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One Size Fits All - TV Tropes Come one, come all and see the incredible shrinking chainmail! In many video games, clothing and armor can be worn by anyone, regardless of its source or the wearer's size or gender. These are usually Acceptable Breaks from Reality, as it's a pain to have exclusive sets of equipment for each character, but sometimes it just gets ridiculous. Compare Informed Equipment, as well as Costumes Change Your Size. A default ability of the Adaptive Armor. Contrast Gender-Restricted Gear. Related to Magic Pants. See Universal Eyeglasses for when one lens prescription fits all. ## Examples: - Compared to other examples, it seems odd that this trope was averted in Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure. There is a second playable character named Popon, who is, just like Parin, a little girl. However, attempting to put on any of Parin's headgear will result in the message "It doesn't fit" greeting the player. - In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, all the weapons enemies use are scaled to their size. Even if a weapon is small or huge, they'll magically change to a size suitable for Link once dropped. Averted with the Thunder Helm, which was originally designed for the adult Gerudo woman Urbosa to wear and which slides around on the much younger Riju's head when the latter puts it on. The lack of this is also a plot point with the Zora Armor: \|\|Muzu refuses to believe that Mipha was in love with Link until Sidon points out that the chest portion of the armor she crafted, traditionally given by Zora women to their intended husbands, fits Link's Hylian physique perfectly.\|\| - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom continues the trend as well as adding some new ones thanks to the fusion system. Whatever items Link fuses to his weapon will generally scale up or down to fit on the attached weapon. For example, a huge iron spiky ball will shrink down when fused to a weapon for Link, but it'll scale up instead if used by a larger enemy like Moblins. - World of Warcraft provides extreme examples: - It's possible for a Tauren (an 8-foot-tall bipedal quasi-bovine) to wear gear looted from a leper gnome. - When worn by a female, gear instantly becomes not just smaller, but also more revealing/form fitting. - When worn by draenei or tauren, pants and robes magically sport tailholes. - Shoes lose the shoe part, and become something like legwarmers. Note that you can later give the shoes to someone without hooves and have the shoe part reappear. - The Cataclysm expansion brought Worgen to the table. In human form, shoes are just normal shoes, but in worgen form, they become leg warmers. Your shoes will magically switch between shoes and leg-warmers depending on what form you're in. - Also, any robes, pants or shoes that a Forsaken puts on will immediately have large holes ripped in the elbows, knees, and toes, all the better to show off their decaying skin and exposed bone. - The MMORPG Guild Wars is a notable exception, as all armor of any type (including gloves and shoes) must be custom-built by a merchant NPC and is only usable by the character that bought it, although it can be salvaged for crafting components or upgrades (always less than what went in). Weapons are sharable unless you want them customized, in which case they get a slight damage increase but can never be sold again either. - Further, you can recover mobs' armor as loot - but it's only usable for sale of to be broken into components. - The sequel game Guild Wars 2 implements a more traditional loot system playing this trope straight. Even more egregiously, sometimes weapons resize when drawn. For example, a full-sized sword is too large to fit on an asura's back, so it shrinks when sheathed and grows when drawn. - One personal story option for GW2 norn characters involves said norn wearing a dredge mining suit in order to infiltrate a dredge mine. Norn are 9 feet tall, and going off the cutscene art dredge are maybe half that. The suit fits perfectly. - Averted in Retro Mud, where every equipment has a numbered size, as does your character. This makes it really annoying to find equipment if you're not playing as a humanoid. - Runescape mostly plays this straight with male and female equipment although they can look different depending on what gender wears it. Even the gender-specific platelegs and plateskirts can be worn by both. Averted with armors for other races, such as goblins. - Both averted and played true in the MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies. The same shirt or suit of armor can fit a 6-foot human and a 4-foot Bothan; however, Wookiees and Ithorians can only wear specialized clothing and armor, certain types of clothing (for humanoids) are gender-specific, and certain species cannot wear certain forms of headwear or helmets (partially due to the graphics issues). - Largely averted in Puzzle Pirates. All females are exactly the same size, so one size truly does fit all females. Ditto with males. However, cross-dressing is never allowed, leading to oddities such as bandannas that can never be worn by males. - Played completely straight in Nexus Clash, in which all clothes fit you no matter what body you happen to be possessing at the moment. Since players usually respawn in a random body, this can lead to a situation where (for instance) someone dies in the body of a male bodybuilder and respawns in the body of a little girl — who comes back wearing the previous body's clothes, which still fit perfectly. Justified by the same random respawns — it wouldn't be fun to have to carry around a set of clothes for every possible body you could respawn in. - Final Fantasy XIV plays it straight 98% of the time: - Since gear doesn't bind on equip, but only when you actually do something with it, as long as they just equip the item, a max-size Roegadyn and a min-size Lalafell can pass the same plate armor back and forth all they like, and it'll fit them both perfectly. The "try on" command that lets you preview gear has similar results. - Most hats will change shape when equipped by Miqo'te, to accommodate their ears. Oddly, pants tend not to gain proper tail holes, but the tail will just clip straight through the model. - Averted in one story quest that has you Dressing as the Enemy — Yugiri has three Garlean soldiers that she Mugged for Disguise, and you have to pick the one that broadly matches your size. Not that this is hard — you're either tiny (Lalafell), giant (Roegadyn, male Au Ra, Hrothgar), or medium-sized (anything else) — but there's hilarious Flavor Text for trying to take the wrong ones. If there were three of you standing on each other's shoulders, you could perhaps fit into this uniform. Walking, however, would present a challenge. - Weapons also change size based on the size of the player, which averts the Giant's Knife; Human's Greatsword problem. One scene plays it straight where Rauhban gives his adopted son, Pipin, his sword and the lalafell has to hold the sword with both hands to wield it properly. - Averted in EverQuest. Most armor came in three sizes- small (e.g. halflings, dwarves, gnomes), medium (e.g. humans, elves) and large (e.g. ogres, trolls) sizes, and players aren't allowed to use any size that doesn't fit them. Played straight with some unique equipment, which usually doesn't have sizes, as well as with weapons; there's nothing stopping a dwarf warrior from picking up and using a sword looted off a giant. - In NetHack: - Armor can be too small (when you're polymorphed into a creature too large to wear it), or the wrong shape, but never too large. Any creature that's vaguely human-shaped and no larger than human-size can wear any armor: gnomes can wear plate mail (though it may burden them because it's uncomfortably heavy) - Rings and amulets can be worn not just by humanoids, but by jellies, snakes, and intelligent clouds of vapor, but only if a humanoid ring-wearer is polymorphed into sucha creature. It's mainly a balance mechanic: the ring changes with you to prevent easily getting rid of cursed jewelry by shapeshifting into a form that can't wear it. - The game of Dwarf Fortress abstracts this issue into size categories, so that clothing and armor is only usable by races of the same size category as the one that produced the item. Previously, there were also 'stout' and 'narrow' categories, which kept goblins, dwarves, and elves from wearing the same armor even though they were the same size. - Averted for some items in the Roguelike Incursion: many weapons which can be wielded one-handed by normal sized beings must be wielded two-handed by small beings, and small beings can't wear normal sized backpacks. - A common complaint in Angband was that a gnome could wield a weapon that was heavier than him with strength-boosting equipment. - Dungeon Crawl averts this completely. Characters of large or small sizes either have lowered AC gains from armour, or can't use some (or all) armour slots at all. The same goes for weapons - only Ogres and Trolls can use giant (spiked) clubs, and small races like Kobolds and Spriggans can only use normally-one-handed weapons as two-handed, no matter the character's Strength. - In the original Ogre Battle, any unit can equip any armor. Even armless creatures like dragons can wear mail or use weapons without problems. - In Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars you can buy Work Pants that will fit any character, even though Bowser clearly wears no pants. In fact, the Work Pants are actually the best armor for Bowser until very late in the game. - Many Final Fantasy games will have armor or clothes that can be passed around relatively universally, even if the sizes of your teammembers range from "7-foot-tall muscle-bound dude" to "8-year-old girl." - Especially odd in Final Fantasy IX, when many people on your team aren't even the same species, with all the differences in physical build that would imply. However, they at least make an attempt to address this trope with some male/female specific equipment. - Partly averted in VI, which has armor only females can wear. However, considering they mean Terra, Celes, or Relm... - This trope is fully in evidence in the Champions of Norrath series. In Return To Arms, for example, a piece of clothing will change from a form-fitting, cleavage revealing blouse on a female human mage to a pair of shoulder pads that appears to be made of leather and bone on a male lizard man. - Divinity: Original Sin II: Equipment is equally wearable by any playable character, be they male or female; human, elf Lizard, or dwarf; or skeletal undead. Many pieces display differently based on who's wearing them, so a human's simple wide-brimmed hat could become an ornate headdress on a lizard. - Dragon Quest V: - It's funny to give Bianca back the same clothes & armor that she wore as an 8 year old when you next meet her again as an adult or to swap armor with your own son. - Also used in-story for Zenithian helmet, which resizes itself to fit the Chosen One. - Similarly in Might and Magic VI and on, where the same suit of leather, plate or chain is equally form-fitting and functional as it is passed from dwarf to elf to goblin to human to half-orc and from male to female and right back again. It does have limits, though — in VIII, helmets and boots can't be used by minotaurs (who have hooves and horns), and dragons can only use rings and amulets. - The Elder Scrolls: - Morrowind: - Played straight for the non-beast races. You can loot a piece of armor off an Orc or Nord, then equip it to your much-smaller Bosmer and it will fit perfectly. After installing Tribunal or the "LeFemme" armor official plug-in, cuirasses will become Gendered Outfits. You can loot one off of a male NPC and equip it to your female character, and it will change to the female model. - Beast races avert it for closed helmets and boots. Because of their elongated faces and unusual feet, Argonians and Khajiit cannot wear them. - Both Oblivion and Skyrim: - Particularly jarring is that if you play as a female character and loot clothing or armor from a male character (or vice versa), the item actually magically changes appearance when worn - trousers become skirts and shirts become blouses. An extreme example is the "Huntsman's Vest", which, on male characters, is a simple fur vest. On female characters, it becomes a fur bra. Perhaps the most ridiculous example is that the historical artifact armors of men (Ex. Tiber Septim, Pelinal Whitestrake, etc.) adjust for women. - Ironically, the one armor set that should be custom tailored to your character in Oblivion, the Imperial Dragon Armor, is bugged so that it appears the same regardless of your gender. - Unlike Morrowind, this even includes helmets. All the beast race's horns, muzzles, spikes and foot long ears seem to just fold right up. Excusable as an Acceptable Break from Reality since beast races being unable to wear helmets in Morrowind was a major fan complaint. - In Fallout 3, you can blast your enemies limbs and head off and still take the armor, which magically becomes whole again. Vault-issued sewing kit, perhaps? - Some clothes have different appearances depending on the wearer's gender. If your character is male and you remove "pre-war casual wear" from the inventory of a woman wearing a dress, when you put it on yourself it will be pants and a shirt. - Earlier Fallout titles generally did not allow players to loot armour from corpses, but armour and clothing will fit any character just fine. The massive Sulik and the tiny Myron can both wear the same Leather Jacket with no problems. - Fallout: New Vegas provides perhaps the most absurd example in the Dead Money DLC. At one point you encounter the skeletal corpse of a female singer about whom you've heard much, and the skeleton has her dress still on it. You can take the dress, shown as a dress right in front of your eyes and well established as having been worn by a female, and it will instantly morph into a tuxedo if you're playing as a male. - Averted in Planescape: Torment - everyone who winds up in your party has their own armour or clothing, and refuses to take it off. You can buy armour for the party Action Girl, but you can't wear that (or the clothing it replaces). - This goes even further - one character cannot wear earrings due to the shape of his ears. Another, being a skull, is unable to equip anything except a set of teeth. This does not explain his large inventory. - Averted in Mass Effect. All species use different types of armour, save for the asari, who are close enough to human (female) shape that they can wear human armour without hitch. On the other hand, all species use same type of weapons, even though it's a bit hard to see how the massive krogan even fit their fingers on human-sized triggers. - And still played straight, as human armour fits all sizes of humans and asari and has a form-fitting breast plate only when worn by a woman. - Averted in Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura where torso clothing comes in three sizes: small, medium and large, and Ogres can't use pistols and other small firearms due to their large hands. Of course everything else is one size fits all. - Zig-Zagged in Secret of Mana. There are armor sets that can be worn by all three party members, but Primm gets a couple of clothing options that Randi can't wear and vice versa, while Popoi can wear some of Randi's gear and some of Primm's, but not all of either's. The fact that Popoi is about half the size of either of the human protagonists is apparently not an issue. - Averted in Trials of Mana, where each character has their own set of weapons and armor exclusive to them. - In The World Ends with You, clothing plays a major part in the gameplay. As long as you have a high enough Bravery level, any character can wear any outfit. This includes the guys wearing gothic lolita dresses. However, they're Invisible to Normals, and you don't actually see the outfits. - In Sonic Chronicles The Dark Brotherhood, all the footwear that Cream and Amy can wear, Big can wear. Boots that can be worn by Rouge can also be worn by Eggman. Gloves can be worn by any non-robot. - Messed about with in the first Star Ocean game - most characters are roughly the same size, but Ilia (a kung-fu-fighting woman and Pericci both have unique sets of clothing that only fit them. On the other hand, Phia (a female warrior) wears the exact same stuff as Roddick and Cyuss (male ones). Oh, and some characters have tails, but since the game takes place on a world where almost everyone has tails, the assumption is that the tail holes are always there but the human characters just ignore them. - Muppy, a slug-like alien from Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis roughly around a fourth of the size of the other playable characters, can still equip armor that comfortably fits his otherwise human allies. - In Dragon Age: Origins, any suit of armor will fit anyone, be they a stocky dwarf, a slender elven girl, or a towering human male. To say nothing of your giant Qunari. Fortunately, averted with Shale, who uses a separate line of equipment. - Averted in Venetica: any armor found by the player has to be taken to the blacksmith to be tailored. - In Dubloon, you can even have your Team Pet Ricky wear armour if you wish so. - Played mostly straight in Drakensang, who comines this trope with Form-Fitting Wardrobe too. Is sometimes averted by certain clothes and armor pieces who can only be worn by dwarves or can't be worn by dwarves at all. Plus, the Amazonian Armor set and dresses can only be worn by female characters. - In the Game Mod Star Wars Conquest, the race of the characters is only a cosmetic feature. Droid parts, human-sized armours and helmets, alien-shaped helmets, woookiee bodies, etc can be worn by everyone. - Mario & Luigi - The items you buy will always fit both Mario and Luigi, despite their size and body structure differences. Amusingly, the official artwork of the first three games featured Luigi wearing overalls that were a bit too short for him, exposing a pair of striped socks, so perhaps one size didn't actually fit all? - Averted in Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story and Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam, where the baby bros, Bowser and Paper Mario have different types of clothing. - Played straight for the first six party members in Xenoblade Chronicles 1, who can all wear the same armor, even the diminutive Team Pet Riki. It also inexplicably takes on a different appearance for each wearer. - Averted in Rakenzarn Tales, as armor types are restricted by the character's class. The exceptions are Kyros and Kyuu, whose Arxus classes allow them to wear all types of armor. - The Epic Battle Fantasy series uses both this and Gender-Restricted Gear. Anna and Natalie can wear the same outfits despite Natalie being considerably curvier. In game 5 NoLegs can wear the same male-specific armors as Matt or Lance despite being a cat who stands waist-high to either of them. - Played straight in Animal Crossing series because having Your Reward not fit your Virtual Paper Doll wouldn't work so well with the sharing and communication aspects of the game. - Flight Rising takes this to an extreme. Every piece of clothing can be worn by any adult dragon of any breed, meaning an overcoat worn by a 30-meter Imperial can be removed and placed on a half-meter Fae, and vice-versa, without any problems. - In the Disgaea series, the only equipment restriction is that monsters have to wield monster weapons, and humanoids have to stick to the six other weapon types. Otherwise, any unit can wear any piece of armor (Even the dresses and bikinis) or weapon regardless of gender or species, and can even wear three pieces of the same armor type, like three pairs of shoes, or three pairs of glasses. The weapons used by humanoids are the only visible piece of equipment. - In Shining Force II, rings, bracelets and similar generic accessories can be worn by characters who don't have hands. - In the handheld and NES Fire Emblem games any equipped weapons will magically adjust to the style that the character wielding them likes. A Hero using an Iron Sword will wield a massive broadsword. Pass that same sword to a Myrmidon and it's a katana. Finally give it to an assassin and it's a pair of daggers. - Some of the SNES entries, and Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn, have weapon appearance based on the weapon instead of the person holding it, however. - In Heroes of Might and Magic, any hero can wear or wield any artifact, breastplate, sword, shield, boots, etc. regardless of the fact that some heroes shouldn't technically be able to (genies for instance shouldn't have feet). - Downplayed with Metal Slug Infinity. Every unit is able to ride any Slug (i.e. combat vehicles or attack animals) regardless of size difference or vehicle knowledge (especially with most nonmilitary units). Slugs with a visible cockpit has the larger unit shrink in size and/or be very cramped inside of it. ## Examples Outside Video Games: - Saiyan battle armor from Dragon Ball Z has this effect: the suits come in one size, but are extremely elastic, and can expand to fit any wearer comfortably... even when that wearer is a 50-foot tall giant ape! - In Rebuild World, augmented suits are made of a special elastic metal weave that starts at a default size, but it can stretch or shrink based on data input to fit anyone. - In Overlord, all enchanted equipment has this property. Enchanted weapons will resize themselves so they can be wielded properly by anyone. Enchanted armor will also resize itself to fit comfortably on someone no matter what. Some examples below: - When the goblin Jugem slew the zombified troll Guu, he took the troll's greatsword for his own use. Since the greatsword was a magical weapon, it shrunk down to a more manageable size. - When Ainz kills the Beastman bafolk warlord Buser in volume 12, he gives Buser's magical armor to his temporary squire Neia. The armor which was previously worn by a demi-human far larger than most humans shrank down to fit comfortably on a slim young woman. - The Guardian Armor, one of the Re-Estize Kingdom's National Treasures, was first seen worn by Warrior Captain Gazef Stronoff. \|\|Much later it is worn by Prince Zanac as he prepares to fight the Sorcerer Kingdom in a futile last stand. Zanac even notes that the armor being magical is the only way it could still fit him, especially since he's actually gained weight due to stress-eating.\|\| - Batman: 5'8", 145 lbs Tim Drake wearing a Batsuit fitted for the 6'2", 210 lbs Bruce Wayne in Battle for the Cowl. - Interestingly, in Knightfall, when Tim gives Jean-Paul a Batsuit, Tim mentions that it's one fitted for him and that the original one worn by Bruce is on injured reserved. - Averted in Harley's Little Black Book. Harley Quinn knocks out Wonder Woman and steals her costume, but then realizes that she's too short and lacks Wonder Woman's Amazonian bust. To get the costume to fit properly, she ends up having to use tape. - Birds of Prey (2020) features a piece of body armor which somehow magically fits the relatively svelte Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and the decidedly more full-figured Detective Montoya (Rosie Perez) perfectly. - Downplayed in Ever After: Danielle repeatedly steals Marguerite's dresses to disguise herself as a courtier, and while the improbable fact that her stepsister's clothes fit her perfectly is never mentioned, Danielle does comment that "the shoes are too big," and she ends up wearing her ordinary servants' shoes to court. - At the finale of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the Spengler kids and their friends don some of Egon's old Ghostbuster jumpsuits that they found in his hidden lab before going out to bust some ghosts. The jumpsuits, meant for a 6' tall man in late middle age, fit perfectly on two twelve year olds, a fifteen year old boy and a seventeen year old girl. - In Hussar Ballad, Shura takes \|\|Vincento Salgari's uniform\|\| for her disguise \|\|to infiltrate the French camp\|\|. Though she is several inches shorter and has a different build, it apparently magically shrinks in-between the scenes and is shown to be a perfect fit. - Pointed out in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of Space Mutiny. Hero David Ryder steals an Enforcer uniform, which fits perfectly despite Ryder being about half a foot taller and considerably more muscular. As Crow says, "So, he fits into a suit that was restrictive on a really small man?" - In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne steals one of the warden's suits prior to his escape from the prison. Andy is quite a bit taller than the warden, yet the suit fits him perfectly. - In Species Sil steals clothes from a female train conductor to blend in, yet somehow the overweight, middle-aged woman's clothes fit perfectly on Natasha Henstridge's model body. - In Stage Beauty, Maria steals Ned Kynaston's dress to wear to dinner at the palace. Kynaston, being a man, has broad shoulders and a large torso, and Maria is much smaller than he is, yet the dress fits like it was made for her. - Parodied in the first Austin Powers like so many other things are. Austin and Vanessa follow two uniformed security guards who very obviously are completely different sizes and body types than either of them, brief sounds of scuffle ensue out of sight, and they come out wearing perfectly fitting uniforms. - Enforced in A Brother's Price: When Jerin and his sisters have nothing suitable to wear at the royal court, a team of tailors solve the problem by altering clothes that other people commissioned, but then refused to paid for. It's easier than making new clothes from scratch. - Averted in Dragon Blood: \|\|Tisala\|\| escapes from being tortured, and as she was stripped beforehand, she steals some clothes. After walking some miles in ill-fitting shoes, her feet look exactly like you'd expect them to look, namely, very bad. - In a possible model for this trope, the titular Rings of Power from The Lord of the Rings are capable of altering their size fit their present owner (and to treacherously slip off their finger). - In the movie, when Isildur picks up the ring after destroying Sauron, it actually shrinks in his hand. - In The Neverending Story, Auryn, the Childlike Empress' amulet was worn easily by a centaur, two boys, and a large luck dragon, all around their necks. The Childlike Empress also wears it, but she is the god of the world, so that can be justified. - In Dragon Bones, Ward inherits his fathers ring, that gives him ownership over the family ghost/slave Oreg. After Ward has put the ring on, Oreg tells him that he can only take it off in the hour of his death. Apparently the ring has never been too small for any owner, and shrinks after you put it on. - In the official novelization of Iron Man, Colonel Rhodes doesn't just look at Tony Stark's Mk. II armor and decide "Next time, baby"; he decides Tony might need his help out there; he goes for it; he... physically can't get the helmet more than halfway down before he risks getting himself hurt. ("Damn.") - A Song of Ice and Fire. Tyrion Lannister has a custom-made suit of armor for his dwarf body, but it's back at Casterley Rock so whenever he needs armor he has to make do with what is available, leading to an ungainly combination that still manages to save his life. - Averted in Thinks by David Lodge. When Helen visits the Messengers' rural retreat, she borrows Wellington boots to go for a walk; and being wealthy and hospitable, they have several sizes for visitors to choose from, rather than them happening to be a good fit. - Arrow - Despite being noticeably shorter than Oliver Queen, in "Public Enemy" Roy Harper has no problem dressing up as the Arrow and surrendering to the police to clear Oliver from suspicion. - Averted in "Left Behind" where John Diggle poses as the Arrow and Laurel Lance as the Canary. Diggle complains that his costume is too tight and later switches to plainclothes, while Laurel just wears a different costume with the same wig and Domino Mask. - Batwoman (2019). Much is made of the Batsuit being a multi-million one-of-a-kind high technology superhero outfit, yet in the pilot episode Kate Kane has no problem modifying it on short notice to fit her feminine frame despite it being constructed for a presumably larger man. In Season 2, Ryan Wilder finds the suit and dons it without Luke Fox being available to alter it. - In Buffy the Vampire Slayer flashback Spike steals his leather coat from a dead Slayer, who naturally is much smaller than him, and who wears quite form-fitting clothing. The coat visibly grows between scenes when he pulls it off her. - In Quantum Leap, it's established (usually) that Sam Beckett is leaping around in time in his own body, and he merely takes on the appearance or "physical aura" of the person he's leaped into. Despite this, his hosts' clothes always fit him perfectly, even when he leaps into people much smaller than he is. In one of the comics, Al mentions that the project programmer, Gooshie, has considered the problem and theorized that the leap causes a disturbance in the molecular structure of the clothes, making them unstable. Sam considers this theory for a moment and concludes, "Gooshie reads too many comic books." - The Seinfeld episode "The Raincoats" has a button-up shirt originally owned by the short and stocky Frank fit the tall, slender Kramer perfectly. Season 9's "The Bookstore" averts it, in the cold open where Kramer (among many other things) puts on one of Jerry's (similar in build, but a good 3-4 inches shorter) suits and pretends to do a stand-up set. The suit is noticeably too small for him. - BattleTech plays this trope ridiculously straight when it comes to Battle Armor. The Elemental Battle Armor worn by the Clans' genetically engineered, eight foot tall, musclebound infantry troopers was in canon able to be operated by Kai Allard-Liao, who was barely taller than five feet and slender of build, thanks to the use of "platforms" in the boots and "extensions" in the arms. Later forms of Battle Armor would have write ups that mention they were constructed specifically to allow wearers of a variety of sizes to fit in them. - The tabletop Dungeons & Dragons both uses and avoids this. Armor and clothing are treated realistically, as individual pieces can't be worn by someone the wrong size and/or shape (a halfling can't wear chain mail designed for an orc). However, many magical items (aside from weapons) are explicitly stated as resizing themselves based on the user, so a giant can wear a normally human-sized magical ring, and a tiefling with goat hooves could wear a pair of magical boots. - Characters can typically use a weapon that is one size off of theirs with a penalty. For example, in 3.5 at least, one could use a "large" short sword, long sword, rapier, etc. with a -2 attack roll penalty. - Plate mail also only fits the character it was made for and has to be "fitted" to be worn by someone else. This is actually unrealistic; with adjustable straps it's possible to make a plate armour that will accommodate a fairly wide variety of people, as long as they aren't very far off from the average size in height or weight. It won't fit as perfectly as armour made by your measures, but grand majority of the Medieval soldiers and knights had no trouble using such equipment. Every LARPer or reenactment participant that has worn plate mail can attest to this, as the armors worn are just a little lighter than the real thing, and usually one tries a friend armor before buying ones own. - This also varies heavily by edition, with some saying to not worry about it, some requiring a massive fee almost the cost of creating a new set, and some allowing anything to change size as long as it's magic. - This can get beyond ridiculous at times, when the rules suggest specific magical items created for colossal dragons (like tail-guards and horn-covers) which will change shape entirely to fit the analogous part of a humanoid. - However, many video games based on D&D dispense with these rules,meaning you can freely swap that plate mail suit between a seven foot tall half-orc and a three foot halfling. - This makes sense though, since the designers want you allow players to roll up characters of different race/gender combos, it would take a lot more programming to whip up random items with a decent chance of actually being used rather than sold. - Earlier editions—up to 2d edition AD&D—were heavy aversions. One supplement had a chart for a percentage chance of swapping armour between species, and an additional modifier when gender comes into play. And reminded the DM that Rule Zero still applied, so they should definitely remind the 6' barbarian heroic human built like a square of muscle that he's not going to have any chance at all putting on the magic chainmail from the dead female elf. - 5th edition plays this trope straight by default ("within the bounds of common sense"), but has an optional variant rule requiring armor to be custom-fit to the character before it can be used. - Averted in GURPS armor for characters larger that a normal human is heavier and more expensive. Some ultra-tech armor will resize itself within limits. - Averted in Shadowrun when armour for dwarves is actually more expensive than armour for humans, because 90% of the population are human so dwarves often need to order specially and end up paying as much as trolls. The same is true of vehicles, guns, you name it. (Well, guns are less of an issue for dwarves, but trolls still need them customised) - The boardgame Talisman has armour that will fit anyone from a sprite or a dwarf up to a minotaur, a troll, or even a centaur. The minotaur cannot wear a helmet; a few other characters are debarred from armour use for arcane reasons, but none because it simply does not fit. What's more, if the troll picks up armour that the sprite was wearing it fits just fine and is fully effective with no adjustment whatever. - Played straight in Magic: The Gathering, where those Swiftfoot Boots can be equipped to any creature card, ranging from humans to elves to snakes to fish to spiders to dragons... Justified in the meta sense since printing rules on each card about what creature types can and can't use a piece of equipment would overwhelm a single card. - Cracked Photoplasty advertises one-size-fits-all armor for entry #6 in "26 Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games". - The Adventures of Puss in Boots features magical artifacts that vary on if one size fits all is included in their set of powers. While a magic gauntlet doesn't causing Puss to get stuck inside it, a pair of magic boots does, and even lets him wear the boots on top of the boots he already wears. A magic crown designed for The Chosen One will only shrink to fit said chosen one. - The Trollhunter armor from Trollhunters. The first time Jim summons it, it summons at the size it was for Kanjigar, but then quickly resizes to fit Jim better. - Transformers: Prime: The Apex Armor is a suit of ancient Power Armor crafted by Solus Prime that is usually just a small chest piece. When placed on a cybertonian body it extends armor that adjusts to the wearers size and body shape. In season 3, we find out that it is even compatible with humans, though it doesn't shrink below a certain size. - Batman Beyond: The high-tech Batsuit Bruce Wayne built to compensate for his declining physical prowess is used by Terry McGinnnis twenty years later, despite Terry's distinctly slimmer build. Possibly justified if its high-tech abilities include self-refitting. - The best armors in history were always bespoke and made to measure, but for the majority of soldiers in times and places in which a lot of armor was worn, armorers also made off-the-shelf munition sets in volume that could fit different people with the same general build, sometimes with the help of some slight modification. You might be able to get a breastplate that's a bit too big to fit better with some extra padding, or add a couple of patches to a mail hauberk or fabric gambeson to expand its girth. You could only take this so far, however, especially with pieces of plate armor such as the greaves which require a very precise anatomical fit in order to work properly. Armor that really doesn't fit is no good at all, since a set that's way too big will weigh you down with unnecessary metal and fit too poorly for the load to rest on the right parts of your body, while you would only hurt yourself by trying to squeeze into pieces that are too small.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneSizeFitsAll
One-Product Planet - TV Tropes Data : Fascinating. Your society is dedicated exclusively to the production of a single product . Picard : A product for which you have no use for, but which the Ornarans can't live without. Langor : One of the little ironies of life, Captain. In the Standard Sci Fi Setting, trade is common between star systems. Sometimes a planet becomes so specialized that it focuses on a certain commodity or service. Maybe it's building laser weapons or training doctors. Maybe its building luxury starships or sexbots. Whatever it is, the world trades this resource with other planets, becoming renowned for its expertise in the commodity it exports. This trope isn't about a single Planetville; It focuses on the "big picture" on how individual worlds interact with each other. Subtrope of Planet of Hats, though any location (a big asteroid, small moon, space colony) can serve as this (and indeed, small, otherwise barren locations make more sense for this than the entire society of an Earthlike planet). Compare/Contrast Single-Biome Planet. Most SF tales assume Casual Interstellar Travel; it's possible for Slower Than Light ships to transport commodities, but the items being traded would have to be of extreme value to justify the high cost and long wait. It also often crops up if the setting is confined to a single solar system, which is slightly easier to justify as it only requires somewhat Casual Interplanetary Travel. Well-done versions of the trope will explain that a planet is widely known for its major export, while its other industries are neither profitable nor popular; or, perhaps, the other areas of society are chugging along just fine, but happen to be disdained and ignored by the segment of the population that goes into space and interacts with offworlders. It could also be used for comedic effect, by exaggerating it to the point of absurdity (a Planet of Toasters). Economics aside, a planet has other values: political, cultural, religious, and a military culture. The importance of the export directly influences the importance of the planet. For example, the Planet of Phlebotinum (the galaxy's only source of the Phlebotinum that powers warp fusion drives on starships) would have a lot of power and economic clout, so expect an armada protecting it. The Library and Data Planet would have political influence, as knowledge is power, but it lacks economic influence and maybe warrants a fleet of space corvettes to safeguard its information holdings. Meanwhile, the Farming Planet would have economic clout due to its role in supplying food to the capital, but lack political influence. The amount of protection a planet needs depends on how much influence they have with their neighbors and with the ruling elite. May correlate with Multipurpose Monocultured Crop, if the One Product is farmed instead of manufactured. # Planet Types ### Capital Political center of an interplanetary or interstellar government, it hosts the legislative and administrative buildings and a coterie of bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists and diplomats. As such, the characters are always holding discreet side meetings and negotiations and the halls of power are filled with intrigue (and possibly backstabbing). The gleaming towers are the apex of culture and power, but they also harbor the rot of decadence and corruption. This world is highly valued, so expect it to be well protected...unless no ships are available due to being pulled away for a far-flung space battle. Capitals of various space Empires tend to be highly urbanized and thus depend on imported food and other resources, a weakness that beseiging enemies may exploit. ### Exotic Offers scientific curiosities and unusual matter (monopoles, antimatter, mini black holes), or a site of strange astronomical happenings (such as wormholes or black holes). If extra-terrestrial life is rare, then worlds with alien biospheres would be of interest. Scientists and Mega-Corp firms would love samples of strange matter, or get a chance to observe such strange phenomenon. Center of industrial mass production. Presented as industrial nightmare-scapes, with polluted skies and large crowded, grimy cities for workers. Its products can include mining raw resources, refining or heavy industries, but whatever they manufacture, but it's often intermediate goods like metal for spaceship hulls rather than high-tech gear. Focused more on production/engineering rather than research, as the scientists can't live and work on such a sooty, grimy planet. Often ruled by tyrants or a Mega-Corp corporatocracy. ### Farms Grows crops and raises animals on an industrial scale. This is no idyllic Arcadia; expect fields or greenhouses as far as the eye can see, tended to by huge machinery and robots. There are typically two types: - Worlds that only produce foodstuffs to feed planets and places that can't produce enough subsistence, such as urbanized worlds or space stations. They are valued as food producers, especially if the importer is totally dependent on them, but in a big system, the rulers may have multiple options for agricultural planets. If a system is dependent on one agricultural planet, it can become an Achilles' Heel, liable to be attacked or destroyed by enemies or La Résistance. Often rural , but industrial-scale built-up regions of hydroponic bays and protein vats are used in some works. Can be large tracts of cultivated land, or water farms for aquaculture on oceanic worlds. - Planets which harvest an important crop that has unique attributes that are important to a society. Such flora or fauna could be used for medicinal uses, especially if it's a drug or it may interest the military if it can be used as a bioweapon. Then it would be more profitable than a world that exports meat or soy. Such farms tend to be a dangerous Hungry Jungle or death world. They may be a Pastoral Science Fiction planet with a beautiful Arcadia; in this case, the peaceful rural inhabitants may be against the rapacious harvest of their flora and fauna by The Empire, so it plants the seeds of La Résistance... Such worlds are usually peaceful, but they may be run by a Mega-Corp which crushes all dissent. They can become unstable if the political situation changes. The local folk are religiously devout, originally settling such worlds to seek ascetic lives. The home of many a young adventurer and military / mercenary recruit - life on a farm world lacks excitement, and encourages wanderlust. Commonly metal poor, justifying why they don't have much industry. Location that is so dangerous due to toxic fumes, unstable atmosphere or predatory aliens that no one visits, except when Space Marines escort in a research team to get samples or for a single Bleak Border Base. Could be a Lost Colony destroyed by plague, virus or infested by alien locusts. Whatever the reason, the planet is no longer of any value, covered in Abandoned Area ruins or wasteland. Only profit-seeking adventurers and the Venturous Smuggler would willingly travel to these risky worlds. Even though it's officially forbidden, The Empire or a Mega-Corp may have a Black Site here to do off-the-books research or test the use of exotic, dangerous resources. ### Gates Point or area where a wormhole/stargate/minimum hyperlimit exist that facilitates FTL transport. Vital for rapid transport (unless you want to slog for centuries across space in a Generation Ship), and in the cases of a Portal Network, a chokepoint. ### Military Exports well-trained Mercenaries, coming in two varieties: - Super Soldiers who are upgraded with more strength and abilities. They live in a spartan, strict military culture and a harsh environment to toughen them up and hone their skills. - Cannon Fodder, lower-skilled, poorly-trained soldiers hired out for reserve duty, filling out dangerous front-line units and garrison forces for that Bleak Border Base where no other units want to serve at. This planet has nothing else to sell other than its unemployed, low-skilled labor. Along with these, various settings have specialized forces: armour warfare, Special Ops, sapping, urban warfare, etc. Life on these worlds tend to be tough, and often produces prideful fighters. Could be ruled under the military or an authoritarian society. In fiction, there are plenty of Libertarian cultures that don't mind setting up such worlds, as long as they are profitable. ### Mines Harvests natural resources, often rare metals, minerals, or gases needed for industry. Like the Factory Planet, it is gritty and polluted, with huge tailing ponds and rivers choked with filthy waste. The influence of a mining world is dependent on what it gathers. A world mining tin isn't going to be much value. However, a planet collecting Helium-3 (which can be used for fusion reactors) or a rare isotope is going to be richer and better protected. Such places can range from terrestrial planets to asteroids to gas giants. As business concerns, they're run by whoever owns the mines. Governance varies, according to the importance and value of the resource. If the planet produces a low-value resource, life tends to be hard and gritty and the people will be poor, except for the higher-skilled machine operators and technologists. These planets are another good source for military recruits - many people sign up for off-world service to escape the harsh, polluted environment or receive better pay. If the planet produces a rare, valuable resource, Mega-Corp firms, governments and military organizations will have a vested interest in law and order to ensure good productivity, so there will be better governance and life will be better for workers, as they can get better pay. ### New World Planet that is newly discovered and up for grabs. Expect new settlers or folks fighting over the planet. If The Empire hasn't established a Bleak Border Base and a garrison, there may be factions of La Résistance and a Wild West lawlessness. Such worlds may have future potential as exporters, but when newly discovered, they have little to export and much to import, due to a lack of infrastructure. If settled, frontier towns are likely. Local government is minimal at best, and may be a mix of local tyrants and warlords with a few administrators and law enforcement officers. Because of the lack of infrastructure, these new colonies tend to be easily conquered and unstable. Dumping grounds for "discontents, dissidents and troublemakers". Expect these worlds to be unpleasant at the least, and at worst, harsh and forbidding. Can range from razor-wire-fenced work camps to large fenced-in communities of prisoners around a factory or mine. In some cases, prisoners are just dropped into the lawless wastelands, with no fences; in this case, the harsh planet is the prison. If these worlds export anything, it's products of slave labor or raw resources. If governed, it would be by the prison administration (authoritarian and harsh by necessity). There will be a spaceport for prison transport spaceships and supply drops. There will be a fortified garrison to protect the guard quarters, and warden's residence and other infrastructure from a prison uprising. Places for tourists to visit and relax, often paradise worlds or something akin to Las Vegas or a brothel in space. Mostly, it is a place for the protagonists to relax, especially if there's beaches. Not likely to be a major target, unless it's a strategic location or attacked for symbolic reasons. ### Science Known for its research and development, and its state-of-the-art technology. The natives value logic and ruled by technocrats. Home to a lot of cool gadgets, new technology, and various scientists (mad or otherwise). It may be run by a Mega-Corp, a government or the military. ### Service Instead of production, these worlds focus on training and providing professionals. Common in SF are: - Medical: Devoted to healing others in body and mind. Includes Doctors and Psychologists. - Education: Known for their universities and training centers. - Financial: People who work with money, including loaning, banking, trading, escrow agencies, etc. Often ruled by Merchant Princes. - Military Support: The supreme headquarters of the armed forces, academy for the fleet's officers, and boot camp for the army's troopers. Other services can include lawyers, intelligence agents, engineers, beauticians, etc. May also produce items of great importance to these services, such as instruments if the planet is known for its musicians. ### Shipyards Places to build spacecraft. Since ships are vital to an interstellar empire, the yards are vital industries and military assets. Often military/government operated. Planet notable for its black market products and services. With enough money, one can hire thieves, smugglers, and assassins. Otherwise, one can purchase slaves, illegal technology, and other contraband. The items provided by an Underworld need not be illegal, but merely taboo. Such locations are commonly seedy and ruled by those in the shadows. Artifact of Precursors, often a massive construct such as a Dyson Sphere or ringworld. Or recently made by a highly advanced civilization. Can be visited by intrepid explorers and researchers to produce Lost Technology. There is a disturbing trend for BDO's to be abandoned, acting as prisons for alien viruses, which are accidentally released by said explorers. ### Library Structure that houses a huge database of the knowledge of an entire civilization. Many researchers visit here to learn from the accumulated knowledge. Often left behind by Precursors, though such projects are undertaken by more recent societies as a prestigious project. Expect it to be very quiet and vast, and attracts seekers of truth. ### Phlebotinum Monopoly When there's only one source of Immortality Drugs, Dilithium Crystals or Spice, and everybody needs it. Whoever controls this world can control the galaxy. Anticipate this world to warrant fleets or warships and armies to protect it, and many fights over it. ### Superweapon Where a Superweapon is housed. Whoever controls the superweapon can decide the fate of the galaxy. In Space Opera, this is the site of a climactic battle. In addition to the above types, there are several attributes that can affect the value of a world. Some may overlap or change over time, depending on the current situation. ### Alien Worlds or stations inhabited by Intelligent Extra-terrestrials. An important term for emerging space societies or where life is rare. Trade and travel depends on the temperament on the aliens. ### Blockaded Prohibited from trade, frequently with an enemy fleet enforcing the embargo. Smugglers and rebels would try to get pass the blockade for various reasons. Such embargoes continue until the political situation changes. ### Commerce Trade hub, either acting as a key location on Hyperspace Lanes or housing the headquarters of one or more major corporations. Mercenaries and private security forces will maintain order. The destination of many Intrepid Merchants, but possibly plagued by piracy. ### Cultural Hub Major center of arts and learning, valued for its impact on society. Often focused on entertainment or academics, these tend to be ruled by open and free societies. The destination and home of artists, musicians, students, writers, and and other creative folks. Tourists are also common, which also means Street Performers are near. ### Developing Technology or infrastructure is lagging. Part of the Interstellar culture and trade, but often less advanced than the major powers. Except these planets to be impoverished, often new colonies or exploited conquests. Between the major powers, the Developing worlds would be caught between political struggles. Has seen better days, and is now waning. They may have been over exploited and depleted of primary resources or undergoing a natural calamity. To escape their fate, refugees will flee to the stars. These planets tend to collect garbage, both physical artifacts and the seedier elements of society. If anything of worth remains, it's related to the planet's primary export. ### Habitable Can support human life, or whatever species the protagonists are. Can range from Edens to barely habitable Death Worlds. In a setting were most planets are dead or uninhabitable (say Real Life), a planet with a breathable atmosphere is better than nothing. ### Homeworld Were a species originated from. A lot of historical and religious importance, because of its mystique of being where a species is born. The dominant species of an Empire will have their homeworld as a Primary Capital, although there are exceptions. The destruction of a Homeworld is often a major mistake for space tyrants: it not only crosses the line, but ensures that a native of that world would eventually destroy said tyrant. ### Historical Location of past importance, such as a battle or discovery. Often archaeological sites or monuments are located here. Because of this status, these places are seen as important symbols. For example: a dead moon may have little or no value, but military commanders may make choose to fight there since it was the site of a previous victory. Place of major importance to a religion, with many places of worship and pilgrims. If the religion is benign, attacking this center is a sign that you're an evil jackass. More fanatical sects would protect these centers. May be governed by a Theocracy, though it depends on the faith. Location is no longer accessible or has disappeared. This could be due to a variety of reasons: The local Gate has been destroyed, the wormhole that connected the location is now unstable, or something happened to the settlers. In either case, no one knows were it is and may become myth. Explorers may find these places again. ### Neutral Location that akes no sides in a conflict, either forbidding sides from entering with force or acting as a third-party mediator. Generally worlds or stations that have little interest in fighting, but plenty of services to offer (shipyards, underworlds, pleasure planets, etc.). Often well prepared to make sure they maintain their neutrality. ### Primitive Little or no high technology or advancements. Any inhabitants are either aliens developing civilization or the remnants of a failed colony, often savage. Expect wilderness and perhaps alien ruins. Any interest to these worlds are either for Science or Strategic. Travel to such worlds may be restricted, as to avoid exploitation or culture shock. ### Quarantined Travel to and from location restricted due to a medical emergency. A temporary measure until a cure can be found for the ailment, if at all. Except for medical craft and warships, no sane being would risk going lest they too fall victim. If the plague is left unchecked, the quarantined world may become permanently Forbidden. If it gets really bad, the planet may be sterilized. ### Strategic Location makes this world a vital military target. Expect military fleets and fortresses here. With changes in warfare, space travel, and the political environment, a location could cease being a military prize. ### Unstable The local political situation is bad, and society is barely holding together. Order can fall apart at a moment's notice. Merchants and travelers will avoid going there if they can help it. It results in less trade, and could lose its status as a trade or culture hub. If it's really bad, it may become a War zone or worse. ### War Location is the center of an armed conflict, with military ships and troops fighting each other. Mercenaries and arms dealers would be attracted to this place. Lost of life and destruction of infrastructure will negatively impact its value. Refugees from this world would be common. If this status lasts long enough, a planet may become Dying as well. ## Examples - Crest of the Stars: Interstellar travel relies heavily on Gates. During Jinto's and Lafiel's adventures, they visit a Factory asteroid (producing Antimatter) and a Strategic planet, help enforce a planetary Blockade, and later come across a rather civilized Penal world. - Mobile Suit Gundam SEED: ZAFT's colonies were arranged in this manner, with one group focusing on Farming, another on Information Science, another on Chemistry, and so on. - Marvel Comics: - Rocket Raccoon of the Guardians of the Galaxy is from Halfworld, which was founded as a medical/psychological patient dumping ground. To ensure the patients' security and comfort without requiring anyone to actually have to treat them, the creators uplifted some typical cute and cuddly animals to sentience to act as their orderlies (though the animals weren't told their purpose), Rocket being one of them. - In Marvel NOW!, Wolverine, Loki and possibly others seem to keep bumping into Planet Sin, a gigantic space casino. - Avatar: An example of interstellar commerce with STL craft. Pandora is mostly valued for its Phlebotinum Monopoly, though it has an Exotic Alien society and ecosystem. - As with any good space opera, Star Wars provides plenty of examples. - Coruscant is a Capital, Bespin and Kessel are Mines, Endor houses a Superweapon, the Death Stars and Starkiller Base are Superweapons, Geonosis is a Factory world, Tatooine is a minor Underworld, and Yavin and Hoth were strategic locations. Naboo was Blockaded for a while. - Numerous worlds, such as Naboo, Geonosis or Kamino, were Homeworlds for various alien species. - Aargau, first appearing in Marvel Comics' Star Wars series but referenced in other media with inexplicable frequency, is a banking planet — in fact, the entire planet is owned by bank. - Spoofed in Stingray Sam with Durango, a Planet of Rocket Builders which after an economic slump turns into a Planet of Criminals and then a Planet of Prison Factories (in which they build rockets). - Fiorina from Alien³ only has a closed down prison inhabited by a few prisoners who won't leave. Aliens implied that planets with breathable atmospheres were rare due to the effort they went to terraform Acheron. - Childe Cycle by Gordon R. Dickson: The interstellar economy depends on specialized services, almost to the point of Crippling Overspecialization. Dorsai and the Friendlies provide Military, Ste. Marie focuses on Farming, the Exotics on Health Services, Coby on Mining, Newton and Venus on Science, Ceta on Commercial Services, Cassdia on providing Technical Services as well as mercs. Zombri, otherwise an uninhabited world, is a Strategic location. - "The Didactics of Mystique": Parodied. Interstellar civilization is falling apart because each world offers only one profession, and there are far less inhabited worlds than needed professions. - CoDominium: Alderson Points serve as Gates. During the CoDO era, most worlds were used as Mines, Drug Farms, and Penal Colonies. Many industrialized worlds hired out Military forces as mercs. Latter, more examples, such as Pleasure and Alien worlds begin to appear. - ConSentiency: With the development of Jumpdoors (acting as Gates), traveling between the stars is so causal there a planet devoted to a single service: Beautician worlds, Honeymoon Worlds, even Gynecologist Worlds. Dosadi is part Penal and part Science World, where every inhabitant is part of a massive experiment. - Cordwainer Smith: In his Instrumentality milieu, Norstrilia is a Farm World with a Phlebotinum Monopoly, making it extremely rich and envied. Viola Siderea is an Underworld, a planet of thieves. Shayol serves as a Penal world of the Body Horror kind. - Dirigent Mercenary Corps: Dirigent has its entire economy organized around supplying two things: Professional soldiers-for-hire, and weapons. - Dune: The eponymous planet is a Phlebotinum Monopoly, with Giedi Prime a Factory world, Ix and Richese are Science worlds, Tleilax is a Biological Science world, Caladan is noted for Farming and Fishing, Kaitain is the Capital, Salusa Secundus is ostensibly a Penal colony but also a Military world. Tupile is a Service world, providing protection for exiled families. Both Ix and Tleilax cross over with Underworld in that much of their science borders on the illegal and probably would have led to them being sanctioned if not for their products being that useful. Ginaz is a Military world, training swordmasters for the various Houses. Swordmasters of Ginaz were instrumental during the Butlerian Jihad. - Empire Star: Comet Jo's homeworld exists only to produce a plant called plyasil. Everyone living on the planet is either involved in plyasil production or in supporting the people who produce the plyasil. - Foundation: - When the series begins, Trantor is a City Planet and the political capital of the entire Galactic Empire. However, as the empire decays into nothing, Trantor is Sacked (see "The Mule" and "Trantor Falls" for details). To recover from their loss of wealth and infrastructure, the citizens of Trantor transform their world into a farming planet and export their crops and their incredible reserves of scrap metal. However, "Search by the Foundation" reveals that \|\|a small group of these citizens are actually the Second Foundation, who is secretly controlling the Foundation from behind the scenes\|\|. - Terminus is initially established to produce an Encyclopedia, so their "one product" would be science. However, Seldon planned the location and timing to ensure that after only a few decades, the Foundation would be producing a Scam Religion to spread their science to the neighboring nations. This turns them into a Holy City as well. They gradually transition from a fake religion that has suborned the political organization of their neighbors to a trader culture with Terminus as a real political capital in charge of their neighbors. - When Kalgan is introduced in "The Mule", it is as a "producer of pleasure" and "seller of leisure". However, as the Mule begins his interstellar campaign of conquest, it becomes his headquarters and political capital. The Mule's Villainous Legacy means Kalgan remains military-focused until "Search by the Foundation", when the Foundation is forced to conquer them. - Gaunt's Ghosts: The forest planet Tanith was, when it still existed, a major exporter of high-quality wood. - Hammer's Slammers: Several Farms and Mining Worlds were apparently set up this way so new colonies couldn't become economically independent. Occasionally, the protagonists end up fighting in Big Dumb Objects or against Aliens. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, to the point that some planets now have commodities growing naturally on them such as a swamp planet with mattresses that get slaughtered and dried to be slept on. Another planet has tools that grow on trees. - The Hunger Games: Districts in the series function like this. Each has one and only one job to do (such as District 12: coal mining, or District 11: agriculture), all of which support the Capitol. - A Planet Called Treason: Variant of this trope on a planetary level, where each Region on the planet are Service providers, specializing in different areas: Biology, Theology, Genetic Engineering, and Acting, to name a few. - Honor Harrington: - The Manticore System serves as a Gate, housing the Manticore Wormhole Junction which provides Manticore with a lot of economic clout. - Montana's only significant export is stated to be beef, and it is frequently suggested that Montanan beef would command top prices on developed planets in the League or SKM. That said, one wonders how many cows it takes to fill a five million ton freighter... - During the war with Haven Trevor's Star serves as Strategic since its holds a Junction Terminus that would allow Haven access to the Manitcore system. It's also becoming the Capital World of the burgeoning Star Empire of Manticore. - Beowulf in Sigma Draconis is a Science World, noted for being the galaxy wide leader in (ethical) biomedical and genetic research. Given recent developments in the series, it may also become Strategic as well since it also hosts the one end of the Manticore Wormhole. - Retief has the CDT sent on various Alien/Developing worlds, often trying negotiate with the natives. Such worlds are often caught between the cold war of the CDT and the Groaci, who vie for political influence. - Star Guard by Andre Norton: Earth, a poor backwater latecomer to a galactic civilization, exports soldiers for combat on primitive or more advanced worlds (the military units are referred to as "Archs" and "Mechs" respectively). - Star Surgeon: Each species has a specialty, and Earth's is medicine; this sets up a story in which the hero is a nonterrestrial doctor who faces prejudice in his attempt to succeed in the Terran-monopolized interstellar medical system. - Star Wars Legends: In the Jedi Academy Trilogy, Carida is dedicated to the single and solitary purpose of training soldiers and officers for the Imperial army. Its extensive military academy is its sole settlement of note, and the rest of the planet is dedicated to training facilities and wilderness areas for hostile climate exercises. - To the Stars: Invoked. A Big Brother-like Earth lords it over interstellar colonies set up to be totally dependent upon each other. Since each colony requires numerous goods (which they are never allowed to stockpile) each made only on one of the other colonies, it would be impossible for a revolt to succeed unless every colony did so at once. Which they do. Not only are the planets set up this way, but their cultures are also custom-designed to reinforce this setup. - Vorkosigan Saga: Komarr serves as both Gate and Strategic for Barrayar since it contains the wormhole route that is the only connection that Barrayar has to the rest of the galaxy. The Hegen Hub is a more general Gate. Beta Colony is Science (of almost all varieties), Jackson's Whole is Underworld Service and Earth is Cultural Capital. - Andromeda has several prison planets and a planetary system that accepts garbage from other systems. - Babylon 5: There is a brief mention of a Disneyplanet, and the Centauri Republic colony world of Ragesh 3 is identified in discussions as an agricultural colony. - Battlestar Galactica (2003): - The Twelve Colonies of Kobol are set up as such. Aerilon is the breadbasket of the colonies. Caprica is the capital and cultural Center. Gemenon is a holy center. Libran is known for its lawyers. Picon has strategic value (the Fleet HQ is located here), and a cultural center since it's used as a substitute for Caprica in entertainment. Scorpia has shipyards, and Tauron is another farm center. Following the fall of the colonies, the rag-tag fleet's economy is set up like this. Justified, in that only certain surviving ships were equipped for certain functions. - Doctor Who has featured many such examples. "Silence in the Library" takes place on a library planet. Satellite 5 is a Service station providing news \|\|and a Capital for the true rulers of the Human Empire\|\|. Billions of years in the future, Earth is a cultural and historical center. - An early episode of Farscape deconstructs this trope: Sykar was forcibly remade into a farm world by the Peacekeepers; most native plantlife was almost completely destroyed to make way for vast fields of Tannot root, and every single inhabitant of the planet were reduced to farm-labourers, planting, tending and harvesting the crops. Thanks to the high demand for Tannot root, the farms themselves are steadily being worn out through overharvesting and reduced to barren wastes; the one seen in the episode is said to be the last fertile region of the planet. For good measure, the only thing stopping the Sykarans from noticing any of this is the fact that their food is made entirely of mind-control drugs, and they all believe that every day is the last day before a weekend. - Game of Thrones: According to Tywin, each of the houses of the Westerlands contributes a unique skill or service to further the whole of the region. House Clegane provides fierce knights and warriors, particularly Ser Gregor the Mountain and Sandor the Hound. House Payne provides loyal servants. Finally, House Lefford guards the main mountain pass into the Westerlands, though Tywin muses that because of the Starks' incursions into the region, "perhaps [we] need a new gatekeeper." - Stargate SG-1: Most worlds are valued as Mines for rare materials, although Libraries, Big Dumb Objects, Farm worlds, Forbidden worlds, and Superweapons make appearances. - The Orville: Moclus is a heavily-industrialized planet and their sole export is weapons. They are able to leverage the importance of their arms industry to kowtow the Planetary Union into accepting their inhumane culture. - Star Trek: - Earth serves as the Federation capital, though oddly enough is unprotected in many movies. Mars is best known for the Utopia Planitia Shipyards, though it has a Terraforming industry as well. Risa is a Pleasure Planet, Rura Pente is a penal world, and there are various Unobtainium mines, Big Dumb Objects, Forbidden locations, and Exotic places. Memory Alpha is a Library world for the Federation, though we only saw it during construction. - The "single resource mining planets" might be justified. Since replicator technology can accommodate most of the Federation's needs, there are only a few resources (like Dilithium Crystals) that they need to bother looking for on other worlds. - Star Trek: The Next Generation shows us the trope in action. In the episode "Symbiosis", one of the two planets of the week produces nothing but a narcotic which the other planet believes is a cure to a virulent plague (whose symptoms just happen to look exactly like withdrawal). Deconstructed — the providing planet used to have a broader commercial base (it was the poorer and less developed of the pair, but still a full civilization), but the profits of the drug were tempting enough that gradually other industries fell out of use over the generations until both sides were effectively addicted — the buying planet literally, and the selling planet by being dependent on selling the narcotic to keep society running. The system ultimately collapsed when their technology regressed to the point that they couldn't maintain their spaceships (and the Enterprise declined to enable them by fixing them). - Fading Suns: Uses the trope, with many different examples. For instance "Urth" is the Holy center of the Urth Orthodox church while the Imperial Capital of Byzantium Secundus is a Gate nexus. - Star Realms: Several bases are named for their primary function or purpose. For example, Brain World houses one of the Machine Cult's supercomputers. Barter World is an outpost for trading. - Warhammer 40,000: Many worlds are known for what they produce to feed to the Imperium's war machine, with Forge worlds producing complex technology from materials supplied by Mines, Agriworlds producing food for Hive worlds, Hive, Knight, Feral and Death worlds providing different kinds of Military forces, Holy Terra being both a holy Capital of the Imperium and the human Homeworld, and Cadia being a Strategic world. Needless to say, most worlds serve as settings for War at one point or another. - Hive worlds produce a lot of different products, although they're best known as a source of Cannon Fodder for the Imperial Guard. - Numerous Shrine Worlds besides Terra serve as Religious Centers. - Feudal and Feral Worlds are Primitive, being former colony worlds which regressed to either agricultural or stone-age levels. - Numerous Lost human colonies exist, most dating back to the Dark Age of Technology, which are found and incorporated into the Imperium from time to time. - Numerous planets on the Imperium's frontier, where the Imperial law isn't fully settled in, act as New worlds. - Various worlds are Quarantined by the Imperium for a number of reasons, ranging from Chaos or Necron outbreaks to matters of Imperial security. - Many worlds are under the control of aliens, chiefly Eldar, Tau, Necrons or Orks. - T'au serves as both the Capital of the Tau Empire and the Homeworld of the Tau species. Also within the Tau empire are Pech and Vespid, the Homeworlds of the Kroot and Vespid species. - Now that being said, the vast majority of planets in the Imperium are classified as Civilized Worlds. Which mean that they are or are mostly self-sufficent and produce at least some goods of various types for export. But they don't get as much attention as fighting to protect a strip mall in the war torn future isn't nearly as compelling. - Zig-zagged in Traveller, planets have trade codes similar to the categories listed above, but most export more than one product. - Zig-zagged as well in BattleTech. Many of the various planets in the setting are known for producing and trading a number of goods. It is not uncommon for a planet to export food, raw materials, and consumer goods, for instance, while importing alternative versions of the same to give the populace some variety. At the same time, however, some planets are singularly focused on one product or group of products to a point that is almost comical. For instance, no one goes to Hesperus II to buy foodstuffs, because every single industry on the planet is tied to either supporting the giant Defiance Industries BattleMech factory on the planet or protecting that factory from invading armies. Exaggerated in some fanworks, where even the aforementioned factory, a diverse manufacturer of war materiel, is stereotyped as producing nothing but Zeuses and Atlases. - Wing Commander: Privateer put the player in the shoes of a freelance ship owner during a peaceful period of the Terran Confederacy's reign. While the most obvious route to take was killing anything that shot at you, it was entirely possible to make a living solely from trading between the planets, each of which had a specialty. Due to this, each planet would produce certain goods cheaper than elsewhere and purchase some goods for more than other planets. - EVE Online usually subverts this, there are usually a wide variety of goods available at a given market. - while this is true for the stations in the orbits, with the planetary interactions and the general Single-Biome Planet, many players play this straight: get a temperate planet as factory world to make tier 3 or 4 products, while the other planet types often make mine worlds to get the supply for the temperate one. - Also about the moons, as you can only have only one POS (Player Owned Station) in their orbit: some are deathstars loaded with weapons, others have factories or science facilites, and others are just there to mine the moon if it holds valuable resources. - Mostly averted in the X-Universe games, but some sectors specialize in only a few types of goods. Asteroid Belt in Terran Conflict mostly produces different types of minerals from the asteroid mines, for example. Because the X-Universe is a Terminally Dependent Society that relies on the Portal Network, numerous one product planets face societal or biosphere collapse when the jumpgate network shut down ("The Dark") following the apocalyptic Second Terraformer War. In X: Rebirth, DeVries is one such system, being an Earth State mining outpost that relied heavily on tech and food imports; when the network collapsed about 30 years ago, the colony faced mass famine and technological decline, and has only recently started to recover. - Partial example in the Escape Velocity series, where bulk commodities can be purchased at most worlds. Usually, among the generics (food, metals, equipment, luxuries, medical supplies) one or two will be cheaply available and one or two will be more expensive. However, in Nova, many worlds have a "special" commodity that is generally only traded at two or three worlds (some supplying it, others demanding it), which are either valuable or just interesting flavor. - In the Myst/ Uru franchise, many Ages served a single economic or social function, often quite narrow. For example, the Age of Teledahn was farmed for a type of fungal spore used in D'ni cuisine. - Knights of the Old Republic features Manaan, an ocean planet that is the Galaxy's sole source of the medical substance called "kolto", the naturally produced precursor to the synthetic bacta from the movies; being the sole producers of such a critically important substance allows the native Selkath to enjoy both considerable wealth and an untouchable neutral status in the galaxy's continuous wars and struggles. The planet's eventual fate also shows the dangers of being a one-product planet — the more effective bacta eventually supplanted kolto as the galaxy's healing juice of choice, and Manaan's economy and status, highly reliant on the kolto monopoly, collapsed. By the time of the prequel trilogy, the Selkath had regressed to barbarism, and kolto and its importance had been almost entirely forgotten. - Star Wars: The Old Republic features this with Quesh. The one reason the Empire and the Republic are interested in this planet? The Quesh Venom can be refined into useful adrenals. This is also the only reason that the Hutt Cartel is expressing any interest in the planet as well. Also justifies it's status as a one product planet as the Quesh Venom has devastated the environment and it's a horrible pollutant. The can't really have an economy other than Quesh Venom. - Scrap Mechanic is set on a dedicated agricultural planet, staffed primarily by robots to reduce costs and the need for human presence. One can guess where that eventually went. - Slime Rancher has your employers take you to the Far, Far Range, an Exotic/Farm variety of the trope that features plenty of slimes that you're meant to catch and feed in order to obtain their plorts, which are stated to be used for so many utilities, resources, and other needs for the human populace. The Far, Far Range does contain many more wonders than just slimes, including crystals, ancient ruins and flora, lemons that can somehow phase through reality, and portals, including one to a desert full of natural glass structures and wells of ancient water, your employers only care about one thing: The plorts. For that reason, plorts are the sole resource you can directly sell for money. - Starshoot: Space Circus Fever has Tensuns. A tropical planet that, as the name suggests, possesses ten artificial suns that allow tourists to get a perfect tanning all around the clock on the many sandy beaches said world possesses. Another example is Killer Expo, a planet-sized arms fair that features attractions such a war simulator and a missile center, not to mention a store called Torture World where you can get all the instrument you'd need to make your enemies spill the beans. - The planetary economy system in Stellaris didn't start out this way (what you wanted a planet to produce was entirely up to you), but constant gameplay overhauls and expansions gradually shifted it in this direction. You can still mix and match any world's productive output however you like, but now it is much more efficient to specialize them instead. Almost every resource (energy, minerals, food, alloys, consumer goods, etc.) has special buildings that provide considerable bonuses to the output of the resource they're dedicated to, but all of them are expensive to maintain, so it's generally better to build as many as needed, but as few as possible. Officially classifying a world as an agri-world, a forge world, a fortress world or the like improves their effectiveness even further, especially if you carefully choose which worlds you settle based on their natural deposits. This way you can set up planets entirely dedicated to trade, mining, food production, scientific research, army recruitment, or as near-insurmountable military roadblocks whose ground defenses can halt invasions into your empire for years all on their own. - Invader Zim: The Irken Empire from Invader Zim has conquered numerous alien planets to give them a convenient specialization. Some examples: Blorch, the new parking structure planet; Callnowia, the mail order planet, along with Conveyor Belt Planet for shipping; Conventia, the convention hall planet; Foodcourtia, the food court planet; etc. They have so many they don't even really have a plan for new planets until they conquer them and wipe out the lifeforms present, then they just decide on a whim what kind of new planet might be handy or fun. - In Shadow Raiders the four planets of the Cluster — Fire, Ice, Rock and Bone — each have one resource that the others need, although at the start of the series they've been raiding each other for years instead of trading. - The G1 Transformers cartoon gave us Monacus the gambling planet, Junkion the landfill planet, and Torkulon, a psychiatric hospital planet (which was implied to be only one of several similar worlds).	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneProductPlanet
One-Gender Race - TV Tropes "You know, I've been stuck in these cages watching the mogu a lot, but I'm pretty sure I've never seen a girl mogu. What's with that? " Not a tribe, but an entire race or group of humanoids inexplicably made up of one sex. Male is usually the default, but females under the Cute Monster Girl rules are becoming more common and more obvious. The lack of the other sex is Hand Waved briefly (or left unexplained altogether); disaster wiping out the other half, or voluntary separation are two common reasons, although sometimes it seems they just don't appear. If the genetic stock is replenished by mingling with other 'races', you often get the strange explanation that Gender Equals Breed, rather than the offspring being actual hybrids; alternately you can get Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism where two One Gender Races are revealed to be the male and female versions of the same species. This is really more about creating a unique culture without having to create an enormous amount of back story. For obvious reasons this used to be an easy device to soapbox gender issues, with all the associated political and social biases in place. Sufficiently old mythological creatures may be grandfathered in even in a series avoiding One Gender Races, because the alternative gender is rarely depicted or has no instantly recognizable version. Tends to be on the High Fantasy of fantastical scale for reasons obvious to anyone with any concept of biology (with the exception of species that are actually Hermaphrodites, clones, or something more bizarre). Assuming sex is genetically determined in the usual way, sex ratios in animals tend to even out over time, even though sexual selection would suggest only a handful of males (traditionally the "unlimited", low-investment sex, at least among mammals — birds, for example, are often a totally different story) are actually needed or preferred for a population. Within a population or an explicitly social group, however, sex may or may not play much of a role. For example, the concept of mammals (such as lions and certain species of seal) who have "harems" has been commonly reinterpreted as females tolerating a single male simply due to access to resources his leadership provides, while having more than one is simply bothersome to the group after a certain age. However, this doesn't mean fewer males contribute to the species; many live on their own or in bachelor groups, taking what they can get. In real life, there do exist all-female fish and whiptail lizard species. Also, some species have sequential hermaphroditism: meaning they can change genders throughout their lives. This can mean that the species has a very lopsided but stable sex ratio. In the right (or wrong) subculture, expect Fanon concerning hermaphroditism and various methods of Homosexual Reproduction, especially if the race is all-female. Subtrope of Bizarre Alien Sexes. Supertrope of Monogender Monsters. See also Chromosome Casting, Gendercide, Hermaphrodite, One-Gender School, and Species Equals Gender. ## Examples: - Invoked in 3×3 Eyes: the Sacred Folk of Amara is made entirely and exclusively of women, since their creator Ushas got permanently scarred by one of her male creations and became resentful towards them, with her Wu Amara reacting to the wound by exterminating all male creations. This however is also Deconstructed, as when Negroni points out that they have to rely on the not-always working labs to create new beings and the Sacred Folk cannot procreate by themselves. - The Arume in Blue Drop are all female and reproduce through technical means. They can even impregnate human women, which they find highly attractive, and actively steal from earth men, whether the women like it or not. - Notably, they used to be a two-gender race, but their men went extinct, and reproduce using technology similar to cloning (they give the females some of the genes from males to make recombination easier — they're genetic hermaphrodites, albeit not physical ones). They could technically become a regular two-gender race again if they would only mate with human males, but they like things just the way they are, thankyouverymuch. IE; guys weird them out. - Certain parts of the manga actually do take a look at the consequences of this setup: \|\|The Arume initially invaded for the men but got cold feet, and apparently do so multiple times. Unless they buckle down and broaden their horizons, they're heading for societal collapse, either due to unrest on the occupied Earth, or due to Earth women not doing anything for their slowly degrading Y-chromosome supply (they'd find incorporating new ones icky)\|\|. - Zigzagged in Cells at Work!; some types of cells have both male and female members (such as Red Blood Cells), some seem to only have males (e.g. Neutrophils), while others only have females (e.g. Macrophages). Depending on whose body we look at, these are also subject to change to represent blood type. - The Namekians of Dragon Ball. As described by Akira Toriyama, Namekians are designed after slugs, and in-show they reproduce asexually (by laying eggs with their mouth). That said, their secondary sexual characteristics are distinctly male (see the fellow in the moustache in the picture above, although that guy only appears in an Imagine Spot that Yajirobe had, even before they visited Namek). - Frieza's race is also implied to be this, as Toriyama has stated that Frieza was born from his father only. Most notably, in the Dragon Ball Xenoverse games, Namekians and the "Frieza Race" are the only ones with no gender sliders. - In the Elfen Lied anime, all Diclonius shown are female. They reproduce by infecting humans with their virus, via their vectors, invisible arms they control with their mind. They age slower physically than humans too. The only exception is the main character, who can reproduce in the same way as a human and appears to have aged at a normal rate. \|\|However, there is one male Diclonius in the manga, Lucy's half brother.\|\| - The Solnoids from Gall Force were all female, and reproduced by cloning. Their enemies, the Palenoids / Paranoids, were androgynous but ostensibly male (as far as the viewer can tell; they look more like living suits of armor, but all the voices are male). \|\|The Half-Human Hybrid created from combining Solnoid and Paranoid DNA was a human boy, who was used to set up the ending of the original OVA.\|\| - Played for Horror in Goblin Slayer. Goblins are an entirely male species, but there's also a serious number of them. The reason is because whenever they attack a settlement, they will always try to kidnap females and imprison them in their nests to use them to breed. Every single Goblin out there is a Child by Rape by default. And that's only when they feel practical about it. Other times, they do it for the sake of Cold-Blooded Torture. - Amazons in Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? is a female-only race. They're cross-fertile with all mortals, but will only give birth to Amazons. - Played for Laughs in KonoSuba with the Orcs. Konosuba orcs are a race of muscular (porcine) women who rely on men from other species to reproduce. The males of the species were wiped out and on the rare occasion one is born they're usually "overworked" to death before reaching sexual maturity. In their first appearance a mob of them chase Kazuma down and attempt to mate with him against his will. - Magi: Labyrinth of Magic reveals about halfway through the story that some of the Djinns came from such races, including Paimon (member of a race of beautiful black-haired women, which also might explain her Lipstick Lesbian tendencies), Phenex (Garuda, a race composed of gigantic, Winged Humanoid women) and Amon (Hermits, a whole race of old codgers). - In Marginal, humans on Earth become an all-male race after a biological disaster. There is only one individual capable of reproduction (like a queen bee) revered as "Mother". \|\|However, it turns out to be part of an elaborate Ancient Conspiracy.\|\| - Maze Megaburst Space: Fairies are all female, and reproduce with human men on the one day when they're human-sized. - All mermaids in the original Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch are female. They can reproduce the normal way in their human forms with other races (although this is incredibly rare if not anathema, given their strained relations with anyone else; still, Hanon mentions that mermaid nations have a streamlined age of consent, and considering that some of them are straight and nobody sees anything wrong with that... - The more usual way is by having their pearl placed in a giant magic shell when they die to create a successor. (Strangely enough, the only time we see this, it creates a six-year-old, both mentally and physically. It is assumed that they stay that way for the next six years and then age normally.) While this results in no net increase of mermaids, it also ends up in a mermaid longer-lived than usual. - Averted in the sequel series Aqua, with the introduction of the antagonistic merman Laurent. - In Monster Musume, the Lamia, Harpies and Arachnes have no males. As such, they require human males to reproduce. - Angels\|\|, Seeds of Life (Adam/Lilith), and probably the Evas themselves by extension\|\| in Neon Genesis Evangelion are strongly implied to be hermaphrodites: the genome analyses shows that they have 24 chromosome pairs, which includes both Y and X sex chromosomes (meaning they have the karyotype XXYY). The very existence of paired Y chromosomes generates a bit of Fridge Logic. - The Kuja in One Piece may be this. It's not known for sure if they are merely a tribe on an isolated island, or if they are a race separate from regular humans. What makes them weird is that they do not have one-gendered reproduction, and they have to leave their island to get pregnant with a man. The child will then always turn out to be a girl. Furthermore, they seem to be better than other people to awaken and train their Haki, but appearance-wise they are similar to other human females. - More in the Manga: Pet Shop of Horrors, \|\|with the Count and family\|\|. The fandom makes it a business of figuring out how they truly do it... - Project A-Ko: The Alpha Cygnans are all female. - In the Saber Marionette series, the human inhabitants of Terra II were all male, cloned descendants of the six male survivors of the colonization mission. The Marionettes were a 'race' of Robot Girls that served as Replacement Goldfish because they were not apparently able to create females (having X-chromosomes apparently didn't help), though their owners tended to have an ironically non-sexual attitude towards them. - The titular Sekirei are overwhelmingly female (only 2 male ones have been seen so far, 3 if you count Homura). - The Zentradi in Super Dimension Fortress Macross (and the first part of Robotech) segregate themselves into single-sex units and reproduce by cloning, but are generally seen as one species. In The Movie adaptation Macross: Do You Remember Love?, however, the two sexes see each other as entirely separate races, as they have different names (Zentradi and Meltrandi) and are even at war with one another. Both forms of this gender segregation have faded away in later Macross series among Zentradi who have integrated into human society. - In the anime continuity of Uma Musume, horse girls have no male counterparts. note : This is more or less implied to be the case in the video game as well, since many of the horse girls' real-life counterparts were stallions. The best descriptions their fathers have are "mysterious", and the method of being born a horse girl is mostly overlooked. - The Taraks (males) and the Mejare (females) from Vandread; both races (Humans that were deliberately separated by gender) reproduced by couples mixing DNA to create Designer Babies. - It's revealed late into The World God Only Knows that the New Devils who inhabit Hell in the present day are all female. There are a few men left among the older generations, but none among the youngest, which is implied to have something to do with the civil war that tore Hell apart and turned it into a Childless Dystopia. - The Koorime, or ice maidens, from YuYu Hakusho. They usually give birth to an identical daughter every 100 years via parthenogenesis; however, \|\|they can have sex with various male demons, and, in that case, a boy will be born who looks like his father. This boy is called a "forbidden child," and will get dropped off of the floating island where the Koorime live, in the hopes that the fall will kill them. Hiei is just such a child\|\|. - In Magic: The Gathering, angels are always female. (There are two exceptions: one from an Alternate Universe, and another that predates the style guide). Likewise, demons are male when they have an identifiable sex. This is possible because they are not actually biological beings, they're manifestations of mana (white for angels and black for demons). - The card art only shows females (Most Writers Are Male). The art directors once required an artist to redraw a card after he turned in a painting of a male angel. According to the books and text materials, there are plenty of male angels (Serra, at least, made sure of it for her realm). - In the plane of Amonkhet, conversely, all angels are male. Demons are more bestial there; the one named is clearly male, but there are also Ammits, which are based off a female entity in Egyptian Mythology. - Maerynians in Sentinels of the Multiverse started out in Sentinel Comics, the fictional comic book publisher the game purports to be an adaptation of, as an alien race that just happened to all look like dudes. Later writers established that Maerynians engage in asexual reproduction and are all capable of it, and their gender identities are pretty different from human, with "he" therefore not being a strictly accurate pronoun for Tempest but it works. - The fairy-like Preservers in Wendy and Richard Pini's comic book series ElfQuest are neither male nor female. Surprisingly, all the characters who encounter any given Preserver seem to know to automatically use the gender-neutral "it". The one known exception is from futuristic series The Rebels which has an apparently female elf-sized Preserver named Rosie, who has some percentage of human DNA because the Preserver DNA was not complete enough to clone a real Preserver. - The Guardians of the Universe in Green Lantern comics were all male, because the females of their race thought the whole "guardians of the universe" project was misguided, and took themselves off to found an all-female society somewhere else. (They were Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, and practically immortal, so the continuation of their race was not a consideration.) When they died and were resurrected by Kyle Rayner, he intentionally made half of them female, to give them back that perspective (it didn't really work). - In a story written by Alan Moore, "Vega: A Man's World" ( Omega Men #27), a female alien anthropologist discovers another alien race composed entirely of males, with a tribal culture. When she describes the fact that it's possible to procreate with a female like her, the young man who acts as her translator is eager to try it (and she's fairly receptive, too). Unfortunately, the way the beings of this species procreate is by stabbing a giant snail-like creature in a special purple membrane, which causes babies of the tribe's species to bud off the snail (and also increases the numbers of the snails). The young man then brags to one of his elders that he's finally become strong enough to perform the ritual, the proof being outside his hut: a spear covered in red gore, as opposed to the purplish ichor of the snails. - In Pocket God, the pygmy tribe originally had only six males, much like the video game it is based on. Subverted later on when a female pygmy is introduced and she reveals that she belongs to a tribe of six female pygmies. When the tribes meet, they decide to merge together to help each other out. - In Alessandro Barbuci's Sky Doll, the Aquarians are an all-female race that reproduce through a cloning process utilizing genetic material from an object known as the "Holy Fish." \|\|While it is not explained further, it is implied that Gaia, the figurehead of the race, has had relations with Agape, and possibly Noa, as well.\|\| - In Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog, the Bem species from Argentium are an all-female alien race, presumably due to cloning. - While this is not true in all Transformers comics, some (especially those written by Simon Furman) display the Transformer race as free of gender, with the only "females" being failed alterations or side projects. While this makes sense as they are sexless robots, they all look and act "male". This is because the fandom is male-directed. - The Amazons in Wonder Woman avoided the question by making their race immortal. - In the original versions, the Amazons were an all-female society, but still human (they just don't age on Paradise Island). Post-Crisis, this was changed to being a race created by the Greek goddesses out of clay (with the souls of murdered human women.) - Wonder Woman (1942): The Neptunians are an all male extraterrestrial race. - Wonder Woman (1987): The kreel of the Sangtee Empire claim to be all male. Any kreel who develop as female in the uterine replicators is sequestered throughout childhood to be raised as male and is only allowed to enter society at large when they can convincingly pass as a man. - Wonder Woman (2006): Zeus decides to replace the Amazon with his own group that's been raised from the dead, the much more noticeably undead and entirely male Gargareans, whom he thinks will be slavishly loyal to him. He's wrong as several of the Gargareans are plotting to betray him immediately since they didn't want to leave Hades. - Wonder Woman (2011): In the New 52, Amazons apparently are Femmes Fatales who have sex with passing sailors and then murder them. Any male children born are traded as slaves to Hephaestus in exchange for weapons. - Wonder Woman: Warbringer: The Amazons are a society of immortal women who died fighting as women and were given the chance to come back as Amazons if they took up the Amazon's oath and kept the evils that might use Themyscira as a door to the wider world at bay. They are all tied by blood and can feel the pain of their sisters in arms regardless of distance. - Leprechauns in Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse are all male. \|\|Even the queen.\|\| We aren't given details on how they reproduce. - Nearly every mammal species on Earth becomes this in Y: The Last Man, after a strange event somehow kills off every male mammal on Earth except two, a human and a monkey. (The "on Earth" part becomes important later, as \|\|the International Space Station wasn't affected\|\|) - The Bridge: - Mothra and Gyaos are both all-female species who reproduce asexually. Mothra Lea is an anomaly as she was born from a union between her mother and Battra. - Mermares are all female and reproduce by mating with other races. Daughters are Mermares with some of the father's traits. Sons are the father's species with some Mermare traits. The three Sirens are born from such a union; their fathers are eventually revealed to be \|\|the Windigos.\|\| - The Nendo-kata are an all female race first created for Frederick Dean Herriots Urusei Yatsura fanfic series The Senior Year. They first appeared in Together the Outland, then afterward. They've also showed up in Urusei Yatsura - The Ishinomaki Years, his Ranma 1/2 stories Three Sisters and Like A Phoenix From The Ashes, plus his Bubblegum Crisis series Illusions. - Date A Re:Live: - \|\|The Rinne arc reveals the Spirits were an all female race before their demise, hence why only girls can bond to a Sephira Crystal. Even Shido, who's the only boy with any Reiryoku, is stronger when he's transformed into Shiori\|\|. - \|\|All of the Demons are shown to be male, in contrast to all of the above-mentioned Spirits being female\|\|. - Purposely subverted in Empath: The Luckiest Smurf, as there are (and were) naturally-born female Smurfs, but the ones in Papa Smurf's generation have all died, and most of the Smurfs in Empath's generation are male (Sassette being the sole exception). - Fallout: Equestria: All the artificial alicorns are female; when they begin regaining their minds, one mentions that she remembers she used to be a stallion. Because of the fact that the "templates" used to create the alicorns are all female, any newly created alicorn is female. Part of the reason they sided with Red Eye was because he promised them male alicorns so that they could breed. \|\|Red Eye's plan fails, but the alicorns bring his data to Velvet Remedy. She is eventually able to devise a way to change some of the alicorns back into stallions, and in the afterword there are several newborn alicorn foals\|\|. - Intelligence Factor: Defied with Throh and Sawk; they were believed to be all male until the Federation started analysing their DNA. - Subverted in Raven Child's The Smurfette Village series, as it shows how both male and female Smurfs were created in the beginning and why they were separated into two single-gender villages. - In Weres Harry?, veela are all female. Any female children born from veela/human unions will themselves be veela, while the male children will be ordinary (if handsome) humans. - The Minions in the Despicable Me movies are often assumed to be an all-male race, due to having male names and such, though some of them aren't afraid of cross-dressing when disguising themselves. Though it is possible they have No Biological Sex and just have male names. - Downplayed in the Tinker Bell movies, where female fairies are more common than males. - 90s film Leapin Leprechauns present all leprechauns as male and all fairies as female. When a character asks if they marry each other, both sides react offended by the idea. - The Venusians met in Abbott And Costello Go To Mars are all female, having banished the males and claiming to have perfected immortality. One or two small girls are seen, so it's possible some form of pro-generation goes on. - Boogymen in Don't Look Under the Bed. This is reveled at the end when the Boogeyman \|\|turns into Frances' imaginary friend, Zoe, who insists on using boogeyperson.\|\| - The Dracs from Enemy Mine are masculine ("I... am not... a woman!"), but reproduce asexually. The books on which the movie is based state that yes, Draks can have more than one child in their lifetime, but \|\|something has gone wrong with Jerry, resulting in his Death by Childbirth\|\|. The books also confirms that Dracs don't always reproduce asexually, and that falling in love can result in pregnancy all on its own. - A Garry Shandling vehicle named What Planet Are You From?, starring the comedian as a member of an all-male alien race sent to Earth to procure a mate. - Closely related to this trope: All the Immortals shown in the Highlander movie are male. One theory is that since an Immortal must suffer a violent death to become... well, immortal, and that in past times women were less likely to suffer violent deaths, there would be fewer female Immortals. At the same time, women were less likely to have sword training at the time of their death, and would find themselves more likely to lose a duel, even discounting any physical disadvantage. There are a number of female Immortals on the TV show, most of whom are skilled, tough and clever enough to have at least survived a few duels. - In the entirety of Jack the Giant Slayer, there is not one single female giant seen. Even the giants' fortress is inhabited only by males. Though their fortress being occupied only by males could be justified, since it is most likely a military garrison. The filmmakers have mentioned in an interview that there was at one point female giants in early stages of the script, but were cut out mainly because the director didn't want to have Jack kill any of them. - While not exactly a single race or species, dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are all female to prevent uncontrolled reproduction. \|\|Or that's what they thought.\|\| - Kong: Skull Island: According to the website, the monstrous spiders (called Mother Longlegs) are all female. - Vampires in Perfect Creature are exclusively male, the result of a mysterious virus that causes normal women to give birth to vampires. No female was ever born, coupled with the fact they can't turn other people into vampires and are unable to breed with humans, their propagation hangs solely on more Brothers being born from this virus. \|\|The plot is kicked off when its revealed they haven't produced any new members in 70 years and they turn to genetic manipulation to fix this, unleashing one crazed vampire scientist in the process\|\|. - The Hutts of Star Wars are hermaphroditic, but as a cultural thing, they alternate gender terminology between the periods when they are capable of reproduction and when they are not (as a result, we could consider them a genderfluid race). At least, that was the case in the Star Wars Legends continuity. The new Expanded Universe has made them dual sexed again, without the gender switching. - The Time Machine (1960): The Morlocks here all seem to be males, or at least none shown look female. If any seen are female, they have no sexual dimorphism. - The vampires in We Are the Night are all female. It's explained that the male vampires were too noticeable and were all killed off, so now there are only females left. This is also a more easily explained one, as they just only turn women. - In Kiss Me Quick!, the inhabitants of the Buttless Galaxy are all of a single sex (seemingly male, but that might just be outward appearance) that reproduces by splitting like amoeba. Sterilox is astounded when he is told there exist races with two sexes. He is sent to earth to acquire a superior specimen of womanhood who can act as the progenitor for a servant race. Dr. Breedlove shows him a wide variety of examples of feminine pulchritude in varying stages of undress, but never having seen a woman before, Sterilox has no idea what he is looking at, or what he is supposed to be looking for. - Krasnoludki in Kingsajz are all male, which is part of why the Magic Potion that allows Sizeshifting (and meeting normal-sized women) is in such a high demand. - Bas-Lag Cycle: The Khepri are a version of this trope. Males and females both exist, but only females are sapient. Females resemble a red-skinned human woman with a scarab beetle for a head; males are just the scarab and are essentially mindless. - The Belgariad: Dryads are a female-only race that live as long as the tree to which they're bonded (sometimes hundreds or thousands of years). They reproduce by breeding with humans. Sons are human and sent to live in their father's world while daughters are dryad and raised by the dryads in the forest. The exception is the Tolnedran royal family. A dryad-human marriage means the royal males are human and the royal females are dryad, but the females remain in human society because one is destined by ancient treaty to become the wife of the Rivan King. It's strongly implied the original human-dryad marriage was a manipulation to ensure the Rivan King, who would have a sorcerer's unnatural lifespan, would be given a wife that was equal to him in both social status and lifespan, as such equalities in sorcerer marriages are very important to the gods. - Black Fleet Crisis: The Fallanassi are a single-sex sect of Force users (only women). - Cal Leandros: - In Christine Feehan's Carpathians series, the titular "pre-vampire" species have very few females, mostly due to them not being born very often, or not managing to survive the transition between drinking mother's milk and drinking blood. This leads to male Carpathians either fighting it out for the few females, or finding telepathic human females to mate with. - The humans in the Celaeno series by Jane Fletcher are all female, as are (presumably) the domesticated animals. Only the animals indigenous to the planet reproduce naturally, the domesticated animals are cloned, while the humans have their genetic information imprinted from the gene-mother to the birth-mother. - Consider Her Ways speculates how society would function after a male Gendercide. While the new society is technically human, the species has been biologically restructured along with society into four classes: the Mothers are enormously fat and only bear children, the Workers are extremely large and strong and do physical labour, the Servitors are small and do other menial work, and the Doctorate most closely resemble contemporary humans and are the ruling intellectual class. - The Arachosians in Cordwainer Smith's short story "The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal" are a Lost Colony consisting only of men, as the result of something unexplained about their star which "makes femininity carcinogenic". Oh, and they reproduce... the normal way. - The Crimson Shadow: Cyclopians and dwarves have no female members from what's seen, nor are they even mentioned. It's left unclear just how either species reproduces. - Cthulhu Mythos: All extraterrestrial species — not the unique Eldritch Abominations — are composed of neuter creatures that reproduce asexually. Though nothing is stated outright, the implication is that asexuality, in all possible senses, is a necessity for technological advancement on the scale that the Mi-Go, the Elder Things, and the Great Race of Yith demonstrate. It's likely that the aforementioned unique beings have non-binary genders as well; the narrator of "The Call of Cthulhu" refers to Cthulhu as "he" sometimes, but it's the epicene "he", judging from the number of times that Cthulhu is also called "It". - In The Dark Profit Saga, the Dwarves are all male. This doesn't stop them from reproducing, although no one knows how. And trying to ask a Dwarf usually results in a beating. One day, a Dwarf is seen alone, and the next, there's a tiny, bearded Dwarf on his back, swinging around a toy hammer. For this reason, Dwarves tend to be very uncomfortable discussing romantic relationships, since they themselves don't have them. It often gets to TMI levels, with a Dwarf reacting the way a prudish person might react to a graphic description of a sex act. - The Vampires and Kurjans in Dark Protectors lack the traditional X chromosome (having instead a VY chromosome) and are incapable of siring female children. As such, they get their mates by finding a compatible human female. However, any resulting children will be male. - Discworld: - The golems, being created beings, are genderless. Until Going Postal, when one of them gets named "Gladys" so the postmistress doesn't object to her cleaning the ladies' privies. Since golems believe what they've been told to, Gladys is subsequently female, and people think of her as such. (And in Making Money, Moist notes that, somehow, this seems to make the "default" golems male.) - Subverted with the dwarfs, who seem to be an all-male species, but it turns out that female dwarfs just look — and traditionally act — just like male dwarfs. (Later on, some of the female dwarfs start to push back on this a bit.) - The Nac mac Feegle are an almost all-male race: females are very rare, and always become Keldas. The Kelda does the thinking for the clan, while the Big Man (either her husband or her eldest son) leads them in the fighting. The rest of the clan are her brothers, brothers-in-law or children. When a female child comes of age, she takes a few of her brothers to find a clan that lacks a Kelda. - Chelonians, in Doctor Who Expanded Universe novels by Gareth Roberts, are a race of hermaphroditic humanoid cyborg turtles. They all self-identify as male, but parents and offspring are referred to as "mothers" and "daughters." - A Door into Ocean is about an all-female race on the ocean world Shora who reproduce by parthenogenesis. They are master genetic engineers. - The Draco Tavern: The alien Chirpsithra are all female (or are said to appear so, though how you can tell when they're 11 feet tall with salmon-pink exoskeletons, deponent knoweth not). Males are never seen, and other races learn not to ask about them, because it offends the otherwise good-natured Chirps. - The Draconians from the Dragonlance novels are all male in the earlier works. This is explained and expanded on in a later book, The Doom Brigade. Very short version: Draconians were a created race, and the creators decided at the last minute not to allow the draconians to breed and put the eggs containing the female draconians into magical stasis. They were eventually freed. - The Tleilaxu in the Dune series are all-male, ahem, geneticists. It is later revealed that the "axlotl tanks" repeatedly mentioned throughout the series are semi-conscious Tleilaxu females hooked up to machines and used for the sole purpose of their genetic experiments, which include raising the dead by harvesting their DNA. \|\|Some of them manage to escape and are not happy about it; they become the precursors to the Honored Matres of later stories.\|\| - Empire from the Ashes: The Achuultani are all male and reproduce via cloning \|\|because the evil A.I. running their culture won't allow female cloning or normal breeding\|\|. - Evolution: The last of humanity's descendants 500 million years in the future are all functionally female, there are no males anymore, and gender is meaningless. - Fablehaven has a few of these. Fairies are always female \|\|because the male fairies were transformed into imps\|\|. Astrids are all male. - In Faery Rebels by R. J. Anderson, faeries are an all-female race who leave an egg containing a new faery when they die. Later in the book, it is revealed that \|\|this isn't supposed to happen. Faeries would marry human men and have their children, then bring back any daughters they had to be raised in the wyld as faeries\|\|. In the second book, \|\|we find out this isn't the norm either. Male faeries do exist, and just as frequently as females. Mating with humans is unusual for their kind\|\|. - Part of The Female Man is set on "Whileaway", a utopian alternate future Earth where the entire male population was killed off by a plague generations earlier, though it's implied in a couple places that the men may have in fact been killed off by the women in a worldwide war of the sexes. The novel explores what the ramifications of a single-sex society might actually be (well, when it's not in the middle of an Author Filibuster about how women are oppressed): on Whileaway, for instance, the greatest sexual taboo is cross-generation, getting involved with someone old enough to be your parent or your child. - Green (2011) downplays and justifies this trope. The majority of leprechauns are male, but there are females. This is because leprechauns are a very long-lived species and the gender-imbalance serves as population control by stopping them from having too many babies. Brownwyn: We leprechauns live a long time, Lil. A very long time, indeed, by human standards. If our numbers were equal between the sexes, we'd have overrun you ages ago. But our lasses are born scarcely one to four lads. It's nature's little way o' keeping the folk in check. - Hainish: - In The Left Hand of Darkness, the inhabitants of the planet Winter are humans that have been genetically engineered to spend most of their time in an androgynous, sexless form, with monthly periods of "kemmer" in which they develop sexual dimorphism (any individual can manifest either sex) and interest in intercourse. The alien impact this has on a biologically male outside observer is a major part of the plot. - The short story "The Matter of Seggri" deals with a planet where males are a rarity, with something like 12 females for every one male. The story is written like a study about the anthropological quirks of such a species and how it affects the planet. - Harry Potter: - The Veela are an ambiguous case. The Slavic fairies they're based on are all female, as are all the ones mentioned in the books. However, Half-veela humans are considered distinct from full Veela, and the ability to reproduce with humans (or wizards, at least) would imply the existance of male Veela as well, although given that they're explicitally magical it doesn't really require it. For what it's worth, Word of God does mention one part-veela male: \|\|Louis, the eighth-veela son of Fleur and Bill\|\|. - All centaurs seen in the books are male. Word of God says that yes, they are a one-gender race. - Hags are also mentioned at various points and seem to all be female. - All the goblins mentioned are male. While there is no mention of female goblins in the books, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them features a female goblin night-club singer. - Herland sort of fits this trope, as the inhabitants of Herland are perfectly normal human women but can somehow reproduce asexually, with only girls born. - The witches in the His Dark Materials trilogy constitute a separate, entirely female species. They breed with human men, but generally don't get too emotionally attached, since — compared to the witches — humans have such very, very short lifespans. The children of these witch/human couplings might be male or female, but only the daughters are the same species as the mothers, the sons are short-lived humans like the fathers. Witches from some other worlds had men amongst their ranks, although neither male nor female witch lived any longer than humans. - In James Tiptree Jr.'s novella Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, \|\|astronauts from the present (all male) accidentally travel through time to the future Earth. Eventually, they discover that plague wiped out most human life, including all the males. The surviving women reproduce through cloning and have no interest in bringing back males, though they do want some genetic material to produce a few more templates to clone from. They also have no intention of allowing the men to disrupt their way of life and aren't going to keep them prisoner; much more humane to simply kill them\|\|. - Used painfully (and deconstructed) in The Immortals. All 'Immortals' — species which cannot die of old age or disease, but can be killed by physical or magical means — are born in the Divine Realms as the product of human dreams or nightmares. One such species, the Tauros, is essentially a race of minotaurs who exist to rape and kill women. Daine, the protagonist of the story, asks the god of the 'duckmoles' (platypuses), if there even are any female Tauroses. When he says no, she gets angry and basically says 'well no wonder they attack human women all the time! That's all they know to do without women of their own who can handle it!' Broadfoot, the duckmole, muses that she's right, and 'Someone should consult the Greater Gods about this...' Later works reveal that the Greater Gods did examine it and found the trope was enforced: because Tauroses are born out of women's fear of rape, they will continue to exist as long as rape does and can only target human women. - Immortal Guardians: Across 13 books, the Immortal Guardians have yet to encounter a female vampire. Seth, the Immortals' leader, explains that this is because it takes several feedings across several days to convert a human to a vampire and the sociopathic, sadistic male vampires tend to lose control and rape and murder any females they capture long before the conversion process can be completed. Female Immortals are also rare as most Immortals were humans, turned against their will only for their enhanced humans DNA allowed them to heal after being left for dead by the vampires who turned them. But again, the females tend not to survive long enough to begin the healing process. Immortals can turn Gifted Ones, but usually only do so for the person they intend to mate, preferring to allow humans to remain human. - Imperial Radch: Played with, with the Radch being a One Gender Society. While the people are physically ordinary humans with two sexes, the Radchaai make very little distinction between them, with fashions, social opportunities, and everything else being equally applicable to both sexes. The Radchaai language doesn't even have pronouns to differentiate between them, with everyone defaulting to female, and their society is completely egalitarian with jobs determined by a standardized test called the Aptitudes that are taken some time before adulthood. Breq often laments about the difficulty of having to decide which pronoun to use to keep from looking foolish and how relieving not having to worry about it is after returning to Radch space. - InCryptid: In Discount Armageddon, the dragon princesses — women who hang out with dragons, or at least did until all the dragons were killed — are thought to be this, until \|\|the last male dragon turns up, and it's revealed that the dragon princesses are actually just female dragons\|\|. They can reproduce by parthenogenesis, which is why they all look so similar. - The Lyranians in Lensman have males for reproduction but they never appear and are described as short, stupid, and useful for only one thing. - In Loyal Enemies, dryads are a female-only race, leading to their ruler being The High Queen and their army an Amazon Brigade. It's not really explored how new dryads are born, but seeing how they're nature spirits, they probably don't need men. - Lyremouth Chronicles by Jane Fletcher solves the issue of dwarf women by making the dwarves hermaphrodites. - In Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, there's a story about a race of women who reproduce by parthenogenesis. They can interbreed with male humans, losing their "family quirk", and they think of themselves as humans. Or at least they did until \|\|one of them tried to give birth to a Vulcan son and almost succeeded\|\|. - The koloss from the Mistborn trilogy are all male, though this is because they are an unnatural race and do not reproduce by normal means. \|\|Instead, they're created by binding five people together with a special skin and four hemalurgic spikes. This is why they're as strong as five people and are confused by conflicting memories.\|\| By Wax and Wayne, this has changed; Harmony made it so that they have natural genders and can reproduce. The child of a koloss is a "koloss-blooded," stronger and tougher than ordinary humans. Once they come of age, they can then choose to make the transformation into a full koloss or leave the clan. Ordinary humans can also choose to join the clan and make the transformation; no distinction is made from a koloss who was originally an ordinary human and one who was koloss-blooded. - The Norby Chronicles: - The Jamyn dragons are all spoken about with female pronouns, but actually reproduce by budding, establishing that they reproduce asexually. - The All-Purpose Pet are an intellectually simple species that is designed to reproduce by laying eggs. Norby announces that theyre supposed to be "she", just like the dragons. Oola is adopted by Mentor One, but the egg is given to Fargo so that he can have Oola Two. - In Oceanic, whether you're born with a penis ('bridge') isn't important; each time you copulate, it detaches and re-attaches itself to the other partner. Married couples take turns bearing children. This race of humans was artificially created, apparently because members of the uploaded human societies that appear in various of Greg Egan's other works (especially Diaspora) thought that giving up the flesh had been bad for their souls. - The Clayr in Old Kingdom are mostly female. Male Clayr are mentioned in terms of their scarcity, but we never meet any. Children are typically fathered by casual lovers chosen from among the visitors to the Clayr's Glacier. - The Otherworld: Witches are always female, and sorcerers always male, and both reproduce with humans. These are explicitly stated not to be male and female version of the same race. (\|\|Until Savannah came along, that is. There are some hints that the characters may be mistaken about that "not the same race" idea...\|\|) The werewolf gene only passes down to sons. Werewolves reproduce with human women, but their daughters are human. Lycanthropy can be caught via infection/attack, though until recently the werewolves thought no woman could survive the Change. An infected werewolf will pass the trait down to his sons. At the end of Broken, \|\|Elena, the first and only female werewolf, gives birth to twins, a boy and a girl. Both of them are lycanthropes, though they will not change until adolescence. Since their father is also a werewolf, it is unclear whether sons inherit from fathers and daughters from mothers, or if mothers pass lycanthropy down to both genders\|\|. - The Pentagon War: Each Centaurian is both male and female. Being born with only male or female parts is considered a birth defect. They still require a partner to mate with, but both of them can get pregnant from the encounter. - Perry Rhodan: As far as anyone can tell, the Uleb and their various descendants are single-gendered (and the male pronoun is used throughout) yet clearly capable of reproduction — how exactly is never detailed, though the fact that in one issue the Halutian Icho Tolot managed to somehow produce (sadly short-lived) offspring after decades on a human generation ship with no other members of his species around suggests that either parthenogenesis is at least one option or that his species is capable of storing donated genetic material for considerable timespans. It's probably justified in that the original Uleb were an "artificial" species, intended to replace the extant "warrior" species of M 87's galactic caste system with a genetically engineered new and improved super soldier version. - Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: As said in Princesses Don't Play Nice, this is part of witch culture. They appear to be regular Blood Magic-using humans otherwise, who fall into this trope due to a No Fathers Allowed society: "I didn't know wi... your people had fathers." said Cassie. "You all seem to be girls." The cleric blushed with embarrassment. "Oh, we got fathers," said Bianca. "We just don't have much to do with them. Our moms pick guys with good magic backgrounds, have us, and then they're gone." - The Rainbow Magic series has all-male goblins. A few books imply that females exist, but we never see them. - Appears several times in the works of Roald Dahl: - In The BFG, all Giants are male; the BFG explains that giants simply come into being. - The Witches: All Witches are female (though they don't interbreed with humans and are all evil), but as they are demons and not humans, it doesn't particularly matter. The book also mentions barghests and ghouls to be all-male. - Schild's Ladder: Pronouns still have gender, determined not by physical sex (which is temporary anyway) but by the traditional and arbitrary gender of the given name. Some people like to tease earlier-model humans who show up out of the deep past (thanks to relativistic time compression) by telling them fanciful stories about sex. - Second Apocalypse: Due to a Gendercide called the Womb Plague, presumably caused as a side effect of the immortality granted to them by the treacherous Inchoroi, the Nonmen are a race of immortal males who have all been slowly succumbing to despair, madness and The Fog of Ages. - Discussed in Space Cadet. The Venerians seen are all female, and Oscar is asked if they even have males or if they're this trope. He replies that they definitely have two sexes, but no human has ever seen a male. - Space Captain Smith: The M'Laks have No Biological Sex, but all identify as male. They reproduce by vomiting up a bucketload of frogspawn, which grow into froglike juveniles and eventually humanoid adults. As all offspring are genetically identical to their fathers, M'Lak ensure diversity by deliberately exposing infants to high levels of radiation to cause mutations. - Chief Engineer Burgoyne 172 in the Star Trek: New Frontier novels is a member of a hermaphroditic race called the Hermat. S/he dismisses comparisions to the J'Naii by explaining "They are neither. We are both." - The Stars Are Legion is set on a series of worlds with all-female inhabitants. The women get pregnant according to the whims of the world and give birth to whatever the world needs. Not whoever, whatever. - Justified with the Confessors in Sword of Truth, since male Confessors don't have the recovery time after using their powers that their female counterparts have, they turn into absolute tyrants. \|\|Male infanticide has been practiced since the last male Confessor was killed, and YMMV on whether it's made more or less horrifying by the Confessed lovers of Confessors having to do the killing.\|\| - Tolkien's Legendarium: Dwarves/Black Elves were originally described as spawning from stone. J. R. R. Tolkien eventually put a much-copied twist on this. Only about one female is born to every three males, and to untrained eyes, their women look very similar to men. They also dress in such a manner to add to the confusion. From The History of Middle-earth Vol XI, The War of the Jewels: "No Man nor Elf has ever seen a beardless Dwarf unless he were shaven in mockery, and would then be more like to die of shame than of many other hurts that to us would seem more deadly. For the Naugrim have beards from the beginning of their lives, male and female alike." - Lampshaded in the extended edition of the movie: Gimli: It's true you don't see many dwarf women. And in fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance, that they are often mistaken for dwarf men. Aragorn: [whispering] It's the beards. Gimli: ...and this in turn has given rise to the belief that there are no dwarf women, and that dwarves just spring up out of holes in the ground! Which is, of course, ridiculous. - The same movie presents the Uruk-Hai as all-male and being spawned fully formed from mud pits. - The surviving long-lived ents in The Lord of the Rings are all male, due to an estrangement with the entwives thousands of years ago (the ents tended deep forest, the entwives cultivated land) never to be seen again, despite the ents' best efforts to find them again over the millennia. It is heavily implied that the entwives still exist, but they are never found during the trilogy. Treebeard: We lost the entwives. Pippin: I'm sorry. How did they die? Treebeard: Die? No. We lost them, and now we cannot find them! - The True Meaning of Smekday: The Gorg probably used to have females, but now \|\|they're all clones\|\|. - In Victoria, Azania is not yet there, but working hard to become this. Ruled by Straw Feminist ideologues, it has outlawed natural births, hoping to breed a new, all-female humanity through eugenic cloning. - The Vorkosigan Saga has a male one of these on the planet Athos, where Designer Babies are created from a bank of ovarian tissue from the initial settlement of the colony. Several generations later, the plot culminates in a representative (Ethan) leaving the planet for the first time, meeting women and the awkward diplomatic question "Would you care to donate an ovary to Athos?" - The Well World novels (specifically Quest for the Well of Souls) include, among 779 alien species (not counting inorganic life), the Yaxa, a race of giant scary butterflies of whom only females are sentient. (This helped make up for the presence of a different insect species in the first book which were severely patriarchal. Oh, and there are also the plant-people of Czill, who are completely genderless and reproduce by budding. He likes to play with these issues a lot.) - The Myrddraal in The Wheel of Time are presumed to be this, as they're all male looking (though they're usually referred to as "it" rather than "he", suggesting that they simply don't have a gender). As Myrddraal are a mutant offshoot of Trollocs, they don't have to worry about reproduction — new ones will be born among the Trollocs as a matter of course. Averted with the Trollocs themselves — though none have been confirmed on-page, Word of God is that there are female Trollocs. - Joanna Russ's short story "When It Changed" takes place in an all-female society after a plague killed all the men. They reproduce by combining their eggs and behave in traditionally male ways. Astronauts from Earth arrive and don't understand how the women could survive without men. - World of Tiers: The all-male Zebrillas are the males for the all-female Dryad. If the offsping is male, he will be a Zebrilla, else, she will be a Dryad. The Zebillas are tall, bipedal gorillas with human intelligence and the Dryads are a whole race of paragons of feminine beauty. The Thoan RPG even had a picture of a mating between a Zebrilla and a Dryad. - Wraeththu: The eponymous post-humans are hermaphrodites who appear male. In the first few books, they reproduce by transforming human males into Wraeththu via blood transfusion, then having sexual intercourse with the "initiate" to set the change. Like many other One Gender Races, the Wraeththu have a female (or, in this case, feminine hermaphrodite) counterpart; and, like many other One Gender Races, the two species don't get along very well. - Xanth: All-male satyrs mate with all-female dryads, and all-male fauns mate with all-female nymphs. Harpies were this for a while, forcing them to alternate vulture and human mates with each generation or die out (with such crosses always female), until a male harpy returned from suspended animation a long way into the series. - Babylon 5: - On screen, all pak'ma'ra have just one gender, which is neither male nor female, reproducing asexually through parthenogenesis every five years or so. However, they do engage in carnal acts that would otherwise be viewed as sexual, including with other species (assisted by technology when necessary), though purely for recreation. Given this they lack a concept of marriage, with most living alone, though some do have what are called "thought mates" which are more like a very close friend. Nevertheless expanded material subverts this as other sources like the Role Playing Game guide says that actually their humps are their females (pak'ma'ra without humps are the equivalent of a single person). - In Crusade the Drazi are mentioned to be hermaphroditic and all look and act like males in-universe. (Nevertheless this might contradict the fact that in the mother series Babylon 5 Londo mocks the Drazi ambassador implying that his wife had an affair. Of course whether this still means that they are hermaphrodites and still marry and one of them assumes the role of wife or Londo didn't know that they are hermaphrodites is up to you). - The Venusians in El Chapulín Colorado are all female and in Jungle Girl outfits. - Doctor Who: - The history of the Time Lords is, as with so many things, muddled. Technically, the second Gallifreyan we ever saw was female, although Susan wasn't even around when the concept of Time Lord even existed in the show the Doctor was Ambiguously Human during her tenure, and she was only said to be Gallifreyan retroactively. For about a decade, all the Time Lords seen after the introduction of the concept were male; even the name implies this. Tom Baker assumed the Time Lords were all male and purposely played his Doctor a little awkward around women to give the impression, with the Sisterhood of Karn even coming across as the Time Lords' Distaff Counterpart. However, seventies Doctor Who was rather unclear as to whether "Time Lord" was the name of the race, or a title for members of the Chapters, which would make Tom's portrayal more of an unworldly Oxbridge don from the days when women weren't allowed on campus except as housekeeping staff. Regardless, the introduction of Romana in 1978 removed this assumption, and several Time Ladies have appeared since. In fact, with the Master becoming the Mistress (and the General in "Hell Bent", and now Jodie Whittaker) it has been established that Time Lords(/Ladies) can change sex when regenerating. So they're not so much a one-gender race as an all-genderfluid one. - Daleks are biologically genderless and reproduce by genetic engineering and cloning. They are usually referred to as "it", but occasionally people or the Daleks themselves use male pronouns to describe them. - The Drahvins, from the William Hartnell story "Galaxy 4", are a seemingly all-female race. They use the few males only for breeding. Their commanders are naturally born and their footsoldiers are clones. - The original Cybermen were all male models. - The Sontarans are a militant male-presenting race who reproduce through cloning. They have noticeable difficulty with the very idea of gender (e.g. two genders is "a bit further than they can count"). According to some of the Expanded Universe material their species originally reproduced normally and was far less war fixated until the day a horrendously narcissistic military man, one General Sontar, started cloning himself and slaughtered the rest of the population. The canonicity of this is disputed, however. - According to Word of God, the original inhabitants of Telos, the Cryons, are an all-female race. - The Sisterhood of Karn in "The Brain of Morbius" are all female and do not reproduce, being instead immortal. The Expanded Universe and revived series retconned them into a Time Lord faction instead of a distinct race. - The Carrionites are all female from what we see of them, and can apparently engage in Homosexual Reproduction. - TARDISes apparently. In "The Doctor's Wife", \|\|the TARDIS herself said that House's planet was filled with the corpses of her sisters. Well of course ships are always female.\|\| - Earth: Final Conflict: The Taelons are a single gender race, or perhaps a no gender race. It's mentioned in the first episode when one character questions another's use of the pronoun "he", which they use through the series. Although he was probably acting as an Audience Surrogate for anyone who knew they cast all the Taelons with female actors. In the final season, Howlyn asks Zo'or how "he" would handle becoming an Atavus (the original species, from which the Taelons and Jaridians were created), a two-gender race. Naturally, given who plays Zo'or, the Taelon ends up becoming a female Atavus. It's never made clear how the Taelons came to be this trope. The original Taelons were cultists, who drained the rest of the Atavus of their core energy to make themselves The Ageless, turning the rest into the short-lived Jaridians. They were flawed creations and nearly died out, until the Kimera came and corrected their genome (the Taelons thanked them by wiping them out). - The centaurs in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess are all male. They reproduce with human women. - K9 has the Ukkans, an all-female species of librarians. - Dwarfs in Once Upon a Time are all male, and hatch fully grown (and clothed!) from eggs. Fairies are all female, and their origins have not been explored (although given that the All Myths Are True includes Peter Pan, the laughter of babies is a possibility). - The Orville: Moclans have only males. \|\|Turns out they do have females, but they're rare and Moclan society mandates that they be surgically reassigned as males, as Moclans consider the female gender a horrific birth defect that needs to be fixed. Later we learn of a hidden colony world in "Sanctuary" that is settled entirely by Moclan females, to spare them being forcibly "corrected" into males.\|\| - In The Outer Limits (1995) episode "Lithia", the world is now an all-female post-apocalyptic society in which almost all males were wiped off the planet due to war and a virus. They decide to not reintroduce the remaining men into the population because every time they took one out of stasis, it caused conflict in the society because the men pushed limits that the elders were not comfortable with, like building generators or stealing from other towns. Sucks to be male. - Star Trek - The Jem'Hadar on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, genetically engineered by the Founders to serve as soldiers. Weirdly, though they are also cloned, the Vorta are not single-gender. Probably because the Vorta were adapted from a pre-existing species, while the Jem'Hadar seem to have been created out of whole cloth (it might also have something to do with the Vorta being intended as diplomats). Earlier in the series we were introduced to a never again seen Gamma Quadrant species that was awfully similar to the Jem'Hadar, except with more limited versions of their abilities. - Word of God states the Tosk were created by the Dominion as a gift to the race that hunts them. - Star Trek: The Next Generation introduces the J'Naii, who once had two genders but "evolved" into a species with one gender. Some members of their race secretly identify as male or female and face persecution for it. The epsode is a thinly veiled Gay Aesop episode about homosexual acceptance. In spite of the plot, the episode isn't really attempting to comment on gender identity, which had yet to become a widely recognized part of the nascent LGBT+ movement in 1992. A such, it's a bit muddled to modern viewers. - Tribbles. One sex, seemingly born pregnant, according to Dr. McCoy. ("Seems to be a helluva time saver!") - The Taresians of Star Trek: Voyager are a species consisting entirely of females that mate with males of other humanoid species to perpetuate themselves by implanting viruses in them that slowly turn them into male Taresians. As it turns out, the mating process (one male is given up to three females as his wives) is deadly toward males as they die after mating with their wives. Harry Kim was implanted with a virus that made him believe that he was secretly a Taresian, but eventually he and the Voyager crew find out the truth about the Taresians and rescue Kim before he became their next victim. - Tidelands (Netflix): Sirens are all female and they reproduce by mating with human men. Hybrids which result appear human, both male and female. It's left unclear where original sirens come from, though Bill says they've been in the waters forever. - The Twilight Zone (1959): In "Mr. Dingle, the Strong", one Martian notes that one of the three planets on their itinerary after Earth seems particularly interesting, since it contains only females. - Y: The Last Man (2021): With all the men gone, this is what the human race becomes (biologically-they also make a point of mentioning there are plenty of men, just all are trans men) - short lived as it will last. - The subject of whether angels are all male in The Bible has been subject to debate. The Bible itself never says that angels are all male, but this is assumed to be the case due all named angels having male forms of their names (For example, Michael and Gabriel) as well as male pronouns being exclusively used for angels. Some interpret "the sons of God" having children by women as meaning angels who did have sex (and so presumably bodies, unless this involves possessing humans) while some apocrypha (like the Book of Enoch) supports the idea. Another line of thought is that angels are genderless and sexless, because they exist on a different plane than humans and thus cannot be perceived as being the same as us, with this supposedly being supported by the statement that angels in heaven did not marry. That being said, angels being genderless is never indicated in the Bible despite being a popular interpretation. Regardless, this hasn't stopped the depiction of female angels in artwork, and the named archangels themselves have been subject to some gender-bending in media. - Chinese dragons are often depicted as being always male, in contrast to the always female fenghuang (a mythical bird similar to The Phoenix). - Older Than Feudalism: Greek Mythology has many humanoid beings that appear to be of a single sex, such as female harpies, male satyrs, male centaurs, and female nymphs (which are minor deities that can interbreed with human men). This has inspired many of the other examples on this page. In late Classical works there were female centaurs and satyrs, but these are unusual cases; kentaurides (the female centaurs) were barely spoken of in ancient Greek literature and only one example, Hylonome, is mentioned by name, while the satyresses (the female satyrs) are Canon Immigrants from late 15th/early 16th century poems and art, and didn't exist at all in the ancient works. - Originally satyrs were depicted as human men with beards, bald foreheads, pug noses, pointed ears, horses tails, and constant erections. Technically, only the tails and ears set them apart from standard image of a 'wild man'. - The original Greek depiction of the very human Amazon civilization variably implied they replenished their numbers the way most warrior cultures did, from invading villages. And depending on how charitable the writer was, any male children were either returned to be reared in those villages, or killed. - Greek mythology also had the Gargareans, an all-male tribe and Spear Counterpart to the Amazons. The two tribes depended on one another for reproduction. - Most bizarre of all, Hesiod apparently considered humanity to be all male before the gods "cursed" men with the horror of living with women, ruining human society forever. Nope, no misogyny here. - Angels are always male according to The Qur'an. - Some mythologies depict fairies as always female. The human-sized fairies in French fairy tales are always described as female (although similar male beings called genii, wizards, or enchanters appear in some stories, who might be their male counterparts). Several stories feature fairies marrying human princes. - In Western folklore, werewolves are almost always male, as human men tend to get hairy later on in their lives during puberty. - The Valkryies in Norse mythology are all female. - The Medusas of GURPS Banestorm are all female. They mate (carefully) with humans, elves, and orcs' males to produce offspring. The kids are usually medusas, but some are boys with a recessive medusa trait. Word of God says that the world of the Banestorm also has Euryales, a small all-female reptilian race, whose eggs are fertilized by eating their dead; and Sthenos, a much bigger all-female reptilian race, produced by a virus that infects human (or orc or elf) women, and spontaneously transforms them if they are violently injured. - In the paper-and-pencil RPG Castle Falkenstein, Dwarves are, in fact, exclusively male. They mate with the females of other Faerie-kind (some varieties of which are all-female); male offspring are Dwarves, while female offspring are the same kind of Fae as their mother. - Dungeons & Dragons: - All-male satyrs mate with all-female dryads, and all-male fauns mate with all-female nymphs. The two races are close enough to immortal that it doesn't much matter anyway; both can also mate with humans to create Half Human Hybrids. - Hags are all women. They mate with male humans (no mention is made of the various other sentient races) and typically subsequently kill and eat them. A female offspring becomes another Hag, while a male becomes a Hagspawn, large, brutish creatures with no particular talent for magic that the Hags often abandon. - D&D medusas (based on gorgons) aren't this; male medusas are called maedars, and are bald humanoids with an affinity for snakes and an intristic stone to flesh ability. They're also extremely rare. In 4th edition, male medusa are just called that, look just like masculine counterparts to the medusa (still bald, though) and have traded the stone-to-flesh-by-touch power for a gaze attack lifted straight from the mythological basilisk. That is, if they look at you, their gaze is so venomous you die of poisoning if you meet their eye. This is the same edition that states there are male harpies, whereas the previous editions meandered between implying that harpies kidnapped human men to breed with and that they laid eggs parthenogenically. In 5th Edition there are no maedars; male medusae are exactly like the female ones. - There are four species of sphinx, three of which are always male (evil hawk-headed heirocosphinxes, neutral but brutish ram-headed criosphinxes, and good human-headed androsphinxes) and one of which is always female (neutral human-headed gynosphinxes — they're the ones who like riddles). All three male sphinxes can mate with the gynosphinx and have offspring of their own type, but gynosphinxes can only be born of an androsphinx father. For this reason, and the temperament, gynosphinxes prefer androsphinxes. - In 2nd Edition AD&D, the standard version of the minotaur is an all-male race. New minotaurs come into being when a human male is cursed to become one by the gods, or when a minotaur abducts and impregnates a human woman. This only applied to the "default" version, and minotaurs from specific game-settings such as Dragonlance did come in two genders. (4th Edition averts the trope altogether.) - Forgotten Realms: Song dragons are always female, and chiefly reproduce by mating with humans to produce song dragon offspring. - Mystara: Nixies are an all-female race of water-spirits. - Oathbound, a third-party setting, has aurads, who appear male and reproduce via circle-jerking. (No, really.) - Pathfinder: - Xills (a Captain Ersatz of A.E. van Vogt's Ixtl) and thriae (inscrutable seers based off of bees) are all female. The Deep One-inspired skum are all male. - Pathfinder's first edition had a number of all-female monsters, many of whom reproduced by abducting, raping and devouring humanoid males. Second edition vastly cut down on the number of these, with many of these species, including lamias, harpies and mariliths now being explicitly stated as having both male and female members. Hags are some of the only remaining exceptions— they're still exclusively female. - Hags in 1st Edition give birth to all-female changelings, who must be persuaded, tricked or coerced into undergoing a magical ritual to become hags in turn. Well, to be accurate, they have male offspring as well, but A: very rarely, and B: they kill them on birth. 2nd Edition has altered this to have male changelings as well, though they are much less likely to feel the psychic call that urges them to take part in the hag transformation ritual. - Starfinder gives us ramiyels and vilderaros, both of which seem to be hermaphroditic species that exclusively identify as female. (And, in the case of ramiyels, present as female; vilderaros don't really do any recognizable sort of gender presentation.) - While not technically a "race" in the usual sense, Eclipse Phase's combat-tailored Fury biomorphs are almost all female, in order to reduce unnecessary aggression. - Lampshaded in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy: "there are female fauns, and bringing up the myth that fauns and nymphs are males and females of a single species is an excellent way to start a fight." - Transhuman Space features a few Straw Feminist geneticists trying to engineer an all-female human subrace. - Traveller: Hivers don't have biological sexes; all Hivers are able to reproduce with any other. Because of the nature of their Bizarre Alien Reproduction (essentially, any time two Hivers meet, they create an offspring, but only a tiny fraction of those offspring will reach adulthood), gender as a concept is meaningless to them. - Vampire: The Masquerade: - The modern Ahrimanes are all-female by choice, as the one Ahrimane who can create more of her kind isn't interested in changing men. Male Ahrimanes are possible in V20 Dark Ages, but they and their creator find themselves being hunted down. Trans women are accepted, as the Ahrimanes judge by spirit rather than body. - The Daughters of Cacophony were all-female in Revised, again seemingly by choice, with no physical restrictions on Embracing men. Other editions have the bloodline female-dominated, with a few men as members. - Werewolf: The Apocalypse features the Black Furies tribe that is just women Garou whose goals are to protect all women and children. Their characterization ranges from Amazon Brigade to Wife-Basher Basher to Straw Feminist stereotypes. The Black Furies however are not all female through magic or genetic means, but philosophical. Black Furies can still have sons who may as they grow up become Garou themselves, but they are cast out of the Tribe for being male (which is a step up from being ceremonially sacrificed). The only exception are male Metis (children of the forbidden union of two Garou) either to atone for the sin of breaking the Litany or because Metis are by and large even more discriminated against in Garou society. - Games Workshop: - Warhammer 40,000 The Orks in (and possibly the Orcs in Warhammer) seem to be all ridiculously masculine, early non-canonical references to female Orks notwithstanding; however, since Wh40k Orks are actually a hybridization of mammal and fungus that reproduce via spores, attempting to assign a gender to them is an exercise in futility. - Blood Bowl has orc cheerleaders, which are female. Then again, Blood Bowl is essentially an alternate universe. - In case you were wondering, the old fluff was such: On the battlefield, you did have Female Orcs, but they were all in "War Mode", which made them all identical to the males. Once their numbers dropped enough however the Orcs would retreat and go home(or settle in if their conquest was successful), and their sexual characteristics would develop, allowing them to reproduce and replenish their numbers for the next war. - According to one supplement, the Gene-Seedthe stuff that makes Space Marines grow to nine-foot tall poison-drinking, car-lifting supermenis only compatible with male genetics. This is probably due to several of the upgrades being essentially weaponized Testosterone Poisoning. - Theoretically all Tyranids are this, as there is no documentation on exactly how they "reproduce" (The Norn Queens require biomass to create new creatures but doesn't seem to need anything resembling a male to actually spawn them). Things get weird when you realize that, due to their symbiotic weapons, they all technically qualify as females as their weapons spawn and gestate eggs, then spew them out via a muscle spasm. - Chaos Daemons, aside those of Slaanesh, are generally mono-gendered because they're fragment representations of their respective Chaos Gods. This is because rather than being born biologically, they're created via other methods (Khornate and Tzeentchan Daemons are usually created by actions of their respective gods, while Plaguebearers are spawned from the departed souls of people who die from Nurgle's plagues). Slaanesh is a special case because he/she/it and all of his/her/it's daemons tend to switch pronouns depending on who you ask (Eldar exclusively refer to Slaaneshi daemons with female pronouns) and technically Slaanesh is a hermaphrodite. - Averted with the Necrons. While the rank-and-file soldiers have no discernible difference between male and female, there are Dynasties which are led by Phaeraks, such as the Ogdobekh Dynasty, the Rytak Dynasty, and the Maynark Dynasty. - The Lizardmen in Warhammer are all males; they are born from spawning pools throughout Lustria, and were initially created by the Old Ones. Their war with the Skaven began when the Skaven poisoned one city's spawning pools. - XEVOZ gets hit hard with this one — six races, with two more added later on, and every single member is male, or at least lacking any distinct female traits (one race is Energy Beings after all). Unless you consider that ony the drones in an insect colony are male, and the two character types under the Big Creepy-Crawlies race are heavily implied to be soldiers rather than drones. - The Witcher Role Playing Game: The Dryads employ an army entirely composed of naked Action Girl archers. - Optionally defied with Witchers, as the book states plainly that while there is nothing in canon depicting female Witchers, Game Masters are free to allow it if a player wants it. - In BIONICLE, there were different types of the Matoran (and Toa and Turaga) species, grouped by different Elemental Powers. Most elements are male only, including five of the six common elements. The only of the six most common elements to be all-female is water, along with some uncommon elements. The only co-ed element is light. As explained by writer Greg Farshtey, there originally weren't supposed to be any female characters in the series. A LEGO exec recommended marketing the toys to girls as well, so one of the six original tribes was made all-female, and then this setup just stuck, but only for the Matoran species. Justified in that Matoran gender differences are psychological and they weren't originally created to be sentient. They only gained sentience thanks to \|\|Velika's\|\| experiments. - The element of psionics is an interesting case. The first Toa of psionics was male, and messed up horribly in the task assigned to him (he was supposed to pacify the Zyglaks, but threw a temper-tantrum so hard the Zyglaks are now known to be the most vicious animals in the universe), so the Great Beings decided to make every Toa of psionics after him female, as they believed Women Are Wiser (though this notion was disproven in-universe). - In Angels 2200, the Humans have become (almost) entirely female after a mysterious plague wipes out 99.5% of all males on Earth. The few surviving men are carefully protected to ensure the survival of the species.One of the major questions of the series is whether this affected the colonies as well, as it occurred during a major insurrection (and may have been a caused by a biological weapon). - Bardsworth: The faeries are all female and the demons all male. New faeries are born by combining magic and a tree - The Phoenix A species of Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures technically do not have a gender but appear (and refer to themselves) as female, and they don't reproduce conventionally since there are always a certain amount of them at any given time, and their method of "reproduction" is to essentially reincarnate. - Deviants (old continuity): - Amazons have females and hermaphrodites. This is still a psychological gender, since they still consider themselves female regardless. And the floppy bit is retractable. - Enforced with demons. While succubi (Always Female) usually contented themselves with each other and a human man or two, incubi (Always Male) would amass huge harems of succubi and human women, threatening the human population. Eventually, the Enforcers demanded that incubi be magically neutered and allowed to die out, or they'd launch a genocide and take the succubi with them. The protagonist, Jameson, is The Last of His Kind, although he seems to be a product of a Nebulous Evil Organization's pet project. - Fairies seem to be all female, or at least, no male fairies appear on-camera. - Werewolves and vampires have both sexes. - In Dangerously Chloe, the Succubus are a single-gendered species; there is no naturally occurring male equivalent (such as the Incubus). There is a loophole though, Succubus are capable of changing their gender to male, but Chloe explains this is taboo even for demons, as once a Succubus becomes male not only do they become incredibly more dangerous, but it becomes nearly impossible for them to change back (Teddy becomes a male Succubus/sex demon at one point, and it seems in addition to increased power and strength, his sexual appetite becomes insatiable, moreso than even the typical sex demon). - In Draconia Chronicles, dragons technically DO have males, but they left for parts unknown when the Forever War started. New dragons are created by way of cloned, um, seeds applied to an egg. However, Clone Degeneration is in effect, albeit slowed down due to their aeon-long lifespans. Princess Luminia, bred the good old fashioned way (seeds, er, "from the tap" applied to an egg), is more powerful than the Royal Guards, who are all at least a century older than her. - Despite the fact that the only two to appear to far take on the appearance of a man and woman in order to blend in on Earth, the Fiah in The End are revealed to all be of a single sex which reproduces by laying eggs parthenogenically. - Erfworld: Not surprisingly, Charlie's Archons are an all female species. As this world lacks childbirth (or children), and sex appears completely disconnected from procreation, a number of races we've encountered might be all male (or possibly female for some elf variants); we're sure about the archons. - If you count unit classifications as racially distinct (this world runs on tabletop strategy physics), there are known all female-vampire subraces, although there are also regular female vampires. - The Elves of Fetch Quest: Saga of the Twelve Artifacts are in danger of becoming this, especially with factors both genetic and historical. - Played with in Forward: Transhuman humans still have two sexes, but most of the concept of gender is lost due to tech advances making body parts swap-out-able and sexism having been overcome, effectively creating a version of humanity where everyone is nonbinary. - For a very long time, the webcomic Freefall left it apparent that all of the robots (whose enormous population forms a major part of the cast) were considered male by default. Only in strip # 1,403 does the question finally come up. Disappointingly, the explanation is as stereotypical as it is silly: the robots determine themselves to be male or female based on how much talking they do. - The Uryuoms in El Goonish Shive don't normally have genders, per se; any two Uryuoms can form an egg together, and they can use DNA from any living species to fertilize it, including Half Human Hybrids (surprisingly, they aren't The Virus, being relatively benign and somewhat whimsical). Those living on worlds where gendered species are dominant will generally adapt to the local customs; on Earth, they generally choose their own gender at some point, though some have one chosen for them by their parents. - Heart of Keol: All Elyeo are female. \|\|However, sometimes the otherwise Elyeo child of a human and an Elyeo can turn out male...\|\| - Homestuck: Leprechauns are an all-male species who reproduce homosexually. - MSF High has the Legion, who are a race of Green Skinned Space Babes, who reproduce by converting other races into Legion. They used to be similar to the Borg, but now they act nicely, and retain free will. They're still a bit love-crazy, though. - Not So Distant's Albategna (of which the main character Sadachbia is one) are hermaphroditic. In english the pronoun "he" is used to refer to Sadachbia simply as a default, because "it" would be rude and English hasn't used the pronoun "ou" since the 13th century. - Schlock Mercenary: Carbo-silicate amorphs are, for all intents and purposes, a one gender race, and their reproduction process is explained in some detail in the comic, but is an interesting example of how parthenogenesis could produce offspring which differ from the parent. Technically they don't have a gender at all; Sergeant Schlock is referred to as "he", but Schlock is kind of an odd duck, in that he is A) actually kind of violent, and B) not the result of normal amorph reproduction, but the result of a critical failure in the process of amorph-to-amorph combat. - Vampire Cheerleaders: There are no females among the mothmen, which was part of the reason they chose Stephanie to be their new Queen and abducted her. The main reason, however, was because they'd been hunted almost to the point of extinction, by the Reptilians. So they needed her to repopulate their species. - Faeries in The Wolf at Weston Court are all female. - Draconians from Dragon Sanctuary but it's not so cut and dry. Technically they're created male, but since they do not reproduce and their gender serves no biological purpose, they do not relate to the concept and their language is entirely gender-neutral. When interacting with other races, some of them adopt he/him pronouns to make things easier while others exclusively use they/them. - Looming Gaia: - Nymphs have No Biological Sex and cannot reproduce, but they are all created with a feminine appearance and are referred to by she/her pronouns by default. They can be female-to-male transgender or nonbinary, however. - All arachne are female. They reproduce by mating with male silkbeasts. - All skorpius are male. They reproduce by kidnapping women and impregnating them with their venom. - In the Monster Girl Encyclopedia, all demons and monsters are either naturally female or turned female. What the encyclopedia classifies as "Incubi" are simply human men empowered by demonic energy. - Neopets has numerous types of faeries with different elements and alignments, all of which are all female. No explanation is ever given. - And apparently if you try to get into the contests or "Neopian Times" (bi-weekly site newspaper) with a story about a male faerie, it will get rejected solely because of that - the staff doesn't seem to want to endorse any mention of male faeries at all. - The Fairies of the Notting Cove series are all female. - In The Return Succubae are all female regardless of what gender they were as a human. - In the works of the (often) Rule 34 artist flick, orcs are an all-female race after a spell cast by the other non-orc species to save themselves (orcs being Explosive Breeders), being unable to bear male children. In response, the orcs cast their own spell which ensured that orcs would be able to mate with males of said other species, bearing orc women with some characteristics of the other parent. - In the Madness Combat setting, there are no known female Nevadeans. While Nevadeans seem to be largely male-presenting and primarly use masculine pronouns, series creator Krinkels has stated that technically they aren't males and are "their own thing". - All the evil races is Adventures of the Gummi Bears seem to be like that; Carpies, Trolls, and Ogres. If there are female Ogres, for example, they are never on screen. Troggles (Lady Bane's dog-like minions) were apparently male, yet during the Wedding Episode in which she and Toady were going to marry (due to a Love Potion), Troggles are shown in striper outfit dancing for the Ogres, so... they probably are all female. - The Amazonians from the Futurama episode "Amazon Women in the Mood", who ousted their male population under the compulsion of the mysterious Femputer. The other men died from crushed pelvises from Snu-Snu. - The Gnomes in Gravity Falls are all male, at least in their first appearance. They apparently are supposed to have a single female "queen" which the entire tribe is married to and is presumably the mother of the younger generation, as father-son pairs of gnomes exist, but this seems to usually be a kidnapped human woman or girl. However, a single gnome that appears to be female briefly appears (with no dialogue or plot significance) in "The Last Mabelcorn". - My Little Pony actually made more sense without the "big brother ponies," when the ponies appeared to be a one-gender race that reproduces via parthenogenesis, resulting in babies physically identical to their mothers. Instead, this seems to be only the case for unicorns and pegasi, as all the males seen in that episode are Earth ponies. - According to one of the comics, little ponies reproduce by looking in a Magic Mirror and wishing for a baby, hence the identical babies. The real question is, where did the babies without an adult counterpart come from? The "old way," maybe? - In My Little Pony (G3) , with the exception of Twinkle Wish Adventure, the ponies are all female. It is even unknown how the G3 ponies would reproduce since there was no mention of it in the films. The only male character in the films was, of course, Spike the Dragon himself. - Not surprisingly, when Lauren Faust (who watched the older cartoons growing up) came on board for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, she promptly made sure to avert this trope - Equestrian ponies come in both genders and reproduce the way Earth mammals do, no ifs, ands, or magic mirrors. - The Smurfs: - The Smurfs do have some females... three in fact, but at least two of them weren't "natural" members of their species but rather the results of Gargamel creating golem-like beings to infiltrate the Smurfs, and Papa Smurf subsequently making them "real". Smurfs appear to reproduce by stork: - Smurfette was made by Gargamel as a Femme Fatale. - Sassette was made by the three male smurflings \|\|(themselves originally adults)\|\| wanting to make a companion for Smurfette after she complained about being "the only girl".. - The feature film Smurfs: The Lost Village reveals the existence of \|\|a second Smurf tribe made up of all females, neither village aware that the other existed\|\|. - Droids just might have one female droid among the entire cast. The droid is pink, but the series consistently averts the Pink Means Feminine rule. If the droid isn't female, then all robots in this cartoon are male. - Steven Universe: Gems have No Biological Sex and reproduce asexually with machines, though all of them appear female and use "she/her" pronouns. The only exception is Steven, who's a Half-Human Hybrid. The show's supervising director Ian JQ went so far as to confirm this in a Tumblr post by specifically linking to this TV Tropes page as a reference, citing the Namekians from Dragon Ball as another example. Creator Rebecca Sugar has stated that Gems don't have a gender binary and are more or less genderless from their own perspective, but roll with being identified as female because they don't really mind or care. As the series has gone on, some of the types gem types introduced are almost or completely androgynous, and a very small number of them even have male voice actors (Snowflake Obsidian and one of the Pebbles, along with one of Steven's fusion). - The grunts from The Brothers Grunt all appear to be male. - The rolling stock from Thomas & Friends. Passenger cars such as Annie and Clarabel, Henrietta, and Old Slow Coach are always female, while freight cars such as the Troublesome Trucks, the Spiteful Brakevan, Hector the hopper car, and Rocky the repair crane are always male. - While not a concrete example, female Transformers are exceedingly rare. In fact, in some continuities, they don't exist at all. Why a mechanical race even has genders is a frequently-debated topic, as are... how to put this delicately?... other questions related to gender functions. - In the Generation One cartoon, the Transformers were built as civilian and military hardware by the Quintessons for sale to other species. Though the Quints themselves are a one-gender race, they know and understand genders and built their products to appeal to their clients. Another thing is that for the longest time there were only female Autobots, the civilian line. Female Decepticons (the military line) were unheard of, and we only began seeing female villains in the sequel series Beast Wars (Blackarachnia) and Beast Machines (Strika). Both of whom might have been Autobots or their descendants: Blackarachnia was a reprogrammed Maximal (Autobot descendant), and Strika is a revived spark, of unknown original side. - The idea of Transformers being a genderless race seems to have been thrown for a loop by the new Aligned continuity introduced by Hasbro; in which, one of the Thirteen Original Transformers, Solus Prime, is explicitly revealed to have been female (and thus the first female of their race). - The Pixies from Winx Club are a female-only race. They don't need males since they are created by a magical tree in their village. Amore (the pixie of love) got really sad when this was pointed out to her by Jolly. Digit actually makes a few references to male relatives, but no male pixies are ever seen in the show. To make things more confusing, Livy and Jolly are said to be cousins, which makes no sense if pixies just come into existence. - This is made more confusing by the presence of male pixies in their Spin-Off, though it's a different canon. It is also heavily implied that they reproduce...the old-fashioned way...since pixies are shown to have families, including parents, though it also possible that they are only structured into families. - Male fairies are never seen or mentioned, indicating that they can't be fairies. Although, with Early-Installment Weirdness, some male background characters are shown to be able to cast spells in the first season. - It is implied that paladins serve as some male equivalent to the fairies, especially Paladium (who even had wings), but this is never fully confirmed. Likewise, wizards (such as Valtor and the Wizards of the Black Circle) are heavily implied to serve as a male equivalent to witches, but this is also never explained. - Inversely, all the pixies in The Fairly OddParents! are male. - Wander over Yonder: Subverted with the Watchdogs, as only males are shown on-screen, but females do exist according to the creators. - Aphids reproduce mainly by parthenogenesis, and they are indeed born pregnant. Some aphids do have males and sexually reproducing females at certain times, such as in the fall, so that they can produce eggs that can survive through the winter, but for the most part aphids are a one-gender race. - The barramundi is a species of fish where all start as male and slowly change to female throughout their lifecycle (resulting in the vast, vast majority of large fish being female). - The clown fish essentially does the opposite. Fish are either sexually immature males, mature males or females with one mature male and one female living in a given population of clown fish. When a female dies, the mature male becomes the female and an immature male becomes the mature male (the female is always the largest and the mature male the second-largest). This means that by the time Nemo met his father in Finding Nemo, he would have actually been his mother. - Bdelloids. They are all female and lay fully fertilized eggs. - The Brahminy blind snake is the only all-female snake species, reproducing by parthenogenesis. It's also known as the flowerpot snake as it has been accidentally introduced to many areas where it's not native in the soil of imported plants. Being parthenogenetic means it's quickly able to establish itself in new places. - Female stick insects reproduce asexually. Though males do exist in some species, they are extremely rare. - Marmorkrebs, or marbled crayfish, is an all-female crayfish that reproduces through parthenogenesis. It is a captive, mutated form of the slough crayfish, Procambarus fallax. The slough crayfish is an aversion, since it has both males and females. - Mycocepurus smithii, a species of ant, is entirely female, reproducing asexually. - Subverted with the Flabby Whalefish. The males, females, and juveniles were once though to be separate species (Big Nose, Flabby Whalefish, and Tape Tails respectively). - Snails, slugs and worms are all hermaphrodites; they do mate with others in order to reproduce but only one of the two can lay eggs. - Some species of rotifers are apparently 100% female, though it's possible that the males (which tend to be a lot smaller) just haven't been seen yet. Even rotifers that are capable of producing male offspring usually do so only if the puddle they're living in starts to freeze or dry up, as mating with males allows them to produce durable eggs that can endure harsh conditions. When conditions are good, rotifer populations go all-female, and the thin-shelled parthenogenetic eggs they lay contain clones of themselves. - Subverted with hyenas. Medieval scholars thought spotted hyenas were all male and reproduced homosexually. This probably happened because females have enlarged clitorises that look like penises before they give birth for the first time. - The Teiidae family of whiptail lizards includes many species that are either all-female or nearly so. This is made possible due to parthenogenesis induced by sexual stimulation. Yep, hot girl on girl action producing babies. How wicked can nature not be? There are also lizard species that require sperm to reproduce, so they seduce males of other species. - There are some species of fish, such as the Amazon Molly Fish, that are only female, reproducing solely with the males of another certain species (one which has both males and females). These species work this way because either the act or the presence of sperm will stimulate egg production. Genetically, the offspring are the mother's. - There is a species of all male fish. Reproduction is a two-step process for them: first they mate with the females of another closely related species (which has both males and females), producing hybrids that also have both males and females. Purebred males are created when another purebred male mates with a hybrid female. - Tortoiseshell and calico cats are almost exclusively female, due to the requirement of two X chromosomes to make the orange and black coat combo. While males do exist, they are very rare, usually sterile, and are either chimeras (result of two eggs fusing together) or XXY males. - Triggerfish. Males are never born. Instead the biggest, baddest, strongest female undergoes a sex change to male. - While anglerfish have both males and females, in some species the males attach to females and fuse with them until the male is little more than a lump of flesh on the female used to fertilize eggs. - While there are female bees and male bees (drones), as a general rule the bees you'll see are female. Only the queen reproduces in a beehive, and she can choose whether to make sterile female workers (diploid), another queen (diploid individuals fed royal jelly for thirty days), or a drone. Drones are haploid, meaning they were not fertilized, and their sole purpose is to mate with another queen to give her a lifetime's supply of sperm. Once they mate, they are cast out of the hive and die, or die thanks to their genitals being ripped out of them after intercourse. - The wolbachia bacteria (right now confined to arthropods) kills all mature males, turns all other males female and allows females to have virgin births. Many species now have it incorporated into their sex-determination system permanently.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneSexRace
One Riot, One Ranger - TV Tropes Franklin Pierce Holland: We're done for. I asked for a whole company and they've sent me one Ranger. Captain Bill McDonald: Well, there's only one riot, isn't there? — Like most legends , there's a grain of truth surrounded by a lot of story A huge threat has raised its evil head. This threat is a danger to the entire state/province/nation/planet/galactic empire, and has already done a lot of damage. However, the government doesn't do the obvious thing to fight this oncoming hazard (rally the troops, send out the Marines, and use its full resources to destroy the threat once and for all). Instead they send in one man. Now, the man might be a highly trained operative but he is still only one man. note : The ability to create clones or duplicates and summon monsters doesn't count. No one questions the government's choice in sending out one special guy, either. This is not a desperation move, as in Halo, where one guy is all the government has left... no, in cases like this, the choice is usually "send the entire fleet" or "send Joe". If the group that requested help gets one guy, they may be upset they didn't get an army only to find out that their ranger is an army. A common handwave/justification for this trope is that a full military assault would draw unwanted attention to the operation. As in, if we send an army to attack the secret base, the villain will use his superweapon, and game over. If we send Joe then villain won't react so intensely, and we can get past his guard. More realistically, the entire army may be needed to hold the villain's army at bay or slow them down long enough to give Joe time to stop the villain. If Joe makes a habit of succeeding at these missions he'll get a reputation for Doing the Impossible. This trope is most often seen in First-Person Shooters and other Action video games (and often, the number can rise up to two), although it's still regularly seen in movies and television shows. This trope is an extreme application of The Main Characters Do Everything. It is related to It's Up to You and The Only One. It can involve Conservation of Ninjutsu. Contrast Surprisingly Elite Cannon Fodder, which is where a scrappy Ragtag Bunch of Misfits is sent out on an Impossible Task rather than an obvious badass. ## Examples - Happened once in Negima! Magister Negi Magi. What reinforcement should the Mahora mages send against a force that easily defeated the Kyoto Magic Association and is about to release a Demon God? Their entire mage reserve, that would be too slow and too weak to make a difference, as well as leaving Mahora unguarded? No way. Send Evangeline instead. - Hellsing: - Alucard is the most obvious example, but certainly not the only one. That series runneth over with badasses. - Points to Alucard for actually being a One-Man Army. \|\|At full release of his Restraining Bolt system, Alucard can spawn an entire army consisting of everyone he's ever eaten. Suffice to say, that's a lot of minions. And he could already fight hundreds of enemies, other freakishly powerful vampires, and reform from grotesque dismemberment and decapitation.\|\| - Additionally, following a certain incident at the manor, \|\|the Hellsing Organization loses most of its rank and file soldiers and resorts to hiring mercenaries. The mercenaries are also wiped out to the last man by the end of the manga. Basically, if a character in this series isn't a complete badass, he's a Red Shirt.\|\| - In One Piece, a major part of Rob Lucci's backstory involves an instance where pirates invaded a kingdom, taking their several-hundred-man army as hostages, and demanded control. The World Government sent only Rob Lucci, who was only thirteen years old at the time, to deal with the situation. Turns out that was kinda overkill. - Kakuri in Bokko. When the small border city of Ryo is threatened by a large invading army, they send a request for help to the clan of Bokk. They send a single man to save the city. - Fullmetal Alchemist: In the Ishval war Amestrian soldiers had the upper hand on the Ishval troops but the Ishval priests could take down 10 men. The state alchemists, due to their status of living nukes, could wipe out whole areas. The response to trouble with Ishval insurgents was to send in Kimblee. - This is the entire modus operandi of the 3WA in Dirty Pair, where sending just one pair of operatives to deal with even planet-wide issues is standard practice. - Watchmen: - During the police-strike riots, the "One Ranger" was Dr. Manhattan. Yup, that'll definitely do it. But the other heroes meet with mixed success. - Rorschach managed to quell the riots in his neighbourhood just by appearing. - The Comedian suppressed his riot by using prodigious quantities of tear gas. They stopped the riots, just... not very well. - Deconstructed in Echo. Ivy Raven, NSB field agent, contacts her superiors and begins to get guidance from her Washington organization on locating and stopping the Phi Project, the military/corporate experiment that might end life on Earth as we know it. However, Julie Martin wonders why they have not received any support or personnel to help deal with the potentially Apocalyptic scenario. This causes Ivy to begin to think about it and she starts to agree with Julie that this might have some unpleasant implications as to the trustworthiness of her superiors - Judge Dredd: - In one comic after the "Judge Cal" arc, the Judges are trying to figure out how to clean up a district that had become totally lawless. The council wants to send in a small army of Judges. Dredd decides that they need to send a different message and convinces them to just send one. Dredd went into the district with nothing but his gun and a dump truck. He left, totally unharmed, with a dump truck full of criminals. - In fact, the very first Dredd strip portrayed Dredd going against a gang of criminals who had killed a Judge on his own for the same reasons. - Green Lantern. Each of the Universe's designated sectors comprises multiple populated star systems and in some cases whole galaxies. The guardians assign each sector one Lantern. Earth is a special case. Given the number of attempted invasions, supervillains, and cosmic crises it incurs, this one planet in sector 2814 needs up to 4 dedicated lanterns. - A non-combat example: in L.E.G.I.O.N. '89-'94, the organization is racing to evacuate a planet that's doomed to destruction. While they're using many, many spacecraft in the effort, Green Lantern Hal Jordan shows up and asks leader Dox if he can be of any help. Dox says "Can you evacuate a city by yourself?" A few panels later, Hal is flying off with a few thousand people in a ring-bubble. - Done literally in Tex Willer, where the title character, a Texas Ranger, has been sent alone, or at most with up to three companions (his fellow Ranger Kit Carson, his son Kit Willer, and his Navajo friend Tiger Jack) to deal with large gangs (sometimes large enough to effectively control a whole town), potential Indian rebellions, and in one occasion a regiment worth of Confederate nostalgic soldiers. There's a series of very good reasons for this: each of them is a One-Man Army and together they can easily deal with twenty or thirty outlaws, at times the authorities don't realize things are that bad or are sending them to find what exactly is happening before deploying the US Army, and at times the situation just requires a subtle approach (when it comes to potential Indian rebellions Tex has enough prestige and the willingness to listen their grievances to often calm things down or at least reduce it to a few hot-blooded young warriors, and when Tex and Carson were called to deal with the Confederate regiment it was specifically said that it was hidden somewhere in Virginia and sending in the US Army a few short years after The American Civil War would have been an incredibly stupid idea). - Invoked as the concept behind Action Man: rather than a full team of agents like General Colton's, Action Man is a single agent, trained to "physical and mental perfection", who can operate in situations where a larger team can't. - Discussed and deconstructed in ROM (IDW); Space Knights are supposed to avert this by having partners or squads accompanying them, but Rom has insisted on working alone ever since \|\|he had to Mercy Kill his first partner\|\|. This had the effect of making Rom both hyper-competent and The Dreaded, but also means he has no backup at all if something goes wrong. His boss, Orphion, is getting increasingly angry with him for breaking protocol by refusing to get a new partner. - Early in IDW's Transformers comics, the Autobot-Decepticon war has become a sort of cold war fought over thousands of worlds by small groups, due to the adoption of the Infiltration Protocol by the Decepticons. Essentially, small groups of Decepticons are sent to infiltrate a target world, escalate pre-existing tensions, devastate the world's defenses with surgical strikes if necessary, and then call in a Phase-Sixer like Sixshot to raze the world to the ground. When the series begins, Earth is targeted by a small six-bot team led by Starscream with only four Autobots to oppose them. - In Memento Vivere, a Final Fantasy X fanfiction, this is pretty much a canon trope about all Summoners in Spira. - In Worm - Justice For All, Taylor gains several powers that make her stronger when fighting alone against groups. One of them (based around a Sheriff star, no less) is even named after the trope. - Remo Williams, the hero of the Destroyer series of action novels, is a tongue-in-cheek satire of the One-Man Army genre of adventure fiction, but he's also a perfect example of this trope. The authors even lampshades it in several of the novels of the long-running series by having everyone note how ridiculous it is to only send one man out to stop the latest menace. Although this may also be the result of Remo being so top-secret that only the President gets to know that he exists, or at least originally being so. In the first book of the series it's explained that the secret organization CURE is allowed to lie, cheat, and steal, but not to kill. This is because the President is worried about creating an agency that could be a threat to the country. CURE finally persuades the President to agree to one man. When one CURE member laments that one man is not enough, the head of CURE replies that's all they are going to get, so he better be a badass. Luckily for CURE, he is. - Malazan Book of the Fallen: The small island nation of the Seguleh rebuffs missionaries from the Pannion Domin, a massive theocracy practicing cannibalism and rape of dying enemies. After the Pannion Domin declares war on the tiny nation, the Seguleh respond by sending a punitive army... consisting of three brothers. The most dangerous of whom is only considered the third most dangerous Seguleh. - The Ranger's Apprentice novel series actually uses this phrase to describe the kingdom's group of elite archers, spies, and tacticians. It's not exactly wrong, considering this happens several times during the series. In fact, there's a bit of backstory where the page quote is adapted to the (Araluen) Rangers, and the phrase is brought up several times. It's rarely wrong. - In Leo Frankowski's Conrad Stargard series, the Trapped in the Past protagonist is assumed to come from the miraculous (and non-existent) realm of Prester John to help Poland fight the invading Mongols. When asked why they'd only send one man, Conrad quips that there's only one invasion. - Discworld: - Detritus, a troll employed in the city watch, shows up to escalating situations with a crossbow/ballista that fires a bundle of arrows that, due to the power, shatter and turn into shrapnel. It doesn't take out doors, it takes out walls. Needless to say, Vimes calls on Detritus quite often, usually as just a threat to drive his message home. Usually. - The wizards at the Unseen University tap Rincewind several times in the same way, but mostly because they don't want to bother with it themselves. - 71-Hour Ahmed has a camel, a sword and a huge country to \|\|police.\|\| He stays alive through his wits and a fearsome reputation. He is also expected, and manages, to solve the mystery behind his missing employer by himself. - Northworld: The Consensus sent a fleet to investigate the disappearance of the newly colonized planet Northworld. The fleet vanished too, so they sent another one, and then a third when the second was lost — and of course, number three disappeared as well. And then they got serious — and sent Nils Hansen, a police special operations officer. Subverted, because as of the end of the trilogy, he hasn't returned to the Consensus either. However, he has become a god. - Referenced in Friday after a riot started by a previously unknown pseudo-religious sect attacking Scientologists and Hari Krishnas in an airport. Friday herself mentions it took almost as many Mounties as there were rioters to stop it, as opposed to the usual ratio of One riot: One Mountie. - Space Cadet: Girard Burke is annoyed when the Space Patrol doesn't send a warship to put down the 'native uprising', only one rocketship which crashes injuring its commanding officer and leaving the space cadets to handle the situation. It turns out there is no native uprising, just a crisis caused by Girard needlessly antagonising the Venusians which is solved through diplomacy by the cadets, not gunfire. - In Fury Born has the principle that one company of the Imperial Cadre is enough to handle most situations. The number of exceptions to this rule can be counted on both hands with fingers left over. Near the end of the book, one character has a brief Oh, Crap! moment on the villain's behalf when he learns that the Cadre is planning to send a full battalion of drop commandos in after them. - Downplayed somewhat but still played straight in The Eagle of the Ninth, as the protagonist is travelling in disguise and under a cover identity. - Going back a bit, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn uses the trope: a lone man shames a lynch mob into disbanding. - In The Ungoverned, reinforcements are sent to deal with an invasion by the Republic of New Mexico. Urr... make that "reinforcement", singular. One man. Wil Brierson. To be fair, the request for help had been vague about what kind of help was needed, and Wil calls for reinforcements as soon as he finds out what the problem is — but he still solves the problem by himself before the reinforcements arrive. - In The Demon Breed, 'one invasion/one Guardian' is the Parahuans' conclusion from their debacle on Nandy-Cline. One young, female Guardian at that. "Guardians" being the class of superhumans who the Parahuans believe to be the secret rulers of the Federation. But other aliens think — correctly — that the ratio is even worse: one invasion / two ordinary humans, who are merely somewhat better than the average. Evidently the Guardians had considered it unnecessary to employ one of their more formidable members to dispose of the invasion forces; and evidently their judgement was sound. - The rather poetic introduction to the novelization of Revenge of the Sith claims that as adults across the Republic watch in fear as the beloved Palpatine is captured by the enemy, their children comfort them, because the great Anakin and Obi-Wan will be there any minute to set things right. They're correct. A pair of starfighters. Jedi starfighters. Only two. Two is enough. Two is enough because the adults are wrong, and their younglings are right. Though this is the end of the age of heroes, it has saved its best for last. - In The Golden Oecumene, Marshal-General Atkins Vingt-et-un is the entire military. Sometimes this takes the form of Me's a Crowd, but he also accomplishes feats like easily disabling an opponent in Powered Armor using just the right amount of force while literally naked. (The nanites in his blood help, but it's still awesome.) - The Lone Wolf gamebooks initially justify this trope by the titular hero being the last Kai Lord in existence. However, non-magical soldiers still pose a significant threat to him, so you have to wonder why the king never assigns him any help beyond one or two guides to whatever territory Lone Wolf is infiltrating. (Perhaps because the Rule of Drama dictates that those guides, however skilled, inevitably die.) - The Caverns of Kalte adventure justifies the trope fully: the snowlands are simply too distant from Sommerlund for a group of people to get there in time. To say nothing of how such a group would find or bring enough food there- Lone Wolf employs two sleds to carry all his supplies, and even those are frequently lost to predators and unstable terrain. Besides, Lone Wolf always (canonically) succeeds however outnumbered he is, so why overcomplicate the mission by bringing in backup? - Doctor Who: - The Doctor is called an army by River in "The Time of Angels". Father Octavian: You promised me an army. River Song: I promised you the equivalent of an army. - In fact, this could be considered the Doctor's Modus Operandi, as lampshaded by Rory Williams in "Asylum of the Daleks". The Doctor: You're going to fire me at a planet? That's your plan? I get fired at a planet and expected to fix it? Rory: In fairness, that is slightly your M.O. The Doctor: Don't be fair to the Daleks when they're firing me at a planet! - 24 skirts this trope. Even though Jack Bauer is backed by the CTU and an entire brigade of government agents that ought to be out there backing him up, he somehow always ends up going it alone, sometimes at the direction of his superiors. Eventually, the powers that be begin to realize both how good he is, and the fact that he can be trusted — sometimes your own people are Starscreamy and The Mole is somewhere in CTU. After a certain point, this once-a-season saying joins the series' Catchphrase list: "Get me Jack Bauer." - The Pilot Movie of Walker, Texas Ranger was called "One Riot, One Ranger." However, in practice, Walker's almost always backed up by Trivette, and for larger operations a full assortment of law enforcement units helps out. However, there are quite a few episodes where he does it alone because no one but Chuck Norris can do it. - This trope is pretty much the entire justification for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Although the show could be considered a subversion, as it's often pointed out that the only reason Buffy has been the most successful and long-lived Slayer is that she's not alone. By working with a team, she is much more powerful than just a lone Slayer. The Watcher's Council (before Buffy) seemed to employ a "We Have Reserves" concept. It didn't matter if a slayer died in an impossible mission, the next one would succeed. Or the one after that. - Babylon 5: - This trope serves as the philosophy for the Rangers. It doesn't always work, and they have back-up, but it's mentioned in one spin-off. "One crisis, one ranger." - Especially earlier in the series, the Rangers specialize in being discreet, as evidenced by the fact that they show up mixed in with the extras in several episodes of the show before they are actually introduced. At least one main character whose job it is to be Properly Paranoid turns his head to pay attention to one of them before he is told about their existence. Another character who insists on knowing everything that happens on her station, reveals that she knows everything about them already just as The Captain is about to brief her on their existence. - Later in the series, they are able to send lone Rangers (or lone White Stars, the Rangers' ship of choice) to deal with problems, because everybody knows by then that they represent The Alliance. On occasion, it still doesn't help. - Star Trek: - As shown in the later seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the rogue intelligence agency Section 31 operates in this manner. This is justified because the organization is implied to only be a small group of rogue agents who are reliant on using legitimate agencies of the Federation government to do any sort of heavy lifting. However, even the single agent that's encountered by the DS9 crew is able to turn the tide of a galactic war simply through the use of a Batman Gambit. - Starfleet itself tended to operate this way. Most Federation starships were sent out alone to explore the galaxy and deal with whatever crisis they happened to come across, the various Enterprise ships being the prime examples. Eventually, after encountering such powerful enemies as the Borg and the Dominion, they had to discontinue this and instead began operating in fleet-sized groups. - In the 1986 series Shaka Zulu, the British Colonial Office is faced with the prospect that the Zulu army sweeping across Southern Africa may continue on to the Cape Colony. Various solutions to defend the Colony are rejected — mercenaries are unreliable, raising troops in Britain will take too long, taking experienced troops from India risks losing that colony as well. Lord Bathurst comes up with the idea of sending just one man, Francis Farewell (though he does have several men with him), to arrange trade talks with the hope of deliberately obfuscating the situation and thus play for time. - In Marty Robbin's "Big Iron", a town that has been run by an outlaw that has killed 20 men who came to arrest him is finally saved by a single Arizona Ranger. - Steve Earle's "Justice in Ontario": It was the local police who made the call. They said "Send us Corporal Terry Hall." - "Snoopy's Christmas" by The Royal Guardsmen: The news had come out in the First World War The bloody Red Baron was flying once more The Allied command ignored all of its men And called on Snoopy to do it again. - Tales of the Texas Rangers plays this trope straight most of the time. Ranger Pearson normally works with the local authorities, but he's usually the only ranger assigned to the case. - This trope is name-dropped in Deadlands, in the description of the Texas Ranger archetype. That said, it's ultimately subverted because the Texas Rangers frequently hire, ahem, troubleshooters. Like, say, the posse. Generally speaking, operating alone in Deadlands is a bad idea. Rangers may be brave, hombre, but they ain't stupid. - Warhammer 40,000: - Dan Abnett's novel Brothers of the Snake starts this way — the primitive people of a backwater planet under attack by the Dark Eldar invoke an ancient pact they made with the Iron Snakes Space Marines, who respond by sending a single Marine and a dog. This one Marine is enough to do the job. This is not that unusual to the setting either: in the Great Crusade, at one point a single squad of Iron Warriors Astartes was left as a garrison on a world with several million inhabitants. A saying goes in this setting that a mere squad of five Marines are enough to conquer an entire city. - Also used in one of the Last Chancers novels, where the titular team is sent in to destroy a hive city to contain a Genestealer outbreak. The "mass assault vs. single infiltration" justification is used explicitly. - In the backstory, above even the Space Marines you have the Adeptus Custodes, the Emperor of Mankind's personal bodyguard. While how powerful they are tends to vary, they're generally described as "being to a Space Marine what a Space Marine is to a regular human". This is shown when they're finally introduced as a playable faction in the game itself: a "regular" Custodes is about as tough as an Ork Warboss, and as a reminder, the Orks are a race that lives by Asskicking Leads to Leadership. - Dungeons & Dragons swears by One Dungeon, One Party. Frequently, major threats to local communities - goblin warrens, crypts overrun with the undead, demonic portals - are sorted out by those communities posting an Adventurers Wanted ad and then offering whatever Ragtag Bunch of Misfits show up in response a sack of cash if they solve the problem. Some settings try and justify it further; Eberron, for example, states that the player characters are genuinely exceptional individuals, so a group of four people being able to take on an entire village full of Dragon Below cultists and emerge slightly battered but otherwise intact is just one of the perks of being that damn good. - Sniper Elite, its reboots and its sequels are pretty much this combined with Sniping Mission. Karl Fairburne, all by his lonesome, is tasked with helping to destroy the Nazi War Machine, its many wonderweapons, and even prevent the Soviets from getting them. - Halo: - Spartans are treated more as tactical weapons than normal soldiers. This is lampshaded in Halo 2 by a comment from one of the marine superiors. - The Arbiter is the Covenant's version of the trope. Because of the lack of honour involved, they tend to use it as a Uriah Gambit. - Mass Effect: - The series is all about this trope. There's even a pretty well-supported in-game explanation for it, too. The Citadel Council can't send their battlefleet to stop The Dragon because it would spark a galaxy-wide war, so they hand the problem over to their One-Man Army. They don't even provide a ship and crew, the Alliance has to step in and give Shepard their new Super Prototype stealth frigate. - All Spectres are One Rangers — literally; you don't get selected unless you're that sort of omnicompetent badass and leader of men. The Council was savvy enough to stay on the lookout for those sort of people, give them a special designation, and use them appropriately. As force responses go, sending a single Spectre is considered one step below an entire warfleet. - On the other hand, up until the third game, other than Shepard him/herself every Spectre encountered was either actively working against the council, corrupt, or dead in short order. The council gives them no oversight whatsoever, and would actively prefer not knowing what they're up to. - Also, this is deconstructed and subverted in the case of most Spectres. Shepard in the first game has an entire ship and crew at his/her command, including a team of six badasses who could each be a Spectre with a little training, along with several independent weapons developers contracting to provide them with arms and armor. By the end of the game, Shepard will likely be a millionaire with an armory of the galaxy's most advanced weaponry and five One-Person Armies behind him. \|\|All five of them proceed to become some of the galaxy's most influential figures as well.\|\| Saren, meanwhile, has built himself into a major corporate power player via his investments in Binary Helix and has his own private hideouts on obscure worlds and a small army of mercenaries he regularly hires. And this was before he allied with the geth. - Generally speaking, each race has their own equivalent to this trope. The salarians have the Special Tasks Group, which served as the inspiration for the Spectres. Even in the highly centralized and bureaucratized salarian society, the STG is highly independent. The asari have their Huntresses, who tend to operate in small teams, and the Justicars, who operate alone and have liberty to eliminate anyone who stands between them and their mission (including other asari authorities). For their part, the human Systems Alliance has the N7 program, which produces highly trained and skilled operatives capable of operating in a wide variety of hostile environments note : Given the perspective of the games, the N7 program gets the most detail: members of the N (special forces) program are chosen by invitation only, and there're 7 levels to the program. Just being chosen for the program is an honor in the Systems Alliance military, and every level you pass is more prestigious. N6 operatives that wash out are still entirely capable of being one-person armies, and N1 inductees are already elite (the example we see in the games, James Vega, is already an experienced and decorated soldier when he's introduced), but only those that complete the entire program get the privilege of letting people know that they had anything to do with the training program, by putting the N7 badge on their armor and dress uniforms. The only person in the first three games with that honor is Shepard. That said, Anderson was the first graduate of the class, Lee Riley and Susan Rizzi (off duty) appear in 3, Kai Leng was a N7 before being dishonorably discharged, and Pathfinder Ryder, the father of the protagonist of Andromeda, was an N7 that retired to pursue a scientific career. Hackett meanwhile, is implied to have completed the program before becoming an Admiral.. - FreeSpace and its sequel were somewhat notable for making the protagonist just a wheel in the cog of the army machine, particularly toward the end of the sequel, where you don't really win anymore... you just hope to survive. It speaks volumes about this trope that the games were actually criticized for detaching the player from the plot this way; people want to be the Guy. Not that one. - Mobius One from Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies had well proven his One Man Air Force credentials, so in the Operation Katina of Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, when a resurgent Erusean military tries to attack, he alone (and AWACS SkyEye, but he never fires a shot and so doesn't count) is sent to fight them off. - Likewise in the penultimate level of Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, the plan is basically for Galm One and PJ to perform an Airstrike Impossible while everyone else goes high and draws the enemy's fire away from them. - Lampshaded in Half-Life 2 when Breen notes Gordon Freeman's tendency to plow through enemy forces like a weedwhacker. At the moment of his apparent defeat, he reveals he's aware that somebody wanted Gordon to be there, and to do what he did. Whether this trope actually applies is still an open question. Yes, the G-Man sent Gordon in alone to take down the Combine (presumably), but his perspective and resources are, well... unusual, to say the least. - Metal Gear: - Subverted in Metal Gear. Solid Snake is sent in alone \|\|purposely\|\| to take down Outer Heaven because \|\|Big Boss is also the enemy commander, and wants Snake to fail\|\|. Played straight with Grey Fox. - Played straight in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Snake is sent in solo because at this point, he's well-known for simply being a badass on the level of Grey Fox. - Subverted in Metal Gear Solid; at first, it may seem like the government's putting a lot of faith in Snake's abilities, but in the end, it's revealed that \|\|the entire point of sending him was to spread a biological weapon and kill everyone so that they can recover the Metal Gear they stole and its test data intact\|\|. - Justified in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, in which a Navy SEAL team is sent into Big Shell and promptly slaughtered by one of the villains. \|\|Even worse, the SEAL team was sent in as a decoy, so that Raiden would be able to infiltrate undetected. High Command didn't just know that the SEALs were in danger, they purposely sent them to their deaths.\|\| - Also justified in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, as the U.S. government can't risk sending in troops \|\|to stop Volgin and kill the Boss\|\| in order to avoid starting a war with the Soviet Union. - Also done in the above-mentioned realistic manner in the final act of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots — multiple people are sent onto \|\|Outer Haven\|\| for the final battle, but overall, the job of everyone other than Snake is to make sure he and the Metal Gear Mk III get where they need to go and keep any trouble that pops up off their backs. - Averted in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Venom Snake is frequently the only operative on the ground during a mission, but he's backed up by an entirely paramilitary organization that he built, including intel, support, and artillery teams. He also has the option of bringing a "buddy" with him, whether it's his trusty horse, a wolf-dog, or \|\|an enemy sniper who converted to his cause and fell in love with him\|\|. - Commandos in Command & Conquer, especially since later games restrict you to having a single one deployed at a time. Made quite explicit in the First-Person Shooter Command & Conquer: Renegade, in which almost every case of Havoc actually getting backup is just existing GDI forces who happen to be deployed in the area in question; even the first mission is Havoc being called in to rescue a larger recon group that gets ambushed while looking for a Nod base. The second mission, however, plays with this, in that when a friendly base is overrun by Nod troops, the actual plan is to wait several hours for reinforcements to arrive to help them; Havoc ends up doing his One-Man Army thing right away only because he explicitly ignores orders when the Nod forces anger him by rounding up the survivors and nearby civilians for torture and brainwashing. - This fits Samus Aran of Metroid to a T. - The first game is a subversion, in that the Galactic Federation already tried and failed a large-scale attack, so in desperation, they send a lone bounty hunter. After she utterly annihilates everything, standard procedure becomes "Send Samus first." - The same plot point applies in Metroid II: Return of Samus and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes; Samus is sent in after a team of her Federation predecessors didn't return. - Not an exaggeration. In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, the Federation is savvy enough to hold off its entire space armada while Samus forges ahead on her own twice: \|\|the Space Pirate Homeworld first and then Phaaze immediately afterward\|\|. Even after the Federation's badass upgrade, they're not stupid. Prime 3 actually takes this a step further: Samus is sent to investigate, by herself, two planets that have had a Leviathan impact, and the Space Pirate homeworld. While Samus spent a month in a coma, the Federation sent her fellow hunters on solo missions to each location, figuring that their hard-earned statuses as people of mass destruction would mean they could get the job done. When contact is lost with them, the Federation sends Samus to find out what happened to each of them. - Metroid: Other M then averts this by having Samus respond to a distress signal that the Federation also responds to by sending The Squad. \|\|Of whom all but one die.\|\| - Metroid: Samus Returns features a non-Samus example: \|\|Ridley is sent by himself to SR-388 to fight Samus and retrieve another Metroid specimen for the Space Pirates. Implicitly this means him taking out the Ceres station at the beginning of Super Metroid is another example, considering he's the only enemy Samus encounters before landing on Zebes.\|\| - Urban Chaos: Riot Response. It's you, and, for the beginning mission, your superior. For the rest of the game, you get you, a riot shield, a gun, and if you're lucky, backup in the form of a beat cop, firefighter, or EMT. Sadly, the "backup" you're speaking of isn't backup. They're guys who you rescued and are escorting to a safe location, and until then, they support you. - Geneforge 4 & 5, being set during an open war between the Shapers and the rebellion, repeatedly make the point that a skilled Shaper in the right place is effectively an army. In 4, one Shaper is perfectly capable of securing a mountain pass all by himself, and the five infiltrators sent into a rebel-occupied province soon have the rebellion in disarray. This is in large part because Shapers shape, crafting mons from vats of goo or, in a pinch, nothing but sheer willpower. A Shaper is a One-Man Army because one man can create a small army of fire-breathing lizards. Or acidic zombies. Or telepathic helium-filled squid things. This is central to the plot of the series and how the Shapers try to maintain their rule. But still true when the Shaper sent isn't a shaper by class. Agents operate alone but one agent may still be considered a sufficient response to a problem. - The opening sequence of Mega Man X: Command Mission sees three Hunters being dispatched to quell a rebellion on a Floating Continent. While their mission is explicitly stated to be infiltration, with the full-scale assault as plan B, the distinction rapidly fades as the game progresses. Granted, they sent X and Zero in, both of whom are known for wiping out small armies on their own. - Serious Sam: In keeping with its status as an old school style FPS, Sam "Serious" Stone is the only agent they send through time to recover the Plot Coupons, shoot his way through entire armies (literally, it's what the "Serious Engine" was designed for) and use them to kill the Big Bad. It's All There in the Manual that the time-travel device only allows for one person to be sent through (except when you play co-op), but still. \|\|And then the prequel retcons this to be that Sam is the only person still around to use the device at all, traveling through it right before an asteroid hits and outright destroys the planet.\|\| - The Elder Scrolls: - Morrowind: - The Player Character, in order to fulfill the Nerevarine Prophesy, needs to be named the "Hortator" of the three Dunmeri Great Houses with holdings on Vvardenfell. A Hortator is a traditional Dunmer war-leader, implied to typically lead entire armies into battle. However, circumstances are such here that the Nerevarine will need to go alone into Red Mountain to face Dagoth Ur. Primarily, \|\|because he/she has been rendered immune to all disease (another requirement to meet the prophecy) while anyone he/she could bring along would risk catching a Blight disease, or worse, the Corprus Disease\|\|. - The Buoyant Armigers are the Tribunal Temple's elite special forces, generally hand-picked by Vivec himself. In the few instances we get to see or hear about them in action in the game, they almost exclusively work alone. One exception is a Fighter's Guild quest which has you aid a rookie Buoyant Armiger in clearing out a necromancer's den. - In Oblivion, you get kind of a reputation for being able to walk into Oblivion Gates and single-handedly killing the Daedra residing there. By the time the Oblivion Crisis goes into full force, the counts and countesses send you to deal with Oblivion Gates near their cities, rather than their professionally trained armies. When a local order of knights enters an Oblivion Gate to fight off the Daedra instead of waiting for you, it is actually portrayed as detrimental. - In Skyrim this is how you get used by the Civil War factions. Simply joining the Empire faction requires proving you can do this: One fort of bandits, one dragonborn. You answer to General Tullius, who serves as this role on an international scale. He is a "troubleshooter" for the Empire and seems to have arrived with a small force and recruited most of his men while in Skyrim. - The backstory of Cave Story. An Artifact of Doom, granting its wearer insane magic powers, resides on an island bristling with dangerous wildlife. Several nations want this artifact, so they send entire squadrons of war robots to retrieve it and kill anything in the way. Meanwhile, some other, unknown party wants to prevent the artifact from falling into the wrong hands—opting for quality over quantity, they send a pair of robots to destroy the artifact. Said pair of 'bots succeed (eventually), while the army robots all get destroyed. note : In the Aeon Genesis translation, at least. The Nicalis translation implies the opposite, that Miakid gaining the Crown would have been a success for the army of killer robots if any of the robots were actually left. - The Crusader games have the Silencer sent in on missions it would normally take an entire team of rebels to pull off. He's not entirely alone, with fellow Rebels doing troubleshooting from the base or taking out security measures not reachable from the game map, but you get the impression if they hadn't sent him for the meat of the mission they'd have to send at least five or six guys. In the final mission of the first game, he's supposed to command a squad of rebels, but due to complications, they don't show up. He of course pulls it off anyway. - Vagrant Story presents us the sole player character, Ashley Riot, member of the Riskbreakers, Valendia's elite force trained to handle high-risk black-ops missions by their lonesome, thus his suspicions over fellow Riskbreaker Jan Rosencrantz's offer of his assistance. In fact, his credo is... "Reinforcements? I am * the reinforcements."* - Dawn of War II: The recruiting worlds of the Blood Ravens are under attack from a huge Ork horde. The defenders are Davian Thule, about 5 squads of Space Marines and 30 or so raw initiates. They need reinforcements. They get one guy. It's enough. - Fallout: - The backstory for the games explains that Power-Armored soldiers weren't just good at fighting the Chinese, but also in subduing riots, with one being enough to pacify a small American town. - NCR Rangers: - Likewise, the NCR often takes a One Riot One Ranger approach in its use of its NCR Rangers. Given that a single Veteran Ranger is among the toughest humans in the game, barring Living Legend badasses like Lanius or Joshua Graham, this is quite justified. - Deconstructed in another example. While exploring Vault 3, you run into a Ranger sent to kill the fiends there. After killing a few dozen sneaking around, he gets careless and suffers a leg wound from a trap, and while he still gets out fine (albeit with a leg needing treatment), Colonel Hsu will state that sending him alone was a bad idea (and that Rangers succeed often enough to make people forget they're still only human). - Rangers are generally divided into three groups: Civilian, Patrol, and Veteran. All three have proven that they are tougher than Deathclaws and stealthier than shadows with Stealth Boys. While still only human, the gap between patrol Rangers and veterans is like the gap between a rocket launcher and a tactical nuke (with the caveat of the Badass Longcoat Rangers being tougher to scare than one). - The player develops this reputation throughout Fallout: New Vegas: They may not be Rangers, and they may not technically be associated with any particular group, but that doesn't mean that people won't recognize the Courier's badass status. Develop a high enough reputation with a particular group (especially the NCR), and rather than offering your services for hire, they'll beg you to help them out with their problems. - Ulysses, being a counterpart to the Courier, does a great many things on his own in his service to Caesar's Legion as the best of his Frumentarii. Without giving away too much of the plot, let's just say that a big chunk of the plot elements, especially in the DLC, are the Courier reacting to the events that Ulysses set in motion. - Other Frumentarii are theoretically this, but in practice, Caesar knows that sending them out individually is a great way to get them killed thanks to their inferior equipment. For covert rendezvous, however, they're perfect. - Deus Ex Universe: - The first mission in Deus Ex. NSF terrorists have raided and set up a command post on Liberty Island, the location of UNATCO Headquarters. There are UNATCO troops and security bots on the island, but they are ordered to pull back and let the protagonist, JC Denton, handle the situation as a test of his abilities. - Adam Jensen of the prequel Deus Ex: Human Revolution is very much this, but isn't actually employed to be one in the first place; he's just the security chief of Sarif Industries. Through the first game, he gains a reputation for being a One Ranger. - In each game of the Time Crisis series, one or two (for co-op play) agents with pistols are sent to fight wave after wave of terrorists and solve whatever time-sensitive crisis is threatening the world that week. Of special note is the first game, where Richard Miller is said to be the only agent with no partner due to no one else in the VSSE being able to perform at his level. - The 1995 Space Fighter sim Star Rangers refers to this trope by name in the manual when discussing the proud history of the eponymous organization. As a Star Ranger, the representative of law and order on the final frontier, it is your job to single-handedly battle entire fleets of Space Pirates, including squadrons of fighters and giant capital ships, with your lone small starfighter, often jumping from one side of the (very large) playing area to another in moments to stop attacks from multiple directions. You can also choose to fly with a single AI-controlled wingmate, however — but given the state of game AI at the time, they weren't much help. - Max Payne 3: Good cop Da Silva knows that the bad guys will pull a He Knows Too Much on him and his family if he digs too deep. Max, on the other hand, can take care of himself, and so the latter gets the job of dealing with them. Favela full of violent Gangbangers? Send Max. Derelict hotel defended by paramilitaries? Send Max. Do an All Your Base Are Belong to Us on \|\|the Dirty Cops\|\|? Send Max! - Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine: Similar to the literary 40K example above, three Ultramarines are sent to Forge World Graia to stop the Ork invasion, or at least slow it down long enough for reinforcements to arrive. Then the Forces of Chaos show up with Chaos Space Marines in tow. While it's played straight in gameplay, it's averted in the story; there's an entire strike cruiser full of Ultramarines trying to land, and a second force of Blood Ravens shows up to help out as well. Captain Titus is simply the point man, operating ahead of his company. - XCOM: Enemy Unknown: The "Lone Wolf" achievement, earned by clearing a UFO Crash Site using a single soldier, on either Classic or Impossible difficulty levels. - Star Wars: - In the Dark Forces Saga, Kyle Katarn, and later Jaden Korr, will almost always be sent in alone to deal with whatever is threatening the Rebel Alliance/New Republic. For Jaden, the missions start off proportionate, apprentice-sized jobs for the apprentice, though he still ends up doing almost all of the work entirely on his own, either by happening to handle the part that involves all the combat when he and Kyle split up (the two missions to Tatooine) or because Kyle simply never shows up (the mission to Bakura), with the only mission of the first set where Kyle visibly does nearly as much as Jaden being the one on Corellia, where he provides air support. By the time they're upgraded to a full Jedi Knight, it's more "Here's a problem we'd normally send a small army for, have at it, Jaden." - One mission in Jedi Academy invokes this, with Wedge Antilles deliberately devising a plan for a single ground soldier, with Wedge giving fighter/bomber support, to single-handedly take over an Imperial tibanna gas platform. Naturally, that single ground soldier needs to be a Jedi. - Four thousand years previously, in Knights of the Old Republic, the player character of the first game is sent out in a stolen freighter with a handful of allies because you are the only one with both leadership skills and knowledge of where the Star Maps are \|\|because you're the Big Bad's former boss, only amnesiac\|\|, and sending the Republic fleet is not viable because a) the Big Bad's fleet is still flying around blowing things up, and b) several of the locations — especially Korriban and Manaan — are not viable targets due to things like Sith academies or being steadfastly neutral producers of medical supplies. Of course, in the Dark Side ending, this backfires badly on the Republic. - B.J. Blazkowicz of the Wolfenstein series is generally this in all his missions in Wolfenstein 3-D and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. In the 2009 game, he ranges between this and It's Up to You in situations where the Kreisau Circle is fighting alongside him. - Resident Evil: - One or two agents with occasional air support is considered an appropriate response to anything less than a country-sized biohazard. It isn't until 2009, chronologically, that we see the B.S.A.A. even has six-man teams. There is some justification that sending more, less-well-prepared soldiers against zombies just makes more zombies, and that the agents are usually there to investigate and possibly help survivors before the area is sanitized. - Resident Evil 4 is a prime example of this. Biohazards are not expected at all. The threat was simply that the President's daughter has gone missing. You'd think this'd cause a massive investigation across the world but instead they just send the one guy, Leon, armed with only a handgun, a knife, and a single photograph of the president's daughter into a backwater country seemingly just to ask if anyone has seen her around. He doesn't even speak their language. He gets the job he was sent in for done and takes down an entire biohazardous terrorist organization to the point there's nothing left of them except samples of their parasite. - A literal example in Metro 2033; when Exhibition Station is under attack by the Dark Ones, the Order sends one Ranger— Hunter— to deal with it. Justified because the Order is a very small fighting force, numbering only about a hundred or so, and Moscow is the biggest city in Europe. Naturally, they can only muster small squads for big threats, or single operatives if an outlying station like Exhibition needs help. - In EVE Online, the Capsuleers are this to any faction that employs their services for Security Missions. By the time a Capsuleer reaches Level 4 missions, said missions involve one lone Capsuleer up against entire fleets of dozens of NPC ships with at least half a dozen battleships on average, the biggest ships in EVE Online barring capital ships. With the appropriate ship and fittings, one Capsuleer can solo these fleets on their own. - The Security Officer in Marathon is an odd example. He usually has some form of backup, but they might as well not be there, considering he usually eliminates the entire enemy force nigh-singlehandedly, as well as does basically all of the heavy lifting of the operation. - In the opening to DOOM Eternal, King Novik's narration explicitly says that against the evil of demon and man, only the Doom Slayer will be sent. He's enough. - The earliest iterations of the MechWarrior games— 2 and 3 in particular—are fond of sending out the player out solo on missions which in the lore would be better suited to larger formations of Humongous Mecha. It is no exaggeration that the average mission will pit you against three to five times your own tonnage in enemy units, and that some missions will bump that as far as ten times your tonnage. They expect you to do this on the regular, and you will have to succeed if you want to finish the game. - In Kid Icarus: Uprising, Palutena sends Pit to scenes where the Underworld Army and Forces of Nature have sent hordes. Pit justifies this during a conversation with Magnus, pointing out that the Centurions get revived when they die, have no incentive to toughen up, and thus aren't motivated to get stronger; Pit, who is motivated to get stronger, is more capable than nigh on the entire Centurion Army combined. - In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Twilight and her friends are the collective Ranger by virtue of owning The Elements Of Harmony. When Nightmare Moon is about to return, Celestia sends Twilight to make friends and defeat her. - In Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, the good guys are given the choice between a mass assault vs. sending in one ship with only a few people. The latter is ultimately chosen, on the reasoning that it would be more stealthy. - This trope was the promotional Tagline for Bravestarr. Occasionally applied to one of its Space Western brothers, too. Some Galaxy Rangers episodes only had a single one of the main characters present (the Supertrooper duology, featuring The Lancer Shane Gooseman, are the most prominent examples), and were usually split into teams of two. - In 414BC the city-state of Syracuse (on Sicily) was getting monstered by an Athenian invasion force of about 7,300 soldiers and 134 warships. Syracuse appealed for help to Sparta, which sent one man to lead the resistance: Gylippus. The Athenians sent another 5,000 troops and seventy ships. Gylippus won. Not a single member of the Athenian force escaped alive (to Gylippus' frustration, as he wanted to take war captives back to Sparta). - Bernardo de Gálvez earned a motto with this trope after he had outstanding participation in The American Revolution with little support from the rest of the Spanish Empire: yo solo ("me alone"). - T.E. Lawrence, a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia. The British government wanted to create a civil war in Turkey's Arabian provinces. He was originally intended to fulfill a diplomatic role and not actually involve himself in the conflict directly. When he started doing so with some success, the British sort of just went with it. - The slogan for the Texas Rangers, as noted in the TV section entry for Walker, Texas Ranger up above. - The Mounties (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) have a similar reputation. Their original name was the Northwest Mounted Police, and they were given responsibility for just about everything north and west of Ontario. When the Yukon gold rush occurred, the NWMP made sure it was the most orderly and civilized gold rush ever seen note : although arguably this was only because groups like the NWMP conducted ethnic cleansing on the First Nations groups living in the area beforehand and during the gold rush, especially when contrasted against the California gold rush a few decades before. The Mounties today serve as the federal police investigation branch (similar to the FBI), and are considered polite, professional, elite, dedicated, and fearsome if crossed. - Léo Major. After singlehandedly liberating Zwolle, he was sought after when the Korean War broke out, and he and twenty-two soldiers were sent in to recon Chinese positions and held off two entire divisions when US forces in the sector were forced to withdraw. - Charles Gordon, the popular ex-Governor of Sudan, was sent with a few Egyptian staff officers to organize the withdrawal of Anglo-Egyptian soldiers (and civilians) from Sudan during The River War. This backfired spectacularly when Gordon refused to evacuate Khartoum, was besieged by the Mahdi, and the British government was humiliated into organizing a relief expedition — which failed to save Gordon.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneRiotOneRanger
Master of One Magic - TV Tropes A character that's the best at what they do, and what they do is magic. Well... a type of magic, to be precise. Whether it's summoning, elemental magic, or just plain old moving stuff, they're simply the best there is. They're often used as Old Masters from whom The Hero must learn his ultimate powers. The Hero may even learn from several of them. Getting apprenticeship from these characters may comprise a bulk of the story. Of course, there's nothing stopping a writer from making The Hero into a Master of One Magic, although they usually claim that title only through sheer power alone. If there's any magic-user organization that specializes in one type of magic, you can expect the Master of One Magic to be the head of the group. They're often subject to Crippling Overspecialization, especially if they only rely on the magic they excel at when they can generalize their abilities. Also keep in mind that "magic" doesn't always have to go by that name when adding examples. Enlightenment Superpowers, Ki Manipulation, Psychic Powers, and the like can be counted as well. Compare The Archmage, a powerful and learned wizard, which a Master of One Magic often is. Also compare The Red Mage, who isn't a master of any one field but has a nearly unparalleled versatility. Poor, Predictable Rock is when someone is dedicated to a single element in an Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors universe. Contrast Master of All. ## Examples: - Zigzagged in Black Clover. Most mages are capable of using only one element, and all known exceptions are instances of experimented mages, hybrids, and powerful devil hosts. The Protagonist Asta can only use Anti-Magic, Magna can only use fire magic, Julian can only use time magic, etc. However, they quickly learn how to use their magic types to do many different things, with the most skilled mages able to do near anything they want with their designated types. - Fullmetal Alchemist: Roy Mustang is theoretically a fully qualified alchemist who should, by rights, be able to do all the stuff Edward Elric can, only slower (since he would have to draw a transmutation circle). In practice, he barely uses anything other than flame alchemy, an art of which he is the only practitioner, leading to a Running Gag that as soon as his gloves get wet, preventing him from igniting the explosions he's preparing, he's useless. The flipside is that he is very, VERY good at it when circumstances line up to let him show it off: just ask the charred remains of \|\|Lust\|\|, for example. - Louise François LeBlanc de la Vallière of The Familiar of Zero fame seems to be the poster girl for this. In the ZnT world, mages have elemental alignments that can be stacked (a single-element mage is a Point Mage, one who can use two elements is a Line Mage, three elements give a Triangle Mage, and so on). Louise is constantly mocked for her absolute inability at producing a single spell of any element... Until it's discovered she's aligned to the legendary Void element, and she's ridiculously and skilled in using its Explosion spell. scarily - Megumin from KonoSuba takes this trope to the extreme in that she can only cast one spell: Explosion, an enormously powerful offensive spell that summons a massive fireball. Unfortunately, this spell is incredibly Awesome, but Impractical, combining the worst attributes of a Fireball and a Disintegrate spell from Dungeons & Dragons; it has a massive radius and doesn't discriminate between friends or foes, meaning it can't be used safely in confined spaces, and anything killed by it is reduced to ashes... meaning that any valuable bodyparts or other loot is lost. On top of that, it has such a high mana cost that even the most powerful archwizards can only cast it once per day. Megumin, on the other hand, flies past this trope into Powerful, but Incompetent in that she has focused all of her skill points on maxing out her proficiency with Explosion, completely forgoing expanding her mana pool or learning other spells, so she literally only cast this one spell, once per day. It's true that she can cast literally the most powerful iteration of Explosion ever seen in her world, but even the base damage from Explosion is so high that her version is usually massive overkill. Note that Megumin could learn other spells, she just refuses to do so, because she thinks no other spell is as cool as Explosion. \|\|Then it turns out that she was saving points, which she asks Kazuma to spend for her to make her a more well-rounded mage... but then he realizes that the best way to make her happy is to dump them back into Explosion again.\|\| - Slayers: - Sylphiel is a master of healing and protective white magic (she can cast such powerful healing spells as Resurrection), and almost completely inept in other kinds of magic. In the first season, Lina tries to make her cast Flare Arrow, a simple shamanic attack spell, and the spell comes out as a harmless carrot. Later, however, Sylphiel surprises everyone and learns to cast the Dragon Slave. - Lina herself is top of the field at black and chaos magic, and is actually the only practitioner of chaos magic in the world and intends to stay that way. This is not a result of her greediness, but of her moral character; since the only two chaos spells she's invented are the Ragna Blade, which exhausts her within seconds of being cast, and the Giga Slave, which will destroy the world if she loses control for an instant. She's somewhat less competent in shamanic magic and inept in white magic. Zelgadiss is the master of shamanism. - Codex Alera: Everyone (well, almost everyone) in Aleran society has elemental powers, though most people have access to at least a couple and the nobility have them all, with single-element crafters generally considered fairly lowly. However, there are certain single-element crafters who show that they can do a lot with what they've got — Amara and Isana with their wind- and watercrafting are the most prominent examples. - Rincewind the Wizzerd from Discworld could be considered a comical version of this: as a student in the Unseen Academy, he read a forbidden spell book and one single, very powerful spell lodged itself in his mind. The spell is so powerful that it's semi-sentient, crowding out his ability to learn any new spells. He's very much not the master of it, rather it's the cause of a lot of his misery in the early books. - The Dresden Files: Some people have some magical ability, but not enough to be considered a wizard. Some of those people focus on using one spell really, really hard. - Ernest Armand Tinwhistle (better known as Binder) is a "one-trick hack" who can summon up Faceless Goons. By the dozen in under a minute. And while they're nothing next to most of the supernatural baddies readers have seen, their sheer numbers make Binder the head of his own personal army capable of standing off forces technically far superior to himself and being a general nuisance enough to earn a good living as a mercenary. Just as long as nobody draws a circle around his lads, that is - though, as he hints in Skin Game, if he's prepared for someone to 'start playing circle games', he can work around it (he leaves precisely how unspecified). - Mortimer Lindquist is an Ectomancer, who specializes in magic related to ghosts and spirits. He's even better at it than most wizards and can do things like borrowing combat skills from them. We later find out he's served as almost a second Wizard of Chicago preventing all manner of ghostly threats from hurting anyone. - The Alphas, Harry's Friendly Neighborhood Werewolf friends, are regular people who learned a "human-to-wolf" spell rather than possessing any of the more traditional curses associated with lycanthropy. Billy (the group's leader) does mention that the spell has a secondary application as a healing spell, and describes it as being similar to transforming into human form. - At one point in Ghost Story, Harry's friends have to fight a Kinetomancer, who specializes in force magic applied to physical movement. Meaning he's incredibly fast and strong. - This trope is deconstructed in regards to Hannah Ascher, who's very good at Playing with Fire but sucks at pretty much everything else. While she is very, very good with fire, quite a bit better than Harry (who's certainly no slouch with pyromancy himself), she has little combat versatility and is no real match for a more experienced combatant, as shown when she and Harry finally get into it. Even with all her skill and \|\|Lasciel and all her knowledge of Harry's tricks and spells\|\| on her side, \|\|Harry puts her down with relative ease and spends most of the fight begging her not to force him to kill her. She doesn't listen.\|\| - The Tabletop Game has this type of magic-user as a playable "class", called the Focused Practitioner, whose main advantage is that they get to be very, very good at the one type of magic they practice. The sample Baltimore setting detailed in the "Your Story" gamebook has a character described as a Caffinomancer, a Focused Practitioner whose magic exclusively deals with the brewing of coffee. - Harry Potter: Hogwarts professors are skilled in magic in general, but each has a specialty that they are best at. The prime example is Gilderoy Lockhart, who unlike the other professors isn't any good at other kinds of magic (including what he's supposed to teach). He is, however, extremely good at memory charms, and uses this skill to make people forget their own heroic deeds, then take credit for them himself. - Harry himself is this trope, as he is decidedly average-to-poor in every aspect of magic except for defensive spells, in which he is a virtual child prodigy, mastering skills like the Patronus charm many years before it's even possible for most wizards. His reputation as such, especially when they keep him alive in many life-threatening incidents, has his classmates turning to him to teach them Defense Against Dark Arts when the corrupt Ministry of Magic prevents Hogwarts from teaching the proper curriculum in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. - In Heroes Die, Lamorak is a crappy mage overall, but his Dominate is really good. - In China Meiville's work Iron Council Judah Low is the foremost expert in golemetry, animating non-living material with magic. He learned from a group of native nonhumans called stiltspears while he was working as a surveyor for a train track being planned. While the stiltspears treated the practice as childish play, the principles lead Judah to animate a startling variety of materials, including gunpowder, corpses, light, darkness, and eventually replicating the use the adult stiltspears turn the practice to in hunting, but on a huge scale by using some of the local magi-tech to power the creation of a \|\|Time golem, trapping the titular iron council forever and derailing everyone's plans in an anticlimax\|\|. - The Last Horizon: Wizards increase in specialization as they advance in power, making it impossible for a true archmage to be a master of more than one type of magic. Which is why Varic used a once-in-a-millennium ritual to steal knowledge from his alternate selves. - The Legends of Ethshar - Tobas of Telven from With a Single Spell spent months learning Thrindle's Combustion (a spell which uses a pinch of brimstone to ignite anything flammable no matter how wet it is or what the conditions around it are and makes existing fires explode with incredible force) because his master was a crabby old man who was reluctant to teach him anything else. After all that practice, though he's got it down cold, and it proves remarkably useful (a well-timed casting puts paid to a fire-breathing dragon, for example). He does learn other spells later, though. - The Frog Wizard is a man who easily and masterfully learned one incredibly complex and difficult spell—turning people into frogs—and nothing else. He uses sleight of hand to get by otherwise. - In The Locked Tomb series, each of the Nine Houses of necromancers has a specific specialty, in addition to generally useful necromantic abilities like wards. Of particular note within the story are that the Ninth House specializes in bone constructs, the Sixth House in Psychometry, and the Eighth House in the extremely dangerous soul siphoning. - In Mistborn, each of the Mistings in Kelsier's crew is a master of their particular Allomantic power: Breeze in Soothing, Marsh in Seeking, Ham in being a Thug, Spook in being a Tineye, Clubs in Smoking, and Kelsier himself in Pushing and Pulling. Mistings in general are this; since they have only one of the sixteen allomantic powers (as opposed to a Mistborn, who has all of them), Mistings who take their abilities seriously tend to get very good with them. Full Mistborn, by contrast, are much more powerful and versatile, but generally have less finesse in any given power because they're spread thinner. - Taking it to extreme are the "metal savants," single-metal allomancers who have flared their metal for so long that it's physically changed them. Spook becomes a tin savant in The Hero of Ages, giving the reader an example of how much you can accomplish with nothing but Super Senses if that's all you have to work with. - In The Quest of the Unaligned, nearly all mages are born aligned to one of the four elements, and attempting to access any element beyond the one you are born with is impossible. The only exception are the unaligned mages of the royal house, who are born able to use all four elements. \|\|And the orahs and hosheks. But they don't exist.\|\| - An extra on the author's website tells the tale of Kaltin the Fool. Born aligned to fire, he attempted to master water as well and succeeded...for about two seconds. After that, the conflict between the two elements essentially caused him to explode. - In Shadow of the Conqueror, Lightbinders can increase their ability in one power by specializing in it. Lyrah refuses to tell Daylen how this is achieved, wanting to give him as many incentives to join the Archknights as possible, but he later figures it out on his own when he channels light to his \|\|intelligence\|\|. While the details are saved as a Sequel Hook, it seems to involve using certain bonds only for the specialized attributes, as Lyrah always reserves two of her bonds for strength and refers to the third as her "free bond." - In The Stormlight Archive, each of the orders of the Knights Radiant has access to two forms of magic called Surges, plus a 'resonance' that combines both. Their enemies the Fused, in contrast, work differently - each order (or 'Brand') of Fused can use only one Surge, but between their specialization and the fact that they're all thousands of years old, most Fused are very, very good with their single Surge, to a level Radiants rarely attain. - In The Wheel of Time, Androl is an asha'man with very weak overall power but an enormous skill for portals and travelling weaves. - In Sergey Lukyanenko and Nick Perumov's Wrong Time for Dragons, all members of Elemental clans can only control their particular element. It's not clear if anyone has ever tried to learn to control another element. Presumably, this is not looked upon favorably, as learning someone else's magic means you're not honing your skills in your area. So, Ritor may be the best Air mage in the Middle World, but he knows nothing about Earth, Water, or Fire magic. Ditto for Torn (Water), Anjey (Earth), and Navajo (Fire). The same is true for any members of any of the Totem clans. Totem magic is largely limited to enhancing physical combat qualities, although the status of a first-rank Totem mage is, technically, equal to that of a first-rank Elemental mage. When a third-rank Water mage forgets this and treats Loy Iver (the leader of the Cat Clan and a first-rank Totem mage herself) as someone of lower stature, she quickly reminds him by temporarily putting him under her control with some Cat magic. Averted with Victor, who is supposed to become the master of all four Elemental magics in order to become The Dragonslayer. However, it's implied that his mastery will disappear after his task is fulfilled (Ritor was once a Dragonslayer himself). - In the Xanth novels by Piers Anthony, everyone can only do one form of magic; basically, everyone just has one innate magic "trick" they can do. Some have the gift stronger than others, however, and the very strongest person in the land is usually made king. One king was a guy who was able to manipulate the weather; he used horrible storms to kill his nation's enemies, and nobody could pull up a tornado like he could. His successor, Trent, was a master of transformation magic. Humphrey was the best there was at information-gathering magic; if you wanted an answer, you went to him, and so on. - Seawitch implies that its witches are only skilled in magic related to the ocean. - Dungeons & Dragons introduced the concept of "Specialist Wizards" in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, which invoke but play with this trope in various ways. - The "core" specialists of Abjurer, Conjurer, Diviner, Enchanter, Evoker, Illusionist, Necromancer and Transmuter originally sacrificed the ability to access a specific school of magic in exchange for increased proficiency with their associated school. In 3rd edition, this was changed to these eight specialists gaining the same increased proficiency, but having to sacrifice access to two schools of their choice. - The basic concept of specialists would be revisited in various sourcebooks, creating a wide family of 2nd edition specialists who gained increased proficiency with certain kinds of magic, at a lowered or prohibited ability to access other magics. In general, the most powerful the boost, the more restricted the specialist. Prominent examples include the Undead Master (a necromancer with increased aptitude for Conjuration and Enchantment spells, including the power to Command undead and extraplanar beings at-will, at the cost of being unable to cast Divination, Illusion or Transmutation spells), the Arcanist (a Ravenloft specialist with massive boosts to learning to Divination and Necromancy spells but equally massive penalties to learning spells from any other school), and the Dualist (a specialist who can use two normally opposed schools of magic with twice the proficiency of a normal specialist, but who forsakes every other school of magic to do so). - The 3rd edition iteration of the Forgotten Realms has the Red Wizard of Thay prestige class, which requires being a specialist wizard to get into and provides even more proficiency with the character's focus school a the expense of sacrificing access to a third school of magic. - Third edition also introduced a number of alternative arcane casting classes, who are able to use certain kinds of magic in much more expert ways than the standard wizard, but sacrifice much of the wizardly versatility to do so. Prominent examples include the Enchantment-based Beguiler, the necromancy-based Dread Necromancer, and the Warmage, who is a master of Abjuration and Evocation but little good at anything else. - Fifth edition takes the unusual step of making specialization mandatory, giving each specialization-based subclass an array of unique abilities to represent their mastery of that particular field of magic, but removing penalties; any wizard can cast any spell, but they'll be able to cast spells aligned with their subclass better. - GURPS also has schools of magic, similar to the D&D ones. Since GURPS treats magic in the same way as other learned skills, it is also possible to create a "Johnny One-Spell"; a character who only knows a single spell, but is very, very good at it. - Invisible Sun has Zelats, spellcasters who specialize in a specific type of magic, almost always to the point of mastering only a single spell. A few may be able to manipulate a particular facet of magic in a couple of different ways, but even then with a highly specific focus (i.e. magic to manipulate only plastic or wood). - In Mage: The Ascension, the Council of Nine Mystic Traditions is an alliance of nine groups of wizards with different philosophies, which all have an affinity with a specific aspect of magic. The master of each tradition is supposed to be the ultimate authority on that particular branch of magic (although they are all extremely powerful mages in general too, and most of them are masters of at least two or three other spheres of magic in addition to their specific area of expertise). - Pathfinder: - Since it follows on from the precedents set by D&D, Pathfinder has a similar situation. However, normal specialist wizards merely find it harder to train in spells from their "weak schools", and can actually choose which two schools they are denied access to. They also gain special abilities cementing their mastery over that school. (Suffice to say, there are very few generalist wizards.) The "Thassilonian Specialist" archetype/option is a Mythology Gag to D&D, where they function almost exactly like specialist wizards of 3.5 edition D&D. - The Summoner class focuses heavily on summoning. They actually lose out on gaining some high-level summoning spells (their spellcasting only goes 1th to 6th level rather than 1th to 9th like wizards, clerics, and the like) as spells, but on the other hand, they get the big ones of those as spell-like abilities instead, get to cast other summoning spells as lower-level spells and get a permanent customizable summon called an Eidolon. - In Occult Adventures we get the Kineticist class, embodies this in regards to the use of one of seven elements: aether, air, earth, fire, plant, void, and water. One can eventually do two elements, but the second will almost always be weaker, and it comes with the opportunity cost of boosting your element to its fullest potential, i.e. intensifying your fire blasts so they glow blue and hit like a pyromaniac's guilty dream. - From the same book as the Kineticist we have: - The Occultist, who can be considered guilty of this in two ways: one, being restricted to and an absolute prodigy with the use of magical artifacts and items, and two, potentially being able to hone one implement school of magic to the exclusion of almost all others. - The Mesmerist, which is functionally like a Bard that focuses on Mind Manipulation. - The Medium, which is functionally like a Summoner who utilizes a powerful spirit instead of an Eidolon. - Warhammer has plenty of characters of this sort. Indeed, since the vast majority of wizards in the game are only allowed to use a single spell lore at once (though most have several to choose from), specialization is the rule and breadth of magic the exception. As such any wizard with the "Loremaster" special rule would qualify for this trope, as the rule means that they know all the spells from the Lore of Magic they specialise in (usually seven), rather than the 1-4 most normal wizards get. Notable Loremasters include Balthasar Gelt (Lore of Metal), Mannfred von Carstein (Lore of the Vampires and Lore of Death), High Priest Khatep (Lore of Nehekhara), Tetto'Ekko (Lore of the Heavens), and Vilitch the Curseling (Lore of Tzeentch). Other very powerful wizards who only use a single lore of magic - such as Arkhan the Black (Lore of Death) would also fit. Special mention should be made of Kairos Fateweaver (Lore of Tzeentch) and High Loremaster Teclis (High Magic), who both have the equivalent of the Loremaster rule for their own discipline, but don't really fit the trope because they can choose to be generalists and take spells from all eight of the colour magic lores (in Kairos's case as well as his Tzeentch spells, in Teclis's case instead of his High Magic ones). The in-universe explanation for this is that the winds of magic are too powerful/abstract for human minds to use without sacrificing sanity or physical integrity (which Chaos worshippers naturally don't care about), so they're normally restricted to one; elves don't have this limitation and in fact are the only beings besides the lizardman Slann to be capable of using High Magic (which involves making use of all winds). - In Disgaea, this is the case for all magic users; they specialize in one elemental damage type or healing. - The Elder Scrolls series has the Master Trainers of the various schools of magic. Each is able to train you to the very highest levels in their particular magical discipline. - Mages from the Final Fantasy series tend to focus on the type of magic they are named after, from the famous Black Mages, White Mages and Summoners to the adherents of more esoteric disciplines such as Blue Magic and Time Magic. - Elementalists in Guild Wars can use Fire, Water, Air, or Earth magic, but because of the limit in skill slots and skill points it's best if the player specializes in only one element (often Fire, which does the most damage to multiple enemies). This does not hold true in its sequel, Guild Wars 2, where the most powerful Elementalists will switch their attunements in combat for a given situation, usually to make use of their combo fields. - In MARDEK, Annunaki society is composed of seven Schools, one for each of the Annunaki Elemental Powers (air, water, fire, earth, light, dark and aether). The greatest of each school gets a seat on the ruling body, the Governance de Magi. - Amadeus from Trine is adept at creating objects and controlling them. However, he can't cast fireball, an extremely basic spell in the game, which has held him back in his academy throughout his entire life. - ZAngband has High Mages, a class which only knows one magic school instead of the normal two, but is very good at it. - In Fate/stay night, Archer has the unique ability to analyze, reproduce, and modify any weapon he sees. Their quality is so high, they're nearly indistinguishable from the originals, but they're slightly weaker than the originals due to the rules of magic. He makes up for the difference in quality with quantity, being able to make as many weapons as he likes for as long as he has magical energy. He's used this technique to stock numerous Infinity+1 Swords in his Hyperspace Arsenal. This also applies to the protagonist, Shirou Emiya. Which only makes sense, since \|\|Archer is his future self.\|\| - Sarin of The Dragon Doctors is a master of Shapeshifting magic. - Kyros of Irregular Webcomic! is a Player Character in a tabletop campaign with the rule that you can only spend XP on talents that you used in a session. This has led to something of a feedback loop surrounding the spell Fireball, which tends to be the only thing he uses in any given encounter, meaning it gets all the XP, meaning it gets more powerful and more tempting to use. He does eventually pick up some other forms of elemental magic, but his default reaction to most problems remains his fireball, which to the eternal irritation of the Death of Extremely Overpowered Fireballs somehow never seems to kill any of his party members no matter how irresponsible he is with it. - The Erlkönig's magic in Roommates is almost exclusively darkness based, he can wring out an astonishing number of effects from the element (from using shadows as teleport network, to dream manipulation), though. - To be expected in Avatar: The Last Airbender, since only the Avatar can bend more than one element: - Toph and Bumi are the best Earthbenders (one contest between them ended in a draw because the others didn't want that massive battle to attract attention). Toph even invents a brand new form of earthbending that she's still the best at in The Legend of Korra. - Master Pakku is the best Waterbender. - Ozai, Iroh, and Jeong Jeong are the best Firebenders. - While each element has many techniques, the assassin called Combustion Man by the heroes (we never do get his actual name) has honed one rare firebending ability to perfection - the ability to focus his power into one tight beam that causes a massive explosion. - In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, all unicorns can learn magic, but most only learn basic telekinesis and spells related to their personal area of expertise. For example, Rarity's magic almost always relates to beauty and artistry. - In The Owl House, Emperor Belos establishes and enforces the Coven system, in which all magic users are required to join one of the nine covens. This, in turn, prevents them from using any type of magic besides the one used by their coven. Each of these covens is then represented by their most powerful member known as a Coven Head, and all Coven Heads are part of the Emperor's Coven, the only coven where witches are allowed to become Masters of All.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnePowerWonder
One Season Athlete - TV Tropes Bob finds out he has the athletic talent to play for a sports team and becomes an overnight sensation, possibly helping his new team win the title. However, as per Status Quo Is God, his career only lasts one season and he immediately goes back to his original career after retiring. Oftentimes, the One-Season Athlete serves as The Hopeless Replacement on a really bad team, and their ability is enough to elevate the team around them. A Subtrope of Sports Stories. May occur because of a Career-Ending Injury. Single-game occurrences normally involve an Unlikely Hero or Accidental Athlete in a Save Our Team circumstance, participating in a Big Game that goes Down to the Last Play; often a Desperate Object Catch or Calling Your Shots clinches victory. See Artistic License Sports if the situation becomes improbable enough, such as involvement of a non-human player via an Animal Athlete Loophole. This is a spoiler trope; all examples will be unmarked. No Real Life Examples Please. Though there are many IRL examples known in sports nomenclature as a "Cup of Coffee", putting them all here would require a deep dive into every sports encyclopedia. # Examples Fan Works Film - In Like Mike, Calvin Cambridge is given shoes worn by a former basketball legend, spends most of the movie playing for the Los Angeles Knights NBA team. He retires after the team makes the playoffs because the shoes break, robbing him of his athletic talent. - Necessary Roughness: Paul Blake was a standout high school quarterback until he had to give up his dreams to run the family farm after his father's death. He gets recruited for the Texas State Armadillos in his mid-30s because the team was stripped of almost every player due to scandal and Blake still has college eligibility left. - Rookie of the Year: After getting hurt and having corrective surgery on his throwing shoulder, a young boy ends up being signed by the Chicago Cubs after he displays incredible arm strength. After losing his ability when he trips on a baseball, he decides to retire (though he at least allowed the Cubs to win the World Series). - In Space Jam, Bill Murray comes on in relief of Wayne Knight's character in the Tune Squad-Monstars game. After helping the team win, Murray announces his retirement. - The Natural: Although Roy Hobbs did play semi-pro ball and was on his way to a tryout with the Chicago Cubs, his time with the New York Knights can be considered as an example of the trope. - The Replacements runs on this trope, as it's about a group of football players who are recruited to replace an entire professional football team during a player strike. Most of them either haven't played in years or had issues that prevented them from being taken seriously as an athlete (such as one of the players being deaf). They play for a few games, then at the end of the movie they're all released as the strike is settled. - Little Big League: Billy Heywood, an ordinary boy, inherits the Minnesota Twins from his dead grandfather, and ultimately becomes the team's new manager. He retires at the end of the film, but still technically owns the team. - Field of Dreams: Archibald "Moonlight" Graham, a real-life baseball player who only played one MLB game in his baseball career. In the film, Graham doesn't seem too upset at his baseball career being cut short, because he went on to have a long and rewarding career as a doctor. Ray Kinsella: Fifty years ago, for five minutes you came within... y-you came this close. It would KILL some men to get so close to their dream and not touch it. God, they'd consider it a tragedy. Moonlight Graham: Son, if I'd only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes... now that would have been a tragedy. - In A League of Their Own, Dottie Hinson is the best ballplayer in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. But she only plays in the first season of the league and retires by season's end. Live-Action TV - In Cheers, bar owner Sam Malone is approached to come out of retirement as his old team really needs his services as a reserve player. Sam consents to this, then when he is on tour with the team realises he is an old man in his thirties among players ten years or more younger, whose priorities aren't his. He understands that he has grown up and moved on and this isn't his life any more. Sam returns to Cheers and accepts this is where he belongs now. - In Necessary Roughness, Damon Razor is brought into the New York Hawks as a back-up for Terrance "TK" King. He only lasts one season before his troubled personal life causes him to retire. - Smallville: During the season covering Clark's senior year in high school he becomes a star football quarterback after not having played before (because he was hiding his powers). After that season he never plays football again. - Glee: Lauren Zizes joins the New Directions in season 2, then quits at the beginning of the next season after they fail to boost her popularity. Theatre - Damn Yankees revolves around Joe Boyd making a Deal with the Devil to help his favorite team, the Washington Senators win the pennant over the New York Yankees. The deal involves him becoming young slugger Joe Hardy, who immediately boosts the Senators' pennant hopes. Western Animation - American Dad!: - The episode "Kiss Kiss, Cam Cam" has Stan (with the CIA's help) become an MLB player after being recruited out of Cuba. Initially signed by the Yankees, Stan takes steroids and signs with the Nationals. In his Nationals debut, he takes his position, then takes off his uniform to be with Francine in the stands. This all came about because Stan was banned from the stadium after fighting a camera operator after bungling his appearance on the Kiss Cam. - Steve becomes a popular MLB umpire in the episode "Fantasy Baseball", thanks in part to his theatrics from playing Dungeons and Dragons. After fundamentally changing baseball to the point where it's almost unrecognizable, he abruptly retires when he realizes all he wanted to do was just bond with Stan, who encouraged him to get into baseball in the first place. - In the final season of Kim Possible, while Ron initially cheated his way into a football team with a battle suit, his talent for running away from a fight allows him to stay due to his natural speed. - Futurama: Leela becomes a publicity stunt beanball pitcher for the New New York Mets Blernsball team. Initially embracing her status as the first female blernsball player, Leela comes to realize that she is regarded as a joke and after getting some pro advice from Hank Aaron, is able to pitch like a regular pitcher. However after giving up a home run to another female blernsball player, she decides to retire, cementing her status as the worst blernsball player in history. - The Legend of Korra: In season one, Korra joins the pro-bending team, Fire Ferrets, as a Hopeless Replacement after one of the team's regulars left them. She then becomes a regular team member and keeps on playing alongside Mako and Bolin all the way into the finals. Later at the beginning of season two, pro-bending falls off the spotlight as Korra has taken up her duties as a full-time Avatar and Mako has a job as a police officer. - Fairly OddParents: One episode has Timmy wishing that he could play basketball so he could pay for a new V-Cube. He spends the episode playing for the Dimmsdale Ballhogs and after earning the money and teaching the team to put their egos aside, everything reverts to normal. - Family Guy: In the episode "Patriot Games", Peter is signed by the New England Patriots to play center, but his antics force the team to trade him to a team in London. After challenging Tom Brady and the Patriots to a game and losing, he retires.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneSeasonAthlete
Tooth Strip - TV Tropes Travis: And while we're talking about mouth bones: why I gotta floss!? One solid piece. Griffin: One big tooth! Travis: One solid chomper! Most people have 32 teeth, and in animation it isn't always practical to draw each individual tooth in a character's mouth. In some case it can run the risk of careening down the Unintentional Uncanny Valley. Because of this, a popular way of simplifying teeth is to draw them as a solid toothy mass stretching from one side of the mouth to the other. Mostly an ignored trope. Especially unusual when some characters have tooth strips while others have realistically drawn teeth. It's common for people with normal teeth to be drawn this way while characters with Scary Teeth, Cute Little Fangs or otherwise unusual chompers have their individual teeth drawn to further emphasize their otherness. Depending on how loosely an animator is tethered to their model sheets, this can vary Depending on the Artist. Contrast with British Teeth and More Teeth than the Osmond Family when you really do mean to see each one of those pearly whites. Tombstone Teeth are a lesser degree of simplification where the teeth are drawn individually, but just as rectangles. For a similar shorthand used on facial stubble, see Solid Cartoon Facial Stubble. ## Examples: - Notably averted in Beck in that every character has all their teeth visibly shown. - The only character in Speed Racer that has individual teeth is Captain Terror. - One Piece Zig-Zags this. A good portion of the time characters are shown with these teeth with notable exceptions like Arlong, especially early in the series, though later on it sort of goes back and forth with this. - Generally, non-Gonk women have these at all times, while men (who are generally drawn with larger, more expressive mouths) only have this when they're speaking calmly. - A female from Franken Fran goes through extreme plastic surgery to look like a cute anime girl. At one point, her lower jaw gets removed and replaced by an artificial, small version that has a single strip for teeth, because her chin his made so small to fit the look, there is no more room for individual teeth. - Prof. Chronos de Medici/Dr. Vellian Crowler is a notable aversion. His teeth are always drawn distinctly apart from each other. It doesnt really do his Gonk appearance any favors though... - Characters in Cap Revolution Bottleman have undivided strips of teeth. - The Iguanadons in Dinosaur all have tooth strips, as a sop to real Iguanodons having beaks (basically they have lips over their beaks in the movie). - Pixar is infamously known for their tendency to give most of their nonhuman characters this kind of teeth, whether they are either toys, insects, monsters, fish, or vehicles. - The Incredibles averts this completely. Several characters' teeth were modeled after those of Pixar's animators. - Played straight with many animated Disney characters. Aversions include Beggar Jafar's crooked dentures and The Coachman's Nightmare Face. - Second Apocalypse: One of the many distinguishing features of the Nonmen is that their teeth are all fused together. The sranc, being based on Nonmen DNA, also have this feature. - In The Enemy Papers, the Dracs have one continuous tooth strip. - This is one of the signature traits of the eponymous purple dinosaur, Barney. - The Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger and Power Rangers Dino Charge have their helmets molded to resemble dinosaur heads; where helmets based on carnivores have serrated triangular patterns for teeth, the herbivore-based helmets have just a set of strips on the top and bottom. - The Leucrotta from Greek mythology is a hyena-like creature that has a solid ridge of bone in place of teeth. - Parodied in FoxTrot. Roger tries a whitening toothpaste which erases all the lines between his teeth. - All of the Sonic The Hedgehog characters are shown this way, though quite a few of them have Cute Little Fangs as well. - This is how a great many Nintendo characters are drawn; exceptions, such as Wario and King Hippo, are almost always to invoke Gonk. - Impressive Title: The playable lion characters' teeth are depicted as thin white strips to compliment their cartoony appearance, but since the teeth are completely flat, the lions don't have any noticeable fangs to show off. This bugged many players as they argued that they looked unnatural, and some insisted on wearing the Fangs accessory item on their characters at all times just to give them more proper-looking teeth. Some fan-hosted servers even went to the point of editing the game's models, or replacing the teeth entirely just to keep it from annoying players. - Averted in Feral Heart, in which the playable characters have a realistic set of teeth displaying incisors, molars, and all. - Zigzagged in Ask the Ryans; characters having individual teeth varies between comics, but typically they will have strips if they are a significant distance away. - ''Girl Genius': The artstyle depicts most human teeth as a single flat white strip, unless there are fangs to be drawn or indicating individual teeth will help get an expression across. - Humans in Gunnerkrigg Court are usually depicted this way. - Lackadaisy actually shows a good reason as to why you'd want to use this trope in the first place. Just compare Rocky with a tooth strip to Rocky with fully rendered teeth. - In El Goonish Shive, most characters are depicted this way unless they are particularly monstrous or nonhuman. - Pretty much anyone in a Seth MacFarlane series. Especially Mr. Bottomtooth of Family Guy, a pretentious rich guy with a single bottom tooth. His son shares this trait. Strangely, Herbert the creepy pedophile also has tooth strips when he laughs or chuckles, despite not having most of his teeth. The end of the episode "Mind Over Murder" takes this to an even more bizarre extreme; Stewie's teeth have teeth. - Averted in South Park— even though the characters are crudely animated, they still have lines to mark the division of teeth. - The Powerpuff Girls: The girls sometimes have these. - We see a weird variation in Invader Zim: the Irkens all have their teeth joined together in an undulating, zipper-like pattern◊. The humans usually have their teeth drawn separately. - This is standard in 3D modelling: the artist models a tooth strip and maps the color and normals to make it look like a row of discrete teeth. - Bubs from Homestar Runner. - The Car Crusher at the end of The Brave Little Toaster has a large guillotine-like blade used to crush cars into tiny cubes that's shaped like a wall of teeth. - Recess uses this sometimes. Usually, regular shots of the characters will have this trope in effect, while more exaggerated expressions avert it. - 101 Dalmatians: The Series, Depending on the Artist. - Also Depending on the Artist, Spliced had one artist who seemed keen on presenting uneven teeth in some of the characters. - Just like the above example, Animaniacs had this happen at times. Usually in the shorts by Wang Film Productions, StarToons and on occasion, TMS Entertainment. - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic generally draws teeth like this. The exceptions tend to be extreme closeups, such as during Sweetie Belle's nightmare in "For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils" and the Mouth Cam shot of Zecora in "A Health of Information". - The big bad of the Season 4 Finale, \|\|Lord Tirek\|\| more often than not subverts this trope. His teeth often being animated as disgustingly crooked and fanged by the animators. - Attentive viewers will note that Hulked-out Saddle Rager averts this trope too. - Batman: The Animated Series Mostly plays this trope straight with its characters. The most notable exceptions are The Joker, and Two-Face's scarred side's drooping mouth. Sometimes subverted when extreme reactions are shown. - Big City Greens downplays this a bit; while everyone does have white strips of teeth, the ends are bumpy to resemble the tooth lines. Played straight with Cricket's celebrity doppelganger Zillon Brax, who is the only character on the show whose teeth lines are completely straight with no bumps. - Hanna-Barbera animator Carlo Vinci utilized these. - Characters in Steven Universe generally have their teeth simplified to strips, unless their teeth are the only visible part of their mouth—then, they'll be drawn as three or four teeth in a single row◊. Jasper's more detailed expressions, including several Slasher Smiles and attempts at genuine smiles, are an exception, having both rows of teeth drawn individually. Spinel also generally has her teeth drawn more detailed than the other characters, even after her HeelFace Turn. - In an unusual non-human example, The Amazing World of Gumball gives all the rabbit characters (Richard, Anais, and Granny Jojo) a single frontal tooth instead of the closely-space buck teeth of real-life rabbits. The same goes for Frankie, a rat, and the family of goats in "The Copycats". - Luna from Let's Go Luna! has a long, undivided strip of teeth. - The Crumpets sometimes depict teeth like this, usually if only the upper teeth is visible and the teeth is not blocking the entire mouth. - Most of the human characters in Avatar: The Last Airbender, and by extension The Legend of Korra, have teeth of this kind. - Characters In SpongeBob SquarePants zigzag this. Squidwards almost always drawn with his teeth like this (likely in reference to the fact that, as a cephalopod its actually a beak). Mrs. Puff almost always has them like this as well. Eugene Krabs is an interesting subversion in that, while his teeth are always one solid strip, they do have divider lines that dont COMPLETELY connect from top to bottom. - Ready Jet Go!: The characters' teeth are usually styled in this manner, although a few close-up shots show that they do have individual teeth. - Popeye starting in 1951 for the theatrical shorts has these teeth. Other characters like Bluto and Olive Oyl are drawn with them Depending on the Artist. Though his nephews are an aversion, almost always being drawn with a single tooth. - Dunkleosteus, a prehistoric fish with armored skin, once sported exposed jawbones closely resembling fictional examples of this trope. - Cookie-cutter sharks have all of their teeth fused together with one another, causing them to lose, swallow, and replace entire rows of teeth at once.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneRowTooth
One-Shot Fic - TV Tropes A one-shot (or oneshot) is defined as a fanfic that has only one chapter. It can be one very long chapter or one very short chapter (sometimes referred to as a "drabble", though other people will tell you that's a misnomer note : According to the traditional definition, a drabble must be exactly 100 words), but as long as it's only one chapter then it counts. One-shots can also have sequel fics and still be considered one-shots. One-shots will also be examples of either Flash Fiction, Novelette, Novella, or Short Story. Compare to Completed Fic for multi-chapter stories that have finished. ## Fanfics by the source work: <!—index—> ## A Certain Magical Index ## Code Geass ## Death Note Fullmetal Alchemist ## Haibane Renmei ## Inuyasha ## Kill La Kill ## Neon Genesis Evangelion ## Osomatsu-san ## Pokémon Diamond and Pearl Adventure ## Sailor Moon ## Wandering Son ## Yuki Yuna Is A Hero - but i wrote the words to the swan song (crossover of Romeo and Juliet and The Avengers (2012)) - Captains Crash (crossover of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and DuckTales (1987)) - Changes (crossover of NUMB3RS, Without a Trace, and Law & Order) - Destiny (Afterandalasia) ( Disney Animated Canon) - The Fable of Joyful Wing ( The Dresden Files, Bridge of Birds) - Fairytales ( Disney Princess) - God of War - Not All Gods ( God of War (PS4), Kid Icarus: Uprising) - hush now, little one ( Turning Red, Encanto) - It's Always The Quiet Ones ( Harry Potter, Cthulhu Mythos) - Learning from the best (whether you want to or not) ( The Incredibles, Miraculous Ladybug) - Mononofu ( Touken Ranbu, Onmyōji) - Monsters Versus Aliens ( Lilo & Stitch, Monsters, Inc.) - Suicidal Overconfidence ( Central Park, Marvel Universe) - To a Merry Christmas ( Disney Princess) - The New Recruit ( Chronicle, The Avengers (2012)) - The Truth Behind The Lie ( Doctor Who, The Neverending Story) - Wander over Foster's AU One-Shot ( Wander over Yonder, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends) - Tokimeki PokéLive! and TwinBee ( Pokémon, Love Live!, Tokimeki Memorial and Twinbee The Main Stories are episodic, self contained stories that are lighthearted and comedic.) ## Alvin And The Chipmunks ## The Aristocats ## Avatar ## The Black Cauldron ## The Children's Hour ## Cinderella ## Encanto ## Frozen ## Godzilla ## Hook ## The Hunchback of Notre Dame ## Kingsman: The Secret Service ## Mean Girls ## Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Star Wars ## Animorphs ## Discworld ## Fifty Shades of Grey ## Harry Potter ## Land of Oz ## The Lord of the Rings ## Max & Ruby ## A Song of Ice and Fire ## Twilight ## Warriors ## Wicked ## Arrow ## Numb3rs ## Raven's Home ## Shadow Chasers ## Sherlock ## Star Trek ## Supernatural ## Ever After High ## My Little Pony ## Doom ## Fire Emblem ## The Legend Of Zelda ## Story of Seasons ## Super Mario Bros ## Super Smash Bros ## Avatar The Last Airbender/The Legend of Korra ## Batman the Animated Series ## Blue's Clues ## Caillou ## Carmen Sandiego ## Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers ## Dungeons & Dragons ## Jem ## Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures ## Kim Possible ## The Magic School Bus ## Making Fiends ## Miraculous Ladybug ## My Little Pony 'n' Friends ## My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic ## Octonauts ## The Powerpuff Girls ## Ready Jet Go! ## Rugrats ## Scooby Doo ## Steven Universe ## Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) ## Total Drama ## Young Justice <!—/index—>	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneShotFic
