breaking down. - In the War Master audio miniseries Only the Monstrous, the War Master goes to considerable lengths to deliberately create such a person. After \|\|the Msater saves pilot Cole Jarnish from the accident that would have caused his death, he manipulates Cole into a course of action that turns an innocent race of farmers into ruthless cyborg conquerors. This turns Cole into what the Master describes as a "potent living paradox", which the Master intends to use to power a weapon that he hopes will allow him to rewrite the whole history of the Time War\|\|. - John Constantine is noted as a "glitch" in the universe, thus making him able to abuse the rules of the universe (via his Synchronicity Highway). As it was once put, "circumstances, people, events, even time and space, just line up for him". - Adam Warlock has become something akin to this, a being who stands outside and is not affected by otherwise universal forces of chaos and order or life and death. His sometime enemy the In-Betweener was similarly described in his first appearance, but has since been treated as a creation and servant of the Anthropomorphic Personifications of chaos and order. Adam's ally Gamora was plucked from the timeline to make her into such a being, but it didn't take. - Another Marvel Comics cosmic being, the Anomaly, is essentially the embodiment of Things That Should Not Be. - The most famous Reverse-Flash, Professor Zoom, otherwise known by his real name Eobard Thawne, turned into one thanks to his connection with Negative Speed Force in The Flash: Rebirth, able to alter history and be the only one to remember the way things were before. In Flashpoint, he becomes a paradox in that universe due to being from the prior timeline, which allows him to try and kill Barry without fear of losing his powers (though he's killed by Thomas Wayne before he can go through with it). In The Button, his return to life gives him the idea to use this as a weapon against \|\|Dr. Manhattan\|\|, reasoning he can use it to steal his reality-altering power for himself. He's wrong. Very, very wrong, though notably he still comes back from even this. The "Paradox" arc shows that each time he dies he's reborn in the Negative Speed Force with his memories of what happened before; not only that, but he retains said memories even when he's at points in his timeline (like killing Nora Allen) where he shouldn't. Finally, his position as this is undone at the end of "Legion of Zoom" and "Finish Line" when Barry figures out that the reason this is happening is Thawne has nothing to ground him in the current timeline - so he \|\|phases through Eobard and imparts some Speed Force energy to him - acting as a lightning rod to anchor him to the here-and-now by having the connection to Barry he always wanted, erasing the Reverse-Flash as he is from existence and "resetting" him to the Nice Guy curator of the Flash museum in his home time period\|\|. - Donna Troy, aka Wonder Girl. A founding member of the Teen Titans with a Multiple-Choice Past as a result of so many retcons that both in and out of universe nobody's really sure where she came from, not even herself. And of course, the Speed Force complicates things further thanks to Wally West knowing her with Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory despite her latest "origin" contradicting it. - X-Man from the X-Men franchise is one of the few survivors from the Age of Apocalypse timeline which no longer exists. This is discussed (in a maddened gabble) by Legion, who unwittingly created the Age of Apocalypse, in X-Men: Disassembled. - So are Dark Beast and Blink. However, the AOA exists again. Don't ask. - The Samaritan from Astro City. Came back through time from the future in order to prevent an apocalypse, and in successfully doing so managed to erase the timeline from which he came... meaning technically he's never going to be born. - The 3rd Loki tried to do a HeelFace Turn and failed, becoming King Loki, but their turning back to evil came too late to do the damage they wished for so they travelled to the past to put their younger self on the right path sooner. Unfortunately said younger self would rather burn virtually everything that belonged to their past selves (which may or may not count as dying, cats and boxes and all) so instead of King Loki they became Loki the God of Stories... making that future an alternate timeline and both of them this trope by virtue of temporal paradox and being goddamn confusing. - Walker Gabriel, the DC hero named Chronos (not to be confused with his mentor, the DC villain named Chronos), eventually ends up preventing his own childhood as the only way to \|\|save his mother's life\|\|. He's rather surprised when his time travel powers enable him to survive this, and he goes right on ahead existing. Unfortunately, an earlier adventure left him in a dystopian alternate timeline which he then had to fix, but with the result that his evil self from that timeline also survived (calling himself Anachronos), and he wants revenge. Also, an associate of his is the Contessa, a Renaissance Italisan noblewoman from a now-deleted timeline, who continues to survive only as long as she stays in the extradimensional city of Chronopolis; she's rather bitter about it. - Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): Silver, due to constantly Time Traveling back and forth between the present and his own Bad Future while causing various changes in the timeline, ultimately ended up "decoupled" from time. On the plus side, this means he remembers the past versions of the timeline before his various history-altering acts and he's immune to Ret-Gone. On the bad side, he needs to figure out what changed due to his actions the hard way by combing through the "new" records of history. - In the Futurama fic Blame It on the Brain, it is revealed that Fry's status as his own grandfather is important for more reasons than just his lack of the Delta Brainwave; \|\|as revealed by Nibbler, the Brainspawn and the Nibblonians are essentially the same race (the universe was created by a mass-inversion event that turned the nothingness of pre-universe into the something-ness of the universe, so the Brainspawn are the inversion of the Nibblonians who came before it/the Nibblonians are the pre-reflection of the Brainspawn), with the result that the three are linked as a complex cosmic trinity due their shared state of self-manifestation\|\|. - Child of the Storm has Doctor Strange, who has an unusual variation on immortality and a very strange relationship with time thanks to \|\|being empowered by the Time Stone\|\|. As a result, he's also a low-level Reality Warper, doing things that should logically being impossible and treating the Laws of Nature as vague guidelines. - 'Nathan' is this because he's \|\|a version of Harry\|\| from another reality, and thus an Outside-Context Problem (for the villains). - This is Braniac's view on Danny Phantom in Days of Justice. "Phantom," Braniac said. "You are aptly named. Your energy and physiology still intrigue me. You have no heart beat and you only breathe when you communicate verbally with others. You are unaffetcted by gravity, and move phase through matter as if it were not there. You can create concussive blasts of the same energy that you exude; yet it leaves no visible residue and dissipates before any data can be collected. You are a scientific anomoly. You should not exist; yet you stand before me." - Rainbow Dash in Austraeoh. \|\|After killing Discord\|\|, she became host to both Chaos and Harmony, the two constantly battling for dominance. As long as she's wearing the element of Loyalty, she can survive without adverse affects, but if she removes it, Chaos starts taking hold and she \|\|mutates into a chaos being like Discord\|\|. Her goal in the fic is to \|\|reach the midnight armory, where she can reforge the other elements, which would have the added benefit of making her immortal.\|\| - In Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, \|\|Miles learns he's one of these as the spider that bit him came from an Alternate Universe, leaving that reality without a Spider-Man and forcing history to correct itself in his own by killing off his Spider-Man to make room for him. It's for this reason that he was excluded from the Alliance of Alternates and Locked Out of the Loop\|\|. - Vanellope von Schweetz in Wreck-It Ralph is a Glitch Entity in a racing game called Sugar Rush, making her a paradox person within the world of the arcade. All of the Other Reindeer ostracise her and relegate her to live in a Dummied Out bonus level, and King Candy refuses to let her race out of fear that people would notice the glitch and unplug the "broken" game, which would leave most of the characters without a home and delete Vanellope herself from existence. \|\|Or so King Candy claims turns out he's the one who doesn't belong, being an invader from an earlier racing game called Turbo Time. Vanellope used to be a legit character in Sugar Rush; in fact, she was originally the princess of the game world until King Candy deleted her, and she ends up returning to rule (as a president this time) after the usurper gets overthrown.\|\| - Discworld: In Mort someone becomes a Paradox Person by not dying properly. Mort, Death's apprentice, is supposed to reap the soul of a princess, but she's so beautiful he can't bring himself to do it. Since the event that actually killed her still happened, she's left between life and death, kicking off most of the major events of the book. - Doctor Who Expanded Universe: - Becoming a Paradox Person by abusing Time Travel is the basic membership qualification in the spinoff group Faction Paradox. - Over in the Eighth Doctor Adventures, there's Samantha Jones. Her timeline had been rewritten, so when she encountered a temporal anomaly, she got 'restored' to her original timeline... where she'd never met the Doctor. The original Sam ended up jumping into the anomaly again to save the Doctor, rewriting her timeline so she became the Sam who'd met the Doctor, and making her the person who rewrote her timeline in the first place. - In the Eleventh Doctor novel Touched by an Angel, the Weeping Angels attempt to manipulate Mark Whittaker into becoming one by sending him back in time seventeen years with a letter allegedly written by his future self. Most of the letter's advice helps Mark ensure that his own past works out as it should, such as giving his past self a winning lottery ticket and retrieving his stolen wallet during a holiday, but the Angels' ultimate goal is to trick Mark into saving his wife from the accident that killed her in 2003. Without that death, Mark would have no reason to want to go back in time in the first place, but he would therefore have no reason to do everything else he's done in the past, creating a potent paradox that these Angels can feed on. - In David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself, the eponymous time traveler also manages to erase his own birth at least once...but by then he's created so many alternate timelines that there's thousands of him lurking around, all of whom are outside of the timeline and thus should not exist. - In J. R. R. Tolkien's mythology: - Dwarves were not created with the world and therefore would not exist in its first designing. They were created when Aulë, the smith god, grew impatient for the first of Ilúvatar's children (the elves) to awaken; he decided to create creatures for himself. However, because he didn't have the power of true creation, they were originally little more than automatons, with no free will. Ilúvatar questioned Aule's intentions for stepping outside the plans for the universe which led to the creation of a mockery of real life. Aulë responded that he did it only because he was compelled by his love for creating which drove him to give life to creatures to share in that love. He then repented and was sorrowfully preparing to destroy the first dwarves but because unlike Melkor he genuinely respected his creations and didn't see them as an extension of his will, Ilúvatar, seeing Aulë's grief, gave the dwarves free will. As a result, the dwarves exist in Tolkien's world, but they occupy a strange place in it: they are like the Children of Ilúvatar (elves and humans), and yet separate from them as they technically were made by the force of crafting and skill. - Tom Bombadil is an unusual... Person. He was apparently already there at the creation of Middle Earth and he isn't a Human, Hobbit, Dwarf, Elf, Vala or Maia. He's also completely immune to the effects of the one ring and defies the mythology of Middle Earth. It's never explained as to what exactly he is. - Young Wizards has the Transcendent Pig, an immortal being whose existence transcends space and time. He counts as a paradox person because none of the Powers That Be, who collectively created Reality itself, can remember creating him (a fact about which the Powers are rather embarrassed). - N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy: - In Asimov's The End of Eternity Noÿs appears to be this: Her existence seems to be so unlikely that Harlan can't find any altered version of the timeline that still includes her. \|\|This is because she is from the distant future.\|\| - The Wheel of Time: Invoked by the Dark One to create The Soulless Gray Men. Usually, soul loss leaves the victim a drooling Empty Shell, but extracting the soul within the Eldritch Location of Shayol Ghul creates a being with an intellect but no actual "self". This impossibility creates a Perception Filter that keeps people from noticing a Gray Man's presence. - The Long Price Quartet: In order to create an andat, a poet must somehow twist the concept he wishes to embody against itself, creating an innate paradox that keeps the andat from simply returning to the memetic void from which it was pulled. This is why all andat seek dissolution, because ceasing to exist is the only way by which they can resolve the intolerable self-contradiction that is their own existence. Freedom-from-Bondage, however, is called out as being this even by the standards of the andat. Other concepts such as Stone-Made-Soft or Clarity-of-Vision can be bound as andat, but there is no way to control something that embodies the impossibility of control. Freedom-from-Bondage could be created as an andat, but no poet could hold it in existence for more than the blink of an eye. - 12 Monkeys: The Primaries' prophecy in Season 4 speaks of "the Djinn", a person whose existence is the root cause of causality being twisted into an interconnected series of Stable Time Loops. It is naturally assumed that the Witness is this, as they fit the criteria (having used time travel to ensure their own existence). \|\|However, it actually turns out to be James Cole, the first successful time traveler, whose mother turns out to herself be a time traveler from the future, whose life was saved as a child by Cole (who didn't realize who she really was).\|\| Taken up a notch during the Grand Finale, wherein \|\|Cole lets himself be erased from all points in time in order to break the loop, only for a last minute change by Jones (and the blessing of time itself, which feels it owes him) ensures that he pops back into existence, despite the fact that his parents will now never meet, meaning he now has no timeline.\|\| - Arrowverse: - \|\|Eobard Thawne/the Reverse-Flash becomes this throughout the show. The first season ends with him being retroactively erased from history thanks to the Grandfather Paradox. Then a younger version of him shows up in season two, apparently protected by the Speed Force "until" all that other stuff happens. By the time he appears on Legends of Tomorrow, he's become such a timeline headache he has a unique form of Clock Roach gunning for him specifically. Strangely enough, the younger version of him somehow gained the memories of his older self. Even after this version is killed, another version of his older self pops up later, and only gives a dismissive time travel, so very confusing Hand Wave when asked where he comes from. Season 5 of The Flash explains it as him using the Negative Speed Force, which protects him from temporal changes.\|\| - At the end of Season 3, \|\|Savitar becomes this, after failing to kill Iris. With the Stable Time Loop broken, he only has a few hours to live, so he has to go with his plan B - having Cisco modify the Speed Force Bazooka into a quantum splicer, which will turn Savitar into a god, thus sparing him from being Ret-Gone. When hes killed before completing the plan, he fades away in a similar way to the Thawnes from season 1 of The Flash and season 2 of Legends of Tomorrow.\|\| - At the end of Season 2 of Legends, the titular team itself willingly becomes this trope, interacting with their past selves, in order to stop the Legion of Doom. Most of the future team end up being killed anyway, while Sara vanishes into thin air after \|\|the Black Flash kills Thawne\|\| and the Legion is stopped. This means that forevermore, the Legends are walking paradoxes: they exist because they were saved by versions of themselves that they never became thanks to having been saved by those selves. People who can't exist at once thanks to their own actions had to work together to make those actions! ...mind you, this did cause damage to the space-time continuum that they'd spend quite some time cleaning up, but it should never have been able to happen in the first place and the Legends as we know them now should be impossible. - After the Crisis, Earth-1, Earth-38, and Black Lightning's Earth are all merged, while Earth-2 is destroyed and replaced with a new one which serves as the setting for Stargirl. However, for some reason, the Laurel Lance who appears in the last two episodes of Arrow is still the same one we've been following for the past four seasons. She still acts as if she came from Earth-2, even though it doesn't exist (and, post-Crisis, never did). In fact, the Laurel from Earth-1 who died all the way back in Season 4 is stated to be a different person and still dead (though thanks to Oliver saving Tommy from death, they were married), even though everyone else is merged with their Earth-2 selves. This is because Oliver specifically chose to save Earth-2 Laurel; with him being the Spectre, he had the ability to reconfigure the multiverse so she could continue to exist even when she should have not. - Similarly, the aftermath of the Crisis sees Dinah Drake return to her normal place in the Earth-1 timeline, long enough to \|\|attend the funeral of Oliver Queen\|\|... only to wake up the very next day in Mia's future, with all evidence of her past existence in the timeline having been erased. - Dark (2017): \|\|By the end, it turns out that no less than fourteen of Winden's residents specifically : Jonas, Martha, Mikkel/Michael, Tronte, Ulrich, Mads, Magnus, Silja, Agnes, Hanno/Noah, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Franziska and The Unknown were never meant to exist in the first place, and do so only as a result of the temporal anomaly caused when H.G. Tannhaus tried to change history in order to save his family, inadvertently splitting the universe in two, dooming both sides to destruction and the town's inhabitants to an endless cycle of misery caused by their own efforts to prevent it. Worse, all of them except for Silja, Agnes and Noah are products of circular family lines, effectively making them all living time anomalies. Ultimately, Jonas and Martha manage to change history so that Tannhaus' family survive, preventing the anomaly from occurring and saving all those not "part of the knot", but do so knowing that they and all the others will be eliminated from existence.\|\| - Doctor Who: - The Doctor's reference to "The Could-Have-Been-King with his army of Meanwhiles and Never-weres" suggest that some of these were fighting as part of the Last Great Time War. - There are plenty of time headaches in the main cast. To wit: - Rose saved the world by following the clues that were left by... herself, when she saved the world. Her two minutes or so of absolute power are felt throughout history. Most notably... - ...Jack Harkness is a "fact" of time and space thanks to Rose: he's immortal due to the fact that his body will always revert back to the way it was on Satellite Five. The TARDIS ran to the end of the universe rather than let him inside. - Amy Pond grew up in close proximity to a crack in time, and can remember things erased from time: Rory and later the Doctor himself were restored from her memory. Amy's own parents were also among those erased pre-series, and yet Amy still exists. - Clara Oswald (The Impossible Girl) exists in multiple places and times, due to \|\|dispersing herself along the Doctor's timeline.\|\| - Clara also exists \|\|a heartbeat from her own fixed-point-in-time Heroic Sacrifice, thanks to the Doctor abusing Time Lord technology to try to save her life. This leaves her functionally immortal, but also renders the Universe in danger of coming apart if she doesn't eventually repair the paradox by returning to her moment of death.\|\| - Kamen Rider Zi-O is straightforward by time travel TV standards, right? Our hero Sougo is the horrible villain Ohma Zi-O in the Bad Future; our secondary heroes want to keep him from going dark, or failing that, take him out; the bad guys are the Time Jackcers who want to take his place in history so they rule the world instead. Except... Sougo becomes Zi-O in the first place because Woz, who is from that future, gave him his transformation gear. Why'd he need it? Because the Time Jackers showed up. On top of that, one Time Jacker's plan to rule the future, unbeknownst to the others, is to set Sougo up to become Ohma Zi-O and manipulate his actions from behind the scenes. In other words, Ohma Zi-O only exists because of what several players are doing about the fact that Ohma Zi-O already exists. - Loki (2021): The protagonist Loki is the one that teleported away with the tesseract during Avengers: Endgame. This violated the Sacred Timeline, causing the TVA to arrest him. He's explicitly called a Cosmic mistake. - However, played with when it turns out \|\|that he didn't cause any real temporal paradox, and that the TVA isn't even designed to contain those; it's just enforcing one specific (and apparently arbitrarily chosen) timeline, and pruning anyone who makes decisions that would diverge from that- such as Loki variants that decide to be genuinely heroic.\|\| - In the third season of The Umbrella Academy (2019), the Umbrella Hargreeves siblings \|\|unknowingly\|\| become ones because \|\|Viktor's removal of his powers from Harlan wasn't entirely complete, so Harlan goes on to accidentally kill all of their mothers via these borrowed powers before they were born and create a Grandfather Paradox in which the siblings need to exist in order to travel back in time to give Harlan his powers to kill their mothers, but their timeline meddling means that they should never have been born in the first place to give Harlan his powers.\|\| Their very existence interacting with the Sparrow Hargreeves timeline of 2019 spawns the kugelblitz in the Academy's basement. - Chronicles of Darkness: - This is the whole point of Promethean: The Created. Reality itself rejects your existence and staying in one place for too long causes the location to decay. - Mage: The Awakening: - The Cult of the Doomsday Clock was born when a fight between two mage factions in a sensitive location ended up completely disrupting the time stream. They should have been wiped out of existence... but weren't. And now, they're not planning on leaving the timestream unless they can take everyone else with them... - Tremere liches induct new members by severing their soul (which normally destroys the victim's magic, followed by their mind) and baptising them in the Ocean Ouroboros (which normally erases anything from existence). Somehow, the rite instead lets them live on with a paradoxical un-soul that even hides their true nature from magic, so long as they consume souls to sustain it. - All characters are Paradox People in the card game Chrononauts, and un-paradoxing yourself (by changing history so that your birth happened) is one of the ways a player can win. Other players may come from different incompatible versions of history though, so they'll try to stop you, in order to prevent them becoming an even more impossible Paradox Person. - In Continuum, the players (as well as enemy time travelers) can become Paradox People through the accumulation of Frag, representing how out-of-sync their recollections are with history. It's not a pretty sight: the symptoms start with nausea and disorientation, leading up to gradual physical disintegration, after which the unfortunate time traveler becomes a barely sentient ghost. Doing this on purpose is called "Time Combat". - Dungeons & Dragons has the leShay, a powerful, ageless Mage Species who resemble albino elves with solid black eyes. Once they had a mighty civilization, but some magical catastrophe not only brought their race to the brink of extinction, it also changed history so that the leShay's empire never existed in the first place. Apparently trying to undo this would cause an even worse apocalypse to happen, so the few surviving leShay try to stave off ennui as best they can, the remnants of a past that never happened. - In Exalted, there is the Yozi Oramus. The first of the Primordials to awaken was Cytherea—yet when she did, Oramus asked what took her so long, because Oramus is the embodiment of paradox and the impossible. Unable to hold him in any lesser prison, the gods stitched Oramus' wings together and bound him within himself. - The Neverborn also qualify as this. As Primordials, they couldn't be killed, so when the Exalted killed them anyway, the afterlife basically crashed from trying to process the death of something that could never die. The Neverborn ended up trapped in an endless agony of undeath, and now seek to unravel Creation in order to escape their current paradoxical torment. - The mortals who become Getimian Exalted were never born because Heaven decided while planning the future that they, and their effects on Creation, should never come to be. The Getimian Exaltation brings that discarded destiny into existence; from a newly-Exalted Getimian's point of view, they've gone from a world where they were going about their lives to a world where they never existed, while from an outside observer's perspective, their original world never existed in the first place. - Magic: The Gathering: Sarkhan Vol, after the events of Fate Reforged. In that set, he traveled back in time to alter the course of history, saving the Spirit Dragon Ugin from death at the hands of Nicol Bolas. While this had a lot of side effects, one of the most profound was that Sarkhan himself was no longer born in the new timeline. Perhaps due to his Planeswalker spark, he still exists, despite the fact that he was no longer born. - Hunduns, powerful incarnations of entropy, are this in Pathfinder. One of their abilities is literally defined as reality constantly reconfiguring in their vicinity to correct the paradoxes generated by their existence. The Great Old One Cthulhu has a similar ability. - Kingdom Hearts: - Nobodies are initially described as this. They are the remains of a person's body and soul after they lost their heart (which becomes a Heartless), animated by their strong will. They are born lacking hearts, which make them unable to truly feel, but their memories allow them to act out the appropriate emotions in the right situations. They are said to defy the laws of the universe to the point that neither the Realm of Darkness nor the Realm of Light accept them. As the series goes on, however, the Nobodies' inherent otherness becomes less and less emphasized, making it seem like the whole "unable to feel emotion" shtick is an Informed Flaw created so people can subject them to Fantastic Racism. It all culminates with The Reveal in Dream Drop Distance that \|\|everything established as fact about Nobodies is one enormous lie, simply conjured up by Xemnas to make the members of the Organization easier to manipulate. Nobodies are not contradictory; they are simply the natural state people endure when their hearts are ripped out. By all accounts, the state is temporary and Nobodies will eventually replace the lost hearts with new ones, unless (as with the Organization) they are made to believe that can't happen and ignore any hint of their own emotions.\|\| - A more straightforward example is Xion, who is an Artificial Human created from Sora's memories and is meant to be a clone and replacement of Sora's Nobody, Roxas. Because of her relationship with Roxas, she unwittingly absorbs Sora's memories, causing her to grow stronger and essentially becoming a person, but making both Sora and Roxas weaker. When she perishes, she is Ret Goned. \|\|Or so we think. It turns out that replicas, like Nobodies and other intelligent beings who lack hearts, are capable of growing them given time. Xion did, so when the heart is returned to her, everyone remembers her again.\|\| - \|\|Ciel\|\| from Tsukihime is a walking, talking paradox because she cannot live and cannot die at the same time, making her effectively a perfect immortal. - In BlazBlue \|\|Noel Vermillion\|\| never existed in previous timelines (as the result of being an Artificial Human Attack Animal of some sort). Terumi is able to use this knowledge (combined with the fact that \|\|that Tsubaki would have Jin to herself and withholding the fact that in the prime universe, she'd be dead and Jin would become Hakumen\|\|) to More than Mind Control \|\|Tsubaki, Noel's best friend\|\| into a FaceHeel Turn. - Serge of Chrono Cross, at least after falling into an alternate timeline where his counterpart died ten years ago. While this naturally disturbs everyone in that timeline's version of his hometown and leads to interesting conversations with a fortune teller ("You're not dead or anything are you? [...] You just might be the key to the destruction of this entire planet"), it also renders Serge vital to the plans of numerous forces hoping to use him to their advantage. - Waluigi from Super Mario Bros. is this from a postmodern perspective, as discussed in the essay "Critical Perspectives on Waluigi". In the author's words, "Waluigi is the ultimate example of the individual shaped by the signifier. Waluigi is a man seen only in mirror images; lost in a hall of mirrors he is a reflection of a reflection of a reflection. You start with Mario the wholesome all Italian plumbing superman, you reflect him to create Luigi the same thing but slightly less. You invert Mario to create Wario Mario turned septic and libertarian then you reflect the inversion in the reflection: you create a being who can only exist in reference to others. Waluigi is the true nowhere man, without the other characters he reflects, inverts and parodies he has no reason to exist. Waluigis identity only comes from what and who he isnt without a wider frame of reference he is nothing. He is not his own man." - Pokémon Scarlet and Violet introduced \|\|Paradox Pokémon, which are supposedly past/future versions of contemporary mons brought to the current day by The Professor's Time Machine. The game itself points out that several aspects of their existence don't add up, such as the fact that there were sightings of them before the time machine was even built, Roaring Moon is supposedly connected to Mega Salamence when Mega Evolution has only existed for 3000 years, Brute Bonnet has the same Poké Ball pattern as Amoonguss despite coming from an era that predates humanity, Scream Tail (prehistoric Jigglypuff) predates multicellular life, and the future mons apparently evolved (in the Darwinian sense, mind you) into robots. It's implied that these mons never actually existed to begin with, and were created by the machine drawing from people's imaginations as a result of the Mineral MacGuffin used to make it and the influence of a mysterious third Legendary shown in Arven's book which was later identified as Terapagos.\|\| - Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite. \|\|Being born of another universe and split between the two, she can access virtually any conceivable universe.\|\| The Burial at Sea Episode 2 DLC \|\|sees her lose this status, due to the fact that by returning to Rapture after the version of her there died at the end of Episode 1 by her own actions, her existence as a quantum suspension is "reset" and now she's stuck in that timeline and will die for real the next time (which ultimately happens at the end).\|\| - In Devil Survivor 2 Record Breaker, \|\|Miyako Hotsuin, aka Cor Caroli, was created by the divine being Canopus as a replacement for Yamato Hotsuin after his data in the Akashic Records went missing. However, he is eventually brought back into the world, making Miyako this. Just trying to process the paradox of their simultaneous existence is enough to make the supposedly-invincible Canopus freak out so hard it becomes vulnerable.\|\| - \|\|The Player Character is himself a paradox in the storyline of Record Breaker as his data was erased in the second world, and in the current third world there are moments where he will still temporarily flicker out of existence while his data is being simultaneously repaired by Yamato and attacked by Canopus.\|\| - In the Persona 2 duology, \|\|Tatsuya Suou participated in the destruction of his world via the Oracle of Maya's prophecy, leading to the end of the Innocent Sin timeline. While Philemon rewound time to separate the True Companions to avert the Oracle by creating a new world (the Eternal Punishment timeline), everyone else in his group allowed themselves to forget each other. Tatsuya, however, refused to forget Maya, and his stubbornness instead sent him into the EP world's Tatsuya. Ironically, in his attempts to protect Maya, he wound up ensuring a repeat of many of the events of the IS world.\|\| - In Injustice 2, Reverse-Flash can't return to the future due to the fact that Superman's Regime in this timeline killed one of his ancestors, thus making him a paradox. - In The Elder Scrolls series, Mephala is a Daedric Prince whose sphere is "obscured to mortals", but who is associated with manipulation and the themes of murder, sex, and secrets. All of these themes contain subtle aspects and violent ones (assassination/genocide, courtship/orgy, tact/poetic truths); Mephala is understood paradoxically to contain and integrate these contradictory themes. It's rather fitting then that Mephala has associations with Sithis, a primordial force representing chaos, change, and limitation. Sithis is described as an equal but opposing force to Anui-El, "the soul of all things", making Sithis is the antithesis of all things. Sithis Is Not. - In Tales of Maj'Eyal, Paradox Mages' power is increased by causing trouble in spacetime, and their Time Master powers are not limited by the rules of sanity, let alone causality. Fittingly, the class can only be unlocked when a Temporal Warden is killed by his own future self; this is only the start of the reality glitching. - World of Warcraft: - Sylvanas Windrunner is viewed this way by the Alliance. She falls into the category of "The Powers that Be did not intend you to happen". She was killed and raised to undeath by the Lich King, but the Lich King was supposed to keep his army (called The Scourge) mind-controlled. Someone did some magic interfering with this, and Sylvanas managed to get free of the Lich King's mind-control. Oops. She also freed some other people including her former lover Nathanos Maris who always happened to be a brilliant tactician. Basically, The Scourge was screwed. The Alliance however views the undead as unnatural abominations, and therefore Sylvanas is a paradox person for them. - Illidan Stormrage thinks he's this due to consuming the Skull of Gul'dan and becoming a demon, but he might also just be an arrogant Jerkass Hero. Though with how weird the lore in this game is getting, one never knows for sure. - In the Legacy of Kain series, Raziel is one starting about a third of the way through the first Soul Reaver game. This is because he absorbed the soul of the titular reaver, which is his soul from a possible future. Since there are now always two of him at the same point in space/time wherever he goes, he is a walking paradox. - Jeanne D'Arc Alter Santa Lily of Fate/Grand Order is the idealistic child self of a being that was a) Born as an Adult and b) wished into existence by the Grail. The Throne of Heroes threatens her life because there is no concievable timeline or universe where she can naturally exist without some tie to the original Jeanne, and due to her young age she hasn't done anything that can connect her. Amakusa and the Protagonist manage to justify her existence in time by bringing her to the ocean, fulfilling a dream that Jeanne (and by extension Jeanne Alter) never got to experience in her youth. - In Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, Billie Lurk gains her new powers due to the canonical events of Dishonored 2, in which \|\|Emily tampered with the past, which resulted in Billie regaining her eye and arm as a side-effect\|\|. This somehow causes Billie to be a living time paradox and thus grant her unique abilities outside of the Outsider's powers. - The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie, Rean Schwarzer encounters a man who looks very similar to him yet at the same time is a Red and Black and Evil All Over version of him. This variation of Rean ends up causing reality to try and merge the two Reans into one being as only one Rean is supposed to exist in the timeline. It's revealed that the other Rean \|\|is a simulated version of him in an alternate timeline where he performs his Heroic Suicide as depicted at the end of Cold Steel IV, formally named as "Ishmelga-Rean".\|\| - In Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, You Can't Fight Fate is one of the defining features of the setting. So when the Fateless One comes along, it's a very big deal. The paradox is made evident early on: a man knows that he's fated to die at a certain time by the hand of a certain monster. But when the time comes, the Fateless One kills the monster, saving the man. This action indelibly alters not only the fate of the man, but also that of every other person he will interact with for the rest of his life (and everyone the monster and its future offspring would have interacted with, as well). - The climax of Mortal Kombat 11 sees the birth of Fire God Liu Kang, who comes into existence as a result of the fusion between the souls of Past!Liu Kang, Revenant!Liu Kang, and Raiden. This fact in itself already creates a paradox (as his past self's death would have been completely undone and it would have prevented his Revenant's existence), and he also exists outside of time as Raiden revealed to have been a property gods have. In Aftermath, when the three people that make up his being don't merge (with his human and Revenant possibly dying too), he still shows up in the end to confront Shang Tsung. Simply put, there are so many factors that prove that he shouldn't even exist but he still does due to being a god. - In the cosmology of Genshin Impact, all things belonging to Teyvat are recorded in Irminsul. However, these records do not account for beings like The Traveler that came from other worlds and are therefore "not of Teyvat". Irminsul's records are also not immune to tampering, which can result in a clash of divine laws. - Sumeru's Archon Quest explores this trope at length. \|\|Greater Lord Rukkhadevata realized this would be the result if she attempted to erase herself from Irminsul, and therefore created Nahida as her reincarnation to exploit a loophole. Her lingering memory and the corruption attached to it would cause numerous disasters throughout Sumeru until Nahida was finally able to purge Rukkhadevata from the world's memory. In doing so, Nahida herself is given credit for her predecessor's actions to account for everyone but the Traveler forgetting Rukkhadevata ever existed\|\|. - The interlude quest, "Inversion of Genesis", likewise centers on this trope. \|\|Scaramouche's attempt to erase his own existence results in him becoming such a being. As the amnesiac Wanderer, he encounters the Traveler and resolves to reclaim a hidden copy of his lost memories. As of the quest's conclusion, he resolves to take advantage of his Ret-Gone status to take revenge against the Fatui. The organization, normally so careful about cleaning up loose ends, has completely forgotten the existence of such a dangerous former member and all the secrets he knows\|\|. - The art prep room ghost from hololive ERROR: The Game may or may not be one of these in-universe (out-of-universe, it's just because the developers didn't want to injure the likeness of a hololive talent on-screen). Watchers of the motion manga would quickly realize that things simply don't match up, and not just in appearance, because not only does \|\|Mari Akagane\|\| not show up after her death, the deaths tied to the blood painting are associated with a simple curse there, not the ghost of the painter coming in and draining you of your blood to use as more paint. \|\|As such, it is very likely that the game version was created by the Perfect World itself, but it then would've had to reconfigure itself after Shino Misora found out the truth about Mari and thus wouldn't need the overly-violent stand-in anymore. However, even after the ending of the motion manga, she is still there in the game, suggesting that she somehow was unaffected and still exists despite the fact that she shouldn't. Shino even supports this, stating in "202 Accepted" that there is some kind of "error" in the new world.\|\| - Mercurius from Dies Irae is a mysterious existence, a being so ancient that even his original name has been lost. But one thing that is known is that he is something that ought not be. He is someone who was supposedly born as he died and died as he was born, all thanks to another man trying to manipulate time to his advantage. - In anti-HEROES, Aldran is half fiend and half angel. Such a cross was thought to be impossible, but here he is, him and his brother Eldhin. - In Blip, the protagonist K is someone whose existence Heaven never predicted, so there's no place for her in the divine plan. - The Dragon Doctors: Delta X, "the result of a mad scientist kidnapping a girl and fusing as many things into her as he could—creatures with contradictory natures, like fire and ice." - Jones from Gunnerkrigg Court. A human (sort of) who already existed before the beginning of life on Earth. Nobody knows where she came from, not even herself. Her existence even predates the one of gods, who only exist in this universe because they were imagined by humans. The gods themselves don't seem to know what the deal is with Jones either. - Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has the sentient beings composed of literally nothing who form the population of the Nothingverse, where it is impossible for anything to exist. - Sluggy Freelance: - Chaz — a sword but a Talking Weapon so he's also a person — is stated to be from outside the Fate Web, which is why he's able to kill a god and why even the King Of Gods is unable to destroy him. Though the details remain sketchy, he was brought into the world from \|\|the hellish dimension the Never, by Satan.\|\| - Oasis the immortal gymnastic assassin is also said to be one of the few things that operate outside the Fate Web, though that doesn't go a long way towards solving the mystery of what she is. - Tower of God - The Irregulars are beings who have entered the Tower from the outside and are not subject to its rules, nor the limits set by its all-powerful Administrators, which is largely the same thing. The also seem to be Immune to Fate. - In the computer-program-like virtual reality of the Hidden Floor, Urek Mazino's sworn enemy is left behind when he leaves the program. He shouldn't continue to exist there and constantly has error messages floating around him. - DEATH BATTLE!: "Goku Black vs. Reverse-Flash" explores what happens when two Paradox People want each other dead. After duking it out the old-fashioned way in the first half of the battle, Thawne and Zamasu both get the idea to travel back in time and kill their opponents before the fight begins (a la Green Lantern vs. Ben 10)... only to find neither of them is affected by the deaths of their past selves. \|\|Thawne wins this one, courtesy of being a natural Paradox Person; Zamasu only possesses the status due to his Time Ring, which can be removed.\|\| - Every human(ish) SCP of the SCP Foundation, by dint of not complying to how reality (as we know it) works. Some of them are outright normal people with something subtly wrong with them that makes them harmful or a threat to The Masquerade. - In Doctor Whooves Adventures, \|\|Penny Dreadful's parents met in an aborted timeline\|\|. She exists solely because the universe has overlooked this fact while the timelines, in Doctor's words, are "boiling". Fixing the universe has to involve erasing her. - Red vs. Blue: Near the end of the Season 16, The Reds and Blues decide to Time Travel and prevent Wash getting shot in Season 15, and contracting brain damage. They succeed, but cause a Reality-Breaking Paradox that traps them in a loop of "Soft Time", forever reliving their lives up until that point. In Season 17, Donut learns that after the moment the paradox happened, Agent Washington is now two people in one body- a Wash who got shot and was treated, and one who wasn't shot and didn't get treated. This has resulted in Wash checking into a hospital for a gun wound that never happened, and when Donut finds him, is now constantly shifting between Sane/treated and Loopy/untreated. Luckily, confronting the Logic Bomb stabilizes Wash's personality. - Adventure Time: In "Gold Stars", the Lich mentions that before time started, there was nothing, and then mentions the group of monsters who were around before that nothing. Orgalorg (\|\|AKA Gunter\|\|) was one of them, the Lich and Marceline's father may be others. - Ben 10: Alien Force: A monster from 50 years in the past that accelerates time is destroying a town, and Ben and the gang is told the creature does not hold order in the time stream. - Futurama: Fry became his own grandfather, thanks to some mixups sending the crew to 1947. Because he is a paradox himself, he lacks a delta brainwave, which becomes a plot point later on. - Bender's Big Score: Time paradox doubles are also an example of this trope, being temporal copies brought about when a time-traveller breaks their own causality when interacting with their past self. These doubles inevitably die because they're paradoxes. \|\|Lars Fillmore, Leela's new love interest, turns out to be one of Fry.\|\| " History abhors a paradox."	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParadoxPerson
Blipvert - TV Tropes "It's like they got fifteen hours worth of random clips and couldn't pick the good ones. So they made 'em all really short." The term "blipvert" comes from Max Headroom and referred to highly time-compressed advertisements. More generally, a blipvert is a brief collection of often-random images cut together very quickly. The Trope Namer made Your Head A-Splode. Note that blipverts only refer to very high speed montages. If it's a few seconds to pause on each, odds are it's just a normal Previously on . ## Examples: - The End of Evangelion has a Blipvert, featuring fan mail and actual death threats sent to Hideaki Anno after the infamous last two chapters were broadcast all over Japan. One scene features a reel of all the Episode Title Cards. - The technique is also used several times throughout the series. Shinji in the bath in the second episode, and most strikingly in the Mindrape sequence, where it's all scribbled words related to Sigmund Freud's theory of Psychoanalysis, as well as terms related to mental disorders, death and disease. - The last half of the opening credits in the main series does this as well, cutting back and forth between scenes and major characters from the show, jargon from the show and medical terms written on stark white-on-black title cards. - In episode 31 of Fullmetal Alchemist, when it shows \|\|Ed's first visit to the "gate"\|\|, it rapidly shows a series of photographs. One of them is of an Austin-Healey Sprite Mk 1 with the Japanese Hagane no Renkinjutsushi logo in the license plate holder. - This concept was used in Aliens Outbreak. In the future, the human attention span is so short that one-second-long commercial bursts are used to keep your attention. This is used to \|\|transmit an image of a Xenomorph into the viewer, making him or her obsessed with getting impregnated.\|\| - In Transmetropolitan they're called "Block Consumer Incentive Bursting", better known as "Buy Bombs", and contain compressed information so potent you dream advertisements in your sleep. - A Subway ad does this. It says "Spot the non-Subway sub" and it flashes through impossibly perfect subs, with a monkey on a yellow submarine about halfway through. - For a while, advertisements for Sprite consisted of exactly this, involving some very surreal, and frequently disturbing, pictures and clips, and all centered around yellow and green colored things. The message "Quench your Thirst" tended to feature prominently. Of course, it was so out there and ridiculous, it may have been a parody (or perhaps a pastiche) of this trope. - Some GE advertisements had 'One Second Theater' stories at the end. A quick flash of a number of images, that if slowed down, told some sort of a story. This shows one slowed down. - One of the earlier ads for Late Night with Conan O'Brien had Conan saying "Hi, I'm Conan O'Brien and I only have four seconds. So how do I..." - Master Lock had a famous one-second commercial. It was just a bullet hitting the titular product, which didn't break, and the company name flashed on the screen. - This commercial for Batman Beyond on Toonami includes very quick images from the intro of the show at the very end. - For those wondering, the World Record for the shortest commercial ever belongs to MuchMusic in Canada. In January 2002, they started airing what they call "Quickies", twelve different commercials that ran for 1/60th of a second each. 1/60th of a second is also half a frame in Standard Definition. It's a record that is unlikely to ever be broken. You can watch all 10 of them here. - The United Kingdom cable channel, simply titled Horror Channel ran some blipverts when they reran classic Doctor Who stories in April of 2014. One featuring a Dalek, one featuring a Cyberman, and one featuring The TARDIS. - The signature feature of one of the most famous Russian ZX Spectrum demoscene group, skrju, combined with (unintentional) Very Nice, Very Nice-like slideshow and really Merzbow-inspired soundtrack. Which is especially odd, considering that sq (formerly Screamer) once coded an oldskool-style Jaundice, kq (formerly Kristoph/Kreestaj, now inactive) was a graphical artist with pictures being pretty close to state-of-the-art and nq (more commonly known as n1k-o) is still considered to be the best musician on the platform, as well as bearing his own unique and quirky style... All of whom made this little and literally mind-blowing blipvert. - Ur-Example: The 1961 Canadian short film Very Nice, Very Nice. The creator had recorded a montage of audio and, in a response to a suggestion made by a colleague, set it a similar sampling of images. Lipsett Diaries, a film created about Arthur Lipsett, the man behind Very Nice, Very Nice, also employs this technique deliberately to terrifying degree in illustrating Lipsett's psychological turmoil culminating in his eventual suicide. - The original movie trailer for Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, 1964. - Also the trailer for A Clockwork Orange. Apparently, Stanley Kubrick liked this trope. Makes sense, as he wanted Lipsett to make the trailer for Dr. Strangelove. Lipsett declined, so he made the trailer in that style. - One of the oldest, longest and most sinister blipverts of all (excerpts pictured) appears in The Parallax View. Its influence from Very Nice Very Nice can be plainly seen (the same image of the audience in 3D glasses is present in the original). - In Sunshine, when the crew of the Icarus II \|\|boards the Icarus I\|\|, we get flashes from the group photo of the crew of Icarus I. - In Run Lola Run, the theme is the butterfly effect (sensitive dependence on initial conditions). On Lola's three journeys her effect on other people is shown by blipverts, a series of polaroid photos showing the (widely varying) futures of those people. - Used near the end of the trailer for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005). - Requiem for a Dream and its trademark "hip hop montages" played every time someone uses a psychotropic substance. These montages have become famous enough to even be parodied — Lucky Star, for example, does one with instant noodles. - The end of The 6th Day starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. - At the end of the 1964 film The Time Travelers the team returns to their lab in the present day but find that time appears to be frozen around them. Their only option is to escape to the far future, which they do. But their brief presence in the lab has created a Stable Time Loop which is indicated by the entire film being reshown in blipvert mode, repeating over and over and getting faster each time... - In The Jacket, when Jack is locked into the isolation chamber, he has visions that are presented as flashing images in quick succession. - Don Jon features several sequences of briefly intercut footage from other works. - In Enter the Void, Gaspar Noé had to get through the opening credits "as fast" and "as graphic" as possible, since the film was already nearing three hours in length. What resulted from this was an exhilarating 2-minute display of people's names melded into Design Student's Orgasms coming one right after the other at a breakneck pace. The sequence has easily become the most iconic part of the film, heavily influencing the similarly seizure-inducing images in Kanye West's music video for "All of the Lights", and being honored by Quentin Tarantino as the greatest opening credits sequence in film history. - Closet Land: While the Interrogator speaks, images are shown of children greeting Hitler, attending a KKK rally and finally wielding guns rapidly passing, possibly emphasizing how they can be corrupted. - In The Divine Comedy, rapid-fire series of visions (involving a murderous nightingale and a crucified anti-semite) assail Dante at the start of Purgatorio Canto 17, constantly shattering to show new examples of wrath that rain down into the poet's mind. In General: - As noted by the quote above, a few opening credits can combine this with Design Student's Orgasm. - Bad Influence, a kids' show about videogames, and How2, a factual kids' series, both from The '90s ITV did "datablasts" during the credits- lots of text recapping the episode, flashed on screen quickly- the idea being that you'd video the program, and flick through the datablast on freeze-frame or slow-motion. In practice it didn't work, because VHS was too low quality. However, this practice has been Vindicated By YouTube- so here is a typical example from an episode of Bad Influence. Series: - Our Miss Brooks: - In "The Auction", Miss Brooks suggests a blipvert to cheaply advertize a charity auction at Madison High School: Mr. Conlin: Miss Brooks, do you have any idea how much a thirty second spot announcement costs? Miss Brooks: Well, we don't have to buy thirty seconds. We can buy about five, and say something quick, like "Today. Auction. Madison High School." Harriet Conklin: But Miss Brooks. That sounds like we're auctioning off the school. Miss Brooks : Is that bad? . I mean, if the object is just to lure people over . . . . Mr. Conklin: Any feasible suggestions? - Angel used quick flashes of images in the episode to cut from one scene to another. - Babylon 5: - An episode which took the form of a news report on the station had a "commercial" for the Psi Corps. During the commercial, the message "The Corps is your friend, trust Psi Corps" was flashed on the screen. Series creator J Michael Straczinski mentioned that the FCC has a precise definition of "subliminal advertising" and the director of that episode made sure that the Psi Corp blips were one-tenth of a second longer than that definition, to create an effect without "actually" brainwashing people. Other countries have stricter laws, requiring that segment to be cut out entirely for broadcasts in those countries. Ironically, studies have shown that subliminal advertising has no effect at all. - The end of the last episode featured a blipvert of pictures of the entire cast and crew, with the intention that people could pause the playback (or, today, rewind their DVR) and put faces to all the names in the credits. - The 2000s Battlestar Galactica places a blipvert of scenes from the upcoming episode at the end of the main title sequence, an homage to the same device in Space: 1999 and Mission: Impossible. The blipvert was dropped at the beginning of the second season when the network wanted to make room for more commericals. Fan demand led to it being restored starting with "The Farm". - The title sequence for The Big Bang Theory presents a chronological series of together 109 images of the great moments and inventions in human history. Even in the early days, each image appears for a fraction of a second, but the pace really picks up when we get to the Industrial Revolution; progress occurs so quickly that each image appears for only a single frame. - Buffy the Vampire Slayer also does this in "The Gift". Careful frame-by-frame examination shows that every episode received a mention, and the very last frame was a still from the climax of the episode "The Gift" itself. Due to interlacing of frames, this was only viewable if watching one frame at a time in reverse.... - Chuck does this when something from the spy database in his subconscious bubbles to the surface. - Second season slows it down so viewers can make some sense out of it. - There's also the "Chuck's Secret" commercial aired before the series premiered, which, when slowed down, tells the premise of the show amongst the random imagery and messages. - Doctor Who: In "The Lodger", the Info Dump via "psychic headbutt" the Doctor delivers to Craig appears like this. There are actually two of them, one chronicling the general history of the entire series up to that point, and one summarizing the events of the episode itself. In the first blipvert, Doctors One through Four and Eight through Ten, Rose Tyler, the Cybermen, the Ood and a Weeping Angel all appear briefly. - On the final episode of Farscape, the Previously on segment was a blipvert featuring every episode of the series. Careful frame-by-frame examination actually reveals that one episode from the series isn't represented. This was likely not intentional. - The NBC drama Kidnapped used blipverts to enter ad breaks. - Max Headroom is the Trope Namer, of course, and the Trope Codifier for Subliminal Advertising 20 Minutes into the Future. Somehow, the transfer of so much information so fast is enough to literally fry viewers' brains. - NCIS always blips the final image of the current act just before it starts. - NCIS: Los Angeles does a very brief montage of black-and-white images before each commercial break, containing teasers for the upcoming act. - In the Smallville episode "Blank", a montage of images from each previous episode represents Clark's memories. This is shown twice, played once when Clark loses his memories and again in reverse when he regains them. - Thunderbirds did the same in the title sequence, which may have inspired the Mission: Impossible and Space: 1999 versions. (Both Thunderbirds and Space: 1999 were Gerry Anderson productions.) - Get the Vacation Jackpot in White Water and the machine goes dead for a moment, then sounds sirens, displays split-second frames and soundbites from other animations in the game, then awards you the points. - Similarly, in Scared Stiff (also by Dennis Nordman), after successfully completing the Stiff-O-Meter, the game starts a Mind Screw sequence that plays split-second animations, quotes, and soundbites at completely random times. - In The Shadow, this happens after the player wins the Final Battle and successfully kills Khan. - Ripley's Believe It or Not!: The introduction to the hidden mode, Frog Frenzy, is this (downplayed, though). After collecting the 7th Super Jackpot, the game appears to be going on the fritz, with lights going off and random animations on the display. It ends with the machine "rebooting" itself, until the words "JUST KIDDING!" appear in small letters. After that, Frog Frenzy starts. - Completing Ringmaster Battle in Cirqus Voltaire causes this to occur. One notable snippet in this specific blipvert includes a boot-up screen from Python Anghelo's infamously cancelled Pinball Circus machine. - The opening ceremony of the Athens 2004 Summer Olympics featured blipverts projected on very large screens positioned in the center of the arena. The blipverts featured images of different human faces and human emotions (including screams of fear and pain) and were arguably pretty unsettling, forming a jarring contrast with the remainder of the ceremony. - Eternal Darkness had this happen every time a character (from chapter 3 on) picked up the tome of Eternal Darkness. - Dying in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots results in a quick montage of images from recent cutscenes to flash before cutting to white noise and the "Continue/Exit" menu. - In The Path, there is one for each girl at the end of their scenario. It is used in a very unsettling manner, accompanied with creepy music for added effect. - Portal's GLaDOS has several screens flashing random images, most to do with cakes. - Super Robot Wars Z example: When ~~Masaki's~~ Asakim's mech, the ~~Cybuster~~ Shurouga uses its ~~Akashic Buster~~ Ley Buster attack, a series of flashing, blurry drawings result. These are the source of many Epileptic Trees regarding Asakim's connection to Masaki (though that was pretty obviously the intention. Dude even has the same voice as Masaki.) - Mass Effect - Mass Effect: When Commander Shepard accidentally activates the Prothean Beacon on Eden Prime, a nightmarish flash of images is played. It turns out that this was intended to be a warning about \|\|The Reapers\|\|, but being a stranger entirely to Prothean culture, Shepard had no way to interpret was s/he was seeing at first. It is also possible to see the vision again later in the same game. - Mass Effect 2: Let the timer run down to zero in The Arrival, and you get a similar flash of images depicting the Reapers' invasion of the galaxy. Similarly, a sidequest lets you see a slightly extended version of the first game's vision, with a few extra scenes that make the whole thing easier to understand now that Shepard generally knows what's going on. - The Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends episode "Bloo's Brothers" features a blipvert of different variations on Bloo that other kids had imagined. One of them apparently resembles Homestar Runner. - Done in Finding Nemo when Dory sees the word Sydney on a sewage pipe and suddenly remembers the previous events of the movie, from her first meeting with Marlin up to that point. - Chowder pulls one in "The Froggy Apple Crumple Thumpkin" when Mung lists "the following ingredients" for the dish. This leaves Chowder in a daze. For the sake of interest, here's the scene in question. - The Venture Bros.: in "Showdown at Cremation Creek, Part 2", the Previously on is so fast and densely packed with old scenes that is is basically impossible to understand. - Space Ghost Coast to Coast had one near the end of the episode "Joshua", including a card saying "Haven't you anything better to do than to go through this frame by frame?". - Vakama's visions from BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui tended to contain a sequence of flashing images. Some of these were actually foreshadowing later events from the movie. The end credits also had these. - The finale of Moral Orel, "Honor", opens with the very end of the first episode "The Best Christmas Ever" with Orel believing deeply that God will fix everything, and he still has hope, followed by a rapid fire montage of scenes from the series during the one year between both episodes. The montage ends with Orel getting his cast off his leg after being shot in "Nature." showing the extreme contrast of the once innocently faithful Orel one year prior, to the more depressed Orel who's endured innocence shattering events by the end of the series. - In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Magical Mystery Cure", during the song, "A True True Friend," Twilight's destiny-swapped friends have images of their adventures from the last three seasons flash in their eyes when they get their cutie marks back. - The montage in the The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Burden", where Gumball and Darwin kiss a lump of Principal Brown's hair, several images of live-action hair being shaved are inserted in between each scene, cutting into the music with buzzing sounds.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParallaxMontage
Paralysis by Analysis - TV Tropes "There are more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the universe. No one can possibly predict them all, not even you. Which means that the first move can be terrifying. It's the furthest point from the end of the game, there's a virtually infinite sea of possibilities between you and the other side... but it also means that if you make a mistake, there's a nearly infinite amount of ways to fix it. So you should simply relax, and play." It's the final quarter. The game is still too close to call. The clock is counting down. There are seconds to go. You have the ball. It's all up to you. And you stand there. Think back to your training. Analyze the best response. And do absolutely nothing in the meantime. Friend, you just choked. Any time you're doing something you're accustomed to, something you're good at. Hell, you can be a recognized master in your field, but as soon as the pressure is on, you can choke. It can happen in sports. It can happen on game shows. It can happen in bed. Expert athletes often talk about getting in "the zone", when they stop thinking about what they're doing it and just do it. This usually leads to perfect performances that crush the other team easily. Choking occurs when, instead of getting in the zone and shutting off the thinking, the expert starts thinking about what he's doing. He starts trying to control everything, trying to account for every last variable. He gets in his head and because there's just too much to think about, he can't do anything. He's got the yips or, as The Other Wiki calls it, focal dystonia. Compare with the Centipede's Dilemma. Contrast Awesomeness by Analysis. ## Examples Anime and Manga - My Hero Academia: A problem Momo sometimes had in early fights was that her Quirk lets her make pretty much anything and she'd struggle to decide what she should make, slowing her reaction times. At least once, this cost her a fight she should have been able to easily win (against Tokoyami in the Sports Festival). Fan Works Film - 8 Mile: Bunny Rabbit's first time performing on stage leads to him freezing while the crowd chants "Choke! Choke! Choke!". - Bull Durham: Crash's rule #1, "Don't think, it'll only hurt the ballclub." - Teen Wolf: The eponymous teen opens the movie at the free throw line, way up in his head. He bounces. He bounces the ball. He bounces. He bounces. He bricks it. He is despised. - Tin Cup: Kevin Costner's eponymous character gets the yips when he's simultaneously worried about his love interest and the upcoming U.S. Open. Literature Live-Action TV - In 30 Rock, it happens to Jenna and Pete is able to help her because it happened to him in the Olympics. - In The Good Place, this seems to be at least one of Chidi's problems with making decisions. As a professor of moral philosophy, he tries to do all he can to live his life ethically, but there are many ways to see any dilemma. Should he use utilitarianism, or maybe virtue ethics? In which situation? Can he be sure another piece of information wouldn't change things? How can he ever be sure he's doing the most ethical thing? This means he has a hard time making decisions about even the smallest things. \|\|This ironically turns out to be what doomed him to the Bad Place: he was so obsessed by waffling about what the 'right' decision was that he never really made any meaningful decision, hurting people through inaction and indecisiveness and blotting his moral copybook regardless.\|\| - How I Met Your Mother: Happens to Barney in "The Yips". He runs into Rhonda, the older woman he lost his virginity to. She previously told him he was the best she ever had, and when he found out she was lying, he lost his confidence and had a hard time flirting with women, since he kept overthinking. He got it back when he slept with her again, and this time she said that he really was the best she's ever had. - NUMB3RS: Charlie's dad can't understand why the Cal Sci Basketball team is so poor (although Charlie points out, not unreasonably, that it's not really a burning concern for a bunch of science geeks) and convinces Charlie to try to improve them using "Scientific Methods". This only results in increasing frustration for Charlie as his methods fail to achieve anything. Ultimately, they only win \|\|thanks to his dad bringing in a couple of Ringers.\|\| - Psych: "Shawn Gets The Yips". - Scrubs: Elliot is unable to perform a tracheal intubation, an easy medical procedure she learned in her first week as an intern. - In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Peak Performance", Picard and Riker fight each other as part of a military exercise, and Data (who is acting as Picard's first officer) gets hit by this twice. First, he loses a strategy game to the Starfleet observer, and spends almost half the episode agonizing about his loss and analyzing his systems for what went wrong. Then, when Picard orders him to get his act together and come up with a strategy to defeat Riker, Data nearly does this to himself again by analyzing Riker's usual strategy, analyzing how Riker is likely to change his strategy knowing Data knows his strategy, analyzing how Riker is likely to not change his strategy knowing that Data knows Riker knows Data knows his usual strategy, etc. - Young Sheldon: In "The Yips and an Oddly Hypnotic Bohemian", Both Missy and Sheldon get "the yips" (with Sheldon thinking he caught them from Missy); Missy chokes on the pitcher's mound, Sheldon on his midterm exam. George's advice for Sheldon is to stop thinking about it, which Sheldon finds impossible to do until he discovers Bob Ross. As for Missy, Dale cures her yips by making her angry at him and have her take it out on the catcher's mitt. Tabletop Games - "Analysis Paralysis" usually has a slightly different but related meaning when used in discussion of Tabletop Games. Some players become highly analytical in every game they play, always looking for the best possible move on every turn. However, some games have such a huge number of possible moves, with subtle and far-reaching consequences, that analyzing them all could take ludicrous amounts of time. (There's a reason why the chess clock was invented.) Others are designed as simple little family games, to be played quickly and casually, with little riding on the result; subjecting them to chess-master levels of analysis just gets ludicrous. Most tabletop games have a turn sequence, with each player waiting their turn, so the player who is paralyzed by analysis doesn't actually lose as a result; they just slow things down to a painful extent and make the game boring. A few tabletop games include components such as egg-timers to enforce time limits on turns, saving less analytical players from boredom. Video Games - A Real Life version pops up with John Doe in Season 2 of Batman: The Telltale Series, who's struggling to adjust to life outside of Arkham. John: It's- it's the freedom that gets to you. There's so damn much, you hardly know what to do with it. It's not like Arkham. Sometimes I miss those padded walls. You knew where the lines were drawn. Which ones not to cross. - Kingdom of Loathing: - Weaponized with Ed the Undying's "Curse of Indecision", which stuns the opponent for several turns by making them aware of every possible outcome of of every possible move. - Parodied by the "Option Paralysis" trophy, which is earned by simultaneously dressing as a Red Shirt and having a status effect of "escorted by a Red Shirt". You're entitled to the "Option Paralysis" Trophy, for making it so your enemies have no idea who to kill first. Web Comics - Dork Tower: Guest cartoonist Charlie Bates has Carson demonstrate the tabletop games version of the trope (see above) here. - The "Lair of the Trapmaster" in Oglaf is an empty room with "Overthinking" painted on one wall. The adventure party ends the strip still standing around wondering what it means. - xkcd #1445 has a graph showing the respective time costs of two strategies next to the far greater time cost of assessing which of the strategies is more efficient. Web Original - Doormonster's aptly titled "Analysis Paralysis" shows that Ricky suffers from this trope - \|\|even in a game as simple as Candyland\|\| - The Noob webseries and novel imply that Sparadrap is completely immune to it (mentioning that "pressure has no effect on him"), which helps his real-life profession as \|\|a tennis player\|\| a lot. Western Animation - Miraculous Ladybug: In Party Crasher, this occurs to the eponymous villain after the heroes start dancing around randomly to screw with his power. He's so overwhelmed by all the possibilities that his power shows him, he doesn't manage to land a single hit on any of them before his goggles (which contain his akuma) are knocked off and destroyed. - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Rainbow Dash has this issue, particularly when her idols, the Wonderbolts, are involved. For instance, in "Sonic Rainboom", she enters into a big stunt flying competition for which the Wonderbolts are judges. However, her inability to pull off the titular move a second time (after pulling it off once as a young filly) while practicing gives her pause for thought, which quickly snowballs into panic, and eventually leaves her practically catatonic with fear. \|\|Then she has to save Rarity and the 'Bolts from falling to their death, and Rainbooms without even thinking about it.\|\| - The Transformers: This is the primary weakness of the Technobots combiner Computron. He always thoroughly and completely analyzes every situation for the perfect response, but often arrives at that solution too late for it to be useful. Real Life - Ken Jennings, who holds the longest win streak on Jeopardy!, once told an interviewer that the question he was most embarrassed about getting wrong was because he knew the answer. And he knew that he knew the answer. He just couldn't remember the answer, because he'd never sat down and studied the poem like he did with everything else. Because it was his father's favorite poem: "Jabberwocky". - Professional Greg Norman blew it out of the water for three days at the 1996 U.S. Master's. Then he tanked on the last day and finished five shots out of first (And That's Terrible). - Several baseball players have struggled with "the yips", the inability to do the one they've done since early childhood, throw a baseball: - Rick Ankiel was a promising young pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals at the turn of the millennium, finishing in the top ten in ERA and strikeouts in his rookie season at the age of 20. In the 2000 NL Division Series, he was selected to start Game 1, but mysteriously, his control abandoned him completely, walking four batters and setting a major league record with five wild pitches before being removed in the third. In his next playoff start, Ankiel threw five pitches over his catcher in the first inning. His control never recovered for reasons unknown, but Ankiel was able to salvage his career thanks to being a superb hitter, resurfacing in the majors a few years later as a converted outfielder with good power and, thanks to his pitching experience, an absolute cannon for an arm. - Chuck Knoblauch was an All-Star second baseman with the Twins and the dynastic Yankees of the late 90's. However, in 2000, he was unable to make routine throws from the relatively short distance of his position to first, even once airmailing a ball into the stands and clocking Keith Olbermann's mother in the face. Despite several methods on trying to correct it, eventually he forced out from his position into a full-time designated hitter, staying off the field. - Jon Lester, formerly of the Red Sox and currently with the Cubs, is one of the most established pitchers in baseball, with All-Star appearances and championship rings to his name. However, he apparently has issues with throwing to first, as he oddly went two years without attempting a pickoff to first (a relatively common tactic to keep baserunners close to first). Although he vehemently denied having an issue, it became so blatant of his aversion to throwing to first base that hitters have started to bunt towards Lester, forcing the catcher to come a long way to field it and throw to first, or having Lester do it. Like the other examples, no one's sure why Lester is uncomfortable with that throw in particular, especially since he has no such issues pitching effectively to home. - This trope is the basis of Somatic marker hypothesis: why emotions were evolved in humans and other animals as a means of avoiding them. Too much time spent trying to analyze one's situation could mean the difference between escaping a dangerous situation or not, if the situation you're in is so inconsiderate as to not remain static while the brain tries to work out the best solution. There is a story of a man whose brain had been damaged so that his emotional response was heavily muted but was otherwise fine — he found that he would spend upwards of two hours driving around a parking lot at his local grocery store because he, relying only on his brain's reasoning ability, couldn't decide on which spot to take. - For a non-sport related example, this can occur to people with sensory processing issues. The brain usually filters out most of the stimulus it receives. However, this process can fail to work properly, or simply not be able to cope with the amount of input received, resulting in a sheer deluge of data that's difficult to sift through efficiently.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParalysisByAnalysis
Parasite Eve - TV Tropes Parasite Eve is a series of media, kicked off by a 1995 science fiction/romance novel of the same name. The media in the series are: If an internal link led you here, please change it to point to the specific article. Thanks!	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParasiteEve
Parasites Are Evil - TV Tropes "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars..." Though undeniably horrifying and on occasion dangerous to human beings, there's nothing objectively evil in what parasites or parasitoids do. Regardless of whether they control the minds of their hosts, use them as incubators for their young, simply eat them (or their nutrients) from within or just generally make their lives a little bit more uncomfortable than normal, the creature committing these acts is merely trying to survive and reproduce in much the same way as any other animal - in fact, nearly every non-parasitic species on Earth has more than one unique parasite, meaning that parasites comprise the vast majority of life as we know it. However, humans have a nasty habit of projecting their morality on the natural world, or at the very least, forgetting that Nature Is Not Nice. Consequently, parasitism in nature may be regarded as immoral and vile. Imagine someone living in your house without your consent or stealing your stuff. That's what parasites are. Thusly, fictional parasites, parasitoids and their ilk can all too often be depicted as evil, with their need to live upon others being regarded as cruel or immoral, especially if sentient. In keeping with the Always Chaotic Evil portrayal, dysfunctional societies with lots of backstabbing and betrayals may be a possibility. If sufficiently powerful and/or intelligent, they might even qualify as the main villains of the story. For this reason, parasites may end up becoming the exception to a hero's code against killing, even if they do qualify as sapient life forms; in extreme cases, they may even become the target of a Guilt-Free Extermination War. NOTE: To qualify for this trope, the parasite or parasitoid must be confirmed to be of evil origins or deliberately malevolent. An ordinary parasite simply acting in its own natural interests does not count, hence No Real Life Examples, Please! Compare and contrast Predators Are Mean, Scavengers Are Scum, and Monstrous Germs, all similar examples of human morality being imposed on nature. Could overlap with Parasitic Immortality; after all, taking somebody's body against their will so you can live forever is pretty immoral by default. ## Examples - Dragon Ball GT: The machine mutant Baby is a parasitic lifeform that invades the bodies of his targets via scratches, completely taking over their mind and altering their appearance as well as being able to use his host's abilities as his own. A Psychopathic Manchild by nature, he takes over Vegeta's body upon arriving on Earth and uses his powers to enslave and brainwash nearly everyone on the planet. - Parasyte plays with this trope extensively: - The titular parasites may be sapient creatures who see their human hosts as nothing more than livestock to kill, devour, and impersonate. But they are not Always Chaotic Evil for it, nor are they treated as such by the story; instead, they operate under Blue-and-Orange Morality, at best being logical, ruthlessly pragmatic beings who only do what they do because it is how they survive as a species in the first place. Some chose to engage in symbiosis with their hosts, but only when they are forced to do so in order to survive, and some even learn human emotions and empathy over time. In fact, the only outright evil characters seen throughout the series are a handful of ordinary humans. - Shinichi, the protagonist of the series, even goes as far as to \|\|call this trope into question, deciding at one point that humans have no right to kill or impose their values on the parasites because of the above facts. Though he later grows out of this mindset, he still doesn't hold any malice against the parasites he fights and protects people from\|\|. - Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V: The Doctor brainwashes his victims by inserting parasitic insects in their ears. The infected become uncharacteristically sadistic, rejoicing when watching others suffer and even taunting their friends when they try to set them free. - Big Finish Doctor Who: In "Enemy of the Daleks", the Kiseibya were created as a biological weapon for use in the war against the Daleks. They are voracious parasitoids in their larval stage, slowly and painfully devouring their hosts from the inside before metamorphosing into metal-eating adults. They're found to be intelligent enough to speak, but possessed of an outlook that's nothing short of terrifying: if they were deprived of Daleks to prey on for food and incubation, they'd gladly turn on humanity. After seeing the Kiseibya disable the Black Dalek and implant him with their eggs, the Doctor decides that they can't be allowed to leave their home world... - Locke & Key: It's eventually revealed that the "demons" that dwell beyond the Black Door are actually a race of extradimensional parasites known as the Children of Leng; they want to experience everything our world has to offer but can only do so by inhabiting the body of someone crossing the Door threshold. They don't possess people in the traditional sense, but actively rewire the souls of their hosts so that they enjoy cruelty, until any difference between host and parasite becomes purely academic. Motivated solely by sadistic hedonism and megalomania, the Children of Leng can only pretend to be virtuous if it means getting what they want - and even doing that irritates and disgusts them, to the point that Dodge can only keep up his innocent facade by fantasizing about the horrific things he'd like to do to the Locke kids... and \|\|brutally raping Ellie Whedon behind closed doors.\|\| - Supergod: Morrigan Lugus is a godlike colony of parasitoid fungus built around the bodies of three long-dead astronauts, and easily the most malevolent of the gods appearing in this story. Along with his power to infest anyone in breathing range and make them worship it until they die of fungal growths in their lungs, Lugus actually gets a speech in which he gloats over the weaknesses of humanity, decrying its worthlessness for still obsessing over gods. However, Reddin hopes that the minds of the astronauts are still present somewhere within Lugus and can used to inspire him to save the human race. \|\|As it turns out, the astronauts are aware that they were sacrificed for the sake of an experiment and want revenge: it's for this reason that Lugus ultimately betrays his creators in order to sporulate unfettered across the world, condemning the human race to extinction.\|\| - Alien: The Xenomorph is a parasitoid lifeform that was created after an insane android repeatedly experimented on various creatures by exposing them to an extremely powerful mutagen. As a bioweapon, the species possesses brutal cunning, but no empathy and no overt goal except to expand, killing other beings even when it doesn't intend to use them as hosts. This particular parasitoid is so vile that genocide is considered a worthwhile alternate to letting them roam free, while in Superman/Aliens II: God War, Superman himself states that the Xenomorphs are a disease that has no right to exist and lives only to annihilate. - Slither: The alien parasite is a galactic menace that travels from planet to planet, destroying anything in its path. Its modus operandi features it merging with a host from the local population and then begin reproducing by brutally impregnating unsuspecting hosts, infesting all forms of life with its slug-like offspring and absorbing the infested creatures into itself until it's essentially a living biosphere. When it merges with Grant Grant's mind at the beginning of the story, the resulting monster not only murders pets across the town for their meat, violently impregnates Brenda and infests just about everyone in town with the brain slugs, but also demonstrates the very worst of Grant's own attitude problems: jealousy, controlling tendencies, and a vicious temper. - The Thing (1982): The titular villain is a microscopic alien parasite that can corrupt and assimilate any living being it comes into contact with. Throughout the film, it actively instils fear and paranoia on the heroes, turning them against each other to make them easier targets. In the climax, it's revealed that one of its "selves" was in charge of building a small spacecraft, implying that the alien intended to spread the infection across the entire Earth. The tie-in story The Things confirms that the Thing is sentient, albeit nightmarishly abstract in thought patterns, and regards human intelligence as so disgusting that it's prepared to assimilate everyone on Earth to eradicate it — and assimilation is a process that its victims directly compare to rape. - Venom (2018): Invoked by Venom, who reacts with fury and offense upon being called a "parasite", since he genuinely believes in having a symbiotic relationship with Eddie, unlike other members of his kind. - Animorphs: The Yeerks are the main antagonists of the series, a race of parasitic slugs controlling the minds of those they inhabit, and have built a galactic empire out of their need to find new bodies in which to live. Yeerk infestation is often portrayed as a terrifying, dehumanizing experience, and the Yeerks themselves are encouraged to treat their hosts as little more than cattle and even break their spirits to mould them into better hosts. However, the portrayal becomes much more complex as the series continues, with the Yeerks even becoming something of a Woobie Species once they make it clear that inhabiting the bodies of others is the only way they can appreciate the world - or even see it, as Yeerks are blind in their natural state. It's even revealed that the Yeerk Empire is harboring a freedom movement that wants to shift the species away from parasitism and into symbiosis; these rebel Yeerks are regarded as sympathetic and even serve as tentative allies of the Animorphs on occasion. \|\|In the finale, many surrendering Yeerks opt to transform into animals, willingly accepting a Shapeshifter Mode Lock so they can live peacefully on Earth.\|\| - John Connolly's short story "The Cancer Cowboy Rides" plays with this. The source of Buddy Carson's cancer-spreading touch is imagined as a black worm living deep within him, encouraging him to infect more people as time goes on. For good measure, it's not above torturing him from the inside if he ever begins to weaken in his devotion to propagating "The Black Word". However, Carson isn't even sure that the worm is real or if it's just a delusion he suffers — and even if it exists, the cowardly evangelistic horror within him is still less villainous than Carson himself. - Known Space: Played with. The puppeteers are embarrassed that they're parasitoids, requiring a livestock animal which they infest with their larvae to propagate (which they insist is actually the third sex of their species). However, their extreme cowardice leads them to do such things as socially engineering their rivals on the galactic stage into ineffectuality and release metal-eating bioweapons (a type of yeast that feeds on room-temperature superconductors) into Precursor ruins so they can't ever become a threat, never mind that they could study such Lost Technology. - Necroscope: The Wamphyri walk a wobbly line between symbiosis and parasitism: essentially a race of alien leeches, they empower their hosts with immortality, inhuman strength, necromancy, and the ability to warp flesh at a touch. Unfortunately, being bonded means being painfully and unwillingly impregnated with a fetal vampire symbiote complete with rape imagery - and subject to its hunger. Regardless of how benevolent they were beforehand, hosts are all gradually corrupted into villainy by their new appetites, to the point that any differences between the parasite and its host vanish: the end result is a Humanoid Abomination that will think nothing of committing murder, torture, anatomically impossible acts of rape, and other crimes too hideous to describe. Vampires are considered so evil in this setting that, upon dying, they're actually excluded by the other dead minds, who want nothing to do with them. \|\|Even Harry Keogh isn't immune to this sort of treatment once he gets infected by a vampire symbiote.\|\| - Perdido Street Station: The Handlingers, on top of being cold-hearted Puppeteer Parasites that create their own shadow communities among other sentient races, are also supporters of Mayor Rudgutter's corrupt regime, serving as elite spies and operatives across the city. - Hyperion Cantos: The TechnoCore are revealed in the last book to be a product of digital evolution which was massively inclined toward parasitism (like stealing the codes needed for reproduction). In 99% of the cases, their view of the humans is limited to either using them as Wetware CPUs, or as DNA donors for their Wetware Bodies — including the A.I.s attempting to move beyond the purely parasitic mindset. - Stargate SG-1: The Goa'uld are snake-like Puppeteer Parasites, and commonly use the powers they naturally confer on their hosts to pose as gods, especially when combined with their advanced (and stolen) technology. They regard other life-forms as nothing more than slaves, treating them with a mixture of sneering arrogance and chortling sadism, gladly leaving their hosts trapped in a tormented state of helplessness. It's made clear that they're biologically locked into this through Genetic Memory, with each new generation of Goa'uld being inclined to regard themselves as true gods and stab each other in the back to acquire more power. Only one Goa'uld has been confirmed to have given up the parasitic lifestyle: she founded the Tok'ra, a resistance movement advocating cooperation with their hosts; they're a much more pleasant people - though they're still a bit on the haughty side. - Celebro, the main villain of Ultraman Z, is a space parasite that simply revels in causing death and destruction, having manipulated numerous planets and civilizations into creating super-weapons that results in their own destruction. He even has a name for his patented planetary destruction operation: the Civilization Self-Destruction Game! - Pathfinder: - Ghlaunder, the Gossamer King, is a Chaotic Evil god of parasitism and disease strongly associated with biting insects — he himself takes the form of a hideous, mosquito-like monster. Thematically, his cult and mythos emphasize motifs of feeding off of others while spreading weakness and disease to one's victims. - First edition's second Bestiary specifically notes that parasitic animals, such as lampreys or ticks, do not have counterparts among agathions, Neutral Good outsiders who resemble humanoid animals of various sorts. While the text notes that parasites are not intrinsically evil, it also states that their habits and natures are too far from the noble goals of the upper planes for blessed souls to wish to model themselves off of them. - The Unofficial Hollow Knight RPG: This trope is Downplayed with the ticks and fleas, who are portrayed as mostly being made up of criminals who use trickery and misdirection to pull one over on their opponents. This is implied to be due to their size rather than their parasitism though, as they need to use underhanded tactics to make up for just how much smaller they are than all of the other bugs. - Halo: The Flood is a race of parasitic superorganisms yearning to usher in a perfect, utopia without classes, degradation, conflict, or unhappiness. And how do they aim to achieve this goal, you ask? Why by forcibly turning all organic lifeforms across the universe into hideous, disgusting zombies, of course! The The Forerunner Saga only amps up their villainy by dropping the bombshell that the Flood is a Precursor bioweapon birthed from their powered remains for the sole purpose of exacting their revenge upon the Forerunners. - Kirby: Triple Deluxe: Word of God says that the Big Bad Queen Sectonia is based on parasitic wasps. Her parasitism, in her case, is her using her magic to repeatedly possess other beings, due to her obsession with beauty. Played with in that she used to be a good guy in the past, and that \|\|as other games revealed, she wasn't always a wasp, but something more like her subordinate Taranza (a spider-person)\|\|. - The Legend of Zelda: - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: In a gambit to obtain the Sage Stones, Ganondorf creates monsters to parasitize two of its guardians. Gohma's disease kills the Great Deku Tree, though Link manages to save Lord Jabu Jabu from Barinade's infection. - The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: The sky spirit Levias has been infected by Bilocyte, the ocular parasite. Under its influence, the deity turns malicious, summoning lightning storms wherever it goes and attacking Skyloftians on sight. - Zigzagged in Metroid. In most games in the series, the titular Metroids are treated as a force too dangerous to be left unchecked, with the standing order upon seeing them is to wipe them out to the last. However, in Metroid II Samus chooses to spare the last infant Metroid in hopes that its powers can be harnessed for good, and it imprints on her and comes to save her life. It's later revealed that the Metroids were bioweapons created to stop an even worse parasite, the X, who would be a plague on the universe if allowed to spread. Samus speaks of them with disdain, saying that the X have no souls. However, in Metroid Dread, \|\|a single X who consumed the remains of Quiet Robe seemingly comes to Samus's aid, suggesting that either Quiet Robe retained his consciousness in this form or the X containing his memories came to reach sapience.\|\| - Ōkami: The demon Blight parasitizes the Emperor's stomach, using his body to spread a toxic fog around the city. - [PROTOTYPE]: The Supreme Hunter starts life as a parasitic, cancer-like entity created to kill Alex Mercer. Mercer later re-purposes it for use against Elizabeth Greene, but after Greene's biology rejects the re-engineered virus, it mutates into a large shapeshifting humanoid Hunter obsessed with consuming its "father": intelligent, manipulative, scheming and \|\|ultimately the final boss of the game\|\|. - Resident Evil 7: Biohazard: E-001 has the rare distinction of being both a fungal parasite and a brood parasite: producing clouds of brain-warping spores, this mould takes over the brains of anyone in range and encourages them to see her as their daughter. In the process, the victims are gradually driven insane, often mutating hideously into monstrous toys for E-001 to exploit and abuse at will. Spiteful, manipulative and gleefully sadistic, E-001 is second only to Lucas in sheer malice, repaying the kindness of the Bakers with suffering and luring in Ethan for no other reason than to replace a toy she's grown tired of. - The Secret World: The Filth is eventually revealed to be capable of infecting plantlife as well as humans, resulting in a wide variety of fungal monstrosities devoted to serving the Dreamers as loyally as any run-of-the-mill Filth infectee. Among these include examples of the parasitoid fungus Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis, which work much as they do in real life, except that the results can be applied to humans. In this case, the parasite isn't just evil, it's a flat-out Lovecraftian horror. - Trauma Center: The main threat in the DS games are the bioengineered plagues known as G.U.I.L.T. Unlike normal parasites, G.U.I.L.T. specifically damage the body in a way that ensures the host suffers in agony before dying. If they detect outside interference, such as a doctor trying to save the patient, they speed up the infection to try and kill the host before they can be dealt with. - Martin Mystery: In "The Beast from Within", Martin is infected and brainwashed by a slug-like alien. Having turned its host into a living incubator for its larvae, the alien spends the episode sadistically stalking the other heroes in the hopes of making them the breeding ground for its offspring. - Rick and Morty: Played with in "Edge of Tomorty": here, Rick bumps into an iteration of his dimension inhabited by giant wasp versions of himself and his family — more specifically, parasitoid wasps. Wasp Rick makes it abundantly clear that their way of life involves eating their prey alive and laying their eggs in their eyeballs... and yet, he's easily one of the nicer Ricks in the multiverse, with a much healthier relationship with his family and a happier home life in general. Plus, he's the only Rick encountered in the episode who isn't part of a fascist dictatorship. There's even a heartwarming scene where the Wasp Smiths have dinner together — it's just that dinner just happens to be a screaming caterpillar version of Goldenfold, who is not only fully sentient but also watching in horror as Wasp Morty devours his children. \|\|Wasp Rick ends up saving the day by laying his eggs in the newly incarnated Hologram Rick's eyeballs, killing him before he can kill Rick and Morty.\|\|	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParasitesAreEvil
Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality - TV Tropes In extreme cases, it doesn't take much. "You know what? I respect women! I love women! I respect them so much that I completely stay away from them!" Alice is celibate and might even come across as if she was asexual. However, her sexuality is actually very strong, it's just that she can't express it because she is too burdened by shame, fear, and/or guilt. Thus, she might be unable to take initiative herself or to consent to things she actually does want. Even if she does manage to take initiative or give consent, it might still backfire horribly as the shame, etc reasserts itself. This is a subtrope of Internalized Categorism: Alice really can't stand the thought of being one of those people — the "perverts", the "sinners", maybe even including anyone who actually likes sex instead of doing the proper thing. However, the character does not necessarily think that Sex Is Evil. Instead, she might simply doubt her own ability to handle it. There are many reasons why this might be, whether it's treated as funny or not. One of the most common is virginity, where a character who has never had sex before is nervous about it for one reason or another—sometimes because they don't know how; are worried about finishing too early or not at all (especially with teenagers); or they're just nervous about having sex for the first time in general. Other examples may be a fear of intimacy, leading to them fearing the inherent physical and emotional vulnerability involved in sexual situations, or low self-esteem. Another frequently used explanation for this is a character having been raped/sexually assaulted and developing a fear of sexuality as a result of the trauma. Note that in Real Life and in fiction alike, not everyone reacts this way, but both are reactions seen in survivors of rape and sexual assault and will vary from person to person. When a character struggling with this overcomes it, the problem might be resolved by entering a simple stable relationship. However, this could turn sour if the character hasn't really dealt with the underlying issues, or it could result in a counter-reaction, where the character turns overtly sexual. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how the character handles it. In a balanced story, both paths are possible. There also might also be some zig-zagging as the character learns to cope with their sexuality. However, in an Anvilicious work, only one of the two paths is possible, since the author has already decided either that Sex Is Good or that Sex Is Evil. Note that while this trope and Sex Is Evil, and I Am Horny are sometimes caused by the same social and psychological mechanisms, they have two very different ways of handling it: Sex Is Evil And I Am Horny is about acting out in a way that is self-destructive and/or abusive while Paralyzing Fear Of Sexuality is about avoiding expressing one's sexuality at all. Both are discussed in Psychosexual Horror. See also Celibate Hero and Windmill Political. Compare Heteronormative Crusader. Contrast Does Not Like Men and He-Man Woman Hater. This trope is much more frequently applied to women than men, and when it is applied to men, its often considered funny. In Real Life, its widely believed to be far more common among women than among men, along with a perception that if a man suffers from it, it's often partially built on a fear of being abusive. Another common belief is that all gay people are promiscuous (though Armoured Closet Gay characters have been known to overlap with this trope — whether they're repulsed by the idea of sex with The Beard, afraid that acting on their true orientation would corrupt them, or both). However, its important to note that there is a vast range of reasons someone might feel this way, and anyone can be nervous about sex, regardless of gender or sexuality. When a kid is too shy to express their (usually nonsexual) Puppy Love, they may appear to be an Affection-Hating Kid on the surface. ## Examples - Berserk: Because of being abused as a child, Guts Hates Being Touched by anyone except Casca, and to an extent Griffith as well. After being celibate for a long time he eventually develops Single-Target Sexuality for Casca, but he has a panic attack during Their First Time as a result of his pent-up trauma. The good news is that they work through it together, and after that, he even expresses interest in doing it with her 1000 times more. The bad news is that the Eclipse and Casca's mental condition afterwards create a different problem: He strongly desires to have sex with her again even though he knows she isn't able to give consent, and \|\|a Near-Rape Experience with her caused by his Enemy Within\|\| makes him fearful that his urges will lead to him abusing her. From then on he tries not to ever see her unclothed and leaves most of her personal care to Farnese. - In Chobits, Hideki is tormented by his fear of being a pervert and living with an Innocent Fanservice Girl who will suffer a personality death if he actually were to act on any sort of desire towards her. This is probably the most justified example here. - In Fumi Yoshinaga's Gerard & Jacques: Jacques is a virgin at heart, a wannabe Celibate Hero, and deeply believes sexuality is, oh dear, such a sin. Unfortunately, the UST between him and his, ahem, experienced master, keeps piling until Jacques succumbs to a DIY solution, and gets a huge moral hangover for it. The whole issue is played for light drama and fun, but in a darker work, it could have fueled worlds of angst. - Girls Bravo: Yukinari gets hives whenever he makes contact with other girls, mostly because he is, and has been, intimidated and pushed around by them all his life. - The protagonist of I Love Yuri and I got Bodyswapped with a Fujoshi! is a Yuri Fanboy who loves the idea of intimacy between girls but is disgusted at the idea of a male being even present. Then one day he switches bodies with a Yaoi Fangirl; what might seem like heaven is made into torment by how he still thinks of himself as a boy who defiles girls by just seeing them. Making it worse is that he expects the girl to be equally horrified in his body, but instead she enthusiastically gathers "reference material" and invites him to make use of her body. - Common fanon for Ranma ½ is to present either Ranma Saotome, Akane Tendo, or both as having this trait. Because the manga keeps things surprisingly tame despite frequently invoking raunchy scenarios, and the recurring theme of Poor Communication Kills, it's reasonable speculation, if probably not canon. - Despite the fact that three of his four would-be lovers are gorgeous girls who literally throw themselves at him and make it quite clear they want sex, Ranma never lifts a finger, and gets extremely distressed during intimate-seeming moments - either nervous if it's Shampoo, Ukyo or Kodachi, or very shy if it's Akane. In his case, it probably has to do with a combination of his feelings for Akane and his general inexperience with romantic love. - Akane, on the other hand, is the first to leap to sexual conclusions about any situation that could be interpreted that way, and almost invariably gets angry or violently defensive when things seem to be taking a turn "for the perverse". Even on the rare occasions that she doesn't, she still pushes back at Ranma in a passive-aggressive sort of way. Her reluctance to admit her desires for Ranma has to do with a potent combination of lingering distaste for men as a result of the "Hentai Horde" incident, smoldering resentment over the fact she was engaged to Ranma by her father against her will, her own insecurities that Ranma wants her back, and a desire not to have her heart broken by admitting her love for Ranma and then losing him to one of the other girls. - SPY×FAMILY: Yor Forger, unlike her husband Loid (who's seduced numerous women for his missions), has zero experience in romance, and thus becomes a wrecking mess whenever a romantic situation arises. She often tries to invoke Liquid Courage to give herself a boost, but it only works for a brief time. - Yui Kotegawa from To Love Ru, is a firm believer of All Men Are Perverts and Sex Is Evil at first. As the story progresses, she undergoes Character Development and becomes closer to this trope. - In Zetman, Kouga Amagi develops this from experiencing the "Jirou Incident" where a large number of innocent victims were \|\|raped and murdered as part of an attempted plot to discredit his family\|\|. He starts going out with Mayu, a girl he rescued from that ordeal, but after two years together he hasn't even held her hand because of the PTSD-like symptoms he gets from anything associated with sex or intimacy. - Bitchy Bitch has this kind of baggage in her backstory, and it keeps dragging her down. - Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Johnny's outright disgust with human sexuality and aversion to being touched implies that he may very well have a sexuality but deeply represses it. Given that his arousal is one of the internal forces he lists as wanting to free himself from in his search for autonomy in Book 7 (along with hunger and tiredness), that's probably it. - In Runaways, Klara is horrified by sexuality, due to a combination of a strict religious upbringing and a lot of sexual abuse. - In Watchmen, Rorschach has this as a part of his pathology. - In the Mob Psycho 100 fanfic Baby Steps to the Finish Line Teru wants to take things to a more intimate level in their relationship but Mob is afraid to do more than kiss. It's very slow going but they work through it together. - In the Death Note Crack Fic A Charmed Life Light finds the very idea of sex to be disgusting and terrifying \|\|until Ryuk helps him through it\|\|. - Downplayed in Feelings and Desires. Ash Ketchum has finally moved on from his Chaste Hero and Oblivious to Love stages, and is in a happy relationship with Misty. However, during their first anniversary together, he wants to take their relationship to a more intimate level but is afraid to take the step out of fear of Misty taking it the wrong way (the fact that Misty had a bad breakup two years prior might also be a factor). Misty catches on and intentionally gets him in embarrassing situations, partially to fluster him, and partially to get him to man up and do it. They finally talk things out and Misty helps Ash realize there's nothing to be ashamed of, so long as they do it out of love, culminating in them having Their First Time. - Taken to utterly ridiculous levels in Harry Potter Becomes a Communist when Snape, who is portrayed as The Fundamentalist, tries to capture Cho Chang. She successfully defeats him by throwing her naked boobs at him, which causes him to freak out and declare, "The female body is so fucking sinful! You keep those horrible things away from me or I'll go to hell!" - Han Solo for a while in the Star Wars fic My All. Entirely justified, as in the fic that preceded it, Important Information, he was repeatedly raped during a horrific torture ordeal. Even after he finally lays his internal struggles with his ordeal and his captor—who somehow seemed to find a way to entice his body when Leia killed her and ended up wreaking havoc on his mind—to rest, it's still some time before he can finally stop seeing his tormentor, release the shame and pain he's held inside, and finally be able to make love to Leia again. - In the Maleficent fanfic Your servant, Mistress, Maleficent suffers from this. Understandably, as the incident that makes her go dark in the film is changed into the thing that it was symbolic for in the first place. As this is an all-human story wherein she and Diaval are in a BDSM relationship, this makes things very complicated. - The premise of The 40-Year-Old Virgin. See page quote. It avoids many of the pitfalls of dealing with this trope by introducing a large and relatively well-developed supporting cast, all with their own hangups surrounding sex and/or relationships to work through. - The teenage girl in Female Perversions is portrayed as a quite natural counter-reaction to her desperately oversexualized aunt's creepiness. - Laurie in Halloween (1978). It's pretty much all but outright stated that she is the only virgin among her friends. While she shows a clear interest in the opposite sex she is either too shy, awkward, or scared to act upon her desires. Word of God states she was written like this to make her comparable to the main villain, Michael, and that when she stabs him several times at the end of the movie, this is her taking out her pent-up sexual frustrations. - Played With in It: Chapter Two. Richie makes so many lewd jokes about women that he's literally made a career out of it, but \|\|Pennywise hinting that it recognises Richie as an Armoured Closet Gay\|\| has him literally running for his life. - Catherine Deneuve's character in Roman Polański's Repulsion takes this trope to frenzied extremes. - Sons and Lovers: Miriam. Her mother is a crazed religious zealot who thinks that Sex Is Evil and intercourse should only be allowed for the specific purpose of making babies. Her nonstop hectoring of Miriam has left Miriam terrified of sex. She's reluctant to have sex with Paul, much to his frustration, and when she finally does put out she's terrible at it, closing her eyes and clenching her fists. Paul is so disappointed that he breaks up with her immediately. - Liz Lemon in 30 Rock generally always had a disinterest in sex, though after a few seasons it was Flanderized into this trope. The episode "Reaganing" revealed that when Liz was young, she was riding her rollerskates around the house when she needed to use the restroom. She tried to use the restroom with her skates still on but lost her balance and her mother found her on the floor with her underwear down covered in a Tom Jones poster. Assuming the worst, her mother tore down all the posters of the men she liked in her room, leading Liz to proclaim that "Sex makes the people go away!" - Raj in The Big Bang Theory goes completely silent the moment an attractive girl is around or is talking directly to him. He is painfully shy around attractive women. He literally can't talk to women. He still manages to have sex with one early in season one, though, even before he realizes that he can talk to women if he's drunk. - Dexter deliberately dates a woman with this issue because it suits him down to the ground — he wants a relationship for passing as normal and grows to enjoy the emotional connection. While Dexter does have a sex drive, he's afraid of himself (he's a serial killer and sometimes gets aroused by thoughts of murder and such) and he's also afraid that his girlfriend will see through his facade if they get intimate. He's also faintly repulsed by intimacy (in the novel, deeply repulsed, and also pretty much despises Rita, but they made the TV character much more relatable), and every previous sexual encounter has resulted in his ability to fake normality being totally blown out of the water since he's emotionally abnormal and spends most of his life going through the motions. This does not work very well for sex. She eventually starts to get over her trauma and get her sex drive back, and with some work, they eventually manage to build a functioning sex life together because he does get inadvertently attached to her...and then his emotional life gets a shake-up courtesy of the Season One antagonist and his mind games. In the books it's implied the only reason he and Rita can have a sex life is that she's so damaged from her abusive ex-husband, she can't tell that he's not "doing it right". - Dougal in Father Ted is visibly uncomfortable around women except for Mrs. Doyle or older nuns, and shows genuine fear when he believes a strange woman may have entered the house. It's implied that a fear of women was his primary motivation for entering the priesthood, as he's shown to be uninterested in the tenets of Catholicism, and effectively an atheist in his personal beliefs. - General Hospital's Karen chalked this up to typical virginal nervousness until she remembered being molested by a boyfriend of her mother's. - Glee: - Emma is afraid of getting into a relationship due to cleanliness OCD and Hates Being Touched. - A less extreme example would be Kurt in the second season. As of Sexy, the thought of sex makes him incredibly uncomfortable, preferring to focus purely on romance. Played with in that he didn't appear to have much of a problem with it during season one—but then, after "Never Been Kissed"... It is also important to note that at his age, it is perfectly normal not to feel like you are ready for sex. Everyone develops at a different pace. (As of "The First Time" he's gotten over it.) - Monk, due to his severe OCD. Also, he still regards himself as "married", although his wife was killed ten years before. - Laura Dickens from The Sandbaggers — according to the staff psychiatrist, it results from a combination of a prudish upbringing with a completely disastrous marriage that only lasted a week. \|\|She's in the process of working through it so she and Neal can build a relationship when she's killed in the season 1 finale\|\|. - Veronica Mars: - Mac describes herself as "frozen from the waist down" since a traumatic episode. She and her boyfriend had planned a special night to lose their virginity together. Just before the event, she takes a shower while he waits in bed for her. When she comes out of the shower, he is gone. \|\|It turns out that he is a serial killer and rapist, and he left to kill Veronica because she had figured out he was the culprit\|\|. He takes her clothes, too, so she can't follow him, resulting in Veronica finding Mac crying and wrapped in a bedsheet. - Mac's boyfriend \|\|Beaver\|\| wouldn't do anything more than hold hands anyway, because of \|\|his molestation as a child\|\|. However, she subsequently seems to get over this fairly easily, with little on-screen explanation. - The Pet Shop Boys song "It's A Sin" is about the way a domineering Catholic upbringing will instill this in you. - Laharl from Disgaea has a rather extreme aversion to sexy women and all talk of sexual things. In fact, one villain takes advantage of this by stocking his side with succubi and barely-dressed Cat Girls, which actually halves Laharl's stats for that level. - Psycho Mantis in Metal Gear Solid, who wears bondage gear and has a disgusted fascination with sexuality, but finds the thought of sex traumatic due to having mind-read the sexual fantasies of everyone he's come into contact with. He also hates the idea that all humans are programmed with the atavistic desire to pass on their genes. - Arueshalae in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous has a bit of this going on early in her romance arc, for understandable reasons. Sex between demons is usually exploitative at best, and her past affairs with non-fiends generally ended with her corrupting or eating her partners, so she doesn't really have a mental template for how to conduct herself in a healthy, loving sexual relationship, however much she wants one. There's also the issue that as a Pathfinder succubus, her Vampiric Draining abilities are always on, making physical contact of any variety dangerous to her mortal partner. - \|\|Ashmedia, the Overlord of Lust\|\| in Trillion: God of Destruction is this, panicking when she's caught by surprise in a sexual situation and immediately saying that she's not comfortable with it \|\|and informing Zeabolos, who pulled the prank, that she's actually a virgin\|\|. While it's not stated outright, it's very clear that she has Histrionic Personality Disorder, as stated below. - The entire premise of the Yaoi webcomic 14 Nights seems to be to cure one of its main characters of this. The comic has gotten better about this lately, placing said character squarely in this trope. He genuinely desires a sexual relationship with his boyfriend, but his mind goes to very ugly places all too easily. Disassociating sex from Squick is his much-desired endgame. - El Goonish Shive: Susan's greatest fear is that she might become a slutty homewrecker like the one her dad had an affair with. So while she finds others sexually attractive, she is repulsed at the idea of anyone having sex with her specifically out of fear that she might endanger someone else's relationship, to the point of asexuality. - In Harbourmaster, Governor Tal Monteblanc is deeply uncomfortable with sexuality and physical intimacy, to the point that he can't even offer a perfectly chaste comforting hug. - Tina Maxwell of Nineteen-Ninety-Something is a Moral Guardian of the Tipper Gore stripe, who believes any and all portrayals of intimacy are evil and must be stamped out. She tends to get a panicky, manic expression and quickly changes the subject whenever one of her kids asks her anything about sex (up to and including "Why are you freaking out about this?") - Hannelore in Questionable Content is terrified of any physical contact with others, but particularly sexual contact, due to her severe OCD and germophobia. She definitely shows interest in the subject, though. - Ruby of Sticky Dilly Buns works through this problem. She has problems with sexuality and is initially prone to paralysis. However, after she's been exposed to a few sexual scenes, it becomes very clear that she finds guy on guy very hot, and she moves from total paralysis to deep denial, while finding more excuses to look. Eventually, when she believes that her boyfriend is proposing sex, she decides to go for it -- nervously, but not unwillingly. Ironically, he wasn't proposing sex, and him ignoring her subsequent behavior over the next few days has her erroneously believe that he is this trope until they find themselves in a situation where he begrudgingly admits that it's her pressuring him into the act that's the actual issue. - In the Walkyverse: - Joyce in It's Walky! starts out like this. She eventually relaxes somewhat, and after getting engaged and losing her virginity, realizes how silly her fear was. She thereafter has an emotionally healthy and (very!) active sex life with her fiancé, much to the delight of her mother. - A similar arc presents itself in Dumbing of Age, where she's quite happy about being in a relationship with Ethan—she's afraid of her lusts, and he has no interest in pushing her for sex. - On Daria, one of the last episodes revolves around Daria wondering if she should have sex with Tom; she ultimately can't go through with it, finding the thought of so much physical contact to be too overwhelming. Tom, for the record, is fine with this; Daria was the one who worried that not having sex made their relationship deficient. - Interestingly, it's strongly Implied that Quinn has this too. She dates every attractive or popular boy possible but is never seen physically affectionate with them, and in one episode claims she won't slow-dance until the fifth date. She was also extremely freaked out when she thought that Daria and Tom actually had slept together. - Billups in Star Trek: Lower Decks has remained a virgin his entire life because under the laws of his homeworld, which he's the crown prince of, if he ever has sex, he'll instantly become king and have to leave Starfleet. When his mother the queen \|\|seemingly\|\| dies and he needs to take the throne for the good of his people, he's unable to perform the "royal duty" with his incredibly attractive male and female Bodyguard Babes and seems genuinely terrified throughout. When he learns that \|\|his mom faked her death\|\| and he doesn't have to go through with it, he's overcome with joy and relief, even throwing a celebration party.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParalyzingFearOfSexuality
Parallel Porn Titles - TV Tropes Pants may travel, but sex apparently doesn't. "Hmm. You know, curiously enough, the X-rated version had the same name." Virtually every popular mainstream movie or TV show will have its title and the rudiments of its plot morphed into a porn video. This fact of adult entertainment is even more certain than death and taxes. It's mandated pursuant to the provisions of Rule 34. The porn industry really only has one product to sell. That's graphic depictions of people having sex. Naturally this makes things very competitive with each production company looking for an edge in the marketplace. The gay porn industry has its members always trying to stick out, while the straight porn industry is always trying to find a niche to squeeze into. So much like Hollywood itself, it exploits that which is already successful. There are entire web sites dedicated to listing actual porn ripoffs of popular media — most of them Not Safe for Work, naturally. And, most of the time, the only connection to the original work is the title. Parody porn, by and large, was most popular during the late 70s into the 80s, when porn required a visit to an adult 'theater' or 'bookstore,' and so places to show movies were limited. With the advent of home video and the Internet, most porn does not bother with such niceties as plot, and instead has titles consisting of any of the following: (Race) (Sexual Orientation) (Other Defining Characteristic of Participants) (Optional Fetishes) ( Acts Performed) (Number In Series), the only fixed order generally being the number. For example, Interracial MILF Gangbang 14. However, those titles rarely lend themselves to humor and aren't much fun to talk about. Some major studios note : We're not going to name them; look for yourself if you're interested and even VR sites started producing porn parodies in greater numbers in the 2010s, although it's still a niche compared to the Porn Without Plot they mainly distribute. This coincided with the rise of Superhero movies and other sci-fi and fantasy genre works like Game of Thrones. As of 2023, basically any mainstream work can expect to get this treatment, making it a Popularity Polynomial. If it's a really popular property, different studios will even start competing to release their own parodies. It's also a common game to take normal media titles and see how many porn titles they can be twisted into. Curiously, part of the porn industry's actually started to make higher-budget, better-made parodies, which recreate the works they spoof with careful attention to detail... but tend to reject parody titles and simply add a simple "This Ain't" prefix or "A XXX Parody" suffix to the original title. See also Rule 34. Just for Pun in action. Rule of Funny is also involved; why have a potentially squicky actual porn title when you could have one of these and get a small laugh? Compare The Mockbuster, which usually lacks the naughty bits. See Porn Names for the pornification of the actors' names. Also see Euphemistic Names for general media. - In Transmetropolitan, Spider Jerusalem's enemies try to make people stop taking him seriously by putting out a porn flick called I Hump It Here (the title of his column being "I Hate It Here"). Technically that wasn't his enemies, just all kinds of opportunists flocking to the money-making machine - after Spider's assistant Yelena sold them license to use his name and likeness. Spider wasn't amused. - Garth Ennis loves these. In both Chronicles of Wormwood and Kev there is a scene with a lot of porn videos on display with such titles as The Hunt for Red Cocktober, Starsky and Crotch, Baredevil, and so on. - In a comic by Michael Kupperman, an old man grants a boy special powers when he says SKREWPA, which is an acronym... - Silex and the City has primitive porno films titled Diplodocul ("Diplodocass") and La famille Pierrafuck ("The Fuckstones"). - National Lampoon Films: - Sex Criminals has a scene involving an in-universe porn movie (one of the films that a character starred in) called The Licked + The Divine, which is a porn version of the real-world comic The Wicked + The Divine. Things got even more metafictional when the "remix" issue of The Wicked + The Divine used panels from the Sex Criminals scene to depict \|\|Woden hiring sex workers to act as lookalikes for the female Pantheon members\|\|. - In Cavewoman: It's a Girl's Life, Carrie shows Meriem and Mona a porno called Greased at their Slumber Party. Afterwards, Mona comments "I'll never think about 'hand jive' the same way again". - Referenced in Back to the Future. One of the movies playing at the porno theater in the rundown town square of 1985 is titled Orgy, American Style, a title parody of the TV anthology series Love, American Style. On the DVD's audio commentary, Bob Gale stated that he was unsure whether there was an actual movie with that title, but said there probably was. There is. - RiffTrax: - For The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), Mike speculates that the porn version is called The Thighland of Dr. More-O. - In the one for Batman & Robin, Mike is quick to ask Kevin if he's sure he didn't accidentally rent " Buttman and Robin" during the Lock-and-Load Montage at the beginning of the movie. Kevin reassures him that there's no way he'd make that mistake a third time. - In Dirty Work, the protagonists work at a movie theater and get revenge on their abusive manager by replacing Men in Black with the creatively named Men In Black Who Like To Have Sex With Each Other. Screen Voice # 1: Look! An alien! Screen Voice # 2: Yeah. We'd better have sex with each other. Screen Voice # 1: Hey! This alien looks just like a hot guy! Screen Voice # 2: You're right. We'd better have sex with him. - Lessee... In Black Men - was that so hard? - On one episode of The Drew Carey Show, Drew's dad accidentally rents gay porn for Oswald's bachelor party... the title? Men in Back. - That Ben Stiller film The Heartbreak Kid (2007) where he had to give Carlos Mencia's character a nudie vid titled Remember the Tight Ones. - Inverted with South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut which took its name from John Bobbit's porn film. - In Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Zack meets a guy at a party, and learns that he's an actor: Zack: Look at you! Anything I've seen? What movies? Brandon: Oh, all sorts of movies with all-male casts. Zack: All-male casts? Like " Glengarry Glen Ross "? Like that? Brandon: Like Glen and Gary Suck Ross's Meaty Cock and Drop Their Hairy Nuts in His Eager Mouth. Zack: ...is that like a sequel ? Brandon: Sort of. A reimagining . - Then there's their decision to call their own film Star Whores... - Everyone is a bit weirded out by Delaney's vehement insistence that the final movie in their trilogy must be called Revenge of the Shit: The All-Anal Finale. - The Auteur is a pastiche of both obsessive and unstable auteurs and these. Pornographic film producer/director Arturo Domingo — roughly equal parts Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog, and Gerard Damiano — is an uncompromising artist whose penetrating vision has resulted in such masterpieces of erotic filmmaking as Five Easy Nieces, Requiem for a Wet Dream and Dyke Club. During the filming of his seminal masterwork * Full Metal Jackoff* (actually a parody of Apocalypse Now), problems with filming, strained relations with his wife, and Executive Meddling cause a breakdown. He attempts to rise back to prominence with his most ambitious and epic project to date: Gang Bangs of New York. - Cecil B. Demented: " Some Kind of Happiness? I've already filmed it. Only my version is called Some Kind of Horniness." - In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, the films in the protagonist's Porn Stash have titles such as School of Cock. Which actually does exist, to absolutely no one's surprise. - This iPhone auto-correct failure corrected Puss in Boots to Pussy 'n Butts, which commenters noted would be a great porno version of the movie (the other option, Pus in Butts, not so much.). Other porno-sounding autocorrects include The Cunt of Monte Cristo and Panty of the Apes. - Tromeo and Juliet has a Porn Stash going after other Shakespeare plays with Et Tu, Blow Job, The Merchant of Penis, As You Lick It, and Much To Do About Humping. This last, interestingly, has substituted a different sexual innuendo for the one that was already in the title of the original. - A Serbian Film has a few, given the protagonist is a former porn star. Acockalypse Now, Hanniballs Rising, Rumble in the Cocks, Penis From Heaven, Top Crotch, Cock of Duty note : the last one's not even a movie!... - Stan Helsing has a ton of punny porn titles as the eponymous Stan is a video store clerk. - In the short film Tomorrow Calling (an adaptation of The Gernsback Continuum by William Gibson), the protagonist is watching porn as Psychic Static. However he rejects one titled Cream Me Up, Spotty (with a cover showing a space babe and a Dalmatian in Fishbowl Helmets.) - Miss Congeniality: The original Miss New Jersey has to step aside as it turns out she'd appeared in a movie called Arma-get-it-on before entering the pageant. - 40 Days and 40 Nights has "In Diana Jones and the Temple of Poon". - In Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem, a character called Harvey Simworth gets a passing mention. He's a pornographic writer who tailors classical fairy tales and novels this way. Among his achievements there is Ali Baba and the Forty Perverts and the "Sex-life" series which include such titles as Sex-life of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Sex-life of Hansel and Gretel and Sex-life of Alice in Wonderland. - Little Green Men has the Yearning Channel, which shows pornographic movies such as Space Bimbos from Planet Lust twenty-four hours a day. - In Porno (sequel to Trainspotting) a group of people are making a pornography film simply to prove they can. The title of the film is Seven Rides for Seven Brothers, spoofing Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. - Snuff, by Chuck Palahniuk, includes an absolute hurricane of parallel porn titles. In other words, a Hurricane of Porns. - The Brian & Jill Show has this whenever porn film critic Sir Phalluster Slideright III makes an appearance. The first time started with Ben & Jerry flavors ("Pop My Cherry Garcia", "Peanut Butter Double D-Cup") and moving on to actual movie titles ("Beaverly Hills Cop", "Men in Black Men" and "Indiana Joan and the Black Hole of Manboo"). - On one episode of House to Astonish, Paul O'Brien proposes a porn comic called X-Stonishing Ass Men. He hasn't worked out the details beyond that. - An episode of Think the Unthinkable had Sophie going through Jed's DVD collection. As well as another sighting of Good Will Humping, she correctly surmises that his version of Free Willy isn't about a whale. - An Australian skit spoofing the Reverend Fred Nile had him entering a video store to make sure they weren't selling anything dirty. A senior citizen with bad eyesight slowly reads out the titles of the movies she's picked off the shelves. As they appear to be family comedies they all get Nile's approval and he leaves. The store owner then rings up the titles which turn out to be porn movies, e.g. Herbie Goes Bananas was actually Herpies Goes Bananas. - The Leisure Suit Larry games often parody this. Magna Cum Laude is especially full of them - between the porn section of the local video rental store and the nearby adult theater, there are dozens of parody porn titles used as throwaway jokes. Some of the better ones: Lawrence of My Labia, The Rodfather (created by Francis Ford Gropella), Bukkake To The Future, Close Encounters of the Behind, Schindler's Fist, Anal-yze This, and Terms of Enrearment. That last one actually holds special significance to Larry, and ends up being the springboard for a hilarious post-ending conversation mini-game. - The Last of Us Part 2 has a gag involving Ellie coming across a copy of Smash Brandis Cooch, which is an obvious reference to Crash Bandicoot, which Naughty Dog also created. Funnily enough, Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time would be announced and released later that year. - Grand Theft Auto: - In inFAMOUS 2, one can find Parallel Porn Titles of various games found on the marquee of the theater, such as Assassin's Need (LoveToo), Hey, Low Reach, Epic Hickey and others. - In Sensible Erection RPG, a large part of the game mechanic centers around finding porn. All of them have interesting titles, like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Poon. - Fallout 2 had a few features, straight from the Golden Globes Porn Studio in Reno (some already having been used before), including a couple of puns on the series itself; Vault Sexteen (Vault Sixteen) and Pullout: A Post Nuclear Boogaloo ( Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game). - While the PC version of Duke Nukem 3D had the Million Dollar Theater playing the infamous Attack of the Bleached-Blonde Biker Bimbos, accompanied by a dancing woman on the movie screen, the N64 equivalent had the more subtle parody title Uranus Attacks. (Playing into Nintendo's extreme censorship towards the game, the movie screen now only displays a spaceship.) - A Cutaway Gag mini-game in the Family Guy game has Brian burying a copy of The Blair Fist Project, starring Quagmire. - BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea features an adult bookstore, where there is an erotic novel titled, "Big Daddy". - Word of God says that a cut line of dialogue from a mission in the FreeSpace 2 mod Wing Commander Saga had a reference to Wing Come-At-Her III: Heart of the Muff Diver. - A "Binjpipe Bonus" in the credits of You Don't Know Jack Full Stream features a writer named Brittany saying she wanted to make a Dis Or Dat where the choices were either " Schoolhouse Rock! song about numbers" or "Porno". She didn't write it because she got too scared to search for porn titles. Brittany: Apparently, typing "Only porn titles, please, don't show me porn" in the search engine doesn't work. It still shows you a lot of porn. - At the start of Stay Tooned!, one of the channels on the TV advertises "The XXX Files: The Naked Truth is out there". Yes, this trope is played completely straight in a kids' game. - Bad Gods' webcomic Capybara Brothers has an example of the porn title game. - Foster Hearst of Scandal Sheet finds he has a gift for generating Parallel Porn Titles in his first job after graduation. Diddle Her on the Roof indeed... - SomethingPositive* had a Crossover with Scandal Sheet where Aubrey and Foster discussed the possibility of a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory parody, titled Willy Wanker and the Fudge Factory. Then they found out it had already been done. - Willy Wanker and the Chocolate Factory appears in Max and Paddy's Road to Nowhere as the porn film Paddy decides to act in to get a bit of extra money. He doesn't find out until too late that it's gay porn. - Ménage à 3: The first to be mentioned was Perry Hotter Part 16: The Wizard's Staff. Later, when readers learned more about the past career of ex-porn-star character Amber and her friend Chanelle, their work turned out to include a number of parodies; Boobarella (September 29, 2012, NSFW), Elizabeth & Veronique, Sabrina the Barely Legal Witch, and Kim Pussyble and Spank Her, She's French-Canadian (November 13, 2012, NSFW). It's possible that these two characters specialised in that part of the business, or that the very geeky character Gary fixated on porn parodies of geeky subjects — but more likely, those titles just made good jokes in strips that happened to be about porn. - A few in Cracked: - Name That Porno is a collection of those. - Something Awful.com once had a Photoshop contest where people altered the titles and cover art for Harry Potter novels, including "Hairy Pooter and the Chamber of Secretions." - They also had two "Porn Versions of Classic Films" contests. - In the Gorillaz interactive online game Plastic Beach, the player can ask 2D if he's bored and 2D informs the player that he has movies to watch. Some of the titles he lists are this trope. He describes them as "a bit random, but very, very, very watchable." - WikiPorno's Best Porn Movie Names page has a whole bunch of these, and it's incomplete. They don't even have the entire Star Whores series listed. - SF Debris: In the review for the Firefly episode "Out of Gas", Chuck makes a comment on Wash's Porn Stache. He also rattles off porn title versions of other Joss Whedon shows: Buffy the Vampire Layer, Dr. Horrible's Super-Long Dong, and Sex-Doll House. - Uncyclopedia have a comprehensive list that you'll probably spend a whole day chuckling over. Behold, Porno Titles That Should Exist, But Don't. - The web series Watch Blue Movies is about a porn studio that specialises in making these kinds of films. You've got G.I. Ho, The Porn Identity, Forrest Hump and so on. The first episode is about a porn parody of The Dark Knight, but no title is given. - The Nostalgia Critic: - In one Black Nerd Comedy video, Andre pretended to be Reggie Fils-Aime and announced that Nintendo was bringing porn to the Wii U, including PokeMeMon, Donkey Dong, Dikmin, Barely Legal Icarus, Wario Hard Ware, Pilotwangs, Kirby Eats Yoshi, StarFux and Raper Mario, among others. My body is ready. - The Cinema Snob, a parody of pretentious film critics, frequently finds himself reviewing this sort of movie. - A particularly notorious (and lazily-named) example is E.T. the Porno, which the Snobs' actor Brad Jones found hilarious enough that he did an April Fools' sketch about remaking it, where his character- who is producer, actor and director- eventually admits that he the only scene he actually wanted to film was himself as E.T. doing a sex scene. - In their crossover review of Tromeo and Juliet, The Cinema Snob is far from impressed with these in that movie , while Oancitizen has some suggestions of his own. - He also came up with Dr. Buttlove, or How I Learned To Stop Clenching And Love The Plug and Dick Jewell. - As Jones is famously not a fan of generic porno names like the aforementioned This Aint the Smurfs XXX or Spider-Man XXX: A Porn Parody, he tends to give such films a new Punny Name title for Cinema Snob episodes; in the case of the aforementioned titles, The Smuffs and Spanker-Man. In the case of Sex & the City: The Original XXX Parody, he gave it the bogus title Sex and the City 3. - In online sketch comedy group LoadingReadyRun's video 'Format War', Graham HAS to have Sweeney Knobs: Demon Boner of Boob Street on Blu-ray, to get a feel for the story they're going for. He also can't wait for 300...People Having Sex to come out. Matt is sure Blu-ray will fail and Graham will have to get another copy of The Spiderwank Chronicles. - When SF Debris did a review on the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Evolution", he tries to play a clip of Field of Dreams, but can't find any footage, so he has to make due with Field of Wet Dreams. He also recommends other porn parodies of James Earl Jones films, namely The Empire's Got Back and The Hunt for Ms. October.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParallelPornTitles
Paranoid Thriller - TV Tropes A sub-genre of Psychological Thriller revolving around characters who believe they have uncovered shady goings-on beneath the veneer of everyday life and/or are pursued by some kind of conspiracy run by a shadowy organization. The key difference from Conspiracy Thriller is that the work focuses on the unstable mental state of the protagonist rather than on the exact nature of the conspiracy, and the audience is never sure (at least not until the end, and sometimes not even then) whether the character is really uncovering something, or that there truly is a shadowy organization, or whether they're just imagining it. May overlap with World of Mysteries (this is how the characters in this genre usually see the world around them), Mockstery Tale, and Mockspiracy (if it turns out that the whole conspiracy never really existed). ## Examples - Serial Experiments Lain has the protagonist uncover a transhumanist conspiracy using the internet, all while leaving it ambiguous as to how much of the plot is her schizophrenic delusions. - In A Beautiful Mind, a young gifted mathematician is hired by the intelligence services to find hidden messages in newspapers by a secret Communist organization; he soon becomes paranoid, suspecting nearly everyone around him of being a Communist spy. \|\|It turns out that he suffers from schizophrenia, and the whole story of his involvement with intelligence services was a delusion.\|\| - Eyes Wide Shut has the protagonist infiltrate a mysterious masked orgy apparently thrown by rich and powerful members of the society. He is exposed, and though he manages to make it out, he starts feeling that he's pursued by the members of the conspiracy, and a couple of other people are seemingly Killed to Uphold the Masquerade. However, the details are never clarified, and there are some hints that the whole story was a dream. - Flightplan (2005) is about a woman whose daughter disappears from a plane in the middle of a transatlantic flight, but there are no records of the girl on the flight and no one will admit she was ever there. Two thirds of the film is spent unsure of whether the mother is delusional or being conspired against\|\|, but it turns out to be the latter.\|\| - In The Game (1997), the main character joins a mysterious Alternate Reality Game which soon becomes threatening, and begins to interfere with his everyday life, driving him to paranoia, since he doesn't know the intentions of the people behind it, and who is and who isn't involved in it. \|\|It turns out that The Game Never Stopped, and almost everyone was in on it.\|\| - In Jacob's Ladder, a Vietnam veteran suffering from PTSD believes he is pursued by government agents who want to silence him, as well as by demons and fantastic monsters. Throughout the movie it remains unclear which, if any, of his bizarre experiences are real, and which are hallucinatory\|\|, but in the end, it turns out that all of it was his Dying Dream, and he never made it out of Vietnam; demons pursuing him are actually angels who want to help his soul ascend to Heaven.\|\| - In Sunset, a Hungarian 2018 film, a young woman is looking for her lost brother in pre-World War I Budapest. It is implied that her brother was a revolutionary fighting against a group of decadent nobles who kidnap young women for some sinister purpose, hiding beneath the facade of a prestigious hat store. However, the exact nature of this conspiracy is never clarified (as well as whether or not it exists at all), and the movie hints that the young woman is slowly descending into madness. - In The Tenant, a shy tenant in an apartment complex starts to believe that his neighbours are conspiring to gaslight him. \|\|The Gainax Ending leaves it unclear whether he just went off his rails, or something sinister is indeed going on at the apartment complex.\|\| - In Under the Silver Lake, a young slacker in his 30s spends his days investigating the disappearance of a young woman he fell in love with by looking for hidden clues in pop music, video game magazines, and cereal boxes. He encounters some weird characters, including a Hobo King and a woman in an owl mask who seduces and kills men in their sleep, and eventually gets to the bottom of the conspiracy... However, a number of scenes imply that he is an Unreliable Narrator, and at least some of this stuff may be happening only in his head. - The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet by Stephen King is about the paranoid writer Reg Thorpe who believed in the existence of Fornits (a kind of luck-elves who lived in typewriters and brought inspiration to writers), and that some sort of sinister conspiracy was about to kill the Fornit that lived in his own typewriter. The protagonist, who is Thorpe's editor, gradually loses his grip on reality and starts to believe in Reg's fantasies, largely due to his own alcoholism. The story leaves it unclear whether or not the fornits and the conspiracy really existed, but there are some implications that they did. - In Blow-Up (also known as The Devil's Drool) by Julio Cortázar, a photographer takes picture of what he believes is a young woman flirting with a teenage boy. A closer examination of the picture apparently reveals a much darker subtext: the woman was trying to lure the boy into the clutches of a pedophile, a creepy man waiting in a car nearby. This story leads the narrator to contemplate the murkiness of reality and the sinister undertones of everyday situations. The style of narration is also extremely idiosyncratic and incoherent, reflecting the unstable mental state of the main character. - In The Crying of Lot 49, the protagonist Oedipa believes that she uncovered a centuries-old conspiracy involving an underground mail delivery company, Trystero. The novel implies that the whole Trystero story may be a practical joke by Oedipa's late husband or even hallucination of hers, but it might be real as well; the open ending never resolves this. - In Foucault's Pendulum, the three main characters invent a parody conspiracy theory to mock the real-life conspiracy theorists and occultists. Eventually they come to believe in it themselves, and become targets for an actual secret society. From this point, the narrative becomes increasingly paranoid and incoherent, with the protagonist believing that nearly every item has a hidden meaning, and nearly every bystander is following him, and the novel doesn't clarify which of the events happened in reality, and which were hallucinated by the protagonist. - Higurashi: When They Cry switches between this and Religious Horror, depending on the main character's current understanding of what's going on. Characters repeatedly go insane trying to understand why one person dies and one disappears every night during the Cotton-Drifting Festival. \|\|There actually is a conspiracy going on, but the characters' progressing paranoia in the different retelling usually works to keep them hunting down Red Herrings, like the local Yakuza family.\|\|	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParanoidThriller
Alternate Universe - TV Tropes The criminal and the ape-thing, OK. But a woman ?! That's just silly. "Penny, while I subscribe to the many worlds theory which posits the existence of an infinite number of Sheldons in an infinite number of universes, I assure you in none of them am I dancing." A story in which the characters we know are seen in a reality that's somehow different, often disturbingly so. If they can access multiple alternative universes at the same time, that's The Multiverse. Sometimes everyone has an Evil Twin. Other times, everyone has a twin that's just a little different. Allows the goodies to be baddies for an episode, or for half of the cast to be killed but not really. Sometimes it's just part of Side-Story Bonus Art. Given a long enough run, any series based on superhero comic books will run into these. If the writers want to depict an Alternate Universe, but the show's genre would not usually allow an Alternate Universe per se, the depiction may be accomplished via an extended Dream Sequence. This trope is not to be confused with the following: - Alternate Continuity The meta version, where a set of works is declared to take place in different universes (or, more specifically, different Canons). - Alternate Reality Episode Asking and exploring a What If X and Y happened differently? question. - Alternate Universe Fic Pretty much the same as above but for fanfics. Here at TV Tropes we use slightly different terminology, hence "universe" instead of "reality". - Another Dimension Technically directions, such as left/right, up/down, and forward/backward. Some people say past/future, or time, is another one. Some also say the direction perpendicular to past/future is to different universes, hence over time "dimension" has become synonymous with "universe". - Constructed World It's not Earth. Simple, right? May be meta-caused by aforementioned Alternate Continuity; as well as by any of the three varieties of Discontinuity (Canon Discontinuity, Fanon Discontinuity, or Negative Continuity). Specific variations: <!—index—> <!—/index—> - Alternate History Some major event in the past changed, like the Russian Revolution never occurring. - Alternate Timeline This alternate reality is reached by rewriting history. Different from Alternate Universe the same way using a new piece of paper is different from using an eraser or correction fluid. - Alternate Tooniverse An animated counterpart to reality. - Bizarro Universe A lot of things in that world are reversed from the usual context, good is evil or vice versa, etc. - Crossover Alternate Universe A universe that is created for a crossover. - Dark World Our world's dark, sinister opposite. - Elseworld Famous characters are placed into a situation which is potentially wildly different from the norm. - For Want of a Nail One small change caused a huge difference between the universes. - In Spite of a Nail Tiny changes have made the world almost the same but the differences are critical (or wildly different, but the characters are still the same and still together). - Gender-Bent Alternate Universe Males and Females are reversed. - It's a Wonderful Plot You get to see how the world would have turned out if you were never born/existed. - Merged Reality A universe where two or more universes are combined together into one. - Mirror Universe Often a subset of Bizarro Universe, Good and Evil are reversed, but otherwise most of the things are the same. - The Multiverse The people involved have the capacity to cross over to more than one additional universe. - Prime Timeline — The original timeline, the one all these alternates are an alternate to. - Retro Universe The universe obviously resembles the past, and may or may not include additional fantastic elements. - Role Swap AU A universe where some or all of the main characters are the same, but they've rearranged their roles. Often seen in superhero stories, with the same group of characters but the powers, alter egos and origin stories rearranged. - Short Screentime for Reality The alternate universe is incredibly vast and exciting compared to our own limited, ordinary universe. Another type of Alternate Universe is that which doesn't take any of the characters, but instead takes concepts, or machines. Such Alternate Universes are uncommon, but exist. Gundam is the perfect example, with no less than ten separate universes, all of them rehashing essentially the same plots and concepts in particular, the conflict between those living in space and those living on Earth. With giant robots. This trope is a common excuse for game masters to use when importing player characters from one tabletop role-playing campaign to another. Compare with Masquerade, where a world might look the same, but something hidden makes it different. See Doppelgänger Gets Same Sentiment for examples wherein someone from one universe projects their feelings for their version onto a different universe's version. ## Example Subpages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other Examples: - Bakegyamon: The game is held in a kind of mirror world where the kids are able to summon monsters, and the game master can float around. - In the Kyoto Animation adaptation of Key's Visual Novel CLANNAD, Tomoyo's arc, which was never completed properly, was showcased in an AU OVA entitled Another World: Tomoyo Arc, where Tomoya never met Nagisa and Tomoyo is the winning girl. - In July 2009, they released the final DVD of Clannad: ~After Story~ that contains an extra OVA episode entitled Another World: Kyou Arc. Kyou finally gets her arc! - Code Geass, like K, has an Idol AU, featuring the characters as idol groups, instead of militaries. The groups are Code Black, a goth/punk band consisting of Lelouch, C.C., Kallen, and Shirley (with animal ears); Royal Rouge Rounds (or RRR), an idol group featuring either Euphemia, Suzaku, Cornelia, Gino, Anya, and Jeremiah, or Cornelia, Euphemia, Suzaku, and Lelouch; and Princess Peach, featuring Kaguya, Nunnally, and Lihua. Several figure sets have been made from this AU, and an album is (supposedly) on the way. - Doraemon: In "A World Without Sound", the characters go to an alternate universe where there is no sound and everyone communicates through writing. - Dragon Ball has three varieties: - The first is the demon world, which mirrors the regular setting except for the fact it is populated by demons. It first showed up in a filler episode of Dragon Ball Z dealing with a martial arts master from the demon world breaching the seal between the two worlds in order to kidnap human girls but later was added into continuity proper when the evil wizard Babadi enslaved the demon world's strongest fighter. The main villains from Dragon Ball Online hail from the demon world and Dragon Ball Xenoverse implies they too want to break the seal between the two worlds. - The second variety comes in the form of multiple timelines, a concept introduced when Future Trunks arrived via time machine to try and discover how to defeat two enemies from a very dark Bad Future. Unfortunately he was followed from an even darker future from which Cell hails. \|\|He killed his timeline's version of Trunks, who had already killed the Androids Cell needs to absorb, leading him to steal the time machine so he could absorb them in the past.\|\| Dragon Ball Online implies these alternate timelines are potentially endless and the main job of the protagonists was to prevent more of them from splitting off before encountering villains that aimed to change the known timelines rather than create new ones. - Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods and Dragon Ball Super introduces the third variety that comes in the form of twelve separate "universes", which come in pairs that are determined by their designated numbers adding up to thirteen. The main setting is designated Universe 7 and so it paired with Universe 6, which superficially resembles it but has seen some drastically different developments over the course of its own history. - In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) \|\|the opposite side of The Gate is shown to be our universe.\|\| The two worlds have vastly different continuities but all humans have an Alternate Self on the other side of the gate. - Fairy Tail - As the story was written by Hiro Mashima, who already had experience with this with Rave Master, it only made sense for it to have one of these as well, in the form of Edolas, a world where magic power is scarce and slowly dying out, with the populace unable to use magic themselves but capable of storing it into tools and weapons and have resorted to using a special spell to siphon magic energy from Earthland. It makes for an interesting plot twist, and despite its relative lack of plot significance, it doesn't feel tacked on at all. Although it does explain a good few things, like Happy and Carla's origin, and why \|\|Jellal and Mystogan look identical to one another\|\|. - In Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest, \|\|alongside a surprise return to Edolas\|\|, it's revealed there are other dimensions connected to Earth-land that aren't usually capable of being reached. One such Alternate Universe is Elentir, the Transcendent Magic World, where magic power flows in such an abundance \|\|it actually threatens to erupt and destroy it in a cataclysm without the aid of an order of priests that use White-Out Magic to pacify the land's magical energy.\|\| It is the home of \|\|both another Exceed named Touka and the White Mage/Faris, the latter of whom used the former to come to Earthland as part of a scheme to save her world from the Moon Dragon God Selene.\|\| - The Hetalia Bloodbath 2010 event: \|\|the culprits turn out to be alternate versions of various countries from another world where everyone has cat ears and they walk around nude like it's no problem, and apparently contains 123 different Frances. The survival of that world depends on finding a nation with a certain mark on their chest or butt before the end of Christmas, hence the stripping.\|\| It Makes Sense in Context. - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure eventually starts dealing with these: - The climax of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean involves \|\|Pucci's Made in Heaven causing the universe to reset and remade in his own image; however, his plans are ultimately foiled before he can finish the job, resulting in a restored version of the original universe that features alternate versions of all the characters he killed. The only one not affected was Emporio, the kid who killed him\|\|. - From JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run onward, each Part takes place in an alternate universe with parallels to the previous timeline. \|\|Word of God has gone on record saying the universe of Steel Ball Run and JoJolion is an entirely separate, unrelated universe with a new continuity that merely pays homage to the original story\|\|. - The Big Bad of Steel Ball Run has a Stand based around weaponizing a similar concept. He could escape death by pulling an identical version of himself from another universe to replace him, and could also force others to come into contact with their doppelgangers, and thus be obliterated. The other universes are almost identical, with the sole prominent difference being \|\|the lack of the Holy Corpse in all but the main universe\|\|. - K has both a High School AU and an Idol AU, which feature the series' feuding factions as rival school clubs or idol producers. - The Official Doujin spinoff of Kaguya-sama: Love Is War eventually becomes a collection of AUs instead of the initial Hotter and Sexier premise. There are The Little Mermaid AU, Cinderella AU, an all-girls school AU, and so on. The most well-known one is the Kindergarten AU, where Shirogane and Hayasaka are kindergarten teachers and the others as their students. It also has \|\|Hayasaka becoming Shirogane's love interest in this universe instead of Kaguya\|\|. - The Kirby anime is meant to be an alternate universe from the games, something many fans miss. - Unlike the traditional Lyrical Nanoha setting, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha INNOCENT is set in a universe without magic and alternate dimensions. Instead, the characters are normal humans living on earth, dueling one another via a recently introduced virtual reality-based Card Battle Game. - The franchise itself is one to the Triangle Heart series, where it's the rest of the Takamachis that live a secret battle-hardened lifestyle while Nanoha is an ordinary little girl. - Mazinger Z has a bunch of alternate universes: New Mazinger, set several years in the future, in a polluted, torn-warn Earth; God Mazinger, which has absolutely nothing to do with the original universe; Mazin Saga, Z-Mazinger, an alternate retelling where Kouji and Sayaka fight aliens masquerading as Greek deities; Mazinkaiser, another alternate retelling where Kouji finds his grandfather's true legacy; Shin Mazinger, yet ANOTHER retelling; Shin Mazinger Zero, a sequel to the original series set in an alternate timeline... - Naruto: Most of the Non-Serial Movie, Naruto the Movie: Road to Ninja, takes place in another world that Tobi sent Naruto and Sakura to. Many of the filler episodes of Shippuden after Madara activates the Infinite Tsukuyomi also use alternate takes on the main setting—in addition to alluding to Road to Ninja, one "seen" by Tsunade takes place in a universe where both Naruto and Sasuke's families weren't killed and, particularly, Naruto is publicly acknowledged as the son of the Fourth Hokage but still secretly ostracized as a jinchuriki. - Neon Genesis Evangelion: - In Episode 51 of Powerpuff Girls Z, the girls spend the entire episode traveling through time (using the Dynamo Z) gathering 3 flashes of light. Before they can get to the 2nd light, Him sends them off-course by transporting them into the universe of The Powerpuff Girls (1998), where the PPG can be seen fighting the Giant Balloon Fish in Townsville. However, the girls don't stick around long enough to meet their original counterparts, as they immediately travel back to their own universe and continue time traveling. - A major plot twist in Rave Master involved this trope: \|\|the entire series exists within an Alternate Universe, which was created when the last survivor of the original reality manipulated time in order to create a parallel world where The End of the World as We Know It didn't come to pass. The Omnicidal Maniac that was destroying this parallel world was in fact a balancing force created as a result of the unnatural divergence in the timestream\|\|. - Officially stated by a character in Saint Seiya: Episode.G Assassin: Shura and Aiolia are not in their usual timeline nor universe. - Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has one of these in Episode 26 with \|\|the Big Bad's Lotus-Eater Machine.\|\| - In a different vein, the new Parallel Works music videos leading up to the movie seem to be using these. - The series also has a High School AU manga. - One fan also seems to make an excellent example with an AU universe comic about TTGL worthy of the series. - Tsubasa Chronicle has many different worlds, and the four protagonists actually come from different worlds. - Panzer World Galient: The third OVA is an Alternate Universe to the series in which \|\|Jordy, Chururu and Hy Shaltat both are brothers-in-law, and Hilmuka isn't an alien.\|\| - Pokémon: The Series: - An episode of Pokémon the Series: XY has one where Ash and his Kalos friends have Mirror Universe counterparts that have completely polar personalities. In that universe, Ash has become a wimp who cries when things go bad, Alternate!Serena has become a Jerkass who often taunts Alternate!Ash, Alternate!Clemont has become a magician, and Alternate!Bonnie is more quiet and polite. Also, the real Team Rocket encounter their alternate counterparts, where they were actually seen as heroes of the Kalos region. Their Pokémon get affected too; Alternate!Hawlucha has become a wimp like Alternate!Ash, and Alternate!Pikachu has become cocky and is a regular nuisance to Team Rocket. - A two-parter in Pokémon the Series: Sun & Moon has Ash and Pikachu sent to an alternate universe version of Melemele where pollution and attacks by Guzzlord have devastated the now-abandoned island. They team up with the lone survivor to force the Guzzlord back to its home dimension before they are returned to their home universe. - Another two-parter in Pokémon Journeys: The Series revolves around a Bizarro Universe in which Ash is a weak-willed Shrinking Violet like in the XY mirror universe while Goh & Chloe are Hot-Blooded, and the Team Rocket trio is high-ranked and competent enough to have mooks of their own. The story revolves around their efforts to Save Both Worlds from Alternate!Team Rocket's Rage Against the Heavens plot. - Zigzagged in Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V which has The Multiverse and inter dimensional travel as a major plot point, but each dimension is an Alternate Universe version of a previous setting in the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise (though there's no direct communication between these dimensions and the settings they serve as counterparts to). \|\|After The Reveal it turns out this trope is either invoked or averted, depending on your point of view.\|\| - Space☆Dandy plays with this trope a lot. Each episode of the series is arguably set in a different universe as many of them end with the characters dying, becoming zombies or even micro-organisms, only for them to be perfectly fine the next episode. \|\|The series also ends with Dandy rejecting the Narrator's offer of Godhood, which causes the universe to reset itself to the very first episode...though things appear to be slightly different this time round.\|\| - One episode features Dandy, Meow and QT actually meeting different alternate versions of themselves, including a space trucker Dandy, a guy in a pink suit who thinks he's a robot (QT's alternate self) and a scary cyborg Meow. - Late into UQ Holder!, Kirie Sakurame is briefly sent into an alternate universe that's all but directly stated to be \|\|the universe that the reader resides in, as she mentions the year was 2021 (as opposed to 2086 where the story takes place) and there was a virus currently plauging said world\|\|. - Each season of GG Bond features the characters having different personalities, an oddity that's explained in Season 16 as being because there are multiple alternate universe that the characters can be found in. - It's implied that the two Cinderella sequels are set in different universes. - The LEGO Movie: The LEGO World is this to the Real World. While the events of the film and actions of the protagonists seem to be heavily influenced by Finn's actions at his father's LEGO set, Emmet still possesses his own thoughts when he falls into the Real World, and even wills himself to move at one point, independent of Finn or his father. The two worlds are separate, but apparently run parallel to each other, with whatever happens in the Real World affecting what happens in the LEGO world. The inverse also appears to be true, as Finn's father realizes his son's work when Emmet points it out to President Business. - In My Little Pony: Equestria Girls, Twilight Sparkle goes to one where the ponies are humans in high school, accessed via a Magic Mirror. However one visual gag raises the possibility that it's an alternate point in time rather than an alternate universe... - Shrek Forever After takes place in a universe where Rumpelstiltskin is crowned king, and many of Shrek's former allies have been changed in one way or another (I.E. Puss in Boots becoming the ogre clan's housecat and Donkey being treated as a regular mule). - Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse: While the actual Ultimate Marvel universe until Ultimatum very much reflected reality like the classic Marvel Universe did, the film uses the Spider-Verse concept to take the idea of Miles Morales coming from an alternate reality even further; for example, New York police cars are labeled with "PDNY" rather than "NYPD", Bland Name Products abound (with "Koca-Soda" instead of Coca-Cola and "RedEx" instead of "FedEx"), Shaun of the Dead became an actual franchise, and Miles doesn't know what Comic-Con is when Peter quips about it. This is cemented by Peter Parker's own universe having a Coca-Cola neon sign and the traditional "NYPD" abbreviation on a police car. - Beau Is Afraid's version of 2022 contains a number of differences from our reality, including there existing a US city and state named Corrina, the US being involved in a military conflict with Venezuela, Moviefone still maintaining its now defunct call-in service, and there being no references to the COVID-19 Pandemic. - In Cube 2: Hypercube, the hypercube transects parallel universes. The characters don't realize this until they start running into duplicates of themselves and each other. Exploited by one character who uses them as a human food source. - Love Is All You Need? (2016) takes place in a universe, where homosexuality is commonplace and heterosexuals are victimized and persecuted. - The One is a cross between this and Conservation of Ninjutsu. The villain is traveling around to the various universes killing all the alternate versions of himself so he'll have all the power that would otherwise be spread out between them. Since the hero is one of the alternates, he winds up with bigger and bigger slices of the power pie as well, making for a battle royale when it's down to just the two of them. - Super Mario Bros. (1993) posits a "sub-dimension" created through the impact of the meteorite into earth that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs continued to evolve in this sub-dimension in the city of "Dinohattan", a city mirroring New York City. - Discussed in a short story from Arthur C. Clarke called The Other Tiger, in which two scientists start talking about the infinite universes that could theorically exist. - In the 100 Cupboards trilogy, the different worlds the characters reach through the cupboards are implied to be parallel universes whose timelines have diverged so dramatically from that of "our" Earth that they bear little resemblance anymore. - Stephen Baxter's Anti-Ice: The discovery of an Applied Phlebotinum with properties similar to anti-matter dramatically accelerates the Industrial Age. The book begins with the Crimean War ending with the destruction of Sevastopol by a single anti-ice shell, and includes a Jules Verne-like trip to the Moon. - Discworld: - In Teresa Edgerton's Celydonn trilogy, the Inner Celydonn plays this role to Celydonn proper, so that, for example, the version of Tir Gwyngelli known in traveller's tales really exists as the home of The Fair Folk. - Daryl Gregory's The Devil's Alphabet: A virus (of sorts) mutates the populations of a couple of cities in different parts of the world. The eventual realization is that the various types of new humans (Argos, Betas and Charlies) are what humans are normally like in alternate versions of the world. - One of the types of dimensions the portals in''Liv in the Future can lead to. While not shown, one government-sustained portal is known to lead to a universe where Jamaica has sharp sand. - H. Beam Piper's Paratime: This series by is based entirely around this concept, in which an advanced Earth civilization with the technology to explore alternate universes does so in order to secretly mine them for resources. - The Dark Tower books by Stephen King : Mid-World is a strange collision of Scavenger World, After the End, and Weird West with some trace elements of Steampunk to boot. It exists "next" to our world on the Tower, and shares some overlap, such as the existence of "Hey Jude" as a type of ancient campfire song, the presence of an Amoco gas pump, and a mysterious race of Precursors who had knowledge of and access to our world. This is without mentioning the endless levels of the Tower which make up different versions of our world and Mid-World. See The Multiverse page for that. - In Dragonlance, Raistlin succeeds in becoming a god and killing every other god as well as all life in Krynn. Then Caramon time travels back to prevent him from succeeding. - The Alternate Universe part comes from the suggestion that there are universes where Caramon didn't succeed. - Most of the Claimed in Dis Acedia come from various alternate universes. - In The Edge, the Weird is a mirror universe to our world, mirrored so that Florida is in the west and California in the east. None of the characters are duplicated, though. - The Genesis of Jenny Everywhere by The Lyniezian makes use of the Shifter's ability to exist in multiple alternate universes and read the thoughts of other versions of herself (see also Web Original folder). Her home universe, though fairly mundane and boring has a continuing Imperial Japan in the news about to invade Mongolia, various Anachronism Stew elements (Radio 4 is still the BBC Home Service despite being otherwise identical to Real Life; Jenny listens to music on what may or may not be 8-track cartridges, but other girls at school obsess over boy bands and reality TV), and, of course, there are the obligatory zeppelins. This Jenny, a bored schoolgirl with an overbearing mother, would rather be dreaming of excitement in some more Adventure-Friendly World or other- then gets her wish when she discovers her shifting power. - In the fourth Haruhi Suzumiya novel, The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, Kyon suddenly finds himself in a world without supernatural powers, with the SOS members remain leading normal, human lives, and where Haruhi went to a different high school. It is, however, quite important to the plot that it actually \|\|was not an alternate universe, the one he has always been at had been rebuilt\|\|. This universe is further explored in the manga spinoff The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan. - Isaac Asimov's "What If (1952)": Mr If's scrying glass allows people to view "what might have been". Liwy and Norman ask "What if we hadn't met that day?" and see events play out slightly differently because of it. - Isaac Asimov and Janet Asimov's Norby Finds a Villain: In this story, it is discovered that, with enough power, robots like Norby and Pera can use hyperspace to travel into other universes. - The Gwendalavir Universe is a world parallel to ours. - This is the origin of all the strange things in John Dies at the End. - The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick contains an alternate 1960s California controlled by the Japanese after a defeat of the allies during WWII. There is mention of another alternate reality, apparently revealed to an au ctthor who writes a book about such an alternate in which the US does not lose WWII. This is slowly revealed not to be "our" alternate, but one dreamed up by the writer, and of no special significance. The book was written using the I-Ching as a guide to the character's actions. - Robert J. Sawyer's "The Neanderthal Parallax" trilogy is all about an alternate universe where Neanderthals didn't go extinct, but homo sapiens did. - Robert A. Heinlein's The Number of the Beast and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls are based on this, exploring various fictional universes created not only by Heinlein but also others, especially Oz. - The Reluctant King: The world of the trilogy is one for Earth, which in turn constitutes its afterlife. Early on, Jorian briefly crosses over into Earth before going back. He's completely befuddled by his encounter with what are clearly cars on a paved road, then a highway patrol officer who's trying to help what must seem like a very strange man. - The Shadowhunter Chronicles has an unknown amount of alternate universes. Four have been introduced so far. - The first is Edom, introduced in the latter half of City of Heavenly Fire. It is a world where Jonathan Shadowhunter was a cocky individual who rejected working with the Downworlders in the fight against demons. As a result, the Downworlders sided with the demons, enabling the latter to kill all Shadowhunters in the world. The demons subsequently ate everything else, turning the entire Earth into a wasteland. The sea is drained and the sun is obscured by gray clouds. There are no living things, except for demons who scavenge for food. Edom is now ruled by the demons Lilith and Asmodeus. - The second is Thule, introduced in the second act of Queen of Air and Darkness. It is a world where Clary Fairchild was killed during the Battle of the Burren in the year 2007, as depicted in City of Lost Souls. As a result, the Shadowhunters lost their primary champion in the fight against Sebastian Morgenstern and his army, who then spread a demonic plague called Blight that served as portals for demons to take over, turning the Earth into a wasteland, much like Edom. However, because the point of divergence with the main world is much more recent compared to Edom, Thule still has Shadowhunters and Downworlders, although the former have lost all of their angelic powers. - The third is an unnamed realm ruled by Belial, which appears in Chain Of Gold. It used to belong to Belphegor until Belial took it. The realm is made of a desert environment that is devoid of color. There is also a ruined civilization that looks similar to London. The realm is destroyed when Cordelia incapacitates Belial using Cortana. - The fourth is Diyu, based on the Chinese afterlife of the same name, which appears in The Lost Book Of The White. It was ruled by a Greater Demon, Yanluo, until he was killed. It used to be the place where the wicked were tortured, but after Yanluo's death it has fallen to disarray and is currently inhabited by wandering demons. Sammael has plans to take over it. - the secret lives of Princesses: Princess Ices produces a mirror that you can step through to travel to another world. - The alternate history series 1632 runs on this trope. Not long after the Virginia mining town from 2000 appears in Europe in 1632 during the Thirty Years War, some characters speculate they have moved to a different universe. - In Smoke and Shadows, \|\|Arra\|\| comes from what seems to be a parallel Earth given how easily she adapts to life in Vancouver. Her world was less technological, but magic use was mainstream. - Spectral Shadows has this; Word of God says that the "Somebody Else's Dream/Episodes from Hell" segment of Serial 11 is this. - The Myriad Universes Star Trek novella collections have the "for want of a nail" version of this trope. The Mirror Universe short story collections, on the other hand, are very different to the main universe. - The Farside Trilogy involves travel between Earth during the World Wars and a magical realm called Yuulith where humans have to deal with Elven Empires and an invasion from a Europe taken over by utterly alien seeming creatures who want to enslave everyone in Yuulith. - In The Wicked Years it's implied that the story takes place in an alternate universe and Oz is a counterpart to America. This differentiates from the original Oz canon, as Oz was simply another country on Earth. - In Wildside by Steven Gould, a teenager has a portal to a parallel world in which humans never evolved on his farm. He and several friends try to use it to become rich by exploiting the knowledge of huge gold strikes on their earth that were never discovered on the human-free world (of course). They do attempt to not pollute or otherwise screw up that universe— and then \|\|the American government (the bad parts of it) discover the group's access to an alternate world, and things get dangerous. Eventually, it is revealed that the main character's mother came from a different world in which the Industrial Revolution ran amok and destroyed it, eventually using portals to come to our timeline and saving the uninhabited world as a potential "lifeboat" for our world\|\| - Michael Kurland: - In The Unicorn Girl, the protagonists inadvertantly explore several alternate universes. - In The Whenabouts of Burr, somebody steals the Declaration of Independence and replaces it with its counterpart from an Alternate History; the protagonists go in search of that alternate history in order to find answers and get their own Declaration back. The title comes from the fact that the alternate Declaration was signed by Aaron Burr instead of Alexander Hamilton — which incidentally makes the protagonists' world an alternate history as well, because in our history Hamilton didn't sign it either. - The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith — a police officer in a dystopian United States is accidentally blown into an alternate universe where the North American continent is a libertarian society, and must help his alternate self defeat a plot to conquer this new world. Basically an Author Tract (albeit an entertaining one) for libertarianism, it's available online as a graphic novel as well. - The Red and the Rest takes place in a parallel Earth where the major difference seems to be a link to one of these. The main characters soon find themselves lost in the world of lost things, which really kicks off the plot. - * A Thousand Pieces Of You. The whole storyline of the books is about two scientists traveling from universe to universe and finding trouble in each one. - In Rough Draft, the protagonist finds himself the customs officer of an Inn Between the Worlds with access to a number of parallel worlds. Some of these are explored in greater detail than others: - Earth 1 (Arkan): A universe 35 years behind Earth 2 from a technological and historical viewpoint, although some areas of technology here are superior to Earth 2. - Earth 2 (Demos): Our world. One of the most technologically advanced known worlds. Nicknamed "Demos" for the prevalence of democracy. - Earth 3 (Veroz): A world without nation-states or oil, so Steampunk is common. City-states can be found across the world, frequently in the same locations as on Earth 2 but with different names. Australia hasn't been explored or settled. Seas are full of dangerous creatures, such as krakens. One of the more fleshed out worlds in the novel. - Earth 4 (Antik): A world stuck at the Classical stage of development with an "evolved" form of slavery (e.g. slaves can be richer than their owners and can rebel twice a year). - Earth 5: Humans have a spring mating season and are at the 50s-60s level of development. - Earth 8 (Firmament): A world dominated by the Catholic Church, stuck in Medieval Stasis with the exception of advanced bio-engineering. The Cardinals run the Church (no Pope) and are protected by female Swiss Guards with killer Yorkshire terriers, razor-sharp halberds, and flying gargoyles. - Earth 14 (Janus): A planet with harsh winters and scorching summers. Spring is the only (barely) tolerable season. There is no moon and no magnetic fields. Initially appears lifeless, but one character insists that some human and animal life survives by migrating with the spring. - Earth 16: It appears to be Earth stuck at the primordial stage with unceasing volcanic activity and radiation. \|\|It's later revealed that it's an After the End world that is the homeworld of the Functionals. Human and animal life survives on a single island\|\|. - Earth 18 (Preserve): A pristine world with no humans. Frequently treated as a resort place, provided the visitors clean up after themselves. - Earth 22 (Nirvana): A world with no animal life. Filled with plants that produce spores that trigger a narcotic effect. Used as a prison of sorts, since all people dumped here are permanently stuck in a drugged stupor. Taking someone out results in a lengthy withdrawal period. - Earth 46: A technologically-advanced world, whose people have successfully resisted an inter-dimensional invasion. They practice Brain Uploading and "preserve" their dead by copying their minds into robots. They have used their advanced quantum physics knowledge to seal off their world from the rest permanently. - Andrey Livadny's The History of Worlds* setting turns five of his previously separate settings into The Multiverse, allowing characters from them to interact. Four are unofficially called by key works set in them, and one is called by the name of a key character. - The History of the Galaxy universe: the most explored setting due to being the author's longest-running series with over 60 novels, novellas, and short stories, spanning a millennium of humanity's exploration of the galaxy and various conflicts between human powers, corporations, and aliens. - Another Mind universe: humanity is at the early 21st century development level and comes under attack from space. - Life Form universe: humans are settling the Solar System with STL interstellar travel a possibility; alien artifacts are discovered on some planets. - Contact universe: humans are exploring the galaxy using FTL-capable ships; then an archaeological discovery on Ganymede is made, revealing the existence of multiple alien races. - Omni universe: Earth is a radioactive wasteland, following a mutually-destructive war against a race of Insectoid Aliens, with the survivors of both species attempting to rebuild their civilizations. - Tasakeru takes place in an alternate universe where humans have never existed. - Gravity Falls: Journal 3: During his travels in the multiverse, Ford came across several of these, most notably one he deemed "The Better World": \|\|Stanley took Journal 1 instead of fighting him and alongside Fiddleford, that worlds Ford kept Bill Cipher at bay and created the Institute of Oddology, becoming rich and famous in the process thanks to his multidimensional travel technology.\|\| - In the Christian novel The Tuning Station, an atheist meets an alternate version of himself, who is a devout Christian, and they are given the assignment to find out where their lives diverged. - Armadillo Fists exists in a multiverse, where travel between realities is commonplace enough that people hold "dop conventions" where they meet with all the other versions of themselves. This can be an unpleasant experience, though - main character June learns that almost every other version of her is male, while villain Rape Face discovers that there isn't a single universe where he became something better than a petty asshole criminal. - Gloryhammer: The first album, Tales from the Kingdom of Fife is set in a Fantasy Scotland with unicorns, magic, trolls and goblins. The second album, Space 1992: Rise of the Chaos Wizards is set ten centuries later in the grim darkness of 1992, when Zargothrax, the Evil Sorcerer from the first album, comes back to wreak havoc with the aid of the Goblin King and the Chaos Wizards. At the end of the second album, McFife follows Zargothrax through a wormhole into another reality. - Tsukipro - a fictional talent agency representing various artists, mostly boy bands. Their main releases are music singles, accompanied by audio dramas about their daily lives, stories which continue on the official twitter accounts and in the various anime adaptations. Normally, it would stop there, but not this time. This series makes good use of its Universal-Adaptor Cast, and AU stories have been made turning them into youkai, military officers in space, angels and demons, rabbit royals, and more. It helps that in canon, one of the idols is a demon king. Or maybe it doesn't... - The retrofuturistic Eighties setting of Within the Wires is a False Utopia that divorces children from the concept of family, separating them from parents, and eliminating/repressing memories of siblings and childhood relationships at the age of ten via pharmacology, cybernetic implants, and batteries of psychological programming. Gradually, the series reveals a Point of Divergence, a devastating war called "The Great Reckoning." In its aftermath, The Society was created, and it was decided that nationalism, tribalism and familial loyalty were the root causes of war and violence, to be eliminated through drastic social engineering. - Many roleplays on the Bay12 Forums use this as their base: - The first story in the Brave New World Universe has an entire story arc dealing with a character traveling to multiple alternate realities. - Fate/Nuovo Guerra takes one of Fate/stay night's bad endings and runs with it as their Back Story. The Fifth Grail War results in the destruction of Fuyuki City, prompting the Einzberns to start a new Grail War elsewhere. - In Lords of Creation every one of the new gods became that way by successfully offing a god in their own universe, now they have to create their own and hopefully not screw it up. - Survival of the Fittest: - It has had several small-scale AU RP's. These range from simple What-If scenarios (What If the students had been rescued on Day 3, What If SOTF really was a TV show, etc) to radically different concepts such as Mech SOTF and SOTF with zombies. - In 2010, a spin-off site effectively dedicated to Alternate Universe versions of Survival of the Fittest was created, with the pilot in an interesting Continuity Nod, being an alternate version of Battle Royale, the concept which SOTF was based off. While the Battle Royale AU was left unfinished, several other A Us have been established and seen multiple versions. A list can be found here. - Several Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings are alternate universes to both Earth and each other, though this is rarely referenced in game materials and comes mostly from Word of God. - Greyhawk exists in a Multiverse (along with Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms), but it's not made up of alternate universes. Rather, it's the term used for the system of heavens and hells, elemental planes, the Astral Plane, and so on; the different campaign settings are planets in the same universe. - Forgotten Realms. The entry for 1357 DR in The Grand History of the Realms notes that in that year, on an alternate Material Plane world known as Earth, Ed of the Greenwood gathered together various books and maps given to him by Elminster of Shadowdale, and made the first publication of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting. - Mystara somehow exists in a different multiversal set-up from the other campaign settings. In addition to Earth, it also crossed over with another universe with futuristic technology; a starship from that universe crashed on Mystara and its radioactive engine became a major source of arcane power. - Unlike most other official Dungeons & Dragons settings, Greyhawk and Mystara share background elements pulled from early games (such as the aforementioned starship crash, the Barony of Blackmoor, and connections to Earth), but in slightly different formats. - Gothic Earth, a spinoff of the Ravenloft product line, is an Alternate Universe version of our own planet in which supernatural horrors lurk beneath the façade of Victorian-era society. Also, some characters from classic fiction in our world are real there. - Urban Arcana's worlds on the other side of Shadow could be this, but the nature of Shadow makes travel between universes... tricky. As in, 'you can't go back'. One of the adventures includes a character from the other side that has figured out how you can travel between the Earth of UA and his world. This character, and his organization, also appeared in Planescape... - Broken Rooms is a science fiction horror game involving movement between 13 alternate realities. The premise of the game is that on a certain date on our world nothing remarkable happened...but on 13 other realities the beginning of the end of the world took place. These can range from a catastrophic meteor strike, to a nano-viral zombie plague, to an alien invasion, to the annihilation of the solar system from a rogue black hole. Only people with a certain hindbrain anomaly can travel between these realities by way of Broken Rooms, places where tragedy has eroded the barrier between realities. - The Exalted supplement Shards of the Exalted Dream features four versions of the main Exalted universe: a Space Opera setting, a modern day setting, a fighting game-style setting, and a setting based on Battlestar Galactica (2003). - GURPS Infinite Worlds setting. - It involves the PCs as agents travelling through alternate universes. Officially all GURPS settings are universes within the Infinite Worlds. This includes assorted Alternate Histories ( GURPS Technomancer, GURPS Reign of Steel), several universes where All Myths Are True ( GURPS Camelot, GURPS Atlantis), multiple worlds with superheroes ( GURPS Supers, GURPS International Super Teams), and even universes inexplicably modeled on the popular fiction of the baseline universe ( GURPS Conan, GURPS Discworld)! - The enemy timeline is Centrum, a scientific state that wants what is best for all, and for this to continue (discovering where this one branched off is a surprise)... others in the Alternate Worlds books have included Gernsback (named for the Golden Age SF editor), where Nikola Tesla's inventions shaped the development of science; Excalli, where the dominant empire is an Aztec-derived one; Roma Aeterna, where the Empire of Rome simply carried on, with the adoption of science; an alternate where China continued to trade overseas; and several versions of the usual "Nazis triumphant" parallel. Oh, and the United States of Lizardia, where dinosaurs evolved into sentient beings but somehow ended up recapitulating human history along the way. - Wizards of the Coast long ago published a set of generic supplements for handling deities in roleplaying games, called The Primal Order. One of the books in this series, Chessboards, covered in exquisite detail how to design and manage an entire multiverse complete with cosmology. - Sentinels of the Multiverse, as the name implies, features several alternate universes both shown in the game itself and in its background lore. This includes such universes as the Iron Legacy Timeline where all around Boy Scout Legacy goes totalitarian after his nemesis kills his daughter, The Inverse-verse where heroes are bad guys and villains are good guys, the Xtreme-verse where everything is XTREME(!), the Animal Verse where everyone is an animal except for Plague Rat who is instead Plague Man (this one in particular originated as a joke after Christopher and Adam, the game's creators, accidentally referred to the character Sergeant Steel as Sargent Seal), and many, many others. - TORG: - It features several different dimensions/realities, each corresponding to a different genre (such as Aysle, a traditional world of Medieval European Fantasy; the Cyberpapacy, a Cyberpunk world run by a Corrupt Church; the Space Opera-influenced dimension of the Space Gods; Orrorsh, a Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror Story in a Heart of Darkness style British colonial jungle setting; the Nile Empire, a world of Pulp Action Adventure; the Living Land, with sentient dinosaurs; and others), all cooperating to invade Earth. - Part of what makes TORG such an interesting game is that it's based on distinctly different rules for how reality works, depending on the context of the home dimension. First edition's Nile Empire, for example, had no room for moral ambiguities: every character was either Good or Evil, though they could change from one to the other under the right circumstances. Characters can engage in literal 'reality duels' with opponents from different dimensions, and the High Lords can do the same with entire areas of real estate. - The Hyborian Campaign was alternate universe to the Conan the Barbarian series, particularly as it progressed and more and more Space Filling Empires nonexistent in canon arose as players conquered increasing amounts of land. - Warhammer 40,000 was originally just Warhammer Fantasy IN SPACE!, then the two were implied to be alternate universes of each other or that Fantasy was just set on one planet among billions in 40K. Now the universes are more or less set apart except for the occasional reference to high-tech wargear finding its way to Fantasy by way of the Warp. - BIONICLE has the Olmak, also called the Mask of Dimensional Gates. Does exactly that. Its wearer, Brutaka, has used it both to teleport and to send enemies to a dimension they probably won't return from. He tried to send his former friend Axonn into the Zone of Darkness (a pitch-black dimension with only flat, featureless plain with gravity), and also used his (then damaged) mask to teleport Takanuva to Karda Nui to warn the heroes of a great danger. However, the mask malfunctioned, and sent Takanuva into both Alternate History and a Bizarro Universe. After finally finding the another Olmak in one of those universes, Takanuva entered inter-dimensional space and got to his intended destination. This is a Multiverse with a twist, as "our" dimension is explicitly called "the real universe", the rest are only pocket dimensions that shows how things would've turned out if they were done differently. Brutaka's mask was destroyed eventually, but the lunatic villain Vezon managed to get his hands on another one... and it ended up fusing to his face. Now he is a living dimensional gate, and has already visited several other universes (among them a few of those that Takanuva got lost in). - A subversion of this trope happens in the book Time Trap before any of the other examples. Vakama wakes up in an alternate timeline where he and the rest of the Toa Metru never became Toa and six others became toa in their place. At first it seems like he accidentally changed the past with the mask of time, but \|\|it turns out the Big Bad was using illusions to trick him. Vakama figures out the situation isn't real by mentioning an event that didn't happen to a friend who would know that it didn't happen, then continues to play along with the illusion for a while to look for clues.\|\| - Danganronpa: - Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc IF takes place in a "What if?" version where Naegi finds a switch to escape the school before any of the students can attempt a murder. - Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony takes place in an alternate universe where \|\|the Danganronpa franchise is a popular series of video games and anime. So popular, in fact, that it became a reality TV show where high school students willingly sign up to take part in real killing games where they are mind-wiped and implanted with the fabricated personalities and backstories of Danganronpa characters as a form of Enforced Method Acting. It's mentioned that world peace has been achieved and there are no wars or conflict anymore, so watching Danganronpa is now the only way for humanity to satisfy its lust for violence\|\|. - Each of the main Danganronpa entries has an extra mode (School Mode in Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, Island Mode in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, Dangan Salmon Team in Danganronpa V3), all of which could be considered alternate universes where the killing games never happened. Danganronpa V3 also has an unlockable game titled Ultimate Talent Development Plan which could count as yet another alternate universe, where the rosters from all three novels attend Hope's Peak Academy during the same period and the Monokubs take over as the school's headmasters. - Hatoful Boyfriend has at least two alternate universes (that we know of) compared to the one the game takes place in. The first is the universe that the upcoming sequel Hatoful Boyfriend: MIRROR takes place in, where the main protagonist's parents are alive (and the \|\|Heartful Home incident never happened, preventing the chain of events that lead to Nageki's death and Hitori taking Kazuaki's identity, meaning both Nageki and the real Kazuaki are alive\|\|). The second is the world of the book Absolute Zero: The Forbidden Epic of Fallen Angels, which is the alternate universe that's mainly seen as Anghel's fantasy world, yet is actually a real parallel dimension (indicated by things that Anghel very obviously should not know about being present in the book, such as \|\|"Kazuaki" being Hitori's impersonation of the real Kazuaki and Shuu knowing Ryouta's father when they were younger\|\|) and it's implied that Anghel is some sort of Reality Warper capable of temporarily merging that dimension with the one he's actually in. - The main plot behind Little Busters! can be described as this. \|\|At first you don't realize because you're playing like any other DSIM, but at each playthrough the two main characters evolve a little (better seen on their status screens) and little things change from one playthrough to the other. It's only when you complete the Rin route for the second time, after playing through all the other five routes that it's revealed that the world they live in is actually an alternate universe created for the two main characters by the other eight, in order to help them cope with what happened in the real world.\|\| - Sunrider Academy is a Highschool AU of the main Sunrider universe. Sola's route reveals that both universes are part of a larger multiverse, as \|\|Academy!Sola is one of several "fragments" of the main universe Sola, created when the main Sola was transported thousands of years into her future; as such, Academy!Sola should not exist and the plot of her route involves preventing her from being erased from reality\|\|. - Every path in the multi-route TYPE-MOON games is a potential outcome of the main scenario, which makes it rather difficult to establish the rules of the 'verse due to the plot differences in each route; according to Word of God, all of them are canon. - The When They Cry franchise is filled of this, referred to as fragments/kakera. In Higurashi the Ground Hog Day Loop is revealed not to be repeats of the same events but instead different universes with a certain person pushing the Reset Button after each arc searching for a fragment in the sea of fragments where \|\|Rika won't be killed\|\|. In Umineko we are introduced to witches who can travel in the sea of fragments looking for specific events that fit their needs or wants. - The Nonary Games trilogy all hinge on using knowledge gained in an Alternate Universe path with a Bad Ending in order to progress on the main path to the True Ending. - The 150th Strong Bad Email had Strong Bad visiting many of the website's alternate universes. - Smash King is a story based on an alternate universe in the world of Smash that's parallel to the Nintendo multiverse at large, and the trophies know they're replicas of their original selves from the multi-verse, yet create their own society and choose their own personalities of their own volition, living life on their own terms in this tier based society. - In Underverse, the plot jumps between timelines and multiple different universes, tracking Cross's effort to get his timeline back. - Crystore Inc. revolves around the titular company and its iterations across the Red, Green, and Blue Bridges, alternate universes designated by the colour of their Golden Gate Bridge. - Feather Adventures: There are several alternate versions of the titular world which are only accessible by portals during special occasions or episodes. - The first known one is only accessible on Halloween. The alternate Sqaishey is called 'Sqoshey', the entire world has a much darker atmosphere, mobs like spiders and phantoms are friendly while cows and horses are hostile, and all the pets are bunnies. - Another example occurs in Episode 336, "Let It Snow!", where an alternate Sqaishey named 'Sqlushey' appears through a portal. Sqlushey looks like a snowman version of Sqaishey and they leave a trail of snow wherever they go, and appears to have some control over ice and snow. They have also been featured in later Christmas Episodes. - A third one appears in Episode 344, "A Polluted World", where the place looks almost normal at first glance (though a bit darker and less cheery) and houses the green 'Sporshey', who spends a lot of their time clearing out rubbish and smog clouds and shifts between bright and greyish shades of green depending on the level of pollution of the land. \|\|The land becomes a lot brighter and more colourful when the rubbish and smog are cleared out, and once more trees and flowers are planted around. Fittingly, the episode where Sporshey is introduced is released on Earth Day 2022 and has a Green Aesop.\|\| - Come on, we have to mention Jenny Everywhere in here somehow! (She is meant to exist in all possible such universes and can shift between them. Conveniently allowing for variability in settings and variations on the nature of the character in different stories.) - In Keit-Ai, two lovers from alternate dimensions help each other out in hooking each other up with the AU versions of themselves by telling their deepest, darkest secrets through their cellphones (hence the title). - Phaeton takes place entirely in and out of alternate universe (Labeled Alpha Gamma 64) and the records of events were somehow sent to our universe, exactly how is as of yet untold. - SCP Foundation. The Foundation has many contained objects that apparently come from (or are doorways to) other universes, many of which are similar to the Foundation's universe. - Dr. Mackenzie's SCP-001 Proposal ("The Legacy"). In his diary The Administrator claims to originally be from a parallel plane of existence that he calls an "alternate reality". - SCP-093 ("Red Sea Object") is capable of transferring people to an alternate world using mirrors. This world is mostly a wasteland filled with futuristic technology and giant humanoid monsters that attack and absorb any living things they see. Explorers from our universe find a journal of an SCP agent from a third universe that details what happened here. The world the object connects to was visited by an incredibly powerful god-like being only named He, who arrived during the Industrial Revolution and declared the world to be unclean. He instigated a massive Tech Boom for a war to purge the world of sin. This left the world in ruins and the survivors became the giant abominations, mutated thanks to exposure to a pure form of a substance called His Tears, which was apparently supposed to free them from sin. Not only that but there are numerous copies of the Red Sea Object that are all linked to other universes, and there's a possibility that He could use the Object copies to travel to any of them... including ours. - SCP-507 ("Reluctant Dimension Hopper" is a man who randomly and involuntarily gets sent to various ones, which The Foundation keeps a log of. - SCP-970 ("The Recursive Room"). Anyone who passes through all of the doors in SCP-970 and ends up in their original location will actually be in a slightly different universe. Each time they pass through SCP-970 the universe will change a little more, until things get really strange. - SCP-1142 ("A Cry for Help"). SCP-1142 is a radio receiver that broadcasts transmissions from an alternate Earth where the Nazis summoned an Eldritch Abomination that is threatening to destroy their world. - SCP-1739 ("Obsolete Laptop"). SCP-1739 turns an Eldritch Abomination into a Sealed Evil in a Can by creating one of these. The Abomination is distracted by being allowed to destroy the new universe, keeping it from destroying the universe it's in. - SCP-2069 ("AEGIS") is a collection of debris that was blasted into the Foundation's universe. It was the aftermath of when AEGIS (a team up between the Foundation and the Global Occult Coalition) used a doomsday device called NOVA as a last-ditch attempt to stop an Alien Invasion. - SCP-2273 ("Major Alexei Belitrov, of the Red Army's 22nd Armored Infantry Division"). SCP-2273 is a soldier from another universe where the U.S. and U.S.S.R. got into a nuclear war. - SCP-2332 ("Thought Messenger") is a butterfly made of ultraviolet light that was originally created and sent out by another universe's version of the Foundation. It ended up in this universe by accident. - SCP-2451 ("Love Through Time, Space and Species"). SCP-2451 is a doorway to a series of other universes, some of which are very different from the Foundation's universe. In one the "humans" are 8 foot tall bird-like creatures with beaks the size of a human's arm. - SCP-2645 ("Through the Looking Glass"). The anomalous mirror SCP-2645 has another universe accessible through its mirrored surface that is initially identical to the SCP Foundation's universe. The contents of that universe can be changed by the influence of entities in the Foundation's universe. - SCP-2935 ("O, Death") is a cave underneath a cemetery, which leads to another world exactly like our own, except that all life died at the exact same instant on April 20, 2016. Corpses lay where they fell, vehicles have crashed, trees are broken, and nothing is decomposing because all microbial life is dead as well. Even SCP-682 is dead. What caused it? \|\|This world's Foundation sent someone to investigate their own 2935, and just like our world's Foundation, he too discovered a world where everything died at the exact same instant. Then he came back to his own world, and the instant he did, everything in his world died (except for him, though he took care of that himself later). The investigators from our Foundation wisely decide not to return to their own world so that the same thing won't happen to it, and send a drone back with their findings and instructions to blow up the cave and seal it off.\|\| - SCP-4823 ("The Whole World Has Gone Bananas!") is a banana that functions as a portal to an alternate universe where all life is plant-based and instead of humans, there are humanoid banana-people. Diplomatic relations between our Foundation and their Foundation were going well... \|\|until a single fruit fly accidentally hitched a ride over to Banana World with one of our guys, found the best all-you-can-eat buffet it could ever ask for, and started laying eggs. Six months later, an Apocalyptic Log was ejected through the portal, written by a French banana girl as her world was devoured by The Swarm, with the last entry stating that she is about to die as well, but is sending her journal over so that our Foundation knows exactly what they did\|\|. - Almost every story in The Wanderer's Library takes place in a different one. - YTMND: - The website gets its name from Sean Connery's line "You're the man now, dog!" in the movie Finding Forrester. One user created a YTMND of the full scene containing the line, which also included Connery saying "Punch the keys for God's sake!" This inspired the creation of an alternate universe where the site's creator chose that line to make his site around instead of "You're the man now, dog!". PTKFGS had slightly different versions of YTMND's fads, such as "omg, internet" instead of "lol, internet", "R U SHUR?" instead of "O RLY?", etc. These sites had a blue PTKFGS watermark in the upper right corner to contrast YTMND's orange watermark in the upper left. This eventually snowballed into the creation of a third universe, YESYES, named after Connery's exclamation of "Yes! Yes!" in the same scene from Finding Forrester. YESYES sites had a green watermark in the bottom right corner. Multiple attempts were made to create a "fourth corner" universe, but nobody could agree on what to definitively call it since Connery didn't have any more lines in that scene. Proposed suggestions included "HEH" (Connery lets out a small chuckle during that scene), "Typing Noises" (another character can be heard typing on a typewriter during that scene), and "YHTMOAG" ("You have the manners of a goat", a Connery line from Highlander). Eventually one user created a YTMND establishing lore that the fourth corner was in fact a multiverse containing all proposed suggestions. - There were other AU memes on the site beyond the traditional "corners", such as "GAYTMND" (Camp Gay and often set to "Shut Up (and Sleep With Me)"), "CRAPTMND", "LOUDTMND", and "Violin" (which involved edits of other sites to have classical music and pictures of violins pasted into them, and being perpetuated as a Forced Meme on the front page by a user's repeated donations). - In the season four finale of Adventure Time, the Greater-Scope Villain \|\|the Lich\|\| finds and opens a portal to The Multiverse. When Finn and Jake follow, we see them in a universe where the Mushroom War never happened. Thus, the Candy Kingdom doesn't exist, Jake can't talk, and Finn is not the last human. He also has a robot arm. - We find out more about this in the season 5 premiere. \|\|Finn wished the Lich out of existence, so he and Jake ended up in an alternate timeline where the Ice King performed a Heroic Sacrifice to prevent the final bomb from falling in the Mushroom War, and the creation of the Lich, from ever happening.\|\| - Ben 10: Omniverse introduced us to the multiverse for a major arc. Among the alternate universes seen are a world where Ben never got the Omnitrix and a post-apocalyptic world a la Mad Max. - In the Codename: Kids Next Door episode "Operation: P.O.O.L.", Numbah Four travels to an alternate world where the KND are the DNK (Destructively Nefarious Kids). His own evil counterpart is the leader (complete with goatee). - The Negaverse in the Darkwing Duck episode "Life, the Negaverse, and Everything" — a mirror universe set up to explain the origin of Negaduck (not to be confused with the self-proclaimed Negaduck whom Megavolt accidentally created in another episode by dividing Darkwing into good and evil clones) The portal to the Negaverse was lost at the end of this episode, in a traditional Status Quo Is God ending. - Futurama: - In "The Farnsworth Parabox", Farnsworth creates a box leading to an alternate universe where every coin toss has the opposite outcome. There are also lots of other boxes, leading to other alternate universes, each linking to each other. - In "I Dated a Robot", Fry goes to the edge of the universe and sees alternate versions of himself and his friends, all wearing cowboy hats. - In "The Beast with a Billion Backs", a portal opens to an alternate universe, home to only one sentient being: Yivo, the infinitely huge, love-lorn ball of tentacles. - In "The Late Phillip J. Fry", after Farnsworth, Bender, and Fry have reached the end of the universe, a second Big Bang creates a universe identical to the last, giving the trio a chance to go home. And giving Farnsworth a chance to shoot Hitler. And once they reach their time, Farnsworth accidentally slips on the controls, forcing them to go all the way back around again. This time around, Farnsworth misses Hitler and hits Eleanor Roosevelt instead. - In "The Lesser of Two Evils", the sign which says "Tonight: MISS UNIVERSE PAGEANT" a moment later turns into "Tomorrow: MISS PARALLEL UNIVERSE PAGEANT". - In "That's Lobstertainment!", there is a Parallel Universal Studios side-by-side with the Universal Studios. - An episode of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero featured a timeline where Cobra had succeeded in taking over the world. - Invader Zim seems like it may take place in one, but then again, it may just be 20 Minutes into the Future. - The Halloween special had one where everyone was a horrific monster version of themselves and they were trying to get into our world with a portal in Dib's head. - The Real Ghostbusters episode Flipside. - Justice League had several — the retro-styled world of the Justice Guild, the dark dystopia of the Justice Lords, the Vandal Savage-ruled world created through time travel, and others. - Notably, the Justice Lords Universe depicted Arkham Asylum, and Gotham City for that matter, as very bright, Metropolis-esque places, in one of the few instances of the city being shown during the day. - Superman: The Animated Series also featured a universe where Lois is assassinated, prompting Superman to team up with Luthor and take over Metropolis. - Kaeloo: The episode "Let's Play Astronauts" had the main four go to an alternate universe through a black hole in space. There, Kaeloo's transformation works in reverse, Quack Quack and Mr. Cat (known as Meow Meow and Mr. Duck) had each other's personalities and traits, and Stumpy was a genius who loved physics and hated comic books. \|\|It turns out Stumpy dreamed this all up.\|\| - In Episode 70, the main four meet themselves from another dimension where the concept of life is "Let's Learn..." instead of "Let's Play...". Alternate Universe!Kaeloo's transformation takes place in reverse, and instead of being sweet and gentle, she's strict and somewhat abusive. Alternate Universe!Stumpy is intelligent instead of being The Ditz, and Alternate!Universe Mr. Cat is a quiet idiot who eats books instead of an extremely intelligent but Ax-Crazy psychopath who goes around destroying stuff. - In an episode of Rugrats, Tommy and Chuckie think they're in a "Mirrorland". - In The Secret Saturdays, the whole family (except the female lead's brother) has a twin in an alternate universe, who all try to take out the heroes as Psycho Rangers. - Star Trek: The Animated Series: - "The Magicks of Megas-Tu" has the crew discover a world where much of their equipment doesn't work, but Functional Magic is commonplace. Oddly, Spock adapts quickly. - "The Counter-Clock Incident." In the other universe, time runs in reverse, and the only way to travel between universes is to go through a dead star/nova at Warp 36. - The various incarnations of the Transformers have done this quite a bit, with alternate timelines galore. - A large percentage of Rick and Morty revolves around parallel universes and inter-dimensional travel. In one episode, it is revealed that many of the infinite other Ricks from alternate dimensions came together to form the Citadel of Ricks, a society made entirely up of Ricks with their Morty companions, complete with their own form of government. \|\|The ability to travel between dimensions has also helped the duo on more than a few occasions. Most notable was the time where Rick irreversibly altered the DNA structure of everyone on Earth, making them Cronenberg creatures. They remedied the problem by finding an alternate dimension where both Rick and Morty die shortly after solving the problem, leaving the "invading" Rick and Morty to bury their own corpses and assume their own lives in a new dimension.\|\| - SpongeBob SquarePants: "SpongeBob's Big Birthday Blowout" has SpongeBob and company going to a restaurant on the surface called the Trusty Slab and encountering live-action human versions of themselves. - Many physicists and cosmologists are coming up with the possibilities of other worlds, and that there are more than one universe, but multiple universes in the "multiverse". This idea has been theorized in religion, transpersonal psychology, literature, astronomy, and philosophy. Even though the theory is quite popular in science fiction and fantasy cultures, many scientists are trying find proof of existing dimensions. Some believe we are living in parallel universes that had different timelines, alternate histories, and different, but similar environments. But the existence of alternate universes has not yet been confirmed.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParallelUniverse
Paranoia - TV Tropes This is the entirely harmless disambiguation page for "Paranoia". You were looking for—pardon, are you looking for: If an internal link led you here, please change it to point to the specific article. Thanks!	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Paranoia
Parasitic Immortality - TV Tropes "I told you once that I made more mistakes than any man, woman and child on this planet, and I wasn't exaggerating. I'm... cursed. For thousands of years, I have walked the surface of Remnant, living, dying and reincarnating in the body of a like-minded soul. The Professor Ozpin you all met was not my first form, and clearly wasn't my last. It's... an extraordinarily strenuous process... on everyone involved." Immortality is a complex thing, how is it achieved exactly? Some get reincarnated, some just don't age, and some Just. Won't. Die. This is none of those tropes, Parasitic Immortality is when one person is existing off the life of someone else. Which involves forcefully taking over another's body and taking over a person's remaining life for villainous characters. However, some actively live alongside their hosts and aid them in a mutualistic manner, and others just exist unnoticed in their host's body. The one thing that is common among this trope is a person needs to live through new hosts to achieve immortality, however benevolent versions manage to share their host's life in mutual symbiosis. The results of this type of immortality may be very detrimental to the host. The worse case usually leads to a Death of Personality and a Transformation of the Possessed for the victim; even the most mutualistic examples may still cause a Split-Personality Merge, a Split-Personality Team, or Sharing a Body at best. However, commensal types usually exist unnoticed by the host and don't affect them in any way. In some special cases, users may gain enough skill over the years to eventually even Hijack Cthulhu. However, most of the time, the weakness of this immortality is when someone kills the host before they can jump ship. If the parasitic character in question is an Artificial Intelligence, then their appropriation of a human body, machine, or body of an android may induce a Mind-Reformat Death for the contained consciousness or intelligence. Sub-Trope of Immortality and Body Surf. See also Familial Body Snatcher for when the host is related. This trope more often than not crosses over with Immortality Immorality and Parasites Are Evil due to its very nature. May result in somehow becoming Trapped in the Host as a form of karma. Compare Heroic Host and Symbiotic Possession. For examples in which the character drains the life or soul to live, see Life Drinker and Your Soul Is Mine!. ## Examples: - Dragon Ball Z: Captain Ginyu's signature move allows him to swap his mind with that of his target. His modus operandi is to mortally wound his current body before replacing it with the one he desires, a strategy he uses first to claim Goku's body and then tries to repeat against Vegeta. He misses the second time, hitting a random frog and becoming trapped in its body for the remainder of his days \|\|until he is killed in Tagoma's body during Dragon Ball Super\|\|. - Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA: \|\|This is how Darius has remained the head of the Ainzworth family.\|\| He uses Displacement magecraft to attach his soul to \|\|the "next head of the family", and each time he does, something of his personality gets erased. It started with him losing a scar and forgetting an emotionally charged event connected with it, and now there's barely anything left of the original. This has been going on for millennia\|\|. - Fullmetal Alchemist (2003): Dante and Hohenheim are immortal former lovers who used the Philosopher's Stone to cheat death by jumping into new bodies. Each time that they do this, parts of their souls chip off, causing the new bodies to decay faster and necessitating quicker transfers. Eventually Hohenheim got tired of this existence, opting to use his last life to settle down and raise a family as best he could. Dante had other ideas. - Magi: Labyrinth of Magic: Arba has secretly manipulated the rise of the Kou Empire (the manga's equivalent of ancient China) to generate wars, distress, and chaos across the world. In order to keep an eye on the royal family, she created a spell to take over the bodies of certain members of the Imperial family, allowing her to keep so reincarnating in the bodies of its female members, overwriting their personalities. She does this with the current empress, Ren Gyokuen, \|\|and after her death, she possesses Ren Hakuei, Gyokuen's daughter. Even when she's forcibly expelled from her body, she tries to take over the body of her son Hakuryu\|\|. - Naruto: Orochimaru dreams to achieve immortality so that he can learn every existing jutsu in addition to those that will be created in the future. To this end, he creates a technique that transfers his soul into other people's bodies, effectively cheating death by periodically swapping hosts. - Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V: Yuto, Yugo, and Yuri all die throughout the series, but their spirits manage to live on by inhabiting one of their counterparts' bodies. \|\|By the end of the anime, they are all residing within Yuya.\|\| - The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Oliver Haddo, the main villain of Volume III, has done this for centuries to keep himself alive: he brings a disciple/inheritor next to him on his deathbed then switches bodies as the previous one dies a few seconds later. It's finally put to a stop when his plot to create the Anti-Christ fails and said Anti-Christ (\|\|Harry Potter\|\|) instead kills Haddo's last body and keeps his still-living severed head with him in a cage at Grimauld Place, rendering Haddo unable to transfer to a new host. After the Anti-Christ is dealt with, this severed head is taken away by Mary Poppins as she leaves the scene of the fight. - Providence: Robert Black unknowingly encounters several immortals from the Stella Sapiente occult group who keep themselves immortal through various means. The most malicious is the Frenchman Etienne Roulet, who has survived for centuries by doing a swapping bodies with members of his family line, transferring his consciousness into a new body while the original occupant dies in the previous body. He demonstrates the process by swapping minds with Robert, trapping him in the body of 13-year-old Elspeth Wade, while Roulet uses Robert's own body to rape him/her. - Transformers (2019): Exarchon earned the "Threefold Spark" sobriquet because whatever mysterious "benefactors" drove him insane and unleashed him on Cybertron also granted him the ability to divide his Spark into three. This allowed him to control three bodies simultaneously, generally by infecting a Cybertronian and snuffing out their own Spark to replace it with his. A Bad Future shows him inhabiting the bodies of Megatron, Shockwave, and Onslaught, and through the story he takes over characters like Ruckus, Flatline, and Deathsaurus, taking over and abandoning bodies as he sees fit. His ultimate goal is discovered to be drilling to the center of Cybertron to infect the Allspark, the source of all Sparks, so he will achieve Complete Immortality. It's also shown to be his greatest weakness: he has an instinctive need to control three bodies at all times, and the combined Autobot-Decepticon army take advantage of this to trap and destroy two-thirds of his Spark (and an Autobot assault team barely manage to destroy his final body before he locates the Allspark). - X-Men: The Shadow King has kept himself alive for millennia by possessing different hosts, including the mutants Amahl Farouk, Xuan Cao Manh, and David Haller. - In the Undertale fandom, there's an Original Character shared by the community known as Fresh. Despite his Totally Radical appearance, he's actually a soulless tentacled parasite that enters any monster big enough to fit him, transforms them into his preferred form (the totally radical skeleton look), and slowly devours the host's soul for nutrition. When the host can no longer support him, Fresh leaves it to dust and moves on to the next soul. This can potentially go on for as long as monsters exist in the multiverse. - Being John Malkovich: The twist behind the door that leads inside the mind of John Malkovich. \|\|The door was discovered by Dr. Lester (a.k.a. Captain Merton), who uses it to take over "vessel bodies" connected to it and live forever by jumping from body to body on each subject's 44th birthday. He ultimately succeeds in possessing Malkovich, and at the end plots to do the same to Malkovich's daughter eventually.\|\| - Get Out (2017): \|\|The Order of the Coagula have managed to achieve immortality through a procedure involving hypnotizing black people, and then transplanting the brains of cult members into their bodies.\|\| - Horror Express: The unnamed alien terrorizing the titular Orient Express train is revealed to be a formless Energy Being who can leap from lifeform to lifeform, and by the time of the film has already lived for millions of years at the very least. Should its current host be killed and the alien be unable to find a new body to inhabit, it will die, which is ultimately how the protagonists kill it during the ending, by derailing the train off of a cliff, with the alien still inside. - The Rise of Skywalker: Palpatine wants to do this by possessing Rey, who turns out to be \|\|his granddaughter\|\|. Whether he would have been taking over her body or if he would just be living inside her is left unknown. - The Skeleton Key: The villains of the film are two black magic practitioners who created a spell that transfers their souls to their victims' bodies and vice-versa. They have been using it for decades, taking over younger hosts whenever their current bodies become too old. - X-Men: Apocalypse: Apocalypse was able to live for thousands of years by repeatedly transferring his essence into the bodies of other mutants, allowing him to steal their powers in the process. Eventually achieving true immortality by taking over a man with a Healing Factor, Apocalypse was sealed away by rebels and spent 4000 years in a dormant state before being accidentally reawakened in 1983, after which he sets his sights on Charles Xavier, hoping to absorb his telepathic powers in order to exert influence across the entire globe. - Buffyverse: The main villain of Heat is Qin Shi Huangdi, the first emperor of China who has returned as an evil spirit called a "Possessor". Possessors hop from body to body in order to remain in the land of the living but the bodies they possess are drained of heat very quickly. - In Dead Eyes by Tais Teng, an ancient Chinese emperor made a deal with a demonic Evil Sorcerer for eternal life. However, ordinary humans cannot be made immortal except by stealing the life force of others, so the sorcerer arranged for the emperor's soul to be placed into a new body whenever the current one died of old age. The plot is kicked off when the most recent transference goes wrong and causes the emperor to be trapped in a conscious host. - Diana Tregarde: Fay Harper is a Wicked Witch who keeps herself immortal by body swapping with her daughters before killing them afterwards. - The Dresden Files: - The Denarians are Fallen Angels who were sealed in silver coins and are unable to act unless the bearer of a coin becomes their Willing Channeler. Some hosts end up effectively trapped inside their own minds while the angel runs rampant, but others, like Nicodemus, form a partnership with the angel and can share in their powers. - Corpsetaker is a necromancer who swaps bodies whenever she's near death. In Dead Beat she swaps with Warden Luccio but Harry notices and shoots her in the head, which gives Luccio a younger but less powerful body once she recovers from the wounds she herself had inflicted. - Give The Dark My Love: Bennum Wellebourne is a Necromancer who transfers his soul into bodies of the various rulers of The Empire and overwriting their mind with his in order to live forever. - Harry Potter: Having been cast out of his original body before the events of the first book, Voldemort had to move his soul from host to host, shortening their lives in the process. It got so bad that they had to drink Unicorn's blood, which curses those who consume it. - Heralds of Valdemar: Ma'ar, the Mage of Black Fire, attempted to cheat death during the Mage Wars set in the series past by possessing one of his progeny. Unfortunately for him, the spell was botched and his own personality was too dormant to take control of the host, merely subtly influencing them with his worst traits. Even worse, every time his soul transfers to a new host, the host and Ma'ar lose some of their magical ability, ultimately leaving the combined entity weaker. The final host was half-crazed from Ma'ar's influence, and barely powerful enough to be an apprentice mage. - The Host (2008): The story features parasitic aliens called "Souls" who survive by taking other sentients as hosts. When the host dies, the Soul is removed and can be placed in a new host. - Leech: \|\|The titular leech\|\| is a hive mind that has existed for centuries by moving from human host to human host — the plot involves it encountering a parasite even more vicious than itself. - The Machineries of Empire: Hexarch Nirai Kujen exists as a Virtual Ghost in the Black Cradle and needs a Meat Puppet to act outside it. Unlike the other occupant of the Cradle, he can Body Surf at will and control his host's actions with effort; however, he tends to let the host act on his behalf and at least one host enjoys his company. - Malediction Trilogy: \|\|Anushka the witch\|\| has managed to survive for several hundred years by taking over bodies of her female descendants, generation after generation. It is suggested that the young women's souls were forced out of their bodies in the process, meaning they effectively died. - Morgaine Cycle: It is possible to use a Gate to take over another's body, and do so pretty much indefinitely, but it was subsequently shown that the original personality tends to fade after many body swaps and may eventually lose control of the body to the current host. - Old Kingdom: Chlorr has terrorized the northern tribes into raising generations of girls to become her hosts, which seems to destroy the original personality. Without a host body, she's stuck as a much weaker spirit, but she can only be truly destroyed by \|\|releasing the last human part of her soul from stasis in her original body.\|\| - Patternist: Doro has the power to jump into the nearest human's body and consume their soul, regardless of distance; he needs to eat at least a few people each year and can't prevent himself from jumping out of an incapacitated or dying body. After living for thousands of years in this manner, he sees humans as nothing more than food and entertainment. - In The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham by H. G. Wells, a young man named Edward Eden meets an extremely old man named Egbert Elvesham who says he wants Eden to be his heir. When Eden agrees, Elvesham tricks him into taking a drug that transfers their minds into each other's bodies. Eden realizes that Elvesham has found a way to gain effective immortality as long as he can find new, young victims. Elvesham tricks Eden into taking a lethal poison, which ties up all the loose ends. - Xanth: The Sea Hag was once an ordinary human who lived thousands of years ago. When she died she discovered that her Talent allows her to possess someone's body whenever she dies. She kidnaps a viable, young host when she's nearing the end of her current life and takes them over. Her soul is finally expelled from Xanth in The Dastard, ending her threat for good. - Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Hive, the main villain of season three, survives by killing and possessing human hosts. The cult wing of Hydra would send one of their own as a sacrifice every few decades, sustaining him for thousands of years. - Babylon 5: "Exogenesis" introduces the Vindrizi, an ancient species of engineered symbionts that serve as living recorders, preserving knowledge while bonded to hosts who would otherwise have meaningless lives. - Crusade: "Appearances and Other Deceits" has an alien entity that survives by transferring itself into other bodies and taking control of the hosts. The body doesn't even need to be alive for the entity to use it. - Doctor Who: The Master pulls this off in the serial "The Keeper of Traken" when he possesses the body of a man named Tremas due to being out of regenerations. He does the same thing again in "Doctor Who: The TV Movie" before finally getting a new set of regenerations during the Time War that happened between then and the show's 2005 revival. - Lexx: His Divine Shadow inhabits a series of human hosts over the millennia of his reign but each host has a distinct personality and he keeps their brains around as advisers. \|\|His original body was a giant insect that hibernated under the surface of his capital planet until the end of the first season when he fed his subjects to it and re-inhabited it.\|\| - Stargate SG-1: The Goa'uld are worm-like parasites that can live for millennia, they also have sarcophagi that can prolong the lives of their human hosts a similar span but if they don't have access to one (or refuse to, like their Defector from Decadence faction the Tok'ra) they have to change hosts every couple centuries. - Star Trek: - Star Trek: The Next Generation: In "The Schizoid Man", Dr. Ira Graves effectively does this with Data. Somehow, he transfers his consciousness into Data's body and eventually emerges, replacing Data's mannerisms and personality. He realizes his own strength (from Data) and personality make him a poor fit to continue living, so he transfers himself out of Data's body, and into the Enterprise's computer, where the information of his mind is saved, but his human consciousness and awareness is lost. - Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Trill can join with a symbiont species that retains their memories long beyond the Trill's natural lifespan, blending personalities with each successive host. Unlike most examples, the hosts seek this voluntarily and since there's only about 500 symbionts and millions of Trill there's much competition to qualify for one. - Star Trek: Voyager: In "Warlord", three individuals are rescued from their ruined and self-destructing ship, but Kes suddenly begins to show signs of abnormal personality. It turns out one of the individuals was a planetary dictator named Tieran who cheated death by finding a way to Body Surf to new individual bodies, replacing their consciousness. He absconds with Kes' body, back to his original home planet, to reinstall himself as the ruler, but unfortunately for him, Kes isn't the Innocent Flower Girl that everyone thought she was; she's fighting back with all her might, and it's taxing Tieran's consciousness. (Even extending a nap that he intended to have only for a few minutes, to 4 hours. Although it's small, it's still a sign that something is seriously wrong for him.) Kes: I'll find every little crack in your defenses. You'll feel yourself crumbling from within, your sanity slipping away. I won't stop until you're broken and helpless. There's nowhere you can go to get away from me. I'll be relentless, and merciless, just. like. you! - Call of Cthulhu: - Campaign The Fungi from Yuggoth, adventure "Castle Dark". An evil sorcerer named Baron Hauptman has lived for more than 700 years by repeatedly using a spell named Mind Transfer to exchange his personality with those of young men. - Supplement Curse of the Chthonians, adventure "The Curse of Chaugnar Faugn". The spell Mind Exchange allows the caster to move their mind to another person's body and vice versa. Once this has been done enough times, the change can be made permanent. If done regularly to persons younger than the caster, it can be used to gain effective immortality. - Dungeons & Dragons: - Unlike normal liches, Dracoliches can't reform from their Soul Jar when destroyed. As a result, they need to possess the nearby corpse of a dragon or reptilian creature. - Grim Hollow: A high-level warlock with the Parasite patron gains the Larval Regeneration ability. If they die, their body spews forth a larval parasite that can burrow into the flesh of other humanoids. While burrowing, the parasite inflicts necrotic damage on the host, and if the host dies from this damage, they become a new PC under the player's control, taking on the original character's personality and warlock powers. - GURPS: With the Possession advantage, the only thing stopping you from living forever is being able to find new hosts. - Warhammer 40,000: The Slaneeshi champion Lucius the Eternal wears armor covered in the screaming faces of his victims. If anyone ever manages to kill him (and feel any satisfaction at having killed a Champion of Chaos), their body slowly morphs into that of Lucius as he possesses them until the killer is just another face on Lucius' armor. - Detroit: Become Human: One of Connor's endings has him \|\|transfer his memories into his pro-human version and thus save the Android Rebellion at the cost of Hank's life\|\|. - Dragon Age: Origins: Morrigan suspects her mother Flemeth of this, birthing and eventually possessing a series of daughters to maintain her immortality. Should you accept the side quest to kill Flemeth before she can possess Morrigan, \|\|Morrigan appears in subsequent games no worse for it, and it is implied that Morrigan had misinterpreted the nature of Flemeth's immortality.\|\| - ICO: The main villain is an evil queen who wishes to reclaim her youth by taking over her own daughter's body. - Resident Evil: Revelations 2: The main villain's research on immortality leads her to believe that the only way to escape death is by imprinting her consciousness into another host. \|\|By the end of the game, it's implied that she was successful in her goal, as one of the playable characters starts displaying some of her mannerisms.\|\| - Star Wars: The Old Republic: In the Sith Inquisitor storyline, \|\|Darth Zash plans to do this. The entirety of Act I involves the protagonist acquiring relics for her so she can possess you. Fortunately, your long-lost ancestor warns you before it happens\|\|. - Street Fighter: M. Bison's "Psycho Power" is too much for his own body, so he starts to seek others to increase his lifespan, even training the "Dolls" (especially Cammy) to be his back-up bodies. Also, canonically M.Bison's body was about to explode during Street Fighter Alpha and has gotten a new one since Street Fighter II. However, the search continues in Street Fighter V where his body suffers the same as before but was finally put down for good by Ryu and friends. - Tomb Raider (2013): Queen Himiko survives by transferring her soul into a new host whenever her current body begins to fail her. This process would continue for centuries until the girl chosen to be Himiko's next vessel chose to commit suicide instead of serving as a host for the Sun Queen's spirit leaving her soul trapped inside her current body. By the time the events of the game take place, Himiko has been using Father Mathias and his Solarri Brotherhood to capture young women to determine whether they were worthy of becoming Himiko's new vessel. - Warframe: When the Orokin elite grew old, they used a process called Continuity to rejuvenate themselves. This involved torturing children and driving them past the Despair Event Horizon so the Orokin could steal their bodies. - Nasuverse: - Fate/stay night: Zouken Matou is the immortal patriarch of Matou family thanks to the use of his own personal magic that lets him transfer his consciousness into his worm-bugs, who in turn eat people in order to stay alive, living more like a mass of critter shaped like a person than as a proper human. He is called a "vampire" by various characters note : in a certain sense, they are right. In Nasuverse terms, a vampire is an [1] umbrella term used by the Church to cover all kinds of beings that extend their lifespans by draining the life from other living beings. and his mental state seems to deteriorate with each new change to stay alive because his "soul" is rotting. - Tsukihime: This is how Roa Valdamong achieved immortality: while he was alive in his own body, he magically prepared a number of unrelated individuals across the world as future host bodies, so when his body died, he transferred his consciousness to one of the candidates and repeated the process, thus staying alive for hundreds of years. In the story proper, \|\|Ciel\|\| is the most recent host whose body inexplicably came back to life after she was killed and Roa had already left it behind. \|\|SHIKI Tohno, Akiha's real biological brother,\|\| is the current host, to whom Roa's spirit transferred after that. - El Goonish Shive: The aberration Sirleck is a former human wizard who gave up his conscience and other human traits for what is basically immortality. He takes over a human host and then lives as that person. It's not said how many hosts he's already had but when he's introduced, his current host is an old decrepit man (who is implied to already be brain dead) and Sirleck is planning on gaining a new host and setting up ways to pass his fortune on. The way he describes it suggests he has done so before. - Space Boy: The Wanderer must possess the body of a human host, or else he will die within nine hours. He is known to have possessed \|\|Captain Putnam of the Arno\|\| and has attempted but failed to possess \|\|Oliver and Amy\|\|. - The Adventure Zone: Balance: The Animus Bell grants this ability, allowing the holder to rip someone's soul from their body and take it over. \|\|It turns out to have been created by Barry, a necromancer who also lived forever this way, albeit non-maliciously. As a lich, when he dies, his spirit lingers on, and he found a way to clone and recreate his own body over and over again, so every time he dies, he can just grow a new body and, effectively, possess himself. This breaks virtually every arcane law regarding death and mortality, but Barry is a well-meaning person who doesn't want to hurt anybody, and is horrified by the way people have torn each other to shreds to get the Bell.\|\| - The Magnus Archives: \|\|Jonah Magnus\|\| takes over the bodies of successive hosts by transferring his eyes into their sockets. - SCP Foundation: By using SCP-963, Doctor Bright can transfer his consciousness into a new host body with all his memories. However, this replaces the host's brain waves with those of Dr. Bright. If SCP-963 is not removed in 30 days. it will cause the host to possess an exact duplicate of Dr. Bright's consciousness. - Batman Beyond: "Out of the Past" features the return of Ra's al Ghul, who was thought to be long dead before the start of the series. After Ra's' body was mortally wounded to the point even the Lazarus Pit was unable to do anything for him, he decided to insert his consciousness into his daughter Talia's mind, which basically killed her and gave Ra's full control of her body. Ra's intends to do the same to Bruce, having come up with a plan to trick the latter into rejuvenating himself using the Lazarus Pit so that Ra's can steal his body and return to Gotham pretending to be the son of Bruce and Talia in order to get control of Bruce's assets. Bruce is so disgusted by Ra's' actions that he's willing to leave him for dead when Ra's' lair explodes and forbids Terry from trying to save him. Bruce: Sure, Ra's, why not? Anything to hold off the Grim Reaper another few seconds. I take it back. You don't cheat death; you whimper in fear of it ! - The Owl House: \|\|After being splattered by The Collector and going to the Human Realm, Belos possesses the local animals while he reconstitutes himself, though this quickly kills them and nearly does the same to Hunter. Upon returning to the Demon Realm without a host, he rapidly deteriorates until he can barely move, forcing him to possess a failed Grimwalker. Belos later takes over and impersonates a transformed Raine, with their puppet body being immune to decay.\|\| - She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Horde Prime is a Narcissist whose army consists of his own clones. He also uses them to Body Surf to prolong his life. But this procedure is flawed: he must retain his old bodies to take access to memories from the time he occupied them because he forgot most of his past life. - South Park: In "Pip", Miss Havisham tries to use her Genesis Machine to transplant her consciousness into her daughter Estella's body to prolong her life. Her plot is foiled when Pip convinces Estella she has a heart and gets her to leave the Genesis Machine while it's working. This causes the machine to explode, killing Miss Havisham.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParasiticImmortality
Paranoia Fuel - TV Tropes "ALWAYS WATCHING When things that should be harmless, or on the viewer's side, turn nasty, stripping away all sense of safety. How can a viewer sleep easy in their bed, when they've seen how toys can come alive when all is dark and wreak unspeakable vengeance? What trust can they have that anyone will protect them, when they've just seen some cheerful kid's program where a kid just like them was bloodily slaughtered by his own possessed mother as she sang a sweet lullaby? This is perhaps the main reason why the Monster Clown, and especially Bad Santa, are Tropes unto themselves. He sees you when you're sleeping... Paranoia, by definition, requires a level of suspicion and distrust. A monster chasing after you in broad daylight is probably not Paranoia Fuel, but a shape-shifting murderer targeting you who may be hiding among your friends or family or the clothes in your closet most likely is. A good rule of thumb is if a show or commercial makes you double check the people or objects around you (or triple check, or quadruple check, or...), then it fits here. One of the most psychologically devastating forms of Nightmare Fuel, because of its mental persistence and perception of inescapable omnipresence. He knows where you live... Other paranoia-inducing concepts include: - The Chessmaster: Things happening in your life or around you, whether big or small, could be a result of someone manipulating the events, whether using you, someone you know, or never even met as an Unwitting Pawn. - Invasion of privacy (from Big Brother Is Watching to literal Telepathy): One of the most pervasive forms of Paranoia Fuel, since we basically know they can use our secrets against us (Black Mail, Room 101, etc). - Hypochondria Fuel: playing on fear of diseases, parasites, medical Body Horror and the fragility of human biology in general. Do you know how easy it is to infect you on the microscopic level without you yourself noticing? Or how easy it is for one genetic disorder that can make you go And I Must Scream to suddenly go horribly wrong inside you? - Slipping a Mickey/Tampering with Food and Drink: Do you know how easy it is to poison you? Goes hand in hand with Hypochondria Fuel above. - Attack of the Killer Whatever/Everything Trying to Kill You/May Contain Evil: betrayal by everyday items. - Malevolent Toys: a subtrope of the above, specifically for toys. - Chest Monster: That chest could contain (or even be) a malevolent creature ready to kill you. - Artifact of Death: That beautiful ring you just found? Has a part of a radioactive source as its stone. That big metal thing your shovel hit while digging up your backyard? Is a World War II-era land mine or other explosive device. - Gaslighting is when someone tries to deliberately provoke a feeling of this upon you by altering your everyday environment without your knowledge, often with the intent of sending you crazy. - Fate Worse than Death or And I Must Scream: You can suffer one of them anytime, anywhere. - Good Luck Sleeping: things that attack specifically while you're sleeping. - They Could Be Anyone: Anybody could be out to get you, even your friends and/or family. - Grand Theft Me: Your enemy could've swapped bodies with someone you know, and are now pretending to be the person to dig up dirt on you! - Master of Disguise/Shapeshifter: Your enemy could be disguised as someone you know (and may have killed the real person), and is taking their place to be able to hurt you. - Invisible Jerkass: They're everywhere, and could come at you without you realizing it. - Sinister Conspiracy: There is a... well, sinister conspiracy at work in the world, and they have it in for you. Sometimes goes hand-in-hand with "They Could Be Anyone" above: Anyone, even someone you trust, could conceivably be part of this conspiracy. - Mind Manipulation: Especially if they control your loved ones, or worse, controlled you, made you do humiliating things, and then subjected you to Laser-Guided Amnesia. - Nothing Is Scarier: Sure that sound could have just been the neighbor's cat, but then again... - Through the Eyes of Madness: The very nature of the story is that you can't be entirely sure of what the truth is... - Justified Paranoia: Then again, once you've had absolute proof that something's out to get you, you have every valid reason to seek security. - Static on a television, and its heir, the Blue Screen of Death. - Television Is Trying to Kill Us - Scarily Specific Story: When someone tries to make another person paranoid by making the characters and/or setting of a Ghost Story similar to the listeners or what's happening now. - The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: When fiction starts threatening the audience. Fear of the dark is related, but falls under Primal Fears. Not directly related to the game Paranoia. Or, at least, that's what they want you to think. See also The Paranoiac, for whom is Paranoia Fuel (and whose paranoia tends to be a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy by virtue of making them evil jerks who anybody with any sense will want to slaughter ASAP lest the paranoiac slaughter everything them), and Improperly Paranoid, which is when paranoia drives a person to do something stupid and/or reprehensible without necessarily being a recurring occurrence. ## Example subpages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> BEHIND YOU ... Sleep tight.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParanoiaFuel
Pants-Free - TV Tropes A consummate professional. "I'm not wearing any pants. Film at 11." In television, film, and especially comics, it is conventional to focus on the upper body, since the upper body is usually the most expressive part of any character. Face, arms, and torso all convey more information to the audience than the legs. In some works, you're doing little more than watching actors talk, and anything other than the face is superfluous anyway. This has led to the framing of many scenes in many media to lack any onscreen representation of the body below the waist. The legs are still there, of course, just Behind the Black. But what is covering those legs? In many cases, the creators decide to play with this and reveal that the person whom the audience assumed to be fully clothed is naked from the waist down. This is especially common with TV presenters such as news anchors, because they usually sit behind a desk for the broadcast. "Not Wearing Pants" Dream is where this happens in a dream sequence, but this is when the audience (at least initially) cannot see that the character is pantsless, whether it's in a dream or not. Remember, to be this trope, you must meet the following criteria: - A character must be naked, underdressed, or legless from the waist down - The audience should initially have no reason to suspect that the character is bottomless - The nudity must initially be either out of the shot/panel or Behind the Black. A subtrope of Reveal Shot. ## Examples - An advert for Schick razors that showed in New Zealand around the late 1990s depicted a seemingly routine army camp drill. That is, until the drill sergeant makes his inspections of the recruits, stops suddenly, and loudly calls out to one of them, "Haven't you forgotten something?" The final shot reveals the offending recruit has forgotten to put his pants on. - A 1999-2000 advert for Tissot watches featured a young woman meticulously timing her preparation for the arrival of her fiance, and when he shows up at the door... she's forgotten to put on her skirt. - One Gag Manga Biyori sketch has people making their most embarrassing confessions on TV because a meteor is about to hit so why the hell not—and just as the guests have all confessed to shocking things, the crisis is averted! The host expresses relief that he no longer has to make his embarrassing confession. Cue an Iris Out framing his unclothed rear as the credits roll.... - In a Garfield Sunday strip, Jon Arbuckle dresses for a date and frowns when Garfield laughs, not realizing that he's forgotten to put his pants on. - Butt-Monkey Vanate Yavali in Hivefled is a ghost who died when most of his digestive tract exited his body in an unpleasant manner, and has spent multiple centuries lacking pants and trailing the resulting mess behind him. - In Airplane!, when co-pilot Roger Murdoch, played by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, succumbs to food poisoning, as he's carried away, it's revealed that he's wearing his basketball shorts underneath his pilot uniform, implying that Kareem was set to hit the court as soon as his scene wrapped. - In Animal House, Donald Sutherland's character reaches to get something from a cabinet, raising his sweater and exposing his pants-less buttocks. - Richard Lester's black post-nuclear war comedy The Bed Sitting Room has a BBC announcer going door-to-door, reading the news while kneeling behind a gutted-out tv cabinet, wearing a tie and coat outfit that, beneath chest level, is tattered long underwear. - In Casino, Robert De Niro's character emerges from behind a desk not wearing pants. He does so as to not crease the trousers of his suit by sitting down in them. - Electra Glide in Blue: After his promotion to homicide detective, Wintergreen eagerly puts on his new suit and steps out onto the front porch before realizing he forgot his pants. - Hamlet 2: The writer leaves his computer, revealing that he is not wearing pants. - In Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay the titular pair find themselves at a bottomless party. The host at one point chastises one female guest for removing her top. - In Charlie Chaplin's The Idle Class, a presumably sober aristocrat (played by Chaplin) gets dressed up at a resort to meet his lovely wife at a train depot. When he walks out of his room, it is revealed that he forgot to put on pants and is walking to the depot in his underwear. He doesn't find out until he enters a phone booth and looks down. He tries to hide this, but his wife eventually finds him and leaves him until he stops drinking. - The Kentucky Fried Movie: The newscaster reveals that he's not wearing any pants. Film at 11. - In Ladder 49, in the scene where Joaquin Phoenix meets John Travolta for the first time. - Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl opens with the troupe dressed as waiters singing the rousing number "Sit on My Face", then walking off, revealing themselves totally pantsless beneath their aprons. - A rare Played for Drama example in Network. During one of Howard Beale's tirades, he is wearing a trenchcoat, shirt, and tie, which is fairly normal for a newscaster. Then, he rises out of his desk as his anger begins to swell, and the crew filming him and the audience see that he is wearing pajama bottoms and slippers on the bottom half. This becomes one of the first indicators of Beale's descent into madness as the film goes on. - In Run Fat Boy Run, Dylan Moran's character is revealed to be completely naked from the waist down the whole time he's been talking over a balcony. Twice. - Schizopolis: A man wearing a t-shirt with the film title runs from the camera, revealing that he is wearing nothing else. - In Short Cuts, Julianne Moore does an entire scene naked from the waist down. Neither the audience nor her husband, played by Matthew Modine, notice she isn't wearing underwear until she appears from behind the kitchen counter. - Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run has his character preparing for a date, grooming himself at the mirror, leaving his apartment...then coming right back in, with the camera panning back to reveal he forgot his pants. - One of the chapter-quotes in the Girl Genius print-novel Agatha H. and the Clockwork Princess plays with this for both humor and horror: Lucrezia: You sir, should remove your pants. Stranger: Indeed? Judy: Indeed, it's time. We have all laid aside modesty but you. Stranger: I... wear no pants. Lucrezia: (Terrified, aside to Judy.) No pants? No pants! - In Alfonso Bonzo by Andrew Davies, there's a scene where the protagonist is watching the evening news and then is magically transported to the TV studio, where he learns that the newsreader is wearing nothing from the waist down but Goofy Print Underwear. - In Worlds Of The Imperium by Keith Laumer, this is a plot point. The hero is sent to impersonate his alternate universe counterpart, the ruler of an evil empire. The people sending him copy the ruler's uniform from his TV broadcasts, but have to guess on the pants, since the ruler is only seen from the waist up. When the hero gets there, he discovers why: the ruler lost his legs in battle during his rise to power, but had been making a secret of it to the public. So much for impersonation. - In the opening of the Broad City episode "Apartment Hunters," the camera pans down to reveal that one of the dancers is in his underwear. - In the pilot episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Jake is told by Captain Holt to wear a tie to work, which Jake refuses. Eventually he seems to relent and is seen at his desk with a tie on, but after Holt commends him on it, Jake gets up and reveals that he's wearing nothing below his waist but a Speedo. - This also happens to Captain Holt in the episode "Beach House"; he is forced to do this when he spills hot soup into his lap. Jake figures this out without leaving his desk, using his sharp detective skills. And then it also happens to Jake. Cue Gina walking in on Jake and Holt both pantsless behind Captain Holt's desk. - Father Ted: Father Jack apparently always played this trope during the summer, all in the name of saving money on "wear and tear". - In the Here Come the Brides episode "A Dream That Glitters," Jeremy is so nervous about meeting Candy's grandfather that he forgets to put on pants and almost walks out the door in his underwear, which neither he nor the viewers see until Joshua points it out. - For Pedro Pascal's turn as Inigo Montoya in Home Movie: The Princess Bride, he wears a reasonably accurate recreation of Inigo's costume from the waist up and calves down with a crappy wig, and Goofy Print Underwear in place of trousers. - In How I Met Your Mother, Robin's co-anchorman does not wear pants. - A US military general steals the Constitution while in transit in an episode of JAG note : It's part of a plan to remind the nation of its glorious heritage, probably. To make a broadcast about the theft, he puts a shirt, tie and jacket, but doesn't change out of the rest of his army gear, which remains out of shot for the camera he's using. - Jeopardy!: An outtake in 2005's Ultimate Tournament of Champions showed host Alex Trebek walking onstage without his pants on, with Alex explaining to the audience that he overheard the three finalists (Brad Rutter, Ken Jennings, and Jerome Vered) say that they had considered playing the game without pants themselves. As Alex left to put his pants back on, a camera behind the podiums showed \|\|the players still had their pants on.\|\| - On Modern Family, Phil and Claire talk about how absent-minded Alex is at times, and a Cutaway Gag shows her going out the door naked from the waist down. As Phil runs out to stop her, he's revealed to be wearing briefs. - In one episode of The Muppet Show, a newscaster reads a report about a newscaster who forgot to put on pants before appearing on the air. Then he comes to a sudden realization... - Shaun Micallef's Mad as Hell: In S15.E6, Shaun stands up to salute as the ABC Ombudsman/Lord High Executioner enters the studio, revealing that he is not wearing pants. - On Sports Night, irked wardrobe folk hold up the anchors' pants, leading to them having to go on the air in suit and tie, boxers and black socks. - The West Wing: White House Press Secretary C.J. Cregg has to do a live TV interview pantsless, after accidentally sitting on a freshly painted bench. - Leslie Hall has the single No Pants Policy about there being no pants allowed nearby when she takes to the dance floor. - The Lonely Island song "My Pants" (not to be confused with their more well-known "Jizz In My Pants") featured a man named Lance asking everyone to stop making fun of his pants, only to reveal at the end that he was naked from the waist down the entire time. - The Poxy Boggards have a song entitled, "I Wear No Pants", which was featured in a Dockers Super Bowl commercial. - The video for the Silverchair song "Anthem for the Year 2000" featured the "no leg" variation. The clip starts out with (waist-up) images plastered everywhere of a politician who always appears to the public on screen/behind a desk. As the clip goes on, we find out she isn't alive but is actually being mechanically controlled. It also turns out that below the waist, she doesn't have a body but is instead attached to a series of cables, levers and something like the base of an office chair (with wheels). - In the video for "Weird Al" Yankovic's Eat It, as one of the gangs is walking, the camera zooms out to show they aren't wearing pants. - After introducing himself from behind the commentary desk on NXT Season 3, CM Punk announces that he's not wearing pants. - Enforced on Truth Martini's unauthorized ROH A Night Of Hoopla, where only those in matches were allowed to wear anything resembling pants. - The cover of one BattleTech sourcebook featured Precentor Apollyon of the Word of Blake on the cover wearing a robe, and nothing underneath it. As he's a Hollywood Cyborg with only metal from the waist down, nothing is showing. - In a venerable vaudeville gag, a Sharp-Dressed Man is grooming himself in front of a mirror. Then he moves out from behind a panel, only to reveal that he forgot to put on trousers. - Ted McPain from Awesomenauts. He was reincarnated without pants, meaning his stars 'n stripes thong is nearly always visible, save for a few skin exceptions (except his Party Boy skin, which manages to show off even more). - Combined with a minor Tomato Surprise in Billy vs. SNAKEMAN (which is text-based): your ninja character can through sufficient exploration of the game's equivalent to Karakura High School discover the secret of the power of the Soul Reapers. A consequence of that discovery is the realization that your character has been going "pantsfree" the whole time, at least while in the school. - Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars outtakes. Michael Ironside has no pants on. - Dishonored 2: A letter can found on the Dreadful Wale during Emily's campaign. It's addressed to her probable lover, stating that during an important council she kept a straight face all the while sitting behind her desk without any pants on. - The player character for Jurassic Park: Trespasser was seen from a first person view, and all you saw of her was one arm and her breasts (her Life Meter was tattooed on one of them). Uncovering the game's Dummied Out third person mode, modders discovered that that's all she has. - The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past's official artwork makes it pretty clear that Link's not wearing any pants underneath that tunic. - Some renditions of Angel in various Shin Megami Tensei games depict her as bottomless.◊ - Starcraft II: Donny Vermilion, the infuriatingly smug news anchor, was at one point intended to be revealed as a robot. His model consists of his upper body behind a desk, with one animation showing sparks flying around. - In Spear of Destiny (a mission pack prequel to Wolfenstein 3-D), there is an Easter Egg which displays a photo of the development team with nothing below their torsos visible, captioned "We're not wearing any pants." - During Bennett the Sage's review of Twilight of the Cockroaches after Jeremy suggests giving the female viewers Fanservice in the form of showing Sage's bottom half for once the camera cuts to a full body shot of Sage that shows him in boxer shots (with the clear implication that he does all his reviews like this). Sage then says he doesn't think that's such a good idea. - Echo Chamber Trope Of The Week Episode 2 opens with a shot of Tom, who is well-dressed...until he stands up, revealing that he is wearing Batman Boxers and nothing else from the waist down. - hololive: During one of her streams, Mori Calliope is forced to get up to answer the door, only to let it slip that she had to put on her pants first, leading into her constantly having to deny such after realizing that she did. - After Zoran Gvojic temporarily took over hosting duties for The Kill Count while James A. Janisse was taking a break as an extended honeymoon (barring a few cameos), a Running Gag was that he wasn't wearing any pants while he hosted the show. James is depicted as seriously disturbed by this. - Iliza Schlesinger hosts the weakly news in her underpants, which typically only becomes apparent when she gets up from behind her desk for the Once an Episode "dance party" segment. - A cut in Spoony and Linkara's review of Warrior #4 a cut reveals that Dr. Insano's not wearing pants, and instead has heart boxer shorts. When directly asked about this Insano just replies that it's not important right now due to Hyper Time shenanigans. - Noah also reveals in a Counter Monkey episode, appropriately named "The Importance of Wearing Pants" that one of his co-players in a game campaign once called him explaining why he was late and that he had to go home because he forgot his pants. Noah comments that he's pretty sure the guy wasn't lying because it's "So stupid it has to be true" and because the guy was a huge flake in the first place. - Reviewer Tekking 101 wears a suit and tie in most of his videos. Near the end of his review for Bleach chapter 639, he revealed he was wearing shorts, justifying it by saying it was very hot. - Uncle Jay Explains The News had Uncle Jay stand up at the end of an episode, revealing no pants. - In the Vlogbrothers episode aptly titled "Nerdfighter MARRIAGE PROPOSAL," John Green was asked by a fan to propose to the fan's girlfriend for him. He decided that an occasion like this necessitated nicer clothes than the t-shirt he started the episode in, then jump-cut to him adjusting himself in his seat, wearing a nice suit jacket and a dress shirt. When he called the girlfriend, did the proposal, and she said yes, John began cheering, and sprang out of his seat to reveal that he was still in his boxer shorts. - The Whitey Tighties Music Video only shows Alex, Derek, and Lauren from the waist up at first. Eventually, it zooms out to reveal that they (even Lauren) are wearing white briefs. - Batman: The Brave and the Bold featured a nerdy basement-dwelling supervillain's helper who appeared on camera only from the waist up. - Dogstar: In "Robot Revolution", Hank the newsreader objects when the servo-bots attempt to remove him from the studio for two reasons: firstly, it's his studio and secondly, he's not wearing any pants. When they physically haul him out from behind the desk, his is indeed not wearing pants. - Gravity Falls: In "Irrational Treasure" Quentin Trembley, the long-lost "eighth-and-a-half" President of the United States, didn't believe in wearing pants, and one of the laws he passed as president was the "Em-pants-ipcation Proclamation". When he's revived from being frozen in peanut brittle, Trembley promptly takes his pants off and spends the rest of the episode running around in a pair of 19th-century pantaloons. - A Johnny Bravo short has Johnny walking out of his house talking about how it's a great day where nothing can go wrong. His mother then runs out and yells at him that he forgot his pants. Johnny mentions feeling a draft, and a passing driver laughs at him. In this instance, we don't get to see him below the waist. - Happens a few times in Phineas and Ferb, usually where the audience and/or Perry the Platypus discovers Major Monogram isn't wearing pants when he gives his briefings to Perry. - Five examples from The Simpsons: - From "Marge in Chains": Lionel Hutz: And so, I rest my case. Judge Snyder: Mr. Hutz, do you know you're not wearing any pants? Lionel Hutz: Huh? (Notices his bare butt) AUGH! - From the episode "Homer Goes to College": Homer: A test? This is like one of those bad dreams ! (Camera pulls out revealing him in his underwear.) Homer: AAAHH!!! - Yet again: Homer: Where are my pants? Marge: You threw them out the window in a fit of passion. You said you were never going to need them again. - In the "Homer Live" segment of "Simprovised", Bart sneaks in from behind the desk and takes Homer's pants. In the East Coast version, he asks for them back at the end. - During an outbreak of Osaka Flu, Mayor Quimby is shown to be wearing swimming trunks and flip-flops with his suit jacket, shirt and tie while making a public service announcement from the Bahamas. - Sean Connery went pants free for the zeppelin scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (it was muggy) and supposedly all the driving scenes in the James Bond films. In response to the Last Crusade bit, Harrison Ford elected to go pants free for that scene as well. - In Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, George Clooney plays the President of the United States, appearing only in video communications which show him from the shoulders up.◊ All his scenes were filmed at his house in one afternoon. He was wearing pajama bottoms below his suit jacket, dress shirt, and tie. - Many TV news personalities, apparently including Sean Hannity, wear casual dress from the waist down. Glenn Beck didn't even try to hide it and even made it part of his persona. - A joke from The Philippines is that newsreaders wear nothing but underwear below the desk and also that priests only wear underpants underneath their robes. - Bryan Cranston once delivered a video acceptance speech on behalf of the cast of Malcolm in the Middle, none of whom could attend the ceremony. In the course of his speech he casually took a couple of steps to the left, placing a full-length mirror behind him, revealing that he was only wearing the top half of a tux, and nothing else. - This clip shows ABC News anchor Peter Jennings was a practitioner of this trope. - An accidental example happened with Italian newscaster Costanza Calabrese, when the camera zoomed out at the end to reveal she was sitting behind a glass table with her legs apart. - Pedro Pascal confirmed in an Instagram story that when he had to record interviews over Zoom, to promote Wonder Woman 1984, he didn't always have pants on. - The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 required lots of official business (business meetings, courtroom procedures, TV appearances, etc.) to be done remotely. Since you are generally only seen from the waist up in this kind of teleconferencing, and it is usually done from home, many people figured out that wearing pants is optional for this.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PantsFree
Paranormal Romance - TV Tropes Paranormal Romance is the subgenre of romance where, instead of being a Fantasy or Science Fiction story with a romantic subplot, the relationship is brought to the front and the heroine finds her true love when supernatural forces or sci-fi Applied Phlebotinum are involved. (For this genre, what's "paranormal" is defined as broadly as possible.) So instead of the motley cast of misfits heading out on a journey to slay the Evil Overlord with two characters suffering from UST, the heroine gets zapped back in time. She's lost, lonely and confused with no known way of getting back. To add to her worries, she doesn't realize she has romantic feelings toward that man standing over there with the top hat and monocle. Using sci-fi and fantasy to create an exotic location for your romance story is fine, provided that the budding romance between the two lovers is the main focus, rather than the magical or scientific Applied Phlebotinum. The story can even take place in the Standard Fantasy Setting. Setting it in any established fantasy or science fiction universe is also fine, provided it's just Fan Fiction, or you have permission from that franchise's copyright holders. With permission from Paramount, for instance, you could set a paranormal romance in a Star Trek Extended Universe novel. That being said, Paranormal Romance can be combined with almost any other genre out there. These stories can sometimes blur the line between focusing on the relationship and focusing on the setting, plot, and action. Common plots include: Perhaps you've noticed that up to this point, we've been assuming that the more "normal" character in the pairing is a woman. Because most of this genre is marketed towards a female audience, this is usually the case, with a relatable heroine falling for a hunky supernatural guy. However, plenty of exceptions exist: sometimes it's the guy who is the normal protagonist. Sometimes it's a queer love story and they're both women, or both men, or maybe one (or both) are non-binary. And sometimes it's the more supernaturally-aligned character who is the protagonist. Compare Urban Fantasy, which is a (very) similar genre but without the focus on romance; A common joke holds that the difference between the two genres is that Urban Fantasy has a half-naked woman on the cover, where Paranormal Romance has a half-naked man on the cover. Compare Fantastic Romance, which refers to love stories that may involve time-travel or dimension-hopping. ## Examples <!—index—> - Inuyasha is a borderline example; it's arguable whether the A-plot is Kagome and Inuyasha's budding Reincarnation Romance or the quest for the Shikon Jewel. - The Abandon Trilogy - Along The Winding Road - The Anita Blake series - Armadilha para Lobisomem - Black Dagger Brotherhood - Blood and Chocolate - Bloodsucking Fiends - The Caster Chronicles - The Cavaliers Series - Cemetery Boys, a novel where the romance is between a transgender boy and the \|\|supposed\|\| ghost of a local bad boy. - In The Changeover, the romance is between Laura Chant, a "sensitive", and Sorenson "Sorry" Carlisle, a troubled young man. - The Coldest Girl in Coldtown - The Cornersville Trace Mythos - A Court of Thorns and Roses: There's a major plotline involving the protagonists trying to stop evil faerie overlords from conquering the world, but the series largely focuses upon the heroine's romance with faerie royalty (especially in the first two books). - The Cursed Satyroi series involves human women becoming romantically involved with cursed satyrs. - The Dark Hunters - The Dark Carpathians series, a Long Runner with the first book published in the early 90s, makes this a Trope Codifier for paranormal romance. - Dark Kiss Of The Reaper features a romance between a human girl and the Angel of Death. - Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Dark Visions series - A Deal With A Demon - Dragon and Damsel - Elemental Series (Kemmerer) - Evernight - Fire & Rescue Shifters, and most other novels by Zoe Chant - Ghostlight - Golden Dawn - Green Hills - The Guardians (Meljean Brook) series - Guild Hunter has strong shades of this, despite being mainly an Urban Fantasy series. - Halo 2010 No, not that one—this one's about a teenage angel stuck in a Muggle and Magical Love Triangle. - Heart of Steel features a Beauty and the Beast-esque romance between a disfigured, reclusive Cyborg Mad Scientist and a troubled ER doctor he has captured. - Hidden Legacy series - His Fair Assassin series - The Horsemen series, featuring romance between human women and centaurs. - The Host (2008), described as a "love triangle with two bodies," has a Puppeteer Parasite fall for the boyfriend of her human host. - The House of Night series, where the protagonist becomes a vampire; sometimes borders on a harem story. - Hush, Hush - Immortals After Dark - Immortal Guardians - Keturah and Lord Death - Kanes Mountains - Most Lynn Kurland novels - The Legend of All Wolves - The Legend of the Ice People is a long series of these, all concerning the same family. - Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined - Longsummer Nights - The Lords of Satyr - Lords of the Underworld - Magical Annals - The Mediator series - The Mortal Instruments is a borderline example—it's an Urban Fantasy adventure about a girl who discovers that she has a magical lineage and helps save the world, but her romantic issues also get a lot of focus. - My Merlin Trilogy, where Merlin returns as a teenage boy and winds up dating the main character. - Nightshade Trilogy - Night World series - The One Who Eats Monsters - The Otherworld Series - Over The Hills Of Green - Paranormalcy - The Parasol Protectorate series - Pretty Dead - Pretty When She Dies - Psy Changeling series - Rainbow - Rolitania - The Shadow Raiders duology, about werewolf soldiers falling in love with human women in post- Civil War America. - Shifting Elements - The Silver Kiss - The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries - The Syrena Legacy - Tairen Soul - Tough Love: Centers around a quintet of horror monsters acting as a supernatural dating service. - To Wed A Centaur King - The Turning Vampire Series - In Twilight (2005), Bella falls in love with a vampire named Edward; in the following book, it becomes a Love Triangle with her best male friend, who turns out to be a werewolf. Since the series is a huge seller with a devoted fandom, this led to Follow the Leader, making The Twilight Saga the Trope Codifier for Young Adult Paranormal Romance. - Vampire Academy series - The Vampire Diaries series - Viridian Saga, about Andromeda Slate, the most ordinary girl in America, who winds up literally romancing Cthulhu. Naturally, she prevents him from destroying the world with The Power of Love, but also gets into a Love Triangle with her Muggle Best Friend. \|\|Actually a Stealth Parody of this genre written by several authors, most notably Team NChick, under a pseudonym\|\|. - Warm Bodies has a Zombie Apocalypse where one of the zombies falls for a girl, in part because eating her boyfriend's brain gives the zombie his memories. - We Can't Rewind, a romance involving paranormal events rather than creatures. - What She Wants, a romance involving a shape-shifting centaur. - Wicked Lovely - Whyborne and Griffin - Wolves of Mercy Falls Series - Monsterhearts encourages this, since its characters are all teenagers and supernatural beings. <!—/index—>	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParanormalRomance
Pardo Push - TV Tropes A pilot's aircraft (or space craft) has been damaged, and has lost an engine, or is leaking fuel, but is still airworthy. Due to the damage, he won't be able to make it back to friendly territory, and may be forced to eject and become Trapped Behind Enemy Lines. That is, of course, unless the Ace Pilot is able to help him get out of enemy territory somehow. But how? If he is crazy awesome enough, he might just push the other guy to give him a boost. Because Reality Is Unrealistic, the Trope Namer is the Real Life Pardo's Push, with Alliterative Name to boot. Not to be confused with a Tractor Beam. If you end up with an Ass Shove, then you have done something horribly wrong. ## Examples - Done in the X-Wing Series novels during the Wraith Squadron arc. An X-wing is damaged and its pilot unconscious, so another pilot uses his own X-wing in an attempt to nudge the damaged craft into a less pointed-at-the-ground trajectory. \|\|He almost manages it, and gets a medal for trying (and living through the attempt). He considers it a Medal of Dishonor because he failed.\|\| - In the novelization of Revenge of the Sith, Anakin uses his fighter to push Obi-Wan's damaged fighter into the Invisible Hand's hangar. - Temeraire: Badly injured dragons that are having trouble flying are often mentioned to have other dragons coming in to help lift them. This maneuver is presumably easier for dragons than planes, having things like limbs and fine motor control. - Battlestar Galactica: In the miniseries, Starbuck pulls this maneuver to get Apollo back to Galactica after his Viper is crippled in combat. Of course, rather than just pushing his fighter as in the other examples, she actually forcibly slams into his, locking their ships together before afterburning back to Galactica. Apollo being (at the time) not as ballsy as Starbuck, yells that she's beyond insane the whole way in. - JAG: Harm, being the embodiment of all that is great in fighter pilots, does this to help a stricken fellow Tomcat make it over a coastal mountain range so he can eject over the ocean rather than over Serbian territory. A Title Card at the end of the episode references the Real Life example of this trope, as they tend to do when borrowing particularly outlandish flying feats from history. - Occasionally employed by Scott Manley in his video's for Kerbal Space Program to retrieve or de-orbit non-functional space craft. Mostly of the automated variety, but on at least one occasion to rescue a Kerbal stranded in orbit after a staging accident. - During the Vietnam War, Captain Bob Pardo had his wingman, Captain Aman (whose plane had been hit by anti-aircraft fire and had lost most of its fuel already) lower his tailhook, while Pardo carefully moved his own jet up so he could use the windscreen of his plane to push against the tailhook of his wingman's plane, reducing Aman's rate of descent enough so that they were able to make it over Laos before ejecting (Pardo's own plane suffered an engine fire and ended up running out of fuel as well). Pardo was initially criticized for his recklessness, and for not saving his own, less damaged plane as well, but he, along with his Guy in Back, Lieutenant Wayne, was later given the Silver Star, nearly two decades later. - An earlier example (which gets covered by Dogfights) involving a pair of F-86 Sabres from the Korean War: then-Captain Robinson "Robbie" Risner used his fighter jet to push his wingman to keep him in the air long enough to get near friendly forces farther south. Tragically, after his wingman made it clear of enemy territory and bailed out, he became tangled in his parachute cords and drowned.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PardoPush
Paratext - TV Tropes Everything that is an element of the whole package immediately encompassing the text and not part of the text itself. In other words, all that stuff that isn't a part of the show/movie/story itself, but still comes with it. The stuff on the box, the stuff that comes before the show/movie, etc. See also Text Tropes.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParatextTrope
Paratext - TV Tropes Everything that is an element of the whole package immediately encompassing the text and not part of the text itself. In other words, all that stuff that isn't a part of the show/movie/story itself, but still comes with it. The stuff on the box, the stuff that comes before the show/movie, etc. See also Text Tropes.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParatextTropes
Paranormal Mundane Item - TV Tropes "There is a connection between our minds and the unknown, often hostile forces intruding on our world. These forces gravitate toward everyday objects a gun, a television, a house with a reputation of being 'haunted.' So somehow, we affect these events. We're holding the key, but we don't have a clue on how to use it." — Dr. Casper Darling , Control , "Multimedia: Altered World Events" Items with mystical properties are commonly assumed to look antiquated, bearing associations with ancient civilizations, the Middle Ages or some other time period no later than late 19th-early 20th century. Common examples are magical staffs, manuscripts, mirrors, potions, etc. This trope instead is about paranormal items that look like they were bought in a shop nearby. They are usually labeled with either an unfamiliar trademark or a familiar trademark with a strangely altered label. For example, it may be a chocolate bar which would transform you into a monster if you eat it or a video game cartridge that would teleport you into the game's realm as soon as you put it into your console. Such items can often be found in Urban Fantasy. They may be used by a Blue-Collar Warlock, and are frequently sold in The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday. Often overlaps with May Contain Evil, in which case they may be a Cursed Item; also compare Supernatural Phone, Haunted Technology and What Do You Mean, It's Phlebotinum?. ## Examples - The Goosebumps series have lots of those: - Full Moon Fever has chocolate bars called "Best" (actually "Beast"; turns people into werewolves) and "Cure" (actually "Curse"; makes people shrink in size) that look like your everyday shop merchandise. - The Monster Blood from the eponymous book is a jar of weird green substance that looks like children's slime toys, but has very creepy magical properties. - Beware of the Purple Peanut Butter has the titular purple butter that makes you shrink, and a piece of cake that makes you grow in size. - In Shop Till You Drop ... Dead!, the protagonists are on a Scavenger Hunt to find a number of items in a night department store. Goods found in this store include among the rest a Heart-Attack Backpack that suffocates people until they have a heart attack, and a toy ape that comes to life at night. - In Scream Shop series by Tracey West, Sebastian Cream's Curiosity Shop specializes in selling such objects. One of the notable examples from The Curse of Count Blood is a vial with the symbol of a comic book character which turns out to be a tool for resurrecting staked vampires. Of course, as the main character quickly finds out, in his world Comic Books Are Real... - Robert Sheckley's "Fishing Season" centers around food items that look very similar to usual grocery products, but have some strange minor differences. They actually serve as a "bait" for humans, and those who eat them are sucked into another world. - The portkeys in Harry Potter are seemingly meaningless pieces of trash, like an old boot. Deliberately averted with horcruxes, however: Harry asks if they could be anything, citing the portkeys, and Dumbledore replies that they could be, but any wizard vain or evil enough to make one, like Voldemort, would never lower themselves to put a piece of their soul in something easily mistaken for garbage. Petty criminals are known to engage in "Muggle-baiting", or deliberately enchanting mundane items to screw with Muggles. - Warehouse 13 involves many items that may have been run-of-the-mill when they were first made, but because they were owned by historically important people they ended up obtaining paranormal powers (or maybe the historically important people became such because they have paranormal powers; the series is glad to leave either option in the air). - The Objects in The Lost Room are perfectly ordinary-seeming items with bizarre and unintuitive powers, like a comb that can stop time, a canteen that causes everyone nearby except its holder to asphyxiate, and a pair of scissors that forcibly turns whatever they point at around any axis. They were originally entirely mundane items that were part of a man's luggage within the titular room when a mysterious Event transformed them, and they have since been disseminated around the world as people fought over them. The Objects are also indestructible, except when inside the Room itself. - Friday The 13th: The Series revolves around the objects of a certain store that held paranormal properties (and some of them were quite modern-looking, like a radio), but all of them were a pretty vile Power at a Price (as an example: a crucifix that allowed even people who knew nothing of spiritism to perform exorcisms, but had to be fed human blood (and that meant stabbing people dead with it)), a scalpel that would insta-heal whoever it was used on in an operation (but required it to be charged up by killing someone), a wheelchair that gave the capacity for Astral Projection to whoever used it, and the like. - Buffy the Vampire Slayer had supernatural power invested twice into mundane comestibles, creating candy bars that made you act like a teenager and beer that turned you into a caveman. - In Twin Peaks The Return, Freddy Sykes buys a gardening glove at a hardware store at the behest of The Fireman, a mystical being from Another Dimension. The glove becomes fused to his hand and gives him the power to deliver Megaton Punches with it. - The d20 Modern setting Urban Arcana has multiple examples of these kind of items within its gear section, from a chainsaw that gave its user a capacity to summon berserker rage in combat, a car bumper that gave the car it was attached to the capacity to ram with the strength of an even bigger car (so a Sports-Utility Vehicle would be hitting with the power of an eighteen-wheeler), a cell phone that had literal Super Cell Reception and could dial the phone nearest to anybody the user wanted to contact (if that person didn't had a phone of their own), and the like. - Control: With the FBC being essentially Remedy's version of the SCP Foundation, this is to be expected. Altered Items are objects with strange effects and properties, such as duplicating mannequins and letters that teleport around a room. Objects of Power are similar, but can be bound to someone in order to grant them a paranormal power. Examples include the Floppy Disc (grants telekinesis), the Safe (grants a powerful shield), and the Ashtray (creates a constantly shifting maze around itself which only the binder and those they grant permission can pass through). Background details mention that anything of cultural or personal significance can become an Altered Item or Object of Power; the Bureau uses only generic non-branded products for everything because anything with a recognizable brand is more likely to gain supernatural properties, especially in the Eldritch Location where they work. Also, it seems objects have to be at least a few decades old before they're considered significant enough in humanity's collective consciousness to be eligible for getting supernatural powers. The FBC has to make do with computers from the 80s, a pneumatic tube system for communication, and guns from World War I, because anything more modern than that tends to explode when it enters the Oldest House. - Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse centers around the mystical Toys of Power which are actually very ancient, but for some reason look like ordinary toys that may be found in a modern-day toy shop (like a toy telephone that allows its user to teleport and a wacky putty toy that gives him the ability of transformation). - In El Goonish Shive, cans of shrink soda look like ordinary cans of soda, there are also bottles of sunscreen whose contents transform the person into the Female Variant #5 form which is elaborated upon on its label◊. - There is a shop in the mall that sells items like this including a toothbrush that transforms your teeth and jaws with every use, plus the aforementioned shrink soda and other presumably canned magical beverages like femme cola, and furry juice. - Whateley Universe: Ms. Grimes's reliquary (storage device for magical energy) is a bowling ball bag. - SCP Foundation: A decent number of artifacts contained by the Foundation bear some resemblance to some form of product intended to be sold to the public, to the detriment of anyone unfortunate enough to find one. In addition, there are a number of organizations of interest that specialize in the production and or sale of such artifacts.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParanormalMundaneItem
Paranormal Tropes - TV Tropes "The exact process of how an Altered Item is born eludes us. We find them in the aftermath of Altered World Events. They take the form of everyday objects — ever-present in our lives, constantly evoked in the thoughts of millions of people. Now infused with unpredictable energies, they're altered. The superstitious would call them cursed." — Dr. Casper Darling , Control , "Multimedia: Altered Items" Tropes for the paranormal: those things that are spooky but not outright magical. May require investigation. Frequent in the horror genre. <!—index—> <!—/index—>	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParanormalTropes
Fetish - TV Tropes A sexual fetish (or, more properly, a paraphilia) is getting turned on by something that isn't considered a normal turn-on by one's culture. Of course this means what is considered a fetish will vary, and puritanical cultures will even consider any form of arousal to be taboo. Anything that isn't a normal turn-on could be a fetish. That is the other reason not to go into a detailed description of what exactly a fetish is. In fiction, there are general clues to show what's being treated as a fetish—namely, how people react to someone being aroused by something. If people are either disgusted or uncomfortable talking about it, it's generally a fetish. If people are impressed, it's kinky, but still on the edge of normal. Handcuffs can easily slide between fetish and kinky this way. It's still uncommon to see a fetish openly discussed in mainstream fiction, and rare to see those with a fetish not treated like weirdos. For a partial list of recognized fetishes, see That Other Wiki. A Super-Trope to Casual Kink, Hemo Erotic, and Kinky Role-Playing. Compare Rule 34, Rule of Sexy, Fetish Fuel (when something in media sets off a viewer's fetish, while this trope is when someone on the show is turned on).	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Paraphilia