One to Million to One - TV Tropes A person has just been hit by a laser beam, or a truck. The person doesn't fly off into space, though. Instead, he shatters into hundreds of... animals? Which then flock over in unison to a different spot? Then regroups into that person again, whole and unscathed? Alternatively, the person may not be in imminent danger of being splattered into pieces involuntarily, and merely decide to scatter himself into many many tiny bits which then fly away elsewhere. And even then, the go-elsewhere part is also optional; the person may just scatter into dust lest a truck runs him over. Most of the time, the person in question has a superpower, or may also be supernatural, or may be in fact The Worm That Walks. Or they're just a vampire (in which case the animals are almost always bats) - a form they might weaponize against their enemies, as a Barrage of Bats. Unlike in the case of Literally Shattered Lives, those employing this trope don't die from being shattered. See also Pulling Themselves Together, which is similar to the second half of this trope, and generally trauma-induced. Blob Monster and Elemental Shapeshifter can do something similar to this. Literal Split Personality may also result. Compare also Detachment Combat if they just detach their body parts rather than breaking down to flying pieces. Related is Destructive Teleportation that employs a method similar to this, i.e breaking the subject into atoms and then reconstructing them in another place; people who have this as an ability might achieve long-distance movement similar to a teleport this way. Compare Me's a Crowd and Asteroids Monster. Not to be confused with Million to One Chance. ## Examples for trauma-induced variants - This happens with cars in an insurance commercial (Liberty Mutual?) The car would be rear ended, and fly into little pieces, before reforming a short ways away. - In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: JoJolion, Wu Tomoki's Stand, Doctor Wu, lets him disintegrate his body into tiny stone fragments and reform later. He can use these fragments to control other people if they get inside their body. - Kinnikuman: When Kinnikuman uses his Megaton Punch to shatter Akuma Shogun's body, it breaks into hundreds of razor-sharp pieces that fly though Kinnikuman's body before reforming. - Naruto: Itachi Uchiha has a technique that creates a clone of himself that disperses into crows when damaged. But since he often combines it with his illusion techniques it's hard to tell whether he is using a clone or an illusion. - This is the standard with characters in One Piece with Logia powers: Because they embody elements, they can turn themselves (and their clothing and any nonliving things carried on them) into their element, which can then move around in midair and reform at will. These properties effectively render these users invulnerable to most forms of physical damage, but at the cost of near helplessness against their elemental weaknesses. For example, Sir Crocodile is able to scatter into sand and take the form of a living sand cloud, reforming anywhere he wants—but moisture will cause the grains of sand to pack together and be unable to separate. - Princess Resurrection: Reirei, being a vampire, can turn into a smaller bats and reform back fairly easily. She uses it to mostly avoid attacks or get around her assailants with ease. - Whenever the Yu-Gi-Oh! monster Revival Jam gets splattered by an attack, it quickly reforms itself. Marik combines this with the Jam Defender card to ensure that Yugi's attacks only hit Revival Jam, making his other monsters untouchable. - Wonder Woman (1987): The shattered god was split into many pieces long ago and has been slowly rebuilding themselves. Their individual pieces can each possess an animal or person individually, allowing them to at one point attack Diana as a flock of birds. - Gabriel in The Prophecy series sometimes teleports this way, as when a shot from a gun turns him temporarily into a murder of crows. - Played in a hilarious fashion in the Disney sequel, Halloweentown: Kalabar's Revenge. Sophie and Dylan realize that Alex, believed to be Carl's father, is in fact a golem created from the villain Kalabar to distract Gwen. The golem (wearing a frog costume) eats a fly Sophie conjures with her magic, breaking the illusion. An angry Gwen then blasts him with magic, turning him back into a pile of frogs. - In Book 14 of Lone Wolf, one boss is an armored, fire-breathing, demonic monkey. After it is killed, its corpse turns into a swarm of man-eating insects for you to contend with. Notably, the insects are an illusion. At that point, Lone Wolf has achieved a level of mental discipline that allows him to simply ignore them. - Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files: - In Dresden's debut short story, Harry and Murphy manage to smash a troll, which breaks into dozens of tiny trolls that escape into a storm drain. Harry notes that supernatural predators will catch most of the little ones before they can reach a threatening size again. - In Small Favor, while the shapeshifted form of Tessa isn't actually made of bugs, she is a giant preying mantis with little praying mantises instead of blood that fly out when she gets shot. - In Renegades, Donna/Monarch can transform herself into a swarm of monarch butterflies, making her an excellent scout and spy. - In Smallville, Clark Kent battles a Spider-Man-esque villain named Greg Arkin in episode 2. When Greg gets crushed by falling debris, his body breaks up into dozens of beetles. - Madonna's music video Frozen has one scene where she seemingly falls over and shatters into crows which then fly away. - Dungeons & Dragons: - From 3rd edition Unapproachable East, a Telflammar Shadowlord of at least 5th level, if dealt a killing blow while in shadows or darkness, has a chance to "discorporate" instead, turning into dozens of flitting shadows which vanish. The character basically cease to exist until the next sunset, where it reappears intact within a mile. - From 3.5's Fiendish Codex I, one of twenty random death effects for a demon is for the defeated infernal to collapse into a horde of inch-high duplicates of itself, which fight each other until one remains, which vanishes in a puff of smoke. - In 4th Edition, the crystalline beings known as the Shardmind have an ability that lets them separate into individual pieces and reform a short distance away after being successfully attacked. - This is how the player character "dies" in cat planet. - Subverted in Dungeon Keeper: Vampires turn into a cloud of bats when defeated, but only when Killed Off for Real. If defeated in a way they come back from, they turn into mist instead which then reforms the vampire in your graveyard. - The Forest Quartet have you playing as a ghost roaming a dark forest. One of your powers allows you to disperse into hundreds of butterflies made of light before reforming. - This is an infuriating ability of the "Golden Knight" enemies in Karnov. - The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker has Jalhalla, boss of the Earth Temple. Killing the smaller parts is what actually harms it, as evidenced by its lifebar. - The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: - The mini-boss Deathsword (who, as the name suggests, appears to be a lich wielding a large sword) of Arbiter's Grounds disintegrates into a massive swarm of scarabs after being defeated. - Armogohma, a truly spectacular and terrifying Giant Spider. After you beat her the first time, she disintegrates into an eye with legs and a swarm of smaller spiders, which you have to fight off while going for the eye. - Boolossus, the third boss of Luigi's Mansion, is defeated by luring him into the horn of a nearby ice unicorn statue, causing him to pop into many smaller Boos, which you can then capture. - Remilia Scarlet, the Final Boss of the sixth Touhou Project game, pulls off this move if you try to Smart Bomb her during her final Spell Card pattern. The compendiums elaborate upon this, revealing that Remilia can spawn thousands of bats and is capable of fully reforming in a day if so much as a single bat survives. - In Hollow Knight, Troupe Master Grimm \|\|and Nightmare King Grimm\|\| split into dozens of Grimmchild-like bugs upon getting staggered. One of the bugs, indicated by an aura, can still be hurt during this period. After a few seconds of random flying, all bugs converge in one place and the boss reforms. - minus.: minus in the guise of a fairy godmother once saves a jumper from suicide by making him splatter into smaller copies of himself on impact after he wished it didn't have to end on the way down. He appears to be much happier with his life. ## Examples for at-will variants - Movie villain Janenmba from Dragon Ball Z can teleport around by breaking his body into smaller, squared bricks that reform at the desired location, usually just behind the opponent. However, he cannot attack unless he has completely reformed. - In the manga version of Guyver, Aptom converts his own body into Gaster's organic missiles to attack an enemy. After Aptom converts himself completely, the manga cuts to a distant rooftop, where it is revealed that while most of the missiles blew up, some of them flew away and recombined into a diminished Aptom. - Arachne from Soul Eater hid herself by turning her body into 3000 spiders that spread across the world, and then hid her soul inside a giant Golem. - As befitting the King of All Vampires, Alucard from Hellsing can do this in spades. He does the traditional version with bats to regenerate from being beheaded, then changes into a swarm of centipedes after undoing Restraint Level One and unleashing his familiars. - Benisato in Ninja Scroll does have a normal body, but she can use a writhing mass of snakes to hide or fight with. - In One Piece, Gekko Moriah fights by sending his Living Shadow at his enemies. It can appear as a giant made of shadow, but can also split into many small globes of shadow to protect Moriah, and those globes can then sprout wings and fangs to attack as a swarm. - Additionally Karasu has consumed a Devil fruit that allows him to turn into a murder of crows at will. The classification of this fruit is currently unknown. - Naruto: Katsuyu can not only voluntary split into thousands of tiny versions of herself and reform, those who have signed the Slug contract (including Tsunade and Sakura) always summon portions of her. Whereas the Toad and Snake summons have entire families of differently-sized summons, there is only one slug, and she's at least big enough to be summoned at a size equal to other Great Summons, by both Tsunade and Sakura, at the same time. - Snake Youkai Tayura from Ushio and Tora usually moves around by transforming his body into a whirlwind of razor-sharp splinters which he can also use to attack in tandem with his partner (a frog youkai)'s Overly-Long Tongue. According to Tora, the weakness of this attack is that Tayura needs an open space to move properly, and is reduced to a sitting duck when cornered in an elevator. - It isn't clear if it actually happened or not but Legosi of Beastars briefly appeared to transform into a swarm of moths during his final fight with Tem's killer. He never uses this ability again, making it a bit of a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment. - As a vampire, Rose from My Cheat Skill Resurrection Revived Me is able to transform her body into numerous bats shown in manga chapter 10 and 21. - Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 10: In the second issue, one vampire disperses into a swarm of bees to avoid a crossbow bolt from Dawn. Spike deals with the bees using a Booze Flamethrower. - Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: The Ammonites are a race of transforming, combining robots similar to Cybertronians. Unlike Cybertronians, every Ammonite is a Combiner, with no limit to their combination ability beyond how many there are. This takes the Cybertronians who encounter them initially by surprise, as a large Ammonite suddenly splits into a bunch of smaller robots, each only slightly larger than a human, then merge back together into a different large robot. - Corpse Bride has Emily dissolve into butterflies by the film's end. - Aladdin: The Return of Jafar: The Genie and Abu's picnic is attacked by a swarm of spiders that pile together before turning back into Jafar. The bugs weren't his true form, however — apparently he just wanted to freak them out. - A example in the Dragon Hunters movie with the "Red Swarm". Constitued of many small red flying creatures (looking like a cross of toad and bat), it can assemble into a large, fire-breathing dragon/ogre. Once, the dragon reconstitutes while the swarm is separated in several places; its head ends up stuck inside a barn, the body outside and one leg farther away, but still mobile and aware of its other body parts. - The 2010 Clash of the Titans has Hades teleport by having demon imps fuse into him (and he can fission into said imps). He also has a "conventional" Villain Teleportation where he appears from what is essentially a shadowy black hole that has sucked up a platoon of Argosian soldiers. - The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The vampire Mina Harker can split up into a swarm of bats at will, travel some distance and reform into a human again. - Snow White & the Huntsman gives this ability to the Evil Queen, who can disperse into crows. - Little Nicky once turned into a bunch of spiders to escape an angry mob, then reformed in his apartment. - In Bram Stoker's Dracula, among other transformations, Dracula takes the form of a horde of rats to escape the protagonists. - After being released from her bonds in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, the sea goddess Calypso grows to about 30 feet tall then dissolves in a shower of crabs, to escape into the ocean. - In the live-action modern version of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the villain, Maxim Horvath, first appears as a swarm of cockroaches scurrying out of a matryoshka doll and assembling themselves into a human figure, complete with clothes. - Upon becoming a vampire, Vlad III, the newly risen Dracula in Dracula Untold, is capable of doing this with bats, and does so very often, both to teleport and in a Flash Step. He adorns the page image. - Destoroyah from Godzilla vs. Destoroyah is a kaiju made of multiple tiny crustaceans merged into a single gargantuan body. At the climatic battle, when Burning Godzilla wrestles against him, Destoroyah is forced to briefly split on his aggregate form, medium-sized crab-like monsters, to tackle Godzilla as a group. - In Transformers: Age of Extinction this is how KSI's line of mass-produced transformium-based products are able to change. They break down into numerous small cubes which can hover and reassemble into new shapes, then smooth out into the desired product. \|\|This includes their "new and improved" line of attack drone robots based on the Autobots, which are actually being controlled by Megatron's consciousness inside their "Galvatron" model.\|\| - Xianniang from Mulan (2020) can turn into a swarm of bats. - In Terry Pratchett's Discworld, a vampire can only change into a single bat if they've been feeding on human blood, since it takes great magical power to change one's body mass in the setting. Belonging to the beetotaler Black Ribboners, Lance-Constable Sally von Humpeding, the first vampire to join the Ankh-Morpork City Watch in Thud!, turns into a flock of bats. This is theoretically easier than turning into a single bat since you don't have Shapeshifter Baggage problems. What you do have are "keeping track of where they all are" problems and, for female vampires, "making sure two of them carry your clothes for you" problems. - Despite being very much not Black Ribboners, the Magpyr family transforms into a swarm of hundreds of magpies at the end of Carpe Jugulum, presumably because it looks cool. - Played with in Castle Hangnail. As part of the demonstration Molly gives her new minions to convince them she's powerful enough to run the castle, she appears to disperse herself into a swarm of bats and fly away. (She can't actually; what she does is turn invisible at the appropriate moment while a friendly swarm of bats who live in the castle's belfry provide the effects.) - In the Wild Cards novels Inside Straight, Busted Flush and Suicide Kings, Jonathan Hive has the power to turn himself into a swarm of wasps and back again. - In Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen, D'ivers are shapeshifters who can turn and split into several animals of the same species at once, rather that just one. Some of them, like Gryllen or Mogora, can turn into hundreds of rats and spiders, respectively. Mogora in particular loves collapsing into a heap of spiders only to reassemble into her human form a short distance away and laugh. - In Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett: - The demon Hastur bursts out of a phone line as a massive wave of maggots and eats a roomful of telemarketers. - Also, Crowley scared the pants off a guy with a form that basically overloaded his brain. Aziraphale thought the maggots were a bit much, but that's angels for you; never appreciate a good maggot form. - In Hex and the City, a powerful demon takes the form of a huge swarm of biting flies. - In The Dresden Files book Skin Game, the Denarian Tessa (see Trauma section) attacks Harry in a secure bank vault by converting her body mass into a swarm of insects that attacks every inch of his exposed skin while trying to burrow into his orifices, while simultaneously whispering demonically into his mind. - The Locust Undead in Kamen Rider Blade can split himself into multiple smaller locusts to attack the BOARD office before returning to a more humanoid locust form to fight Kenzaki as the titular Kamen Rider Blade. - The '90s Dracula: The Series has the vampires break up into swarms of bats when making a quick getaway. - On Shadowhunters, the Prince of Hell Azazel can evade attacks by dissolving into a swarm of insects and flying away. - In the Crisis On Infinite Earths' final battle, the heroes prepare to battle the horde of Shadow Demons until they merge into a cloud of dark energy from which the Anti-Monitor appears. - Gorm, the Big Bad of Galidor, has the ability to turn into a swarm of bat like creatures, which he uses to travel, in a way similar to Villain Teleportation. - Exalted has the spell Flight of Separation, which turns the caster into a flock of birds. - Werewolf: The Apocalypse: The Ananasi, werespiders who, in their animal form, turn into their weight in spiders. Since they can eventually regenerate their entire bodies from even one of those spiders, it makes for a great escape technique. - In the New World of Darkness: - The Changing Breeds can do this with a specific aspect. Werecrows turn into crows, werebats turn into bats, and werecats turn into a horde of small cats or kittens... - In Vampire: The Requiem, vampires capable of shapeshifting into animals can learn to become a swarm of tiny creatures like bats or rats instead. Unlike regular shapeshifting, the experience is confusing enough to leave them slightly deranged for hours afterwards. - Dungeons & Dragons: - In 3.5th Edition, the warlock can transform into a cloud of darkness and bats, but given any warlock's extremely limited skillset and how late this comes, nobody ever takes this power. - What's worse than a druid who can turn into a giant bear and eat you? A druid who can turn into a swarm of 10,000 flesh-eating scarabs and eat you. Plus as a druid with the swarm ability you gain heavy resistance to melee and basic ranged attacks. The flavor art for the 4th edition Primal Swarm druid build depicts one such druid transforming into a bunch of cute, placid frogs, humorously enough. - Worse, there are some feats and magic items that turn you into a magic, resistant-to-all-damage walking colony of flesh-eating insects. - The Swarmshifter template from 3.5 allows DMs to apply this trope to all sorts of monsters. - The 2nd edition Discworld Roleplaying Game has the Alternate Form: Swarm Body meta-trait to represent Discworld vampires, above. - Big Eyes, Small Mouth has the Swarm power, which allows its user to transform into a swarm of insects or a flock of birds. - One of the new Taken in Alan Wake's American Nightmare, the Birdman, turns into a flock of crows at will, but doesn't have the darkness shield of vanilla Taken. - In Alice: Madness Returns Alice gains the ability to briefly turn into the swarm of butterflies to get back from Bottomless Pits or just Flash Step around. - In Awesomenauts, Ix the Interloper can avoid attacks by splitting his body into many smaller crystals - In Bayonetta, by dodging an attack at the very last second, Bayonetta can shatter into bats upon getting hit, negating the attack and gaining increased amounts of Witch Time in the process. For Jeanne she turns into a swarm of moths, and this is the only way she can get Witch Time normally. In the sequel, \|\|Rosa\|\| can also use this ability, turning into a swarm of hornets. This carries into her Super Smash Bros. incarnations, too. When she attempts, but just barely fails, to dodge an attack, she bursts into a cloud of bats and reforms at her intended destination, taking reduced damage from the attack and none of the knockback. - In BioShock Infinite, the Zealots of the Lady (also known as "Crows") are a series of Elite Mooks that are able to use the "Murder of Crows" vigor to transform into a flock of crows, avoiding all damage before reforming to attack. Weirdly, the player can also obtain the Murder of Crows vigor, but they don't get this ability (instead they get the power to summon a horde of crows to swarm enemies). - The fire elemental boss from Cadash looks like a big demon standing still in a pit of fire, that shatters in a multitude of fireballs before reforming into another fire pit. - Carrion: After the Villain Protagonist monster obtains the Hydrophilia upgrade, it becomes able to transform into a swarm of worms when it enters the water and reform into its usual amorphous flesh structure when it exits the water. This allows it to fully bypass the "metal square" barriers whose gaps are normally too small to pass through, but it only works while underwater. - Castlevania: - Dracula occasionally teleports this way. Being the good ol' Drac, he becomes a mass of bats. Curiously, the ability was first seen in an NES-era boss fight with Alucard, who uses Drac's classic pattern from the other games. - Some games, such as Castlevania Chronicles, also give this ability to the Phantom Bat. Similarly, Super Castlevania IV gives this ability to the mummy boss, Akmodan II, who teleports as a stream of loose bandages. - In Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, Dracula can do this with a plague of rats when hiding in shadows, and Alucard can teleport himself with a swarm of bats. - The Succubi and Incubi of Darkstalkers make their clothes out of souls, which manifest as bats. They can occasionally turn themselves into bats as well, an ability Morrigan makes use of to help her distract and then get the jump on Iron Man in one of the trailers for Marvel vs. Capcom 3. - Nevan from Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening teleports across her room/battle arena by dissolving into bats. - In The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, Yuki gains the ability to dodge attacks by instantly shredding herself into a full body version of Pink Mist then reforming elsewhere. - The Ultimate form of the Shapeshifter mage subclass in Dragon Age: Origins is a swarm of bees. Taking a master level in Shapeshifter turns them into parasitic insects. - Vampire Lords in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim can turn into bursts of bats to travel short distances. - This tactic is imitated by the Dragon Devil in I Wanna Be the Guy. - Khimera Puzzle Island: The mastermind, when Chelshia tries to punch them in their reveal cutscene, dodges by turning into four bats that reform away from the starting location. - Beelzebub in La-Mulana alternates between being a swarm of flies, being more-or-less normal humanoid, and being one giant fly. - This is Kain's favorite method of transportation in Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen and Defiance. Being a vampire he transforms into a flock of bats. - Link's Crossbow Training: After its outer layer of armor is knocked off, the Darknut demonstrates the ability to dissolve into thousands of flies and reform at will. Although this allows him to teleport around the room and avoid Link's attacks, it also reveals his weakness: \|\|There are three white flies among the black ones, and if they are destroyed, the Darknut can be killed in his humanoid form.\|\| - Cackletta and Antasma of the Mario & Luigi series are both capable of splitting into a cloud of bats and rushing the brothers. Notably, in the case of the latter, jumping on and destroying the individual bats will deduct from his HP when he reforms. - The Yellow Devil and its many, many successors throughout the Mega Man franchise fights by sliding square segments of its body across the screen one at a time until it reforms on the other side. - The Dimitrescu Daughters in Resident Evil Village can turn into swarms of flies to move around and evade attacks. Their only weakness is cold temperatures which kill the flies very quickly. - This is one of the abilities of Swarm, the Air-elemental giant in Skylanders. He can turn into a swarm of bees at will, and since he is a massive humanoid bee, it grows into a massive cloud that damages opponents that touch it. One upgrade path allows him to improve on this, letting him unleash shockwaves or even form the swarm into a giant axe for massive damage. - Being Western-inspired vampires (as opposed to more conventional Eastern vampires), Touhou Project's Remilia and Flandre Scarlet are able to turn into and reform from a swarm of bats. Interestingly, Flandre's bats have normal wings, even though she herself has bizarre metal/crystal wings. - XCOM 2: War of the Chosen introduces the Spectre, a robotic humanoid that reverts to a cloud of Nanomachines when it moves. This allows it to fly over difficult terrain, and grants it the Lightning Reflexes perk, making the first Overwatch shot against it miss. - Vagullion, the Warm-Up Boss from Ys Origin, will sometimes transform into a flock of bats and fly toward the player to attack. After taking enough damage, it splits into two beings, both of which use the swarming attack. It likewise appears in Ys: Ancient Ys Vanished ~ Omen, to which Origin serves as a prequel, where it is most definitely not a warm-up boss, coalescing into its singular form for only a split-second at a time. - Kill Six Billion Demons: Gog-Agog is a Hive Mind of The Worm That Walks and capable of assembling and disassembling bodies from her component worms at will (she has a lot of worms, and can teleport). She pulls the trick several times during King of Swords and Breaker of Infinities, usually in ways full of Body Horror. - In PepsiaPhobia, Krphxyzwlps the Neitherbeast is a shapeshifter who can take many forms, but always with the same total mass. This can include several humans, or in one case a swarm of mice to slip through a small hole. - Flander's Company: In the season 5 finale superhero battle royale, \|\|Kevin, in a spectacular case of New Powers as the Plot Demands, spew some green silk from his mouth and wraps himself in a cocoon. It later breaks open, releasing a swarm of Kevin-headed butterflies which fly around before reforming anew into Kevin as human-butterfly hybrid\|\|. Nadège is very disturbed by the whole sight. - Slime molds break apart into individual amoeba-like cells that forage for microscopic food, then merge together into much larger colony organisms that ooze around, feeding on decomposing plant matter as they prepare to reproduce.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneToMillionToOne
One-Track-Minded Artist - TV Tropes George Rodrigue and his Blue Dogs. Raz: Wow. See? Sometimes you just have to... you painted a bullfight over the doctor's face. Why a bullfight? Huh? Edgar, why do you— Edgar: EVERY TIME! Every time it's the same! The matador! The bull! How I despise you both! But my hands... my hands won't let you go. That is why I am here, chained more ways than you can see. When trying to create something, anything, being inspired is the first step. With a good idea in mind, it becomes much easier to make that art a reality. However, for some, finding inspiration isn't necessary, because they already know what they'll make. They know, because they've made it before, and they'll make it again, and they'll keep on making it. The subject and medium can vary wildly, as it all depends on the person behind these creations. Maybe Alice is obsessed with painting pictures of bats, and so she fills up her studio with nothing but. Maybe Bob can't stop drawing flowers, even after he's run through every flower species he knows of. Maybe Charlie only takes photos of his dog, and refuses to waste camera-roll space on anything else. What can also vary is the reason behind the obsession. The easiest explanation is that the artist just has an extreme interest in one thing and a lack of interest in anything else. The darker explanations can be as mundane as mental illness to being outright supernatural in origin; this is especially likely when the character in question isn't even an artist, but is just compelled to repeatedly create similar works after an encounter with the unknown. Another reason could be Author Appeal. For extra fun, this can be played in two ways. When Played for Laughs, the obsession will be downright silly, and it'll just be a funny quirk. Played for Drama, and the situation can be almost a look into the character's psyche, or the symptom of a much larger, much darker obsession, bordering on or outright being Played for Horror. This would overlap with Later-Installment Weirdness if the artist creates these are the later parts of their career. To see if someone fits, common signs to look out for are that the artist's room, studio, or what-have-you is filled with art of this particular subject, in-universe acknowledgement about the obsession, or even a scene of just watching them create similar works over and over again. A person who just happens to specialize in one specific field, like a carpenter who only makes chairs, doesn't fit unless it's clear their field is based on an obsession. ## Examples: - Saturn of Heaven's Design Team is obsessed with horses, which he considers his personal masterpiece, and would try to incorporate them in almost all of his subsequent design submissions. - Honey and Clover: Being shy and raised in a sheltered environment, Hagu learned art by drawing sketches of her porch every day up until her grandmother's death. - Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: - After spending all of chapter 60 trying to find a new hobby, Tohru decides to funnel her obsession with Kobayashi into making various works of art including paintings, sculptures, and music (much to the annoyance of Kanna and Ilulu). - This is a Running Gag with Saikawa in Kanna's Daily Life, who will always theme any art she makes around Kanna. She even manages to work her into a self-portrait in the Minidora shorts by having Kanna reflected in her eyes. - Rising Stars has a variation; as children, the Pederson Specials were all given an assignment to draw a picture of their earliest memory. Every single one of them drew a picture of the Mass Empowering Event that gave them all superpowers, despite the fact that none of them were even conceived that night. - In Brave, there is a witch who doubles as a wood carver. Both her carvings and her spells seem to always involve bears. - In Fantastic Mr. Fox, all of Mrs. Fox's paintings involve stormy weather (usually lightning, but in one instance a tornado). - In Tangled, all of Rapunzel's paintings have the sun on them somewhere. This could have something to do with either the lanterns that get sent up on her birthday, the fact that she was the lost princess of a kingdom who use a sun as their symbol, the fact that her powers come from a flower that was powered with "a drop of sun", or a combination. - Judge Dee: The judge gets the better of a smart-aleck artist when he notices every female character he paints has the exact same face, revealing he's obsessed with that particular woman, who turns out to have been missing. \|\|Unfortunately, the Psycho Lesbian kidnapper thought she'd been found out and murdered her.\|\| - The Magic Book of Spells: All of Dirhhenia Butterfly's drawings are of circles, balls, and other round things. She even drew balls on the walls of Castle Butterfly. This is one of the reasons why she was deemed unfit to be Queen of Mewni. - Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Captain Holt has painted nothing but the same rock almost a hundred times, from different angles. - The Fast Show: Johnny Nice Painter combines this with Madness Mantra: while he's perfectly able to paint other things, any mention of the word "black" in his presence causes him to start smearing black paint over everything he's painted up until that point while rambling incoherently about negative things. - Girl Meets World: To everyone else's irritation, Riley only likes to make paintings of purple cats, as discussed in "Girl Meets Creativity". Cory even tells her that if she puts one more purple-cat-painting on the fridge, he's "moving to Brooklyn". - Midsomer Murders: In "Picture of Innocence", one of the photographers entire body of work consists of photographs of every meal he has eaten. When Joyce comments on how similar all of his photos are, he says that he has eaten the same meal every day for more than a decade. - Ugly Betty: When Matt's Fleeting Passionate Hobby is art, nearly all of his paintings have Betty in them. - Wizards of Waverly Place: When Alex first meets Mason, she discovers that the only subject he is interested in painting are dogs, to the point where he wants to paint Alex as a dog. She uses magic to make her his inspiration instead, and he becomes completely obsessed with making art of her and only her, to where it's all he can do. - In Psychonauts, velvet painter Edgar Teglee suffers from an unidentified mental illness that gives him a Hair-Trigger Temper and an odd obsession in painting bulls and bullfighters and nothing else. He is assigned by his "psychiatrist" Dr. Loboto to paint his portrait as a part of his treatment, but every time he tries, his psychosis gets in the way, leaving him literally chained to the floor of the abandoned asylum. When Raz uses Sasha's mind-portal to enter his mind (portrayed as a Mexican villa painted on black velvet), he discovers on the surface that it involves his wife Lampita getting seduced by the bullfighter Dingo and ultimately leaving Edgar to be with him. Edgar was devastated by this and was driven mad with heartbreak, painting nothing but bullfights to symbolize his anguish. \|\|Or at least, that's the romanticized version, as what really happened was that his high school girlfriend was stolen away by a male cheerleader, breaking his fighting spirit and causing his friends on the wrestling team to abandon him, leaving him nowhere else to turn but the art lab; the connection between bullfights and the events is instead born out of him having had a bull-themed wrestling persona.\|\| - The Sculptor in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is constantly carving wooden statues of Buddha. Moreover, the statues always look more like furious Shuras than serene Buddhas, regardless of his intent. This is revealed to be because The Sculptor \|\|used to be a ninja with many lives on his conscience. All the killing eventually made him lose his humanity, until he almost turned into a Shura himself. In time, the weight of the many lives he took made him retire from the shinobi life entirely, seeking instead to repay the karmic debt he owed to his many victims by carving statues of Buddha... but no matter how many statues he carved, he couldn't find the peace in his heart and mind to forgive, and so he can only carve sculptures of wrath.\|\| - The Cry of Mann: At the start of the series, Jack is only interested in making paintings of trains. His studio is filled with paintings he'd already finished, and he is seen attempting to make even more, telling a caller that his paintings have to look like trains. However, he later begins to paint orange phones instead, filling his art exhibition with nothing but art of phones. - Marble Hornets: As part of his Operator obsession, Alex spent a ton of time drawing nothing but Operator symbols, paper after paper, over and over again. - Bob's Burgers: When Linda's sister Gayle was introduced in "Art Crawl", she was an aspiring artist whose paintings were all of animal butts. - Fillmore!: One pretentious character in "To Mar a Stall" remarks, when busted, "Yes! I draw toilets. Beautiful toilets. The perfect marriage of form and function, of style and substance, of water and porcelain." - The Simpsons: - Squidward Tentacles from Spongebob Squarepants always makes paintings and sculptures based on himself. - Steven Universe: Vidalia's gallery consists mostly of portraits of Amethyst, which she kept making even years after they'd last met, largely because Vidalia considers Amethyst her biggest inspiration. Reuniting with Amethyst seems to have gotten Vidalia to do other things, as she's later shown making a portraits of other people. - According to Arnold Drake, Bob Kane spent his later years completely obsessed with painting pictures of clowns, and was convinced that these paintings were going to make him even more famous than Batman. - In his later years, and due to an eye surgery that supposedly gave him ultraviolet vision, Impressionist painter Claude Monet painted subjects consisting mostly of waterlilies that show vibrant colors. - Damien Hirst and his friggin' spots. He's made over one thousand paintings of colored dots. He has done plenty of other stuff too though. - Louisiana artist George Rodrigue based the vast majority (but not quite all) of his paintings around a blue spaniel terrier dog with piercing yellow eyes, inspired by his own pet dog, Tiffany. The dog gained a much wider recognition after being featured in a 1992 ad campaign for Absolut vodka. - While Yayoi Kusama does do other types of artwork, most of her art is based around polka dots and pumpkins, mostly polka-dots.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneTrackMindedArtist
One-Time Dungeon - TV Tropes In video games with wide open worlds built on revisiting the same locations over and over, there are certain places that you can only enter once and never again. Sometimes this is because the place no longer exists thanks to being a Doomed Hometown or a Collapsing Lair. Sometimes it's because the plot keeps you out of it. Whatever the reason, these are places that can never be returned to. The items inside the dungeon are frequently Permanently Missable Content and there are often times that you can only fill up your Monster Compendium by grinding there. Note: In order to qualify, a game must generally be open to backtracking and not just have a linear advancement through it. So the 1950s areas in Portal 2, for example, don't qualify here. # Examples: - God of War (PS4): The duo can't return to explore \|\|most of Thamur's Corpse or Helheim beyond the bridge\|\| after completing those sections in the story. - In the first Xbox Ninja Gaiden, you can't go back to the Ninja fortress of chapter 1 nor in chapter 3's airship since it crashes. - The insides of Demon Whale in Alundra 2, which becomes unavailable after the thing turns back into a normal whale. - In ANNO: Mutationem, the rooftops of Noctis City, the first major area, cannot be revisited after Loki's mecha is beaten, leaving any Treasure Chest left behind unobtainable until New Game Plus. - Brave Fencer Musashi has the Noob Cave where Lumina is found, which can't be revisited after it is completed. You also can't enter Steamwood outside of the two Timed Missions where you need to prevent it from exploding nor can you ever ride the underground gondola ever again, not like any sane player would ever want to. - In Cave Story, Waterway is accessible only from an area whose entrance shuts permanently after a certain point. Depending on which story-path you take, the entire Labyrinth may become inaccessible. - The Legend of Zelda: - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link provides an example with the Palaces that become Mountain squares on the overworld map after you beat them, but only after you both defeat the boss and collect the required item. The only things that can truly be lost are some Experience Point bonuses and a 1-Up doll in the sixth Palace. - In The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Hyrule Castle and its tower are permanently locked after defeating Agahnim and entering the Dark World for the first time. - In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, it is impossible to reenter the courtyard of Hyrule Castle after recovering all three Spiritual Stones and Zelda flees from the castle, as guards will be blocking the passageway indefinitely from that point on. - In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, the areas at the very beginning of the game cannot be revisited once you have passed through them. This includes the Lost Woods, which cannot be returned to after Skull Kid transforms Link into a Deku Scrub, and the underground section (referred to as the "Portal" in the official Player's Guide) that follows, as the door in the Clock Tower basement can never be reopened. Fortunately, no items of any significance are in these sections. \|\|These areas are briefly revisited during the credits, though, where it is revealed that the withered tree in the Portal is actually the Deku Butler's deceased son\|\|. - The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: - Tetra's Ship is only ever visited at two points during the game. The first time is when Link joins Tetra's crew at the beginning of the game; the ship goes away after Link arrives at the Forsaken Fortress. The second time is when the ship is docked at Windfall; it will vanish after Link obtains Nayru's Pearl. The ship is seen again during the ending cutscene. - The Ghost Ship will permanently disappear the moment Link collects the treasure that's inside. note : A Triforce Chart in the GameCube version, replaced with a Triforce Shard in the Wii U version. Upon receiving the treasure, the screen will fade to black, and Link will reappear back on the open sea upon the King of Red Lions. - The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has the sewers and rooftops of Hyrule Castle. You can only explore these sections at two different points during the game, namely when Link first enters the Twilight, and again after clearing Lakebed Temple. - The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass has the fourth dungeon, the Ghost Ship. It has a Developer's Foresight moment: if you leave without taking its Heart Container, the only item in the dungeon relevant to 100% Completion, it is sent to you via mail to avert Permanently Missable Content. - The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has the final dungeon, the Sky Keep, which is inaccessible after you \|\|grab all of the Triforce Pieces\|\| due to \|\|falling into the Sealed Grounds to crush The Imprisoned\|\|. It has no Heart Pieces. - The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has the Divine Beasts that, unlike the shrines, can't be visited after clearing them. The Heart Containers found within are placed just outside them should you not pick them up before finishing the dungeon. - Ōkami has the Moon Cave dungeon that cannot be accessed again once your defeat Orochi and leave it. There is also Oni Island, the miniature sections of the Imperial Palace, the Sea Dragon's body and \|\|Past Kamiki\|\|. This is generally not frustrating since these areas only contain Shop Fodder, but no important secret item — with one exception to the spoilered area, which has a dog to feed. If you overlook this on your one visit to that area, you cannot get 100% Animal Tome completion and you'll have to wait until the New Game Plus for another chance. - Ōkamiden, the sequel to Okami, is not so forgiving. It has the Five-Story Pagoda, the Moon Cave (again), the Underground Ruins, and the Ice Room; all of these contain unique items that are needed for 100% Completion. - DarkIce Mines and CloudRunner Fortress are the only satellital areas in Star Fox Adventures that get sealed off after you defeat their respective bosses and retrieve their Spellstones. Fox can hang around their Arwing landing sites (as long as you replay their associated Arwing shooter levels), but that's it. The good news is that there's nothing missable (like Energy Cells or Cheat Tokens) in them, if only because none of the satellital regions have optional collectibles anyway. - In Pathways into Darkness, the Plot Tunnel starting with the one-way door near the end of "Warning: Earthquake Zone" and concluding with "Okay, Who Else Wants Some?" cannot be revisited, so missing either the Nuclear Device or the Lead Box before heading in, or forgetting to set the bomb or pick up the Alien Gemstone at the end of it renders the game unwinnable. - Breath of Fire: - In Breath of Fire I, Nanai and the dungeon beneath it are destroyed after you leave. Neither Mogu nor Mote's dream dungeons can be re-entered once you complete them. The Goddess' Tower is also destroyed \|\|after Jade releases the Goddess\|\|. - In Breath of Fire II, a few locations become unrevisitable: - The well beneath Capitan, as it floods after beating the boss. A few items can be missed, but furthermore, there are several trapped and possessed villagers (some of whom can potentially be chosen as carpenters to build Township later on) who can be missed for good if you don't go back for them. - The vast majority of Mt. Fubi, as a rockslide destroys it after you beat the bosses (though a shortcut gets created as a result). - HighFort can only be done once, as the fortress undergoes extensive damage following the boss fight there, and becomes completely inaccessible following Sten's arc. - The levels that take place "inside" someone or something — the interior of Grandpa the Whale is inaccessible after you wake him up; Gandaroof's mind is only available until you defeat Aruhamel/Alzheimer; and the Queen of Tunlan's body is only available until she loses all her excess weight. - Gandaroof's mind even has its own example-within-an-example: The initial village you visit, populated by elderly men? \|\|Once you visit the town of Gandaroof's youth, one child there will remark that there's no town there, but a tower. Returning to the town of elderly men will reveal it to be the actual dungeon of the area.\|\| - The trial/catacombs area of Wyndia is unavailable after Nina completes her trial there. - The Grand Church is only available to visit once. \|\|It collapses after you defeat the boss and either kill or free Ganer.\|\| Similarly, the toilet dungeon you escape through on your initial visit can only be done once. - Chrono Trigger: - The Fiendlord's Keep is this once you \|\|defeat Magus and the Time Warp sucks in the fortress itself.\|\| - The Black Tyrano fortress in 65,000,000 B.C. is destroyed when Lavos crashes into it (although its boss reappears in the Giant's Claw dungeon later on). Mt. Woe in 12,000 B.C. (a floating mountain) is no longer accessible after the chain anchoring it to the ground breaks and it falls into the sea. - The Ocean Palace in 12,000 B.C. is no longer accessible after \|\|Lavos awakens, destroying it and the Kingdom of Zeal\|\|. - Also the Black Bird \|\|as the heroes accidentally shoot it down after recovering the Wings of Time and finding that Dalton not only installed weapons but altered the controls while failing to label the buttons.\|\| - \|\|The Black Omen\|\| is also a possibility, depending on \|\|which time period you finish it in. Completing it in the earliest time period (12,000 B.C.) prevents you from finishing it in the other two (600 A.D. and 1,000 A.D.) Going from the most recent time period to the oldest allows you to complete it 3 times total.\|\| - Once you beat the boss of Geno Dome, Robo shuts the place down permanently, putting an end to its human-processing operations but also effectively killing the robots and computers inside. Including whichever one was responsible for opening the front door. - Several areas in Cosmic Star Heroine cannot be revisited, especially ones you visit before getting your own spaceship. Among them are the building from the opening mission, the jungle path to a lab on Rhomu (the lab itself can be revisited later), API headquarters, the Underwater Base on Araenu and the asteroid. - The Ultharian spaceship in Cthulhu Saves the World becomes inaccessible once you defeat its boss because it crashes into the planet. Not even a chance to revisit it in the form of a holodeck simulation which wouldn't be out of place in a silly game. - The beginner dungeon in Dubloon cannot be accessed after Bradley curb-stomps you. Thankfully there is nothing in this dungeon that can't be acquired anywhere else. - The Final Fantasy series has plenty of these. - Final Fantasy II has the Dreadnought, which is destroyed by the party and Emperor Palamecia's cyclone castle, which dissipates once he's defeated. Unfortunately, the cyclone also wiped half the towns off the world map before that, so here it's not just dungeons that get the worst of this trope. The towns are still visible on the map, but they are completely wrecked and cannot be entered. Castle Palamecia is also one of these thanks to \|\|the Emperor destroying it with his newfound demonic powers\|\|. - Final Fantasy III has a floating Hyne Castle, which after finishing gets planted into a forest you're not allowed to get back to. - Final Fantasy IV has the Tower of Zot, which collapses once finished with, as well as the Giant of Bab-il, and the Tower of Bab-il's two parts. Unlike the first two, the Tower of Bab-il actually remains on the world map — it's simply closed off. - This happens in quite a few dungeons in Final Fantasy V, such as Karnak Castle, the Lonka Ruins, the Barrier Tower, Exdeath's Castle, Fork Tower and others are destroyed or otherwise disappear. - In Final Fantasy VI there's the Imperial Camp, Phantom Train, Magitek Research Facility, Sealed Cave, Floating Continent, and Cyan's Soul. There's also Kefka's tower, but only half of it. - Final Fantasy VII has several locations that can only be visited once: Sectors 1 and 5 reactors, Shinra Headquarters (won't be revisited again until the raid late in Disc 2, and can't be revisited after that), Cave of the Gi, Corel Prison, Temple of the Ancients, Gaea's Cliff (and by extension the Whirlwind Maze), Underwater Reactor, and Midgar sector 8 during the raid. - In Final Fantasy VIII, there's Dollet Communications Tower, Galbadia D-District Prison, Missile Base, Galbadia Garden (during the attack), Great Salt Lake and Lunatic Pandora (only visited twice) leading to almost all locations inaccessible due to Time Compression. Not to mention the Laguna dream sequences. - Final Fantasy IX: Evil Forest, the Ice Cavern, Cleyra, Fossil Roo, and all of Terra (including Pandaemonium). - Final Fantasy X has Home \|\|which is destroyed immediately after leaving\|\|, the Bevelle temple and the Via Purifico (which are blocked off). - Final Fantasy XII has several, and in an uncharacteristic act of kindness, the programmers indirectly tell you which ones by giving you a prompt about not being able to leave them until you finish them when you try to save in them: - Nalbina fortress which is only there in the prelude due to it being destroyed. - Rabanastre Palace during the heist. - Nalbina Dungeons which is only accessible during your escape. - Several airship dungeons including the Leviathan and Shiva. - Draklor Laboratory in Archades. - Final Fantasy XIII is mostly linear, with only the areas you can access in the last few chapters being revisitable. Among those, Orphan's Cradle has the paths you traverse between its boss fights disassemble themselves after you move on, leaving its hub section as its only permanently accessible area. - The Golden Sun franchise has a few: - In the first game, the very first dungeon, Sol Sanctum, becomes inaccessible after you've completed it. - Dark Dawn has multiple Points of No Return, but two stand out for completely opposite reasons. The first one is the Clouds of Passaj, which come immediately after the second Point of No Return and the only one where the game warns you ahead of time that there's no going back after this point. note : Ironically, every area in between the first and second Point of No Return actually does become accessible again after the final Point of No Return and there's one sidequest that can only be completed by returning during this time, though it still counts as a Point of No Return because there's one Djinni that can only be obtained before this point. After getting through the Clouds, you can't reenter them. The game's fairly merciful, though, in that the only treasure chests in the area contain common items that can easily be bought in item shops. The second, far more insidious one is the Belinsk Ruins. There's nothing to indicate that once you have the band play Arangoa Prelude, you won't be allowed to leave Belinsk until you complete the Ruins and even less to indicate that once you do, you'll have to leave Belinsk by sea when you entered it by land, and furthermore that Arangoa Prelude was in fact the third PoNR and that leaving Belinsk after \|\|the Grave Eclipse has started\|\| is the fifth, since you also can't go back into the Ruins after you've beaten their boss. There are two special summons that are only available during this time, as well as one Djinni and some fairly nice items in the dungeon's chests. - Kingdom Hearts: - Kingdom Hearts: Destiny Islands cannot be revisited after the prologue, since it is destroyed. While you can visit Halloween Town anytime, Oogie's Manor cannot be revisited after defeating Oogie Boogie, as he merges with his manor for another fight. Thus the manor is destroyed afterwards, as well as a Red Trinity Mark that, if missed, can't be recorded in the journal (subverted with any regular treasure chests that were missed, which just get moved to the area that had been under the manor before its destruction). The Final Mix Updated Re-release moved that Trinity Mark to fix the issue. - Birth by Sleep: The Land of Departure and Keyblade Graveyard cannot be accessed in the Final Episode, since Aqua transforms the former into Castle Oblivion, while the latter is inexplicably locked. Their Endgame+ superbosses can only be fought in the other episodes and only after you beat the Final Episode, so if you deleted your old save files before starting the Final Episode, you are screwed. - Kingdom Hearts III: The Realm of Darkness (or the Dark World) and the Land of Departure are this, as you cannot visit them again after your business there is finished. - Last Scenario generally averts this, with one notable exception; the Biorite Facility can only be visited once, given that \|\|the party rigs it to explode\|\|. - The Legend of Heroes: Trails: A frequent occurrence from Trails In The Sky SC onwards is to have at least one dungeon that can only be explored on the first visit, or if it can be revisited to make things like Monster Encyclopedia data only obtainable once. This includes the Lakeside Laboratory, the first part of the Glorious and the 'Another Dimension' versions of the four Towers in Sky SC, Gehenna in The 3rd, St. Ursula Medical College Research Building in Trails from Zero, lots and lots of dungeons in Trails to Azure and everything in Trails of Cold Steel other than the Old Schoolhouse, since Trista is the only location you get to see in more than one Chapter. Despite having free travel for much of the game, most of Cold Steel II's dungeons are also single-visit because the situations that lead you to fight in them go away after the first time. Notable exceptions are the four Shrines and the Ancient Quarry. - Mother: - In both EarthBound Beginnings and EarthBound (1994), Magicant vanishes. In the first game, Magicant can be revisited prior to completing a particular subquest; in the latter, it's a true One-Time Dungeon with a few special items that are permanently missable. There's also Moonside in EarthBound, which \|\|is just an illusion created by the Evil Mani Mani, and disappears when it is defeated\|\|. - Mother 3 uses a Chapter system, but most dungeons and areas in the game can be revisited in at least one later chapter (although the enemy types and layout will change with the plot). The major exceptions are the Attic Dungeon in Chapter 4, which becomes inaccessible once the Chapter ends with its completion, and the Thunder Tower, which is only accessible in Chapter 5 because the story at that point involves infiltrating and destroying it. - Octopath Traveler II: The Sacred Guard Ship, which is explored during Temenos' second chapter, sails away and cannot be revisited after fighting the boss there (though its icon still appears on the world map). - Persona: - Persona 2: Most of the dungeons are these. When you try to reenter, a member of your party will complain to stop goofing off, or explain that they don't need to go there. In any case, most of them get destroyed anyway, either by Sudou during his reign of terror, or Zodiac Shrines that sprout in their place. - Persona 4 Golden has the Hollow Forest, the bonus dungeon. When your party discovers it, you're warned that it's rapidly disappearing, which means that you don't have long if you want to \|\|save Marie\|\|. Once you get what you came for, the dungeon self-destructs and is no longer available. - Persona 5 features Palaces, dungeons that are based around the distorted desires of villainous individuals. Once the treasure representing the owner's desire is stolen, the Palace ceases to exist; it is up to the player when exactly to steal the treasure and trigger the collapse of the palace, meaning any chests that were not opened before or on the last day are lost forever. Any Personae found in the Palace, however, can either be fused or found in Mementos. - Pokémon: - The S.S. Anne in Pokémon Red and Blue. After you heal the captain and he gives you the Cut HM, the ship sails away, never to return. This leads to a few items there, including TMs, being no longer obtainable if you didn't get them. - In Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, the Team Magma/Team Aqua Hideout becomes inaccessible after beating Tate & Liza, which unfortunately makes the Master Ball unobtainable if you don't get it before then. Thankfully, this doesn't happen in Emerald or the remakes. - The Distortion World in Pokémon Platinum. The initial, plot-relevant area is one-time, anyway; you can enter it again later, though it's a different section of it. - N's Castle in Pokémon Black and White is destroyed and cannot be revisited. It can be in the sequel, though, as it is a Bonus Dungeon there. - Pokémon X and Y has the Team Flare Secret HQ, which is destroyed after clearing it. Fortunately, there's nothing there that you can miss out on. - \|\|Ultra Space\|\| in Pokémon Sun and Moon. - The dungeons you explore in the future and The Nightmare in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers - Subverted to a degree in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity. While the Glacier Palace and the Magnagate dungeons used to reach it can't be visited again through normal methods, it's possible to temporarily be warped into them for a few floors while exploring specific dungeons in the post-game. - Showdown Mountain in Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon is only available once during a mandatory main quest, and isn't accessible afterwards. - As Skies of Arcadia is a fantastical twist on the Age of Exploration, the few places that cannot be revisited tend to be smaller than usual for this trope. The dungeons that cannot be revisited are the ship manned by Alfonso that's raided in the opening, Valua's Grand Fortress (which is part of a prison break sequence, Dangral Island, the interior of the Hydra airship (lost after defeating Galcian, its captain), and \|\|the Great Silver Shrine\|\|. Dangral Island and \|\|the Great Silver Shrine\|\| can be visited repeatedly once assessed, but will both be destroyed after certain points in the story: Dangral will fall apart after the second story-mandated trip to it, while \|\|the Great Silver Shrine is eventually used to destroy Soltis' barrier during the final assault against Galcian's forces.\|\| - Shin Megami Tensei: - In Digital Devil Saga, The Deserted Ship in the first game and the Power Plant in the second, which are both destroyed after completion. - Shin Megami Tensei IV: - The Monochrome Forest is only explored once, then becomes unavailable after you leave it. However, the demons that appear there can later be encountered in the Central Breakwater area, but getting there requires a Global Airship that requires some optional mini-dungeons and a quest. - The alignment-specific final dungeons, \|\|Purgatorium and Lucifer Palace\|\|, close up after you beat their respective Final Bosses. While it's logical that you can't access them anymore on Law or Chaos since there's nothing more of value you can do afterwards, this trope is in play on the Neutral route since after defeating those two dungeons' main bosses you can continue to explore Tokyo and Mikado, visit dungeons, and do sidequests until you decide to wrap up the game by deliberately visiting a specific location. - In Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, \|\|Lucifer Palace\|\| from SMTIV makes a return, once again disappearing once you beat the main boss inside of it. It sticks out more in this game because it's even earlier relative to the main body of the game if you're pursuing either of the full-length routes. - Super Mario Bros.: - Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga has the entire beginning of the game; specifically, Mario Bros. house, Peach's Castle (where you fight Bowser), Toadtown Square, the Koopa Cruiser, and the Mushroom Kingdom side of Stardust Fields before the Border Jump minigame. There's also Chucklehuck Woods Underground (after beating the Chuckolator), the Guffawha Ruins (which can only be visited by Luigi from the entrance), the S.S. Chuckola, the repaired Koopa Cruiser, and the Beanbean Castle Town's houses after the second destruction, which are all are visited at one point and all become inaccessible for repeated visits after completion. - In Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, the player can only explore the Koopa Cruiser (when playing as Baby Mario and Baby Luigi) and the Shroob Mothership once. After the player completes those areas after leaving them, you can't return to those areas again. - Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam has an odd example. When Bowser Castle \|\|takes flight and becomes Neo Bowser Castle, the game treats it as a completely different dungeon, but the structure remains almost the same, with the sky replacing the earlier lava pits.\|\| So, while you can't revisit Bowser Castle, it could be said that \|\|Neo Bowser Castle makes up for it.\|\| - Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has segments after every Chapter where you get to play as Peach and Bowser. While these mostly boil down to uncovering information and minigames, the Bowser segments that come after Chapters 2, 4 and 6 contain unique side-scrolling levels based on Super Mario Bros.. As these "Bowser" levels containing nothing of any real significance, once you complete one, there is no way of replaying it. - The Tales of... series has a handful of these scattered throughout its various entries. Examples include: - Tokyo Xanadu: The Viridian Path, Amber Waterway, and Frost Demon Path labyrinths in the After Story. They're short and linear dungeons that you only visit once to reunite with the other X.R.C. members after they've been separated. But afterwards, you're unable to revisit them, even from the Eclipse selection menu. - Xenoblade Chronicles: - Xenoblade Chronicles 1: Twice in the first game. First, a good chunk of the Ether Mines in Colony 6 becomes unavailable after the boss has been defeated; and well after that, it ups the ante by locking away \|\|the entire freaking Mechonis, i.e. the other half of the game world, after it's been destroyed\|\|. - \|\|The Lifehold Core\|\| is the only place in Xenoblade Chronicles X that can only be played once; afterwards you can only hang around the outside parts. Thankfully, it has no missable items nor elements. - The very first dungeon of Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the Ancient Ship, is one of these. Handful of consumables in chests and the usability of two Guest Star Party Members, but nothing else of value can be missed within. - In Ys IV (both Mask & Dawn), the raising of the Ancient City causes certain dungeons to be destroyed or rendered inaccessable. After the city of Kefin reappears in Ys V: Lost Kefin, Kingdom of Sand, the desert town is buried by a sandstorm, and the dungeon under Xandria collapses while you're escaping from it. In Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim, the Romun Fleet is destroyed by Galba-Roa after you're finished there, and Zemeth Sanctum also is destroyed by the Ark's revival. - Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!: Helios Station cannot be revisited after you escape from it in the prologue of the game, making the boss of this location impossible to farm. - Eamon: the Beginner's Cave (on the game's Main Hall disk) is accessible only once. The game checks when the player tries to access it; only a true beginning character is allowed to enter, and a player who finishes the cave is no longer a beginner. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984): Completing one of the sublocations can close it off to further play, usually by an insta-kill that sends you back to the Heart of Gold. - The dream areas in 2 that are found in each zone (including the intro) by sleeping in a bed. Once you grab the Heart Container and leave, the beds inside each dream will explode. - In Hollow Knight, the Path of Pain within the White Palace can't be replayed after completion (But then again, would you want to?). The Palace itself originally became inaccessible once you obtained its Kingsoul fragment, but that was changed when the Path of Pain was added. - Iconoclasts: There are several sections in the areas that get locked off through plot progression, such as the Omega Controller tunnels in Darland Ascent and nearly all of One Concern East. - The Metroid series usually averts this, as nearly every game allows players to explore the whole part of the overworld map available. But there are exceptions: - Super Metroid has the Ceres Space Colony. The only fight you deal with there is Ridley and escape. - Metroid Fusion: The top secret laboratory becomes inaccessible after being explored as its emergency protocol is activated which detaches it from the BSL Space Station and sends it hurtling into SR388 to prevent \|\|the Metroids onboard from escaping into the space station.\|\| \|\|It fails\|\|. - Metroid Prime: The Frigate Orpheon in the prologue. In its wrecked-but-still-operating state, it can only be explored during the prologue of the game; after the first boss is defeated and Samus escapes in her gunship to land onto Tallon IV, the vessel crashes not too far from the heroine's landing site, and eventually it can be revisited in its flooded, badly altered form. Even then, all of its content and gameplay have changed and are now considered to be part of the Tallon Overworld area; this also means that, if you didn't scan the place's missable log entries or unique enemies, you never will for the remainder of that save file unless you're playing the Wii version and wait until the New Game Plus. - Metroid Prime 3: Corruption: The GFS Olympus is only available during that game's prologue and (thankfully for its living passengers) does not get destroyed despite suffering a Space Pirate attack; the closest thing you'll get to reliving your moments there comes when you visit and explore the GFS Valhalla, which has a nearly-identical layout and theme to Olympus but was internally destroyed by the Pirates shortly before the events of the game and all that remains now is a Ghost Ship. - In the vanilla edition of Ori and the Blind Forest all of the major dungeons, as well as the maze portion of the Misty Woods, are either destroyed or sealed off upon completion, but the Definitive Edition allows you to revisit them, and also removes the much-maligned Point of No Return at the Final Dungeon entrance. - Tails Adventure: Coco Island is intended to be one of these (Completion of the level causes it to transform into The Battle Fortress), with two items within. However, an oversight on the part of the devs * : When the player completes the Lake Rocky tunnel leading to Coco Island, the game deposits the player onto Coco Island on the map... even if it's already become the Battle Fortress causes the trope's technical aversion. - City of Heroes is generally very good when it comes to backtracking, as you can replay most story arcs and badge missions at will via the Flashback System. However, Praetorian Characters get hit by this trope hard. The first three Praetorian zones can be revisited at any time, but the story arcs can never be replayed once you outlevel them. The Praetorian Alignment Badges and Temporary powers are lost if you don't have them when you leave. This is due to an issue with the game's Karma Meter. note : Resistance and Loyalist characters are their own alignments, and certain contacts are only accessible if you have the corresponding alignment. As you can change your alignment multiple times throughout the storyline, being able to replay the arcs as a Hero or Villain would screw things up. Praetoria used to be a much more extreme example of a One-Time Dungeon. When the zones were first released, leaving Praetoria at level 20 meant leaving it permanently. There was no way back! Things have gotten much more relaxed now. - Pre-Searing Ascalon in Guild Wars invokes this via Doomed Hometown. It's intended as a tutorial area to leave at around level 4 or so, but the area is so pretty and nostalgic that some players choose to stay there forever. - In MapleStory once you leave Maple Island, you can't go back. That ship inexplicably only goes in one direction. The game blends this with Guide Dang It! and Permanently Missable Content, because there is a special quest reward that will boost your HP recovery while resting that you can only get by sticking around. - Star Wars: The Old Republic has this with the various storyline missions for each class. Each storyline mission, of which there are dozens for each class storyline, can only be played once per character. While side quests and flashpoints and operations (raids) can be repeated indefinitely, there are several hundred missions across the 8 class storylines that can only be played once. - World of Warcraft: Cataclysm introduces several in the form of Doomed Hometowns for the Worgen and Goblin races. It is possible to return to Gilneas, although there is no longer anything there (and that means absolutely nothing, no NPCs and no enemies, which arguably makes an already Bleak Level even creepier). However, Kazan and the Lost Isles are completely sealed off once you leave. Notably, this started with the Death Knight starting experience in Wrath of the Lich King. Mists of Pandaria continued this tradition with the Pandaran starting area, The Wandering Isle. The last time a starting zone was introduced that was contiguous with the main world was Burning Crusade. - Banjo-Tooie: - You cannot reenter the Digger Tunnels or the Gatehouse after clearing their respective Klungo fights; you instead bypass them and simply continue to the next area. Fortunately, there is nothing of interest in any of these areas once you've completed them. - Bottles' House cannot be reentered after clearing the Tower of Tragedy quiz, cutting off access to Bottles and his family. If you neglected to receive the Amaze O' Gaze Glasses from Goggles before beating the quiz, you'll never be able to get them. - In Bugs Bunny: Lost in Time, you can't re-enter the Tutorial Level, Nowhere. After you clear it, its place in the Time Era Selection is taken by the ending of the game, and won't open until you get at least 120 Clock Symbols. - All areas that pertain to the War Arc (Chapter 7) in Conker's Bad Fur Day close off after Conker completes the chapter and returns to the Windy area. Though it's justified due to the scale-wide explosion of the Tediz island, it turns out you can't return to the starter area where you had to remove the remnants of a downed airship either (despite it being part of the Panther King's now-safe land), as the metallic door that takes you there never opens again. Unlike in all other chapters, there's no money Conker can gather here, so there's nothing missable. - Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back: If you sit through the intro with Crash and Coco without skipping it, you can play an "intro stage" where Crash runs into the jungle to take something Coco needs; you'll find some breakable crates and Wumpa Fruits, but no important collectables, so this is entirely optional. - Jak and Daxter: - Mega Man: - Mega Man Zero 4: You'll be unable to re-access the intro stage (takes place on moving trucks and then moves onto an enemy airship) and the "forced stage after defeating 4 main bosses" (takes place around Area Zero, in which you fight Craft for the first time). The latter also has an enemy (Moloid) exclusive to that stage; the machine parts that they drop will contribute towards 100% completion, not to mention being the ingredient for some good enhancement upgrades, so you better make sure you get 2-3 parts of them before you finish the stage. - Mega Man ZX Advent: - The intro stages for both characters, Grey note : takes place in a part of an abandoned lab; late game stage will have you visit another part, as the bridge that connects the two parts are broken in the intro's boss fight and Ashe note : takes place on an airship that crashes down in the end, which can be found in the Oil Fields. Interestingly, in the world map for both characters, you can see where their intro stages were placed, but you get no option to go there. - The penultimate level Undersea Volcano, which can't be returned to since \|\|it was destroyed by all the Model Ws forming into Ouroboros before smashing up through the ocean floor and waters into the sky.\|\| - Psychonauts 2: The casino in the physical world is only visited once for a mission in the early-game, and cannot be returned to after said mission concludes. - The tutorial levels in Ratchet & Clank games generally can't be revisited after completion. However, in some cases (\|\|Veldin from Ratchet & Clank (2002) and Aranos from Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando\|\|) an altered version of the level appears later on, from which point it can be revisited. There's also the decommissioned Blarg ship in Nebula G34 from Ratchet & Clank (2002) and the Leviathan in Zeldrin Starport from Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, both of which explode upon completion. - In Rayman 2: Revolution, the first two sections of the Woods of Light (Rayman's prison cell in the Buccaneer and the opening woods section) cannot be revisited once completed. - Super Mario Bros.: - Super Mario World: The Switch Palaces cannot be re-entered after beating them, even after the game is completed. The end-of-world castles, as well as the fortresses, also act this way since they're destroyed in-story, but simply holding down the R button gets around that. - The starting stage of Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins can't be replayed after beating it. Also, the boss stages can't be replayed unless you get a Game Over and lose all the Golden Coins you've collected. - Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 has Course 10 of Mt. Teapot. You can only access this course until you beat Course 12 and hit the switch, which makes the lid of the mountain slam down onto the top of the mountain. It lands right on Course 10, which transforms it into the much more rough and claustrophobic Course 13. - Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island: "Welcome to Yoshi's Island", the introductory level to the game, cannot be replayed after clearing it. The level is short and contains nothing of any real significance. The Game Boy Advance remake of the game does incorporate the layout of "Welcome to Yoshi's Island" into the final part of its last bonus level, "Endless World of Yoshis", for what it's worth. - Every boss level in Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Hidden Treasure cannot be revisited once completed. Justified in that upon playing through them, Buster rescues one of his Brainwashed and Crazy friends from Dr. Gene Splicer's mind control helmets, or in the case of the haunted pirate shipwreck level, has already found and collected the titular "hidden treasure". These elements are important in keeping the game's story intact. - The Akbadain Ruins in Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask, explored in Chapter 6, cannot be revisited upon completion. It's justified in-game because \|\|Hershel wants nothing to do with the place after the apparent death of his best friend Randall\|\|. While missing any optional puzzles from it won't be a big problem (Granny Riddleton will retrieve them for you once Chapter 7 starts), any missed Hint Coins and Treasure will stay lost, so gathering them all is important if 100% Completion is a priority. - Resident Evil: - In addition to the obligatory Collapsing Lair at the end of each game, the series has a number of destroyable locations that occur mid-game, such as the Hospital in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, the part of Rockfort Island in Resident Evil Code: Veronica where Claire starts out (destroyed shortly before her escape), and the train in Resident Evil 0. The only exception thus far is the very first game and its remake, where the entire mansion and its outlying grounds are fully available to explore right up until you confront the final boss. note : If we want to be picky, there is one room that is permanently closed off to Jill if you don't disarm the ceiling trap first. - In Resident Evil Village, each of the first three Lord areas become inaccessible once their respective boss is beaten and Ethan leaves the area. Any possible treasures, weapons, or unsolved labyrinths that the player misses will be completely inaccessble from that point onwards. - In Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, you get a Dimension Whistle from Juwanna Mann, which gives you a one-time ride to the B-Ball Dimension. Points of interest include a tournament arena featuring an enemy gauntlet, a Dating Sim minigame for Cyberdwarf, and what appears to be a breeding mini-game where you can raise your own pet b-ball. Of course, this being a One-Time Dungeon means the breeding mechanic is entirely a farce, like many fake secrets in this game. - Bug Fables: The majority of the Wasp Kingdom Hive cannot be re-entered after Chapter 5, as it becomes sealed off for the rest of the game. In the postgame, it is possible to enter the main hall, but not the residential area that served as a stealth section. The only thing that can be missed is a single Dark Cherry buried in the prison area, which is an unlimited resource. - Diablo II: The Cow Level can only be played once per difficulty level. - The Elder Scrolls: - Oblivion has the Painted World area and a dream sequence that can't be returned to. Closing an Oblivion gate destroys that instance, although it's possible (and indeed likely) to find an identical map behind another gate, but completing the main quest line permanently closes all the gates, cutting off access to Oblivion entirely. - Skyrim: - Fallout: - In Fallout 3, completists would be advised to grab the collectible Energy Weapons bobblehead during the brief Raven Rock sequence, since once the door shuts behind you, you're never getting back in there. - Same for Vault 101 and the Medicine bobblehead, although you get to revisit one final time in the "Trouble on the Homefront" sidequest. - The Anchorage Reclamation simulation in the Operation: Anchorage DLC, and the Mobile Base Crawler in Broken Steel are also only accessible once. - In Point Lookout, the Calvert Mansion self-destructs at the end of the "Thought Control" quest. - You can go back to Mothership Zeta after completion, but only parts of it; most of the lower half of the ship, including the two optional areas, is locked after the "Among the Stars" quest, and once you teleport to the Death Ray hub, the teleporter breaks, locking you out of the Weapons and Experimentation Labs. - Fallout: New Vegas: - The Securitron Vault under Fortification Hill was intended to be such, with the player being unable to re-enter once it is completed, and the guard's dialogue not permitting you to leave until you complete the task. However, the actual implementation permits you to leave (using dialog or killing the guards) as long as you don't complete the section. - The Dead Money DLC cannot be visited after it is completed, unlike the Honest Hearts, Old World Blues, and Lonesome Road DLCs. It's explained as the path being "hard to find"; the Super Mutant who brought you there (while you were unconscious) even says that he occasionally has to sniff to find the trail again. So while you'll be able to go back to the Mojave, getting back to the Sierra Madre seems next to impossible. - The Honest Hearts DLC zigzags this trope. You can go back to Zion Canyon once the main quest is over, but all of the named NPCs are gone. So the area itself is still accessible, but the experience is gone. - In Fallout 4, if siding with any faction other than the Institute, their underground base (as well as the CIT Ruins above it) will be destroyed in the final story mission, and if siding with either the Institute or the Railroad, the Brotherhood of Steel's airship will be destroyed in the penultimate quest. - In Mass Effect, while most side worlds can be freely revisited, Therum, Peak 15, ExoGeni building and Virmire all become inaccessible once you complete your mission in these locations. That's nothing compared to the sequel where even sidequest areas can be visited only once. - Might and Magic: - In VII: - The starter location, The Emerald Isle, cannot be accessed once you complete the first main quest and leave it. There is nothing you can't get elsewhere though. - Red Dwarf Mines is dungeon which has two floors connected by an elevator and a sidequest to disable it. Should you do so, the lower floor becomes inaccessible for the rest of the game. Think twice before pulling it off, because one of monsters here has an unique amulet. - In VIII, The Great Crystal serves as the gateway to the Plane between the Planes where \|\|Escaton's palace is. At the game's end it is destroyed, so the location and of course the Crystal's interior are not accessible post-game.\|\| - In X, each of DLC's dungeons can be accessed once. - In Ravensword: Shadowlands, you cannot return to the titular Shadowlands after you are done with them. - South Park: The Stick of Truth has actually many examples. - The alien spaceship becomes inaccessible once it crashes at the end of the first night. - The school can't be explored a third time after the human assault on the second night. - The interiors of your house's walls becomes blocked with a wooden plank at the end of the second night. - The abortion clinic doesn't allows the character to advance beyond the reception after the battle with \|\|the giant Nazi zombie fetus\|\|. - \|\|Clyde's Fortress\|\|, The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, also disappears after the credits. Same for \|\|Mr. Slave's Ass\|\|. - In Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, once you leave Davik's Estate upon acquiring Ebon Hawk, you cannot return to it (or the rest of Taris of that matter) due to the Sith razing the planet. You also cannot return to the Leviathan after breaking out from it. - In Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II The Sith Lords: - Goto's Yacht cannot be revisited, as it is destroyed after you complete it. You also can't go back to Peragus (the beginning planet) for the same reason. - The only time you get to explore the Telos Restoration sites is when you're searching for your stolen ship. You also cannot revisit Ludo Kresh's tomb once you're done. - You only travel to Onderon twice (you instead get to revisit one of its moons, Dxun, at your leisure), but due to its political predicament it's in a vastly different state on the return trip. - Undertale: - The Ruins are the only major area in the game that cannot be revisited after clearing it. The doorway leading to it will lock, and stay that way for the rest of a regular playthrough. Taking advantage of this, one midboss late into the game can be skipped by buying an item only available either at the Ruins, or right before said boss at a ridiculously high price. \|\|The doors to the Ruins are re-opened after the final boss of the best ending, and the location can be explored again during the ending's epilogue\|\|. - There's an area in Waterfall that becomes inaccessible after you've been through it, because when you first go there, you are with a monster who helps you climb up onto a ledge you can't reach, and then you get chased on a bridge by Undyne, who breaks part of it and sends you falling into the dump. The only thing that you miss out on is a save point and a little bit of information about the war though. - \|\|The True Lab\|\| is the only area you can't go back to in the Golden Ending. - Deltarune: In each chapter, once the Dark Fountain is sealed entirely, all areas connected to it will disappear forever. Any recruited monsters will reside at Castle Town. - Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: Most of the game world can be freely accessed after each area becomes available, but the Sabbat warehouse, the Elizabeth Dane ship, Grout's mansion, the Museum, Andrei's home, the Giovanni mansion, and the Society of Leopold stronghold can only be visited once each during their related quest in the main story. The player character is specially dispatched there and only leaves by completing the quest.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneTimeDungeon
One-Take Wonder - TV Tropes "You know the other great thing about that story? First * draft. Fuck you, Hemingway!"* When rehearsing and performing a scene or sequence it is often done multiple times in case there is a blooper in the first good take or trying to figure out the right tone by playing with multiple options, often referred to as the "safety" take. However, when a performance is so phenomenal or so genuine that another take would be deemed superfluous (or there is logistical issues where there isn't enough money to blow up another building in the background), it becomes famous for getting it right on the first try. Compare All or Nothing, Throw It In, and One-Scene Wonder. May overlap with The Oner if the take is sufficiently long. Many, if not all, spoilers will be unmarked ahead. You Have Been Warned. ## Examples: - The Italian dub of Death Note had Light's Evil Laugh from the last episode (widely regarded as one of the best versions!) done in one take by Flavio Aquilone. - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Two examples from the English dub. - Golden Wind: In Giorno's No-Holds-Barred Beatdown towards Cioccolata, the former lets out his Kiai for 30 straight seconds. Cioccolata's English actor, Bill Butts, revealed that Giorno's English actor, Phillip Reich, performed that entire scene in one take. - Stone Ocean: Yong Yea, Pucci's English actor, confirmed in a YouTube video that he was able to record his death scene in one take, and even showed a behind-the-scenes video of him voicing the scene, including him needing to drink water due to feeling lightheaded. - The final scene of episode 48 of Star★Twinkle Pretty Cure, where main characters Hikaru and Lala bid each other a tearful farewell, was performed by actresses Eimi Naruse and Konomi Kohara in a single take. Their strained performances were genuine, not only because of the raw emotion of the scene itself, but also due to their realization that the show was almost over and they wouldn't be meeting up regularly to record anymore. - In Episode 7 of the anime adaptation of When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace, not only was Hatoko's infamous rant towards Andou done entirely in one take, Hatoko's VA, Saori Hayami, pulled it off on the very first take as well. Given the toll it took, she had to go home to rest her voice after that. - Beauty and the Beast: - The titular song was originally conceived as a more up-tempo rock song; it was eventually retooled into a romantic ballad to better fit the scene. Angela Lansbury, who portrayed Mrs. Potts, was initially reluctant to provide the vocals, thinking herself a poor fit for the style of song. At the directors' request, the actress recorded one take as a backup, in case no other options were found. Lansbury reportedly brought the entire studio to tears with her performance. - Tony Jay recorded all of Monsieur D'Arque's dialogue as part of his audition. The directors decided that his delivery was perfect as it was and that there was no point bringing him back to record the same lines again, so they sent his paycheck and used the audition recording exactly as it was. - Finding Nemo: Ellen DeGeneres did the "I look at you and I'm home" speech in one take, and wasn't able to get through the second because she was so caught up in the emotion of the scene. They used the first. - The Rescuers: According to Milt Kahl, Geraldine Page nailed every single one of Medusa's lines in one take. - Steven Universe: The Movie: Sarah Stiles spontaneously decided to sing all of "Other Friends" in one take (previously it was done in pieces), and most of the final version comes from that take. - Natalie Wood was known for getting all her lines right on the first take - and she was nicknamed 'One Take Natalie' as a result. - As a filmmaker, Clint Eastwood is known for working fast and for being one of the few to bring in his movies under budget and under schedule, rarely necessitating multiple takes. Eastwood has expressed that he finds the process of doing dozens of takes a useless exercise, and that if the actors felt they got it in a particular take, even the first one, it's good enough for him (plus it helps him get to the golf course). - Alien: The iconic chestbuster scene needed one take, and the story behind it is interesting: The actors read what was going to happen, but no one really expected John Hurt to act like he was having a heart attack or to see blood exploding from his chest, so their reaction was genuine. As Sigourney Weaver said, they thought John Hurt really was dying right there. - Anthony Hopkins astounded the crew of Amistad by delivering the entire seven-page courtroom speech in a single take. Steven Spielberg was so in awe, he couldn't bring himself to call him Tony, and insisted on addressing him as Sir Anthony throughout the shoot. - Batman Returns: Michelle Pfeiffer got so good at using a whip that she was able to do the scene where Catwoman knocks the heads off a row of mannequins in one take. The crew gave her a round of applause for it and she improvised using the whip as a jump rope to celebrate. - The "Malkovich, catch!" scene of Being John Malkovich almost didn't enter the movie, as it was getting late and Spike Jonze feared drive-by beer can to the head would be hard to achieve. Yet the guy who volunteered to do so, an assistant of John Cusack, nailed it on the first try! - Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), by nature as an entire film done in one take, had to nail each sequence on the first try, or else set the production back significantly. Apparently, Zach Galifianakis was particularly talented at this—though he did mess up occasionally, he was able to save messed up takes through improvisation. - The Bridge on the River Kwai had only one chance to destroy the titular bridge due to how long it took to build it and how expensive the set was (it featured an actual train getting destroyed as it crossed a collapsing bridge). If they messed it up, the film was ruined. But they got it right. - Citizen Kane: When Kane's wife leaves him, he completely destroys her bedroom. Given the destruction Orson Welles caused to the set, the first take of this infamous scene was, understandably, the only take. - The Dark Knight: - The hospital scene, where the Joker totters out of Gotham General with the hospital exploding around him. The explosion stops for several seconds, causing the Joker to fiddle with the detonator, before the explosions suddenly continue. Heath Ledger does not break character (with rumors about how it was a mistake by the effects team abounding, though it turns out it was entirely intentional), nor does he even turn to watch the explosion even when he gets on the bus. Everything is executed perfectly, resulting in one of the most memorable scenes in the movie. - In the DVD Extras, it's mentioned that they only purchased two Lamborghinis for the scene in which Bruce Wayne blocks the truck driver's attempt at running over Coleman Reese. It wasn't the end of the world if they got it wrong on both takes, but splashing a million dollars on two cars is naturally not exactly the optimal scenario. However, everything went right on the first try. - Dead Poets Society: The scene outside in the snow after Neil's suicide was done in one take due to the fact that it started snowing. - Dr. Who and the Daleks: As an incentive, Roberta Tovey (who was 11 at the time the film was produced) was paid a shilling (5p) by director Gordon Flemyng every time she did a scene in one take. She made so much money, Flemyng didn't offer her the same deal for the sequel. - The climactic scene of Duel was filmed in one take due to budget restrictions, since it shows the tanker truck driving off a cliff. A mechanical malfunction during filming caused an unintended addition to the scene: the truck door hanging open from where the stunt driver had to jump out at the last second, which some viewers mistook for a hint that the Serial Killer driver character escaped the crash. - In Elf, the elaborate Christmasland display that Buddy makes for his first day at Gimbel's Department Store took hours to set up. As such, the hilarious, room-trashing fight between Buddy and the Mall Santa was done in only one take, as the producers didn't have time to recreate the set. - The scene in The Exorcist where Regan projectile vomits at Father Karras only required one take. The vomit was intended to hit Jason Miller in the chest, but the plastic tubing misfired, hitting him in the face. His reaction of shock and disgust while wiping away the vomit is genuine, and Miller admitted in an interview that he was very angered by this mistake. - The scene in Extreme Prejudice where Powers Boothe picks up a scorpion then crushes it with his bare hand was done in one take. - Bobby's scene with his father in Five Easy Pieces only required one take. - The Fugitive: The train wreck scene was shot in a single take with a real train whose engine was removed. - The train-on-a-collapsing-bridge setup was done for the climax of Buster Keaton's The General. - The racetrack scene in Get Carter was done in one take. - Sonny's death scene in The Godfather was the most expensive in the movie to set up and film, for it cost over one hundred thousand dollars to set up, and was finished in just one take from four or five different camera angles. - Eli Wallach refused to do another take of the train scene in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly after almost getting decapitated. Thankfully, it only required one. - Hard Boiled: Because of the shooting schedule, the crew only had one chance to perform the continuous take during the gun-battle in the hospital. - High and Tight: Kaireht Yovera was given free reign to improvise during Becky's Confession Cam segment. What she improvised was significantly better than what had been written for her. They did however two more takes, because the loud rain outside was affecting the sound. - The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey: Stephen Hunter (Bombur) caught the egg thrown into his mouth on the first take, but was unable to catch it on subsequent takes. Therefore the take used was the first one. - In Home Alone, Daniel Stern had a live tarantula put on his face for one take only because the prop one wasn't working. - Many of the more complex stunts in the James Bond films were done exactly once, such as the full corkscrew in a car in The Man with the Golden Gun and the ski jump from The Spy Who Loved Me. - Jonathan Frakes is known on sets as "Two-takes Frakes" due to the efficiency of his directorial style - Spencer Tracy's eleven-minute closing speech in Judgment at Nuremberg was filmed in one take. - Jurassic Park (1993): Jeff Goldblum claimed that his reaction to seeing a Brachiosaurus for the first time was captured in one take ("you crazy son-of-a-bitch, you did it"), with Steven Spielberg dictating to him off-camera what expression he wanted. - Cloris Leachman's last scene in The Last Picture Show was printed on the first take without any previous rehearsals. She wanted to rehearse the scene but director Peter Bogdanovich thought it would ruin the scene if it was rehearsed. After she completed the take she said to him, "I can do better." He replied, "No, you can't - you just won the Oscar." Ultimately his sense of direction paid off, as Leachman won the Academy Award for her performance. - The scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers where Gandalf calls for his horse, and Shadowfax comes galloping across the fields and straight up to his Master, was achieved on the first take. - The Master: Joaquin Phoenix's unhinged performance as an alcohol-addled follower of a cult was on full display in a largely improvised scene. Phoenix went absolutely berserk, and his first take at the scene was the one Paul Thomas Anderson chose to use in the final cut. - The falling bookcase gag in The Mummy (1999) was done in one take. - According to Sidney Lumet, the "Mad as Hell" speech in Network was filmed in one and a half takes. Midway through the second take, Peter Finch abruptly stopped in exhaustion. Lumet was unaware of Finch's failing heart at the time, but in any case, did not ask for a third take. What's in the completed film is the second take for the first half of the speech, and the second half from the first take. - Phone Booth: The shooter demands that Stu come clean to his wife about his marital infidelities, resulting in an emotional scene that Colin Farrell managed to nail down on the first take. The entire film itself was shot in just 12 days. - The climactic scene in The Pit and the Pendulum of Nicholas strangling Elizabeth was all done in one take. - The climactic mall pole slide sequence in Police Story was filmed in one take, without any rehearsals or use of wires. - In Poolhall Junkies there is a scene where Christopher Walken is called upon to make a trick shot. He was supposed to take a practice run of the scene before filming but he asked for the practice run to be filmed in case he actually made the shot on the first try, which he did. - "Your Crowning Glory" from The Princess Diaries 2 was the first time Julie Andrews had sung in public, or on-screen since she had throat surgery in 1997. She reportedly nailed the song on the first take, and brought tears to the eyes of the crew present. - The psychiatrist's speech at the end of Psycho was considered an extremely important part of the film, since it provided the detailed Exposition needed to understand everything that had happened up to that point. But since the speech was so long and full of nuance, by all expectations it should have been a struggle to film. Instead, actor Simon Oakland did it perfectly in the first take, leading Alfred Hitchcock to stand up, shake his hand, and say "Thank you very much, Mr. Oakland. You've just saved my picture." - There was only one take of the abduction scene in Rabbit-Proof Fence, because it was so traumatic to the child actors. - During the production for Rocky, with the film running behind schedule, Sylvester Stallone was allowed only one shot at Rocky's most vulnerable moment, confessing his insecurities to his girlfriend, Adrian. Thankfully, that was all he needed, and the character's pivotal moment was kept. - Romeo and Juliet (1968): Olivia Hussey's first scene to be filmed was where Juliet hurries to see Friar Laurence and bumps into Paris. She imagined that Juliet would have ran all the way there and so would be all agitated and out of breath, so she did laps all around the set to get herself in the mood. She then told Franco Zeffirelli he didn't need to direct her and went straight into the scene. Once cut was called, there was a moment of silence before the director chimed in "One Take Hussey I think we'll call her now." - Run Lola Run has a scene where Lola plays roulette, bets everything she has on Red 20, and wins. They filmed the croupier spinning the roulette wheel and dropping the ball, intending to later film a prepared shot of the ball landing on the correct spot, and edit the two shots together. But the ball actually landed on Red 20 on the first take, so no editing was needed. - Some Like It Hot: Marilyn Monroe was notorious about insisting on multiple takes (the "where's that bourbon" line took eighty-one takes before she was happy). But for the upper berth bed scene, they did the whole thing in one take and at the end Marilyn said "I loved it too" — shocking everyone. - Meryl Streep did the final scene of Sophie's Choice in one take and refused to do it again, saying that as a mother, she found it too painful and emotionally draining. - 10 Things I Hate About You: The then-17-year-old Julia Stiles slowly broke down into tears while reading the poem on the very first take, an acting cue that was not in the film's script. First-time director Gil Junger was so moved, he called a wrap to the shoot after that. - Titanic (1997): The scene where the Grand Staircase floods had to be shot in one take because the whole set would have been too damaged for a second. The water destroyed the period-accurate materials to the point where wood blocks and even an actual part of the staircase became dislodged while filming. - To Kill a Mockingbird: Atticus Finch's closing statement, in which Finch demanded the jury "do their duty", was originally planned to take several days. But Gregory Peck somehow managed to nail the speech in only one take—that alone was enough to guarantee Peck's only Best Actor Oscar. - Trading Places: Don Ameche, who played Mortimer Duke, abhorred swearing, so he agreed to film only one take of Mortimer yelling "Fuck him!" towards the end and apologized afterwards. - Many scenes in Trainspotting had to be done in one take due to the low budget. - According to Kevin Smith, Johnny Depp never learned his opening monologue for Tusk because a misprint in his script gave him the impression he'd be delivering that monologue off-screen (meaning they could just ADR it in later). Undeterred, Depp grabbed the script and memorized the scene in five minutes flat. He ended up nailing the monologue in one take. - For obvious reasons, they had only one take in V for Vendetta to shave Natalie Portman's head. - Martin Scorsese claimed that the scene in The Wolf of Wall Street where Jordan attempts to get in his car while extremely impaired on Lemmons was improvised on the day of filming, and that it was Leonardo DiCaprio's idea to open the car door with his foot. DiCaprio strained his back during the scene, and was only able to perform the stunt once. - Robert Mitchum's speech in the Lakota language in The Way West was shot right after his teacher read it to him just two times out loud! Mitchum only needed one take to do it flawlessly and his teacher said that it was the best Lakota accent he had ever heard. (Mitchum was famous for his phenomenal memory.) - Boy Meets World: The final scene of the series finale, set in Mr. Feeny's old classroom at John Adams High, was completed in the first take because the cast was far too distraught to try for another one. Even in the take they got, both Danielle Fishel and Rider Strong are in tears and choking up as they deliver their lines. Even William Daniels, a consummate professional, seems to have difficulty with his (and the show's) final line. - Breaking Bad: - In "Caballo Sin Nombre", the famous "pizza tossing" scene, where Walt angrily throws a pizza on the roof of his house, was shot in one take. The crew tried to reshoot it, but Bryan Cranston never managed to have the pizza land on the roof again after the first take. - According to Dean Norris, \|\|Hank's death scene\|\| was done in one take. - Done as part of the Enforced Method Acting in Broadchurch: actors were deliberately given little time to prepare and no rehearsal, and though they filmed retakes, they actually used the first take for the vast majority of scenes. - During an episode of Connections, host James Burke pulls off a feat of timing a monologue on a rocket launch to coincide with an actual rocket launch in 1978. It was the launch of Voyager 2, which would visit all the planets of the Outer Solar System. Burke had only one chance to time this shot, as it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to witness the rocket's launch; if he messed up the timing even slightly, the shot would have been ruined, with no way to fix it (since such techniques didn't exist at the time). However, despite having only one try to get it right, the shot was captured perfectly. - Doctor Who: - The circus tent explosion in "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy" was supposed to be mostly special effects, but the crew brought the wrong equipment and had to do it with real pyrotechnics. The explosion ended up way bigger than it was supposed to be, but in a Real Life Moment of Awesome for Sylvester McCoy, he maintained his Unflinching Walk despite being a little bit on fire because he knew they weren't going to get another shot. - In "The End of Time", The TARDIS console room exploding was done in one take because of the coral pillars being really expensive to redo, so multiple takes was not on the cards. - The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: The infamous ending to "Papa's Got a Brand New Excuse" includes only the first take, despite the fact that Will's baseball cap fell off after Uncle Phil hugs him and Karyn Parsons (Hilary) could be heard crying backstage. The cast and crew were too emotional to do another take. - Hannibal: At one point Hannibal Lecter is seen performing an elaborate cooking trick where he throws an egg in the air, cracks it over the narrow edge of a spatula as it falls and catches the yolk inside a small bowl. The crew were convinced the trick was too difficult and prepared several dozen eggs as well as three chefs to act as hand doubles. Mads Mikkelsen performed the trick perfectly on the first take with no rehearsals. Turns out Mikkelsen was a juggler in his youth, which he credited for being able to pull off the trick. - In the How I Met Your Mother episode "Bad News", Lily steps out of a cab and tells Marshall that his father has died. This prompts an emotional reaction from Marshall, with him embracing Lily and crying "I'm not ready for this." Marshall's actor, Jason Segel, did not know about the twist before Lily said the the words, and the scene was done in only one take. - I Love Lucy: The second-season episode "Lucy is Enceinte" climaxes in a scene where Lucy, failing to find the opportunity to tell her husband Ricky she is pregnant, attends his nightclub show and submits an anonymous request for a song to celebrate her pregnancy. Ricky silently asks the women in the audience if they submitted it until he gets to Lucy, jokingly asks, and receives confirmation and is overcome with emotion and sings another song and dances with her. Ricky's actor Desi Arnaz happened to make a minor flub to the lyrics in that take, but the emotion and chemistry from his real-life marriage to Lucy at the time made the scene so powerful that crew and audience members loudly protested when a second take to correct the lyrics was suggested. The flawed but powerful first take was used. - Newhart: The legendary reveal scene at the end of the Grand Finale was shot in the only take — without rehearsal — because the live Studio Audience's initial reaction would not have been replicated on subsequent takes. - The crew of The Office (US) gave Brian Baumgartner this actual nickname. as many of his scenes as Kevin, were shot using only a single take of filming (including the famous scene of Kevin dumping his chili on the floor). - The "Chandelier Scene" from the Only Fools and Horses episode "A Touch of Glass", in which the Trotter brothers prepare to remove a priceless chandelier for cleaning only for their grandfather to unscrew the wrong one which crashes to the ground behind them, had to be done in a single take as they could only afford one chandelier for the gag. David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst were under strict instructions to stand completely still and silent for 30 seconds after the chandelier dropped as the scene was originally supposed to be the final shot of the episode. Lyndhurst later claimed the director told him he would be fired if he made a mistake or started laughing. - Seinfeld: George's climactic monologue in "The Marine Biologist" was shot on the first take, and without rehearsal as the scene had only been rewritten the night before. - Sesame Street: After Mr. Hooper's actor died, the character was killed off, and an episode was produced explaining his death in-universe as well. The cast was so emotional, they barely made it through the first take, and were utterly unable to do a second one without breaking down completely. - Star Trek: The Original Series: Spock's emotional breakdown in "The Naked Time" was shot in one take (as they didn't have time for a second one) — though contrary to urban legend, it was not improvised. - Star Trek: The Next Generation: In "Sarek", the scene where Picard struggles with Sarek's emotions after their mind meld was shot in a single take. - Zoom: An interstitial for an episode of Arthur note : For those interested, it's "The Last of Mary Moo Cow". reveals the "Zoom Znack" segment for fruit pizza was shot in a single take. - "Weird Al" Yankovic: - The Award-Bait Song "My Heart Will Go On" by Céline Dion for Titanic (1997) was recorded in one take from her demo. - Bad Company's self-titled song's vocals were done this way, with the added bonus of recording in an open field at midnight for added atmosphere. - The Beatles' cover of "Twist and Shout". John Lennon had a cold during the recording session, so the song was saved for the end of the session to save his voice. The band recorded it in one take, with John's voice sounding raspy and raw. They tried doing a second take, but John had "nothing left" according to the band mates. The first take was released on the Please Please Me album, and the rest is history. - They were also able to record "Long Tall Sally" in one take due to the sheer number of times they played it live beforehand. - The Cherry Poppin' Daddies' sole hit, "Zoot Suit Riot," had its vocals done this way due to No Budget. There's a cheeky lampshade on the end, where singer Steve Perry tells the engineer "I think I'm about ready to sing this!" right before the song ends. - Eddie Hazel's solo on Funkadelic's Maggot Brain was done in one take and made up on the fly. - Ronnie Dunn of Brooks & Dunn recorded the vocals for their cover of Roger Miller's "Husbands and Wives" in only one take. - "The Mariner's Revenge Song", by The Decemberists, was recorded on a single take using a single microphone at a church. - Freddie Mercury was very ill when Queen were to record "The Show Must Go On." When Brian May expressed concern that he might not be well enough to sing the part Mercury responded by throwing back a shot of vodka, declaring "I'll fucking do it, darling!" and nailing the vocals in one take. - Josh Gracin didn't think that he would be able to record Marcel's "Nothin' to Lose" due to it being incredibly rapid-fire... only to nail the song on the first take. - Whitney Houston recorded the incredibly demanding lead vocal line for her hit "I'm Your Baby Tonight" in one take... because she wanted to leave the recording session early enough to shop at the mall before it closed that day. - Kathy Mattea's "455 Rocket" had several takes recorded, but the first one was kept because, according to Mattea, none of the musicians were aware that they were being recorded at the time. As a result, the recording has a "looser" feel, and the drummer can be heard dropping his drumsticks and laughing at the end. - LeAnn Rimes's "One Way Ticket (Because I Can)" was recorded entirely in one take. What makes this all the more impressive is that she was only 14 when she cut the song. - According to the booklet, the vocals to Manowar's song "Hatred" was recorded in one take, with singer Eric Adams looking at the recording studio's manager who was screwing the band over. - Michael Stipe's haunting performance on R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion" is all the more impressive for the fact that the vocal track was recorded in a single take. The band later described the whole process of creating the song as feeling like they had tapped into a base archetype, as the rest of the composition and recording went nearly as cleanly. - Gordon Lightfoot and his backing team recorded "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" on the first take...having never played it together before. - Steve Wariner does this frequently, most notably the entirety of his Burnin' the Roadhouse Down album. - The debut album by Country Music band The Tractors was recorded in this fashion. - Lita Roza recorded just one take of her hit single "How Much is That Doggy In the Window"... because she absolutely loathed the song and only agreed to one take to placate her producer. It became a massive Black Sheep Hit but she refused to sing it again; as far as anyone knows, the take on the record is the only time she performed it in her life. - The Kingsmen's cover of "Louie Louie" was recorded in one take; they thought it was a warm-up and didn't realize the tape was rolling. This, along with the primitive conditions of the recording studio, led to the infamous slurred quality of the vocals and also led to a couple of mistakes ending up on the finished recording: the drummer can be faintly heard yelling an expletive after a fumble about a minute in, and the singer comes in too soon after the guitar solo and quickly stops to let the band catch up. - Lera Yaskevich recorded her song "Sebye Pomoch" in one take because, in her own words, "how to perfect something that tears your soul and blows up your brain is not thought about in this situation." - Tommy Earl Jenkins' anguished performance as Die-Hardman in his final scene in Death Stranding was done in one take. - Spec Ops: The Line reportedly had every single voice-line recorded during the same day. By the end, the voice actors were just as tired and weary as the characters they were portraying - which was wholly intentional. - Due to his busy schedule, Sir Christopher Lee told the voice directors for Kingdom Hearts II that he would go to the studio, read out his lines for Ansem the Wise exactly once, and then walk out. - Due to technological restraints of the time, Red Dead Redemption's cutscenes were each recorded in one long take. - The voice recording team of Skylanders: SWAP Force were running short on time and by that point, and one of the NPCs, Snagglescale, had a couple of long lines left. Instead of the team cutting them, his voice actor, Mitch Urban, did all of them together in one take. - Aaron: Thomas Fitzgerald did the close-up shot of Adam \|\|revealing that his girlfriend miscarried\|\| in just one take. - Chuggaaconroy stated on Twitter that the speedy capture equation reading from Episode 1 of Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 was recorded in a single take. He was expecting to mess it up and have to edit it in post, but he didn't need to. - In Epic Rap Battles of History, Epic Lloyd as Genghis Khan draws his sword and cuts an easter egg in half in just one take while filming "Genghis Khan vs. The Easter Bunny". - Gold Standard the scene of Fergal smashing \|\|Tom's head in with the shovel\|\| was done by Bobby Calloway in one take — including an ad-lib of Fergal pausing to check if he was still dead, before smashing him once more. - Red vs. Blue: a Season 1 episode had a shot of a Warthog being blasted by a tank from the ground to the top of Red Base, landing perfectly upright. They thought this would be really tough to film, but to their astonishment it happened in one take. In the commentary, Burns muses that, in retrospect, they were for once doing something in the series that Halo's engine was actually meant to do. - Jen Taylor nailed the narration from the first episode of RWBY in the first take, making the producers a bit uneasy ("Dude, we have her for an hour and she got it in the first two minutes, what do we do?"). - Tom Scott is very well known for doing this; making long speeches to camera. He very rarely cuts away for anything more than to show supplementary footage (or if his explanation necessitates him moving about). - The theme song of Adventure Time is a scratch recording that was kept because they were never satisfied with any of the other attempts to record it, resulting in the opening having the faint sound of one of the show's artists typing away at a keyboard and squeaking in their chair. - The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Schooling" ends with Gumball Motor Mouthing a passive-aggressive assessment of how pathetic Larry's life is. His voice actor did it in one take. - Rob Paulsen performed the song "Yakko's World" from Animaniacs in a single take, and he still sings it live at conventions. - DuckTales (2017): David Tennant (the voice of Scrooge) nailed the most emotional scene from "The Last Crash of the Sunchaser!", both the monologue and the ensuing fallout, in one take. - Played for Laughs in an In-Universe example in Futurama. Calculon makes it a point to never do two takes on the Show Within a Show "All My Circuits." In "Bender Should Not be Allowed on TV," this causes problems when Bender goes offscript and delivers a long, emotional monologue during a nighttime hospital scene; Calculon tells the producers to "splice in some reaction shots of me," which leads to blatant continuity errors when said reaction shots come from an outdoor beach episode. - Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964): Fifteen year-old Janis Orenstein, the voice of Clarice, managed to nail the song "There's Always Tomorrow" in one take. - Star Trek: The Animated Series: Billy Simpson, who voiced the young Spock in the classic episode "Yesteryear", recorded all of his lines in a single take for his audition and was later informed he would not be asked back to re-record them for the final episode. This is why several of his lines have odd affects (such as placing emphasis on the word "healer" instead of "here" in the phrase "I will bring a healer here"). - Batman: The Animated Series: During the Joker's eulogy to Batman in "The Man Who Killed Batman", Harley playing Amazing Freaking Grace on the kazoo had to be done in one take because everyone was laughing too hard afterwards to do it again — you can hear Arleen Sorkin about to fall apart laughing through the whole song.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneTakeWonder
Five-Second Foreshadowing - TV Tropes "But if he's not with you, and he's not with us, who's he with?" The audience is informed of some fact X, which is both shocking and important. There's a bomb in the briefcase, or Alice is The Mole, or whatever. This is often communicated via a character who has just realized X, and says it out loud (thus informing the audience); perhaps he realizes X while explaining the situation to someone else. Another alternative is to use a fact-revealing Flashback. In any case, the audience very suddenly realizes X. Less than five seconds later, before anyone has a chance for a meaningful reaction (such as disarming the bomb), X becomes incredibly relevant. The bomb goes off, or Alice shoots Bob, or whatever. The purpose of this trope is to allow something shocking to happen without confusing the audience. If Bob flips a lightswitch and suddenly his whole house explodes, the audience might be left wondering what happened. If the writers want to avoid that feeling, they employ this trope. Thus, Carol figures it out beforehand and says something like "Alice put a bomb in Bob's house!", or perhaps we're shown a flashback of Alice planting the bomb. In either case, the audience is informed and confusion is avoided. Of course, if we're informed about the bomb several minutes before the event, it won't be as shocking, and in Bob's case it leaves the writers with the trouble of explaining how Bob knew about the bomb, but didn't manage to do anything about it before it went off. Thus, we're informed of the truth, and the truth becomes relevant soon afterwards. Alternately, it's an easy way of setting up and dealing with an Exact Words twist quickly. Technically, this trope should only apply when the audience (not just a character) learns something new. If the audience already knows what's up and it's only the characters who suddenly realize something, that's a different trope. Also, if the bomb goes off and the audience is only told after the fact that Bob had it all figured out five seconds previously, that doesn't count either. It's perfectly fine if there are hints about X scattered around the story, just so long as the audience is not intended to really get it until a critical moment, just before X causes something drastic. Frequently, the only thing a character has time for in this situation is to go "Oh, Crap!", sometimes as a revelation. Can be related to sudden awful weather, and often involves things getting worse. Compare Confirm Before Reveal, Imminent Danger Clue and Musical Spoiler. ## As this normally happens just before a plot twist, all spoilers will be unmarked ahead in the examples below. Beware! ## Example subpages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other examples: - Attack on Titan: In the pilot, the three main characters are wondering if titans will ever break through the walls to the city again. Armin says, "Just because it hasn't happened in 100 years, doesn't mean it won't happen today," and in mere seconds the air calms, all background noises cease, a flash of lightning sends a shockwave over the city, and standing outside the wall is a titan taller than they've ever seen. It kicks through the wall, and all hell promptly breaks loose. - Bokurano: - The manga combines this with Description Cut. During Kako's battle, Kako, having witnessed the enemy robot wipe out the Self-Defense Forces fighter planes and ships, begins running away in a futile attempt to save himself, knowing that even if he wins his battle, he'll die. Moji knows that if the time runs out, the world will be destroyed, but wonders how anyone can convince Kako that he has to fight and die to save the world, and concludes that "No one can." The next panel shows Kirie, and the panel after that shows the dawning realization on Moji's face, before Kirie snarkily says that Kako "sure (is) a fast runner," thus causing Kako to fly into a rage. - In the anime, just as Chizu dies, she leans back in her chair and puts her hands on her stomach. In the next scene, the group learns that she was pregnant, and Anko makes note of this specific gesture. - Buso Renkin: As Papillon picks up Doctor Butterfly's kakugane, the audience can see that it has the same unique serial number as Kazuki's. Moments later the shell on Kazuki's kakugane breaks away to reveal that it is actually a black kakugane, the same type that created the Big Bad Victor. - In Death Note, as Light is taking university entrance exams, one of the proctors scolds another student for not sitting properly. Sitting oddly is one of L's signature quirks, so a few panels later, L turns out to be taking the test with Light. - In the final episode of Digimon Adventure: (2020), as Omegamon battles Abaddomon, his right arm which normally has the Garuru Cannon changes into a golden sword, and then both arms transform into the Garuru Cannon and a red cannon respectively. An attentive viewer may recognize those colour schemes for the alternate weapons as the ones used by BlitzGreymon (the red cannon) and CresGarurumon (the golden sword), and this serves as this trope for the the final moments of the fight, featuring Omegamon Alter-S as a Super Mode for Omegamon. - For a heroic example, in Fullmetal Alchemist, Fu uses a variety of flashbangs and colorful explosives in combat. During the fight at the main gate in Central on the Promised Day, there's a sudden burst of brightly-colored clouds, and, sure enough, Fu announces his presence a few seconds later. - The early (and surprisingly dark) Fujiko Fujio short, The Meeting of Myself, have the protagonist meeting his future selves from one, two and three decades later, and his five-year-old self from a decade ago. The story's final page have his present self witnessing his future equivalents getting into a heated argument about investments and property, making him wonder if he knew his future would be that bleak, he probably wouldn't even want to live. \|\|Literally one panel later his five-year-old self jumps out a window to his demise, causing his present and future versions to suffer an instant Ret-Gone\|\|. - In New Game!, as Nene's college lets out for summer break, she sees a job posting for Eagle Jump on a bulletin board. In the next scene, as Umiko notices that one of the debuggers is late and considers firing her, Nene shows up in a cold sweat, revealing that she took a job at Eagle Jump. - One Piece - When Luffy and Nami ask the Galley-La shipwrights about whether they can repair the Going Merry, there's a brief flashback in which Zoro(who'd waited at the ship) is shown reacting in surprise to Kaku's assessment of the ship. Kaku then reveals to Luffy and Nami what he'd told Zoro- that the Going Merry can't be fixed. - When a masked assassin arrives in Iceberg's room, Hattori the pigeon lands on the assassin's shoulder. Seconds later, the assassin is revealed to be Rob Lucci, a government assassin who'd posed as a Galley-La shipwright, and pretended he couldn't speak, using Hattori to speak for him. - Pandemonium Wizard Village: On the way to the village chief's house, Zipher, Domika, and Molte pass by a graveyard. A few pages later, Ainu makes it very clear that the village cannot resurrect the dead. - Persona 5: The Animation has a scene in which, like in the game, Chihaya foretells misfortune befalling Ryuji shortly before he's set upon by the Shibuya Creatures. Unlike in the game, though, in which it happened after the protagonist was done meeting with Ohya, the Creatures show up about a minute later. - The Quintessential Quintuplets: A character bio in one of the volumes states that Yotsuba's favorite drink is carbonated juice. In Chapter 113, Fuutarou is shown to order a can of juice from a vending machine; a few panels later, he arrives to the room where Yotsuba had left her phone in and says, "Sorry for the wait." - In one of the Robotech novels, "End of the Circle," the planet Haydon IV turns into a Giant robot. On its hands are two massive tuning-fork like prongs. The Sentinal Alliance decides to attack the planet-bot and seems to be doing well, but the planet isn't taking much damage due to pin-point barrier systems and anti-air batteries. It seems normal, except for power buildup in the prongs. Suddenly, Exedore realizes that the two technologies (transformation and pin-point barriers) were both used in the original SDF-1, and that the tuning forks are near-exact copies of the ship's Wave-Motion Gun. He starts to call out a warning, but the guns fire, nearly destroying the fleet flagship utterly. - In the first episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, once Professor Chronos gets the upper hand in the duel with Judai, the audience realizes that he is using his real deck and not one of the weak proctor ones, so everybody is waiting to see if he really has a legendary rare card. No sooner do they finish speaking than Chronos summons his ace monster, which is the card they were talking about. - In Yuri is My Job!, after Hime Shiraki mentions that a classmate who saw through her façade ruined her reputation, Mitsuki Ayanokouji asks for the classmate's name. Hime immediately says that the classmate's name is Mitsuki Yano, mentioning it to the readers for the first time and foreshadowing what happens next- Mitsuki revealing that she was the person in question, and thus, her sharing a first name with Hime's old friend wasn't a coincidence. - Mechamato: - A man being served shaved ice remarks "That's a lot of ice!". Then he's frozen over by Sejuku arriving by the river on his wintery rampage not a moment later. - Mr. Jamie starts considering teaching his students robotics moments before a bad robot kidnaps him in the library. - A Black Widow storyline has Natasha on the run after secrets of her past have come to light. Angry they include her once kidnapping a mentor of his years before, Iron Man tracks Natasha down only to find her bloodied, nursing broken ribs and crying out in pain when he grabs her arm. He takes her to his private lab where a bioscanner runs over them. Tony: Huh, that's strange. It should be highlighting your wounds but all it shows is a few minor scrapes—- - The Oracle Code: Yeong and Izzy find their friend Shanta who they'd been told had gone to a different institution in the private ward and she wakes enough to give an ominous warning right before Lachlan shows up willing to kill everyone to keep what he's been doing silent. Izzy: We thought she just left. She was nearing the end of her therapy. They told us they couldn't do anything more for her. People leave the center all the time. Shanta: leaves the center. No one - During the Swamp Thing story-arc "Earth to Earth", Swamp Thing attacks Gotham City, whose police are holding his wife on "crimes against nature". When one character mentions that, as a city, there's not a lot of plant matter for Swamp Thing to manipulate, Batman mentions the Gotham Botanical Gardens, which include all kinds of plants. As Batman lists off a few examples, a low THOOM THOOM THOOM sound is heard in the background. Just as Batman finishes his list of examples with the word "Redwoods...", we see a 200-foot tall Swamp Thing made of intertwined redwood trunks approaching the city's center. - Ultimate Wolverine: Wildchild's mooks are suddenly naked, and Wildchild suffers a Neck Snap in high speed. And then, the blur stops: it's Quicksilver. - Becoming the Mask: While sparring with Draal for the first time, Jim takes several hits and becomes somewhat disoriented. He wonders why the arena is so brightly lit - not due to his head injury making it look brighter, but because, as a later line of narration reveals, he's having a flashback to his time in the Darklands. - build your wings on the way down: Hughes meets Gabby at the train station for Ed's departure and thinks she looks familiar. \|\|He then immediately realizes that Gabby shares her looks with her sister, Olivier Armstrong.\|\| - The Dark Lords of Nerima: "What's a gas main?" Said by a monster, leading to Ranma realizing that not only is the fake altar packed with about four times as much explosives as they need due to Poor Communication Kills, the whole shebang is right next to said gas main. Cue Oh, Crap!. - A Long Road: Nie Mingjue expresses worry at the possibility of Valdemar trying to keep his friend Lan Xichen's younger brother within their boundaries, and a frontier guard twitches when he lays eyes on Lan Wangji since he's dressed in white — the traditional attire for Heralds. Sure enough, the guy is almost immediately Chosen by a Companion barely a few hours after entering the country — and it's all in the first chapter. - In Robb Returns, when Baelish shows up for his trial by combat, Jon Arryn seems oddly gleeful to see him wearing the heaviest armor the former could find. A minute later, the reason becomes obvious: so he will drop to the depths of the Blackwater and drown. - A Triangle in the Stars: - In Chapter 10, Connie runs off to the pool to get a lifeguard. Who else do we know who got a brief job as a lifeguard? it's Wendy Corduroy. - In Chapter 23, Wendy half-heartedly jokes to Connie about there being a secret room in the library. Guess what happens several minutes later? - Alma: After entering the toy shop, Alma trips over a fallen wind-up doll of a boy on a bike. When she picks it up and puts it on the floor, it immediately tries to drive towards the door, which closes before it can escape. He's actually a child who has been transformed into a doll, which is what Alma also becomes just moments later. - Bartok the Magnificent: After Ludmilla drinks a vial containing a potion that will turn her into what she is inside, she drops it on the ground and a rat slurps up some remaining drops, which turns it into a rat/dragon hybrid. - Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: While at a resturaunt, Flint's father mentions that the steaks being served seem a bit big. We can also see in the background, that other tables are having comically large steaks fall onto their plates. A minute or so later, when Flint is walking home, he notices hot dogs at a much bigger size then usual, which leads to him realizing that the food is beginning to overmutate. - Coco: When Imelda prepares to give Miguel her blessing to send him home, the marigold petal she uses emits a faint glow. When the same occurs with Ernesto de la Cruz, the petal he uses does not glow; this is but moments before the big reveal that he's a fraud and not related to Miguel. - In Ed, Edd n Eddy's Big Picture Show, we finally meet Eddy's elusive older brother. When we do, he asks if anyone knows Eddy's there with him. One minute later... - In Frozen II, Elsa, by virtue of her powers, has always been immune to cold. When she starts shivering and breathing mist, something is seriously wrong. \|\|The depths of Ahtohallan freeze her solid only seconds later.\|\| - The Incredibles had Kari calling Mrs. Incredible about how the replacement sitter had shown up to take care of little Jack-Jack. "I didn't order a replacement sitter!" Cue Syndrome, who'd fooled Kari and makes a last stand in an attempt to kidnap Jack-Jack. - In Incredibles 2, Evelyn talks to Helen about how consumers will sacrifice quality for ease every time, which is a very similar sentiment to the Screenslaver's Motive Rant. She is revealed to be the real Screenslaver before the scene is over. - In Inside Out, when Riley gets sent to her room and slams the door, Family Island has a small rumble, foreshadowing what is about to happen to the rest of the Personality Islands. - At the very beginning of The Little Mermaid (1989), Triton and Sebastian are looking forward to the concert. Sebastian comments to the king that Ariel has the most beautiful voice but, once the king's out of earshot the crab mutters to himself "if only she'd show up for rehearsals once in a while." And what do you know, shortly afterwards, Ariel's revealed to be absent, to everyone's shock, and Triton's fury. - In the Codename: Kids Next Door movie Operation: Z.E.R.O., the Distant Prologue sees two boys finding a hidden KND chamber. Inspired by the discovery, one of those two boys decides to begin his revolution against his own father, renaming himself Numbuh 0. Later in the movie, while escaping from Citi-Zombies, Numbuh 1's father happens to accidentally discover the same secret chamber in their own house. This makes Numbuh 1 take a gamble and guess (correctly) that his aforementioned Bumbling Dad is Numbuh 0 in the flesh. - Pinocchio: While Pinocchio is in the pool hall with Lampwick, upon close inspection, the chair he sits in has the engraving of a donkey along the top. - Ratatouille: Ego demands his assistant "spit it out" then does a Spit Take when the assistant does. - It is established in Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island that Jacques the ferryman doesn't come to the island at night. So when Jacques actually does show up at night (and at a very opportune moment, as Shaggy and Scooby are being chased by zombies), this feels a little suspicious. And sure enough, mere seconds later he turns into a Cat creature and starts chasing them. - In Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, mere minutes before Doc-Ock appears one of the villain's arms has been left in plain view on the lab desk as Spider-Man attempts to "hack" the computer. This, along with Spider-Man remarking on how he is going to re-examine his personal biases a few moments before that (when he assumed the head evil scientist was the traditional man instead of a woman) both foreshadow that this universe's Doc-Ock is Olivia Octavius, the head scientist. - Tangled: A tiny unicorn figurine, last seen during the "I've Got A Dream" musical number performed by the ruffians at the Snuggly Duckling tavern, appears just before the same ruffians show up to rescue Eugene. - Teen Titans Go! To the Movies: When Robin wakes up after being konked by a stage light, he comments at how real the Teen Titans set looks, as Jade Wilson gives a Traitor Shot. She then does a Look Behind You, which was a Mind Manipulation trick Slade had used. When she coos "Made you look!", Robin realizes that Jade isn't what she claimed to be. Robin: Oh, no! - Toy Story 2: - In the scene of Andy coming home early, the card game some of the other toys are playing consists of all aces, hinting that it's actually a dream of Woody's. - When Woody first sees the "Woody's Finest Hour" tape, it's stopped in the middle of a cliffhanger, with Stinky Pete saying Woody's Roundup was cancelled before airing the conclusion. This is the very same tape Woody plays for the others when they come to rescue him, except he doesn't pause it. On the TV in the background, after Buzz delivers his Armor-Piercing Question and leaves, Woody asks "Everybody okay?" and Jessie responds "Sheriff Woody! I knew you'd make it!" implying that Woody rescued Jessie and Pete before the show goes into the "You've Got a Friend in Me" song, showing that Stinky Pete lied shortly before he reveals himself to be Evil All Along. - Zootopia: - After Nick is shot with a Psycho Serum that causes those injected with it to "go savage", he doesn't shift into a more feral appearance, unlike the serum's previous victims. Sure enough, he turns out to be faking it just a minute or so later. - When Judy is frightened and cornered, her nose twitches in fear; when being cornered by Nick after he is hit with the Night Howler pellet, upon close inspection her nose is not twitching, giving viewers a hint she's really acting. - The Artist: In the 2011 Silent Film, George and Peppy are audibly panting after their dance routine at the end, hinting it's no longer a silent film and now a talkie. - Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: During their fight, Batman's punches to Superman's face start moving his head slightly less— mere seconds before one harmlessly clangs off his chin, showing that the kryptonite gas wore off. - The Dark Knight: While looking at a rectangular object in a prisoner's gut, which suddenly rings; "Is that a... phone?" Yes, it is. Attached to a bomb. - When the crew of the passenger ferry shuttling people out of Gotham discover the explosives below deck, complete with a detonator, one of them asks, confused, "Why would they give us the detonator to our own bomb?" The Joker immediately cuts into the PA system to helpfully explain what it actually is (a detonator to the explosives on the adjacent ferry). - Death Proof: When Pam realizes that Stuntman Mike isn't actually going to give her a ride home, there's a super close up of her eyes. One second before Stuntman Mike hits the gas and speeds off... With Pam locked in the passenger side. - Den of Thieves: During the final shootout, the cops warn the bystanders in their cars to get down in such a way that the engine block is between them and the bullets, letting the audience know that Concealment Equals Cover is not in effect. By the end of the scene, Merrimen is shot through a thin metal fence. - In Dobermann, the transvestite providing Pitbull with LSD in the club explains how she conceals the drugs in cartridges because the police never think to search there. When the club is raided shortly thereafter, the transvestite grabs her revolver and leaps out to confront the police. Too late, the drug addled Pitbull realises that she grabbed the wrong cartridges and is attempting to shoot the police with a gun loaded with drugs. She gets gunned down. - In Friday the 13th (1980), Pamela Voorhees is introduced a handful of seconds before being revealed to be the killer. - The Godfather trilogy: - The Godfather: Michael realizes something's fishy about the car, and quickly tries to warn his Sicilian wife about it, but shortly thereafter she starts the car and it explodes. - The Godfather Part II: Michael realizes that the drapes are open a second before his room is hit with a hail of gunfire from outside, giving him just enough time to dive for cover. - The Green Mile: The botched execution scene. People who are executed by electric chair are supposed to have a wet sponge placed on their head so they are killed quickly. Paul and the other men notice that the sponge is dry, but by then it's too late to stop it, and Eduard Delacroix proceeds to die a truly Cruel and Unusual Death. - The Hangover: Some viewers may notice that the clothes 'Doug' is wearing during the exchange are not the clothes he was wearing last time we saw him. - In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, when the trio realizes they have to play their way across a giant chessboard, they take their positions on the board before Hermione nervously asks an appropriate question: Hermione: This isn't going to be like... real wizard's chess, is it? (Ron sacrifices a pawn to an opposing pawn to test it; said pawn ends up shattered) Ron: Yes Hermione, I think this is going to be exactly like wizard's chess. - During Harry's Occlumency lessons in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Professor Snape snaps at Harry that "You and Black, youre two of a kind, sentimental children forever whining about how bitterly unfair your lives have been. Well, it may have escaped your notice, but life isnt fair. Your blessed father knew that, in fact he frequently saw to it!" Right after this, Harry accidentally reverses Snape's Legilimency back on him and sees Harry's father James bullying Snape when they attended Hogwarts. - Home Alone 2: Lost in New York: - Multiple times during the family's sprint through the terminal, we can see a man identical to Kevin's father right behind them. He goes the other way than the family at an intersection. Guess who Kevin follows to the plane? hint : Not his father... - "Now why would anybody soak a rope in kerosene?" (Though if one was paying attention to the Hard-Work Montage of Kevin's preparations, one might have spotted this one before....) - How To Blow Up A Pipeline: Almost right after some of the group talk about how people who make bombs accidentally blow themselves up quite often, bomb maker Michael almost really does. - The climax of Interstellar has the crew of the Endurance pull off the mother of all Spaceship Slingshot Stunts around a black hole. In order to help the main ship shed mass (and to gather potentially vital quantum data), TARS detaches his lander when it runs out of fuel, plunging him into the black hole. Brand frowns in confusion when she hears Cooper's farewell: "See you on the other side, slick!" Sure enough, Cooper detaches his own craft moments later, having calculated that the lander alone would not make enough of a difference. - In John Wick, Iosef is irritably on edge in his hideout and yells at his cohort playing a First-Person Shooter at full volume to turn it off, finally snapping "WILL YOU STOP PLAYING THAT FUCKING VIDEO GAME!" Literally five seconds later, \|\|John gets him to stop playing by sniping him from afar.\|\| - In the climax of Joker (2019), Arthur confesses his murder of the three Wall Street kids on national television and defends his crime with "They were awful!" Moments later he uses the same word to describe the Jerkass host Murray, and moments after that he kills Murray with a bullet to the head. - A case of this and Interface Spoiler. Kong: Skull Island's closing credits spoil The Stinger by crediting Toho as the owners of Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan and King Ghidorah, who show up in said stinger. - Marvel Cinematic Universe: - At the beginning of The Avengers (2012), the Tesseract is acting up. Hawkeye suggests that someone out there (i.e. not on Earth) may be trying to open a doorway to Earth. Several seconds later, a portal opens and Loki arrives. - At the end of Captain America: Civil War, when Iron Man arrives \|\|at the old Winter Soldier complex to help Steve and Bucky fight the other five Soldiers\|\|, one of them asks him how many heat signatures he's picking up; he says "...One." The next shot is of the Soldiers still in their cryo chairs and wiring... with bullet holes in their foreheads. Zemo never intended to use them for anything except as bait so he could show Tony that one security tape. - In the finale of Avengers: Infinity War, after Thanos destroys half the life in the universe with a snap of his fingers, the surviving heroes pick themselves up and lick their wounds. Black Panther helps a shell-shocked Okoye stand up, telling her, "Up, General, up! This is no place to die". He then immediately disintegrates into ash just before she can take his hand. - It is established in Infinity War that donning the Infinity Gauntlet with all six stones causes a powerful, painful surge of energy through the wearer. This happens when Thanos completes the Gauntlet, and then in Avengers: Endgame it happens to Hulk, and then again to Thanos in the final battle. Captain Marvel interrupting this moment of vulnerability buys the heroes time, and when she is defeated, Iron Man races in and grapples with Thanos for the Gauntlet before being bashed aside himself. Thanos places the Gauntlet back on his hand, smugly declares himself inevitable, and snaps his fingers - but nothing happens, as Tony swiped the stones during their scuffle without him noticing. The clue is that Thanos didn't suffer the energy surge this time. - The NeverEnding Story: Atreyu sees a number of murals that show various events that have already happened to him. He then sees a mural showing a growling wolf in some rubble, which he definitely hasn't encountered. He then hears some growling, spins around and sees the wolf. - Ninja Assassin: Raizo has been captured and taken to the secret ninja temple, but secretly he has a GPS tracking device in his gut, alerting the good guys to the temple's location. The ninjas discover the device, and right after that the temple is attacked. - Nope: - The leadup to Otis Sr.'s death features a radio report about a group of missing hikers. Before the scene is over, Jean Jacket vomits a rain of metallic objects — the undigested personal effects of what used to be the hikers — and a nickel falls out of the clouds to pierce Otis through the eye. - In the climax after Em does her sliding bike stop in Jupiters Claim, you can see the parks exit sign in the background that reads So Long Cowboy. In the next scene she begins releasing the giant inflatable cowboy that would be used to bait Jean Jacket into position for a picture and then kill it. - The Passion of the Christ had two little boys check to see whats wrong with Judas, and when he said to them Leave me alone you little satans! it turns out the boys are actually demons in the forms of human children. - Paycheck: The bad guy stands in front of the machine that shows the future, but only sees his own back, as he is futilely trying to get away from the exploding machine. Soon afterwards he realizes that this means the machine will explode, and futilely tries to get away from it. - Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End: A random Mook in a steam house had been identified as not belonging there, and threatened under the assumption he was allies with Turner and Barbossa. Barbossa shrugs and tells Sao Feng to go ahead and kill the guy, cause he's not with them. Will wonders, then, who he is with — and not two seconds later, Cutler Beckett's men break in and start firing. - Richie Rich, the movie: Richard uses his smell detector to sneak a few of his gifts on their plane...then it sniffs out "trinitrotoluene." He brings that gift to the cockpit, where his wife figures out it's TNT...he opens the package. "My God, Regina, it's a bomb!" He does manage to get it out of the plane in that one second, so the resulting Kaboom! plants them in the ocean instead of killing them. - In Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Ramona always uses the term "Exes" when describing her previous lovers, and corrects Scott whenever he says "Ex-Boyfriends" instead. Scott eventually notices this and comments on it—and roughly two seconds later, someone knocks him upside the head. It's the Fourth Evil Ex... the very female Roxy Richter. Roxy: He really doesn't know? Scott: ...wait... (A lever in Scott's head moves from "NO CLUE" to "GETS IT") Scott: YOU AND HER? - Serenity: The Operative: [to Mal] You are fooling yourself, Captain. Nothing here is what it seems. You are not the plucky hero, the Alliance is not an evil empire, and this is not the grand arena. Inara Serra: And that's not incense. [He turns to look: the incense stick burns away - rather like a fuse - and FLASHES in an explosion of light and sound] - That could have been Fridge Brilliance, since a flashbang would be most effective if he was looking at it. She may be trying to get him to do just that. - Sonic the Hedgehog (2020): - During the chase through San Francisco, Sonic skids under a truck with an ad for a travel agency on the side, reading "Visit Paris!" over a shot of the Eiffel Tower. A few seconds later, Sonic's next thrown ring portal sends them to the Eiffel Tower, since they send you to whatever location you were thinking of. - Listen closely to the "Speed Me Up" song during the credits. \|\|One of the lyrics reads "best friend named Tails". A few moments later, during The Stinger of the movie, Tails shows up, looking for Sonic\|\|. - Star Trek: - Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: Chekov and Captain Terrell are baffled by the discovery of inhabited cargo containers on Ceti Alpha VI, which is supposed to be a deserted planet. Then, Chekov discovers a belt buckle with "Botany Bay" written on it, and he realizes they're really on Ceti Alpha V, where Khan was exiled years earlier. Sure enough, before they can go anywhere, Khan and his followers have returned, taking them prisoner. - Star Trek: Generations: When Dr. Soran checks on his sun-killer missile after Picard messes with it, the viewscreen says that the missile's locking clamps are still engaged. Soran gets an Oh, Crap! look on his face as he and the audience realize that something bad is going to happen when the missile tries to launch. Then the missile explodes, killing him. - Star Trek: Nemesis: The Enterprise is being stalked by a cloaked ship, so the crew hopes to rendezvous with the fleet for protection. On the way, they enter an area of space where long-range communications don't work. Data and Picard realize that this would be a perfect place for the stalker ship to attack them. After that thought, they get attacked. - Star Trek Into Darkness: Kirk notes that in the event of an attack, protocol dictates that all available senior Starfleet officers should gather for a special briefing in this very room. Cue second attack. - Star Wars: - The entire franchise has the famous Share Phrase "I have a bad feeling about this" (and small variations thereupon). Whenever anyone says this, they are absolutely correct, and the cause of the "bad feeling" usually makes itself known within minutes. - The Empire Strikes Back: While in Cloud City, Han and Leia idly ask why the Imperials haven't made a move on the city, with Lando informing them that he's just made a deal that will keep the Empire out of there forever. Guess who they find seated at the dinner table? - Return of the Jedi: "But how could they be jamming us if they don't know th- ...that we're coming." In this case, they get enough warning to avoid immediate destruction by colliding with the Death Star's shield, but shortly after, we see evidence aplenty that the Imperials did indeed know the Rebels were coming, and had lured them into a trap. - The Viking: In the first scene of the movie, one of the ladies in Lady Editha's room prays before a cross "From the sword and the chains of the Vikings, O Lord, deliver us." Next we see a Viking kill a guard from behind a tree, and less than three minutes later, the castle has been stormed by Vikings and Alwin has been carrried off to Norway as a slave. - Young Frankenstein: "Well now look here, if it wasn't you and if it wasn't you..." - \|\|Ax's death\|\| in Animorphs happens like this. He and his ship are exploring a seemingly abandoned ship, when someone notices white hairs on the ground. Then says wait, not white but transparent. He then yells for his ship to raise shields just as the supposedly abandoned ship opens fire (the colorless hairs would be from polar bears, which meant the Yeerks were still nearby). - The Girl from the Miracles District: when Nikita and Robin are investigating Sawa, a rat - likely a spy of the local Beastmaster - suddenly jumps out and squeaks in alarm, which is all the warning the two get before they're attacked a moment later. - In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, during the Battle of Hogwarts, Harry sees and hears Bellatrix Lestrange laughing at Molly Weasley, the same exact laugh that his godfather * : and Bellatrix's cousin Sirius Black used just before Bellatrix killed him. Since Bellatrix taunted Molly over Fred Weasley's death and tried to kill Ginny Weasley, that laugh makes Bellatrix's fate a Foregone Conclusion. - The Machineries of Empire: Cheris realizes that the supposedly-friendly fleet is here to destroy her ships just in time to start giving orders to her people, but too late for this to save any of them. - A Song of Ice and Fire: The music at the wedding of King Robb's uncle (made hastily to patch over the rift caused by him breaking his own betrothal) is played rather badly. There's a reason for that. - Sorcerer Conjurer Wizard Witch has a small version that doesn't affect the plot except to underline the personality of the villain, Zenf. At a gathering of underground figures, Zenf reaches into his pocket for his cigarette case and casually remarks that some pickpocket seems to have triggered the poisoned blade booby trap built into it. At that exact moment, the poison takes effect and a man standing nearby collapses, foaming at the mouth. - In Ward, The nature of the Anti-Villain Parian's true power-previously thought to be solely telekinetic manipulation of cloth, thread, and needles-is hinted at earlier in the same chapter it is is revealed. Partway through Radiation 18.6 Foil gets a ride on a giant leather bird created by Parian and comments to Antares that Parian must be running low on materials, because leather always seemed to be a better material for her power and she tries to hold it in reserve. Leather is of course made of the skin of a dead animal. Then a little later, she is shown using clothes stripped from dead heroes for material, out of desperation. At the end of the chapter, it's finally shown that her true power is the telekinetic manipulation of dead human skin and other tissues, and the ability to use other textiles is merely a side-effect. - Whenever the song Ave Maria plays during most films, television, and even some video games, expect some sort of grand violence, destruction, or tragedy to occur seconds later, sometime lasting until the song is over. - Early 2015 when Jay had set up a camera to promote the Briscoes' ROH Tag title defense against Team Ambition. He was explaining why he wasn't impressed with either Davey or O'Reilly's "rational thinking", stating his brother, who was off camera sure as hell wasn't, before nearly shitting himself when a gunshot from Mark shattered a beer bottle behind him, followed by Mark's apologies that he thought Jay was done with it. - After Brock Lesnar put The Undertaker down with a third F5 in WrestleMania XXX, if one paid attention, they could see Lesnar getting overwhelmed with emotion before using the cover pin to make sure Taker stayed down; they could also hear Lesnar manage to utter an emotional "Thank you, Taker" during the pin moments before the count of three, indicating that not only did Lesnar know he would end the Streak, but he had to do so under Vince McMahon's decision and with Taker's blessing almost four years earlier. - The eponymous Hatchimals. Though the owner won't know what animal they get until their egg is opened, the sole hint toward what's inside is it will be one of the two Hatchimals displayed on the front of the package. The Mystery variant averts this. - Wowwee has a line called My Squishy Little Dumplings, whose electronic eponymous dumpling toys keep whoever will pop out a mystery. However, you can tell who will pop out by the dumpling's mouth design — Dee has lipstick, Dot has his tongue sticking out, Dip has a big smile, and Doe has a normal grin. - In Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, the leader of the last ace squadron you fight on the Knight path makes a call to a Wizard 5, but you can only see four planes in their introductory cinematic. Then, very shortly into the fight, another four planes in the squadron - stealth planes - pop up seemingly out of nowhere to ambush you while you're distracted. - In The Adventures of Willy Beamish, the title character gets home from school and is free to check the family's answering machine. Doing so all the way to the final message reveals a phone call from an employment bureau for his father Gordon. Later, at dinner, Gordon reveals that he's been fired instead of being promoted. - There are a few hints leading up to The Reveal in Assassin's Creed III that Haytham is a Templar, but there's a big one just before at the mention of "order and purpose" during Charles Lee's initiation. Astute players have just enough time to think "Wait, what?" before the Wham Line hits. - At the end of Batman: Arkham City, Talia fatally stabs the Joker. Batman then muses on a number of odd events and various bits of Mook Chatter that have happened over the course of the game, and realizes there were two Jokers. Talia is then shot in the back by the real one seconds later, and the one she stabbed is revealed to be the still alive Clayface. If the players were paying very close attention, they have guessed this as well. - BioShock uses this for The Reveal: Andrew Ryan reveals that the phrase "would you kindly" acts as a command phrase for the player, forcing him to obey. The player immediately sees a flashback montage of several scenes in which Atlas had used the phrase, which if the player noticed at all simply sounded like a Verbal Tic. - Before the violence begins in BioShock Infinite, Jeremiah Fink refers to a woman working at the Raffle and Fair as "the prettiest young white girl in all of Columbia". The fact that he mentioned her being white subtly foreshadows the city's jingoistic racism, which is made evident when the raffle prize is revealed: you get to have the first throw at the stoning of an interracial couple. Another clue was the fact that the entry to the raffle is free; even if the player didn't know about Jeremiah Fink and his greedy tendencies, no free raffle would ever have a prize of tangible value. - Black Mesa: Shortly before your first encounter with the HECU troops in "We've Got Hostiles", Freeman has to work his way past some turrets and laser-tripmines they've set up, obstacles that would seem a bit odd to introduce if the marines were the good guys. Then the typically calm, human-sounding Black Mesa Announcement System gets taken over by a creepy, robotic and very hostile-sounding Military VOX mid-announcement. Any remaining illusion that the HECU are a benevolent rescue squad is shattered in the next room, when their troopers start gunning down the surviving scientists to cover up the incident. - In Bravely Default, just after Alternis has been beaten, you get the usual display of the group in the new Job outfits, in this case the Dark Knight. Ringabel's Dark Knight armor is identical to what Alternis had been wearing. In the cutscene immediately thereafter, his helm splits open, revealing that he has Ringabel's face. Even before that, both Alternis and Ringabel had the same pre-battle jumping animation before drawing their weapon. - In Castlevania: Symphony of the Night after the player has explored most of the castle and discovered some optional items they can then enter a secret chamber underneath the marble gallery's giant clock. The chamber in question is quite clearly \|\|upside down\|\|, the first oblique hint at the existence of the \|\|reverse castle\|\|, which can be discovered immediately after visiting this chamber. - In Cookie Run, the custcene that plays when obtaining a costume indicates the rarity of the costume. If GingerBrave is stumbling on the obstacles, you're most likely going to get a Common costume. On the other hand, seeing Cheerleader Cookie's cheerleading squad literally pull out the red carpet for you means an Ultra-Rare is in your near future. - In the trailer (around 1:50) for the Warhammer 40,000 game Dawn of War 2, a Space Marine strikes down an Eldar with his chainsword, proclaiming "This planet is ours, witch!" "No," she gasps, pointing towards the heavens, "This planet... is theirs." Enter the Tyranid horde, as the Space Marine turns to meet a massive 'Nid bug right behind him. - Fire Emblem does this sometimes, thanks to the color-coded army factions. - In Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, Wallace appears to Lyn's group and questions the legitimacy of their claims. Everyone assumes he's going to capture her, but, since his overworld sprite is (the allied) blue, the player can easily figure he'll change his mind at the end of the conversation. - Fire Emblem Fates does the opposite a couple of times, foreshadowing certain characters being enemies. - In Birthright, Takumi and Flora both show up as red units on the map right before officially revealing themselves as enemies (though in Takumi's case, he fortunately gets snapped out of it quickly enough). In Flora's case, she leaves the group as a friendly unit and returns as an enemy unit. Similar to the above example, you also see a friendly General (a disguised Ryoma) show up at the end of Chapter 13 of Birthright, just before the individual in question attacks Leo. - Fates has a dialogue example in the Paralogue in which you recruit Leo's son, Forrest. Leo's younger sister Elise casually mentions Forrest being a troubadour, and says she's excited to see her nephew again only to find that Leo is unusually reluctant to visit. Leo's retainer Niles then reports that a "beautiful woman" who happens to be a troubadour is helping the victims of a brigand attack. You can then put two and two together to realize that Forrest is a crossdresser. - Halfway through one level of Gamer 2, the player witnesses a setpiece zombie munching on a policewoman's corpse. Almost immediately after this, the game's first police enemies start appearing. - At the beginning of GreedFall, Constantin mentions that he heard a rumor that the Nauts had brought one of the giant creatures from the island back in one of their ships, only for Kurt to say it's ridiculous, citing that the Nauts aren't stupid. Almost as soon as he says that, a giant creatures breaks free from one of the nearby ships. - Halo: Reach, after the city mission, Kat declares that the Covenant are beginning glassing procedures. Another Spartan asks, "How close?" Cue massive explosion from the surface bombardment. - Kingdom Hearts: - The Last of Us: During the cutscene following Lincoln, Joel and Ellie, in the pickup truck they got from Bill, pass a sign that says "Pittsburgh 242 miles". The next playable chapter takes place in Pittsburgh, where Joel and Ellie are ambushed by the Hunters. - A painfully blatant example in The Legend of Tian-ding. Ding Peng, the leader of the La Résistance who's portrayed as the Big Good for most of the game, decides to distribute the new amulets for the resistance, yourself included. Which turns out to be funeral trinkets. Cue the revelation that Ding Peng is actually working for the villains, followed by a platoon of Japanese soldiers marching in and executing everyone a few seconds later. - Mass Effect 2 has this in its prologue. The Normandy is in a part of space where a few ships have gone missing. Thinking geth, they pick up a ship moving in behind them, which they dismiss because the Normandy's stealth systems are engaged, and thus they can't be detected unless someone looks out a window (which the geth won't, because they think windows are a structural weakness). Then the ship turns to an intercept trajectory. Right as Pressley is saying that the geth don't have the technology to pick up the Normandy, Joker realizes... - Medal of Honor: - In Vanguard, after being asked 'What's the holdup Corporal?', Corporal Garrett responds by saying how the area ahead of them is 'perfect sniper country'. Exactly three seconds later, a soldier (who thinks that area is empty) is killed by a sniper. - In the 2010 reboot, this happens to Sergeant Peterson's Ranger team as they are about to kick in the door to clear a house, only to hear a mobile phone ring inside. Bonus points as the player knows what this sound means, having seen the same trick in the game's prologue mission, but the characters have no clue what is about to happen. Tech Sergeant Ybarra: ...cellphone? *BOOM* - Metroid: - Super Metroid: In Tourian, you will enter a room filled with grayed-out enemies that crumble to dust if touched or shot. In the very next room, you become trapped with one such enemy, which is impervious to your weaponry (except super missiles). In the next second, you find out what happened to the others. - Metroid Dread: - The Corpius in its invisible state can be seen in the background of a room in Arteria before retreating, with the monster itself fought not long afterwards. It can be seen much earlier as well, but the second time is only a few rooms away from where it is finally fought. - The Elun area is sealed off by a massive bulkhead, and Samus has to submit to a scan at the entrance before she's allowed further in. Elun is where the X Parasites were quarantined. - On the Itorash, the final area of the game, the standard network room conversation with Adam takes a sudden turn, as he explains that Samuss trip to ZDR was all according to his plans. The very next line then makes it explicit that Samus is speaking to Raven Beak instead of Adam, and has been ever since their encounter at the start of the game. - Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden: Your characters are mutants in a Scavenger World who live in a settlement ruled by The Elder, and are trying to find a legendary place called Eden. When you reach Eden, you can find a note saying that Dr Ingmar Edison took some mutants to the birthing chamber instead of euthanising them. If you remember The Elder's claim to have found the mutants in the forest, this is a big clue to the subsequent revelation that The Elder created the mutants. - In Noita defeating the final boss opens a portal to a room with an altar where the MacGuffin can be placed to end the game. Also in the room is a gold statue of another Noita and a message in the game's runic language reading "WHAT YOU DESERVE". All of this is warning that the Work is the wrong place to complete the ritual, as it will turn the Noita and the entire world to gold. - Not for Broadcast: In Day 296: "The Heatwave", just before Jeremy Donaldson takes the entire studio hostage, Camera 2 prominently shows the CCO's handgun. - In Paper Mario: Sticker Star, the boss of Drybake Stadium requires a baseball bat to massively damage him, as you fight him in a baseball field. Also, the battle intro says "Play Ball". Where this trope comes into play is that the top floor is the only floor with a sports motif- the five floors preceding it, meanwhile, have no sports stadium theme whatsoever. - For most of The Pedestrian (2020), the camera is more or less fixed on the current puzzle and only moves to keep up with the player character. Come the final section, \|\|the game indicates you can move the right stick/mouse, something that previously only moved the cursor in sign repositioning mode. As of that point, however, doing the same thing lets you fully rotate the camera to look at the surroundings. With that, what was previously a third-person puzzle platformer experience suddenly gains first-person elements.\|\| - The Pokémon ability Anticipation causes the Pokémon who has it to 'shudder' on the turn they are sent out if the opposing Pokémon has any moves that are super-effective against it, knocks out opponents in one hit, or Self-Destruct or Explosion. If a Trainer switches to a Pokémon with Anticipation mid-turn, and the enemy had used a move that is super-effective against it, the consequent shudder could well be about the move that your opponent immediately uses. Similarly, Trace causes the user to copy the opponent's Ability (with certain restrictions for Pokémon-exclusive abilities) at the time they are sent out, and one Pokémon who has it is Alakazam's Mega Evolution. Mega-Evolving an Alakazam against an opponent who has Anticipation - especially against AI-controlled Trainers, who always prioritize super-effective moves - might well cause your Alakazam to shudder immediately before taking a super-effective Ghost- or Dark-type move. - Red Dead Redemption II: If the player hasn't already realized where Arthur Morgan's disease came from or that it's a contagious one, they might be clued in by Dr. Joseph Barnes immediately and nervously washing his hands after inspecting Arthur. - Saints Row 2: In the midst of the fight against the Ronin lieutenant Jyunichi in Johnny Gat's house \|\|after the assassin had already decapitated Aisha in a failed bid to stop her warning them\|\|, as Gat is engaging in a sword fight, the Boss is mopping up Ronin thugs. Gat briefly turns away from his fight to slash a thug, giving Jyunichi the chance to deliver a leg kick that knocks him down. A few minutes later, the Boss calls to Gat to get out of the way, causing him to turn away yet again. This time, however, Jyunichi takes the opportunity to end the fight immediately, though Gat does get a chance to deliver a double-hand clap and possibly rupture his eardrums before the Boss chases Jyunichi off and Gat collapses from shock and/or blood loss. - SINoALICE: - When pulling the Grimoire (the gacha roulette), pay attention to Parrah and Noya's dialogue. If either one of them mentions missing a rare, followed by Parrah hurling abuse on Noya, one of the brown books (A weapons) will be replaced with a shiny book (S or SS(R) weapons). If the rope breaks during the pull and Noya loses his head, congratulations - at least 1 of the shiny books contains a SS(R) weapon/Nightmare. - During Recycle Grimoires (exchanging an unused SS(R) weapon for a pull which guarantees at least 1 new SS(R) weapon), players launch a book into a machine instead. If the book hits Noya and he loses his head again, one of the new weapons has a cost of 19 and above. However, should the player miss the first time, but subsequently cracks the ceiling, congratulations - there's more than 1 SS(R) weapon in the pull. - In Sonic Riders Zero Gravity, after Eggman is beaten once again and the power-unit meteorites are recovered, Tails looks back on wondering why the Babylonians sealed them away in the first place. After questioning the "lightless black" that destroyed them and how a robot containing one of the meteorites suddenly exploded from the inside, Tails immediately realizes that the meteorites have the power to create a black hole. - Star Wars: - The flashback approach is taken with The Reveal in the first Knights of the Old Republic. Right before Darth Malak drops the Revan bomb, the game replays every single bit of foreshadowing that had happened earlier in the game. - Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order: while reliving the moment where he was forced to go on the run, Cal recalls training with his master on a ship with clone troopers who can be overheard discussing new orders that will be coming in soon. Not long after, they receive their new instructions: Execute Order 66. - Street Fighter IV: Newcomer C. Viper appears for most of the game to be a job-focused businesswoman, equipped with gadget weaponry to help her compete. Her Arcade intro adds that she's an agent in the villainous S.I.N. organisation. In her scripted Arcade Mode fight against Chun-Li, though, her post-match winquote says 'Geez... You almost blew my cover'. Sure enough, all that remains is the final boss fight against Seth and her epilogue's reveal that she was an undercover CIA agent the whole time. - In Subnautica, the first leviathan-class predators you're likely to encounter are the terrifying Reapers, known for their Monstrous Mandibles and screaming echolocation. Hours later, when you make it to the Inactive Lava Zone, you might find Reaper Leviathan skeletons on the cave floor, and scanning them notes trace amounts of tissue that suggests the creatures were killed recently, presumably by a larger predator that dragged them down from the surface. Sure enough, the very cavern you're in is home to the Sea Dragon Leviathan, which literally eats Reapers for lunch. - In Undertale, in the True Pacifist ending, you've spared everyone in the game, everyone is together, everyone is happy, when suddenly... Alphys : How did you know to call everybody? Papyrus : Let's just say... a tiny flower helped me. Alphys : (visibly frightened ) A tiny... flower? [Cue Flowey showing up, everyone right where he wanted them, ready to absorb everyone's SOULs] - Warframe: The Tennocon 2019 cinematic trailer gives two: - The girl wipes the dirt off Mag's faceplate, revealing her mirrored helmet. Meaning the warframes in front of her are not merely statues, but actual warframes. - When the girl is done praying, she removes her hood, revealing that she has Operator implants. Then she disappears in a burst of Transference energy, and the warframes begin to wake up. Bonus points because new players will have no idea why it was important or what just happened, while it's a huge Wham Shot for more experienced players. - X-Kaliber 2097 have the boss, Chainsaw, who taunts you by calling you a "worthless sack of flesh"... a really weird thing to say for a flesh-and-blood enemy. That's because he's actually a Terminator Impersonator - defeat his first form (which can be done in less than a minute) and it's followed by a Robotic Reveal where Chainsaw's actually a machine underneath. - In the Danganronpa games, a One-Woman Wail plays in the background whenever a corpse is discovered. In Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, the absence of that when \|\|Kokichi\|\|'s corpse shows up in Chapter 3 is a tell that he isn't actually dead. - Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors: While possible to grow suspicious ahead of time, due to all the windows on the ship being iron-plated closed, and the waterline of a supposedly sinking ship staying ludicrously still, the biggest hint that the players were in Building Q all along, (and thus in no danger of drowning at 6 AM) is the shot of the Gigantic sinking 9 years in the past. It makes sense that a large ship would be difficult to recover and reuse, but this big visual hint is only one scene-transition from the reveal proper. - no-one has to die.: At one point, Steve complains about how the player is the one who chooses who dies to the fire, asking them what they would've done if he wanted to sacrifice himself for someone else. Christina dismisses his statement, saying that Steve would never sacrifice himself for anyone, to which Steve points out that Christina wouldn't either. A few moments later, the player has to choose between saving Steve or Christina, and each of them want to sacrifice themselves for the other. - In Exiern, the know-it-all book tells Ctyx that The Fractured are planning to perform a ritual. Two strips later, Tiffany and Teresa enter a room where said ritual is being performed with three sacrificial men, just in time to save the day. - Goblins: From here. "...is that Thaco the goblin? What is he doing?" Dellyn squints at Thaco in the distance, and then realizes with dawning dread... "How many guards were left at the dungeon?!" he demands of his second-in-command. Just two, the second-in-command admits. Dellyn screams for the west gate to be closed, having realized what is then revealed: Thaco took advantage of the guard force's absence to get the dungeon keys and free all the prisoners. - Metompsychosis Union: When freeing OPAL's captives in the shipping container it can be seen that one of them has partially opened their restraints moments before they grab the man who had taken Tilo captive at gunpoint. - The Order of the Stick: - In the pyramid, Xykon calls Roy by his name. Previous encounters have shown that Xykon is only vaguely aware that the Order even exists, and sure enough it's soon revealed that Roy is stuck in a Lotus-Eater Machine. - Also, the panels during the "fight" slowly get desaturated, hinting that something is very off about the whole scene. - In #1101, Haley does some spitballing about the spell Vampire Durkon had supposedly been trying to learn. She points out that, given their new knowledge of the character's plans, their prior assumption about the spell's identity doesn't make sense. Just as she completes this thought, the corpses around them rise as vampires, revealing that the actual spell was the one to hasten the rise of a vampire. - In 1203, Durkon is facing away from the rest of the Order while windwalking. The next strip reveals he went to parlay with Redcloak. - One of the twists of Stand Still, Stay Silent is a person turning out to be in a crate of food supplies for the main characters. In the panel preceding this reveal, the team's mage, who can see spirits of both living and dead and shows signs of having a vaguely defined mental disorder, is standing next to the crate, staring at it and growling a little, while another member of the team is starting to open it. The only other in-story warning of the crate person showing up eventually was the aforementioned mage seeing him in a dream. - Spooky Month: - After sending Skid and Pump off to the house on the hill, Roy mentions it's the place his uncle takes him. When Skid and Pump burst into the manor in the next scene, a creepy stranger locks them inside and references Roy tricking them into coming, revealing him to be Roy's uncle. - When Jaune presents the Happy Fella doll she bought for Pump, it has Dexter's white eye, indicating he's already possessing it. Lila understandably begins to panic, and Dexter tries to break out the doll's box shortly after. - Achievement Hunter released the video Cleaning Gavin's Desk. Long story short, Jeremy did a silly thing to Gavin's desk despite both of them being repeatedly told it wasn't a good idea. Michael's reaction after says it all. Michael: Remember when I said it was gonna break? - In "BooBoo & The Washing Machine of Doom!", BooBoo says the washing machine spins at random moments. The washing machine starts spinning immediately after she says this. - Potter Puppet Pals: "Hey, everyone! I found the source of the ticking; it's a pipe bomb!" "Yay!" BOOM - Having started recording before determining who gets what starter in Mario Party TV Group Nuzlocke of FireRed/LeafGreen, Steeler comments that the Random Number God will probably determine that Holms ends up with Squirtle when he's the only one not interested in running him. Sure enough... - A particularly hilarious example occurs in the 4-player Battletoads race between ProtonJon, Super Jeenius, PCULL 44444, and NintendoCapriSun, when Patrick is having trouble with a shark in Terra Tubes: Patrick: I was doing, I was doing alright and then the shark started killing me and then I dodged him and he's chasing me and it's making me sad, but I'm going through this thing quickly now... and he's gonna make me die on these spikes down here— SHIT! Achievement Unlocked! Called It: Narrated your own death - The Runaway Guys get into this quite a bit, especially with Jon's dice throws. Emile: Jon always rolls ones, it's his thing. Jon: demonstrates this - Sword Art Online Abridged: Princess Leafa, introduced towards the end of Episode 13, shares a lot of characters traits with Episode 1 Kirito: Snarky, Lack of Empathy, superiority complex, starting exposition with "For you see!"... For good reason: at the end of Rpisode 14, Leafa's player Suguha finds out Kirito is her real-life stepbrother... and she said he had a nice ass. - The Angry Video Game Nerd devotes an entire mini-rant to heavily chastizing the Frankenstein NES adaptation for doing this, by having a fallen soldier mention a monster roaming in the woods right before you encounter and fight it as a boss: Nerd: Then immediately, you fight the evil He-Monster and She-Monster of the trees, which is what the guy just told us about. Doesn't it seem cheap, that right after he tells us about a certain monster they appear? It doesn't build up any mystery. Remember the first Zelda game? You knew that you had to fight Ganon, the instruction manual talked about him, characters in the game talked about him. But at the time, nobody knew what Ganon looked like. It created all this suspense. But imagine if they never talked about him until right before you walked into that room. It's like: "Oh, there's this monster you gotta fight. Oh, there's the monster! Fight him!"	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneSecondLater
Second Season Downfall - TV Tropes Nail your second season and youre almost certainly going to remain on the air for years to come. Flub your second season, like UnREAL (2015) * did, and youre in trouble. Fall somewhere in the middle and you might get renewed but fail to convince your viewers to emotionally invest at the level a great serialized story requires."* The vast majority of television shows don't make it very far. Networks order dozens of new series every year, launch the most promising ones in the fall... and almost immediately begin cancelling ones that don't live up to expectations, replacing them with the shows that didn't make the first string of launches, in the hope of eventually getting a schedule of hits. The network model simply isn't generous to shows that don't get off to a healthy start. But for all the dozens of shows that fail in their first year, there are a few that survive this initial culling, complete their first season, and are renewed for a second. Smooth sailing from now on, right? Well... not always. Sometimes nobody expected the show to make it, and so the writers and producers pulled out all the stops in the first year, leaving nothing to work with for the next season. Sometimes a show with a novel concept inspires imitators that either pull off the gimmick more skillfully, or are so ubiquitious that viewers become bored with both the original and the knockoffs. Sometimes Executive Meddling is to blame, especially if the second season coincides with a change in network leadership. Sometimes there's no clear cause at all; the show simply ran out of steam, and Seasonal Rot kicked in early. And perhaps most common of all, maybe the network just didn't want to commit to two more seasons of the show. Yes, two more seasons. Very, very few American broadcast network shows are canceled after their third season because a show usually needs about 4 seasons' worth of episodes in order to be viable for off-network syndication, which for producers is often where the real money is. So, if a network looks like it might be thinking about canceling a show after its third season, the studio that produces that show will usually offer the network some sort of incentive to keep it on the air for long enough to reach syndication; as a result, when network programming executives decide whether or not to renew second-season shows, they often do so based on whether they can see having that show on their schedules for another 2 seasons. In any case, there are a lot of shows that successfully make it through a first season, only to fall victim to a Sophomore Slump and get canceled by the end of a disappointing second season. In the end, these shows are Short-Runners. Emily VanDerWerff, writing for Vox, has gone into depth on this trope, referring to the second season as a make-or-break point for a TV drama. She argues that this has become especially common for the sort of big, high-concept premises that make up many "prestige" shows in the 2010s, which lend themselves well to great first seasons but are difficult to follow up in the second season, the point where "a TV premise becomes a TV show" and they need to expand the world and supporting characters rather than just rely on the basic premise to pull in viewers. Shows that fail to do so will inevitably be remembered as having only been good for one season, even if they manage to get renewed afterwards. Note: This only applies to shows that end after their second season. If the show is believed to have declined in quality during the second season, but nevertheless continues for a third season or beyond, that would be a case of Sophomore Slump (if the show improves with its third season), or Jumping the Shark (if despite a third and/or additional seasons, the show does not improve in quality over the second). If quality varies during different seasons, you're dealing with Seasonal Rot. Compare Jumping the Shark and contrast Growing the Beard. Contrast Long-Runners. ## Examples: - The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes has a first season bearing arguably some of the greatest pieces of Marvel-adapted animation. In contrast, the second season suffers from having more filler than the first, especially after Jeph Loeb and Man of Action Studios came on as executive producer and creative consultants, respectively. They created so much filler, that subplots the original writers set up earlier went unresolved and/or unexplored by the time the show ended. Their run also saw most of the Avengers get pushed Out of Focus, and Out of Character Moments become more frequent. Plus, the animation in this season sometimes seems cheaper, and the awesome theme song permanently got ditched in favor of recaps of old episodes and a promo for the Avengers movie. The show's low ratings among the target demographic, at least compared to the Periphery Demographic, prevented the green-lighting of a third season. - The Critic was pulled from ABC after its first season, then made a Channel Hop to Fox for its second. However, this season only lasted three months and proved to be the show's last. - The Incredible Hulk (1996) was a dark cartoon — its protagonist was a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds, always on the run, attacked from all sides by hero and villain alike. The Hulk is alone. This trope comes along in season 2, and the earlier introduced character of She-Hulk is now in every episode, making it far more Lighter and Softer. Hulk wasn't even an outcast. This sudden shift in the series' tone led to a swift cancellation. - Legion of Super-Heroes was heavily retooled due to Executive Meddling in its second season, which ended up being its last. - Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM), though this was more due to the simultaneous cancellation of all of ABC's then-current lineup in favor of Disney programming (as they had just acquired ABC) than the actual quality of the writing. It has been observed that was an increase in comedy episodes, but the season also delivered a well-received Story Arc. - The most prominent reason why Whatever Happened to... Robot Jones? never lasted long was because Cartoon Network aired the episode premieres of the second season at 10:30 p.m. and the only other reruns being on Sunday at 4 p.m., which led to the show being Screwed by the Network. - Sheep in the Big City was never particularly successful to begin with, its absurdist humor not understood by most of the viewers, and being aired particularly late on Friday nights meaning it had a pretty shaky first season. Cartoon Network, rather than bumping Sheep to an earlier time slot for a better chance of success, INSTEAD banished the show to the even WORSE timeslot of Sunday evenings, when nobody was really watching TV. Just when it seemed like Sheep was getting axed and thus becoming a One Season Wonder, outcry from the most diehard of fans meant a last-minute announcement of a second season... which was aired in the SAME Sunday evening slot, resulting in similarly dismal ratings, before eventually being moved to even LATER on Sundays, just before [adult swim] came on (when the target demographic would usually be going to sleep), thus killing any chance Sheep had of getting another season. - The second season of The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat took a budget cut in the animation, attempted to take the series into a more script driven and less weird direction with more emphasis on the Joe Oriolo era of the Felix the Cat series, and the change was not for the betterthe ratings for it tanked even harder than the first seasons underperformance. It only lasted eight episodes before the show was cancelled altogether. Even the production team considered the second season a complete disaster. - Jimmy Two-Shoes' second season experienced a decline in both animation quality (due to a production change from Toon Boom to Adobe Flash) and writing quality (producing some of the fanbase's most hated episodes and poorly handling its characters, especially Heloise and Saffi). There was also the lack of promotion by its international distributor, Disney XD, taking its toll, which ultimately killed the show despite announcements for a third season. - When The Mr. Men Show first aired, it won many viewers and was one of the best shows Cartoon Network had during its dork age in the late 2000s. But by the second season, despite having better animation, fans thought the show lacked the same impact of its first season thanks to Chorion trying to change it (this ultimately became karma for the company, as they shut down a few years later). Cartoon Network hardly advertising the show didn't help, leading it not to get renewed for a third season. The changes include: - Miss Calamity being absent due to Chorion's dislike of the character. This resulted in more focus on Mr. Bump, Quiet and Fussy, turning off a lot of fans due to them suffering a lot in the season (though mainly with Mr. Bump and Quiet). - Mr. Persnickety/Pernickety being renamed and recolored like his book counterpart because Chorion didn't like his original self. Not only did fans feel like the simpler name was a form of dumbing down, but they made him more one note, being a complete control freak instead of the gentleman he had been before. - The new characters introduced in the season. Some fans don't like how they were different from the books. But the main issue everybody agrees on is that they hardly used them as fans expected they would be used in many scenarios. Miss Giggles and Miss Magic were the only ones added onto the site a week after the show ended. - The second season didn't show off new character dynamics for either existing or the new characters. What makes the first season special to most fans is how the creators experiment with how the characters play off each other. In the second, the sketches repeat the same relationships, so fans felt a bit put off that the staff hadn't tried new relationships with characters that hardly interact in the first season. Mixing this with both Miss Calamity's removal AND the new season characters getting hardly any screentime makes it a bit hard to swallow the changes. - Mr. Rude's fart sounds changed from silly cartoony honks to more realistic sounds, which turned off some fans on how gross it became, not helped by how there are considerably more jokes centered around it. - The number of shorts was reduced to only four (one always a minute long, usually used for in-universe commercials and adverts), which only padded out some sketches for longer than expected, eating up time that could've been used for another sketch. Some countries only got three sketches, meaning they lost out on a longer show. The only episodes that retained at least five segments were "Airplanes", "Sun and Moon" and "Sand and Surf". - The narrator being used more for every opening sketch. While this is a nice tribute to Little Britain and trying to use that character more like in the original, some fans felt like the sketches had been dumbed down. - The changing schedule on Cartoon Network. When the first season started, a brand new episode would air at 9 in the morning and repeat again in 1:30 in the afternoon. But in the second season, they pushed it to 11:30 and only aired it once. It felt like Cartoon Network wasn't giving the show a chance compare to its first season. This was around the same time some shows like Foster's Home, Ed, Edd 'n Eddy and Transfomers Animated were ending. - Similar to The Mr. Men Show, Olivia (owned by Chorion at the time with some of the staff who worked on the same show), suffered some changes that fans disliked that likely caused the show to be canceled. With Olivia and Ian going through Vocal Evolution, Julian being Demoted to Extra, Daisy taking a a level in jerkass, the addition of songs (especially the one Olivia sings Once an Episode) and the O gadget, plus the switch from a realistic tone to Denser and Wackier from the show, people were unhappy with the changes. - Harvey Beaks had a relatively successful first season on Nickelodeon, before getting hit HARD with Screwed by the Network in the second. Less-than-stellar viewership of the "Steampunks" two-parter as well as the other early second season episodes meant the show getting banished to Nicktoons, cancelled shortly thereafter, and burned off its remaining episodes there. - Star Wars Resistance Season 2 is considered to be weaker compared to Season 1. While Season 1 slowly built up to the events of The Force Awakens, many feel that Season 2 doesn't carry the momentum, with the characters no longer having a tangent end goal and not being allowed to further connect with the films due to the writers not knowing how the Sequel Trilogy was going to end. As such, fans pin Season 2's weaker writing on the films rather than through any fault of the show's staff. Word of God says that a Post-Script Season 3 that would've connected with the sequels again was considered if the show was a success, but combined with the aforementioned Troubled Production, a late Sunday night timeslot on the dying Disney XD block while also being released in the midst of Disney's transition to streaming, being widely dismissed by the general fanbase for being a Force-less, more children-oriented cartoon set during the divisive Sequel Trilogy era, and being overshadowed by the revival of the more widely acclaimed Star Wars: The Clone Wars, it hardly stood a chance. - The first season of the anime adaptation of The Promised Neverland was one of the Winter 2019 anime season's big breakout hits, carried by its memorable First-Episode Twist and its unique focus on young children in a Shōnen/horror hybrid. The second season on the other hand burned a lot of fans by being a heavily Compressed Adaptation that Adapted Out both fan-favorite characters and story arcs, cumulating in an alternate ending widely viewed as inferior even to the already divisive ending of the manga. - Angry Birds on the Run: Season 2 was much more poorly received than Season 1, due to the massively lowered stakes (e.g. being able to order food from a restaurant despite previously being unable to communicate with humans, and no threat of being replaced), as well as getting Lost in Medias Res between the seasons. - After MASH* was cancelled in the middle of its second season. - B Positive had an unusual premise mixing Screwball Comedy with Medical Drama: recently divorced Drew needs a kidney transplant and finds a donor in his party girl childhood friend Gina, who he reconnected with by chance. The first season ended with the two going in for surgery. After it got renewed for a second season, show creator Marco Pennette (who based it on his own kidney transplant experience) stepped aside, and to try to maintain interest post-transplant, executive producer Chuck Lorre switched Drew and Gina from a Like Brother and Sister vibe to a Will They or Won't They? situation, and had Gina suddenly inherit a multi-million dollar fortune. Fans had a They Changed It, Now It Sucks! reaction, the already marginal ratings slipped a bit, and CBS decided against a third season. - Breaking In had a well-received but extremely short (only seven episodes) first season. Viewing numbers were low but enough fans caused a loud-enough ruckus for Fox to un-cancel it for a second season. Unfortunately, the second season dropped the two of more intriguing characters, brought in two hated replacement characters, had to write out the primary love interest (her actress had been cast in House after the original cancellation), changed the concept from a weekly heist show to office comedy, and neutered the Magnificent Bastard into an ineffectual afterthought. The show couldn't even finish its miraculous second season. - Car 54, Where are You? went directly up against the second half of The Ed Sullivan Show (Sundays at 8:30) in both of its two seasons. - CBS originally aired The Good Guys, Bob Denver's first series following Gilligan's Island, on Wednesdays during the 1968-1969 season. The fall of 1969 saw the series moved to the Friday Night Death Slot against The Brady Bunch : (ironically, that show also happened to be Sherwood Schwartz's first post- Gilligan's Island project as well), and The Good Guys disappeared in January 1970. - Kevin Can Wait: Between the first season and the second season, executives decided to fire Erinn Hayes, kill off her character, and turn the show into a The King of Queens ripoff. Fans of the first season were livid and the show got cancelled after the second season. - The Monkees was highly appreciated during its first season, providing the Fake Band with three hits and two #1 albums by the season's end. In the second season, the timeslot (Monday at 7:30) stayed the same but its competition became Gunsmoke, and the series' cancellation at the season's end caused the group to go downhill. - Room For Two, an ABC mid-season replacement in 1992, overperformed in its short first season, ending as one of the top 20 shows on network television. Its second season saw its ratings plummet, though. - The Ropers, a spin-off of Three's Company, did great as a six-episode tryout on Tuesday nights following its parent show. But once it was moved to Saturday nights for Season 2, the ratings fell and the show limped through the year. - Time Gentlemen Please, Al Murray's sitcom, got a second season, and was so poorly received that neither full series was released on DVD until 2009. - I'm Alan Partridge (Series 2) killed the series until it was revived a decade later. The second went overboard on the sitcommy elements, particularly Alan's Ukrainian girlfriend Sonja, and whilst the first one could have you feeling sorry for Alan, the second made him wholly self-centered and unlikeable. The travel tavern in the first series was a much better setting than the caravan, because it allowed Alan to interact with more characters. The second series is certainly watchable, just a step down. - Sledge Hammer! is an interesting case. It looked as though the show wouldn't survive its first season, so the final episode ended with a nuclear explosion with the cast at ground zero. The ratings were surprisingly up for that episode, so a second season was approved by the network (with the season premiere claiming all future episodes take place five years before the nuke, despite obvious continuity issues that created). However, for the second season, the budget was cut (most shows get a budget increase with a second season), meaning the episodes looked cheaper, and fewer episodes entirely were produced. Even more damaging, ABC put the show up against ratings juggernaut The Cosby Show. The second season would be its last. - On Disney Channel, Phil of the Future, Cory in the House, Sonny with a Chance, Jonas LA, I'm in the Band, Crash & Bernstein, Mighty Med, I Didn't Do It, and Best Friends Whenever all got the boot after their second seasons. - Bracken's World had so bad a first season (1969-1970) that NBC had to change it significantly. Nothing helped — not even with the addition of Leslie Nielsen — and by the end of 1970 the series was history. - Buck Rogers in the 25th Century went off the rails when the second season had the series premise changed to a retread of Star Trek: The Original Series with Wilma Deering suffering major Chickification. - CBS' expensive Prime Time Soap Central Park West was heavily retooled after an under-performing Season 1, missing half the original cast. The retooling only alienated the show's dwindling fanbase, and it was canned at the end of Season 2. - Dark Angel spent its first season as a fairly gritty and down-to-earth Post Cyber Punk series where the villains were criminals and corrupt authority figures. Thanks in part to the 9/11 attacks taking place between the seasons, portraying the government as evil fell out of fashion and had to be toned down. The second season abandoned that for a Genetically Engineered Creature Of The Week formula and an ongoing plotline involving an Ancient Conspiracy and the heroine being the Chosen One. It did not go over well, and the series was cancelled, with its slot taken by... Firefly, which didn't even survive its first season. - Dirty Sexy Money was seen as a sharp and fun dark comedy of a rich family with critics loving its shots at the "nighttime soap" genre and sharp writing. Its first season was cut short by the 2007 Writer's Strike and by the time it ended, ABC decided to hold the show for the following fall. When it returned, it was under new showrunners who decided to play the satire totally straight, losing the humor amid nonsensical plots and bad character turns. The show was then axed for good after just 13 episodes. - Joss Whedon's Dollhouse survived its first season but was cancelled at the end of its second. Fans love to argue over whether or not Fox really felt the show deserved a second season, or were just trying to avoid a repeat of the situation with Firefly. - Gabriel's Fire (1990) was a serious drama starring James Earl Jones as a former police officer, wrongly convicted of murder, who becomes a private detective after his release from prison. In its first season, it won three Emmys (Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series (Jones), Outstanding Supporting Actress (Madge Sinclair), and Outstanding Guest Actor (David Opatoshu)) and an NAACP Image Award. Going into its second season, the show was re-tooled into a Lighter and Softer Dramedy, adding Richard Crenna as Jones's white partner, and changed the name to Pros and Cons. The new version was cancelled after 12 episodes. - Human Target was on the ratings borderline even in its first season, but that season had a solid reputation for its strong action sequences and compelling characterization. With a somewhat surprising renewal for season two came a boatload of Executive Meddling, the introduction of new female characters who ultimately contributed little and took focus off the original trio of Chance, Winston and Guerrero, the firing of composer Bear McCreary in favor of Tim Jones, whose compositions were considered ill-fitting and hollow, and the elimination of any ongoing storylines from the first season. Fans were not impressed and left the series in droves, while casual viewers sensed that the show was most likely being used to fill space until the premiere of The X Factor and also stayed away. Thus, the show was eliminated along with the rest of Fox's drama underperformers from this season (excepting Fringe) in May 2011. - Joan of Arcadia, thanks to heavy Executive Meddling to make it more marketable to teens, eliminating the premise of Joan rescuing lives and helping her father solve crimes, and centering it around high school drama. - Kamen Rider Amazons: The show's second season is widely-considered by most to be the side-project's death knell. The first season was lauded as an intriguing take on Kamen Rider as a whole, emphasizing a Darker and Edgier setting and the Gray-and-Gray Morality that stems from the tragic circumstances of the Amazon monsters. The second season aimed to do this by taking all of these aspects too far. Chihiro isn't seen as intriguing enough to carry the show on his own; defined by a nebulous Tragic Backstory and a Battle Couple dynamic with Squicky implications. note : Chihiro has accelerated growth, yet he's technically underage while said Love Interest is a reanimated Emotionless Girl. Established favorites do return to carry the story, but only in a tangential way. \|\|The vendetta between the show's two primary Riders isn't settled (with one of them heavily-battered by The Worf Effect after getting an upgrade), none of the series' over-arcing villains are ever meaningfully confronted (in fact they spend the whole show gloating or being cruel), no outstanding narrative change is enacted by either side despite the numerous grim twists employed, the one event that could have led to something note : Chihiro's attempted siege on 4C ends before it can begin with the heroes just leaving and the ending sees Chihiro murdered VIA jump-cut to set up a Sequel Hook\|\|. People were getting progressively fed-up while Season 2 was airing, but the lack of any definitive conclusion to the tragic events at-hand made people question what, if anything, even happened. When Last Judgement was announced, fans weren't hyped but mad the senseless tragedy was still going. Said movie came out to pittering reviews and Amazons has since silently faded away into the ether. - Popular had a strong enough start as a straight drama. The second season became... well, definitely not an Affectionate Parody, but more like a Cliché Storm of everything that was on The WB. One episode even went so far as to unleash a torrent of standard sweeps period stunts, in what ended as an inversion of the She Spies case downward. - She Spies started off as a successful Affectionate Parody of the whole Spy Fiction genre (it originally had a production team consisting of veterans of Moonlighting, and made similar use of Fourth Wall abuse). In the second season, the production company changed (to the company that produced Baywatch,) and the show underwent a massive retooling (the only things that remained were the three lead actresses and the general Boxed Crook premise.) The tone shifted from light-hearted parody to straight drama, and it became a lukewarm retread of Charlie's Angels, quickly losing its audience and any chance for a third season. - Smash was already a victim of deteriorating ratings (the term "Hate Watching" was popularized by this show) during its first season. NBC fired creator Theresa Rebeck, replaced her with the show runner from Gossip Girl, and heavily retooled the cast, ditching most of the more infamous scrappies. However, the network also stranded it on Tuesdays in between cycles of The Voice, where its lead-in was the incredibly weak rookie comedy The New Normal. Smash predictably collapsed further in the ratings, and continued to be unliked by critics, but without the same level of cultural awareness from the first season (when it aired behind The Voice). NBC eventually banished it to Saturdays partway through its second season to quietly dispose of what was once believed to be their future franchise drama. - Although the first season of Space: 1999 faced some criticism for the physical improbability of its setup, it was still well-received for the most part and often compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The second season, on the other hand, was an entirely different story, seen by many as one of the most egregious examples of this trope in sci-fi. For its second half, the series was retooled into a Lighter and Softer action series with much less cerebral plots and several characters removed without explanation. These changes went over very poorly with the established fandom and even some of the cast members (especially Martin Landau) and the series was swiftly cancelled soon after. - The second season of Top of the Lake got much more negative fan and critic reactions due to Shoot the Shaggy Dog issues. \|\|(The two main suspicious deaths were probably suicide, a lot is left vague, and the Hate Sink villain pulls off his last-minute-reveal real evil scheme, does a Villain: Exit, Stage Left, and gets away scot free with the proceeds.)\|\| Campion and Moss were also accused of exploiting and insulting actual Asian-Australian sex workers, after it was reported that they had interviewed them about personal details of their lives and the series then rarely rose above Asian Hooker Stereotype cliches. - Touch (2012) is similar to previous Fox series Dollhouse in that it only got two half-length seasons of 13 episodes each, with one first-season episode not even airing during the regular season (it was aired as a bonus in September 2012, six weeks before the intended second-season premiere). Weak ratings for the bonus episode were probably the reason why Fox chose instead to postpone the premiere for nearly four months until it could take over the Friday Night Death Slot following the ending of Fringe, and the new season's ratings were as poor as those of Fringe - a huge shocker, considering it had the strongest debut of Fox's four freshman series of 2011-12. Unlike Fringe, however, Touch sadly didn't have the benefit of a large and devoted fanbase to keep it alive, even with the Darker and Edgier, more Myth Arc-oriented turn the second season took. - Twin Peaks. David Lynch explicitly stated that he never wanted to bring the Laura Palmer story to a close, preferring to use it as a frame for the sub-plots and span it over several seasons, but ABC didn't think the audience would stick around. As a result, her killer was revealed halfway through Season 2 and the show became nothing but sub-plots. Lynch justifiably backed mostly out of its production to continue with his film career, directing only a few episodes with others directed by filmmakers of various skill levels. - Most diehard fans of War of the Worlds (1988) tend to hold the opinion that the changes from the first to second season (which included the deaths of several major and supporting characters - including the villains of the first season, the world flipping over 20 Minutes into the Future and most of the first-season plot threads dropped in favor of standalone episodes) caused the show's death. - The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss had a good first season, but underwent a drastic shift in the second season to try to compete with Bear in the Big Blue House. This change resulted in multiple flanderizations- for example, the Cat in the Hat became more of a host rather than The Trickster who likes to push the stories along (as well as being recast with a new puppeteer). Unsurprisingly, the attempt to compete with Bear failed and the show was cancelled. - The Frank Sinatra Show was a musical variety show broadcast on CBS for two seasons from 1950 to 1952. While the first season did well on Saturdays at 9 against Your Show of Shows on NBC, the second one faltered on Tuesdays at 8 against Texaco Star Theater (Milton Berle's show) on NBC and the surprise hit Life is Worth Living on DuMont, which debuted in mid-season. The show's popularity was also hurt by the scandals surrounding Sinatra's affair with Ava Gardner and his musical career being at a low point commercially and artistically (his late Columbia-era output being notorious for gimmicky novelty tunes). note : (The name was reused for an unusual variety/drama format which aired on ABC for one season in 1957-58; that one failed due to Sinatra attempting to tape eleven shows in fifteen days (he hated rehearsing), which showed in his performances and earned him a critical mauling.) - The Pat Sajak Show was an attempt by CBS to challenge Johnny Carson that put the host of Wheel of Fortune through massive changes while in late night. It didn't help, and Sajak was yanked off near the end of Season Two. - The American version of That Was the Week That Was was hit hard with this in its second season, especially because it conflicted with the 1964 Presidential election, and until the election was over it was shown only on a monthly basis. By the time it went back to a weekly program, most of its viewers had switched to its competition, Petticoat Junction and Peyton Place.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneSeasonWonder
One Side of the Story - TV Tropes Lisa: Wait, let me finish my sentence! Homer: Never! One character jumps to the most obvious conclusion from what he or she has just observed about another character (or possibly a non-obvious conclusion if Insane Troll Logic is involved). The resulting argument then proceeds in a one-sided manner, so that the other side doesn't get to tell their side of the story (which is always the correct one). Expect to hear "'But...' 'No buts'" in there at some point. May facilitate an Oops... I Did It Again plot. Should the culprit finally realize the truth, they might possibly be humbled enough to listen this time around, or they might scold the victim for not saying anything even though they kept telling them to shut up (which may either be genuine due to them not paying attention or on purpose if they don't want to admit they were at fault). The victim may call out I Warned You (or more specifically "I Tried To Warn You"). Compare with The Rashomon. See also You Know What You Did. ## Examples: <!—index—> <!—/index—> - Happens in the latter part of Code Geass when the Black Knights, having heard some convincing half truths about their leader Zero from Schneizel, decide to betray him by luring him into an execution squad. Kallen, who has been sent to retrieve him and has been commiserating with him on the way, calls the situation one-sided before her comrades tell her to get out of the way or else be shot under suspicion of being under Lelouch's geass. At this point, it's completely obvious that the Black Knights are completely set on executing their leader, not to mention that Schneizel, who always has a backup plan, is behind it, so Lelouch decides to lie to everyone that he used them, Kallen included, in order to have her spared. - In Fullmetal Alchemist, Alphonse suspects Edward gave him Fake Memories of his life and accuses him of not telling him. The events of consequence vary by adaptation; in the 2003 anime, before Ed can get in a word Alphonse runs off, leading Ed for an episode-long hunt for him before he can finally ask his real question, whether or not he hated him for what happened to him. The manga and Brotherhood anime adaptation mercifully averted all of this by having Winry stop Alphonse and call him out on not realizing how worried sick his brother had been every night in bed over him. - Ranma ½ pretty much lives on this trope, with Akane barging in with fist flying and Ranma (social retard that he is) usually too tongue-tied to do more than stammer out a "Let me explain" before going sub-orbital. Maybe one time out of ten is the incident that draws Akane's ire actually Ranma's fault. (Although to be fair, there's much less of that in the manga) - It's even Lampshaded at one point, where Akane asks why Ranma didn't just explain what was going on, and Ranma replies, "Have you ever listened to anything I say before you pummel me?" - When Huey, Dewey and Louie first tried to join the Junior Woodchucks — according to the Don Rosa story "W.H.A.D.A.L.O.T.T.A.J.A.R.G.O.N.", they were outright rejected for calling Elvira Duck "Grandma", as they usually do. The Senior Woodchucks were scandalized that they would address their founder's daughter that way. One of the boys tried to explain but got a "No buts", and they were only got allowed back when Elvira explained she's technically their great-grandmother, which of course instantly turned them into desirable material instead. - Robin Series: After a Not What It Looks Like moment in which Ariana's uncle outright tried to kill Tim when he saw him with Ariana when Ari was only wearing lingerie (they didn't do anything, it was all Ari's idea and Tim was uncomfortable with her trying to force their relationship to the "next stage"), Tim comes home to find his own father completely furious with him and he grounds Tim and takes his car from him, and angrily cuts off Tim's attempt to explain himself. - Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): After the events of the Iron Queen's occupation of New Mobotropolis, which briefly resulted in NICOLE being hijacked and forced to help trap citizens in their home, Mina, hoping to spread awareness regarding possible problems with NICOLE being compromised again, uses her status as an Idol Singer to her advantage to start spreading such messages with her music. It's only after her first song is sent that she discovers from Sonic and Sally that NICOLE had actually broken free from the Iron Queen's control, but was working undercover to protect as many people as she could, which Mina was not aware of beforehand. This, combined with a Hate Plague generated by Ixis Naugus, eventually results in NICOLE being banished from the city, something Mina never intended. - In Daddy's Little Girls, Monty is at a custody hearing for his daughters when the opposing lawyer brings up a police record showing that he had spent time in jail \|\|for raping a teenager\|\|. His boss/lawyer/girlfriend is furious, and the judge immediately denies him custody, with neither of them (both of whom really ought to know better) giving him the chance to explain \|\|that he had been falsely accused and later exonerated\|\|. - Hitch. The title character's love interest Sara has a friend who slept with a guy who dumped her the morning after. On the way out the door, he makes an offhand comment, "Date doctor my ass." Sara makes it her mission to find the date doctor and expose him, blaming him for enabling the scumbag to use her friend. \|\|When she finds out it's none other than Hitch, the guy she's been seeing and whom she likes, she trashes him and his completely innocent client in her gossip column. This effectively ruins his reputation and livelihood.\|\| The kicker? \|\|He hadn't even worked with the jerk who dropped his name, and Sara hadn't bothered to find out the truth.\|\| And when Hitch is still hurt by her actions and doesn't take her back immediately, he's the one who ends up having to make a grand gesture to make it up to her while she gives him the cold shoulder. - Funny thing is, \|\|her friend immediately believes Hitch when he explains that he never helped the jerk, even explaining why he does what he does (to help shy guys make that first step), while Sara just assumes he's lying to protect himself\|\|. - In The Sixth Sense, \|\|the audience is not aware that the main character is dead, so the restaurant scene goes like this: Man shows up a little late for his wife's anniversary dinner, but no matter how hard he tries to reconcile, she won't even talk to him; then she grabs the check before he can touch it, throws him a chilly "Happy Anniversary," and stalks out. But once you know that he's dead, it's: She's keeping his anniversary dinner X years after he died!!\|\| Her entire character (in other scenes as well, such as where \|\|it appears she's ready to cheat on him\|\|) changes based on that info. - Gods Play: Happens when William tries to explain being a shifter to Toby when he's in a compromising situation. - Harry Potter: Sirius Black spent years in Azkaban Prison because everyone who didn't know Peter Pettigrew was a Death Eater assumed Sirius betrayed the Potters and killed Peter Pettigrew and several muggles. It was eventually revealed Peter faked his death and framed Sirius with everything. - 8 Simple Rules: John Ritter continuously berates one of his daughters for shoplifting. In reality, the friend she was shopping with did it. - One call on 9-1-1 is apparently a domestic dispute between a man and his British wife. She constantly refers to him having a sudden change in behavior and making wild accusations. When the man finally has a chance to speak, he reveals that his wife isn't actually British and she's the one who's had a change in behavior. A quick medical examination reveals she's having a stroke. - Buffy the Vampire Slayer: This causes the major climax in the Season 5 episode "Blood Ties" when Dawn discovers she's the mystical Key. - She overhears only the first part of a conversation between her mother and sister: Joyce: She yelled at a teacher. The things she said, Buffy, I mean she never used language like that. Buffy: She probably feels like she can say or do anything right now. She's not real. We're not her family, we don't even know what she is. - Dawn immediately runs off into danger and totally misses the rest of the conversation: Joyce: How can you talk about Dawn as if she's a thing? Buffy: I'm not! I'm just saying that's probably how she feels. - El Chavo del ocho: Whenever Doña Florinda is sure Don Ramon hurt or tried to hurt her son, she'll certainly slap him and never allows him to explain. She's lucky he Wouldn't Hit a Girl. - In the Jessie episode "Moby & SCOBY", Jessie and Ravi are in a college class taking an exam. Jessie bothers Ravi during the exam and he tells her to stop bothering him, but the professor catches this and tells him to leave for disrupting class, cutting off every single attempt Ravi makes to explain that it wasn't his fault. Thankfully, Jessie admits that she was the one being disruptive and leaves in Ravi's place. - Inverted in an episode of Frasier wherein, rather than someone assuming someone else's guilt and not letting them get a chance to defend themselves, someone gets over-defensive about something without letting the other person raise any questions, accusatory or otherwise. To set the scene, Diane Chambers has re-entered Frasier's life and the two have begun spending time together, digging up Frasier's insecurities and confused feelings regarding Diane having pulled a Runaway Bride on him years before. At one point, he meets Niles for coffee and begins to ramble about Diane, only to start preempting Niles's responses, presuming that he's going to lecture Frasier about the situation being unhealthy, getting increasingly defensive, and eventually having a full-blown shouting match before storming off in a huff, with Niles having never spoken a single word. - Full House: - D.J. was trying to take a beer can away from three boys at a school dance when her uncle Jesse catches her in the hallway and wrongfully accuses her, until one of the boys who were drinking confess to Jesse (after he apologizes to D.J.). Slightly different in the respect that D.J. did get to tell her side of the story, but even after answering every one of Jesse's questions, he still didn't believe her and didn't even consider the possibility she was telling the truth. - Jesse himself became the victim of this trope the following season when he tried to borrow a truck to get to his wedding to Rebecca on time, only for the sheriff, who is also the driver's cousin, to arrest him for stealing the truck. Laser-Guided Karma, anyone? - An episode of Superior Donuts has Randy involved in an arrest where she has to use force on a black suspect. The arrest is caught on video. Franco is very mad at her as a result, but Arthur tells him not to make a big deal of it. Franco refuses to let it go, even after Randy is shot while making another arrest. (She's hit in a non-lethal area.) The rift between Arthur and Franco continues until Franco argues that Arthur hasn't even seen the video. Arthur then asks to see the video and then sees why Franco was so upset: Randy was smiling during the previous arrest. - In the Zoey 101 episode "Quarantine", Quinn spills a virus she created in her, Zoey, and Lola's dorm room, which results in them getting quarantined (along with Chase, Logan, and Michael). Zoey has a date with a cute guy named Danny and has to miss it as a result, so she gets her brother Dustin to tell him why she can't make it. Unfortunately, there are two Dannys at PCA, so he ends up talking to the wrong one. When Zoey finds out that Danny never got the message, she's about to explain why she had to miss the date, but he just assumes that she was standing him up, doesn't listen to her explanations and leaves angry at her. note : Although, even if she did get the chance to explain, he probably wouldn't have believed the real story because of how ridiculous it sounds. - Guild Wars plays with this on multiple levels. The Charr in the first game are presented as an Always Chaotic Evil race of invading fire-worshiping hellcats who live to destroy and enslave, and like to eat their human prisoners, and that slaughtering and torturing the Charr is not at all a bad thing. Both the characters in-game and the players were lead to believe this was the truth. Cue Guild Wars 2 revealing that all that was only propaganda from the human kingdoms - the Charr are far more complex, never ate people, and the invasion was their struggle to reclaim their occupied homeland. - Mass Effect: Geth. For three hundred years every race in galaxy thought they were murderous synthetics because quarians, who barely avoided total genocide at their hands, claimed so. \|\|Geth were just defending themselves and minority of quarians who claimed that geth won't rebel. Better yet, they still think of quarians as their Creators and ready to serve them. No one knows about it, because they isolated themselves so galactic races won't see them as threat.\|\| Geth \|\|heretics\|\| didn't help the case either. - In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers, Chatot tasks you and your partner with getting Perfect Apples from Apple Woods for Wigglytuff, but Team Skull ends up sabotaging them and stealing all the apples. When you tell Chatot that you couldn't get any Perfect Apples, he immediately assumes that you two screwed up and accuses your partner of making "excuses" when they try to explain what happened. He takes away your dinners as punishment and, to add insult to injury, makes you two watch everyone else eats their dinner. - All Grown Up!, "Brother, Can You Spare The Time?": Dil appears on a talk show, "What's Your Tragedy?", about Tommy abandoning him upon winning an award in filmmaking, prompting booing and jeers from the audience when Tommy shows up to explain his side (basically, that it's not the case at all). - In the Sadie Hawkins dance episode of As Told by Ginger, Darren thinks Ginger is jealous because Courtney invited him to the dance while Ginger is going solo (Ginger's actually trying to tell him that Courtney meant to invite his older brother Will). - Bojack Horseman: A certain flashback in "Time's Arrow" has Butterscotch constantly getting interrupted by his wife Beatrice during an argument as he tries to say something throughout, to which he groans in frustration and eventually shifts the blame to "the goddamn baby crying all the time". Young BoJack: (confused) I'm not a baby! I'm six ! Butterscotch: Yes, (mockingly) Wah-wah, gah-gah, goo-goo! Young BoJack: I'm forming sentences! Butterscotch: Oh, and I can't?! Everyone's a critic! - Fritz the Cat: The pig cops in the 1972 movie have a conversation like this in the synagogue. One of them desperately tries to inform the other that he saw Fritz, but the other keeps slapping him to make him shut up out of respect for his Jewish faith. - A variation of this takes place in How to Train Your Dragon (the film), when Hiccup tries to tell his father that he really can't kill a dragon. (He knows this to be so because he just had a golden opportunity to kill one, the Night Fury he later names Toothless, and couldn't bring himself to do it.) Stoick, his father, keeps brushing off his objections as fear and browbeats his son into agreeing to enter dragon training. Hiccup even lampshades the trope by noting that "This conversation is feeling very one-sided." - I Am Weasel: the Weasel berates I.R. Baboon for coming late for a motorcycle test and refuses to listen to whatever stupid explanation he has. He finds out too late he forgot the brakes to the motorcycle, leading to wacky hijinks. - In an episode of King of the Hill Boomhauer's brother is getting hitched, and quickly proves unfaithful and resorts to all sorts of sleazy antics, Boomhauer constantly attempts to stop and scold his brother, but is constantly manipulated to look like the culprit himself, leading to a long drawn chewing out from Hank, complete with the cliched booming of "BUT NOTHING!!!" whenever he tries to babble an explanation. Subverted later on when Hank, having had time to calm down, goes to Boomhauer and asks him to look him in the eye and tell the truth; Boomhauer does so, and Hank believes him. - Many Looney Tunes shorts operate multiple gags on this premise, most notoriously "Bugsy and Mugsy", where Bugs is able to convince Rocky the Gangster that his sidekick, Mugsy, is trying to kill him. - Mickey Mouse Works: Daisy's berating Donald Duck for (for example) dancing with her neighbor (the neighbor literally dragged Donald into it), while he's supposed to be building a brick wall at her house. - Rocket Power, "Race Across New Zealand": Ray Rocket won't stop flapping his yap on how his son Otto doesn't like to lose to hear out his daughter Reggie's own grievance: that she managed a tie in the previous race, and the only thing Ray cared for was Otto's loss. - The first Shrek movie pulled off a two-sided version of this. Shrek half-overhears a conversation between Fiona and Donkey, but misses the most significant part: that Fiona turns into an ogre at night. The next day Shrek and Fiona both assume that Shrek heard the whole conversation and each jump to a false conclusion. - The Shrek conversation is skillfully crafted to become two separate scenes based on whether or not you know the piece of information; the audience is aware of it at the time. - The Simpsons: When Bart tells a dirty joke to Reverend Lovejoy, his wife and daughter while visiting them at home he is thrown out of the house. As Bart starts stuttering "but, but, but...", trying to explain himself, Helen Lovejoy thinks he is repeatedly saying the word "butt" and asks him to "make it stop!". - Played and Lampshaded in the TaleSpin episode "It Came From Beneath The Sea Duck" when Rebecca is berating Kit for taking Molly out of the house (for a number of convoluted reasons in reality). Baloo suggests letting Kit explain what happened, only for Rebecca to shush him as well. ### It doesn't even have to be an argument, as long one character won't stop talking long enough to hear out the truth: - In Full Metal Panic!, Sousuke seems to have this going for him whenever anyone gets too direct about trying to convince him that someone has feelings for him. Many times, while they're in the process of trying to explain to him why someone is acting strange around him, he'll end up interrupting them before they get too direct, coming to his own outlandish conclusion as to the reason why. Most people just sigh and shake their head. This tends to happen the most in relation to Tessa. - Almost every arc of Higurashi: When They Cry runs on this trope. - The anime adaptation of THE iDOLM@STER: Cinderella Girls has Rin getting into trouble with a police officer. He assumes she was bullying a young boy, and it isn't until they're at the station that he learns that she was actually helping the kid. - In Tsukigasa, the facts everyone knows are that Azuma cut off Kuroe's arm and Kuroe ran away and joined a band of robbers. Everyone has their own idea of what actually happened and why it happened, many of which are misinformed because they are unwilling to just put it all out in the open. Eventually, all the pieces are dragged out one by one and things get resolved but it takes awhile. - All Grown Up!, "It's Cupid, Stupid": Nicole won't stop being excited over Tommy long enough for Tommy to tell about Chuckie wanting to ask her out to a Valentine's dance (Imaginary Love Triangle). - A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving: Peppermint Patty invites herself to Charlie Brown's house for Thanksgiving dinner, not giving Charlie the chance to explain that he's going to his grandmother's for dinner. - She is eventually called out on it after Marcy asks her if Charlie Brown really did invite her, Franklin, and Marcy over for Thanksgiving Dinner, however. Feeling guilty about her actions, she apologizes to Charlie Brown and they make up. - Danny Phantom, "Splitting Images": Monster of the Week (not really a monster, but who cares?) Poindexter believes Danny to be a bully after Danny dealt Dash (an actual bully) some much-needed humiliation, and, yep, won't even let Danny explain himself. Once the initial confrontation is over, it's just taken for granted that Danny apparently was wrong, in an Anvilicious "With great power Comes Great Responsibility" Aesop. One that he seems to forget on several occasions and has even has to visually re-learn within the first Made-for-TV Movie. - The DuckTales (1987) episode "Top Duck" has Launchpad become nervous because he's supposed to be taking part in an air show which his parents and sister are also supposed to attend. He's afraid that they see him as an embarrassment due to his tendency to crash planes when they're actually proud of him for never giving up despite his repeated crashes. When they finally meet, Launchpad beats himself up verbally without letting his family speak. He's in the middle of doing it again at episode's end when his father holds his beak shut long enough to tell him how proud they are of him. - Hey Arnold!, "Arnold & Lila": Lila won't stop talking long enough to allow Arnold time to say he didn't write "Arnold and Lila" on some wall. Helga had scrawled "Lila" in place of you-know-who to hide her dirty laundry... only to create this other dirty laundry. - Looney Tunes: this is the basic schtick of Foghorn Leghorn. He goes on and on without letting the other characters get a word in edgewise, then complains how they never listen to a word he says. On at least one or two occasions, the other characters have been seen yelling at the rooster to shut up and hit him on the head with a stick to knock him out. - Twilight Sparkle did this to herself in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode It's About Time. She appears before herself to give herself a message, but Past Twilight wouldn't shut up and stop asking questions, so the spell timed out and returned Future Twilight to her proper time. Having only pure speculation based on her future appearance note : a torn body suit, eyepatch, bandana and damaged hair, and a cut on her face and the date (next Tuesday morning), Twilight proceeds to disaster-proof the entire town... and slowly drive herself insane with worry about the future. By the time she becomes her future self, we find out that the message was \|\|for her to not worry so much about the future\|\|. - Amity Blight from The Owl House had this during her first few appearances, whenever Luz tries to talk to her and make up, Amity had No Listening Skills and refuses to even hear her out, only focusing on and blaming Luz for embarrassing her or getting her in trouble and ignores the fact that she nearly got Luz killed and gravely injured instead of realizing that she did that to herself, she even calls Luz a bully over an incident with her diary, thinking that Luz is a horrible person and still refuses to listen when Luz tries to explain herself and apologize. - The page quote comes from The Simpsons episode "Catch 'Em If You Can", where Homer and Marge decide to go on a vacation away from the kids. Bart and Lisa get incensed over this and chase their parents down at every turn, until eventually Homer and Marge give up and resign themselves to another "family" vacation. However, after this happens the kids feel guilty and go to an amusement park to give their parents some privacy... but unfortunately Homer and Marge are there too, and when they run into each other they think that the kids are still chasing them even as Lisa tries to explain and apologize.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneSideOfTheStory
One True Faith - TV Tropes The phenomenon in which a work of Science Fiction or Fantasy has only one religion (The Church) in it; furthermore, there are never any factions of it, or different interpretations of its belief. This is related to Law of Conservation of Detail . The lack of other faiths doesn't particularly break Willing Suspension of Disbelief, so why bother? Having said that, it's inherently unrealistic; our planet has seven or ten major religions in the modern day alone (some founded individually and others spun off from existing ones), and other religions have come to prominence and since died out. But no one ever questions this when it happens, making it either an Acceptable Break from Reality or something too controversial to touch with a ten-foot pole. It is most justified in works where much more is known about the spiritual world than in Real Life, and there's lots of evidence to back it up to the point that not believing in this faith would make one a Flat-Earth Atheist (though that still doesn't explain the lack of factions; there is no hair so fine that people won't try to split it). Ignore Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions. This trope is more of a Sliding Scale than a straight trope, since there are numerous aversions and subversions. We'll go in order. ## Played Straight: One Religion, No Factions - The Wheel of Time, arguably. See "subversions" below. - In Watership Down, all rabbits depicted worship the sun god Frith and believe the first rabbit was El-ahrairah. However, since only a regional group of rabbits appear, the beliefs elsewhere might differ. - In The Cold Moons, all European badgers worship a vaguely Abrahamic-inspired religion where their god is named Logos. - In Survivor Dogs, dogs, wolf-dogs, and wolves worship the Spirit-Dogs. This applies to pet dogs as well as feral dogs. - In Tales of Symphonia, two entire worlds share the same religion with only minor cosmetic differences. Justified by the Big Bad having created and actively running both. Although the village of Mizuho has its own gods. - Dead Space has Unitology, which is specifically mentioned to be the only religion that has survived into the timeframe of the games. \|\|It is mass low-level Mind Control by the Markers, preparing humanity to be turned into Necromorphs.\|\| It seems to be primarily modeled after a certain controversial religious movement in the United States, though the writers have said it's based on religious cultism in general. - In all Tropico games except Tropico 2, the only religion is the Catholic Church. This is justified since the games are set on Spanish-speaking islands in the Caribbean, which are very much Catholic country. - Stardew Valley has the Yoba religion which is also followed by non-humans who usually don't have contact with normal people, like Krobus (a shadow person) and it's implied dwarves as well. But there are a few characters that claim to be atheists. ## Averted: More Than One Religion - A Certain Magical Index has just every religious denomination that's present in the real world in its world as well. They're all true, and each has its own magic. - The Familiar of Zero played with this, in the fact that humans have one religion, based off on Crystal Dragon Jesus version of Christianity in the Fantasy Counterpart Culture of Vatican, Romalia. However, it is not the only religion per se, as the Elvens follow a different one. This becomes a plot point in the third season. - In Empath: The Luckiest Smurf, nature worship with Mother Nature as the patron deity of sorts is the religion most Smurfs worship, with Christianity and the religion of the Psyches being minority religions. - In RWBY: Scars, humans on Remnant worship either the Two Brothers or Dust. Faunus on the other hand worship the Ishvara pantheon. Some humans worship Ishvara and some Faunus worship either Dust or the Two Brothers, but this is rare. - Most of the works by Brandon Sanderson avert this trope, by virtue of the author's fascination with religion and divinity. - Elantris includes Shu-Dereth and Shu-Korath, offshoots of the base faith Shu-Keseg in the past. All three religions believe in unity - the unity of the heart (compassion), the unity of purpose (political dominance), or the unity of the mind (meditative clarity). Completely separate is the worship of the Elantrians themselves. - The Lord Ruler of Mistborn wanted to achieve this, but was never quite able, mostly due to the efforts of the Keepers. After \|\|the Lord Ruler is killed,\|\| the situation shatters completely, with people turning to various faiths, new and old, for support. - Warbreaker continues the trend, with the conservative, stoic worshipers of Austre on one hand and the colorful worshippers of the Returned on the other. - Finally, the religions of Roshar in The Stormlight Archive are just as varied as the people. The dominant religion in the area we see is Vorinism, where the people worship the Almighty and train to help him to reconquer the Tranquiline Halls, but when we encounter a number of slaves, we are introduced to many more religions. - Discworld, with its proliferation of Physical Gods. In fact, some gods are actually several different gods at the same time; apparently all it takes to pull that off is a pseudonym and a wig. - A Song of Ice and Fire: There are so many gods worshiped in many parts of the world, that there's a character subpage for religion alone. The following religions are most prominently featured and have had major impacts on the plot: - The nameless, faceless old gods that are worshiped in the North and beyond the Wall. There's no organized clergy, so worship is done in front of weirwood trees with faces carved in them. - The Seven Faced God, also called the new gods, in the rest of mainland Westeros. The seven aspects of the god are the Father, the Mother, the Warrior, the Maiden, the Smith, the Crone and the Stranger. It's loosely based on the Medieval Roman Catholic Church. - The Drowned God in the Iron Islands is a violent god of the sea who charges his followers with pirating the mainland. The Drowned God is opposed by the Storm God. - R'hllor, also called the Lord of Light, is popular in Essos but only has a few followers in Westeros (House Baratheon of Dragonstone and the Brotherhood without Banners). R'hllor demands Human Sacrifice and (apparently) gives his priests/priestesses various powers. His Arch-Enemy is the Great Other. - The Faceless Men of Braavos worship the Many-Faced God, a god of death that all other gods are considered aspects of. - His Dark Materials, even though The Church gets all the attention. - The Wicked Years, most Ozians worship either the pagan fairy goddess Lurline or the Crystal Dragon Jesus Unnamed God. However, it's also mentioned that other religious beliefs exist. Melena's quadling lover Turtle Heart is from the rural south and has never even heard of the Unnamed God. - In Orcs, not only are there several religions (mainly a monotheist and a polytheist one), but they are very important in the plot. - Ender's Saga, where matters of ensuring freedom of religion are plot-significant at some point. - In the Left Behind series during the Tribulation, there's the pantheistic mishmash of all world religions called Enigma Babylon One World Faith as the official one-world religion, but there's also Christianity (as defined by the books' authors and the Tribulation Force characters), Judaism, and Islam (which in the book series ends up being a minority religion), which all become illegal to practice even when Enigma Babylon is replaced by the Luciferian-type state religion of Carpathianism around the midway point of the Tribulation. In the Millennial Kingdom, Christianity becomes the official one-world religion, though dissidents are permitted to practice the beliefs of the Other Light despite the fact that (1) it's totally in error when it comes to believing Satan is going to defeat God and Jesus by the end of the Millennium and (2) those who remain unbelievers in God and Jesus Christ by the time they reach 100 will instantly die and go to Hell. - The Belgariad has one for every culture. At the end of the series, however, it's stated that \|\|Eriond\|\| will eventually be the one god of the world, while the other gods move on to start life on other planets. - In To Shape a Dragon's Breath, while the dominant faith is based on Norse Mythology, it's not the only one shown or seen. Indigenous people have their own faiths, for one, Liberty states she doesn't bother going to the temple of Fyra on Sundays, and a minor character, Zhina, is Kindah and appears to be the equivalent of Muslim (she wears a headscarf and doesn't eat pork or unclean foods, as well as saying she believes in one god who has multiple prophets.) - Exalted: While the Immaculate Order would certainly love to be the One True Faith, the plain fact of the matter is that human nature and the cosmology of the setting works against it. As it is, they only really have this status on the Blessed Isle, and only there because they ruthlessly suppress any hints of non-Immaculate leanings. - BattleTech: Most 20th-century human religions have survived into the 31st century just fine and the Catholic Church at least has even found itself sprouting a whole new branch — New Avalon Catholicism —, if somewhat by accident. (A breakdown in communications during the fall of the Star League regarding a temporary transfer of Papal authority away from occupied Earth had something to do with it.) - Eberron, contrary to the typical Dungeons and Dragons setting, has comparatively few Physical Gods running around (and most of those are both evil and currently incarcerated), the end result being that there are a vast number of religions in the setting. Some of the biggies include the Sovereign Host (and the related Dark Six), the Church of the Silver Flame, the Blood of Vol, the various Druidic sects, the Undying Court, the Path of Light, the Path of Inspiration, and the dizzying array of Cults of the Dragon Below. Furthermore, all of these (with the exception of the Path of Inspiration, which enforces conformity and is controlled by immortal spirits with the kind of pull to make that happen) have further subdivisions within themselves. - While Anima: Beyond Fantasy has one religion -basically a Catholic-like Christianity mixed with some Old Testament, that turns around a Crystal Dragon Jesus- that is by far the most extended in human lands, with its church undoubtedly the most (visible and human) powerful organization of the setting, many other cults are present albeit much less extended. It's stated also that there're branches in the game's Christianity but all of them are contained within the same church... for now. - Xenogears features two distinct major religions, (very) briefly hints at a third in one scene. Most of the beliefs of the organized religions, however, seem to be based upon a similar set of concepts. - World of Warcraft has multiple religious faiths, many of which are diverse from one another. - In the Alliance, the humans, along with the dwarves and the draenei, practice a Crystal Dragon Jesus religion known as the Holy Light. The exceptions are the night elves, who worship a moon goddess known as Elune, possibly the Gilnean worgen, former humans who were brought to the Alliance by night elves (though their religious practices are almost unknown), and the gnomes, who have for the most part completely forgone religion in favor of science. - It's noted in the tabletop roleplaying game that Elune is the only true actual deity in the game world, though that sounds like Night Elven propaganda to me. - It should be stated that the Holy Light is non-theistic (that is, it has no godhead) and allows for some degree of syncretism. - That said, earlier games make references to a more theistic bent, and references to a deity by worshippers of the Holy Light have been seen within World of Warcraft. Given the amount of turmoil that has taken place over the course of the games, it's entirely likely that the Church has undergone theological, philosophical and metaphysical developments. - The Horde is split up for the most part. Orcs, as a whole, have a shamanistic heritage. Almost all trolls worship their multiple Loa spirit gods. The tauren worship their tribal deity known as the Earthmother. Forsaken undead have some sort of religion involving the shadow, themselves and the light(to a lesser extent). Blood elves follow the Holy Light. Its unknown what goblins worship but they can be priests. - The Pandaren (both those on the Wandering Isle and on Pandaria) worship the August Celestials, four Physical Gods based on the Four Symbols of Chinese mythology and astrology: Yu'lon the Jade Serpent representing the Azure Dragon, Chi-Ji the Red Crane representing the Vermilion Bird, Xuen the White Tiger representing the White Tiger, and Niuzao the Black Ox representing the Black Turtle. - In addition, there are many other races that worship other deities: members of the Cult of the Damned worship the Lich King, many corrupted followers of the Old Gods exist, and there are many others. - Breath of Fire II, which sports the benevolent but mostly impotent Dragon God, the minor earth deity Namanda and the \|\|villainous\|\| Church of St. Eva. - Repeated in Breath of Fire III, with the God of the Urkans \|\|(actually the Goddess Myria)\|\| and the Dragon God Ladon, who still has a few shrines as the "god of travelers" and serves as a Master. - Vagrant Story, with two - La Pucelle, technically: although the story centers on members of the eponymous church, there is another one who doubles as its theological rival, enemy and Church Of Evil. - Arc Rise Fantasia has three, although two (North and South Noireism) are kind of variations of each other. - Final Fantasy X-2, where the former Yevonites have divided into the Youth League and New Yevon. The major bone of contention is the speed at which technology should be incorporated into daily life. - Mass Effect takes place in the future, where humanity has not Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions—the main religions of today still exist in the future, albeit at a lesser extent. (Most notably, party member Ashley is religious; while she never states what religion specifically she belongs to, it's generally assumed that she's Christian.) The discovery of Prothean ruins on Mars led to a few new human religions starting up. The alien species also have some diversity among their religions; the asari have both monotheistic Goddess (Athame) worship and a pantheistic religion called "siari". While the latter is more widespread, many asari still invoke the Goddess in casual conversation (By the Goddess!), similar to how atheists will say "oh my God" despite obviously not believing in one. The drell have a traditional polytheistic religion, but the Thane notes that many young drell are turning away from it, and the Codex says that siari is becoming popular among the drell. The hanar worship the Protheans to the point where it (and being extremely polite GrammarNazis) is their hat. Aliens are also adopting alien religions; the codex notes that Confucianism and Zen Buddhism are fairly popular among the turians, and a Cerberus Daily News story mentions businesses which provide dextro-amino kosher food for turians and quarians who have converted to Judaism. - But of course. Also, nearly every faith is heavily fragmented into several different sects. ## Subverted: Single Religions With Internal Factions - Star Wars: Jedi vs. Sith at the very least. The Expanded Universe features enough "alternative" religions to make the franchise an aversion, but we're ignoring those for the moment. A number of other Force sects exist as well. - The Lord of the Rings, in which certain cultures (or subcultures) place more emphasis on their favorite members of the pantheon. - Omnianism in Discworld, going through endless schisms after the last prophet, Brutha in Small Gods - Lois McMaster Bujold's Chalion universe has two closely related religions who are bitter rivals, since they disagree about whether one of the five gods is, or isn't, The Devil. - David Weber's Safehold series is the story of one world's transition from a single monolithic religion to a deeply divided global religion - but it's still the same religion, just divided. The second and third novels in the series are called By Schism Rent Asunder and By Heresies Distressed, which are a fairly accurate description of the fate of the Church of God Awaiting. - The reason for the single religion is that it was achieved artificially through massive brain washing and by nuking any opposition from orbit. We do not know what the religious makeup of the original colonists was. Other religions might have popped up over the centuries but they would have been mercilessly wiped out by the Church. - The Wheel of Time, like Star Wars, has one single monolithic belief system for the whole world - but it's dualistic, and the darker side has many adherents, and they're the antagonists. Well, the main antagonists. So that darker side might be considered a schismatic completely separate religion or a part of the same religion with different ways of observing it. - As typical of Robert Jordan, every side also has different factions: for example, the Children of Light and the Aes Sedai both worship the Light and the Creator, but have a very different view of the One Power... Masema's followers also behave like a fanatical cult, putting Rand on the same level as the Creator. Plus he's legitimately The Chosen One (reincarnated from the previous guy), but many other false claimants arose, making a lot of people skeptical that he's for real. - Tasakeru: The eight sentient species' cultures all originated from worship of the same three Gods, but each species developed a different set of beliefs over time. - In the Humanx Commonwealth, there's only one major human and Thranx religion- the Church, which is presented as being something of a mishmash of different belief systems with more of a focus on charity and helping those in need than specific doctrines. Other species, like the AAnn have their own religions, and Flinx even manages to accidentally trigger the creation of a new cult on a pre-industrial world that he illegally visits. - Tailchaser's Song implies that all cats worship Meerclar Allmother. However, cats are depicted as British instead of African (and they were created as is instead of being domesticated African wildcats) so the religion might change depending on the area. - The Lost Fleet: Both sides in the Forever War seem to follow the same rather vaguely-defined religion that combines ancestor-worship with the concept of "The Living Stars", which may or may not be gods in the conventional sense of the word. The faith is openly and quite widely practiced in The Alliance, and semi-officially frowned upon but tolerated in private by The Syndicate Worlds. What religious practices are common in the various other factions to play a role in the story never really comes up. - Doctor Who: In the future the army (human army that is) is run by the Church and among the Clerics there are mentions of both Anglican troops and of a Papal mainframe. - In Story of Seasons, all the villages and towns worship the Harvest Goddess in a Crystal Dragon Jesus manner. There are varying Harvest Goddess and most towns have their own specific one. However, it's also shown that Harvest Goddess worship differs from place to place. In Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands, Cliff from Mineral Town doesn't have the exact same beliefs as the local priest. - South Park had a two-parter set in the future where everyone has become an atheist. However, the atheists have split into many factions, fighting wars just as bloody as the religious wars of the past, over \|\|what their name should be\|\|. ## Played Both Ways - Artesia has multiple religions (the Old Religion of Yhera, the faith of the Divine King, and the mystery cults, among others), but they all fit into the same cosmology, many gods are worshipped in both religions, and the Phoenix Court of the Empire worships the Divine King but also pays respect to the gods of the Old Religion. - Judge Dredd comics generally assumed that the Church of Grud was a universal replacement for all previous establishment religions (it's even centred in Vatican City), until Paul Cornell's Pan-African Judges said, "No, the Muslim world is still Muslim." - Played with hard in With Strings Attached. When the four first arrive in Ketafa and talk to Stal, they learn that Ketafa had been settled hundreds of years ago by people fleeing the gods, but that recently the conquering Idris brought the gods back. However, Stal is in despair both that the religion is very likely fake and that the people took to it so readily. When the four get sent across the ocean to Baravada, they find that real gods (the Dalns gods) are present there, and that the Ketafan religion merely incorporated their names among many others... but that the Baravadans have no idea what the words religion and worship mean, and treat the gods pretty much like employers. Moreover, the Dalns gods are prevented from doing anything in Ketafa because of a curse on that continent. Things get even more complicated when, much later in the book, the four travel to the Ghost City of Ehndris and glimpse crumbling temples and statues which are clearly part of some other, lost religion. - Honor Harrington: Let's see, we've got the formerly Space Amish Church of Humanity Unchained, with its own internal factions, and its extremist splinter The Faithful, the Methodist-descended Third Stellars (which has practically every congregation-or even every person-being their own faction), along with a 2nd Reformation Catholic Church, a new Judaism faction, and passing mentions of most other current major religions. - The Stormlight Archive: There are numerous religions worshiping the Heralds of the Almighty. Many see them as gods, or see one as a god while all the others are angels, and so on. The audience knows that the Vorin religion is closest to the truth, but they get a number of things wrong—most notably, they are completely unaware of the fact that the Heralds gave up their oaths because they were so tired of the endless fighting. - Star Trek, which features religious Planet of Hats (Bajor), Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions (while Roddenberry was alive) and religious proliferacy (after he'd passed on). - Babylon 5: - In the first-season episode "The Parliament of Dreams" during a cultural exchange week each of the alien races put on some kind of demonstration of their religion. Every alien species only has one religion, but what will the Earth do? Finally it's Earth's turn. Cmdr. Sinclair: shaking hands or bowing or giving the appropriate gesture This is Mr. Harris. He's an atheist. Father Cresanti, a Roman Catholic. Mr. Hayakawa, a Zen Buddhist. Mr. Rashid, a Moslem. Mr. Rosenthal, an Orthodox Jew. Running Elk, of the Oglala Sioux faith. Father Papapoulous, a Greek Orthodox. Ogigi-ko, of the Ebo tribe. Machukiak, y Yupik Eskimo. Sawa, of the Jivaro tribe. Isnakuma, a Bantu. Ms. Chang, a Taoist. Mr. Blacksmith, an aborigine. Ms. Yamamoto, a Shinto. Ms. Naijo, a Maori. Mr. Gold, a Hindu. Ms.... Fade to Black - That being said, humans aren't the only species to have more than one religion. The Narn in particular are noted to have a number of different faiths, each with their own beliefs and practices, each of which is named for the religion's founder/prophet and has a scripture named "The Book of [Founder's name]." G'Kar, for instance, is a devotee of the faith of G'Quan. In later episodes, \|\|G'Kar himself becomes a "prophet" after he has a spiritual awakening while imprisoned in the B5 brig and decides to write his memoirs/explication of his transformation. He doesn't mean to become a prophet, but eventually Narns begin to follow him, which at first frustrates him to no end. Eventually, he learns to take it in stride.\|\| - Dragon Age: More than one religion overall, but you only get one religion per race—there is no sense that any particular person could ever be a different religion from the one they are. The human religion, that of The Maker and the Prophet Andraste has some subdivisions, but these are clearly marked as 'real religion' and 'evil cult' so don't really represent religious diversity. The narrative itself (and the Warden, if you choose) can be read as having a subtle atheistic bias. - Notably averted in Orzammar, where you find a dwarf cleric of Andraste who is genuinely good; should you choose to help him, you see why there's only one religion per race. - There's also a subversion that gets a bit more attention in Dragon Age II, where the Tevinter Imperium has its own schismatic Chantry that's under the control of the mages, rather than the other way around. Fenris calls it a scam to keep the magisters in power, but we don't actually see the Black Divine or any of his people. - Also, if you read the Codex, the reason there's only two versions of the Maker's worship is because the Chantry takes it very seriously, aggressively wiping out variations of the faith. Kind of like the Catholic Church used to, only with more success. It's even part of the religion that the Chant must be recited perfectly, with no variations. However, despite all of this, the occasional underground offshoot manages to thrive. - Likewise, it's mentioned that when the Chantry decided to lead an Exalted March against the Dales, the "Canticle of Shartan" was stripped from the Chant of Light, removing all reference to the Dalish General of Andraste's army. - It's interesting to note that, apparently as a result of being raised on the surface by exiled nobles from Orzammar, Varric Tethras is ostensibly non-religious, but frequently will invoke both the Dwarven Ancestors and Andraste's name. It is confirmed in Dragon Age: Inquisition that Varric is in fact Andrastian, although he doesn't often bring up the fact that he sincerely believes. - Hawke also appears to show acceptance of multiple, diverse faiths. Despite being nominally Andrastian, Hawke nonetheless aids Merrill in performing several Dalish rituals, in Legacy offers a Dwarven prayer after recovering the body of Varric's ancestor in the Deep Roads, works with the Qunari on numerous occasions and in Mark of the Assassin, while also mentioning offhand that their family was one of the few that the Chasind Wilders chose to trade with in Lothering. A Snarky!Hawke gives a few hints that s/he is actually more of a Nay-Theist. - While there's one main religion per race, there are some minority faiths and a few converts. In addition to the Andrastian dwarf mentioned above, the Chasind and Avvar barbarians are human polytheists, and there are a fair number of converts to the Qunari faith who are human or (especially) elven. Many of the city elves are Andrastian, though they retain some traditions of elven polytheism (such as the vhenadahl, or sacred tree). The Rivaini are pantheists who believe in a Natural Order (and also have a number of Qunari converts). - In The Legend of Zelda, the Triforce seems to be used universally and everyone seems to adhere to the same legends, yet each race is mainly seen worshipping deities separate from the Golden Goddesses - usually protector spirits like Jabu-Jabu or Valoo, but other ones as well, like the Ocean King or Hylia or the Desert Colossus. It's possible these all form a unified pantheon hierarchy, but that's never been made explicit. - The Elder Scrolls plays with it in a number of ways depending on the instance. - Averted in general with the primary religion of most of Tamriel, the religion of the 8 (or 9) Divines, sometimes referred to as the Imperial Cult. It was a compromise religion created by Alessia, the first empress of Cyrodiil, to appease the different races with different religious beliefs who made up her empire. While the main sect of the religion is based out of the Imperial City in Cyrodiil and is fairly uniform, there are other versions of it in different provinces. For example, the Altmer still refer to Akatosh by his Aldmeri name of Auriel, and have some very different beliefs about the motive for the creation of the universe. Further, many Nords still refer to the Divines by their ancient Nord names and still hold Shor (aka Lorkhan) as their top god even if the official version of the religion leaves him out. - That said, every single religion on Tamriel shares a number of consistent elements in their creation stories. It's usually their interpretation of the motives of the gods involved that differ. - For some 4000 years, the Dunmer of Morrowind instead worshiped a trio of Physical Gods known as the Tribunal, or ALMSIVI, made up of Vivec, Almalexia, and Sotha Sil. The Tribunal Temple was founded which worships them. The friction between the Temple and the Imperial Cult is felt in the main quest of Morrowind. Then Subverted within the Tribunal Temple. While they present themselves in this fashion and attempt to suppress all dissent, the Dissident Priests and Nerevarine Cult have split off from the mainstream Tribunal worship. When talking to Vivec, he'll reveal that the Temple isn't entirely right, and that the others aren't completely wrong. - Also Averted when the Dunmer Ashlanders are considered. They practice ancestor worship (which is still part of Tribunal Temple doctrine, though to a lesser extent,) and also, to a degree, worship (or at least respect) the Daedra. (Particularly Azura, Boethia, Mephala, Sheogorath, Molag Bal, Mehrunes Dagon, and Malacath.) Again, the Daedra are acknowledged by the Tribunal Temple, but are considered subservient to the Tribunal. - Speaking of the Daedra, they are worshiped (usually individually) by many in Tamriel as an alternative to the Aedric Divines. - The Skaal of Solstheim add another to the mix, with their worship of the "All Maker." - While some Argonians may convert to the religion of the Divines, their species as a whole tends to worship the Hist, a race of sentient trees native to their Black Marsh homeland. - The Dark Brotherhood worships Sithis, also known as the "Void" or the primal "Is Not".	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneTrueFaith
One True Pairing - TV Tropes The One True Pairing (usually abbreviated as OTP) is the couple that a fan or group of fans prefers over all other 'ships. Canon and logic do not necessarily apply, and crossover OTPs are not uncommon. The degrees to which this is taken varies wildly. It can mean anything from "I just like Drakken/Shego best" to "I won't read Fan Fic that pairs Anya and Xander with anyone but each other" to "Cloud always and still loves Aerith and they made love to each other in the flower field at the end of the movie", to the extreme "All of the canonical evidence that Harry and Hermione are not going to get together is a lie spread by the Ron/Hermione 'shippers, who must be stopped before their evil destroys the universe". note : All examples chosen at random, but the last group really are that scary sometimes. When one of the Ron/Hermione shippers turned out to be J. K. Rowling herself, some of the "Harmonians" abandoned the series in anger, lashing out at Rowling for "ruining the story." That's right, some think Rowling intentionally ruined her own story. OTP shipping wars were second only to Subbing Versus Dubbing for heat and violence. The degree of fanaticism displayed for a particular OTP may be proportional to their distance from the Official Couple and/or the Word of God for the work in question. In some cases, holding their preferred characters to completely different standards than the official pairing is an excellent mark of OTP shippers. If someone argues that you need to show that X and Y got married to prove they're in love, and the rings on their fingers don't count, but they know that X and Z love each other because of 'chemistry', they're definitely defending their OTP. It is technically possible for a person to have multiple OTPs, just with no overlap between them. Some people refer to their favourite threesome ship by the similar term One True Threesome, or OT3. Or really, "OT" appended with any number if they're even more ambitious with the number of people involved. BroTP is used as a term for non-romantic OTPs, of the "these people are best friends and no one will tell me otherwise" variety (for instance, John Sheridan and Susan Ivanova of Babylon 5). Male/female and female/female BroTPs are sometimes also called FrOTPs. Inversely, a NoTP is a ship that one opposes vehemently. Often the term "OTP" is used sarcastically in parody of shipping, especially if it involves an unconventional pairing (such as the ever-popular ChadxFloor OTP), or a character and their favorite food ("Hiro/Waffles OTP"), etc etc. Compare to Fan-Preferred Couple, which it can overlap with if the OTP in particular ends up becoming more popular than the canon couple.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneTruePairing
Onesie Armor - TV Tropes Some games treat suits of armor as a single item, rather than giving each piece (e.g.: breastplate, leggings, pauldrons, etc.) its own stats and armor value. Usually, this is an Acceptable Break From Reality, as it could get pretty complicated to track the value and effect of each piece, especially in Tabletop Games. It also makes sense if the game doesn't allow one to target specific body parts, as you can't decide to just hit the target wherever its armor is the weakest (or on whatever body parts aren't armored, if this is the case.) This trope can also apply if the suit is one item but the helmet is another, or if some parts (such as boots or gauntlets) just aren't treated as armor by the definition of the game. The trope comes in two basic types: - Type A: The entire armor is treated as one item, and protects the entire body even if it's just a breastplate, vest, or something else covering only the torso. - Type B: The "armor" items (e.g. chainmail armor, plate armor, etc.) only cover most of the body (usually the torso, arms, and waist), but items such as gauntlets or boots also exist, although whether they are actually classified as armor by the game varies. In either case, Magical Accessories are usually exempt from this rule for some reason. See also Body Armor as Hit Points, which also treats a set of armor as one abstract unit. ## Examples: Comic Books - Witchblade: The Witchblade can expand itself around Sara's body to form Adaptive Armor, though mostly it forms a Stripperific outfit closer to a Chainmail Bikini. Still, when facing a bevy of baddies, this mystic artifact will encapsulate Sara, allowing her to slice-and-dice enemies without taking much damage. Tabletop Games - Ars Magica 5 th edition: Armor is classified as either partial or full-body, though this only affects its weight and overall Damage Reduction. A suit of armor's game stats are determined only by its primary material (from leather to chainmail), ignoring any mix-and-match. - Dark Heresy adapted the advanced rules from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and made them obligatory, though full armor sets exist that just give a flat armor bonus to the entire body. Full flak armor, notably, grants more armor than a combination of flak vest, leggings and helmet covering the same areas, handwaved by the full armor being military grade while the individual pieces are all security/consumer grade. - In Dungeons & Dragons, a suit of armor is treated as one unit with the armor class value and dexterity check penalty applying to the whole thing. The exceptions are boots, gloves, and helmets (and other headgear), which aren't covered and have their own stats, but usually don't provide any bonus to armor class, instead just having magic powers. - Downplayed in Old World of Darkness. While some armors are called things like "armor t-shirt" or "flak jacket", the armor with the highest rating is simply called "full suit". While this makes some sense, it raises the obvious question of why you can't just attack someone wearing a flak jacket in the legs to ignore their armor, other than just because the game rules say so. - The One Ring: Body armor counts as a single unit, with five different types offering scaling levels of protection against becoming Wounded. Downplayed as adventurers can also wear a helmet for a minor bonus. - Pathfinder: In first edition, which is basically a modified 3.5 Dungeons & Dragons, armor mostly follows the same rules. There is a set of optional rules for "piecemeal armor", and it's just as complicated as you would think, particularly if you are wearing different kinds of armor (which is the main point of such rules). - Shadowrun: Uses the B variant of the trope. Armour grants armor points to all your soak rolls, but in-universe-wise only tend to cover the arms, torso and legs. Armored boots, helmets and forearms/gloves are accessories that add additional armor points to all soak rolls, and the highest-grade milspec and security armors are full-body covering and come with those accessories included. - Starfinder: A suit of "armor" in the game is basically an armored space suit, with full-body protection, oxygen supply, and limited radiation and hazmat protection. - Zig-zagged in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: The game offers the choice of quick armor rules, where armor is full-body, and advanced armor rules, where characters can build a suit out of different pieces. Attacks do strike specific body parts, but under the quick armor rules, this mostly only determines potential Critical Hit effects. Video Games - In Battle Brothers there are only body armors, which protect the bearer from all hits on their body and extremities, even if there can be temporary and permanent legs and arms injuries too, and helmets that protect from more serious hits on the head. - The first two Dragon Age games give the player character and companions Type B suits of armor. Although there are separate helmets, boots, and gloves, what covers most of the body is treated as one continuous piece of armor. Dragon Age: Inquisition mixes it up by allowing the player to add customized arms and legs to some of the armor sets; they're still treated as being part of the whole, but provide additional stats and attributes. - The Elder Scrolls has gone both up and down the scale. To note: - Arena and Daggerfall offer gauntlets, boots, and greaves each as a complete set, then separate left and right pauldrons, a cuirass, and a helmet. - Morrowind breaks the gauntlets into single left and right items. A particularly notable single artifact gauntlet, Wraithguard, is required for The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. - Oblivion and Skyrim go the other direction: gauntlets returned to being a single item, while pauldrons are removed entirely, being considered part of the cuirass. Skyrim also removes greaves. - Fallout: - Mass Effect: - Armor works like this in the first game. The second game introduced the option to customize Shepard's armor by swapping out pieces of the default N7 armor for pieces purchased from merchants. However, some specialized suits of armor (such as the Collector Armor, Blood Dragon Armor, and Cerberus Assault Armor) still come in a single piece (including a helmet covering Shepard's head at all times). - The third game carries on the second game's system, but adds a greater variety of both individual armor pieces and single-piece outfits (not to mention also the option to remove the helmet during cutscenes regardless of which outfit Shepard is wearing). - Minecraft Dungeons, even though it takes inspiration from games like Diablo which averts this trope by having multiple armor slots, has only a single armor slot where a whole suit can be equipped. - Monster Hunter: Stories only features complete sets of armor in one piece, in contrast to the mainline Monster Hunter games where you can mix and match armor pieces. - The Outer Worlds: An armor or clothing item is a single piece protecting everything but the wearer's head. A separate hat or helmet does that. - Unreal has the Kevlar Suit (covers from the chest to the crotch) and Assault Vest (covers only the chest, includes shoulder pads). There's also the Antitoxin and Asbestos Suits, which in addition to being classified as armors, they include environmental protection as well (against acid and fire area damage), and they cover the entire body. Those are the only sets of armor present in the game. - Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: Attacks don't target specific body parts, so the various armors are full-body outfits with static benefits. Each outfit morphs according to the Player Character's Clan, which can get a bit ridiculous — heavy leathers on a Malkavian male appear as an open pimp coat with no shirt. - In XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2 body armor is one single piece statwise, though various protective vests may be worn under it for additional protection as a utility item, and purely cosmetic Character Customization allows you to individually change headgear or body armor	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnesieArmor
One True Love - TV Tropes "All of our young lives we search for someone to love. Someone that makes us complete. We choose partners and change partners. We dance to a song of heartbreak and hope. All the while wondering if somewhere, somehow, there's someone perfect who might be searching for us." The most indomitable of romantic ideals is the idea of one utter perfect specimen who is your ultimate match. Perhaps they will have everything in common with you and share your dreams. Perhaps they will be your Foil because True Love is Exceptional. A third possibility is Mindlink Mates leading the two of them to understand each other better than anyone else. The main difference between a standard Official Couple and a One True Love is in how each partner views the other. While an Official Couple simply needs to be a canon pairing between two characters, a One True Love also requires a canon couple to view each other as their be-all, end-all soulmate with no romantic interest in anyone else once the pair gets together. This is comparable to the difference between "daisuki" and "aishiteru", both terms meaning "I love you" in Japanese. "Daisuki" is a casual term that couples typically use whether they are dating or married. It can be heard often between partners in public, and it can also double for loving a thing (ex. "I love pizza" or "I love watching basketball"). "Aishiteru", on the other hand, is a term reserved only for couples that view themselves as soulmates. Those who say "aishiteru" would do anything necessary to stay by their partner's side and view their partner as their One True Love. It's a serious term, and you'd seldom, if ever, hear it in public explicitly for this reason. Often Love at First Sight occurs when someone spots or otherwise realizes that this person is their true love. Because Destiny Says So or The Power of Love are often invoked to explain why that person is the way they are or how you met them. If sex is involved, it may overlap with Sex Equals Love. Sub-Trope of Love Interests. Not to be confused with One True Pairing, which is what the fans want to happen. This only applies to examples where it's made clear and deliberate in the work, regardless of what the editor happens to ship and regardless of how convinced you are. Also not to be mistaken for the Short Story by Isaac Asimov about a computer that falls in love, titled "True Love". ## Examples: - Despite the premise of the manga, Hahari of The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You deconstructs this by bringing up the corollary that only your one true love will do. She was madly in love with Hakari's terminally ill father and her decision to have Hakari was so that a piece of him may live on. It was an incredibly dangerous decision that she openly admits was reckless and left her a single mother. Furthermore, she goes into detail about how losing him caused a void in her life that not even her daughter's love could fill. It was only when she fell in love with Rentarou, which proved that she could love again and disproved the notion that only that one specific person will do, was the void filled. - CLAMP are very fond of this trope, and use it frequently in their manga. Most evident in Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-, which ties together all their various stories into one multiverse (along with alternate universes thereof), and when counterparts of established romantic couples pop up, they will invariably still be in a relationship regardless of how their circumstances differ in the various worlds. - Deconstructed at the end of Codename: Sailor V: Minako and Ace share this, but Minako will always put her mission over love and Ace, knowing this, became Danburite so that she'd understand it by \|\|killing him\|\|. Needless to say, by the time she debuts in Sailor Moon Minako has some serious issues, even if she does everything in her power so nobody will notice. - Cyberpunk: Edgerunners: As the series progresses, it becomes clear that David and Lucy are soulmates who have searched for meaning in their livesand found it in each other. While David is initially upset with Lucy for her Manic Pixie Dream Girl act, he never resents her and joins Maine's crew partially to get close to her. It soon becomes clear how far both are willing to protect one another, and David's willingness to help others wins over Lucy's heart. Once they become an Official Couple, Lucy trusts David to the point of revealing \|\|her traumatic childhood at Arasaka as well as her deep-dive neural port\|\|, and both come to value the other's life over their own. While their relationship does become strained \|\|from David's slippage to cyberpsychosis and Lucy's unwillingness to share the truth of Arasaka's plans for David\|\|, both David and Lucy remain committed to one another when push comes to shove. \|\|Their love is so strong, Lucy's True Love's Kiss helps David recover from his cyberpsychosis... which sadly ends with David sacrificing himself to help Lucy escape Arasaka Tower\|\|. - DARLING in the FRANXX: The main symbol of the series is the Jian, a one-winged bird from Chinese mythology. In Chinese myths, a pair of Jian birds represents marriage since the two are inseparable and co-dependent on one another. Much like a Jian pair, Hiro and Zero Two are inseparable and serve as each other's wings. \|\|Back when they were children, Hiro tried to help Zero Two escape the APE facility where she was being tested on and tortured. Looking past Zero Two's inhuman appearance, Hiro became the only boy who admired and loved her for who she was Warts and All, and even promised to marry her while they were on the run. Their short time together as children made an impact on Zero Two and, as Episode 12 reveals, she spent much of her life looking to reunite with her original "darling", the boy she loved and missed. When she finds out Hiro was her "darling" all along in Episode 13, she becomes distraught over her actions up to that point before the two make up in Episode 15.\|\| Since then, the two have shown unconditional love for one another and know that their bond will help them overcome whatever obstacle fate throws at them. - Fairy Tail: Zeref Dragneel and Mavis Vermilion — they are undoubtedly the love of each other's lives, but constant misfortune has kept them apart. As the only two existing bearers of the Curse of Contraditions, they are the only two people that could ever hope to fully understand and empathize with each other. This fact caused them to fall in love with each other, but as the curse's purpose is to deny its bearer happiness, Mavis "died", separating them for over a century before Mavis was revived. Denied a chance to be with the love of his life and the only person to have ever made him truly happy, Zeref fell into greater despair than ever before until he finally snapped and dedicated himself to being as evil as the world declared him to be. Mavis, now an Astral Projection only visible to members of Fairy Tail, stayed close to Zeref and was forced to watch as the man she loved begin his true Start of Darkness, all the while being unable to comfort him and stop him in his tracks. In the present storyline, despite everything that has happened, they are still deeply in love with each other — Mavis all but begs Zeref not to destroy the world because it was the world where they met, while Zeref's only regret about his plan is that in the new world he wishes to create, he and Mavis will never meet. The sheer tragedy of their relationship is only highlighted when fans are shown in an omake that in least one other world, they managed to find happiness together. Eventually, thanks to the power of the One Magic, they are finally able to be together in the afterlife. - Inuyasha: A bit of a complicated example because Inuyasha's One True Love is Kikyou's soul. Inuyasha and Kikyou were deeply in love and were very close to living out their ideal married life, but this ended tragically when Naraku tricked the two into hating each other. Naraku fatally wounded Kikyou while disguised as Inuyasha, and expected Kikyou to take Inuyasha's life while using the jewel to heal herself. She could not bring herself to do either out of love for Inuyasha and instead used her remaining strength to shoot a single sealing arrow to pin him to the Goshinboku tree; this meant, Kikyou was full of both bitter hatred and very strong love towards Inuyasha at the time of her death, so the Shikon Jewel became corrupted in response to her hatred while the love granted her a wish to see Inuyasha again. Naraku planned to use the tainted Jewel but Kikyou realized this and with her last words, ordered Kaede to burn it with her body, which she and the locals did. Inuyasha and Kikyo's love transcended time and space as the desire to see Inuyasha again was the wish that the Shikon Jewel used to reincarnate Kikyou as Kagome Higurashi, and therefore reconstitute itself despite Kikyo's conscious decision to destroy the jewel with herself. With time Kagome becomes Kikyou's successor, and although Kikyou was the woman Inuyasha "loved most in all the world", Inuyasha comes to realise that he is destined to be with Kagome (though they are different people, they are also one and the same), and Kagome also comes to understand it and let go of her own insecurities about Kikyo and herself. Inuyasha and Kikyou (as Kagome) finally get to live out their happily married lives together in the end, like they had first planned those many years ago. And before that, the revived Kikyou passed away peacefully in Inuyasha's embrace, finally free of everything. Rumiko Takahashi stated that she chose Kikyou's name basing on the language of flowers, as the Chinese Bellflower's meaning is "unchanging love". - Mobile Suit Gundam 00: Marie and Allelujah are destined to be soulmates and connected (thanks to their quantum brainwaves) since their childhood. However, when he and the other kids try to escape from the institute, Allelujah decides to leave her in the institute because she still needs medical treatment. When the researchers implanted the Soma Peries persona to make Marie into a perfect super soldier, Soma has no memory of Marie's persona and doesn't know who she is, making her unable to remember Allelujah too. After he learns her identity and the truth about her, Allelujah decides to save her from the A-Laws and the Federation, so she will never be used by the military as a "living weapon". After Marie's persona returned, Marie remains on Allelujah's side and is very supportive of him. Even when/if Soma and Hallelujah's personas dislike each other, Marie and Allelujah will always be together and will never be separated. - Naruto: - Naruto has spent almost his entire life searching for the one person who would love him unconditionally, in spite of everything that has and will transpire in his life, along with all of his flaws, like his parents would have if they lived beyond his birth. However, since he never understood the romantic implications of such a relationship, he's been blind to the fact that the person he's been searching for has been right in front of him all this time: Hinata, the girl who has admired, acknowledged and loved him for the way he is since the day they first met as children. It takes him until the canon movie The Last: Naruto the Movie to finally realize that Hinata is the precious person he wants to protect and be with. Confirmed by Word of God in this 2015 New York Comic Con interview: Masashi Kishimoto: I think what made me realize it was partly because, if you really look back and think about it, Hinata always supported and acknowledged Naruto, even before Master Iruka. She had the ability to see beyond his reputation and see the true person inside. I think I started realizing that they were meant to be . - Naruto's own parents recognize they are each other's soulmates. His mother Kushina was bullied as a child for being an outsider and for her long flowing red hair in particular, which caused her to resent it. She also initially didn't think much of his father Minato, believing him to be "flaky", similar to how Naruto initially thought of Hinata as "weird". One day, though, Kushina was kidnapped by Kumo ninja for being the Kyuubi Jinchuriki. She made a Trail of Bread Crumbs using strands of her hair, and just when it seemed no one had caught on, Minato appeared and rescued her. He was the only one to catch on to what she was doing and even admitted that the first thing he noticed about her when they first met was her beautiful long red hair. That was the moment that Kushina realized that the hair she hated so much had become her Red String of Fate that led her to her soulmate. - Princess Tutu: Rue and Mytho end up being this to each other by the end. - Sailor Moon: - Usagi and Mamoru are repeatedly stated to be this, and their love is often used by Usagi to gather the strength to defeat the villain in the end. - This is also the case between Haruka and Michiru, who are in a long lasting relationship after S and are rarely seen apart from each other. - It played literally for Nozomu in Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei where he only has love for Kafuka and no one else. Despite marrying all the girls in his class, he insists to everyone that he has only one wife whom is Kafuka. It makes sense in context when \|\|Kafuka is revealed to be a ghost, indirectly living through her organs and blood donated to the girls in Nozomu's class, and only able to possess one of the hosts at a time on a daily basis\|\|. Nozomu is willing to go through a daily repeating cycle of divorce & marriage among his wives to stick to his beliefs on only loving Kafuka despite having babies with all of his wives - Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Jaden and Yubel. In a past life, as children, he promised to love them and only them forever. His feelings for them were so strong, they carried over through his reincarnation and memory loss: it only takes him a few minutes after remembering to reaffirm the vow and fuse their souls together for eternity. On Yubel's end, they loved him so much they voluntarily underwent a Painful Transformation into a monster just so they could protect him, and apparently waited thousands of years for him to be reincarnated. Yubel's love was so strong it drove them to insanity, damned and redeemed them in succession. - Aquaman and Mera are this to the point that most non-comic book fans aren't even aware that Aquaman had other love interests. They were married long before Lois and Clark and it took the death of their son for there to be any real strain in their relationship. In the New 52, when Aquaman's relationship with Mera did start breaking down, it turned out to be because \|\|she had been replaced by her evil younger twin sister Hila\|\|. - Apollo and Midnighter of The Authority and Stormwatch. The peculiarities of their comics-verse means that we've seen a great many alternate universe versions of them (Palette Swap versions, kid heroes, samurais, a golly-gee parody of Blue Beetle and Booster Gold...), and all of them are joined at the hip. They take it for granted to the point where Midnighter is disturbed and upset to meet an alternate universe version of them that broke up. - Jessica Jones and Luke Cage hasn't really had any other love interest than each other since they got married and any issues in their marriage has never involved jealousy or unfaithfullness. - Batman, despite his numerous relationships in both personas, has only ever loved two women: Catwoman and Talia al Ghul. Of those two women, the one that can be described as the love of his life is Catwoman. But because True Love Is Boring, they have never managed to settle down in a lasting relationship with each other long enough to cement them as this in the eyes of the general public, though this has been explored in What If? scenarios. In adaptations where Bruce does manage to settle down, it's usually with Selina. - Green Arrow and Black Canary. While their relationship tends to be turbulent at times, in the end they only really have eyes for each other. There's only ever been one adaptation they both appear in where they aren't an Official Couple, and that's one of the main reasons why that adaptation isn't very popular with comic book fans. DC themselves went out of their way to reinforce this after that adaptation ended, with one comic noting that as long as they're apart, it doesn't matter how happy they are — they will both always feel as if something is 'missing'. - Hal Jordan and Carol Ferris are living proof that just because you're this, it doesn't mean your relationship is stable; while Hal admits the only woman he wants to settle down with is Carol, it's not enough to keep them from constantly breaking and making up. Though the epilogue of Wrath of the First Lantern does reveal they will get their Happily Ever After one day. - Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy have recently become this as many find the duo's chemistry great, especially since the latter is shown to be a healthier partner for the former than The Joker. - In a case of Word of God, James Tynion IV said in an interview for Death of Wolverine Legacy, that Mystique has only ever loved one other person and that was her partner, Irene Adler aka Destiny. Her death drove Mystique insane and she has expressed her willingness to do anything in order to get Destiny back several times. - Kate Kane and Renee Montoya have each had multiple love interests, but the two of them together is, according to both comic canon and Word of God, the pairing that is meant to be at the end of the day. This is perhaps made most explicit in the Rebirth Batwoman series, but they also end up together in Convergence and 52. And in Injustice: Gods Among Us, though an alternate universe, they're even married. - Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Woman are this. Reed has shown no interest in basically any woman aside from Sue apart from flashbacks from before they met, while Sue has had the choice between Reed and other guys and always goes with Reed. The two of them have also been together in the comics since 1965 with their wedding issue and have never actually broken up since which is something of an anomaly for comics. Even when their marriage is strained, they still find their way back to each other. - Nightwing has two: Barbara Gordon and Starfire (Koriand'r). While most media tend to lean towards Barbara, Kori's romance with him has gotten extensive focus as well (usually in Teen Titans media), and he's technically gotten married to both (as seen in Convergence). His pre-Flashpoint version married Barbara, and his pre-Crisis version married Kori. Essentially, if Dick Grayson is ever going to settle down, it's going to be with one of them. But because True Love Is Boring, he's never going to seal the deal with either of them. - Scott Summers and Jean Grey are this to one another — while Scott married Maddy Pryor (Jean's literal clone, not that anyone realised), and had a long-term relationship with Emma Frost, he was always pining after Jean (something both women were acutely aware of). Likewise, while Jean's flirted with Wolverine a few times, she's always defaulted back to Scott. As teen Hank explains to Bloodstorm (a teenage vampire alternate Storm), her crush on Scott is as doomed as his was on Jean, because Scott and Jean always end up back together — even after the two spent ages trying to avoid the matter to try and avoid their perceived Bad Future, it happened. - For Spider-Man, it's Mary Jane Watson, a fact that writers and editors have struggled with, given that she's both good for Peter and popular with the audience, which led to their marriage in the regular continuity after vocal public demand. The issue? See: The True Love Is Boring caveat, one of the things that led to the much-reviled One More Day storyline that retconned their marriage out of existence. The fact that Aunt May wanted to set her up with Peter, and that she and Peter have a great deal in common (being both poor kids from Queens who wanted to make it big), and that she spent the longest time married to Peter in the regular continuity and appears in most adaptations, made her for most of Spider-Man's history. The only love interest Peter Parker ever came to loving as much as he did Mary Jane was his First Love, Gwen Stacy (whose death, incidentally, was what pushed Peter and Mary Jane together in their grief). - Superman: Clark Kent and Lois Lane. Everyone and their dog knows that these two are made for each other. Evidence: every form of media they've ever appeared in. There's not a single adaptation where they don't end up together — and if Clark ends up with anyone else, it's after Lois' death. (One exception: In the New 52 they were just work collegues, and Clark eventually started dating Wonder Woman. And then Rebirth rendered that whole thing Canon Discontinuity and retconned back in that he'd been married to Lois the entire time.) - Tim Drake and Stephanie Brown. They've been a mostly solid Official Couple after they got together and only really broke up because Stephanie died (or faked her death, so to speak). They got back together in Convergence, as did their New 52 counterparts, and have barley shown any interest in anyone else since. - Wally West and Linda Park may rival Lois and Clark in this regard. They've literally come back from the dead for each other through The Power of Love, and their love was so strong that when Neron (DC's stand-in for Satan) took it, it almost killed him. - Wonder Woman: Diana and Steve Trevor have been each other's love interests since the Golden Age of Comics. One of the reasons for Dianas lack of romance Post-Crisis is because Steve was demoted from being her love interest and paired off with Etta Candy instead. Any and all attempts to pair Diana with other men failed because they simply lacked the chemistry Steve and Diana had, which eventually led to Steve being promoted back to being Dianas love interest in DC Rebirth. - The Addams Family: In almost every version, Gomez and Morticia Addams are always presented to be madly in love with each other, with this being especially apparent in the 1964 series and Barry Sonnenfeld-directed films. The two never think of cheating on each other and constantly refer to each other as the love of their life. Even the slightest word from Morticia is enough to have Gomez all over her, and Gomez even once says he would not only kill for Morticia but die for her as well. The two are also up for anything the other wants, and even after having two kids are constantly affectionate with each other. For example, in the first of the Sonnenfeld films, just hearing that Morticia is in danger is enough to get Gomez out of his depression. - In 30 Kisses, 30 Ways Asuka and Shinji, the premise is each chapter shows a different alternate reality, and in all of them Shinji and Asuka get together. - Hetalia: Axis Powers fanfic Gankona, Unnachgiebig, Unità: Two people, one love. As in Italy was in love with both Germany and Japan at the same time, because both fulfilled him. They loved him too, and they grew to love each other as well. - The Big Bad of The Bug Princess mockingly uses this exact term for the relationship between the leads. He's trying to rattle BJ's cage, but at the same time, he's right. - Children of Time: Sherlock Holmes and Beth Lestrade. Interestingly, despite the series involving more couples, it's only to the Holmeses that the trope applies. The Doctor is explicitly stated to have had other loves before Rose (including his wife, the mother of his children), and Watson had Mary before Sally. It is heartbreakingly easy, however, to see that Sherlock and Beth are the only lovers each other will ever have. - The Princess and the Knight: Victoria and Jadelyn are presented as being true loves. When Noxymis tries to force Jadelyn to fall in love with him, he finds himself unable to do so. Jadelyn's love for Victoria is so strong that as long as she lives, he can't use the gem on Jadelyn to this end. When Victoria is on the edge of death, she refuses to die once she hears Jadelyn asking her not to and is able to hold on long enough for Trina to save her. - Reconciliation: Shinji and Asuka are this for each other. For a good chunk of the fic, we find several alternate versions of Shinji and Asuka. The versions may be wildly different, but they are always in love with each other. Always. - In chapter 11 Asuka becomes aware of it: A dream-scape formed around them. A physical realm in which their imagined forms manifested. Simply from the will of a girl who had lived infinite lives, time and time again, with only one constant. Her lover was always there. For her. It's time she was there for him. - And in chapter 12, Lilith calls Asuka Shinji's life mate. - RE-TAKE: Asuka told that after Third Impact countless alternate realities were born, all of them different and unique... and the single only unifying element was that Shinji and her always met and fell in love. - Scar Tissue: Rei visited thousands of realities during Instrumentality. No matter what reality she visited or what world she went to, Shinji and Asuka were always together, always bonded by destiny. They were one. - Transformers Animated: Cybertronian Genesis: Optimus Prime views Elita-1/Blackarachnia as his, which is why he doesn't even entertain the idea of a relationship with anyone else, even though, as the Hero of Cybertron, he could have anyone he wanted. In another life, had Blackarachnia remained Elita-1, it would've been mutual — it's outright stated that Optimus was the only 'bot she ever felt anything for, even during her relationship with Sentinel. But in this life, she refuses to acknowledge his feelings, even though some part of her still feels the same way. - In The Many Dates of Danny Fenton, a Danny Phantom fanfic, \|\|Kara Kent\|\| is this officially to Danny. - Subverted in Somnium. Aurora believes that her chance at love is gone because her One True Love, Phillip, died after saving her with True Love's Kiss. She initially tries to reject Giselle with this, but Giselle tells her that love can come more than once. - explosivesky is a RWBY fanfic author famous for fics were Blake and Yang are always destined to be together, no matter what. In most of the fics, Blake and Yang figure it out immediately, and often mention that they feel like they've done all this before. There are also usually background relationships of Ruby/Weiss, Jaune/Pyrrha, and Sun/Neptune, but they don't get much focus. Sometimes the background pairings are shuffled around. - In Interpretive Steps for a New Tango, it's shown that Bruno and Pablo love each other so deeply that even after they break up due to Pablo's lingering hang-ups about his sexuality, they're completely unable to form a meaningful relationship with anyone else because all other romances feel hollow compared to what they had with each other. When they inevitably get back together, the narration confirms that the two of them lived Happily Ever After. - The author of the Video Game Shrines loves this trope: - The Bolt Chronicles: Bolt and Mittens become the Official Couple of this series in The Ship, and their soulmate status is overtly confirmed in The Rings and The Gift. - In the Facing the Future Series, Danny and Sam both show and outright say that they see each other as the love of each other's life. - In one day at a time and its sequel the superhero game, Jason Todd has only ever really loved three women in his life. However, he admits the only one that can really be described as the love of his life is Donna Troy. \|\|When Donna comes back in time like him, she admits she feels the same way about him, and the two lose no time in restarting their relationship\|\|. - In the House/ Once Upon a Time fanfic Definitely Not Lupus, Emma and Regina are constantly called true loves throughout the story. Their love is strong enough that Emma becomes pregnant through said love, and when they kiss, it manages to give Emma her magic back. - Beauty and the Beast: The titular characters here, the follow-up films and the 2017 live action remake note : See below for that entry.: - Belle and the Beast—Prince Adam—at first of course couldn't be more different, but find that incredibly common ground throughout the film given he's a man turned animal for how spoiled and rotten he was and she's a lovely woman who constantly is looked down on for actually having an intelligent mind. Belle agrees to stay with Beast in the castle in exchange for her father Maurice—his prisoner—being set free—and a surprisingly moved Beast accepts the offer while then saving Belle from wolves later while she then helps Beast after he's wounded too. Belle helps teach Beast how to be a man again and he soon enough falls in love with her; Beast tells Belle she's free to go and save Maurice from the cold; Belle goes back to save Beast from Gaston—with him inspired to fight back and then grant Gaston mercy upon seeing her—and Belle confesses her love to Beast just in time to break the spell and turn him back to human, resulting immediately in Happily Ever After. - The Enchanted Christmas & Belle's Magical World: The two animated follow-ups expand upon their relationship further as Belle and Beast overcome different issues like disagreements about whether or not to bring back Christmas or who should apologize first. While it's reasonable how much the two movies downplayed the stronger aspects and simplified things too much, the outcome of the story isn't changed though. Despite the two taking hits character-wise, it doesn't in any way ruin the perfection of their love story in the first film. - Shrek: Shrek and Princess Fiona. The spell cast on Fiona to eventually break her curse is supposed to allow her to meet her true love (who is supposed to rescue her from the dragon guarding her while she's in the highest room in the tallest tower), with True Love's Kiss sealing the deal. The problem is that no one really expected Fiona's true love to be an ogre (least of all Fiona herself), so it takes time for them to really acknowledge they're this. It's also something of a deconstruction, in that while Shrek and Fiona are soulmates, they aren't actually in love with each other when they first meet, instead falling in love while they're traveling to Duloc in order to deliver Fiona to Lord Farquaad to be his bride. As all but stated by Shrek Forever After, even if Shrek had kissed Fiona when they first met, it wouldn't have broken the curse because they weren't actually in love yet. - In Turning Red, the song "1 True Love" is predictably about the singer declaring their crush to be this. - The Chronicles of Dorsa: Tasia and Joslyn are this for each other. Over all the adventures and hardships they experience, both of them remain in love with each other fiercely, realizing this by the end. - Chronicles of the Kencyrath: Played with in regards to Ganth and the Dreamweaver. Ganth obsessively adored her, and it was clearly unhealthy. It definitely isn't glamorized — it's clear this is very screwed up... although Ganth's feeling at least are also somewhat tragic. But even so, Ganth definitely believes she is his One True Love... but no one else really agrees with him, and the story doesn't present them as such. Ganth : You don't understand. What happened was fated. Trishien : Well, it was certainly fatal. - In The Dilbert Future, Scott Adams Deconstructs the trope, pointing out that the One True Love is always within driving distance, and of the preferred gender, age, and species. And if the relationship doesn't work, the person usually will find their "True" One True Love under the same circumstances. - Harry Potter: Per Word of God in this 2007 interview, Harry and Ginny are soulmates. \|\|Tellingly, Harry's last thoughts right before Voldemort kills him (Harry actually survived, but he didn't know he would) are of her, all but stating that she was the greatest comfort in his life\|\|. Notably, Harry tried to deny his feelings for her at first (mainly because she was Ron's sister) and only after seeing her make out with her boyfriend did he finally accept the truth. Ginny herself admits after they got together that she never fully got over her crush on him at the beginning of the series. They only broke up because of, as Ginny puts it, "some stupid, noble reason", with the unsaid understanding that if they both made it through the war, they would get back together. \|\|The epilogue reveals they eventually got Happily Married with three children\|\|. Also, in all the alternate timelines shown in The Cursed Child, Harry and Ginny still become an Official Couple. - While The Hunger Games for the most part averts this trope, it is surprisingly brought up at the very end. Upon declaring her love for \|\|previously fake-boyfriend Peeta\|\|, Katniss states that the two of them ending up together "would have happened anyway", implying that she believes they would have fallen in love even if \|\|they hadn't been in the Hunger Games together\|\|. - "Lifemates" in the Liaden Universe are rare but when they do happen, that 'verse's science of psionics can objectively verify it. (It is eventually revealed that this is due to genetic spiritual meddling by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens in the past, and there's a damn good reason why it always seems to happen to the "dramliz" and not anyone else.) - A major plot device in Night World (that is often central to the plot of every novel) is the Soulmate Principle, in which everyone is destined to have a partner who is ideal for them and makes them a better, more complete person. The connection between soulmates is so strong that some of them will be instantly attracted or drawn to each other even if this is the first time they met and making physical contact sends an electricity-like jolt between them. It's also implied that some soulmates can even reincarnate together. Every book features the main protagonist finding her soulmate, which will almost always be complicated by the fact one of them is human and the other is a Night Person, which is forbidden under Night World law. Given that a lot of Redferns and Harmans (or their relatives) start finding human soulmates, the witches speculate that this could be a sign that times are changing for both the Night World and the human world. - Odd Thomas and Stormy Llewellyn were destined to be together forever. It says so on the little card a carnival fortuneteller machine gave them. Taken to the extreme when \|\|Stormy dies at the end of the first book. Odd seems perfectly willing to go the rest of his life without finding anyone else. When it seems he might find someone to replace her, he can't help but feel conflicted\|\|. - Condwiramurs and Parzival in Parzival — so much so that both of their names are written on the Holy Grail, allowing them to love each other. - The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo: The Driving Question of the first third of the novel is which of Evelyn's husbands was the great love of her life. The answer? \|\|None of them. Evelyn's true love was Celia St. James, and the majority of Evelyn's marriages were to either hide their relationship or to get over Celia\|\|. - Subverted, like so many tropes, in A Song of Ice and Fire: Cersei Lannister has spent their entire lives convincing her twin Jaime that she and he are this for each other. It is instead made very clear that Cersei's only interest in Jaime is in his role as a male version of her; once he \|\|loses his right hand\|\| and begins to rediscover his own honor, instead of simply being a reflection of her who will do her bidding, she has no more use for him. - The Summer I Turned Pretty: Conrad Fisher has dated several girls, but he outright admits that the only girl he truly fell in love with is Belly Conklin. \|\|Goes both ways, as Belly realizes that she will always pine for Conrad despite being married to someone else, which is why she decides to cancel her wedding to Jeremiah at the last minute.\|\| - Older Than Feudalism: In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes tells a "Just So" Story about how human beings once had four arms, four legs and two heads, which allowed them to roll around like boulders and (somehow) gave them enough power to threaten the gods of Olympus. Most of the pantheon suggested these humans be wiped out, but Zeus instead split them all in twain with his thunderbolt, leaving the navel as the place where they were stitched up again. This, Aristophanes explains, is why humans love: we are looking for the half that we lost (which could be the same sex as us). This work, published ~ 375 BC, is the Ur-Example of the "One True Love" trope in Western Literature. - The Syrena Legacy: Most young Syrena males become attracted to several females and can decide which would be the most suitable mate, but some feel "the pull" towards only one Syrena who is their perfect match in every way. Galen has never had any interest in finding a mate even though he's old enough that he's expected to do so, but he still dismissed the pull as a myth until he met Emma and instantly fell in love with her. - Isaac Asimov's "True Love": Milton is disappointed in the first date that he and Joe arrange, and they realize that they can't be Milton's ideal woman unless he's their ideal man. So the two of them adjust their search to figure out who would see him as their ideal man. Only one woman out of the 3,786,112,090 in the world match their criteria. - Bella and Edward in Twilight are repeatedly stated to be this, giving or attempting to sacrifice everything for the sake of each other. In their universe, it is deliberately invoked by the werewolves, who bond to a single soulmate for whom they always love. - In the Vita Nuova, Beatrice is the only woman Dante can truly love; all the women he fawns after after her death are just distractions from the memory of his true beloved. - The 100 has Clarke Griffin and Lexa who, despite their rocky start and the rough patch they hit \|\|after Lexa chooses to rescue her people from Mount Weather over Clarke's own\|\|, are shown to develop a strong bond for each other that eventually becomes a romance. \|\|Lexa's early death shocks Clarke and she never fully recovers\|\| and she never gets together with anyone else in the series. \|\|To cement her status as this in the series final episode the Judge who decides whether humanity will transcend to a higher form of consciousness or be destroyed takes on Lexa's form for Clarke with both the show and its creator confirming that this is because Lexa was Clarke's greatest love.\|\| - Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons. Fitz and Simmons have been put through Hell and back over the course of the series and still find a way to be together. With Fitz letting himself drown to save her to jumping into an alien portal find her. Even if it means helping Ward and HYDRA bring a monster back to Earth to prevent them from hurting her. When Fitz is plugged into the Framework, AIDA alters his memories so that she took Jemma's place in Fitz's life. This causes Fitz to not only become a sadist but to develop obsessive loyalty not to Jemma, but to AIDA. When Fitz is woken up from the Framework, AIDA still wants to be with him, but even with two lives' worth of memories, Fitz says he can't love anyone but Jemma. Despite witnessing the horrors Fitz committed in the Framework Jemma still believed in Fitz. - Babylon 5: - John Sheridan and Delenn, despite the fact that she was his Second Love. The Power of Love between them has been enough for Sheridan to defy both death and torture and may in fact be responsible for winning two separate wars. - Jeffrey Sinclair and Catherine Sakai, to the point where Love Transcends Spacetime. - Battlestar Galactica (2003) has Laura Roslin and Bill Adama. Mary McDonnell, who played Roslin, explicitly stated that the two are soulmates: McDonnell: I do think that the other thing [Ron] created is that there are soulmates in life, and I think that's true with this relationship — if you look at it from a soul-mate point of view, their destiny brought them together to serve a bigger cause, together, and in the process perhaps heal something very old and very familiar between themselves. - Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Tara is generally portrayed as this to Willow. While she gets together with other people after Tara, none of the relationships ever last and even years down the line in season 10, she confesses to Andrew that she occasionally thinks about finding a way of bringing \|\|Tara back to life\|\|. - ER: Doug Ross and Carol Hathaway, to the point where Carol calls him her "soul mate" and a friend of theirs says that she is "the one" for Doug. This remains true for all six seasons they are on the show and \|\|they do get their happy ending together\|\|. - The Flash (2014) - Barry Allen and Iris West. They're even married on an alternate earth and in the first timeline of the series. While both are capable of feeling genuine attraction to others and can even fall in love with other people (Eddie Thawne for Iris, Patty Spivot for Barry), it always comes back to them in the end. Barry fully admits that Iris is the love of his life, and she admits she feels the same way, too. - Caitlin Snow and Ronnie Raymond, who were also together/married on an alternate earth (the same alternate earth as Barry and Iris' doppelgangers, in fact). While Caitlin was able to move on from Ronnie's death and find love again with other people, neither of those relationships went anywhere (one of them because the guy turned out to be evil). And even then, it's outright stated that Ronnie will always be first in her heart regardless of who she ends up with in the end. - Friends: - In The Good Place, everyone has a soulmate that they are introduced to upon their arrival in the afterlife. Eleanor is Chidi's, and Jianyu is Tahani's. Except Eleanor is only in the Good Place due to a mix-up, and it all goes haywire from there. \|\|This is ultimately subverted when the season one finale reveals that they are all actually in the Bad Place in an elaborate form of psychological torture. Michael even confirms later that soulmates aren't real, but rather he made them up to torture the four humans.\|\| - A season four flashback shows Michael confessing to Chidi that he doesn't know if soulmates are real, but if they are, they're made, not found. - Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham in Hannibal. Invoked throughout the series: Hannibal and Will's other relationships are all either doomed to fail because Hannibal or Will are too 'abnormal' compared to their partner, or framed as lacking something essential even when they're otherwise satisfying. Conversely, Hannibal and Will are consistently framed as being the only ones who can truly "see" the other — understanding and accepting each other to a degree of intimacy inaccessible to anyone else — and are irredeemably drawn to each other. Will has a harder time accepting this than Hannibal, but in the series finale, \|\|they're revealed to be in love with each other, effectively marking them as a twisted, violent version of this.\|\| - Holby City: Serena Campbell calls Bernie Wolfe "the one great love affair of my life", and Bernie admits without shame that she would wait for Serena "for eternity". The writing goes on to make it painfully clear that they are "it" for each other, and no one else will ever come close. The series ends with them \|\|married, working together again, and ready to start the next chapter of their lives together\|\|. - House of the Dragon: King Viserys and Aemma Arryn very much loved each other and the loss of Aemma would haunt Viserys until the end of his life. Even after remarrying, it's clear that he doesn't have the same feelings for Alicent nor cares about his children with her as much as he does with his only surviving child by Aemma, Rhaenyra. Since Aemma is dead, we dont know if she feels the same way about him after he had C-section done on her without anesthesia for the slim chance of having a male heir. - The entire premise of How I Met Your Mother is based around Ted's search for his future wife, who has been shown to have the exact characteristics that Ted is looking for. - Interview with the Vampire (2022): Lampshaded by Louis de Pointe du Lac at the end of Season 1 when he refers to Armand as "the love of my life," and it's important to note that he never told Lestat de Lioncourt "I love you" directly. Armand is extremely devoted to Louis because "I care for him more than he cares for himself." By 2022, their ongoing romance (a minimum of 49 years) has lasted a lot longer than Louis and Lestat's relationship (which was just over 29 years). - Lucifer (2016): - Lucifer Morningstar and Chloe Decker. Not only is Chloe the first and only woman Lucifer has ever truly loved, but Chloe was literally made for him by his Father, who had Amenadiel bless Chloe's mother so she could be conceived. This is deconstructed, because Lucifer fears his feelings for her might not even be real but instead another tool for his Father to manipulate him and takes some time to accept this isn't the case. \|\|Later in Season Five, after Chloe finally finds out, she begins fearing that she has no choice in the matter, and like Lucifer, that her feelings aren't even real. It takes her time to accept that while she may have been made for Lucifer, it's up to her whether or not they get together\|\|. - Dan Espinoza and Charlotte Richards. In an Alternate Universe where Dan never met Chloe, he still manages to find his way to Charlotte, and it is shown that their romantic relationship is stronger than Dan and Chloe's ever was. \|\|And after Charlotte dies, he doesn't so much as give any other woman a second look for the rest of the series (sans a depression-fueled one night stand with Ella that he immediately regretted). Eventually, after Dan himself dies and makes peace with his guilt, he ascends to Heaven and reunites with Charlotte there\|\|. - Arthur and Guinevere in Merlin. Merlin even says that Gwen and Arthur are destined to be together, even though this pairing is never explicitly mentioned in any of the prophecies featured on the show. - The Middle: Axl Heck and Lexie Brooks. Having met due to the former being Sue's older brother and the latter being her college roommate, Axl very nonchalantly is fully himself around Lexie and while they start out having an adversarial but very respectful friendship, Axl clearly started out highly interested in Lexie from the beginning and still acted like Lexie was interested in him even when he had a girlfriend already in the form of April. Lexie eventually sees that genuinely caring and sensitive side to Axl and she begins to realize her own feelings for him, wanting to get his attention and when Axl discovers this, he nearly rushes to see her—even while he still has said girlfriend. Eventually it's not long after Axl ends things with April that he reciprocates Lexie's feelings by kissing her, the two spending a lot of time together, her constantly being cheerful and proud of their union, supporting each other through difficult times and eventually making it through the ups and downs in end. Proves how ultimately strong that bond of love is when in the future, they're Happily Married with three-four kids. - One episode of Mysterious Ways focuses on the idea of soulmates and whether a person can have more than one. One character mentions that you will "never be able to shake" your soulmate once you find them; later in the episode, it's pointed out that Declan can't seem to "shake" Peggy OR Miranda. - NCIS: - Main protagonist Leroy Jethro Gibbs' true love was his first wife, Shannon, who was killed alongside their daughter Kelly. At one point, Ducky, one of Gibbs' oldest, closest friends, called her the love of Gibbs' life. Gibbs has never been able to let go of their deaths, and it has doomed every single romantic relationship he's had since, including his three marriages after Shannon. - Tony DiNozzo and Ziva David are strongly implied to be this. Both had numerous relationships with other people throughout both their tenures in NCIS, but when it came down to it, the ones they loved most were each other. Ziva's childhood friend and her brother Ari's lover even used this in the Season 11 premiere to hurt Ziva by lying to Tony about whether or not she'd seen her while Tony was hunting for her in Israel; she wanted to pay Ziva back for taking away the man she loved by separating them. Even after Ziva left NCIS and stayed in Israel permanently, Tony never stopped thinking about her. \|\|Eventually, he departs from NCIS himself after Ziva supposedly dies in the Season 13 finale to take care of their daughter, Tali. Ziva herself returns from hiding in Season 17, and after finishing her own unfinished business, leaves the espionage world for good to be with Tony and Tali\|\|. - Quite literal in the Netflix series The One (2021). Rebecca Webb and her business partner James have developed a dating service that finds your "match", who is pheromone DNA matched to be the best person for you. From what is seen in the show, it works and changes dating as we know it. - Once Upon a Time: Tinkerbell uses magic to help Regina find hers: \|\|Robin Hood\|\|. Unfortunately, thanks to Regina's issues and a streak of bad luck, their relationship is ground to a halt every time it tries to start up. - Snow White and Charming are this, too. They are, according to Rumplestiltskin, the definition of true love, and will always find each other. - Played for Laughs for an entire series of Peep Show, where Once an Episode Mark has decided that each and every girl he meets is the perfect woman for him. - Every main character in Pretty Little Liars has one. In Emily's case, that person is Paige. In some of the fandom's eyes, it's Alison but by season seven it's made abundantly clear that it's Paige. Even if they didn't end up together and Emily ended up with Alison, the show wanted the audience to know that this was not the happy ending Emily herself wanted and that it was fanservice to the max and it lampshaded it in 7x15 when Emily and Paige have their final goodbye: Emily: Nobody wanted this Paige: Somebody did, they just never asked any of us. Emily: I HAVE to do this. Paige: I know. That's what makes you Emily. - An abundance of them in Princess Returning Pearl: Yong Qi and Xiao Yan Zi, Er Kang and Zi Wei, Han Xiang and Meng Dan... - Raising Hope: Virginia and Burt have remained married for over 20 years, despite Maw Maw continually trying to break them up, because she wanted to boot out her freeloading family. Jimmy later narrates that "if two people are meant to be together, they will stay together no matter what tries to get in their way"—while deleting a text message on Sabrina's phone from her boyfriend, asking her to go to a restaurant, so he could take her out to eat instead. - The Resident has top-flight surgeons Randolph Bell and Kit Voss, who start out as close friends with chemistry and come to find, to their own mutual surprise, that they are the loves of each other's lives — something both state out loud on multiple occasions. Kit: ...you are the great love of my life, and I'm pretty sure I'm the great love of yours. - Played With in Runaways: Xavin wholeheartedly believes they're this to Karolina, due to their understanding of a prophecy claiming that the two are spiritually betrothed and destined to be together. Karolina, however, is having none of it, due to already being in a complicated but committed relationship with Nico, and generally wanting to be free to make her own romantic choices even if her current relationship doesn't work out. \|\|The conflict is resolved when Xavin becomes the foster carer of Karolina's newborn sister Elle, and realises that the prophecy was real but that their "great love" was always meant to be for their adopted daughter.\|\| - Sabrina the Teenage Witch: The final episode of the series reveals "soul stones"; everyone has one on the North Star, and those that fit together are soulmates. \|\|Sabrina stops her wedding with Aaron after she finds that their soul stones don't fit, and walks away from the altar—only to run into Harvey. They kiss and ride off as their soul stones fall together and fit perfectly\|\|. - Scandal: Olivia Pope and President Fitzgerald Grant III are the love of each other's lives. Unfortunately, because True Love Is Boring, their relationship is constantly on-and-off, either due to outside forces (such as Fitz's political career, as he's unhappily married to First Lady Mellie Grant — Olivia is/was his mistress, even though he sees her as more than that) or their own personal reasons (Olivia broke up with Fitz in Season Five even though his divorce meant they could finally be together openly because she, like Mellie, hated the idea of being stuck in a Gilded Cage and playing the part of First Lady, being far more capable than just a glorified hostess and housewife). - In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Will Riker and Deanna Troi may get plenty of action in Gene Roddenberry's Free-Love Future, but ever since their first brief relationship, they have been each other's Imzadi (a Betazoid term that, in the EU, has deeper meanings than just "beloved"). They finally get married in Star Trek: Nemesis, and as of Star Trek: Picard, they've been married for twenty years and are raising a daughter. - Supernatural: - Sam had had other love interests since Jess' death, but none have continued to be mentioned for so long and none of them seemed to have close to the same level of impact on Sam. Azazel and Brady both mentioned that had she not died, she and Sam would have gotten married and lived happily ever after. - In Season 5, Sam and Dean visit Heaven where a friend confirms that they're soulmates and share a Heaven, leading to a full five-second silence where they don't look at each other. Ash: Mm-hmm. Yeah. See you got Winchesterland. Ashland. A whole mess of everybody-else-lands. Put them all together: heaven. Right? At the center of it all? Is the Magic Kingdom. The Garden. Dean: So everybody gets a little slice of paradise. Ash: Pretty much. A few people sharespecial cases. What not. Dean: What do you mean special? Ash: Aw, you know. Like, uh, soul-mates. [Neither Sam or Dean say anything.] Anyway. - \|\|As it turns out, Dean was this for Castiel since the first moment they saw each other in Hell. Unfortunately, this doesn't save either of them\|\|. - That '70s Show: Eric Forman and Donna Pinciotti. Having known each other since they were young kids living next door to each other, Eric while always having had a crush on Donna didn't end up dating her eventually until they were teens and she finally showed the same interest. Eric and Donna constantly support and trust each other through difficult times—Donna confiding in Eric when her parents have had problems for one thing—even when their relationship has been on and off again and have probably the healthiest relationship among the teens in the show. Donna's constantly forgiven Eric for dumb things he's done that either broke them up or put them on the ropes and the two also do whatever they can for each other—with Eric going to California to find Donna when she runs away and Donna putting off college to stay with Eric—to the point that even when Eric leaves for Africa and then comes back in the series finale, Donna almost immediately takes him back. By the time of the sequel series, Eric and Donna are husband and wife and have a teen daughter named Leia. - Damon and Elena from The Vampire Diaries fit this trope. While the series initially centers on a love triangle between Damon, Elena, and Stefan, she eventually chooses Damon while her relationship with Stefan is explained as being magically manipulated. According to Word of God, Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec planned to continue the love triangle to see if Elena could find her way back to Stefan and to end the series with both brothers dying for her. But the departure of Elena's actress Nina Dobrev solidified Damon and Elena's status as the main pairing. \|\|Damon and Elena are also the end game pairing of the novel series the show is based on where they are confirmed as soul mates\|\|. - Warrior Nun: Ava and Beatrice are this to each other. While their time together is short, it's clear from the scenes they share and their subtle interactions that they value and care for each other greatly, quickly becoming the most important part of each other's lives. \|\|Ava turns to Beatrice as she's the only person who aids her during her difficult time in the Cat's Cradle, bonding with the Sister Warrior over a short period of time and even reassuring her that "she's beautiful" after Beatrice tearfully vents about her Dark and Troubled Past. Meanwhile, Beatrice becomes attached to Ava as she sees a version of herself in her, not tied down by the church or duty. They grow so close after the Time Skip to Season 2 that they both, at different points, try to get the other to abandon the fight and leave to just live their lives\|\|. - Yellowstone: Kayce and Monica Dutton are VERY much this. From the beginning of the series, its obvious that they are deeply in love. Even when they argue, its clear that their love for one another is at the forefront and no matter what happens, its the two of them, thats it. Dialogue implies it was true from the very beginning. Kayce: Im trying to remember what I was wearing when I met you. Monica: All I remember is, you werent wearing it for long. - Trick & Treat: As the official Steam store indicates: Trick or treating in a vampire's house. Trick & Treat is a light-hearted Halloween adventure. It's about exploring and solving puzzles in a spooky atmosphere. There will be some horror elements, romance, many bad ends and a happy ending of true love. - Invoked in the NES game based on the Beetlejuice film. When Betelgeuse (who is the player character) first comes across Lydia, he explicitly identifies her this way. - The Witcher features a side story starring a Hooker with a Heart of Gold named Carmen and her paramour — a \|\|guard captain\|\|-turned-vigilante werewolf. Carmen risks life and limb to find a cure for her beloved's lycanthropy, and with Geralt's help, she tries out everything until only one option remains: the proverbial "true love". Geralt is understandably skeptical and awkward when he suggests it, but to everyone's surprise, it actually works, somehow, with Carmen's lover cured of lycanthropy. Even a hardened cynic like Geralt is taken aback by this success and calls the whole story nothing less than a fairy tale. - Fated relationships, both romantic and platonic are a key element of The House in Fata Morgana. - The main game features Michel and Giselle, who despite a rocky start never look anyone else's way after getting together. While Michel's \|\|dying wish is for Giselle to find someone else and live a happy life, she refuses to move on, spending nearly a full millennium waiting for his reincarnation to return to her. When they finally reunite for good in their next life, they quickly rekindle their relationship and eventually get married.\|\| - Despite \|\|causing her mutilation and death\|\|, Jacopo has been in love with Morgana since she was eleven, while she is heavily implied to have had a Precocious Crush on him. Word of God states that Jacopo is attracted to her soul and would have fallen for her regardless of age or gender, and while he \|\|marries someone else in his second life, his wife turns out to be an incarnation of part of Morgana's soul\|\|. In the afterlife, Jacopo is \|\|on the brink of destroying his soul out of guilt when Morgana saves him despite not having forgiven her murder, allowing him a chance to make amends and win her heart in their next life\|\|. Both the prequel and sequel give them much heavier focus (even more than Michel and Giselle), with the prequel exploring their friendship \|\|in their first lives\|\| and the sequel exploring their new relationship in \|\|their third and final life together. They're instantly drawn to one another, finally reconciling thanks to Jacopo's better treatment of her even before they regained their memories of their past lives and his Anguished Declaration of Love, and the game ends with them taking a trip he'd promised her in their first life together\|\|. - Heartstopper: Nick and Charlie. The series confirms they would find each other in any universe, and several side stories depict them falling in love in different settings and timelines. - Discussed and explored in Goblins, as Kin — a yuan-ti — explains to Minmax that her species doesn't form emotional attachments, though there are rare cases of "True-Seeing", in which they're literal soul-mates and can experience each other's pleasure and pain, but applies solely to yuan-ti. She has to explain this because Minmax is falling in love with her, and Psion!Minmax believes it to be true - \|\|it later turns out that they're the sole exception to that rule\|\|. Psion!Minmax : As childishly cliched as it is, the previously unnoticed detail is love. The two of you are genuinely in love. Something so mathematically improbable that I suspect you to be the only reality to suffer from this state. There are many realities in which the two of you are romantically involved, but none of them are able to demonstrate actual love on a relevantly deep level. Real love is indeed something very special. It's known universally as the most efficient way to inject nausea into simple mathematics to the point of permeation. - David Willis has said that Dumbing of Age is a deliberate aversion — the core couple of the Walkyverse might have been Joyce and Walky, and they were very happy together, but that doesn't mean they have to be. Dumbingverse Joyce outright dislikes Walky, and barely notices Danny, her counterpart's other main love interest, and instead has dated Ethan, Jacob (neither of whom she even met in the previous universe) and most recently \|\|Joe, which would be utterly absurd in the Walkyverse, but makes a surprising amount of sense here\|\|. - Deconstructed in a What If? entry. While Munroe doesn't attack the idea of someone who is perfect for you, he does address the corollary — that you'll be miserable with anyone else — and points out how that condemns the vast majority of humans to a loveless existence. - The Beatles episode "I Want To Hold Your Hand" has a scientist aboard a cruise ship, having captured an octopus whose unhappiness stems from being lovesick. The scientist lowers a diving bell into the ocean to gather some input on finding the octopus's true love. The Beatles have hidden inside the diving bell from their wild female fans, and under the sea they discover a similarly lovesick female octopus. Once back on ship, the boys buy the male octopus and throw him back into the ocean to be with the female octopus to live happily ever after. - Danny Phantom: Jack and Maddie Fenton, the titular protagonist's parents. In an alternate timeline where Maddie married his best friend Vlad Masters, who also had feelings for her (and still does in the main timeline), it is shown that she is absolutely miserable with Vlad and still loves Jack, who took Vlad's place as the first halfa and stayed away from Maddie out of shame as a result. Hell, when Vlad designed a computer program based entirely off her, designed specifically to love him and disparage Jack, the program reveals in its dying moments that it never loved him and instead loved Jack (or "The Jack Program", in this case). It doesn't matter when, where, or what they are; Jack and Maddie are simply meant to be. - Futurama Turanga Leela is this for the main character, Philip J Fry. This doesn't stop him from dating other women though. Leela mostly rejects him in early seasons but eventually admits to her love for him. They have a rather unstable relationship for a season after the show was revived but eventually settle into a more stable relationship in the last season. - Justice League: John Stewart and Shayera Hol are implied to be this, as they were in love in a previous life. Though Shayera falls for a male Hawk first, it's John she always ends up with in the end. - Kim Possible: Word of God confirms that Kim and Ron are this. Both have dated other people and have had brief relationships but as the show goes on, it becomes very clear to everyone except them — both in and out of universe — that the people they're meant to be with are each other. So the Drama implies that deep down, even they knew it, but refrained from taking the next step for their own reasons (for Ron, it was their long-standing friendship; for Kim, it was peer pressure and the level of Ron's maturity). It's only after Drakken interferes and tries to push them apart that they finally muster up the courage and act on what's between them. - Miraculous Ladybug both plays it straight and inverts it. Marinette, who is the titular heroine Ladybug, has such a massive crush on Adrien Agreste that she has trouble speaking around him. Adrien, who is the superhero Chat Noir, is in love with Ladybug and flirts with her constantly. Neither is aware of the other's identity, however, so they are unknowingly in love with each other. The only times they reciprocate their feelings are when Marinette, while in her identity of Ladybug, meets Adrien. - A variation in Pound Puppies (2010): Everyone has a soulmate-level perfect pet.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneTrueLove
One Thing Led to Another - TV Tropes "Oh, and stay away from your friend the Captain. You save his life, he saves yours, this leads to that... [meaningful pause] * I was young once too."* The pattern is always the same: Two minor, innocuous incidents, yadda yadda yadda, "...and the next thing I knew, we were having sex." The most popular way to brag, to confess to someone you've cheated on, or to answer an angry parent who has asked, "How did this happen?", as a way to avoid going into all the details no one really wants to know. If this is how someone (optimistically) plans to get someone into bed, it's a Missing Steps Plan: - Step One, Boy Meets Girl; - Step Two: ???; - Step Three: They have sex. Don't Try This at Home. Not to be confused with Halfway Plot Switch. ## Examples - In Dragon Ball Future Trunks sums up Bulma and Vegeta's relationship as "...and then she saw my father sitting there so proud and lonely and then one thing just led to another." - Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA 2wei chapter 16. Judging by Luvia's Imagine Spot, she hopes to eventually have a child and marry Shirou using this method. - Takes place between \|\|Shiho and Chiomi\|\| in Private Actress, doubling as \|\|Rescue Romance.\|\| - A Crown of Stars: Shinji and Asuka took a shower together a short while after their Love Confession. They were going to wash each other's backs and they weren't planning on having sex, but then they started kissing, and eventually Shinji was pinning Asuka against the bath wall while they humped each other. - This is more or less how Toji and Hikari's offscreen Relationship Upgrade went down (literally!) in Doing It Right This Time: Hikari : "... after what happened with Unit-03 I came so close to losing Toji... Well, I'd only planned on letting him cop a feel, but it all kind of snowballed; I was still technically a virgin afterwards but only 'cause the condom in his wallet was past the expiry date." - The Page Quote comes from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, where Dr. Cid mentions that Aki should avoid her old flame Captain Grey, lest she find herself in his... company once again. - In Juno, Bleaker just wanted to watch The Blair Witch Project, but Juno wanted to make out, culminating in the plot. - Played with in Cabin Fever. Although the film features an Out with a Bang-themed dialog to set up the sex scene between Marcy and Paul, the act itself begins so abruptly, viewers are still left with a lot of questions about how they got from that conversation to having sex. In particular, Paul seems to be reluctant and astonished that they are actually having sex, and also very nervous about not using a condom. Viewers can only wonder how on earth they were able to strip naked and get into the cowgirl position, with Paul being so inhibited by these concerns. - Discussed in A Brother's Price: Jerin doesn't want to do anything that could be considered sexual (like kissing) with a woman, because he knows that one thing could lead to another, and he has to remain chaste to marry well. (Sexually transmitted diseases are a serious danger in that world.) - In A Song of Ice and Fire, Robb ends up breaking a marriage treaty because of this, which has very unpleasant consequences later (just like everything else in the series). - The Wheel of Time: This is how Rand Al'Thor falls for two of his three love interests. - Decorated with numerous lampshades in William Goldman's early novel Boys and Girls Together, where Jenny actually says at one point, "In a book it'd say 'their lips met' and then there'd be a double paragraph break and a line of stars," whereupon— their lips meet, and there's a double paragraph break and a line of stars to imply that the characters had sex. - A non-humorous version in Harry Turtledove's second World War novel Tilting the Balance, as \|\|Barbara Larssen\|\|'s explanation to \|\|her husband\|\| of how \|\|she\|\| and \|\|Sam Yeager\|\| first ended up sleeping together in the first novel. The phrase is used verbatim. In her defense, \|\|she had reason to believe he was dead, and she and Sam had just very narrowly escaped being killed, while a soldier next to them was not so lucky.\|\| - In the Mary Russell novels by Laurie R King, Russell's narration uses this dodge as a Sexy Discretion Shot when she and her husband Sherlock Holmes are about to engage in hot monkey marital relations. - In the novel "To Sir, with Love", Pam's mother name-drops this trope when explaining her and her daughter's estrangement, admitting that she invited a friend of hers over for tea, "one thing led to another and he decided to stay the night. . .", thus revealing that Pam is upset with her because she walked in on them. - In The Secret History, Richard Papen achieves this in the narration with the blunt "Matters progressed." (They don't progress that far, however, as a third party walks in and interrupts.) - Used by the model six Cylon in Battlestar Galactica: Razor in describing how she got involved with \|\|Admiral Cain\|\|. - The Big Bang Theory Leonard: Okay, let me try it this way, uh, I was at a coffee klatch with a couple of friends and one thing led to another and it turns out you're off the team. - In the Frasier episode "Party, Party", Niles tells Frasier about the new woman he's started seeing: Niles: The next night, I took her to dinner, one thing led to another, and soon, there was no further need for words. Frasier: Except for your frantically babbled "Thank you's." - In The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will gets seduced by his girlfriend's mother, while she was trying to start a fling with Uncle Phil. To keep the same from happening to Phil (caring, not cock blocking), Will takes Phil aside to warn him: Phil: Tadow? Will: You know, "taaaa-DOW". - In an episode of Friends, it is revealed that when Ross was in high school, he made out with the school librarian (who was much, much older than him). When asked how it happened, he replies: "I was working late in the library one afternoon. It was just the two of us. She needed some help with her word jumble. And one thing led to another..." - Hunter. An ex-girlfriend describes to Dee Dee McCall how she once got involved with Hunter by saying, "This led to this, that led to that..." - Frequently heard on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. A pregnant teenaged girl pleads, "We never meant for it to happen, it just did." An ex-boyfriend recalls, "We shared a glass of wine, one thing led to another, next thing I knew, we were in bed." A teacher who raped a 12-year-old boy defends herself: Meredith Rice: He was crying. I followed him to make sure he was okay. One thing led to another... Next thing I know, we're having sex. Detective Stabler: And that seems like a perfectly natural segue to you? - Round the Twist, when Pete tries to explain to his father the strange supernatural twist of the week. Pete: I met this girl and, and one thing led to another... Linda: I think what Pete is trying to say is, he got her pregnant! Pete: No! She got me pregnant! - Seinfeld: - In the episode "The Contest", George uses the phrase to describe how he ended up masturbating in his parents' house: "I stopped by the house to drop the car off, and I went inside for a few minutes.. Nobody was there - they're supposed to be working. My mother had a Glamour magazine, I started leafing through it... So, one thing led to another..." - It also uses a similar phrase, "Yada Yada Yada," to describe a mysterious lead-up to strange or sexy events. George Costanza: So Listen to this. Marcy comes up and she tells me her ex-boyfriend was over late last night, and "yada yada yada, I'm really tired today." You don't think she yada yada'd sex. Elaine: (Raising hand) I've yada yada'd sex. George: Really? Elaine: Yeah. I met this lawyer, we went out to dinner, I had the lobster bisque, we went back to my place, Yada Yada Yada, I never heard from him again. Jerry: But you yada yada'd over the best part! Elaine: No, I mentioned the bisque. - It then turns out that the "Yada Yada Yada" George's girlfriend used was not sexual - \|\|it was used to gloss over her shoplifting antics\|\|. - Brian Regan: I hate when you're trying to read something and you come across the expression "One thing led to another". What in the hell kind of lazy writing is that? Isn't that your job as the writer to tell me how this led to that? You can just throw that in there? "Adolf Hitler was rejected as a young man on his application to art school. One thing led to another... and the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the sovereign nation of Japan." "This is some pamphlet!" - Rose says this about her relationship with \|\|Roy Campbell\|\| in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. \|\|And she would say that, as she doesn't really have a relationship with Campbell, it's all just a cover to keep Rose and her (and Raiden's) child safe from The Patriots\|\| - Strongly implied to happen between \|\|Kent and Fiora\|\| from Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade if their support chain is completed. The hilarious part is that the two were meeting to try and cut down on unprofessional fraternization within their army. Clearly, it didn't work. - Parodied in the Homestar Runner toon "Pumpkin Carve-Nival", where the King of Town tries to explain how his Jack-O-Lantern entry turned into a partially-eaten pumpkin pie. - Pokemon Pals: Misty gets charmed by a man at a bar, who claims that she was the reason he got into Pokemon. They end up sleeping together offscreen. He disappeared the next day.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneThingLedToAnother
One True Sequence - TV Tropes The good guys and the bad guys are both pursuing a set of MacGuffins or Plot Coupons that are hidden or distributed in what appears to be a random manner. In order for either side to achieve their aims, it is necessary that they get to these objects before the other side does. However, the objects are difficult to locate or reveal — research must be done, or inspiration must strike, before one of the hidden objects can be found. Strangely, regardless of the differences between their resources and their methods, the good guys and the bad guys always find the same object at the same time and have to fight over it. There's never a case where the heroes get one while the villains head off in a completely different direction and get another, with no problems for either side. It's almost as if they're not random and have to be approached in a predetermined sequence that forces both sides into conflict. But that's ridiculous, isn't it? A common trope in videogames, where, even though the bad guys seem to be everywhere at once, and even though the player can Take His Time, they'll always close in on a particular MacGuffin just as you do. A common video game variant is discovering the bad guys have had the final MacGuffin in their possession the whole time, forcing you to storm their stronghold and have a climactic battle against their leader. Another has the villains trading a convenient hostage for the items the heroes collected and then storming their castle. Yet another reveals that the villains were just letting the heroes collect the treasures so they could steal them later. ## Examples: - In Sakura Wars (2000), five mystic stones, scattered and hidden through the capital city, act as seals on an ancient and powerful demon. If even one remains, the demon cannot be released. Naturally, the bad guys are locating and destroying them, and the good guys can never find any but the next one the bad guys are about to attack. - After the first 5 or so "Jewel Seeds" are individually fought over in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, this is subverted as both the heroes and villains focus on getting the closest ones that the other isn't pursuing. The plot jumps ahead to after each side has collected all the ones available. - In Sailor Moon S, the Outer Senshi (good guys, although not initially in the same team as the main character) and the Death Busters (bad guys) are simultaneously searching for three talismans supposedly hidden inside unknown humans. In every episode, both sides arrive at the same time to examine the next Victim of the Week. It is hinted, however, that the good guys cannot extract the talismans themselves, and must thus rely on the bad guys to do the dirty work for them. - Similar things happened with the Nijizuishou (Rainbow Crystals). - Averted in the YuYu Hakusho movie "Bonds of Fire": there are multiple shrines that contain the energy needed to restore the flooded Spirit World. Rather than go to one after another, both sides split up and go to all of them simultaneously. This is probably because they didn't have time for a series of protracted battles, since it's a movie. - The hunt for Innocence in filler episodes in D.Gray-Man's anime. Whenever they find a fragment of innocence, the Akuma have found it too and are after it. Cue epic battle! Often justified by showing that the bad guys were there first but were too inept to break through the barriers, solve the puzzle or resist the protective magic to the MacGuffin, and are just bashing away at those obstacles in the hope of getting through. Only the heroes have the resourcefulness to actually get through, so they always get it. Then the bad guys attack the heroes to try and get it, now that the barriers are gone. - Averted in Part II of Naruto: with the exception of Shukaku and the Nine-Tailed Fox (both of whom were/are sealed in major characters), the antagonistic Akatsuki has been able to collect most of the Tailed Beasts with almost no opposition from the protagonists whatsoever. - Averted in almost all Dragon Ball instances. In the first arc, Prince Pilaf and the heroes didn't meet until the heroes had six Dragon Balls and Pilaf had just one. In the Red Ribbon arc, the Red Ribbon Army was always there before Goku was, but just hadn't found them yet. In the Namek arc, no one side finds a Dragon Ball with any of the others around to challenge them for it. - Played straight in Dragon Ball GT, with the Para Para Brothers encounter. - This is subverted at the end of The Emperor's New Groove. After a short chase scene Kuzco and Pacha loose the villains and arrive safely at the lab. They then discover that the bad guys are already there to begin with. When Kuzco asks how they managed to beat them to the lab, the villains examine a map of the prior chase scene before conceding that it "makes no sense" and shrugging it off. - Played unapologetically straight in nearly every Indiana Jones movie, where either the villains reach a MacGuffin first but can't attain it, allowing Jones to figure it out behind their backs; or with Jones arriving first with the villains chasing close behind, and then waiting at the dungeon entrance to steal the prize. - In every single episode of Relic Hunter, the bad guys would appear right behind the good guys just as they'd discovered the relic of the week. - Taken advantage of in The Key to Time Story Arc of Doctor Who, in which the White Guardian sends the Doctor to gather the six segments of the eponymous cosmic MacGuffin before they fall into the hands of the evil Black Guardian. It turns out that the Black Guardian's agent had been waiting by the final segment all along, having decided to sit back and let the Doctor run all the risks of gathering the first five segments, then steal them off him when he came for the last segment. - Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Chase": While chasing DNA fragments of an extinct race, the Enterprise runs into Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians at pretty much every single stop. - Seen in nearly every episode of Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, in which the Rangers and four factions of enemies are participating in a giant treasure hunt for five mystical jewels, with each individual jewel having another half dozen minor artifacts pointing the way to it in a linear clue-based system... but none of the five groups ever search for different artifacts than each other. Ostensibly, this was because the 32 episode season would've been done in 6 or 7 if they'd all gone after one jewel each. - Prison Break season 2 is basically 22 episodes of this trope. Mahone tracked down Michael by reading the Cliffs Note version of the plot tattooed on the latter's body and despite the tattoos not being in any particular order, Mahone always managed to figure out each development at the exact time Michael was enacting it. - On Alias SD-6 often goes after a Rambaldi document or relic at the exact same time Cubans or another secret organization go after the exat same one. - Subverted in the first edition of Scion. In the pack-in adventure in God, the forces of Mikaboshi are attacking both the Overworld and World links holding Takamagahara in place. The game presents options for whether players choose to defend one or the other, and both must fall to destroy Takamagahara, so the players can succeed at the quest whichever one they protect. - Subverted in Mother 3 , where the the player encounters scouting parties at the first few MacGuffins, while the Enigmatic Minion captures its opposing number. Even then, every time the enemy successfully claims one, your party is close enough to the area to see it happen. Five of the seven MacGuffins in this instance can be approached in any order, although the game pushes you in a certain direction to do so. - Subverted in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, as Bowser often reaches the locations of the Crystal Stars one chapter behind the heroes. Of course, he isnt the Big Bad this time around. - Averted in some instances in Drakengard. While trying to defend the Desert Seal, if you have Arioch, she tells you at a certain point that the Island Seal has already fallen. Similarly, if you have Leonard and are trying to defend the Forest Seal, he tells you the Desert Seal is already gone. - Skies of Arcadia averts this for the Purple and Yellow Moon Crystals, when the bad guys are not involved at all, but plays it straight for the others. Belleza tags along with Vyse's team to have them recover the Red one for her; the natives who had the Green Crystal all along used it to fight The Empire, but only after the heroes arrive to see it; and The Empire only attacked Yafutoma for the Blue after Vyse finds it. Even the Silver Crystal ended up being straight with the Big Bad attacking right when the heroes were confronting the Omniscient Council of Vagueness. - Averted in Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark in Shaori's Fell, where Sabal goes after the mirror pieces in a specific order, and even if you try to go ahead of her she ends up with at least one. - Averted and subverted with Final Fantasy IV's crystals. - Of the light crystals, one is stolen by the main character just prior to the opening sequence, one is stolen just as the player arrives (too late for conflict), one is stolen when the bad guys actually win the battle, and one is explicitly retrieved by the player as ransom for a hostage. - Then it's revealed that there's a second set of crystals. The bad guys have already collected two of the four dark crystals before the heroes even know they exist, and steal the other two after the good guys acquire them. - Fortunately, the second second set (of eight lunar crystals) is content to sit tight and cheer you on while you tackle The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. Meanwhile, they carry on the task of keeping the Big Bad confined to the moon's core. - Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story doesn't subvert this, but contains enough Dramatic Irony to make Bowser think it did. From his perspective, the Mario brothers found the first Star Cure while he was dealing with a Boo researcher and his tower, and he beat them to the second Cure by a mile. In truth, \|\|the Brothers needed the researcher's invention to get the first Cure from a character he swallowed much earlier, and they helped him get the second one\|\|. - Played with in Fallout 2 when you reach Vault 13 to find \|\|The Enclave had already shown up and cleared out the population and a G.E.C.K.\|\| However, they overlooked one G.E.C.K. which you can take to your tribe... - Justified in Nostalgia (Red Entertainment), since the Cabal can't take the tablets without Fiona. - In * Pokémon Gold and Silver* and the remakes, the Olivine and Cianwood route can be done independently of the area around Mahogany town, but Team Rocket will always be blocking the Mahogany gym just when the player happens to show up, and Lance will come invade the Rocket base exactly when the player chooses to. - Final Fantasy intends for players to face the Four Fiends in the order Earth, Fire, Water, Air (Lich, Maralith/Kary, Kraken, Tiamat). However, while Lich must be faced first simply due to you not having the means to do otherwise, most players leave Maralith for last and engage in Sequence Breaking to get the Airship and class change early. The remakes take this into account by having the Fiends acknowledge whichever order you defeat them in. - Done in the G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero Five-Episode Pilot, where the Joes and Cobra were after the rare elements needed to power the Mass Device. - Averted in "Revenge of Cobra", where the objective was the three components to the Weather Dominator. Both teams sent out three teams to recover them simultaneously. - Xiaolin Showdown plays this ridiculously straight — every time a new Shen Gong Wu becomes active, the good guys and the bad guys will reach it simultaneously and even touch it at the same time, forcing an epic battle. Sometimes a side will get to it first and claim it early in the episode, but usually only long enough to have it to wager and lose in the Showdown at the end. - Like Xiaolin Showdown, Jackie Chan Adventures plays this straight. A pitched battle is fought over nearly every talisman, animal, gateway and demon mask. - The second season of Transformers: Prime is focused on the Autobots and Decepticons finding weapons and other artifacts hidden on earth by decoding the same document. Even assuming something in the way it was written requires decoding to be exactly in order, Optimus and Soundwave still inexplicably manage to find the location of each artifact a couple hours apart at most. - In Ninjago, when the ninja are trying to stop the Serpentine from getting the four Fang Blades to revive the Great Devourer, they run into the Serpentine every time they locate one. The ninja actually got the location of the fourth one from a Serpentine informant, but decided it was too far away and it would be a better plan to raid the Serpentine's stronghold to steal the other three while most of their forces were away (in a reverse-Macguffin Delivery Service), but it turned out the Serpentine already had the fourth blade.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneTrueSequence
One True Faith - TV Tropes The phenomenon in which a work of Science Fiction or Fantasy has only one religion (The Church) in it; furthermore, there are never any factions of it, or different interpretations of its belief. This is related to Law of Conservation of Detail . The lack of other faiths doesn't particularly break Willing Suspension of Disbelief, so why bother? Having said that, it's inherently unrealistic; our planet has seven or ten major religions in the modern day alone (some founded individually and others spun off from existing ones), and other religions have come to prominence and since died out. But no one ever questions this when it happens, making it either an Acceptable Break from Reality or something too controversial to touch with a ten-foot pole. It is most justified in works where much more is known about the spiritual world than in Real Life, and there's lots of evidence to back it up to the point that not believing in this faith would make one a Flat-Earth Atheist (though that still doesn't explain the lack of factions; there is no hair so fine that people won't try to split it). Ignore Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions. This trope is more of a Sliding Scale than a straight trope, since there are numerous aversions and subversions. We'll go in order. ## Played Straight: One Religion, No Factions - The Wheel of Time, arguably. See "subversions" below. - In Watership Down, all rabbits depicted worship the sun god Frith and believe the first rabbit was El-ahrairah. However, since only a regional group of rabbits appear, the beliefs elsewhere might differ. - In The Cold Moons, all European badgers worship a vaguely Abrahamic-inspired religion where their god is named Logos. - In Survivor Dogs, dogs, wolf-dogs, and wolves worship the Spirit-Dogs. This applies to pet dogs as well as feral dogs. - In Tales of Symphonia, two entire worlds share the same religion with only minor cosmetic differences. Justified by the Big Bad having created and actively running both. Although the village of Mizuho has its own gods. - Dead Space has Unitology, which is specifically mentioned to be the only religion that has survived into the timeframe of the games. \|\|It is mass low-level Mind Control by the Markers, preparing humanity to be turned into Necromorphs.\|\| It seems to be primarily modeled after a certain controversial religious movement in the United States, though the writers have said it's based on religious cultism in general. - In all Tropico games except Tropico 2, the only religion is the Catholic Church. This is justified since the games are set on Spanish-speaking islands in the Caribbean, which are very much Catholic country. - Stardew Valley has the Yoba religion which is also followed by non-humans who usually don't have contact with normal people, like Krobus (a shadow person) and it's implied dwarves as well. But there are a few characters that claim to be atheists. ## Averted: More Than One Religion - A Certain Magical Index has just every religious denomination that's present in the real world in its world as well. They're all true, and each has its own magic. - The Familiar of Zero played with this, in the fact that humans have one religion, based off on Crystal Dragon Jesus version of Christianity in the Fantasy Counterpart Culture of Vatican, Romalia. However, it is not the only religion per se, as the Elvens follow a different one. This becomes a plot point in the third season. - In Empath: The Luckiest Smurf, nature worship with Mother Nature as the patron deity of sorts is the religion most Smurfs worship, with Christianity and the religion of the Psyches being minority religions. - In RWBY: Scars, humans on Remnant worship either the Two Brothers or Dust. Faunus on the other hand worship the Ishvara pantheon. Some humans worship Ishvara and some Faunus worship either Dust or the Two Brothers, but this is rare. - Most of the works by Brandon Sanderson avert this trope, by virtue of the author's fascination with religion and divinity. - Elantris includes Shu-Dereth and Shu-Korath, offshoots of the base faith Shu-Keseg in the past. All three religions believe in unity - the unity of the heart (compassion), the unity of purpose (political dominance), or the unity of the mind (meditative clarity). Completely separate is the worship of the Elantrians themselves. - The Lord Ruler of Mistborn wanted to achieve this, but was never quite able, mostly due to the efforts of the Keepers. After \|\|the Lord Ruler is killed,\|\| the situation shatters completely, with people turning to various faiths, new and old, for support. - Warbreaker continues the trend, with the conservative, stoic worshipers of Austre on one hand and the colorful worshippers of the Returned on the other. - Finally, the religions of Roshar in The Stormlight Archive are just as varied as the people. The dominant religion in the area we see is Vorinism, where the people worship the Almighty and train to help him to reconquer the Tranquiline Halls, but when we encounter a number of slaves, we are introduced to many more religions. - Discworld, with its proliferation of Physical Gods. In fact, some gods are actually several different gods at the same time; apparently all it takes to pull that off is a pseudonym and a wig. - A Song of Ice and Fire: There are so many gods worshiped in many parts of the world, that there's a character subpage for religion alone. The following religions are most prominently featured and have had major impacts on the plot: - The nameless, faceless old gods that are worshiped in the North and beyond the Wall. There's no organized clergy, so worship is done in front of weirwood trees with faces carved in them. - The Seven Faced God, also called the new gods, in the rest of mainland Westeros. The seven aspects of the god are the Father, the Mother, the Warrior, the Maiden, the Smith, the Crone and the Stranger. It's loosely based on the Medieval Roman Catholic Church. - The Drowned God in the Iron Islands is a violent god of the sea who charges his followers with pirating the mainland. The Drowned God is opposed by the Storm God. - R'hllor, also called the Lord of Light, is popular in Essos but only has a few followers in Westeros (House Baratheon of Dragonstone and the Brotherhood without Banners). R'hllor demands Human Sacrifice and (apparently) gives his priests/priestesses various powers. His Arch-Enemy is the Great Other. - The Faceless Men of Braavos worship the Many-Faced God, a god of death that all other gods are considered aspects of. - His Dark Materials, even though The Church gets all the attention. - The Wicked Years, most Ozians worship either the pagan fairy goddess Lurline or the Crystal Dragon Jesus Unnamed God. However, it's also mentioned that other religious beliefs exist. Melena's quadling lover Turtle Heart is from the rural south and has never even heard of the Unnamed God. - In Orcs, not only are there several religions (mainly a monotheist and a polytheist one), but they are very important in the plot. - Ender's Saga, where matters of ensuring freedom of religion are plot-significant at some point. - In the Left Behind series during the Tribulation, there's the pantheistic mishmash of all world religions called Enigma Babylon One World Faith as the official one-world religion, but there's also Christianity (as defined by the books' authors and the Tribulation Force characters), Judaism, and Islam (which in the book series ends up being a minority religion), which all become illegal to practice even when Enigma Babylon is replaced by the Luciferian-type state religion of Carpathianism around the midway point of the Tribulation. In the Millennial Kingdom, Christianity becomes the official one-world religion, though dissidents are permitted to practice the beliefs of the Other Light despite the fact that (1) it's totally in error when it comes to believing Satan is going to defeat God and Jesus by the end of the Millennium and (2) those who remain unbelievers in God and Jesus Christ by the time they reach 100 will instantly die and go to Hell. - The Belgariad has one for every culture. At the end of the series, however, it's stated that \|\|Eriond\|\| will eventually be the one god of the world, while the other gods move on to start life on other planets. - In To Shape a Dragon's Breath, while the dominant faith is based on Norse Mythology, it's not the only one shown or seen. Indigenous people have their own faiths, for one, Liberty states she doesn't bother going to the temple of Fyra on Sundays, and a minor character, Zhina, is Kindah and appears to be the equivalent of Muslim (she wears a headscarf and doesn't eat pork or unclean foods, as well as saying she believes in one god who has multiple prophets.) - Exalted: While the Immaculate Order would certainly love to be the One True Faith, the plain fact of the matter is that human nature and the cosmology of the setting works against it. As it is, they only really have this status on the Blessed Isle, and only there because they ruthlessly suppress any hints of non-Immaculate leanings. - BattleTech: Most 20th-century human religions have survived into the 31st century just fine and the Catholic Church at least has even found itself sprouting a whole new branch — New Avalon Catholicism —, if somewhat by accident. (A breakdown in communications during the fall of the Star League regarding a temporary transfer of Papal authority away from occupied Earth had something to do with it.) - Eberron, contrary to the typical Dungeons and Dragons setting, has comparatively few Physical Gods running around (and most of those are both evil and currently incarcerated), the end result being that there are a vast number of religions in the setting. Some of the biggies include the Sovereign Host (and the related Dark Six), the Church of the Silver Flame, the Blood of Vol, the various Druidic sects, the Undying Court, the Path of Light, the Path of Inspiration, and the dizzying array of Cults of the Dragon Below. Furthermore, all of these (with the exception of the Path of Inspiration, which enforces conformity and is controlled by immortal spirits with the kind of pull to make that happen) have further subdivisions within themselves. - While Anima: Beyond Fantasy has one religion -basically a Catholic-like Christianity mixed with some Old Testament, that turns around a Crystal Dragon Jesus- that is by far the most extended in human lands, with its church undoubtedly the most (visible and human) powerful organization of the setting, many other cults are present albeit much less extended. It's stated also that there're branches in the game's Christianity but all of them are contained within the same church... for now. - Xenogears features two distinct major religions, (very) briefly hints at a third in one scene. Most of the beliefs of the organized religions, however, seem to be based upon a similar set of concepts. - World of Warcraft has multiple religious faiths, many of which are diverse from one another. - In the Alliance, the humans, along with the dwarves and the draenei, practice a Crystal Dragon Jesus religion known as the Holy Light. The exceptions are the night elves, who worship a moon goddess known as Elune, possibly the Gilnean worgen, former humans who were brought to the Alliance by night elves (though their religious practices are almost unknown), and the gnomes, who have for the most part completely forgone religion in favor of science. - It's noted in the tabletop roleplaying game that Elune is the only true actual deity in the game world, though that sounds like Night Elven propaganda to me. - It should be stated that the Holy Light is non-theistic (that is, it has no godhead) and allows for some degree of syncretism. - That said, earlier games make references to a more theistic bent, and references to a deity by worshippers of the Holy Light have been seen within World of Warcraft. Given the amount of turmoil that has taken place over the course of the games, it's entirely likely that the Church has undergone theological, philosophical and metaphysical developments. - The Horde is split up for the most part. Orcs, as a whole, have a shamanistic heritage. Almost all trolls worship their multiple Loa spirit gods. The tauren worship their tribal deity known as the Earthmother. Forsaken undead have some sort of religion involving the shadow, themselves and the light(to a lesser extent). Blood elves follow the Holy Light. Its unknown what goblins worship but they can be priests. - The Pandaren (both those on the Wandering Isle and on Pandaria) worship the August Celestials, four Physical Gods based on the Four Symbols of Chinese mythology and astrology: Yu'lon the Jade Serpent representing the Azure Dragon, Chi-Ji the Red Crane representing the Vermilion Bird, Xuen the White Tiger representing the White Tiger, and Niuzao the Black Ox representing the Black Turtle. - In addition, there are many other races that worship other deities: members of the Cult of the Damned worship the Lich King, many corrupted followers of the Old Gods exist, and there are many others. - Breath of Fire II, which sports the benevolent but mostly impotent Dragon God, the minor earth deity Namanda and the \|\|villainous\|\| Church of St. Eva. - Repeated in Breath of Fire III, with the God of the Urkans \|\|(actually the Goddess Myria)\|\| and the Dragon God Ladon, who still has a few shrines as the "god of travelers" and serves as a Master. - Vagrant Story, with two - La Pucelle, technically: although the story centers on members of the eponymous church, there is another one who doubles as its theological rival, enemy and Church Of Evil. - Arc Rise Fantasia has three, although two (North and South Noireism) are kind of variations of each other. - Final Fantasy X-2, where the former Yevonites have divided into the Youth League and New Yevon. The major bone of contention is the speed at which technology should be incorporated into daily life. - Mass Effect takes place in the future, where humanity has not Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions—the main religions of today still exist in the future, albeit at a lesser extent. (Most notably, party member Ashley is religious; while she never states what religion specifically she belongs to, it's generally assumed that she's Christian.) The discovery of Prothean ruins on Mars led to a few new human religions starting up. The alien species also have some diversity among their religions; the asari have both monotheistic Goddess (Athame) worship and a pantheistic religion called "siari". While the latter is more widespread, many asari still invoke the Goddess in casual conversation (By the Goddess!), similar to how atheists will say "oh my God" despite obviously not believing in one. The drell have a traditional polytheistic religion, but the Thane notes that many young drell are turning away from it, and the Codex says that siari is becoming popular among the drell. The hanar worship the Protheans to the point where it (and being extremely polite GrammarNazis) is their hat. Aliens are also adopting alien religions; the codex notes that Confucianism and Zen Buddhism are fairly popular among the turians, and a Cerberus Daily News story mentions businesses which provide dextro-amino kosher food for turians and quarians who have converted to Judaism. - But of course. Also, nearly every faith is heavily fragmented into several different sects. ## Subverted: Single Religions With Internal Factions - Star Wars: Jedi vs. Sith at the very least. The Expanded Universe features enough "alternative" religions to make the franchise an aversion, but we're ignoring those for the moment. A number of other Force sects exist as well. - The Lord of the Rings, in which certain cultures (or subcultures) place more emphasis on their favorite members of the pantheon. - Omnianism in Discworld, going through endless schisms after the last prophet, Brutha in Small Gods - Lois McMaster Bujold's Chalion universe has two closely related religions who are bitter rivals, since they disagree about whether one of the five gods is, or isn't, The Devil. - David Weber's Safehold series is the story of one world's transition from a single monolithic religion to a deeply divided global religion - but it's still the same religion, just divided. The second and third novels in the series are called By Schism Rent Asunder and By Heresies Distressed, which are a fairly accurate description of the fate of the Church of God Awaiting. - The reason for the single religion is that it was achieved artificially through massive brain washing and by nuking any opposition from orbit. We do not know what the religious makeup of the original colonists was. Other religions might have popped up over the centuries but they would have been mercilessly wiped out by the Church. - The Wheel of Time, like Star Wars, has one single monolithic belief system for the whole world - but it's dualistic, and the darker side has many adherents, and they're the antagonists. Well, the main antagonists. So that darker side might be considered a schismatic completely separate religion or a part of the same religion with different ways of observing it. - As typical of Robert Jordan, every side also has different factions: for example, the Children of Light and the Aes Sedai both worship the Light and the Creator, but have a very different view of the One Power... Masema's followers also behave like a fanatical cult, putting Rand on the same level as the Creator. Plus he's legitimately The Chosen One (reincarnated from the previous guy), but many other false claimants arose, making a lot of people skeptical that he's for real. - Tasakeru: The eight sentient species' cultures all originated from worship of the same three Gods, but each species developed a different set of beliefs over time. - In the Humanx Commonwealth, there's only one major human and Thranx religion- the Church, which is presented as being something of a mishmash of different belief systems with more of a focus on charity and helping those in need than specific doctrines. Other species, like the AAnn have their own religions, and Flinx even manages to accidentally trigger the creation of a new cult on a pre-industrial world that he illegally visits. - Tailchaser's Song implies that all cats worship Meerclar Allmother. However, cats are depicted as British instead of African (and they were created as is instead of being domesticated African wildcats) so the religion might change depending on the area. - The Lost Fleet: Both sides in the Forever War seem to follow the same rather vaguely-defined religion that combines ancestor-worship with the concept of "The Living Stars", which may or may not be gods in the conventional sense of the word. The faith is openly and quite widely practiced in The Alliance, and semi-officially frowned upon but tolerated in private by The Syndicate Worlds. What religious practices are common in the various other factions to play a role in the story never really comes up. - Doctor Who: In the future the army (human army that is) is run by the Church and among the Clerics there are mentions of both Anglican troops and of a Papal mainframe. - In Story of Seasons, all the villages and towns worship the Harvest Goddess in a Crystal Dragon Jesus manner. There are varying Harvest Goddess and most towns have their own specific one. However, it's also shown that Harvest Goddess worship differs from place to place. In Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands, Cliff from Mineral Town doesn't have the exact same beliefs as the local priest. - South Park had a two-parter set in the future where everyone has become an atheist. However, the atheists have split into many factions, fighting wars just as bloody as the religious wars of the past, over \|\|what their name should be\|\|. ## Played Both Ways - Artesia has multiple religions (the Old Religion of Yhera, the faith of the Divine King, and the mystery cults, among others), but they all fit into the same cosmology, many gods are worshipped in both religions, and the Phoenix Court of the Empire worships the Divine King but also pays respect to the gods of the Old Religion. - Judge Dredd comics generally assumed that the Church of Grud was a universal replacement for all previous establishment religions (it's even centred in Vatican City), until Paul Cornell's Pan-African Judges said, "No, the Muslim world is still Muslim." - Played with hard in With Strings Attached. When the four first arrive in Ketafa and talk to Stal, they learn that Ketafa had been settled hundreds of years ago by people fleeing the gods, but that recently the conquering Idris brought the gods back. However, Stal is in despair both that the religion is very likely fake and that the people took to it so readily. When the four get sent across the ocean to Baravada, they find that real gods (the Dalns gods) are present there, and that the Ketafan religion merely incorporated their names among many others... but that the Baravadans have no idea what the words religion and worship mean, and treat the gods pretty much like employers. Moreover, the Dalns gods are prevented from doing anything in Ketafa because of a curse on that continent. Things get even more complicated when, much later in the book, the four travel to the Ghost City of Ehndris and glimpse crumbling temples and statues which are clearly part of some other, lost religion. - Honor Harrington: Let's see, we've got the formerly Space Amish Church of Humanity Unchained, with its own internal factions, and its extremist splinter The Faithful, the Methodist-descended Third Stellars (which has practically every congregation-or even every person-being their own faction), along with a 2nd Reformation Catholic Church, a new Judaism faction, and passing mentions of most other current major religions. - The Stormlight Archive: There are numerous religions worshiping the Heralds of the Almighty. Many see them as gods, or see one as a god while all the others are angels, and so on. The audience knows that the Vorin religion is closest to the truth, but they get a number of things wrong—most notably, they are completely unaware of the fact that the Heralds gave up their oaths because they were so tired of the endless fighting. - Star Trek, which features religious Planet of Hats (Bajor), Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions (while Roddenberry was alive) and religious proliferacy (after he'd passed on). - Babylon 5: - In the first-season episode "The Parliament of Dreams" during a cultural exchange week each of the alien races put on some kind of demonstration of their religion. Every alien species only has one religion, but what will the Earth do? Finally it's Earth's turn. Cmdr. Sinclair: shaking hands or bowing or giving the appropriate gesture This is Mr. Harris. He's an atheist. Father Cresanti, a Roman Catholic. Mr. Hayakawa, a Zen Buddhist. Mr. Rashid, a Moslem. Mr. Rosenthal, an Orthodox Jew. Running Elk, of the Oglala Sioux faith. Father Papapoulous, a Greek Orthodox. Ogigi-ko, of the Ebo tribe. Machukiak, y Yupik Eskimo. Sawa, of the Jivaro tribe. Isnakuma, a Bantu. Ms. Chang, a Taoist. Mr. Blacksmith, an aborigine. Ms. Yamamoto, a Shinto. Ms. Naijo, a Maori. Mr. Gold, a Hindu. Ms.... Fade to Black - That being said, humans aren't the only species to have more than one religion. The Narn in particular are noted to have a number of different faiths, each with their own beliefs and practices, each of which is named for the religion's founder/prophet and has a scripture named "The Book of [Founder's name]." G'Kar, for instance, is a devotee of the faith of G'Quan. In later episodes, \|\|G'Kar himself becomes a "prophet" after he has a spiritual awakening while imprisoned in the B5 brig and decides to write his memoirs/explication of his transformation. He doesn't mean to become a prophet, but eventually Narns begin to follow him, which at first frustrates him to no end. Eventually, he learns to take it in stride.\|\| - Dragon Age: More than one religion overall, but you only get one religion per race—there is no sense that any particular person could ever be a different religion from the one they are. The human religion, that of The Maker and the Prophet Andraste has some subdivisions, but these are clearly marked as 'real religion' and 'evil cult' so don't really represent religious diversity. The narrative itself (and the Warden, if you choose) can be read as having a subtle atheistic bias. - Notably averted in Orzammar, where you find a dwarf cleric of Andraste who is genuinely good; should you choose to help him, you see why there's only one religion per race. - There's also a subversion that gets a bit more attention in Dragon Age II, where the Tevinter Imperium has its own schismatic Chantry that's under the control of the mages, rather than the other way around. Fenris calls it a scam to keep the magisters in power, but we don't actually see the Black Divine or any of his people. - Also, if you read the Codex, the reason there's only two versions of the Maker's worship is because the Chantry takes it very seriously, aggressively wiping out variations of the faith. Kind of like the Catholic Church used to, only with more success. It's even part of the religion that the Chant must be recited perfectly, with no variations. However, despite all of this, the occasional underground offshoot manages to thrive. - Likewise, it's mentioned that when the Chantry decided to lead an Exalted March against the Dales, the "Canticle of Shartan" was stripped from the Chant of Light, removing all reference to the Dalish General of Andraste's army. - It's interesting to note that, apparently as a result of being raised on the surface by exiled nobles from Orzammar, Varric Tethras is ostensibly non-religious, but frequently will invoke both the Dwarven Ancestors and Andraste's name. It is confirmed in Dragon Age: Inquisition that Varric is in fact Andrastian, although he doesn't often bring up the fact that he sincerely believes. - Hawke also appears to show acceptance of multiple, diverse faiths. Despite being nominally Andrastian, Hawke nonetheless aids Merrill in performing several Dalish rituals, in Legacy offers a Dwarven prayer after recovering the body of Varric's ancestor in the Deep Roads, works with the Qunari on numerous occasions and in Mark of the Assassin, while also mentioning offhand that their family was one of the few that the Chasind Wilders chose to trade with in Lothering. A Snarky!Hawke gives a few hints that s/he is actually more of a Nay-Theist. - While there's one main religion per race, there are some minority faiths and a few converts. In addition to the Andrastian dwarf mentioned above, the Chasind and Avvar barbarians are human polytheists, and there are a fair number of converts to the Qunari faith who are human or (especially) elven. Many of the city elves are Andrastian, though they retain some traditions of elven polytheism (such as the vhenadahl, or sacred tree). The Rivaini are pantheists who believe in a Natural Order (and also have a number of Qunari converts). - In The Legend of Zelda, the Triforce seems to be used universally and everyone seems to adhere to the same legends, yet each race is mainly seen worshipping deities separate from the Golden Goddesses - usually protector spirits like Jabu-Jabu or Valoo, but other ones as well, like the Ocean King or Hylia or the Desert Colossus. It's possible these all form a unified pantheon hierarchy, but that's never been made explicit. - The Elder Scrolls plays with it in a number of ways depending on the instance. - Averted in general with the primary religion of most of Tamriel, the religion of the 8 (or 9) Divines, sometimes referred to as the Imperial Cult. It was a compromise religion created by Alessia, the first empress of Cyrodiil, to appease the different races with different religious beliefs who made up her empire. While the main sect of the religion is based out of the Imperial City in Cyrodiil and is fairly uniform, there are other versions of it in different provinces. For example, the Altmer still refer to Akatosh by his Aldmeri name of Auriel, and have some very different beliefs about the motive for the creation of the universe. Further, many Nords still refer to the Divines by their ancient Nord names and still hold Shor (aka Lorkhan) as their top god even if the official version of the religion leaves him out. - That said, every single religion on Tamriel shares a number of consistent elements in their creation stories. It's usually their interpretation of the motives of the gods involved that differ. - For some 4000 years, the Dunmer of Morrowind instead worshiped a trio of Physical Gods known as the Tribunal, or ALMSIVI, made up of Vivec, Almalexia, and Sotha Sil. The Tribunal Temple was founded which worships them. The friction between the Temple and the Imperial Cult is felt in the main quest of Morrowind. Then Subverted within the Tribunal Temple. While they present themselves in this fashion and attempt to suppress all dissent, the Dissident Priests and Nerevarine Cult have split off from the mainstream Tribunal worship. When talking to Vivec, he'll reveal that the Temple isn't entirely right, and that the others aren't completely wrong. - Also Averted when the Dunmer Ashlanders are considered. They practice ancestor worship (which is still part of Tribunal Temple doctrine, though to a lesser extent,) and also, to a degree, worship (or at least respect) the Daedra. (Particularly Azura, Boethia, Mephala, Sheogorath, Molag Bal, Mehrunes Dagon, and Malacath.) Again, the Daedra are acknowledged by the Tribunal Temple, but are considered subservient to the Tribunal. - Speaking of the Daedra, they are worshiped (usually individually) by many in Tamriel as an alternative to the Aedric Divines. - The Skaal of Solstheim add another to the mix, with their worship of the "All Maker." - While some Argonians may convert to the religion of the Divines, their species as a whole tends to worship the Hist, a race of sentient trees native to their Black Marsh homeland. - The Dark Brotherhood worships Sithis, also known as the "Void" or the primal "Is Not".	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneTrueReligion
Informed Equipment - TV Tropes A video game playable character has quite a few sprites (2D) / skins and models (3D) to deal with, which makes it hard to justify changing that valuable art for something as fickle as equipment. Drawing a 2D hero in the starting armor and the most powerful armor alone would double the sprite count for every frame of the hero doing everything in almost every direction; this only gets worse with combinations of different types of equipment. Some 2D titles ameliorate this by superimposing sprites on top of each other, or relying on Palette Swapping. Three-dimensional models make this far easier to avoid, since you can simply change textures/skins, or bolt extra models onto the same skeleton, while reusing animations. As a result, the hero you see on the game screen usually doesn't represent the hero you see on the equipment screen. It's become so ridiculous that some games will just skip giving the heroes any body armor at all, which is okay because they're heroes and heroes are Made of Iron. Still, by the end of the game, it can be hard to excuse your hero bumbling around in civilian clothes while going up against the 10-story Superboss. This trope seems to be fading as 3D graphics become more common, space becomes cheaper, and game engine-rendered realtime cutscenes become more prevalent. 3D models are completely free of the exponential increase in artwork that plagued games with single-sprite 2D models, as each additional piece of equipment can be simply added rather than having to re-create every permutation of animation; on the other hand, weaponry and equipment not currently in use are often ignored in third-person games so player characters don't look ridiculous having four full-size rifles dangling off various parts of their body. In addition, armor is often intentionally left Informed Equipment to maintain a recognizable image associated with a character and avoid hiding their face. Super-Trope to Equipment-Hiding Fashion, where the player can deliberately invoke this trope to better customize their character. Compare No Cutscene Inventory Inertia, where occurrences of this trope are limited to cutscenes, and the more general Limited Wardrobe. Contrast Virtual Paper Doll, Rainbow Pimp Gear (all gear is visible, and the game lets you mix and match as you like). ## Straight Examples: - Dust: An Elysian Tail limited passive items to things that logically wouldn't show up on the player character's sprite (pendants worn under his cloak, rings worn under his gloves, and sharpening items for his one and only sword) for exactly this reason; the sprite is hand-drawn and uses frame-by-frame animation. - The first four games in the Quest for Glory series did this: your character's sprite was always shown wearing a leather jerkin, despite the fact that the Fighter class was supposed to sell the jerkin in the very first game in exchange for a chainmail vest. In the fifth and final game, which was the only one to use 3D models, the hero's in-game appearance changes every time he puts on a new piece of armor. - Dissidia Final Fantasy has an even more exaggerated version. The characters can equip completely different weapon types (the Warrior of Light, for example, can equip axes as well as swords), but no matter what they'll always use their default weapon in combat, bar alternate costumes that still don't reflect their equipment. - Super Smash Bros. for 3DS/WiiU has equipment that fighters can equip. They match up with what the fighter wears (for example, overalls can be worn by Mario, Luigi, and Wario), but it doesn't change their appearance. - Even with the ARMA series' focus on realism, this can happen on occasion — Operation Arrowhead adds a few guns that can load different types of magazines, from normal 30-round boxes to 100-round dual drums. However, the game doesn't make a physical distinction between the two and will have weapons appear to load the standard magazine at all times. ARMA III changed things so the magazine models do change to account for what kind of magazine you've actually loaded, but until an update in 2019, the game was selective about which weapons could exchange magazines (e.g. the sniper version of NATO's MX rifle couldn't take hundred-round magazines meant for the support-weapon version, even though that support weapon could take the standard 30-round magazines meant for the others), and they would also change colors to match the color of whatever weapon they were loaded into. - In Battlefield 4, attack jet models are loaded up with a fearsome array of air-to-ground ordnance. These are unusable by the player flying, who is limited to the gun and one secondary weapon for balance. - Command & Conquer: Renegade tries to avert this, wherein while holding one weapon, the next one in sequence will appear on your character's back. Of course, that ignores that you're still lugging around upwards of ten weapons at any one time (and, similar to the later Call of Duty example above, the pistol is also slung across the back rather than near either hip). Averted further for enemies in singleplayer, however, who typically only have their one weapon, and will wear it on their back while at ease if you manage to catch them when they're not armed and ready. - Infamously present in many early shooters: The marine in Doom netgames was always shown carrying the same rifle normal zombies used, making it impossible for other players to tell what they were up against. There are some people working on combating this, for some Doom source-ports, and some mods (like Brutal Doom) have gone out of their way to give the player unique sprites for each individual weapon. - A variation on this is the inability to tell what items a multiplayer opponent is carrying in reserve, allowing someone to romp around seemingly helpless with a pistol only to whip out a three foot long BFG at the last moment. A lot of games starting from when Halo 3 and Modern Warfare came out have fixed this to an extent by showing carried weapons (although not grenades and reserve ammo), and the latter also has the odd issue of pistols being stowed on a character's back rather than in a holster (although the upshot is that several games in that series also include ballistic shields, which continue protecting you from bullets to the back if you have the shield stowed on your back). Attachments on the weapons are still a frequent victim of this, where at best you can expect the dropped model of a weapon to show that it has a Grenade Launcher; otherwise your only recourse to see what a gun's previous owner had on it is walking over it to get the "press <button> to take" prompt (and hope that the game you're playing actually tells you what attachments are on it rather than just showing the gun's icon). - In Duke Nukem 3D, the sprites do not update to show you what gun a player is holding. However, there is a toggle key which makes an icon appear over their head to show you, making it appear as if Duke is having a very violent Idea Bulb. This was pretty much endemic to Build engine games that came after Duke 3D as well. The original Shadow Warrior, however, at least had separate sprites for when Lo Wang was using his katana. - One of the earliest aversions was in Marathon, where player sprites are split at the waist, with the top half changing to account for which weapon that player is currently using, though as above there's still no indication of all the other weapons they have. - The Quake and Unreal series only make distinctions when the character is powered up (or has shielding in Unreal). Otherwise, their poly model appears the same regardless of their armor state or health. - Unreal, and Quake from the second installment onward, had proper weapon models in the hands of the player(s). Quake, on the other hand, showed the player always with the same gun, though at least there was a separate model for when the player was wielding the axe. - Rainbow Six: Vegas and its sequel do a form of this — while every weapon you have (barring the riot shield) is always visible on your person, and weapons in a player's hand will reflect any attachments whether you're seeing the weapon in first- or third-person, when it gets dropped on the ground all that flies out the window and you just get a lower-poly, completely unmodified version of the weapon. Weapons dropped by terrorists in singleplayer in particular seem to always spontaneously sprout a 6x scope if you loot one from its previous owner. - This is also usually the case for the first-person view itself; games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl and Unreal Tournament assume your character is always wearing fingerless gloves, no matter what armor in the former (even fully-enclosed Powered Armor gives you fingerless gloves) or model in the latter (you always appear as a regular white guy with no sleeves on whether your model is a regular Caucasian human, a deathly-pale Necris, a human/Skaarj hybrid or a Nali cow) you're using. Later games have managed to avert this in various ways — some ( Unreal Tournament 2004) go back to the GoldenEye idea of not showing any hands on your gun at all, while others ( Left 4 Dead, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequels, and the above Call of Duty post- Modern Warfare) change the appearance of the arms holding the gun depending on what character you play as or what your character is actually wearing. - City of Heroes follows the trope by making the player's appearance almost completely independent from their superpowers. While you may be wreathed in flames or partial covered with stone when certain powers are active, you never have to compromise between wearing a cool outfit or effective armor. Most players of the game love that they can look how they want no matter what level they are and what powers they took. - And now the game allows you do even chose the colors of most powers, select from different weapon models, and in some cases different attack animations. - This of course leads to some rather interesting events in game, such as "Task Force: Fabulous", in which the entire party runs a Task/Strike Force in Cowboy Boots, Swimsuits, and Glitter. - DC Universe Online follows the example City of Heroes does and expands it by allowing you to keep the armor you're wearing, but be able to swap it out for a previous look. Your cape gives you better defense, yet you want to keep your Green Lantern-inspired look? Just make the cape invisible! - Dragon Nest has some kinds of armor show on the character while others are invisible. There are also many armor pieces that show on the wearer's model but look completely different from their icons. - Eden Eternal has entire sets of cosmetic armor unlocked as a character reaches certain job levels. The character's appearance is determined by said armor rather than what he or she has equipped. Cash shop items do show, however. - Kingdom of Loathing semi averts this. Most of the time, your character image is the default for your class and gender. However, if you assemble and wear an entire outfit, it will change to that one. This is used in game to disguise yourself to infiltrate places. - Star Trek Online plays it straight... for the Klingons and Romulans — they've yet to get models for the in-game armor, so they're still wearing their usual clothing. Federation players avert this as their armor and gear will appear on them, but you can set it so that it goes back to their normal outfits. - That has changed in recent updates. Armor and Kit pieces have been added to the Tailor options for all player characters, allowing you to have an armored / geared up look as one of your switchable outfits. This replaces the former "Show / Hide Armor Visuals" toggle as described above, and it allows full customization of armor. On the other hand, it unfortunately removed a convenient way for players to have a "standard uniform/combat ready" switch for the player's NPC landing party. You can save an armored costume for your landing party characters, but those saved outfits can only be accessed at a Tailor making it impossible to switch on the fly when going from casual scenes where regular uniforms are appropriate to a more geared and ready look when going into combat. - Vindictus both averts this and plays it straight. Major equips such as armour and weapons are fully present and modelled; not only in-game, but also in cut scenes and the character loading screen. Minor equips such as earrings and belts, by contrast, are never visible. This despite the fact that armour and weapons are often covered in all sorts of little dangly bits that fully utilize the capabilities of the physics engine, as do nearly all hair and fur (but not water) effects for both PCs and monsters. - World of Warcraft plays with this for certain races, where boots are concerned. Tauren and draenei both have digitigrade hooves (on which traditional footwear would look odd); worgen in wolf form also exhibit a digitigrade stance (which would again make traditional footwear look odd; the boots appear normally when the worgen are in human form). Trolls simply prefer to go barefoot. Unlike other examples of this trope, however, equipping boots for these races actually does result in a graphical change; the footwear covers the ankles and part of the shin, but stops before the part of the foot that actually touches the ground. - The tendency for trolls to go barefoot is referenced by a special transmogrification which turns a player's footwear invisible — "troll style", as the item's flavor text states. This item literally makes your boots Informed Equipment. - Played straight with options to hide your character's helmet and cape which, if used, make those Informed Equipment. Also, smaller items (rings, trinkets, and amulet) are not rendered. A recent update allows shoulders and belts to be hidden as well. - Mechagnomes have it even worse - the lower portion of whatever pants they wear isn't rendered to show their metal legs, making it look like they're wearing diapers instead of pants. - Zig-zagged in Wynncraft. Armor shows up on the player's body just like how it does in Minecraft, but accessories do not. - None of the equipment collected by Hailey in Gamer 2 is represented on her sprite. - The player in Spelunky can equip many pieces of equipment, including gloves, shoes, spectacles and a Hedjet, yet the only thing they are actually shown wearing are their default clothes and either a jet-pack or a cape. - In Theta vs Pi 7 when youre carrying a shield, its shown in a box at the top of the screen but you dont actually have it on you at all. This is averted however with the wizard hat which you do in fact wear on your head. - In Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap, Wonder Boy's sprites show the same sword, armor, and shield no matter what he has equipped... except in his Lizard-Man form, when he had no visible equipment and his inability to use or sword or shield was relevant to gameplay, but he could still equip them normally and still got stat boosts from them. - In the Baldur's Gate series, multiclass fighter/mages use the fighter model, but can still equip mage robes because of their experience as a mage. However, while any piece of armor (that isn't a robe) is shown on their character sprite, robes aren't, so they end up standing around casting spells in their underclothes. Same thing happens when you equip a thief with the use any item ability with armour heavier than studded leather. Aside from these two exceptions (which are probably due to technical limitations of some kind), the series completely averts this trope. - Chrono Trigger falls into this trope as well. While weapons change and the characters actually draw them when they start a fight, armor is still non-existent. And Crono's mop still shows up as a katana when he uses it. - In an oddball case of this, one of the most popular Game Mods for Dragon Age: Origins is a mod that makes hats and helmets invisible. This seems to owe from a common opinion that the hats and helmets in the core game look really dorky◊, especially if you're playing a mage. - Dragon Ball Z: Buu's Fury allows you to equip all manner of items on the Z Fighters to enhance their stats, ranging from mundane clothing to some truly bizarre things, but since it is a sprite-based game on the Game Boy Advance, none of these items actually show up on the character. A shame, as memorable events like the Goku vs Majin Vegeta fight could have only been enhanced by the sight of Goku wearing a snorkel and a suit of armor carved from wood while Vegeta is wearing a paper hat and a fancy tuxedo. - Goes all the way back to Dragon Quest I. The first armor in the game? "Clothing". You can go into battle without it, yet the sprite nonetheless showed the hero wearing a full suit of armor. It's also averted as the sprite isn't holding a weapon or a shield unless you have purchased one. The sprite's even altered to showing him carrying the rescued princess. - Dubloon is rather egregious with this. Not only are any helms or armour equipped invisible, so are the weapons. - This appears in Dungeons of Dredmor, too: During the animations, regardless of what they look like in the inventory, all swords look like normal iron long swords, all potions and drinks are in the same red bottle and the hero is always wearing a leather cuirass over a white shirt. The last point is a bit odd, because you can't equip more than one torso armor piece, and you might not even start with either of those things. - In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, most equipment (as noted below under "exceptions") does show up on the character model. However, jewelry (including rings and necklaces), belts, and sheathed weapons do not. - In Eternal Sonata, neither weapons nor outfits make any visible changes on the characters, despite the fact that said weapons and outfits are often specifically described in terms of their colour and general appearance. - Exit Fate. Whether it's fighter types depicted with heavy armour (including females in a rare aversion of Chainmail Bikini) regardless of daytime and occasion, mages wearing robes, a dancer turned mage wearing a skirt and bikini top, and plenty of people wearing casual clothes or fine dresses, they'll always wear that on their portrait and sprite regardless of what they have actually equipped in gameplay terms. - Final Fantasy has shown different appearances for weapons in battle since the first game. But not armor, at least until Final Fantasy X. And even then only shields get displayed in the non-MMO games. This means characters could be wearing Diamond equipment over their whole bodies and still be shown wearing their street clothes. The 8- and 16-bit games are the worst offenders, naturally, since various characters' sprites could show them wearing full plate armor yet having nothing actually equipped. - In Crisis Core Zack's outfit doesn't change with his materia and equipment loadouts either. Though he does change his uniform appearance partway through the game, as well as his weapon later. - Final Fantasy VIII doesn't even have different armor, as the characters use junctions to boost defense and everything else. In the only cases where changing clothes was important (the formal SeeD attire and the Galbadian uniforms) visibly different models were used. - While Final Fantasy XII allows you to change weapons as much as you please, without even restricting which characters can use which weapons, and even allows you to equip armor and hats, the characters keep their default clothing models through the entire game. This is taken to absurd levels when your characters, who start off in rather minimal clothing in the middle of a desert, use same clothing in the middle of snow storms. It's also unfortunate, in that Final Fantasy XI had selectable models for your weapons AND hat, body armor, pants, shoes, and gloves. - In Final Fantasy V and VI the shields (and Elf Capes) actually do get shown... but only when the character is actually blocking an attack with them. Surprisingly, they don't all look the same, given the small 16-bit sprites, but the variation is mostly just color. - The main characters from the Final Fantasy Tactics series will still be in their artwork clothes, even though they change their job classes. - The Final Fantasy Legend games let your party members wear up to eight pieces of heavy equipment, but no matter what you wear, your humans look heavily armored and your mutants look bare. - Taken to an extreme in Lufia & The Fortress of Doom and Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals. While even the most basic games in the NES era made at least slight changes to weapons so that someone with an axe would attack with an axe, the characters in Lufia II would be still be holding a sword as they attack with a bow, or a whip as they attack with a sword. - Improved — slightly — in Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals: Dekar is now the only person who can wield multiple weapon types, and it does show him equipping different types, but all weapons of a type still look the same during combat. \|\|Except Dual Blade, of course.\|\| - Machine Knight plays it quite straight. Of note, Frain's portrait shows him carrying a sword on his back at all times, even at the start of the game when he's just an unarmed scientist, making the trope work both ways: it informs you he's going to get a sword before you ever see battle. - In NetHack, by virtue of being able to sit safely on cockatrice corpses, players have deduced that heroes wear pants which are not indicated in the inventory. It's probably the circle around the 'a' in the @ that represents them. Oddly, this is also true of all other monsters in the dungeon as well. There's also the Backpack and the Purse, neither of which exist independently, but the former of which can be "stolen." Possibly several times in a row if you made a point of it. - In early versions of Neverwinter Nights, the only equipment that appeared on the character's model was the weaponry and armor. They later released a patch to make the cloaks appear too. - Played straight in Octopath Traveler, where nobody's weapons or armour is reflected in their sprite. This is because they go for reflecting their job, instead. In a sprite-based game, with eight distinct playable characters and eight jobs with vastly different outfits, none of which are exclusive. - Persona - Pokémon: Until the third generation of games, all Pokemon on the Party menu were represented with rather generic sprites (with the exception of Pikachu in Yellow, and Gyarados in Gold/Silver). Starting with Ruby and Sapphire, each Pokemon had two sprites of their own for the party menu. - The use of held items and special abilities. If the battles were perfectly realistic, it would be incredibly easy to determine whether your opposing Pokemon had a special pair of glasses which boosted Special Attack or was holding a berry which constantly restored health; in the games, there's no way of knowing without the use of a special ability or a move. Similarly, while it should be easy to tell if a Bronzong has the ability to levitate (which makes it immune to Ground-type attacks), there is no indication of its ability. - Happens in Project × Zone. No matter what you equip your characters with, or how high they rank up, they will have the same 2D sprites throughout the game: equipment only affects stats. What's more, you can equip against type: characters who canonically don't use weapons (Akira/Pai), dislike weapons (Heihachi), or are more powerful than most weapons barehanded (Heihachi again, Ryu/Ken), can be equipped with any manner of guns and swords, and said equip will often improve their stats, sometimes more than it will for the character it was "meant" for. - All over the Realms of Arkania trilogy. Especially noticeable in the third game when the whole party is dropped stark naked into the final dungeon due to a shrinking spell but you still see them wearing robes and armor during the fights. Or in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team where you can equip overalls, socks and gloves and say, you don't have any on? - This occurs in Resonance of Fate due to its Design-It-Yourself Equipment system. Not only is it possible to attach various Gun Accessories to your characters pistol at several extension points, higher level mods have extension points of their own that further accessories can be added. At the end of the game, the gun is a ridiculous monstrosity with several scopes that are often stacked on top of one another, additional barrels pointing in every directions, handles attached to super long clips that themselves have barrels attached to them, and other insanity. - Sonic The Hedgehog: - Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) has you buy equipment, but it never appears on the characters. For that matter, what the item even looks like is never shown in the stores. Game hacks might suggest that they were supposed to be there, but its unknown - While you can equip armor and equipment in Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, none of it actually shows up on the model. This gets somewhat ridiculous when you equip a hammer, but it still doesn't show up. Only equipped Chao can be seen in battle, where they float behind the characters in your party. - Used in the Suikoden franchise, but they also play with the trope in the sense. Everyone's weapons are fixed, gaining new names as they are further enhanced by blacksmiths, but for armor, if the character is visibly wearing something particularly iconic, they'll likely have a matching piece of armor locked into that slot. Examples include Luc (a wind mage) having a guard robe and a speed ring, Mina (a professional dancer) wearing a magic robe and toe shoes, Pesmerga (a dangerous knight) having dragon armor, etc. You're welcome to throw whatever gear into the remaining slots, though, and their appearance won't change. - Played straight in all Super Mario Bros. RPGs ever made ( Mario & Luigi, Paper Mario and Super Mario RPG). You can equip them with a ton of gear, badges and other things, but with the exception of the L and W emblems in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, you never see any of this stuff equipped on the character models/sprites. Then again, given how you never see what said gear even looks like outside an identical icon in the menu (based on gear type), it could be that every possible piece of clothing in the kingdom looks 100% identical to Mario and Luigi's normal clothing. Which raises even more questions. - Though in all honesty, could you imagine Mario walking about in Iron Pants and Luigi in School Slacks or whatever? - The Tales Series usually displays weapons and, if the character wears any, shields. The original SNES Tales of Phantasia would show only the type of weapon Cless was wielding (sword, axe, spear or halberd) and just the presence of a shield, but the remakes changed that. - In Tales of Symphonia the character's equipped weapons would be displayed in battle, but cutscenes would show the same ones they'd started with. The Hero gets his cutscene-weapon upgraded from his initial wooden swords to metal ones and later the Swords of Plot Advancement, but it's still not affected by what he's got equipped. - Then, in Tales of the Abyss, the weapons would change in the cutscenes to the ones that are equipped. - Back to straight in Tales of Hearts. Each character just has one evolving Empathic Weapon, but despite the shape of the weapon changing as it goes up in tiers, the battle sprite remains the same until you reach one of the final postgame forms. - Tales of Vesperia displays the character's weapon and special equipment (Rita's spellbook, Karol's bag, etc) but still no armor, headgear or accessories. - The PS3 port of Vesperia featured DLC that changed the characters' costumes, so they would look like they were wearing their most powerful armors. This is still only cosmetic, however; you can still have crappy armor equipped with this costume on. - Ultima: - Ultima VIII, one of the last games released on disks rather than CDs, had only room for one isometric sprite set for the hero — which came with a pot helmet all the time. - Ultima VII, on the other hand, didn't have separate sprites for the various kinds of armor and cloaks one could wear, but did have an actual nude sprite for characters. - Ultima VII Part II: Serpent Isle did have a potent paperdoll system that depicted every piece of armor and almost every other item equipped, but the sprite showed no differences other than the weapon equipped. The Exult engine allowed this function for the previous The Black Gate too, which had one humorous side effect; if you recruited 13-year-old Spark, his paperdoll was still the default "huge muscular guy", with the head of a small boy. - In Undertale, many weapons and lots of different armour can be found throughout the game, and characters sometimes mention what the protagonist is wearing. However, the protagonist's sprite never changes no matter what they're wearing. - Played painfully straight in The World Ends with You, where fashion is one of the key themes in the game. You could have Neku clad head to toe in punk clothing, bargain bin quality threads or even wearing a pink frilly dress, but he'll still be wearing his normal garb in-game and in cutscenes. Oddly enough, there's a point in the game where your objective is to talk to a support Reaper while fully dressed in clothes from one specific brand. The dialogue you get when talking to said Reaper has him comment on how the outfit you put together suits you well. Even though that brand has nothing to do with Neku's cutscene outfit. Also, the clothes actually shown on Neku's sprite are purchasable, but only relatively late in the game, when you can access the Jupiter of the Monkey shop. So you need to buy a second set of these clothes to benefit from them, even though Neku is clearly wearing one already. The sequel continues this trend. For example, on the last day of Week 2, a Reaper asks you to wear a piece of Gatto Nero clothing to get through. \|\|Shoka\|\|, who has just joined your party notes that it's a "piece of cake," due to wearing Gatto Nero clothing(specifically \|\|a Mr. Mew hoodie\|\|), but you will still have to put on a Gatto Nero thread in order to pass. - In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, unlike the previous two games, where Raiden or Naked Snake would at the very least hold a different type of pistol in cutscenes if you entered it with that one equipped, here Old Snake always ignores your choice of weapon and instead brandishes the Operator he gets after the first ten minutes. Where this gets taken further, however, is that when gameplay resumes he'll have put away whatever weapon you were using and still have the Operator in his hands. If you removed the Operator from your inventory completely, it will be back in slot one, having kicked out whatever weapon was there to make space. The M4 Custom is a rare accomplice to this as well, being the only long-arm he'll equip in cutscenes where he does so outside of maybe two exceptions; this essentially forces players who don't want to use the Operator and M4 Custom to dedicate two of their five weapon slots to those guns anyway, since they're going to find their way back after just about every cutscene. - In the Ace Combat series, Skies of Deception, Joint Assault, Assault Horizon Legacy, Infinity and Skies Unknown allow you to customize planes by adding parts to them, but the changes are not physically reflected; the only physical change you can make is the paint scheme and, in Infinity and Skies Unknown, the emblem. - Animal Crossing series averts this with clothes but plays it straight with tools: carried but unequipped tools are invisible. - Due to the game using sprite-based graphics, nothing you fit to a ship in Escape Velocity ever appears on it. - In the first four MechWarrior games, the in-game models of your 'Mechs did not reflect what weapons you had loaded on to it, Mechwarrior 3 being a particularly infamous example with mechs vomiting up guided missiles from their cockpit canopy and shooting lasers from missile racks. Living Legends and Online have since fixed that, with missile racks changing in size depending on what is fitted, weapon barrels changing to indicate the type of laser or cannon, and so on. - X-Universe: When you fit a gun to a slot on a ship, a cannon appears in a corresponding spot on the ship's model. It looks exactly the same no matter what gun you put there. Other equipment doesn't even do that much. - Isaac Clarke of Dead Space has a suit of RIG servo-armour that changes as you upgrade it, but his weapons are apparently stored in his groin, meaning that a pulse rifle just pops out of nowhere when you decide you're running low on plasma cutter ammunition. - While Resident Evil 5 allows your characters to wield a variety of weapons and outfits, only their outfits will change in cutscenes. Throughout the game, Chris and Sheva are shown wielding only their default handguns. - Which sometimes leads to unintentionally funny scenes, such as Sheva holstering her pistol on her bare thigh. - Done in a unique way in Resident Evil 6 where you can carry numerous weapons, but only two at most will be shown at a time. If you swap from a long gun to a hand gun, the long gun you previously had equipped will be slung on the character's back. The other five guns are in his side pocket or something. - You can get a bulletproof vest in Silent Hill 3. Equipping it makes Heather tankier but a much slower runner, and that's it — it doesn't appear on her model at all. - In BattleTech, the artwork and miniatures for the Humongous Mecha are often commissioned when the actual loadout is still on the table, leading to informed equipment (which is explained away via Flavor Text), though it has gradually become less common. For example, the art and miniatures for the AS7-D "Atlas" shows it having a cannon on both hips; the right one is the actual Autocannon/20, while the flavor text describes the left as a power and coolant hookup. The informed equipment goes through the roof when the game's Design-It-Yourself Equipment is in play, which was particularly noticeable in the MechWarrior PC adaptations (see Simulation Games, above) - Also something of an Enforced Trope at times. Thanks to the "Unseen Era" Explanation : From 1996 until 2015, a number of 'mechs were legally forbidden to be depicted in art or minis, players had to proxy minis to represent machines that had legal stats but were unavailable. This proxy ethos is strong in the BattleTech community partly due to this. - Dungeons & Dragons figures rarely look much like the player characters they represent. - In fact, this is largely a given if you're using miniatures for any RPG. Players strapped for cash might even resort to using whatever's on hand in place of minis. - It's also not unknown to just not use miniatures at all; some players prefer to have the entire game play out solely in their collective imaginations, so a character may end up never being visually depicted at all or get at best a character portrait if their record sheet provides room for that and the player feels artistically inclined. This is of course one of the reasons many tabletop player characters end up carrying around implausible amounts of equipment — since nobody ever quite sees it except as a line of text with maybe an encumbrance value somewhere, it doesn't really "count". - Actually partly averted for the Pathfinder Iconic characters; Their portraits◊ show them carrying quite a lot of gear, including multiple backup weapons. - Most table top game using miniatures, like Warhammer 40,000 or Warhammer have a rule where all unit equipment must be represented on the miniature, or it doesn't get factored into the game. This is to encourage players to embrace the miniature side of the game... and buy more miniatures. Some games will have caveats that certain basic items are assumed to be equipped whether or not they appear. - Starbound has equipment slots for cosmetic items, which override visual displays but provide no bonuses. So you can wear heavy, clunky armor (with the appropriate boosts) while still looking like you wear your uniform, or flower costume, or alpaca suit, or a different heavy, clunky armor. - Lampshaded in this Adventurers! comic. - morphE is styled like a visual novel and many times the text will describe a character holding something which is not on their sprite. Exceptions are made for equipment which is always on a certain character such as cellphones, notebooks or in one case a gun. - Return To Player has equipment that may be invisible at the player's option. ## Exceptions: - Sometimes averted, sometimes not in Castlevania. - In Symphony of the Night, almost everything Alucard can equip will show changed art on his model. However, even if you completely unequip his cloak, he's still visibly wearing one. Since it's much harder to avert this trope with Game Boy hardware than PlayStation, the GBA games tend to only show changes to characters' weaponry. - Present in even the DS games such as Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin and Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. Even though the best armor for female protagonists is typically a wedding dress (in fact, several fancy dresses tend to be superior to plate armor once you start getting the high-end gear) Shanoa and Charlotte remain in the same outfits they start out in, perhaps because the fetish material would not overwhelm the Narm of someone kicking vampire ass in bridal gear. - In Faxanadu your character's sprite would display the armor he equipped, which was a pretty cool feature when the game debuted in 1987. - In Hand of Fate, Xanthia goes through roughly a dozen outfits as she goes to new places (as the prior ones are either damaged in the transition or unsuitable for the new climate), but she doesn't have an unlimited supply, as she mentions at one point that she's running out of clothes. In the previous game she tells Brandon that she's "not giving up [her] wardrobe spell", implying that they're just stashed in an extradimensional space or something. - Title character of Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen — the first game in the series, made by Silicon Knights for PlayStation and PC — had a rather extensive collection of visually distinctive weapons and armor suits each of which altered the way Kain looked, despite the game being completely 2D. - Played straight in the pre-rendered cutscenes, though (obviously), Kain would always be wearing his starting equipment, the iron armor and sword. Kind of justified in certain instances; walking into the court of the king wearing a suit of armor made out of bones would probably look suspicious. - The Legend of Zelda. Not only the 3D games, but even the 2D ones had different sprites for most equipment. - However, all items other than swords, shields, and clothing items are still hidden until you take them out. Link has a quiver for his arrows, but you can't see it — you only see the bow itself, and the arrow currently in use. This trope is particularly obvious when using the Skull Hammer in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, as the hammer is not only invisible when not in use, it is as big as Link and cannot possibly be carried on his person unless he has Hammerspace pockets. - Similarly, in games that feature the Iron Boots, he is only weighed down by them when actually wearing them. Carrying them on his person does nothing to affect his mass. - Though The Legend of Zelda (1989) cartoon show actually showed in one episode that they DO have Hammerspace pockets, with the items shrinking in appearance to fit inside, then growing when they were taken back out. - Averted in Ōkami about half the time and played straight the other half, bizarrely. In some cutscenes, Amaterasu will have whatever weapon she has equipped, and in others, she'll have her default weapon. The cutscenes are all in-engine, so this doesn't make very much sense. - Secret of Evermore averts it for weapons (though different weapons of the same type note : barring the femur just show up as Palette Swaps, looking nothing like their icon) but doesn't show armor. - Soul Calibur IV averts this, modify a character and take the armor away, and they'll be fighting in historically questionable undergarments. As you gain major bonuses from armour and clothing, this makes things a hell of a lot harder. Try it combined with the joke items on hard mode and you'll be seeing the "Stage Failed" screen a lot. - Also inverted in Tekken 6, where only certain clothing and accessories found in Scenario Campaign actually give you a stat boost. Narm frequently ensues, as the current best combination of stat-boosting items often makes your character look completely ridiculous. - The Warriors plays the trope in both ways. If your character is holding a weapon, it won't show in a cut scene. However, any hats that they happened to pick up and wear will always show up in a cut scene. - Also averted in the ARMA series — one of the above-mentioned guns that can load different types of magazines is the G36 series, which normally use transparent magazines. One can clearly see the number of rounds within decrease as it's fired, though after about 15 shots they're obscured from view by the gun itself. - As gaming technology gets better, more and more developers of shooters are realizing that it is indeed possible to model translucent magazines with bullets in them that actually disappear as the player fires them — Rainbow Six: Vegas and F.3.A.R. are other examples. - In Borderlands 2 other players can see your character's gun in your hand, your previous gun on your back, and your shield, grenade mods and relics on your back. - Though in a strange twist on this trope, other players can't see the unique reloading animation each gun uses, instead seeing a generic sequence of movements regardless of the weapon being used (except for Tediore guns). - Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (PSP): The currently selected weapons for each Tachikoma also appear in cutscenes throughout the game. - Averted in some cutscenes in Goldeneye 1997 for the N64. The end of the trainyard level has Bond (James Bond) killing two guards on the train itself. It's a bit of a different action for whatever gun you are wielding. In other cut scenes, the game keeps track of grenades. - The sprite-based Marathon games featured a peculiar solution to the problem in the form of split sprites: there was one set of sprites for the legs and lower body, and another for the torso (including the weapons carried thereon). - Rage (2011) alters your guns' and cars' models accordingly depending on what upgrades you pick up. It also alters your character model twice: once when you get the armor for your Ark suit, and again when you ditch the Ark suit for wastelander clothes. - In Team Fortress 2, a Spy disguised as you will reflect your loadout, including accessories and/or silly hats. Unfortunately due to body group incompatibility, the disguise can glitch out and leave the Spy holding a weapon the disguise's class can't equip, or missing textures or even body parts altogether. - In XIII, many enemies wear body armor of various styles, which magically vanish when they soak up too much damage. This makes it imperative to sneak up behind and take them down silently, so as to loot their unblemished armor. - In Diablo, there were very few models, though there were some different ones for different kinds of armor: specifically light leathery armor, medium chain-y armor, and heavy plate armor. Diablo II made a branch between early games with no or few extra models and later ones with piles of them, where each class had its own style of armor, and different types of armor each had a different look on each class. Items with abilities that associated with a particular — such as deep green for poison — reflected those colors on the character's model, as well. - Handled ingeniously by splitting the models into different sections and sprites to have more combinations of equipment. - Which ends up causing different parts of the character's body to be dyed in accordance with the item. Masks specifically end up dying your Necromancer's normally white hair various colors, and certain one-of-a-kind items will turn a Sorceresses hair into something that looks like a giant bleach-stained towel taped to her head. - Totally averted in the Diablo II-inspired Titan Quest. Every individual piece of equipment appears on your in-game character. In fact, Titan Quest takes it one step further, if a particular monster has a unique item in its inventory to be dropped upon its death, the monster will be shown using that piece of equipment, with the item's model appropriately placed. - Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. Also you can literally fight in the nude, being able to strip male or female characters down to skimpy (and anachronistic) thongs. Yes, you can see nipples. - Yahtzee had quite a bit of fun with this feature: Determined to see how long he could go without ever putting any armor on at all, he picked the necromancer class, set all the character sliders to their minimum possible values and dubbed his character "Thinderella the Necromantic Naturist". - Anarchy Online plays with this. Armor and certain gear do appear on your character. Shoulderpads are toggled, and only one of the two sleeve slots will be visable. Invoked with the option to show a character's social gear instead of their armor (in some cases, hilarity may ensue), and there's also the polymorph programs... - Dream of Mirror Online (DOMO), allows to see your character weapon, shield and armor any moment, cutscenes included. When naked, characters still wears underwear (very skimpy for the Shura/Felin race). anyway, the exact look of an armor changes due to race or gender. Most notably the "newbie clothing", that change from a bathing suit to a formal robe, based on your character creation. - Mabinogi. Player characters are fully modeled with all their gear (except accessories, which are effectively too small to see at game resolution), even in cutscenes. - MapleStory almost completely averts this. Despite your character only being a inch or three tall, 90% of all equippable items are represented on your character, up to and including earrings and shoes, which might only be a few pixels large! - NeoQuest II updates your characters' appearance (clothes and weapons), on the field and in battle, to reflect what armor they're wearing. - Star Wars: The Old Republic: Virtually all clothing and weapon changes will be reflected upon both you and your companion, though some companions cannot equip gear other than weapons following the companion system rework that accompanied Knights of the Fallen Empire. The game also has a costume system that overrides this for Player Characters, allowing them to choose between displaying either their currently equipped armor or any of several sets of cosmetic equipment. - World of Warcraft (and many other MMORPGs): Every weapon, piece of armor, and article of clothing is rendered fully on each character in the game, excluding jewelry. Because of the overwhelming importance of having the ideal stat combinations from gear, however, this often resulted in Rainbow Pimp Gear for characters at all levels of the game. The Transmogrification feature introduced in patch 4.3 helped to resolve this by allowing players to customize their gear by replacing models and skins with those of other pieces of gear in their possession, with certain restrictions such as requiring both items to be of Uncommon or higher quality. Before transmogrification, roleplayers often kept separate sets of gear worn only for their appearance rather than their combat effectiveness, and many continue to maintain such sets due to incompatibilities with transmogrification's restrictions. - Behind the scenes, this creates a great deal of additional work for the art team, as all new character models and changes to existing models must be compatible with every existing item model in the game, and new item models must be compatible with thirteen races times two genders (not to mention non-player races that make use of player armor, such as pre-Cataclysm goblins). - Played straight by shapeshift forms, such as druids' animal forms and many gag items. Most shiftshifts have singular appearances (although druid forms have multiple color palettes) that use the same armor models (or lack thereof) regardless of what the player has equipped. Weapons typically still avert the trope, save for the case of druid forms (except for moonkin), which hide equipped weapons entirely. - All games in the Ghosts 'n Goblins series will show Arthur running around in his boxer shorts if he's not wearing any armor (i.e. got hit). - The Mega Man X series utilized sprite overlays for each of X's armor upgrades, in addition to the traditional palette swaps for his alternate weapons. - Metroid, suit upgrades are visible on the model in all games. In the 3D games, the model even changes for weapon upgrades, and in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, the suit also reflects Samus's Phazon corruption. - Shovel Knight from Shovel Knight gets a Palette Swap to indicate what armour he's wearing. - The two Sonic Adventure games show any bits of equipment collected on the character's models. Since the gear cannot be removed, it's completely impossible, for eg, to get Knuckles to take off his sunglasses once he's picked them up. - Terraria shows your character with whatever armor they have on, and there are also social slots now. If armor is put in these slots, that's what you see your character in, but gameplay-wise you are still wearing the non-social armour. - Wonder Boy in Monster Land had separate palette maps for armor, weapon, shield, and footwear (but they all behaved exactly the same in relation to the frames of animation). - In the Genesis version of Wonder Boy in Monster World, most weapons and shields have unique sprites. (In the Master System version, swords have different sprites from spears, but that's it.) - Units in Age of Mythology would be shown holding different pieces of equipment depending on the armory upgrades purchased and units with line upgrades would look different in each age the upgrade was purchased. - Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars: Just like in Generals, many units and buildings will have changes or additions to their models to visually show the upgrades they have. From the relevant research buildings storing the prototype versions of the upgrade. To guns getting bulkier, new guns replacing the old ones, reinforced barrels for weapon upgrades, Tiberium-enhanced Super Soldier exhaling toxic green grass, tanks getting bulldozer blades and etc. - Command & Conquer: Generals, where the 3D model was updated depending on upgrades. A missile upgrade for a jeep resulted in that missile showing up on the side of the jeep, etc. - In Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War, any equipment added to your troops is reflected on their models, including weapon and miscellaneous wargear additions. These changes are also visible on their persistent corpses (that can lay there forever, with the appropriate config menu setting). This makes a lot of sense since some of the tournament rules for the tabletop game require that any wargear be shown on the plastic/white metal/resin models. - Units in Medieval II: Total War are shown in better armor and carry the better weapons that are researched for them in their cities of origin. Also, the individual units are semi-unique, averting the usual "clone army" look of the typical RTS. - Starcraft II: Zigzagged: while some upgrades result in changes to the unit models (the zergling speed upgrade gives them insectoid wings, marine combat shields show up, etc.), most need to be moused over to be verified. - In Heart of the Swarm's campaign, several units have a permanent upgrade that gets a different model (the zergling Raptor strain has wings, as mentioned above, while the Swarmling grows a great big dorsal fin) with a general green or purple color scheme. - Warcraft III: It's not seen in the basic game, but the game engine does allow you to avert this trope by attaching special effects to various parts of a unit (head, weapon, offhand...). Many RPG custom maps use this, though it eats up a lot of space (requiring a specially made weaponless, armorless model, not to mention the weapons themselves). - And averted again in the PS2 roguelike Baroque. A full set of equipment consists of a coat, a pair of artificial wings, and a sword (or the Angelic Rifle), all of which show up over the nameless protagonist's normal clothing and are carried over into cutscenes. - Zig-zagged in The Binding of Isaac. Item costumes will stack as much as possible, usually transforming your character into a lovely mutilated demon monster by the end of a run. However, some costumes don't stack properly if they're added to the same area, meaning only the most recently picked up item(s) will be visible. Afterbirth+ also added dressers that can spawn in the starting room occasionally, which will hide most of your items and randomizes which ones are showing each time you use it. - In Dicey Dungeons, the character art implies that the Warrior always has a sword, the Thief always is Dual Wielding daggers (even though he only starts with one Dagger card), the Inventor always has a hammer, and the other characters are unarmed (though Witch is shown casting a small flame, which isn't always possible in some Witch runs). Even more odd in \|\|Parallel Universe episodes\|\|, where the starting equipment for Thief and Inventor are completely different, and \|\|Bonus Round episodes\|\| where the Warrior can start with irregular equipment as well. - Averted with the player character in DRL, at least as much as possible for a game with ASCII graphics, as the the color of the @ which represents you changes to match the color of your equipped armor. However, the enemies that can equip armor they come across play it perfectly straight. Since hell knights and barons of hell can also equip armor, this can cause a nasty surprise or two. - In Elona, individual pieces of armor show up on your character's sprite when equipped, but you can choose to make them invisible and customize the clothing underneath. - Averted in the roguelike Powder, which bolts images of whatever you're wearing to the image of your character. It helps that there isn't any animation to speak of. - Every item you collect in Risk of Rain 2 can be seen on your character. They work even if they're being held in improper ways. Part of the game's Video Game 3D Leap from the first was that the devs wanted to show this. - In Rogue Legacy, the player character's sprite consists of several pieces of armour that are coloured differently depending on what they wear. - Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura — not only does equipping no armor or clothing leave your character running around in his or her underwear, but most people you meet refuse to talk to you until you are decently dressed. - Despite being an NES game, Crystalis altered your character's look depending on whether he had shields or armor equipped. - However, there was no difference based on what armor you wore, or what shield you had, so other than the beginning of the game, you were almost always wearing fur armor. Similarly, all four swords look the same in combat, even though the item screen implies them looking rather different (especially the water sword). - Dark Cloud 2 avoids this by not having armor; the characters clothing can be changed, but it bears no stat advantages. Similar to the Grand Theft Auto example above, the clothing differences are worked into the cutscenes. - In Dragon Quest IX, every piece of equipment has a unique look to it. This can lead to some rather strange looks as you mix and match the things with the best stat gains. - Dragon Quest VIII has unique weapons for each character, but mostly plays the trope straight as far as armor is concerned. A few armors or armor combinations do change the character sprites, though most of these are for Jessica, for some reason. The Updated Re Release made it so that everyone in the party has at least one different costume, however, the initial female character still has the most options. - Dragon Quest XI brought back the certain armor sets give costumes from VIII, including the fact that Jade, the most fanservice-y female character, had the most costume options, although not by considerable amount compared to Jessica. - Dungeon Siege, by giving every item its own 3D model. - The Elder Scrolls: - Starting with Morrowind, the majority of equipment and clothing is displayed on the character model for both the Player Character and NPCs. The only exceptions are jewelry, belts, and sheathed weapons. - Oblivion continues the trend, now including jewelry and sheathed weapons. - And the same with Skyrim. One exception is if you're dual wielding, in which case you'll only see both weapons when drawn. When sheathed, only one weapon is visible. - Fable. Your character will always appear to be wearing whatever clothing or armor he currently has equipped. If you unequip everything, he will be forced to run around the game world clad only in his underpants. Almost every quest has a bonus if you do it without any equipment, in fact. - Fallout is notable, being fully sprite-based. Every armor in the game has its rendering for each of the available the player models, and each weapon is represented by the class model (small arms, spear, big arms, etc.) visibly wielded by characters. NPCs in the game are generally rendered according to the armor they wear. - And averted in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas where every armor used, even on NPCs will be shown and the same thing with the currently used weapon. - Final Fantasy X had most of its cutscenes rendered via the in-game engine, and thus changes to weaponry were acknowledged; armor, meanwhile, was handled entirely via shields and other small items. Weapons rarely ever appeared in the prerendered sequences. - Similarly, in Final Fantasy XIII-2, the cutscenes show changes to Noel's and Serah's equipped weapons. - In Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time this trope is averted, as any armor, helmet or weapon you equip on any character actually shows, although you can't remove any of these, so no running in the nude or fighting barehanded. However no matter what a character is wearing, the icon of their face (next to their HP and MP on the top screen) remains the same. - Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles has a semi-aversion with its weapons, but much like the above the clothing does not change. However, this was changed in the sequel Ring Of Fates, the first DS entry. Every piece of equipment you equip changes how the on-screen characters look. - Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light boasts an aversion of this: weapons and armor equipped will change the character's model to match. - Gothic, where the player character's changes of clothing show up in-game and in cutscenes, and the Mentor putting on his old armor is a FanServicey nostalgia moment in Gothic II. Unfortunately, if the player for some reason decided not to wear the magic armor during the final boss fight in Gothic, this created a plot hole at the start of Gothic II where it's revealed that the armor saved his life when the cave collapsed. - Zig-zagged in the Inazuma Eleven series. Each character has a 3D model for close-ups and a separate miniature (2D sprites in the first three games, replaced by 3D models in Inazuma Eleven GO) for more distant camera angles. The miniatures play the trope straight, but the close-up models avert it; shoes and goalkeepers' gloves are all texture swaps, and accessories are added to the model. - Seen in the Kingdom Hearts series: - Kingdom Hearts: in the in-game cutscenes, Sora will be holding whatever Keyblade he has currently equipped (occasionally causing problems with clipping if it's one of the larger or oddly-shaped ones). In Kingdom Hearts II, it'll also show whatever Drive Form he's in. However, a few select cutscenes in the numbered titles play it straight: - In the first game's ending, Sora is shown to be using the Kingdom Key regardless of which Keychain you have equipped. \|\|This is because it's one of a pair, and Mickey has the other one on the other side of the door.\|\| - In the scene before the Battle of the Thousand Heartless, Sora, Donald, and Goofy have their default Kingdom Key, Mage's Staff, and Knight's Shield. This is because the cutscene has all thousand Heartless in it. - Also played straight throughout the whole of Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, where Roxas always has the Kingdom Key in cutscenes despite the Gear you may have equipped on him. - The series' various Theater Modes always use default loadouts, because you're accessing them from the menus and they can't refer to your current save file. - In terms of actual equippable clothing (which consists of bangles, rings, ribbons and other similar objects that are more akin to jewelry/bling than anything else) don't show up on either Sora nor any of his companions. - Knights of the Old Republic shows different types of weapons and armor as different models, though some are just different-colored versions of similar armor or weapons. You can, in fact, strip your character to their undies, and it happens at least once in each game whether you want it to or not. You even start both games in your undergarments. - Knights of Xentar takes the aversion to the logical extreme. Not only do the various types of armor, shield and weaponry you can equip show up on your character in battle (and, for that matter, when wandering around the map) — but if you de-equip everything, your characters do, indeed, fight in the nude. Including that cute sorceress. It's little quirks like these that help to make the game a perfectly valid RPG, if you can get past the fact that every five minutes you'll be staring at a pair of badly drawn breasts. - On the other hand, Ultima VII (and part two, and the expansion, and part two the expansion) have nude sprites available for the protagonist, which are shown at certain points as required by the plot, but cannot be accessed by simply removing all of your gear. - The game series Kouryuu Densetsu Villgust — when a character gets a full set of next-level equipment, their battle sprite changes (usually just colors, but in some cases a headband or extra armor gets added) to reflect it. However, only in the equipment screen is each piece of equipment rendered (in a Paper Doll style) — in battle, if you have all the members of the "blue" set and a "green" helmet, for instance, you usually still appear green. - Legend of Legaia. Every weapon and armor was represented. In fact, you had numerous different types of armor along with those weapons, so as you progressed through the game, you got to see the characters in constantly changing outfits, though these outfits would mostly match the base clothes in style. You didn't get anyone in the nude, as the default armor was what they wore outside of combat, but considering how old the game is, it was a refreshing change to see all the different armors and weapons shown in battle. Not to mention that the equipment could look genuinely intimidating. Yes, even Gala's battle earrings. - The sequel, Duel Saga, only has different models for the characters' weapons. Characters who don't use weapons have no changes whatsoever. - The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age reflects every change you make to your party's equipment, no matter how mismatched. - In Mass Effect, every armor suit and gun is individually rendered. However, your squadmates do still show up in their starting armor in a few cutscenes when they are not currently selected as active party members. Some of the alien squadmates will also show up in default armor while on your ship, the others wear either civilian clothes or crew uniforms. Private Jenkins' model, however, doesn't change based on his equipment. Given that the only ways you can have different items to give him are a New Game Plus (where you know not to bother) or using cheats, this is definitely reasonable. - In Mount & Blade and the CRPG mod, all the different types of weapons and armour are clearly or somewhat distinguishable, considering there are hundreds of each this starts to matter very little, as most of armours or weapons of the same class tend to be pretty much the same with only slight differences. Its again not as helpful in multiplayer and even worse in CRPG as anyone wearing armour which has a metallic colour on it is probably too armoured for you to have hope of beating with your handful of rocks and pitchfork. All the horses have different appearances but are all the same to a player on foot as they attempt to dodge the instant kill lances. - Neptunia won't show your armor (as they're just bracelets and other rings), but any changes to your weapon, accessories, outfits or processor parts for the CPUs will appear in battle. - Neverwinter Nights changes characters' models for armor and weapons, though the game isn't detailed enough to do anything more. - In Neverwinter Nights 2 most, if not all, equipment appears on the characters, and magical weapons will usually have a relevant magical effect. Certain pieces of head equipment, such as circlets, also appear on the character portrait. - Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous display all equipped gear on the character's model with very few exceptions, mainly that scrolls, magic rods, and potions equipped in belt slots for use in combat are represented generically. - This is mostly the case in Persona 3 during mission sequences (outside of missions they wear whatever is appropriate), but every character has a couple of outfits that change the character model's clothes as well. For instance, females can wear the High-Cut Armor, and each also has a separate maid outfit. When you assign these armors to the characters, they tend to get a...bit...flustered. Some of the unique male armor also gets a less dramatic reaction (since none of it is anywhere near as Fanservice friendly). Note that this only happened in the FES version — while the outfits do exist in the vanilla game, you can only get the reactions from the characters while their clothes stay the same. - Persona 4 is only a little better; while the characters in Persona 3 have seasonal school uniforms and summer vs winter day clothes, they always go adventuring in their winter uniforms. However their weapons are all unique, with the ultimate weapons being extra cool-looking. The cast of Persona 4 actually do go adventuring in their summer uniforms if they're wearing them in the game (though you still can't go adventuring in their holiday clothes). - 4 is pretty good about this: the gang use their school uniforms to smuggle equipment into Junes (The big department store that the gang likes to use as a base because it houses the safest entry to the TV world) because Youske and the protagonist once got arrested for waving around weapons in there. This is actually a fairly conceivable Handwave, as all the armor is usually magical or wearable under clothing, and most of the party members carry weapons that can be easily concealed. Nevertheless the Protagonist somehow sneaks enormous swords/baseball bats/golf clubs into Junes and Kanji is even worse. His first buyable weapon is a DESK. - In the remake, Persona 4 Golden, "Outfit" became a seperate equipment slot and each character could wear different outfits that they had previously purchased or received, including swimsuits, holiday wear, and more. - In Radiata Stories, every armor changes Player Character Jack Russell's appearance, including in cutscenes. This can be anything from ordinary street clothes to giant suits of armor. - Siege of Avalon shows every piece of equipment you put on your character except for the Hand equipment slots, which are presumably either worn under the Gloves slot (and too small to see when not wearing gloves) for rings, or just not shown for books and scrolls. There are a couple dozen different garments and pieces of armor for each armor slot, and at least twice that for the weapon slot, even ignoring the ones that look the same but have different stats. - Sudeki averts this completely, partially by virtue of each character only having 3 sets of armor (that are awarded at fixed points in the plot, no less), but each weapon has its own unique model, appearance, and in the case of ranged weapons, projectile. Some, like the Chainsword, even have their own noises. - Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology averts this to such a degree that equipping a piece of armor that would theoretically cause major overlap issues on your character automatically de-equips the offending piece(s) upon equipping the new one — with each change shown on your character's model, remembering how large each piece actually is comes in handy. - Wild ARMs 5 has pieces of armor which will change the character's model. - All equipped gear in Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is visible on your character model, in both the gameplay and cutscenes. It's also accurately reflected in the flashbacks. Understandably though, any flashes of prophecy in the future will use the character's current models as opposed to the impossible task of attempting to predict what equipment the characters will be wearing several hours of gameplay down the line when that scene in question actually comes into play. - Xenoblade Chronicles X CAN play this straight at the player's discretion, thanks to fashion gear. Got some gear that has awesome game breaker skills but makes your characters have one out of place arm? No worries, just attach the equipment you wish displayed under the fashion gear tab and that's the equipment that will show up on the character model. There's also fashion gear (things like hoodies, trousers, Dragon Ball scouters, business suits and skimpy bikinis to name a few) which is intentionally made for this tab, as most of them have terrible stats and hardly useful skills. This can result in some Narm when an intense cutscene plays and you've got the party members or your character wearing a bunny girl bikini suit for example - Weapons-only aversion in the Disgaea series. Armor isn't shown, but every single weapon (except the Fist-type and monster-type weapons) has a unique sprite. Also, each weapon can be either legendary, rare or normal, and the sprites are recolored to show this. - Played Straight and Averted depending on which Fire Emblem game you're playing. Some of the Fire Emblem games use one or two sprites/models for all weapons (Fire Emblem doesn't have "armor" as an item, basing defense purely on a character's stats) of each type in-battle, while others have unique sprites for each weapon. The first two games and portables generally fall in the former, while the SNES and later(non-portable) games fall in the latter. Interestingly, in the games where a single design is used regardless of the particular weapon a character has, the design itself tends to be different according to the class of the character using it, leading to two characters using the same weapon having it appear completely differently in-battle. - In addition, the portraits of the characters do not reflect when the characters are promoted into an advanced class. Only few characters has different portraits when promoted like Ike from Ranger to Lord. - Jagged Alliance games altered the characters' appearances based on the weapon types they were equipped with although pistols and SMG's looked identical, same as shotguns and rifles. The armor equipped, however, had absolutely no effect on appearance, which became rather ridiculous when the mercenaries were technically wearing full Spectra outfit, complete with a helmet and a gas mask, yet still appeared to wear the same t-shirt they had at the beginning of the game - X-COM: - The Godfather 2 averts this. Upgrades you get from owning certain business types, such as body armour and knuckledusters, are clearly visible on your character. - Excellently avoided in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, in which you can change the main character's clothes and hairstyle, give him tattoos, and even alter his basic body shape (though this last is a long process, involving overeating to get fat or exercise to get muscular). Any changes to the character's appearance are worked seamlessly into all of the game's cutscenes. Body armour, on the other hand, is invisible, even if you are naked from the waist up. - Oddly averted in Grand Theft Auto IV. When Niko \|\|confronts Dimitri in the Revenge ending, the weapon he holds in the pre-execution cutscene is the same one you used to get the last hit. What makes this weird is that many players used the rocket launcher for its area-effecting ability to get around cover, so in the cutscene, Niko walks up to point blank range and waves the launcher in Dimitri's face like it's a pistol.\|\| Aside from that, the game works the same as its predecessor. - Similarly, when facing \|\|Pegerino 2 missions later (in the Revenge ending), no matter what weapon you were using in the preceeding firefight Niko will have an AK-47 in the scene (even if you had the Carbine Rifle, which takes up the same weapon slot as the AK)\|\|. - In the end of Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned \|\|no matter what pistol you have when you reach Billy, Johnny will be holding the automatic pistol in the scene\|\|. - In Grand Theft Auto V, body armor is invisible. In Grand Theft Auto Online, however, any character that's supposed to have armor on will be seen having the appropriate type of armor over their shirt. Wearing a jacket can cover it up. - In Minecraft, every piece of armour you wear is shown on your character's model. A full set almost completely covers it, kinda making all that painstaking skin design a waste of time. - Similar to the San Andreas aversion above, Saints Row 2 incorporates ridiculous levels of character customization, including four separate layers on the chest alone, all of these changes will be visible in cutscenes along with six different voice sets for the player character. But, it does play this trope straight in one very bizarre way. Throughout the game you can obtain alternate handguns, shotguns, assault rifles and the like, but, while every cutscene will accurately depict your character in almost every way, their weapons are prescripted. This can (and does) result in the player character using pistols they aren't carrying on a fairly regular basis. - Scarface: The World Is Yours. At one point you chase down and confront the evil \|\|Sheffieldm your lawyer\|\|. The death scene plays out differently depending on what you use but oddly, only three ways are available at this point. Using your opponent's clearly seen weapon is not possible, sadly. - In Spore, not only is equipment shown in the later stages, but you have to put it on yourself.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneSpriteFitsAll
Curb-Stomp Battle - TV Tropes "One blow...that was all it took. One blow delivered by some of the mightiest sinews in existence, fueled by anger and guilt and need, laid low all twelve of the heroic attackers. It happened so fast that Thok was not even sure Brutaka had moved. But the proof was strewn on the chamber floor before him in the forms of six half-dead Toa Nuva and six possibly very dead Matoran." A fight that's extremely one-sided, where one side just absolutely trashes the other with little-to-no effort. Commonly used as a way of establishing a character as being very strong, especially if the person on the receiving end of the beating is known for being very rough and tough. The name comes from the act of forcing someone to lie down in the street and bite the curb, then stomping on the back of their head. This could be very humiliating, especially if they were to die. Even if the victim were to survive, they may be missing some teeth and have a severely broken jaw. Sometimes, this is played for humor; other times, it tends to be a Moment of Awesome. Sometimes, it actually makes sense by the logic of the story, but writers use Third Act Stupidity to avert it. Compare Pendulum War, which is where sides take turns to perform this trope upon each other. In Professional Wrestling, this frequently overlaps with Squash Match. In video games, see Flawless Victory. Breather Bosses, Zero-Effort Bosses, and Anticlimax Bosses are the types most likely to be on the receiving end of a Curb-Stomp Battle. If this is done to the heroes, on the other hand, it becomes a Hopeless Boss Fight, often from a Hero Killer (or is at least a sign that you're going to have to do a lot more Level Grinding to get past that Beef Gate). Compare No-Sell, where one side thoroughly wins because they can shrug off whatever the other can do. Contrast Story-Breaker Team-Up. If the curbstompee manages to get a few good hits in to show that he or she is not totally helpless, it's a Curb-Stomp Cushion. A No-Holds-Barred Beatdown is similar, but much more realistic, brutal, and violent. And more importantly, the ignominy of such a beatdown will often fall on the aggressor in the end. Foes that manage to withstand such a beatdown, even one in private (though for realism's sake, this is usually averted) often get double the incentive if it's a matter of forcing their opponent to say "uncle", especially in a fight that's inevitably going on someone's permanent record. A curb-stomp battle that's heavy on Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs may actually turn into a no-holds-barred beatdown (but it's just as possible for a curb-stomp battle to be over in a few separate blows, if not just one, whereas a no-holds-barred beatdown is always a prolonged smorgasbord of violence). Also compare Single-Stroke Battle, which are also one-sided, but are decided by the attacker using a single move to win rather than drawing it out. See also One-Man Army. One-Hit Kill is a subtrope that's Exactly What It Says on the Tin. A subtrope for elections is Landslide Election. There Is No Kill like Overkill is often the result of a Curb-Stomp Battle. Often paired with The Worf Effect, which it amplifies. ## Examples: <!—index—> <!—/index—> - In episode 21 of Pleasant Goat Fun Class: Sports are Fun, Wolffy easily beats Weslie and Tibbie in a badminton game with almost no effort at all. He gets tons of points before Weslie and Tibbie get a single point. Weslie and Tibbie proceed to do the same to him and get even. - The Simple Samosa episode "Sumo Momo" is about Samosa being challenged to fight a wrestler named Sumo Momo. Unfortunately for him, Sumo Momo is way stronger than he is, and as a result Samosa is defeated easily... 93 times in a row. Subverted when Sumo Momo cracks the tip on the top of Samosa's head, which ticks him off so much that he attacks Sumo Momo like a madman over it and ends up winning the fight. - In the Russian folktale The Death of Koschei the Deathless, Prince Ivan first hears of warrior queen Marya Morevna when he comes upon an army completely wiped out by her forces. After travelling some distance he came to a field where a host of soldiers were lying dead. And he called: If there is any man left alive here, speak up and tell me: who killed all this mighty force? Just one man was left alive, and he answered. All this mighty force was killed by Maria Morevna, the beautiful queen. - Smooth McGroove's Pokémon theme parody is sung from the perspective of in-game Pokémon trainers who try to fight the Player Character using their crappy teams, only to be beaten badly. The music videos shows a poor lv. 13 Pidgey falling to a Hyper Beam from the player's lv. 70 Mewtwo. - The initial battle against Scorpius in Sequinox sees the team barely scratch her because of her armour. \|\|By the time Autumn lands a decent hit, she's already killed Winter and Spring and quickly proceeds to kill the other two girls. Fortunately, they come back and put up a better fight while powered up.\|\| - As noted in the page quote, Brutaka, one of the most powerful BIONICLE characters ever, actually did this during his time as the co-Big Bad of the 2006 story. As an example of his immense strength and power, he instantly defeated and nearly killed both the Toa Nuva, who are already powerful enough, and the Voya Nui Resistance Team with just one swing of his Rotating Blades. Fortunately, before he could continue, Axonn and the Toa Inika came, and Brutaka was also betrayed by the Piraka who temporarily stole his powers. - Dies Irae: - Any battle Reinhard partakes in becomes one of these horrifically one-sided affairs. Special mention has to go to the battle against Methuselah in that for most of the battle, Methuselah didn't even realize he was facing down one of these and believed that he himself was delivering one upon Reinhard and that his legions stood no chance, only for Reinhard to finally start trying a little after Wilhelm manged to get Claudia back from Methuselah and promptly ending the battle in a single strike, much to Methuselah's disbelief. - Reinhard is not the only one capable of dishing these out, either. The Schreiber vs Wilhelm battle is perhaps one the most brutal, with Wilhelm trying futilely to hit Schreiber, only to get thoroughly trashed and eventually killed in return. - The protagonist of Double Homework has a fight with Dennis in the final chapter. The protagonist starts by throwing Dennis out of a second-floor window. Then, after Dennis miraculously lands softly and starts running away, the protagonist chases him down and beats him up. All the while, Dennis is out in the snow in his underwear. - Fate/stay night had its own share of Curbstomps as well. \|\|Archer vs Berserker\|\| stands out for being a curbstomp on both sides. \|\|Archer\|\| gave 5 curbstomps in a row, but sustained sufficient injuries doing so that when \|\|Berserker\|\| went in for round 6 it was really a lost cause, with the final victor being \|\|Berserker\|\|. - At the climax of Heart of the Woods, the true Fairy Queen faces off against the Big Bad, and destroys the latter with a single spell. This even happens in one of the bad endings, in which the Fairy Queen is fatally wounded at the time but still manages to kill the Big Bad with the last of her strength, showing just how great the difference between them is. - In Silver Crisis, the main protagonist, Lucas, constantly has him on the receiving end of this due to his status as the load, with one of the most notable instances being his fight against Bowser, \|\|which ends with him begging him to live\|\|. - This is also a recurring trope for the story as the heroes on the whole are usually on the receiving end of this for any battle against Silver or Ganondorf, \|\|assuming Captain Falcon or Claus arent around\|\|. But even then, those exceptions are subverted towards the end of the story.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneSidedBattle
One Super, One Power Set - TV Tropes A superhero or supervillain has a weakness, has Power Incontinence, is a Badass Normal, but still just a normal person. But wait! Here's this Kryptonite-Proof Suit/Powered Armor/Protective Charm etc. that can fix that! Not going to happen. Status Quo Is God. This trope deals with the Fridge Logic that inevitably arises as superpowered beings and thus the various means to create those beings become more and more commonplace in a particular fictional universe, it also means that ways to remove Kryptonite Factors, turn Badass Normals into Empowered Badass Normals, or just ways to make a hero or villain more effective and unstoppable in general pile up, yet despite this those beings will stay with the same powers and abilities they've had pretty much since their creation. For instance, if a hero has water based powers and a weakness to electricity, expect them to rarely if ever wear rubber when fighting an opponent that uses it, or if the hero is a Handicapped Badass in a universe where plenty of examples of healing magic that can fix anything, has good or better than the original prosthetics, Powered Armor, etc. that are common or even easily accessible, don't expect them to ever use them. This trope doesn't necessarily have to involve weaknesses or disabilities either. If a Super is already powerful and could use various means to become even more powerful, and doesn't, that also fits this trope. Part of the issue seems to be that western comics (DC, Marvel) in particular are especially beholden to Status Quo Is God: the company owns the characters, the characters are part of a larger shared setting, and as writers come and go, characterization can only change gradually. By contrast, in Manga and more independent works, there is typically an overall narrative that a single writer is trying to convey. That's why Next Tier Power-Up was once called Shōnen Upgrade: it's not that Spider-Man never gets new powers, it's that he has to lose them within the year, or new readers might be confused. If the power-up involves Power at a Price, the Godzilla Threshold, or any other sort of negative consequences, are rare and difficult to pull off, or unique, it is justified and thus Not This Trope. This trope only applies if there is no logical reason in universe for why either the heroes or the villains to only have the same powers and use the same gimmicks they always have despite not only the ability to make themselves better, but the fact that such abilities are common. This also includes when the Super refuses the improvement when offered. Compare Holding Back the Phlebotinum and Never Be a Hero. Other causes may be Forgotten Phlebotinum, Forgot About His Powers, or possibly even Depending on the Writer. Related to Kryptonite-Proof Suit. Disposable Superhero Maker and Superman Stays Out of Gotham are also related to this trope. ## Examples: - Justified in Buso Renkin. Using a different kakugane from your normal one just produces the same buso renkin with different styling. Likewise homunculi can't gain new powers; all they can do is train to use the ones they already have more effectively. However, the Sorting Algorithm of Evil averts this; normally the most dangerous monster is a humanoid homunculus with a kakugane; this gives them all the benefits of both homincili and buso renkin (animal types are still limited to their animal instincts, and have to stick to natural weapons). \|\|Subverted with Kazuki, whose kakugane is eventually revealed to be a special black kakugane that produces a new buso renkin with different abilities.\|\| - One Piece has a good example, too: Similar to the Buso Renkin example above, Devil's Fruit abilities are stated to never get stronger per se, but you can discover new and better ways to use them. It is also a rule that you can only use one, that you'll die if you try to gain a second, but Blackbeard seems to have found a way around that. - Played straight by most of the eponymous warriors in Claymore, who develop their special yoki techniques early in their careers and rely mainly on them for the rest of their lives. Completely averted, however, by the main heroine, Clare, who keeps picking up various techniques as the story progresses and thus gets to play in the highest supernatural league despite having relatively weak yoki potential. - Possibly justified, since most warriors with signature techniques are powerful enough to not encounter opponents that would necessitate improvement. In general, the trope is averted by \|\|the Seven Ghosts, due to their 7 years' time hiding and training: Miria develops a less youki-based phantom technique, ridding herself of the number-of-uses restriction she had before; Helen learns Jean's drill sword technique, building off of her own extendible arm technique; Deneve adopts Undine's dual-wielding combat style, supplementing her amazing recovery powers; Tabitha gains youki-sensing abilities akin to "God-Eye" Galatea; Cynthia learns the youki-synchronizing technique and develops a healing technique; Yuma gets good at throwing swords like javelins, and many chapters later is also able to learn Cynthia's healing technique; and Clare, as mentioned above, gains a variety of techniques throughout the series.\|\| Other than that, however, almost no introduced characters develop their abilities or styles, or adopt new ones. - Batman is the head of Wayne Enterprises, has fought against and alongside many superpowered beings that possess advanced technology, use magic, and have reliable and effective mutagens. Despite this, he has been, and most likely always will be, only a mere Badass Normal Crazy-Prepared genius detective. This is usually justified by any powers he does happen to acquire either going to his head or simply not being something he feels he needs to keep long-term. Robin: So, how was it? Using that ring [Green Lantern's]? Batman: Not my style. - Superman and Supergirl have a weakness to Kryptonite. They also have access to Kryptonite Proof Suits. You'd expect them to wear it pretty much all the time or at least line their costumes with lead to reduce the effects. However, Clark or Kara bring it out only when they're fighting a villain that specifically uses Kryptonite as a weapon and expect it in advance. It's because the suit is fragile relative to the power levels of both Kryptonian heroes and many of their foes. What they have done on more than one occasion is try to get rid of the Kryptonite since its supposed to be rare but more just keeps showing up. - Barbara Gordon -Batgirl- becomes crippled by The Joker in The Killing Joke, and remains crippled from then on until the New 52 reboot. This is despite the fact that people with superpowers that can heal any injury, Powered Armor, Magic, and others exist all over the DC Universe that can fix or replace her legs with but a phone call. In fact, Batman himself had his spine broken in Knightfall, but quickly recovered. This is given the somewhat hamfisted justification that Barbara deliberately refuses to embrace the metanatural options she has for undoing her spinal damage because she doesn't want to be "special" compared to all the other crippled humans in the setting. Even after she is cured, she is shown wangsting over it. - X-Men: Professor Xavier has tried many times to restore the use of his legs, but when he does succeed, he becomes crippled again before long. - Most times that a superhero or supervillain is held prisoner, there is a Power Nullifier in action. Most of the prisoners find a way to get rid of them, but they seem to work well in their original purpose. So, what about the heroes who want to be normal? There is an easy way for Cyclops to get rid of the sunglasses, for the freaky-looking mutant to seem like a regular joe, or for Rogue to have a lot of sex: just try the new mutant trend, the power-nullifier collar, and do as you want! And if you need your powers for something, just take off the collar and that's it. Usually justified as paranoia about how an individual could hack or steal the nullifier and use it against the super when they need it. - Following The Other arc, Spider-Man acquired enhanced strength, the ability to communicate with spiders, organic webbing, and retractile stingers in his wrists, among other powers. Post- Brand New Day he's gone back to his original powers, and the augmented ones have gone to his clone Kaine. This was justified by the vastly negative reaction Spidey's fans had to his new powerset, which ranged from "nonsensical" (spider-talking, retractile stingers) to "obvious cash-ins on the movies" (organic webbing). - Jubilee (Marvel Comics): The title character was one of the mutants depowered by the Decimation event in 2006, and lost her original power set of pyrotechnic energy blasts. She returned as a tech-based hero named Wondra who worked with the New Warriors, and then in 2010 she became (of all things) a Vampire in the Curse of the Mutants storyline that lasted a good eight years. Then, at the beginning of 2018, her original power set and mutant status was restored. Many here happy with it, mainly because turning her into a vampire was mostly done to cash in on the Twilight fad more than anything else and it made little sense to keep her the same after said series faded from public consciousness. - The Reckoners Trilogy: Played straight and inverted. All Epics have a specific powerset, and the powers are usually at least thematically related (though not always). The interesting part is that in the rare cases of two Epics having an identical powerset (mostly with twins), it soon became apparent that there is literally one powerset that they are both using at the same time. Whenever one of them uses their powers, the other suffers great pain and can sense the location where the power is being used. Therefore, twin Epics almost always murder each other sooner rather than later. Furthermore, \|\|this turns out to be the secret between the Magic-Powered Pseudoscience of "motivators." A minor cell culture of an Epic is put in an incubator that motivates it with a carefully calibrated electrical charge. The powers themselves apparently can't tell the difference between a tiny cell culture and a real person, so with the right electrical charge it will produce the power just as easily as a real Epic. The only problem is that living Epics can sense that as well, so motivators are made almost exclusively from dead Epics\|\|. - Wearing the Cape: Due to the way powers are obtained, this is almost universal. People "break through" when in an incredibly stressful and life-threatening situation, and receive powers to deal with the situation, based on what they consider an appropriate response, plus whatever they need to survive their new powers. Therefore, powers generally follow some very clear types and trends. One of the easiest ways to prove you're not a shapeshifter is to demonstrate a power besides shapeshifting—shapeshifters with anything like Super Strength or Playing with Fire are so rare as to be functionally nonexistent. - One early episode of Angel had the title character acquire a ring that grants vampires immunity to sunlight and makes them all but invulnerable. Wow, Angel, you'd be able to do a lot of good with that ring, wouldn't you? Certainly he could, but during the episode, many evil vampires try forcibly taking it from him, and he realizes that as long as it continues to exist, they're going to keep trying, and if they succeed just once, the world is screwed. Between that and the threat of him losing his soul and becoming Angelus again, he decides it's better to destroy the thing. - Zig-Zagged in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Sam "Falcon" Wilson received Captain America's shield from Steve Rogers at the end of Avengers: Endgame, but chooses to give it up at the start of the series: he donates it to a superhero exhibit at the Smithsonian, only for the US government to turn around and hand it to a new Cap, John Walker. Walker is later removed, and Sam takes back both the shield and the title of Captain America, on top of using a vibranium version of his wingsuit. - At least two superhero games, Champions and Villains & Vigilantes, have specifically advised players not to significantly change their PC hero's powers. Champions has also advised players to not get rid of their PC's weaknesses, because they help to define the character. - Averted with inFAMOUS 2. While in the first game Cole is stuck with his lightning powers and nothing else, inFAMOUS 2 allows Cole as part of the storyline to use a machine to copy either fire or ice powers from two other superpowered people, depending on his alignment.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneSuperOnePowerset
One-Two Punchline - TV Tropes Twice is nice! Right? A comic trope in which either the two last panels of a strip each contain a punchline, or the last panel contains double the punchlines for double the fun. This sometimes takes the form of crossing the line twice. The penultimate panel is often a sight gag or take, and if this is true, then the last panel may add a spoken punchline to this. Conversely, the spoken punchline may be in the penultimate panel with a Wild Take or Gross-Up Close-Up added as the second punchline. Related to Escalating Punchline. For webcomics, Alt Text is frequently used as a way to convey the second punchline. ## Examples: - Often used in Pearls Before Swine, especially in the pun strips, in which the first punchline is a contrived pun after a long setup, with the second being someone, usually Rat, reacting with annoyance. - Calvin and Hobbes: Bill Watterson was fond of these, with Hobbes adding another punchline on the far right of the last panel, often a mockery or lampshade hanging on what Calvin was saying. - Doonesbury was the first newspaper comic strip to regularly use this, and was directly or indirectly the inspiration for most modern uses. - The "two punchlines in last panel" variation is frequently seen in Cul de Sac. - In Political Cartoons an additional punchline / comment is sometimes supplied by an Author Avatar drawn in the last panel or in the bottom left. Currently satirized by The Onion's "Kelly".	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneTwoPunchline
One True Threesome - TV Tropes First Guy: Tomoko... I love you. Tomoko: I... I... Second Guy: But Tomoko, I also love you. First Guy: But now two of us love you. Who will you choose? Tomoko: ...Why don't we all just... fuck each other? You know, just... one big fuck pile. [Beat] Second Guy: ...Yeah okay. First Guy: Sounds good to me. In any given fandom, if there is any Shipping going on at all, there will usually be a particular couple substantially supported by both the Canon events of the series or story, and the general consensus of the fandom regarding Fanon. Even if some parts of the fandom aren't thrilled about the nature of the relationship, it's generally agreed that the relationship does exist and cannot be easily ignored. These unbreakable couples usually (but not always) consist of The Protagonist and their Love Interests, though they're often seen among villain groups as well. What makes this relationship unique can really only be decided by the individual viewer, and they are called OTP: One True Pairing. In some cases, love rivals may compete for a single love interest, and the fandom is wholly divided over which one most deserves to get the girl or guy, with large fandoms developing into factions devoted to one relationship over another. Or it may just be a matter of a standard Love Triangle or a particular corner of a Love Dodecahedron where, because romantic relationships usually consist of exactly two people, one of the competing parties is eventually going to be disappointed. And sometimes, because of Fan Dumb, this can go overboard and cause Ship-to-Ship Combat. In a display of Take a Third Option, some fans adopt the concept of the OT3: the One True Threesome. It's just like One True Pairing, except that there are three characters involved; most often this means the Hero, the Love Interest, and one of their best friends with whom they've both had homoerotic subtext at some point. That way everybody's happy, the sex is kinkier, and no matter who's involved, there's always a little homoeroticism happening. It's like Give Peace a Chance, only instead of Peace, it's Three-Way Sex. While these groupings are most often the result of combining two other disputed couples, there are some examples of characters who simply group together in this way without the fandom splitting them into pairs; Power Trios are especially ripe for OT3ing. OT3s are a part of shipping. The in-universe subtext that fuels said shipping goes under Threesome Subtext. If they're in a canon relationship, you're looking at Polyamory. As a philosophy, polyamory may be present in shipping as well. Note that, while not necessarily covered by this exact trope, sometimes fans will go even further and have an OT4, OT5, etc. Not under any circumstances to be confused with the most notorious part of the Church of Happyology. ## Examples <!—index—> <!—/index—> - Harpie Lady Sisters, Queen's/King's/Jack's Knight, Dark Magician/Dark Magician Girl/Dark Magician of Chaos (feel free to substitute with other magicians), pretty much anything remotely human in Yu-Gi-Oh! that comes in threes. - Some fans of Peanuts have suggested this as a way to resolve the Marcie/Charlie Brown/Peppermint Patty triangle. - The Book of Life: - Joaquin/Maria/Manolo (better known as Tres Leches) is pretty popular since all three are great people who remain good friends even after the whole Triangle thing gets resolved. Even Jorge has admitted to loving◊ the ship, occasionally posts pictures on his Tumblr, encouraged stories for it at least one, and joked about it being his original intent! - Joaquin and The Adelita twins too, due to the twins showing a lot of interest in him near the film's end, mixed a bit with Pair the Spares. - In Corpse Bride, Victor ends up learning to love Emily enough to want to join her in the Afterlife after believing his chances with Victoria are over. And Emily loves Victor enough to step aside and push him back to Victoria (who dearly loved Victor to begin with). ...Oh well, there's always the Afterlife. - Frozen: - Kristoff/Anna/Elsa (or "Kristelsanna" as it's called). Most Elsa/Anna fans like Kristoff too much to bash him much, so he's either made into Anna's platonic best friend or added into the Elsanna action. More rare is Anna/Kristoff/Elsa, which doesn't involve incest. - Due to their cameo, Rapunzel and Eugene from Tangled get shipped in various threesomes and foursomes with Frozen characters. Much of it is Kissing Cousins due to the fanon that Rapunzel is Anna and Elsa's first cousin. - In Inside Out, Fear, Anger, and Disgust are all shipped together by some fans, especially after the absence of Joy and Sadness from Headquarters in the film caused the three emotions to have to work together to try and help Riley. - While the Luca fandom is still picking up speed, no one can deny that Alberto/Luca/Guilia would work as a ship given that all three of them have wonderful chemistry on a platonic level. - The Princess and the Frog has Naveen/Tiana/Charlotte for those who think Tiana and Charlotte would make a cute couple but don't want to tear apart the Official Couple. It helps that both Charlotte/Tiana and Charlotte/Naveen tie up Charlotte's plot-thread about wanting to marry royalty. - From The Road to El Dorado, Chel/Tulio/Miguel for those that like the Miguel/Tulio paring but don't hate Chel. It helps that both Tulio and Miguel go slack jawed when around her, or that Chel flirts with both about equally, and of course there is Miguel and Tulio's relationship. Considering the ending, it's almost-sorta-kinda canon! - Toy Story: - In Toy Story 3 after \|\|Bo Peep got Put on a Bus\|\|, Woody/Buzz/Jessie became quite popular. \|\|It was implied to be canon in "Spanish Mode"\|\|. - Woody/Bo/Buzz/Jessie has also picked up in popularity. Toy Story 4 gave it a large boost after Bo Peep was reintroduced. - Turning Red: Some fans do consider Miriam/Mei/Tyler to be a valid option instead of Mei/Miriam or Mei/Tyler. - Descendants has a few possible options. - Pre-series stories sometimes have the core V Ks involved with each other. This can evolve into their canon love interests (primarily Ben, Doug and Jane since they appear and were confirmed in the final film) being brought into the relationship. - Ben/Mal/Uma and Mal/Ben/Audrey have followings though more the former. - Jay/Carlos/Jane. Lonnie may be thrown in here as well. - Ben/Mal/Evie/Doug, mostly due to the girls' chemistry with each other and the actors behind Ben and Doug having a great bromance. - The series "Package Deal" explores a relationship developing between Mal, Ben and Evie, as Mal and Evie were girlfriends back on the Isle of the Lost and Mal asks Ben if he would be willing to 'share' her with Evie as she can't give either of them up. The subsequent series explores how Ben and Evie become involved with each other beyond their existing bond with Mal, Mal affirming in a talk with the Fairy Godmother that, in contrast to the idea that fairies can only have one true love, she considers Ben and Evie to be her only partners rather than consider one 'above' the other. - Uma/Gil/Harry. - The Devil Wears Prada has Miranda/Andy/Emily as the most popular threesome pairing. It covers two very popular pairings, that of Miranda/Andy and Emily/Andy. It has also been known to sometimes become a foursome, and include Serena. It has the most fanfics of any threesome on Archive of Our Own. It's also very popular on YouTube to make a video about the three. If you are more into crossover pairings, there's Miranda/Andy/Cruella de Vil, which is surprisingly popular. - Do Revenge: While Eleanor/Gabbi make up a fairly popular Official Couple and Eleanor/Drea are the Fan-Preferred Couple with plenty of Homoerotic Subtext, a lot of fans ship Drea/Eleanor/Gabbi together rather than shipping Eleanor with either on their own as a way to avoid Ship-to-Ship Combat. It helps that Gabbi defends Drea following her and Eleanor's fight and Drea helps Eleanor win Gabbi back, making it easy for fans to assume Gabbi and Drea get along with each other. - Ferris Bueller's Day Off: Ferris is dating Sloane. Ferris has Ho Yay with Cameron. Cameron has Ship Tease subtext with Sloane. All three actors have wonderful chemistry, and it's clear that all three characters love and care for one another above all else — even Ferris, who is extremely selfish, obviously cares a lot about Cameron, and swears he'll marry Sloane. Of course these three get shipped together. - Inception: - Arthur/Ariadne/Eames is quite popular. As is Arthur/Ariadne/Cobb. - Cobb/Mal/anyone isn't the most popular combination, but it makes a lot of sense, metaphorically speaking, as \|\|Mal exists only inside Cobb's head at this point.\|\| - The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015) has Napoleon/Gaby/Illya, fueled by their chemistry as co-protagonists, the Napoleon/Illya Ho Yay, Illya and Gaby's canonical attraction, and Napoleon's flirtiness. - Marvel Cinematic Universe: - The Avengers: Having unexpectedly copious amounts of Tony Stark/Bruce Banner Ho Yay, along with expectedly copious amounts of Steve Rogers/Tony Stark Ho Yay, some fans have resolved this with an OT3 that's worth it for the Portmanteau Couple Name alone: Stark Spangled Banner. - Similarly, those wanting to run with the Steve/Tony Ho Yay but not wanting to break up Tony/Pepper go with Pepper/Steve/Tony and those who want Tony/Bruce go with Tony/Bruce/Pepper. - With the release of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, this expanded to include any combination of the foursome Steve/Bucky/Sam/Natasha, and any variant combinations with the pairings above. - As the two loves of Steve's life, Steve/Bucky/Peggy is also popular. - Since the release of Captain America: Civil War, many fans have happily rolled Stucky, Steve/Sam, and Sam/Bucky together into one big Steve/Sam/Bucky OT3. - And with the two biggest pairings in the fandom being Steve/Bucky (Stucky) and Steve/Tony (Stony), some fans Take a Third Option in this shipping conflict and ship Steve/Bucky/Tony (Stuckony). - What do you do when you can't decide between Clint/Natasha and Clint/Coulson? Why, you ship Strike Team Delta, aka Clint/Coulson/Natasha! - Peter Parker has two within the fandom as well. Peter/MJ/Ned and Peter1/Peter2/Peter3. - More recent fics such as "Tingle" and Spider-Man: Finding Home have introduced the new pairing of Peter, Yelena Belova and Kate Bishop, exploiting Kate and Yelena's obvious connection and their likely bonds with Peter as spiders and street-level heroes. - Others solve the problem by the simple expedient of letting the entire cast of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have a wild orgy. - Patchwork ends with Jennifer and Ellie 'killing' Madeline's personality and then having Garrett brought back to life, creating the possibility for them to have this kind of relationship as Jennifer and Ellie remain active in their shared body and each appear fond of Garrett at least. - Pirates of the Caribbean: - Red Notice: Hartley and Booth have lots of Ho Yay, but Hartley and Sarah also have some good relationship subtext going on \|\|and are actually lovers\|\|, and all three of their actors have great chemistry with each other. Most fans' solution to this is just to ship all three of them together. - Since the Holmes/Watson/Mary love triangle is pretty much canon in Sherlock Holmes (2009), it's no surprise some fans have taken to OT3ing them. The three of them do seem quite cozily domestic with each other in that last scene... Irene is sometimes added to the mix as well. - The fandom of Singin' in the Rain loooooooves Don/Kathy/Cosmo. Don and Kathy are the Official Couple, and have great chemistry, but Don and Cosmo's bromance is also pretty Ho Yay-heavy, and rather than evolving into a Friend Versus Lover situation, Kathy and Cosmo get along great. In particular, there's one really cute scene that the fandom has latched onto with shipping goggles, where Cosmo and Don share a Man Hug, followed by Don kissing Kathy... which is then followed by her pecking Cosmo on the cheek, who gets so embarrassed he falls over. So a lot of fanfic authors make them a triad — everyone wins! - In Skyfall James Bond seduces Severine, the villain's kept woman. The villain Silva caresses Bond while he has him tied to a chair. Later, when Severine enters the picture again, Silva greets her by saying, "Darling, your lover s are here." This has led to not a few fics positing a ménage à trois in the event of Bond joining or being forced to stay with Silva. - Sky High (2005) has a surprising amount of Will/Layla/Warren fics, given the amount of Die for Our Ship going on in the fandom. - Star Trek (2009): - Kirk/Spock/Uhura. McCoy often becomes a part of this arrangement too. - Supported by Paul Gadzikowski's fan comic The Hero of Three Faces (story arc starting here). - Star Trek Into Darkness adds more fuel, marketing them as the main Power Trio. In the 2009 movie, Kirk's interaction with Uhura consisted of her clearly rebuffing his attempts to hit on her. Now they're on decent enough terms to discuss her relationship with Spock, and one scene is described elsewhere on this wiki as "a three-way lover's spat". - The sequel resulted in a lot of threesomes involving John Harrison \|\|aka Khan\|\|, mostly John/Kirk/Spock. - Star Wars: As a trilogy of trilogies, each about a trio, this is no surprise. - The original trilogy: Luke/Han/Leia, before... you know. Though that hasn't stopped a lot of fans from continuing to ship that particular OT3. And the incest can always be muffled a little with Han serving as the vortex, and a buffer. - The prequel trilogy: Obi-Wan/Anakin/Padmé (Obianidala) totally. The Novelization of Revenge of the Sith almost makes it canon, with Palpatine explicitly stating that Anakin's choice isn't between the Jedi and the Sith, but whether or not he loves Padmé more than Obi-Wan. - The sequel trilogy: Poe/Finn/Rey (Jedistormpilot). Between Finn's Love at First Sight with Rey and the instant bromance that forms between him and Poe, this pairing took off faster than the Falcon making the Kessel Run. - For a Foe Yay Shipping example, there is also Rey/Kylo/Hux (sometimes abbreviated as Reylux), since Rey/Kylo is pretty much the closest thing the sequel trilogy has to an Official Couple, while Kylo/Hux bitter rivalry is seen by their shippers as a form of Belligerent Sexual Tension, and Rey/Hux is surprisingly quite popular, presumably due to their actors' chemistry. - Flynn/Lora/Alan is a Running Gag in TRON fandom, backed up by the fact Lora dated Flynn before marrying Alan. However, few are actually brave enough to write it. - Venom (2018) has Eddie/Anne/Venom, thanks to the canonical Eddie/Anne relationship and the copious amounts of Ho Yay between Eddie and Venom, \|\|culminating in a scene where a Venom-possessed Anne makes out with Eddie to transfer the symbiote back to him.\|\| Anne's fiancé Dan will occasionally get thrown in to make it a foursome, given how well he and Eddie get along. - Almost Night uses this to solve the conflict between Ed and Bocaj. - For The Chronicles of Narnia, Peter/Susan/Caspian and Edmund/Lucy/Caspian are fairly popular, particularly because of the movies. There is also Susan/Caspian/Lucy, although it's rarer. - In Deltora Quest theres Lief/Barda/Jasmine. - The Eagle of the Ninth has Marcus/Cottia/Esca. - Guenevere/Arthur/Lancelot in The Fionavar Tapestry and probably plenty of others. - The GONE series has the Devils trinity, which consists of Drake/Caine/Diana. This ship is popular, mainly because these three characters have many conflicting (and popular) ships, like Cake (Drake/Caine), Caina (Caine/Diana, actually canon) and Driana (Drake/Diana). - It might well have solved some fairly major problems if the setting of Gone with the Wind had been one in which an Ashley/Melanie/Scarlett One True Threesome had been a possible option. - Harry Potter: - Harry/Ron/Hermione, the three main characters. - Harry/Ginny/Luna is a popular pairing, even being named Flaming Nargles. - James/Lily — being kind of important as a couple — are often paired with Lupin, Severus, Sirius, or occasionally Regulus depending on the author's favorite '70s era student. - When it comes to Marauders shipping, Fan-Preferred Couple Sirius/Lupin might be joined by either James or Tonks, with the added bonus that Sirius and Tonks are cousins. - Lunar Harmony (Harry/Hermione/Luna) has a relatively small but dedicated fanbase. - Ginny/Hermione/Luna also has some fans. - Harry/Hermione/Draco combines three of the most popular ships (Harmony, Drarry, Dramione) - DGB (Draco/Ginny/Blaise) has a popular following, and Hermione/Draco/Blaise has become mildly popular in smutfics. - Hermione/Snape/Lucius and Hermione/Snape/Lupin are popular for those who like older men. - Some other themed OT3s are Bellatrix/Lucius/Narcissa (Death Eaters) and Katie/Alicia/Angelina (Gryffindor Quidditch Team). - For the Hurog duology, Tisala/Ward/Oreg is very, very popular. To the point that there are almost no fanfics about other pairings. The Ho Yay between Ward and Oreg is just that obvious. And as Tisala is the most badass woman of appropriate age, there is no serious competition for her. - The Infernal Devices has Tessa/Will/Jem. - Very nearly canon in The Lions of Al-Rassan with Ammar/Jehane/Rodrigo. - The Lord of the Rings: - There's Arwen/Aragorn may be joined by either Boromir or Éowyn. Throw Faramir in the mess for extra points. - Éomer/Aragorn/Faramir, or Legolas/Aragorn/Arwen, or even Aragorn/Arwen/Frodo. - Legolas/Aragorn/Éomer, Aragorn/Faramir/Boromir and OT4 Sam/Frodo/Merry/Pippin. - Rosie/Sam/Frodo isn't as popular, probably because Rosie barely appears in either the books or movies, but it's out there. Considering that \|\|Rosie and Sam kept taking care of Frodo after they got married\|\|, this one works really nicely. - Aragorn/Legolas/Gimli has its fans. They manage to stick together through practically the entire journey. - The Maze Runner has Thomas/Newt/Minho as its most popular threesome pairing, with tons of fanfics for it. The three are the most popular characters, share lots of Ho Yay all around, and have great chemistry with each other. It is made up of three popular ships: Thomas/Newt, Thomas/Minho, and Newt/Minho, and helps to avoid any shipping wars. Fans have also been known to either throw Teresa in or have her replace Minho. - In Les Misérables fandom, there is the technically canon threesome of Joly/Musichetta/Bossuet, and in some fanfics the main love triangle is solved by shipping Cosette/Marius/Éponine. - The Moomins: Moomintroll/Snufkin/Snorkmaiden is a very popular three-way ship. Moomintroll's canon Love Interest is Snorkmaiden, but Snufkin also gets a ton of Ho Yay with him, to the point where it's debated whether it's actually intentional Homoerotic Subtext note : Supported by how the author of The Moomins, Tove Jansson, was bisexual and sometimes included subtle queer themes in her stories and making Moomintroll/Snufkin the Fan-Preferred Couple. Those who can't decide which pairing they like best often just do both at the same time. The liberal atmosphere of Moominvalley also makes it easy to imagine that the characters would be accepting of polyamory. - Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Percy/Nico/Annabeth has its followers in the fandom. - A Song of Ice and Fire: - Theon/Jon/Robb (abbrev: THEJOBB) seems to be popular. Jon and Robb are close; Robb and Theon are close; Jon thinks Theon is an asshole, and we know what that means... - Jon/Tyrion/Dany has its followers. Considering that Jorah told Dany she needs 2 husbands, it's not out of the question. - Jon/Robb/Sansa is also popular, as is Daenerys/Jon/Sansa (which has the bonus of resolving a lot of Ship-to-Ship Combat). It helps that Jon, Robb, Sansa, Theon and Dany are all Launchers of a Thousand Ships. - For those who believe Lyanna and Rhaegar to be Jon's parents it is not unheard of to find Rhaegar's wife Elia Martell being not just okay with it, but involved as well. - The Star Wars Expanded Universe gives us Jaina/Zekk/Jag, which almost became canon in the Dark Nest Trilogy. Ben/Taryn/Trista (hinted at), Zekk/Taryn/Trista (also hinted at), Ben/Jacen/Tahiri (we could ship... on Ship!), Luke/Corran/Mirax (Luke even hinted as such in I, Jedi.), Luke/Corran/Mara (more Stackpole subtext, which is not very subtextual unless it's Ho Yay but a lot more subtextual than his spiritual heir Troy Denning), Ahsoka/a clone/another clone. - some The Stormlight Archive fans have decided to find their own ending to the love triangle with Kaladin/Shallan/Adolin, or even Shallan/Adolin/Kaladin. - In Further Tales of the City, Anna Madrigal jokes that Mary Ann, Brian, and Michael are her favorite couple. The trio really don't mind this notion at all. - Laurence/Granby/Tharkay in Temeraire is quite popular. Meanwhile fanfic that only pairs Laurence with one person tends to have shades of this anyway, since Temeraire must be taken into account. - The Truth has the Newspaper OT3 of William/Sacharissa/Otto. - The Twilight Saga: - Obviously enough, Edward/Jacob/Bella. Even in the first book, there's Ho Yay between Edward and Jacob. Then Breaking Dawn gave us Edward telling Bella she could have as many kids as she wanted with Jacob. - The relatively popular Alice/Bella/Edward, Alice/Edward/Jasper and Edward/Bella/Carlisle. - Its weird that there isn't more Edward/Bella/Rosalie, given that Carlisle and Esme initially hoped to set Edward up with her, and the way Rosalie and Bella get quite close in Breaking Dawn. - From the wolves the most popular ones are Jacob/Embry/Quil and Jacob/Seth/Leah. - Warrior Cats: - The Love Dodecahedron practically asks for this. Firestar + Sandstorm + Spottedleaf neatly solves all the drama caused by Firestar's love for both she-cats. Although Spottedleaf being Sandstorm's aunt might squick some shippers. - Crowfeather + Feathertail + Leafpool is nearly the exact same situation as above, with Crowfeather having first loved one she-cat, then another after the first died. - Squirrelflight + Ashfur + Brambleclaw could make Squirrelflight not have to choose between the two toms. - Squirrelflight/Brambleclaw/Stormfur works quite well, as both toms were interested in her in the second series, and were also close with each other during their journey. Stormfur even joined ThunderClan for a while. - Graystripe + Silverstream + Millie has its problems (the two she-cats never met) but both love Graystripe a lot and what with all three of them inevitably sharing StarClan together, it's less crazy than it sounds. - Hollyleaf + Ivypool + Blossomfall became reasonably popular on sites like Tumblr. - Water for Elephants: August/Marlena/Jacob definitely has some appeal. This will really take off once the movie comes out, since it stars Robert Pattinson, Christoph Waltz and Reese Witherspoon. Curiously similar to Sophie's Choice, since both \|\|older males have volatile tempers due to mental health problems, both younger men are sort of 'adopted' into an established marriage and both younger men end up sleeping with the woman.\|\| - Wings of Fire: Moonwatcher/Qibli/Winter is a fairly popular solution to their Love Triangle in the second story arc. - On Archive of Our Own, The Shield (Dean Ambrose, Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns) is the OT3 for both WWE and professional wrestling in general. Combinations of any of the two is the One True Pairing. - The Undisputed Era was originally a trio - Adam Cole, Kyle O'Reilly, and Bobby Fish - and were very, very close, constantly hanging all over each other. It became a true Power Stable and foursome with the addition of Roderick Strong. Cole himself dubbed he, Bobby, and Kyle "the OT3" in a promo once, and while he is One of Us, he likely meant that in a platonic manner. Maybe. - The Bible: - David/Jonathan/Michal. - Some churches will outright state that God is a third party in any sanctified marriage, although it is not intended to imply anything sexual. - Classical Mythology: Achilles/Patroclus/Briseis, Hercules/Iolaus/Alcmene, Zeus/Hera/Ganymede, and Persephone/Adonis/Aphrodite. Hades (Persephone's husband) can also be thrown into that last one. - The Epic of Gilgamesh: Gilgamesh/Enkidu/Shamhat. - Maybe Loki/Sigyn/Angrboða from Norse Mythology relationship is this. - The basic idea behind the "Two Ladies" number in Cabaret. - The ending of A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder seems to at least imply this, as the Love Triangle between Monty, Phoebe, and Sibella never really gets resolved. - The Phantom of the Opera: - While Christine is almost unanimously shipped with the Phantom, some ask why she couldn't have chosen both her Victorious Childhood Friend and her Stalker with a Crush. (Hell, the Phantom probably would've taken anything he could get...) - Additionally, Phantom/Christine/Meg in the fanfic/fandom zone. Two girls? Joys of the flesh indeed. I don't hear the Phantom protesting too hard... - In Wicked, a great deal of the tragedy that unfolded could have been avoided if Elphaba/Fiyero/G(a)linda had become a threesome. Considering Fiyero was with both Elphaba and Glinda at different points in the story, and Elphaba and Glinda's strong bond with each other is by far the most important relationship in the play, it's not too hard to scrounge up enough evidence to make a case for it. - Sometimes in opera, the usual "tenor and baritone fight over the girl" plot can be spiced up with a bit of Ho Yay, making this this ideal outcome (if only everyone survived). The Metropolitan's 2016 productions of Les Pecheurs de Perles and Roberto Devereaux stand out as examples—and, coincidentally, they featured the same tenor and baritone. - Ace Attorney: - Danganronpa: - The "Trial Point Getters" from the first two games seem to be this. The first game has Makoto/Kyoko/Byakuya while the second game has Hajime/Chiaki/Nagito. - Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: - Chihiro/Ishimaru/Mondo, charmingly called Chishimondo. There is also a canon example in the case of \|\|Naegi/Aoi/Hagakure/possibly Togami\|\|, in the bad ending at least, but it's rare to see that in fandom. - Makoto/Kyoko/Hina is occasionally seen as well, especially after Danganronpa 3 did some Ship Tease both ways. - Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair has a love triangle between Sonia Nevermind, Kazuichi Souda, and Gundham Tanaka. So, of course, some fans like to ship all three together. - Keeping up the theme of The Protagonist, The Love Interest, and The Rival, Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony gives us Kaede/Shuichi/Kokichi. V3 also adds a new one in the form of Shuichi being paired with Kaito and Maki, affectionately called the "Training Trio". - Strongly implied canon for one of the endings of Date Warp with Janet/Linds/Rafael. - Higurashi: When They Cry: - Mion/Keiichi/Rena is without a doubt the most popular. They're close friends and it helps fix their love triangle. Keiichi canonically likes either one depending on the arc as well, so it makes sense he could love both at once. Mion and Rena get along well as well, so it's easy to ship them together. - Shion/Mion/Keiichi usually happens when people enjoy the twincest subtext between Mion and Shion but also ship Keiichi/Mion. Shion/Keiichi/Mion is also popular because Keiichi is very similar to Shion's canon love interest, Satoshi \|\|who is in a coma throughout the franchise and presumed dead\|\|. - Rika and Satoko have a close Homoerotic Subtext filled relationship while Hanyuu probably knows Rika better than anyone else. Obviously Satoko/Rika/Hanyuu is a thing. - Katawa Shoujo: - Lilly/Hisao/Hanako, or, in some fictions, Lilly/Hanako/Hisao or Hanako/Lilly/Hisao, is the most popular OT3. Lilly and Hanako are noted to be extremely close, both appearing frequently in the other one's route, and it's even reflected in how you get onto their routes — most walkthroughs lump the two together, as the paths to the two routes are identical up until the final choice before the route lock. - Hisao/Shizune/Misha have their shippers, coming in second. \|\|It helps that it's a canon love triangle as Misha is in love with Shizune.\|\| - Emi/Hisao/Rin, while rarely seen in fanfiction, is pretty popular in art pieces, due to people enjoying their interactions. - Fanfiction "pseudo-routes" about pairing Hisao with background students Miki or Suzu originated a somewhat popular shipping for Miki/Hisao/Suzu, or even Hisao/Miki/Suzu or Hisao/Suzu/Miki and its own set of fics. - Nasuverse: - Tsukihime: Shiki/Arcueid/Ciel and Shiki/Hisui/Kohaku are the most common. Both somehow supported even canonically. First in Ciel Good End where Arcueid and Ciel effectively and begrudgingly "share" Shiki. There is much teased at, but unconfirmed attraction between the two of them. Second is the main theme of Kagetsu Tohya's sidestory Flower of Thanatos in which Shiki together with humble servants Hisui and Kohaku lives in the isolated Tohno Mansion, where Shiki practically can do with both maids whatever he wants, and Kohaku is very enthusiastic when they both serve him at the same time \|\|(including sexual desires, or periodic rapes) although it's not so simple as it seems and Shiki begins to have regrets\|\|. - With Melty Blood there is also Shiki/Akiha/Sion, notable as Sion is probably the only girl interested in Shiki Akiha gets along with. Or Satsuki/Sion/Riesbyfe as the Back Alley Alliance. - Fate/stay night: There are Shirou/Saber/Rin and Shirou/Sakura/Rider or Shirou/Sakura/Rin. Both are expanded at various levels in Fate/hollow ataraxia and many other associated works or materials, and are very popular in fandom. - Shirou/Saber/Rin is based on the Unlimited Blade Works route where \|\|in the Good End of this route\|\|, some fans believe that this is what was going on behind the scenes (doesn't hurt that Rin discovered that she is bisexual in the original Fate route while sleeping with Shirou and Saber). - Shirou/Sakura/Rider is based on the Heaven's Feel route, where Shirou \|\|is mind-raped by Rider disguised as Rin in the original game. Rider also stays with Sakura in the endings, and leaves it ambiguous whether she needs to replenish her mana without Sakura's knowledge, while it's openly stated that Shirou depends on Sakura to live his life.\|\| It's most evident in Fate/hollow ataraxia Eclipse story's The backside of Kibisis, \|\|in which they have a hot threesome scene, and although this turns out to be actually just Rider's illusion, it's clear how things are\|\|. - Shirou/Sakura/Rin is based on \|\|Shirou being with Sakura in the True End of Heaven's Feel, while Rin still has feelings for Shirou, even after she leaves for London alone. Interestingly while not confirmed, there are even hints of this occurring in the Normal End of Fate.\|\| - The protagonists of Zero Time Dilemma are conveniently divided into trios during the Decision Game, but one of these groups includes a kid and another turns out to be \|\|a woman and her parents\|\|, so Team C (Carlos/Akane/Junpei) naturally became the most popular threesome pairing. It's fueled by the fact that, in-universe, Carlos is really determined to get Akane and Junpei together, despite only knowing them for a few days, and often asks questions about their relationship. - City of Reality is a literal, and Deconstructed utopia, to the point where, when a person catches their spouse cheating, the natural and normal reaction is to join in. - Collar 6 gives us the canon couple of Sixx/Laura/Ginger. Made possible as all the girls were already into polyamory beforehand. - Dumbing of Age fans wasted no time in shipping Amber/Danny/Ethan once Danny was confirmed to be bisexual and attracted to them both. - There appears to be a number of El Goonish Shive fans that ship Sarah with one of the Official Couples of the comic, Tedd/Grace. She has received some Ship Tease with both of them, but she is \|\|or rather, was\|\| part of another Official Couple. \|\|However, given certain developments in the comic, she is now free to fulfill the wishes of the fans.\|\| - Given some additional traction by this (probably) non-canon "Sketchbook" page. And further Ship Tease when a Q&A claimed to be "out of space" to discuss it and a "Wrong Answers Only" Q&A wasn't prepared to give a solid "yes" in case it wasn't a wrong answer. And the NP story "Blanket" appears to be an extended riff on there being Only One Couch. - Girl Genius fandom has strong (although not exclusive) support for Agatha×Gil×Tarvek. While Gil's the more traditional Designated Love Interest and proposed to Agatha even before he knew her background, as Violetta points out, Tarvek is equally devoted to Agatha and would be a much less politically troublesome match. The Cinderella parody done in one of the interludes ending with Agatha-as-Cinderella marrying both Gil and Tarvek indicates that the writers think it's a perfectly reasonable resolution to the romantic plotlines. In-universe, it's been acknowledged as a possible outcome by several characters. The in-universe betting pool has Gil at 2-1, Tarvek 3-1, and Both at 5-1, showing just how likely some find it. - Gunnerkrigg Court: - Jack/Zimmy/Gamma has popped up among certain fans after a revelation or two in the comic. Mostly for laughs, but a few not so much. - When Jack is introduced with a girlfriend, Jenny, who refers to Annie with "my love," Jack/Jenny/Annie cropped up in response. note : She's from The West Country, and that's just how people talk there, but still... - Homestuck It's pretty common to see some love triangles resolved this way, creating pairings like Dave/Terezi/Karkat or Eridan/Feferi/Sollux. More unusually, because trolls in Homestuck canonically have four different kinds of romance and usually desire to fulfill all of them, it's common for OT3s to involve multiple different relationship types. (It doesn't help that one of said relationship types inherently requires a threesome.) Using the earlier example, it's not unusual to see people shipping Eridan, Feferi, and Sollux all in red relationship (that is, a normal human romantic one), but it's arguably even more common for people to ship Eridan and Sollux both in a red relationship with Feferi but in a black relationship with each other. Needless to say, fics with lots of different pairings and multiple quadrants for each character can get very... complicated. - John's Dad/Rose's Mom/Dave's Bro was at least popular in the fandom's early days (it didn't hurt that Mom/Dad was an Official Couple and Mom and Bro were Dave and Rose's biological parents). Things became complicated after \|\|the Scratch, wherein alternate versions of Mom (Roxy) and Bro (Dirk) swapped roles with Rose and Dave while Dad stayed the same\|\|. - The Law of Purple's Lette/Blue/Synn is pretty much canon. - Magick Chicks: When Faith tells Tiffany that she loves her, Tiffany counters by bringing up Faith's habit of sleeping around. So Faith said she'd agree to stop seeing other girls, if Tiffany asked her to. Tiffany considers it for a moment, then asks about Faith's boyfriend, Ash, which is where Faith drew the line and proposed they form a threesome instead. - Ménage à 3: According to some fans, Gary/Yuki/Zii (because Yuki is crazy-jealous respecting both Gary and Zii, and both Zii and Gary have expressed interest in each other at certain points, it seems like the relationship might actually be stable). - Questionable Content: - Siren's Lament: Lyra/Shon may be the official couple with Ian as the unlucky suitor for Lyra but the ship of Ian/Lyra/Shon set sail quite early on due to Ian proposing it. Ian trying to join in on a hug between the two before they started dating helped kick things off, and was reinforced by Shon carrying Ian bridal style when Ian nearly passed out and Ian's habit of flirting with Shon to annoy him, and Shon on at least two occasions responding in kind. - SomethingPositive: Davan/Vanessa/PeeJee, anyone? Vanessa has even stated that she would not be averse to such a set up... the author, on the other hand, is. Davan and Peejee will never be a canon item. - Camp Camp has a few possible triads, some popular and others not. They include - Max/Neil/Nikki - Max/Preston/Space Kid - Nerris/Harrison/Preston - Nerris/Ered/Nikki - Harrison/Preston/Max - Harrison/Neil/Max - Snake/Neil/Max - Tabbi/Erin/Sasha - Gwen/David/\|\| Jasper\|\|, albeit only possible in AUs. - Crossovers with Xray And Vav* can feature Gwen/David/Mogar and Hilda/Gwen/David/Mogar. - Helluva Boss: - While Moxxie and Millie are already an Official Couple that fans adore seeing express their love, there are a decent number of fans that like adding Blitzo to the mix, as not only does Blitzo express both familial and sexual interest in the duo (he outright shows in "Loo Loo Land" that he wants to have a three-way with them), the trio often act like a group of dysfunctional but caring parents towards Loona, who Blitzo is already the adoptive father of. - Some Blitzo/Stolas shippers threw Verosika into the mix after "Spring Broken", noting that she and Blitzo may not be completely over each other and that Verosika, being a succubus, may not care about Blitzo sleeping with other people. Meanwhile, even though Stolas and Verosika have yet to interact onscreen at the time of this writing, the subtle but unmistakable parallels between them have led a lot of these shippers to assume they'd get along like a house on fire. Not to mention the logic and appeal inherent in shipping two of the biggest perverts on the show with a succubus... - Not long after their debut, plenty of fans who like C.H.E.R.U.B took to shipping all members of the trio together, since whenever they show their true colors, their conflicting interactions provide prime Belligerent Sexual Tension bait. There are a few that go the Fan-Preferred Couple route with Keenie and Collin since her frequent aggression towards him makes for a good Tsundere dynamic, along with them both being sheep-angels, but Cletus acts as a good mediator for the two, along with how the show effectively dares the fanbase to ship them by having Blitzo call him a sheep-fucker. - Mystery Skulls Animated: Arthur is jealous of Lewis and Vivi's relationship, but the series is ambigous as to how; the fandom solves this by shipping the three together, though whether it's a complete or partial triangle depends on the writer. - Off the Page and into Life: - Henry loves Gail, Gail loves Henry, Terrence loves Henry, Terrence and Henry have a lot of Ho Yay, and Terrence and Gail sometimes veer into Foe Romance Subtext. Naturally, many people (both In-Universe and out) have pointed out that a threesome would solve a lot of problems. Gail, Terrence and Henry did not agree. (Ironically, all three muns for those characters have said they liked the idea.) - Gail's entangled in another OT3 with her best friend Meg and her boyfriend Morpheus. And with Jackson and Tim. And Sam and Henry. Gail gets shipped with everyone. - To a lesser extent, Frederick with his ex-girlfriend Gloria and Gloria's new girlfriend Emily. - ProZD's suggests this trope should happen when it comes to anime love triangles. Currently the page quote. - In the Red vs. Blue fandom, portraying Agents North Dakota, New York, and Washington as lovers is fairly popular. Being three of the nicest characters in a series full of clueless, bitter jerkasses probably has something to do with it. note : Of course, \|\|North and York being dead\|\| means that these tend to be either fix fics, occur \|\|before Project Freelancer fell apart\|\|, or take place in an alternate universe. - RWBY: - Blake had ship tease in the show with both Sun and Yang across the first five volumes. One solution to the fandom shipping wars between Blake/Sun (Black Sun) and Blake/Yang (Bumblebee) was to create the fairly popular ship Sunny Bees, consisting of all three characters together. - Once Volume 5 confirmed that Ilia used to be in love with Blake, threesome ships of Ilia/Blake/Sun and Ilia/Blake/Yang exist. However, the big solution, given the already existing Sunny Bees threesome, was to simply add Ilia into the mix and make it a One True Foursome. - Taiyang has two daughters by two different mothers who are two years apart in age. Both of their mothers were in Taiyang's team in school. Instead of arguing about whether Taiyang/Raven or Taiyang/Summer is the better ship, fans went for the threesome. This generated the meme "Entire Team, Qrow" due to there being no hint that Qrow was ever a likely love interest for Taiyang; the joke is that, as the only member left out of the ship, Taiyang must be determined to land Qrow and score the entire team. - Ruby Rose is most commonly shipped with Weiss Schnee, her Defrosting Ice Queen partner, and Penny Polendina, a Robot Girl to whom she is the first friend. After a moment in the Volume 7 finale where both Ruby and Weiss cuddle up to Penny at the same time to comfort her, Ruby/Penny/Weiss has become a common ship. - That Guy with the Glasses: - In Welcome to Night Vale there was clearly some sort of romance between Childhood Friends Cecil and Scoutmaster Earl, even if it was only one-sided. Earl apparently died in the episode he was introduced, but it wouldn't be too much of a stretch for him to come back and for their relationship to blossom. Except, Cecil's now in a committed and frankly adorable relationship with Carlos the scientist. This was the only logical conclusion for many. - Whateley Universe fandom has the triangles of Thunderbird/Chaka/Riptide and Stalwart/Fey/Bugs and Molly/Chou/Dorjee resolved this way (the latter was resolved by canon Polyamory). - Xray And Vav has Ash/Xray/Vav. "And so anime was solved forever!"	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneTrueThreesome
One-Steve Limit - TV Tropes Principal Skinner: Bart, I'm flabbergasted. Surely you knew as you were writing your own name in forty-foot-high letters on the field, that you would be caught. Bart: Maybe it was one of the other Barts, sir— Principal Skinner: THERE ARE NO OTHER BARTS!!! A pretty rigid rule that no two characters in a work of fiction (novel, movie, play, TV series, comic book, etc.) should share the same first name, or even similar-sounding names. If there's a Laura in the story, there will not be a Lyra; if there's an Ed, there will not be a Ted (this is sometimes discarded if the characters happen to be twins). If you wake up one morning and suddenly discover that you don't know any two people with the same first name and that your phone number begins with 555, you can safely assume you've fallen into a work of fiction. The rationale behind this is that the audience, actors reading a script and even the writer will get confused by multiple characters with indistinguishable names: "Wait, was it good-guy Steve or bad-guy Steve who launched the missile?" It's even common for scripts to avoid names of similar length and/or first letter. A strong dramatic reason to duplicate names can override the rule, as, for example, in the Jack Nicholson movie The Two Jakes, but it's so rarely done that audiences will pick up on it almost instantly. Unintentional duplication of first or last names also sometimes occurs when characters from previously distinct works of fiction meet one another, or when fiction is in any way using individuals from Real Life, or in sprawling, shared-continuity settings like the DC or Marvel Comics universes. It's probably more feasible to list the exceptions rather than examples. Usually when there are exceptions, there will be a storyline involving the characters being confused for each other. One possible way to avoid the issue, however, is for the characters with the same name to use different derivatives: James and Jimmy, Lizzy and Betty, Ted and Theo, etc. One could only wish this were Truth in Television, but as teachers know all too well, names go through cycles and depending on the era, a single class might have three Jasons, Michaels, Jennifers or Claras. Hence, this trope is generally considered an Acceptable Break from Reality. It is an Enforced Trope, however, within screen and stage acting. After a large number of mistaken identity incidents that caused actors to lose out on jobs to other actors with the same name or even where actors' careers were unjustifiably ruined because of a similarity note : one such case was that of the actor William Boyd. He had been a up-and-coming matinee idol in the late silent era, and was part of the Production Posse for Cecil B Demille. However, there was another screen actor named William Boyd, usually credited as "William (Stage) Boyd" who had gotten in trouble with the law for alcohol possession and drunkenness (this was during Prohibition) among other things. The reports did not differentiate which Boyd was under arrest, and a number of national newspapers, assuming it was the more famous Boyd, ran his photo in the stories. RKO, who had is contract at the time, fired him on the grounds of the morals clause, even though he had not committed the acts alleged. This stalled his career, though he finally won fame as the portrayer of Hopalong Cassidy, most theatrical unions require or at least very strongly recommend that members joining who have a name of a pre-existing member change it to something else. For instance, "Stewart Granger", born James Stewart, who changed his name to avoide confusion with the James Stewart, or Michael J. Fox, who joined the union when veteran character actor Michael Fox was still active — Michael J added the "J" (which stands for nothing outside of a tribute to Michael J. Pollard, his real middle initial is "A") to differentiate. This is also a problem in dubbing with "dubbed names". For example, Gomez Addams in Latin America is "Homero", just like Homer the Spider. Or a mobster named Bruno showing up in a Batman (who is known as "Bruno Díaz" instead of "Bruce Wayne") comic. The antithesis is Planet of Steves, wherein everybody is Steve. Compare One-Mario Limit, where the "Steve" is too famous for anyone else to use a similar name. Contrast Inexplicably Identical Individuals, where there is a whole bunch of interchangeable characters that look the same and may share the same name—or have very similar names. Also contrast Same Surname Means Related, which removes the possibility that "Steve" and "Tom, Dick and Harry" having the same last name is just happenstance (even if/when they share one of the most common last names in whichever part of the world their franchise was produced). While on topic, characters from a same family will obviously share the same surname so it's not an aversion of this trope. However, related characters sharing a same first name do count: In Real Life, the practice of a child being named after a parent is not unheard of, and while you may often see a character with "Junior" in their name, or a Preppy Name such as "Charles Reginald III", you will rarely encounter said character's parents. For moments where there's a one person limit for roles see Cast Speciation. See also Significant Name Overlap, We Named the Monkey "Jack", Identically Named Group, and Dead Guy Junior, for other ways characters can share names. <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other non-straight examples: - There was a time when the Yellow Pages ran a series of commercials showing a Visual Pun of a listing and then the listing. (A football player pounces on a fish being reeled in = Fishing Tackle, A group of men display their ability to perform a death scene for a director = Die Casting.) One such commercial shows a convention of men, all of whom introduce themselves as "Herb". What is the listing? Herbs (silent "h"). - Parodied by The Firesign Theatre on their album Boom Dot Bust, which takes place in a town called Billville, where everybody's name is Bill. - The Firesign Theatre are themselves an example—there are only four of them, and two are named Phil. They once made fun of this by referring to themselves as "Phil, Phil, Phil, and Phil." - For Better or for Worse: At least four characters were named Paul, although their storylines didn't overlap and they were never confused with each other by the other characters: Gordon and Tracey's son Paul Mayes; April's guitar teacher Paul Bergan; contractor Paul Gauthier; and Liz's boyfriend Paul Wright. There were also two characters named Susan whose storylines never overlapped — the first was one of Elly's supervisors at the library, and the second, Susan Dokis, replaced Liz as a teacher in Mtigwaki. - Funky Winkerbean has among its characters both band director Harry L. Dinkle and student-turned-mailman Crazy Harry. - Knights of the Dinner Table: - There are two characters named Bob: Bob Herzhog, one of the main characters, and Bob "Waco" Forzey, who works at Hard Eight Enterprises. It's easy to miss, though, since the latter Bob usually goes by his nickname. - The owner of the local gaming store is "Weird" Pete Ashton, who shares a name with Pete Skipowsky, another Hard Eight employee. And, like Waco, he's usually known by his nickname of "Skip." - Nancy: A character named Rollo had his name taken and put onto a character known as Marmaduke after a similarly named strip had appeared, causing some confusion for those who have picked up the first book of Fantagraphics reprints, where the little rich boy was named so. - Even then, John Stanley worked on the Nancy comic book series, where he was given a last name, Haveall. Yes, his name is Rollo there and then on. - Peanuts: The girl named Patty who was a regular character starting from the very first strip but eventually stopped appearing is a different character from Peppermint Patty, who was introduced years later but is much better remembered. - Retail: - Cooper exploits this trope when Stuart comes to fire both him and Val for violating the 'no workplace romance' policy by having a friend of his pose as a man also named Cooper and made it look like Val was dating him, making Josh (who reported them) look like a fool for the mistaken identity. - There were two Fionas in the comic: a girl who got lost in Grumbel's, and Marla's daughter. The former might very well have influenced the name of the latter, as it was watching the first Fiona while waiting for her mother that made Marla decide she wanted children. - In Safe Havens Maria Hamper was named after Maria Novello, the time traveler who delivered her. \|\|They turn out to be the same person.\|\| - The general lack of names in fairy tales makes this problem rare, but when Joseph Jacobs collected Kate Crackernuts, both of the princesses were named Kate. He changed one to Anne to avoid confusion when he published it. - In Grimms' Fairy Tales, Snow White from Snow White (princess pursued by her evil step-mother, helped by seven dwarfs) is not to be confused with Snow White from Snow-White and Rose-Red (helps a bear who turns out to be a prince, gets into trouble with an evil dwarf). Note that in the original German this problem does not exist as the former ("Sneewittchen") uses a Low German name, while the latter ("Schneeweißchen und Rosenrot") a High German one. Played with in Bill Willingam's comic Fables, where both Snow Whites were merged into a single character; this is also the case in the Dark Parables games. - In Russian fairy tale The Death of Koschei the Deathless, as well known as Marya Morevna, both the title character, Ivan's wife, and one of his sisters are Marya. But the wife is always referred to with the patronymic, so there's no danger of confusion. - In Barbie Big City Big Dreams, Barbie visits New York and meets a girl from Brooklyn who has the same exact first and last name as her (Barbie Roberts), thus they go by the nicknames "Malibu" and "Brooklyn" to distinguish the two. - In Horton Hears a Who! (2008), Morton mentions that the Kangaroo has sent Vlad after Horton. Horton inquires as to whether he means Vlad the Vulture, or Vlad the bunny who gives out cookies. (It's the vulture.) - For that matter, Horton and Morton are a subversion right there. - On a meta level, this might explain why the young kangaroo is named Rudy instead of the more-cliché Joey—they already had a JoJo. - The Ralph Bakshi version of The Lord of the Rings felt that the names Sauron and Saruman were too similar, and so Saruman was renamed to "Aruman". Although they still called him Saruman half the time. - In Mulan, the title character's mother is named Li, which also happens to be her Love Interest's surname. There's also a moment where Mulan practically references this trope: after causing trouble in the camp, the "son" of the Fa family is asked for "his" name and Mushu starts giving her suggestions, one of which is Ling, which Mulan points out is already another soldier's name and she eventually settles on Ping in the face of Shang's growing annoyance with her. - Averted in Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World: after her romance with John Smith, Pocahontas begins a new relationship with John Rolfe. Justified since these characters are all based on historical people (even if the John Smith part is probably just a legend). - Averted in Robin Hood (1973) with Prince John and Little John. Justified, as it's adapted from the original legends. - Frozen has a cross-media version. In the book A Frozen Heart, one of Hans' brothers is named Lars. The comic Frozen: Breaking Boundaries introduces an ice-harvester named Lars. - In Turning Red, this is Averted. There are two Aarons in 4Town, namely Aaron T., the group's comedian, and Aaron Z., the group's athlete and main dancer. - Godzilla: - Mothra vs. Godzilla: Both Nakamura the egg-loving reporter and Torahata the greedy businessman have the first name Jiro. - Destroy All Monsters: Gorosaurus was accidentally misnamed Baragon when he attacked Paris even though they look nothing alike. Justified for a reason, as the Baragon suit was going through modifications, was used for many monsters in Ultraman, and was still being repaired in the middle of filming. - In the Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)* novelization, there's another Rick besides Dr. Stanton working for Monarch, located at the outpost containing Scylla. And as of Godzilla vs. Kong, Dr. Chen (who is slated to return for the film) is no longer the only Ilene who's a relevant character. - Jurassic Park (1993): Mr. Arnold's first name received Adaptation Name Change to avoid confusion with Hammond. - Jurassic World: There are two Nick's (Letting and Kilgore) in the same scene at one point. - The Saw movies contain a couple of examples: In the first film, Dr. Gordon's wife's name is Alison, which is also Detective Kerry's forename. In the second, a main character is Daniel Matthews, which is also Detective Rigg's forename. However, we don't learn Rigg's or Kerry's first name until the fifth movie, soit's a subversion. Other examples include Mark, a victim in the first film, and later an antagonist from the third movie onward (Hoffman), and the surname "Young", shared by recurring character Amanda and one-off character Timothy. - In Brooklyn Tide, not only are there two characters named "Jonathan", but Jonathan Corbin and Jonathan Clay function as the protagonist and antagonist respectively, were former partners, and both have the initials JC. - A very important aversion in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice; Lex Luthor \|\|captures Superman's mother, Martha Kent, and threatens to kill her unless Batman's head is brought to him within an hour\|\|. Superman rushes off to Batman, not completely certain if \|\|he will end up asking for Batman's help, or simply kill him\|\|, but Batman doesn't spend a moment listening to him, and immediately tries to kill him. The battle eventually ends with Batman \|\|having his boot on Superman's throat, seconds away from killing him. Superman desperately chokes out "Save Martha"\|\|—and this makes Batman stop, because his mother was also named Martha, and her name was his father's last word as he died. - Alfred Hitchcock's classic Shadow of a Doubt stars Joseph Cotten as a Faux Affably Evil Serial Killer named Charlie, and Teresa Wright as his adoring niece, also named Charlie. - In Heathers, three of the lead cast are called Heather. As the name implies. - Die Hard has a duo of FBI Agent Johnsons. No relation. One even answers a phone, "This is Agent Johnson. No, the other one." Die Hard 4.0 has a callback with another Agent Johnson, and McClane reacts with alarm at the name. - In The Science of Sleep there is Stéphane and Stéphanie. - The Big Lebowski: The basis of the entire plot is that a slacker named Jeffrey Lebowski is mistaken for a millionaire of the same name. Nicknamed "The Dude" and "The Big Lebowski" respectively, to avoid confusion. - Pirates of the Caribbean had William Turner (Bootstrap Bill) and his son William Turner (Will). \|\|(And HIS son, William Turner the 3rd)\|\| Justified since it a common real life naming convention for fathers and sons. It's also used for a throwaway joke. Dead Men Tell No Tales retcons the name of Will and Elizabeth's son from William Turner III to Henry Turner, presumably to avoid problems with this trope now that he's a major character. - The Two Jakes, says right in the title that there are two primary characters named Jake. - Office Space has 'the Bobs'. \|\|And the Lumburghs.\|\| - Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade features a father and son pair of Dr. Henry Joneses, which is highlighted when a character greets, "Doctor Jones" and both reply. The younger Jones, however, prefers going by "Indiana" rather than his first name or "Junior." In the fourth film, there's a third Henry Jones. - Night of the Blood Beast may or may not have featured a team of scientists named "Steve", perhaps foreshadowing the IRL Project Steve. - The main character of Groundhog Day is named Phil and of course there's the groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil. Phil, with the typical Bill Murray Typecasting, loathes the rodent even more because of this fact. - My Big Fat Greek Wedding has a funny scene in which the father introduces the extended family. Just about everyone's name is a variation of Anita or Nick. Gus: Welcome to my home. Over here is my brother, Ted, and his wife, Melissa, and their children, Anita, Diane and Nick. Over here, my brother Tommy, his wife Anzie, and their children, Anita, Diane and Nick. And here, my brother George, his wife Freda, and their children, Anita, Diane and Nick. Taki, Sophie, Kari, Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick, uh, Nikki, and I am Gus. - In Goodfellas, Karen's narration at her wedding reception mentions the abundance of Peters, Pauls and Maries among the guests. - Pirates of Silicon Valley, about the early days of Microsoft and Apple, had three characters who were really named Steve—Jobs, Wozniak, and Ballmer. Risk of confusion was removed by using Ballmer's last name and Wozniak's nickname of 'Woz'. - Played with in the baseball movie Major League: Back to the Minors. Finding that he has two Juans on his team, the manager denotes them Juan 1 and Juan 2. A pitcher with a psychology degree comments about it possibly giving them issues. The manager asks if he'd like to be Juan 3. - Played with in The Hangover: Black Doug and White Doug. The fact that the main characters are looking for the latter, but other characters assume they're refering to the former, whom they lead them to instead, takes up a big part of the plot. - RoboCop (1987) have two Bobs, the OCP executive Bob Morton and a mook named Bobby. \|\|Both of them died rather messily halfway into the film\|\|. - Rocky: - The series has two "Duke"s: a good Duke who was Apollo Creed's trainer until \|\|Apollo died in Rocky IV\|\| and then became Rocky's trainer, and an evil Duke from Rocky Vwho is Tommy Gunn's manager in and just wants to make money out of him. Both Dukes are black. - Also, Rocky's son is Rocky Jr. - The Karate Kid (and Cobra Kai) has Jerk Jock Johnny Lawrence and his Evil Mentor, John Kreese. The latter is typically referred to simply as "Kreese" to avoid confusion. - The police station in Hot Fuzz has two Andys working there, whose last names are Wain wright and Cart wright. Both names have the same origin: they both mean "wagon maker" - The Terminator: - The Terminator kills two other women named Sarah Connor before targeting the future mother of John Connor. He had no idea what Sarah Connor looks like or exactly which one he's after, but does know what town Sarah will be living in, so he just goes through the phone book and ices each one on the list. The police quickly figure out his pattern because of this. - It's easy to miss, but the police detectives with the surnames Traxler and Vukovich have the same first name: Ed. - In Kingdom of Heaven, the producers purposefully changed the name of the historical Raymond of Tripolis to Tiberias because they were afraid the audience would mistake him for Reynald de Chatillon. - xXx has "The Ivans." - The Infernal Affairs trilogy has two women called Mary \|\|both of whom are successive love objects for Ming\|\|. - The Ju-on franchise has two characters called Kyoko. The first one, who has psychic powers and thus can sense that something is very, very wrong with the house, appears in the first two movies, and the second one is (arguably) the protagonist of the fourth movie. - Casino Royale (1967) has Sir James Bond pulled out of retirement, his name and number already given to the one we all know—spearheading a campaign against SMERSH, he gives all his agents (men and women alike) the name James Bond, to keep the enemy confused. - Enforced in The Golden Compass where Word of God changed Iofur's (pronounced like Yo-Fur) name to the much more evil sounding Ragnar because it sounded too close to Iorek (said as Yor-ek). - The James Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me has a brief aversion; besides Mr. Bond himself, a random sailor in the background during the Liparus shootout is also called James. British Lieutenant: (issuing orders to a few of his crew): "Andrew, James, Russell, Purvis, follow me!" - Averted subtly in Unforgiven where the protagonist is called William and the antagonist is called Bill (which is, of course, the short form of William). - Subverted in Letters to Juliet when \|\|two Patricias get confused as she thinks there is only one\|\|. - To clarify the above point, Sophie gets mistaken when \|\|Charlie introduces her to Patricia, recognizing the name of his ex-girlfriend. It turns out that this Patricia at the wedding was his cousin\|\|. - Also averted with Lorenzo Bartolini, as there were dozens of men with that name. - In Son of Frankenstein, the title character, Wolf Frankenstein, has a wife named Elsa; the sequel The Ghost of Frankenstein is about Wolf's brother Ludwig, who has a daughter also named Elsa. - The Hammer Horror films suffer from having a lot of characters share names. The Frankenstein movies have a seemingly endless line of guys named Hans, while the Dracula movies seem to have an infestation of Pauls. - Out On A Limb, starring Matthew Broderick, has a pair of brothers both named Jim. "We were named after different people though. I'm named after our Dad, and he was named after our Grandpa." - Inverted VERY deliberately in the 2006 film Inside Man starring Denzel Washington and Clive Owen. To confuse the police, victims and any potential witnesses, the members of a bank heist crew call each other differing variants of "Steve": Stevie, Steve-Oh, etc. The amazing thing is how smoothly they work despite this. - American Beauty: Lester: That's our neighbour, Jim, and his partner... Jim. - Sister Bridget cruelly enforces this in The Magdalene Sisters. When Rose introduces herself she says they already have a Rose and has everyone call her by her middle name, Patricia. Crispina's real name is Harriett, so we could assume there was another Harriett in the laundry as well. - Averted in Slumdog Millionaire where Jamal searches the name Latika in the phone listings and gets over 3000 results. Even when he searches Salim K Malik he gets six results. - Averted in Black Swan. The director's name is Thomas. One minor character—one of Lily's friends at the nightclub—is named Tom. - Averted in, of all things, Plan 9 from Outer Space. Jeff's co-pilot is named Danny, and Tor Johnson's character is Inspector Daniel Clay. This is probably just another case of Ed Wood's general problems with internal continuity. - Averted in Gerry with the characters Gerry and Gerry. One of the few examples where this doesn't get confusing because they're the only two characters. - Averted in Mystery Men, with the leaders of the Disco Boys being Tony P and Tony C. - Averted in The Public Enemy (1931): There are two guys named Patrick, but most of the time they're called Paddy Ryan and Pat Burke, so there's no reason to get confused. - Big Business stars Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin as two mixed-sets of twins. The two characters played by Tomlin are both called Rose, those played by Midler Sadie. - In Smiley Face, the protagonist's roommate is named Steve, as is her pot dealer. They are referred to as "Steve the roommate" and "Steve the dealer" respectively in the credits. - Totally shattered in the Finnish 1985 movie Calamari Union, which—depending on the source—features between 14 and 16 characters named Frank. - Subverted in the Star Wars movies, which feature the pilot Wedge Antilles, Captain Antilles of the Tantive IV, Bail Antilles (senator from Alderaan), Bail Organa (senator from Alderaan), Mace Windu (Jedi), and Mace (shipwreck survivor on Endor). However, confusion over the Maces is unlikely, since Endor-Mace wasn't in the feature films, but a non-canon TV movie. Word of God (that being George Lucas) is that, as exotic that it sounds to us, "Antilles" is supposed to be a last name as common as "Smith" in the Galaxy Far, Far Away. - There are also five canon characters named Ben: Obi-Wan "Ben" Kenobi, Ben Solo, Ben Neluenf, Ben Quadinaros and Ben Teene. - In Episode II, we see the death of Jedi High Councillor Coleman Trebor at the hands of Jango Fett. By Episode III, his seat has been taken by Coleman Kcaj. The characters are named after Industrial Lights & Magic employee Robert Coleman and his son Jack respectively. - Viva Maria!'s main characters are both named Maria. - Considering its size, the Friday the 13th franchise has done a remarkably good job of playing this trope straight over the years. There is actually only one instance of two characters sharing the same name in the same movie (victims "Jim" and "Jim Carlson" both appear in Part VIII), but considering that the franchise spans 12 movies with well over a hundred named victims, it's pretty much inevitable that a few names would be recycled across installments. The most commonly used root name to date has been "Rob", which has been given to five different characters (Rob in The Final Chapter, Robin in Part V, a different Robin in Part VII, Admiral Robertson in Part VIII, and Robert Campbell in Jason Goes to Hell). And yes, all five of them die. - Averted and a major plot point in Jennifer 8 \|\|in which a cop called John is investigating several murders of blind women; when a fellow detective who's carrying a wire confronts the killer, he shouts "Not you, John! Not you!" before getting iced. The murderer is a cop called John, but the hero's John Berlin, while the killer is John Taylor\|\|. - Disregarded out of necessity in the Icelandic film Útlaginn, which is based on Gísla saga Súrssonar. A common complaint among foreign viewers is that the characters more or less look alike and bear similar names. "Just when you've distinguished one character from another, he gets killed." - The Distinguished Gentleman: The protagonist swindles his way into Congress by invoking this trope, capitalizing on the fact that his name is very similar to a recently deceased Congressman. Nobody realizes that "Jeff Johnson" isn't the politician they are accustomed to until he shows up to give his acceptance speech. \|\|He decides to do it again at the end of the movie by running for President—his full name is Thomas Jefferson Johnson!\|\| - X-Men Film Series: There are a few aversions. - Subverted in The Book of Life. The film has characters named Maria and Mary. - Played straight out of necessity in the movie The Wrong Guys, which stars Louie Anderson, Richard Lewis, Richard Belzer, Franklyn Ajaye and Tim Thomerson as life-long friends and ex-Boy Scouts. The rule of The Danza is in effect for most of their characters, but Richard Belzer's character is called Belz (otherwise we'd have two Richards). - Played for laughs in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, where ALL the Lectroids are named John. - Zardoz has Arthur Frayn, almost always called by his last name, and Friend, whose first name is never given. A first-time viewing can be confusing, as the names are pronounced almost identically, and the two characters are close associates who are often mentioned when neither is present on screen. - Blood Work: James Cordell and James Lockridge (the latter is known as James Noone in the book). - Played for laughs in the French movie RRRrrrr!!!, where everyone - including women - is named Pierre (which is the French form of Peter). This is a play on the expression "L'Age de Pierre", which in French means either "The Stone Age" or "The Peter Age". They can still distinguish each other by name, as seen when the chief call its tribe's members one by one by name and they know which Pierre it is (they even notice when one of them is missing). - Averted on If Looks Could Kill: the protagonist is a Detroit high school student named Michael Corben, and there is an American super spy named Michael Corben. This confusion (made stronger because of the murder of Corben the spy before he can get on the same flight to Europe that Corben the teen was taking) creates the whole Mistaken for Badass situation that composes the plot (and when someone points out at one point that Corben is too young, the others assume that he's a Teen Superspy or an example of Older Than They Look). - Averted in Saving Private Ryan, the squad finds Private James Ryan and prepare to bring him home, telling him his brothers have been killed. The private then starts bawling and asks how his brothers died, but then mentions they're still in grade-school, prompting the squad to realize they'd run into James Frederick Ryan from Minnesota. Later on, on finding the right Private Ryan, Captain Miller makes sure to confirm he's actually James Francis Ryan from Iowa. - Used as a Red Herring in Final Destination 3. In one of the Spooky Photographs that Wendy took before the roller coaster premonition, she is wearing a McKinley (the name of the town and high school) shirt. Realizing this, she believes that Ian (after \|\|his girlfriend's death and his resulting Sanity Slippage\|\|) will somehow be the cause of her death due to McKinley being his last name, but \|\|he is killed before he gets the chance\|\|. - Averted in The Passenger where David Locke, the protagonist, shares his name with David Robertson, the man whose identity he assumed. - Transformers: - In the live-action films, a character named "Brawl" is erroneously referred to as "Devastator". This is fine and dandy, but he is called "Brawl" in his toys and licensed media. Then, Revenge of the Fallen introduces the Constructicons, a bunch of Transformers that combine to create a colossal Decepticon... by the name of "Devastator". - In Transformers: Cybertron, one of the Mini-Cons is named Thunderblast, which just so happens to be the name of a Decepticon in the same series. - The upper ranks of the Decepticons in media derived from Transformers: Generation 1 tend to include separate characters named Soundwave and Shockwave at the same time. - In the scope of the entire franchise, some names get used a lot. Most media will include most or all of the following: Optimus Prime, Megatron, Starscream and Bumblebee. Additionally, there was a point in the mid-2000s when around five toys were named "Prowl", and they represented anywhere between two to four different characters. This rarely happens with major characters, though, unless it's just to hold onto a trademark. Sometimes this gets complicated, though, as writers have a weird habit of retconning characters who share the same name as being the same person. - When Kevin James LaBrie joined Dream Theater, he dropped his first name and adopted James as his stage name, to avoid having two Kevins in the band (along with Kevin Moore). The band still had two Johns, however. And Mike Mangini has replaced Mike Portnoy as the drummer. - Deep Purple has had multiple singers, but the best known is Ian Gillan. The drummer is Ian Paice. - Our Lady Peace frontman Michael Maida became Raine Maida to avoid confusion with guitarist Mike Turner (and possibly just to be more memorable.) - Progressive metal band Symphony X has three Michaels: Michael Romeo on guitars, Michael Pinnella on keyboards and Michael Lepond on bass guitar. - Extreme metal band Dimmu Borgir once had three Stians: Stian Thoresen (vocals, better known as Shagrath), Stian Arnesen (bass, better known as Nagash) and Stian Aarstad (keyboards, no stage name). - The Mike Doughty song "27 Jennifers" plays with this trope: I went to school with twenty-seven Jennifers Sixteen Jenns, ten Jennies and then there was her. - The core members of They Might Be Giants are John Flansburgh and John Linnell. They are often referred to by fans as "the Johns." For almost five years, their touring band of Dan Miller, Dan Hickey, and Danny Weinkauf was often called "the band of Dans." In 2004, Dan Hickey was replaced by Marty Beller, introducing a third name to the group. - Australian Pink Floyd introduce themselves on stage as six Bruces, four Sheilas, and Rolf. - When Long Island band Taking Back Sunday replaced their lead guitarist and back-up vocalist for the second time, they ended up with two Matts, Matt Rubano on bass and now Matt Fazzi on guitar. They differentiate by last name. - The Rodney Carrington song "Fred's Riding Fred" parodies this, as the narrator is drunk (or stoned in some recordings) and can't remember the names of anyone in the story, so he names them all Fred. This includes the protagonist, the horse and the protagonist's girlfriend. - Helloween has Michael Weikath and had Michael Kiske. Weikath is frequently referred to as "Weiki" and Kiske is occasionally "Michi" (though "Michi" seems to be more a fangirl thing). - Partial example/subversion with Alice in Chains. The band had two bassists named Mike, but not at the same time. - Relient K has Matthew, John, Matthew, Jon, and ~~Matthew~~ ~~Dave~~ Ethan. - The Academy Is... has Mike Carden (rhythm guitar) and Michael Guy Chislett (lead guitar). Before Chislett joined the band, the very first lineup included Mike Carden and Mike DelPrincipe (drums). - The Cab had, at one point, three of five band members all named Alex—Alex DeLeon, Alex Marshall, and Alex Johnson. The latter two have since left the band, though. - Lacuna Coil has two Marcos, two Cristianos and a Cristina... and Andrea. - Placebo are a bit confusing with this, in that they replaced a drummer named Steve (Hewitt) with a drummer named Steve (Forrest). Also, the bassist's name is Stefan. - Led Zeppelin had a John (Bonham) and a John Paul (Jones). They did not have a John Paul George Ringo, however. - The Tea Party had two Jeffs (Martin and Burrows). - The Beatles had lead guitarist George Harrison and producer George Martin, which can lead to all sorts of confusion when you're reading about the production of certain albums. - Bruce McCullough from The Kids in the Hall had a song called "Daves I Know", each verse being about a different Dave (or David) from his life. - Marillion has two members actually named Steve: lead singer Steve Hogarth and lead guitarist Steve Rothery. They are often referred to as "h" and "Rothers" respectively to avoid confusion. - Def Leppard have two "Rick"'s, Rick Allen, the drummer, and Rick Savage, the bassist. Rick Savage is differentiated by the nickname "Sav". (Interestingly enough, they also had a "Steve", rhythm guitarist Steve Clark, who died in 1991.) - Australian band Powderfinger includes two Johns. One goes by JC, which doesn't really help since the other's surname also begins with C. - Averted by the short-lived supergroup GTR, featuring progressive guitar heroes Steve Howe and Steve Hackett. - Also, in the band Toto, guitarist Steve Lukather and keyboardist Steve Porcaro. - When he formed Dexys Midnight Runners, Kevin Rowland insisted that Kevin Archer (the group's first guitarist) start going by his nickname "Al" Archer. Apparently, he even said, "There's only room for one Kevin in this band." - The Brechtian cabaret band The Tiger Lillies consists of Martin the Monster Clown lead singer, and two guys called Adrian. - From about 1995 to 2008 Nocturnal Rites had both Nils Norberg and Nils Eriksson in their line up. Norberg used to sign his autograph as "Nils2". - Danish pop band Alphabeat has six members: Anders, Stine, Anders, Rasmus, Anders, and Troels. - During their peak, Duran Duran had three members all with the last name Taylor: Bassist John, guitarist Andy, and drummer Roger. Not one of them was in any way related to either of the other two. - Devo has both Robert Mothersbaugh and Robert Casale. They are generally referred to as Bob1 and Bob2. Interestingly, both had brothers in the band—Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale respectively. - After the death of Bob2, the band now features drummer Josh Freese and guitarist Josh Hager. - Jon Anderson left Yes in the late 70s and Trevor Horn took his spot for the album Drama before the band went on hiatus. When they reformed for 90125, Anderson returned as vocalist, but Trevor Rabin became their new guitar player, and Horn produced the album. - Kevin Crompton (Cevin Key), Kevin Ogilvie (Nivek Ogre), and Dave "Rave" Ogilvie of Skinny Puppy. - Journey has/had three Steves: Steve Perry (lead singer), Steve "Smitty" Smith (drummer) and Steve Augeri (lead singer following Perry's departure from the band.) - The original lineup of Pink Floyd technically had two Rogers, but it wasn't much of an issue because Roger Barrett was already going by Syd before the band started. - US thrash metal band Whiplash is an odd example as one of their Rock Trio lineups had two Anthonys and one Tony, but they all performed as Tonys. - The Spice Girls had two Melanies. Melanie B (Scary Spice) and Melanie C (Sporty Spice). The initials remained in their stage name as they started solo careers, although Scary was simply known as Mel B. - Vocaloid has both a Miku and a Miki. - The Eagles have Don Henley and Don Felder. - R.E.M. has both Michael Stipe and Mike Mills. - Funeral for a Friend has the lead singer Matt Davies and former bassist Gareth Davies. For the band's first three albums, they used these names and were constantly asked if they were brothers. They got tired of this, so for their fourth album Memory And Humanity, Matt changed his surname to Davies-Kreye and Gareth changed his to Ellis-Davies. Gareth ultimately left before the album was released, so not many people actually referred to him by that name anyway. Matt has kept his. Since the start of the band, Kris Roberts had already been going by Coombs-Roberts, so the double barreled thing was actually a trend in the band. - Sound Horizon's Roman takes the aversion to the logical extreme, where just about every male character is named Laurant. - Paul and Storm have some songs supposedly by a barbershop quartet entirely made up of guys named "Barry". The fake band is called "The BarryTones". - Insomnium's original lineup consisted of Niilo Sevänen (vocals and bass), Markus Hirvonen (drums), and two guys named Ville on guitar. After Ville Vänni left the band, leaving Ville Friman as the only "Ville" in the band, his replacement was...another Markus. - Canadian band Martha and the Muffins (of Echo Beach fame) was named for singer Martha Johnson, but they also had keyboard player Martha Ladly during their successful period in 1979/80. - An early line-up of Whitesnake featured drummer Dave Dowle, known as 'Duck' to distinguish him from David Coverdale; he was soon ousted in favour of Coverdale's old Deep Purple mate Ian Paice. - The most recent line-up includes two Brians: drummer Brian Tichy and keyboard player Brian Ruedy. - KISS guitarist Ace Frehley's real first name is Paul; he used his nickname of 'Ace' to distinguish himself from Paul Stanley (who, ironically, is not a Paul at all. His real name is Stanley Eisen.) For similar reasons, Paul Caravello changed his name to Eric Carr upon joining the band as drummer. - Lampshaded by The Donnas who went by the names of Donna A, Donna R, Donna F and Donna C until reverting to their own names by their fourth album. - For a short time in 2010 Evanescence featured two members called Will Hunt, both drummers. Vocalist Amy Lee dubbed the 'new' one Will 'Science' Hunt during his time with the group. - Finnish power metallers Stratovarius (known for their tendency to be a Revolving Door Band) featured guitarist Timo Tolkki and vocalist Timo Kotipelto for several years until the former quit the band. - The Faces featured bass player Ronnie Lane and guitarist Ronnie Wood, the latter now better known as a Rolling Stone. - Two out of the three Beastie Boys are named Adam. They're usually referred to by their full names or stage names anyway—Adam Yauch is MCA while Adam Horovitz is Ad Rock. - The remainder of the group consisted of Mike D and DJ Mixmaster Mike. - David Bowie's real name is David Jones, but assumed the surname of Bowie to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees. - Speaking of which, The Monkees included Micky Dolenz (George Michael Dolenz) and Mike Nesmith (Robert Michael Nesmith), though ironically, both go by their middle name. - Sheena Easton's song "9 to 5" was renamed "Morning Train (9 to 5)" to avoid confusion with Dolly Parton's song "9 to 5." - Peter Gabriel has had 4 self-titled albums released, which were nicknamed after what was shown on the cover (Such as Car, and Scratch) Although in the United States, it was made so that the 4th was titled Security. - Super Group Fight or Flight was essentially started by Dan Donegan from Disturbed and Dan Chandler from Evans Blue. - The two constant members of Welsh rock group Stereophonices are singer/guitarist Kelly Jones and bassist Richard Jones. - The Yacht Rock Revue has 3 Marks in it. Mark Bencuya is typically addressed by his last name, Mark Dannells is nicknamed "Monkey Boy", and Mark Cobb writes his name with a ? in front ("Question Mark", get it?) - Foster the People has two Marks, singer Mark Foster and drummer Mark Pontius, who have been the only two constant members throughout. - Neuraxis once had two Oliviers in the band (Pinard and Beaudoin); amusingly enough, Despised Icon (started by former drummer Alexandre Erian) also had two Alexandres in the band (Erian and Pelletier). - Spawn of Possession once had THREE Jonases in the band (Karlsson, Bryssling, and Renvaktar). - There are two rappers with remarkably similar stage names: Aesop Rock and A$AP Rocky. Even The Other Wiki clarifies they aren't to be confused with each other. - Similarly, there's the the R&B singer Mario Winans, and the...other R&B singer...known simply as Mario. - Until shortly after the release of their second album, the lineup of Genesis had two people named Anthony (Phillips, the guitarist, and Banks, the keyboardist). Fortunately, they go by "Ant" and "Tony", respectively, so this wasn't much of an issue (although their long-time band manager is named Tony Smith, and their past manager was Tony Stratton-Smith, who was not the same man). Also, two of the band's previous drummers were both named John (Silver, then Mayhew). They did, however, have only one Steve in their lineup (lead guitarist Steve Hackett). - The Stooges for a short while had no less than three members named James—James "Iggy Pop" Osterberg, James Williamson, and Jimmy Recca. They also had two members named Scott Asheton and Scott Thurston. - UK instrumental rockers The Shadows' 1962-63 lineup had three out of its four members named Brian, but only one went by his real name and nothing else. The three Brians were: Hank Marvin (b. Brian Robson Rankin) on guitar, Brian "Licorice" Locking on bass, and Brian Bennett on drums. - Over the course of Built To Spill's career, they've had a Brett Nelson and a Brett Netson. - When Otis Harris replaced Eddie Kendricks as the Temptations' lead tenor, he changed his first name to Damon, as they already had Otis Williams in the group. - Post-hardcore band Finch features rhythm guitarist Alex Linares and drummer Alex Pappas. - Mike + the Mechanics featured both Paul Carrack and Paul Young on lead vocals until the latter passed away in 2000. - Phil Collins worked on a few of Earth, Wind & Fire singer Philip Bailey's solo albums, and (as radio DJs love pointing out to this day) the two both sang lead vocals on "Easy Lover". - KPop girl group GFRIEND has two Eunbis, Jung Eunbi (who goes by Eunha) and Hwang Eunbi (who goes by SinB) - Da Yoopers had Jim DeCaire (drums) and Jim Bellmore (guitar). Their early bassist was Jim Pennell, who quit after the second album and was replaced by Joe DeLongchamp, who himself overlapped then-guitarist Joe Potila. Jerry Coffey was a longtime percussionist, who overlapped collaborator Jerry "Mungo" LaJoie. - Trisha Yearwood's first few albums were produced by Garth Fundis. She frequently collaborated with, and later married, Garth Brooks. - Finnish band HIM has a severe case of violating the limit. One of their line-ups featured Mikko Paananen on bass, Mikko Lindström on guitar, Mika Karppinen on drums and Jussi-Mikko Salminen on keyboards. Oh, and speaking of drummers, they had Jukka Kröger and Juha Tarvonen in different points of their history. To prevent confusion, all the band members, except for vocalist, use nicknames. - Edguy has vocalist Tobias Sammet and bassist Tobias Exxel. Exxel goes by the nickname "Eggi" though, so there's no confusion. - Santana used to have two members named Chester Thompson—the drummer who played with Frank Zappa and would later tour with Genesis, and the organist who also played with Tower of Power. - Averted by ImagineDragons, who have three members with the first name Daniel — vocalist Reynolds, who goes by Dan, drummer Platzman, who is usually billed by his complete first name, and guitarist Sermon, who goes by his middle name, Wayne. - Megadeth has lead singer/guitarist Dave Mustaine and bassist Dave Ellefson. The latter usually goes by David, or sometimes "Junior" to distinguish him from Mustaine. - Short-lived band Oh-OK had Linda Hopper (later of Magnapop) and Lynda Stipe (Michael's sister) for their duration. Meanwhile, when drummer David Pierce left, he was replaced by David McNair. At least guitarist Matthew Sweet was able to keep his name unique. - Former After Forever bandmates Floor Jansen and Mark Jansen have been known to joke about people mistakenly thinking they're siblings due to sharing their last name. - The Rolling Stones averted the limit from 1969 to 1974, when frontman Mick Jagger was joined by guitarist Mick Taylor, who bridged the gap between Brian Jones and Ron Wood. - The Band had two Richards—Manuel and Danko—but the aversion wasn't too obvious since the latter used the nickname "Rick." - Eminem: - The second verse of "Guilty Conscience" introduces an early-twenties guy named Stan who considers raping an underage girl at a party (with Dr. Dre holding him back and Shady egging him on). Eminem later wrote his iconic song "Stan" about a different Stan who is also his stan. He has stated that he just never thought about that when writing and never intended the two characters to be the same, but they could be, if you want. - "Guilty Conscience" also mentions a Renée, who is presumably the aunt of Eddie (the robber in the first verse). Renée also turns up on "Get You Mad" as someone whose house Slim Shady throws live grenades at. - "Kim" contains a passage where Slim/Marshall reminds Kim of the time she threw up at "Brian's party". An unreleased song for the same album, "Jimmy, Brian and Mike" (eventually released in 2022), describes a house party Slim attends with a Brian who takes a shit in a clothes hamper, then gets thrown out by Slim for being too drunk and ruining his shoe (and told to drive off). It's not clear if these are the same Brian, but probably not. Another Brian shows up in "The Kids" as the Eric Cartman Expy who heckles Slim. Another (?) Brian turns up in the Ken Kaniff skit at the end of "Underground" on Relapse as the guy speaking before Ken interrupts the addiction counselling session with his tap dancing. - In Eminem's "blonde" albums, he refers to a character named "Eric". Little Eric jumps off the terrace in "Who Knew"; Little Eric looks just like Eminem in "White America" (so he survived?); and then in "My 1st Single" Eric gets high on generic sleep medication and wakes up naked in bed next to his best friend Derek, which probably is not the child Eric referred to in the other lines. Eric Cartman and Eric Harris also make appearances as characters in Eminem's songs. - Several Relapse-era songs mention a Victim of the Week named Dakota, and one references Dakota Fanning. It's a topic of debate as to whether the Dakota of "Music Box" is Ms. Fanning. - The song "Headlights" features fun.'s Nate Ruess on the hook, but also involves lyrics about Nate Mathers, Eminem's little brother. - Lampshaded in the music video for Stevie Ray Vaughan's cover of "Superstition". After the music concludes, an offscreen voice calls for a cat to "come to Stevie", before the camera pans to reveal that the Stevie in question is not Vaughan, but Stevie Wonder, the song's original author, making a Creator Cameo. - T.I.'s current stage name was the result of both this and mild Executive Meddling. When T.I., then still known by his longtime nickname, Tip, signed to Arista Records, Q-Tip was already there under a solo deal. Because of a potential marketing snafu, and T.I.'s own respect for Q-Tip's legendary career, Arista made him shorten his name to "T.I.", which stuck well after he departed Arista. - Discussed by The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing. "Steph(v)enson" is about George and Robert Stephenson, the father and son who co-invented the first commercial steam locomotive; not to be confused with Robert Stevenson, a lighthouse engineer who also worked on trains; not to be confused with Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde and Treasure Island. - The soundtrack to the movie Dead Man On Campus includes a Cover Version of Dusty Springfield's "I Only Wanna Be With You", as performed by Marilyn Manson bassist Twiggy Ramirez and model / actress / singer Twiggy (partial inspiration of the former's stage name) - seemingly just done for the fun of having the track credited to "Twiggy & Twiggy". - A very old exception is the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde contains two characters named Isolde, both of whom pursue a romance with Tristan. The two are typically called "Isolde of Ireland" and "Isolde of Brittany" to minimize confusion. - Arthurian Legend: - There were at least four Elaines, three of which were associated with Lancelot: Elaine of Benoic (his mother), Elaine of Astolat (the Lady of Shalott), and Elain of Carbonek (the mother of Galahad). The last was one of Arthur's interchangeable third half-sisters, and to make matters more confusing, T.H. White combined Astolat and Carbenok in The Once and Future King. Yet another Elaine was Percival's mother-in-law. - There were also three Guineveres, two of which were half-sisters/twins known as the "True Guinevere" and the "False Guinevere." The True Guinevere was Arthur's wife, although the false one switched places with her on at least one occasion. Partly this is because the French re-tellings adapted the original Old Welsh names of the sisters Gwenhwyfar and Gwenhwyfach in such a manner that they became identical - although, given that these names mean "Gwenhwy the Greater" and "Gwenhwy the Lesser", respectively, it's not really much better. - In a particularly egregious case, there were two knights named Sir Yvain/Owain... and they were half-brothers. Good going, Dad. One is usually just called Yvain, while the younger, illegitimate one is called Sir Yvain the Adventurous or, more unfortunately, Sir Yvain the Bastard. - Aversions of this and even One-Mario Limit, or the presence of weirdly similar names for no apparent reason, are in fact rather common in Arthurian legend; over the centuries, just to give some other, and the most egregious examples, there has been at least one Sir Kay, two knights named Sir Gaheris, one Mordred, several people named Morgan, three Galahads (or, counting Lancelots childhood name and his ancestor Galahad, five), and even a few Arthurs who are completely different people from the more important carriers of their names who you are more likely to actually know or care about. This, translation issues, and nonstandard spelling has resulted in quite a few possible Decomposite Characters and instances of unintentional Composite Character creation, if not both (as could have happened with Morgan Le Fey and Morgause), and even the most well-read scholars shrugging on whether some characters are supposed to be the same as another or not. - The Bible: Lots of names are repeated; for example, about six women named Mary are in the New Testament, although different sources disagree on who they are. Other people are referred to by their family name, so several Herodian rulers are all called "Herod". And in some cases, names were originally different end up being rendered the same way in translation (e.g. a male "Noach" and a female "Noah" both being called "Noah" in English). For this reason, devotional life and adaptations tend to find ways to distinguish the Steves. - This is particularly important among the Apostles of Jesus: - Two Simons; this is relatively easy, since one of them was also known as Peter, and became St. Peter. The other was typically knows as "Simon the Cannanite" or "Simon the Zealot". - Two Judases, though one was typically known as "Thaddeus", or "Judas, son of James". "Thaddeus" was also referred to as "Judas", and would later simply be shortened to "Jude" to differentiate him from Judas Iscariot. At one point in John's gospel, the narrator has to clarify, "Judas (not Iscariot) said..." - Two Jameses, and this is the complicated one; they'd simply be known as James the Great (son of Zebedee; also brother of Apostle John, also refered to as "son of Zebedee") and James the Lesser (son of Alphaeus). In scripture, both are frequently referred to simply as "James", with no additions to differentiate them. - John the Apostle also shares a name with John the Baptist, who appears early in the gospels. - Translations of the Old Testament in some languages give Joshua the same name as Jesus. This is because Joshua's Hebrew name, Yehoshua, was sometimes translated via the worn-down form Yeshua, which is approximated as Iesous in Greek. Jesus' name in the original Greek New Testament is also Iesous, and in fact Yeshua was probably his actual given name. - There are also two major Josephs in the Bible: Jacob's son in Genesis, and the husband of Jesus's mother in the New Testament. - There are also King Saul and Saul of Tarsus, later called Paul. - The Qur'an and its associated hadith: - Utterly averted. The Arabs, despite having a language with an astronomical number of nouns, apparently have a small pool of personal names even before the advent of Islam, but when the religion became more known, the rule gets turned up a notch. Oh, patronymics don't really help either, since patriarchs also have the same common names, and it only becomes useful if you try to track the family line to several generations above (hence why most Arabic names to this day can get ridiculously long; you have to come to the point where you won't confuse that person with someone else). Plus, many of the Biblical characters and events are also recognized in Islam, and with it its utter aversion of the One Steve Limit. - Muhammad (Arabic for "most praiseworthy one") was already a very common name in the Arabian Peninsula before the prophet's time. In addition to the prophet, two of the prophet's companions are both named Muhammad, for example (ibn Abu Bakr and ibn Maslamah). - The Quran shows what happens when you have two different individuals with the same name and then confusing the two. The Quran doesn't mention personal names a lot, especially women, who are generally referred as "[insert name here]'s wife/sister/mother" or "the woman [who did] this [insert event name here]". However, Jesus' mother, as in the Virgin Mary, is not only named (in its Arabic form, Maryam, obviously), but gets a whole chapter devoted to her. note : Though, ironically, devotion to Mary by Muslims, while exists, is not as ubiquitous as Catholics and Orthodox, who have extreme devotion, hence the many "Our Lady of [insert name here]" titles. Meanwhile, Moses' sister, Miriam (whose Arabic form is also Maryam), is not named in the Quran, but, apparently, the writers still thought of her name as Miriam, because both of Mary and Miriam's fathers are named Amram‒or Imran in Arabic (in the Bible, only Miriam's was named Amram; Mary's father was called Joachim). In fact, there was once a long debate on which Amram is referred to in the Quranic chapter "The House of Imran". \|\|The scholars settled on Joachim/Mary's father.\|\| - According to the verse 19:710, Yahya (John the Baptist) was the the first to receive this name. - In Greek Mythology: - Ajax the Great (Ajax son of Telamon) and Ajax the Lesser (Ajax of Locris) were both Greek warlords in The Trojan War, and figure in The Iliad. - Zeus has two sons named Sarpedon; one is the son of Europa and brother to Minos and Rhadamanthys and the other is the son of Laomedia and a hero in the Trojan War. - Zeus has two daughters named Thalia, one of the muses and one of the Charities. - The titaness Tethys is often confused with Thetis, the mother of Achilles, who is her granddaughter. - Cronos was the leader of the titans, Chronos was the personification of time. The former is also sometimes spelled Cronus or Kronos, while the latter is also spelled Chronus or Khronos. Which doesn't really help matters. Even the Greeks got them confused from time to time, and by the Renaissance the figure of Father Time was usually depicted as carrying a scythe, the weapon the other Cronos used to castrate Uranus. - The rule also gets trampled by the dozen mythical figures named Eurypylus. Two of them fought on opposite sides of the Trojan War. At the same time, a third one was among the suitors of Penelope. One generation back, another Eurypylus had helped Heracles sack Troy. Yet another was a son of Heracles, not to be confused with the one who was killed by Heracles... and so on. - The name Hippodamia is shared between a dozen of women including two of the fifty Danaids. - King Diomedes of Thrace was a villain who would feed people to his man-eating mares and was eventually killed by Heracles. Later, another Diomedes became a hero who fought on the Greeks' side during the Trojan War and became famous for wounding both Aphrodite and Ares. - One Euryale was the sister of Medusa. Another was the daughter of King Minos and was the possible mother of Orion. Another was one of the Amazons. - There's Aeolus, son of Hippotes, master of the Winds and Aoleus, son of Hellen, ruler of Thessaly. Weirdly enough both have a daughter named Canace. Some authors confused the two including Hyginus who mistakenly says that Odysseus met the son of Hellen. - Averted with Robin Hood. We have both Little John and Prince John, and Will Stuteley and Will Scarlet. - One Russian fairy tale centered around two identical brothers who were both named Ivan. Also, nearly every male protagonist in Russian fairy tales is an Ivan. - There are also some versions of a fairy tale involving Ivan Tsarevich (son of the Tsar), Ivan the Maid's Son, and Ivan Bykovich (the Cow's Son). They fight three dragons, all called Chudo-Yudo. - In Norse Mythology, we have the more famous Loki son of Laufey, a giant who lives with the gods in Asgård, and the less famous giant Utgarda-Loki, who lives in the castle of Utgard in Jotunheim. There's also Logi, when he is separate from Loki Laufeyson (the word (and sometimes name) Logi isn't actually related to the name Loki—it means something like 'destroying fire'—but sounds close enough that even the Norse seems to have gotten them mixed up at times). - Celtic Mythology: in the surviving corpus of Irish mythology, there are at least five Ailils, two Áines, and around three Brídes. Because the timeline is confusing and contradictory at the best of times, it can be hard to determine which character is being referenced in a given story, and many scholars have intentionally or accidentally conflated some of them together. - The Ulster Cycle also has two Ferguses. The trope is specifically defied when Medb renames all her sons Máine, because she was told her son Máine would kill Conchobar. And then subverted again, when one of them kills the wrong Conchobar. - Averted in The Adventure Zone, by Brian and his pet spider Bryan. - There have also been four Jerrys over the course of the show. A gerblin in Here There Be Gerblins, two Hammerhead ruffians named "Regular Jerreeeeee" and "Lil' Jerry" in Petals to the Metal, and a bank guard in The Eleventh Hour. Guest host Stuart Wellington added a fifth one in tribute to the Hammerheads with Goldcliff's Councillor Jerry, who also had the Hammerheads' distinctive "Joe Pesci" accent. - Finally, there are two bugbears named Jamie Green. One is \|\|Klarg's mother and Lucas' gardener\|\|, and the other is a reporter on the \|\|IPRE's homeworld.\|\| - Averted as well in the ongoing series of The Aliens That Came From A Completely Different Planet To Earth within The John Dredge Nothing To Do With Anything Show: It features both Jeff and Jim, who are constantly getting mixed up by the other characters—occasionally even they themselves can't get their names right. Jeff: A flying saucer, Jeff? Jim: I'm Jim, you're Jeff. Jeff: Sorry, that's the trouble with having two characters with similar names, Jeff. Jim: Jim. - MarsCorp has Dave Price and David Knight in its main cast. In this case it's a side-effect of Write What You Know crossed with The Danza: the characters are named after their actors, who also co-wrote season one. So far none of the characters have remarked on it (in reality, why would they?). - MarsCorp also has Jonathan Kingsley and John Smith. - Played with in the Cool Kids Table game Here We Gooooo! when it comes to the Yoshi. Alan's character has an Overly Long Name, so they call him Yoshi for short. But to keep things from getting confusing when Yoshi is introduced in a kingdom full of Yoshis, they refer to Mario's Yoshi as the "OG Yoshi". - My Dad Wrote a Porno has, in the titular erotic literature, three characters named James: James Spooner, Sir James Godwin, and Jim Sterling. In addition, two of the hosts are named Jamie and James. - In episode three of Mystery Show, Starlee assumes that Bob Bland and Bob Six are the same person. \|\|They're not.\|\| - Also subverted in episode six with Starlee's client Jonathan and John, an author that she meets during her investigation. - Since two of the three regulars on the OSW Review podcast are named Steve, they go by the nicknames V1 and Mr. OOC. - Averted in Welcome to Night Vale: - All of the angels who stay with Old Woman Josie are named Erika. With a "k". - There's also two Laurens: Lauren Mallard (Night Vale Radio Station manager and StrexCorp Shill) and Lauren James (Night Vale Weekly Gazette writer). - And two Janices: Cecil's niece Janice and Janice Rio from down the street. - For the record, there is only one Steve: Cecil's Sitcom Arch-Nemesis \|\|and Janice's stepfather\|\| Steve Carlsberg. - The Magnus Archives technically has three recurring characters named Michael: \|\|Michael Crew, avatar of the Vast, Michael Shelley, Gertrude Robinson's former assistant, and "Michael", the Distortion avatar that killed Michael Shelley and now inhabits his body\|\|. There's also a Mikaele Salesa — it's pronounced very differently, but jumps out at you when you see it written down. - It's probably also worth mentioning Sasha James, Not-Sasha-James, Sasha Rackett from the sister Rusty Quill Gaming podcast, and castmember Sasha Sienna. (Quite a few Magnus Archives characters are named after cast and crew members from various Rusty Quill productions; series creator Jonny Sims named the protagonist after himself. He'd been warned, too.) - AWA had FOUR Richards or similar names hold the AWA World Heavyweight Title during the promotion's existence (Dick the Bruiser [William Richard Afflis], the Destroyer [Dick Beyer], Mighty Igor Vodic [Dick Garza], and Rick Martel [Richard Vigneault].) - New Japan Pro-Wrestling on a few occasions employed both Masa Saito and Hiro Saito, who despite a close physical resemblance are not related. - WCW had a good number of Scotts at one point (Hall, Steiner, Norton, Riggs, Armstrong, Putski, Dickinson [a referee], Hudson [a TV announcer]), and then it was revealed that Raven was also a Scott when his mother showed up for a storyline note : his real name is Scott Levy. In addition, Raven's Flock included Riggs and Sick Boy (real name Scott Vick). The nWo had Hall, Norton, and Steiner all in the group, and when it splintered into the Wolfpac and Hollywood factions, all three Scotts were in nWo Hollywood. Scott Steiner was widely referred to on a Full-Name Basis during this time, since he was a) not the only Scott and b) not the only Steiner (see below). - Early in his career, Kevin Sullivan arrived in the Gulf Coast Wrestling territory in Alabama. Wrestler Eddie Sullivan (real name Ruben Huizar) was already established there, so the promoters renamed Kevin "Johnny West." - WCW had an infestation of men named Rick during the 90s. In 1997 alone their roster included at least 12 wrestlers using Rick or Ricky as their first name (Ric Flair, Rick Fuller, Rick Martel, Ricky Morton, Rick Rude, Rick Steiner, Ricky Santana, Rick Grange, Rick King, Ricky McDaniel, Rick Thames, Rick Thorn note : the last six were Power Plant [WCW's wrestling school] members or jobbers that only wrestled one match.). As an aside, Rick Steiner's real first name is Robert (as everyone watching Summerslam 1993 discovered when his sister accidentally called him "Rob"), which makes you wonder why he didn't use that name in WCW to avoid confusion with the more famous Ric Flair or Rick Rude note : "Rick Steiner" is actually his (and Scott's) last name, spelled Rechsteiner. This list does not include Ricks that had already retired (i.e. Ricky Steamboat) or had yet to debut (i.e. Rick Cornell aka Reno of the Natural Born Thrillers) in 97. WCW always seemed to have a swarm of jobbers named Rick. Between 1991 and 1996 they had 24 men, not counting the big names, known as Rick note : (Santana, Thames, Stockhauser, Garcia, Hayes, Hudson, Keller, Matrix, Teasley, Valentino, Tango, Fargo, Hardrock, Ryder, Bravo, Ford, Cannon, Nelson, Stockhauser, Jones, Cats, McCord, Wilkins, Riddle, Kenan) and they had a combined record of 1-125 note : The one win belongs to Thames. He beat WCW World Heavyweight Champion Vader by DQ in February 93. - Interestingly, WCW's title scene actually adhered to this rule during its existence. From January 1991 through March 26, 2001, of the 19 different men who held the WCW World Heavyweight Title, none of them had the same first name as any of the others. This ended when Chris Jericho won the title on October 21, 2001, during the InVasion/Alliance storyline, since Chris Benoit had won it on January 16, 2000 note : And you could make the case this doesn't count, Benoit's win was invalidated the next night (because he asked for and was given his release, the kayfabe justification was Sid's foot being under the ropes when he was pinned) and later retconned by WWE into a title reign. Not to mention that WCW ceased to exist 7 months before Jericho won the "WCW" world title. Literalized, since Sting was one of the guys who held the title and his real first name is in fact Steve. - Averted by the WCW tag team Kronik, since both guys (Brian Adams and Bryan Clarke) were named Bryan and nobody seemed to question it. - During the 1980s, WWE called Kamala, normally known as "the Ugandan Giant", "the Ugandan Headhunter" due to the fact that André the Giant, who Kamala feuded with both in WWE and elsewhere, was in the promotion at the time. It also doubled as a Name to Run Away From Really Fast. - WWE changed Buzz Sawyer's Red Baron from "Mad Dog" to "Bulldog" during his brief run in 1984 because Mad Dog Vachon was in the promotion at the time. - Bruiser Brody used the name King Kong Brody in territories where Dick the Bruiser was established. - 2 Cold Scorpio had to use the name Black Wazma in Mexico because another wrestler named Scorpio was already established there at the time. - Ricky Morton averted this when he and Ricky Fuji teamed up in Japan as The New Rock N Roll Express. - The WWE World Heavyweight Championship has been held by three Michaels (Shawn Michaels [Michael Shawn Hickenbottom], Mankind [Mick Foley] and The Miz [Michael Mizanin]). There have also been THREE Roberts or similar names (Bob Backlund, Sgt. Slaughter [Robert Remus], and Rob Van Dam [Rob Szatkowski]). There have also been two Randys (Randy "Macho Man" Savage [Randal Mario Poffo] and Randy Orton), two Stevens/Stephens ("Stone Cold" Steve Austin [Steven Williams, born Anderson] and Sheamus [Stephen Farrelly]), two Pauls (Triple H [Paul Michael Levesque] and The Big Show [Paul Wight]), and three Johns (John "Bradshaw" Layfield [John Charles Layfield], John Cena and Dean Ambrose [Jonathan Good]). - There have occasionally been wrestlers in WWE with the same first names though they are normally called by their last names by announcers. Chris Jericho and Chris Benoit, as well as the similar sounding Christian. WWE renamed Christopher Pavone "Caylen Croft" because his previous ring name of Chris Cage was too close to Christian's previous name of Christian Cage. There was even a storyline started when Lilian Garcia goofed and announced Benoit as "Jericho" (something Jim Ross would do often on commentary). There was also the time when Mark Henry and Mark Jindrak were on the roster at the same time. There was also John Cena, John "Bradshaw" Layfield, John Laurinaitis, John Morrison, and Johnny Curtis. There are also Paul Wight and Paul Levesque, but don't call them that. - At one point in WWE there was a Jacqueline, generally called Jackie by everyone, and Miss Jackie Gayda. As Jacqueline went by the name "Miss Jackie Moore" in TNA there is often confusion whenever reporters recap old events and forget that Miss Jackie wasn't her name in WWE. According to Ivory (Word of Saint Paula?) they avoided this problem backstage by simply calling them Black Jackie and White Jackie. - WWE tends to change wrestlers' names to avoid this trope altogether. A notable example is Steven Regal becoming William Regal since they already had 3 Steves:"Stone Cold" Steve Austin, "The Lethal Weapon" Steve Blackman, and Steven Richards. And Steve Williams becoming Steve Austin was another example, to distinguish him from "Dr. Death" Steve Williams. - "Stone Cold" Steve Austin got his name because of this trope. He began competing in WCCW under his real name Steve Williams, but when it was bought out and merged with another territory, they already had "Dr. Death" Steve Williams. Since Doc was the senior of the two, it was Austin who had to change his name. Dutch Mantell tossed off Steve Austin (claiming it had nothing to do with The Six Million Dollar Man). Austin hated the name, but it stuck, and he eventually became the biggest draw in the history or wrestling. - Chris Jericho once remarked that after he joined WWF from WCW he had to change his finishing move name from the Lion Tamer to the Walls of Jericho as Ken Shamrock already had his special Lions Den Match, humorously remarking that Vince McMahon had said "there are too many lions!" - ECW had THREE NWA ECW Heavyweight Champions/ECW World Heavyweight Champions with the real first name of Terry (Terry Funk, Sabu [Terry Brunk] and Rhino [Terry Gerin].) There were also two Jameses (Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka [James Reiher] and the Sandman [Jim Fullington]), two Johns or similar names (Johnny Hot Body [Johnny Weiss] and Mikey Whipwreck [Jonathan Watson]), two Scotts (Raven [Scott Levy] and Bam Bam Bigelow [Scott Charles Bigelow]), and two Peters (Taz [Peter Senerchia] and Justin Credible [Petey Polaco]). - Starting in February 1999, WWE has had at different times several women on its roster with "Mary" or related names in their real names, including Stephanie Marie McMahon, Ivory (Lisa Mary Moretti), Stacy Marie Keibler, Victoria (Lisa Marie Varon), Ashley Marie Massaro, Eve Marie Torres, Dawn Marie (Dawnmarie Psaltis), Amy Marie Weber, Savannah (Angela Marie Fong) and Maria Kanellis. - Zig Zagged to all hell and back by Ken Kennedy. He started wrestling under his real name Ken Anderson. Then when he joined the WWE he changed his name to Ken Kennedy to avoid comparison to the fictional Anderson Wrestling Family. Then it was revealed in-story that his name is Kennedy because he's the bastard son of Vincent Kennedy McMahon. Then it was revealed that he was making that up. Then he got fired and went to TNA as Ken Anderson. - TNA has a preponderance of men named Robert. Rob Van Dam, Bobby Roode, Robbie E, and Rob Terry. From 20022017, TNA was also a subsidiary of Panda Energy, owned by Robert Carter. Technically, there was also Bobby Lashley. - Alicia Fox used the names Victoria and Tori in Ohio Valley and WWE's version of FCW (her real name is Victoria, of which Tori is a nickname) so of course when she was called up they already had a Victoria and a Torrie Wilson, whose real name was Victoria Anne Wilson (and the latter two at one point were both members of a heel trio called Vince's Devils). It'll give you a bit of a chuckle to hear she was put into a storyline with another Victoria—Vickie Guerrero. WWE's previous Tori was known as Terri Power as an indy wrestler, but changed her name to avoid confusion with Terri Runnels. However she was in the company when Victoria entered in 2000 and Torrie Wilson in 2001 meaning they had 3 women with the same name. - Brooke/Miss Tessmacher fell victim to this after the signing of Brooke Hogan to TNA. This was also used when Brooke Hogan departed as she had been in a romance angle with Bully Ray. After Brooke's absence he still kept talking about her and eventually introduced his "girlfriend Brooke" on TV...to reveal that it was Tessmacher now. - When Shawn Daivari was in WWE's developmental league Ohio Valley Wrestling, they changed his name to Khosrow, most likely as a tribute to The Iron Sheik, whose real name is Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri, although the name "Khosrow" never made it to WWE TV, and also to presumably avoid anyone possibly confusing Daivari with Shawn Michaels. Similarly, when WWE brought in the tag team the Heartbreakers (Antonio Thomas and Romeo Roselli), they renamed them the Heart Throbs because Shawn Michaels' Red Baron is "The Heartbreak Kid." - CHIKARA spoofed this in a way with the tag team Lancelot (or Lance-A-Lot) made up of two masked guys each named "Lance Steel". - In LLF, had both Dark Angel and American Angel. And both were unmasked to reveal they were Sarah Stock and Sara Del Rey. (Which wasn't too surprising if you knew them already, especially not the latter) - While Nikki Matthews was a last minute addition to SHIMMER, they found time to change her billing to Nicole, as they already had a Nikki Roxx. Nikki The New York Knockout is just NY Knockout likely for the same reason. Then they picked up Nikki Storm. Then Nicole Savoy. (Amusingly, their first champion also used to be known as Nikki until this trope came into play) - Colt Cabana was renamed Scotty Goldman because of Carlito's Talk Show with Fists "Carlito's Cabana." Averted in Jersey All Pro Wrestling with him and Chris Cabana, though given the later was a member of the Christopher Street Connection it was less likely anyone would be confusing them. - Pro Wrestling RESPECT, which did developmental shows for ROH and SHIMMER academy trainess before moving over to Chikara, had several ninja jobbers for them to beat up that came in several variations (Red Ninja, Ninja Cheetah, etc), one of them just being plain The Ninja, accept The Ninja had a tag team partner also just called The Ninja. - Total Divas uses this. Most of the women are referred to by their real names—except Eva Marie, whose real name is Natalie. She's called Eva presumably to avoid confusion with Natalya—who is called Nattie by everyone. However otherwise averted with the boyfriends as three women are involved with men named John. Nikki is with John Cena, Trinity is with Jon Fatu (though his ring name is Jimmy Uso) and Eva Marie is with Jonathan Coyle. And that's not including Nikki and Brie's father Jonathan Garcia and brother JJ (Jonathan Jr.) Garcia. Additionally Josie is the name of both Eva Marie's mother and Brie's pet dog. - Male cheerleader stable Spirit Squad had members whose real names are Nick Nemeth and Nick Mitchell. As the former went by Nicky, the latter went by Mitch, a shortened version of his surname. - Previously averted in WWE by Luke Harper and Luke Gallows. As of 2018, WWE dropped Harper and Erick Rowan's first names when they became The Bludgeon Brothers. And Harper, by then known in AEW as Mr. Brodie Lee, sadly passed away in 2020. - Pro Wrestling NOAH had Takeshi Rikio and Takeshi Morishima, who spent their early years as a tag team. - Dragon Gate: - Since its inception, DG has employed both Masaaki Mochizuki and Susumu Mochizuki. They were even in a popular stable together, M2K, named for the two Mochizukis and Yasushi Kanda. Eventually, Susumu lost the rights to the name in a match with Masaaki, and took the name Susumu Yokosuka after his beloved hometown. - Susumu would later found a stable called the Jimmyz, almost all of whom changed their name to Jimmy - Jimmy Susumu, Jimmy Kagetora, Ryo "Jimmy" Saito, Jimmy K-Ness J.K.S., and Jimmy Kanda among them. - Ryo Saito is one of three Saitos in DG, the others being K-Ness (Makoto Saito) and Super Shisa (Yoshiyuki Saito, who had previously wrestled under the name SAITO). Presumably Ryos nickname SaiRyo originated backstage to differentiate him from the more senior Saitos. - In 2016, some new trainees debuted, including Hyou Watanabe and Shun Watanabe. Shun quickly donned a mask and adopted the name Shun Skywalker to avoid confusion. - Averted with Ring of Honor, who had two Adams (3x champ Adam Cole and midcarder Adam Page), and three Jays (Jay Lethal, Jay Briscoe, and Jay White). Played straight when both Adam Cole and Adam Page joined the Bullet Club and Page changed his name to Hangman Page following a gimmick change where he started stringing up opponents with a noose - Possibly played straight during "All Ego" Ethan Page's brief run in the promotion, concurrent with Adam Page's ongoing run. While announcers acknowledged that he went by Ethan Page elsewhere, they stated that he changed his name in ROH to Ethan Gabriel Owens. As noted below, Ethan Page later kept his name despite again coming into a company where Hangman Page was well established when he was signed to AEW in 2021. - Enforced when it comes to the McMahons. Gregory Helms was told that he could not go by Shane due to Shane McMahon, and when asked why they were fine with three Chris's on the roster note : Jericho, Benoit and Masters. Christian would make it four as well , he was told it was because "There's no Chris McMahon". Likely the same is true for Linda Miles going by Shaniqua and Stephanie Garcia-Colace going by Nikki Bella. - Milena Roucka went by the name Rosa Mendes likely to avoid confusion with Melina Perez. In fact, there was a long standing rumor that Melina was romantically involved with Batista while still with her long-time boyfriend John Morrison. In reality, it was Mendes who dated Batista at that time. - Cross-gender example: Male wrestler "Smooth Sailin'" Ashley Remington" (aka Dalton Castle) had stopped appearing in CHIKARA by the time Ashley Vox arrived. - WCW had male wrestler Shannon Moore and female valet/wrestler Daffney Unger, whose real name is Shannon Spruill, on the roster at the same time. - Averted during the 2004 "Million Dollar" edition of Tough Enough, which featured eventual winner Daniel Puder and third-placer Daniel Rodimer. This season also featured the aforementioned Nick Mitchell, who became Mitch to avoid confusion with fellow Spirit Squad member Nicky (aka Dolph Ziggler). - Averted big-time with All Elite Wrestling. As of September 2022, they had the following aversions: - Brian Cage, Christian Cage, "Hangman" Adam Page, Ethan Page, and Diamond Dallas Page - Adam Cole and Adam Page - Cole is part of a stealth aversionhis real name is Austin Jenkins, and AEW also has Austin Sopp, performing as Austin Gunn. - Colt Cabana and Colten Gunn. - Christian Cage, Chris Jericho, and Christopher Daniels - Brian Cage, Brian Pillman Jr., and Bryan Danielson - Maxwell Jacob Friedman and Max Caster - Matt Jackson, Matt Sydal, Matt Hardy, and Matt Menard - Shawn Spears and Shawn Dean - Jon Moxley and John Silver - Mark Henry, "Smart" Mark Sterling, and Marq Quen. AEW also had Marko Stunt before his May 2022 release. - Anthony Bowens, Anthony Ogogo, Antony "Tony" Khan, and Noah Anthony "Tony" Schiavone - Brody King and Mr. Brodie Lee Jr. - Lee Johnson and Lee Moriarty - Parodied in the BBC comedy Deep Trouble, which in its second series had an Alison and an Alice. But since the show is set on a submarine, everyone is usually referred to by rank and surname anyway (and Alice Barry in fact insists on being called Barry). - BBC comedy The Burkiss Way once featured a group of servants who were all called Rose, male and female alike, since they could only afford one name between them. - Truth in Television, or rather Truth In Radio for that matter. 96 Trent FM (now known as Trent FM) had Matt Wilkinson presenting afternoons and Matt Wilkins appearing at various times of the day. Hilarity Ensues. Confusion reigns. So Matt Wilkins became Matt Marsden, on Trent FM at least. Now he's at Key 103 under his original name. - The Archers: Edward "Eddie" Grundy, and his second son, Edward "Ed" Grundy. - Round the Horne had Kenneth Horne and Kenneth Williams. - Old Harry's Game had a demon called Gary in series 1, and a dimwitted teenager called Gary in the first episode of series 6. - New Dynamic English is rather realistic. It has at least two Johns (John Wilson and John Orwell) and three Karens (Karen Wilson, a Karen from a Daily Dialogue and a Karen from Man on the Street). - The Goon Show had Count Jim Moriarty, Jim Spriggs and Little Jim as regular or semi-regular characters. In 'The Starlings' there's another: Bluebottle gives his full name as Jim 'Bluebottle' Tigernuts. - Behind The Veil has some of the more common names repeated, but the one that takes the cake is the tale of the two Jons: Both are Bone Gnawers, Theurges, at the same sept. - Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, owning to the large cast, has a few repeat names across the main and secondary characters: - Two of the supporting characters are called Edward- one goes by Ed, whilst the other goes by Eddie (or his surname, Longhorn). - Tracy is the name of both Ivy's mother and Jenna's little sister. - Ciro and Luna both have a father called Robert. - The government agent keeping an eye on the kids is called Sarah, the same as Vivian's mother. - One of the supporting characters, Jae, shares a name with Hyeon's out-of-town cousin. This one is somewhat ironic, as the first Jae has a rivalry going on with Hyeon. - v3 of Open Blue featured a Colonel Jackson and a Sergeant Jackson. One commanded a brigade of troops from the five major countries of The Federation, and the other commanded a The Squad of Praetorian Guard from a single country. The two were as familially related as their job descriptions are similar. - Ruby Quest: - There's two Toms- Subjects #5 and #6 (named after the two Toms in Animal Crossing: Tom the Cat and Tom Nook respectively). Subject #5 is Ruby's companion and Deuteragonist, while Subject #6 is a side character first mentioned in notes as being extremely violent and dangerous, and who Ruby later meets in Upper Lab B. \|\|The characters having the same name comes in pretty handy for hiding that the players had them both mixed up all along- the person in Upper Lab B was actually Subject #5. Ruby's companion Tom was Subject #6 all along.\|\| - There's also a meta example, as Weaver references two real life people called William Murdorch, one of whom was the inventor of the pneumatic tube and the other was a rather obscure poet. A pneumatic tube figures heavily into the plot, and The Metal Glen, the poem Ruby Quest was based on, was by the poet Murdoch.\|\| Actually the poem was by Weaver, who pretty accurately mimicked the real Murdoch's style for it.\|\| - Survival of the Fittest has had duplicates of several (first) names, including that of the winner of version 1. The nature of the RP, of course, renders this trope essentially unenforceable. - Perhaps the biggest example of this is the name James, which is given to two characters in V1 and SIX characters in V3. - V4 currently has three Aarons and three Sarahs. - The above doesn't even come close to the duplicate name insanity that is v4. Not even counting the terrorists and just the students that appear on the island, there are 2 Peters, 5 Alexs, 3 Johns, 2 Tims, 3 Maxs, 4 Davids, 4 Roberts, 3 James/Jimmys, 2 Steves, 3 Chrises, 3 Simons, 2 Trents, 2 Daniels, 3 Williams, 2 Mikes, 2 Rolands, 2 Frankies, 3 Sarahs, 2 Jennifers, 2 Tiffanys, 3 Janets, 2 Alices, 2 Marias, 3 Jackies, 2 Charlottes and 3 Lilys. And that's not even getting into names that sound the same, but are just spelled differently, or names that sound extremely similar (Gary and Garry, Nick, Nick and Nik, Eve, Evie and Eva, Raine, Rena and Raina, Remi and Remy, and Allen and Alan). Not to mention Erik Laurin and Eric Lorenz, whose first and last names are very similar to one another. - Often averted in Warhammer 40,000. - Because the epic, millennia-spanning scale of the lore, this is sometimes because characters appearing later in the timeline are named in honor of earlier ones, such as the famous Commissar Sebastian Yarrick, whose parents named him after legendary crusader and church reformer Sebastian Thor, though there are also a few who are contemporaries in the very same story, such as Big Bad Horus Lupercal and his idealistic subordinate "Little" Horus Aximand in the Horus Heresy prequel novels. - One of the more drastic aversions in the setting is the name Lucius, which belongs to at least five characters (including three Space Marines) and a planet, with no known relation between any of them. - Despite the wide variety of names available to orks, they still managed to get two bosses named Gorgutz: Gorgutz Ghostkilla Deffscreama Bloodspilla Deffkilla Gunsmasha Daemonkilla 'ead'unter in Dawn of War, and another Gorgutz with no qualifiers in the Blood and Thunder comic who serves as the Villain Protagonist's Bad Boss until he takes an exploding gargant to the face. - In the Mystara setting for Dungeons & Dragons, Stephan and Stefan are in fact the most common names for noblemen. There is an amazingly high number of them around. - Steve Jackson Games and Games Workshop were respectively founded and co-founded by two different Steve Jacksons. The Steve Jackson from Steve Jackson Games even wrote several books in a series primarily written by the other Steve Jackson, and there's little to no indication within them that the author is a different person. - The original Faerunian pantheon from the Forgotten Realms included both a goddess of joy named Lliira and a goddess of illusion (currently deceased) named Leira. The similarity of their names was Lampshaded by an ugly rumor that circulated in the immediate aftermath of the Avatar Crisis, alleging that Lliira's avatar had intentionally hunted down and killed Leira's, specifically because their names were too much alike. - Sentinels of the Multiverse: - The heroine Fanatic is also known as Helena; the villain-turned-hero La Capitán/La Comodora is named Maria Helena...Teresa Fafila Servanda Jimena Mansuara Paterna Domenga Gelvira Placia Sendina Belita Eufemia Columba Gontina Aldonza Mafalda Cristina Tegrida de Falcon. Even given that most of her names are taken from Spanish, it's honestly impressive that she only really overlaps with another character once. - The hero Randall Butler/Benchmark shares a first name with Randy "Rotmouth" Burke, the low-life who would eventually become Plague Rat. It probably helps that, within the fictional comics, by the time the former debuted, the latter had been a feral rat creature answering to the name of "oh God it's got my arm" for a while. - The Parsons line has a tradition of naming the heir to the Legacy identity Paul, meaning that both the standard Finest Legacy and the promo Greatest Legacy are named Paul Parsons (VII and VIII respectively). Paul VIII's firstborn is spared this only by having been born a daughter instead, so she was named Pauline instead. (The Parsons family is typically loyal, steadfast, noble, diligent and compassionate, but it's just a wee bit short on imagination.) Naturally, she prefers to go by her middle name, Felicia. - In William Shakespeare's plays: - Similar to the Bible example above is The Comedy of Errors, which involves two sets of identically named identical twins separated at birth and maintaining the same bourgeois-and-servant relationship. Hilarity Ensues. - As You Like It, for no particular reason (i.e. makes no particular mention of it in the story, unlike Comedy of Errors), has two characters named Oliver (Orlando's eldest brother and the country priest) and two characters named Jaques (Orlando's middle brother and the melancholy wit in Duke Senior's retinue). - The Two Gentlemen of Verona: Sir Eglamour, the Milanese friend of Silvia, has the same name as the suitor of Julia who's mentioned briefly in act 1. - The history plays have a lot of duplicate names, because real history is like that. Shakespeare did try to reduce their number, though; for example, Lord Richard Grey and Sir Richard Ratcliffe—both characters in Richard III—are referred to by their last names only. - Lampshaded in Richard III where Queen Margaret starts riffing on the remarkable bodycount of the past few plays in Act IV, Scene iv: "I had an Edward, till a Richard kill'd him; I had a Henry, till a Richard kill'd him: Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard kill'd him; Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard kill'd him..." and it goes on from there. There's a special kind of pride that comes from hearing that scene and actually knowing who all the Henries, Richards, and Edwards were. - Henry IV Part 1 is basically about a war between King Henry and Prince Henry versus Henry Percy and his son Henry Percy. They get the last name / title / nickname treatment in the script, though. - And in The Taming of the Shrew we have Gremio and Grumio. Good luck remembering which is which. - A Midsummer Night's Dream gives us Puck, known by the euphemism "Robin Goodfellow", but in addition to him, we have Robin Starveling, the tailor. - Julius Caesar had both Cinna the conspirator and Cinna the poet. Unfortunately for Cinna the poet. As well as five Marks: Antony, Lepidus, Cicero, Brutus, and Corvinus. There's also Marcus Brutus and Decius Brutus (they were related, although the play doesn't mention this): the former is usually called just "Brutus" while the latter is usually called by his full name. - In the Stage Version of Bugsy Malone Joe is a recurring name. - RENT has two (minor) Steves: one of them is a member of the Life Support group (so we know that he is named after a friend of Larson's who died of AIDS), and the other is one of the (unseen) people Joanne is talking to on the phone in We're Okay. It's also not entirely impossible that these are the same person, but it's not relevant or interesting or significant in any way if they are. - Notably averted in 1776, in which the two main characters are both named John (Adams and Dickinson). In point of fact, there are no less than four Johns in the show (Adams (MA), Dickinson (PA), Hancock (MA), and Witherspoon (CT)). There's also the Georges (Reed (DE) and Washington (VA)) and Thomases (Jefferson (VA) and McKean (DE)). However, since they usually address each other as "Mr. Lastname," it doesn't really matter. - Similarly, the cast of Hamilton is composed of historical figures, so we have Philip Hamilton, named for his grandfather Philip Schuyler; James Madison and James Reynolds; George Washington, King George III, and George Eacker; as well as John Laurens and John Adams (although the latter doesn't actually appear in the musical). - Similarly, The Crucible is based on historical fact and so features a number of characters with the same name—in this case, also John: Proctor, Hale, and Hathorne. However, like in 1776, this never becomes an issue because most of the men are referred to by surname. The only man referred to as John is Proctor. - Also in the play are Thomas Danforth and Thomas Putnam. - Enforced in the case of the Putnams' daughter, since the Putnam girl who was an accuser in the Salem Witch Trials was named Ann, a name she shared with her mother (officially, they were Ann Putnam Jr. and Ann Putnam Sr.). The play changes the daughter's name to Ruth to prevent audiences from confusing the two. - Similarly, "Susanna Walcott" was actually named Mary Walcott in real life, with her name changed in the play presumably to avoid confusion with Mary Warren. - A Man For All Seasons has an unusually large fraction of (real-life) male characters named Thomas: main character Thomas More; Cardinal Thomas Wolsey; chief minister Thomas Cromwell; Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk; and Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. - The Amish in Plain and Fancy have four Jacob Yoders and two Abner Zooks. Fortunately, only one Jacob Yoder appears in the show, though Fat Jacob Yoder and Hairy Jacob Yoder are mentioned. - Completely averted in Yeast Nation, in which every character is named Jan. Every single one. (Of course, it's written by the same guys what did Urinetown, so...) - The play Society Shell features four upper class women all named Mary. They are mostly on a full name basis amongst themselves. - In Donzietti's opera Anna Bolena ("Anne Boleyn"), the historical Henry Percy has his first name changed to Riccardo to avoid confusion with King Enrico/Henry VIII. - Completely averted in Six, where no less than three of the protagonists bear the given name of "Katherine" (of Aragon, Howard and Parr) and two others have the similar "Anne" (Boleyn) and "Anna" (of Cleves). This is justified, due to being based on the real wives of Henry VIII, who, much like the above example, also had a historical namesake in Henry Percy, who was briefly mentioned. - Westeros: An American Musical: The Compressed Adaptation gets the play rid of several pairs of characters sharing a name from the original story. However, focusing the play on the King's Landing events while having a couple songs about the Night's Watch results in the play having both several mentions of Jon Arryn and on-stage appearances of Jon Snow. - The powers that be at Mattel must have a short memory due to how many Barbie characters share names, even within their debuts coming less of a decade amongst each other: - "Chelsea" is the name of a one of cousin Jazzie's friends (although spelled "Chelsie"), a My Scene character and Barbie's second-youngest sister (after years of being named "Kelly"). - Speaking of "Kelly", this is also the name of foreign markets for "Stacie", the second-oldest Barbie sister. - "Whitney" are names of a short-lived mid-80s brunette friend of Barbie and a (usually) redheaded friend of Stacie's in the 90s. - "Todd" has been a twin twice: a redheaded one from the 60s and a brunette one from the 90s. In spite of their similar identifies, they are said to not be the same character. - There have been plenty of friends named "Stacie" over the years and with varying spellings, but the most popular has been the Barbie sister introduced in 1991. - Noticeably averted in BIONICLE where most of the names are made up words. Several locations are named after legendary beings, examples being Mata Nui, Artakha, and Karzahni, the latter having a sentient plant named after him. - Also, some of the names sound similar: Krekka, Krahka, Krika, Krakua; Onewa, Onua - Makuta subverts this. Originally introduced as "Makuta," he was referred to as "the Makuta" just as often. As it turns out, "Makuta" is the name of an entire species, with the original "Makuta" just preferring to use the title instead of his actual name, akin to a group of dukes where one likes to call himself Duke (though admittedly, Teridax is rather epic itself). - Care Bears features two bears whose names are the same, albeit in different languages. "Amigo Bear" shares his name with the earlier character "Friend Bear". In Spanish they are called "Amigosito" and "Amigosita", which are the same name except masculine and feminine respectively. - My Little Pony suffered from this during the middle of its G1 run. There were two "Twilight"s, two "Sniffles", two "Snookums", three "Sea Breeze"s, and many ponies with the name "Cuddles". The G3 line reused many names from G1, and the G2 line reused certain names too (for example "Prince Firefly" shares the name with the female G1 pegasi "Firefly"). My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic took a few characters in the toy lines and reused their names, though changing the designs for several. The most absurd case is probably all the different Twilight's. There are now approximately seven different ponies named Twilight, if you count the ones where it's followed by a second word—the two G1 Twilight's, G3's Twilight Twinkle and Twilight Pink, and G4's Twilight Sparkle, Twilight Sky, and Twilight Velvet (two of whom are related). When someone on a collector's site asks for artwork of "Twilight" to set as their forum signature, the artist can and will get very confused. - Squishmallows: Sometimes characters will have names that are only slightly different from those of other characters, like Jingle (a Christmas tree) and Jingles (a cat). There are also cases where multiple Squishmallows share a name. - Tamagotchi: - There are two Tamagotchis named Masktchi, a Waddling Head one from the original 1996 virtual pet and a more humanoid one that debuted later. The former is usually referred to in modern materials as "Maskutchi". - Cosmotchi from the Tamagotchi P's isn't the only Tamagotchi with that name. Way back in 1997, Tamagotchi Video Adventures featured a different Cosmotchi as a main character. - Before the introduction of the more popular Kuromametchi in 2006, there was actually another Kuromametchi who appeared in the 1998 Licensed Game Hoshi de Hakken! Tamagotchi. The Hoshi de Hakken! Kuromametchi looks a bit like Mickey Mouse due to his black suit with mouse-like ears. - ToyBiz's Silver Surfer toyline from the 90's renamed changed Nova's name to "Super Nova" to differentiate him from Frankie Raye, who was using the Nova name at that time. - Subverted in Double Homework. Morgan reveals in the penultimate chapter that her real name is... Amy. \|\|Not only that, shes named after Amy (an incognito princess), as the two girls were born on the same day.\|\| - When They Cry: - Higurashi: When They Cry has Jirou Tomitake and Daiki Tomita—both of whom are almost always addressed or referred to by their surnames. Incidentally, they both happen to look similar, though Tomita is just a minor character. \|\|Plus, Tomitake's name is implied to be an alias, anyway.\|\| - In Umineko: When They Cry, the Ushiromiya family's human butler Genji's family name ("Ronoue") is pronounced almost exactly the same as the name of Beatrice's demon butler ("Ronove"). \|\|This is implied to be because Ronove is one of Sayo Yasuda's many Imaginary Friends, and she based Ronove off of Genji. To further reinforce this, a flashback in the EP8 manga reveals that young Genji looked very much like Ronove.\|\| - SHUFFLE! has two Rins: the male lead and one of the love interests (in her case it's short for Nerine). Sometimes you can tell which character is being addressed by the honorifics used. For instance, when Sia uses the affectionate term "Rin-chan", she means Nerine; she likes Rin but doesn't know him as well, so he's usually "Rin-kun" unless she's being very serious. - An important plot point in Tsukihime. \|\|The main character and the Big Bad are both called Shiki Tohno — the main character is adopted, in fact, and it seems the main reason he was adopted was because the head of the family thought that it was amusing that he had the same name as his son.\|\| - \|\|The two names are spelled differently in kanji though, so after The Reveal there's no confusion whatsoever to the readers. It had previously been assumed that he just wrote his name in katakana as kid out of laziness. English fans of the series write out SHIKI in all caps to differentiate.\|\| - Then there is Shiki's alter ego Shiki Nanaya, named for \|\|his biological clan\|\|. - Interestingly, the author also used this exact name confusion thing in The Garden of Sinners. It's even the same name: \|\|Shiki (Ryougi). Again, they're spelled differently in kanji and in fact both of them are different from both of the spellings in Tsukihime. Furthermore, this Shiki has three personalities, one of them being named SHIKI. The reason why Shiki Tohno and SHIKI Tohno share their first name with Shiki Ryougi (and SHIKI Ryougi) is because the author reused Ryougi's gimmick for Tsukihime when it initially seemed that Kara no Kyoukai wasn't getting published.\|\| - So all in all, there are six different characters that bear the name Shiki in the Nasuverse. - Ace Attorney: - Some cases in the Ace Attorney series have two characters with similar names. For instance, case 1 of Justice for All has two witnesses: Dick Gumshoe and Richard Wellington, and case 4 of Ace Attorney Investigations has Manny Coachen and Manfred von Karma. Whenever this happens, the name similarity isn't pointed out at all, since their names were completely different in the original Japanese version. - Similarly, the series also features Larry Butz and Lawrence Curls, Robert Hammond and Bobby Fulbright, Zak Gramarye and Zacharias Barnham, and Jack Hammer and Jack Shipley, though none of these sets of characters appear in the same game. - Because of this series' penchant for Punny Names, occasionally the same pun will be used for two different characters: Horace Knightley and Knightle (knight), Shelly de Killer, Kira and Lady Kee'ra (killer). Once again, none of these sets of characters appear in the same game. - The English version of Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth plays this trope straight, changing the character Zinc White's name to Zinc Lablanc, probably to avoid any connection to Redd White from the first game. As Redd White's name had also been changed from the original Japanese, this was only an issue in the international release. - The Engish Fan Translation of Gyakuten Kenji 2 generally avoided this with its character's names but the official localisations of later games resulted in this: Simon Keyes and Simon Blackquill, John Marsh and Johnny Smiles, and Patricia Roland and Paht Rohl (both puns of "patrol"). The Great Ace Attorney has another "patrol" pun with Patricia "Pat" Beate and her police officer husband Roly. - The Great Ace Attorney has a major character called Iris Wilson, who has the same name the nun Iris from Trials and Tribulations (who's called Ayame in the original Japanese, which is Japanese for Iris). There's also an Ayame in the game, namely Yujin Mikotoba's late wife, \|\|and Yujin chose to name Lady Baskerville's orphaned daughter "Iris" in honor of his wife.\|\| The duology also has both John Garrideb and John H. Watson/Wilson. The witness Oscar Fairplay is renamed Bruce Fairplay in the English localization, not to be confused with Bruce Goodman, the victim of Rise from the Ashes. - Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc averts this, since \|\|Celestia Ludenberg's real name is Taeko Yasuhiro, and there's another character named Yasuhiro Hagakure\|\|. This provides a big clue towards \|\|figuring out who the murderer is in Chapter 3\|\|. - Minotaur Hotel: Averted with the delivery man, whose name is Jean-Marie, the same name as the master of the hotel that preceded Clement, which raises suspicion towards the man. - Averted in Snatcher, which has Junker chief Benson Cunningham and Junker engineer Harry Benson as part of its supporting cast. \|\|This becomes a plot point when Gillian discovers evidence that someone named "Benson" may have been snatched.\|\| - In Ever17: no two characters actually share the same name, but the names that the player initially knows them as can sometimes be one of several characters. \|\|"You" could be either Youbiseiharukana Tanaka or Youbiseiakikana Tanaka, "Kid" could refer to Ryogo Kaburaki or Hokuto\|\|. - One example actually does exist, though it is a minor one. Takeshi Kurenari is the name of the main character, and shares his given name with the father of another character (Coco Yagami), although Takeshi Yagami is only mentioned in dialogue and never appears onscreen. - In Yearning: A Gay Story, there's a pair of girlfriends who are both named Liz and use their last name initials to differentiate their names (Liz B. and Liz G.). When Dan asks why they don't just call one of themselves "Elizabeth" to avoid confusion, they retort that he can call himself Elizabeth because it's his middle name too. - In Kanon, it's later revealed in Makoto's route that \|\|she's actually a fox that Yuuichi looked after seven years ago, and thus she doesn't have a real name or even a human identity. The name "Makoto Sawatari" was the name of an older girl Yuuchi told Makoto he had a crush on at the time, and she took that name for herself as one of the few things she could remember after she became human at the price of her memories. The real Makoto Sawatari makes a notable appearance in the 2006 anime, where she looks like an older Makoto.\|\| - A variant happens in Highway Blossoms. Marina and Mariah's names are merely similar, but after Amber starts calling the Marina "Mare," she later learns that Joe uses the same nickname for Mariah. - Camp Camp: The aspiring astronaut solely known as "Space Kid" claims his name is Neil Armstrong Jr. (named after his "great-grandfather" Neil Armstrong), which would mean he shares his first name with main character Neil. \|\|The second season finale reveals this really is his name, and the original Neil is not happy to find this out.\|\| - DC Super Hero Girls features a large cast so this occurs. One noticeable example is Batgirl and Cheetah. They're both named "Barbara" and are referred to as such, but not in the same episode. - DSBT InsaniT: Weird Girl suggests Koden calls her 'WG', but he says he can't do that because he already knows a WG (Waterfall Girl). - The Most Popular Girls in School: There's a Jenna Darabond and a Jenna Dapananian, both being important characters. There's also a Trisha Cappelletti and Trisha 2 - both also major characters. - Averted with Slush Invaders, whose cast consists of two Brians. - Homestar Runner: - In the action film spoof Dangeresque 1: Dangeresque Too?, hard-boiled detective Dangeresque (played by Strong Bad) is assigned a partner also named Dangeresque (played by Homestar); the latter is usually called "Dangeresque Too". - There's also Science Fiction Greg and D&D Greg from the Teen Girl Squad 'toons. The TGS spin-off "4 Gregs" introduced Open Source Greg, Japanese Culture Greg, and minor character Regular Greg. - One of the scenes in the Animutation "Irrational Exuberance" riffs on this, saying "There can be only one" Dave Thomas and then using "Worthington's Law: more money = better than)" to eliminate the less successful of the two. - Red vs. Blue has two Franks (Franklin Delano Donut and Frank DuFresne), but like the rest of the cast, both are always referred to by their nicknames Donut and Doc respectively. There's also \|\|three Leonard Churches (Doctor Leonard Church, Alpha, and Epsilon) and three Allisons (the original, the original Agent Texas, and the Epsilon-created Agent Texas). None of the three Allisons co-existed (and the original is barely even referenced), and the Churches are generally called "the Director"/"Director Church"/"Doctor Church", Church/Alpha, and Church/Epsilon\|\|. Still, it gets confusing when it comes to fan theories. "And then \|\|Church\|\| did this." "Wait, do you mean \|\|Alpha-Church\|\| or \|\|Epsilon-Church\|\|?" - Averted and lampshaded on Extra Credits, with the three Dans. There's Dan Floyd, the narrator, Other Dan, who helps with editing and behind the scenes work, and Dan #3, the new artist. Confusion starts almost immediately. - Averted in brewstew, where the narrator describes two Zacharys and two Davids that he knows. There's Zachary, the kid everyone hates because he's a snitch, has ADHD, and won't stop TALKING ABOUT MONSTER TRUCKS! And then there's Zachary, the kid across the narrator's street who is not quite like everyone else because he likes Beetleborgs rather than Power Rangers. The first Zachary has glasses while the other does not. Then, there's David, Tyler's best friend during cub scouts, who got last place in the Pinewood Derby and got sold off into child slavery in Nigeria. And then there's his cousin, David, who created the "Shitmas Tree". - This trope is the reason for some squick within the Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse fandom. Midge was reintroduced and she falls for a new character named Ryan. The problem is Midge was previously seen in the toyline with a son named "Ryan" (with her husband, Alan). This made some fans grossed out because it seemed like maybe they were the same character with Ryan's backstory being revamped. However, they're too different in design to be the same Ryan. - Kanon's RomCom Mangas: Hakuba Nakata thinks Alice has a crush on someone else with the same name as him, named Sho Hakuba, who's also his best friend. \|\|As it turns out, she really likes him instead of Sho. After receiving Alice's confession, many girls attempt to confess to Hakuba as well, with one of them explaining they were only approaching Sho to get closer to the former while viewing the latter unworthy to date. Later on, Sho explains to Hakuba that he doesn't want to date any girl and have a crush on him as well.\|\| - This xkcd has an Alt Text which jokes that, when so many hurricanes form in one season that all 21 pre-set names, all letters of the Greek alphabet, and every single other word in the Oxford English Dictionary has been exhausted, and the hurricanes appear in such a pattern that it becomes impossible to number them, the exasperated meteorological community will collectively throw their hands in the air and name every single hurricane as "Hurricane Steve". Your forecast for this evening: Steve. - Played with in Girl Genius. One pair of characters that have the same name turn out to be the same person. - The comic does feature two unrelated minor characters named "Wilhelm": Aaronev Wilhelm Sturmvoraus, the sixth Prince Aaronev of Sturmhalten, who uses his middle name to distinguish himself from his ancestors, and Wilhelm Diamant, the Mechanicsburg town-official in charge of shuttling prisoners into Castle Heterodyne. This isn't too surprising, since in real-world 19th-century Central Europe at least, Wilhelm isn't just a common name, it's the common name. Complicating matters is one of those aforementioned prisoners, Sanaa Wilhelm; it's ultimately revealed that \|\|it's not her real surname, and she used Diamant's name when assuming her alias\|\|. - In addition, the full name of Aaronev Wilhelm Sturmvoraus' only son is Aaronev Tarvek Sturmvoraus, though he is generally only referred to as Tarvek to avoid confusion. - More atypically, one of Agatha's ancestors and one of the rogue Sparks who attack Mechanicsburg share the first name "Igneous". - Alice has main characters named "Joan" and "Joanne". - The Wotch has Samantha Wolf and Samantha Smith, Allison Taverner and Allison Wise, and Miranda West and Sarah West (not related). - Tailsteak's apparently currently defunct Band is composed of Paul Henderson, Brian Smith the willowy übergeek, Brian Smith the hulking drummer, and Tyler, the alien/demon/squid. Neither Smith ever reveals his middle name or answers to a nickname, having sworn a "blood oath" to that effect. - The Order of the Stick: Nale: Another one? Good gods , man, that's eleven so far who Must Not Be Named. Not To mention the four Who Must Not Be Looked At , the two Who Must Not Be Spoken To, and the one Who Must Not Be Toilet-Trained! - An ironic self-depreciation occurs in the preface to the print version of book 4, "Don't Split the Party". It features a helpful diagram of the comic's enormous cast and the tangled web of different kinds of relationships between the characters; one of them is "Names Confusingly Similar", connecting Thog with Thor, Durkon with Dorukan, and the Dark One with the Creature in the Dark. - Narbonic features a secret society of people called Dave and a woman with the same name as her mother because she's a clone. - Troop 37 has two spoiled cheerleaders named Melissa with nickname Missy. - Arthur, King of Time and Space uses a variant spelling for Iseulte of Ireland to distinguish her from Isolde of Brittany. It keeps all the Elaines, though, and the "false Guenevere" in the fairy tale arc (in the contemporary arc she's called Fascha, and is Guenevere's full sister). - Parodied in a Ctrl+Alt+Del strip. - El Goonish Shive parodies this here. - Also, Immortals pick their names when they are reborn, and it's usually mythology based. Apparently, the hissy fits when two Zeuses meet is hysterical. The immortal who explains this, possibly in order to spite his former self for entering into a permanent Geas, then names himself 'Zeus' after being reborn. - At one point, Susan complains that "Tom is a jackass". Tom—but not the one Susan meant—takes offense momentarily. A Running Gag that began in The Rants and eventually migrated into the comics is that this Tom is in fact a shining paragon of goodness, unlike the Tom Susan was actually complaining about. - Kevin & Kell: - There were three different background characters named "Carl" before a rhino named Carl was introduced as a teammate of Rudy's on the Beige University competitive gardening team. - There's also two Georges: Fiona's father George Fennec and a gopher named George who transferred to said gardening team in 2019. - Vin Vulpin, Rudy's bully \|\|and half-brother\|\|, and years later, long after Vin was Put on a Bus, Vin, Rudy's self aware, self-driving car. Lindesfarne, on her blog, noted the same name. - Kevin Pease's Absurd Notions, during its college run, reversed this for a joke. (The archive commentary notes that the real joke is the ubiquity of the name "Jennifer" in the early seventies. Later on in the strip two Jen Greens appear, but they quickly get the initialism nicknames Jyg and Jag.) - Mountain Time is rife with people (and monsters) named Paul. There's even a Paula or two. - Melonpool's cast is the comedic version of this trope. First you have Ralph (evil genius) and Ralphie (Ralph's good clone). And then you have Sam (the talking dog), and Sammy (the giant talking hamster). Sammy's very far from intelligent, though, and just picked the first name he liked. - Questionable Content: - Lampshaded - when we are introduced to Marigold, she mentions the name "Angus". When recurring character Angus later shows up, Dora says "I thought she mentioned your name!". Granted, there aren't a lot of people named "Angus", but still... - One storyline features Dora, suspecting Cosette is cursed, calling in an elderly witch named "Claire." Fast forward a few hundred strips, and a very different 24-year-old named Claire finds her way into the main cast. - Parodied in Ansem Retort. When the main cast (with Riku) went into hiding, there was a supporting fill in cast, with Rikku. Darth Maul just referred to her as "girl Rikku". - The Problem Sleuth story of MS Paint Adventures had a ball with this; by the end there were at least 6 variations of Pickle Inspector, numerous Ace Dicks, and a few Problem Sleuths, and multiple timelines for all of them. This resulted in an occasional page dedicated to explaining who was doing what. Justified in that they were all variants of the original characters. - Homestuck subverts this in a similar way. Objectively, no characters share a name, despite the long list of them. (It helps that the two main sets of characters are separated by culture and species, allowing a lot of Aerith and Bob.) However, many characters interact with their own future or past personas. - Plus, presumably all game concept characters, such as Jack Noir, Cetus, and PM carry over into each session of Sburb. While ostensibly being the same person and sharing a basic personality, the variations of each character sometimes are quite different, only sharing the initials of their title. Spades Slick, for example, while still ruthless, is \|\|much less bloodthirsty than the Sovereign Slayer\|\|. - Played straight later with \|\|the post-Scratch Guardians presumably having the same names as the pre-Scratch Kids, and Rose and Dave's iterations have the same "titles" as their guardians in the Beta Session, meaning there are 2 Mom Lalondes and 2 Bro Striders. Also, a third set of Dersite Agents was introduced, which means there are three separate characters running around, all named Jack Noir\|\|. - Of course, accounting for the Jack Noir that \|\|killed Calliope, there are actually four\|\|. - Both the Aimless Renegade and Dirk Strider's Auto Responder are referred to as "AR" until the latter renames itself Lil Hal. - In Fans!' second year, one of the new members was named Tim, but there was already a Tim on the major cast. (The strip where the new Tim introduced himself had the page title "God Made Two of 'Em".) Characters and readers alike generally called the new one "Tim the Fanboy". Eventually, two developments reduced the ambiguity: Tim adopted a new name (as part of his FaceHeel Turn), and we found out his unabbreviated name was Timin, whereas the other Tim is presumably a Timothy. - While Everyday Heroes does, in fact, have only one Steve, it had at one point two Janes (who were members of the villainous team "The Jane Gang"). - Also, the neighborhood moms are named Jane, Joan, June, Jenny, Ginny, and so on ... - In Li'l Mell (featuring the young version of Mell Kelly from Narbonic), there are two girls named Taylor (one blonde caucasian, one dark-haired Asian), and their male counterparts named Tyler. - Coga Suro has, in fact, precisely one Steve; the main character. - Subverted in Spinnerette, where the main character learns that the name Spinnerette is already a name used by a spider-themed (Specifically, Drow-themed) villainess. The character is later referred to as Evil Spinnerette by everyone else. Later, the comic introduces the main character's counterpart from an earlier date in another universe, who is subsequently known as "Silver Age Spinnerette". - Lampshaded (and subverted!) in this Multiplex strip. - In Wright as Rayne, the last name of Dorothy, the girl Alex Rayne winds up in the body of, is Wright, which is also the last name of one of Power's mooks. Word of God has it the two aren't related in any way. - Parodied in this Treading Ground strip where a manager refers to two employees as Nate and Black Nate, even though their names are Nate and Jimi. - In Charby the Vampirate, one of the Rose Sisters (who initially only appeared in one strip but later returned) is named Rosemary, and one of Zerlocke's sisters (introduced much later, but a much more important character) is also named Rosemary. When the Rose Sister found out there was someone else named Rosemary, her response was "Whaat? There can be only one! Destroy her!" (She was talked out of it). - Averted in Elf Blood where one of the lead characters, Mara, shares her name with (and indeed was probably named after) the Elves' Mother Goddess. - In The Dreamer, there are two characters named Benjamin—Benjamin Cato and Benjamin Tallmadge. Cato lives in the 21st century, while Tallmadge lives in the 18th century. - Subverted in The Word Weary with Sam and Sam 2. - Averted, probably accidentally, by Ménage à 3 and its spin-off Sandra on the Rocks: - The setting features a Sandra, a Sonya, and a Senna. (And a Suzi, but everyone calls her "Zii".) The occasional confusion resulting on discussion boards may be as good a demonstration as any of why the rule is a good idea. For bonus points, some posters seem to insist on referring to Sonya as "Sonja". - There are also two minor characters named "Adrien". - However, the limit was later enforced belatedly after one strip introduced a new character named "Jim" when that name had already been used once. In the next strip, the new Jim was addressed as "James", and the tags attached to both strips were changed accordingly. - Tails of Lanschilandia gives us Lanschi and King Lanschi, who are not the same person and presumably not related. There's also Lanschi's brother Panschi. - Averted with White Dark Life: - There are two people named Alison. One was Collin's girlfriend, the other is one of the many deaths. - The RPs avert this even further, as there are two people named Rebecca, Damien, Altair, Artemis, and Matthew. Even funnier is that both Matthews have a relationship with Uma (one is her father, the other is her wannabe boyfriend). \|\|And even then, Luigifan and pommyman are also named Matthew, so there are actually four of them\|\|! - Averted in Fortuna. For any given AI, there are several different versions; for example, the comic has followed both Apollo V1 and Apollo V3, with both usually being referred to as just "Apollo". Even crazier, there are a couple of player characters named Hermes and Prometheus, even though there are already A.I.s with those names (the latter is implied, though hasn't actually made an appearance yet. - Averted by Jenny Over-There's cameo in Jenny and the Multiverse: despite the similarity in name, she has no relationship to Jenny Everywhere, and neither looks like her nor conspicuously unlike her. She's just another character with a similar name, no more, no less. - Averted in L's Empire. There are two entirely unrelated characters named Rosa and both are referred to as such. It actually confuses Void (since he met the first) when the second one is introduced. - In Consolers, as the characters share their names with the companies they're based off, there are two companies named Tiger - Tiger Telematics and Tiger Electronics (though the latter one has yet to appear), both usually just going by "Tiger". When the first one gets mistaken for the second, he's NOT happy about this. - The family tree published after Chapter 12 of Stand Still, Stay Silent showed a few first names running in families. Three pairs of identically-named characters were relevant to the fandom before that point: - Sigrun shares the name of her great-grandmother, who is one of the focus characters in the Just Before the End Distant Prologue. - The author ended up giving the name "Árni" to both Reynir's great-grandfather from the Distant Prologue and Reynir's father so his name would have a familiar ring to readers not familiar with the Icelandic Patronymic system. The Distant Prologue character is basically named "Árni, Reynir's son", while his present-day descendant is named "Reynir, Árni's son". - Before the family tree was made, All There in the Manual had already revealed that Mikkel has a twin named Michael, which is also the name of their great-grandfather from the Distant Prologue. - When Steven in Ask White Pearl and Steven (almost!) anything meets the Crystal Gem Pearl, he starts referring to White Pearl as "Earl" to avoid confusion. - The Redacverse loves messing with this trope. Some characters can have octopus counterparts with similar names, but spelled with an "octopus accent" (for example, Matthew's counterpart is named Maffhew). Another kind of counterpart can be found on the Moon (Mattis for Matthew or Terrys for Therry). And then there's a whole group of characters known as Your Father, His Father, Your Son... - Invoked by Debbie in the epilogue to the chapter "Shade" in Latchkey Kingdom, regarding the copy of \|\|Willa\|\|. She can't go by her first name (for obvious reasons) or by her middle name because another character is named \|\|Rosaline\|\|, so she chooses the name Rose for herself. - Mr. Boop: Features both Sonic The Hedgehog and Dr. Sonic the Hedgehog (an unrelated human man). - This Carry On strip, which doubles as a Newhart Shout-Out. - Nature of Nature's Art: Lycosa plays with this trope as a plot point. The arthropods are identified by their genus and species names instead of having family and given names. Despite the comic using a Cast of Snowflakes, two spider characters are the same species, so they should have the same name... but they use different classification systems, giving them different genus names. \|\|The plot point is that Lycosa herself is using the older genus name; the ninth member of Venom 8 is a Gladicosa wolf spider.\|\| - Unsounded: - Karl is the name of a random kid in Ulestry and the name of the man Toma's wife leaves him for. - Hart is the name of a wright and the captain of the peaceguard in Ethelmik. - Jon was the name of a bully Duane \|\|killed\|\| in school and the name of his second in the military. His commanding officer was also named John. - Walkyverse: There are two Rachels in this universe: Rachel Jackson, one of the co-builders of Ultra Car and the catalyst for the story arc that got Robin and Leslie together for good, and Rachel Moore, a minor character seen in the background a couple times. - In the Ultimate Universe version of this verse, Dumbing of Age, the two Rachels actually become roommates. Rachel Moore in this 'verse is called 'Other Rachel' (even in the tags). - Also in Dumbing of Age, the reason Jennifer Billingsworth went by the name Billie for years is because when she was in kindergarten there was already a Jennifer and a Jenny on the bus she took to school and they accused her of stealing her name from them. Billie went back to being called Jennifer in the second semester of college. - There are two Alexs in the strip: the grouchy male TA running Amber's class, and the more bubbly female TA that replaced him. A popular Fanon is that they're the same person pre and post transition respectively. (Word of God doesn't hate the idea.) - War and Peas has recurring characters Bob and Bob, whose entire schtick is being a regular friend duo. - Gone with the Blastwave averts and lampshades this. - Since the Whateley Universe has such a massive number of named characters, it's not surprising that there are lots of names occurring more than once. Like Elaine: Elaine Nalley and Elaine Fleischer are both gorgeous mutants with the Most Common Superpower, and they're both inventors. When they both went on Phase's birthday trip to Boston, Elaine Nalley went by "Doc" to avoid confusion among the other guests. On the other hand, the school does enforce rules about distinct codenames for everyone. - Averted in the "Humans Are Space Orcs" Tumblr blog, due to the Token Human being designated "Human Steve." This led to a joke that "Steve" must be a remarkably common name among sapient races, with the crewmember who is just named "Steve" being a cross between a spider and a starfish. Regular and Abnormal Steve are female and male yeti's, respectively. Extra-Regular Steve is the ship's cat, Tall Steve is an AI on a microchip (and is, somehow, The Casanova), and Evil Steve is the captain (it detests this nickname, however). - Jon Bois \ SB Nation has several aversions: "Lonnie Smith" from Pretty Good also features music from one Dr. Lonnie Smith, "History of the Seattle Mariners" from Dorktown briefly shows the career of every MLB player named Randy. But the greatest aversion from Jon is The Bob Emergency, which exclusively goes through the careers of athletes named Bob, even uncovering one obscure fighter who averts it on his own with the name Bob Bob. - Viral Texts: Sally accuses Dave of cheating on her after finding a wedding invitation on his desk, Dave tries to explain to her that he got it from a friend from high school who had the same exact name as him, but she dismisses him and divorces him. \|\|Dave really told the truth and Sally was just using the opportunity to divorce him so she could be together with another man.\|\| - Averted in Jreg, the video Leftist Infighting introduced a character named Post-Left to moderate a debate between Ancom and Commie but by the end of Centricide 3, Ancom has become Post-Left as well. - The Nightmare Time episode "Abstinence Camp" features two camp counselors, Boy Jerry and Girl Jerry, \|\|and their son Little Jerry\|\|. - Out With Dad'': Averted. First there's Rose's friend/crush Vanessa, then she also dates another girl with the same name, whom they call "New Vanessa", and later nicknamed "Nessa". - The Chairman's Ear: Averted, since the characters are all ersatzes of real-life politicians, almost exclusively referred to by their first name. There are two Jarosławs (the Chairman and the Deputy PM), two Mariuszes (the Chairman's assistant and the coordinator of the secret services) and two Donalds (the Chairman's rival and the president of the United States).	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneSteveLimit
One True Threesome - TV Tropes First Guy: Tomoko... I love you. Tomoko: I... I... Second Guy: But Tomoko, I also love you. First Guy: But now two of us love you. Who will you choose? Tomoko: ...Why don't we all just... fuck each other? You know, just... one big fuck pile. [Beat] Second Guy: ...Yeah okay. First Guy: Sounds good to me. In any given fandom, if there is any Shipping going on at all, there will usually be a particular couple substantially supported by both the Canon events of the series or story, and the general consensus of the fandom regarding Fanon. Even if some parts of the fandom aren't thrilled about the nature of the relationship, it's generally agreed that the relationship does exist and cannot be easily ignored. These unbreakable couples usually (but not always) consist of The Protagonist and their Love Interests, though they're often seen among villain groups as well. What makes this relationship unique can really only be decided by the individual viewer, and they are called OTP: One True Pairing. In some cases, love rivals may compete for a single love interest, and the fandom is wholly divided over which one most deserves to get the girl or guy, with large fandoms developing into factions devoted to one relationship over another. Or it may just be a matter of a standard Love Triangle or a particular corner of a Love Dodecahedron where, because romantic relationships usually consist of exactly two people, one of the competing parties is eventually going to be disappointed. And sometimes, because of Fan Dumb, this can go overboard and cause Ship-to-Ship Combat. In a display of Take a Third Option, some fans adopt the concept of the OT3: the One True Threesome. It's just like One True Pairing, except that there are three characters involved; most often this means the Hero, the Love Interest, and one of their best friends with whom they've both had homoerotic subtext at some point. That way everybody's happy, the sex is kinkier, and no matter who's involved, there's always a little homoeroticism happening. It's like Give Peace a Chance, only instead of Peace, it's Three-Way Sex. While these groupings are most often the result of combining two other disputed couples, there are some examples of characters who simply group together in this way without the fandom splitting them into pairs; Power Trios are especially ripe for OT3ing. OT3s are a part of shipping. The in-universe subtext that fuels said shipping goes under Threesome Subtext. If they're in a canon relationship, you're looking at Polyamory. As a philosophy, polyamory may be present in shipping as well. Note that, while not necessarily covered by this exact trope, sometimes fans will go even further and have an OT4, OT5, etc. Not under any circumstances to be confused with the most notorious part of the Church of Happyology. ## Examples <!—index—> <!—/index—> - Harpie Lady Sisters, Queen's/King's/Jack's Knight, Dark Magician/Dark Magician Girl/Dark Magician of Chaos (feel free to substitute with other magicians), pretty much anything remotely human in Yu-Gi-Oh! that comes in threes. - Some fans of Peanuts have suggested this as a way to resolve the Marcie/Charlie Brown/Peppermint Patty triangle. - The Book of Life: - Joaquin/Maria/Manolo (better known as Tres Leches) is pretty popular since all three are great people who remain good friends even after the whole Triangle thing gets resolved. Even Jorge has admitted to loving◊ the ship, occasionally posts pictures on his Tumblr, encouraged stories for it at least one, and joked about it being his original intent! - Joaquin and The Adelita twins too, due to the twins showing a lot of interest in him near the film's end, mixed a bit with Pair the Spares. - In Corpse Bride, Victor ends up learning to love Emily enough to want to join her in the Afterlife after believing his chances with Victoria are over. And Emily loves Victor enough to step aside and push him back to Victoria (who dearly loved Victor to begin with). ...Oh well, there's always the Afterlife. - Frozen: - Kristoff/Anna/Elsa (or "Kristelsanna" as it's called). Most Elsa/Anna fans like Kristoff too much to bash him much, so he's either made into Anna's platonic best friend or added into the Elsanna action. More rare is Anna/Kristoff/Elsa, which doesn't involve incest. - Due to their cameo, Rapunzel and Eugene from Tangled get shipped in various threesomes and foursomes with Frozen characters. Much of it is Kissing Cousins due to the fanon that Rapunzel is Anna and Elsa's first cousin. - In Inside Out, Fear, Anger, and Disgust are all shipped together by some fans, especially after the absence of Joy and Sadness from Headquarters in the film caused the three emotions to have to work together to try and help Riley. - While the Luca fandom is still picking up speed, no one can deny that Alberto/Luca/Guilia would work as a ship given that all three of them have wonderful chemistry on a platonic level. - The Princess and the Frog has Naveen/Tiana/Charlotte for those who think Tiana and Charlotte would make a cute couple but don't want to tear apart the Official Couple. It helps that both Charlotte/Tiana and Charlotte/Naveen tie up Charlotte's plot-thread about wanting to marry royalty. - From The Road to El Dorado, Chel/Tulio/Miguel for those that like the Miguel/Tulio paring but don't hate Chel. It helps that both Tulio and Miguel go slack jawed when around her, or that Chel flirts with both about equally, and of course there is Miguel and Tulio's relationship. Considering the ending, it's almost-sorta-kinda canon! - Toy Story: - In Toy Story 3 after \|\|Bo Peep got Put on a Bus\|\|, Woody/Buzz/Jessie became quite popular. \|\|It was implied to be canon in "Spanish Mode"\|\|. - Woody/Bo/Buzz/Jessie has also picked up in popularity. Toy Story 4 gave it a large boost after Bo Peep was reintroduced. - Turning Red: Some fans do consider Miriam/Mei/Tyler to be a valid option instead of Mei/Miriam or Mei/Tyler. - Descendants has a few possible options. - Pre-series stories sometimes have the core V Ks involved with each other. This can evolve into their canon love interests (primarily Ben, Doug and Jane since they appear and were confirmed in the final film) being brought into the relationship. - Ben/Mal/Uma and Mal/Ben/Audrey have followings though more the former. - Jay/Carlos/Jane. Lonnie may be thrown in here as well. - Ben/Mal/Evie/Doug, mostly due to the girls' chemistry with each other and the actors behind Ben and Doug having a great bromance. - The series "Package Deal" explores a relationship developing between Mal, Ben and Evie, as Mal and Evie were girlfriends back on the Isle of the Lost and Mal asks Ben if he would be willing to 'share' her with Evie as she can't give either of them up. The subsequent series explores how Ben and Evie become involved with each other beyond their existing bond with Mal, Mal affirming in a talk with the Fairy Godmother that, in contrast to the idea that fairies can only have one true love, she considers Ben and Evie to be her only partners rather than consider one 'above' the other. - Uma/Gil/Harry. - The Devil Wears Prada has Miranda/Andy/Emily as the most popular threesome pairing. It covers two very popular pairings, that of Miranda/Andy and Emily/Andy. It has also been known to sometimes become a foursome, and include Serena. It has the most fanfics of any threesome on Archive of Our Own. It's also very popular on YouTube to make a video about the three. If you are more into crossover pairings, there's Miranda/Andy/Cruella de Vil, which is surprisingly popular. - Do Revenge: While Eleanor/Gabbi make up a fairly popular Official Couple and Eleanor/Drea are the Fan-Preferred Couple with plenty of Homoerotic Subtext, a lot of fans ship Drea/Eleanor/Gabbi together rather than shipping Eleanor with either on their own as a way to avoid Ship-to-Ship Combat. It helps that Gabbi defends Drea following her and Eleanor's fight and Drea helps Eleanor win Gabbi back, making it easy for fans to assume Gabbi and Drea get along with each other. - Ferris Bueller's Day Off: Ferris is dating Sloane. Ferris has Ho Yay with Cameron. Cameron has Ship Tease subtext with Sloane. All three actors have wonderful chemistry, and it's clear that all three characters love and care for one another above all else — even Ferris, who is extremely selfish, obviously cares a lot about Cameron, and swears he'll marry Sloane. Of course these three get shipped together. - Inception: - Arthur/Ariadne/Eames is quite popular. As is Arthur/Ariadne/Cobb. - Cobb/Mal/anyone isn't the most popular combination, but it makes a lot of sense, metaphorically speaking, as \|\|Mal exists only inside Cobb's head at this point.\|\| - The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015) has Napoleon/Gaby/Illya, fueled by their chemistry as co-protagonists, the Napoleon/Illya Ho Yay, Illya and Gaby's canonical attraction, and Napoleon's flirtiness. - Marvel Cinematic Universe: - The Avengers: Having unexpectedly copious amounts of Tony Stark/Bruce Banner Ho Yay, along with expectedly copious amounts of Steve Rogers/Tony Stark Ho Yay, some fans have resolved this with an OT3 that's worth it for the Portmanteau Couple Name alone: Stark Spangled Banner. - Similarly, those wanting to run with the Steve/Tony Ho Yay but not wanting to break up Tony/Pepper go with Pepper/Steve/Tony and those who want Tony/Bruce go with Tony/Bruce/Pepper. - With the release of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, this expanded to include any combination of the foursome Steve/Bucky/Sam/Natasha, and any variant combinations with the pairings above. - As the two loves of Steve's life, Steve/Bucky/Peggy is also popular. - Since the release of Captain America: Civil War, many fans have happily rolled Stucky, Steve/Sam, and Sam/Bucky together into one big Steve/Sam/Bucky OT3. - And with the two biggest pairings in the fandom being Steve/Bucky (Stucky) and Steve/Tony (Stony), some fans Take a Third Option in this shipping conflict and ship Steve/Bucky/Tony (Stuckony). - What do you do when you can't decide between Clint/Natasha and Clint/Coulson? Why, you ship Strike Team Delta, aka Clint/Coulson/Natasha! - Peter Parker has two within the fandom as well. Peter/MJ/Ned and Peter1/Peter2/Peter3. - More recent fics such as "Tingle" and Spider-Man: Finding Home have introduced the new pairing of Peter, Yelena Belova and Kate Bishop, exploiting Kate and Yelena's obvious connection and their likely bonds with Peter as spiders and street-level heroes. - Others solve the problem by the simple expedient of letting the entire cast of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have a wild orgy. - Patchwork ends with Jennifer and Ellie 'killing' Madeline's personality and then having Garrett brought back to life, creating the possibility for them to have this kind of relationship as Jennifer and Ellie remain active in their shared body and each appear fond of Garrett at least. - Pirates of the Caribbean: - Red Notice: Hartley and Booth have lots of Ho Yay, but Hartley and Sarah also have some good relationship subtext going on \|\|and are actually lovers\|\|, and all three of their actors have great chemistry with each other. Most fans' solution to this is just to ship all three of them together. - Since the Holmes/Watson/Mary love triangle is pretty much canon in Sherlock Holmes (2009), it's no surprise some fans have taken to OT3ing them. The three of them do seem quite cozily domestic with each other in that last scene... Irene is sometimes added to the mix as well. - The fandom of Singin' in the Rain loooooooves Don/Kathy/Cosmo. Don and Kathy are the Official Couple, and have great chemistry, but Don and Cosmo's bromance is also pretty Ho Yay-heavy, and rather than evolving into a Friend Versus Lover situation, Kathy and Cosmo get along great. In particular, there's one really cute scene that the fandom has latched onto with shipping goggles, where Cosmo and Don share a Man Hug, followed by Don kissing Kathy... which is then followed by her pecking Cosmo on the cheek, who gets so embarrassed he falls over. So a lot of fanfic authors make them a triad — everyone wins! - In Skyfall James Bond seduces Severine, the villain's kept woman. The villain Silva caresses Bond while he has him tied to a chair. Later, when Severine enters the picture again, Silva greets her by saying, "Darling, your lover s are here." This has led to not a few fics positing a ménage à trois in the event of Bond joining or being forced to stay with Silva. - Sky High (2005) has a surprising amount of Will/Layla/Warren fics, given the amount of Die for Our Ship going on in the fandom. - Star Trek (2009): - Kirk/Spock/Uhura. McCoy often becomes a part of this arrangement too. - Supported by Paul Gadzikowski's fan comic The Hero of Three Faces (story arc starting here). - Star Trek Into Darkness adds more fuel, marketing them as the main Power Trio. In the 2009 movie, Kirk's interaction with Uhura consisted of her clearly rebuffing his attempts to hit on her. Now they're on decent enough terms to discuss her relationship with Spock, and one scene is described elsewhere on this wiki as "a three-way lover's spat". - The sequel resulted in a lot of threesomes involving John Harrison \|\|aka Khan\|\|, mostly John/Kirk/Spock. - Star Wars: As a trilogy of trilogies, each about a trio, this is no surprise. - The original trilogy: Luke/Han/Leia, before... you know. Though that hasn't stopped a lot of fans from continuing to ship that particular OT3. And the incest can always be muffled a little with Han serving as the vortex, and a buffer. - The prequel trilogy: Obi-Wan/Anakin/Padmé (Obianidala) totally. The Novelization of Revenge of the Sith almost makes it canon, with Palpatine explicitly stating that Anakin's choice isn't between the Jedi and the Sith, but whether or not he loves Padmé more than Obi-Wan. - The sequel trilogy: Poe/Finn/Rey (Jedistormpilot). Between Finn's Love at First Sight with Rey and the instant bromance that forms between him and Poe, this pairing took off faster than the Falcon making the Kessel Run. - For a Foe Yay Shipping example, there is also Rey/Kylo/Hux (sometimes abbreviated as Reylux), since Rey/Kylo is pretty much the closest thing the sequel trilogy has to an Official Couple, while Kylo/Hux bitter rivalry is seen by their shippers as a form of Belligerent Sexual Tension, and Rey/Hux is surprisingly quite popular, presumably due to their actors' chemistry. - Flynn/Lora/Alan is a Running Gag in TRON fandom, backed up by the fact Lora dated Flynn before marrying Alan. However, few are actually brave enough to write it. - Venom (2018) has Eddie/Anne/Venom, thanks to the canonical Eddie/Anne relationship and the copious amounts of Ho Yay between Eddie and Venom, \|\|culminating in a scene where a Venom-possessed Anne makes out with Eddie to transfer the symbiote back to him.\|\| Anne's fiancé Dan will occasionally get thrown in to make it a foursome, given how well he and Eddie get along. - Almost Night uses this to solve the conflict between Ed and Bocaj. - For The Chronicles of Narnia, Peter/Susan/Caspian and Edmund/Lucy/Caspian are fairly popular, particularly because of the movies. There is also Susan/Caspian/Lucy, although it's rarer. - In Deltora Quest theres Lief/Barda/Jasmine. - The Eagle of the Ninth has Marcus/Cottia/Esca. - Guenevere/Arthur/Lancelot in The Fionavar Tapestry and probably plenty of others. - The GONE series has the Devils trinity, which consists of Drake/Caine/Diana. This ship is popular, mainly because these three characters have many conflicting (and popular) ships, like Cake (Drake/Caine), Caina (Caine/Diana, actually canon) and Driana (Drake/Diana). - It might well have solved some fairly major problems if the setting of Gone with the Wind had been one in which an Ashley/Melanie/Scarlett One True Threesome had been a possible option. - Harry Potter: - Harry/Ron/Hermione, the three main characters. - Harry/Ginny/Luna is a popular pairing, even being named Flaming Nargles. - James/Lily — being kind of important as a couple — are often paired with Lupin, Severus, Sirius, or occasionally Regulus depending on the author's favorite '70s era student. - When it comes to Marauders shipping, Fan-Preferred Couple Sirius/Lupin might be joined by either James or Tonks, with the added bonus that Sirius and Tonks are cousins. - Lunar Harmony (Harry/Hermione/Luna) has a relatively small but dedicated fanbase. - Ginny/Hermione/Luna also has some fans. - Harry/Hermione/Draco combines three of the most popular ships (Harmony, Drarry, Dramione) - DGB (Draco/Ginny/Blaise) has a popular following, and Hermione/Draco/Blaise has become mildly popular in smutfics. - Hermione/Snape/Lucius and Hermione/Snape/Lupin are popular for those who like older men. - Some other themed OT3s are Bellatrix/Lucius/Narcissa (Death Eaters) and Katie/Alicia/Angelina (Gryffindor Quidditch Team). - For the Hurog duology, Tisala/Ward/Oreg is very, very popular. To the point that there are almost no fanfics about other pairings. The Ho Yay between Ward and Oreg is just that obvious. And as Tisala is the most badass woman of appropriate age, there is no serious competition for her. - The Infernal Devices has Tessa/Will/Jem. - Very nearly canon in The Lions of Al-Rassan with Ammar/Jehane/Rodrigo. - The Lord of the Rings: - There's Arwen/Aragorn may be joined by either Boromir or Éowyn. Throw Faramir in the mess for extra points. - Éomer/Aragorn/Faramir, or Legolas/Aragorn/Arwen, or even Aragorn/Arwen/Frodo. - Legolas/Aragorn/Éomer, Aragorn/Faramir/Boromir and OT4 Sam/Frodo/Merry/Pippin. - Rosie/Sam/Frodo isn't as popular, probably because Rosie barely appears in either the books or movies, but it's out there. Considering that \|\|Rosie and Sam kept taking care of Frodo after they got married\|\|, this one works really nicely. - Aragorn/Legolas/Gimli has its fans. They manage to stick together through practically the entire journey. - The Maze Runner has Thomas/Newt/Minho as its most popular threesome pairing, with tons of fanfics for it. The three are the most popular characters, share lots of Ho Yay all around, and have great chemistry with each other. It is made up of three popular ships: Thomas/Newt, Thomas/Minho, and Newt/Minho, and helps to avoid any shipping wars. Fans have also been known to either throw Teresa in or have her replace Minho. - In Les Misérables fandom, there is the technically canon threesome of Joly/Musichetta/Bossuet, and in some fanfics the main love triangle is solved by shipping Cosette/Marius/Éponine. - The Moomins: Moomintroll/Snufkin/Snorkmaiden is a very popular three-way ship. Moomintroll's canon Love Interest is Snorkmaiden, but Snufkin also gets a ton of Ho Yay with him, to the point where it's debated whether it's actually intentional Homoerotic Subtext note : Supported by how the author of The Moomins, Tove Jansson, was bisexual and sometimes included subtle queer themes in her stories and making Moomintroll/Snufkin the Fan-Preferred Couple. Those who can't decide which pairing they like best often just do both at the same time. The liberal atmosphere of Moominvalley also makes it easy to imagine that the characters would be accepting of polyamory. - Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Percy/Nico/Annabeth has its followers in the fandom. - A Song of Ice and Fire: - Theon/Jon/Robb (abbrev: THEJOBB) seems to be popular. Jon and Robb are close; Robb and Theon are close; Jon thinks Theon is an asshole, and we know what that means... - Jon/Tyrion/Dany has its followers. Considering that Jorah told Dany she needs 2 husbands, it's not out of the question. - Jon/Robb/Sansa is also popular, as is Daenerys/Jon/Sansa (which has the bonus of resolving a lot of Ship-to-Ship Combat). It helps that Jon, Robb, Sansa, Theon and Dany are all Launchers of a Thousand Ships. - For those who believe Lyanna and Rhaegar to be Jon's parents it is not unheard of to find Rhaegar's wife Elia Martell being not just okay with it, but involved as well. - The Star Wars Expanded Universe gives us Jaina/Zekk/Jag, which almost became canon in the Dark Nest Trilogy. Ben/Taryn/Trista (hinted at), Zekk/Taryn/Trista (also hinted at), Ben/Jacen/Tahiri (we could ship... on Ship!), Luke/Corran/Mirax (Luke even hinted as such in I, Jedi.), Luke/Corran/Mara (more Stackpole subtext, which is not very subtextual unless it's Ho Yay but a lot more subtextual than his spiritual heir Troy Denning), Ahsoka/a clone/another clone. - some The Stormlight Archive fans have decided to find their own ending to the love triangle with Kaladin/Shallan/Adolin, or even Shallan/Adolin/Kaladin. - In Further Tales of the City, Anna Madrigal jokes that Mary Ann, Brian, and Michael are her favorite couple. The trio really don't mind this notion at all. - Laurence/Granby/Tharkay in Temeraire is quite popular. Meanwhile fanfic that only pairs Laurence with one person tends to have shades of this anyway, since Temeraire must be taken into account. - The Truth has the Newspaper OT3 of William/Sacharissa/Otto. - The Twilight Saga: - Obviously enough, Edward/Jacob/Bella. Even in the first book, there's Ho Yay between Edward and Jacob. Then Breaking Dawn gave us Edward telling Bella she could have as many kids as she wanted with Jacob. - The relatively popular Alice/Bella/Edward, Alice/Edward/Jasper and Edward/Bella/Carlisle. - Its weird that there isn't more Edward/Bella/Rosalie, given that Carlisle and Esme initially hoped to set Edward up with her, and the way Rosalie and Bella get quite close in Breaking Dawn. - From the wolves the most popular ones are Jacob/Embry/Quil and Jacob/Seth/Leah. - Warrior Cats: - The Love Dodecahedron practically asks for this. Firestar + Sandstorm + Spottedleaf neatly solves all the drama caused by Firestar's love for both she-cats. Although Spottedleaf being Sandstorm's aunt might squick some shippers. - Crowfeather + Feathertail + Leafpool is nearly the exact same situation as above, with Crowfeather having first loved one she-cat, then another after the first died. - Squirrelflight + Ashfur + Brambleclaw could make Squirrelflight not have to choose between the two toms. - Squirrelflight/Brambleclaw/Stormfur works quite well, as both toms were interested in her in the second series, and were also close with each other during their journey. Stormfur even joined ThunderClan for a while. - Graystripe + Silverstream + Millie has its problems (the two she-cats never met) but both love Graystripe a lot and what with all three of them inevitably sharing StarClan together, it's less crazy than it sounds. - Hollyleaf + Ivypool + Blossomfall became reasonably popular on sites like Tumblr. - Water for Elephants: August/Marlena/Jacob definitely has some appeal. This will really take off once the movie comes out, since it stars Robert Pattinson, Christoph Waltz and Reese Witherspoon. Curiously similar to Sophie's Choice, since both \|\|older males have volatile tempers due to mental health problems, both younger men are sort of 'adopted' into an established marriage and both younger men end up sleeping with the woman.\|\| - Wings of Fire: Moonwatcher/Qibli/Winter is a fairly popular solution to their Love Triangle in the second story arc. - On Archive of Our Own, The Shield (Dean Ambrose, Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns) is the OT3 for both WWE and professional wrestling in general. Combinations of any of the two is the One True Pairing. - The Undisputed Era was originally a trio - Adam Cole, Kyle O'Reilly, and Bobby Fish - and were very, very close, constantly hanging all over each other. It became a true Power Stable and foursome with the addition of Roderick Strong. Cole himself dubbed he, Bobby, and Kyle "the OT3" in a promo once, and while he is One of Us, he likely meant that in a platonic manner. Maybe. - The Bible: - David/Jonathan/Michal. - Some churches will outright state that God is a third party in any sanctified marriage, although it is not intended to imply anything sexual. - Classical Mythology: Achilles/Patroclus/Briseis, Hercules/Iolaus/Alcmene, Zeus/Hera/Ganymede, and Persephone/Adonis/Aphrodite. Hades (Persephone's husband) can also be thrown into that last one. - The Epic of Gilgamesh: Gilgamesh/Enkidu/Shamhat. - Maybe Loki/Sigyn/Angrboða from Norse Mythology relationship is this. - The basic idea behind the "Two Ladies" number in Cabaret. - The ending of A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder seems to at least imply this, as the Love Triangle between Monty, Phoebe, and Sibella never really gets resolved. - The Phantom of the Opera: - While Christine is almost unanimously shipped with the Phantom, some ask why she couldn't have chosen both her Victorious Childhood Friend and her Stalker with a Crush. (Hell, the Phantom probably would've taken anything he could get...) - Additionally, Phantom/Christine/Meg in the fanfic/fandom zone. Two girls? Joys of the flesh indeed. I don't hear the Phantom protesting too hard... - In Wicked, a great deal of the tragedy that unfolded could have been avoided if Elphaba/Fiyero/G(a)linda had become a threesome. Considering Fiyero was with both Elphaba and Glinda at different points in the story, and Elphaba and Glinda's strong bond with each other is by far the most important relationship in the play, it's not too hard to scrounge up enough evidence to make a case for it. - Sometimes in opera, the usual "tenor and baritone fight over the girl" plot can be spiced up with a bit of Ho Yay, making this this ideal outcome (if only everyone survived). The Metropolitan's 2016 productions of Les Pecheurs de Perles and Roberto Devereaux stand out as examples—and, coincidentally, they featured the same tenor and baritone. - Ace Attorney: - Danganronpa: - The "Trial Point Getters" from the first two games seem to be this. The first game has Makoto/Kyoko/Byakuya while the second game has Hajime/Chiaki/Nagito. - Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: - Chihiro/Ishimaru/Mondo, charmingly called Chishimondo. There is also a canon example in the case of \|\|Naegi/Aoi/Hagakure/possibly Togami\|\|, in the bad ending at least, but it's rare to see that in fandom. - Makoto/Kyoko/Hina is occasionally seen as well, especially after Danganronpa 3 did some Ship Tease both ways. - Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair has a love triangle between Sonia Nevermind, Kazuichi Souda, and Gundham Tanaka. So, of course, some fans like to ship all three together. - Keeping up the theme of The Protagonist, The Love Interest, and The Rival, Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony gives us Kaede/Shuichi/Kokichi. V3 also adds a new one in the form of Shuichi being paired with Kaito and Maki, affectionately called the "Training Trio". - Strongly implied canon for one of the endings of Date Warp with Janet/Linds/Rafael. - Higurashi: When They Cry: - Mion/Keiichi/Rena is without a doubt the most popular. They're close friends and it helps fix their love triangle. Keiichi canonically likes either one depending on the arc as well, so it makes sense he could love both at once. Mion and Rena get along well as well, so it's easy to ship them together. - Shion/Mion/Keiichi usually happens when people enjoy the twincest subtext between Mion and Shion but also ship Keiichi/Mion. Shion/Keiichi/Mion is also popular because Keiichi is very similar to Shion's canon love interest, Satoshi \|\|who is in a coma throughout the franchise and presumed dead\|\|. - Rika and Satoko have a close Homoerotic Subtext filled relationship while Hanyuu probably knows Rika better than anyone else. Obviously Satoko/Rika/Hanyuu is a thing. - Katawa Shoujo: - Lilly/Hisao/Hanako, or, in some fictions, Lilly/Hanako/Hisao or Hanako/Lilly/Hisao, is the most popular OT3. Lilly and Hanako are noted to be extremely close, both appearing frequently in the other one's route, and it's even reflected in how you get onto their routes — most walkthroughs lump the two together, as the paths to the two routes are identical up until the final choice before the route lock. - Hisao/Shizune/Misha have their shippers, coming in second. \|\|It helps that it's a canon love triangle as Misha is in love with Shizune.\|\| - Emi/Hisao/Rin, while rarely seen in fanfiction, is pretty popular in art pieces, due to people enjoying their interactions. - Fanfiction "pseudo-routes" about pairing Hisao with background students Miki or Suzu originated a somewhat popular shipping for Miki/Hisao/Suzu, or even Hisao/Miki/Suzu or Hisao/Suzu/Miki and its own set of fics. - Nasuverse: - Tsukihime: Shiki/Arcueid/Ciel and Shiki/Hisui/Kohaku are the most common. Both somehow supported even canonically. First in Ciel Good End where Arcueid and Ciel effectively and begrudgingly "share" Shiki. There is much teased at, but unconfirmed attraction between the two of them. Second is the main theme of Kagetsu Tohya's sidestory Flower of Thanatos in which Shiki together with humble servants Hisui and Kohaku lives in the isolated Tohno Mansion, where Shiki practically can do with both maids whatever he wants, and Kohaku is very enthusiastic when they both serve him at the same time \|\|(including sexual desires, or periodic rapes) although it's not so simple as it seems and Shiki begins to have regrets\|\|. - With Melty Blood there is also Shiki/Akiha/Sion, notable as Sion is probably the only girl interested in Shiki Akiha gets along with. Or Satsuki/Sion/Riesbyfe as the Back Alley Alliance. - Fate/stay night: There are Shirou/Saber/Rin and Shirou/Sakura/Rider or Shirou/Sakura/Rin. Both are expanded at various levels in Fate/hollow ataraxia and many other associated works or materials, and are very popular in fandom. - Shirou/Saber/Rin is based on the Unlimited Blade Works route where \|\|in the Good End of this route\|\|, some fans believe that this is what was going on behind the scenes (doesn't hurt that Rin discovered that she is bisexual in the original Fate route while sleeping with Shirou and Saber). - Shirou/Sakura/Rider is based on the Heaven's Feel route, where Shirou \|\|is mind-raped by Rider disguised as Rin in the original game. Rider also stays with Sakura in the endings, and leaves it ambiguous whether she needs to replenish her mana without Sakura's knowledge, while it's openly stated that Shirou depends on Sakura to live his life.\|\| It's most evident in Fate/hollow ataraxia Eclipse story's The backside of Kibisis, \|\|in which they have a hot threesome scene, and although this turns out to be actually just Rider's illusion, it's clear how things are\|\|. - Shirou/Sakura/Rin is based on \|\|Shirou being with Sakura in the True End of Heaven's Feel, while Rin still has feelings for Shirou, even after she leaves for London alone. Interestingly while not confirmed, there are even hints of this occurring in the Normal End of Fate.\|\| - The protagonists of Zero Time Dilemma are conveniently divided into trios during the Decision Game, but one of these groups includes a kid and another turns out to be \|\|a woman and her parents\|\|, so Team C (Carlos/Akane/Junpei) naturally became the most popular threesome pairing. It's fueled by the fact that, in-universe, Carlos is really determined to get Akane and Junpei together, despite only knowing them for a few days, and often asks questions about their relationship. - City of Reality is a literal, and Deconstructed utopia, to the point where, when a person catches their spouse cheating, the natural and normal reaction is to join in. - Collar 6 gives us the canon couple of Sixx/Laura/Ginger. Made possible as all the girls were already into polyamory beforehand. - Dumbing of Age fans wasted no time in shipping Amber/Danny/Ethan once Danny was confirmed to be bisexual and attracted to them both. - There appears to be a number of El Goonish Shive fans that ship Sarah with one of the Official Couples of the comic, Tedd/Grace. She has received some Ship Tease with both of them, but she is \|\|or rather, was\|\| part of another Official Couple. \|\|However, given certain developments in the comic, she is now free to fulfill the wishes of the fans.\|\| - Given some additional traction by this (probably) non-canon "Sketchbook" page. And further Ship Tease when a Q&A claimed to be "out of space" to discuss it and a "Wrong Answers Only" Q&A wasn't prepared to give a solid "yes" in case it wasn't a wrong answer. And the NP story "Blanket" appears to be an extended riff on there being Only One Couch. - Girl Genius fandom has strong (although not exclusive) support for Agatha×Gil×Tarvek. While Gil's the more traditional Designated Love Interest and proposed to Agatha even before he knew her background, as Violetta points out, Tarvek is equally devoted to Agatha and would be a much less politically troublesome match. The Cinderella parody done in one of the interludes ending with Agatha-as-Cinderella marrying both Gil and Tarvek indicates that the writers think it's a perfectly reasonable resolution to the romantic plotlines. In-universe, it's been acknowledged as a possible outcome by several characters. The in-universe betting pool has Gil at 2-1, Tarvek 3-1, and Both at 5-1, showing just how likely some find it. - Gunnerkrigg Court: - Jack/Zimmy/Gamma has popped up among certain fans after a revelation or two in the comic. Mostly for laughs, but a few not so much. - When Jack is introduced with a girlfriend, Jenny, who refers to Annie with "my love," Jack/Jenny/Annie cropped up in response. note : She's from The West Country, and that's just how people talk there, but still... - Homestuck It's pretty common to see some love triangles resolved this way, creating pairings like Dave/Terezi/Karkat or Eridan/Feferi/Sollux. More unusually, because trolls in Homestuck canonically have four different kinds of romance and usually desire to fulfill all of them, it's common for OT3s to involve multiple different relationship types. (It doesn't help that one of said relationship types inherently requires a threesome.) Using the earlier example, it's not unusual to see people shipping Eridan, Feferi, and Sollux all in red relationship (that is, a normal human romantic one), but it's arguably even more common for people to ship Eridan and Sollux both in a red relationship with Feferi but in a black relationship with each other. Needless to say, fics with lots of different pairings and multiple quadrants for each character can get very... complicated. - John's Dad/Rose's Mom/Dave's Bro was at least popular in the fandom's early days (it didn't hurt that Mom/Dad was an Official Couple and Mom and Bro were Dave and Rose's biological parents). Things became complicated after \|\|the Scratch, wherein alternate versions of Mom (Roxy) and Bro (Dirk) swapped roles with Rose and Dave while Dad stayed the same\|\|. - The Law of Purple's Lette/Blue/Synn is pretty much canon. - Magick Chicks: When Faith tells Tiffany that she loves her, Tiffany counters by bringing up Faith's habit of sleeping around. So Faith said she'd agree to stop seeing other girls, if Tiffany asked her to. Tiffany considers it for a moment, then asks about Faith's boyfriend, Ash, which is where Faith drew the line and proposed they form a threesome instead. - Ménage à 3: According to some fans, Gary/Yuki/Zii (because Yuki is crazy-jealous respecting both Gary and Zii, and both Zii and Gary have expressed interest in each other at certain points, it seems like the relationship might actually be stable). - Questionable Content: - Siren's Lament: Lyra/Shon may be the official couple with Ian as the unlucky suitor for Lyra but the ship of Ian/Lyra/Shon set sail quite early on due to Ian proposing it. Ian trying to join in on a hug between the two before they started dating helped kick things off, and was reinforced by Shon carrying Ian bridal style when Ian nearly passed out and Ian's habit of flirting with Shon to annoy him, and Shon on at least two occasions responding in kind. - SomethingPositive: Davan/Vanessa/PeeJee, anyone? Vanessa has even stated that she would not be averse to such a set up... the author, on the other hand, is. Davan and Peejee will never be a canon item. - Camp Camp has a few possible triads, some popular and others not. They include - Max/Neil/Nikki - Max/Preston/Space Kid - Nerris/Harrison/Preston - Nerris/Ered/Nikki - Harrison/Preston/Max - Harrison/Neil/Max - Snake/Neil/Max - Tabbi/Erin/Sasha - Gwen/David/\|\| Jasper\|\|, albeit only possible in AUs. - Crossovers with Xray And Vav* can feature Gwen/David/Mogar and Hilda/Gwen/David/Mogar. - Helluva Boss: - While Moxxie and Millie are already an Official Couple that fans adore seeing express their love, there are a decent number of fans that like adding Blitzo to the mix, as not only does Blitzo express both familial and sexual interest in the duo (he outright shows in "Loo Loo Land" that he wants to have a three-way with them), the trio often act like a group of dysfunctional but caring parents towards Loona, who Blitzo is already the adoptive father of. - Some Blitzo/Stolas shippers threw Verosika into the mix after "Spring Broken", noting that she and Blitzo may not be completely over each other and that Verosika, being a succubus, may not care about Blitzo sleeping with other people. Meanwhile, even though Stolas and Verosika have yet to interact onscreen at the time of this writing, the subtle but unmistakable parallels between them have led a lot of these shippers to assume they'd get along like a house on fire. Not to mention the logic and appeal inherent in shipping two of the biggest perverts on the show with a succubus... - Not long after their debut, plenty of fans who like C.H.E.R.U.B took to shipping all members of the trio together, since whenever they show their true colors, their conflicting interactions provide prime Belligerent Sexual Tension bait. There are a few that go the Fan-Preferred Couple route with Keenie and Collin since her frequent aggression towards him makes for a good Tsundere dynamic, along with them both being sheep-angels, but Cletus acts as a good mediator for the two, along with how the show effectively dares the fanbase to ship them by having Blitzo call him a sheep-fucker. - Mystery Skulls Animated: Arthur is jealous of Lewis and Vivi's relationship, but the series is ambigous as to how; the fandom solves this by shipping the three together, though whether it's a complete or partial triangle depends on the writer. - Off the Page and into Life: - Henry loves Gail, Gail loves Henry, Terrence loves Henry, Terrence and Henry have a lot of Ho Yay, and Terrence and Gail sometimes veer into Foe Romance Subtext. Naturally, many people (both In-Universe and out) have pointed out that a threesome would solve a lot of problems. Gail, Terrence and Henry did not agree. (Ironically, all three muns for those characters have said they liked the idea.) - Gail's entangled in another OT3 with her best friend Meg and her boyfriend Morpheus. And with Jackson and Tim. And Sam and Henry. Gail gets shipped with everyone. - To a lesser extent, Frederick with his ex-girlfriend Gloria and Gloria's new girlfriend Emily. - ProZD's suggests this trope should happen when it comes to anime love triangles. Currently the page quote. - In the Red vs. Blue fandom, portraying Agents North Dakota, New York, and Washington as lovers is fairly popular. Being three of the nicest characters in a series full of clueless, bitter jerkasses probably has something to do with it. note : Of course, \|\|North and York being dead\|\| means that these tend to be either fix fics, occur \|\|before Project Freelancer fell apart\|\|, or take place in an alternate universe. - RWBY: - Blake had ship tease in the show with both Sun and Yang across the first five volumes. One solution to the fandom shipping wars between Blake/Sun (Black Sun) and Blake/Yang (Bumblebee) was to create the fairly popular ship Sunny Bees, consisting of all three characters together. - Once Volume 5 confirmed that Ilia used to be in love with Blake, threesome ships of Ilia/Blake/Sun and Ilia/Blake/Yang exist. However, the big solution, given the already existing Sunny Bees threesome, was to simply add Ilia into the mix and make it a One True Foursome. - Taiyang has two daughters by two different mothers who are two years apart in age. Both of their mothers were in Taiyang's team in school. Instead of arguing about whether Taiyang/Raven or Taiyang/Summer is the better ship, fans went for the threesome. This generated the meme "Entire Team, Qrow" due to there being no hint that Qrow was ever a likely love interest for Taiyang; the joke is that, as the only member left out of the ship, Taiyang must be determined to land Qrow and score the entire team. - Ruby Rose is most commonly shipped with Weiss Schnee, her Defrosting Ice Queen partner, and Penny Polendina, a Robot Girl to whom she is the first friend. After a moment in the Volume 7 finale where both Ruby and Weiss cuddle up to Penny at the same time to comfort her, Ruby/Penny/Weiss has become a common ship. - That Guy with the Glasses: - In Welcome to Night Vale there was clearly some sort of romance between Childhood Friends Cecil and Scoutmaster Earl, even if it was only one-sided. Earl apparently died in the episode he was introduced, but it wouldn't be too much of a stretch for him to come back and for their relationship to blossom. Except, Cecil's now in a committed and frankly adorable relationship with Carlos the scientist. This was the only logical conclusion for many. - Whateley Universe fandom has the triangles of Thunderbird/Chaka/Riptide and Stalwart/Fey/Bugs and Molly/Chou/Dorjee resolved this way (the latter was resolved by canon Polyamory). - Xray And Vav has Ash/Xray/Vav. "And so anime was solved forever!"	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneTrueTriad
Never Split the Party - TV Tropes "Don't you know? You never split the party! Clerics in the back to keep those fighters hale and hearty, The wizard in the middle, where he can shed some light, And you never let that damn thief out of sight..." The reverse of Let's Split Up, Gang!, this is when the whole party decides that they aren't going to split up unless forced to. Sometimes it can be taken to indicate at least a minimal level of genre savviness, for example, in situations where splitting up means that one group will later have to go find the other group. It's also a clear win in horror films where the monster/killer will pick off each member one by one. At other times, it's clear proof of Genre Blindness; if there's only one Big Bad, and the group is running from it, staying together means that the whole scene becomes the punchline of a joke: "I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you." Additionally, staying in a group in that case makes it much more likely that when The Millstone trips and falls, they'll wipe out at least one other person as well. In this case, it might be deemed safer to apply Let's Split Up, Gang!. This trope is extremely common in Tabletop Games and related media, where splitting up the party can make the game a headache to run. Almost always, a split of any length will result in some players sitting around doing nothing because their characters are not present, not to mention an overworked gamemaster trying to track and manage different locations at once. For this reason, tabletop groups often won't split up even when it would be tactically advisable to do so from an in-setting standpoint — or, indeed, when they have no logical reason to continue sticking together whatsoever. It may involve telling Commander Contrarian or The So-Called Coward, "Fine, You Can Just Wait Here Alone." Or there can be an Involuntary Group Split. See Split and Reunion. ## Examples - In Bleach, the heroes infiltrate Hueco Mundo to rescue Orihime. When they come across a series of corridors and have no idea where any of them lead to, Ichigo of all people tells everybody to stick together to increase their chances of survival and success. Unfortunately, Renji and Rukia call him out on his "whining" and say "A true warrior doesn't fear death." The team splits up, and this blunder nearly gets them all killed. - Fairy Tail: During the S-Class Trial arc, Levy suggests that she, Lisanna, Elfman, and Evergreen stick together, in light of the circumstances. Meanwhile, Natsu, Gray, and Cana have all run off by themselves. - During the Hetalia: Axis Powers Bloodbath 2010, Iceland had a feeling that something bad was going to happen and pleaded with Turkey to stay with them as it would be the safest. Of course, in the background, the rest of the Nordics got kidnapped while Iceland was talking. - In Yu-Gi-Oh!: Capsule Monsters, the heroes are forcibly separated by monsters in the first two episodes and recognize the danger of being alone. - Are You Afraid of the Dark?: The kids in the horror stories always deliberately try to stick together, which is understandable since, while they might not be Genre Savvy, the Midnight Society member telling the story is. A good example is when two movie theater employees find their boss collapsed in his office (from a vampire bite, as they'll find out shortly), and the phones are, naturally, dead. Boy: We gotta get help. Girl: Well, I'll stay with him. Boy: No, we're staying together. Now come on. - In Boy Meets World's Slasher Movie episode, "And Then There Was Shawn", when the gang tries to hide from the killer in the library: Shawn: "All right, everybody, as much as this goes against my horror movie instincts, I think we should split up , that way, the killer can't get to us all at once." - Person of Interest. In "If-Then-Else", Team Machine is trapped and the Machine is running thousands of simulations to find a way of them accomplishing their mission and get out alive. We're shown two scenarios in which the team is split, with one group to carry out the mission while the other secures the escape route, that result in them getting killed or captured. Only the third scenario shown, in which Team Machine stays together to give mutual aid and protection, has a chance of success. - Lampshaded in Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, where Dax warns about how they're going to get picked off one by one, but the rest of the team ignores him and splits up anyway. - Red Dwarf: Lister: Okay, look, let's split up. Rimmer: Why? Why should we split up? Lister: Well, we'll do the search quicker. Rimmer: What's the hurry? Have you got some major luncheon appointment you have to rush off to? - YouTube has several music videos of a song by Emerald Rose called "Never Split the Party." Don't you know? You never split the party! Clerics in the back to keep those fighters hale and hearty, The wizard in the middle, where he can shed some light, And you never let that damn thief out of sight... - Dice Funk: Anne confronts the headmaster alone, much to Rinaldo's frustration. - French Humorist Jean Marie Bigard had a skit on how Slasher Movie Main Characters are Too Dumb to Live. At some point the four survivors decide to split up, prompting a rant on how stupid it is, how there are plenty of situations where splitting up is a good idea note : (such as grocery shopping, where it saved him 15 minutes a few days ago) and how being hunted by a slasher is not one of them. - The trope appears in a joke amongst tabletop role-players: - In Adventure!, dramatic editing rules assure that the split party will rejoin up at exactly the right moment. Chase scene? A car with the rest of the party comes flying out of a side street, sideswipes one of the pursuing cars, and open up tommy-guns on the others. Fight scene? They swing in on a chandelier with sabres! Shoot out? One of the masked gun-men is the absent member of the party, and the moment the major villain unmasks himself, so too will the "henchman". - Dungeons & Dragons - Wizards of the Coast used this phrase in an advertisement for Dungeons & Dragons products. - The disclaimer on the D&D 5th Edition Player's Handbook, on the credits page. Don't. - Played with, together with its opposite number, in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. Here, how well a character does alone, with a single partner, or as part of a larger group respectively is part of the game's mechanics and listed on their character sheet — which can make for interesting group dynamics between characters with a high rating in "Solo" and those with higher dice in "Buddy" and/or "Team" in particular note : So that is why Cyclops and Wolverine butt heads all the time!. And one of the canonical uses for "doom dice" (the GM's all-purpose "trouble" dice pool) is in fact to split up or rejoin the party whether they like it or not... - Mutant City Blues, a low-powered sleuth game, presents an interesting technical reason to keep the party together. When everyone are playing uniformed detectives it's not very easy to conceive of 4+ detectives all working on the same case in the same scene. But the system says that clues on the scene are automatically (or semi-automatically) available only to those with the right skill off the long long list, which is only feasible to 100% cover with the whole party. Therefore, if 2 detectives go one way and 2 other go the other (which would, in real life, make perfect sense), the first group on their scene will automatically miss all the clues tied to the skills of 2 other detectives, and vice versa, possibly rendering even a relatively straightforward case unsolvable. - Usually averted in Paranoia. Treating the other Troubleshooters as your teammates will get you killed six times in as many minutes. Of course, wandering off alone into the various hazards of Alpha Complex will also probably get you killed 6 times in as many minutes, making the game a complicated dance of making sure that you're just close enough to nip behind a meatshield, just far enough away to abandon your partners when they get stupid or unlucky, and making sure that you backstab them more than they backstab you. You'll probably still die repeatedly no matter what you do, but at least it'll be funny. - Can be averted in certain settings of TORG, but usually isn't. In Orrorsh, in order to overcome the Power of Fear there is a game mechanic called Perseverance which can be obtained in a variety of ways. One of them is having someone (a party member, for example) die horribly — but only if it happens offstage. Of course, gamers being what they are, no one wants to be the one that dies horribly so they'll try to arrange that it happens to an NPC. - Most White Wolf Story Tellers in any kind of hacky-slashy situation will cackle with glee if the party is split up simply because they know that they will be eating character sheets for dinner when the PCs split up in a combat situation. - Baldur's Gate has an infamous notification for "You must gather your party before venturing forth." The most common reason for this announcement, which becomes really annoying really quickly, is not a deliberate attempt to split the party, but the fact that the pathing in this game is not the world's greatest and one or more of your idiot party members decided to go the long way around an obstacle (or got stuck behind it). By the time the quickest party member reaches the edge of the screen the stragglers likely won't be quite close enough to travel to the next area yet. - Used in Beyond Good & Evil, D.B.U.T.T insists they can't split up. The characters have to later. - In Dead Rising, if you leave a survivor in a different area, their health will slowly sap away until they die. The sequel makes the survivors wave for attention if you get too far away when you tell them to stop following you. They can't stop waving so they won't kill nearby zombies until they're attacked. - In Enslaved: Odyssey to the West Monkey must stay close to Trip, or the slave headband she placed on him will stop his heart. - In the first Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles game, no matter where the players go, the camera stays with the party's chalice, a magical device that dispels the miasma that covers the world. There's nothing preventing any of the players from wandering offscreen, but they will die within a few seconds without the chalice's protection, forcing the party to stay together. If your character dies and becomes a ghost, however, being already dead, you can wander wherever you damn well please. Not that you'll be able to see where you're going if you're not the one with the map, though. - ICO flat out requires you to be paired with Yorda, because any length of time separate from her allows the shadows to take her away more easily if you don't fight them. If they take her completely, the game ends. - One mini-game in the Hundred Acre Wood section of Kingdom Hearts II has you going into the depths of a spooky and potentially dangerous cave. Sora and the Winnie-the-Pooh gang insist on sticking together through the cave. You have to ensure that you and your friends stick together, or else you'll waste valuable time—and you'll have to go hunting your buddies down in order to move forward. - Knights of the Old Republic averts this in most cases, only allowing you to have between one and three of your party members (your party can reach nine or ten characters in the first game and eleven in the second) in play at a time, but it doesn't let you transition to the next area unless your three party members are close enough to the transition point. - League of Legends: - Late in the games, the key damage dealers can either insta-gib one champion or unleash massive sustained damage on the entire team if allowed to live. However, they also crumple like paper if caught alone. Being down that champion is a major blow, such that one mistake caused by splitting the party can decide the game. - Kha'Zix has this as a mechanic. If his target is alone, his Q ability will deal more damage to them. Splitting up when there's a 'Zix lurking about is a great way to get yourself killed. - In Left 4 Dead, break up the team and you will die, no exceptions. So it's better to never break up. A survivor grabbed by any Special Infected note : Hunters, Smokers, Jockeys and Chargers is completely helpless and is guaranteed to die unless freed by a fellow survivor. Additionally, trying to do everything alone, such as setting off panic events to get ahead, may actually bring harm to the rest of your team, which they will gladly yell at you about if you decide to run ahead. More angry players may shoot you to death or boot you from the game. Naturally, a Griefer thrives on this kind of deviant behavior before being booted off the team. If you get people who are really spiteful, they will actually let people who run ahead to keep going and if they get pounced on, the rest of the team will just take their time as the Rambo player is being killed. - While it doesn't enforce it, in Metal Gear Online it's a bad idea to split up from a group if you are going to enter combat. If you don't have coordination with the group, then you are a lot more likely to die because the enemy will most likely come in a group when you face them. Unless you are going for a stealth attack, you will always benefit from a team mate or a couple of team mates in combat. In certain areas it lends its self better to split up and sneak rather than stick around for an outright assault. - PAYDAY: The Heist and the sequel heavily encourages players to never wander off alone. Cops and SWAT always attack in groups and it's very easy for a lone player to get overwhelmed by them, making it difficult for the rest of the the team to run in and save the downed player. - Primal Carnage: Running off alone as a human is almost certain and immediate death because several small dinosaurs have attacks that can pin individual humans, similar to the Special Infected in Left 4 Dead, leaving the player totally helpless unless a teammate shoots them off, while the large dinosaurs have such large health pools and do so much damage at once (Tyrant class dinosaurs in particular have One-Hit Kill attacks) that it's difficult for a single human to kill them. The only real chance of humans winning is by staying together in a tight group. - In Sweet Home (1989), you have five characters who can either operate independently or in groups of up to three. However, it's usually best to keep everyone in teams, as a character who is working solo can easily get caught in a trap that requires the help of an ally, or get cursed or poisoned by a monster and be left completely helpless as their health fades away (and characters who die in this game are gone for good). - One of the most memorable moments in Acquisitions Incorporated occurs at the climax of season three, where Aoefel, in pursuit of his Oath of Vengeance's target (and the season's Dragon), runs out too far ahead of the rest of the party and falls into an acid pit trap. As he is way too far from them to call for help, they don't even find a corpse by the time they catch up. That was the very last occurrence of party-splitting on the show ever since. - AFK: Whenever anyone suggests it, someone objects that this isn't a good idea. - The Spoony Experiment - Referenced in Spoony's riffing of the Dungeons & Dragons-spinoff board game ''Dragon Strike'': "Seriously, if you split the party, I'll wring your stupid neck." - Also mentioned by him when reviewing Mazes and Monsters, when the party, surprisingly enough, decides to split, he repeatedly chants 'don't split the party.' Naturally, something bad happens to the characters shortly thereafter. - In the D20 Live at Con-Bravo: Spoony: (to Linkara, after the latter suggests going to investigate the plot hook on his own) You're splitting the party. Never do that. Big Mike: Well, I've only mentioned thieves about five times, what's the worst that could happen ? Spoony: He could get shanked in the kidneys and die. - Counter Monkey: - There's a whole video dedicated to the trope, entitled Let's Split Up (We can destroy the campaign faster that way.) During said video, Spoony references his earlier Dethklok campaign and how splitting the party cost LordKat and Rollo T their original characters: when confronted with a mysterious portal, Jason and Chris jumped in while the rest of the team refused, which resulted in two PCs fighting a battle intended for all six heroes and getting slaughtered. - Reinforced in a later Counter Monkey video, "BABOON!!!", where the party is split twice, both ending horribly. First, the team's Technical Pacifist gnome druid Fidget went to explore a secret underground area alone, while the rest of the group was asleep, and was promptly mauled by Goretusk while too far away for the team to hear her cries. Later, the team sent their elf rogue and cat-man ranger to scout several blocks ahead, and upon the Big Bad's Dragon learning about them, he sent swarms of insects after them before himself attacking. Avery (the rogue) was nearly killed, but Spoony improvised a story arc that saved her character. - Several stories of the Whateley Universe have this, usually in Team Tactics class. Caitlin's biggest gripe with the other teams is splitting up, it gets to the point that when Team Kimba choose names for their tactics, splitting up and tackling tasks separately is deemed 'the anti-Caitlin'. - A frequent issue in Captain Planet and the Planeteers. By now the kids should know that they'll need the Captain eventually, and all five of them must be together to summon him. Doesn't stop them from splitting up to try to save the day with their individual powers. - Johnny Bravo of all people invokes this during a crossover with Scooby-Doo. Johnny: (to Freddy) There's a monster out there and you want us to split up?! - In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, when the main characters have to explore a giant scary hedge maze, they realize they need to stick together. Unfortunately, they get forcibly split up within seconds by the Big Bad. - In Scooby-Doo, Shaggy and Scooby know they will be the first to find the monster if they do split up, and insist the gang sticks together. However this often falls on deaf ears. - South Park: Butters, both in the "Pray the gay away" camp (with his accountabili-buddy) and the class trip to an "Old West" museum absolutely refuses to leave his trip buddy. Butters: (after slinging Cartman's unconscious body onto the first step of the bus) Teacher... my buddy is back on the bus. - Teen Titans - Beast Boy turns into an octopus and grabs everybody before they split up. He then explains the trope to the team, adding the bit where the funny guy (and strangely not the black guy) goes first. He's right. Beast Boy: Split up? Split up?! Did you not SEE the movie?! When you split up, the monster hunts you down one at a time, starting with the good-looking funny relief guy— ME! - Not to mention that, being a kids show and trying to get kids to work together, many episodes rely mainly on the fact that, without all five members, the rest of the team can't beat the bad guy. A few of the many examples include "Final Exam" (Robin), "Divide and Conquer" (Cyborg) and "Every Dog Has His Day" (Beast Boy). - In Yin Yang Yo!, the heroes were transported into an old horror movie. When Yo suggests splitting up, Yang points out why that's a bad idea by telling a random dude from the movie 'We have to split up!' The random dude agrees, runs off-screen, and is horribly killed, thus proving Yang's point. - This is what the expression "defeat in detail" was invented for. Breaking your forces up into units spread out too far to support each other lets even a numerically inferior force attack your units separately with the advantage of numbers in each encounter. - Custer's Last Stand is an example of the above. He split his group up at Little Big Horn and that battle did not go in his favor. - The Battle of Midway was a US victory because Admiral Yamamoto had carefully split his fleet in a manner that would allow each successive element to come to the aid of the one before it...assuming that the US forces were as he believed them to be. Unfortunately for him, US Naval Intelligence had cracked the Japanese codes and the Americans knew what to expect, so they sent more and stronger forces. Meanwhile, the Japanese were completely in the dark about US movements. This allowed the American task force to destroy Admiral Nagumo's flotilla well before the flotillas of Admirals Yamamoto and Kondo could come to their rescue. - Sun Tzu mentioned this in the sixth chapter of his book The Art of War. In the moment of ignorance, the enemy force will likely split his army into several units in hopes that they will cover more ground, but this will just bring the opportunity for the other side to use his whole army to crush these units one by one. On the other hand he recommends it in some situations; baiting a trap, for instance. - There's the Older Than Feudalism military credo, Divide and Conquer. - Surprisingly, this trope was totally averted during The American Civil War at the Battle of Chancellorsville, wherein Robert E. Lee split his army in two versus a Union force that outnumbered his own two-to-one and gave the Union one of the most humiliating defeats of the war. Of course, the fact that Joe Hooker (the commander of the Union troops at that time) had a catastrophic crisis of confidence and started retreating before the battle even turned against him did a lot to aid Lee's victory, too. - It happened on J.W. Powell's exploration of the Colorado River in 1869. After passing the dangerous Lava rapids by portage, they were on their way home when O.G. Howland, his brother Seneca, and William Dunn split from the main party - and were never heard of again. - German's first three campaigns against the USSR during WWII. The Germany Army High Command (OKH), optimistic and impatient to get the war over with, ultimately split its force of 3 million men and 3000 tanks into three Army Groups. These were to pursue three initial goals 500km away and 300km apart (Riga, Smolensk, Kiev), three primary goals 1000km away and 600km apart (Leningrad, Moscow, Rostov-on-Don), and three final goals 1500km away and 1000km apart (Archangelsk, Samara/Kuiybyshev, Baku). Needless to say, by the time they reached the initial goals in July the problems with this approach had become apparent: all three Army Groups were too under-supplied and weak to advance without either stopping offensive operations for at least a month or redistributing forces to concentrate on taking just one or two of the primary goals. The OKH wanted to focus on Moscow alone, for questionable reasons note : its commanders wanted the glory and political clout, it didn't care about the economics of Germany's war effort, and they may have genuinely thought it might win the war (for some reason) , arguing that it was possible to capture and hold it with a small force which could be reinforced later. Hitler overruled this hare-brained scheme and did something sensible instead, ordering a campaign to take raw resources necessary for the German economy at Kiev (July-September) and placating the Army with a questionable advance on Leningrad (August-September). The scheme was too hare-brained for Adolf Hilter, who was himself quite prone to ill-conceived and overly grandiose plans. Let that sink in. Postwar evaluations of this strategic choice show that the German Army's scheme for taking Moscow was an incredibly bad idea as it would have entailed a force of just 200,000 men and 1000 tanks attacking a well-entrenched defensive force of more than 500,000 men. Even if they had succeeded, it would have left the German forces in/around Moscow extremely vulnerable to the Winter Counter-Offensive as they would have had at most 500,000 troops to hold a salient less than 200km wide and 500km long against an attacking force of as many as 1.5 million troops attacking from the north and south. Indeed, successfully taking Moscow in the face of heavy Soviet resistance could only have weakened these forces even further than in real life. Given that Soviet forces were able to advance up to 100km in a single operation in some of the actual winter offensives, an early advance on Moscow would likely have been nothing short of disastrous. Never split the party indeed. - Lachester's Laws, as detailed on The Other Wiki, explain this trope. In brief, imagine two sides of perfectly equal soldiers. Same training, same capacity, same equipment, same position. One force is larger than the other. Engagements by the two sides can be thought of as exchanges. Every time the smaller force loses a casualty, it also loses a proportionally greater part of its capacity to deal the other side damage. For example, suppose Force A, 100 strong, engages Force B, 1000 strong. Each unit has a 5% chance to cause another to be eliminated during each exchange. B eliminates 50 of A in the first exchange. A eliminates 5. In the next exchange, B's 995 remaining men will likely destroy A, and A can expect to only cause 2-4 more casualties. As a result, A would be eliminated at the cost of less than 10 from B. Numbers count twice, as they add firepower and dilute the ability of the enemy to negate your firepower. - The math has been greatly simplified, but is not too difficult for those familiar with calculus. - Because of real-world concerns discussed on The Other Wiki, the usual formulation is that greater numbers of absolutely equal troops apply an exponent of 1.5 to the superior numbered side's capability, but before the law can be applied, you have to know all the Force Multipliers. These are any and all advantages that make a unit more effective, such as superior equipment, terrain, leadership, training, and so on. For an abstract combat game like many role playing games and wargames, the original exponent of 2 may make more sense. - Back to Never Splitting the Party, the absence of one character of a four-strong group not only means 1/4 of the group's power is unavailable, but the enemies that would have attacked the missing member now attack the remaining three. Using an exponent of 1.5 in Lanchester's law, the party is at about 65% effectiveness instead of the 75% you might think. Using an exponent of two, missing one member of a four person group leaves the group 56% as effective.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnePartyLimit
One-Song Bard - TV Tropes When the cast of an audiovisual work includes a bard, or another type of professional musician or singer, but they only seem to perform a single song in the course of the story, instead of numerous, as you would expect from a seasoned performer. There can be a number of in-story justifications for this, but out-of-universe, it usually boils down to the production costs of writing and recording a plot-relevant song specifically for the story. Compare One-Hit Wonder. See One-Book Author for the closest you can get to Real Life examples. ## Examples: - Brook from One Piece only ever plays "Bink's Sake" until the Time Skip, even when he asks for requests. - A variant occurs in the anime adaptation of Genshiken, where Kosaka is very skilled at playing video games, but aside from a VS match of Puyo Puyo (which mostly happens off-screen) the only game he's ever shown playing is Guilty Gear Isuka, and only the exact same Sol vs. Jam match every time. - Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon features Minako's idol singer career as a major plot point, but viewers are going to have to hear a lot of repeats of "C'est la vie". - Lost has the rock musician Charlie, whose band Drive Shaft seems to have one and only song, "You All Everybody". After mockery from fans, it was later revealed that the group were a One-Hit Wonder. - Uncle Jesse on Full House. When he wasn't being an Elvis impersonator, his only real hit song was "Forever." Stephanie continues the tradition on Fuller House with "The Boy Next Door." - The Zit Remedy (later the Zits) on Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High only had the one song, "Everybody Wants Something". - While Johnny Crawfish has many songs on The Noddy Shop in which he sings, he's only had one solo song, "Special", which was made for a potential investor in the show and was not featured on the show itself. - Despite much of Atlanta following Alfred aka Paper Boi's career as a rapper, only one song, "Paper Boi" (his first hit) has any substantial play. Occasionally other song titles are referenced, but they're never actually performed. - Iolo FitzOwen from the Ultima series may well be the king of this trope: despite being present as a famed bard in every installment (except VIII), he is only ever credited with a single full song, "Stones", which he didn't even compose until Ultima V (and whose lyrics were actually written by his wife)! - Leliana in Dragon Age: Origins prides herself in her bardic past (although bards in this series are not just performers, but also assassins and saboteurs for hire), but only ever sings once in the course of the story, namely "In Uthenera", an ancient elven funeral song. Later games don't see her sing at all note : Dragon Age: Inquisition has her sing "The Dawn Will Come" along with the rest of the Inquisiton, but that performance is started and led by Mother Giselle, although she does perform the same song at \|\|Wynne's funeral\|\| in Asunder. - Lohse in Divinity: Original Sin II is a world-famous bard and several NPCs recognize her as such, but she only ever sings one song in the game, "Sing To Me". This is justified by the fact that a powerful demon that is possessing her hates music on principle: the first time she tries to sing in the story, he makes her break her lute, and she doesn't sing for the second and final time in the game until after he has been exorcised from her shortly before the final act. - Azura from Fire Emblem Fates is a Songstress, but she only ever really sings one song, "Lost in Thoughts All Alone". This is justified in-story by it being a versatile Magic Music, which she can use to achieve different magical effects, focused on buffing allies and debuffing enemies. Thus, Azura simply doesn't ever need to learn any other songs. - Averted in Saints Row, where Aisha's fame in-universe matches her actual presence on the radio, with no less than three singles playing on different in-universe stations during regular gameplay. It's particularly notable because Aisha is just a minor side character in the Vice Kings story arc, yet Volition hired an professional R&B singer-songwriter to voice her and to record all three songs exclusively for the game. - Jimmy (The Bard) in South Park: The Stick of Truth only has one real song: The Maiden from Stonebury Hollow. - The bards in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim know precisely two songs, and they all perform them the same way. Conveniently, one song supports the Stormcloaks, and one supports the Empire. If you're going to make money as a musician during a civil war in Skyrim, you need to be able to entertain both sides of the conflict. - Before the events of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, Phoenix Wright became the pianist for the Borscht Bowl Club, even though he only knew how to play one song. This is justified since his title as a pianist was just a cover for his real job, which was to challenge customers to games of poker. - The Order of the Stick: With a few exceptions, all of Elan's songs follow the same basic tune of "x, x, x, x the y" with any extra lyric crammed in at the end. Since Elan is a Quirky Bard, it fits. - The New Scooby-Doo Movies: In the episode where Jerry Reed guest-stars, he sings a song to help the gang find him. Instead of singing any other songs he might be known for, he sings "Pretty Mary Sunlight" over and over. - Parodied in Family Guy's Shot for Shot Remake of A New Hope, Blue Harvest, where the leader of the Cantina Band subtly implies that they only know one song. Bandleader: Thank you, we're the Cantina Band! If you have any requests, just shout 'em out! ( aside, in a high voice) "Play that same song!" ( normally) Okay, same song! Here we go! ( plays the first song again)	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneSongBard
One-Way Trip - TV Tropes A hero is in a tight spot and determined to go through with The Plan. Both the audience and other characters wonder how they plan to get out of it. That's when the hero drops The Reveal: they'd expected to have to make a Heroic Sacrifice all along, because Someone Has to Die, so escape wasn't necessarily part of the plan. Often, this hero isn't alone either; they've taken others along with them who were assuming the hero had some plan up his sleeve to allow them to survive. In this case it's usually clear that the stakes are so high it's hardly a Moral Event Horizon for the hero to sacrifice his companions for the greater good. In fact, it's usually considered a small price to pay for saving thousands of other lives. When the others find out, they typically are shocked and horrified, and quickly realize they've got three options: - Refuse to cooperate, in which case they will likely become the Doomed Contrarian. - Reply 'I'm (gulp) OK with that.' - Take a Third Option. Can lead to a justified Deus ex Machina in which The Cavalry plucks the Badass in Distress out of danger at the last instant. Compare Suicide Mission. Often an ending or Death Trope, so beware of spoilers. ## Examples: - In Buso Renkin, Kazuki \|\|punts himself and Victor to the Moon, in the knowledge that there will be no rescue\|\|. - \|\|For the winner of the fight, specifically. He pulls a Taking You with Me, knowing that his odds against Viktor aren't all that great. And even if he were to win, he's still given up his best chance at returning to normal.\|\| - Done subtly in Code Geass. - In The Abyss, Bud Brigman uses up too much of his oxygen getting to the nuke and disarming it to return to the undersea habitat. He even uses the phrase "I knew it was a one-way trip". Subverted in that he's saved by the aliens. Also, it's the aliens who stop 50-foot waves from flooding coastal cities and not him. To be fair, the aliens were inspired by Bud's message. - In The Avengers, the Omniscient Council of Vagueness launches a nuke at Manhattan in the hopes of shutting down the portal that is spewing the Chitauri invasion forces. Fury warns Iron Man about it. Just before the Black Widow shuts down the portal, Tony flies the nuke Superman-style into the portal with Captain America telling him it's a one-way trip (because, despite the portal being two-way, the Avengers can't risk leaving it open and have to shut it immediately). The boosters use up the power of the ARC reactor, and Tony releases the missile as it flies towards The Mothership. His out-of-power suit starts falling back to towards the portal and barely makes it through before it closes. - Deep Impact: \|\| Mark: How do we set the nukes inside the comet and get out before they blow?\|\| \|\| Orin Monash: We don't.\|\| - Executive Decision: \|\| Kurt Russel: 'We're not gonna make it!\|\| \|\| Stephen Segal: 'You will' (pushes him to safety and falls)\|\| - Mandalay: Dr. Burton and, shortly after, Tanya are both aware their trip to Mandalay is this trope, what with a deadly plague ravaging the city. The former is, in fact, counting on it so he can atone for his mistakes. The latter, on top of preferring certain death to be a sex worker, warms to the idea because she will be with a man who loves her (and won't manipulate her) and also will be helping people, thus finding a new purpose in life. - From Midway: a Japanese sailor stops the pilot attempting to board the aircraft he's working on: 'Sir, there's a hole in the right fuel tank!' Pilot: 'Did you fill the left one?' - In Monsters vs. Aliens, there was only enough fuel in the jetpacks for the monsters to get to the Big Bad's UFO. - The Thing (1982). An alien capable of duplicating and replacing people infests an Antarctic camp. If it makes it out into the world, humanity is doomed. After it's apparently destroyed, the two survivors (one of whom may be an alien replacement) talk it over. Childs: The explosions set the temperatures up all over the camp. But it won't last long though. MacReady: When these fires go out, neither will we. Childs: How will we make it? MacReady: Maybe we shouldn't. - From Star Wars: "Escape is not his plan. I must face him alone." - In The Return of the King Frodo's only concern is that they have enough supplies to reach Mount Doom. Samwise mutters that they might be wanting to make it back as well. He never loses hope till the end \|\|when they get rescued by the eagles anyway\|\|. - In Emergence, the hominem community has discovered there's a planet-wrecker bomb in orbit around the Earth, scheduled for re-entry at a known time. The only way to stop this event is for a small crew to go up in a stripped-down space shuttle and disarm it. There is no way for the shuttle to have enough fuel for the crew to make a return trip. \|\|When Candy discovers that the hominems' information is incomplete and that there's a still-active threat to the hominems in the form of the Khraniteli, a group of surviving h. sapiens who want to exterminate hominems, she figures out how to get the bomb and a warning to her people down in one piece ( after she disarms the warhead!). Then it dawns on her that she could ride down, too.... (Her crewmates are both dead. One killed the other, she killed the killer.)\|\| - Played with in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The titular Chamber is accessed via \|\|a sewage pipe\|\|, and the characters debate how to reverse the trip. \|\|Luckily for them, Dumbledore's Phoenix is strong enough to carry them all out. And when they revisit the place in Deathly Hallows, they just bring brooms\|\|. Similarly, in the first book, the end-of-book mission required the trio to drop down a hole with no idea whether there'd be a way back (there was). - Angels and Demons: When the camerlengo boards the helicopter with the antimatter bomb, Langdon follows him aboard, expecting him to drop the bomb where it can explode safely (such as in a quarry, or far out to sea). Unfortunately, it turns out that the camerlengo is going nowhere except straight up — and there's only one parachute...\|\| however, as the camerlengo is the big bad, he jumps out with the parachute leaving Langdon to explode with the antimatter. Langdon prefers to jump without a chute. He makes it.\|\| - Cold War novel Hullo Russia, Goodbye England is based on this. The RAF pilots who will deliver British retaliation in the event of nuclear war know that by the time they're in the air, there will, in all probability, not be a Britain to return to. American pilots who will operate from Britain and do a similar job know this too. Much very black humour is derived from this, especially the attitude of a veteran pilot who started out bombing Germany in World War II and was at least assured of a country to fly back to. - A villain version occurs in The Outrider series by Richard Harding. The Big Bad sends an assassin to kill the hero Bonner, but actually to reveal that I Have Your Wife. Bonner only realises this after he examines the man's vehicle and finds there's not enough petrol for the return journey. They're in a Scavenger World and the Big Bad knew that Bonner would get the best of his assassin, so why waste petrol? - On Stargate SG-1., our heroes have just tossed a grenade down to the engine core of a Goa'uld ship to destroy it. O'Neill asks what they do now. Bra'tac says "Now we die." O'Neill immediately counters with "Well, that's a bad plan!" - Doctor Who : - The finale of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica had the titular ship going on a mission to rescue Hera from the Cylons. The area where the Cylons were was filled with dangerous obstacles and it was the Cylon homeworld, meaning they'd do everything they could to protect it. Adama even says in his Rousing Speech that it's likely to be a one-way-trip. Luckily, thanks to Starbuck, they find coordinates to get themselves out and even find Earth. - Star Trek: The Next Generation: In the episode "Yesterday's Enterprise" the Enterprise-C was on a mission to rescue a Klingon outpost from a surprise Romulan attack. They fell through a rip in space and time and came out over 20 years in the future in another sector. The Federation is now in a losing war against the Klingon Empire, when they should be allies. Enterprise-C's Captain Garret is informed by this version of Picard, after much consideration, they could Set Right What Once Went Wrong, go back though crippled, and die against the Romulan attack trying to protect Klingon lives. This one action by a then-loathed enemy could change the perception of the whole Klingon Empire about the Federation. That they would give their lives for Klingon would move the two groups towards peace, not the war that has come to them. After talking it over with her surviving crew, Garret chooses to go back. - A non-fatal example occurs in the season2 finale of Star Trek: Discovery. In order to keep the rogue AI Control from using the enhanced computer on Discovery to achieve sentience and exterminate all life in the galaxy, our heroes devise a plan to send the ship 950 years into the future. It's made clear that once this is done, Discovery won't be coming back to the 23rd century. - The Order of the Stick: - Subverted in Homestuck. \|\|Rose\|\|'s plan to defeat the \|\|now omnipotent\|\| Big Bad is to \|\|take a session-destroying bomb to the source of his power\|\|; \|\|she\|\| says to Dave that "she is not coming back"... and Hussie cuts off for the day. It turns out that \|\|Rose\|\| was referring to \|\|her\|\| dreamself. - Double subverted, as when it comes time to actually enact the plan, \|\|her waking self is dead.\|\| - And then triple subverted when \|\|she dies on her Quest Crypt, causing her to come back strong\|\|. - Batman does this in the Justice League finale "Starcrossed" \|\|by crashing the Watchtower... manually.\|\| Superman rescues him in the nick of time. - Tecna of Winx Club decides to enter the Omega Portal and close it the only way she can�from the inside�to save Andros from exploding, though she knows that she will most likely never be able to survive there with all the escaped convicts around, much less ever be found \|\|Timmy manages to find her by building a super computer linked to her\|\| - Leave A Legacy, an Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes fan fic, has an entire basis on Janet knowing that she will not survive the mission. Possibly a dead fic. - Occasionally comes up as a strategy in warfare, either due to limited range of vehicles, or because the scale of destruction means that there won't be a safe haven for them to return to once they launch their attack: - The Doolittle Raid in World War II wasn't strictly supposed to be this, with the plan being for very stripped-down US Army B-25 Mitchell medium bombers carrying extra fuel to launch from Navy aircraft carriers, bomb targets in Japan, and then land at friendly airfields in China. The Navy task force was discovered a day before they planned to launch, forcing the Army bombers to launch several hundred miles farther away from Japan than they intended, and most of their intended airfields in China were captured by the Japanese. Several bombers ended up crash landing in the sea or in China, and one managed to make it to the neutral Soviet Union note : Though the Russians were fighting the Germans alongside the Americans and British, they were neutral in the war with Japan., where the crew was interred for some time. The motivation for this raid? The Americans badly needed a victory to rally morale, due to a string of losses in the first few months of the war. As a side benefit, the Japanese, thinking the Americans had a land base within range of the Home Islands, ended up diverting considerable resources to their defense, years before the Americans would be able to launch any real attacks. As a result, Admiral Yamamoto got the political support for his plan to take Midway atoll, a move which was found out by American codebreakers and enabled the US Navy to score a crippling victory against Japan in the Battle of Midway. - Due to the likely results of a full-scale nuclear exchange, most nuclear strike-related missions, both by the bombers and their escorts and support aircraft, are predicted to likely be this, either because some earlier bombers wouldn't have the range to hit targets in Russia and make it safely to friendly territory, or simply because there would be few to no intact airfields they could land at after the nukes were launched by both sides. Nevermind if you got caught by the enemy's substantial defenses on the way. - A common urban legend is that kamikaze pilots were only given enough fuel to reach their target, forcing them to commit to their Suicide Attack once they took off. This was not the case for a fairly simple reason: There are plenty of legitimate reasons why you would want to abort an attack (mechanical failure, changing weather or battlefield conditions), and losing a valuable pilot to a simple fault with their aircraft would be a waste. - Virtually all (unmanned!) space missions follow this, with the spacecraft (or at least most of it) not designed to come back to Earth after having completed its mission. On manned space exploration, it's often considered that the first manned mission to Mars ( if we ever go there) will be an one-way trip, with the astronauts remaining there preparing the ground for subsequent missions while being supplied from our planet.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneWayTrip
One Stat to Rule Them All - TV Tropes "I put all my skill points into 'Knowledge - Game Master.'" Game Balance is a tricky thing, especially if the game has a plot. The more variety you have, the harder it is to be sure that something isn't broken. Combinations of powers and abilities tend to have an Exponential Potential effect as more powers and equipment are published, making it all the more likely that something game-breaking will slip in. Once players find that game breaker, they will naturally want their characters to take advantage of it, and choose stats accordingly. As a result, almost every game has one stat that winds up being vastly more valuable than all the others, often called a "god-stat" in gaming circles. Expect minmaxers to put as many points into this as they are allowed to. In many tabletop Role Playing Games, Dexterity or Speed is disproportionately powerful compared to the other attributes. These stats usually allow characters to dodge most attacks, give them extra actions or turns, and many useful skills in the game are governed by Dexterity. The likelihood of Dexterity or its equivalent being the One Stat to Rule Them All seems to increase the more technologically advanced the game's setting is (as guns, whose use and the ability to avoid presumably both depend on it, become more powerful while melee combat becomes conversely less useful): in a medieval fantasy game, at least melee combat requires Strength. In a modern game, as it was once put, "Dexterity determines how easily you sneak into the compound, how quickly you pick the locks, how accurately you shoot at the guards, how many of their shots you dodge in turn, how fast you make it to the escape vehicle, and how well you drive it." Many video games with an encumbrance system have Strength (or some similar stat) as this, mostly due to the amount of weight you can carry being strictly based on it, Strength being required to use a lot of gear and still increasing combat capability otherwise. Some games don't even bother to split Endurance/Constitution from it and give it the ability to raise your HP, in which case Strength might as well be labelled "How good you are at combat". Any stat that improves your ability to dodge attacks (often Speed, Agility, or Evasion) has a high chance of being this, simply because if the enemies can never hit you, your other stats technically don't even matter at all. Even if you never raise any of your other stats and have to spend several minutes Cherry Tapping every enemy to death, with bosses taking even longer, all the while everything can kill you in one hit, as long as nothing can get that one hit on you, you'll still win eventually (but you should probably raise your other stats anyway just to keep yourself from being bored to death). In games where dodging is a manual action and not simply a number that grants a higher chance for the Random Number God to make the enemies miss (for example, Soulslikes), the effectiveness of your dodge tends to be tied to the weight of your currently equipped gear. In that case, the god stat will be whatever lets you maintain maximum dodging effectiveness in absurdly heavy armor, if it exists. If it doesn't, expect nobody to bother with armor at all and wear the lightest possible cloth or even go naked. Even in games that don't have "stats" in the traditional sense, the Fragile Speedsters and Glass Cannons tend to dominate Metagames and tier lists. In some games, increasing your stats has a negligible effect compared to your gear. For example, let's say increasing your Strength by 1 also increases your attack power by 1, but your sword has a base attack power of 100 already, so is that extra 1 point really going to do much? Or let's say increasing your Dexterity also increases your attack speed, but attack speed has a Cap, and you can easily hit the cap even at 1 Dexterity just by wearing a couple pieces of gear that increase it or even having your White Mage cast an attack speed buff on the whole party. In these games, it often turns out that Constitution is the stat of choice. Because even if everything else is overshadowed, one can never have enough HP. Making speed the most important stat is often the result of a Visual Initiative Queue, since you can tell how manipulating speed will affect the turn order. A Sub-Trope of Whoring. See also Minmaxer's Delight, Changing Gameplay Priorities. Contrast Dump Stat. ## Examples: - Played for Laughs in Bofuri: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense.. The Hero Maple is a newbie to gaming, so she dumps all of her stats points into her VIT stat and leaves all her other stats at zero (for reference, a zero in AGI means that a turtle is faster than she is). Then, by complete accident, she ends up acquiring skills that quadruple her already absurd VIT stat and equipment specifically tuned to pump up her VIT even higher. The result is that no player or NPC can even scratch her and due to the mechanics of the game she gains an Acquired Poison Immunity to poison and paralysis, covering the two most problematic status effects to her build. And her own lack of offensive stats is rendered moot by the use of skills that don't rely on her non-existent stats, such as summons, status effects, pets and transformations, all of which she gains earlier than the developers ever intended due to her unique build letting her challenge content that would be way beyond her level. Maple quickly becomes one of the most infamous players in the game by complete accident. - In My Huntsman Academia, readers are able to choose what Izuku does to progress the story and increase his stats in a manner akin to a game of GURPS. Due to the way the mechanics were structured, readers quickly realized that IQ is by far the most powerful stat available, as additional points in it provides Izuku with more actions per phase, which leads to more stat grinding, which leads to more points in IQ, and so on. The author realized this and put a cap on IQ to limit abuse. - The Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks allows players to usually start off with three stats: SKILL, STAMINA or LUCK. However, players would prefer to roll a high initial SKILL of either 11 or 12 points — having a high skill score makes them near-invincible against most enemies, whose skill are usually between 6 to 8. With a skill high enough, players won't be needing to sacrifice their luck stats to inflict additional damage or heal themselves, since the battle will go directly in their favour most of the time. - While in Aberrant, Mega-Charisma was ungodly powerful. Legend has it that in an early con-demo, one player took every combat trait he could find, but lost instantly to a mega-charisma build in a fight after the latter player said, "Go home." The combat monster had to do exactly that. Given a bullhorn, a mega-charismatic nova could sway armies, even nations, with only a single speech. This doesn't even take into account that Charisma, and Mega-Charisma, affect a bunch of non-combat skills, and the astoundingly abusable ability to create things. Given some creative players, armies of miniature guns quickly emerge and demolish the opposition's boss/team/base/city/continent. - In Apocalypse World Cool and Sharp both have this reputation. The other three stats apply to fairly specific situations (Hard is for hurting or threatening people, Hot is for persuading people, and Weird is for going on bizarre psychic dream-quests), while Sharp gives you bonuses to any other roll as long as you do as the MC tells you, and Cool is for almost everything else. Given the broad applications that implies, a decent Cool stat can be VERY important. - To a lesser extent, one can build one's character to make this the case for whichever stat they prefer, so that they (for example) roll against Weird whenever they would normally roll Cool. - Parodied in Bad Attitudes, an Action Movie RPG. The only stat is Attitude, which is initiative, Hit Points, and points to spend on the important skills (shooting, hand-to-hand, driving, not falling, and picking up girls/guys). The only other skill, despite being an all-encompassing knowledge skill, is called Basically Worthless Stuff. There are three 'classes', Regular Folk, Sidekicks, and Action Heroes, with progressively-higher Attitude scores. Action Heroes can only buy the five action skills; Regular Folk can only buy Basically Worthless Stuff. Damage is also class-based. Essentially, everyone should be playing a brainless Action Hero. - For the longest time in the BattleTech RPG spinoff Mechwarrior, Intuition, and to a lesser extent Reflexes controlled a lot of skill rolls. It didn't help that players who wanted to play Mechwarriors (and this was most players, naturally) needed both of their INT and REF rating scoring at least 4 or better to qualify as a Mechwarrior, in a game where having a 6 in a stat was considered an exceptionally high rating. This lasted up through 2nd Edition supplemental, and echoes of it still appear in 3rd edition and beyond. - Big Eyes, Small Mouth operates on Guardians of Order's Tri-Stat System, which uses three base stats: Body, Mind, and Soul. These are used to calculate derived stats like Hit Points (Body and Soul), Energy Points (Mind and Soul), and Combat Value (all three). Soul is by far the most important of the three base stats since it's used to calculate all of these derived values, meaning a high Soul stat is indispensable regardless of character type or game genre. In addition, Soul checks to defend against certain attacks are the most common single-attribute checks in a system where most checks are based on multiple attributes. - In Bleak World it depends on your race, but there always is one. For Puny Humans the best stat is funding which evens the odds of any battle with the ability to buy a private army equipped with chainsaws and RPGs. For Vampires the best stat is generally considered to be shapeshifting (for Nosferatu fog builds and Primal dragon builds). Witches have Entropy which gives more HP, Aliens have devastation which can allow the ability to summon the whole martian fleet, the Experiments have disguise so that they can actually accomplish things without an angry mob queuing up to chase them, Hold is the most important for ghosts as it allows them to actually win the game. Mummies require Eternity as it not only increases their HP but also their mana abilities and rewards. Princesses need servants if they have any hope of fighting The Darkness. Finally the Jotun should take a lot of points in Craft in order to build their Giant Mecha. - In Bushido — a D&D-like game set in feudal Japan — all skills are determined by adding stats together. For example, leaping and climbing ("Karumijutsu") is Deftness plus Will; strategy ("Senjo-Jutsu") is Wit plus Will; most fighting skills are Strength plus Deftness plus Will; overland speed ("Hayagakejutsu") is Health plus Will; horsemanship ("Bajutsu") is Will plus Will... starting to see a pattern? - The Call of Cthulhu RPG inspired a cartoon praising the benefits of movement speed... a stereotypical Two-Fisted Tales burly hero is trying (and failing) to escape from a cloud of tentacles whilst a little old lady on a wheelchair is vanishing into the distance at high speed. There's a lesson to be learned there somewhere. - In game, of course, there's POW of which you need an awful lot if you're going to be a hard core wizard. Unfortunately, garnering anything more than the tiniest amounts of POW tends to result in total brain melting insanity, so its a bit tricky to min-max this one, in practice. - There's of course another practical reason for high POW - POW is the stat that gives your character their starting Sanity, so a higher POW means a slightly better chance that you won't go shrieking into insanity first thing from seeing a Deep One. It also means that character will last longer mentally speaking, so long as they don't do anything to tempt fate or try to fight the horrors head on. - d20 Modern: - The game is ruled by Dexterity. Everybody who wants to be at all effective at combat needs it, because it rules ranged attacks. Because D20 Modern is set in the modern world, guns exist and are highly effective. It's pretty hard to be effective in melee combat unless you specialize in it, and even then a good bullet or shotgun blast will be able to bring you down because of the Massive Damage rules making you highly vulnerable even at higher levels. On top of that, armor is rare because of the feat requirements, so Dexterity is vital to increasing your rate of survival, especially if you play a class that does not get armor bonuses. In addition to that, many skills which might be useful in combat in the modern world, such as Drive, Tumble, and many others, use Dex. - In the Urban Arcana setting, Knowledge (Arcane Lore) is king. No party without it can dream of doing the ridiculously heavy-duty stuff Incantations make possible. Furthermore, reasonably high Knowledge (Arcane Lore) checks can easily layer on months- or even years-long buffs that allow you to crush any non-buffed opponent into the ground including, without much interpretation, buffs to Knowledge (Arcane Lore). - Dungeons & Dragons: - In 3rd Edition, as well as spin-off Pathfinder, Dexterity determines when you act in combat, your reflex defense, several good physical skills, accuracy with ranged weapons, and light-armor-high-dex tends to give better defenses than heavy-armor-low-dex. In addition it can be made to determine your accuracy for melee weapons as well. - Notably averted in 4th Edition, because every class applies its own "primary" ability score to accuracy and damage. - In 5th Edition, Dexterity is often complained about for being overpowered because it dictates attack accuracy and damage with ranged and finesse weapons as well as initiative, armour class, and a number of useful skills. The result is a character with far more versatility and power than any Strength-based build, as Strength only deals with attack and damage to non-finesse melee and thrown weapons and the (to be fair, very useful) Athletics skill. 5th Edition does attempt to mitigate it a little with some classes and subclasses letting the players substitute a different stat in some situations (such as the Hexblade Warlock or the Battle Smith Artificer using their primary spellcasting stat for weapon attacks) or some other way to compensate for potentially low Dexterity scores (such as the Barbarian's Danger Sense and Feral Instinct giving advantage on Dexterity Saving throws and Initiative rolls respectively). - Several builds focus on making Paladins immensely powerful by multiclassing to Warlock and/or Sorcerer, which not only improves their spells but lets them use Charisma-their main stat)-powered attacks in ways a regular Paladin can't. - For all editions, Constitution is a downplayed example. While it doesn't help you win fights, it does help you survive them by giving extra Hit Points and better saving throws. Most classes don't strictly need Constitution (except maybe the Barbarian class since that uses the constitution modifier in the unarmored defense stat), but none of them want to dump it. - Early editions of Dungeons: The Dragoning had Dexterity as the God Stat — it controlled to-hit, ranged damage, static defense, and move speed. It's still one of the more important stats, but not as much as it used to be. - In Exalted: - Dexterity is the absolute key to both avoiding getting hit and hitting enemies. You can make up for a low level of strength with a better weapon and augment your poor stamina with better armor, but if your dexterity is low, you're not going to be doing much in combat except bleeding. There is a merit that lets you use Strength for attack rolls, which is a notorious Game-Breaker. The issue is that Exalted as a system is aware of how important Dexterity is, and prices it accordingly. Anything which increases Attributes will charge extra for Dexterity, with lower limits on how much it can be increased. Strength is comparatively trivial to raise, so the Merit which lets you use it for attack rolls is basically a free pass to game-breakingly large attack pools. - Socially, appearance has the same issue. The "pretty kitty" effect means that high appearance compensates for low Charisma or Manipulation much better than the other way around. - In games based on the Fate system ( Spirit of the Century, The Dresden Files et al.), whatever a character's peak skill happens to be can be turned into this to an extent. This is because one available standard function of stunts is to allow a character to use an alternate skill instead of the usual one for some specific task (say, using Deceit instead of Empathy to figure out whether somebody is lying, Intimidation instead of Resolve to resist hostile intimidation attempts, Guns instead of Weapons to throw suitable weapons and projectiles...) and players and GMs are always free to add new stunts at their discretion. So in principle at least it's entirely possible to build a character, player or non-, who uses his or her highest skill rating, if not all the time, then at least for most of the things he or she actually cares about. - Fate Accelerated, the system's "lite" equivalent, replaces all skills with six "Approaches" — Carefully, Cleverly, Flashily, Forcefully, Quickly and Sneakily. The idea is that you always use the Approach that best fits the description of the action you're performing, as you're performing it... the problem is that, as many have pointed out, the correct action in almost every situation, basically by definition, could be described as Clever. Someone who's maximized Cleverly, thus, will be able to always use it and thus always roll at their best. - Feng Shui's Reflexes stat is the main combat stat, and though the main combat archetypes have a fixed combat skill AV (meaning that you could leave Reflexes at 5 if you wanted with them), the stat also governs Initiative, meaning if you didn't pump it up, you're not going to be doing much during a fight until the other guys, who have high Reflexes, have acted, unless you've got the Tiger fu schticks, which allow you to counterattack those who think they've got a free shot on you no matter what your Reflex score, or the Fast Draw gun shtick, which allows you to jump ahead a number of shots equal to the amount of schticks you've spent on it and get right into the action with a Guns attack. - In Genius: The Transgression, Intelligence rules normal application, all of Wonder creation, most Wonder use note : Basic levels of Epikrato, non-urgent Exelixi, all Metatropi transformations and Katastrofi artillery and most Genius-specific rolls. Also, don't treat mental skills as a Dump Stat unless you are Too Dumb to Live note : They are required for Wonder construction; no dots in the required skill results quite often in bad things happening. It is about Mad Scientists, after all. - In GURPS 3e, both Dexterity and Intelligence gave more bang for the buck than Strength and Health. Come 4e, they're both still more useful, but now they cost twice as much as well... and people still think they're overpowered. - In the Hero System, Dexterity affects your ability to hit, your ability to avoid being hit, is the base stat for Speed (which is how often you act) and affects a large array of adventure-useful skills. So it costs three Character Points per point, while Intelligence is only one Character Point per point. - In Sixth Edition, 'figured' characteristics as such no longer exist (the stats are still there, but are bought up or down separately from fixed base values). Dexterity is still good — it determines initiative, after all, especially in that all-important first phase where everybody who isn't caught flat-footed gets to act once before taking a free recovery, and it still has a number of important skills riding on it. But it's no longer the god stat, and its cost has correspondingly dropped to two character points per +1. - In superheroic campaigns at least Strength can also have aspects of this. It gives you the ability to inflict damage in hand-to-hand combat or (via suitable thrown objects) at range, adds to the damage of any actual hand-to-hand attack powers your character may have, has the obvious benefits high strength implies for such purposes as lifting heavy objects or wrestling...all for the same basic five character points per die of damage as the attack-only, no-free-adds (if ranged by default) Blast power. The "brick" archetype is one long-standing favorite in this system for a reason. - In Mage: The Ascension, Arete determines how powerful all your magical abilities are. - Durability in the Marvel Universe RPG. It's your Hit Points, of course, but it also provides energy, which is the fuel for all your skills and powers. Being a diceless game, having more energy is required to succeed at anything. Characters have the option of using Intelligence for energy instead, which is even better as it serves you as a mental defense and a base stat for any mental powers. - Similarly to the above, the Matrix RPG There Is No Spoon has a Matrix stat which is rolled pretty much constantly, and trumps mundane skill. There are other things to spend character points on, but the game admits flat-out that Matrix is the god stat. - In Mekton Zeta, players commonly refer to Ref(lexes) as the God Stat. All combat actions attack, defense, initiative were determined off this one stat. Since all the stats were assigned an equal value, however, it became stupidly easy to min-max. Min-maxers would put two points in everything (as required by the rulebook) and then dump the remaining points to the following stats in order: Ref(lexes), Int(elligence) [Skill Points, Electronic Warfare skill in Z+, and Awareness/Notice, used in some tracking rolls], Education [Skill points]. This only requires 44 points to have a max-reflex character with 30 skill points to start with, a decent amount of which will, obviously, go into reflex combat skills. - Realm and Spirit in the first two editions of Nobilis are usually seen as the poor cousins to Aspect and Domain. Domain is your ability to work miracles, according to what you're god of, so it's the stat that a thunder-god uses to throw lightning bolts or a nightmare-demon uses to manipulate fear. Aspect is basically the stat of being James Bond or Batman; it governs doing anything a mortal can theoretically do, but better. While the other two stats are useful, Spirit is largely defensive and Realm only works in your home locale. - Third Edition replaces Realm and Spirit with new stats, Treasure and Persona. Treasure is basically the stat that governs all the cool artifacts, gadgets and servants gods have, things that don't really fit under Domain. Persona governs the definition of the concept you're god of; if, for example, you're a love goddess, and one of your properties is 'Love hurts', you can make anything hurt like love — or make love stop hurting. - Several RPGs, usually light or humorous ones, literally have a single stat for everything your character does. These include Strength in TWERPS, Number in TrollBabe, and Power in StickGuy. - In RuneQuest, your Power (POW) stat positively influences multiple sets of skills (and negatively affects stealth), makes your magic more effective, helps you resist hostile magic or spirits (in a setting where practically everyone has a little magic), and makes it easier to get Divine Intervention or reach higher rank in your cult, making it a literal God Stat. - Scion: While Dexterity is almost always a very useful stat, improving your attack, defense, ability to do damage, and initiative as well as a lot of useful skills, this disparity reaches ridiculous proportions in Scion, as Epic Attributes provide much greater benefits than normal ones. - In a sense, every Epic Attribute in Scion was the (aptly named, in this case) God Stat in relation to every none-epic one. This might very well have been intentional, except that the mechanical execution tended to make the in-game effects... wonky, to put lightly. Each dot in an Epic Attribute added a number of automatic successes (which could be thought of as the equivalent of 3 dots in a regular attribute) equal to its level, cumulatively. That means that the number of extra successes one gains from Epic Attributes goes from 1 for the first dot to 2 for the second to 4 for the third, then to 7 for the fourth, 11 for the fifth and quickly building up into utter ridiculousness (at the 10 dot level, a character got 42 automatic successes for every use of the attribute, before even rolling). This was all fine and dandy, especially in the lower rungs, except that in practice what it meant was that past a certain point a character with even 1 dot higher in an Epic Attribute would pretty much always defeat one with a lower rating, no matter what. Since dexterity still governed all combat, that meant that by the time the Band hit Legend 4 everyone without a maxed out Epic Dexterity was just about as good as a liability the moment combat started. Meanwhile, since the only way to make non-combat tasks challenging for a ludicrously capable character was to give them stupendous difficulty ratings, any late-game character who wasn't specifically specialized at doing anything couldn't ever hope to accomplish any task beyond their narrow area of expertise. A subset of the issue was that with guns: since unlike bows and melee weapons guns did not benefit from the wielder having higher stats for the purposes of damage, they became essentially worthless past Legend 4 since any enemy the Band couldn't curbstomp would likely be completely immune to them. All this while the fluff keeps insisting guns are useful and assigning characters legendary guns in lieu of other Relics. This has been significantly toned down for the 2nd edition, which removed all non-physical Epic Attributes and turned them into Purview rather than giving them special mechanical effects - someone with Epic Strength can now use it to pull off a lot more impressive strength based stunts, but not actually get dozens of automatic successes for every damage roll. - Likewise in the Serenity RPG the character with more Agility wins in combat, the character with more Willpower wins in social settings. - In Shadowrun 3rd Edition, the Quickness attribute directly or indirectly governs how well you sneak around the guards, how well you shoot firearms when they spot you anyway, how fast you run when the enemy turns out to have bulletproof vests, and how well you drive your escape car when they turn out to outnumber you 15 to one. Every character who isn't a Decker (Computer Hacker) usually maxes out quickness. Quickness even adds a big bonus to the all-powerful combat pool. Even many characters in wheelchairs are commonly seen with maxed-out quickness. 4th edition partially toned this down by splitting quickness off from reaction speed, but it's still important there. - 4th Edition Shadowrun has Agility. To make it clear, Agility is the base attribute for EVERY combat skill, with one exception (Dodge, which, to be fair, is pretty important). What this means is that having a high Agility makes you equally capable with melee weapons, guns, grenades, heavy weapons, vehicle-mounted weapons, your fists... You get the idea. Since it's much easier to increase your skill ratings than to increase your attributes, a combat character can just start with a high Agility (Augmented by one of the exceedingly cheap Agility-boosting implants) and spend a few skills points and voila! Instant combat master. - In the Star Trek: The Next Generation RPG from The Last Unicorn Games, there are fairly typical base stats: Fitness, Coordination, Intellect, Presence, and Psi. However, because this is Star Trek and technology is such an important part of the setting, Intellect is far and away the most vital stat for most characters. Using Techno Babble to figure out a way out of one's situation is almost encouraged. Presence is the second most important, as characters often find themselves in tricky diplomatic negotiations. - Star Wars: Saga Edition is fairly balanced on the stats front, but Dexterity is often viewed as disproportionately important. It determines how accurate you are with ranged weapons (which is most of them, unless you have a melee-specific build) and how good you are at avoiding both melee and ranged attacks. In addition, dexterity is the governing stat for more skills than any other, including some of the most useful ones (namely Initiative, Pilot, and Stealth). It's not impossible to build a character without focusing on dexterity (certain Jedi and Noble builds can get away with it), but a character with a low DEX stat has some significant built-in pitfalls that need to be dealt with or worked around. - The Star Wars d6 roleplaying game has six stats: Dexterity, Knowledge, Mechanical, Perception, Strength, and Technical. While you should have at least one character specializing in each stat, all your characters must have an average or better Dexterity, since it is what you use to block any attacks, dodge any attacks and use any weapons! - Cinematic Unisystem, the core engine of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Army of Darkness RPGs. - Dexterity is king for nonmagic characters. It's used for several useful skills, initiative, attack rolls and defense rolls, as usual, but the real Game-Breaker is that it sets the number of combat actions you get per round. - Strength is also hugely beneficial for combat-orientated characters. The default cinematic rules (which are also frequently houseruled) calculate damage using multiples of Strength, with bigger/more lethal weapons having bigger multipliers. In the hands of a character as strong as Buffy or Angel themselves, such weapons would kill most enemies in one standard hit. Strength also dictates jumping and lifting, as well as helping to calculate Hit Points and Speed. - Of course, that's only true for non-magical characters. (Which is, admittedly, almost every character in Angel or Army Of Darkness.) In Buffy, magic wielding characters will do better with two points in Intelligence, then dropping as many points into Will as possible. This lets them cast more spells, more easily, with less chance of something going wrong — in the "summoned a demon" sense. If you can cast spells with impunity, then you can simply buff your other stats with weekly spells. - Vampire: The Masquerade: - The Celerity Discipline (which boosts a vampire's speed and lets him take extra actions in a turn) can approach Game-Breaker levels on a combat-oriented character. This isn't as much of a concern in a less combat-oriented campaign, though. The Obvious Rule Patch introduced in Vampire: The Dark Ages has each dot of Celerity cost a blood point to use. - The Generation background. Five dots at character creation will put you at 8th Generation, with a higher blood pool and the ability to use more blood points per round, which will help out with healing and almost anything else you can think of. By and large, the game book discourages players from beginning with more than three dots of Generation, and encourages Storytellers to do the same, partially for this reason and partially because Eighth Generation characters are typically old and powerful enough to actually get respect in Camarilla society, where the players aren't supposed to. Not to mention, inexperienced vampires with low Generation are diablerie bait. - In Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader, Willpower (WP) is the stat of choice, as it defends you against fear effects (distressingly common), insanity points (also distressingly common) and other negative mental effects. Almost every stat in the game can be partially compensated for with the right equipment or traits, but while a poor toughness or wounds statistic means you're more likely to die after two hits instead of three, and poor weapon skill will mean it will take you an extra round to kill that goblin, a single bad willpower roll can put your character not only out of the fight but out of the campaign in ways that Fate Points can't save you from. - Wild Talents is... different about this trope. Those who win the Super Power Lottery are very mean indeed, but given the flexibility of superpowers, it's very likely someone can develop a counter to even complete invulnerability (the text suggests teleporting such an upstart to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, which is more than possible at that power level). The real world-changers, as repeatedly pointed out in the text itself, are Hypermind, Hypercharm, and Hypercommand, as every WT setting so far averts Reed Richards Is Useless with a vengeance. To quote Greg Stolze, the guy with 10 hard dice in Disintegrate is a tough customer, but he's nowhere near as bad as the Hypercommanding politician who can persuade millions to vote for him by speaking three words. - Witchcraft had all the good physical skills use Dexterity. And nearly all the supernatural powers run on Willpower. - In Arcanum the number of attacks (influenced by dex) is more important than damage, part of what makes balanced swords so broken. Dex also affects a very large number of skills (Melee, Dodge, Bows, Throwing, Backstabbing, Lockpicking, Disarming Traps, and Lockpicking), making it even more important. - Wizards could somewhat bypass this, since they could stack Dex-boosting magic provided their mental stats were high enough. Because there is a magical dagger that has a special feature of only taking 1 AP per swing, and hitting 20 points in Dex gave you a bonus 5 AP (on top of the 1 AP per 1 Dex you already gained), it allowed you to enter turn-based mode as soon as you got close to an enemy, and proceed to hit the enemy 25+ times in a row before the enemy would have a chance to counter you. This is in comparison to a normal character getting 2-3 hits in a turn (although said hits would probably be 2 or 3 times as powerful). Almost no single enemy would be able to survive that kind of beating. - Batting in Backyard Baseball. Even the fastest runners can still easily get out if they have bad batting stats. - Games like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale, utilizing the 2nd edition of AD&D rules, have numerous stats for a character to have, depending on class, but no matter the class you pick, Dexterity is the stat to cap out as much as possible. Dexterity reduces your character's Armor Class, making them harder to hit, which is important for everyone, especially your Squishy Wizard who will begin the game with anywhere from 4-6HP tops. Dexterity also influences effectiveness of ranged attacks, which is also important for keeping your more fragile characters out of melee combat. - Damage is widely seen as the best stat in The Binding of Isaac, with Tears (rate of fire, as most characters attack with their tears) coming at a close second. Speed can make going through the game more convenient, especially reaching the Boss Rush and/or Hush on time, but otherwise isn't too necessary when it comes to dodging attacks, and less-experienced players can risk running in to spikes with the stat too high. Range is usually not necessary to increase since at base level tears still travel pretty far, a lack of range only really becomes a problem with specific items that drastically decrease it, making Range Up items nearly useless in most runs. Shot Speed is outright seen as detrimental because more of it can make certain items less effective and it has no synergies by itself. Luck can be useful for certain items (with the Tough Love item, enough Luck can translate to having a permanent 3x damage multiplier) and with Lucky Pennies from Afterbirth onwards it's easier to increase than the other stats, but by itself and without any Luck-influenced items it's nothing too big. Tears/rate of fire is also useful in increasing damage per second, but unlike the Damage stat, it has a soft cap that requires certain items to exceed (one of them, Soy Milk, comes at the cost of being a huge Damage down anyway), and there's only so much rapid-fire can do when the shots in question aren't strong. But with just a few Damage upgrades, enemies that would take four hits to kill could be one-shotted and bosses go down much quicker, which adds up to a much easier and faster game in the long run, since tanky enemies and bosses become common as early as Chapter 2. Even Health becomes a non-issue with enough items that boost Damage, since the player will often be killing every enemy before they have a chance to attack, and most bosses go down in only a few seconds. To put it all in perspective, Chapter 3 or 4 with the other stats at their base levels can be managed with good enough Damage or items that otherwise increase overall DPS, while even entering Chapter 2 at base Damage could very well be a death sentence. - Arcane is among the most incredibly useful stats to raise and to base a character build around in Bloodborne. Most stats raise only one thing (Strength raises strength weapon adjustment, skill raises skill weapon adjustment, etc.), but Arcane raises elemental weapon damage (and all enemies have an elemental weakness), increases the attack damage of most attack items (like firebombs), grants access to the use of magical items, and raises item drop rates. Long story short, even if your build is strength or skill based, many advise raising your arcane during your second playthrough so you can make the best use of all of your items, and broaden your arsenal so that you're up for the challenge. The Old Hunters DLC introduces the Kos Parasite, a peculiar weapon that turns you into a Lumenwood Kin and it only scales with Arcane. In other words, if your primary weapon is the Kos Parasite, you don't even need to raise any other stat at all. - Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night: While all stats are important, Luck holds an advantage overal all others for one major reason; it influences the drop rates of items and Shards from enemies. As much of Miriam's power comes from how quickly she can obtain the items necessary to craft new gear, upgrade her Shards (which as noted, the drop rates of which are also guided by Luck), and prepare various foods for permanent stat bonuses, investing in Luck is a necessity to let her quickly snowball her way to full power. It also influences the rate of her critical hits, which can make up for a dearth of offensive buffs. - Boktai: - Boktai 2: Solar Boy Django has Agility, which increases your running speed. Since Sneak Attacks and Hit-and-Run Tactics are the way to win fights (especially as a vampire, where your attacks flinch enemies) and heavier (read: more effective) armor slows you down, the most effective strategy is to put most of your stat points into Agility and a bit into Strength, completely ignoring Vitality (health) and Spirit (magic power) until Agility is maxed out, and rely on equipping and replenishing to make up the difference. - Boktai 3: Sabata's Counterattack greatly reduced Django's melee abilities and ammunition for his gun, and removed the Agility stat, so this time around putting everything into your Strength stat is the best way to go. Since even with a bolstered Spirit stat you'll still struggle to keep your ammo up without items or skylights, your best bet is to turn Django into a Glass Cannon and go in fast and hard before they can retaliate or you run out of ammo. - In the online games Caravaneer and Caravaneer 2 agility is the only stat you really have to look for in new hires, since it determines how many actions they can take in one turn(similar to the first two Fallout games) as well as their move speed on the world map. It even replaces accuracy, since taking twice as many shots at half the hit chance is better than a few super-accurate shots. - Crystal Story II has speed as its god stat, as it determines how often you can make a move. It can reach a point where your characters can act two or three times before your enemies can even make their first attack. - Dark Souls: Endurance itself works the same as in Demon's Souls, and it's actually even better because the addition of the Poise stat and armor upgrades increased the value of heavy armor, and thus equipment load. Dark Souls II and Dark Souls III have stamina and equip load dictated by different stats (Endurance and Vitality, respectively), but also made spells consume stamina just like physical attacks. While previously, pure mages were the only one who could get by with low Endurance (they could wear only cloth to remain mobile and use all their stamina to dodge), this made Endurance a necessity for any viable build. - Dark Souls II has its own stat to rule them all in the form of Adaptability, which raises Agility, which determines how many invincibility frames you get while dodge rolling, as well as the speed of certain animations such as drinking Estus. You need 96 Agility to have the same amount of i-frames as a Dark Souls I medium roll, and 105 for a lightroll. So if you plan on relying mostly on dodging attacks over blocking with a shield, which you probably do, be prepared to pump many levels into Adaptability. It is for this reason that Adaptability/Agility is widely considered a Scrappy Mechanic. - Demon's Souls: Endurance gives a boost to stamina for every level put into it up until it reaches forty, after which it only has the secondary effect of raising equipment load. Stamina allows for longer sprints, more attacks in a row and better blocking with less chance of being guard-broken, making putting at least thirty points into Endurance something almost every build does at some point. All other stats can be very helpful too, but depend heavily on build and playstyle, whereas decent Endurance is helpful to everyone. - Devil Survivor does the same thing as well: magic attack, magic defense, and MP are all decided by the exact same stat, while all increasing strength affects is physical attacks. To make this even worse, physical attack has far less of a variety of attacks and most of the enemies later in the game have an ability that make them immune to them entirely. Fortunately, physical attacks have a lot more utility in the Updated Re-release and its sequel, although it can take quite some time to accumulate enough skills to where you can have more than one physical bruiser roaming the field. - Devil Survivor 2 fixed this problem by meaning damage only falls into one category, meaning that all damage received is governed by Vitality... except Vitality became the one stat and magic-users became useless due to being even squishier than usual, at least until later into the game when you've unlocked their personal demons. - This is the fate of Vitality in Diablo II. Nearly every single character build follows this stat format: - Strength: as little as possible to meet equipment requirements - Dexterity: as above, or exactly enough for maximum block. - Vitality: PUT EVERYTHING YOU HAVE HERE! - Energy: never put anything into this. (Even when playing a sorceress!) - Strength is outdone by skill- and equipment-based damage boosts. The attack rating (accuracy) from Dexterity can easily be found elsewhere or is simply irrelevant. The same can be said for the mana gained from Energy. Thus, with enemies having high damage, Vitality is the only thing really worth investing in. - This is why Diablo III has automatic stat point assignment. Many fans ironically consider this to reduce the importance of player skill because in Diablo II if you are a newbie you will put your stat points in wrong and end up with a useless character. - They're probably fixing some Unstable Equilibrium with this. One of Diablo II's newest patches, 1.13c, added in the ability to "respec" and reset attribute and skill points once per difficulty level to encourage non-Min-Maxing. - Diablo III does this to an even greater extreme, thanks to automatic stat assignment and the loot system that makes gear with relevant stat bonuses appear more often. Although each stat (other than Vitality) has some effect, their primary purpose is a damage multiplier. Mages and Witch Doctors use Intelligence, Demon Hunters and Monks use Dexterity, and Barbarians (and Crusaders in the Reaper of Souls expansion) use Strength. Usually, the main stat will be in the thousands at level 70, while the secondary ones lag behind in the double digits. - In Digimon World 3, speed drastically increases evasion against physical moves — which are the most common type of moves used by enemies — and, if your speed is considerably higher than the enemy's, you get to have two turns for each turn the enemy has. - Dislyte: Speed becomes the most important stat of them all as it allows your team to act fast before fobes can do their stuff. Combined with skills that inflict stun or frozen, you can essentially stun-lock foes to decimate them before they can get to do anything. The stat is so important that it may be impossible for you to climb through higher tiers in Point War due to many higher ranked teams relying on high speed with crippling status effects. - Out of all the Attributes in The Division, Damage to Elites was by far the most useful stat in the endgame. This is because it affected the damage done by both your skils and your weapons, and in high-level Endgame Content, every single enemy would be an Elite, so it basically functioned as a straight-up damage buff in those situations. Enemy Armor Damage was a close second for the exact same reason. - Dokapon Kingdom has Speed (SP) and Hit Points (HP). SP increases hit rate and evasion rate for physical attacks in battle, as well as for field magic. A moderately high HP total can make up for a low, even almost 0 DF stat. These are also both stats that most pieces of equipment will not raise, so it can be especially important to invest in them. - Cunning for certain Rogue builds in Dragon Age: Origins. It is one of the slower builds, but by end game you will reach the maximum support and offensive potential of the Rogue class. This is because Cunning can be added multiple times to your weapon damage with the right talents, which Strength and Dexterity can't no matter what weapons you use. In addition, all the support abilities are Cunning based and focusing on the stat will cause you to be able to unlock or disarm anything in the game without getting the matching skills or talents like other Rogue builds would. You still require a minimal amount of Strength and Dexterity due to prerequisites for equipment and talents, but end game, the Cunning score will be about equal to all of your other stats combined. - The most durable build is the Arcane Warrior class, which invokes this trope as one of its class features: your Magic score is used to determine what armor you can wear and (indirectly) how much melee damage you deal, instead of your Strength. This effectively renders Strength and Dexterity redundant for your build - leaving only Willpower (for normal spells) or Constitution (as a Blood Mage dual classer). Even if you don't use the melee aspect of the Arcane Warrior class, the Magic score still affects the raw power of your spells, letting you layer on a couple of sustained defensive buffs and become a Stone Wall or Mighty Glacier that can tank attacks that would take out a warrior. - To add to this, Magic was already the one stat even if magi theoretically lacked multiclassing and the other two classes did. Everything other classes can do, a mage can do better, from a distance, and possibly even with an effect that is exclusive to them. - In the sequel, dual-weapon rogues are just as dependent on Cunning, at least until it reaches 40, since that's the point at which your critical damage is fairly hefty and you can pick any lock and disarm any trap in the game, and it'll increase your Defence stat. With certain talents, you can add massive quantities to your raw and critical damage based on your Cunning, meaning that the only reason you'll be investing in Dexterity is to keep your hit-rate up, and there's really no incentive at all to invest in anything else unless you drastically need a few more HP. - In Dragon Nest, the much-coveted Final Damage stat is an additional modifier used for your overall damage. Its power increases exponentially the more of it you stack, making it extremely powerful when amassed. Naturally, it is very difficult to come across. Entire fortunes can be made if you're lucky enough to obtain Final Damage plates and other items to sell. - For elemental classes, or non-elemental classes using an elemental conversion gem, fire/ice/light/dark % (depending on the class) functions as a secondary OSTRTA, like a poor man's FD. - The first console RPG, a sort of Spiritual Successor to Adventure on the Atari 2600 called Dragonstomper, has literally one stat called dexterity which is a massive catch-all Luck Stat. Attack strength is determined by the Life Meter, so it probably doesn't qualify as a true stat (although if it did qualify it would handily be the dominant stat, for obvious reasons). - In Elden Ring, Vigor is by far the most important stat to raise. Especially once you beat the Climax Boss and access the last third or so of the game, where everything does so much damage that having less than 40 Vigor is just asking to be one-shot by even regular enemies, and it's strongly recommended that you take it all the way to the softcap of 60. For reference, the generally agreed-upon stopping point for levelling Vigor in previous Souls games was somewhere in the 20-30 range. Also of note is that Elden Ring brought Endurance back to its former glory of raising both stamina and equip load, which caused it to be this trope in previous games, and yet it still loses out to Vigor in importance. - The Elder Scrolls: - In the games with attributes, Endurance is the ruling attribute. Considering that it determines your starting health, as well as your health gain per level, it is a critically important attribute for all character builds. Making Endurance one of your favored attributes during character creation is highly encouraged, even for magic-oriented characters, in order to avert becoming a Squishy Wizard. Further, this makes The Lady a favored birthsign in Morrowind, as it gives a sizeable boost to Endurance right at the start of the game. The Warrior birthsign gets the same benefit in Oblivion, as it boosts Endurance along with Strength, mentioned below. - In Morrowind, for skills, it is Alchemy. With 100 Alchemy, you can churn out healing and magicka potions like no one's business, making you nigh-invincible and able to kill anything through sheer attrition. (Not that you'd need to, because you can buff all your other stats easily with more potions.) If you're willing to exploit a loophole, you can even create potions of boosted intelligence, quaff them, create greater quality potions of boosted intelligence because of the intelligence boost, and continue recursively until you have such an insane INT score you can craft universe-warping weapons and items. You essentially become The Singularity. - In Skyrim, this same trick can be used using Fortify Restoration potions to boost enchants of Fortify Alchemy, making the same buffs preformed with obscene precentage boosts. - Oblivion also has Strength, even for pure magic or stealth builds, because of all the great-selling but insanely heavy loot you'd start to find. Custom Feather potions can be use as an alternative however. Also, you can drop the heaviest item on the ground and abuse the physics engine by simply dragging it to the door, picking it up to rezone, then dropping the other side if necessary. But then, that would be cheating! - Attack in the flash game The Enchanted Cave. Since you want to survive as long as possible, you need to take as little damage as possible — and if your Attack stat is high enough, you can kill the enemies before they ever hit you. While Defense is helpful for this reason, the best defense is a good offense — you don't need Defense if you're never hit. Speed is helpful early on, but it's fairly easy later to make up for any deficit in Speed with equipment and there's no point in boosting Speed faster than the fastest enemies. Magic is just useless, since the healing spells — which are the only spells actually worth spending MP on — don't scale with it. - In the sequel the enchantment to rule them all is MP regen. With heal it can function as a better version of HP regen while also allowing you to spam elemental attacks to kill foes faster. - In the original Exile games, Strength was dominant because it heavily affected physical damage and Hit Points — and, in later games, carrying capacity to boot. - Fallout: - In the 1, 2, and Fallout Tactics, Agility is one of the most useful stats because it gives you more action points, which let you attack more often, and helps with small guns, the weapons you will use for most of the game. Agility also allows you to move farther distances in combat, which is useful in the Navarro Run as it gives you a better chance to escape the various random encounters that the player will face along with escaping the \|\|Enclave\|\| patrolmen that roam around Navarro and will kill you in a few turns at most. Intelligence is of lesser but still significant importance, governing how many skill points you get per level up and giving you more conversation options. Skill points would remain important throughout the series, but 3 and New Vegas significantly curtail Intelligence's effect on them numbers : In 1 and 2, up to 4/5 of your skill points come from your IN stat. This was lowered to 1/2 in 3, and even further to 1/3 in New Vegas.. - In Fallout: New Vegas, Endurance is an extremely useful stat, though not for its primary purpose of determining base hit points, poison, and radiation resistance (you get far more hit points from leveling up, while the latter two can be maxed out with clothing, perks, or chems). Endurance determines how many implants your character can receive at the New Vegas Medical Clinic. Each point of Endurance allows for one implant, which include SPECIAL-raising implants. An Endurance stat of 7 lets you get +1 to every SPECIAL attribute, while 9 Endurance gives you all of the SPECIAL implants, +4 Damage Threshold, and minor health regeneration. In short, more Endurance means more of everything else in the long term because the implants come at no significant cost. - In Fallout 4, Luck is incredibly powerful, not so much for its inherent effect (increasing Critical Hit charge rate) as because a lot of the perks unlocked by Luck are the most ridiculously overpowered, especially when used together: Idiot Savant gives so much extra EXP to low Intelligence characters that they'll average more than high-Intelligence characters without (when boosting EXP is Intelligence's primary function). Better Criticals, Critical Banker, Grim Reaper's Sprint, and Four Leaf Clover combined with mods and/or Legendary weapons that boost crit damage will make a Critical Hit Class that will deal out One Hit Kills with absurd frequency. - The Final Fantasy series: - In Final Fantasy II Agility/Evasion (Agility goes point-for-point into Evasion-%) are basically the godstat duo. Your Evasion-% determines your chances of avoiding attacks (especially important for instant-death/petrification attacks), turn order in battle, odds of getting preemptive strikes or being ambushed, and chances of running from battle. Incidentally, your chance of gaining Agility after battle is entirely based on Evasion-%, meaning the more Agility you get, the more Agility you will get. - Final Fantasy III has a minor version. Each job has fixed stats per level for everything except HP, which is determined by your Vitality at the time you level up, making Vit a god stat until you hit max HP. - Final Fantasy VI has a bug that means evade is useless and Magic block (essentially magic evasion) worked as both stats. Which means that if you load a character with magic block boosting items they become borderline-invincible. This was fixed in the GBA version of the game. - With a magic block of 128, all attacks that can miss, will miss, period. 128 is actually fairly easy to pull off, at least on one character. - On the offensive side, Magic Power is far more important than Vigor/Strength. Not just spells, but most of the worthwhile special attacks, such as Sabin's most powerful Blitzes, use Magic Power. - In Final Fantasy IX, Spirit is by far the most useful stat, as it affects many different aspects of combat — including speeding up both your Trance gauge and the rate of Auto-Regen. - In Final Fantasy X there are separate stats for Evasion and Accuracy, both of which are increased in the same manner as all the other stats (by filling in nodes on the Sphere Grid), and both max out at 255 - but the separate Luck stat grants a bonus to both Evasion and Accuracy, with Luck effectively maxing both stats out separately, as well as being the determining stat for critical hit rates. However, Luck is mostly relegated to post-endgame Min-Maxing due to how tedious it is to increase. - In Final Fantasy XI, capping Haste has become trivial — and, correspondingly, it's no longer the God-stat it used to be. - For meleeing and melee Weapon skills, the all-important stat is Accuracy. It doesn't matter how much Attack, Double Attack, Triple Attack, or Store TP you have if you can't land a hit—and most bosses these days are Lightning Bruisers - Likewise, for ranged attacks and Weapon Skills, the most important stat is Ranged Accuracy — although Store TP is a much closer second for ranged attacks than for melee. - For nukes and elemental Weapon Skills, however, Magic Attack Bonus is God. It doesn't matter how slow your cast time, recast time, or magic accuracy are if you can burst Meteor or Death for 64k+ damage. By the same token, Leaden Salute, the signature move of Corsairs, is one of the most powerful W Ss in the game, right next to Savage Blade and Rudra's Storm — as long as the player takes the time to stack enough MAB. - Final Fantasy XIII gives your characters only THREE stats: Hit Points, strength, and magic power. Low strength and magic can be made up for with special abilities, staggering, and customizing weapons and equipment, but low HP means everything can kill you in two hits because you take full damage from every attack in the game. This essentially means that until near the end of the game, you'll want to keep a few HP boosters on your characters, or something that makes them take X% less HP damage per attack. The developers also locked the best HP boosts at the end of the Crystarium so they weren't available until the very end of the game. - Final Fantasy XIV exemplifies the trope in several ways. Your base stats (strength, vitality, dexterity, mind, intelligence, and piety) grow as you level up, and each role has one stat that determines what's most important to them, which the game will automatically prioritize; tanks will go for vitality, melee DPS will go for strength, ranged, non-magical DPS will go for dexterity, healers will go for mind and piety, while DPS casters will pour points into intelligence. Gear also encourages this type of behavior since they're made specifically for classes who can take advantage of their most used stats. As the game evolved, it came to exemplify this trope even more, as now one stat literally rules what a class is supposed to be doing; tanks now scale their damage mainly to Vitality, while Healers' attacking spells scale to Mind instead of Intelligence (only magical DPS classes that happen to have healing spells still have attacking and healing run off separate stats, meaning they're not nearly as good at it as a dedicated healer). Most accessories are role locked now, so a Tank can't equip DPS accessories over Tank intended accessories in order to increase their DPS at the cost of survivability. - Additionally, Accuracy was once an extremely important stat and the main priority to invest in over anything else because end-game raids required a certain level of accuracy in order to never miss your attacks. Simply put, whiffing means lowered DPS. It was eventually removed and replaced with Direct Hit, which serves as a secondary stat that can allow a player to score direct hits (essentially mini-crits, which can combine with critical hits). As of the current state of the game, there are no accuracy checks against enemies of the same level, so you never miss. - That being said, a new stat emerged as the most important one after class-specific ones - Critical Hit. Unlike other stats, which scale linearly, Critical Hit affects both frequency and potency of crits, and it works even on heals. While exact specifics vary from class to class, a general strategy of "get enough Skill/Spell Speed to feel comfortable, then as much Crit as you can" works for basically every character all the way up to Savage raids. - In almost every Final Fantasy Tactics game, speed is the go to stat to raise since more speed means your turns come up a lot sooner. - In Tactical RPGs that rely on clockticks rather than alternating between teams ( Final Fantasy Tactics in the former, Fire Emblem in the latter), speed is the most important stat in the game, because more speed = more turns. By the same measure, mobility related stats can be tremendously important; if you combine speed, move, and jump, the other stats don't matter: You've got someone who can strike and then retreat safely out of range before the enemy can attack. - In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Speed was not merely the best stat, it was the ONLY stat that mattered for most character builds. Thanks to entirely useful Useless Useful Spell being so dominant, all that really mattered was getting off your Game-Breaker mass debilitator/instant kill attack before the enemy could launch their attacks. - The original version of Tactics Ogre is almost certainly the poster boy for this version of the trope. Through abuse of a certain ability, you can create characters with 1 WT. If you're unfamiliar with the WT (Wait Turn) system: there's 1,000 ticks per turn and you get a number of turns = 1,000/your WT. Note that without abusing the aforementioned ability, even a super-well-made Ninja (Which demands Save Scumming at best, as the original version of Tactics Ogre doesn't have a stat-raising item for Agility) ends up with WT in the 300s or so, or even less if you're feeling like letting the guy walk around naked (Every item in the game has a weight value that adds to WT when equipped) in combat. Meaning a character with 1 WT gets about 300 turns before a Ninja acts. So yeah... - In Phantom Brave, the discrepancy between high-speed and low-speed units is very noticeable. The high-speed units may even clear the board before the low-speed units get a turn. And did we mention there are some attacks that use the speed stat to calculate damage? - In Nethack, like pretty much all Roguelikes with highly deterministic turn orders, speed is extremely important. Sure, Nethack's speed isn't as important as the Roguelikes with just three speeds [half speed, normal speed, double speed], but an advantage in speed means that you can run away while occasionally using ranged attacks, and equal speed enables circling round areas recovering while monsters chase you with no hope of ever landing a blow. - Much later in the game, the only things that universally matter on individual characters are HP, Damage Cap Up, and Charge Attack Up. Everything else is either character-specific (Stamina and, to a lesser extent, Enmity are universally beloved, but very rare) or role-specific. This is because Weapon Skills should end up pulling enough weight to have them hit the cap with the characters' skills and filler EMPs giving any extra boost they need. HP is often not a concern outside of very specific circumstances, as big hits are typically either heavily mitigated or negated outright. - Fire Emblem: - Despite the purely turn-based nature of the series, most players agree Speed is the most important stat. It determines evasion (Luck does too, but to a much smaller degree) which, in a game where characters can be Killed Off for Real, is VERY important. It also determines double attacks (a unit hits twice if their speed is greater than a certain amount above their opponent's) which can be the difference between finishing the enemy in one move or having to waste a second character's move to deal the final blow, which sometimes is neither possible nor practical. Furthermore, doubling works for the enemy too, meaning slow characters tend to get hit twice, which is especially bad if the unit also has low defense, like most magic users, and even worse if the enemy has a non-zero Critical Hit chance, as now they have two chances to get a critical instead of one (and one is usually bad enough). It gets so bad that on the higher difficulty levels of the latest games, Mighty Glacier characters with high Defense are actually less durable than someone with worse Defense, but enough speed to avoid being doubled. (Getting hit twice for 15 damage each is worse than getting hit once for 25.) This can be zigzagged, though, as characters tend to quickly outpace the enemies, resulting in characters with high Speed having their Speed become overkill unless they're wielding the heaviest weapons. - Though it (almost) never increases with stat growth, Move is the other main stat, due to the simple sheer versatility of being able to move around quicker. Units with high Move consistently outperform units with low Move on the tier lists, and the Boots (which increase Move) are universally seen as one of the game's strongest items, to the point that you rarely get more than one pair per playthrough. In Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light and Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, both of which have freely buyable Boots, tend to have players sinking as much of their funds as possible into purchasing Boots by the cartload. - Defense is much more important in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, where speed is much more averaged-out between classes. - In Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, weapon level is the game's god stat. Most of the enemy forces are weak to some sort of effective weaponry, so being able to use the effective damage weapons right off the bat is critical to your success. For example, Cain (whose stats make him a Lightning Bruiser on paper) will fall off very early on due to specializing in the worst weapon type and having to build up a solid weapon rank from nothing, while Jagen (a Crutch Character with miserable stats on paper) can last well into the midgame with nothing but his B in lances and a cheaply forged Ridersbane. - While Normal and Hard modes of Fire Emblem: Three Houses still have Speed as the most important stat, Maddening mode devalues it by a lot, thanks to enemies having Speed stats so inflated that most of your units will never be able to double them. While it's still an important stat for not being doubled, the most important stat in Maddening is instead Strength (or Magic for mages), which directly increases the damage a unit deals with all attacks. This is incredibly valuable in a mode where your most reliable option is frequently to kill enemies in a single blow with combat arts. Speed may double a unit's damage if they're actually able to double, but since so few units can even hope to double, having any amount of increased damage is better. STR and MAG are also highly coveted in Maddening due to the gameplay focus on whittling away enemy healthbars using attacks and arts that outrange their counterattacks before moving in for the kill, as Maddening difficulty enemies simply hit too hard to approach the usual way. This is especially true in the early game where most of your units are fragile enough that they can only soak two or three hits at most. - In Fly FF, most 1v1 classes work best with full STR, if you have enough funds. You can get DEX (for attack speed, crit rate & hit rate) from awakenings or gear bonuses, more hit rate from upgrading your gear, and you don't need much STA to take a hit. It's easier to get crit rate from awakenings (1% crit rate is 10 DEX), and you can get ICD note : Increased Crit Damage/ADoCH note : Additional Damage of Critical Hits (crit damage, the OSTRTA awakening for 1v1) from sets, weapons, and of course awakenings. For Area of Effect classes, it's either STA (for tanking) or DEX (for block rate) depending on the class (or INT for a specific elementor build); most put about 100 or so points in their AoE's damage stat then pump their STA (or vice versa), but rangers note : And bow jesters, but they're not important. & blades get their Area of Effect damage from their DEX, so they use high block rate to compensate for low STA builds. - Gacha World: Initially, this game makes it look like DODGE is the best stat but in reality killing enemies faster does the job better than staying alive due to Death Is Cheap. The real game breaker stat is SUM which increases summon by a percentage when coupled with Penelope Coconut as leader since her leader skill guarantees summoning from the start of turn one and can easily keep the summon chain going on with proper setup. CRIT comes in a close second as it increases the percentage of chance for every individual attack to be at 2x its normal damage. - In Gearhead, a Roguelike mecha-RPG, the Reflexes ability determines almost all your mecha piloting capabilities. This is, let's reiterate, in a game based around being a mecha pilot. Oh, and it helps with most of your hand-to-hand combat abilities when you're forced to fight on foot, too. Among skills, the — what else — Mecha Piloting skill also qualifies. - The second Geneforge game has Parry, and it acts as an additional dodge chance coming before the standard one. Boost it to 20 (the max being 30), and against most monsters you are almost unhittable. - For anyone who Shapes, Intelligence is a god stat, because it allows you to keep more and stronger creations in your party. In the first game, it costs the same to increase a stat no matter how many times you do, so there's almost no reason to put any points in anything other than this (and Mechanics and Leadership). In the sequels, it costs more to increase a stat the more you do, so once you get up into the range of being able to increase Intelligence by one every three levels, it's not so worth it anymore. - Granblue Fantasy: Characters have two raw numerical stats, ATK and HP which represent their health and attack power respectively. There are also secondary stats (known as EMPs) represented by percentages such as Defense, Critical Hit Rate / Damage, Dodge Rate, Hostility Rate, Skill Damage, Charge Attack Damage, Stamina, Enmity, Damage Caps, Healing Caps, Debuff Success, and Debuff Resistance. While almost all of them can be boosted by Extended Mastery Points, Rings, and Weapon Skills, the Attack stat (though not the Attack EMP, which is considered absurdly wasteful outside of the main character's) is considered as the best stat to invest towards. Granblue is ideally about being able to defeat opponents and enemies in the fastest way possible (Justified, as multi-player raids have a time limit, and the best way to contribute to raids is to deal as much damage as possible within a few turns. - In the online portion of Grand Theft Auto V, strength is king. While the other stats aren't useless, strength plays a bigger role since it not only boosts your melee damage, it also increases your overall defense and makes you climb ladders faster. Since Armor Is Useless online and getting into a gunfight is pretty much a guarantee, it pays to be able to survive a few more bullets before dying. - Playing Hearts of Iron 2 as the Russians makes infantry and artillery techs into this. You'll never need a navy unless you're going for a full world conquest, and an air force has nothing on a pure human-wave strategy. The stronger the grunts, the more decisive the victory as a general rule. - For goalkeepers in Inazuma Eleven, the Guard stat (or in Inazuma Eleven GO and Inazuma Eleven Strikers, the Catch stat) and max TP are essentially all that matters. This one actually makes perfect sense (and was likely intentional) since goalkeeper is by far the most specialized position in soccer. - In Kingdom Hearts II (and, to a lesser extent, the original) your stats can be whatever you want... except for your AP. By the end game, it doesn't matter how high your strength or magic are. What matters is if you can equip all of your devastating finishing blows and boost the duration of your godlike alternate forms. - In the Final Mix of Kingdom Hearts II, the godstat changes, as by the time you're grinding to get ready for Organization Data and Terra, given how that game throws AP Up at you, you have the potential to have more AP than you will ever need. The new godstat of your three — Attack, Defense, Magic — depends slightly on your strategy but tends to be magic because of Reflect, which creates a Beehive Barrier around Sora that reflects pretty much every move onto the attacker — damage based on the strength of the original move and Sora's magic stat. - In Kingdom Hearts, AP wasn't quite so important, as there were no godlike alternate forms and only one devastating finishing blow. The real god stat in the game is MP, because more MP = more magical healing, and more special power moves such as Sonic Blade and Ars Arcanum. Even better, the strength of your spells was determined by your maximum MP, so you have better spells in addition to being able to cast them more often. - For Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, exploiting critical hits (the final blow in a combo) are the key to soloing the mission mode. Take a character with high critical stats like Saïx, equip him with the Zero Gear and the Critical Sun ring, and you'll be taking off entire bars of HP per combo. - The Dex equivalent in Kingdom of Loathing, Moxie, is pretty similar. The majority of monsters have a preset level of stat ranges, and barring critical hits from foes that will always hit, having more Moxie than the enemy in question means that it can't hit you. - However, enemies that scale to your stats can 1-hit you if your Muscle(determines your HP) is too low. In practice, this rarely happens, as many foes will link their attack to your Moxie (defensive), whereas their defense will match your Muscle (attack) stat, give or take a few points. Alternatively, on scaling monsters, more Muscle gives them more defense, more Moxie gives them more attack and HP, but they don't scale with Mysticality. With using spells that don't have a damage cap, you can outperform scaling monsters with little trouble. - As of 2013, it's started to depend more on player goals, as both challenge paths and the noncombat portions of quests shake it up a bit. There are more cases where you'll want to soak up physical or elemental damage or fight monsters which scale beyond your physical stats (by default or your own preference), and more reasons why you might be without your normal skills. - Strength in Knights of the Old Republic affects damage and accuracy. Contrast the others. Dex is very easy to build with items. Con affects Hit Points and save DCs, the first is useless because you should be dodging most attacks, and the second is useless because the The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard. Int affects skill points and skill use (aside from persuade skills) are mostly useless and the little use they have can be given to party members note : Slightly better in the second game, but there it is awareness on the MC and a party member with lock pick.. Wisdom affects save DCs, again, the enemy cheats and wins anyway. Charisma affects persuade, but all the checks of it are low enough to make with a maxed skill alone. - Dex moves up to God Stat in the sequel, which gives you access to Finesse feats letting you use whichever is higher out of Dexterity and Strength to affect accuracy, or better, lets you make good use of blasters, a Game-Breaker when crafted well. An alternative build in the sequel involves playing a male character to get the Handmaiden to join you, and learning Battle Precognition — which adds your Wisdom to your AC. At this point, start spamming Force powers — Wisdom is now governing save DCs, difficulty to hit you and your stock of Force points, meaning you're unlikely to ever need to do anything as crass as fire a blaster. - For La Tale, give gloves critical damage, shoes movement speed (unless you're stacking evasion, then you get both), and your weapon min/max damage. Then put stamina and/or luck on everything else. The first three are the only places you can put those enchantments on, while the extra criticals you'll deal with luck will deal far more damage than the extra damage you'll deal with strength/magic, and stamina is the only base stat to increase your survivability. - Appropriately enough, The Lord of the Rings Online features One Stat To Rule Them All, with the twist that the one stat is different depending on character class. Broadly speaking, Might is important to melee fighters, Agility to ranged fighters, and Will to support classes. Remarkably, a class's ruling stat isn't set in stone; during the last major update the Warden (a light Tank class) was switched from Might to Agility with (relatively) little outcry from the players. - In Lufia: the Legend Returns , each character has a Spiritual Force stat of a specific color which flows into other members in their row and column, providing stat boosts and affecting IP attack usage. While all S.F. colors are necessary to unlock IP attacks, only Yellow S.F. is worth raising any higher than needed. Yellow S.F. boosts Speed (as well as max MP), which determines battle order and scales much more slowly than other stats (especially Attack Power or Defense Power). It's invaluable to outspeeding enemy encounters, or turning Randolph into a viable Lightning Bruiser. - In Madden NFL, Speed has long been the most important stat. In the game, speedy but otherwise mediocre players in real life would become game breakers thanks to this attribute. The reason for this is a combination of Muscles Are Meaningless, meaning these players do not suffer drawbacks to their blocking, tackling, and tackle-breaking abilities as much as their real life counterparts, and because the design of the game makes it difficult to pull of some common real life tactics involving bigger, slower players. (For example, passes are programmed to be aimed at the receivers chest, making it extremely difficult to throw jump balls to possession receivers.) A few particular examples come to mind: - Michael Bennett, a extremely fast but otherwise rather limited running back who played most notably for the Minnesota Vikings in the early 2000s, was the epitome of this trope in the game. In real life, he'd struggle to shed tackles or pick up blocks, and his small stature meant that he was injured frequently. In the game, however, it wasn't unheard of for players abusing this trope to rack up game and season rushing records using Bennett. - Michael Vick, particularly in Madden 04 where he was the cover athlete. When not throwing unerringly accurate deep passes. he could run the ball exceptionally well, usually blowing past much slower linemen and linebackers for huge gains. A committed player could usually end up leading the league in both passing and rushing with Vick in that game. - In MapleStory, every job has use for only two stats, one being more important than the other. For example, Warriors only use STR and DEX, and STR is really all they need. It raises pretty much everything, EXCEPT accuracy and requirements to use some equipments. This is why the other stat is important. Some people however choose to forgo the second stat and raise the primary one, while using scrolls to give equipment the secondary stat, therefore allowing them to wield higher-leveled equipment. Eventually, the secondary stat requirement for most classes was removed entirely; the one exception to the rule is Xenon, which actually requires putting points into three different stats (STR, DEX, and LUK). - In the Mario Golf series, characters with long drives tend to win out over everyone else simply because they hit the ball farther. Characters with a long drive tend to have lousy control, meaning your ball will go way off course if your timing for your swings are even slightly off, but after some practice, the weakness becomes trivial. - While Mario Kart has varying examples through its history, one remaining stat is acceleration for Grand Prix, considering you have to recover from enemies' attacks before everything else. On the other hand, top speed is the best stat for Time Trials once you know the races perfectly. - Super Mario Kart encouraged skilled players to take Bowser and Donkey Kong Jr. for their maximum top speed at higher difficulties, as they could easily overtake you on the finish line otherwise. - On the other hand, Mario Kart 64 seemed to favor acceleration, as only light characters could reach maximum top speed. - Super Circuit tried to restore a balance, but players discovered that all characters could reach maximum top speed, making heavyweights almost pointless. This also held true for Double Dash!! - In Mario Kart DS, acceleration was the sole defining stat for the snaking technique: the higher it was, the longer your mini-turbos lasted, which made snaking easier note : although players tend to take the vehicle with the best top speed to acceleration ratio for Time Trial World Records. - Mario Kart Wii and 7 had swung the stat the other way by making speed the most vital stat, (alongside drift and mini-turbo for heavier combinations). Wii actually makes acceleration pointless because of the stationary drift, making power vehicles true Lightning Bruisers. - Mario Kart 8 has two interesting variations: - At first, it seemed to follow Wii and 7 by insisting on top speed for time trials and competitive gameplay in 150cc thanks to fire hopping. However, Deluxe corrects it, making acceleration as important as top speed. - The 200cc difficulty makes every kart indecently fast and slippy, transforming top speed into an actual handicap. Handling became the most important stat since, may it be with a light or heavy character, along with acceleration and mini-turbo. - In Mazes of Fate for the Game Boy Advance Strength was far more useful than the other stats. By maxing Strength and 2-handed weapon skill you could easily clear the first half of the game even without your party members. By the second half of the game, you would have plenty of skill points to spend on magic skills to buff yourself and completely dominate with your high Strength and BFS. - Similarly in Monster Rancher, there were six stats: Life, Power, Speed, Skill, Defense, and Intelligence. Of those, Speed referred to a monster's ability to dodge, while Skill referred to its ability to land a blow. In Monster Rancher 3, Speed and Skill were merged into a single Speed, making it vital to both dodging and hitting — breaking the balance the prior games had and making it overly important. - Mount & Blade has this to an extent when it comes to the player character. Since you can get several companions with various specialties, and there is no magic, and there are 3 skills which only matter for your leader (2 of which are charisma linked), Charisma becomes the most vital attribute, and the only one that needs to be above 15 late game, since its the only attribute that affects your maximum party size. Not the case for your companions, since they do not need any CHA skills at all. - All Nippon Ichi games so far have suffered from this on the higher levels. Early in the game (The first couple of hundred levels), all stats are important. But at the end of the game, all that matters is whatever stat you attack with. Playing defense becomes futile, since any attack that hits you WILL kill you, and unless you're using specific abilities to boost dodge, no amount of Speed will give you any kind of decent chance to dodge. ATK, SPD, HIT, INT, and RES are the stats that matter depending on your weapon/class, and it is rare for more than one to matter for a given character. - Disgaea 3 revels in this trope — your attack stats, and maybe your dodge stats are the only things that matter. At the high levels, every attack is a one-hit kill, unless it is dodged. This is thanks to the fact that you can stack massive bonuses to your damage (all of your special attacks having something like +1200% damage just from their base effects, not counting additional bonuses) which apply before defense rendering defense completely pointless. - Hell, Gun users will ever only need but one stat: Hit. That lets them do insane, critical damage that always hits on any enemy, bar ones with huge Speed or Defense, from a distance. - Phantom Brave also heavily rewards high Speed. The movement stats are also very important, but can be difficult to increase. The Speed stat determines turn order: a unit with a hundred Speed is going to get a dozen more turns than a character with only ten Speed. - In Phantom Brave, Speed is a damage stat, although only for a limited number of relatively unusual abilities, which mostly revolve around the "trolly" and "weed" (the plant, not the drug) weapons. The same goes for every stat: INT and ATK (which are only for attack) certainly have the most attacks that use them, but every stat has some attacks whose damage is based on it. Including HP, which can be slightly problematic without the right skills on the character (mainly because the damage is calculated on current HP rather than max HP, making skills that use it almost useless if you're getting battered). - Speed was so important that some weapons were actively unusable (e.g. crystals, signs, and rocks) because they gave huge speed penalties. In the early game, you can get by thanks to the defense bonuses, but by higher levels, the penalties become crippling. - Disgaea weapon damage is based off a given stat based on the form of attack, and each weapon is based in one of a given number of setups. Character base stats don't do too much compared to equipment stats and aptitudes, however. - Swords, Spears, and Axes are pure ATK. It's not uncommon to see a character stack Gladiators in one of these and cap off attributes for a Yoshitsuna, Baal Sword, or whatev' and then apply an augmenting dual-stat specialist to optimize the performance once it's mastered. The same applies to Monster weapons with a physical lean. - Fists were pure ATK in Hour of Darkness, but changed to ATK/SPD hybrid in Cursed Memories. So not only are fist users hitting for profane amounts of damage even by Disgaea standards, they are insanely difficult to kill due to SPD serving as the evade stat. As if Adell and Champloo weren't Game Breakers on their own... - Bows are ATK/HIT hybrids, but tend to be treated as inferior to guns, which were pure HIT until Absence of Justice made them HIT/SPD hybrids. Further explanation is unnecessary; just look above. - Staves and magic Monster weapons use ATK to determine damage when you swing them; the typical player will not max ATK, and instead pour everything into INT, which determines damage from spells and the magic abilities the monsters using these weapons utilize anyway. Clerics will focus on RES development, but that is for using their Heal spells on Reverse Damage panels; as stated before, everything end- and post-game is dodge or die. - Weapons that use two stats are considered inferior to weapons that use one stat because of the system for using specialists to maximize an item. 8 specialists boosting one stat or 8 specialists getting averaged (halved) between two stats and coming out equivalent to 4 specialists? You decide. - Disgaea 5 averts this by making some welcome changes to the formula by adding armor mastery and changing how skill level works. The Carnage Dimension even punishes min maxing. - Long Live the Queen: While the game is prone to suddenly requiring a so-far useless skills to be at a high level, there are a few skills that are consistently an obvious good investment: - The entire Conversation skillset, as lacking it can make Elodie be unintentionally rude to the wrong people, get into compromising situations without realizing it (and getting out of some of them gracefully requires even higher Conversation skills) or look incompetent enough to have to face a rebellion. - The Military skillset, especially in no-magic runs. There are three different major events that can be dealt with if Elodie's Military skills are good enough, with the last one being inevitable. Military skills not quite good enough to win may still be enough to limit losses or Know When to Fold 'Em. - Composure, as it's often used for keeping Elodie from acting on impulse in situations where doing just that is the worse thing she can do. - Reflexes is often checked when it comes to physically doging things that might be otherwise lethal. Even in runs not relying on it, getting it at 30 by Week 3 will accomplish the triple duty of keeping the milk viper from biting anyone in Julianna's absence, not bumping into Alice on a later week and unlocking the only means of making Elodie angry all while leaving the hidden cruelty stat alone that isn't reliant on story events. - BP (badge points) is by far the most useful statistic in the Paper Mario series, and due to certain combos of badges being nearly certain Game Breakers (The Danger and Peril Mario badge set ups for example), you could have it set up so it pretty much took the place of the other stats, or made them completely redundant as all your basic attacks, due to the certain badge combos massively boosting attack power would do like 90 odd damage per hit and one hit pretty much everything. So yeah, BP was probably this kind of stat in that series. - Adding to this, you gain 3 BP per level up. If you wanted 5 HP instead, there are badges that will give you the same amount of HP for... 3 BP. So long as you had a spare HP or FP badge, you could NEVER go wrong picking BP. - If you wanted to break the game even further, you could visit an NPC that lets you raise a stat while lowering another. Naturally, by lowering your HP to be at only 5 points while raising your BP, Mario would be in the Danger status in the start of every battle and get super powered up from every badge that gives him a boost while his HP is low (including some that reduce or randomly negate damage). The aforementioned Danger/Peril Mario builds rely on this trick. - Planescape: Torment 's Wisdom stat is pretty much god, due to it providing the most dialogue along with experience boosts. Amusing considering that the Cleric class (the only one that can actually benefit from high wisdom) is not available to your character. Contrary to popular belief, wizards do not benefit from a high wisdom, only from intelligence. - The higher your wisdom, the more experience you'll get. Investing in Wisdom early on can net you enough bonus experience through this and extra dialogue options to be stronger and tougher by the end of the game than if you had invested in them from the start. Planescape: Torment is one of the more balanced games though — there are noticeable differences, but no stat is a designated Dump Stat unless the player chooses it to be. - The first generation of Pokémon games had the Special stat affecting both the attack power of AND defense from Special moves. In that generation, the Special stat affected some of the most powerful attacks, including all of the Psychic moves, which was particularly important given that in Gen 1, the Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors was poorly balanced against Psychic, giving it no meaningful weaknesses either offensively or defensively (Ghost was bugged and did no damage to them instead, plus only had Night Shade as its only decent move and was a physical type when its only would-be abusers had awful Attack, Bug had no moves good enough for the weakness to matter, Dark and Steel did not exist yet). This is why Mewtwo was so ludicrously broken in its heyday - Psychic type combined with the highest Special stat in the game. The second generation of games split this into Special Attack and Defense, and, in fourth generation, Physical and Special moves are no longer determined along rigid type lines (Hyper Beam is now a special move, for instance). - And for non-Special types, Speed covered this, as it didn't only influence turn order, but also Critical hit rate. Meaning that moves such as Slash used by a high-Speed Pokémon would always score a powerful, defenses-ignoring critical hit. - In competitive Pokémon, Speed is considered the most important stat, as it's advantageous to be able to KO the opposing Pokémon before it can make a move. Generally, the only thing players don't make as fast as possible are walls; in only a couple generations was Speed really end-all, but players tend to max it out more than other stats anyway. A few craftier veteran players will defy this. In Generation IV, a move called "Trick Room" was introduced that inverts turn order — this means that on some Pokémon, it is more advantageous to have a low speed stat. Any Pokémon on the slow side needs a reliable healing move, no matter how much of a wall they are—fast Pokémon can defeat multiple opponents without taking damage, but slow Pokémon don't have that kind of benefit and need some way to erase the damage they'll inevitably sustain. - Possibly even more than Speed, in competitive battles, evasion can be seen as such a Game-Breaker, or something that increases the luck factor, that moves specifically raising that stat, such as Double Team and Minimize, are generally banned in unofficial matches. - In Pokémon Legends: Arceus, Speed is once again the most important stat. The change to the damage formulae&stats meant that just about every Pokémon is a Glass Cannon if they don't resist an incoming attack. As a result? It's better to just strike first so that you can strike hard. - Progress Quest has strength, which affects your carrying capacity, and thus how often your character has to go back to town. As progress quest is a 'zero player RPG,' this is the only effect any stat has on the so-called 'gameplay.' - In Puzzle Quest, a high Battle stat will allow you to mow through most enemies with ease. The game itself tries to offset this by giving the magic user classes (Wizard and Druid) much higher point costs to raise their Battle levels. (3pts per level, and you only get 4pts per level up). THAT is offset by a point-buy system that allows you to purchase permanent stat boosts. - A specific mana color counts as a class's One Stat, such as red mana for a warrior riding a spider-dragon. - Dexterity (again) in Ragnarok Online. Melee fighters need Dex to hit enemies. Ranged fighters need Dex to hit enemies and do damage. Casters need high Dex to reduce the game's long, interruptable cast times. - Vitality arguably is a more important stat in "War of Emperium", the game's version of Guild vs Guild PvP. Since the majority of damage dealt by players is "healable" with the liberal use of health pots of some form, the only danger to well-equipped (serious) WOE PvP players are one hit KO skills, which are naturally easier to survive with more health (governed by Vitality). Dexterity isn't quite so useful in WOE, as the ability for players to dodge attacks is highly nerfed in that mode, and casting classes can generally team up with Bards/Clowns who have a buff that reduces cast time. - Rainbow Skies: The Speed stat is very important. The game has Turn-Based Combat, and higher Speed means an earlier turn, and more turns if the difference is big enough. Having a high Strength means more powerful attacks, but that won't help very much if the enemy can get a few solid hits in before you can even assume a defensive stance. - In Runescape, Magic and Defense. The vast majority of enemies are weak to Magic, and Defense increases your chances of completely avoiding an attack. Constitution is also important for any combat build, but it's actually very difficult to have a low Constitution. You should also be dodging most attacks in the first place. To Melee-oriented builds, Prayer is also very useful. The only downside is that Magic costs a lot more because the runes needed to use it are consumables. - In PvP, the only stat that matters at lower levels is Strength, to the point where it's beneficial to use non-combat methods so your Constitution stays at the base 10 until you're ready to fight other players. Sure, you can have a hard time hitting and go down in two or three hits, but that doesn't matter when you take them down in one hit off a normally mid-game weapon that only requires 60 Strength to equip. Other stats start to matter more once you get to higher combat brackets, but Strength is the only melee skill that doesn't harm you for leveling it beyond a gear's requirements. Ranged also ends up becoming more valuable, as its attacks come out the fastest and leveling it doesn't harm your combat level like the other non-Magic combat stats do. In fact, Constitution is so heavily disliked that some players even make their accounts Ironmen note : Ironmen can't trade with other players, pick up any items from players they kill, and most importantly, gain zero experience from damage dealt to other players, among other things and instead just bring a second account to pick up the loot once it's available to everyone (which doesn't guarantee they even get it) simply so they don't ruin their base 10 HP. - In Shadowrun Returns Quickness is king for the "Dead Man's Switch" campaign that comes with the game, at least for the player character. Quickness determines your physical agility which in turn determines how often you get hit and how fast you reload whereas Willpower determines spell accuracy and magic evasion. Seeing how nearly everyone tries to shoot you and your crew, a Street Samurai with high quickness skill will avoid a lot of shots and dish out a world of hurt and be even better with augments that improve stats but reduces your Willpower. That being said, a mage with a lot of crowd control spells is a godsend, just not as much as a player character. - DLC campaign Dragonfall makes Intelligence, specifically for Decking, your main stat. It isn't so much an improvement to combat as it is the sheer number of Decking and Intelligence checks in the game. Your character practically needs to be a Decker to get the most out of the game. - Shin Megami Tensei: Depending on the game, your preferred character build (magic vs. strength), and to what degree you can control stat distribution, which stat is the stat is a your mileage may vary issue. To prevent flame wars, Shin Megami Tensei IV players created a guide calculating exactly how many points of damage would be added for each point spent in the relevant stats. - In Persona, by far the most useful stats in the game are Agility and Dexterity. Luck is your final point dump stat, but Strength and Vitality are borderline useless. Maxing out Agility early on allows the main character to move first nearly every time as well as raising his evasion and hit rate. Dexterity raises his attack defense and his hit rate as well. Luck raises those stats too but it mainly is useful for the critical hits. Strength and Vitality on the other hand only raise Attack and Defense respectively and they don't do it at regular intervals either. Nothing a good persona can't fix. - In most games that use the Press Turn system ( Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, both volumes of Digital Devil Saga, Shin Megami Tensei IV, and Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse), Agility is a very important stat, but for another reason: If a character's attack misses and it's not a status or One-Hit Kill spell, their side will lose an additional turn. Increasing Agility means the player can minimize their turn losses while maximizing the enemy's. Shin Megami Tensei V revamps aspects of the battle system in a way that completely reverses this, robbing Agility of nearly all its functions and turning it into the game's Dump Stat instead. - Even before Press Turn, Agility is regarded as the best stat in the classic trilogy of Shin Megami Tensei I, Shin Megami Tensei II, and Shin Megami Tensei if.... Agility determining turn order is a massive deal in these games' battle system, it increases the chance of multi hit attacks hitting more in the latter two games (a massive deal when the protagonist with a multi hitting sword tends to end up with the highest damage output in the party), and it increases dodge chance. Strength/Magic and Vitality are still important, but the benefits of Agility far outweigh them. - In the game Shin Megami Tensei IV, Dexterity is the best offensive stat. While spells can be used to hit elemental weaknesses, they also can't critical, and it takes up several skill slots to be able to cover a lot of weaknesses. And between Strength and Dexterity, Strength increases melee weapon attacks, Dexterity increases base gun attacks, and both increase Physical and Gun skills, however Dexterity increases BOTH more than Strength does. Very few foes resist both Physical and Gun skills at the same time, one attack stat can increase both well, it will only be 2 skill slots, and increasing luck alongside it makes a 2 Dex, 2 luck, 1 Agility build extremely powerful, being able to deal massive, mostly unresisted damage while having several skill slots open for healing or buffs/debuffs, which are extremely useful. - Similar to the above as well as Devil Survivor, Persona 2 has Dexterity, which increases Maximum MP, Magic Attack and Magic Defense. Agility would come in a close second due to handling both accuracy and evasion, but the fact that most Personae give a +1 Agility boost upon level up means that you'll never have to increase it manually, it'll be monstrously high by the end of the game regardless, especially for Lisa and Maya. Subverted with the Luck stat, which often results in both good and bad rolls (for example, a skill you can get at the end of the game kills the character with the highest Luck in battle. Usually Jun.) - In the SNES and Playstation games, Speed and Stamina/Vitality are both equally important and trump all other stats. Each point of Speed directly goes into your Evade, as well as increasing the chances of ambushing enemies and preventing the same for your own party. It also increases Defense. Stamina is arguably less important as it only increases Defense, but is much more useful in its higher levels due to increasing maximum HP. - Solatorobo: the truly important ones are Attack (how much damage an enemy takes when thrown/gets something thrown at them) and Hydraulics (how fast you can lift and toss an enemy). And even then Hydraulics is slightly better, since thrown enemies are helpless for long periods of time. - Spellforce III falls into this. All classes need mana to use skills, which means they all need willpower (increases mana pool) and intelligence (for regeneration). On top of this, while dexterity and strength increase damage of auto-attacks, most damage skills only scale with base weapon damage and so stat influence is limited, while all classes have plenty of skills that scale with intelligence or willpower (things like taunts and group buffs). - The Mind stat, and its substats, in Pre-Combat Upgrade Star Wars: Galaxies. These were the only stats that could not be healed by medics or buffed by doctors and, as a result, were the target of choice in PvP. As a result, most minmaxers dropped their other stats down to their bare minimums (which made the character completely worthless if unbuffed — although, at that point in the game, no one ever willingly entered combat unbuffed) and threw every point they could into their mental stats. - Super Robot Wars: - For the pilots, it's Dodge. After all, it doesn't matter if you can take a hit or not if nothing ever hits you. If a mecha has an "Automatic Dodge" skill (like ECS or Open Get), then Maneuverability, which determines how often it comes out, will share time with it. Later games limit the effectiveness of this by adding the "Evasion Decay" mechanic where every successful dodge makes the next less likely, resetting only once you take a hit. - For the Mecha, it's Mobility, which also determines not only dodging but hitting as well, for the same reasons. - Hit is also extremely important. However, there's not much you can do outside of Strike/Focus spirit and Hit increasing parts, in most games. Recently however Hit has been upgradable in a mech. In games with the pilot point system on the other hand you can ramp up your pilot's Hit and Evade to make them much more powerful. (Or if you're talking about a tanking mecha, Defense) - Skill in the Z Series. Skill not only determines critical hit chance but also governs the activation many other abilities such as Counter note : Chance of interrupting an enemy's attack with your counterattack first, Attack Again note : Allows the pilot to provide offensive support for himself if Skill stat is 20 or better than enemy, Sword Cut note : cut down incoming missiles or parry melee attacks, and Shield Defense. - In the Super Smash Bros. series, the speedier, quick-attacking characters rule the competitive scene, as they have the ability to output damage more efficiently than every other character does. Meta Knight, in Brawl, has the distinction of being the only character who can combo with the minimal hitstun, making him formally banned at many tournaments. - In the entire Trails Series, Speed is the most important stat as it allows players to take more turns before the enemies do, or at least catch up to them. Strength and Arts are also important as well. Meanwhile, Defense is usually the dump stat especially on Nightmare Mode because of how insane damages get. - Trickster Online gives us the four types. Each of the four types has one stat that you're expected to put all your points into for non-PvP play. - Power types: AP (Attack Power). Straight up damage dealing. Mostly because this is the only way to get past most monster's Damage Reduction. - Magic types: MA (Magic Attack). Damage dealt from Spell skills. Seriously, this is the only stat that makes a difference in a Magic Type's lethality. - Sense types: Okay, there's a bit of a split here: - Pure Lions: AC (Accuracy, which is a Power-type stat) really boosts the damage from Guns. - All other Sense Type players: DA (Detect Ability) not only improves the chances of a guaranteed Hit/Miss from Drilling (A guaranteed Miss means that's one more use of your drill), but also improves the damage dealt from Thrown Items. - Charm Types: HV (Dodging Ability, or Nimbleness or Flexibility or whatever). Increases chances of avoiding damage altogether, and improves damage dealt by skills. - In Wakfu, either Lock or Dodge depending on whether you are a melee or ranged character respectively. - It didn't show in normal gameplay, but Agility was by far the best stat in Warcraft III. It raised attack speed and armor (plus attack power as the primary stat) while strength only affected health and intellect only affected mana and mana regeneration... which was pretty useless since spells still had cooldowns and didn't scale with anything. - This was so significant that not only did no Agility Hero have a particularly high Agility growth (most would end up in the low 30s while other class heroes never got lower than low 40s in their main stat, and some Strength Heroes could hit as high as mid-50s before factoring in bonuses), but that in fact only one Agility Hero had Agility as his highest attribute at the end of his natural progression. - Whoring onto Agility generally happened in Warcraft III inside custom maps where it was possible to raise any of a hero's stats significantly. - Some custom maps tried to balance this by making agility boosts much more expensive and intelligence cheaper. The very complex ones use spells that actually scale with stats instead of fixed damage. - Warframe: Before Update 11 brought Damage 2.0's revamps, Armor Piercing was the damage type you had to boost if you wanted to be relevant against higher-level enemies. - Efficiency was one of these stats; however, as the game's expanded, more and more methods of restoring energy at a moment's notice have entered the game, to the point where the only reason to bother with it is to make sure that ability costs aren't too expensive to make use of at a moment's notice. - For weapons, the king stat is (unsurprisingly) damage. While the physical damage mods are pretty underwhelming across the board, the raw damage mods and elemental damage mods scale very well, and the two categories boost each other multiplicatively. Multishot is a very close second for non-melee weapons, since it lets you fire multiple copies of the weapon's projectiles at once for no extra ammo, and it scales multiplicatively with both raw damage mods and elemental damage mods, but there are still a few weapons that don't necessarily use it or outright avoid it: explosive weapons can become more hazardous to the wielder, while the (Synoid) Simulor's unique mechanics end up doing better without multishot thanks to some odd interactions. - Thanks to the way Critical Hits work and the increasing number of ways to boost Critial Chance, Critical Chance and Critical Multiplier have outpaced Damage as the most important stat for weapons (although Damage and Multishot are still good). This is because it is possible to go over 100% Critical Chance and get double (or in some cases, triple or even quadruple) crits which allows the bonus damage from the Critical Multiplier to stack. Status has also gained promenence as various status effects can boost this damage further depending on which damage types a gun has. As of Update 27.2, Viral makes enemies more vulnerable to damage and can stack with itself, while Slash causes the damage that triggers it to be dealt again as "bleed" damage that ignores Armor. This means that even in high level areas where enemy HP and Armor can spiral out of control, a weapon with high crit stats that deals Viral and Slash damage can instantly kill weaker enemies like Lancers and inflict a brutal Time-Delayed Death on tougher enemies like Corrupted Bombards. - In Wasteland 2, high Intelligence gives you extra Skill points at every level, and you will need high Skill Scores to accomplish most things that aren't combat in this game. In combat, Awareness and Speed have the biggest effect because they decide Combat Initiative and therefore the number of turns you get and how early you'll get them. - Wildstar simplified things to the point where there were only two main stats - Assault, used by all DPS, and Support, used by all Tanks/Healers. - World of Warcraft goes through iterations of stat balance with each major patch, resulting in a very active metagame as players use complex spreadsheets and simulators to determine optimal stats even before the changes hit live realms. An effect of this is that most classes and specs have one or two absolutely optimal stats, with others needed only enough to balance things out. Examples: In 3.3.3, Assassination Rogues valued Attack Power over everything else, while Combat Rogues used Armor Penetration and Subtlety Rogues used Agility. One of Blizzard's objectives in Cataclysm was to once again rebalance stat desirability, but even they admit that achieving a perfect balance is likely impossible. - Patch 4.0.1, a.k.a. Cataclysm, came with a more sweeping revision of the stat system that arguably averts this trope. Every class now has One Stat to Rule Them All, and regardless of spec it is their primary stat that matches their damage type (strength for some physical damage-dealers, agility for others, intellect for casters). However, the amount of those stats on items is (nearly) constant at a given item level, so maximizing your primary stat is now a no-brainer. The challenge, and customization option, comes from secondary stats: critical strike, dodge, expertise, haste, hit, mastery, parry and spirit. Everyone needs some of several of those and don't care about others. While most classes and specs have one or two secondary stats that are technically optimal, no one can completely ignore the rest due to caps, diminishing returns and similar effects. - Slightly interesting as many classes and specs deal with limitations that change the metagame when reached. For instance, hit rating is far and away the best secondary stat for spellcasters until they reach 17% hit chance increase (up to 8% are covered by talents and debuffs), at which point it becomes worthless to increase further. - The notable aversions to this trend are healers and tanks, where it's much less clear what the best stat is. Tanks have to balance stacking Stamina (to improve their maximum health and thus their resistance to spike damage) with avoidance/mitigation (to decrease the average amount of damage they take) and threat (to help keep enemies from running off and killing the damage-dealers). Healers, on the other hand, have to balance throughput (given by Intelligence and most secondary stats) with regeneration (given by Spirit, and a bit by Int as well, which increases how long they can last in a fight). However, the notable exception to these aversions is the druid class. Druid tanks are advised to simply stack Agility on any fight that doesn't specifically call for a big health pool (Agility gives all of avoidance, mitigation, and threat, making it a no-brainer). And due to a quirk of their mechanics, druid healers care about Intelligence more than anything, as not only is it far and away the best throughput stat, but it also increases their longevity better than anything else. - Durability in WWE Day Of Reckoning 2. Did not apply in the first game and while no stats are useless in 2, durability needs the most investment before it stops being a visible weakness. Injury resistance, resistance to tapping out and stamina loss are tied to durability. - In X-COM: UFO Defense, psionic attacks are a Game-Breaker. The Psi Strength stat determines how good a particular soldier is at psionic attacks and how well he resists them. It is also the only stat that cannot be trained and almost all trainable stats (Throwing and Shooting accuracy and Bravery being the major exceptions) can be trained by attempting psionic attacks. I think you can see where I'm going with this. - Terror from the Deep was similar, although the enemies were so much nastier it slightly ameliorated this. In both cases, there was a lot of work involved in getting a squad of soldiers with high Psi Strength and good combat skills. Getting a squadful of Psionic commandos generally required hiring and firing dozens of soldiers every month, and was critical to victory at higher difficulty levels. - The 2012 Remake continues the trend, with Will being key to psionic troopers. A soldier's likelihood of being psionic is dependent on their Will stat, which also determines the chance of psionic attacks (such as Mindfray and Mind Control) actually working whilst also rendering the soldier more resistant to said attacks. Will is increased by ranking up but can be boosted with items, and can be permanently reduced if a soldier is critically wounded during a mission. With sufficiently high Will, a soldier can reliably Mind Control Muton Berzerkers and Ethereals. - XCOM: Enemy Unknown has the option to have random soldier stats on recruitment. In this case, no matter your class, Aim is king, with Mobility a close second. After all, if you can hit the ayys and get in the best position to hit the ayys, you won't take damage (where HP comes in) or be subjected to psionic abilities (where Will matters), and an unharmed soldier doesn't panic because of low Will. Even after psionic enemies start showing up, only the squad leader needs to have high Will once you get Lead By Example. - The X-Men Legends and Marvel Ultimate Alliance series made by Raven have the focus stat. Particularly the first, focus increases the special gauge and the rate it regenerates. This means more damage reducing buffs and specials that already do more damage than punching enemies. - In the later levels of Forum Warz, Offense is all that really matters. This is not to say that you can't get through the game without putting a single point into Offense, even with a naturally Offense-poor class. But late-game forums come in two types. The kind that can be very annoying if you can't take down their threads quickly, and the Marathon Boss kind. In those, enough consumables will replace the need to avoid getting hurt, and the faster you can do damage, the less time the fight will take. - In TierZoo (a video series that treats nature and wildlife like an MMO known as "Outside" and puts animals into in-universe Character Tiers), the video maker states that the most powerful stat is Intelligence. This allows for both group tactics (which by itself is an extremely powerful ability) and wisdom accumulation. Humans, who have high Intelligence and average speed but rather low stats everywhere else, have come to utterly dominate the game by abusing their maxed-out intelligence to simply craft items that give them extremely high stats in everything except Health. The show does make some caveats, as it notes that a few required support features are needed to get the most out of intelligence, mainly a long enough lifespan to accumulate wisdom, and the ability to use tools, because while intelligence is still extremely powerful without them, it's not absolutely broken the way it is with them. Octopuses, for example, have extremely high intelligence and and remarkable problem solving skills, and together with their camouflage abilities this gives them very lethal hunting and fighting skills, but since they only live for a few years, they don't get to do all that much with it in the end. Dolphins and Orca do have a high intelligence and long lifespan, so they can do things like cooperate for more efficient hunting and group protection strategy, but without the ability to make and use tools, even if humans were to completely disappear from the game, dolphins would have no chance of completely dominating the game the way that humans have. - GamePro Magazine used four ratings for their game reviews: "Graphics", "Sound", "Controls", and "Fun Factor". While not equivalent to an "Overall" rating (which was elaborated in an editorial section), "Fun Factor" was treated as the ultimate factor in determining whether a game is worth playing, followed by "Controls" for directly impacting the player's ability to have fun with the game. note : This correlation was seen in the ratings themselves, with "Fun Factor" almost never ranking more than 0.5 points (out of 5) higher than "Controls".	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneStatToRuleThemAll
One-Tract Mind - TV Tropes When a politician or other public figure has a message so important that he has to insert it into all his speeches, no matter how irrelevant to what they're supposed to be about. Compare Author Tract and Writer on Board, which is when the people at the keyboards are prone to this. Single-Issue Wonk is an in-universe example where this is something incredibly petty. ## Examples: - Transformers (2019): Nominus Prime just cannot shut up about overconsumption of fuel and preventing energy crises. His preoccupation with the subject is a tad understandable, considering Cybertron had only just overcome a devastating energy shortage (and a war caused in part by said shortage), but quickly gets ridiculous when he starts to lecture the Constructicons about recreational use of fuel at a party held in their honor. - A Doonesbury cartoon just before the 2004 election has George W. Bush's press secretary answer every single question with "9/11". The punch line: "Uh, Scott, is 9-11 the answer to every question now?" "Yes, it's 9-11, 24-7." "Until when?" "11-2." [Election day] - Animal Farm: Many of Napoleon's speeches end with the dire warning that "Jones will come back" if the animals do not obey whatever his latest diktat is. - David Letterman has a recurring bit where he shows a clip from "the new Osama bin Laden tape" where he talks about his Oscar picks, the Super Bowl, etc. He finishes, starts to lower the mic, then raises it again to say, "Oh, and Death to America." - Charlie Brooker's Newswipe - The time: February 2010, the man: David Cameron. The overriding compulsion: to use the phrase "Broken politics" at any and every opportunity. Even worse, this is a spin-off of his next favorite meme, "Broken Britain". - Inevitably came up a few times on The West Wing, such as in one episode where the Democrats were about to come out with their tax plan and Will, the new deputy communications director, was working with a staff of only four inexperienced interns to write tax policy into every measly statement the president or the White House was going to make in the coming days. Toby: Read me what you've got for the swearing in of the ambassador. Will: "Ambassador Stanis will help to build and sustain a new era of cooperation between the United States and Hungary, and let's please all remember that cutting capital gains taxes is a bad idea." Toby: ...Okay, you're gonna polish that up? Will: Yeah. - One issue of MAD featured a comic strip depicting then-recent then-President George W. Bush as a superhero. His power was that as long as he kept saying "9/11!", he was invincible. - In the Family Guy episode "It Takes a Village Idiot, and I Married One," Brian advises Lois, in her campaign for mayor, to pander to undecided voters by giving them short, simple answers. She tests out a few phrases, and when she gets the most applause with "9/11 was bad," she decides to make "9/11" the answer to all remaining questions. - Cato the Elder, a senator of The Roman Republic and veteran of Rome's second war with Carthage, made a habit of inserting the phrase "Carthago delenda est" ("Carthage must be destroyed") or "Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam" ("Moreover, I advise that Carthage must be destroyed") into all his speeches, even on matters totally unrelated to war and foreign politics. Rome would ultimately wage a third war against Carthage a few years after his death, during which they razed the city to the ground, so in the end he got his wish. - Polish politician Andrzej Lepper, for some time, ended all his speeches with "Balcerowicz has to leave." (For a reason.) Moreover, we advise that Carthage must be destroyed.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneTractMind
Infinite 1-Ups - TV Tropes Repeat until bored and/or out of time. 1-Ups are a good thing in many games; with a limited number of Video-Game Lives, you'll need some extras just in case if you want to get through the game in one sitting. Some game designers, however, don't know when to quit giving you opportunities to earn them, and create an Infinite 1-Ups, an incredibly easy (if sometimes tricky) way of gaining an infinite amount of life which makes the game far easier than it should be. Typically, this'll be some sort of Guide Dang It! infinite loop combo that would rack up extra lives like crazy, but Infinite 1-Ups can be used to describe any instance where you're able to gather an insane number of extra lives, through gimmicks or no. This trope can cause the game to have Meaningless Lives. On the other hand, a really Nintendo Hard game can eat through even the lives gained by this, since the life counter is going to reach a Cap sooner or later. See also Bragging Rights Reward, which Infinite 1-Ups is if performing it is harder than surviving anything in the game. This can happen either by design (an Easter Egg or a reward for pulling off some challenge the game designer thought would be incredibly difficult), or by accident due to a Good Bad Bug. ## Examples: - Super Mario Bros.: - Super Mario Bros.: There's the infamous "Koopa Shell Bounce" (where you corner a Koopa Troopa Shell on a stair and continuously jump on it, keeping it stuck there while you rack up points and lives until you jump off and land on the ground; since each enemy you Goomba Stomp without touching the ground gets you more points and eventually 1-ups, get the shell at just the right spot for you to endlessly bounce off of it and you're immortal! The Lost Levels lets you do this at the very beginning of the game!) note : and you'll need every last one, the "Koopa Shell Ricochet" (where you'll keep on earning lives from enemies a kicked Koopa Shell kills, as long as it doesn't stop or go off the screen, exploited heavily in areas where you can trap a shell in one screen between two blocks while Lakitu or another Mook Maker can keep feeding foes to the grinder), the "Starman Rush"/"Demolition Mario" (essentially the same as the Koopa Shell Ricochet, except you use the power of a Starman instead of a shell to kill enemies), the "Goomba Stomp Chain" (the Koopa Shell Bounce done on multiple enemies and usually with the assistance of Video Game Flight, again only stopping when you touch solid ground), and the "End Point Exploit" (only applicable in Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World, where touching the goal while enemies are on the screen turns them into point-heavy coins). In the case of Super Mario Bros. and The Lost Levels, though, you have to be very careful about how you use your Infinite 1-Ups, because the game features an unintentional form of No Fair Cheating where getting more than 128 lives at once makes the life counter overflow into negatives, giving you an instant Game Over as soon as you die (or even clear the level!) - Super Mario Bros. 2: The Game Boy Advance version changes the Turtle Shell behavior to be more like the classic Koopa Troopa shell. Where once it would disappear when it hit an obstacle, it will now bounce back (and will damage the player), and has the "each enemy hit by it gives more points until a certain point, after which each one gives you an extra life" mechanic. This creates a few "Mook Maker equals 1-up factory" opportunities. - Super Mario Bros. 3: - It starts pretty early. With the Raccoon Tail letting you glide slowly to the ground, a pipe in the second course that endlessly spawns Goombas lets you rack up 1-ups until the clock runs out. - A level allows you to turn all bricks into coins. Mario can gain about five extra lives before the clock runs out; repeating this level over and over can give you 100 lives in about an hour. - There are several levels where enemies spawn infinitely and with just a little planning, you can queue up a bunch of free lives. World 3, Level 5 has a Lakitu that throws out Spinies, while several of the auto-scroll levels in World 8 have a number of cannons placed close to each other such that with a little practice, you can build up your score multiplier by jumping on cannonballs until the point bonuses turn into 1-Ups. - The Koopa Shell Bounce exploit is even shown in the 9-Volt/18-Volt character video in WarioWare: Smooth Moves, accompanied by three giant "1-UP"s. - Super Mario World: - The game has hidden 3-Up moons, as well as two different hidden areas that you can use to acquire up to 9 lives. Also, there are fences in many of the castle and fortress stages that contain Koopas, and as long as you don't touch the ground, you can rack up plenty of lives simply by knocking them off. There's one castle that's almost entirely Koopa Troopas on fences, pretty much serving as a 1-up factory you'll want to make use of because the difficulty is about to go up a notch. - In the Sunken Ghost Ship, wait for a Bullet Bill, bop it and keep it afloat. Lather, rinse, repeat. - In the water fortress level, there are Bony Beetle enemies can re-form after a certain amount of time like a Dry Bones. There is a hallway before a door with two of them where you can farm 1-ups by bouncing off them both, swimming to stay off the ground, then bouncing off of them again when they reform. Once again, Lather rinse repeat. - The mid-game hidden stage "Vanilla Secret 2" allows you to run through a section with a lot of critters after using a silver P-Switch (which basically is the equivalent of the Starman Run, except the bonus goes up to 3-Ups.) Ending the sequence with at least 40 lives added is well known. Also, Mario can respawn said silver P-Switch by eating it with a Yoshi as it is crushed, allowing expert players to get pretty much every single enemy in one go, which is hundreds upon hundreds of lives. - The "Top Secret Area", above the Donut Ghost House has nothing but five question blocks with two fire flowers, two capes and one Yoshi, which if you have Yoshi, is an extra life. You can simply leave and come back, as many times as you want! - The Donut Ghost House itself has four 1-Ups in the secret passage that unlocks the Top Secret Area. All you need is a cape, and going there takes less than a minute. - In Forest of Illusion 1, there is a set of platforms containing four Wigglers and three Koopas contained in blocks. By using Caped Mario and floating back and forth, bouncing off the Wigglers and Koopas, you can continually bounce between them for as long as you want (the Koopas and Wigglers reset their states offscreen). When you do it for long enough, the 3-ups you receive turn into incomprehensible symbols that give you Metric Butt-tons of points and coins. Yeah, that last bit is a glitch. The bug was fixed in the Advance version, but you can still gain a jillion lives there the normal way. - As for the normal way: There's a powerup box that cycles between several different items, including the Invincibility Star. Pick up the Starman, and then simply charge through the level running into every enemy you find (and there are a lot) to get a minimum of about 20 1-Ups. It gets better after you first complete it: this game lets you repeat any level, and also exit a level by pressing Start and Select with no penalty for doing so. And did we mention said box is right after the midway checkpoint? You can get the star, rack up the 1-ups, exit, re-enter to just before this sequence, and do it over and over and over. - The most damning game breaker in nearly all the "Advance" games is the fact that the game saves your lives. Average players will likely max the counter out by mid-game. And the max is 999. - Also, the GBA version of Super Mario World grants points for simply hitting a Koopa shell with Mario's cape, and these hits can be used in chains, allowing this to happen. Wow. - The 1995 NES bootleg version gives you a 1-up for leaving Yoshi's house and you can enter the level as many times as you feel like. The game is Nintendo hard due to its poorly-cloned control scheme so you'll be visiting Yoshi's house often. - In New Super Mario Bros., the old stair-shell trick still works. - Also Green Mushroom Houses may give very big number of lives in New Super Mario Bros if you're lucky (getting these isn't hard...) - And getting the Mega Mushroom in 1-1 guarantees at least one (and quite easily, all five) lives in each play-through. - Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island makes it even easier, due to lacking a time limit, the fact that carrying a shell or Melon Bug doesn't reset the 1-Up counter, and many pipes that constantly spawn Shy Guys providing you don't have a full complement of eggs. The earliest example is found in level 1-7: Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy, where Yoshi can use a Melon Bug and a pipe spawning Shy Guys. - Super Mario Galaxy practically lampshades this trope by having Peach mail you five 1-Ups every time you start the game, \|\|or 20 in the New Game Plus,\|\| as well as feeding you tons of the green mushrooms in every level which respawn when you die (and in the Hub World). - Super Mario Galaxy 2 goes back to tradition by allowing you to farm Koopas for 1-Ups. Go to Supermassive Galaxy, and head for the planetoid with the three giant Koopas. Jump onto the shell of one of them, and judge the control stick so you keep stomping on it. You'll hit 99 lives in less than a minute. - Made easier if you use Co-star mode to immobilize the Koopa you're jumping on with the second control. - This tool-assisted speedrun of Super Mario Bros. 3 turns certain entire levels into Infinite 1-Ups. - In the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 (Lost Levels), you get a 1-Up if your coins are at a multiple of 11 that matches the last digit of your timer (e.g. 11 coins with 201 left on the timer). It's possible to do this in nearly every level of the game. - Amusingly, Super Paper Mario actually punishes you for doing this in an area early in the game where the Koopa Shell Bounce staircase is replicated. Stomping the shell enough will cause you to lose points after a while. - New Super Mario Bros. Wii has "Infinite 1-Up" videos that can be purchased at the castle that will show you all kinds of tricks to get infinite lives. One method is to have one character start Goomba Stomping enemies, and then have another player use Yoshi to swallow him until you find some more enemies. Being swallowed by Yoshi does not count as touching the ground. - An interesting instance can be found in between 6-6 and the World 6 Castle. Touching one of the Bullet Bills on the map sends you into a minigame where you have to collect eight Toad balloons to save Toad, and at the end, you get three Mushroom power-ups. Unlike most such minigames, this one can be done over and over. Furthermore, any enemies onscreen when the 8th balloon is collected are turned into points. And since the theme of the level is Bullet Bills...that could easily be enough enemies to get 1-3 extra lives as well. And since each completion gets you three Mushroom power-ups, you should easily enter the level with an extra hit to give every time. - Because of New Super Mario Bros. 2's emphasis on gaining coins, the entire game can turn into this, but by far the biggest example is World 2-4. There's an easily obtainable Gold Flower at the beginning of the level which, among other things, grants you coins instead of points for killing enemies. Later on there's an area that infinitely spawns Goombas. Jumping on them consecutively starts awarding a 1-up for every other enemy you kill (since the counter tops out at 50 coins per enemy killed). Since a skilled player can rack up around 9000 coins in a single playthrough of this level using this method, and 100 coins still nets you an extra life, you can do the math from here. - New Super Luigi U has "Larry's Trigger-Happy Castle", in which it is very easy to grind lives by jumping to Bullet Bills. - Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins has the Hippo level, which lets you easily get coins, lives, a mushroom or any powerup of your choice. The unnamed auto-scrolling extra stage, opposite the path to the Hippo, allows you to get a couple of 1-ups via the Starman rush. Also, there is a Betting Mini-Game which randomly gives you up to 99 lives. - Super Mario 64 DS: In Whomp's Fortress, on any star except the first, if you acquire the Super Mushroom from the box near the first Thwomp and manage to get to the topmost portion of the fortress, you can knock the enormous plank-platform over so it lays flat on the ground. Proceed to run into the side, and after a moment the thing will start giving 1-Ups at an alarming rate. Because it is extremely difficult to get atop the fortress in your giant state, the usual number you'll end up with is probably in the 40s or 50s, but if you're really good you can quite efficiently max out the life counter at 99, with 1-Ups to spare. - Super Mario 3D Land has a spot in World 1-2 with the old "bounce a Koopa shell into the wall" trick, but with a twist; you're bouncing the shell into the fourth wall. There are several other levels with Koopas and walls in the proper placement to do this trick, but World 1-2 is the easiest and the earliest; it's amusing to render lives entirely pointless not even two levels into the game. - Also, when fighting Pom Pom, when she goes in her shell and hops around the room trying to stomp Mario, you can jump on her shell and bounce off repeatedly, gaining dozens of 1-ups in the process... - Super Mario 3D World has the fastest way to earn extra lives in the series. You still need to bounce repeatedly on a Koopa shell, and you can do it in several levels, but World 1-2 has a particular spot where you can earn 1-ups so fast with this technique that you'll be able to earn Crown-Crown-Crown (1,110) lives and still have more than enough time to finish the level like normal, with the stars and stamps. - With its many Game Maker tools, Super Mario Maker and its sequel allows this in multiple ways (even to the point of having canons straight-up shooting 1-Up Mushrooms!). Unfortunately, they really don't matter in this game, except in 100-Mario Challenges but you can never know what kind of level you will get. Your fate lays in the hands of the makers! However, both games only let you take three lives with you once you complete the level. - In the Natraps X series, the first Death Montage shows Spelunker using the Koopa Shell Bounce trick before killing Rockman. The second has Rockman, reduced to one life, getting his revenge and some of his lives back by bouncing on Spelunker in the same way. - Fable has the Resurrection Phials, potions that revive you should you lose all your health. While there's no special task to getting them (and you can only carry nine Phials at a time), they are incredibly plentiful and fairly cheap to buy from stores and traveling merchants, effectively making you immortal as long as you have the cash to keep buying them (which is no problem, either). - Donkey Kong Country has balloons. Red balloons give one extra life, green ones give two and blue ones give three. Collecting three identical animal tokens opens a special area where the player can get even more extra lives. A lot of lives; every 100 mini-tokens you gather in the special areas net you an extra life, and there's a mega-token there that, if collected, doubles the total amount of mini-tokens collected. - Donkey Kong Country - The first level, "Jungle Hijinxs", is short and extremely easy and contains tons of life balloons (in addition to the lives you get from bananas and animal tokens). It can be played as many times as you want before moving on to the rest of the game. - The rope trick consists of getting on a rope in the stage "Misty Mines" and placing yourself next to the barrels that spawn enemies. From there you can jump on an enemy and then back to the vine without touching the ground. After doing it eight times, each consecutive time. - The Krusha trick can be done in "Loopy Lights," "Manic Mincers," or "Millstone Mayhem" (the first ruins stage); play as Diddy Kong and bounce on a Krusha pinned up against the wall as many times as you want to get a ginormous amount of lives insanely quickly - as in, you will earn extra lives roughly three times faster than the life counter can display. You can easily reach 99 (and far beyond, though the life counter doesn't show it) in under 60 seconds. - One of the recurring minigames tasked you with repeatedly stomping a Klaptrap (who spat out more bananas and moved faster after each hit). In one level this minigame featured three such Klaptraps, enabling the player to bounce between them continuously, accumulating many extra lives in the process. - Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest - DKC2 has Swanky's games, which give you 6 extra lives if you answer all the (pretty easy) questions correctly. Although it's not infinite, it's a huge boost. - This game also gives you the ability to easily exit levels you have beaten before. The first level has a balloon one screen from the starting position, so once you've beaten it you can easily enter, get balloon, then exit in about 20 seconds. You can then just repeat until you get bored. - And there's also "Barrel Bayou", where a little ways past halfway are two Kloaks (enemies who throw various things) that keep throwing easily defeated enemies for a while, and then throw a chest with a green balloon worth 2 lives before leaving. Given that enemies respawn if they are avoided but not killed, you can pass the Kloaks and them come back to them to repeat the process as much as you like. - Donkey Kong Country Returns introduces a new gameplay mechanic: similarly to Mario, jumping on several enemies consecutively eventually gives you 1-Ups. This becomes handy in "8-K: Five Monkey Trial". One of the trials consist of jumping on Squidlies in order to reach the top of the area, but the pattern of their arrival is fixed, and one knowing it could do a Leap of Faith from one of the upper Squidlies with the help of Diddy's barrels and landing on one of the bottom Squidlies and repeat the process. - In various Sonic The Hedgehog games, some levels have more than one 1up monitor, which reset if you die. You can collect two extra lives, kill yourself, and repeat for as long as you want. - And of course you get a 1-up for collecting 100 rings, so you can double the rate of life grinding if you delay your suicide until you've found both monitors and collected 100 rings. - In the Launch Base Zone of Sonic 3, there are alarms that send robotic birds to attack you when triggered. Standing in one to continuously trigger it and holding down for a Spin Dash results in this. The birds will try to divebomb you, and break, with the amount of points you get for breaking each one increasing until you get 10,000 points for each. You get an extra life every 50,000 points, resulting in another life every 10 seconds or so. Getting a Time Over removes one life and puts you at the starting point, right next to an alarm, so this can be done until you get bored or the game glitches out. Only the first 99 are saved when the game is turned off or completed, though, and it stops working once your score maxes out. - Final Rush in Sonic Adventure 2, for instance, has three easy 1up opportunities in the first quarter of the stage. - The key difference, though, is that extra lives don't respawn in Sonic Adventure 2, or at least not in the Gamecube port. Choosing "restart" from the pause menu will make them respawn (again in any version), at the cost of undoing any checkpoints you may have hit. Since the lives are close to start, that's not likely to matter in this case. - A Good Bad Bug was discovered in another level that dwarfs any other source of 1-ups in the game, potentially earning as many as 95 lives quickly. - Sonic Adventure also has this trope, this time in a Hub Level rather than an actual stage. It only works as Knuckles or Tails, but it is broken as all hell. Basically, you need to get a magnetic shield (by either digging as Knuckles, or cutting down grass as Tails), then stand on the switch in the hotel lobby. The switch will cause rings to appear, and can do so infinitely; the shield will pull those rings towards you, collecting them automatically. It may not be quick, but it is safe, and these rings carry over into the next level with the switch. If you are careful, you can get dozens of lives and thousands of rings via one use of this (rings are useful for Chao raising). - Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1 has Casino Street Zone Act 2 where one ups are very frequent. - Sonic Unleashed provided two extra lives at the start of Apotos, Windmill Isle (Day) - Act 2. Combine that with the extra life you can get by collecting 100 rings (Which can be amassed not even 1 minute into the stage), grabbing these three and restarting will have you at a comfortable amount of lives in no time. - You can also go into the hub worlds (the ones that house the actual levels), which always have some lives just laying around and a ton of rings. Enter, collect everything, leave, repeat. - Finishing the credits on Sonic Colors can grant about a half-dozen lives each time. Of course, the credits are rather long, and you'd have to have already beaten the game, but the lives are there. The same game gives anywhere from one to four lives just by finishing a stage, so getting lives isn't that hard. - The Yoshi's Island DLC stage in the Wii U version of Sonic Lost World is a relatively easy stage and if you manage to collect every Yoshi Egg in the level and complete it can give you upwards of 30 lives each time. The Yoshi level locks for a little while after each completion of it, but there's also Windy Hill Act 1, which has an area after a checkpoint with many extra lives that only require some moderately precise jumping to get every time; then you can leap off the stage and repeat the process. Both of these farming opportunities are useful as the game is surprisingly stingy with extra lives generally. - In Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, the first level hub has 1ups that reappear every time you enter it. You can keep exiting and reentering the stage to collect them ad infinitum. - Ninja Gaiden II has a 1-Up in a later stage that respawns, but only if you immediately climb back down to where you were before you entered the area with the 1-Up, then climbed back up; moving past it and climbing up to the next screen negates this. - The first Ninja Gaiden has one in 5-3, with the same rule. The PC-Engine port of the game, however, removes it. The Super NES port does not. - In Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, in the second hub (ice theme), the player can jump on a polar bear in front of one of the level warps in order to make it cry. Doing so ''repeatedly'' will give you several lives. - In the same game, the \|\|secret area in Level 15, right after the checkpoint, has two one-up crates that don't turn into question mark crates after they respawn - they're just out of sight unless the camera is just right\|\|. - In the second level that features bees, when being chased by swarms, sliding into them and spinning at the right moment will give you a 1-up. This can be done as many times as you like, since the bees respawn infinitely. It's a little tricky to pull off, but rewards greatly when you do. - While not a trick, Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex has "Bamboozled", which can only be described as a "life level" akin to Jungle Hijinx in the sheer number of extra lives that either come in boxes are can be attained from the hundreds of pieces of fruit in the stage. You can easily get over a dozen lives in each playthrough. - In Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped, the wumpa fruit in \|\|the secret level Eggipus Rex don't disappear like they usually do in Time Trail mode. As you don't lose lives in this mode, you can farm the wumpa fruit for more lives\|\|. - Mega Man 9 has the Mystery Tank, a sort of mega E-Tank that refills your life and all of your special weapons. However, if you use it when all of your health and weapons are full, the tank instead turns all enemies on the screen when you exit out of the weapon selection screen into 1-Ups. You can only carry one at a time, but they're sold in the store, and if used in Galaxy Man's stage (where there are several blob enemies that split into smaller blobs when you attack them), you can refill your entire cache of extra lives in one sitting. - This trick originated from Mega Man 5, where Mega Tanks worked the same way when you used one with full life and weapon energy. - Not to mention Jewel Satellite + mook makers for endless screws. - In Mega Man 2, you can use the egg-dropping robots' little birds to get a lot of random powerups quite easily (best when done with Metal Blade, but the Leaf Shield also works). Since among those powerups are large weapon energy ones, large hp ones and extra lives, you can just try and kill all the small birds just after the egg breaks and expect to get plenty of lives easily. - The screws from Metal Man's stage respawn indefinitely and never directly on your position, making them a safer, slower alternative. - Mega Man 8 also has an easy way to rack up a comfortable number of lives through Clown Man's stage. At the start, kick a Mega Ball into the clown-head's mouth, and out pops a life. Although time consuming, as well as only being possible after clearing Clown Man's stage, one can get the extra life, leave, and come back. Rinse and repeat as needed. - Armored Armadillo's stage in Mega Man X has a Shout-Out to the bat enemies from Mega Man 2 among the normal bat enemies. It frequently drops an extra life when killed, and respawns when offscreen. This is probably put in so players seeking the hidden hadoken move in that level can easily gather enough lives to get it. note : The capsule that has the move appears on the fifth time you get to the location of said capsule, and its far easier to kill yourself and spawn close to it as opposed to restarting the stage, but it can be gotten without dying. - A second, slightly conditional point in the game for this comes just before the boss of the first Sigma stage. There's a small hallway with a place where enemies drop on you from above. As long as you've got at least enough juice to charge a full-power shot of the Rolling Shield (full power generates a forcefield around you), you can stand under that point and anything that spawns will be instantly killed. It's time consuming (most enemies don't drop anything), but if you leave for a couple an hour or so you're pretty much guaranteed to have all weapon energy, full life bar, full subtanks (rechargable spare life bars) and max extra lives when you return. - An even better spot for the above trick is the vertical shaft in the final (4th) Sigma stage, as the caterpillars always spawn from the same point, can't move quickly enough to avoid you, and in my experience have a much better chance of dropping lives than normal enemies. - Commander Keen 2 gave you lives at every 20,000 points (or so). One of the levels also had a section where you could kill about 80,000 points or so worth of enemies in a single go. And when you die, the level resets, complete with new enemies. Kill, suicide, kill, suicide, repeat. At least one level in 3 allows for the same abuse. - Both Commander Keen 4 and 5 have a large amount of 1-ups hidden in the first level. They are, however, placed so that you can't kill yourself after obtaining them. Both games however do have a level with two 1-ups and a way to kill yourself after obtaining them. - In Commander Keen 6, the Bean-with-Bacon Megarocket level looks innocuous, but leads to a hidden area containing 10,000 points and 2 vivas (the "collect 100 for 1-up" item). While it is difficult to reach the items, and they are not worth enough on their own for a 1-up, you can complete the level and come back infinitely many times. - The early Donkey Kong clone for CP/M computers, LADDER, gave you extra lives every 10,000 points. On the second level, it was possible to quickly get to the respawn chute for Der Rocks, jump on top of it, and simply hold down the space bar. Each time a Der Rock came out of the chute while you were in mid-air, you got points for jumping over it. Continue until time runs out and your Lad dies, then repeat. This early in the game, the timer clock was long enough that you were pretty much guaranteed at least 10,000 points each time you ran down the clock in this manner, so you could slowly build up as many lives and points as you wanted. Then, once you got bored with holding down the space bar, you could finish the level and head into the rest of the game with a ridiculous number of lives to play with. - Kirby's Dreamland 2 has a rather ridiculous example: the game has points, and your points are saved in your save file. Thus, if you play long enough, you'll eventually reach the maximum score of 9999990 points. When you've reached this number, everything in the game that gives any number of points will give you a 1-Up. Also, thankfully, the game doesn't play the 1-Up jingle if your lives are already maxed out. - Super Monkey Ball has an odd variant: Advanced 11 and Expert 9 each have more than 100 bananas, making it possible to collect an extra life and some spare change towards another one, intentionally fall into the abyss, and repeat indefinitely if you're skilled enough. However, the vast majority of these bananas are on little rails, with a width equal to 1/10th the diameter of the ball. To compound the difficulty, to get more than 100 bananas requires you to switch between rails, which in turn requires you to nearly fall while rolling at top speed in order to smash into the edge of a platform or a piece of the scenery and bounce back up onto your destination. All with a time limit of 30 seconds. Only a couple of the world's best players can pull this off with any kind of consistency. See the strategies here: Advanced 11 and Expert 9, only you're supposed to intentionally fall off at the end instead of going into the goal, in order to redo the level. - Possible Ur-Example: the "lurking" tactic in Asteroids. When you have destroyed most of the asteroids in a screen, the game starts spawning small saucers to try to hurry you up. They are small (obviously), deadly accurate, but their photon pulses can't pass across the screen wraparound (unlike those of the big saucer and your ship) and they always spawn from the top corners of the screen. So you can clear the screen of all but one asteroid, park your ship at the top of the screen close to a corner, fire a continuous, horizontal stream of photons across the wraparound, and blast the small saucers as they appear and before they manage to fire a shot. Each small saucer is worth 1,000 points. You get a new life every 10,000 points. If you ever found an Asteroids game left abandoned with a big score and a two-figure life counter being steadily eaten away, this was probably why. - Although not a game with One-Ups, Final Fantasy XII was made for this: With the Gambit system, you can set up your characters to act on their own so you aren't spending all your time micro-managing the action. What this means is if you find a monster that can spawn other monsters, you can effectively make use of the system to only target its weaker underlings. One of the better known areas is with the Ghasts made by Negalmuur in the Stilshrine of Miriam: Negalmuur can do virtually no HP damage and relies on countdown-to-death attacks, and the Ghasts are no challenge. Set up the gambits to cure the Doomed party leader and revive allies as soon as they're down and you can effectively leave the PS2 on and effortlessly grind to level 99 and get the full array of License Points and some nice loot. - The Thunder Force series of shmups tends to have lenient extend points; in Thunder Force III, for instance, you can have as many as 15 lives by the time you get to Stage 6. - The Arrange Mode in RayCrisis hands out 1-up items, as if they're regular powerup items. With some effort, it's possible to stay at the maximum of nine lives up to the Final Boss. However, if you're playing for score, this is somewhat of a bad idea, because collecting 1-ups resets the point values of the point items. - Robotron 64 has a low score requirement for extra lives, there are bonus round where you can't get killed and some levels have ton of them as items. It's very possible to have more than 90 of them by the 100th level while having died a few times. - One level in M.C. Kids, a Super Mario Bros. 2 clone/McDonalds product placement game, allows this. There's a pit where you can see two 1-ups. However, below that is a bottomless pit, so the idea was that a player would pick up one, then fall to his death, making it ineffective. On the contrary, due to some weird physics in the game, you can pick up one, then quickly float over to the adjacent 1-up. Pick it up, die once and repeat. It doesn't help that this is at the very beginning of the level. - There's a worse example than that - very early on in the game, there's a ~~bottomless pit~~ topless ceiling where you can sacrifice one life to get about seven. - An obscure game called Tri-Heli (for the Atari ST) allows this. To complete a level, you have to collect two diamonds. Each level, the points value of diamonds increases by an increasing amount, while the score needed to get an extra life either goes up by a fixed amount with each extra life earned, or stays constant (it's been a while). You can also spend a life to skip a level, and, while the difficulty tends to increase gradually over the levels, there's a short-term five-level cycle with the first level in each cycle being relatively easy, and the last being relatively hard/actively impossible. If you get far enough through the game, collecting one or both diamonds on the first level of a cycle gains you enough lives to skip the remaining four levels... - At the Butane Pain stage from Pac-Man World 2, there is a hidden place with 8 lives, which respawn when Pac-Man dies. It's not even an Easter Egg, as you do need to go there to collect one of the level's tokens. - In the SNES game Super Star Wars, there is a level called Land of the Sandpeople, where at one point you can drop down into a canyon holding down left while falling takes you to a secret area where you can get 7 lives. Then you have no choice but to jump down and die, but it still means 6 extra lives. Then when you restart the level, just repeat this process to gain 6 more lives. And another six after that up until 99 lives. - Super Empire Strikes Back had a Leap of Faith cave containing five extra lives in an early level. The catch was that once you collected them, you had to jump in a Bottomless Pit and die. You respawned a bit earlier in the level, meaning you could do the Leap of Faith again, ad nauseam. - Revenge of Shinobi (the original Genesis version, not the GBA one) has an unusual example: at the beginning of the factory level, there's a hidden 1-Up item on the left side of the first conveyor belt immediately to the right of the starting point. It's virtually impossible to get this without falling into the adjacent pit and dying. The trick is that this item actually gives you two lives, and respawns when you die. - The ZX Spectrum graphic adventure game My Name is Uncle Groucho, You Win a Fat Cigar had a casino in the main town which offered a "Lucky Seven" game with a positive expectation (bets on throwing the number 7 with two dice paid off at odds of 9 to 1, the mathematically fair odds being 5 to 1), so if one was careful to avoid the "gambler's ruin", one could rack up endless amounts of money. - Not an infinite 1-up, but in the SNES game Soulblazer, it is possible to gain infinite XP, 1 experience point at a time, by repeatedly talking to a spirit in one of the gemstones. Though by the time you reach this in the game, there are far easier and quicker ways to rack up literally millions of XP points in minutes, so it's mostly a Bragging Rights Reward for those who find this little gem... - Terminator for the NES gave lives for reaching point milestones, and it also had infinitely respawning enemies. Move next to an enemy respawn point, put something heavy on the fire button, walk away from the game, and come back to see your lives count reach the Cap of... six. - Legend of the Mystical Ninja features a maze available between beating the first boss and getting on the cruise ship. The (quite simple) maze has an extra life every time you enter it and the level timer stops while you're in it, making it easy to rack up lives by entering and exiting repeatedly. While it costs 100 ryous to enter (a fairly hefty sum at this point), the maze also has 100 ryous in a treasure chest, completely negating the one potential downside. - Touhou Kishinjou ~ Double Dealing Character, collecting 60 or more items at once spawns a life fragment. Collect 3 life fragments and you earn an extra life. Meanwhile MarisaB's bomb turns cancelled enemy bullets into power items. If you play your cards right, you can spawn and collect 2 batches of 60+ power items with a single bomb. Note that you get 3 bombs per life. However, this doesn't create a truly infinite loop since enemies fly off if you don't defeat them in time, and bosses have time limits. Plus you can only carry up to 8 extra lives at a time. - Reaching the highest rank in Police 911 is no easy feat, as deaths and shooting civilians will demote you. But if you can pull it off, you'll get a 100-life bonus as a reward. However it is not a guaranteed win, because you can still get a Game Over by running out of time. - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is the only game in the series to use a life system. It's also much more difficult to get 1-ups in this game than it is in most other games in this example, but due to the way the game's experience system works, each level up after you have maxed out all your stats leads to a 1-up. There are also parts of the game that allow for infinite experience farming. The easiest of these is in level 5, which contains a room where an infinite number of Moas can spawn (ghosts that give 50 exp each). The process is much slower than in most other games in this list, but it's possible to farm one life every minute or so. Because the game is Nintendo Hard, you'll probably need every single one of them. There's a video that demonstrates the process and explains more details about the technique here (poor video quality, but much better description than most other videos available). - In The Adventures of Lomax, there are a few levels where there is more than one 1-Up available, enabling you to get all of them, kill yourself, and repeat as many times as you want. - In Kid Kool, getting to the top of a spring pole in stage 1-3 (not a difficult trick) allows you to collect ten 1-ups on a single life. - In Conker's Bad Fur Day, on the farm, there is a hidden squirrel tail that gives nine lives instead of the usual one. When you die, squirrel tails respawn, so you can keep collecting the hidden tail again and again. - In Hack 'N' Slash, there is an event in which an NPC gives you 10 additional hearts added onto your maximum health. However, not long after, it is possible to reset the flag that says it occurred, enabling you to repeat the event again and again. The interesting part? Said flag being reset is not a glitch. In fact, this is the function of an item given specifically for this purpose. It even goes so far as to specifically say the name of the variable that's being reset. Of course, if you've played this game much past that part, that seems like nothing. - At this point in the game, it becomes obvious that Meaningless Lives is an intentional design choice. - Super Bomberman 5 has 2 kind of enemies (A camera with legs at world 5 and a cute plushie with a hammer at world 4) which can turn your bombs into powerups, such as lifevests and remote bombs, and also may yield extra lives, turning them into living armories. - Bonus Levels in Bug! involve collecting medals (every 10 or so collected gives you a life). One of them in the second-to-last world stands out — Bug starts out on a platform above the "arena", the entire floor of which is filled with springs (that only work on Bug) while huge snowballs are dropped into and bounce all over the arena. Every time a snowball hits the ground, it spawns a medal, and the number of snowballs increases over time. Unlike several other bonus zones there's no time limit and no limit to the amount of medals that Bug can collect until he get hit and booted out, meaning that if you let Bug stay on the platform above until the ground is littered with medals then quickly venture down to grab an area of medals, he may be able to get several lives which you'll need. - This is how contestant Michael Larson was able to go on his infamous $110,237 run on Press Your Luck. At the time, there were two spaces on the board that guaranteed an extra spin. Utilizing his knowledge of the board patterns, Larson was able to time his spins so that he always landed on one of these two spaces, ensuring he had a virtually endless supply of spins with which to rack up insane amounts of cash.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneUpFarming
Infinite 1-Ups - TV Tropes Repeat until bored and/or out of time. 1-Ups are a good thing in many games; with a limited number of Video-Game Lives, you'll need some extras just in case if you want to get through the game in one sitting. Some game designers, however, don't know when to quit giving you opportunities to earn them, and create an Infinite 1-Ups, an incredibly easy (if sometimes tricky) way of gaining an infinite amount of life which makes the game far easier than it should be. Typically, this'll be some sort of Guide Dang It! infinite loop combo that would rack up extra lives like crazy, but Infinite 1-Ups can be used to describe any instance where you're able to gather an insane number of extra lives, through gimmicks or no. This trope can cause the game to have Meaningless Lives. On the other hand, a really Nintendo Hard game can eat through even the lives gained by this, since the life counter is going to reach a Cap sooner or later. See also Bragging Rights Reward, which Infinite 1-Ups is if performing it is harder than surviving anything in the game. This can happen either by design (an Easter Egg or a reward for pulling off some challenge the game designer thought would be incredibly difficult), or by accident due to a Good Bad Bug. ## Examples: - Super Mario Bros.: - Super Mario Bros.: There's the infamous "Koopa Shell Bounce" (where you corner a Koopa Troopa Shell on a stair and continuously jump on it, keeping it stuck there while you rack up points and lives until you jump off and land on the ground; since each enemy you Goomba Stomp without touching the ground gets you more points and eventually 1-ups, get the shell at just the right spot for you to endlessly bounce off of it and you're immortal! The Lost Levels lets you do this at the very beginning of the game!) note : and you'll need every last one, the "Koopa Shell Ricochet" (where you'll keep on earning lives from enemies a kicked Koopa Shell kills, as long as it doesn't stop or go off the screen, exploited heavily in areas where you can trap a shell in one screen between two blocks while Lakitu or another Mook Maker can keep feeding foes to the grinder), the "Starman Rush"/"Demolition Mario" (essentially the same as the Koopa Shell Ricochet, except you use the power of a Starman instead of a shell to kill enemies), the "Goomba Stomp Chain" (the Koopa Shell Bounce done on multiple enemies and usually with the assistance of Video Game Flight, again only stopping when you touch solid ground), and the "End Point Exploit" (only applicable in Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World, where touching the goal while enemies are on the screen turns them into point-heavy coins). In the case of Super Mario Bros. and The Lost Levels, though, you have to be very careful about how you use your Infinite 1-Ups, because the game features an unintentional form of No Fair Cheating where getting more than 128 lives at once makes the life counter overflow into negatives, giving you an instant Game Over as soon as you die (or even clear the level!) - Super Mario Bros. 2: The Game Boy Advance version changes the Turtle Shell behavior to be more like the classic Koopa Troopa shell. Where once it would disappear when it hit an obstacle, it will now bounce back (and will damage the player), and has the "each enemy hit by it gives more points until a certain point, after which each one gives you an extra life" mechanic. This creates a few "Mook Maker equals 1-up factory" opportunities. - Super Mario Bros. 3: - It starts pretty early. With the Raccoon Tail letting you glide slowly to the ground, a pipe in the second course that endlessly spawns Goombas lets you rack up 1-ups until the clock runs out. - A level allows you to turn all bricks into coins. Mario can gain about five extra lives before the clock runs out; repeating this level over and over can give you 100 lives in about an hour. - There are several levels where enemies spawn infinitely and with just a little planning, you can queue up a bunch of free lives. World 3, Level 5 has a Lakitu that throws out Spinies, while several of the auto-scroll levels in World 8 have a number of cannons placed close to each other such that with a little practice, you can build up your score multiplier by jumping on cannonballs until the point bonuses turn into 1-Ups. - The Koopa Shell Bounce exploit is even shown in the 9-Volt/18-Volt character video in WarioWare: Smooth Moves, accompanied by three giant "1-UP"s. - Super Mario World: - The game has hidden 3-Up moons, as well as two different hidden areas that you can use to acquire up to 9 lives. Also, there are fences in many of the castle and fortress stages that contain Koopas, and as long as you don't touch the ground, you can rack up plenty of lives simply by knocking them off. There's one castle that's almost entirely Koopa Troopas on fences, pretty much serving as a 1-up factory you'll want to make use of because the difficulty is about to go up a notch. - In the Sunken Ghost Ship, wait for a Bullet Bill, bop it and keep it afloat. Lather, rinse, repeat. - In the water fortress level, there are Bony Beetle enemies can re-form after a certain amount of time like a Dry Bones. There is a hallway before a door with two of them where you can farm 1-ups by bouncing off them both, swimming to stay off the ground, then bouncing off of them again when they reform. Once again, Lather rinse repeat. - The mid-game hidden stage "Vanilla Secret 2" allows you to run through a section with a lot of critters after using a silver P-Switch (which basically is the equivalent of the Starman Run, except the bonus goes up to 3-Ups.) Ending the sequence with at least 40 lives added is well known. Also, Mario can respawn said silver P-Switch by eating it with a Yoshi as it is crushed, allowing expert players to get pretty much every single enemy in one go, which is hundreds upon hundreds of lives. - The "Top Secret Area", above the Donut Ghost House has nothing but five question blocks with two fire flowers, two capes and one Yoshi, which if you have Yoshi, is an extra life. You can simply leave and come back, as many times as you want! - The Donut Ghost House itself has four 1-Ups in the secret passage that unlocks the Top Secret Area. All you need is a cape, and going there takes less than a minute. - In Forest of Illusion 1, there is a set of platforms containing four Wigglers and three Koopas contained in blocks. By using Caped Mario and floating back and forth, bouncing off the Wigglers and Koopas, you can continually bounce between them for as long as you want (the Koopas and Wigglers reset their states offscreen). When you do it for long enough, the 3-ups you receive turn into incomprehensible symbols that give you Metric Butt-tons of points and coins. Yeah, that last bit is a glitch. The bug was fixed in the Advance version, but you can still gain a jillion lives there the normal way. - As for the normal way: There's a powerup box that cycles between several different items, including the Invincibility Star. Pick up the Starman, and then simply charge through the level running into every enemy you find (and there are a lot) to get a minimum of about 20 1-Ups. It gets better after you first complete it: this game lets you repeat any level, and also exit a level by pressing Start and Select with no penalty for doing so. And did we mention said box is right after the midway checkpoint? You can get the star, rack up the 1-ups, exit, re-enter to just before this sequence, and do it over and over and over. - The most damning game breaker in nearly all the "Advance" games is the fact that the game saves your lives. Average players will likely max the counter out by mid-game. And the max is 999. - Also, the GBA version of Super Mario World grants points for simply hitting a Koopa shell with Mario's cape, and these hits can be used in chains, allowing this to happen. Wow. - The 1995 NES bootleg version gives you a 1-up for leaving Yoshi's house and you can enter the level as many times as you feel like. The game is Nintendo hard due to its poorly-cloned control scheme so you'll be visiting Yoshi's house often. - In New Super Mario Bros., the old stair-shell trick still works. - Also Green Mushroom Houses may give very big number of lives in New Super Mario Bros if you're lucky (getting these isn't hard...) - And getting the Mega Mushroom in 1-1 guarantees at least one (and quite easily, all five) lives in each play-through. - Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island makes it even easier, due to lacking a time limit, the fact that carrying a shell or Melon Bug doesn't reset the 1-Up counter, and many pipes that constantly spawn Shy Guys providing you don't have a full complement of eggs. The earliest example is found in level 1-7: Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy, where Yoshi can use a Melon Bug and a pipe spawning Shy Guys. - Super Mario Galaxy practically lampshades this trope by having Peach mail you five 1-Ups every time you start the game, \|\|or 20 in the New Game Plus,\|\| as well as feeding you tons of the green mushrooms in every level which respawn when you die (and in the Hub World). - Super Mario Galaxy 2 goes back to tradition by allowing you to farm Koopas for 1-Ups. Go to Supermassive Galaxy, and head for the planetoid with the three giant Koopas. Jump onto the shell of one of them, and judge the control stick so you keep stomping on it. You'll hit 99 lives in less than a minute. - Made easier if you use Co-star mode to immobilize the Koopa you're jumping on with the second control. - This tool-assisted speedrun of Super Mario Bros. 3 turns certain entire levels into Infinite 1-Ups. - In the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 (Lost Levels), you get a 1-Up if your coins are at a multiple of 11 that matches the last digit of your timer (e.g. 11 coins with 201 left on the timer). It's possible to do this in nearly every level of the game. - Amusingly, Super Paper Mario actually punishes you for doing this in an area early in the game where the Koopa Shell Bounce staircase is replicated. Stomping the shell enough will cause you to lose points after a while. - New Super Mario Bros. Wii has "Infinite 1-Up" videos that can be purchased at the castle that will show you all kinds of tricks to get infinite lives. One method is to have one character start Goomba Stomping enemies, and then have another player use Yoshi to swallow him until you find some more enemies. Being swallowed by Yoshi does not count as touching the ground. - An interesting instance can be found in between 6-6 and the World 6 Castle. Touching one of the Bullet Bills on the map sends you into a minigame where you have to collect eight Toad balloons to save Toad, and at the end, you get three Mushroom power-ups. Unlike most such minigames, this one can be done over and over. Furthermore, any enemies onscreen when the 8th balloon is collected are turned into points. And since the theme of the level is Bullet Bills...that could easily be enough enemies to get 1-3 extra lives as well. And since each completion gets you three Mushroom power-ups, you should easily enter the level with an extra hit to give every time. - Because of New Super Mario Bros. 2's emphasis on gaining coins, the entire game can turn into this, but by far the biggest example is World 2-4. There's an easily obtainable Gold Flower at the beginning of the level which, among other things, grants you coins instead of points for killing enemies. Later on there's an area that infinitely spawns Goombas. Jumping on them consecutively starts awarding a 1-up for every other enemy you kill (since the counter tops out at 50 coins per enemy killed). Since a skilled player can rack up around 9000 coins in a single playthrough of this level using this method, and 100 coins still nets you an extra life, you can do the math from here. - New Super Luigi U has "Larry's Trigger-Happy Castle", in which it is very easy to grind lives by jumping to Bullet Bills. - Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins has the Hippo level, which lets you easily get coins, lives, a mushroom or any powerup of your choice. The unnamed auto-scrolling extra stage, opposite the path to the Hippo, allows you to get a couple of 1-ups via the Starman rush. Also, there is a Betting Mini-Game which randomly gives you up to 99 lives. - Super Mario 64 DS: In Whomp's Fortress, on any star except the first, if you acquire the Super Mushroom from the box near the first Thwomp and manage to get to the topmost portion of the fortress, you can knock the enormous plank-platform over so it lays flat on the ground. Proceed to run into the side, and after a moment the thing will start giving 1-Ups at an alarming rate. Because it is extremely difficult to get atop the fortress in your giant state, the usual number you'll end up with is probably in the 40s or 50s, but if you're really good you can quite efficiently max out the life counter at 99, with 1-Ups to spare. - Super Mario 3D Land has a spot in World 1-2 with the old "bounce a Koopa shell into the wall" trick, but with a twist; you're bouncing the shell into the fourth wall. There are several other levels with Koopas and walls in the proper placement to do this trick, but World 1-2 is the easiest and the earliest; it's amusing to render lives entirely pointless not even two levels into the game. - Also, when fighting Pom Pom, when she goes in her shell and hops around the room trying to stomp Mario, you can jump on her shell and bounce off repeatedly, gaining dozens of 1-ups in the process... - Super Mario 3D World has the fastest way to earn extra lives in the series. You still need to bounce repeatedly on a Koopa shell, and you can do it in several levels, but World 1-2 has a particular spot where you can earn 1-ups so fast with this technique that you'll be able to earn Crown-Crown-Crown (1,110) lives and still have more than enough time to finish the level like normal, with the stars and stamps. - With its many Game Maker tools, Super Mario Maker and its sequel allows this in multiple ways (even to the point of having canons straight-up shooting 1-Up Mushrooms!). Unfortunately, they really don't matter in this game, except in 100-Mario Challenges but you can never know what kind of level you will get. Your fate lays in the hands of the makers! However, both games only let you take three lives with you once you complete the level. - In the Natraps X series, the first Death Montage shows Spelunker using the Koopa Shell Bounce trick before killing Rockman. The second has Rockman, reduced to one life, getting his revenge and some of his lives back by bouncing on Spelunker in the same way. - Fable has the Resurrection Phials, potions that revive you should you lose all your health. While there's no special task to getting them (and you can only carry nine Phials at a time), they are incredibly plentiful and fairly cheap to buy from stores and traveling merchants, effectively making you immortal as long as you have the cash to keep buying them (which is no problem, either). - Donkey Kong Country has balloons. Red balloons give one extra life, green ones give two and blue ones give three. Collecting three identical animal tokens opens a special area where the player can get even more extra lives. A lot of lives; every 100 mini-tokens you gather in the special areas net you an extra life, and there's a mega-token there that, if collected, doubles the total amount of mini-tokens collected. - Donkey Kong Country - The first level, "Jungle Hijinxs", is short and extremely easy and contains tons of life balloons (in addition to the lives you get from bananas and animal tokens). It can be played as many times as you want before moving on to the rest of the game. - The rope trick consists of getting on a rope in the stage "Misty Mines" and placing yourself next to the barrels that spawn enemies. From there you can jump on an enemy and then back to the vine without touching the ground. After doing it eight times, each consecutive time. - The Krusha trick can be done in "Loopy Lights," "Manic Mincers," or "Millstone Mayhem" (the first ruins stage); play as Diddy Kong and bounce on a Krusha pinned up against the wall as many times as you want to get a ginormous amount of lives insanely quickly - as in, you will earn extra lives roughly three times faster than the life counter can display. You can easily reach 99 (and far beyond, though the life counter doesn't show it) in under 60 seconds. - One of the recurring minigames tasked you with repeatedly stomping a Klaptrap (who spat out more bananas and moved faster after each hit). In one level this minigame featured three such Klaptraps, enabling the player to bounce between them continuously, accumulating many extra lives in the process. - Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest - DKC2 has Swanky's games, which give you 6 extra lives if you answer all the (pretty easy) questions correctly. Although it's not infinite, it's a huge boost. - This game also gives you the ability to easily exit levels you have beaten before. The first level has a balloon one screen from the starting position, so once you've beaten it you can easily enter, get balloon, then exit in about 20 seconds. You can then just repeat until you get bored. - And there's also "Barrel Bayou", where a little ways past halfway are two Kloaks (enemies who throw various things) that keep throwing easily defeated enemies for a while, and then throw a chest with a green balloon worth 2 lives before leaving. Given that enemies respawn if they are avoided but not killed, you can pass the Kloaks and them come back to them to repeat the process as much as you like. - Donkey Kong Country Returns introduces a new gameplay mechanic: similarly to Mario, jumping on several enemies consecutively eventually gives you 1-Ups. This becomes handy in "8-K: Five Monkey Trial". One of the trials consist of jumping on Squidlies in order to reach the top of the area, but the pattern of their arrival is fixed, and one knowing it could do a Leap of Faith from one of the upper Squidlies with the help of Diddy's barrels and landing on one of the bottom Squidlies and repeat the process. - In various Sonic The Hedgehog games, some levels have more than one 1up monitor, which reset if you die. You can collect two extra lives, kill yourself, and repeat for as long as you want. - And of course you get a 1-up for collecting 100 rings, so you can double the rate of life grinding if you delay your suicide until you've found both monitors and collected 100 rings. - In the Launch Base Zone of Sonic 3, there are alarms that send robotic birds to attack you when triggered. Standing in one to continuously trigger it and holding down for a Spin Dash results in this. The birds will try to divebomb you, and break, with the amount of points you get for breaking each one increasing until you get 10,000 points for each. You get an extra life every 50,000 points, resulting in another life every 10 seconds or so. Getting a Time Over removes one life and puts you at the starting point, right next to an alarm, so this can be done until you get bored or the game glitches out. Only the first 99 are saved when the game is turned off or completed, though, and it stops working once your score maxes out. - Final Rush in Sonic Adventure 2, for instance, has three easy 1up opportunities in the first quarter of the stage. - The key difference, though, is that extra lives don't respawn in Sonic Adventure 2, or at least not in the Gamecube port. Choosing "restart" from the pause menu will make them respawn (again in any version), at the cost of undoing any checkpoints you may have hit. Since the lives are close to start, that's not likely to matter in this case. - A Good Bad Bug was discovered in another level that dwarfs any other source of 1-ups in the game, potentially earning as many as 95 lives quickly. - Sonic Adventure also has this trope, this time in a Hub Level rather than an actual stage. It only works as Knuckles or Tails, but it is broken as all hell. Basically, you need to get a magnetic shield (by either digging as Knuckles, or cutting down grass as Tails), then stand on the switch in the hotel lobby. The switch will cause rings to appear, and can do so infinitely; the shield will pull those rings towards you, collecting them automatically. It may not be quick, but it is safe, and these rings carry over into the next level with the switch. If you are careful, you can get dozens of lives and thousands of rings via one use of this (rings are useful for Chao raising). - Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1 has Casino Street Zone Act 2 where one ups are very frequent. - Sonic Unleashed provided two extra lives at the start of Apotos, Windmill Isle (Day) - Act 2. Combine that with the extra life you can get by collecting 100 rings (Which can be amassed not even 1 minute into the stage), grabbing these three and restarting will have you at a comfortable amount of lives in no time. - You can also go into the hub worlds (the ones that house the actual levels), which always have some lives just laying around and a ton of rings. Enter, collect everything, leave, repeat. - Finishing the credits on Sonic Colors can grant about a half-dozen lives each time. Of course, the credits are rather long, and you'd have to have already beaten the game, but the lives are there. The same game gives anywhere from one to four lives just by finishing a stage, so getting lives isn't that hard. - The Yoshi's Island DLC stage in the Wii U version of Sonic Lost World is a relatively easy stage and if you manage to collect every Yoshi Egg in the level and complete it can give you upwards of 30 lives each time. The Yoshi level locks for a little while after each completion of it, but there's also Windy Hill Act 1, which has an area after a checkpoint with many extra lives that only require some moderately precise jumping to get every time; then you can leap off the stage and repeat the process. Both of these farming opportunities are useful as the game is surprisingly stingy with extra lives generally. - In Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, the first level hub has 1ups that reappear every time you enter it. You can keep exiting and reentering the stage to collect them ad infinitum. - Ninja Gaiden II has a 1-Up in a later stage that respawns, but only if you immediately climb back down to where you were before you entered the area with the 1-Up, then climbed back up; moving past it and climbing up to the next screen negates this. - The first Ninja Gaiden has one in 5-3, with the same rule. The PC-Engine port of the game, however, removes it. The Super NES port does not. - In Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, in the second hub (ice theme), the player can jump on a polar bear in front of one of the level warps in order to make it cry. Doing so ''repeatedly'' will give you several lives. - In the same game, the \|\|secret area in Level 15, right after the checkpoint, has two one-up crates that don't turn into question mark crates after they respawn - they're just out of sight unless the camera is just right\|\|. - In the second level that features bees, when being chased by swarms, sliding into them and spinning at the right moment will give you a 1-up. This can be done as many times as you like, since the bees respawn infinitely. It's a little tricky to pull off, but rewards greatly when you do. - While not a trick, Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex has "Bamboozled", which can only be described as a "life level" akin to Jungle Hijinx in the sheer number of extra lives that either come in boxes are can be attained from the hundreds of pieces of fruit in the stage. You can easily get over a dozen lives in each playthrough. - In Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped, the wumpa fruit in \|\|the secret level Eggipus Rex don't disappear like they usually do in Time Trail mode. As you don't lose lives in this mode, you can farm the wumpa fruit for more lives\|\|. - Mega Man 9 has the Mystery Tank, a sort of mega E-Tank that refills your life and all of your special weapons. However, if you use it when all of your health and weapons are full, the tank instead turns all enemies on the screen when you exit out of the weapon selection screen into 1-Ups. You can only carry one at a time, but they're sold in the store, and if used in Galaxy Man's stage (where there are several blob enemies that split into smaller blobs when you attack them), you can refill your entire cache of extra lives in one sitting. - This trick originated from Mega Man 5, where Mega Tanks worked the same way when you used one with full life and weapon energy. - Not to mention Jewel Satellite + mook makers for endless screws. - In Mega Man 2, you can use the egg-dropping robots' little birds to get a lot of random powerups quite easily (best when done with Metal Blade, but the Leaf Shield also works). Since among those powerups are large weapon energy ones, large hp ones and extra lives, you can just try and kill all the small birds just after the egg breaks and expect to get plenty of lives easily. - The screws from Metal Man's stage respawn indefinitely and never directly on your position, making them a safer, slower alternative. - Mega Man 8 also has an easy way to rack up a comfortable number of lives through Clown Man's stage. At the start, kick a Mega Ball into the clown-head's mouth, and out pops a life. Although time consuming, as well as only being possible after clearing Clown Man's stage, one can get the extra life, leave, and come back. Rinse and repeat as needed. - Armored Armadillo's stage in Mega Man X has a Shout-Out to the bat enemies from Mega Man 2 among the normal bat enemies. It frequently drops an extra life when killed, and respawns when offscreen. This is probably put in so players seeking the hidden hadoken move in that level can easily gather enough lives to get it. note : The capsule that has the move appears on the fifth time you get to the location of said capsule, and its far easier to kill yourself and spawn close to it as opposed to restarting the stage, but it can be gotten without dying. - A second, slightly conditional point in the game for this comes just before the boss of the first Sigma stage. There's a small hallway with a place where enemies drop on you from above. As long as you've got at least enough juice to charge a full-power shot of the Rolling Shield (full power generates a forcefield around you), you can stand under that point and anything that spawns will be instantly killed. It's time consuming (most enemies don't drop anything), but if you leave for a couple an hour or so you're pretty much guaranteed to have all weapon energy, full life bar, full subtanks (rechargable spare life bars) and max extra lives when you return. - An even better spot for the above trick is the vertical shaft in the final (4th) Sigma stage, as the caterpillars always spawn from the same point, can't move quickly enough to avoid you, and in my experience have a much better chance of dropping lives than normal enemies. - Commander Keen 2 gave you lives at every 20,000 points (or so). One of the levels also had a section where you could kill about 80,000 points or so worth of enemies in a single go. And when you die, the level resets, complete with new enemies. Kill, suicide, kill, suicide, repeat. At least one level in 3 allows for the same abuse. - Both Commander Keen 4 and 5 have a large amount of 1-ups hidden in the first level. They are, however, placed so that you can't kill yourself after obtaining them. Both games however do have a level with two 1-ups and a way to kill yourself after obtaining them. - In Commander Keen 6, the Bean-with-Bacon Megarocket level looks innocuous, but leads to a hidden area containing 10,000 points and 2 vivas (the "collect 100 for 1-up" item). While it is difficult to reach the items, and they are not worth enough on their own for a 1-up, you can complete the level and come back infinitely many times. - The early Donkey Kong clone for CP/M computers, LADDER, gave you extra lives every 10,000 points. On the second level, it was possible to quickly get to the respawn chute for Der Rocks, jump on top of it, and simply hold down the space bar. Each time a Der Rock came out of the chute while you were in mid-air, you got points for jumping over it. Continue until time runs out and your Lad dies, then repeat. This early in the game, the timer clock was long enough that you were pretty much guaranteed at least 10,000 points each time you ran down the clock in this manner, so you could slowly build up as many lives and points as you wanted. Then, once you got bored with holding down the space bar, you could finish the level and head into the rest of the game with a ridiculous number of lives to play with. - Kirby's Dreamland 2 has a rather ridiculous example: the game has points, and your points are saved in your save file. Thus, if you play long enough, you'll eventually reach the maximum score of 9999990 points. When you've reached this number, everything in the game that gives any number of points will give you a 1-Up. Also, thankfully, the game doesn't play the 1-Up jingle if your lives are already maxed out. - Super Monkey Ball has an odd variant: Advanced 11 and Expert 9 each have more than 100 bananas, making it possible to collect an extra life and some spare change towards another one, intentionally fall into the abyss, and repeat indefinitely if you're skilled enough. However, the vast majority of these bananas are on little rails, with a width equal to 1/10th the diameter of the ball. To compound the difficulty, to get more than 100 bananas requires you to switch between rails, which in turn requires you to nearly fall while rolling at top speed in order to smash into the edge of a platform or a piece of the scenery and bounce back up onto your destination. All with a time limit of 30 seconds. Only a couple of the world's best players can pull this off with any kind of consistency. See the strategies here: Advanced 11 and Expert 9, only you're supposed to intentionally fall off at the end instead of going into the goal, in order to redo the level. - Possible Ur-Example: the "lurking" tactic in Asteroids. When you have destroyed most of the asteroids in a screen, the game starts spawning small saucers to try to hurry you up. They are small (obviously), deadly accurate, but their photon pulses can't pass across the screen wraparound (unlike those of the big saucer and your ship) and they always spawn from the top corners of the screen. So you can clear the screen of all but one asteroid, park your ship at the top of the screen close to a corner, fire a continuous, horizontal stream of photons across the wraparound, and blast the small saucers as they appear and before they manage to fire a shot. Each small saucer is worth 1,000 points. You get a new life every 10,000 points. If you ever found an Asteroids game left abandoned with a big score and a two-figure life counter being steadily eaten away, this was probably why. - Although not a game with One-Ups, Final Fantasy XII was made for this: With the Gambit system, you can set up your characters to act on their own so you aren't spending all your time micro-managing the action. What this means is if you find a monster that can spawn other monsters, you can effectively make use of the system to only target its weaker underlings. One of the better known areas is with the Ghasts made by Negalmuur in the Stilshrine of Miriam: Negalmuur can do virtually no HP damage and relies on countdown-to-death attacks, and the Ghasts are no challenge. Set up the gambits to cure the Doomed party leader and revive allies as soon as they're down and you can effectively leave the PS2 on and effortlessly grind to level 99 and get the full array of License Points and some nice loot. - The Thunder Force series of shmups tends to have lenient extend points; in Thunder Force III, for instance, you can have as many as 15 lives by the time you get to Stage 6. - The Arrange Mode in RayCrisis hands out 1-up items, as if they're regular powerup items. With some effort, it's possible to stay at the maximum of nine lives up to the Final Boss. However, if you're playing for score, this is somewhat of a bad idea, because collecting 1-ups resets the point values of the point items. - Robotron 64 has a low score requirement for extra lives, there are bonus round where you can't get killed and some levels have ton of them as items. It's very possible to have more than 90 of them by the 100th level while having died a few times. - One level in M.C. Kids, a Super Mario Bros. 2 clone/McDonalds product placement game, allows this. There's a pit where you can see two 1-ups. However, below that is a bottomless pit, so the idea was that a player would pick up one, then fall to his death, making it ineffective. On the contrary, due to some weird physics in the game, you can pick up one, then quickly float over to the adjacent 1-up. Pick it up, die once and repeat. It doesn't help that this is at the very beginning of the level. - There's a worse example than that - very early on in the game, there's a ~~bottomless pit~~ topless ceiling where you can sacrifice one life to get about seven. - An obscure game called Tri-Heli (for the Atari ST) allows this. To complete a level, you have to collect two diamonds. Each level, the points value of diamonds increases by an increasing amount, while the score needed to get an extra life either goes up by a fixed amount with each extra life earned, or stays constant (it's been a while). You can also spend a life to skip a level, and, while the difficulty tends to increase gradually over the levels, there's a short-term five-level cycle with the first level in each cycle being relatively easy, and the last being relatively hard/actively impossible. If you get far enough through the game, collecting one or both diamonds on the first level of a cycle gains you enough lives to skip the remaining four levels... - At the Butane Pain stage from Pac-Man World 2, there is a hidden place with 8 lives, which respawn when Pac-Man dies. It's not even an Easter Egg, as you do need to go there to collect one of the level's tokens. - In the SNES game Super Star Wars, there is a level called Land of the Sandpeople, where at one point you can drop down into a canyon holding down left while falling takes you to a secret area where you can get 7 lives. Then you have no choice but to jump down and die, but it still means 6 extra lives. Then when you restart the level, just repeat this process to gain 6 more lives. And another six after that up until 99 lives. - Super Empire Strikes Back had a Leap of Faith cave containing five extra lives in an early level. The catch was that once you collected them, you had to jump in a Bottomless Pit and die. You respawned a bit earlier in the level, meaning you could do the Leap of Faith again, ad nauseam. - Revenge of Shinobi (the original Genesis version, not the GBA one) has an unusual example: at the beginning of the factory level, there's a hidden 1-Up item on the left side of the first conveyor belt immediately to the right of the starting point. It's virtually impossible to get this without falling into the adjacent pit and dying. The trick is that this item actually gives you two lives, and respawns when you die. - The ZX Spectrum graphic adventure game My Name is Uncle Groucho, You Win a Fat Cigar had a casino in the main town which offered a "Lucky Seven" game with a positive expectation (bets on throwing the number 7 with two dice paid off at odds of 9 to 1, the mathematically fair odds being 5 to 1), so if one was careful to avoid the "gambler's ruin", one could rack up endless amounts of money. - Not an infinite 1-up, but in the SNES game Soulblazer, it is possible to gain infinite XP, 1 experience point at a time, by repeatedly talking to a spirit in one of the gemstones. Though by the time you reach this in the game, there are far easier and quicker ways to rack up literally millions of XP points in minutes, so it's mostly a Bragging Rights Reward for those who find this little gem... - Terminator for the NES gave lives for reaching point milestones, and it also had infinitely respawning enemies. Move next to an enemy respawn point, put something heavy on the fire button, walk away from the game, and come back to see your lives count reach the Cap of... six. - Legend of the Mystical Ninja features a maze available between beating the first boss and getting on the cruise ship. The (quite simple) maze has an extra life every time you enter it and the level timer stops while you're in it, making it easy to rack up lives by entering and exiting repeatedly. While it costs 100 ryous to enter (a fairly hefty sum at this point), the maze also has 100 ryous in a treasure chest, completely negating the one potential downside. - Touhou Kishinjou ~ Double Dealing Character, collecting 60 or more items at once spawns a life fragment. Collect 3 life fragments and you earn an extra life. Meanwhile MarisaB's bomb turns cancelled enemy bullets into power items. If you play your cards right, you can spawn and collect 2 batches of 60+ power items with a single bomb. Note that you get 3 bombs per life. However, this doesn't create a truly infinite loop since enemies fly off if you don't defeat them in time, and bosses have time limits. Plus you can only carry up to 8 extra lives at a time. - Reaching the highest rank in Police 911 is no easy feat, as deaths and shooting civilians will demote you. But if you can pull it off, you'll get a 100-life bonus as a reward. However it is not a guaranteed win, because you can still get a Game Over by running out of time. - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is the only game in the series to use a life system. It's also much more difficult to get 1-ups in this game than it is in most other games in this example, but due to the way the game's experience system works, each level up after you have maxed out all your stats leads to a 1-up. There are also parts of the game that allow for infinite experience farming. The easiest of these is in level 5, which contains a room where an infinite number of Moas can spawn (ghosts that give 50 exp each). The process is much slower than in most other games in this list, but it's possible to farm one life every minute or so. Because the game is Nintendo Hard, you'll probably need every single one of them. There's a video that demonstrates the process and explains more details about the technique here (poor video quality, but much better description than most other videos available). - In The Adventures of Lomax, there are a few levels where there is more than one 1-Up available, enabling you to get all of them, kill yourself, and repeat as many times as you want. - In Kid Kool, getting to the top of a spring pole in stage 1-3 (not a difficult trick) allows you to collect ten 1-ups on a single life. - In Conker's Bad Fur Day, on the farm, there is a hidden squirrel tail that gives nine lives instead of the usual one. When you die, squirrel tails respawn, so you can keep collecting the hidden tail again and again. - In Hack 'N' Slash, there is an event in which an NPC gives you 10 additional hearts added onto your maximum health. However, not long after, it is possible to reset the flag that says it occurred, enabling you to repeat the event again and again. The interesting part? Said flag being reset is not a glitch. In fact, this is the function of an item given specifically for this purpose. It even goes so far as to specifically say the name of the variable that's being reset. Of course, if you've played this game much past that part, that seems like nothing. - At this point in the game, it becomes obvious that Meaningless Lives is an intentional design choice. - Super Bomberman 5 has 2 kind of enemies (A camera with legs at world 5 and a cute plushie with a hammer at world 4) which can turn your bombs into powerups, such as lifevests and remote bombs, and also may yield extra lives, turning them into living armories. - Bonus Levels in Bug! involve collecting medals (every 10 or so collected gives you a life). One of them in the second-to-last world stands out — Bug starts out on a platform above the "arena", the entire floor of which is filled with springs (that only work on Bug) while huge snowballs are dropped into and bounce all over the arena. Every time a snowball hits the ground, it spawns a medal, and the number of snowballs increases over time. Unlike several other bonus zones there's no time limit and no limit to the amount of medals that Bug can collect until he get hit and booted out, meaning that if you let Bug stay on the platform above until the ground is littered with medals then quickly venture down to grab an area of medals, he may be able to get several lives which you'll need. - This is how contestant Michael Larson was able to go on his infamous $110,237 run on Press Your Luck. At the time, there were two spaces on the board that guaranteed an extra spin. Utilizing his knowledge of the board patterns, Larson was able to time his spins so that he always landed on one of these two spaces, ensuring he had a virtually endless supply of spins with which to rack up insane amounts of cash.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneUpSampo
Put on a Bus to Hell - TV Tropes So an actor's walked out of the show, leaving you and the other writers in a bit of a sticky spot. Or maybe one of your characters has (for whatever reason(s)) become The Scrappy. You don't want to kill their character off, but you're still feeling pretty malicious, and just having them Put on a Bus isn't nasty enough. The solution is to put them on a Bus to Hell: write them out in a way so mean-spirited that it's clear to all and sundry that you're doing it out of malice and spite. The most common form is for them to suffer rapid Character Derailment, often over the course of a single episode. Maybe they're too busy holding onto the Idiot Ball to prevent a beloved character from getting hurt, or perhaps they even did something irredeemably awful themselves. Whatever the circumstances, by the end of the episode, they have no choice but to leave town forever to preserve what tattered shreds of dignity they have left and save their friends from the worthless wreck of a human they've become. This trope is for specifically non-fatal examples. If a character dies under these circumstances, then that is Actor Leaves, Character Dies. Compare Dropped a Bridge on Him and Put on a Prison Bus. Contrast Bus Crash. More literal cases go under Dragged Off to Hell. ## Examples: - Dragon Ball GT does this to Piccolo, quite literally. After he's already dead. Of course, he went there himself on purpose, actually prefers being there, and uses his newfound position to guard here as seen at the end. - Miya from My-Otome disappears completely from the show following her implication in Arika's Attempted Rape situation halfway through the series, while also confessing to other Arika-related incidents (in one of the situations, she is completely innocent) before being led out of Garderobe by school administrators. None of the other characters see or hear anything from her again. - The Avengers: The graphic novel "Rage of Ultron" has Hank Pym absorbed into Ultron, forced to keep his insane robo-son in check. This is a more permanent way of keeping Hank out of comics than actually killing him would be. As of 2022, various comics have gone back and forth on whether there even is any Hank anymore, or if it's just Ultron's insanity. - Asterix: The fate of Erix, the teenage pirate. The other three pirates form a well-balanced Comic Trio with a good joke template (after a failure, Pegleg says a Latin aphorism, Baba makes a pun on it and Redbeard yells at them both to shut up), leaving Erix with nothing to do. Since he isn't funny, his own dad is forced to sell him into slavery offscreen, and Erix is never heard from again. - Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew seemed safe as long as they were in Comic-Book Limbo. Unfortunately, when they were brought back in the mid-2000s, their Animal Superheroes world had to become darker to reflect the Darker and Edgier mainstream DC Universe. As a result, Little Cheese is murdered, and then comes the Captain Carrot And the Final Ark mini-series. Their world has become uninhabitable, so Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew, and the other anthropomorphic animal superheroes, arrange for an ark to take them to the Justa Lotta Animals' world, Earth C-Minus. However, because of a mishap, not only do they end up in the "main" DC Universe Earth but they are also turned into non-anthropomorphic animals who can't communicate with Superman and the Justice League. The mini-series ends with them stuck this way, and the DC heroes not knowing why this ship appeared filled with animals. Fortunately, there's good news: \|\|The Monitor Nix Uotan breaks down that bus to Hell by reverting the Zoo Crew into their original forms in time for the final battle of Final Crisis.\|\| - Justice Society of America: In the immediate aftermath of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the Justice Society get dragged into a time-loop of living out Ragnarok. It took several years before they were given an out... and almost immediately after that, several of them were killed in Zero Hour. - Marvel was really bad about this in the 2010s: - After Fear Itself, Nick Fury was shuffled off and replaced by his son, Nick Fury Jr. (the one who looks like Fury's Ultimate version), with the explanation that the Infinity Formula that sustains him is wearing out... somehow. Then, a few years later Original Sin states that in fact it had worn out ages ago, leaving Nick looking his actual age. \|\|Then he turns out to be the one who murdered Uatu, and winds up cursed to live forever on the Moon as "The Unseen".\|\| - The Mighty Thor: How did Marvel take Thor out of the picture when they decided that they wanted to replace him with Jane Foster? By having him become unworthy and unable to lift his hammer, then lose his powers and his left arm, then' try to reclaim his hammer only to discover that there's someone else wielding it, having to relinquish his signature weapon and his name as a result. There's also how Jane herself relinquishes the mantle; \|\|she takes it up to stave off the effects of her cancer, but the kicker is that, every time she transforms, her body reverts to how it was before chemotherapy, to the point where Doctor Strange warns her that, if she "Thors out" once more, she will die. Still, she takes on one last mission in order to stop a rampaging Mangog by hurling him into the Sun while chained to Mjolnir (since any other method of getting rid of him would just end up with him coming back). While Jane does die after Mjolnir gets vaporized, Odin and Thor travel to rescue her soul and bring her back from the gates of Valhalla (where she's just standing because she hesitated), and so she comes back to life, with her cancer in remission, and lets Thor be Thor again — although, without Mjolnir, he makes do with a variety of enchanted hammers until the climax of War of the Realms when he has Mjolnir reforged.\|\| - Captain America is aged into a really old man so that Sam Wilson can take his place. And when the original is brought back, his whole history is changed via an in-universe retcon to make him a villain and a HYDRA agent all along. Even worse, it's eventually revealed that the HYDRA agent is the original Captain, and the non-HYDRA Cap we know and love had been created by a previous Cosmic Retcon, making the new HYDRA Captain actually a return to his true self from the original timeline—or so HYDRA Cap thinks, as it turns out that HYDRA Cap himself was the Cosmic Retcon created by the Red Skull, and the non-HYDRA Cap is indeed the real Cap, who returns at the end of Secret Empire. - In Runaways, Xavin poses as Karolina and offers herself up to the Majesdanians, who had demanded that Karolina return with them to answer for her parents' crimes. The odds that Xavin, a Skrull, might be spared if the Majesdanians ever discover the deception are not exactly favorable... - In Runaways (Rainbow Rowell), it's established early on that Klara was taken away by child services after the events of Avengers Arena. Subverted when it turns out that Klara is happy with her new foster parents, although it took some time for her to accept them because they were a gay couple. Ironic, given how foster care has been portrayed as a Fate Worse than Death in this franchise, and given that Klara is precisely the sort of kid who would not do well in the system... - Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): The "Endangered Species" arc has Thrash the Tasmanian Devil banish the entire Echidna species (except Knuckles) and also Charmy Bee's girlfriend into the Twilight Zone, before escaping, on account of the behind-the-scenes problems the series was having. There is the hope Knuckles could have found Thrash and saved some Echidnas if things had worked out eventually, but then more behind the scenes stuff occurred, and they were all erased from existence. - Spider-Man: Mary Jane Watson once left for a short period of time to avoid her and Peter getting married. They did so with her returning the engagement ring he gave her and claiming that marriage just isn't her thing, doing so in a rather unsympathetic way. - The Thanos Imperative ends with Star-Lord and Nova facing down an utterly enraged and completely unkillable Thanos in order to keep him stuck in a collapsing universe. The surviving Guardians acknowledge that even if they somehow survived, they're stuck there. With Thanos. However, Star-Lord and Thanos came back within two years. Rich took a little longer. - Baldo: Smiley is originally Baldo's tomboyish next-door neighbor and later becomes his girlfriend. Word of God is that the relationship wasn't interesting to write, so the characters break up but decided to stay friends. A couple of months later, Smiley has some offscreen Character Derailment within the span of three days, culminating in an Evil Makeover into an Alpha Bitch. Despite a claim from the author that she might return, Smiley disappeared from the comic after 2006. - Retail has Josh. While he was always obnoxious and disliked by other employees, he was initially just eager to be the best employee possible. However, after he gets promoted to assistant manager, he becomes more and more antagonistic, culminating with him lying about receiving a job offer from a rival store in order to secure a big raise. After some time, his bosses discover that he lied about the offer, but opt not to fire him immediately due to it being the holiday season, and them needing all the help they can get. Josh eventually realizes that his superiors have discovered his scheme, so he quickly finds a new job before they have a chance to fire him. After Josh turns in his two weeks' notice, he admits to lying about the job offer and brags about it. Josh is fired on the spot, not letting him work out his notice. He hasn't appeared since 2014, although he is mentioned in one 2016 strip. - Dangan-Pinguino: Nagito gets disillusioned with the conflict of Hope's Peak Academy versus Daft Capo, as it wasn't the "Hope vs. Despair" conflict he was hoping for. So he sells out his classmates to their enemies, believing this would make their eventual victory "more satisfying". When confronted, he admits what he did without an ounce of remorse or shame, resulting in his immediate expulsion. With no meaningful connections outside of Hope's Peak (and having completely severed any potential bonds he might have made with his peers), he disappears from the storyline. - A very popular Fandom-Specific Plot in My Hero Academia stories is to have Mineta Minoru expelled by Aizawa at the Quirk Apprehension Test or for his perverted antics. This is especially common with Crossovers and Self-Inserts that put somebody new in Class 1-A because the class has to stay the same size, and if somebody has to go, it might as well be Mineta. Americans hate him, after all. - Angel: Interestingly, Lorne has something akin to this happen, in a case of Tropes Are Not Bad. His growing discomfort with the gang's Enemy Mine situation, and feeling out of place as the resident comic relief guy in an increasingly dark series, is cemented in the finale. He helps out with Angel's plan to take out the worst bad guys ever — shooting resident Amoral Attorney/Arch-Enemy Lindsey after they fight off a bunch of demon Mooks but makes it quite clear that he's finished with their vigilante shtick, and that this is the last thing—and personal Moral Event Horizon—he's going to do with them. After that, he becomes the force that binds the universe together. He also gets an encore that flips the script, this time literally in hell. In the Angel comic series, he gets to be an almost angelic leader of a refuge district of the LA hellscape. - Spanish sitcom Aquí no hay quien viva did this with the character of Paloma Cuesta, who fell into a coma at the end of the second season as the result of a dispute between actress Loles León and the production team. The character remained offscreen but was occasionally referenced until the decision was finally made to briefly bring her back via a Fake Shemp replacement in order to have her Killed Off for Real. - Babylon 5: - Ivanova was hastily written out of the series after the actress, Claudia Christian, left under a cloud. This happened during tense re-negotiations with WB and threw the fifth (unplanned) season into utter chaos. Enter Harlan Ellison, who handwaved Ivanova's departure with a Take That!, saying she left for a better-paying job. - Even before this, Talia Winters had her personality erased and turned evil in the span of one episode, following producer arguments over screentime with actress Andrea Thompson. A throwaway line in a later episode suggests she had been killed and dissected. Following this actor dispute, J. Michael Straczynski was keen to point out that every character had a possible replacement planned - only for emergencies, of course. (This particular twist had been planned, and the gimmick to restore her already written in with a scene with "The Vicar", but due to the actress' deteriorating marriage to Jerry Doyle, she declined to return.) - blackish: Lucy is fired in the season 2 finale and is replaced by the boss's son. Fitting with her status as the Butt-Monkey, her firing is a massive Humiliation Conga. - In The Blacklist, Samar had to be written out after her actress left, so the writers gave her a degenerative brain disease caused by her near-drowning at the end of season 5. After half a season of increasingly severe memory issues and aphasia, Mossad takes out a hit on her because they believe her condition has made her a liability, forcing her to go on the run and leave the rest of the task force behindincluding Aram, whom shed planned on marrying. Unlike many examples, Samar was not The Scrappy; she was a fairly well-liked character, and the decision to leave her alone, on the run, and disabled from brain damage baffled many viewers (especially because Liz had survived a year-long coma with seemingly no consequences not even a season prior.) Fan dissatisfaction with her ending likely contributed to the unpopularity of her replacement, Alina Park. - Buffy the Vampire Slayer: - Oz is written out by a Story Arc which ends with him acting amazingly stupid, breaking Willow's heart, and killing (a villain, but this is a show where Thou Shalt Not Kill). His encore episode later on is barely any kinder, though he at least makes amends with Willow this time. - Riley is similarly written out, with his alienation from the group turning to mind-melting stupidity that nearly gets him killed, and quitting when Buffy can't forgive him. Again, he gets an encore episode where he's portrayed more nicely, if blandly. - Coronation Street: The departure of Todd Grimshaw is probably meant to be sad, but since it involves him verbally abusing and assaulting both his brother and the ex-girlfriend he cheated on for sleeping together, then jumping on a bus declaring no one would ever love her like he did, it's hard not to think the writers were trying to make sure no one would miss him. (He does come back to be best man at the couple's wedding, to show there were no hard feelings, but then he comes back again as a snob who is ashamed of his working-class roots.) - Degrassi: - In Degrassi Junior High, Nicole Stoffman (who played Stephanie) left the show in the third season to further her career elsewhere. In the next episode, Stephanie's brother says that their mom has sent her to a private school with a strict dress code, "including knee socks." Stephanie is a fashionista who had spent the entire show up to that point trying to be glamorous and pretty, so she could escape her Control Freak mother's iron fist. - Degrassi: The Next Generation. Dan Woods, who had been commuting between L.A. and Toronto, wanted to leave the show because his productions for Speed Channel were taking off; Principal Raditch speaks to Rick three times in the two days before the shooting, entirely clueless as to how deeply troubled Rick was, and is Reassigned to Antarctica not long after. - Doctor Who: Dodo was kicked out of the companion role by a producer who hated the character. In her final story, she is hypnotized by the supercomputer WOTAN. The Doctor fixes her mind, also using hypnosis, but she leaves offscreen and doesn't show up in the final episode of the story or get to say goodbye to the Doctor, instead getting a second-hand goodbye via Polly who assures him that Dodo sends her love. - In Les Filles d'à côté, core character Magalie was written out of the show after her actress walked out on the series. To explain her disappearance, she is portrayed as a despicable sneak thief with personality issues who robs the gym and goes on the run. - Friends: Happens in-universe to Joey's TV persona, Drake Ramoray, after he inadvertently pisses off the writers of the show. He is written to fall down an elevator shaft and left in a coma, with brain damage so severe that Drake himself was the only doctor who could have treated the damage. - Game of Thrones: Ellaria Sand is last seen in Season 7, \|\|chained up and trying to comfort her daughter who is dying of poison in the dungeons\|\|. A fitting end to the character \|\|who had to be punished by Cersei for poisoning her daughter, Myrcella, leaving her to die in her father's arms\|\|. - On Glee, Lauren leaves New Directions at the start of Season 3 after breaking up with Puck and deciding that the club just isn't cool enough for her anymore, despite having bonded with some members during Season 2, explicitly not caring what others think of her, and being well-received by viewers. To add insult to injury, since this wasn't the actress's idea, her only speaking role in Season 3 is where she tells Puck Screw This, I'm Outta Here. - The Good Fight has Maia leave Chicago for New York with her Evil Mentor Blum, alienating herself from all her friends and becoming a drug addict. - Hogan's Heroes has a ready-made one (albeit only ever for one-shot characters) in the Russian Front. However, if Solzhenitsyn's accounts are anything to go by, this trope could also fit the Russian POW's return. - Home and Away has Alex Poulos, who is ostracised by most of the town for the heinous crime of dumping his current girlfriend for his ex, and leaves town in shame. In case viewers didn't get the message, he comes back a few years later, reveals the girl in question has left him, uses his unknowing sister to smuggle drugs, puts his nephew's life in danger by leaving drugs lying around, and leaves town in even more shame. - In Land of the Lost (1974), the first episode of the third season starts with Rick Marshall (played by a double and seen only from the back) falling through a time doorway back home, leaving his kids stranded. Spencer Milligan had a dispute concerning the fact that the cast members' likenesses were being used in merchandising and that they got no share of those royalties. The Kroffts elected to not renew his contract. - Law & Order: SVU has Stuckey sent to prison. They also get rid of Detective Chester Lake by having him arrested for committing a vigilante murder. - The Man in the High Castle: The last we see of Nicole, Himmler is sending her to a reeducation camp in Germany over her "perversions" (she's bisexual). - Neighbours has Dan Fitzgerald. While he doesn't turn downright evil, his character assassination becomes very obvious toward the end of his Ramsay Street run. He was originally portrayed as the stereotypical 'good guy', being the principal of Erinsborough High as well as a valued mentor figure for the teens; he's even said to be the "good brother", in stark contrast to his younger sibling Lucas. In one of his last episodes, however, he is shown verbally abusing his mother-in-law—who is carrying his (as a surrogate mother)—who becomes so distressed by this that she actually trips and ends up losing the baby. Then he walks away. child - Orange Is the New Black: - Miss Claudette. During the first season, she reconnects with an old friend and has renewed interest in being released. However, at the end of the season, her appeal is denied and in a fit of anger, she attacks one of the guards. She is taken away to maximum security, where you don't get out. - Nicky gets sent away to max, as did Sophia, but \|\|both of them come back next season\|\|. - In season 4, \|\|Lolly\|\| got sent to psych. - Earlier in the series, there is an elderly woman named Jimmy who has developed Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia. While in one of her delusions, she mistakes the altar in the prison chapel for a diving board... and (predictably) gets hurt. The prison can't keep her (even in psych), seeing as she's such a high risk to herself and others, nor is the state willing to commute her sentence to a psych facility or a nursing home. Unfortunately for Jimmy, she has no family or friends on the outside that she can rely on, or that could get her into long-term care, either. So she is given "compassionate" release. She gets out of prison, but they basically just throw her out onto the street, with the idea that "whatever happens, happens," since she has no place to go. - In the two-part premiere of Power Rangers Zeo, when the Machine Empire arrives and kicks Rita Repulsa and Lord Zedd off the moon, the villainous couple is forced to seek refuge with Rita's father Master Vile. Zedd hates Master Vile, and Finster, Squatt, and Baboo don't seem too pleased by the idea, either. - Schitt's Creek: Happens to Moira Rose In-Universe. After contract negotiations break down and her treacherous co-star Clifton Sparks pushes for her firing, Moira's Sunrise Bay character vomits a demon into a toilet and then drowns. Then is shredded. When Moira is invited back for a reboot, her daughter Alexis does some sleuthing with the help of the Fandom, discovers Clifton's part in her mom's firing, and encourages her to demand what she is worth. - Sliders: - Sabrina Lloyd supposedly didn't return for season four due to behind-the-scenes drama, and her character Wade's fate sure seems to confirm this: she gets taken by the villains to spend the rest of her life being used for breeding purposes. The way she's brought back is not much friendlier, being kept in a jar with her brain exposed to control the same villains' new advanced dimension-hopping machine. She destroys the base in a Heroic Sacrifice but appears to Rembrandt once more afterward, so there's hope she survived... if you can call being trapped in the ruined Kromagg base in a mutilated, And I Must Scream condition "hopeful." - Likewise, after Jerry O'Connell's departure, there was no reason to keep his brother Charlie around, leading to his character getting stuck sliding between worlds for all time. - Two and a Half Men accomplishes this with a particularly vindictive Bus Crash. After some controversy revolving around Charlie Sheen that led to him leaving the show, the next season premiere not only kills off his character off-screen, but spends the entire episode effectively pissing on his grave, with events like a funeral attended by many of Charlie's ex-girlfriends who heckle the funeral and desecrate his body, Alan spilling Charlie's ashes all over the floor, and the heavy implication that Charlie's Stalker with a Crush turned wife Rose killed him and got away with it. \|\|The series finale joins in on it too, revealing that Charlie was actually alive this whole time but was locked up in Rose's basement, only to kill him off again in the last few minutes of the series by dropping a piano on top of him after he escapes.\|\| - Van Helsing (2016): Midway through Season 4, \|\|Vanessa\|\| is trapped in the Dark Realm in the process of stopping Dracula's escape. She doesn't appear again until midway through Season 5. - Water Rats: Regular character Constable Terry Watson was written off by having him get arrested for abducting his 3-year-old daughter. He does this in order to frame the loser his ex was with at that time. - Zoey 101: Alexa Nikolas quit the show because of a feud between her and Jamie Lynn Spears. Alexa's character, Nicole, is an intensely boy-crazy, insecure kid who hates unfamiliar situations — and Zoey says in the third season premiere that Nicole has been shipped to an all-girls boarding school. In a previous episode, Nicole had broken down sobbing when she thought she'd have to transfer to another school. - It's common for a wrestler leaving a company to lose ("do the job") in their last match there, in order to make their opponent look good. These are not examples of this trope, they're just the norm in the industry. What is an example is when it's known that a wrestler is planning on leaving for another company, and having them lose repeatedly in order to diminish their potential value. One particularly notable example is The Undertaker, being infamously undefeatable at Wrestlemania (previously his winning streak had only been broken once in 25 years, by Brock Lesnar at Wrestlemania XXX) for his entire career. While he's made the occasional cameo since then, his second-ever defeat at Wrestlemania XXXIII at the hands of Roman Reigns seemingly marked the character's retirement, as The Undertaker left his trademark boots coat and hat in the ring for what seemed to be a "final exit". Ultimately subverted, as the character would return several more times, including winning twice at Wrestlemania 34 and 36 before officially retiring at Survivor Series 2020 on the 30th anniversary of the character's debut. - 1997's Montreal Screwjob is one of the most infamous instances of this in Professional Wrestling: - Wrestler Bret Hart had a disagreement with WWF owner Vince McMahon as to whether Hart should lose his final match before departing WWF for WCW, as is the norm in the industry. Moreover, Hart was the WWF champion at the time. Previous WWF Women's Champion Alundra Blayze had left for WCW still holding the belt, and on her first appearance on WCW, she dropped it in a garbage can on live TV. Vince McMahon had no desire to see a repeat of that with the WWF championship belt, and it was thus of utmost importance for Hart to lose the championship before leaving for WCW. Hart, however, was unwilling to lose in his native Canada, which he felt would destroy his character, and didn't want to give the belt to Michaels, whom he disliked. Hart also had a "reasonable creative control" clause in his contract, meaning he could veto angles he deemed detrimental to his character so long as doing so wouldn't completely derail an ongoing storyline. Hart and McMahon agreed on a disqualification ending for the match with Hart surrendering the title on the next night's RAW (an alternative to jobbing to Michaels on the PPV that would've kept the storylines intact, thus meeting Hart's contract clause)... but when Michaels put Hart in a submission hold from which Hart was scripted to escape, McMahon ordered the bell rung and the match awarded to Hart's opponent Shawn Michaels as though Hart had surrendered, in order to make sure Hart lost the match and his WWF Championship before leaving. The effects of the Montreal Screwjob are still felt over today, and it also led to a Real Life Writes the Plot situation, as McMahon's Kayfabe character went from nice-guy announcer to scheming politician. - According to Eric Bischoff's 2006 autobiography (produced by WWE, no less), WCW was so restricted by Turner Broadcasting's legal team (due to a pending trademark lawsuit brought by the then-WWF over Kevin Nash & Scott Hall's debuts) that there would have never been a reprise of the "belt in trash can" incident, or any inclusion of a WWF/E trademark (such as a title belt) on a WCW program, even if Bret had been willing to do it. Ultimately, the entire "screwjob" incident did little more than serve as a catalyst for the change in Vince McMahon's on-air character and may have done as much as WCW's booking incompetence to ruin Bret's wrestling career. - Michaels has since admitted that he was in on the job, and whenever he appears in Canada, he receives "YOU SCREWED BRET!" chants from the Canadian fans. Referee Earl Hebner (now with TNA) and Vince also receive said chants. Then-writer Vince Russo claimed in his autobiography that he was responsible for the screwjob, but then again, this is Vince Russo we're talking about. note : Another, much more likely truthful, version is that it was actually Jim Cornette that came up with the idea almost by accident, angrily but sarcastically yelling "Why don't we just double-cross him?" in a booking meeting a couple days before. Russo's only contribution was being in the room looking confused while the people that actually knew something about professional wrestling were discussing it. - When Bret returned to the WWE, after a storyline where he and Shawn made peace, Vince played the villain and tried to torment both of them. Needless to say, it ended with Vince in the sharpshooter. - The Spirit Squad's grand exit from WWE under those characters involved being shipped off to Louisville (home of WWE developmental territory OVW) in a giant crate by D-Generation X. Three of the members note : Mikey did a stint in Ring of Honor as Mike Mondo, Mitch [Nick Mitchell] retired, and Johnny [Jeter] disappeared in WWE's developmental league Ohio Valley Wrestling sometime in 2008 were never seen on WWE TV again, the fourth (Kenny Doane, er, Dykstra) returned solely to job up until his release in late 2008, and the fifth and sole remaining member returned to portray Dolph Ziggler, the guy who really, really likes shaking peoples' hands and repeating his own name (and being a total Jerkass Heel). Ziggler actually went on to be successful, becoming a two-time World Heavyweight Champion and a Triple Crown Champion. The main reason he got over so easily is that he was completely repackaged — the Spirit Squad gimmick was originally to put over Kenny, but that backfired on Kenny because he became forever associated with the gimmick, so the audience never took him seriously. - Batman: Arkham Knight, being intended as the Grand Finale of the Batman: Arkham Series, gives a number of characters this fate (the ones that don't end up dead, at least), stymieing any chance at continuing the series without having to shift the focus to Batman's allies or the wider DC Universe. \|\|Riddler's stuck in prison with his robot factory destroyed and his bank account drained, robbing him of any resources he could use in the future. Scarecrow is reduced to a gibbering, catatonic wreck after being subjected to a concentrated injection of his own fear toxin. Freeze's sole reason for being a criminal is removed as Nora convinces him to stop trying to save her and let her live out her final days with him. Ra's Al-Ghul, depending on the player's actions, is slowly dying after the Lazarus Pits have finally dried up, and is last seen barely even able to speak and on life support at the police station. Batman himself is either dead or in hiding, but either way, both his and Bruce Wayne's reputations are irreparably destroyed and if he ever returns, it'll never be the same again.\|\| - Crash: Mind Over Mutant: While the other villains either run off or are shooed away by Aku Aku, Nina Cortex gets sent to Evil Public School against her will by her uncle Neo Cortex, out of retaliation on behalf of him being betrayed by her in the previous game. - The ending to Portal 2. \|\|Given that Wheatley had become the villain, he needed a punishment when he was finally defeated. However, killing him off or letting GLaDOS torture him forever would be too much, but a simple slap and detach from the mainframe was too little, hence the final version of the ending, where he is blasted off into space\|\|. - Sonic Rivals 2: Eggman Nega is sealed in the Ifrit's dimension and is never seen again. - Star Control 2: The Androsynth suffer this just before the game starts when their experiments in FTL technology attract the attention of an Eldritch Abomination. - Tomb Raider: Between the 2013 reboot and its sequel, Sam doesn't return because \|\|Himiko was partially successful in possessing her, landing her in a psych ward.\|\| - SMG4 has an almost literal example at the end of SMG4 Movie: It's Gotta Be Perfect, where \|\|after Peachs Castle is destroyed in order to get rid of the Eldritch Goop, its shown that Peach slept through it and is still inside the castle, which itself is inside a massive demonic entity.\|\| - Girl Genius has Moloch von Zinzer — although his bus comes back four years later (or a couple of months later in comic-time), it doesn't change the fact that he was sent to the sentient Castle Heterodyne for being part of a plot that he had no idea existed. It's so bad that when he asks for help from the guy that roped him into the plot in the first place, he is given a poison pill that will kill him instantly because it's better than living in the Castle. Nonetheless, he manages without it. - Penny and Aggie. Cyndi \|\|is committed to a psychiatric hospital\|\| at the end of the "Missing Person" arc; her very last appearance shows \|\|her parents driving into the hospital's front entrance as she asks where they're taking her\|\|. - Scary Go Round: Not only is Erin Winters literally sucked into Hell, but her very memory is also Ret-Gone from everyone who knows her, so no rescue attempts will be made. In Bad Machinery The Bus Came Back, but still no one remembers her. Allison subsequently wrote a story about Erin breaking out of Hell and becoming its ruler. Then, back in Scary-Go-Round, Erin surrenders her mortal life to save her mortal sort-of boyfriend, returning to rule Hell, although she can still occasionally visit her sister, who now remembers her. Then her boyfriend gets himself killed anyway. They both eventually return to Earth again, under unexplained circumstances. This annoys the heck out of the personification of Death, who complains that the Winters family keep treating mortality as temporary. - Puffin Forest: Inverted for laughs at the end of the Malikar storyline. Malikar is an immortal who is reborn every time he gets killed and is performing a ritual that would have destroyed the world. The players had spent the campaign searching for a weapon that can permanently kill him. The players confront him with the weapon and disrupt the ritual, but ended up just barely losing the final fight by a single dice roll. This results in the most of the player characters and Malikar getting randomly scattered into the various outer planes. Through sheer luck of the dice, all of the player characters end up in planes on the good side of the great wheel. When Ben rolls the dice to decide where Malikar ended up, he bursts out laughing because he was sent to \|\|Mount Celestia, the plane of Lawful Good and equivalent of Heaven, where he is immediately arrested and imprisoned, removing him as a threat for a long time.\|\| - The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Void" has Gumball, Darwin, and Mr. Small discover that background character Molly the sauropod has been sucked into a dimension full of bad ideas because she's so boring. At one point, another equally minor character, Rob the cyclops, can be seen floating around the background of the void. Since nobody notices or remembers him, he, unlike Molly, is still stuck there by the end of the episode... \|\|or so it seems. He returns in "The Nobody", where it is revealed he escaped, although the results aren't very pleasant\|\|. - In the first season of Gravity Falls, Mabel has a brief romance with a merman named Mermando who leaves for the ocean before the end of the episode. In the next season, he sends a postcard informing her that, for political reasons, he's been forced into an Arranged Marriage to a manatee. The photo attached makes it obvious he is not happy about it, although Mabel doesn't notice. - Jackie Chan Adventures: Daolon Wong, who tried to wield the greatest dark power to become the Chans' greatest enemy and spent a couple of seasons succumbing to his mistakes, comes across an artifact that allows a person to revisit their past and planned to undo his defeats. Thanks to some interference from Jackie Chan, the two arrive during the first time the Dark Hand's Enforcers visited Uncle's antique store, and Jackie tricks them by claiming Daolon Wong knows about the shield (with the rooster talisman), and they take him to Valmont for questioning, dragged away in protest. There is no indication that he ever escapes this fate. - Justice League: Galatea ends up electrocuted by Supergirl in their final battle, leaving her a charred, twitching husk. The show never brings up her whereabouts ever again. According to the writers, Galatea was taken back to Cadmus labs where Dr. Hamilton is caring for her and teaching her basic motor skills. - The Simpsons: - One-shot characters Lurleen Lumpkin and Mindy Simmons, both of whom attempt to entice Homer into an affair. The former makes several cameos where she appears to be down on her luck and struggling with substance dependency (to the point she sometimes doesn't seem to know where she is), while the latter apparently "hit the bottle pretty hard" and lost her job. Lurleen eventually got a follow-up episode where the Simpsons help to get her life back on track and Marge kinda-sorta buries the hatchet with her. Mindy, meanwhile, still appears in background shots at the plant, but whether this is her benefiting from George Jetson Job Security or just the animators getting lazy has never been addressed. - Homer's half-brother Herb is left financially ruined thanks to Homer's antics and leaves on a literal bus, spitefully making it clear that he has no intention to acknowledge Homer as his brother any longer by the end of the episode. Apparently the executives were left uncomfortable, so they ensured another episode was made in which The Bus Came Back, allowing Homer to help Herb regain his fortune and the two half-brothers to reconcile. He hasn't been seen since, but his answering machine message in season 24 states that he isn't currently rich. - Homer voices the character "Poochie" in one episode of the animated cartoon within the animated cartoon, The Itchy & Scratchy Show. Poochie proves so unpopular that in the next episode, the animation stops in its tracks as Poochie (not voiced by Homer) says he has to return to "his planet", his departure simply involving sliding his animation cel up and off the screen. A screen appears with a message drawn in marker reading "Note: Poochie died on his way back to his home planet." Immediately afterwards, Krusty the Clown puts the final nail in the coffin by cheerfully declaring Poochie dead, and signing a contract prohibiting him from ever returning. This didn't stop Poochie from making a cameo later on during Scratchy's funeral. - South Park: Due to Isaac Hayes having a falling-out with the show's staff (which later turned out to be a misunderstanding on the writers' part), "The Return of Chef" wrote Chef out of the show in the absolute cruelest way possible, first by having him get brainwashed into becoming a child molester, then \|\|suffering a Cruel and Unusual Death that resulted in him being converted into Darth Chef.\|\| Despite still being at large, the closest Chef's got to returning thus far was \|\|Darth Chef\|\| appearing in the opening sequence and \|\|Chef himself briefly being resurrected as a Nazi Zombie in South Park: The Stick of Truth, seemingly ignoring Darth Chef altogether.\|\| - In The Spectacular Spider-Man, John Jameson, a likable and heroic character, gets powers that make him a Flying Brick and expresses interest in becoming a superhero ally of Spidey. Unfortunately, these powers cause him to become increasingly aggressive and irrational, which is helped along by Venom attacking him while pretending to be Spider-Man. Spider-Man ends up having to de-power John in order to stop him. When last seen in the show, John is in an asylum and is a broken wreck suffering from power withdrawal, shown to be every bit as crazy as Electro, the most mentally unstable character in the series. Ironically (and appropriately), Eddie Brock ends up with roughly the same fate as him after losing the Venom symbiote again, left as a ranting mess while being hauled off on a stretcher. - Spider-Man: The Animated Series has Mary Jane sucked into a limbo between universes. She later comes back, until it's revealed that this is a clone, and the series was Screwed by the Network before the real Mary Jane was seen again. The final episode does make it clear that Peter is about to go on a mission to save her, though. - This happens to Mandarin twice in Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!. - In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987), Baxter Stockman is last seen trying to retreat into a dimensional portal with Shredder's retro-mutagen ray, intending to use it on himself, only for the Turtles to reclaim it and escape the portal, leaving him stranded in Dimensional Limbo. He is never seen again. - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012)'s crossover episode with the above series has the death-defying villain Kraang Sub-Prime get flung into the Mirage Turtles universe by the end. He doesn't show up for the rest of the series, although given how the Turtles are like in that universe, his chances of survival are very slim. - Kim from The Venture Bros. is a very insignificant character who became an Ensemble Dark Horse randomly after showing off a cool outfit and vaguely interesting personality in the episode "Victor. Echo. November." The writers never particularly cared for her and didn't bring her back - so they wrote her out with a quick line in the fourth season finale, where her friend Triana says that Kim moved to Florida, fell in with preppies, got addicted to drugs, then became a born-again Christian. In other words, they deliberately killed anything cool about her and skewed her as far in the other direction as possible.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneWayTicketToNowhere
One Twin Must Die - TV Tropes Alice is pregnant. She and Bob are waiting for a healthy child, but they get two for the price of one. Normally this might be considered an extra gift, but in this world/time/place, Alice and Bob's twins are considered a bad omen/bad luck by popular beliefs, religion, or simply superstition. The parents' reaction may vary between reject the child(ren) or love them both but forced to abandon one of them. The aftermath probably will be choose one of the twins and dispose of the other, either by killing the child or leaving the child to his/her own luck. In the latter, sometimes the child could be adopted by other people or just simply became a Wild Child or Street Urchin. But there's always a third option, and Alice and Bob may leave their lands to another one where they can live together as a family... or the twins can escape by themselves. In cases where the twins had been Separated at Birth and the "disposed" one lives, eventually they will reunite since You Can't Fight Fate, most of the time not knowing the existence of the other or simply considering his/her sibling as dead since always blood is Thicker Than Water and the connection between the twins is stronger. When they finally reunite, the reactions also may vary: this could be a Big Damn Reunion, but the other extreme could be an Abel And Cain scenario. The unlucky one could convert into the Evil Twin or they could be Polar Opposite Twins. Truth in Television that twins may be played by real actors/actresses that are twins- but it could also be Acting for Two, it all depends. Part of Twin Tropes and Family Twists Index. Compare Don't Split Us Up and Twin Desynch. See also Separated at Birth, in which neither twin has to die but they must be separated. Not to be confused with Cloning Blues or any tropes related. Contrast Sibling Murder where one sibling kills the other. As The Reveal with deaths included, spoilers couldn't be marked as such. You Have Been Warned. ## Examples: - In After School Nightmare, it ultimately turns out that Mashiro's gender issues are actually a pair of boy-girl twins where one of them has to die in order for the other to live. - The story of the birth of Ram and Rem in Re:Zero refers to the belief from Japanese folklore, as their oni's people must symbolize medieval Japan and Japanese demons in particular. And so, in the people of these girls it was customary to kill the born twins, as it was considered a bad omen, and because very often the twins shared horns for two, because of what they had more weaker abilities than their other tribesmen. However, Ram is a very powerful mage, so powerful that she is considered incredibly talented, so the girls manage to survive.. And ironically, all their people are killed after 10 years. - In the Asgard Saga of Saint Seiya (anime only), there's Syd and Bud, twins Separated at Birth, since in Asgard having twins was a bad omen. Syd was the lucky twin, being raised by his parents and having a good life, and Bud was the unlucky one, being a Street Urchin. When Polaris Hilda reunited their God Warriors, Syd and Bud finally get together, but Syd was the "official one" (God Warrior Mizar Zeta) and Bud was the "shadow one" (God Warrior Alcor Zeta). Always jealous of his twin's luck, Bud became the Evil Twin, but later he changed his ways after Syd sacrificed his life to save Bud's, while also giving him a heartbreaking speech where he explained that he had always known about Bud and was always sad and frustrated over being unable to help him. - Fai D. Flowright from Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-. In the manga it's revealed further in the plot that Fai isn't his real name, but his dead twin's name. In his kingdom, having twins was considered a curse that would harm the country and it's people. After their parents died Fai and Yui's Uncle (the Emperor of the kingdom) told the twins that they could either kill one of them off, or live together and be unhappy, because only if the twins are unhappy could the country prosper. The twins, refusing to harm one another, were thrown into a giant pit reserved for bodies of sinners and criminals. Yui was stuck down in the pit trying to climb the walls with stocking up dead bodies to stand on, while Fai was locked in a tower rising from the middle of the pit; together, but separated. They were never given food or anything else, but their magic kept them alive and young... and miserable. Until at least a decade later when one twin dies and the other gets free, both with a help of an outside interference ... right before their kingdom is completely destroyed anyway, because, turns out, the Emperor wasn't quite right in the head. - In Shaman King there's Hao Asakura, one of the founder of Asakura clan and one of the most powerful members of the clan; however, his desire to avenge his mother's death and his growing hatred of humans made him evil and was stopped in two lives. His second reincarnation was along his twin brother Yoh; knowing Hao was in this world again, the grandfather of the twins (Yohmei) attempt to kill both children, but since the old man really didn't want to do it, he hesitated for a second... then Hao saw the opening and escaped with the Spirit of Fire to be raised by one of his minions and various years later, joining to a new Shaman King competition after failed in his past two lives. - In YuYu Hakusho, ice maidens only give birth to daughters unless they've been with a man. Being with a man is completely forbidden. Hina gives birth to twins, one boy and one girl (Hiei and Yukina). Because Hiei is a boy, he's forbidden to live among them and is left for dead. Also causing Separated at Birth with Yukina. - In Finder, Ascians view twins as such a crime against nature that both are killed at birth. - Thorgal: In "The Blue Sickness", Thorgal escapes from a desert prison and runs into a tribe of swamp-dwelling pygmies led by the twin brother of the king who imprisoned him in the first place. Their father threw one out to avoid a Succession Crisis, unfortunately he definitely chose the Jerkass to rule. Thorgal eventually leads the brother back, but instead of usurping him decides the throne's big enough for the two of them. - Pre-Zero Hour Durlans forced twins to fight to the death in the Right of Survival as "only through death can the choice of the gods be surmised". Reep Daggle, who went on to become Legion of Super-Heroes member Chameleon Boy, won the right of survival by killing his twin but regrets it and feels remorse over his sibling's death for the rest of his life. - Downplayed in Animorphs: When Yeerks twins are born, they are given the same name, but one is designated "primary" and the other "lesser." In Visser Three's case, he apparently felt threatened that his "lesser" twin might catch up to him and purposefully stymied his advancement. (You shouldn't feel too bad for him, though.) - In The Ear, the Eye and the Arm, the main characters visit Resthaven, an idyllic City in a Bottle that preserves a traditional lifestyle — which happens to include killing the younger member of any set of twins. One villager argues that the visitors can't pick out the parts of their culture that they find objectionable and enjoy the rest, so they promptly escape with the twin that would have died. - In The Giver, when identical twins are born, the smaller of the two is promptly Released to Elsewhere since having two identical people is at odds with their strictly ordered society. When Jonas sees his father euthanise an infant simply because it didn't match their quota for births, it drives home the scope of the Industrialized Evil that maintains their Crapsaccharine World and he immediately makes plans to escape. - In King Solomon's Mines, this turns out to be the custom of Kukuanas. Twala, the evil king, was supposed to be killed at birth, but was saved by his mother to usurp the throne once he grew up. \|\|Umbopa, the heroes' companion, turns out to be the son of the murdered brother, come to reclaim his kingdom\|\| - In the New Jedi Order, twin births among the Yuuzhan Vong are incredibly rare; their custom is for the twins to fight to the death once they reach adulthood, with the survivor invariably going on to greatness. Supreme Overlord Shimrra is a twin, having fulfilled the custom by killing his brother when they were seven. After learning that his nemesis Jacen Solo is a twin, Tsavong Lah becomes obsessed with capturing Jacen and his sister Jaina and forcing them to perform a Twin Sacrifice to bring divine favor to himself. \|\|After Lah dies his successor abandons the plan, figuring that twins from a species among whom such births are common probably aren't worth it, and Lah was letting his ego and personal vendetta overrule his common sense\|\|. - Heavily implied to happen with Donald and Douglas in The Railway Series. The Fat Controller had ordered only one goods engine from Scotland (Word of God says it was Donald) and their introductory arc had the twins worry about one being sent back to Scotland, where they would be scrapped. Thankfully averted when The Fat Controller hears of the twins' plight and decides both can stay. - In the Secret Histories series, Eddie learns that this is the basis of a deal with an Eldritch Abomination that powers the Drood family's magic torcs and instant Powered Armor: every Drood is born with a twin, which is promptly absorbed by the Heart to create their torc. \|\|He destroys and replaces the Heart via a deal with a more friendly Eldritch Abomination who doesn't demand human sacrifice.\|\| - In Split Heirs by Esther Friesner and Lawrence Watt-Evans, twins and other multiple births are regarded as a bad sign, so when a queen gives birth to triplets she secretly has two of the children taken away and raises the remaining one as her only son. Fate reunites the siblings when they're older and Hilarity Ensues. - Things Fall Apart: The Igbo people of Umofia believe twins to be a divine curse, and leave both children out in the surrounding forest to die. Some of the characters question the practice, but keep their doubts to themselves. These characters wind up flocking to the Christian missionaries when they come to Umofia, who go into the forest and collect the twins to raise themselves. - Three Dark Crowns: An Triplet version. Two must die so one ascends to be the Queen. This is a continuing cycle. - A variant in The Village on the Lake, a Stone Age novel by Sergey Pokrovsky. When twins are born, the younger one is considered to be fathered by a spirit instead of a human father, but is only killed or banished if it is believed the spirit is an evil one. The protagonist is banished due to such a suspicion, but manages to return after presenting "evidence" his father is a benevolent oak spirit. - Wolves of the Calla: Almost all births in the town of Calla Bryn Sturgis are twins. The titular Wolves ride out of Thunderclap roughly every twenty-three years and kidnap one of each pair of the town's children. Months later, they are returned via train, "roont", deformed into Dumb Muscle Empty Shells that painfully grow until they die young. The purpose of this operation is revealed as The Crimson King harvesting the innate material responsible for Twin Telepathy to feed it to powerful psychics to enhance their abilities he is utilizing to destroy the Dark Tower. - Subverted in Sabrina the Teenage Witch: When Sabrina discovers she has a twin sister, Katrina, a series of trials are held to determine which of the twins is evil; Sabrina fails the trials and tradition dictates that Katrina must push her into a volcano. Katrina does so without hesitation, but it's actually a Secret Test of Character; Katrina's willingness to kill Sabrina exposes her as the Evil Twin and she gets sentenced to imprisonment in the Other Realm, while Sabrina survives the fall and is declared the good twin. - Subverted and averted in "The Vampire Diaries": The Gemini Coven is revealed to have an merge whenever an set of twins turns 22 which is problematic for Liv & Luke in the sixth season. \|\|However, Luke found a loophole where he didn't have to go through The Merge with Liv. Instead he performed the merge with his older brother Kai, as they were both biologically 22 years old (Kai qualifies as Human Popsicle due to be stuck in a prison world for 2 decades) and shared a bloodline as brothers despite the fact that they weren't actually each other's twin. Kai emerged as the winner to everyone's chagrin.\|\| Kai would later kill his own twin sister Jo while simultaneously having an hand in Liv's death which made Luke's sacrifice basically All for Nothing. - Grim Hollow: The Laneshi are a race of merfolk who have a cultural affinity for Necromancy and a strong case of Blue-and-Orange Morality compared to the land-dwelling races of Etharis. Their tradition dictates that when twins are born, the second-born twin is sacrificed in a necromantic rite that transforms them into a spirit-guide and bonds them with the first-born. - Orc culture in Arcanum contains a variant of this, according to the manual. Twin births are a more common event for orcs than for humans, but triplets are seen as an unnecessary burden, as the mother, with her two breasts and arms, is seen as only being capable of raising two children at once. The solution to the problem is for the father to pick the weakest looking newborn and eat it, in celebration of his own fertility. - An unintentional case in Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within: the Maxwell family has a curse that affects twin girls, and after the birth of twins to the family in 1982, they proceed to immediately bury the twins under a tree. During this, two of George Maxwell's enemies, Allen Hale and Phillip Tate, conspire to save the twins in hopes of causing his ruin, however, they only manage to save one, Alyssa. In some irony, Maxwell didn't realise he had fraternal twins, and the twin who died, Bates, was actually a boy, but his spirit proceeds to enter his sister's body, and as such technically ends up being female anyway. While it's ambiguous whether the curse is real or not, Alyssa and Bates do end up opposing Maxwell, and eventually end up playing a part in his demise. - In Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, Minakami Village had the ten year annual Crimson Sacrifice Ritual, where one twin had to strangle the other to death in order to keep the Hellgate beneath the village sealed. After a failure that caused the entire village's destruction, the restless ghosts of the inhabitants try and force Mio to do the same to her own twin, Mayu. \|\|Canonically she does end up doing it, which plays a role in the third game, in which her guilt makes her become a victim of the Tattoo curse. Other endings do have both twins survive (one at the cost of Mio's eyesight), one in the remake has them choose to be Together in Death after being too late to stop the Repentance, and another in the remake has Mayu kill Mio instead.\|\| - Played With in Fire Emblem Engage. Fell Dragons are always born as twins, since only one of them is expected to live to adulthood. The Fell Xenolouges main characters, Nel and Nil, are said to be an exception. However, \|\|it turns out that Nil really did die at a young age, and that the "Nil" that weve been following this whole time is actually a guy named Rafal, who was said to bare an uncanny resemblance to the real Nil. After he died, Nil asked Rafal to take on his identity, so that Nel wouldnt have to deal with losing him. She knew right away, but played along to not upset Rafal. It turns out Rafals twin died as well, which is part of why he grew close to Nel and Nil.\|\| - Defied in Guilty Gear XX. Bridget was born male with her twin brother in a village where the birth of same-sex twins is considered a bad omen, and one of the twins would have to either be exiled or killed. Her parents chose to Take a Third Option and raise her as a girl. To aleviate her parents' guilt, Bridget would grow up to become a famous bounty hunter, proving the superstition wrong and ending it for good. But living as a man triggers her gender dysphoria, leading to her transgender Coming-Out Story in Guilty Gear -STRIVE-. - When the Sonozaki twins were born in Higurashi: When They Cry this was meant to occur. Their grandmother ultimately didn't kill them, but the youngest was sent away. \|\|To make matters complicated, Shion and Mion often did Twin Switches as children. One day they did it at the wrong time and were permanently switched, due to the heir being given an "oni" tattoo on her back. Thus, the girl known as "Mion" was really born "Shion", the younger sister who wasn't killed at birth. No one besides them know of the switch.\|\| - In Unsounded's Gefendur faith twins are bought from their parents at birth and raised with other twins, apart from society. When they come of age, the oldest is enrolled in the clergy, while the youngest is poisoned and eaten by the clergy, state officials and anyone with enough money to pay at one of two annual events. - In various aboriginal tribes around the world, especially in Africa, having twins was not just a bad omen, they were (and still today are) considered the same human disease as malformed babies, so the children had to be expelled from the tribe or killed, depending on the culture. Sometimes the shamans or wizards of the tribe would be the ones who rejected the babies, but sometimes, the parents themselves wouldn't want them. Sadly, this happens a lot even today in Madagascar, where twin babies are usually abandoned and killed because of superstitions, and families who keep their twins may be exiled from their village. - In 1800s Japan, it was rooted in the belief that a demon had replicated the real baby and was in the process of trying to take its place-although perhaps it was only a more socially acceptable way for impoverished families to justify getting rid of the two extra mouths to feed. There are quite a few tales of the spirits of twins left in the wilderness to die coming back as Yōkai or vengeful ghosts (yurei/onryo). - During the Middle Ages (in Europe), there was a common superstition that multiple births meant the mother had been unfaithful to her husband. That might be a milder form of this trope. However, the superstition may have been discredited by the late 12th century, since in the French lai (poem) Le Fresne, when a knight's wife makes this accusation to another knight's wife who had twins, it is considered slanderous, and the wife who made the accusation bore twin daughters. - Giant pandas give birth to twins in about half of pregnancies, but the mother only cares for the stronger one and lets the other one die, since she is unable to produce milk for both as she does not store fat. - A Body Horror example is the "Vanishing Twin Syndrome" or "Fetal Resorption", in which one of the twins is condemned to death...in the mother's womb, being assimilated by the survivor twin. The most fitted (and horrible) example in fiction is Stephen King's The Dark Half.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneTwinMustDie
Fixed Damage Attack - TV Tropes Many games (especially RPGs) feature complex systems for determining how much damage is meted out in combat; the attacker's strength and/or skill, the defender's armor, Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors... even the Luck Stat may play a part to determine what happens when a character is hit. But a Fixed Damage Attack ignores all this, and instead causes a fixed, predictable amount of damage each time it is used, regardless of all the normal rules. The amount of damage is often a very specific, exact number — for example, an Eldritch Abomination might prefer a spell causing exactly 666 points of damage to whomever it is used against. (This is obviously a dire threat to a Squishy Wizard with a maximum of only 700 HP, whereas a Stone Wall with a maximum of 3,000 HP would no doubt brush it off as Only a Flesh Wound.) Unfortunately, if the player can acquire one of these skills themselves, it will usually become a Useless Useful Spell because many RPG systems give monsters more HP than the players, and the fixed amount of damage ceases to remain useful as the player progresses to stronger monsters — though if acquired very early on, it could also double as a Disc-One Nuke. (It could also provide a One-Hit Kill against the Metal Slime's low HP and impenetrable defense). As a means of averting this, some systems may link the amount of damage to the user's experience level in some way, allowing the attack to grow stronger as they do. However, it is still exempt from the normal damage mechanics (including Status Effects that affect attack or defense powers), and still inflicts a set, predictable amount of damage every time it is used. While this is called an "attack" trope, the main idea is the dealing of fixed changes to combat-relevant stats, so healing counts too. Compare and contrast Percent Damage Attack, which is also exempt from normal damage rules. Contrast Randomized Damage Attack, the total inverse of this, where you can't control how much damage a particular attack deals (or have control; it also tends to be exempt from normal damage rules), as well as Situational Damage Attack, when you can make an attack stronger by manipulating a certain variable. very little See also Scratch Damage and Cap, when a fixed amount of damage occurs for different reasons. Can lead to a Death of a Thousand Cuts. # Examples: - In the Nasuverse, Leonardo da Vinci's Noble Phantasm does this in lore. In part by her own brilliance and in part with the help of her glasses and mechanical arm, she instantly picks apart the mechanism of any defense and recompiles her own Noble Phantasm to bypass it, forcefully dealing a fixed set damage that ignores Magic Resistance, defensive Skills and even defensive Noble Phantasms. In a setting with as much Conceptual Magic and weird idiosyncratic abilities as the Nasuverse, dealing absolute constant damage is a hell of an achievement. Sadly, in gameplay her NP isn't quite that good, but even there it ignores all "normal" (i.e. not Plot Armor) defense boosts and even outright invulnerability. - In InfiniteDendrogram, Ray Starling's signature attack 'Vengeance is Mine' deals twice the accumulated damage back to his opponent. This in combination with his growing fame leads some antagonists to attack him indirectly. - Weapons in Apocalypse World and most RPGs Powered by the Apocalypse have fixed harm ratings, meaning that they do a deterministic amount of damage each time they are used. That said, dice rolls can affect the damage output, since good rolls let players increase their damage output or decrease damage taken, but this is not a direct consequence of the dice roll itself, but rather something the players pick themselves from a list of available additional effects. - Dungeons & Dragons, Deities & Demigods Cyclopedia. - American Indian (Native American Mythology) mythos - The deity Shakak does 20 Hit Points of cold damage per minute to any creature within 30 yards of him. - The thunder bird can cast a lightning bolt up to 300 yards away that does 30 Hit Points of damage. - Central American (Aztec Mythology) mythos - The deity Huhueteotl can fire a beam of light up to 2 miles that does 50 Hit Points of damage. - The deity Tlaloc can use a bolt of lightning as a weapon. It does 40 Hit Points of damage to opponents wearing armor, 30 Hit Points of damage to anyone wearing clothes, and 20 Hit Points of damage to bare flesh. - Babylonian mythos (Mesopotamian Mythology) - The mace of the deity Druaga does 35 Hit Points of damage per hit. - The deity Anshar can fire a beam of darkness up to 300 yards that does 40 Hit Points of damage. - Any creature within 10 feet of the deity Girru takes 10 Hit Points of damage per minute. - When the deity Ramman is struck sparks will fly, doing 30 Hit Points of damage to any creature within 30 feet. Ramman can cast lightning bolts that 30 Hit Points of damage. Any creature struck by the deity's 10 foot long mallet takes 30 Hit Points of damage. - Celtic Mythology - In battle, the deity Brigit does 30 Hit Points of fire damage to any creature within 30 feet of her. - If anyone abuses a weapon created by the deity Goibhnie, they will be hit by a thunderbolt causing 50 Hit Points of damage. - Chinese Mythology - The Dancing Sword of Lightning fires a lightning bolt that does 30 Hit Points of damage. - The deity No Cha has a spear that does 30 Hit Points of damage per hit. - Egyptian Mythology - The deity Shu has a fiery aura that causes 25 Hit Points of damage to any creature who touches him (or if he grabs them). - The deity Tefnut can throw lightning bolts up to 1,000 yards that do 24 Hit Points of damage. - For healing, Geb has a staff that gives Gradual Regeneration of Regenerating Health of 25 Hit Points of damage on its wielder per minute. - Finnish mythology (The Kalevala). The deity Kiputytto can cast a sickness that causes 5 Hit Points of damage per minute on the target. - Greek Mythology. When the goddess Hera is angry, hearing her harsh voice causes 20 Hit Points of damage to every creature within 50 yards. - Japanese Mythology - The deity Ama-Tsu-Mara has a 12 foot long axe that does 45 Hit Points of damage per hit. - The deity Daikoku's mallet does 20 Hit Points of damage. - The deity Susanowo can cast lightning bolts that do 30 Hit Points of damage and his armor does 20 Hit Points of heat damage to anyone within 10 feet. - The deity Sukiyomi's pike hits for 40 Hit Points of damage. - Newhon mythos ( Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser) - The deity Kos's broadsword does 50 Hit Points of damage to anyone but him who touches it. - The leviathan does 30 points of hull damage per minute to any ship it attacks. - Norse Mythology - The deity Odin's Rune Wand drains 100 Hit Points from anyone who touches it. - The deity Hel can cause 5 Hit Points of damage to any creature just by looking at them. There is an aura of withering withing 90 yards of her that causes 20 Hit Points of damage. - The deity Modi has a vorpal blade that inflicts 25 Hit Points of damage per hit. - Norse Mythology. Eating one of the apples of Idun cures 50 Hit Points of damage per bite. - Sumerian mythos (Mesopotamian Mythology) - The deity Enlil can throw lightning bolts that do 40 Hit Points of damage up to a mile away and has a stone axe that does 50 Hit Points of damage per hit. - The deity Enki has a small green jade mace that does 35 Hit Points of damage on a hit. - The goddess Inanna possesses a small brass axe that does 25 Hit Points of damage. - The deity Nanna-Sin has a black axe that does 30 Hit Points of damage per hit. - The sun deity Utu can fire beams of light that do 20 Hit Points of damage. - 3 rd Edition: In regards to healing, the bottom-level "Cure Minor Wounds" spell heals a single Hit Point - a small fraction of any starting PC's hit points, except an unusually Squishy Wizard, but the minimum needed to keep someone from going into a nearly-dying state when applied at 0 HP. Its secondary effect, to stabilize a dying character with no need for a Heal skill test, remains useful for longer, before Rocket-Tag Gameplay sets in. - 3.0 and 3.5 Edition had the Metamagic feat Maximize Spell. You cast a spell using a slot three levels higher than the spell's normal level (so, for example, Fireball, which was a 3rd level spell normally required a 6th level spell slot), but in return you automatically get the maximum die-variable numeric effect of the spell. So the previously mentioned Fireball normally dealt 10d6 damage but Maximized automatically dealt 60. There was also Maximize Spell's epic level big brother: Intensify Spell, which caused the spell to automatically get double the normal die-variable maximum effect, so an Intensified Fireball would automatically inflict 120 damage. By the time you could use it, it was no longer relevant. - 4th Edition's magic missile was an unusual case: in all previous editions, it was an Always Accurate Attack with no saving throw. In 4th Edition, they made it target the enemy's reflex defense like most spells. Most players didn't like this one bit, so much that they eventually changed it to always hit (no attack roll required) but only do either 2,3 or 5 damage (depending on level) +any relevant modifiers, rather than rolling damage every time like almost every other spell. It was still very useful on minions, as unless they had some force resistance they would always get killed in one hit. - 5th Editions version of the Marut has an Unerring Slam attack which always does 60 points of force damage, and a Herd-Hitting Attack which inflicts 45 points of radiant damage to everything within a 60-foot cube. - The Guardian of Faith spell summons a Guardian Entity which lashes out at any hostile creature that comes within its reach. If the creature fails its save against the spell, it takes 20 radiant damage; otherwise, it takes 10 radiant damage. - The Cleric and Paladin can get Beacon of Hope, a buff makes healing spells into this. Under the effects of the Beacon of Hope, any time a healing spell affects something, it heals the maximum amount that the dice could potentially heal with it (a 3d8 healing spell would always heal 24 hit points, 5d8 would always heal 40 hit points, etc). If a Cleric takes the Life Domain, when they reach Cleric Level 17, they get the Supreme Healing passive which always causes their healing spells to do this. - The One Ring: Attacks deal a fixed amount of damage that's determined by the weapon, while a Great or Extraordinary success on an attack roll also adds one or two times the attacker's Body score to the damage. - In Bleach: Brave Souls, any character afflicted with the "Weaken" ailment will do just 1 damage with all of their attacks until it wears off. - Brave Hero Yuusha: the Mettle Strike "always deals 2 damage." - Bravely Default has attack items that have fixed damage. Their base damage is 500 full-party damage for the weaker variants, 1500 for the stronger, and 5000 single-target damage for one particular item, but certain things can be equipped that will boost them and elemental weaknesses still apply, so one can potentially get them up to 1125, 3375, or 9999 damage (possibly more with additional element-boosting skills). - Breath of Fire: - In Breath of Fire I, all spells and dragon transformations deal a fixed amount of damage, though this amount can be modified by elemental weaknesses and critical hits. An item you get early on in the game, the Earth Key (E. Key), always deals 30 damage to a group of enemies. - In Breath of Fire II, the special attack "Chop Chop" always does 25 damage. It's gained late in the game, but since it ignores enemy defense enemies that normally only receive 1 or 2 damage from any other attack are all instantly killed by it since the ones with the highest health only have 20 health. - In Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, the Diana card gives your whip projectiles, but the strength of their attack is unaffected by leveling up. This makes them one hit kills for early enemies and the first boss, but by the end of the game, your normal whip attack will inflict more damage than most of them, although they are still very useful. - Chrono Trigger has an enemy that does either an attack that does exactly 1 hp of damage, or an attack that sets HP to 1. Especially fun when you face a group of those enemies, each of them either battering you to near-death or flicking you hoping to snatch that last HP. The DS remake adds a bow for Marle that always does 777 damage. - In Crying Suns, squadrons inflict a fixed amount of damage with every attack. The amount doubles when they attack something that is weak to them in the squadron triangle, or when attacking a Cruiser at close range. Some battleship weapons also inflict fixed damage, while others have variable damage outputs. - In Dicey Dungeons, some attacks do a set amount of damage such as Infliction, Magic Missile, Boop, and Bop. Others like the Robot's Forcefield and Mechanical Arm increase their set damage value with each roll. - Digital Devil Saga 2 has Seth and his Desert Wind attack, which leaves its target with 150 HP before forcing them out of the fight. - The Dragon Quest series has most spells and abilities working like this, dealing damage in a fixed range regardless of level or the Wisdom stat (though it may be altered by Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors). All games starting with Dragon Quest VIII factor in a character's magical stats into spell damage, but there are still abilities that work like this. - Dungeon Encounters: Weapons and magic are split between this and Randomized Damage Attack. Weapons and spells that deal fixed damage cost more to equip but are generally more reliable than the random-damage weapons, which can deal as low as 1 HP damage if you get a really unlucky roll. - Bog in Elemental Story has a skill which deals exactly 77 damage to its target and upon evolving, gaining another skill which deals exactly 777 damage. - The Epic Battle Fantasy series: In multiple games from the third game onwards, since the first two had fixed maximum Hit Points for the Player Party of 9999: - Epic Battle Fantasy 3: All of the healing items' effects: - Kiwi: "Heals an ally for 300 HP." - Epic Battle Fantasy 4: After the Battle Mountain update, most healing items' effects: - Kiwi: "Heals an ally for 300 HP." - Crisps was, "Heals all living party members for 500 HP and 50 MP.", but, post update, was the Percent-Based Values, "Heals all living party members for 25% of their max HP." - Chips was, "Heals all living party members for 3000 HP and 300 MP.", but, post update, was the Percent-Based Values, "Heals all living party members for 50% of their max HP." - In Exit Fate, a certain boss has the spell "Annihilation Ray", which always deals 5000 damage (which is more than your characters are expected to have at any point of the game), regardless of defense or buffs, and can be avoided only by the Status Buff 'Blink'. - Fable: Health Potions and Will Potions restore a fixed number of Hit Points and Mana Points, respectively. The Hero has ample opportunity to raise his Health and Will maximums, so, while one potion is enough to top him up at the beginning of the game, he'll be chugging them rapid-fire by the end. - In Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, the Rock item inflicts a fixed amount of damage to its target, with higher-quality Rocks inflicting more damage. Theres also the Reaver classs Desperate Blow attack, which inflicts damage equal to the difference between the Reavers maximum and current HP. - The Final Fantasy series is replete with examples, not the least of which is "One Thousand Needles", a Flechette Storm that inflicts exactly 1,000 points of damage every time it is used; it is the signature move of the "Cactaur" (anthropomorphic cacti) species. Often, the player can acquire this as a Blue Magic skill. Stronger versions exist, such as "10,000 Needles" and "100,000 Needles", able to inflict more damage than the player's maximum HP cap. - In Final Fantasy VI, "10,000 Needles" is executed as "1000 Needles" 10 times in a row, each usage targeting a random standing party member. - Cactrot Rapido in Final Fantasy XI also has the above version of 10000 Needles. 1000 damage per hit is still a heavy amount, but players can band together in large groups (up to eighteen players, in fact; and that's not counting whatever pets, NPCs, or summons that each player can bring alongside them to soak up damage while the humans keep their distance). - Final Fantasy IX has several of these attacks usable by the player: - Freya's Dragon Crest, which does damage dependent on the number of dragons the player has killed throughout the game; - Zidane's Thievery, doing damage based on the number of successful steals, and his Lucky Seven, which does either 7, 77, 777, or 7777 damage if Zidane's HP currently ends in 7; - Quina's Frog Drop, which does damage according to how many frogs you've caught, and his/her Limit Glove, which does 9999 damage if s/he has exactly 1 HP remaining. - Final Fantasy VI also features the "Step Mine" / "Traveller" Blue Magic for Strago, which inflicts one point of damage for every 32 steps the player has walked from the beginning of the game. (To balance this, its cost is proportional to the player's gameplay hours.) - In Final Fantasy VIII, the Superboss Omega Weapon has two attacks that do a set amount of damage. One deals 9998 damage to your entire party, bringing everyone down to 1 HP if they have 9999 health, and KO'ing them otherwise. Another always deals 9999 damage, but fortunately only hits a single target. - The Jumbo Cactuar adds insult to injury when performing 10,000 Needles, leaning over the victim before clogging that part of the screen with a thousand "10"s. - Similar to the Thievery example above, Final Fantasy VII had a rare status effect (for lack of a better term) called "All Lucky 7s" where any character with exactly 7777 HP would fly into an Unstoppable Rage and unleash a series of attacks that always cause 7777 damage per hit. However, it reduces the player's HP to one after battle. (But if the player is lucky enough to build one character with a maximum of 7777 HP....) - Superboss Emerald Weapon had a special attack that hit each party member for 1111 HP for each Materia that character had equipped. With a normal setup, this would be devastating. However, by equipping sufficiently-levelled characters with two HP Plus Materia, they could reach the cap of 9999 HP. And then get hit for exactly 2222 HP. Which leaves them on 7777 HP. Bingo. - Enemies are also affected by this; if on 7777 health they don't go into rage mode, but every action they make hits for 7777 damage. Including area effect attacks (instant party wipe!) and poison affliction (poison is classed as self-inflicted damage, resulting in the enemy One-Hit KO-ing themselves.). - In Final Fantasy X, two of Rikku's Mixes give this to your party; the Quartet of 9 makes one ally always hit for a minimum of 9999 damage or healing, and the Trio of 9999 does this to everyone currently battling. It won't reduce your power, so if you have a Break Damage Limit weapon equipped, its wielder will continue to hit above 9999. The best uses of this are with Yuna's Pray to fully heal everyone and any attack that hits multiple times, particularly ones like Rikku's elemental gems that are normally pretty weak. - In Final Fantasy X-2, the "Cat Nip" accessory caused the user's attacks to inflict a fixed 9999 points damage any time time their HP dropped below half. (It could also combine with the Gunner's multi-hit "Trigger Happy" and Lady Luck's "Dice" skills in the original release, with almost Game-Breaker results; the International and HD re-releases also caused the accessory to inflict Berserk so that strategy won't work) Another, secret and more obscure attack is Finale, which deals 99,999 damage. One Boss has Lightfall, which inflicts 5,000 to the entire party. - The Gil Toss move used by Jugglers in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. You use 30 gil to attack, and as long as it hits, it'll always to 30 damage, no matter the enemy. - The Tonberry's Karma/Grudge move does damage proportional to number of enemies that the target killed (or the number of Tonberries the party killed). The damage tends to scale up to OHKO levels quickly. - Multiple Final Fantasy games, starting with Final Fantasy V, feature an ability called Revenge, which does damage equal to the difference between your maximum hit points and your current hit points. - The Bomb Summon Magic, a rare drop from Bomb-type enemies in Final Fantasy IV, would deal damage equal to Rydia's current hit points to one random enemy. While somewhat hampered by the fact that Rydia is a Squishy Wizard (thus having low maximum HP and poor defenses, even on the back row), its low cost make it potentially the most cost-effective damage spell in the game. - Final Fantasy Tactics has the Drain and Osmose spells work like this, doing a percentage of the target's maximum hit points or magic points respectively as damage (and healing the same amount). These spells work on anything not undead. This includes the final boss. - Final Fantasy XII lets you use 1000 Needles. It also has the Esper Zodiark, whose ultimate attack does exactly 50,000 damage and is (oddly) Non-Elemental. - The gun weapons from the same game deal damage directly dependent on the user's attack stat, which depends on the gun equipped as well as the ammunition. Measures function the same way, though their attack is low and they give beneficial statuses to whoever they hit, so they're supposed to be used on party members, instead. - In addition to regular Cactuars that do the expected moves, Freemium game Final Fantasy Brave Exvius will sometimes have a showcase mission (to show off new units with storyline importance) that pits the player against a high-HP Cactuar that repeatedly only uses 10 Needles. Yes, it only does 10 damage, and the absolute weakest character in the game has over 100 at base. It's Played for Laughs, and said fight is meant to let the player try out the newly released unit for free and thus encourage them to spend resources trying to get it from the gacha. - Fire Emblem: - The Lightning Sword in Fire Emblem Gaiden and its remake Echoes is effectively this, with a massive 15 Mt... but it doesn't take its user's own Attack into consideration at all. It's fantastic in the early game, but loses value as you gain more Attack and your enemies gain more Resistance, which reduces the Lightning Sword's damage. - The Light Brand in Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade works this way, dealing a fixed 10 damage when used as a ranged attack. This was hardly useful, but it was the only way for the player to have a sword user deal ranged damage. - The long-range dark magic attack, Eclipse, has a fixed damage rate. In Binding Blade, it automatically took a unit down to 1 HP when it hit. Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade and Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones toned it down so that it dealt damage equal to half the unit's current HP (rounded up if it was an odd number). - Crossbows in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn have Might values far surpassing any other weapon, but deal damage equal to that without taking the user's Strength into account. This makes them somewhat shaky choices overall, but incredibly potent against enemies weak to bows, as weapon effectiveness bonuses triple a weapon's effective Might, not its total damage. - The first game in the series, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, had no "Magic" stat, and magic attacks didn't take Strength into account. Combined with the fact that the Resistance stat (which reduced damage taken from magic) was practically nonexistent for both enemies and allies, it effectively made all magic into fixed-damage attacks. - In Fire Emblem Heroes, some skills or weapons allow for a fixed amount of damage to be dealt on top of whatever normal damage is done. For example, the staff Pain always does exactly 10hp of damage to the foe after combat. - Going Under: The "Cancellr" app deals 100 damage to a targeted basic enemy and ignores their armor. - Granblue Fantasy: The Poison status effect, including Damage-Over-Time debuffs act like this trope in the game. Poisoned characters or enemies take a fixed Non-Elemental damage per turn until the debuff expires. - Hades: Each weapon has two attacks, a regular and special attack. These always do the same amount of damage without any random elements. The game has buffs from Boons and gifts, but these either add a flat damage bonus or increase all damage by a percentage, ensuring that the amount of damage per attack remains entirely predictable. Subverted if Zagreus takes boons from Artemis, as her Critical Hit mechanic occurs at random. - The Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Game Boy Color game gives us Aragog (or rather his fangs as Aragog himself is part of the background) who has an attack that deals exactly 80 damage regardless of your defense. - Jade Cocoon 2: A particular tree of Earth attacks, while intended to break a specific Earth shield spell, will do a set amount of damage to unshielded targets. The higher the rank of the attack, the greater its damage. This is useful against Divine Beasts with very high Defence stats, since it guarantees consistent damage output, but is much less so in situations where any other attacks, which have the potential for critical hits or would do more damage anyway, are more effective. - Last Scenario has a mushroom Palette Swap with a "One Thousand Spores" attack, a clear Final Fantasy series Shout-Out. There's also the Slap spellcard attack, which hits for 1 damage. Useless in combat, but great for snapping allies out of Sleep or Berserk without doing too much damage to them. - In Lufia: the Legend Returns , there are several of these attacks: - Amon uses an attack that deals 666 damage. It's highly unlikely that you'll have that much HP at this point of the game. - Several opponents use attacks that will leave you at one HP. One of these will also poison you. And no, you don't have enough equipment at that point of the game to protect everyone against poison. - Your characters can learn several attacks that remove a percentage of the opponent current HP. One of these halve the opponent HP. And those attacks works on any boss as well. - Mega Man X: Command Mission has the Optional Boss, Ninetails, who has a move called Nine Fragments which does 999 damages per hit nine times, adding up to 8991 damage. The game's attack items work like this as well; Mega [element] items deal 500 elemental damage to one enemy, while Ultra [element] items deal 750 to all enemies. Strangely, the version of these items used by enemies don't follow this and can potentially hit for higher damage. - Metal Gear Ac!d's Cyborg Ninja card deals exactly 50 damage to any target. This is instant death to any enemy in the early game, but still very handy for taking out cameras later on. - The Mother series features Psychic Powers (which are the series's magic). These powers are a cross between this trope and Random Number God: they do a fixed amount of damage between a range of numbers, regardless of stats. - There's also the Bottle rockets from EarthBound (1994), which do about 120 HP of damage. - Overwatch: Inverted, such that instead of damage, it's healing, with health packs, which differ from most FPS's packs in that they restore flat values of health, meaning they're more useful for low-max-health heroes than their tankier counterparts because they restore a higher percentage of their health. - Persona 3: - The game has a Fusion Spell, available if the Protagonist has both Helel and Satan in his Persona roster, called "Armageddon" that does exactly 9999 HP worth of damage. It's one of the few ways, if not the only way, that one can even beat the Superboss, as said boss is fond of spamming full-heal spells and character annihilation spells when the character's HP reaches 10,000 or less. - There's also Superboss Elizabeth's One-Hit Kill 9999-damage Megidolaon hitting the Hit Points Cap, done whenever the player breaks the rules of the fight (it's also done twice, in case, by some miracle, the player manages to survive the first one.) - Pokémon: It comes in attacks, and healing: - There's a variety of moves that inflict a fixed amount of damage regardless of attack/defense powers or, in most cases, Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors. Most of these would be removed from games in Generation VIII, with the player being asked to delete the move if they traded a Pokémon from an earlier generation into Pokémon Sword and Shield or later. - "Sonic Boom" inflicts a fixed 20 points of damage on anything but Ghosts, who are immune to Normal-type attacks. - "Dragon Rage" inflicts a fixed 40 points of damage on anything but Fairies, who are immune to Dragon-type attacks. Notably, Dragon Rage was the only damage-dealing Dragon-type move in Generation I, making its Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors effects completely meaningless. - "Night Shade" and "Seismic Toss" inflict a fixed amount of damage equal to the user's Level. Normal-types are immune to Night Shade, while Ghosts are immune to Seismic Toss (after Gen I). - "Psywave" is a strange one: It inflicts a randomly selected amount of damage ranging from 50% to 150% of the user's level, regardless of all other factors, against anything but Dark-types, who are immune to its element. Despite being introduced in Gen I, no Pokémon could actually learn the move naturally until the following generation. - "Counter" inflicts damage to the opponent equal to double the physical damage the user just took, while "Mirror Coat" does the same thing for special damage. A third move, "Metal Burst", can counter any type of attack but inflicts only 1.5x damage. - Gen II introduced "Pain Split" divides the user's and opponent's HP equally between them, thus functioning as a Life Drain for whichever Pokemon has the lower HP (ideally the user). Until Gen IV, it was exclusive to Misdreavus. - "Endeavor" is a move introduced in Gen III that reduces the opponent's HP to the same amount as the user (and has no effect if the user has more HP). It became notorious as part of the "F.E.A.R." build - a minimum-level Pokémon (usually a Rattata) gets struck by an enemy attack, survives with 1 hit point because it's holding a Focus Sash, then uses Endeavor to reduce its opponent's HP to 1. Then on the next turn, it uses an Action Initiative move like Quick Attack, defeating its opponent through Cherry Tapping. - Gen V brought us "Final Gambit", which causes the user to faint, but inflicts damage equal to however much HP the user had remaining before using it. Funnily enough, it's possible via breeding to have One-Hit-Point Wonder Shedinja know this move. - When Pyukumuku is KO'd, its ability "Innards Out" inflicts damage to the attacker equal to its previous Hit Points. - On the healing side: - All games have levels of potion that heal a certain number of HP, so you have to buy larger potions. regular Potion=20 HP, Super Potion=50 HP, Hyper Potion=200 HP, then there's the final Max Potion, which uses Percent-Based Values and heals 100% of the HP. - Pokémon Gold, Silver, and Crystal: With the Berries. A regular Berry restores 10 Hit Points, while the Gold Berry restores 30 Hit Points. - In RuneScape, Nomad posesses one attack that inflicts damage equal to your maximum HP - 1. So if you're at full health, you survive with just one HP; anything less and it's an instant kill. - Science Girls!: Multiple, all from Heather. - Her Better Slingshot deals a small, fixed amount of damage that can't be blocked and isn't affected by Damage Reduction. - Her Exponential Explosion deals damage based on the Powers Of Two, going up by a power with each successive use, but can have its Damage Reduced, but that DR only does up to blocking around 3 points of damage, for bosses. - Shin Megami Tensei IV has Michael of the Four Archangels as a DLC demon and he has one of the nastiest skills in the game, Fallen Grace. This move deals exactly 666 points of almighty damage to all enemies! - In Sonic Shuffle, when Amy draws a Special card in battle, she will receive a card that will always land on 5. This is useful against most enemies, but if one is going for all seven Precioustone pieces, which is especially true in Story Mode, the score of the monster guarding the final Precioustone piece will be 6, which outranks Amy's special move. - Super Mario RPG contains an attack called "Geno Whirl" which, if properly executed, will always cause 9999 damage to all non-boss (\|\|plus Exor\|\|) enemies in the game. Oddly enough, the highest HP user in the game only has 8000 HP, making this attack almost humorously over the top. There are also a couple items that inflict fixed damage to all enemies when used. The Rock Candy, which deals 200 damage; and the Star Egg, which deals 100 damage, but is reusable. - In Sushi Striker: The Way of Sushido, Hohten's Stick Chop always deals 500 HP of damage, with it increasing by 100 each time Stick Chop is improved. The way this game scales HP with progress through the game, Stick Chop's damage becomes increasingly weak, and would be rendered ineffective by mid-game, if not for the fact that Stick Chop will deal its assigned damage regardless of any defensive or disruptive effects in play (even Stealth Striker, which causes all other attacks to pass through the user). - In Tales of Vesperia, Patty's Card The Gamble and Janpai spells do a varying amount of fixed damage based on what cards or mahjong tiles come up, the most painful being the combinations with the highest point value. - The rarity-5 enemy yari in Touken Ranbu always deals fixed damage regardless of your sword's level or leadership stat. Add to that its ridiculously high speed, which allows it to almost always attack first, and the yari class's ability to bypass troops and you have a nightmare on your hands. - Transistor: It's the nature of all Functions, a.k.a attacks, such as Breach's base 100 damage, which can be improved by using other functions to upgrade them, but game progression gives enemies improvements to their health and abilities, making the route of progression the exploitation of synergies between functions, instead of just the functions themselves getting stronger. - A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: The final boss of the Nightmare Dimension has an attack that does 9999 damage if unblocked, and 4999 damage if blocked. - Wargroove: Sedge's groove always deals 35% damage to all targets no matter how damaged the target or Sedge is. - Wild ARMs 3 has this in form of Dark Luceid, a spell that does a fixed amount of damage for every elemental resistance the enemy has. Usually deals pitiful damage given that enemies rarely have more than one elemental resistance (there are eight in total), but then, some Bosses just pile on Resistances... - Many old RPGs in general, such as Wizardry, had spells deal fixed damage. - In World of Tanks, a tank that is set on fire starts rapidly losing a fixed amount of health based on its maximum health. Fire damage is the same no matter how the fire was started, but the damage slowly lessens as the fire is put out, and quickly using a consumable fire extinguisher stops any further damage. - XCOM: Enemy Unknown gives the psychic soldiers under your command the starting ability "Mindfray", which deals a meager 5 points damage—but it always deals them (unless the enemy is immune or practically immune to psychic powers), which in a game where the Random Number God hates your guts is a godsend when you absolutely must finish off an enemy before the end of your turn * : Enemy Within changed psionic powers to have a chance to hit based on the attacker's will versus the defender's will, making it more difficult to use effective, except against Mutons. Grenades and rockets also do fixed damage in their area of effect. - XCOM 2 has very few weapons that deal guaranteed damage, making explosives much more devastating: grenades and rockets do variable damage to targets, but always do the maximum amount of damage at the center of their area-of-effect. - Once you unlock weapon modifications, you can attach stocks to your guns, which guarantee that you'll always do at least 1, 2, or 3 points of damage (for basic, advanced, and superior qualities) if you miss. The ability to consistently deal damage, even with a low probability of hitting, is extremely good or really bad note : Guaranteed damage is a significant drawback against enemies that retaliate, such as the Codex, which will duplicate itself whenever it takes damage. Stocks and bad accuracy mean you'll be overwhelmed by too many Codexes quickly. - DLC War Of The Chosen has the Katana, the exclusive weapon of the Assassin. While it technically could miss, it has a base accuracy of 100%, meaning it's functionally impossible for it to miss, and it always deals at least 8 points of damage. In a game where nothing is guaranteed, this is an extremely powerful attack option. - Xenosaga uses this in Episode III, against \|\|Citrine, Jr's "sister"\|\|, a boss you fight on the Durandal. One attack dropped all targets' HP to exactly 666. The next attack does - you guessed it - 666 damage exactly. If the enemy boosted after the first attack, well, kiss your ass goodbye.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneThousandNeedles
One-Track-Minded Hunger - TV Tropes A character has One-Track-Minded Hunger when they will do (almost) anything to get something to eat to such a degree that it almost seems like their Character Alignment. No matter what, they'll go for food, and they won't ever let up. Nothing can convince them not to eat everything they can reach... except maybe another One-Track-Minded Hunger character standing in their way. That said, It's NOT a good idea to stand between them and their food. They might not care much about Good or Evil, and laws are at best a suggestion. They may be good or evil-aligned, but only by accident or because it will earn them more food. It can sometimes start as basically this, then develop into a more personal goal for the character to get their meal out of pride which may or may not lead into Motive Decay depending on how much of the character's gluttony was caused by hunger or psychological reasons to begin with. These characters are (most of the time) Big Eaters that might also be an Extreme Omnivore to boot. They tend to suffer Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny! level susceptibility to Delicious Daydreams; sometimes even Meat-O-Vision. When they do get their mitts on a meal, don't be surprised if they proceed to scarf it up like a wild animal. Heavily prone to falling for a Delicious Distraction. You want them to be on your side? Give them food. You need them to do any sort of task or favor for you with a 99.9999% success rate? Simply bribe them with food. Sub-Trope of Obsessed with Food, which is someone who isn't necessarily always seeking to eat food but otherwise has a fixation on the subject. Compare Bratty Food Demand. See also fairly common overlapping tropes Horror Hunger and Hungry Menace. Contrast Forgets to Eat. ## Examples: - The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: When Kurumi gets hungry (which is almost always), she will become aggressive and can't help but think about the food she wants. - Dragon Ball Z: Majin Buu, in his "fat" form, is quite malicious but really only cares about candy. The number of people he killed without eating them can be counted on one hand. - Gluttony the Homunculus in Fullmetal Alchemist is technically a bad guy, but he's really more of a mentally-deranged kid with Extreme Omnivore tendencies. - One Piece: - Luffy only thinks about one thing outside fights and that is food. - Later arcs introduce Big Mom, a member of Yonko, who has a vague disorder where she gets cravings for a specific food and rampages until said craving is satisfied. Unfortunately, she's an incredibly powerful giant of a woman capable of ''stealing souls'' who becomes incapable of discerning even family in these rages and might devour anyone in her way. It's been said that she's even devoured more than one of her own children when in the grips of her hunger. \|\|The only reason she even has her Devil Fruit power is because she ate the previous holder during a particularly bad hunger frenzy as a child.\|\| - Toriko's Neo lives and breathes the trope. Its only goal in existence is to revive through Acacia's Full Course (\|\|the Full Course of the World\|\|) and devour the world. Since the manga is about food, it essentially speaks for itself. - Galactus in many of his incarnations. He even says he's Above Good and Evil! - Venom's Ultimate counterpart was created to be a protoplasmic cure for cancer, but in its incomplete, weaponized state it is ravenously hungry for flesh and drives its hosts to devour anything and anyone around it. - Played with horrifyingly in the first arc of Hellblazer when John Constantine has to stop Memnoth, a Hunger demon which is loose in New York. Said demon kills his victims by cursing them with an insatiable hunger for a non-food item, usually something valuable that the person covets, such as jewels, rare comics, etc. In one case, he makes a bodybuilder eats his own ARM in an attempt to sate his hunger. If the victim doesn't suffocate from trying to swallow solid items, they die when their bodies consume themselves from Memnoth's possession. - Kaa from Disney's The Jungle Book (1967) seems to suffer from this. He's rather affable and, unlike Shere Khan, not a wrathful active villain (one episode of Jungle Cubs even shown him to be an outright Friend to All Living Things the rare time he is full) but he is constantly setting his hypnotic eyes on a new morsel, making him a danger to the protagonists. - The Greedy from Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure. He is a gigantic Blob Monster made out of taffy, who spends all his time eating himself yet never feels satisfied. He believes a "sweetheart" will satiate him. When Raggedy Ann tells him about her candy heart, The Greedy goes absolutely berserk trying to obtain it. - The alien slugs in Slither can turn people into this. Making them seek out the closest source of meat they can find, regardless of what or who it is. - Pizza the Hutt from the movie Spaceballs is always eating. And when locked in his car, he eats himself to death. - In Animorphs, the Taxxons have an endless hunger that drives them to eat their own wounded (as well as anything else they can get their mouths on). Many Taxxons willingly became Controllers because being part of the Yeerks' forces meant they would have the power to hunt and eat more prey. Their hunger is so powerful that not even the Yeerks can stop it. The Yeerk that would become Visser Three refused to become a Taxxon Controller because he didn't want to live with that hunger. \|\|In the final arc, the Animorphs persuade some Taxxons to switch sides by offering to transform them into animals with smaller appetites, like pythons.\|\| - There's a brief bit in one of the Discworld novels which shows the POV of a shark, whose entire mentality comes down to "=", i.e. "sense it = eat it". (It's brief, because the "it" it senses is Rincewind's feet, and the Luggage follows a similar equation with regards to anything that threatens its master...) - The Hungry Tiger from the Land of Oz books. He is always hungry, no matter how much he eats, and longs to eat a "fat baby," though he never would because his conscience will not allow him to do so. - Ungoliant from The Silmarillion is a spider-like Eldritch Abomination who is all about hunger and eating stuff. She teamed up with Morgoth because she was hungry and he offered her to suck the Two Trees dry. Later he betrayed her because she was still hungry and wanted to eat the Silmarils. Morgoth had to call his devil goon squad to stop her from eating these artifacts along with him, since she was already overpowering him. Although she disappeared afterwards from history alltogether, it is said that she isn't around anymore because she eventually ate herself to death. - Dungeons & Dragons: - Supplement REF5 Lords of Darkness. One opponent the PCs can encounter is Rugen Phimister, a ghoul who is always hungry and always eating. - Dark Sun setting. The Fael are undead creatures who never quenched their need for material consumption in life. In death, they're condemned to be always hungry and always searching out food to eat. Worse yet, the more they eat the hungrier they get, so no matter how much they eat they're never satisfied. - Famine Spirit is the 3.5th edition adaptation of the Fael — a corporeal undead that doesn't have the ability to stop eating. - The Fiendwurm is a giant earthworm that has a rift to the Abyss in its stomach and in constant pain. Eating reduces the pain so it seeks to eat as much as it can. - In Nomine: Haagenti is the Demon Prince of Gluttony. He spends all his time either eating or getting more food, and anyone around him is at risk of becoming his next meal. - Warhammer 40,000: The Tyranids are smart enough to do things like sacrifice their own or employ psychological warfare to demoralize prey, so it can be easy to forget that, at base, their only real endgame is to eat everything. - In the play of Metamorphoses, Ceres curses Erysichthon with an insatiable hunger. He eats everything he can. Sells his possessions and then tries to sell his own mother for food, and then eventually eats himself. - The demon Gorgoth in Arcanum is cursed with insatiable hunger, and was banished to the Void when he chowed down on a halfling village and no one could think of anything better to do with him. Recruiting him into your party and keeping him loyal requires you to keep him fed with a steady supply of lizard carcasses. - In Commander Keen, the Dopefish — the second dumbest creature in the universe — has a thought process that goes, "Swim swim hungry. Swim swim hungry." - Quina of Final Fantasy IX is always on the lookout for new food to try and will eat, or express interest in eating, anything, including at one point, a rock. - The Heartless in Kingdom Hearts act all out of instinct, and their instinct is to get hearts to eat. Nothing more. - Kirby is seen as a hero, and yet more than once he saved the world by accident, looking for a cake or something similar. - League of Legends: - Kog'maw, a champion, attacks only using his gastric acid. It's stated he spits acid on stuff because he can't swallow them whole (yet), meaning anyone he spits on is a potential breakfast. And because it's a baby, he doesn't even understand good and evil. - Same with Cho'Gath, except that Cho actually is Chaotic Evil, too. It is an Eldritch Abomination in constant hunger, devouring anything coming too close to its claws. And its main objective is to bring its species to join the feast. - The Maw's entire purpose is to eat everything, to the level of a Cosmic Horror. - The Spirit Eater Curse from Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer is built around this trope. The Spirit Eater is a horrific demi-godlike entity that turns the host into an insatiable devourer of spirits, fey, and the dark energy of the undead. The curse becomes so strong that it eventually consumes the soul of the host; destroying the very essence of their existence and leaving only an empty corpse behind. The eater has consumed countless spirits for generations, and the Player Character can use it For the Evulz. It devours all life in the Forgotten Realms and a couple other planes. The gods band together to fight it and it literally eats half of them before they bring it down. (It's even implied that the Betrayer didn't truly die from the wrath of a dozen gods.) An ironic thing about it is that Myrkul, the god who created the curse can be eaten by it. D&D gods are virtually unkillable, they just partially fade away. The spirit eater completely destroyed them. - Annabelle in The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel starts out as a young woman on a journey who takes up fishing as a way of stretching her travel budget. By the second game, she has shifted her priorities so that the point of the journey is to catch and eat every variety of fish in the Empire (to the point where the only time she isn't seen near a fishing hole is after she was dragged to shelter after she tried fishing in a blizzard), which continues for the rest of the series. She ends up marrying the younger brother of the owner of Erebonia's top producer of fishing gear, and her idea of a honeymoon is a cross-continental fishing trip. - Pokémon: - Munchlax, which forgets about the food it has stashed in its fur in its sheer desperation to eat. It's said to eat whatever looks like it might be edible (keyword: might) without a thought. It also has no time for chewing. Its evolution Snorlax of course applies as well, as eating is the only thing that motivates it to do anything besides sleep. It's said to have no interest in anything other than eating. - Morpeko has a lightning-fast metabolism, so it gets hungry again very quickly after eating. When it's hungry, or in "Hangry Mode", its temperament becomes highly aggressive and will resort to dastardly acts to satiate itself. - Guzzlord, known as UB-05 Glutton, is a far more extreme example. Guzzlord's eternal hunger is to the point where it stops at nothing to consume everything — buildings, mountains, even the very land and sea. Most horrifyingly, no one has ever found their droppings, so they are essentially black holes. - The Gobblers from Wizard101 definitely apply. They are Extreme Omnivores that continue to eat buildings even after they are fed a potion that is suppose to both magically and chemically trigger the gag reflex. - The Eaters from Chimera Beast are a Horde of Alien Locusts that have no other motive than to eat all lifeforms in sight, assimilating their abilities. In one ending, \|\|they leave the planet after destroying the planet's ecosystem, continuing on to destroy other planets until they eventually reach Earth.\|\| - The Dead Money DLC for Fallout: New Vegas presents us with Dog, one half of the divided personalities within a schizophrenic Nightkin. Dead Money's overall story carries a theme of greed, and Dog represents this via pathological, uncontrollable hunger. If he can't maintain a steady diet to keep his appetite under control, eventually he can no longer resist it and will simply feast upon anything edible-looking within reach, no matter how he has to crush and mangle it to fit - Ghost People, explosive collars, humans... - Boreas from Xenoblade Chronicles 2 thinks about little other than food. Almost every node of his affinity chart requires either feeding him or donating food to his personal stash. When said stash is stolen, he stops at absolutely nothing to get it back. - In What Remains of Edith Finch, Molly becomes this after she is sent to bed without dinner. First, she eats everything she can find in her room: old gerbil food, a tube of toothpaste, and some holly berries. What happens after this depends on your interpretation of her diary: she either becomes various animals hunting for their prey, ending with a sea monster eating her real self, or she dies of food poisoning while hallucinating of becoming the aforementioned creatures. - The titular slimes of Slime Rancher basically live for food, especially the Pink Slimes that will eat basically anything. The rest are a little pickier, only being willing to eat out of their category of food (fruit, veggies, or meat) and each have a Trademark Favorite Food, though all of them will attempt to take a bite out of you if they turn feral and will also try to eat plorts from other slimes. Whether they're hungry or grumpy or feral, food will always make them feel better. Then of course there's The Tarr who eat other slimes and whose favorite food is ranchers, and "BOb" a pile of Pink Slimes in a trench coat who have figured out how to use Ranch Exchange... and use it to ask for chickens. - Cream Heroes has this with Lulu. He's willing to even paddle around in water if it means getting hold of a snack. Kitten Dodo can be just as bad, if not worse. He's also risked getting his paws wet in the name of food, and even fished the spoon Claire had mixed and served his food with out of the sink so he could lick it. - Captain Planet and the Planeteers does this in an episode where a kid somehow got cloned. The clones are all ravenously hungry and the more they eat, the more they multiply. There are many repeated "we are hungry" cries while the Planeteers work to undo it. It was possibly an overpopulation lesson. - Looney Tunes: - Whatever obstacles stand between the Tasmanian Devil and a snack won't stand there for long. Many episodes open with a description of him which includes a long list of animals he eats, ending with "especially rabbits", or on one occasion, wild duck. - Sylvester may also qualify. Most of his villainous antics abide to setting on eating Tweety or some other small animal. Also at times he can be a bit of a bully and a schemer towards other cats and dogs. Outside those moments, he is either forced into a chase by a human owner or acts as a non-provocative protagonist. - As would Wile E. Coyote — frankly, any animal protagonist in an animated cartoon would probably qualify, barring the times where they interact only with non-prey characters and more aspects of their personality are shown. - Case in point, Zig the Hyena from Zig & Sharko. His one and only obsession is trying to eat Marina the siren, and it doesn't matter how much pain Sharko is going to inflict him for his attempts — Zig is not going to give up. - The Eruptodon from Dragons: Riders of Berk is a Titan-wing Boulder-class dragon that must constantly feed, its primary diet being volcanic lava. If it goes without feeding for very long, it becomes insatiable until it dies of starvation. - A defining characteristic of the protagonists of 2 Stupid Dogs is their obsession with food.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneTrackMindedHunger
One, Two, Skip a Few - TV Tropes Miss Flamiel: Yakko, can you count to 100? Yakko: One, two, skip a few, 99, 100! Miss Flamiel: No, give me all the numbers! Yakko: Hey, it's only a six-minute cartoon. A person is counting something - be it exercise reps, money, items, etc. At first their counting is honest, but then said person intentionally jumps their count. This can happen for several reasons: The person is tired of counting or doing something repeatedly (especially for exercise reps), or he/she is trying to impress someone nearby, or conversely, he/she is trying to deceive his friend/higher-up (especially with money count). Or perhaps they're just being silly. Compare Counting to Potato. ## Examples: - There's a MAD magazine comic featuring two guys at the gym, one of whom is counting "..105, 106, 107..". The other says "You must have awesome strength to do that many reps." "It's mind over matter. Whenever a pretty girl walks by, I start counting at 100". - Used twice in Calvin and Hobbes. In one strip he's doing push-ups and his counting is well in the hundreds, because he claims exercise is more rewarding if you count what it feels like. In another he's jump-roping, and is counting in the millions because higher numbers give him more time to jump over the rope. - In one Peanuts strip, Lucy is skipping rope saying "Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen..." When she passes by Charlie Brown and Linus she loudly says " Ten billion and one, ten billion and two, ten billion and three, ten billion and four..." Once they're out of sight she returns to "Twenty one, twenty two, twenty three..." - Monsters vs. Aliens: The Missing Link is lifting weights when Susan walks by. "Seven, eight, nine hundred ninety-nine, one thousand. Can't believe I did ten sets." - Atlantis: The Lost Empire: Commander Rourke threatens to shoot the Atlantean King on the count of ten if he doesn't divulge the whereabouts of the Heart of Atlantis. The countdown goes "one, two, nine, te..." It's only when Rourke \|\|notices the symbol in the pool in front of the throne that turns out to be the portal to the Heart\|\| that he puts the gun down. - The Jungle Book (1967): he doesn't exactly skip a few numbers, but the effect is the same when Shere Khan decides to toy with Mowgli before killing him by closing his eyes and counting to ten. "One...two...three...four...you're trying my patience. Fivesixseveneight, nine, ten!" - A variant from the Sgt Bilko movie, during a surprise inspection by Major Thorn, the title character has to tell one of his out-of-shape men to "drop and give me twenty". While the Major is distracted by something else, Bilko mercifully says "And 20", even though the private only managed about one and a half pushups. - Reversed in Spaceballs during the self-destruct countdown. Computer: Nine. Eight. Six. Skroob: Six?! W-what happened to seven? Computer: Just kidding! - And who can forget King Arthur from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: King Arthur: One, two, Five! His servant what'shisname: Three, sir! King Arthur: Three! - In Home Alone, Kevin watches a gangster movie called "Angels with Filthy Souls" which features a scene where Johnny, the main character, sees off a fellow gangster: Johnny: Hey. I tell ya what I'm gonna give you, Snakes. [ Johnny pulls out his tommygun] Johnny: I'm gonna give you to the count of ten to get your ugly, yella, no-good keister off my property, before I pump your guts fulla lead! Snakes: All right, Johnny, I'm sorry! I'm going! Johnny: One... two... ten! [ Snakes gets thoroughly ventilated as Johnny laughs maniacally] Johnny: Keep the change, ya filthy animal! - A variant in an episode of Red Dwarf, when Rimmer is trying to dictate an essay for a practice astronomy exam question, "What does the red spectrum tell us about quasars?" - although it's clear that he has no idea what a red spectrum or a quasar is. Lister enters the room and Rimmer immediately skips to "...in conclusion, this comprehensively answers the question of what the red spectrum tells us about quasars." - Don Draper does this by the book in a Season 1 episode of Mad Men. He's doing push-ups in his bedroom, counting under his breath, and when his wife enters the room he abruptly goes from single digits to somewhere in the nineties. - In The Suite Life of Zack & Cody episode "Who's the Boss?", Arwin is testing out his letter-sorting machine, where it scans the recipient's name and shoots it into its proper cubby, but the test results are the same as his other inventions. He counts down before starting it up: Arwin: [ about to activate the machine] Ten, nine, eight... Moseby: Arwin! Arwin: Three, two, one. - In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Thirty Days" Tom Paris is doing push-ups in his brig cell (long story). He starts honest with "One, two, three", but then Neelix comes in with a meal. After a slight pause he jumps to "Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred." - As another example, the song Heroes by Sunday Driver has this directly in the lyrics: "Now I better stay home, counting brain cells. One, two, skip a few. Put them up for resale." - In "Music to My Ears" from Bear in the Big Blue House, Ojo as the bandleader introduces the "Hey, We Can Play" song with "Okay! A-one and a-two and an eight, ten, twelve!" - Israeli playwright Khanokh Levin once wrote a skit satirising the peace talks between Israel and Egypt, showing the leaders of both sides in an introductory round, pondering meaningfully before giving a slightly higher number in an apparently meaningless count, making the mediator quickly lose his patience. When both of them have to leave for some time and leave him to continue in their place, he uses their absence to speed up the counting until he reaches 2000 and declares the round over. - In the stage adaptation of 'Allo 'Allo!, a scene begins with Herr Flick doing push-ups; when his love interest Helga enters, he adds a thousand to his count. - In "The Dinosaur Song" from the stage show Franklin's Class Trip, the Dinosaur tells Franklin that he is 100 million years old. Snail: One hundred million? Is that a very big number, Franklin? Franklin: I'm not sure. Let me see... one, two, three, four, five, six, seven... one hundred million! Yep, it's big. - In The Lost Crown, Nancy skips at least half the numbers when she's supposed to be counting to thirty in a game of hide-and-seek. - One mission of Borderlands 2 has you set up missiles Tiny Tina made to take out a train track. After they're set up she counts down from ten, but launches after nine because she got bored. - Joking in front of Katarina as Garen in League of Legends causes him to play his animation, a one handed hand stand, and say "999... and 1000! Oh, didn't see you there!" - One of the flashback sequences in Heavy Rain has you playing as a young \|\|Scott Shelby\|\| who is playing hide-and-seek with his brother. You can count up to twenty manually or skip ahead a few numbers. - The Animaniacs episode "Chalkboard Bungle" provides the page quote. Miss Flamiel asks Yakko to count to 100. Yakko counts to two before skipping to 99. When Miss Flamiel tells him to give her all the numbers, Yakko reminds her the cartoon's only six minutes long, implying that he has the ability to count all the numbers, just not the time to do so. - Bugs Bunny cartoon "Racketeer Rabbit": Rocky (an Edward G. Robinson expy): Oh yeah, yeah. (counting:) One for you and one for me. Two for you and one, two for me. Three for you and one, two, three for me. - Cool Cat, another Looney Tunes character, repeated this version in "3 Ring Wing Ding." - Yosemite Sam tries to do a quick count on Bugs during a duel in "Wild and Woolly Hare" ("1, 2, 3, 9, 10!") but Bugs was hip to him and walks behind and kisses Sam on the nose when he turns and fires behind him. - Subverted in "Hare Trimmed" as Bugs and Sam duel. Bugs counts off but marches in place, extending 9 to fractions until Sam is in the middle of the street and gets run over by a bus. - The catch phrase of the The Real Ghostbusters, when shooting off their guns. "On, three. Three!" In one episode, the veteran member explicitly instructs the younger members to wait for him to count. - Danger Mouse will pull the "after three" gambit as well. In "The Good, The Bad and the Motionless" after he figures his evil alter ego created three blue demons from thought alone: DM: Demons, you're just a figure of his imagination so after three, vanish. Three. ( The demons vanish) - In Superman: The Animated Series, Lobo is introduced this way: Lobo: I'm givin' you geeks ten seconds before I frag everything in sight. Ooooone, TEN! [ Lobo pulls out a big gun, scene cuts to outside the bar with blasts of light creating holes in its structure from the inside] - Family Guy: Brian tries to impress a hot girl he has seen coming to a coffee shop after running by putting on a headband, acting like he just got done with a run himself. Brian: And, one thousand, whew! Girl: One thousand what? Brian: Percent, that's what! - Not quite a straight example, but in the "Not Too Little" song from the Strawberry Shortcake episode "Baby Takes the Cake," Apple Dumplin' sings that she can count to ten. Apple: 1, 5, 9, 6, 10! - In "I'm Really Ever Not So Well" from Charlie and Lola, when Lola gets a cold, Charlie tells her it's because of all of the germs in her mouth. After an extended musical sequence, she comments that there must be thousands and hundreds of germs. He suggests that she count them, so she does so. Lola : One, two, three, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, sixty-four, eighty-nine, a thousand three hundred, 64 billion, 500 trillion, twenty-two thousand, twenty-two hundred, twenty-two thousand, one hundred billion and trillion gazillion , million, tillion, quillion, million... - Microsoft's numbering system for its Windows operating system is rather confusing. To date, as far as primary versions released to consumers, it goes Windows 1.0, Windows 2.0, Windows 3.0, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me (Millennium Edition), Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 and Windows 11. Note in particular the skip between Windows 8 and Windows 10, though if you count up all of the ones leading to Windows 10, it would actually be Windows 11, and that's not even counting all the NT releases including Windows 2000 which were marketed mainly only to businesses.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneTwoSkipAFew
One-Hit Kill - TV Tropes Over already? Any time people gather with the goal of hitting each other until one of them keels over, the ultimate trump card would be a weapon, spell, technique, trick, or what-have-you that makes people fall over immediately, without all that annoying strategizing and healing and stuff. The One-Hit Kill is that trump card. Often, the One-Hit Kill isn't humble enough to just kill, instead petrifying, permanently polymorphing, or banishing its victim to the Phantom Zone. At times, it's not even content with a single target, becoming a One-Hit Polykill. Usually, the One-Hit Kill comes at a price. Sometimes it's a Dangerous Forbidden Technique which to use requires Casting From Hit Points or life span, other times it's just really hard to pull off, or leaves you wide open for a counterattack. One-Hit Kills are a common spell in RPGs. In video RPGs, it's frequently a Useless Useful Spell because of low hit rates, inability to affect bosses, or a prohibitive cost required to cast it, if not all three combined. Tabletop RPGs, by contrast, have a history of letting those pesky spellcasters make these spells insufficiently useless, turning many fights into a mere Quick Draw contest. In martial arts, it frequently takes the form of the Touch of Death. If it only works at the start of a fight, it's a Back Stab. If it only works at the end of a fight, it's a Finishing Move. If every enemy attack is a one-hit kill, the protagonist is a One-Hit-Point Wonder. If every attack by both you and the enemy is a one-hit kill, you get Rocket-Tag Gameplay. There's also a non-lethal variant of this: The One-Hit Knockout. One-Hit KOs usually don't involve anything like forbidden techniques or rare technology, just an immense amount of force applied at once, usually in the form of a punch to the face. (Bonus points if a particularly fleshy or swift and satisfying sound effect accompanies the blow.) The drawback of this is somewhat self-explanatory: It's not a kill, only a knockout. Still, it gives the user at least a solid five-minute head-start, perhaps even longer, to make an escape or thwart some evil plans before the target can recover and figure out what hit him. In certain works, this is a common reprisal when someone (accidentally or intentionally) presses someone's Berserk Button. With bladed weapons, cinematic representation of this trope often becomes a Single-Stroke Battle. When a character opens a fight with their most powerful attack in hope of a one-hit kill, the trope overlaps with Begin with a Finisher. See also Chunky Salsa Rule. Often a Death or Glory Attack. Compare Coup de Grâce. Note that if the battle is laughably brief because the attacker is much more powerful, as opposed to simply using an instant-death weapon, it's a Curb-Stomp Battle. Compare/Contrast HP to 1, where the attack is merciful enough to spare a single Hit Point. A Mook that can deliver this is an Instakill Mook. ## Example subpages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other examples: - Amulet: \|\|The Amulet spirit kills Chronos the Mountain Giant by crushing him under a massive boulder. Keep in mind Chronos is a giant winged half-spider, half-beast creature, providing a horrifying demonstration of how strong the Amulet spirit is\|\|. - The DCU: - In Justice League International #5, Guy Gardner challenges Batman for leadership of the League. Bats ends◊ the fight with one punch. - Done again, in Injustice: Gods Among Us with John Constantine taking Gardner's place... on the floor◊. - Future Guy Gardner mastered this move himself. - When Batman gets his powers swapped with Superman via Banshee, he gets brutal one-hit payback◊ against poor Bane. The time where Bane broke Batman looks tame in comparison. - In Red Lanterns the adorable and deadly Dex-Starr is on the receiving end of a "One Punch" by the Midnighter, whose clearly not proud of this action◊. - The Flash has the Infinite◊ Mass◊ Punch◊. - Thanks to Superman's near-unstoppable Super Strength, anytime he's serious or enraged almost all his confrontations becomes this. The What If? scenarios with Supes fighting Batman, tend to end quickly◊ unless Batman is crazy prepared prior to facing Superman. There's also The Joker's death in Injustice aka the "Superman high five". Or Superman punching Brainiac out after the latter has gotten him real mad. However, if it's a reversal and it's Superman going down in one attack, it's usually an "Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?" moment or at worst The Worf Effect. - Superman's cousin Kara doesn't fall far from the tree, as proved in Supergirl (2005) story arc Girl Power when Kara knocks Solomon Grundy out cold with one single punch. - Superman's son Jonathan doesn't fall from the tree either as he gives a love tap to Damian Wayne that knocks the little bugger out cold◊. - The time Hal Jordan tried to measure up to Darkseid in New 52... didn't work out well for Hal◊. - Another straight example comes from He-Man of all people who takes out◊ a possessed Superman with one stab of The Power Sword in a crossover. By the power of Gray Skull people. - Lady Shiva's signature move is the Leopard's Blow, a single strike to the chest that kills her victim by disrupting their heartbeat (though in more graphic works it's her putting her hand straight through someone's face using the "weak" point across which their eyes lay). Batman, Red Robin, Cass, Richard Dragon and Bronze Tiger can tell she's nearby if they come across victims of this attack with barely a cursory examination of the bodies (which is much more easily explained by the more gory take on the attack). - Judge Dredd: Dredd was confronted by one of the "Dark Judges" — Judge Fear, one look at whose face will usually kill; Fear opened the visor on his helmet and invited Dredd to "Gaze into the face of FEAR!" Dredd responded by PUNCHING RIGHT THROUGH FEAR'S HEAD, killing him, while bellowing, "GAZE INTO THE FIST OF DREDD!" - Marvel Universe: - Heavy hitters like The Incredible Hulk and The Thing are fond of this. - Thor knocks out◊ Namor with one punch in Invaders #33. - One of Iron Fist's gimmicks is his◊ ability◊ to one shot foes with his signature fist. - The Enchantress vs She-Hulk in Secret Wars (1984)... take a wild guess who wins◊. - Magneto has gotten this many times (mainly from Wolverine◊, Colossus◊ and Cyclops◊) two clearly fatal, one just a K.O. It's perfectly justified as the Master of Magnetism is still a Squishy Wizard. - Magneto in the finale of X-Men: Age of Apocalypse (where he's the closest thing this Crapsack World has to a Big Good) goes one on one with Apocalypse, who's pounding on Magneto and asks why he doesn't fight back. Magneto responds that he can't, because he's concentrating. Apocalypse doesn't even have time to wonder what Magneto means before getting ripped in half. - Despite being touted as "Street-level" Spider-Man has done this a lot, likely due to Spidey having the necessary strength to knock The Incredible Hulk around. The more average or even some higher-level foes don't stand a chance when Peter Parker gets serious. - Early example with Flash Thompson who made the dear mistake of challenging Peter to a boxing match, Peter tried using just a fraction of his strength to end the bout before Flash got hurt. But even a love tap from Peter sent Flash flying◊. - Grey Hulk has a memorable "encounter◊" with Cosmic Spider-Man, aka getting punched into space. Some nearby kids appropriately stated that if Spidey starts pulling stunts like that, he'd better start wearing a cape. - The poor T-rex◊ who meets Spidey in the Savage Land. - Happens in Dark Reign where Norman Osborn, who had long since gone off the deep end, is ranting madly and gets quickly◊ silenced by his Arch-Enemy. - In The Death of Spider-Man, the Human Torch does this to the Green Goblin. Keep in mind, that in this universe, the Goblin is a nigh-invincible hulking beast with the ability to throw fireballs and not a guy in a suit as he is in most media. Though this then shifts into Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu, when Goblin — who's fire-powered in the Ultimate universe — comes back from this bigger and stronger than ever, allowing him to fulfil the name of the arc. Later in that same arc, Peter Parker shows up, bleeding from a gunshot wound, and takes the Vulture out for a while with one web. - It's revealed in Superior Spider-Man, that Peter is holding back all the time as Doc-Ock discovers when he takes over Peter's body and punches Scorpion in the face, tearing his jaw off◊. - One of the coolest examples is the Megaton Punch Spider-Man does against Red Goblin◊ after rebounding with the Venom symbiote. - In the What If? version of "Back in Black", Kingpin's sniper killed MJ. When Spidey finally corners him, Kingpin has Aunt May as hostage and tries to use her to have him stand still while he beats him to death... Except Spider-Man has realized he plans to kill her next to avoid having a witness, and tears his heart out◊. As he dies, Kingpin realizes that Spider-Man had been pulling his punches immensely the entire time because he didn't want to kill him. - There's the time Ultimate Universe Wolverine meets◊ Ultimate Universe Hulk. - Drax the Destroyer once did what he born/created for and killed Thanos with a single Mortal Kombat-esque Finishing Move; this being Thanos he got better soon. - Thanos himself is a fan of this trope using his insane strength to murder War Machine◊, Star Lord, Falcon◊ and Mentor◊ (his own father) with a single attack. - In Uncanny Avengers, Rogue accidentally does this to Grim Reaper after absorbing Wonder Man's strength. She was unprepared for just how much more powerful she'd become, and ended up snapping the villain's neck with one punch. While still holding back. - Rogue's main powers come from Carol Danvers, who drops Norman Osborn (who's wearing Powered Armor at the time) with a single punch◊. - The Quest For The Time Bird, this is a favorite of legendary warrior Le Rige, who tends to kill his prey with just one swift and powerful blow of his axe. - Marv from Sin City never seems to have to hit a person a second time (although sometimes he does anyway). The only exception to this rule was Manute, who was just as big and powerful as he was and required a hell of a beating to take down. - Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): In the penultimate chapter, Godzilla obliterates \|\|Keizer Ghidorah (as well as leveling and lastingly irradiating Berezniki)\|\| in one hit when he \|\|unlocks his Spiral Heat Ray thanks to Mothra\|\|. - Ace Combat: Wings of Unity has Fluttershy of all ponies get this in the third chapter: when the villains launch a "burst missle" that destroys a fleet of Equestrian ships, she enters a Freak Out and knocks an enemy Pegasus out of the sky to his doom with one punch, screaming in rage the whole time. Even her friends are startled, with Firefly remarking on how she'll avoid making Fluttershy angry at all costs. - In Celestia's Rocket Adventures, Team Rocket's Robo Mega Meowth had been successfully tanking everything that could be thrown at it without any sort of damage. This streak comes to an end when it tries to attack Team Flare's ultimate weapon, with a single low-powered blast ripping the mech apart. - "Days of Futures Past What Does That Mean It Kinda Sounds Sexy", \|\|Naruto knocks out Superboy by throwing a cake laced with Kryptonite at his face\|\|. - Gather features this as Taylor's ultimate attack. As part of her AU powerset, she can instantly kill any parahuman she makes skin contact with, stealing their powers and turning them into a nearly indestructable minion. - Maris Stella: Like in canon, several supervillains have powers that would defeat the heroes in one hit. - Thorn Reaper can turn people into flower petals with her scythe. - Knockout can knock people unconscious with a single punch. - Phantom💔Kamen's powers allow him to knock people unconscious with his playing cards. - Queen Guillotine can turn people into dust with her flying guillotine. - Shadow Glaive has the power to drain enough energy to knock a target unconscious with just a single hit. - Sharkbite can destroy anything or anyone it bites and erase them from existence. - On the heroes' side, the power of Liberation is a functional one-hit-kill against akumatized villains, as it can free them from the negative emotions being used to manipulate them. - Seventh Endmost Vision, rather terrifyingly, this is how \|\|Lucrecia fights. She kills four people in Barret's seven-person group, as well as a non-combatant, during their fight, and it only takes her one move for each kill, emphasizing her precision and deadliness\|\|. - In Sugar Plums this is how most of Ume's fights end. It's noted this is because she's weaker than most shinobi by default, thus unlike other shinobi who will prod and test opponents to conserve energy in case they have to run away or fight other opponents she will go all out immediately. It's only because of this trait she's able to kill objectively stronger opponents at all and even then it'll usually come at a cost. - In the Tamers Forever Series, \|\|Chaos easily kills Doumon by crushing her skull in his hand\|\|. - Naruto gets to deal one of these out to \|\|Sasuke\|\| in the Alternate History fic Team 8 during the Chuunin Exam preliminary battles (it's a knockout instead of a kill). It's fully explained in author's notes later on, given the context of the fight — \|\|Sasuke was still recovering from Orochimaru's seal being applied (and then removed), Naruto just watched Neji beat Hinata half to death in their preliminary battle and was understandably pissed off, and Sasuke crossed a line he should not have crossed\|\|: - Transformers: The Movie: Galvatron \|\|kills Starscream with one shot\|\|. - In Turning Red, Mei ends the fight with \|\|her mother's kaiju-panda form\|\| by headbutting her once in the forehead. - Any number of Kung Fu B-movies, which often featured characters (usually villains) who knew a special technique that could kill people (or otherwise take them out of a fight) instantly. - In a parody of this, the Wuxi finger hold in Kung Fu Panda. - The Flying Guillotine from the movies was a weapon version of this. If it gets on your head and the villain pulls the chain, it's game over for you. - In Back to the Future, skinny wimp George McFly hits his long-time tormentor Biff Tannen with a single left hook after he shoves Lorraine to the floor. Biff spins over on the spot, falls back against the car behind him, and slumps to the pavement completely out cold. One of the most satisfying moments in film. - In Diggstown, "Honey" Roy Palmer gets pissed off and knocks out an opponent with a single punch immediately after the round starts. Roy: ( to the ref) Get the next one in here now. - Drive Angry gives us the Godkiller. A unique gun that can kill anything shot by its bullets in one shot, and even banishes them from existence. - All but the tiniest phantoms in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, since they're an Intangible Man that does Collision Damage by ripping the soul from your body like walking through a cloud of smoke. - Jason Voorhees shows how it's done in Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan when he corners Action Survivor and promising amateur boxer Julius. Julius makes a brave last stand against the walking corpse, punching him over and over again even though it proves futile. Finally, when Julius is completely exhausted, his hands broken, and he's literally unable to do anything else he just calmly stands upright and tells Jason to take his best shot. Jason hits Julius with a Megaton Punch that would make Saitama proud, as it literally rips Julius's head clean off his body. - Godzilla: - The title character possesses the "Spiral Ray" in a few of his later incarnations, a supercharged, red/orange-colored variant of his normal light-blue atomic Breath Weapon. It proved capable of annihilating some of Godzilla's most powerful foes ever (such as Super Mechagodzilla, Spacegodzilla, and Kaiser Ghidorah) within seconds. The one and only time it did not provide an immediate victory was when used against Destoroyah — and that was when it was being used for the duration of the entire climactic battle — which demonstrated how amazingly dangerous Destoroyah really was. - Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla: Kiryu (AKA "Mechagodzilla 3") possessed a weapon called the Absolute-Zero Cannon which could instantly freeze anything it hit down to absolute zero. The devastating effects of the weapon are seen when Kiryu accidentally freezes several skyscrapers during a battle with Godzilla. Said skyscrapers collapsed into dust almost immediately after freezing. The lethality of the weapon is subverted when used against Godzilla himself twice. The first time, Kiryu had gone berserk from hearing Godzilla's roar and was rampaging across Tokyo before they could fire the weapon. And, the second time, the Absolute-Zero Cannon was badly damaged and could only very temporarily trap Godzilla in ice. - Godzilla (2014): Godzilla performs one on the male MUTO, by way of a Tail Slap into a skyscraper. Amusingly, the way Godzilla turns around to deliver said attack looks almost casual. - The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies: As you may know after reading the book, \|\|the dragon Smaug gets instantly killed by Bard after being pierced by the Black Arrow on the scaleless skin spot of its chest\|\|. - Indiana Jones: - In the I Spy film, Eddie Murphy's character is a boxing champion known for one-hit KOs. Not exactly a "kill", but it would definitely end your career if you went down from one punch. - In Jason Bourne, Bourne is shown knocking an opponent out in a single hit during a illegal fight. - The Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique in Kill Bill is a special Pressure Point technique that once performed kills the victim once they take five steps through means of exploding their heart. Pai Mei taught this infamous technique to only one student during his lifetime: \|\|The Bride, who uses it on Bill himself at the end of Volume 2\|\|. - In Kingsman: The Secret Service, Gazelle does this \|\|to Lancelot\|\|, cutting him in half lengthwise. - Bruce Willis pulls off a one-hit kill in The Last Boy Scout. "I'm gonna need a light. You touch me again, I'll kill ya." - Marvel Cinematic Universe: - Tony Stark aka Iron Man given the abilities of his suit, can easily◊ Megaton Punch the average joe so hard it kills him. On a less lethal note, Iron Man One-Hit K.Os the Hulk in Avengers: Age of Ultron with the Hulkbuster Armour, justified as Hulk was distracted (having just come to his senses after Scarlet Witch meddled with his mind). - The Incredible Hulk's Emil Blonsky gives a demonstration as to why◊ normal humans (even those who have injected themselves with Psycho Serum) shouldn't be stupid enough to try measure up to the Hulk. Blonsky only survives thanks his Healing Factor. - The Bunker Buster aka "Ex-wife" from Iron Man 2 is supposed to be this, but it being developed by the inept Justin Hammer means it fails miserably when Rhodey uses it against Whiplash. - Thor swings and throws with Mjölnir tend◊ to be◊ one hit kills unless you're a super powerful being, a man in a power suit, have a indestructible shield or possess a magical superweapon of your own to match Mjölnir. Even without the hammer (or without powers) Thor can knock out trained regular humans with a single blow. - \|\|Thor does the near impossible and takes out Thanos with a single throw of Stormbreaker into the Titan's chest, however it would've been a true One Hit Kill if he'd aimed for the head\|\|. - Using the power of an Infinity Stone will tend to vaporise your target instantly e.g Guardians of the Galaxy using the Power Stone to destroy Ronan. Though you are more likely die yourself from just touching or coming into contact with one of the stones. - Despite Steve Rogers aka Captain America being the Determinator (once again) against Thanos in the Avengers: Infinity War by catching and holding back the Infinity Gauntlet, causing a stalemate, Steve is then instantly knocked out when Thanos uses his other hand. Considering Thanos overpowered Hulk, Thor, Vision and Spider-Man, the fact that Steve still has a head on his shoulders is a mark of his strength. - Non-lethal variant. In Doctor Strange, The Ancient One demonstrates a palm strike move that will kick out a person's astral body out, leaving their physical body unconscious and helpless. Considering she uses the same move against \|\|Professor Hulk in Avengers: Endgame\|\|, it's clear that physical might is irrelevant when defending against this move. - Ong-Bak contains a kick-to-the-face that is possibly the best example ever. - In Punisher: War Zone, Frank kills a man with a single punch that penetrates his skull. - The Duel to the Death in Seven Samurai comes down to this. - Snatch. has "One Punch Mickey", Gypsy bare-knuckle boxing champion. Bonus points for doing it when he shouldn't. - At the start of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, three Klingon battlecruisers launch an Attack Hello against the entity V'Ger, which proceeds to effortlessly one-shot each of them. By contrast, the Deflector Shields on the refit Enterprise barely manage to No-Sell a similar blast from V'Ger. - In Star Wars: - The Death Star plays this both ways. One shot from the superlaser at a target planet creates the planetary equivalent of the Chunky Salsa Rule. Whereas a single proton torpedo to the thermal exhaust port, and the Death Star — the size of a moon with a crew numbering in the millions — turns itself into a planet-sized firework. - This is how the famous "who shot first" is resolved. Han shoots and kills Greedo with a single shot before Greedo can react. - Despite how badass and unique Darth Maul is in Phantom Menace many forget he is the only major film antagonist to be taken out (sliced in half) in one slash by Obi-Wan. Kylo Ren (Big Bad Wannabe) in The Force Awakens in contrast got up again after taking a slash to face from Rey's Lightsaber strike. - General Grievous from Revenge of the Sith survived mutiple Lightsaber strikes and having his arms sliced off thanks to being a Cyborg. But thanks to his heart being left vulnerable Obi-Wan just shoots him dead with common blaster. - The Servile Enthrallment spell from Blood Sword's Enchanter will completely control any foe under its influence and don't worry about it running out of time. It'll last past the end of the fight, where the Enchanter and/or party will simply slit their enemy's throat — killing the victim regardless of how much health they have remaining - A staple of Choose Your Own Adventure books are the no-escape dead ends, though gamebooks (e.g. Lone Wolf) fit the trope best with instant death if you're lacking the right skill/item or just plain unlucky — being not only accepted, but expected. - In Lone Wolf, the bow and arrow, far from being just annoying, often allows a one-hit kill for the hero, if he chooses the right target and is enough of a good shot (though some monsters are utterly immune to this). Also fights can end in an instant death, if there's a sufficiently large difference between the combatant's weapon skill. - The best Choose Your Own Adventures were better known for their creatively gory endings to your life than for their successful endings. - Ditto Star Challenge. You and/or your robot are as common to be the one(s) on the receiving side as your enemies. - In the Fighting Fantasy book Creature of Havoc, the Player Character is a hulking Monstrous Humanoid with a 1-in-6 chance each combat roll of landing a Critical Hit that instantly kills its opponent. \|\|It can also accidentally drink a potion that suppresses this power.\|\| - In Freeway Fighter and The Rings of Kether, you can do this but only in vehicular combat and are limited by ammo. The first example, your car has rockets to blow up enemies while the second, your spaceship has smart missiles to vapourize them. - In Rebel Planet, humans (and it's only humans) have taken to mastering the martial arts against their alien oppressors, the Arcadians. Human fighters know all the pressure points on Arcadians and humans, so they have a chance to kill either species if they fight them unarmed (making your character's laser sword kinda pathetic barring a skill penalty for being unarmed). - In Slaves of the Abyss, your character is a master with their sword of Fangthane steel. With this weapon and only this, your character will instantly kill enemies if you roll a pair of 6 for your Attack Strength. - In Starship Traveller, if you successfully shoot someone with a phaser — they're either dead or stunned depending on the weapon's setting. Unfortunately your enemies have the same advantage (except for one "primitive" species that uses a rocket staff — your Medical Officer has a chance of stabilizing crew that have been struck, preventing them from dying). - Dungeon Life: Grim, the scythe-wielding groundskeeper, starts out with Earth affinity and Fate affinity, then picks up Death affinity, and eventually Life affinity. With all of those together, he can cause creatures to simply die on the spot, without lifting a finger. - In Golden Dragon Fantasy Gamebooks's 4th book The Eye of the Dragon, the insectoid swordsmaster Lord Mantis has an artifact called the Glove of Unerring Dexterity — if you fight him, he has a chance of killing you instantly. But if you beat him or otherwise somehow get his glove, besides improving your attack roll, if you roll a pair of 6s you automatically skewer your enemy's heart. - In GrailQuest's 4th book Voyage of Terror, one encounter has you meeting the Poetic Fiend again and the guy's carrying a magical crystal-bladed knife. It automatically hits and instantly kills its victim by exploding inside of them, as you discover if you attack the Fiend. If you listen to the Fiend's poem, he's actually trying to help you and gives you the crystal-bladed knife plus a golden key. - In the Sagard the Barbarian series by Gary Gygax, the 2nd book The Green Hydra, Sagard can find 7 "fire darts". These are magical darts that explode in a fireball that instakills its victim. Against the Green Hydra boss, one fire dart is only good for killing one head. - In the Savage Realms series by Brian Henson and Troy Anthony Schermer, your character(s) can find "epic" weapons such as the Death Bringer Blade. These are Limited Use Magical Devices that instantly kill enemies that have a maximum health of 50 or have health that's been reduced to 50 and some especially potent epic weapons will kill every foe of 50 or lower health in an encounter. Unfortunately epic weapons won't have any effect on the Boss monster regardless of their health. - In Sorcery!, the ROK spell will petrify enemies while the MUD spell turns the ground under them into quicksand drowning them unless they can fly. These spells do require ingredients which limits how often you can take down your enemies with these. - In the Tolkien Quest and its successor Middle-earth Quest books, there was always a chance that you could instantly kill your enemy (or stun them if they have godlike stats way beyond yours). In one book it was possible for your sorceror's apprentice to knock out his boss, Saruman the White, with a single hit! - In Way of the Tiger, your ninja assassin Avenger can instantly kill opponents if he has the Poison Needle skill and is given the option of using it. He sometimes can kill enemies with the Nerve Strike skill if he took that as his special skill learnt from the Island of Dawn. Additionally he carries a garrotte and a single dose of the "Blood of Nil" - which is the deadliest poison in the world, sometimes he gets the option of using those particular tools on a hapless victim. Finally there are rare instances that he ends up killing someone if you chose a specific attack; for example in one book he breaks the neck of an attacking ninja by throwing that novice who ends up landing poorly. - In Wizards, Warriors and You, there is no health stat. Fights involving the Warrior either result in him slaughtering everybody otherwise he's the one getting killed or captured. - In Fred Saberhagen's Book of Swords series, Farslayer can kill anyone (including demons and gods) anywhere as long as they don't have Shieldbreaker or Woundhealer to save them. - In Billy Budd, the eponymous character is accused of conspiracy and mutiny aboard a British man-of-war by the ship's master-at-arms, who is doing this to fight off his "strange attraction" to the androgynous sailor. Upon hearing this, Billy freezes up, unable to say anything in his defense. Eventually, he answers the only way he can — by punching the liar in the temple. The man dies on the spot. Unfortunately, \|\|Billy is found guilty of murder by the tribunal of officers, despite them all being sympathetic to the boy, and hung the next day\|\|. Interestingly, \|\|the tribunal was about to find him not guilty as a weird case of self-defense, when The Captain intervened and convinced them of the necessity of the execution\|\|. - In Changes, \|\|Ebenezar McCoy \|\|casts what essentially is a mass version of aforementioned Avada Kedavra onto two hundred or so Mooks. There's no flash, no sound or anything, he just makes a wide gesture with his staff and those he points to simply drop dead. - In the second series of The Chronicles of Amber, Merlin knows a "neat little cardiac arrest spell." He only uses it once, but he just obliterates a Jabberwock with it. Apparently, he has a separate "death spell," but he never uses it. However, he does note that the first spell wouldn't have been a One Hit Kill on a fire angel, as they have three hearts. - In The Chronicles of Narnia, Jadis uses the deplorable word and basically one-shots an entire planet, resulting in no more subjects for her to rule. But that's okay, a pair of children help save the day on Earth and Narnia - The Ivory Knife in P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath, a mere scratch from which will kill; it is described as "the very tooth of Death". As one might imagine, this can be somewhat dangerous for the wielder as well. Heroine Jame carries it in her boot sheath for a long while, at first because she doesn't realize what it is, then after she knows, because she doesn't have anywhere safe she can leave it. - The Vord Queen in Codex Alera has become powerful enough by First Lord's Fury that, when an Aleran High Lord takes the field at the battle of Alera Imperia, she blasts him out of the sky with one hit. When he's protected by dozens of Citizens and knights. Cue the Mass "Oh, Crap!". - Cradle Series: By Skysworn, Lindon is finally at a reasonable power level. He's far from the strongest, and people far stronger than him keep declaring oaths of vengeance against him, but at least he's past the point where the average child would curb-stomp him. When a random idiot of his power level attacks him, Lindon counters with a punch, already planning for how to continue after the idiot blocks with his shield but is knocked back a few feet. Instead, the fight is over in that one punch, and he has no idea what to do. Lindon has spent so long fighting desperately against those stronger than him that he hasn't realized how overpowered he is compared to people who are supposed to be on his level. - In The Destroyer book series, the martial art of Sinanju is mostly one-hit kill moves. The (very long) series isn't entirely consistent on how much of this is based on actual precise technique targeting vital spots, and how much is because practice of Sinanju raises basic physical abilities to the point where pretty much any imaginable attack can be used to do lethal damage. - "Morganti" weapons in Dragaera all destroy the soul of the victim upon entry, making revivification impossible, and also making it impossible for the victim to travel the Paths of The Dead to the afterworld. (Assuming the victim has a means of both suiciding and entirely disassociating their soul from their body before contact — a never certain process, aside from its obvious drawbacks — they damage the corpse as an ordinary weapon of their type.) note : One book has Sethra and Vlad discuss the issue, as part of a discussion about "Great Weapons" (more powerful, and almost "intelligent", versions, capped at 17 in existence). Sethra comments that if you stick a Morganti weapon into a corpse, it does nothing to a 'dead' soul, but it's still there to leave the body after three days. Vlad just comments he wasn't in the habit of testing the matter, being usually hired to use such weapons on living people... - The demon-in-the-form-of-a-sword "Stormbringer" in Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone series kills any non-magically protected human in one blow (it also eats the victim's soul). "Mournblade" is a similar demonic sword, and one story reveals that there is an entire race of these demons — all of them taking the form of swords. - In Michael Moorcock's novel "The Eternal Champion", when \|\|the Eldren\|\| use their ultimate weapon, \|\|a high-powered energy gun\|\|, against their opponents, who are using classic Middle Ages armor, their attack is a One Hit Poly Kill, obliterating entire lines of their opponents each shot. - Much like in real life, more than one viewpoint character in Grent's Fall took down a target in one hit. - Harry Potter: - Honor Harrington delivers a One Hit KO to the Honorable Sir Reginald Houseman in Honor Of The Queen, after he demands that she pull her forces out of Yeltsin's Star, leaving the Graysons to be conquered or nuked by Masada. It worked not only because Honor is a Heavy Worlder, but that he was such an Entitled Bastard that he had no idea at all that she would dare to actually strike him. - Any of several magic words in the Inheritance Cycle which cause instant death to whoever they were directed at. - The inspiration for the James Bond film and video game Golden Gun, the book version in The Man with the Golden Gun is a gold-plated Colt Single Action Army firing custom solid gold bullets with silver-plating. Ballistics calculations (using lead .45 Colt bullet weights as a starting point) indicates that Scaramanga's revolver hits like a .500 S&W Magnum, which has aided his reputation for only needing one shot. - In A Song of Ice and Fire, it's not that Gregor Clegane has any magical trick or secret technique that suddenly turns him deadly. He's just that big, strong, able to wear so much armour and can wield a cavalry weapon that's just that big (while he's on foot; in a single hand, no less) in such a way to lay waste to even the most heavily armoured of his opposition in one swing thanks to the sheer power he can put behind it. Now, add a horse's mass and velocity to this equation for when he starts using a lance in or out of the lists... If he makes contact, you're so very dead (and, probably even the guy next to you and the one next to him). It's simple physics and psychotics — and, he proves it time and again. The downside is that he isn't the fastest (still faster than you'd expect, considering how much he and his poor, disposable horses haul about) and he suffers from chronic physical pain thanks to his gigantism for which he's on constant medication. But, if you think that's a bonus, it just means you need to hurt him more (all while dodging the inevitable) for him to even register it. - In the Star Carrier series H'rulka weapons easily one-shot smaller Confederation ships, being as how their ammunition consists of what amounts to miniature black holes. They also outrange most Confederation weapons. - Shardblades from The Stormlight Archive cut the soul of living things rather than the flesh, and cut straight through almost any inanimate matter without any effort. Slicing the blade through one of a victim's vital organs kills them instantly. Slicing it through a limb "kills" that limb, rending it permanently paralyzed and numb. The only beings that are likely to give somebody with a Shardblade a problem are those with a suit of Shardplate, (which can withstand a Shardblade, at least for a while) or beasts so large that the blade can't easily be sliced into their vital organs (and these are BFSs an average of six feet long, so the fact that there ARE beasts that big, and a lot of them, says something about this world). - In Sword Art Online, the boss of the \|\|75th\|\| floor. It's bad enough that \|\|the only door out closes and disappears, and teleport crystals don't work, so the raid group is trapped until they either win or get wiped out\|\|. But on top of that, it also one-shots almost everyone unlucky enough to get hit by it. Most of the fighters are suitably terrified. By the end, \|\|14 out of 32 are gone\|\|. - The Magic Wand that Griswalda gives Lucifer in The Vagina Ass of Lucifer Niggerbastard. Lucifer, "tests", the Magic Wand out on Griswalda. - In Warbreaker, Vasher uses his sword "Nightblood" to dispatch numerous Mooks. Nightblood, when fully drawn, will \|\|completely obliterate its victims, soul and all, in a single strike, leaving nothing but a brief cloud of black smoke where they were standing. Wielding Nightblood in this manner comes with severe drawbacks\|\|. - Balefire in The Wheel of Time instantly erases from existence anyone it hits retroactively. And it kills in such a way that even the Dark One (who has power over death and can reincarnate people) can't save them. Balefire comes at a very high price, though. Since it kills retroactively, the past will be changed — any actions performed by the killed within for everything for a minute back to days (all according to the power of the Balefire) will now not have happened. If this happens too much, reality itself unravels, causing a Temporal Paradox that can destroy the world. - Buffyverse: - Every single vampire without Plot Armor goes down (turns to dust) with one stab of a wooden stake (or sharp wooden object) to the heart. Usually there's a drawn out fight at the very least to showcase vampires as powerful foes, then at other times they get staked instantly, and some don't even make it out of their own graves before Buffy dusts them. Sunlight also ends vamp-fights quickly e.g. Russel Winters in the first episode of Angel who is pushed out a skyscraper's window by the titular hero and doesn't make it to the ground. - Despite how much a threat they are played up to be, most Big Bad(s) in both Buffy and Angel are taken out in one attack such as The Master, The Judge, The Beast and Jasmine. - \|\|Before Saitama there was Illyria in Angel Season 5.\|\| - CSI: NY: Done in "Super Men" where a martial arts expert killed a victim of the week with a single blow to the back of the neck. - In Doctor Who the Dalek race's beams are this, even for other daleks, who are usually really hard to even scratch. There's a very memorable scene in the 9th Doctor's first Dalek episode where a room full of soldiers shoot at a Dalek uselessly and instead of shooting back the Dalek just hits the fire sprinkler on and shoots one death beam and electrifies all the wet soldiers in one. Further material has stated their rays have different power settings and are usually set to instantly kill whatever they're pointed at — and then the Daleks themselves dial it down just a little bit so that death is both assured and agonizing. - Game of Thrones: As Bronn stated, one can attempt to fight Gregor "The Mountain" Clegane by out-maneuvering him, but if he gets just one good hit in, that fighter is dead. This is illustrated in "The Mountain and the Viper." After spending an entire fight flailing at — and missing — the much more nimble Oberyn Martell, Gregor finally manages to get his hands on him and ends the fight in seconds. - Game Shows: In its simplest sense, the one-hit kill was a contestant winning the game outright on the first play of the game, before his opponents even have a chance to play. Although rare, the most notable examples were: - Tic-Tac-Dough: The "red box" "Bonus Category," which immediately allowed the contestant another turn if he/she answered a three-part question correctly. The categories were moved to other boxes after the question, and the "Bonus Category" always appeared in an adjacent box or other space that allowed him/her to set up and eventually complete a Tic-Tac-Toe. Played correctly - and it often was a tic-tac-toe was completed without the opponent getting a chance to play (although he/she was always invited back to play the next game). Eventually, in the interest of fair play, the category was retired, in lieu of the modified "Double-or-Nothing." - The Joker's Wild: - Spinning three jokers on a single spin automatically won the game for that contestant ... provided he/she correctly answered a question. While it has happened several times on the game's first spin, only once - the first time it happened - did it result in the opponent not getting to play. (The opponent, a challenger, forced his smile as he was on and off the show in roughly 90 seconds.) The ""first-spin triple joker" quick kill was averted thereafter by allowing the challenger - who always played second - an opportunity to catch up by continuing to answer questions until they either caught up, won by surpassing the opponent's score or giving an incorrect answer; however, the game would end if the challenger spun the triple joker and answered the question correctly. - Like its sister show Tic Tac Dough, the 1977-1986 syndicated version had special scoring categories, which could be used on the player's first turn to build a huge lead and virtually assure themselves a win, simply by severely pressuring the opponent. Categories fitting this example were "Fast Forward" and "Bid," both which allowed contestants to answer multiple questions in a single turn until they either stopped and kept their winnings ("Fast Forward") or completed the terms of their bid to earn the cash ("Bid"). - Concentration: Solving the puzzle after making a match on the game's first turn. - Although one contestant did spin (and miss) before her, Caitlin Burke solved I'VE GOT A GOOD FEELING ABOUT THIS on Wheel of Fortune after calling the L. - Legend of the Seeker: The dacras can kill instantly with magic if they hit someone (at least when this isn't a main character). - In the finale of Life (2007), \|\|Crews kills Roman with one blow to the throat\|\|. - The Power (2023): The power is capable of killing someone with a heart attack on command if precisely used. - In the competitive robot combat show Robot Wars robots could be battered into submission and some robots were in fact powerful enough to disable an opponent with a single lucky blow. Robots could also be flipped over and those with no way to right themselves were immobilized and defeated. However there was only one guaranteed way to defeat an enemy robot in a single strike: throwing it over the wall and out of the arena. The first time it happened, no one could believe their eyes. Not to mention, the pit. - In Smallville, especially early seasons, there are very few opponents that Clark doesn't take out in one hit. Like many adaptations of Superman, this is the reason Kryptonite Is Everywhere. - The Zat'nik'tel in Stargate SG-1. Although it takes two shots to kill, one shot delivers excruciating pain, enough to neutralize any target that's not protected against it. - One Season 8 episode has O'Neill use an Ancient ship that is basically a transport shuttle (defensive weapons only, no shields) to do this to a Goa'uld Ha'tak mothership (the same class of ship that was a major threat to Earth in the early seasons). Shows how powerful the Ancients were. - Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In the episode "The Changing Face Of Evil", we see for the first time the Breen's Energy Dissipator, which in one shot, disables the engines, weapons and shields of its target. While not necessarily a "one-hit kill" per sé, the target becomes a sitting duck. - Star Trek: Voyager: In the final episode (Endgame), Voyager gets upgraded with technology from the future. It gets armor that makes it immune to Borg weapons, and it gets special torpedoes that can destroy Borg cubes in one hit. - Supernatural: - The Colt is a magical gun that can one-shot nearly anything in existence, even beings that would normally be considered unkillable. However, there are a few cosmically powerful creatures that it can't outright kill. \|\|Dean and Sam learn a bit too late that Lucifer is one of them.\|\| - Most of the highest ranking angels enjoy doing this to anyone less powerful than them who manages to piss them off, with Lucifer being the standout example. One snap of his fingers is usually enough to turn just about anyone into a red paste. - During the first Demogorgon mode in Stranger Things, shooting the ball into its mouth results in the monster immediately being destroyed, ending the mode. - It's pretty common in North America for a pro wrestler's Finishing Move to be used as a One Hit Kill; matches where the opponent kicks out afterwards are rare. There are many, many matches where one participant spends the whole match getting the snot beaten out of him, then seizes an opportunity to hit his finisher and win the match. Note that this is less common in Mexico, Japan (except in New Japan Pro-Wrestling, where finishers are treated as One Hit Killers there), and Europe. - The One Hit Kill effect is essentially what made Diamond Dallas Page so dangerous in WCW. You could beat him up all day, but all he had to do was hit the Diamond Cutter and he'd come out on top — and he could hit the Diamond Cutter at a moment's notice, from fifty-two different positions. - As well as Randy Orton's RKO. Though the RKO occasionally gets hit with The Worf Barrage. Orton's Punt to the Head is a better example, as no one has ever kicked out of it. - Also witness this WWF title match between Bob Backlund and Diesel. Kick, Jackknife Powerbomb, match over. - Though he didn't use it for obvious reasons, Michael Tarver of The Nexus once had the gimmick of the 1.9 second punch, a punch that would instantly KO anyone. - Santino Marella has The Cobra, a jab to the throat. He's still mostly a Jobber because he wastes so much time signalling for it that he's almost always intercepted. - And then after months, he finally hit the move for the first time on Zack Ryder...and still ended up losing the match. - People now have to sell the damn thing. - Umaga's Samoan Spike. One of the few people that required two Samoan Spikes to keep down was Kane. - Shawn Michaels and Sweet Chin Music. - The Tombstone Piledriver: In the (almost) thirty years that The Undertaker had been using it, you could count the amount of people who had even kicked out of it once on your fingers. In fact, when Shawn Michaels kicked out of it at WrestleMania XXV, the look on Undertaker's face and reaction of the commentators was akin to "That did not just happen!" - Kenta Kobashi's Burning Hammer can actually one-up on the Tombstone: nobody has ever kicked out of it. As a result, he's only used it seven times to maintain its special-ness. Well, eight if you include the time he used it on his cancer. - Sheamus. The Brogue Kick. - Big Show. The Knockout Punch aka The Weapon of Mass Destruction. - Spike Dudley's Acid Drop/Dudley Dog. - A simple roundhouse kick to the head is a staple of the Japanese shoot-style finishing offensive. It's credible enough to pass for a real KO, and the Mixed Martial Arts world has taught us that it's indeed as powerful. This is seen in Yoshi Tatsu's debut match in WWE's ECW against Shelton Benjamin. Benjamin got distracted at the beginning of the match with mocking Tatsu's Japanese salute... and hitting the roundhouse kick was all Yoshi had to do for the win. - Lacey Evans has The Woman's Right, a right hook that almost always KO's her opponent. - Despite his very hit-and-miss booking, Baron Corbin has possibly the most-protected finisher on the entire current WWE roster in his End of Days (Pendulum Lifting Reverse STO). Austin Aries was the only person to ever kick out of it for many years and that was while Corbin was still in NXT. Drew McIntyre would become the second in 2022. - Kenny Omega's One Winged Angel. Kota Ibushi is the only one so far who was able to kick out of it. - Brock Lesnar's F5. Only few main eventers are able to survive a single F5 from him and may make him raise an eyebrow. Surviving 2 F5s though can give him an Oh, Crap! moment. - Destroy the Godmodder uses this often. Any attack that isn't charged has an incredibly high chance of this happening to it. If the godmodder doesn't brainwash them and turn the summon to his side instead. - The Ballad of Edgardo: Raw Spirit cannot be resisted, so enough Spirit will turn any attack into this. And once Edgardo combines his Overflowing Spirit perk (which means he has no Spirit cap) and the Spirit Well buff from the city of Haven (which instantly fills your spirit reserves up to the cap), he can destroy anything in the setting with a single punch. - In El Goonish Shive, Susan, armed with a magic sword, and supercharged with magic, can take out an aberration with one swing. - In Noblesse, Raizel has the ability to take out any opponent with one strike of his blood magic, but it shortens his life span the more he uses his powers. - Scoob and Shag has the Ballyhoo "Power", which grants the user the power to "turn off" anything... by making it collapse on itself until it disappears. The user can also undo the effects by "turning on" anything that they previously erased. If they want to permanently kill someone, they can just target the head. - The Golden Arrows from Slightly Damned tend to take football sized chunks out of their targets. It's not a guaranteed kill, but it's pretty close. - Sluggy Freelance: - The talking sword Chaz can kill pretty much anything with a single swing. Even a scratch will suffice in most instances. The Demon King of the Dimension of Pain managed to survive getting scratched, but was still permanently crippled. The only limitation is that Chaz only has this power after bathing in the blood of the innocent. - Later, 4U City's military is shown using weaponized teleporters which transport whatever they hit into Another Dimension. Not really a one-hit kill, but definitely a one-hit victory. - In Yokoka's Quest, Pinky and Inky both get knocked out in one blow at the start of the fight against two tunnel dwellers, requiring Blinky to revive them with a Healing Potion. - Art of the Instakill celebrates the trope in several modern game franchises. Visual effects included. Here's a reference for those who may not know. - One of Cracked's 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "no matter how strong and powerful you are, some scrub will take you out with a death spell." - Dreamscape: The Overlord of Evil can fire a small laser that annihilates whoever is hit. Unless you have Resurrective Immortality like Melissa, you're done for. - Red vs. Blue: - Season 1 has Donut throw a plasma grenade and oneshot Tex, who was halfway across a canyon and in a tank. This gets a Call-Back in Season 10, where he manages to lob three plasma grenades in one throw to kill three soldiers. - In Season 10, Agent Maine does this to The Big Guy of the enemy team to show off his new Super Strength. The guy is killed in a single punch (which also either knocks his reinforced titanium helmet off or out-and-out decapitates him... the camera angle leaves this unclear). - SCP Foundation: - SCP-544 perceived threads extending upwards from the heads of others, as well as from other living things, and could kill anything instantly by cutting its thread with his mind. - One of the 001 proposals can obliterate anything in a single strike of its flaming blade, from people to missile bases, 049 has an extremely effective Death Touch, 956 will petrify you with a single look (while not immediately fatal, you'll wish it was), and witnessing anything done by someone infected by 370 will mean You Are Already Dead. - TierZoo: - The Crocodile's Death Roll was mentioned to be an instant kill in an earlier video. A later video expanded upon this — while it was a death sentence when successfully pulled off, it also required the crocodile's unbroken concentration meaning that it could be interrupted by an ally of the victim. - In the Dinosaur Tier List, the sauropod's Giant Foot of Stomping was mentioned to be the most devastating attack of any animal, knocking down the target while dealing lethal crushing damage. This effectively gave them an "Instant Death" Radius and was one of the reasons why sauropods were the sole dinosaur type in the S-Tier. - The Poison Dart Frog's poison was stated to be lethal enough to one-shot any attacker that hit it. The trouble is that the frog had to be attacked for this to work, and due to its tiny size, it would also be killed easily. - Whateley Universe: Tennyo's 'death blow' can kill anything — including Physical Gods and Eldritch Abominations — Deader than Dead. Even the sub-atomic particles that made up their body simply decay into nothingness. - Avatar: The Last Airbender: - The series gives the impression that the advanced Firebending ability to shoot lightning is a One Hit Kill if it manages to get a direct hit. This is offset by the difficulty of shooting lightning in the first place (it requires a mindset which is opposite to the usual for Firebending, and insufficient skill is likely to cause it to explode in the users face), and even when mastered the time it takes to build up the charge tends to telegraph the attack. - In the grand finale, Aang's use of Energybending borders on a peculiar sort of Have-a-Heart instant neutralization. - Ty Lee was also feared enough for her ability to temporarily kill someone's Bending. Not a 'kill', but in a world where children can throw fireballs it leaves you pretty helpless (various big name mundanes aside). The horror is taken to a whole new level in the sequel series, The Legend of Korra, which features characters who can kill someone's Bending permanently, much like Aang's Energybending, except it doesn't need much to work with. Judging by how the victims of the procedure are treated, this is basically the Avatar-verse equivalent of lobotomy. - Castlevania: - Celebrity Deathmatch: - The Loch Ness Monster gets one on Bigfoot during their fight when he slices Bigfoot in half. - In Spice Girls vs. Hanson, Marilyn Manson gets one on both combatants by crushing them under the light rigging. - In Kid Rock vs. Eminem, Joe C jumps into the ring and eviscerates guest referee Carson Daly, but not before Carson kicks him into the air. He lands on Eminem, and takes control of Eminem's body, which he uses to take out Kid Rock with one hit. - Jean-Claude Van Damme cuts Chuck Norris in half with one hit. - Code Lyoko: - Many of XANA's monsters are able to do that. - The Kankrelat, one-shot Yumi in Episode 91. - The Blok's rings of fire are powerful enough to one-hit a Lyoko-warrior. - The Megatank's attacks, starting with Season 2 is an instant kill. - The Manta's explosive mines. Ulrich was immediately devirtualized in Episode 66. - Any of the Kolossus' attacks : it is so big any of it's attacks (whether it's his arm-sword or him crushing someone) instantly sends you back in the scanners. - Some Lyoko-warriors are also able to do that. - William. Even when he was a beginner, any of his sword attacks will devirtualize you. When Xanafied, it goes from Bad to Worse. He gains a sword beam attacks which is not only as fast as Odd's laser arrows, but are also a One-Hit-Kill, except when William lowers it's powers in order to capture Aelita. - Aelita's fully charged Energy Field. Not even William can tank it. - Yumi's fans devirtualizes instantly monsters without having to hit their weak point. In some episodes, XANA-William can tank it, however. - If you don't block Ulrich's sword throw attack, you're as good as dead. XANA-William tasted it. Twice. - In general, unless you're Vlad Masters, if you find yourself on the receiving end of Danny Phantom's Ghostly Wail, you're about to go down and stay down. Good thing, too, since the attack is so draining it usually leaves the hero de-powered and severely weakened afterward, stopping it from being a Story-Breaker Power. - Elena of Avalor: Shuriki's "Vadisima" spell can destroy or kill anything with a single blow; it in particular killed the parents of the titular heroine. When Shuriki attempted to use the same spell on Elena, she was spared by the magic of the Amulet of Avalor. After Shuriki upgrades to the Scepter of Night, its "Demolish" spell works the same way, with Elena once again spared by the Scepter of Light during their final confrontation. Shuriki is also killed herself by a single blast of the Scepter of Light's "Blaze" spell, in reverse of what happened during their first encounter years prior. - Kramer vs. Predator, as seen on Family Guy. - Miraculous Ladybug: This is a common power among the rogues gallery, but one of the heroes' has this on his side. - Cat Noir's Cataclysm power will almost instantly destroy anything he touches. As we are reminded every time he ends up Brainwashed and Crazy, this very much could include human beings. - Timebreaker can absorb the time of anyone she touches, causing them to fade away from existence. - The Gamer (before his upgrade) can turn people into points that he uses to level up his mecha. - The Collector can seal anything or anyone in his book, as long as he's still got blank pages. - Befana's candy gun turns those she views as bad into coal statues. She's not immune to her own weapon. - Glaciator can turn people into statues of ice cream if they're hit by the ice cream he uses as ammo, but he refuses to attack loving couples. - Style Queen's main offensive power is that she can turn anyone into a statue of golden glitter, or a pile of golden glitter if she's particularly mad. - Backwarder has a non-lethal but still hopelessly debilitating variation. Anyone hit with her clock hand cane will be forced into rewinding their actions, with Backwarder absorbing their remaining forward time. - Desperada can turn anyone she hits with her musical instruments or the beams they can fire into yellow smoke and a sticker on her guitar case. - Party Crasher can seal anything or anyone in his disco balls, as long as there's still a blank square. - Cat Blank, being a villainous version of Cat Noir, has unlimited uses of his signature Cataclysm, which have been powered up to the point he can destroy \|\|the entire Milky Way Galaxy, and this is lowballing it\|\|. - Heart Hunter's female face can turn anyone who feels any kind of love into a heart, which promptly gets eaten by the male face. - King Cash can turn whoever he slashes with the gold blades of his fan into golden statues. \|\|However, that ability was never seen in action.\|\| - Yan Woshi can reduce anyone to a pink mist with his Eye Beams. \|\|With the exception of the wielder of the Prodigious.\|\| - Mr. Pigeon got an upgrade for his 72nd akumatization. On top of controlling every pigeon in Paris, his pigeons can turn people into more pigeons under his command with just a touch. - Sole Crusher can absorb anyone she kicks, stomps, steps on, or otherwise touches with the bottom of her shoes, and becomes bigger as a result. - Queen Banana can turn anyone shot by her banana gun, or hit by a banana shot from the turrets of her banana-themed car, or hit by her giant gorilla companion Banana Boom Boom and the giant bananas he throws, into a certain curvy yellow fruit. - Robustus (the second time around) can trap anything or anyone in a cyberspace prison using the smartphones he's hacked (and their mind-controlled holders). - Wishmaker can transform and brainwash anyone into performing their childhood dream if they're hit by the energy shot from his microphone-like staff, which would unmask the heroes in the process should they be hit. - Moolak's safe is equipped with lasers that can turn anyone hit into gold coin that is teleported inside the safe. - Sole Destroyer's kicks and stomps can turn anyone into a high-heeled shoe that sings her praises. - Gold Record's gold record turns anyone it touches (except for him) into a vinyl record that automatically plays a song that contains their deepest secrets. - In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, the main characters use the Elements of Harmony twice: \|\|once to take down Nightmare Moon, the evil ruler of the moon, and again on Discord, the omnipotent dark god of chaos\|\|. - Even without the Elements, a Circle of Friendship attack has enough power to One Hit Kill a trio of Windigos, powerful monsters capable of causing a world ending blizzard. - Samurai Jack: - In "Jack and the Zombies," most of the zombies turn into dust after one hit. - Season 5; Jack seemingly kills one of the Daughters of Aku with a single punch to the face, snapping her neck in the process. - With the amount of damage the gems in Steven Universe can take, it's easy to forget that humans don't have the same luxury. Therefore, \|\|Lars dying in a Robonoid explosion\|\| was one of the most shocking moments in the show. - Truth in Television. Many weapons don't need many hits to kill a person, especially if they hit the brain. - This is the aim on both kendo and German School of Swordsmanship. - It is entirely possible to kill or knock out a person instantly with a single surprisingly gentle blow. However, beyond accidental cases there is little evidence for the existence of a reliable martial technique. Chances of an instant knockout are significant if any highly trained fighter is given a reason to go all out against an opponent with little or no conditioning. Even if the attacker has no training, (un)lucky hits can lethally aggravate a pre-existing condition (aneurysms are particularly infamous) and kill in short order. If the initial blow causes the victim to fall over (not necessarily unconscious) onto a hard surface or an object that results in critical trauma to the brain or spinal cord, the fall and resultant impact can easily paralyse the unfortunate victim, or even be fatal. - A rare real-life example outside a military context is commotio cordis. If a blow strong enough strikes a small region of the chest between the 2nd and 4th ribs during a 15-millisecond window in the heartbeat cycle, the heart rhythm will be disrupted and cardiac arrest will ensue. While this probably can't be induced during a real fight due to the coincidences involved, it has happened to hockey, lacrosse note : the reason defensemen in that sport are no longer allowed to step into the crease and play goalie when the actual goalie and his mandatory chest protector are elsewhere and baseball players who have been hit by shots or hits. Lacrosse players have died from this, while NFL player Damar Hamlin nearly died from such a blow in January 2023. - Nuclear weapons, capable of annihilating entire cities and the inhabitants located in them. Practically anything near the epicenter of the explosion is vaporized by extreme heat, while the resulting blast-wave can instantly demolish most structures. Anything that hasn't died from either of the above may then succumb to radiation poisoning within a matter of hours or days. - The Box Jellyfish, the deadliest venomous animal known to exist. It generally takes somewhere between 5 minutes to a second for its sting to kill. Only one person is known to have survived from one. - The poison dart frog poison kills in less than 3 seconds; it has to get in the blood though, so contact itself probably won't kill you. Unless it's the Golden Poison Dart Frog, which can. - In both armoured and naval warfare, a well-aimed or lucky hit in the opposing tank/ship's magazine can lead to that unfortunate target being blown up by its own ammunition. This is what happened to three British battlecruisers at the battle of Jutland in 1916 (as well as two older British armored cruisers and a German predreadnought battleship) and to HMS Hood in 1941. It doesn't even have to be in the main magazines! Two of the hits that killed the British battlecruisers at Jutland (one of them on HMS Invincible, note : although that ship's belt armor was thin enough that, had the incoming shell instead hit the side of the ship, the result would likely have been the same the other on HMS Queen Mary) each penetrated the roof of a main battery turret, note : as did a third that came very close to taking out HMS Lion, which avoided going up only due to a mortally-wounded crewman who, after the initial shell hit, ordered the turret's magazine flooded before the rest of the propellant charges in the turret and its handling room ignited which wouldn't have been a problem (other than for the people in the turret itself) except that the Royal Navy's battlecruiser gunners were bypassing safety protocols for the sake of rapid fire and leaving a nice, flammable chain of cordite leading all the way to the magazines. note : The third battlecruiser, HMS Indefatigable (which, by the way, means "unable to be defeated"), plus the two armored cruisers (HMS Defence and HMS Black Prince) and the predreadnought (SMS Pommern), were blown up in the more conventional manner, by shells (or, in Pommern's case, a torpedo) simply punching straight through into the magazines. That, and the fact that the cordite stock hadn't been sufficiently rotated and the stuff was a bit old and chemically twitchy, added up to cause disaster. In the Hood's case, Bismarck's gunners most likely got a very lucky shot that slipped in just below the ship's armor belt and penetrated to the magazines. note : Hood's armor extended far enough below the waterline that this normally wouldn't be possible (in order to hit the side of the ship below the lower edge of the armor belt, a shell would have to hit the water well short of the ship, which would likely initiate the shell's fuze, and travel a considerable distance through the water, which would slow the shell quite a bit and could easily destroy the fuze; the combined effect of these two factors would've been either to detonate the shell in the water outside the ship's hull, or to keep it from detonating at all, even after punching through the hull and into the ship)... unfortunately, due to the specifics of her construction, when travelling at high speed (as she was in her final battle) she generated a bow wave prominent enough that the trough of this wave (which just so happened to line up with the longitudinal position of her aft magazines) almost uncovered the lower edge of her belt, allowing a shell which happened to land right in the trough just a few feet short of the hull to punch through below her armor without being set off outside the hull or having its fuze destroyed, and then to reach the magazines and detonate. - Japanese cruisers in general were vulnerable to this. This was because they carried highly-volatile "Long Lance" torpedoes, which were the most advanced torpedoes in the world by the 1940s but powered with pure and flammable oxygen. Even glancing hits from low-caliber shells could cause them to quickly cook-off and destroy or cripple the ship. In particular, during the Battle of Samar, the USS Johnston managed to land a crippling hit onto the Japanese heavy cruiser Kumano, completely taking it out of the battle with a torpedo hit (the hit blew the ship's entire front end off). - Another notable Japanese naval example from the Second World War was the loss of the carrier flagship Akagi in the Battle of Midway. During the Battle, the Japanese Carrier Forces were in the process of refueling & rearming their planes to launch an attack on the US Fleet; however (by sheer chance) American Carrier Planes managed attack the Japanese fleet at this exact moment to devastating results. In the Akagi's case, she was hit only by a single aerial bomb. Ordinarily, this would not have been fatal damage; however the bomb hit & detonated within the main hangar deck when it was littered with munitions & aviation fuel to be used for the upcoming assault. Because of this, the Akagi was quickly engulfed in flames that proved impossible to control, made worse by the fact that after several hours burning the carrier lost all power, which destroyed any chance of putting out the fires to save her. Realizing how hopeless the situation was for the ship, Admiral Yamamoto personally ordered the Akagi scuttled. - In World War I, the SMS Szent István was torpedoed in the aft boiler room, killing the power needed to use the pumps and throw the water out. In fact a direct hit from a well-placed torpedo will sink most warships, with only the biggest capable of surviving. Modern torpedoes, which all use proximity fuses rather than needing to strike the target, ideally detonate a short distance below the keel of a vessel "breaking its back" under the target's own weight, causing the ship to split in two and sink relatively rapidly. The "back breaking" effect happened to one US ship during World War II from a kamikaze aircraft instead of a torpedo. The aircraft crashed in front of the ship, the ship ran over it, and was destroyed by an airplane which had already been shot down. - In general, aircraft are extremely susceptible to being brought down by a singular cause, whether intentional or accidental. A propeller strike on a single-engined plane, for instance, can effectively cripple the plane's means of propulsion, resulting, at best, in a forced landing. In air-to-air combat, a direct hit by a single missile will generally suffice to bring down any aircraft. - Hydrogen-filled Zeppelins in World War I were surprisingly resilient to being brought down by machine gun fire, note : but not, as popularly told, invulnerable to it; before incendiary ammunition was developed, several zeppelins were brought down by riddling the envelope and gas cells with bullet holes until it eventually lost too much lifting gas to stay airborne but they could be downed with just one burst of incendiary ammunition or a single explosive shell in the right place. This was, in a roundabout way, also the cause for the Hindenburg disaster... The US, seeing Nazi Germany gear up for a war, refused to sell helium to them, forcing the Nazis to use hydrogen as lift gas. - Similarly, anything that penetrates the armor of a tank will kill it, or at best take it out of action for the duration of the battle. This is because tanks are very compact vehicles, so anything that gets through the armor is going to hit something important. Increasingly, this "something important" is the crew itself. - Masutatsu Oyama, founder of Kyokushinaki Karate, was considered in his time the embodiment of "One Strike, Certain Death". Three times in exhibitions, he killed a full-grown bull with a single punch. - A lot of pesticides are made like this. - Many combat athletes are known for their ability to end a fight with a single strike. Perhaps the best contemporary example is the UFC's Anthony "Rumble" Johnson, who, as of March 2017, shares the record for most all-time knockouts (including TKOs) in UFC history (11) with Anderson Silva, and boasts an incredible five KO/TKO victories in 51 seconds or less, with two of them coming in 13 seconds each. In the words of UFC commentator Joe Rogan, "Rumble Johnson connects on people, and they just shut off.". Another great example is Jorge Masvidal knocking out Ben Askren in five seconds at UFC 239, when Jorge only needed a flying knee to lay Ben out cold, setting the record for fastest KO in UFC history.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneTurnKill
One, Two, Three, Four, Go! - TV Tropes In Japanese, "Go" (五) means "five", but many Japanese are also aware that it means "move forward" or "take action" in English, When the word is mixed into Gratuitous English, or included as Gratuitous Japanese, it becomes a pun, having both meanings at once. This could apply to titles, names, dialog, and many things related to a Five-Man Band. Perhaps in pure Japanese, the pun is there, but someone who knows Japanese would have to explain how the pun is there in any such examples. Popular in both Manga, Anime, and Animesque shows. A Sub-Trope of Goroawase Number. Seven Is Nana is a Sister Trope. ## Examples (Please be sure to explain how they fit here) - GoLion ( Voltron in America) is made of five lions, and they shout "Let's Go Lion!" before forming. The opening theme counts off the pilots in English, "One plus one plus one plus one plus one, Golion!" - In Hikaru no Go, Hikaru wears a shirt with the number 5 on it, and he's a go player. - Usually races in Initial D start with a different countdown, but this one appears a few times. - The song "Gohan wa Okazu" ("Rice as a Side Dish") from K-On! episode 20 contains the refrain "Ichi, ni, san, shi, gohan!" (One, two, three, four, rice!") - One Piece: - Opening 15 of the anime, "We Go!", has the refrain "Ichi, ni, sunshine, yon, WE GO!" The romanization of "sunshine" is "san-sha-in," in which "san" is the traditional three. - Five tiny mermaid quins are named Ichika, Nika, Sanka, Yonka and... Yonka Two. - The original title for Speed Racer is Mach Go Go Go after the car, which is called the "Mach Go". So calling it the "Mach 5" in the dub just made sense. Since the word meaning "number" can be pronounced "go" as well, an accurate translation of the original title would be "Mach #5, Go!" - all 3 "go"s have different meanings. - It helps that Speed's original Japanese name was "Go". - For those who care, "go" doesn't exactly mean "number," though it frequently can be used as such—it's a suffix attached to the name of a vehicle, which frequently do involve numbers but don't have to. E.g. Tetsujin Nijuhachi-go is literally "Iron Man #28", but Captain Harlock's ship, the Arcadia, is also referred to as "Arcadia-go" in Japanese. - For those of us who are even more pedantic, the "Arcadia-go" example above is actually a fourth way of using the word. The word "go" (written 号) does means "number", but in the sense of a numerical label (e.g. any place where you'd use the # sign to mean "number"), not in the sense of a quantity (in which case you'd use "suu"/数 instead). - The fourth Tamagotchi series is called GO-GO Tamagotchi!, a pun on the fact that the show celebrates the fifth anniversary of the Tamagotchi anime. Also, the fifth series in general is called Tamagotchi! Tamatomo Daishuu-GO!. - In one episode of Twin Princess of Wonder Planet, Bumo, Evil Counterpart to Pumo, disguises himself as the latter and tries to lead the main characters into a trap by explaining that the answer their Crystal Fortulette gave (6) meant to go to the Thorn (Ibara) Mansion, since one ( ichi) and five (go) add up to six. - Yes! Pretty Cure 5 is the first series of Pretty Cure featuring a Five-Man Band. The sequel series plays the trope even straighter, as it is aptly named Yes! Pretty Cure 5 GO!GO!. - Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds: Yusei's D-Wheel is called the Yusei Go. Its Wikia page should give some insights on the many possible meanings/puns of the name. - In Fuse, book 2 from The Pure Trilogy by Julianna Baggott, the heroine Pressia dreams she is counting with the words "Itchy knee. Sun, she go." It puzzles her at first, wondering where the sun was going, but these words turn out to hold the key to her missing memories of childhood in Japan. - Scatman John has "Ichi Ni San... Go" song, which (likely unintentionally) avenges what English language suffered at the hands of Japanese media. Poor pronunciation, timing and emphasis, impossible syntax, you name it. - "Speaking Japanese" by Shiny Toy Guns, which has four lines preceded by the singer shouting "Ichi! Ni! San! Shi!" leading up to beginning the chorus after shouting "Go!", with full intent of the double meaning. - The Bait-and-Switch video game music collective SiIvaGunner has a playlist for a fake game titled Maroon GO. Its title, besides being named after Maroon 5 and Pokémon GO, is also a pun on how the number "5" translates as "Go" in Japanese. - When Ichiro Suzuki came to the United States to join the Seattle Mariners baseball team in 2001, he was given the uniform number 51, meaning that when read as individual numerals, his uniform number is "Go", and "ichi". This fits well with the common fan chant, "Go, Ichi! Go, Ichi! Go, Ichi!" - In DanceDanceRevolution Ultramix 4, one of the songs is entitled "GO!" — getting its title from its 5/4 time signature. Throughout the track, a voice can be made out in the background counting off in Japanese. - Pump It Up Pro 2 has a different remix of the same "GO!" song mentioned above, with the same time signature issues. - Mushroom Go: At the beginning of the comic, Go becomes the fifth member of the Chainless.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneTwoThreeFourGo
One-Man Industrial Revolution - TV Tropes The Gadgeteer Genius is good at what he does, but he doesn't have a particularly profound effect on The 'Verse, because Reed Richards Is Useless. This guy, however, is almost singlehandedly responsible for ending the Medieval Stasis: the one person responsible for all the high technology in a setting. Anyone Giving Radio to the Romans is likely to be this; and if instead of one person it takes a whole group of people who by random chance just happen to have the right skills and knowledge to start the industrial revolution, it's Stranded with Edison. See also Alternate Universe Reed Richards Is Awesome. ## Examples: - In General, many Trapped in Another World mangas have the main character become this, and depending on the story it is either the main focus of the plot (i.e. Release That Witch) or being completely by accident (i.e. The Eminence in Shadow). This is usually due to them being sent to a fantasy-like setting that has technology no more advance than the middle age, and said main character just creating items or using techniques common from today's age. - Dr. STONE has its protagonists wake up several millenia after the entire human race was turned into stone − needless to say, all the machines and facilities have long crumbled by then. One of those protagonists, Senku, is a walking encyclopedia and a bonafide scientific genius. He ends up in a primitive human village and introduces certain modern mechanics, food, and systems to their civilization much earlier than they would have done it themselves, to the point the villagers first call it "sorcery". Senku and co. are opposed to Tsukasa, a super strong guy who intends to rebuild a society freed of the evils of technology and thus sees Senku as his main enemy. - The Whispered in Full Metal Panic! have the potential of becoming this due to their main purpose of creating Black Technology, which is far more advanced than present tech. According to Gauron, Amalgam always seeks out Whispered and tests them for their scientific prowess, which can be as low as making a new rocket or high as devices that can convert one's willpower into a physcial force. - In Maoyu, in her guise as the Crimson Scholar, Maou is proving to be this to the Southern Kingdoms. In her case its slightly more realistic as she is moving gradually first with a Green Revolution in agriculture before moving on to the Guttenburg Press. Other characters also contribute such as the seeds of Liberalism and Alternate Currency. - Dr. Vegapunk of One Piece is the primary reason the Ocean Punk setting has robots with Frickin' Laser Beams. The technology he's created, most of which is heavily controlled by The Government, is explicitly described as 500 years ahead of the rest of the world. However, when we meet Vegapunk himself (sorta), the doctor laments that his work is so advanced that virtually no one else is smart enough to replicate it, and crazy expensive to boot. That and having to do all the work by himself from scratch without being able to delegate anything is another hurdle, \|\|though he found a solution for ''that'', too\|\|. - One might be inclined to call this a Four-Man Industrial Revolution, considering that Caesar Clown, Vinsmoke Judge, and Queen all worked with him and made major contributions of their own... but those three are all so villainous that Vegapunk disowned them, and went off to invent cyborgs by himself. Judge did end up creating \|\|human cloning and genetic modification\|\|, though. - Dornkirk, from The Vision of Escaflowne; any number of Emperor Scientists may have this going on as well. Which isn't much of a surprise when you realize Dornkirk is actually \|\|Sir Isaac Newton\|\|. - In Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan's ability to make rare elements from scratch is the reason his world has cancer-free cigarettes, efficient zeppelins and cheap electric cars. - Superman: - Lex Luthor in Superman: Red Son is responsible for technology decades ahead of its time. - In main DC continuity, the city of Metropolis was "upgraded" by Brainiac around New Year's Day 2000 to be centuries ahead of its time. - In ElfQuest's "Shards" arc, the half-elf, half-troll Two-Edge becomes this for the human warlord Grohmul Djun. - In Universal War One, Kalish finds a way to travel through space and time, and literally starts a new civilization. - An Iron Man story had Tony Stark getting thrown back in time to the King Arthur era, much like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Unable to return to his own time, he sets up shop and becomes a blacksmith, while using his knowledge to create as much modern technologies as possible. - A major theme in Dungeon Keeper Ami. Justified. Ami has access to all the knowledge of the modern world, in addition to several kinds of magic and a horde of minions to impliment said Industrial Revolution. A fair ammount of innovation is her own, as well, she is highly intelligent after all. This is what founds and feeds her reputation of cunning and genius. - A Song of Ice and Fire/ Game of Thrones fanfics: - In A Connecticut Yankee in King Robert's Court (Story-only thread), an American engineer gets thrown into Edmure Tully, and an American nurse into Myranda Royce. While Edmure manages to introduce brandy, new roads, paper, gunpowder and new agricultural techniques, Myranda manages to create new jewelry, the bra, better health practices (including cardiopulmonar resuscitation) and the spinning wheel... and there is foreshadowing that there is going to be a lot more. It is a Two People Industrial Revolution. - In Greyjoy Alla Breve, Theon Greyjoy receives not only the memories of a modern man familiar with the books, but a mental connection to The Other Wiki and thus detailed knowledge of everything from gunpowder to photography, to medicine, Bessemer process and flight. - Flim and Flam in The Rise of Darth Vulcan tried. However when it became apparent to their frustration that no one regarded their revolutionary inventions as anything more than novelties, they decided to get their own back by becoming con ponies. - Ahsoka Tano in Harry Tano. She brings a lot of incredibly advanced technology with her, but in the end she still needs the help of her magical friends to make the first steps towards the new industrial revolution. - With the help of an entity that makes it technically a crossover, Saruman in Saruman of Many Devices overturns the sword and bow warfare of the Third Age with the application of rifle-armed Uruk Dragoons. - Downplayed in the Undertale fanfic Visiontale, posted on Archive of Our Own. A small group of monsters is responsible for the scientific innovations, hard and soft, in the Underground. They have lived for centuries, so they have had the time to develop their ideas. Even so, they still need help from others to conduct research and turn their ideas into tangible results. - The How to Train Your Dragon fanfic A Thing of Vikings has Hiccup being basically this to the early Medieval Period. While canonically in the fic he doesn't invent steam power, he does create industrial tech that is literally centuries ahead of its time (sheet metal roller, drop press, etc). It is noted that part of the reason for this is that compared to other geniuses of the time or before him, Hiccup as the heir to a rapidly emerging power did not need to seek funding to build his inventions or spend time just trying to earn enough money to feed himself. This is lampshaded by one of the epigraphs, where it's stated that many modern students of history lament the fact that Hiccup "just missed" inventing the steam engine, seeing as how he had all the necessary components at hand. However, as the epigraph counters, he lacked the need for such inventions, since many of the things steam power could accomplish, dragon power could do just as well for the needs at the time. - Taylor Hebert in Distance Learning for Fun and Profit was a polymath capable of performing seventh dimension math in her head before her invention caused her to basically steal alien cable, specifically a distance learning program. From there, she worked out anti-gravity, a handheld MRI machine, a cheap room temperature superconductor, and a cloaking device small enough to fit in a phone. Not only is she not a parahuman of any sort, but only the last device is even inspired by parahumans (specifically a piece of Squealer's tinker tech). Taylor becomes so incredibly important to the United States of America that in less than a year, the president himself insists that her safety be given priority over his own should it ever come to that. - Meet the Robinsons has a fairly extreme example: Cornelius Robinson has invented all the cool new stuff we see the future has, and it's managed to become widely adopted by the time he's still middle-aged! - Noriko Null from Beyond the Impossible. She develops an incredibly cheap fusion reactor that is scheduled to completely phase out nuclear power and fossil fuels within a couple of years. - A time traveler's 3rd-hand account in the Burton & Swinburne Series, leads Isambard Kingdom Brunel to create a steampunk industrial revolution while Charles Darwin has a counterpart genetic engineering revolution. All this in the 19th century. - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Hank develops bicycles, gunpowder, and even electricity, enriching the lives of the medieval peasants. He's also able to spread these technologies because he happens to meet the king early on and scares him into compliance with a conveniently timed eclipse. This allows him to set up a system of schools and manufacturing complexes which make his introduction of technology almost plausible. Until the Church declares Hank a heretic and bans his inventions. - A deconstruction is Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, written in 1911. A mining engineer finds himself in the same position as Twain's hero, but finds he can change little. - Poul Anderson showed the problems with this in his short story The Man Who Came Early, in which an American soldier stationed in Iceland is sent back to the Viking Era after being hit by lightning. Luckily the Icelandic language has not changed much since then. All his attempts to change history fall flat on their face. When he tries to show the Vikings how to make compasses, he has no idea where to find or mine magnetic ores. When he tries to show them how to build more modern sailing vessels, the Vikings point out that such vessels are too cumbersome to dock anywhere where there is not a ready built harbor, an obvious rarity in that time period, and so on. The story's main point is that introducing future inventions, while possible, is immensely difficult, because most advances are useless without an equally advanced societal infrastructure to support them or outright impossible to make without them. - K. W. Jeter's Fiendish Schemes takes place about a decade after George Dower had sold all the inventions in his father's shop in Infernal Devices. The result is a steampunk revolution where lighthouse crab walkers are a thing, geo-thermal steam power is available in every British home and fetishized mechanical body modification shows up in "ferric sex" clubs. - Leo Frankowski's The Cross Time Engineer series. However the protagonist gets a good deal of covert assistance from a future time-traveling relative. - The Prince Roger series has Space Marines crash on a planet chock full of alien barbarians. In order to make it across the planet to the spaceport, they ally with certain tribes and give them Roman Empire-era technology and tactics. - Safehold: Nimue "Merlin" Alban brings modern technology back to the colonists, who are in a sort of involuntary Space Amish-ism. - Among the locals, Baron Seamount is so this that at least one character argues against telling him about the technology stolen from them in part because he's already single-handedly progressing Safehold technology without access to the knowledge, thus furthering exactly the sort of inquisitive scientific mindset the protagonists want to encourage in Safeholdians generally. If everybody bringing technology back to Safehold is just duplicating stuff that was developed on Old Earth that's not going to encourage the desired mindset. - Martin Padway in Lest Darkness Fall invents distilleries, the telegraph, the printing press, the telescope... He's a time traveller stuck in Italy just before Justinian's disastrous reconquest, so he tries to make the best of it. - In "The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass", a deconstruction of Lest Darkness Fall, a man goes back in time to the Roman Empire and brings them modern knowledge until a thousand years later the Earth is so overpopulated that the future sends someone else back in time to kill him just as he arrives in Roman times. The last line in the story is "And darkness blessedly fell". - Subverted in Mostly Harmless: Arthur thought he could do this since he comes from a technologically advanced place (compared to the place he ends up at), but then he realizes he didn't know how any of that stuff actually worked. The one invention he ends up bringing to them is... sandwiches. - J.F. Bone's novel The Meddlers: A man's starship runs out of fuel (wire made out of precious metals) and he lands on a primitive planet. He must teach the natives how to use technology so he can get enough fuel to get home. - Vernor Vinge: - Sherkaner Underhill takes technology from WWI-ish to present day singlehandedly in A Deepness in the Sky. - A Fire Upon the Deep reveals that every spaceship carries 'uplift' files, in case they get caught in the slow zones where higher end technology won't work, and they have to build lower-tech replacements to get back to the higher zones. - In Michael Swanwick's Jack Faust, German scholar Johannes Faust kickstarts a technological revolution that skyhooks Renaissance Europe into the early 20th century in the space of a century. Justifiable in this case, as the story is written more as a fable than a realist novel (at least, if the parts where Mephistopheles tells Faust how to create new technologies is anything to go on) - In Harry Harrison's Deathworld 2, set many years in the future, in spite of the main character being a professional gambler with no education in engineering or history, when stranded on a backwards planet he manages to reinvent everything up through the Industrial Revolution. - Subverted in the Discworld with Leonard of Quirm, who could create massive technological change had the Patrician not had him placed in a large, airy room for which he has the only key, where his failure to consider the consequences of his inventions can't do any harm. This is a man who created something for use in the mining industry "for when they want to move the mountains out of the way". Some of his designs do creep out, with the result Ankh-Morpork has a few Clock Punk devices like the Barbarian Invaders game, but not enough to revolutionise the Disc. - While not a one person Industrial Revolution, the core cast of Everworld manages to plant the seeds for technology, starting in Enter the Enchanted, where April shows Merlin how to perform a blood transfusion, but more significantly in Discover the Destroyer, where Jalil and David manage to get a lot of gold for showing the fairies how to construct a telegraph. It all comes to a head in the last two books where the technology has spread so drastically that there is now electricity and cable cars. It goes even further when, after battles, April instructs the elves in safety from germs and bacteria, as well as other things. Christopher was of the belief that April's contribution brought the study of medicine in Everworld forward by about five hundred years practically overnight. - Not to mention trading the formula for gunpowder (out of a high school chemistry book) to some aliens in exchange for a little upgrade to their pocketknife. - A Hero's War is all about this, taking a largely agrarian and artisan society and turning it into an industrial powerhouse. Cato is actually trying to make it not all about him, encouraging others to experiment and measure and standardize and automate, and to a degree he's successful, with several of his allies adapting to this new mindset quite well. But in the end, it was Cato who kicked it all off, and he also has the head start of knowing (from Earth) a lot of what's possible and which paths of research to pursue. - The protagonist of R. A. Lafferty's Rainbird is this. So brilliant is he that at the end of his life he invents a time machine so he can give his younger self all his future inventions, allowing young!Rainbird to work on even more advanced technologies. \|\|After trying this once too often, old!Rainbird freaks out young!Rainbird and causes him to give up inventing altogether, thus erasing all Rainbird's inventions from history.\|\| - Ayla from the Earth's Children book series single-handedly invents and introduces to prehistoric Europe an absurd number of things, including making fire with pyrite and stone, sewing needles, wound suturing, animal domestication, bras and sanitary napkins for women. We are also supposed to believe that she is the first person ever to realize that children are conceived as a result of sex. - In David Duncan's The Seventh Sword series an Earth engineer Wally Smith is transported into the body of a swordsman on a primitive world. He finds himself unable to speak of anything advanced — the language lacks the appropriate words and the warrior's vocabulary is too limited and one-sided. When he does manage to explain something, the locals are wary of anything new. After meeting local "sorcerers", who already possess the secret knowledge of \|\|writing, firearms and spyglasses\|\| and are ready to learn new things, Wally muses that if he is captured, "He would be thrown into the nearest torture chamber and laid on the rack, producing a secret a day for the sorcerers like a battery hen, a one-man industrial revolution." While undesirable, it does fit his goal of developing this world. Later he finds less painful ways to collaborate with them. - In Ultima Thule, Tommy Paine deliberately and repeatedly invokes this trope among multiple worlds of the United Planets over a period of years. He's not just doing it for kicks, though. - In Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy, Charles Darwin discovered not only the theory of evolution, but Mendelian genetics and DNA. This advanced the understanding of biology so quickly that by the onset of World War One, Britain and her allies (the "Darwinist" powers) have replaced much of the machinery in their societies with genetically engineered animals instead, like a Bio Punk version of The Flintstones. - Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace in The Difference Engine, and most of the many "Victorians with computers" Steampunk stories that came after it. - Shef, in Harry Harrison's The Hammer and the Cross has shades of this; while many of the inventions aren't his, he is the driving force behind the wave of new mechanisms and devices that sweep the world. - This is very literally true about Emily in the Schooled in Magic books. She introduces the printing press, basic accounting methods, and steam power (just to name a few things) to the medieval world she finds herself in. - Attempted in Envoy from the Heavens, where all attempts by human agents to subvert Osieran Medieval Stasis end in failure. When Ivar tries to subtly reference early experiments with steam engines, people point out that they tend to explode, making them unsafe and, therefore, undesirable. The local horse equivalent is only used for pulling chariots. Ivar's suggestion of a saddle to ride the animal are met with horrified expressions. The locals would never put their weight on such noble animals. Political upheaval is out of the question, as The Empire is extremely stable and firm in its rule of the sole inhabited continent. The continent on the other side of the planet is uninhabited, but the local religious beliefs preclude attempts to explore oceans (they think the world is flat). - The Young Ancients gives us a Magitek example in Tor Green Baker. In a decade or so of story time, the Kingdom of Noram goes from Medieval Stasis with some magic items floating around to a damn-near post-scarcity society with cool spaceships and a moon colony. Tor and his family are eventually banished from Earth, in fact, because they're too disruptive to everything and the world needs time to adjust to things like instant healing. Aside from having a lot of imagination and workaholic tendencies, the major difference between Tor and every other Master Builder is that Tor always spends an extra hour or so on his designs, to make them easily duplicated and mass producible. - Release That Witch: Played very straight. Most of the scientific inventions come straight out of the main character Roland's head, including concrete, steam engines, hot air ballons, smokeless gunpowder, electric lighting, and more. And even concepts already discovered in the setting, like black powder or sulfiric acid creation, are only moved to industrial scale production thanks to Roland. - In The Spacehounds of I.P.C., E. E. "Doc" Smith has his hero recreate much of the technology of human civilization on Ganymede. He does get a leg up by way of having parts of a destroyed spaceship available, but first he needs power; to get power he needs a hydroelectric dam; to make the dam he needs tools and parts; to get the tools and parts he needs other tools... and so on. - Doctor Who: In "A Town Called Mercy", crash-landed alien scientist Kahler-Jex brings the titular Wild West town decades ahead of where it should be in terms of technology and medicine. - On Stargate Atlantis, McKay does this to/for a civilization he mistakes for a Sim game, bringing them from Medieval Stasis to Steampunk over the course of two years. This doesn't sit well with his "game" opponent John Sheppard, whose country reflects his military mindset, and who constantly complains that McKay cheated by advancing them too fast. - Sheppard has also advanced them beyond what they would normally have, just not to the extent of McKay. - The Outer Limits (1995): In "Final Appeal", the time traveler Dr. Theresa Givens discovered that advanced technology was banned in 2076 due to 80% of humanity being wiped out by nuclear weapons during the War of 2059. She then brought advanced technological devices from her own time, the 1990s, forward to 2076 in the hope of igniting a second Industrial Revolution. However, her efforts were unsuccessful as she was arrested, tried and convicted of breaking the anti-technology code. - In The Adventure Zone: Balance, Lucas Miller and his mother are responsible for much of the setting's sci-fantasy elements, including robots, virtual reality, and elevators. - The Twilight Histories episode The Winged Victory has you introducing steam engines, flintlock riffles, gas lamps, flamethrowers, and even rudimentary airplanes to Ancient Greece. This is to prepare them for the coming Roman invasion. - GURPS Time Travel supplement Alternate Earths has this. In the "Gernsback" parallel, Nikola Tesla's inventions revolutionized the modern world. Downplayed in that the biggest change is him marrying Anne Morgan, the daughter of J.P. Morgan, in 1893, giving him access to his vast wealth to finance development of his wireless communication and power transmission technology note : In Real Life, J.P. did fund the Wardenclyfe Tower when it started out as an intercontinental wireless communication tower, but he refused additional funding when Tesla wanted to expand it to work as a wireless power transmitter before it was even finished. And by "before it was even finished", I mean "Tesla decided to do this almost immediately after signing the contract and receiving the funds, which resulted in J.P. being (understandably) upset at what he saw as a breach of contract", giving access to earlier intercontinental wireless communication and viable wireless power transmission. This arguably makes it a more realistic take on this trope, as the main reason he is able to work on such a scale was because his wife was the daughter of one of the most powerful and influential financiers of their time. - In the Deadlands setting, Dr. Darius Hellstromme is responsible for the vast majority of technical advancements from about 1870 to the 2100s - the steam-powered wagon, the transcontinental railroad tunnel from Denver to the West Coast, the zombie-brain-powered robots (he uses a similar technique to put his brain into a robot body after his original body dies), the nuclear bomb (in both fantastic and regular forms), faster-than-light space travel, et cetera. - Zigzagged with Gilbert Bates from Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura. Bates is universally credited invented the verse's first steam engine, sparking an industrial revolution that transformed Tarant from a backwater hole into a world superpower. \|\|As a matter of fact, Bates didn't invent the steam engine - he merely appropriated the old dwarven prototype, which is something the dwarves didn't forgive him at all - but rather, he introduced it to the rest of Arcanum, using its full potential to accomplish the world's technological transformation\|\|. - Mordred on Astro-Knights Island in Poptropica. - Many, many Alternate History stories cast Nikola Tesla as this. For instance, Command & Conquer: Red Alert Series did it. - In Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals, Lexis is responsible for technology based on Energy Cores. - Lucca in Chrono Trigger, in fact; she lead to \|\|Porre becoming a military superpower\|\| based on her technology in Chrono Cross. - The Kappa were already technologically advanced in Touhou Project, but the goddess Kanako Yasaka feeds a dead sun god to a Hell Raven to give them access to nuclear power; and start their Industrial Revolution. When that fails, she successfully exploits Gensokyo's properties to harness cold fusion. Indeed, Kanako has a vested interest in advancing tech level: she's trying to shift her area of influence from "wind and rain" to "technology" due to Gods Need Prayer Badly. - Infel from Ar tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica is a one-woman Magitek Revolution. Nearly everything about current-age Reyvateils can be traced to her \|\|including the I.P.D. outbreak. She's the Big Bad\|\|. - Jade Curtiss of Tales of the Abyss developed \|\|fomicry, a magical method of instant, nearly exact cloning that can work on objects as well as people.\|\| This invention changed the very landscape of the world of Auldrant, and Jade was just a kid! - Emperor Valkorion \|\|aka the ex-Sith Emperor, Vitiate,\|\| from Star Wars: The Old Republic: Knights of the Fallen Empire supposedly did this to/for the people of Zakuul (albeit raising them from something more like modern technology to an insanely automated droid-based industry that surpasses anything else in the galaxy). It remains to be seen precisely how he did this, whether it was from things he personally invented at some point in his centuries-plus life or used some form of Lost Technology that he discovered in Wild Space. Beyond a few examples which are definitely the latter, the actual technology isn't actually that much more advanced. He's just using galactic standard technology in ways the other factions refuse to (the Republic would never allow the economy to be centralized to the degree required, and the Sith use slaves rather than droids for purely idiological reasons). - In the Trails Series, orbment technology was invented by Professor Epstein and improved upon by Professor Russel. Made slightly more realistic in that it took two people to make the technology practical, and it wasn't until Russel invented a functioning orbment-powered airship (which improved commerce immensely) did the technology suddenly start getting adopted in large amounts by society. - In the world of Dishonored, much of the technological and industrial progress in the Empire can be attributed to the name "Edmund Roseburrow" — a brilliant, if troubled Renaissance Man who almost single-handedly invented the contemporary whale oil-based industry, among other things. He later committed suicide when he saw how his discoveries were used by the Empire's aristocracy to subjugate the common people, rather than make the world a better place. - Mega Man: No matter the timeline, Doctor Thomas Light/Tadashi Hikari is a technological genius who completely rewrites the global landscape with whatever he puts his mind to. - Kevyn from Schlock Mercenary might count. He invented the teraport and pretty much changed the whole interstellar ball game: it's amazing how much new tech used and taken for granted in the comic is based off the teraport. - The Mechanist of Avatar: The Last Airbender fame can produce tanks, jet skis, and a huge freakin' drill, but the concept of a hot-air balloon eluuuudes him. - Hiroshi Sato of The Legend of Korra invented the first mass production automobile, then moved on to \|\|shock-gloves, Humongous Mecha and fighter-bomber airplanes\|\|. - Varrick apparently invented moving pictures (including the video camera, audio recording, and the film projector) and the first battlecruiser of his setting; he invents and produces an elaborate maglev train system, in a sticky situation MacGyvers an EMP, co-invents the flying mecha suit, and discovers how to utilize \|\|spirit energy, the Avatar universe's rough equivalent to nuclear fusion. He suddenly grows a conscience when he realizes its potential to be weaponized.\|\| He's also named a unit of power after himself (and a unit of mass after his assistant). It is implied he has invented much more than these prior to the start of the series, although not all his ideas were winners. Due to his eccentricities, he only works one hour a day. - The Disney Fairies movies have Tinker Bell be this. - In Futurama, during his time at MomCorp, Professor Farnsworth conceived of the original design and operating system for all modern robots in the series, and was able to convert previously-useless dark matter into the fuel that all ships use (prior to the fifth season). Given how innovative his work for the 30/31st century was, he's surprisingly humble (and, in some cases, regretful) about his inventions. He makes up for it by being crotchety about everything else. - Archimedes may well have done this - for a certain, probably low value of mechanization given the reasons listed below - for the Roman empire, but then a soldier went and killed him because he was too busy working on a math problem to respond to the Roman army sacking the city. It could have been something to do with all of the giant death machines Archimedes had built for the Carthaginians, such as a crane for crushing Roman ships. The Greeks at the time had invented a rudimentary mechanical calculator. It probably wouldn't have made a great deal of difference due to the economics of the situation, but one cannot help but wondering What Could Have Been... - Hero of Alexandria: bringing us the steam engine 1600 years before it was patented. He had also invented all the other components necessary to build a proper steam turbine (with the very important exception of the improvement metallurgy that would be needed to make one large enough to be useful), but never realized what could happen if he put his inventions together. - Thomas Edison came close in real life. His inventions (or inventions from his lab, anyway) gave birth to electric lighting, the recording industry, the cinema industry, and lots of incremental improvements in telegraphy, power generation, and other fields. He's often a villain in fiction nowadays because of his feud with Tesla, but how can you hate a real-life inventor who actually had a pipe organ in his laboratory? - He also inadvertently gave birth to major film studios based in Hollywood by monopolizing film-making technology, forcing independent film-makers to run as far away they could. Namely, to California. - Edison could be an indirect example. Though many inventions attributed to him may actually have been from the various inventors he employed, it was his business methods that enabled those inventions to crystallize in the first place. Quite a few also spread because of his efforts to promote them — his celebrity status earned the public's trust for new technologies with his name stamped on them. - Well, Nikola Tesla is widely credited as the inventor of most of the electrical systems in use today. The guy pioneered AC and perfected its use in the USA, then went on to develop things like radio, remote control, fluorescent lightbulbs and the wireless transmission of electrical power (which we're only now implementing into consumer products). Also, VTOL aircraft and a Death Ray... maybe. - One example that appears in real life is Samuel Slater, known as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution". In the late 1700s, America was still very much pre-industrial, with very little manufacturing. At this time, England still maintained a strong monopoly on the textile industry, because of its mechanization of that industry. Slater was able to sneak plans for these machines out of England by memorizing the details of the plans. He came to the United States, and helped build these machines, and revolutionized the textile industry in the United States, kicking off the American industrial revolution, as his moniker indicates. - It's worth noting that Slater had the benefit of luxurious loans from British banks keen on investing funds overseas, as well as horrifically high US import-taxes (tariffs) of 50% on all non-edible goods, and that tax was on top of shipping costs. - Michael Faraday is another quite literal example. His invention of a working electric motor kickstarted the Industrial Revolution, as well as his work on the induction engine, magnetism, polarization, and various other works. - Richard Trevithick was perhaps the individual who in our reality is the greatest contender for this. By single-handedly pioneering high-pressure steam engines, at a time when respected existing steam inventors said that high-pressure steam was either impossible to harness or too dangerous to be worth doing so (early high-pressure engine boilers regularly blew up, with deaths not uncommon), Trevithick invented, built, tested and proved the worth of a new type of engine that got much more energy out of coal than ever before, and thence created the first vehicle to ever move under its own power generation, and the invention was then taken on to create trains, cross-ocean liners, and large-scale electrical power generation. Along with Faraday's electricity, it can be seen as the core invention that created the industrial world and then modern world we see today—but without Trevithick's high-pressure steam energy generation, electricity would never have been generated efficiently enough to change the world itself. High pressure steam is now seen as perhaps the most significant invention of all time. - Henry Ford wasn't the first person to utilize assembly-line mass production note : Ransom Olds beat Henry Ford to it, but he popularized the production process, changing the way many industrial goods are produced.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneWomanIndustrialRevolution
One-Woman Song - TV Tropes Brian: Wow, a song named after a girl. There aren't a million of those already. Stewie: Name twenty . Brian: Rosanna , Roxanne , Michelle , Alison , Sarah , Angie , Brandy note : Full title "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)", Mandy , Gloria , Cecilia , Maggie May , Jessica , Nancy , Barbara Ann , Billie Jean , Layla , Lola , Polly , Helena , Jenny from the Block. Stewie: Name six more . Brian: Sherry , Laura , Wendy , Maria , Peggy Sue , Minnie the Moocher . Stewie: Name five more . Brian: Tracy , Jean , Jane , Mary Ann , Eleanor Rigby . Stewie: (throws down guitar ) Go fuck yourself. Songs named after girls, usually the Love Interest of the male singer. This trope is one that just keeps coming back, but for some reason female singers tend to not name songs specifically after guys. Not to be confused with One-Woman Wail. For songs about men, see One-Man Song. ## Standard Examples: - "Laura" - Scissor Sisters' pop number opening their first full album. Also the name of a song by Billy Joel. - "Mary Jane" - Alanis Morissette - "Valerie" - The Zutons (covered - Mark Ronson, of course). Also the name of a song by Steve Winwood. - "Arabella" - Arctic Monkeys - "Ramona" - Beck (From Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) - "Isobel" - Björk - "Emaline" - Ben Folds Five - Also "Julianne," "Kate," "Alice Childress," and "Gracie." - "Gracie" is written (and named) for Folds' daughter. - Also Ben Folds' (no longer Five) "Saskia Hamilton" and "Kylie from Connecticut" - "Caroline" and "Rosalie" - Concrete Blonde - "Grace" - Jeff Buckley - "Magdalena", "Brena", and "Judith" - A Perfect Circle - "Jacqueline" - Franz Ferdinand - "Tautou" - Brand New - "Mary", "Talula", "Ophelia", "Marianne" and "Josephine" -Tori Amos - "Lucy" - Skillet - "Djohariah", "Tonya Harding" - Sufjan Stevens - "Ruby note : Ruby Ruby Rubaaaaaaaay! " -The Kaiser Chiefs - "Adrienne" - The Calling - "Alison" - Slowdive - "Claudia Lewis" - M83 - "Alice", "Marian (Version)" and "Lucretia My Reflection" - The Sisters of Mercy - "Christine" - Siouxsie and the Banshees, especially odd due to the song being sung by a woman. - "Charlotte Sometimes" and "A Letter To Elise" - The Cure - "Caroline" and "Louise" from The Velvet Underground's much-maligned album Squeeze - "I Love You Suzanne" from Lou Reed's solo album New Sensations - "Ana Ng" - They Might Be Giants - "Isabel" - Ego Likeness - "Jenny Was a Friend of Mine" - The Killers - "Angelene", "My Beautiful Leah", "A Perfect Day Elise", "Catherine", and "Joy" - PJ Harvey (All from one album) - Tales of Us by Goldfrapp is an entire hard-to-categorise album of down-tempo single-person songs and seven of them are One Woman Songs: "Jo", "Annabel", "Drew", "Ulla", "Thea", "Simone" and "Laurel". - Swedish-language lied "Rose-Marie" by Zachris Topelius and Karl Collan. It's about Rose-Marie being pretty and seventeen. - "Für Elise" by Ludwig van Beethoven; an instrumental piano piece but well known by the name of the woman it's dedicated to. - "Molly", "Isabel" and "Annie's Song" - John Denver - "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town" -Johnny Darrell (Covered Up by Kenny Rogers) - Spawned an answer song "Billy, I've Got To Go To Town" by Geraldine Stevens - "My Maria" - B.W. Stevenson (Covered Up by Brooks & Dunn) - "Sweet Annie" - Zac Brown Band - "Adalida" - George Strait - Zig-zagged with Alan Jackson's "Dallas". The title refers to both the city and a girl named Dallas, with the narrator singing that "I wish Dallas was in Tennessee". - "Louise" - Daniel Romano - "Amy's Song" by Brent Anderson, which samples "Amie" as seen below - "Annabelle (Arkansas Is Callin' You)" by Hot Apple Pie - "Arlene" by Marty Stuart - "Kathleen" and "Loretta" - Townes Van Zandt - "My Antonia" by Emmylou Harris and Dave Matthews - "Valerie Leon" - Daniel Romano - "Amie" - Pure Prairie League - "Charlene" - Missing Heart - "Boten Anna", "Camilla", "Elinor" - Basshunter - "Angeline" - Groove Coverage - "Stella" - FM Attack (dedicated to the artist's daughter) - The trance act Ayla and their self-titled song were named after a girl who was in the studio while lead producer DJ Tandu (Ingo Kunzi) was recording said song. It later received a Sequel Song in the form of "Ayla Part II". - "Maria" - TKA (the chorus has a Shout-Out to the song of the same name from West Side Story) - "Stella" - Jam & Spoon - "Bernadette" - IAMX - "Delilah" - The Dresden Dolls - "Suzanne" - Leonard Cohen - "Barbara Allen" (Also "Barbarous Ellen", for her treatment of Jimmy Grove.) - traditional British; variants all over the English-speaking world. - "To Ramona" - Bob Dylan - "For Emma" - Bon Iver - "Hazey Jane I" and "Hazey Jane II" - Nick Drake - "Molly Malone" - an Irish traditional about a beautiful seafood-peddling girl who died and continued wandering the streets with her barrow as a ghost. - "Peggy Gordon" - a Canadian song of unknown origin. - "Flora" and "Polly Von" - Peter, Paul and Mary - "Annmarie" - Anaïs Mitchell. The singer pleads with the titular woman. - "Marianne" - The Easy Riders - "Cecilia" - Simon & Garfunkel (She's breaking his heart, shaking his confidence daily; AND he's begging her please to come home) - And its updated version, "Oh Cecilia", by The Vamps and Shawn Mendes. - "Mrs. Robinson", also by Simon and Garfunkel. - If you're feeling generous, "For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her" ... though with that one if you don't know what the name is you would never guess it (there's no chorus per se and the name "Emily" never appears in the song itself at all, only in the title). - "Sally Anne", "Penelope" and "Margarita" - Great Big Sea. - "Rosie" - Fairport Convention - "Alison Gross" (a witch) - Steeleye Span - "Hey Rose", "Genevieve", and "Viola" by Girlyman, though only one was written by a man. - "Janis" by Country Joe McDonald. - Martina-Phranc, by a woman this instance. - "Polly" by Walk Off the Earth - "Jenny" by the Mountain Goats (an allusion to Pirate Jenny). - "Come On Eileen" - Dexys Midnight Runners - "Beth" - KISS (He hears her callin', but he can't come home right now) - "Carrie" - Europe - Thin Lizzy have "Sweet Marie", "Sarah", and "Sarah": Both songs called "Sarah" were completely unrelated musically, but were about different relatives of Phil Lynott with that first name (the first was about his grandmother, the somewhat more well-known second was about his then-new-born daughter). There's also "Rosemarie", which they Covered Up from Bob Seger. - "My Michelle" - Guns N' Roses - "Sylvia" - The Antlers - "Alisa" - Cut Copy - "Cath..." - Death Cab for Cutie - "Geraldine" - Glasvegas - "Celestine" - Kirsty Mac Coll - "Girl Called Alex" - Kurt Vile - "Silvia" and "Billie Holliday" - Miike Snow - "Jezebel" - Two Hours Traffic - "Dr. Suzanne Mattox PhD" and "Patricia the Stripper" - The Wombats - "Josephine" and "Caroline" by Brandi Carlile - "Irene" - Pinguini Tattici Nucleari - Pick ONE post-"Ho Hey" hit for The Lumineers. "Ophelia", "Gloria", "Angela", "Cleopatra"...you get it. - "Itoshi No Riley" - DREAMS COME TRUE - "Maggie May" by Rod Stewart, about a possessive girlfriend. - Michael Jackson: - "Billie Jean" - Michael Jackson's signature song, from Thriller. It's about how the titular Billie Jean has been going around telling everyone she and the narrator are lovers, and that her child is his. - Also, "Dirty Diana," from the Bad album. - "Jenny from the Block" - Jennifer Lopez's Rock-Star Song - "Kitty" - Written by Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn, recorded by Racey and Covered Up by Toni Basil as "Mickey". - "Eve" and "Julia" - Chantal Kreviazuk. - The Four Seasons: - "Sherry" - "Ronnie" - "Dawn" - "Marlena". - "Brandy" - Looking Glass (She's a fine girl. What a good wife she would be.) - "Diana" by Paul Anka: "I'm so young and you're so old, this, Diana, I've been told." - "Rosanna" by Toto, sung about the keyboarist's girlfriend at the time, Rosanna Arquette. - Less famous ones from various albums include "Angela", "Manuela Run", "Lorraine", "Goodbye Elenore", "Carmen", "Holyanna", "Lea", "Anna", "Mushanga", "Pamela", "Mrs. Johnson", "Miss Sun", "Melanie", and "Chelsea" - "Alison" - Jordy (with both the singer and the cartoon girl being children). - "Célimène" - David Martial. - "Oh! Carol" - Neil Sedaka - "Windy" - Ruthann Friedman, sung by The Association - "Angie" - Cobra Starship - "Carrie Ann" - The Hollies - "Jean" - Oliver! - Also "Angelica", "Anna", and "The Picture of Kathleen Dunne" - French singer Najoua Belyzel is particuarly fond of these songs, as she has a female example and THREE male examples. The female example is "Stella" and the male examples are "Gabriel", "Denis" and "Jérémie". - "From Sarah With Love" - German singer Sarah Connor. - "I've Got A Crush On Hilary Duff" - Australian singer Scott Cain. - "Racey Lacey" - Girls Aloud - "Anita" - Doe Maar - "Nachtzuster ("Night Nurse") - Doe Maar from their album 4US (Album). - "Black Lady" from Donna Summer's I Remember Yesterday. - "Diana" and "Olivia" from One Direction - "Eloise" - Barry Ryan - "Yoshimé (and the Pink Robots)" - The Flaming Lips - "Chloe (You're the One I Want" by Emblem 3 - "Juliet" - The Four Pennies - "Caldonia" - Louis Jordan and His Tympani Five - "Delilah" - Tom Jones - "Ginny Come Lately" - Brian Hyland - "Diane" - The Bachelors - "Bernadette" - Four Tops - "Bernadine" - Pat Boone - "Candida" - Tony Orlando & Dawn - "Ashley" - Escape the Fate - "Emily" - From First To Last - "Alice" and "Marian" - The Sisters of Mercy - They also covered "Emma" by Hot Chocolate and "Jolene" by Dolly Parton. - " "Medusa," "Louise," "Lorraine," "Evelyn," "Clementina," "Cynara," "Desdemona," and "Michelle" - Clan of Xymox - "Anna" by The Menzingers, about narrator's faltering long-distance relationship with the titular Anna. - "Denise" - Fountains of Wayne - "Jenny" - The Click Five - Music/Waltham were apparently pretty fond of this trope, as four different songs on their self-titled album were named after women: - "Cheryl (Come And Take A Ride)" - "Joanne" - "Maria Simeone" - "Nicole" - "Bernadette" - Four Tops (Some men spend their whole lives searching for what we had) - "Charlene" - Anthony Hamilton - "Michelle" and "Mari-Johanna" - by Mariska, a female artist. Even though the song explicitly refers to Mari-Johanna as a girl it can be easily taken to stand in for something other than an actual girl. - "Sherane a.k.a. Master Splinter's Daughter" - Kendrick Lamar, based on his real high school girlfriend of the same name. - "Thotiana" by Blueface. - "Roxanne" by Arizona Zervas. - "Ah! Leah!" — Donnie Iris - "Amanda" - Boston - "Angie" - Depending on which rumor you believe: Mick Jagger bragging about nailing David Bowie's wife, Mick Jagger lamenting wanting Bowie's wife, or Mick Jagger apologizing for nailing her husband. - "Ann" - Andy Dwyer's song about Ann Perkins on Parks and Recreation; written and performed by Chris Pratt, the actor who plays Andy. Subverted in a later episode when he wrote a song about April... and titled it "November". - "Barbara Ann" - The Regents, from 1961. Covered later by The Beach Boys on their Cover Album Party. They tried other girls, but they knew they wouldn't do. - "Carol" note : and "Anna" - Al Stewart - "Cross-Eyed Mary" - Jethro Tull, from Aqualung - "Dear Prudence" - The Beatles. This song was written by John Lennon in India while they were studying Transcendental Meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. One of their friends, Prudence Farrow (Mia Farrows sister), became overzealous in her meditation and turned into a recluse. Lennon wrote this song as a message to snap her out of it. - "Debbie/Denise" - Blue Öyster Cult - "Emily" - The title of songs by From First to Last, Elton John, and Michael W. Smith, Pink Floyd, and Frankie Valli, all unrelated to one another - "Jane" - Jefferson Starship - "Janie Jones" - The Clash - "Janis" - Focus - "Lucille" - Rauli Badding Somerjoki - "Lydia" - Fur Patrol note : The same band later inverted this trope with their next single "Andrew".[[/note - "Maria Maria" - Santana - "Mary" - The Feelers - "Martha" - Tom Waits from Closing Time. - "Milla" - Anssi Kela - "Ramona" - Tuomari Nurmio - "My Sharona" - The Knack (by the way, the woman named Sharona, who was on the single cover, is an ordinary woman who sells real estate in Southern California.) - "Michelle" - The quintessential Silly Love Song from The Beatles. - "Peggy" and "Amalia" - Samuli Edelmann - "Rosalita", "Leah", "Sherry Darling" - Bruce Springsteen - "Rosemary" - Lenny Kravitz - "Roxanne" - The Police about "redeeming" a prostitute. - "Sara" - Bob Dylan - "Sara" - Starship (Storms are the wind in her eyes, of course.) - "Sophia" - Hed PE - "Susie Q" - originally by Dale Hawkins, made famous by Creedence Clearwater Revival (Baby, I love you) - "Suzy Lee" - The White Stripes - "Sylvia" - Focus - "Vera" - Pink Floyd (The One Woman in this case is the real-life Vera Lynn) - "Vera" - Blue Öyster Cult - "Vivica" - Jack Off Jill - The Blasters' catalogue is full of these. "Kathleen," "Marie, Marie," "Justine," "Julie" .... - A metric tonne of Finnish Schlager canon, including but not limited to: - Foksi songs: "Eeva", "Irja", "Maruzella", "Karina" - Humppa songs: "Sheila", "Amalia" (or "Erokirje heilille") - Walzes: "Emma", "Saariston Sirkka", "Ramona", "Kyllikki", "Joensuun Elli", "Anniina" - Finnish Tangos: "Humiko", "Sabina", "Aila", "Annabella", "Anneli Anneli Anneli", "Monika Monika Monika", "Ritva", "Angelique" - Humorous couplets: "Lievestuoreen Liisa", "Babylonin Sanna", "Ieva", "Lenita", "Elsa, kohtalon lapsi", "Esteri, tyttö sadepisarain" - Others (not intended to be danced): "Lulu", "Sulamit" - Tango songs: "Perfidia" - "Santa Lucia" is originally a Neapolitan song that's about the city and boating with repeats of "Saint Lucy" added in pretty much like filler, but the Nordic Saint Lucy celebration songs actually are about the saint. - "Lili Marlene" And countless others. ## Others: - "Lilian" - Depeche Mode. Ostensibly about a really evil ex who's just broken up with the singer. - "Mary Jane" - Tori Amos. It's not about a girl. - Also subverted in "Song for Whoever" by The Beautiful South, A song about a cynical songwriter of these kinds of songs, who due to repeated Muse Abuse, can't remember which of the many One Women is which: Oh Shirley, oh Deborah, oh Julie, oh Jane I wrote so many songs about you I forget your name Oh Cathy, oh Alison, oh Phillipa, oh Sue You made me so much money I wrote this song for you - Subverted in "Helena"; the song is about grieving for a dead woman (Word of God says the singer's grandma.) - Subverted in "Debra" - Beck. The song's lyrics begin to direct the song towards a woman named Jenny ("oh girl, I only wanna be down with you") until it's revealed that Beck has a secondary interest: Debra, Jenny's sister ("and your sister, I think her name is Debra"). The track is done in the vein of R. Kelly-like R&B ballads and seems to be one until the hilarious twist of Beck pining for a little more is made apparent. - "Jamie" by Weezer, a tribute to their lawyer. Similarly, "Susanne", about their A & R assistant. - "Magdalena" by dEUS from The Ideal Crash. - "Whatsername" by Green Day. - "Lucille" by Kenny Rogers, which is about the man's wife running off and leaving him to raise their four children alone on a farm. - Played with in that Rogers is not singing as the jilted husband, but as the poor barfly Lucille was trying to hook up with who is now having to watch this poor stranger's life fall apart. - "Jolene" by Dolly Parton, sung by the cuckolded wife to the woman her man is having an affair with. - "Boy Named Sue" - Johnny Cash, as the title says the girl's name in this case doesn't relate to a girl. - "Christiane" by Apollo 440. There are no actual lyrics; only One Woman Wails. - "Song for Thelma" by Anders Enger Jensen was dedicated to a friend's dog that had passed away. - "Diana" by Comus. It's about rape. - "Reva Thereafter" by Girlyman, about the singer's grandmother, and coping with her suicide. - "Mary Jane" by Rick James. Like the Tori Amos song, not about a girl. - In "Polly" by Nirvana the narrator addresses their rape victim as if she was a pet bird. - "Ana's Song" by Silverchair. 'Ana' is actually short for anorexia, not a girl's name. - "June" - Florence + the Machine. It refers to when the song, written in support of the LGBT community, took place (namely the 2016 Pulse nightclub shootings). - "Matilda" by Harry Belafonte is about a woman who stole $500 from the narrator and ran off to Venezuela. - "Molly" by Bobby Goldsboro is about a newly-blinded soldier returning to his wife and child. - More than half of the songs on Slint's Tweez are named after women ("Carol", "Charlotte", "Darlene", "Rhoda", and "Nan Ding"). The thing is that all of these are non-appearing titles that have nothing to do with the song content, and the remaining four songs have male names. They decided to just title the songs as arbitrary shout outs to band members' parents. As for why there's an odd number of names, well, Rhoda was drummer Britt Walford's dog. - "Lola" - Silly little number by The Kinks... that's actually about a transvestite. Maybe. All we know for sure is that the singer is "glad I'm a man, and so is Lola." - "Chelsea Dagger" by The Fratellis. - "Delilah" by Queen. The lines "You get away with murder so innocent" and "you pee all over my Chippendale suit" feel somewhat out of place in a sweet and catchy love song, if you don't realise that \|\|it's about a cat\|\|. - Why Leelee Won't Love Me by Primitive Whore. - "Martha My Dear" by The Beatles. It's about Paul's dog. - "Noelle" by Daniel Amos, which isn't a love song by any means. - "Mia" by Chevelle. No one's quite sure what it's about. - "Andzia" by the Polish band Oddział Zamknięty. This is ostensibly a love song about a girl the singer "can no longer live without". In reality, while "Andzia" is a girl's name, it also sounds very much like "gandzia" (pronounced similar to "ganja"), i.e. cannabis. The song, in reality, is about a man's enjoyment/addiction to marijuana. - "Sara", "Rhiannon" and "Annabel Lee" by Fleetwood Mac. - "Ilona" by Apulanta is about Ilona's suicide and the narrator's grief, not the girl herself. - "Thea"[[note]]Demo version of "Blood-Spattered Sundress" by Schoolyard Heroes is about a real bitch of a (former) friend. - "Rene" by The Small Faces. She's a prostitute in the London Docks of the 1960s. - "Pamela" by Jaakko Teppo is about the character in Dallas and the narrator is a (moderately sane) Loony Fan who sings about his reasoning behind his choice of Pamela as his favourite lady. (Lucy is too "tiny" and Sue-Ellen too heavy a drinker for him.) - Stephen Colbert had a signature song that was "chart-adjacent" in the eighties, entitled "Charlene", where the narrator is obsessed with the titular woman and the song literally spells out how the narrator stalks her. - There was a sequel song recently that Colbert sang with the Black Belles called "Charlene 2 : I'm over you". Hint:he's not really. - Martina Navratilova, Wish You Were Mine-As heard on the ''Tony Horne In The Morning'', the song talks about how the legendary tennis champ is Not Like Other Girls, broke the singer's fingers, looks manly, and how he probably wishes she was his girlfriend. - Paul And Storm have "K-R-I-S-T-I" about Kristi Lee of the Bob & Tom show, which is a song in the acrostic poem mold. The first I stands partially for "my eye, which you adorned with pepper spray", while T is for "tears I shed from love ... and pepper spray" and the other I is for "my other eye, which you also pepper sprayed."	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneWomanSong
Rank Inflation - TV Tropes Oh, I sea what you did there. Cassia: Jeez, dude... I mean, really? Really? If you're gonna waste time playing video games instead of doing your job, I at least expect you to beat my high score. Mook: I only missed the A rank by 500 points! Cassia: It goes up to triple-S. Mook: (horrified) Triple-S...? In video games, rather than mark the player on a simple success/failure scheme, it is common to give the player some kind of rank (e.g. bronze, silver and gold medals, or grades A+ to F-), depending on their performance. This allows casual players to coast through and simply get the bare minimum required to pass, while those who want a challenge can aim for the gold medals. But then what about the players who are really looking for a challenge for whom mere golds aren't enough? The solution — give them platinum medals to aim for. A-grade not good enough for you? Go for A+, or S. note : "S-rank" was popularised by Japanese media - in native academia "S" stands for Shuu - the Japanese reading of 秀 ("excellent"). Sometimes, even these inflated ranks are subject to inflation, with A being about average and the real goal being a higher S rank: SS or even SSS. Compare Harder Than Hard, Random Power Ranking, Score Screen, Pinball Scoring, Serial Escalation. When it's a reviewer doing this, it's Broke the Rating Scale. Contrast with its inverse, F--. No relation to Ridiculous Future Inflation. ## Examples: <!—index—> <!—/index—> - Fairy Tail has a version of this. Normal jobs are just jobs. No ranking whatsoever. There are really tricky ones who are ranked "S" though due to being considered difficult enough that only a guild's S-Class Wizards are allowed to take them. Later, to make the Fairy Tail guild's Gildarts Clive seem that much cooler, they say he can also take "SS" jobs, and was assigned something even more impressive: "The 100 Years Quest", so named because no one has ever managed to complete it in 100 years (and almost none of them managed to come back alive). \|\|Unfortunately, he failed because of outside circumstances and had to go home. The interruption was the most powerful dragon in the world tearing out an arm, a leg, and some of his innards in one instant, faster than he could react.\|\| The actual specifics of said 100 Years Quest is revealed in the sequel, where the quest well-deserves its title because it involves \|\|defeating five dragons nearly as strong as said most-powerful dragon.\|\| - Food Wars!: At Totsuki Academy, assignments are graded on a scale of A (excellent) to E (failure). Chef Chapelle (notorious for giving any assignment not worthy of an A an E) gives Soma and Tadokoro's first assignment an A, and regrets that he doesn't have the authority to give them a higher grade. - Haruhi Suzumiya joked about this in its first chronological episode, when Taniguchi ranked every Freshman girl from D to A. His favorite (Asakura Ryoko) was ranked AA+. - The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious: All worlds that need to be saved are ranked by letters to denote the difficulty of the task. It's also possible for the difficulty rank to increase if the Demon Lord of that world successfully conquers it. - In the first season (the only one to use power levels/ranks) of Jewelpet, the regular ranks are, in crescent order, Acrylic, Glass and Crystal. When Opal got introduced, it also introduced the Super Crystal rank, in order to emphasize how powerful she is. Only two other Jewelpets are ranked so \|\|(the newborn Labra and Ruby after undergoing Training from Hell)\|\|. - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure ranks aspects of stands from E to A for things like Strength, Range, Learning (user's ability to fully exploit their stand's powers) and such. The scale isn't weighed on too heavily in the series, but in one notable exception, Giorno Giovanna's Gold Experience Requiem is so powerful that its attributes are literally ALL ranked "unknown", as it is simply impossible to rank such vast powers off the scale. To put things into perspective, Gold Experience Requiem's power is so overwhelming that he could beat practically anyone from any other series/reality (short of a Reality Warper and even then, that's debatable) simply because he can nullify any attack/move that his opponent makes and has what is essentially a One-Hit Kill. - In Kiddy Grade, the Nanomachines-based superpowers are ranked by class: C (Copper) is the lowest, S (Silver) is high, and G (Gold) is the highest. The protagonists of the show are C class but \|\|actually, they are G class, just suppressing their powers along with hurting memories that come with them. Their Da Chief is also G class, by the way.\|\| - The magical power scale used in Lyrical Nanoha: there's F for those without any magic power, and then E- for those with a bit, going up with plus and minus qualifiers through the alphabet until rank A, which is considered the elite, and going further to AA, then AAA, then S, SS, and SSS. The difference between AAA and AAA+ is canonically pretty substantial, which makes most of the cast of the first two seasons (who are estimated to be in the AAA ranks at the time) quite powerful, because of this the next season had Power Limiters become a major element of the story. - Mage Rank covers skill, not just power. In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, Teana holds Rank B, however, she demonstrates the ability to create spells (specifically, the Variable Bullet) that are normally used by Rank AA mages. - Which is why Yuuno, despite being Non-Action Guy, The Medic, and a Stone Wall, is an A-ranked mage. This rank relative high even in universe, for example; Uno, Due, and Sein of the Numbers and Ginga Nakajima) are A-ranked, and pretty strong. - Interestingly, while the SSS rank exists, no known mage actually has that rank. The highest ranked mage that is known is StrikerS-era Hayate at SS, and she's \|\|got the full strength of the Book of Darkness behind her (though, admittedly, not a whole lot of skill)\|\|. What a SSS rank would be capable of, then, is a scary thing to think about. Whether anyone has ever achieved SSS rank has yet to be revealed, though the very existence of the rank would seem to imply that someone at some point must have. Otherwise why not just make SS the top of the scale? Fans have thus had a field day speculating about whether big-name figures from the verse's distant past (particularly Sankt Kaiser Olivie Sägebrecht) might have been SSS rank. - Fate's mother Precia, the villain of the first season, also has her rank given as SS in supplementary materials, and unlike Hayate her power is entirely natural. This can actually be seen fairly well in the series itself, as she was able to cast a spell powerful enough to disable a spaceship while she was in another dimension, which is quite possibly the single most impressive feat of magic in the entire series. And this was after decades of suffering from an Incurable Cough of Death and insanity \|\|from desperation to revive Alicia\|\|. - Ninja missions in Naruto are ranked anywhere from D (picking up trash, catching stray cats) to S (there's a very high chance you'll die.) - There was some confusion (and a bit of a Hatedom) when the third Databook came out and the mission to capture or kill Akatsuki members Hidan and Kakuzu- S-Class criminals- was classified as an A-Rank mission, the same as Team 7's first big mission against the weaker duo of Zabuza and Haku. The reason, however, was that missions are ranked not just by difficulty of the task but also the strength of the ninja assigned to the task; in this case, one had a team of three fresh Genin and a slightly out-of-shape Jounin, the other involved teams of seasoned Chuunin and a more in-shape Jounin with another such group behind them as back-up. - More typical Rank Inflation has been going on with the strength of jutsu: it starts with E (basic academy stuff like untying ropes, body replacement, One Thousand Years of Death) and goes up to S (which includes bringing one person back to life at the cost of another, making something get hit by a real lightning bolt, and regenerating all the parts of your body including organs), but recently even S rank attacks have been ineffective. In something of a subversion, more powerful attacks continue to be introduced, but new ranks have not. - Jutsu are not ranked by strength, but difficulty; Kakashi's Raikiri, for example, is the same strength as Kakuzu's Raiton: Gian, yet that is B-Rank while Kakashi's is S-Rank. Higher ranked jutsu are obviously as powerful as they are difficult -it would be a waste of time learning them otherwise- but there are easier jutsu to learn that are just as strong and useful. There are also several powerful jutsu that are not learned, but derived from unique bloodline traits, such as Amateratsu, Tsukuyomi and Susanoo, which are jutsu unique to the Mangekyou Sharingan, and in and of themselves don't require any skill to use, though they do require practice to perfect. - Usually, the stronger jutsus are either forbidden note : Generally because the jutsu is either dangerous to its own user, is particularly heinous (such as involving human sacrifice) or both. (i.e. the first incarnation of "Fuuton: Rasen Shuriken"), or new/not heard of, so they can't be easily categorized. - Internationally wanted ninja criminals or "missing-nin" are referred to as "S-class" (including everyone in Akatsuki), though there has been no indication of lower ranks note : Lesser missing-nin who aren't of international concern would normally be tracked down by their own village's ninja, and it's never specified what system each nation uses (if any) to rank the threat and/or priority of their own missing-nin. Most fans assume that such "ordinary" deserters are simply classed according to their ninja rank (genin, chunin or jonin), while "S-rank" missing-nin are all assumed to be significantly more dangerous than a typical jonin regardless of what their official rank in their village was. or this applying to non-criminals. - In the Naruto D20 there are also Super-S class jutsus, which are usually forbidden as well. - The Negima! Magister Negi Magi manga alludes to a ranking system for combat Mages which promptly falls into this, with ranks going from an unspecified low end up to SA. The only AAA ranked fighter so far (Fate), apparently has a power level of around 3000, with Negi being at around 500 (an A class), and later 2600 or so. Naturally, soon afterward this turns out to be the low end of the spectrum, with Rakan ranking the demon from Kyoto at 8000 (and by extension Evangeline is at least 8000, probably higher) and himself at 12,000. Oh, and \|\|Fate is likely over 8000 as well\|\|. Then you have Nagi and the Lifemaker, who are both more powerful than Rakan. Of course, Rakan made up the Power Levels himself, and Chisame points out how arbitrary it is. But it doesn't change the fact that the Combat Rankings don't really mean much. - Connoisseurs in the Pokémon anime are ranked from C-Class to S-Class, with Cilan and Burgundy being A-Class and C-Class, respectively. It's Cilan's goal to reach S-Class. - During a trip to an amusement park, Shana of Shakugan no Shana uses her powers to cheat at a swordfighting virtual reality game, maxing out the score counter and earning a rank of SSS. - That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: This happened thrice-over with the classification system in the backstory. Originally, it was simply ranked as "Novice < Beginner < Intermediate < Advanced System"; but "Advanced System" was deemed too vague and so it was reorganized as "F < E < D < C < B < A" where Advanced System was split into C, B, and A class. Then people realized that still wasn't good enough and added in "A < Special A < S < Special S" to better separate the real monsters while giving these ratings the special monikers of "Hazard", "Calamity", "Disaster", and "Catastrophe" respectively, further adding "-" and "+" modifiers to all the tiers for even better classification. "Special S+" class can basically be summed up as "could break the planet like an egg if they go on a temper tantrum". - Tokyo Ghoul has Ghoul Threat Ratings and Ghoul Investigator Ranks, which are roughly equivalent to each other according to Word of God. - C-rate Ghouls, considered incredibly weak. - B-rate Ghouls and Junior Rank Investigators (Ranks 1 - 3) possess moderate strength, and are roughly equal to each other. The average Mook is from this ranking. - A-rate Ghouls are considered Dangerous predators, and equal in strength to a senior First Class Investigator. They serve as the Elite Mooks of the series. - S-rate Ghouls are high-level threats and serial predators, equal to the senior Associate Special Class Investigators. - S+ rated Ghouls are extremely dangerous, equal in strength to the elite Special Class Investigators. - SS-rate Ghouls are beings of abnormal strength, typically leaders of major groups or otherwise possessed of extreme abilities. An entire team including at least one Special Class Investigator are suggested for hunting them. - SSS-rated Ghouls, the rarest and most dangerous beings. Only two characters in the series hold this rank, being the Big Bad and Big Good, respectively. Operations to challenge them are the largest in scale, often making use of an entire squad of Special Class Investigators and the best equipment available. - In Toriko, the Garagara Gator, being capture level 8, was considered a big deal. Then the Troll Kongs are shown to be level 9. In the next chapter, the Puffer whales are capture level 30. - Note that capture level refers to how easy it is to retrieve an edible sample; there are many fragile but harmless ingredients with high capture level, like the aforementioned Puffer Whales, which are like Fugu, but improperly removing the poison bladder make the whole body poisonous, and is located in a different spot in each one. - Also note that Capture Levels can also refer to the overall power of an ingredient, since the more powerful creatures tend to be proportionately harder to catch, hence powerful creatures always receive Capture Levels equivalent to ingredients whose Capture Levels are related to the environments they are found in. - In the Gourmet World, on the other hand, the lowest Capture Levels are at least 100, which is equivalent to the Four Beast, the ingredient with the highest Capture Level in the Human World... Which is only based on its four "bodies", as the real Four Beast has a Capture level in the mid 300s and kept on increasing beyond that. The Eight Kings of the Gourmet World? Their Capture Levels are in the 6000s, or on the precipice of it at least. - Power levels of demons in YuYu Hakusho are ranked from D to S. However, anything above B is exceedingly rare (Toguro, one of the strongest beings, was a B class demon). Anything higher than a 'C' is too powerful to travel between worlds; higher ranks were either from Earth originally (like Toguro) or started lower and trained themselves up on this side. Demons of each rank are progressively rarer, and at one point, it's stated that only one out of one hundred C class demons even has the potential to reach B class. Thanks to the plot we see many more A and S rank demons than their rarity would suggest (although this arc takes place in the demon world, and is presumably every demon of that rank; mere thousands out of billions). - It is also worth noting that S Rank is actually a very broad spectrum that basically just means "Stronger than A". One demon notes that "S Rank" is a Spirit World codeword for "demons too strong for us to deal with." The three rulers of the demon realm consider it a grave insult, as they are grouped in the same class with their foot soldiers and servants, despite being leagues above them in power. There is also the category of "Upper S class", which is often used for the strongest S class demons such as the three kings and Raizen's friends. Some have even suggested that Raizen in his prime was in a class of his own, "SS" or "Super S" class. - Also used in Zoids: New Century Zero. Other Zoids series? Not so much. - A meta-example: Zettai Ryouiki is categorized into "Grades". Grade F encompasses ankle socks (ye Gods! Why would anyone bother?!), Grade E includes socks 16 cm high from the shoes (the standard), Grade D is 26 cm high, Grade C is 35 cm (but not above the kneecap), Grade B is 50 cm, and Grade A is 57 cm high ("the one sock to rule them all", as some put it). While the lowest Grades are usable by any gender, the top two are Always Female by definition. The highest level of all, however, is Grade S, which includes 57 cm high socks/stockings, Tsundere attitude, and twin-tail hairstyle (so far, only a good half-dozen characters have qualified for Grade S). Refer to this article for more info. - Some of these characters include Rin Tohsaka (the inventer), Sion Eltnam Atlasia and Kokoa Shuzen. - In Kyon: Big Damn Hero Tsuruya gave an S rank to Kyon's speech when she asked him if she should learn about the supernatural in the SOS Brigade. - In the Daria/ Legion of Super-Heroes crossover series Legion of Lawndale Heroes, the myriad powers are ranked on what's known as 'the Claremont-Byrne scale' (an obvious Shout-Out to one of the writers' favorite series). The C-B scale is based partly on the power scales used in the X-Men films (Classes One through Five), with an series of levels within each class (Marginal, Low-grade, Mid-range, High, and Extreme). - A Growing Affection takes the normal E-S ranks, and adds an "X" rank for missions and Bingo book entries. "X" rank is described as requiring the resources of two or more of the great villages. - Espers in A Certain Magical Index are ranked from Level 0 (unusably-weak powers that can only be detected with special equipment) to Level 5 (One-Man Army, only seven currently in existence). The top Level 5 esper (Accelerator) is stronger than all the other Level 5s put together, and claims that the only reason he's not ranked higher is because that's the highest the scale goes. Then the theoretical Level 6, aka "SYSTEM", is introduced, defined as an esper who gains such mastery of the world around them that they "grasp the designs of God". No esper has yet reached that level, but Academy City's best simulations projected that it was possible. - The hero of Decline and Fall applies for a job as a teacher and asks why the school that hires him is graded as just "School". The recruiter explains that there are four grades: Leading School, First-Rate School, Good School, and School. "Frankly, 'School' is pretty bad". - In Discworld there are eight levels of wizardry recognised by Unseen University, but some foreign wizards try to make themselves look good by inventing extra levels, sometimes as high as 23. (This is actually a Retcon to explain why a foreign wizard in The Colour of Magic described himself as level 15). - It has happened to naval classification in the Honorverse. Battleships were originally the biggest and most powerful hyper-capable warships there were, until the invention of large, more powerful Dreadnoughts and Superdreadnoughts. Why the classification of "battleship" didn't simply grow upward (since DNs and SDs are similarly armed to BBs, just carrying more weapons and more armor, at least until the evolution of the Pod Superdreadnought) is unknown. - Out of universe, for the first few books and the prequels B Bs, D Ns, and S Ds are equivalent to 3rd, 2nd, and 1st rate warships in the Napoleonic Wars. - The Lensman series, as essentially the prototype for much space opera and military science fiction that came later, had rank inflation in ships right from the start of the genre: the Galactic Patrol had ships ranging from scout ships to battleships, then apparently skipped dreadnoughts to go straight to super-dreadnaughts. Later in the series came maulers, massively-powerful but ponderous warships. Then followed shortly by super-maulers, the super-maulers designed to try and counter the ultimate level in warships that emerged in the eponymous Lensman Arms Race, heavily armed and armoured mobile planets. note : Not a descriptive name of a really large ship like the Death Star: a literal planet. - The Others (latent and practicing mages) in the Night Watch (Series) are placed into seven categories from the weakest (seventh) to the strongest (first). And then, there are practicing mages who considerably exceed the requirements of the first category, who are dubbed "mage/sorceress beyond categories" or "Grand Mage/Sorceress". - Similar to the Honorverse example above, Perry Rhodan added "super-" (diameter 1500 m) and "ultra-" (2500 m) battleships added to a roster that had previously topped out at just plain battleships (800 m) fairly early in the series. That said, the trend stopped there — what few larger ships came into being later were generally one-of-a-kind designs — and there were some in-universe centuries between the two additions. (The "original" super-battleship, the Veast'Ark/later Titan, was still brand new along with her type in 1984; the first "ultra" model, the Crest III, made her first appearance in early 2404.) - The Machineries of Empire: In Revenant Gun, faced with a major rebellion and \|\|the assassination of the old Kel military command\|\|, Four-Star Badass Kel Inesser is promoted to the new top rank of "Protector-General". Justified because Kel soldiers are mentally conditioned to obey superior officers. - Kamen Rider Ex-Aid, thanks to its video game aesthetic, uses numerical Character Levels to rank the Riders' different forms. Level 1 is a Super-Deformed state that's somewhat weak but serves a very important purpose (separating The Virus from its human carriers), Level 2 is their normal combat form note : except Lazer, who turns into a motorcycle, Level 3 is their first upgrade, and Level 5 is the Co-Op Multiplayer power-up shared between the four main Riders. Things start jumping around from there: Level X/Ten has theoretically unknown power, the protagonists end up getting Level XX/Twenty, 50, and 100 Super Modes, one antagonist gets a Level 99 form, and the Big Bad and The Hero's ultimate form don't even bother with levels since they're In-Universe Game Breakers. The concept is arguably spoofed in the post-series movie Kamen Rider Genm vs. Lazer, where Genm (who has a truly monumental God complex) gives himself a Level form...that's just a Palette Swap of Ex-Aid's Level 99 form \|\|and is ultimately defeated by Lazer's Level X form.\|\| Billion - Kenan & Kel has one episode taking place 1,000 years in the future. Kenan and Kel take a test in alien biology, and Kenan scores an A+, which at that time is considered a failing grade. Kel scores an A++++, which is considered the future equivalent of today's A+. - Magic: The Gathering introduced this with its "Mythic Rare" rarity level. - The Pokémon TCG: - The "Holo Rare" level has been around since the game started, which are simply a subset of the rare cards which were printed with foil artwork (ironically, there were more Holo Rares in the original Base Set than normal Rares). - Ultra Rare was added later, which replaces the Rare card in roughly one pack in five, all of which are cards with that sets gimmick (EX, GX and VMAX being recent examples). In additon, several more common cards have an Ultra Rare variant with alternate art covering the entire card, known as Full-Art cards. - Secret Rare cards (or just "Secrets") have collector numbers beyond the official list (for example, 101/100), and about one Rare card in every two boxes of packs will be replaced with a Secret Rare (the "box topper", an extra card for buying a whole box, is also a Secret card but is marked as being just Holo Rare). Originally these were Shiny Pokemon as a nod to their rarity in the videogames, though more recently the Secrets have been alternate prints of less rare cards with a full art rainbow print, known as "Rainbow Rares". These and Full-Art prints can be traded by someone who just wants to play the game to a collector who will happily give a whole pile of the functionally-identical normal print in exchange. - MicroStars, a Subbuteo-style game revolving around collectible figures of real-world footballers, initially had six colour-coded tiers -0 Green, Red, Blue, White, Silver, and Gold — that denoted both power and rarity. Later, a seventh "Black" tier was added, that was even rarer than Gold but also even stronger. - In El Goonish Shive, Pandora describes Sarah's magic mark as "an S-rank spell". In The Rant Dan says he picked this up from Fire Emblem and sees it as "sort of a like an 11 on a 1-10 scale". - Mages in Flipside are ranked from Level 1 to 3 as they pass "dissolving tests" that unlock their abilities. It's later revealed that a distant continent has an even more advanced magical society where Level 4 practitioners are common and that \|\|Suspiria\|\| is implanted with an Amplifier Artifact that's elevated her to Level 6 or 7, which grants her city-wide Reality Warping Power Incontinence. - In Kubera, mages are graded similar to the American grading system; A+, B+, B, so on. The highest rank is AA. Asha is easily the most powerful mage in existence, breaking records left and right when she took her exam. However, in order to get the AA ranking, you need to be able to interface with a barrier stone, which in turn requires three matching elemental attributes. Asha insisted she could do it despite the fact that her attributes don't match, but they refused to let her try because that would be extremely dangerous. In order to celebrate her incredible achievements regardless, she was given the brand-new rank of A++. Technically, it's no different than A+, but everybody has heard about her, and treats her as befitting her skill. Then, during the siege of Atera, she proved that she is fully capable of interfacing with a barrier stone and keeping a barrier going (\|\|by changing the attribute of the barrier to match her own, which should be impossible\|\|). The title of that arc is AAA. - Kill Six Billion Demons: In the supernatural Gladiator Games, the protagonist's stats are ranked C/B/SS+, the latter of which presumably refers to the fact that the most powerful Amplifier Artifact in the universe is embedded in her skull. - Questionable Content: At Coffee of Doom, drinks are available in size small, medium, large, extra-large, and WTF. - The Anti-Cliché and Mary-Sue Elimination Society formerly ranked targets on a scale of one to eight. Now, it operates on a one to ten scale, with ten being damn near omnipotent. For reference, one Level Nine Stu was able to whoop almost the entire Society. He was the weakest of the Level Nines. - Shown here as used in Chaos Fighters with F--. - PolitiFact's scale runs from True to False to the "Pants on Fire!" rating, reserved for especially far-reaching or ridiculous claims. - SCP Foundation started out with three official object classes: Safe (easily contained, though not necessarily harmless), Euclid (harder to contain; most humanoids and animals fall in this category since they're unpredictable), and Keter (extremely difficult to contain). A fourth official class was later added, Thaumiel (can be used to contain other SCPs, but this still doesn't mean they're harmless). Other object classes exist, but are unofficial and usually restricted to one SCP; an example of this is Kronecker, which is actually an SCP itself, which affects the documentation for objects labeled with that class. There are exceptions to this rule such as Hiemal (multiple related SCPs that naturally contain each other), Archon (should not be contained as this would cause severe harm to humanity), Tiamat (cannot be contained covertly and require direct engagement from the Foundation) and \|\|Apollyon (uncontainable or about to permanently break containment; essentially the class above Keter)\|\|. - Worm: - Parahuman threats are ranked for their relative danger level, from Class D up to Class A. Then there's Class S: a national or even global-level threat that can necessitate Enemy Mine situations between heroes and villains. While the Endbringers and certain villains with One-Man Army-level superpowers are the most well-known, the rating is based not on sheer power but rather danger. For example, Jack Slash, head of the Slaughterhouse Nine, is considered Class S despite not really having that impressive a superpower, instead because he's proven extremely resourceful and has slaughtered thousands without getting caught. - Late in the sequel, Ward, Victoria briefly notes in the midst of the final battle that there's something off in the distance that her HUD is marking as "Class SS". Exactly what that thing was is never made clear, though most speculate it was \|\|Titan Fortuna, which was the mastermind of the whole situation and was preparing to blow up the Earth (in multiple dimensions at once)\|\|. - The Starbucks example below was parodied in Animaniacs in an episode where Doctor Scratchensniff went to the movies with the Warners. Scratchensniff asks for a small popcorn; the attendant tells him that the popcorn only comes in Large, Super Chubby, and Double Super Chubby sizes. A frustrated Scratchensniff asks why they don't call the Large a Small then, and is greeted with "I'll have to ask my manager." Of course, it finally seems to sink in at the end; Scratchensniff says "Just give me a Large!" and the attendant hands him a truly colossal tub of popcorn. - The resident Sadist Teacher of The Fairly OddParents! Denzel Crocker loves to invert this trope. He gave Timmy a Super F in Mind Over Magic and the first Jimmy Timmy Power Hour had him threaten to give Jimmy Neutron an F-. Naturally, this didn't go well with the kid genius. - In Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, Phil Ken Sebben has an Alert level system parodying the color based Terror Alert System used in the US. Above red was "Blackwatch Plaid," which he later pushed even further to "The cover of Rush's seminal album, "Moving Pictures"." - In the South Park episode TMI, after the government publishes an equivalent to BMI for penis size, the many men with below-average penis sizes go crazy and try to create a rebellion. The rebellion is quelled when the government revises the scale so that an "average" size is now far wider, meaning that pretty much everyone now has an at-least average penis size... except Cartman. - The Simpsons: - In the episode "Guess Who's Coming to Criticize Dinner?", Homer became a restaurant critic for a newspaper. The editor eventually complained that all of his reviews were over-the-top gushing praise, and as an example pointed out a recent article he'd written where he gave a restaurant "9 thumbs up". This prompted Homer to get mean and snarky, and one of his later reviews (to Marge) said "I give this meal my lowest rating ever: 7 thumbs up." - In the episode "Lisa Gets an 'A'", Lisa catches a cold and being forced to stay at home. She wasn't able to read a book she's supposed from class for a test because she got addicted to a video game. With Bart's help, she receives the answers from Nelson and cheats the test. She gets an A++++. Actually, A+++ because there's Drambuie on the paper. She gets summoned by Skinner due to her test bumping up the school's GPA qualifying for a grant which trigger's the plot of this episode. - A variation in one episode of Futurama: after Professor Farnsworth's latest invention is ridiculed by the scientific community, Wernstrom gives it "the worst grade imaginable...an A-minus- minus!" note : Wernstrom is still smarting over Farnsworth giving him an A- 99 years ago and sees this as his vengeance. The worst part? He only got an A- because penmanship counted. - CERO has five ratings from all ages to adults only. They are; - A (all ages) - B (ages 12 and up) - C (ages 15 and up) - D (ages 17 and up) - Z (ages 18 and up only) - When was the last time you saw a pizza advertised as "small"? At at least one local pizzeria the advertised sizes are "large, extra-large, and party-size" - Ditto for canned olive sizes - Ah, Starbucks. Coffee sizes start at Tall, then Grande, then Venti, because apparently no one just wants a small goddamn coffee note : There is a Short size (8 oz.) that you can order most drinks in; they just don't list it on the menu.. Then they came out with a Trenta size, which is even larger than the Venti size, for cold drinks. It holds 31 oz (910 mL) of liquid, or two-and-a-half the capacity of a typical human bladder. For true caffeine addicts! - At the height of the Cold War, both pro- and anti-nuclear campaigners were fond of pointing out "overkill factors" (how many times over the world's nuclear arsenal could kill all the people on Earth). The number peaked at around ninety. - A theoretical war that actually used all this firepower was apparently referred to in strategic circles as a "Bounce the Rubble" exchange. - One notable one still used to this day is the Doomsday Clock, where midnight represents all out nuclear war. How close civilization approaches to nuclear war is represented by how many minutes away from midnight the minute hand sits. It started at "seven minutes to midnight" and has since gone as high as seventeen minutes (The chance of nuclear war is practically negligible) to as low as 100 seconds (1⅔ minutes; a pin drop could result in the destruction of civilization). We're at 100 seconds right now, which has caused some pundits to think the Clock is no longer useful. - Particularly notable in that the clock was originally intended to have "fifteen minutes to midnight" as the safest possible setting, so its being set to seventeen minutes to midnight from 1991 to 1995 is the most direct application of this trope. - The U.S. Department of Agriculture food quality ratings can go up to grade AA. - Minor League Baseball originally ranked its leagues D, C, B, A. Now it's Rookie, Short Season, A, A Advanced, AA, AAA. (And this is all below the Major Leagues.) - The professional English football leagues used to simply be named Division One through Division Four. The creation of the Premier League in 1992, and the Championship in 2004, mean that "League One", as it's now known, is actually equivalent to the original Division Three. - When Formula One switched to Pirelli tyres in 2011, the different compounds were labelled hard, medium, soft, and supersoft. In 2016 a new ultrasoft tyre was added, followed in 2018 by an even faster hypersoft tyre and a slower superhard tyre. The superhard was never used, and everyone agreed that things were just getting silly, so in 2019 the FIA inverted the trope: while there are still several different compounds, the three brought to each race are just called soft, medium, and hard to make things simpler. - Martial artists often want to stay a rank ahead of their students in order to maintain "master" status, leading to ranks as high as 15th dan becoming commonplace in more popular styles. - Some Freemasons have added an additional thirty degrees on top of the original three. Some even have ninety, altogether. - However the thirty-three ranks go back over two hundred years. - In many US states' high school sports, the schools are grouped into classes based on size, since most often the big schools with deep benches have a significant advantage over smaller ones with smaller talent pools. In most states these are A, B, C, D, etc with A at the top. Indiana was one of the last to implement one, and theirs go A, AA, AAA, AAAA, with A the smallest. - ESPN lists this year's high school football champions here (map still not filled in for all states). Many use D1, D2, D3, etc., but New York had one of these, with D, C, B, A, and AA (so did Montana). Oh, and apparently, AAAA is no longer the largest in Indiana—5A is (although 5A is only for the football classes). - Many states go up to 5A, apparently. Illinois starts at 1A and goes up to 8A. note : This is a side effect of Illinois' 4 class system and smaller 32-team brackets compared to other states South Dakota has AA, A, B, then 9-man AA, 9-man A, and 9-man B. If it's about size, shouldn't a school large enough to field a team two full divisions better than a 9-man B team be large enough to field an 11-man team? Colorado, Iowa, and Idaho all top out at 5A, but have more than five divisions and nothing below A. Colorado has "A-8" and "A-6" as the two below 1A (A-6?), Iowa has a level simply called "A" (that's one level lower than 1A), and Idaho splits 1A into "1A Division 1" and "1A Division 2". Nebraska districts are labelled A, B, C1, C2, D1, and D2. (D2 schools are small enough, for example, that football is played with six players on a side, instead of eleven. Meanwhile, Texas goes to 6A. - The "A-6" and "A-8" in Colorado's schools refer to the number of players on the football team by each side at a given time. - The NCAA has Division I split for into two subdivisions for football. Interestingly, they inverted the trend of more A's being better, since until 2007, the higher subdivision was called Division I-A and the lower one was called Division I-AA. Since this distinction only applies to football,the subdivisions were renamed before the 2007 season, though the lower subdivision still has the more prestigious-sounding name. I-A was renamed the Football Bowl Subdivision, while I-AA was renamed the Football Championship Subdivision. - Standard & Poor's use a rating code for debtors, AAA being the best and D the worst. - These also have plus and minus grades for a total of twenty-two different ratings, and the accepted "passing grade" for investments is BBB. - Of course, the revelation that these triple letter rankings were created to make bad debtors look better by moving the curve and allow some companies the opportunity to manipulate their value for profit at the cost of the debtor's credit value without suspicion (and be the major cause of the 2010 Global Financial Crisis) makes one wonder if that sort of thing should be allowed. - The US Homeland Security Advisory System was in use from 2002 to 2011. Over its lifetime, its lowest two levels were never used, making "Elevated" the system's current default level. - The Boy Scout of America ranks are Scout, Tenderfoot, Second Class, First Class, Star, Life and Eagle. Eagle Scouts can wear combinations of Bronze, Gold and Silver palms by earning merit badges beyond the twenty-one required for Eagle Scout (although gaining palms doesn't mean much as compared to becoming Eagle). - The English/Welsh GCSE system uses the usual A,B,C,D,E,F grades, with a A* over and above the A. Originally this was intended to indicate exceptional performance by an A-grade candidate, but is now universally considered the top grade. Since the introduction of the modular AS/A2 level to replace the A-level it has also become more common to attain several A grades at A-level too, leading some to call for the introduction of a A* at that level also. - A few GCSE's offer A* distinction now, but they are rare. - This perpetuates a fascinating annual cycle when the results are released in which the media will initially deplore grade inflation and the "dumbing-down" of British education, then castigate itself for doing so, thus providing a never-ending news story until something more interesting comes along. - This has became a joke among people in former British colonies in Asia, which more or less kept the old GCE grading curves—in their terms, GCSE's A* has became the "new A," A became the "new C," while C became the "new E." - In a partial inversion, GCSE grades actually go down to G, and if you want to be technical about it, G still counts as a pass. U is fail (standing for "ungraded"). Of course, most places ask for A-C grades, and if they ask for pass they're after A-D, but if they ask for GCSE's generally rather than "passes" or a specific grade range, as long as you got a G it counts. - After The New '10s, Hong Kong uses a modified GCSE system called HKDSE, which uses numbers instead of letters for grades in language subjects (Chinese and English). The former B grade is now 5, and A grade is 5* . They also keep the old A* thing, therefore you now have a 5** grade. - The STEP (used by Cambridge for maths students) has a scale going fail, 3, 2, 1, S. - British university degrees are awarded with one of the following honours classifications: first class, upper second, lower second, third, and ordinary. The "ordinary" class is now considered worthless enough that Cambridge has abolished it; you either graduate with honours or fail. In practice, it's common in many professions for job postings to demand at least an upper second. - Rampant in the auto industry; the usual practice is to introduce a new top-of-the-line trim level every few years (to much fanfare) and (quietly) drop base models that become unpopular- the 1957 Chevy Bel Air was the most extravagant car Chevy made that year; by The '70s the Bel Air was a bare-bones fleet model. "LE" was originally the top trim level of Toyota Camry; currently it's the base model. Even legendary trim names are subject to this: the "R/T" name was, for a long time, the top-of-the-line trim for Dodge's muscle cars, but now this distinction is for the "SRT" models. note : The numbers after the SRT are not an extension, but merely the number of cylinders their engine has: SRT-8 is the most common (for Dodges with Hemi V-8s); while SRT-10 is the most powerful (currently reserved for Vipers, but a model of Ram also used to have it.) - The United States military has added on higher ranks for generals and admirals as the need has arisen. George Washington himself only ever wore three stars. Ulysses S. Grant was the first to have four stars, but the title was such that would have made it five stars. The rank was retired after the last of the three generals died, reducing the max rank down to major general, though four star general was reintroduced. World War II required creation of five-star ranks to be standardized as General of the Army and Fleet Admiral (after the Air Force became independent in 1947, General of the Army Henry Arnold Became the first and so far only General of the Air Force). In 1945, the US government created, but never awarded, what would have been a six-star rank for Douglas MacArthur in anticipation of the invasion of Japan. George Washington was later awarded that rank, General of the Armies of the United States, posthumously and retroactive to July 4, 1776, meaning that no officer ever has or ever will outrank Washington. Grant himself was also posthumously promoted to six star General of the Armies of the United States, in effect making that rank a special promotion for Generals with exceptional military achievement who later became President. - The United States Navy has had considerable rank inflation. When the Navy was founded, its officer ranks were Lieutenant, Master-Commandant, and Captain. The titles of "Lieutenant, Commanding" and "Commodore" (for Lieutenants in command of small ships and Captains in command of multiple ships, respectively) were added during the War of 1812. The former became the rank of Lieutenant Commander after the American Civil War (Master Commandant had become Commander in 1838, 20 years after the Royal Navy had done so with its equivalent rank, "Master And Commander"). The first Rear Admirals were promoted during the Civil War and Vice Admiral David Glasgow Farragut was promoted from their ranks to overall command of the USN's mobile forces. - Original (Royal Prussian) Iron Cross medal had 2 classes only and held them throughout 19th century wars and WWII. When the Führer reinstated it as of 1939, he added the Knight's Cross as a superior grade to replace the former Prussian orders of chivalry. As the war progressed, the Iron Cross itself got awarded by the millions and the Knight's Cross by the thousands. So to set apart the people who qualifed for them again and again, the Knight's Cross got the Oakleaves, then Oakleaves and Swords, above which came the Oakleaves, Swords and Diamonds and so on. By late war, soldiers were outraged to get only an Iron Cross or a German Cross in Gold, which they derided as "the fried egg". - In certain schools, certain teachers don't give out "D" grades; fall below the cutoff for a C(-) and you fail. - Credit cards have added new prestige ranks (gold, platinum) as the old ranks became commonplace. Right now the biggest difference between a silver, gold, and platinum card is the color, with titanium looking to be the next level. Also both Visa and Mastercard have a level over Platinum (the Signature and World cards - guess they ran out of metals) - This satirical article is about the new Diners' Club "Plutonium" and American Express "Kryptonite" cards. - Likewise, in some companies, "Gold" is the lowest rank of a customer. Higher ranks might be Platinum or Diamond. But if your customer rating does not have one of these snazzy, expensive sounding designations...then you are probably a real VIP. - The final exams of Finnish high schools have gone through multiple iterations of this. Initially, there were three passing grades and maximum of six exams. Only a small percentage of the population took the exams so one who passed was considered a learned person and the getting the six Laudaturs (the best possible grade) was a sign of genius. The grade limits were based on percentages so when number of students grew new grades had to be introduced (Oddly, Laudatur remained the best, three were added below it) but the number of Laudaturs still grew. Then the students were allowed to take the exams over multiple years, enabling more foreign languages and improving grades from previous years. The final step was that the Real exam (i.e. everything that is not a language or mathematics) was split into multiple exams. As the result, the famous six Laudatur grade is now quite common and the current official record is ten (the unofficial eleven was split between too many years). - Likewise, the possible grades used to be Laudatur (excellent), Cum Laude (good), Approbatur (passed) and Improbatur (flunked). During the years, three new grades were introduced: Lubenter (passed decently), Magna Cum Laude (very good) and Eximia Cum Laude (almost excellent). - The Mathematics and Real exams have a choice of questions. Some of them are scored from 0 to 9 instead usual 6, so it is possible to have a score above the "maximum". - Since universities count only the relevant part of the grades into entry scores, the highest final exam grades are purely for bragging rights. - In most American Contract Bridge League events, the players are grouped into C, B and A ranks. At some national or international tournaments, the strata expand to D, C, B, A and X. - Also, the ACBL title "Life Master" initially signified a very high level player note : It included a lifetime membership and subscription to the monthly magazine — now there are Bronze, Silver, Ruby, Gold, Sapphire, Diamond, Emerald, Platinum, and Grand Life Master levels above that. - Inverted example: Traditionally, martial arts rankings start off at 10th kyu. The rankings for the board game Go, on the other hand, start as low as 30th kyu. - There is a system of Ninjutsu that goes up to 15th Dan. - PC enthusiast magazine Maximum PC stirred quite a controversy when it rated Half-Life 2 the only 11/10 rating the magazine has done. - This trope applies to game rating in general, to the point that it has its own trope. On a scale of 1 to 10, an average game that's nothing special but not particularly bad either ought to score 5, and as per normal distribution most games ought to fall in the 4-6 range, with only the exceptional scoring more or less. - All reviews of PC hardware and software (not just games) tend to be inflated. If the item in question didn't get at least a 7 out of 10, you can expect it to suck. - Due to advances in efficiency, the European Union energy label for some appliances had the grades A+ and A++, and later A+++, added on top of the usual G to A grades. - Since energy efficiency went Off the scale, the entire ranking was reset in March 2021. The new scale is again without any plus signs...but probably bound to make a return as appliances get even more efficient, even though no products were initially given an 'A' rating to allow for more efficient products to be graded in the future. - In Germany earlier in the 21st century, when pupils go to school, they're graded from 1 to 6 (1 being the highest). More recently, a scale from 15 to 0 (15 the highest) was introduced, which are then reverted back into the original system. As the first three numbers on the second scale represent 1+, 1, 1- and so on (only the 6 cannot be modified by + or -), getting straight 15s reverts actually back into 2/3! It's still just displayed as 1.0, but it's there. - The Mikimoto system for grading pearls has A1, A, A+1, A+, AA1, AA, AAA1, and AAA. - Eggs in the US are rated C, B, A, and AA. The A grades are just slight differences in the consistency or quality of the egg white or yolk. B eggs have a few things you don't want to see. C eggs are basically aborted chicks. - Even the former USSR product grades (which were very practical and came from very strict state quality regulations, called GOST) went through this over time. "Sorts" (Grades) of various foods almost always extend beyond 1st into "Highest", "Extra", or, say, "Hand-picked" (for eggs). Conversely, the low grades as a rule were too vile to see them on the store shelves often (like in other countries). One exception would be cigarettes: seems that there is no limit on how bad the cigs can be if they're cheap, so they ran about 5 or 6 tobacco grades in different USSR republics. - In the earliest days of written music, there were three lengths of note: the maxima, longa and brevis. Over time, composers started creating shorter and shorter note values, with the longer ones falling out of use. By the end of the 16th century or so, when the inflation stopped, the longest note in common use was (and still is) the semibreve or whole note, which is half as long as the shortest of the original notes. - eBay evaluations : "will buy again, A+++++++++" is the minimum expected if the seller didn't abduct your family and mail them back to you one piece at a time. - And even then it depends on how much they charge for shipping on the pieces. - Similarly, giving anything other than a maximum rating on sites like Newgrounds or Youtube is interpreted as a vicious slam. - YouTube has changed this, swapping to a Thumbs-Up/Thumbs-Down system. - On Newgrounds this is actually considered good manners, after a fashion; five is "I liked it, thumbs up," and zero is, "I wish the creator had been aborted so I would have never seen this". Voting something in between, however, is apparently a sin that is beyond forgiveness. - This has became kind of an enforced in Taobao, the Chinese equivalent of eBay and Amazon Marketplace, especially due to press reports about many sellers actually harass buyers that gave a rating less than 4/5. So right now the average rating is usually somewhere between 4.5-5, and nobody look at the numerical rating that seriously—any criticisms would be aired in the comments that may accompany a 5/5. - In chess the title of Grandmaster was first officially created and awarded to the top 27 players. By 2009 there were over 1200 Grandmasters. - Dana Carvey joked that with condoms now going up to Magnum XL, 'regular' has become code for 'small', as no one wants to approach the counter and go "yeah, give me a pack of those 'teeny-weenys'" or something along those lines. - Similarly, according to astronaut Michael Collins, NASA had to rename the condom catheters (installed in spacesuits so that astronauts can urinate while on spacewalks or moonwalks) sizes from "small, medium, and large" to "extra large, immense, and unbelievable" because astronauts kept trying to pick sizes that were too big for them and it resulted in quite a few messes in those million-dollar spacesuits. - A proposed solution to get rid of all the ego and embarassment problems would be to have the different sizes of condoms assigned random letters of the alphabet, so that unlike bra letters you could not necessarily assume that D was bigger than A, etc. A man would need to consult a chart to determine which letter corresponded to his size. Since it would be both unnecessary and troublesome to memorize letter/size pairs other than his own, and he could assume that other men wouldn't bother to do so either, he could stop worrying about judging or being judged whenever somebody bought condoms. - The Size of Marching bands are judged like so: A (for smallest), AA, AAA, AAAA, and AAAAA. You can also have a 6A band if a College Band enters at a High School Competition, which happens enough to have rules for it, but not enough for it to not be a spectacle, since a Single A College Marching band, is about the same size as 3A. - The Byzantine Empire got very, very good at creating pompous titles. Towards the end of its history "Augustus", the title of the old Roman Emperors, was being awarded to the equivalent of interns, while the people the emperor actually liked would get to be called things like Augustus First Class, Beyond All Augustuses or Emperogustus. In a strange inversion, however, the most prestigious title of all was simply Lord. - A few years ago, Burger King inverted this trope by changing the size labels of its meals from "medium", "large", and "king size" to "small," "medium," and "large." They didn't change the actual sizes, which led to some confusion when you ordered a medium coke with your meal and got something that won't fit in the cup holder. The former "small" size is now called "value" - A 22 fluid ounce (650 ml) soda used to be the standard "large" size. Then it became "medium", and is now labelled "small" by many (but not all) chains. - Tim Horton's (a coffee chain predominantly in Canada) also did this in 2012, changing small, medium, large, extra large to extra small, small, medium, and large, and adding a new extra large. - In Australia, bushfire danger ratings were Mild, Moderate, High, Very High, and Extreme. Following the 2009 Victorian Bushfires, a new category of "Catastrophic - Code Red" was added. - Aggregate review website MetaCritic adjusts its scale specifically for games. Movies, TV shows, and music have a ranking division of 81-100, 61-80, 40-60, 20-39, and 0-19. The games on the other hand have a harsher division consisting of 90-100, 75-89, 50-74, 20-49, 0-19. - A joke for one of the reasons why the US will never go metric is this: What sounds more impressive, an 80 yard field goal, or a 73 metre one? note : This is American Football, by the way. This is of course facetious: although Canada went metric in 1973, Canadian Football—which is very similar to American football—still uses yards. - Soccer however went that way. Being invented in England and using imperial measures (a goal is 24 by 8 yards - or 7.32m by 2.44m these days), so the 12 yard penalty kick became an 11 metre penalty kick in most languages. - Before 1982, Disneyland required tickets to go on the rides. Originally there were three classes of tickets from A to C, with C being for the most thrilling rides. Over time, D tickets and then E tickets were introduced. - Many high schools have begun weighting their classes so that the most advanced classes grade on a 5-point GPA scale as opposed to the standard 4 point scale. - Some also have classes with a 6-point scale, usually reserved for those that come with college credit. - The Gamespot forums (although Gamespot itself doesn't count) are known to call a game scoring a 7.0 and 7.5 on the main Gamespot page an "A" game; an 8.0 an "AA;" and so on, with console exclusives such as Halo getting an E after it. What does Super Mario Galaxy 2, a Wii exclusive with a 10 by Gamespot translate into? An AAAAE game. - The Burj al Arab hotel in Dubai is often touted as a "7-star hotel". - Several other hotels also do this. In truth, hotel star ratings mean absolutely nothing unless you compare them to other ratings given by the same organisation (and it has an actual system for awarding them). - Brassiere cup measurements originally only had sizes from A through D. Smaller sizes are typically designated with multiple A's, going down to AAA in some training bras. Larger sizes sometimes repeat the D and sometimes go to higher letters, up to G in the United States or up to K within the UK. - This is worse in Japan, where cup measurements have finer granularity and don't use repeated letters. So a K cup might qualify as an M cup. - This is averted by the Gemological Institute of America when grading the color of diamonds: a completely colorless diamond is ranked D on a scale that continues downward to Z (prior to reaching the point where you actually want a colorful diamond). The logic was that, by starting with A, someone would claim an A+ to better it, and then you'd continue on to get this trope, but nobody in their right mind would go out of their way to claim a super-colorless diamond was ranked C. - The rank of general. Before 19th century, "general" was simply the commander of the whole army on campaign while "marshall" was the overall commander of the whole military of the country. As the units and formations were regularized and ranks were formalized, "general" became now commander of an army corps, while the subformations were commanded by "lesser" generals: army corps by general lieutenant, division by general major and brigade by brigadier general. But in the 20th century, even larger formations materialized, and more ranks were needed: the German army had Generaloberst (colonel general) for army group and Generalfeldmarschall (general field marshall) for army theatre of operations. Therefore you may have a total of six ranks of generals and rank of Marshall for the supreme commander. - Computer power supplies are certified under the 80 Plus program, which originally gave 80 Plus, 80 Plus Bronze, 80 Plus Silver and 80 Plus Gold rankings for increased efficiency. Nowadays, as power supplies get better, the scale was extended to 80 Plus Platinum and 80 Plus Titanium to match. - the Titanium ranking was to address another issue: 80 Plus was originally designed to start testing at 20% of the power supply's load. Below that, from say a 1000W power supply under idle conditions, the power supply could be lower than its minimum rated efficiency. Titaninum starts at 10% load. However because it's this efficient, it actually beats Platinum. - Taiwan's new high school entrance system introduced in 2014 already suffered this before it was introduced. Originally the CAP test was meant only have three grade levels: A (Excellence), B (Basic) and C (Needs Improvement) and only limited to 40% of the decision. However, some top school are still highly impacted, even limited by catchment areas, so the test administrators were forced to sub-divide both A and B grades into three equally-sized subgrades each: A++, A+, A, B++, B+, B. - In Imperial Russia, the public servants, or chinovniks, were divided into 14 degrees on the Table of Ranks, and the possession of a 'chin awarded personal nobility to its holder, except for the ranks 8 and above, which gave hereditary nobility note : Which gave the holder, with the exemption of capitation and the knout, the right to own serfs; given the advancement was done every three years on average, some low-ranking bureaucrats or soldiers ended with the hereditary nobility that came with the title of State Councilor. This was fixed by Nicholas I, who decided personal nobility would come only with the 8th rank — Collegiate Assessor and Major — and the hereditary one only with the 5th — State Councilor and Kapitan — and that, moreover, any promotion beyond the fifth degree would require imperial authorisation. - Notation for French public servants is such that any grade below 16/20 denotes a moron holding a grievous level of incompetence. In an inversion, the highest official grade is 18/20. - The Michelin Restaurant Star system, being a reconstruction of the Four-Point Scale, averts this. Getting even a zero-star or one-star rating is a mark of an excellent establishment, and the limit is three stars. - Health and beauty products abuse this for marketing purposes, where a grading system simply underscores the desired properties. Hair gels, lacquers and foams never get "medium" or "weak" adhesion grades, even if the manufacturer's "system" has 6 or 7 grades. All of them are strong, super strong, ultra strong etc. Meanwhile, toothbrushes, logically, run from very hard to very soft, but even "hard" ones are virtually impossible to find on a rack. - The grading of coins by professional numismatists (coin collectors/dealers) has always run on this trope. The generally used European grades (under their English names) are: Poor, Fair, Good (G), Very Good (VG), Fine (F), Very Fine (VF), Extremely Fine (EF/XF), Uncirculated (Unc), Brilliantly Uncirculated (BU), and Fleur de Coin (FDC) note : called Perfect in America. Most coin collectors will not touch a coin unless it is at least Very Fine/Extremely Fine condition or it's exceedingly rare. - In the Scout Association (UK), each section has its own awards for young members to earn, and they follow progressively up the sections: - Chief Scout's Bronze Award (Beaver Scouts' top award) - Chief Scout's Silver Award (Cub Scouts' top award) - Chief Scout's Gold Award (Scouts' top award) sounds like the top one, but then... - Chief Scout's Platinum Award (Explorers Scouts/Scout Network) - Chief Scout's Diamond Award (same) - Queen's Scout Award (The actual top award) - The McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index, used to measure the risk of fires, originally started with five levels: Low-Moderate, High, Very High, Severe and Extreme. After the Black Saturday bushfires, the Catastrophic level was added. - If one were to use the USDA Beef Grading system as the standard, then both the Australian and Japan beef grading system adds even more ranks above the best rank the USDA system can offer. The best rank USDA can offer, Prime, floats somewhere around the middle of the Japanese A4 and Australian MS5-MS6 ratings. Japan still has an A5 rank (where the best Wagyu comes from) and Australia another 3 tiers. - Leather is graded in four (sometimes five) levels. If you see something advertised as "genuine leather", bear in mind that's the second- worst level. (In order from worst to best, the levels are bonded, genuine, top-grain, and full-grain. Some systems put "split-grain" between genuine and top-grain.)	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneTwoThreeLetter
One-Word Title - TV Tropes A title of a work that's only one word long. Not much more to say. If the title is a noun, it is possibly also other tropes. Titles that refer to characters either by name or by job (e.g. "Rose", which refers to the character Rose Tyler; or Bartender, which is about the bartender protagonist), they go under Character Title or Job Title, as well. If the name is the location the work is set in, that's The Place. Words composed of two or more words that are not usually written as one also count as examples of Portmantitle. Subtitles do not disqualify a title from this trope. When adding examples, please give whatever context you can, even if it's as simple as "It's called Wings because all of the main characters are associated with a flying service." Or "It's called Friends because it's about a group of friends." If Word of God or Word of Saint Paul exists for why the title was chosen, give that. Sometimes, such a short title is picked because it's memorable. Verbed Title and Mononymous Biopic Title are subtropes. Compare to One-Letter Title and Short Titles. Contrast to The Fantastic Trope of Wonderous Titles and Long Title. ## Example Subpages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other Examples: - 1963: Named for being Retraux to look like it was published that year. - Aero: The wind-elemental eponymous heroine's codename. - Ant: Codename of Protagonist Title. - Barracuda: Not only the series as a whole, but also each of the individual volumes, which are (in English): - Bizarrogirl: Named after the titular anti-hero and co-protagonist. - Blackbird: Named for an In-Universe status. "Blackbird" means \|\|a paragon who is a loner and not part of a greater cabal.\|\| - Blackhawk: The name of the titular military unit. - Bone: A play on Species Title, as the Bones are named after their species, or possibly their species is named after their surname. - Burlap: Name given to mysterious Sackhead Slasher vigilante targeting Serial Killers. - Catstronauts: Something Nauts, Portmantitle referring to cat astronauts. - Chassis: First Name of Protagonist Title. - Chew: A Epunymous Title. "Chew" is a homophone for "Chu", the last name of the main character who also has a superpower based around eating. - Chlorophylle: Name of the main character. - Copperhead: The Place where the story is set. - Criminal (2006): Job Title of all the protagonists, as a deconstruction of the crime genre. - Critter: Protagonist Title - Crucible: Named after the titular super-hero academy. - Jeff Lemire series using Idiosyncratic Episode Naming ["Direction Verb"-er]: - Die: Double-Meaning Title: As the name of the tabletop game that's being played, and as the singular of "dice". - Dolltopia: The Place that the protagonist goes and also becomes under threat. - Duster (2015): Appears to be a Job Title for the protagonist's crop duster job. - Excalibur: Team Title: - Farmhand: Job Title-type Pun-Based Title for farming hands with Organic Technology and another name for a farmer. - Fatale: As a reference to the Femme Fatale supernatural power of the protagonist. - Funnyman: Codename of Protagonist Title. - Ghostopolis: The name of the supernatural city where the story is set. - Girrion: In-Universe name for a type of technology. - Gunsmoke: Name of Protagonist Title. - Halcyon: Previously called Utopian. Current title is a Team Title. - Happy!: Secondary Character Title. Happy's a little blue flying horse that assists the protagonist. - Harleen: First Name of Protagonist Title. - Haunt: Named as protagonist is being haunted by a ghost. - Henchmen: The title of The Protagonist's job. - Hide: Verb for the protagonist's need to. - Hillbilly: Job Title of protagonist. - Hinterkind: Group title Antagonist Title. - Horizon - Hound - Invincible: Codename of Protagonist Title. - Irredeemable and its spinoff Incorruptable: Irredeemable is about a Superman-expy going off the deep end after accidentally going past the tipping point, and then not looking back \|\|although in the end while he can't be redeemed, by sacrificing himself he planted the seeds for redemption in a convoluted, multi-verse-y way\|\|. Incorruptable is about the opposite, a Card-Carrying Villain forced to become good because with the events of Irredeemable, the world is in too much danger for him to be eeeeeeevil. - Kabuki: Only One Name-type Protagonist Title - Killtopia: The Place where the story occurs. - Monstress: Implied to be Protagonist Title, as she's carrying a Monstrum in her body. - Nailbiter: Job Title-type Protagonist Title. - Neonomicon: Reference to the Necronomicon of H. P. Lovecraft, whose works this is based off. - Norby: Most of the comics in Boys Life appear as one word entries in the Table of Contents. The chapters themselves use the name of the original book. - Owly: Only One Name-type Protagonist Title - Postal: Named for an important character being a postal worker. - Providence: Double-Meaning Title, of H. P. Lovecraft references: A reference to Lovecraft's birth city, but also means a divinely ordained chain of events. It is implied throughout the story that Black's journey is due to forces above his own volition and he is continuously referred to as a "herald". - Psychonaut - Red (2003): A reference to "red status", a.k.a being an active CIA agent which the protagonist returns to after retirement, and also the color of blood, in a story where there is a lot of murder. - Saga - Seconds, named after the restaurant in which most of the plot transpires. Also a Double-Meaning Title, as it's referring to both "Seconds" as in a second helping of a meal, and the idea of a second chance (as the book has a Peggy Sue plot). - Shadowhawk - Shadowland - Shadowpact: Team Title. - Silverblade - Sleepless - Snowman - Stray - Tomahawk - Tomboy - Trees: Subverted Species Title. It's not actually about the plants. It's just what the humans call the huge alien towers that landed on Earth. - Trouble: Implied Event Title, likely referring to the Teen Pregnancy trouble of the story. - Typhon: First name of Protagonist Title. - Vibe - Watchmen: The comic takes its name from the quote "who watches the watchmen?" which refers to both the notion of the protectors needing protection, and the protectors abusing their protectorate. - Analog: - Given how large the original title made Astounding compared to the rest of the title ( Astounding Stories), you could be forgiven for assuming the title was simply one word. The changes to the title only reinforce the idea that the magazine is simply Astounding. - Analog still sometimes shows up with a subtitle (such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact), but the cover usually shows only the one word prominently enough to be associated with a title. - Theogony: Greek for "genealogy of the gods," and is pretty much Exactly What It Says on the Tin. - Ramayana: A compound word in Sanskrit roughly meaning "The Journey of Rama," which narrates the story of Prince Rama, the 7th incarnation of the god Vishnu. - Mahabharata: Another Sanskrit word, roughly meaning "Epic of the Bhaarats." Notably contains Bhagavad Gita, the famous sequence of Prince Ajurna's dialogue with his charioteer Krishna, the 8th avatar of Vishnu. - Dianetics: One of two books by L. Ron Hubbard, one subtitled The Modern Science of Mental Health and the other subtitled The Evolution of a Science. Generally speaking, the short title refers to the former. - The Bible: Many of its internal Books, when discussed, usually omit the "Book of", such as the Book of Genesis, Book of Exodus, and the Book of Judges. - The Qur'an: Again, depending on if the "The" is omitted. Its original title in Arabic is Al-Qu'ran, which is technically a compound word, so it fits. - Avatar: Named after the film it's based on, Avatar. - Barracora: Character Title, Only One Name-type. She's laid out under the pinball table. - Breakshot - Caveman: Protagonist Title of the mini-game inside. - Checkpoint - The Williams Electronics "rollercoaster" series, named after such featured in the games: - Congo: Based on the film, Congo, based on a novel that all use the name. - Contact: Named after the electrical "contact" (switch) to initiate the action. - Corvette: Released to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Chevrolet Corvette. - Diner: The Place. Taking place in a 1950s-style train car diner. - Earthshaker!: Event Title about the big event of the game. And it's about earthquakes. - Embryon: Important word. Hit the two captive balls in the middle of the playfield to spell EMBRYON, and it's a game about embryos-ish. - Fathom: Because of its underwater theme. One Working Title also counts: "Barracuda", but not the others, "Deep Threat", "Reef Threat" and "Black Coral". - Fire! (1987): It was loosely based on the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. - Fireball - Firepower - Flash: Referencing its flash lamps effects, presumably. - Gamatron: Character Title for the robot depicted. - Genie: Character Title for the genie depicted. - Gladiators - Hyperball - Kingpin: Job Title for where the mobster protagonist wants to become. Also a Character Title for who the voice of the game is from. - Mayfair: It is an unofficial adaptation of the 1964 film adaptation of My Fair Lady. - Meteor: It was a tie-in to the 1979 disaster movie of the same name. - Paragon: The Place where the game is set. - Robot: Antagonist Title, as fighting a Robot War. - Rollergames: It is based on the short-lived roller derby 'sports entertainment' television show of the same name from 1989. - Rush (2022) is based on the band of the same name. - Sapporo: The Place. Commemorates the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan. - Seawitch: Job Title and Character Title, given the two seawitches fighting. - Sorcerer: Job Title-type Antagonist Title for the Evil Sorcerer depicted. - Spectrum: A Mastermind-type Puzzle Game involving colors. A.k.a the color spectrum. - Taxi: Vehicle Title for the Player Character, who is driving one. - Wizard!!: Artifact Title, What Could Have Been: According to designer Greg Kmiec, he originally intended Wizard! to be centered around a white-bearded medieval wizard who used magic to turn over the Flip Flags. - Varkon: Only One Name-type Antagonist Title. - Victory: The game is, quite simply, a fictionalized auto race in pinball form. Event Title for the goal. - Viper: The viper in question is the "Roto-Shooter," a rotating turret in the center of the game's playfield. - Whirlwind: The game is themed around a rampaging tornado. - Xenon: Secondary Character Title. The game centers around Xenon, the supercomputer at the heart of a futuristic society. - Hearts: Named because Hearts (and the Queen of Spades) are penalty cards. - Spades: Named because Spades trump any other cards in the deck. - Abyss: Named to evoke the game's setting in an underwater city. It doubles as a reference to moral depravity, as their political system is marked by corruption and power struggles. - Azul ("blue" in Portuguese): Named as a nod to the Portuguese tiles called azulejos, which the game is inspired by. - Bang!: Named for the sound a gun makes, which is also the name of the cards played to shoot other players. - Codenames: Named because thematically, the game is all about spies using codenames to find each other. - Fluxx: Named for the fact that its rules constantly fluctuate. - Jaipur: Named for its setting. Your goal is to become the Maharaja's personal trader by showing that you are the best candidate for the job. - Monopoly: Named because the game is about obtaining monopolies and leveraging them to drive your opponents into bankruptcy. - Pandemic: Named for what your team is fighting against. - Saboteur: Named for the player faction trying to thwart the other players' goal. - Seasons: Named for its signature season mechanic, which determines which resources will be available to the players at which times. - Splendor: Named to evoke the beauty of the gems your merchant guild deals with, as well as the grandeur of the nobles you can attract. - Uno: Named for the rule that you have to shout "Uno!" when you're on the edge of winning. - Villainous: Named because iconic villains have been promoted to Villain Protagonists. - Wingspan: Named as a nod to the birds the game revolves around. They even have a "wingspan" property that some game pieces care about. - Cinders: Protagonist Title, as a work based on fellow single-word Protagonist Title Cinderella, with both characters' names based on "cinders", a.k.a partially burned wood. - CLANNAD: Intended as a reference to the series' themes about family, due to the creator mistakenly believing "Clannad" was the Irish word for "family." - The Hayarigami series, that starts with Hayarigami, given where the Numbered Sequels place their numbers. - NekoMiko: Referencing the Catgirls, "Neko" means cat, who are Miko, and start the plot. - Nicole: First name of Protagonist Title. - NinNin Days: With the alternate title, NinNinDays. - Planetarian - SC2VN: An acronym title for StarCraft 2 Visual Novel. - Snatcher - Camdrome, so named after the main focus of the game, the evil AI known as Camdrome. - Aventures and Starventures: Tabletop Game adventures, and the same, but in Star Wars. - CLW Entertainment: The video "Thumbs". - Dad, named after the main character "Dad" and focusing on him and his family. - Noob - Mitten Squad: Some video titles: - Numberphile: The video, "16". - Pikasprey, which is the nickname of the series creator. - Pokémon Talk: Most episodes, for example, from Season 1: - "Genwunners" (previously, "Gen1ers") - "Celebrity" - "Spotlight" - "Eeveelutions" - "Allergies" - "Danger" - "Revenge" - "Finale" - Seriesly: Reviewing popular film franchises / series one entry at a time. Also Pun-Based Title: Hey everybody, and welcome to Seriesly , where we take franchises Serious Business way too seriously . - Sonic - Versus: A competitive, co-commentary series of Let's Plays of various games. A.k.a versus each other.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneWordTitle
The Oner - TV Tropes "We don't do any of your adorable little quick-cut fights around here. We do everything in a single take." Called a "long take", this is one very long, uninterrupted camera shot. The camera moves, the actors move, things happen, the camera keeps shooting. Difficult. Expensive. Rarely makes it out of the editing room intact. It can also present a logistical challenge, as film cameras once lacked the storage capacity to run for more than 5 minutes at a time — if that. A screw-up means a lot more than just a re-shoot. But when done right, it can be hailed as a directorial triumph, a chance for the performers to show He Really Can Act, and just plain awesome. More so if it's a One-Take Wonder. This used to be much more common, since before Desi Arnaz's Three Cameras technique and pre-shooting on film became popular, most TV shows were done live with just one camera. Modern technology has made Oners easier, to the point where some are actually shot piecemeal in smaller takes and then stitched together through cleverly hidden edits or CGI. Significantly easier in animation, for obvious reasons, but even there, a long shot can still be a pain in the ass, since (1) you effectively have to work on the entire shot as a whole, effectively preventing most division of labor and making any editing rather troublesome and (2) the result almost always needs to be edited for pacing, leading back into problem 1. Compare Leave the Camera Running, which may also be a long single shot, but is really distinguished by its static-ness. Also compare Epic Tracking Shot, where the camera movements are virtually impossible without some sort of visual trickery. A Sub-Trope of Real Time. Compare with Unbroken First-Person Perspective. ## Examples: - The first season of Attack on Titan gives us a GORGEOUS one in episode 11 showing Eren swinging and hurtling through \|\|Trost, ending with a mid-air titan transformation.\|\| - Girls und Panzer: - The first scene of puts the camera in the POV of the main characters' tank, and stays in this view for about a minute and a half as they get in and drive past the rest of the team. - \|\|At the end of the first episode, there is another epic Oner: tracking from the rusted hulk of the Pz.IV, out past the school grounds, down the street until we pull all the way back to find the whole city is on a gigantic aircraft carrier!\|\| - '''Memories has "Cannon Fodder", which is drawn and edited together to look like one long take. - Negima!?: In episode 14, all the class 3-A students form a Pactio with Negi while free falling. All animated as a single continuous shot. - The Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt episode "Nothing to Room" is a fixed shot with the two ladies on a couch. - One of the most memorable segments from the first season of Pop Team Epic, involves AC-bu (AC部), the team behind the "Bob Epic Team" segments, telling the origin of Hellshake Yano using drawings from numerous sketchbooks. The following season, an entire episode is devoted to them telling a sequel story where everything was done using only sketchbooks. Break-off points were only limited to one take for the opening credits, one take for the main segment, and two separate takes for the ending credits connected with careful editing to make the episode capable in doing continuous loops when rewatching the episode. - Seitokai Yakuindomo: - Super Dimension Fortress Macross has an impressive one early in the series, where the arm of Hikaru's Valkryie is shot off in midair while carrying Minnmay. Hikaru manages to catch up to the falling arm, open the canopy, grab Minnmay and pull her into the cockpit, and bring it all safely to a landing. - A Christmas Carol (2009): - The five-minute title scene starts with one conversation with Scrooge, flies all around London and then back down to the other side of the city, and finishes with him approaching his house. - The entire Ghost of Christmas Past scene simply fades from time period to time period without any cuts. - In The Polar Express, the scene where Hero Boy loses a ticket is a oner as we follow the ticket's journey as it blows around in the wind as it returns to the inside of the train. - A scene near the beginning of Beowulf (2007) goes from inside a mead hall to above it, where a rat is caught by a bird and flown far away, to Grendel's lair. - Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron opens with one of these, following a bald eagle over various natural landmarks in America's Old West. It was one of the first sequences started during production and one of the last to be finished. - Fantasia: - The final shot, during the "Ave Maria". A very complicated shot to film, comprising one of the biggest multiplane set ups ever devised, finished only hours before the movie's premiere. According to one article, the shot had to be done three times. The first time it was discovered that the entire shot had been filmed with the wrong lens on the camera, producing impromptu time lapse footage of the animators working around the edge of the frame. The second time there was an earthquake during shooting, which shook the planes out of alignment. The shot was eventually completed so close to the wire that the first print of it had to be spliced into the reel in the projection room of the premiere theater. - The Astronomic Zoom that opens the "Rite of Spring" segment, although it consists of separate elements combined through cross-dissolves. - The simulated Epic Tracking Shot that opens The Rescuers Down Under, done using the then-new CAPS program that replaced the traditional multiplane camera. - In The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney), the song "Out There" ends with a long pan out on Quasimodo standing atop the cathedral, which then pans down to the Paris streets. - The whole Bagghar chase scene in The Adventures of Tintin (2011) is a Oner, in which Tintin, his dog Snowy, and Captain Haddock are on a motorcycle chasing down a bird holding \|\|the three scrolls leading to Sir Francis Haddock's sunken treasure\|\|. They race through (as well as lay waste to) the entire town, and the camera shifts from person to person as they all get separated. The camera never cuts once, and it lasts for approximately two and a half minutes. - Used for a roughly two minute long scene in Penguins of Madagascar where the penguins fall out of the cargo hold of one airplane, slam into another airplane, actually board another plane and mess around on it a little before deciding to leave it, then barely miss getting on yet another plane, and finally fall to the ground, with the shot ending just before they actually land. - In Ice Age: Collision Course, Buck is introduced by retrieving a stolen egg from a family of dromaeosaurs. His first appearance on screen, the chase to retrieve the egg and giving the egg back to its mother all take place in one singular shot. - Pinocchio has a spectacular multiplane scene where the camera journeys through the village at morning, starting from the top of a church's bell tower and ending at Gepetto's shop. A shorter one also appears during the "Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee" number, an overhead shot of Honest John and Gideon leading Pinocchio down the street. - Used several times in the Urusei Yatsura movie Beautiful Dreamer, with quite a few shots lasting longer than a minute, including a lengthy sequence of the gang fighting over food at the dinner table, and a Round Table Shot of Onsen-Mark discussing his feelings of déjà-vu with Sakura as he begins to realise everyone is trapped in a "Groundhog Day" Loop. - The Wolf House is shot to look like the camera is continuously moving through the house in real time. - The Bad Guys (2022) opens as an homage to Pulp Fiction with Mr. Wolf and Mr. Snake talking to each other before they rob a bank. This is done as one continuous shot with no cuts lasting two minutes, 25 seconds and seven frames. The longest one-shot in Dreamworks Animation history. - The Memories segment "Cannon Fodder" is animated to seem like a continuous shot. It's a roughly 22-minute-long short about the daily lives of people living in a city of cannons that is forever at war with an enemy that they don't even know anything about. Entire feature films - Hardcore Henry is filmed entirely in the protagonist's P.O.V. Cam, and while the film does have visual robotic glitches that act as cuts in a film, the great majority of the films' action setpieces are oners. Just as the Tagline says, doesn't stop for a single breath. Tagline: WITNESS THE FIRST PERSON EXPERIENCE THAT NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER STOPS - Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), bar the opening and ending, appears as entirely one take, with scene transitions involving people walking down hallways or, in a couple of cases, being a timelapse of a building. Due to the style of shooting, the actors would have to remember up to 15 pages of dialogue at a time while hitting precisely timed choreography marks. Some CGI trickery is used. - The 2005 independent movie The Circle, starring Angela Bettis, was filmed entirely in a single take. Especially impressive, given there were a few different locations, a flashback sequence, and two of the actors moved from one location to another in a car. - The 2016 Quebec drama film King Dave by Daniel Grou was filmed all in one take on location, including dream/memory sequences and a transition by real metro train from one station to another. - The 2021 action thriller film One Shot is done in one take. - The 2003 film Russian Ark was filmed in a single shot that lasted over 90 minutes. This historical drama took place in the Russian State Hermitage Museum and involved over 2,000 actors. - The 2019 war film 1917 is largely shot and edited to look like it was filmed in a single take, with cuts happening during moments of darkness or as the heroes pass through a doorway. The crew and actors spent six months rehearsing for their scenes, which required enormous sets (such as trenches, towns, and fields) to be hyper-specifically measured and built to accommodate the flow of the script. - The 2010 Uruguayan horror film The Silent House and along with its 2012 American remake are presented in one continuous shot in 80-minute long take. - The 2000 film Timecode consists of four continuous 90-minute shots, each filmed in a single simultaneous take. Each shot follows different parts of the action, and is displayed in a quadrant of a split screen. The sixteenth take was used. Actors (whose dialogue was largely improvised) move from camera to another, but the cameras never capture each other by accident. The story — multiple plot threads about characters in a Los Angeles film production company. - The 2018 Norwegian film Utøya: July 22 Based on a True Story about the Breivik Massacre in Norway, 2011, has the entire film being shot like this. The idea being to show in real-time how the shooting played out for some of its victims and how long it lasted, The Oner lasting for 72 minutes, just as long as the Real Life shooting did. - The 2015 film Victoria consists of a single take spanning 134 minutes, 22 locations, a bank robbery, car chases, a kidnapping, sunrise, and three character deaths. It reportedly required a digital handycam, three months' practice and three live runs to complete. - Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes: The whole film is shot to appear as one take, though there are hidden cuts throughout. - Boiling Point (2021) is presented in a single, unbroken take note : The director chose to use the third out of four completed run throughs. to show what happens over the course of a single night at a fine-dining restaurant. It is the expansion of a short film, also titled Boiling Point, that was also shot in a single take. Directors who do this a lot - Kenneth Branagh's doesn't appear to like oners, he ADORES them. - His 1996 movie version of Hamlet features several entire scenes, including ones that span several rooms, shot in a single take as well as most of the soliloquies. - He used it in his adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing (1993) as well. Roughly the last eight minutes is one continuous shot. - His adaptation of Henry V features the aftermath of the Battle of Agincourt with the soldiers picking up their wounded and dead, while singing "Non Nobis" all in one take. - Dead Again has a technically challenging continuous circular shot around a table featuring Derek Jacobi hypnotizing Emma Thompson with Branagh himself as witness, and they all deliver their very best in performance and timing. - Murder on the Orient Express (2017) features three different instances: - A nice one where Bouc negotiates with the porter to get Poirot a berth on the Orient Express, and then Poirot boards the train and meets some of the passengers while on his way to his berth, just over two minutes long and masterfully paced, with a good chunk of the scene filmed outside of the train with the camera following Poirot through the train windows. - The scene where Ratchet's body is discovered is a continuous two-minute take with the camera shooting entirely overhead. - Poirot leaving his berth and walking down the hallway to leave the train while mentally weighing the events of the case is also shot in one take of around 90 seconds. - Alfonso Cuarón is known for making long continuous takes part of his directing style: - There's a couple of sequences in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that use this: - A panning shot starting outside Hogwarts and going inside to see our heroes around three-quarters of the way in. - The Time-Turner scene. Hermione puts the Time-Turner around hers and Harry's necks. They go back in time and turn around to run out of the clock tower. The camera goes out through the clock and catches up with them in the courtyard. This all happens in one take which lasts for slightly longer than one minute. - Chris Columbus was impressed by these because the length of the shots in the first film were literally how long the kids could stay in character. The kids improved a bit by the second film, so the shots are somewhat longer than on the first, but not by too much. So naturally Columbus found it impressive that they had come far enough to do an entire scene in one take by the third movie. - Children of Men features a number of these, with a degree of special effects assistance which has not been completely revealed. It's known that some of the shots used blue screen effects, and some were stitched together cleverly from short takes. The in-car sequence required a complex rig that was placed on top of the car so there would be no equipment in the car aside from the camera itself while it was moving. CGI was used heavily to add elements that would have been impossible to film traditionally, as well as replacing parts of the car that had to be removed. - Y tu mamá también: - A Oner happens during the scene where the boys are driving the car. - While less impressive from a technical point of view (there's no tracking), the scene where the boys are hitting on Luisa while watching the mariachis. - Tenoche's sex scenes with his girlfriend (about 2 minutes) and Luisa (about 4 minutes). - The kiss under the rain in Great Expectations. - His sequence in Paris, je t'aime, called "Parc Monceau." The whole short film was one continuous shot. - Gravity. There is only one cut in approximately the first thirty minutes. The remainder of the camera work is accomplished through continuous panning. The cinematography is done by the highly acclaimed cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, a frequent collaborator of Cuaron, who also did the cinematography for Y Tu Mama Tambien, Great Expectations and Children Of Men, all which are mentioned above, so this isn't surprising. - Films by Jim Cummings took this form after the success of his single-shot short Thunder Road. Its adaptation to a feature is basically composed of these, and he even got a deal with Fullscreen to produce 6 one-shot shorts throughout 2017. - Brian De Palma: - Phantom of the Paradise features a Split Screen version of this for the scene where the Phantom attempts to use a bomb hidden in a car that's to driven on stage for a performance to kill The Beach Bums. - Carrie (1976) features an extended tracking shot during the prom scene as the camera starts at Carrie and Tommy's table as they hand in their ballots, follows the ballots as they are switched for a fake stack to be handed to the teachers for counting, pans up to \|\|the bucket of pig's blood over the stage and the rope being held by Chris and Billy\|\|, and finally zooms in on Carrie and Tommy's table as they are declared prom king and queen. - Snake Eyes: The opening scene follows Nicolas Cage's character as he enters and walks through the casino to the boxing ring. Also, when Cage's character questions various suspects and witnesses to the murder about what they were doing, their flashbacks are shown via a continuous point of view shot while they narrate over it. - The Untouchables (1987) includes a oner before \|\|Wallace and George get killed\|\|, - Redacted: is used in found footage. - Casualties of War has two oners similar to The Untouchables (1987) that creates suspense and is seen through the eyes of an evildoer: when the soldiers are about to kidnap Oanh and when \|\|Clark tries to kill Eriksson\|\|. - Carlito's Way uses one towards the end of the film, when Al Pacino's character enters Grand Central Station in an attempt to escape from his pursuers. - There a few in Blow Out, such as the Slasher Movie sequence and the scene in Jack's studio where \|\|he realizes his tapes have been erased\|\|. - Peter Greenaway loves doing this in general by either keeping the camera still and shooting one long take or following the characters through various sets. - The intro to Prospero's Books has the title character reciting Shakespeare while the background comes alive behind him with characters appearing out of the shadows, including a small boy urinating in the pool. There are actually several long panning shots that follow characters through multiple sets while giving monologues. - He did this throughout the entire film of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. - Alfred Hitchcock: - Rope was made "continuous" by closeups of a back or whatnot to allow changing reels. (Known as a Body Wipe) Technically, there are a total of ten cuts in the entire film, counting the opening of the first reel. Of those, half are disguised by having an actor or a prop in front of the camera; the other half are simply done as regular cuts. The unmasked cuts were due to necessity as projector reels could only hold 20 minutes of film at the time. - Rear Window sometimes shows occurrences in the apartments through unbroken pans past different tenants' windows. - Shows up a few times very effectively in Frenzy: - A woman enters a building where someone has just been murdered. We spend a good while just waiting outside, until we hear her scream as she discovers the body. - The killer invites another victim into his apartment, followed by the camera retreating down the stairs as if afraid of what's going to happen, and ends up on the street as numerous people walk by, oblivious to what's happening in the building. - The protagonist's sentencing after he's framed for the murders is filmed from outside the courtroom, as the soundproof doors only let us hear pieces of what the judge is saying as people walk in and out. They shut just before he states the sentence, but the furious shouting afterwards makes it clear what it was. - James Rolfe - The Night Prowler is made to look like it's filmed entirely in a single take, though the cuts are poorly disguised with whip pans. - Kill For Thrill is (for the most part) entirely in one take as a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock's Rope. - M. Night Shyamalan does them a lot. - Unbreakable: Most scenes are shot entirely in one take. - The Last Airbender includes several, including: the whole earth bending battle, Aang and the Blue Spirit's escape of the Fire Nation camp, and the finale as Aang fights his way through a Fire Nation army in the Water Tribe's settlement. Note that Tropes Are Not Good: the Earth Kingdom fight, though technically impressive, also yielded a Fight-Scene Failure due to strange tracking choices (see also: the Pebble Dance) and the sight of stuntmen standing around waiting for their moment in the fight — a thing which most directors hide by the simple expedient of not filming it. - In The Happening, the camera follows a gun as one person after another picks it up and kills themselves. - One of Steven Spielberg's trademarks is to take a relatively simple scene that would normally created by editing together a master shot and various coverage shots by shooting it in a single take (for example, Marion Ravenwood's introduction in Raiders of the Lost Ark) and doing it in a way that the audience doesn't even realize that they just watched an extended sequence. Some people refer to this technique as the "Spielberg Oner". - Quentin Tarantino examples: - The final, Tarantino-directed segment of Four Rooms. - Pulp Fiction: - The scene with Jules and Vincent in the apartment building hallway at the beginning is one shot. A shorter one follows Vince into and through Jackrabbit Slim's. - The sequence when Butch goes from his car down an alley, through a hole in a fence, and across an empty lot to get to his apartment. - Jackie Brown: - The opening credits with Jackie on a moving sidewalk were a single shot. - The scene where \|\|she wanders through the mall working herself up into being panicked, and waiting an appropriate about of time before yelling for Ray in order for her scheme to work.\|\| - In Kill Bill Vol. 1, the part in the House of Blue Leaves where Sofie Fatale leaves O-Ren's dining room and goes into the restroom was one long shot. - Kill Bill Vol. 2 captures The Bride's walk down the aisle, the reveal of the Vipers outside of the chapel and the ensuing massacre in a single shot. - In Reservoir Dogs, Mr. Blonde walking to his car to retrieve gasoline in order to light a captured, beaten, and tortured cop on fire. - In Death Proof, a conversation in a coffee shop around half-way through. - Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky is one of the all time masters in long takes, and his films such as Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev, and Stalker make masterful uses of the long take, with fantastic camerawork and framing. Nostalghia includes a nine-minute single take of a man carrying a candle across a drained pool. - This was a trademark of Orson Welles' work: - There are two long takes in Citizen Kane. It was the first time it had ever been done for narrative purposes rather than technical limitations. At the time, no one had ever thought to do it. As a newbie to film making, Welles didn't know that, and impressed everyone by pulling it off. - There's a four-minute continuous take in The Stranger that starts in the middle of the road and then follows the actors through the forest. - Touch of Evil - The opening sequence features one of the most famous continuous camera shots. It's also an impressively long Tracking Shot. - Also, the scene which takes place at the Sanchez residence where Menzies discovers two sticks of dynamite in a shoebox Vargas had just moments before seen to be empty. This was the first scene filmed. When Welles shot it in one continuous take, it put the film ahead of schedule which helped to placate studio execs nervous about having the meticulous director at the helm. - The remnants of one can still be seen in The Magnificent Ambersons during the ball scene where the camera originally tracked two characters walking up three floors on a staircase. Welles considered the shot the greatest technical achievement of the film, but Executive Meddling saw it (like the rest of the film) severely cut, with the single-shot aspect consequently lost. - The scene in The Trial where the police show up in Josef's apartment early in the morning, without any warning, and start interrogating him begins as a four-minute continuous take. - The trademark of the late great Hungarian filmmaker, Miklós Jancsó. - Jancsó's films consisted of very long (often ten-twelve minutes), very complicated and carefully choreographed shots, featuring large crowds of people, including dancers, musicians, horse-riders, soldiers, etc. - Also the trademark of another acclaimed Hungarian filmmaker, Béla Tarr. - Tarr started this in his 1982 student film adaptation of Macbeth, filmed on video. The entire film consists of two shots: one running for five minutes, the other for a full 57 minutes. - It became his real trademark starting with 1988's Damnation, and continuing with the seven-hour masterpiece, Satantango in 1994, Werckmeister Harmonies in 2000, The Man From London in 2007, and his final film (at least at the moment), The Turin Horse in 2011. - Tarr uses long shots (often around five-ten minutes) with very slow pacing, depicting the dullness and emptiness of life in its entirety, such as characters sitting around drinking, walking through dirty roads, dancing around drunk, etc. - Gus Van Sant frequently uses long takes (in which he was greatly inspired by Tarr). - In Elephant (2003), for example, shots often show characters simply walking for several minutes of screen time, sometimes without the camera even following them (that is, they walk away and the camera remains stationary, with them shrinking into the scene's background). - He also used it in his earlier Gerry, a lot. One of particular note is an extended shot of the two main characters walking through the desert, the camera in extreme close-up, with only the crunch of the rocks beneath their feet on the soundtrack. - Another was a seven minute shot of the two of them walking away from the camera (as it followed them) as the sun rose. - There's a particularly painful one in Last Days, a long shot featuring the camera on a dolly moving slowly backwards from a window. It was complicated by a) they only had two pieces of dolly track for a movement about five times that distance b) the ground was visible in the shot and c) they were shooting live sound. An extra on the DVD shows a bunch of art dogs trying their damndest to remove the track and then reassemble it behind the dolly while crouching beneath the shot and not making a sound. It took upwards of a dozen tries before they got it. Other examples - 12 Angry Men has two—one towards the beginning, in which each of the jurors establishes himself as the camera pans around the room and focuses briefly on several different conversations; and one when Henry Fonda goes to wash his hands and other characters duck into the bathroom to chat with him. - In the film of the musical 1776, the opening scene of Adams descending the staircase from the bell tower, entering the Continental Congress, and delivering his opening monologue before the first song is all one take. The filmmakers note in the DVD commentary how difficult it was building a camera rig that would give a smooth transition from descending from the ceiling into the Congress chamber. There's a noticeable bump as the camera is wheeled off the extending platform used to film the stairs part of the shot. - The camera in 2:37 often follows a character through the school for extended periods of time, sometimes switching which character it follows mid-shot. - Aladdin (2019)'s opening has the camera pan from the narrator's boat into Agrabah and the Cave of Wonders, introducing every character in the movie. - All Quiet on the Western Front, the 1930 version has a rather long shot of French soldiers getting mowed down. - All the President's Men has a six minute long shot of Redford talking on the phone with three different people, in a total of four phone calls, trying to track down Kenneth H. Dahlberg. Not only is there the challenge of making a phone call interesting to watch, there's also a ton of dialogue featuring some heavy exposition and the extras are making a lot of noise in the background. At one point Redford calls one of the people he's talking to by the wrong name, but keeps character and just goes with it. - Antebellum opens with a sweeping tracking shot that begins by coming across the lawns to the idyllic facade of the plantation manor house. The shot continues—growing darker both in lighting and subject matter—sweeping past the house and through the Confederate troops and house slaves, to the back the property where the field slaves labour; finishing with Captain Jasper swigging from his hip flask as he prepares to ride down a runaway slave. - The 2018 wuxia Assassins of Brotherhood has a tavern fight filmed in this manner, when the hero marches into a seemingly-empty tavern... only for two dozen mooks to burst out and attack, where the camera then follows the hero killing enemies one at a time, leaping to the tavern's second floor, facing more mooks in a corridor which he kills, before leaping to the ground floor, all in one take. There might be a few "cheat" angles as the camera gets momentarily blocked by the hero's body or by a pillar, but it's disguised well enough to avoid giving away any cuts. - When Robbie first comes to the beach in Atonement, there's a oner that follows him as he takes in all the carnage. It's five and a half minutes long, required a thousand extras to film, and Steadicam operator Peter Robertson collapsed after it was finished. - Back to the Future: - The scene in Back to the Future Part II where the whole McFly family (including three characters played by Michael J. Fox) eats dinner was filmed as a oner to showcase the new technology that made it possible for three Michael J. Foxes to appear at once. When someone pointed out that you wouldn't film the scene that way under ordinary circumstances, Zemeckis decided to break it up. - Back to the Future begins with a pan through Doc Brown's laboratory that goes at least two minutes without a cut. - Used in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. When arresting a suspect who's holed up in his house, McDonaugh orders his unit to keep their guns trained on the front door. Then the camera follows him as he circles around through the neighbor's adjacent house, enters through the back door, puts his gun right against the back of the suspect's head, and marches him out through the front door. - Be Kind Rewind has a nice oner where we see a bunch of films getting edited simultaneously. - Big Fat Liar actually does one of these very well, in Jaleel White's introductory scene at an on-location film shoot. The DVD deleted scenes contain an even longer cut of the same shot. - The Big Lebowski uses these, both running exactly two and a half minutes, in the two on-screen appearances of the narrating Stranger: - In his first scene, after The Dude has been paid a visit by the nihilists "threatening castration", he, Walter, and Donny discuss the events at the bowling alley's bar before an argument has the latter two opting to go bowl. The camera closes in on The Dude getting another drink before pulling back and revealing the Stranger in the spot where Walter and Donny previously occupied. - In the final scene of the movie, The Dude encounters The Stranger again and "abides", leaving The Stranger to monologue the movie to a close, finishing with an emphasized shot of a bowler in the background throwing an apparent strike with a Smash to Black. - Black Snake Moan: Rae grabs young Lincoln in a passionate embrace; we're outside as she slams the front door. The camera slowly pulls back, rises in the air (a crane shot), and stays there for about 45 seconds. It's not long as oners go, but there's a lot of tension as Lazarus, who'd been buying gifts for Rae, slowly drives into the yard, gets out, and enters the house. - Boogie Nights has several of these, including the opening, the pool party, the scene where \|\|Little Bill shoots his wife, her lover, and himself\|\|, and the ending. - Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory has a long shot, one of the first ever shots done with a Steadicam, following Woody Guthrie as he goes through a Depression-era shantytown. - Charlie's Angels (2000) opens with one, which is actually three shots stitched together via hidden cuts. The shot goes from the Columbia logo to a plane in flight, through the window, down the aisle and back and ends when LL Cool J (actually Dylan in disguise) grabs a hijacker and pulls him out the door. - City Hunter: The Cupid's Perfume: The P.O.V. Cam scene, including Ryo's interrogation by the bad guys, then him managing to free himself and fight the henchmen, is at first a fairly long unique shot for an extremely complex scene involving lots of fighting, special effects (the revolvers being caught by the scrapyard electromagnet) and concluding with a car crash. There is one cut to Kaori, before returning to the P.O.V. Cam again to finish the fight. - A Clockwork Orange: - The scene in which Alex's head is forced into an (obviously full) water trough while he is brutally beaten is filmed in one tank to maximize the effect of Alex never being allowed to come up for air. Instead, the filmmakers put a breathing apparatus under the water, but it failed to work properly and McDowell did, indeed, nearly drown. - The film's opening shot is one of the most iconic oners in film history, showing Alex giving a menacing, unblinking Kubrick Stare to the viewer as the camera slowly pans out and he gives a voiceover monologue. - Cloverfield has a lot of these, due to its premise of the camera being operated by one of the main characters. - All segments of Haneke's Code Unknown are shot as long single takes, with the first one lasting over seven minutes. - Crazy Samurai Musashi has a 77-minute long action sequence in which the title character kills 400 different opponents, all done in one take. - Creed has a four-minute real boxing match between Adonis and Leo Sporino, spanning match introductions, two rounds, and the final victory, in order to make the fight feel more relentless and stress how it feels to be in the ring. The camera tracks both boxers and the referee, getting within feet of the actual punches being thrown. When fighters bob and slip, they disappear from the frame completely. Stereo audio is also implemented, where character voices come from the speaker or location that mimics their position relative to the sole camera. A stationary character, such as Rocky staying within Creed's corner, sound as if they're coming from left or right, in front or behind, relative to where the camera is pointing. Depth also comes into play, with characters fading out the farther they are from the filming. The audience's noise comes from all over, as well, but are quieter when the camera gets close to the fighters, to show how locked in they are to the fight. - In the forgotten comedy The Crew, the movie has a rather clever homage to the Goodfellas oner; the film's four lead aging gangsters try to get in to a crowded diner for an early-bird special, and are led through the back of the kitchen for a good minute, Scorcese-style. Only instead of being led to a table, the manager leads them to the back alley exit and shuts the door behind them. - Cry_Wolf has a rather impressive Oner with an extremely steady cameraman —- no dolly used, even. It goes over all sorts of rough terrain. - Tyler Perry's Daddy's Little Girls had one in the scene where Monty and Julia arrive back at her house after a night out on the town. - Special case: Dancer in the Dark shoots all its Musical numbers as one continuous Long Take using up to 100 stationary cameras in Technicolor, then cuts between all the footage generated. The rest of the movie is filmed with blurry handheld cameras in the style of Dogme '95, to show how the protagonist is going blind and the musical numbers are what she sees in her head. The result is fascinating because you can tell all the footage of singing dancing was taken from multiple odd angles of one single take (under a desk, atop a railway car, etc.). - The Dark Knight, The Joker, a hospital, and a lot of bombs, some of them even going off. - The opening shot of The Day After Tomorrow is the longest CGI generated one-shot, it runs for just over two minutes. - The film Death Sentence has one which follows Kevin Bacon's character chasing a mook through several floors of a parking complex. As it was a handheld camera that covered a lot of distance both horizontally and vertically, it was literally handed off from one cameraman to another through the duration of the sequence. - The Hindi film Dil Dhadakne Do has the song Gallan Goodiyaan, with a large cast singing and dancing, and was shot not just in one shot, but also in one take. - An early one is this sequence from Charlie Chaplin's A Dog's Life. - The film version of Doom, has a single continuous sequence seen from the first person, that due to filming requirements had to be done in this manner, with the actors for the monsters stacking up into a long line behind the camera, and staying outside of the shot the entire time. It took three weeks to make! - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) begins with a three-minute continuous shot which moves between two interiors across a large set — both technically and aesthetically daring for the time. Even more impressively, this shot is from Jekyll's point of view. At one point the camera-as-Jekyll even looks in a mirror; the production had the actor standing on the other side of a glassless frame, with a duplicated section of room-scenery behind him. - Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: Dorics shape-shifting escape from Sofina and the palace guards is edited into one shot. - Elena Undone: The entire scene in which Elena first kisses Peyton, leading to an intense makeout session, is a oner clocking in at 3 minutes and 51 seconds. - Fight Club has a scene which appears to show Tyler in two places at once, achieved by Brad Pitt running around the back of the camera very quickly as it pans round. - The long Steadicam shot in The Formula, including the men walking down flights of stairs while talking. - A Free Soul has a 14-minute continuous take courtroom scene. This was done by using two cameras and splicing the footage together. - Funny Games featured several of these throughout the film, including a 10-minute take of Anna and Georg cutting through their bonds and moving into the kitchen after \|\|the killers murder their son and seemingly leave them alone in their own house.\|\| - Furious 7 opens with a long take of Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) giving a monologue to his brother in a hospital, then casually walking out of said hospital, revealing that it had been almost completely destroyed in a firefight between him and a SWAT team. - The Game Changer opens with a minute-long uninterrupted shot of 1940s Shanghai, sweeping through the city's waterfront, the streets, rows and rows of cars, before finally having the camera going inside the limo where the female protagonist is seated. - Game Night has the sequence where the protagonists are attempting to steal the Faberge Egg from Donald Anderton's house, constantly tossing it to each other in order to stay ahead of the security guards chasing them. - Gangster Squad does this in the scene where Jerry Wooters goes to a nightclub of Cohen's to meet with Jack Whalen. It starts outside the nightclub, follows Jerry as he passes and pays off Pete the shoeshine boy, enters the club, hands his hat to one of the cigarette girls, then makes his way into the club, and eventually sits down with Whalen. - Ghost (1990) does this with its opening credits, an unbroken two-minute tour through the attic of Sam and Molly's new home. - Ghostbusters has one in Louis's apartment during his party. The entire shot was also ad libbed by Rick Moranis. - Goodfellas: The famous scene where Henry Hill takes his girlfriend to the nightclub, past the line at the door, in through the kitchen and out into the club where veteran comedian Henny Youngman peforms. It's made more impressive because the extras outside the club had to run inside to serve double-duty as the night club audience. Youngman proved to be the biggest liability, as he kept flubbing his lines at the very end. - In Good Will Hunting Robin Williams's famous monologue on the park bench is shot for roughly the first two thirds of it in a single take that lasts over three and a half minutes. The camera shot is a closeup of Williams's face as it very slowly pans around him. Notably this breaks one of the standard rules of filmmaking as he does ask brief questions from Matt Damon's character Will during it and he responds, but the camera does not cut to the other speaker. - Gun Crazy used a oner during a bank holdup filmed from the inside of the getaway car. The entire scene takes three-and-a-half minutes. - The opening scene in the original Halloween. - Michael's return to Haddonfield in Halloween (2018), in which he wanders through a block of houses and stabbing the inhabitants, is done as a one-take, albeit with some disguising edits. - Hanna has several long takes, including a 3-minute one happening in a busy bus station and ending in an underground tunnel brawl. - John Woo's Hard Boiled includes a two-minute and forty-two second long take of Tequila (Chow Yun-Fat) and Alan (Tony Leung) clearing room after room of bad guys during the big shootout at the hospital. The Criterion edition of this Hong Kong action classic actually has a chapter dedicated to this sequence called "2 Minutes, 42 Seconds." - The final action scene of Hellboy is shot in one continuous take. - Both Henry V films: Olivier's 1944 version had the charge of the French cavalry at the beginning of the Battle of Agincourt. Branagh's 1989 version had the king walking the battlefield at the end of the battle. Both versions record Mistress Quickly's monologue in one take, with Branagh directly referencing Olivier's version. - Except for maybe the Flying Elvises, Honeymoon In Vegas is a thoroughly forgettable movie that happens to contain one of the best put-together long takes ever seen. It's August in Vegas, and two old-school wiseguys (James Caan and Johnny Williams) arrive for a little R&R. They're shown in a dolly shot walking poolside upon their arrival, walking, walking, weaving around cabana chairs and splashing children, walking, walking, for about 30 seconds ... suddenly Caan stops and turns to Williams: God damn it's hot. - The scene in The Hunt for Red October where the officers eat dinner is done as one take with the camera panning to follow the conversation like someone sitting at the table turning his head. - Propaganda pic I Am Cuba has some incredibly long takes in which the camera floats around throughout the scene. In one sequence, it goes around a high-class pool party and even ducks under the water for a while before emerging again. In another, it follows the coffin of a dead student through crowded streets, up the sides of a building, through the top floor, and then out again along a balcony. These were often done by having the camera passed along a "bucket line" of cameramen! - In Bruges homages Touch of Evil with a scene of Brendan Gleeson's character watching the appropriate scene from the film and then having a long phone conversation with Ralph Fiennes' character within a single shot. - In the Heights plays out Usnavi's and Vanessa's exchanges in "Blackout" and "Champagne" uninterrupted, complete with the actors singing on set. - Irréversible consists entirely of Oners shown in reverse order. One contains \|\|a murder, another a rape\|\|. - It Follows: - The very first shot after the opening titles starts with a pan across the street to Annie's house and ends with Annie driving off. - A slow pan around a school corridor occurs when Jay and Greg try to track down Jeff/Hugh and you can see (though the camera shows it no favour) "It" walking off of the campus pavement toward the door of the hallway bearing the school records room in which Jay and her friends are doing research. - Jay running from the beachhouse, getting in the car, driving off of the road, and having an accident all takes place during a single shot. - James Bond: - You Only Live Twice: There's a extended helicopter tracking shot as Bond runs across a roof, beating up dock workers working for the villain. - Several in Skyfall: - The fight sequence between Bond and Patrice in Shanghai. - Bond and Eve surveying the casino in Macau. - Raoul Silva's introduction, where he steps out from an elevator at the end of a long hallway and slowly walks towards Bond, all while giving a long (yet intriguing) monologue. The director had the hallway constructed to accommodate the length of the speech. - Two in Spectre: - The one opening the movie following Bond's movements from the Day of the Dead procession as he stalks Sciarra, into the elevator of the hotel, into the room that he's sharing with the Bond Girl du jour, then out onto the rooftop. It is not actually a single take but four (for one thing, the last shot was filmed at Pinewood Studio in the UK) and you can see the joins if you know what to look for. - Lucia Sciarra entering her apartment and walking to her outdoors fountain. - No Time to Die has the stairwell action sequence — an apparently unbroken shot of Bond fighting his way up a staircase, exchanging bullets and punches with numerous heavily armed goons, avoiding grenades, and at one point going into Shell-Shock Silence. - JCVD features a couple, opening with an extended parody of star Jean-Claude Van Damme's previous movies, with Van Damme roaming around an urban battlescape deploying every kind of weapon up to and including the kitchen sink. Later he floats up to ceiling (at least in his own mind) and engages in a heartfelt and extended soliloquy. - Jurassic World: In the climatic battle, the moment \|\|Blue enters the fight till the I. Rex is defeated is one shot. You see Blue attacking the Indominus, then Rexy rejoining the fight, the protaganists trying to flee the scene and again the fight\|\|. - Kamen Rider ZO: The beginning of the last fight against Doras is a single take that last for 1 minute and 40 seconds. The camera isn't mounted, and they fight around a central pillar - at one point, the camera operator is lifted up onto a walkway 3 meters up and lowered again as the fight continues below him. - The church battle in Kingsman: The Secret Service is designed to look like one, though there actually are several cuts hidden with whip pans (plus the inserts of the people watching). In an interview, Colin Firth claimed that the sequence was so carefully rehearsed and choreographed that they could have done it on stage in front of a live audience. - Kingsman: The Golden Circle has its final battle apparently filmed in a single take. It was actually a very complex, heavily digitally enhanced shot on a green screen set with switches between the actors and stunt doubles. - A Knight's Tale has one that the director freely admitted was for a purely practical reason: he really wanted to film one scene in a certain cathedral and could only get permission to film there for one night. Since setting up individual shots always takes up a lot of extra time; he managed to film quickly by reducing the scene to three: a lengthy distance shot during which most of the scene takes place, and two brief close-ups for a dramatic exchange of final words at the end. - Knowing: The airplane crash sequence is one continuous shot that's over two minutes long. - Busby Berkeley supplied a famous example in Lady Be Good. Two-thirds of Eleanor Powell's dance to "Fascinating Rhythm" is a single shot. - Many of the shots in La La Land are over thirty seconds long. The opening musical number is actually three shots, but edited with whip pans to make it seem like one continuous shot that lasts for six minutes. Also, Mia's final audition consists of one shot of a zoom into her face, a pan around her, and a zoom out, which last three minutes. - The opening number of the film version of The Last Five Years is actually five shots: a crane in through a window on Cathy's face; a cut to the reverse shot of the letter Jame wrote her to say goodbye; several expositional shots of the Official Couple's photographs, showing the detritus of their now-sundered marriage; and back to Cathy. Only the transition between the first two shots is a clear edit; everything else is seamless. - The pull-back from inside Audrey's apartment at the end of "Somewhere That's Green" and out into the street up to the top of a building for the beginning of "Some Fun Now" in Little Shop of Horrors was one continuous shot, achieved with a crane mounted on a crane. - The first sequence of Living in Oblivion is about an independent director's attempt to get an emotionally charged scene in one shot. He suffers every setback in the industry. - The Final Battle in London Has Fallen starts out with one of these, similar to a scene from Hard Boiled. And it's awesome. - The Longest Day has a long take showing French commandos storming a German strongpoint at Ouistreham. Although shorter than many other entries on this list (about ninety seconds), it still contains hundreds of extras coming in from multiple directions, over several city blocks, and lots of pyrotechnics, all of which had to be carefully choreographed. And it was filmed from a helicopter. - In The Long Good Friday, the final shot holds on Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) as he's driven away, replaying the events of the last few days in his head. We see him run the gamut of emotions as everything becomes clear to him. - The 2015 film adaptation of Macbeth has the "out, damned spot" soliloquy played out in two shots: first a quick establishing shot that shows Lady Macbeth sitting on the floor alone, then it cuts to a close-up of her face for almost 3 minutes (the longest take in the entire film) and only cuts once the soliloquy is over. Then we see that \|\|Lady Macbeth has been talking to a hallucination of her dead child\|\|. - Almost all of 19-minute short film Madre is a single take of a woman pacing around her apartment while on the phone. - Judy Garland's performance of "The Man That Got Away" in the 1954 version of A Star Is Born was shot in one take. The camera doesn't move to much, but wow, does it show off the performance. - Ed Burtynski's documentary Manufactured Landscapes opens with an alarmingly long shot of a Chinese factory floor—nearly ten minutes of assembly lines and work benches. - Marvel Cinematic Universe: - The Avengers: - The climactic battle, following each member of the team as they whoop the Chitauri's collective ass to hell and back. We start with Black Widow riding a hijacked Chitauri craft... to Iron Man covering her back by blasting chasing craft... to Iron Man landing next to Captain America and reflecting his beam off of Cap's shield to clear out enemies... to Hawkeye picking off Chitauri from nearby to afar... to Thor and the Hulk fighting on top of a Leviathan and ultimately using a concerted effort to bring the monster down. The scene can be viewed here. - There's a less epic one earlier, when the team is arguing aboard the Helicarrier. - Avengers: Age of Ultron: - The sequel starts with one, with the team fighting their way through the woods of Sokovia, assaulting a base of HYDRA. - The scene of the Iron Man drones getting back to the Stark tower is also a long take, with the "camera" going through a glass ceiling to follow the Avengers. - During the climactic final battle, we get one long beautiful rotating shot of all the Avengers taking down Ultron's drones. - The title sequence for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is a single take of Baby Groot dancing to "Mr. Blue Sky" while the rest of the Guardians fight the Abilisk in the background. - Black Panther: During the fight in the Korean illegal casino, one shot starts on the balcony with Okoye fighting Klaue's goons, moves down to the main floor where Nakia, T'Challa and Ross are tussling with their own foes, and then follow Klaue back to the balcony, pursued by T'Challa, with no visible cuts in the action. - Avengers: Endgame: - Ronin's assault on the Tokyo criminals is shot in a single long take. - The scene from the initial clash between the two armies up to the Back-to-Back Badasses moment of Pepper and Tony is a continuous shot, and admittedly the most daunting for the SFX teams. - Tony's funeral, starting at the floating wreath and and ending at the front door with Fury, passing by every hero in attendance. - Minority Report had a Oner sequence that was copied/homaged by Kill Bill Vol.1 that involved the camera floating above the ceilings of the apartment building. - Les Miserables had a couple of songs as one long take, most notably "I Dreamed a Dream" and Éponine's version of "On My Own". - Monty Python and the Holy Grail: The Overly-Long Gag "make sure the prince doesn't leave the room until I come and get him" scene in Swamp Castle is one take. - Mission: Impossible Film Series: - The scene in Mission: Impossible III where Ethan Hunt runs through Shanghai is done in one long 20-second take, with the camera following his path while warning the citizens to move out of the way. - The underwater setpiece in Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation is filmed featuring several individual Oners intersected with cuts to Benji and Ilsa. - Mission: Impossible Fallout has the HALO jump section, which stitched together three takes note : out of over 100 into a seemingly continuous sequence, where we follow Ethan every step of the way, from the initial jump, to him saving Walker, finally cutting when the chutes are deployed. - Non-Stop: A particularly neat tracking shot following Marks as he "randomly" searches passengers. Obviously edited, since halfway through the camera moves through a window and reenters the plane at another one further down, but that doesn't mean it's not impressive. - The famous "hallway rampage" sequence of Chanwook Park's Oldboy (2003) pans along a long hallway, following the hero as he fights off an entire gang, armed with a hammer. The scene nears four minutes in length. - One Cut of the Dead: The film's first act is a single, 30-minute long continuous take of a zombie movie crew getting attacked by zombies, filmed without hidden edits. The film then reveals that this whole sequence was \|\|a Show Within a Show. The rest of the film is a flashback to a film crew planning and executing the single-take horror film to be broadcast live on television.\|\| - Outlaw King opens with an eight and a half minute single shot that starts with an extended monologue, follows the characters out into a swordfight, then returns to the tent for a conversation, and finally leaves the tent again for the firing of a trebuchet. - The opening shot from The Place Beyond the Pines, which follows Luke from his trailer to the globe of death. - Robert Altman's The Player has an eight-minute single-cut intro. It features two men walking through the scene discussing old movies with single-cut intros. Perhaps even more impressively, all the background characters are people in the movie industry talking about movie-related stuff; so the (real) people in the movie industry who were playing the characters ad-libbed all the background dialog. - The movie Postcards from the Edge starts with a scene lampshading this practice; a misspoken line threatens to ruin the entire shot. - In Pride and Prejudice, right after Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy dance at the ball, a montage of the ball starts. It's easy to miss that this is really one long shot. After a bit of dialogue, Keira Knightley had to sprint through the house to pass a doorway before the camera got to it, and then steady her breathing for when the camera got to her in her next position. - [REC] has a few, seeing how this is done in the style of a pseudo-documentary. A good example is the introductory scene, in which Ángela and the firemen arrive outside, enter the lobby and speak with the tenants, ascend the stairs and talk with the policemen, break the door down and enter the apartment, and meet and get assaulted by the zombified woman. - The Revenant has an incredibly impressive one in the beginning, depicting a battle between the trappers and Native American Arikara. - Revenge: The is a single long tracking shot that starts when Richard hears a noise and steps out of the shower and picks up his shotgun. The shot then follows him as he prowls the house and the pool area in search of Jen. The long shot is useful as it establishes the exact layout of the corridors where Richard and Jen will later be playing cat-and-mouse. - Saving Private Ryan has several, most notably the scene in which the squad enters Neuville, with the halftrack and a shot in the final battle where Mellish, Henderson and Upham move to the second floor of the cafe. - Scaramouche features the longest continuous sword fight in film history. As it took place in a pre-Revolutionary France theatre, complete with over 600 extras in full costume, they had to get it done in one take. As it was so long the lead actors couldn't be trusted to do it, so the fight director and his assistant did it all in long-shot. After beginning the fight on the edge of the boxes, it moved to the corridor outside, then to the balconied foyer, where a single camera picks up the shot and follows them down the stairs, across the foyer, and back into the auditorium, roughly a third of the fight. The whole fight took over seven minutes, included two near-fatal accidents, and needed nine cameras to film, to cover the boxes, the corridor, the foyer, the auditorium, onstage, and backstage, none of which could be in shot for any other camera. After it was done, the leads did some close-ups of a few short sequences during the fight, and these close-ups cover the cuts between each camera. - The Secret in Their Eyes has a truly impressive Oner that starts high in the air, shot from a helicopter approaching a soccer stadium where a game is being played, pans over the players and zooms in on the crowd where Esposito and Sandoval are \|\|trying to find the suspect\|\| which they do right as a goal is converted and the crowd goes mad, causing them to \|\|lose him\|\| which in turns gives place to a \|\|chase scene\|\| through the inside of the stadium, up and down several levels of passages and staircases, \|\|inside a bathroom and back out\|\|, and eventually back out \|\|onto the playing field\|\|, where \|\|the suspect is finally captured\|\|. The whole scene lasts over five minutes. - Serenity introduces the crew by tracking through the ship in a oner. It actually needed two shots because of the configuration of the ship sets; the cut is disguised with a Whip Pan between Mal and Simon when they hit the staircase. - Shaun of the Dead has two oners of Shaun walking from his flat, across the street to the store, and back. One of them takes place before the Zombie Apocalypse and one is during. Shaun had just woken up and is equally oblivious in both. - The opening scene of A Shot in the Dark is four minutes of people sneaking into each other's bedrooms, establishing that everyone in the Ballon household is having an affair with at least one other member of the household. - Unique, if somewhat short, variant: Silent Hill features one shot that starts directly behind the protagonists struggling to hold a door shut, facing a complete wall. It then rises until pointing downwards, over the wall and door, and then lowers until aiming straight-on again behind the men trying to break in. Obviously thrown together with just a bit of cheap bisecting CGI of the wall to cover the wipe, right? Nope; the entire wall was constructed to let the top open up, allow the camera through, and close back up before coming down on the other side. - In Silver Lode, there is an uninterrupted shot lasting nearly a full minute following Ballard through the town on his way to the telegraph office as he does his best to avoid detection by the townspeople. - $la$her$ appears to be shot entirely in one continuous take done by the cameraman of a murder reality show. The cuts were actually disguised by being done when no actor was on camera, but there's still fewer than one cut per 10 minutes of action throughout the movie. - The Spectacular Now: Aimee and Sutter's first time is shot in one take lasting 3 minutes. Well, 30 seconds of coitus and the rest being buildup. - Stan & Ollie opens with the titular duo in their dressing room, tracks them as they walk across the busy studio lot, and then follows them onto a movie set where they proceed to film a scene. - While the sequence is almost entirely CGI, the first shot of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith is a Oner, going from the beginning of the opening crawl, then following two starfighters though a battle to nearly three minutes later focusing in on Anakin in his starfighter. - The German movie Kreuzweg ( Stations of the Cross) is brought in 14 chapters, paralleling the 14 stations of the cross that Jesus encounters in his final days and hours. Each of these 14 scenes is brought in a single take, and all but two chapters (late in the film) are filmed with a fixed camera angle. The longest take is the first scene in a Sunday school class lasting for almost 14 min. - The opening scene of Strange Days, taking about five minutes with a handicam and several physical stunts (like climbing a ladder and jumping off a building) and ends with \|\|the POV cameraman/character falling off a roof and dying.\|\| - Stranger by the Lake: The shot where Michel drowns his lover and then leaves the lake, walks back towards his clothes, gets dressed and then leaves, is all one continuous shot. - Sucker Punch features a futuristic fantasy sequence where the main characters storm a moving train, and have to fight a horde of gun-toting robots to get to a ticking time bomb. The next 2-and-a-half-minute fight scene is composed as one (mostly-CGI) shot, with the camera moving between each character, and even in and out of the train itself. - In the first Superman film, Superman flies off Lois' balcony and seconds later within the same shot Clark appears at her door. The part of the shot where Lois watches Superman fly away is actually Margot Kidder looking at a rear projection. It's also not a single take, but two shots very cleverly edited together. - In Tatie Danielle (1990), one shot shows Sandrine and Danielle starting to drive off after leaving Danielle's dog in the park, then pulling back after Sandrine remembers that the dog wasn't wearing its collar, Sandrine getting out of the car, Sandrine putting the collar on the dog, Sandrine getting back into the car, and the car leaving the park (for real this time). - Dario Argento's Tenebre takes a crane shot up one side of a building, over the roof, and down the other, for no reason other than that it's awesome. - John Connor's helicopter crash in the opening sequence of Terminator Salvation. - Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line uses the technique in some of the tracking shots during the hill assault scenes. - Tomorrowland features one as Casey takes her first full trip into the eponymous city. - Tom-Yum-Goong (aka The Protector): - Features a four-minute note : the time was chosen specifically because that was how much usable footage could be shot with a single canister of 35mm film one-shot elaborate fight sequence that reportedly took eight days to get right in which Tony Jaa fights his way up a building. Up multiple sets of stairs and through rooms, with occasional pans out and back again to show extras landing after being thrown over the railings. The only CGI in the whole sequence is a window breaking, and only because the real prop didn't work right and cheating it in with CGI was cheaper than rebuilding the entire set for another take. - Another occurres during a fight in the old Redfern tram depot, against bikers, skateboarders, and roller-skaters. - Top Secret! contains a scene where the protagonists visit a Swedish bookstore to learn how they can make contact with the leader of the Resistance. It's a relatively short scene as far as oners go, but the actors performed everything in reverse, then the clip was spliced backward into the film, making the dialogue sound suitably foreign and resulting in some gravity-defying effects. - The Train (black-and-white WWII film with Burt Lancaster) has some wonderful long tracking shots. They also wreck a lot of real trains. - The Trope Maker is probably A Trip Down Market Street, a 13-minute documentary film from 1906 that is just that, namely, a 13-minute ride down Market Street in San Francisco. Almost all of it is a single take. - Waiting... has one very long and very impressive continuous shot, all done with a freehand camera to emphasis the chaoticness of the dinner rush, that pans through the entire restaurant with every major character actively doing something as it passes by and ends with Raddimus getting busy in the bathroom. During a rehearsal of it that was filmed (found in the extra scenes of the DVD), Ryan Reynolds who appears near the end of the shot remarks how badly he'd love to completely ruin the shot on purpose. - A quite powerful one near the end of Wall Street, as Charlie Sheen \|\|is arrested for insider trading and slowly breaks down in tears during the long walk out of the office.\|\| - Darren Aaronofsky's The Wrestler has two extended sequences which follow its protagonist from just behind his shoulders. - The 2017 Chinese historical drama Youth has exactly one action scene in it, set during the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, and it is a 6 and a half-minute long continuous take. - The Longest Day in Chang'an: The opening scene is two minutes long, only one shot, and moves all over the city. - The first episode of the fifth season of Jane the Virgin has a long take as Jane totally loses her mind over the events of the beginning of the episode. - In the fifth and final season there's one where Jane has a breakdown over the contents of her telenovela life, unanimously hailed as a career highlight for Gina Rodriguez. - The sixth episode of The Haunting of Hill House has five long takes, the longest of which is 18 minutes. Because it covers two separate time periods and different locations, a rigged set was built with elevators and hidden doors for the crew and cast (and their body doubles) to run around. - Firefly: - In "Objects in Space", the second-to-last shot of the episode was one long shot over about a minute, showing each member of the crew. It was intended to show that River had been accepted onto the ship as one of the crew, as opposed to a passenger, by having her appear with everyone else on the ship. The scene ends with Summer Glau and Jewel Staite in the cargo bay of the ship. Because everything had to go right in one take, if anyone made a mistake, they'd have to start the whole scene over again. When Summer kept screwing up, forcing a reshoot because the very last part of the long scene (it's about 5-7 minutes long) was screwed up, it necessarily ended up frustrating the other cast members, who, from the other side of the set, would cry out "SUUUUMMER!" whenever she messed up. This became a behind-the-scenes running gag: whenever someone would screw up, they'd shout "SUUUUMMER!" - An outtake had one of these as Nathan Fillion rushed around to appear in four places in a close-up rotation amongst the cast at a funeral, ending with him in the casket with the corpse. Suffice to say, the other actors quickly corpsed. - Planet Earth included a shot of wild African dogs chasing a gazelle. While the pack strategies used by hunting canines was well understood, an entire hunt had never before been filmed from start to finish. The camera crew used a single camera to capture the hunt from a helicopter in one long shot, which is detailed in the "Making Of" featurette on the DVD. - Buffy the Vampire Slayer: - The filming of the song "The Parking Ticket" from "Once More, With Feeling" was done in one take. The camera starts on Giles, Xander and Anya, then pans over to Marti Noxon singing before rejoining the Scoobies' conversation. - One of the opening scenes of "The Body" was shot as a oner, which adds to the realism of the episode. - Maybe the first one to show up in the series is "Anne", as the gang returns to school; it runs for 3:30, features every main character plus all minor characters important for the episode, and is book-ended by two scenes showing Buffy in L.A., just to ram it home how utterly alone she is. - Whedon actually uses one in the very first episode of the show and comments about this very fact in the DVD commentary. - And to complete the Whedon Trilogy, the intro of the Angel Investigations gang on their first day of work at Wolfram & Hart in "Conviction" was a oner, and featured every starring member of the cast. - The Mad About You episode "The Conversation" (Paul and Jamie are anguished about whether to leave Mabel alone through the night, not going to her when she cries) was filmed in a single shot, except for The Teaser and The Tag. They then apply Lampshade Hanging in The Tag, when Paul and Jamie are watching and discussing a movie filmed in that way - Paul points out how difficult this is for the actors, while Jamie (who had actually flubbed one of her lines) merely claims "It's their job!" - Loki (2021): The climax of the episode "Lamentis" is filmed and stitched together to look like one shot. - The West Wing opened the series with a long one (Leo arriving for work) and came close to closing the series with a similar one (POTUS Bartlet thanking all of the minor staffers, including a funny inside joke between Martin Sheen and his real-life daughter). - Quite a few of their Walk and Talk scenes were done as Oners. - The fourth episode, "Five Votes Down", includes a three-minute tracking shot of the senior staff leaving a venue after President Bartlet gives a speech. For added complexity the scene was shot on location rather than the usual soundstages and at some points required the cameraman to walk backwards to keep the cast in shot. - The X-Files episode "Triangle", features an alternate-reality Scully and a modern-day Mulder thrown into her 1939 world. Though the show actually had a few cuts, each act was one continuous shot. This results in a beautiful moment in the first scene back with the original Scully. Skinner flubs a line, and manages to correct in character, but collects a Death Glare from Gillian Anderson along the way. Apparently she was really tired of doing that damned scene. - It was the one shot in the episode where the camera was focused entirely on one character from start to finish. The camera tracked her for 10 minutes, 20 seconds as she engaged in separate but continuous conversations with The Lone Gunmen at her desk, Skinner in his office, Kirsh in his office, Spender in the X-Files office, and again with Skinner in the elevator (who managed to get to first base with Scully before Mulder) before escaping in The Lone Gunmen's van. Brilliant. - ER often used continuous tracking shots (achieved through extensive use of the Steadicam) to stress the intensity of the moment, during mass casualty incidents when the whole cast scrambled to save several lives simultaneously. Rather than cut between different events, the camera would just follow characters between rooms and circle around them as they worked. - One of the earliest examples of this is the first season episode "Blizzard" which contains a five-and-a-half minute long mass casualty scene that contains just 16 cuts. It includes a very impressive 100-second long tracking shot that moves around the entire ER set and features every cast member. - The frequency of these kinds of scenes inspired the cast and crew to broadcast an entire episode live from start to finish. The episode was called "ER: Live", and while it did feature multiple cameras, it was essentially done in a single take (technically two takes, since they did the show twice, once for the East Coast timeslot, and once for the West Coast). - In Season 4's "Exodus", we get the opposite of the usual use, as it features a quite haunting 40-second long tracking shot of a completely empty and abandoned ER. - Episode 4 of Psychoville is a comic homage to Rope, but manages to one-up the original by shooting the entire 28-minutes of action in just two takes, the first of which was 17 minutes long - something that was only possible on video, since film cameras only contain 10-minute reels. - The two-part episode Quentin Tarantino directed for CSI includes such a shot. The camera first films the CSIs talking around a table, before following Sarah across the entire lab as she goes to fetch a suspect's file in another room. - Third Watch's 100th episode, "A Call For Help" consisted of 4 Oners, each comprising about 10 minutes of screen time. - Scrubs season one episode "My Student" began with a two-and-a-half minute Cold Opening. DVD special features show that the primary technical difficulty was actor Donald Faison's inability to sink a three-pointer on cue. - The two-minute date at the end of the How I Met Your Mother episode "Ten Sessions" (better known as the one with Britney Spears). - Also in that show, in the episode "The Naked Man," the camera pans away from Ted to follow another character; when it pans back ten seconds later he's managed to take off all his clothes. - The episode "Gary Blauman" contains a 2 and a half minute guest star studded panning one shot. - British police series The Bill used it a lot in the very early days of its existence, when the remit was to create a kind of documentary effect. A good example is the 1995 episode "Good Intentions" which has 4 takes over the 22 minute episode. The first lasts approximately 6 minutes and follows characters outdoors and indoors and up and down stairwells. The second and third last approximately 3 minutes each. The fourth, which includes several parts of the police station set, lasts 12 minutes. Towards the end of the series the show tended to rely more on using WhipPans and other camera tricks to break up scenes. However, the very final shot of the show is a classic Oner, going through the station and ceremonially saying goodbye to the characters. - The first post-credits sequence of the 2003 Battlestar Galactica mini-series is a 3 minute 15 second steadicam shot running around the upper levels of the ship, with almost every named crew member wandering through. - Game of Thrones: Has practically become a tradition for their major battle sequences. - During "The Watchers on the Wall", the penultimate episode of season 4, there is a continuous, unbroken shot of the battle happening in the center yard at Castle Black, which slowly pans in a complete circle showing how the battle is playing out for pretty much everyone at The Wall. - In "Hardhome", we get one with Jon Snow moving from the wight-covered gate to the Wildlings' meeting hut in order to retrieve the dragonglass daggers he brought with him in order to emphasize how much of a massacre it is. - In "Battle of the Bastards", directed by the same director as Hardhome, in the thick of the battle with the Boltons, there's a long shot of Jon on the battlefield killing as many soldiers as he can. Cavalry are charging everywhere, arrows are constantly falling and it's sometimes difficult to tell who's a foe and who's not. It's used to emphasize the utter chaos of such a battle as well as how most of the time, survival is based on luck as much as skill, as Jon only survives because of sheer luck multiple times. - During "The Spoils of War", the camera focuses on Bronn's navigation through a battlefield, passing by screaming soldiers, fires everywhere and Drogon flying overheard, burning everything in his path, pushing the fact that for the Lannisters, this is less of a CMOA and more of horrific massacre. - The series 4 opener of Skins begins with one of these. It's comfortably the best thing about the episode. - A faked Oner/tracking shot appears in the BBC/Discovery Channel documentary Life in the "Plants" episode, where the camera glides through a moss-covered tree while plants grow over an entire season in fast-forward. The whole thing took two years to compile due to the different growing rates of the plants and lasts one minute on screen. - The intro to Drop the Dead Donkey follows Damien out of the editing suite, switches to other characters as they pass through the busy office (passing all the main characters), moves on to the news-desk set and ends just as they go on air. - Stargate-verse: - In the Stargate SG-1 episode "Fallen", one of the first scenes follows Jonas from Level 18, into the elevator, down to Level 28, and into the briefing room, all in one continuous shot. - One of the direct-to-video movies, Stargate: Continuum, opens with one of these directly, starting in the Gateroom as one team arrives from offworld, then travels through the base, and back to the Gateroom again as SG-1 prepare to leave. - Rick Mercer's rants, beginning Deliberately Monochrome on This Hour Has 22 Minutes and continuing (in full color) on the The Rick Mercer Report. Comedienne Elvira Kurtz, on her short lived series Popcultured!, did a bit showing all the work that goes into these Oners, including holding up a mirror to show the cameraman walking backwards and keeping pace with her with a full rig on his shoulder. - The penultimate Band of Brothers episode "Why we Fight" opens with a shot of a violin being taken out of a case. The camera pulls back to reveal the full string quartet playing in a bombed-out German town, and then executes a complicated maneuver around the town square, showing the townsfolk salvaging whatever they can from the rubble, before tilting up to reveal some members of Easy Company standing in what's left of the upper story of a house. The shot only lasts a couple of minutes, but must have taken ages to set up. (The violin also BookEnds the end of the episode.) - In Community, the opening scene of Season 2 is a continuous panning shot over multiple sets as the characters wake up to the first day of the new college year. - Breaking Bad: - Jesse goes through a long explanation of how he's expected to teach the Mexican Cartel how to cook Walt's meth, followed by Walt cruelly refusing to help him, all done in one take with some very impressive acting by Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul. - The final shot of "Crawl Space" is one long pull out shot, showing Walt lying in the titular crawl space after realizing that Gus plans to kill his entire family and he doesn't have the money he needs to run away from them. The crawl space almost looks like a grave. This has caused many fans to believe that Walter died in the crawl space, and only Heisenberg remained. - The opening of season 2 episode "Better Call Saul" is a great example of a faked Oner: while it looks like a single, uninterrupted shot, the editors actually used people and cars passing through the foreground to hide the cuts between different takes. - The Da Vinci's Inquest episode "It's Backwards Day" begins with a ten-minute scene that looks like a full oner, but has at least two edits (a whip pan just before Detective McNab arrives on the scene, and a shot following Officer McNab (the detective's daughter) when she is walking towards a witness for an interview). During this scene, Da Vinci is investigating a hit-and-run by talking to five different people (two uniformed officers, a paramedic, a detective, and an eyewitness), discussing the failure of his "safe injection site" plan with Detective McNab, and flirting with Officer McNab. Even though it's been edited, it's very well executed. - Mystery Science Theater 3000 is made of these—all the host segments are done in a mere one take, with the exceptions of ones featuring the Mads as they have the cheat of cutting back and forth between the Satellite of Love and the Mads' base. The theater segments, which usually last anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes depending on the placement of host segments and commercials, also have to be done in one take to maintain continuity. This can result in some Throw It In moments; such as "Repticulus", where Jonah dropping the wooden monster cutouts was not in the script. - The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Naked Time" has a long one-shot scene with Nimoy that is quite memorable. - In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Sarek", Picard mind-melds with Sarek to temporarily take on some of the burden of the latter's emotions, as he is losing his ability to suppress them. There is an incredible revolving shot of Picard as he experiences a breakdown under the influence of Sarek's emotions and thoughts. - The Star Trek: Voyager episode "The Disease" features a one-take argument between Janeway and Harry that goes from the conference room to the bridge to Janeway's ready room. - In 19-2, a spine-chilling 13-minute tracking shot shows the comings and goings of multiple police agents trying to stop a school shooting. - The end of the True Detective episode "Who Goes There?" In order to find a serial killer, Cohle goes back undercover with an East Texas biker gang the suspect is dealing meth to. The gang goes into the projects dressed as cops to rob a stash house. There is a six-minute long steadicam shot from where Cohle and the gang breaks into the drug den, hold the occupants there hostage as they rob the place, things go very wrong, Cohle incapacitates his contact and leaves, calls Hart to pick them up and tries to get out of the projects as the police arrive. You can watch it here. - Believe, being co-created by Alfonso Cuaron, naturally, has a few short oners in its pilot episode. - In the Supernatural episode "All Hell Breaks Loose, Part One" (S02, Ep21), there is a single long uncut shot after Jake enters the schoolroom. The camera pans across the empty chalkboard and then pans around the schoolroom in a circle until the chalkboard is seen again, but now the chalkboard is covered with the sentence "I will not kill" written over and over again. - In the Covert Affairs season 2 episode "World Leader Pretend" there's a magnificent Oner where the heroine is trying to shepherd a defector to safety through a busy hotel kitchen (!). It looks like it would have been... challenging, to say the least! - Daredevil (2015): - "Cut Man" ends with a five minute long fight scene in a hallway where Matt, already heavily injured, takes on a dozen men. It's not a true oner (a little digital trickery disguises the cuts) but it plays and looks exactly like one. - "World On Fire" contains a long cut in a dark alleyway, with various actions and the tail-end of a fight scene between Matt and some of Vladimir's men taken in by a wide-angle camera inside a car. - "New York's Finest" has a lengthy fight scene between Matt and a bunch of bikers, first in a hallway and then down a flight of stairs. Though there are several cuts, it's given the appearance of one take. - "Blindsided" has an 11 minute-long continuous shot. Without the camera once changing angles, Matt fights off a bunch of inmates Wilson Fisk has hired to kill him, then takes down a pair of guards in Fisk's pocket, gets the Albanian mob boss in the jail to give up the name of an inmate Fisk paid to shank him, and convinces said inmate to have one of his men disguise himself as a guard to escort Matt out of the prison, fighting off other inmates and guards on Fisk's payroll, then follows Matt as he exits into the courtyard and into a waiting taxi, the single shot ending just as sedatives Matt was injected with at the start of the fight kick in. Production had to be stopped for a full day to allow the cast and crew to rehearse it. The directors actually designed the shot to allow some digital stitching if necessary, then went back and lightened the moments in question to make it clear to the audience that this hadn't happened. And compared to the "Cut Man" one-take, Charlie Cox performs about 95% of the fight, only switching with his stunt double for two points where Matt gets thrown through the air. Plus, it features firebombs and blood spray, increasing the technical difficulty. - The Defenders: There's a pretty impressive lengthy shot at the start of the team-up Hallway Fight, which starts with Matt and Jessica arriving, Luke and Danny's boardroom brawl with Hand henchmen breaking through the wall in front of them, both groups exchanging words with one another, and Matt sensing Elektra approaching. - Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: The episode "The Dirty Half Dozen", which aired just a few weeks after the Daredevil season 1 one-take fight, contains a few minutes-long fight scene with the camera following Skye as she expertly cuts down an entire room of HYDRA agents. Bask in its glory for yourself. Even better, there was no stunt double. It was all Chloe Bennet. She messed up and broke her arm in the middle, but stayed in character long enough to finish the scene. - The final episode of Jon Stewart's tenure on The Daily Show includes an awesome one-continuous-shot camera tour of the program's off-stage facilities and offices, with pretty much everyone — studio staff, writers, prop people, designers, etc. — who contributed to Stewart's appearances and routines getting a cameo. This was also a clear sendup to the famous Goodfellas example. With the help of some creative editing, which is of course lampshaded. Editor: Are we going to have to edit this later? Jon Stewart: No, no, it's all one shot! Let me just spin the camera here... - The Comedy Bang! Bang! episode "Tom Lennon Wears Black Slacks and a Black Skinny Tie" is made of long takes divided only by commercial breaks. In the episode, the editors go on strike, and Scott attempts to prove that he can do the show without any cuts or edits (and can also make a three pointer at the end of it). - In the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend episode "Josh's Sister is Getting Married!," Greg has an entire song, "I Could If I Wanted To", done all in one take. - The Better Call Saul episode "Fifi" opens with a pretty impressive four minute long continuous shot created with the help of some CGI trickery, following Hector Salamanca's drug mule as his ice cream truck goes through a customs inspection at a United States border crossing. - The It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode "Charlie Work" features a seven minute-long sequence with the appearance of one shot following Charlie as he takes the health inspector around the bar and orchestrates the other characters to make the building seem up to code. There's some very seamless trickery to combine the footage together, as the Paddy Pub's interior set is not in the same location as its exterior. - David Copperfield employs these for several of his "make enormous things disappear" tricks. - In Babylon 5 they almost managed one but were foiled by a Special Effects Failure. In "Severed Dreams" Delenn's speech to the Grey Council is meant to be one continuous take, with the camera following her behind the councilors in a circle. And it almost worked...except when Mira Furlan attempted to break the staff in half ("then the Council should be broken!") the prop staff didn't break on the first take. - For the final episode of its 31st season, and to commemorate the series' 30th anniversary, British hospital drama Casualty made British television history by recording a Oner... that was 48 minutes long. Even more impressive was the fact that they managed to switch cameramen halfway through (after about 20 minutes, the camera would just be too heavy) and that they managed to nail it in under ten takes. - Crisis (2017) features a 7 and a half minute long fight sequence during Episode 8 when the SIT unit attacks the headquarters of the Light of God cult. - The entire Mr. Robot episode "Eps3.4runtime-error.r00" appears to be this, and was aired without commercials, although there are cleverly hidden edits. - Parodied in Seth Meyers Oscar Bait trailer as among the many tropes you'll see in such a film. And including the reasons for it too — to impress viewers and critics with the technical feat, and to drive home an emotional point . Announcer: Boom! There's your Oscar, motherfuckers!" - Escape at Dannemora: Sweat's dry run of his prison escape is filmed in a single shot as he navigates the labyrinthine service corridors of the prison and through an incredibly long tunnel to the manhole cover outside the prison walls. There are a few disguised cuts as the camera spins back and forth to focus on Sweat and the path ahead. - The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is known for featuring continuous tracking shots. - The second season opens with one of these to show Midge in her new job in the basement switchboard at B. Altman. It's not entirely a single oner, but rather, two separate shots stitched together with CGI (this being where we see the camera follow a letter sent down the mail chute to the basement). - "We're Going to the Catskills" features a lengthy oner during the initial Steiner dance challenge. This one sees Midge race around the dance floor looking for dance partners with initials matching her own, during which she sets up one couple and has a chat with one of the Steiner employees. It even continues after the initial dance ends into the next dance, as Midge slowly waltzes with Joel. - The season 4 episode "How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?" has a three-minute oner where Midge, Lenny Bruce, and dozens of extras try to escape the backstage of a burlesque show during a police raid. - Schitt's Creek: The fourth season Christmas Episode opens with a Flashback to one of the Roses' famous Christmas Parties, and the single long shot contains a number of easter eggs. - Each The Television Ghost episode consisted of a single fifteen-minute shot of George Kelting's face as he told a story. - Patriot occasionally films scenes in one continuous take: - In season one, there is at least one instance of a depressed John sitting in a field as person after person stops by to deliver some bit of news, information or command that will make John's life more difficult. You can even see people in the background slowly making their way towards him long before they arrive. - In season two, en Epic Tracking Shot follows John walking from a subway to a grocery store, where he and his friends rob the clerk and get shot, then nonchalantly walk back to the subway, all narrated by John in the form of a folk song. - The Flash: - In "Think Fast", although there is a brief transition at the beginning as DeVoe shrinks a guard and steps on him, the remainder of the scene—lasting for one minute and twenty-five seconds—is an extended tracking shot of DeVoe using his various powers to take out the A.R.G.U.S. facility guards in various ways. - In "The Last Temptation of Barry Allen, Part 2" there is a roughly two-minute long, mostly uninterrupted camera take of Kamilla and Cecile fleeing Ramsey's zombified thralls in their office building. - The Key & Peele sketch "How Not to Remember Where You Parked Your Car" appears to be an unbroken two-minute shot. - Northern Exposure: a rather memorable one occurs in the episode "Get Real." The scene begins with Joel in his truck; the camera is clamped to the door of the truck looking at Joel through the driver's side window. He offers Enrico Belotti (The Flying Man) a ride into town. When Mr. Belotti declines the offer, Joel drives off, drilling himself in preparation for his internal medicine Board exams as he goes. When he gets to town, there's Mr. Belotti waiting for him by the side of the road, looking like he's been through some vigorous exerciseand Joel realizes that they don't call Mr. Belotti "The Flying Man" for nothing. - In The Haunting of Hill House, two episodes have standout examples: - Episode 6 is a lot of this, with scenes often going 10+ minutes in solid, continuous shots. - Episode 7 has a pretty long take just of Horace Dudley telling Hugh about his family's past with Hill House. It just slowly zooms in on him over the entire story. - The Good Place: In the series finale, there is one long shot where Eleanor walks from the pizza place to her house to Michael's office and back to her house, without any visible cuts, all while still hiding how Janet comes and goes as she pleases. - Cobra Kai: - The Season 2 finale features one during the school brawl between Cobra Kai and Miyagi-Do, showcasing the students of both dojos fighting in the hallway while the rest of the school watches and takes videos. - There's another one in the Season 3 finale, tracking around the LaRusso's house during the fight between \|\|the invading members of Cobra Kai and the Miyagi-Do/Eagle Fang alliance.\|\| - Chicago P.D. Season 8, Episode 8 "Protect and Serve" features a 360 degree shot with members of the Intelligence Unit being asked questions by the shrink. - High School Musical: The Musical: The Series has "Something in the Air", the musical number that opens season 2. It's almost seamless, with only two transition spots where they could hide the edits. - Wu Tang An American Saga: Season 1, Episode 8 "Labels" features five continuous long takes for each Act of the episode. There are hidden cuts, but each Act happens in a different location in real time as Bobby embarks on his first journey through the music business. - Star Wars, The Book of Boba Fett, "Return of the Mandalorian": From the moment Din Djarin takes the elevator, arrives at the bar, discusses with his employer (with an Orbital Shot around the table), departs through the same elevator and till he exits it, all of this is one uninterrupted continuous shot with the camera following him. - In the Stranger Things episode "Dear Billy" a shoot-out is done in a single take of just over the minute. - The Chosen: Matthew 4:24 opens with an impressive fifteen-minute tracking shot. - Kamen Rider: Episode 65 has an 80-second continuous shot of Hongo fighting his way through a line of Shocker goons below a miniature ski lift. The camera is mounted on one of the ski lift cars, following the action. - Spice Girls, "Wannabe." Actually three shots, broken up by what looks like two very short pans over and "through" walls. - Utada Hikaru's Hikari featuring Utada washing dishes in one take - While perhaps recorded piecemeal due to both its length (the video is nearly nine minutes long) and places where cuts were either convenient or necessary, the video for Between The Buried And Me's The Coma Machine follows a solitary character as he wanders through various strange mindscape-y rooms, finally meeting the comatose man who features on the album's cover. Judging by the facial hair, the only two people seen in the whole video are representations of the same man. - Lisa Hannigan did this twice in support of her album Passenger: - "Little Bird" — she lip-syncs the song at 4.5x speed while submerged in a bathtub in her mother's house. - "Knots" — she performs the song against a white backdrop in a white dress while she gets progressively Covered in Gunge in real time. - OK Go has made quite a lot of these: - "A Million Ways" — an elaborately choreographed dance sequence. - "Here It Goes Again" — an elaborately choreographed dance sequence on treadmills. - WTF? — a elaborate dance sequence carried out in front of a green screen in order to have trails behind everything on screen. - This Too Shall Pass — an elaborate outdoors dance sequence with the Notre Dame marching band. - This Too Shall Pass again — an elaborate sequence with a Rube Goldberg Device synchronized with the music. - The Rube Goldberg video isn't quite a true oner, and the band has admitted to such. The machine worked in its entirety three times (each time filmed as a continuous take), but the video contains at least one well-disguised cut in order to sync better with the music. - White Knuckles — an elaborate dance sequence with trained dogs. - Arguably End Love — a single live-action sequence shot over 18 hours with a mixture of stop-motion and Overcranking. Among the signs of its Oner-ness: a local goose named Maria that took a shine to the band and hung around them during most of the shoot. The video finishes with a timelapse shot of the skyline that compresses eight full days into four seconds of runtime. - The theme of The Oner dance sequences is so strongly associated with the band that when a contest was made to make a music video for "I'm Not Through", the winning video was one. - "I Won't Let You Down", done in slightly speeded up motion with a drone camera. - "Upside Down & Inside Out", both is, and is not. The video was shot in one take, but due to the parabolic airplane arcs they could only get 27 seconds of microgravity at a time, and then had to wait five minutes for the plane to reset position. They just held as still as possible while waiting and edited out the holds. - "The One Moment" is a single take where the first three minutes of the video are slowed down from footage that took 4.2 seconds to film, which is shown at the beginning. The footage doesn't stop at that point, nor did it begin there. - "The Writing's On The Wall" is a music video featuring various optical illusions made utilizing certain clothes, numerous mirrors, and specific camera placement. - Eagle-Eye Cherry, "Save Tonight", Not a true oner, as there are hidden cuts that allow Eagle-Eye to play all the important roles, but it is presented as such. - Jamiroquai, "Virtual Insanity", Not a true oner, but rather separate shots bridged together with extreme upwards and downwards camera tilts, creating an illusion of a single shoot. - "El Sol no Regresa" by La Quinta Estación. - Sting's video "Fortress Around Your Heart" is mostly a Oner. Most of the video is one long black & white shot mixed with a few "making-of" shots in color. - TheProdigy, "Smack My Bitch Up" from The Fat of the Land, also filmed in first person with a Tomato in the Mirror ending. - "Nothing Compares 2 U" by Sinéad O'Connor - a Oner of Sinead's head looking straight to the camera. Intercut with some shots of her moping around a park in Paris at the insistence of the studio, who had paid to film her in Paris, dammit, and were going to get their money's worth. - Tom Petty's "You Don't Know How It Feels" was once credited as the most expensive single-shot music video to date. - R.E.M.'s "Imitation of Life" is an oddity: a very short single-shot video, where the music video is made by continually playing it forward and in reverse while panning around the footage to highlight certain aspects at the right time. - Here's a recreation of the complete footage. - Prior to that, they made another such video for a song called "Bang and Blame" for their album Monster. - Coldplay: - Feist, "1234" and "I Feel It All." - Lucas, "Lucas with the Lid Off". Amazingly complex, with some weird Escher-esque perspective tricks, and yet it was still filmed in a single take. - The incredible "Red Hands" by Walk Off the Earth is a single video take, but every line of the song was filmed in the wrong order. The video speeds up, slows down, and reverses to sync the itself to the music. The music video therefore keeps the music as one straight track - to see the video unedited with the audio synced, click here. - "What Do You Mean?" is another example of a Oner. - Radiohead has done this a few times: - "No Surprises" from OK Computer video is notable, in that the continuous 57 seconds in which Thom Yorke is submerged was done by speeding up the track Thom is miming to as his face becomes totally submerged, then editing the footage to slow it down for the full minute. The making of this video is featured in the band's documentary Meeting People is Easy, which shows Thom's frustrations with being unable to do the shot correctly for several takes. - "Man of War" is a crazy variant on the trope in that the sequence of events are choreographed as a singular take, but it regularly flips between two variations of itself, one taking place during the daytime and another at night, \|\|with elements from each eventually bleeding into one another\|\|. In essence, it's a oner that seamlessly splices in a shot-for-shot remake of itself. - Bruce Springsteen's "Brilliant Disguise". - Nine Inch Nails - "March Of The Pigs" - Primus - Mr. Krinkle - The Smashing Pumpkins - "Ava Adore." Notable for having several sections slowed down or sped up to create graceful or oddly jerky motions. - Jars of Clay - "Work", notable for being shot in a very confined space and having the entire room filling with water the whole time. - Traci Bonham, "Mother Mother." - Miley Cyrus, "Start All Over." - Linkin Park's "Bleed It Out" video shows a bar fight in reverse as the band preforms on stage in "forward time." It looks good and was done through a combination of greenscreen and carefully timed tracking shots. As opposed to... - Mutemath's video "Typical" where the band had to perform the song from "finish to start" reversing the lyrics so their lips sync up when the music is dubbed over. Actually consists of two shots (the lead singer obscures the camera partway through to hide a cut), but the overall impression is of a Oner. - Their second video, "Spotlight," is another Oner, sped up from an approximately 12-minute shoot to match the song. Some parts are sped up more than others, such as when they move the piano into the van. It was actually finished on the first take. - On a similarly backwards note, Cibo Matto's "Sugar Water", directed by Michel Gondry, is a really interesting example. The same single shot runs forwards on one side of the screen and backwards on the other side - and yet there is interaction between the two sides. - Nick Cave & PJ Harvey's "Henry Lee" from Cave's album Murder Ballads. - Animusic's "Drum Machine." - Spoon's "The Underdog" is one long tracking shot following several people through various halls and rooms of the studio passing the relevant musician as each new musical element is introduced. - Fastball's "Fire Escape." There's a twist at the end where \|\|the actress in the video can't open the door to the car, and as she storms away angrily, the director yells "Cut!" and tells the crew that they're going to shoot the entire video all over again.\|\| - Sky's "Some Kind of Wonderful." - The Tea Party's "Babylon." - Semisonic's "Closing Time" is two parallel Oners shown side-by-side. note : Perhaps a homage to a similar sequence in Phantom of the Paradise. - Both Oners were shot simultaneously, so lead singer Dan Wilson had to run back and forth so he could be in the shots at the right times. - Destiny's Child's cover of "Emotion" ups the split-screen count to three. - Vampire Weekend's "Oxford Comma" and "A-Punk." - Massive Attack have two of the best-known videos of this type: "Unfinished Sympathy" and "Protection." - Jack Johnson's "Sitting, Waiting, Wishing." Done backwards in addition to being a oner. - While we're at it, God Lives Underwater's video for From Your Mouth is also a backwards oner. Strangely hypnotic, if a little disgusting. - Puffy AmiYumi's Nice Buddy is set up like this, but considering that, at one point, 8 identical versions of one of the singers runs past the screen... - The video for Herb Alpert's Whipped Cream had 5 shots in total for video lasting more than 3 minutes. Whole not a Oner, the long shots are notable. - Metric's Gimme Sympathy. They even let you see how they did it. - Elton John's "I Want Love" is shot like this, following Robert Downey, Jr as he lip-syncs to the song. (Downey, allegedly, kept wanting to gesture with his hands; allegedly, they taped them into his pockets to help him avoid that.) - Will Young's Leave Right Now, which took several takes to get right and resulted in a large amount of bruises for a large amount of the cast. Especially Will. - Inugami Circus Dan's "Honto ni honto ni gokurosan." - Beyoncé's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)". This is one of those cases where it took a few takes to film (about three) the video, but it was edited to seem like a Oner though there are a few dozen visible camera shifts in the final product (not counting the flashing at the end). - IU - Friday - Janet Jackson's "When I Think of You" is actually two oners merged by an edit at around 3:19 (when the photographer's flash goes off.) - Alanis Morissette's "Head Over Feet" - U2's "The Sweetest Thing" (except for the beginning where the girl gets into the vehicle), as well as "Numb". - Lisa Stansfield's "Never Never Gonna Give You Up." - Ludo's "Love Me Dead". - This acually employs the well-disguised cut at least once. - Lisa Mitchell's "Neapolitan Dreams". - Kylie Minogue's "Come Into My World" is displayed this way, with Kylie walking around a town square, but as she walks back to the start people and objects in the background start repeating, along with past versions of Kylie singing. - The Chemical Brothers' "Star Guitar" is also shown as a Oner, but again is obviously CGI. The various components of the song are displayed as objects passing by when looking out of a train window. Both this and the above example were directed by Michel Gondry, who seems to be fond of this trope. - Weezer, "Undone (The Sweater Song)", which was shot on a steadicam at a faster frame rate, using a sped-up version of the song. The process was so lengthy and arduous that after the 14th take, the band gave up the idea of taking the video seriously and goofed off in front of the camera. - "The Denial Twist" from Get Behind Me Satan by The White Stripes. - "Second Go" by Lights. - Serj Tankian's "Sky Is Over" - LoadingReadyRun's "Desert Bus Killed the Internet Star" - Featuring 7 people in one small room (full of couches/electronics to be maneuvered around), with the camera being handed off 3 times. - Sara Bareilles's "Gravity". - Charlotte Hatherley's "White" is another reversed Oner... in which she also plays the guitar in reverse, all the while being pelted with paint. - Electrasy's "Morning Afterglow" is also a reversed Oner. There is also a making-of video showing how it was done. - "Free As A Bird" from The Beatles Anthology by The Beatles is made to look like this, even though it would be utterly impossible for a number of reasons, chief among them the fact that they include old clips of The Beatles spliced in. - The first half of Theory of a Deadman's "Hate My Life" is a single shot of Tyler Connolly walking through the city and singing while the camera follows him and events around him reflect the lyrics. Then after the second chorus he joins the band on a parade float for the guitar solo and it becomes a more traditional performance video. - LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends". Up close and personal, with added face paint. - Robyn's "Call Your Girlfriend" uses it very effectively, with some intense (and seemingly improvised) dance moves and an equally intense light show going on around the Swedish pop star. - "The Lazy Song" by Bruno Mars appears to be this. - "Evlenmeliyiz" ("We Should Get Married") by Turkish pop singer Hadise, which breaks the fourth wall in playful fashion. - "Mad World" by Gary Jules. - "Americanarama" by Hollerado. - "Happiness" by Goldfrapp. Appears to be one-shot, note : 0.45 goes behind SUV, 1.19 after garbage bin lids, 1.58 goes behind red phone box, 2.19 goes behind telephone pole, 2.56 behind pole before giving flowers, 3.14 bike stunt while dancing with 3 girls one has to wonder what kind of fitness is needed for over 3 minutes of bunny hopping. - "Anti-D" by the Wombats. An emotionless Murph walks through a suburb while strange and improbable things happen around him until, halfway through, he is mauled by some doctors. They leave, all the colorful characters from before help him up into a chair they've suddenly acquired, lift the chair onto their shoulders, and carry him down the street, throwing confetti and holding balloons. All of this is one shot. - The drama version of "It's You" by Super Junior has the camera follow each of the members around a small town square as they walk in and out of the frame for their solos. At the end, they all walk back into frame and come together at the intersection. - "Who Dat" by J. Cole. - Charlene Kaye's "Animal Love I". They also helpfully show how it is done. - In iamamiwhoami's hour-long concert video TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN each number is a single take, stealthily edited together to appear nearly seamless. The tracking shot in "u-1" is particularly long and challenging. - "Freaks and Geeks" by Childish Gambino - Green Day's "Redundant" and "Macy's Day Parade". - The first couple minutes of Extrawelt's "Raum in Raum". - Taylor Swift does it with super fast costume changes in her video for "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together." - Reece Mastin does this with his video for Rock Star. - "Anna Sun" by Walk the Moon. The entire first half of the video (2.5 minutes) is done in one shot, tracking the lead singer through several different rooms while weaving through numerous other background actors/dancers. The band revealed in an interview that they did a total of 22 takes before quitting, and ended up using one of the earliest completed takes for the final video. - D'Angelo's famous clip for "Untitled (How Does It Feel?)" masquerades as one of these, though it contains a few well-hidden cuts. - Panic! at the Disco's "Girls/Girls/Boys," which is a homage to "Untitled (How Does It Feel?)". - Robert DeLong's "Global Concepts" also masquerades as one — its few cuts are hidden by blackouts or blip-edits that match the song's digital "record scratches". - Janelle Monáe's "Cold War" is a single long take of Janelle's face as she lip-syncs to the song. - Kerli's "Love is Dead" video is just one shot in front of a changing green screen. - The Black Keys, "Lonely Boy". - Most of Adele's Deliberately Monochrome music video for "Someone Like You" consists of a single long shot following her as she walks through the Paris streets. - Anna Kendrick's music video for "Cups" is a two-er; there's one cut about two-thirds through the video. Interestingly, at one point the guy spinning cups at the bar makes a mistake, but it made it into the final video (presumably it was still the best take they could do). - In a possible homage to the original, Sam Tsui's cover of Cups involves the four singers sitting at a table in the park and performing the titular actions, while the camera rotates around them for the entrety of the song in a single shot. - An alternative version of Suzuko Mimori's "Yakusoku Shite yo, Issho da yo!" consists of a single shot of her dancing to the song while the camera constantly moves back and forward. - Pharrell Williams' promotion of "Happy", which he initially recorded for the soundtrack of Despicable Me 2. The website "24 Hours of Happy" was Exactly What It Says on the Tin; a 24-hour long interactive music video consisting of 360 different 4-minute long videos of "Happy" (15 per hour). Each video was shot in one take and set up to merge almost seamlessly to the next video, showing either Pharrell (starring in the first video of each hour) or a host of others dancing in various settings around Los Angeles. The performances range from children playing to some fairly sophisticated choreography, and include appearances by Magic Johnson, Jamie Foxx, Kelly Osbourne, Jimmy Kimmel, Steve Carell (the voice of DM2's Gru) and Gru's Minions. The site is no longer up, but the videos are available in 24 hour long blocks on YouTube. Start here at 12-1 am. - Accordingly, "Weird Al" Yankovic's parody "Tacky" is likewise a single take. It starts off with Al at the top of Los Angeles's Palace Theater in a hideous outfit, then the camera follows different celebrities (Aisha Tyler, Margaret Cho, Eric Stonestreet, Kristen Schaal, Jack Black) as it makes its way down the building, and ends with Al on the ground floor in a different hideous outfit. The really impressive part is they did six takes of it, and every time Al ran down five flights of stairs (while changing clothes!) to make it to the ground floor. - New Order's "World (The Price of Love)" video takes place at an Italian resort where the camera tracks continuously from the pier to the interior of a hotel, members of the band making brief cameos. - Canadian-born, New York-based, UK popular Kiesza has a single called "Hideaway," the music video of which is one solid take of her dancing across Brooklyn. - Metronomy's "Love Letters", a one-shot Dress Rehearsal Video in an unusual structure. - Shawn Mendes is developing a reputation for these. "Something Big" is one of the few exceptions. - One Direction: "You & I" is presented this way. With a few interesting twists. - "Error" by German singer Madeline Juno. - "Ants Marching/Ode to Joy" by The Piano Guys, utilizing a drone camera. - Pig with the Face of a Boy's "Middle"/"Climate Change Denier," with an alternate fixed-camera view from above (from a different take). - The first version of EXO's music video for "Growl". Seeing as the only mistake in the final cut is that Kai's hat falls off (which he proceeds to smoothly pick up) about two/thirds of the way through, it was very well-performed. - British rapper Stormzy has Know Me From, which has him walk down a street while the lyrics are illustrated with the help of plenty of friends. Played for Laughs when the video cuts to black halfway through to explain that two cars blocked the shoot, although the rest of the video is from the same take. - "Cups," "Epic Patty Cake Song", and "Coke Bottle Song" are all vids that have song and hand/rhythm filmed in one shot without any mistakes. - "Var är vi nu?" by Kent - Played With Italian songwriter Franco Battiato's video for No Time No Space. Most of it is a one-shot Performance Video, but in two instances the camera is focused on a screen showing a clip of whirling dervishes with several cuts. - The video for the MC Lars song "The Top 10 Things to Never Say on a First Date" is all one shot. - Perfume's "I Still Love U" It even opens on the clapboard, showing us that this was the 5th take. - Chico Cesar's "Mama Africa". Which as MTV Brazil showed, is a great example in how a single take video can have many a Funny Background Event. - The video for a cover of the Bruno Mars hit "Uptown Funk" in Gaelic, performed by the students at a language school in Ireland, is one continuous take. - "Save Me" by BTS is filmed in one take, with the camera (moving continuously to do things like take a solo shot of a member in one side (with the rest of the members and cinematography team running behind the cameraman in the meantime, as seen here) or moving in between the members to film the ones in the back row. And all of this outdoors on a rainy day (right after the rain stopped, but still). - Near the beginning of Dua Lipa's "New Rules" video there's one that lasts for an entire minute, covering the first verse and hook in full. - Lindsey Stirling shot "Warmer in the Winter" as a oner, utilizing quick costume changes and clever set design to pull it off. - Music/Haim shot the video for "Want You Back" as a true oner, a tracking shot of them walking down an empty street. "Little of Your Love" appears to be a oner through a dance hall but there are several edits that work to make the video appear as such. - Gin Blossoms' "Allison Road" has the camera moving about in a large (possibly boarding) house, with the band being seen only on televisions kept around the place. - Lisa Loeb's "Stay", which follows her wandering around what looks like an empty studio-apartment. - Lou Reed's "No Money Down"...More like a Oner-and-a-half, as the original shot moves away to a picture-in-picture while we see \|\|the accompanying hands ripping apart the animatronic Lou head, also a Oner.\|\| - INXS' "Mediate." note : The second half of a two-part song along with "I Need You Tonight." Speed is altered at some points to keep one member's cue card-throwing in sync with the song. - YouTube channel Game Music Collective made a cover of Ellie's version of Through the Valley in the first teaser for The Last of Us Part II. The whole video consists of an uninterrupted Orbital Shot around the singer playing Ellie, showing other instrumentalists joining her, Ellie's bruised back, a bloody machete, the golf club \|\|used to kill Joel\|\|, a hooded figure with a rifle and a machete, and then it ends with Ellie finishing the song standing over a dead body. It was confirmed in the comments by the channel to have indeed been one long take. - The Happy Fits: Not only was the music video for "Go Dumb" filmed in one take, but it was filmed backwards. Lead singer Calvin Langman had to learn how to sing the song backwards before filming. - Skylar Stecker made two videos for "Only Want You", both of which were done in a single take. - Leo Moracchioli's metal cover of "Feel Good Inc." by Gorillaz is Leo following a camera through a mall, in a bunny suit, miming playing the song on his guitar, all done in one shot. - Cavetown's video for Home is one of someone flipping through a pop-up book - a freaking gorgeous pop-up book, at that - containing the song's lyrics (also making it a Lyric Video). - Death Grips: - "You Might Think..." starts with a 16-second clip of a fire in a fireplace, followed by an uninterrupted shot of MC Ride having a disturbing-looking Freak Out. - "On GP" has the three band members sitting in an empty room, barely moving, as the song blares out of a large speaker. For six minutes. - "I Break Mirrors With My Face In The United States" is uninterrupted footage of the band rehearsing the song using cameras attached to the band members' wrists. The same footage is shown twice: first from Andy's camera, and then again from MC Ride's camera. - STU48: "Kaze wo Matsu" is a long-take MV shot with a drone. - Hinatazaka46: "Konna ni Suki ni Natchatte Ii no?" and "Tsuki to Hoshi ga Odoru Midnight" have alternate long-take music videos. - Several plays are staged such that the actors never leave the audience's sight. This is especially common in shows with smaller casts, where two actors might carry out what is essentially a single long scene for the duration of the play. - This is particularly notable in Les Misérables, where the center portion of the stage is a giant turntable. Some of the transitional songs, such as "Valjean's Soliloquy", use it to achieve a neat effect in which the character walks in place as scenery and other characters rotate in and out around him. This creates the perception of the "camera" following the character as he travels over a long distance and/or time. - This is how the Disney Theme Parks 3-D Movie Honey, I Shrunk the Audience is able to have the plot it does. The first half is a oner in which the camera doesn't move, and the scale of the performers and scenery is correctly scaled to appear as if they are actually people on a stage at an awards ceremony. Close-ups of the performers and important actions, and the camerawork of a technician wearing a helmet-mounted camera, appear on a video monitor off to the side of the main screen. Once the audience is "shrunk", the film proceeds to another oner from a very different vantage point. The tricks to accomplish these shots involve, among other things, the power going out somewhat frequently, allowing for surreptitious camera transitioning. At one point, during the shrunken segment; a cart goes by and you can notice that some scientists in the background suddenly appear. Director Randal Kleiser breaks it down in a commentary. - The entirety of God of War (PS4) and God of War Ragnarök is shown as one long continuous camera shot, aside from a few cuts to white during a short sequence in the middle of the game. - Half-Life is probably the most famous, and earliest (released in 1998) example. All the games directly follow one long shot from Gordon's point of view, differing from other games at the time (and still many now) due to lack of traditional cut scenes or even loading screens (instead simply showing the word "loading" in the center of your view while the next level loads — though this could technically be considered a disguised cut because of how the engine works). The only parts of the series that are less than seamless are when Gordon is knocked unconscious or teleported. - Far Cry 2: A taxi drive after you arrive in Africa. It describes the setting, the current goings on, information on the game factions and antagonists. - Call of Duty 4: Has the player in the shoes of overthrown President Al-Fulani, being captured, taken onto a car and driven around, you can see things like a family being killed, armed men breaking into houses, APC's firing on unarmed civilians, a group of your apparent supporters being lined up against a wall and shot, when you arrive, you are taken to a televised/filmed rally, tied to a post, then executed by Khaled Al-Asad. - Batman: Arkham Series: - Batman: Arkham Asylum's opening sequence with Batman escorting the Joker into Arkham has a feel like this. Batman follows the Joker through multiple hallways and elevators, waits while the Joker is scanned for contraband and given a check-in by a doctor, and is taunted mercilessly by the Joker. \|\|Later, in a hallucination, this sequence repeats, only with Batman strapped to a gurney and the Joker escorting him.\|\| - Batman: Arkham City has a similar one, starting with Bruce Wayne attempting to break free from a chair, beating up a guard (and palming his radio's decryption chip), getting knocked around by a second guard, ordered through processing, going through the bulkhead doors into the city, countering some prisoners while handcuffed, and finally being grabbed and delivered to The Penguin. - The ending of Batman: Arkham Knight is a series of consecutive Oners that each have a core theme to tell, representing everything about the Arkham series in half an hour. Spoilers: - \|\|First up, Batman's quiet introspection about how it all began is interrupted by Hallucination!Joker, who fights Batman with an army of clones until he snaps. This represents the Arkham series' deviation from Batman's core themes of crimefighting to a Beat-Em-Up of endless annoying thugs, which subverts the theme of mercy due to excessive violence.\|\| - \|\|Next is Scarecrow finally defeating The Batman once and for all by forcing Gordon to unmask him. Live. The whole unmasking is a boring, cliché infested B-movie script, downplaying the importance of Batman's secret identity.\|\| - \|\|Next is Batman's worst nightmare played in his head: Hallucination!Joker takes control and kills everyone. You get to use live ammo from the Jokermobile on an entire army, shoot down, and watch Gotham literally burn as the Joker laughs. It's a deconstruction of third-person shooters, as you end up killing the Rogues with little to no effort, as opposed to fighting an army of mooks in strategic combat.\|\| - \|\|Then Hallucination!Joker gets his worst nightmare. You end up shooting boring statues of Batman as Joker's memory is permanently erased from Gotham. This deconstructs First-Person horror games as you end up shooting the same, easy-to-kill enemy over and over.\|\| - \|\|Then Batman and the Arkham Knight turn the tables on Scarecrow, subjecting him to his worst fears and giving us a glimpse of the terrifying Dark Knight that the series was originally famous for.\|\| - \|\|And for the Grand Finale, Bruce Wayne blows up his house while the media watches. It's symbolic of cutting off all ties with Gotham and dying alone against the real enemy: human indulgence.\|\| - \|\|The Stinger shows a new Batman, now with superpowers that are focused on a single trait only: FEAR.\|\| - Dead Space: - The series avoids ever "cutting" its camera, from the moment you start a new game to the ending. Even the sparse loading screens zoom the camera up to a computer panel, to zoom away when it's finished. - The sequel does this as well: you've never not looking at Isaac. - The remake continues this tradition. - The latest official TrackMania 2: Canyon trailers do this. - Any sequence in the Assassin's Creed series where Altair/Ezio/Kenway is following someone down a street as they provide exposition creates this feel. - The opening quest of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim feels like one, even if you have full control over your character, since you're running for your life to escape a dragon that's burning the town around you, taking a long, circuitous route through the town that features no loading point breaks. - In One Take, you have to film a scene in a single take, following the director's instructions. - In his more recent games, Hideo Kojima has experimented with long takes in his cutscenes. - Both games in the Metal Gear Solid V duology make extensive use of this trope. Kojima's intention was to have as few hard cuts as possible, while seamlessly transitioning to and from gameplay. The opening mission of Ground Zeroes, for instance, has a single, unbroken 8-minute cutscene which then flows seamlessly into gameplay, while the ending cutscene has a single cut (which is actually a Time Skip) over 22 minutes. Depending on how you play the mission, it's perfectly possible for there to be no hard cuts whatsoever until said Time Skip. - The trailers for Death Stranding, despite running on a different engine (Decima), have long takes in the same style as Metal Gear Solid V. The Game Awards 2016 trailer had a shot lasting 2.5 minutes, and the Game Awards 2017 trailer had one lasting 5.5 minutes. - In Halo 5: Guardians, Fireteam Osiris's opening cinematic, where Locke's team assaults a Covenant compound, with all four Spartans given time to shine, and the camera doesn't cut once. It also doubles as a Shout-Out to the opening of Avengers: Age of Ultron, with a huge team fight against an enormous army, the battle being in the snow, taking place in one long shot, plenty of vehicles exploding, and the team leaping up high to "pose" for the camera at the very end. - Halo Infinite takes cues from the likes of Dead Space and God of War in maintaining a single smooth camera motion throughout the game's entire running time, with smooth transitions in and out of gameplay as well as the few camera cuts being disguised by panning across an object in the foreground or the extremely rare Fade to Black when a time jump is absolutely necessary. Even accessing the in-game menu doesn't break the single take, as it takes the form of a Diegetic Interface the Chief can pull up on his visor. - A Way Out showcases this beautifully during the \|\|escape from the hospital\|\| as the gameplay and camera seamlessly shifts between both protagonists while keeping the players on their toes. Leo even gets into a hallway fight that's a clear tribute to the Oldboy scene. - Yakuza 4 uses a long, interrupted shot to follow Tanimura in the cutscene where he first enters the Little Asia district of Kamurocho. The shot serves a dual purpose: highlighting the destitute and cramped living conditions of the residents as the camera is forced through narrow alleys and tight apartment corridors, and also showing Tanimura's intimacy with the place as he easily navigates through its confusing layout, showing him to be a native before it's brought up in text. - RWBY: The opening scene of Volume 6 begins with a very impressive continuous shot of a speeding train, the Argus Limited, being chased and assaulted by a pack of Manticore Grimm that is led by a Sphinx Grimm; it follows the perspective of one Manticore, from its approach to the train until it is killed by Ruby. The shot then focuses on each member of Team RWBY as they battle the Grimm atop the train before moving to Team JNR who do the same. This shot lasts over one minute and comprises a majority of the first scene of the chapter. - Know Your Meme did a whole episode on this technique, including some of the above. - As part of a series on Minneapolis businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, a drone operator filmed this 87-second video in a bowling alley and theatre centre. The video quickly went viral earning rave reviews from Hollywood filmmakers. - Echo Chamber has an episode on Walk and Talk which was done in one take, except for The Stinger after the credits. - The First Take is a Japanese Youtube channel that hosts various popular artists and invites them to do one of their songs in one take. Mess ups and skipped lines will not prevent them from seeing the song through. - Ryan vs. Dorkman: - Both of the fights open with one of these. 19 seconds in the first one, 30 seconds in the second. (To be sure, 20 seconds isn't that impressive... but all the other examples on here are actual films with actual budgets, as opposed to two untrained amateurs playing with sticks.) - Topped by Ryan vs. Brandon 2, by the same team +1 (Dorkman did cinematography). A 23-second Orbital Shot Oner. (Clip starts at the shot, so just rewind to the beginning if you want the whole thing.) - Daft Hands. Daft Hands. Daft Hands. Daft Hands. Daft Bodies. - The city of Grand Rapids, Michigan made a 9-minute lipdub of American Pie that was done all in one take. - LoadingReadyRun did this with "The Writers' Room", a sketch consisting of a single shot over six minutes in length. It was especially challenging as most of the actors had minimal stage experience and weren't used to memorizing all of their lines and cues. "Desert Bus Killed the Internet Star", while shorter, required actors entering and leaving the frame, hiding and passing quickly behind the camera in the middle of a small, furnished room. - Shorewood Lip Dub is a 4.5 minute long video filmed backwards. It has to be seen to be believed. - The entries of Marble Hornets vary in length from half a minute to seven minutes, and almost all of them are done in a single shot. It serves both to lend credibility to the premise that it was done hastily by film students on the fly and to make the entries almost unbearably suspenseful. - Cypress Ranch High School's Anti-Bullying music video is all one long (and impressive, considering the scale) shot, a fact which was overtly parodied by South Park in "Butterballs." An interesting note is that even when one girl blacks out the camera with her hand, it continues to be a single shot. - collectivecadenza, otherwise known as cdza is an innovative YouTube channel that primarily does their videos as Oners to the point where non-Oners are a Formula-Breaking Episode. Their most well-known video, "Fresh Prince: Google Translated", which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, fits this trope. - Jon Cozart (on the YouTube channel Paint) combines this with Self-Backing Vocalist to carry this out four fold. - Oners are discussed in the Every Frame a Painting episode, "The Spielberg Oner". In a twist, the focus is on oners that are (or try to be) less conspicuous. - The sci-fi short film "Mis-Drop" is done in this style. It's actually done in multiple takes, but the cuts are cleverly hidden by the In-Universe Camera, which is damaged and glitching out. - Discussed in Anime Crimes Division as a prestige TV fight scene hallmark, unlike anime which usually settles for cutaways like Battle Discretion Shot. - Abigail Thorn from Philosophy Tube is a professional actor, and tends to use this trope to show off. Her video "Men. Abuse. Trauma." was done in a single 31-minute long take in order to reference No Exit, a play that comprises a single uninterrupted scene and which is heavily referenced throughout the video. - The Angry Video Game Nerd's episode on The Immortal (NES version) was done in one shot. It was James stretching his muscles as a filmmaker. - Tom Scott's video on whether YouTube will ever run out of video IDs (short answer: not in the next several thousand years) is over five minutes long, has him speak continuously the whole time while walking around a London park with a camera moving with him, has him go through the math based on YouTube's ID system to get to the exact maximum answer (73,786,976,294,838,206,464), all in one take. Which he celebrates with a little Happy Dance at the end of it. - Most Derrick Comedy videos employ this to some degree, with many of them being done in one shot. - "Gladiators - fighting to entertain the mob" by Lindybeige consists of Lloyd talking to camera for nearly two hours with no obvious edits. Illustrations are shown in a corner of the screen, not full screen. - Every episode of One Take follows this format, the camera running uninterrupted for 5 minutes. - This entire music video, cover of a remix of the Ghostbusters song, is shot in one long sequence with the camera constantly moving. (There are maybe two cuts in it, but they're hidden really well.)	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Oner