Paranormal Investigation - TV Tropes "We're ready to believe you!" A genre centered on characters who specialize in investigating the paranormal and the supernatural. In other words, works featuring Occult Detectives. After all, who else are you gonna call? Depending on the case, or the series in general, the paranormal activity can either be a hoax or the real thing. When actual supernatural forces are in play, the detectives may need to consult a specialist to combat it, or they might deal with it themselves through esoteric means, such as: occult magic, enchanted weapons, and the like. Closely related to Who You Gonna Call? and often involves Demon Slaying. According to the Ghostbreakers website the genre is in fact Older Than Feudalism starting with the letter To Sura by Pliny the Younger. ## Examples: - Karas: Kure and Sagisaka work as Shinjuku's sole paranormal police task force, making them a bit of a joke to the rest of the police. - Phantom Quest Corp., a.k.a. Yuugen Kaisha, is exactly what it sounds like: a privately run agency that investigates the paranormal and the supernatural. Many of their assignments are commissioned from U Division's Detective Karino, as a personal favor to Phantom Quest's president, Ayaka Kisaragi. - Ghost Talker's Daydream: Misaki Saiki has had the ability to see spirits, since childhood, and eventually learned she was a medium note : a spiritual conduit by which the deceased can communicate with the living. As such, spirits are naturally drawn to her. She doesn't have a firm of her own, so she accepts assignments from the Livelihood Preservation Group, as an exorcist. But she mainly does it so the spirit in question will move on and leave her alone. - Sailor Moon: Ittou is a member of the Sci-Fi Club at his school, to which he reports any UFO sightings. In fact, after witnessing Mamoru healing himself and Luna talking to Usagi, he thinks that their group might be aliens. - YuYu Hakusho started out this way in the beginning, but quickly dropped the paranormal mystery aspect of the series in favor of paranormal action. - Tasogare Otome X Amnesia: The Paranormal Investigation Club tends to function this way, more so in the manga. - The Blue Clan, Scepter 4 in K is a supernatural police division, tasked with cases involving Strains, the series' rogue supers. Inverted in that the main character is an Ordinary High-School Student who's been framed for a murder, on the run with both Scepter 4 and the Red Clan after him. A lot of the side materials have them clashing (in more ways than one) with the Red Clan, who are essentially a superpowered street gang. - Ghost Sweeper Mikami: The Ghost Sweepers (GS) exist as a profession of private exorcists for hire, in response to the problems caused by homeless spirits who continue to roam in the world of the living. The titular protagonist is one, serving only the highest bidders to survive in the cut-throat corporate world. - Doctor Thirteen, the Ghost Breaker. A die-hard skeptic, originally every haunting he investigated turned out to be fake, but then Thirteen started teaming up with The Phantom Stranger and became part of the DC Universe, and his skepticism has been Played for Laughs ever since. Depending on the Writer he may or may not have some kind of unconscious Anti-Magic power that turns actual supernatural monsters into mundane things. - Hoax Hunters is about a group of paranormal experts who investigate supernatural activity — and cover it up by using their TV show to present it all as a hoax or a tall tale that got out of hand. They have an obscure connection to the government, and have been operating in some form for decades. - The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (B.P.R.D.) of the Mignolaverse, former employer of Hellboy, is an entire government agency dedicated to paranormal investigation. - Wynonna Earp belongs to the 'Black Badges': a secret division of the U.S. Marshal Service charged with investigating and stopping crimes committed by supernatural beings. - In the Discworld of A.A. Pessimal, a group of four urban Witches take on a paranormal investigation at a suburban house in Ankh-Morpork. They carry out the exorcism of some quite nasty disembodied spirits and earhbound ghosts, by pointing out there are indeed some scary things walking unafraid in the psychic ether in this house. And they're us! An hour or so later, the premises have been exorcised to within an inch of their Afterlife and the Witches point out that there is no longer a haunting problem. - In Warning Letter, the Japanese Task Force are eventually forced to that the Kira and Phantom Thieves investigation has become this, given that the former is killing people via seemingly supernatural means and the latter invoking an extreme Heel Realization. - C.T. Phipps has multiple installments of these: - The Bright Falls Mysteries is about a young weredeer shaman (named Jane Doe, natch) who functions more like an Occult Detective in a small town in rural Michigan. There are numerous horrid secrets and occult happenings within. - The Morgan Detective Agency deals with an alcoholic private detective who also does work as a bounty hunter in a city run by vampires as well as possessing a large populace of other supernaturals. - Straight Outta Fangton is a series about a vampire convenience store clerk who is always investigating the occult happenings around New Detroit. - Many of the Cthulhu Mythos stories start with this — a scholar or academic type investigating a legend or occult artifact. - The standard plot of the Carnacki the Ghost-Finder stories by William Hope Hodgson, a contemporary of Conan Doyle. Particularly notable for the fact that he regularly investigates both hoaxes and genuine supernatural menaces, in roughly equal proportion. - The Dresden Files. The trope title is even part of Harry Dresden's yellow pages ad. A running deconstructive conceit of the series is that while the Muggles call in Harry to investigate weird stuff, the Fey and other creatures call on him to investigate mundane things like murder, theft, missing persons etc. - The Haunting of Hill House: The main plot is kicked off when a group of people are recruited by an expert in paranormal research to stay in a Haunted House and try to see if they can observe any supernatural phenomena. - In the Kitty Norville series, Kitty is successful, a rising star in the radio culture. Her radio show, The Midnight Hour, has become an overnight sensation, providing outre music, observations about the bizarre, and call-in radio advice for the loners, the odd, and the unusual. Initially she doesn't investigate the supernatural herself, merely research, discuss, and theorize about it, but as time goes on she ends up having to to some degree in order to protect herself and those she cares about from the various supernatural threats she encounters. She also meets an actual cable TV show in book six, Paradox PI, that is very much modeled after Ghost Hunters. - Though he calls himself a "psychic doctor," Miles Pennoyer uses his extensive training in the mystic arts to solve mysteries pertaining to malign supernatural events distressing his patients. In his work he crosses paths with ghosts, vampires, necromancers, mages, and changelings. - Shadow Police follows a group of London police officers investigating hidden London's paranormal threats. - Sherlock Holmes: The Hound of the Baskervilles crosses into this territory with the mysterious and apparently otherworldly hound roaming the moors. - Vampirocracy, in which Leon Ragnarson, Vampire Hunter, runs a paranormal private investigation firm and lends his expertise to the police in matters of supernatural crime, all under a recently-established vampire-run government. - There's a growing subgenre that brings national governments, and all their messy history, into matters. The occult world is cloaked in secrecy but a potent source of power—themes that parallel espionage fiction. Two notable works in the "occult intelligence" subgenre are Tim Powers' Declare and Charles Stross's The Laundry Files. - Paranormal Anthologies about this include: - Becoming Human: Does it count if it is the paranormal doing the investigating themselves? - Buffyverse: - Cheo Yong involves a Korean police officer solving crimes with the help of the ghosts he can talk to. - Choujin Bibyun is a Toku superhero series about a Power Trio investigating attacks by Youkai, and then beating them up. - "Reality" TV series about the concept include: - The Dead Files, whose spin is that, separately, a medium reads the site of the haunting and a detective investigates the history of the site and the clients, and then combine their findings during the reveal to the client(s). - Destination Truth: A "reality" TV series. Usually half of the episode segments feature a haunting investigation while the rest deal with cryptids. In an effort to distinguish itself from other paranormal shows, Destination Truth focuses investigating more exotic and interesting locations like the Great Wall of China or the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia. - Ghost Adventures and its Spin-Off Paranormal Challenge on the Travel Channel. - Destination Fear: A Travel Channel series which premiered in 2019 centered around the team of Dakota Laden, his sister Chelsea, their childhood friend Tanner Wiseman and cameraman Alex Schroeder. The show mostly focuses on Dakota's interest in the psychological impacts of experiencing paranormal activity. The team get around via an RV, and the location they are about to go to is hidden from the others until they are nearly there. The show is executive produced by Ghost Adventures host Zak Bagans, who Dakota worked with several times prior. People tend to view Destination Fear as being more down-to-earth, genuine and even more well-edited than other paranormal shows. - Ghost Hunters and its Spin-Off shows Ghost Hunters International and Ghost Hunters Academy on the Syfy Channel. - Ghost Hunting with... was a series in the UK hosted by Yvette Fielding in which she takes a group of celebrities to haunted locations throughout Britain. The episodes tended to have more comic results from the celebrities' reactions. - Ghost Brothers, whose main selling point was that the three leads are black. As one of them lampshaded in the trailer, "Why is everybody white?" - Paranormal Home Inspectors features both a psychic and a normal home inspector. Each episode features first the home inspector giving mundane explanations for "mysterious happenings" note : Such explanations include one tv turning on when another turns off because the couple uses a universal remote, flickering lights caused by bad wiring, and pictures falling off the wall due to nearby train tracks then the psychic talking the ghosts that haunt the place and trying to connect with them. Then there's the night vision investigation segment, which is usually unintentionally hilarious as they try to milk suspense out things like a door that the inspector had already demonstrated doesn't latch properly opening on its own. - FreakyLinks: The crew of the eponymous website investigates alleged paranormal phenomena and posts the results on the internet. - Friday The 13th: The Series: The heirs of an antique dealer who sold cursed items chase around trying to get them back. - * Fringe: The Fringe division of the F.B.I. investigate paranormal happenings around the country. - Ghosted: Is a Sitcom take on the idea. Leroy Wright and Doctor Max Jennifer work for the Bureau Underground, which was created to keep mankind safe from the paranormal. Together they investigate aliens, crypids and other monsters. - Grimm: A Portland police department detective named Nick, is a Grimm. He is a historical hunter of cryptids called Wesen. He and his friends hunt these creatures down. - Haven's early seasons are like this before the Genre Shift into more Lovecraft Lite. A typical episode would involve Audrey investigating a strange crime caused by someone's Trouble. - Parodied, however, in season 4's "Shot in the Dark," when two wannabe ghost hunters arrive in Haven to investigate a mythical creature that turns out to be a creation of that seasons' Big Bad. They're portrayed as bumbling and incompetent, but they do have some handy equipment that helps Audrey and the gang, and one of them makes another appearance in season 5 with some more helpful equipment. - In The International Sexy Ladies Show* in the UK, sexy ladies (what else) go to a haunted house, where the first thing they do is strip down to their undies. Invariably, it's too scary and they all run back to the bus without dressing. - Kolchak: The Night Stalker: In both incarnations Carl Kolchak is a reporter who investigates crimes involving the supernaturla and super science. - Lost Tapes: this is part of the premise of Death Raptor, in which a pair of investigators look into apparent demonic activity around a church which turns out to have a "mundane" explanation, and Poltergeist, where a whole team try to help a family whose son may be exhibiting psychic powers only to learn that it's actually a violent haunting. A few other episodes have shades of the genre by being investigations into something that turns out to be paranormal, but these are the only two episodes involving legit, recognized paranormal investigators as character. - Many of the investigations conducted on Mystery Hunters are based around looking whether alleged paranormal activity is indeed paranormal. - Amelia from Power Rangers Dino Fury wants to be one, and is always pitching stories to her boss Jane involving ghost sightings or cryptids. She finally gets permission to work on one in the premier. Funnily enough, Amelia works for a media company called BuzzBlast, and her character is almost definitely inspired by BuzzFeed Unsolved. - In Psi Factor the Office of Scientific Investigation and Research (O.S.I.R.) investigates the paranormal. - Psych: Constantly, and always a red herring. Obviously the police aren't going to go through the trouble of consulting a psychic Amateur Sleuth unless something really wacko is going on. - Secret Investigation Record aka Joseon X-Files - Special Unit 2: A series about a secret division of the Chicago Police Department that deals with paranormal crimes. The rest of the police department is completely in the dark about what SU-2 is. - Supernatural has the protagonists investigating everything from ghosts to witches to vampires to demons. - Things That Go Bump, an NBC pilot that never made it to series, focused on the paranormal division of the New Orleans PD. - Torchwood: Top secret, beyond the government, funded by the crown alien investigators and weapons stockpilers (based on a rift in space in time in the middle of the craziness that is Cardiff in the Whoniverse to boot). - Twin Peaks: F.B.I. Agents investigate a murder in the town of Twin Peaks and are faced with paranormal overtones. - Ultra Q and its reimaginings Ultra Q Dark Fantasy and Neo Ultra Q all use such characters as their protagonists, and often with The Professor to help them out. - Ultraman Orb has the Something Search People (SSP), made of Naomi, Jetta, and Shin. They investigate all sorts of bizarreness around Tokyo that usually turns out to be the work of a kaiju or an alien. But in the process, they end up caught in the middle of Ultraman Orb/Gai's struggle with Jugglus Juggler. - Warehouse 13: Secret Service agents in charge of Warehouse 13 hunt down paranormal artifacts - The X-Files: Many many episodes. Of course, the FBI is supposed to investigate things, but they happen to keep throwing two specific agents at certain cases. - YUP's Toppatakkeja ja Toledon Terästä has a song where the main character detective gets important information from a living severed head stored in a closet with a cassette recorder. - The Magnus Archives is narrated by the archivist of an institute dedicated to academic research into the paranormal. He works through the archive of statements people have given about alleged experiences, and he and his assistants investigate those they can. However, many in the Magnus Institute prefer ivory-tower academia to the legwork of actual investigation, and they like think of themselves as serious scholars rather than silly ghost-hunters. Conversely, other paranormal investigators regard the Institute as a joke. - The Thrilling Adventure Hour "Beyond Belief" episodes feature Frank and Sadie Doyle; toasts of the upper crust, headliners on the society pages, and, oh yes, they see ghosts. A typical episode features the Doyles enjoying an activity, usually drinking, only to encounter some form of paranormal threat that they have to deal with, if only because it's the quickest way to get back to their drinking. - Pacific Northwest Stories and the Public Radio Alliance: - The Black Tapes features Alex Regan as she works with paranormal investigator Richard Strand, playing the Agent Mulder to his Agent Scully as they investigate cases Strand was, at the time, unable to conclude to his satisfaction. - TANIS starts out as Nic Silver looking to investigate mentions he's encountered of a place called Tanis, thinking he's found the world's last true mystery. As he investigates, things begin to focus on an Eldritch Location that has caused death, misery, and insanity to all who've wandered through it and in people who seek to either limit, exploit, or worship the powers involved. - RABBITS begins more grounded in reality, focusing on Carly Parker investigating the mysterious disappearance of her friend Yumiko. That search involves Carly in an Alternate Reality Game that truly does involve alternate realities by the end. - Beyond the Supernatural revolves around paranormal investigators (or just plain unlucky ordinary folks) stumbling upon supernatural mysteries and cases that they must survive and solve. Most enemies encountered in the game are otherworldly monsters or alien entities but more mundane horrors can appear as well if the GM feels like it. - Call of Cthulhu: Pretty much the whole point of the game is paranormal investigation. - Chill has an organization called S.A.V.E. dedicated to this trope, and it is assumed the characters are members of, or at least associated with the organization. - In Conspiracy X, you investigate all matter of paranormal occurrences along with alien threats. - Dark Heresy, by dint of its parent universe, can turn this way in any given investigation. While purely human motives or aliens could draw the attention of an Inquisitor, there's always a decent chance that the Acolytes might find something mysterious and supernatural. It doesn't help that the daemon-worshiping cult that they might find themselves trying to take down, might be able to actually summon daemons, given the proper expertise and resources. - DarkMatter, a modern-day setting of conspiracy theories and paranormal investigation. - Alone in the Dark: Carnby investigates the paranormal throughout the series, often finding documents in each area detailing of what he's dealing with. - ANNO: Mutationem: The agency where Ann and Ayane work at looks into the occult and inexplicable phenomenon. The head of the agency, Raymond, mentions how he's on the search for a Mad Doctor wearing a plague mask. - Clive Barker's Undying: Patrick's current profession is paranormal investigator. Despite possessing the Gel'ziabar Stone and knowing some magic, he's rarely come across anything that couldn't be explained by mundane causes. Until now. - Control: America Overnight presents itself as an off-the-books spot to share supernatural stories most of the listeners would say the government would suppress, making it especially ironic that it is secretly a government-supported operation to do exactly that. - One of the passengers on the Nancy Drew: Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon is the host of a paranormal investigation TV show, and apparently does believe in ghosts. - In Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Ethan finds a videotape showing three men who enter the decrepit bayou mansion believed to be haunted. Seeing as this is Resident Evil, however, things go horribly wrong when they run into the other kind of undead. - In The Consuming Shadow, the player character has a limited time to stop an Eldritch Abomination from invading the world. You must travel through England and Wales to gather clues in order to accurately identify the threat (there are three gods: the invading god, another one who is helping the first, and a third one who is helping you), research the correct ritual to banish it, then actually perform the ritual in Stonehenge. A "Ministry of Occultism" offers advices (usually in the form "you should investigated [town]") and limited help. Three of the four available character classes (The Scholar, The Wizard, The Ministry Man note : agent of the Ministry of Occultism) are common archetypes of occult detectives. - Phasmophobia is a very scary game where you and friends play as paranormal investigators. The ghosts all use a fairly sophisticated AI with no scripting, so every ghosthunt is very different. Players can even use voice chat to communicate with the ghost through a Spirit Box, and the ghost reacts accordingly (giving consistent answers to questions like age, gender, how they died and their emotional state). - Mario Party 8: Spoofed in the minigame Specter Inspector. Two dueling characters have to enter a deep-dark mansion similar to the eponimous building of Luigi's Mansion. The hall they explore is played in first-person perspective with flashlights, and the characters have to check objects and furniture to find mooks (Fly Guy, Flutter, Piranha Plant, etc.) hidden there. If a character unveils a ghost instead, they'll be startled and briefly incapacitated. Whoever manages to find three mooks first wins; if five minutes pass and neither character managed to find three mooks, the minigame ends in a tie. - Mario Party: Island Tour: The minigame Peep a Peepa takes all characters onto a haunted ghost ship overrun by Peepas. The objective is to move the 3DS to look around the ship and illuminate the appearing Peepas to defeat them. The longer a character exposes a Peepa with light for, the more points they'll receive. After 30 seconds, whoever scored the highest wins. - In Paramedium, the Paramedium Guild is called out to investigate hauntings and the like. They can charge ghosts with specific offences, like police might — for example, non-hostile occupancy of a house gets ghosts a six-year sentence, or less if they don't resist arrest. - Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters has you playing a group of high-school ghost-hunters for hire. - Vampire Cheerleaders: The Paranormal Mystery Squad, like Phantom Quest, is exactly what it sounds like. Stephanie and co. hunt and eliminate cryptids for a living, just as her parents did before their untimely demise. By vol.3, they begin to capture and detain cryptids instead, as a result of Stephanie coming to accept that all cryptids weren't inherently evil. - Adler's Watch features two girls named 23 and Sam who investigate reports of paranormal monsters across Austin, Texas. - In Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name, the title character and his partner are paranormal private eyes. - Autumn Bay: Stephen, Callie, and Adam investigate weird stuff around the titular city, which Stephen then blogs about. - Storywisher: Fi is constantly dragging her cousin Ben around, looking for evidence of the supernatural in Little Bootle. - Supernatural Investigation Department, naturally, centers around an official secret police task force that deals with supernatural incidents in Korea. - In El Goonish Shive, Ellen and Nanase do this kind of thing as a hobby in the vein of Scooby-Doo. - Castela and her friends in Wapsi Square form a paranormal investigative club in their school. - LISDEAD has hints of this, especially around the investigation of 'His' powers. - Part of Marble Hornets is Jay looking through tapes of his friend Alex getting stalked by a tall creature with no face. - The Boo Review is based around this trope but with a bit of a comical edge. - The Cartoon Man begins with an investigation into the disappearance of an occultist animator. Various supernatural phenomena take place in his apartment, causing the main character to start transforming into a cartoon. - Venturian Tale: Johnny Ghost and Johnny Toast. - The narrator of Crossing Kevin's Crossing moved to the titular town specifically to investigate strange occurrences. - Achievement Hunter has Achievement Haunter, a semi-Affectionate Parody in which the group actually do go ghost hunting. However, they've emphasized that they're quite skeptical about the existence of ghosts and mainly do it for fun and to troll each other, with the show's tone falling along the lines of Buzzfeed Unsolved. - Echo Rose features the protagonist trying to investigate the death of a ghostly woman that keeps showing up. - The Bumps in the Night segment on The Proper People combines paranormal investigation with the channel's main focus, urban exploration. The hosts are both skeptics of the paranormal, but decided that going on the occasional ghost hunt was worth a shot, since even if they found nothing, they'd still have an exploration video to show for it. - Homestar Runner seems to really like parodying this trope: - Bubs claims "paranormal investigator" as one of his many questionable professions (along with "normal investigator"). - The Strong Bad Email "ghosts" has Strong Bad and the Cheat check out Strong Badia at night in response to being asked if it had any ghosts, and end up awakening the ghost of Strong Bad's old computer. - The 2016 Halloween cartoon briefly featured Strong Bad (in-character as "Sharpdene"... don't ask) and Strong Sad doing some ghost hunting, with Strong Bad carrying some sort of electronic device he claims found evidence of the Poopsmith's ghost. - And then there's The Homstar Runner Mysfit-steries, which is just a straight-up parody of Scooby-Doo, featuring teenage versions of Homestar, Strong Bad, Strong Mad, and Marzipan as investigators of... the mysterious (even though Strong Bad doesn't believe in mysterious). - The SCP Foundation is a top-secret organization which specializes in investigating all kinds of anomalous/paranormal/supernatural phenomena, and collecting as information about them as possible. The Foundation employs countless secret agents to find and capture these SCP anomalies so they can be secured and contained at various research facilities, where scientists study these SCPs in order to get a better understanding of how they work, and continue keeping them locked away from the outside world. - Sam and Colby are a duo of best friends who post paranormal investigation videos on YouTube, becoming much more serious about it in 2019 and now doing it pretty much full time. - All Scooby-Doo all the time. Mystery Inc. seems to specialize in this kind of thing. - The Mr. Men Show: Mr. Nosy and Mr. Small run a ghost hunting service in "Full Moon". - The Looney Tunes film Daffy Duck's Quackbusters is a compilation of classic shorts with the bridging story that Daffy Duck opened a paranormal investigation service to rid other people of ghosts like the one who has been plaguing him and taking his money. Daffy: You say the Loch Ness Monster is living in your jacuzzi? [rolls eyes] Daffy: Well, call Roto-Rooter ! - The 1937 Disney animated cartoon Lonesome Ghosts featuring Mickey, Donald and Goofy as a trio of ghost hunters who are baited into a haunted mansion by three bored ghosts with no one to scare. - On Invader Zim, eleven-year-old Dib aspires to being a paranormal investigator, and is the only person to realize that Zim is an alien. Other paranormal investigators appear in the series (Bill, the Swollen Eyeballs), but they tend to be fairly useless. - Gravity Falls: Dipper and Mabel investigate all sorts of paranormal activity in the town of Gravity Falls. In addition, Dipper plans to create his own paranormal investigation show when he grows up. Season 2 reveals that It Runs in the Family with the introduction of \|\|their Great-Uncle Ford Pines.\|\| - City of Ghosts features a team of kids who go around Los Angeles to find and interview ghosts to learn their stories and about the neighborhoods they inhabit.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParanormalInvestigation
Parental Betrayal - TV Tropes Sometimes the villain in a work hits much closer to home than the hero would expect — it's their parent. Yes, the parent who we've seen throughout the movie, book or show, doing their usual parent stuff and being seemingly a good guy, only to turn out to be evil all along. Can be very shocking if pulled off right. This also refers to when a character's previously unseen parent is revealed to be evil. Not the same as Luke, I Am Your Father, which is basically the inverse — the parent (who was previously shown) is suddenly revealed to be the villain, rather than the other way around. Offing the Offspring can either ensue after this, or be the way this trope is revealed. When the betrayal backfires, Self-Made Orphan can be the outcome. See also Parental Abandonment, Evil Matriarch, and Archnemesis Dad. Inverse of Betrayal by Offspring. ## Examples: - Bakuten Shoot Beyblade has two cases. First, on the low end of this trope, is Judy Mizuhara, who takes her work for the PPB serious well beyond what could justify her open derision of her son's team. It took Max wiping the floor with the PPB's champion and securing the BBA's victory before she truly came around. The other case is Sōichirō Hiwatari, whom his grandson knew wasn't a good person but didn't know was out to conquer the world and aiming to use him as his main weapon. - Code Geass has every other bad parenting trope covered, so it should be little surprise that this one does as well. The real surprise is who: \|\|Lelouch's lost mother, Marianne vi Britannia, who turns out to be in league with Charles and his plan to kill God\|\|. - Cross Ange: Poor Hilda. While she is initially just the base's resident Alpha Bitch, she later becomes something of a Jerkass Woobie when it's revealed that \|\|her mother, whom she'd had a loving relationship with as a child (with her mother even begging the authorities to give back her child after they found out she was Norma), has, in the intervening years, had another daughter, also named Hilda, and has almost completely forgotten her first child. Not only that, but her mother even calls her a monster and says she wishes she'd never given birth to her\|\|. - \|\|Natsuki\|\| of My-HiME has this happen to her mother. In the anime, \|\|it's revealed that her mother was planning to sell her to the Searrs Foundation, although after a period of doubt, Natsuki decides to believe in the mother she remembers\|\|. In the manga, \|\|Natsuki's mother arrives as part of the Searrs takeover of the school, and Natsuki has to fight against her, although at the end of the fight, after Natsuki's mother comes to her senses and ends up Taking the Bullet for her daughter, the two reconcile\|\|. - Batman: - The Batman R.I.P. comics storyline toys with the possibility that the villain responsible for the defining tragedy in Bruce Wayne's life was \|\|Thomas Wayne, who had his wife Martha killed while faking his own death\|\|. However, the conclusion of the story kinda seems to confirm that someone was just messing with Bruce in the end. - Batman: Detective No. 27 also has \|\|Thomas Wayne as a supervillain who faked his death\|\|. As an Elseworld, it doesn't need to worry about Status Quo Is God, so it really is him. - A Death in the Family: Jason Todd has had horrible luck with his mom too. After finding out that the mother who raised him was not his biological mother, Jason sets out across the globe searching for his birth mother. Eventually, Jason is reunited with her; however, his mother is evil. There is really no other way to describe a woman who would so willingly and suddenly betray her 15-year-old-son to the Joker to cover up her crimes and actually stand there watching him be beaten brutally to near-death with a crowbar, all the while looking none too fazed. After all this happens, the Joker betrays her, ties her up and leaves her and Jason in a room with a bomb. Jason, injured though he is, tries to save the mother who just betrayed him. He cuts the ropes binding her and together they make it to the door. Naturally, the door is locked. The bomb explodes, Jason and his mother die. He got better. She didn't. - Jason believes that Bruce is guilty of this. Even after Jason's death, he still keeps letting the Joker live, and eventually replaced Jason with another Robin. It's not hard to see his viewpoint since the Saviour of Gotham apparently was ready to replace his dead son & partner without even bringing the killer to "justice". - Bruce's son Damian hasn't been much luckier. He wasn't at all pleased when his mother Talia willingly allowed Slade to control his body by means of implanting a device in his spine. And when he supported Dick and Bruce's ideals rather than her's, he found out that Talia had \|\|actually created another clone of Damian because he wasn't "perfect enough"\|\|. Then she kicked him out from the house of Al Ghul and told him not to come back, while all Damian wanted was some of his mother's love. Jerkass Woobie indeed. This culminates in \|\|Damian's death at the hands of his own clone. He even pleads with his mother to call off the attack, but she does nothing as the clone impales her own son on a sword.\|\| - In New Mutants, Sunspot learns his father is evil and working for the villainous Hellfire Club after his dad puts a hit out on his mother. Furious, he disowns his father, and then for a long while worries that he's going to end up like him. - This is the premise of Marvel's Runaways. Children learn that their parents are supervillains, and run away from home, fearing they would otherwise grow up to be like them. - Arrowverse fanfiction: - Blackbird (Arrow): Dinah already had this with her canon decision to let Sara sleep with Laurel's boyfriend; but when she gave Laurel to the League of Assassins so they'd release Sara, she gave this trope an ugly new face. - Wrong Road to the Right Place: When Oliver learns that Dinah let Sara get on the Queen's Gambit to sleep with him, he outright tells her she betrayed Laurel. The fact that she needed to be told it was a betrayal just makes it worse. - Persona V: Reversing the Wheel of Fate: Much to Ren's heartbreak, after spending his whole life being a good, upstanding defender, his parents refused to believe his side of the story when he assaulted Shido. Later subverted; one phone call from his mother is enough for Ren to realize something may be up, and for the readers to glean that Shido made them do it...and they're still in his grasp. - Hunters of Justice sees Jacques Schnee hand Willow and Whitley, his own wife and child, over to Brainiac so the AI can learn the secrets of their hereditary Semblance. - Turning Red: This is a major driver of Mei's changing relationship with her mother. Two examples stand out: - Ming promises to "be with you every step of the way" while Mei waits for the red moon, but then she does absolutely nothing to help Mei fight the panda transformation. - During the climactic fight at the concert, the enraged Ming accuses Mei of not being a good daughter, when Mei has always done her best to be exactly that. That's enough to send Mei into a real rage of her own. - The Reveal in The General's Daughter. The general \|\|covered up his daughter's gang-rape\|\| to protect West Point's reputation and secure himself a promotion. This betrayal hurt his daughter more than \|\|the rape ever did\|\|. She was so distraught that the investigators told her father that \|\|he was the one who truly murdered his daughter — the guy who choked her to death merely put her out of her misery\|\|. - The surprise twist in the first act of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). Dr. Emma Russell initially seems to be an innocent kidnap victim with her daughter Madison, forced to aid the eco-terrorists in their plot to keep them alive. But it's soon revealed that Emma was working with the eco-terrorists all along. She manipulated Madison into joining her as an accomplice by feeding her sugarcoated lies and partial truths. Emma also poisoned Madison against her estranged father, Mark, by lying that he left them because he no longer wanted to be with them. Madison doesn't take it well when realizing that her mom lied, disowning her mother and rebelling against her. - Mouth to Mouth: She's not evil, but Sherry's mother joins the cult instead of trying to get her daughter to leave. Even after Sherry realizes how screwed up everything is (partly due to her mother agreeing with everyone else to punish her for no good reason) and decides to leave, her mom stays. - In the Grey Griffins books, Max's father turns out to be evil and wishes to use Max to access a world-destroying artifact. He has no qualms about killing his own son and his son's friends - genuinely shocking to Max, since he doesn't get along with his mom, and had always preferred his dad. - In Canadian teen adventure novel, Jack's Knife, a girl's father is involved in some criminal operation. He binds and gags his own daughter, which freaks out the main character (who is thinking "my god! She's your own daughter!"). When the man's partner suggests doing away with the kids, he is nice enough to suggest that doing so would be a bad idea ("we don't want to be wanted for murder as well"), but it's left unclear whether this is for selfish reasons, or to spare his daughter's life. - 24: \|\|Jack's father\|\| was a Big Bad, the Man behind the Man (\|\|Graem\|\|) behind the Man (\|\|President Logan\|\|) behind the Man (attempted assassination of the Russian President). Attempted to kill his son. \|\|And he did kill his other son Graem for failing him.\|\| - Alias: Irina betrays Sydney several times over the course of her life starting with abandoning her by faking her own death and kidnapping her while Syd is pregnant to try and find one of the many Rambaldi artifacts. - Angel: Played straight and then inverted in the final season episode "Lineage". Roger Wyndam-Pryce, Wesley's father. It turns out he intends to steal Angel's free will. Then it turns out he was a robot (which was shot by Wesley before the revelation). - Arrow: - A variation. Dinah Lance saw that Sara was going to join Oliver on the Queen's Gambit and realized she was sleeping with her sister's boyfriend. After some initial attempts to talk her out of it, Dinah let Sara go through with it, effectively allowing her to betray Laurel and betraying Laurel herself through inaction. To make matters worse, she didn't even come clean about when the ship sank and only admitted it years later. - A stronger example would be Moira Queen. Soon after her son, Oliver, returns from being stranded on an island for 5 years after witnessing his father's suicide, Moira has him kidnapped and interrogated to find out if his father, Robert, had revealed any secrets before his death. Unfortunately for Moira, Oliver is now a superhero and is able to escape without revealing anything. - Malcolm Merlyn: - Spends much of the first season fighting both Oliver and his alter ego, the Hood, despite Oliver being his son's best friend since childhood and Malcolm being aware that Oliver is the Hood. - Causes the death of his own son, Tommy, who dies when he's crushed in a building destroyed by Malcolm's Undertaking Earthquake Machine designed to level the entire section of the city in which his wife was murdered. - Drugs Thea, \|\|his illegitimate daughter\|\|, and gets her to \|\|kill Sara Lance\|\| in order to distract \|\|the League of Assassins\|\| who want him dead, knowing that \|\|Sara and Nyssa al'Ghul were lovers\|\| and that this would cause \|\|the League of Assassins\|\| to descend on Star City for revenge. It is a Batman Gambit because Malcolm knows that Oliver will intercede to save his little sister. The only way to settle it is a fight to the death. If Oliver dies, his death settles the blood debt, and Malcolm is no worse off than he began. If Oliver survives and kills \|\|R'as al-Ghul\|\|, Thea's blood debt is cleared and the leader of \|\|the League\|\| that wants revenge on Malcolm is dead and his grudges along with him. - Firefly: Depending on who you ask, this may be present in the form of River and Simon Tam's parents, whose callous disregard for River's plight at the Academy may have been due to foreknowledge of the Mind Rape that the Academy was doing to her. - House of Anubis done by Mr. Sweet- Eddie's father. A bit of dramatic irony, too, as the viewers and the rest of Sibuna knew that Mr. Sweet was a member of Team Evil but nobody told Eddie, and when he found out he was completely devastated. Gets even worse after Mr. Sweet starts proactively manipulating Sibuna to further the plans of his own team— and knowingly hurting Eddie in the process. - Justified: Career criminal Arlo Givens betrays his son US Deputy Marshall Raylan Given several times, including attempting to walk Raylan into an ambush where he would be killed by Cartel hitmen, convincing Raylan on multiple occasions that he and Helen (Raylan's stepmother) are being targeted by criminals only to later be revealed as the aggressor after Raylan uses his official capacity to intervene, and later shooting and killing a highway trooper he mistook for Raylan at a distance. - In Kamen Rider Drive, we get a doozy. \|\|Kiriko and Gou's father, Professor Banno, was one of the creators of this year's villains, the Roidmudes, but it was always assumed that it was a case of A.I. Is a Crapshoot. Nope, Banno is basically Davros; the Roidmudes' current state is his deliberate doing, and the Heart Roidmude, the Big Bad until that point, was horribly abused by him and basically a case of The Dog Bites Back. Banno betrays the SCU and his own children, lets us know he sees even his own children as a means to his dark but as-yet-not-fully-understood ends, and rises to the role of Big Bad. Right now, dealing with him is everyone's main concern, good guys and bad guys alike.\|\| Humans Are the Real Monsters, indeed! - In Lost, Anthony Cooper strikes up a father-son relationship with Locke in order to steal his kidney, then unceremoniously dumps him. - NCIS: - Ziva being kidnapped by hostile terrorists and nearly murdered multiple times can be linked back to her own father. - An episode has a model die during the shooting of a reality TV show on a base, only for Gibbs and Co. discover that the man responsible was her agent who, while not biologically related, had adopted her as a teenager. The woman had begun a relationship with a sergeant and was going to give up modeling to be with him. - In The Red Road, Philip's dad Jack is aloof (when he's not ordering his son to commit crimes for him) and clearly wasn't around while Philip was growing up. It gets worse when Philip finds out that his dad is the reason he was sent to prison before the events of the show. - In Sons of Anarchy, Gemma continually does underhanded things to undermine her son, Jax's, relationship with his girlfriend and eventual wife, Tara. Gemma explicitly says that Tara was Jax's first love, that he was heartbroken the first time they broke up, and that he would do anything for her, making Tara the only person who has a strong enough influence on Jackson to overpower Gemma's own overbearing, manipulative influence on him. Jax loves his mom and is none the wiser to her manipulations. Gemma is so determined to control Jax that she eventually \|\|murders Tara\|\|, a move that emotionally destroys Jackson and leads to him \|\|murdering Gemma in retaliation\|\| before \|\|dying of suicide to atone for all the murders he committed trying to avenge Tara's murder\|\|. - Veronica Mars: Veronica's Mum, who abandons Veronica twice and, the second time she does it, she takes Veronica's college fund for good measure. - Gaia of Greek Mythology did this to three generations' worth of her divine progeny after they pissed her off by empowering the next generation. Her first son Uranus, who was also her first consort, was jealous and fearful of their children, the Titans, and trapped them inside Gaia. A pissed off Gaia forged a huge sickle and gave it to her youngest son Cronus and had him castrate Uranus with it. Cronus eventually turned out to be similar to Uranus and trapped his non-Titanic siblings, the Hechatonchaires and the Cyclopses, inside Gaia since he feared their power. Cronus knew that Gaia would try to turn his own children against him in revenge, so he ate his own children after they were born. A pissed off Gaia conspired with Cronus' wife Rhea to save the last child Zeus and raised him to be a Laser Guided Tyke Bomb against his father. After Zeus and his fellow Olympians eventually prevailed, they stuck the Titans, who refused to surrender to them, in the deepest pits of Tartarus, which upset Gaia since she didn't want her children to suffer such a horrible punishment. A pissed off Gaia then sent various giant monsters such as her youngest and strongest offspring Typhon to overthrow the Olympians. This chain of betrayal ended when Zeus and the Olympians defeated the threats sent by Gaia, proving that they had surpassed her. - Warhammer 40,000: The Emperor (not yet God-) was many things, but a good father was not one of them. Most of the Primarchs who fell did so due to his giving exactly zero consideration to what they wanted: - The one that started it all: Lorgar was the first to view the Emperor as a god, and his Legion took longer than the others to reconquer planets because they kept building temples and proselytizing the natives. The Emperor showed up with Ultramarines in tow, made the Word Bearers watch as they tore down the temples, and finally kneel before them. Little wonder that Lorgar paid attention when he heard about gods that rewarded faith and loyalty, or that he'd end up converting Horus to his cause. - Angron was on the eve of leading a Gladiator Revolt on his home planet when the Emperor showed up. Rather than help him win the day or even, y'know, bring down an Orbital Bombardment or five dozen from his fleet, the Emperor teleported Angron away so as not to lose any time on his grand conquest of the galaxy. The revolt was easily crushed, with Angron's comrades died thinking he'd run away or worse, betrayed them. - Magnus was aware of Horus' treachery before the Emperor was. Unfortunately, he chose to deliver the message by teleporting to Terra using forbidden magics, which destroyed the Webway Gate the Emperor was building. Instead of heeding Magnus' warnings, he declared Magnus the traitor and sicced the Space Wolves on his homeworld Prospero. - Mortarion was raised by a barbarian warlord, one of the few adapted to their homeworld's poisonous atmosphere. Those who could survive the mountain fogs regularly preyed on the regular humans living in the unpolluted areas, Mortarion eventually rebelling against his adoptive father and joining them. When the Emperor arrived, he allowed Mortarion a single chance to carry out his vendetta, intervening when the fog proved too much even for the Primarch. Mortarion later believed the Emperor had become just another tyrant like the man who'd raised him (their views on the Warp being diametrically opposed didn't help matters), joining Horus once he rebelled. - Konrad Curze was essentially The Punisher, Batman and Wolverine rolled into one, brutally murdering those he saw as criminals, in addition to suffering from horrific visions of things to come. This made him susceptible to Chaos corruption and made him even more unstable (though persuaded of the innate righteousness of his actions), culminating in his being assassinated on the Emperor's orders. Your presence does not surprise me, Assassin. I have known of you ever since your craft entered the Eastern Fringes. Why did I not have you killed? Because your mission and the act you are about to commit proves the truth of all I have ever said or done. I merely punished those who had wronged, just as your false Emperor now seeks to punish me. Death is nothing compared to vindication. - BlazBlue. Carl Clover, a young boy who's innocent and cheery, was deeply traumatized when it turns out his father Relius nonchalantly turned his sister Ada into a Nox Nyctores, a mechanical doll known as Nirvana... and it was incomplete, and he just left the incomplete Nirvana for Carl to finish. This event caused Carl to become extremely bitter to both the world and adults in general. Making matters worse, the next time he met Relius, he found out that Relius did the same to Carl's mom, Relius' wife, Ignis, and still with the same nonchalant attitude of For Science!. - Diablo III has \|\|Adria\|\|, in one of the cruelest betrayals of the entire series, \|\|revealing herself to be Diablo's high priestess before using the Black Soulstone, with all seven Great Evils inside, on her own daughter Leah, who she had for the sole purpose of using her as the vessel for Diablo's rebirth as the Prime Evil.\|\| - God of War II features Zeus betraying his son, Kratos out of fear that Kratos would kill him and usurp his throne as ruler of Olympus, taking into evidence Kratos' destructive behavior and scorn towards the gods out of their refusal to erase his nightmares about his slaughtered family. Zeus does this by taking some of Kratos' godly powers and putting them into the colossus of Rhodes, tricking Kratos into giving up his remaining powers to obtain the blade of Olympus, and then wounding and murdering Kratos. Of course, Kratos is healed and swears vengeance on Zeus, setting off a series of events where Kratos personally murders the vast majority of the Olympic gods and Titans over the course of this game and the next. - In Mass Effect, Wrex eventually explains that he was a leader of his people back on his homeworld following the Krogan Rebellions. He was advocating peace so that the Krogan could rebuild, but his father, Jarrod, was a rival warlord pushing for war. Wrex and Jarrod agreed to meet on neutral ground to discuss their differences. Being krogan, though, it could only end one way. Jarrod's troops managed to wipe out Wrex's followers, forcing him to leave the planet both for his own survival and because he was disgusted with his own species' self-destructive nature, but not before Wrex managed to kill his father for the betrayal. - Silent Hill: - In the original Silent Hill, Dahlia Gillespie set her own daughter on fire, but magically kept her alive, to force the girl to use her magic powers for Dahlia's own sinister purposes. This is referenced in Silent Hill 3 and Silent Hill: Origins. - In Silent Hill: Homecoming, \|\|the descendants of the town founders all killed their kids as a sacrifice, except for Alex's parents. They had intended to kill Alex, but complications arose, and Alex's dad went back on his "duty."\|\| - Strongly hinted to be the case in Umineko: When They Cry with \|\|Battler's parents, Rudolf and Kyrie who take the chance when the gold is found and kill everyone except Battler and Eva.\|\| - Harley Quinn (2019): After seemingly reconciling with her parents, it goes straight out the window when it's revealed \|\|that they want to kill Harley for a $1 million bounty.\|\| Harley is so disgusted she doesn't even bother to kill them. - In The Legend of Korra, it turns out that \|\|Hiroshi Sato\|\| is an Equalist. The traditional "We Can Rule Together" spiel is given, but the child violently refuses. \|\|Culminates in an attempt at Offing the Offspring in the finale when Asami claims that Hiroshi doesn't love her late mother anymore since he's too full of hatred. Hiroshi declares that she's beyond "saving" and seriously tries to murder her. Bolin rightly calls Hiroshi a horrible father, and Asami agrees.\|\|	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentalBetrayal
Chute Sabotage - TV Tropes If you want to murder a skydiver, one way to do it is to sabotage their parachute, causing a parachute malfunction. This method has a number of advantages. It is almost invariably fatal, the murderer does not need to be anywhere near the victim at the time of death, and there is a good chance the death will be written off as an accident. In the Real Life, this happens, but only rarely. There are three possibilities for sabotage: either canopy, suspension lines or harness. It must be remembered that all skydiving rigs contain not one, but two, parachutes: main and reserve. Sabotaging a parachute rig so an experienced skydiver won't notice isn't simple. To make it work, you have to sabotage both the main and reserve canopies. Most experienced skydivers are very jealous about their rigs and never let anyone else pack them, and the regulations require them to check the gear before every jump, so once the detectives work out the death was murder, they will start looking for someone with skydiving experience. This gives them a limited circle of suspects, consisting mostly of the victim's friends and associates. Double malfunctions, where both main and reserve canopies fail, are extremely rare, so suspicion of a murder instead of an accident is pretty much imminent. See also Inconvenient Parachute Deployment and Wrong Parachute Gag. Compare and contrast Death Flight. ## Examples: - Detective Comics #435: In "Case of the Dead-On Target!", Private Eye Jason Bard is reenacting a parachute jump to prove how a skydiver could seemingly have been murdered in midair. The real killer is the pilot, who had also packed Jason's chute for the jump and rigged so it would not open. After the other three jumpers had bailed out, the pilot shoves Jason out the door of the plane. Jason survives, if only barely, by holding on to the pilot and dragging him along, and the activating the pilot's chute. - Subverted in the French comic LEffaceur (The Eraser), where the titular hitman gets rid of an entire group of skydivers by flying at a very low altitude instead of sabotaging each individual parachute. - In Curse of the Pink Panther, Dreyfus shoots a parasailing Sleigh out of the sky with a missile from a rocket launcher. - In Drop Zone, Jessie's parachuting friend Selkirk is severely injured after using a faulty parachute that Ty had intended for Jessie to use. - Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare: Freddy Krueger performs an on-the-spot and very unsubtle example at the mid-point of the movie. As his victim descends helplessly from a parachute, he casually and nonchalantly begins cutting the straps to the parachute with his bladed glove. To add insult to injury, after the victim plummets, Freddy appears directly below on the ground, pushing a bed of spikes where he'll land. - Lampshaded in Point Break (1991) as Johnny becomes suspicious, and the surfers swap their rigs with each other while in the jump plane. - In The Skydivers, the jilted Femme Fatale Suzy murders her ex, Harry, by damaging his parachute with acid before a drop. - Played for laughs in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. While visiting Toon Town, Eddie Valiant falls out of a skyscraper and, in mid-fall, runs into Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse, who are both skydiving. Bugs loans Eddie his "spare", which turns out to be a spare tire. - Wild Things 2: Brittney murders \|\|her jerkass stepfather\|\|, whose death she had previously helped fake, by replacing his parachute with newspapers before shoving him out of an aeroplane. - Between Silk & Cyanide. SOE arranges for a German Double Agent to parachute into Germany, ostensibly to establish a sabotage ring, but in actually his parachute has been sabotaged so he'll be killed and the details of the operation discovered on his body. The idea is to make the Gestapo think there's an active sabotage ring already operating in Germany. Leo Marks is stuck with the job of briefing the man in codework knowing he'll never use it because he's being set up for the chop. - Doc Savage: At the end of The Laugh of Death, the Big Bad tries to escape a fight on an airplane by jumping out with a parachute on his back. Doc's assistant Monk plunges a knife into the parachute pack as the villain is jumping, then innocently notes that the man's parachute didn't open. - Jaine Austen Mysteries: In Death of a Bachelorette, which takes place on a "Bachelor" knockoff, the book's victim, contestant Hope Harper, is on a skydiving date with the show's bachelor, Spencer Dalworth VII. His chute opens up in spite of his raging incompetence. Hope's, not so much. - In an Alistair MacLean thriller a hijacker avoids this trope by requesting an aircraft and parachutes for both himself and the crew, with the selection of who uses which chute to be made at random. - The Brokenwood Mysteries: Mike's birthday party in the park is cut short when a skydiver dies on impact nearby. The detectives discover that his chute was tampered with in such a way that it would pass inspection, but fail when he actually tried to deploy it. - In the "Free Fall" episode of Bull, the governor takes his closest advisors on a skydiving trip. Both his main and reserve chute fail to open. The instructor realizes what is going on and dives after him trying to grab him and use his own chute to bring them both to the ground safely. He runs out of time and both men die. The governor's wife then sues the skydiving company for negligence. Bull's team is trying to show that the governor's chute might have been sabotaged as that would mean the the skydiving company was not liable for the death. - Cannon: When Cannon finds an unused sabotaged parachute in a wrecked plane in "Country Blues", it starts him down the track to the solution: that someone was trying to kill the pilot, not the passenger. - The Coroner: In "The Drop Zone", the chief instructor, Rafe, of a sky diving school falls to his death when his main and reserve parachute fail to open. The parachutes having being tampered with leads to suspicion of murder by one of his colleagues and when Jane receives a medical report that he had a terminal illness suicide becomes another possibility. - CSI: - In "The Descent of Man", the near-death of a skydiver whose parachute was sabotaged turns out to be connected with the deaths of two men who were killed from the sky. \|\|The skydiver actually sabotaged his own chute in an attempt to commit suicide out of guilt over his involvement in the two murders. It doesn't work.\|\| - In "Angle of Attack", the reserve chute on a pilot's wing suit is disabled before he is sent flying to his death. \|\|Except he was already dead The sabotaged wing suit is an attempt to disguise the cause of death.\|\| - CSI: Miami: In "Terminal Velocity", the investigation into the death of a skydiver who had his control lines dissolved with acid uncovers a multitude of suspects when the team finds out he was a regular sperm donor. \|\|The killer is his wife, who found out he had a vasectomy after they got married and was incensed that, despite him being a sperm donor, he had no intention of having any children with her.\|\| - In the Elementary fifth season episode Bang Bang Shoot Chute the Victim of the Week, a BASE jumper, is discovered to have been killed by two separate murderers, one of whom sabotaged his chute before the other, not aware, shot him as he fell. - In the "They Fought in the Fields" episode of Foyle's War a German airman is found dead because his chute failed to open. Later events in the episode reveal that he grabbed the parachute intended for the plane's radar operator, which had been sabotaged so as to preserve the secrecy of German radar systems. - Harrow: In "Audere Est Facere" ("To Dare Is to Do"), the Victim of the Week is a BASE jumper killed when the murderer switches the line for his pilot chute from the left to the right side of his pack, so he cannot find it after he jumps off the building. - On Hollyoaks, Psycho Lesbian Lydia cuts Zoe's parachute so she can have Sarah to herself. However, the chutes become mixed up. Sarah falls to her death with the faulty parachute. Lydia frames Zoe but is eventually convicted. - The Mentalist: In "Carnelian Inc.", an anonymous campaign against a big corporation begins with the threat of a murder at a specific time and place. CBI is waiting at the location when a corporate executive from Carnelian Inc. on a corporate retreat plunges from the sky; the canopy lines on his parachute cut. - Motive: In "Pitfall", the Victim of the Week is murdered when the killer swaps out his parachute for one that has the lines on both the main and reserve canopies cut. - NCIS: In "Hung Out to Dry", a Marine dies during a training jump. The investigation reveals that his shroud lines had been coated with an acidic cleaning agent, causing the fibres to disintegrate. The pull ring on his reserve was soldered so that it wouldn't open. - The Professionals. In "First Night", a gang of kidnappers include in the ransom demand an RAF aircraft out of the country equipped with a dozen parachutes, with the RAF crew made to jump first as insurance against this trope. - The first mission in Hitman 3 allows you to cut off the parachutes that your targets use as a secondary evacuation measure, be it sabotaging the parachute bags with a knife when it still in its safe or shooting it with a sniper rifle when your targets are descending down. - Neopets "Cooty Wars": clicking on the canopy of the parachute disposes of any Cooty paratrooper that appears. - Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe allows you to shoot down the chutes of enemy pilots after you destroy their planes. It's not helpful, but it's funny. - Looney Tunes: In Duck Amuck, when the unseen animator makes Daffy's plane crash into a newly drawn mountain, Daffy deploys his parachute. Then the animator erases that and replaces it with an anvil. - In a real life example, a Belgian woman named Els Clottemans was convicted of murder in 2010 for killing a romantic rival by cutting her parachutes' suspension lines (the cords which connect the canopy to risers). She got 30 years' prison sentence on basis of mental illness. - Happened in the US military in 2003 — a Marine was sentenced to twenty years after being caught sabotaging his service mates' parachutes and attempting to frame another innocent Marine. See the article. - In 2018, a British soldier was convicted of trying to kill his wife by sabotaging her parachutes. - Note that strafing a bailed-out combat aviator while under parachute - or strafing his canopy so he plummets to his death - is a genuine War Crime. The rationale is that he is totally helpless and cannot possibly take any offensive action in his current state; this is why the same laws do not apply to paratroopers, for whom parachuting is part of their method of attack.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParaSabotage
Parasol of Pain - TV Tropes "The Undercover Brella looks like a normal umbrella, but that's just to throw people off. It's actually made for clandestine face-splatting!" A good fighter can take anything and be able to use it as a weapon. Swords, guns, boomerangs, chainsaws, and even... an umbrella? Yes, despite their standard use as protectors from rain, snow, and sunlight, a parasol can be a deadly weapon in the hands of any fictional character, if used the right way. In this case, they're mainly used for clubbing people to death, but some varieties of umbrellas can shoot things - from bullets to gas to laser beams. Don't be fooled if you see an old lady wielding an umbrella. Get on her bad side, and she'll whack you good! The carrier isn't Always Female, though: another likely candidate is a Quintessential British Gentleman, given that the umbrella-and-bowler-hat combo was for many years the unofficial uniform of a British businessman. It's a pretty versatile "weapon", too. For starters, you've got a long stick with a hard spike at one end and (depending on design) a crook at the other. Opening the parasol often lets it serve as a shield against attacks (some works get around the impracticality of this by Handwaving that it's somehow reinforced). It can even, in a pinch, serve as a parachute. Running Razor Floss along the rim of the canopy turns the parasol into a razor-edged shield. And if all else fails, you can always just hide a sword in it. Compare Silk Hiding Steel, Kicking Ass in All Her Finery. Contrast Parasol of Prettiness, though in the hands of a Girly Bruiser, there is plenty of room for overlap. ## Examples - Batman villain The Penguin has a famous arsenal of deadly umbrellas which he uses to commit crimes. - In his first appearance, he toted around three varieties: one that shot bullets, one that shot "paralyzing gas", and one that shot Hollywood Acid. Since then, he's used umbrellas that functioned as helicopters, jetpacks, stun guns, missile launchers... - The graphic novel Penguin Triumphant shows that Penguin's usage of these dates back to childhood when he used the sharpened tip of an umbrella to cut a bully's face. Thirty years later, said bully still bears the scar on his cheek. - At least one origin story is that his fussy mother insisted on him carry an umbrella everywhere, regardless of where he was going or what the weather was like. He was bullied for this, possibly inspiring him to ultimately use it as a weapon against said bullies. - In The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones #20, Marcus uses his umbrella to knock out the crook who is attempting to run Indy down with a forklift. - Percival Pinkerton, a member of Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, is fond of carrying an umbrella to the field. - Spider-Man: - Turner D. Century had a flamethrower umbrella. - And White Rabbit one that shot carrots. Deadly carrots. - Subverted in the Don Rosa story The Three Caballeros Ride Again, in which it turns out that José Carioca's umbrella is no match for an actual machete. - In The Steam Engines of Oz, Cool Old Lady Candace drives off the kalidah (a creature with a body like a bear, a head like a tiger, and claws long and sharp enough to tear a lion in two) that is sniffing at the box where Victoria, Phadrig and Gromit are hiding by whacking it repeatedly with her umbrella. - In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment in WALLE, a robotic umbrella opens up and blocks the stasis lasers fired by the security robots. - Amelia Peabody Emerson, from the series of books by Elizabeth Peters, has made an art out of using her parasol in battle, to the point that some superstitious 19th-century Egyptians believe it to be a magical weapon. By the time she's in her 50s, Amelia actually has custom parasols made with extra-strong shafts so they aren't destroyed by the damage she deals with them, and at least one is built along the lines of a sword cane—this latter is a special present from her husband, which delights her even though she doesn't actually know how to fence. Not that that stops her. Very little stops Amelia. - Arcadia Snips and the Steamwork Consortium: Umbrella belonging to one of main protagonists is specifically made very sturdy. It has been used as a shield against fire, bullets, and grenades. Also due to the weight of all functions and components, it can deliver a good whack. Doubles as Parasol Parachute (intended function). - In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a furious Mrs Gloop points her umbrella at Mr Wonka, as if she is about to run him through. - Discworld: The Agony Aunts, the enforcers for the Ankh-Morpork Seamstresses' Guild, can do terrifying things with a parrot-head-handled umbrella to unruly customers (or anyone else who threatens the "working women" under their watch). - Elemental Masters has Nan and Sarah, who had parasols specifically made for combat since a woman can't openly carry weapons in Edwardian era London. In a Shout-Out to Amelia Peabody, they apparently got the idea from a woman in Egypt. - A character in The Facts of Death is killed by getting stung with a poisoned umbrella. The real-life assassination of Georgi Markov (see below) is immediately brought up during the investigation. - Hagrid from Harry Potter keeps his broken wand inside his pink umbrella. He's not allowed to cast big spells with it, since he isn't a full-blown wizard as he didn't finish Hogwarts. - Aw, look at Jessamine's parasol in The Infernal Devices! It's so pretty and pink and it even has flowers on it...and the edges are laced with electrum. Ouch. - The eponymous character of Jane, Unlimited makes umbrellas as a hobby, and at the beginning decides to make a self-defense umbrella. In the five stories that follow (all based around a single choice she made in the prologue), she sometimes stays with that idea and sometimes makes something else, although she never gets to use it in combat. - In The Lord of the Rings, elderly hobbit Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is jailed after wielding her umbrella against a bunch of thugs twice her size. - In The Parasol Protectorate series, one of these is Alexia \|\|Maccon nee \|\|Tarabotti's weapon of choice. It has all sorts of surprises built into it. \|\|She eventually bequeaths it to her daughter Prudence in the sequel series The Custard Protocol\|\| - Alexia actually goes through three versions. The first is weighted with brass shot and tipped with silver in case of werewolf attacks, \|\|the second contains a number of hidden features such as numbing darts, acid mist, and a magnetic disruptor, and the third adds a grappling hook to the mix while retaining all the functions of the previous version.\|\| - In Brian Daley's Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds and its sequels, a well-equipped "breakabout" (spacer) will often carry a "gamp" or "brolly" that can double-in-brass as a weapon, emergency shelter, and other things. - One of the Southern Sisters Mysteries opens with the eponymous sisters getting arrested because Mary Alice hit a bank president over the head with Patricia Anne's umbrella. - In Stephen King's novel The Tommyknockers, Jim Gardener gets into an argument with a guy at a party about the safety of nuclear power. Eventually, it deteriorates into Gardener beating the guy up with an umbrella. He notes to himself that this is the only part people will remember. - In the Lemon Demon song "Samuel and Rosella", the eponymous character, annoyed by a young person in Hot Topic, "didn't like the way he dressed, so they closed their umbrella and they rammed it through his chest." - The Adventure Zone: Taako has an umbrella (an Umbra-Staff) which, in addition to giving him spellcasting bonuses, can also eat the magical artifacts of any magic-user he defeats and steal their power. \|\|It used to belong to his sister Lup, whose soul became trapped inside the umbrella for over a decade until Taako broke it during the Story and Song-finale.\|\| - Dario from the Cool Kids Table game Here We Gooooo! wields a parasol that he grabbed from his mom as he left to go on his adventure. - A tradition of British wrestling back in the '60s and '70s was the front row being full of grannies who'd smack and poke and Heel that came their way - In Progress Wrestling, there's Marty Scurll who uses this as his weapon of choice. He brings one to the ring and if he's having trouble winning the match cleanly, he will resort to hitting his opponent with it. - Jack Gallagher, another Brit and Progress alum, keeps his trusty umbrella William III by his side in the Cruiserweight Division. He has even used it against Chris Jericho in the 2017 Royal Rumble. - Exalted has Princess Magnificent with Lips of Coral and Robes of Black Feathers, one of the Deathlords. Her weapon of choice is the Umbrella of Discord, a dreadful thing stitched together from the flesh and bone of five Solars killed in the First Age. - GURPS Steam-Tech has the Defensible Brolly, a woman's umbrella which, at the touch of a button, flattens its canopy into a shield and produces a spearhead from the centre, enabling her to fend off an attacker. - Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, see entry in Literature section above, is a hero character in The Lord of the Rings wargame by Games Workshop, armed with an umbrella. However, she has a special "Umbrella is not mightier than Sword" rule, which negates any wounds she could have inflicted. - In Munchkin Cthulhu, one of the classes is Monster Whacker, and one of the illustrations for it is a woman beating up a small monster with her umbrella. - In the New World of Darkness Core Rulebook, there is a piece of fluff where a character fights off an attacker with an umbrella (and stabs him in the eye for his trouble). - In the play The Turn of the Worm, two teenage thieves break into an apartment where two old ladies live. Pina, the feistier of the old ladies, stabs the male thief in the foot with an umbrella (it was revealed earlier in the show that she sharpens the point specifically for this purpose). - There are enemies in Maximum Carnage who use umbrellas as both weapons and shields. - Lan uses a high-tech parasol defensively in Mega Man Battle Network 3, to block a brainwashing beam. - The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom: P.B. Winterbottom's umbrella. - In the Speccy game Mystery of the Nile, one of the player characters uses an umbrella as a One-Hit Kill weapon. - In No One Lives Forever, chemically tipped umbrellas are used for terrorist attacks. - Rosalyn from Okage: Shadow King is an interesting variant. She only uses a parasol to disguise her curse - she \|\|casts a pink shadow when hit by direct light\|\|. She actually attacks with a sword. She does, however, use it to cast magic. - Kagura in Onmyōji who happens to share voice actor with another umbrella-wielding Kagura - There are also Youkai with the body of a human and the head of an umbrella. - Oriental Legend have Chang 'er, the Goddess of the Moon, as a playable character, who kicks all kind of ass using her trusty umbrella. - This, and drops of water picked up with it, was your weapon in Parasol Stars. - Phantasy Star Online had two types of parasols, both usable only by women. They're among the best melee weapons for the non-melee classes. - Phantasy Star Online 2 has more parasol variants which can act as swords, rods, or gunslashes, on top of now being usable by characters of all genders. - In Level 2 of the Pinocchio Licensed Game, Jiminy Cricket can use his parasol to attack enemies. - In Puyo Puyo Tetris, Ess carries around a parasol that matches her green color scheme. She's seen using it to attack in her animations during puyo/Tetris battles. - Radiata Stories has one of these as a unique weapon. It has a base damage of 1. - Adorably Precocious Child Shizumaru Hisame from Samurai Shodown. He does have a concealed sword, but the umbrella is his primary weapon. - Okuni from Samurai Warriors uses a parasol as her weapon of choice, and has been using it for every appearance of hers. - The elegant Kitsune Kiyoko Nanabi from fighting game Schwarzerblitz uses her umbrella as a weapon. - The thunderstorm umbrella from Secret Agent Clank is an umbrella that shoots lightning - Azai Nagamasa's joke weapon from Sengoku Basara 2. - Yagyuu and Mirai from Senran Kagura both use umbrellas as weapons in different ways. Yagyuu uses an oilpaper umbrella that can sprout out blades where as Mirai uses a Gothic Lolita-style umbrella that has a machine gun attached to it. - In Siren, the character Risa Onda can get an umbrella as her weapon. It deals the lowest amount of damage compared to other melee weapons, but is surprisingly efficient enough to take out the Spider Shibito one-by-one with practice, and can even be used to take out \|\|an incredibly dangerous Mina Onda\|\| if the right steps are taken. An umbrella can also be used as a weapon in Siren 2, but is notably weaker in power to the point where it barely cause the standard Shibito to flinch from the attack. - Parasoul in Skullgirls uses a western-style umbrella that is also a Living Weapon as her main fighting tool. Her sister, Umbrella, who is slated for DLC, also uses her own umbrella as a weapon. - Setsuka from Soul Calibur III, as a Lady Snowblood Expy, keeps a short sword concealed in her umbrella. Her fighting style is battajutsu, the art of rapidly drawing, attacking with, and then sheathing the sword. Of course, she has at least one or two attacks that have her smacking her opponent with the umbrella itself. - The Arsenic Candy gang in Spider-Man 3 use umbrellas as one of their primary weapons. - Splatoon 2 introduces the Brellas, an entire weapon class. They shoot ink from their ferrules, and when opened, serve as a protective shield against enemy attacks. Brellas can also launch their canopies as stronger attacks, though they leave the user defenseless for some time. - Josephine from Suikoden V. - Princess Peach has one as an item in Super Mario RPG and Super Princess Peach. - Tales of Zestiria has Edna as the first in the Tales series to use one and she uses it for firing magic attacks. And poking "Meebo" for her amusement. Her case is justified too; though she's a powerful Earth Seraph, she's too small to really pull off massive feats of strength like other Earth Seraph without extreme pain afterwards so has to deal with a lighter weapon. And, in regards to Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, Water is weak to Earth and an umbrella, as a Water-elemental weapon, makes it easier for Edna to channel her magic. - In the Tarzan Licensed Game for the PlayStation and Nintendo 64, during the seventh level, "The Baboon Chase", Jane can use her parasol as a shield to protect her from any baboons approaching her from the front as she rides on Tarzan's back. - The Civilian in the original Team Fortress. Later reused for the famous They Hunger Half-Life mod. - In They Hunger, the first weapon you pick up is an umbrella. It is still powerful, capable of breaking many much harder objects found in the game. - In the RPG/dating sim Thousand Arms one of the recurring boss fights is Bandiger, a lanky man in a white disco suit who uses an umbrella for a weapon, and his magic. He is actually far more powerful than the rest of the bad guys you fight through the game, and way more annoying. - The Neotokyo intro cutscene in TimeSplitters 2 has Ghost using one to protect himself from Sadako's Gang (who had Wolverine Claws). - In the Touhou Project series, a few characters have parasols or umbrellas as part of their outfit, and two of the most powerful qualify here: - When processed, Sybil Reisz from Transistor wields the parasol that she was frequently seen with as the social coordinator of Cloudbank. As a boss, she folds it up and uses it like a rapier; making consecutive long-ranged and high-speed slashes at Red. Interestingly, a similar (if not identical) parasol can be found planted in the ground inside the backdoor, leading some fans to speculate that Sybil may have been using the Sandbox as her own personal space. - Inui from Umblade Senki wields a red umbrella. He can attack and glide with it, yes, but most importantly, once it is open, it blocks stuff. Any stuff. Bullets, spikes, bombs, giant dinosaur feet, massive explosions and lasers, and even atmosphere friction! - Lilka from Wild ARMs 2 uses umbrellas as her equippable weapon. She attacks by thrusting it into the enemy and opening it, and also swings it around when casting magic. She also poses with it in her Victory Pose. - Umbrellas are available weapons in the Yakuza games and can be used to attack enemies, alongside having their own unique heat actions. - A notable use of an umbrella as a weapon in a cutscene was Majima's debut in Yakuza/Kiwami where he uses it to discipline a yakuza mook that picked a fight with Kiryu. As Majima is about to seriously harm him by using the end tip to stab the poor bastard, Kiryu stops Majima before he could seriously harm the poor mook. - Being the playable deuteragonist of Yakuza 0, Majima has a special heat move when it comes to using an umbrella, which is called "Essence of Umbrella Onslaught". - Yakuza: Like a Dragon: Nanba's default weapon is an umbrella. - In Little Busters!, one of Mio's unique weapons is her Parasol of Prettiness. It's pretty useless in battle, though, and in a fighting system where all the weapons are improvised and other weapons include things like bars of soap, origami, and eel pie, that's saying something. - In Yumina the Ethereal, Kirara's weapon is one of these. - Aerynn from Electric Wonderland gives a laser-shooting umbrella to Shroomy after Shroomy realizes her boyfriend Parker didn't give her anything for Christmas. - In Homestuck, John obtains the umbrellakind strife specibus and alchemizes the Barber's Best Friend, an umbrella made of razors. He never uses either, though, in favour of hammers. - In The Phoenix Requiem when Anya and Jonas visit the city, they meet the sister of the man who shot Jonas. She is rather unhappy about him being alive and attacks him with his umbrella. Not that it would be a deadly weapon, but she just went mad and started hitting him with whatever she had in her hand. - Hon Akraptor from Tower of God uses an umbrella that can fire and shield against Shinsu. And he uses it to pierce hands, too. - Manly Guys Doing Manly Things has Ace carrying an umbrella on a clear day for "stylish combat dramatics". It fits his characterization as a Quintessential British Gentleman-esque action hero. - "Classic" umbrellas (cane-like, non-telescopic) are perfectly able to turn into vicious stabbing weapons due to the 5-inch metal spike on top, which is naturally sharp and can be further sharpened if needed. A military man trained in bayonet combat also knows how to hold it with both hands to avoid bending the shaft, and hook-handle umbrellas are also extremely useful for striking or tripping opponents. Moreover, in many jurisdictions, it is illegal to carry knives with blades longer than 3 inches, but you can carry an umbrella almost anywhere and still be seen as unarmed by most people, including law enforcement. - The use of the Western umbrella became an integral part of the Hung Gar kung fu, when Doctor Wong Fei-hung saw their prevalence as China became increasingly westernized in the latter part of the 19th century. It also became the weapon of choice that came to define Wong Fei Hung in cinema, notably those in which he is portrayed by Jet Li. - The Wong Fei-Hung film (starring Chin Kar-lok as Wong), Great Hero of China have another umbrella fight scene, where Wong is attacked by an Elite Mook squadron of fighters armed with metal parasols with blades extending from their sides. Wong himself has a regular umbrella, and yet he defeats his enemies as usual. - The style of Bartitsu utilizes walking sticks and, yes, umbrellas. Pierre Vigny, a particularly renowned practitioner of one such technique, once (by his own account) fought off several Apaches (Parisian street gangsters, not Native Americans) with a light umbrella. This now somewhat forgotten martial art may be responsible for many of the examples listed here. - Mestre Bimba and Mestre Pastinha, the two greatest masters of Capoeira, were known to be skilled umbrella fighters. Both of them carried umbrellas everywhere regardless of the weather, and the former's contained a hidden blade. Another master, Mestre Onça-Tigre, gave a famous exhibition about how to defend a knife attack with an umbrella. - In another example of bizarre Truth in Television, people have actually made umbrellas designed to fight. A company called "Unbreakable Umbrella" makes and sells umbrellas that have strong shafts and frames and are built to be used like a baton, and the Philippine Secret Service has used combat umbrellas that can split watermelons. Also, when firepower is needed, you have this gun/sword/umbrella. - The Umbrella Murder: On September 10, 1978, the London-based Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov died of ricin poisoning. It was later determined that he had been killed by a poison capsule that was injected into his leg by the tip of an umbrella, most probably the work of the Bulgarian Secret Service. Any fictional Conspicuously Public Assassination using this trope is likely inspired by this incident. - As with nearly everything else, the MythBusters have covered this one. - During the Battle of Arnhem, British paratrooper Major Allison Digby Tatham-Warter armed himself with a pistol in one hand and his signature combat umbrella in the other. Devised as a way to mark himself as an Englishman due to his chronic inability to remember passwords, the umbrella came in handy for more military purposes when he used it to disable a German armoured car by thrusting the rolled-up umbrella through an observation slit and incapacitating the driver. - Britney Spears allegedly beat some paparazzi with an umbrella. - Prinz Ernst August von Hannover did attack a newspaper reporter with an umbrella. A computer game was even made based on this incident and what led to it.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParasolOfPain
Parental Fashion Veto - TV Tropes "Don't step out of this house if that's the clothes you're gonna wear!" No child of mine is Describing Parental Fashion Veto Here in a shirt like that! A kid, often a Bratty Teenage Daughter, wants to go out with her friends, out on a date, or out to a party, but the way she's dressed does not please her guardians, usually a Boyfriend-Blocking Dad and/or an old-fashioned mom. This may be due to the outfit being overly sexy, or the parent may simply disapprove of the style. In The '90s and early 2000s, bare midriffs was a common cause for this, the style being a visual shorthand for "rebellious teenage girl". This may also extend to makeup and hair. What happens can vary. Often the kid will obey but in a huge huff. Other times a fight will break out, and might even cause enough bitter feelings to make the Conflict for the episode. Sometimes the kid will try to outsmart the parent by smuggling the offending outfit out of the house, either hidden under clothes they know will meet with parental approval or carried in a bag. The kid then changes clothes once they are safely away from their parents' disapproving gaze. However, this is likely to end with the kid suffering a mishap which results in the parent finding out they wore the forbidden clothes. Compare Age-Inappropriate Dress, I Want My Beloved to Be Fashionable, Underdressed for the Occasion. This trope is central to the "parents won't allow pierced ears" version of the Ear-Piercing Plot. Contrast No Dress Code, which implies a distinct lack of parental fashion veto. # Examples: - Pokémon Adventures: Taken to abusive extremes by Lillie's mother Lusamine, who forced her daughter to dress how she wanted and would often mock her appearance. This emotional abuse is extreme enough that Lillie developed PTSD-like symptoms and gets triggered when her appearance is complimented. - Archie Comics: There are several pages of Betty and Veronica (often Veronica with a dash of Ms. Red Ink) wearing clothing that their fathers object to them wearing due to making their daughters look like the Ms. Fanservice types they are. - The Boys: During The Name of the Game, Butcher has a meeting with Mother's Milk. MM objects strongly to the outfit his daughter's wearing. She ignores him and Butcher chews her out over disrespecting her father, terrifying the two 'gangstas' she was hanging out with in the process. Note that this is somewhat more justified in that his daughter \|\|looks to be almost 20 but is actually 12\|\| due to the Compound V in her body. - Doom Patrol: A flashback in the tenth issue of John Byrne's run as Nudge's father scold his daughter for attempting to go out wearing fishnets. - MAD: One strip had a father passive-aggressively berating his teenage daughter for wearing a tube top. Daughter: Is it okay if I wear this to school? Father: Sure, if you want to look like a tart! Daughter: What's a tart? Father: A tramp, like your mother. A loose woman who flaunts her goodies for every plumber and pool boy who comes around! Daughter: So, is that a yes? Father: Sure, it's a free country. - Calvin and Hobbes: Several strips involve Calvin's mom disagreeing with Calvin's style choices: - In one strip, Calvin's clothes gain sentience and force themselves on him, leading to him trying to leave in the horribly mismatched outfit. Calvin's mom says "You're wearing that?" and is implied to make him change. - Another strip involves Calvin trying on Triangle Shades, only for his mom to refuse to buy them. - In one strip, Calvin decides to invert his pants and shirt when headed to school, but his mom has none of it. - The Far Side: - In one cartoon, a fly leaves for a date, with her father telling her to remove some of that makeup and the gallon of pheromones. - Another strip has a calf wearing a leather jacket - his parents tell their guests just to ignore him, as he's just going for the shock value. - Stone Soup: While it's not unusual for Holly to favor pieces that are both high-priced and slutty, in one strip she managed to outdo even herself in such a way that her mother Val finally laid down the law: "NO DAUGHTER OF MINE IS GOING OUT LOOKING LIKE THAT!!!" - Some DeviantArt pictures spoof this by having Darth Vader from Star Wars get upset at Leia's bikini: - The Black Sheep Dog Series: Walburga Black is outraged to see her eldest son dressing as a Muggle — worse, a penniless Muggle. She throws his entire wardrobe out to replace them with "proper" — read aristocratic — clothes, to Sirius' big displeasure. - The first chapter of A Day in the Life sees Professor Utonium veto a bright pink bikini that Blossom wants to wear, with Buttercup offering snarky commentary and Bubbles trying to find a middle ground between the two. During the ensuing argument, he accidentally reveals that she's actually the youngest of the three Powerpuff Girls, much to her and her sisters' shock. - Superman/Batman: Apocalypse: While he's her cousin rather than her actual dad, Clark Kent takes on this role when Kara Zor-El arrives on Earth. When they go shopping together, she tries on a very revealing outfit which he quickly disapproves of. She decides it's perfect. - In Turning Red, this is played with. Ming says "Youre not going out like that, are you?" but what she's referring to is not Mei's clothes but her Little Bit Beastly appearance. - Apollo 13: The Lovells' teenaged daughter wants to go trick or treating dressed like a hippie despite her mother's disapproval. She tries to appeal to her dad instead which doesn't work. Barbara: Dad, can I wear this? Jim: (mild glance) Yeah, sure. Marilyn: Jim... Jim: No! No, absolutely not! Barbara: (walking away, groaning) This stinks! - Bridget Jones' Diary has a scene where Bridget shows the modern and urban outfit she'll wear to meet Mark Darcy, her eccentric and critical mother pronounces it inadequate for obtaining a man and makes her wear a brocade skirt and vest ensemble with a red pussy bow blouse (not impressive), later (in the original script) Bridget opts to wear a sexy and black dress to the consternation of her mother. - The Cheerleaders (1974 softcore comedy film): Jeanne, a new cheerleader, is going to a party dressed in a very tight shirt and shorts she wore when she was 10 years old. Her father doesn't let her go. Her new cheerleader friends explain that you have to sneak out in more conservative garb and then change. - Clueless: Cher is about to head to a party (on a date with Christian) when Josh asks her dad if he's going to let her go out in what she's wearing, a white mini-dress. Cher's father asks her if that's what they're calling dresses these days, tells her it looks more like underwear, and makes her put something on on top. She puts on a transparent wrap. - E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (bowdlerization taken from its 20th Anniversary Edition): "You're not going out dressed like that! You look like a hippie!" - A Kid Like Jake is about a four-year-old boy who likes wearing skirts and other girl's clothes. His parents allow him to dress up at home or at school, but they don't allow him to wear what he wants in the streets. Jake has a fit when his parents won't let him dress up as Rapunzel from Tangled for Halloween. At the end of the film, \|\|his parents finally allow Jake to wear skirts outdoors\|\|. - The Snapper: The second-eldest daughter Lisa, who's presumed to be 13 or 14, wears a Madonna-like short skirt and jewelry and leather boots much to the patriarch's dismay. - The Spy Next Door: Farren wants to go out wearing clothes that are wholly inappropriate for a 13-year-old. In one scene, Gillian has to make her change twice. In another, Bob vetoes Farren's outfit over the newly-installed intercom. - 1-800-Where-R-U: Jess's mother tries to enforce this in the first book when Jess wants to go to school in a pair of jeans that expose her knees (she'd originally planned to wear a top that would expose the upper part of her chest, but decided against it since she's acquired a star-shaped scar right there and doesn't want anyone seeing it), calling them "slut jeans". Her father, on the other hand, sees nothing wrong with them and lets her go out without any issue. - The Berenstain Bears: In the Big Chapter Book And the Dress Code, Sister Bear starts wearing "rad clothes" (in her case, jeans with holes in the knees), the new spring fashions, but only at school (she stops at Babs Bruno's house and changes into and out of them on the way to and from school) because Papa, who doesn't approve of them, wouldn't allow her to do so otherwise. - Colin Fischer: In seventh grade, Melissa Greer used to show up for school in dark trousers or long skirts, go into the girls' room, and come out in ripped jeans or a miniskirt. - Love Anthony: Thirteen-year-old Sophie tries to wear makeup to the family photo session, but Beth wipes it off before they leave the house. - Can You See Me?: In Ways to Be Me, Tally persuades Mum to buy her a crop top if she promises not to wear it in public. In fact, she wants to wear it to a laser tag party because her friends will all be wearing similar tops, but Mum makes her wear a T-shirt instead. When she arrives, she sees that Layla's mum also made her wear a T-shirt. - In Orange Clouds, Blue Sky, Skye wears a short denim skirt that she has to secretly change into at a Burger King. She regrets it when Starr hits her at a bookstore, causing her to fall into a bookshelf and her skirt to ride up. Later, she gets chewed out by both her parents for wearing it. - In Carpe Jugulum Countess Magpyr feels this way about the younger "reverse-Goth" vampires, commenting that Lady Strigouli should be making "Wendy" (Hieroglyphica) wear more eyeshadow. - "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)" by Beastie Boys: "Don't step out of this house if that's the clothes you're gonna wear". - Alter Ego (1986): It is possible to object to an especially stupid fashion involving scotch tape worn by your children. - Mother 3: At the beginning, Hinawa orders Lucas to change into his clothes before going outside to play with his brother. - Pokémon Sun and Moon and Pokémon Ultra Sun and Moon: Played for Drama. Eleven-year-old Lillie has always been forced to dress how her mother wants. A part of her Character Development is escaping her mother's abusive grip and beginning to dress how she pleases (which Lillie dubs her "z-powered" form). - My Two First Loves: On the first day of school, the protagonist plans to wear an off-the-shoulder crop top and a tight miniskirt. Her dad makes her change, but she can sneak it out as a diamond option.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentalFashionVeto
Parasol of Prettiness - TV Tropes Any time a lady carries a parasol as a sign of high-class grace and femininity, and sometimes as a sign of demureness and innocence. The parasol has been used in cultures all over the world for at least 2,000 years, from Egypt to Greece to China, before making its way to Europe and the United States in the 18th century. This trope basically kicked in during the 19th century, when it was almost always proper for a well-to-do lady to carry one to keep from getting sunburns on her delicate skin, whereas poor women had to grub in the fields. Now that having a suntan isn't seen as so gauche anymore, it's just symbolic of the lady having aforementioned traits. Plus, it just looks...well, pretty. Bonus points if she is also wearing a white, lacy dress, and even more points if she is on an Old-Fashioned Rowboat Date. Of course, this means the trope is prevalent in The Gay '90s and Southern Belles. Also of course, this can set off Real Women Don't Wear Dresses. It can overlap with Parasol Parachute, Parasol of Pain, Kicking Ass in All Her Finery. Compare Umbrella of Togetherness, High-Class Gloves, High-Class Fan, Southern Belle, The Ingenue, Elegant Gothic Lolita. ## Examples: - In Doki Doki! PreCure, Alice is never seen without a ruffly parasol, indicating her femininity, gentleness, and wealth. - Maruga, the white dragon Empress from Dragon Crisis! almost always walks around with a parasol, sometimes even at night. - Juvia of Fairy Tail used to carry a parasol during the Phantom Lord arc, due to her being the bringer of bad weather. - K has a Rare Male Example in Yashiro "Shiro" Isana, who is never seen without his pretty red parasol. Which he later on starts using as a variation of a Parasol of Pain in regards to channelling his power in it to block attacks - but ''only'' to block. - Momo the Lolita from Kamikaze Girls is always twirling a parasol that matches her elaborate outfits. - In Kill la Kill the "royal couturier", Nui Harime (a cutesy psychopath of immense strength and foil to the lead character Ryuko Motoi) first enters the narrative sporting a lacey parasol accompanying her generally high-fashion-meets-frills attire. However, she soon ditches the parasol to reveal \|\|Nui prefers to sport half of a massive pair of scissors as a weapon, proof that she is the killer of Ryuko's father that the protagonist has been seeking\|\|, although she is still frequently seen with the parasol later, particularly when effortlessly dodging a hail of attacks, which the stylized animation of the show often represents by showing her and the parasol as a Paper Person rotating along the vertical axis. - Tot's parasol in Knight Hunters is both of prettiness and of pain, being a lacy and frilly one with a hidden blade. - Evangeline of Negima! Magister Negi Magi sometimes uses this to complement her Elegant Gothic Lolita attire. - Miss Valentine of One Piece. Thanks to her weight-changing powers, it doubles as a Parasol Parachute. Perona has a parasol as well. - Osomatsu-san: In the first episode, Todomatsu, the girliest of the boys, shows up holding a pink parasol. It's also one of the reasons he's the trope picture for the potholed "girliest" (Yes, it's actually him). - Quon from RahXephon carries a prettied up parasol on occasion. - Ranma ½: Played for laughs when an old, dying man starts to haunt Ranma's dreams, because "she" reminds him of his first love. In these recurring dreams, Ranma is dressed in girly clothes and sporting a parasol to further accent the femininity of the look. He has to use an equally feminine parasol later on, which only adds to his annoyance with the situation. - Revolutionary Girl Utena: Anthy carries one while watching a duel. - For the first few pages of the Rosario + Vampire manga's obligatory Beach Chapter, Mizore holds a parasol. Justified, in that it's blocking the hot sun from causing any damage to her. Although, she has no qualms about dropping the parasol and donning a stripy bikini later on. - One of Usagi's disguise dresses in Sailor Moon came with one of these. She was infiltrating a high-class affair and the disguise wouldn't be complete without it. - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. When outlaw Tuco is Crossing the Desert on horseback he's not only wearing a sombrero, he puts up a pretty pink parasol as well. Blondie, however, is bareheaded and on foot, as Tuco wants him to die a slow death of heatstroke or thirst. - Mandalay: Tanya is introduced twirling a lovely parasol on a hot day, unaware of her imminent betrayal. Her physical beauty is key to the plot since it's because of it that she becomes the brothel's main attraction \|\|after her lover sells her to a pimp\|\|. And then again, \|\|why she's able to blackmail her way out of it\|\|. - Mary Poppins' standard umbrella doesn't qualify, but her parasol in the chalk painting sequence sure does — complete with lacy white dress. - Master and Commander. When HMS Surprise stops off at a Brazilian port, the natives come out in longboats to trade with the sailors, including several women implied to be prostitutes. A rather pretty Brazilian twirling a parasol catches the captain's eye; he's clearly tempted, but as he's married Aubrey walks away instead (though he can't resist turning for one last look at her). - Many posters for My Fair Lady have Eliza Doolittle using one while Henry Higgins watches on. - In The Sound of Music, one of the Von Trapp daughters wanted a pink parasol, possibly for this reason. - Summer Magic. At the lawn party in which Julia and Nancy are competing over Charles, Julia carries a delicate parasol that matches the dress she made. - In Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Mrs. Lovett has a light parasol with red polka dots during her "I Want" Song "By the Sea" — she would like to be a lady and have a happy family. - In Tombstone, Josephine carries one when she first appears. - Subverted in Under Ten Flags. During World War 2, the Horny Sailors on a British merchant ship are eagerly checking out the parasol-twirling Kimono Fanservice on a (then still neutral) Japanese vessel, until the 'women' cast aside their parasols and race to man the guns of their disguised German raider. - Kaylee from Firefly carries a parasol when she is first introduced, to show that despite being a Wrench Wench, she still likes some pretty things (a trait we see more of in "Shindig"). - The Ghost and Mrs. Muir: In "It's a Gift!", the Captain attempts to buy Caroline a gift in an attempt to make up for his interfering in Jonathan's education. He is convinced that a parasol would be the perfect gift—as it would have been for a lady of his time—and has an Imagine Spot of her strolling in the garden wearing a lacy white dress and carrying the parasol. - Kari of MythBusters works the occasional parasol if she's dressing up for an experiment. - In NCIS, Abbie wore a lacy dress (but a black one), and had a matching parasol that she twirled around. - Worn with a matching dress in the opening of That Girl. - In an episode of Unhappily Ever After, Jennie wanted a picnic like that in a film she watched (didn't work out), and wore a white dress and a parasol. - In the 1999 miniseries adaptation Wives and Daughters, lots of ladies can be seen with a pretty parasol. It's especially noticeable with free-spirited Lady Harriet (emphasis on high class and beauty) and the heroine Molly Gibson (emphasis on gentle disposition and femininity). - In Lestat, Claudia mentions how cute people think she is with a parasol in "I'll Never Have That Chance". - The young ladies who perform the foot juggling act in Nouvelle Experience not only carry Chinese parasols but use them as their primary props! - Parasols are featured prominently in the opening number for Ragtime. In fact, they're presented as one thing that separates the upper-class whites from "Negros" and "Immigrants". - According to a note in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Daniel had to use one when he went to the desert. He didn't want to, since he would invoke this trope. - BlazBlue: Lady Rachel Alucard is Weakened by the Light due to being a vampire, so they're used for protection from the sunlight. Being a Fighting Game character, they double as a Parasol of Pain and a cat. - In Fire Emblem Heroes, Constance carries a parasol with her at all times in her map sprites, likely to avoid conflicting with how the game has no way of changing her mood whenever she's in direct sunlight. - Yamato from KanColle carries a small one. The shaft is modelled after her namesake battleship's distinctive inverted-tripod mast. - The King of Fighters: - Mai Shiranui from Fatal Fury wields one in one of her win poses. Out of nowhere, apparently, just to make her look even more prettier. - Considering that she is absolutely loaded, Rose Bernstein owns one, even if she doesn't act prim and proper. One of her brother Adel's special moves solely consists of her strolling in, under the parasol, and taunting him. - Princess Agitha from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess isn't really a princess, but she sure acts like one, and when outside she uses a parasol that matches her dress. - In the mobile phone game Love Nikki - Dress Up Queen, an outfit called Umbrella Memory that requires spending real money to obtain has a special pose with Nikki holding a parasol. The outfit evokes blue and white Chinese porcelain. - The Parasol Zombie from Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time. Aside from making her look somewhat elegant (for a zombie), it also makes all lobbed-shot attacks bounce off harmlessly, protecting zombies near her from them. - Selphy, an Eligible Bachelorette in Rune Factory Frontier has one of these when she's outside in the sun; she twirls it a lot, and since it's heavily hinted at that she's \|\|a Rebellious Princess\|\| this definitely counts. - Okuni from Samurai Warriors is a travelling performer who is incredibly refined in both tastes and fashion, as is evidenced by her use of one of these, but it doesn't stop her from using it as a Parasol of Pain. - From the Soul series, we have Setsuka, who wields a parasol (and a blade hidden within it). - Josephine, the "fop" character of Suikoden V, fought with one. - Princess Peach from Super Mario Bros. being the sweet, feminine lady she is, often gets a parasol. She gets one in the first Paper Mario game that lets her disguise herself as anyone she points it at. It overlaps with Parasol of Pain in Super Mario RPG and the Super Smash Bros. game. - Princess Peach has access to Perry again in the fan game Super Mario Fusion Revival as her answer to Mario's Raccoon Suit. Perry can be used to fly, to slow her fall, and to attack. - Several of the Touhou Project girls can be seen with umbrellas, including Yukari Yakumo, Yuuka Kazami, Remilia Scarlet (who is a vampire, and uses it for sunlight protection), and Kogasa Tatara (the last one has it as a result of actually being an umbrella youkai). - Mio from Little Busters! always carries a lacy white parasol with her whenever she's outside. This emphasises her traditional, elegant beauty, as well as implying a great physical fragility. The fact that she's never seen in direct sunlight also hints at there being more to her than what people see on the surface, while her nickname 'no shadow' refers to the way she seems as though she doesn't belong to this world. The parasol is so integral to her character, in fact, that her default battle title is 'Parasol-holding Silent Beauty' and her credits sequences involve a stylised, slowly-spinning parasol. \|\|It's very important to her plotline - she carries the parasol to hide the fact that she literally no longer has a shadow.\|\| - Dahlia Hawthorne from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trials and Tribulations has a parasol with a shade of light pink and ever-present personal butterflies. \|\|Until she burns them up with her demonic gaze as part of her Villainous Breakdown.\|\| - As part of her elegant, traditional appearance, Kakuya from Spirit Hunter: NG carries a red parasol when confronting Akira in the underpass. It'll make an appearance in some endings where Kakuya was supposedly locked away, signalling that she might not be gone for good. - A male example (assuming the gender of this character is stated) is the Monster in the Darkness from The Order of the Stick, who is ordered to stay in the shadows until the right time to reveal him. When going outside, he has to stay in the shadows of a parasol, which is Hello Kitty pretty, to show his gentle nature.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParasolOfPrettiness
Parental Bonus - TV Tropes * "The kids got the cartoon. The parents got the jokes.* " A joke in a work marketed toward children that kids of the appropriate age would likely never get, but which their parents would. Serves as a way to keep the adults and older kids entertained and usually takes the form of a Homage to a movie or TV show that children would not normally be familiar with. This is the master trope to other "subliminal" tropes like a Double Entendre, Does This Remind You of Anything?, No Celebrities Were Harmed, or Getting Crap Past the Radar. It could also count as a Genius Bonus since most children would have to be educated above their general age level to understand these. Popularized by Sesame Street, note : The first decade of the show, an actual mission of the show was 'Entertain the parents so much, they force the kids to watch!' with characters like Sherlock Hemlock and the Count, and thus most common on educational shows. Surprisingly, the barely intelligible Cookie Monster seems to get the most Parental Bonus lines, at least in recent history: "Me undergo sea-change," etc. Of course, a badly done Parental Bonus will entertain neither the kids nor the adults and may terrify the latter that the former actually will "get" it... Golden Age animated shorts, especially those from Fleischer Studios and Warner Bros., often had material which would be considered Parental Bonus today (if people still got the references), as they were intended for all audiences (see Animation Age Ghetto). As a result, many cartoons had numerous double entendres and pseudo-cameos which were expected to go over the younger viewers' heads. These jokes also give the shows rerun value years later when the original viewers are old enough to get the jokes that once went over their heads: see Late to the Punchline. Might be Fridge Horror for some if they think the joke is disturbing and that supposedly lewd joke might just be Accidental Innuendo. A Super-Trope to Parent Service, Demographic-Dissonant Crossover and Demographically Inappropriate Humourinvoked. ## Example Subpages <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other Examples - Lots of these are present in Kirby: Right Back at Ya! since the series has tons of Shout Outs in general. - An early example, Miss Machiko (Humiliated Professor Machiko) was infamous for having the titular teacher end up naked in every single episode, often as a direct cause of her students groping her or otherwise destroying her clothing. Miss Machiko was a kids show, and her students were 6 years old. It was so prevalent that she even turns up naked in the episode openings. Twice. - Pokémon: The Series: When Team Rocket is stealing Pokémon from a hospital, they modify their motto to fit the occasion: Jessie: To protect us from all that chafing and itching. James: It might even stop all of Jessie's... complaining . - Boruto: - In the dub of the first episode of the first season of Bakuten Shoot Beyblade, Tyson's grandfather mentions he'll give him The Talk next week. - Yo-Kai Watch, the Japanese version at least, loves this. It is filled with a shocking number of '70s and '80s (occasionally more recent) references. - Super Mario contains a fair amount of adult humor, such as when Peach accidentally sees Mario's genitals and gets flustered. - In episode 17 of Sonic X, the Monster of the Week references Cutey Honey by imitating Honey's catchphrase. The catchphrase in itself isn't particularly naughty, but you wouldn't expect Sonic X to reference a franchise infamous for its borderline hentai content... - Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Joys of Seasons episode 42 features a pirate whose name and appearance heavily resemble Luffy from One Piece. Pleasant Goat's target audience probably isn't that familiar with One Piece, so this reference seems to be aimed at older viewers. - In one issue of Gold Key's Pink Panther, the titular feline finds a laundry bag filled with money. "I've heard of filthy lucre, but I never knew it needed to be laundered!" - Marvel Comics' All-Ages title Marvel Adventures loves referencing older comics, concepts, and complex storylines that the target audience is generally completely ignorant of. - Marvel Adventures: Avengers 24 sneaks in a Simpsons ref, a "reverse-Napoleon complex", Spidey "needs a wife", Wolverine quoting Rorschach, and a surprising hint of Les Yay. In one comic. - They don't just reference other Marvel comics. Issue 3 of their Iron Man solo title featured Plantman as the villain. When he's not in his leafy armor, he's dressed in a suit, Homburg hat, and gardener's apron — that is to say, he looks like Peter Sellers as Chance the Gardener. - Tiny Titans, a non-canonical comics series for kids featuring many of the younger superheroes/sidekicks from the DC Universe as young children, is obviously aimed at young kids. However, the many, many references to either storylines from the "grown-up" books (such as the Battle for the Cowl, when they fight a cow that stole Batman's cape and cowl, or when Darkseid is their substitute teacher and gives them a surprise exam, which they pronounce a finals crisis!) and other media aimed at adults (such as the first two rules of Pet Club being "you do not talk about Pet Club" and "you do not talk about Pet Club") prove they were intended to be entertaining for parents as well. And they certainly are. - Tintin features typical slapstick gags and exciting adventures children will appreciate. Adults can enjoy it for the satire on 20th-century politics, exquisite story structures, and beautiful art. - Asterix has a lot of general slapstick, running gags and situation comedy that both parents and children can enjoy. But it is as much a comic for adults as it is for children, with many puns, double entendres, satirical gags, cameos and references to classic literature, the Ancient Greek, Roman and Gaulish time period, francophone culture and 20th-century society. Additionally, virtually all the characters' names are some sort of pun, most of which wouldn't make sense to children (such as Vitalstatistix the chief, Getafix the reclusive druid and even one-off character like Crismus Bonus the Roman centurion). - Nero shares both jokes that children can enjoy as references to national and international politics and that were current when the stories were published in the newspapers. - Suske en Wiske is a children's comic that originally made a lot of jokes about Flemish-Belgian politics that only adults would get. Later most of them were removed from the later reprints, though occasionally some of them are still present. - In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW) Scoots says she isn't sure she wants a picture of Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle on her flank for the rest of her life. Any parents or older readers with really unfortunate tattoos can probably empathize. - The ALF comic, published by Marvel's STAR comics imprint from 1988-1992, had a very different tone from the TV series it was based on; it had a much more notable sci-fi twist to it, and loved to pack in all sorts of references and parodies to everything from X-Men and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Citizen Kane and Death of a Salesman. - Used in all of the Shrek films. For example, in the first one, Shrek sees Lord Farquaad's towering castle and remarks, "Do you think he's Compensating for Something?" - There are many references to the University of Notre Dame in the movie as a handful of the people that produced the movie were "Domers" (Notre Dame graduates). The biggest example being the shape of the castle, which is exactly like that of the Hesburgh Library. Another reference is the town of Duloc; the University's name is University of Notre Dame du Lac, which refers to Mary, Our Lady of the Lake. The student guide/disciplinary manual is also called "du Lac". A third reference is Lord Farquaad. There are many quads on the ND campus, and there is a dorm that is in the middle of nowhere, i.e. on a "far quad". You can also see the outline of the famous golden dome of the university on the back of Shrek's vest. - "Farquaad" was also used as a way of getting as close as possible to "fuckwad". - More relevantly, Shrek 2 has literally dozens of movie and TV refs, only a handful of which are going to be known to the kids. One example is the "Knights" show, which was a parody of COPS. The refs go back as far as the original B&W "Frankenstein". - Shrek 2 also had a bevy of modern pop culture references that would go over kids' heads: the best is the people running away from the Giant Gingerbread Man who run out of one ~~Starbucks~~ Farbucks and into another Farbucks across the street. - When the Fairy Godmother gives the vial of love potion to King Harold, it's labeled "IX" - i.e., Love Potion #9. - And of course, the chase involving Donkey being referred to as a "White Bronco". - Please keep off of the grass. Shine your shoes. Wipe your...face. - Robin Hood's song "I like an honest fight and a saucy little maid / What he's basically saying is he likes to get— paid! - Blink and you'll miss it, but as the Fairy Godmother rattles off her list of fairy tales, she slips Pretty Woman in there. - The frogs singing "Live and Let Die" in Shrek the Third. The joke is that a Frog Chorus is singing a Paul McCartney song, and while Rupert and the Frog Song was aimed at kids, it was 23 years earlier. (And Live and Let Die was even longer ago, and definitely wasn't.) - Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: - "See? Even Steve note : the monkey is throwing chocolate snowballs... ...Ohhh." - Disney's Aladdin, thanks largely to the comedic genius of Robin Williams, works on every level humanly imaginable. Specific example: as the Genie is being tricked into getting Aladdin out of the cave, he gets very angry at Aladdin. Kids laugh because of his sarcastic tone and the ruse working; parents laugh because the speech is almost directly lifted from Taxi Driver. Kids are also unlikely to recognize the Genie's imitations of William F. Buckley, Peter Lorre, Carol Channing, Groucho Marx... - Aladdin's introduction scene also had a Les Miserables reference, since Jasmine's song actor, Lea Salonga, was playing Eponine on Broadway in the same year. - There's a moment during the song "Never Had a Friend Like Me". During the song, the Genie uses his magic to make a group of harem girls appear. Normally this would be (somewhat) harmless but when you consider both the way the girls were acting towards Aladdin and how Al himself reacted it seemed like one of the girls (the one in the middle to be exact) was giving Al a freaking lap dance. In addition, the way Aladdin's hands are positioned it looks like he's groping the girl's ass, the scene in question is in 1:45-1:53. Could be viewed as Parent Service. - There's also a specific comment by Genie during Aladdin and the King of Thieves during the beginning of the scene where the infamous 40 Thieves rob the palace. When the stampeding elephants come towards the wedding which causes the ground to shake, Genie jokingly comments "I thought the earth shaking didn't start until the Honeymoon" you can guess what that means. The line is even worse in the Finnish dub, which changes "honeymoon" to "marriage bed". - Genie makes a ton of references from old movies: Poltergeist, Alice in Wonderland (obvious), RoboCop... anyone else recognize the big blue robot as the ED-209? - He even references The Tale of One Thousand and One Nights with the first line in his intro song; "Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherazade had a thousand tales". What's funny (and rather sad) is that most kids - or even adults - wouldn't register that both Aladdin and Ali Baba are stories that Scheherazade told during those one thousand and one nights. - "Arabian nights, like Arabian days, more often than not, are hotter than hot, in a lot of good ways." - The Lion King: - The film's Triumph of the Will-inspired imagery goes (one hopes) right over the kiddies' heads. - Of all the rides in Disneyland proper, "It's A Small World" is the safest for small children, and its song is nothing short of notorious. So it was a gesture to plenty of long-suffering parents when Scar gave the song a great big Take That!. - This may also be an allusion to Mozart!'s Don Giovanni. - Hercules: - Herc and Megara see the play Oedipus Rex. Hercules only had one thing to say about that: "And I thought I had problems." - Also a Basic Instinct reference. Megara talks about having weak ankles, uncrosses and recrosses her legs, and says, "Do you have a problem with this?... weak ankles, I mean." - Although this joke wasn't sexual when Pain and Panic (disguised as children) are "trapped" underneath the giant rock, one of them yells, "Someone call IXII!"—the Roman numerals for 911. - And then there was the sundial salesman... - And Herc making sure to get a good look at Nessus' (a centaur's) body before calling him a 'sir'... - The Hunchback of Notre Dame has a character say to his horse "Achilles. Heel." Think about that for a second. - Lilo & Stitch and its franchise does a lot of referencing Elvis Presley (Lilo Pelekai is a big fan), right down to having half the original film's soundtrack be his songs. There's even a montage of scenes where they try to bring it down to the level of kid viewers by having Lilo try to teach Stitch how to be more like Elvis. - At one point when Stitch is misbehaving by destroying things, as he approaches and rips a painting by Lilo, she protests, "that's from my Blue Period!", a reference to Picasso. - Alice in Wonderland had one. The Queen is angrily interrogating the cards, demanding to know who painted the roses red. The ace blames the two. The Queen answers, "The deuce, you say?" Parents in the original 1951 viewing audience would have recognized, "The deuce, you say!" as their older generation's slang way of calling, "Bullshit!" - Frozen II: - When Olaf and Kristoff are forced to wear formal clothes, Kristoff says he'll only wear it for an hour, and Anna comments that she likes him better "in leather, anyway." Younger audience members likely will only hear it as her saying she prefers him the way he usually dresses. Older viewers will wonder if she is referring to a more intimate aspect of their relationship. Double bonus for all the languages which don't have separate words for skin and leather. - Olaf then expresses surprise that Kristoff can last an hour. In the clothing or in the bedroom? - The aforementioned 80's power ballad spoof, "Lost in the Woods." Many kids must have wondered why their parents were suddenly laughing. - Pixar: - In Flushed Away a fridge is lifted at one point to reveal a cockroach casually reading. And what is he reading? Why, Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis of course! - Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation: Buster: I can't marry all three of them, that's bigamy! Big Daddy Boo: No, that's big 'a me! - From G-Force: "Yippe-ki-yay, coffeemaker!" - A Goofy Movie has Goofy mentioning "mambo king" Xavier Cugat (who, in actuality, was the rhumba king), a relatively obscure reference for such a film. - In Shark Tale, the plot and many of the jokes heavily reference classic gangster movies like The Godfather and the works of Martin Scorsese (who plays Sykes). - Rango, among several other references, has a short scene in the beginning of the movie where the protagonist lizard Rango (voiced by Johnny Depp) crashes into the windshield of a red sports car with in it two characters that are unmistakably Raoul Duke (also Depp) and his attorney from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. - The productions of Illumination Entertainment seems to love referencing the ongoing global economic crisis, as Despicable Me references Lehman Brothers while The Lorax mentions the book (and eventual film) Too Big to Fail. - Wreck-It Ralph has some video game characters that most children would not recognize. The scene where Q-Bert is left homeless will hit hard for older viewers, but children won't get why their parents are sobbing because they won't know who he is. Also, most small children have not yet played Street Fighter, and the Metal Gear reference will only be funny to older viewers and those who have played MGS. - During the Bad Guys Anonymous meeting, Kano mentions that being a good guy isn't about what you do for work but that being good is all in your heart. As he is saying this, he tears the heart out of a zombie sitting beside him, making a reference to his Fatality move from Mortal Kombat where he tears his enemy's heart out and holds it high in the air. - Madagascar has a Twilight Zone joke ("It's a cookbook!"), a Planet of the Apes joke ("You had it all and you burned it up! Darn you! Darn you all to heck!"), and an American Beauty joke (Rose petal scene vs. steak scene). - Plus a Moulin Rouge! reference right before the characters are shipped off to Africa. - Not to mention a Cast Away joke. "Shut up, Spalding!" - The sequel has a great one near the end: "Ramming speed!!" - Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs has a ton of these, which is unsurprising, considering its creators' credentials. A notable one combines this with a Historical In-Joke, in the climactic food storm across the globe. When Mount Rushmore is hit by giant pies, Lincoln is the only one to get hit in the back of the head, and even starts immediately gushing fluid out of its eyes and nostrils. - Penguins of Madagascar has the Running Gag of Dave saying a minion's name and then an order that coincidentally happen to sound similar to that of a celebrity. Also, Skipper's reaction to Kowalski saying the plane they're on is going to Paris; Skipper: France!? Forget it! Not with their tax laws! - Minions features an endless homage to the culture and music of the 1960s, being set mostly in that period, as well. - The Sponge Bob Movie Sponge Out Of Water has a reference to The Shining when Plankton entered Spongebob's mind and met two popsicles. - Zootopia: - The Shout Outs to both The Godfather and Breaking Bad hopefully go over the heads of the kids in the audience. - Judy works in a wicked double entendre while doing some quick math: "I am just a dumb bunny, but we are good at multiplying." - PAW Patrol: The Movie has a character named Marty Muckracker. Muckrackers are people that expose the flaws of society, and were prominent during the Industrial Revolution. - The "patty cake" scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a double subversion. \|\|Jessica Rabbit and Marvin Acme were actually playing the game patty cake, but that's basically the Toon equivalent to screwing.\|\| - There's plenty more where that came from. Dolores' line about having to "shake the weasels", for instance. - "Dabbling in watercolors, Eddie?" - Who Framed Roger Rabbit is one of the kings of this trope. - "Nice booby trap." - Not to mention Jessica's breasts making boinging sounds twice when she visits Eddie's office. - There's a scene where Eddie fires some toon bullets at a fleeing assailant, who ducks down an alleyway. The bullets stop, wonder "which way did he go?", and proceed to go in the wrong direction. Eddy comments "Dum-dums!" - Enchanted has quite a bit of this as well. Morgan: Remember, when you go out not to put too much makeup; otherwise, the boys will get the wrong idea and you know how they are... [off Giselle's wide-eyed look] Morgan: They're only after one thing. Giselle: What's that? Morgan: I don't know. Nobody will tell me. - The Cat in the Hat movie attempted this, with questionable results. Apparently, the writers' idea of Parental Bonuses are almost PG-13-level double entendres; see here. - In the Jim Carrey version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, the Grinch as a young boy looks in at a Christmas party where people are dropping keys into a fishbowl, indicating this was a swingers party. - Seconds before the keys are dropped into the fishbowl, a pair of Whos walk across the window, a man giving a woman a ahem "Reverse Piggy Backride". - In another scene, babies fall from the sky in baskets with umbrellas, a variant upon the Stork myth. A man sees a baby outside his own house, and joyously shouts to his wife that the baby is here, then pauses and adds "He looks just like your boss..." - The Grinch burns the Christmas tree at the party he was invited to. His childhood crush whispers "Oh, wowwwww", in a very lascivious tone with a very, er, dazed look on her face... - The Grinch attempts to hail a taxi, which blows right by him. - 101 Dalmatians (1996) (Live-Action Adaptation): Roger tells Cruella that Anita is pregnant... Cruella: Well, what can I say? Accidents will happen. Roger: We're having puppies, too. Cruella: ( gasps ) Puppies! You have been a busy boy! - In Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, as Wonka searches for the button on the Three-Course-Dinner Gum machine, he offhandedly asks "Button, button, who's got the button?" - Dexter's Laboratory pulls a similar joke when Dee Dee is, of course, left standing next to a button unattended. - Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest has a deliciously subtle one when Tia Dalma finds the Black Spot (an omen of death) in Jack Sparrow's palm: Gibbs: The Black Spot! Ragetti: The Black Spot! Pintel: Black Spot! Jack Sparrow: My eyesight's as good as ever, just so you know. - Which is a very roundabout way of making a connection between palm sores, masturbation, and the myth that it causes blindness. - It's also an indicator of syphilis (which Johnny Depp has more or less confirmed Sparrow as having, probably a contributor to his eccentric nature), which can damage eyesight. - There's a very subtle one in the same film. The sailors going on the Flying Dutchmen chant "Pull out your eyes, Apologize, Apologize". Any James Joyce reader will recognize this from Dante's introduction in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Scooby-Doo had one that is very easy to miss out on: Woman on Plane tells Shaggy her name is Mary-Jane. Shaggy: Mary-Jane? That's my favorite name! - For those who don't get it, Mary-Jane was an old-timey slang term for marijuana. - The "hot box" scene. Soon after the team "breaks up" at the start of the film, the following scene shows the Mystery Van with a whole lot of white smoke billowing out of it with Shaggy and Scooby giggling loudly. Cut to inside, and you see that Shaggy and Scooby simply have a miniature barbecue that is letting off a lot of smoke. - In Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, Chance the dog is chewing a shoe and offers a piece to Sassy the cat. She replies "No thanks, I'm not into leather". - In Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco, Sassy wakes up and finds herself lying next to that runt dog with fleas. Sassy recoils in disgust and says, "Yuck!" The dog responds, "That's not what you said last night!" - Non-joke example: In The Monster Squad, after the kids have been to Scary German Guy's place and he turns out to be quite the good guy despite his scary exterior, the leader of the titular group mentions that he "sure knows a lot about monsters." Scary German Guy's response: "Now that you mention it...I suppose I do." And as the kids leave, we're shown a reveal on Scary German Guy's arm of a numbered tattoo that the adults of the audience will recognize as a concentration camp identification tattoo, signifying that this guy indeed knows a great deal about monsters. - In Fred Claus, Santa demonstrates the power of the snow globe to his brother, Fred, who's visiting some part-time work. Fred then asks if he could use it to check on the Swedish Women's Swimming Team, to check if they were doing anything "naughty". - Space Jam had a little Pulp Fiction reference in the end basketball game... - The Wizard of Oz had many lines what would be funny to adults but not children. Dorothy: We've brought you the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West. We melted her. Wizard: You liquidated her, eh? - The line spouted by the Scarecrow when he received the Th.D. degree, which was a hashed up version of the Pythagorean Theorem: The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side. - The wizard awarding the Lion a medal called the Triple Cross. - The Scarecrow and the Wizard: Scarecrow: I've got a brain! How can I ever thank you enough? Wizard: Well, you can't. - The Scarecrow to Dorothy: Scarecrow: Of course some people do go both ways. - The Santa Clause has quite a few of these. - Annie (2014) has a clever way of referring to someone as a prostitute, which flies right over the heads of any kids in the audience. Miss Hannigan: [approaching limo] Hi there! Stacks: I'm sorry, I am not interested in temporary companionship. Miss Hannigan: What!? Stacks: God has a path for all of us! Yours should be taking you away from the car. - Casper has the three Big Uncle Bully ghosts singing, "It's my party, and I'll die if I want to." It references an old song by Lesley Gore. - At the end of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014), Mikey plays the song "Happy Together" for April, which is obviously yet another example of his crush on her. The band that performed the song: The Turtles. - A few examples dotted throughout Paddington (2014), the most darkly notable of which is the origin of the flowers Mr. Curry presents to Millicent, \|\|which are heavily implied to have come from an accident memorial, given he found them tied to a lamppost\|\|. - "Speed Me Up" from Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) has the line "do the dash like Tay K". While this will fly over the little ones, the bigger ones, who may know Tay K as a rapper convicted of murder, will be surprised. - Alvin and the Chipmunks 4: Road Chip has a scene involving John Waters' cameo, with Alvin namedropping Pink Flamingos, which he has apparently seen. - In Howliday Inn of the Bunnicula series, while Louise and Georgette are fighting over Max, Louise calls Georgette "Hester Prynne." Very, very few kids are familiar with The Scarlet Letter, but parents who're familiar with it know that Louise just called Georgette a slut. - A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels feature numerous plot devices to get the characters to travel in space and time and even into their own bodies, most of which are based on real scientific concepts. This makes reading them as a kid and as an adult two very different experiences. - In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, courage takes the form of a liquid. Or, at least, the kind of courage that "makes you forget you are afraid" does. Or so the Wizard claims. - An in-canon example occurs in one of the Amber Brown books, which are written specifically for elementary-school kids. When Amber, her mom, and her mom's boyfriend are about to start baking, Amber claps her hands and goes "Alright, let's start some preheating!" Her mom and Max look at each other, laugh, and refuse to explain. Amber narrates how annoying that is. - A Series of Unfortunate Events. By. The. Truckload. Just a few examples: - 99% of the characters' names are literary references, especially the inhabitants of the island in The End. - Mr. Poe had two sons named Edgar and Albert. Just guess that one. - Similarly, the two Quagmire triplets that the Baudelaires meet first are named Isadora and Duncan. - In The Reptile Room, the Baudelaires are told not to let the Virginian Wolfsnake near a typewriter. - The whole plot of The End is one big Bible reference/commentary. - The titular festival of The Carnivorous Carnival is called Caligari Carnival. - Stephano, Dr. Georgina Orwell, Vice Principal Nero, Coach Ghenghis, Esme Squalor... - A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh has many jokes that will go straight over your average five-year-old's head. Meanwhile the parent reading the stories aloud may be having a hard time not cracking up. - Louise Rennison's Withering Tights, a 2010 novel aimed at 14-year-old girls, has a scene that's a mashup of An American Werewolf in London, Withnail and I, and the Monty Python's Flying Circus milkman sketch (the "some of them are very old" punchline is identical). - In the Rainbow Magic series, the king and queen of Fairyland are named Oberon and Titania, the names of the fairy king and queen in A Midsummer Night's Dream. To drive the point home, the kingdom has an annual party called the Midsummer Ball. Keep in mind that the series is for girls under the age of 10. - Some of the characters' names are references to celebrities. Rebecca's book has several references to Elvis Presley, while Lucy the Diamond Fairy is a Shout-Out to The Beatles. - Harry Potter, oh so much. From literary and historical and mythological allusions to names significant if you have just a smattering of Latin or French or German. Not to mention the social satire. One could—and several people have—write a book. - In one of the Sam Pig books by Alison Uttley, Irish labourers give the pigs some gifts. One of them is a bottle of cream ... only it's a brown colour and when Tom Pig tastes a little he splutters and says "They have queer cows in Ireland". Uttley does not explain to the child audience what Irish Cream actually is. - Children reading Lottie and Lisa might not understand why the painter Gabele feels he needs to hide the painting depicting a scene from classical antiquity from Lotte-as-Luise, but parents will know what is meant. Then there are the references to Irene Gerlach being a "real woman" who "knows how to make use of herself". - The Phantom Tollbooth is a Hurricane of Puns, and many are Stealth Puns that require an excellent vocabulary and knowledge of colloquial phrases. In other words, many will pass over the head of a child, but an adult reading along will get the joke. - How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom: Conversed with a Show Within a Show example in volume 5 when Souma creates a Toku-styled Edutainment Show for his Jewel Voice Broadcasts, and casts very attractive adult actors to play the leads as eye candy for the parents in the audience—one of them being Carla, who is so mortified at being stuffed into her stripperiffic costume that she has to be restrained from trying to kill him after the show. - The Cartoon's "Didlee Dee". Children will hear a catchy, nonsensical song to dance to, and it's only their parents who get what the song is actually about. - Comedy Bang! Bang!: Invoked but averted. Theatrical producer Don Dimello as portrayed by Andy Daly insists that his perverted contributions to the source material are just "a little something for daddy" but they clearly go way past subtext into disturbingly graphic content you'd never want your kids to see. - In Pokémon Live!, James delivers a joke about employment benefits and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". - At Disney Theme Parks, many places serve alcoholic beverages for adults. In fact, Drinking Around the World is a popular activity for older guests at EPCOT. - This happens the third version of the Disney World ride Journey into Imagination in the smell lab. A slot machine is seen, and it rolls to reveal 3 Figments dressed as skunks. Then, they all say "Whoohoo! You win one scent!", and Figment releases an unexpected aroma. - The Great Movie Ride at Disney's Hollywood Studios was filled with references to old movies that parents appreciated. - General Pepper from the Star Fox series. Think about it. If you don't get it, here's another clue for you all: in the Star Fox comic in Nintendo Power, Fara asks why Pepper didn't do something. His answer? "I was only a sergeant then..." - In EarthBound (1994), the Beatles references never end: the Runaway Five, a yellow submarine, a set of default names for Ness & co. (in the Japanese version), when Nessie takes Jeff across the lake, the musical score is very obviously the opening mellotron from Strawberry Fields Forever. Also, one of the NPC's in Onett will ask you to "Finish this famous Beatles song —-terday" with a yes or no prompt. - On the topic on the Runaway Five, not only is the design of the lead singers reminiscent of the Blues Brothers, but a certain hotel newspaper (as reported by the bellboy) claims that band member Lucky (modeled after Jake Blues, played by John Belushi) was seen in Congress, an elaborate reference to John Belushi's role as John "Bluto" Blutarsky in National Lampoon's Animal House, in which the aforementioned character goes on to become a senator. - Oh, and the New Age Retro Hippie's theme sounds a lot like Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode." As does Rockin' K.K. from Animal Crossing. - No one can forget Peaceful Rest Valley — or as named in Japanese, Grateful Dead Valley. Home to a strange cult in a familiar outfit, with a strange obsession with the power of a certain color... The Happy Happy Cult can be taken two ways: either as a reference to Blue Meanies, or the Ku Klux Klan. Or both. - One of the enemies is called Diamond Dog. - The Dungeon Man's theme, after he joins your party, is based on 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'. - The music that plays when Jeff rides in the Sky Runner is taken from a song by The Who. - The thing with Earth Bound is that these are less likely to be intended as a Parental Bonus, so much as being thrown in because those involved (mainly Shigesato Itoi and the composers) really, really liked this stuff (the entire franchise is specifically named after a Beatles song). - Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is just loaded with somewhat suggestive material, to the point that it's a wonder they managed to get such low age ratings. It got a 3+ rating in Europe and an E rating in North America (the "E-10+ " rating didn't exist at the time). - Including a nude scene for Princess Peach. She's invisible at the time. - Goombella is a walking Parental Bonus as well. Many of her tattle-analyses toe the line (or break the fourth wall). Oh, and the Goomba-Gang that tries to hit on her "plays real nice". - Then there's Fahr Outpost, a snowy region populated by bombs who wear bearskin hats. Their mayor speaks broken English peppered with 'da's and vehemently denies the existence of a superweapon on the base. - Among the less daring examples, the whole of Chapter 6 is a spoof of English detective novels and one of the supporting characters from Chapter 5 is a pirate named Cortez. - The Battalion Wars series of games are chock-full of references to nearly everything under the sun. - The countries are The Theme Park Version of real countries: - Western Frontier: (Cold War U.S.A.), overanxious, obsessed with sports, ever vigilant of the Tundran Bear, led by a man named Herman. - Tundran Territories (Cold War U.S.S.R.): red uniforms and armour, vehicles look thrown together, condemns Frontier decadence. - Solar Empire (Japan): Better technology than anyone else, like quoting Sun Tzu, fight for honour. - Anglo Isles (Great Britain): Use yellow Sgt. Pepper-class submarines, one of their leaders is named Windsor. - Xylvania: Full of German and vaguely German accents, a nation determined to return to power after a defeat. - Kommandant Ubel of Xylvania is a muscle-bound thickhead with dreams of becoming "governator". - M17s, KA-74s, Humbugs, etc. in unit descriptions. Most of the Frontier units with names are references to a real-world American military vehicle of some kind. - Some of the mission names, like "Bridges over the River Styx", or Herman's Heroes. - Ape Escape. The third installment had movie-and-TV making as its conceit, so this involved parodic Homage Shots of such kid-friendly things as The Exorcist, Psycho, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, Apocalypse Now, Django, and Titanic (1997) (to name just a handful), as well as games parodying Mortal Kombat and Metal Gear. The names of the monkeys, in the UK localisation at least, often reference people in the movie industry (there's monkeys called M. Clayderman, D. Elfman, Ricky Ger V, and Culkin, for just a handful of examples). Not only that, but some of the Simian Cinema shorts have a 'clean meaning' that the kids will find funny, and a 'dirty meaning' the older demographic will find funny (the one with the nude monkey telling the other nude monkey 'the ancient secret to keeping warm' before flossing between her legs with a towel as demonstration comes to mind). - The European website for the games is called Ape Club. Its logo is a bar of pink soap. One of the minigames on it explicitly asks you to 'Spank the monkey'. - Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure was a Mission-Pack Sequel to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4. Here's a few of Zurg's moves, word for word: - Humongous Entertainment. Oh boy, where to start? Pajama Sam's superhero references, SPY Fox's James Bond references, Backyard Sports's '80s references (most pros were kids then)...all more likely to grab parents than kids. - In the animated storybook The Smelly Mystery, there are TONS of references and parodies to classic and popular movies and TV shows, including quite a few to the James Bond franchise and the 1960s Batman (1966) TV show. - Spyro the Dragon: - The Crash Bandicoot series tends to aim its Shout Outs at older players. Apart from the fact that getting all the name jokes requires a GCSE-level understanding of everything from Victorian literature to thermodynamics, level titles in Warped include 'Tomb Wader', 'Area 51', and 'Eggipus Rex'. - Stephen Fry's narrations in LittleBigPlanet contain innuendo and jokes that children won't get. "Here you can choose how erect your piston is. No smirking back there." Also, the fact that some of the Licensed DLC is usually from titles for higher ages such as Metal Gear Solid and God of War. - Sly Cooper has little jokes and pickup lines tossed in that have steadily built the series' adult fanbase. Here's an example: Carmelita: FREEZE! - The Sega Superstars series is made to please gamers of all ages. The children play them for the Sonic and Super Monkey Ball characters, while the teens and adults play them for the classic Sega characters like NiGHTS, Beat, Ulala, and Ryo Hazuki. Most children will be asking their parents, "Daddy, who's the guy with the headphones and goggles? Who's the pink-haired girl? Who's the guy on the motorcycle?" And so on. - MySims Kingdom has this mostly in its Task and Scroll names. For example, an early Task is called Gears of Where?, and completing it gets you a scroll called Solid Gears of Metal. - Yoshi's Crafted World is a rare example of a children's video game that fits the \|\|Our Slashers Are Different trope generally found in works intended for mature audiences with one surprisingly creepy late-game level containing murderous demonic invincible axe-wielding ragdoll clowns who make loud annoying screeching sounds chasing after the player character Yoshi\|\|, despite the game being otherwise bright and cheery. - The Eye Toy series of games are some of the most wholesome, kid-friendly things ever made... except the window-washing minigame, which uses for its music a Bawdy Song about a window cleaner being The Peeping Tom: ''The blushing bride, she looks divine, The bridegroom, he is doing fine, I'd rather have his job than mine, When I'm cleaning windows."	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentalBonus
Flies Equals Evil - TV Tropes In many works, especially horror movies, the first thing that indicates something going nasty is the arrival of flies, mosquitoes, wasps, and other flying creepy crawlies. Bonus points are earned if they are seen entering or emerging from a sleeping protagonist's mouth, nose, or ears. Generally linked to demons and ghosts, but might just be a symptom of something more natural like decomposition. This trope has its roots in Beelzebub being "Lord of the Flies", and other Satanic connotations. Alternatively, it may be linked to the Ten Plagues, or simply to decay and death. Subtrope of Bugs Herald Evil. See also The Swarm and The Worm That Walks, when the bugs are not only an indicator of evil, but are actually used as a monster directly, Beelzebub, Uncleanliness Is Next to Ungodliness, Evil Smells Bad, and Smells of Death. ## Examples: - Louie the Fly from Mortein pesticide commercials brags about how unpleasant, mean, and unclean he is, all while relishing about spreading filth and diseases through houses. - Big Finish Doctor Who: In "Litefoot and Sanders", a swarm of creepy crawlies gathers—including flies, cockroaches, bugs, millipedes and spiders—gathers around Sanders if he stays too long in one spot. He eventually says it is because they can sense his true nature as bringer of death. - Magic: The Gathering: Although Dark Is Not Evil, Black mana is associated with death and parasitism, and insects — especially carrion eaters, such as flies — are strongly tied to Black. - The DCU: - Batman: When written by Scott Snyder, the Joker is often associated with flies to the point of almost being an Animal Motif. He's always got flies buzzing around him, tying into his habit of spreading disease and misery. - Blackest Night: Billions of Black Lantern Rings travel together through the universe. They're described by characters as sounding like swarming buzzing flies. - Swamp Thing: Flies are commonly associates with the Rot in general, and with Arcane in particular. Despite technically being part of the Red, flies are so close to the rot that they're infamously untrustworthy. - Tim Drake: Robin: A close up of a fly crawling on a body's mouth is shown as Tim determines the victim was murdered rather than dying in an accident as those first on scene had assumed. - In Dungeon Keeper Ami, one of the most basic creatures of Keeper Mercury's dungeon are giant flies. Although they're usually discarded by most other Keepers for their low combat capabilities, Ami uses them as mounts for her goblins and as occasional scouts instead; getting a better use of their abilities. - OSMU: Fanfiction Friction: When Todd visits Basil Valentine and his two minions in an abandoned house, one of the walls is covered in flies. - Barton Fink: The titular character has a mosquito problem, in spite of everyone informing him this is impossible, as Los Angeles is a desert. Mosquitoes do, in fact, live in Southern California. - Candyman does something similar, though it substitutes bees for flies. Wherever bees swarm, the Candyman is nearby. - In Constantine (2005), Beeman has a fly crawl out from under his eyelid as a sign of demonic attack upon him. He's later found dead with flies covering him and crawling out of his mouth. - Drag Me to Hell has a fly following the protagonist around for much of the film. It both enters and exits her mouth and nose, as well as landing on the camera. - Grace: Flies are attracted to the Undead Child so much that the mother puts netting over the crib and hangs fly paper all over the nursery. - In Mirror Mirror (1990), one of the first signs of the the mirror's evil nature is a large number of flies congregating on its surface when Megan is upset about her mother flirting wit Mr. Veze. One of the flies lands in Veze's food, causing him to choke. - Mister Frost: Downplayed. The titular character is Satan in a human guise and the odd fly seems attracted to him; one can be seen on his chair as his conversation with Detweiller comes to an end, and he later uses one crawling upon a window as a Literal Surveillance Bug to overhear a conversation in the courtyard below (and once he gets the information he needs, crushes it). A later scene has him actually being annoyed by a buzzing fly and trying to catch it. (This is also, likely, an Actor Allusion: Frost is played by Jeff Goldblum, and when the film was made at the turn of The '90s his highest profile role had been in The Fly (1986), which is not an example of this trope.) - Phenomena: The Pest Controller heroine Jennifer uses a sarcophagus fly with a particularly strong sense of smell to find the Serial Killer who is terrorizing her school. The fly leads her to the evil and its festering handiwork and that exactly makes it clearly more useful to the side of good. The thousands of flies that can be found there and contribute to the ambience are unconventionally in larval form. - Poltergeist (1982): The titular ghosts cause a steak to be suddenly covered with maggots. - Primal: A tiny bug lands on a protagonist early on, and a swarm of them is found in a broken bottle near the campsite. The night before the real menace appears, another character gets sick and the group prepares to take her to a hospital, but it turns out more swarms have managed to eat the wheels of their minivan. - In Raising Arizona, Leonard Smalls informs Nathan Arizona he has flies, but Nathan insists this is impossible, due to his office being climate controlled. Still, Leonard catches one between his fingers. They seem to be following him around. - Scary Movie: The second movie subverts this for laughs in its parody of The Exorcist. The priest who's been summoned to perform a Hollywood Exorcism is seen in torment, praying for God's help while a growing cloud of flies buzz around him; then the camera zooms out to show that he's straining on the toilet. - See No Evil: Flies have made a nest inside the main antagonist's head and one always appears before he attacks. - The Terminator: As the Terminator's synthetic human guise starts to rot due to repeated damage and gunshot wounds, its skin has a noticeably waxy, corpse-like pale color, and flies are buzzing around and sitting on its face. This even draws an inquiry from a janitor, wondering if the foul odor is coming from a dead animal's corpse. The robot responds rudely and resumes its chase against Sarah and Kyle. - In The Amityville Horror, flies swarming around during the height of winter was a sign of paranormal activities taking place. - Cthulhu Mythos: Subverted in "The Disciple" by David Karr Kirtley. The Obviously Evil professor running the "special class" can make flies buzz in formation around him, which the students regard as a sign of his formidable occult powers. When Cthulhu himself turns up, the protagonist realizes that they are the flies to this Eldritch Abomination. The professor, it turns out, doesn't have formidable powers. The whole thing is a sting operation so that Miskatonic University can get rid of potentially dangerous people. - "Father Hugh and the Deadly Scythe": The eponymous priest decides which of three suspects killed a man with a scythe by observing which scythe a group of flies, described by Father Hugh as the creatures of Beelzebub, choose to settle upon. The murderer confesses in terror before he remembers that flies are attracted to fresh blood, which they would find on a murder weapon. - "Flies": One character is always being followed by flies. Another investigates why and discovers that \|\|the first is essentially Beelzebub in human form\|\|. - Lord of the Flies: The title itself is a reference to Ba'alzevuv, or Beelzebub; a swarm of them show up during Simon's symbolic showdown with the pig's head. - "The Sanctuary" has flies show up as a manifestation of Satanic influences, with particularly grotesque results for Satanists who attempt to recant. - Swan Song: The Man with the Scarlet Eye sends flies out to search for Sister and the glass ring and report back to him. They do. - In the second book of The Wheel of Time, there's a... memorable scene in an empty village, where the main character is nearly overwhelmed by a multiplying swarm of flies. - American Gods (2017): Played with with Laura Moon, who is persistently accompanied by flies due to her being a reanimated corpse (although the show also uses the motif in flashbacks to when she was alive, which serves to foreshadow her fate and also indicate that during life she was more or less dead inside — after being reanimated she finds a sense of purpose). She's not evil, exactly, but she's not especially good, either. - Breaking Bad: In "Sunset", a tribal police officer is sent to do a welfare check on a woman who isn't answering her daughter's calls. When he gets there, no one answers, but then he hears the buzzing of flies, follows the sound, and finds said woman dead under a tarp, covered in flies. The Cousins are revealed to have killed her and taken over her house. The police officer gets back to his truck to call for backup, but the Cousins proceed to kill him before it can arrive. - Doctor Who: In "Heaven Sent", the Doctor is stalked through a shifting castle by "the Veil" — what appears to be a walking corpse swathed in rags and surrounded by flies. It reflects one of his earliest nightmares: when he was young, he was at the funeral of an old woman. They covered her up but couldn't keep the flies away. - Painkiller Jane: The team investigates an alleged haunted house in "Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself". Jane finds a room that is inexplicably swarming with flies right before having visions of a corpse in a mirror, and of her dead mother in a recreation of her old bedroom. - Supernatural: One of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Pestilence, is surrounded by flies. - Alice in Chains: The music video to "I Stay Away" shows the gory chaos caused at a traveling carnival by a malicious boy who frees flies he has trapped in a jar. - Marilyn Manson: Flies are a big theme within the Triptych, the band's three biggest albums, which are concept albums linked together to form a single story. In Holy Wood, flies are used to symbolize those who profit off of death (particularly sensationalist journalists), while in Antichrist Superstar, the resident tortured, self-destructive antihero undergoes a metamorphosis similar to that of a fly, with his first form being a bloated, featureless humanoid worm and his following form having what appear to be insectoid wings. - Beelzebub in demonology is called Lord of the Flies and gets depicted as a fly sometimes. - Champions: One of the symbols of the Pulp-era Satanic conspiracy group the Order of the Seven is a scarlet housefly. - Middle-Earth Role Playing: Mordor is home to large, biting insects known as Morgai Flies or Orcflies, which swarm throughout the dark land, sucking blood and spreading disease. - Pathfinder: When the archdevil Baalzebul demanded of Asmodeus that he should rule multitudes, his arrogance was shattered, and he was remade out of millions of biting flies. His worship involves covering yourself with a mix of rotting fruit, spoiled meat, and anything else that will attract flies and staying perfectly still as they swarm over you. Successfully performing this ritual grants abilities like summoning swarms of bloodsucking flies and forcing foes to hallucinate swarms of flies and maggots eating them alive. Baalzebul himself is just as bad as you'd expect an archdevil to be, but his most horrific feat was maiming a god of healing before stringing their near-lifeless body up in his throne room to feast on for eternity. - Vampire: The Masquerade: The Baali clan of demonologists had a specific sect called the Avatars of the Swarm. These are especially notable for breeding thousands of ghouled flies within them and using living humans as farms. They embrace by force feeding humans handfuls of flies, bloated with their blood. Nasty. - In Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, and Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, flies are associated with the Chaos God Nurgle. In fact, one of the symbols of Nurgle is actually a stylized fly. When the Plague Marines of Nurgle invade a world, the interior of their ships gets filled with millions of flies that are released when they land. Even when they use teleportation, enough flies are carried with them to blot out the sun. The Beast of Nurgle, a disgusting aberration that looks like a monstrous slug and acts like an over-excited and love-filled puppy, becomes the horrible Rot Fly when it grows disillusioned, saddened, spiteful, and all around bitchy, after which it is returned to Nurgle's Gardens and lies in the muck to mope. Nurgle's fattest flies cocoon it, and it metamorphoses into the embodiment of hatred against life's unfairness. The Plaguebearers that ride them push them into greater heights of revenge. - BIONICLE: The Nui-Rama are huge flies with claws and stings. The influence of Infected Kanohi turns them into deadly foes. - Anchorhead opens with "a fly buzzing around here somewhere." \|\|This is also how it ends, and the ending implies that it isn't really over at all.\|\| - In The Binding of Isaac, flies are a very common enemy, and several other monsters vomit flies or otherwise summon them. However, with certain items you can spawn your own allied flies which can be very powerful in the right circumstances. - Black & White: A God Is You, and if your totem animal falls to the bottom of the Karma Meter, it gains a cloud of flies that follow it around along with other physical deformities. In the sequel, flies also start showing up in your territory if you go Evil, in contrast to fireflies and butterflies if you become Good. - Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Castlevania: Harmony of Despair has Beelzebub, a zombie giant sealed inside Dracula's castle that become the host of dog-sized flies. - Clive Barker's Jericho: The enemies killed dissolve into swarms of flies and in the endgame you have to beat a Dual Boss by destroying hives of flies to turn off their shields. - Dungeon Keeper lets you recruit giant flies and fireflies as evil minions to add to your Evil Overlord dungeon. - Eternal Darkness: A sound akin to the buzzing of a swarm of flies is used to represent great evil or madness in the soundtrack. - Fable: If the player-character falls to the evil end of the Karma Meter, he'll be surrounded by a swarm of flies, in addition to gaining horns and red eyes. - God Hand: Belze transforms into a huge fly-like being with his face situated between the eyes for his boss fight. - Lakeview Valley: As the player commits more and more murders, the number of flies around the town also goes up. The reason for this isn't clear until later: the villain is a giant fly-monster who you may or may not have been unwittingly helping all week. The flies are his Soul Jars, and the only way to stop him for good is to kill all of them. - Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor: Morgai Flies are a strain of carrion fly tainted by Sauron's evil. They are horrendously voracious and have the sigil of the flaming eye on their backs. You use their nests as booby traps by shooting them down on Orcs, which they then viciously attack. - Mortal Kombat: - Drahmin of Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance fame was once a human conqueror, but his life of evil caused him to end up in the Netherrealm upon death, where he became an eternally rotting Oni. This explains the constant swarm of flies around him. He can even weaponize them as a special move. - Mortal Kombat X introduces D'Vorah, member of the Kytinn, a race of Bee People. Appropriately enough, she speaks with a buzz that adds reverb to her voice and makes her come across as raspy. - Shin Megami Tensei Beelzebub is a demonic fly the size of a tank wearing a skull necklace and holding a skull scepter, just in case the evil part was too subtle. In some games he has the Signature Move Death Flies: guaranteed instant death against anything not immune to death, massive Non-Elemental damage otherwise. - The Sims uses flies as an indicator that something is dirty. They're actually hard to see, but when you're trying to figure out exactly what needs to be cleaned, you can hear their buzz. - One of the antagonists of Wick (2020) are demonic flies called Legions, who can be found buzzing around some parts of the cathedral. They will chase and attack Wick if they spot his flame, causing him to lose wax with each hit. - Although never done with malevolent intent, some flies' tendency to burrow both in the bodies of living creatures (warning, massive amounts of Squick) as well as dead ones, especially in third-world countries, as well as their ability to spread disease, makes their association with evil by human cultures justified. Subverted by specially bred (i.e., laboratory-bred, thus sterile) maggots, which are often used as a last line of defense against wounds infected with antibiotic resistant bacteria, they would only eat dead flesh but leave healthy tissue alone. Do Not Try This at Home: this only applies to the maggots of some species; others are much less discriminate in their dining habits and will happily snack on either living or dead tissue, and there are even some that only eat living tissue. - There is a type of cheese called casu marzu that contains maggots on purpose, made in the Sardinia region of Italy. It is produced by leaving ordinary pecorino (a type of sheep's milk cheese) outdoors once it's fully matured, in hopes of attracting a specific type of fly to lay eggs in the cheese. The larvae are then allowed to hatch, and to feast on the cheese, breaking down some of its fats and proteins. Sometimes the larvae are eaten along with the cheese, and sometimes they are removed immediately before consumption. note : There are a few other types of cheese that allow cheese flies to lay their eggs in it during production, but casu marzu is the only type where the maggots are allowed to hatch and go nuts on the cheese, and certainly the only one that comes to the table crawling with maggots as a matter of course. Because of the dangers inherent in eating cheese so far gone that maggots are nesting in it, the cheese is illegal in most of the EU, including the region where it is produced. Some traditional cheesemakers in Sardinia are trying to get an exception made for it, on the grounds that it is a traditional food of the region, but thus far, they have not been successful.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParasiteInfestedEvil
Gratuitous Iambic Pentameter - TV Tropes Among creators, there's a certain kind Who always have poetic forms in mind. In ev'ry situation — great or small They can't resist the urge to rhyme at all, And even if they don't use rhymes, you hear Poetic rhythms jangle on the ear. Though often plainer words would suit much better, Gratuitous Iambic Penta-MET-er. Poetic Meter 101 : An iamb is a poetic beat containing an unstressed syllable and then a stressed one: ba-DUM (if it goes DUM-ba it's called a trochee). Pentameter, as the "penta" prefix implies, is verse with five beats (tetrameter has four, heptameter has seven, etc.), so iambic pentameter has five iambs per line. This can work out to either ten or eleven syllablesan odd unstressed one at the end, called a "feminine ending," doesn't affect the meter much. In addition, poets often jazz up the rhythm by substituting a trochee, or even a three-syllable beat, for one or more of the iambs. This kind of verse is very common in William Shakespeare, as in for example "Un-EA-sy LIES the HEAD that WEARS a CROWN" ( Henry IV, Part 2). This trope can apply to any dialogue written in a rhythmic verse form, though. ## You'll find this trope within the works below: - The Fatima Fates sometimes lapse into iambic pentameter when delivering a prophecy in The Five Star Stories, though this may only be in the English version. What's strange is that Clotho's prophecy in Volume II has the rhyming couplet at the beginning rather than the end. This is probably a deliberate artistic choice to highly the nonlinear nature of time in the FSS universe. - Taking this in a new and strange direction, the demon Etrigan in The DCU speaks in rhyme. This is taken by one of the Endless as a sign he has been promoted in the demonic ranks. And when Alan Moore writes him, he actually does speak iambic pentameter. One incarnation of him accidentally forgot to rhyme in haste, meaning that it's a conscious effort on his part rather than automatically how speech comes to him. - Played with in the miniseries Arkham Asylum: Living Hell, when it turns out that not only do many demons speak in rhyme, anything not in rhyme is incomprehensible to them. Thus, the human/demon interpreter job is left to Humpty Dumpty, who speaks fluent Poetic. - In Shadowpact, it is revealed that rhyming demons are considered as part of the underworld's upper class and one has to earn the privilege to become one. However, it must be a lower rank than being (a) Lord of Hell, as Neron was furious to be promoted to rhyming demon. Yes, a lowering of rank is called being promoted. They're demons. The lower they are, the more powerful and evil they are. Yes, it's stupid. But they discuss it at length when Blue Devil gets his demotion and starts rhyming. - In an issue of Justice League of America, there's a demon practicing rhyming speech, hoping for an eventual promotion. - The Super-Buddies are sent to Hell when Booster Gold toys with Dr. Fate's stuff. Blue Beetle catches Etrigan saying something that doesn't rhyme. His only reply is "So sue me". - Garth Ennis's Hitman (1993) also plays with this, with a lower ranking demon named Baytor who, due to his inability to rise in Hell's ranks, can only say, "I am Baytor!" - An issue of Excalibur (Marvel Comics) told from the point of view of Lockheed features him flying around spouting bad rhyme. Which is interesting, as it's been suggested on more than one occasion that, being an alien life-form, his vocal apparatus just can't cope with English. - In another example of Neil Gaiman using this trope, the conversations between Dream and the young Shakespeare in The Sandman (1989) are actually in iambic pentameter. The character Nuala also briefly drops into iambic pentameter at one point. Dream himself, when explaining himself to queen Titania of Faerie, also goes into blank verse mode. Understandable, as this is the issue where A Midsummer Night's Dream is performed. - Gaiman makes a hobby of writing poems in unusual verse formats that have fallen out of fashion, sometimes for centuries. The prevalence of them appearing in his comic work is pure Author Appeal. - In an early issue of The Sandman, Lucifer claims that various poetic styles have been fashionable amongst demons at different times, and currently it happens to be rhyming. - Another Alan Moore example — the title Anti-Hero of V for Vendetta occasionally speaks in iambic pentameter, as part of his theatrical masquerade and his celebration of literature long suppressed. Particularly apt since "V" is "5" in Roman numerals. - Another Alan Moore example: Witch Wench, a 17th-century superheroine (and member of the time-travelling League of Infinity) introduced during Moore's run on Supreme. - Alan Moore really loves his iambic pentameter; in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book The Black Dossier, the final passage features Prospero explaining at length (and in iambic pentameter) the importance of fiction. Makes sense, since he is a character from Shakespeare. - It comes back in Century: 1969, in the form of a punk rocker in a seedy nightclub singing in perfect iambic pentameter. - A supplemental comic for the most recent comic incarnation of the Transformers explains Wheelie's habitual rhyming as due to being stuck on an uninhabited planet alongside an alien with a translation device that only works reliably in rhyme. After several centuries of that, Wheelie's still rhyming by force of habit. Unless something scares him badly enough, that is. - In the Fables spinoff Jack of Fables, Lady Luck speaks in Iambic Pentameter. - In Empowered, the Caged Demonwolf combines this with Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness and Purple Prose (also, thesaurus abuse) for some truly remarkable dialogue. - One professor in a story by Wilhelm Busch talks like this. - From Herc's book onwards / Chaos King speaks in Haiku / for added coolness. - In De Cape et de Crocs, Maupertuis and the Master-at-Arms especially like to practice the art of "Rixme" (a portmanteau between the french words "rixe" and "rime", respectively "fight" and "rhyme"), which is fencing while taunting the opponent in Alexandrines. Justified, since they are fencers, poets and gentlemen, and in the Master-at-arms case, \|\|Cyrano de Bergerac\|\|. - In the Asterix comic, Asterix and Cleopatra, an Egyptian named Edifis makes a journey to Gaul to seek the help of Getafix the Druid. Edifis speaks in what sounds like a stilted verse-form. The druid explains to a bemused Asterix and Obelix what it is, and makes a pun: "C'est un alexandrin", ie "He's from Alexandria". note : An "alexandrin" is a verse-form in classical French literature and occupies the same place in French Lit as the iambic pentameter does in English. English translations render Edifis's speech into iambic pentameter to carry over something of the pun. - In Hoodwinked!, Red comes across Japeth, a singing senile country western mountain goat: Red Puckett: I'm looking for Granny Puckett's house? Japeth the Goat: [singing] Graaaaaaaanneeee Puckeeeett... Red Puckett: Could you stop singing for one moment? Japeth the Goat: [singing] No I can't, wish I could, but a mountain witch done put a spell on me , 37 years agoooooooo, and now I gotta sing every thing I saaaaaaaaayyyyyy... Red Puckett: Everything? Japeth the Goat: [speaking] That's right. Red Puckett: You just talked! Just now! Japeth the Goat: Oh, did I? [singing] Did I? Dididididodadidididoooo... [Red gives a pissed off Aside Glance to the audience] - A really gratuitous example from the trailer for Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted: "You FOOL! How COULD you LET them GET aWAY!?" - A not-quite-famous example in cinema would be Rudy Ray Moore's alter-ego Dolemite. - The entirety of Sally Potter's Yes is spoken in rhyming iambic pentameter. - The musical Les Demoiselles de Rochefort ( The Young Girls Of Rochefort) has a scene in which everyone speaks in alexandrines (the classical French line and equivalent of the iambic pentameter.) - James Gunn told Lloyd Kaufman he wrote Tromeo and Juliet completely in iambic pentameter. He didn't, but there is a lot of it. - The medieval parts of Roger Corman's The Undead have much of the dialog in varying types of blank verse. - The Boob's dialogue in Yellow Submarine is almost exclusively in rhyming couplets. He can even make rhymes from whatever the Beatles say to him, even if it doesn't follow form or iambic pentameter precisely. Paul: Hey fellas, look! Boob: ( writing on a note pad with a pen between his toes) The footnotes for my nineteenth book. This is my standard procedure for doing it. And while I compose it, I'm also reviewing it. George: A boob for all seasons. Paul: How can he lose? John: Were your notices good? Boob: It's my policy never to read my reviews. - In The Exploits of Ebenezum by Craig Shaw Gardner, we are almost immediately introduced to a Big Bad rhyming demon named Guxx Unfufadoo. He can speak without rhyming, but as his power (defined very generically) grows with every rhyme, he almost never fails to rhyme. In the succeeding trilogy he joins the party in an Enemy Mine scenario, with a Malfunction Malady where sneezing fits prevent him from rhyming... so he only speaks in blank verse with a specific beat pattern (and hopes he doesn't reflexively end a verse in a rhyme and start sneezing). - Lewis Carroll's "Hiawatha's Photographing" is a parody of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's narrative poem "The Song of Hiawatha". It's preceded by an introduction which is written as normal text, but stealthily follows the same meter as both poems (trochaic tetrameter). In an age of imitation, I can claim no special merit for this slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy. Any fairly practised writer, with the slightest ear for rhythm, could compose, for hours together, in the easy running metre of "The Song of Hiawatha." Having, then, distinctly stated that I challenge no attention in the following little poem to its merely verbal jingle, I must beg the candid reader to confine his criticism to its treatment of the subject. - The Lord of the Rings features Tom Bombadil, an enigmatic figure who often breaks into verse and actually made the ring itself turn invisible. - In The Particolored Unicorn by John De Cles, all unicorns love to show off—some speak Sanskrit, some recite poetry—in order to be impressive pets. Lifesaver, the titular unicorn, speaks in iambic pentameter. As with the Etrigan example above, he drops it at one point in his excitement. - In The Fires of Affliction, the leader of the Mystery Cult speaks entirely in iambic pentameter up until The Reveal. Incidentally, the book was written by one of the editors of the English script for Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, which also features this trope. - In Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest the dialog is pretty much entirely in iambic pentameter, mostly unrhymed. - The main character in The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss ends up spending some time in Fae, where most conversations seem to be carried out in rhyming couplets. It's implied that this is a somewhat whimsical form of amusement, rather than a natural speech pattern. - Lord Peter Wimsey keeps doing this unintentionally in Busman's Honeymoon. The other characters lampshade it. - in Ruled Britannia not only are Marlowe and Shakespeare's plays obviously in Iambic Pentameter, their conversations between each other often are as well. - In the Star Trek: The Lost Era novel The Buried Age, there's a scene where Picard and Ariel discuss Shakespeare, and he realises afterwards that she was casually speaking in iambic pentameter, including finishing with a rhyming couplet. - Ruled Brittania: much of the dialogue is written in iambic pentameter, as its cribbed from various plays of the era. - A Song of Ice and Fire: GRRM's writing style is heavily iambic, and iambic pentameter occurs frequently enough that it's unlikely to be coincidental. A few of the more quotable examples: Jaime Lannister: There are no men like me. There's only me. Jon Snow: First lesson: Stick them with the pointy end. Eddard Stark: And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die. Ygritte: All men must die, Jon Snow. But first we'll live. Jon Snow: The more you give a king, the more he wants. Narration: ...and Eddard Stark dreamed of a frozen hell reserved for the Starks of Winterfell. Jeor Mormont: The things we love destroy us every time. Aeron Greyjoy: No godless man may sit the Seastone Chair. - The final chapter of Jerome K. Jeromes Three Men in a Boat suddenly lets loose with: But the riverchill and weary, with the ceaseless rain-drops falling on its brown and sluggish waters, with a sound as of a woman, weeping low in some dark chamber; while the woods, all dark and silent, shrouded in their mists of vapour, stand like ghosts upon the margin; silent ghosts with eyes reproachful, like the ghosts of evil actions, like the ghosts of friends neglectedis a spirit-haunted water through the land of vain regrets. It is not the books only Hiawatha parody, but it is the sneakiest. note : If you must split hairs, this is not iambic pentameter. It is trochaic tetrameter. - Found in the "MAD Personal Columns" in an issue of MAD: HANDSOME MAN who speaks in rhyme, seeks a gal who's mighty fine. I'm wealthy, smart and 43, but all my friends are sick of me. All I do is speak in verse; I say I'll stop and then get worse. So if you like a man who's dumb, write to me—BOX 41. - Forsooth!: The game gives a guide for some Elizabethan phrases; though it doesn't advocate actually improvising in meter, some very motivated players try. - There is a very amusing scene in Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), where the main character, having been sucked into Othello, realizes that she is now effortlessly speaking in iambic pentameter. It's all so strange, What's even stranger though I speak in blank verse like the characters Unrhymed Iambical Pentameter It seems to come quite naturally to me I feel so eloquent and... eloquent . My God. I think I'm on an acid trip. - Subverted in Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, in which the title character, having learned that it is more elegant to speak in prose rather than affecting metre, is delighted to learn he has been speaking prose all his life without knowing it. - Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, Princess Ida has its dialogue in blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter. The long Alfred, Lord Tennyson poem that Princess Ida parodies used the same meter. - William Shakespeare has been known to indulge in this trope: - Many of the Bard's loftier plays are written in iambic pentameter, but he lampshades it in As You Like It, where Rosalind amusedly speaks in iambic pentameter with the pretentious Jaques, but immediately lapses into prose upon leaving him and meeting Orlando. - Because even Elizabethan prose had a habit of falling into the cadence of iambic pentameter, it's not always clear whether Shakespeare meant certain passages to follow that meter or not. For example, critics and printers have disagreed sharply about whether crucial scenes in King Lear were verse or prose. - The play King Charles III, which is set in modern-day England. - The Tumblr blog Pop Sonnets translated lyrics to well-known songs into Shakespearean sonnets. Sadly, it apparently went inactive in 2016, but not before releasing a book.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PardonMeStewardessISpeakIambicPentameter
Parasitic Horror - TV Tropes Parasites are organisms which depend on feeding off living hosts for their survival. For sapient creatures such as humans, this is an inherently horrific concept as it violates all our ideas about bodily autonomy and how we interact with other creatures. While "normal" predation is at least intelligible to a species of former hunter-gatherers, parasitism seems to us both pestilential and insidious, not an acceptable part of the circle of life but some abberant perversion of nature. In fiction, this often takes on far more extreme forms, being infected by parasites the size of your fist, ones that take over all of your motor functions, or horribly mutate your body. It may be the offspring of some other lifeform implanted into you against your will, based off the similar behavior of parasitic wasps. Sometimes they will get inside your body through Orifice Invasion, otherwise they'll just burrow into your skin. In some cases the parasite might even be both intelligent and malevolent. Sub-Trope of Body Horror. Super-Trope to Puppeteer Parasite, Chest Burster, Parasite Zombie, Parasites Are Evil, and Womb Horror. ## Examples: - Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): In this MonsterVerse fanfiction, two of Ghidorah's "children" cause this. When the Many are being injected into their first human victims, it looks like something is slithering under the body's skin. One of the unborn \|\|Zmeyevich\|\| kicking like a regular baby against its mother's belly is just a little bit more visible than is human. - The Bay is a Found Footage Film that starts out as a documentary of the Fourth of July celebration at Claridge, Maryland, only for the town to succumb to a plague of \|\|a mutated species of Cymothoa exigua spawned from the polluted bay. They infect the people through the water supply and eat them alive and spawn until they die, where they escape their host and jump to a new one. By the end of the film, nearly everyone in the film had died after the US government quarantined it, the footage leaked by the reporter that survived.\|\| - Growth is about an island that unwittingly hosts a secret government laboratory studying parasites. While they're intended to produce extremely big, shiny pearls, this is only a proof-of-concept. They are accidentally released, first infesting a creepy kid (who, does, as a matter of fact, have them swarming out of her eyes), then overrunning the whole island. The Cruel Twist Ending of the film shows that \|\|those pearls are actually their eggs, and they're hatching...\|\| - The Mummy Trilogy: Scarab beetles can quickly burrow into a person's skin and eat them from the inside out. They are especially fond of human brains. - The Ruins: The evil vine not only eats people (or drinks their blood), but it also infects them with spores which then proceed to grow inside the victim. One of the main characters ends up killing herself as she tries to cut them out. - Sputnik. The alien lives in the host's oesophagus and stomach, and secretes a toxin that knocks out the host and relaxes his muscles so the alien can exit via the mouth to hunt and feed, which it does every night. Once outside the body and ingesting oxygen it grows from a snakelike form to a multi-limbed Starfish Alien 1.5 metres in length. It's speculated that the alien is using the host as a spacesuit until it becomes fully adapted to Earth's environment, whereupon it will discard the host like a cocoon (turns out the relationship is symbiotic). - The Thing (both 1982 and 2011): The titular villain is an extraterrestrial single-celled organism that can infect its victims by mere touch and hides inside of them. If its cover is blown, the Thing creates a horrific pandemonium of meat, tentacles, and mouths out of its host's body. To hide and hunt efficiently, the Thing orchestrates paranoia to the heroes, causing them to accuse each other for being the alien menace. - Venom (2018) is a reconstruction of this. While Eddie is initially terrified by the Venom symbiote using his body as a host, and is especially horrified by his new diet, Venom is actually sentient and able to be reasoned with—and, as consolation, being his host also grants Eddie all kinds of cool superpowers. They grow to genuinely like and trust one another, to the point where Venom is hurt and angered by being called a parasite, insisting their relationship is mutually beneficial. By the end, Eddie's grown to like having Venom around, and offers the compromise that they only eat bad people, to which Venom agrees, allowing them to become a full-on Horrifying Hero. - All Tomorrows: On one world that resisted their invasion, the Qu punished the people living there by transforming some of them into an array of parasites. Some were tortoise-sized and ambulatory, others were fist-sized and lived attached to hosts, and there was even one variety that infested the wombs of its victims. Most of them went extinct after the Qu left, but one variety subverted this, as they went on to regain sentience and formed a symbiotic relationship with their hosts. - The Troop involves a parasite-based bioweapon created as a side-gig to a genetically engineered tapeworm diet aid. While the diet aid was meant to become The Symbiote, the bioweapon took all the bad things about them and cranked them up, and added a few more besides. - Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke: The last parts of the book involve Agnes being convinced by Zoe to \|\|consume raw insect-infested meat, willingly giving herself a tapeworm in order to fulfill her desire to be a mother.\|\| - Babylon 5: The episode "Exogenesis" features giant centipede-looking alien critters who are shown sinking into the flesh and bonding to the spinal columns of assorted lurkers in Downbelow, where they seem to take control of their hosts' bodies. \|\|Contrary to what Marcus and Doctor Franklin initially think, the Lurkers aren't victims, but volunteers, and the alien critters are actually symbionts, sharing their memories with the Lurkers in exchange for the ride. Basically what the Trills from Star Trek would be if the Federation didn't know about Trills.\|\| - One episode of Earth: Final Conflict introduces a parasitic worm that burrows into the body of its host, making them completely unafraid of everything, up to and including death. However, after an hour, the parasite will kill the host. - The Expanse: In season 4, Holden and Amos are trapped on an alien planet with the other colonists and have sought refuge in the ancient artifacts. It later turns out that the water contains parasites which nestle inside their eyes, slowly causing them to go blind. - In one episode of Primeval a flock of dodos manages to escape into a building in the present day. The dodos themselves are about as dangerous as you might expect, but they bring with them a highly infectious worm-like parasitoid that can also transfer to humans. - Stranger Things: The Mind Flayer manages to leave a bit behind when it injures El, which starts wriggling and painfully crawling around under her skin later. Jonathan has to cut her leg open and try to dig it out with his fingers while they're all hiding from the Mind Flayer. - Star Trek: - Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan features Ceti Eels, which burrow into their victim's head through the ear canal and attach themselves to their host's brain. This has the side effect of making their victims extremely susceptible to suggestion. Khan uses this to hijack the starship Reliant and force Captain Tarrell and Commander Chekov to lure Enterprise into an ambush. When Khan orders Terrell to kill Kirk, he's able to resist the eel's influence just enough to eat his phaser before Khan can force him to murder the Admiral. - In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the episode "Conspiracy" plays the parasites for various types of horror: firstly, they change people's personalities, secondly, they make people violent and super strong, thirdly they themselves look pretty gross with their appendages sticking out of the person's neck, and fourthly, some of them breed in somebody's stomach, causing him to explode. - Ultra Series: - Ultraman: The Next: Beast the One, the Big Bad of the film is a parasitic, space demon who merges with a human host and slowly overrides their mind, body and finally, kills them altogether, absorbing its host into itself. It can do the same with other living creatures for the sake of augmenting itself. - Ultraman Z: Celebro, Big Bad of the series, is a space entity that takes possession of various organisms to carry out his evil plans. His possessions are shown to be rather unsettling as his body language shows signs of twisting the bodies and actions of those possessed to suit his needs and his possessions are shown as rather painful. - The plot of Baldur's Gate III concerns the protagonists being implanted with illithid tadpoles, seeking a cure before the parasite eventually consumes their brains and transforms their bodies into mind flayers. The opening cutscene demonstrates the implantation of these tadpoles, showing them entering their victim's skulls by crawling around their eyeballs. - Destiny has the larvae of the Worm Gods, which are in each and every single member of the Hive race. The larvae give their hosts immortality and, when supplied with enough death and destruction, the ability to bend reality to their whim. However, if they are not sustained with enough death, destruction and wanton murder, they feed on their hosts. The Hive have turned this grotesque relationship into a religion. - Endoparasitic sees Cynte infected with a parasite that he is only able to keep at bay with vaccines syringes scattered across the research facility. - The Last of Us revolves around a Zombie Apocalypse caused by a mutated strain of the Cordyceps fungus, which turns people into bloodthirsty zombies and, over time, covers the victims in fruiting bodies, starting with the head. - Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5 involves a mutative Puppeteer Parasite known as Las Plagas. They often reveal themselves as carnivorous arthropods growing on people's spines after their host gets decapitated. - In Skies of Arcadia, when the crew reaches The Empire, a certain enemy is a homeless man being piloted by a gigantic cockroach-like insect. - Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: Mindworms. Just Mindworms. The dominant native lifeform of Planet, Mindworms are small, maggot-like creatures that attack in massive swarms and paralyze their prey with psychic terror before laying their eggs inside the brains of their conscious, screaming victims. And they always make a beeline towards the biggest sources of pollution. Fun. - StarCraft's Infested Terrans are stuffed so full of alien parasites they (both the poor space marine and all his new passengers) are bursting out of their spacesuits. - A certain Creepypasta involves a man on a bet to lose weight take anabolic steroids and a tapeworm pill together. The tapeworm begomes giant and eats all his organs. - Mortasheen, a horror-themed Mons world heavily influenced by real-life biology, has too many parasite-based monsters to list individually. Wormbrains are Puppeteer Parasite flatworms that control genetically-engineered host bodies. Botanical monsters are cultivated as parasites of natural plants. The Genetimorph and Underfiend are dangerous parasitoid creatures whose offspring are Chest Bursters, whereas the Wrigglegeist is an endoparasite that lives harmlessly inside an unwary host. Still more Mortasheen parasites feed off of weirder things like genetic material and neural activity.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParasiticHorror
Parental Favoritism - TV Tropes "I know, we're not supposed to have favorites. But still, we're only human. We love who we love." It is tough being a kid in Fiction Land. Bad enough when you're an only child, but if you're among a pack of siblings, this particular trope is nearly guaranteed to raise its head at some point in order to make life even more difficult. Parental Favoritism is just what it sounds like — one child is given preference over their siblings. In order to qualify, this has to be consistent. One child being asked to do the other's chores because their sibling is sick is not favoritism, although that won't stop the kid lumbered with the extra work from grumbling. But one child having to do all the chores on a daily basis, while their sibling sits and plays video games, is definitely favoritism. It may show itself in a variety of ways. If there is an argument or fight, the parent(s) (or parent(s) of parent(s)) will always take the side of one particular sibling, and the other(s) will be the ones being scolded/punished. The parents may brag about one child in particular and be admonishing or dismissive of the others for their faults, regardless of the achievements of the brothers and sisters. A regular line that may be entailed with this is a variant of, "Honestly, (insert name), why can't you be more like (insert favorite's name)?" There may always be one particular kid who gets out of doing their chores, even if the other kids get pulled up for forgetting to tidy their room. Sometimes, there may be more than one "favorite", or the mother and father will have different "favorites", making life even more of a headache for their siblings. There are a few different versions of the trope and a few different "explanations" as to why one child is preferred over the other. These divisions can be by: - Birth Order: - The oldest child is favored because they are the firstborn/family heir. Tends to apply more to sons than daughters, since old inheritance laws favor boys over girls. This is found more often in fantasy or historical literature, where these laws have a real impact on how the family is run. Sometimes, the oldest child may have a huge set of standards thrown on them, but other times, an overachiever will set other standards for the younger ones. - The youngest child is favored because they are the "baby" of the family, and the parents will protect them from being bullied by their older siblings even when they are big enough to defend themselves and/or started the trouble in the first place. This is popular in more modern literature, especially in teen novels and children's TV. - Middle children can often get a rough deal; very rarely are they the family favorite, unless they do something really outstanding to explain it. Middle Child Syndrome, as it's known, is a real-life phenomenon that some psychologists are studying today. - Occasionally, the parent(s) will favor a child who shares their own place in the birth order over the other children, due to their own childhood experiences with their siblings. For example, a parent who was the middle child themselves might sympathize with that one, at the risk of leaving one of the others out in the cold. - When the parents split favoritism, it will usually be the father favoring the firstborn and the mother favoring the baby. - Gender: - Preference by gender often relies on the boys:girls ratio within the family. If there are several of one sex and only one of the other, the sibling with a different gender from the others will be "the favorite". This can backfire though — they may instead be the "ugly duckling" of the family if the parents prefer one gender over the other, a preference that often hinges on the culture the story is set in (i.e, the solitary sister who's expected to clean up after, and cook for, her brothers). - If there is one son and several daughters, the son will acquire the title of "heir to the family". His parents may believe him to be "more important" than his sisters, and they might be expected to obey him or take care of him. If the father is not in the picture, he'll be the "man" of the house. - If there is one daughter and several sons, she will be the "baby girl" of the family regardless of birth order (possible exception if she is the oldest sibling, in which case she'll be the de facto babysitter). Strangely, brothers are seldom shown as resenting their sister — in fact, they'll defend her honor more ferociously than their parents will. Any potential boyfriends are in for a hard time. - Sometimes, parents have a preference for their child's gender to match their own because they feel like they'll "connect" with them better. Their expectations often rely on prejudices and expectations rather than what the child actually is or wants to be but sometimes it ends up working if the child matches the parent's expectations or pretends to do so. A similar case are parents who get disappointed when the baby's sex turns out to be the opposite of what they expected and mentally prepared for and never get over it, such as a father who wanted a son but is "stuck" with a daughter or only daughters. - Personality: - Sometimes, one child is funnier, more gregarious, or more talented than the others, making them "the favorite" almost automatically. In some cases (such as Megan Parker on Drake & Josh), this sibling will be sweetness and light to everyone else, but the Devil in Plain Sight to their brothers and sisters. Although in other cases, the other child could have a negative personality, so the fault could partly fall on them. A child may have different interests than a parent, such as a child of a jock parent who is uninterested in sports. Alternatively, somebody (one of the parents) may die. In this case, one child will be favored because of their resemblance to a particular person. Particularly narcissistic parents, however, tend to favor the child that most looks/acts like themself (although that can happen in a more benign way, with a parent simply having more in common with a child who's also athletic, musical, artistic, etc.). - Looks: - Some parents take Beauty Equals Goodness seriously and favor the more conventionally attractive child simply for their looks, sometimes the parent will favor the child that physically resembles them and look down on the one that looks like their spouse. - Disability: - Sexual Orientation and/or Gender Identity: - If parents find out one of their children is LGBT, expect the burden of continuing the family line to go to their straight siblings, and thus, for the queer child to be written off as "a waste" for being less likely to reproduce. Grandkids aside, the queer child will often be seen as the Black Sheep of the family, especially if they're very open about it. - This can also go the other way in more progressive stories. If the kids are all one gender, the queer one might have a special bond with the opposite-gender parent. A mom with several boys might see her Camp Gay son as the "daughter" she never had, doing all sorts of girly things with him while his brothers are out playing football. - Biological vs. Adoption: - It hardly needs mentioning that dozens of fairy tales (notably Cinderella) involve stepchildren mistreated by their parents in favor of their biological children. This is a Discredited Trope today; more commonly, you have an adopted child who suffers some perceived slight from their stepparent and must be reassured that they are loved just as much as the parent's natural children. - This is also commonly inverted — the adopted child will be well behaved, the biological child will be spoiled and jealous, and when the inheritance or the call to adventure is passed down to the adopted child instead of the "true" inheritor, expect the biological child to start a Cain and Abel situation rapidly. Often the two can mix, with the biological child still being favored by the parents but the adopted child being given the call to adventure from outside the family. Harry Potter is a good example of this. - Inherited Ability: - If the parent has a specific talent, skill, career path, or what have you, any kid who shows promise in that field will instantly be doted upon by that parent for following in their footsteps. Say, if the dad is a police officer, he might share a bond with a daughter who also wants to be a cop. - In fantasy/sci-fi stories, this can also involve superpowers if they're passed down genetically. If one child inherited mom's psychic abilities while the other kids are muggles, she'll spend a considerable amount of time with that one to teach them how to use their powers...at the cost of neglecting her other children. Any of these criteria can backfire. For example, one child might be the favorite because they look and act just like their saintly, deceased mother. Another might be just the opposite — The Un-Favourite — because of their resemblance to the mother that walked out on the father — or even because they remind the father of the saintly mother. If the saintly mother died in childbirth, then the poor kid who was birthed this way usually has a hell of a lot of resentment to get over, no matter what the physical similarities, often due to the father, consciously or unconsciously, blaming them for the mother's death. Occasionally, parents have a child that naturally requires more care and attention than the others, because they're very young, disabled, or psychologically damaged. This will still seem unfair to the other kids who get less of their parents' time, but it's a necessity rather than favoritism... usually. This is a favorite plot for children's books and television, where the lead character is jealous of a new baby sister or brother only to be reassured that "we love you just as much". On the other hand, if the favorite is Too Good for This Sinful Earth, the parents may never learn to appreciate their living children. Sometimes, the parents are reasonably handing out the privileges and responsibilities with age. When the older child looks only at the responsibilities and the younger at the privileges, both can come to the view that they are The Un-Favourite. Or they may responsibly differentiate, but the musically untalented child may resent the lessons as favoritism, and the talented one, the other's free time as favoritism; or the child who must do all the chores resents the sickly child's confinement to his bedroom and inability to play. Cue Sibling Rivalry. Of course, it is common that the parents are not aware of their favoritism and may be appalled at themselves upon realizing it. Very few parents would actually pursue favoritism with the knowledge of the other children's hurt feelings. In fact, the obligatory "talk with the parents" is normally part of a Parental Favoritism plot...but that does not guarantee it will solve anything. If the writer is trying to Hand Wave the glaring bias of the parents, there will be a scene where mum and dad will give a long speech on how they value all their kids equally and will tell The Un-Favourite child that making them live in the basement and forcing them to bow whenever their sibling enters a room is really a mark of their esteem. The words "you're the responsible one" will be mentioned in some form. A more realistic version is where the big talk is honest, and the parent doesn't bother trying to justify their actions but do realise they were wrong and attempt to make amends. This is regularly done to "humanise" the hitherto parents — but it's too late. By the time of the talk, most of the audience will already be set against the parents, and it'll take a hell of a lot of good writing to redeem them. If the parents have clearly realized their foolishness and have shown to be really sorry, then this may take a lot of weight off them. Parental Favoritism can have a huge impact on characters even when they become adults. The Favorite will either be spoiled and throw a tantrum if they don't get their own way, feel that they were a sort of "experimental" child and develop insecurities, or be a Nervous Wreck who permanently fears that he or she won't meet the parents' expectations; kids at the bottom of the pecking order will usually be bitter and cynical about relationships and family life (and often blame the favorite children alongside the parents), or have serious self-esteem issues, leading to self-deprecation or clinginess as ways to compensate. This is all too often Truth in Television. The friendship version of this trope is Friendship Favoritism. Compare Grandparent Favoritism, which refers to when grandparents prefer their grandchildren in general over their own children (their grandchildren's parents); if they specifically favor one grandchild over their other grandchildren, that still falls under this trope, but the two are not mutually exclusive. ## Examples: - Implied in an ad for Invisalign Teen. Twin teenagers both need braces; however, their parents get Invisalign for one daughter and regular braces for the other. The Un-Favourite spends the commercial complaining about all the limitations of her headgear, while the favored daughter gloats and rubs her face in how she doesn't have to deal with all those issues. Someone then takes a picture of the twins and makes a smart remark about finally being able to tell them apart. - The 2011 Mackenzie Foy - AT&T commercial television commercial. In this commercial, the son and daughter are sitting in front of a TV and only one more show can be recorded. They decide which child is going to get it, and they pick why they choose, the father then asks to say which child they favor the most, and both pick the daughter, of course, neither child actually cares, but then the father says to give it to the son instead, because that is all he going to get. - Another commercial for Guinness uses the same premise; two parents tell their adult son he's their least favorite child, to the point that he's not only under his siblings but also the dog and their fine china. But they buy him a case of Guinness to make up for it. - One pizza chain had an ad where the children ask their father about his preference for dinner, and he protests that trying to choose would be like trying to decide which of them was his favorite child. They persist, wanting to know what he wants for dinner, and he finally relents and declares, "Bobby." - Downplayed in Bokurano, as Jun and Kana Ushiro's father unintentionally favors the latter, his biological daughter, over the former, his adoptive son. He does love both his children, but he stays relatively distant from Jun, afraid that if he tries to get close and Jun rejects him, their relationship will never be the same. Mr. Ushiro is portrayed somewhat sympathetically for this trope, though, because he doesn't realize he's doing this until it's too late- namely, when he realizes that \|\|he took the news that Kana would have to pilot(which would end with her death even if she won), much worse than the news of the same thing happening with Jun, being devastated by the news and horrified by his own reaction\|\|. When Jun apologizes for being such "a bad son" all this time in his final conversation with his father, Mr. Ushiro replies that he's sorry for being a bad father. - Code Geass: Lelouch perceives himself and Nunnally as The Unfavourites to their father, The Emperor Charles zi Brittania, because their mother was a commoner. \|\|In reality, they're actually his favorite children because Marianne was the only woman he ever truly loved. He sent the kids to Japan to protect them from Marianne's "killer", their uncle V.V., and intended to have them be a part of the Assimilation Plot he, Marianne, and C.C. had devised. When Lelouch finds out about all this, he lets them have it.\|\| - In Crayon Shin-chan, 5-year-old Shinnosuke's brother is The Un-Favourite and he knows it. - The emperor and empress of the Misurugi Empire really set their eyes on their middle daughter, the titular character of Cross Ange. Which bites them in the ass in the very first episode. - Death Note: A minor example, but still there. Light's father Soichiro doesn't completely dismiss the possibility that Light could be Kira (which he is, but Soichiro goes to his grave without ever finding this out), but is adamantly certain that Light's little sister Sayu couldn't possibly be the killer. - Why Ken partially resented his older brother in Digimon Adventure 02. Not only was he the younger sibling, and thus overlooked for the firstborn, Osamu was also a child prodigy and a media darling. This ensured that Ken never got the kind of attention he desperately wanted from his parents. It didn't help matters much when \|\|Osamu died in an accident\|\|, and his parents were too caught up in \|\|their grief to notice Ken even after that\|\|. After he's manipulated into more or less selling his soul in the Digital World, he gains the prodigy aspect his brother had, and his parents apparently begin to love him... \|\|but only as a shadow of what they once had with Osamu. It took him vanishing into the Digital World with the intent to stay there permanently, then returning in the midst of a complete mental breakdown, for them to finally begin loving him as Ken.\|\| - Dragon Ball: - In all media where Frieza's elder brother Cooler appears, it's made clear that King Cold favors Frieza over him. Cold never once mentions Cooler, even in passing, and in Cooler's Revenge, Cooler bitterly reflects that Frieza was a "little brat" and that Cold always spoiled him rotten. - It's heavily implied that Bardock and Gine, Goku's parents, favored Goku over his older brother Raditz. In his debut special, Bardock never once thinks of Raditz, even in his dying moments, and in Minus and Broly, when they realize Frieza's plan to wipe out the Saiyans, their sole concern is ensuring Goku's escape and survival. The closest they show to any concern or regard for Raditz is Bardock asking where Raditz is when he arrived back on Vegeta on Frieza's orders, telling Goku that he'd also tell Raditz not to look at the moon, and lamenting that Raditz has to put up with "The Prince". Word of God reveals Gine at least was proud of Raditz being assigned to invade planets alongside Vegeta. Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 sadly confirms Bardocks preference to Goku over Raditz as upon reuniting in a special event, Bardock is very cold towards his eldest son even telling him to shut up and Raditz being upset that his father didnt even let him know that he was alive. Although Bardock does say he respects Raditzs stubbornness. - Part of the backstory of Big Bad King of Gallia in The Familiar of Zero; his elder brother was the favorite for being better at everything. Then, in the old King's last moments, he named the younger his successor, due to the old king's insanity. Ecstatic, even knowing the true reason he was chosen, he went to rub it in his older brother's face. Unfortunately, the elder was honestly happy for his younger brother's success. This drove Joseph mad, and he ended up killing his older brother. So begins the tale of the mad king. - Fruits Basket: - Played with in regards to Yuki and Ayame's mother. She openly favors Yuki over Ayame, but that's only because as the Rat of the Zodiac, Yuki is the closest to God and worth a lot of money and prestige whereas Ayame, the Snake, is much lower on the scale; she cares nothing for Yuki as a person and openly admits she only sees him as a Meal Ticket she can use to boost her wealth and social status. A rare case where being The Unfavorite works in one's favor, as Ayame can enjoy far more freedom than Yuki. - Even though Momiji's father had promised to love him even more to compensate for his mother forgetting him, he apparently changed his mind after Momiji's little sister Momo was born and seems to ignore Momiji in favor of his wife and daughter. Momo even got into the violin lessons she wanted at the cost of Momiji being forced to quit by their father, even though Momo wants to learn violin to play with Momiji. - Machi was constantly pressured to be perfect by her mother, who largely viewed her as a Trophy Child who could inherit her husband's fortune... only to cast Machi out of the house once her younger son was born. Mrs. Kuragi openly tells a friend that Machi is "dull" and that she prefers her new baby boy because a male heir has better chances at getting the fortune. - Very messed-up example with the Homunculi of Fullmetal Alchemist, where Pride has that name in part, being the oldest, and the one whose personality represents Father in his purest form. Continuing the metaphor, the Anti-Villain Greed has a sort of "Well Done, Son" Guy relationship to Father and turned Defector from Decadence because he couldn't stand being second to anyone (being the least evil of the bunch also helped). - In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), this is the reason for Envy's hatred of the Elric brothers; he is the homunculus created by their father in an attempt to revive his firstborn son, and he was cast aside when he came back as a "monster". - In the manga, a side story reveals that this existed between the Elric brothers themselves when they were quite small, as Edward was very jealous of his mother Trisha's love for the baby Alphonse. A neatly-delivered lesson from father Hohenheim changed his mind, however, and by the time of the main story they are absolutely devoted to one another. - Inverted in Gakuen Babysitters where it is the toddlers who prefer one parent over the other. Kirin prefers her mother as her father is often away on business trips (she calls him Papa-san, something she does not do with her mother). Kazuma and Takuma prefer their mother as they tend to get scared of their father's acting roles on television as they cannot tell the difference between reality and fiction. Taka exclusively interacts with his mother and doesn't even know he has a father (who left shortly after Taka was born). - In Girls und Panzer, Shiho Nishizumi favors Maho, her elder daughter and heir, over Miho, her younger daughter and the main character. A good example of this is when, in Little Army, she arrives after Miho and Maho's training battle and offhandedly says, "So Miho's here as well," before congratulating Maho on her tournament victory. Shiho disapproves of Miho so much that after hearing of her going to the semifinals against Pravda, she \|\|considers disowning her. However, once Miho defeats Maho in the finals, Shiho sighs, then smiles and starts clapping, which could indicate that her attitude is shifting\|\|. - Shui Long from Haou Airen is the most talented member of a very famous family of doctors, but his father passed him up in the family hierarchy despite his talent. He ended up allied with The Triads and the Tongs and as one of Hakuron's True Companions. - Played with in Hetalia: Axis Powers: - At first, it looks like Grandpa Rome likes only his youngest grandson Veneziano and completely neglects older grandson Romano due to Veneziano having more talent than his brother, but it later turns out that he does visit Romano from the afterlife too. In fact, a Himaruya sketch shows Romano crying Tears of Joy... and then hiding because he doesn't want his Grandpa to see him cry. - America also seems to be England's favorite ex-colony, especially compared to America's brother Canada. Though on the other hand, Canada is seen as The Reliable One and England asks him for advice rather than America. - Despite being the White Sheep of the Zoldyck family, Killua from Hunter × Hunter is the most beloved child of the family. His mother and his eldest brother love him too much, his relationship with his father is the best father-son-relationship in the whole family that is known, his younger sister and younger brother admire him, and the servants love him because Killua is nice to them. The only one who doesn't like him is the second eldest son, Milluki, who is a Fat Bastard, but even he admits that Killua is the best candidate to be the next heir of the family. - Imaizumin-chi wa Douyara Gal no Tamariba ni Natteru Rashii: ~DEEP~: Imaizumi's father has little hopes for him, compared to his brother Keichiro, because Keita needs to learn to be a man. - Inuyasha: The chip on Sesshoumaru's shoulder stems from the belief that he was The Un-Favourite to Inuyasha, to the extent where he actually believes his father was grooming Inuyasha to kill him. The situation between the brothers is eventually resolved when it becomes clear that their father understood the vulnerabilities of being half-human and just how powerful Sesshoumaru would one day become. His real desire was for Sesshoumaru to become a source of support and guidance for Inuyasha. - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood: When Dio Brando comes to live with him, George Joestar I falls into this, punishing Jonathan harshly for every little mistake while essentially letting Dio do as he pleased. At the end of his life, he acknowledges that this was a mistake- in fact, he was stricter on Jonathan due to having higher standards for his biological son- and had he been tougher on Dio, perhaps he wouldn't have turned out as bad as he did. - Ren Gyokuen in Magi: Labyrinth of Magic openly said that first prince Kouen (in actuality her nephew/stepson) was her "most loved son" while flirtatiously embracing him in front of the rest of her children, including her two biological children. Kouha disgustedly remarked how she used to fawn over Kouen and now wanted him to "replace" her recently dead husband. - March Comes in Like a Lion provides a rather interesting case. Rei's adoptive father, Kouda, leads a very shogi-centered life that extends even to his home. As such, his children's skill in shogi more-or-less determines the kind of attention he gives them. \|\|Unfortunately for Rei, he ends up as the most skilled, creating strained relationships between him and the biological children of the household, who became something of The Unfavourites.\|\| - In Monster, it is something that plagues Johan very intently. Which one of them was the unwanted one? - In the case of My Hero Academia's Shoto Todoroki, being the Favorite wasn't a good thing, as it led to Training from Hell by his father. Meanwhile, his older siblings were more or less discarded for not turning out how he wanted, but it also means they missed out on the horrible "training". - My Little Sister Stole My Fiance: For whatever reason, Eliana's younger sister, Luna, was always favored by their parents. She never had to undertake training like Eliana did, and after Luna throws a fit for not getting to marry the prince, her father eventually swaps fiancées. - In Naruto we see in the flashbacks that Fugaku Uchiha preferred his older, genius son Itachi to the younger Sasuke, saying several times to Sasuke that he wanted Sasuke to become a shinobi like Itachi. - The situation eventually turns around completely after Itachi is suspected of murdering Shisui \|\|which he did (except that he really didn't; Shisui really did commit suicide, albeit it, with Itachi's help)\|\|. After Sasuke masters the fireball technique, Fugaku tells him not to follow Itachi's footsteps. - Turned around even earlier when Sasuke's mother Mikoto, who was rather close to Sasuke, told him that in public Itachi was the shining star, and Fugaku, in his capacity as head of the clan, was naturally concerned about him, due to his importance to the clan. In private, the only thing Fugaku talked about was Sasuke. - \|\|It's revealed in Chapter 590 that despite all this, they loved both their children. When Itachi came to kill them the night of the massacre, Mikoto assured him that his parents still loved him and that they fully understood his decision, while Fugaku asked Itachi to take care of Sasuke, and that regardless of their differences in beliefs and the paths they both took, he was still proud of him.\|\| - Likewise, Hiashi Hyuga preferred his younger daughter Hanabi, as he believed Hinata lacked any real talent, especially when compared to her genius cousin Neji (the son of Hiashi's twin brother). After Neji loses his fight against Naruto, Hiashi's attitude starts to change and he softens up to both Hinata and Neji. - Neon Genesis Evangelion: Gendo shows no love or affection to Shinji, but is almost uncharacteristically fond of Rei, who he treats as an adoptive daughter. \|\|The reason he's fond of Rei, however, is because she is a clone of his dead wife, and in the end, both the children are little more than pawns to him toward resurrecting her. Before his death, however, Gendo admits that he secretly held great love for Shinji in his heart but was simply too afraid to face it, and in his last words he says that he's sorry.\|\| - One Piece: - Charlotte "Big Mom" Linlin's favorite child is one of her youngest daughters, the teenage Charlotte Pudding. \|\|Though Big Mom seems to only do so because of Pudding's Third Eye note : (which should help her read the Poneglyphs' content without understanding the language, like how Roger used his mysterious ability of "hearing the voices of all things" to read Poneglyphs) since she thinks that, once it opens, it'll lead her to Raftel and be her key to becoming the Pirate King. While Pudding enjoys the perks of being spoiled rotten by her Evil Matriarch, she is annoyed of Big Mom constantly asking about if the third eye has opened yet. Plus a flashback shows that Big Mom was psychologically abusive to Pudding when she was a little girl, also for the Third Eye which she found disgusting.\|\| - Squard accuses Whitebeard of this in the Marineford Arc. \|\|Due to his hatred of Gol D. Roger for killing his old crew, he was susceptible to Admiral Akainu's lie that Whitebeard was planning to sell out his allies in exchange for Ace's life. When Squard stabbed Whitebeard, he did so because he believed Whitebeard was willing to betray the rest of his "family" just to save his "precious" Ace.\|\| Squard is wrong, however, and Whitebeard proves that he loves all of his family \|\|to the point of hugging and forgiving Squard for stabbing him in the chest.\|\| - \|\|Vinsmoke Judge is an exceptionally cruel example as he heavily favors his daughter Reiju and 3/4 of his sons Ichiji, Niji and Yonji over his third son Sanji. This mainly due to Bio Augmantion failing to turn Sanji into a Supersoldier due his mother's Sora interference as she wished for her sons to keep their humanity instead being ruthless killing machines. After Sora dies over keeping Sanji's humanity, Judge treats Sanji like absolute shit and doesn't lift a finger to protect him from his brothers. Judge even imprisons Sanji and acts like he doesn't exist while adoring his other children◊. He doesn't care in the slightest when Sanji escapes to East Blue. Thankfully this all comes back to bite Judge in the ass as when Big Mom is about to have Judge along with his super children assassinated he breaks down in blubbering tears and sees Ichiji, Niji, and Yonji unable to share his sorrow at their imminent demise all because of him. Ironically Sanji is the only child Judge can connect to, as they're both normal human beings (Sanji being albeit a Badass Normal) though this just makes Judge despise his third son more.\|\| - \|\|On the flip side Sora favors Sanji over her other sons (due to the reasons above), even when Reiju her daughter whom Sora clearly also cares about comes to her on her sickbed, Sora just talks to Reiju about how much she loves Sanji.\|\| - Imposed by the premise of Ōoku: The Inner Chambers, in which 17th-century Japan is ravaged by a plague that only targets men, leaving only one man for every four women. Thus sons can expect better treatment than daughters since the plague only stops hitting men who reach forty, and die very frequently. And in the more unhinged families, can result in Parental Incest as well. - Ootori Kyouya is a victim of a subtle version in Ouran High School Host Club. As the youngest of three sons in a rich family, he is expected by his father to perform at respectable standards, but never to do anything to one-up his brothers, who will inherit the Ootori business empire. - His sister also seems to get this treatment to some extent. She's admonished for returning home when she is happily married and has no real business to be there. This has the Ootori family fulfill two of the criteria. She, however, seems to ignore it and act cheery nonetheless, going out with Tamaki on occasion to explore the world of commoner cuisine. - A similar fate befalls Azuma Yunoki in La Corda d'Oro, who is forced to give up playing piano by his grandmother because he's better at it than his two older brothers; as he says, "My place is always below my brothers." Most a result of Japanese cultural values, and seems wildly unfair to Western readers. Azuma develops a bit of a psychological problem as a result (which means it's supposed to seem unfair to the original audience, as well). - In +Anima, the Royal Family of Sailand is a perfect example of Favoritism. \|\|In fact, it's most likely why Husky was named Crown Prince out of birth order.\|\| - Ranma ½: Kasumi is clearly Soun Tendo's favourite child. This is because she helped him raise her little sisters, and the image song Otousan ( Father) performed by Soun and Kasumi's seiyuu states that he feels rather guilty about it. - In Rosario + Vampire, Akasha and Gyokuro love their own respective blood-related daughters more than the other daughters. While Akasha loves her stepdaughters, too, Gyokuro loves only Kahlua; she distrusts Akua because Akua is adopted and only keeps her around because Akua is useful to her plans, and hates both Moka and Kokoa, the latter being her other blood-related daughter, to the extent that she tried to murder them. - Among the Shuzen sisters, Moka is the most beloved one. Akua is a Yandere for her, Kahlua loves all of her sisters, and Kokoa loves her because Moka is the only one in the family who treats her with respect. - Taken to extremes in Saiyuki. Gojyo is a 'child of taboo,' raised by his stepmother and half-brother. She eventually attempted to kill him, but her biological son killed her first. - Sakura Discord has a strange and pretty disturbing example with Mebuki Sakura. Being a Child Prodigy for piano, her parents put way too much pressure on her, which resulted in her hating piano and said parents feeling incredibly guilty for it. So they started to unreasonably spoil her and forgive all of her mistakes and whims, but their introduction scene shows that this is not a healthy relationship by any means. She considers herself dead inside. To make it worse, her big brother Shin'ya tries to isolate her even more so that they will finally give up on her and focus their attention on him. - In Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters, Gozaburo favored his biological son Noah than his adoptive son Seto, at first. But Noah, whose body is dead and his mind is copied in a virtual world, was later ignored by his father, and Gozaburo furthered Seto who had more natural talent than Noah ever had. And of course, Noah's childish personality made it impossible to become an heir of Gozaburo. Well, after being betrayed by Seto, he doesn't give a crap for any of his sons. The other adoptive son Mokuba was always ignored by Gozaburo. - Batman: - Dick Grayson (Robin I/Nightwing) has been noted to be Batman's favored son, being the first Robin, the easiest to get along with, and, as Batman himself notes, possessed the qualities none of the other Robins will ever have. He understands Bruce's teachings the most, came into his own as a hero, and while as skilled as Bruce, can still make friends and keep them, something Bruce can't do. It's to the point that Bruce has shown an absolute willingness to kill for him multiple times, something he doesn't show for anyone else. After Bruce "died" in Final Crisis, Dick became Batman against his wishes. When he returned, he reacted pretty well to it, to the point that it's just common knowledge among the Batfamily that Dick will take over when Bruce is unable to be Batman. There have been several times that Batman has shut out members of the Batfamily for one reason or another, however, he only rarely does this to Dick, who he trusts the most. Although Bruce tries to hide it, everyone in not only the Batfamily but the entire DCU knows that Dick is Bruce's favorite son, partner, and colleague. - Bruce also treats his sometimes adopted daughter, Cassandra Cain, with some favoritism. He gives her own Batcave, expects her to eventually take his place as Gotham's protector, and generally showers her with praise. The favoritism gets to a point that when Damian, Bruce's biological son, meets her, he is immediately hostile (despite the fact that, having been raised as a League of Assassins member, he knows that she's supposed to be their chosen one) because Bruce chose her over him. It's heavily implied that this treatment is because he is projecting onto Cassandra, treating her more like a miniature version of himself rather than her own person, which Barbara Gordon (the first Batgirl) calls him out on several times. - Black Panther has T'Chaka clearly display favoritism for T'Challa, his heir and a biological son. He didn't seem to really care about Shuri and began to ignore Hunter (his adopted, white son) as soon as T'Challa was born. - Darkseid treats all his children terribly, but the one he actually respects and "likes'' is Orion. While he is on the side of good and serving Highfather, putting in opposition to Darkseid, Orion is the strongest and most competent out of his offspring. Because of this, Darkseid respects him as a Worthy Opponent. - The Flash: Barry Allen (the second Flash) became the adoptive father of Wally West (the first Kid Flash and third Flash). He essentially raised Wally alongside Iris West, after Wally's parents divorced. After Barry marries Iris, they have two twins, the Tornado Twins, who they raise in the future. The twins have a tense relationship with Wally because they feel like Barry always considered Wally his "real" son. They're actually not far off — Wally is Barry's Berserk Button and he's gone to great lengths for Wally whenever he felt Wally needed him. Knowing that he was going to die and his mantle would pass on to Wally, Barry found three days in Wally's life when he would need Barry, and time-travelled to those times to help his protégé before his own death. When Wally was forgotten by the world and returned, Barry outright threatens Aquaman when he doubts Wally's sincerity. When Barry thinks Wally may have been killed by Booster Gold, he mercilessly beats the shit out of Booster, then runs across time and into the Speed Force to try to find Wally. Finally, when Barry finds out that Wally's heinous actions at the superhero therapy centre Sanctuary were the result of Eobard Thawne hypnotising Wally into doing these things — and Thawne had corrupted the Tornado Twins in the same story without this reaction from Barry — he chases Thawne across the timeline, screaming that he'll murder him. - In The Kingdom, Wally West has two kids: Barry and Iris West. Both inherited his superspeed, but are vastly different in how they use them. Barry is a slacker who uses them for petty reasons, though not anything illegal. Meanwhile, Iris took up Wally's old identity of Kid Flash and is actively a superhero. However, Wally clearly favours Barry and constantly drives him to be the next Flash. It takes its toll on Iris, and Barry knows it. It may have something to do with his name even, since Barry Allen, the second Flash and Wally's mentor is someone Wally has never stopped looking up to. - In Lucky Luke, Ma Dalton constantly dotes on her youngest son, Averell, while just as constantly giving her oldest, Joe, a hard time. \|\|She later admits that Joe is actually her favorite; he's the smartest and reminds her so much of their father, and Ma is only hard on him because she expects so very much of him. Averell, however, will always be her baby.\|\| - The Mighty Thor: Thor is clearly his father's Odin's favorite, to the point that in Fear Itself, he is willing to destroy the entire Earth for Thor's sake. He never goes that far for Loki, Tyr or even Baldur. His wife Freyja consistently ignores most of their (from her perspective mostly adopted) children not named Thor, save for Aldrif/Angela (her long believed dead biological daughter), and in 2010s suns she becomes emotionally abusive towards Loki in his books (though she does come to regret it). - Robin (1993): Mary Quintas eventually decided the best way to win her deranged family's serial killer competition was to kill her brothers and their families since her mom continued to favor them even after they'd been caught and incarcerated while she continued to get away with her murders. - Rogue Sun has one from a serial absentee father. Marcus Bell, the superhero Rogue Sun, was married to a woman named Gwen Siegel and had a son with her, Dylan. He abandoned them when Dylan was 2-years-old, just long enough for Dylan to remember having Marcus in his life, the result being that, when Dylan is 17 when Marcus dies, he still severely resents him. Marcus married another woman, Juliette, and had two children with her: Aurie and Brock, who he didn't parent very much, either, but was still in their lives. In his will, he leaves his powers and mantle to Dylan specifically because he doesn't care about his safety compared to Aurie and Brock. Marcus' spirit also tells Dylan that he believes Brock could've played a hand in his death, and tells Dylan that Brock always unsettled him a bit. With Aurie, when she stopped talking to him for weeks because he missed one of her birthdays, Marcus revealed his identity to her and explained why he was so absent, and even let her help him with his work. This makes Aurie Marcus' favourite by default, but his favourite nonetheless, since he didn't completely ignore her like the others and did care about her feelings. - Harry Osborn from the Spider-Man Trilogy films, Ultimate Spider-Man and The Spectacular Spider-Man, which is an interesting case since he is an only child. His father Norman Osborn sees Harry's friend Peter as being more gifted, intelligent and hard-working, often chiding Harry for not being as sucessful as Peter. This dynamic wasn't present in the original comics, but was put in afterwards after the success of the other iterations. It gets even worse for Harry, as not only does Norman favor his Arch-Enemy over him, but he also cares more about his grandson Normie. Norman even chooses to infect Normie with the Carnage symbiote and tries to get him to kill his own parents before Harry and Peter stop them. The reason why Norman prefers others over his own son is likely due to Norman's own twisted Might Makes Right philosophy that is at odds with Harry, who is all-around meek Nice Guy with no super powers, so naturally he doesn't fit Norman's evil values. - In The Technopriests, Panepha openly favors Almagro over his siblings Albino and Onyx, mainly because Albino is, as his name suggests, an albino and Onxy has red skin and four arms. - Wonder Woman Vol 1: Out of her one surviving biological son and three adopted daughters "Grandma" Heyday clearly favors Tillie, as she is the most practical and kind of her children, and is even leaving everything to her in her will though she expects Tillie to look after her irresponsible sisters with the money. When her son, who lost his mother's favor due to his criminal behavior, learns of this he decides to kidnap Tillie and force her to sign over her inheritance at gunpoint before trying to kill all three of his sister/nieces. - X-Men: - Usually averted with Charles Xavier and his students, with him displaying equal affection to all of them, even the rebellious ones. However, it is clear that he has some favorites. The foremost being Jean Grey, who is a telepath like himself and the one who he particularly dotes on and helps with her psychic powers. Cyclops is his second favorite student and his favorite male X-Man, given he chose Scott to be The Leader of the team, sometimes such as in Secret Wars (1984) the professor will elect Scott to lead the X-Men even though Storm was technically the leader at that point, causing Storm to accuse him of favoritism. Overall Xavier seems to partially prefer his original five X-Men (Cyclops, Jean, Beast, Iceman, and Angel) over his other students, though this did come back to bite him as 3/5 of his favorite five have turned evil: Jean and Scott due to being driven mad by trauma and the burden of the Phoenix Force and Angel due to Apocalypse, \|\|made even worse by the fact that Scott killed him\|\|. It's also worth noting that between Deadly Genesis (which revealed the truth about Vulcan) and the Krakoa era, Cyclops wanted nothing to do with Xavier, hating him as much as he loved him thanks to his years of manipulations. - Magneto cares more about Scarlet Witch than Quicksilver as he never truly gives Pietro praise and considers him foolish and arrogant. While he sets a high standard for his son, he is more affectionate with Wanda and blames Pietro if they go against him, even if it was her choice. However, Magneto may actually favor his biological daughter Lorna Dane aka Polaris, due to Lorna inheriting his magnetism powers. Magneto even displays outright physical affection to Lorna (including forehead kissing), something Pietro and Wanda almost never get from him. Still, X-Men Red (2022) suggests neither Wanda or Lorna are actually his favourite daughter \|\|an honour that goes to Anya, Magneto's deceased first child, despite her being completely human.\|\| However, the emphasis on her may be because the reveal just beforehand via the creation of the Waiting Room by \|\|Wanda\|\| at the end of The Trial Of Magneto that \|\|she was human and therefore can't be resurrected\|\|. - Mystique zigzags these trope with her children, on the surface it seems she cares for Rogue more than her biological son Nightcrawler, being distraught when Rogue defects from the Brotherhood to the X-Men and later on she's willing to kill a baby (Hope Summers) so long as it revives Rogue. However, at other times Mystique treats Rogue the worst out of her children, having slapped, stabbed, and shot her adoptive daughter on multiple occasions, while ironically — apart from dropping him as a baby — she's never physically hurt Nightcrawler again. In AXIS where Mystique, thanks to Red Skull and Professor X, is completely good, she does in everything in her power to protect Nightcrawler, which is interesting considering she does the exact opposite normally. It is agreed upon that Mystique heavily favors both Nightcrawler and Rogue over her other son, Graydon Creed, who was born a normal human and whom she killed without regret when he became Anti-Mutant activist. Even Sabretooth was appalled at Mystique's treatment of their son. - An odd case is Thomas Logan, the biological father of Wolverine. When he was alive, he didn't care about James (it's unclear if he knew Wolverine was his child) or Dog, but when Wolverine ends up in Hell, he meets Thomas for the first time. Thomas gives him, of all things, a "Well Done, Son" Guy moment, because Logan has become a violent bastard who's killed thousands, and Thomas can respect that. He makes zero mention of Dog. - Jean Grey loves all three of her children dearly (Stryfe was neither raised by her nor, technically, biologically her child, since he's a clone of Cable who was the son of her clone). She's affectionate, motherly, supportive, and where necessary, violently protective of them. However, she has a consistently stronger rapport with Cable and Nate Grey than Rachel Summers. This is partially justified, since she actually raised Cable, and Rachel first turned up when she was dead - once she came back, the two had complicated feelings for each other, but eventually reconciled. Nate, by contrast, turned up when she was alive and was actively (albeit subconsciously) seeking out his mother, and more open to developing a relationship with her, but also more than willing to give her space. Plus, her experience with Rachel had probably done a great deal to help her adjust to the appearance of unexpected children. - In Y: The Last Man, Yorick and his sister Hero both think their father preferred the other sibling. It's unclear whether either of them is right. - "Cinderella": The stepmother's ill-treatment stems from her desire to elevate her daughters above Cinderella. - Franz Xaver von Schönwerth's "Follow Me Jodel": The old farmer has two sons, Michael and Jodel. He is fonder of Jodel because he has a good heard, even though he is less bright than his brother, to the point he hopes to leave his farm to Jodel, even though he is the younger son. Michael is understandably not happy about it. - In "Mother Holle", the widow favors her lazy daughter over the hard-working one because the former is her own offspring. - In "Morozko", the old woman pampers her biological daughter and mistreats her stepdaughter. - In "The Three Little Men in the Wood", the stepmother has her birth daughter completely pampered and spoiled whereas she hates her stepsister to death. - Advice and Trust: Subverted. Rei is Gendo's favorite. However, Asuka realizes that it does not stop him from treating her like crap. Finding out what Rei's life is like helps Asuka to get over her jealousy. Asuka didn't say anything for a minute. "She's the Commander's pet, his favorite," she said in a low voice. "Not you, his own son. Not me, the top scorer. Her. She's the one he likes. And they've got her taking so many tranquilizers and dissociatives I'm amazed she was even able to get angry enough to slap you. That amount of drugs has to be making her nearly a robot. That's the kind of cocktail you give to someone you want to keep totally pliable, un-argumentative, too doped up to care about anything... someone you want to make into a doll." Asuka shuddered. "If they can do that to the Pilot they like, what do they think of us?" - Better Bones AU: - Tigerstar favors his children by Goldenflower over his younger litter, as shown when he intervenes to spare the life of Flametail, his grandson through Tawnypelt, despite him knowing about the Dark Forest's plans and threatening to take the knowledge with him to StarClan. Hawkfrost realizes he would never do this with Mothwing, a realization that helps trigger his HeelFace Turn. - Graystripe favors his older litter Feathertail and Stormfur over his kits with Millie despite the former two being respectively dead and living far away, alienating his younger children with how he is always comparing them to his older kits. - Child of the Storm: - Carol's father favours his youngest child, Joe junior, over his quiet and artistic middle child, Stevie, and Carol, his tomboyish daughter, because Joe is the All American Boy and thus fits his heavily gendered expectations for how his children should behave. Stevie wilts under this treatment, while Carol straight up hates him. However, neither has any real issues with Joe junior. - After Hermione figures out that she's Wanda's biological daughter in the sequel, she strongly suspects that Harry - her best friend and Wanda's godson - is her mother's favourite. She's got good reasons for believing this: Wanda avoids her as much as possible, treats her with distant politeness, and has to be visibly arm-twisted by Strange into teaching Hermione how to master chaos magic, while showering attention and affection on Harry. However, the situation is a bit more complicated than it seems. - In a nutshell: Hermione was Happily Adopted and Wanda avoided her for the same reason she gave her up, to stop her from becoming a target. Harry needed a Parental Substitute, and when his dad turned out to be an incarnation of Thor, was such a target that her involvement made no difference. - However, there is indicated to be some truth to it; a few characters muse that while Wanda probably loves both equally, Hermione's startling resemblance to her mother and shared powers remind Wanda of two extremely painful periods in her life (when her powers came through and nearly drove her mad, and when she had to give up Hermione). This plus her relatively uncomplicated relationship with Harry makes him easier to love. - Doing It Right This Time: Subverted. Gendo loves Rei more than Shinji... However, Gendo being Gendo, it only means he treats her in a slightly less crappy fashion. - Ghosts of Evangelion: Misato took Shinji and Asuka in. Shinji was Misato's favorite and she favored him blatantly. Asuka is quite resentful about it. After Third Impact Misato admits that she made a mistake. - The King Nobody Wanted: Garth Tyrell is more fond of his Otherys daughters in Braavos than his Flowers sons in Highgarden, and makes no particular effort to hide this fact. Garth: [in front of his son Garse] Daughters are such a treasure, I find, even if sons are so often a burden and a disappointment. - The Palaververse: When talking about Zebrican religion: Mother Neighle['s] three children[:] The spirits of Sun, Sand, and Sweet Water. [...] Sweet Water, Mother Neighles favoured child and only daughter. - Shigeko Kageyama AKA Mob Ritsu is the obvious favorite in the family. He resents his status as the favorite because it means that he has expectations his sister, (genderswapped) Mob, will never have to live up to and he isn't free to make a single choice for himself. - Star Trek: Phoenix: Discussed and deconstructed. One of the root issues for Twilight's conflict with Sunset in the second season is that Twilight believes that their adoptive mothers favored Sunset over her. - Tokyo Mew Mew No Hope Left has this trope in spades at the beginning. The protagonist's parents are described as preening her older sister and sending her to a fancy school while forgetting that our heroine exists. - When She Smiles (Fresh C): Deconstructed. When Misato tries to stop Shinji from looking for a missing Asuka, Shinji calls her out on always favoring him over her...which, as far as he is concerned, means she did not really care for any of them. - Subverted in X-Men: The Early Years. Scott is convinced that Jean is Xavier's favorite student. In fact, when Jean's father expresses his concerns as to the presence of a kid with a criminal record in the school, Xavier replies if he had to choose between keeping Scott and taking Jean in... Well, he is the only father figure Scott has left. - Played with in Empath: The Luckiest Smurf. The other Smurfs think Papa Smurf treats Empath as the favorite son. \|\|It helps that Empath is Papa Smurf's only biological son.\|\| Empath, however, feels that he is more The Un-Favourite, as Papa Smurf does nothing to get him out of living a life away from his fellow Smurfs in Psychelia. - In a Harry Potter fanfic where Sirius Black has two children, a boy and a girl to be more precise, their mother favors the girl over the boy because he looks like Sirius and she thinks Sirius is guilty. - In Imaginary Seas, this is weaponized in the form of Percy's Noble Phantasm: Poseidon Asphalios: An Ocean of Blessings for the Most Beloved. As Poseidon's favorite son, he has his full blessings on top of the skills of all of the other sons of Poseidon but better. This is why he has an A+ Rank in Stout Arm of Brutality, his father's armor, Divine Core, and trident, and the same invulnerability as Caenis. - In the Soul Eater fanfic Oblivion, Medusa claims that when she and her sisters were children, she was their mother's favorite, Arachne was their father's favorite, and Shaula was The Un-Favourite. Based on their mother's behavior in Shaula's flashback (where she treated Shaula kindly and intended to punish Medusa for bullying her), this is likely not true. That doesn't stop the claim from being Shaula's Berserk Button. - Subverted in The Second Try. Asuka used to believe that Shinji was their caretaker Misato's favorite, but during a heart-to-heart talk she admits that maybe she misunderstood Misato's behavior. - In How the Light Gets In, Laurel knows that her parents do love her, but between her mother's actions (see Arrow below) and her father's drunken rants making it clear he wishes she died instead of Sara, realizes that they both love Sara more. Her mother, Dinah, takes it to extremes. Laurel recalls Dinah has only come to one of Mary's (Laurel's daughter, and her granddaughter) birthdays... and it was only because she thought Sara would be there. To the point that Laurel is hesitant to have more than one child because she's terrified she'll do this too. Notably, this doesn't affect her relationship with Sara (whom she still loves dearly), and Sara herself seems to be unaware of it. - In the Drake & Josh fanfic Into the Darkness, Drake and Meghan's biological father shows this to extreme levels. He clearly has adored Meghan since she was born and uses pet names like "sweetie" or "angel" whenever he talks about her. Drake on the other hand he hates for being born, among other nonsensical reasons such as "got me sent to jail for killing my boss" and "looking like me", and wants him dead, even being willing to take matters into his own hands, spending nearly a week torturing Drake until he breaks emotionally and comes within an inch of death. - Misty suffered a lot of this in Pokémon Reset Bloodlines. Her parents constantly pampered her older sisters, while they treated her as little more than a servant, as she had been an unplanned child and had no interest in the performing arts like the rest of her family. Things just got worse for her after she was revealed as a bloodliner, and the only reason they didn't get rid of her was to avoid bad press. - SAO: Mother's Reconciliation: Asuna ends up believing her mother favors Kouichirou over her, especially after Kyouko makes the mistake of comparing the siblings' accomplishments. This ends up spurring on her decision to run away from home. Asuna: You already have your perfect son who's the very definition of success himself! So why don't you stop wasting your time on a failure like me and focus all your attention on him?! - In RWBY Alternate, Taiyang began favoring Ruby over Yang after Summer died due to Ruby's Strong Family Resemblance to her mother. As a result, Yang and Ruby have a distant relationship (mainly on Yang's side). - In Blackbird (Arrow): - Even before the Gambit sank, Laurel was aware that both of her parents favored Sara, even if she (Laurel) was the one they were proud of. Quentin because she was the baby of the family, Dinah because Sara reminded her of herself when she was younger. - Her mother however, takes it to extremes. She goes as far as to blame Laurel for what happened to Sara just because she was the one who was dating Oliver and brought him into their lives, and uses it to justify trading Laurel for Sara to the League of Assassins. Dinah refuses to admit that Sara's choices were her own and she only has herself (and unbeknownst to everyone, Malcolm Merlyn) to blame for what happened. She's also a deconstruction of this trope, because it becomes clear that Dinah is a terrible parent in general and Sara being her favorite does not exclude her from her mother's emotional abuse, no matter how unintentional it is. - Nyssa tries to comfort Laurel by commenting that she also knows what it is like to be the unfavorite child. Presumably, she has too much of a soul to be a "good" heir. - The Bloods of Bolton: - It could not be more clear that Roose heavily favors Drucilla over her other siblings. He dotes on her, encourages her sadistic tendencies, and refuses to punish her for her actions. He also treats her with more fairness than most fathers in Westeros society would by letting her attend his council meetings. - Bethany tends to have more favor for Domeric. Granted, she's tried being a loving mother to her daughter, but Drucilla's growing hatred for her mother and her psychotic tendencies put a lid on all her attempts. - In Junior Officers, Deborah's father favours her brother David over her and her sister Margaret because of his gender. - One step backwards and Three forwards: Gabriel prefers Felix over Adrien, treating the elder brother as his heir apparent while largely ignoring his second son. What's particularly twisted about this is that Felix is Adrien, in a sense — reality was rewritten by the villains' Wishes, and Adrien's memories ended up in Felix while the 'new' Adrien remained as Lila's trophy boyfriend. It's implied that part of the reason he favors Felix is because he's written his other son off as nothing more than an Unwitting Pawn to keep Lila happy. - In Three Can Keep a Secret, it turns out that the Pines parents tended to prioritize Mabel's feelings and were largely dismissive of Dipper's throughout the twins' childhood, and this had a significant negative effect on both children's development, contributing to both Mabel's obliviously self-centered perspective and Dipper's deep insecurities. - In Njal Gets Burned, Njal openly favours his foster-son Hoskuld over any of his biological sons, even going so far as to state this out loud in court. Obviously, his sons resent this. - moral of the story (Nyame): Both Quentin and Dinah heavily favor Sara over Laurel, to the point of using Sara's fate to actively abuse and neglect her. After the poor handling of Sara's return helps drive Laurel to suicide, a drunken Quentin guiltily switches his favoritism to Laurel and begins disparaging Sara instead. That does absolutely nothing to improve their relationship as Laurel still loves Sara, and she instead takes it as a sign that she needs to cut ties with him. - A.I.: Artificial Intelligence: The robot child a couple uses to replace their comatose son becomes The Un-Favourite when their real child wakes up from his coma. - This is the Red Queen's Freudian Excuse in Alice in Wonderland (2010), as she claims (with some accuracy) that her parents and the rest of the kingdom favored her little sister, the White Queen, more than her. - In Beast (2017), Hilary clearly favors Polly over Moll, as Polly was a well-behaved girl who is now married to a successful man and expecting children, and generally fits into the family a lot better than Moll, who is often at odds with how Hilary wants her to live her life and brought a scandal upon them as a teen by getting expelled for violent behavior. Interestingly, Hilary tends to pay more attention to Moll, though it's because she feels the need to closely monitor Moll's every move so she won't screw up again and constantly criticize her, while Hilary usually has nothing but praise for Polly. - In Boyz n the Hood, Darrin "Doughboy" Baker is obviously The Un-Favourite of his single mother, Brenda, compared to his brother Ricky, who has a different father. This may partially explain why Doughboy is a gangbanger and Ricky is a college-bound high school football player. The favoritism is implied throughout the movie and is outright stated by Doughboy after \|\|Ricky's death in a drive-by shooting. In fact, the first question their mother asks after Doughboy and Tre bring Ricky's body to the house is, "What did you do to him?"\|\| - An interesting example in Cool Hand Luke. Luke's mother tells him that she's leaving everything to his brother, because she'd always loved Luke more, and wanted to make up for it. She's not proud of her favoritism but sees it as beyond her control. "Way it is, sometimes, you just have a feelin' for a child or you don't, and with John, I just didn't." - Zach from the Quebecois film C.R.A.Z.Y is the fourth son of five and manages to be a case of both Parental Favoritism AND The Un-Favourite — his religious mother believes he has the power of healing and defends him from his father's scorn. Meanwhile, his dad, having suspected him of being gay from an early age, lavishes most of his praise on the three older brothers, who are respectively a genius, a jock, and a macho lady's man. Meanwhile, the youngest just seems to get ignored. - Cries and Whispers: By Agnes' account, the younger sister Maria was their mother's favorite child. This made Agnes jealous as she was terribly fond of their mother, who in turn tended to be distant towards Agnes. The screenplay also indicates the eldest sister, Karin, was The Un-Favourite. - In Dead Poets Society, Todd receives a birthday present from his parents — a replica of what they sent him the previous year. It comes out that his brother's birthdays are a big deal, but his own are clearly an afterthought. One of his friends helps him throw the present off a balcony and jokingly tells him to cheer up: he'll get another one next year. - In Deewaar, Sumitra admits to her son Ravi that she always loved his brother Vijay more. - Ramsey Hogan in Desert Heat clearly favors one child over the other two. Matt: Why are you ridin' me and Jesse so much and never Petey? Ramsey: I love Petey 'cause I loved his mother. She died giving him birth. He's our love child. Matt: What about me and Jess? Ramsey: You two are the unfortunate results of some recreational fucking back when fucking was fun. Matt: ... geez. Ramsey: Get over it. - In Ever After, Rodmilla de Ghent favors her eldest daughter Marguerite, who is beautiful and behaves the same way as her mother, compared to her stepdaughter Danielle and her younger daughter Jacqueline, who has a much sweeter, kinder personality. - Played painfully straight in The Feast of All Saints, where Cecile overtly favors her son Marcel and barely tolerates her daughter Marie, largely because she is jealous of Marie's beauty. This culminates with \|\|Cecile attacking Marie when the latter comes home after being gang raped\|\|. Near the end of the movie, Cecile even says she wishes Marie was dead and asks Marcel to pass along the message. - Ferris Bueller's Day Off: Ferris's sister complains that her brother can get away with anything, and their parents will believe him. Since her brother is Ferris Bueller, she's right. On the other hand, Ferris wanted a car, which she got. - In The Godfather, Vito shows favoritism towards Michael, his youngest son, wanting him to have a better life. The expression on his face when he's told that Michael killed Sollozzo and McCluskey and thus becoming involved with the mafia business is one of heartbreak. - In the novels, Fredo accuses his father of showing favoritism to Tom, his unofficial adopted son. While nothing comes of it, Vito does compare Sonny unfavorably to Tom in terms of responsibility to an extent that Sonny cannot help but feel a little resentful. - In Hobo With a Shotgun, the villain Drake clearly favors his son Slick over his other son Ivan. When Slick dies, Ivan tries to assume his place in his father's eyes, without much success. \|\|Ultimately, Drake tells him that he'll never measure up and shoots him.\|\| - Kapoor & Sons: Between their two sons, Harsh and Sunita like Rahul more because he found success in his writing career (unlike Arjun). It's why he's reluctant to \|\|come out as gay to them, since they think so highly of him, but it wears on him throughout the film\|\|. - In Knives Out, Linda appears to be her father Harlan's favourite out of all his descendants and extended family. He speaks to her more respectfully and does not single her out for a telling-off like all the others. She is also the closest to becoming a Self-Made Woman in the way Harlan values. They had a secret way of communication and Linda is the only one openly grieving his death. It's strongly implied that during the will reading, Linda simply wanted to inherit the house for sentimental reason as she isn't shown getting excited over the money or publishing house like the rest of her family is. - The Lord of the Rings: Denethor clearly favors his eldest son Boromir over his youngest son Faramir, to the point of telling the latter You Should Have Died Instead. Of course, when it looks like Faramir has actually died (he wasn't), Denethor loses what sanity he had left and tries to burn himself alive and his son's (apparent) corpse with him out of despair. Faramir : (Trying Not to Cry) You wish now that our places had been exchanged. That I had died and Boromir had lived. Denethor : (hesitates a moment) Yes. I wish that. - A scene entitled "Sons of the Steward" from the Extended Edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers further elaborates on Denethor's preference for Boromir and his emotional abuse of Faramir. It's noticeable that Boromir clearly hates being the favorite and doesn't hesitate to call out his father on such abuse; it's also made very clear that the brothers love each other dearly, and Faramir doesn't resent Boromir for the favoritism. - In Madea's Family Reunion, Victoria Breaux favors and pampers her younger daughter, Lisa, and despises her older daughter, Vanessa. This is because Vanessa's father was a musician who dumped her and left her broke, while Lisa's father was a rich man who gave her a luxurious lifestyle. She even allowed her second husband to rape Vanessa to stop him from leaving her. However, the film makes it clear that Victoria's favoritism didn't do Lisa any favors; while Victoria favors her, she also controls her entire life, which has left her unable to fight for herself, and has been stealing from her trust fund for years, leaving it virtually empty. She also pushed Lisa to marry Carlos, the very banker who's been helping her steal from the trust fund, because he's rich and he'd be able to keep them in luxury, despite the fact that he's horribly abusive. By the end of the movie, Lisa has broken free from her mother's control and her abusive fiancé while Victoria and Vanessa appear to be on the path of mending their relationship. - Marvel Cinematic Universe - Thor: Odin paid more attention to Thor as he was heir to the throne (as well as Odin's true-born son), while Loki (whom Odin adopted) was more of a tool to unify the Asgardians and Ice Giants. Odin's preference for Thor initially made him blind to the latter's faults and ended up setting Loki on his path to villainy. - Subverted by the time of Thor: Ragnarok \|\|as Odin says he loves both his sons and gives a Loki So Proud of You moment. Both Thor and Loki have gone against his wishes and become better people for it. Odin still holds his sons in greater regard than Hela, his first child, and strove to make both of them better rulers\|\|. - Played with in regards to Frigga. Loki, being In Touch with His Feminine Side, shares a lot more in common with her than Thor does (though Thor resembles his mother more than Loki). Thor: The Dark World reveals that Frigga was Loki's instructor in magic, so they once had a mentor-pupil relationship in addition to a mother-son one; she would've naturally grown close to him after spending so much time together. Meanwhile, Thor's fighting style was much more similar to Odin's. Tom Hiddleston confirms this in this interview (as quoted below). However, Avengers: Endgame makes it clear that \|\|Frigga nonetheless loved Thor just as much as she did Loki and even accepts her future son's presence without question. Thor is overjoyed to see her again and is more emotionally open with her than he was with Odin\|\|. Hiddleston: Rene Russo and I, always, from the very first film, part of the backstory we created was that Frigga was really the most attentive to Loki when he was a child. And Odin didn't really know how to connect. He connected much more with Thor. They were sort of cut from the same cloth. And Frigga and Loki had this kind of beautiful, sensitive, more artistic relationship. And it was actually her who taught him all his magic. - Yondu from Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) as a Father to His Men, in particular, cared for Peter aka Starlord more than other Ravagers, though Yondo had trouble admitting it to him. First Mate Kraglin Obfonteri in Vol. 2 is not fooled and calls out the favoritism Yondu shows Peter when the Ravagers were hunting the Guardians down on behalf of Ayesha. - Thanos doesnt try to deny that he considers Gamora the best of his adoptive children and says as much in front of his other kids. She gets preferential treatment from him and is the one he relates to the most. He continues to feel this way even after she does a HeelFace Turn and disowns him. This comes back to bite both of them in Avengers: Infinity War; \|\|to get the Soul Stone, Thanos must sacrifice what he loves most... which he quickly realizes means killing his favorite daughter. He reluctantly does and is inconsolable afterward.\|\| - Meet Joe Black: William favors Susan over Allison and strangely enough, Allison is okay with it. - Nope: Otis Haywood Senior groomed OJ as his successor, completely shutting out Emerald from the business and taking her horse away from her for a movie he was working on. Emerald still holds a grudge even after his passing and her relationship with OJ is tense at the start of the film. OJ suggests that this was because she and their father were too similar, causing them to butt heads. - Rags: Arthur plays favorites quite a bit. In addition to Charlie suffering from forced servitude as the stepson, he also plays favorites among his own sons, treating Andrew with far more respect than he does Lloyd. - Smooth Talk: June, Connies older sister, appears to be the favorite daughter. Connies mother, who frequently clashes with Connie, emphasizes June is an angel to a friend right in front of Connie. - Gordie is most definitely The Un-Favourite in Stand by Me, and believes his father would rather he have died than his charming, athletic older brother. The only thing keeping Gordie from feeling worse than he does is the fact that he and his brother had a great relationship, and his brother used to praise and encourage him in his writing. - This is in contrast to the book, where the age difference between them means that their relationship wasn't as close and the favoritism hurt Gordie a lot more. It's explained in the narrative that Denny was a miracle baby, born after several years of infertility, whereas Gordie was born when his parents were old enough to be grandparents and didn't really want to be raising another child. - Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story: The fact that Dewey Cox's father is fond of reminding Dewey that "the wrong kid died" when discussing Dewey's deceased older brother is a pretty good indication of where Dewey stands on the pecking order. - Welcome to the Dollhouse: The mother obviously favors the cute youngest daughter Missy over the plain middle daughter Dawn, to the point where Mom and Missy cuddle on the couch while watching television and Dawn has to sit on the floor. - X-Men Film Series: Downplayed with Professor X, since he never neglects any of his students whether as a teacher or as a Parental Substitute, but he is closer to those who are Birds of a Feather, like Hank McCoy in X-Men: First Class and Jean Grey in X-Men: Apocalypse. Hank and Jean do receive a bit more of Xavier's time and care. - Sid Sawyer in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. All the adults adore Tom's little brother and wish Tom were more like him... when in reality he's a manipulative, mean-spirited brat, but only Tom, Huck, and Becky ever notice. - In Diana Wynne Jones's Archer's Goon, the youngest of the seven magical siblings is the most powerful and favored of the group. His elder brothers and sisters are bound magically to protect him. - As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury both feature a mother having a favorite son out of all her other children, despite the fact that the son is a Jerkass. - In Beyond the Western Sea, Lord Kirkle favors Laurence, while Lady Kirkle favors Albert, leading to a Cain and Abel situation. - Brother Cadfael: One story has the two sons of a landowner, Nigel the elder being obviously favored. Meriet the younger is sent to the abbey as a novice despite being obviously unfitted for the life, but both he and his father insist on it. It turns out the son was sent to atone for a crime he committed... \|\|except he was actually covering for Nigel, whom Meriet thought had committed murder, but was actually guilty of treason and hiring an Overzealous Underling to waylay a messenger.\|\| The father makes amends when he realizes what an ass he's been. Therefore my grievous sin against my son Meriet is not only this doubt of him, this easy credence of his crime and his banishment into the cloister, but stretches back to his birth in lifelong misprizing. - In Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey novel Busman's Honeymoon, the Dowager Duchess explicitly tells Harriet that Peter is her favorite child. - Paula Danziger is another teen writer who was fond of this, although in Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice?? she turns the trope on its head — big sister Melissa is the family favorite until she defies her draconian father by moving in with her boyfriend. Rather than choosing a "new" favorite, her father takes his annoyance out on his two younger daughters. - In The Chronicles of Narnia, it's a case of brotherly favoritism. Peter loves all of his siblings but he is especially close with the youngest, Lucy. - In the Chinese Cinderella story Bound by Donna Jo Napoli, at first the stepmother cared for neither main character Xing Xing or her biological daughter, as during her time, sons were more favored. However, as Xing Xing's father grew closer to Xing Xing after the death of his wife, the stepmother grew closer to her own daughter, while simultaneously despising and envying her stepdaughter. - Goes both ways in the Conqueror books. Temuge is the youngest of five brothers, and his mother dotes on him as a result. This leads to him becoming a rather soft and chubby child who never learns to use a bow or sword effectively, making him the least favorite in his father's eyes. - In the Cyteen novel Regenesis, part of the backstory of Giraud and Denys Nye is that their mother wanted to raise a genius, and pressured Giraud, the eldest, to perform as a child; although he was bright, he wasn't up to that level, and was The Un-Favourite. Denys, on the other hand, was a genius and was coddled. Denys grew up introverted and antisocial, depending utterly on Giraud to handle interaction with other people. - In Gene Stratton-Porter's A Daughter of the Land, Mary. With Kate singled out as The Un-Favourite. "I am not! But it wasn't a 'fool thing' when Mary and Nancy Ellen, and the older girls wanted to go. You even let Mary go to college for two years." "Mary had exceptional ability," said Mrs. Bates. "I wonder how she convinced you of it. None of the rest of us can discover it," said Kate. - Manny Heffley, the baby of the Heffley family from Diary of a Wimpy Kid. (Manny is three years old, Greg is around eleven to thirteen, and Rodrick is implied to be between fifteen and seventeen.) Manny is allowed to do all sorts of stuff like bring toys to church, call his brothers names, throw fits to get his way, and crawl out of bed at night and stay up. Greg states that when he was Manny's age, he had none of that, as his family was in a weaker financial state at the time. The Parental Favoritism also spreads to the extended family. (Manny is given far more presents for Christmas and more stuff that he wants, while Greg is given stuff like books of Algebra or deodorant.) The only in-focus grandmother is particularly bad, as she claims to like all of her grandchildren equally but her fridge is practically wallpapered in pictures of Manny. Also, Manny hardly ever receives punishment for his actions, even when he \|\|steals supplies and leaves his family for dead during a blizzard.\|\| - The only onscreen grandfather meanwhile actually subverts this. It's also why he is Gregory's favorite grandparent, for obvious reasons... "Gregory's my favorite!" - Murphy in Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files suffers from this. In Blood Rites, she asks that Harry time an assault on a vampire lair so that she can skip her family reunion. The timing is off, however; she attends part of the reunion and learns that her younger sister — whom their mother explicitly says is allowed more freedom as the youngest than Murphy had as a youngster — is marrying Murphy's ex-husband. The sister got involved with the ex when he failed to arrest her for underage drinking when she was spending an unsupervised vacation in New Orleans. Their mother is A-OK with this and criticizes Murphy for her reaction. - Of course, only part of this is because Murphy's sister is the favorite sister. The other part is that Mrs. Murphy absolutely loves her son-in-law. She's thrilled that she's getting him back in the family again. - A Drowned Maiden's Hair: Victoria Hawthorne laments that she was always unloved no matter how hard she tried to be good, while her charming sister Hyacinth was adored by everyone despite her lack of positive qualities. The family house at Hawthorne Grove was passed down to Hyacinth, even though she was the youngest, just because their father liked her better. - A major theme in East of Eden, due to the running Cain and Abel parallel. It happens first with Cyrus Trask, his unfavorite eldest son Charles, and the favorite, Adam. Thanks to Generation Xerox, things go the same way with Adam's twin sons, Cal and Aaron. - In Stephen King's novel The Eyes of The Dragon, Peter is King Roland's favorite son, largely because he reminds him so much of Queen Sasha. Thomas, meanwhile, takes after his father, which means that Roland sees his own flaws reflected back at him. (In fact, many of the eavesdropped statements that led to Thomas's resentment ended with a "like something I would have produced at his age" that Thomas missed.) The Big Bad, Flagg, is able to use Thomas' resentment as part of his plot to destroy the kingdom. - All over Flowers in the Attic. Cathy was her father's favorite. Chris is his mother's favorite. Corrine was her father's favorite before he disowned her for marrying his much younger half-brother. - In the later books in the series, there's a massive sense of this between Cathy's three children, as she sometimes appears much fonder of eldest child Jory and adopted daughter Cindy than of her troubled middle child Bart. She does love Bart, however, and the sense of favoritism has a lot to do with his view of things, not necessarily how they actually are. - In A Frozen Heart, a Tie-In Novel to Frozen, some of Hans' brothers resent him for being their mother's favorite and taunt him for being a Momma's Boy. They also resent Caleb, the oldest of 13 sons, for being their father's favorite. - FUDGE, in Judy Blume's series of young adult novels beginning with Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, is the family favorite, getting away with murder while big brother Peter got repeatedly whacked over the head with An Aesop about loving his brother. The fact that Peter Can't Get Away with Nuthin' doesn't help. - In fact, this is one of those odd instances where it's not clear whether Fudge is the parents' favorite, or the author's. Peter's parents seem as if they're supposed to be the wise, sensible, benevolent type, and they do make up for some of Fudge's excesses, but the fact that Fudge never gets called on his bad behaviour suggests that either he was given serious preference by his parents... or Blume didn't want to let such things as "discipline" get in the way of Fudge's antics. - In Double Fudge, Fudge's latest "phase" is that he's obsessed with money. His parents are actually somewhat worried about this, and Anne, the mother, is positively mortified when Fudge's excessive greed results in him getting evaluated by a counselor, who tells Anne that maybe she should try to stress that "the best things in life are free," etc. The problem is never solved, per se, in order to allow for hijinks and because Warren and Anne really have no idea what to do about it, but it does seem to lessen. Slightly. - His parents do get fed up with Fudge and punish him when warranted. In Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Fudge is throwing a tantrum and not eating his cornflakes and his dad makes him stand in the bathtub while he dumps the bowl of cereal on his head, and in Superfudge he's occasionally scolded (and spanked once) by his mother over his misdeeds and at the end is punished by his parents for riding his bike to town without telling anyone. - In Gone with the Wind, Scarlett is Gerald O'Hara's favored child. He has come to realize that he will never have any sons and speaks to Scarlett in a sort of man-to-man way that Scarlett enjoys very much. Scarlett carries this out much further with her own children; her youngest daughter, Bonnie, is her favored child. - J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter: - Harry endures some pretty extreme abuse at the hands of his aunt Petunia and uncle Vernon, while his cousin Dudley is extremely pampered. This is owed at least in part to a long-held jealousy Petunia held of his mother. In the sixth book, Dumbledore notes that Dudley arguably got the worse end of the deal, being unprepared for the real world. - Ron certainly feels for a long time like this is the case, although readers generally see no evidence of it; his parents clearly love him. Among his many insecurities, he frets about being the sixth boy in a family that always wanted a girl. Being the best friend of an actual celebrity, who is treated by his parents as an extra son, doesn't exactly help. The fact that he got plenty of hand-me-downs from his older brothers (due to his family being poor) might also play a part in this perception. - Regulus was the favorite over older brother Sirius (mostly because the former was just as much a bigot as his parents), to the point that even the family house-elf preferred him, partially for sharing the same bigoted views and partially because he was kind to him and \|\|cared enough about him to order Kreacher to leave him behind and allow him to be the one to die when he betrayed Voldemort. In Order of the Phoenix, Kreacher's dislike and animosity towards Sirius for his "betrayal" of the House of Black culminates in Kreacher betraying him to his death\|\|. - Dumbledore's sister Ariana required constant supervision, leaving Albus rather aloof - much to their brother's annoyance. - Marvolo Gaunt favored his son Morfin greatly over his daughter Merope, and eventually was arrested when his abuse of her was seen by an Auror. - Petunia certainly felt that her parents liked Lily better after discovering she was a witch and it is heavily implied she already felt like The Un-Favourite before Lily ever received her Hogwarts letter. - The House on the Lagoon: Straight with Rebecca, who spoils Ignacio and her daughters in comparison to Quintín. Deliberately averted with Isabel, who treats both her biological son and her adopted son equally. - In Andre Norton's Ice Crown, Uncle Offlas has charge of Roane, but blatantly favors his own son. - In Stuart Hill's The Icemark Chronicles, the youngest son Sharley has a crippled leg, so his parents overprotect him and love him more than their other offspring. His sister Medea grows more and more hatred towards him throughout the second book, until she eventually tries to kill him. Here he was, the reason and root of her inability to embrace the cause of the Icemark, her family, humanity, the mortal world... everything! She wasn't responsible for her actions. Sharley was. - Present across the Julio-Claudian family in I, Claudius. - Forced to play up his idiocy and disability, Claudius always disgusted his mother, especially when compared to his noble and valiant brother Germanicus. There was no resentment of Germanicus on Claudius's side. - Livia justified her actions by pointing out how disastrous Augustus's Parental Favoritism was: by favoring Marcellus over Agrippa, and Lucius, Gaius and later Germanicus against Tiberius, he risked civil war in Rome after his death. - Claudius later used this to protect his own son, Britannicus, from his adopted son Nero, hoping to divert Agrippinilla's attention from him. He fails. - Stephen King's It plays with this to horrific effect with Patrick Hockstetter, one of the minor antagonists in the novel. Patrick suspects that his parents love his newborn brother more than him (which the narration confirms to the reader), but doesn't care one iota about that, because Patrick is solipsistic (he believes that he is the only real mind that exists) and a psychopath. What he can't stand is the idea that the newborn infant might not only exist just like him, but will also disrupt his carefully planned schedules, and promptly smothers the infant to death, disguising it as crib death. - It's Not the End of the World: Karen is shocked when she learns that her parents have been having marital problems more or less since six-year-old Amy was born, causing her to theorize that the root of the discord was that her father made Amy his favorite and her mother retaliated by making oldest child Jeff her favorite. Karen remarks she's glad to be no one's favorite. - A major part of the plot of Jacob Have I Loved: Sarah Louise's younger twin, Caroline, received all the attention as a baby because she was always weak and sickly. She grew up beautiful, popular, talented at singing and the piano, sweet, and perfect, while Sarah Louise became a hard-working tomboy who "never gave her parents a moment's worry." Sarah Louise's mission in the novel is to find a life outside her sister's shadow. - In Jane Eyre, Jane is treated only like another mouth to feed for her spiteful aunt (whose husband treated Jane more kindly before he died) and her cousins, especially John, take delight in bullying her, even in front of their mother who does nothing to stop them. - A very important part of L. M. Montgomery's Jane of Lantern Hill: Grandmother only loves one of her children, Robin, Jane's mother. She's also insanely jealous, so this love doesn't extend to Jane. - Joe Pickett: In Endangered, Brenda Cates dotes on her youngest son Dallas; treating him as a hero and constantly insulting and belittling his older brothers, Bull and Timber. - Cara from Julia's Kitchen always felt that her mother preferred her, and her father preferred her younger sister Janie. It was all fair until her mother and Janie died in a House Fire. Now she struggles to connect with her father. - Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982: Jiyoung's parents and relatives prefer her little brother over Jiyoung and her sister because he is male. - Mercilessly deconstructed in Leaving Poppy by Kate Cann. The heroine, Amber, has a younger sister that is so favored by her mother it reaches ridiculous levels. At the start of the story, the heroine is due to go on holiday to celebrate her exam success. But Poppy — who her mother describes as "fragile" — suddenly becomes "ill," crying all the time and throwing tantrums. Their mother guilt-trips Amber into staying... and Poppy "miraculously" gets better. In later chapters, it is revealed that \|\|Poppy is not sick — she's psychotic, partly as a result of being spoiled, but it's also suggested that she was "born bad." Even as a child, she slashed another kid with scissors — and planned the whole thing meticulously.\|\| - In The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, Rah is the favorite of virtually the entire Muggle community, because he's a good boy who doesn't ever deviate from the norm and builds them a mill. This is taken to ridiculous levels in one chapter when he wins a croquet game and everyone acts like he won the Olympics, complete with giving him an old and valuable medal. Rah also seems to be the author's favorite as well, given that she made his entry in the character glossary easily the most detailed, while most everyone else (including Zyn) got two or three sentences tops. - In the Maximum Ride series, Jeb clearly favors his foster children (the Flock) over his six-year-old biological son Ari, to the point at which he leaves Ari in an underground lab filled with unethical scientists who unsurprisingly have no problem experimenting on the poor kid. Because of this, Ari understandably resents the Flock for this (especially Max) and tries constantly to gain his father's favor. \|\|Then the parental favoritism becomes literal when it turns out that Max and Ari are half siblings\|\|. Of course, it's a bit blurry as to whether he genuinely loved them or was just another in a long line of people trying to use the Flock to their advantage. The fact that he doesn't shut up about how they have to save the world might be an indicator. - Mo Dao Zu Shi: - Jin Guangshan doesn't particularly care about any of his children, but his legitimate-born son Jin Zixuan certainly fares better than bastards Meng Yao/Jin Guangyao and Mo Xuanyu. Even after the latter two are brought into the sect, they're frequently browbeaten, insulted, neglected, and coerced into performing immoral acts trying to win his non-existent approval. - The Yunmeng Jiang sect's inner family has a complicated version. Jiang Fengmian favors the-not-even-formally-adopted Wei Wuxian over both of his biological children, and while Yu Ziyuan frequently calls him on it, her hatred of the boy doesn't mean she favors Jiang Cheng so much as she's constantly castigating him for not doing better at getting his father to notice him. - In Lynda Robinson's Lord Meren mysteries, it is revealed in Murder at the Feast of Rejoicing that Meren, the eldest son, was put under great pressure to excel by his Abusive Father, while his younger brother Ra was indulged and spoiled. - In Outbound Flight, Jedi Lorana Jinzler is confronted, to her shock, by the brother she never knew, who told her angrily that their parents, whom she also never knew, loved her for being a Jedi, loved her more than their other children, held her up as a shining example of what they should be. She's confused and disturbed and both of them come away from that confrontation worse off; at the end of the book, Lorana tells someone to find her brother and tell him that she was thinking of him, and hoping that he could find a way to let go of his anger — at her, at their parents, at himself. - Played with in Judy Blume's The Pain And The Great One, a kids book told in two parts. The first, an older sister describes how her little brother "The Pain" gets away with murder and is clearly the parents' favorite, in the second the brother describes the sister "The Great One" in the same way, also concluding that she must be the favorite. - The gods in Percy Jackson are guilty of this. In fact, Poseidon openly admitted that \|\|Percy was his favorite son\|\|. - Jodi Picoult favors the Delicate and Sickly variation on this trope: - In My Sister's Keeper, youngest daughter Anna was conceived specifically to be a donor for cancer-struck big sister, Kate. While she is pregnant with Anna, her mother, Sara, admits that she hasn't really considered her new daughter's personality, only the genetics that ensures she will make a good donor. Even when Anna is born, Sara's main concern is that the doctors don't damage the umbilical cord (which can be used to save Kate) — she pays very little attention to the newborn baby. Anna's dad is more concerned with her, but even he neglects his oldest child, Jesse. Late in the book, he admits that he hasn't really paid much attention to Jesse's development, and can't fill in the gap between being told that Jesse wasn't a suitable donor for Kate, and being confronted with a seriously troubled 18-year-old. Jesse and Anna are only seen in terms of what they can do for Kate — who, to her credit, notices this and doesn't like it one bit. - In Handle with Care, Willow suffers from severe brittle bone disease, which understandably necessitates a lot of care and caution. However, her mother, Charlotte, takes it to an extreme, ignoring older daughter Amelia and systematically destroying the girl's life as she campaigns to improve Willow's. When Amelia develops bulimia and starts self-harming, Charlotte genuinely can't see why Amelia has such problems. Unlike Willow, who is cared for by her family, Amelia is promptly shuffled off to a clinic in Boston when her problems are revealed, to be someone else's problem for a while. What makes this particularly sad is that before Willow's birth, Charlotte admits that she would hesitate to take a bullet for her husband because Amelia would need her, but she's protecting Amelia no matter what. By the end of the book, it's doubtful that Charlotte would give the same answer. - Robert Caro's The Power Broker: Robert Moses' mother Bella favors him more and more over his brother Paul (who is more willing to contradict her), culminating in \|\|Robert getting most of her estate when she dies\|\|. - The Bennet sisters, in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Tearaway Lydia is Mrs. Bennet's favorite daughter; sensible and witty Elizabeth is Mr. Bennet's. Oldest sister Jane is loved by everyone thanks to her sweet nature, but bookish Mary and second-to-youngest Kitty get the short end of the stick. (Kitty doesn't even get a character trait; she's just 'second-to-youngest'. That's favoritism for you.) - In the Realm of the Elderlings trilogy: - Althea is clearly the favourite of Ephron, who treats her like the son he never had and indulged her tomboy nature by taking her on sailing trips with him and spoiling her quite a bit. This drove quite a wedge between the sisters, since Keffria notes that despite being the older, obedient, dutiful daughter who married and had children as expected of her, she never got the attention her younger, more charismatic sister did. Ronica is more neutral, able to see both her daughter's strengths and weaknesses, but she spends far more time overall with Keffria since Althea runs away in the first book. - Kyle, Keffria's husband, treats his oldest son Wintrow with nothing but disdain, to the point of disowning him entirely on their voyage and ignores his youngest son, but he positively dotes on his only daughter, Malta, giving her everything she wants and intervening when anybody tries to discipline her. Ironically the person who clashes with Malta most is Althea, who is just as much as a spoiled Daddy's Girl as Malta is - according to Keffria, Althea was even worse at Malta's age. - Jane Rizzoli of the Rizzoli & Isles series is blatantly ignored in favor of her brothers, especially brother Frankie. One book tries to Hand Wave this with the explanation that her mother always knew that Jane was the strong one while her brother needed help, but a later novel has her finally admit her mistake. - Mrs. Dashwood does a bit of this in Sense and Sensibility. She is kind and affectionate to all three of her daughters, and a Good Stepmother to her husband's son from his first marriage; but she has a particularly close relationship with Marianne, who strikingly resembles her and is constantly referred to as being her darling child, doted upon, or something of the sort. Meanwhile, she generally finds Elinor incomprehensible and fails to take her feelings into account, possibly because she often doesn't realise they exist. When the sisters have similar love problems, Mrs. Dashwood leaves Elinor to shift for herself while giving Marianne her unlimited support. While some of this could be explained by Elinor's and Marianne's respective attitudes, Mrs. Dashwood continues to be inconsiderate to Elinor even when it is revealed that \|\|her love interest is engaged to another woman\|\|. Completely inverts the Middle Child Syndrome. To her credit, near the end she gets a clue and fears that "she had been unjust, inattentive, nay, almost unkind to her Elinor." - For bonus points, Elinor and Marianne have a younger sister, Margaret. Margaret exists. That is all. - In Shaman Blues, the wraith's mother clearly favored her older son, eventually putting the Curse of Cain — which makes all bad befall the then-would-be wraith and all good fall to the boy — on the two of them. The wraith's mocking way of telling the story suggests that this was just the cherry on top of other signs pointing at whom mother loved more. - Sherlock Holmes has a case (\|\|The Priory School\|\|) where the favored son isn't given preferential treatment because he's illegitimate, and while the father doesn't disdain or even mislove his younger son, the elder was the child of a woman he truly loved and so the father gives in to his whims. \|\|When the Bastard Bastard's machinations to disinherit the legitimate heir result in the death of a man, however, he immediately confesses to his father and flees the country.\|\| - George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire has a few: - Tywin Lannister's blatant playing favorites with his children Jaime, Cersei and Tyrion is one of many things that make him a bad parent. Most glaringly, he favors his oldest son Jaime, who's tall, handsome, a ferocious knight and generally regarded as the golden son. His second son Tyrion is a malformed dwarf whose mother (Tywin's beloved wife) died while giving birth to him. Since Jaime and Cersei are prevented from inheriting (Jaime is a member of the Kingsguard, who can't hold lands or father children, while Cersei is a woman), Tyrion is the heir, which is Tywin's Berserk Button. Tywin's daughter, Cersei, is between her brothers in terms of value in their father's eyes: she and Tywin got along when she was younger, even with hints of Cersei being Daddy's Girl (she was one of two people in the house at whom he smiled), but she was "just" a daughter in his eyes, even if Tywin he saw her as a good one. That said, Tywin's treatment of all his children is abusive, just to different degrees, and Jaime, the favored sibling, is also the only one loving and loved by the other two. - Warrior-like Randyll Tarly (said to be the finest soldier in the realm) bypasses his heir, the cowardly, compassionate, bookish and weight-challenged Samwell, for his younger son Dickon (and by "bypasses" we mean "chains him up for three days, threatens to kill him, then has him forfeit his birthright and be exiled to the Night's Watch rather than let him become a gasp academic"). He explicitly tells him he'll enjoy hunting him down like an animal if he doesn't join the Watch while skinning a dead deer. He rips its heart out in front of him for emphasis. - Queen Cersei lavishes shamelessly preferential treatment on her sociopathic eldest Joffrey while publicly berating the sweet, gentle Tommen as a weakling. She also frequently ignores her only daughter in favor of both boys, not noticing that she repeats the pattern her father had set. - While Catelyn dearly and deeply loves all of her children, she has mentioned that Bran is her favorite as he is her special boy. There is also a mild version between Arya and Sansa specifically, as Catelyn often finds herself wishing that Arya could be more like her ladylike sister. (While Catelyn loves all of her own children, she resents her husband Ned's illegitimate son Jon for being Ned's son by another woman, and disdains the Starks' ward Theon Greyjoy.) - Theon gets the short end of the stick again when, feeling unwelcome in Winterfell, he tries to go back home to Pyke. After Balon's oldest boys were killed and the youngest — Theon — was taken hostage as punishment for his attempted rebellion, Balon was left with his daughter Asha. Balon doesn't welcome his remaining son Theon, who was raised by his enemies the Starks, and he absolutely dotes on Asha. - In Gene Stratton-Porter's The Song of the Cardinal, the cardinal got this. His father stuffed him with food in the nest, and his mother, more equitable, gave him only half of what she gathered. The king came to see him and at once acknowledged subjugation. He was the father of many promising cardinals, yet he never had seen one like this. He set the Limberlost echoes rolling with his jubilant rejoicing. He unceasingly hunted for the ripest berries and seed. He stuffed that baby from morning until night, and never came with food that he did not find him standing atop the others calling for more. The queen was just as proud of him and quite as foolish in her idolatry, but she kept tally and gave the remainder every other worm in turn. They were unusually fine babies, but what chance has merely a fine baby in a family that possesses a prodigy? The Cardinal was as large as any two of the other nestlings, and so red the very down on him seemed tinged with crimson; his skin and even his feet were red. - In The Stormlight Archive, Shallan was the favorite child of an extremely abusive father, being his only daughter and the potential savior of the family (as she can marry higher up the social ladder and restore their prestige). However, she gains no advantage from this at all. She's forced to grow up with the enormous expectations of the family and also feels responsible for the suffering of her brothers, to the extent that she takes on all their ever-increasing problems. When her father dies, it's Shallan who steps up to the plate as leader of the family, despite being the youngest. And being the favorite didn't stop her from copping more than her fair share of emotional and verbal abuse from him, either. At the end of the second book, \|\|The Reveal that Shallan is the one who killed her mother (which her father took the blame for) casts their relationship in a different light. On a reread, it's implied several times that her father is terrified of her\|\|. - In The Story of Valentine and His Brother, Richard can't bring himself to love Val because he takes after his mother, who abandoned both of them. He wishes she had left Dick, who looks more like Richard. - Fifty years later, in Survivor's Quest, that person Lorana talked to finally stops neglecting the promise and arranges for Dean Jinzler to go to the ruins of Outbound Flight, where his sister died. Time has muddled up his anger, and although he still believes that she was unduly favored, he wants to put things to rest and say his goodbyes. During the events of the novel, he realizes, that he'd been lying to himself for years. Their parents had loved the absent Lorana, but they had loved the children they had just as much. All those years when Dean had been pushing himself to excel in his father's fields, they had been proud. He just hadn't seen it. "I'm an electronics technician. Like my father before me." - In the Sweet Valley High series, Ned and Alice Wakefield consistently blast Jessica for her bad behavior — promiscuity, bad grades, etc. Similar behavior from Elizabeth is glossed over or rationalized. One scene illustrates this perfectly; when Jessica tries to fix her brother Steven up with one of her friends, she's screamed at by everyone. But when Elizabeth steps in to defend Jessica and explain that it was her idea, suddenly it's a great idea and everyone's falling all over themselves to praise her for it. Only when Jessica ran away from home ( , in two separate books) did it finally dawn on her family how troubled she was. twice - Laurence in the Temeraire books. He's the unnecessary third son of a minor aristocratic family, and his father, who'd never paid him any attention, expected him to go into the priesthood, but instead, he ran away and joined the Navy. And just when he thought he might have been in a position to make his way back into his father's good graces with his accumulated military honors, he experiences the local equivalent of Falling into the Cockpit and finds himself recruited to the socially unacceptable Aerial Corps instead, and his father almost disowns him. Their relationship only gets worse from there. - The Thorn Birds: Fiona favors her oldest son Frank. This is because Frank is the son of the man she really loves, who seduced and abandoned her. Meanwhile, she has several other children with Paddy, the man kind enough to marry her when no one else would because of her illegitimate child, but to a large extent, she ignores them. Only daughter Meggie actually thinks she's dying when she starts her period because her mother never bothered to tell her anything about it. Twenty-something years later, Meggie repeats this mistake with her own children, favoring her son Dane (her illegitimate child with the priest she has loved since childhood) over her daughter Justine (her child by her neglectful husband Luke). - To a lesser extent, it seems that Meggie is Paddy's favorite child, possibly because she's the only daughter in a large family of sons. Meanwhile, Frank is The Unfavorite, due to not being Paddy's real son. - J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium: - The Lord of the Rings: Boromir (the elder son) is heavily preferred to Faramir by their father, Denethor. It's especially emphasized in The Movies, where Denethor is shown as blatantly unfair; in the book, Gandalf at least believes that it is partly that Denethor is still grief-stricken over the death. In the book, it's also heavily implied that a lot of his favoritism comes from Boromir's loyalty — Boromir always puts Gondor's interests first, as Denethor does, while Faramir seems more interested in Gandalf's plan to take care of Middle-Earth as a whole (even if that means causing some serious trouble for Gondor). Case in point: both brothers are faced with an opportunity to take the Ring by force and use it to defend Gondor. Boromir goes for it; Faramir just gives the hobbits some supplies and lets them go. It should be noted though, that Boromir and Faramir love each other dearly, and Boromir protects Faramir as much as possible and is thoroughly sick of the way their father treats him. - In The Silmarillion, Fëanor and Fingolfin, who are half-brothers, fight for the love of their father Finwë, who shows no signs of favoritism. Then the eldest son, Fëanor, publicly threatens to kill Fingolfin, setting the point of his sword to his brother's chest. He is exiled... and his father Finwë goes with him. Poor Fingolfin. (Though arguably this might have been necessary to keep the slightly unhinged Fëanor from going batshit crazy... which he did anyway, mind, but only later.) Even so, Finwë declares that as long as his son is exiled, "I hold myself unkinged," and refuses to see or talk to his people, even during the holiest festivals. - Katie Nolan of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn knows when she gives birth to her son Neeley that she'll love him more than her daughter Francie, but promises she won't show it (she fails). She rationalizes much of her favoritism by saying that Neeley needs more encouragement, while Francie is strong like her and will get what she wants somehow. For example, when she can only afford to send one of the kids to high school, she says it should be Neeley because he won't go unless she makes him, but Francie will get an education because she wants it. - King Dedelin kicks off the plot of Warbreaker with this: rather than send his oldest daughter, Vivenna, to an Arranged Marriage with an Evil Overlord, as per their treaty, he sends the seventeen-year-old Siri (the treaty never specified which daughter, though it was assumed it would be Vivenna). He tries to justify this as the kingdom needing Vivenna more, but admits privately that he simply couldn't bear to send Vivenna to be raped and sacrificed — but he could bear to send Siri to the same fate. \|\|Luckily, said Overlord turns out to be far nicer than described, and he and Siri wind up being perfect for each other\|\|. - Warrior Cats: - Crookedstar was this to Rainflower, to the dismay of him, his brother Oakheart, and their father Shellheart all because he broke his jaw, thus "ruining his good looks." But he eventually tells her that she would never make him ashamed of who he was. - Breezepelt feels like this at first, because his dad never pays attention to him (but not knowing he \|\|had more than one kit\|\|). So he starts working with the Dark Forest not only to destroy the Clans but also to get revenge on Crowfeather. - It's strongly hinted that \|\|Brambleclaw is Tigerstar's favorite kit, despite them being on opposite sides\|\|. - Even though she may not have made it obvious, Scourge (back then Tiny) believed his mother Quince liked Socks and Ruby more than him. Though it's hinted that she favors him over the others. - Brokenstar was this to his foster mother, Lizardstripe. Justified, as she didn't want kits in the first place, and accepted Brokenstar extremely reluctantly. - In Terry Pratchett's The Wee Free Men, Tiffany Aching, the next-to-youngest child in a family of girls, is somewhat overlooked because the youngest child is the only boy. - The Westing Game: Grace Wexler doesn't even bother to hide how much she prefers her older, angelic daughter Angela over younger daughter Turtle. While angry at Turtle, she confides to her husband that she has always harbored a suspicion that the hospital had gotten the babies mixed up when Turtle was born and Grace explicitly states (while both girls are present) that she intends to leave everything she owns to Angela. The older girl is generally regarded as the perfect daughter \|\|much to Angela's resentment, due to her mother micromanaging her life.