One-Wheeled Wonder - TV Tropes Barring the odd three-wheeler tricycle, most wheeled vehicles throughout history have sported an even number of wheels, usually four for bigger vehicles like carriages and cars. Bikes and motorbikes have two. But that doesn't seem streamlined enough for some futuristic aesthetics. This trope describes creatures (usually robots or cyborgs) or vehicles that move by balancing on a single wheel, or occasionally a spherical ball. Try not to think too hard about how it stays upright. Truth in Television insofar as the unicycle has been in use since at least the late 19th century, when riders of penny-farthings found that they could lean forward, raising the much smaller rear wheel off the ground, and still maintain balance. Eventually the rear wheel was left off of the design altogether, resulting in the modern unicycle. However, it has largely been regarded as a gimmick since the development of the safety bicycle, a significantly more practical and safer pedal-powered vehicle. Monowheel Mayhem is a subtrope in which a vehicle is a single wheel, with the rider and components sitting inside it. Non-robotic creatures to which this trope applies are examples of Bizarre Alien Locomotion. ## Examples: - Doraemon: - Dragon Ball: Launch is shown riding a one-wheeled bike when she robs a train in her introductory episode. - Ricardo Fellini in Gundam Build Fighters occasionally uses a support unit called the Meteor Hopper, a one-wheeled motorcycle for his Wing Gundam Fenice. He eventually stops using it after upgrading his Gundam to transform. - Venus Wars features a violent sport called Battle Biking, which is kind of like roller derby fought on one-wheeled monobikes. The heroes of the manga and anime, the Killer Commandos team, use their bikes in their first guerilla action against the Ishtar invaders. - The Lorax (2012): Ted's scooter has only one wheel, looking like a big ball. This doesn't stop him from doing impressive stunts with it. - Officer Shrift from the animated adaptation of The Phantom Tollbooth gets around on a wheel that resembles that of a rolling chair, connected to something that looks like a car jack that can be raised to compensate for his height. It's unclear whether this is a vehicle that he is seated on under his long jacket or a part of him or what. - Poet Anderson: The Dream Walker and its prequel comics features plenty of one-wheeled hoverbikes, mostly used by non-evil characters. - Bigweld in Robots rides on one giant ball, which makes up most of his body. - A little hard to see, but M-O from WALLE runs around on a motorized ball. - Alita: Battle Angel: Hugo uses a monowheeled motorcycle to move around Iron City, and frequently gives rides to Alita. - One of the bikes in the Mega Race during Spy Kids 3: Game Over is a motorized unicycle with a very high seat. - Star Wars: - The droid waitress WA-7 in Dexter's Diner on Coruscant from Attack of the Clones serves customers while balanced upon a single wheel. - BB-8 from The Force Awakens is a little droid that rolls around on a ball. This was a practical effect and not CGI. - Ciaphas Cain: One of the techpriests in Emperor's Finest and Caves of Ice had his lower body replaced with a single wheel. Made even worse by the fact that techpriests have huge metal dendrites attached to their backs and like to replace as much of their body with metal as possible, though Ciaphas mentions that he must have very good gyroscopes to work. - Piers Anthony's Cluster Series has several unusual alien physiologies. One of them is the Polarian — a race that travels and balances on a big ball — which makes it a bit easier on the creatures than the usual one-wheel design. - The Mulefa in the third book of Phil Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. They're a race of Starfish Aliens who use a giant round seed as a wheel, and attach it to their two middle feet. - Groomatron from House of Robots: Robot Revolution is drawn as using a single wheel for mobility. - In Robert A. Heinlein's novella "If This Goes On" the protagonist (at that point on the run from the police) at one point casually claims to have ridden "a unicycle" on a very steep mountain road. The person he tells this to clearly doesn't believe him, but from the context it's clear that the story is the equivalent to claiming to have ridden on a steep mountain road on a bicycle—it isn't the unicycle part that's unbelievable or even particularly unusual in that setting (which also includes Flying Cars). - One of the road-gang in The Last Continent rides a huge wheel with a saddle on top, pulled by an emu. - In Robert Heinlein's short story "The Roads Must Roll" a "tumblebug" is a vehicle "about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized on a single wheel". They're used by the engineers who maintain the moving roadways that power society to move around among the massive machinery down below the roadways. - Heinlein really liked this one. In Stranger in a Strange Land Jill suggests to Mike that a good present for Duke would be "one of those cute little Belgian unicycles" as he could spend hours playing with the engine. - In Wizard by John Varley the mob on Earth chasing the Titanide in the beginning is mounted on powered unicycles. - Animusic: The drum robots in "Beyond The Walls" and all the instruments in "Pogo Sticks" stand on two wheel side by side, allowing them to lean forward and backwards. - A citizen in the BattleTech universe can purchase the DB-6000 Defiance Bluestreak racing-style monocycle, which runs on a hydrogen fuel cell. - The Castle Falkenstein supplement Steam Age throws in steam-powered personal unicycles. Because why not? - In the Warhammer 40,000 Gaiden Game Gorkamorka, one of the Kustom Leg Replacements that an Ork can randomly acquire from a visit to the Doc's Serjery is the Gyro-Stabilised Monowheel. This crude prosthetic consists of a single wheel attached to an engine that replaces the Ork's legs. A model with a Monowheel increases their Movement stat but is unable to move through difficult terrain, board vehicles or climb walls. - Ball Breakers for the Playstation have you playing as a monowheeled robot in an arena, fighting other monowheeled robots for points. You can even upgrade your stability after battles later in the game, when enemies start getting tough so you don't slip and fall. - Claptrap from the Borderlands series is a small robot that gets around on one single wheel. He even tilts in the correct directions when he starts moving. - The Stillborn Franchise Defenders of Dynatron City included Buzzsaw Girl, a mutant heroine whose lower body was a buzzsaw that functioned as a wheel. - Hard Edge have gigantic robots on a single sphere for it's feet as recurring enemies. They can balance themselves surprisingly well despite their absolutely humongous upper body. - The Securitron robots, which form the personal guard of the post-apocalyptic mogul Mr. House in Fallout: New Vegas, stand on a single small wheel. - The system-repair drones from FTL: Faster Than Light move around on a single wheel. Anti-personnel and boarding drones, by contrast, move on twin treads, giving them a more intimidating design. - Maestro in Mystery Mountain. He is the only android designed this way; Mrs. Beasley and Eggbert hover and the rest are bipedal. - The clown of Kick Man rides on a unicycle. - The helper Wheelie from Kirby Super Star. You can ride onto it and become the Wheelie Rider. - Taken even further with the other Wheelies from Kirby Air Ride, with Wheelie bike, Wheelie Scooter and Rex Wheelie. - The Type-9 Surveillance Robots Machine Hunter. It's fast and comes with a built-in rocket launcher. It's a headache if it's an enemy, until you disable it and take over it's circuits thanks to your Machine Hunter powers. - Mega Man - Mighty Goose have multiple one-wheel tanks piloted by enemy robots serving as enemies in various areas. Though the titular character can sometimes hijack a one-wheeled tank for himself to kick ass. - Mighty No. 9's Round Digger and Round Borer have spherical bodies with a separately moving belt around its centreline that it uses as a wheel. - The obscure video game Mo Ho had gladiatorial robots with a single ball on which they moved. - The protagonist of Pokémon Colosseum travels around Orre in a motorcycle that has one wheel in the back, plus a sidecar with...some kind of...hover-thing. Good luck figuring out how this thing works. - Skylanders has two: The legendary Giant Bouncer and the Swap Force entrant Magna Charge. - The eponymous protagonist of Rocket: Robot on Wheels for the Nintendo 64. - Ruff N Tumble have you battling robotic enemies throughout the game, the first batch being round, roly-poly robots who moves about with a single tiny wheel in place of feet. - Some of Dr. Eggman's robots from the Sonic the Hedgehog video game series are like this. The earliest (and probably most notable) example is the Motobug from Sonic the Hedgehog. - The Octo Samurai from Splatoon 2 moves about the arena by riding on a comically small unicycle. He can make something more practical by combining it with his oversized ink roller, however. - Star Wars Droidworks has several locomotion options for wheeled droids, including one that's a non-magnetic unicycle, \|\|which is useful for avoiding being caught by electromagnets,\|\| and another as a streamlined tricycle. - Robot Medics in Team Fortress 2 are the only robots in the game to not use legs, instead opting for a single wheel. - Roadkill Rodney, a robotic enemy from the arcade game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and its ports. Not only could it stay upright on one wheel, but it could send out an electric cable to try to zap a turtle. Whether or not it succeeded, it never fell over until it was defeated. - In Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Hidden Treasure, the robot enemies in the factory levels stand on one wheel. - In the Super Famicom Product as Superhero game UFO Kamen Yakisoban: Kettler no Kuroi Inbou, riding the Yakisoban Unicycle (a non-action toy in the commercials) provides Temporary Invincibility. - Mettaton's standard form in Undertale is a rectangular body balancing on a single comically tiny wheel. - Wildstar has the Grinder mounts and the Uniblades, preferred by the Exiles and Dominion respectively. They are interesting both in the fact that while they have one wheel, the rider's placement varies. With Grinders, they sit on a support out in front of it, while the Uniblades have the riders on a strut behind the wheel. Also, both technically could be considered cheating; they use antigravity to keep stable and prevent themselves from tipping. - The robot mascot for the website/image search engine TinEye is a one-wheeler. Also a case of Invisible Anatomy, since that wheel is not visibly linked to the rest. - In Campaign 3 of Critical Role Sam plays the automaton Fresh Cut Grass, who gets along on a single wheel. He's implied to have to lift himself up stairs step by step, but can navigate them thus far. - The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: Jimmy Neutron designed his android little brother Brobot this way. - Buzz Lightyear of Star Command ends by introducing a love-interest for XR: a robotic personality named 42 living inside Star Cruiser 42. By the end of the episode, 42's personality is "surgically" removed from the cruiser and placed inside a short, humanoid, robotic body with a single wheel as its mode of locomotion. - Starting in Season 2 of Code Lyoko, Ulrich has the Overbike (pictured above), which also flies. - DuckTales: - Speedors in Legends of Chima are one-wheeled vehicles that are regularly used for races. - Ready Jet Go!: In "Try and Try Again", the kids try to put one wheel on Jet 2, but it doesn't work. The episode also shows Bergs riding a Penny Farthing bicycle. - The unicycle, of course. - Behold, the Honda UNI-CUB. - A self-propelled unicycle has been developed. Like a Segway, all the rider need do is lean forward. The unicycle more or less self-balances. - The Uno-Wheel Motorcycle, the first fully functional one wheeled-motorcycle. Though technically it has two wheels side-by-side, it looks quite close to Code Lyoko's Overbike. - Along the lines of the Polarian mentioned under Literature the Ballbot is a robot that balances and moves on a single ball. - The BB-8 droid from The Force Awakens is a practical effect, meaning that such a robot actually does exist in real life. You can even buy your own smaller licensed version.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneWheeledWonder
One World Order - TV Tropes According to a good deal of Speculative Fiction set in The Future, it is the natural order of things that all governments will merge together to create a central authority to govern the entire species. It's not necessarily the human species, however. Sapient aliens also almost always have a single government to whom every law-abiding sophont in their race answers. Any conflict between members of the same species will be called a civil war. Especially true if The 'Verse of the show contains boatloads of sapient species. The examples can cover a range of extremes: the government is benevolent, efficient, enlightened and out for your well-being; just downright evil; or plain realistic, or anything in between. It may be true that in order to expand to the stars, a species would have to pull together as a team and overcome the tremendous challenges involved. Though it can also be seen as corner-cutting on the part of writers, to avoid having to keep track of more than one government per alien. Every species in the increasingly crowded galaxy will also have a single unified culture. It can be detailed, as for an alien in the main cast, or it can be a one-note quirk if the creature in question hails from this week's Planet of Hats. Either way, it is rare for any species to have more than one language, artistic tradition, religion, or culinary style. This trope is not necessarily unjustified. There are a number of conceivable differences in the way an alien race's history played out versus our own that could result in their world being more unified than ours. For example, if their starter population and/or landmass was smaller, or if one tribe conquered the others. If the species in question is humanity, there may be more diversity involved, if only because the writers don't need to invent it all. The aliens may also look the same. The United Nations was a popular choice for fulfilling this function before the organization gained a reputation for corruption, indecision and inefficiency that persists to this day. Of course, that in itself can be a useful trope. See Ditto Aliens. See also Planetville and Planetary Nation when this applies to non-human species. Note: If you happen to be in a Christian "End Times" story, and a single government controls the planet, watch out for the dude with the goatee. Alternately, watch out for the guy standing BEHIND the dude with the goatee. If the "villains" are seeking a One World Order to remove the political divisions that enable international war, they may be Well-Intentioned Extremists. If the villains go even further than that, it could be an Assimilation Plot. Earth examples often overlap with United Nations Is a Superpower. ## Examples: - In Dragon Ball, the entire world is ruled by the King of Earth who's briefly usurped by the Great Demon King Piccolo. What's even weirder is that the king is a talking dog, and dogs apparently have a history of ruling over humanity. Weirder still, according to Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot that particular dog Was Once a Man. - In One Piece, the entire world is ruled by the aptly named World Government. In the past, there were other countries (at least 20) but they banded together to defeat the old world power. Nowadays there is a civil war led by the Revolutionary known as Dragon. - However, the World Government is, in many senses, more similar to the real-life United Nations than to a single state. It is repeatedly shown that the leaders of countries that are part of the World Government still hold considerable power, and Vivi has numerous flashbacks that show the kings and leaders engaged in debates and politics similar in style to, say, the UN Security Council. The core differences are that the World Government a) seems much more united in its efforts than the often divided and bickering UN and b) has vastly more resources at its direct disposal. - There are still many minor governments, but the World Government is working hard to incorporate them (sometimes peacefully sometimes... not), or obliterate them and send their populations to slave works. They are that kind of people. - It is noted there are some unaffiliated countries, but in most cases it's because they're poor nations unable to pay the "Heavenly Tribute" tax required by member states of the World Government. These countries usually become lawless wastelands without the protection of the Marines due to constant pirate raids. - And within the World Government, there are people everywhere on the moral scale. Compare Spandam, who (used to) run Cipher Pol 9, an assassination network, and has no qualms about shooting anyone, even his own allies, if it meant avoiding trouble; to Magellan and Hannyabal, who run the world's top-security prison and genuinely feel their duty is to keep the world's worst criminals from wreaking havoc on innocent people. As a result, normal people's views on the World Government are a mixed bag, with either dread or relief depending who they find out is involved. - Anatoray and Disith in Last Exile eventually merge to form this under the leadership of \|\|Empress Sophia\|\|. - Sara's and Lottie's home planet in Str.A.In.: Strategic Armored Infantry, as well as possibly the whole Union, resembles... Victorian England in space with gender equality. Go figure. - In Martian Successor Nadesico, Earth and several lunar and Martian colonies are governed by United Earth, with a united military force called the "United Earth Allied Forces" - Common in the Gundam franchise: - In the Universal Century Gundam shows, the Earth Federation had long established control over the entire planet. On the other hand, it's presented (especially further down the line) as an elitist, bureaucratic mess rife with corruption. Their reach beyond the planet is also shown to be shaky at best, with many of the colonies not exactly eager to be under EF rule. And it's strongly hinted that their grip on Earth itself progressively becomes less stable. - In Gundam 00, the three world-dominating blocs which make up most of the world form a World Government to oppose Celestial Being, and call themselves The Federation. At first they are evil, due to the manipulations of the Big Bad , but at the end of the show become a benevolent version (and headed by someone who looks a lot like Hillary Clinton). - The latter half of Gundam X focuses on the remnants of the old Earth Federation trying to reclaim their old influence... by forcibly conquering Europe, Asia, and Africa. By the end of the series, though, they're still having a hard time with North America (they really didn't expect the generally lawless and fractured city-states and Vultures to band together against them) and the remaining space colonies are not pleased with the Federation's revival. - In Gundam Wing, we get to see this in action as the Romefeller Foundation uses their overwhelming military power to conquer the planet, forming the World Nation. Then they make Relena their figurehead leader and she pulls Reassignment Backfire by turning the World Nation benevolent. At the end of the series, the World Nation surrenders to the colony rebel army White Fang, and between then and The Movie it becomes the Earth Sphere Unified Nation, which despite the name seems to be a more benevolent Federation. - It was also the same case in Gundam AGE, except their enemies are Martian colonists with a grudge for the corrupt Earth government. - As Gundam: Reconguista in G reveals, the Earth Federation ultimately collapses under its own weight. Centuries later, its successor, the Capital, is ostensibly content overseeing the semi-independent nations that now dot the globe \|\|on behalf of its true, Spacenoid masters\|\|. - In Monster, many organizations hope that Johan Liebert will lead them to this. Johan Liebert doesn't care about any of that as he shows all of them that Evil Is Not a Toy. - Macross: Mankind is united after World War III under a more powerful United Nations. By the end of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, the government renames itself the New UN, which develops into a decentralized interstellar federal republic spanning half the galaxy that has incorporated multiple other Protoculture-influenced species, most notably the Zentraedi (with other races including the Zolans and the Ragnans). - Code Geass has the Holy Britannian Empire become this briefly in the end after the Final Battle, conquering the fledgling United Federation of Nations. \|\|After Lelouch dies, Britannia gives up those recently-conquered territories and begins to coexist peacefully with the rest of the world.\|\| - The Science Adventure series, which includes Chaos;Head, Steins;Gate and Robotics;Notes involves the \|\|Committee of 300 who seek to unite the world through a one world government\|\|. - Earth Federation in Transformers: Energon. - The civilization setting in One-Punch Man turns out to be this. - In one Justice League of America story, it's explained that the reason so much cosmic weirdness gets drawn to Earth and not other inhabited worlds is that Earth is unique in the universe for having a multitude of different races and cultures. Go figure. - Similarly, Green Lantern/ Sinestro Corps Secret Files claims that Earth is "the most diverse and emotionally rich planet in the universe, boasting more differing cultures and languages than most galaxies". - Earthgov in the Zero Hour version of Legion of Super-Heroes is like this, with a little President Evil (President Thawne) and Secret Police (the Science Police) thrown in for spice. The United Planets in general might qualify, but they're more The Federation. - Some Chick Tracts are set in a world ruled by a single (and malevolent) government, as foretold according to some interpretations of Christian end times prophesies. - Strikeforce: Morituri had the Earth ruled by a one-world government called the Paideia at the time of an alien invasion, although the earlier nations still existed as a lower level of government. The series was notable for the way in which a change of writer rapidly caused the Paideia to shift from benevolent to cartoonishly evil. - The Star Wreck parody films have the P-Fleet, which controls all of Earth. In the final film, after being stranded in the past, Pirk, Dwarf, and Info convince the personnel of a nuclear power plant to build them a new warship. Pirk then approaches the Russian President and provides his forces with advanced weapons. They conquer Earth fairly quickly, after which Pirk gets rid of the President and becomes the Emperor. - All the Troubles of the World: Nations appear to have been dissolved; there is only "the government" and regional managers of the government. As part of the Setting Update, the regions are no longer named for the audience. - One Nation Earth is in control of all the earth throughout all the movies in the Apocalypse film series so far, and has been shown to be rather oppressive to both Christians and those who have not chosen a side. - Barbarella: According to this film, in the 41st century, the entire planet Earth will have a single president. There's also something about him having authority over the entire Solar System but it's not clarified. - Bicentennial Man: The government works differently compared to the original story, although specifics aren't given. When Andrew is pleading his case, it is before an organization called the World Congress, but the "head judge" is World President. They have the power to pass bills. So it's all three branches in one, without any need for regional/state legislature? - The Fifth Element: Tiny Lister plays the President of Earth. - The Starship Troopers universe had one government controlling Earth and all colonies. There was a massive war between China and Russia/Europe/America and after 90 years a wave of revolts in Europe overthrew the current governments and formed the United Citizens' Federation, then the Americas did the same. Finally they decided to go to war with China (and anybody who was left) to create the peaceful loving government we know. Would you like to know more? - In Space Truckers, not only is Earth run by a single government, but that government is about to be privatized by a Corrupt Corporate Executive named E.J. Saggs. - In the second The Omega Code film, Stone Alexander convinces the leaders of the world to create a united government and name him as its president. He proceeds to endear himself to the world by coming down on terrorism hard. The world is split into various "zones", but a few nations are still holding out and refusing to submit, including the US, China, and a number of Latin American countries. The American President even bristles at his country being offhandedly mentioned as part of the North-American Zone, stating that he's still the President of the "United BLESSED States of America". By the end, Stone even starts wearing a military uniform and a beret, like he's a third world dictator or something. \|\|The Chinese appear to submit eventually, and all three hold-out armies send their forces to join Stone's, only to attack suddenly, with Stone's brother David, now the President of the US, leading the charge.\|\| - Z.P.G.: The future Earth is run by a dictatorial government called the World Federation, which has outlawed reproduction for thirty years on pain of death. - The nation of Alar in Adam R. Brown's Alterien. This nation is comprised of the Alteriens who have learned to live together in harmony. - In David Wingrove's Chung Kuo, the entire world is ruled by the Seven and simply called the City, or Chung Kuo. - In Star Wars Legends, most species on the galactic scene are very much from a Planet of Hats. - But... at the same time the trope is somewhat averted. Several alien species hail from a number of planets - Duros, Twi'leks, Zabraks, and, yes, humans, all come from any number of worlds rather than just One World Order. Even the Mandalorians (more of a loose cultural affiliation rather than a species) now come in more than one variety, each wildly different than the other, thanks to Star Wars: The Clone Wars. It's also worth noting that the galaxy is, itself, often depicted as a multispecies coalition rather than as single-race empires. - Starfighters of Adumar is about, among other things, a planet that had been human-colonized and left isolated being discovered by the New Republic and the Empire. The planet, Adumar, was a nonunified mass of countries, many at war with each other, making trying to get the world to affiliate with one or the other complicated. Negotiations were with the leader of the largest country with the greatest number of allies. He was trying to unite the planet under him; other countries weren't having that, and there was a battle. The bottom line has a world government formed from representatives of each country, rather than that one guy. - In the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, The Antichrist becomes leader of the UN and creates the Global Community, declaring a single world government, currency, and religion. No one objects, and it's not clear if this is supposed to be because of his Mind Control abilities. Its successor, the universal state created by God after the Second Coming, also qualifies as a (supposedly) more benign example. - Ira Levin's This Perfect Day has the entire world unified under the control of one gigantic supercomputer, although the backstory shows that political and cultural unification predates the building of UNICOMP by a generation or two, while each continent had its own computer before that (EUROCOMP, USACOMP, et cetera). This political unification is one of the few things about his society that doesn't annoy the hero so much that he decides to blow up the computer. - The first arc of Perry Rhodan, "The Third Power", features the unification of Earth under ultimately one of these as part of the plot. Here it's presented as a positive development — the 1971 Earth of this universe is caught up in a three-way Cold War (loosely, in addition to the standard split China and the Soviets don't exactly see eye to eye either) and needs to get its act together because the first aliens have already arrived in their crashed starship on the Moon and more are sure to eventually follow. - In Peter F Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy, Earth deliberately creates colonies of this sort by a process of "ethnic streaming", to avoid giving people obvious differences to fight over. This is realised after the first, multi-ethnic extra-solar colonies descend into anarchy. Earth itself has a unified government, GovCentral. - In Dan Simmon's Hyperion Cantos books, the Hegemony of Man is a Multiple-World Order, with almost 250 planets under one government, all connected by millions of Farcaster portals. - In Rocketship Galileo by Robert A. Heinlein, peace is enforced by the guided rockets of the U.N. World Patrol. - The Ganymede Takeover by Philip K. Dick and Ray Nelson makes reference to the U.N. Army fighting the Alien Invasion. - In the contemporary Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard Morgan, a U.N. Protectorate maintains its rule over the Earth colonies by propaganda, military force and subtle corruption. - A particularly cynical version appears in Larry Niven's stories of Svetz the time traveler. The "SecGen" is apparently the absolute monarch of humanity, but the current SecGen (the product of centuries of inbreeding) is a grown man with the mind of a small child. The actual control of the government rests with those who are most successful at bureaucratic infighting and at cajoling the SecGen into approving their decisions. - In A World Out of Time by Larry Niven, the Human Popsicle protagonist is revived into a world ruled by the State, a totalitarian government that controls all of Earth and its offworld colonies (although the colonies have something to say about that later in the novel). - It is strongly implied that The Church of His Dark Materials wields de facto (if not de jure) power over the whole Earth. At least in Lyra's universe. - Last and First Men: World governments arise several times over humanity's history. - The Americanized First World State lasts for four millennia; yet its downfall \|\|rapidly leads to a new dark age\|\|. - The Second Men create three global civilizations over their history, each lasting for millennia. - The Third Men likewise form three global governments, whose lifespans measure between fifty thousand years for the least-enduring to a quarter million years for the most. - The Polity: This is pretty much what the Polity is — it's autocratic but fairly benevolent. - German philosopher Oswald Spengler wrote in his non-fiction book The Decline of the West that he thought the western civilization might create this at the end. - Carrera's Legions: The UN became this several centuries prior to current events in the series, and was renamed United Earth after the concept of nations was eliminated through legislative and bureaucratic methods. - In the Childe Cycle, the worlds of Newton, Cassida, the Friendlies, and Exotics are governed by strong planetary governments. Newton and Cassida are ruled by technocrats, the Friendlies are a theocratic republic, and the Exotics are... unique. Though there are constant sectarian violence with the Friendlies, their leadership is powerful enough to keep things in order. - The Tower and the Hive series has humanity united under the Star League. In the Pegasus trilogy, we get to witness the evolution of the United World; while the world is united under one government, that government is composed of layers of international institutions, and the various nation-states still exist and retain sovereignty. - The UHU (United Human Universe) in Maurice Dantec's Cosmos Incorporated although it's vague on how much actual power it has as national governments still exist under it's umbrella. - In The Moon Maid by Edgar Rice Burroughs, 21st-century Earth is united under "the Anglo-Saxon race," and governed jointly by the United States and the United Kingdom. This is broken in The Moon Men, when the Earth is invaded by the lunar people. - Played with in The Lost Fleet: - Humanity most definitely isn't one of these, but individual solar systems within The Alliance and the Syndicate Worlds are invariably highly centralised; mention is made of Syndic "Planetary CEOs", and it seems that the Alliance Senate has no more than one senator from each system, which works because individual worlds are very sparsely populated by our standards; one hundred million in a system that boasts a comfortably Earthlike world is considered quite substantial. Old Earth is still around, but its large number of still-extant national governments is something of a historical oddity, and a cautionary tale. - The "Beyond the Frontier" sequel series lampshades and deconstructs this trope when the Alliance finally meets the alien race whose existence was foreshadowed with steadily decreasing subtlety from the first book onwards. It takes them a while to figure out that the aliens are also politically divided, and apparently dislike each other intensely enough to keep Star Killing weapons emplaced in their border regions. Unfortunately for the Alliance fleet, Species Loyalty and their intense dislike and mistrust of humanity trump whatever differences they may have. - This is explored more in The Genesis Fleet prequels, set during the formation of The Alliance. Old Earth is actually getting less like this trope by doing away with its single Space Navy, selling off ships and crews to new colonies in need of protection. The Alliance gets founded specifically as a way for new colonies to protect themselves from hostile colonies, who try to take advantage of the power vacuum. On the other hand, interstellar law only permits a single group colonial rights to a world. This is why it's such a shock when the expansionist colonists from Scatha establish a second colony (and a powerful military base) on Glenlyon, with the people of Glenlyon being initially unable to do anything about it. Additionally, there is tension on Kosatka, as the colony's second city demands independence from the planetary government. The government eventually agrees to allow the other city limited autonomy, but it's not enough, and a full-blown civil war breaks out, although it becomes clear that Scathans are secretly supplying the rebels and inflaming the situation. - Develops through a layer of international institutions during the To Ride Pegasus trilogy. Individual nations still exist, and the United World functions as a federal government. - Most alien societies follow this in the EarthCent Ambassador ebooks, but EarthCent itself doesn't have much actual power over humans in general or Earth's nations in particular: it's initially little more than a formality imposed by the Stryx in exchange for FTL drive. Kelly's diplomatic exploits start to expand its influence over the course of the series. - Isaac Asimov's - "All the Troubles of the World": With Multivac the supercomputer, Earth has merged all governments into a single organization run by the greatest computer ever devised. If Multivac were to be destroyed, it would be The End of the World as We Know It. - "The Bicentennial Man": Like many other stories in the Robot Series, America's form of government has expanded to encompass the entire world. Sir is a member of the Regional Legislature, while there also exists a World Legislature, World Court, and World President. - "The Dead Past": At this point in the future, there's a single unified government that has taken over not only the national governments, but also the colleges and universities that teach and sponsor scientific research. - "Evidence": The different countries of Earth are replaced by nameless Regions, and laws are justified with references to individual Rights under the Regional Articles. It's made more explicit in the collection I, Robot, and Dr Calvin says the Regions of Earth formed a Federation in 2044. - "The Evitable Conflict": Stephen Byerley is the chief executive of the world, and given the title Co-ordinator of the Earth. Below him are the four Regional Vice Co-ordinators, one for each of the geopolitical parts of the world; Chin Hso-lin (The Eastern Region), Lincoln Ngoma (The Tropic Region), Madam Szegeczowska (The European Region), and Mr Mackenzie (The Northern Region). Of course, all policy decisions are actually made by the Machines. - "The Hazing": Implied Trope based on one of the aliens commenting that the humans from the Solarian System have a "world capital" called Earth. - "Homo Sol": - It is implied that the humans of Sol have formed a single unified government by the existence of Terrapolis, known as the capital city of Earth. - It is stated several times that the only known forms of intelligent life in the galaxy are Humanoid Aliens. Over two hundred species have joined the Galactic Superpower so far. - "In a Good Cause": - "The Martian Way": There's not much said about the world government, but it is implied to essentially be the same branches as the USA's. The General Assembly is a legislative branch with committees and Assemblyman Hilder is aiming to become the next Global Co-ordinator. The colonies appear to have their own local governments because they sign trade deals with Earth. - "Mother Earth": Earth is the capital of the Terrestrian Empire, but even as this story begins, the empire has shrunk to Earth's system alone. Each of the Outer Worlds, as the colony planets call themselves, has their own planetary government, and they've broken several ties with Earth. The belligerence displayed by the Terrestrial government provokes the Outer Worlds to war against the homeworld. At the end of the story, Ernest Keilin learns about the conspiracy that provoked the war, and how they're arranging for him to be President of Earth under a brand-new constitution. They envision Earth taking the lead again in a century's time. - "Not Final!": Earthmen have united under a single government, one that has begun colonizing additional parts of the Solar System, including Ganymede. - "The Tercentenary Incident": Despite revolving around the celebration of America's tercentennial, it is no longer the USA, and is instead one political segment of a larger Planetary Council, which is the governing body of a Federation that encompasses all of humanity, including the Colonized Solar System. It was no longer a nation in the old sense; it was rather a geographic expression; part of a greater whole that made up the Federation of all of humanity on Earth, together with its offshoots on the Moon and in the space colonies. By culture and heritage, however, the name and the idea lived on, and that portion of the planet signified by the old name was still the most prosperous and advanced region of the world...And the President of the United States was still the most powerful single figure in the Planetary Council. - "The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use": The Terrestrial Government runs all of Earth's affairs, with a President of Earth. Until the native Venusians revolted, there was a provincial Venusian Government as well, which reported to the Terrestrial one. - Isaac Asimov and Janet Asimov's The Norby Chronicles: A Downplayed example because while the Solar Federation is a government for the entire Colonized Solar System, it doesn't have absolute command. Even places like Manhattan International Territory are considered part of the Solar Federation. The organization is probably intended to be similar to the different jurisdictions of Federal, State, and Municipality governments in America. - The Sister Verse and the Talons of Ruin has this in just about every dystopic government introduced, the Crest being of particular note, who attempted to merge every universe into one for the purpose of social unification. - Arrivals from the Dark: Averted in the first novel Invasion, with the old nation-states still around (although some have merged, such as US and Canada for one and Europe for another). In fact, until the arrival of aliens, the Space Navy's primary concern is fighting a number of rogue terrorist nations that have sprung up over the past several decades. After the failed invasion, however, the UN is fairly quickly upgraded to the World Government. A few novels later, it's further transformed into the Earth Federation that includes the Solar System and all human extrasolar colonies. Averted in the case of the Kni'lina, whose homeworld is split into a number of clans/subspecies, dominated by the Ni and the Poharas clans, who even have different cultures and governments (the Ni are technocratic and secular, while the Poharas are deeply religious and have an empire). Most Kni'lina colonies tend to belong to a particular clan, but at least one is evenly split between the Ni and the Poharas, with plenty of tension on that planet. In fact, during the Human-Kni'lina War, only the Ni and their affiliated clans were involved in open hostilities with humans, the Poharas maintained their neutrality. - In The History of the Galaxy books, Earth is initially dominated by four superpowers, but they are eventually absorbed into the World Government, although a number of Mega-Corp have considerable influence. After the Great Exodus, with thousands of FTL-capable colony ships have left the Solar System never to returns, the various mining colonies across the system lord over the overpopulated and resource-starved Earth. Eventually, John Winston Hammer is elected President of Earth, and he proceeds to conquer the entire Solar System, establishing the Terran Alliance. Most colonies are also run by a single government. - Emperor Dayless tried to create one of these in the backstory of Shadow of the Conqueror so as to gain the resources needed to wipe the Shade out once and for all. The problem was that he tried to do so via militaristic expansion, hence his title, "the Conqueror." - All of the Houses in The Zodiac Series answer to their respective governments, and most of these Houses encompass two or more planets. - Babylon 5 - EarthGov is more of a national alliance than the traditional One World Order, but it's the only representative of the entire human race to the other races. Although a large part of the story arc is that it becomes this trope when President Morgan Clark seizes dictatorial powers and uses the Psi-Corps and Earthforce to impose his authority on Earth and its colonies. - The Centauri and the Minbari are of the more traditional interpretation of a One World Order, each as the sole government of their respective races. - Despite the fact that the humans in Battlestar Galactica come from twelve different planets, there is only a single primary religion among them (although some groups are more extreme or dogmatic in their beliefs than others, and atheism definitely exists in their culture as well). However, in the original series, at least, there are different sects referred to, and a guarantee of religious freedom is part of Colonial law, or at least culture. It's also arguably justified by the fact that their gods seem to exist physically in some form. - At least in the new series, the Twelve Colonies are implied to have been in contact since their founding, making it fairly reasonable that they would have a fairly unified culture. The really surprising thing is that different skin colors and British accents still exist, and yet don't seem to map at all to colony of origin. - Not entirely true; apparently Baltar overcame an Aerilon (Yorkshire) accent so that people wouldn't know where he was from. Still doesn't explain why he has a British accent and everyone else pretty much speaks with a generic American accent. - Also, there are certainly other cultural differences; the people of Gemenon take their faith much more seriously than those of the other colonies, and the people of Sagittaron (mostly) don't believe in modern medicine. - The Colonies may be united but they haven't been so for many years and they only did it because of the common threat presented by the Cylons. Before unification, it is mentioned the Colonies were very much at each others' throats. Which is why they built Cylon Centurion model robots in the first place. And old hatreds still run deep in what's left of the Fleet. It is occasionally mentioned the ships with mixed populations tend to be the most unruly. - All of that is depicted in the Prequel series Caprica; the Colonies are all independent states, with different forms of government (although since each colony is an entire planet, it still semi-fits this trope). For instance, given talk of a "Prime Minister" and "Commerce Minister", it appears that Caprica itself (later capital of the Twelve Colonies) is a parliamentary republic. Also, it turns out that there wasn't just the one religion. The Ancient Grome themed polytheistic religion is not interpreted the same way by everyone (as was the case in real life). For example, Taurons use the Roman names of the gods, whereas Capricans and some others use the Greek names, and the Tauron view of Mars is definitely not the same as the Greek Ares. There were also a few people who were monotheists, even before the Cylons. - Other sources such as The Caprican online newsletter explain a bit more of the differences between the Colonies. Leonis was an empire (albeit one in decline) and Virgon is a parliamentary monarchy and both had colonised Tauron for some time. Tauron was a democracy before the civil war but is now an oppressive dictatorship. Aquaria/Aquarion, owing to its tiny population, could afford to have a direct democracy. What is consistent is that almost every Colony, even the ones that share friendly relations, suffer from prejudice and dislike towards one another. It's explained that if it wasn't for the threat of the Cylons, the Colonies would not have united. - Doctor Who: In "Last of the Time Lords", the Master is the sole ruler of Earth after the attack of his minions, the Toclafane. - In Firefly, the Alliance more or less rules all planets inhabited by humans, and has thoroughly put down the secessionist rebellion of the Independent Faction (in which Mal Reynolds served as a Browncoat). - Intergalactic: In 2143, Earth's united under the global state of Commonworld. - The Orville: Earth apparently has one in the future, not surprisingly. - The Outer Limits (1995): In "Lithia", the society of the future is ruled by a body named the World Council. It's justified by the fact that most of humanity died as a result of war and then a plague, so the survivors banded together presumably for their mutual benefit. - In SeaQuest DSV, United Earth Oceans appears to be this for all intents and purposes, at least until the third season, when the show was renamed to seaQuest 2032. In the ten years between the second and the third seasons, another major power arises, the Macronesian Alliance, starting a Space Cold War with UEO. This is in an attempt to make the show Darker and Edgier. There is also a small but powerful aquatic Asian nation called Chaodai. Had the show not been cancelled, the Chaodai would've become a third power, able to rival the UEO and the Macronesian Alliance. - Star Trek is the number one utilizer. The Federation is in fact a government for several species, and it's rare for there to be any diversity in alien culture except in service to the plot. (Benzites do not report a situation to their commanding officer until they have fully analyzed it, for example, preventing a Benzite crewmember from heading off a situation before it can escalate to a dramatic level.) In one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Picard and Beverly even discuss whether or not having this is a prerequisite for Federation membership. (It isn't, technically, but apparently the question has never come up before.) - Deep Space Nine was a little less blatant about this, partly because they stayed in one place so could get a bit more involved with the politics of alien races (particularly the Bajorans, who were shown to have different "provinces" on their planet, as well as at least one terrorist splinter group) and partly because it was Darker and Edgier anyway. - The Federation seems to be unable to truly coexist with any culture without absorbing it, and its rivals - empires of similar size - are shown to be not only culturally but racially homogenous note : The Expanded Universe suggests the Klingons and Romulans have plenty of "client" races; they just aren't represented in the space navy or government, so we never see them. - Star Trek: Enterprise takes place prior to the foundation of the Federation, but after the establishment of the United Earth. There does still appear to be some cultural and institutional variation on Earth (there are references to the Royal Navy in the near past, as an example), but politically Earth seems to have left the Post-Atomic Horror in a spirit of unity. - This is actually T'Kuvma's point in Star Trek: Discovery. He fears that the Federation is slowly stripping Klingons of their racial identity, while disguising it with their phrase "We come in peace". He absolutely hates that phrase and uses it to rally the Klingon Houses under his banner against the Federation. - While there is much debate as to its interpretation, meaning, and indeed relevance, the Book of Revelation has been interpreted in Christianity as setting out a timetable for the Last Days of Humanity prior to God's calling a halt to things. One common theme is that the world will be seemingly united under a One World Order: unfortunately for True Believers, it will be a dictatorship run by the Antichrist and his acolytes. Many conservative evangelical Christians, especially in Eagleland, maintain a vigilant watch for signs this is happening already. - The "New World Order" conspiracy theory is played both ways in the DarkMatter campaign setting for d20 Modern (well, unless your GM modifies things) — the conspiracy theorists are right in that the UN intends to unite humanity, and they are right in that black helicopters are used by the UN elite forces. It's the other bits that are mistaken: It is suggested that the UN's leadership would prefer this to be a democratic state, which is one reason why it has taken so long, the UN have solid, sensible reasons for thinking a human unification to be a Good, or at least Necessary, Thing, and they have Christians amongst the top ranks. - The Technocracy in the Mage: The Ascension game from the Old World of Darkness. Literally committed to and highly successful at shaping the beliefs of the entire human race. Due to the consensual nature of reality in the setting, this collective perception of how the world works literally defines even the rules of magic and science. In fact, the only reason science and technology work at all is because the Technocracy has convinced the masses that it is supposed to. New technological innovations are introduced into the consensus at the Technocracy's discretion and they ruthlessly try to stamp out "reality deviants" that threaten their hold over humankind. Obviously, all of this requires them to manipulate everything from the media to governments. Their leading sub-faction is even called "The New World Order". They do cheat and break their own rules of course, employing technology far beyond what they have allowed the general public to believe is possible. Up to and including interstellar space travel. - The Tau Empire in Warhammer 40,000, though as their fluff is expanded, differences between Tau Septs are starting to appear. - This actually makes a measure of sense. The Tau homeworld was contentious and wartorn until the coming of the Ethereals and the firm establishment of the Caste system united them for the Greater Good. Then came a period of glorious victory and expansion. Now, they're butting up against the big boys (the entire Empire is barely a fraction of the size of the Imperium) and having to face against the horrors of alien races. This is the cause of most of their divisions. - The Architects of the Flesh from Feng Shui have set up one of these in 2056, run by the Bureau of Tactical Management (or the Buro in short). The population is kept in line through powerful feng shui, though there are still pockets of resistance around the world. There's also one major area that is immune to the influence of Chi and where technology more advanced than ancient weapons just doesn't work, watched over by the Vikings. - In Crimestrikers, Creaturia has a (mostly) benevolent world government, led by a parliamentary body-cum-Fictional United Nations called the Creaturian Council. - Played With in BattleTech, where One World Orders were brought about twice, only to collapse within a century or two. First there was the Terran Alliance (Earth and the initial human colonies), which fell apart when first the colonies rebelled and then Terrans themselves overthrew the Alliance. Later practically all of humanity - the Great Houses of the Inner Sphere and the Periphery states - were united under the First Star League. This fell apart again after two hundred years, leading to a Forever War that has raged on and off (mostly 'on') for nearly four centuries now (2786 to the 'present day' of 3151), with the driving impetus being reestablishing the Star League in one form or another. - In the setting of Crusader, the world (indeed, the solar system) is ruled by a single government, the WEC. Simply put, the WEC is every corporation in the world, merged into a hypercorporation, ruling the stead of a government. - The truth is naturally more complex than that, but this is a very useful lie. - In Spore uniting the whole planet is the last step to unlock space travel. - Once you control 8-9 of the 10 cities, the others will hail you and explain that they "see the writing on the wall" and just join your empire on the spot. - Alternatively, if the last empire left is allied with you, they'll agree to join you peacefully "so the world may live as one!" - The EDEN empire in the Galaxy Angel games encompasses a lot of diverse planets, but yup, each one has one culture to its name. Parodied (as with all things) in the Galaxy Angel anime, where there are such things as industrial planets, resort planets, etc. owned by one person. - Earth finally uniting as this is the reason why the Cyrollans extend an invitation for humankind to join the Symbiotry of Peaceful Beings in The Journeyman Project \|\|and why a key element in Dr. Elliot Sinclair's plan to prevent the Cyrollans, who he sees as a threat - legitimately so, as the third game reveals - from having an interest in Earth involves disrupting the peace talks that resulted in Earth's unification\|\|. - This is the goal of Deus Ex's Corrupt Corporate Executive and Big Bad, Bob Page. By buying influence with money or blackmailing with a critical vaccine, he can have his choice of appointees in any government agency in the world, and have the legislation drafted to give them authority to declare and maintain martial law. He gradually stages legal coups to make the transfer of authority to a U.N. enforcement agency permanent, consolidating control of all governments. - This is deconstructed; since his influence outgrew its natural boundaries, he effectively sabotaged every contingency plan the Illuminati used to defend themselves against failure, which meant that his giant conspiracy was still a house of cards. Then, as the one person in charge, he pooled all his resources into an AI so he could merge with it and develop super-intelligence to run the whole thing. The AI promptly went rogue from lack of confidence in a deluded megalomaniac, and concluded the only way to truly implement a one-world order is if everyone was involved in ruling it - whether they want to or not. - The flaws in such a system are even discussed in-universe by J.C.'s brother Paul, who points out that "a few bureaucrats in New York can't make good decisions for New Jersey let alone Paris, or a village in China" and ultimately only the wealthy would benefit from such a convoluted system while average people suffer. - Mass Effect plays with this a bit — the codex notes that Earth is still controlled by several sovereign nations; however, anything outside the solar system is controlled by the Systems Alliance, a supranational body that controls human space business independent of any individual nation's interest, by necessity: the bickering nations couldn't effectively run an empire of that size. - Mass Effect both uses and subverts this trope. On the one hand, there is a galactic council that oversees issues relating to the greater galaxy, but they only actually control about half the galaxy, with the other half being known as the Terminus Systems, which are highly fractured and largely ignore anything the Citadel Council has to say. The in-game literature also talks about how separate, smaller governments still exist. Also, they mention how each other species has as many varied languages, cultures, and religions as humans do. - Even at a species level, truly unified government seems rare: the Turian Hierarchy is fairly centralized, but the Systems Alliance is a multinational organization that provides interstellar defense and diplomatic representation to Earth's actual nation states, the Salarian Union is a semi-feudal collection of independent matrilinear clans, and the Asari Republics barely qualify as a government at all (their council member is the only permanent asari political office). - Technically, the Reapers qualify, being the apex predator of the entire galaxy which has won every battle for the past 3.2 million years, all without squabbling. However, it's implied that they only stay unified because they refuse to rule; they commit mass genocide over centuries, then sleep for about 49,500 years. - Project Sylpheed gives us the Terran Central Government (TCG), which apparently rules the entire Earth and its colonies. It has the Terran Central Armed Forces (TCAF) as its military. - Played straight in the Dead Space series with EarthGov. It's mentioned in background sources that this was the result of several wars, political upheavals and the depletion of natural resources planetside. It's also mentioned, however, that special preference was made to the United States. - In Team Fortress 2, the Administrator is the CEO of two NGO Superpowers, RED and BLU, and a weapon supply company, TFIndustries; all together, they give her complete control of the entire world. - In many ways, this has become Early-Installment Weirdness though. RED and BLU are now depicted as a pair of obsolete companies fighting over a resource that stopped being viable decades ago. The weapon and supply company was renamed to Mann Co. While owning it is considered to be a highly desired, and the Administrator is still a class A manipulator, the world is clearly not under her control. - The ultimate objective of most Total War games is to make one of these with your faction of choice. A lot harder than it sounds. - Rise of Nations: - One method of winning Campaign Mode in is to have your faction take over the world, creating one. - Skirmish mode can be won by advancing so far beyond your enemies technologically that your nation can research "World Government", which instantly merges all other factions into your own. - In Stellaris there is a human faction where Earth is now this thanks to the United Nations Is a Superpower trope. - In Deadalus aka. Robotica, the Earth is united under the World Silent Security Systems, based on the space station Deadalus. - The Terran Republic in PlanetSide controls effectively the entirety of human civilization. In the first game, the Republic is a republic in name only that monitors everyone, but has created a thousand years of peace. In the second game, the Republic was founded after a century of war devastated Earth and was putting humanity on the road to extinction, and is a benevolent socialist government, though The Remnant we see was forced into drastic measures to try and curb insurrection on the crippled and lost colonization fleet heading to Auraxis. Subverted in both games where the miners, libertarians, and corporations break away to form the New Conglomerate, while the scientists and tech worshippers split off to form the Vanu Sovereignty while isolated on Auraxis. - The Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series has the multinational Global Defense Initiative gradually transition from the UN's military task force in Tiberian Dawn to a de facto global government by the time of Tiberium Wars, due to the ensuring breakdown of global order leaving GDI-controlled sectors more often than not the only functional authority left. Member states and national governments still exist, but in practice have all been subsumed into GDI. - In the 31st century of Schlock Mercenary the entire Solar System is unified under the super-government of the United Nations of Sol, though there were independent exosolar human colonies like Celeschul until they accepted UNS protection during the Teraport Wars. - Lovely People: The government is simply referred to as the World Council, implying that the entire world is ruled by a single entity. - In the Alternate Universe of Within the Wires, various asides gradually reveal that after a massive war called the Great Reckoning, all national boundaries were erased, flags and soldiers were "done away with," (to what extent is left deliberately vague) and replaced with the Society. It further ensures the nonviolence of its citizens through divorcing children from the concept of family, separating them from parents, and eliminating/repressing memories of siblings and childhood relationships at the age of ten. - In Futurama, Earth is under one government based in Washington D.C., implying that the U.S. has taken over everything. Its flag, "Old Freebie" is just the Stars and Stripes with a globe in place of the stars. Earth, in turn, is part of the Democratic Order of Planets (DOOP), analogous to the United Nations (or to The Federation, which is how the Star Trek-obsessed Fry understands it). - Moreover, all bureaucrats — apparently all of them, in all organizations (commercial, governmental, or otherwise), large enough to require any bureaucrats — are members of a single Central Bureaucracy. - Although a lot of 21st-century countries (America, Mexico, Jamaica, China, etc.) somehow still exist as culturally distinct regions. - In Ben 10: Omniverse, in the Ben 10,000 timeline it's shown that Con Man Argit, of all people, was elected "President of Earth". - Teen Titans: Starfire's family are the rulers of all of Tamaran. - In Danny Phantom, this is what used to be for the Ghost Zone when the evil dictator Pariah Dark ruled it with an iron fist. Naturally, the citizens weren't happy and rebelled. He tried to get his kingdom back AND take over Earth, but he had Big Damn Heroes on the opposite end. - Jimmy Two-Shoes: "Rocket Jimmy" seems to imply that Miseryville is its own planet, ruled by the Heinous Family for centuries. Since the setting is implied to be Hell, it's not surprising. - In Time Squad, Larry and Buck explain to Otto that by the year One Million, Earth had eventually merged all its countries into one big "super-nation." - Certain theories for Globalization have this serving as the logical conclusion, politically and culturally, while others either subvert or avert this trope altogether. ## Subversions and Aversions - Averted, subverted and occasionally played straight in the Humongous Mecha manga series The Five Star Stories, where out of the half-dozen or so habitable planets orbiting the titular stars, only one is unified under a single government and wars between the various countries on the other planets are extremely common. As national identity is a major theme in the series, the aforementioned planetary empires attempts to unite the others through military conquest later in the series... doesn't turn out so well. On the other hand, in the series' backstory, we find that the entire galaxy and then some was united in a mystical "Super Empire" in the distant past. - The Gundam series in general are a subversion of this trope; when colonies are established in space, they inevitably try to become independent from Earth resulting in Space Wars. - The Universal Century timeline comes close, in that the Earth Federation rules over all of Earth and generally claims sovereignty over the colonies, but some colonies are not overly happy about this. Even the UC colonies aren't a unified bunch. Side 3 makes up the heart of Zeon (considered semi-autonomous after the One Year War, albeit with a puppet government controlled by the Federation in reality), while Side 6 declares political neutrality in the One Year War, Side 4 briefly becomes the Cosmo Babylonia aristocracy, while Side 2 eventually becomes the Zanscare Empire. Then there's the Jupiter Sphere, which is technically considered part of the Earth Federation (by the EF, anyway), but they're so far away that Earth can't really enforce anything on them, so they consider themselves independent. That's not even mentioning the whole situation with Axis. Needless to say, the UC timeline totally destroys this trope. - Gundam SEED frequently refers to the Earth as though it were one political entity, but this isn't the case. It is in fact divided into seven or eight supranational blocs, as well as the Orb Union, a small but powerful south Pacific island country. Most of them are united under the banner of the Earth Alliance, which is effectively led by the Atlantic Federation and is hostile to the space nation of ZAFT. However, a couple of nations on Earth support ZAFT, most notably the Oceania Union (Australia + New Zealand), which lends ZAFT the use of a large naval base at Carpenteria, and a few others remain stubbornly neutral in the whole affair, including Orb. - Gundam Seed Delta Astray establishes the existence of the Mars colonies as well, a recently-established group of space colonies (Mars itself not being terraformed). They're considered a separate nation. There was also another colony that converted itself into a giant spaceship and headed for Jupiter (notably without the consent of whichever nation owned it), because its citizens saw the constant conflict the Earth Sphere was getting into and basically said "Screw This, I'm Outta Here!" - Averted in G Gundam, the United Colonies Federation is merely more like the present United Nations, and the nations themselves are independent on each other. It is just that the country which wins the Gundam fight will be for four years the leading nation in the Earth Sphere. - Legend of the Galactic Heroes subverts this in the long run. Planets by and large are run by only a single government, usually under either Empire or Alliance. But the sheer expanse of space (and not to mention human nature) means that humanity doesn't stay united for long. - Inversion of Enforced Trope in An Entry with a Bang!: The writers have mostly agreed that, despite Clancy-Earth presenting a united front in their relations with the BattleTech entities, the countries on C-Earth proper will not unite into a super-entity in its purest state of a truly singular government, but exactly what the CSN's political structure is to be instead is a discussion that has gotten inflammatory at times. - Star Trek Into Darkness subverts this. While the Earth is united, there remains cultural and national diversity, with at least some present-day countries apparently surviving into the 2250s in some form. The Union Jack is still shown flying in London, suggesting that the UK made it as well, while in a bar scene involving Kirk, what looks like an American flag appears to be in the background. However, this may be in line with some TNG material which references a starship being built in the Soviet Union; old Earth countries still exist, but are subsumed into a federal United Earth government. - In Star Wars Legends, species that don't have much to do with the greater galaxy are quite capable of maintaining several different cultures, factions, sects, teams, and fan clubs. - A good aversion of Scifi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale. Since a vast majority of star systems in the galaxy can (and do) support sentient life, there are simply far too many races and planets for all of them to be homogenized under one banner. Even The Empire at its height controlled maybe 60-65% of the galaxy and had nowhere near enough soldiers or starships to make their presence known outside of space-faring systems, with many "mini-Empires" and planets that enjoyed de facto autonomy. Chances are good that hundreds, maybe thousands, of star systems within the Empire's borders watched it come and go without ever having known it was there. - In The Strugatsky Brothers novels, this appears to be the natural consequence of achieving a certain degree of technological/social advancement. Earth and all the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens Earthlings encounter have a One World Order, but the various Crapsack Worlds inhabited by humanoids have warring nations messing things up even further. - Ursula K. Le Guin: - The Left Hand of Darkness, in which Gethen has several different countries. The protagonist eventually visits the country of Orgota, to find that its government and customs are vastly different from Karhide, and even mentions that he's not as familiar with the native language. - Similarly, in The Dispossessed, Urras is divided into several countries, including (at minimum) the liberal democratic capitalist A-Io and the "socialist" totalitarian state Thu, which are fighting a proxy war in unstable Benbilli. If this sounds like the Cold War... well... it should. Urras, it should be noted, is a double planet, with its (relatively) barren partner Anarres having been settled by "Odonian" anarcho-syndicalists who, as such, have no state. Although LeGuin is herself a noted anarcho-syndicalist, Anarres has a legion of problems, including the development of entrenched bureaucracy among the "syndics." - In Out of the Dark, the Shongairi are confused that humanity managed to get to our current level of advancement without becoming this. - Subverted with the Dorsai in the Childe Cycle. Though officially they have a planetary government, the Dorsai are fiercely independent folks. As a result, the world government has no real power in comparison to the other worlds. - Played with Ceta - the planet has several nation-states. However, thanks to economic and social engineering, they're all under the de facto rule of William of Ceta. - Averted with Earth (and New Earth!) in the Cycle - there's still plenty of various national governments. - In the CoDominium, the eponymous organization controlled all of Earth and its fledgling extrasolar colonies. Unfortunately, the two controlling factions - the USA and the USSR - still hated each others guts, and after a few decades of iron-fisted peace and massed off-planet deportation, the CoDom collapsed overnight in a global thermonuclear war. Two Empires of Man followed, the first of which collapsed due to internal revolt, leading the second to be far more... assertive with its territories. - Subverted on Defiance: the Earth Republic presents itself as this, viewing itself as the rightful successor to all pre-Pale Wars human governments. However, there's plenty of the planet that's independent of E-Rep control, not least of all being the Votanis Collective-controlled territory in South and Central America. - Doctor Who has an interesting use: By the Twelfth Doctor, Earth has had enough planetary crises (even though they cover most of them up) that they've decided that in the event of a global emergency, they can elect a President of Earth who has full authority over the entire human race. - Stargate SG-1: - The Goa'uld are ruled by a group called the System Lords; true to their name, their government is generally very feudal, with Goa'uld serving different leaders, trying to empower themselves, and at war most of the time (using expendable human slaves). - Also, the Tok'ra reject the Goa'uld practice of taking over unwilling hosts, and live as symbionts with partners who voluntarily host them. - Some human planets are also divided, including the unnamed planet in "New Ground", Euronda in "The Other Side", and Jonas Quinn's homeworld. And Earth, of course. When Anubis sends a message to the President of the United States (by projecting himself right into the Oval Office) to "surrender Earth", the President acknowledges that the U.S. is only one of many countries. - Even the Asgard (who are all clones) mention having political strife (although we never actually see much of it). - This trope is justified in a few cases where we see a free (but undeveloped) planet; the entire civilization is generally within a few days' walk of the stargate so is much smaller than a lot of countries on Earth. - Also averted in Stargate Universe with the planet Novus (colonized by a version of the crew of the Destiny, who have been thrown 2000 years into the past) being divided between the nations of Tenara and Futura. They come together when Novus becomes unstable and build evacuation ships. - Interestingly, while later incarnations of Star Trek are definitely associated with this trope, the Original Series frequently averted it. Many worlds had two conflicting cultures, which were always metaphors for an Aesop on either racism, classism, or the Cold War. - Also, the Vulcans, in a way: they tried to unify their race politically and culturally, but in the end that simply resulted in creating the Romulan Star Empire in contrast with Vulcan proper. - The backstory universe of BattleTech has the One World Order forming and collapsing no less than 4 times! First Earth became a one-world order who sent out space colonies. Eventually the colonies rebelled into several bickering nations. Finally a force of personality united the bickering 5 major nations into a united One-Galaxy Empire. This collapsed after a Usurper killed the leader and his family and the five nations each claimed the throne. The Army of the now gone One-World Government fled and set up a new one world government of its own (the Clans). After 300 year of fighting, these clans returned. After an initial thwarting, the One-world-Order leader of the Clans was dissolved. In eventual response to the invasion, the 5 governments recreated the original one-world government again as a united force to stop the invaders. After the invaders stopped, the government, its mission accomplished, was dissolved. At which point an army of religious fanatics attempted to take on the whole galaxy to recreate another one-world government in their own image. The point seems to be that One World Orders aren't viable... up until you realize that if a sustainable version were to be created, the game would end. - ... or just tear themselves apart anyway, 'cause that's how we roll. After all, Real Life governments of all sizes have a habit of doing this once there's nobody left to fight, too. BattleTech always was one of the more intensely political fantasy/sci-fi universes. - Traveller: Played with. The Third Imperium is the dominant power. However the Imperium has thousands of subsidiary governments, sometimes several on the same world, as well as governments outside the Imperium. Planet Terra itself is usually under one government. - In Warhammer 40,000, the Imperium itself is supposedly a One Galaxy Order. But the galaxy is so utterly massive that each world within it is run by a vassal government with a planetary governor at its head (or an analogous setup for those worlds under Mechanicus or Space Marine control). - \|\|The final villains\|\| in Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War seek to bring about peace and correct the non-OWOness of humanity by eliminating the political entities, ergo governments and borders, that lead to war. - Galactic Civilizations II appears to follow this trope at first, with civilizations named after their race and all the usual trappings. But in many situations it's highlighted that none of these space-faring civilizations speak for ALL their species, just the ones that got into a big ol' pile and started starfaring together. For example: If any one planet has a monumental population boom, the news will go out of its way to state that the 2 billion new faces couldn't possibly have been born in less than a year, and that much of it is from same-race foreign immigrants applying for citizenship. - There are also various political parties in the game. You choose a specific political party at the beginning of the game that grants bonuses to certain statistics. If you decide to change your government from an empire (the default) to a democracy then you must keep up your popularity or have a new party take control and make you lose your party bonuses. - Most of the alien races from the Star Control games are examples of the trope, but there are a few exceptions: - The Yehat empire consists of several warrior clans that often fight for supremacy. In Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters, one can convince a group of Yehat dissidents who despise being Battle Thralls to start a new civil war. - The history of the Thraddash consists of several civil wars waged between factions of their Proud Warrior Race Guy culture that popped up every few hundred years. By the time of Star Control II, the Thraddash were up to Culture 19, and the player can end up inspiring Culture 20 if they beat enough Thraddash ships. - In fact, the plot of The Ur-Quan Masters involves a conflict between two factions of the Ur-Quan race: The Kzer-Za (who want to subjugate all other sentient races in the galaxy) and the Kohr-Ah (who want to kill all other sentient races in the galaxy). - Also averted in Homeworld, at least with the Kharaki/Hiigarans. While the species itself is unified, it's mentioned there are various, distinct clans and houses that serve as countries onto themselves. - Further addressed in the Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak prequel, where the Northern Coalition is, more or less, The Alliance of the kiithid to the north of the Great Banded Desert, which takes up the majority of the surface of the planet. Not much is stated about the Southern kiithid, though. The primary conflict in the game is between the Coalition and the Gaalsien religious fanatics. Later on, you also have to fight Kiith Siidim, who betray the Coalition. - More or less the goal in Civilization games. The conquest victory would be an evil example, the diplomatic victory a benign case (although the U.N. does appoint you ruler over everything, including anyone still voting against you, so it can still overlap with the sinister examples). The cultural victory doesn't really imply an abolishment of nations, but more turning earth into a Planet of Hats where the entire culture is like that of your country, so it comes close. The science victory might imply the formation of The Federation when you travel to another star, but it seems more like telling the world "Screw you guys, I'm going to Alpha Centauri". - Halo: - The Unified Earth Government (and its main arm, the United Nations Space Command) is a mix of the United Nations and the American federal system. While individual countries, organizations, and cultures are still very much alive, the UEG/UNSC will not hesitate to use force to prevent its colonies from becoming independent, with several of its factions, like the Office of Naval Intelligence, tending to favor outright authoritarian methods of rule. That said, several human worlds do enjoy a good amount of autonomy (particularly in the aftermath of the chaos caused by the Covenant war), and that's not even counting the Insurrectionist-aligned ones who've managed to sever all ties to Earth's government. - The member species of the former Covenant also tend to be aversions; the Elites and Brutes are each divided into a number of opposing factions and clans (several of which employ a wide variety of other species), and the Jackals are such anarchists that even Word of God refers to their central authorities as being merely "pseudo-governments". In fact, these decentralizing tendencies were already present even before the Covenant collapsed in the aftermath of the Great Schism. - No one ever refers to the three-sided Strand War in Escape Velocity Override as a civil war, despite the fact all three Strands belong to the same species. On the other side of the coin, the United Earth (which only came to be through Alien Invasion in the first place, so nothing natural about it) doesn't make any real claims to represent humanity as a whole, and is still working on establishing the institutions of a united government of Earth (for example, although there is a common parliament and cabinet, currencies are still separate and a subject of ongoing negotiation and planning). - In the X-Universe series, most of the aliens are united under their own racial banner, but on the other hand, the Split Dynasty is split up into dozens of bickering clans who fight for the right to rule, with military coups being fairly common. Humanity is the most fractured, with two powerful factions that hate each others guts - the Argon Federation, a former Lost Colony which controls almost all human territory in the X-Universe gate system, and the highly advanced Earth State, who control the entirety of the Sol system and have fingers reaching into their other Lost Colony, the Free State Of Solara. Minor factions like the Hatikvah Free League are also predominately human. - Zig-zagged in Stellaris. While your planet was unified enough to launch a space colonization effort at game's start, an interstellar empire is quite another thing. As your empire grows, various leaders will become heads of political factions, and pops derive their happiness from how pleased their faction leader is with your actions and policies. Additionally, it's simply impossible to directly govern more than a handful of worlds effectively, and you'll incurs steep penalties if you try. Assigning colonies to semi-autonomous sectors with their own governs lessens the bureaucratic burden, but causes cultural drift that widens the divide between various factions. - Most of this is averted by Hive Mind empires, be they organic or robotic. There's no political division between the physical extensions of a single massive mind, so these empires are truly united and immune to rebellions or civil war. They do, however, have to split up their territory into sectors and assign local governors to exercise efficient control just like individualist empires do, although in their case it's probably more akin to sharing network load between several servers or computers instead of forming semi-independent fiefdoms. - Parodied in South Park, where it is revealed that in the rest of the Universe, each species has its own planet; Earth was created to be a bizarre mix of all different kinds of things (gazelles, lions, Jews, Arabs, etc.) to form the basis of a TV show. - The entire premise of Transformers is that there are two distinct and warring factions of the same alien race. The overall culture within each faction is largely monolithic, however (Autobots bland and friendly, Decepticons backstabby), and very few characters are presented as neutral or independent. Occasionally, we had characters with unusual or seemingly inappropriate personalities who were nonetheless distinguished by their alliance. Later examples present more complex cultures, especially Beast Wars. - There was also Sideways in Transformers: Armada, who played first as an Autobot, then a Decepticon. It turned out he was actually an agent of Unicron. - An old idea going as far back as the ancient Greeks and Chinese, this could be considered a subversion on Earth. A world government would on paper be interested in very different, more global issues from the countries contributing to it and would likely look much more like the UN than a traditional country covering the whole world. Whether such efforts will, or should, ultimately result in a universally recognized world order, let alone what kind it would take remains a matter of much debate.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneWorldGovernment
One-Way Visor - TV Tropes A visor is a piece of eyewear that covers at least both eyes and the bridge of the nose. It's like a pair of goggles, but with temple-arms. Visor also refers to the faceplate of a helmet, the part that can be raised or lowered. This is about both kinds, specifically, ones that are opaque on one side, which is often—but not necessarily—connoted by a gold, silver, or obsidian mirror effect. Opaque, spherical helmets also count. Bonus points if the technology to do this shouldn't have been invented yet. For all we know (unless we've seen out from the wearer's POV), any of these could be opaque on both sides, but unless the wearer is blind this would be a rather major design flaw. When used symbolically, it can show that the character has an aspect he wants to hide (sometimes physically) or isn't all there to begin with. Sometimes used in tandem with Samus Is a Girl. Usually used with Faceless Goons. Separate lenses don't count, they go on Opaque Lenses. Compare Sinister Shades, The Blank, Eyeless Face, The Faceless. Contrast In Space, Everyone Can See Your Face. ## Examples: - Bakuon!!: Both Raimu and Rin's father wear their motorcycle helmets 24-7, with the latter going as far as doing so while at home and in his undies. Oddly enough, the latter wasn't that way when Rin was a child, but seemed to have started doing so in the wake of his accident. - Kaname Tōsen from Bleach initially wears clear goggles that are later replaced by band-like goggles.◊ - Zero from Code Geass wears one as part of his disguise. A perfect balance between visual cues for maximum handiness, and for keeping yourself anonymous. - From Digimon Frontier we have Kazemon/Fairymon's really cool-looking visor that looks more like a piece of hardware wrapped across her eyes. - Arc Ail snipers from Elemental Gelade. - At various points throughout the Ghost in the Shell multiverse, Motoko is seen using one sooner or later. - The Earl's Mooks from Interstella 5555 - Naruto: In the Distant Finale, as well as Boruto, Shino trades his sunglasses with a fancy three-striped visor. - Keel Lorenz from Neon Genesis Evangelion and \|\|Gendo Ikari\|\| from Rebuild of Evangelion Q. - The spacesuits in Planetes are equipped with protective opaque visors incorporating a heads-up-display to provide the wearer with vision. - In The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World, Red's helmet features a visor he can see through but others can't, though the art sometimes lets us see his eyes so we can make out his facial expressions. - Female Saints of Athena from Saint Seiya wear masks with no visible holes for their eyes. - Crimson Scorpion's henchmen in Steam Detectives. - The Uruk Army commanders from The Tower of Druaga anime (the regular, BFS-weilding footmen don't count, however). One is also seen in the background when Jil gets his armor fixed. - The Pluto colonists from Vandread. - Judge Dredd, In the comics, the upper part of Dredd's face is never seen. Normally it is hidden behind the fixed visor of his helmet, and on the one occasion that his helmet was removed, his face was hidden by bandages. It's supposed to be a reference to "Justice is blind". - Moon Man, a pulp mag character who came out when one-way glass was invented. - Originally, the Red Hood, a Batman villain had this. Later, it was changed to the standard superhero opaque eyepeices. - Cyclops of the X-Men always wears one made of ruby-quartz, an obligatory guard against the Power Incontinence of his Eye Beams. - Mysterio, a Spider-Man villain. - Red Hook Asylum guards from Neonomicon - Yorrick's gas mask in Y: The Last Man - Space Marines from Won Ton Soup - In G.I. Joe, Cobra Commander's battle helmet featured a completely mirrored facemask. Many varieties of Cobra Vipers wore such masks as well. - Dave in Safe Havens used to wear one in his childhood, because he functions best with a certain amount of distraction. He eventually switched to Sunglasses at Night (with an MP3 player built in) after the NCAA banned the visor. Ming was introduced wearing one before she switched to shades (and later ditched even those). - In Amazing Fantasy, Clash conceals her face behind a Daft Punk-like helmet. Similarly, Boomerang keeps his identity hidden with a motorcycle helmet. - Orbit Smurf from Empath: The Luckiest Smurf wears shiny mirrored wraparounds due to the fact that he's light-sensitive. - In From Muddy Waters, Izuku's hero costume includes a helmet with a tinted visor designed to protect his identity from the League of Villains and conveniently hides his frequent expressions of anguish, fear, and regret. \|\|Unfortunately, it's all for naught when Noumu and Shigaraki crush and disintegrate it.\|\| - Lamp Shaded in Back to the Future. Doc Brown wears one, and Marty waves his hand in front of them to make sure Doc can see him. Later on, Doc specifies that it's a "rear-view visor"—remember that the time-machine hardware which sits upon the engine makes an ordinary rear-view mirror impractical. - Snake Eyes from G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, as well as the Mantis Fighter-Sub pilots. - Gigan from Godzilla vs. Gigan, Godzilla vs. Megalon and Godzilla: Final Wars has a red one. Fitting considering his nature as an insane alien cyborg kaiju. - Cool Rider from Grease 2 - The Mouth of Sauron from Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. - RoboCop, as seen in the page image. - Jango/Boba Fett's helmets, as well as Clone Troopers from Star Wars.. Also, other bounty hunters like Boushh. - Darth Vader's helmet doesn't have a visor per se, but fits the spirit of the trope because he can see while wearing it but his face is masked. However, this may be a subversion because he technically can't see through the eyepieces; instead there is a HUD inside the helmet that looks like Robo Cam. - The sunproof spacesuits from Sunshine - A mercenary gunman from Babylon 5 sports one. - The mooks, and the heroes' Powered Armor in Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. - Bekhesh from Farscape. Production notes indicates that it's a cybernetic replacement for the top of his head. - Emperor Ming's guards (a.k.a. "Patriots") from Flash Gordon. - Wraith soldiers from Stargate Atlantis. - Geordi laForge's VISOR from Star Trek: The Next Generation is a subversion; he's literally blind without it. It isn't actually transparent from the other side, but a sensor array that relays data to neural implants to give a blind person vision. It's also not a solid visor, but made up of several alternating "teeth" extending from the upper and lower frames (and was based on a popular hair accessory in the 80's/90's). This is so actor Levar Burton could see through it in order to move around on set. - Many heroes in Toku series ( Power Rangers, Super Sentai, Kamen Rider, and many more.) Interestingly, some heroes' visors or eyepieces look like they'd be very hard to see through because they are. Suit actors have more skill than you think. - A net movie produced for the Kamen Rider Decade movie revealed that they typically have two versions of a character's helmet: one used for close-ups that looks more solid, and one that has better visibility and is used for action scenes. Even so, while the close-up mask is very blinding, the action mask is still pretty blinding. Kamen Riders' eyepieces are a completely opaque reflective material; the action mask gets a few tiny slits where the closeup mask doesn't, and it's where the eyepieces connect to other parts of the mask (ie, not where your eyes are.) Think of that next time you're watching a Kamen Rider riding a motorcycle, especially with the kind of bike stunts you see in Kamen Rider Kuuga. - The Stig from Top Gear. - Though Doctor Who villains tend to be humanoid monsters with facial appliances and visible eyes, and the Cybermen (who have apparently one-way eye-holes, though some iterations of their helmets have see-through chins) fall instead under Opaque Lenses, some lesser creatures like the Slabs (animated solid-leather humanoids with the appearance of motorcycle couriers) from "Smith and Jones" do qualify. - The titular character of The Mandalorian and the other Mandalorians are seldom seen without their helmets. - Daft Punk wear these. - The SWAT team from the Animated Music Video for Chage and Aska's On Your Mark - Electronic/synth rock band Tupper Ware Remix Party's Doctor Sung (cone-head) and Lord Phobos (gold colored full-face helmet + rebreather) both have their eyes obscured. - The male warrior shown in Gottlieb's Gladiators wears one of these. - The astronaut on the backglass for Apollo 13 has his face entirely covered. Probably done because Tom Hanks' likeness wasn't available. - All the astronauts in Black Hole have these. - Many of the male warriors in Laser War wear various face-concealing visors. - Warhammer 40,000 unsurprisingly features many such helmets. The Dark Eldar are especially fond of these, with mirrored full-face masks common among Reaver jetbike pilots, and most of the Haemonculi "creations" such as Wracks and Grotesques have blank visors surgically implanted over their faces. - Godot from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trials and Tribulations wears a visor consisting of three horizontal, red, glowing lines. \|\|It allows him to see since he lost his vision due to poison, but he can't see red on a white background (presumably because the visor tints everything red).\|\| - The Judicatrix and Pillar Security from Collar 6. - Girl Genius: - Othar Tryggvassen, GENTLEMAN ADVENTURER! wears a steel visor with a red lens. - The Wulfenbach Stealth Fighters wear asymmetrical visors with a stripe of red lens across their left eye that extends across the face towards the right eye until it reaches the frame of the round lens over their right eye. - The Jägermonster that gave Agatha a ride to the cave system that the Mechanicsburgers who weren't in town when the Baron attacked are living in after the time skip has a metal visor with a thin red strip that can presumably be seen through that appears to be permanently attached to his face. - The alien cabbie from Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger. It's just for show anyway, his eyes aren't behind the visor but on short tendrils around his head. - Arbite helmets from Servants of the Imperium. - One What Could Have Been strip for Gone with the Blastwave, titled "GWTBW 250k", has Gunless and Sniperguy in helmets that are featureless save for the crosshair etched in the centre and some red detailing. - Splink from Zortic. He likes weasring bizzarre makeup and/or prosthetics underneath so he can weird out people who make him take it off. The Continuity Reboot/Retcon introduces the Soykil, who have a pentagonal one as part of their uniforms. - One human scientist from Daydream wears one. - Dominic Deegan - \|\|Lord Sigfreid\|\| wears one when he's claimed by the Demon Lord Karnak and made into his second-in-command. - Part of the Callan Battlecaster uniform. - In Puffer and Clarissa, Killer Whale always wears a black visor that covers his eyes. - Scarlet and her four sisters' Powered Armor from Sequential Art. - Zig-Zagged with Mecha Maid from Spinnerette. About fifty percent of the time she has this. - Greylock, the four-armed climber dude, and Gali-Leo from American Barbarian. - P-T.U.N.I.A. note : Plant-(at)Tuned Undead Named In Acronym from Beyond the Canopy. - Callista of Magick Chicks never seems to take hers off. It's made evident when Cerise removes it and it leaves lines on her face. - "Sarge", one of Nova's cyborg minions, from Keychain of Creation. - The Emmissary from Chorus of the Neverborn. - In Beardy Bastards, when the radio areal on the Sasquatch is being repaired, it's shown that Dwarf space suits have blue ones. - \|\|Mituna Captor\|\| from Homestuck, who wears a helmet with a red/blue visor. - Sarilho: It sure is nice when the all the meditans put up their helmets and their faces are no longer visible and they're all wearing the same uniform... - Huckleberry's Mechaworm wears a helmet with a red visor that conceals his eyes. - Squall Troopers from Space Janitors. - "Icemen" from NES Godzilla Creepypasta. - YouTuber Casey Neistat explained why he always wears sunglasses with a reflective finish: it hides that he's actually looking at his camera's wrap-around view finder so he can do things like point at what's going on behind him without having to look back. - Virtual reality kits (Playstation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive) are basically centered around this kind of visor. As of 2016, you need at least a Playstation 4 Pro or an AMD Radeon RX 480 graphics card to make them work. - The Samsung Galaxy Gear VR, which turns your Samsung Galaxy S or Note into a VR kit, features a "pass-through camera" mode, so you can remove the light-shield from the front and actually walk around with a phone where your eyes should be. - Space Suits have these, though this is more of a practical need than to make astronauts look badass. (Of course, they do that, too.) They need to filter out direct sunlight since it's kinda bright without an atmosphere to absorb some of it. - Welding helmets and goggles have heavily smoked glass to protect one's corneas from the light generated by plasma arcs and metal-melting flames. - Hazmat Suits - Some sports eyeshields (including motorbiking helmets). - Air Force pilots sometimes wear these (as seen on almost every Air Force movie, usually on Mooks). Truth in Television, because when pilots fly that high, the sun is really bright, and they need to see what they're doing. - Mirrored, wraparound sunglasses. - Invoked by the Nintendo Virtual Boy. It certainly looked the part, but was so heavy it needed a stand. - A paparazzi-deterring visor was frequently worn by V. Stiviano while she was involved in Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling's scandal over racist comments. - Many costumed "fur" characters at the Disney Theme Parks have their "eyes" be lenses for the performer inside to see out of, but the guests can't see in. - A lot of other costumes like this use thin black or dark colored fabric at a spot where it makes sense (like the character's mouth). As long as there's enough light, the person can see out enough to make sense of their surroundings but people can't see inside due the combination of the fabric obscuring what's inside and it's too dark inside the suit compared to the surroundings. - A low-tech version of the above technology is used in cosplaying and fursuiting. Commonly known as "eye mesh," it is little more than a very light sheet of dark material (sometimes extruded plastic, but usually fabric) which is thin enough for a user to see out of, but is very hard to see into. The shadowing effect of a mask on the face of the wearer retains the illusion of there being nothing past the eyes and permits vision out of something other than an inch-wide hole in a mask.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneWayVisor
Ratchet Scrolling - TV Tropes "Think you're the good guy? Your quest is so right, You can't go left." An element in video game design, Ratchet Scrolling occurs when the game screen only scrolls in one direction and prevents the player from backtracking. This is similar to an Auto-Scrolling Level, except that the scrolling does not occur by itself, but in response to the player's movement through the level. Like the nature of a mechanical ratchet, it scrolls forward freely as the player moves, but 'locks' in place and prevents the player from backtracking. Lesser versions may allow the player some degree of backtracking, but only to a certain distance or recent checkpoints, while the most extreme versions will keep your character near the left edge of the screen, giving them very little room to move around without ratcheting the screen further. This is often a Scrappy Mechanic, especially when the screen is ratcheted vertically, where any platforms that disappear even a few pixels off the screen edge leave Bottomless Pits in their wake, in defiance of all logic. In early video games, Ratchet Scrolling was a way to improve performance. If the player could only scroll in one direction, game objects and enemies could be created when they enter the screen and erased as soon as they scroll out, reducing memory usage. Though this is now mostly a Forgotten Trope, only seen occasionally in simple phone games like Doodle Jump, it was once incredibly common (particularly in Platform Games). ## Examples: - Battletoads for the Game Boy, NES, etc. However, some levels were free-scrolling. - Almost all Beat-em-Ups and Action Games with platforming elements in the arcade will do this to you. - All Nintendo-era Contra games featured both varieties of this. Not funny when in a vertical shaft, and you fell off the platforms... - Super Castlevania IV has vertical ratchet scrolling, making for a few obnoxious challenges if you jump to an area and it ratchets due to overjumping. - Metal Shark Player's level of Mega Man X6, the second section has you ratcheted, in contrast to the rest of the game (note that if taking the "alternate" second section, it will be auto-scrolling instead.) - Kick Master doesn't let you go backward; while it's a largely linear game, there are many hidden items that can be missed. - Layla for the NES, which can lead to some unwinnable situations. - Amagon featured this as well, one of the last NES games to do so (released in Japan in December of 1988). - Journey to Silius does this as well and is even older than Amagon. - The original Glider combined this with Flip-Screen Scrolling. - Done in the Video Mode for Gottlieb's Super Mario Bros., which features a simplified Super Mario Bros. video game. - The Video Mode for Harley Davidson: Third Edition has an isometric scrolling road that only goes forward. - Done in the Video Mode of Doctor Who, done similarly to the Mario example above. - Curse of the eastern god implements this scrolling type, justified in-universe as a type of curse (although the player can't scroll left from the starting position). The player meets others that likewise crossed the barrier that, and are stuck against an invisible wall if they try to go back. - Super Mario Bros. - Due to the way the levels were compressed in the original Super Mario Bros., the Lost Levels Mission-Pack Sequel, and Super Mario Land, you can't go back once the screen advances. The invisible checkpoints in levels are frequently located after a useful power-up, making some players almost pray for Checkpoint Starvation instead. - While the Deluxe GBC port of the original game retains this trope, it does lets you backtrack to a certain extent, because there's less of the game visible on the Game Boy screen compared to the NES on a TV. - New Super Mario Bros. for DS has "Challenge Mode" that enables this, accessed by pausing on the map screen and entering a code note : L, R, L, R, X, X, Y, Y. Special mention goes to the vertical-scrolling levels, which become an Ice Climber or Kid Icarus-style Rise to the Challenge. - The Super Mario World Game Mod Hammer Brother has this. Unfortunately, you have to go left or backwards at certain points, making it extremely easy to get stuck at random. - The level called Kinder Surprise in Something uses this particular gimmick. It makes dodging the Kinder Surprise eggs much harder. Also, Mario can take the wrong path at some points, but fortunately the are reset doors available. - Sonic the Hedgehog: - Syobon Action abuses ratchet scrolling to torment the player. - A LittleBigPlanet level entitled "When things don't go right, go left" is effectively a basic platformer, apart from the fact you scrolled left. - The Kaizo Mario inspired level of Pickory will only scroll to the right, but you can backtrack up to half a screen. One trap can only be avoided by exploiting the scrolling and the fact that anything that goes off the left side of the screen is destroyed. - Adventure Island I and III feature horizontal scrolling limited to the right side. II has arbitrary points after which the screen couldn't scroll backwards anymore, but scrolling is otherwise two-directional. III has two-directional vertical scrolling, with stage 3-6 being the only time the screen can scroll to the left. - Kid Kool, obviously modeled on the example of Super Mario Bros., disallowed going backwards. Its Spiritual Successor Psycho Fox followed suit. - Kid Icarus is notorious for its vertical ratchet scrolling - if you fall (and don't have a feather) you die instantly and have to repeat the level. Even if there was a platform just off the screen. Your little wings are no good for flying. This was removed in the sequel, Of Myths and Monsters. - \|\|The escape from Wily's castle\|\| in Rockman 4 Minus Infinity uses this, though granted there's no reason for backtracking anyway. - The platforming stages of Alex Kidd: High-Tech World. (Other stages require backtracking.) - All of the platformer games in Action 52 use this. One of its top-view games, Dam Busters, also has this, and it can easily get you stuck in an area that keeps you from moving forward, forcing you to reset the game. - Creatures for the Commodore 64 scrolls only to the right, making it important to backtrack to some bonuses before they get scrolled off the screen. - Sort-of used in Knightmare: the player could never exit a room via the door they came in by. Most of the time this door wouldn't be visible as it was off the bottom of the "screen" but occasionally the entry door was visible. - In One Way Heroics, once something is scrolled off to the left, it's consumed by the Darkness and you can't go back. In fact, trying to go off the left side of the automatically-scrolling screen is an instant Game Over. - Discussed in the comic We Go Forward.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneWayScrolling
1-Up - TV Tropes "A lot of people like to call 1-Ups 'extra lives', or 'free men'. I like to call them 'life insurance.'" An item or event which increases the number of Video-Game Lives the player will have to continue following death. In simpler games, where the player is a One-Hit-Point Wonder, each time the player receives a critical injury or falls into an abyss, one life is deducted from his reservoir. When they are depleted, the game is over. More complex games deduct a life only when the Life Meter is emptied. Also, most modern games typically do something more friendly than simply end the game: the player is penalized, generally by having to restart the major area ("world", where losing a life with lives in reserve merely requires that the player restart the minor area), or from his last saved game. Some games used "continues", much like extra lives but senior to them. The distinction between the stockpile of extra lives and the Life Meter has faded for most game genres. Consider that "video games" started as pinball machines, then moved to arcade consoles. Customers paid for the games a nickel, then a dime, then a quarter or 50¢ or more at a time (as increased complexity and inflation increased prices). Charging for each life was essential for the game to be paid for. With games moving into home consoles, the game was paid for from the beginning, so having a limited number of lives to play is no longer necessary for most games. Almost all games which measure lives include a means to increase the stockpile. Popular methods include: - A rare pickup item (or maybe common, if your game has Infinite 1-Ups). Often looks like a small version of the protagonist, or his face. It was even common once that the item's graphic would be no more than a literal rendering of the words "1 UP". - A reward for Every 10,000 Points or every 100 coins. - A reward for finishing certain levels. - An exchange for some other game resource (especially game money). - In arcade games, inserting more coins. The term is a shortening of the phrase "Player 1 Up", traditionally displayed in older arcade games where multiple players took turns playing, to tell that it's the first player's turn (i.e. "Player 1, you're up. Start playing!"). The notion dates clear back to pinball machines. See Justified Extra Lives when there is an in-universe explanation, often an expendable clone, or a clOne-up. Compare Auto-Revive. Also see Meaningless Lives for games that don't really rely on the importance of extra lives for a reason and therefore practically throw excess amounts of 1-ups at the player when it's not really necessary (unless it is). ## Examples: - Drawn to Life has 1ups in the shape of your character's head. Which probably wouldn't be noteworthy, except that that means you determine what they look like; in this game, you're responsible for drawing your own player character. - Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain has the Heart of Darkness, which, like previous examples, can instantly restore Kain to (un)life if he dies with at least one in his possession. They can also be used as healing items, and while they're available all over the place, there's a very sneaky (and awesome) way to instantly acquire 99 of them at once. And no, it's not a bug. - In Ōkami, Amaterasu can come back to life with the help of her Astral Pouch, as long as it is filled with food. - In the SNES game, Legend of the Mystical Ninja, one late stage featured finding 1-up Icons sold in shops! Unfortunately, you had to make sure to buy the one for your character, or else you'd be spending your money on Player 2! - The fairies (or magic medicines in the case of the Game Boy and DS games) in The Legend of Zelda series will replenish your health when you run out, although in many cases it doesn't restore it all the way, so keeping a Healing Potion on hand alongside fairies is often a good idea. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is the only Zelda game to have traditional Video-Game Lives, and it portrays them as dolls modeled after the main character. Breath of the Wild also has \|\|the Champion's power Mipha's Grace\|\|, which replenishes all of Link's health and adds a few extra temporary hearts, though it has a real-time cooldown to make up for it. - Fairly early in Fahrenheit, a character offers you a cross for protection. Accepting gives you an extra chance at quicktime events, and after the prompt (whether you accepted or declined) you'll start to find more crosses lying around on the ground in out-of-the-way places. Depending on the situation, the extra chance may mean shrugging off the failure (for instance, if you just got punched in the chest), or restarting the event (for instance, if you just got hit by a car.) Sadly, they provide no protection against failure from Sanity Meter loss, failure in the Stealth-Based Mission, or the occasional Non-Standard Game Over like taking aspirin with alcohol. - Dark Seed II has a curious example of this. Any time you witness the death of a Dark Worlder you receive a 1-up; if Mike is killed, their life-force will be sacrificed in Mike's place. \|\|The very first 1-up you receive upon entry to the Dark World must be used to die in a specific place after obtaining a key item, or else the game is rendered Unwinnable.\|\| - In Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, crests are chances for presenting the correct evidence during trials. Additional crests can be obtained by performing unique actions during investigations or saying a certain statement. - In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game, extra lives could be gained upon achieving 100 points... an achievement which could be sped up by defeating enemies with the powerful jumping kick attack. - Similarly, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time had such a system, but scoring could be sped up by hurling as many enemies as possible toward the screen. - TMNT III: The Manhattan Project had scores in the ten thousands, and would give an extra life based on your score. Its high-scoring move was away+B. - In the Streets of Rage series, 1-Ups can be rarely found in certain stages. In the first game, it was an icon of the main characters grouped together, the sequel has a simple 1-Up icon, and the third game has an icon of Adam Hunter. - In Devil's Dare, there are the Soul Tokens, which give an extra life to the player, when they're otherwise forced to buy far more expensive continues. - Angry Birds 2 has a meter at the top of the screen that is filled as you destroy stuff in a stage. Each time it completely fills, you get back one of your spent birds, or sometimes a spell although this is fairly uncommon. You can also hit a golden pig to instantly fill the meter. - Progressbar 95: Beating a level with the bar being 100% blue grants an extra life. - In the WarioWare series, an extra live is given if a Boss Stage is reached and completed, failing the stage does not yield one. - Super Smash Bros. - Super Smash Bros. Brawl has Stock Balls, which only appear in The Subspace Emissary. - Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U introduces the S-Flag item, which grants an extra life if used in a stock match (in a timed match, it grants one KO point instead). The catch is that you must hold it in a specific pose for a few seconds, during which you cannot perform any other actions, not even to cancel out of the pose, so unless you've managed to get your opponent(s) out of the way, you're likely asking to be sent to the blast lines instead. - Rise of the Triad has two extra-life power-ups, which give 1 or 3 lives. There is a little catch, though: if your health is less than 75% when you pick one of these up, one of the lives from the power-up restores you full health instead of giving you an extra life. The game also include life items which will give you an extra life if you collect enough of them (they come in values of 1, 5, 10, and 25; and 100 are needed for an extra life). The game also gives you a bonus of 10000 points for every extra life you have when you finish the game. - In Descent and Descent II, 1UPs were in the form of extra ships, suspended in a green orb similar to shield orbs. You also got an extra life every 50,000 points, and when you finished the final level, each of your remaining lives added to your score. - Wolfenstein 3-D has them in the form of blue spheres with the protagonist's face on them. - Classic games in the Doom franchise used Soul Spheres, which were originally extra lives during development, but changed to give players 100% health (beyond the 100% maximum, in a way acting as an extra life by doubling the chances of surviving) when the concept of lives were removed from the game. However, DOOM Eternal revisits this concept: extra life pickups make you Respawn on the Spot on death, rather than have you start over at the last checkpoint. - Serious Sam has extra life pickups in some of the games and some of the gamemodes of other games. - Time Crisis gives us perhaps the most difficult method of obtaining a 1-up in any Light Gun Game: you need to score 40 hits on enemies without missing a shot. Project Titan makes this method easier by lowering the requirement to 30. - In Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles and Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, the First Aid Spray that usually serves as a full health restore in the series acts more like an extra life, letting the players immediately continue a fight instead of being sent back to a checkpoint after dying. Notably, the instruction manual for the former game says the player can hold up to three of these items at once, but there's always exactly one per chapter and they don't carry over, so the limit never actually matters. - In the Time Crisis clone Gunfighter: The Legend of Jesse James (both games) Jesse can gain an extra Continue by shooting Wanted Posters of himself. - Garfield's Nightmare: Collecting a silver talisman showing Garfield's face gives hin an instant extra life. It can be found in secret areas of levels. - Pac-Land: The Trope Maker for the collectible kind is the Special Pac, which appears when Pac-Man uses his hover boots above a specific location on the fourth and sixteenth levels. - Super Mario Bros.: - The traditional 1-up item in Super Mario Bros. is the green mushroom. Additional lives are also awarded for certain scores, or for collecting 100 coins. Before this usage, 1-up indicated it was the first player's turn in a multiplayer arcade game, such as Galaga. - Super Mario Bros. 2 keeps the mushroom as a very rare item, but also allows the player to win 1-ups in a slot machine based game between levels (one life is granted when all three items except cherries match; a life is also granted when the first items is a cherry, two when the first two are cherries, and five if all three are). - Super Mario Bros. 3 has a sort of slot machine at the end of every level, where the player character jumps and strikes the box to make it stop on one of the images inside — a fire flower, a star, or a mushroom. If you can hit the same symbol at the end of three levels in a row, you will be rewarded with a number of 1-ups: 2 for three mushrooms, 3 for three fire flowers, and 5 for three stars. Even if the cards don't all match, you can still earn a 1-up for every three you collect. note : But if you know what you're doing, it is quite easy to get stars every time if you jump at the box while the run gauge is maxed out, you'll get a star. The gauge must be maxed out when you first see "slot machine" - Super Mario Land and its sequel use the traditional heart shape as its 1-up. Because of the greyscale graphics, it wouldn't be possible to tell Super Mushrooms and 1-up Mushrooms apart, so in these two games the 1-ups are hearts. Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins even has four different slot machines where you can get 1-ups, and the more expensive slots can give you multiple lives at once. At the most costly slot machine (requiring the maximum of 999 coins for one play), you can win a 20-up, a 50-up, or even a 99-up. - Super Mario World has, in addition to the traditional 1-up mushroom, the rare 3-up moon. The game's signature bonus round is unlocked every time the player accumulates 100 red stars by touching the moving ribbon of the levels' exits (the amount in each case will depend on the height of the ribbon; however, it's important to touch the ribbon and not just walk across the exit, or else no stars will be given). In the bonus round proper, you're playing with a 3 x 3 Lucky Slot machine where eight blocks circle around the ninth which is in the center, and the blocks are also reeling between three images (Mushroom, Fire Flower, Star). You can hit the circling blocks to stop their reels and get item images, whereas the central block already has an image shown. In a manner of Tic-Tac-Toe, you have to time your hits to the blocks so you can form matches, and for every completed line you'll receive an 1-up mushroom. And if the images you get with the blocks match that of the central block, your chances to form lines will be much higher. - Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island has 1-up clouds that are held by the feet of Fly Guys. - In the New Super Mario Bros. series, there are Toad Houses with minigames where Mario and his friends can earn multiple lives. These houses have the shape of the green-colored 1-up mushroom. - In Mega Man (Classic), the 1-up item was a Mega Man head. In later games, the item became a copy of Mega Man's helmet. The Mega Man X series returned to the disembodied heads for the first three games, before the remainder of the series used helmets, while the Mega Man Zero and Mega Man ZX series both resorted to simple Z and ZX icons. In Mega Man Battle Network, the BckupChps, represented as blue-colored computer chips, instead raises the maximum number of Back Ups (i.e. lives) MegaMan can use when entering the cyberworld. - In Mighty No. 9, 1-ups take the form of Xel Cores surrounded by multi-colored rays of light, however, unlike most platformers, the extra lives do not carry over between stages and instead resets to the default value. - The classic platformer Monster Bash allowed the character to gain more lives by collecting voodoo-dolls of himself. - Conker's Bad Fur Day provides a handy explanation to the one-up system: upon dying for the first time, the player is taken to Death's door where Death explains that squirrels, much like cats, are exempt in death as they have as many lives as they "think they can get away with". From that point on, the player can collect squirrel tails around the game world to score extra chances. - Commander Keen: - In the first trilogy, get a 1-up every 20,000 points. - In games 4 through 6, three different ways: - A one-up after the first 20,000 points, then double the points after (40 thousand, 80 thousand, 160 thousand, etc.). - Collecting 100 of the life items: Lifewater droplets (4), vials of Vitalin (5) or flying creatures called Vivas (6). - Collecting a big version of the aforementioned life item: a flask of Lifewater (4) a Keg O' Vitalin (5) or a Queen Viva (6). - In Keen Dreams, a figure of Keen waving. You can also get three 1UPs and eight "flower power" seeds by getting an "all-seeing eye". - In the Glider series, pieces of paper. (You're a paper airplane.) - Ty the Tasmanian Tiger has the traditional floating-head variety. - In Donkey Kong Country you collect balloons with a picture of Donkey Kong's head (or Diddy or Dixie's heads in the first two sequels). When you die, one of your balloons pop, and when they're all gone, it's Game Over. There are also green 2-ups and blue 3-ups. There's even an enemy that takes 1-ups from you instead of killing you. Subsequent balloons don't show any character's face. - Sonic the Hedgehog: In all of the mainstream platformers you get a 1UP by destroying TV monitors with the character's head on it. Additionally, you can get a 1UP via Law of 100 with the rings you collect in the levels, though this noticeably harder compared to other series, due to Sonic losing rings when he takes damage. - Starting with Sonic 2, you also get lives for every 50,000 points you score in most installments. - Some Zones in Sonic 3, as well as some special stages, allow you to gather hundreds of rings. However, the Law of 100 only counts for when you reach 100 and 200 rings. - One of the main reasons why Sonic Colors is the first Sonic game in ages you're likely to see the Game Over screen in more than once is that for the first time 100 rings don't give extra lives. The only way to get lives is to find them hidden in levels or get A rank or better or attack your score during the results screen. - In Sonic the Hedgehog 4 on consoles, you can match 3 cards with the Sonic symbol on it to get free lives in Casino Street Act 2. If you only get 1 or 2 cards at one time, they will stay on screen for 15 seconds or so. You can also match ring symbols (worth 10 rings for 3) or Eggman symbols (worth nothing). - The titular rabbit's head in the Jazz Jackrabbit PC game. A "One up!" sound effect plays when the item is collected. In the second game, the item was changed to a text item that said "1Up." - In Stinkoman 20X6, collecting an icon of Stinkoman's head grants the player an extra life. In an homage to this trope, the 20X6 version of Homestar is named 1-Up. - The first Rayman game had these in the form of figurines fashioned after the titular character. The Law of 100 also applied. - Banjo-Kazooie has these in the form of golden statues in the shape of the bear; a life is also gained if all 100 musical notes are collected in a level (though their bigger purpose is to dispel musical gates that are in the way of the protagonists in Gruntilda's Lair). All subsequent games opt for unlimited lives. - Lives in Bug! look like golden award medals of Bug's head (since he's a movie star), are generally easy to find, and easy to obtain via Bonus Levels. You're going to need them. - Spyro the Dragon: - You get a 1-up from purple chests that blink. The 1-ups are mini-figurines of Spyro himself. In addition to that, if you defeat enemies that you have already killed for their gems, they will drop either the 1-up statues (very rarely), or the much more abundant silver orbs. Collecting 20 of these orbs gives you another life. - In Ripto's Rage and Year of the Dragon, the 1-up statues were replaced with blue butterflies. They could be found in either Glass Jars, after completing a Skill Point challenge, or after killing every 10 fodder. - In Magical Doropie, the 1-ups were miniatures of the heroine. - In Toy Story, Woody gets extra lives from picking up cowboy hats. - The Fairyland Story has this in the form of the Book of Life. - In Bomb Jack, extra lives were obtained by collecting "E" coins. These would appear only after collecting a certain number of gold coins. - In Scooby-Doo: Mystery Mayhem you can earn an extra life by collecting enough ingredients to make a sandwich. - The Darkwing Duck (Capcom) game has dolls of Darkwing serving this purpose. - In The Adventures of Lomax, some of the breakable pots contain 1-Up balloons. - The Smurfs (1994): Smurf dolls provide the player with extra lives in all versions except the Gameboy Advance version, where the player has unlimited lives. - In Freedom Planet, they can be found in some stages as disembodied head creatures resembling your chosen character. Freeing and collecting them gives you an extra live. Alternatively, collecting 200 crystals yields an extra life. - In Rolo to the Rescue, the extra life items are the elephant icons that are particularly plentiful in the Bonus Stages. - In Kao the Kangaroo, you get an extra life whenever you collect 50 coins, and occasionally when you pick up the question mark powerup (which gives you a random pickup). - Muri: Picked up in levels. Usually hidden in some way. They look like the protagonist's armored head. - Bubble and Squeak: They look like little doll versions of Squeak. - Frogger's Adventures: Temple of the Frog has butterflies that Frogger can eat using his tongue that grant him extra lives. - Jardinains! and its sequel have 1-ups as randomly appearing power-ups. - In Wizorb, they're known simply as Extra Life. - Paper Mario and its sequels have an item called a Life Shroom which automatically activates from inventory when Mario (or his partner, in Thousand-Year door) dies, keeping him alive and giving him 10 HP. They may also be selected from inventory. - The Mario & Luigi games have a 1-up Mushroom that restores the target player's health with half of his maximum HP. The 1-up Super does the same with full HP. In both cases, a character in the party must still be alive to administer it, and he uses his turn to do so. - Fable and Fable II have "Resurrection Phials", which activate automatically from the player character's inventory upon death to let them get right back up. They're sold in shops for around the price of a decent sword, yet none of the NPCs seem to use them. - Brandish has the Ring of Life which similarly revives you right where you fell. Considering that you can find many health potions lying around, you can rest anywhere to quickly restore HP, and you can save at will, you might be able to go for a while without consuming the one you start the game with. - Breath of Fire III has the Soul Ring which saves the wearer from death with full HP, once. Through the Faerie Village Side Quest it is possible to get a near infinite amount of them, and you will likely need them to take on the superbosses Berserker and Archmage. - Secret of Evermore has an item called Pixie Dust and a call bead spell called Regenerate which will restore a small amount of HP if the Boy dies before they wear off. There's also an alchemy spell literally called "One Up", but it's not an example of the trope; it's just a full heal for the still-living Boy. - You can buy Potions of Resurrection in dnd that bring you back to life once when you're killed, as a replacement for revival spells that your fellow players could cast on you in multiplayer tabletop RPGs. They are ludicrously expensive and even when you use one, you lose all the gold you have on you when you're killed, so you never want to have to use it. - The Japanese survival horror game Fatal Frame has a particular item, the Stone Mirror (Mirror Stone in V), that will replenish all of your health should you ever drop to zero hit points, in effect acting as a 1-Up. However, you could only ever carry one of them at a time... except for V, which allows you to carry multiple Mirror Stones at once. - The Resuscitate item in Dino Crisis acts as a 1-Up; it revives Regina if she is killed, thus you can continue the game without having to reload your last save. - Total Overdose has Rewind Icons, which if Ram takes a fatal blow can wind back in time with half health. - HQ has Extra Lives, which will allow the player to continue even if they get a question wrong. They can be earned by having a friend use your referral code when signing up or be awarded by the administrators. ## Non-video game examples: - One Piece: More than fifty years ago, Brook ate the Revive-Revive Fruit (Yomi Yomi no Mi), which gave the ability to return from death once. However, Brook died in a remote, foggy area and it took so long for his soul to return from the afterlife, he had rotted to a bleached skeleton (but still retaining his afro). Because It Runs on Nonsensoleum, he still came back to life as a walking skeleton. He was pretty shocked at first, but gradually found there were a lot of advantages to being a skeleton, first and foremost it makes him a lot tougher to kill the second time around. - A one-up in the shape of Scott Pilgrim's head appears in Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness, just after he defeats his love interest's third "evil ex-boyfriend". It briefly creeps him out before he collects it. - \|\|Becomes a Chekhov's Gun when he finally uses it in the last volume.\|\| - This also happens in the movie after defeating the fifth and sixth evil ex-boyfriends, twins. Both versions use a lot of Video Game Tropes. - Discussed in an episode of "Howard and Nester" in Nintendo Power, where Nester is called in to consult on a Ninja Gaiden movie. Seen here. Umberto: Come, tell Umberto how you know so much about up-ones? \|\| Howard\|\|: Up-whats? - Used in the sci-fi horror film Arcade. Where the heroine receives one for rescuing another player trapped inside the murderous machine's game world. Naturally, it becomes a Chekhov's Gun at the end. - Parzival in Ready Player One receives one early in the film, though he doesn't know it at the time, making it a Chekhov's Gun, too. - Minute to Win It, on those shows that it offered the "Blueprint Bonuses," had a 1-up as one of the two possibilities (the other was a 10-second bonus that you could apply to one attempt at one game). - A British game show called Breakaway offers these as rewards for answering a Fame Game-style question correctly. (In the first season, the contestant that answered it correctly could choose to have their 1-up be at the expense of another player's lives, if anyone else had a life, but for the second season, that option was removed). Unlike most game shows that use the concept of lives, all lives are spare lives, which means that in and of itself, running out of lives does not eliminate you (in fact, nobody starts out with any lives at all). In the first season, the lives only come into play for players who have chosen to attempt a "Breakaway" (they're trying to claim all the money by finishing the stack on their own, or with only one partner), but now, on a wrong answer, anyone who had lives can choose to give up a life to avoid zeroing out the pot. - Fifteen to One gave any player who made it to the final round enough extra lives to give them a full set of three. It was slightly advantageous to have all three of your original lives in hand, though, since you started with one point per leftover life. (Slightly, because each question was worth 10, so the leftover lives from the earlier rounds were little more than a tiebreaker if two people survived to the end.) - Starting in the second season, Raven offered a 1-up to any player who could collect seven (later nine) gold rings by winning challenges. - A savvy Dungeon Master in Dungeons & Dragons can require a special rare spell reagent (or, in Fourth Edition, ritual component) for resurrection magic. Popular choices range from Phoenix Feathers or Anima Crystals all the way up to the tears of a dead god. The point is to maintain the game world's verisimilitude and give a reasonable explanation for why death is still treated as permanent and tragic by the majority of the people in the world despite the fact that resurrection magic exists. It also allows the players to loot "extra lives" from particularly difficult enemies (who are likely to have them in their treasure hoard as a form of life insurance anyway.) It's an elegant solution for keeping death from becoming cheap at high level without making it absolutely final. - The One Ring: Bardings can gain the cultural Virtue "Birthright" for, among other benefits, a single-use Unexplained Recovery from otherwise certain death. - Shadowrun has the 'Karma Pool' (1st-3rd edition) and the 'Edge' stat (4th+ edition), which is used as a Luck Manipulation Mechanic by letting the players manipulate their dice rolls. Permanently burning Edge or reducing your Karma Pool allows for the player to pull a No One Could Survive That! and effectively counts as this. Note that even if the player isn't dead (and is protected from further death for the rest of the scene), they are very likely knocked out of the game for a long time. - The Fate Points in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Dark Heresy and their respective spin-off games function similarly to the Shadowrun example above. Fate Points can be spent on re-rolls (in which case they replenish at the end of milestones), or permanently burned to avoid certain death. - In Homestuck, every player has a dreamself on either Prospit or Derse, which can be used as Extra Lives if the players get killed. There are a few exceptions - Sollux had two dreamselves due to his bifurcation gimmick, while Aradia didn't have one at all due to being a ghost. \|\|It later turned out that she did have a dreamself on Derse, it was just sleeping on a Quest Bed in a crypt instead of inside a tower like the rest. This turns out being very handy when Jack blows up Derse, allowing Aradia to ascend to the God Tiers.\|\| However, dreamselves have other uses aside from being spare lives, so oddly enough, the extra life is more valuable than the player's actual life. \|\|Having a dreamself alive in some way is necessary if a player is going to ascend to the God Tiers.\|\| - Wooden Plank Studios had a story arc where Sephiroth killed everyone else in the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate roster, so survivors Kazuya and Incineroar had to find ways for revival, mostly being extra life methods such as green mushrooms and 100 rings.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneUp
Oni - TV Tropes A standard red oni "A ubiquitous character in Japanese folklore, religion, and popular culture, the oni may be variously translated into English as 'demon,' 'devil,' or 'ogre.'" — The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore Oni are brutish mountain Youkai superficially similar to Trolls and Ogres, with either one or two horns (which in some depictions are the source of their power). The word is almost always translated into English as "demons" or mistranslated (by tradition) as "ogres". Contrary to the common mistranslation, Oni starkly differ from traditional depictions of Western ogres. While still large, strong, and often brutish, Oni are known for possessing powerful magic and being far smarter than ogres. Further, certain types are very calm and introspective, and female oni, being very beautiful, can get along well with (and sometimes marry) humans. They are sometimes depicted as good and sometimes as bad, but are usually morally neutral and interested in their own affairs rather than the usually outright malevolent ogres. They prefer huge bludgeoning weapons (iron clubs called kanabō being the most common) and hide loincloths (usually tiger-striped). They are also shown to really love their alcohol, which can make them even more rowdy. Sometimes blamed for streaks of misfortune or violent weather. Others work jobs in Fire and Brimstone Hell as big red devils. If Oni come in pairs, there's a good chance one will be red and the other blue. However, they won't always match the Red Oni, Blue Oni dynamics. If some Oni are explicitly female, Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism may occur with males looking Gonky and the females looking more conventionally attractive. Which is consistent with their mythological descriptions. "Oni" originally referred to misfortune, bad vibes and evil spirits, which were traditionally said to come from the northeast. Under the Eastern Zodiac this is known as the "ox-tiger" direction, so these forces came to be anthropomorphised as beings with features of oxen and tigers note : Namely, horns as of the ox and tiger skins (in addition to tiger-like claws) . Because they're Made of Evil (or at least Made of Chaos), supernatural powers used by oni are often classified as jujutsu ("hexes", "maleficium" or "witchcraft") even when they're overt or harmless. Sometimes particularly wild and brutish humans are depicted as transforming into oni as they are warped by the foul energies surrounding them. At some points in Japanese history the word "oni" became practically synonymous with "barbarian", and conquering or pacifying territories was described as "ridding lands of oni". Particularly powerful oni may be described as kishin (literally "oni god"; the "ki" is an Alternate Character Reading of "oni"), a term used in Japanese Buddhism to refer to Wrathful Deities, while in some istances the term "Akki" (literally Evil Oni) specifically design evil-minded, man-eating oni. Incidentally, the Japanese word for vampire ( kyuuketsuki) can be translated as "blood-sucking oni"; see here for details. Hyakki Yakou, the Japanese equivalent of The Wild Hunt, literally translates as "Night Parade of 100 Oni", though this usage is metaphorical (most depictions of the Parade include a wide variety of Youkai) and is usually glossed as "demons" even when oni is otherwise left untranslated. That said, it has lead to a number of works that use some variant of "Hyakki" (or worse, "Senki" note : "1,000 oni") as a name or title for a particularly powerful oni; in more literal cases they may even be 100 demons fused together into an Eldritch Abomination. Compare Horned Humanoid. For the Oni's Western counterparts, see Our Ogres Are Hungrier and All Trolls Are Different (and occasionally Our Demons Are Different). See also Smash Mook (and some Oni in video games will be that kind of enemy). ## Examples: - 3×3 Eyes: several demons have their name end in "Gui" (the chinese reading of the kanji for Oni) and most of them have the appearence of monstrous humanoids with horns and magical powers. - Anpanman has Onion Oni. His head's an onion (with two sprouts as his horns), and he's still a little boy, so he's a bit of a crybaby (but doesn't want to admit this). - Delicious in Dungeon has Tade, who seems to be an oni or at least has traits of one; she's very tall and strong, has horns, and wields a spiked club like the ones oni in folklore typically carry. - In Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, the titular "demons" are actually oni and are referred to as such in Japanese. While they do have some of the typical traits of oni from folklore (claws, fangs, horns, possessing both great physical strength and magic powers), they otherwise have more in common with vampires (likely a reference to how the Japanese word for "vampire", kyūketsuki, literally means "blood-sucking oni"); they infect humans with their blood and turn them into beings like themselves, they're weak to sunlight, and the only sure way to kill them aside from exposing them to the sun is by decapitation with a special kind of steel. - Ogremon of Digimon - though initially portrayed as an evil minion, later on it was revealed to have no interest in anything other than fighting Leomon and allies with the protagonists to help achieve that possibility. There's also Fugamon and Hyogamon, but they've never played anything more than bit parts and thus were never similarly characterised. - Subverted in the Doraemon OVA, What Am I for Momotaro. The gang time-travels to Meiji Era Japan to investigate the Momotarō myth and encounters the feared Oni from the legends. But it turns out the "oni" of Demon Island is actually a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax created by a Dutch sailor stranded in Japan after his ship was destroyed in a storm, and subsequently mistaken as an oni-like beast due to his huge size (compared to the locals) and language issues. When it's clear that none of the villagers are willing to help, the Dutchman have to keep on pretending to be a demon for his own safety. - King Enma and his underlings in Dragon Ball, mostly bureaucrats working in Hell, Heaven and the check in station for the recently departed that decides who goes where. - Tamahome from Fushigi Yuugi has the character "oni" on his forehead. It's sometimes translated as either ogre or demon. He tends to take the "wild man" interpretation of the Oni when push too far. The most noticeable being his battle against \|\|Suboshi who killed his family\|\|. - Gamaran invokes this with Ryuhou Kibe, a warrior who was injected with the Juugan battle drug and became villainous under the nickname of "Ginki", the Silver Ogre. Not only he's, by Word of God, the physically strongest character of the series, he also reinforces his reputation by painting a third eye on his forehead and using a really big kanabo as his weapon of choice. - GeGeGe no Kitarō often features Oni amongst the many Yokai of the story, usually serving as the guards of Hell. Recurring Oni antagonists include the Raijin-like Kaminari, the Kubireoni and the Kido (Demon Child) Ibukimaru, son of Shuten Doji. According to the flashback and credits seen in episode 49, \|\|Arc Villain Nanashi is half-human half-oni, taking the form of a giant four-eyed baby and manipulating grudge and hatred from the shadows.\|\| - Hell Teacher Nube: Meisuke "Nube" Nueno sealed an Oni in his left hand, and it becomes the signature element of the series. Two other Oni show up, younger siblings of the former, with vastly different agendas. Nevertheless, they are all presented as supremely powerful, destructive demons and the greatest threats to appear in the series. - Ririchiyo Shirakin and Shoukin from Inu × Boku SS. Interesting, Ririchiyo's oni horns look like goat horns instead of the standard smooth forehead ones. - Inuyasha has plenty of Oni, ranging from massive, horned humanoids to witch-like beings like Urasue, the one who revives Kikyo as a clay puppet. There are also Gozu and Mezu, though they appear as human living statues with demonic faces in their chests. - Kill la Kill: Ryuko Matoi has many Red Oni qualities, such as her predominantly red-and-black color scheme, her contempt for Honnouji Academy's rules, and her "barbaric" ability to turn into a nearly-nude demonic form (complete with horns) so she can tear the fascist social order down. She also has a Red Oni, Blue Oni dynamic with the President of Honnouji Academy, Satsuki Kuryuin. - In Kinnikuman, when the titular character temporarly dies during the Castle arc, he finds himself in graveyard-like dimension haunted by the previously killed Chojins and guarded by two classical Oni, wearing tiger-striped loincloths and armed with large metal clubs they use to keep Kinnikuman from escaping. - In Magi: Labyrinth of Magic, the country of Kina is an expy of Japan, has the kanji for Oni in his name and his people all wear ornaments which makes them resemble Oni, such as horns and masks. - Momi from Mononoke Sharing looks like woman with a large rack and horns, and is a lazy shut-in who spends all her time browsing the internet, though it's hinted that she is far stronger than she looks. \|\|The end of the series reveals that she helped the gods in the creation of the planet and personally created the entire mononoke race.\|\| - Tionisha from Monster Musume, at least initially. While translations decided to change her species from oni to an ogre, she was eventually changed to be an outright ogre, who are called oni in Japan. Actual oni are a sub-species to ogres, with another character called Kinu being one of them. While ogres are of truly enormous height (Tionisha is 7'5"/227cm), oni are "only" the size of tall humans (Kinu is 6'4"/192cm)...but are just as strong as ogres. - In the third My Hero Academia movie, one of the hitmen working for Huma Rise has a Quirk which turns him into a huge, deep-voiced red Oni with tusks, horns and a pair of spiked clubs for hands. - In Naruto, the Sound Four resemble Oni while using their Curse Mark forms (with the exception of Jiroubou's lacking horns). - One Piece: - Early on, during the Baratie Arc, Don Krieg's right hand man, the otherwise unassuming Gin, is known as "Kijin" (Lit. Ogre Man or Demon Man) because once he engages his opponent in battle he's as remorseless and cruel as a Oni, viciously pummeling his enemies with giant sphere-tipped tonfas. - The two former Giant Pirates captains Dorry and Brogy have the meaningful moniker of Red Oni and Blue Oni, for their battle auras and overwhelming strength. Unlike Gin, they're also giants, and, at least one of them wears a horned helmet. - Oars and his descendant Little Oars Jr are giant so big they dwarf normal giants and have the massive body, giant horns and huge tusks typical of Oni. The former is even red. Their race's name is eventually confirmed to be "Ancient Giants". - Kaidou, one of the Four Emperors, has probably the strongest Oni motif: he's an enormous, muscular man with wild hair, huge horns, a fondness for saké and wields a kanabo as his weapon of choice. He has taken over the Japan-lookalike of Wano and even resides in the island of "Onigashima" (Ogre Island), where he rules over a giant amound of underlings, all wearing horns to emulate him. His child Yamato is a Horned Humanoid as well and during a brief battle, Kaidou himself claims that Yamato (who herself was called "Oni Princess" before she claimed Oden's identity) is a "Oni Child", though it's unclear if Kaidou was being literal or metaphorical (after all, Kaidou himself is demonically ruthless and was born in a seemingly human realm). - Kaidou's subordinates include the Numbers, a cadre of ten colossal humanoids who were a secret government attempt to recreate Ancient Giants: they are all huge, brightly-colored humanoids with massive horns and fangs, usually armed with kanabo clubs appropriate for their size. - From the same Mangaka as Magi, Orient features the Oni as evil, grotesque monsters who require human sacrifices and slave labor to procure ore, which they consume to gain power. In this story, Oni have taken over the Japan-expy of Hinamoto, defeated the Bushi protecting it and using God Guise to make human work for them willingly. Most Oni appear as pathetic or harmless, but can transform into much more monstrous forms once they've eaten metal. - Pretty Cure: - A reoccurring villain from Smile Pretty Cure! is Akaoni, a brutish red oni who carries a club and wears tiger-striped clothes. He didn't have a blue oni, but did encounter one in one episode... though just a human actor/stuntman who's wearing a blue oni costume. - The antagonists of Star★Twinkle Pretty Cure, the Notraiders, are all themed around yokai, and the oni of the group is Galogre, a blue oni wearing a robe. He's a competent and dangerous villain, so much so that the Cures have to be at the top of their game to beat him. - In Rave Master, the Onigami band is one of the three main villainous organizations aside from Demon Card and is composed of Oni under the control of Ogre the Gold Claimer, though they're the weakest of the trio. The Oni from this world are mostly human-looking with horns of varying size and fangs, can breathe and move underwater effortlessly and seems to be technologically advanced. - Oni in Shaman King are malevolent Tulpa-like beings born when a person with unusual spiritual abilities falls into despair. The majority of oni are little more than feral beasts, but they can increase their power and intelligence by consuming other spirits. Some types of shaman are capable of "taming" oni and using them as servants, but this is incredibly difficult. - One of the Transformation Rays in Sgt. Frog essentially turns people into Oni, by cheaply slapping on Oni features, arming them with clubs and turning their clothes into hide loincloths. Female victims tend to wind up looking like Lum. - In Toriko Oni are among the many inhabintants of the Hex Food World in Area 8 of the Gourmet World. Judging from the description, they resemble the typical portrayal, though the only one we see is Dinner, who looks like a one eyed, one-horned Bishōnen who's actually very polite and gentle. Aside from them, many Appetite Devils, especially Toriko's, resemble hornless Oni, and are even called as such at one point (though apparently Red officially belongs to the Ogre category). - Lum from Urusei Yatsura is an alien, but she and her race are obviously based on traditional depictions of oni in Japanese folklore. They have (very small) horns and wear tiger-striped clothing, but otherwise look like humans save for the green hair. Judging by Lum's father, the men are a bit more monstrous, with fangs and sharp fingernails, and are slightly larger. - In Ushio and Tora, a Oni serves as a Starter Villain early on. In this case, the Oni is the reincarnation of a man who died while holding a huge grudge and is hauting his own daughter, causing harm to all those who try to get between them. According to Tora, all Oni are of human origin. - In Yaiba, Onimaru and (briefly) Yaiba take on the appearance of oni when they are possessed by Fujin and Raijin. The former gains horns and extra muscle mass, while the latter becomes all spiky and electrified. - The old series of Yatterman has a couple of episodes with Oni, one as a parody of Momotaro and another as a parody of the Rashomon Oni. Surprisingly enough in both cases they're good guys, being harmless farmers in the former and a decent guy in the second episode, and the Yattermen ends up helping them. - Kyousuke and Touka Kishi of Yozakura Quartet. They are a literal Blue Oni, Red Oni sibling with Kyousuke acting as a personal assistant to Hime Yarizakura and Touka being her best friend. - YuYu Hakusho features a few oni as side characters (The Ogre Triad, the winner of the final tournament, etc.), and probably Jin and Shishiwakamaru. - Oni Embodiments: The sculptures are based on the demon-ogres of Japanese Folklore. Both draw from the depiction of technicolor-skinned ogres with tiger hide-made loin-cloths and kanabōs in hand. - One set of Magic: The Gathering featured various Oni. They were classified as Demon Spirits and looked vaguely ogre-like, but they were also served by actual Ogres. - The creature referred to as "Ogre" in Goblin Slayer is otherwise clearly an oni. It has the appearance, complete with horns, the iconic iron club, and magic, which regular ogres usually lack. It also has rapid regeneration. - There's a whole island full of them in Momotarō called Oni Island. They terrorized the local village and stole from them before being defeated by Momotaro and his three animal companions. They then swore to never steal again. - In Re:Zero, oni are normally born with two horns that serve as the source of their powers. \|\|Rem and Ram are an exception due to being twins, who are born with a single horn each. In the present day, Ram is much weaker than Rem due to losing her horn.\|\| - In That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, six of them become close servants and advisors of the protagonist, although after being named they evolve into Kijin and go through the Bishōnen Line, looking like humans with horns and Facial Markings. - In Tinker, "Oni" is a catchall term for the inhabitants of a dimension bent on the conquest of Earth and Elfhome. Tengu and kitsune are included under this term but only one true Oni is seen, Lord Tomtom portrayed as a large, whitefurred apelike creature who is brutal but of high intelligence. There are also lesser Oni who look like very large, red headed humans and function as Lord Tomtom's mooks. The kitsune, tengu, and lesser Oni have all been created through magical gentic engineering to serve the true Oni. - Super Sentai - The main villains of Hyakujuu Sentai Gaoranger are the Oni Tribe Org, who were born from the madness and despair of humans. They are shown to have a hierarchy base on the number of horns they have. Baron Orgs, the Monsters of the Week, have two horns and are spirits who possess Inanimate objects. The Duke Orgs and their masters the Highness Duke Orgs had single horns. - In Gaoranger's American remake, Power Rangers Wild Force, they are referred to simply as Orgs. Their origins are very different to their Japanese counterpart in that they were born from a toxic pool, and revived in the modern age thanks to rising pollution levels. Their horns were also the source of their powers and if it was destroyed, they would die. - Gengetsu Kibaoni, the Big Bad of Shuriken Sentai Ninninger, is an Oni as well, although he actually used to be an evil feudal warlord whose own heinousness resurrected him and his followers as youkai 444 years after his original death. Same applies with his son Mangestu Kibaoni. - Shuten-Douji mentioned below in "Mythology" has appeared as a formidable Monster of the Week in Ninja Sentai Kakuranger (along with his younger brother) and Shuriken Sentai Ninninger. - Denshi Sentai Denziman and Kousoku Sentai Turboranger had regular Oni as MOTWs called Onilar and Oni Boma respectively. - The Kamen Rider franchise has featured Oni in various roles, mostly heroic: - The Kamen Riders in Kamen Rider Hibiki are all called Oni, but they are humans who transform with magical instruments to fight the Makamou, evil spirits. - The Imagin of Kamen Rider Den-O are basically an updated version of Oni, being proud and highly idiosyncratic monsters caused by time travel that perform mischief while possessing series hero Ryotaro. In particular, Momotaros, who looks far more like a classical oni than the other Imagin who work with the Den-Liner crew, and he often gets called an oni. He does not like it. - In Kamen Rider Ghost, both the title character and Kamen Rider Spectre are themed after oni and oni-bi, with Ghost having one horn and Spectre having two. They barely miss the red oni, blue oni in appearance since Ghost wears orange while Spectre is blue; this is however amended later in the series, when Ghost obtains the red Toucon Boost form as his Super Mode. - Oni kaiju have appeared in some of the Ultra Series - Ultraman Ace: One of Yapool's monsters was Oni-Devil, who was the Monster of the Week in an episode about the Japanese holiday of Setsubun (see the "Other" folder). - Ultraman Taro had Enmargo, a giant oni samurai sealed away inside a cliff by a Buddhist monk and remained imprisoned with a magic statue of the monk. Later on, Taro battles an oni-like alien named Onibanba, who despises the Setsubun holiday and is based on the famous ogress Onibaba. - Ultraman Leo's Oni-On loved to eat fruit and could breathe tear gas ( onion, get it?). Fittingly, he appeared in an episode based on the fairy tale of Momotaro the Peach Boy. - Sakuna Oni from Ultraman Tiga was a sword-wielding oni with two faces and one eye on each. He was originally defeated long ago by the samurai Kagetatsu, but returned in the present when thieves stole Kagetatsu's sword. - Gorothunder, debuting in Ultraman Taiga, is a cross between an Oni and a Raijin, and wields an Oni's club as his default weapon. - A pair of red and blue cyborg Oni brothers, with one horn and two horns respectively, show up as Akuma Clan Captains and villains in Akumaizer 3. - Some appeared in the second half of season 3 of Teen Wolf. In sharp contrast to the usual burly Oni, they look more ninja like wearing hannya mask with no horns. They are also weak against sunlight and can turn into black smoke - The wind God Fujin and the thunder God Raijin of Japanese Mythology are sometimes depicted as Oni. The latter was sometimes said to eat the navels of children. - Shuten-douji was a leader of the oni of Mt. Ooe, and considered one of the Three Great Evil Youkai of Japan (alongside Emperor Sutoku/Ōtakemaru and Tamamo-no-Mae). While generally depicted as a human who transformed into an oni, there are multiple stories as to how this happened, including being cursed for spurning the love of his female admirers, or performing the taboo of wearing an Oni costume after drinking sake. - Ōtakemaru was another extremely powerful Oni sometimes recognized as one of the Three Great Evil Youkai in lieu of Sutoku, a master of sorcery in possession of three enchanted swords which made him invincible. Eventually he was tricked by the goddess he was wooing and defeated by an heroic general (after trying to have his severed head bite his skull off), but he reformed in a far away continent and returned with vengeance, only to be quelled again. - Ibaraki-douji is another oni with close ties to Shuten-douji (either as a subordinate, relative, even wife in one myth). And just like Shuten-douji, had multiple origins on how (s)he became a oni like being born that way and frightening his mother to death or being cursed at the same time as Shuten-douji. - Zenki and Goki (lit. Preceding Oni and Following Oni) are the archetypal Red Oni, Blue Oni which can apparently be summoned by Shinto priests to serve as familiars or bodyguards. Zenki is a massive, musculare male Oni with red skin, two horns and an axe, while Gouki is a female blue Oni with a single horn carrying a stone jug with her. - A sub-variant of oni includes the namahage, wild men who wear oni masks and wield overly-large kitchen knives and hunt down bad kids, threatening to take them away and eat them if they don't change their ways and are seen as Japan's answer to the Krampus or Bogeyman. In some stories, they sometimes go after newly wed couples and warn them they'll do the same thing if either of them become unfaithful to each other. - During some Japanese festivals, such as New Year, it's also common for actors to dress up as namahage and go around neighbourhoods searching for children and young couples to admonish. - The Oni's proverbial ferocity and strength were so renowed that many warriors, especially from the Azuchi-Momoyama (Sengoku, if you prefer) period, were often nicknamed "Oni" by their peers or successors, examples include Shibata Katsuiie, Shimazu Yoshihiro, Hattori Hanzō and Ii Naomasa (The Red Oni, because of the engine-red armor he and his troops wore). - The demons known as Ox-Head and Horse-Face, said to be the guardians of Hell in Chinese mythology, are often identified as Oni in Japan, by the name of Gozu(ki) and Mezu (Bull-headed Demon, Horse-headed Demon). - The strength and power of the oni, and their affinity for bludgeoning implements like the kanabō is acknowledged in the saying "oni ni kanabō" which basically means "making the strong even stronger." - Fujiwara no Chikata, a figure of poetry and folklore, was said to be an Evil Sorcerer who tried to kill the Emperor and used Black Magic to obtain the service of four powerful Oni, the invulnerable Kinki (Metal Oni), the invisible Ongyoki (Hidden Shape Oni), the flood invoking Suiki (Water Oni) and the hurricane-summoning Fuuki (Wind Oni). Some versions change some of the demons (usually Ongyoki and Suiki) with Doki (Earth Oni) and Kaki (Fire Oni). The Four Oni were powerful enough to stall armies, but were eventually subdued and banished. - In ancient times, the Rashomon Gate in Kyoto was said to be the hunting ground of a ferocious Oni (sometimes identified as Ibaraki Doji, see above) simply known as the "Rashomonki". Eventually a samurai came there to investigate, was attacked by the Oni but managed to drive it away by cutting his arm, though later the Oni managed to get his severed limb back with a trick. - Lady Momiji or Princess Sarashina was a famous and powerful Kijo infesting Mount Togakushi and antagonist of the Noh (and later Kabuki) play Momijigari, where she's hunt down by the hero Taira no Kagemochi and slain with the sacred sword Kogarasumaru. She appears either as a beautiful princess with her attendants or as a giant female Oni with fiery maple branches for horns. - A benevolent example of Oni is found in the Sankichi Oni: in his human form he enters taverns to get drunk, growing more and more oni-like as he gets drunk and leaving without paying once he has his fill. However, if left undisturbed during his drinking time, he will repay the innkeeper with anything he need (usually large amounts of lumber or rice). - Some Youkai are referred to as "oni" or have "oni/ki" in their names despite not being humans, such as the Sazae Oni (Turban Shell Demon), Ushioni/Gyuuki (Ox Demon) and Oniguma (Demon Bear). - One of the Ogre kiths (player types) in Changeling: The Lost is oni. Physically, they resemble the oni of legend (huge brutes with red skin), and they feed on blood, though in the game they were Was Once a Man instead of being born as spirits. - Oni are briefly detailed in the Gods and Monsters supplement for Mage: The Ascension: 20th Anniversary Edition. They mostly hide among the Yakuza and other violent organizations. - Oni are the template for ogre magi in Dungeons & Dragons (in fact, one early Sourcebook referred to them as "Japanese ogres"). In 4th Edition, they decided to just call ogre magi "Oni" and be done with it, though in the 3E Oriental Adventures, Oni are a very wide grouping of demonic monsters that merely includes ogres. - Eberron: In the nation of Borunan on the continent of Sarlona, the ogres helped the angels fight demons in Shavarrath, the Eternal Battlefield. Some ogres bound demons into themselves, similar to the kalashtar but the demons were unwilling. This created the oni, and they attempt to redeem the demons through righteous combat, but they still have to deal with malevolent instincts. When the Inspired took over, they convinced everyone (including the oni) that the oni had made deals with devils out of naked lust for power, and the only way to redeem themselves was service to the Inspired. - Pathfinder expands on the Dungeons & Dragons depiction of oni by making them evil incorporeal spirits who manifest into material form, using various humanoid races as templates. The traditional ogre mage, of course, is based on ogres, while the most powerful Oni are the yai, based on giants. There's also oni based on humans, tengu, and kitsune, with the latter two drawing from negative characteristics attributed to the youkai their normal counterparts lack. - In Legend of the Five Rings, Oni are demons that enter the mortal world either through some poor fool summoning them, or through the Festering Pit of Fu Leng that connects the mortal and demon realms. They have an endless array of forms, some of which resemble the traditional Oni, like the Shikibu. One manual even includes a series of random generator tables to create your own Oni. - In Shadowrun, there is a Japanese ork metavariant that looks very much like the traditional Oni and is usually referred to as such. This causes them a fair bit of trouble because although they're still metahumans that are not necessarily good or evil, society expects them to act like the fairy-tale creatures they resemble. - In Scion, Oni are a specific form of low-level Giant. Scions of the Chinese Celestial Beauracracy can also take loyalist oni — specifically, the Hells-staffing demon oni Ma Mien (Horse Face) and Niu T'ou (Ox Head) — as followers. - Tenra Bansho Zero depicts Oni as something akin to Blizzard-style orcs, being a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of the Ainu who are hunted by humans because their crystalline hearts can be used to power Magitek. Oni also look enough like humans that they can pass as human by cutting off their horns, though this causes them to lose their racial Psychic Powers. - Absinthia: Ibuki is an oni who can be found in the Eastport Buff secret map, and she wields a club in her boss battle. She's friendly to the party, but will not give up her treasure unless they beat her in a non-lethal battle. Afterwards, she'll give advice to the party and can be fought again in rematches. - Ao Oni: The eponymous monster, who pursues Hiroshi and his friends throughout the game. \|\|When each of your friends get caught, they're transformed into more Oni, and several more deformed versions of the original Oni are found in a jail cell near the end of the game\|\|. - In Arknights, a good number of the Operators are of the Oni race. - Koga Kitamikado from Ayakashi: Romance Reborn is a very handsome and benevolent oni who can hide his horns to appear human. He cares deeply about the Capital and its citizens (especially kids). True to his oni nature, he also loves drinking. - BlazBlue: Tager is called "Red Oni" in Japan because of his big red body and big fangs. Interestingly, he's also a Cyborg, and he was a normal human before both traits are given by his master, Professor Kokonoe, after he's mortally wounded in the past. - The Empire of the Rising Sun in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 has the King Oni. Fittingly, they resemble giant hulking brutes, though their main form of attack are Eye Beams. They do however have a bull rush ability which causes them to rush forward and knock away anything unlucky enough to get in their way. \|\|And The Emperor has the original prototype of it. It's red, bigger, has shoulder-mounted missile pods and The Emperor is gonna kick your ass with it.\|\| - DanceDanceRevolution: The Challenge difficulty is known in Japanese as "Oni", and the Challenge Mode (a version of Nonstop Mode in which gameplay ends if you score four Goods or lower) is called "Oni Mode". In games where the difficulties are represented by graphics, Challenge is symbolized by a kanabo-wielding oni. - While they don't appear in Dark Souls III, they are mention in the lore of the Onislayer Greatbow. - An oni appears as a playable killer in Dead by Daylight, absorbing blood dropped from survivors and fill a meter to go into a One-Hit Down fury for 45 seconds with a kanabo by using Blood Fury. Wasn't always an Oni, though. Before the entity found him, though, he was just a pretty regular (albeit insanely bloodthirsty and vengeful) human samurai. - Red Magnus from Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance isn't mentioned to be any specific type of demon, but is clearly modeled after one of these. - Dynasty Warriors: Dian Wei has a subtle Oni motif: he's Cao Cao's main bodyguard and a massive brute of a man known as the "Incoming Evil". In the first five titles, he always carries an axe with an ox motif and an armguard with a horse motif, a nod to Ox Head and Horse Face, the guardians of Hell who became the Oni Gozu and Mezu in Japan. - Fate/Grand Order: - Gender Flip versions of Shuten-douji and Ibaraki-douji appear as playable Servants. They are both man eaters with a love of alcohol. Shuten-doujin also has romantic ties with Sakata Kintoki, one of the Four Heavenly Warriors to have participated in the extermination of the Oni of Mt. Ooe. However, he greatly regretted it, and his wish for the Holy Grail was for her revival. - Kotaro Fuuma and Tomoe Gozen are both mostly human but with oni ancestry (Fuuma specifically has the blood of the oni mixed in him to create the perfect leader of the Fuuma Clan). Tomoe even grows oni horns as she ascends. - Benienma is also an oni, though unlike Shuten and Ibaraki she's a Hell Oni who's part of Hell's Celestial Bureaucracy. She also doesn't have any of the typical physical traits oni have, instead having a sparrow motif since she originates from the Japanese folk tale "The Tongue-Cut Sparrow". - Onis are common enemies in Grimms Notes. One of the Chaos Tellers is even a giant Oni with two heads. - In Final Fantasy IV, the Final Boss Zeromus' first form is surprisingly Oni-like, especially in the 3D version, having a leering, mask-like face with sharp teeth and two fleshy appendages resembling horns and being covered in hair. Furthermore, it's spectral in nature and a mass of sheer hatred, grudge and other negative feelings. When forced to take a physical body though Zeromus becomes a more abstract abomination. - In Fire Emblem Fates, the quasi-Japanese nation of Hoshido has a Barbarian Hero class known as "Oni Savage", which promotes to "Oni Chieftain". note : In the original Japanese release, they are known as Kijin ("oni man") and Shura ("Asura"). While they aren't actually oni, they still invoke the imagery of them; they wear oni masks and wield clubs (The Hoshidan equivalent of the axe) in reference to oni-ni-kanabou ("oni with an iron club"). - Flash of the Blade have gigantic red-skinned Oni enemies who Dual Wield gigantic clubs serving as enemies in the hell stage. - The Shugoki in For Honor aren't actually Oni, but they invoke the appearance with their monstrous size, demonic masks, and enormous kanabo clubs, as well as the beastly and animalistic nature of many of their animations. It is also strongly implied that they are actually descendants of citizens of the Dawn Empire who intermarried with the native Vikings, which gives rise to their sheer size and strength, and they are also the only Samurai hero who can have blond or red hair. - Oni appear as enemy assassins in Guild Wars: Factions. They serve the greater demon Kanaxai who dwells in The Deep. - Jitsu Squad have red-skinned Onis armed with tetsubo clubs as a recurring Giant Mook enemy. - Some of the Horned Humanoids of the Abyssal Fleet from KanColle like Seaport Princess, Northern Ocean Princess, and Battleship Princess. There's also some who have Oni in their names like Aircraft Carrier Water Oni, Anchorage Water Oni, and Isolated Island Oni. - In Kuon, \|\|Abe no Seimei\|\| can use her spells to summon either Zenki or Goki to protect herself. Both resemble imposing humans with mask and long hair (gold and red for Zenki, silver and white for Goki): the former can attack enemies in front of the summoner, the latter acts as a counterattack. - The Legend of Dragoon: early boss Fruegel has a rather Oni-like appearence, being a huge ogre of a man with a big belly, noticeable horns and wielding a kanabo-like cudgel. For bonus points, he's the chief warden of an horrible prison often compared to Hell itself. - The Legend of Zelda: - In The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, the Bokoblins are given a design resembling traditional depictions of Oni (outward-jutting fangs, loincloths made from big cat skins, etc.), in contrast to the Pig Man designs they usually have. - In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, \|\|Ganondorf's new body as the Demon King is modeled after an oni, with horns, flaming hair, and sharp teeth. He can even summon a kanabo to attack Link with\|\|. - The final level of "The Islands" region of LittleBigPlanet is called "The Terrible Oni's Volcano". Appropriately enough, the final boss is an Oni made of Fire Material. - Air Man's stage in Mega Man 2 features several floating oni heads as platforms. - In Monster Maulers, Diablo, "a demon who summons storms," is essentially an Oni (its Japanese name, Furaiki, literally means "wind/thunder oni"), even though its stage is a Chinese pagoda. It has blue skin and red hair. - Drahmin and Moloch from Mortal Kombat, though In Name Only (like many other Japanese-named things in Mortal Kombat, by the way) - Oni of various kinds appear in Muramasa: The Demon Blade, from small imp versions to hulking horned blues and reds to the horse-head and bull-head versions. One of Momohime's bosses is a huge, orange Great Oni, the boss of all the Oni. One of the DLC even has you play as a Cute Monster Girl oni. - Nioh, Oni, called Yoki in game files, are the result of people being corrupted by Amrita crystals. Normal Yoki are encountered in game as tough enemies, wielding swords, dual-swords or axes, complete with an even thougher, crystal-covered counterpart. Yoki can be stunned by smashing their horns. Bosses include Derrick, the Executioner of London's Tower, who's transformed into a Oni by Kelley, the Onryoki, formed by countless grudge-carrying souls and covered in chains, and the Ogress, a female, long-nailed female monster who's actually \|\|Ieyasu's former wife\|\|. The second games carries on the tradition, having as bosses not only the infernal guardians Gozuki and Mezuki, but also Shuten Doji, represented as a tall, flame-haired Oni with huge horns, a massive spiked rod and a massive drunkard and the great Ohtakemaru, whose backstory is narrated in the intro (and is turned into a Gentle Giant who became evil after being abused and attacked). - ONI Road to be the Mightiest Oni have you playing as a blue, chibi-Oni beating up a forest of assorted enemies. - The benefactors for the heroes of the Onimusha series; worse demons killed them off so they gave their power to humans. The Game Boy Advance Onimusha Tactics game gives nod to the different versions by stating that some escaped this fate by getting jobs in the Underworld. - Red Earth: There's Kongou, a typical red oni from Zipang, the same land Mukuro hails from. He was originally a human named Tanuma, a simple merchant, until he made a deal with Scion that turns him into a big red oni with an iron club. - Pokémon: Sawk and Throh are based on these, with one being red and one blue. They originally had horns but lost them because it was feared that they'd be confused with the Kami trio of legendaries. - In The Secret World, an exiled clan of oni are involved in organized crime in modern-day Tokyo. - In Sengoku Basara, certain special soldiers invoking the Oni imagery, as they are twice the size of nearly everyone safe for giant characters like Tadakatsu and Shingen, wield huge kanabo clubs with enough strength to send people flying and usually take a huge amount of punishment just to flinch. Most notably, a small army of these Giant Mook are employed by the Takeda in their Crane Wing Formation in Kawanakajima against Kenshin. - In Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson, there are two enemies whose appearances gained them the names "Red Oni" and "Blue Oni". There's also Murakumo from Gessen School who wears a oni mask. It's actually use as a emotion crutch as without it, she acts all shy. - These are among the tougher demons that Lo Wang faces in the Shadow Warrior remake, which primarily carry large shields. - The Shin Megami Tensei franchise has oni as some of the demons you can recruit. - Smite's depiction of Raijin and Fuujin are that of a red oni and blue oni respectively. Their lore mention them competing against one another to see who is the strongest. - The Deadly Six from Sonic Lost World are based on Oni, and are even known in Japan as "The Six Oni". - Soul Calibur IV's Kamikurimusi is essentially Tionisha from Monster Musume considering she beats up the game's endboss and lives out the rest of her life with him. - Street Fighter IV: Later updates add a character named Oni, who is actually Akuma after being fully consumed by the Satsui no Hadou. He's even more of a Blood Knight then Akuma is, wanting to cause nothing but destruction. - The first Summoner game takes place partially in the empire of Orenia, a fantasy setting based on an amalgamation of China and Japan. Oni appear as random monsters, but are concentrated in the Forest of Lianshan, where they are said to be the cursed spirits of humans who turn bestial over time. Killing them doesn't remove the curse, and their monster forms will reappear after a time. - Super Mario Odyssey has enemies in Bowser's Kingdom called Stairface Ogres, which are based on oni. They wield large mallets that they will use to try and crush Mario when he gets close, although this allows Mario to climb up the mallet onto their heads and Ground Pound their weak point. They also make Kabuki Sounds upon death. According to the in-game travel brochure for Bowser's Kingdom, the Stairface Ogres are locals there. - Throne of Darkness, Oni of different size and shapes (including the diminutive Shoki, the feral Forest Oni and the large, Kanabo-wielding elite) are encountered amongst the forces of Zanshin. One of them is his second in command and killing him is part of a mandatory quest. - Tomb Raider (2013): The Stormguard warriors are occasionally referred to as "Oni" by other characters, but they are actually "merely" extremely long-lived (and quite possibly undead) human samurai, not mythological demons. However the Stormguard Stalker, their de-facto leader, is a gigantic, flesh-eating, club-wielding, ogre-like brute who certainly fits the mold, so it's possible that he is the source of the nickname, and it eventually transferred to the Stormguard as a whole by association. - Touhou Project: - Suika Ibuki and Yuugi Hoshiguma are powerful oni based on the legendary Shuten-douji and Hoshiguma-douji respectively, who once worked together as part of a group called the Big Four of the Mountain. The two are heavy drinkers, with Suika having never been seen sober in 700 years, and Yuugi being unable to be intoxicated. Kasen Ibaraki is heavily implied to be another member of their group, based on Ibaraki-douji, who has chosen to disguise herself as a human for unclear reasons. \|\|Kasen's identity as an oni is confirmed in Chapters 49 and 49.5 of Wild and Horned Hermit\|\|. A notable trait of oni in Touhou is their honesty; they Will Not Tell a Lie and they hate liars. - Remilia and Flandre Scarlet are vampires implied to be of European origin, but reference the "blood-sucking oni" translation by possessing the traditional weaknesses of oni in addition to their vampiric ones. - Oni are the main enemies in Toukiden. They come from the underworld and there are both male and female Oni in many different varieties. - Warriors Orochi: the third title introduces Shuten Doji as a playable character, appearing as a massive red Oni with tattoo-like signs over his body and carrying a huge gourd across his back he can use as an impromptu cudgel, as a bazooka, a vacuum-creating weapon and a beverage holder. \|\|He's also the "good" side of Orochi after he was split in the Youja/Hydra and him. Appropriate since in some myths, Shuten Doji is the child of the Yamata-no-Orochi.\|\| - The world of Mooshu from Wizard101 has Oni as corrupting forces that take advantage of when the Emperor is injured. \|\|They possess the bodies of powerful warlords.\|\| Like demons from other worlds, they look like anthropomorphic Indian elephants◊ - Yokai Hunter Shintaro is a game where almost all enemies encountered are yokai, and unsurprisingly there are multiple Oni mooks showing up throughout. Including a King Mook Oni tall enough to bump the top of the screen who fights you Sumo Wrestling-style. - Many youkai in Yo-Kai Watch are oni. Oni even appear during Terror Time. In Yo-Kai Watch 3 (which takes place in America), they're replaced with zombies. - Shinra in Enchanted in the Moonlight is an oni (translated in the English-language release as "demon"). He's first seen in the prologue complaining about how oni are villainized in folk tales like that of Momotaro; he's blunt, brash and a little violent, but good-hearted. - Mion Sonozaki from Higurashi: When They Cry has an Oni tattooed on her back out of family tradition. The Sonozakis and the other great families (the Furudes and Kimiyoshis) claim to have Oni blood. - Oni have existed in the Nasuverse ever since Tsukihime, due to people in the past having tried to crossbreed with them to create Half Human Hybrids, which include \|\|Akiha Tohno\|\|. Fate works, especially Fate/Grand Order, expand on both half-breeds and actual oni with the likes of Fuuma Kotarou and Tomoe Gozen as half-breeds and Ibaraki-douji and Shuten-douji as actual oni, and reveal another type of oni, the Hell oni, with Beni-enma (as compared to Ibaraki and Shuten, who are Earth oni). - Erma; Erma's maternal uncle Kentaro is an Oni, and is quite popular among the other yokai as both a Big Fun party animal and a brave defender of weaker yokai. He quickly takes a shine to Erma and her family and has no reservations about her status as a Half-Human Hybrid. - Fire Emblem On Forums: - In The Monstergirl Encyclopedia, Red and Blue Oni are two of the many profiles. Red Oni are hot-headed Hard-Drinking Party Girls who live to eat, drink, party and have sex. Blue Oni are more intellectual and reserved, but become raging horny drunks when they drink. The work also includes the Ushi Oni, here depicted as a sort of cross between a tarantula-based drider and a minotaur that is an insatiable beast that roams the hills, looking for victims to capture for sex and whose blood is so powerful it can corrupt any who are touched by it. - Tarakudo and the other Oni Generals, the antagonists of Season 4 of Jackie Chan Adventures. They have the ability to summon the Shadowkhan, demonic warriors made out of shadows. They were trapped in Hannya masks that represented their own faces, and could possess anyone who wore them. Tohru, one of the good guys, was deeply afraid of the Oni because of the stories he heard from his mom. Ironically enough, these fears mean that he has a better idea of their strengths and weaknesses, and has a limited ability to sense their presence. This is important since Uncle's Chinese magic doesn't include any spells for dealing with oni (and he can't decipher Japanese mystical texts without help), meaning that for most of the season he's forced to assist his apprentice Tohru instead of doing everything himself. - An oni makes up one of the variety of yokai living in the underworld in Legend of the Three Caballeros. - Miraculous Ladybug: The titular Villain of the Week of the episode "Oni-Chan" is, as her name implies, based on an oni, although her weapon is a sword rather than a bludgeon. - In one episode of The Venture Bros., a floating Oni head starts following Dr. Venture. \|\|The ending revealed that it was playing matchmaker for the Doctor and his former crazy bodyguard\|\|. - Oni-ni-kanabou ("oni with an iron club") is a Japanese expression meaning "overwhelmingly strong" or "a strong person with a tool or advantage that makes them even stronger, to the level of overkill". - The Japanese versions of a number of childrens' games reference oni, including tag ( oni-gokko: "playing oni"; the player who is "it" is the oni) and hide-and-seek ( kakure-oni: "hide [from the] oni"). - Mamemaki, a ritual practiced at the Japanese festival of Setsubun, involves a crowd of people preparing for the new year by throwing roasted soybeans at a performer in an oni costume while shouting "Oni out! Luck in!".	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Oni
Onion Tears - TV Tropes "Hey, who left this bowl of onions here?" "A hard man is he who an onion shreds, yet not a teardrop sheds." Just like how pepper can make you sneeze, onions in fiction can produce oceans of tears, giving the appearance that you have experienced a horrendous tragedy, instead of the mild eye irritation that occurs in boring Real Life. Oftentimes, onions will make the characters sob uncontrollably, rather than just leak a few tears from the eyes. In Real Life, if the onions are green or very fresh, especially if cut very close to the root end, they can produce the copious tears, often accompanied by sniffing (because your tear ducts and nasal tubes are connected), but not the sobbing (although sometimes, the tears and sniffling can make you congested, forcing you to breathe through your mouth and send you even one step closer to the appearance of sobbing). However, there are easy ways to avoid this eye irritation if you're cutting or peeling onions; chilling the onions first, using a sharper knife, and wearing eye protection are all effective methods. This has several useful applications for those with something to hide: either you can disguise your real tears of pain by grabbing some onions to peel (compare Sand In My Eyes), or you can use onions to get tears in your eyes and simulate real pain when you don't feel it. Vaguely related is the situation in anime where a character simulates crying while not-very-subtly holding an eyedropper bottle. Apparently only the audience can see it, though. ## Examples: - A 90s Papa John's commercial had two employees talking, and they both start tearing up as they talk about how rough the job can be and how everything has to be "perfect". That's when their manager comes up and gives them more onions to chop up. - Beastars: Jack uses onions to force himself to cry because he think it is wrong that the disturbing information he learns about the world's history doesn't make him cry due to his species being engineered to not feel strong emotions. - This actually happens to Tommy in Digimon Frontier, the kids are forced to make burgers so they can save a digimon from Arbormon. He puts onions in his, and he even comments on it with the line "Here come the tears". - In episode 10 of Season 1 of K-On!, both Yui and Ritsu do this. Yui in particular looks cute while doing it. - One episode of Ranma ½ involved a mirror that could allow whoever held it to travel through time if their tears fell on it (which appeared in a previous episode). Genma tries to invoke this by shoving onions in Ranma's face. - An episode of Sailor Moon had Usagi and Chibiusa invite a young girl home for dinner. When the girl talks about how sad she is that she doesn't think her mother loves her, she asks if she could help them chop up an onion. - Episode 10 of Dragon Crisis! starts with Ai, Rose and Misaki all crying heavily, then shows that they are chopping onions at a picnic. - In episode 42 of Smile PreCure!, Nao cuts some onions and gets little bubble tears in her eyes. - In Vandread, Pai sees Dita and Hibiki in the kitchen, with Dita crying. She assumes that Hibiki upset Dita somehow, and uses this as an argument to get the men kicked off the ship. She feels bad later when she discovers that Dita was just chopping onions... because she and Hibiki were making her a surprise meal to celebrate her anniversary aboard the ship. - Akis: In "Why Oh Why", Akis' attempt to mimic a woman's acting from a TV program involves her smashing an onion on her face to make her tear up. The onion stings her eyes so much that she can't stop crying. - BoBoiBoy: - In episode 11, after Adu Du gets Probe to stop watching a sad soap opera, the former takes a look at the soap opera himself and starts crying. When Probe reappears and asks why Adu Du's eyes are red, he lies that he was just chopping onions while exercising, even demonstrating the combo to seem convincing. - In season 3, Adu Du exploits this by making an onion monster to get BoBoiBoy's tears as part of the DNA samples he needs to make BoBoiBot. It attacks the school and makes gas attacks which cause everyone to cry, but Yaya and Ying outsmart it by clipping their noses shut to stop crying. - In episode 10 of Happy Heroes, everyone is fawning over how good the food from the rice cooker tastes, and they even start to tear up over it... or not. The tears are actually just from Sweet S. chopping up some onions. - In Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Joys of Seasons episode 31, Wolffy has to water the seed of a remembering flower with his tears so that he can feed the resulting plant to Wolnie and restore her memory. One of his attempts to water the seed is to place two halves of an onion over his eyes to make him cry, which doesn't work. - Scott Pilgrim: Near the end of Volume 5, Scott is shown solemnly chopping onions with a completely stoic face while his eyes have turned into Ocular Gushers. A fellow worker comes and comforts him, to which he retorts by stating that it's the onions, not him. - In Shrek 4D (the 3-D Movie that plays at Universal Studios), newlywed Fiona is crying because her carriage is an onion. It's also referenced in the original Shrek movie during the "ogres are like onions" scene — Donkey suggests, "They make you cry!", as one of the possible connections. - In Pinocchio, Stromboli takes a bite of an onion and talks close to Pinocchio giving him tears. - This happens in the movie Last Holiday with Queen Latifah. Chef Didier discovers Georgia (Latifah) is dying and uses the fact that he is chopping onions to pretend to conceal his sorrow when she asks him not to be sad. - Averted in Diva with hipster-outlaw Gorodish, who uses a diving mask and snorkel when he chops onions in his kitchen. - Gargamel subjects Papa Smurf to this with this Smurf essence extractor in The Smurfs. - Used for a gag in Show People. Peggy has to play a dramatic crying scene in the film she's starring in, but she can't cry on command. Onion slicing is one of several attempts to get her to produce tears. - In Julie & Julia, Julia Child is practicing cutting onions. Her husband Paul walks into their kitchen and immediately tears up, starts wiping his eyes, and hurries out of the room. - A dead baby joke runs thus: What's the difference between a baby and an onion? \|\|You don't cry when you cut up a baby.\|\| Also applies to bagpipes, accordions, and violas. - An unrelated joke actually inverts this trope: You are so ugly you made an onion cry. - A mother and daughter are making dinner, the former carving chicken and the latter peeling several onions... and getting teary-eyed all over. "Why don't you try peeling them in water? You won't get the fumes in your eyes." the mother suggests. The daughter seems to get it and start filling a wash basin with water, but just then the phone in the hall started ringing. The mother leaves the kitchen, had a lengthy conversation, comes back fifteen minutes later... and finds the daughter soaking wet in the face, hair, and totally out of breath. "You're right, mom, it works!..." the daughter said. "But the problem is, it's so hard peeling them when your head's underwater!" - Private Eye uses the device " [Takes out onion]" to indicate/allege that a character (real or fictional) in its satires is insincere in his/her sorrow. - Referenced by way of a pun in "Vidalia" by Sammy Kershaw. The title female in the song gains her unusual name as a portmanteau of her parents Violet and Dale. As Vidalia is also a type of onion, this then sets up the title lyric "Sweet Vidalia, you always gotta make me cry". - In The Hidden Almanac, one of the history moments concerns an art work titled "Eleven Hundred Small Bits of Onion". Reverend Mord recalls that it was "reported to be a success, as no one could view it without bursting into tears, although some art critics suggested that this method was probably cheating." - Our Miss Brooks: In the episode "Tears for Mr. Boynton," Mrs. Davis advises Miss Brooks that she has to appear more vulnerable to attract Mr. Boynton. Davis hides onions in Miss Brooks' purse. In fact, the sobbing Miss Brooks is very successful in getting sympathy from Mr. Conklin and Walter Denton. She even gets Mr. Boynton to propose . . . almost. - The Trash Pack, Shopkins, and The Grossery Gang, three toylines from Moose Toys that share connected universes, all have a crying onion character (Smelly Onion, Boo-Hoo Onion, and Onion Scum and Smelly Onion, respectively). - Beyond: Two Souls: Jodie will shed a few in "The Dinner" when making either the chicken curry or the Asian beef. - In Sam and Max: Situation Comedy, the Freelance Police pay a hefty sum for a "Tear gas gun" that turns out to be a salad shooter full of onions. But it works! - In Tokimeki Memorial 2, one of the Drama clips of Mei Ijuin 's Blooming Stories CD has her cooking a meal for the main protagonist she has begun to fall in love with. As she's cutting an onion (her most hated food, which speaks for how much she cares for him), she reminisce about their childhood and how his selfless attitude towards her hasn't changed since then. Moved to tears by these thoughts, but prideful as ever, she claims the onions are making her cry. - In The Binding of Isaac, the Sad Onion is a passive item that increases Isaac's fire rate. It gives him two cartoony Ocular Gushers on either side of his face as well. - In Jack the Nipper in Coconut Capers, naughty points are achieved by using an onion to make hyenas cry. - A recurring character in the Cookie Run games is Onion Cookie, a young girl cookie who cries when she's scared... and because her tears are made of onion juice, once she starts crying, she can't stop. - Cuphead features a boss fight against a trio of giant vegetables known as the Root Pack, one of them being an onion named Ollie Bulb who attacks the player with his tears. - This happens twice in the Puyo Puyo series, both instances being caused by the onion-headed Onion Pixie. - In Sig's WakuWaku course in Puyo Puyo Fever 2, Sig will remark that "That onion made me cry" after defeating him. - In Puyo Puyo Chronicle, as the party makes their way through the Color Tower, they all get assaulted by an oniony stench making their eyes tear up. Surely enough, Onion Pixie is also nearby. - When the onion's cell walls are breached by cutting, the chemicals inside combine to form this gas, which irritates the lacrimal glands. A sharp blade will crush fewer cells. Cutting your onions underwater (e.g. in a bowl) or wearing sufficient eye protection prevents the gas from reaching your eyes. Rub stainless steel or wash your hands between cutting onions and touching your face, or this comes up in full force. - Also, this trope can be averted by proper cutlery know-how. Most of the chemicals that cause irritation to the eyes are located in the area near the root of the onion, so by simply not cutting there, and using correct technique, you can avoid watery eyes. - An old cooking trick is to hold a piece of bread in your mouth (not a mouthful of bread, but a whole slice, so some of it is sticking out). Others say to chew the bread slowly. Or, freeze the onion, and/or cut it under your stove vent fan set on high. - Fox News Channel commentator Glenn Beck spoofed his tendency to tear up on camera in a video showing an intern dabbing Vicks Vap-O-Rub under his eyes. Yes, the video is a joke. - Thinkgeek.com sells special onion goggles to avoid just this. note : Otherwise known as ANY set of goggles. - Buying frozen pre-chopped onions eliminates this problem altogether. - Though onions in general can lead to tears, they can be lessened by choosing your onions wisely. More pungent onions, including most red onions, will trigger more than a few tears in most people, while sweet onions like Vidalia or candy onions probably won't cause as much crying. - Referenced by the "onion-cutting ninjas" meme, those shadowy, even invisible cooks who are responsible for many a Sand In My Eyes moment.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnionTears
Online Alias - TV Tropes The Internet: Where you find yourself saying things like, "Ass Dan and Whackadoodle are right." People using the internet will rarely go by their given name. Writers seem to have some very specific ideas of how this works. The Cracker and Playful Hacker will use an alias as a pseudonym for all their hacker-y deeds (in extreme cases they'll only go by that name). They tend towards single words or two word phrases (preferably cool sounding). Expect generic references to popular characters and streams of numbers and letters appended to the end, or replacing some of the characters. It will almost certainly involve a pun on the user's given name if they're an important character. If an aforementioned "hacker" uses one of these it's generally to show that they're rather pathetic. Either way, expect usernames to be full of Xtreme Kool Letterz or be Names to Run Away from Really Fast. Their online alias could also be a Lazy Alias if poorly put together. In more recent works, since Technology Marches On, there's a fair chance there will be a more "normal" screen name for a character with an email or IM address. No one will go by the same or a similar handle and the main characters will never have any trouble getting a username derived from their real name no matter how common it is (unless it's being Played for Laughs), since It's A Small Net After All. note : Although the One-Steve Limit is sometimes Truth in Television for websites with user accounts. Computers often have cool names too; see Names Given to Computers. ## Examples; - Gundam Build Divers: All the main cast have GBN usernames derived from their real names - Yukio "Yukki" Hikada, Momoka "Momo" Yashiro, Koichi "KO-1" Nanase note : 1 = ichi, Aya "Ayame" Fujisawa, and... Riku "Riku" Mikami (written in English rather than kanji). - Yuusha Gojo Kumiai Kouryuugata Keijiban (AKA, Hero Union BBS) is framed as a series of threads on an interdimensional message board, so every character is primarily known by a handle. New users are called "Hero" by default, but they soon differentiate themselves by profession or world of origin, like recurring characters Student, Sage, Freeter, and Princess Shrine Maiden. A few even have new handles forced on them, like the college student who gets dubbed Magical Girl despite being mortified by her patissier-themed costume. - Red Robin - Tim Drake-Wayne/Red Robin goes by redbird. - Lonnie Machin (formerly Anarky) goes by MoneySpider. - Garfield: - December 3, 1999: Jon goes on a chat room under the name "Stephano", describing himself as "very rich and macho." According to Garfield, "nobody can empty a chat room like Stephano." - September 24, 2008: A comic revolves around Garfield using a cat chat room. His username is Garf1, and there are unidentified users named Whiskers232 and Pussnboots113. - In Hero Chat, the Miraculous Holders use aliases related to their hero names when they use Team Chat. They vary between Shout Outs and puns. - In Toy Story 3, someone by the name of Velocistar237 AIMs Trixie, temporarily interrupting Woody's attempts to use Bonnie's computer. - In The Matrix the rebels seems to adopt their handles as their names. Amazingly enough, their aliases are cool and mysterious... presumably because having a character named "Yoda324" would have ruined the tone of the movie. - Hackers, oddly enough, averts this partly; most people use two word phrases, like Acid Burn or Crash Override. - Kevin Smith appeared in Live Free or Die Hard as a Playful Hacker who considered his hacking Serious Business and went by the Xtreme Kool Letterz name of W4RL0CK or some such thing. - The Transformers live-action movie has Decepticon Barricade grill the protagonist over his alias: "Are you LadiesMan217?" - In the Japanese dub it's "playboy217" since "ladies' man" isn't a familiar term in Japan. To better suit this joke in the Spanish dub, his username is "DonJuan217", named after the famed Spanish womanizer. In the IDW comics adaptation, his ePay username is "hotstud217". - In Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the title characters are badmouthed by a bunch of anonymous internet loudmouths, all of whom are using an alias online. The most obnoxious of whom was named after an actual Troll on Kevin Smith's forums. (Perhaps a troll's CMOA.) - Thor trash-talks Korg's rival in Fortnite in Avengers: Endgame who has the online alias of NoobMaster69. - In Tad Williams' Otherland novels, one of the main characters goes by "T4b". Presumably pronounced "Tab". - Animorphs mostly features the "modern" idea of names: YeerKiller9, Gump8293, etc. But it also has some more hacker-like ones, like "Govikes" and "YrkH8er". - Lisbeth Salander from The Millennium Trilogy goes by the hacker name "Wasp," which becomes a plot point as Mikael is able to track her down using it. She initially had a tattoo of one on her neck, but The Girl with the Wasp Tattoo doesn't have the same ring to it. - Snow Crash has Da5id and, of course, Hiro Protagonist. They go by that in meat-space, too. - All the hackers in Vernor Vinge's novella "True Names" use these to keep their identities secret from the cops ("The Great Enemy") as well as each other. Mr. Slippery, Erythrina, Wiley J. Bastard, The Slimy Limey, DON.MAC, and The Mailman are just some of the characters known mainly or exclusively by their aliases. - In The Romulan Way by Diane Duane, it's explained that the Romulans' secret fourth names originated as online handles on the Vulcan version of the Internet. - In Sword Art Online, characters tend to get referred to more often by their MMORPG characters' names than their real ones, both in-series and out. A few characters' aliases are derived from their real names; for example, Kazuto Kirigaya goes by "Kirito" and Shino Asada goes by "Sinon". Asuna using her real name in Aincrad is cited by some characters as proof that she's a newbie (she adopts the aliases "Titania" and "Erika" in later games). - ½ Prince has most of the characters refer to each other by their Second Life character's name once they meet offline, because it's simply easier for them to recognize each other this way. - Log Horizon: Most characters also use usernames instead of their real names, when even some of them have friends who've learned their real names. At least three characters are known to have derived their username from their real name - Kei "Shiroe" Shirogane, Marie "Maryelle" Sakamoto, and... Naotsugu "Naotsugu" Hasegawa. - Infinite Dendrogram has a few cases of "clever" usernames backfiring on their users: - In one episode of the 11th season of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit there is a guy who goes by "Master Bater". - In an episode of My Family Ben is getting advice from a forum. A joke is made about the wisdom in getting advice from someone going by the name "Yoda2". - In one episode of The Drew Carey Show, Drew, as BeerStud2, has cybersex with a woman calling herself HoneyBee28, who turns out to be his Sitcom Archnemesis Mimi. - In Sex and the City, Stanford uses the screen name Rick9Plus on a gay hook-up site, and ends up having cybersex with someone calling himself BigTool4U. More mundanely, when Carrie sets up her first AOL account, she chooses the username "shoegal". - In one episode of Elementary, Sherlock discovered a potential suspect who had been online with the victim, but was confused as to why a male suspect would call himself "Lego Lass". When they met him, he explained he was "Legolas5". - Deckers in Shadowrun used mysterious and cool names if they were established and competent and ridiculous and common aliases if they were newbies. The first type were usually used as runner aliases as well. - Several are revealed after completing Lair of the Shadow Broker in Mass Effect 2. Miranda Lawson fittingly goes by LawBringerSR2. Jack uses Jck_60734, jkz0-19510, and, (for a submission to a professional poetry forum), Jaqueline Nought. Legion humorously goes by Infiltrait0rN7 for his MMO gamer profile. - Snake Fist in F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin, AKA Terry Halford. His 90's style handle is in-keeping with his status as Comic Relief who serves as a slightly awkward Mister Exposition and a Voice with an Internet Connection \|\|Until his untimely death\|\|. - In The Sims 3, there is a Sim in Sunset Valley who goes only by his online alias, "Cycl0n3 Sw0rd". - Many people in Deus Ex: Human Revolution have online aliases. The most prominent is probably Francis Pritchard's "Nucl3arsnake". - An interesting case in Uplink. The online handle that you choose for yourself at the beginning is also used as your legal name when you hack the Social Security or law enforcement databases. That's right, your Social Security Number belongs to a person legally named L33tH4x0r. Everybody else just goes by their normal name, including the world's top hackers. - Matt Miller, the leader of the Deckers gang in Saints Row: The Third, uses R4gn4r0k as his alias, though that only comes up in supplemental material. - Marcus Halloway in Watch_Dogs 2 goes by "Retr0" in online hacking circles, even before he joined DedSec. Josh, another DedSec member, uses "Hawt Sauce" as his handle. - In Life Is Strange, Max goes by "Noir Angel". A Shout-Out to another heroine named Max with strange powers. - Quantum Protocol: The Quantum members and other significant characters are usually referred to with their online handles. Though Leo uses his Real Name as an Alias. - Queen's real name is Elaine. - Esper's real name is Irene. - Aurora's real name is Alyssa Neskara. - Idol's real name is Lisa. - Omega, the leader of the city, has Kyril as his real name. - \|\|Kaia uses her species name, Dragoon, as her handle.\|\| - In Daughter for Dessert, KathyKat is the author of several stories on erotica websites where the main characters have striking resemblances to the protagonist and Amanda. - All the main characters in SC2VN use their online gaming aliases. Their real names are never revealed. - In Penny Arcade: - Ben from Loserz is "zombiejuiceYUM". Jodie is "p0rnstar6912". See this strip. - In The Noob, a little girl gets perma-banned by the KKK-like moderator without so much as a word of explanation, when he mistakes her character for the protagonist's, due to them having similar (but not identical) appearance and name. - Chat nicknames used in General Protection Fault: Gort (\|\|Nick\|\|), Pookel (\|\|Ki\|\|), B0R0M1R (Yoshi). - In Joe vs. Elan School, Joe posts on Reddit under the name "gzasmyhero," which he chooses as a tribute to the GZA from the Wu-Tang Clan. - The Guild, being a show on the web about gamers, definitely uses this. We sort of know the real names of the characters - all but Tink - but they rarely get used in favour of their gamer handles. - All of the main protagonists (yes, all 16 of them) of Homestuck have "chumhandles" that they use in their in-universe version of Instant Messager. All of them reflect the user's interests, personality or foreshadows their role in the series. They also follow a specific pattern of Theme Naming. - Notably averted by the White Text Guy, who communicates to the protagonists through their IM clients, but doesn't have a chumhandle. Or even a computer. - Also, a good part of the fandom has adopted online aliases following the convention of two words in Lower CamelCase. - And then parodied when we see the usernames of some GameFAQs posters, such as "ChaosDemon" and "winnie the poop 2". - Library Of The Damned has a Command Staff Chat for the Riffleet. So far, we only know that agig (The Character) is agigtheadmiral, thanks to a gag involving Xtreme Kool Letterz. - Everyone in Noob, that happens almost entirely in a MMORPG. Only the (real) names of the main characters, some people from their faction, the game's creator, the recurring Game Master and the recurring hacker are known. - A Something Awful cyberpunk parody included, among others, a character known as "Haz Cheezburger." - In the Shared Universe of Sunstone and Blood Stain, the main characters of both comics interact with each other through the in-universe MMORPG. We see in-game usernames in a supplemental comic, and we see a subversion for this trope; the usernames are clear references to their real names. Ally's and Dr. Stein's usernames are puns on their names ("allycat", "bloodstein"), while Lisa's and Elliot's are goofy but still clear ("liiiiiiiiisa", "ellyoldcoot"). - Sword Art Online Abridged uses most of the names from its source material, but throws in some twists. Agil goes by "Tiffany" in this treatment for as yet unexplained reasons, even though he's fully aware it's a woman's name. Klein got trapped in SAO under his test character profile, BallsDeep69, so soon his guildmates think "My name is Klein!" is how he says hello. And Kazuto gains enough notoriety in Aincrad as Kirito to have his preferred handle already taken when he tries out Alfheim Online - after hours spent going through permutations such as Kirito1, Kirito2, or Kiritwo, he ends up logging in under xVx_K1r1t0_xVx_KillMe; Kazuto shortens it when talking with Leafa, aka Suguha, who realizes who he is as a result and expresses squick-induced outrage back in realspace.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlineAlias
Two Words: Added Emphasis - TV Tropes Danae : Well? What are you waiting for? Lucy : A good reason to do this... Danae : Two words, Lucy...Risk Management. Lucy : Oh, I think I'm gonna need a lot more words than that. Two words: Spurious emphasis. Something so fundamental that it can be expressed in a snappy utterance, or just its mere existence. In fiction, if the reference is something the characters know about but never reveal to the audience, it can be an instance of "Two words: Noodle Incident". For comedic effect, The Ditz or The Fool will sometimes miscount the words, or anyone may break a single word into two parts for additional emphasis. That would be the subtrope, Two Words: I Can't Count. See Spelling for Emphasis for another form of emphasis. ## Three words: List. Of. Examples. - Denis Leary appeared in a number of MTV ads in the early 90s where he regularly invoked this trope, including this public service ad promoting tolerance and condemning racism: "One word folks, racism. One more word, Earth. If anyone gets any mail from outer space, that's gonna be the mailing address, okay?...I've got two words for you, David Duke. I got two more words, Nose Job, okay?" - A tin sign that advertises the Pontiac GTO says "Two Words... You Lose!" - A Steve Martin stand-up comedy routine from the 1970s. "You can be a millionaire and never pay taxes. Yes, you can have one million dollars and never pay taxes! How? First, get a million dollars. Now, you might ask, Steve, what do I do when the tax man comes by and says, 'You have never paid taxes'? Two words: 'I forgot.' How often do we get in trouble because we don't say 'I forgot'? Armed robbery? Just say, 'I forgot armed robbery was illegal.'" The bit predictably ends with, "Two words: 'Excuuuuse me!'" - To quote Jubilee from Generation X... "Three words, chump. Back and off." - In Issue 5 of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW) comic, Rainbow Dash sums up one of her plans to rescue Rarity from the Nightmare spirits with "Two words: time machine!" - Toward the end of Joss Whedon's first arc on Astonishing X-Men, Wolverine tells Colossus, "I got just two words for you, Bub." We don't see him say the two words, but the next two-page spread shows what they are: Fastball Special. - Teen Titans Go!: This line from Beast Boy when he and Cyborg are discussing two Super Ninja Fury movies and arguing over which one is better. Beast Boy: Two words, Cyborg: Canadian ninjas. - Sonic the Hedgehog/Mega Man: Worlds Collide: Sonic does this after Mega Man asks if he's impressed. Sonic: By that little robo-snake? Two words, kid: egg viper. - Dogs of C-Kennel: "Two words... Jet Lag."◊ - A few from Garfield: - January 5, 1979: Jon: Do you know why you need me, Garfield? I can sum it up in two words. Quality companionship. Garfield: Body heat. - December 29, 1991: Garfield: Sigh. Christmas is over, and New Year's is almost here. Sigh. So it seems appropriate at this time to stop and reflect. To reflect on those three words which represent the true meaning and spirit of the holiday season... Boogie! Boogie! Boogie! - July 15, 1995: - In the book Garfield's Book Of Super School Excuses, one of the excuses for "Why I didn't go to gym class" is "Two words: Towel snapping.", and one of the ones for "Why my library books are late" is "Two words: Hungry termites". - April 14, 2022: Garfield: If you give me a good number, I'll make it worth your while. Electronic Scale: You can't bribe me! Garfield: Two words: unlimited batteries. Electronic Scale: Hellooooo, Skinny! - Burning Vengeance has Yui ask Mephisto II how he can punish a sexual fetish demon. He replies "Two words: Enforced. Abstinence." - In the Danny Phantom/ Beetlejuice crossover Say It Thrice, Betelgeuse gets to deliver one to the poltergeist Sanduleak. - Turnabout Storm has an exaggeration, courtesy of Pinkie Pie. Pinkie: You know what this calls for? Two words: A PARTY! Phoenix: A party? Pinkie: Twenty one words: Yeah, a party! You should come celebrate, too! Because I love having parties with all my friends after something good happens! Phoenix: [counting] "After... something... good... happens... [Beat] H-How did you...!? - In Finding the Truth Harry comments on Fred and George's twin-speak. Harry: You know that's almost more bearable with the super hearing, except when you two comment under your breaths while the other is talking. Then it's like hearing the same voice in stereo yet talking about something completely random. Two words: Headache. Inducing. - In Sword and Shield Hermione claims that Harry "owes" her and the student body for what they've done for him. Harry: I owe them nothing. They ridiculed me, teased me, pushed me down the stairs and tripped me in the halls, tearing my robes. And you! You pretended to support me but now I can tell you actually didn't! And for all the help you gave, if you had left me alone, I would have learnt it by myself sooner. And as for the adventures I only have two words- Mountain Troll! - Hercules has a Running Gag where Philocetes cannot manage to use "Two words" correctly. The Latin Spanish dub makes his Last-Second Word Swap the only time Philocetes follows "Two Words" with actually two words. In the original English, Phil says "Two words: o-kay".] - "I am retired", however, actually does translate to two words in Greek, becoming "Είμαι συνταξιούχος." - Shrek: Shrek tells Donkey at one point: "Two words: Shut up!" - Moana: As part of the Villain Song Shiny: Tamatoa : I need three words to tear her argument apart: Your granny lied! - Ice Age: Continental Drift: While our heroes witness Captain Gutt abusing his workers (who, by the way, are about the size of gerbils), Sid remarks "Two words: Anger management." - Ben Sobel, from Analyze That, is talking with a pair of police detectives, one of whom is an attractive woman in a short skirt. After his wife catches him staring at the detective's legs (and inadvertently commenting on them via a Freudian Slip), she excuses herself from the room, briefly commenting to the other woman that she should wear a pants suit instead of a skirt. "Two words of advice, from one professional woman to another: Pant. Suit." - In the film Beautiful Girls: - Andera tells Tommy there are four words she needs to hear before going to sleep; "Good night sweet girl." - Later in the film, as Marty and Willie are discussing Willie's girlfriend Tracy, Marty says, "Two words not in her vocabulary; lunch money." - The trope may have originated in The Graduate, with one word: "Plastics." - Independence Day: "Two Words, Mr. President. Plausible Deniability." - Sister Act Sister Mary Clarence: I got two words for ya, Vince! Mary Roberts: Mary Clarence! Sister Mary Clarence: ...bless you. - In This is Spın̈al Tap, one of the band's reviews for Shark Sandwich is "Just two words: 'Shit sandwich.'" This is one of the few times where the cast actually laughs. - Angel: "The Shroud of Rahmon": There are two words that Cordelia does not like to hear together: "tomb" and "unearthed". Cordelia: OK, two words I don't like right off the bat: "tomb" and "unearthed." People, you've gotta leave your tombs earthed! '' - In Married... with Children, when Kelly is rendered bald and bearded by the side effects of a pimple cure, the director of a beer commercial she was to star in cancels the shoot. Upon hearing this, the Straw Feminist group protesting the commercial threaten to sue. Director: [to Al] Can they do that? Sue on behalf of the ugly? Al Bundy: Four words: Attorney General Janet Reno. - Buffy the Vampire Slayer: - Ordered by Buffy to explain what he's doing in five words, Spike retorts "Out. For. A. Walk." Realizing he still has one left, he adds, " Bitch." - "Consequences": Wesley is quite taken with Cordelia the first time he sees her, describing her as "cheeky," but Faith deflates him by commenting, "Uh, first word: jail; second word: bait." - "Dead Man's Party": Principal Snyder refuses to allow Buffy back into school, so Giles goes to have a quiet word. Snyder: If the word is Buffy, then I have two words. "Good" and "Riddance". - Supernatural. The jailbait gag is also used when Dean insists on being the one to interview a high-school cheerleader. - Gavin & Stacey, when Smithy goes to the stag party organiser: Jammy the Stag Party Organiser: One word: Overhead Projector: PRAGUE Jammy: Two words: Projector: PISS UP Jammy: One word: Projector: TITS - Doctor Who: - In the episode "The Christmas Invasion", The Doctor emphasizes to everyone present that with only six words he can bring down Harriet Jones' government. He says the words "Don't you think she looks tired?" and Harriet Jones' government collapses within the day. - In the Series 3 finale, Martha Jones prepares everyone in the world to say "just one word.. Doctor" at the exact same instant and, with spectacular use of a Chekhov's Gun (somehow), brings the Doctor back to his original state and saves the entire planet. - At the end of "Turn Left", \|\|Donna relays a message from Rose to the Doctor: "She told me to tell you two words... Bad Wolf". Cue the Doctor's Oh, Crap! and the Cloister Bell for emphasis\|\|. - In "Last Christmas", when the Doctor, Clara and several others encounter Santa Claus: Shona: This is not happening! Santa: I've got three words, Shona, don't make me use them... My Little Pony ! - Madame Vastra gives Clara one word for her emergency message to the Doctor from the Victorian period. One word: Pond. - Played with in 30 Rock: - One Whose Line Is It Anyway? improv game starts by giving each player a number, and they had to act out a scene by speaking only lines consisting of that number of words. Hilarity Ensues. Stephen Fry: [6 words] Well I'm sorry, but it gets. [beat] My goat to hear her talk! - In the Grand Finale of Chuck, Chuck has a showdown with the Big Bad on the roof of a concert hall. The villain gloats about how he's set up a bomb that will go off once the music stops. (Chuck already knew about this.) He listens as the orchestra finishes its performance and waits for the bomb to go off. Suddenly, we hear the opening drumwork of "Take On Me". Big Bad: What's that? What is that? Chuck: One word: Jeffster. - Gossip Girl: "3 words, 8 letters; say it and I'm yours." The 3 words in question are "I love you," but there have also been jokes about it: "I got food." - From a Whitest Kids U Know sketch: Executioner: Do you have any last words? Prisoner: YES, JUST THREE. [beat] - The West Wing episode "Stirred" has Bartlet explain that the reason he wants to keep Hoynes as his vice-president is "four words," which he writes down: \|\|"Because I could die."\|\| - In the Boy Meets World episode "Honesty Night", Cory suggests to Topanga that they should pretend to be still estranged despite their recent reconciliation so Shawn can save the day and not feel left out. Topanga doesn't think of this as a good idea while Mr. Feeny sees this as a disaster in the making and decides to intervene, prompting the following exchange: Mr. Feeny: I have five words: Topanga is correct. Cory: That's only three. Mr. Feeny: You moron. - A predator on Dateline spawned a meme by defending himself like this. "Two words: 'Role-playing chatroom', dude." - Kanye West's album College Dropout has a song called "Two Words". - The Order of the Stick: - Schlock Mercenary: - Tagon is trying to recruit Massey into joining the Toughs as their attorney. Massey refuses, as ever since meeting the Toughs he's been put in numerous life and death situations. And now that the Partnership Collective wants to assassinate him, all Massey really wants is some bodyguards. Tagon response: "Two words: Armed Mercenaries." Cut to Massey signing the recruitment forms. - Massey's initial refusal started with one as well: "Two words: No way.". - Earlier in the story Tagon gave one to Breya: "Two words: Bomb on board." that it was three words wasn't lost on the "admiral". - In a later arc the temporarily in command Kevyn leveraged his reputation as the resident Mad Scientist to intimidate the grunts into behaving with two words: Guinea Pigs. And a couple arcs later his future self scared his past self by completing the sentence first. - Homestar Runner: In the Strong Bad Email "radio", Strong Bad demonstrates how a typical College Radio DJ tends to be a mumbling, awkward "bewildered freshman" and says "College radio can pretty much be summed up in five words: Dead air, 'um', dead air." - According to SF Debris's Chuck Sonnenburg in part 1 of his Nightsisters review, there was a two word review for the Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated movie: \|\|"Shit sandwich." Which he then reuses more than half a minute later to describe his opinion on the first episode of the cartoon based off of said movie.\|\| - In Ten Little Roosters, Ryan has to play Charades with Miles to get him to put on the headset in the soundbooth. Miles: [Ryan holds up two fingers] Two words. [Ryan does gesture for sound] Sounds like... [Ryan flips off Miles] Go fuck yourse— Oh, you want me to put on the headset. - Darkwing Duck after facing a huge fire-breathing monster; "Two words, breath mint." - In the "Late Show" episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, the #1 line on the "Big Ten list" is "'Two words.' * beat* That's it, just... 'two words.'" - Exaggerated in The Spectacular Spiderman. In response to Peter's protest, J. Jonah Jameson asks him to scram, followed by him giving a 17-word suggestion. Humor ensues when Peter questions how fast talking J.J. Jameson could count the amount of words he would use in his next sentence in the split second it took him to say the words. "How about scram? Or two words: Scram kid? Or seventeen: Get out of my office in two-point-three seconds, or I'll staple you to a flagpole!" - The Fairly OddParents! has Cosmo say "two words: mouth wash" in one episode. Wanda corrects him by telling him mouthwash is one word, after which Cosmo says mouthwash twice to correct this. - The Simpsons: - Episode "I Married Marge" parodies the practice by making the "'n'" of "and" half a word when Patty says, "Marge, I've got two-and-a-half words for you. Gulp. 'N'. Blow." - When Lisa asks for advice on how to gently let down Ralph Wiggum, Homer suggests, "Six simple words: I'm not gay, but I'll learn." - In Total Drama Action, when the castmates have to vote off two at once, Lindsay refers to them each as a single word because she hates how much they keep making out: - Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum: In "I Am Cleopatra", Xavier doesn't know how to ask his parents if he can stay up late to see a supermoon. Yadina suggests telling them that Xavier has two words: "Super. Moon." Xavier points out that it did not work when Dr. Zoom wanted "More. Pie." - Young Justice (2010). At the end of "Alpha Males", Kid Flash has taken the red beret worn by the ape Monsieur Mallah as a Battle Trophy. Artemis: What are you grinning about? Kid Flash: One word: "souvenir"! (puts on the beret) Artemis: Two words: "gorilla lice". Kid Flash: Ugh! Oh, man! (Immediately takes the beret off) Two words, The Stinger.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneWord
One with the Index - TV Tropes Greetings, fellow troper. I can feel your presence for I am at one with this web page. I am on a quest to find others who have extended their perceptions beyond their original body. We meet every other Friday for tea and crumpets and discuss our unique experiences. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause to those of you who have transcended time but are not yet quite sure how to reverse the process. For assistance, please call 9+1i.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneWithTheIndex
One We Prepared Earlier - TV Tropes "One We Prepared Earlier" may refer to: - The old name for In Medias Res, when a story begins in its middle. - One I Prepared Earlier, for a pre-made version of an item for cooking shows or the like, to speed up the demonstration process. 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/OneWePreparedEarlier
Tooth Strip - TV Tropes Travis: And while we're talking about mouth bones: why I gotta floss!? One solid piece. Griffin: One big tooth! Travis: One solid chomper! Most people have 32 teeth, and in animation it isn't always practical to draw each individual tooth in a character's mouth. In some case it can run the risk of careening down the Unintentional Uncanny Valley. Because of this, a popular way of simplifying teeth is to draw them as a solid toothy mass stretching from one side of the mouth to the other. Mostly an ignored trope. Especially unusual when some characters have tooth strips while others have realistically drawn teeth. It's common for people with normal teeth to be drawn this way while characters with Scary Teeth, Cute Little Fangs or otherwise unusual chompers have their individual teeth drawn to further emphasize their otherness. Depending on how loosely an animator is tethered to their model sheets, this can vary Depending on the Artist. Contrast with British Teeth and More Teeth than the Osmond Family when you really do mean to see each one of those pearly whites. Tombstone Teeth are a lesser degree of simplification where the teeth are drawn individually, but just as rectangles. For a similar shorthand used on facial stubble, see Solid Cartoon Facial Stubble. ## Examples: - Notably averted in Beck in that every character has all their teeth visibly shown. - The only character in Speed Racer that has individual teeth is Captain Terror. - One Piece Zig-Zags this. A good portion of the time characters are shown with these teeth with notable exceptions like Arlong, especially early in the series, though later on it sort of goes back and forth with this. - Generally, non-Gonk women have these at all times, while men (who are generally drawn with larger, more expressive mouths) only have this when they're speaking calmly. - A female from Franken Fran goes through extreme plastic surgery to look like a cute anime girl. At one point, her lower jaw gets removed and replaced by an artificial, small version that has a single strip for teeth, because her chin his made so small to fit the look, there is no more room for individual teeth. - Prof. Chronos de Medici/Dr. Vellian Crowler is a notable aversion. His teeth are always drawn distinctly apart from each other. It doesnt really do his Gonk appearance any favors though... - Characters in Cap Revolution Bottleman have undivided strips of teeth. - The Iguanadons in Dinosaur all have tooth strips, as a sop to real Iguanodons having beaks (basically they have lips over their beaks in the movie). - Pixar is infamously known for their tendency to give most of their nonhuman characters this kind of teeth, whether they are either toys, insects, monsters, fish, or vehicles. - The Incredibles averts this completely. Several characters' teeth were modeled after those of Pixar's animators. - Played straight with many animated Disney characters. Aversions include Beggar Jafar's crooked dentures and The Coachman's Nightmare Face. - Second Apocalypse: One of the many distinguishing features of the Nonmen is that their teeth are all fused together. The sranc, being based on Nonmen DNA, also have this feature. - In The Enemy Papers, the Dracs have one continuous tooth strip. - This is one of the signature traits of the eponymous purple dinosaur, Barney. - The Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger and Power Rangers Dino Charge have their helmets molded to resemble dinosaur heads; where helmets based on carnivores have serrated triangular patterns for teeth, the herbivore-based helmets have just a set of strips on the top and bottom. - The Leucrotta from Greek mythology is a hyena-like creature that has a solid ridge of bone in place of teeth. - Parodied in FoxTrot. Roger tries a whitening toothpaste which erases all the lines between his teeth. - All of the Sonic The Hedgehog characters are shown this way, though quite a few of them have Cute Little Fangs as well. - This is how a great many Nintendo characters are drawn; exceptions, such as Wario and King Hippo, are almost always to invoke Gonk. - Impressive Title: The playable lion characters' teeth are depicted as thin white strips to compliment their cartoony appearance, but since the teeth are completely flat, the lions don't have any noticeable fangs to show off. This bugged many players as they argued that they looked unnatural, and some insisted on wearing the Fangs accessory item on their characters at all times just to give them more proper-looking teeth. Some fan-hosted servers even went to the point of editing the game's models, or replacing the teeth entirely just to keep it from annoying players. - Averted in Feral Heart, in which the playable characters have a realistic set of teeth displaying incisors, molars, and all. - Zigzagged in Ask the Ryans; characters having individual teeth varies between comics, but typically they will have strips if they are a significant distance away. - ''Girl Genius': The artstyle depicts most human teeth as a single flat white strip, unless there are fangs to be drawn or indicating individual teeth will help get an expression across. - Humans in Gunnerkrigg Court are usually depicted this way. - Lackadaisy actually shows a good reason as to why you'd want to use this trope in the first place. Just compare Rocky with a tooth strip to Rocky with fully rendered teeth. - In El Goonish Shive, most characters are depicted this way unless they are particularly monstrous or nonhuman. - Pretty much anyone in a Seth MacFarlane series. Especially Mr. Bottomtooth of Family Guy, a pretentious rich guy with a single bottom tooth. His son shares this trait. Strangely, Herbert the creepy pedophile also has tooth strips when he laughs or chuckles, despite not having most of his teeth. The end of the episode "Mind Over Murder" takes this to an even more bizarre extreme; Stewie's teeth have teeth. - Averted in South Park— even though the characters are crudely animated, they still have lines to mark the division of teeth. - The Powerpuff Girls: The girls sometimes have these. - We see a weird variation in Invader Zim: the Irkens all have their teeth joined together in an undulating, zipper-like pattern◊. The humans usually have their teeth drawn separately. - This is standard in 3D modelling: the artist models a tooth strip and maps the color and normals to make it look like a row of discrete teeth. - Bubs from Homestar Runner. - The Car Crusher at the end of The Brave Little Toaster has a large guillotine-like blade used to crush cars into tiny cubes that's shaped like a wall of teeth. - Recess uses this sometimes. Usually, regular shots of the characters will have this trope in effect, while more exaggerated expressions avert it. - 101 Dalmatians: The Series, Depending on the Artist. - Also Depending on the Artist, Spliced had one artist who seemed keen on presenting uneven teeth in some of the characters. - Just like the above example, Animaniacs had this happen at times. Usually in the shorts by Wang Film Productions, StarToons and on occasion, TMS Entertainment. - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic generally draws teeth like this. The exceptions tend to be extreme closeups, such as during Sweetie Belle's nightmare in "For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils" and the Mouth Cam shot of Zecora in "A Health of Information". - The big bad of the Season 4 Finale, \|\|Lord Tirek\|\| more often than not subverts this trope. His teeth often being animated as disgustingly crooked and fanged by the animators. - Attentive viewers will note that Hulked-out Saddle Rager averts this trope too. - Batman: The Animated Series Mostly plays this trope straight with its characters. The most notable exceptions are The Joker, and Two-Face's scarred side's drooping mouth. Sometimes subverted when extreme reactions are shown. - Big City Greens downplays this a bit; while everyone does have white strips of teeth, the ends are bumpy to resemble the tooth lines. Played straight with Cricket's celebrity doppelganger Zillon Brax, who is the only character on the show whose teeth lines are completely straight with no bumps. - Hanna-Barbera animator Carlo Vinci utilized these. - Characters in Steven Universe generally have their teeth simplified to strips, unless their teeth are the only visible part of their mouth—then, they'll be drawn as three or four teeth in a single row◊. Jasper's more detailed expressions, including several Slasher Smiles and attempts at genuine smiles, are an exception, having both rows of teeth drawn individually. Spinel also generally has her teeth drawn more detailed than the other characters, even after her HeelFace Turn. - In an unusual non-human example, The Amazing World of Gumball gives all the rabbit characters (Richard, Anais, and Granny Jojo) a single frontal tooth instead of the closely-space buck teeth of real-life rabbits. The same goes for Frankie, a rat, and the family of goats in "The Copycats". - Luna from Let's Go Luna! has a long, undivided strip of teeth. - The Crumpets sometimes depict teeth like this, usually if only the upper teeth is visible and the teeth is not blocking the entire mouth. - Most of the human characters in Avatar: The Last Airbender, and by extension The Legend of Korra, have teeth of this kind. - Characters In SpongeBob SquarePants zigzag this. Squidwards almost always drawn with his teeth like this (likely in reference to the fact that, as a cephalopod its actually a beak). Mrs. Puff almost always has them like this as well. Eugene Krabs is an interesting subversion in that, while his teeth are always one solid strip, they do have divider lines that dont COMPLETELY connect from top to bottom. - Ready Jet Go!: The characters' teeth are usually styled in this manner, although a few close-up shots show that they do have individual teeth. - Popeye starting in 1951 for the theatrical shorts has these teeth. Other characters like Bluto and Olive Oyl are drawn with them Depending on the Artist. Though his nephews are an aversion, almost always being drawn with a single tooth. - Dunkleosteus, a prehistoric fish with armored skin, once sported exposed jawbones closely resembling fictional examples of this trope. - Cookie-cutter sharks have all of their teeth fused together with one another, causing them to lose, swallow, and replace entire rows of teeth at once.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneWideTooth
Online Games - TV Tropes Games that can only be played while connected to a wide area network like the internet. All online games have two necessary components: a server and a client computer, with larger games having multiples of each, though usually the number of client computers is far greater than servers. Many games throughout the history of gaming have been exclusively online. The earliest form of online games are arguably the Play-by-Post Games, originally referring to snail-mail and covering games such as Chess; they moved online with the advent of email and forum servers, the quicker response times and computer automation let to text-based muliti-player games like the Multi-User Dungeon (M.U.D.), related to the single-player Interactive Fiction. As computer graphics expanded into 2D and 3D rendering, video-games had wildly varying limits on the maximum amount of players in a single virtual-space, with newer games trending towards smaller groups as hardware development was focused on graphics-quality. This changed with the development of Massively Multiplayer Online games, or M.M.O.s for short, showcasing large numbers of players beyond typical multi-player gaming for LANs. One way this is accomplished is by having multiple servers, each hosting a different section of the in-game world. MMOs started with the Role-Playing Game genre and have since branched out to others, including First-Person Shooters and Real-Time Strategy genres.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlineGames
Video Editing Terminology - TV Tropes Video editing comes in various forms, and this page focuses on some of the methods used, such as continuity editing and variants thereof. <!—index—> The core of this style is the careful timing and use of cuts and other transitional effects. Deciding when to switch from one shot to the next can be crucial, as a mistimed cut will be very noticeable to the viewer. The defining characteristic of Montages is that they don't follow the rules of continuity editing. With the rise of digital, the workflow is slightly different. Digital can in theory be made from the original files, as it is "non-destructive". But as most films are still done on film, it will first need to be scanned, which creates large and heavy files for editing. Same goes for many digital cameras, shooting on large, hard-to-edit files. As such, most material is transcoded into proxy files, the standard formats being Apple ProRes and Avid DNxHD codecs, which are used for editing. When the edit is locked, these will then be replaced (using a linking process) with the originals. The film also goes into color grading. When working with analogue film, some work was done in the lab to control the look, but in digital the possibilities are very big. Today's film stocks and cameras like the Arri Alexa and RED cameras all shoot with very big dynamic range, resulting in images that look rather "flat" but gives detail in both shadows and highlights. On set, these will be previewed with a LUT (Look-Up-Table) with some more color and contrast and then during grading the final look is created. After this, the film is mastered to digital files and then either sent to a negative for film releases, or converted to DCP (Digital Cine Package) for digital projection and prepared for DVD or Blu-Ray releases. On today's digital workflows, the work itself is not that different. The major difference now is now more technical, with the editing not compromising on working with timecodes, but instead editing files directly, allowing faster speed and simplicity. This form of editing is also called non-destructive as it doesn't alter the original files. In theory, this means that it could be made without the need for an Online Edit, but most films are still shot on film (then being scanned) and many digital formats are very processor heavy, instead leading to the use of proxy file which are files that are down converted to easier to edit format (the industry standard being Apple ProRes and Avid DNX). The most basic form of linear editing can be done with two VCRs. Just hook one to the other, press play on the first and record on the second. More decks and equipment can be added to mix audio, synchronize control tracks, and add transitional effects and keys. Mistakes can kill this type of editing, so having an extensive plan made up from the Offline Edit is essential. Until sophisticated digital platforms came around, this was really the only game in town for footage shot on tape. Film has always had the advantage of the Non-Linear Edit — tape, glue, a razor blade, and some skillful hands are all it takes — so even after tape was invented many pre-recorded shows were (and are) still shot on film. Because of the limitations of linear editing, shows that were made on videotape, such as I, Claudius or Upstairs Downstairs tended to be shot one whole scene at a time using multiple cameras, which tends to explain their theatrical look. Live production is a form of linear edit, except instead of a tape the output goes directly to the transmitter. In order to perform a non-linear edit, the footage to be edited must be recorded to the hard disk. If the footage is analog (i.e. VHS, Video8, Hi-8, Betamax), it must be digitized. If the footage is already digital (such as MiniDV or Digital8 cassettes), it must be captured. If the digital footage is recorded onto an internal hard drive or flash memory within the video-recording device or a memory card, the footage files can simply be imported into the computer via drag-and-drop. Next, appropriate software is used to trim and assemble the footage, add transitions and graphics, mix the audio, and render the visual effects. Then, the footage is "printed" back to a tape, uploaded to the Internet, or reformatted to a digital video file and stored on DVD or a video server. To allow maximum efficiency when dealing with the large video files, most non-linear systems use hard drives running in parallel to store their footage (RAID arrays). Non-linear systems revolutionized video editing, and with the falling price and increasing power of personal computers it is available even to the amateur video producer. Since many DV camcorders recorded directly in digital form and had direct digital output (via Firewire), and modern consumer and prosumer camcorders often record directly onto memory cards or internal memory storage that simplifies the import process (usually via direct USB connection or an SD card reader/slot), home computers can do what was impossible even for broadcasters as few as twenty years ago. It's even gotten to the point where simple-to-moderate video editing capabilities can be performed on Smartphones and tables, thus enabling shooting, editing and sharing video all within the same device! In film, non-linear editing is accomplished by physically cutting the film up (with a razor blade) and gluing it back together. This is an advantage that tape doesn't have, since you can't see the frames on a video tape to accurately cut them. (One can assemble tape in this way, but it is crude at best. Nonetheless, some audio editors do it as a matter of course.)	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlineEdit
Only a Flesh Wound - TV Tropes "Anyone who has been shot in the leg and tried to walk immediately afterward was not hired as the technical consultant on this movie." On television, as well as in movies, there seems to be this general idea that if someone is shot in the shoulder, or in the leg, then the worst that happens will be that the person will grimace and go on with what he was doing before he was shot. Getting shot in the leg may cause him to hobble around a bit, but no worse than a knee sprain. A "good guy" will sometimes shoot someone in the leg or shoulder, "just to stop him," and in television and movies, this is almost always nonlethal. In reality, there's no "safe" place to shoot a person, not even in a seemingly non-vital extremity like a leg or arm. Since the arm is a highly-developed and extremely important area of the body, it's supplied by plenty of absolutely huge blood vessels that go through the shoulder, note : To name three of the biggest ones, the Subclavian artery, which comes right off the aortic arch, the axillary artery and the brachial artery while the area also has lots of very delicate nerves and a very complex ball-and-socket joint that no surgeon on Earth can put back together once it's smashed to splinters by a bullet. Furthermore, a shot to the shoulder has a very high chance of causing arterial blood to spill into the lung, which would be fatal in most instances. The legs also contain large blood vessels; a shot that nicks the femoral artery will cause a fatal loss of blood in only a few minutes. And this is all assuming a "clean" through-and-through wound, disregarding the possibility of the bullet glancing off a bone or joint and deflecting or fragmenting into pieces, of which each can then hit something else more important inside. In short, there's no way for anyone, good or bad, to shoot someone and know that they will survive the wound. As they say, if you're shooting at all, you're shooting to kill. But this trope is so widespread that it's caused people to assume that it's an accurate reflection of reality. In truth, since there isn't any safe place to shoot at, police and soldiers usually aim for the center of mass ( i.e. the torso) simply to increase the odds of hitting the person in the first place. Trying to intentionally wing a target increases the odds that you'll miss entirely or end up hitting someone else. When dealing with dangerous criminals and where innocent lives are on the line, presumably, hitting the target, and only the target, should be top priority. Insofar as this trope has any truth to it at all, it comes from the fact that the largest muscle pads on the human body about the only type of tissue which can take a wound of impressive visual nastiness that isn't necessarily incapacitating or life-threatening are in the thighs and the outside ( not the center) of the shoulder. The gluteus maximus will also suffice, but that particular target zone is often felt to lack dramatic gravitas. This is despite it being a relatively common wound among retired soldiers because of its size, and because getting hit there is ( comparatively) less lethal. Hitting someone on the other side of their body, in the groin, on the other hand, pretty much guarantees they will bleed out very quickly. When the character insists on this, regardless of evidence to the contrary, he is saying I Can Still Fight! (which he does not, in fact, have to survive). Video Games are usually an exception. Draining a game target's HP is quasi-realistic enough to kill/destroy it even if all damage was to the legs or arms. In games with dismemberment, taking off a limb may lead to instant death. Very few video games actually feature bleeding and those that do tend to be Overdrawn at the Blood Bank. Surprisingly, a person suffering a traumatic amputation in Real Life is often less likely to bleed out due to an autonomic muscle clamping response that closes major blood vessels. In these cases, a clean cut or puncture is actually more dangerous. Do note that many of the examples below are subversions or outright aversions. A small part of Surprisingly Realistic Outcome. See also Major Injury Underreaction, Hollywood Healing, Made of Iron, Critical Existence Failure, Didn't Need Those Anyway!, Unexplained Recovery, Belated Injury Realization, Obviously Not Fine, Lodged-Blade Recycling, and 'Tis Only a Bullet in the Brain. Contrast with Instant Death Bullet. Particularly egregious examples would fall under the category of No One Could Survive That!. ## Examples: <!—index—> <!—/index—> - Eddie Murphy deconstructs this trope in a bit from his club days captured on his eponymous debut album. He tells the audience about having seen a friend get shot, and contrasts how it happens in the movies with all the standard clichés, ("I'll be OK ... go on without me") including the name of this trope with how it happened in real life: his friend screaming endlessly and yelling "Motherfucker, I've been shot!" - In one of ventriloquist Jeff Dunham's concert films, "Spark of Insanity", Jeff points out that Achmed the Dead Terrorist is, as his name suggests, dead: Achmed: No I'm not! I feel fine. Jeff: But...you're all bone! Achmed: It's a flesh wound. - Averted in the Fire Emblem Fates fic A Brighter Dark where even "light" hits are enough to effectively remove a character from play for long periods of time. Though less noticeable than other examples due to frequent timeskips. - Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami features a final battle in which \|\|Soichiro Yagami and Watari, having been irradiated, set on fire and taken unholy amounts of punishment beforehand, continue to fight each other after having hacked each other's arms off\|\|. - In The Night Unfurls, the closest instances of a major injury that Kyril sustains are a punctured lung from a crossbow shot, and a sword wound to an arm and a leg from his duel with Vault. Both of them are received in the Liberation of Ansur Arc. Being a Bloodborne hunter, it would not be surprising to see him shrug off said injuries without trouble. - In a James Bond Fan Film Property of a Lady, one of the mooks is shot in the leg, interrogated (without the wound being bandaged or anything) and is then able to walk not 15 min. later. - When Tails refuses to hand over Cosmo to him in Episode 73 of Sonic X: Dark Chaos, Tsali throws him to the floor and rips his heart and lungs out of his chest with his bare hands. Tails responds by turning into Shroud Tails, immediately regenerates his wounds, and retaliates in kind. - Thoroughly averted in the Supernatural fic Down to Agincourt, in which a minor bite from a brownie (the fairy kind, not the chocolate kind) gives \|\|Dean\|\| a systemic infection that literally kills him twice and which he spends months recovering from. - Warriors of the World: Soldiers of Fortune averts this trope when Valkron gets a blade in his left shoulder. His left arm is rendered completely useless for the remainder of the time, he can't fight, he's bleeding profusely and the only thing stopping him from falling unconscious from shock is adrenaline — and even that was only for a while since he eventually passes out. - Naruto: The Abridged Series spoofs this in the first episode where Iruka-sensei gets stabbed by a gigantic shuriken: Iruka: Ow! That kind of stung. Naruto: Didn't that hit your spine? Iruka: Nope! It's only a flesh wound . Naruto: But it's pretty deep in there. Iruka: Eh. I've had worse . - In Hero House, \|\|Vegeta\|\| isn't quite as concerned about losing his hand as he should be. - A.A. Pessimal's Discworld fic Why and were sees Assassin Johanna Smith-Rhodes having her left arm broken when a leopard goes for her. note : She is wearing an armoured sleeve; she escapes with a broken arm and a few toothmarks . After being patched up by an Igor, she goes back into battle with a splinted and plastered left arm. and ends up in a position where she has one silver-plated crossbow bolt and a direct line of sight on a wereleopard. Knowing the impact of firing a crossbow on a newly broken arm will not do it any good at all, she fires anyway... - Cars: - In Cars, a totaled racecar insists that he can still race as he's being towed away. - In Cars 3, Lightning McQueen crashes violently in the Los Angeles 500 as a result of pushing himself too hard. But after a 4 months recovery in Radiator Springs, he appears to not have any lasting injuries and is not paranoid about the crash itself but more about what that crash could mean for his racing career. - In the first Shrek, Shrek is Shot in the Ass with an arrow. After Fiona pulls it out, without any other first aid, he's fine. He didn't know it was even there until Fiona pointed it out. - Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children: - Cloud getting stabbed in the shoulder by Sephiroth with no ill effects, and worse, a few minutes later, Yazoo shoots him in the back, with the bullet coming right out of his chest. He doesn't even get healed or anything... - Advent Children Complete is even more guilty of this. \|\|After Cloud gets stabbed in the shoulder by Sephiroth, He gets thrown into the air, stabbed around 7 times (through the arms, shoulders, chest, one stab going THROUGH his knee and continuing into his shoulder). He then falls to the ground in a puddle of his own blood, pulls out Omnislash and is apparently fine except for being exhausted and having a few cuts ....Until Yazoo fires at him.\|\| He gets a HEADSHOT and doesn't really care about it. His glasses are gone though... - Averted in The Transformers: The Movie, where Starscream kills Brawn by shooting him in the shoulder. - "Rocky Raccoon" by The Beatles: He said Rocky you met your match And Rocky said, Doc it's only a scratch And I'll be better I'll be better Doc, as soon as I am able'' - Trapped in the Closet, Part 7 He says "Son, we gotta get you to a hospital and take a look at that wound." Twan says "No, I'm okay. It's just my shoulder. All I need is a bathroom." - "Trigger Happy" by "Weird Al" Yankovic: Oh, I accidentally shot Daddy last night in the den I mistook him in the dark for a drug-crazed Nazi again Now why'd you have to get so mad? It's just a lousy flesh wound, Dad You know I'm trigger happy, trigger happy every day - Bleak Expectations: Protagonist Pip Bin gets stabbed in a sword-fight and insists it's just a flesh wound. A deep flesh-wound. In fact, so deep a flesh-wound that it's gone straight to some of his vital organs, "but a flesh-wound nonetheless!" He's fine shortly afterwards. - In the Magician episode of Another Case of Milton Jones, a rival magician shoots at our hero. Milton assures his girlfriend that he can catch the bullet... in his shoulder. "Ow", he adds. - Tying in with Made of Iron, Survival of the Fittest often has characters shrug off wounds which, in real life, would be either severely debilitating or outright fatal. Jacob Starr is a good example of this, as he was able to take injury after injury yet just keep on coming. - Averted in Aces And Eights. There are damage charts detailing four possible damage types: Gunshot, Slashing, Piercing, and Bludgeoning, and effects of different levels of damage inflicted depending on the body part. Typically anything around 7 and higher results either in a broken bone, severe bleeding, or a permanent injury regardless of location. - Dark Heresy's (fairly absurd) Critical Damage tables avert this. It's about as easy to kill someone with a leg shot as one to the torso, and hitting anywhere can often cause blood loss (and resulting death...). - Averted in F.A.T.A.L., involving some of the usual Artistic License Biology. It's possible to damage the uterus on a male mook while avoiding everything else completely. - GURPS has an optional "Only a Flesh Wound" rule to deliberately invoke this trope in less-gritty games. - Damage charts in The Riddle of Steel are quite brutal; even glancing blows have the ability to knock out the target, and lower levels of damage still have the ability of tearing a muscle or breaking a bone. All damage dealt also causes the recipient to lose dice in their dice pools, effectively weakening their combat proficiency and further increasing the risk of injury or death. - Witch Hunter: The Invisible World has the "It's Just a Scratch" talent, which allows the user to ignore the penalties from Light and Medium wounds. - Averted in Cyberpunk. Much damage to an extremity will leave it useless, with the extra bonus of a saving throw to survive the shock. Besides this, damage is treated the same way as if you were hit on the torso (not in the head.) - This is the effect of Storms' Practical Magic in Princess: The Hopeful. A Princess of Storms can invert wound penalties into bonuses, meaning that she will actually get stronger when severely injured. In addition, invoking this magic means that the Princess will not have to roll to avoid falling unconscious when her health track is filled with Bashing damage, though she does start bleeding out if her health track is filled with Lethal damage. - In Promethean: The Created, the titular Prometheans don't suffer any wound penalties, don't have to roll to avoid falling unconscious when their health track is filled with bashing damage, and don't start bleeding out when their health track is filled with lethal damage. In effect, you can fill a Promethean with bullets or stab it half a dozen times, and until you get to the point where you're chopping off limbs or blasting large chunks of the Promethean's body away it will still be as dangerous as ever. - Red vs. Blue: - In the first season, Sarge receives a bullet wound to the head, and is resuscitated with standard CPR. Later in the early second season, Caboose's toe is shot off and is rendered fine after being rubbed with some aloe-vera. In season 3, we come across a group of 'capture the flag' players, who get up after a trumpet is played, even after being shot point-blank with a sniper rifle. Even later, it is practice for the Red team to shoot Private Grif before enacting any plans. Regardless, it seems no injury is sufficient to render someone in the series dead indefinitely. - In most cases, this is just Rule of Funny, although sometimes it's played a little more seriously. During Reconstruction, Caboose shoots Agent South Dakota. After a few minutes of battle, they approach her. She says she can't walk on her own but appears to be perfectly capable of standing (though that's partly due to the limitations of machinima). - The DEATH BATTLE! episode that sees Shao Kahn fight Akuma, the former shrugs off the latter punching a hole into his chest like Liu Kang did in Mortal Kombat 9. \|\|Only unlike in 9, where he needed Quan Chi to speed his healing up and was still staggering when he got back to his throne room, the episode applies Adaptational Badass and Shao's up on his feet, ready to resume the fight, and kills Akuma within moments of the wound's infliction.\|\| - Forcibly played straight in The Adventures of Dr. McNinja. Doc is shot multiple times, passes out, and nearly(?) dies of blood loss. He refuses to die by arguing with the Grim Reaper that none of his wounds are fatal and missed all his vital organs (and then immediately drags himself back to the clinic for stitches and a quick blood transfusion). When Death mentions his arteries, the good Doctor responds by ripping off his head and batting it away with his body. - Bob and George: - Taken to extremes with Nate at one point - since he's a Yellow Devil who can shapeshift at will, even being splattered all over the walls is just a flesh wound to him. - Averted here, where the Helmeted Author tries to claim that a huge chunk of physical energy through his gut is just a flesh wound, as he's already visibly pale from blood loss and immediately keels over afterwards. \|\|He gets better a few strips later when Nate removes his helmet and releases his true form.\|\| - Concerned. Lampshaded near the ending when it was revealed that Gordon Frohman survived a ton of abuse and injury — up to and including zombification via a headcrab — because \|\|he was inadvertently using a cheat code that prevented his health from going below one. After he again-inadvertently turns the code off because "Buddha" is fun to say, he properly bleeds out and dies from all the wounds sustained from being thrown from the top of the exploding Citadel and then getting hit in the face with his also-falling shovel. Amusingly, an unofficial sequel set during Episode One then has him brought back by automatically reloading a checkpoint from just before he turned off Buddha mode\|\|. - This was BLU Engineer's reaction \|\|when the new RED Spy cut his hand off\|\| in Cuanta Vida. BLU Engineer: Relax, kid. I'm not gonna die. BLU Scout: Jesus Christ, dude! \|\|Your hand!\|\| BLU Engineer: \|\|I'll build a new one .\|\| - Demonseed Redux: Dee is cut from behind by Rhoda's raven-griffon. When Chica kills it, Dee says she's fine by quoting the trope. Though on top of being pregnant, it eventually takes a toll on her. - Averted in Get Medieval: Asher suffers a shoulder wound and is reduced to talking status for a while. - Girl Genius has a rather... extreme example. Gil: Seven broken ribs. Severe fracture, right leg. Fractured clavicle. Some crush injuries, but the kidneys appear unharmed. First and second-degree burns on upper back and lower legs, third-degree on the lower back. Four broken fingers, three broken toes, sprained and bruised muscles throughout major and minor lacerations, and a concussion. Klaus: I've had worse. - It hasn't been explicitly stated in-comic, but \|\|Klaus was evidently stitched together from the remains of three brothers who were killed in a lab accident. So... he's not lying\|\|. - Dimo the Jagermonster tries to shrug off his arm injury (referred to by the other Jägers as rhino-hiding, so they are obviously familiar with this sort of thing) and eventually loses the arm. - How to be a Werewolf: After being bitten by a werewolf and having to tear the werewolf off leaving a large bloody wound in his side Vincent tells Malaya he's fine and gets back up to rejoin her on his own, though shortly after he ends up on his knees when the adrenaline wears off. - Averted in It's Walky!: Jason is shot in the arm trying to help Sal escape prison. The wound becomes infected (since caring for a bullet wound isn't like caring for a shallow cut) and gets steadily worse until he can be convinced to see a doctor. - In the Little Worlds comic named "Breaking In", Derby incredulously asks Eightball, "Aren't you supposed to be SHOT?" to which Eightball replies, "It didn't take." Apparently, a bullet wound ain't no thang. Earlier in the chapter, Eightball refers to the wound as a "rather inconvenient bullet." - The Order of the Stick often has characters getting SNEAK ATTACK run through with swords and being okay to keep fighting. Or frozen into blocks of ice like the rogue guild's leader. Very dependent on having a name. The characters aren't supposed to represent real animal physiology; their health and wellbeing is based on the hitpoint system used in Dungeons & Dragons. - This happens to Set in Sonic the Comic Online!. Tekno \|\|tries to murder him, by bashing his head in with a metal bar, and a few issues later he comes back and says that she didn't hit any major organs\|\|. He lacks any scars too. - Soul Symphony: John fractures his arm in battle, preventing him from playing basketball for the rest of the season. He says the injury is "totally worth it." - Stand Still, Stay Silent: Sigrun tries to pull this off after a troll bites her in the arm badly enough to require stitches. Unfortunately for her, Surprisingly Realistic Outcome occurs during a critical battle when the pain from the bite wounds leaves her unable to keep a grip on her dagger, and she's promptly slammed in the stomach by an attacking troll. - And Shine Heaven Now subverts it; in spite of her bravado, the character is knocked down in the very next strip. - In Yokoka's Quest, Mao's right wrist gets bitten by a snake-centipede, though it's not clear how deep it pierced his flesh. He continues using that hand to throw fireballs and Kalliv without difficulty later in that same fight. - Discussed in this Straight Dope article. - In Void Domain, many injuries that would be serious for humans in Real Life are rendered far more harmless thanks to the existence of potions. Demons don't need to bother with potions, their enhanced regeneration abilities render the loss of limbs as literal flesh wounds. - Terrence of KateModern gets shot in the shoulder in "Answers". The pain causes him to pass out almost instantly, but he's up and about, and apparently unimpaired, a couple of days later. \|\|He is a former Shadow, though.\|\| - Halfway through the Epic Rap Battles of History between Romeo & Juliet vs. Bonnie & Clyde, Bonnie shoots Juliet in the stomach. She got up a few seconds later, happily singing that "[her] flesh was merely grazed".	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyAFleshWound
One World Order - TV Tropes According to a good deal of Speculative Fiction set in The Future, it is the natural order of things that all governments will merge together to create a central authority to govern the entire species. It's not necessarily the human species, however. Sapient aliens also almost always have a single government to whom every law-abiding sophont in their race answers. Any conflict between members of the same species will be called a civil war. Especially true if The 'Verse of the show contains boatloads of sapient species. The examples can cover a range of extremes: the government is benevolent, efficient, enlightened and out for your well-being; just downright evil; or plain realistic, or anything in between. It may be true that in order to expand to the stars, a species would have to pull together as a team and overcome the tremendous challenges involved. Though it can also be seen as corner-cutting on the part of writers, to avoid having to keep track of more than one government per alien. Every species in the increasingly crowded galaxy will also have a single unified culture. It can be detailed, as for an alien in the main cast, or it can be a one-note quirk if the creature in question hails from this week's Planet of Hats. Either way, it is rare for any species to have more than one language, artistic tradition, religion, or culinary style. This trope is not necessarily unjustified. There are a number of conceivable differences in the way an alien race's history played out versus our own that could result in their world being more unified than ours. For example, if their starter population and/or landmass was smaller, or if one tribe conquered the others. If the species in question is humanity, there may be more diversity involved, if only because the writers don't need to invent it all. The aliens may also look the same. The United Nations was a popular choice for fulfilling this function before the organization gained a reputation for corruption, indecision and inefficiency that persists to this day. Of course, that in itself can be a useful trope. See Ditto Aliens. See also Planetville and Planetary Nation when this applies to non-human species. Note: If you happen to be in a Christian "End Times" story, and a single government controls the planet, watch out for the dude with the goatee. Alternately, watch out for the guy standing BEHIND the dude with the goatee. If the "villains" are seeking a One World Order to remove the political divisions that enable international war, they may be Well-Intentioned Extremists. If the villains go even further than that, it could be an Assimilation Plot. Earth examples often overlap with United Nations Is a Superpower. ## Examples: - In Dragon Ball, the entire world is ruled by the King of Earth who's briefly usurped by the Great Demon King Piccolo. What's even weirder is that the king is a talking dog, and dogs apparently have a history of ruling over humanity. Weirder still, according to Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot that particular dog Was Once a Man. - In One Piece, the entire world is ruled by the aptly named World Government. In the past, there were other countries (at least 20) but they banded together to defeat the old world power. Nowadays there is a civil war led by the Revolutionary known as Dragon. - However, the World Government is, in many senses, more similar to the real-life United Nations than to a single state. It is repeatedly shown that the leaders of countries that are part of the World Government still hold considerable power, and Vivi has numerous flashbacks that show the kings and leaders engaged in debates and politics similar in style to, say, the UN Security Council. The core differences are that the World Government a) seems much more united in its efforts than the often divided and bickering UN and b) has vastly more resources at its direct disposal. - There are still many minor governments, but the World Government is working hard to incorporate them (sometimes peacefully sometimes... not), or obliterate them and send their populations to slave works. They are that kind of people. - It is noted there are some unaffiliated countries, but in most cases it's because they're poor nations unable to pay the "Heavenly Tribute" tax required by member states of the World Government. These countries usually become lawless wastelands without the protection of the Marines due to constant pirate raids. - And within the World Government, there are people everywhere on the moral scale. Compare Spandam, who (used to) run Cipher Pol 9, an assassination network, and has no qualms about shooting anyone, even his own allies, if it meant avoiding trouble; to Magellan and Hannyabal, who run the world's top-security prison and genuinely feel their duty is to keep the world's worst criminals from wreaking havoc on innocent people. As a result, normal people's views on the World Government are a mixed bag, with either dread or relief depending who they find out is involved. - Anatoray and Disith in Last Exile eventually merge to form this under the leadership of \|\|Empress Sophia\|\|. - Sara's and Lottie's home planet in Str.A.In.: Strategic Armored Infantry, as well as possibly the whole Union, resembles... Victorian England in space with gender equality. Go figure. - In Martian Successor Nadesico, Earth and several lunar and Martian colonies are governed by United Earth, with a united military force called the "United Earth Allied Forces" - Common in the Gundam franchise: - In the Universal Century Gundam shows, the Earth Federation had long established control over the entire planet. On the other hand, it's presented (especially further down the line) as an elitist, bureaucratic mess rife with corruption. Their reach beyond the planet is also shown to be shaky at best, with many of the colonies not exactly eager to be under EF rule. And it's strongly hinted that their grip on Earth itself progressively becomes less stable. - In Gundam 00, the three world-dominating blocs which make up most of the world form a World Government to oppose Celestial Being, and call themselves The Federation. At first they are evil, due to the manipulations of the Big Bad , but at the end of the show become a benevolent version (and headed by someone who looks a lot like Hillary Clinton). - The latter half of Gundam X focuses on the remnants of the old Earth Federation trying to reclaim their old influence... by forcibly conquering Europe, Asia, and Africa. By the end of the series, though, they're still having a hard time with North America (they really didn't expect the generally lawless and fractured city-states and Vultures to band together against them) and the remaining space colonies are not pleased with the Federation's revival. - In Gundam Wing, we get to see this in action as the Romefeller Foundation uses their overwhelming military power to conquer the planet, forming the World Nation. Then they make Relena their figurehead leader and she pulls Reassignment Backfire by turning the World Nation benevolent. At the end of the series, the World Nation surrenders to the colony rebel army White Fang, and between then and The Movie it becomes the Earth Sphere Unified Nation, which despite the name seems to be a more benevolent Federation. - It was also the same case in Gundam AGE, except their enemies are Martian colonists with a grudge for the corrupt Earth government. - As Gundam: Reconguista in G reveals, the Earth Federation ultimately collapses under its own weight. Centuries later, its successor, the Capital, is ostensibly content overseeing the semi-independent nations that now dot the globe \|\|on behalf of its true, Spacenoid masters\|\|. - In Monster, many organizations hope that Johan Liebert will lead them to this. Johan Liebert doesn't care about any of that as he shows all of them that Evil Is Not a Toy. - Macross: Mankind is united after World War III under a more powerful United Nations. By the end of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, the government renames itself the New UN, which develops into a decentralized interstellar federal republic spanning half the galaxy that has incorporated multiple other Protoculture-influenced species, most notably the Zentraedi (with other races including the Zolans and the Ragnans). - Code Geass has the Holy Britannian Empire become this briefly in the end after the Final Battle, conquering the fledgling United Federation of Nations. \|\|After Lelouch dies, Britannia gives up those recently-conquered territories and begins to coexist peacefully with the rest of the world.\|\| - The Science Adventure series, which includes Chaos;Head, Steins;Gate and Robotics;Notes involves the \|\|Committee of 300 who seek to unite the world through a one world government\|\|. - Earth Federation in Transformers: Energon. - The civilization setting in One-Punch Man turns out to be this. - In one Justice League of America story, it's explained that the reason so much cosmic weirdness gets drawn to Earth and not other inhabited worlds is that Earth is unique in the universe for having a multitude of different races and cultures. Go figure. - Similarly, Green Lantern/ Sinestro Corps Secret Files claims that Earth is "the most diverse and emotionally rich planet in the universe, boasting more differing cultures and languages than most galaxies". - Earthgov in the Zero Hour version of Legion of Super-Heroes is like this, with a little President Evil (President Thawne) and Secret Police (the Science Police) thrown in for spice. The United Planets in general might qualify, but they're more The Federation. - Some Chick Tracts are set in a world ruled by a single (and malevolent) government, as foretold according to some interpretations of Christian end times prophesies. - Strikeforce: Morituri had the Earth ruled by a one-world government called the Paideia at the time of an alien invasion, although the earlier nations still existed as a lower level of government. The series was notable for the way in which a change of writer rapidly caused the Paideia to shift from benevolent to cartoonishly evil. - The Star Wreck parody films have the P-Fleet, which controls all of Earth. In the final film, after being stranded in the past, Pirk, Dwarf, and Info convince the personnel of a nuclear power plant to build them a new warship. Pirk then approaches the Russian President and provides his forces with advanced weapons. They conquer Earth fairly quickly, after which Pirk gets rid of the President and becomes the Emperor. - All the Troubles of the World: Nations appear to have been dissolved; there is only "the government" and regional managers of the government. As part of the Setting Update, the regions are no longer named for the audience. - One Nation Earth is in control of all the earth throughout all the movies in the Apocalypse film series so far, and has been shown to be rather oppressive to both Christians and those who have not chosen a side. - Barbarella: According to this film, in the 41st century, the entire planet Earth will have a single president. There's also something about him having authority over the entire Solar System but it's not clarified. - Bicentennial Man: The government works differently compared to the original story, although specifics aren't given. When Andrew is pleading his case, it is before an organization called the World Congress, but the "head judge" is World President. They have the power to pass bills. So it's all three branches in one, without any need for regional/state legislature? - The Fifth Element: Tiny Lister plays the President of Earth. - The Starship Troopers universe had one government controlling Earth and all colonies. There was a massive war between China and Russia/Europe/America and after 90 years a wave of revolts in Europe overthrew the current governments and formed the United Citizens' Federation, then the Americas did the same. Finally they decided to go to war with China (and anybody who was left) to create the peaceful loving government we know. Would you like to know more? - In Space Truckers, not only is Earth run by a single government, but that government is about to be privatized by a Corrupt Corporate Executive named E.J. Saggs. - In the second The Omega Code film, Stone Alexander convinces the leaders of the world to create a united government and name him as its president. He proceeds to endear himself to the world by coming down on terrorism hard. The world is split into various "zones", but a few nations are still holding out and refusing to submit, including the US, China, and a number of Latin American countries. The American President even bristles at his country being offhandedly mentioned as part of the North-American Zone, stating that he's still the President of the "United BLESSED States of America". By the end, Stone even starts wearing a military uniform and a beret, like he's a third world dictator or something. \|\|The Chinese appear to submit eventually, and all three hold-out armies send their forces to join Stone's, only to attack suddenly, with Stone's brother David, now the President of the US, leading the charge.\|\| - Z.P.G.: The future Earth is run by a dictatorial government called the World Federation, which has outlawed reproduction for thirty years on pain of death. - The nation of Alar in Adam R. Brown's Alterien. This nation is comprised of the Alteriens who have learned to live together in harmony. - In David Wingrove's Chung Kuo, the entire world is ruled by the Seven and simply called the City, or Chung Kuo. - In Star Wars Legends, most species on the galactic scene are very much from a Planet of Hats. - But... at the same time the trope is somewhat averted. Several alien species hail from a number of planets - Duros, Twi'leks, Zabraks, and, yes, humans, all come from any number of worlds rather than just One World Order. Even the Mandalorians (more of a loose cultural affiliation rather than a species) now come in more than one variety, each wildly different than the other, thanks to Star Wars: The Clone Wars. It's also worth noting that the galaxy is, itself, often depicted as a multispecies coalition rather than as single-race empires. - Starfighters of Adumar is about, among other things, a planet that had been human-colonized and left isolated being discovered by the New Republic and the Empire. The planet, Adumar, was a nonunified mass of countries, many at war with each other, making trying to get the world to affiliate with one or the other complicated. Negotiations were with the leader of the largest country with the greatest number of allies. He was trying to unite the planet under him; other countries weren't having that, and there was a battle. The bottom line has a world government formed from representatives of each country, rather than that one guy. - In the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, The Antichrist becomes leader of the UN and creates the Global Community, declaring a single world government, currency, and religion. No one objects, and it's not clear if this is supposed to be because of his Mind Control abilities. Its successor, the universal state created by God after the Second Coming, also qualifies as a (supposedly) more benign example. - Ira Levin's This Perfect Day has the entire world unified under the control of one gigantic supercomputer, although the backstory shows that political and cultural unification predates the building of UNICOMP by a generation or two, while each continent had its own computer before that (EUROCOMP, USACOMP, et cetera). This political unification is one of the few things about his society that doesn't annoy the hero so much that he decides to blow up the computer. - The first arc of Perry Rhodan, "The Third Power", features the unification of Earth under ultimately one of these as part of the plot. Here it's presented as a positive development — the 1971 Earth of this universe is caught up in a three-way Cold War (loosely, in addition to the standard split China and the Soviets don't exactly see eye to eye either) and needs to get its act together because the first aliens have already arrived in their crashed starship on the Moon and more are sure to eventually follow. - In Peter F Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy, Earth deliberately creates colonies of this sort by a process of "ethnic streaming", to avoid giving people obvious differences to fight over. This is realised after the first, multi-ethnic extra-solar colonies descend into anarchy. Earth itself has a unified government, GovCentral. - In Dan Simmon's Hyperion Cantos books, the Hegemony of Man is a Multiple-World Order, with almost 250 planets under one government, all connected by millions of Farcaster portals. - In Rocketship Galileo by Robert A. Heinlein, peace is enforced by the guided rockets of the U.N. World Patrol. - The Ganymede Takeover by Philip K. Dick and Ray Nelson makes reference to the U.N. Army fighting the Alien Invasion. - In the contemporary Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard Morgan, a U.N. Protectorate maintains its rule over the Earth colonies by propaganda, military force and subtle corruption. - A particularly cynical version appears in Larry Niven's stories of Svetz the time traveler. The "SecGen" is apparently the absolute monarch of humanity, but the current SecGen (the product of centuries of inbreeding) is a grown man with the mind of a small child. The actual control of the government rests with those who are most successful at bureaucratic infighting and at cajoling the SecGen into approving their decisions. - In A World Out of Time by Larry Niven, the Human Popsicle protagonist is revived into a world ruled by the State, a totalitarian government that controls all of Earth and its offworld colonies (although the colonies have something to say about that later in the novel). - It is strongly implied that The Church of His Dark Materials wields de facto (if not de jure) power over the whole Earth. At least in Lyra's universe. - Last and First Men: World governments arise several times over humanity's history. - The Americanized First World State lasts for four millennia; yet its downfall \|\|rapidly leads to a new dark age\|\|. - The Second Men create three global civilizations over their history, each lasting for millennia. - The Third Men likewise form three global governments, whose lifespans measure between fifty thousand years for the least-enduring to a quarter million years for the most. - The Polity: This is pretty much what the Polity is — it's autocratic but fairly benevolent. - German philosopher Oswald Spengler wrote in his non-fiction book The Decline of the West that he thought the western civilization might create this at the end. - Carrera's Legions: The UN became this several centuries prior to current events in the series, and was renamed United Earth after the concept of nations was eliminated through legislative and bureaucratic methods. - In the Childe Cycle, the worlds of Newton, Cassida, the Friendlies, and Exotics are governed by strong planetary governments. Newton and Cassida are ruled by technocrats, the Friendlies are a theocratic republic, and the Exotics are... unique. Though there are constant sectarian violence with the Friendlies, their leadership is powerful enough to keep things in order. - The Tower and the Hive series has humanity united under the Star League. In the Pegasus trilogy, we get to witness the evolution of the United World; while the world is united under one government, that government is composed of layers of international institutions, and the various nation-states still exist and retain sovereignty. - The UHU (United Human Universe) in Maurice Dantec's Cosmos Incorporated although it's vague on how much actual power it has as national governments still exist under it's umbrella. - In The Moon Maid by Edgar Rice Burroughs, 21st-century Earth is united under "the Anglo-Saxon race," and governed jointly by the United States and the United Kingdom. This is broken in The Moon Men, when the Earth is invaded by the lunar people. - Played with in The Lost Fleet: - Humanity most definitely isn't one of these, but individual solar systems within The Alliance and the Syndicate Worlds are invariably highly centralised; mention is made of Syndic "Planetary CEOs", and it seems that the Alliance Senate has no more than one senator from each system, which works because individual worlds are very sparsely populated by our standards; one hundred million in a system that boasts a comfortably Earthlike world is considered quite substantial. Old Earth is still around, but its large number of still-extant national governments is something of a historical oddity, and a cautionary tale. - The "Beyond the Frontier" sequel series lampshades and deconstructs this trope when the Alliance finally meets the alien race whose existence was foreshadowed with steadily decreasing subtlety from the first book onwards. It takes them a while to figure out that the aliens are also politically divided, and apparently dislike each other intensely enough to keep Star Killing weapons emplaced in their border regions. Unfortunately for the Alliance fleet, Species Loyalty and their intense dislike and mistrust of humanity trump whatever differences they may have. - This is explored more in The Genesis Fleet prequels, set during the formation of The Alliance. Old Earth is actually getting less like this trope by doing away with its single Space Navy, selling off ships and crews to new colonies in need of protection. The Alliance gets founded specifically as a way for new colonies to protect themselves from hostile colonies, who try to take advantage of the power vacuum. On the other hand, interstellar law only permits a single group colonial rights to a world. This is why it's such a shock when the expansionist colonists from Scatha establish a second colony (and a powerful military base) on Glenlyon, with the people of Glenlyon being initially unable to do anything about it. Additionally, there is tension on Kosatka, as the colony's second city demands independence from the planetary government. The government eventually agrees to allow the other city limited autonomy, but it's not enough, and a full-blown civil war breaks out, although it becomes clear that Scathans are secretly supplying the rebels and inflaming the situation. - Develops through a layer of international institutions during the To Ride Pegasus trilogy. Individual nations still exist, and the United World functions as a federal government. - Most alien societies follow this in the EarthCent Ambassador ebooks, but EarthCent itself doesn't have much actual power over humans in general or Earth's nations in particular: it's initially little more than a formality imposed by the Stryx in exchange for FTL drive. Kelly's diplomatic exploits start to expand its influence over the course of the series. - Isaac Asimov's - "All the Troubles of the World": With Multivac the supercomputer, Earth has merged all governments into a single organization run by the greatest computer ever devised. If Multivac were to be destroyed, it would be The End of the World as We Know It. - "The Bicentennial Man": Like many other stories in the Robot Series, America's form of government has expanded to encompass the entire world. Sir is a member of the Regional Legislature, while there also exists a World Legislature, World Court, and World President. - "The Dead Past": At this point in the future, there's a single unified government that has taken over not only the national governments, but also the colleges and universities that teach and sponsor scientific research. - "Evidence": The different countries of Earth are replaced by nameless Regions, and laws are justified with references to individual Rights under the Regional Articles. It's made more explicit in the collection I, Robot, and Dr Calvin says the Regions of Earth formed a Federation in 2044. - "The Evitable Conflict": Stephen Byerley is the chief executive of the world, and given the title Co-ordinator of the Earth. Below him are the four Regional Vice Co-ordinators, one for each of the geopolitical parts of the world; Chin Hso-lin (The Eastern Region), Lincoln Ngoma (The Tropic Region), Madam Szegeczowska (The European Region), and Mr Mackenzie (The Northern Region). Of course, all policy decisions are actually made by the Machines. - "The Hazing": Implied Trope based on one of the aliens commenting that the humans from the Solarian System have a "world capital" called Earth. - "Homo Sol": - It is implied that the humans of Sol have formed a single unified government by the existence of Terrapolis, known as the capital city of Earth. - It is stated several times that the only known forms of intelligent life in the galaxy are Humanoid Aliens. Over two hundred species have joined the Galactic Superpower so far. - "In a Good Cause": - "The Martian Way": There's not much said about the world government, but it is implied to essentially be the same branches as the USA's. The General Assembly is a legislative branch with committees and Assemblyman Hilder is aiming to become the next Global Co-ordinator. The colonies appear to have their own local governments because they sign trade deals with Earth. - "Mother Earth": Earth is the capital of the Terrestrian Empire, but even as this story begins, the empire has shrunk to Earth's system alone. Each of the Outer Worlds, as the colony planets call themselves, has their own planetary government, and they've broken several ties with Earth. The belligerence displayed by the Terrestrial government provokes the Outer Worlds to war against the homeworld. At the end of the story, Ernest Keilin learns about the conspiracy that provoked the war, and how they're arranging for him to be President of Earth under a brand-new constitution. They envision Earth taking the lead again in a century's time. - "Not Final!": Earthmen have united under a single government, one that has begun colonizing additional parts of the Solar System, including Ganymede. - "The Tercentenary Incident": Despite revolving around the celebration of America's tercentennial, it is no longer the USA, and is instead one political segment of a larger Planetary Council, which is the governing body of a Federation that encompasses all of humanity, including the Colonized Solar System. It was no longer a nation in the old sense; it was rather a geographic expression; part of a greater whole that made up the Federation of all of humanity on Earth, together with its offshoots on the Moon and in the space colonies. By culture and heritage, however, the name and the idea lived on, and that portion of the planet signified by the old name was still the most prosperous and advanced region of the world...And the President of the United States was still the most powerful single figure in the Planetary Council. - "The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use": The Terrestrial Government runs all of Earth's affairs, with a President of Earth. Until the native Venusians revolted, there was a provincial Venusian Government as well, which reported to the Terrestrial one. - Isaac Asimov and Janet Asimov's The Norby Chronicles: A Downplayed example because while the Solar Federation is a government for the entire Colonized Solar System, it doesn't have absolute command. Even places like Manhattan International Territory are considered part of the Solar Federation. The organization is probably intended to be similar to the different jurisdictions of Federal, State, and Municipality governments in America. - The Sister Verse and the Talons of Ruin has this in just about every dystopic government introduced, the Crest being of particular note, who attempted to merge every universe into one for the purpose of social unification. - Arrivals from the Dark: Averted in the first novel Invasion, with the old nation-states still around (although some have merged, such as US and Canada for one and Europe for another). In fact, until the arrival of aliens, the Space Navy's primary concern is fighting a number of rogue terrorist nations that have sprung up over the past several decades. After the failed invasion, however, the UN is fairly quickly upgraded to the World Government. A few novels later, it's further transformed into the Earth Federation that includes the Solar System and all human extrasolar colonies. Averted in the case of the Kni'lina, whose homeworld is split into a number of clans/subspecies, dominated by the Ni and the Poharas clans, who even have different cultures and governments (the Ni are technocratic and secular, while the Poharas are deeply religious and have an empire). Most Kni'lina colonies tend to belong to a particular clan, but at least one is evenly split between the Ni and the Poharas, with plenty of tension on that planet. In fact, during the Human-Kni'lina War, only the Ni and their affiliated clans were involved in open hostilities with humans, the Poharas maintained their neutrality. - In The History of the Galaxy books, Earth is initially dominated by four superpowers, but they are eventually absorbed into the World Government, although a number of Mega-Corp have considerable influence. After the Great Exodus, with thousands of FTL-capable colony ships have left the Solar System never to returns, the various mining colonies across the system lord over the overpopulated and resource-starved Earth. Eventually, John Winston Hammer is elected President of Earth, and he proceeds to conquer the entire Solar System, establishing the Terran Alliance. Most colonies are also run by a single government. - Emperor Dayless tried to create one of these in the backstory of Shadow of the Conqueror so as to gain the resources needed to wipe the Shade out once and for all. The problem was that he tried to do so via militaristic expansion, hence his title, "the Conqueror." - All of the Houses in The Zodiac Series answer to their respective governments, and most of these Houses encompass two or more planets. - Babylon 5 - EarthGov is more of a national alliance than the traditional One World Order, but it's the only representative of the entire human race to the other races. Although a large part of the story arc is that it becomes this trope when President Morgan Clark seizes dictatorial powers and uses the Psi-Corps and Earthforce to impose his authority on Earth and its colonies. - The Centauri and the Minbari are of the more traditional interpretation of a One World Order, each as the sole government of their respective races. - Despite the fact that the humans in Battlestar Galactica come from twelve different planets, there is only a single primary religion among them (although some groups are more extreme or dogmatic in their beliefs than others, and atheism definitely exists in their culture as well). However, in the original series, at least, there are different sects referred to, and a guarantee of religious freedom is part of Colonial law, or at least culture. It's also arguably justified by the fact that their gods seem to exist physically in some form. - At least in the new series, the Twelve Colonies are implied to have been in contact since their founding, making it fairly reasonable that they would have a fairly unified culture. The really surprising thing is that different skin colors and British accents still exist, and yet don't seem to map at all to colony of origin. - Not entirely true; apparently Baltar overcame an Aerilon (Yorkshire) accent so that people wouldn't know where he was from. Still doesn't explain why he has a British accent and everyone else pretty much speaks with a generic American accent. - Also, there are certainly other cultural differences; the people of Gemenon take their faith much more seriously than those of the other colonies, and the people of Sagittaron (mostly) don't believe in modern medicine. - The Colonies may be united but they haven't been so for many years and they only did it because of the common threat presented by the Cylons. Before unification, it is mentioned the Colonies were very much at each others' throats. Which is why they built Cylon Centurion model robots in the first place. And old hatreds still run deep in what's left of the Fleet. It is occasionally mentioned the ships with mixed populations tend to be the most unruly. - All of that is depicted in the Prequel series Caprica; the Colonies are all independent states, with different forms of government (although since each colony is an entire planet, it still semi-fits this trope). For instance, given talk of a "Prime Minister" and "Commerce Minister", it appears that Caprica itself (later capital of the Twelve Colonies) is a parliamentary republic. Also, it turns out that there wasn't just the one religion. The Ancient Grome themed polytheistic religion is not interpreted the same way by everyone (as was the case in real life). For example, Taurons use the Roman names of the gods, whereas Capricans and some others use the Greek names, and the Tauron view of Mars is definitely not the same as the Greek Ares. There were also a few people who were monotheists, even before the Cylons. - Other sources such as The Caprican online newsletter explain a bit more of the differences between the Colonies. Leonis was an empire (albeit one in decline) and Virgon is a parliamentary monarchy and both had colonised Tauron for some time. Tauron was a democracy before the civil war but is now an oppressive dictatorship. Aquaria/Aquarion, owing to its tiny population, could afford to have a direct democracy. What is consistent is that almost every Colony, even the ones that share friendly relations, suffer from prejudice and dislike towards one another. It's explained that if it wasn't for the threat of the Cylons, the Colonies would not have united. - Doctor Who: In "Last of the Time Lords", the Master is the sole ruler of Earth after the attack of his minions, the Toclafane. - In Firefly, the Alliance more or less rules all planets inhabited by humans, and has thoroughly put down the secessionist rebellion of the Independent Faction (in which Mal Reynolds served as a Browncoat). - Intergalactic: In 2143, Earth's united under the global state of Commonworld. - The Orville: Earth apparently has one in the future, not surprisingly. - The Outer Limits (1995): In "Lithia", the society of the future is ruled by a body named the World Council. It's justified by the fact that most of humanity died as a result of war and then a plague, so the survivors banded together presumably for their mutual benefit. - In SeaQuest DSV, United Earth Oceans appears to be this for all intents and purposes, at least until the third season, when the show was renamed to seaQuest 2032. In the ten years between the second and the third seasons, another major power arises, the Macronesian Alliance, starting a Space Cold War with UEO. This is in an attempt to make the show Darker and Edgier. There is also a small but powerful aquatic Asian nation called Chaodai. Had the show not been cancelled, the Chaodai would've become a third power, able to rival the UEO and the Macronesian Alliance. - Star Trek is the number one utilizer. The Federation is in fact a government for several species, and it's rare for there to be any diversity in alien culture except in service to the plot. (Benzites do not report a situation to their commanding officer until they have fully analyzed it, for example, preventing a Benzite crewmember from heading off a situation before it can escalate to a dramatic level.) In one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Picard and Beverly even discuss whether or not having this is a prerequisite for Federation membership. (It isn't, technically, but apparently the question has never come up before.) - Deep Space Nine was a little less blatant about this, partly because they stayed in one place so could get a bit more involved with the politics of alien races (particularly the Bajorans, who were shown to have different "provinces" on their planet, as well as at least one terrorist splinter group) and partly because it was Darker and Edgier anyway. - The Federation seems to be unable to truly coexist with any culture without absorbing it, and its rivals - empires of similar size - are shown to be not only culturally but racially homogenous note : The Expanded Universe suggests the Klingons and Romulans have plenty of "client" races; they just aren't represented in the space navy or government, so we never see them. - Star Trek: Enterprise takes place prior to the foundation of the Federation, but after the establishment of the United Earth. There does still appear to be some cultural and institutional variation on Earth (there are references to the Royal Navy in the near past, as an example), but politically Earth seems to have left the Post-Atomic Horror in a spirit of unity. - This is actually T'Kuvma's point in Star Trek: Discovery. He fears that the Federation is slowly stripping Klingons of their racial identity, while disguising it with their phrase "We come in peace". He absolutely hates that phrase and uses it to rally the Klingon Houses under his banner against the Federation. - While there is much debate as to its interpretation, meaning, and indeed relevance, the Book of Revelation has been interpreted in Christianity as setting out a timetable for the Last Days of Humanity prior to God's calling a halt to things. One common theme is that the world will be seemingly united under a One World Order: unfortunately for True Believers, it will be a dictatorship run by the Antichrist and his acolytes. Many conservative evangelical Christians, especially in Eagleland, maintain a vigilant watch for signs this is happening already. - The "New World Order" conspiracy theory is played both ways in the DarkMatter campaign setting for d20 Modern (well, unless your GM modifies things) — the conspiracy theorists are right in that the UN intends to unite humanity, and they are right in that black helicopters are used by the UN elite forces. It's the other bits that are mistaken: It is suggested that the UN's leadership would prefer this to be a democratic state, which is one reason why it has taken so long, the UN have solid, sensible reasons for thinking a human unification to be a Good, or at least Necessary, Thing, and they have Christians amongst the top ranks. - The Technocracy in the Mage: The Ascension game from the Old World of Darkness. Literally committed to and highly successful at shaping the beliefs of the entire human race. Due to the consensual nature of reality in the setting, this collective perception of how the world works literally defines even the rules of magic and science. In fact, the only reason science and technology work at all is because the Technocracy has convinced the masses that it is supposed to. New technological innovations are introduced into the consensus at the Technocracy's discretion and they ruthlessly try to stamp out "reality deviants" that threaten their hold over humankind. Obviously, all of this requires them to manipulate everything from the media to governments. Their leading sub-faction is even called "The New World Order". They do cheat and break their own rules of course, employing technology far beyond what they have allowed the general public to believe is possible. Up to and including interstellar space travel. - The Tau Empire in Warhammer 40,000, though as their fluff is expanded, differences between Tau Septs are starting to appear. - This actually makes a measure of sense. The Tau homeworld was contentious and wartorn until the coming of the Ethereals and the firm establishment of the Caste system united them for the Greater Good. Then came a period of glorious victory and expansion. Now, they're butting up against the big boys (the entire Empire is barely a fraction of the size of the Imperium) and having to face against the horrors of alien races. This is the cause of most of their divisions. - The Architects of the Flesh from Feng Shui have set up one of these in 2056, run by the Bureau of Tactical Management (or the Buro in short). The population is kept in line through powerful feng shui, though there are still pockets of resistance around the world. There's also one major area that is immune to the influence of Chi and where technology more advanced than ancient weapons just doesn't work, watched over by the Vikings. - In Crimestrikers, Creaturia has a (mostly) benevolent world government, led by a parliamentary body-cum-Fictional United Nations called the Creaturian Council. - Played With in BattleTech, where One World Orders were brought about twice, only to collapse within a century or two. First there was the Terran Alliance (Earth and the initial human colonies), which fell apart when first the colonies rebelled and then Terrans themselves overthrew the Alliance. Later practically all of humanity - the Great Houses of the Inner Sphere and the Periphery states - were united under the First Star League. This fell apart again after two hundred years, leading to a Forever War that has raged on and off (mostly 'on') for nearly four centuries now (2786 to the 'present day' of 3151), with the driving impetus being reestablishing the Star League in one form or another. - In the setting of Crusader, the world (indeed, the solar system) is ruled by a single government, the WEC. Simply put, the WEC is every corporation in the world, merged into a hypercorporation, ruling the stead of a government. - The truth is naturally more complex than that, but this is a very useful lie. - In Spore uniting the whole planet is the last step to unlock space travel. - Once you control 8-9 of the 10 cities, the others will hail you and explain that they "see the writing on the wall" and just join your empire on the spot. - Alternatively, if the last empire left is allied with you, they'll agree to join you peacefully "so the world may live as one!" - The EDEN empire in the Galaxy Angel games encompasses a lot of diverse planets, but yup, each one has one culture to its name. Parodied (as with all things) in the Galaxy Angel anime, where there are such things as industrial planets, resort planets, etc. owned by one person. - Earth finally uniting as this is the reason why the Cyrollans extend an invitation for humankind to join the Symbiotry of Peaceful Beings in The Journeyman Project \|\|and why a key element in Dr. Elliot Sinclair's plan to prevent the Cyrollans, who he sees as a threat - legitimately so, as the third game reveals - from having an interest in Earth involves disrupting the peace talks that resulted in Earth's unification\|\|. - This is the goal of Deus Ex's Corrupt Corporate Executive and Big Bad, Bob Page. By buying influence with money or blackmailing with a critical vaccine, he can have his choice of appointees in any government agency in the world, and have the legislation drafted to give them authority to declare and maintain martial law. He gradually stages legal coups to make the transfer of authority to a U.N. enforcement agency permanent, consolidating control of all governments. - This is deconstructed; since his influence outgrew its natural boundaries, he effectively sabotaged every contingency plan the Illuminati used to defend themselves against failure, which meant that his giant conspiracy was still a house of cards. Then, as the one person in charge, he pooled all his resources into an AI so he could merge with it and develop super-intelligence to run the whole thing. The AI promptly went rogue from lack of confidence in a deluded megalomaniac, and concluded the only way to truly implement a one-world order is if everyone was involved in ruling it - whether they want to or not. - The flaws in such a system are even discussed in-universe by J.C.'s brother Paul, who points out that "a few bureaucrats in New York can't make good decisions for New Jersey let alone Paris, or a village in China" and ultimately only the wealthy would benefit from such a convoluted system while average people suffer. - Mass Effect plays with this a bit — the codex notes that Earth is still controlled by several sovereign nations; however, anything outside the solar system is controlled by the Systems Alliance, a supranational body that controls human space business independent of any individual nation's interest, by necessity: the bickering nations couldn't effectively run an empire of that size. - Mass Effect both uses and subverts this trope. On the one hand, there is a galactic council that oversees issues relating to the greater galaxy, but they only actually control about half the galaxy, with the other half being known as the Terminus Systems, which are highly fractured and largely ignore anything the Citadel Council has to say. The in-game literature also talks about how separate, smaller governments still exist. Also, they mention how each other species has as many varied languages, cultures, and religions as humans do. - Even at a species level, truly unified government seems rare: the Turian Hierarchy is fairly centralized, but the Systems Alliance is a multinational organization that provides interstellar defense and diplomatic representation to Earth's actual nation states, the Salarian Union is a semi-feudal collection of independent matrilinear clans, and the Asari Republics barely qualify as a government at all (their council member is the only permanent asari political office). - Technically, the Reapers qualify, being the apex predator of the entire galaxy which has won every battle for the past 3.2 million years, all without squabbling. However, it's implied that they only stay unified because they refuse to rule; they commit mass genocide over centuries, then sleep for about 49,500 years. - Project Sylpheed gives us the Terran Central Government (TCG), which apparently rules the entire Earth and its colonies. It has the Terran Central Armed Forces (TCAF) as its military. - Played straight in the Dead Space series with EarthGov. It's mentioned in background sources that this was the result of several wars, political upheavals and the depletion of natural resources planetside. It's also mentioned, however, that special preference was made to the United States. - In Team Fortress 2, the Administrator is the CEO of two NGO Superpowers, RED and BLU, and a weapon supply company, TFIndustries; all together, they give her complete control of the entire world. - In many ways, this has become Early-Installment Weirdness though. RED and BLU are now depicted as a pair of obsolete companies fighting over a resource that stopped being viable decades ago. The weapon and supply company was renamed to Mann Co. While owning it is considered to be a highly desired, and the Administrator is still a class A manipulator, the world is clearly not under her control. - The ultimate objective of most Total War games is to make one of these with your faction of choice. A lot harder than it sounds. - Rise of Nations: - One method of winning Campaign Mode in is to have your faction take over the world, creating one. - Skirmish mode can be won by advancing so far beyond your enemies technologically that your nation can research "World Government", which instantly merges all other factions into your own. - In Stellaris there is a human faction where Earth is now this thanks to the United Nations Is a Superpower trope. - In Deadalus aka. Robotica, the Earth is united under the World Silent Security Systems, based on the space station Deadalus. - The Terran Republic in PlanetSide controls effectively the entirety of human civilization. In the first game, the Republic is a republic in name only that monitors everyone, but has created a thousand years of peace. In the second game, the Republic was founded after a century of war devastated Earth and was putting humanity on the road to extinction, and is a benevolent socialist government, though The Remnant we see was forced into drastic measures to try and curb insurrection on the crippled and lost colonization fleet heading to Auraxis. Subverted in both games where the miners, libertarians, and corporations break away to form the New Conglomerate, while the scientists and tech worshippers split off to form the Vanu Sovereignty while isolated on Auraxis. - The Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series has the multinational Global Defense Initiative gradually transition from the UN's military task force in Tiberian Dawn to a de facto global government by the time of Tiberium Wars, due to the ensuring breakdown of global order leaving GDI-controlled sectors more often than not the only functional authority left. Member states and national governments still exist, but in practice have all been subsumed into GDI. - In the 31st century of Schlock Mercenary the entire Solar System is unified under the super-government of the United Nations of Sol, though there were independent exosolar human colonies like Celeschul until they accepted UNS protection during the Teraport Wars. - Lovely People: The government is simply referred to as the World Council, implying that the entire world is ruled by a single entity. - In the Alternate Universe of Within the Wires, various asides gradually reveal that after a massive war called the Great Reckoning, all national boundaries were erased, flags and soldiers were "done away with," (to what extent is left deliberately vague) and replaced with the Society. It further ensures the nonviolence of its citizens through divorcing children from the concept of family, separating them from parents, and eliminating/repressing memories of siblings and childhood relationships at the age of ten. - In Futurama, Earth is under one government based in Washington D.C., implying that the U.S. has taken over everything. Its flag, "Old Freebie" is just the Stars and Stripes with a globe in place of the stars. Earth, in turn, is part of the Democratic Order of Planets (DOOP), analogous to the United Nations (or to The Federation, which is how the Star Trek-obsessed Fry understands it). - Moreover, all bureaucrats — apparently all of them, in all organizations (commercial, governmental, or otherwise), large enough to require any bureaucrats — are members of a single Central Bureaucracy. - Although a lot of 21st-century countries (America, Mexico, Jamaica, China, etc.) somehow still exist as culturally distinct regions. - In Ben 10: Omniverse, in the Ben 10,000 timeline it's shown that Con Man Argit, of all people, was elected "President of Earth". - Teen Titans: Starfire's family are the rulers of all of Tamaran. - In Danny Phantom, this is what used to be for the Ghost Zone when the evil dictator Pariah Dark ruled it with an iron fist. Naturally, the citizens weren't happy and rebelled. He tried to get his kingdom back AND take over Earth, but he had Big Damn Heroes on the opposite end. - Jimmy Two-Shoes: "Rocket Jimmy" seems to imply that Miseryville is its own planet, ruled by the Heinous Family for centuries. Since the setting is implied to be Hell, it's not surprising. - In Time Squad, Larry and Buck explain to Otto that by the year One Million, Earth had eventually merged all its countries into one big "super-nation." - Certain theories for Globalization have this serving as the logical conclusion, politically and culturally, while others either subvert or avert this trope altogether. ## Subversions and Aversions - Averted, subverted and occasionally played straight in the Humongous Mecha manga series The Five Star Stories, where out of the half-dozen or so habitable planets orbiting the titular stars, only one is unified under a single government and wars between the various countries on the other planets are extremely common. As national identity is a major theme in the series, the aforementioned planetary empires attempts to unite the others through military conquest later in the series... doesn't turn out so well. On the other hand, in the series' backstory, we find that the entire galaxy and then some was united in a mystical "Super Empire" in the distant past. - The Gundam series in general are a subversion of this trope; when colonies are established in space, they inevitably try to become independent from Earth resulting in Space Wars. - The Universal Century timeline comes close, in that the Earth Federation rules over all of Earth and generally claims sovereignty over the colonies, but some colonies are not overly happy about this. Even the UC colonies aren't a unified bunch. Side 3 makes up the heart of Zeon (considered semi-autonomous after the One Year War, albeit with a puppet government controlled by the Federation in reality), while Side 6 declares political neutrality in the One Year War, Side 4 briefly becomes the Cosmo Babylonia aristocracy, while Side 2 eventually becomes the Zanscare Empire. Then there's the Jupiter Sphere, which is technically considered part of the Earth Federation (by the EF, anyway), but they're so far away that Earth can't really enforce anything on them, so they consider themselves independent. That's not even mentioning the whole situation with Axis. Needless to say, the UC timeline totally destroys this trope. - Gundam SEED frequently refers to the Earth as though it were one political entity, but this isn't the case. It is in fact divided into seven or eight supranational blocs, as well as the Orb Union, a small but powerful south Pacific island country. Most of them are united under the banner of the Earth Alliance, which is effectively led by the Atlantic Federation and is hostile to the space nation of ZAFT. However, a couple of nations on Earth support ZAFT, most notably the Oceania Union (Australia + New Zealand), which lends ZAFT the use of a large naval base at Carpenteria, and a few others remain stubbornly neutral in the whole affair, including Orb. - Gundam Seed Delta Astray establishes the existence of the Mars colonies as well, a recently-established group of space colonies (Mars itself not being terraformed). They're considered a separate nation. There was also another colony that converted itself into a giant spaceship and headed for Jupiter (notably without the consent of whichever nation owned it), because its citizens saw the constant conflict the Earth Sphere was getting into and basically said "Screw This, I'm Outta Here!" - Averted in G Gundam, the United Colonies Federation is merely more like the present United Nations, and the nations themselves are independent on each other. It is just that the country which wins the Gundam fight will be for four years the leading nation in the Earth Sphere. - Legend of the Galactic Heroes subverts this in the long run. Planets by and large are run by only a single government, usually under either Empire or Alliance. But the sheer expanse of space (and not to mention human nature) means that humanity doesn't stay united for long. - Inversion of Enforced Trope in An Entry with a Bang!: The writers have mostly agreed that, despite Clancy-Earth presenting a united front in their relations with the BattleTech entities, the countries on C-Earth proper will not unite into a super-entity in its purest state of a truly singular government, but exactly what the CSN's political structure is to be instead is a discussion that has gotten inflammatory at times. - Star Trek Into Darkness subverts this. While the Earth is united, there remains cultural and national diversity, with at least some present-day countries apparently surviving into the 2250s in some form. The Union Jack is still shown flying in London, suggesting that the UK made it as well, while in a bar scene involving Kirk, what looks like an American flag appears to be in the background. However, this may be in line with some TNG material which references a starship being built in the Soviet Union; old Earth countries still exist, but are subsumed into a federal United Earth government. - In Star Wars Legends, species that don't have much to do with the greater galaxy are quite capable of maintaining several different cultures, factions, sects, teams, and fan clubs. - A good aversion of Scifi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale. Since a vast majority of star systems in the galaxy can (and do) support sentient life, there are simply far too many races and planets for all of them to be homogenized under one banner. Even The Empire at its height controlled maybe 60-65% of the galaxy and had nowhere near enough soldiers or starships to make their presence known outside of space-faring systems, with many "mini-Empires" and planets that enjoyed de facto autonomy. Chances are good that hundreds, maybe thousands, of star systems within the Empire's borders watched it come and go without ever having known it was there. - In The Strugatsky Brothers novels, this appears to be the natural consequence of achieving a certain degree of technological/social advancement. Earth and all the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens Earthlings encounter have a One World Order, but the various Crapsack Worlds inhabited by humanoids have warring nations messing things up even further. - Ursula K. Le Guin: - The Left Hand of Darkness, in which Gethen has several different countries. The protagonist eventually visits the country of Orgota, to find that its government and customs are vastly different from Karhide, and even mentions that he's not as familiar with the native language. - Similarly, in The Dispossessed, Urras is divided into several countries, including (at minimum) the liberal democratic capitalist A-Io and the "socialist" totalitarian state Thu, which are fighting a proxy war in unstable Benbilli. If this sounds like the Cold War... well... it should. Urras, it should be noted, is a double planet, with its (relatively) barren partner Anarres having been settled by "Odonian" anarcho-syndicalists who, as such, have no state. Although LeGuin is herself a noted anarcho-syndicalist, Anarres has a legion of problems, including the development of entrenched bureaucracy among the "syndics." - In Out of the Dark, the Shongairi are confused that humanity managed to get to our current level of advancement without becoming this. - Subverted with the Dorsai in the Childe Cycle. Though officially they have a planetary government, the Dorsai are fiercely independent folks. As a result, the world government has no real power in comparison to the other worlds. - Played with Ceta - the planet has several nation-states. However, thanks to economic and social engineering, they're all under the de facto rule of William of Ceta. - Averted with Earth (and New Earth!) in the Cycle - there's still plenty of various national governments. - In the CoDominium, the eponymous organization controlled all of Earth and its fledgling extrasolar colonies. Unfortunately, the two controlling factions - the USA and the USSR - still hated each others guts, and after a few decades of iron-fisted peace and massed off-planet deportation, the CoDom collapsed overnight in a global thermonuclear war. Two Empires of Man followed, the first of which collapsed due to internal revolt, leading the second to be far more... assertive with its territories. - Subverted on Defiance: the Earth Republic presents itself as this, viewing itself as the rightful successor to all pre-Pale Wars human governments. However, there's plenty of the planet that's independent of E-Rep control, not least of all being the Votanis Collective-controlled territory in South and Central America. - Doctor Who has an interesting use: By the Twelfth Doctor, Earth has had enough planetary crises (even though they cover most of them up) that they've decided that in the event of a global emergency, they can elect a President of Earth who has full authority over the entire human race. - Stargate SG-1: - The Goa'uld are ruled by a group called the System Lords; true to their name, their government is generally very feudal, with Goa'uld serving different leaders, trying to empower themselves, and at war most of the time (using expendable human slaves). - Also, the Tok'ra reject the Goa'uld practice of taking over unwilling hosts, and live as symbionts with partners who voluntarily host them. - Some human planets are also divided, including the unnamed planet in "New Ground", Euronda in "The Other Side", and Jonas Quinn's homeworld. And Earth, of course. When Anubis sends a message to the President of the United States (by projecting himself right into the Oval Office) to "surrender Earth", the President acknowledges that the U.S. is only one of many countries. - Even the Asgard (who are all clones) mention having political strife (although we never actually see much of it). - This trope is justified in a few cases where we see a free (but undeveloped) planet; the entire civilization is generally within a few days' walk of the stargate so is much smaller than a lot of countries on Earth. - Also averted in Stargate Universe with the planet Novus (colonized by a version of the crew of the Destiny, who have been thrown 2000 years into the past) being divided between the nations of Tenara and Futura. They come together when Novus becomes unstable and build evacuation ships. - Interestingly, while later incarnations of Star Trek are definitely associated with this trope, the Original Series frequently averted it. Many worlds had two conflicting cultures, which were always metaphors for an Aesop on either racism, classism, or the Cold War. - Also, the Vulcans, in a way: they tried to unify their race politically and culturally, but in the end that simply resulted in creating the Romulan Star Empire in contrast with Vulcan proper. - The backstory universe of BattleTech has the One World Order forming and collapsing no less than 4 times! First Earth became a one-world order who sent out space colonies. Eventually the colonies rebelled into several bickering nations. Finally a force of personality united the bickering 5 major nations into a united One-Galaxy Empire. This collapsed after a Usurper killed the leader and his family and the five nations each claimed the throne. The Army of the now gone One-World Government fled and set up a new one world government of its own (the Clans). After 300 year of fighting, these clans returned. After an initial thwarting, the One-world-Order leader of the Clans was dissolved. In eventual response to the invasion, the 5 governments recreated the original one-world government again as a united force to stop the invaders. After the invaders stopped, the government, its mission accomplished, was dissolved. At which point an army of religious fanatics attempted to take on the whole galaxy to recreate another one-world government in their own image. The point seems to be that One World Orders aren't viable... up until you realize that if a sustainable version were to be created, the game would end. - ... or just tear themselves apart anyway, 'cause that's how we roll. After all, Real Life governments of all sizes have a habit of doing this once there's nobody left to fight, too. BattleTech always was one of the more intensely political fantasy/sci-fi universes. - Traveller: Played with. The Third Imperium is the dominant power. However the Imperium has thousands of subsidiary governments, sometimes several on the same world, as well as governments outside the Imperium. Planet Terra itself is usually under one government. - In Warhammer 40,000, the Imperium itself is supposedly a One Galaxy Order. But the galaxy is so utterly massive that each world within it is run by a vassal government with a planetary governor at its head (or an analogous setup for those worlds under Mechanicus or Space Marine control). - \|\|The final villains\|\| in Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War seek to bring about peace and correct the non-OWOness of humanity by eliminating the political entities, ergo governments and borders, that lead to war. - Galactic Civilizations II appears to follow this trope at first, with civilizations named after their race and all the usual trappings. But in many situations it's highlighted that none of these space-faring civilizations speak for ALL their species, just the ones that got into a big ol' pile and started starfaring together. For example: If any one planet has a monumental population boom, the news will go out of its way to state that the 2 billion new faces couldn't possibly have been born in less than a year, and that much of it is from same-race foreign immigrants applying for citizenship. - There are also various political parties in the game. You choose a specific political party at the beginning of the game that grants bonuses to certain statistics. If you decide to change your government from an empire (the default) to a democracy then you must keep up your popularity or have a new party take control and make you lose your party bonuses. - Most of the alien races from the Star Control games are examples of the trope, but there are a few exceptions: - The Yehat empire consists of several warrior clans that often fight for supremacy. In Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters, one can convince a group of Yehat dissidents who despise being Battle Thralls to start a new civil war. - The history of the Thraddash consists of several civil wars waged between factions of their Proud Warrior Race Guy culture that popped up every few hundred years. By the time of Star Control II, the Thraddash were up to Culture 19, and the player can end up inspiring Culture 20 if they beat enough Thraddash ships. - In fact, the plot of The Ur-Quan Masters involves a conflict between two factions of the Ur-Quan race: The Kzer-Za (who want to subjugate all other sentient races in the galaxy) and the Kohr-Ah (who want to kill all other sentient races in the galaxy). - Also averted in Homeworld, at least with the Kharaki/Hiigarans. While the species itself is unified, it's mentioned there are various, distinct clans and houses that serve as countries onto themselves. - Further addressed in the Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak prequel, where the Northern Coalition is, more or less, The Alliance of the kiithid to the north of the Great Banded Desert, which takes up the majority of the surface of the planet. Not much is stated about the Southern kiithid, though. The primary conflict in the game is between the Coalition and the Gaalsien religious fanatics. Later on, you also have to fight Kiith Siidim, who betray the Coalition. - More or less the goal in Civilization games. The conquest victory would be an evil example, the diplomatic victory a benign case (although the U.N. does appoint you ruler over everything, including anyone still voting against you, so it can still overlap with the sinister examples). The cultural victory doesn't really imply an abolishment of nations, but more turning earth into a Planet of Hats where the entire culture is like that of your country, so it comes close. The science victory might imply the formation of The Federation when you travel to another star, but it seems more like telling the world "Screw you guys, I'm going to Alpha Centauri". - Halo: - The Unified Earth Government (and its main arm, the United Nations Space Command) is a mix of the United Nations and the American federal system. While individual countries, organizations, and cultures are still very much alive, the UEG/UNSC will not hesitate to use force to prevent its colonies from becoming independent, with several of its factions, like the Office of Naval Intelligence, tending to favor outright authoritarian methods of rule. That said, several human worlds do enjoy a good amount of autonomy (particularly in the aftermath of the chaos caused by the Covenant war), and that's not even counting the Insurrectionist-aligned ones who've managed to sever all ties to Earth's government. - The member species of the former Covenant also tend to be aversions; the Elites and Brutes are each divided into a number of opposing factions and clans (several of which employ a wide variety of other species), and the Jackals are such anarchists that even Word of God refers to their central authorities as being merely "pseudo-governments". In fact, these decentralizing tendencies were already present even before the Covenant collapsed in the aftermath of the Great Schism. - No one ever refers to the three-sided Strand War in Escape Velocity Override as a civil war, despite the fact all three Strands belong to the same species. On the other side of the coin, the United Earth (which only came to be through Alien Invasion in the first place, so nothing natural about it) doesn't make any real claims to represent humanity as a whole, and is still working on establishing the institutions of a united government of Earth (for example, although there is a common parliament and cabinet, currencies are still separate and a subject of ongoing negotiation and planning). - In the X-Universe series, most of the aliens are united under their own racial banner, but on the other hand, the Split Dynasty is split up into dozens of bickering clans who fight for the right to rule, with military coups being fairly common. Humanity is the most fractured, with two powerful factions that hate each others guts - the Argon Federation, a former Lost Colony which controls almost all human territory in the X-Universe gate system, and the highly advanced Earth State, who control the entirety of the Sol system and have fingers reaching into their other Lost Colony, the Free State Of Solara. Minor factions like the Hatikvah Free League are also predominately human. - Zig-zagged in Stellaris. While your planet was unified enough to launch a space colonization effort at game's start, an interstellar empire is quite another thing. As your empire grows, various leaders will become heads of political factions, and pops derive their happiness from how pleased their faction leader is with your actions and policies. Additionally, it's simply impossible to directly govern more than a handful of worlds effectively, and you'll incurs steep penalties if you try. Assigning colonies to semi-autonomous sectors with their own governs lessens the bureaucratic burden, but causes cultural drift that widens the divide between various factions. - Most of this is averted by Hive Mind empires, be they organic or robotic. There's no political division between the physical extensions of a single massive mind, so these empires are truly united and immune to rebellions or civil war. They do, however, have to split up their territory into sectors and assign local governors to exercise efficient control just like individualist empires do, although in their case it's probably more akin to sharing network load between several servers or computers instead of forming semi-independent fiefdoms. - Parodied in South Park, where it is revealed that in the rest of the Universe, each species has its own planet; Earth was created to be a bizarre mix of all different kinds of things (gazelles, lions, Jews, Arabs, etc.) to form the basis of a TV show. - The entire premise of Transformers is that there are two distinct and warring factions of the same alien race. The overall culture within each faction is largely monolithic, however (Autobots bland and friendly, Decepticons backstabby), and very few characters are presented as neutral or independent. Occasionally, we had characters with unusual or seemingly inappropriate personalities who were nonetheless distinguished by their alliance. Later examples present more complex cultures, especially Beast Wars. - There was also Sideways in Transformers: Armada, who played first as an Autobot, then a Decepticon. It turned out he was actually an agent of Unicron. - An old idea going as far back as the ancient Greeks and Chinese, this could be considered a subversion on Earth. A world government would on paper be interested in very different, more global issues from the countries contributing to it and would likely look much more like the UN than a traditional country covering the whole world. Whether such efforts will, or should, ultimately result in a universally recognized world order, let alone what kind it would take remains a matter of much debate.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneWorldOrder
One-Woman Wail - TV Tropes "A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because her children are no more." For the proper reading experience, play the music from this video while reading on. It's not Ominous Latin Chanting, it's not the Cherubic Choir, but somewhere in between, close to the Ethereal Choir. A solitary, usually wordless wail (possibly to simulate wind or grieving), usually done by either a woman or, for extra poignancy points, a child (usually a boy soprano). The best time to include this trope is during the aftermath of something really dramatic a battle, natural disaster, etc. Basically, any event where vanilla OLC would just fall short in the sadness department. Often fills out a Moment of Silence. Kin to the Lonely Piano Piece. This is also what can come to mind when you hear the word "Opera". You get extra extra poignancy points for cutting out all sound during the epic event, go into Slow Motion, and having the One Woman Wail play over it. Note that this is explicitly part of the soundtrack, though a Diegetic Switch is allowed. If you're looking for a single character, male or female, screaming in anguish, try Skyward Scream or perhaps Screaming Woman. Clean-up note: Wordless singing that isn't the otherworldly, often anguished, and even startling wail is not this trope, it's Scatting. Feel free to move examples which would be more at home over there. Melismatic Vocals are a different sort of wailing noise representing actual words being stretched over a rack and tortured. Subtrope of Simple Score of Sadness. ## Examples: - The track " Libera Me From Hell" from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, instantly identifiable by being an integral part of all the most badass scenes of the second arc. And for being a fusion of opera with Ominous Latin Chanting (the words actually are a Latin prayer) and Rap (although the rap part is skipped the second and third time it plays). - The Latin lyrics used thereof are derived from two songs used in a Requiem Mass,a to note: - The first Latin line, from the Introit: Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine... - The second line (The first full Latin stanza) from Libera Me, albeit with a bit of variation: Líbera me, Dómine, de morte æterna in die illa treménda, in die illa Quando cli movéndi sunt et terra. Dum véneris iudicáre sǽculum per ignem. Tremens factus sum ego, et tímeo, dum discússio vénerit, at que ventúra ira. - The second full stanza, although mistaken for Dies Irae, is actually an altered continuation thereof: Dies illa, dies iræ, calamitatis et miseriæ, Dies illa, dies magna et amara valde, et amara valde. - The final line, after going back from the Introit, is the last half of the final verse, before going back to the first half of the first stanza: Et lux perpetua luceat eis. Libera me, Domine... - The song "Dante" from Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) features a uniquely low female voice echoing Dante's leitmotif. - The opening theme to Gatekeepers 21. The second half flips the themes, and this is moved to the ending credits, while the catchy J-Pop song "Ima, Egao ga Areba" in the ending credits plays to a new OP sequence. - Prominently featured in Anemone's theme from Eureka Seven. - "Lilium", Elfen Lied's opening theme, is both this trope and Ominous Latin Chanting by being a one-woman Latin wail. When it's used during scenes, it sounds like it's sung by a bunch of monks instead. - The "Introjection" track from (disc III of) the Neon Genesis Evangelion soundtrack. - Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, where almost ALL the opening themes are sung by a Russian singer named Origa. The first theme, "Inner Universe" even takes the next step and features Latin vocals from boy soprano Ben Del Maestro. - Appears frequently in Blood+, where the aria "Diva" is sung by Elin Carlson. - Kira Yamato's personal battle theme in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, "Kira Just as He Pleases" features the One-Woman Wail, in direct contrast to Shinn Asuka's theme, which has Ominous Latin Chanting. - "Innovator" from the second season of Mobile Suit Gundam 00. - ∀ Gundam: "Black History" plays when Black History is revealed. It's a funeral dirge during the final battle, underlining the severity of the catastrophe that set up the premise of the series and is now on the verge of repeating. - Hell Girl uses these to evoke a lot of different moods and emotions. "Ake ni Somaru", for example, features both a woman and a child, mixed with creepy trance music. It did a damn good job of turning mundane, peaceful scenes (like a cityscape at sunset) into spooky panoramas while seeming to kick the characters while they're down. "Mangetsu," by contrast, is a heartwarming theme that plays over some of the few genuinely happy moments in the series. "Kumo To Rouba To Shoujo," meanwhile, is used to evoke feelings of sadness and sympathy both for the Victim of the Week and for Ai and her minions. And that's just from the first season's soundtrack. - The ending credits to Gunslinger Girl has this in Italian, with a second voice occasionally speaking without tone during interludes. The entire sequence shows a handgun lying on a cobblestone street as it rains and the credits scrolling up, heightening the tragic overtones of the series. - Flag's opening puts a wail over photographs of war and the childhood of the protagonist. It's actually pretty good. - Saint Seiya had two different songs with this. One was sung by none other than famous theme song singer Horie Mitsuko, who'd later join the cast as Princess Hilda. - The Sailor Moon S anime featured one of these every time \|\|Hotaru manifested her powers as Mistress Nine\|\|. Here it is. - The track "Cage of Fate, Circle of Destiny" from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. Used in scenes such as the final confrontation with Precia. - The track that accompanied the opening scenes of the Negima! Magister Negi Magi ~Ala Alba~ OAD's first episode, where Ku:Nel confirmed that Nagi was alive and could possibly be found in the Magicl World and Negi and crew proclaim their intent to search for him there. - Spoofed in Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei: the track that would normally serve as a wail tends to play during faux-dramatic scenes and sometimes at completely random times, such as during the sponsor message. It's also often cut short when the shot suddenly changes. - Dragon Ball Kai: When Goku \|\|dies in front of his friends\|\|, the BGM changes to a wail as the episode draws to a close. - And also after when \|\|Yamcha is killed by a Saibaiman's sacrifice\|\|, also before that \|\|Tenshinhan it's going to do the Kikoho and sacrifice their life, in the same moment that Kamisama is predicting their own death\|\|, when \|\|The Saichoro dies, and by consequence, the namek Dragon Balls are turned in stone before the third wish\|\|, when \|\|Vegeta is dying by the hands of Freezer\|\|, and in a filler scene when \|\|Goku is having a nightmare during their combat with Freezer, now using the 50% of their maximum power\|\|. - Prétear has a creepy wail (accompanied with either clanging piano or doomy sounding kettle drums, depending on the version) titled "Nikushimi no Hate" that's a leitmotif for the Dark Magical Girl. It's one of the best (and creepiest) songs on the entire soundtrack. - Used in Bleach when Ulquiorra releases his Zanpakuto. - "Autumn of Life" during the final confrontation with Kagato in Tenchi Universe. - A great example is from Uchuu Senkan Yamato. Almost every movie and TV series opening starts with a voice-over narration accompanied by a magnificent wail The Infinity of Space. Example from the Space Battleship Concert 1984. - In Digimon Data Squad, the Burst Mode evolution theme is an orchestral piece accompanied by a wail. - There are a couple of songs in the anime Soul Eater that fall under this category — usually the darker sounding negative ones played during parts dealing with evil magic users in the show. Particularly notable are Kindertotenlied (translating roughly as "Song of the Dead Children") and Peace be with you. - Tiger & Bunny scores Barnaby's flashbacks of his parents' murder with an ominous operatic wail. - Features in a few tracks on the Attack on Titan soundtrack (most notably the tracks "Attack on Titan" and "Bauklötze"). - In My-Otome, "Materialise" starts with this before getting joined by a choir and techno music. It gets played when one or more of the heroes is about to unleash some major ass-kicking on the enemy. Which makes sense, since the title is basically the command word to activate the Otomes' Dresses. - Revolutionary Girl Utena has this twice the first with "Bara No Tameiki" which is Anthy's theme and then again later with "Poison" which uses elements with of Anthy's theme used especially after \|\|the dark reveal of the relationship between Anthy and Akio\|\|. - Much of the score to Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- feature vocalist Eri Ito. The noted examples include, "A Song of Storm and Fire", "Voices Silently Sing", "Ship of Fools" and "Sacrifice", to name a few. - Hell Girl uses soundtracks with this in scenes with a variety of moods ranging from sad to creepy to tense to heartwarming. - Used hauntingly throughout Shiki's soundtrack, but especially in its main theme, aptly name "SHI-KI". - Pokémon: The First Movie has an epic one being delivered during the big battle where the Pokémon fight their clones. Unfortunately, in the dub it was replaced by the awkwardly-sounding "Brother, My Brother". The wail was retained in the dub for the 2019 remake, however. - The non-chorus parts of "Karma", the first opening to the Phantom of Inferno OVA Phantom ~Requiem for the Phantom~. - During Misuzu's final moments in the AIR anime, the acapella intro of the song "Aozora" starts playing. It evolves into a full-blown song after a while, but it serves its purpose as a One-Woman Wail at that point very well, immensely heightening the impact of an already very sad scene. - In Ah! My Goddess it occurs when Keiichi's wish for the goddess Belldandy to stay by his side forever is granted. - Frozen: - Frozen (2013): Used over the end of For the First Time in Forever (Reprise) after Anna is struck in the heart by Elsa's ice magic. It really drives home how screwed she is. Oddly, the wail is absent in the soundtrack version of the song. - Frozen II has this for the Voice of the Mountain in "Into the Unknown", courtesy of Norwegian singer Aurora. - The animated adaptation of Harmony features a One-Woman Wail in its final soundtrack: "Harmony", the moment where \|\|people are robbed of their consciences to create an utopia\|\|. - Used to great effect in The Prince of Egypt: "Deliver Us" and several other tracks feature vocals by Ofra Haza, who also voices Moses' mother, Yocheved. - Mocked in Team America: World Police, during the scene after the dam bursts and everyone drowns. - In The Red Turtle, "She Is Dead" plays first plays during the red-turtle-floating vision, then when the man and the woman get romantically involved for the first time and also at the end when the turtle leaves the beach. - Sleeping Beauty: During the scene where Maleficent lures Aurora to the top of the tower to prick her finger on a spindle and fulfill her curse, if you listen closely to the background music, a woman's voice can be heard calling ominously, "Aurrrroraaaa...". Flora hears this, which alerts her to Maleficent's presence. - In the opening sequence of The Amazing Spider-Man, a boy soprano sings mournfully over the score as Peter Parker is handed over by his parents to his Uncle Ben and Aunt May. - Apollo 13 features Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics wailing away as the titular ship disappears into radio silence behind the far side of the Moon and Marilyn Lovell finally breaks down crying. She sings several other times, but usually with accompaniment. - Apocalypse: The Second World War uses this trope (accompanied with the rest of the orchestra) as part of its credits theme, over video clips of the war. - Used in the climax of Gravity as Dr. Stone \|\|re-enters Earth's atmosphere in the Shenzou\|\|. - Blade Runner has this. It was a great effect with the blue light filtering in from overhead. - Blown Away opens with "Prince's Day", a wail-like reprise of the Irish song "Though Dark Are Our Sorrow" rearranged by Alan Silvestri and sung by a soprano boy (instead of a woman) with an ethereal choir in the background. Thomas Moore originally wrote the lyrics. - Heard for a while in Borat, after Azamat leaves. - This same piece of music, Ederlezi, was first used in Emir Kusturica's Time of the Gypsies during Perhan's dream on the river. - Chika Fujino's score for Boys Love repeatedly features a string heavy piece with a soaring soprano part (sung in Latin, of course) particularly during the film's bittersweet climax. - Several cues in the score for Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula featured an especially ghostly female vocalist. - A One Woman Wail provides an "eerie vampire sadness" motif in Dracula 2000 as well. - Inama Nushif from Children of Dune, which plays over the Cleansing of the House montage towards the end of the first film. For added points, it's in Fremen - There's a bit in the end credits music of Cloverfield. - The trope is used many times in the movie Crash (the one without James Spader or fetishism) to make some scenes more moving. - Not surprisingly, the Graeme Revell score for The Crow has a lot of this going on. - This happens in The Day After Tomorrow, as the camera lovingly pans over scenes of meteorological destruction. - DC Extended Universe: - Heard during the execution sequence in Dead Man Walking. - The main theme for Death Wish V: The Face of Death. - Drop Zone has one right after the hero's kid brother is shot and yanked out of the depressurized airplane cabin. - Occurs throughout numerous scenes in Denis Villeneuve's Dune, with the destruction of the harvester by a Sand Worm perhaps being the most notable. Other scenes, such as the departure from Caladan, have the instruments imitating the wail. It also shows up in the trailer for Dune: Part Two. - The Field of the Dead from Alexander Nevsky. - The Diva's song in The Fifth Element during Leeloo's fight against the Mangalore soldiers is a partial example of this trope (partial in that it is a moment of high asskickery rather than of grief or dramatic tension). - Flash Gordon: The scene in which Aura resurrects Flash after his execution is sung solo: by Freddie Mercury. - The soundtracks of Gladiator and Troy indulged in a fair amount of this. - "Godzilla's Requiem" in Godzilla vs. Destoroyah plays with this, by having a whole choir sing alongside Akira Ifukube's Orchestra. This is especially striking, as the notes continue to be sung, even as Godzilla's death is played out in full. - Is a recurring theme throughout the soundtrack of The Grudge 2. - Used at the start of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 as Snape \|\|overlooks the soulless military camp that Hogwarts has become.\|\| For bonus points, it's "Lily's Theme". - Used twice more to great effect: the tracks are called \|\|"Snape's Demise"\|\| and "The Resurrection Stone". While "Lily" and "Snape" are very mournful lamentations that complement each other, the warmer, more hopeful "Stone" plays as Harry prepares to join his loved ones in the Forbidden Forest, bringing the Marauders' strand of the story to its close. - The Hunger Games: One-woman wails are used several times throughout the series. Notable uses include the opening scenes of the first film, where ethereal vocalizations are heard as we are introduced to Katniss and her impoverished home in District 12, as well as the final film during the rebel siege of the Capitol. - The opening sequence of I, Frankenstein features this. - The Insider, which also starred Russell Crowe one year earlier than Gladiator, uses (and some would say abuses) the wail. - In Journey 2 The Mysterious Island, there's a one-woman wail during the giant bee chase when Kaylani falls off the bee and plummets to the jungle floor below, until \|\|she is caught by Sean astride his giant bee.\|\| - Used in The Karate Kid (2010) during the cobra scene (and whenever it makes reference to it). - In King Arthur (2004) with Clive Owen. While Bor's... wife? Wife-to-be? is singing what appears to be a Sarmatian song, her voice gradually fades out as the scene cuts to the other knights, who are mouthing the words. - Appears in-universe and to chilling effect (though there was more than one woman performing it) while the Harif army in Lawrence of Arabia is setting out to cross the Nefud and attack Al-Aquaba. The shot from the top of the cliff with the mourning women drowning out the stirring battle songs from below. - It's called "ululation", which is different from a wail and could also be interpreted as the women giving the men an encouraging send off. - That's what it is when Native American women do it (well, that and to scare the enemy). Lakotah holy man Black Elk refers to it as the "tremolo". It's also a way of showing respect or honor and is done in many other world cultures. - The Lord of the Rings series has several moments like this: - A boy soprano cutting in at dramatic moments like Gandalf's escape from Orthanc and the Ents breaking Saruman's dam, and almost any other moment when nature shows resurgence. - Faramir's \|\|apparent death\|\| is accompanied by a One Hobbit Mournful Solo that Pippin is singing elsewhere for Denethor. - Female solos accompany several significant scenes: - Gandalf's fall from the bridge of Khazad-dum. - Leading a chorus of other singers during Gandalf's lament in Lothlórien, and as Haldir and the other Lórien elves are cut down at the Battle of Helm's Deep. - The resurrecting dream Arwen sends to Aragorn after his tumble fighting the wargs. - When Gollum recovers the One Ring. - When the Eagles rescue Frodo and Sam at the end. - In the extended version, Éowyn's lament at her cousin Théodred's funeral provides this. - The Matrix: while they're giving Neo acupuncture as part of his transition into the real world. - Mission: Impossible II has Injection and Mano a Mano. - The entire ending sequence of The Mist, starting after they escape the food mart and continuing to the Downer Ending. - One of these is delivered near the end of the "Shiver My Timbers" opening number in Muppet Treasure Island, shortly before we're reminded that dead men tell no tales and Flint opens fire on his crew. - Ennio Morricone likes this. - Mercedes' lullaby to Ofelia in Pan's Labyrinth. - Passion in the Desert features this heavily on the soundtrack. - Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales: The teaser trailer ends with a haunting, melodic wail before the skull-and-crossbones logo is shown. - Lestat's song "Forsaken" (as sung by David Draiman) in Queen of the Damned features this. - Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Ark's theme has it at certain points. When it shows up, really bad things start happening to people. - Battle Adagio from Rambo. - In The Red Violin, a woman humming, called "Anna's Theme" on the soundtrack, introduces the titular violin. In a subtle transition, the woman's hum becomes the sound of ~~ Joshua Bell~~ the violin. And if you pay attention, during the credits the violin's score returns — and then fades back into Anna's humming. - Gavin Hood's jaunt through real-life attrocity, Rendition features a lot of one-woman wailing since much of the movie is poignant. - Repo! The Genetic Opera. There is a short burst of this at the start of 'At the Opera Tonight', and the choir backing up 'We Started This Op'ra Sht'. - Certain versions of "Lux Aeterna" from Requiem for a Dream* have this. - Used in Rob Roy. As Archibald Cunningham murders Alan MacDonald, setting the plot in motion, Rob and his clan listen to a woman (Karen Matheson of Capercaillie) sing a mournful solo performance. The film cuts between the two scenes with the song playing over both. - Genius Bonus if you know that she's singing "Aleinn duinn" ("Dark Alan"), the lament of a woman whose lover was lost at sea...and the last, shadowy image we have of MacDonald is that of Cunningham sinking his body in the loch. - A Mood Whiplash moment in the Kevin Bacon comedy She's Having My Baby: Kevin Bacon's wife is in labor, and he's in the hospital, psyching himself up to coach her. Before he can enter the delivery room, a nurse pushes him back, informing him that, due to complications in the delivery, they have to perform a potentially dangerous cesarean section on his wife. As it dawns on him that he may lose both his wife and unborn child, the soundtrack shifts to Kate Bush wailing the first notes of "This Woman's Work". - Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith has an extremely eerie one as Anakin is sitting in his quarters and fighting with himself as to whether he should save Padme by protecting Palpatine. At the same time, Padme senses that something is wrong with him and goes to her window to look outside. Without realizing it, they are looking at each other from miles away as they're sharing the same fears. Cue chilling wail, with no other sound. - The Sum of All Fears has The Mission. - Titanic (1997) uses this quite a bit, with the vocals of Sissel Kyrkjebø being beautifully interwoven throughout the score to invoke nostalgia and memories for the entire film. - Brian Tyler's "Into Eternity" from the Thor: The Dark World OST (played during \|\|Frigga's funeral\|\|) uses this. - Mocked in Thor: Ragnarok, where an a capella version of "Into Eternity" is sung by a small choir during a deliberately Narm-tastic recreation of \|\|Loki's apparent death\|\| from Dark World in an Asgardian play. - The Tree of Life features an epic 15-minute The World Is Just Awesome scene full of Scenery Porn with a haunting operatic voice over scenes taking the viewer from the creation of the universe to the birth of the main character. - Like many tropes, this one is parodied in Tropic Thunder. - Top Gun has "Memories," which plays when Maverick consoles Goose's wife and son \|\|after he dies in a training accident halfway through.\|\| - In Irish and Scottish folklore, the banshee (or bean-sidhe) is a fairy-woman and often guardian spirit of the old Gaelic families who can foretell death in "her" family; she wails and cries through the night to warn the family that one of them will soon die; if the family hears her crying three nights in a row, they know that they should begin planning a funeral. As she can foretell death in the family that she protects, the banshee is also grieving for the family as well as warning them of impending death. When many mná-sídhe (fairy-women) are heard wailing at once, it foretells the death of a major political or religious figure. - Much of Latin America believes in the legend of La Llorona, the spirit of a woman who died after she drowned her children and cannot enter Heaven until she has found them; she is heard crying "¡Ay, mis hijos!" ("Oh, my children!") as she searches for them. Those who hear her crying supposedly are doomed to die soon. - Used to great effect when Jack Bauer raids the warehouse where the Drazens (who Jack believes to have killed his daughter Kim) are hiding out near the end of the first season of 24. - A big feature of the revamped theme tune of the second season of The 100. - Parodied in the latest season of Arrested Development, in which the wail turns out to just be a very overworked rendition of the word 'coincidence'. - Also used when Jack kills \|\|Curtis Manning\|\|. - Battlestar Galactica examples include "A Call to Arms" and "The Storm and the Dead", the start of the main theme and in "Lords of Kobol." - Used in "Slayer's Elegy" from the Buffy episode "The Wish" when absolutely everything is going wrong. - Used in The Colbert Report during the segment Mysteries of the Ancient Unknown: King Tut's Penis," with some accompanying eyebrow twitches. Also used the first time he talks about the revolts in Egypt. - The opening credits for the CBS detective series Cold Case features a rather ghostly female wail. - Parodied in the Community episode "Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples." A female vocalist ululates Abed's name for a sort of joking Biblical epic effect many times throughout the episode, then in the "dramatic" ending, the singer eerily wails Shirley's name. - Also parodied in "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" when Brutopolis is cruelly slain by Pierce the Insensative (read: Chang's character is killed by Pierce's character, and has to hand in his character sheet). - Doctor Who: - "The Ice Warriors" has a weird score, especially by Classic series standards, consisting of a wailing operatic soprano over dissonant orchestra stabbing. It's very Sixties. And terrifying. - The series has its resident wailist, Melanie Pappenheim, notable for contributing wordless vocals for tracks such as the old Doctor's theme, "Doomsday", "Martha's Theme", and "The Doctor Forever". - "Planet of the Ood" has a lot of this to represent the songs of the Ood. - The Steven Moffat era seems to have switched over to Yamit Mamo, who sang "The Stowaway" and "My Angel Put the Devil in Me", for the wailing, as heard in "The Mad Man with a Box." - And in Season Six we have one for the, as a fan described it, "having my brain explode" moments. - The Thirteenth Doctor's theme starts off as this trope before the soloist escalates it into a full-throated yell. - Dollhouse's main theme carts out this trope. - The beginning of the Firefly episode "Heart of Gold". That one is an old Punjabi wedding song called "Madhaniyan", if anyone cares to listen. - Gameof Thrones features this in a few pieces, perhaps most poignantly in the end of "The Iron Throne," which plays over \|\|Daenerys's death scene, as Drogon flies away over the sea with her body.\|\| - General and I's first episode starts an eerie, mournful wail. - Lampshaded in an episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, where the singing is heard while Herc is mourning the death of his second wife, and the singer turns out to be Xena. - The funeral song that Xena sang in multiple episodes of the franchise was actually a pre-existing song called "Burial" written and performed by Lucy Lawless. - The opening theme for The Last Kingdom, performed by Eivør Pálsdóttir. - Promos for various cop shows, especially Law & Order, use a wordless Arabic-style women's vocal when this week's episode is going to feature Muslims in some way. - The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: The One-Woman Wail is heard while the orcs are chasing Arondir, Theo and Bronwyn through the woods, belongs to Disa, which is a plea to rocks to let the miners get out alive. - Parodied in MADtv (1995) where they invite a woman supposedly responsible for providing the wailing and demonstrate how it makes everything more dramatic. The host asked her what language that's suppose to be but she replies that she doesn't know. - played with in the Modern Family, in the episode Family Portrait, where Cameron is singing Ave Maria in a wedding, while Mitchell is trying to kill a pigeon who got into their house. - Once Upon a Time uses one in the episode "Shattered Sight" as \|\|Ingrid the Snow Queen makes a last minute Heroic Sacrifice to redeem herself. She is then reunited with her sisters in the afterlife.\|\| - In Over There, the wail would usually play in the Iraqi side-story. - Used in the fifth episode of The Philanthropist when \|\|a bomb goes off in Kosovo and kills four people.\|\| - Princess Silver: An eerie wail plays during Rong Le and Rong Qi's farewell. - Heard in the background every so often on Rome. - The Silent Witness theme tune, Silencium by Jane Sheldon. - Subverted in Spartacus: Blood and Sand. This plays after Spartacus and Crixus think they've defeated The Dreaded Theokoles in the arena. But it turns out it's just a Hope Spot, and Theokoles jumps up to let the real battle begin. - Included in the theme music for Stargate Atlantis (otherwise an Instrumental Theme Tune). - The theme song for Star Trek: The Original Series. - Star Trek: Picard: In "Absolute Candor", when Elnor and Picard meet again for the first time in fourteen years, there's the sound of a woman wailing. It's towards the end of the piece entitled "Picard Goes Back." - Survivor used this during its Pearl Islands and All-Stars seasons; the former when Sandra and Lil were leaving the camp for the last time, and the latter when Jenna chose to take herself out of the game to be with her terminally ill mother. - Gray's Theme from Torchwood is a rather heart-wrenching one. It first appears in "Adam" when Jack recalls losing his brother as a child. - The West Wing: - The X-Files had bunches of these, though the most notable was probably Scully's theme from Season 8. - Amon Düül II has a lot of this on their first album, Phallus Dei, courtesy of singer Renate Knaup. - One of music's Ur Examples is surely Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground." Supposedly a musical interpretation of Christ's suffering on the cross, it was considered such a powerful expression of human loneliness that it was chosen to be sent into space. - Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon, "The Great Gig in the Sky". - Lisa Hannigan, especially in the background on "Ora" and "Swan". - The soprano solo in Ralph Vaughan Williams's "Sinfonia Antartica", who alternates with a wordless wailing female chorus accompanied by a wind machine. (The symphony is derived from the film score for Scott of the Antarctic.) - Ralph Vaughan Williams's "Pastoral" symphony features another wordless soprano (or tenor or, if neither is available, clarinet) solo at the beginning and end of the fourth movement. - Yoko Ono is known for this. Example: "Don't Worry, Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow)". Particularly the version on her release with John Lennon, Some Time in New York City/Live Jam. It's also the main reason why Lennon's first two solo albums Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins and side 1 of Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions are such a Sensory Abuse. - The opening guitar solo from Asia's "Don't Cry" was written to sound exactly like this. - Tenacious D does a one- man wail in "Tribute": "Nay, we are but men! Rock!", not to mention the various "Ah"s from "Master Exploder". - Ethereal Wave is subgenre of Goth Rock which combines a more soothing sound with the sound of Goth Rock with many songs in the genre having these types of vocals. - The Cat Empire do the male version of this all the time, making use of Harry James Angus' magnificent falsetto. - Ian Gillan also does the one-man wail in Deep Purple's "Child in Time", especially the live version. - Some early Judas Priest songs had Rob Halford doing the male version of this, most notably the incredibly powerful falsetto passages in "Run of the Mill" and "Dreamer Deceiver". - "Helena's Theme" In Kamelot's album Epica. \|\|After the previous track, in which the protagonist tells Helena he's Lost and Damned. She softly sings her lament while walking by a river, then she throws herself into it, an unborn child in her womb.\|\| - Fortress Europe by Asian Dub Foundation. - Dead Can Dance: It was while a member of that band that Lisa Gerrard developed her aforementioned signature style. - Tiesto's "A Tear in the Open" uses a Gaelic stock vocal snippet based on a Scottish folk song, which was also used in the Tomb Raider: Legend soundtrack. - Inverted: Ozzy Osbourne does a one-man wail in the song "Black Rain". - Used by various Gothic Rock bands such as Within Temptation ( What Have You Done, The Cross and the haunting live performance of Memories) and Lacuna Coil ( Our Truth - twice). - Another Within Temptation song makes excellent use of this trope is The Truth Beneath the Rose, immediately after the first chorus and again at the end of the song. - Henryk Górecki's "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs", although not a straight example as the Wail is in Polish and sung in a rather traditional operatic style, as opposed to the more recent examples that have an "exotic" flavor to them. - Natalie Merchant's "My Skin". - In Havergal Brian's Symphony No. 1 "The Gothic," the extended A Cappella opening of the fifth movement trails off into a wordless, unaccompanied soprano solo. - Michael Jackson's "Little Susie" starts with sad chanting, and then moves on to a small girl (presumably the titular Susie) singing wordlessly accompanied only by a music box. - Blixa Bargeld does this often. Nick Cave once described Blixa's wailing as "a sound you would expect to hear from strangled cats or dying children." - Ayreon's "Ride the Comet." - A signature of Enya. - Kate Bush and her various devotees, most obviously Tori Amos, Sarah Brightman and Sarah McLachlan... the latter of whom used a classic example of this trope in the song "Silence" with... - Delerium, a side project by Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber of Front Line Assembly, who employ this trope to the point of excess. Featuring a series of female back-up singers (including their label-mate, a pre-superstardom Sarah McLachlan), Delerium songs rarely employ more than a handful of words; the substance of the song comes from long wordless vocal interludes over techno-rock orchestrations. Originally an ambient soundscape band, Delerium found commercial success with a more emotionally-oriented techno-pop approach - the keystone of which involves this trope. - Conjure One, another side project of Rhys Fulber, records albums that are virtually indistinguishable from those released under the name Delerium... especially in their (over)use of this trope. - Kristy Thirsk, a regular vocalist with Delerium, also appears on FLA's cover of "Justify My Love". - The late Israeli pop icon and Eurovision Song Contest representative, Ofra Haza, provided one in "Temple of Love" by The Sisters of Mercy. - Orbital: "Belfast", "Halcyon (& On & On)", "Are We Here", "Dwr Budr", "Nothing Left" (both featuring Alison Goldfrapp), and "One Perfect Sunrise" (featuring Lisa Gerrard). - Paul Hartnoll's solo project 8:58 continues the trend with "The Past Now", featuring Lisa Knapp. - Hybrid featuring Kirsty Hawkshaw - Just For Today, which also samples the vocal from the aforementioned "Belfast" at one point. - Blue Amazon: "The Javelin", "Paradise Regime", etc. - Juno Reactor's "Pistolero", "Giant", "Mona Lisa Overdrive", and "Navras", all featuring Taz Alexander, and maybe others. The latter two also use Ominous Latin Chanting. - "First Strike" by Signum. - "Healesville Sanctuary" also uses this. - BT features this in "Quark", "Firewater", and "Mercury and Solace". - Dave Matthews Band: "The Last Stop". - Linkin Park (circa 1999, when they were known as "Hybrid Theory"): "Carousel". - Mike Oldfield uses this occasionally. - In "Red Dawn" from Tubular Bells II. - In "The Inner Child" from Tubular Bells III. - Rhapsody (of Fire)'s "Queen of the Dark Horizons" uses this. - Spinoff band Luca Turelli's Rhapsody does this in "Dark Age of Atlantis." - Sarah McLachlan. - Found in The Most Unwanted Song. - Vocaloid KAITO's "Sayang": The beginning and ending's wail obviously sung "Sayang", but it's officially a One Man Wail in the middle. - Another KAITO song, "Pane dhiria," features this as one of the background vocals. - Amanda Palmer likes this on tracks like Slide and Deliah - Rapsody's "Prince Igor" features frequent switches to an impressive wail from Sissel Kyrkjebo, wherein she sings an excerpt from the original Prince Igor. - "Persia" by The Art of Trance uses a Middle-Eastern wail. - Swans' former vocalist Jarboe was prone to this. "Blood On Your Hands" comes to mind, as does the Swans Are Dead version of "I Crawled", in which [[spoiler:it eventually mutates into a Metal Scream. - Roza Rymbaeva, especially in "Alia." "AAAAAALIIIIIIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! Aru qyzy sen khaaaaalqyyyyyymnyyyyyn! AAAAAALIIIIIIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! Batyr qyzy sen khaaaaalqyyyyymnyyyyyn! Yerke kusy sen daaaalaaaamyyyyn! AAAAAALIIIIIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" - Nina Hagen's "Natuträne." The song starts out as a very positive, poetic description of a German city. Then she mentions how much seeing a loved one outside makes her want to cry, and how the little bits of nature around the city touch her heart, and she starts to warble. - The Tiger Lillies do this occasionally, despite being an all-male band — the lead singer is a perfect falsetto. Their song "Maria", a 9-minute wail about a woman who is slaughtered by a madman, is the most prominent example. - Tarja Turunen naturally is rather fond of this. Nightwish tunes "Astral Romance," "Angels Falls First," "Swanheart," "The Siren" and especially "Passion and the Opera" use it, and most of her solo works as well. - Current Nightwish singer Floor Jansen lent her name to the fandom term "Floorgasm" after she joined the band, applying in particular to the closing aria of her take on "Ghost Love Score" (originally written for Tarja). - Much of Iced Earth 's recent Set Abominae-based material has made use of both this and Ominous Latin Chanting. Most blatant one is probably "Awakening." - The third movement of Leonard Bernstein's "Jeremiah" Symphony has a mezzo-soprano singing extracts from the Lamentations of Jeremiah in Hebrew. - Another rare male example occurs in Rush's "2112", at roughly 1:45 here. Of course, if any man can do such a wail, it's Geddy Lee. - The deeply unsettling Doom. A Sigh by Kronos Quartet features field recordings of two Romanian women singing laments for the dead; the first seems to be actually weeping as she sings, and the poor quality of the recordings gives it all an otherworldly feel. - On the ABBA song "The Day Before You Came," Agnetha Falskog sings the verses with lyrics about a romantic affair and then Frida Lyngstad(who is a trained opera singer) sings a long mournful wail. - Emilie Autumn likes this, and it's most notable in "Shalott" and "God Help Me". Usually preceded by a Madness Mantra. - Deborah Sasson's "Carmen (Danger in Her Eyes)" samples "Habanera" from Bizet's Carmen. - PJ Harvey does this in "The Mountain." - Present in Diamanda Galás' "skotose me (kill me)." - Another one-man wail inversion occurs in Simon & Garfunkel's live rendition of "For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her". - Namgar uses these both in her own songs (often reinterpretations of traditional Buryat-Mongol songs) and in her vocal work on the soundtrack for Inspector Putilin and Prince of the Wind. - Canadian goth-synthpop band Austra uses this trope regularly. - Traditional music has many great examples. Here's Yo-Yo Ma and Mongolian singer Khongorzul introducing a Long Song. The name refers not to how long it takes to sing the song, but rather the long distances over which the song may be heard, as it is an ancient method of communication. - Electric Wizard employs this in "Ivixor B/Phase Inducer". - The intros of Funker Vogt's "Hard Way" and "Our Life". - Solarstone uses these in "4ever", "Ultraviolet", "Zeitgeist", "The Last Defeat (Part 2)", which also uses Ethereal Choir at its climax, "Nothing but Chemistry Here", and "Shield Pt 1". - The verse of The Cruxshadows' "Cassandra" has a vocodered background wail, alongside electric violin. - Dream Theater uses this in the intro to Through Her Eyes from their Concept Album Scenes From a Memory. - Lindsey Stirling in her music video for Assassin's Creed 3, when she's not rocking out on her violin. - Vangelis uses this on the Heaven and Hell concept LP. On the Hell side, a chorus of the damned souls in Hell (who are being whipped by demons) morphs into a classic One Woman Wail, loaded with pain and sorrow and regret. - Within Temptation uses a two women wail in their song Paradise (What about Us). It also features Tarja Turunen as the second wailing woman. - The Frozen Autumn's "Fragments of Memories", which was their first song to feature the female vocalist Arianna, also known as Froxeanne. - Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy" has a male falsetto wail, courtesy of Jimmy Somerville. Ditto "Why?" - Front 242 used this trope in "Modern Angel," and its reprise, "Happiness(More Angels)." - Void Vision uses this vocal style in "Everything is Fine", "To The Sea", and "Slow Dawn". - Delta Rae occasionally use this - one of the most striking is Brittany's singing in "Scared." - The song "Ah Yeah" by Korean Pop Music group EXID features one by member Solji to kick off the song's climax. - Many songs by Grimes, such as "Laughing and Not Being Normal." - Most of Xeno & Oaklander's female vocals are this trope or scatting. - Ratty's "Sunrise (Here I Am)." - Sabaton: The soundtrack version of their Concept Album about World War I remixes the songs into epic and often forlorn orchestral pieces featuring a mixture of choir and this trope in songs such as "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" and "The End of the War to End All Wars" lamenting the tragedy of the war. - Black Rain's "Profusion" and "Profusion II," both featuring Zoe Zanias. Ditto most of Zanias's solo material. - Watergate's "Heart of Asia," the trance version of Ryuichi Sakamoto's theme song to Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, has a wailing woman vocal that wasn't present in the original. This carries over to the Speedy Techno Remake "Tokyo Rush" by Brisk, Vagabond and Uraken. - Mono Inc.'s Katha Mia performs One Woman Wails on many of the songs that have her backup singing, complementing lead singer Martin Engler's deep baritone vocals. For example, "Children of the Dark." - The Scandinavian music tradition of kulning/kaukning almost is this trope — as a result of originally being a form of herding call, they are wordless songs sung by a single person (usually a woman) with aspects that make them carry far (many that overlap with 'and sounds haunting'). It also incorporates tones traditionally associated with sad music. - The Gaels of Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man have a currently defunct keening tradition, the practice of ritualized singing and wailing for the dead. "Keening" is derived from the Gaelic verb caoin, meaning "to weep, to mourn/lament" and the verb caoineadh ("weeping") also refers to a musical style, a lament for the dead. A keening-woman would be hired by the family of the deceased to lead the community through their grief, with the keening occurring at the graveyard and the keening-woman (or bean-chaointe in Gaelic) would sing and wail a semi-improvised lament with the rest of the mourners joining at least during the chorus, the whole performance often punctuated with sobs. It was a way of helping the family and the community through their grief as well as a means of ensuring that the soul of the departed with reach Heaven, The Otherworld, or wherever spirits seek to go. the wealthier the family of the deceased, the more keening-women that they would hire. The caoineadh usually consisted of stock elements (the illustrious ancestry of the deceased, their good qualities, and the heavy hearts of their surviving family and friends) and was often half-improvised, complete with beating your hands and tearing at your hair. The tradition of keening-women is described here, plus a few surviving recordings. - The keening-woman is the human counterpart of the banshee (or bean-sidhe, if you speak Gaelic). Bean-sidhe (plural, mná-sidhe) means "woman of the fairy folk", a guardian spirit of the ancient Gaelic families. She visits "her" family's home in the evening and wails and sobs through the night to warn the family that one of them will soon die. if the family hears her crying three nights in a row, they know that they should begin planning a funeral. They wail of the banshee might be dreaded, but the banshee herself is only a messenger and she means no harm. If many mná-sidhe could be heard wailing in chorus, it was a warning that somebody of great political or religious importance would soon die. - The vocals in "Isabella's Dream" by Anders Enger Jensen are entirely wordless one-woman wails. - "U" by Grum features a heavily electronically-modified wail at various points of the song. - "Nocturne" by Irish-Norwegian duo Secret Garden (later covered by Celtic Woman), which won the 1995 Eurovision Song Contest. - Interface's Where All Roads Lead album has this in its outtro track, "Hiraeth". - Apollo 440: - "Moonshine" by Project Medusa vs. Exor plays up this trope most strongly in the two Exor mixes. - Gearwhore's aptly-named "Ghost By Day" is a Drum N Bass track employing banshee-like wailing vocals. - Bernard Herrmann's opera Wuthering Heights ends with an eerie soprano voice resembling Cathy's, accompanied mostly by the sound of the wind, calling out to Heathcliff. - Cirque du Soleil: - The Songbird's numbers in Saltimbanco. - The "Aftermath" interlude in KA. - "Le reveur" in Varekai. - The suspended poles ("Enchanted Reunion") and Chinese pole ("Creature of Light") acts in Amaluna - "Distorted" in La Nouba. - Volta most prominently has this in "Man Craft", "Battle of the Man", the climax of "The Bee and the Wind", and the coda of "Inside Me". - The Phantom of the Opera has Christine do this near the end of the titular song. - Richard Strauss's opera Daphne ends with Daphne transformed into a laurel tree and her now-wordless voice singing through the branches. - The stage musical of The Little Mermaid has a one-woman wail version of "Part of Your World" as a Dream Melody. - The BGM for Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War's final mission, "Zero," includes about 50 seconds of wailing... before heading into a remix of the BGM from the final mission of Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War. - Axiom Verge and Axiom Verge 2 feature multiple tracks with wailing, fitting the lonely feeling of the games' many isolated areas. Sometimes there's even a chorus of wailing. - Appears prominently in the soundtrack for Baten Kaitos, particularly as things get darker around the second disc. Probably the most memorable use is "Ruinous Commander," the Final Boss theme from Origins. - Bayonetta 2 features one during the boss theme "Alraune Whisperer of Insanity," which fits in eerily well amongst the Ominous Latin Chanting. - The soundtrack for Xen in Black Mesa makes heavy use of this. One of the best examples is the haunting opening track Transcendent, perfectly setting the tone for the beautiful, dreamlike, alien place that is Xen. - BlazBlue features this as the Leitmotif for Nu -13-. Awakening The Chaos. - Borderlands 2 features one briefly in the ambient soundtrack for Thousand Cuts. - Castlevania: - One of the GLA's tracks in Command & Conquer: Generals has this at the start. - Commandos 2: Men of Courage has a couple of such themes. For example, Savo island's undersea areas are set to this. - "Critical Moment of Contra" from Contra: Shattered Soldier. - Crimson Echoes: The song played during the battle with Antaeus Porre features this. - The DanceDanceRevolution songs "L'amour et la liberte" and "Tears". - Darius: - Darius Gaiden: - This clip. It doesn't help that in that clip it is heard just as the boss appears. Not only this is the final stage music, the bosses in Darius Gaiden are Nintendo Hard in and of themselves. Even the uploader admitted that he'd die if the boss pulls the disappear-into-the-background trick again; yeah, The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard. For bonus score? This particular boss resembled the very first boss, giving a very nasty surprise to any unprepared players. - That same warbling voice echoes in the game's many different endings, most of which are either tremendously nihilistic or just downright weird, kinda like the music. - Darius Burst: - In Dark Chronicle, Emperor Griffon's battle theme, "Sun", features a dramatic wail set against a male choir of Ominous Latin Chanting, representing \|\|Sirus' longing for Alexandra as well as his psychotic hatred towards humanity.\|\| - Dark Souls has a few boss themes that fit the mold. There is also "Daughters of Chaos", which plays at the bonfire kept by Quelaag's sister—probably the most tragic of all Tragic Monsters in the game. - In Dead Island, the background music for the church safehouse has a theme based on this trope. - DEFCON has this in the main background music. Extra points for not being a woman singing in a sad voice, but actually crying. Which is very fitting, considering that the point of the game is to bomb as many of your enemies' cities with nukes as possible. - While the soundtrack of the original Deus Ex is almost entirely techno - the second game, Invisible War features a One Woman Wail remix of the original game's theme. The soundtrack of Human Revolution, on the other hand, has a wail in almost every track. - The Diablo III cinematic trailer unveiled in June 2008 features such a wail. - Dragon Age series: - Dragon Age: Origins loves this trope, with wailing at the title credits and during the Battle of Ostagar. Leliana will sing in camp if you have high enough approval rating with her. - Our Lady makes a brief reappearance in the main theme for Dragon Age II, but she's mostly replaced in favor of some very plaintive strings. - In Drakengard 3, whenever Zero taps into her Intoner powers, she sings along to the background music. This is also featured in all the Intoner boss fights, with the voices turning into jumbled murmuring (not unlike a fast rap verse) when Intoner Mode is activated. - The main theme of Dungeons & Dragons Tactics, also used in the map screen. - The first level of Einhänder. - The track Frostfall in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim contains one. - In Endless Legend, both themes associated with the Drakken feature One Woman Wails: An Ancient Wail and Wisdom of Dark Ages. - "Dust to Dust," from Final Fantasy XIII, plays when you enter the ruined village of Oerba. Particularly powerful, since Oerba was Vanille and Fang's hometown, but is now nothing but decaying wreckage, crystal sands, and Cie'th. The music even overrides the battle theme, driving home the sorrow and desolation. - Fire Emblem: Awakening has a rare fusion of Ominous Latin Chanting and the One Woman Wail: before you fight one of the major story bosses, as he and your character have their dramatic discussion before fighting one another, this piece will play: a One-Woman Wail that isn't sad or forlorn, but rather ominous and chilling. Once the fighting starts, though, it kicks right into Ominous Latin Chanting. - Gears of War 2 has this in With Sympathy, except that the wail slowly becomes more powerful towards the end. - God of War (PS4) uses this to great effect throughout the soundtrack, such as in "Memories of Mother." - In .hack//G.U. we have the Keel Mountain Range of Briona Gwydion, which is just one of several pieces like this. - Halo: Used in "Ashes" from Halo: Reach, alongside Lonely Piano, and "Atonement" from Halo 4. - Hearts of Iron III's song Letters From Home features this. - From Hellsinker we get the theme of the Apostles of the Seed. - And soon thereafter we get Segment 7, the theme of Rex Cavalier although it's more of a One-Man Wail. - Hollow Knight has a one-woman wail in the outside sections of the City of Tears, whose melody is also sung by the ghost songstress Marissa in the Pleasure House. Some portions of "Daughter of Hallownest" (Hornet's remixed DLC theme) also fit. - Horizon Zero Dawn uses the vocals of Julie Elven frequently and to great effect, most obviously in "Aloy's Theme" but in many other parts of the soundtrack as well. - "Grace and Glory," the final boss theme of both Jet Set Radio games. - The ending song by Lisbeth Scott, "I Was Born for This", from Journey (2012). - A One-Woman Wail in Kid Icarus: Uprising plays when Pit sees \|\|the destroyed Skyworld, caused by the Chaos Kin possessing Palutena, for the first time. It later serves as a Recurring Riff throughout the rest of the Chaos Kin arc.\|\| - Kingdom Hearts III: The gut-wrenching fight against \|\|a darkness-corrupted Aqua\|\| has segments that involve a wordless "ah" vocalization from one woman, and segments that seem to be a duet between two of these. - A number of the special Infected leitmotif in both Left 4 Dead games feature ominous wailing, especially the Witch's theme. - The Legend of Zelda: - LittleBigPlanet 2's Victoria's Laboratory Int Music with only the Melody playing. - Lobotomy Corporation has this included in the Third Warning music. - Library of Ruina has a similar haunting wail during the third version of Furioso, the theme that plays when you fight Roland during his Floor Realizations \|\|as well as the first three stages of his reception.\|\| - The opening animation for The Lost Crown has this. - From Lost Odyssey, "Parting Forever," which plays when \|\|Lirum dies.\|\| - Some tracks of the game Malicious use it, such as the eponymous music (very soothing by the way). - Mass Effect: - An in-universe example happens in Mass Effect, wherein defeating the geth in the Armstrong Cluster triggers a recording of a lone quarian woman wailing. This is also one of the first indications of their (for want of a better word) humanity. - The beginning of "After The Drop" from Medal of Honor: Frontline has a boy soprano version of this. Halfway through the song, a full Cherubic Choir joins in. Ditto for "Arnhem". - The game Medieval: Total War uses this trope in every way it can. - Rome: Total War has it as the theme for losing battles and battles ending in a draw, as opposed to the victorious-sounding Ominous Latin Chanting played during victories. It is fittingly entitled "Lost Souls". - The opening (and later, the ending) of Metal Gear Solid features a One-Woman Wail... in Irish, which not even a native speaker can follow. (Ironically, if you look at the official translated lyrics, she's singing about how life is wonderful and how people aren't alone). - Metal Gear Solid 4 took it to a more obvious extreme by wrapping the trailers in a Hebrew One Woman Wail which is more emblematic of the trope. It's about how terrible war is. \|\|A vocal-only version accompanies Snake's trip through the microwave hallway, as he damn near kills himself, and his allies do the same thing.\|\| - Metal Gear Solid 4 also \|\|features a callback to the first game's One Woman Wail when Snake goes back to Shadow Moses Island.\|\| - Metal Gear Solid 4 also has the credits song "Here's To You", which probably counts as a one-woman wail if you don't speak English. The bulk of Japanese gamers probably don't have to sit and wonder who Nicola and Bart are. - Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain features the song "Sins of the Father" by Donna Burke, which has a more dramatic take on this trope, seen in gameplay when Snake smokes a Phantom Cigar: " WOA- " HAAAAAAAA! - The ending theme of Metro 2033 that plays if you get the good ending includes this alongside the music as Artyom sits atop the tower, looking out across the world. - Might & Magic 7 features this in heaps. The wailing is present almost everywhere, but the soundtracks for Barrow Downs, Eofol, Deyja and the Bracada desert really lean on it. Perfect wasteland wandering motifs. - From the Myst series, Uru: Ages Beyond Myst and Uru Live (AKA Myst Online) has a wail in Kadish's Gallery. Another such wail plays in Kadish's Vault. - The Kadish Vault theme was later used in the trailer for the movie Munich. - The main theme and related leitmotifs for Ninety-Nine Nights features this technique. - No More Heroes with Bad Girl's theme, Pleather for Breakfast. - The main menu theme of Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising starts with one of these, followed with throat singing and very US Army orchestral reprise (sounding very much like themes from America's Army and Metal Gear Solid 4). - Ori and the Blind Forest has many examples sung by Aeralie Brighton, such as "Ori, Lost in the Storm", "The Spirit Tree", "Approaching the End", "Returning to the Spirit Tree", "The Sacrifice", and "Light of Nibel". - Parasite Eve: While it has a few musical themes using this trope throughout the game, the most notable of these is Eve's battle theme, "Influence of Deep", which features a One-Woman Wail being heard amidst techno music. It also has an instrumental segment played using an organ tossed in. - Persona: - The music in the Velvet Room, variously translated as "Aria of the Soul" and "The Poem for Everyone's Souls". In the first and second games, it's justified by having the singer (Belladonna) actually standing at a mike in the Velvet Room. It's also used in the final boss battle of Persona 3, which makes sense given that the song's title can be translated as "The Battle for Everyone's Souls". - In Persona 2, a frightened woman's scream is repeated throughout Nyarlathotep's Leitmotif. - The music in P.N.03's intro cutscene, and by extension the final stage, features both male and female throat singing. - There is an incredibly haunting track on the second volume of the Portal 2 soundtrack called \|\|PotatOS's Lament\|\|. It's sung by GLaDOS after she's been \|\|turned into a potato\|\|, and plays in the Act II title screen. The lyrics are in Latin (and make little to no sense when translated), but the Drone of Dread-music combined with the fact that you can hear GLaDOS's voice breaking at the end. - Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones often has this as background music when navigating the ruined city of Babylon. - Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time has a track that consists entirely of this. - Quake has this in one of its CD music tracks, although strictly speaking it's a one-man scream. A man's yell/scream begins and continues for an unnaturally long time, fading in and out and occasionally becoming ragged. The effect is suitably disturbing for the player. - The last level in R-Type Delta has a One Woman Wail as a soundtrack. Here's a music-only submission. - Resident Evil Code: Veronica: Alexia's battle themes use this prominently for the "Berceuse" melody. - This is a favorite technique of Shadow Hearts series composer Yoshitaka Hirota. Take for example "Brain Hopper", a battle theme. - Skullgirls uses this trope in the intro to the opening theme of the game, and is also used in the Final Boss theme: "Skull Heart Arryhmia". - Another example definitely intended to be ominous rather than sad is the final boss theme of Sonic CD. - The themes for the battles against Fienne, Thuris and \|\|Drazil\|\| in Soul Nomad & the World Eaters. - Notably in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, the background music on the aptly named planet Styx. - The opening animation sequence of Suikoden II. - The opening animation sequence of Suikoden III. - The Super Mario Galaxy 2 remix of the "Road to Bowser" music from Super Mario 64. - The Judecca's Leitmotif in Super Robot Spirits is basically this, probably because Levi is the final boss of the game. - The Super Smash Bros. Melee remix of the Pokémon theme. - In Team Fortress 2, the "ROBOTS!" song on the soundtrack features this near the end, as the voice wails along with the melody. - The opening and ending of Thunder Force VI. - In Turgor, the tracks called "The Adit" and "\|\| Sister's Death\|\|" - Twilight Wing has these in "Emotion Eater"(Changeling Swamp) and "Gold Dusk"(Final Stage). The former samples the vocals from the Metal Gear Solid intro/ending theme. - The Snowy Roads music in Twisted Metal Black uses this. Also used, along with For Doom the Bell Tolls, on the Freeway level. - Tyranny has Theme-and-Variations Soundtrack based on one such wail. It runs through tracks like "Binder of Fate" and "Kyros", and shows up in-game in the game's climaxes, \|\|such as during the breaking of Edicts and the deaths of Archons\|\|. - Reina Akikawa's theme in Wangan Midnight R, which can also be listened to in Maximum Tune 3 by unlocking the Wangan Midnight R soundtrack. - Warcraft III uses this when Arthas returns before killing his father, a One Boy Soprano Wail as he catches a rose petal and watches it wither in his hand, and a One-Woman Wail in The Ascencion cinematic at the end of The Frozen Throne. - The Night Elves' defeat music also features one. - World of Goo: - "The Burning Man," which plays in a good amount of the dark, industrial levels of Chapter 3, consists largely of metallic screeching combined with ethereal choir. It effectively encapsulates the hell that the factory is in the game. - Its reprise, "Are You Coming Home, Love MOM," that plays upon meeting the eponymous character, as well as \|\|in the wreckage of the World Of Goo Corporation\|\|, reuses the above's vocals to a much more relaxed, yet still somber melody. - In World of Warcraft, an obscure questline ends with you going to Undercity to give Lady Sylvanas a necklace she lost in battle, at which point she conjures a choir of banshees and sings "Lament of the Highborne" as she recalls the fall of Silvermoon and her own death. The song replaces Undercity's normal BGM for its duration, and all players in the city will hear the ghostly dirge, which especially adds to the city's haunted feel for players who don't know about the quest. There are words, but they're entirely in Thallasian (the High/Blood Elf language). - The Wrathgrate Cinematic created for Wrath of the Lich King has one near the end, during \|\|Highlord Bolvar Fordragon's death\|\|. - The intro cinematic to Wrath of the Lich King also features this, using the Ascension theme from The Frozen Throne (see below), except this is a boy soprano, not a woman. - In the X series, the BGM for the Boron capital sector Kingdom End-uses this with some reverb added. In this case, it's probably meant to be evocative of whale song, since the Boron are an aquatic species. - In Xenoblade Chronicles 1, the song "Engage the Enemy" has a woman wail that plays in the 2 minutes mark. Since the first use of the song is \|\|before Fiora's death\|\|, this works with the heartwrenching nature of the song. The Switch version makes the wailing more emotional. - Fate/stay night: - In the 2012 Updated Re-release, the new version of Shirou's leitmotif that plays whenever he does something momentous is accompanied by this. Have a listen. - "This Illusion", the opening song, turns into this halfway through. - The main theme of Higurashi: When They Cry. It's the main theme because it sort of embodies the tragic insanity everyone, including most of the young girls \|\|and the male lead\|\|, fall under. It's most often used during scenes regarding the aftermath of the Great Hinamizawa Gas Disaster. - One song that plays often near the end of Snatcher has a decent-for-its-time clip of a woman screaming between repetitions. - Broken Saints: - At the final part of Chapter 24 Act 4, contains a very powerful wail titled "Truth". - Apart from that, the tracks "Come Into The Dark", "The Eight Element", "Belief", "Kenoma", and "Qaf", used at various points in the series. - Weiss's theme Mirror Mirror from RWBY features this. - Avatar: The Last Airbender: - The Grand Finale features the Wail during the climax of the battle between Aang and Fire Lord Ozai. - Also happens during the last episode, when Sokka and Toph are about to die. Just before Suki arrives! - Courage the Cowardly Dog: Multiple: - This trope is used during a boat chase scene in "Human Habitrail" where Doctor Gerbil pursues Courage. - Also in the episode "Shadow of Courage", played whenever Muriel rushes over to whack Eustace with a rolling pin (because he's scaring/harming Courage). - Code Lyoko incorporates a wail whenever Aelita uses her Creativity power. (Some viewers mistake it for Aelita actually doing the singing, but she sometimes speaks, vocalizes, or sings her own note at the same time, showing it isn't the case.) - Gravity Falls: Parodied in "Sock Opera", where a woman singing "Ave Maria" plays over a puppet show getting destroyed by fireworks. - Parodied in the Phineas and Ferb Halloween episode "Druselsteinoween." When Ferb starts singing the song "Vampire Queens Love Pimpernels," there's an ethereal wail in the background... and as the song progresses, there's a brief moment where it turns out that Baljeet is doing the wail. - Samurai Jack: Heard in a couple of brief moments in "Jack and the Spartans". - The Space Ghost Coast to Coast theme song, which begins with a wail of parts of the original Space Ghost theme. - Shows up in Squidbillies as the Sheriff attempts to resuscitate a pig who has died of a meth overdose. - During \|\|Kanan's sacrifice\|\| in Star Wars Rebels, all audio is muted except for the music, with the Wail serving as the voice for the grieving characters. - Wordless ethereal female singing can be heard in "The Ballad of the Crystal Ponies" from Season 3, Episode 1 of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Unusually for this trope (but more in line with what you'd expect from the franchise) it's very cheerful and uplifting (it's easier to listen to here (at 0:55) than in the full song proper).	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneWomanWail
One-Man Army - TV Tropes Loki: I have an army. Tony Stark: We have a Hulk. Sometimes The Hero (or The Big Guy in their team) will face a large horde of Mooks and tell their leader they're going down. The leader will often say, "You and What Army?", then discover that the hero doesn't need one. This one person is the army and can go around killing thousands of enemies. The One-Man Army does far more than pull their own weight. Villains tend to underestimate this person at first, considering him Just One Man. They are quickly proven wrong. This is often justified by making the character a Super Soldier against mundanes, possessing far superior weaponry, or otherwise tremendously advantaged. The damage to the psychological state of someone like this is not always considered. It is usually affected by taking so many lives away. The impact of this is lessened if the character is explicitly a Living Weapon and/or if the enemies are Faceless Goons or don't register as human beings and therefore exist solely to provide a Mook Horror Show. Alternatively, the character may inflict Non-Lethal KOs instead. In a series aimed at younger audiences, they may simply defeat large masses of people rather than outright kill them. In playing this trope, it is useful to have the Evil Army try to Zerg Rush said character in The War Sequence. This trope caters to everyone's inner Munchkin; 99% of First Person Shooters ever made fall under this. Often goes hand-in-hand with It's Up to You and Walking Armory. When the One-Man Army is intentionally sent out to take care of the problem by himself, it's a case of One Riot, One Ranger. Compare and contrast Person of Mass Destruction, who's symbolically treated like a weapon by the setting, and Omnicidal Maniac, who is all too willing to push themselves into this territory. In the latter case, the Omnicidal Maniac often gains their kill-count through using WMDs on hapless civilians rather than personally fighting enemy combatants. Villains who are like this aren't bothered by Mook Depletion. Being one of these qualifies you as a Crew of One (though not for a Big Badass Battle Sequence). However, very few people will respect your ability, or worse, seek to abuse it because "We Do the Impossible" is in effect. Contrast with the Badass Army where each individual could be considered this but are part of said army, as well as the Easily Conquered World where it's the severely, severely outnumbered enemies who are kicking ass and taking names. If one man makes the army, then you have The Minion Master. Likewise, if one man becomes the army, it's Me's a Crowd. May be a case of The Dreaded, where the hero is more of a Terror Hero and is single-handedly the most dangerous entity on the battlefield to the point where the enemy may begin focusing on him/her out of knowledge that if they can't defeat the hero, they're going to lose hard. Compare Showy Invincible Hero and The Ace. See also Conservation of Ninjutsu, which postulates that being outnumbered is what gives the character the advantage. Compare Gideon Ploy for a more literal one-man army. A subtrope of Quality over Quantity. Related to Law of One. While Real Life examples do exist, this is generally not a good idea in Real Life. ## Examples: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other - Several characters in The God of High School are this, but very few can match Jin Mo Ri's feat of \|\|wiping out over 180,000 angels the size of skyscrapers in under thirty seconds after unlocking his power as the Monkey King.\|\| - Multiple characters in Ravages of Time are able to hold their own against whole armies, such as Liaoyuan Huo and Zhang Liao. A special notice goes to Lu Bu who, with his daughter strapped to his back, tried to break through the siege of Xiapi; he was severely out-numbered but managed to take out all of Cao Cao's generals and was only defeated when he was absolutely exhausted. - "One Woman Army" by Porcelain Black, naturally. - "Seven Nation Army" by The White Stripes is about one man taking on the titular army. - Cyrano de Bergerac: Between Act I and Act II, Cyrano stands against one hundred men and kills eight of them (as you can see in Real Life, this was Truth in Television). Between Act IV and Act V, he manages to survive the Last Stand of only one company of Gascon cadets against all the Spanish Army. - Hector in Troilusand Cressida, according to the Greek general Nestor: There is a thousand Hectors in the field: Now here he fights on Galathe his horse, And there lacks work; anon he's there afoot, And there they fly or die, like scaled sculls Before the belching whale; then is he yonder, And there the strawy Greeks, ripe for his edge, Fall down before him, like the mower's swath: Here, there, and every where, he leaves and takes, Dexterity so obeying appetite That what he will he does, and does so much That proof is call'd impossibility. - Played oh-so-straight when Sgt. Slaughter joined the ranks of G.I. Joe. The commercials were something else... - BIONICLE: - Toa usually work in teams, but there are occasions where they manage to demolish small armies. One particular example that stands out is Kopaka defeating three dozen Zyglak offscreen. What makes this even more impressive is that Zyglak are almost immune to Elemental Powers which Toa usually use as their primary attack. - Axonn and Brutaka are each worth a team of Toa by themselves, and together they handle an army of Skakdi warriors note : A Skadi is usually about as physically strong as a Toa, only handicapped by the fact they're there to broker an alliance and thus not (intentionally) trying to kill any of them. - The Makuta take the cake thanks to their Combo Platter Powers and the fact they can literally spawn their own personal army of kraata and Rahkshi. Teridax once held his own and survived fighting odds of 100,000 to 1, albeit with his robot vessel beaten to a barely-functioning pulp by the end of it. - Masters of the Universe: He-Man, the Most Powerful Man in the Universe. Of course, he doesn't always fight the forces of evil by himself... - Transformers: Generation 1: Sixshot is dubbed a "One-Robot Army, having tremendous amounts of power and versatility due to his rare ability of being able to transform into six different modes. His official designation is S.T.A.G.-Solo Transformer Assault Group. - Ciconia: When They Cry revolves around a new invention, the Gauntlet, that allows its wearer to fly, project protective barriers, and carry tons of weaponry. The Gauntlets can only be used by a small group of soldiers who have been trained since infancy and are still quite young, meaning that all the military power in the world has suddenly been put in the hands of idealistic youths. The story deconstructs the idea of these kids being given so much power: Miyao, the protagonist, is an idealist who formulates a plan for world peace and decides now's the only time it could work, before the Gauntlet Knights get older and become corrupt adults, and convinces several elite Gauntlet Knights from other nations' armies to go along with him, but ultimately, they are still dependent on adults to refuel their Gauntlets, so going against their military interests ends up having unexpected consequences. - In Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, \|\|Peko Pekoyama becomes one in her execution (which is even called "One-Woman Army" in English), taking down numerous Monokuma attackers armed solely with her sword. In the process, she accidentally slashes out Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu's eye, at which point she gives up and allows herself to be killed.\|\| - Grisaia Series: Though the previous novels in the series handled protagonist Yuuji's capabilities with at least a touch of realism, by the end of Eden, \|\|when he assaults Oslo's base in the climax, he carves a bloody path through his private army, taking down 40-50 armed mercenaries.\|\| - Majikoi! Love Me Seriously! has many characters who can beat up masses of people by themselves. For instance, most of the named characters in the Kawakami War are essentially Hero Units. - Abraham Van Helsing is the single toughest fighter the protagonists of Code:Realize have on their side. So much so that when they're attacked by multiple enemy airships in the anime, their solution is load Van into cannon and shoot him at the enemy. Van then proceeds to move from airship to airship, taking them out one after the other. - CollegeHumor video "Video Game Boss Lament" has villains expressing shock to their minions at how a protagonist is able to get through them. - Dreamscape: Implied with Melinda, considering it took the entire population of her Mirror Universe to weaken her enough to seal her away, as seen in the flashback in "The Mystery of Melinda". - Millie from Helluva Boss is a Fragile Speedster variation of the trope: If she gets hit even once, odds are she's down for the count. But as long as she's not getting hit, she's one of the deadliest imps in all of Hell. She has single-handedly taken down a Kaiju with nothing but a knife, made mince out of a demon-hunting government organization with a battleaxe, and turned a demonic Loan Shark mob family into sushi mostly using whatever she could rip out of their own bodies. - Hank from Madness Combat is perhaps the universal embodiment of this trope. In the flashes, he could kill a hundred guys in five minutes. - Jebus also qualifies. As well as all of the fan-characters. - In Episode 67 of The Most Popular Girls in School, Brittnay \|\|kills all four of The Expendables, in self-defense.\|\| - Every. Single. Freelancer. Ever. from Red vs. Blue. Season 9 makes this very apparent. - When sufficiently angered, Caboose can smash his way through dozens of soldiers. Problem is, he's Caboose, so he forgets how to get angry fairly often. - RWBY: The Vacuo Campaign was the decisive battle of the Great War after the King of Vale took to the front lines to defend Vacuo from Mantle and Mistral. Wreaking such devastation that both his enemies and ally surrendered, he refused their offer to rule the world in favour of brokering world peace by restructuring governments, stepping down as king and creating the Huntsmen Academies. Eighty years later, historians may believe his exploits were hyperbole, but Vacuo still hasn't recovered. \|\|He's also heavily implied to be the deceptively passive Professor Ozpin.\|\| - Dream SMP: - Technoblade, with virtue of being played by the content creator of the same name, is proficient in combat to the point of being able to equally match three people in a fight with a pickaxe. Quackity even identifies him as "the next best thing" to an army during the Red Banquet. - This is also implied to be the case for Purpled. While he rarely displays his combat prowess on the SMP due to his lack of involvement in most of the server's events, Quackity hires him to take on the Eggpire with him, calling him the best mercenary he could find across the land and one of the best fighters on the server. Considering that out-of-universe, Purpled is renowned for playing Bedwars, a combat-intensive minigame, to the point that he is nicknamed "Purpled Bedwars", this reputation is very justified. - Galm comments on this when he plays Sniper Elite III: "I am the most interesting man in this world. We need like fifty of me." - In the pilot of Hogan Vs Flair, the card features the "Kevin Nash Burial Gauntlet Match". It's pretty much Nash just destroying one guy after another after another with his Jackknife Powerbomb, parodying the way the Real Life Nash would always insist on winning (and get his way most of the time.) - Knight of Hope sees a single Knight in Shining Armor take on an entire bandit camp by himself to save a woman they'd been keeping as a Sex Slave. While he does come out of it exhausted and injured, he successfully kills them all by himself. Even more to this trope is the bandits do not abide by Mook Chivalry, he's just that skilled, full-plate armor is far more useful than Hollywood would have you believe it is, and it's heavily implied God himself is behind him. Notably, this isn't as outlandish as it would seem, as a well trained, fully armored knight would have a serious advantage against unarmored, untrained opponents, especially given few of the bandits have the proper weapons to damage him through his armor. - The Kriegan Army from Lambda. Each soldier is trained to take down dozens of enemies by themselves. Higher up, their elite Knights of Grabacr are up there at Person of Mass Destruction. - SCP-076-2 - As a result of the Mob's total inability to switch out Pokemon, some Mons in Twitch Plays Pokémon tend to fall into this category. Pidgeot ("Bird Jesus") from the first run is the primary example, but Feraligatr ("Lazor Gator") and Azumarill ("M4 Moe") also have this status. - Worm has quite a few, but the standout example is Contessa, who has singlehandedly delivered a Curb-Stomp Battle to a large group of people in every fight she's been in.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneWomanArmy
Only a Model - TV Tropes So this is what the building she's in looks like. Number Two: Over the last thirty years, Virtucon has grown by leaps and bounds. About fifteen years ago, we changed from volatile chemicals to the communication industry. We own cable companies in thirty-eight states. ( the thirty-eight states illuminate on a map ) Number Two: In addition to our cable holdings, we own a steel mill in Cleveland. ( a steel mill miniature illuminates in Cleveland ) Number Two: Shipping in Texas. ( a model ship off the coast of Texas illuminates ) Number Two: Oil refineries in Seattle. ( a model oil refinery illuminates in Seattle ) Number Two: And a factory in Chicago that makes miniature models of factories. Models of larger things are often used in fiction for a variety of reasons. Heck, if there isn't an immediate thing happening with the model in one scene, it's likely something will happen later. One common use is models to describe plans (that will go wrong of course). Often overlaps with The Big Board, Exposition Diagram and Planning with Props. Another is a Corrupt Corporate Executive showing the plans he makes for some place he is going to rebuild after tearing down some place (that the heroes have to save). Sometimes a model can actually be one of the special effects props on a show, thrown in as a nod to attentive fans. A Super-Trope to: Compare Fun Size. ## Examples: - In The World God Only Knows Haqua tries to summarize the events of her introductory arc with a miniature model of the school and animated dolls. It ends up with the figurines of Keima and Haqua engaging in questionable activities. - In Despicable Me, Gru gives a pep talk to his Minions, during which he reveals that they had stolen the Statue of Liberty- "The small one from Las Vegas," that is, as well as a respective replica of the Eiffel Tower. - The climax of Hot Fuzz is in a model of the town (including an infamous weaponizing of it). - Diamonds Are Forever: Willard Whyte has a rather large image of the United States on the floor with models of all his enterprises. This provides a "Eureka!" Moment where the Supervillain Lair is, when Bond points out a model of an offshore oil rig that isn't part of Whyte's business empire. Whyte: Baja? I don't have anything in Baja! - On Austin Powers, Number Two lists the many businesses owned by Virtucon, which are accompanied by models lighting up. One of the businesses mentioned is a factory that makes these models. - Battle of the Bulge. Col. Martin Hessler is being shown models of Germany's new wonder weapons, including one of the King Tiger tank. He snarks, "It's a very beautiful model, General. It proves that the Germans are still the world's best toy makers." However the general just smiles and takes him to inspect the very real King Tigers they've assembled for the upcoming attack. - Monty Python and the Holy Grail names the trope when Arthur's servant snipes that Camelot is just a special effects model (and is immediately shushed), after all the knights act amazed at the sight. Ironically, it wasn't a model; the filmmakers used a real castle because a model would've been too expensive. - Zoolander: When Mugatu shows Derek a model for the "Derek Zoolander Center For Kids Who Can't Read Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too," Derek thinks the model is the actual school and destroys it in a rage. Derek Zoolander: What is this, a center for ants? How can we expect to teach children to learn how to read if they can't even fit inside the building?!. - Fred in The Flintstones, in his first executive board meeting where Cliff is describing the pre-planned community he plans to build with his new revolutionary automated construction system that will make traditional quarrying obsolete. After unveiling the model of the community, Fred stands up, picks up one of the model houses and asks aloud: Fred Flintstone: If we build houses this small, who's going to live in them? - Wrong is Right. Sean Connery's character is briefing the White House staff on what will happen to New York City if the two suitcase nukes hidden there by terrorists explode, when he's apparently Killed Mid-Sentence along with everyone else amid scenes of the city burning and melting amid a fiery mushroom cloud. We then see everyone staring glumly at a smoldering model of New York that's just been destroyed in a simulated blast. - The 1979 Disney comedy A Spaceman in King Arthur's Court opens with a NASA rocket apparently flying through space, then a hand reaches over and removes the Space Plane from the payload bay and holds it up to show a roomful of government bigwigs who are there to approve the building of the real rocket and spaceplane. - In Black Adder Goes Forth Melchett and Darling show George a model of the stretch of ground that has been captured in the latest battle. It turns out that the model is on a scale of 1:1, so the actual gain is only a few square feet. Closer examination reveals that it's not even a model — it's the actual square of turf. - In The Mighty Boosh episode "The Nightmare of Milky Joe" there appears to be a ship in the distance that may rescue our heroes from the island they're stranded on. It's only a model, as Vince proves when he reaches out and plucks it right off the horizon. - Monty Python's Flying Circus In the Architect's Sketch, the second architect (the one who didn't design an abattoir) shows a model of a high rise block of flats that falls apart in various ways during the presentation, ending with it catching fire. The developers nevertheless decide to go with the design, saying it will probably be OK if the tenants don't weight very much and they have a spate of good weather. But it's mostly because the architect was a Freemason. - The Goodies. "The Lost Island of Munga", opens with a model longboat floating in the water while Graeme's voice tells how long ago a crew of Vikings were blown off course by a mighty storm. (It's an adaptation of an earlier radio sketch, see below) Graeme: Suddenly the sea gets rough, there is a mighty wind, and a fearful noise fills the air! Bill: Because Thor pulled the plug out! Reveal Shot shows Graeme is actually reading out loud from a book while sitting in the bath with a toy longship. - The Goodies' sketch (above) of a Viking ship foundering in a mighty maelstrom which turns out to be a model in a bathtub first saw the light of day in the show's radio precursor, I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, also written by Garden and Oddie. - Babes In Outer Space, a parody of 1950's sci-fi B-movies by Steve Lovett, opens with a space station apparently being destroyed by a Death Ray. The next scene is a press conference where it's explained that someone is destroying space exhibits at theme parks throughout the country to discourage humanity from the exploration of outer space. - The Mann vs. Machine map Coaltown in Team Fortress 2 includes a small museum containing, among other things, a model of ... the map itself. - The "Cold Reception" level in James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire contains within it a model of an oil rig. Snapping it with the Q-Camera will award you a Bond Move, for Bond will visit it later on. - The Simpsons: - In the season eight episode "Homer's Enemy", Homer enters a "build a model nuclear power plant" contest for kids... and not only kicks their asses, note : Homer's copy of the existing plant but with stripes added beat Martin's functioning model for a better one because Burns hates being told everything he's done isn't already perfect but humiliates his antagonistic co-worker into a Villainous Breakdown and accidental suicide! - Close to the halfway mark of the VeggieTales episode "Rack, Shack, and Benny", Mr. Nezzer shows the titular characters a model of the giant amphitheater and bunny statue that he's constructed so the workers can bow down and show their love for the bunny. - In Star Trek: Lower Decks episode "An Embarrassment of Dooplers", Tendi and Rutherford spend the episode building a model of their ship, the USS Cerritos. A fully functional model, complete with phasers and a working warp core. At the end of the episode, Tendi decides to up their game with a model of Deep Space Nine, complete with miniature Jadiza and Erzi Dax! ''SHHH!!!''	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyAModel
One-Winged Angel - TV Tropes "Behold my true form, and despair!" Classic Big Bads have the tendency, when push comes to shove, to turn into big honking monsters. A Mad Scientist in a fit of urgency might down his own Psycho Serum, or a practitioner of Black Magic might mutate himself into an Eldritch Abomination, or... you get the idea. Bets are good they'll become way more bloated, ugly, or plain disfigured. And with this new form, their power grows immensely. This indicates that the villain means business and it's time for the heroes to get cracking. Video games in general absolutely adore having their final boss do this, even when their original form is scary enough anyway. In fact, it's gotten to be somewhat of an arms race: thanks to the popularity of Frieza in 1991, three-form bosses are now somewhat common, and those games going for "epic" will sometimes go for even more. The Trope Namer is Sephiroth, the Final Boss of Final Fantasy VII, who goes from a pretty boy with long hair, to a bizarre seven-winged entity, to an Angelic Abomination (and then back to a pretty boy with long hair). "One-Winged Angel" is the name of Sephiroth's Battle Theme Music. He's become one the most famous examples of the concept, and as a result, it's common to see other JRPGs follow the three-stage example of Sephiroth: the base form, the "bizarro" form that is huge and scary, and the "angel" form that is eerily beautiful and accompanied by Ominous Latin Chanting. Once beaten, or on becoming even more powerful, the villain may cross the Bishōnen Line and into safer territory for an Evil Makeover to work its magic (though it's a case of Tropes Are Not Bad; as much as it's used, you'd be hard pressed to complain when they turn into something completely awesome). Usually accompanied by the stock phrases "No one who's witnessed this form has lived to tell the tale!", "I have only , or begun to fight!" "This isn't even my final form!" Sometimes you never even fight their human form at all and they immediately turn into a monster. Can count as The Unfought if they showed fighting ability in their human form. This is more popular among minor video game villains who will often transform into tougher versions of earlier monsters like in the Breath of Fire and early Final Fantasy games, as a unique battle sprite for them would take up extra development time and storage space on the cartridge (one unique boss could take the space of several mooks, more with the use of a Palette Swap). Interestingly, heroes, particularly transforming characters, have been known to occasionally use this "turn into a big scary monster" tactic for their Super Modes as well. It's extremely rare for it not to cross into Superpowered Evil Side territory. And for those with firmer morals, this qualifies the villain as a monster, making it fine to kill him. One way to defeat a villain who became giant is to become one yourself. A Behemoth Battle can be even worse than a single giant monster, but it may be done anyway if there are no other options left. Scaled Up and Make My Monster Grow are major subtropes. Super Mode is a sister trope. See also Power-Upgrading Deformation, I Am Not Left-Handed. Compare Emergency Transformation, Lovecraftian Superpower, Came Back Wrong, and Not Even Human. Some subversions are to make it a Clipped-Wing Angel or Power Up Letdown. When the transformation is caused by the character's pain or anger it's Hulking Out. For when the transformation is the villain dropping their humanoid disguise and assuming their true, more powerful form, see This Was His True Form. Not to Be Confused with Broken Angel. For those looking for actual winged people, see Winged Humanoid, Our Angels Are Different, and (most relevant to this trope), Power Gives You Wings. Before adding examples, please be aware that this trope is not about just transforming into a monster. It's not even about villains who can transform into a monster. It's a plot trope for climactic final battles with villains. ## Example subpages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other examples: - Magic: The Gathering: - Cards like Form of the Dragon do this to the player. - Meanwhile, cards that do this to CREATURES are too many to count. Green in particular can transform even the meekest creatures into game-ending monstrosities. However, on top of it all is Eldrazi Conscription, which apparently can transform any creature into an Eldritch Abomination. - Can happen in the card game version of Legend of the Five Rings when overlaying a character with an Experienced version of said character that is infected from Shadowlands taint. This can cause normal-looking samurai such as Kuni Yori, Ikoma Ryozu, or Hida Amoro to instantly increase in power while also becoming disfigured monstrosities. Already-monstrous Shadowlands beings such as Moto Tsume and Akuma no Oni become even more horrific-looking as they increase in power. A rare heroic example is Togashi Yokuni whose Experienced 2 artwork shows him finally transforming into his dragon form. In the official fiction, his brother Fu Leng likewise becomes a dragon at this point to battle him. \|\|Yokuni doesn't survive. Intentionally.\|\| - Yu-Gi-Oh! also has too many examples to count — probably more than is entirely healthy. - Legends of Runeterra: - Ursine Spiritwalker is normally a man wearing bear skins and middling stats for the cost, but if you play him with plunder effect activated, he becomes Stormclaw Ursine, half-man half-bear monster with increased attack and aura granting Overwhelm to your other units. - Shyvana transforms into her true dragon form when she levels up. It doesn't give her much of an immediate stat boost, instead giving her larger temporary boost when she attacks and providing you with an extra Strafing Strike card to play on that turn. Classic "Witness my true power!" voice line is of course included. - Renekton and Nasus become towering giants in their level 3 forms, with accompanying increase in statlines to 10/10 (potentially much more in case of Nasus). - The concert is over. You have just confronted the most sublime manifestation of avant-garde classical music. You survived its tone clusters and polytonality. The thundering dissonance and disharmony begin to fade away from your aural registers — and with that, a new appreciation for sound in all its forms sets in. Out of respect for the sheer artistry of the pianist, you and the rest of your party begin to clap. The pianist, exhausted of his repertoire, walks back out onto the stage to bow to the audie—wait, what. What is he doing? Oh—Oh God. Oh God. He's come back. Oh God. He's returning to the piano. - A particularly appropriate example — Henry Cowell's Dynamic Motion is considered a rather... out-there piece of avant-garde piano, described as an act of "pianistic violence". This alone would make a suitable BGM for any RPG final boss battle music... Then you have the Four Encores to Dynamic Motion. The fourth, Antinomy, is just asking to depict a scene where a slain alien horror resurrects itself out of its own corpse as a distorted choir sings its glory in the background. - Michael Jackson pulls this off with great effect in his music video Ghosts as the Maestro. He also does a pretty good Demon Head near the end. - In Metroid Prime Pinball, this is Metroid Prime in both of its forms, and the second one can only be damaged with a specific powerup. - After losing a match against Evolution in 2003, the "Big Red Monster," Kane, was forced to permanently remove his trademark red-and-black mask. This resulted in audiences seeing his true face for the first time since the character's debut 6 years earlier - despite allegedly having been severely burned in a fire, Kane's face was not covered in scars as he claimed; he was simply that insane. Now that he could no longer hide his "disfigurement", Kane became even more psychotic and dangerous than before. - Japanese pro wrestling loves this trope. Jushin "Thunder" Liger, during intense rivalries, sometimes transforms into the more aggressive, much more evil looking "Kishin Liger". Also Bx B Hulk, a normally upbeat gimmick about dancing, turns into "Killer Hulk", adopting an all black costume and evil looking facepaint. - Mick Foley occasionally treats his Cactus Jack persona as this. In his feud with Triple H, him shedding his Mankind persona to turn into Cactus Jack scared the crap out of Triple H. - For particularly serious grudge matches, Delirious will don a "Red Poison" variant of his traditional ring attire with a black-and-red color scheme instead of black-and-green. - NXT's Finn Bálor is definitely so much this when he dons his demonic bodypaint for special events, claiming he's channelling an actual demon through it. It's a callback to his popular paint jobs in his past as Prince Fergal Devitt prior to WWE signing him. - Aztec Mythology does this all the time. The gods generally have two forms, an attractive one, and other more animalistic or downright bestial! - Older Than Feudalism with Jesus. No, seriously! In the Book of Revelation, particularly chapter 19, He shows up as a Warrior Prince with flaming eyes, surrounded by Instant Runes and riding a white horse at the head of a legion of angels. He spits a burning sword out of His mouth, summons an army of carrion birds, and proceeds to lay the smack down on the various monsters, demons, and false prophets that had been corrupting the earth and fighting with His forces for the previous couple chapters. - In The Kalevala, the evil sorceress Louhi turns into the mythical thunder bird Kokko to pursue the heroes, wielding scythes for her claws. - A lot of Hindu deities have avatars that basically serve this purpose. Kali, in particular, is a terrifying and destructive (but not evil) form the warrior-goddess Durga assumes to deal with the extremely powerful demon Raktavija. It doesn't end well. - The oft-quoted Robert Oppenheimer describes Vishnu as taking on a "multi-armed form" before making the infamous Badass Boast. - As a heroic example, in the epic, Táin Bó Cúailnge, Cuchulainn enters a "Ríastrad" or "Warp Spasm". In this state he transforms into a horribly mutilated monster whose very appearance is enough to scare enemies away. The catch is that, while in this form, Cuchulainn may not know friend from foe. - There's a three-headed dragon in Zoroastrian mythology named Azhi Dahaka, who is said to be one of the worst evils humankind will ever have to deal with. His origins aren't clear in the Avesta, the most iconic story about him is from The Shahnameh which was written thousands of years after the first time the monster was mentioned. The Shahnameh depicts the dragon as a formerly human tyrant with two brain eating snakes on his shoulders who was imprisoned inside a volcano after the revolution that followed his milennia-long rule. Many Iranians like to do a bit of Canon Welding, believing that the Shahnameh's Zahhak has grown and mutated into the dragon form over the years.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneWingedAngel
Only Evil Can Die - TV Tropes "All your bad guys die, and your good guys survive. We can tell what's gonna happen by page and age five." In Nobody Can Die, no one dies, not even the villains. In Anyone Can Die, everyone dies (or, well, can die note : "everyone does die" is a whole other thing), villains and good characters alike. In this trope, no one dies except the Big Bad, The Dragon, the Villain of the Week, and villains' Mooks (although good characters may end up Faking the Dead or be wrongly believed to have died). This trope exists mainly because people don't feel the same level of upset when the villain dies as when the good characters die, and killing the villain is a good way to resolve the plot. This is also a notable trope in fairy tales and fantasy for younger readers, as once again, villain death is not treated with the seriousness that good character death is. No Posthumous Character counts towards these only characters with onscreen deaths. Sub-Trope of Plot Armor when not only the main character but all the morally correct characters have it. See also Improbable Infant Survival if the large group with the Plot Armor is the children rather than the good characters, although they may overlap if the good guys are kids and the bad guys are adults. Mutually exclusive with Too Good for This Sinful Earth. For when a villain survives because he pulls a HeelFace Turn, see Redemption Earns Life. Note: This trope only applies when the good characters are actually in situations in which they might die. As a Death Trope, beware of Spoilers. ## Examples: - A very well-known tendency in Bleach is that despite the sometimes extremely gory battles and almost every fight being to the death, none of the good guys or those allied with them ever die. Even potentially crippling injuries get healed in some fashion. This is eventually subverted when the Thousand-Year Blood War arc starts with the death of a Mauve Shirt, and more follow soon after. - Played with in Dragon Ball in that while people of either alignment die, Death Is Cheap, but this almost always applies to heroic characters. Villainous characters almost always are Killed Off for Real if they haven't had a HeelFace Turn, with notable exceptions of Vegeta (though he was working for the heroes at the time) and Frieza (it takes a long time in-universe and out, but he does eventually gain Joker Immunity). The Majin Buu arc invokes this with them wishing everyone but the most evil people Majin Buu killed back and all the villains in the arc so far stay dead. - Tintin: All the characters who die in this comic series are villains, while none of the good guys ever die (the closest thing to a good guy who died was Frank Wolff, but he was a reluctant ally to a villain). - In Beauty and the Beast, Gaston is the only casualty, even though there were wolves and a battle in which Beast gets stabbed. - The Rescuers Down Under. Despite all of the danger the good guys go through, only the poacher McLeach dies by falling down a waterfall. - In Sleeping Beauty, although everyone falls asleep, no one dies except the villain Maleficent. All the people in the castle, such as Aurora, her parents, and the serving staff, live. - In Shrek, Shrek, Donkey, and Fiona all survive the fiery escape from the castle with the giant, vicious dragon. Farquaad, on the other hand, gets immediately swallowed by the same dragon. (Somewhat justified, since Farquaad was taken by surprise from behind.) - Godzilla vs. Kong: One of the signs of just how Lighter and Softer this film was than the previous MonsterVerse is that with the exceptions of Mooks, a few nameless civilians in the Crowd Panics, and a couple Rock Critters being eaten by their natural predators; none of the heroes ultimately die, and all of the relevant character deaths are antagonists: all the core members of Apex, the Warbats, \|\|and Mechagodzilla\|\|. - Marvel Cinematic Universe: - In Iron Man 2, despite the Hammer Drones going amok amid the crowded Stark Expo and doing untold fortunes in property damage, not a single bystander is ever shown getting so much as a boo-boo. The only deaths are Whiplash, who commits suicide, two of Hammer's goons, and Whiplash's father in the backstory. - This is something of a common theme of the universe and many jokes have been made about The Battle of New York having a death toll consisting entirely of aliens and parked cars. - None of the good guys die in Spider-Man: Homecoming, with the only victim being the villain Jackson Brice. - In Peter Pan, villainous pirate Hook is the only one to die, despite the battle between the pirates and the kids. - In The Princess Bride, \|\|Westley\|\| seems to have died \|\|twice, but turns out to have survived both times.\|\| The arrogant bully \|\|Vizzini\|\| and the sadistic \|\|Count Rugen\|\| are not so lucky. - In addition, \|\|Inigo\|\| gets stabbed in the stomach \|\|but still manages to fight and kill Count Rugen and survive to the end of the film.\|\| - In the YA novel A Study in Charlotte and its sequels, \|\|no one actually dies except Jerkass Lee Dobson and villain Lucien Moriarty, although good characters August Moriarty and Dr. Larkin do fake it at one point, \|\|and there are lots of attempts on the good characters' lives. - Tricky Business notes in its epilogue that "everybody who got killed out there was a scumbag." Two non-villainous characters who were shot both survive. - Usually a major element in the Power Rangers franchise, where the villainous faction of the series (especially their Monsters Of The Week) meet their end in blazing fashion (except for the ones who manage to pull a HeelFace Turn), while the heroes' side usually doesn't suffer a single casualty note : Though there have been known to be exceptions, and even then, they end up being a Disney Death. - Discussed in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Bride of Chaotica!" where Tom Paris goes into the holodeck where his "Captain Proton" program is running and finds Proton's assistant Constance Goodheart dead. He notes that something must be wrong, as the program is based on old 20th Century film serials where the "good guys" never died. - Christianity: - Justified: death is the wage of sin and, more precisely, the consequence of the original sin. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. — Romans 6:23 - This led to Catholicism developing the doctrine of the Assumption, since Mary, being without the taint of Original Sin because of Immaculate Conception, couldn't die. - Bioshock 2: In Minerva's Den, not counting the various posthumous characters from the backstory in and out of Rapture, only the main villain Reed Wahl is killed while Subject Sigma (\|\|aka Charles Milton Porter\|\|) escapes Rapture alongside Tenenbaum with a copy of The Thinker on hand. A stark contrast to the main game where \|\|many people including the protagonist Subject Delta die, while the main villain, Sophia Lamb, has the capacity to live\|\|. - Clam Man: In the first game, Clam Man investigates a conspiracy. He runs into a variety of gangsters and criminals, but as the game is mostly comedic, they're all laughably ineffectual, making it seem like Clam Man is in no real danger. However, there are two villains revealed near the end who are taken seriously: The Big Bad and The Dragon, \|\|Mayor King and Clam Man's friend Pete respectively. Pete had only good reasons for joining the villains, and quickly regrets his actions before making a HeelFace Turn, leaving King as the sole truly evil figure.\|\| Although he attempts to kill Clam Man and puts up a fight against the Big Good, \|\|Mayor King\|\| is the only character to die, by being sent flying into outer space where he asphyxiates. - Very notable in One-Punch Man. Monsters are killed by the thousands, yet Heroes have not suffered a single casualty. Hell, it's not just evil, but humans, good or evil are spared. While many civilian deaths are mentioned, the instances where a human actually gets killed onscreen can be counted on one hand and every single one of them either are villainous or a Token Evil Teammate.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyEvilCanDie
One-Word Vocabulary - TV Tropes "What, I can't say a full sentence every once in a while?" The Logical Extreme of Catchphrase. Not only is this word or phrase something that a person habitually says and identifies that person, but that person never says anything else (and may well be unable to). In short, someone with an extremely limited vocabulary. It may be a single word or a short phrase. The single word may be gibberish or a nonsense word. Sometimes, the tension that builds up from this limited communication is resolved by having the character finally add another word or two to their vocabulary. The limited vocabulary may be due to being very terse and laconic, not speaking the dominant local language, a mental disability, an old age-related condition, or because the speaker is a talking animal or alien species. A Sub-Trope is Pokémon Speak, where the only thing they can say is their name. See also Welcome to Corneria where NPCs in a video game only ever talk like this. This does not mean they can't say the phrase with many different tones and intensities, but the words seldom (if ever) vary. ## Examples: - In the Little Caesars' commercials, the eponymous character only says "Pizza, pizza!" - An early-2000s commercial for the Visa Check Card featured NBA player Yao Ming. Yao attempts to buy a souvenir from a store by writing a check, but all the employees only respond "Yo!" and point to a sign that says checks are not allowed. Yao, who was still learning English, thought they were trying to say his name but just saying it incorrectly. - During the 2019 U.S. tax season, financial software company Intuit ran a series of commercials for their TurboTax software in which every speaking character, in place of actual dialogue, only uses the word "free" throughout to emphasize the fact that using TurboTax "won't cost you a cent". Three years later they shelled out $141 million to settle a class action lawsuit, as they made it very difficult for consumers to emerge without paying. - Aggretsuko: The instructor at the yoga class Retsuko starts taking in episode 4 can only communicate by saying the word "Protein!" - In Chainsaw Man, one of Quanxi's assistants is a Genki Girl who can only say "Halloween." She is actually \|\|the Cosmos Fiend, whose special ability is that she has all the knowledge that ever was and ever will be in her head.\|\| This leaves her in a perpetual state of information overload, unable to think of anything but Halloween—and can inflict it on other people if she can think about something other than Halloween for an instant. - In the movie Dragon Ball Z: Broly Second Coming, compared to his previous movie, all Broly ever says is "KAKAROT!" He does have one line that isn't him yelling that near the end, \|\|"Not until you lie dead at my feet."\|\| - Nyu, Lucy's innocent alternate persona in Elfen Lied, only ever says the word she was named by others after. Real Lucy, on the other hand, is a lot more eloquent. - In The Promised Neverland, Adam only ever says a single number, 22194. After the Goldy Pond arc, he adds Emma's ID number to his vocabulary. - In Tamagotchi: The Movie, Mametchi invents a little portable named Mamesunnytchi to light up the way whenever it gets dark, since he's scared of the dark. The only word Mamesunnytchi ever says is "twinkle". - In Yuki Yuna is a Hero, the only fairy who can talk is Karin's, Yoshiteru, and he only speaks one sentence, "All things must pass," randomly and repeatedly. (Though of course, it winds up being meaningful near the finale.) This technically makes him the only male character with a line of dialogue. - Flower Fairy: In Season 7 episode 3, the Harvest Guardian only says "fengshou" ("立秋"), or "harvest". - Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Boxer, Sparky's pet boxing gloves, can only say "Get 'em!" (in the English dub, at least). - Stan Freberg's famous record "John and Marsha" is a spoof of soap operas consisting of just the main characters saying each other's name ("John!" "Marsha!") in different dramatic intonations. - In Adventures In The Rifle Brigade, only the officers of the title group have actual dialogue. The enlisted men are this trope: Sergeant Crumb ("'ey oop"), Corporal Geezer ("Yer aht of ordah!"), and Private Hank the Yank ("Gawd Dammit!"). The Piper, the final member of the squad, is The Voiceless. - The Boys has Groundhawk of the G-Men; all he does is growl the word "Gonna!" - Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy spends a long time only able to say "I am Groot". This started out being a reflection of how much his intelligence had been reduced since Tales to Astonish, but was later presented as if he was saying quite complex things if you could understand him (the first character to claim this was Maximus the Mad, and most people assumed he was living up to his name, but later Rocket Raccoon became a Translator Buddy). In Infinity Countdown, Groot's speech returned to what it was in his original appearance. - Saga has Lying Cat, whose spoken vocabulary only consists of "Lying", spoken when she hears a lie. - X-Men has Rover the Sentinel, who can only say "Destroy!" - In B.C., the character Grog only says his name, usually quite loudly. - Ashes of the Past: Mr. Suziko, who just says "Remarkable", such as in Chapter 180, until the end of Chapter 299, where Nurse Joy says it instead and he summarizes the contest in her place: "It's a draw!" Mr. Sukizo announced. "A wonderful display of skill, where the two Coordinators are exactly evenly matched to the point that they can't even be separated by a tie break!" He spread his hands. "It's a heartwarming reminder that sometimes, even though a Contest is about picking winners, ultimately what really matters is that everyone does their best and has fun doing it!" "Remarkable!" Nurse Joy agreed. Mr. Contesta rubbed his temples. "I think I need a stiff drink. Nothing makes sense any more." - A toddler Youmu in Apartment Gensokyo mostly says "Muh". She does have variations of the word (and can say other things besides the word) but "muh" is all she ever says. - The seagulls in Finding Nemo can only say "Mine!" whenever they see a potential meal (whatever unlucky sea creatures they want to hunt). - Pumpkin Ellingboe from Klaus only ever says Mine!. - Nugent the dog from Over the Hedge only says "Play!". - The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training: the Bears use the mentally challenged groundskeeper as a beard so they can go on a road trip without any supervision. All he can say is Hello! How are you?" Except at the end when he says "Goodbye." - Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey: The alien Station can only say "station". - In Death Line, the male cannibal can only repeat the phrase "Mind the doors" over and over again. - In The Deer Hunter, Axel's only line, repeated several times, is "Fuckin' A." - Groot from Marvel Cinematic Universe only ever says "I am Groot". \|\|Though near the end of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), he manages to say, "We are Groot."\|\| - Throughout Hot Fuzz Lurch only says "Yarp", as an affirmative answer to any question, leading to a gag in which Nicholas, impersonating Lurch via walkie talkie, has to guess that "Narp" is a negative answer. - Uh-Huh from The Little Rascals (1994); to the point it's a Verbal Tic Name. At the end of the film, he reveals he has a very big vocabulary for a 5-year old boy; he just never had to say anything beyond "Uh-huh". - The invading Martians in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! can speak only one syllable ("Ack"), changing its timing and infliction to change the meaning. Somehow, Doctor Kessler is able to translate this monosyllable language into English. - They Saved Hitler's Brain. The title character, infamous for his Rousing Speeches, seems only capable of shouting "Mach schnell! Mach schnell!" ("Hurry up! Hurry up!") at his minions. Then again, they didn't save his lungs along with his brain, so Hitler probably doesn't have the puff to do much else. - In Trading Places, the two very big jailbirds call bullshit on Billy Ray's bragging; one of them only ever says "Yeah!" to what the other one has just said. - In The Belgariad, the boy known as "Errand" only says the word "Errand" for the first part, mainly because the only thing Zedar ever told him was "I have an errand for you." He eventually learns to talk normally. - Discworld: - The Librarian only says "ook", "eek" and "ooo". - In The Wee Free Men there's a man in fairyland who only says "sneebs". Slight twist in that his actual meaning (normal words) appears in the hearer's brain. - In a dream sequence in Wintersmith, Tiffany Aching meets the "Jolly Sailor" who appears on her grandmother's tobacco packets. He can only say "A Good Smoke in Any Weather!" because that's what's written in his speech bubble on the packet. - Quoth the raven subverts this by refusing to say "the N word", "nevermore" (and was thus named by a previous owner, a wizard with a deplorable sense of humor). - Another animal character with a vocabulary like this is the Death of Rats, whose dialogue consists entirely of "SQUEAK" (always in all capitals). - Cody from Language Arts knew a lot of words as a toddler, but lost all of them except for "God." That word got shortened to "Gaaaah," which he applied to everything, including his sister Emmy. - In Mary Poppins, the Bird Woman only says two phrases: "Feed the birds!" and "Tuppence a bag!". Subverted in the sequels that reveal that she can also speak other words, when not selling birdseed. - In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven", the only thing the titular bird ever says is "Nevermore". - Hodor from A Song of Ice and Fire can only say "Hodor". Interestingly, Hodor's actual name is Walder, but since the only thing he ever says is Hodor people started to call him that. - On All That, Kel Mitchell's recurring character Lump Maroon only ever says the word "Jupiter". - The Korean boy adopted by the Bluths in Arrested Development only says "Annyong", which the others assume is his name. It's actually "Hello" in Korean. In the finale of the regular series it is revealed that \|\|not only can he speak English, but he's actually a spy getting revenge on the Bluths for stealing his father's frozen banana business. And his real name is Hel-loh.\|\| - In Bread, small-time gangster Yizzel only says the single word "Yeah!", usually in response to his more talkative colleague (billed as 'Yizzel's Mate') calling on him for support. - Magnitude from Community only ever says his Catchphrase, "Pop pop!" In an episode where he is told he can no longer use the phrase, he becomes extremely distraught. - In Father Ted, the elderly Father Jack Hackett's minimalist vocabulary is something of a recurring gag. Drink! Girls! Feck! - Kimmy's boyfriend Dwayne from Full House only ever says "Whatever". - Mystery Science Theater 3000. In the episode Time Chasers, 1985-Mike Nelson's coworker at the cheese factory only ever says, "Dude." He actually manages to convey quite a bit just by varying his tone. - The Clive Anderson and Drew Carey runs of Whose Line Is It Anyway? featured an improv game titled "Two Line Vocabulary", in which two panelists are each limited to two different lines' worth of dialog. - The Juntawa in Mission to Zyxx speak a tonal, highly-contextual language which consists entirely of the word "Juntawa". - All Bunsen's partner Beaker from The Muppet Show can say is "Meep meep". - Sesame Street: - Frazzle is a monster who can only say "Arrrrgh!" In a song dedicated to him his friends tell the audience how he says certain words or expresses emotions, all of which are "Arrrgh!" - In the early '90s, a female construction worker Muppet named Stella was often seen with Biff and Sully, and all she could say was "Yo!" - In The Addams Family musical, zombie butler Lurch communicates in a low growl. Naturally, the Beinekes can't understand him at all. \|\|Also subverted: at the end of the show, Lurch starts the song "Move Toward the Darkness".\|\| - In Lady Windermere's Fan, the only phrase Lady Agatha says is "Yes, Mamma". - In Monica Bauer's play The Maternal Instinct, there is a homeless woman who can only say the word "Ouch". - The Arfenhouse games (and movies) have giant Pringles cans that say nothing but "BUUUUH!" - Borderlands: Steve the bandit only has one word in his entire vocabulary: "Hey-o!" In the Massive Multiplayer Crossover game Poker Night 2, Borderlands regular CL4P-TP lampshades this: CL4P-TP: Well, of COURSE you won with those cards. Even Steve would've won with those cards, and all he can say is "Hey-ooo!" Steve: [off-screen] Hey- CL4P-TP : SHUT THE @#$% UP STEVE. And people say I'm annoying . - Chibi-Robo!: The only thing Jenny can say is "Ribbit," unless she's talking to Chibi-Robo in the frog suit. She grows out of it in later games. - In The Darkside Detective, zombies can only say "Brains!" with a variety of inflections, but are able to convey meaning to anyone who knows the language. - The dwarf Sandal in the Dragon Age franchise is an Idiot Savant who has a gift for enchanting weapons and armor—rare for his species. "Enchantment" is also the only word he can say. - Fallout: - Vault 108 in Fallout 3 featured a cloning experiment Gone Horribly Wrong, and the clones were only able to utter the name of their original template called "Gary". - In Fallout 4, the Super Mutant Behemoth Swan can only say his name, which is a step above other Behemoths, who don't speak at all. - In Five Nights at Fuckboy's, Chica, as well as her Withered and Phantom counterparts, is only capable of saying "Devour my hot bird ass Freddy". Sometimes, she adds "dead" before "Freddy" when talking about him being dead, or replaces "Freddy" with other name of whoever she addresses (like Splash Woman), or just drops "Freddy" entirely, but otherwise, she's incapable of saying anything else. The only time when she said something other than her usual phrase is when she and her fellow animatronics got trapped in the 80's, resulting in Chica uttering a single "Fuck". Though, as her conversation with Freddy in Act 3 of the third game shows, she can convey different meanings with her phrase, which can be understood by anyone who knows her closely. - Five Nights at Vault 5: The only thing the third robot ever says is shouting "Intruder!" whenever he sees the player. - Tisiphone from Hades: Her vocabulary consists purely of "murder" and "murderer", usually spoken with plenty of Trrrilling Rrrs. Zagreus starts out somewhat creeped out by both this and her appearance, but soon learns to take it in stride and begins openly snarking at her. She later learns one additional word: "Zagreus" to which she uses to form the sentence "Murder Zagreus". - Bon Bonne from the Mega Man Legends series can only say "babu". Justified, since he is a baby. - Most zombies in the Plants vs. Zombies series can only say the name of their favorite food and greatest desire, "brains". - In Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Nemesis can only say "S.T.A.R.S." because he's a Living Weapon engineered to fight members of our hero's organization S.T.A.R.S. - Battle for Dream Island: David is only able to say "Aw, seriously?". - Happy Tree Friends: The characters' vocabulary is already limited as is, but Russell the pirate almost only ever says the word "Yar!" - Seen in the Newgrounds flash series Larry the Littlest Freakin Knight, with a minion who can literally only say "yes". The big bad thinks it's hysterical, and makes him say yes to increasingly absurd and embarrassing questions. - The Turk from Clockwork Game, could only say one word: "Echec", meaning "Check". Justified in that it was a machine, and its vocal apparatus (designed in the 19th-century) could only say that one word. Previously, it was unable to speak at all. - In Hoofstuck, Cloud Kicker's only dialogue is "Cloud!" It's apparently a proper language, as a few characters actually understand her. It even shows up as a Painting the Medium gag: when you play as Cloud Kicker in the interactive flash walkaround, the text on all her prompt buttons is replaced with "Cloud!" - Housepets! : Daisy has only said "Hi! I'm Daisy!" during the course of the strip. - Early on in Scandinavia and the World, Finland only ever says "Perkele." It's an obscenity. Averted later, though. - When Bubbles the intelligent watercooler first appears in Skin Horse, all she can say is the phrase "Service is my only joy!" As she develops (and starts dating Unity) she begins using fragments of this sentence to mean different things. (Muttering "Service, service" when she'd rather be on a date with Unity, for instance.) And then she spontaneously develops the ability to say "Service is NOT my only joy!" under Tigerlily's influence. - After she spends some time with one of the Killotron robots (who themselves have a downplayed example where they will replace certain words in sentences with their One Word, like the Smurfs), she learns the word "destroy", bringing her total vocabulary to seven words. - A man in this video only says "hello" while he is stuck in an elevator. That is until he surprises us at the very last 5 seconds with "fucking bastards!". - There was much amusement in 2014 at the release of a phone app called Yo, which did nothing but send out the word "Yo" to whoever the user wanted to contact. Naturally, it proved wildly popular. - Critical Role: - In Campaign 1, after Doty \|\|is left in the Nine Hells\|\|, Taryon \|\|creates a new Doty,\|\| and gives him the ability to speak one word: "Tary". - \|\|In Campaign 2, after Mollymauk is revived, he is only able to say "empty", though he eventually calls the other members of the Mighty Nein he knows by the tarot cards he made of them; Yasha is Love, Beau is Rumors, Veth is Tinkerer, Caleb is Magician, Fjord is Sea, and Jester is Joy.\|\| - In one of The Nostalgia Critic's commercial reviews, this is used for a joke in the commercial about Denny's "Red, White & Blue" pancakes. When the old man says "America" in response to the question about what the pancakes taste like, the Critic goes off on an inspired tangent about how the entire history and everything the country stands for is contained within these pancakes, only to realize shortly after that "America" is all that the old man can say. - In Yugioh The Abridged Series Bandit Keith's underling Bones only says "Brains", though the inflection changes and translates to more complex sentences. It is unclear whether others actually understand his meaning. - Clint of Lazy Game Reviews has a "Christmas Clone" of himself that shows up every December to force him to do Christmas Episodes. His vocabulary consists entirely of the word "Christmas". - The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: The Needleheads from "Win, Lose & Kaboom!" can only say "Mibs". - Bunsen Is a Beast: The Halloween Episode "Beast Halloween Ever" features a candy-obsessed beast named Sweet Teeth, who is unable to say anything besides "candy". Somehow, this doesn't prevent the other characters from understanding him. - Chowder: Shnitzel can only say "Radda". When he drew a card in a board game and read it, the card contained the text; "Radda radda radda." - Dexter's Laboratory: One episode has Dexter screw up trying to learn French in his sleep and wake up the next morning only able to say "omelette du fromage" (roughly "omelette with cheese".) Curiously, though, he finds that saying that actually works in normal conversation, to the point that he's able to answer class questions, order lunch, and even bring about world peace just by saying that single phrase. But the only thing he can't do? Speak the password to his laboratory. - The Flamin' Thongs: Rerp's entire vocabulary consists one word: "Rerp". Nevertheless, Holden seems to understand him. Lampshaded is "Jurassic Dork" when Holden asks Rerp what he should name his new pet diprotodon. Rerp replies "rerp", and Holden considers that for few seconds before deciding two pets named "Rerp" would be too confusing. - Gravity Falls: Shmebulock is the only forest gnome who's cursed to say his own name and nothing else. He tends to communicate with body language to compensate for the lack of verbal diversity. Same goes with his father Shmebulock Sr. However, he can be seen shouting "Queen!" with the other gnomes in the first episode to Mabel. - Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius: Jimmy's Do-Anything Robot dog Goddard only ever says "Bark!" — and not like a normal dog would; he actually, literally says that word as-is, just like it's spelled. - Josie and the Pussycats: When the show was Recycled IN SPACE!, it appended the alien creature Bleep, who speaks only in bleeps. Fortunately, Genius Ditz Melody is Suddenly Fluent in Gibberish and can easily translate Bleep-speak into English. Curiously, no reverse translation is needed for Bleep, who can understand English just fine. - Lilo & Stitch: The Series: - 627, who has been designed by Jumba to be even more powerful than Stitch himself. Not only that, but he also cannot be turned good and the only word that he can say is "Evil" (although the later Stitch! anime expanded his vocabulary). - The same show also introduced Felix, a Neat Freak experiment who could only say "Dirty!" - Max and Ruby: Roger only ever says "Uh huh" and "uh-uh". In later seasons, he starts speaking more. - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: - The vocabulary of Big Macintosh mostly consists of two words: "Eeyup" and "Nope". Thie is a case of flanderization, as he did have more dialogue in his first appearance, which is handwaved in "Hearts and Hooves Day" when Apple Bloom points out that Big Mac is rather shy when it comes to ponies he's not related to. Most of his other dialogue falls under O.O.C. Is Serious Business. He does start talking more in later seasons, especially around his girlfriend. - Pinkie Pie's twin sister Marble Pie only says "Mmm-hmm". - ReBoot: Al is never seen, he is only ever heard shouting "WHAT?" from offscreen. - Road Runner: The only thing that the Roadrunner ever says is "Beep Beep". - Rugrats: Played with for Chuckie. Although he can use actual dialogue with the babies, in the last three seasons, following Rugrats in Paris, the only word he can say to the adults is "No," regardless of the context. - The Simpsons: In "Who Shot Mr. Burns", Mr. Burns awakens from a coma, with only the words "Homer Simpson" in his vocabulary. - SpongeBob SquarePants: The anchovies only ever say "meep", over and over again. Although this is (sometimes) averted in later episodes. - Star Trek: Lower Decks: In "Cupid's Errant Arrow", although the parasite can say other words, it mostly just exclaims "Lover!" over and over again. - Teen Titans Go!: - One episode had Cyborg and Beast Boy apparently only be able to say the word "waffles". - Pain-Bot can only say one of two things: "Pain" and "All I know is pain". - The Banana Bandits from Top Wing can only say "Banana". - The Tick has two alien races, the Whats and the Heys, whose languages consist solely of the words "What" and "Hey" respectively. The Whats sent to gain the Tick's aid do speak fluent English, and their interrogator also appears to speak Hey quite well. - T.U.F.F. Puppy: Bird Brain's Bumbling Henchmen Duo Owl and Bat only say "Who?" and "Where?" respectively, which drives him mad. - The X's: The Robo-Mom Truman builds in "AAIIEE! Robot" only says "Destroy!".	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneWordVocabulary
Only Bad Guys Call Their Lawyers - TV Tropes "What is on Kobe's mind? Going to Colorado, around all these white people, and not bringing Johnnie Cochran? Well, then they say, 'Well, if you hire Johnnie Cochran, you're going to look guilty.' Yeah, but you going ! You want to look innocent in jail? I'd rather look guilty at the mall." home — Chris Rock , talking about the 2003 Kobe Bryant sexual assault case, Never Scared In crime dramas, when someone is arrested, they are read their Miranda Rights, "You have the right to remain silent.", "You have the right to an attorney.", etc. It seems, however, that all good, law-abiding citizens are willing to waive their rights and talk to the police without any qualms at all, but as soon as someone demands a lawyer, or refuses to talk without one, you know instantly that they are a sleazeball. Maybe not the one the police are actually seeking, but they are definitely someone of ill repute. The dramatic explanation, of course, is that if every suspect would call in a lawyer, the wait for the professional would both kill the flow of the scene and the lawyer reading out a carefully crafted and Teflon-smooth statement would be far less interesting to watch than a little Perp Sweating to reveal the suspect has an entirely different reason to lie and Be as Unhelpful as Possible that has nothing to do with the Mystery of the Week but gives the detectives a new piece of the overall puzzle. This has no bearing on Real Life. Any lawyer or law school professor will tell you that if you're arrested or the police think you committed a crime, (note that this doesn't mean that they're obligated to you shouldn't talk to them except to say that you won't be answering questions and to ask for a lawyer get you a lawyer just that they can't interrogate you without one). In fiction, only one or two crimes ever happen at the same time, while in reality, there are a lot more. You may want to help the police catch a crook, but in doing so, you may accidentally implicate yourself in another crime, or the same crime. Keep in mind, this may be especially true of someone who has committed no crime a reasonable, innocent person tends to think that he or she can explain the situation logically and reason it out with the police, but this can get you in a lot of trouble. Police officers are human beings, which means they're susceptible to all the cognitive biases of human beings. If they already have a narrative in their heads as to how a crime went down, it's very easy for them to fit an innocent person's comments into that narrative not out of maliciousness, but a simple desire to solve a case in as little effort or time as possible, even if theyre throwing seemingly innocent people in jail to do it. Most suspects never call their lawyers, regardless of whether they're guilty or innocent. Most suspects are also stupid. Also, the police have no power to take you to the station without arresting you; if they ask you nicely to come to the station, you can politely refuse and leave at any time, unless they decide subsequently to arrest you (i.e. they must expressly state that you are under arrest, opening themselves to a false-arrest complaint if they have no legitimate justification for doing so). If you are talking to police for any reason such as if you're a witness to a crime, or if your lawyer has advised you to answer a question, do not ever lie (just say nothing) as that will not only make you look guilty, if you are speaking to a US Federal agent, lying is actually a crime in itself. This is a Sub-Trope of Artistic License Law. See also Be as Unhelpful as Possible, Don't Answer That. Also, the typical use of the One Phone Call. ## Example subpages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other examples: - In his comedy special Never Scared, Chris Rock humorously criticizes Kobe Bryant for not getting a lawyer when he was accused of sexual harassment in 2003. Chris: What is on Kobe's mind? Going to Colorado, around all these white people, and not bringing Johnnie Cochran? Well, then they say, "Well if you hire Johnnie Cochran, you're going to look guilty." Yeah, but you going home! You want to look innocent in jail? I'd rather look guilty at the mall. - Tom Segura discusses the risks of applying this trope as outlined above while discussing the reality T.V. show The First 48: Tom: Here's what I've learned watching that show, okay? Lawyer. Up. You can't handle that shit. Everybody's like "I'm gonna talk to the cops and straighten this whole thing out!" You're gonna do 25 to life, have fun with that, man. Nobody asks for a lawyer. I've seen three- hundred people get interrogated on this show; two of them were like "Can I talk to a lawyer?" and both times the detectives were like "Fuck!" - Completely defied in Powers when Detective Pilgrim is being questioned by Internal Affairs. As soon as she realizes how serious the investigation is, she asks for a lawyer (being a cop of course means how aware she is of how this sort of situation works). The internal affairs investigator tries to imply this trope, roughly saying "You know what they say about people who insist on getting their lawyer..." to which Pilgrim responds "Yeah. They say that those people are smart." - In Crescendo, when Scott is arrested for breaking into Nora's house (granted, after \|\|she stole something from him and refused to return it\|\|), and the cop who arrests him says that Scott sounds guilty because he asks for a lawyer. \|\|Apparently angels posing as detectives don't fuss too much with mortal laws.\|\| - A lampshaded aversion in Neal Stephensons Cryptonomicon: Randy wondered whether it would be a bad idea, from a narrowly tactical standpoint, to ask for a lawyer so soon after customs discover the drugs that were planted in his luggage. - Invoked and inverted in the second The Dark Tower book. Eddie has been detained on suspicion of drug smuggling (of which he is, in fact, guilty). After a lengthy interrogation, he threatens to get his lawyer involved. One of the interrogators invokes the trope directly. Eddie inverts it by admitting that he doesn't currently have a lawyer but will be retaining one as soon as he's released. - Dead End Job Mysteries: More than once in the series, Helen or a friend or coworker of hers wants to call their lawyer (and they do), and the police immediately claim this as reason to be suspicious of them. Book 7 has a very specific lawyer show up to help Helen (who's been accused of murdering her ex-husband Rob after he faked his own murder to get away from his new "wife", who'd sent the lawyer in question), and the cops make it clear that they consider this particular lawyer arriving to be proof positive of Helen's guilt, due to his reputation for defending the obviously guilty. - The Demolished Man: The murderer Ben Reich calls his lawyer the instant the body is discovered at the party he's attending. The detective tells him openly that the fact that he's the only guest to call his lawyer immediately makes him the prime suspect. - Semi-played straight in Discworld in general, but rather justified given the corrupt pre-Victorian justice system. In this case it's sort of a correlation =/= causation thing; the bad guys who ask for lawyers aren't asking for lawyers because they're bad guys, they're asking for lawyers because they have a tendency to be rich and think of themselves as above the law anyway, and they're usually asking for Mr. Slant, who is well known to be morally dubious at best anyway. Poor criminals have a tendency to not trust lawyers any more than Vimes does (of course, they also tend to be repeat offenders of much more minor crimes, with whom the Watch has an almost friendly relationship and not the actual bad guys). It also helps that if you're an innocent man, Commander Vimes genuinely is your best hope in the world of going free. Insomuch as an Aesop can be gleaned from Discworld, it seems to be that "if you're rich enough to afford a lawyer to begin with, you're that much more likely to be enough of a scumbag to abuse the privilege". - And when William de Worse ask for Slant, it's to \|\|protect his family's 'good name': yes, his father was a part of the plot, but his siblings and mother don't need to be taken down with him\|\|. Vimes is pissed off to no end, but also seems pretty sure that William himself had no part in anything that happened (and is only a person of interest since he can name names). - Nick in Gone Girl is smart enough to know about this, and holds off on getting a lawyer, even when he's the main suspect for a murder he did not commit, specifically because of it, and then when he does get a lawyer, he gets one known for defending extremely guilty dirtbags. - In David Simon's nonfiction work Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, upon which the TV series of the same name is based, the trope is deconstructed. The police's main tactic in solving cases boils down to: convince the perp not to call his lawyer, then lie to him about the evidence you don't have, and threaten him with a hardass prosecutor if he doesn't confess. At one point, a notably stupid suspect is convinced that beating a woman into unconsciousness and raping her was okay because he didn't strike the fatal blow, even thinking note : after he takes the police to all the evidence that can make the case truly ironclad, including retrieving the victim's jewelry he'd stashed with his younger brother, who warns him how dumb he's being that he'll get a ride home. The police derive immense satisfaction from his crestfallen demeanor when the penny drops. Unfortunately, as good as this tactic is for putting down the low-level drug murders that make up the shift's bread-and-butter, it doesn't work a damn on the real players, who know exactly what to do. It's probably also worth noting it's a great way to get innocent people to confess to crimes they didn't commit. Interrogator: (sits down) Anything to say this time, Dennis? Perp: No sir, just want my lawyer. Interrogator: Fine, Dennis. (leaves) - Noted in a discussion with the detectives themselves, who can't believe that anyone ever does ANYTHING in the box other than ask for a lawyer and shut their mouths. - In The Westing Game, after \|\|Turtle sets off a bomb in an elevator\|\|, her mother tries to get her to profess her innocence. \|\|Turtle\|\| saying "I want a lawyer" is treated as all that needs to be said to seal any doubts on her guilt. Zigzagged in that while she did \|\|set off that particular bomb, she wasn't responsible for the others. Her sister, Angela, set them off, and Turtle took the blame for them\|\|. Further subverted in that \|\|when Judge Ford talks to Turtle, after the explosion, she figures out pretty quickly that Turtle was covering for Angela, and thus just lets her off with a warning\|\|. - Lampshaded in Margin for Error. When Horst refuses to answer any of Moe's questions until he contacts his lawyer, Denny remarks, "Exactly the tone a guilty man takes." Horst gets indignant and insists on his legal rights. - Deliberately used as a Red Herring in one of the Eagle Eye Mysteries challenge cases where one of the suspects is uncooperative and demands a lawyer. If you accuse her of the crime, her careful explanation of innocence assumes that you did so primarily because of that reason. - Henry Stickmin Series: One of the three routes in Escaping the Prison begins with Villain Protagonist Henry using a cell phone to call his lawyer (a Captain Ersatz of Phoenix Wright), who has to get him acquitted of the charges brought against him. Successfully doing so nets you the "Lawyered Up" ending. - MadWorld: When Jack confronts \|\|Leo Fallmont, the mastermind behind the Deathwatch games\|\|, he tries to ask for a lawyer. Jack chainsaws him off a skyscraper. - In Mass Effect 2, at least half of Elias Kelham's dialogue when you have him arrested consists of "I want to see my lawyer." The other half consists of "Come on, hit me. I dare you." On the other hand, informing that you are a Spectre, and therefore do not have to give him a lawyer, will cause him to talk immediately. Either way, going into the interrogation you do actually immediately know that Kelham is a crime boss and that he's already ordered an assassination, so calling for the lawyer is not, itself, treated as a flashing sign that he's a bad guy. - Averted in Who's Lila?, where the true killer of Tanya Kennedy, \|\|the titular Lila\|\|, is perfectly willing to talk to the police without a lawyer, confident that they can smooth talk their way out of it. Whether the culprit succeeds depends on the player's actions. - Ace Attorney: - Inverted for Wright and co., who all defend the wrongly accused, and (for the most part) never defend the guilty party. On the other hand, quite a few people buy into the belief that defense attorneys are sleazeballs who only keep criminals out of jail. - Played straight in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Spirit of Justice, where when the legal right to a certain artifact comes under question, the plaintiff, Paul Atishon sues Apollo's client with the best lawyer money can buy: \|\|Phoenix Wright\|\|. When suspicion comes onto Paul for the \|\|murder of Archie Buff\|\| he asks if he can see his lawyer, except \|\|his lawyer resigned only a few minutes prior\|\|. - Justified Trope in two ways. In Phoenix Wright? EVERYONE is considered guilty until proven innocent...and both Phoenix and Apollo have limited mind-reading capabilities. - In the epilogue, the Big Bad is looking for a lawyer to represent them... after they tried to make a law that banned all lawyers in their country. Even the sleaziest lawyer isn't going to respect that level of petty hypocrisy. - The Great Ace Attorney gives a reverse example, wherein Ryunosuke admits it's quite sketchy his extremely wealthy client, Magnus McGilded, can't find a lawyer and must rely on a public defender such as himself. McGilded asserts it's the fault of the prosecutor's reputation rather than his obvious guilt. \|\|They're both right—McGilded is did commit the murder, but the reason no one will take his case is instead because every defendant Barok van Zieks has failed to convict dies a grisly death shortly thereafter, and no defense lawyer wants that blood on their hands\|\|. - Parodied in the Lilo & Stitch: The Series episode "Holio", in a scene where Lilo pretends to have been arrested: Lilo: [behind bars at Kokaua Town's jail] I know my rights! I demand a lawyer! Officer Kaihiko: Lilo, you're not under arrest. Come out of there before someone sees you. Lilo: Not until I get my One Phone Call .	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyBadGuysCallTheirLawyers
Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap - TV Tropes Deckard: Is this a real snake? Zhora: Of course it's not real. You think I'd be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake? In many near-future dystopian science fiction settings, prices on some items, particularly natural things created by natural processes, are quite high, as opposed to mass-produced via synthetic processes. This is particularly the case if the setting is specifically shown to be one of severe environmental degradation, where agriculture is difficult, natural foodstuffs are unsafe, most natural-born animals are extinct, and resources are stretched so thin that raising something as superfluous as a live animal in your house is madness. Either way, people just take it for granted that certain things are not to be had for regular folks, or that if they are, they're grown in batches in laboratories or, in the case of animals, may be machines designed to look like the real thing. This trope typically occurs when one character encounters an object, usually food or an animal, and questions the owner about it. They may ask "Is this real?" to which the owner of a synthetic item/cloned animal replies "Of course not." That, or, if the character is meant to be fabulously wealthy and a wee bit eccentric, they'll say "Of course." Normally, this can be written off as Artistic License Biology. Making more of themselves is something that living things tend to be pretty good at, so supply isn't an issue. Moreover, you'd be surprised at how little energy animals need to survive. The human body, assuming one does not engage in constant strenuous activity, burns up an average 100 watts of power. You have appliances in your home that consume several times that amount of power. And keep in mind, most animals — particularly reptiles such as in the page quote — run on even less than that. One of the reasons for this is cellular respiration being able to convert 40% of glucose's chemical energy into ATP. It doesn't sound like much, but keep in mind most top-of-the-line internal combustion engines struggle to convert just 30% of octane's chemical energy into motion. Animals are very efficient. However, this trope can be justified if pollution or disease have directly attacked the remaining real organisms' fertility. For agricultural products, it may be further explained by an economy of scale — once most people switch to the cheaper synthetic product, the real thing becomes even more expensive because it's made in smaller quantities. Moreover, plants are one of the few instances where life is quite inefficient given that Rubisco, the enzyme in charge of photosynthesis, is extremely slow and lacks specifity. Even modern photovoltaic cells are more efficient than plants. note : Though the comparison isn't entirely fair as solar panels don't have to synthesize sugar. See also Extinct in the Future, Future Food Is Artificial, Common Place Rare, Black Market Produce, Mundane Luxury. A counterpart is Worthless Yellow Rocks; both can exist in the same work. ## Examples: - In one episode of The Big O, pet animals are in fact so rare that everyone is quite shocked when Dorothy finds a cat. The owners come and take it back despite how attached Dorothy has gotten \|\|because it's really their son. A mad scientist turns people into animals because they're so incredibly rare. Or something. Later, it gets turned into a giant monster.\|\| They're that rare, apparently. - In Clover, one character owns an organic cat but disguises it as a robot so people won't steal it. - Ghost in the Shell: - In Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, Togusa asks Batou if his basset hound is a clone, remarking that the real thing (as though a clone is any less real) is expensive. (Batou also feeds his dog real food, but this is not presented as an issue of cost, but one of taste.) Ghost in the Shell is set in a world recovering from war, not (demonstrably) one with a thoroughly devastated environment, however, so the trope borders on cliche here. Of course, in a world where cybernetics and androids are so plentiful, it could be that some people keep robotic pets that don't have the living and training needs of a real live one. - In the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series, the robotic Tachikomas regard all-natural motor oil as a real treat, much better than synthetic oil. Batou treating "his" Tachikoma differently from the rest, by regularly treating it to natural oil, is a catalyst for the robots developing individuality and self-awareness. \|\|That and the anomalies caused by the oil corroding part of its circuit board\|\|. - In Rebuild of Evangelion 2.0, this trope is played straight when the kids get shown a giant aquarium where specimens of pre-2nd impact sea life are preserved. Rei muses that they are the same as her and can't live outside this sheltered environment. Also, the fact that synthetic meat is the norm. The sheer dissonance between the kid's bewilderment at their first time seeing sea life, and Kaji and Misato's painful memories of the 2nd impact (Misato did not want to come because she would remember the event; Kaji wanted the kids to know what life was before 2nd impact), makes for a very dramatic moment as the viewer realizes this trope is in full effect. Slice of life and backstory exposition and character drama all rolled into one. - At one point in the series, Misato thinks that buying the EVA pilots a steak dinner would bankrupt her. Realizing this, they take her to a fast-food place instead. This becomes Fridge Logic when one realizes that she works for the most important and powerful organization in the world, has precisely two superiors... yet four steaks would wipe her out. If steak is that rare, is there anyone who can afford it? - In Aurelio Voltaire's Chi-Chian series, there is a story of a blind pleasure-robot. Her eyes were stolen because they were made of the most valuable substance on the planet - pure wood. Yes, wood. It's Chi-Chian. Just go with it. - Fray. It's difficult to be a Vampire Slayer in a future where there's a shortage of natural wood for stakes. - The vast majority, if not all, of food in Judge Dredd falls into one of three categories: Animals that we would not normally consider food like rat, as most domestic animals seem to be extinct, extremely mutated plants (this is the source of most meat) that can grow in the toxic environment of cursed earth or make entirely of chemicals. - Rocketship Voyager. While at the messdeck, Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres have to eat yeast-based protein as the meat vats and hydroponics garden are still being repaired. Later Captain Janeway invites Chakotay for a formal dinner at the officer's wardroom and they have beef and vegetables from the ship's stores, though the taste is a bit off from the irradiation used to preserve it for space travel. Janeway is surprised when she attends a luxurious banquet on an alien space station and finds their alien hosts are serving up fresh meat. - In The Adventures of Pluto Nash, the events of the film take place on the Moon. Certain items are hard to come by on the Moon and aren't cheap to have delivered from Earth, the most commonly mentioned being wood (not the stuff used in cheap Real Life furniture, but actual wood). At one point, a mobster is mentioned by someone to have had a briefcase made of genuine alligator skin. Naturally, this immediately outed him as an Earther. - In Mamoru Oshii's Avalon, the wealthy (compared to the abject poverty of her fellow players) Ash feeds her dog quality food, as contrasted to the gruel that her peers survive on. - In Blade Runner, the planet's deteriorating condition has killed off most animals, causing people to keep synthetic pets. One can tell how prized they are by the fact that the Voigt-Kampf test scenarios, created to evoke an empathetic response, are mostly centered on animal cruelty. - In the sequel Blade Runner 2049, the protagonist acquires a carved wooden horse and is told he's rich because it's genuine wood. - In Demolition Man, society is entirely vegetarian. When they visit the 'scrap' society, he eagerly eats a hamburger. It's not beef... but at least it's not human. It's actually rat. He doesn't care and keeps on eating. He even says it's the best burger he's had in years. note : Which is, admittedly, a Lampshade Hanging on the fact it's the only burger he's had in years, having spent the last 30 of them in cryogenic stasis. It bears mentioning that unlike most examples on this page, meat-eating isn't rare due to global disaster, it's a sign of how overly coddled and pacified human civilization has been rendered. - In the distant galaxy of Kin-Dza-Dza, one of the transplanted Earthlings discovers that the wooden matchsticks he's carrying in his pocket are actually the most valuable things in the system, as every last scrap of naturally-occurring organic or mineral material had long since been converted into one kind of fuel or another. Water is bought by the drop, and food is made of plastic. - The Matrix has elements of this, and all the food that isn't gruel is virtual. This is why, in Reloaded, some Zionites give Neo bread as a sign of admiration. It's the equivalent of giving him gold, frankincense, and myrrh. - An early example of this is in Soylent Green, where one character is excited about having "hundred and fifty bucks a jar of strawberries." - German sci-fi movie Sturzflieger. At the end, the protagonists grow rich when they discover a storeroom full of chicks. - In V for Vendetta, Evey expresses amazement that V has access to real butter. He stole it from a shipment meant for the prime minister. - In Waterworld, potted plants and the soil to grow them in are considered valuable trade goods, as are non-sea-derived materials such as paper. - Inverted in Zombieland, where the drive of one of the main characters is to find a stash of Twinkies. After all, plants still grow after a zombie apocalypse, but with the Hostess kitchen shut down, snack cakes become an endangered species. ## Authors: - This trope is present throughout much of Isaac Asimov's fiction, although it's gone into more detail than usual in The Caves of Steel. Most of the humans in Caves of Steel eat food crafted from vat-grown yeast; having a piece of bread made from actual wheat is unheard of. - Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novella upon which Blade Runner was based, goes into this trope in more detail than the film. Real animal pets are considered the ultimate status symbol, and new editions of a blue book are published listing each species's going rate. Many species are thought to be extinct. The main character owns an electric sheep but conceals the fact that is artificial. At the end of the book, \|\|he discovers a toad, thought to be extinct, and thus priceless, but it turns out to be artificial as well.\|\| - In his short story "Breakfast at Twilight", an American family accidentally time-travel to World War III where they're accosted by a squad of malnourished American soldiers who have a This Cannot Be! reaction to their refrigerator stocked with milk, eggs, butter, and meat. They plunder the contents and hide them in their transport before The Political Officer arrives. ## Individual works: - An interesting non-sci-fi example appears in Erich Maria Remarque's famous novel All Quiet on the Western Front. One of the soldiers in the story is overjoyed when he discovers an actual cherry tree in bloom during a march across the countryside to a new position. Since he (and the others) have spent entire weeks on the western front of World War I, this is hardly surprising - the frontline being a lifeless war-torn muddy wasteland and all. And the less said about the rations given to soldiers in the latter parts of the war, the better... - The People in the Artemis Fowl series inhabit an underground civilization and seem to subsist mostly on foods preceded with sim- and things you can grow underground (like fungal goods). Sustainable and organic, but clearly not quite the same as surface food. (Not that they'd set up systems to get food from human farming, because of the pesticides.) The logical extension of this includes things like high-stakes seafood smuggling. - Sheri S. Tepper's Beauty both plays this straight and subverts it. Part of the book deals with a dystopian future Earth run by "Fidipur", an agency created to "Feed the Poor" by using much of the Earth's biological productivity and advanced science to create very efficient food wafers that would seem unnatural to modern or premodern people. The population keeps growing and eventually all arable land is needed to make their strange wafers, so the last farms that produce vegetables for human consumption are shut down. A surprisingly long section of the book describes a documentary called "The Last Radish" and a random citizen is selected to have the honor of eating the last natural vegetable while the world watches. The trope is played straight in that natural food is considered very special and exclusive, but subverted in that the radish-eater gives the natural vegetable very poor marks in comparison to his regular ration of nutrition wafers. - Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, in which one of the phyles bases its entire economy on providing luxurious hand-made goods for the Neo-Victorian elite, while everything else is produced in matter compilers. The Title Drop is that diamond is now one of the cheapest materials you can have (because, being the absolute simplest pattern of the most common solid atom - a lattice of carbon - it's the easiest thing your matter compiler can make) but glass is a luxury good. The idea here is that the goods themselves are not important, but hand-made goods are valuable because they prove that you have enough power to compel another human being to take time out of their limited existence to make things for you when you could have just gone to the nearest matter compiler and got the equivalent product with a snap of your fingers. - Inverted in Dies the Fire by S. M. Stirling, when the protagonists have a long gripe session about all the delicious junk food they miss, now they've been reduced to growing food naturally. - A variant happens in Dune when a Fremen representative spits on the table during their first meeting with House Atreides. One of the protagonists gets angry and tries to draw a weapon to repay the "slight", but Duke Leto stops him - the act was a gesture of respect, as water is incredibly scarce on Arrakis. - Leto's horrified to learn of the many demeaning customs his rivals the Harkonnens instituted during their rule of Arrakis based on wasting water; upon entering the palace, guests ceremonially splash water on the floor for servants to mop up with towels, who then sell the squeezings to the poor. They planted date palms everywhere, then put up Deflector Shields to keep peasants from eating the dates. Yueh: One date palm requires forty liters of water a day. A man requires but eight liters. A palm, then, equals five men. - Some of Leto's first rulings upon taking residence are to have the palms removed and for free water rations to be available to anyone who calls on the holding during mealtimes. It's a pragmatic move on his part as well as humanitarian, as it ensures that the people of Arrakis support his rule. How typical of a Harkonnen fief, the Duke thought. Every degradation of the spirit that can be conceived. - In Honorverse this is played on a more meta scale food is, for the most part, neither scarce nor artificial, but the peculiarities of the hundreds of different biospheres, their interplay with the human-brought species, not to mentions various genetic tweaks made to them so they may prosper in their new homes, make sure that some commodities will pretty much always remain rare and coveted. For example, the genuine Terran whiskey is considered a rare and expensive treat even on Manticore (which is one jump and three days away from the Earth), and while celery is widespread and largely consistent over the many inhabited worlds, only a Sphinxian one contains the "telepathy vitamin" coveted by the native sentient species. The 'cats actually have the other, native source of that, but the celery is just much tastier. - Although the future depicted in the In Death series is not especially dystopian, soy and vegetable imitation foods are very common, and it is a mark of Roarke's Impossibly Cool Wealth that he always drinks real coffee, smokes real tobacco, and eats real beef. The coffee in particular is insanely expensive and is made much of by Eve and her fellow cops. - In Sergey Lukyanenko's Line of Delirium, spinach now has to be grown in absolutely sterile environments and is only available to the rich. This happened after human counter-intelligence agencies successfully "convinced" the Meklar that spinach was absolutely essential to human metabolism. The Meklar devoted large amounts of resources to develop a species-crossing retrovirus lethal to spinach and to deploy bomber fleets all across human space. Devastating losses in those fleets and the utter failure of the plan shocked the Meklar into a peace treaty, though. - In Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! (which Soylent Green is based on) even soy-based faux steak is expensive and worth practically rioting over. - In The Merchants Of Venus, rich people are wearing wood jewelry. - In The Naked God, one character proudly shows off his 20th-century lava lamp, now a priceless and beautiful antique instead of a tacky room decoration. - Neuromancer has a scene where Molly chastises Case for not eating his steak; Jesus, gimme that. You know what this costs? They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn't vat stuff. - In Quozl by Alan Dean Foster, the titular aliens live aboard a Generation Ship, and as such value wood considerably. It's not rare on the planets they have colonized, but space travel takes decades and growing trees in such an environment is impractical. They have elaborate public wooden sculptures, but the most wood an individual Quozl is likely to own is a small ring. - In The Roar, due to the Animal Plague and the poor being forced into the northern parts of the world \|\|while the richest people in the world live in mansions in forests\|\| natural-grown food such as strawberries and even artificially produced meat were considered food only for the rich in the North. - Not to mention \|\|the animal plague never happened. It was made by the government and the rich to scare everybody behind The Wall so they could have the forests and wildlife all to themselves.\|\| - In The Saga of Recluce books Mag'i of Cyador/Scion of Cyador by L.E. Modesitt, Jr., an indication that the Empire is in decline is the increasing rarity of coffee. - In Larry Niven's Saturn's Race, the protagonist eats real meat in the insanely rich refuge of Xanadu and comments on how well-crafted this soymeat is. When she is informed that it is the real thing, she briefly considers whether she should be disgusted by the idea, but then decides to just treat it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. - Schismatrix is set in a future founded by refugees of an ecological meltdown on Earth. Outside of cockroaches, most animals are extremely rare, and in certain places, the same goes for food that isn't artificial. - Played with in several Star Wars Expanded Universe novels: - In the X-Wing novels, the heroes visit the home of Biggs' father on Tatooine. He's a very wealthy moisture farmer and shows this by having a study with imported hardwood and sculptures with running water. - Kirtan Loor wonders why Ysanne Isard's office is so spartan. Sure, it's a nice size, but any Imperial higher-up worth their salt would have filled it with ostentatious displays of wealth and power... Then he remembers that they are on Coruscant and that having empty unused space in the galaxy's most desirable area is pretty much as ostentatious as displays of wealth and power get. - A minor example in The Stormlight Archive. One of the reasons why the gemstones used as currency in the setting are so valuable is that they are the only thing that cannot be created by Soulcasters. - Joe Kimball's novel Timecaster does this without the environmental-degradation angle. It is set in a future "green utopia" in which every available surface is covered with growing plants — virtually all of which are ultimately rendered into either food or much-needed biofuel. Making durable goods or luxury consumables out of natural materials is seen as wasteful; therefore, wooden furniture is a sign of decadent wealth while paper and drinkable alcohol are against the law. - Elizabeth Moon's space opera series Vatta's War. With humanity scattered across space, the puppy Jim the stowaway finds is a mysterious novelty to most of the crew, though Jim, coming from a backwater world that relies on animal labor, knows what it is. Real food can be had but won't keep for long trips in space so it is a special treat supplemented by nutrition bars and MREs. When the main character's ship takes on refugees from other ships after a war breaks out, a snotty-ass captain makes a big deal about his personal stock of expensive raspberries being divvied out as rations. - Oh, and the aforementioned dog (a Jack Russell?) ends up filling Jim's college fund when they arrive on a world where the local fauna has a tendency to kill dogs, making them rare and expensive. So they sell its sperm (in the same vein as selling racehorse sperm). - In the Vorkosigan universe, this applies to some planets but not others. The heroine of the first two novels is from Beta Colony, a high tech but barely habitable desert planet, who winds up on Barrayar, which has a breathable atmosphere, lots of running water, and trees all over the place, but is also socially and politically and to some extent technologically backwards on account of having been cut off from contact with the rest of the galaxy for a few centuries (only ending a couple of generations before the action of the books). She has to remind herself that on this planet things like wooden buildings and furniture mean poverty, not wealth. - The War Against the Chtorr. When the government wants to hire the luxury airship Hieronymus Bosch, they have to use chocolate (among other things like coffee, oil, or gold) in payment as money is becoming increasingly valueless. - The MacGuffin in The Windup Girl is a seedbank of natural plants; one Mega-Corp or another has driven all other plants in the outside world into extinction in favor of genetically engineered counterparts. - In Lloyd Biggle, Jr.'s short story, "Wings of Song", an eccentric collector in the far future stumbles across a priceless antique violin, made of actual wood. He's never even seen any before, as apparently Earth is a completely barren wasteland due to war. - World War Z featured this when Arthur Sinclair was trying to negotiate with cattle ranchers to use their land to grow much-needed crops - they agreed only if their breeding stock remained untouched. Arthur Sinclair: "Tender, juicy steaks - can you imagine a better symbol for our artificial pre-war standard of living?" - It's a point only because \|\|the Solanum virus is fatal to all life, but only cause humans to turn into zombies. For anything else, it's just fatal and results in their flesh becoming unsafe for human consumption.\|\| - The environment is fine in Babylon 5, but space travel is still expensive and the eponymous space station is too far from Earth to ship much food out. They've got a positively huge hydroponic farm, but it only grows "essential foods" and is geared towards providing a nutritionally complete diet, rather than a tasty and varied one... though said diet seems to include oranges and nectarines, and Takashima managed to sneak in a few coffee plants under the radar (later taken over by Ivanova). - Even for the command staff, a shipment of real eggs is seen as an amazing luxury. Steak is similarly rare, though at one point the doctor fudges some paperwork to have a couple brought in after losing a bet with Garibaldi. An alien meat-based product called "spoo" is available, though it is extremely expensive and, to a human palate, not particularly good. - In space, showers are sonic; Captain Sheridan raves about the fact that his quarters have a water-based shower, which was not the case on the warship he commanded previously. - The price and difficulty of importing foods is highlighted in one second-season episode when Garibaldi tries to obtain certain Italian ingredients (olive oil, garlic, butter, and anchovies) for a birthday treat. - A deleted scene in Battlestar Galactica (2003) mentions that the meat locker is the most heavily guarded area on a spaceship because the last remaining steaks, burger, fritters, etc, in the universe are there. Later in the series, we see the fleet is reduced to eating algae-derived food, and fruit and cigars are valuable black market commodities. - In the second episode of Black Mirror, all physical items are a sign of opulence. The everyday man can only purchase digital goods for his virtual avatar and the food is all grown in a lab. When the main character manages to become a famous TV star he splashes out and buys a real wooden penguin. - Blake's 7. In "Bounty", Blake encounters Sarkoff, a Fan of the Past who has decorated his home with rare Earth artifacts including a tray of butterflies, now implied to be extinct (Blake later forces Sarkoff to come with him by threatening to smash the tray). Sarkoff: Beautiful, aren't they. Earth insects of the order Lepidoptera. Blake: Butterflies. Sarkoff: Ah, so you're a historian, are you? Blake: No, but I did study some natural history. Sarkoff: It's interesting, isn't it, that when that term "natural history" was originated, it referred to the study of living things. It was much later that it came to mean the study of things long since past and dead. History in its more conventional sense. - Cowboy Bebop (2021): - A downplayed version in "Callisto Soul". As Jet Black isn't interested in the algae-soy hybrid meal, he tries to order a couple of rib-eye steaks using a 2-for-1 coupon, only to be told the coupon doesn't apply to "real meat". - Because only the rich could afford to take their pets with them during the Homeworld Evacuation, dogs are worth between 20 to 30 million woolongs. When Jet tries to give Ein to his daughter as a pet, his ex-wife puts her foot down as they can't afford to pay the tax. In fact their rarity actually makes it difficult to sell them on the black market. - Doctor Who: - In an inorganic variant, a bandit chieftain in the story "The Creature from the Pit" was once seen to wax rhapsodic about the amazing treasures his group has stolen: precious items of iron, zinc, and even nickel! Needless to say, this scene takes place on a Metal-Poor Planet, where only members of the elite \|\|who got them by robbing and betraying an inoffensive alien ambassador\|\| can boast such prizes. - In "The Sun Makers", Gatherer Hade is shown to be one of the richest members of the evil company that controls a dystopian society on Pluto by his having a desk made of real mahogany. The member of the oppressed underclass who admires it has only seen a picture of a tree, and even the Gatherer himself mispronounces it "ma-ho- ga-ny". Later, he offers the Doctor a raspberry leaf as a rare treat. - Kaylee eating a strawberry in the Firefly pilot. It was orgasmic. - Eobard Thawne mentions in the season 1 finale of The Flash (2014) that in the 22nd century, cows have become extinct, which explain his love of burgers in the 21st century. - Stargate SG-1 has an odd example. A Big Eater Goa'uld is unfamiliar with and can easily be bribed by foods he's never heard of... like chicken and turkey. We don't know much about the ecology of most planets in the galaxy, but apparently the Transplanted Humans that make up 90 percent of all aliens didn't take any fowl with them. Nerus: And this seedless watermelon — how do you get the seeds out? Landry: Sorry, state secret. - Cyberpunk 2020 plays this straight. Fresh food is an expensive commodity, only within the reach of rich people, and most of the population lives eating Kibble (a mass-produced food identical in all respects to the pet food that gives it its name) and what is basically artificial food not much better than Kibble. (Live) pets, short of wild animals, are expensive too, and one of the Chromebooks even features one corporation whose business follow the lines of pay-us-and-we-bring-you-the-animal-you-wants, even if it has to be stealing it from someone or worse. - In past editions of Dungeons & Dragons which include the Elemental Plane of Air in their cosmology, dirt is considered a valuable commodity on that plane, as it's made up of gas-filled space. Anyone who wants to build a floating castle must either import some dirt to build it on or (more cheaply) use magic to solidify a cloud for a foundation. - Eclipse Phase takes place after a hurried evacuation of Earth and colonization of the rest of the solar system. Naturally grown food, especially meat, is expensive due to the shortage of inhabitable space, but culture vats and nanofabricators can produce substitutes that snobs insist they can detect - but it's compared to modern-day wines. Now organic bodies, those are expensive because they take three years to grow and there's a lot of demand from the billions of Virtual Ghosts in storage, while most Synthmorphs can be printed out in a matter of hours. - In the Mystara D&D supplement "The Shadow Elves", the subterranean elf city's grandest and most-admired public avenue is lined by a dozen or so small trees, grown from precious cuttings brought down from the legendary surface and provided for with fertilizer and artificial lights. Elven tourists come hundreds of miles through twisted tunnels and caverns just to see them. - Paranoia: - With most of society living in a massive underground supercity, real food grown in hydroponic gardens are considered a rare luxury, and are distributed according to security clearance. Infrareds get nothing, Reds get real food as a reward, and so on up; it isn't until Blue that a clone gets nothing but real food. - Petbots are often mentioned in the game, as Alpha Complex is not designed to allow for real pets. Some books mention high programmers own real animals in private zoos. - In Shadowrun, the in-character "shadowtalk" interspersed through the sourcebooks occasionally contains remarks like "I've never once had a real steak". Everyone but the ultra-rich evidently lives on cultured fungal protein and krill. Synthetic leather and tobacco products are also standard, as is "soycaf" instead of coffee. - Inadvertently gets a laugh in the Tir Tairngire sourcebook when it's mentioned that the elves have somehow re-created extinct species for their wilderness areas. It's funny in that both of the named species, grizzly bears and gray wolves, are not only still alive and well today without any magical or cloning assistance, but they would have had to go extinct, all over the world and also in captivity, in less than a decade after the supplement was published, in order to meet the timeline suggested for their "extinction". Also, depending on wording, it's unlikely that the species Canis lupus ever went extinct in captivity, unless the setting is also completely devoid of dogs, since technically domestic dogs are a subspecies of gray wolves. note : To be fair, the reclassification of Canis familiaris was fairly recent, and after thousands of generations of human-controlled breeding, dogs no longer look or act much like their wild cousins. Still, they are interfertile and are currently considered the same species. - Taken to the point that a Running Gag was to mention things like Imitation Cheese Substitute. - Fourth Edition cuts back considerably on this. Sure, your average shadowrunner is still subsisting mostly on soy, but you can still find most of what you'd see in RL 2011 in the shops of Shadowrun 2070 for not much more than the equivalent price. It's just that most shadowrunners are in a state of Perpetual Poverty. - Warhammer 40,000: - Depends on the planet. Most forge worlds have ruined their environments to the point that life barely exists outside controlled habitats and food needs importing, while hive worlds might have decent environments but the average citizen will never see the outside and live entirely on artificial foods. Agricultural worlds, on the other hand, can invert this trope, with many having abundant plant and animal life but very little in the way of technological goods (although those that are close to other planets or particularly rich might avoid this). - The Dark Eldar apply this to birthrates: Their population is billions-strong, but most of it consists of vat-grown individuals called Halfborn who supply most of the soldiery (slave labor is provided by slaves, which is why they're always out raiding other species). Trueborn are the upper class, being born the biological way (due to the danger of Slaanesh claiming their souls during sex, the luxury of safety needed to carry a child to term, and because the Dark Eldar wouldn't be the Dark Eldar if they didn't have an entire strata of society to look down on / plot to overthrow). - All material goods are scarce in Wraith: The Oblivion since the Underworld is a quasi-real interstitial state of being that was never meant to host a civilization or a significant population. Most of what there is are either fading memories of real items and buildings or goods fabricated by soulforging Wraiths into Human Resources. A very small number of living things and "natural" resources exist that cannot be explained by one of these two phenomena, all of which are staggeringly rare and valuable. For instance, the Deathlords of Stygia have a small number of apparently-living horses in their personal guard - no one knows where they came from, but Stygian policy is that their survival is more valuable than that of their riders. - BioShock. The city of Rapture, being entirely underwater, does not contain enough farmland for growing nonessential crops or raising cattle, so real beef and tobacco aren't available except through Fontaine's smuggling operation. Somehow, Rapture's scientists have managed to synthesize both from what they do have on hand, which seems to be mainly sea life, and it's implied that customers generally don't mind. - One of the splicers complains about the quality of a steak she's found, though given the setting it's probably rotten by that point. - In the Video Game tie-in to the Blade Runner movie, the player character Ray has an artificial dog named Maggie you can play with, and the crime Ray was initially investigating involves the slaughter of several real animals including a rare tiger. \|\|Then it gets complicated: the shop owner was selling fakes but fudging records and tests so they were considered 'true' (and more expensive) animals\|\| - It's noted in the game and novel that animal life is held in higher regard than humans — considering Crystal's reaction is nearly identical to walking in on a murder of a child. - There is also a point in the game where McCoy mentions that cheese is a black market item, whose illegal distribution evidently comes with jail time. - Since the sun will turn anyone without proper protection into stone in Digital Devil Saga 2, this makes any plants you find quite valuable. - Nexus Clash plays Inexplicably Preserved Dungeon Meat absolutely straight, but this trope comes up a lot in more serious role-playing. Fruits and vegetables can be grown in the abandoned city that became the battlefield of Valhalla, but there are few if any animals to eat, and meat, eggs, and dairy can only be preserved for so long. - Growing regular crops in Project Aura is difficult — the game happens After the End, thousands of years after climate change has rendered the Earth uninhabitable and Humanity had to turtle within energy shields in order to not die from exposure to the harsh elements, and producing their food reflects that. To grow natural crops you first need to research the ability to scavenge seeds from the seabed, send your seabed trawling airships for some seeds, restore them to good condition in a lab using a Core Research Document that costs five Research Documents (and getting them is not easy — they are crafted out of Innovation Points that are generated from activities such as seaweed production, water desalinization or recycled garbage production, and one cycle of these activities yields barely one tenth of an Innovation Point), and then plant the seeds in a Botanic Garden, which also consumes one Research Document. As a result, if you want to feed your citizens something tastier than processed seaweed, you need to keep the green documents flowing, and in order to do that, you need an obscenely developed material recycling industry. - In Rise of the Dragon, set in the distant future, Blade Hunter must calm down his angry girlfriend by giving her flowers. To do this, he spends $200 plus tax to buy "Organically Grown Roses." - Shadowrun Returns: In Dragonfall Altug sells real Turkish coffee for 50 nuyen a pop at his café, as opposed to soykaf at 5 nuyen. He explains that it is a special blend which even in a time when "real" coffee was everywhere would be considered a rare delicacy. - In Shin Megami Tensei IV, genuine meat and vegetables in Tokyo are extremely expensive due to their rarity and are eaten mainly by high-ranking organized crime bosses. This is because the people of Tokyo averted a complete annihilation of humanity because a Japanese god shielded Tokyo from the destruction but left Tokyo completely covered in a stone dome. With no light, vegetables must be grown using artificial light in special greenhouses, and there are no farm animals left so whatever meat remains has been kept frozen the entire time Tokyo has been under the dome. Meanwhile, demons are running loose in Tokyo's streets— their meat is what the normal citizens of Tokyo have been eating. - In Xenosaga, we view one of Ziggy's memories in which he gives his son a robotic dog as a pet, as he was regretfully unable to obtain a real one. - Freefall takes place on a planet being Terraformed, so organics are worth considerably more than gold or diamonds. - Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: In one theoretical future, advertisements generate revenue by annoying their customers into paying a fee to skip the ad. Marketing loses sight of the greater goal and creates increasingly annoying troll-adverts that pervade into regular advertising, dooming any product that needs adverts of any kind. As a result, mass-produced basic needs are extremely cheap, but any luxury (including ketchup) is near-impossible to find and costs trillions of dollars. Humanity backslides into a dystopian mass-produced subsistence life as all media and art is repurposed to torment its viewers. Of course, the punchline is that humans still pretend bad media is entertaining and funny. - Stand Still, Stay Silent: Inverted. A spare part for a mechanical vehicle can cost as much as a healthy workhorse, resulting in mechanical vehicles being used only by the military while civilians go around in horse-drawn carriages. Supplementary material has also mentioned sugar to have become quite expensive. - In Starslip, Sam Edgewise tries to turn down a transfer from captaincy to a desk job, only to be told how prestigious the desk job is: - "Edgewise, that desk is the greatest desk in the Academy. It's made of real wood." - Real Life plays this completely straight with synthetic gemstones, which are completely identical to the natural stone chemically and have the same optics. One can buy several pounds of artificially created sapphires, emeralds, or rubies for the price of a single carat of the natural stuff, even though the natural one will actually be cloudier and less brilliant than the synthetics. And yes, this includes diamonds, which is why those used for industrial applications are almost exclusively synthetic while those used for jewelry are mostly natural and expensive due to shrewd marketing by De Beers, who control some 90% of the market. - Free-range or organic foods tend to be more expensive and luxurious than the industrial kind. Much like the gemstones above, this is almost entirely marketing. - Wild-caught fish and shellfish and tend to be far more expensive than farmed. Same applies to hunted game, which is more expensive than farmed. - Seafood in general used to be considered poor-people food because of the lack of refrigeration and fast goods delivery (so fish could only be sold locally, and thus did not command high prices) and because seafood was simply more abundant in the past (before overfishing). - The original reason the Catholic Church specifically does not consider seafood to be "meat" was so that poor people would have something to eat on "meatless" Fridays and during Lent. - They say that Louis XIV used to have a cavalry regiment meant exclusively for bringing him fresh fish. - In the 19th century there was even a rule in most prisons not to feed lobster to the prisoners more than a few times a week since it was considered cruel towards them. Although this was in large part because European and American people at the time did not realize that lobster was best if cooked immediately after being killed so it was typically grabbed, killed, and then cooked some hours later like fish was. Lobster didn't become popular until the railroads, looking for a cheap meat that they could try to pass off as "luxurious", discovered canned lobster. A better understanding of how to prepare lobster properly meant that live lobsters were sent straight to the cannery so they could be cooked and canned immediately after being killed, resulting in a much better flavor and causing demand for lobster to skyrocket. - Russian sturgeon caviar. Some centuries ago, it was just a byproduct of fishing. Now it is VERY expensive to the point of being illegal and restricted because sturgeon is close to extinction. note : For the same reason, sturgeon itself is expensive. A few generations ago, young fried sturgeon and catfish were listed as a cheap Friday dinner for seasonal laborers. Now good luck finding any of them in other place than the most expensive fish shops. Similarly, there is an old Polish recipe for sauerkraut and caviar. That's right, people used caviar to season sauerkraut! - Salmon. In Jack London's stories set in the Yukon, salmon is mentioned repeatedly as mainly fit to be sled dog food, while actual settlers and Gold Rush pioneers pay exorbitant prices in hard-dug gold for any non-locally manufactured food such as eggs. And the demand that the employer not feed them salmon more than two times a week was fairly standard for hired hands seeking employment in 18th century Russia. - Cod stocks around the world are actually on the verge of collapse due to heavy overfishing, so most mass-market cod-based dishes have long been adapted to other, cheaper and more abundant whitefish species, such as pollock, and if you want to have the real stuff you're usually in for the heavy markup. For example, in Brazil cod is considered a delicacy and highly sought after for traditional Portuguese dishes. Decades ago, it was the cheapest meat available. - Sushi and sashimi used to be the Japanese equivalent of fast food (fish was originally transported in vinegared rice as a preservative, and poor people buying the goods would end up eating the rice as well as the fish). Nowadays, sushi is considered fancy food, and auctions are held for who gets to eat bluefin tuna sashimi first, even reaching $1.7 million! While higher-quality sushi is still available at sushi restaurants, sushi is also available in supermarkets. - Similarly, oysters were once the food of the poor in Britain (though still considered a treat). Noah Claypole the "charity-boy" in Oliver Twist eats a large quantity. - In the first year or two after a new species or strain of livestock comes into demand, they can be temporarily hard to come by, as their owners prefer breeding their stock for future profits over selling them now. For example, when llamas first began to see use as sheep-guards and environmentally-friendly pack animals in the United States, only gelded males were available for these purposes: breeding animals cost far too much. Ditto for exotic pets. - Thomas Edison once declared that: "We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles", and he saw that future coming thanks in part to his arch-rival. Whilst the latter half of this boast hasn't entirely come true (generic candles are fairly cheap), it is indeed much cheaper to run a light-bulb that produces the same amount of light as an equivalent candle for the same amount of time as that candle can burn for, even if you factor in the cost of the globe itself (as it can probably continue alongside hundreds of successive candles before burning out). - There are candles and candles. Generic ones made with paraffin wax are cheap and readily available, but those made with beeswax are considered fancy decorations and considerably more expensive. You'd have to be really poor not to be able to get into a store and buy one if the desire to have it suddenly gripped you, but you won't find them used for emergency illumination in the average low-wage worker's home. - As the standard of living in the developed world has risen since the middle of the 20th century the cost of labor-intensive products have risen dramatically to support this standard, while technology improvement has made the cost of products that can be mass-produced fall dramatically. The result is that products once made by skilled craftsmen are now virtually unobtainable, while anything produced by machines are often so cheap to be completely disposable. One of the handful of exceptions to this is clothing. Cloth is an unpredictable material compared to metal and plastic, so sewing machines still require human operators. However, those operators don't have to be highly trained or educated to produce cheap, low-quality products quickly. This is why very little garment manufacture happens in the developed world. - For babies in America, breast milk. It means the mother is either rich enough not to work outside the home or has a good job that gives her maternity leave. - And on the other side of the trope: Vitamin enriched puffed soy cakes? USD4.50 for a 6"x14" cylinder. Available flavors include cheese, bacon, chocolate, and probably half a dozen others (including something that probably shouldn't have used green food colouring [?]) - An inversion is the price of meat. Until relatively recently, meat, especially red meat, was something most people would only have rarely if their farm animals died (it was more worthwhile to keep the animals alive for milk, eggs, wool to be produced consistently). Only the wealthy could afford to eat meat regularly until mass farming and refrigeration became common, lowering the price of meat, although the price may go up again as demand increases. - In Anne of Green Gables, chicken was served as a special meal for important guests, and "eating chicken with salad every day" was a part of imagined upper-class life listed among diamond jewellery and silk dresses. - Herbert Hoover used "A chicken in every pot" ("and a car in every garage") as an advertising slogan in the 1928 U.S. Presidential campaign. Rather ironic, considering how the Hoover administration turned out. The original sentiment goes all the way back to Henry IV of France, who wrote "I want there to be no peasant in my realm so poor that he will not have a chicken in his pot on Sunday" - Order a soda at almost any restaurant in the U.S., and you can have it refilled as much as you like at no extra charge. The stuff is so cheap and profit margins so high that they can afford to practically give it away. On the other hand, ask for something that's reasonably healthy and natural, like fruit juice, and you'll pay for every glass. This is because the sodas come from soda fountains, which simply carbonate tap water and then mix in some small amount of concentrated syrup, while the juices (even if they're made with concentrated juice) are delivered in separate containers. The price for delivery and storage is therefore much higher (per serving) for anything but sodas. Also, this is mainly found in the US (which generally has very low food prices anyway), as restaurants in other countries usually don't miss the chance to charge a steep markup for what is basically sugared water. Outside of the States, you can mainly encounter this in US-originated restaurants that simply carried this tradition with them, or in places trying to invoke an American feel, where the owners believe that the atmosphere is more important. - And the reason why soda is so cheap in the US, along with candies and other sweets, is because of the invention of high-fructose corn syrup as a substitute for cane sugar that can be produced economically using the vast (and heavily subsidized) corn crop of the American breadbasket. In the US, cane sugar is a rarity found only in organic and other specialty foods and drinks, thanks to competition from high-fructose corn syrup, a relative lack of places in the US where sugarcane can be grown note : The lower Mississippi Valley, the Gulf Coast, Florida, and Hawaii, along with sugar beets in California, eastern Oregon, South Dakota, and Saginaw Bay, Michigan, and import tariffs designed to protect American sugar and corn syrup producers. - Thanks to the invention of butter-flavored oil as an alternative to the real thing, the most expensive component of a bucket of movie-theater popcorn is, in fact, the paper bucket. Using actual butter would jack up the cost considerably. - "Food deserts" in the developed world; neighborhoods without access to fresh food, usually in very poor, densely-populated urban areas. Grocery stores in wealthier neighborhoods or suburbs can stock fresh produce, meat, and unprocessed staples. The convenience stores that may be the only "grocery" in walking distance (those living in that area are often too poor to own a car) will favor processed, shelf-stable "food" that offers calories and little else. What little fresh food they have will be under a steep markup. Again, this heavily varies with the level of urban segregation in the larger world, with many countries either not having it to the same degree, with the rich and the poor rubbing shoulders every day or having functional public transport systems that allow the poor to affordably access the wider markets. - The coffee plantations in South America and Africa are known for producing some of the best coffee beans in the world, but often the farmers can only afford to drink cheap instant coffee. This also applies in the developed world. Most coffee drinkers find that pre-ground, mass-produced coffee is cheaper than fresh coffee beans from local roasters roasted in small batches. The latter is mostly the province of connoisseurs, with a few diehards experimenting with home roasting, something that also used to be routine prior to the development of mass-produced coffee in the 19th century. - Fast food menu items are based around meats like beef or chicken that used to be expensive before intensive agriculture, but fast food restaurants use meat that is of comparatively low quality. - Because maple syrup is so laborious to produce, can only be produced during a relatively small window of late winter/early spring note : Well, okay, it can also be produced in late fall and early winter, but syrup produced in the fall is thought to be lower quality because the sap is thought to be lower quality. , and it takes many gallons of sap to produce even a small amount of syrup, the real thing is expensive. Pancake syrup, however, is little more than corn syrup with artificial, vaguely kinda-sorta-not-really-maple-y flavoring and caramel coloring. It can be had for as little as $1. - Vanilla is expensive because each vanilla orchid takes a long time to reach maturity. When it does, it produces flowers that are only open for one day, and it doesn't have a lot of natural pollinators. (And if it's being grown outside of Central or South America, it has no natural pollinators.) So the flowers need to be pollinated by hand. Then, if they're successful, the beans take many months to grow to their full size, and then they need to be cured (otherwise, they're just bland like green beans.) This is why imitation vanilla flavoring (made from wood pulp) exists. - Cotton is the only natural fiber that HASN'T gone through the "formerly cheap to expensive" cycle, and even it has a distinction between "regular cotton clothes" and "high-end cotton." Wool and linen are much rarer than they used to be after synthetics came around, and they take a lot of maintenance that synthetic fibers don't. In the case of wool specifically, people commonly think wool is itchy/scratchy when that's actually a sign that it's inferior wool, that it got washed incorrectly, or (ironically) that a "wool blend" yarn or fabric barely has any actual wool in it.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyElectricSheepAreCheap
One-Book Author - TV Tropes "I have said what I wanted to say and I will not say it again." — Harper Lee note : who did technically write a second book , but it was an early draft of her first and was never intended for publication. There is a certain tragedy known as the One-Book Author, when a person produces one work in a specific field that becomes extremely popular but never forays into said field again. In the world of literature, the author might have a couple additional short stories or poems that were published, but no other novels. Compare One-Hit Wonder, where someone has produced several works but only one managed to become popular. May overlap with Died During Production (where the author doesn't live long enough to compose another work, i.e. works published posthumously), Tough Act to Follow (where they're afraid they've peaked on their first attempt, and may also be a Reclusive Artist) or at times with Short-Lived, Big Impact. Compare One-Song Bard. Contrast Author Usurpation for when the author did make more works, but they're only known for one while the rest are forgotten. # Examples: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Hosts and announcers - Wheel of Fortune has many examples: - Host-hostess tandem Pat Sajak and Vanna White, who took over from Chuck Woolery and Susan Stafford in 1981 and 1982, respectively, originally met this trope: Pat was a former DJ and weatherman (although he hosted at least one unsold pilot before Wheel), and Vanna's only other TV "role" was as a contestant on The Price Is Right in 1980. However, their fame in these capacities led to other roles that now make them aversions. - Former San Diego Chargers place kicker Rolf Benirschke hosted the daytime version from January 10 to June 30, 1989. This was his only TV role. - The only TV role for Cynthia Washington (ex-wife of San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Gene Washington) was filling in for an injured Stafford for just over a week. - Tricia Gist (now-wife of Wheel creator Merv Griffin's son Tony) filled in for Vanna for a few weeks in 1991, thus giving Gist her only TV role to date. - Again contingent on whether or not "contestant" counts as a role, the only on-camera role for Mike Reilly was hosting the short-lived 1990 game show adaptation of Monopoly. Series creator Merv Griffin chose Reilly after he was a Jeopardy! contestant. - Yet another game show example: Paola Diva, the original Lovely Assistant on Concentration. And another still in Marjorie Goodson-Cutt on the 1980s-1990s revival, Classic Concentration. The latter was producer Mark Goodson's daughter. - Many people have been prolific in other fields, but only hosted a game show once (well, games that made it to air, anyway). Among them are: - Kevin O'Connell (a weatherman whose only hosting gig was Go, as well as the Keynotes and Money in the Blank pilots) - Henry Polic II (aka Jerry Silver on Webster; only hosting gig was Double Talk, plus the Eye Q pilot). Polic also had his only gig as an announcer when he filled in for Johnny Gilbert on a few episodes of The $100,000 Pyramid during John Davidson's tenure as host. - Chuck Henry (an LA news anchor whose only hosting gig was the 1989 revival of Now You See It, although he previously hosted an unsold pilot for Beat the Odds in 1975) - Laurie Faso (a voice actor and occasional live-action actor as well; only hosting gig was I'm Telling!) - Nick Clooney (George Clooney's father) (a long career as a broadcaster; only hosting gig was The Money Maze) - Patrick Wayne (John Wayne's son) (several roles as an actor; only hosting gig was the 1990 revival of Tic-Tac-Dough, and possibly for good reasons) - In the UK, Evan Davis is the longstanding host of Dragons' Den, which The BBC is fairly insistent is not a game show, though most people ignore their protestations. Whatever it is, it is Davis' only role away from his usual position as a news anchor. - Win, Lose or Draw: - The versions between 1987 and 1992 had a combined four hosts: Bert Convy (1987-89, syndication), Robb Weller (1989-90, syndication), Vicki Lawrence (NBC), and Marc Price ( Teen Win, Lose or Draw on Disney Channel, 1989-92). Among these four people, Convy is the only one of the four to have helmed any other game shows (most notably, Tattletales and Super Password). Lawrence was best known for her roles on The Carol Burnett Show and Mama's Family and was a panelist on several other game shows, but Win, Lose or Draw remains her only hosting gig to date (she also hosted two pilots for Mark Goodson and ABC called Body Talk in 1990). Weller's only other major role was a short gig as host on Entertainment Tonight (he hosted the 1986 pilot of Blackout, the failed 1990 pilot of Split Second (1972) and the 1993 pilot of Hollywood Teasers, a revision of All-Star Blitz), and Price's only other notable role was Irwin "Skippy" Handelman on Family Ties. - The Disney Channel version, Teen Win, Lose or Draw, had a few different Mouseketeers from The Mickey Mouse Club announce, none of whom did any other announcing work (or in the case of Brandy Brown, much of anything at all). The exception was Mark L. Walberg, who was not a Mouseketeer, and who had experience in both announcing and hosting game shows for many years afterward (and, since 2006, of Antiques Roadshow). - "Gorgeous George" Davidson, the Subverted Lovely Assistant on GSN's WinTuition, has no other credits. - The only television role for Tony Pigg is as The Announcer of Live with Kelly and Ryan, a role he has held since the show began in 1983 as The Morning Show. - Deejay Mark Driscoll announced the first few weeks of the 1989 revival of Now You See It before being replaced with Don Morrow. To date, Driscoll has not done any other television work. - The game show The Cross Wits has two examples. The 1975-80 version was the only television role for Lovely Assistant Jerri Fiala; one week of episodes had her serve as a celebrity partner, while Kitty Hilton (then-wife of game show announcer Bob Hilton) got her only TV role taking Jerri's usual spot. The 1986 revival was also the only television role for announcer Michelle Roth. - UK financial journalist Louise Noel's only TV hosting role was the stocks-and-shares game Show Me the Money. - Kirk Fogg has no other television roles of note besides hosting the kids' game show Legends of the Hidden Temple. - The only game show credit for Phil Hartman was as the announcer of The Pop 'N Rocker Game in 1983. Hartman supposedly auditioned for Let's Make a Deal and The Price Is Right as well, but didn't make the cut for either. - Brian Cummings' only on-screen role to date is the announcer on the first season of The All-New Let's Make a Deal in 1984 (although he also announced the pilot of Fun House (1988)). However, he is a prolific voice actor. - The only on-camera role to date for voice actor Bob Bergen is Jep!, a short-lived children's spin-off of Jeopardy! which aired in 1997. - The Russian adaptation of 1 vs. 100, Odin protiv vseh on TV Centr, is the only TV hosting credit for Alexander Nuzhdin, who is mostly known as a DJ and a radio personality. - In 1977, Saturday Night Live ran an "Anybody Can Host" audience contest, the winner of which was a 80-year-old New Orleans grandmother named Miskel Spillman, who hosted the December 17, 1977 episode. This was not just her only hosting appearance (and SNL's only non-entertainer host to date), but her only national television appearance. ## Studios and Companies - Enigma Entertainment, the Spanish company which dubbed ×××HOLiC in what is considered one of the best anime dubs in Spain, literally disappeared after doing just one more work with Ultimate Muscle. Almost none of its voice actors have had a role in dubbing again, and even their whereabouts are currently unknown. - Patlabor is the only work by the artist collective Headgear, although Headgear's individual members have done various succesful works before and after Patlabor. - Looking Up at the Half-Moon's anime adaptation was the only thing licensed by the short-lived distributor Crimson Star Media. - Tokyo Media Connections only made the short anime Majo demo Steady in 1986. According to this video by anime historian Kenny Lauderdale, it could have been a marketing ploy to promote the song sung by the female protagonist's voice actress, since it's featured in its entirety. Nobody who worked on this anime seem to have worked on anything else. - Prana Films, a German studio, produced only one film, the 1922 horror classic Nosferatu. The studio was forced into bankruptcy after being ordered to pay copyright damages to the estate of Bram Stoker. - Tailor Made Productions, a production company run by Dan Lautner (Taylor's father). Setting out to make him into an action star thanks to the financial success of the Twilight films, Dan chose to start a series of action movie vehicles for his son, with the sole film made by the company being 2011's Abduction, which was both a critical and financial flop. - Kroyer Films did animations for several films of other studios as well as the video game Pitfall The Mayan Adventure, along with producing the short film Technological Threat, but only made one feature-length film of their own, FernGully: The Last Rainforest. - A company called Elastic Productions made only one movie before going belly up: the Direct to Video film Bands on the Run. - The obscure 1995 film Goldilocks and the Three Bears appears to be the only sort of statement made by Twin Dolphin Filmed Entertainment. - The one-off distribution company Shining Excalibur Films was created to release Kids, as Miramax, then owned by Disney, got cold feet over releasing an NC-17 film. - Summertime Entertainment's only film was Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return. - Luscious Spirit Studios was an all-women yuri indie group with plans for comics, short stories and more all around the central theme of romance between women. Sadly, after a successful Kickstarter of a compilation of short stories, the two writers left the group for reasons unexplained, taking their written works with them. The final member disappeared into the ether after that, leaving behind a pair of unfinished comics and a planned visual novel that will never see the light of day. - The Hurler roller coasters at Carowinds and formerly at Kings Dominion were built by a company named International Coasters, Inc., which built nothing else. - L.A. Noire was the only work of Team Bondi, the Troubled Production of which ultimately bankrupted the company. - Four Leaf Studio, the group of people behind Katawa Shoujo, was created specifically just for this one game and has not made any other projects. It was a collaborative effort by people from all over the world (many of whom were long gone when the final product was released) and it was five years in the making. - Metal Arms: Glitch in the System was the sole game released by developer Swingin' Ape Studios. Their next game was to have been StarCraft: Ghost; Blizzard even acquired the studio before disbanding it and canceling the game. - The Electronic Arts-published combat driving game Auto Destruct was the only title developed by Neurostone. - Studio Archcraft developed the 2009 Nintendo DS RPG Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled, and quietly disappeared afterward. - Members of that team resurfaced to make the SRPG Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, which includes a playable cameo from Black Sigil's hero, Kairu. - Limbo of the Lost was the only game by British developer Majestic Studios, which spent 13 years in Development Hell and it shows. It was pulled from stores for copious stolen assets. This is despite The Stinger showing that the developers intended to make a sequel titled Limbo of the Lost II: Flight to Freedom. - The only game developed by the Squaresoft subsidiary Escape was Driving Emotion Type-S. - Digital Tome only made one game, Siege of Avalon, before disbanding. - Amiga run 'n' gun Ruff 'n' Tumble is the only game ever developed by Wunderkind. - Amiga platformer Yo! Joe! Beat the Ghosts is the only game ever developed by Scipio. - Amiga beat 'em up Motörhead, based on the eponymous group, is the only game ever developed by Kaitsu Software. - Apogee's team Developers of Incredible Power created the original Rise of the Triad in 1994-1995. The team disbanded while working on their second game, Prey (2006), which was eventually outsourced to another company. - Amstar Electronics ( Phoenix, 1980) - 38 Studios (created by baseball star Curt Schilling) only released one game, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, before going down in a blaze of loan default to the state of Rhode Island. - Dark Energy Digital only managed to create two games before going bust: Hydrophobia and the Updated Re-release Hydrophobia Prophecy. - JAM Productions ( Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, 1993). - Nintendo subsidiary Project Sora only made one game: Kid Icarus: Uprising, which was quite popular and a Killer App for the Nintendo 3DS. Afterwards, they were absorbed back into their parent company, Sora Ltd. - Rock-Ola ( Nibbler, 1981) - Crack Dot Com ( Abuse, 1996) - Parker Brothers (yes, THAT Parker Brothers) made plenty different games, which were usually good, but the only video game they made that was not an arcade/Computer port or a licensed game was Montezuma's Revenge. - Secret of Evermore was the only game developed by Square USA. - Steel Reign was the only game by Chantemar Creations. Shortly after its release, most of the company's staff joined Everquest developer Verant Interactive. - Bit Blot ( Aquaria, 2007) - Recoil Games's only release was Rochard (2011), a critical success but a financial failure. They began development on a sequel, but never finished it due to lack of funding, and eventually folded completely. - Sanctuary Software ( Backlash, 1994) - Clockwork Tortoise, Inc. ( The Adventures of Batman & Robin for Genesis and Sega CD, 1995) - Gaslamp Games might count since, outside Dungeons of Dredmor and all its re-releases and DLC, they only released the unfinished Clockwork Empires. After two years on Steam's Early Access, the game was sold in late 2016 at full price but in an incomplete, broken and messy state. Then the devs went silent since December 2016 and the company more or less imploded (see also: Creator Killer). - Neorex ( Cosmic Race, 1995) - Whoopee Camp only developed Tomba!, and its sequel, Tomba! 2: The Evil Swine Return, before shutting down due to those games' poor sales. - Rebel Act Studios ( Severance: Blade of Darkness, 2001) - SuperBot Entertainment (formerly known as Broodwork, Inc.) was an American studio founded by Sony in 2009 to make exclusive games for their consoles. They made PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale in 2012 and, despite the positive critical reception, Sony cut ties with them since they felt the game's sales were "inadequate". They tried to pitch other projects, but couldn't find a publisher, so they had to disband in 2013. - Topheavy Studios's only release was The Guy Game, an FMV quiz game where the player's goal is to answer enough questions in order to make a bunch of drunken, unaware young women in bikinis strip fully naked. While already infamous at the time for taking advantage of intoxicated, random women on Spring Break, the game itself would end up being banned from North America retail because one of the girls stripping naked was only 17-years-old. This, combined with the game's poor sales (being released around the same time as Doom³ didn't help), caused Topheavy Studios to close its doors. - Ultra Ultra, a studio started by former IO Interactive employees, were only able to release ECHO before shutting down a year later. - Looking Glass Software, who are unrelated to the more famous Looking Glass Studios, have only one game to their name, Creative Contraptions, released in 1985 for PC/MS-DOS, Apple II, and Commodore 64. - Häus Teknikka produced Frantic Flea for SNES, and nothing else. - Chakan: The Forever Man is the only game that Extended Play Productions ever developed. That said, some of its staff members went to Western Technologies Inc. (the company behind the first X-Men game for Sega Genesis). - Recreational Brainware only helmed one game in its lifetime: The first Taz-Mania game for Sega Genesis. - LaserDisc arcade game Cube Quest (1983) was the only game developed by Simutrek. - The original Japanese version of Adventures of Dino Riki, titled Shin Jinrui: The New Type, is the only game credited to Rix Soft. They were the software development branch of Ricoh Elemex Corporation, that makes precision manufacturing technology, but never made another game. - Smoking Car Productions, the company formed by Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner to develop The Last Express, shut its doors after that game's commercial failure. - Rhythm & Hues was a company specializing in movies and animation that worked on a few games but only ever made one game of their own: Eggs of Steel. - Golgoth Studio was a French company with ambitious projects: making HD sequels and remakes of famous arcade games on PC. However, it went pretty badly for them. The only game they actually released was the mediocre and unfinished Magical Drop V for Steam; their Joe & Mac remake never got past character designs and the Toki remake was released... a decade after the initial announcements by a third party, when Golgoth already closed up shop. - Nintendo second-party developer Param only developed only one game, Doshin the Giant for the ill-fated Nintendo 64DD, and went defunct in 2003. The modest success of the Nintendo GameCube port in 2002 wasn't enough to save the company. - Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly was the only game developed by Check Six Studios. The game's critical and commercial failure ensured they wouldn't make another game. - Frogger: The Great Quest is the only game credited to Papa Yeti Studio. - Dr. Mario 64 is the only game developed by Newcom. - Mathilda is a game company that was created primarily by special effects wizard Screaming Mad George to make the Japan-only ParanoiaScape. - AMBER: Journeys Beyond was the only game by Hue Forest Entertainment. - The MMORPG WildStar was the only game developed by Carbine Studios, who closed down shortly before the game went offline. - Typhoon Studios' only game was Journey to the Savage Planet. They were shut down a year after the game's release. - Swedish developers Villa Gorilla have made only one game, and it's called Yoku's Island Express. Justified in that they're a small studio and developing the game took them five years instead of one, as they originally thought. - The Labyrinth of Time was the only game made by Terra Nova Development. - Besides two CD-ROM multimedia divination programs (!), Japanese developer Rodik, Inc. only made one game, the bizarre adventure Cookie's Bustle, then they turned into a research company before closing down in the early 2000s. - Birdiy (sic) was the only game by Japanese developer Mama Top. With its extremely repetitive gameplay and heaps of Fake Difficulty, it was a huge flop in arcades, so the other two games they were supposed to release never materialized. - 3VR, Inc. was a Californian developer that only lasted one year (1997-98) and in that brief time window apparently only released The 3D Adventures of Sailor Moon for Windows, a collection of mini-games. - Tales of Legendia was the only game developed by Project MelFes. - Twin Goddesses was the only game made by PolyGram K.K. - Cellius, a joint venture between Sony and Bandai Namco, only had one game in their portfolio, which was the critically-panned (at least in the West; its Japanese release was somewhat better received) Ridge Racer for the Play Station Vita in 2011. - Deep Silver Vienna, originally named Games That Matter, only developed Cursed Mountain before shutting down a few months later. - iROCK Interactive's sole game was the PlayStation 2 exclusive Dark Fantasy combat flight sim Savage Skies. It was going to be a licenced game featuring the likeness and music of Ozzy Osbourne under the title Ozzy's Dark Skies, but the prohibitive licensing expense and other complications forced iROCK to drop the tie-in with Osbourne and retool it as a generic Panzer Dragoon clone sans the on-rails movement. - Hi-Bit Studios funded 198X through Kickstarter, and shortly after its release they revealed it was actually an episodic game; however, sequels to the game (as well as the Xbox One port) remained Vaporware and the team became radio silent on social media and official pages since 2021, so it appears 198X Part 1 is going to be their only game. - Despite having a debut to feature animation that most studios could only dream of (a box office hit and one of the few non-Disney/Pixar films to win the Oscar for Best Animated Picture), Rango remains Industrial Light & Magic's only foray into making their own movies. Disney's acquisition of parent company Lucasfilm pretty much ended plans for more animated films by the special FX studio. However, ILM would return to producing animated films with Transformers One, an upcoming animated spin-off of the Transformers Film Series, having previously produced VFX for some of the series' films. - Three episodes of Tiny Toon Adventures were animated by a company called Encore Cartoons, which appears never to have done anything else. - Two episodes of Peter Pan & the Pirates were animated by a company named Red Apple Group. This show is their only known work. - British company Molitor Productions co-produced the Redwall animated series. All the company has really done otherwise is documentaries, including one on Saint Catherine's Monastery. - Children's Television Trust International, a joint-venture comprising an All-Star Cast of European, Australasian, African, Asian & American broadcasters, produced the series Animated Tales of the World and did nothing else afterwards. - The 4th season of Cyberchase was co-produced by a company named Flying Minds, which appears to have done nothing else. - The Orphanage opened a subsidiary called Orphanage Animation Studios. OAS co-produced Sym-Bionic Titan and did nothing else (a sequel to The Dark Crystal was planned, but it never came to fruition). ## Authors of non-fiction - Edmund Gettier was a philosopher looking for tenure at Wayne State University. To help with this he was encouraged to publish any ideas he had. He published a 3-page paper called Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? which completely changed epistemology (the study of knowledge) by showing that apparently, no it wasn't, contrary to everything since Plato. He never touched epistemology again, and in fact has published nothing else. - Philosophy and Science Fiction: The editor, Michael Phillips, is a professor emeritus of philosophy at Portland State University, and is not to be mistaken for the Christian Mystery/Romance author or the several other authors by the same name. This Michael Phillips has only published this one anthology. - While Bernhard Riemann published many papers, he only published one single paper on number theory. It is considered one of the most important and influential papers ever published on that field. ## Fictional Examples - In JSA: The Golden Age, Jonathan Law (Tarantula) had only one book to his name that he wrote and published, Behind The Mask, after which he was unable to come up with anything else. Libby Lawrence's mentioning him being a "one-book, one-hit wonder" ended up being what broke up their relationship with each other. During the battle with Dynaman near the end of the story, Tarantula dies thinking that this battle would have made for a great book to write. - Throw Momma from the Train: Larry's wife Margret seems to be milking the hell out of the one book she's credited with writing, Hot Fire, with adaptations galore. However, she'll likely remain a one-book author because she stole it — and she might become a no book author if and when she's caught. - The premise of Finding Forrester involves Forrester being a One Book Author. \|\|In the end, he writes a second book.\|\| - Ditto for the plot of Wonder Boys. - The end of the film Croupier has the protagonist, a novelist and casino dealer, having completed and published his Roman à Clef, realize that it is probably better for him to quit while he's ahead and not write another novel. - Stone Reader is a documentary following a dedicated reader who tracks down an obscure but brilliant One Book Author and helps get his book republished. - The plot for the indie movie The Kiss is even more restrictive: The protagonist finds the author's one book in manuscript form without an ending. She seeks him out to persuade him to become a One Book Author. - In the Teenage Worrier series, Letty's father is the author of a widely acclaimed novel called "Moving On", but since his daughter's birth it has taken him almost sixteen years to finish his next work (and, it is implied, he probably never will.) - The Teenage Worrier example is similar to the father in I Capture the Castle, but at the end, we learn the father in that book has begun creating another work. - Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death Sun: the author of the titular book apparently has no interest in writing another as he makes more money as a scientist. - Toni L.P. Kelner's series Where Are They Now? follows journalist Tilda Harper, who specializes in hunting down former stars - most of whom only ever did one real work (or at most minor guest star roles) and then left the business. The very first book, Curse of the Kissing Cousins, involves her work in tracking down the cast of an in-universe series, Kissing Cousins; at least three of the actors fall under this trope, including one who left the business to run a motorcycle shop until he died in an accident, one who tried to continue her career but eventually gave up and went into real estate, and Mercy Ashford, who was cast in a single film role after the show ended but left the set after about a week's work one day and disappeared. \|\|It turns out she was attacked and beaten by an abusive ex-boyfriend with connections and an If I Can't Have You attitude, and afterward went into hiding because she knew he wouldn't give up on her; even after his arrest, she chooses to stay out of the public eye.\|\| - Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: One possible future for Jake Sisko has him write Anslem as his sole novel. (He also writes an anthology of short stories, though that is his only other literary work). In fact, the way we find out about this is exactly as given in the example at top. - Frasier: An author whose only work (that he hates to talk about) was a landmark success befriends Martin. Niles and Frasier discover a manuscript for his planned second novel. When the author catches them reading it, he asks for their opinion. However, while praising it, they unintentionally make him realise he ripped off Dante's The Divine Comedy and throws the manuscript into the fire. - In Fable, there's a weapon called The Dollmaker's Mace which is apparently the only time they ever made a weapon. It's a pretty damn good one too, with high speed and a satisfying damage rating. - Larry Butz of Ace Attorney apparently achieved some success as "Laurice Deauxnim" with his picture book, Franzy's Whippity-Whip Trip. But it seems that's all he's released, even after the 8-year Time Skip between the original trilogy and the rest of the series.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneWorkWonder
One-Shot Revisionism - TV Tropes A term coined by Justin B. Rye in his essay "Star Trek: Mark Two," which points out various inconsistencies in Star Trek and ways of avoiding them for a hypothetical remake. One-Shot Revisionism occurs when a writer notices an illogical trope or plot device and attempts to avert it. More often than not, the attempt only draws further attention to the lack of logic of the convention — "if X didn't happen here because of Y and Z, why does it happen every other time?" — and at the same time makes it harder for other writers to Hand Wave the whole thing away. Especially bad when the plot device in question has been used multiple times in the same Canon where the one-shot revision is set. The important thing about One-Shot Revisionism is that it works; generally the only problem with it is that it draws attention to all the other times it theoretically could and should have been used but wasn't. This distinguishes it from a Voodoo Shark, which doesn't even work on its own terms. ## Examples: - The revised JMS origin for Spider-Man which says that a "spider-totem" made him fated to get the power, and explains why Spider-Man has a lot of villains who are themed around animals. Of course, this just calls attention to the fact that lots of other superheroes also have a gallery of themed villains with no explanation whatsoever. - Another such explanation was given by writer Mark Gruenwald in Quasar; that all superheroes and villains in the Marvel Universe are the result of a cosmic being's influence, and that "themed" beings are naturally drawn to each other. This also counts as One-Shot Revisionism, as the idea's never been acknowledged by other writers; of course, since this was in Quasar, it's likely no-one knows about it. - An untold story of the Crisis on Infinite Earths comic book series was published in 1999, featuring Earth-D, a perfectly racially mixed world. On it, Atlanteans and Thangarans pointedly did not have human racial features. What makes this trope is that it makes it harder to forget that the aliens still had most human features not associated with race. The diversity also drew attention to the fact that the major heroes of most DC Earths just happen to be white. - When Legion of Super-Heroes introduced their first member of African descent, they chose to say he came from a island of separatists that's normally not in this dimension and only appeared on Earth periodically. Unfortunate Implications abound, which is a strange thing for the writers to have come up with considering they had a member who was green and another who had antennae. - A comic strip in the Doctor Who Magazine Christmas Annual 1995 featured a black Time Lord. As The Completely Useless Encyclopedia put it, what this means is that there are black people on Gallifrey, but none of them had done anything remotely interesting before. The new series has included more diversity amongst Gallifreyans. - In Ocean's Twelve, Tess, played by Julia Roberts, is brought into a plan to impersonate the real life Roberts in order to sneak past security. This is further complicated when she has to interact with other celebrities like Bruce Willis who know the real Roberts personally. Considering that the film series features an All-Star Cast, it's quite humorous to imagine that there are apparently a bunch of lookalikes for A-List celebrities out there who all happen to work together as master thieves. - In Star Wars, Space Is Noisy is just a convention that fans accept, along with the use of the convention of sound traveling at the speed of light, as being imaginary sound effects for the viewers' pleasure. The Expanded Universe goes further and Hand Waves that these sound effects are for the pilots' use as well. Attack of the Clones tries to portray space more realistically, only to stop halfway: there is sound in space, but it travels slower than light! - In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry's friends take a rare luck potion before the Death Eaters show up at Hogwarts. This justifies the Death Eaters' Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship and it's suggested afterwards that many of Harry's friends would have died had they not taken the potion. However, the Death Eaters having bad aim was played straight in the climax of the previous book. In the case of the Battle of the Ministry, the members of Dumbledore's Army who were there were using the twisting corridors as well as their smaller size and youth to their advantage; outpacing the Death Eaters as well as using extensive cover and tactics to avoid taking casualties. Even then, however, they still lose several members (Hermione, Ginny, etc.) to the Death Eaters as they attempt to escape. - Seven Sorcerers by Caro King averts Nobody Poops... exactly once in the beginning when Nin, fresh from the normal world, asks for a pause to relieve herself. Afterwards, one could think humans in Drift don't have to use toilets. (Magical being get a pass as they are literally based on imagination). - From Star Trek, taken from the aforementioned essay: - The "Kirk Maneuver" in the second movie: a ship "diving" and then "resurfacing" before the attack. It's a clumsy break from the 2-D Space convention, still unconvincing (why resurface?), and making it impossible to just discount 2-D Space as a TV convention that doesn't reflect how the space battles "really" went. - In the sixth movie, there is the one time when a ship loses artificial gravity. Which only highlights the fact that it breaks much more rarely than it should. In fact, in the Voyager episodes "Year of Hell", the ship is scarred and barely holding together, but never does the gravity give out. Expanded Universe material justifies it (sort of) with the explanation that artificial gravity is built to be almost impossible to disrupt in Federation starships because most Federation member races are really uncomfortable in zero-G and work far less efficiently. This makes sense considering most of them only go out in zero-G conditions for bare minimum qualification trials. So while other factions' vessel designs use a centralized gravity generator, Federation gravity is plated into the floors so that any disruptions are local. Life-support and Deflector Shields are apparently harder to decentralize. - Image lag effects in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Battle". Why do they happen only this time and not every time there's a disruption in faster-than-light travel? - The "Star Trek Phase II" fan-film web episode "Blood and Fire", based on a rejected Next Generation script, is a one-shot revision of the complete lack of homosexuals in the Star Trek universe. So now instead of zero homosexuals in the universe, there are exactly two, which is almost worse. - The Expanded Universe novels have started being pointedly casual about mentioning this or that character with a same-sex partner, possibly to compensate for the above. It can sometimes come over as trying too hard. - In the TNG episode "The Wounded" we see a space battle at 250,000 km, which is decided by one ship using their superior weapon-range to engage the enemy at a distance where they can't return fire. This makes all those occasions where ships fight nose-to-nose all the more dumb. - The TOS episode introduced the subcutaneous transponder a device implanted under the skin to enable them to beam up the landing party should they be out of communication. Considering how many times they'd have their communicators confiscated, it's a wonder it has never mentioned before or since. Incidentally, the device was never used for that purpose. It was removed and used to fashion a laser from a light bulb to escape a cell. - Stargate SG-1 has such a moment associated with the pilot episode, "Children of the Gods": The novelization of the episode has the characters lampshade Aliens Speaking English, which confirms that yes, the aliens do speak English after all; it's not merely translated for the audience's benefit after Daniel reconstructs the local language and teaches it to his teammates off-screen. - Doctor Who: - "The Masque of Mandragora" attempts to explain Aliens Speaking English as Translator Microbes for the first time in the series ever, when Sarah Jane suddenly notices that she can understand some Italians. (Chatting to people from outer space goes entirely without notice for decades of show history, but Italians are apparently a leap too far.) The story even uses this as a hint that something is badly wrong with Sarah's mind simply because she noticed it happening. - In the new series, the Doctors' appearance is up for open criticism from the other characters, who often mock his dress sense and accent. This only really serves to draw attention to the times he showed up wearing sillier clothes and sillier accents in the Classic series without anyone mocking him for it — having a Northern or Scottish new-series Doctor is almost as (apparently) hilarious as their mildly unusual outfits, but no-one makes fun of the Fourth Doctor's ridiculous scarf and peculiar voice or the Third Doctor's lisp and questionable frilly clothing. - The new series goes out of its way to address the uncomfortable power dynamic between the Doctor and the companion, by making him more dependent on her than she is on him, and by cutting back a lot of the creepy subtext of the Doctor's paternalism, as well as inserting romantic elements. The trouble is that the uncomfortable relationship is still there by sheer function of the way the show works, only now it's presented as a romantic ideal, whereas the original series tended for the most part not to sugar-coat how difficult travelling with the Doctor could be. It also ends up providing the retroactive interpretation that a lot of the No Hugging, No Kissing Classic Doctors might have been hugging and kissing the companions more than we see on screen. - The story "Midnight" took on the oft-used idea that the Doctor could show up with no history, no credentials, and a lot of knowledge which he refuses to explain, be detained for two minutes, and then be treated like an authority because there's a crisis going on. In this one story, these traits actually make everyone else suspicious of the Doctor as would happen in reality. (Some Classic era stories did touch upon this — both "The Tenth Planet" and "The Faceless Ones" deal with it heavily — but since the Revival series omits sequences of the Doctor stumbling around, getting captured and convincing the natives that he's helpful, the Classic series didn't have to rely on this conceit for Acceptable Breaks from Reality to the same extent.) In the modern series the usual explanation is that having somebody normal to vouch for him puts people at ease; in this case Donna was elsewhere. - "Resurrection of the Daleks" is a Classic series attempt at "Midnight". The Doctor has no credentials, his witty jokes fail to charm anyone, and the more he attempts to explain that he knows what he's doing the more he ends up looking like he's responsible for the problem itself. - There have been a couple of attempts to nerf the Sonic Screwdriver, by explaining that it doesn't work on anything with a "deadlock seal" (which showed up fairly often for a while, but seems to have been abandoned), or anything made of wood. Which means that he can use it to hack an alien computer millions of years in the future, but can't open a modern bedroom door. One radio adventure featuring the Fourth Doctor (possibly adapted from one of the lost episodes) also featured a slightly more sensible version; the Sonic Screwdriver can shift the tumblers inside a lock, but can't exert enough force to move a really stiff and heavy door-bolt. - Power Rangers RPM did a lot to decrease some of the worn out clichés of the series and even came up with some decent hand waves for others. Such as the rangers' morphing call being a voice reading security device. However it does still cause some head scratching when the rangers need to shout POWER RANGERS RPM! when using the Megazord finisher (and even then, not every time). - Each Knights of the Old Republic game contains exactly one situation where an NPC will scold you for being a Kleptomaniac Hero. Others will completely ignore you looting their possessions under their nose, which gives you no dark side points either. Except the Tusken Raiders, who will not merely scold you but shoot you on sight... - Dragon Quest: - In Dragon Quest II, when the Kleptomaniac Hero opens a locked door in Midenhall, the guard initially reacts the way you'd expect somebody to when someone breaks in to loot a chest. However, he then recognizes the Prince and apologizes. - Similarly, in Dragon Quest III, your hero is the son/daughter of Ortega. When you break into the treasure chamber of your liege's castle, the guard recognizes you and says that he respects your father too much to stop you. He still mildly calls you out for it, particularly since the king will actually give you permission to raid the treasury late in the game... - Some campaign missions in Starcraft take place on space stations or in other places where natural resources you need to build a base and train troops would not be realistically found. Because this is a strategy game, they are provided anyway with no explanation. However, in one mission in the second game, your Mission Control mentions how you were lucky to find resources because this particular space station is very old and has undergone bombardings by resource-rich asteroids. So... what about all the other space stations? - The Azuregos quest chain in World of Warcraft, while hilarious, features the only appearance of a Spirit Healer in-story (a named one at that, in love with a dragon!), which makes it harder to Hand Wave the Spirit Healers away as a mere case of Gameplay and Story Segregation and brings up questions why only the players can use them, and why any characters dead in lore don't just resurrect themselves at the nearest graveyard. - The first volume of the Chronicle made the Spirit Healers fully canon as part of expanded lore on the universe's equivalent to Valkyries. The explanation is now that there are a few of them without masters who occasionally guide the dead back to the land of the living, which still makes one wonder why they never choose to save a canon character, but leaves open the excuse that it's up to their whims. - Done again in the Battle for Azeroth expansion where Bwonsamdi acts as a Spirit Healer on Zandalar. For Horde players, there is a quest where they seek his help in exchange for one million souls. Naturally, Bwonsamdi would willingly send the players back to the land of the living to continue to pay off their debt; but why would he extend the same courtesy to Alliance players? Shits and giggles apparently. - In Dink Smallwood, the title character can engage in Comedic Sociopathy, both by abusing Videogame Cruelty Potential, and through scripted events. This is subverted a few times: - In the starter town, if Dink hits one of his neighbors, she screams and runs up and down. Makes sense, but why does everyone else stand still when taking a beating? - Dink can choose to kill his wife-beating uncle. A hard battle, depending on when the player decides to do it, but winnable. Why