\|\| - Whateley Universe: Multiple instances: Melusine, [...] used to be Papas glowing favorite. Then, of the lot of us, its Mara who finally has a kid. Paige was twelve years old, and where I took after Dad, she definitely took after Mom. It was no wonder that she was Moms pride and joy. Id long since accepted the fact that Paige was my moms favorite, and Id even come to appreciate the benefits. While Paige received our moms full parental attention, I usually received far less scrutiny. Mom would never listen to anything that might be considered as criticism of Paige, not when Paige was her pride and joy, and especially not from me. - Nessarose is Frexspar's favorite child in Wicked. Her elder sister Elphaba thinks it's because Nessa is disabled, but it's more complicated than that. Frexspar was in a poly relationship with his wife Melena and another man named Turtle Heart. Melena didn't know who was Nessa's father, but Frex decided that she was all of theirs. - Jacqueline Wilson has used this a few times: - The Diamond Girls involves a mother who is desperate for her fifth child to be a boy, after having four daughters. She obsesses over it to the point of planning her new life around her son — demeaning the value of her daughters as she does so. This is one of the few cases where Parental Favoritism has started before the kid is born. \|\|It doesn't work out so well for the fifth Diamond child when "he" turns out to be a she,...\|\| - Girls In Love has one character, Nadine, with a younger sister who is the favorite of their superficial and snobbish mother. Natasha is a Devil in Plain Sight, but she looks cute, and later starts a career as a child model, so of course, she's "Mummy's favorite." - In The Illustrated Mum, Star is clearly Marigold's favourite child because she's the daughter of The One That Got Away. Dolphin finds this incredibly unfair, as Star shows Marigold constant disdain and leaves to live with her newfound father, while Dolphin chooses to stay with Marigold. \|\|Later, when Dolphin finds her own father, she's upset to learn he already has two daughters and seems to want her friend Oliver as a son, lamenting, "I'm not anybody's favourite."\|\| - Love Lessons deconstructs this somewhat, as Pru is the favourite of her father, who belittles her younger sister for being fat and slow, but being the favourite doesn't stop his verbal abuse of her and her mother is an Extreme Doormat who expects Pru to try and contain her father's rages. - In Wuthering Heights, Mr. Earnshaw favors his foster son Heathcliff (who may or may not be his illegitimate son) over his own two children Hindley and Catherine. Cathy overlooks this as she and Heathcliff become soul mates, but for Hindley, the Sibling Rivalry reaches Cain and Abel proportions, to the point that he reduces Heathcliff to servitude after his father's death. - In Andre Norton's The Zero Stone, the family split in two: Jern and his father, and his mother with the other two siblings. - In Garden of Shadows, Malcolm blatantly favors his daughter, Corrine, over both of his sons, giving her everything she wants while being overly critical and harsh towards Mal and Joel. When Olivia calls him out on it, he either claims Olivia is jealous that she didn't have the same opportunities growing up or that girls have to brought up diferently than boys. - Damien Adare in My Sweey Audrina openly favors and adores his second daughter, Audrina, over his eldest daughter, Vera, who he refuses to even acknowledge as his child, whihc in turn causes Vera to hate and mistreat Audrina. Later, in Whitefern, Damien starts to favor Sylvia, his third daughter, over Audrina, mainly because she fawns over him in a way that Audrina doesn't, though unlike Vera, Audrina doesn't hold it against her. - American Housewife: From the outset, Katie Otto is very clear that her youngest, Anna-Kat, is also her favorite. She does a terrible job hiding this from her other two kids (mostly because she doesn't even bother hiding it from them). Her only son, Oliver, is also The Unfavorite, though this is mostly because of his materialistic and self-centered personality. - Arrested Development: - Arrow: It is never directly stated or confirmed, but Dinah Lance seems to favor Sara over Laurel. It's revealed she saw Sara packing to join Oliver on the boat, and after briefly trying to talk her out of it, let her go despite it being a betrayal of Laurel. Tellingly, after admitting this, she breaks down weeping and apologizes to Quentin and Laurel for killing Sara; but doesn't apologize to Laurel over the betrayal or for keeping it a secret this long. She also ran away shortly after the boat sank, abandoning Laurel, and made little effort to stay in touch until that point. - Bates Motel: Norma Bates obviously prefers her son Norman over her other son Dylan. While she only shows some affection to Dylan when he does her a favor or is useful to her or Norman in some way, she's obsessed with Norman and her feelings for him go beyond motherly love. - In Battlestar Galactica (2003), \|\|Ellen Tigh\|\|, one of the creators of the humanoid Cylons, apparently considered artistic Daniel as her favorite. As Model Number Seven, Daniel is essentially the second youngest of eight. The eldest of her children, John, was quite resentful of this relationship and eventually murdered his brother out of jealousy and reprogrammed his siblings to forget about him and their parents. - The Big Bang Theory - Leonard's mother frequently brings up how much more successful and impressive Leonard's siblings are. Interestingly, she doesn't express much affection for them either, treating all of her children with the same detached, clinical manner. - Sheldon is clearly Mary Cooper's favorite child. Mary dotes on Sheldon even in his adulthood and doesn't speak very highly of George Jr. or Missy, referring to them as "dumb as soup". The prequel Young Sheldon shows that this was always the case. George even laments to Leonard that despite all the financial support he provided to his family after his father's death and working hard to become a successful businessman, Sheldon is still Mary's favorite. - The unfamiliar viewer could see this in Bones. \|\|At first glance, Brennan and Booth may seem to prefer their daughter Christine to Parker, Booth's son, since they spend much more time with her than they do with him. However, it must be noted that Booth shares custody with Parker and Parker spends a lot of time in England with his mother. And it's worth mentioning, that when we do see Parker with Brennan and Booth, they are both shown giving just as much affection to him as they do to Christine; it's also indicated that Brennan cares for Parker like her own as well. Similarly, Parker also loves Christine deeply.\|\|. - The Borgias: Although Rodrigo Borgia is plainly very fond of all his children, his daughter Lucrezia is obviously his favorite, to the point where it becomes a little creepy. And of his three sons, he indulges Juan the most by far and remains completely oblivious to his glaring faults, to the clear resentment of The Dutiful Son Cesare. Meanwhile, little Gioffre gets rather overlooked but doesn't seem to mind too much. Being overlooked is a blessing in the Borgia family. - Played for Laughs with Amy's family in Brooklyn Nine-Nine: her parents very openly play favorites with their eight children, with Amy's mother even shamelessly arranging their photos on the mantle in the order of who makes her proudest. Amy's brother David has always been the favorite, much to Amy's chagrin. - On Caroline in the City, Caroline's parents clearly unconsciously favor her brother, who really is highly accomplished and successful and of whom Caroline has always been a little resentful and jealous. During a visit home, Caroline's employee, friend, and eventual lover Richard comforts her by comparing her brother to an alien, and saying that if it wasn't so cold, he'd be 'out looking for his pod'. Later, he gently teases Caroline by saying she has to get elected President, 'so her brother can become the Pope'. - Criminal Minds: It doesn't really come up within the BAU (Morgan seems to get some favoritism in his family due to being the youngest, the only boy, and living the furthest away, but his sisters take it in stride), but the ugly side of this shows up in some of the unsubs the team faces: - The mother in "The Inspiration"/"The Inspired" gave birth to twins and couldn't manage as a single mother, so she had to choose a favorite and give the other up for adoption. When she had to choose, Wallace said "I love you, Mommy," while Jessie said nothing, so she kept Wallace. However, Wallace inherited their father's mental illness and became a serial killer, whereas Jessie became a sucessful lawyer, so when Jessie made contact, she switched her preference and plotted to have Jessie Kill and Replace Wallace so she could have the better son. Jessie initially resents Wallace for being kept (even though, as far as we can tell, Jessie had loving and supportive adoptive parents), but when they actually meet, he sees how much they have in common and recognizes their birth mother as the guilty party. For what it's worth, their birth father, who is barely in touch with reality and hasn't seen them since they were todlers, seems to prefer Wallace because Wallace inherited a nervous tic (a shaky middle finger) from his father. - The unsub's mother in "Safe Haven" initially seems to have abandoned her teenage son out of desperation after he broke his sister's arm. He eventually gets her to admit that she's seen him as The Unfavorite since before he was born due to seeing him as a Fetus Terrible because she'd been pregnant with twins until she suddenly wasn't, which made her believe he'd killed his sibling. - The unsub's father in Backdoor Pilot "Beyond Borders" favored his new American wife and stepchildren over his biological son, causing the unsub to lash out at American families. - It only gets a brief mention in "'Til Death Do Us Part," but the unsub's mother left her florist business to only one of her daughters, despite both of them running it. It might have something to do with Dana obsessing over her sister's boyfriend and deluding herself into believing he was actually in love with Dana the whole time. - Discussed in The Crown. Elizabeth is appalled that Margaret Thatcher openly favors her son, while Philip argues that every parent has favorites, and admitting it is only honest. Elizabeth: What about you, who's your favorite? Philip: Anne. Elizabeth: You said that alarmingly quickly! Philip: Because it didn't require any thought. - Seen in full flow in Dallas. Youngest son Bobby is the family favorite, much to the disappointment of eldest son JR, who has spent years honing his skills, cunning and ruthlessness in the hopes of winning over Jock. (Middle child Gary became an alcoholic and even after recovering moved away from the family.) Strikingly, when Jock dies, it hits JR by far the hardest. - This actually turns out to benefit the family in ways no one expected. Being the family favorite, receiving unconditional love and support, ended up shaping Bobbys altruistic nature, turning him into a man of deep principals who was committed to being the good guy. Jock even states point blank in the pilot I spoiled Bobby rotten and he turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. - In The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Brea's mother definitely spoiled her more than her other sisters, which Seladon never hesitates to call out on. - Deb from Dexter feels this way about her father toward her brother. The truth is that Harry just wanted to protect his children and loved them both. Dexter was just a little more high-maintenance due to being, well, a budding Serial Killer. - Doctor Who: In "Demons of the Punjab", Yaz's grandmother Umbreen says that Yaz is her favourite granddaughter, prompting annoyance from Yaz's younger sister Sonya and a warning from Yaz's mum Najia not to say things like that. \|\|It's hinted that Umbreen's reason for this might be because she knows of Yaz's presence at her first wedding in 1947.\|\| - Sometimes, this occurs in ER. When two brothers come into a hospital after an accident, the father chewed the adopted one out, accusing him of doing stupid things that would hurt his son. However, we find out that he is just as strict with his biological son, which was why said son preferred his stepbrother over his father. Even when the stepbrother went into critical condition, the father was more concerned with his real son. Ray angrily called him out on it. - Everybody Loves Raymond. Even the show title suggests so. Robert always gets the short end of the stick from their parents. - Inverted on The Expanse, Holden is the sole child of eight biological parents, but the one he loves the most is the mother that actually gave birth to him, as he addresses all his letters home solely to her (though he claims it's understood the letter is meant for everyone). - From what is seen in Firefly, Simon seems to be the favorite of the family. While River never comes across as The Un-Favourite, we still see that the Tam parents pump vast amounts of energy and money into Simon's social standing and career, but are shown to make no such efforts towards River (despite her being even more gifted than him) and seem more bothered by Simon's attempt to contact his sister than the fact that River has vanished after being sent to an institute. - Subverted in many ways on Frasier: - Brothers Frasier and Niles were each convinced that the other was their parents' favorite, which resulted in the intense and petty sibling rivalry that they each suffer from in adulthood. It's often made clear, however, that their parents didn't play favorites (and in fact their father Martin in many ways considered both of them his least favorite, as they were so completely different from and diametrically opposed to him) and that all this was just their own insecurities acting. - The female 'baby' of the family is also subverted in Daphne's relationship with her mother — despite Daphne's endless, thankless sacrifices over the years, her mother is nothing less than hyper-critical and demanding of her, whilst doting upon her boorish, obnoxious, feckless and ungrateful older brother. - In the Doyle family, it seems that Roz was favored by her father, while Roz's mother favored her other daughter, Denise. - Friends: This trope is Played for Laughs a few times: - Game of Thrones: - Tywin Lannister favors Jaime (by manipulating him to do what Tywin wants), while generally ignoring Cersei (because she's just a woman) and openly despising Tyrion (who is a dwarf). He trusts Jaime with half of his army, praises him on occasion and considers him his heir, even though by law Jaime cannot inherit it, as he is a member of the Kingsguard. Cersei and Tyrion, who both love Jaime, are still resentful of this blatant favoritism. Tyrion in particular points out that he will never be recognized for all his accomplishments, even though he's by far Tywin's most capable descendant, while Jaime is still Tywin's designated heir even after forfeiting his inheritance, murdering a king, losing his sword hand, and screwing his own sister, which caused a countrywide scandal and a Succession Crisis that almost destroyed the Lannister bid for the Iron Throne. Tyrion: You're the golden son. You could kill a king, lose a hand, fuck your own sister, you'll always be the golden son. - Catelyn Stark loves all her children but has a special affection for her daughter Sansa (whose hair she brushes personally) and her son Bran (whose injury causes her a Heroic BSoD). - Balon Greyjoy favors Yara over Theon because Theon spent half his life as a hostage of the Starks. She's the only person he seems to show any affection for. Most of Theon's poor decisions are motivated by a desire to earn his father's respect. - Samwell Tarly's father forced him to join the Night's Watch so his younger son could become his heir. - Joffrey is clearly Cersei's favourite child, with Myrcella second and Tommen running a very distant third. Considering the effects, the younger children have probably benefited from that. - Daenerys says her dragons are the only children she will ever have and loves them greatly, but it's very clear that Drogon is her favourite. - Margaery is her grandmother's favourite, as Olenna has groomed her to be her successor and largely dismisses Loras as a "silly boy on a horse." She isn't cruel about it like Tywin, though, and it's clear she does care for him too. - It's implied that Catelyn was Hoster's favourite child, calling her "Little Cat". - According to Sandor, Gregor was their father's favorite. Their father hoped he would become a knight and also gave a cover for his scarring of little Sandor so as to protect him from justice. The same father Gregor later murdered (probably). - On The Good Place, Tahani's parents adore her sister and vaguely tolerate her, to the point that they misspelled her name as "Tahini" in their will. - During a special "test" in Season 2, Tahani meets her parents and realizes at last that nothing she did was ever going to be good enough in their eyes to be as good as her sister was. - Miley's grandmother in Hannah Montana feels that her brother Jackson gets the short end of the stick being the normal brother of a world-famous pop star, and so she tries to make up for it by openly admitting that he's her favorite. For instance, she blows off Miley's visit with the Queen of England to see Jackson's volleyball game. Miley hates this until she learns of her grandmother's reasoning and agrees with her. In the same episode, we're shown that Jackson thinks Miley's the world's favorite (including their father's), as she gets all the attention, being an international pop star. - Robbie Ray also tends to prefer Miley over Jackson, forcing Jackson to learn harsh lessons while he just tells Miley what she did wrong. - The grandparent variation occurs in The Hardy Boys (2020). Gloria does care for both her grandchildren and has genuine concern for Joe when he was briefly taken hostage and when he went missing, but overall she shows more attention to Frank and actively tries to bond with him a lot more than with Joe. Most likely because Frank is older and getting to the point where she can start grooming him for leadership for the Circle, whereas Joe is still just a kid. - Much drama is wrung out of this question in Heroes: Just who is Angela Petrelli's favorite son? \|\|Arthur says it's Peter, much to Sylar's disappointment.\|\| - Played with in Home Improvement. Tim Taylor is a good and loving father to all his sons. But it's often mentioned that he favors Brad over Randy and Mark because he and Brad have more common interests. This leads to Tim spending more time with Brad and allowing him special treatment, like standing in for Al on Tool Time. Somewhat subverted in that Tim is aware that he favors Brad and feels genuinely bad about it. Enter Wilson... - Pam Puckett on iCarly. It's obvious to everyone that of the twins, she prefers Melanie over Sam. She even outright asks Sam once why she can't be more like Melanie. - Nermin of the miniseries Innocent blatantly favors older son Taner over his younger brother Tarık, to the point of dismissing the latter's mental health struggles. Her husband Cevdet, who cares for his sons equally, calls her out for her disproportionate concern. - Played to extremes on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, by Dennis and Dee's mother. She was horribly emotionally abusive to Dee while insisting that Dennis could do no wrong. This clearly didn't work out very well for either of them. At least Frank is more or less equally bad as a parent to both of them. - Kirby Buckets' parents have both consistently showed favoritism towards him over Dawn. - Downplayed version in Last Man Standing. While Mike and Vanessa clearly love all three of their daughters, it's no secret that Mike likes the youngest daughter Eve, the Tomboy who enjoys sports, hunting, etc. as much as he does, the best. Similarly, Vanessa prefers spending time with the oldest daughters Kristin and Mandy because they are more girly and interested in the feminine activities Eve does not like. - "Three Sisters" makes this a plot-point when Mike won't take money out of a college fund so Eve can buy some recording equipment, but Kristen does. When Mike objects to this as circumventing his authority, it leads to a big argument over who the favorite actually is, with each sister thinking it's someone else and pointing to various acts of perceived favoritism. Mike and Vanessa argue that while it might look like one child is getting constant favoritism and attention, it's actually parsed out. As unfair as it sounds, they say raising multiple kids over the years sometimes required deciding which one of them needed special attention and help, even if it was at the expense of the other daughters. - An episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent called "Saving Face" featured a young doctor who could never escape her brother's shadow, despite the fact that he had died many years ago ( "He was the lucky one!"). It was blatant to the point where they were more worried about his portrait being damaged than her being hauled off to jail. She even did the math and discovered she was conceived almost immediately after his death, making her nothing more than a replacement for him. - Det. Goren is aware that he's The Un-Favourite in spite of the fact that his brother is a homeless drug addict. - In another later episode, Rip Torn plays a parent with adult children. He dotes on one child and undercuts the other very consistently. The dynamic causes one child to kill the other. The father is then given custody of his two surviving grandchildren. From the first meeting, he selects one child to favor over another, setting the scene for a repeat of the current tragedy. - One of the most baffling things of The League is that Kevin and Taco's mother clearly believes the pot-smoking moron Taco who has no idea where he is half the time and no career or goals is far more successful a person than Kevin, a happily married lawyer and father. - Comes up during an honesty game in Life in Pieces. Sophia: Who's your favourite child? Heather: [looking for a way out] Tim? Tim: Pretty sure it's Tyler. - Lucifer (2016): Eve, the First Woman, loved her son Abel and was upset at Cain killing him, to the point that she doesn't particularly care that Cain was cursed to walk the Earth for all eternity only to finally get killed over a mortal woman. "He probably got about what he deserved." This despite the fact that Abel was at least as bad as Cain; according to Cain, they tried to kill each other all the time, and the only difference between them was that Cain won their final fight. In fact, Abel was the first human soul in Hell. - Subverted in Malcolm in the Middle. Hal and Lois start favoring Malcolm after he is revealed to be highly gifted, but it's out of the ordinary because a) they only express their favoritism by bluntly telling Malcolm he's the one person in the family who has a chance of succeeding in life, they never let him off the hook or treat him better than his brothers, b) they are harder on Malcolm as a result, and c) all Malcolm's brothers are also in on the plan to favor Malcolm above the rest of the family to help him fulfill his potential. After that, the laborious work he had to do in order to attend Harvard is as much paying his family back for their support of him as pursuing his own dreams. - This is all spelled out in the series finale when Malcolm graduates from high school. His mom turns down a six-figure salary job he was being offered instead of college and the family explains (jeez, they thought he knew this already) that he's going to work his ass off to get through Harvard and claw his way up becoming President one day (not just President, the best President) and do some amazing good in the world for people like their family who have to struggle to get by everyday. - Over time, it becomes pretty obvious on Married... with Children that Al and Peg prefer their ditzy, slutty daughter Kelly over their smart, perverted son, Bud. At one point in the same season, they screwed him out of going into space and meeting the President because she was going to be a spokesmodel for a nationwide company (Weenie Tots, a food product which they also happen to love) and she was dating an alderman and that was deemed more "worthy" of their time and money. Plus, the family is more likely to come together just to mock him than they are to mock her. - Interestingly though, in something of an inversion, as far as the superior parent, Bud and Kelly actually prefer Peg over Al, in spite of her virtually doing nothing for them, be it starving them, ignoring them or just plain mocking them. - This was also the case of Marcy, who was forced to go to work hauling slabs of meat in supermarkets to pay off her sister's college education because their mother decided the sister was too pretty and too delicate to work. - Marvel Cinematic Universe: - Luke Cage (2016): Willis "Diamondback" Stryker has harbored a lifelong grudge against his half-brother Luke Cage because of perceived parental favoritism, like Isaac and Ishmael in the Bible. The key word is "perceived", as Luke explains to Claire Temple that their father James Lucas didn't really like Luke either. Much of it has to do with the fact that Willis was a bastard, sired as a result of an affair that the Reverend Lucas had with his secretary Dana Stryker. - Iron Fist (2017): When it comes to Harold Meachum's bond with his kids, his son Ward gets the short end of the straw. He dotes heavily on his daughter Joy but despises and denigrates Ward every chance he gets. - The Middle: - Deconstructed in "Last Whiff of Summer", the two-part fourth season premiere. Early in the episode, the kids debate among themselves which of them are their parents' favorites, then ask them, and their answers and non-answers (Frankie denies that parents can favor any child above another) set up the episode's plot threads. The parents also find themselves asking the same question, and Brick later reveals he's been keeping score. - Subverted in another episode. Frankie tries to get Sue to quit her cross country team run so they could go cheer for Axel at his football game, leading Sue to believe she favors Axel. However, the run had finished for everybody else hours ago, while Sue'd gotten lost and was too stubborn to quit. Frankie 'does' admit she cares more about Axel's event than her daughter's, but not because she likes Axel better. It's because Sue is always so loving towards her family and always shows her parents affection, while Axel has turned from a 'Momma's boy' kid into a hormonal teenager who wants nothing to do with his parents. Frankie wants to go to her eldest son's game because it's one of the few chances she'll have were he has to let her be his mother again. - In Modern Family, the favoritism varies: - In the Dunphy family, Luke is definitely Phil's favourite, due to him being the only boy and them having very similar senses of humor. Haley is most like Claire, and so while Claire relates to her the most, she's mostly worried about Haley making the same mistakes that she did. Both Phil and Claire will blatantly admit that Alex (who is an Insufferable Genius) gives them the most to be proud of, but because she's so different from her parents, she largely gets ignored whenever she isn't winning some kind of award. - In the Pritchett family, Jay has made no secret of how he couldn't relate at all to Mitchell when he was a kid, and he still isn't 100% comfortable with Mitchell's sexuality. Claire, however, was a total daddy's girl and was a tomboy, so she was essentially the son that Mitchell wasn't. - Gibbs of NCIS is the Team Dad of the main cast, and makes no secret that The Lab Rat Abby is his favorite out of his team of Bunny-Ears Lawyer investigators. The other team members seem to accept this with good grace, partly because they also dote on her and partly because it's recognized that she's \|\|something of a substitution for Gibbs' real daughter, Kelly, who was murdered as a child and would have been around the same age as Abby\|\|. - In Season 7 of Once Upon a Time, Starter Villain Lady Tremaine favored Anastasia over Drizella. In this continuity Lady Tremaine was Rapunzel, who already had her two daughters when Mother Gothel kidnapped her; when she escapes and gets back to her family she feels that Drizella doesn't remember her and is an Emotionless Girl, so doesn't show her any love either. Then, Anastasia falls through thin ice, and believing You Should Have Died Instead, Lady Tremaine only uses Drizella (and half-sister Ella) as a tool in her plan to revive the favorite sister. - On Passions, the eldest son of Julius and Ivy Crane, Ethan, is considered the shining star of the family: a handsome, intelligent, well-educated lawyer and the proper one to carry on the family name, even over Julius himself. This in turn led to younger brother Fox to become the troublemaking Black Sheep of the family while younger sisters Fancy and Pretty to have little aspirations besides being vacuous socialites (evidenced by the fact that they were named "Fancy" and "Pretty".) Turns out, Ivy had another reason to shower her firstborn with more love and attention than her other children: \|\|he was actually the product of a one-night stand between her and her first and true love, Sam Bennett, after she ran out the night before her wedding day upon learning that Julius and his father Alistair had planned to have them marry due to a lucrative merger with her own wealthy father's company instead of out of love.\|\| - Played for irony in Power Rangers Megaforce. In the episode "All Hail Prince Vekar", Vekar openly states that his younger brother Vrak was always favored more by their father, even though Vrak wasn't the heir. This seemingly unfair favoritism plays off as Vekar's own Freudian Excuse: He believes that destroying the Power Rangers and conquering Earth will prove his superiority over Vrak. - In Roseanne, it's pretty clear that Jackie and Roseanne's parents have each chosen a favorite. Jackie's close relationship with their father leads her to excuse a lot of the abuse they suffered and look to excuse his affair. Bev is ridiculously hard on Jackie and dotes on Roseanne. One episode, where their mother's favoritism is glaring, Roseanne worries that she and Dan may act this way to their own girls. She spends the rest of the episode trying to bond with Darlene, who is a Daddy's girl, while forcing Dan to do things with Becky (including an excruciating day at the mall). After things mostly backfire, Dan and Roseanne agree to go back to doting on their respective favorite and decide to toss a coin on who gets to ruin DJ's life when he's old enough. - One episode revealed that Jackie is actually Bev's favorite, but in a different way. Bev decided when the girls were young that Jackie had a spark and she would be destined to do great things, while Roseanne was plainer and going to wind up being a housewife and mother. Bev only dotes on Roseanne because she took "the right path" and nags Jackie endlessly because she feels she screwed up her life by not becoming a doctor. Both sisters, particularly Roseanne, are understandably upset by this, and Roseanne again reconsiders how she treats Becky and Darlene. - Roseanne also has an interesting case of inverting this, with Roseanne and Jackie each having a favorite parent. Early on, the girls seem to be equally irritated by both of them, but later on, they've each picked sides. Roseanne favored their mother slightly, seeing their father as abusive, neglectful, and a cheater. Jackie, on the other hand, one time criticized Roseanne for being so hard on their father and making him unwelcome in her home, believing that he was a troubled man doing the best he could, while at the same time, absolutely despising her shrill, judgmental, controlling mother, telling her husband not to refer to her as "Mom," only "Bev" or "Sea Hag," and more than one time genuinely seeming excited about the prospect of her death (when she walked into an asbestos-filled basement, Jackie said "Breathe deep, old woman," and genuinely hoped that dropping the news she was unmarried and pregnant might kill her.) - Once David Healy moved in with the Conners, he became the favorite in Roseanne's eyes. Even when she found out he was staying with Darlene alone, she still wanted him to move back to the Conner household. There are hints that the reason why is because David came from an abusive home just like herself and she sympathizes with him, especially after she meets his mother and realizes just how screwed up his upbringing was. =—> Roseanne: ( describing the situation to Dan ) I grew up in a house like that. Dan: That bad, huh? - The Bible: - The story of Joseph and his brothers. Jacob had twelve sons by four wives; his favorite, Joseph, was the elder of his two sons by his deceased favorite wife, Rachel. Not only did Jacob give Joseph a special gift (traditionally a colorful coat, though translations vary), Joseph had prophetic dreams that the others would one day bow to him. In anger, the ten older brothers sold Joseph into slavery and faked his death; Jacob mourned for the next twenty-two years, while Rachel's other son, Benjamin, got promoted to favorite. Ultimately, the repentant brothers get into trouble with the Vizier of Egypt, and when he wants Benjamin as a slave, they come to his defense. It's at that point that the Vizier reveals that he's actually Joseph, and his attempt to get Benjamin was a Secret Test of Character. - Jacob himself had been his mother's favorite, though that was a case of Jacob and Esau. - Then there's Isaac, who was born to Abraham and Sarah very late, and after Sarah (in despair at a total lack of children) had told Abraham to have a child by her maid Hagar. Once Isaac was born, Ishmael did something that made Sarah upset, and she (with God's backing) told Abraham to send Ishmael and Hagar away. - However, Deuteronomy 21:15-17 prevents this in the case of a man having two wives, that, if he has sons of those two wives, and his first is from that of his unloved wife, then he cannot allow the firstborn of his loved wife to have the firstborn rights of inheritance in preference over his actual firstborn from his unloved wife, since that firstborn is considered "the first fruit of his vigor". - Classical Mythology: Zeus infamously left a lot of spawn all over the map, not all of which he was really all that involved with, but Athena was certainly his favorite, to the point of getting to borrow his trademark attributes and weapons whenever she pleased, closely followed by Heracles, Hermes, and Dionysus. None of these are children of his legitimate wife, which infuriated her to no end. Closer to the bottom of that list, we find Ares. Also Hephaestus, who actually got thrown off Olympus for a while—in one version, by Zeus for siding with Hera in a fight, and in another by Hera because he was born ugly. - Wooden Overcoats: Antigone says that her late father favored her twin brother Rudyard, and scarcely even remembered her name. Given that Rudyard himself never disputes this, and their father left him and only him in charge of the Family Business, even though Antigone has also worked there her whole life and is in general the more competent of the two, these claims probably do have some merit. - The News Quiz, Season 83, Episode 1: Susan Calman: It's absolutely untrue to say you love all your children equally. I have no children, but I am a child of someone, and if you have children you do love one of them more than the others. Now if you're a child thinking "It's not me", you're right. Because you know if you're the favorite. It's usually the youngest, the cutest, the one that's on Radio 4. Hi, Mum and Dad! Sandi Toksvig: No, that's not true. I have three children and I say to all of them "You're my favorite, don't tell the others." - Discussed and parodied by Greg Giraldo in his stand-up special, Midlife Vices, when talking about how much he enjoyed being a father to his three little boys, then explaining that he has his "main son" and his "other sons". - Dungeons & Dragons: On a species-wide scale, the draconic god Bahamut has made it abundantly clear that the silver dragons are his favored creation. - Fighting Fantasy: The wealthy ruler of the city of Fang blatantly favors his elder son Sukumvit over his younger son Carnuss, making Carnuss develop a searing hatred for his brother. When Sukumvit becomes ruler of Fang on his father's death, he constructs the deadly Deathtrap Dungeon as a private hobby, challenging adventurers to try and survive going through it for a 10,000 gold piece prize. An embittered Carnuss sees a chance at getting revenge on his hated brother and begins kidnapping people to test them until he can find someone tough enough to send as his champion to penetrate the dungeon and humiliate his brother. He eventually succeeds in the book Trial of Champions (where the dungeon had been remade after someone had beaten it once), only for his hated brother to turn the tables on him, offering the champion anything he wished on top of the gold, correctly guessing that what the champion wanted was revenge against Carnuss, and promptly killed him. - Warhammer 40,000 backstory has Horus being the first son found by the Emperor, who was later made Warmaster above his nineteen brothers and generally treated as the Emperor's eldest son. Ironically, he went on to betray the Emperor and lead The Unfavourites in what would become the bloodiest war in human history. - In Death of a Salesman, Willy favors Biff over Happy. - In King Lear, Lear favors Cordelia over his other daughters, until she refuses to praise him as lavishly as her sisters. Given Goneril and Regan's behavior, he had good reason to like Cordelia best. - The Lion in Winter: - John feels like this: John: Who says poor John? Don't everybody sob at once! My God, if I went up in flames there's not a living soul who'd pee on me to put the fire out! Richard: Let's strike a flint and see! - Geoffrey, in turn, has a bad case of Middle Child Syndrome: Geoffrey: It's not the power I feel deprived of... it's the mention I miss. There's no affection for me here: You wouldn't think I'd want that, would you? - In Next to Normal, Diane shows favoritism toward Gabe over Natalie. This is an especially sore point, as \|\|Gabe has been dead since before Natalie was born.\|\| Natalie brings this up in her song "Superboy and the Invisible Girl." - In Wicked, Elphaba's father \|\|or at least, the father who raised her\|\| clearly prefers her sister Nessarose. It's heavily implied to be because she was born green, and that that is the only reason. This indirectly led to the death of Elphaba and Nessarose's mother after their father made her drink poppy milk (or some liquid like that) to keep from having another green child. This led to Nessa's legs being crippled and their mother dying in childbirth. - The book suggests he might just blame Elphaba for that just a bit. And the fact that she can't bathe in water is a real pain in the twees too. Oh! And the sharp teeth. The deck's just kind of stacked against Elphaba here. - In the book, there's another reason. Nessa shares his religious zeal, more than Elphaba or their brother, Shell. That may be a chicken and egg situation. - The book also provides a third reason; Frex didn't know for certain whether Nessarose was his biological daughter (the third book reveals she was, but he had no way of knowing) or if she had really been fathered by the glassblower Turtle Heart, his and his wife Melena's mutual lover. As such, he saw her as all of their daughter and so he loves her more because she is the symbol of the love the three of them shared or perhaps to overcompensate for her possibly not being his child. - Subverted in Devil May Cry. Vergil believed that Eva abandoned him and left him behind to prioritize Dante's safety over his, which is the catalyst for his Start of Darkness and resentment towards Dante. However, Devil May Cry 5 reveals that Eva's last words were calling out for Vergil, trying to find him after she secured Dante's safety. - Dragon Age: - In Dragon Age: Origins, both the Human Noble Warden and the Dwarven Noble Warden are implied (or outright stated) to be the favorite child of their respective fathers. - Dragon Age II: It's implied that this was the case with Hawke's deceased father Malcolm. Since he was a mage, he spent a lot of time with Hawke's sister Bethany to teach her to control her magic. If Hawke is a mage as well, then Malcolm will spend time with both of them for the same reason. Regardless to both cases, this makes the Muggle Carver feel like The Un-Favorite. Similar to a family with a disabled child, this was due to necessity rather than malice. Power Incontinence and Demonic Possession are very real dangers for untrained mages, and the only alternative to training his children directly was to lose them to the Circle of Magi, which Malcom himself had run away from shortly before Hawke was born. The irony of the situation was that Malcom resented his own magic and hoped that none of them would be mages which will make Carver, the only non-mage child of the family, being his most ideal child, who takes this particular revelation with considerable surprise. On the flipside, Bethany (who is clearly sensitive of her status as a mage unlike mage Hawke) wonders if her father secretly resents her for being born as a mage. Her oldest sibling is quick to shut down that line of thought; Malcom adored Bethany and only resented that she carried a burden the rest of their family couldn't comprehend. - In the backstory of the family, Hawke's mother Leandra was vastly preferred by both of her parents over her younger brother Gamlen. Gamlen mostly took this in stride growing up because he and his sister were extremely close; as an adult, however, he has issues with having been The Unfavorite, not least because he was the one who took care of his parents as they died from cholera and they still preferred Leandra, even though they had formally disowned her for eloping with an apostate mage. At least part of this is implied to be guilt over rejecting Leandra and concern over Gamlen's financial ineptitude. - The DS version of Dragon Quest V has this with the Briscolettis. Elder daughter Debora is a self-absorbed Rich Bitch, while her sister Nera is sweet and adored by everyone. While Debora is still able to get all the material goods she wants from her parents, Rodrigo clearly favors Nera and appears to have simply given up on trying to rein her sister in. Should the player choose to marry Debora, the father reacts with surprise, but throws his full support behind the wedding, and afterward confesses that you've made him very happy as he'd given up hope of Debora getting married a long time ago. - This is a game mechanic in F.E.A.R. 3's cooperative campaign. Whichever brother has the highest score at the end of the campaign is deemed Alma's favorite, and \|\|will kill/consume the other\|\|. - A huge plot point in Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade. King Desmond favors his daughter Guinevere and hates his son Zephiel because Guinevere is the child of his beloved old girlfriend while Zephiel is born from an unhappy marriage to Queen Helene. To make things worse, Zephiel is The Ace and insists on pleasing his father out of love, while Guinevere loves her brother but is condemned to be in Zephiel's shadow since, well, she's a girl and a bastard. This becomes so bad that \|\|Desmond hires the Black Fang to murder Zephiel right before his coming of age ceremony so Guinevere can become the heir apparent instead. This ends up backfiring horribly. If anything, Desmond would be glad to know that Guinevere became queen of Bern in the end, nevermind the reign of terror the kingdom was forced to endure because of how he treated Zephiel.\|\| - Also plays a part in Fire Emblem Fates: - With the maid twins, Flora and Felicia. Flora mentions in her supports with her sister that growing up, Felicia was naturally adept at handling weapons and so their father, Kilma, only praised her during training sessions, leading Flora to become very jealous of her sister and train excessively to make up for her own lack of talent. Ironically, Felicia envies Flora because Flora is a much more competent maid than she is. Thanks to Kilma's treatment, Flora has some massive insecurities and is obsessed with her duties towards the Ice Clan and the events of the games do not help - in Birthright \|\|Flora is so torn over her decision to betray the Avatar to protect the Ice Tribe that she sets herself on fire due to shame and guilt.\|\| - Xander is clearly Garon's favourite child in Conquest, as he is the only one of his children he fathered with the late Queen - Camilla, Leo and Elise were all the result of trysts with Garon's various concubines and Xander is the only one capable of reasoning with Garon without immediately attracting his ire, but even this goes out the window when \|\|it turns out Garon died years ago and he's been possessed by Anankos, who is hellbent on the destruction of both Hoshido and Nohr and doesn't really give a damn about any of Garon's heirs.\|\| - This comes up a few times in Fire Emblem: Three Houses: - With Ingrid and Sylvain, who are both the favourite of their respective families because they have Crests. However, this is shown to be a case of Cursed with Awesome, as Ingrid is repeatedly put into Arranged Marriages by her well-meaning father, as her family are Impoverished Patricians who need Ingrid to marry well to improve the family's finances, since she is the only one of her siblings to have a Crest, yet she longs to become a knight. Meanwhile because Sylvain was born with a Crest, his older brother Miklan lost the position of heir of House Gautier and became pathologically jealous of Sylvain, bullying him throughout his entire childhood and even once shoving him down a well and leaving him there before he was eventually disinherited and kicked out. Sylvain's relationship with his parents is left ambiguous, as he comments he was given a lot of freedom to do as he pleased as a child, but he developed some serious psychological issues because of his ingrained belief that people only want him for his Crest, leading him to become a cynical Handsome Lech. - Mercedes reveals in her backstory that her younger brother Emile was the favourite to her stepfather, as he was born with a Crest, to the point where her mother and Mercedes herself were treated like they didn't exist once her brother was born and they eventually fled House Bartels \|\|when it turned out her stepfather was planning on marrying Mercedes to try and produce more Crest-bearing children once her mother became past the age she could conceive.\|\| - It is strongly implied that Edelgard is the favourite child of the sickly Emperor Ionius IX, though \|\|being his sole surviving heir makes it impossible to verify it one way or the other.\|\| - Caspar is the younger son of Count Bergliez and he outright states his older brother got all the attention because he was born with a Crest and is the successor to House Bergliez. Though he is remarkably better adjusted than some of the other students thanks to his simplistic outlook on life and without the pressure of living up to his family name, he does admit to being intimidated by his father and his extremely competitive nature might be due to compensating for being ignored so much at home. - Somewhat zigzagged in Hilda's case - her older brother Holst is The Ace of the Leicester Alliance and heir to House Goneril, with Hilda remarking he's strong, kind and honorable. However, it is also strongly implied that Holst is so dedicated as a warrior because of the harsh expectations set for him by his parents, which terrified Hilda that she'd never be able to meet the same, so she downplays her own abilities so nobody expects anything of her. However, far from being neglected, Hilda is very much doted on and spoiled by her father and older brother (especially since her mother is never mentioned), so who exactly is the favourite child is up in the air. - It's all but stated Glenn was Lord Rodrigue's favourite child and Felix confirms he was never able to beat his brother when they would spar together, though Felix adored his big brother as well and it is Glenn's death that was Felix's Cynicism Catalyst and caused an enormous rift between father and son, to the point where Rodrigue seems to prefer Dimitri to Felix. - In the backstory of Kameo: Elements of Power, Queen Theena spent more time with Kameo than with Kalus as they grew up. This is because Kalus' Strong Family Resemblance to her deceased father was too painful a reminder for Theena of her loss. Kalus grew up neglected and resentful of both Theena and Kameo as a result, and clung to her birthright of the Element of Power for validation. So when Theena decided to pass on the Element of Power to Kameo instead, Kalus snapped at this final apparent snub by her mother. - An interesting case occurs in Kana: Little Sister. At the beginning of the story, Taka (the main character) is resentful towards Kana because their parents tend to favor her (due to her terminal illness). This position is reversed towards the end of the game (which takes place almost a decade later). \|\|When Taka offers to donate one of his kidneys to Kana, his parents are opposed to it, because they don't want Taka (their true son) to take risks for Kana's sake (because Kana is adopted)\|\| - Kings Quest (2015) plays around with this in regards to King Graham's twin children. His son Alexander was kidnapped as a baby and Graham spent the next 18 years trying to find him, apparently neglecting his daughter Rosella to an extent. However, it doesn't play out as one would expect because Graham and Rosella get along quite well thanks to their similar personalities, but he had a hard time connecting with Alexander at first because of how dissimilar they are; in effect, each child is half of what Graham wanted (a son who shares his love of adventure and puzzles). Eventually, he realizes that he has been wrongly blaming Alexander for not being the "perfect son" he wanted, and accepts him for who he is. However, the favoritism is played much straighter with Graham's grandchildren: he blatantly favors Alexander's daughter Gwendolyn over Rosella's son Gart, doting on her and telling her stories from his youth and \|\|rewriting Daventry's laws so she could inherit the throne after his death\|\|. - Odin Sphere: Early in the game, it becomes painfully obvious that Odin shows more love to Velvet (who resents him for very good reasons) than to his other children (who absolutely revere him or, in the case of Ingway, despise him). This still doesn't stop him from allowing her to be executed to save face in front of his vassals. Odin's not exactly Father of the Year. He eventually admits this and starts to regret it. - In Red Dead Redemption II, it's noted that John is Dutch's favorite over Arthur and several other members. Arthur outright states this is the reason why Dutch allowed John to rejoin the gang after a year's absence, stating no one else would be let back in as easily. In a drunken conversation, Bill even tells John how everyone thinks John is "Dutch's pet". However once John starts taking his role as husband and father seriously, Dutch starts treating John with hostility, hinting he thinks John is having Conflicting Loyalty and it's threatening Dutch's power over John. It's worth noting that Dutch and John's relationship deteriorates the more John becomes a better husband and father. Eventually, for all his favoritism, Dutch would \|\|abandon John more than once and John no longer stays loyal to Dutch.\|\| - In Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, \|\|Nemora's parents\|\| prefer to raise her older sister to become the new heir of their Rotom Phone company rather than even trying to see how \|\|Nemona\|\| is doing. She's not really bothered by their actions, though, because that means she's free to be a trainer, which she obviously loves being with all her soul. - The Sims 2 has a couple of examples: - The meaningfully named Pleasant Twins of Pleasantview. Angela Pleasant, who's a straight-A student and implied to be a dutiful daughter, is favored by her parents over her twin sister, the Gothic D-student Lilith. Their family bio pictures imply that this goes back to their childhood, as we see Angela celebrating their birthday with a cake and party, while Lilith sits in the other room alone. Lilith has such a terrible relationship with her family that she and Angela will autonomously pick fights with each other, and the same will happen with her parents when she ages up if their relationship is not fixed. Ironically, Angela is going steady with Dustin Broke, a budding criminal from a poor family whom her father hates, while Lilith dates good student Dirk Dreamer. - The Grunt Family in Strangetown is a perfect demonstration of the Golden Child/Problem Child/Lost Child dynamic. Eldest son Tank is favored by his father, General Buzz, due to having a similar personality and interests and sharing his love for the military and hatred for the Smith family. Middle son Ripp has a bad relationship with both his father, implied to be because of his lack of interest in the military and laziness. Similar to Lilith Pleasant, he and Tank autonomously pick fights and the same will happen with his father if their relationship is not fixed before he ages up. He also is close to Johnny Smith, whose father is an enemy of General Buzz. Meanwhile, youngest son Buck is implied by his bio to be ignored by his father. Ironically, General Buzz actually has a higher lifetime relationship with his enemy, Pollination Tech#9 Smith than his does with any of his sons. - Sonic Frontiers: Applied to a whole family in this case; one of Dr. Eggman's Egg Memos delves a bit into his backstory and has him admit that he was always had a seething jealousy of his cousin Maria Robotnik (who died when he was a kid). Between her kindhearted nature and illness, Maria was the family favorite and tended to suck up all their attention without really meaning to, even after she died, leaving Ivo feeling like he spent his childhood competing with a ghost for his family's affections. - In Spiritfarer, Alice favors one granddaughter over the others, but will never tell which one. - In Stardew Valley, Demetrius dotes on Maru, who is a scientist just like her dad and they bond over their nerdy hobbies, while he ignores his stepson Sebastian so much that he never even mentions him in conversation. - In the Super Mario Bros. series, once Bowser Jr. appeared on the scene, it appeared that Bowser Jr. was Bowser's favorite child, preferring him over his other seven children, the Koopalings. However, it became clear that this wasn't the case as Junior was Bowser's only child, with the Koopalings being relegated to high ranking members of the Koopa Troop instead. - In To the Moon it is revealed that \|\|Johnny's mother always favored his twin brother, Joey, over him; which is the reason why, after Joey was accidentally run over and killed by his mother, she made Johnny take the beta-blockers which made him forget everything up to the accident, in order to mold Johnny into Joey's Replacement Goldfish in her mind\|\|. - In Wild AR Ms 1 Mother clearly favours Ziekfried, to the point he's the only Quarter Knight she addresses in the Photosphere. Unfortunately for him, this is one parent you don't want favouring you as \|\|she uses his body as the next vessel for her existence for when she moves onto the next world to destroy.\|\| - In Awesome Video Games, Dad obviously prefers Chet over Ace. Whether this has any lasting effects is yet to be seen. - In Batman and Sons, Batman obviously favors Terry over Dick, Jason, or Tim. Most likely due to him being Batman's only biological son (and thus, another Batman). This might not be biological favoritism so much as Terry (being a baby) not having the ability to backtalk yet like the older boys. The kids can be very blunt about how messed up Batman is (much to his annoyance) but Terry's the only one who can't say it yet. - This trope initiates The Cloud Maker's plot. The creator-god tells his three children-gods to maintain the Earth while he leaves to do vague plot things. When he comes back, the sky-goddess and sea-god have done well, but the land-god has neglected parts of his territory and left it to wither. So the creator-god rewards the sea-god by giving the ocean life, as in animals. (The sky-goddess would have been given the same, but she was "too young and inexperienced" for it.) Then the creator-god leaves again, and the land-god starts getting very resentful of his siblings... - Crimson Knights: Nevio was perfectly aware that his elder brother was their father's favorite and the primary heir, and as a result left Natish at the first opportunity to find his own life. - In Dragon Ball Z Abridged, King Cold clearly favored Freeza over Cooler, something that the latter seemed to develop a complex over and Freeza was all too willing to hold over his head. - In Dumbing of Age Sal and Walky's mother blatantly favors Walky, to the point of not even acknowledging that Sal's in the room when she visits. Walky thinks it's because of Sal robbing a convenience store in her youth, but Sal argues it's because Walky is lighter skinned than she is. \|\|When Walky remembers that he was in a Christian children's show as a child-and Sal wasn't-he starts realizing she may have a point.\|\| - Hazbin Hotel according to Word of God, Angel Dust is The Unfavorite to his father, who preferred his older brother over him. - In If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, the Emperor spends entire one episode badmouthing all of his sons... except for Sanguinus, who, in canon, is described as most similar to him. When Custodian lampshades it, the Emperor gets angry at him. Don't you talk shit about my fabulous fucking hawk-boy. He died for me, so be grateful. - Played for Laughs via Unreliable Narrator in Least I Could Do. Ryan is describing how he was kept in a cage and fed older newspapers by his family while his big brother got extravagant meals. In reality, his parents were loving to both of their kids. John: "You know he's making this up right?" Mick: "I know but his stories amuse me." - An unusual case in Misfile, Ash Upton manages to be on both sides of the Parental Favoritism divide thanks to Rumisiel's little filing mishap. As a boy, she had no contact with her mother and her relationship with her father was distant at best (his plans for Ash's summer vacation apparently involved re-roofing the house). As a girl, she has a close relationship with both parents who are much more involved in her life. For some reason she feels this sucks. - Also a subversion, as the change was due completely to Ash's actions. \|\|In Ash's past (s)he wrote a letter to his/her mom. As a boy, masculine pride made him throw it away. As a girl, the letter was sent.\|\| - In the Nuzlocke Comics, Norman shows favoritism to "Good-Ruby", a Vigoroth that he dresses in a hat similar to Ruby's, over Ruby. - The Order of the Stick: - Eugene Greenhilt favored his daughter Julia over his son Roy, because Julia became a wizard like him, while Roy became a fighter. ("I can tell because you almost never use the phrase, 'crushing depression' when talking about her.") - In a later example, Elan's father Tarquin favors Elan over his other son Nale, even though Elan is a hero. But at least he's good at being a hero (...kind of) while Nale is too short-sighted and egotistical to be an effective villain. - Discussed in the Overly Sarcastic Productions episode "Ares' Abduction:" Red: Zeus is definitely the kind of parent who like, conspicuously brags about only some of his children. Like at the family reunion he'll be all like "Hey Athena! How's my favorite War God doing?" and Ares is just like, one chair over. - RWBY: Weiss's father, Jacques, is heavily implied to prefer her little brother Whitley over her and her sister. During a shot showing his work desk, Whitley's is the only picture that he keeps there. \|\|Halfway through Season 4, Weiss causes a scene and Jacques takes her off his will and reveals that Whitley is the only one that will inherit his company and fortune. It's implied he has taken Winter out of the will when she joined the military against his will and Whitley is the only one to never have challenged him.\|\| - A humorous variant is found in SomethingPositive. Fred MacIntire has two (living) biological children, Davan and Dahlia, and an adopted daughter, Monette. His fourth "child" is Davan's friend PeeJee, who lives with them for a long time; one strip has him admitting that she's* his favorite. It's Played for Laughs, of course, as it's made remarkably clear through all the Deadpan Snarker dialogue that Fred's actually a damn good father. - A SrGrafo in Time: Comic #24 has the main character's sister ask their mother who her favorite child is between them. She assures them that she loves them both equally, but after the sister leaves, the mother tells her son that "it's [him]... and by A LOT." - Sticky Dilly Buns invokes the trope a couple of times: - 50/50 Heroes: Mo believes Sam to be their mother's favorite when he finds two tickets to a show he wants to watch. \|\|It turns out a client of hers gave her the tickets and she later bought a third one so she can take both Mo and Sam. She has no favorites.\|\| - The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Goons", Richard states that Darwin is his favorite child. Nicole, Anais, and Gumball shoot him an angry glare, causing him to hastily add that Darwin is his favorite fish. - One episode of American Dad! had Stan trying to insist that Francine's (adoptive) parents did not love her as much as they loved their biological daughter Gwen. Francine starts to believe it when Stan finds her parents' will leaving all their stuff to Gwen. But later, the father reveals that \|\|they only left everything to Gwen because she's apparently a moron and needed all the help she could get, while they knew Francine was already well taken care of because she married a good man\|\|. - For the Smiths themselves, they by far treat Steve better than their adult daughter Hayley. It's more straightforward with Francine, doting on Steve since he is technically still a child and thus "her baby". Stan doesn't really care for Steve, but because Hayley opposes him in every ideological way, Steve is his favorite by default. - Arthur's parents tend to heavily favor his sister DW over him. However, they favor baby Kate over DW. - Avatar: The Last Airbender: - A major part of Zuko and Azula's Backstory. Azula was daddy's little girl, while Zuko (the eldest son and heir) was hated by his father just for being alive (and possibly compassionate). The finale makes it clear that this was not due to Ozai loving Azula more; Azula's cruelty against Zuko's kindheartedness meant that she was simply a more useful tool for him, one that he cruelly tosses aside the instant he can't think of more uses for her. Azula's realization of this leads to an utterly spectacular meltdown. - In The Search, we finally get more insight into the Royal Family's Dynamic. - Also, Azula, due to her upbringing by Ozai (whose favoritism toward Azula means he hates Zuko), mistakenly believes that her mother favored Zuko and that she didn't love her. From what we see, both in the show and the comics, Ursa does love Azula, worries about her constantly, and often attempted to discourage Azula's bad behavior and discipline her for things like burning the flowers in the royal garden or hoping that her uncle would die and her father would inherit the throne instead. - Fire Lord Azulon wasn't much better. He seemed to greatly favor Iroh over Ozai and was greatly angered when the latter suggested that Iroh's birthright be revoked. This favoritism extends to his grandchildren as well, as shown by his sympathy over the death of Iroh's son (and lack of anger toward Iroh for abandoning the siege as a result of it), and by his disinterest in Azula's impressive firebending display and his sentencing Zuko to death in order to punish Ozai. - Aang didn't technically have parents (given that Airbending Air Nomad children were sent off to live with the monks) but it was fairly obvious that he was Monk Gyatso's favorite. - The rough counterpart to the Fire Nation royals, Hakoda's family, doesn't seem to have this problem. Hakoda doesn't show any favoritism for his son or daughter. And while Ozai and favored child Azula came to share certain traits, Hakoda and Sokka are similar without this affecting Katara negatively. - The Legend of Korra: - The trend continues with \|\|Noatok being favored by his father over Tarrlok. However, Noatok hates his father for this just as much or more than Tarrlok does.\|\| - In Season 2, it is revealed that Aang himself favored Tenzin over his two other children, Kya and Bumi. Mostly due to Tenzin being the only airbender among them and thus, the only one able to carry on the burden of restoring an almost wiped out culture, forcing Aang to invest a lot of time in Tenzin's training and teaching. Which is sad but at least a little understandable, but then Aang would take Tenzin to places just to goof off but still left Kya and Bumi behind. This favoritism even extended to the Air Acolytes, who seem to almost worship Tenzin and his Air bending children while having no idea that Kya and Bumi even existed. This favoritism had some negative consequences for Tenzin as he felt he needed to live up to his father's legacy and viewed himself as "The son of Avatar Aang and the hope for future airbenders" rather than just as "Tenzin". - In Bob's Burgers, we have an inverted example with the Belcher kids—while Tina is more indifferent, Gene prefers Linda and Louise prefers Bob. - Gayle claims she's the favourite between her and Linda, but she is an enormously Unreliable Narrator. We dont see Gayle interacting with their parents until Season 10 while they regularly visited Linda and Bob in early seasons. Just about the only hint that Gayle is right is that Gloria and Al are generally not good to Linda. - For the Belcher parents, this trope is Zigzagged and oddly reflective of complex real-life family dynamics. Bob readily admits that Tina is his most docile and supportive child, Linda calls Tina her BFF, and the entire family goes to great lengths to please her. However, Bob also has trouble keeping up with her more atypical interests and actually gets along best with Louise (the two spend time alone bonding over old movies and TV), while his relationship with Gene isn't as strong. In contrast, Linda dotes on Gene the most since he is her most affectionate child and fellow showman, though she's desperate to have a better relationship with Louise and is hurt when Tina wants to spend time with a new friend instead of her mom. In general, Bob and Linda love their kids equally, but if it came down to it Bob would choose Louise and Linda would choose Gene. - In Bojack Horseman: - Beatrice's flashbacks show that her parents vastly preferred her older brother Crackerjack to her, since it was the 1940s and Crackerjack was a boy though she didn't mind too much because she adored her big brother as well. It ends very badly. - Diane was mocked, bullied and ignored by her family while her mother dotes on and coddles her four brothers. - In The Buzz on Maggie first Maggie and then Pupert becomes their uncle's favorite. Aldrin, who has been The Un-Favourite for years, takes this in stride until Maggie suggests a scheme that could benefit both of them. She doesn't hesitate to throw Aldrin under the bus later in the episode, wanting the glory all to herself even though Aldrin had helped her. - In Codename: Kids Next Door — Operation: Z.E.R.O., it was stated by Grandfather himself that he favored Monty Uno over Benedict, who became Father and came to idolize Grandfather. Even after being revived by Benedict, Grandfather wished that Monty was on his side because he saw more potential in him and, unlike Benedict, Monty actually had the spine to stand up to him, becoming Numbuh Zero and founder of the current generation of the KND. When he realizes that Monty remembers the past and is ready to fight him, he actually takes a moment to sincerely offer him a place by his side, though he doesn't hesitate to get ready and try and zombify him after he refuses. - Daria has two cases that begin with this trope and then become more nuanced as Characterization Marches On: - In early episodes Daria's parents (especially Helen) were pretty open about wanting her to be like Quinn, which fit the theme of her and Jane as standouts among the conformists around them. As time goes on Daria's own anti-social tendencies get Deconstructed it becomes more a case of Helen knowing both of her daughter's faults and wanting them to learn from each other's strengths. - Helen's own family. "I Don't" paints the dynamic of Rita as their unseen mother's favorite, with Helen constantly bitter about this and Amy just done with them all. "Aunt Nauseam" muddled the issue a bit: Rita always saw Helen as the favorite growing up and claims that the others' strained relationship with their mother is self-inflicted. Ultimately it's left up to the audience to determine who's right and to what extent. - In the DC Animated Universe, Darkseid shows rather blatant partental favoritism towards his younger son Orion... Who is also his Arch-Enemy and wants him dead. Not only is his other son, Kalibak, incompetent (despite being a devoted servant to Darkseid), but Orion absolutely hates having Darkseid's approval. - The Dragon Prince: - Subverted with King Harrow and his two sons. Older brother Callum is his stepson, while younger brother Ezran is his biological son. While the relationship is somewhat strained, Harrow reveals posthumously that he simply didn't know how to react to having a stepson and felt that Callum needed his space, which resulted in a distance between them. This resulted in Callum's own reluctance to refer to Harrow as his father, calling him 'your majesty' or 'my king', and not helped by the likes of Viren and Soren who seem to feel that Callum has no right to be where he is. In reality, Harrow loved Callum every bit as much as Ezran and is very proud of him, something he makes clear in the letter he writes to Callum in preparation for his death. - Played straight with Viren who clearly favors his daughter Claudia over his son Soren, because Claudia is more intelligent and shares her father's talent for dark magic. - Sarah is blatantly the favourite child in Ed, Edd n Eddy, being spoiled rotten by her parents while they ignore and neglect Ed, who, ironically, is much nicer than his little sister. It's implied that their mother wanted to have a firstborn daughter, not a firstborn son, as it's made clear through Ed's statments that his mom favors girls over boys to the point where his mom forbids him to fight girls, such as the Kanker Sisters during a wrestling match. - Pete on Goof Troop habitually forces his son PJ into servitude. Tellingly, in one episode one of the chores he had to do was "play with Pistol," his younger sister. Generally speaking, Pete puts PJ through all manner of psychological torment and holds him to ridiculous standards while letting Pistol do as she pleases and giving her everything she wants. Resultingly, Pistol is a Spoiled Brat and a Daddy's Girl, while PJ is an Extreme Doormat, a Shrinking Violet, and a Nervous Wreck who has some issues with his dad. Weirdly, though, there are some episodes where Pete treats them equally but in those episodes, PJ and Pistol are played as Satellite Characters. But for Peg, it's reversed, where she would talk nice to PJ and act like a mother should, (and like a mother to his friend Max, as well) but will yell and fuss at Pistol for every little thing. - In Hercules: The Animated Series, Phil and Hercules go visit Phil's mother, where she openly calls Phil's brother her favorite, going on about how he's a successful salesman, which Phil resents. However, when the brother comes to visit, he bemoans to Phil that their mother goes on about Phil's accomplishments to him. The mother admits that she did this to make sure neither would grow a big head and then proceeds to gab to both about their sister's accomplishments. - In Hey Arnold!: - Favoritism seems strong in the Pataki family; Olga is praised for her accomplishments and is given more attention than Helga, which causes a one-sided strain between the two. However, Olga actually wishes she could be treated like Helga, without all the fussing and attention. Olga: You must think I'm lucky, all the attention I get from them. I have to perform for them all the time like some kind of wind-up doll. I get really sick of it. You're lucky they don't even notice you. - Averted with Gerald's family, as his parents don't show any particular preference for any of their children, it's just Gerald tends to think so since Jamie O is the oldest while Timberly is the baby, leaving him with some mild Middle Child Syndrome. - On Invader Zim, Professor Membrane seems to favor his daughter, Gaz to his "poor, insane son" Dib. The comics and the movie make him into a better parent, though. - Kaeloo: Mr. Cat was apparently his mother's favorite child, to the chagrin of his two older brothers. - Kick Buttowski plays this for comedy. Kick, Brad, and Harold all know Brianna is number one in the house, so they all compete for number 2. - A later episode revealed that Kick was actually Honey's favorite, Not Brianna due to being so much like her (secretly being a water sports daredevil herself). This drives her other kids crazy. - On King of the Hill, Hank's father Cotton has another son in his old age and tries to name him Hank, saying he "always wanted a boy named Hank" and telling the original Hank to get a new name because his old one belongs to the baby now. Hank protests that you can't just take a grown man's name away from him, so Cotton names the baby Good Hank instead (or "GH" for short). Hank: Dad, this isn't right. You call him Good Hank, it's gonna make it sound like I'm Bad Hank. Cotton: Well, ya burnt my burger, didn't ya, BH?! - The Loud House: - In "Home of the Fave", it's revealed when Lynn Sr. was a kid, his dad Leonard played favorites with himself getting the short end of the stick. This drives him to give all eleven of his kids equal attention, fearing he himself may be playing favorites. - In "Appetite for Destruction", Rita is implied to favor Lily (the youngest Loud kid) the most, considering her "the sweet one". The other kids aren't pleased when they find out. - Any time Pickles' parents get any screen time in Metalocalypse, it's made abundantly clear that Seth, Pickles' older brother, is the favorite child. To put it into perspective: Seth is an ex-con who lives with his wife (of questionable virtue) in an attic above their garage in Wisconsin. Pickles is the drummer for the most successful band in the world. - Moral Orel: Bloberta's mother clearly prefers her older sister and younger brother over her, as they're much better singers than she is and are able to perform in a choir. Although not the best father, Clay prefers Orel over Shapey, as he suspects the latter might not actually be his son. \|\|He's right.\|\| - In Ninjago, Lord Garmadon points out to his brother, Sensei Wu, that the latter was always their father's favorite before escaping the Underworld. - Dr. Doofenshmirtz on Phineas and Ferb grew up resenting his "goody-two-shoes brother, the favorite of my mother" Roger. Even worse, his father preferred the dog, naming it "Only Son", and the only reason his mother liked his brother more was that said brother was better at kickball. - The Proud Family: Suga Mama prefers her eldest son Bobby over Oscar. However, it's a deconstruction since Suga Mama's doting resulted in Bobby not doing anything with his life, being unemployed (though trying and failing to become a singer), unmarried, and still living with his mama while Oscar at least has a job, his own house, a wife and children. - Ready Jet Go!: In "A Kid's Guide to Mars", Face 9001 tries to invoke this. He convinces his brother Face 9000 that 9001 is their mom's favorite child. He even "quotes" their mother as saying "[Face 9001] knows everything". - On Robot and Monster, Robot and Gart's mother prefers the latter because he's successful at life and not an embarrassment to the family name. - In the Rocket Power movie "Race Across New Zealand," Ray suffers an episode of this when memories of his defeat in the same competition that his kids are competing in resurface at the sight of his former rival, whose son is also competing. When the phrase "Like father, like son" comes up, Ray then focuses all of his attention on Otto to make sure he beats his rival's son for revenge, leaving Reggie out in the cold. - Rugrats (1991): In "The Unfair Pair", Angelica convinced Phil and Lil that every family had one favorite, and that their sibling was it, making both of them The Un-Favourite. - She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Shadow Weaver raised both Adora and Catra from when they were babies. She heaped physical abuse on Catra while giving Adora more subtle psychological abuse. When Adora defects, Shadow Weaver spends an absurd amount of time and effort trying to get her back and keeps blaming Catra for her own failures. In fact, it's implied that she saw Catra as Adora's pet rather than a daughter in her own right. Ironically, Shadow Weaver proudly claims that Adora is an "ambitious, cutthroat, ruthless warrior," when that actually describes Catra far more than Adora. Shadow Weaver: Catra has been nothing but a disappointment to me! - The Simpsons: - Separate episodes have confirmed that Lisa is Homer's Daddy's Girl of a favorite kid and Maggie is Marge's, leaving Bart as The Un-Favourite. Ironically, despite this, Lisa suffers from massive Middle Child Syndrome anyway, due to Bart requiring so much energy to deal with. - She also feels like The Un-Favourite because Bart gets far more attention the few times he actually does something right instead of his usual bratty hijinks, which she ascribes to him being both the oldest child and the only boy. Lisa: Bart gets everything because he's the oldest and he's a boy. And Maggie gets whatever's left over because she's the youngest and she's a baby. - Homers relationships with Bart and Lisa are an interesting example of this because, while Homer clearly prefers Lisa to Bart, he spends more time with Bart because he is the child with whom he has the most in common and is the most willing to go along with whatever ill-advised thing he's doing that week. It's probably also worth noting that his favoritism is subject to change depending on his mood at the moment, with "Lisa on Ice" being an extreme example as he flipped back and forth from Bart to Lisa depending on who was giving the best performance from second to second of a hockey game. - On the flip side, all three children unanimously prefer their mother Marge over their short-tempered Bumbling Dad. Bart: I'm afraid that we don't want to be with anyone but Mom and whoever she chooses to be with. - The Year Without a Santa Claus: Even though both of the Miser Brothers are petty bickerers with each other, it's stated by Heat Miser that their Mother liked Snow Miser more than him.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentalFavoritism
Abusive Parents - TV Tropes Yelling at her to shut up is actually one of the nicest things Peter has done to Meg. "If my son talked like that, I'd beat him to within an inch of his life, I'd whip him senseless with my belt, and hold his head in the toilet till he was begging for mercy! I still don't see why the judge cut off my visitation rights." Parents are supposed to be the protectors of children, but these parents are either so damaged themselves that they can't do the job, greedy or villainous to the point that they never had any interest in doing the job properly, or would rather use the child as a means to an end. Sometimes they're just sadistic assholes. This includes parents who are emotionally, verbally, physically, or mentally abusive, or who neglectfully allow their children to be abused by others if they don't abuse the child themselves; sexual abuse in particular is typically treated as a special kind of evil. Sometimes, the abuse at the hands of their parents becomes a Freudian Excuse for a villain. Other times, the character manages to not grow up broken, bitter, and hateful, and instead a different and better person than the upbringing would incline one to think; they may even pass down their newfound betterment to their own children. Troubling Unchildlike Behavior is often a tell-tale sign that things are not right at home. Abusive Parents are commonplace in fairy tales and Classical Mythology which makes this trope Older Than Feudalism. Note that The Brothers Grimm, when they collected European fairy tales, were uncomfortable with the idea of Abusive Parents and so frequently changed the Abusive Parents in the traditional stories into abusive step parents. Sometimes, a parent will go as far as to kill the child in question, in which case this is Offing the Offspring. In other ways cases, the parent's abuse occasionally drives the offspring to snap, commit Revenge and finally kill them, thus becoming a Self-Made Orphan. Although other times, the parents end up as a Karma Houdini. Calling the Old Man Out occurs when a fed-up child retaliates with a "The Reason You Suck" Speech. If the child gets out of the broken family and forms healthy friendships, but reacts badly when their abusive parents show up again, well, Friends Are Chosen, Family Aren't. Bear in mind that not everyone agrees on the line between actual abuse and merely heavy-handed parenting (or even normal parenting). Is Moving the Goalposts merely inspiring the child to achieve more, or the most insidious form of abuse to instill mistrust and paranoia in the children? Some include spanking as abuse; others think it's appropriate given certain guidelines. Some believe it's okay to make a kid go without a meal (they won't starve that easily); others disagree. Making a kid miss a friend's birthday sleepover — is that emotional abuse? Raising a kid without exposure to TV? Telling your daughter she's getting fat? A little name-calling? There's a line here somewhere, but not everyone agrees on where it is. note : Although, it should be said that the examples listed here and in other places that correspond to the "line" would be considered "disrespectful", especially by the parents, if a child had done it to them or other adults (a parent hitting their kid is considered discipline in some circles, but "disrespect" if vice versa is done), although because of children being seen as sub-human by majority of society, this is never taken into account by some and flat-out ignored by others. If a parent has just dumped the child, for whatever reason, that's Parental Abandonment; if they aren't paying attention, that's Parental Neglect. If the parents refuse to discipline their kids, they are Pushover Parents. Contrast Mama Bear (where others abuse the children and the parents abuse the abusers), Papa Wolf (same), the more extreme variant of Knight Templar Parent (where the abusive parent is violently overprotective) and Abusive Offspring (where the children are abusive to their parents). Abusive Precursors can be considered this, on a metaphorical level. See Hilariously Abusive Childhood for when this is cranked up to absurd levels and Played for Laughs. Black Comedy is often connected in the comedic aspect of it, and a Big, Screwed-Up Family may be involved if it is adult comedy. In keeping with the above note, some may call the show on it and say Dude, Not Funny!. See Evil Matriarch and Archnemesis Dad for characters who are beyond abusive and outright evil. Abusive-type parents are mostly wanted criminals being chased by the law. For grandparents who abuse their grandchildren, see Gruesome Grandparent. While they do not have to be the child's actual, technical parents to be part of this trope, they must be closely related and live together, like a Wicked Stepmother or an Evil Uncle taking care of the Parentally Deprived. After all, it's much more disgusting that somebody related to the child could bring themselves to hurt them, rather than a mere foster family. As in Real Life, this trope can make a child Hate Their Parent. When the abused child in question grows up and starts their own family, they will sometimes bow not to make the same mistakes their parents did with them and will try to treat their own children better with the hopes of Breaking the Cycle of Bad Parenting. The polar opposite, of course, is Good Parents. Also not to be confused with Teasing Parent, who plays harmless jokes on their kids without intending to hurt them. Unfortunately, Abusive Parents are Truth in Television and a very sensitive topic for many, so No Real Life Examples, Please! - It is sufficient to say they do exist and that they are also Too Common. Note: Please do not use this trope for complaining about parents you don't like. ## Example subpages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other examples: - "The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship": The fool's parents are verbally abusive to the fool, not being supportive of him when he wanted to go out and build a flying ship. They also only gave him scraps of food for his journey instead of the lovely meal they gave to his two brothers. - "Morozko": The old woman constantly berates her stepdaughter, to the point that the poor child cries every night, and in the beginning of the tale the old woman attempts to get her killed. - "Maid Maleen": The titular princess refuses to go through with an arranged marriage, so her father tries to "break her spirit" by locking her away in a tower for seven years. - "Hans the Hedgehog": Hans' father regrets having wished for his half-urchin son to be born and literally wishes him dead. He is all too happy when Hans leaves home on his own initiative, and he does not even care when Hans returns with a big herd of pigs to feed the village with. He only starts caring when Hans returns again, now fully human and married to a princess. - "Mother Holle": The main character's stepmother forces her to work until her hands are bleeding. In the Erstwhile version, it is seen that the woman dotes on her biological daughter as long as she obeys orders and does not talk back. - "Prince Ivan, the Witch Baby, and the Little Sister of the Sun": In Arthur Ransome's version, Prince Ivan's parents cared little for his mute son, whose "dumbness" they were constantly moaning about, so it should not come as a surprise that Ivan "spent all his time in the stables, listening to the tales of an old groom". Real child abuse isn't funny, period. However there is Black Humor and Comedic Sociopathy . With that being said: - There's a whole line of short "Mommy Mommy" jokes that are popular: "Mommy-mommy, why do I keep walking in circles?" "Shut up dear, or I'll nail your other foot to the floor." "Mommy-mommy, why is Daddy running back and forth across the field?" "Shut up and reload, dear." "Mommy-mommy, why can't Daddy have a proper burial? "Shut up and keep flushing, dear." "Mommy-mommy, Grandma has a huge mole on her leg!" "Shut up and eat around it, dear." - A mother is making jam in the kitchen, and her legless son plays in the other room. He calls for her to bring him some jam, and she answers that he can easily walk to the kitchen. "But I have no legs..." "No legs, no jam!" - This joke is also told in the "No arms, no cartoons" variety. - Classical Mythology is full of child abuse. - Ouranos and Cronos both made a practice of imprisoning their children at birth: Ouranos threw them in Tartarus, while Cronos swallowed them whole. - Greek mortals abuse their children just as often in myth. For example, Echetus gouged out his daughter's eyes, chained her in a cellar, and made her grind iron chunks to dust. Acrisius locked his daughter Danae in solitary confinement to prevent her from having children, and then threw her in a box and dumped her in the sea when she got pregnant from Zeus. Mythical women suffer various physical punishments and sometimes death for getting pregnant out of wedlock, even when they were raped. Beating kids barely even gets mentioned in Classical Greece, except when someone like comedian Aristophanes mocks moral relativists by depicting them as opposed to beating them. - When Hephaestus was born, his mother Hera tossed him off a cliff because she thought he was too ugly. (He survived.) - Kullervo in The Kalevala is abused so badly he becomes an Omnicidal Maniac and kills himself. At the end of the canto, Väinämöinen especially warns of abusing children, stating that "a boy abused will never have the mind of a man". - In In Strange Woods, Howl's father was emotionally and physically abusive to him, and he grew up in a house without love. - Before awareness campaigns of the 1980s, a child "physical abuse"-type promo was often played for laughs. More common with regional promotions that had their own syndicated TV programs, a heel wrestler or tag team would seriously and in a normal but concerned tone of voice deliver a promo recounting a supposed meeting with a sad-eyed boy or girl, who is crying because (s)he can no longer take his/her father's physical abuse, the wrestler then asking the child if he'd go live with his/her mother to which the boy claims she beats him/her also, then asking who he'd like to live with, to which the kid says, "I wanna go live with (whatever face wrestler/tag team said heels are currently feuding)... because he/they don't beat nobody!" ...with the heel wrestler's demeanor suddenly turning from somber to mocking as he delivers the punch line. - Vince McMahon often acted this way toward his son Shane McMahon, daughter Stephanie McMahon, and his out-of-wedlock "son" Hornswoggle in angles. - Raven claimed that both of his parents beat the crap out of him. CM Punk also said he had issues with his dad, and that he was going to beat Raven because he saw his father in Raven. Some cycle there, huh? - Toward the end of 2005, Raw wrestler Shelton Benjamin began losing most of his matches. It wasn't long before his overbearing "Momma" (actually actress Thea Vidale in "granny" glasses and a muumuu) showed up on television to reprimand him, threatening to beat him (just as she supposedly did when he was a boy) if he didn't start winning matches. Benjamin began cheating to win or allowing Momma Benjamin to cheat for him, thus turning heel. - Cheerleader Melissa would joke about how her rival, "Sweet" Saraya, would treat her kids and declared she was going to beat Britani Kight in her mother's steed when they met in SHIMMER. - During his early hype vignettes, Bray Wyatt said his daddy was a mean man who made him work on his shrimping boat instead of going to school. Bray set fire to his dad's boat - and implied that his dad died in that fire. - Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues: - Mrs. Miller forced all her expectations onto Jacob, which eventually developed into her emotionally abusing him if he didn't match up to her standards. His obsession with routine is his way of coping with it. - Benedict's father micromanages his life, expecting him to get the best possible grades so that he can inherit the family legacy. Even worse, he's blatantly homophobic, going so far as to hurl slurs at his son. As a result, Benedict has become haughty and stand-offish in order to conceal his issues of self-worth. - Daigo's father and stepmother physically abused him, outed him as bisexual, and frequently mocked his Japanese heritage. This only stopped when his stepmother passed away, and his father grew too frail to hurt him anymore- which, in turn, led to Daigo exacting his revenge against the old man. - Emmanuel's lack of self-esteem and self-control are a result of his mother, who verbally abuses him about being overweight. Even after he gained a super metabolism and slimmed down, she still tore into him when she found him eating cookies. - Fairly common as a backstory for characters in Survival of the Fittest, in that there are at least several examples per version. It was particularly common in v1 and v2, and while it isn't as common in later versions they still pop up. V2's Mariavel Varella is one such example, having been abused physically (and in a retconned thread, sexually) by her father, who also killed her brother. - In Touhou: a Glimmer of an Outside World, Marisa's father. Amongst other things, he threw her out — despite Marisa's being sixteen or seventeen at the most — and hit her when she tried to get back in. - Ars Magica has it come up both in a blood-relation manner and a mentor-student manner. The Gift causes people to feel a great sense of discomfort around magi, and those children born with the Gift frequently find themselves on the wrong end of their parents's irritation. As for master-student, the Code that magi follow allows all sorts of nastiness done to apprentices, up to and including murder. Even passing the Apprentice's Gauntlet and becoming a full-fledged magus might not be enough to escape this; the Flaw "Tormenting Master" indicates that once per year, your parens clears two weeks out of their schedule and spends them trying to break your life to pieces. (Because House Tytalus is built around interpersonal conflict, most Tytalus magi might as well put this Flaw on their character sheet before they even start spending points.) - Ability No. X: When Ayame manifested her ability to hear the flowers, her parents frequently abused her because they wanted to cover it up. This made Ayame resentful of her ability and the flowers and she began to hurt them. - ACTUALLY HAPPENED: In the video I Failed To Save My Girl From Her Father, a boy learns that his girlfriend's father is the abusive ex of his aunt. He notices that both his girlfriend Emma and her mother show signs of being abused. When the boy mentions his worries to Emma, she gets angry at him for accusing her dad. The two end up breaking up. - Helluva Boss: - The Flashback Episode "The Circus showed that neither Blitzos nor Stolass fathers are winning the Father Of The Year-award any time soon: - While no details about how Blitzo was treated are shown, what little is shown doesnt paint a rosy picture of his father Cash Buckzo: Not only did he seem to favor Blitzos friend Fizzarolli over him, he valued his own son so little that he was willing to rent him out \|\|as Stolass playdate for a day\|\| for five bucks and a condom. \|\|He also strong-armed the young boy into using the opportunity to steal valuable items from the Goetia manor by guilt-tripping and subtly threatening him.\|\| - Stolass father Paimon is of the neglectful variety; He cant remember Stolass name because he has so fucking many children, shows No Sympathy for Stolass tearful reaction to discovering that hes betrothed to Stella, cant be bothered to attend the titular circus in person despite offering to take Stolas there and hits his son in the head \|\|for politely bowing to Blitzo when greeting him just because Blitzo is of a lower social standing.\|\| Interestingly, Paimon seems to be genuinely unaware of how shitty a father he is, as immediately after hitting Stolas, he praises himself for being so good at daddying. - Exes And Oohs introduces Moxxies mob boss father Crimson, and hoo boy: Of the fathers shown so far, he not only takes the cake, but also the plate, server and table it was served on. Despite tricking I.M.P into coming to the Greed Ring for some business dealings with his son, he seems affable enough at first, treating them to dinner and offering them rooms for the night. (Though Moxxies viscerally negative reaction to finding out where theyve been taken and general discomfort are some pretty big red flags) As soon as theyre alone, though, Crimson shows his true colors; He slaps Moxxie so hard that the younger imp is thrown off his feet, reveals that the business deal involves forcing him to marry is ex-boyfriend Chaz, ignoring the fact that Moxxie is already Happily Married, just so that Crimson can get access to Chazs \|\|non-existent\|\| assets, and threatens to have both Moxxie and Millie killed if Moxxie doesnt comply. Hes also shown to be homophobic and sexist, (Again, the only reason hes arranging the marriage is because he wants Chazs money) and he refuses to accept his sons bisexuality, accusing him of using Millie as The Beard. And when Moxxie finally stands up to him, \|\|he has his right-hand man knock Moxxie unconscious, forces him into a wedding dress, ties him up and gags him to forcefully marry him off.\|\| A flashback shows that \|\|he was forcing Moxxie to execute people at an age where he could barely use a knife and fork, and when the boy hesitated to give some poor sap the Cement Shoes treatment, Crimson slammed his head into the cinderblock and threatened to drown him, too, should he ever disobey him. Hes also shown to have been abusive to his wife, and he's implied to have ultimately killed her for opposing his cruelty and trying to protect Moxxie from him.\|\| - ETU - Animated Stories: Many stories feature neglectful or downright abusive parents. Some of them are very petty. - Milton's parents gave him a poor education and actively sabotage his efforts to be successful just because he wasn't born a girl. Although later in turned out they weren't his real parents. - Another story had the protagonist being locked away for years by her mother because she was "too pretty". Though the mother's boyfriend broke her out and escaped with her. - Happy Tree Friends: Pop usually gets his son Cub killed or injured due to obliviousness, but he's lapsed into this tertiary on a few occasions, including whenever he tries to be a Papa Wolf. For instance, hammering a nail into Cub's face to hide it, yanking him out of a kitchen sink by tying a rope around his neck and car, intentionally breaking off his spine, etc. He killed Cub on purpose once even, in a last-ditch effort to finish off a demon inside him (which unknown to him, had already been liberated by then). One early draft of an episode even had Pop intentionally setting Cub's dead body on fire to dispose of his corspe. - In Alfred's Playhouse, Alfred's parents were very neglectful of him and tried to drown him in the bathtub; he is the result of an unsuccessful abortion. His abuse is the reason why he's so crazy. - Many of the parents seen in "Grounded" GoAnimate videos will ground their kids for insanely long periods of time at the slightest provocation. Starting crying over scary dreams? Grounded for "Triple Infinity" because you aren't allowed to have nightmares. Accidentally left the faucet running at school? Not only do you get expelled, but you also get grounded just because your parents love you so much. In a few instances, they'll even celebrate sending the kid to their room by throwing parties or going out to Chuck E. Cheese's without them. - Hommer Simpson: Hommer is responsible for the death of his daughter Maggie, but is also shown to be repeatedly rude and abusive to Bart and (especially) Lissa. - My Pride: Powerstrike is a female example of this. She names her disabled daughter Nothing, then tells her that she only sees wasted potential when she looks at her. Though it is downplayed with her other daughter, Farleap, who says that she spent all of her life trying to impress her mother. - My Story Animated: Carol and Lana's father from "I Found My Missing Sister In A Graveyard" allows his second wife to torment her stepdaughters and gets physically abusive with Carol. - In Nameless (2005), it's heavily implied that \|\|Miller's\|\| mom molested him, which could be the reason why he's so screwed up. - OverSimplified: A frequent issue among a number of world leaders: - The fathers of Stalin and Hitler were abusive drunks who physically assaulted their children. The "This enraged his father, who punished him severely" meme associated with the channel comes from that phrase being used to the point of Running Gag in the Hitler video. - Alexander III was verbally abusive as well as neglectful to his son, the future Nicholas II, calling him a "girly girl" and refusing to actually teach him how to be a ruler until just before his death. - Rock 'n' Roll Dad: Murry Wilson likes hurting his son Brian's feelings. - RWBY: - From the start of the series, Weiss Schnee heavily implies that Jacques, her father was abusive towards her and possibly her sister while they were growing up. He received a lot of stress from dealing with the White Fang's terrorist acts against the Schnee Dust Company, so he often would come home from work in a less than pleasant mood. Once we see him in Volume 4, he's revealed to be a merciless sociopath who only cares about the family name - which he, in fact, married into and took for himself - and has no qualms about disinheriting Weiss for disobeying him one too many times. - There's also Mercury, whose father is all but stated to be an alcoholic who regularly beat him \|\|and is the reason he lost his legs, but not for the reason you'd think\|\|. Then comes Lost where it turns out the abuse was even worse. Marcus specifically trained Mercury to be a killer and once \|\|he unlocked his Semblance, Marcus used his own to take it, saying he'd give it back when Mercury was strong and referring to it as a crutch. Long story short, Mercury didnt regain it, and probably never will\|\|. - \|\|Cinder\|\| was essentially Made a Slave by their adoptive mother, who forced them to act as child labor in her upper-class hotel, and was made to wear a Shock Collar that was triggered whenever \|\|Cinder\|\| was disobedient, or simply made a mistake. - Nora reveals in private to Ren that her mother was a Dirty Coward who abandoned Nora during a Grimm attack to try and save her own life, which is how she ended up a Street Urchin in Kuroyuri. - Story Booth: Due to the topics revolving around the horrors of daily life, plenty of stories will involve this. Here are a few examples: - "Mean Mom" revolves around Sydney's mother constantly bullying and beating up her own daughter for not being good enough. This results in Sydney going through severe depression, even inflicting self-harm due to her mother's bullying. - "16 and Pregnant" has Poppy's parents disowning her once they figure out she was pregnant with Aiden's child. The kicker is that Aiden extorted her into having sex with him, but the parents clearly couldn't care less. - "My 'Perfect' Dad Wasn't Who I Thought He Was" centers on Zion, whose father forced her to view pornography and violent content, made her sit in the bathtub with her brother, and even physically assaulted her on one occasion. After Zion's mother confronts him for his behavior, he blackmails her by threatening to take her children away. Once doctors became suspicious about the family's mental health, they called 911 and had him arrested. - The titular Salad Fingers has his "family" introduced in episode 11 as a Big Brother Bully and an unpleasant matriarch who lives in mirrors and reflections. While it is unknown whether or not the Glass Mother is in any way his actual mother, she is verbally abusive and gets him to poison himself. His father is not any better, going by her final words before Salad Fingers seals the last of her away in a box after breaking the mirror.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentalAbuse
Paratext - TV Tropes Everything that is an element of the whole package immediately encompassing the text and not part of the text itself. In other words, all that stuff that isn't a part of the show/movie/story itself, but still comes with it. The stuff on the box, the stuff that comes before the show/movie, etc. See also Text Tropes.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Paratext
Parental Incest - TV Tropes Oedipus gets a bad rap; Freud should've named it a Jocasta Complex. Women, listen to your mothers Don't just succumb to the wishes of your brothers Take a step back, take a look at one another You need to know the difference between a father and a lover. Something often depicted in media as much squickier than BrotherSister Incest, Twincest or Kissing Cousins is incest between a parent and their child. Sigmund Freud had a lot to say about the Oedipus complex, and could find subtext in quite a lot of places. But in Big Screwed Up Families, Deadly Decadent Courts, particularly abusive households and elsewhere, one is likely to find examples of this trope. When this trope shows up in media, it's usually used to highlight the specific psychological issues that a character has, particularly if it features in the Backstory of a Serial Killer or other psychopath, or to give an already nasty villain that extra bit of shudder factor. When the parent is the aggressor in the relationship, it is usually quite predatory in nature, and in many cases (particularly in the case of fathers and daughters), it's a crossing of the Moral Event Horizon when it's revealed. If the child is the aggressor in the relationship, it usually means he or she is seriously twisted in some way or in the very least has serious issues. In non-consensual cases where the parent is the victim, its usually Elder Abuse. Sometimes this is played for Black Comedy, particularly in the case of mothers and sons, with the son understandably freaked out due to the mother's advances. This trope appears with step, foster, or adoptive parents as well as biological ones, sometimes to Bowdlerise it somewhat, although the power dynamics are still much the same as in parent/child incest. Wife Husbandry is one way to Bowdlerise it still further — though not out of Squick range. This is a type of Unequal Pairing, since the parent is almost always at least psychologically—if not always physically—in a much more powerful position than the child. See also Rape as Backstory and Abusive Parents. Also see Surprise Incest, where the couple involved do not know they're related, as well as BrotherSister Incest, Creepy Uncle, and Kissing Cousins. When children innocently suggest this, it's Father, I Want to Marry My Brother. See Pervert Dad for parents who don't quite go this far, but still have an (un)healthy dose of weirdness, and Lecherous Stepparent. See I Love You, Vampire Son, when the "parent" is the vampire that sired his "son". Older Than Dirt, thanks to Divine Incest examples. ## Example subpages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other examples: - Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time: Cupid is one of Venus' many illegitimately born children and we can plainly see that the two of them are in the middle of sexual relations with one another. Incest isn't necessarily out of place among Classical gods, so seeing two gods of sexuality committing incest isn't out of place either. - Volume 3 of Yandere Heaven provides Hajime, the protagonist's stepfather. Like her twin brother, he desires a more intimate relationship with her and he wants to be seen as a man rather than a parental figure. - In Fallen Angel, it is widely believed, but not confirmed (although he has not denied it, either), that Xia has this relationship with her son, Jubal. - In the X-Men comics, Legion (a.k.a. David Haller), the psychotic, overpowered son of Professor Xavier with a legion of split personalities, time travels to the past and is implied to have raped his own mother Gabrielle Haller. - In the dystopian divergent timeline of the Age of Apocalypse, Magneto and Rogue eventually marry and have a son despite their initial surrogate father-daughter relationship after she permanently absorbed the powers and part of the psyche of his own secretly long-lost biological daughter Polaris. In addition, Rogue is canonically even younger in this reality than any of Magneto's prior biological children: Polaris and their fellow X-men Pietro and Wanda. One saving grace might be the fact that the mainstream continuity hadn't settled on Polaris being Magneto's actual daughter when this story was written, so the Oedipal aspect wasn't as blatant originally. Though it still was a story where Rogue wound up in love with her main father figure... - Their fellow AoA X-Men, the reformed berserker Sabretooth and the jailbait amazon Blink are a fan-favorite cult pairing despite having a surrogate father-daughter relationship, as he rescued her as a child from Apocalypse's slave pens and raised her to adolescence. This is due to the intense Beast and Beauty pseudo-Battle Couple nature of their relationship, which is exacerbated by the fact that they are both highly sensuous warriors with a deeply intimate psycho-emotional bond and physically demonstrative displays of affection. They were separated when they were both made to lead separate teams of inter-dimensional heroes known as Exiles, but were eventually reunited on a single team. In fact, Blink's then-boyfriend and fellow Exiles teammate Mimic was revealed to have known that she would never love him or anyone else as much and feared that she loved Sabretooth instead. This was shown by the fact that despite having proven herself as a leader, Blink deferred to Sabretooth during field missions. Despite later being separated again on different teams, they are currently still both single, leaving fans ever hopeful. The fact that Mimic resembled Victor in more ways than one though is hardly coincidental. - Fellow AoA mutant Nate Grey. The genetically-engineered son of his reality's Scott Summers and Jean Grey, he crosses over to the original timeline of Marvel-616 where he gets involved with Madelyne Pryor, the long-deceased clone of his biological mother. It is later revealed that he accidentally physically resurrected her with the sheer force of his immense mutant talent when he unconsciously and instinctively tried to psionically contact Jean Grey upon his arrival in the other reality (his interactions with 616!Jean as a rule, are all mother and son, which she reciprocates). He also later gets involved with yet another counterpart of his biological mother, when an evil counterpart of Jean Grey from yet another alternate reality disposes of and impersonates Madelyne Pryor. This Queen Jean, a Jean Grey corrupted by her own power, was revealed to have had a prior consort who was her reality's counterpart of Nate, essentially her own genetically-engineered son, who rebelled against her and was ultimately executed, but not before helping his alternate counterpart defeat his mother Queen Jean. - It should at this point be noted that he only met AoA!Jean once, briefly (though there was an instinctive connection), and it was quite some time before he realized what relation either Jean or Madelyne had to him. After that, he backed off, fast, from Maddy's advances. Maddy, on the other hand, didn't seem to have the slightest problem with it and acted as a textbook, if somewhat homicidal, Tsundere towards him. And his relationship with Queen Jean (who, again, he thought was Maddy) was, at least on his part, platonic (it was implied that she wanted him as a sex slave as well as a Living Weapon). His mental fantasy of the perfect life, Greyville, had Maddy as his best friend. Further, it also doesn't really help that he was forcibly aged to 17 and for a number of his appearances had absolutely nothing in the way of life experience. Still, with all of the above experiences, it isn't exactly surprising that the first rule he made when he attempted to create a utopian reality was 'No Relationships'. - A plot line in Mighty Avengers has one of the characters (the gynoid Jocasta) ending her relationship with her grandfather (Hank Pym, who created Ultron who created Jocasta) when she realizes that he is still in love with her dead sister/mother (his ex-wife/on-off lover Janet van Dyne — whose brainwave patterns Ultron copied to create Jocasta's AI). She marries her father (Ultron) instead (that was why Ultron initially created her in the first place years ago, as he himself had a desire for his "mother", the wife of his creator-father). - The main character of The Tale of One Bad Rat is trying to come to terms with having been molested by her father as a child. - Crazy Jane from Grant Morrison's celebrated run on Doom Patrol is a multi-powered Metahuman who lived with multiple personalities after being raped by her father. Morrison based Jane on the Real Life Split-Personality Team memoirist Truddi Chase. - Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash: The Nightmare Warriors has a brief scene featuring Freddy making out with his daughter, who had just pulled a FaceHeel Turn. - One Bronze Age Superman story told the tale of the end of the Golden Age of Krypton. An overprotective mother created a younger clone of herself and raised it to be her son's ideal wife and married them off, since she didn't think any other woman would be good enough for him. When the son found out, he snapped, killed his mother, his wife and then himself. This eventualy lead to a civil war which devastated Krypton and turned it into a xenophobic, compassionless society. - The famous Twinkie House meme actually comes from a(n) (in)famous gay comic called My Wild and Raunchy Son 2. It's an entire series of exactly what you think it is from an artist (Josman) famous for that specific genre (once even involving a grandfather of all people). To avoid allegations that he had a serious thing for his own dad, the artist said in an interview what he really loved were twins doin' it, and drew a token twincest story to prove it. No one believed him when that story still somehow managed to involve an older man in the mix... - One of the minor characters seen in hell in The Sandman (1989) tells the newly arrived young thugs that "I took my mother by force, and strangled my sister when she wouldn't submit to my advances." - Such is the case in the Sin City short story 'Daddy's Little Girl'. Although it's unclear if they really are related, or it's just a fetish. - Part of \|\|Willow's\|\| backstory in Dreadstar. - Toyed with in the Golden Age comic book series featuring The Clock/Brian O'Brien (1936-1944). In a 1942 storyline, the eponymous hero is injured and dying. He is nursed back to health by preteen girl "Butch" Buchanan. She becomes his sidekick, legal ward, and surrogate daughter for the rest of his series. But she originally viewed him as a gangster and declares herself his "moll", doing her best to seduce him. - The Walking Dead comic had a scene where the Governor kisses his zombie daughter. To make it worse, she can't be older than eleven. It could be seen as a platonic parental kiss, but that's screwed by the fact it's an open mouth kiss (he even removed her teeth in order to do it). - In Barbara Slate's Angel Love, Angel finds out that her sister Mary Beth left home and changed her name to Maureen McMeal due to the shame she carried of Angel and Mary Beth's father sleeping with Mary Beth, and is even ashamed that she actually enjoyed it. After Angel's father left the house when this was discovered, Angel was told by her mother that her father died and went to heaven. - A variation occured with the pre-Crisis Black Canary. Dinah was inhabiting the body of her (near identical) adult daughter when she fell in love with the alternate universe version of her deceased husband. Post-Crisis, the grossness and general oddness of the situation was fixed by simply making two Black Canaries: the modern day one is the daughter of the (now retired) original Black Canary from the '40s. - The infamous Avengers #200 contained something of this. Carol Danvers was kidnapped, mind controlled, and impregnated by Marcus Immortus, the son of Immortus. Carol ends up having a Mystical Pregnancy with no memory of the incident. The baby grew into an adult in under a day and turned out to be another version of Marcus, reborn on Earth. Carol hated the baby, but when she saw Marcus as an adult, she fell for him. Eventually they left together to go to another dimension, and the crazy part was, the other Avengers seemed perfectly okay with it. Despite Marcus handwaving it as not really being pregnancy and just something that "resembled pregnancy", he still refers to Carol as "Mother" and she did give birth to him. Avengers Annual #10 brought Carol back, made it clear she was raped, and let her give a What the Hell, Hero? speech to the others (and by proxy, to the writers of the original story who thought this was acceptable). - The eleventh issue of Spider-Girl had a time-displaced Spider-Girl encounter her father during his earlier days as Spider-Man. Much to her disgust, Spider-Man at one point hits on Spider-Girl, not knowing that she is his future daughter. - The DC Comics standalone story "Smells Like Teen President" follows a disaffected grunge musician who believes he is the son of Prez Rickard. He isn't; he's the product of his mother being raped by his grandfather, but she lied to give him a father he could look up to. - In Alan Moore's Lost Girls: - While Dorothy Gale is recounting this version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, she reveals that her uncle is actually her father who takes her to New York under the pretense of seeking psychological help, but he has sex with her repeatedly while they're in the city. Feeling guilty for the pain the affair caused her stepmother, she leaves home to travel the world. - In Alice Fairchild's retelling of her story, she attends drug-fuelled lesbian orgies, including Mrs. White and her daughter. - The miniseries Daredevil: Father retconned that the old man that Matt saved (in the accident that blinded him and gave him his radar sense) was molesting his own daughter, leading the daughter, Maggie Farrell, to kill several of the people Matt's helped over the years to get back at the continued abused she suffered because Matt didn't know he was saving a monster. - Commonly referenced in fairy tales. The heroine's father decides to marry her — often because she resembles her mother, or because she is the only person who can wear something that belonged to her mother, and her father promised to marry only such a woman. Some of these include "All-Kinds-of-Fur", Allerleirauh, "Donkeyskin", "The King Who Wished Marry To His Daughter", "The She-Bear", "Margery White Coats", and "Golden-Teeth". She usually attempts to hold him off, demanding Impossible Tasks for her consent, but this always fails. The princess must run away to escape, before going to a ball and winning a prince. Many folklorists interpret tales where she must flee her father for other reasons, such as "Catskin", where her father wanted a son and so marries her off with no care, or "Cap o' Rushes" where he takes offense at what she says, or "The Bear" where she is smothered and wants to escape, as Bowdlerised variants. Note that BrotherSister Incest can substitute, with the brother taking the father's place for the threat. - There is an extremely bizarre Russian fairy tale which involves a priest's daughter being tricked by a farmhand into having sex with him, without her knowing what it is (he tells her that his dick is a "comb" and that he is "combing" her). When her father finds out her confusion, he has sex with her and the tale ends with the narrator telling the audience that from then on, the priest had sex with both his wife and his daughter. - Empath: The Luckiest Smurf: - While not biologically related, the MayDecember Romance of Papa Smurf and Smurfette in the alternate timeline story "Papa Smurf & Mama Smurfette" is disgusting enough for the other Smurfs to treat it as that to the point where some even cover their eyes when they kiss each other at the wedding. Otherwise averted in "Papa's Big Crush," where Smurfette confesses to Papa Smurf that she could never love him as anything other than a father \|\|(and this is after purging a horny Hulked Out Papa Smurf of his feelings with a Smurfette sex doll)\|\|. - In the Mirror Universe story "Smurfed Behind: The Other Side Of The Mirror", that universe's Smurfette is married to its Papa Smurf, although she admittedly doesn't stay faithful to him. The Empath of the normal universe is still disgusted to see that version of Smurfette and Papa Smurf kissing each other on the mouth. - Hivefled: the Condesce and the Grand Highblood had kids specifically for this purpose. - The Harry Potter fic "Apex Predator" has a few observations about such relationships in the exploration of the Blue-and-Orange Morality of Veela culture. One scene features Fleur's mother Apolline pledging "allegiance" to Fleur to affirm that she will respect Fleur's right to make decisions regarding her chosen mate, Harry Potter, with part of the ritual involving Apolline licking Fleur's clit. While Fleur and Apolline occasionally double-team Harry during some later sexual encounters, it's explicitly stated that attraction to other women is more situational in Veela than their attraction to men, and this kind of dynamic is still uncommon. Apolline later observes that while it's not uncommon for any male child of a Veela to become his sisters' "plaything", Veela will basically never have a sexual relationship with their own sons as male children are so uncommon that any Veela to have a son must have been engaging in regular sexual activity to conceive the child in the first place, so the mothers don't have any need for such an additional sexual outlet. - What Lies Beyond the Walls has \|\|Log-a-Log Brugo\|\|, who raped his son multiple times in his life until he broke him into being his most trusted ally. - Indirectly in Dead or Alive 4: The Devil Factor; in chapter 7, Dante and Trish briefly make out and begin to have sex, but it ends badly when Dante remembers that she looks like his Missing Mom. - To Lead The Way's Serena is subject to this as part of her backstory. - Bordering on Villainous Incest, there's Ashley's Troubling Unchildlike Behavior towards Blossom in Ladder. Ashley kisses Blossom (with tongue) twice and, though it's not described much, the Professor saw Ashley doing something to a (near catatonic) Blossom that made him so pissed he punched her. This also counts as Sister/Sister Incest, but Blossom has a near-maternal affection for Ashley and Ashley sees Blossom as her mother. To make everything worse, Blossom's only eleven while Ashley is physically five and chronologically a few days old. She doesn't seem to understand her behavior is wrong, but then again Ashley's behavior overall tends to be wrong. - In Restraint, Azula reveals that her father Ozai began abusing her after she turned thirteen. Due to the trauma, she has a tough time being in a relationship with Ty Lee. When visiting him in prison, Azula ends up calling Ozai out one day and \|\|burning his face, like he did her brother's\|\|. - The Troll Fic StarKitsProphcy takes this one step further. Firestar is in love with Jayfeather's daughter Stargleam. The writer never notes this, but this means Firestar is Stargleam's great-grandfather. - You Are Mine: Frollo took in Esmeralda after accidentally killing her mother. The child, renamed "Agnes", is raised as his daughter. Frollo spends the first several years thinking of Agnes as simply his daughter, but things change when Esmeralda grows into adulthood. - Things Jade Hates involves Jade's mom being let out of jail prematurely and coming back home. She was in jail for having abused Jade. Jade fears her mother might abuse her six year old brother, so she wants to live away from her mother. - In UNDERTOW, Minx theorizes that her step-uncle and father were sexually abused by their father. This is why her Creepy Uncle abused her and why her father was so afraid to touch her. - The anthology fanfiction Mother's Dark Love is devoted to mothers from different films/cartoons/etc. and their unhealthy obsession with their children. - Enlightenments doesn't dwell on it too much, but given that the Queen of the Castle in the Mist is immortal through stealing her daughters' bodies yet has the same immortal husband through the ages, it's an odd example of father/daughter incest, one that the father very much does not want to participate in but is forced to go through with and the daughters themselves aren't aware of. - Heavily implied in E350's Happy Fluffy Reviews of Really Bad Fanfics. While scrolling through the M-rated section of Fanfiction Dot Net's Danny Phantom fics, Danny comes across a fanfic that's apparently about him getting sent back in time to his mom's high school days when she makes a wish that she had a friend like him in high school within earshot of the series' resident Jackass Genie. He's okay with it until Tucker points out that the genre listed is romance, at which point he goes Green Around the Gills. - An old Jewish Mother joke: A psychoanalyst has finished talking with little Irving. His mother asks, "What's wrong with him?" The doctor responds, "I'm afraid he has an Oedipus Complex." "Eh, Oedipus, schmoedipus!" she responds. "Just so long as he loves his mother!" - A girl asks her dad if she can get a tattoo for Christmas. He agrees, so long as she gives him a blowjob. She reluctantly complies, but then says, "Dad, your dick tastes like shit!" The dad replies, "Oh, yeah, your brother wanted a computer." - A joke involves a father stating that his daughter has got to the age where she starts to ask awkward questions about sex, said questions involve sex with him. - A young man is going at it hot and heavy with a young lady. He finishes, rolls off her, then says, "Gee, sis, you're even better in bed than Mom!" She says, "Thanks, I know, Daddy said the same thing!" - "The End" by The Doors from their debut album The Doors has the protagonist tell his mother he wants to rape her, but it is almost incomprehensible on the studio recording. Jim Morrison would actually sing "I want to fuck you!" during live performances of the song. - "Alive" by Pearl Jam from Ten is - according to this article - about a mother who reveals to her son that the man he thought was his father was actually his stepfather (a real event in frontman Eddie Vedder's own life)... and then she seduces her son because he looks like his dead (birth) father (not a real event in Vedder's own life, one hopes), leading the protagonist to become so messed up that he becomes a Serial Killer of prostitutes (the song "Once"), and ends up on death row (the song "Footsteps"). However, Vedder has veered away from this interpretation in later years, claiming that the fans "lifted the curse" off the song, and he now sees it as a life-affirming anthem. - "Daughter" sounds rather explicit in its subject matter (Father/Daughter incest), once you get past Vedder's nigh-unintelligible singing voice. Though it reads like that ("she holds the hand that holds her down"), "Daughter" is actually about a child with dyslexia ("mother reads aloud—child tries to understand it"), whose parents don't understand her disability and use harsh physical punishment to deal with it ("the shades go down"). Explained here on The Other Wiki. - No sex happens, but the video for "Lemon Incest" by Serge Gainsbourg and his young daughter Charlotte is extremely creepy. - The video for "Charlotte Forever", on the other hand, feels more romantic than creepy. Of course for some that may make it all the creepier. - "The Father of a Boy Named Sue" by Johnny Cash - maybe. It's implied, but not stated out loud. - "Magdelena" by Frank Zappa from Just Another Band from L.A. is a detailed confessional by a father to his 13-year old daughter of what he'd like to do to her. - "Tier" (German for "Animal") by Rammstein tells the story of a man who rapes his daughter and her getting revenge by killing him. Made even creepier by the fact that one notable live performance included the presence of the young daughter of guitarist Richard Kruspe onstage. The song "Laichzeit" ("Spawning Time") also talks about a man who harbors sexual desires for both his mother and his sister. - The song "Wiener Blut" ("Viennese Blood") from the album Liebe ist für alle da is about the Josef Fritzl case. - Tom Lehrer: - Also played for laughs with The Lonely Island's "Motherlover", where two studs agree to "fuck each other's mothers" for Mother's Day. - "Janie's Got a Gun" by Aerosmith. "What did her daddy do?" indeed. Moral incest within mythology goes here. For incest between the gods, see Divine Incest . - Classical Mythology: - Oedipus Rex is about a prince who is prophesied to kill his father and marry his mother. After being left to die by his father and then found by someone else, he meets him unrecognized on the road and kills him. He has several adventures (including solving the Riddle of the Sphinx) before heading home and marrying the Queen, who, yes, turns out to be his mother. He spends years with her — and they have children — before finding out the truth about what happened, and is so horrified by it all that he goes into exile, after exacting the punishment on himself for killing the old king to end a curse on the land, while she commits suicide. - Electra doesn't canonically have any incest, but subtext is commonly read into it. Electra murdered her mother Clytemnestra in revenge for killing her father Agamemnon, and her name was used for the gender-inversion of the Oedipus complex. Of course, her father was already dead by that point, but she takes a very idealized view of him in the legend. - Myrrha tricked her father Cinyras into incest, after Aphrodite inspired her with passion for him, and got pregnant. Cyniras, horrified and angry, killed Myrrha with an axe. Her corpse turned into a myrrh tree and, ironically, produced Adonis. - Nyctimene committed incest with her father and was turned into an owl. Owls are therefore not seen by day because they are ashamed of themselves. - Hippolytus: Phaedra's unrequited love/lust for her stepson Hippolytus, which ended with Hippolytus dead (or banished away and then taken in by Artemis in other versions) and Phaedra Driven to Suicide. - Thyestes was told by an oracle that he could only avenge the murder of his three sons on his brother Atreus if he had a son by his own daughter. So he raped his daughter Pelopia (in some versions, though, he just raped a woman not knowing who she was), fathering Aigisthos, who, after being abandoned and nursed by a goat, was adopted by Atreus and raised as his own son. Later, after Thyestes was captured by Atreus' sons Agamemnon and Menelaos, Atreus sends Aigisthos to the dungeon... but Thyestes reveals the truth to Aigisthos and Pelopia. Poor Pelopia kills herself with shame, while Aigisthos kills Atreus. - An aversion with one of Heracles' descendants, who was wed to a king's widow when a snake jumped up between them just as they were about to consummate the marriage. The snake had been sent by Heracles to prevent the man from bedding his long-lost mother. - Book of Genesis: - Noah cursed the entire family line of his youngest son Ham for Ham's having "seen his father's nakedness". Since a fair number of Biblical scholars doubt he would have punished him so harshly over merely a little embarrassment, they suggest this phrase was actually some kind of euphemism for molestation or even full-fledged rape. "Uncovered his (or her) nakedness" is often used as a euphemism to mean sex in other verses, supporting this. - After Lot and his daughters escaped from Sodom's destruction, the daughters believed that since their fiancés were dead, they were the last living women and their father the last living man in the area. Having children to populate your locale being rather Serious Business back then, they got their father drunk and raped him in order to have his babies. Nine months later, they each had a son, Moab and Ben-Ammi. The former's name sounds something like the Hebrew word for "from father" and the latter's name means (literally) "son of my paternal uncle" or (figuratively) "son of my people" in Hebrew, and these boys eventually married and had families of their own that grew into two entire nations. Some detractors contend that the Hebrews made up this story to smear the Moabites and the Ammonites, who were Semitic cultures like the Hebrews, though polytheistic and pagan. However, these particular acts occurred centuries before the institution of the sexual laws in Leviticus. As such, they may serve as a kind of retroactive Aesop: "This is the kind of skullduggery people used to do back before we had those laws against sleeping with close relatives, so aren't you glad we have them now?" Also, later books of The Bible clearly state without shame that the Davidic line (including none other than Jesus Christ) came from the Moabites through Ruth. - The Talmud (Sanhedrin 103b), expanding on the evil deeds of the biblical king Amon of Judah, claims that he raped his mother, though not for quite the reason one might expect. Afterward, when she asked him bitterly, "Did you derive any pleasure, then, from the place whence you issued?" he allegedly responded "Did I do this for any other purpose than to provoke my creator?" - In 1 Corinthians 5:1-3, Paul chides the Corinthian believers' fellowship for not having expelled a certain man for sleeping with his father's wife (probably referring to a step-mother), pointing out that not even the pagans around them (Corinth being a rather decadent and sex-obsessed city) would tolerate that kind of sexual immorality and that they ought not to associate themselves with it, either. - Even after The Bible came to its close, certain Christian denominations' legends of the saints had some: - The legend of Saint Dymphna says that, after her mother died, her father Damon fell for her due to how physically similar she was to her mother, went Yandere for poor Dymphna, and tried to force her to marry him. - Saint Markella was a Christian girl from the Greek island of Chios, and her pagan dad wanted both to marry her and force her to renounce Christianity. After a very eventful pursuit, Markella's dad found her near a cave: the rocks had half-swallowed the poor girl, but her head stayed out, so he beheaded her (and in versions where she was swallowed only up to her waist, also mutilated her breasts) and then threw her head away, which is said to have floated to another island. Markella herself ultimately came to be considered a much-venerated Orthodox Patron Saint of Chios, with a monastery built in the place where her father is supposed to have murdered her. - Indonesian folklore Sangkuriang, basically the country's very own Oedipus. Sangkuriang accidentally killed his animal father, driven away by his angry mother who regretted it big time and prayed for the Gods for a reunion that she was given immortality, only for her son with extra levels of badass to come back home, didn't recognize her mom and fell in love and tried so hard to marry her, with his horrified mother actively refusing him (and they ended up creating a "Just So" Story for one of the mountains in Indonesia) and ended up having to get God to turn her into a flower to get away from him, and Sangkuriang went insane because of it. - Dungeons & Dragons: - Belial and Fierna are an ambiguous example of father/daughter incest among archdevils. Being devils, it's very much a Big, Screwed-Up Family. Of course, both of them are embodiments of Lust, so it sort of makes sense. It's not confirmed in the books, but stated to be a rumour... one that isn't hard to believe. - A grandparental example: Lolth, evil goddess of the drow, forced her grandson, a drow war-god, to be her bodyguard and consort for a long time before he was killed off. He apparently hated both positions. - A rather unpleasant way of avoiding this due to Loophole Abuse is found in the Book of Vile Darkness, where it mentions a cruel tyrant who was a previous owner of the Despoiler of Flesh, a cursed artifact which could reshape the flesh of others. This despot was attracted to his very beautiful daughters, but he refused to force himself on them. Instead, to satisfy his urges, he used the Despoiler on his slave girls to make them look like his daughters, and used them instead. - Van Richten's Guide to Witches tells the myth of how hags were first created, and this trope plays a vital part. note : Short version: A woman is a faithful and loving wife towards her husband for many years, bearing him three sons. But the husband is unfaithful, and blatantly rejects her in favor of a younger woman. Her sons refuse to defend her, equating youth with usefulness. The rejected wife is granted dark powers by a malevolent entity, uses a disguise to seduce her husband, kidnaps his lover and holds her hostage, then murders him. Later, she seduces her oldest son (a powerful warrior) the same way, is impregnated by him, then kills him. Then she uses dark magic to transfer her unborn child to the captive woman's womb, and she bears the first annis. She does the same with her second eldest son, a farmer and outdoorsman, uses the same dark magic, and the infant is the first greenhag. Her youngest son, a sailor and fisherman, is not fooled by such a trick and wary due to the deaths of his siblings, so this time she disguises herself as his wife to seduce him, kills him, and again, impregnates her hostage, bearing the first sea hag. Van Richten himself admits in his narrative that the ghastly story is likely apocryphal, and a sidebar confirms this view. - In Warhammer the Dark Elf Witch King Malekith and his mother Morathi were implied to be lovers in an early edition. Given that Morathi is a devoted follower of Slaanesh and will screw Anything That Moves, this is likely true. Given that Malekith is a 4th degree burn victim permanently encased in full body armor, not so much. That being said, incest (no matter the exact kind) isn't unheard of in Druchi society. - Exalted: - The setting book for the Blessed Isle says that a high-ranking Mortal Realm official is in a relationship with her Dragon-Blooded father. It's apparently taboo enough for them to keep it a secret, but not so taboo that there are any consequences for the fact that the rest of the Dynasty knows anyway. - One of the minor characters in Aspect Book: Wood was in a sexual relationship with his mother from the age of eleven. He Exalted — and went utterly insane — upon witnessing her death. These days, he's in the habit of having children brought to his manse, dressing as his mother, giving the children toys and sweets to win their trust, and then violating and strangling them. - William Shakespeare: This gets the plot rolling in Pericles. Pericles want to marry the daughter of King Antiochus but the king demands Pericles solve a riddle. The riddle basically says the king is having sex with the daughter. Pericles figures out the riddle but doesn't actually answer, but the king figures out that Pericles figured it out and sends goons after Pericles to silence him. In the end, both Antiochus and his daughter spontaneously combust. Shakespeare is awesome. - The amount of truly unsettling sexualized language in King Lear has led to a number of productions implying some kind of abusive relationship between the title character and one or more of his daughters. Notable examples include Jonathan Pryce's Lear forcibly kissing Zoe Waites' Goneril on the mouth, Anna Maxwell Martin's Regan climbing into Simon Russell Beale's lap to tell him how much she loves him (complete with him slapping her ass as she walks away), and about half of everything Anthony Hopkins does in the 2018 BBC adaptation. - The plot of Paula Vogel's How I Learned To Drive. (Well, actually her uncle, but Peck is as close to a father as L'il Bit has.) Oddly enough, the relationship is presented as sympathetically as possible, without downplaying the fact that Peck does horrible things. - There's an uncomfortable moment in act 2 of Wicked where the Wizard is trying to seduce Elphaba back to his side. The implication is there and you later find out that he's her father. - In Arthur Miller's play A View from the Bridge the main character is in love with his niece, whom he raises as a daughter, but he can't even admit this to himself. - There are no actual cases on incest in Eugene O'Neil's Mourning Becomes Electra (note the name) but the female lead character and the male (who are siblings) have serious cases of Elektra and Oedipus complexes, respectively, leading to the murders of both their parents. - In Spring Awakening one of the boys is said to have had a wet dream about his mother, and also \|\|the characters of Martha and Ilse are/were both sexually abused by their fathers.\|\| - In The Marriage of Figaro (both the Mozart opera and the original Beaumarchais play), Marcellina is determined to make Figaro follow through on a contractual obligation to marry her. Until it's discovered that Figaro is her long-lost bastard child. - "Accidentally" implied (and, like everything, played for laughs) in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), when they combine all sixteen comedies into one. The Play: The pages' clothes get ripped off, revealing female genitalia. The Duke recognizes his daughter's. Everyone: ... - Some versions of the musical Pippin imply this with Fastrada and her son Lewis. - In Richard Wagner's Die Walküre, Wotan seems way too fond of his daughter Brünhilde. His wife Fricka calling Brünhilde "the bride of his desire" also doesn't help. - "Sie selbst war meines Wunsches schaffender Schoß" — "Herself was my wish's life-giving womb." - Accidentally suggested via Ambiguous Syntax in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, briefly alarming the protagonists. The Player: The old man thinks he's in love with his daughter. Rosencrantz: Good God. We're out of our depths here. The Player: No, no, no! He hasn't got a daughter! The old man thinks he's in love with his daughter. Rosencrantz: The old man is? The Player: Hamlet... in love... with the old man's daughter... the old man... thinks. Rosencrantz: Ah. - In Lizzie, the titular character is being raped by her father. It's implied it's happening to her older sister, Emma, as well. - The patron saints of this trope have to be Aleph and Hiroko of Shin Megami Tensei II. Not only do they play the exact role of Official Couple Kazuya and Yuka from the previous game, but they set out to "rebuild the world" at the end of the game, possibly with Adam and Eve in mind (well, they did just fight God). Bear in mind that Hiroko is Aleph's mother... - In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, The Truth takes umbrage at being called "motherfucker" by a gangbanger. "Firstly, you are a real buzz killer, amigo. And secondly, I never made love to my mother — She wouldn't . And thirdly..." - In Grand Theft Auto V, Trevor also reacts harshly to being called a "motherfucker" and starts rampages because of this. However, some of his missions imply it's true. "It's not legally fucking if you do not penetrate!" - Otacon reveals that he slept with his stepmother during a conversation in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. He was a teenager at the time, and it's implied that his stepmother was predatory. This was outright stated to be the reason why his father killed himself, cementing Otacon's Woobie status. - Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: - It's revealed that \|\|Therese was raped repeatedly by her father as a child, which is part of the reason why she has a split personality (the other part being she's a Malkavian.)\|\| - The player character can get this as well with the optional runaway backstory. It limits your social and seduction skills, but gives you great bonuses on hiding and staying quiet. - Hitman (2016): If you read into Silvio Caruso's family tape's song as being a reflection of his adolescence, the "There were candles burning as we made love" gets a whole lot more disturbing. - In Dragon's Dogma, it's possible for the Player Character to romance their adoptive father Chief Adaro. - The Elder Scrolls: - In Morrowind, the Mad Scientist Divayth Fyr created four Opposite Sex Clones who he variously refers to as either his "wives" or "daughters". - This is more of a fan reaction than anything that actually happens in the game, but for some reason, an alarming number of naughty Oblivion mods are targeted at Seed-Neeus and Dar-Ma, the mother-and-daughter Argonian team in Chorrol. (Some involve threesomes with the player character, some just have them directly go after each other, but most at least involve the two naked in the same room....) That, or when advertising more generic naughty mods (nudity mods, remodeled/textured female bodies, etc.,) Seed-Neeus and Dar-Ma seem to be the examples in the screenshots a disproportionate amount of the time. - Maven Black-Briar of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is head of a family that includes Hemming, Ingun, and Sibbi Black-Briar. Hemming is indisputably her son. He may mention in conversation that Ingun and Sibbi are his children; Maven is listed in the Creation Kit as their grandmother. However, Maven explicitly calls Ingun her "favorite daughter", and both Ingun and Sibbi refer to her as their mother. Maven has no husband; Hemming has no wife. It's not hard to do the math, especially since both kids sound like Borgia expys - Sibbi is in prison for a murder even his mother/grandmother found unnecessarily heinous (though more from the bad publicity than the act itself), while Ingun, the only remotely pleasant member of the family, is fascinated by alchemy and its more lethal applications. - Silent Hill: - \|\|Angela Orosco\|\| in Silent Hill 2 is revealed to have been raped and abused by her own father. \|\|She eventually killed him, which led to her running away to Silent Hill.\|\| - Some fans have actually shipped Heather, the heroine of Silent Hill 3, and her father in a combination of Wife Husbandry and MayDecember Romance. There are some mitigating circumstances, though the power dynamic can still make this one awfully disgusting. The fact that the opening song's lyrics, confirmed by Word of God as describing Heather's feelings about her father, use a lot of sexually charged metaphors certainly doesn't help matters any. The two were originally going to be named Humbert and Dolores in the original Silent Hill as a direct reference to Lolita, so the developers definitely wanted the subtext to be there. - Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, a sort-of remake of the original game, is a lot more forward with the subtext. This incarnation of Cheryl \|\|does indeed love her father. Very, very much. And this time, there's not even the mitigating circumstances anymore. She's his blood daughter, as far as we know.\|\| - In Clock Tower 3, Lord Burroughs is so obsessed with his daughter that he ignores his wife, murders his son-in-law, and abducts his daughter. Later, he transfers his obsession to his granddaughter, the heroine Alessa, who's the very image of her mother. She manages to stop him though. Also a case of Love Makes You Evil. - In the Princess Maker series, it is possible to make the girl marry her adopted father. (See Wife Husbandry.) They are not blood related and, some games let the age of the "father," be pretty low, so the age gap isn't big at all. - In Anime/Manga, a 15-year-old raising a 10-year-old is often used in those cases of "older sibling raising younger sibling(s) due to being orphans." Considering the "father" is a war hero (there are just as many young heroes as there as old in Anime/Manga), it "should" be easier. - In the second game... not only the ending is very hard to get (the daughter must have very low morals, to start), but it's frowned upon by the Gods and the townspeople. The Guardian Deity openly says they're very surprised that this is happening, and only (reluctantly) approve because they're not related by blood. - This trope is a significant component of the premise of the bishoujo game Ko-ko-ro... The protagonist, Souji Kuonji, is tormented by memories of being sexually assaulted by both his parents long after their deaths. - Warden Clement of House of the Dead: Overkill almost definitely had this relationship with his mother, transplanting her brain into the body of Varla Gunns and making out with her. In the end, \|\|after the main characters kill the giant mutant version of his mother, he insists on returning to the womb in order to undo his wrongs\|\|. Agent G then notes the irony of Cluster F-Bomb flinging Washington using Motherfucker all the time except with Clement, which he somehow relates into how deep down, Washington actually likes G as a friend. - In Ending E of the PS2 adventure game Shadow of Destiny, Eike Kusch, a de-aged immortal bishounen with recurring permanent amnesia, gets together and lives happily ever after with his biological daughter Dana, who was switched with another child as an infant in medieval Germany, and brought to the present day as a baby by the manipulative djinn Homunculus, in one hell of an insanely convoluted backstory. Neither of them apparently know they are actually blood-related, and it is unclear whether or not Eike still has eternal youth. - Characters in Medieval: Total War can have this as a surprisingly common trait, reducing their religious support if it's discovered. This can sometimes happen with rather unlikely characters, such as unmarried 15 year olds. Strangely, BrotherSister Incest never happens unless you specifically order it. - Crusader Kings II: - Can rarely happen in an event in which you can fall in love/impregnate a random adult courtier (below 45) in your court, and it doesn't check for blood relationship so it can be your daughter (or granddaughter even). If your character is lustful you can't say no. - It is also possible via cuckolding to if not caught later marry your own daughter when she comes of age. Since as far as everyone else knows, you're not related. - In the Old Gods expansion Zoroastrians were given the option of marrying close relatives, including children and parents, it gives a boost to vassal opinion as they view it as a holy marriage. Messalian Christians (treated as a heresy of Nestorianism) have a similar feature. Due to this, children born of "Divine Blood" marriages have five times less chance to acquire the Inbred trait as an Anti-Frustration Feature, though they are five more times likely to get the Lunatic trait. - In the dimension of Praetoria in City of Heroes, the evil Emperor "Tyrant" Cole, mirror of the main hero "Statesman", has his needs attended to by the villainess "Dominatrix"—his granddaughter. - As of a recent official Q&A for the Going Rogue expansion, this has been rather humorously averted. The devs of the game had actually failed to notice this implication when the Praetorians were featured originally, and several fans calling attention to it got a rather entertaining "oh, crap, we did not mean to do that" reaction from them. Content since has been revised to avoid any sort of implication along these lines. - The comic actually implied it a lot more directly while at the same time pointing out the familial connection. - Sariss in Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II was the daughter of the Dark Side cult leader Lord Cronal, who despised her over his Straw Nihilist ideology that made him see her as a tribute to creation rather than the destruction he idolized. As a result, he had her raped by his fellow cult members and often took part in it himself, making her almost as screwed up as he was and forcing Kyle Katarn to put her down. - Used as a path to immortality by the villain \|\|Croesus Verlac\|\| in the interactive fiction game Anchorhead — and continues in the family for nearly four centuries. - Since The Wolf Among Us features fairy tale characters in '80s New York, this was probably gonna happen at some point or another. But really, who expected the above-mentioned \|\|Donkeyskin\|\| to show up? - The Dark Parables installment The Final Cinderella reveals that the second girl who was designated a Cinderella (\|\|and was in fact the Cinderella who married the Frog Prince, as shown in the second game of the series\|\|) ran away from home because of Donkeyskin-type circumstances. - In Dreaming Mary it is strongly hinted that \|\|Mari's father (represented by Boaris) had been abusing and molesting her.\|\| - Implied in Mass Effect 2. Though Miranda's stated reason for running away from her father/creator was that he was an overbearing Control Freak, she occasionally hints at other problems in their relationship that she'd rather not discuss. - An odd indirect example can occur in Fire Emblem Fates. Nina has a personal skill called "Daydream," which grants her a Status Buff when she's adjacent to any two paired up men. This is not disabled for fathers and sons (such as Leo and Forrest, for example), meaning that Nina is fantasizing about this trope. - In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Mercedes's supports with \|\|Jeritza reveal that their (technically adopted in her case, birth in his) father intended to marry the former to produce more children. Suddenly, no one feels very sorry for him when Jeritza kills him on the spot.\|\| - This was part of the original conception of Summertime Saga, until Patreon objected to the direction the dating sim was taking; the Main Character is now renting a room in a house owned by a woman who is totally unrelated to him although she does look like she could be related when viewed from some angles, and is clearly old enough to be his mother. Amazing coincidence, what are the odds, eh? - In the controversial Rapelay, you can force the mother to have sex with her daughters, just as you can force any of them to have sex with you or the daughters to have sex with each other. - Okiku, Star Apprentice: Slightly referenced with an Sexual Euphemism-type Innocent Innuendo scene involving a son talking about his mother: Boy: Is it just me, or is mommy's tummy getting bigger? Okiku: It sounds like she had some fun. Boy: We played together just yesterday, but... Okiku: Uhhh, that wasn't exactly what I was talking about! Okiku: Oh, never mind, Don't worry about it. - Annabelle (RPG Maker): It is heavily indicated that Jason Sunray sexually abuses his daughter Annabelle. The versions of him appearing in her nightmares tell her that she will be 'his' in a creepily lustful manner. He outright declares near the end of the first game's remake that she will dance, dress, and strip for him. Exorcism also has Annabelle recount an experience where Jason was on top of her while she was sleeping. - As indicated by the title, Daughter for Dessert revolves around this. - Episode 7 of Umineko: When They Cry reveals that \|\|Kinzō had a child with an Italian woman named Beatrice, who died in the process. He then had the not so bright idea of naming the child after her, and since she grew up to look so much like her mother he convinced himself that his daughter was his lover reincarnated. The result was a Child by Rape, who would grow up to become the Big Bad of the first half of the story.\|\| - In Mystic Messenger, a flashback of Jumin's backstory heavily implies that when he was growing up, one of his stepmothers tried to sexually groom him. - Features into the backstory of Yaginuma and \|\|Shinji\|\| in Kara no Shoujo. The first's sister was raped by their father in an attempt to shield him, causing him to act like a jerk that you only get to see come down once. The latter was raped \|\|by his mother and accidentally killed her.\|\| - Long Live the Queen has a couple of examples. - A completely screwed-up example occurred when \|\|the Duke-Consort of Lillah seduced his stepson, the Earl of Io, which is part of what led to the boy going Ax-Crazy\|\|. - The \|\|seduced\|\| bit is putting it lightly considering that, judging by \|\|his oldest half-brother's age, Kevan was 14 at most when it started.\|\| - Conversely, an example that crosses over with BrotherSister Incest occurs in one ending, and is portrayed as completely benign. \|\|Elodie's lover Brin marries her father, and Elodie marries Brin's brother Banion, so Elodie is having an affair with her stepmother/stepsister. In this case, the relationship predates the marriages.\|\| - The entire Overflow universe (including School Days) exist under the shadow of Tomaru Sawagoe doing this constantly with his daughters, their daughters, their daughters' daughters, etc. - In Strip Battle Days 2, after defeating her in a rock, paper, scissors match, Makoto and his mother Moeko both admit to having feelings for each other and they have sex, which leads to her getting pregnant with his child/sibling. - Thwarted hard in DraKoi, in which the protagonist's loli mom (it's a long story) has decidedly non-parental designs on him, and is extremely frustrated when attempts to raise him for reverse-Wife Husbandry are spoiled by the arrival of his girlfriend. All of this is played for laughs. - Anime Toons: It is implied in Dragon Ball- Goten´s REAL Origin that Goten was born out of an incestuous relationship between Gohan and Chi-Chi. Both Goku and Chi-Chi denies it of course. - This is brought up in the Dorkly Originals sketch, Inbred Yoshi where the yellow inbred yoshi talks about how his mom is also his dad's mom. The main green yoshi is naturally disgusted and would rather take baby Mario to the next level himself than to leave him with the inbred Yoshi. - Otakebi: Kenji cheated on his wife Sayuri with his aunt. When the affair was exposed he was disowned by his family and he and Sayuri got a divorce. - Subverted in Tea, Biscuits and Incest where Makayla is impregnated by her father Chad but neither of them know he's the father because it was artificial insemination by sperm donor. But then played straight \|\|(so to speak) when Chad finds out that Jayden, with whom he was having an affair, is his long lost son and Makayla's twin brother And then Chad reveals that their mother is also his daughter.\|\| - Like other incest tropes, End Master's works feature parental incest frequently. - Eternal: \|\|Semra\|\| had a child with her father. Apparently this is not abnormal in svelk culture. - Repression: The main character ends up sleeping with his mother in certain paths. - Suzy's Strange Saga: Suzy \|\|sleeps with her son Anu in one epilogue\|\|. - Tales From The Basement: In one ending, the E-Bay escapist \|\|repopulates the earth with mutant children together with his mother after the nuclear apocalypse.\|\| - In The Guild this is played with, and depending on how literal you take the Hinjew warlock, possibly played straight. This overlaps with over protective parental action...with naked baths and breast feeding till you're eleven. Predictably, Codex and the rest pity Zaboo, a lot. - In The Nostalgia Critic's first commercial special, he riffs on a Does This Remind You of Anything? advert for a slide with an unfortunate name. When the mother slides down it, he shouts "Mom! Get off my wet banana! ...what would Dad say?" The joke is that if his (established to be very abusive) mother tried to be sexual with him, all he'd be freaked out by would be his dad's reaction. - Earlier, in Drop Dead Fred, he says, "Yeah, I remember the last time I laughed at my mom's cooch" in a sarcastic but oddly sad tone. - Heavily implied in Occupy Richie Rich, as one cover features Richie romanticizing his own mother. - It doesn't go anywhere but a joke, but in Dragonball Z Abridged, Bulma starts hitting on Future Trunks. Trunks doesn't take it well: - To be fair, Bulma didn't take it well either when she realized (three years later) what she had done. Bulma: Oh my god, I solicited my son for sex. - Future Bulma, however, is completely unsurprised that her past self hit on Trunks. Trunks: Before you found out I was your son, in the past, you... might have made a pass at me. Bulma: Well duh. Trunks: MOM! Bulma: Hey, it's not my fault your dad's genetics and mine got along like chocolate and peanut butter. - Justified in "Body Shifter Universe" due to Bizarre Alien Reproduction. Shifters reproduce by mitosis, the shifter parent is replaced by two children. The offspring shifters have no problem with mating with their other parent.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentalIncest
Paper-Bag Popping - TV Tropes One character finds that his friend is asleep, so he tries various ways to wake him up, but nothing works. Finally, he gets the idea to blow up a paper bag then pop it while standing by his sleeping friend. POP! The paper bag is popped and the sleeping character is wide awake. A common gag on cartoons is for one character to set up explosives to destroy another character and hide at a safe distance, then for the second character to sneak up from behind and pop a paper bag so the first character will think the explosives went off and run out, just in time for the explosives to go off in their face. Put more simply, this is a method to either wake up a sleeping character or to surprise another character, which may culminate in Surprise Jump. There are also some cases where instead of just using a paper bag, a character will blow up a balloon and pop it with a needle, but it still has the same effect. Compare Banging Pots and Pans ## Examples: - In Episode 4 of the Little Lulu anime, Tubby does this after eating the peanuts that were in the paper bag that he was given. One of the examples that do not involve waking up someone. - There was an Archie Comics story where Archie is being hounded by Mr. Weatherbee, because of the former's sleeping in class, prompting the latter to send him to his office to wait for him. When Mr. Weatherbee gets to his office, he finds Archie sleeping at his desk, which prompts him to blow up a paper bag while stating that everyone has a weakness, then pops it, which surprises Archie so much. At the end, Mr. Weatherbee then says, "That's my only weakness, I'm too softhearted." - Batman: Black and White: In the comedic "Batsman: Swarming Scourge of the Underworld", Batsman sneaks up behind Commissioner Gordon and pops a paper bag, in a spoof of Batman's traditional Stealth Hi/Bye. - In one Baxter Basics strip in Viz, Baxter loses his seat in a general election, and his plan to be re-elected involves murdering an elderly Tory MP by popping a paper bag behind him to cause a heart attack and getting selected for his safe Tory seat in the by-election. - The balloon version is used in The Emperor's New Groove. When Kuzco finds himself surrounded by sleeping jaguars, Bucky the squirrel, as payback for how Kuzco treated him earlier, blows up a balloon, bends it in the form of a llama, and pops it. The pop doesn't wake up the jaguars... but Kuzco laughing at Bucky does. - My Little Pony: Equestria Girls Friendship Games: Snips and Snails are shown in a still of the closing credits about to wake up Lyra and Bon Bon, sleeping in the library, by popping a blown paper bag. - In the Doctor Who serial "Battlefield", the Doctor pops a bag to wake Ancelyn and Bambera from their Sleep Cute. - Winston Churchill does this in a Horrible Histories sketch, as his aides keep falling asleep due to how late he's having them work. Neither of them is particularly amused by this, given this takes place during the Blitz. - iCarly: In the episode "iBeat the Heat", Sam does this to get everyone's attention when Carly is giving a speech that no-one will listen to at first. - Mr. Bean once tries to cheer up a kid on a plane by blowing up an airsickness bag and popping it to wake a sleeping passenger. While he tries in vain to blow up the bag, the kid gets sick and throws up in his bag. Bean sees the full bag, thinks the kid blew it up for him, and pops it. Fortunately the episode ends before we see the results. The gag was reused on Bean, only this time we see Bean's reaction as the bag pops offscreen, along with some of the vomit as it splashes out. - Oddball webtoon Krentz and the Hand of Shame has an instance of this. In this case, it doesn't work — largely because the target is in a coma rather than merely being asleep. - Grrl Power: A flashback panel shows that a younger Maxima discovered her power to shoot blasts of energy with her hand when her brother woke her up by popping a paper bag as a joke, resulting in a large, burning hole in the wall of their house. - In Narbonic, when Artie finally figures out how to \|\|stay in either human or gerbil form\|\| with zen meditation, Mell tests him in this way. - In the Donald Duck cartoon Dragon Around, Donald tries to blow up Chip and Dale's tree with dynamite, but they put the sticks out and trick Donald by popping a bag to simulate an explosion. - In the Garfield and Friends episode "Sound Judgment", Garfield tries to do this to Nermal who is asleep in his bed, but once he gets the paper bag blown up and pops it, there is no sound, because the sound effects editor had apparently quit. Odie is then hired to do the sound effects, with catastrophic results, as the popping sound of the paper bag is then replaced with the sound of a train whistle. - Mr. Bogus: - In the claymation short shown after the third and final act of the episode "Bookstore Bogus", Bogus tries to wake up a sleeping doll without any success, which ends when he pops a blown-up paper bag, with the doll still asleep! - Bogus does this to Ratty and Mole with a balloon in the episode "Bad Luck Bogus", while they were preparing a potion to use on him. The ensuing popping of the balloon surprises Ratty and Mole, culminating in a Surprise Jump from Mole who then lands in the potion. Hilarity Ensues afterwards when the effects of the potion cause Mole to have a convulsive reaction and also causes him to rocket all around the attic. - Peter O'Toole told a hilariously awful story of his childhood that involved this. Mr. O'Toole recalls walking into a room at age 3 or 4. His parents, obviously in their cups, are trying to put up the family Christmas tree. "Is Father Christmas coming?" he demands. Gales of laughter. Marching up to his father, he repeats: "Is Father Christmas coming?" Whereupon his father picks up a brown paper bag and leaves the room. There's a bang. The door opens, and Pat O'Toole returns. "He stands above me," Mr. O'Toole writes, "and looks solemnly down at me before pronouncing very clearly: 'Father Christmas has just shot himself. '"	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PaperBagPopping
Parental Obliviousness - TV Tropes "Open your eyes, Mom! What do you think has been going on for the past two years? The fights, the weird occurrences. How many times have you washed blood out of my clothing, and you still haven't figured it out?" Parental Obliviousness would be best described as a subtrope of Adults Are Useless. The kid is either trying to tell the parent something or trying to hide something, but the parent misses this completely, as well as other significant cues about their child's state of mind or personality. Sometimes the parents are oblivious because there's something going on and the parent is a Muggle who can't know because s/he isn't Secret-Keeper. Or perhaps the Extra-Strength Masquerade seems to be hitting them especially hard. Sometimes it's just a mundane reason for the cluelessness, like work causing mom or dad to be absent too much. Occasionally, it's a case of the parent thinking too much and not being able to see the forest for the trees; or the parent not wanting to see and going deep into denial. And sometimes the parent is actively contriving to not know something they consider brain breaking. Denial is handy to maintain obliviousness. Usually the trope is played for comedic effect, and often in animation to allow child or teenage characters to go off adventuring without their parents knowing and freaking out about it. (The alternative being the parents not being there.) There's often a scene where the kids are in trouble and the parents finally find out and ask why did the kids not come to them about it. To that, the parents are always stunned to hear that their own children fear their reaction more than the trouble itself and cannot understand how their role in family discipline made them an object of fear that helped allow the problem to escalate into a crisis. The flip side is Open-Minded Parent, where they figure out what their kid is up to... And seem strangely untroubled by it. Compare and contrast with Mama Bear, who knows what's happening in her child's life, and nothing will hurt her child. Then there's the Reasonable Authority Figure, who may not believe everything they hear, but will invariably hear them out and humor them. Parental Obliviousness is often required for a Don't Tell Mama or Batman in My Basement situation to work, or at least helps it along. This trope has an older, more senile relative in Grandparental Obliviousness. ## Examples: - Sandra in A Cruel God Reigns is totally oblivious to the fact that her perfect new husband is \|\|beating and raping her teenaged son nearly every night.\|\| However, we find out later that \|\|she apparently knew all along and chose to ignore it. Jeremy finds out when he reads her diary, resulting in a massive Freak Out and eventual suicide\|\|. - Ichigo's dad in Bleach completely fails to notice the shinigami living in Ichigo's closet, his frequent and lengthy disappearances, or, in the anime filler arcs, as many as four sentient stuffed animals in his room. \|\|Actually a subversion; Isshin is a Captain-level shinigami in his own right and knew exactly what his son was getting up to.\|\| - Rea Amano in Future Diary is largely oblivious to Yuno's psychotic behavior and approves of Yuno as a potential bride for her son Yukiteru. - Though in Rea's defense, Yuno can fool pretty much anyone who doesn't know her that well. As everyone else just sees her as a model student and a Genki Girl. - Issei's parents in High School D×D were explicitly shown to be placated by Rias' magic the first time he was caught naked in bed with her, though their fondness for multiple female housemates of his seems to come from cheerfully supporting their son's Harem Seeker ways. It blatantly crosses over into this trope when Issei gets another three female housemates at once without complaint, and when the family house is renovated into a six-story mansion overnight to accommodate everyone (in opulence at that), they awake the next morning and happily remark how nice it is to have the extra living space. - \|\|When the charade is eventually open, it becomes obvious that now matter how weird things got, since it was making their son happy, they simply didn't care.\|\| - Invoked in Higurashi: When They Cry, as Keiichi seems to go out of his way to make sure his parents are oblivious to all the freaky stuff that's going on. - Fumiko Kobayashi in Kemeko Deluxe! has the general signs of this trope, but they're only compounded by her being a mangaka and regularly pulling all-nighters, meaning she's completely unaware of things such as a destructive battle going on in the room right above her, a rocket sticking out of the roof of her house, and the fact that... whatever Kemeko is has suddenly moved into their house. - March Comes in Like a Lion: Kouda has shown no signs of realizing how badly his biased and shogi-centered upbringing has damaged his three children emotionally. At least, as far as Rei's narration is capable of showing the readers. - Haruka's Mom from Noein may be the queen of this trope. She failed to notice all the weird things going on around her (like an arm hanging from the ceiling in front of her face). The only thing that snapped her out of this was seeing her house disappear in front of her. - In Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, the Kid Heroes manage to keep their parents in the dark to an improbable degree. They never catch their children leaving home in the middle of the night. They never get wind of the weird incidents going on at school. (Laser-Guided Amnesia helps.) There's always a convenient excuse for times when the kids seem upset or depressed. - Pokémon: From the time Butch and Cassidy appeared for the second time to the moment it evolved, Ash, Misty, and Brock had no idea baby Togepi knew the Metronome attack that had saved itself and the team on a few occasions. Tracey subverts this by questioning if Togepi really did save them once. - Nana Sawada in Reborn2004 seems to be unaware of the fact that both her husband and her son are part of the Mafia. - Amu Hinamori's parents in Shugo Chara! buy into Amu's "cool and spicy" persona as much as her classmates do, making them unaware of how shy she really is. And, oh yeah... they don't know about the whole Guardian Chara/Humpty Lock/Embryo situation, either. - They also don't realize that \|\|Ikuto is staying in her room for a few days. Her mum thinks it might be cat so she suspects something. I guess she was right in a way...\|\| - Sword Art Online: In addition to simply being a Horrible Judge of Character in regards to Sugou Nobuyuki, whom he had set Asuna up with in an Arranged Marriage, Asuna's father Shouzou had absolutely no idea that Asuna completely despised Sugou even before she was trapped in SAO for two years and the events of the Fairy Dance arc. - Batman: - Depending on who's writing him, during Dick Grayson's formative years, Bruce Wayne was so absorbed in the mission that he was completely unaware of Dick's neglected emotional needs unless Alfred pointed it out. - Likewise, Commissioner Gordon wavers between being totally clueless his daughter was Batgirl, or knowing the whole time and just keeping it a secret. - Robin (1993): It takes a ridiculously long time for Tim Drake's father to find out he's Robin, especially considering that at one point Tim got sent on an unplanned extended trip in space, keeps busy working in Gotham and Bludhaven and on Young Justice and later the Teen Titans, and has traveled all over the world for training and to chase down leads. It helps that Jack was never really involved with his son's life even before Tim took on the role of Robin. - In Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Carrie Kelly's parents completely fail to notice that their daughter is sneaking out to become Robin, because they are rather ambiguous drug users. Theyre so bad that one point, they forget they even have a child. - Edge of Spider-Verse (2022): Queen Mysteria is determined to do whatever it takes to protect her daughter, but is so far off the deep end she fails to notice the mysterious young woman trying to stop her calling her "mom" during their fight. - The Flash: Wally West's biological parents Mary & Rudy West fall into this category, especially during Mark Waid's run. This is why he feels closer to Iris and Barry later on his life. - Just before Green Arrow's ward Speedy is revealed to be a junkie, he gives an explanation of why someone would turn to drugs in which he stops just short of saying "And by someone, I mean me." GA misses the point entirely. - Runaways: More a case of parental-figure obliviousness, Molly's parents keep dismissing her when she tries to tell them she has superpowers (they think she wants The Talk). - In Teen Titans, Eddie Bloomberg's parents largely ignored him, distracted by their own issues, so he turned to his Aunt Marlene and her client Daniel Cassidy, who ended up becoming Blue Devil. - In Cinderjuice, both Lydia and Beetlejuice comment on the fact that Charles and Delia are often profoundly guilty of this. It makes Charles attempting to be a Boyfriend-Blocking Dad all the more amusing to Beetlejuice. - In If Them's the Rules Harry doesn't realize that Tom is simply hiding his sociopathic tendencies and taking him away from his previous environment. - Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail: Chloe's father, Professor Cerise, is completely oblivious to all the reasons why his daughter dislikes Pokémon. Namely, the fact that his research takes up so much of his time and attention, the fact that he has forced her to work as his assistant after school, and the general assumption that she will follow in his footsteps despite her lacking interest. Add in the fact that he only pays attention to her when Pokémon are involved, and you have one of the biggest factors that drove her away from home and onto the Infinity Train. - Played for Drama in Invisible Sun. Dexter's parents are oblivious to the point of Parental Neglect. They ignore him and don't take him seriously. Even when he was a baby, DeeDee acted more a parent to her little brother than their actual parents did. This leads to the Utoniums becoming Dexter's Family of Choice. - Neon Genesis Evangelion: - Advice and Trust: Shinji and Asuka got together and after a short while started sleeping together... and Misato kept thinking they were stuck on the Belligerent Sexual Tension phase. When they finally came clean about their relationship several months later, Misato thought they were pulling a prank on her because she did not believe they could get together without her noticing anything (to be fair, they deceived nearly everybody). - Ghosts of Evangelion: Misato was completely oblivious to her wards' feelings and their increasing mental and emotional instability. As a result of it, they spent their whole lives trying to get over their issues. - In Last Child of Krypton, Misato had no idea what her young ward and assistant was Superman. She only found out when another person told her. - In Neon Genesis Evangelion: Genocide, Misato was pretty oblivious to her wards complicated and quickly-changing relationship... again. Noticing a pattern here? - In Once More with Feeling: - Even though Shinji acts strangely and knows things he shouldnt know, Misato doesnt suspect that hes a time-traveller. - Gendo knows his son isnt at all what he was expecting, and Ritsuko constantly brings to his attention that Shinji keeps doing things that make no sense, but Gendo keeps thinking it doesnt merit his attention. - In The Second Try, this time, Shinji and Asuka are both time travelers and successfully hide that fact from Misato for months. Plus the fact that that, you guessed it, they're dating. - In Thousand Shinji, Shinji and Asuka evolved, transformed, gained new powers, and also were making out the whole time... and Misato never noticed. Once again. Apparently, fanon thinks Misato is the most oblivious person on the face of the Earth. - In Kyon: Big Damn Hero, Kyon's parents are told, point-blank, that their son stood in for an schoolmate's fully trained bodyguard with years of experience who got injured in his job. They don't appear to find anything wrong with this, nor do they wonder why the schoolmate needs protection or how their son got the skills to stand in for the bodyguard without being injured himself. - Zigzagged in Office Politics. Though it never really comes up in conversation "L supposes... Chief Yagami is smart enough to know that his son was not always found nude in the company of L because they were planning on being completely heterosexual with one another." - Rosario Vampire: Brightest Darkness Act III: Issa was completely oblivious to the fact that Akua and Kahlua had joined Fairy Tale right under his nose, even after they steal the Chrono Displacement spell from his secret archive for the organization's use; said archive was a family secret that only Issa and his daughters knew about, so there was no other way Fairy Tale could possibly have known about it, making it even more ludicrous that he didn't suspect anything. - Shadow of the Dragon: As revealed in chapter 19, Himiko Satome apparently had no idea just how much of a monster her son was (said son being a vicious bully and Serial Rapist who has been causing trouble at the school for a ''very long time) until after she discovers he's been arrested for trying to rape Tomoyo. Of course, this is at least in part because she never returned any of the school's calls or showed up at any parent-teacher conferences. - Averted in Shadows over Meridian, where Will's mother Susan suspects her daughter of hiding things from her, but she's not confronting her about it for fear of being overbearing. - In one scene of Big Hero 6 it's painfully obvious that Hiro is trying to hide something, yet Aunt Cass doesn't notice at all. CinemaSins called this out: "Aunt Cass apparently has never seen anyone act suspicious before." - The Iron Giant: Hogarth's mother does not seem to have the faintest clue that Hogarth unabashedly despises Kent Mansley, and has been desperate to avoid him since he moved in. She goes so far to suggest Hogarth take Mansley around and show him the sights. Whether this is true obliviousness or just Hogarth's mother wanting her son to accept they have to rent the spare room for money is not completely obvious. She only picks up a dislike for Kent when he eventually calls the army on her son and nearly gets the town nuked. - The lead's parents in Away We Go (one of whom is Mrs. McAllister) apparently don't consider their son's girlfriend being pregnant and living in a ramshackle house a enough good reason to postpone an overseas vacation and let them use their house. Most of the other parents the young couple encounter aren't much better: "Can we talk like this in front of your kid?" "Pfft, it's all white noise to him, see: Brian. ''Brian''. Brian! Brian!!" (the kid is playing a handheld game, but not wearing earphones nor are the usual sound effects heard.) - Lydia has to endure this in Beetlejuice; among other examples, her father doesn't seem to understand that his daughter does not care for her stepmother and doesn't appreciate his insisting on calling her "your mother." It's not hard to understand why she eventually latches onto the Maitlands as Parental Substitutes, although by the end of the film both her father and stepmother do seem to have improved at least a little. - The Pin's mother in Brick is apparently unaware that her son is a vicious drug lord, despite most of the deals and scheming going on in her basement. She even starts serving drinks to the members of a rival crime family during what she assumes is a friendly get-together. - In The Hairy Bird, Tinka's mom, while talking to her, is not even paying attention to what Tinka is doing, and doesn't even notice her \|\|running off with Snake\|\| at the end. Abby's parents are also oblivious to their daughter in their quest to institute a coed merger. - Home Alone: The McAllisters don't realize Kevin has been left behind until their airplane is already in the air. Granted, they were all in a rush so that they wouldn't miss their flight, but it also makes them look a bit foolish for not remembering about Kevin. - In Irreconcilable Differences, Lucy has no idea where her daughter Casey is most of the time. She is surprised to hear that Casey spends most of her time at the housekeeper Maria's house. - The Last Starfighter: Alex Rogan's mother says exactly the wrong thing to her son who is dreading the idea of life never going further away than the trailer park he's grown up in... and doesn't seem to know why that upsets him. - Played for laughs in Moving Violations, in which a teamster and overprotective father is apparently unaware his 15-year-old daughter is a law-breaking punk who poses as an adult and sleeps around. Then again, she's apparently been deliberately deceiving him since she was 12. - In Mystery Men, Invisible Boy is implied to have gotten started on his particular super power by this trope. When he announces that he's going to his room with three strange men, his father doesn't even look up from the television. - Implied in Mystery Team, although they may just be happy that their kids are spending time with more people than just each other. - The Ring: Aidan knows not to help Samara, but his mother is horrified when he flat out tells her she wasn't supposed to help her, even though she knows her child is psychic. Part of that was Aidan's fault, since he didn't tell his mother anything helpful about Samara. His mother did precisely what nearly anybody in her position would have done: give Samara's body a proper burial. - The clueless doofy dad in the tweener comedy Sleepover qualifies enough that he let four teenage girls be out of the house all night without ever noticing. - Somewhere: After Johnny watches his daughter at ice skating practice, he asks her when did she learn to skate, to which she responds she's been skating for the past three years. When she shows up at his doorstep as a surprise, he asks her why she isnt at school, and she replies, Its Sunday. - The parents of the main character in Time Bandits are completely oblivious to the fact that their young son is traveling extensively through time with a group of dwarf criminals. - Artemis Fowl: The title character's mother has no idea he's a criminal mastermind who consorts with faeries. His father kind of suspects the criminal mastermind part, but knows nothing about the faerie part. - The Autumn Throne: Partially subverted with Isabel de Warenne. Although normally an observant and protective mother, she fails to immediately notice her teenage daughters pregnancy. Somewhat justified by the fact that the childs father is Isabels equally teenage nephew-by-marriage, Prince John (son of Henry Plantagenet and Eleanor Of Aquitaine and villain of many modern Robin Hood adaptations), who had resided in her own household for several years. - Bat Pat: The parents of the 3 main child characters are completely unaware of the many supernatural adventures their Free-Range Children get into. - The Candy Shop War: Takes this past its logical extreme (though this time magic is the cause of the obliviousness). At one point an enchanted wooden Indian is attacking the main character and his father, who is watching, tells him he's only dreaming and needs to get back to bed! - Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Susan seems to be completely unaware of modern teenage behavior. One notable example in Rodrick Rules is that she thinks that the other students at Greg's school would agree that walking into the ladies bathroom at the retirement home by accident was an honest mistake and they'll let him off easy. - Ender's Game: The Wiggin children plan and carry out a plan to take over the world under their parents' noses. Subverted in the sequel Shadow of the Hegemon, which reveals that the parents let them go on with their "secret" online politicking partly because they are open-minded and partly because they know what the kids are doing and agree, or at least respect that the kids know what they are doing. In fact, when Peter finally learns that his parents have known all along that he is Locke, his father chides him, asking him where he thought his brilliant mind came from if not from his parents? - Fablehaven: Even magic can't get the parents to see what's happening around them. - Flora Segunda: Buck is completely unaware of the shenanigans which Flora gets up to (mainly because being Commanding General of the Califan Army takes up so much of her time). Hotspur is a bit more on the ball though. - The Great Brain Reforms: Tom endangers himself and two other boys by sailing his raft in very promising flood conditions. It's not until his brother explains everything that their parents learn that Tom, the boy who is always involved in some money-making scheme and once charged his friends to witness the digging of a cesspool, has been charging for these excursions. You'd think their father would have suspected something when he inspected the raft that Tom told him he was building. - Harry Potter: By the fifth novel, Petunia Dursley is completely oblivious to the fact that her little "Duddykins" has become a smoking bully that runs with a group of other malcontents, and thinks he just goes to a friend's house to have dinner every day. She also somehow overlooks him gradually turning into a miniature humpback whale (not literally) over the previous 15 years. - This trope is pretty much the Dursleys' entire parenting strategy, at least when it comes to Dudley. When he gets bad grades in school, Petunia insists he's a gifted boy and his teachers don't understand him. When Dumbledore comments on the horrid way they've mistreated Dudley (i.e. letting him grow up to be a spoiled bully), Vernon and Petunia are both bewildered. - The Hunger Games: After her husband was killed in a coal mine explosion, Mrs. Everdeen mentally checked out for months while her two daughters slowly starved and nearly died. Theoretically justified, as she was suffering from paralyzing grief, but it created a deep rift between Katniss Everdeen and her mother that took years to even begin mending. - Hush, Hush, Nora's mother seems blissfully unaware that her daughter is being stalked and nearly murdered by multiple parties. This reaches dizzying heights of stupidity when one of said parties visits Nora in the morning, grabs and shakes her, and shouts that he won't let her go until she does what he wants. Nora's mother walks in on the middle of this and is only mildly concerned, buying that he just wanted to copy Nora's homework, and not pursuing the issue at all when Nora brushes it off (ignoring that Nora collapses on the ground and nearly cries after he leaves). - Kadingir: Ishtar's parents are a pair of happy bohemian artists who live and breath their craft, and fail to notice most of the bizarre adventures their children get into. To name but a few: their daughter being spirited away into another dimension; their son fighting against and later making friends with an eight-inch tiger-man; a huge laboratory in their own basement; one of their guests being a giant chicken; two different demonic teddy bears roaming the corridors; a squadron of The Men in Black invading their home; and an increasing number of packages that may very well come from a different planet. - The Lost Thing: The narrator has to point out to his parents that it's even in the room, despite the fact that it's bright red and HUGE. - My Sister, the Serial Killer: Ayoola and Koredes mother has no idea that the former has murdered three of her boyfriends or that the latter covers up for her. - Not Now, Bernard: This horribly depressing children's book is the epitome of the trope. Bernard sees a monster in the garden. He tells various adults, including his parents. They all say, "Not now, Bernard." The monster eats him. The monster goes inside. The parents say, "Not now, Bernard." The end. It's every child's nightmare. Then the story's ending turns hilarious. The parents are so oblivious that they actually mistake the monster for their son and the monster is so utterly confused by the turn of events that he just sort of goes along for the ride. The look on his face at the end after they tuck him into bed is priceless. - Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain: Despite both being world renowned super-geniuses, neither of Penny's parents connect her and her friends to The Inscrutable Machine. The protagonist's realization that they literally cannot make what she considers the obvious connection (because they're laser-focused on dealing with the potential threat her alter-ego ostensibly poses to her real identity) is actually a major plot point that shifts her behavior substantially. - Race to the Sun: Nizhoni and her younger brother Mac are brought up by their father. And he is never there for them, for their school plays or matches. Nizhoni is positively surprised when he manages to come and pick her up from school after her sports injury—but then, in the car, he is constantly talking on his phone or texting, anyway. And he never seems to notice that Mac is constantly bullied, even when he sports a black eye. - Septimus Heap: Sarah Heap refuses to believe that \|\|her eldest son Simon Heap has turned evil\|\| in Flyte. - Skulduggery Pleasant: Valkyrie's parents are completely oblivious to their daughter leading a whole double life. This is explained by her using a magical Reflection that takes her place at school and home whenever she needs to be away (which seems to be most of the time), and by Valkyrie managing to lie convincingly whenever the parents do notice there's something odd going on. - Snow Crash: Y.T.'s mother is apparently quite unaware how dangerous her daughter's part-time job as a Kourier actually is. - Worm: Danny Hebert is oblivious to his teenage daughter's career as a rising supervillain in Brockton Bay, first because he feels the need to give her space after her mother's death and later because she runs away to keep him from finding out. By the time he discovers something's wrong, it's far too late. - Arrested Development: Tobias, Lindsay, and Michael have no idea that not only is Maeby \|\|a movie studio executive\|\|, but also that George-Michael and Maeby \|\|not only have crushes on each other, but are married.\|\| - Batman (1966): Justified, as Barbara Gordon has pixie-cut brown hair and uses a red wig as Batgirl. - Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Buffy's mom, for the first couple of seasons at least, was incredibly clueless. When the truth finally came out in the season 2 finale, Buffy even called her on it, asking her if she'd ever wondered where all the blood she'd had to wash out of Buffy's clothes got there. Oddly enough, the backstory give a perfect reason she wouldn't notice: Buffy was thought to be a troubled kid (she burned down her last school's gym). - There's Willow's mom, who seemed to be only around when it was inconvenient for her daughter. She had only three appearances over the course of the series, and only one of them in person. Any parenting knowledge is cited from what sound like psychology textbooks, and it took her months to notice her daughter had gotten a haircut. - Game of Thrones: Tywin Lannister is practically a modern flagship for the trope, as he never realized that his twin children had been conducting an incestuous affair for the better part of 20 years. Partially justified in-universe, as he spent much of their lives away from home on political duties (and the siblings actively worked to keep things on the DL), but he also had a fanatical obsession with preserving the legacy of his family name - rather than paying any real attention to the actual members of that family. This led to a denial so deep that even when his daughter Cersei threw the truth in his face, he still didn't believe it. - H₂O: Just Add Water: None of the girls' parents are aware that their daughters are mermaids. In fact, some of the other kids' parents seem to be suspecting something, while the parents themselves are clueless. - Heroes: Crazy-Prepared HRG is prepared for everything except the fact that forbidding Claire from going to the homecoming dance means, as a teenager, she's going to defy him and go anyway; even if he did have a really good reason (that, admittedly, he did not bother even hinting at). - In contrast, Claire's mother had no idea at the time that Claire is superpowered (or that HRG is a Badass Normal hero-hunter), but immediately recognizes that Claire is going to sneak out, and even runs interference for her. - And Niki, who has powers of her own, knows her son Micah is gifted, but for a while there, she didn't seem to know how gifted. - The Petrellis have a major, debilitating case of this, to the point that Angela is still dismissing Peter's capacity to accomplish anything after he's rewritten the course of history right in front of her four times. When he comes back from the future in full god mode in season three, she essentially pats him condescendingly on the head and then goes back to putting all her eggs in the Sylar basket. Even when he casually blasts apart and overrides her plans three times in two episodes, she still can't take him or his power seriously. - More generally, the Petrellis constantly play for relatively minor political influence (they just want to Kennedy their way into a few elections, no actual shadow-government stuff involved) while ignoring the very real physical conflict and actual blood-shedding wars that the brothers (especially Peter) are usually involved with. - Schitt's Creek: Johnny and Moira were completely oblivious to their daughter Alexis's wild adventures including run-ins with Thai drug lords, Saudia Arabian princes and at least once romance with a famous soccer player. They didn't even realize she had dropped out of her posh Swiss boarding school, and they attended her graduation. - The Secret World of Alex Mack: Lampshaded in the series finale. Alex is trapped in a cell even her powers can't get her out of, and her parents are kidnapped by the Big Bad and stuck in the cell outside Alex's prison. Alex finally has to admit that she and her sister have been lying to them and hiding her powers for four years. Alex's parents blow a fuse, and her mom even says, "We must be the most oblivious parents ever!" To be fair, they're good parents and Alex happens to have powers well suited to sneaking around and avoiding being spotted. - Stranger Things: Most parents (beside Joyce) are oblivious to the supernatural going-ons related to the Upside Down, but Ted and Karen Wheeler take the cake. Not only do they fail to realize that their daughter Nancy is hunting a monster from an Alternate Dimension, but even worse is that their son Mike successfully hid his super powered girlfriend Eleven in their basement for nearly a week. The only reason Ted and Karen found out about Eleven at all is because the Mad Scientist hunting her when she Escaped from the Lab thought it was a better idea to talk to them to see what they know (which is absolutely nothing) rather than let his borderline insane underling kill them when they start annoying her. At one point, Nancy allows Steve and later Jonathan to spend the night in her room, meaning that both Wheeler children are simultaneously hiding people in the house, and their parents are none the wiser about any of it. To her credit, Karen is at least trying to have a relationship with her children, and just assumes that Mike and Nancy's odd behavior is due to the disappearances of their respective best friends (which isn't entirely inaccurate, even if she hasn't noticed the supernatural side of the story). Ted, however, is just completely checked out on everything regarding his children. - The Twilight Zone (1985): In "The Uncle Devil Show," Joey's parents are entirely oblivious to him using the spells that he has learned from his Tim Ferret and Friends video to change the world around him, including giving them the heads of a lizard and a wolf. - The X-Files: Reversed in one episode ( Lord of the Flies, season 8?) when the mother keeps trying to tell her son something. It turns out she was not an original member of Pink Floyd... and like the son \|\|is a half-fly monster.\|\| - The Serendipity Singers' "Beans in your Ears" has a father issuing a grave warning to his children about doing exactly what is mentioned in the song title. It is obvious from the children's reply that they have no intention of doing anything so bizarre (even giving perfectly sensible reasons), but the end of the song reveals the parent has not listened to a word. - Tommy has a rather dark take on this trope. Tommy's parents offer only token concern before leaving their deaf, dumb and blind son with a drunken rapist. Or his sadistic cousin. Do you think it's all right / To leave the boy with Uncle Ernie? / Do you think it's all right? / He's had a few too many. / Do you think it's all right? / Yes, I think it's all right. - In Chrono Trigger, Crono can bring home a talking frog, the ancient master of evil that tried to destroy the kingdom, the princess, a cavewoman, and a robot from the future in a time-traveling jet and his mom will only get slightly surprised. Not to mention the fact that she doesn't seem to notice or care that you were away for several days while being held in the castle for execution... - Clive Barker's Undying: Joseph Covenant has no idea what has befallen his children until Jeremiah finally breaks down and confesses. Even though he tries hard to find some way to break the curse, he ultimately fails. - Both subverted and played straight in the Mega Man Battle Network series. Dr. Hikari knows quite well that \|\|both his twin sons\|\| are going to save the world, though Mrs. Hikari tends to be more oblivious. - Same for Mega Man Star Force. Dr. Hoshikawa practically set up his son to save the world, while Mrs. Hoshikawa doesn't even have any idea her son is Rockman / Mega Man. - Persona 4 has you living with your uncle. Who is a police detective. Investigating the same incidents that you're resolving. Notably, it averts this trope, \|\|as your uncle suspects you less than two months into the game.\|\| - The protagonist of Daughter for Dessert is unaware of Amanda trying to get his attention in a sexual way. Justified for obvious reasons. - In Double Homework, Laurens mom comes home early when the protagonist and Lauren are busy in the bedroom. Laurens mom has a whole conversation with her daughter without suspecting a thing. - Riley's dad in Angel Moxie takes this to a surreal degree, to the point that the girls can openly discuss a battle plan in front of him and he assumes they are discussing a surprise party. - Duchess Lettie from A Magical Roommate actively deludes herself about practically everything, attempting to retreat into the fantasy world in which she believes magic users live. Aylia, her elder daughter, finally stuck it to her when she legally became an adult by out and out walking away from her plans... and she STILL thought she could maintain some level of control! - Although Miranda's father in But I'm a Cat Person is one of the world's foremost Being researchers, it doesn't take much effort to convince him that her Being is an ordinary human boyfriend. - In Cobweb and Stripes, Charles and Delia Deetz are just as guilty of this as they were in the movie. Charles does at least make some small effort, and clearly loves his daughter even if he doesn't understand her, but Delia is a lost cause. - Bruno's parents in Kevin & Kell. They were so caught up in watching TV that they didn't even realize Bruno (a carnivorous wolf) became a herbivore—or that they gave permission for him to have stomach implant (effectively diet reassignment) surgery. - They've been seen twice, and both times they were planted in front of their TV. The implication is that they are highly detached from Bruno. They may not even be aware of his girlfriend, Corrie. - Jodie's mother in Loserz, as seen here. - In Stomp!, Stomp and Chomp's parents don't believe their adventures are real. They do seem concerned that their uncle is a bad influence, though. - This trope is deconstructed in Funny Business. The protagonist's parents are completely unaware that she is a Reality Warper, because \|\|she herself is using her powers to prevent them from ever finding out, fearing their reaction. When they finally do learn of this, they take the revelation surprisingly well.\|\| - In the first 'Jade' novel of the Whateley Universe, Jade's foster parents not only miss that Jade has superpowers (mild though they may be), that Jade is transgender, that the 'friend' who doesn't want to come to the house is actually a pile of clothing animated by Jade's powers, that Jade is arranging on her own to go to Superhero School Whateley Academy on a scholarship, but also that Jade has to leave to get tested for admittance to the school. - And then of course there's the end of "Christmas Elves," where Fey tells her mother more or less exactly what a mess they got themselves into . . . and Fey's mom just assumes she was trying out for a TV role. This despite everything Fey has told her mom about her adventures thus far. - Granted, she did know that Fey was meeting with a big-name Hollywood producer. Who happened to be in league with a supervillainess at the time. And really, if you knew that part, and then your daughter and her little friend told you they were kidnapped and murdered (yes, a girl stands there and says she was murdered) and had to blow up an entire Syndicate base to escape, wouldn't you think it was a screenplay? At least, right up until the news talked about the building downtown that was just blown to bits. - American Dragon: Jake Long: Jake's father is oblivious partially because of the Secret Keeper issue, but he's still clueless beyond that. He doesn't seem to realize his son is growing up, and that the way his father treats him is chafing the teenage Jake... \|\|and is hurt when Jake lets off steam about it within his earshot.\|\| - He also is clueless that his children can both turn into dragons, but that's another Secret-Keeper issue, and his wife and father-in-law both run interference. - And when \|\|Dad finds out, after a brief moment of surprise he acts like it's no big deal\|\|. - Animaniacs: Mindy's mother is oblivious to the fact that her child is a walking [crawling?] danger magnet, and moreover, she's clueless to the fact that brave and selfless Buttons is pretty much the only thing standing between her and Child Protective Services. - Atomic Puppet: Joey's parents, Phil and Vivian, are totally unaware of the fact that their son is the title superhero and the sock puppet he constantly carries around with him is the former Captain Atomic transformed into a living puppet. This is especially strange since Joey constantly breaks a hole in their roof when he leaves to fight crime, frequently talks to his puppet, and is often away for hours to protect the city. \|\|Phil finally learns the truth in "The Big Shift", though he decides not to tell Vivian because as he explains, "I don't need your mother worrying every time you leave the house".\|\| - Avatar: The Last Airbender: Has a double example. Toph's parents are very overprotective of their "helpless little blind girl", to the point that they keep her locked up in the house at all times, keep her very existence a secret from almost everybody, and think she's still taking baby lessons in Earthbending, oblivious to the fact that she's actually one of the most powerful and skilled Earthbenders alive and regularly sneaks out to participate in (and win) underground fights against grown men who have been Earthbending their entire lives. Once they find out, rather than accept that their helpless little blind girl isn't so helpless, they double down hard and use the whole thing as evidence that they haven't been overprotective enough, declaring that Toph will now be monitored by guards 24/7 from now on. For her own good, of course. This is the final straw which pushes Toph to run away from home for good and join the Gaang. Again, her parents double down and refuse to believe that their helpless little blind girl could have ever managed to run away on her own, that dastardly Avatar must have kidnapped her! So they hire men to go kidnap her back. Her father actually gets worse in the comic continuation. While he's apparently accepted he will never be able to force Toph to come back home, now he just insists she cannot be the daughter he raised, and Toph isn't about to be something she's not to get him to pay attention to her. - The Batman: Although not a strict example, Batgirl is dismayed to discover that Batman knows everything about crime in Gotham city, but wasn't even aware the college they were staking out is the college she now attends. Or that she had already graduated high school. - Commissioner Gordon, as above, who thinks it's a weird coincidence Batgirl has the same shade of hair as his daughter, is also an example. - Beetlejuice: Lydia's parents are even worse about this than they were in the original film. She's constantly slipping away for adventures in the Neitherworld, some of which appear to last for days, and there's never any indication that they have any clue she's missing. It's even worse when Beetlejuice invents a human persona, Mr. Beetleman, who is clearly several years older than Lydia; the fact that this somewhat skeevy thirtysomething character spends a lot of time with their daughter doesn't seem to faze them in the least. - Danny Phantom: - His ghost-hunting parents have no idea he's half-ghost, even though their ghost-hunting equipment has identified him as such more than once. Dark Danny, Danny's evil self from a Bad Future, even lampshades it in "The Ultimate Enemy": Dark Danny: What kind of parents are you, anyway? The world's leading ghost experts, and you couldn't figure out that your own son was half ghost! Hello! Danny Fenton. Danny Phantom. Ever notice a similarity? Jazz did. - Darkwing Duck: Herb and Binkie Muddlefoot fail to notice Honker's long absences and ability to get kidnapped. This could possibly be excused by the entire Mallard household running interference and Honker being nothing in bad-guy bait compared to Gosalyn. However, the writers seem to frequently abuse Honker's mostly Stab-Worthy older brother Tank right under their bills without either batting an eye, most egregiously in "It's a Wonderful Leaf." Yet, they do appear to be genuinely loving parents... - Never attribute to malice what could just as easily be caused by stupidity. - Dexter's Laboratory: Dexter's parents are probably the epitome of this trope. They have no idea that Dexter has a secret laboratory in his bedroom, and assume that he just spends a lot of time in his bedroom. In fairness, Dexter is a Mad Scientist. They have become aware of the lab, and then been rendered unknowing on screen. - The episode "Double Trouble" has Dexter and Dee Dee make countless clones of themselves and Dee Dee's friends, wreaking havoc in the laboratory and rushing out as Mom calls them for lunch. Dad seems to pay no mind to the hundreds of children passing by him in the stairs, and only comments on their hurry. - In the episode "Coupon for Craziness", there's a mix-up at the grocery store and the family brings an entirely different kid home with them, who only kinda looks like Dexter and has a similar name. Dee Dee is the only one who seems to notice the difference between Dexter and "Dextor". - El Tigre: Inverted in that Manny's parents are both well aware that he is a superhero. His father is a little overprotective about it. His mother can't handle it at all; she hyperventilates, and actually left because she couldn't handle it when her husband superheroed \|\|(this is the result of her having been a danger junkie during her own superhero days)\|\|. In fact, Manny's grandfather is a super villain and is often trying to convert Manny to evil. - The Fairly OddParents!: Does this in spades. Aside from being unaware of all of the magical stuff going on in Timmy's life, Timmy's parents are completely unaware that Vicky is a Babysitter from Hell, even when the evidence is right in front of their faces. It gets worse in later episodes where Vicky doesn't even make any attempt to hide her evilness. Taking the worse factor a step further, in "Vicky Gets Fired", Timmy shows his parents incriminating evidence of Vicky torturing him, but they don't even bat an eye. In fact, they only get upset at Vicky and fire her because she erased their reality tape. In one episode, Doug Dimmadome note : That's right, Doug Dimmadome! Owner of the Dimmsdale Dimmadome! of all people chews them out for not realizing she was evil when Chip Skylark wrote an entire song about how evil she is. Doug: What did you think that song was about?! Pumpkins?! Timmy's Dad: ...Yes! - Family Guy: Either they're all really oblivious to Stewie, or they just don't seem to care, neither option seems very good. Lois does this in spades for not seeing Stewie's attempts and contempt for her life. Also, the entire family does this to Meg. - Nobody in the entire show seems to notice that Stewie is an evil genius, with the exception of Brian, who just doesn't care. - Word of God states that they notice Stewie saying and doing everything we the viewers see, but because he is a baby, they do not take him seriously. - Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: The Secret-Keeper variety. Mac's mother doesn't notice that Mac goes to Foster's EVERY DAY. Her having "a million jobs" partially justifies this, but there was a reason the show's writers got The Unintelligible Coco to explain how he convinced his mother to let him go on a TRIP TO EUROPE with people she's never met. - Freakazoid!: Not only do Dexter Douglas's parents fail to notice Dexter's superhero alter-ego, but when his older brother talks about "the blue guy," their Stepford Smiler mother cheerfully attributes it to psychotic delusions on his part. - Gravity Falls: Subverted. The twins are staying with their Great-Uncle Stan for the summer. Throughout the first season, the kids get into all kinds of crazy adventures involving unicorns, dwarves and magic books, while Stan never seems to notice any of it. But as we see at the end of the first episode, Stan has some secrets of his own — he is seen descending a secret mysterious staircase behind the vending machine \|\|at the end of Season 1. In the first episode of season 2, Stan reveals that he knew what the kids were up to all along — he just didn't want to reveal his own involvement.\|\| - Inspector Gadget: The title character hasn't got a clue that his niece Penny is the one who's always saving the day. - Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius: Jimmy's father seems to have a selective denial variation of this. He went through an entire episode seemingly unaware that his son had accidentally swapped heads with a gerbil. (His mother, though... well, Jimmy's genius genes had to come from somewhere.) - Kaeloo: Stumpy and Lavanade's mother is apparently oblivious to the fact that Lavanade has supernatural powers, despite the fact that she floats instead of walking and summons ghosts behind her everywhere she goes. - Kim Possible: - Kim's father is a little oblivious. When it comes to boys, this is by choice. When it comes to fashion, well, he's a dad who doesn't get teenage girls. Outside of these two areas, however, he's a very attentive and supportive parent, fully aware of his daughter's world-saving activities and proud of her for them. - Ron's mother, on the other hand, is just oblivious to everything. Since the series made a habit of subverting tropes, Mrs. Stoppable being so distant in his life could be an intentional reversal of the norm. - The Life and Times of Juniper Lee: Juniper Lee's parents seem to also be in the dark about her being the Te Xuan Xe... due to Secret Keeper. - Miraculous Ladybug: - Played straight by Tom Dupain and Sabine Cheng, who are completely unaware that their daughter Marinette is Ladybug. - Justified with Gabriel Agreste, who is extremely neglectful to his son Adrien, and therefore understandably does not realize that he's Chat Noir. Then double subverted in "Gorizilla" when Gabriel starts to suspect Adrien's secret, but is thrown off (unwittingly) when Adrien recruits Wayhem to act as a Body Double. \|\|Quite fortunately, too, considering that Gabriel is secretly Hawk Moth.\|\| - Benigna Rossi is very busy with her work at the embassy, and does not notice that her daughter Lila is a Consummate Liar. - Moral Orel: Shows an especially glaring example with Orel's parents Clay & Bloberta Puppington. After a second season episode that ended with another family moving out of town, nobody but Orel (and Christina, Orel's Distaff Counterpart from the other family) ever noticed that younger son Shapey and Block, the youngest son of the Posabules, were accidentally switched. \|\|Bloberta discovers this only in the third season premiere, more than ten episodes later. The parents don't accept Block back. When Clay sees both Block and Shapey playing together, he writes it off as an effect of his being perpetually inebriated.\|\| - My Life as a Teenage Robot: Professor Wakeman, the mother of Jenny. She doesn't seem to understand that she programmed her daughter to act like a real teenage girl, and is thus mystified when XJ9 behaves like one. Particularly when she shows up at XJ9's school and forces her to assist in science class. - Phineas and Ferb: Justified, as contrived coincidences always serve to remove all evidence of the titular boys' outlandish creations before their mother can actually see it (or in some cases, just the evidence that they were the ones responsible). At one point Candace uses this to their advantage by trying to tell their mom about something she wants gone. Sure enough, it disappears the second before their mom would have seen it. Their father, though more likely to notice what the boys are doing and has sometimes actively participated in them, seems to be oblivious to most things going on around him. - Rugrats. Bonus points for also featuring Grandparental Obliviousness. - The Simpsons: - When it comes to Barts - and occasionally Homers - long-running issues and misbehaviors, Marge is not oblivious per se, but she often retreats into denial and vainly hopes that they will change for the better. This was even lampshaded in the episode Moms Id Like to Forget, which showed the largest area of her brain occupied first by Repressed Rage and later by Denial About Family. - Lisas Belly: When Lisa gains weight as the result of medication, Marge playfully calls her chunky. This sends Lisa into an existential crisis about her appearance, and Marge takes a PAINFULLY long time to catch on to how much impact her words had. Even Homer grasps the severity of the situation before Marge does, and arranges an outing with Aunt Patty and Aunt Selma to help bring back Lisas confidence. - \|\|Towards the end its revealed that Marge had a similar experience as a child, her own mother calling her features plain, which has apparently stayed with her through the years.\|\| - South Park: The entire show is based around this. The parents are always too busy or don't care what the kids are doing. And when the parents do notice, they tend to over-react in one way or another. - Squirrel Boy: One has the main characters spend the day with the resident bullies. The Bullies threaten them by explaining that their parents believe they are angels and that it's going to stay that way or else. Rodney and Andy agree but the parents end up witnessing their mistreatment... only to be absolutely thrilled that their son was cruel rather than kind. - Christiane F was addicted to heroin by the age of 13, never mind what she had to do to get the money for the drugs. Her mother took over a year to notice. After she was discovered, quit, got addicted again, quit again and went to live with her father, she was soon re-addicted and HE didn't notice either. - The perpetrator of the 2014 Isla Vista massacre, Elliot Rodger, had begun his plans for "revenge" years before, even discussing them with a former close friend; while both of his parents acknowledged that there was something off with Elliot and were sensible enough to send him to counselling, they never knew what he was planning until he published his last video... hours before the massacre. Also, if his manifesto is to be believed, he clearly suffered from parental neglect in his early years.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentalObliviousness
Parasol Parachute - TV Tropes "The sun shines on this Parasol of mine. Where I walk, enemies balk, and I float gently down..." A Sub-Trope of Improvised Parachute and Puny Parachute, in many cartoons and video games, an umbrella or parasol can be used as an improvised parachute, allowing someone who opens it in midair to float safely down to the ground. Of course, the umbrella or parasol may fail, turning inside-out and sending the unfortunate user plummeting to the earth below. Don't Try This at Home, especially not off the roof. MythBusters tested this, alongside other forms of hindering falling: surprise, surprise, it didn't work. Real parachutes have vent-holes in the top to help keep it stable, but that would defeat the purpose of an umbrella in the first place. Theoretically, it is still better than nothing since it makes you fall feet-first, so the main impact won't be on your head. Compare Parachute Petticoat. ## Examples: - Subverted in a 1976 commercial for Kellogg's Raisin Bran. One defective raisin is considered not sweet enough to qualify for the signature 2 scoops and gets jettisoned in the air by Sunny. The hapless raisin parachutes to the ground with an umbrella that quickly fails. - Ads for Travelers insurance (now part of Citigroup) featured men in black pinstripe suits carrying gigantic red umbrellas (Travelers' logo) in this manner. - In Bleach, Liltotto Lamperd arrives on the battlefield floating down on a little umbrella. - Haven't You Heard? I'm Sakamoto: To save a bird caught in a thunderstorm, Sakamoto let the wind pick him up, then opened his umbrella to gently drift down. - This is Older Than They Think, actually. In a rather creepy episode of Mahou no Mako-chan, one of the titular Magical Girl's rivals is a Creepy Child who uses his red parasol (a traditional Japanese one) this way when he jumps off a building and escapes from her. - In the first episode of Majokko Meg-chan, Megu flys down into the human world using an umbrella. This becomes her iconic item. - This is a primary mode of transportation, both up and down, for the stuffed-animal Mary Land characters in Onegai My Melody. - Miss Valentine in One Piece has this as her main gimmick, which along with the ability to change her weight to anywhere from 1 to 10,000 kilos allows her to float using her parasol — or turn it around and crush her enemies flat. - Shiro floats around using his parasol in Project K. - In the first arc of Sailor Moon, Usagi uses a parasol to gently float down from a 4th-floor balcony. As if that isn't bad enough, she had Tuxedo Kamen — a young man — hanging on to her during the descent. This is perhaps justified as the parasol was created as part of a magical disguise, so it could very well be magical itself. - One episode of Smile Pretty Cure! has the team, shrunk down to insect size, summon umbrellas from the Umbrella Decor and use it to float down to ground level from the window ledge, with the acrophobic Akane and Nao hanging onto one umbrella in a panic. - The Ame-Warashi in ×××HOLiC is seen doing this in the opening credits with her umbrella, as well as once in the manga. Then again, she is the Rain Spirit, so her use of it might not be entirely unjustified. - Lamput: In "Opera", Fat Doc tries to scoop up Lamput from below him using an umbrella. He accidentally drops the umbrella, which opens while Lamput is clinging to it and floats slowly towards the audience below until Mr. Moustache grabs it. - One Archie Comics story has Archie and Veronica go for an afternoon drive. With Archie unable to close the roof of his jalopy, they use an umbrella to protect themselves from the sun and lower the windshield to catch a breeze. The breeze eventually becomes so strong, it blows both the umbrella and Veronica away, but they land safely in Reggie's car. Reggie: Don't tell me, I know the name...Mary...Mary Popoff ! - This is a classic shtick of Batman's Penguin who would have special umbrellas that were either designed to be strong enough to act as a parachute or have a helicopter function instead. - DuckTales: During the first segment of Scrooge's Quest, Scrooge uses his umbrella as a parachute while he's chasing his hat (and the money he tucked inside the band). Later, when he falls off an ice bridge at the North Pole, he uses it again, although he admits that it's not going to be able to save him here. Luckily, it doesn't have to, as the boys call Launchpad, who catches him with the plane. - Improbably used by British WWII soldier Percy Pinkerton in Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos. - Calvin finds out that umbrellas don't work that way in Calvin and Hobbes. He also orders a propeller beanie from the back of a cereal box and is disappointed when it doesn't let him fly like a helicopter. - In The Aristocats, Edgar used an umbrella when he jumped off the windmill trying to evade the dogs but turned inside out seconds later. - Arlo the Alligator Boy: Arlo does this in the final chorus of "Beyond These Walls", using a parasol given by Jeromio to parachute past various floating New York landmarks and aspects. - While falling out of the spaghetti twister in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Flint grabbed hold of an umbrella, only for it to turn inside out after a few seconds. - This happens to Pooh at the end of the song "Heffalumps and Woozles" in The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. - Happens to John Darling during the song "You Can Fly!" from Peter Pan. - Pinocchio (and also Fun and Fancy Free) - This is Jiminy Cricket's chosen mode of conveyance. It probably helps that he is, well, a cricket. - Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Meet the Pegasus: After he gets launched into the sky and knocks the wings off Prince Pegasus, Wolffy quickly grabs a parasol to ease his fall, making the joke that "The first secret of beauty is to keep away from UV rays!" as he does so. - The Rugrats Movie: The circus monkeys jumped off the roof of a crash train cart and used an umbrella to float down. Phil and Lil attempt to do the same with a broken umbrella but falls down faster than the monkeys. - In Scooby-Doo! and the Samurai Sword, Scooby and Shaggy use a paper umbrella to first fly (using paper fans as wings) and then parachute. It works fine till Scooby tries climbing on top of it. - In Tarzan, a baby baboon does this with Jane's umbrella after he and the other baboons chase her down for the sketch she drew of him. - The Three Caballeros/ Saludos Amigos - José Carioca is typically seen carrying an umbrella. And since he never seems to use it to keep the rain off of him, Parasol Parachute is one of the alternate uses he has for it. - White Snake (2019): Blanca enchants Xuan's umbrella to be capable of Flight and they share it as they have a Flight of Romance sequence, complete with an Accidental Hand-Hold moment as they both clutch it. - Jackie Chan does this at some point in The Accidental Spy, as he is chased in Turkey. There are no special effects in the scene, he really did it himself. Like almost every other crazy thing he has done in his movies (of course, lots of the times he ends up severely injured... while in the movie he immediately continues to run or whatever)... Medallion was a lot less realistic in this aspect (although to be fair, \|\|people died from falls, it was the titular Medallion that brought them back to life with super-natural powers\|\|). - Played straight in the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, when Bond uses a poolside umbrella to slow his fall when jumping off a wall. It's also useful as a momentary visual shield to avoid bullets. - Near the climax of Inspector Gadget (1999), Gadget and his love interest are plummeting from the top of a skyscraper, so he begins shouting out every possible gadget he can think of that might slow their fall or soften their landing (after he tries "parachute" he glances up for a second because it's actually plausible), eventually trying "parasol", which works. The parachute does open — after they've landed, providing only privacy for an intimate moment. - Mary Poppins: Mary P can propel herself upwards with one, as well, with help from the West Wind. - The conclusion of Practical Magic. - In Radio Flyer, there are seven wondrous abilities that people have while they're children, which become lost as adults. One of them is this, although the scene demonstrating it is played realistically, with Bobby's attempt to use an umbrella to float down is met with him landing heavily on a pile of flowerpots. - Though not exactly a parasol, Short Circuit 2 has Johnny 5 use a built-in hang glider to slow his fall from a skyrise building. Read that again: a multi-hundred-pound robot breaks his fall with a dinky hang glider small enough to fold into a standard-sized toolbox, all while falling upside-down from several stories of a New York high rise. To be fair, they somehow had to spice up the previous scene from the first movie, in which he saved himself with a common parachute. - Main function of umbrella belonging to one of main protagonists of Arcadia Snips and the Steamwork Consortium. It's also very sturdy and doubles as Parasol of Pain (see there). - Subverted in Astrid Lindgren's Madicken where the titular heroine tries this jumping off a roof, fails miserably, and is home with a concussion in the next chapter. - In Scott Westerfield's Pretties, Tally has a dream where she's a princess who gets out of a tower with a Parasol Parachute. Even in a dream, it doesn't work like she thinks it should. - This goes back to L. Frank Baum's Sky Island, in which the child Button Bright has a magical umbrella that flies him wherever he wants to go. - Ruth Plumly Thompson's Speedy in Oz (1934). - In Arrested Development Tobias tries this (while dressed up as a British nanny) to rekindle some wonder from Maebe. Naturally, he just ends up falling through the living room table. - Missy does this in Doctor Who as part of an intentional Mary Poppins homage. Most likely she had an anti-gravity device or something hidden inside. - On Preacher (2016) Cassidy tries this when he is forced to jump out of a plane without a parachute. It helps him land feet first but most of his body still ends up as a bloody mangled mess. However, he is a vampire and he gets better after he drinks enough blood. - Readalong: In the animated intro of the show, the last kid to jump into the book first pulls out an umbrella and uses it to slowly descend into said book. - At the beginning of the The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss episode, "Norval the Great", The Cat in the Hat uses his umbrella to slowly descend as he jumps from a 15-story-high painting of his Uncle Lou. - The music video "Tonight Tonight" by The Smashing Pumpkins (an homage to the 1902 film Le Voyage dans la Lune) features the two characters using parasols to slow their fall to the moon's surface. (Well, the lady uses a parasol. The gentleman uses a more masculine umbrella.) It becomes a Parasol of Pain when the Moonmen attack. - d20 Modern has the Umbrella of Feather Falling, which functions as a feather fall spell when opened. - In the original Dungeons & Dragons setting of Mystara, one of the more controversial "goofy" elements was the fact that the Retebius Air Fleet (an aerial branch of the military for the empire of Thyatis) and the Knights of the Air (a Thyatian club for nobles and adventurers interested in flight) both make use of the "Bumber-Chute", an enchanted umbrella that allows the user to slowly descend from heights, as an emergency protection against being knocked from the sky. - Alice in Wonderland, released in 1985 for the Commodore 64. Though most plummeting descents would leave Alice stunned on her ass with her bloomers in the air, with the parasol she could guide her descent to reach ledges she otherwise couldn't. Alternating this with the top hat, which allowed her to float up in the same way, she could reach a lot of hidden characters, treasures, and Easter Eggs. - Lieselotte of Arcana Heart enters matches by floating down with her parasol. - Rachel Alucard of BlazBlue can slow her descent using her Shapeshifting cat, Nago as a parasol. - The protagonist of the BBC Micro game Boffin used his umbrella to slow falls. - The Drowning Doom Bride units from Brütal Legend do this when they spawn: they hold open their parasols and gently float to the ground after jumping off your stage. - In C Js Elephant Antics and its sequel CJ in the USA, the titular elephant uses an umbrella as a parachute. - At one point of The Curse of Monkey Island, Guybrush fell from a cliff and had to use the umbrella he had in the inventory to float safely to a cave in there. Else he'd fall, crash with the rocks and the bottom and splash on the water...just to surface at the shore seconds later to try again. - Dodge The Prank: Used by the girl if equipped to her by the player after the prankster stretched the bottom of her trampoline while she was trying to rescue a cat. - Fortnite: Battle Royale gives umbrellas as a Cosmetic Award glider-replacement for winning a Victory Royale. "The Umbrella" is awarded for your first win ever, and a special limited-edition umbrella for your first win in each season. - The main character in Goblins 3 uses an umbrella to slow down his fall after jumping off the flying ship where the game starts. - One of Faust's entrances in the Guilty Gear series has him floating down from offscreen using an oversized umbrella. - In Holy Umbrella, the Gliding Brooch upgrades the umbrella to allow the player to do this. - Many games in the Kirby series feature the Parasol Copy Ability, which typically has the additional perk of allowing Kirby to use the parasol to gently float downward. - Baby O'Hara from Jitsu Squad carries a paper umbrella, and when tapping jump while in mid-air, she'll open it up and float a bit around the area. It helps that she's a rabbit and one of the lightest heroes. - One of the main power-ups from Knytt Stories is an umbrella used this way. - The Penguin has one of these in the LEGO Batman game, which can also be used as a weapon. - Lemmings allows you to create floaters who use umbrellas to avoid splattering after falling long distances. - Looney Tunes games: - Olaf from The Lost Vikings does this with a wooden shield. Despite likely weighing as much as the other two vikings combined. - Mario Party 3: There is a mini-game called Parasol Plummet, where you have to avoid hammers while descending with a parasol and catching the coins and coin bags thrown by some of the Hammer Bros. that hang on the beanstalks. Closing the parasol makes you fall down faster, while opening it will allow you to steer sideways to grab the loot. - Subverted in Mega Man Battle Network 6, Lan tries this...and the umbrella collapses. - P.B. Winterbottom's umbrella from The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom. Doubles as a weapon. - An ancient ZX Spectrum Donkey Kong ripoff named Monkey Biznes used this, making it Older Than the NES. - Older Than the NES: Occurs in Richard Bartle's original MUD. - Nosferatu Lilinor: Lilinor has a parasol that she can use to slowly descend as long as she has it open. It can be swapped out for other parasols in the Character Customization part. - This trope is built into the Parasol Stars video game. - There's a level of Power Stone where you are falling from a broken airship, and have to grab umbrellas to slow you as you fall. In Power Stone 2, Julia came pre-equipped with an umbrella, letting her do this. In the aforementioned level, she still needs to grab one of the other umbrellas, though, or splat. - In Ronald in the Magical World for the Game Gear, Ronald collects Mr. Joke's magical stick in the game's opening cutscene, and one of the things it can do is turn itself into a parasol. Ronald can use this parasol to make slow descents, and in the final world, Magical Castle, Ronald can use this on the fans to propel him up to the top floor of Mr. Joke's castle. - Okuni can do this in Samurai Warriors. Given that the game doesn't have falling damage, this doesn't serve much purpose, but gliding with her umbrella is faster than running so if she starts on top of a hill, she can cover a decent bit of ground fairly quickly if she doesn't have a horse. - Sonic Heroes Team Rose can do this with Big's umbrella. It's actually a Shout-Out to the Studio Ghibli movie My Neighbor Totoro. - One of the standard tools in the Super Granny series is a parachute umbrella. Jumping off of things while using it is sometimes accompanied by a voice clip of Granny saying "Supercalifragilistic." - In Super Animal Royale, everyone parachutes down to the island this way. The parachutes can be swapped out for custom ones you earn or buy like other cosmetic items. - Super Mario Bros.: Princess Peach uses parasols in several games. - The Parasol in Super Smash Bros. Melee also works like this, automatically slowing your descent if you jump while holding it. It's reproduced from the Kirby games and is more useful to the combatants who can't fly. - In Tamagotchi: Party On!, one of the possible games you play upon landing on a Gotchi Game space has you pressing a specific at just the right time to make a falling Tamagotchi open an umbrella they're holding and use it as a parachute. - Terraria: The Umbrella is a very early-game weapon that, when wielded, makes the player fall slowly, at the same rate as a Featherfall potion, and negates Falling Damage. The Tragic Umbrella that you can buy from the Clothier has the same effect. - Tower Bloxx: People who enter the building do so by floating with a parasol to it. - The tutorial of Zack and Wiki uses this to slow your descent after jumping from a blowing-up plane. The tutorial then uses the opportunity of you holding an item to show you how to drop items. While you're still falling. - This is done in RWBY by Neo. A few times, she's shown using her umbrella to slow her landing. This is eventually used against her at the end of Volume 3, as she was whisked away by the wind when Ruby activated her parasol on top of an airship. - Homestuck: - When more powerful monsters first approach John's house, one of the imps who had been bothering him up until that point quickly absconds by jumping over the side of the roof while using an umbrella as a makeshift parachute. - Towards the close of Act 5, \|\|when airdropping a large shaving cream-based bomb on Jade's house, the Courtyard Droll hops off the bomb before it lands and parachutes the rest of the way down with an umbrella\|\|. - Pacificators: Muneca Powell can do this using her Gravity Master powers. We could see this on-screen here (it also happens several times throughout the comic, but usually implied). - A man in China once tried this and found that this trope doesn't work in real life (he injured his legs). - Qin Shi Huangdi liked to jump from the Great Wall of China carrying an open umbrella over his head. Existing accounts say that he was never hurt. (However, the Great Wall is only 5-8 meters tall, so it's not really much of a drop anyway.) - Brainiac: Science Abuse once did this along with attempting other makeshift parachutes. - MythBusters tested it. The best thing that can be said about trying this is that it makes you less likely to fall on your head, and more likely to land feet-first, injuring your legs instead of your brain.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParasolParachute
Parental Abandonment - TV Tropes A stunningly large number of heroes and their coteries are lacking in the parent department, either through death or in that they just are not talked about. Even if both parents are alive, they may well be emotionally or physically distant (although that's just Parental Neglect). Everyone is, for the sake of the plot, Conveniently an Orphan, whether they actually are or not. This is a very convenient way for characters to be able to run off in the middle of the night to fight Evil, get sucked into another world, etc. without having anyone responsible for them making a fuss. In fact, one of the first things a creator of stories about children or teens having adventures needs to do is explain a lack of parental involvement. It also allows for the Ordinary High-School Student to be revealed as a super-powered demon fighter, or intergalactic being without the need for a messy Retcon answering the question an alert viewer would ask about why the parents didn't know about this. It's simply a case of the child following in their parents' Secret Legacy. Of course, if you go back far enough, you'll reach a time when most young adults in Real Life actually were orphaned or abandoned. Adults died younger than they do now, and people with chronic diseases like schizophrenia or tuberculosis were often sent away from the family to recover or die. It was also easier to abandon a family member, given the poor communications of the times, sparse documentation, and the lack of a police force. Because of all this, it's quite common for a fictional character from the 19th century or earlier to mention being orphaned with no more emotional reaction than a shrug, since the experience was considered a normal part of real life. A good example is Jane Austen's Emma, where the title character's mother died years earlier, but is barely mentioned. Note that the parents in question don't actually have to die for this Trope to be in effect. Note also that in a few cases listed below, parents are hardly even mentioned — which makes things incredibly awkward. If only one parent is missing or dead, then it's a case of Missing Mom or Disappeared Dad. If the specifics of their absence aren't explained, they're an Ambiguously Absent Parent. When several siblings lack their original parents, the first born will receive a Promotion to Parent. Parental Abandonment is also a leading cause of Dark Magical Girls. One standard method for achieving it is to make your characters Blitz Evacuees. In families with servants, this can lead to the Old Retainer acting as a Parental Substitute. If they were traveling abroad when both parents died, the child may be Raised by Natives. If the parents die in the wilds, their surviving child may be Raised by Wolves. It is also possible the parents left them out there to die, expecting them to be a meal, not an adoptee. When the parents had to separate from the child in order to protect it, this results in Moses in the Bulrushes. When the parents had to leave the child in order to give it "a better life", then it leads to Give Him a Normal Life. When a parent trades their child in exchange for something else they need, then it leads to Baby as Payment. In animation, cases of parentis absentia can be caused by budgeting; it's cheaper to animate one character (usually Dad) than to have two characters basically doing the same thing. Parental Abandonment is a common feature of a Dark and Troubled Past (though children lucky enough to find a Parental Substitute generally avoid such a fate). It is a common feature of a Tear Jerker. It should be noted that parental abandonment does not always mean either or both parent(s) leaving, but also the child being ignored by the parent, knowingly or unknowingly. May entail Tell Me About My Father. Or rarely, mother. For reasons of economy, the child is seldom interested in both parents. See also Parental Neglect, Hands-Off Parenting, When You Coming Home, Dad?, Missing Mom, Disappeared Dad, and Refused Reunion. Parental Abandonment en masse may create a Teenage Wasteland. Compare Free-Range Children when it's the children who voluntarily go out on their own accord. The reverse form is the Missing Child, but there can be interesting crossover: the child may seem to go missing because of the abandonment of/distance created by their parents, and the parents either don't notice or get concerned and finally realize they love their offspring. For the opposing extreme, contrast Helicopter Parents, My Beloved Smother and Fantasy-Forbidding Father. <!—index—>	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentalAbandonment
Parental Abandonment - TV Tropes A stunningly large number of heroes and their coteries are lacking in the parent department, either through death or in that they just are not talked about. Even if both parents are alive, they may well be emotionally or physically distant (although that's just Parental Neglect). Everyone is, for the sake of the plot, Conveniently an Orphan, whether they actually are or not. This is a very convenient way for characters to be able to run off in the middle of the night to fight Evil, get sucked into another world, etc. without having anyone responsible for them making a fuss. In fact, one of the first things a creator of stories about children or teens having adventures needs to do is explain a lack of parental involvement. It also allows for the Ordinary High-School Student to be revealed as a super-powered demon fighter, or intergalactic being without the need for a messy Retcon answering the question an alert viewer would ask about why the parents didn't know about this. It's simply a case of the child following in their parents' Secret Legacy. Of course, if you go back far enough, you'll reach a time when most young adults in Real Life actually were orphaned or abandoned. Adults died younger than they do now, and people with chronic diseases like schizophrenia or tuberculosis were often sent away from the family to recover or die. It was also easier to abandon a family member, given the poor communications of the times, sparse documentation, and the lack of a police force. Because of all this, it's quite common for a fictional character from the 19th century or earlier to mention being orphaned with no more emotional reaction than a shrug, since the experience was considered a normal part of real life. A good example is Jane Austen's Emma, where the title character's mother died years earlier, but is barely mentioned. Note that the parents in question don't actually have to die for this Trope to be in effect. Note also that in a few cases listed below, parents are hardly even mentioned — which makes things incredibly awkward. If only one parent is missing or dead, then it's a case of Missing Mom or Disappeared Dad. If the specifics of their absence aren't explained, they're an Ambiguously Absent Parent. When several siblings lack their original parents, the first born will receive a Promotion to Parent. Parental Abandonment is also a leading cause of Dark Magical Girls. One standard method for achieving it is to make your characters Blitz Evacuees. In families with servants, this can lead to the Old Retainer acting as a Parental Substitute. If they were traveling abroad when both parents died, the child may be Raised by Natives. If the parents die in the wilds, their surviving child may be Raised by Wolves. It is also possible the parents left them out there to die, expecting them to be a meal, not an adoptee. When the parents had to separate from the child in order to protect it, this results in Moses in the Bulrushes. When the parents had to leave the child in order to give it "a better life", then it leads to Give Him a Normal Life. When a parent trades their child in exchange for something else they need, then it leads to Baby as Payment. In animation, cases of parentis absentia can be caused by budgeting; it's cheaper to animate one character (usually Dad) than to have two characters basically doing the same thing. Parental Abandonment is a common feature of a Dark and Troubled Past (though children lucky enough to find a Parental Substitute generally avoid such a fate). It is a common feature of a Tear Jerker. It should be noted that parental abandonment does not always mean either or both parent(s) leaving, but also the child being ignored by the parent, knowingly or unknowingly. May entail Tell Me About My Father. Or rarely, mother. For reasons of economy, the child is seldom interested in both parents. See also Parental Neglect, Hands-Off Parenting, When You Coming Home, Dad?, Missing Mom, Disappeared Dad, and Refused Reunion. Parental Abandonment en masse may create a Teenage Wasteland. Compare Free-Range Children when it's the children who voluntarily go out on their own accord. The reverse form is the Missing Child, but there can be interesting crossover: the child may seem to go missing because of the abandonment of/distance created by their parents, and the parents either don't notice or get concerned and finally realize they love their offspring. For the opposing extreme, contrast Helicopter Parents, My Beloved Smother and Fantasy-Forbidding Father. <!—index—>	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentalDeprival
Parental Favoritism - TV Tropes "I know, we're not supposed to have favorites. But still, we're only human. We love who we love." It is tough being a kid in Fiction Land. Bad enough when you're an only child, but if you're among a pack of siblings, this particular trope is nearly guaranteed to raise its head at some point in order to make life even more difficult. Parental Favoritism is just what it sounds like — one child is given preference over their siblings. In order to qualify, this has to be consistent. One child being asked to do the other's chores because their sibling is sick is not favoritism, although that won't stop the kid lumbered with the extra work from grumbling. But one child having to do all the chores on a daily basis, while their sibling sits and plays video games, is definitely favoritism. It may show itself in a variety of ways. If there is an argument or fight, the parent(s) (or parent(s) of parent(s)) will always take the side of one particular sibling, and the other(s) will be the ones being scolded/punished. The parents may brag about one child in particular and be admonishing or dismissive of the others for their faults, regardless of the achievements of the brothers and sisters. A regular line that may be entailed with this is a variant of, "Honestly, (insert name), why can't you be more like (insert favorite's name)?" There may always be one particular kid who gets out of doing their chores, even if the other kids get pulled up for forgetting to tidy their room. Sometimes, there may be more than one "favorite", or the mother and father will have different "favorites", making life even more of a headache for their siblings. There are a few different versions of the trope and a few different "explanations" as to why one child is preferred over the other. These divisions can be by: - Birth Order: - The oldest child is favored because they are the firstborn/family heir. Tends to apply more to sons than daughters, since old inheritance laws favor boys over girls. This is found more often in fantasy or historical literature, where these laws have a real impact on how the family is run. Sometimes, the oldest child may have a huge set of standards thrown on them, but other times, an overachiever will set other standards for the younger ones. - The youngest child is favored because they are the "baby" of the family, and the parents will protect them from being bullied by their older siblings even when they are big enough to defend themselves and/or started the trouble in the first place. This is popular in more modern literature, especially in teen novels and children's TV. - Middle children can often get a rough deal; very rarely are they the family favorite, unless they do something really outstanding to explain it. Middle Child Syndrome, as it's known, is a real-life phenomenon that some psychologists are studying today. - Occasionally, the parent(s) will favor a child who shares their own place in the birth order over the other children, due to their own childhood experiences with their siblings. For example, a parent who was the middle child themselves might sympathize with that one, at the risk of leaving one of the others out in the cold. - When the parents split favoritism, it will usually be the father favoring the firstborn and the mother favoring the baby. - Gender: - Preference by gender often relies on the boys:girls ratio within the family. If there are several of one sex and only one of the other, the sibling with a different gender from the others will be "the favorite". This can backfire though — they may instead be the "ugly duckling" of the family if the parents prefer one gender over the other, a preference that often hinges on the culture the story is set in (i.e, the solitary sister who's expected to clean up after, and cook for, her brothers). - If there is one son and several daughters, the son will acquire the title of "heir to the family". His parents may believe him to be "more important" than his sisters, and they might be expected to obey him or take care of him. If the father is not in the picture, he'll be the "man" of the house. - If there is one daughter and several sons, she will be the "baby girl" of the family regardless of birth order (possible exception if she is the oldest sibling, in which case she'll be the de facto babysitter). Strangely, brothers are seldom shown as resenting their sister — in fact, they'll defend her honor more ferociously than their parents will. Any potential boyfriends are in for a hard time. - Sometimes, parents have a preference for their child's gender to match their own because they feel like they'll "connect" with them better. Their expectations often rely on prejudices and expectations rather than what the child actually is or wants to be but sometimes it ends up working if the child matches the parent's expectations or pretends to do so. A similar case are parents who get disappointed when the baby's sex turns out to be the opposite of what they expected and mentally prepared for and never get over it, such as a father who wanted a son but is "stuck" with a daughter or only daughters. - Personality: - Sometimes, one child is funnier, more gregarious, or more talented than the others, making them "the favorite" almost automatically. In some cases (such as Megan Parker on Drake & Josh), this sibling will be sweetness and light to everyone else, but the Devil in Plain Sight to their brothers and sisters. Although in other cases, the other child could have a negative personality, so the fault could partly fall on them. A child may have different interests than a parent, such as a child of a jock parent who is uninterested in sports. Alternatively, somebody (one of the parents) may die. In this case, one child will be favored because of their resemblance to a particular person. Particularly narcissistic parents, however, tend to favor the child that most looks/acts like themself (although that can happen in a more benign way, with a parent simply having more in common with a child who's also athletic, musical, artistic, etc.). - Looks: - Some parents take Beauty Equals Goodness seriously and favor the more conventionally attractive child simply for their looks, sometimes the parent will favor the child that physically resembles them and look down on the one that looks like their spouse. - Disability: - Sexual Orientation and/or Gender Identity: - If parents find out one of their children is LGBT, expect the burden of continuing the family line to go to their straight siblings, and thus, for the queer child to be written off as "a waste" for being less likely to reproduce. Grandkids aside, the queer child will often be seen as the Black Sheep of the family, especially if they're very open about it. - This can also go the other way in more progressive stories. If the kids are all one gender, the queer one might have a special bond with the opposite-gender parent. A mom with several boys might see her Camp Gay son as the "daughter" she never had, doing all sorts of girly things with him while his brothers are out playing football. - Biological vs. Adoption: - It hardly needs mentioning that dozens of fairy tales (notably Cinderella) involve stepchildren mistreated by their parents in favor of their biological children. This is a Discredited Trope today; more commonly, you have an adopted child who suffers some perceived slight from their stepparent and must be reassured that they are loved just as much as the parent's natural children. - This is also commonly inverted — the adopted child will be well behaved, the biological child will be spoiled and jealous, and when the inheritance or the call to adventure is passed down to the adopted child instead of the "true" inheritor, expect the biological child to start a Cain and Abel situation rapidly. Often the two can mix, with the biological child still being favored by the parents but the adopted child being given the call to adventure from outside the family. Harry Potter is a good example of this. - Inherited Ability: - If the parent has a specific talent, skill, career path, or what have you, any kid who shows promise in that field will instantly be doted upon by that parent for following in their footsteps. Say, if the dad is a police officer, he might share a bond with a daughter who also wants to be a cop. - In fantasy/sci-fi stories, this can also involve superpowers if they're passed down genetically. If one child inherited mom's psychic abilities while the other kids are muggles, she'll spend a considerable amount of time with that one to teach them how to use their powers...at the cost of neglecting her other children. Any of these criteria can backfire. For example, one child might be the favorite because they look and act just like their saintly, deceased mother. Another might be just the opposite — The Un-Favourite — because of their resemblance to the mother that walked out on the father — or even because they remind the father of the saintly mother. If the saintly mother died in childbirth, then the poor kid who was birthed this way usually has a hell of a lot of resentment to get over, no matter what the physical similarities, often due to the father, consciously or unconsciously, blaming them for the mother's death. Occasionally, parents have a child that naturally requires more care and attention than the others, because they're very young, disabled, or psychologically damaged. This will still seem unfair to the other kids who get less of their parents' time, but it's a necessity rather than favoritism... usually. This is a favorite plot for children's books and television, where the lead character is jealous of a new baby sister or brother only to be reassured that "we love you just as much". On the other hand, if the favorite is Too Good for This Sinful Earth, the parents may never learn to appreciate their living children. Sometimes, the parents are reasonably handing out the privileges and responsibilities with age. When the older child looks only at the responsibilities and the younger at the privileges, both can come to the view that they are The Un-Favourite. Or they may responsibly differentiate, but the musically untalented child may resent the lessons as favoritism, and the talented one, the other's free time as favoritism; or the child who must do all the chores resents the sickly child's confinement to his bedroom and inability to play. Cue Sibling Rivalry. Of course, it is common that the parents are not aware of their favoritism and may be appalled at themselves upon realizing it. Very few parents would actually pursue favoritism with the knowledge of the other children's hurt feelings. In fact, the obligatory "talk with the parents" is normally part of a Parental Favoritism plot...but that does not guarantee it will solve anything. If the writer is trying to Hand Wave the glaring bias of the parents, there will be a scene where mum and dad will give a long speech on how they value all their kids equally and will tell The Un-Favourite child that making them live in the basement and forcing them to bow whenever their sibling enters a room is really a mark of their esteem. The words "you're the responsible one" will be mentioned in some form. A more realistic version is where the big talk is honest, and the parent doesn't bother trying to justify their actions but do realise they were wrong and attempt to make amends. This is regularly done to "humanise" the hitherto parents — but it's too late. By the time of the talk, most of the audience will already be set against the parents, and it'll take a hell of a lot of good writing to redeem them. If the parents have clearly realized their foolishness and have shown to be really sorry, then this may take a lot of weight off them. Parental Favoritism can have a huge impact on characters even when they become adults. The Favorite will either be spoiled and throw a tantrum if they don't get their own way, feel that they were a sort of "experimental" child and develop insecurities, or be a Nervous Wreck who permanently fears that he or she won't meet the parents' expectations; kids at the bottom of the pecking order will usually be bitter and cynical about relationships and family life (and often blame the favorite children alongside the parents), or have serious self-esteem issues, leading to self-deprecation or clinginess as ways to compensate. This is all too often Truth in Television. The friendship version of this trope is Friendship Favoritism. Compare Grandparent Favoritism, which refers to when grandparents prefer their grandchildren in general over their own children (their grandchildren's parents); if they specifically favor one grandchild over their other grandchildren, that still falls under this trope, but the two are not mutually exclusive. ## Examples: - Implied in an ad for Invisalign Teen. Twin teenagers both need braces; however, their parents get Invisalign for one daughter and regular braces for the other. The Un-Favourite spends the commercial complaining about all the limitations of her headgear, while the favored daughter gloats and rubs her face in how she doesn't have to deal with all those issues. Someone then takes a picture of the twins and makes a smart remark about finally being able to tell them apart. - The 2011 Mackenzie Foy - AT&T commercial television commercial. In this commercial, the son and daughter are sitting in front of a TV and only one more show can be recorded. They decide which child is going to get it, and they pick why they choose, the father then asks to say which child they favor the most, and both pick the daughter, of course, neither child actually cares, but then the father says to give it to the son instead, because that is all he going to get. - Another commercial for Guinness uses the same premise; two parents tell their adult son he's their least favorite child, to the point that he's not only under his siblings but also the dog and their fine china. But they buy him a case of Guinness to make up for it. - One pizza chain had an ad where the children ask their father about his preference for dinner, and he protests that trying to choose would be like trying to decide which of them was his favorite child. They persist, wanting to know what he wants for dinner, and he finally relents and declares, "Bobby." - Downplayed in Bokurano, as Jun and Kana Ushiro's father unintentionally favors the latter, his biological daughter, over the former, his adoptive son. He does love both his children, but he stays relatively distant from Jun, afraid that if he tries to get close and Jun rejects him, their relationship will never be the same. Mr. Ushiro is portrayed somewhat sympathetically for this trope, though, because he doesn't realize he's doing this until it's too late- namely, when he realizes that \|\|he took the news that Kana would have to pilot(which would end with her death even if she won), much worse than the news of the same thing happening with Jun, being devastated by the news and horrified by his own reaction\|\|. When Jun apologizes for being such "a bad son" all this time in his final conversation with his father, Mr. Ushiro replies that he's sorry for being a bad father. - Code Geass: Lelouch perceives himself and Nunnally as The Unfavourites to their father, The Emperor Charles zi Brittania, because their mother was a commoner. \|\|In reality, they're actually his favorite children because Marianne was the only woman he ever truly loved. He sent the kids to Japan to protect them from Marianne's "killer", their uncle V.V., and intended to have them be a part of the Assimilation Plot he, Marianne, and C.C. had devised. When Lelouch finds out about all this, he lets them have it.\|\| - In Crayon Shin-chan, 5-year-old Shinnosuke's brother is The Un-Favourite and he knows it. - The emperor and empress of the Misurugi Empire really set their eyes on their middle daughter, the titular character of Cross Ange. Which bites them in the ass in the very first episode. - Death Note: A minor example, but still there. Light's father Soichiro doesn't completely dismiss the possibility that Light could be Kira (which he is, but Soichiro goes to his grave without ever finding this out), but is adamantly certain that Light's little sister Sayu couldn't possibly be the killer. - Why Ken partially resented his older brother in Digimon Adventure 02. Not only was he the younger sibling, and thus overlooked for the firstborn, Osamu was also a child prodigy and a media darling. This ensured that Ken never got the kind of attention he desperately wanted from his parents. It didn't help matters much when \|\|Osamu died in an accident\|\|, and his parents were too caught up in \|\|their grief to notice Ken even after that\|\|. After he's manipulated into more or less selling his soul in the Digital World, he gains the prodigy aspect his brother had, and his parents apparently begin to love him... \|\|but only as a shadow of what they once had with Osamu. It took him vanishing into the Digital World with the intent to stay there permanently, then returning in the midst of a complete mental breakdown, for them to finally begin loving him as Ken.\|\| - Dragon Ball: - In all media where Frieza's elder brother Cooler appears, it's made clear that King Cold favors Frieza over him. Cold never once mentions Cooler, even in passing, and in Cooler's Revenge, Cooler bitterly reflects that Frieza was a "little brat" and that Cold always spoiled him rotten. - It's heavily implied that Bardock and Gine, Goku's parents, favored Goku over his older brother Raditz. In his debut special, Bardock never once thinks of Raditz, even in his dying moments, and in Minus and Broly, when they realize Frieza's plan to wipe out the Saiyans, their sole concern is ensuring Goku's escape and survival. The closest they show to any concern or regard for Raditz is Bardock asking where Raditz is when he arrived back on Vegeta on Frieza's orders, telling Goku that he'd also tell Raditz not to look at the moon, and lamenting that Raditz has to put up with "The Prince". Word of God reveals Gine at least was proud of Raditz being assigned to invade planets alongside Vegeta. Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 sadly confirms Bardocks preference to Goku over Raditz as upon reuniting in a special event, Bardock is very cold towards his eldest son even telling him to shut up and Raditz being upset that his father didnt even let him know that he was alive. Although Bardock does say he respects Raditzs stubbornness. - Part of the backstory of Big Bad King of Gallia in The Familiar of Zero; his elder brother was the favorite for being better at everything. Then, in the old King's last moments, he named the younger his successor, due to the old king's insanity. Ecstatic, even knowing the true reason he was chosen, he went to rub it in his older brother's face. Unfortunately, the elder was honestly happy for his younger brother's success. This drove Joseph mad, and he ended up killing his older brother. So begins the tale of the mad king. - Fruits Basket: - Played with in regards to Yuki and Ayame's mother. She openly favors Yuki over Ayame, but that's only because as the Rat of the Zodiac, Yuki is the closest to God and worth a lot of money and prestige whereas Ayame, the Snake, is much lower on the scale; she cares nothing for Yuki as a person and openly admits she only sees him as a Meal Ticket she can use to boost her wealth and social status. A rare case where being The Unfavorite works in one's favor, as Ayame can enjoy far more freedom than Yuki. - Even though Momiji's father had promised to love him even more to compensate for his mother forgetting him, he apparently changed his mind after Momiji's little sister Momo was born and seems to ignore Momiji in favor of his wife and daughter. Momo even got into the violin lessons she wanted at the cost of Momiji being forced to quit by their father, even though Momo wants to learn violin to play with Momiji. - Machi was constantly pressured to be perfect by her mother, who largely viewed her as a Trophy Child who could inherit her husband's fortune... only to cast Machi out of the house once her younger son was born. Mrs. Kuragi openly tells a friend that Machi is "dull" and that she prefers her new baby boy because a male heir has better chances at getting the fortune. - Very messed-up example with the Homunculi of Fullmetal Alchemist, where Pride has that name in part, being the oldest, and the one whose personality represents Father in his purest form. Continuing the metaphor, the Anti-Villain Greed has a sort of "Well Done, Son" Guy relationship to Father and turned Defector from Decadence because he couldn't stand being second to anyone (being the least evil of the bunch also helped). - In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), this is the reason for Envy's hatred of the Elric brothers; he is the homunculus created by their father in an attempt to revive his firstborn son, and he was cast aside when he came back as a "monster". - In the manga, a side story reveals that this existed between the Elric brothers themselves when they were quite small, as Edward was very jealous of his mother Trisha's love for the baby Alphonse. A neatly-delivered lesson from father Hohenheim changed his mind, however, and by the time of the main story they are absolutely devoted to one another. - Inverted in Gakuen Babysitters where it is the toddlers who prefer one parent over the other. Kirin prefers her mother as her father is often away on business trips (she calls him Papa-san, something she does not do with her mother). Kazuma and Takuma prefer their mother as they tend to get scared of their father's acting roles on television as they cannot tell the difference between reality and fiction. Taka exclusively interacts with his mother and doesn't even know he has a father (who left shortly after Taka was born). - In Girls und Panzer, Shiho Nishizumi favors Maho, her elder daughter and heir, over Miho, her younger daughter and the main character. A good example of this is when, in Little Army, she arrives after Miho and Maho's training battle and offhandedly says, "So Miho's here as well," before congratulating Maho on her tournament victory. Shiho disapproves of Miho so much that after hearing of her going to the semifinals against Pravda, she \|\|considers disowning her. However, once Miho defeats Maho in the finals, Shiho sighs, then smiles and starts clapping, which could indicate that her attitude is shifting\|\|. - Shui Long from Haou Airen is the most talented member of a very famous family of doctors, but his father passed him up in the family hierarchy despite his talent. He ended up allied with The Triads and the Tongs and as one of Hakuron's True Companions. - Played with in Hetalia: Axis Powers: - At first, it looks like Grandpa Rome likes only his youngest grandson Veneziano and completely neglects older grandson Romano due to Veneziano having more talent than his brother, but it later turns out that he does visit Romano from the afterlife too. In fact, a Himaruya sketch shows Romano crying Tears of Joy... and then hiding because he doesn't want his Grandpa to see him cry. - America also seems to be England's favorite ex-colony, especially compared to America's brother Canada. Though on the other hand, Canada is seen as The Reliable One and England asks him for advice rather than America. - Despite being the White Sheep of the Zoldyck family, Killua from Hunter × Hunter is the most beloved child of the family. His mother and his eldest brother love him too much, his relationship with his father is the best father-son-relationship in the whole family that is known, his younger sister and younger brother admire him, and the servants love him because Killua is nice to them. The only one who doesn't like him is the second eldest son, Milluki, who is a Fat Bastard, but even he admits that Killua is the best candidate to be the next heir of the family. - Imaizumin-chi wa Douyara Gal no Tamariba ni Natteru Rashii: ~DEEP~: Imaizumi's father has little hopes for him, compared to his brother Keichiro, because Keita needs to learn to be a man. - Inuyasha: The chip on Sesshoumaru's shoulder stems from the belief that he was The Un-Favourite to Inuyasha, to the extent where he actually believes his father was grooming Inuyasha to kill him. The situation between the brothers is eventually resolved when it becomes clear that their father understood the vulnerabilities of being half-human and just how powerful Sesshoumaru would one day become. His real desire was for Sesshoumaru to become a source of support and guidance for Inuyasha. - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood: When Dio Brando comes to live with him, George Joestar I falls into this, punishing Jonathan harshly for every little mistake while essentially letting Dio do as he pleased. At the end of his life, he acknowledges that this was a mistake- in fact, he was stricter on Jonathan due to having higher standards for his biological son- and had he been tougher on Dio, perhaps he wouldn't have turned out as bad as he did. - Ren Gyokuen in Magi: Labyrinth of Magic openly said that first prince Kouen (in actuality her nephew/stepson) was her "most loved son" while flirtatiously embracing him in front of the rest of her children, including her two biological children. Kouha disgustedly remarked how she used to fawn over Kouen and now wanted him to "replace" her recently dead husband. - March Comes in Like a Lion provides a rather interesting case. Rei's adoptive father, Kouda, leads a very shogi-centered life that extends even to his home. As such, his children's skill in shogi more-or-less determines the kind of attention he gives them. \|\|Unfortunately for Rei, he ends up as the most skilled, creating strained relationships between him and the biological children of the household, who became something of The Unfavourites.\|\| - In Monster, it is something that plagues Johan very intently. Which one of them was the unwanted one? - In the case of My Hero Academia's Shoto Todoroki, being the Favorite wasn't a good thing, as it led to Training from Hell by his father. Meanwhile, his older siblings were more or less discarded for not turning out how he wanted, but it also means they missed out on the horrible "training". - My Little Sister Stole My Fiance: For whatever reason, Eliana's younger sister, Luna, was always favored by their parents. She never had to undertake training like Eliana did, and after Luna throws a fit for not getting to marry the prince, her father eventually swaps fiancées. - In Naruto we see in the flashbacks that Fugaku Uchiha preferred his older, genius son Itachi to the younger Sasuke, saying several times to Sasuke that he wanted Sasuke to become a shinobi like Itachi. - The situation eventually turns around completely after Itachi is suspected of murdering Shisui \|\|which he did (except that he really didn't; Shisui really did commit suicide, albeit it, with Itachi's help)\|\|. After Sasuke masters the fireball technique, Fugaku tells him not to follow Itachi's footsteps. - Turned around even earlier when Sasuke's mother Mikoto, who was rather close to Sasuke, told him that in public Itachi was the shining star, and Fugaku, in his capacity as head of the clan, was naturally concerned about him, due to his importance to the clan. In private, the only thing Fugaku talked about was Sasuke. - \|\|It's revealed in Chapter 590 that despite all this, they loved both their children. When Itachi came to kill them the night of the massacre, Mikoto assured him that his parents still loved him and that they fully understood his decision, while Fugaku asked Itachi to take care of Sasuke, and that regardless of their differences in beliefs and the paths they both took, he was still proud of him.\|\| - Likewise, Hiashi Hyuga preferred his younger daughter Hanabi, as he believed Hinata lacked any real talent, especially when compared to her genius cousin Neji (the son of Hiashi's twin brother). After Neji loses his fight against Naruto, Hiashi's attitude starts to change and he softens up to both Hinata and Neji. - Neon Genesis Evangelion: Gendo shows no love or affection to Shinji, but is almost uncharacteristically fond of Rei, who he treats as an adoptive daughter. \|\|The reason he's fond of Rei, however, is because she is a clone of his dead wife, and in the end, both the children are little more than pawns to him toward resurrecting her. Before his death, however, Gendo admits that he secretly held great love for Shinji in his heart but was simply too afraid to face it, and in his last words he says that he's sorry.\|\| - One Piece: - Charlotte "Big Mom" Linlin's favorite child is one of her youngest daughters, the teenage Charlotte Pudding. \|\|Though Big Mom seems to only do so because of Pudding's Third Eye note : (which should help her read the Poneglyphs' content without understanding the language, like how Roger used his mysterious ability of "hearing the voices of all things" to read Poneglyphs) since she thinks that, once it opens, it'll lead her to Raftel and be her key to becoming the Pirate King. While Pudding enjoys the perks of being spoiled rotten by her Evil Matriarch, she is annoyed of Big Mom constantly asking about if the third eye has opened yet. Plus a flashback shows that Big Mom was psychologically abusive to Pudding when she was a little girl, also for the Third Eye which she found disgusting.\|\| - Squard accuses Whitebeard of this in the Marineford Arc. \|\|Due to his hatred of Gol D. Roger for killing his old crew, he was susceptible to Admiral Akainu's lie that Whitebeard was planning to sell out his allies in exchange for Ace's life. When Squard stabbed Whitebeard, he did so because he believed Whitebeard was willing to betray the rest of his "family" just to save his "precious" Ace.\|\| Squard is wrong, however, and Whitebeard proves that he loves all of his family \|\|to the point of hugging and forgiving Squard for stabbing him in the chest.\|\| - \|\|Vinsmoke Judge is an exceptionally cruel example as he heavily favors his daughter Reiju and 3/4 of his sons Ichiji, Niji and Yonji over his third son Sanji. This mainly due to Bio Augmantion failing to turn Sanji into a Supersoldier due his mother's Sora interference as she wished for her sons to keep their humanity instead being ruthless killing machines. After Sora dies over keeping Sanji's humanity, Judge treats Sanji like absolute shit and doesn't lift a finger to protect him from his brothers. Judge even imprisons Sanji and acts like he doesn't exist while adoring his other children◊. He doesn't care in the slightest when Sanji escapes to East Blue. Thankfully this all comes back to bite Judge in the ass as when Big Mom is about to have Judge along with his super children assassinated he breaks down in blubbering tears and sees Ichiji, Niji, and Yonji unable to share his sorrow at their imminent demise all because of him. Ironically Sanji is the only child Judge can connect to, as they're both normal human beings (Sanji being albeit a Badass Normal) though this just makes Judge despise his third son more.\|\| - \|\|On the flip side Sora favors Sanji over her other sons (due to the reasons above), even when Reiju her daughter whom Sora clearly also cares about comes to her on her sickbed, Sora just talks to Reiju about how much she loves Sanji.\|\| - Imposed by the premise of Ōoku: The Inner Chambers, in which 17th-century Japan is ravaged by a plague that only targets men, leaving only one man for every four women. Thus sons can expect better treatment than daughters since the plague only stops hitting men who reach forty, and die very frequently. And in the more unhinged families, can result in Parental Incest as well. - Ootori Kyouya is a victim of a subtle version in Ouran High School Host Club. As the youngest of three sons in a rich family, he is expected by his father to perform at respectable standards, but never to do anything to one-up his brothers, who will inherit the Ootori business empire. - His sister also seems to get this treatment to some extent. She's admonished for returning home when she is happily married and has no real business to be there. This has the Ootori family fulfill two of the criteria. She, however, seems to ignore it and act cheery nonetheless, going out with Tamaki on occasion to explore the world of commoner cuisine. - A similar fate befalls Azuma Yunoki in La Corda d'Oro, who is forced to give up playing piano by his grandmother because he's better at it than his two older brothers; as he says, "My place is always below my brothers." Most a result of Japanese cultural values, and seems wildly unfair to Western readers. Azuma develops a bit of a psychological problem as a result (which means it's supposed to seem unfair to the original audience, as well). - In +Anima, the Royal Family of Sailand is a perfect example of Favoritism. \|\|In fact, it's most likely why Husky was named Crown Prince out of birth order.\|\| - Ranma ½: Kasumi is clearly Soun Tendo's favourite child. This is because she helped him raise her little sisters, and the image song Otousan ( Father) performed by Soun and Kasumi's seiyuu states that he feels rather guilty about it. - In Rosario + Vampire, Akasha and Gyokuro love their own respective blood-related daughters more than the other daughters. While Akasha loves her stepdaughters, too, Gyokuro loves only Kahlua; she distrusts Akua because Akua is adopted and only keeps her around because Akua is useful to her plans, and hates both Moka and Kokoa, the latter being her other blood-related daughter, to the extent that she tried to murder them. - Among the Shuzen sisters, Moka is the most beloved one. Akua is a Yandere for her, Kahlua loves all of her sisters, and Kokoa loves her because Moka is the only one in the family who treats her with respect. - Taken to extremes in Saiyuki. Gojyo is a 'child of taboo,' raised by his stepmother and half-brother. She eventually attempted to kill him, but her biological son killed her first. - Sakura Discord has a strange and pretty disturbing example with Mebuki Sakura. Being a Child Prodigy for piano, her parents put way too much pressure on her, which resulted in her hating piano and said parents feeling incredibly guilty for it. So they started to unreasonably spoil her and forgive all of her mistakes and whims, but their introduction scene shows that this is not a healthy relationship by any means. She considers herself dead inside. To make it worse, her big brother Shin'ya tries to isolate her even more so that they will finally give up on her and focus their attention on him. - In Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters, Gozaburo favored his biological son Noah than his adoptive son Seto, at first. But Noah, whose body is dead and his mind is copied in a virtual world, was later ignored by his father, and Gozaburo furthered Seto who had more natural talent than Noah ever had. And of course, Noah's childish personality made it impossible to become an heir of Gozaburo. Well, after being betrayed by Seto, he doesn't give a crap for any of his sons. The other adoptive son Mokuba was always ignored by Gozaburo. - Batman: - Dick Grayson (Robin I/Nightwing) has been noted to be Batman's favored son, being the first Robin, the easiest to get along with, and, as Batman himself notes, possessed the qualities none of the other Robins will ever have. He understands Bruce's teachings the most, came into his own as a hero, and while as skilled as Bruce, can still make friends and keep them, something Bruce can't do. It's to the point that Bruce has shown an absolute willingness to kill for him multiple times, something he doesn't show for anyone else. After Bruce "died" in Final Crisis, Dick became Batman against his wishes. When he returned, he reacted pretty well to it, to the point that it's just common knowledge among the Batfamily that Dick will take over when Bruce is unable to be Batman. There have been several times that Batman has shut out members of the Batfamily for one reason or another, however, he only rarely does this to Dick, who he trusts the most. Although Bruce tries to hide it, everyone in not only the Batfamily but the entire DCU knows that Dick is Bruce's favorite son, partner, and colleague. - Bruce also treats his sometimes adopted daughter, Cassandra Cain, with some favoritism. He gives her own Batcave, expects her to eventually take his place as Gotham's protector, and generally showers her with praise. The favoritism gets to a point that when Damian, Bruce's biological son, meets her, he is immediately hostile (despite the fact that, having been raised as a League of Assassins member, he knows that she's supposed to be their chosen one) because Bruce chose her over him. It's heavily implied that this treatment is because he is projecting onto Cassandra, treating her more like a miniature version of himself rather than her own person, which Barbara Gordon (the first Batgirl) calls him out on several times. - Black Panther has T'Chaka clearly display favoritism for T'Challa, his heir and a biological son. He didn't seem to really care about Shuri and began to ignore Hunter (his adopted, white son) as soon as T'Challa was born. - Darkseid treats all his children terribly, but the one he actually respects and "likes'' is Orion. While he is on the side of good and serving Highfather, putting in opposition to Darkseid, Orion is the strongest and most competent out of his offspring. Because of this, Darkseid respects him as a Worthy Opponent. - The Flash: Barry Allen (the second Flash) became the adoptive father of Wally West (the first Kid Flash and third Flash). He essentially raised Wally alongside Iris West, after Wally's parents divorced. After Barry marries Iris, they have two twins, the Tornado Twins, who they raise in the future. The twins have a tense relationship with Wally because they feel like Barry always considered Wally his "real" son. They're actually not far off — Wally is Barry's Berserk Button and he's gone to great lengths for Wally whenever he felt Wally needed him. Knowing that he was going to die and his mantle would pass on to Wally, Barry found three days in Wally's life when he would need Barry, and time-travelled to those times to help his protégé before his own death. When Wally was forgotten by the world and returned, Barry outright threatens Aquaman when he doubts Wally's sincerity. When Barry thinks Wally may have been killed by Booster Gold, he mercilessly beats the shit out of Booster, then runs across time and into the Speed Force to try to find Wally. Finally, when Barry finds out that Wally's heinous actions at the superhero therapy centre Sanctuary were the result of Eobard Thawne hypnotising Wally into doing these things — and Thawne had corrupted the Tornado Twins in the same story without this reaction from Barry — he chases Thawne across the timeline, screaming that he'll murder him. - In The Kingdom, Wally West has two kids: Barry and Iris West. Both inherited his superspeed, but are vastly different in how they use them. Barry is a slacker who uses them for petty reasons, though not anything illegal. Meanwhile, Iris took up Wally's old identity of Kid Flash and is actively a superhero. However, Wally clearly favours Barry and constantly drives him to be the next Flash. It takes its toll on Iris, and Barry knows it. It may have something to do with his name even, since Barry Allen, the second Flash and Wally's mentor is someone Wally has never stopped looking up to. - In Lucky Luke, Ma Dalton constantly dotes on her youngest son, Averell, while just as constantly giving her oldest, Joe, a hard time. \|\|She later admits that Joe is actually her favorite; he's the smartest and reminds her so much of their father, and Ma is only hard on him because she expects so very much of him. Averell, however, will always be her baby.\|\| - The Mighty Thor: Thor is clearly his father's Odin's favorite, to the point that in Fear Itself, he is willing to destroy the entire Earth for Thor's sake. He never goes that far for Loki, Tyr or even Baldur. His wife Freyja consistently ignores most of their (from her perspective mostly adopted) children not named Thor, save for Aldrif/Angela (her long believed dead biological daughter), and in 2010s suns she becomes emotionally abusive towards Loki in his books (though she does come to regret it). - Robin (1993): Mary Quintas eventually decided the best way to win her deranged family's serial killer competition was to kill her brothers and their families since her mom continued to favor them even after they'd been caught and incarcerated while she continued to get away with her murders. - Rogue Sun has one from a serial absentee father. Marcus Bell, the superhero Rogue Sun, was married to a woman named Gwen Siegel and had a son with her, Dylan. He abandoned them when Dylan was 2-years-old, just long enough for Dylan to remember having Marcus in his life, the result being that, when Dylan is 17 when Marcus dies, he still severely resents him. Marcus married another woman, Juliette, and had two children with her: Aurie and Brock, who he didn't parent very much, either, but was still in their lives. In his will, he leaves his powers and mantle to Dylan specifically because he doesn't care about his safety compared to Aurie and Brock. Marcus' spirit also tells Dylan that he believes Brock could've played a hand in his death, and tells Dylan that Brock always unsettled him a bit. With Aurie, when she stopped talking to him for weeks because he missed one of her birthdays, Marcus revealed his identity to her and explained why he was so absent, and even let her help him with his work. This makes Aurie Marcus' favourite by default, but his favourite nonetheless, since he didn't completely ignore her like the others and did care about her feelings. - Harry Osborn from the Spider-Man Trilogy films, Ultimate Spider-Man and The Spectacular Spider-Man, which is an interesting case since he is an only child. His father Norman Osborn sees Harry's friend Peter as being more gifted, intelligent and hard-working, often chiding Harry for not being as sucessful as Peter. This dynamic wasn't present in the original comics, but was put in afterwards after the success of the other iterations. It gets even worse for Harry, as not only does Norman favor his Arch-Enemy over him, but he also cares more about his grandson Normie. Norman even chooses to infect Normie with the Carnage symbiote and tries to get him to kill his own parents before Harry and Peter stop them. The reason why Norman prefers others over his own son is likely due to Norman's own twisted Might Makes Right philosophy that is at odds with Harry, who is all-around meek Nice Guy with no super powers, so naturally he doesn't fit Norman's evil values. - In The Technopriests, Panepha openly favors Almagro over his siblings Albino and Onyx, mainly because Albino is, as his name suggests, an albino and Onxy has red skin and four arms. - Wonder Woman Vol 1: Out of her one surviving biological son and three adopted daughters "Grandma" Heyday clearly favors Tillie, as she is the most practical and kind of her children, and is even leaving everything to her in her will though she expects Tillie to look after her irresponsible sisters with the money. When her son, who lost his mother's favor due to his criminal behavior, learns of this he decides to kidnap Tillie and force her to sign over her inheritance at gunpoint before trying to kill all three of his sister/nieces. - X-Men: - Usually averted with Charles Xavier and his students, with him displaying equal affection to all of them, even the rebellious ones. However, it is clear that he has some favorites. The foremost being Jean Grey, who is a telepath like himself and the one who he particularly dotes on and helps with her psychic powers. Cyclops is his second favorite student and his favorite male X-Man, given he chose Scott to be The Leader of the team, sometimes such as in Secret Wars (1984) the professor will elect Scott to lead the X-Men even though Storm was technically the leader at that point, causing Storm to accuse him of favoritism. Overall Xavier seems to partially prefer his original five X-Men (Cyclops, Jean, Beast, Iceman, and Angel) over his other students, though this did come back to bite him as 3/5 of his favorite five have turned evil: Jean and Scott due to being driven mad by trauma and the burden of the Phoenix Force and Angel due to Apocalypse, \|\|made even worse by the fact that Scott killed him\|\|. It's also worth noting that between Deadly Genesis (which revealed the truth about Vulcan) and the Krakoa era, Cyclops wanted nothing to do with Xavier, hating him as much as he loved him thanks to his years of manipulations. - Magneto cares more about Scarlet Witch than Quicksilver as he never truly gives Pietro praise and considers him foolish and arrogant. While he sets a high standard for his son, he is more affectionate with Wanda and blames Pietro if they go against him, even if it was her choice. However, Magneto may actually favor his biological daughter Lorna Dane aka Polaris, due to Lorna inheriting his magnetism powers. Magneto even displays outright physical affection to Lorna (including forehead kissing), something Pietro and Wanda almost never get from him. Still, X-Men Red (2022) suggests neither Wanda or Lorna are actually his favourite daughter \|\|an honour that goes to Anya, Magneto's deceased first child, despite her being completely human.\|\| However, the emphasis on her may be because the reveal just beforehand via the creation of the Waiting Room by \|\|Wanda\|\| at the end of The Trial Of Magneto that \|\|she was human and therefore can't be resurrected\|\|. - Mystique zigzags these trope with her children, on the surface it seems she cares for Rogue more than her biological son Nightcrawler, being distraught when Rogue defects from the Brotherhood to the X-Men and later on she's willing to kill a baby (Hope Summers) so long as it revives Rogue. However, at other times Mystique treats Rogue the worst out of her children, having slapped, stabbed, and shot her adoptive daughter on multiple occasions, while ironically — apart from dropping him as a baby — she's never physically hurt Nightcrawler again. In AXIS where Mystique, thanks to Red Skull and Professor X, is completely good, she does in everything in her power to protect Nightcrawler, which is interesting considering she does the exact opposite normally. It is agreed upon that Mystique heavily favors both Nightcrawler and Rogue over her other son, Graydon Creed, who was born a normal human and whom she killed without regret when he became Anti-Mutant activist. Even Sabretooth was appalled at Mystique's treatment of their son. - An odd case is Thomas Logan, the biological father of Wolverine. When he was alive, he didn't care about James (it's unclear if he knew Wolverine was his child) or Dog, but when Wolverine ends up in Hell, he meets Thomas for the first time. Thomas gives him, of all things, a "Well Done, Son" Guy moment, because Logan has become a violent bastard who's killed thousands, and Thomas can respect that. He makes zero mention of Dog. - Jean Grey loves all three of her children dearly (Stryfe was neither raised by her nor, technically, biologically her child, since he's a clone of Cable who was the son of her clone). She's affectionate, motherly, supportive, and where necessary, violently protective of them. However, she has a consistently stronger rapport with Cable and Nate Grey than Rachel Summers. This is partially justified, since she actually raised Cable, and Rachel first turned up when she was dead - once she came back, the two had complicated feelings for each other, but eventually reconciled. Nate, by contrast, turned up when she was alive and was actively (albeit subconsciously) seeking out his mother, and more open to developing a relationship with her, but also more than willing to give her space. Plus, her experience with Rachel had probably done a great deal to help her adjust to the appearance of unexpected children. - In Y: The Last Man, Yorick and his sister Hero both think their father preferred the other sibling. It's unclear whether either of them is right. - "Cinderella": The stepmother's ill-treatment stems from her desire to elevate her daughters above Cinderella. - Franz Xaver von Schönwerth's "Follow Me Jodel": The old farmer has two sons, Michael and Jodel. He is fonder of Jodel because he has a good heard, even though he is less bright than his brother, to the point he hopes to leave his farm to Jodel, even though he is the younger son. Michael is understandably not happy about it. - In "Mother Holle", the widow favors her lazy daughter over the hard-working one because the former is her own offspring. - In "Morozko", the old woman pampers her biological daughter and mistreats her stepdaughter. - In "The Three Little Men in the Wood", the stepmother has her birth daughter completely pampered and spoiled whereas she hates her stepsister to death. - Advice and Trust: Subverted. Rei is Gendo's favorite. However, Asuka realizes that it does not stop him from treating her like crap. Finding out what Rei's life is like helps Asuka to get over her jealousy. Asuka didn't say anything for a minute. "She's the Commander's pet, his favorite," she said in a low voice. "Not you, his own son. Not me, the top scorer. Her. She's the one he likes. And they've got her taking so many tranquilizers and dissociatives I'm amazed she was even able to get angry enough to slap you. That amount of drugs has to be making her nearly a robot. That's the kind of cocktail you give to someone you want to keep totally pliable, un-argumentative, too doped up to care about anything... someone you want to make into a doll." Asuka shuddered. "If they can do that to the Pilot they like, what do they think of us?" - Better Bones AU: - Tigerstar favors his children by Goldenflower over his younger litter, as shown when he intervenes to spare the life of Flametail, his grandson through Tawnypelt, despite him knowing about the Dark Forest's plans and threatening to take the knowledge with him to StarClan. Hawkfrost realizes he would never do this with Mothwing, a realization that helps trigger his HeelFace Turn. - Graystripe favors his older litter Feathertail and Stormfur over his kits with Millie despite the former two being respectively dead and living far away, alienating his younger children with how he is always comparing them to his older kits. - Child of the Storm: - Carol's father favours his youngest child, Joe junior, over his quiet and artistic middle child, Stevie, and Carol, his tomboyish daughter, because Joe is the All American Boy and thus fits his heavily gendered expectations for how his children should behave. Stevie wilts under this treatment, while Carol straight up hates him. However, neither has any real issues with Joe junior. - After Hermione figures out that she's Wanda's biological daughter in the sequel, she strongly suspects that Harry - her best friend and Wanda's godson - is her mother's favourite. She's got good reasons for believing this: Wanda avoids her as much as possible, treats her with distant politeness, and has to be visibly arm-twisted by Strange into teaching Hermione how to master chaos magic, while showering attention and affection on Harry. However, the situation is a bit more complicated than it seems. - In a nutshell: Hermione was Happily Adopted and Wanda avoided her for the same reason she gave her up, to stop her from becoming a target. Harry needed a Parental Substitute, and when his dad turned out to be an incarnation of Thor, was such a target that her involvement made no difference. - However, there is indicated to be some truth to it; a few characters muse that while Wanda probably loves both equally, Hermione's startling resemblance to her mother and shared powers remind Wanda of two extremely painful periods in her life (when her powers came through and nearly drove her mad, and when she had to give up Hermione). This plus her relatively uncomplicated relationship with Harry makes him easier to love. - Doing It Right This Time: Subverted. Gendo loves Rei more than Shinji... However, Gendo being Gendo, it only means he treats her in a slightly less crappy fashion. - Ghosts of Evangelion: Misato took Shinji and Asuka in. Shinji was Misato's favorite and she favored him blatantly. Asuka is quite resentful about it. After Third Impact Misato admits that she made a mistake. - The King Nobody Wanted: Garth Tyrell is more fond of his Otherys daughters in Braavos than his Flowers sons in Highgarden, and makes no particular effort to hide this fact. Garth: [in front of his son Garse] Daughters are such a treasure, I find, even if sons are so often a burden and a disappointment. - The Palaververse: When talking about Zebrican religion: Mother Neighle['s] three children[:] The spirits of Sun, Sand, and Sweet Water. [...] Sweet Water, Mother Neighles favoured child and only daughter. - Shigeko Kageyama AKA Mob Ritsu is the obvious favorite in the family. He resents his status as the favorite because it means that he has expectations his sister, (genderswapped) Mob, will never have to live up to and he isn't free to make a single choice for himself. - Star Trek: Phoenix: Discussed and deconstructed. One of the root issues for Twilight's conflict with Sunset in the second season is that Twilight believes that their adoptive mothers favored Sunset over her. - Tokyo Mew Mew No Hope Left has this trope in spades at the beginning. The protagonist's parents are described as preening her older sister and sending her to a fancy school while forgetting that our heroine exists. - When She Smiles (Fresh C): Deconstructed. When Misato tries to stop Shinji from looking for a missing Asuka, Shinji calls her out on always favoring him over her...which, as far as he is concerned, means she did not really care for any of them. - Subverted in X-Men: The Early Years. Scott is convinced that Jean is Xavier's favorite student. In fact, when Jean's father expresses his concerns as to the presence of a kid with a criminal record in the school, Xavier replies if he had to choose between keeping Scott and taking Jean in... Well, he is the only father figure Scott has left. - Played with in Empath: The Luckiest Smurf. The other Smurfs think Papa Smurf treats Empath as the favorite son. \|\|It helps that Empath is Papa Smurf's only biological son.\|\| Empath, however, feels that he is more The Un-Favourite, as Papa Smurf does nothing to get him out of living a life away from his fellow Smurfs in Psychelia. - In a Harry Potter fanfic where Sirius Black has two children, a boy and a girl to be more precise, their mother favors the girl over the boy because he looks like Sirius and she thinks Sirius is guilty. - In Imaginary Seas, this is weaponized in the form of Percy's Noble Phantasm: Poseidon Asphalios: An Ocean of Blessings for the Most Beloved. As Poseidon's favorite son, he has his full blessings on top of the skills of all of the other sons of Poseidon but better. This is why he has an A+ Rank in Stout Arm of Brutality, his father's armor, Divine Core, and trident, and the same invulnerability as Caenis. - In the Soul Eater fanfic Oblivion, Medusa claims that when she and her sisters were children, she was their mother's favorite, Arachne was their father's favorite, and Shaula was The Un-Favourite. Based on their mother's behavior in Shaula's flashback (where she treated Shaula kindly and intended to punish Medusa for bullying her), this is likely not true. That doesn't stop the claim from being Shaula's Berserk Button. - Subverted in The Second Try. Asuka used to believe that Shinji was their caretaker Misato's favorite, but during a heart-to-heart talk she admits that maybe she misunderstood Misato's behavior. - In How the Light Gets In, Laurel knows that her parents do love her, but between her mother's actions (see Arrow below) and her father's drunken rants making it clear he wishes she died instead of Sara, realizes that they both love Sara more. Her mother, Dinah, takes it to extremes. Laurel recalls Dinah has only come to one of Mary's (Laurel's daughter, and her granddaughter) birthdays... and it was only because she thought Sara would be there. To the point that Laurel is hesitant to have more than one child because she's terrified she'll do this too. Notably, this doesn't affect her relationship with Sara (whom she still loves dearly), and Sara herself seems to be unaware of it. - In the Drake & Josh fanfic Into the Darkness, Drake and Meghan's biological father shows this to extreme levels. He clearly has adored Meghan since she was born and uses pet names like "sweetie" or "angel" whenever he talks about her. Drake on the other hand he hates for being born, among other nonsensical reasons such as "got me sent to jail for killing my boss" and "looking like me", and wants him dead, even being willing to take matters into his own hands, spending nearly a week torturing Drake until he breaks emotionally and comes within an inch of death. - Misty suffered a lot of this in Pokémon Reset Bloodlines. Her parents constantly pampered her older sisters, while they treated her as little more than a servant, as she had been an unplanned child and had no interest in the performing arts like the rest of her family. Things just got worse for her after she was revealed as a bloodliner, and the only reason they didn't get rid of her was to avoid bad press. - SAO: Mother's Reconciliation: Asuna ends up believing her mother favors Kouichirou over her, especially after Kyouko makes the mistake of comparing the siblings' accomplishments. This ends up spurring on her decision to run away from home. Asuna: You already have your perfect son who's the very definition of success himself! So why don't you stop wasting your time on a failure like me and focus all your attention on him?! - In RWBY Alternate, Taiyang began favoring Ruby over Yang after Summer died due to Ruby's Strong Family Resemblance to her mother. As a result, Yang and Ruby have a distant relationship (mainly on Yang's side). - In Blackbird (Arrow): - Even before the Gambit sank, Laurel was aware that both of her parents favored Sara, even if she (Laurel) was the one they were proud of. Quentin because she was the baby of the family, Dinah because Sara reminded her of herself when she was younger. - Her mother however, takes it to extremes. She goes as far as to blame Laurel for what happened to Sara just because she was the one who was dating Oliver and brought him into their lives, and uses it to justify trading Laurel for Sara to the League of Assassins. Dinah refuses to admit that Sara's choices were her own and she only has herself (and unbeknownst to everyone, Malcolm Merlyn) to blame for what happened. She's also a deconstruction of this trope, because it becomes clear that Dinah is a terrible parent in general and Sara being her favorite does not exclude her from her mother's emotional abuse, no matter how unintentional it is. - Nyssa tries to comfort Laurel by commenting that she also knows what it is like to be the unfavorite child. Presumably, she has too much of a soul to be a "good" heir. - The Bloods of Bolton: - It could not be more clear that Roose heavily favors Drucilla over her other siblings. He dotes on her, encourages her sadistic tendencies, and refuses to punish her for her actions. He also treats her with more fairness than most fathers in Westeros society would by letting her attend his council meetings. - Bethany tends to have more favor for Domeric. Granted, she's tried being a loving mother to her daughter, but Drucilla's growing hatred for her mother and her psychotic tendencies put a lid on all her attempts. - In Junior Officers, Deborah's father favours her brother David over her and her sister Margaret because of his gender. - One step backwards and Three forwards: Gabriel prefers Felix over Adrien, treating the elder brother as his heir apparent while largely ignoring his second son. What's particularly twisted about this is that Felix is Adrien, in a sense — reality was rewritten by the villains' Wishes, and Adrien's memories ended up in Felix while the 'new' Adrien remained as Lila's trophy boyfriend. It's implied that part of the reason he favors Felix is because he's written his other son off as nothing more than an Unwitting Pawn to keep Lila happy. - In Three Can Keep a Secret, it turns out that the Pines parents tended to prioritize Mabel's feelings and were largely dismissive of Dipper's throughout the twins' childhood, and this had a significant negative effect on both children's development, contributing to both Mabel's obliviously self-centered perspective and Dipper's deep insecurities. - In Njal Gets Burned, Njal openly favours his foster-son Hoskuld over any of his biological sons, even going so far as to state this out loud in court. Obviously, his sons resent this. - moral of the story (Nyame): Both Quentin and Dinah heavily favor Sara over Laurel, to the point of using Sara's fate to actively abuse and neglect her. After the poor handling of Sara's return helps drive Laurel to suicide, a drunken Quentin guiltily switches his favoritism to Laurel and begins disparaging Sara instead. That does absolutely nothing to improve their relationship as Laurel still loves Sara, and she instead takes it as a sign that she needs to cut ties with him. - A.I.: Artificial Intelligence: The robot child a couple uses to replace their comatose son becomes The Un-Favourite when their real child wakes up from his coma. - This is the Red Queen's Freudian Excuse in Alice in Wonderland (2010), as she claims (with some accuracy) that her parents and the rest of the kingdom favored her little sister, the White Queen, more than her. - In Beast (2017), Hilary clearly favors Polly over Moll, as Polly was a well-behaved girl who is now married to a successful man and expecting children, and generally fits into the family a lot better than Moll, who is often at odds with how Hilary wants her to live her life and brought a scandal upon them as a teen by getting expelled for violent behavior. Interestingly, Hilary tends to pay more attention to Moll, though it's because she feels the need to closely monitor Moll's every move so she won't screw up again and constantly criticize her, while Hilary usually has nothing but praise for Polly. - In Boyz n the Hood, Darrin "Doughboy" Baker is obviously The Un-Favourite of his single mother, Brenda, compared to his brother Ricky, who has a different father. This may partially explain why Doughboy is a gangbanger and Ricky is a college-bound high school football player. The favoritism is implied throughout the movie and is outright stated by Doughboy after \|\|Ricky's death in a drive-by shooting. In fact, the first question their mother asks after Doughboy and Tre bring Ricky's body to the house is, "What did you do to him?"\|\| - An interesting example in Cool Hand Luke. Luke's mother tells him that she's leaving everything to his brother, because she'd always loved Luke more, and wanted to make up for it. She's not proud of her favoritism but sees it as beyond her control. "Way it is, sometimes, you just have a feelin' for a child or you don't, and with John, I just didn't." - Zach from the Quebecois film C.R.A.Z.Y is the fourth son of five and manages to be a case of both Parental Favoritism AND The Un-Favourite — his religious mother believes he has the power of healing and defends him from his father's scorn. Meanwhile, his dad, having suspected him of being gay from an early age, lavishes most of his praise on the three older brothers, who are respectively a genius, a jock, and a macho lady's man. Meanwhile, the youngest just seems to get ignored. - Cries and Whispers: By Agnes' account, the younger sister Maria was their mother's favorite child. This made Agnes jealous as she was terribly fond of their mother, who in turn tended to be distant towards Agnes. The screenplay also indicates the eldest sister, Karin, was The Un-Favourite. - In Dead Poets Society, Todd receives a birthday present from his parents — a replica of what they sent him the previous year. It comes out that his brother's birthdays are a big deal, but his own are clearly an afterthought. One of his friends helps him throw the present off a balcony and jokingly tells him to cheer up: he'll get another one next year. - In Deewaar, Sumitra admits to her son Ravi that she always loved his brother Vijay more. - Ramsey Hogan in Desert Heat clearly favors one child over the other two. Matt: Why are you ridin' me and Jesse so much and never Petey? Ramsey: I love Petey 'cause I loved his mother. She died giving him birth. He's our love child. Matt: What about me and Jess? Ramsey: You two are the unfortunate results of some recreational fucking back when fucking was fun. Matt: ... geez. Ramsey: Get over it. - In Ever After, Rodmilla de Ghent favors her eldest daughter Marguerite, who is beautiful and behaves the same way as her mother, compared to her stepdaughter Danielle and her younger daughter Jacqueline, who has a much sweeter, kinder personality. - Played painfully straight in The Feast of All Saints, where Cecile overtly favors her son Marcel and barely tolerates her daughter Marie, largely because she is jealous of Marie's beauty. This culminates with \|\|Cecile attacking Marie when the latter comes home after being gang raped\|\|. Near the end of the movie, Cecile even says she wishes Marie was dead and asks Marcel to pass along the message. - Ferris Bueller's Day Off: Ferris's sister complains that her brother can get away with anything, and their parents will believe him. Since her brother is Ferris Bueller, she's right. On the other hand, Ferris wanted a car, which she got. - In The Godfather, Vito shows favoritism towards Michael, his youngest son, wanting him to have a better life. The expression on his face when he's told that Michael killed Sollozzo and McCluskey and thus becoming involved with the mafia business is one of heartbreak. - In the novels, Fredo accuses his father of showing favoritism to Tom, his unofficial adopted son. While nothing comes of it, Vito does compare Sonny unfavorably to Tom in terms of responsibility to an extent that Sonny cannot help but feel a little resentful. - In Hobo With a Shotgun, the villain Drake clearly favors his son Slick over his other son Ivan. When Slick dies, Ivan tries to assume his place in his father's eyes, without much success. \|\|Ultimately, Drake tells him that he'll never measure up and shoots him.\|\| - Kapoor & Sons: Between their two sons, Harsh and Sunita like Rahul more because he found success in his writing career (unlike Arjun). It's why he's reluctant to \|\|come out as gay to them, since they think so highly of him, but it wears on him throughout the film\|\|. - In Knives Out, Linda appears to be her father Harlan's favourite out of all his descendants and extended family. He speaks to her more respectfully and does not single her out for a telling-off like all the others. She is also the closest to becoming a Self-Made Woman in the way Harlan values. They had a secret way of communication and Linda is the only one openly grieving his death. It's strongly implied that during the will reading, Linda simply wanted to inherit the house for sentimental reason as she isn't shown getting excited over the money or publishing house like the rest of her family is. - The Lord of the Rings: Denethor clearly favors his eldest son Boromir over his youngest son Faramir, to the point of telling the latter You Should Have Died Instead. Of course, when it looks like Faramir has actually died (he wasn't), Denethor loses what sanity he had left and tries to burn himself alive and his son's (apparent) corpse with him out of despair. Faramir : (Trying Not to Cry) You wish now that our places had been exchanged. That I had died and Boromir had lived. Denethor : (hesitates a moment) Yes. I wish that. - A scene entitled "Sons of the Steward" from the Extended Edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers further elaborates on Denethor's preference for Boromir and his emotional abuse of Faramir. It's noticeable that Boromir clearly hates being the favorite and doesn't hesitate to call out his father on such abuse; it's also made very clear that the brothers love each other dearly, and Faramir doesn't resent Boromir for the favoritism. - In Madea's Family Reunion, Victoria Breaux favors and pampers her younger daughter, Lisa, and despises her older daughter, Vanessa. This is because Vanessa's father was a musician who dumped her and left her broke, while Lisa's father was a rich man who gave her a luxurious lifestyle. She even allowed her second husband to rape Vanessa to stop him from leaving her. However, the film makes it clear that Victoria's favoritism didn't do Lisa any favors; while Victoria favors her, she also controls her entire life, which has left her unable to fight for herself, and has been stealing from her trust fund for years, leaving it virtually empty. She also pushed Lisa to marry Carlos, the very banker who's been helping her steal from the trust fund, because he's rich and he'd be able to keep them in luxury, despite the fact that he's horribly abusive. By the end of the movie, Lisa has broken free from her mother's control and her abusive fiancé while Victoria and Vanessa appear to be on the path of mending their relationship. - Marvel Cinematic Universe - Thor: Odin paid more attention to Thor as he was heir to the throne (as well as Odin's true-born son), while Loki (whom Odin adopted) was more of a tool to unify the Asgardians and Ice Giants. Odin's preference for Thor initially made him blind to the latter's faults and ended up setting Loki on his path to villainy. - Subverted by the time of Thor: Ragnarok \|\|as Odin says he loves both his sons and gives a Loki So Proud of You moment. Both Thor and Loki have gone against his wishes and become better people for it. Odin still holds his sons in greater regard than Hela, his first child, and strove to make both of them better rulers\|\|. - Played with in regards to Frigga. Loki, being In Touch with His Feminine Side, shares a lot more in common with her than Thor does (though Thor resembles his mother more than Loki). Thor: The Dark World reveals that Frigga was Loki's instructor in magic, so they once had a mentor-pupil relationship in addition to a mother-son one; she would've naturally grown close to him after spending so much time together. Meanwhile, Thor's fighting style was much more similar to Odin's. Tom Hiddleston confirms this in this interview (as quoted below). However, Avengers: Endgame makes it clear that \|\|Frigga nonetheless loved Thor just as much as she did Loki and even accepts her future son's presence without question. Thor is overjoyed to see her again and is more emotionally open with her than he was with Odin\|\|. Hiddleston: Rene Russo and I, always, from the very first film, part of the backstory we created was that Frigga was really the most attentive to Loki when he was a child. And Odin didn't really know how to connect. He connected much more with Thor. They were sort of cut from the same cloth. And Frigga and Loki had this kind of beautiful, sensitive, more artistic relationship. And it was actually her who taught him all his magic. - Yondu from Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) as a Father to His Men, in particular, cared for Peter aka Starlord more than other Ravagers, though Yondo had trouble admitting it to him. First Mate Kraglin Obfonteri in Vol. 2 is not fooled and calls out the favoritism Yondu shows Peter when the Ravagers were hunting the Guardians down on behalf of Ayesha. - Thanos doesnt try to deny that he considers Gamora the best of his adoptive children and says as much in front of his other kids. She gets preferential treatment from him and is the one he relates to the most. He continues to feel this way even after she does a HeelFace Turn and disowns him. This comes back to bite both of them in Avengers: Infinity War; \|\|to get the Soul Stone, Thanos must sacrifice what he loves most... which he quickly realizes means killing his favorite daughter. He reluctantly does and is inconsolable afterward.\|\| - Meet Joe Black: William favors Susan over Allison and strangely enough, Allison is okay with it. - Nope: Otis Haywood Senior groomed OJ as his successor, completely shutting out Emerald from the business and taking her horse away from her for a movie he was working on. Emerald still holds a grudge even after his passing and her relationship with OJ is tense at the start of the film. OJ suggests that this was because she and their father were too similar, causing them to butt heads. - Rags: Arthur plays favorites quite a bit. In addition to Charlie suffering from forced servitude as the stepson, he also plays favorites among his own sons, treating Andrew with far more respect than he does Lloyd. - Smooth Talk: June, Connies older sister, appears to be the favorite daughter. Connies mother, who frequently clashes with Connie, emphasizes June is an angel to a friend right in front of Connie. - Gordie is most definitely The Un-Favourite in Stand by Me, and believes his father would rather he have died than his charming, athletic older brother. The only thing keeping Gordie from feeling worse than he does is the fact that he and his brother had a great relationship, and his brother used to praise and encourage him in his writing. - This is in contrast to the book, where the age difference between them means that their relationship wasn't as close and the favoritism hurt Gordie a lot more. It's explained in the narrative that Denny was a miracle baby, born after several years of infertility, whereas Gordie was born when his parents were old enough to be grandparents and didn't really want to be raising another child. - Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story: The fact that Dewey Cox's father is fond of reminding Dewey that "the wrong kid died" when discussing Dewey's deceased older brother is a pretty good indication of where Dewey stands on the pecking order. - Welcome to the Dollhouse: The mother obviously favors the cute youngest daughter Missy over the plain middle daughter Dawn, to the point where Mom and Missy cuddle on the couch while watching television and Dawn has to sit on the floor. - X-Men Film Series: Downplayed with Professor X, since he never neglects any of his students whether as a teacher or as a Parental Substitute, but he is closer to those who are Birds of a Feather, like Hank McCoy in X-Men: First Class and Jean Grey in X-Men: Apocalypse. Hank and Jean do receive a bit more of Xavier's time and care. - Sid Sawyer in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. All the adults adore Tom's little brother and wish Tom were more like him... when in reality he's a manipulative, mean-spirited brat, but only Tom, Huck, and Becky ever notice. - In Diana Wynne Jones's Archer's Goon, the youngest of the seven magical siblings is the most powerful and favored of the group. His elder brothers and sisters are bound magically to protect him. - As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury both feature a mother having a favorite son out of all her other children, despite the fact that the son is a Jerkass. - In Beyond the Western Sea, Lord Kirkle favors Laurence, while Lady Kirkle favors Albert, leading to a Cain and Abel situation. - Brother Cadfael: One story has the two sons of a landowner, Nigel the elder being obviously favored. Meriet the younger is sent to the abbey as a novice despite being obviously unfitted for the life, but both he and his father insist on it. It turns out the son was sent to atone for a crime he committed... \|\|except he was actually covering for Nigel, whom Meriet thought had committed murder, but was actually guilty of treason and hiring an Overzealous Underling to waylay a messenger.\|\| The father makes amends when he realizes what an ass he's been. Therefore my grievous sin against my son Meriet is not only this doubt of him, this easy credence of his crime and his banishment into the cloister, but stretches back to his birth in lifelong misprizing. - In Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey novel Busman's Honeymoon, the Dowager Duchess explicitly tells Harriet that Peter is her favorite child. - Paula Danziger is another teen writer who was fond of this, although in Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice?? she turns the trope on its head — big sister Melissa is the family favorite until she defies her draconian father by moving in with her boyfriend. Rather than choosing a "new" favorite, her father takes his annoyance out on his two younger daughters. - In The Chronicles of Narnia, it's a case of brotherly favoritism. Peter loves all of his siblings but he is especially close with the youngest, Lucy. - In the Chinese Cinderella story Bound by Donna Jo Napoli, at first the stepmother cared for neither main character Xing Xing or her biological daughter, as during her time, sons were more favored. However, as Xing Xing's father grew closer to Xing Xing after the death of his wife, the stepmother grew closer to her own daughter, while simultaneously despising and envying her stepdaughter. - Goes both ways in the Conqueror books. Temuge is the youngest of five brothers, and his mother dotes on him as a result. This leads to him becoming a rather soft and chubby child who never learns to use a bow or sword effectively, making him the least favorite in his father's eyes. - In the Cyteen novel Regenesis, part of the backstory of Giraud and Denys Nye is that their mother wanted to raise a genius, and pressured Giraud, the eldest, to perform as a child; although he was bright, he wasn't up to that level, and was The Un-Favourite. Denys, on the other hand, was a genius and was coddled. Denys grew up introverted and antisocial, depending utterly on Giraud to handle interaction with other people. - In Gene Stratton-Porter's A Daughter of the Land, Mary. With Kate singled out as The Un-Favourite. "I am not! But it wasn't a 'fool thing' when Mary and Nancy Ellen, and the older girls wanted to go. You even let Mary go to college for two years." "Mary had exceptional ability," said Mrs. Bates. "I wonder how she convinced you of it. None of the rest of us can discover it," said Kate. - Manny Heffley, the baby of the Heffley family from Diary of a Wimpy Kid. (Manny is three years old, Greg is around eleven to thirteen, and Rodrick is implied to be between fifteen and seventeen.) Manny is allowed to do all sorts of stuff like bring toys to church, call his brothers names, throw fits to get his way, and crawl out of bed at night and stay up. Greg states that when he was Manny's age, he had none of that, as his family was in a weaker financial state at the time. The Parental Favoritism also spreads to the extended family. (Manny is given far more presents for Christmas and more stuff that he wants, while Greg is given stuff like books of Algebra or deodorant.) The only in-focus grandmother is particularly bad, as she claims to like all of her grandchildren equally but her fridge is practically wallpapered in pictures of Manny. Also, Manny hardly ever receives punishment for his actions, even when he \|\|steals supplies and leaves his family for dead during a blizzard.\|\| - The only onscreen grandfather meanwhile actually subverts this. It's also why he is Gregory's favorite grandparent, for obvious reasons... "Gregory's my favorite!" - Murphy in Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files suffers from this. In Blood Rites, she asks that Harry time an assault on a vampire lair so that she can skip her family reunion. The timing is off, however; she attends part of the reunion and learns that her younger sister — whom their mother explicitly says is allowed more freedom as the youngest than Murphy had as a youngster — is marrying Murphy's ex-husband. The sister got involved with the ex when he failed to arrest her for underage drinking when she was spending an unsupervised vacation in New Orleans. Their mother is A-OK with this and criticizes Murphy for her reaction. - Of course, only part of this is because Murphy's sister is the favorite sister. The other part is that Mrs. Murphy absolutely loves her son-in-law. She's thrilled that she's getting him back in the family again. - A Drowned Maiden's Hair: Victoria Hawthorne laments that she was always unloved no matter how hard she tried to be good, while her charming sister Hyacinth was adored by everyone despite her lack of positive qualities. The family house at Hawthorne Grove was passed down to Hyacinth, even though she was the youngest, just because their father liked her better. - A major theme in East of Eden, due to the running Cain and Abel parallel. It happens first with Cyrus Trask, his unfavorite eldest son Charles, and the favorite, Adam. Thanks to Generation Xerox, things go the same way with Adam's twin sons, Cal and Aaron. - In Stephen King's novel The Eyes of The Dragon, Peter is King Roland's favorite son, largely because he reminds him so much of Queen Sasha. Thomas, meanwhile, takes after his father, which means that Roland sees his own flaws reflected back at him. (In fact, many of the eavesdropped statements that led to Thomas's resentment ended with a "like something I would have produced at his age" that Thomas missed.) The Big Bad, Flagg, is able to use Thomas' resentment as part of his plot to destroy the kingdom. - All over Flowers in the Attic. Cathy was her father's favorite. Chris is his mother's favorite. Corrine was her father's favorite before he disowned her for marrying his much younger half-brother. - In the later books in the series, there's a massive sense of this between Cathy's three children, as she sometimes appears much fonder of eldest child Jory and adopted daughter Cindy than of her troubled middle child Bart. She does love Bart, however, and the sense of favoritism has a lot to do with his view of things, not necessarily how they actually are. - In A Frozen Heart, a Tie-In Novel to Frozen, some of Hans' brothers resent him for being their mother's favorite and taunt him for being a Momma's Boy. They also resent Caleb, the oldest of 13 sons, for being their father's favorite. - FUDGE, in Judy Blume's series of young adult novels beginning with Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, is the family favorite, getting away with murder while big brother Peter got repeatedly whacked over the head with An Aesop about loving his brother. The fact that Peter Can't Get Away with Nuthin' doesn't help. - In fact, this is one of those odd instances where it's not clear whether Fudge is the parents' favorite, or the author's. Peter's parents seem as if they're supposed to be the wise, sensible, benevolent type, and they do make up for some of Fudge's excesses, but the fact that Fudge never gets called on his bad behaviour suggests that either he was given serious preference by his parents... or Blume didn't want to let such things as "discipline" get in the way of Fudge's antics. - In Double Fudge, Fudge's latest "phase" is that he's obsessed with money. His parents are actually somewhat worried about this, and Anne, the mother, is positively mortified when Fudge's excessive greed results in him getting evaluated by a counselor, who tells Anne that maybe she should try to stress that "the best things in life are free," etc. The problem is never solved, per se, in order to allow for hijinks and because Warren and Anne really have no idea what to do about it, but it does seem to lessen. Slightly. - His parents do get fed up with Fudge and punish him when warranted. In Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Fudge is throwing a tantrum and not eating his cornflakes and his dad makes him stand in the bathtub while he dumps the bowl of cereal on his head, and in Superfudge he's occasionally scolded (and spanked once) by his mother over his misdeeds and at the end is punished by his parents for riding his bike to town without telling anyone. - In Gone with the Wind, Scarlett is Gerald O'Hara's favored child. He has come to realize that he will never have any sons and speaks to Scarlett in a sort of man-to-man way that Scarlett enjoys very much. Scarlett carries this out much further with her own children; her youngest daughter, Bonnie, is her favored child. - J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter: - Harry endures some pretty extreme abuse at the hands of his aunt Petunia and uncle Vernon, while his cousin Dudley is extremely pampered. This is owed at least in part to a long-held jealousy Petunia held of his mother. In the sixth book, Dumbledore notes that Dudley arguably got the worse end of the deal, being unprepared for the real world. - Ron certainly feels for a long time like this is the case, although readers generally see no evidence of it; his parents clearly love him. Among his many insecurities, he frets about being the sixth boy in a family that always wanted a girl. Being the best friend of an actual celebrity, who is treated by his parents as an extra son, doesn't exactly help. The fact that he got plenty of hand-me-downs from his older brothers (due to his family being poor) might also play a part in this perception. - Regulus was the favorite over older brother Sirius (mostly because the former was just as much a bigot as his parents), to the point that even the family house-elf preferred him, partially for sharing the same bigoted views and partially because he was kind to him and \|\|cared enough about him to order Kreacher to leave him behind and allow him to be the one to die when he betrayed Voldemort. In Order of the Phoenix, Kreacher's dislike and animosity towards Sirius for his "betrayal" of the House of Black culminates in Kreacher betraying him to his death\|\|. - Dumbledore's sister Ariana required constant supervision, leaving Albus rather aloof - much to their brother's annoyance. - Marvolo Gaunt favored his son Morfin greatly over his daughter Merope, and eventually was arrested when his abuse of her was seen by an Auror. - Petunia certainly felt that her parents liked Lily better after discovering she was a witch and it is heavily implied she already felt like The Un-Favourite before Lily ever received her Hogwarts letter. - The House on the Lagoon: Straight with Rebecca, who spoils Ignacio and her daughters in comparison to Quintín. Deliberately averted with Isabel, who treats both her biological son and her adopted son equally. - In Andre Norton's Ice Crown, Uncle Offlas has charge of Roane, but blatantly favors his own son. - In Stuart Hill's The Icemark Chronicles, the youngest son Sharley has a crippled leg, so his parents overprotect him and love him more than their other offspring. His sister Medea grows more and more hatred towards him throughout the second book, until she eventually tries to kill him. Here he was, the reason and root of her inability to embrace the cause of the Icemark, her family, humanity, the mortal world... everything! She wasn't responsible for her actions. Sharley was. - Present across the Julio-Claudian family in I, Claudius. - Forced to play up his idiocy and disability, Claudius always disgusted his mother, especially when compared to his noble and valiant brother Germanicus. There was no resentment of Germanicus on Claudius's side. - Livia justified her actions by pointing out how disastrous Augustus's Parental Favoritism was: by favoring Marcellus over Agrippa, and Lucius, Gaius and later Germanicus against Tiberius, he risked civil war in Rome after his death. - Claudius later used this to protect his own son, Britannicus, from his adopted son Nero, hoping to divert Agrippinilla's attention from him. He fails. - Stephen King's It plays with this to horrific effect with Patrick Hockstetter, one of the minor antagonists in the novel. Patrick suspects that his parents love his newborn brother more than him (which the narration confirms to the reader), but doesn't care one iota about that, because Patrick is solipsistic (he believes that he is the only real mind that exists) and a psychopath. What he can't stand is the idea that the newborn infant might not only exist just like him, but will also disrupt his carefully planned schedules, and promptly smothers the infant to death, disguising it as crib death. - It's Not the End of the World: Karen is shocked when she learns that her parents have been having marital problems more or less since six-year-old Amy was born, causing her to theorize that the root of the discord was that her father made Amy his favorite and her mother retaliated by making oldest child Jeff her favorite. Karen remarks she's glad to be no one's favorite. - A major part of the plot of Jacob Have I Loved: Sarah Louise's younger twin, Caroline, received all the attention as a baby because she was always weak and sickly. She grew up beautiful, popular, talented at singing and the piano, sweet, and perfect, while Sarah Louise became a hard-working tomboy who "never gave her parents a moment's worry." Sarah Louise's mission in the novel is to find a life outside her sister's shadow. - In Jane Eyre, Jane is treated only like another mouth to feed for her spiteful aunt (whose husband treated Jane more kindly before he died) and her cousins, especially John, take delight in bullying her, even in front of their mother who does nothing to stop them. - A very important part of L. M. Montgomery's Jane of Lantern Hill: Grandmother only loves one of her children, Robin, Jane's mother. She's also insanely jealous, so this love doesn't extend to Jane. - Joe Pickett: In Endangered, Brenda Cates dotes on her youngest son Dallas; treating him as a hero and constantly insulting and belittling his older brothers, Bull and Timber. - Cara from Julia's Kitchen always felt that her mother preferred her, and her father preferred her younger sister Janie. It was all fair until her mother and Janie died in a House Fire. Now she struggles to connect with her father. - Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982: Jiyoung's parents and relatives prefer her little brother over Jiyoung and her sister because he is male. - Mercilessly deconstructed in Leaving Poppy by Kate Cann. The heroine, Amber, has a younger sister that is so favored by her mother it reaches ridiculous levels. At the start of the story, the heroine is due to go on holiday to celebrate her exam success. But Poppy — who her mother describes as "fragile" — suddenly becomes "ill," crying all the time and throwing tantrums. Their mother guilt-trips Amber into staying... and Poppy "miraculously" gets better. In later chapters, it is revealed that \|\|Poppy is not sick — she's psychotic, partly as a result of being spoiled, but it's also suggested that she was "born bad." Even as a child, she slashed another kid with scissors — and planned the whole thing meticulously.\|\| - In The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, Rah is the favorite of virtually the entire Muggle community, because he's a good boy who doesn't ever deviate from the norm and builds them a mill. This is taken to ridiculous levels in one chapter when he wins a croquet game and everyone acts like he won the Olympics, complete with giving him an old and valuable medal. Rah also seems to be the author's favorite as well, given that she made his entry in the character glossary easily the most detailed, while most everyone else (including Zyn) got two or three sentences tops. - In the Maximum Ride series, Jeb clearly favors his foster children (the Flock) over his six-year-old biological son Ari, to the point at which he leaves Ari in an underground lab filled with unethical scientists who unsurprisingly have no problem experimenting on the poor kid. Because of this, Ari understandably resents the Flock for this (especially Max) and tries constantly to gain his father's favor. \|\|Then the parental favoritism becomes literal when it turns out that Max and Ari are half siblings\|\|. Of course, it's a bit blurry as to whether he genuinely loved them or was just another in a long line of people trying to use the Flock to their advantage. The fact that he doesn't shut up about how they have to save the world might be an indicator. - Mo Dao Zu Shi: - Jin Guangshan doesn't particularly care about any of his children, but his legitimate-born son Jin Zixuan certainly fares better than bastards Meng Yao/Jin Guangyao and Mo Xuanyu. Even after the latter two are brought into the sect, they're frequently browbeaten, insulted, neglected, and coerced into performing immoral acts trying to win his non-existent approval. - The Yunmeng Jiang sect's inner family has a complicated version. Jiang Fengmian favors the-not-even-formally-adopted Wei Wuxian over both of his biological children, and while Yu Ziyuan frequently calls him on it, her hatred of the boy doesn't mean she favors Jiang Cheng so much as she's constantly castigating him for not doing better at getting his father to notice him. - In Lynda Robinson's Lord Meren mysteries, it is revealed in Murder at the Feast of Rejoicing that Meren, the eldest son, was put under great pressure to excel by his Abusive Father, while his younger brother Ra was indulged and spoiled. - In Outbound Flight, Jedi Lorana Jinzler is confronted, to her shock, by the brother she never knew, who told her angrily that their parents, whom she also never knew, loved her for being a Jedi, loved her more than their other children, held her up as a shining example of what they should be. She's confused and disturbed and both of them come away from that confrontation worse off; at the end of the book, Lorana tells someone to find her brother and tell him that she was thinking of him, and hoping that he could find a way to let go of his anger — at her, at their parents, at himself. - Played with in Judy Blume's The Pain And The Great One, a kids book told in two parts. The first, an older sister describes how her little brother "The Pain" gets away with murder and is clearly the parents' favorite, in the second the brother describes the sister "The Great One" in the same way, also concluding that she must be the favorite. - The gods in Percy Jackson are guilty of this. In fact, Poseidon openly admitted that \|\|Percy was his favorite son\|\|. - Jodi Picoult favors the Delicate and Sickly variation on this trope: - In My Sister's Keeper, youngest daughter Anna was conceived specifically to be a donor for cancer-struck big sister, Kate. While she is pregnant with Anna, her mother, Sara, admits that she hasn't really considered her new daughter's personality, only the genetics that ensures she will make a good donor. Even when Anna is born, Sara's main concern is that the doctors don't damage the umbilical cord (which can be used to save Kate) — she pays very little attention to the newborn baby. Anna's dad is more concerned with her, but even he neglects his oldest child, Jesse. Late in the book, he admits that he hasn't really paid much attention to Jesse's development, and can't fill in the gap between being told that Jesse wasn't a suitable donor for Kate, and being confronted with a seriously troubled 18-year-old. Jesse and Anna are only seen in terms of what they can do for Kate — who, to her credit, notices this and doesn't like it one bit. - In Handle with Care, Willow suffers from severe brittle bone disease, which understandably necessitates a lot of care and caution. However, her mother, Charlotte, takes it to an extreme, ignoring older daughter Amelia and systematically destroying the girl's life as she campaigns to improve Willow's. When Amelia develops bulimia and starts self-harming, Charlotte genuinely can't see why Amelia has such problems. Unlike Willow, who is cared for by her family, Amelia is promptly shuffled off to a clinic in Boston when her problems are revealed, to be someone else's problem for a while. What makes this particularly sad is that before Willow's birth, Charlotte admits that she would hesitate to take a bullet for her husband because Amelia would need her, but she's protecting Amelia no matter what. By the end of the book, it's doubtful that Charlotte would give the same answer. - Robert Caro's The Power Broker: Robert Moses' mother Bella favors him more and more over his brother Paul (who is more willing to contradict her), culminating in \|\|Robert getting most of her estate when she dies\|\|. - The Bennet sisters, in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Tearaway Lydia is Mrs. Bennet's favorite daughter; sensible and witty Elizabeth is Mr. Bennet's. Oldest sister Jane is loved by everyone thanks to her sweet nature, but bookish Mary and second-to-youngest Kitty get the short end of the stick. (Kitty doesn't even get a character trait; she's just 'second-to-youngest'. That's favoritism for you.) - In the Realm of the Elderlings trilogy: - Althea is clearly the favourite of Ephron, who treats her like the son he never had and indulged her tomboy nature by taking her on sailing trips with him and spoiling her quite a bit. This drove quite a wedge between the sisters, since Keffria notes that despite being the older, obedient, dutiful daughter who married and had children as expected of her, she never got the attention her younger, more charismatic sister did. Ronica is more neutral, able to see both her daughter's strengths and weaknesses, but she spends far more time overall with Keffria since Althea runs away in the first book. - Kyle, Keffria's husband, treats his oldest son Wintrow with nothing but disdain, to the point of disowning him entirely on their voyage and ignores his youngest son, but he positively dotes on his only daughter, Malta, giving her everything she wants and intervening when anybody tries to discipline her. Ironically the person who clashes with Malta most is Althea, who is just as much as a spoiled Daddy's Girl as Malta is - according to Keffria, Althea was even worse at Malta's age. - Jane Rizzoli of the Rizzoli & Isles series is blatantly ignored in favor of her brothers, especially brother Frankie. One book tries to Hand Wave this with the explanation that her mother always knew that Jane was the strong one while her brother needed help, but a later novel has her finally admit her mistake. - Mrs. Dashwood does a bit of this in Sense and Sensibility. She is kind and affectionate to all three of her daughters, and a Good Stepmother to her husband's son from his first marriage; but she has a particularly close relationship with Marianne, who strikingly resembles her and is constantly referred to as being her darling child, doted upon, or something of the sort. Meanwhile, she generally finds Elinor incomprehensible and fails to take her feelings into account, possibly because she often doesn't realise they exist. When the sisters have similar love problems, Mrs. Dashwood leaves Elinor to shift for herself while giving Marianne her unlimited support. While some of this could be explained by Elinor's and Marianne's respective attitudes, Mrs. Dashwood continues to be inconsiderate to Elinor even when it is revealed that \|\|her love interest is engaged to another woman\|\|. Completely inverts the Middle Child Syndrome. To her credit, near the end she gets a clue and fears that "she had been unjust, inattentive, nay, almost unkind to her Elinor." - For bonus points, Elinor and Marianne have a younger sister, Margaret. Margaret exists. That is all. - In Shaman Blues, the wraith's mother clearly favored her older son, eventually putting the Curse of Cain — which makes all bad befall the then-would-be wraith and all good fall to the boy — on the two of them. The wraith's mocking way of telling the story suggests that this was just the cherry on top of other signs pointing at whom mother loved more. - Sherlock Holmes has a case (\|\|The Priory School\|\|) where the favored son isn't given preferential treatment because he's illegitimate, and while the father doesn't disdain or even mislove his younger son, the elder was the child of a woman he truly loved and so the father gives in to his whims. \|\|When the Bastard Bastard's machinations to disinherit the legitimate heir result in the death of a man, however, he immediately confesses to his father and flees the country.\|\| - George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire has a few: - Tywin Lannister's blatant playing favorites with his children Jaime, Cersei and Tyrion is one of many things that make him a bad parent. Most glaringly, he favors his oldest son Jaime, who's tall, handsome, a ferocious knight and generally regarded as the golden son. His second son Tyrion is a malformed dwarf whose mother (Tywin's beloved wife) died while giving birth to him. Since Jaime and Cersei are prevented from inheriting (Jaime is a member of the Kingsguard, who can't hold lands or father children, while Cersei is a woman), Tyrion is the heir, which is Tywin's Berserk Button. Tywin's daughter, Cersei, is between her brothers in terms of value in their father's eyes: she and Tywin got along when she was younger, even with hints of Cersei being Daddy's Girl (she was one of two people in the house at whom he smiled), but she was "just" a daughter in his eyes, even if Tywin he saw her as a good one. That said, Tywin's treatment of all his children is abusive, just to different degrees, and Jaime, the favored sibling, is also the only one loving and loved by the other two. - Warrior-like Randyll Tarly (said to be the finest soldier in the realm) bypasses his heir, the cowardly, compassionate, bookish and weight-challenged Samwell, for his younger son Dickon (and by "bypasses" we mean "chains him up for three days, threatens to kill him, then has him forfeit his birthright and be exiled to the Night's Watch rather than let him become a gasp academic"). He explicitly tells him he'll enjoy hunting him down like an animal if he doesn't join the Watch while skinning a dead deer. He rips its heart out in front of him for emphasis. - Queen Cersei lavishes shamelessly preferential treatment on her sociopathic eldest Joffrey while publicly berating the sweet, gentle Tommen as a weakling. She also frequently ignores her only daughter in favor of both boys, not noticing that she repeats the pattern her father had set. - While Catelyn dearly and deeply loves all of her children, she has mentioned that Bran is her favorite as he is her special boy. There is also a mild version between Arya and Sansa specifically, as Catelyn often finds herself wishing that Arya could be more like her ladylike sister. (While Catelyn loves all of her own children, she resents her husband Ned's illegitimate son Jon for being Ned's son by another woman, and disdains the Starks' ward Theon Greyjoy.) - Theon gets the short end of the stick again when, feeling unwelcome in Winterfell, he tries to go back home to Pyke. After Balon's oldest boys were killed and the youngest — Theon — was taken hostage as punishment for his attempted rebellion, Balon was left with his daughter Asha. Balon doesn't welcome his remaining son Theon, who was raised by his enemies the Starks, and he absolutely dotes on Asha. - In Gene Stratton-Porter's The Song of the Cardinal, the cardinal got this. His father stuffed him with food in the nest, and his mother, more equitable, gave him only half of what she gathered. The king came to see him and at once acknowledged subjugation. He was the father of many promising cardinals, yet he never had seen one like this. He set the Limberlost echoes rolling with his jubilant rejoicing. He unceasingly hunted for the ripest berries and seed. He stuffed that baby from morning until night, and never came with food that he did not find him standing atop the others calling for more. The queen was just as proud of him and quite as foolish in her idolatry, but she kept tally and gave the remainder every other worm in turn. They were unusually fine babies, but what chance has merely a fine baby in a family that possesses a prodigy? The Cardinal was as large as any two of the other nestlings, and so red the very down on him seemed tinged with crimson; his skin and even his feet were red. - In The Stormlight Archive, Shallan was the favorite child of an extremely abusive father, being his only daughter and the potential savior of the family (as she can marry higher up the social ladder and restore their prestige). However, she gains no advantage from this at all. She's forced to grow up with the enormous expectations of the family and also feels responsible for the suffering of her brothers, to the extent that she takes on all their ever-increasing problems. When her father dies, it's Shallan who steps up to the plate as leader of the family, despite being the youngest. And being the favorite didn't stop her from copping more than her fair share of emotional and verbal abuse from him, either. At the end of the second book, \|\|The Reveal that Shallan is the one who killed her mother (which her father took the blame for) casts their relationship in a different light. On a reread, it's implied several times that her father is terrified of her\|\|. - In The Story of Valentine and His Brother, Richard can't bring himself to love Val because he takes after his mother, who abandoned both of them. He wishes she had left Dick, who looks more like Richard. - Fifty years later, in Survivor's Quest, that person Lorana talked to finally stops neglecting the promise and arranges for Dean Jinzler to go to the ruins of Outbound Flight, where his sister died. Time has muddled up his anger, and although he still believes that she was unduly favored, he wants to put things to rest and say his goodbyes. During the events of the novel, he realizes, that he'd been lying to himself for years. Their parents had loved the absent Lorana, but they had loved the children they had just as much. All those years when Dean had been pushing himself to excel in his father's fields, they had been proud. He just hadn't seen it. "I'm an electronics technician. Like my father before me." - In the Sweet Valley High series, Ned and Alice Wakefield consistently blast Jessica for her bad behavior — promiscuity, bad grades, etc. Similar behavior from Elizabeth is glossed over or rationalized. One scene illustrates this perfectly; when Jessica tries to fix her brother Steven up with one of her friends, she's screamed at by everyone. But when Elizabeth steps in to defend Jessica and explain that it was her idea, suddenly it's a great idea and everyone's falling all over themselves to praise her for it. Only when Jessica ran away from home ( , in two separate books) did it finally dawn on her family how troubled she was. twice - Laurence in the Temeraire books. He's the unnecessary third son of a minor aristocratic family, and his father, who'd never paid him any attention, expected him to go into the priesthood, but instead, he ran away and joined the Navy. And just when he thought he might have been in a position to make his way back into his father's good graces with his accumulated military honors, he experiences the local equivalent of Falling into the Cockpit and finds himself recruited to the socially unacceptable Aerial Corps instead, and his father almost disowns him. Their relationship only gets worse from there. - The Thorn Birds: Fiona favors her oldest son Frank. This is because Frank is the son of the man she really loves, who seduced and abandoned her. Meanwhile, she has several other children with Paddy, the man kind enough to marry her when no one else would because of her illegitimate child, but to a large extent, she ignores them. Only daughter Meggie actually thinks she's dying when she starts her period because her mother never bothered to tell her anything about it. Twenty-something years later, Meggie repeats this mistake with her own children, favoring her son Dane (her illegitimate child with the priest she has loved since childhood) over her daughter Justine (her child by her neglectful husband Luke). - To a lesser extent, it seems that Meggie is Paddy's favorite child, possibly because she's the only daughter in a large family of sons. Meanwhile, Frank is The Unfavorite, due to not being Paddy's real son. - J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium: - The Lord of the Rings: Boromir (the elder son) is heavily preferred to Faramir by their father, Denethor. It's especially emphasized in The Movies, where Denethor is shown as blatantly unfair; in the book, Gandalf at least believes that it is partly that Denethor is still grief-stricken over the death. In the book, it's also heavily implied that a lot of his favoritism comes from Boromir's loyalty — Boromir always puts Gondor's interests first, as Denethor does, while Faramir seems more interested in Gandalf's plan to take care of Middle-Earth as a whole (even if that means causing some serious trouble for Gondor). Case in point: both brothers are faced with an opportunity to take the Ring by force and use it to defend Gondor. Boromir goes for it; Faramir just gives the hobbits some supplies and lets them go. It should be noted though, that Boromir and Faramir love each other dearly, and Boromir protects Faramir as much as possible and is thoroughly sick of the way their father treats him. - In The Silmarillion, Fëanor and Fingolfin, who are half-brothers, fight for the love of their father Finwë, who shows no signs of favoritism. Then the eldest son, Fëanor, publicly threatens to kill Fingolfin, setting the point of his sword to his brother's chest. He is exiled... and his father Finwë goes with him. Poor Fingolfin. (Though arguably this might have been necessary to keep the slightly unhinged Fëanor from going batshit crazy... which he did anyway, mind, but only later.) Even so, Finwë declares that as long as his son is exiled, "I hold myself unkinged," and refuses to see or talk to his people, even during the holiest festivals. - Katie Nolan of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn knows when she gives birth to her son Neeley that she'll love him more than her daughter Francie, but promises she won't show it (she fails). She rationalizes much of her favoritism by saying that Neeley needs more encouragement, while Francie is strong like her and will get what she wants somehow. For example, when she can only afford to send one of the kids to high school, she says it should be Neeley because he won't go unless she makes him, but Francie will get an education because she wants it. - King Dedelin kicks off the plot of Warbreaker with this: rather than send his oldest daughter, Vivenna, to an Arranged Marriage with an Evil Overlord, as per their treaty, he sends the seventeen-year-old Siri (the treaty never specified which daughter, though it was assumed it would be Vivenna). He tries to justify this as the kingdom needing Vivenna more, but admits privately that he simply couldn't bear to send Vivenna to be raped and sacrificed — but he could bear to send Siri to the same fate. \|\|Luckily, said Overlord turns out to be far nicer than described, and he and Siri wind up being perfect for each other\|\|. - Warrior Cats: - Crookedstar was this to Rainflower, to the dismay of him, his brother Oakheart, and their father Shellheart all because he broke his jaw, thus "ruining his good looks." But he eventually tells her that she would never make him ashamed of who he was. - Breezepelt feels like this at first, because his dad never pays attention to him (but not knowing he \|\|had more than one kit\|\|). So he starts working with the Dark Forest not only to destroy the Clans but also to get revenge on Crowfeather. - It's strongly hinted that \|\|Brambleclaw is Tigerstar's favorite kit, despite them being on opposite sides\|\|. - Even though she may not have made it obvious, Scourge (back then Tiny) believed his mother Quince liked Socks and Ruby more than him. Though it's hinted that she favors him over the others. - Brokenstar was this to his foster mother, Lizardstripe. Justified, as she didn't want kits in the first place, and accepted Brokenstar extremely reluctantly. - In Terry Pratchett's The Wee Free Men, Tiffany Aching, the next-to-youngest child in a family of girls, is somewhat overlooked because the youngest child is the only boy. - The Westing Game: Grace Wexler doesn't even bother to hide how much she prefers her older, angelic daughter Angela over younger daughter Turtle. While angry at Turtle, she confides to her husband that she has always harbored a suspicion that the hospital had gotten the babies mixed up when Turtle was born and Grace explicitly states (while both girls are present) that she intends to leave everything she owns to Angela. The older girl is generally regarded as the perfect daughter \|\|much to Angela's resentment, due to her mother micromanaging her life.\|\| - Whateley Universe: Multiple instances: Melusine, [...] used to be Papas glowing favorite. Then, of the lot of us, its Mara who finally has a kid. Paige was twelve years old, and where I took after Dad, she definitely took after Mom. It was no wonder that she was Moms pride and joy. Id long since accepted the fact that Paige was my moms favorite, and Id even come to appreciate the benefits. While Paige received our moms full parental attention, I usually received far less scrutiny. Mom would never listen to anything that might be considered as criticism of Paige, not when Paige was her pride and joy, and especially not from me. - Nessarose is Frexspar's favorite child in Wicked. Her elder sister Elphaba thinks it's because Nessa is disabled, but it's more complicated than that. Frexspar was in a poly relationship with his wife Melena and another man named Turtle Heart. Melena didn't know who was Nessa's father, but Frex decided that she was all of theirs. - Jacqueline Wilson has used this a few times: - The Diamond Girls involves a mother who is desperate for her fifth child to be a boy, after having four daughters. She obsesses over it to the point of planning her new life around her son — demeaning the value of her daughters as she does so. This is one of the few cases where Parental Favoritism has started before the kid is born. \|\|It doesn't work out so well for the fifth Diamond child when "he" turns out to be a she,...\|\| - Girls In Love has one character, Nadine, with a younger sister who is the favorite of their superficial and snobbish mother. Natasha is a Devil in Plain Sight, but she looks cute, and later starts a career as a child model, so of course, she's "Mummy's favorite." - In The Illustrated Mum, Star is clearly Marigold's favourite child because she's the daughter of The One That Got Away. Dolphin finds this incredibly unfair, as Star shows Marigold constant disdain and leaves to live with her newfound father, while Dolphin chooses to stay with Marigold. \|\|Later, when Dolphin finds her own father, she's upset to learn he already has two daughters and seems to want her friend Oliver as a son, lamenting, "I'm not anybody's favourite."\|\| - Love Lessons deconstructs this somewhat, as Pru is the favourite of her father, who belittles her younger sister for being fat and slow, but being the favourite doesn't stop his verbal abuse of her and her mother is an Extreme Doormat who expects Pru to try and contain her father's rages. - In Wuthering Heights, Mr. Earnshaw favors his foster son Heathcliff (who may or may not be his illegitimate son) over his own two children Hindley and Catherine. Cathy overlooks this as she and Heathcliff become soul mates, but for Hindley, the Sibling Rivalry reaches Cain and Abel proportions, to the point that he reduces Heathcliff to servitude after his father's death. - In Andre Norton's The Zero Stone, the family split in two: Jern and his father, and his mother with the other two siblings. - In Garden of Shadows, Malcolm blatantly favors his daughter, Corrine, over both of his sons, giving her everything she wants while being overly critical and harsh towards Mal and Joel. When Olivia calls him out on it, he either claims Olivia is jealous that she didn't have the same opportunities growing up or that girls have to brought up diferently than boys. - Damien Adare in My Sweey Audrina openly favors and adores his second daughter, Audrina, over his eldest daughter, Vera, who he refuses to even acknowledge as his child, whihc in turn causes Vera to hate and mistreat Audrina. Later, in Whitefern, Damien starts to favor Sylvia, his third daughter, over Audrina, mainly because she fawns over him in a way that Audrina doesn't, though unlike Vera, Audrina doesn't hold it against her. - American Housewife: From the outset, Katie Otto is very clear that her youngest, Anna-Kat, is also her favorite. She does a terrible job hiding this from her other two kids (mostly because she doesn't even bother hiding it from them). Her only son, Oliver, is also The Unfavorite, though this is mostly because of his materialistic and self-centered personality. - Arrested Development: - Arrow: It is never directly stated or confirmed, but Dinah Lance seems to favor Sara over Laurel. It's revealed she saw Sara packing to join Oliver on the boat, and after briefly trying to talk her out of it, let her go despite it being a betrayal of Laurel. Tellingly, after admitting this, she breaks down weeping and apologizes to Quentin and Laurel for killing Sara; but doesn't apologize to Laurel over the betrayal or for keeping it a secret this long. She also ran away shortly after the boat sank, abandoning Laurel, and made little effort to stay in touch until that point. - Bates Motel: Norma Bates obviously prefers her son Norman over her other son Dylan. While she only shows some affection to Dylan when he does her a favor or is useful to her or Norman in some way, she's obsessed with Norman and her feelings for him go beyond motherly love. - In Battlestar Galactica (2003), \|\|Ellen Tigh\|\|, one of the creators of the humanoid Cylons, apparently considered artistic Daniel as her favorite. As Model Number Seven, Daniel is essentially the second youngest of eight. The eldest of her children, John, was quite resentful of this relationship and eventually murdered his brother out of jealousy and reprogrammed his siblings to forget about him and their parents. - The Big Bang Theory - Leonard's mother frequently brings up how much more successful and impressive Leonard's siblings are. Interestingly, she doesn't express much affection for them either, treating all of her children with the same detached, clinical manner. - Sheldon is clearly Mary Cooper's favorite child. Mary dotes on Sheldon even in his adulthood and doesn't speak very highly of George Jr. or Missy, referring to them as "dumb as soup". The prequel Young Sheldon shows that this was always the case. George even laments to Leonard that despite all the financial support he provided to his family after his father's death and working hard to become a successful businessman, Sheldon is still Mary's favorite. - The unfamiliar viewer could see this in Bones. \|\|At first glance, Brennan and Booth may seem to prefer their daughter Christine to Parker, Booth's son, since they spend much more time with her than they do with him. However, it must be noted that Booth shares custody with Parker and Parker spends a lot of time in England with his mother. And it's worth mentioning, that when we do see Parker with Brennan and Booth, they are both shown giving just as much affection to him as they do to Christine; it's also indicated that Brennan cares for Parker like her own as well. Similarly, Parker also loves Christine deeply.\|\|. - The Borgias: Although Rodrigo Borgia is plainly very fond of all his children, his daughter Lucrezia is obviously his favorite, to the point where it becomes a little creepy. And of his three sons, he indulges Juan the most by far and remains completely oblivious to his glaring faults, to the clear resentment of The Dutiful Son Cesare. Meanwhile, little Gioffre gets rather overlooked but doesn't seem to mind too much. Being overlooked is a blessing in the Borgia family. - Played for Laughs with Amy's family in Brooklyn Nine-Nine: her parents very openly play favorites with their eight children, with Amy's mother even shamelessly arranging their photos on the mantle in the order of who makes her proudest. Amy's brother David has always been the favorite, much to Amy's chagrin. - On Caroline in the City, Caroline's parents clearly unconsciously favor her brother, who really is highly accomplished and successful and of whom Caroline has always been a little resentful and jealous. During a visit home, Caroline's employee, friend, and eventual lover Richard comforts her by comparing her brother to an alien, and saying that if it wasn't so cold, he'd be 'out looking for his pod'. Later, he gently teases Caroline by saying she has to get elected President, 'so her brother can become the Pope'. - Criminal Minds: It doesn't really come up within the BAU (Morgan seems to get some favoritism in his family due to being the youngest, the only boy, and living the furthest away, but his sisters take it in stride), but the ugly side of this shows up in some of the unsubs the team faces: - The mother in "The Inspiration"/"The Inspired" gave birth to twins and couldn't manage as a single mother, so she had to choose a favorite and give the other up for adoption. When she had to choose, Wallace said "I love you, Mommy," while Jessie said nothing, so she kept Wallace. However, Wallace inherited their father's mental illness and became a serial killer, whereas Jessie became a sucessful lawyer, so when Jessie made contact, she switched her preference and plotted to have Jessie Kill and Replace Wallace so she could have the better son. Jessie initially resents Wallace for being kept (even though, as far as we can tell, Jessie had loving and supportive adoptive parents), but when they actually meet, he sees how much they have in common and recognizes their birth mother as the guilty party. For what it's worth, their birth father, who is barely in touch with reality and hasn't seen them since they were todlers, seems to prefer Wallace because Wallace inherited a nervous tic (a shaky middle finger) from his father. - The unsub's mother in "Safe Haven" initially seems to have abandoned her teenage son out of desperation after he broke his sister's arm. He eventually gets her to admit that she's seen him as The Unfavorite since before he was born due to seeing him as a Fetus Terrible because she'd been pregnant with twins until she suddenly wasn't, which made her believe he'd killed his sibling. - The unsub's father in Backdoor Pilot "Beyond Borders" favored his new American wife and stepchildren over his biological son, causing the unsub to lash out at American families. - It only gets a brief mention in "'Til Death Do Us Part," but the unsub's mother left her florist business to only one of her daughters, despite both of them running it. It might have something to do with Dana obsessing over her sister's boyfriend and deluding herself into believing he was actually in love with Dana the whole time. - Discussed in The Crown. Elizabeth is appalled that Margaret Thatcher openly favors her son, while Philip argues that every parent has favorites, and admitting it is only honest. Elizabeth: What about you, who's your favorite? Philip: Anne. Elizabeth: You said that alarmingly quickly! Philip: Because it didn't require any thought. - Seen in full flow in Dallas. Youngest son Bobby is the family favorite, much to the disappointment of eldest son JR, who has spent years honing his skills, cunning and ruthlessness in the hopes of winning over Jock. (Middle child Gary became an alcoholic and even after recovering moved away from the family.) Strikingly, when Jock dies, it hits JR by far the hardest. - This actually turns out to benefit the family in ways no one expected. Being the family favorite, receiving unconditional love and support, ended up shaping Bobbys altruistic nature, turning him into a man of deep principals who was committed to being the good guy. Jock even states point blank in the pilot I spoiled Bobby rotten and he turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. - In The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Brea's mother definitely spoiled her more than her other sisters, which Seladon never hesitates to call out on. - Deb from Dexter feels this way about her father toward her brother. The truth is that Harry just wanted to protect his children and loved them both. Dexter was just a little more high-maintenance due to being, well, a budding Serial Killer. - Doctor Who: In "Demons of the Punjab", Yaz's grandmother Umbreen says that Yaz is her favourite granddaughter, prompting annoyance from Yaz's younger sister Sonya and a warning from Yaz's mum Najia not to say things like that. \|\|It's hinted that Umbreen's reason for this might be because she knows of Yaz's presence at her first wedding in 1947.\|\| - Sometimes, this occurs in ER. When two brothers come into a hospital after an accident, the father chewed the adopted one out, accusing him of doing stupid things that would hurt his son. However, we find out that he is just as strict with his biological son, which was why said son preferred his stepbrother over his father. Even when the stepbrother went into critical condition, the father was more concerned with his real son. Ray angrily called him out on it. - Everybody Loves Raymond. Even the show title suggests so. Robert always gets the short end of the stick from their parents. - Inverted on The Expanse, Holden is the sole child of eight biological parents, but the one he loves the most is the mother that actually gave birth to him, as he addresses all his letters home solely to her (though he claims it's understood the letter is meant for everyone). - From what is seen in Firefly, Simon seems to be the favorite of the family. While River never comes across as The Un-Favourite, we still see that the Tam parents pump vast amounts of energy and money into Simon's social standing and career, but are shown to make no such efforts towards River (despite her being even more gifted than him) and seem more bothered by Simon's attempt to contact his sister than the fact that River has vanished after being sent to an institute. - Subverted in many ways on Frasier: - Brothers Frasier and Niles were each convinced that the other was their parents' favorite, which resulted in the intense and petty sibling rivalry that they each suffer from in adulthood. It's often made clear, however, that their parents didn't play favorites (and in fact their father Martin in many ways considered both of them his least favorite, as they were so completely different from and diametrically opposed to him) and that all this was just their own insecurities acting. - The female 'baby' of the family is also subverted in Daphne's relationship with her mother — despite Daphne's endless, thankless sacrifices over the years, her mother is nothing less than hyper-critical and demanding of her, whilst doting upon her boorish, obnoxious, feckless and ungrateful older brother. - In the Doyle family, it seems that Roz was favored by her father, while Roz's mother favored her other daughter, Denise. - Friends: This trope is Played for Laughs a few times: - Game of Thrones: - Tywin Lannister favors Jaime (by manipulating him to do what Tywin wants), while generally ignoring Cersei (because she's just a woman) and openly despising Tyrion (who is a dwarf). He trusts Jaime with half of his army, praises him on occasion and considers him his heir, even though by law Jaime cannot inherit it, as he is a member of the Kingsguard. Cersei and Tyrion, who both love Jaime, are still resentful of this blatant favoritism. Tyrion in particular points out that he will never be recognized for all his accomplishments, even though he's by far Tywin's most capable descendant, while Jaime is still Tywin's designated heir even after forfeiting his inheritance, murdering a king, losing his sword hand, and screwing his own sister, which caused a countrywide scandal and a Succession Crisis that almost destroyed the Lannister bid for the Iron Throne. Tyrion: You're the golden son. You could kill a king, lose a hand, fuck your own sister, you'll always be the golden son. - Catelyn Stark loves all her children but has a special affection for her daughter Sansa (whose hair she brushes personally) and her son Bran (whose injury causes her a Heroic BSoD). - Balon Greyjoy favors Yara over Theon because Theon spent half his life as a hostage of the Starks. She's the only person he seems to show any affection for. Most of Theon's poor decisions are motivated by a desire to earn his father's respect. - Samwell Tarly's father forced him to join the Night's Watch so his younger son could become his heir. - Joffrey is clearly Cersei's favourite child, with Myrcella second and Tommen running a very distant third. Considering the effects, the younger children have probably benefited from that. - Daenerys says her dragons are the only children she will ever have and loves them greatly, but it's very clear that Drogon is her favourite. - Margaery is her grandmother's favourite, as Olenna has groomed her to be her successor and largely dismisses Loras as a "silly boy on a horse." She isn't cruel about it like Tywin, though, and it's clear she does care for him too. - It's implied that Catelyn was Hoster's favourite child, calling her "Little Cat". - According to Sandor, Gregor was their father's favorite. Their father hoped he would become a knight and also gave a cover for his scarring of little Sandor so as to protect him from justice. The same father Gregor later murdered (probably). - On The Good Place, Tahani's parents adore her sister and vaguely tolerate her, to the point that they misspelled her name as "Tahini" in their will. - During a special "test" in Season 2, Tahani meets her parents and realizes at last that nothing she did was ever going to be good enough in their eyes to be as good as her sister was. - Miley's grandmother in Hannah Montana feels that her brother Jackson gets the short end of the stick being the normal brother of a world-famous pop star, and so she tries to make up for it by openly admitting that he's her favorite. For instance, she blows off Miley's visit with the Queen of England to see Jackson's volleyball game. Miley hates this until she learns of her grandmother's reasoning and agrees with her. In the same episode, we're shown that Jackson thinks Miley's the world's favorite (including their father's), as she gets all the attention, being an international pop star. - Robbie Ray also tends to prefer Miley over Jackson, forcing Jackson to learn harsh lessons while he just tells Miley what she did wrong. - The grandparent variation occurs in The Hardy Boys (2020). Gloria does care for both her grandchildren and has genuine concern for Joe when he was briefly taken hostage and when he went missing, but overall she shows more attention to Frank and actively tries to bond with him a lot more than with Joe. Most likely because Frank is older and getting to the point where she can start grooming him for leadership for the Circle, whereas Joe is still just a kid. - Much drama is wrung out of this question in Heroes: Just who is Angela Petrelli's favorite son? \|\|Arthur says it's Peter, much to Sylar's disappointment.\|\| - Played with in Home Improvement. Tim Taylor is a good and loving father to all his sons. But it's often mentioned that he favors Brad over Randy and Mark because he and Brad have more common interests. This leads to Tim spending more time with Brad and allowing him special treatment, like standing in for Al on Tool Time. Somewhat subverted in that Tim is aware that he favors Brad and feels genuinely bad about it. Enter Wilson... - Pam Puckett on iCarly. It's obvious to everyone that of the twins, she prefers Melanie over Sam. She even outright asks Sam once why she can't be more like Melanie. - Nermin of the miniseries Innocent blatantly favors older son Taner over his younger brother Tarık, to the point of dismissing the latter's mental health struggles. Her husband Cevdet, who cares for his sons equally, calls her out for her disproportionate concern. - Played to extremes on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, by Dennis and Dee's mother. She was horribly emotionally abusive to Dee while insisting that Dennis could do no wrong. This clearly didn't work out very well for either of them. At least Frank is more or less equally bad as a parent to both of them. - Kirby Buckets' parents have both consistently showed favoritism towards him over Dawn. - Downplayed version in Last Man Standing. While Mike and Vanessa clearly love all three of their daughters, it's no secret that Mike likes the youngest daughter Eve, the Tomboy who enjoys sports, hunting, etc. as much as he does, the best. Similarly, Vanessa prefers spending time with the oldest daughters Kristin and Mandy because they are more girly and interested in the feminine activities Eve does not like. - "Three Sisters" makes this a plot-point when Mike won't take money out of a college fund so Eve can buy some recording equipment, but Kristen does. When Mike objects to this as circumventing his authority, it leads to a big argument over who the favorite actually is, with each sister thinking it's someone else and pointing to various acts of perceived favoritism. Mike and Vanessa argue that while it might look like one child is getting constant favoritism and attention, it's actually parsed out. As unfair as it sounds, they say raising multiple kids over the years sometimes required deciding which one of them needed special attention and help, even if it was at the expense of the other daughters. - An episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent called "Saving Face" featured a young doctor who could never escape her brother's shadow, despite the fact that he had died many years ago ( "He was the lucky one!"). It was blatant to the point where they were more worried about his portrait being damaged than her being hauled off to jail. She even did the math and discovered she was conceived almost immediately after his death, making her nothing more than a replacement for him. - Det. Goren is aware that he's The Un-Favourite in spite of the fact that his brother is a homeless drug addict. - In another later episode, Rip Torn plays a parent with adult children. He dotes on one child and undercuts the other very consistently. The dynamic causes one child to kill the other. The father is then given custody of his two surviving grandchildren. From the first meeting, he selects one child to favor over another, setting the scene for a repeat of the current tragedy. - One of the most baffling things of The League is that Kevin and Taco's mother clearly believes the pot-smoking moron Taco who has no idea where he is half the time and no career or goals is far more successful a person than Kevin, a happily married lawyer and father. - Comes up during an honesty game in Life in Pieces. Sophia: Who's your favourite child? Heather: [looking for a way out] Tim? Tim: Pretty sure it's Tyler. - Lucifer (2016): Eve, the First Woman, loved her son Abel and was upset at Cain killing him, to the point that she doesn't particularly care that Cain was cursed to walk the Earth for all eternity only to finally get killed over a mortal woman. "He probably got about what he deserved." This despite the fact that Abel was at least as bad as Cain; according to Cain, they tried to kill each other all the time, and the only difference between them was that Cain won their final fight. In fact, Abel was the first human soul in Hell. - Subverted in Malcolm in the Middle. Hal and Lois start favoring Malcolm after he is revealed to be highly gifted, but it's out of the ordinary because a) they only express their favoritism by bluntly telling Malcolm he's the one person in the family who has a chance of succeeding in life, they never let him off the hook or treat him better than his brothers, b) they are harder on Malcolm as a result, and c) all Malcolm's brothers are also in on the plan to favor Malcolm above the rest of the family to help him fulfill his potential. After that, the laborious work he had to do in order to attend Harvard is as much paying his family back for their support of him as pursuing his own dreams. - This is all spelled out in the series finale when Malcolm graduates from high school. His mom turns down a six-figure salary job he was being offered instead of college and the family explains (jeez, they thought he knew this already) that he's going to work his ass off to get through Harvard and claw his way up becoming President one day (not just President, the best President) and do some amazing good in the world for people like their family who have to struggle to get by everyday. - Over time, it becomes pretty obvious on Married... with Children that Al and Peg prefer their ditzy, slutty daughter Kelly over their smart, perverted son, Bud. At one point in the same season, they screwed him out of going into space and meeting the President because she was going to be a spokesmodel for a nationwide company (Weenie Tots, a food product which they also happen to love) and she was dating an alderman and that was deemed more "worthy" of their time and money. Plus, the family is more likely to come together just to mock him than they are to mock her. - Interestingly though, in something of an inversion, as far as the superior parent, Bud and Kelly actually prefer Peg over Al, in spite of her virtually doing nothing for them, be it starving them, ignoring them or just plain mocking them. - This was also the case of Marcy, who was forced to go to work hauling slabs of meat in supermarkets to pay off her sister's college education because their mother decided the sister was too pretty and too delicate to work. - Marvel Cinematic Universe: - Luke Cage (2016): Willis "Diamondback" Stryker has harbored a lifelong grudge against his half-brother Luke Cage because of perceived parental favoritism, like Isaac and Ishmael in the Bible. The key word is "perceived", as Luke explains to Claire Temple that their father James Lucas didn't really like Luke either. Much of it has to do with the fact that Willis was a bastard, sired as a result of an affair that the Reverend Lucas had with his secretary Dana Stryker. - Iron Fist (2017): When it comes to Harold Meachum's bond with his kids, his son Ward gets the short end of the straw. He dotes heavily on his daughter Joy but despises and denigrates Ward every chance he gets. - The Middle: - Deconstructed in "Last Whiff of Summer", the two-part fourth season premiere. Early in the episode, the kids debate among themselves which of them are their parents' favorites, then ask them, and their answers and non-answers (Frankie denies that parents can favor any child above another) set up the episode's plot threads. The parents also find themselves asking the same question, and Brick later reveals he's been keeping score. - Subverted in another episode. Frankie tries to get Sue to quit her cross country team run so they could go cheer for Axel at his football game, leading Sue to believe she favors Axel. However, the run had finished for everybody else hours ago, while Sue'd gotten lost and was too stubborn to quit. Frankie 'does' admit she cares more about Axel's event than her daughter's, but not because she likes Axel better. It's because Sue is always so loving towards her family and always shows her parents affection, while Axel has turned from a 'Momma's boy' kid into a hormonal teenager who wants nothing to do with his parents. Frankie wants to go to her eldest son's game because it's one of the few chances she'll have were he has to let her be his mother again. - In Modern Family, the favoritism varies: - In the Dunphy family, Luke is definitely Phil's favourite, due to him being the only boy and them having very similar senses of humor. Haley is most like Claire, and so while Claire relates to her the most, she's mostly worried about Haley making the same mistakes that she did. Both Phil and Claire will blatantly admit that Alex (who is an Insufferable Genius) gives them the most to be proud of, but because she's so different from her parents, she largely gets ignored whenever she isn't winning some kind of award. - In the Pritchett family, Jay has made no secret of how he couldn't relate at all to Mitchell when he was a kid, and he still isn't 100% comfortable with Mitchell's sexuality. Claire, however, was a total daddy's girl and was a tomboy, so she was essentially the son that Mitchell wasn't. - Gibbs of NCIS is the Team Dad of the main cast, and makes no secret that The Lab Rat Abby is his favorite out of his team of Bunny-Ears Lawyer investigators. The other team members seem to accept this with good grace, partly because they also dote on her and partly because it's recognized that she's \|\|something of a substitution for Gibbs' real daughter, Kelly, who was murdered as a child and would have been around the same age as Abby\|\|. - In Season 7 of Once Upon a Time, Starter Villain Lady Tremaine favored Anastasia over Drizella. In this continuity Lady Tremaine was Rapunzel, who already had her two daughters when Mother Gothel kidnapped her; when she escapes and gets back to her family she feels that Drizella doesn't remember her and is an Emotionless Girl, so doesn't show her any love either. Then, Anastasia falls through thin ice, and believing You Should Have Died Instead, Lady Tremaine only uses Drizella (and half-sister Ella) as a tool in her plan to revive the favorite sister. - On Passions, the eldest son of Julius and Ivy Crane, Ethan, is considered the shining star of the family: a handsome, intelligent, well-educated lawyer and the proper one to carry on the family name, even over Julius himself. This in turn led to younger brother Fox to become the troublemaking Black Sheep of the family while younger sisters Fancy and Pretty to have little aspirations besides being vacuous socialites (evidenced by the fact that they were named "Fancy" and "Pretty".) Turns out, Ivy had another reason to shower her firstborn with more love and attention than her other children: \|\|he was actually the product of a one-night stand between her and her first and true love, Sam Bennett, after she ran out the night before her wedding day upon learning that Julius and his father Alistair had planned to have them marry due to a lucrative merger with her own wealthy father's company instead of out of love.\|\| - Played for irony in Power Rangers Megaforce. In the episode "All Hail Prince Vekar", Vekar openly states that his younger brother Vrak was always favored more by their father, even though Vrak wasn't the heir. This seemingly unfair favoritism plays off as Vekar's own Freudian Excuse: He believes that destroying the Power Rangers and conquering Earth will prove his superiority over Vrak. - In Roseanne, it's pretty clear that Jackie and Roseanne's parents have each chosen a favorite. Jackie's close relationship with their father leads her to excuse a lot of the abuse they suffered and look to excuse his affair. Bev is ridiculously hard on Jackie and dotes on Roseanne. One episode, where their mother's favoritism is glaring, Roseanne worries that she and Dan may act this way to their own girls. She spends the rest of the episode trying to bond with Darlene, who is a Daddy's girl, while forcing Dan to do things with Becky (including an excruciating day at the mall). After things mostly backfire, Dan and Roseanne agree to go back to doting on their respective favorite and decide to toss a coin on who gets to ruin DJ's life when he's old enough. - One episode revealed that Jackie is actually Bev's favorite, but in a different way. Bev decided when the girls were young that Jackie had a spark and she would be destined to do great things, while Roseanne was plainer and going to wind up being a housewife and mother. Bev only dotes on Roseanne because she took "the right path" and nags Jackie endlessly because she feels she screwed up her life by not becoming a doctor. Both sisters, particularly Roseanne, are understandably upset by this, and Roseanne again reconsiders how she treats Becky and Darlene. - Roseanne also has an interesting case of inverting this, with Roseanne and Jackie each having a favorite parent. Early on, the girls seem to be equally irritated by both of them, but later on, they've each picked sides. Roseanne favored their mother slightly, seeing their father as abusive, neglectful, and a cheater. Jackie, on the other hand, one time criticized Roseanne for being so hard on their father and making him unwelcome in her home, believing that he was a troubled man doing the best he could, while at the same time, absolutely despising her shrill, judgmental, controlling mother, telling her husband not to refer to her as "Mom," only "Bev" or "Sea Hag," and more than one time genuinely seeming excited about the prospect of her death (when she walked into an asbestos-filled basement, Jackie said "Breathe deep, old woman," and genuinely hoped that dropping the news she was unmarried and pregnant might kill her.) - Once David Healy moved in with the Conners, he became the favorite in Roseanne's eyes. Even when she found out he was staying with Darlene alone, she still wanted him to move back to the Conner household. There are hints that the reason why is because David came from an abusive home just like herself and she sympathizes with him, especially after she meets his mother and realizes just how screwed up his upbringing was. =—> Roseanne: ( describing the situation to Dan ) I grew up in a house like that. Dan: That bad, huh? - The Bible: - The story of Joseph and his brothers. Jacob had twelve sons by four wives; his favorite, Joseph, was the elder of his two sons by his deceased favorite wife, Rachel. Not only did Jacob give Joseph a special gift (traditionally a colorful coat, though translations vary), Joseph had prophetic dreams that the others would one day bow to him. In anger, the ten older brothers sold Joseph into slavery and faked his death; Jacob mourned for the next twenty-two years, while Rachel's other son, Benjamin, got promoted to favorite. Ultimately, the repentant brothers get into trouble with the Vizier of Egypt, and when he wants Benjamin as a slave, they come to his defense. It's at that point that the Vizier reveals that he's actually Joseph, and his attempt to get Benjamin was a Secret Test of Character. - Jacob himself had been his mother's favorite, though that was a case of Jacob and Esau. - Then there's Isaac, who was born to Abraham and Sarah very late, and after Sarah (in despair at a total lack of children) had told Abraham to have a child by her maid Hagar. Once Isaac was born, Ishmael did something that made Sarah upset, and she (with God's backing) told Abraham to send Ishmael and Hagar away. - However, Deuteronomy 21:15-17 prevents this in the case of a man having two wives, that, if he has sons of those two wives, and his first is from that of his unloved wife, then he cannot allow the firstborn of his loved wife to have the firstborn rights of inheritance in preference over his actual firstborn from his unloved wife, since that firstborn is considered "the first fruit of his vigor". - Classical Mythology: Zeus infamously left a lot of spawn all over the map, not all of which he was really all that involved with, but Athena was certainly his favorite, to the point of getting to borrow his trademark attributes and weapons whenever she pleased, closely followed by Heracles, Hermes, and Dionysus. None of these are children of his legitimate wife, which infuriated her to no end. Closer to the bottom of that list, we find Ares. Also Hephaestus, who actually got thrown off Olympus for a while—in one version, by Zeus for siding with Hera in a fight, and in another by Hera because he was born ugly. - Wooden Overcoats: Antigone says that her late father favored her twin brother Rudyard, and scarcely even remembered her name. Given that Rudyard himself never disputes this, and their father left him and only him in charge of the Family Business, even though Antigone has also worked there her whole life and is in general the more competent of the two, these claims probably do have some merit. - The News Quiz, Season 83, Episode 1: Susan Calman: It's absolutely untrue to say you love all your children equally. I have no children, but I am a child of someone, and if you have children you do love one of them more than the others. Now if you're a child thinking "It's not me", you're right. Because you know if you're the favorite. It's usually the youngest, the cutest, the one that's on Radio 4. Hi, Mum and Dad! Sandi Toksvig: No, that's not true. I have three children and I say to all of them "You're my favorite, don't tell the others." - Discussed and parodied by Greg Giraldo in his stand-up special, Midlife Vices, when talking about how much he enjoyed being a father to his three little boys, then explaining that he has his "main son" and his "other sons". - Dungeons & Dragons: On a species-wide scale, the draconic god Bahamut has made it abundantly clear that the silver dragons are his favored creation. - Fighting Fantasy: The wealthy ruler of the city of Fang blatantly favors his elder son Sukumvit over his younger son Carnuss, making Carnuss develop a searing hatred for his brother. When Sukumvit becomes ruler of Fang on his father's death, he constructs the deadly Deathtrap Dungeon as a private hobby, challenging adventurers to try and survive going through it for a 10,000 gold piece prize. An embittered Carnuss sees a chance at getting revenge on his hated brother and begins kidnapping people to test them until he can find someone tough enough to send as his champion to penetrate the dungeon and humiliate his brother. He eventually succeeds in the book Trial of Champions (where the dungeon had been remade after someone had beaten it once), only for his hated brother to turn the tables on him, offering the champion anything he wished on top of the gold, correctly guessing that what the champion wanted was revenge against Carnuss, and promptly killed him. - Warhammer 40,000 backstory has Horus being the first son found by the Emperor, who was later made Warmaster above his nineteen brothers and generally treated as the Emperor's eldest son. Ironically, he went on to betray the Emperor and lead The Unfavourites in what would become the bloodiest war in human history. - In Death of a Salesman, Willy favors Biff over Happy. - In King Lear, Lear favors Cordelia over his other daughters, until she refuses to praise him as lavishly as her sisters. Given Goneril and Regan's behavior, he had good reason to like Cordelia best. - The Lion in Winter: - John feels like this: John: Who says poor John? Don't everybody sob at once! My God, if I went up in flames there's not a living soul who'd pee on me to put the fire out! Richard: Let's strike a flint and see! - Geoffrey, in turn, has a bad case of Middle Child Syndrome: Geoffrey: It's not the power I feel deprived of... it's the mention I miss. There's no affection for me here: You wouldn't think I'd want that, would you? - In Next to Normal, Diane shows favoritism toward Gabe over Natalie. This is an especially sore point, as \|\|Gabe has been dead since before Natalie was born.\|\| Natalie brings this up in her song "Superboy and the Invisible Girl." - In Wicked, Elphaba's father \|\|or at least, the father who raised her\|\| clearly prefers her sister Nessarose. It's heavily implied to be because she was born green, and that that is the only reason. This indirectly led to the death of Elphaba and Nessarose's mother after their father made her drink poppy milk (or some liquid like that) to keep from having another green child. This led to Nessa's legs being crippled and their mother dying in childbirth. - The book suggests he might just blame Elphaba for that just a bit. And the fact that she can't bathe in water is a real pain in the twees too. Oh! And the sharp teeth. The deck's just kind of stacked against Elphaba here. - In the book, there's another reason. Nessa shares his religious zeal, more than Elphaba or their brother, Shell. That may be a chicken and egg situation. - The book also provides a third reason; Frex didn't know for certain whether Nessarose was his biological daughter (the third book reveals she was, but he had no way of knowing) or if she had really been fathered by the glassblower Turtle Heart, his and his wife Melena's mutual lover. As such, he saw her as all of their daughter and so he loves her more because she is the symbol of the love the three of them shared or perhaps to overcompensate for her possibly not being his child. - Subverted in Devil May Cry. Vergil believed that Eva abandoned him and left him behind to prioritize Dante's safety over his, which is the catalyst for his Start of Darkness and resentment towards Dante. However, Devil May Cry 5 reveals that Eva's last words were calling out for Vergil, trying to find him after she secured Dante's safety. - Dragon Age: - In Dragon Age: Origins, both the Human Noble Warden and the Dwarven Noble Warden are implied (or outright stated) to be the favorite child of their respective fathers. - Dragon Age II: It's implied that this was the case with Hawke's deceased father Malcolm. Since he was a mage, he spent a lot of time with Hawke's sister Bethany to teach her to control her magic. If Hawke is a mage as well, then Malcolm will spend time with both of them for the same reason. Regardless to both cases, this makes the Muggle Carver feel like The Un-Favorite. Similar to a family with a disabled child, this was due to necessity rather than malice. Power Incontinence and Demonic Possession are very real dangers for untrained mages, and the only alternative to training his children directly was to lose them to the Circle of Magi, which Malcom himself had run away from shortly before Hawke was born. The irony of the situation was that Malcom resented his own magic and hoped that none of them would be mages which will make Carver, the only non-mage child of the family, being his most ideal child, who takes this particular revelation with considerable surprise. On the flipside, Bethany (who is clearly sensitive of her status as a mage unlike mage Hawke) wonders if her father secretly resents her for being born as a mage. Her oldest sibling is quick to shut down that line of thought; Malcom adored Bethany and only resented that she carried a burden the rest of their family couldn't comprehend. - In the backstory of the family, Hawke's mother Leandra was vastly preferred by both of her parents over her younger brother Gamlen. Gamlen mostly took this in stride growing up because he and his sister were extremely close; as an adult, however, he has issues with having been The Unfavorite, not least because he was the one who took care of his parents as they died from cholera and they still preferred Leandra, even though they had formally disowned her for eloping with an apostate mage. At least part of this is implied to be guilt over rejecting Leandra and concern over Gamlen's financial ineptitude. - The DS version of Dragon Quest V has this with the Briscolettis. Elder daughter Debora is a self-absorbed Rich Bitch, while her sister Nera is sweet and adored by everyone. While Debora is still able to get all the material goods she wants from her parents, Rodrigo clearly favors Nera and appears to have simply given up on trying to rein her sister in. Should the player choose to marry Debora, the father reacts with surprise, but throws his full support behind the wedding, and afterward confesses that you've made him very happy as he'd given up hope of Debora getting married a long time ago. - This is a game mechanic in F.E.A.R. 3's cooperative campaign. Whichever brother has the highest score at the end of the campaign is deemed Alma's favorite, and \|\|will kill/consume the other\|\|. - A huge plot point in Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade. King Desmond favors his daughter Guinevere and hates his son Zephiel because Guinevere is the child of his beloved old girlfriend while Zephiel is born from an unhappy marriage to Queen Helene. To make things worse, Zephiel is The Ace and insists on pleasing his father out of love, while Guinevere loves her brother but is condemned to be in Zephiel's shadow since, well, she's a girl and a bastard. This becomes so bad that \|\|Desmond hires the Black Fang to murder Zephiel right before his coming of age ceremony so Guinevere can become the heir apparent instead. This ends up backfiring horribly. If anything, Desmond would be glad to know that Guinevere became queen of Bern in the end, nevermind the reign of terror the kingdom was forced to endure because of how he treated Zephiel.\|\| - Also plays a part in Fire Emblem Fates: - With the maid twins, Flora and Felicia. Flora mentions in her supports with her sister that growing up, Felicia was naturally adept at handling weapons and so their father, Kilma, only praised her during training sessions, leading Flora to become very jealous of her sister and train excessively to make up for her own lack of talent. Ironically, Felicia envies Flora because Flora is a much more competent maid than she is. Thanks to Kilma's treatment, Flora has some massive insecurities and is obsessed with her duties towards the Ice Clan and the events of the games do not help - in Birthright \|\|Flora is so torn over her decision to betray the Avatar to protect the Ice Tribe that she sets herself on fire due to shame and guilt.\|\| - Xander is clearly Garon's favourite child in Conquest, as he is the only one of his children he fathered with the late Queen - Camilla, Leo and Elise were all the result of trysts with Garon's various concubines and Xander is the only one capable of reasoning with Garon without immediately attracting his ire, but even this goes out the window when \|\|it turns out Garon died years ago and he's been possessed by Anankos, who is hellbent on the destruction of both Hoshido and Nohr and doesn't really give a damn about any of Garon's heirs.\|\| - This comes up a few times in Fire Emblem: Three Houses: - With Ingrid and Sylvain, who are both the favourite of their respective families because they have Crests. However, this is shown to be a case of Cursed with Awesome, as Ingrid is repeatedly put into Arranged Marriages by her well-meaning father, as her family are Impoverished Patricians who need Ingrid to marry well to improve the family's finances, since she is the only one of her siblings to have a Crest, yet she longs to become a knight. Meanwhile because Sylvain was born with a Crest, his older brother Miklan lost the position of heir of House Gautier and became pathologically jealous of Sylvain, bullying him throughout his entire childhood and even once shoving him down a well and leaving him there before he was eventually disinherited and kicked out. Sylvain's relationship with his parents is left ambiguous, as he comments he was given a lot of freedom to do as he pleased as a child, but he developed some serious psychological issues because of his ingrained belief that people only want him for his Crest, leading him to become a cynical Handsome Lech. - Mercedes reveals in her backstory that her younger brother Emile was the favourite to her stepfather, as he was born with a Crest, to the point where her mother and Mercedes herself were treated like they didn't exist once her brother was born and they eventually fled House Bartels \|\|when it turned out her stepfather was planning on marrying Mercedes to try and produce more Crest-bearing children once her mother became past the age she could conceive.\|\| - It is strongly implied that Edelgard is the favourite child of the sickly Emperor Ionius IX, though \|\|being his sole surviving heir makes it impossible to verify it one way or the other.\|\| - Caspar is the younger son of Count Bergliez and he outright states his older brother got all the attention because he was born with a Crest and is the successor to House Bergliez. Though he is remarkably better adjusted than some of the other students thanks to his simplistic outlook on life and without the pressure of living up to his family name, he does admit to being intimidated by his father and his extremely competitive nature might be due to compensating for being ignored so much at home. - Somewhat zigzagged in Hilda's case - her older brother Holst is The Ace of the Leicester Alliance and heir to House Goneril, with Hilda remarking he's strong, kind and honorable. However, it is also strongly implied that Holst is so dedicated as a warrior because of the harsh expectations set for him by his parents, which terrified Hilda that she'd never be able to meet the same, so she downplays her own abilities so nobody expects anything of her. However, far from being neglected, Hilda is very much doted on and spoiled by her father and older brother (especially since her mother is never mentioned), so who exactly is the favourite child is up in the air. - It's all but stated Glenn was Lord Rodrigue's favourite child and Felix confirms he was never able to beat his brother when they would spar together, though Felix adored his big brother as well and it is Glenn's death that was Felix's Cynicism Catalyst and caused an enormous rift between father and son, to the point where Rodrigue seems to prefer Dimitri to Felix. - In the backstory of Kameo: Elements of Power, Queen Theena spent more time with Kameo than with Kalus as they grew up. This is because Kalus' Strong Family Resemblance to her deceased father was too painful a reminder for Theena of her loss. Kalus grew up neglected and resentful of both Theena and Kameo as a result, and clung to her birthright of the Element of Power for validation. So when Theena decided to pass on the Element of Power to Kameo instead, Kalus snapped at this final apparent snub by her mother. - An interesting case occurs in Kana: Little Sister. At the beginning of the story, Taka (the main character) is resentful towards Kana because their parents tend to favor her (due to her terminal illness). This position is reversed towards the end of the game (which takes place almost a decade later). \|\|When Taka offers to donate one of his kidneys to Kana, his parents are opposed to it, because they don't want Taka (their true son) to take risks for Kana's sake (because Kana is adopted)\|\| - Kings Quest (2015) plays around with this in regards to King Graham's twin children. His son Alexander was kidnapped as a baby and Graham spent the next 18 years trying to find him, apparently neglecting his daughter Rosella to an extent. However, it doesn't play out as one would expect because Graham and Rosella get along quite well thanks to their similar personalities, but he had a hard time connecting with Alexander at first because of how dissimilar they are; in effect, each child is half of what Graham wanted (a son who shares his love of adventure and puzzles). Eventually, he realizes that he has been wrongly blaming Alexander for not being the "perfect son" he wanted, and accepts him for who he is. However, the favoritism is played much straighter with Graham's grandchildren: he blatantly favors Alexander's daughter Gwendolyn over Rosella's son Gart, doting on her and telling her stories from his youth and \|\|rewriting Daventry's laws so she could inherit the throne after his death\|\|. - Odin Sphere: Early in the game, it becomes painfully obvious that Odin shows more love to Velvet (who resents him for very good reasons) than to his other children (who absolutely revere him or, in the case of Ingway, despise him). This still doesn't stop him from allowing her to be executed to save face in front of his vassals. Odin's not exactly Father of the Year. He eventually admits this and starts to regret it. - In Red Dead Redemption II, it's noted that John is Dutch's favorite over Arthur and several other members. Arthur outright states this is the reason why Dutch allowed John to rejoin the gang after a year's absence, stating no one else would be let back in as easily. In a drunken conversation, Bill even tells John how everyone thinks John is "Dutch's pet". However once John starts taking his role as husband and father seriously, Dutch starts treating John with hostility, hinting he thinks John is having Conflicting Loyalty and it's threatening Dutch's power over John. It's worth noting that Dutch and John's relationship deteriorates the more John becomes a better husband and father. Eventually, for all his favoritism, Dutch would \|\|abandon John more than once and John no longer stays loyal to Dutch.\|\| - In Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, \|\|Nemora's parents\|\| prefer to raise her older sister to become the new heir of their Rotom Phone company rather than even trying to see how \|\|Nemona\|\| is doing. She's not really bothered by their actions, though, because that means she's free to be a trainer, which she obviously loves being with all her soul. - The Sims 2 has a couple of examples: - The meaningfully named Pleasant Twins of Pleasantview. Angela Pleasant, who's a straight-A student and implied to be a dutiful daughter, is favored by her parents over her twin sister, the Gothic D-student Lilith. Their family bio pictures imply that this goes back to their childhood, as we see Angela celebrating their birthday with a cake and party, while Lilith sits in the other room alone. Lilith has such a terrible relationship with her family that she and Angela will autonomously pick fights with each other, and the same will happen with her parents when she ages up if their relationship is not fixed. Ironically, Angela is going steady with Dustin Broke, a budding criminal from a poor family whom her father hates, while Lilith dates good student Dirk Dreamer. - The Grunt Family in Strangetown is a perfect demonstration of the Golden Child/Problem Child/Lost Child dynamic. Eldest son Tank is favored by his father, General Buzz, due to having a similar personality and interests and sharing his love for the military and hatred for the Smith family. Middle son Ripp has a bad relationship with both his father, implied to be because of his lack of interest in the military and laziness. Similar to Lilith Pleasant, he and Tank autonomously pick fights and the same will happen with his father if their relationship is not fixed before he ages up. He also is close to Johnny Smith, whose father is an enemy of General Buzz. Meanwhile, youngest son Buck is implied by his bio to be ignored by his father. Ironically, General Buzz actually has a higher lifetime relationship with his enemy, Pollination Tech#9 Smith than his does with any of his sons. - Sonic Frontiers: Applied to a whole family in this case; one of Dr. Eggman's Egg Memos delves a bit into his backstory and has him admit that he was always had a seething jealousy of his cousin Maria Robotnik (who died when he was a kid). Between her kindhearted nature and illness, Maria was the family favorite and tended to suck up all their attention without really meaning to, even after she died, leaving Ivo feeling like he spent his childhood competing with a ghost for his family's affections. - In Spiritfarer, Alice favors one granddaughter over the others, but will never tell which one. - In Stardew Valley, Demetrius dotes on Maru, who is a scientist just like her dad and they bond over their nerdy hobbies, while he ignores his stepson Sebastian so much that he never even mentions him in conversation. - In the Super Mario Bros. series, once Bowser Jr. appeared on the scene, it appeared that Bowser Jr. was Bowser's favorite child, preferring him over his other seven children, the Koopalings. However, it became clear that this wasn't the case as Junior was Bowser's only child, with the Koopalings being relegated to high ranking members of the Koopa Troop instead. - In To the Moon it is revealed that \|\|Johnny's mother always favored his twin brother, Joey, over him; which is the reason why, after Joey was accidentally run over and killed by his mother, she made Johnny take the beta-blockers which made him forget everything up to the accident, in order to mold Johnny into Joey's Replacement Goldfish in her mind\|\|. - In Wild AR Ms 1 Mother clearly favours Ziekfried, to the point he's the only Quarter Knight she addresses in the Photosphere. Unfortunately for him, this is one parent you don't want favouring you as \|\|she uses his body as the next vessel for her existence for when she moves onto the next world to destroy.\|\| - In Awesome Video Games, Dad obviously prefers Chet over Ace. Whether this has any lasting effects is yet to be seen. - In Batman and Sons, Batman obviously favors Terry over Dick, Jason, or Tim. Most likely due to him being Batman's only biological son (and thus, another Batman). This might not be biological favoritism so much as Terry (being a baby) not having the ability to backtalk yet like the older boys. The kids can be very blunt about how messed up Batman is (much to his annoyance) but Terry's the only one who can't say it yet. - This trope initiates The Cloud Maker's plot. The creator-god tells his three children-gods to maintain the Earth while he leaves to do vague plot things. When he comes back, the sky-goddess and sea-god have done well, but the land-god has neglected parts of his territory and left it to wither. So the creator-god rewards the sea-god by giving the ocean life, as in animals. (The sky-goddess would have been given the same, but she was "too young and inexperienced" for it.) Then the creator-god leaves again, and the land-god starts getting very resentful of his siblings... - Crimson Knights: Nevio was perfectly aware that his elder brother was their father's favorite and the primary heir, and as a result left Natish at the first opportunity to find his own life. - In Dragon Ball Z Abridged, King Cold clearly favored Freeza over Cooler, something that the latter seemed to develop a complex over and Freeza was all too willing to hold over his head. - In Dumbing of Age Sal and Walky's mother blatantly favors Walky, to the point of not even acknowledging that Sal's in the room when she visits. Walky thinks it's because of Sal robbing a convenience store in her youth, but Sal argues it's because Walky is lighter skinned than she is. \|\|When Walky remembers that he was in a Christian children's show as a child-and Sal wasn't-he starts realizing she may have a point.\|\| - Hazbin Hotel according to Word of God, Angel Dust is The Unfavorite to his father, who preferred his older brother over him. - In If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, the Emperor spends entire one episode badmouthing all of his sons... except for Sanguinus, who, in canon, is described as most similar to him. When Custodian lampshades it, the Emperor gets angry at him. Don't you talk shit about my fabulous fucking hawk-boy. He died for me, so be grateful. - Played for Laughs via Unreliable Narrator in Least I Could Do. Ryan is describing how he was kept in a cage and fed older newspapers by his family while his big brother got extravagant meals. In reality, his parents were loving to both of their kids. John: "You know he's making this up right?" Mick: "I know but his stories amuse me." - An unusual case in Misfile, Ash Upton manages to be on both sides of the Parental Favoritism divide thanks to Rumisiel's little filing mishap. As a boy, she had no contact with her mother and her relationship with her father was distant at best (his plans for Ash's summer vacation apparently involved re-roofing the house). As a girl, she has a close relationship with both parents who are much more involved in her life. For some reason she feels this sucks. - Also a subversion, as the change was due completely to Ash's actions. \|\|In Ash's past (s)he wrote a letter to his/her mom. As a boy, masculine pride made him throw it away. As a girl, the letter was sent.\|\| - In the Nuzlocke Comics, Norman shows favoritism to "Good-Ruby", a Vigoroth that he dresses in a hat similar to Ruby's, over Ruby. - The Order of the Stick: - Eugene Greenhilt favored his daughter Julia over his son Roy, because Julia became a wizard like him, while Roy became a fighter. ("I can tell because you almost never use the phrase, 'crushing depression' when talking about her.") - In a later example, Elan's father Tarquin favors Elan over his other son Nale, even though Elan is a hero. But at least he's good at being a hero (...kind of) while Nale is too short-sighted and egotistical to be an effective villain. - Discussed in the Overly Sarcastic Productions episode "Ares' Abduction:" Red: Zeus is definitely the kind of parent who like, conspicuously brags about only some of his children. Like at the family reunion he'll be all like "Hey Athena! How's my favorite War God doing?" and Ares is just like, one chair over. - RWBY: Weiss's father, Jacques, is heavily implied to prefer her little brother Whitley over her and her sister. During a shot showing his work desk, Whitley's is the only picture that he keeps there. \|\|Halfway through Season 4, Weiss causes a scene and Jacques takes her off his will and reveals that Whitley is the only one that will inherit his company and fortune. It's implied he has taken Winter out of the will when she joined the military against his will and Whitley is the only one to never have challenged him.\|\| - A humorous variant is found in SomethingPositive. Fred MacIntire has two (living) biological children, Davan and Dahlia, and an adopted daughter, Monette. His fourth "child" is Davan's friend PeeJee, who lives with them for a long time; one strip has him admitting that she's* his favorite. It's Played for Laughs, of course, as it's made remarkably clear through all the Deadpan Snarker dialogue that Fred's actually a damn good father. - A SrGrafo in Time: Comic #24 has the main character's sister ask their mother who her favorite child is between them. She assures them that she loves them both equally, but after the sister leaves, the mother tells her son that "it's [him]... and by A LOT." - Sticky Dilly Buns invokes the trope a couple of times: - 50/50 Heroes: Mo believes Sam to be their mother's favorite when he finds two tickets to a show he wants to watch. \|\|It turns out a client of hers gave her the tickets and she later bought a third one so she can take both Mo and Sam. She has no favorites.\|\| - The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Goons", Richard states that Darwin is his favorite child. Nicole, Anais, and Gumball shoot him an angry glare, causing him to hastily add that Darwin is his favorite fish. - One episode of American Dad! had Stan trying to insist that Francine's (adoptive) parents did not love her as much as they loved their biological daughter Gwen. Francine starts to believe it when Stan finds her parents' will leaving all their stuff to Gwen. But later, the father reveals that \|\|they only left everything to Gwen because she's apparently a moron and needed all the help she could get, while they knew Francine was already well taken care of because she married a good man\|\|. - For the Smiths themselves, they by far treat Steve better than their adult daughter Hayley. It's more straightforward with Francine, doting on Steve since he is technically still a child and thus "her baby". Stan doesn't really care for Steve, but because Hayley opposes him in every ideological way, Steve is his favorite by default. - Arthur's parents tend to heavily favor his sister DW over him. However, they favor baby Kate over DW. - Avatar: The Last Airbender: - A major part of Zuko and Azula's Backstory. Azula was daddy's little girl, while Zuko (the eldest son and heir) was hated by his father just for being alive (and possibly compassionate). The finale makes it clear that this was not due to Ozai loving Azula more; Azula's cruelty against Zuko's kindheartedness meant that she was simply a more useful tool for him, one that he cruelly tosses aside the instant he can't think of more uses for her. Azula's realization of this leads to an utterly spectacular meltdown. - In The Search, we finally get more insight into the Royal Family's Dynamic. - Also, Azula, due to her upbringing by Ozai (whose favoritism toward Azula means he hates Zuko), mistakenly believes that her mother favored Zuko and that she didn't love her. From what we see, both in the show and the comics, Ursa does love Azula, worries about her constantly, and often attempted to discourage Azula's bad behavior and discipline her for things like burning the flowers in the royal garden or hoping that her uncle would die and her father would inherit the throne instead. - Fire Lord Azulon wasn't much better. He seemed to greatly favor Iroh over Ozai and was greatly angered when the latter suggested that Iroh's birthright be revoked. This favoritism extends to his grandchildren as well, as shown by his sympathy over the death of Iroh's son (and lack of anger toward Iroh for abandoning the siege as a result of it), and by his disinterest in Azula's impressive firebending display and his sentencing Zuko to death in order to punish Ozai. - Aang didn't technically have parents (given that Airbending Air Nomad children were sent off to live with the monks) but it was fairly obvious that he was Monk Gyatso's favorite. - The rough counterpart to the Fire Nation royals, Hakoda's family, doesn't seem to have this problem. Hakoda doesn't show any favoritism for his son or daughter. And while Ozai and favored child Azula came to share certain traits, Hakoda and Sokka are similar without this affecting Katara negatively. - The Legend of Korra: - The trend continues with \|\|Noatok being favored by his father over Tarrlok. However, Noatok hates his father for this just as much or more than Tarrlok does.\|\| - In Season 2, it is revealed that Aang himself favored Tenzin over his two other children, Kya and Bumi. Mostly due to Tenzin being the only airbender among them and thus, the only one able to carry on the burden of restoring an almost wiped out culture, forcing Aang to invest a lot of time in Tenzin's training and teaching. Which is sad but at least a little understandable, but then Aang would take Tenzin to places just to goof off but still left Kya and Bumi behind. This favoritism even extended to the Air Acolytes, who seem to almost worship Tenzin and his Air bending children while having no idea that Kya and Bumi even existed. This favoritism had some negative consequences for Tenzin as he felt he needed to live up to his father's legacy and viewed himself as "The son of Avatar Aang and the hope for future airbenders" rather than just as "Tenzin". - In Bob's Burgers, we have an inverted example with the Belcher kids—while Tina is more indifferent, Gene prefers Linda and Louise prefers Bob. - Gayle claims she's the favourite between her and Linda, but she is an enormously Unreliable Narrator. We dont see Gayle interacting with their parents until Season 10 while they regularly visited Linda and Bob in early seasons. Just about the only hint that Gayle is right is that Gloria and Al are generally not good to Linda. - For the Belcher parents, this trope is Zigzagged and oddly reflective of complex real-life family dynamics. Bob readily admits that Tina is his most docile and supportive child, Linda calls Tina her BFF, and the entire family goes to great lengths to please her. However, Bob also has trouble keeping up with her more atypical interests and actually gets along best with Louise (the two spend time alone bonding over old movies and TV), while his relationship with Gene isn't as strong. In contrast, Linda dotes on Gene the most since he is her most affectionate child and fellow showman, though she's desperate to have a better relationship with Louise and is hurt when Tina wants to spend time with a new friend instead of her mom. In general, Bob and Linda love their kids equally, but if it came down to it Bob would choose Louise and Linda would choose Gene. - In Bojack Horseman: - Beatrice's flashbacks show that her parents vastly preferred her older brother Crackerjack to her, since it was the 1940s and Crackerjack was a boy though she didn't mind too much because she adored her big brother as well. It ends very badly. - Diane was mocked, bullied and ignored by her family while her mother dotes on and coddles her four brothers. - In The Buzz on Maggie first Maggie and then Pupert becomes their uncle's favorite. Aldrin, who has been The Un-Favourite for years, takes this in stride until Maggie suggests a scheme that could benefit both of them. She doesn't hesitate to throw Aldrin under the bus later in the episode, wanting the glory all to herself even though Aldrin had helped her. - In Codename: Kids Next Door — Operation: Z.E.R.O., it was stated by Grandfather himself that he favored Monty Uno over Benedict, who became Father and came to idolize Grandfather. Even after being revived by Benedict, Grandfather wished that Monty was on his side because he saw more potential in him and, unlike Benedict, Monty actually had the spine to stand up to him, becoming Numbuh Zero and founder of the current generation of the KND. When he realizes that Monty remembers the past and is ready to fight him, he actually takes a moment to sincerely offer him a place by his side, though he doesn't hesitate to get ready and try and zombify him after he refuses. - Daria has two cases that begin with this trope and then become more nuanced as Characterization Marches On: - In early episodes Daria's parents (especially Helen) were pretty open about wanting her to be like Quinn, which fit the theme of her and Jane as standouts among the conformists around them. As time goes on Daria's own anti-social tendencies get Deconstructed it becomes more a case of Helen knowing both of her daughter's faults and wanting them to learn from each other's strengths. - Helen's own family. "I Don't" paints the dynamic of Rita as their unseen mother's favorite, with Helen constantly bitter about this and Amy just done with them all. "Aunt Nauseam" muddled the issue a bit: Rita always saw Helen as the favorite growing up and claims that the others' strained relationship with their mother is self-inflicted. Ultimately it's left up to the audience to determine who's right and to what extent. - In the DC Animated Universe, Darkseid shows rather blatant partental favoritism towards his younger son Orion... Who is also his Arch-Enemy and wants him dead. Not only is his other son, Kalibak, incompetent (despite being a devoted servant to Darkseid), but Orion absolutely hates having Darkseid's approval. - The Dragon Prince: - Subverted with King Harrow and his two sons. Older brother Callum is his stepson, while younger brother Ezran is his biological son. While the relationship is somewhat strained, Harrow reveals posthumously that he simply didn't know how to react to having a stepson and felt that Callum needed his space, which resulted in a distance between them. This resulted in Callum's own reluctance to refer to Harrow as his father, calling him 'your majesty' or 'my king', and not helped by the likes of Viren and Soren who seem to feel that Callum has no right to be where he is. In reality, Harrow loved Callum every bit as much as Ezran and is very proud of him, something he makes clear in the letter he writes to Callum in preparation for his death. - Played straight with Viren who clearly favors his daughter Claudia over his son Soren, because Claudia is more intelligent and shares her father's talent for dark magic. - Sarah is blatantly the favourite child in Ed, Edd n Eddy, being spoiled rotten by her parents while they ignore and neglect Ed, who, ironically, is much nicer than his little sister. It's implied that their mother wanted to have a firstborn daughter, not a firstborn son, as it's made clear through Ed's statments that his mom favors girls over boys to the point where his mom forbids him to fight girls, such as the Kanker Sisters during a wrestling match. - Pete on Goof Troop habitually forces his son PJ into servitude. Tellingly, in one episode one of the chores he had to do was "play with Pistol," his younger sister. Generally speaking, Pete puts PJ through all manner of psychological torment and holds him to ridiculous standards while letting Pistol do as she pleases and giving her everything she wants. Resultingly, Pistol is a Spoiled Brat and a Daddy's Girl, while PJ is an Extreme Doormat, a Shrinking Violet, and a Nervous Wreck who has some issues with his dad. Weirdly, though, there are some episodes where Pete treats them equally but in those episodes, PJ and Pistol are played as Satellite Characters. But for Peg, it's reversed, where she would talk nice to PJ and act like a mother should, (and like a mother to his friend Max, as well) but will yell and fuss at Pistol for every little thing. - In Hercules: The Animated Series, Phil and Hercules go visit Phil's mother, where she openly calls Phil's brother her favorite, going on about how he's a successful salesman, which Phil resents. However, when the brother comes to visit, he bemoans to Phil that their mother goes on about Phil's accomplishments to him. The mother admits that she did this to make sure neither would grow a big head and then proceeds to gab to both about their sister's accomplishments. - In Hey Arnold!: - Favoritism seems strong in the Pataki family; Olga is praised for her accomplishments and is given more attention than Helga, which causes a one-sided strain between the two. However, Olga actually wishes she could be treated like Helga, without all the fussing and attention. Olga: You must think I'm lucky, all the attention I get from them. I have to perform for them all the time like some kind of wind-up doll. I get really sick of it. You're lucky they don't even notice you. - Averted with Gerald's family, as his parents don't show any particular preference for any of their children, it's just Gerald tends to think so since Jamie O is the oldest while Timberly is the baby, leaving him with some mild Middle Child Syndrome. - On Invader Zim, Professor Membrane seems to favor his daughter, Gaz to his "poor, insane son" Dib. The comics and the movie make him into a better parent, though. - Kaeloo: Mr. Cat was apparently his mother's favorite child, to the chagrin of his two older brothers. - Kick Buttowski plays this for comedy. Kick, Brad, and Harold all know Brianna is number one in the house, so they all compete for number 2. - A later episode revealed that Kick was actually Honey's favorite, Not Brianna due to being so much like her (secretly being a water sports daredevil herself). This drives her other kids crazy. - On King of the Hill, Hank's father Cotton has another son in his old age and tries to name him Hank, saying he "always wanted a boy named Hank" and telling the original Hank to get a new name because his old one belongs to the baby now. Hank protests that you can't just take a grown man's name away from him, so Cotton names the baby Good Hank instead (or "GH" for short). Hank: Dad, this isn't right. You call him Good Hank, it's gonna make it sound like I'm Bad Hank. Cotton: Well, ya burnt my burger, didn't ya, BH?! - The Loud House: - In "Home of the Fave", it's revealed when Lynn Sr. was a kid, his dad Leonard played favorites with himself getting the short end of the stick. This drives him to give all eleven of his kids equal attention, fearing he himself may be playing favorites. - In "Appetite for Destruction", Rita is implied to favor Lily (the youngest Loud kid) the most, considering her "the sweet one". The other kids aren't pleased when they find out. - Any time Pickles' parents get any screen time in Metalocalypse, it's made abundantly clear that Seth, Pickles' older brother, is the favorite child. To put it into perspective: Seth is an ex-con who lives with his wife (of questionable virtue) in an attic above their garage in Wisconsin. Pickles is the drummer for the most successful band in the world. - Moral Orel: Bloberta's mother clearly prefers her older sister and younger brother over her, as they're much better singers than she is and are able to perform in a choir. Although not the best father, Clay prefers Orel over Shapey, as he suspects the latter might not actually be his son. \|\|He's right.\|\| - In Ninjago, Lord Garmadon points out to his brother, Sensei Wu, that the latter was always their father's favorite before escaping the Underworld. - Dr. Doofenshmirtz on Phineas and Ferb grew up resenting his "goody-two-shoes brother, the favorite of my mother" Roger. Even worse, his father preferred the dog, naming it "Only Son", and the only reason his mother liked his brother more was that said brother was better at kickball. - The Proud Family: Suga Mama prefers her eldest son Bobby over Oscar. However, it's a deconstruction since Suga Mama's doting resulted in Bobby not doing anything with his life, being unemployed (though trying and failing to become a singer), unmarried, and still living with his mama while Oscar at least has a job, his own house, a wife and children. - Ready Jet Go!: In "A Kid's Guide to Mars", Face 9001 tries to invoke this. He convinces his brother Face 9000 that 9001 is their mom's favorite child. He even "quotes" their mother as saying "[Face 9001] knows everything". - On Robot and Monster, Robot and Gart's mother prefers the latter because he's successful at life and not an embarrassment to the family name. - In the Rocket Power movie "Race Across New Zealand," Ray suffers an episode of this when memories of his defeat in the same competition that his kids are competing in resurface at the sight of his former rival, whose son is also competing. When the phrase "Like father, like son" comes up, Ray then focuses all of his attention on Otto to make sure he beats his rival's son for revenge, leaving Reggie out in the cold. - Rugrats (1991): In "The Unfair Pair", Angelica convinced Phil and Lil that every family had one favorite, and that their sibling was it, making both of them The Un-Favourite. - She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Shadow Weaver raised both Adora and Catra from when they were babies. She heaped physical abuse on Catra while giving Adora more subtle psychological abuse. When Adora defects, Shadow Weaver spends an absurd amount of time and effort trying to get her back and keeps blaming Catra for her own failures. In fact, it's implied that she saw Catra as Adora's pet rather than a daughter in her own right. Ironically, Shadow Weaver proudly claims that Adora is an "ambitious, cutthroat, ruthless warrior," when that actually describes Catra far more than Adora. Shadow Weaver: Catra has been nothing but a disappointment to me! - The Simpsons: - Separate episodes have confirmed that Lisa is Homer's Daddy's Girl of a favorite kid and Maggie is Marge's, leaving Bart as The Un-Favourite. Ironically, despite this, Lisa suffers from massive Middle Child Syndrome anyway, due to Bart requiring so much energy to deal with. - She also feels like The Un-Favourite because Bart gets far more attention the few times he actually does something right instead of his usual bratty hijinks, which she ascribes to him being both the oldest child and the only boy. Lisa: Bart gets everything because he's the oldest and he's a boy. And Maggie gets whatever's left over because she's the youngest and she's a baby. - Homers relationships with Bart and Lisa are an interesting example of this because, while Homer clearly prefers Lisa to Bart, he spends more time with Bart because he is the child with whom he has the most in common and is the most willing to go along with whatever ill-advised thing he's doing that week. It's probably also worth noting that his favoritism is subject to change depending on his mood at the moment, with "Lisa on Ice" being an extreme example as he flipped back and forth from Bart to Lisa depending on who was giving the best performance from second to second of a hockey game. - On the flip side, all three children unanimously prefer their mother Marge over their short-tempered Bumbling Dad. Bart: I'm afraid that we don't want to be with anyone but Mom and whoever she chooses to be with. - The Year Without a Santa Claus: Even though both of the Miser Brothers are petty bickerers with each other, it's stated by Heat Miser that their Mother liked Snow Miser more than him.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentalFavouritism
Parental Title Characterization - TV Tropes "He may have been your father, boy, but he wasn't your daddy." In fiction, how you refer to your parents is a sign of your relationship with them. "Mom"/"Mum" and "Dad" (or the languages counterparts) are the most neutral and "normal" terms that most characters use. Other titles have more meaning behind them. In some cases, switching from "Mommy"/"Mummy" and "Daddy" to "Mom"/"Mum" and "Dad" is just a matter of a younger user wanting to be seen as a "big kid." A Spoiled Brat or Daddy's Girl will often refer to her father as "Daddy" even as most of her peers outgrow the title, especially if she's rich. In contrast, a full-grown man calling his mother "Mommy" or "Mummy" is seen as goofy or weird, signifying he is either a Momma's Boy, a Manchild, or that his mother is the My Beloved Smother type. "Ma" and "Pa" carry similar levels of informality as the above examples, but in a more rural sense fitting for a Farm Boy (or girl). "Mother" and "Father" used to be perfectly neutral terms but have become formal and old-fashioned over time. It can signify that the characters are uptight and formal, they're royalty, or that their parents are distant. Using "Sir", "Ma'am", and other extremely formal titles has even more weight to it than referring to them as just "Mother" and "Father". It's almost always to signify that the character's parents as abusive, aloof and unaffectionate, or are militaristic. Some children may be expected to address parents by their professional titles, in lieu of using parental titles if they're also their children's students or subordinates, out of respect and keeping personal and professional lives separate. Works of Xenofiction often have animals refer to their parents as "mother" and "father" (assuming he's present) in order to emphasis their otherness. There's some Values Dissonance to this trope. For example, using "Mama" and "Papa" as an adult can be seen as childish in one area or during one time period but perfectly normal and affectionate in another. The Super-Trope to Calling Parents by Their Name, which is used when characters call their parents by their given name and usually signifies either lax parents or bad familial relationships. Compare New Parent Nomenclature Problem, which is like this trope but applied to a "new" parent (adoptive, stepparent, etc.) See also Japanese Sibling Terminology and Japanese Pronouns, which are just as personal for the user. Related to You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious and You're Not My Father. Also see Significant Name Shift. ## Examples: - Are You Lost?: - Homare calls her father "Papa," which Shion finds cute. - Shion uses the very respectful "Otou-sama" and "Okaa-sama" ("Father" and "Mother") on her parents, reflecting her privileged upbringing. - Citrus: - Mei calls her father, who was a teacher at her family's school for much of her childhood, "Sensei" rather than "Father," as a show of respect for his work. Unfortunately, after Shou leaves, Mei is greatly shaken, although she does eventually come to terms with his decision and calls him "Father" as she sees him off on his latest trip. - Yuzu, who's by far the more laid-back of the two stepsisters, calls her mother "Mama," and calls her late father and stepfather "Papa." By comparison, Mei calls her stepmother "Mother." - In Comic Girls, Tsubasa, a tomboyish girl who comes from a very wealthy family, addresses her parents by the very formal "Otou-sama" and "Okaa-sama" (translated as "Father" and "Mother") while at home. It's played with, though, in that this is less proof of the kind of person Tsubasa is and more of the kind of person her parents expect her to be. - In Digimon Adventure 02, thirteen-year-old Mimi is known to lead a comfortable life. When being picked up from a party in one episode, she calls her father "Papa" in the original version and "Daddy" in the dub. It may have had more to do with Gratuitous English in one case, and matching lip flap in the other. In Digimon Adventure, she was ten, but called her father "Dad." - In his Lotus-Eater Machine experience in the second-to-last episode, eight-year-old Cody thinks he's with his father, who had died by the time he was four or five. He's a very intelligent and serious young man; that the subtitles for the original version of this scene have Cody addressing his father as "Daddy" speaks to the emotional impact his father's loss has on him. The dub team made him a year older, so it makes sense that they had him call his father "Dad". - Cana in Fairy Tail tends to call Gildarts by his given name. This is a mixture of her spending years before working up the courage to tell him he was her father, and him quickly becoming an Amazingly Embarrassing Parent once he finds out, much to her chagrin. That said, during the final arc, she does call him "Dad" when he's going up against August and putting his life on the line to protect her. - Food Wars!: The relationship between Soma and Erina and their respective fathers, Joichiro and Azami, is clearly shown by the way each one addresses them. Soma, who is very laidback and casual, calls Joichiro "Oyaji", and the two have a very close relationship with each other, with Soma looking up to Joichiro and wishing to surpass him one day as a chef. Erina, on the other hand, calls Azami "Otou-sama", which is both due to her being raised as an Ojou, as well as a mixture of respect and fear due to Azami being an Abusive Dad to her (albeit in a Knight Templar Parent way). - Fullmetal Alchemist: - Most of the Homunculi call the Big Bad "Father," but Greed, the rebellious offspring, is far more casual and flippant with Father, calling him "Dad" or other such terms. - Ed usually calls Hohenheim by name due to their strained relationship (something Ed's traveling companions once call him out on), while Al, who's less judgmental of his father, still calls him "Dad." At the end of the series, after Hohenheim offers to \|\|sacrifice himself to bring Al back from the other side of the Gate\|\|, Ed angrily refuses the offer, saying "You're useless, Dad!", something that Hohenheim's happy to hear. - In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, Josuke Higashikata insists on referring to Joseph Joestar, who fathered him in an extramarital affair with Josuke's mother and only recently found out about Josuke being his son, "Joestar-san"/"Mr. Joestar," which is appropriately respectful but expresses that Josuke doesn't consider Joseph his father. - Lyrical Nanoha: - Chrono, a TSAB Enforcer who's highly professional and serious to a fault, almost always refers to his mother Lindy, who commands the ship he serves on, as "the captain." There are only two exceptions- he calls her "Mom" once when highly flustered in the original series (before correcting himself), and once refers to her as "my mother" in passing during the second season. - Subaru and Ginga generally call their father, Major Genya Nakajima, "Otou-san"("Dad") but Ginga switches to "commander" while on duty since she serves in her father's battalion. Their adopted siblings have varying modes of address- the very formal Cinque calls Genya "Chichi-ue" ("Father"), Genki Girl Wendi uses "Papa-rin," and Dieci and Nove also use "Otou-san." - In some fan translations, Fate calls Precia "Mother," but calls her adoptive mother, Lindy, "Mom," signifying she has a closer relationship with the latter note : In the original Japanese, Fate uses "Okaa-san" on both. Of course, while her relationship with Lindy is better, it isn't easily established, as it takes her the entirety of the second season to call Lindy "Mom" rather than "Admiral Lindy" (or "Lindy-san" around people who don't know about the TSAB). - Fate's children Erio and Caro address her as "Fate-san"(unlike Vivio, who calls her "Fate-mama"). While it's clear that they love and respect her, their choice of address means it's unclear how much they think of her as their mother. - Major: Goro has this it in a subtle way. He calls his late biological father Shigeharu Honda "Otosan" which is mildly formal, while he calls Hideki Shigeno "Oyaji", which straddles the line between being affectionate and disrespectful (depending on Goro's mood), which suggests he may have slightly more respect for Shigeharu. That said, Goro does have a close relationship with Hideki (even taking his surname later on), so it may have to do with his own personality more than preferences over one father. - My Hero Academia: - Katsuki Bakugo is a hotheaded and rude individual who doesn't even bother to learn most of his classmates' names, instead using insulting nicknames on them. He's similarly rude to his mother, calling her names like "hag", much to her displeasure. - By contrast, Momo Yaoyorozu, a polite girl from a wealthy family and Tenya Iida, a serious and upstanding young man, respectfully call their parents "Mother" and "Father." Tenya's older brother Tensei also does the same. - Shoto Todoroki uses various disparaging terms while referring to his father, due to their extremely strained relationship. He also sometimes refers to him by his hero name, Endeavor, less out of disrespect and more as a way of acknowledging that while Endeavor is a terrible father, he's a great hero, thereby being entirely different people in public and in private. He does call Endeavor "Father" \|\|when Endeavor suffers a Heroic BSoD after realizing that the villain Dabi is his supposedly dead son Toya\|\|, perhaps showing that he does care about him. - Naruto: - Boruto usually calls his father Naruto " oyaji" (old man) to emphasis his feelings of neglect by his father. When he's happy with his dad, he calls him the very affectionate " tou-chan" ("Dad" in the English dub). - Sarada does not know her father Sasuke well due to \|\|him being on a mission since she was a toddler\|\|, however, she refers to him with the affectionate "Papa" (changed to "Dad" in the English dub). She also refers to her mother by "Mama" ("Mom" in the English dub). - In Itachi's Story, Itachi usually calls Fugaku "Father" after graduating the academy at a very young age, which Itachi sees as "a distinction he drew for himself as a full-fledged ninja." When the time comes for the massacre, Itachi switches back to using "Dad," (even though he can't remember the last time he called Fugaku that), because now that he knows that he's going to be parted from his parents forever, Itachi longs for the good old days when they were a family. - In New Game!, Ko Yagami starts to call her mother "Mama" ("Mommy" in the dub), but then switches to "my mother," when talking to Aoba, apparently not wanting to seem childish, since Ko is 25 at the start of the series. Ko's best friend, Rin, teases her about it when she overhears Ko on the phone with her mother. - In One Piece, Vivi usually calls her father, Cobra, "Papa," but at the end of the arc, tells him "Sit down, Papa... I mean, Father." Cobra briefly remarks at how much Vivi's grown up. - Pokémon: - James calls his grandparents "Nana" and "Pop-Pop", implying both that he's a bit preppy and that he's close to them. - Lillie usually calls Lusamine "Mother", with one exception in the English dub — she briefly calls out for "MOMMY!" when \|\|Lusamine is kidnapped by Nihilego\|\|. - Ranma ½: Ranma's love-hate relationship with his Jerkass father is cemented by always referring to him as "oyaji", rather than "otou-san" (in English, this becomes "Pop"). He has a greater deal of respect for his mother, but his casual manner of speaking is set in stone, so it earns her an "ofukuro" from her son (literally "bag", but it stays "Mom" in other translations). - On Spy X Family, Anya always calls Loid "chichi" note : "Papa" in the English translation since she's a very young girl, even though Loid tells her to call him "father," since his mission (which is the reason he adopted Anya) requires him to have Anya attend a school attended by many children of wealthy Ostanian families. It's worth pointing out that "chichi" is often used when talking about one's father, rather than talking to one's father. - In the English dub of the second season of Sword Art Online, Asuna alternates between using "Mother" and "Mom" on Kyouko, using the former in more tense moments, and the latter when they're getting along better. She also meekly obeys a request to come to dinner with a "Yes, ma'am." - In A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow, Koyuki Honami, the daughter of a teacher at her school, refers to her father as "Honami-sensei" while at school, one of many things she does to keep up her reputation as a model student. - Yuru Oyako: - Yuuki calls her mother Sayaka, by name, because she has an incestuous crush on Sayaka. - Sayaka most often calls her mother, the president of the company where they both work, "President," since Sumika is her boss as well as her mother. Sumika insists that Sayaka call her "Mom" note : Actually the much more formal "Okaa-sama" in the original Japanese off the clock. - The rich Daddy's Girl Veronica from Archie Comics refers to her father as "Daddy" even as an adult. - Batman: - Lonely Rich Kid Tim Drake usually addresses his father as "dad" or "sir", but when talking about him to others or in his inner monologue it's more often "father" or "Jack". His mom is "mom" or "mommy" regardless. - Damian Wayne calls his dad father. Its representative of being raised in a formal, hands off cult of assassins. - In Cat's In The Cradle, Sayaka Maizono notices that Kyoko Kirigiri doesn't call her father Jin "Dad" or even "Father," and wonders if it's because Jin is headmaster of Hope's Peak Academy. Kyoko then replies that it's partly for that reason, and partly because she doesn't think of him as her father. - Perhaps to highlight how distant and abusive she is towards her kids, Cellar Secrets has Satsuki and Nui refer to Ragyo as "the Mistress". In the first chapter, Satsuki does call her "Mother" but doesn't stick to calling her that. At another point, Ryuuko dubs Satsuki, her older sister, as "Mam", to emphasize that Satsuki's pratically her mother. - With Cinders and Ashes: the Chronicles of Kamen Rider Dante, the fanfic takes an aspect of what Re:CREATORS established (that being the creators' relationships to their creations are akin to parent and child) and applies that logic by having characters call their creators by parental titles. In particular... - Magane refers to her creator as daddy, showcasing her playful (if outright dangerous) side. - Likewise, Yudai also refers to Hoshi as "dad" most of the time, though often switching it up to father. Emphasizing his more rebellous personality. Though, this is less of him actually acknowledging him as a parent and more constantly guilt tripping him into acknowledging he created him. - Then there's Vega, who exclusively calls Hoshi father to symbolize a more regal persona. Though, he also insists to call Altair mother due to her connections to him. Likewise, due to her own refined tone, Altair refers to her own Creator as mother. - In Continuance, Soji Seta (aka the protagonist) calls his parents "Mother" and "Father," showcasing his distant relationship from them. Yukiko calls her mother "Mom" and her father "Daddy," (in the game, she uses "Mother" on her mother, and uses "Father" on her father in the manga adaptation), to show a hidden playful side to her. - A Different Point of View: Even after turning fourteen, Muffy still calls her father "Daddy" (but her mother is just "Mom"). This shows that she's a Daddy's Girl. - Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Freeza is portrayed as an even bigger Spoiled Brat than his canon counterpart, which is only reinforced by his constantly calling his father "Daddy". - In Goldstein, the Orthodox Jewish characters usually call their parents "Mummy and Tatty." One of Yehudah's friends, Danzinger, comes from a family that used to be less observant than their neighbors; the fact that he called his mother "Mum" was one thing that set him apart from the other children. - Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail: As Chloe's relationship with her father degrades, she increasingly mentally refers to him by his title rather than as her parent. By the end of the first act, she's addressing him as "Professor Cerise". - Invoked by Jacques in Lullabies and Fairy Tales. He insisted that his daughter Weiss use a formal "Mother" instead of "Mommy". - In Let the World Smile, Zelda refers to her father as "my lord". This emphasizes the distant relationship between the two. Her father is more king than parent. - Used with Yang in the one-shot Love, Lose, Repeat, Prioritize. As a child she referred to her step-mother Summer as "mommy" or "mama", but strictly used a more formal and distant "mom" for her absent biological mother Raven. - Discussed in the Ma Fille chapter "Growing Up"; the realization that Katrina isn't a little kid anymore is when she starts called Joe "dad" instead of "daddy". - The Simpsons: Team L.A.S.H.: - In regards to her two dads, Anastasia refers to Monty (the older, wealthier, and more aloof of the two) as "Father", while the younger and sweeter Waylon is referred to as "Daddy". Both of these titles are fitting for Anastasia's character ("Father" is old-fashioned and polite, while "Daddy" is stereotypically often used by spoiled rich girls), but who she refers to with what title also says something about how she perceives each parent. - The other character with two dads, Simon, distinguishes between them in a very different way. He calls them both by their professional titles followed by "Dad"; Principal Skinner is "Principal Dad" and Superintendent Chalmers is "Superintendent Dad". (Think how the Koopa Kids refer to their father as "King Dad".) While the use of "Dad" instead of "Father" or "Seymour/Gary" does establish that he has a close relationship with his parents (which he very much does), the appended title is a reflection of Simon's stiffness, formality, and obsession with his education. - Violet's abusive Stage Mom in the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fic Through Their Eyes enforces this. When Violet was four, she forced Violet to begin using "mother" instead of "mommy". - In wasting beats of his heart of mine, Zagreus reincarnates as a mortal and is adopted by Philomenus the farmer. Zagreus calls him 'sir' as an adult, but both he and the narration refer to him as his father or foster father, implying a loving but slightly removed relationship. In contrast, Zagreus was never close to his late foster mother, and both he and the narration refer to her as Philomenus's wife. - In Where Talent Goes on Vacation, Chiyuri Nagato generally refers to her mother, Yukari, as "Mom," but is expected to call her "Nagato-sensei" while in class, as a way of keeping their private lives separate from their time at school, and showing Yukari the appropriate respect owed to a teacher. While Chiyuri occasionally slips up, she doesn't mind, seeing this as Yukari's way of acknowledging her as a student. The Tachibana sisters, who had a similar arrangement the year they were in their mother's class, know where Chiyuri is coming from, but Akira Azuki, whose mother is her manager, is initially put off by Chiyuri having to treat her mother differently (since Akira is allowed to call her mother "Mom" no matter where they are). - Throughout Bambi II Bambi refers to the Great Prince as "Sir" to reflect the latter's distant and somewhat intimidating nature to him. Them fully developing a loving bond is culminated by Bambi finally calling him "Dad", an even less formal term than his "Mother" whom he had a far more relaxed and affectionate relationship with beforehand. - Brave: Rebellious Princess Merida refers to her mother Elinor as either "Mum" or "Mother". She regresses to "Mummy" in the climax \|\|when she begins crying due to believing her mother is permanently a bear.\|\| - Frozen: - Frozen: The sole time Elsa refers to her parents by their title is when she cries for help. She uses the affectionate and childish "Mama" and "Papa". This fits her young age in the scene (eight), but also shows she has a loving relationship with her parents. Over the course of her childhood, she withdraws from her family due to fearing she might hurt them. - In Frozen II, Elsa and Anna are shown calling their parents "Mother" and "Father". This fits the 19th century time period as well as their royal upbringing. - Igor: Dr. Glickenstein usually refers to his mother (who was apparently a bossy sort and wanted him to be a plumber like her instead of a Mad Scientist) as "Mother", but when he whines about how she was right, he calls her "Mummy", making him seem like a little kid throwing a tantrum. - The Land Before Time: - Daddy's Girl Cera calls her father "Daddy" but her mother "Mom", showing that she's closer to her dad. - Littlefoot refers to his mother as "Mother", although their relationship is definitely warm and close. \|\|It highlights the Bambi parallel when his mother meets her fate.\|\| - The Little Mermaid (1989): Ariel always calls King Triton "Daddy," highlighting her youthful innocence, and showing that despite their painful conflict, their relationship is ultimately close and caring. - The Lion King: - The Lion King (1994): Simba calls Mufasa "Dad" as a cub, highlighting their close, playful bond, but as an adult calls him "Father" when speaking in awe \|\|to his spirit in the clouds.\|\| - Kiara in The Lion King II: Simba's Pride uses "Daddy" on default to show that she's a Daddy's Girl. When speaking more formally, she uses "Father" due to her upbringing as a princess and having become the lioness equivalent of a young woman. - All of Zira's children use "Mother" towards her. She's a strict and abusive mother who doesn't coddle or allow for fun. - In Mulan, Mulan usually calls her father "Father," but when they reunite at the end of the film when she comes home from the army, she touchingly calls him "Baba" (Mandarin for "Daddy"). - In Shrek 2, the fully grown Prince Charming calls his mother, the Fairy Godmother, "Mummy," and it isn't lost on Fiona. As it happens, Fairy Godmother is controlling Prince Charming. - At the beginning of Big Mommas: Like Father Like Son, Malcolm expresses disappointment that his stepson Trey won't call him "Dad". Trey does so at the end of the film after they come to an understanding (and get through a lot of trouble together). - Big Jake: James, a man in his twenties, mockingly calls his estranged father Jacob McCandles "daddy" in one scene. As he is resentful for Jacob abandoning him and his family years ago. Jacob punches him in retaliation and orders him to never refer him by that again. - In Bye Bye Birdie the lead begins referring to her parents by their given names because it's the "modern thing" to do. When she freaks out about winning a contest to kiss her favorite singer, she switches to "Mother" and then "Mommy". - In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, everybody refers to the family patriarch as Big Daddy (and unlike Big Mama, his first name is never given). In the film version, however, there's a scene where Brick goes to have a heart-to-heart with him and refers to him as "Pa" and "Papa." This actually gets Big Daddy angry when he notices. Given the subsequent discussion, Brick seems to think of "Big Daddy" as representative of his big-man, throw-money-around style of parenting, while "Pa/Papa" is his attempt to engage him on a healthier, emotional level. - A weird thing happens with Violet Beaureguarde of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on film: - In Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, both of her parents are present. She addresses her mom as "mother." Judging from the fact that Mrs. Beaureguarde's only line is a First-Name Ultimatum directed at Violet, we can assume that she takes a strict line with her daughter. Violet calls her father "Dad"; he indulges her competitiveness, and they appear to be much closer. - In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Violet's dad is nowhere to be found. Violet probably calls her mom "Mother" here because her mother is her coach. They seem to take their relationship as seriously as everything else, and to them, competition is everything else. - At no point does Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens refer to \|\|Han Solo\|\| as his "father", showing just how much Ren wants to cut himself off from who he once was. - In Hook, The titular character tries to get Peter Pan's son, Jack, on side by being more present and supportive than Peter himself. However, Hook doesn't really care for Jack, so despite being sore at Peter, Jack only ever addresses Hook as "Captain." - In Little Annie Rooney, Annie calls her father "daddy dear" when she tries to sucker up to him while avoiding punishment. - The Santa Clause: Seven-year-old Charlie addresses his parents as "Mom" and "Dad" throughout. Scott and Laura's divorce probably made Charlie feel like he had to grow up a bit more quickly, but he still loves them. - Artemis Fowl: Artemis addresses his parents formally, as "Mother" and "Father". When Artemis and his father are reunited after several years, Artemis slips into formalities. Fowl Sr. shakes his head, remembering that he was indeed that stern and demanding, but has now reverted to the personality his wife was attracted to (that he no longer has to deal with The Mafiya probably helps). - Bambi from Bambi calls his mom "Mother". This could be because of the time period of the book, but it also could be to emphasize that he's an animal. - In The Color Purple, Squeak was in jail for over a decade. As a result, her kids call their step-mom "Mama" but Squeak "Miss." It upsets Squeak. - Squirrel in A Dog's Life notes that her mother's name was "Stream", but that to her and her brother she was just "Mother". - In A Dog's Purpose, all dogs presumably only use "mother". The protagonist doesn't understand that "mom" is another term for "mother" and thinks that Ethan's mother is literally named "Mom". - Erin Hunter: - Most adult cats and older kittens in Warrior Cats refer to their parents by name. In the rare occasion that they do use a title, it's usually "Mother" or "Father". - Dogs in Survivor Dogs refer to their parents are "Mother-Dog" and either "Father-Dog" if they're present in their life or "Sire-Dog" if they're not. - Wolves in Firstborn call their parents the formal "mother" and "father". - In the Hannah Swensen mystery novels, Hannah and her two sisters always call their mother Delores "Mother." Since Delores is a Proper Lady and My Beloved Smother, in sharp contrast with her Girl Next Door baker daughter, the formal title suits her much better than "Mom" would. - In Harry Potter, all of the Weasley kids refer to their parents as "Mum" and "Dad," except for Percy, who calls them "Mother" and "Father" to show that he's stuffy and overly-serious. \|\|After a three-year estrangement, he calls Arthur "Dad" when apologizing to him\|\|. - In a sort of meta example: the American edition of the books changes most of the British slang. J. K. Rowling is fine with this, but was aghast that the first book had the Weasleys calling Molly "Mom" instead of "Mum," which was changed in the later books. - Les Misérables: - Grandparent example: Marius calls his grandfather "Father" (since his grandfather is the one who raised him) when they're on good terms, but "Monsieur" when they're estranged. When he's unsure of where they stand, he avoids addressing him by any name. By the end, he's back to "Father," though. - Cosette usually calls her adoptive father Jean Valjean "Father," while Éponine and Azelma usually call Thénardier "Papa" this highlights the class difference between the girls, and rings somewhat ironic too, since Valjean is the warm, loving father of the two, while Thénardier is an abusive one. Averted in the musical adaptation, however, where Cosette calls Valjean "Papa." Also, when Valjean is trying to distance himself from Cosette for her own good after her marriage, he insists that she call him "Monsieur Jean," but gets to hear her say "Father" again when they reunite \|\|just before he dies.\|\| - In Messenger: The Legacy of Mattie J.T. Stepanek and Heartsongs, there's some discussion about the difference between being a father (merely siring a child) and being a daddy (committing to and nurturing a relationship with the child). Sometime in Mattie's early life, his parents divorced, note : in part because all four of her children had inherited a terminal illness from mother Jeni, unbeknownst to her so he never got to know his father. - My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!: - In the novels, Keith mentions that as an illegitimate child, he was not allowed to call his father or his wife "Father or "Mother." Even after finding a more loving home with Catarina and her parents, he calls Catarina's father "Duke Claes" and Catarina's mother "Madam Claes" in his narration, despite he was adopted by Duke Luigi Claes for the express purpose of being his future heir. - Catarina uses "Okaa-sama" on her mother ("Mother" in English), since her mother is a noblewoman who is strict about etiquette. \|\|When Catarina wakes up in a dream of her old life as "the monkey girl," she calls her mother that. The monkey girl's mother is rather confused, presumably more used to being called "Okaa-san" ("Mom").\|\| - In Out of the Dust, Billie Jo switches from "Daddy" to "[my] Father" after he \|\|accidentally causes her and her mother to get burned\|\| and \|\|leaves her to tend with her dying mother while he goes out drinking. She goes back to "Daddy" when they reconcile\|\|. - In the Ramona Quimby series, Ramona calls her mother "Mama" in the earlier books, but switches to "Mother" as she gets older, except for one emotional moment near the end of Ramona and Her Mother, where she says "Mama" again. She always calls her father "Daddy," though. - In A Song of Ice and Fire, it's part of standard etiquette among nobles to address their parents "My lord father" or "My lady mother" in public situations, but Tyrion Lannister nearly always calls his father that, because they hate each other. - A Tale of...: - Snow White referred to her biological mother who died in childbirth as "Mother", showing her lack of a bond with her. She referred to her step-mother Grimhilde as the affectionate "Momma" growing up but switched to an aloof "Mother" when she became more abusive. She switched back to "Momma" \|\|after Grimhilde turned sweet again after becoming the new Slave in the Mirror\|\|, and she uses that even years later when her own children are grown. - Subverted with Maleficent. She only calls her adopted mother "Mother" once. She's usually referred to as "Nanny". However, it's not meant in a negative manner. It's just everyone calls her "Nanny". - Gothel and her sisters refer to Manea as a stern, distant "Mother", which Manea enforced. Manea was a neglectful and emotionally abusive mother. - In The Ten PM Question, the siblings Louie, Gordana, and Frankie call their mother "Mama" but their father "Uncle George", since they previously thought he was their uncle and the name stuck. - Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quartet (aka, A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels) Inverts the usual way this works: the Murry kids call their parents "Mother and Father" despite being close to them, while Calvin uses "Mom and Dad" despite his family being very dysfunctional. In A Swiftly Tilting Planet Meg (now Calvin's wife) calls his mother "Mom" simply because that's what he does, but privately thinks that it feels odd to address her by anything. - The Bible: - Much fuss has been made about Jesus regularly calling his mother Mary "woman" throughout the Bible (especially the Gospel Of John). Note that calling someone "woman" was much less disrespectful in ancient Greek or Aramaic than it is in modern-day English, and was actually the formal way to address women (kinda like "Ma'am"). But even by those cultural standards, it was a very impersonal and abnormal way to address your own mother in particular. Interestingly, Catholic and Protestant commentators have read this in almost opposite ways; Catholics typically see it as Jesus comparing Mary to Eve in a Call-Back to the Book of Genesis, while Protestants typically read it as Jesus saying he takes orders from his divine parent instead of his human one. A third interpretation is that he speaks to Mary as her God rather than as her son that while she gave birth to his earthly body, his divine nature transcends family ties. - There are a few verses in the New Testament that use the word "Abba" (not that one) when referring to God, which has similar connotations to "daddy." Romans 8:14-15 (ESV): For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, "Abba! Father!" - In the story that inspired "Monster" by Meg and Dia, the Villain Protagonist had abusive parents who made him call them "Sir" and "Hannah". - Both "Daddy" and "Papa" are used in Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach" to show what a Daddy's Girl the protagonist is. The song is about a young woman (or maybe even a teen) who ends up pregnant by her "bad boy" boyfriend. - Bye Bye Birdie: - Kim calls her parents by their first names because it's the "modern" thing to do. But when she gets the call informing her that she's been chosen to be kissed by Conrad Birdie on live TV, she calls, "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!" in wild excitement to tell her the news. - Albert still calls his mother "Mama" in his late thirties, highlighting that he's a Momma's Boy and that Mae is My Beloved Smother. - Wicked: The intro to "What Is This Feeling?" shows the difference between the two main characters in this regard. Spoiled Daddy's Girl Glinda writes to her parents with the cutesy-sounding "Dearest, Darlingest Momsie and Popsicle." Meanwhile Elphaba addresses her with "My Dear Father," showing herself to be more serious and their relationship to be more distant. - In Caillou the Grown Up, Caillou calling his parents "Mommy" and "Daddy" emphasises that he's an immature Manchild. - FreezeFlame. - Carl - The titular character calls his chief of police step-father Calvin "Officer Mitchell", mainly because Calvin considers Carl calling him by his first name a huge form of disrespect (Carl will call Calvin by his given name when he's out of earshot, however). Carl's step-brother Logan, on the other hand, calls his step-mother Linda by her given name, as Linda doesn't mind it as much as Calvin does. Carl's 10-year old half-sisters Carrie and Sally, call Linda and Calvin "mommy" and "daddy" respectively, showing their nature as spoiled little girls. - Bowser's Koopalings: - RWBY: - The affluent Weiss calls her abusive father "Father". In contrast, she has a better (but still troubled) relationship with her mother, who she calls "Mom". - Downplayed in that Yang does call her absent mother Raven "mom", but only sarcastically. Her Good Stepmother Summer, on the other hand, is called "mom" unironically. - Kevin & Kell - Lindesfarne starts off calling her father "Daddy," but gradually switches to "Dad" as the strip starts allowing its characters to age, and she goes off to college. While she called her adoptive mother Angelique "Mother" in her youth, after Angelique walks away from her family, Lindesfarne eventually calls her by name, signifying that she no longer considers Angelique a mother. - When Rudy first gets a visit from the memory of his father Randy, he addresses him as "Father," prompting Randy's memory to say that Rudy had called him "Daddy-kins" around the time of Randy's death. Rudy later calls him "Dad." - The Amazing World of Gumball: - Archers relationship with his mother is dysfunctional, to put it mildly. Their love-hate enmity is so inappropriate it borders on the psychosexual, and definitely not helping the case is the fact that Sterling Archer, a grown man who - for all his flaunting and disrespecting of his mom - only ever (unconsciously) refers to her as "Mother". As he put it, shes gripping him "tightly, by [his] childhoods throat". - Back to the Future: Jules and Verne both have a positive relationship with their parents, but their names for them still differ because of the boys' personalities. Jules calls them "Mother" and "Father", which shows his more formal approach to life. Verne, who behaves more like a normal kid, calls them "Mom" and "Pop". - Cricket Green of Big City Greens refers to his parents Bill and Nancy as "Dad" and "Mom", but his sister Tilly always calls them by the more juvenile terms "Papa" and "Mama". She does, however, call Nancy "Mom" with Cricket at the end of "Phoenix Rises" when she's released from prison. - In The Cleveland Show, Cleveland periodically berates Cleveland Jr. because, among other things, he still calls Cleveland "Daddy" at fourteen years old. - In The Dragon Prince, Callum and his stepfather, King Harrow, are the familial version of Twice Shy. This is demonstrated by their first scene together: Callum bows and starts to address him the way any normal person would, only for Harrow to cut in and an awkward silence to ensue. Two episodes later, Callum's half-brother Lampshades the fact that Harrow would probably be really happy if Callum called him "Dad." Shortly thereafter Callum does, though only as assassins are trying to kill them. - Ed, Edd n Eddy: Edd always refers to his parents as Mother and Father. They also refer to themselves this way in the sticky-notes they leave along with the house. - Family Guy: - Meg calls her grandmother Babs "Nana". It's worth noting that she's a member of Newport high society, and she's in a position to have doted on Meg before, along with and because of her successful corporate CEO husband, Carter. - Lois, who is 43, always refers to her father Carter as Daddy, reflecting her position as a doting daughter to a powerful dad. - Stewie initially deemed Lois his arch-enemy and regarded Peter as a waste of space, and saw fit to referring to them as "Lois" and "the fat man", respectively. He's actually aghast that his future self would even consider calling them "mommy" and "daddy". When his Villain Protagonist nature slowly drifted away over the succeeding seasons, he became more restrained and casual, and now generally calls them by regular parental titles. - Played With in Gravity Falls: Dipper and Mabel refer to their great-uncle as "Grunkle" Stan (a term which, according to Word of Saint Paul, Stan coined himself). Later Stan's brother Ford is introduced. Mabel calls him "Grunkle" Ford, but Dipper, who bonds with Ford specifically because they're both more serious and intellectual, opts for "Great-Uncle" Ford. - Jem: - The Jetsons: Judy Jetson will sometimes refer to her parents as "Mom" and "Dad" but occasionally "Mother" and "Daddy". Brother Elroy always uses "Mom" and "Dad". Jane always refers to her mother as "Mother". - Kim Possible usually refers to her parents as "Mom" and "Dad" like a typical teen. But when she wants to be taken seriously, she'll call her Mom "Mother" (she never does the gender-equivalent with her Dad, due to her father's tendency to be overprotective and treating her like a little girl). And when she's in an affectionate mood and plays up her cuteness on the occasions where she accepts and wants her father's smothering, she'll refer to him as "Daddy". - The titular character of Little Bill is five years old. He calls his mother "Mama," but admires and wants to emulate his father enough to call him "Dad." Little Bill's siblings, eight-year-old Bobby and ten-year-old April, call their parents "Mom" and "Dad." Everyone thinks so highly of their great-grandmother that they call her Alice the Great. - The Loud House: - Used in Miraculous Ladybug: - Protagonist Marinette refers to her parents as "Mama" and "Papa" despite being a teenager, hinting at their close and loving relationship note : in the English dub, she alternates between these terms and the more age-appropriate but still affectionate "Mom" and "Dad". Co-star Adrien in contrasts uses "Father" for the present but emotionally absent parent he has remaining, alternating between "Mom" and "Mother" for his Missing Mom. In French, he uses vous for "you" when talking to his father, which is far more formal than any normal parent/child relationship. - Though parents don't come up as much with other characters, Marinette's babysitting charge Manon uses "Mama" and "Mommy" for her mother and Adrien and Marinette's classmate Alix uses the age-appropriate but affectionate "Pops" when she is seen with her father. Alpha Bitch Chloe uses both "Papa" and "Daddy" depending on dub, indicating her Spoiled Brat status and his Pushover Parent nature. - OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes: - There's a boy in The Proud Family named Michael. He can't be much younger than fourteen-year-old schoolmate Penny, and he calls his father "Daddy." The problem is that his father is the school's P.E. teacher, who would rather Michael call him "Coach" in public. - Recess: Whilst most characters do refer to their parents as "Mom" and "Dad, Gus refers to his father as "Sir" and the Ashleys will often refer to their fathers as "Daddy". - Rick and Morty: Though Rick often claims he treats his two grandchildren with an equal level of disdain, the relationship he shares with Morty is decidedly different than the one has with Summer. They, in turn, treat him pretty differently, too. Summer (who still respects him to a certain degree) refers to him as "Grandpa Rick" or "Grandpa", while Morty, (who knows Rick more intimately for the jaded demon that he is), just calls him plain old "Rick". - The Simpsons: - Utilized iconically by Bart, who frequently calls his father, Homer, by first name or other more derogatory titles to display his cocky impudence (though he also calls him "Dad"). In the original shorts, Lisa did similar to show her similar bratty characterization, though when she diverged into a more precocious, well-behaved child, she started referring to him solely as "Dad". As shown in the flashback episode "Lisa's First Word", both kids referred to Homer by first name even as a toddler, building up to the heartwarming final scene where Maggie calls him "Daddy", though out of earshot. - 12 year old Todd Flanders calls his father Ned Daddy. - Principal Skinner refers to his mother as "Mother" rather than "Mom", which showcases his uptight personality and ultra-formal way of speaking. - When Mr. Burns is talking to his mother in "Homer the Smithers", he refers to her as "Mater", an early-20th-century slang term for "mother". This, alongside other instances of Mr. Burns using Antiquated Linguistics, establishes that he is very old and very behind-the-times. - Used to show the relationships among the blended family in Sofia the First: - Sofia always calls her mother "Mom," and they have a very close bond. Meanwhile, she initially calls her stepfather King Roland by his title, due to not knowing him very well and feeling out of place in the palace. By the end of the pilot movie, she's warmed up to the situation and begins calling him "Dad." - James refers to his father and stepmother as "Dad" and "Mom" respectively. He's shown from the beginning to be quick to bond with Miranda and eager to have a mother. - Amber, meanwhile, typically refers to them as "Daddy" and "Mother." She's very close with her father, though he has more in common with James and Sofia, so her childish affection highlights their unique bond. While most of her animosity at the beginning was reserved for Sofia, Amber also struggled accepting her father's remarriage and isn't shown bonding with Miranda until late in the series, even though she is just as excited as James to finally have someone to spend Mother's Day with, so the formality shows that they aren't quite as close. She finally calls Miranda "Mom" in the last season after she realizes that Miranda does love her as a daughter and want what's best for her, despite filling a disciplinarian role Roland doesn't. - South Park: Stephen and Linda Stotch, Butters' parents, abuse their son on a daily basis and constantly ground him for minor things, even those which are completely out of Butters' control. As a result, Butters usually calls Stephen "sir" rather than "dad". Oddly enough, Butters still calls Linda "mom" even though she is just as abusive as her husband. - SpongeBob SquarePants: Pearl, despite being a teen, still calls her father Mr. Krabs "Daddy", because she's a Daddy's Girl. - Being a nerdy Manchild, Bubble Bass often uses a whiny Mother! when referring to his mom. - Throughout the entirety of Steven Universe, Steven called Greg "Dad", reflecting their close but casual relationship. In the Steven Universe: Future episode "Bluebird", Steven grimly calls him "father" after Greg narrowly escapes a Hostage Situation. Partly it's Steven trying to seem more mature, but mostly emphasizes that Steven was very serious and incredibly pissed at Greg's assailant. - Raven from Teen Titans at first calls her mom by her name when they meet. She switches to "mother" a sentence later. This shows her detached, emotionally repressed upbringing. - The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles usually refer to their adoptive father Splinter as "Master Splinter" or "Sensei", showing their student-teacher relationship. Whenever they use a parental title, it's usually a formal, respectful "Father". Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the sole exception—there, they usually call him "Dad", reflecting that Splinter in this series is their father first and teacher second. - When TLC's titular Little Couple, Jennifer Arnold and Bill Klein, adopted their son Will from China, they encouraged Will to call Bill "Baba," Mandarin for "Daddy." After Bill and Jennifer adopted daughter Zoey from India, the children were encouraged to simply call Bill "Daddy." This was probably done to make it easier on the kids, as Bill had become a father to children from two different cultures by this point. - Fred Rogers consistently referred to his parents as "Mother" and "Dad," implying that while Fred and his father had a more playful relationship, mom was the disciplinarian of the household. - Even his closest blood relatives have to address King Charles III as "Your Majesty" in formal situations. The same was true for his mother Queen Elizabeth II and her predecessors before her. Apparently, official protocol dictates that when first meeting the monarch and his or her consort in the morning, even their immediate family have to call them "Your Majesty" or "Your Royal Highness" on the first encounter of the day. It is believed Elizabeth II was more informal than that to her children and grandchildren. Apparently. - As mentioned in the Miraculous Ladybug example, languages with T-V distinction can create an added question on whether children address their parents or vice versa with the formal or informal "you". Whereas a few old-fashioned households have the parents addressing the children informally and the children addressing the parents formally, this is increasingly seen as overly formal as the terms "Mother" and "Father" and thus only the informal form is used both ways. Some might also address their grandparents formally if they see their own parents doing so.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentalTitleCharacterization
Parental Savings Splurge - TV Tropes Sometimes your parents can't afford to help you out financially with the big things in your life such as university, a wedding, or payment for a house. In other cases, they COULD have helped but they instead decided to spend the money on luxuries for themselves. Maybe the child's inheritance has been squandered, maybe the parents made a promise and then let it slide, or maybe they pumped their money into a ridiculous hobby, addiction, or collection. It's money that the child counted on for a good reason, not just because they're spoiled and entitled. Compare (and may overlap) with Financial Abuse, where parents may spend the money the child earned themselves. No Real Life Examples, Please!, unless it factors into a historical event like the Coogan's Law example listed. ## Examples: - Played for massive drama in Overlord (2012): Arche was a gifted student mage who had to quit her studies to become a Worker (adventurers who take on less legal, but more rewarding jobs) to support her parents and sisters, which leads to her taking on the Nazarick job and dying horribly. The reason for this is that her parents have refused to realize that they were disgraced by the Emperor and continue their Conspicuous Consumption lifestyle (buying jewelry when even the next meal isn't a certainty), eventually selling her sisters into slavery where they both died of overwork. Even worse, the Nazarick raid was supposed to be One Last Job, allowing her to take her sisters away and leave their family behind. - The movie Dead Pet is about a Harvard student who discovers his college fund has been spent by his parents on expensive surgeries for their poodle. Then the poodle dies, and the son is blamed for it. - Repo Man starts with Otto having a bad day, that culminates in his parents donating all his college money to a televangelist. Which prompts him to become a repossession agent. - At the end of His Dark Materials, the Master has to fund Lyra's studies because her parents squandered their wealth on their schemes. - Paradox: Alysha Forrest's mother decided to spend her daughter's inheritance from her father on fancy electronics and other luxuries, forcing her to work at a seedy strip club to afford tuition to the Fleet Academy (yes, the Alliance doesn't know how to run a functional military). - In Hair Raising, a truck driver's widow dumps all the life insurance money her husband had earmarked for their son's education into a hair salon, despite the fact that she's a terrible hairdresser. This leads the truck driver to drag her into court after he returns as a zombie and learns what she's done. - In Boomsday, Cassandra's hatred of Baby Boomers began when she was all set to go to Yale, only to find out that her dickhead father used her college fund to bail out his failing company - after wasting company funds on a private jet and a fancy car. Unable to even get financial assistance because her dad's jet and car raised the value of the family's assets beyond qualification level, she ended up having to join the military. - In Avenue Q, Gary Coleman's explanation for how he ended up as the superintendent at a run-down building on Avenue Q is that his parents got all the money he'd earned from Diff'rent Strokes and presumably blew through it before he was old enough to touch it, leaving him broke. - In Cultist Simulator, if you pick the "Bright Young Thing" legacy, you play as a character "endowed from birth with wealth and talent", counting on an allowance from your father for Funds. After he dies, while sorting out matters with the will, you find out from some puzzling papers that Papa has squandered most of the family fortune. Only by going through the papers and his diary do you find out what the money was spent on. - Downplayed in Pokémon Gold and Silver. The player's mother takes and stores a percentage of the player's earnings through battles, and occasionally uses that money to buy them the items. - Isaac Clarke, protagonist of the Dead Space trilogy, has a strained relationship with his mother because she sunk all their money into rising through the ranks of the Unitology Apocalypse Cult instead of investing in his college education. He managed to get a degree in engineering even so, but the lack of money sure didn't help his future job prospects. - In the original Newshounds Lorna at one point finds that her father had been repeatedly raiding her piggy banks, when she was little. Her Christmas presents were always her cousin's hand-me-downs and her college fund also went missing. Her father is a gambler with too many get-rich-quick schemes. He's introduced being on the run from the mob after embezzling their money. - In one Penny Arcade strip, Gabe claims that he has a policy against playing freemium games that he only instated after blowing Noah's college fund on Genshin Impact. - Arthur: In Binky's Imagine Spot when he thinks he's been left home alone, his parents drive off in their car for a cruise trip, telling their son, "There wasn't enough money in your college fund for three tickets!" - Bob's Burgers: In "Food Truckin", Bob buys a food truck in order to compete with the other food trucks parked outside the restaurant. When Linda asks how he can afford it, Bob admits to using Gene's college fund, which Gene says he probably won't need anyway. When Gene accidentally blows up the inside of the truck, Bob asks Tina and Louise if they want to offer up their college funds to pay for repairs, which they eagerly agree to do. - There's a Running Gag in The Fairly OddParents! where Timmy's parents frequently blow his college fund on frivolous things. - Family Guy: - In "Stu & Stewie's Excellent Adventure", after Stewie follows his future self back to his own time, he ends up costing the latter his job and they turn to Lois for some money to get Stewie back to the present. Lois gives them the money from a secret account that Peter can't access, commenting that she could never trust him with money especially after he blew Meg's college fund on a medieval catapult. - In "The Peanut Butter Kid", after Stewie becomes a child star, Peter and Lois start out by saving the money Stewie makes to pay for his college fund, but they soon devolve into pushy selfish Stage Parents and start spending the money on themselves. - The Simpsons: - Homer discovers he has stock in the power plant and when his broker calls him, he decides to sell it all for beer. Of course, just as he arrives home, he learns that the value skyrocketed after he sold it (instead of having enough to buy beer he could have gotten several thousand dollars). - In "Barting Over", Bart discovers that he was featured in a television advert when he was a baby, but Homer spent all the money that his son made. - In "Pranksta Rap", Homer casually mentions to Lisa that he sold the rights of Bart's kidnapping story (he faked being kidnapped to avoid being punished because he went to a rap concert that Marge wouldn't let him) for a fortune that he had already spent — and because of this, he becomes part of the cover-up of this aforementioned fakery while Lisa tries to bring it to light. - In "Yokel Chords," Cletus' children become famous, and he buys himself fur coats, diamonds, etc.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentalSavingsSplurge
Parent ex Machina - TV Tropes In many sitcoms and teen dramas where young persons are the focus of the show, parents (and other adult authority figures) serve no purpose in the show other than to swoop in at the last second to either deliver An Aesop or to ensure that they Can't Get Away with Nuthin'. After a while, you start to wonder how exactly they keep catching the kids, given that they seem to have absolutely no involvement in their lives otherwise. Few shows adhere strictly to this model: in many, the adult steps out of this role on rare occasions for a A Day in the Limelight episode. Another alternative is the half Parent Ex Machina; the show typically employs Two Lines, No Waiting, with separate storylines for the adults and the kids, which interact only at the last moment to deliver An Aesop or catch the kids. Many a Double Aesop is forged this way. Essentially one step up (or down, depending on how you look at it) from Adults Are Useless. Compare and contrast Parents as People, where the parents are almost too busy getting Character Development to actually do any parenting. ## Examples: - Bleach: - Uryuu Ishida loses his power at the end of the Soul Society arc. When he is targeted by two Aizen-designed Menos-class hollows, his father appears out of nowhere to save him. The pair have been fighting for years because Ryuuken hates quincies and didn't want Uryuu to become one, so Uryuu is shocked when Ryuuken volunteers to restore Uryuu's power to him. Although the restoration method turns out to be brutal (it can only work if the quincy is pushed to both their physical and spiritual limit), Uryuu's power is duly restored. The story still has not explained why Ryuuken offered to restore Uryuu's power despite having spent years wanting Uryuu to give up being a quincy. - At the climax of the Arrancar Arc, the captains, Vizards and even Urahara's group have been defeated by Aizen and there's nothing Ichigo can do, leaving him powerless to watch as Aizen departs the battlefield. Cue his father miraculously gaining his feet in time to inspire him to give pursuit. Not only that, but once inside the time-warping Dangai, Isshin just so happens to have the equipment on his person required to control the time-field to allow Ichigo to engage in a special training method he just happens to know all about. And in super-condensed time, too, so three months training in the Dangai is only an hour's time in the real world. \|\|Later on in the Lost Agent arc, Isshin's activities behind the scenes is what enables Urahara to design a method that allows Ichigo to regain his shinigami power.\|\| - Naruto: - In the Pein Arc, Naruto in his Unstoppable Rage almost rips Kurama's seal open but he is stopped by his father, Minato thanks to a failsafe. - Naruto is taught by Killer B how to enter his inner world to combat Kurama, a tailed beast sealed within him. It just so happens Naruto's mother, Kushina, appears as a chakra ghost and explains to Naruto that she was the previous host of Kurama, and thus has specialized knowledge on how to subdue him, including a technique that's super-effective against the demon fox. This makes Naruto's eventual fight with Kurama much easier, as his mother steps in to restrain the fox. - The Face on the Milk Carton has shades of this. The heroine suffers significant angst through the story, before informing her parents, who fix everything. - Boy Meets World, especially in its early seasons. In the later seasons, Mr. Feeney's character became a lot more substantial, but the parents were all but written out. - Leave It to Beaver. Happens with some frequency. Often Wally, Beaver, or both do something they shouldn't have and their parents always seem to find out, often courtesy of some sort of unexpected circumstance. Happens often enough that it seems they Can't Get Away with Nuthin'. - Just the Ten of Us, especially in its later seasons, where Coach Lubbock's four eldest daughters replaced him as the primary focus of the show. - Gilmore Girls particularly in its later seasons, though subversion since the parent-child relationship is so often reversed. - An episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, "The Squire Of Gothos", had a variation on this. Trelane, who seemed to be a Sufficiently Advanced Alien, turned out to merely be a naughty child. His "parents" (who appeared as blobs of energy) arrived just in time to save Captain Kirk and punish their boy. - Buffy the Vampire Slayer: - A similar situation happened in the episode about Buffy's roommate from Hell. The girl, as it turned out, was a demon who "snuck out" to spend time with the mortals. Her father "rescues" Buffy from having to interact with her anymore, at which point, Buffy moves in with Willow. Being dragged back to her dimension, the demon grumbles: "When will you stop treating me like I'm nine-hundred?" - Buffy herself often faced this trope in the early episodes. Her mother was involved in some plots, but very few, and she almost never did anything useful. Often, when she did appear, it was to try to have a heart-to-heart with her wayward daughter about either mundane matters that had no real importance compared to what Buffy was dealing with (although usually it was somehow metaphorically related to the plot), or supernatural events that she grossly misinterpreted. Later, Buffy told her mother that she was the Slayer, which, after the initial shock, improved their relationship significantly. - Most parents in the GoAnimate Grounded videos are this, often only showing up out of nowhere to punish and ground the troublemaker of the video once they step out of line if they weren't already present. - Dominic Deegan. Miranda Deegan is aware that her children are adults, but doesn't hesitate to bail them out if they are in serious trouble. Since she also happens to be one of the most powerful Archmages in the setting she also counts as a Deus ex Machina. - Kim Possible: Kim's parents are at times very supportive of their globetrotting, crimefighting daughter. - Spoofed in South Park, which usually has one of the children delivering the Aesop to the adults. - In many episodes of Rugrats, probably a majority, Adults Are Useless from start to finish. But there are also many episodes where the parents will suddenly catch onto the Devil in Plain Sight misbehavior of Angelica, or otherwise do something useful to resolve the plot at the end of the episode. - The mischievous alien having fun at the expense of Danger Mouse and Penfold (episode "The Aliens are Coming") turned out to be playtoys of an alien child who leaves Earth with his dad who says there's no intelligent life. - The Futurama episode "Where No Fan Has Gone Before" parodies the example from Star Trek: The Original Series (see above). Melllvar, an energy being who uses the Planet Express crew and the former cast of Star Trek: The Original Series to host his own Trek convention, gets scolded and dragged away by his mother at the end. Except he's not a child, he's 34. - Regularly defied on Phineas and Ferb; Candace wants her mother to serve this role, but any evidence of Phineas and Ferbs antics almost always vanished before she can see it, and on the rare occasions that she does, its either All Just a Dream or immediately retconned. For Candace, Failure Is the Only Option.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentExMachina
Parental Blamelessness - TV Tropes A character, usually an adult, is having a discussion with their parents concerning an event that took place when they were being raised. The son or daughter will comment on a parental action that they are not happy about. Almost as if on cue, the parent will retort with: "I did the best I could!" - and may additionally state: "Children don't come with a guidebook. Parents make MISTAKES." The son or daughter may continue to argue with the parent for some time, but don't expect them to bring the parent around to owning up to the mistake or apologizing; in fact, the conversation will likely end right about then and the parent will come away as if vindicated, with the child receiving no satisfaction of any kind. Alternatively, a character will talk about an injustice or harsh act that they have had to endure from their parents. It could be a strict rule, a general attitude of authoritarianism, or an outright example of poor treatment. Having told their story, though, they will conclude with the statement that their parents, after all, did the best they could, as if to excuse the injustice, and will not be seen to pursue the cause against their parents any further. In other cases, the phrase about the parent doing the best they could will be dropped in passing and not drive or inform the plot in any way. Very much Truth in Television; this kind of low-effort excuse will probably not be accepted if the person being called out is anyone other than a parent. While it is true that everyone makes mistakes, and while raising children is certainly a difficult task, it is a conveniently sweeping assumption to claim that therefore, one could under no circumstances have done better, or that one is always entitled to wrong one's own child without any consequences. Rather than offering an argument backed up by evidence, the parent typically makes no effort to justify the claim that they did their best, other than by repeating platitudes like "children don't come with a guidebook." note : Many life situations, such as marriage, or being a politician, for example, don't come with a guidebook either, but that does not give people a pass never to be held to account for their actions in these situations. It also pretty much assumes that the parent's action was well-meaning, whereas there are many parents whose actions, at least at times, are self-serving, narcissistic, or even downright malicious. A parent resorting to this tactic is essentially refusing a priori to be called to account; conversely, a child justifying a parent's actions in this way can be seen as being reluctant to see the parent in a negative light and fully admit that they may have been wronged. A Sub-Trope of Never My Fault; can be related to Easily Forgiven and Karma Houdini; may overlap with Honor Thy Abuser. Compare Parental Hypocrisy, where parents expect things from their children that they do not expect of, or have not practiced, themselves; or Mama Didn't Raise No Criminal, where a parent can't accept that their offspring turned out a lawbreaker. Often, this trope is a response to Calling the Old Man Out, which itself is a defying or aversion of the trope, seeing as the attitude described here is not only invoked by parents themselves but also by those wishing to excuse their parents' actions. This can relate to bad parenting, which is all too common, so No Real Life Examples, Please!. ## Examples: - Robin (1993): Jack Drake's reaction to Tim making a joke about or even seeming like he's about to question Tim's incredibly neglectful upbringing is to scream at him for being disrespectful and not understanding how hard Jack claims to have worked at being a father, usually paired with Jack destroying some of Tim's things. - Birthmarked: in this 2018 Irish-Canadian film, a husband-wife scientist team raise their children as a scientific experiment, trying to prove that nurture is more powerful than nature. Their actions eventually result in their children being taken away by social services and placed in a private school. The parents make an unauthorized visit, corral the kids, and try to get through to them, claiming that with the experiment they made mistakes, but that those mistakes were made out of love. The kids don't buy it. - Cosy Dens: In the infamous scene where Father Kraus' daughter provokes him by calling her mother's dumplings "gnocchi", to which he reacts with excessive anger, the ensuing argument between father and daughter over this trivial matter provokes a slew of vitriol on part of the father, within which he couches a tirade on how his best efforts at raising her are in vain. One of the invectives he throws her way is: "Once you have raised a daughter, come and argue with me!" - Fathers' Day (1997): Jack (Billy Crystal) and Dale (Robin Williams) are each told by a mutual ex-girlfriend that he is the biological father of her teenage son Scott, who has run away from home. They soon catch up to him and Scott explains that he had run away because his (official) father had forbidden him to see his girlfriend, also claiming that for absolutely no reason, he has taken his car away. Jack decides to tell him a story about how on his tenth birthday, his father had dropped off his dog at the vet's on the way to the circus, telling him after they returned that he had had to be put down, and when Jack had asked why he had to do it on his birthday, had merely replied: "It was on the way". Scott and Dale ask Jack what his point is, and get this answer: "The point is that parents screw up sometimes, and that they don't mean it and that they make mistakes because they're human beings. Doesn't mean that they don't love you; doesn't mean that they don't care; just means that they're doing the best they can! You know?" Scott keeps looking at him silently; Jack leaves and Dale tells him: "I didn't understand the story either." The film appears to be parodying the trope here. - Forrest Gump. When Mrs. Gump is on the point of death, she weaves the stock phrase that she did the best she could when raising him into a recapitulation and philosophical reflection on her life: Mrs. Gump: It's my time. It's just my time. Oh, now, don't you be afraid, sweetheart. Death is just a part of life. It's something we're all destined to do. I didn't know it, but I was destined to be your momma. I did the best I could. Forrest: You did good, Momma. Mrs. Gump: Well, I happened to believe you make your own destiny. You have to do the best with what God gave you. - Lady Bird: The film seems to sympathize a lot with Lady Bird's mother, appearing to imply that, even though her behavior is not always sympathetic, she is doing the best she can in a difficult family situation. Indeed, the film ends with the protagonist \|\|calling her and saying sorry (for defying her in conspiring with her father to get her into an East Coast school.)\|\| However, when one follows the mother's actual actions throughout the film, it becomes clear that the latter was emotionally abusive and that it was effectively she who drove Lady Bird away from her. - This Boys Life: At the end of the film, when Toby and his mother \|\|leave\|\| Toby's domestic tyrant stepfather Dwight, he goes into a Villainous Breakdown and rants at them: "You always sided against me, thought you were better! I tried! I did the best I could! What about me?" \|\|and continues blubbering on in this fashion as they leave.\|\| - Canadian novelist Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy is positively thematic in its treatment of characters whose parents or substitute parental figures demonstrate failings to various degrees. In the first book, Fifth Business, its protagonist Dunstable (Dunstan) Ramsay is in hospital recovering from wounds sustained in World War I when he receives notice that his parents - his authoritarian and somewhat narcissistic mother and his pushover father who had been her enabler - have died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. His initial reaction is to be "...ashamed because I felt the loss so little." He goes on to describe how "It was years before I thought of the death of my parents as anything other than a relief; in my thirties I was able to see them as real people, who had done the best they could in the lives fate had given them." Predictably, this is left as a bald statement for which Dunstan does not provide any justification. In the second book, The Manticore, its protagonist, David Staunton, decides to undergo psychoanalysis following the untimely death of his arrogant millionaire father, who had resented David's going into law instead of business and his never marrying, ultimately disinheriting him in favor of his second wife and daughter. Before beginning the psychotherapy in earnest, David claims to the psychoanalyst that he does not hold a grudge against his father, criticizes the recent trend toward putting blame on parents, and states that, as a lawyer, he believes there has to be a statute of limitations note : i.e. a final date after which a crime cannot be prosecuted for every crime. His argument doesn't take into account the fact that he wasn't really given a chance to have the wrongs wrought by his father righted while the latter still was alive. Later in the book, though, the author provides an aversion to the trope as well, specifically in the backstory of Liselotte Naegeli, who blamed her grandfather, whose ward she was, for her deformed appearance. Specifically, \|\|as an early adolescent, Liselotte had started growing uncontrollably; she was subjected to medical treatment presumably consented to by her grandfather and about which she was not consulted, which arrested her growth but left her with ungainly, unfeminine features\|\|. Out of bitterness, she took her revenge on him by \|\|smashing her grandfather's prized collection of mechanical toys, and for a period of time acted like a vicious, unkempt, antisocial domestic pest.\|\| - The Remains of the Day: the protagonist's father tells him while lying on his deathbed: "I hope I've been a good father. I tried me best." A rather understated example, as he does not state it in reaction to any accusations and in fact hopes that his best really was good enough. - Serendipity Books: One book in the series, Grampa-Lop, ends with the name of the titular character, an old storyteller rabbit, being cleared of telling lies and the young bunnies being allowed to visit him again. However, the author mentions that "The older rabbits never apologized for the wrong they had done the bunnies and Grampa-Lop, for everyone knew that sometimes even older rabbits make mistakes, too." In this way, a lesson to the effect that adults are somehow entitled to be unfair to children with no consequences is bluntly invoked to the reader. - Mysterious Ways: The episode "Condemned", which treats issues of atonement and forgiveness, centres on a convicted killer whose execution has been delayed following a power outage. When his lawyer fails at an attempt to stop the execution, he gets upset about it and throws a fit before his mother, who is visiting him in prison. She starts getting emotional and he tells her: "Don't worry. You won't have to see me here much longer." She calls him out on saying such a hurtful thing and the following transpires: Mother: I'm your mother, Luther. I love you. You're the light of my life! Everything I do is for you! Luther: Yeah? Is that why;- all the jobs, Ma? All the movin' around from place to place? All the different men? Huh? Did you do that all for me? Mother: I did the best I could! Luther: Yeah? Well, look what it got you! - Shortly afterward, \|\|Luther's mother dies. By the end of the episode, the execution has been re-scheduled, and shortly before it is about to take place, Luther has received formal forgiveness from his victim's mother. Just before the execution, when asked if he has any final words, a now penitent Luther deeply apologizes to his victim's mother and states that he is sorry for having given his own mother a life of suffering and pain.\|\| - Disturbed's "Tyrant" is a bitter rant directed at a blame-shifting Abusive Parent. The narrator admits that he used to be a blame-shifter, too, "Why did both of us have to believe that we were right?" and asks the parent to own up as well, with no success: "And it's like pulling teeth cause you'll never confess." - Invoked in Hebrews 12:9-10 in The Bible, as part of the following analogy for God's motives for punishing those whom he loves: "Furthermore, we have had human fathers who corrected us, and we paid them respect. Shall we not much more readily be in subjection to the Father of spirits and live? For they indeed for a few days chastened us as seemed best to them, but He for our profit, that we may be partakers of His holiness." (NKJV) - Joe vs. Elan School: Becomes the defining trait of Mr. and Mrs. Nobody. After their son Joe returns from the abusive Elan School, they repeatedly ignore his protests that the school was abusive, and tell Joe that they were in the right for leaving him there for three years. They insist that Joe is just an ungrateful brat and bad kid rather than a person who is suffering PTSD, they believe the school's line that any talk of abuse is their child trying to manipulate them, and they brush off any other survivor testimony as false. - God, the Devil and Bob: Bob's father, who he had a bad relationship with, ends up dead. Bob, believing that he ended up in hell because of the abuse he suffered, is shocked to learn he is actually in Heaven. When Bob confronts God over this, he reveals that Bob's father did care for him and that as much as a jerk he was, he was nowhere near as bad as Bob's grandfather. Also, despite this, God does tell Bob that his anger over his father is understandable and he has every right to be angry. - South Park: In "City Sushi," after hearing that Butters started a turf war (not realizing Butters had caused it on accident), his parents insist that they're not at fault and he must be mentally ill, ignoring their history of extremely strict parenting and punishing Butters for the smallest behaviors. Linda: Oh, for the love of Pete! What is wrong with that boy? Stephen: I don't know, but it's clear it isn't our parenting! We're awesome! He must have mental problems.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentalBlamelessness
Parenthetical Swearing - TV Tropes Mamma-mia! Now I can't go for that type of pizza, because it has the P-word in the name! Sebastian: Well, your objections have been duly noted and summarily overruled. Sarah: Yes, sir! Sebastian: How come when you say "yes, sir" it kinda sounds like "fuck you"? Sarah: Practice! This language trope is most common to family fare: A character's spoken line contains no profanity whatsoever, but the tone and phrasing used by the actor is so obvious that the audience will hear the intended profanity just the same. This trope does not include made-up swear words or Last-Second Word Swap. The line is spoken with perfectly mundane words and the actor's inflection, tone and facial expression is what conveys the more intense and profane parenthetical. Super-trope to Witch with a Capital "B". Often shows up in Bowdlerized or TV-dubbed versions of movies. It also occurs a lot in the political arena. Compare Stealth Insult, Precision F-Strike. Not to be confused with Narrative Profanity Filter, where a character really does swear—it just doesn't appear directly in the text, or with Mondegreen Gag, which is when a character doesn't swear, but a word they say can be misheard as a swear word. ## Examples: - One issue of Marvel Universe Secret Wars II has Phoenix (the Rachel Summers variety) express sympathy for The Beyonder's hurt feelings, while her face makes it clear she'd kill him if she could. (By the way, the reason his feelings got hurt was that she wouldn't let him manipulate her into destroying the universe.) - In the Grand Finale issue of Superior Spider-Man, all it takes is one quip for the Green Goblin to realize he's not dealing with the so called "Superior" one whom the Goblin had been taunting and playing with, but the original "Amazing" one, who always beats him, and whose return he was not expecting. He says "It's you", but the inflection is way more Oh, Crap!. - In Tintin, many of Captain Haddock's Flowery Insults aren't even offensive words to begin with (they include stuff like scientific terms and medical specialties), but he throws them around with such bile it does feel like he's talking like a conventional sailor. - In This Bites!, after learning the truth of Ohara, Tsuru responds to Sengoku's orders with a "Yes sir" that sounds far more like "Fuck you". - Asuka's "The Reason You Suck" Speech in Neon Metathesis Evangelion makes it clear she's using the term "Sir" they way most people would use "Dumbass" or "Bastard". Understandable considering she's just been criticized for "an embarrassing victory" and asks if he'd prefer "an aesthetically pleasing defeat". - In Deku? I think he's some pro..., Aizawa and other underground heroes have been calling Izuku "Deku" because Izuku gave it as his hero name after a rough day at school. They are naturally horrified when they learn what it is supposed to mean, but Izuku tells them he doesn't mind, since it sounds different when they use it. In the first class, after hearing Bakugo calling Izuku like that, Aizawa understands what Izuku meant by that. - Discworld: - In Thief of Time, Lobsang is distracted from stopping the Perfect Clock when his master Lu Tze strains himself trying to slice time too thin; by the time Lu Tze persuades him to go on alone, it's too late. When Susan learns what happened, she calls Lobsang "you hero!" in the same tones someone would say "you idiot!" - Additionally, in Interesting Times, one of the Silver Horde is the subject of Saveloy's attempts to make him stop swearing every single sentence. He manages to make him use Unusual Euphemisms instead, but then it is observed that he could turn the air blue just by saying "socks" (which becomes Hilarious in Hindsight once you read Monstrous Regiment). - Especially funny because Saveloy, who's the one who put together the swearword conversion chart, is the only one who knows what he's TRYING to say when he uses an Unusual Euphemism. We don't get a translation, but the thing that he translated to "misbegotten wretch" was apparently pretty shocking. - In Wyrd Sisters, Duke Felmet is described as the sort of person who gets more polite and restrained the angrier he gets, to the point where he can give the cutting edge of a severe dressing-down to the phrase "Thank you very much." - In The Truth, Sacharissa can say "you utterly ungrateful person" like it's a curse. - Night Watch has a Sergeant who doesn't swear for religious reasons, so uses this trope to compensate. At one point he calls a bunch of militia recruits "You sons of mothers!" - Snuff shows that coppers learn to inflect "Sir" so that it sounds like "trembling arsehole". - The character of Tzetzas in David Drake and S. M. Stirling's The General series is usually pronounced as if it were a curse. - "He gives graft a bad name." - There's a Running Gag that whenever his name is brought up in conversation, Suzette tells the person/people saying it to stop swearing. - In And Another Thing..., someone is said to say the name "Zaphod" "as if it were a curse". Justified, perhaps, because it goes on to say that in many languages, it now is. - In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, McGonagall refers to Umbridge as "headmistress", and the author notes that she "pronounced the word with the same look on her face that Aunt Petunia had whenever she was contemplating a particularly stubborn bit of dirt". - Carries over into the movie adaptation, in which she and Umbridge are seen "politely" sniping at each other several times. Umbridge: Something you would like to say, Minerva? McGonagall: Oh, there are several things I would like to say! - One scene in Great Expectations has Pip's sister say "Lord bless the boy!" in a way that makes it sound quite the opposite. - The Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Q-in-Law has a wedding taking place on board the Enterprise, about which Worf is not at all pleased. When he informs his captain of the arrival of guests for impending "festivities," the text notes that he pronounces the word as if it were a profanity. - The following line in A Song of Ice and Fire, regarding Jon's unpopular and much-derided decision to employ a former rent boy as his personal manservant: Ser Malegorn stepped forward. I will escort Her Grace to the feast. We shall not require your...steward. The way the man drew out the last word told Jon that he had been considering saying something else. Boy? Pet? Whore? - In the novelisation of Scarface (1983), Tony Montana is passing through Miami airport when a customs officer asks him (as the only Cuban-American male) to stand aside for a search for drugs. The 'sir' was framed in quotes. Turns out Montana is a distraction for the actual drug mules, like the nun and the nice all-American family. - In Wuthering Heights; "Thrushcross Grange is my own, sir," he interrupted wincing, "I should not allow any one to inconvenience me, if I could hinder itwalk in!" The "walk in" was uttered with closed teeth, and expressed the sentiment "Go to the Deuce!" - Jeeves would, of course, never actually swear, but Bertie Wooser did on one occasion point out that Jeeves has a way of saying "Well, sir," and "Indeed, sir," that sometimes leaves the impression that only a rudimentary feudal sense of what is fitting restrains him from substituting those phrases with the words "Says you!" - In one Horatio Hornblower novel, Hornblower's navigator gives him increasingly pessimistic updates on the stronger enemy ship that's pursuing them in a Stern Chase and says "my duty, sir" when Hornblower starts showing signs of irritation. Hornblower replies "I'm glad to see you doing your duty" in a tone that effectively conveys "damn your duty" (a phrase which he can't actually use because it would contradict the Articles of War). - The Secret Life of Bees: Lily and August's favorite snack is Cokes with salted peanuts poured into the bottle. They ask June if she wants any, and she bitterly responds with "I was told it was gonna be Cokes and peanuts." Lily notes that she said "Cokes and peanuts" like you would say "snot and boogers." - In Thunderball, Bond happens to be nearby for an argument with a clerk where, the text confirms, the "damn you" hung in the air unsaid when the client finally goes along. - In Xandri Corelel, this appears to be an important part of Anmerilli diplomacy. "Councilor oar'Saran," Kalemi Ashil interrupted, "Councilor Sendil and I understand how important this is to you." And never had I heard so clearly the unspoken sentiment "and we have no fucks to give about it." But politely. - Penn illustrates this trope in the Penn & Teller: Bullshit! episode on profanity, by insulting a dog in a soft-spoken voice, then angrily screaming at it " ". The point of this exercise is to show the viewers that the dog reacts to the human's tone of voice, not to what actual words he says. I LOVE YOU, DOG! Penn: (reassuringly) No, it's okay. Really, I hate your stinking guts. - Angel example: There is a moment in the third season where Cordelia is forced to overhear a part of Angel's Epic Rage against the way The Powers That Be treats Cordelia. She only hears the part: "She is a rich girl from Sunnydale who likes to play Superhero. She doesn't have what it takes!" Considering Cordelia's reaction, he may as well have said "A Spoiled Bitch..." - An episode of Supernatural has Rufus, one of the boys' allies, mutter, "I'm too old for this." Four guesses as to what everyone heard at the end of the sentence. Plus, he kinda looks like Danny Glover. - Babylon 5 has Bester's name treated like this. Anyone who has spent five minutes in the same room as Bester and is NOT a telepath (and quite a few who are, for that matter...) would understand completely. - It's been noted that Project Runway fashion consultant Tim Gunn can make the word "implausible" sound like a swear word. - Occasionally used on Have I Got News for You: "Perhaps he should go sack himself." - How I Met Your Mother does this sometimes because of the Framing Device of a man telling a story to his children. The story's been sanitized. Various episodes have examples like "Grinch", "Kiss", and the thumbs-up. - The way Jerry Seinfeld always greets his Sitcom Arch-Nemesis Newman, one could easily substitute any swear word in for his name. Jerry: Hello... Newman. - The Daily Show played a clip of professional persecution junkie Bill Donohue ranting about how "every Lenten season" Catholics in America have more political correctness to put up with; Jon noted that "Lenten" really sounds like a swearword when you say it in that tone. - Emily Prentiss from Criminal Minds has an uncanny ability to make the phrase "Yes, ma'am" sound like a particularly blunt and vicious "Fuck you sideways and the horse you rode in on too". - Apparently, she picked it up from one of their FBI consultants. It's a habit you get into when you know every word you say is going to be tape-recorded...but that the recording will then be typed up as a transcript that won't catch tone of voice. - Doctor Who: - In "Destiny of the Daleks", the Fourth Doctor tells some Daleks "just back off!" in a way that sounds so strongly like "fuck off!" that there are still debates online today contemplating whether or not he was swearing in Gallifreyan ("zzh spack off!"). - Somehow, Arthur Darvill manages to make "so far beyond weird" sound a bit like "so fucking weird" despite saying it in an utterly sweet and friendly tone in Doctor Who's "P.S." short. - In Star Trek: The Original Series, McCoy was always making "Vulcan" sound like a swearword. Even Scotty got one in "Day of the Dove", towards Spock, when his and the rest of the crew's minds are taken over by the alien-of-the-week. When Spock tries to restrain him, Scottyshouts "Get your Vulcan hands off me!" but the "V" sounds suspiciously like an "F". - Worf in Star Trek: The Next Generation employs parenthetical swearing practically every few episodes, usually when speaking about things that offend his Klingon sensibilities, like diplomacy. - In Star Trek: Voyager, Kate Mulgrew more than once delivers the line "My name is Captain Janeway" like a death threat. - Also an unsuccessful one in "The Cloud". After dressing down Neelix, she says "Dismissed." Being neither in Starfleet nor the military he doesn't get the implied command and she has to translate it. (see quotes page). - Throughout Star Trek in general, "I'll make a note of that in my log" (and similar variations) seems to be Starfleet for "I don't give a shit." - JAG: In "Shadow", the villain Grover mandates that the naval personnel address him as either "Sir" or "Mr. Grover". He gleefully notices when Meg manages to do exactly that while making it sound as disrespectful as possible. - "Look that up in your Funk 'N' Wagnalls!" - Keith Olbermann could turn the word "sir" into both a profanity and the filthiest insult known to mankind. - On Everybody Loves Raymond, during a multi-episode story arc in which Marie and Debra are refusing to speak to each other, Raymond begs them to make up, calling them "you two mothers" in the process. He's allegedly making an appeal to it being Mother's Day, but his strained and frustrated tone clearly indicate what he actually means. - This is invoked on Billions. Bobby and "Dollar" Bill are having a conversation inside a soundproof room with glass walls so people on the outside can see everything happening inside but cannot hear what is being said. The two men are having a tender moment where they are telling each other that they are like brothers and would do anything for each other. However, their body language makes it seem like they are having an extremely nasty shouting match full of swearing and obscenities. It's part of a Batman Gambit to make a rival investment firm try to recruit Bill who then can feed them false information about Bobby's business dealings. - On MASH, Frank frequently reacted to friendly greetings from his bunkmates as if they were insults, but the only one to actually employ this trope against him was his CO, Henry Blake. - Young Sheldon: In "Mitch's Son and the Unconditional Approval of a Government Agency", Missy discovers how to use seemingly innocent words in place of swear words. Mary knows exactly what she's doing, but is powerless to stop her. - Discussed in a season one episode of Gilmore Girls,* when Lorelai invites a boy Rory likes over for movie night...without discussing it with her. She thought she was being helpful, and Rory tries to explain how mortifying it is for her mother to insert herself into her love life. Lorelai Stop saying "mother" like that. Rory: Like what? Lorelai: Like there's supposed to be another word after it. - Andor almost had Maarva perform a Precision F-Strike against the Empire in her pre-recorded farewell message at her funeral, but Word of God says Disney vetoed it and they had her say Fight the Empire instead. The sentiment still comes across. - This comes up in places in some translations of The Bible: - In the Book of Job, Satan dares God to strike Job to take away all that he has and see if he won't "bless" God for it, in which the intended meaning (as pointed out in most other translations) is to "curse" God. - In other places, people take the self-malefactory oath, "May God do thus and so to me (and more besides!) if...", with the words "thus and so" standing in for the actual curse. - And in 1 Samuel 20, King Saul realizes that his own son Jonathan is more loyal to rival for the throne David than he is to him. Some translations render his words to Jonathan as "You son of a perverse, rebellious woman!" This...doesn't really hide his real meaning. The Living Bible went for a closer, decidedly more vulgar translation. - In Acts of the Apostles Acts 23:1-5, Paul is brought before the Sanhedrin to stand trial, and when he declares that he has lived in good conscience to the present, the high priest Ananias orders Paul to be struck on the face. Paul says that God will judge Ananias for being tried by the law and being slapped contrary to law. When the Sanhedrin rebukes him for reviling the high priest, Paul apologizes for not recognizing Ananias as the high priest, with a touch of sarcasm in his apology. - C. W. McCall's "Convoy", featured in the 1978 movie of the same name, apparently uses "trucking" as a lyrical euphemism for the F-bomb: Come on and join our convoy, ain't nothin' gonna get in our way, We're gonna roll this truckin' convoy across the U.S.A., convoy.... - In Wooden Overcoats, Eric's Catchphrase is "enjoy yourselves," and usually, that's precisely what he means. However, on a few occasions when someone (usually Rudyard and/or Antigone) has managed to truly piss him off, he can say "enjoy yourselves" in a tone that very clearly indicates he means "fuck you." - In the Cabin Pressure episode "Abu Dhabi", Martin self-importantly demands that Douglas call him "sir". Douglas manages to pronounce "Yes, sir" like a particularly vile epithet. He then proceeds to refer to Martin exclusively as "sir" in derisive tones until Martin begs him to stop. - At one point in Hair, a character says "Thank you, Sandy"; the stage directions call for it to be intoned as "Fuck you, Sandy." - "The gnome was muttering to himself, too, in a low, unpleasant manner. He didn't so much curse as deliver each word as if he were cursing, so that 'Butter and bedknobs!' came out sounding like something you'd use to send a demon back to the abyss." - Little Creature and the Redcap by Ursula Vernon. - In this Full Frontal Nerdity, after Lewis suggests that Frank should improve his livestream by falling asleep, Frank responds thusly: Frank: Thank you! Thank off! Go thank yourself! - Digger: When Digger, a committed Nay-Theist, realizes she's speaking to a manifestation of a god, she tries to be polite, yet... Statue of Ganesh: In the seven hundred years that I have been a temple statue, I have never heard someone utter the words "a god" in the same tone that one might describe, oh... foot fungus. - Atop the Fourth Wall—"Our hero, ladies and gentlemen!" (Being said, of course, in as sarcastic a tone as possible and with an expression of obvious disdain.) - In the Homestar Runner cartoon "Donut Unto Others", Homestar opens a doughnut stand near Bubs' Concession Stand. Bubs comes up to Homestar and makes small talk...at the top of his lungs, in a threatening tone, and with his face solid red. Homestar, ever-oblivious, takes a few minutes to realize "Are we in a fight?" - In the RWBY lore video covering the Schnee Dust Company, narrator Qrow Branwen refers to the Schnee family as "S-N-O-Bs" in a tone of voice that suggests the "N" should be silent. - One Twitter post that went viral suggested "spicing up" Facebook posts by adding parentheses to words. "Congratulations" on your new baby! Congratulations on "your" new baby! Congratulations on your new "baby!" - Another similarly viral one pointed out you could offend anyone by doing Air Quotes while saying the title of their job. - In one episode of X-Men: The Animated Series, Wolverine infiltrates an anti-mutant hate group, the Friends of Humanity, by posing as a trashy, mutant-hating bigot. He plays the role to the letter, down to growling " mutant" like a swear word (or, more realistically, a racial/ethnic slur). - In Gargoyles, just about any time Goliath says "Xanatos." - In one scene of A Charlie Brown Christmas, Charlie Brown arrives to direct the Christmas play and is applauded by the other kids... except for Snoopy, who boos him. Charlie's response is to sadly say "Man's best friend...". - Subverted in The Simpsons Season 2's "Bart's Dog Gets an F", when Santa's Little Helper graduates from obedience school: Emily Winthrop: You son-of-a-bitch, good show! note : "Bitch" originally referred to a mother dog before taking on the negative connotations it has today, and likewise, "Son-of-a-bitch" can refer to a bastard in its literal sense, or be used as a general term of contempt. - In the pilot movie/first two episodes of Young Justice, Kid Flash takes issue with Robin's disappearing act antics and calls him on it: "Way to be a team player, Rob." He comes down hard on the nickname. - In The Amazing World of Gumball, there was this exchange: Gumball: Man, What a pile of beans. Darwin: Dude, watch your language, you'll get us in trouble. Gumball: Well I'm sorry, Darwin, but it is. It's a big, steaming, pile of beans. - Gumball is frequently a master of this trope, with his catchphrase of "What the what?" - Avatar: The Last Airbender: "You're too much of a pushover to do anything about it." (Also note that Toph is cracking some nuts of Aang's as she says this to him.) - In the sequel series to this The Legend of Korra Toph once again does this when she says to Bolin's girlfriend Opal "How did you end up dating a dipstick like him?" She says it like "dip shit" instead. - Batman: The Animated Series: In "Perchance to Dream". Bruce is prepared to jump off a tower to prove he's dreaming, but Mad Hatter asks what if he's wrong: "Then I'll see you in your nightmares!" - Thomas & Friends: - This happens in "Mavis", when the titular character gets stuck on a level crossing: Narrator: An angry farmer was telling Mavis just what she could do with her train. - In "Donald's Duck", after being told by Donald that he quacks as though he had an egg laid to stop him from talking too much about the Great Western heritage, Duck indignantly says to Donald "quack yourself!", which sounds similar to "fuck yourself." - In GIJoe, whenever Destro addresses his boss as "my dear Cobra Commander", substitute "bless your heart" and you'll get the intended effect. - Wander over Yonder: In "The Fremergency Fronfract" after Lord Hater, loopy from the anesthetic used during a trip to the dentist, fires on his own troops and has to be knocked out, he awakens in the infirmary and tries to convince himself the events of the episode (which involved bonding with Wander and publicly embarrassing himself) were just a dream. Then Peepers dryly responds "If only, sir, if only...", putting a little more venom into the word "sir" than usual. - In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Princess Spike", after Spike knocks over a fragile statue with a sneeze, he mutters, appropriately enough, "Ah, bless me..." - Inverted in Rick and Morty by Scary Terry, an Expy of Freddy Krueger who seriously overuses This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!. When Rick and Morty help him with his recurring nightmares, he manages to make the word "bitch" sound like sincere thanks. - In Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys, Spydor would frequently use such intensifiers as "monkey-loving" or "monkey-flipping" to compensate for not being able to say "motherfucking" in a children's cartoon. - Everyone in the Southern US knows that "Bless your heart" usually isn't a "blessing." While it can be used in a nice way, the phrase itself is, more often than not, used as a much more polite way of calling someone an idiot (compared to Northerners, Southerners are very big on things like manners and etiquette). It can also be a type of preemptive apology, using it to sweeten a not-so-nice comment ("Bless his heart, that's the ugliest baby I've ever seen.") - Similarly, 'gotta/God love you/him/her' means "I despise...," and "I'll pray for you" means "I hope you rot in hell." Also, if someone asks you to do something you don't want to do, you say, "I'll pray over/think about it," meaning "I'd rather eat ground glass." - One actually recognized by Northerners, usually to their dismay, is "Thoughts and prayers", meaning "I do feel bad about this, but it's not my problem," or even, "I don't care about this at all, but it's good for my image to pretend that I do." - In his memoir, Rogue Warrior, Captain Dick Marcinko reports calling bad officers "sir" but meaning "cur." - Anyone who works in customer service or has to deal with customer complaints on a regular basis at their job can tell you that part of dealing with such a job revolves around hiding thoughts like "go to hell" in words like "I'm sorry to hear that." - One skill people quickly pick up in the military is the ability to make the phrase "Roger that" sound like "You're an absolute moron. I can't believe I have to take orders from you." - The US Navy and Coast Guard also have "Shipmate," which is usually used by a superior about to seriously chew out a subordinate. It's impressive how much disdain and disgust can be poured into that word. - The Anglo-EU Translation Guide, or "what British people are actually saying." - One viral image showed a teacher's note where one kid called another a "Hanzo main". The teacher has no idea what that is but recognized it was clearly intended as an insult (Hanzo players having a reputation as being The Millstone on Overwatch teams due to being popular with inexperienced or just plain bad players). - This can also be done with non-verbal signals. If executed in a suitably sarcastic manner, giving someone the "thumbs up" sign (traditionally a "Good Luck" Gesture) can pretty much become the equivalent of Flipping the Bird. - Given the right teenager, the right inflection, and to be fair, the right maternal figure, it is possible to pronounce "mother" like it's half a word.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentheticalSwearing
Parental Hypocrisy - TV Tropes Ariel: You deliberately disobeyed me! I never want you going out there again, do you hear me? It's dangerous in the sea! Lindsay: Oh, Ariel, you might be a hypocrite or something. You've probably heard that old saying, "Do as I say, not as I do." Mom just doesn't understand! She tells our teenage heroine off for going out with a boy from the Wrong Side of the Tracks or having a secret romantic affair, etc. Then, we find out in a dramatic twist that she did the same thing when she was her age! What a hypocrite! But, of course, having seen her hypocritical ways, we love her again or she sees her wrong-doing and allows the act to continue. Or doesn't. The other case is when the parent has forgotten what it's like to be a teenager. In this case, some other adult their age will remind them, "you were a teenager once, don't you remember?" prompting the parent to guiltily admit they remember, and that's why they're being so overprotective. Note that this trope isn't necessarily a bad thing: the parents went through the same thing their children are facing, learned from it, and now they want to keep their kids out of the same situations. For example, a parent who struggled with binge drinking as a teen may want to stop their kid from doing the same thing. Parents may look upon their Dark and Troubled Past with regret and want a better life for their children. Not stopping to remember how much they'd heed such advice in their time, of course. This trope only focuses on the fact that the parent did the same as the child and it is considered a "twist" in the story. On the other hand, the unsympathetic side of this is when the parent disciplines the child for doing something that they still do as a parent, rather than something they did as a kid, learned a lesson from, and don't do anymore. For example, a parent who still smokes may berate their 19-year-old for smoking. No Real Life Examples, Please! While this trope is indeed Truth in Television, it would be filed with natter and complaining about celebrity parents who engage in hypocrisy. This can be a subtrope of Generation Xerox, as the parent or guardian involved is often a Former Teen Rebel. It can also be a subtrope of Hypocrite Has a Point, where someone is still shown to be right in spite of their hypocrisy. Compare Evil Parents Want Good Kids. Naturally, this can make it harder to Honor Thy Parent. ## Examples: - One Piece: Garp is about to beat on his grandson Luffy when they both fall asleep. When Garp wakes up later, he then wails on Luffy for falling asleep despite having done so himself. - A teacher example: Kuroi-sensei from Lucky Star plays the same online game as Konata, and has been into MMORPG's since before she was Konata's age, but she tells Konata off for doing that very thing, and uses in-game chat to remind her to do her homework. When Konata calls her out on this, she remarks that, as a teacher, she has a duty to uphold, which Konata accepts as understandable, but still... - Played for laughs in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid. Attempts by Fate to complain about Vivio's newly revealed adult form out of worry were eventually short-circuited when Vivio reminded her that, based on Nanoha's stories... - Misae from Crayon Shin-chan beats both her husband and Shin if they flirt with women. However, she is Not So Above It All when it comes to handsome men. - Dragon Ball Z: - Chi-Chi comes across this way towards Gohan, forbidding him from fighting despite her fighting herself when she was a teenager. This is understandable, as she believed that Gohan was far too young to be fighting at age 4-5, and Chi-Chi herself was fighting when she was 12. - After Gohan awakens to Super Saiyan 2, Goku gets on his case about finishing Cell off right away, instead of letting the fight continue to prolong Cell's suffering, even though Goku did the same thing when he awoke to the power of Super Saiyan with Frieza. This is a case of Goku learning from experience, as he barely avoided the explosion of Namek because he prolonged the fight with Frieza. - Doraemon: Nobita's mom Tamako being an Education Mama comes off as hypocritical in the episode where Nobita finds out she wasn't a good student either and wasn't that different from her son. - Sword Art Online: During the Mother's Rosario arc, Asuna' mother forcefully disconnects Asuna's VR helmet and scolds her for being a few minutes late for dinner, accusing Asuna of "disrespecting the staff's efforts," Asuna is sorely tempted to remind her of several occasions where Kyouko was also late for dinner, threw out the meals untasted, and had the staff make them again for her own convenience, but ultimately decides not to do so. - Dramatic example in My Hero Academia: Endeavor and his eldest son, Toya Todoroki, often got into arguments because the latter was constantly off training his fire powers and burning himself doing so since his body is only resistant to the cold. The boy's obsession with perfecting his powers was a result of him wanting to become a Hero for his father, since he was trained since he was little to be a part of the one-sided feud Endeavor was having with All Might and only stopped when his genetics from his mother kicked in. Many people, his wife especially, have pointed out that Endeavor has little right to tell Toya to stop pursuing heroism or give up on himself when Endeavor himself drowns himself in his Hero job over a petty grudge and as his perceived duty to the people, ignoring the damage this is doing to his family. - Advice and Trust: Subverted. When Misato wanted to forbid Shinji and Asuka from sleeping together Asuka tried to argue Misato was being a hypocrite. It did not work. Misato: "Most of your life"? Asuka, you're fourteen! You two can't be doing this! Asuka: You'd have done the same at our age! Misato: At your age plus a year I was catatonic from watching Second Impact at Ground Zero! You are still a child! - The Child of Love: When Misato lectures her about having sex Asuka calls her a hypocrite because she has sex with Kaji. Asuka misses the point, though, since Misato's lecture was about her being underage and having unprotected sex. - In Lilly Epilogue Family Matters, Mr. Satou derides Hisao for being a "middle class bumpkin" despite marrying a journalist, who is not in a well-paying career. However, later on, it is indicated that this attitude is because \|\|he wanted to believe Hisao was unworthy of Lilly\|\|. - In the Harry Potter fanfic By the Way, Tonks and Lupin go to dinner with Tonks' parents. Ted is furious to learn that Lupin is a werewolf, until Andromeda points out that Ted himself was insulted and belittled for being a Muggleborn when he met her family, so he has no reason to be so prejudiced. - In the Harry Potter fanfic series Dangerverse, the cubs and adults of the Pack know this can easily happen, so they have the Hypocrisy Agreement, which states that the adults cannot take the cubs to task for things the adults themselves did. As the adults (at least, Remus and Sirius) were notorious pranksters, it gives the cubs a bit of leeway. - In Fullmetal Alchemist fanfic series Sins of the Father , when Hohenheim finds out that Edward is marrying Roy he complains that Roy is too old for him. He is reminded that he is the last person to complain out marriage with an age difference. - In The Second Try, \|\|Asuka used to tell her daughter "Smile when you're happy, cry when you're sad".\|\| However, when Shinji merges with Unit-01, she can't show grief because she has to keep her façade. So, she sees herself as \|\|a hypocritical mother.\|\| - In Continuance, Yukiko's father, Katsuhiro, makes no secret of how he doesn't think Souji note : Also known as Yu Narukami, the protagonist is good enough for Yukiko. His wife, Ryouko, however, reminds Katsuhiro that he also married into the Amagi family and had to prove himself worthy of Ryouko. - Played for Drama in Conversations with a Cryptid as All for One had many children experimented on or horrifically killed without any remorse. \|\|So Izuku thinks its extremely hypocritical that All for One would rather have Izuku leave the heroing and investigating to the adults.\|\| - In Croft and Son, Nero calls Lara out on her hypocrisy when she says all she wants is for him to live a safe, boring life. She does though come around and decides to support whatever endeavor he chooses to follow. - In this Justice League of America-based Tumblr post, Green Arrow has this to say after the team witnesses Bruce try and fail to reign in his rowdy children. Green Arrow: ...well someone has to say it. The Flash: That he should get an award for parenting that lot? Green Arrow: That clearly inherited behaviour has nothing to do with genetics. I grew up with Bruce Wayne; he deserves every second of this. - Coco: Héctor is later revealed to be Miguel's long-lost great-great grandfather, and before they (or the audience) knows, Héctor is angry at Miguel for lying to him about having other family members aside from Ernesto, with Miguel responding, "You're one to talk", clearly referencing to Héctor's earlier lies. - The Lion King II: Simba's Pride has Simba as very overprotective of Kiara. At one point, Nala points out to Simba that Kiara's just like they were when they were cubs, and Simba explains that this is what worries him. - The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea: Ariel becomes an overprotective parent to Melody and gets on her case for disobeying her, even though she herself was a rebellious teen who regularly disobeyed Triton. Of course, while Ariel went about it the wrong way, she has good reason to be strict with Melody with Morgana on the prowl. - In South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Kyle's mom is willing to start a war if it means stopping her son from behaving improperly. The episode "It's a Jersey Thing" reveals that she's from Joisey. - In the episode, she fully admits it's why she and her husband moved to South Park, not wanting Kyle to grow up there. \|\|However, since he was conceived in Jersey and his mom was there for the first two months of his birth, he is of Jersey descent, and thus liable to act like his mom did when surrounded by Jerseyites\|\|. - Ascendance of a Bookworm: Sylvester is in a tight spot when it comes to parenting his children, as he's a Brilliant, but Lazy Manchild and all too aware of the little leeway it gives him to not fall into this trope's trappings. His wife's solution is to give him a few incentives to be a better example. - In A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold, two parents get upset about their daughter having premarital sex. The boy's mother convinces them to let her mediate a discussion between the two families about the matter, and the parents arrive to find that she's arranged the furniture for the event such that they will be sitting on the very couch where they themselves had premarital sex. - The Berenstain Bears: - In the Big Chapter Book "And the Dress Code", there's a mild version involving a school dress code. The kids adopt obnoxious new fashions, and due to an escalating power struggle between the acting principal who keeps making new rules and the kids using Loophole Abuse, it looks like the school will be going to uniforms... until Grandma Bear defuses the situation by hauling out photos of Papa and Mama Bear in their ludicrous Seventies attire. - Another example occurs in Get the Gimmies. Papa Bear despairs over the increasingly bratty behavior of Brother and Sister, who keep wanting all manner of toys and trinkets; his own parents gently remind him that he was much the same way when he was a cub. - The Sweet Valley Saga novel The Wakefield Legacy featured Theodore Wakefield, the great-great-great-grandfather of the Sweet Valley twins, running away from home to avoid an arranged marriage. When Theodore's daughter Sarah was old enough to marry, however, he insisted that she marry the man of his choice rather than the man she loved. Sarah immediately calls him out on his hypocrisy. He doesn't even bother to justify himself, continuing to insist on his right to veto Sarah's choice. This leads to a split between the two that is never healed. - Dollanganger Series is a generational saga that spans the protagonist Cathy's whole life. In her late teens and twenties she has lots of ill-advised sex, keeps multiple men on the hook at one time, and every single one of her love interests is deeply questionable in one way or another. In the final book she tells her teenage daughter she shouldn't be having sex so carelessly. Now in her 50s, Cathy looks back upon with youth with different eyes, finally sees how ill-advised it all was, and wants to protect her daughter from making the same mistakes she did. Cathy: Your father and I want only the best for you. We don't want you to be hurt. Let this experience with Lance teach you a lesson, and hold back until you are eighteen and able to reason with more maturity. Hold out longer than that if you can. When you grab at sex too soon, it has a way of biting back and giving you exactly what you don't want. It did that to me, and I've heard you say a thousand times you want a stage and film career, and husbands and babies have to wait. Many a girl has been thwarted by a baby that started because of uncontrollable passion. Be careful before committing yourself to anyone. Don't fall in love too soon, for when you do you make yourself vulnerable to so many unforeseen events. Give romance a try without sex, Cindy, and save yourself all the pain of giving too much too soon. - In David Weber's War God series, Baroness Hanatha Bowmaster is forced to forbid her daughter Leeana from doing many of the things that Hanatha enjoyed doing at Leeana's age. In an unusual twist for this trope, Hanatha is the one who brings up the fact that she and Leeana's father were guilty of the same and worse, and Hanatha is well aware that she's being hypocritical and unfair. She justifies herself, however, by pointing out that (a) She's learned from her experiences and doesn't want Leeana to have to go through the same thing, and (b) Leeana's situation is far more precarious than Hanatha's was. - In Eyes of a Child by Richard North Patterson, Chris Paget finds his son Carlo smoking marijuana and lampshades this trope by thinking that this was the sort of moment every parent who grew up in The '60s dreads. Chris ends up admitting to Carlo that yes, he did smoke pot and it didn't kill him or ruin his life, but it just made him kind of dumb and wasn't really worth it. - In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, one of the reasons Molly Weasley opposes her son Bill marrying Fleur is that they haven't known each other very long, and the only reason they're rushing into it is because they know Voldemort's back and they could all die at any moment. Ginny quickly points out that that was exactly what happened with Molly and Arthur. Molly replies with "Yes, well, your father and I were made for each other, what was the point in waiting?" before swiftly launching into a tirade about all the other things she hates about Fleur. \|\|Fleur goes some way to proving them wrong by the end of the book, when she stays totally loyal to Bill despite him being hideously disfigured by Fenrir Greyback.\|\| - A Song of Ice and Fire has various instances of the older generation criticising the younger one for doing things like recklessly going to war, despite having done the same thing at that age. A very dark example of this is \|\|Tywin's fury over Tyrion's use of whores, only for it to turn out that he uses one who had previously been with Tyrion.\|\| - Aegon V Targaryen (great-grandfather to the Mad King, Aerys II) is also an example. Due to being the fourth son of the king, he was able to marry Betha Blackwood for love. However, when he did ascend to the throne (earning the title Aegon the Unlikely), he arranged for all of his children (even the unlikely) to marry politically advantageous partners. All but one of his children rebelled against these arrangements, causing many great houses to feel slighted. His heir abdicated the throne for his love Jenny of Oldstones (angering the Baratheons enough for them to rebel); his second son secretly married and consummated with his sister (angering both the Tullys and the Tyrells); and his final son preferred the company of Ser Jeremy Norridge and ultimately refused to marry Olenna Redwyne (the Queen of Thorns). Poor Rhaelle is the only child that obeyed her father and married Lord Baratheon's heir to ease tensions. It becomes ironic because the only child that obeyed Aegon V is the grandmother of Robert Baratheon, the man who ultimately ends the Targaryen rule of the seven kingdoms during his rebellion. - The Affair: Whitney calls out her father's affair with Alison when he admonishes her for her fling with Scott. - Ash vs. Evil Dead: In Season 3, Ash discovers he has a daughter, Brandy Barr, and is forced into the role of fatherhood. During the Grand Finale, Ash takes a hit off a bong, but refuses to let Brandy have one on the grounds that Drugs Are Bad and he doesn't want her to pick up his bad habits. - The Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Band Candy" has all the adults regress to teenagers; all this, as well as Hilarity Ensues. - In a "sibling-turned-legal-guardian" example, in Everything's Gonna Be Okay, Nicholas' attempts to impose rules on his teenage half-sister Matilda's sex life fall flat because it's hard to tell her that she can't have boys (or girls) over when he lets his boyfriend sleep over all the time. Similarly, he has a hard time trying to tell her she can't drink when he drinks on a regular basis. - Gilmore Girls: Lane's mom, a strict Christian, eventually found out that she was hiding her life away from her. How she found out was a mystery to us for a long while (how did she know to look under the floorboards?). Then, on Lane's wedding day, we find out that Mrs. Kim hid her life away from her mother (a strict Buddhist) under the floorboards, and still does to this day! And she needs to hide her lifestyle fast before her mother arrives for the wedding! - Lorelai engages in quite a bit if this as well, though arguably more justified because she is trying to prevent Rory from becoming a teen parent like she did. The season one episode "Rory's Dance" features it prominently, when Rory stays out all night (accidentally and innocently) with her boyfriend and Lorelai has a complete freak out, despite her own wild child teenage years. - On Home Improvement Tim and Jill catch their son Brad with marijuana. He deduces that they've used it before based on the fact that they were alive during "that whole hippie thing", which turns out to be true in Jill's case (Tim preferred beer). The parents discuss whether they should tell Brad the truth, and eventually, they do and she explains the trouble it caused her and that it was a mistake she doesn't want him to make. - In an earlier episode, one Brad's friends talks him into throwing a party while Tim and Jill are away. At the very end, as they see Brad raking the yard as part of his punishment, they talk about how when they were his age they too got grounded for throwing parties while their parents were away, and the only thing they remember learning about their punishment is how not to get caught next time. - Interview with the Vampire (2022): In "...The Ruthless Pursuit of Blood with All a Child's Demanding", Lestat de Lioncourt is the "Do as I say, not as I do" type of parent because his very harsh lesson to his vampire daughter Claudia after she accidentally kills her First Love (and Lestat forces her to watch as Charlie's face melts in the incinerator) is that vampires should "never get close to mortals because sooner or later, they end up dead." Yet Lestat spent the entire first episode being wholly besotted with Louis de Pointe du Lac when the latter was still human. Lestat stalked, flirted, courted, seduced and harassed Louis over a period of a few months (based on Louis' comment that "It was a cold winter that year, and Lestat was my coal fire"). While Lestat's endgame was to turn Louis into a vampire, he nevertheless fell head-over-heels for a mortal and invested a lot of time bonding with his human Love Interest before offering Louis the Dark Gift. Lestat's warning to Claudia rings hollow knowing that he did the very thing he's telling her not to. - Modern Family: - Deconstructed in the Shake it Up episode "My Bitter Sweet 16 It Up", in which CeCe acts incredibly bratty and demanding to her mother to get all of whatever she wants for her sweet 16 party, only for her mother to get sick of her behavior and ground her for it. Later on, though, CeCe comes across a DVD of her own mother at her sweet 16 party, acting quite similarly to how CeCe was towards her mother over not making her party just like she wants. CeCe decides to call her mother out over this trope, but realizes at the last minute that her doing this wouldn't make the problem any better, and her own mother eventually stopped being like this by gaining maturity later in life. Having learned better from this experience, CeCe apologizes to her mother for her awful behavior. - In Smallville, Jor-El is worse than most examples because he didn't do it when he was young. In "Arrival", \|\|he almost killed Chloe because she was holding Clark back, and she is alive only because of Clark's interference.\|\| In "Lazarus", he berates Clark for \|\|almost killing a psychopathic Lex clone (who set off traps to kill Lois Lane and a bunch of other people), in which case Clark stopped himself from doing it.\|\| - Stargirl (2020): Pat (formerly Stripesy, the original Starman's sidekick) refuses to let Courtney play at being a superhero, pointing out that she's just fifteen. She replies that he had no problem teaming up with Starman when the latter was also fifteen. Pat's response? "That was different." - On Star Trek: Voyager, Q got very angry when Q Junior decided to casually test the Voyager crew by summoning three Borg cubes for them to fight, saying one should not provoke the Borg. This coming from the Q that first introduced the Federation to the Borg way back on The Next Generation by provoking the Borg to go after the Enterprise. - Still Standing: The parents were complete Jerkasses in high school, so they often run into this trope when disciplining their children. - In That '70s Show, Red would often blame things on Eric that he himself was responsible for as well. - In the episode where they both forget Kitty's birthday, Red suddenly remembers by blaming Eric for forgetting, and at the end where they are marking the important days on a calendar, they both forget to mark Kitty's birthday, but Red chastises Eric for not paying attention. - In an episode where a prank by Eric, Hyde, and Fez backfired by not getting Kelso, and instead getting Red, Red comes up with the idea to prank Kelso. At the end, Kelso unknowingly misses the prank, and Kitty ends up hurt. Red grounds Eric for two weeks for the prank, when he calls out Red for coming up with the prank in the first place, he grounds Eric for three weeks. - Veronica Mars runs a booming business in high school exposing the hypocrisies of parents for their children. - Trisha Yearwood's "She's in Love With the Boy" is about a girl who's in love with a boy while her father complains about how stupid and worthless the boy is. After the boy and girl come home late from a date, the father's about to berate the boy, but the mother reminds him that her father used to think the same way about him when they were younger. My daddy said you wasn't worth a lick When it came to brains you got the short end of the stick But he was wrong, and honey, you are too Katie looks at Tommy like I still look at you. - The Beastie Boys' "(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)" has this line: Your pop's caught you smoking and he says, "No way!" That hypocrite smokes two packs a day! - Occurs in "Shuckin' da Cob" by Da Yoopers. The narrator's dad scolds him for masturbating to porn magazines, but the narrator counters by saying that he got them from dad's dresser drawer. - In FoxTrot: - Andy complains to her mom about sending Peter music that annoys her, defending her claim with "But the music I annoyed you with was good!" - It's a running gag with Andy to tell her family not to do something such as procrastinate, only to go procrastinate just as badly as they do. Another example of this is telling Jason to stop playing a violent video game only to get hooked on it even worse after he convinces her to try it. And she tries to get the kids to eat healthy, cooking tofu, eggplant, and other unappetizing stuff, but has a major sweet tooth that manifests on Easter and Halloween, plus an occasional fondness for potato chips. - Similar to the above, this is a punchline in The Buckets. The father complains about how his children's music is nothing but noise, prompting his father to stand there smiling because that's the exact same thing that he said about his music when he was younger. - From Zits: - Another strip has Connie punishing Jeremy after he lets it slip that he's going to play beer pong with his friends. As Connie rants to Walt about it, Walt casually quips that Connie did the same exact thing when she was Jeremy's age, causing Connie to sheepishly grumble "I knew I should've hidden my trophies better!" - One two-panel Baby Blues strip showcases this. The first panel shows Darryl as a teenager standing up in class and declaring "Question authority!" The second panel shows a present-day Darryl declaring to Zoe and Hammie "Do not question my authority!" (note the emphasis on the bold words), along with a caption that reads "What goes around comes around...usually a little too quickly." - Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin's mother once wished aloud that Calvin would have a child as troublesome as he is. Calvin retorts his grandmother says she used to say the same thing about her. - In Herb And Jamaal, Herbert's son calls him out for eating in front of the TV. - Discussed in a rehearsal scene in The Beggar's Opera. Director: There is a question to consider. Peachum and his wife — are they both angry with their daughter, I mean, equally angry? Perhaps Mrs. Peachum is less angry because she, in her youth, has made the same mistakes that Polly does. Actress playing Mrs. Peachum: That would make her more angry. At least, it would make me more angry. - The main conflict in Die Csardasfurstin (The Csárdás Princess) revolves around the Countess strongly disapproving of her son marrying a cabaret singer. It turns out, \|\|she was a cabaret singer herself, rising through the rank of nobility through several marriages.\|\| - A mild example is seen in Dragon Age II. In the backstory of the game, Hawke's mother Leandra ran away from an Arranged Marriage and eloped with Hawke's father Malcolm. It was a happy marriage until his death. In the present day of the game, Leandra offers some pleasant observations about Hawke and their Love Interest - and then follows up by saying that she really needs to work on finding them a suitable spouse. - In Fire Emblem Fates, when the sadistic former thief Niles discovers that his daughter Nina has been acting Just Like Robin Hood, he is very upset. Nina insists that she's acting as a righteous thief and berates her father for trying to get in her way. In their C-Support, when Nina protests that Niles was a thief as well, he is quick to point out that he didn't have any choice. It isn't until A-Rank that we learn the real reason for his objection. \|\|Not only did Niles not have any other choice, but he had many, many unhappy experiences (things that he says would shake her to her core) in the course of his life as a thief. Niles doesn't want his daughter to be a thief, even for a good cause, because he doesn't want there to be even the slightest chance of her going through what he did.\|\| - I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: On the protagonist's 11th birthday, their mother, Flulu, scolds them for trying to fight off the Eyebeast instead of staying in the creche for their safety. They then recall that she was also a fighter back on Earth and note her hypocrisy. - Kodah from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild questions her daughter's choice in men after she hooks up with a Hylian, but notes that she isn't really in any position to criticize given that she was in love with Link when they were children. - Clementine can and will likely be guilty of this at some point in The Walking Dead: The Final Season. She can tell AJ to not swear, despite swearing like a sailor herself. Moreover, AJ can call her out on examples of telling AJ to hold back with the violence if Clem chose violent options herself. - Yakuza: In Kiryu's backstory, it is shown how he and his sworn brother Nishiki got seven shades of crap beaten out of them when they explained to Kazama that they wanted to join the yakuza... In spite of the fact that they only wanted to be yakuza to emulate him. Evil Parents Want Good Kids was definitely in play here. - Girl Genius: - A moment when Gilgamesh jumps in to play corrida with what amounts to a small locomotive with legs and arms, giving his father time to analyze its structure. Klaus roars at him for taking an unnecessary risk, but Jägermonsters eagerly express approval when they see a badass performance, so right at the next page a Jäger sergeant quietly tells Gil that Klaus himself "doz crazy schtupid schtoff like dot all de time". Of course, as they both are mad scientists with chronic anti-hero syndrome, it wasn't likely to be the craziest for either. - Another one with Gil, where he flat-out refuses to believe that the man who taught him not to shake hands with a girl until he'd met her parents was once a famous flirt who had a doomed romance with Queen Albia, to the point of getting more concerned about "this imposter claiming to be my father" than the actual issue he'd been looking into. - Ki's father in General Protection Fault strongly disapproves of her for dating and planning on marrying the non-Japanese Nick, but when he was younger and less conservative, he married a Chinese woman. Both Nick and Ki eventually bring that factor up when trying to get him to approve of their relationship, and they succeed. - xkcd: "Message Boards", posted in 2020, gleefully notes that message boards as a concept had just started getting old enough around then for very old threads to get passive-aggressive necrobumps from the OP's children, providing as an example a kid who wants an electric scooter snarking at their mom having wanted a full-on moped at the same age. - The Weather: The adoptive parents of the tornado complain that he trashed his bedroom and wrote "BUTT" on the wall. When the tornado argues that he learned it from his mother, who trashed her room and wrote "BUTTT" on the wall, they just shoot him down for trying to talk about their issues. - In The Simpsons episode "Simpson Tide", Homer is upset because his 10 year old son Bart got his ear pierced. Bart: Come on, Dad. Didn't you ever do anything wild when you were a kid? Homer: Well, when I was ten I got my ear pierced. But this is completely different! - In As Told by Ginger Ginger's mom Lois forbids her pre-teen daughter things like using makeup and shaving her legs, but it's immediately shown that Lois has a whole bathroom full of beauty products that she keeps locked. This may be because Lois believes that Ginger is too young to be using those things. - This pops up later in "Stuff'll Kill Ya" where Ginger develops an addiction to coffee and in a bid to get Ginger to quit the stuff, Doctor Dave tells Lois to get the coffee out of her house. Just when Lois protests she needs it, she realizes how similar that is to being addicted. - Minor example in Star Wars: Clone Wars. When a suggestion is made to forego Anakin's trials and promote him early, the one arguing the most against it is Jedi Master Oppo Rancisis: Rancisis That is what concerns me. To walk the path of the Jedi, one's spirit must be strong. That requires discipline. And he has often disobeyed you, has he not Master Obi-Wan? Yoda: Did you not disobey me from time to time in your youth, Master Rancisis? - In Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Anakin Skywalker, in trying to train his padawan Ahsoka Tano, often has to teach her not to do the very things which defined his character in the prequel trilogy (and to some extent still do in the series itself). In the pilot movie, it's even said that the Jedi Council paired them together hoping that working with someone even more reckless than him would force Anakin to be more cautious. - In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Ponyville Confidential" Rarity scolds her sister Sweetie Belle about the invasions of privacy she and her friends committed in the name of their gossip column... using the fact that she found out about it by going through Sweetie Belle's things as an example. - In one episode of The Powerpuff Girls (1998), the girls learn a cuss word from Professor Utonium, and spend the whole day saying it. Later, he scolds them for doing so, and is very embarrassed when they tell him, in front of the whole town, that they heard it from him. (He tries to tell everyone watching that it's probably really because of cable, but he's more honest with the Girls.) - In Green Lantern: The Animated Series, Hal complains about Aya ignoring his orders to do something risky but heroic, when this kind of behavior practically defines his character (no points for guessing where she learned it from). Kilowog calls him on it immediately. - Happens in House of Mouse in the episode "Max's New Car." Goofy refuses to let his son, Max, have his own car, as Goofy's convinced that Max isn't responsible enough for it. But Max later shows footage from the short Motor Mania, which shows that Goofy himself was a fairly reckless driver when he was younger. Mickey, Minnie and Donald even all call out Goofy on this. - The Ben 10 episode "Ken 10" had Ben's future self Ben 10,000 show examples of this. He informs his son Ken that saving the world isn't kid's stuff when he himself has been doing so since he was 10 years old. He also asks where his son gets his attitude after he lashes out like he did when he was 10 years old. Both occasions are lampshaded by Ben's grandfather Max giving a scornful look when Ben is hypocritical. - The teaser to the Garbage Pail Kids Cartoon episode "An Egg-citing Adventure" had a pair of children being warned by their parents from off-screen not to watch too much television because they'll turn into couch potatoes. We then see that the kids' parents have literally become potatoes sitting on a couch. - Jamal's father in the Jamal the Funny Frog shorts from Oh Yeah! Cartoons had a tendency to not practice what he preaches to his son. - In "His Musical Moment", he chides Jamal for shirking piano practice to play video games, telling him that playing his video game too much will rot his brain. After Jamal learns that piano practice can be fun, he finds his dad playing the same video game he confiscated from him. - "Dentist" begins with Jamal's dad reprimanding his son for eating junk food for breakfast and not taking proper care of his teeth, when the end of the short has him feast on the junk food left on the table and lose a few of his teeth without a care. - Comes up a few times in King of the Hill, most notably in the episode "Keeping Up With Our Joneses" when all three Hills take up smoking and then they catch each other in the act. Bobby: You guys smoke too? Hank: What we do is none of your business, I told you not to smoke! - The Family Guy episode "Dead Dog Walking" has Lois admonish Chris for getting Stewie addicted to vaping, then is later shown smoking, which Chris calls her out on. - Played for Drama in the DuckTales (2017) episode "Timephoon!". Della tells Louie off for stealing a contraption without thinking of the consequences, then Louie points out that she did the exact same thing when she stole the Spear of Selene ten years ago before the triplets were born (resulting in her kids having to be raised by her brother as she couldn't get home and nobody could find her). Objectively speaking, Louie upsetting the space-time continuum is considerably far worse than anything wrong Della did in her lifetime, but Della interestingly doesn't try to justify against Louie's point and even stops Beakley from defending her as if acknowledging Louie isn't wrong, but still grounds Louie as he nearly destroyed space and time (let alone their whole family). Della : You took off in that contraption without thinking about the consequences or the people you would hurt. Louie : (sarcastic as he looks away angry) I wonder who I got that from ...	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentalHypocrisy
Parental Issues - TV Tropes "Boy, I love meeting people's moms. It's like an instruction manual on why they're so nuts." Not all relationships between parents and their children are happy or ideal. This page lists Tropes about parent-child relationships that are less than ideal, abusive to some degree, or even outright evil. See Child Abuse Tropes for tropes where children are harmed in general, not just by their parents. <!—index—> <!—/index—> - Abusive Offspring: When children mistreat their parents. - Abusive Parents: When parents treat their children horribly. - Adoption Angst: Beefing with your parents for not being your "real" mom and dad. - Adoption Diss: Someone gets insulted for being adopted. - Affair? Blame the Bastard: A child born from infidelity is blamed for their parent's cheating. - Alcoholic Parent: A parent who is an alcoholic. - Always a Child to Parent: A parent has trouble treating their children like adults as they mature over the course of the series. - Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: A child's parents embarrass them in public. - Ambiguously Absent Parent: A character has a parental figure missing from their life without any explanation as to why. - Antics-Enabling Wife: When despite knowing better, the mother will do little to prevent the fallout from the actions of a Bumbling Dad - Antagonistic Offspring: When a child is antagonistic towards their parents. - Anti-Smother Love Talk: It's argued that you can't pamper your children forever and that sooner or later they'll have to figure out how to do things by themselves. - Archnemesis Dad: The villain is the protagonist's father. - Baby as Payment: A parent uses their child as currency to pay for something. - Baby Factory: Women are used to making babies for profit. - Bastard Angst: Being the child of unwed parents causes a character grief. - Bastard Bastard: A character who is a bastard in both senses of the word (i.e., a child born out of wedlock and a jerk). - Because I Said So: Parents using vague reasons for why their children shouldn't do certain things. - Betrayal by Offspring: A child betrays their parents. - Breaking the Cycle of Bad Parenting: A parent vows to avoid the abusive methods used by their own parents, or at least downplay the part about corporal punishment. - Boyfriend-Blocking Dad: A father who will be confrontational to anyone he suspects is getting too close to his daughter. - Calling Parents by Their Name: A child shows disrespect toward their parents by addressing them by their given names instead of "Mom or "Dad". - Calling the Old Man Out: When children call out their parents for their actions. - Calling the Young Man Out: When parents call out their children for their actions. - Child Supplants Parent: A person who challenges their parent in an attempt to supplant them. - Chocolate Baby: A supposed father is obviously not the biological father, because the baby looks very different. - Cinderella Plot: A child is treated like a servant by their (step)parents. - Closet Punishment: Parent punishes their children by locking them in a closet. - Conveniently an Orphan: A character is an orphan so the plot can move along more easily. - Daddy Didn't Show: A parent fails to show up for their child's special event. - Daddy DNA Test: Trying to find out who the dad of a baby is by giving the baby a DNA test. - Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: An estranged father gives an excuse for why he abandoned his child. - Daddy's Little Villain: A villain's equally evil daughter. - Dad's Off Fighting in the War: A dad who's absent because he's serving in the military. - Dad the Veteran: A parent who is a retired military person. - Deceptive Legacy: A child is told lies about their absent parents. - Denied Food as Punishment: Parents punish their children by denying them food. - Disappeared Dad: The character's mother is present, but not their father. - Disneyland Dad: A divorced parent wins their child's affection by taking them to expensive places. - Disowned Parent: A child disowns their parent(s). - Doesn't Know Their Own Child: Parents who don't know any personal information about their child that they should know. - Don't Make Me Take My Belt Off!: Parents use Corporal Punishment on their children as a method of punishment. - Education Mama: When parents are very pushy with their children's education. - Elder Abuse: When the now-old parent is abused. - Embarrassing Relative Teacher: A relative, most often an embarrassing parent, becomes a teacher and humiliates their child during class. - Evil Matriarch: A villainous mother. - Family Relationship Switcheroo: A lie about a family relationship is revealed. - Fantasy-Forbidding Father: A parent doesn't approve of their child's hobbies nor career choice. - Father, I Don't Want to Fight: The Proud Warrior Race Guy is upset that his son doesn't want to embrace his warrior culture. - Final First Hug: A parent only expresses their true feeling when they are dying. - Financial Abuse: A parent abuses their child by using money to control them. - First Father Wins - Follow in My Footsteps: Parents want what's best for their children and so they are forced into their shoes. - For Your Own Good: A parent's explanation in doing something unpleasant to their children (usually forcing them to do something they don't like). - Freudian Excuse: Many examples of a character being evil or mean because of past misfortune has the past misfortune involve issues with the bad guy's parents. - Freudian Excuse Denial: A character who is a harsh or abusive parent denies having a bad upbringing or at least doesn't think it effects them negatively. - Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Even if they had lousy parents, that doesn't excuse their present evil. - Gene Hunting: An adopted child searches for their biological parents. - Generational Trauma: Conflict arises due to unresolved baggage passed down from generation to generation. - Gentle Touch vs. Firm Hand: Two parents have different methods in guiding their children - one is through kindness while the other is through strictness. - Give Him a Normal Life: An unusual character gives up their child for adoption because they don't want their kid to be roped up with the bizarreness or extraordinarity of their life. - Glorified Sperm Donor: A character has a father who left after impregnating the mother. - Grandparental Obliviousness: A grandparent left in charge of their grandchildren is too senile to keep a proper eye on them. - Grandparent Favoritism: Grandparents who like or give preferential treatment to their children's offspring over their children. - Gruesome Grandparent: Grandparents are abusive/antagonistic to their grandchild. - Half-Sibling Angst: Two siblings can't get along because they only share one biological parent. - Hands-Off Parenting: Parents who don't actively raise their children. - Hates Their Parent: A character outright despises at least one of their parents. - Helicopter Parents: Parents who are very involved with their children's lives, often to excessive degrees. - Hilariously Abusive Childhood: A character is shown to have a ridiculously rough childhood for Black Comedy. - Honor-Related Abuse: A character is mistreated or killed by their family for the sake of preserving the family's honor. - I Am Not My Father: A character does not like being compared to their parent. - I Hate You, Vampire Dad: An angsty vampire hates the person who turned them into one (who may be a parental figure, or even their actual parent). - I Have No Son!: When a parent disowns their child for some reason. - I Miss Mom: Character misses their dead/missing parent(s). - Imaginary Friend: A child treats a figment of their imagination as their best friend to compensate for their loner reputation. - Inadequate Inheritor: A child's or heir's worthiness of an inheritance is questioned by their elders. - It Runs in the Family: Family members tend to have similar personalities. - I Want Grandkids: Parents pressure their children to have children of their own. - I Want My Mommy!: A character cries for their mother to come help them. Can be played for comedy by having them yell for mommy once they realize they're in trouble, or played for drama by having them cry for mommy while in inevitable peril. - Jealous Parent: A mom or dad compete with their child for their spouse's affection. - Jock Dad, Nerd Son: The father is very athletic. The son is nerdy but not athletic. - Junkie Parent: A parent who is a drug addict. - Kids Punishing Parents: Kids punish their parents for their misdeeds. - Knight Templar Parent: Parents going above and beyond the limit in protecting their children. - Lecherous Stepparent: A stepparent who sexually abuses their new spouse's children. - Let Her Grow Up, Dear: The father doesn't want the child (often a girl) to have romance, but the mother doesn't mind. - Like Parent, Like Spouse: A character's Love Interest is similar to one of their parents, be it in looks or personality. - Loser Son of Loser Dad: A character is derided as being a loser just because their father was pathetic. - Love-Obstructing Parents: Parents who interfere with their children's personal romantic relationships. - Luke, I Am Your Father: Someone reveals to another person that they are that person's father. - Luke, I Might Be Your Father: Someone reveals to another person that they might or might not be that person's parent/child. - Luke, You Are My Father: Someone reveals to another person that they are that person's child. - Mama Didn't Raise No Criminal: The mother of a criminal denies that her child could ever be such a thing. - Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: A father is unsure if his child is really his. - Mandatory Motherhood: Society essentially forces women to become mothers. - Maternal Death? Blame the Child!: The father (and by extension the rest of the family) blame the child for the mother's death. - Maternally Challenged: A woman who has no idea how to raise a child. - Meet the In-Laws: A character meets the parents of their new spouse. - Missing Mom: A character's father is present, but not their mother. - A Mistake Is Born: A child is conceived when the parents didn't intend to have children. - Motherly Scientist: A scientist who regards their creations as being their children. - My Beloved Smother: A bossy, overprotective, clingy mother. - Mysterious Parent: When the reason for Parental Abandonment is revealed and the parent is an important character. - New Child Left Behind: A male character gets a female character pregnant before he leaves for a long period of time. - New Parent Nomenclature Problem: A character debates whether to call their non-biological parent "Mom" or "Dad". - No Fathers Allowed: Cultures where having fathers present in their kid's lives is discouraged. - Not Actually His Child: One character is believed the biological parent of another. Turns out they were wrong. - Notorious Parent: A parent runs away from their offspring because they are a fugitive criminal wanted by law enforcement. - Obnoxious Entitled Housewife: Mom fights with everybody to get her way, even if it humiliates or terrifies her children. - Offing the Offspring: Parents killing their children. - Open-Minded Parent: A parent who is completely fine with their child being unusual or different. - Orphan's Ordeal: Highlighting the unpleasant side of losing one's parents to death or abandonment. - Over-Enthusiastic Parents: Parents who love their kids to embarrassing extremes. - Parental Abandonment: Neither of the character's parents are accounted for. - Parental Betrayal: Someone betrays their child. - Parental Blamelessness: Parent will always deny any wrongdoing in raising their child. - Parental Fashion Veto: A parent forbids their child to wear clothes which are deemed "unsuitable". - Parental Favoritism: A child the parents like more than the rest of their offspring. - Parental Incest: Sex or romantic relationship between a parent and a child. - Parent-Induced Extended Childhood: An unhealthily obsessive parent literally prevents their child from growing up. - Parental Neglect: Parents who don't care for their kids. - Parental Obliviousness: Parents who are unaware of what their child is getting involved with. - Parental Savings Splurge: Your parents spend your dedicated college savings for selfish reasons. - Parental Substitute: A character who acts as someone's parental figure when their real parents are absent or out of focus. - Parental Title Characterization: What you call your parents indicates your relationship with them. - Parent Never Came Back from the Store: A parent leaves to run a casual errand and never comes back. - Parents Are Wrong: Parents need to let go of tradition so their kids can be free. - Parents as People: Parents with proper character traits besides their parenthood. - Parents Suck at Matchmaking: Whoever their parents pick for their kids is guaranteed to be someone they don't like. - Parent with New Paramour: A character reacts to their parent receiving a new Love Interest. - Permissive Parents: Parents that actively encourage things discouraged for those underaged. - Pervert Dad: A father with an incestuous interest in his daughter. - Playing Catch with the Old Man: When shown in a negative light, can be used to establish a strained or flawed relationship. - Promotion to Parent: A character who has to raise their younger sibling because their parents are absent. - Pushover Parents: Parents who don't control their children's behavior. - Raised by the Community: A child's parents are so incompetent or in over their heads, their community helps raise them instead. - Remarried to the Mistress: A character gets remarried to someone they were having an affair with. - Resentful Guardian: A parent hates their children for putting them in a position as guardian. - Safety Worst: Parents who take safety precautions to such an extent that they're impractical and/or no fun. - Secret Other Family: A character has another family that's unbeknownst to their other one. - Shed the Family Name: A character changes their family name in order to disassociate themselves from a hated family member. - Single Parents Are Undesirable: Single parents have difficulties dating. - Sins of Our Fathers: Children who are punished for what their parents have done. - Solomon Divorce: Divorced parents divide which children they retain custody of. - Sports Dad: Parents who push their kids to excel at sports. - Stage Mom: A parent who pushes their child into show business. - Strict Parents Make Sneaky Kids: Super strict parenting causes the children to become good at hiding things from their parents. - Taking the Kids: When parents split up, one of them takes the kids when they leave. - Teenage Wasteland: Kids now have adult power and responsibility and rule over society. - That Thing Is Not My Child!: A character refuses to consider a clone or artificially created person made from their DNA to be their child. - Think of the Children!: A Moral Guardian who selfishly blames media for being a poor parent rather than admit their own mistakes. - Tough Love: Parents treating their children harshly to make them better. - The Trap Parents: An orphan gains some parents that don't want them to hang around their friends. - Trophy Child: A child who is treated as a status symbol by their parents more so than a person. - Turn Out Like His Father: A character ends up becoming like their parent. - The Un-Favourite: The child who is ignored and neglected in favor of the other children. - Unpleasant Parent Reveal: A character meets their missing parent, only to find out that they're not anything like the child had hoped they would be. - Useless Bystander Parent: A parent does little or nothing to protect their child from abuse. - Vicariously Ambitious: A parent pushes their child to be what they think is best. - Villainous Mother-Son Duo: A villainess is assisted by her son. - Wanted a Gender-Conforming Child: A son or daughter pursues interests commonly associated with the opposite gender, which the parents aren't happy with. - Wanted a Son Instead: A son or daughter is the opposite gender of what the parent was hoping for. - Was Too Hard on Him: When a parent feels remorseful for scolding or punishing their child, especially too harshly. - "Well Done, Dad!" Guy: A parent wants the approval from their child. - "Well Done, Son" Guy: A child wants approval from their parent. - When You Coming Home, Dad?: Someone's dad is almost too busy for them. - Where Did We Go Wrong?: When a kid turns out different than the parents hoped, the parents wonder where they went wrong. - Who's Your Daddy?: A character is unsure who their real father is. - Why Are You Not My Son?: Parents compare their children unfavorably to their friends, with the implications that they would have preferred the friend to be their child instead of their biological offspring. - Why Couldn't You Be Different?: When parents are disappointed that their kids failed to live up to their expectations of them. - Why Did You Make Me Hit You?: A parent uses violence against their child, and then makes their child feel they're responsible about it. - World of No Grandparents: None of the characters have grandparents. - Your Son All Along: A character finds out they're actually the parent of a child they know, but were unaware they were related to. - You're Not My Father: Someone tells another person that they are not their parent, regardless of whether or not it's true. - You Should Have Died Instead: A parent expresses disappointment that their child survived instead of the person who died.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentalIssues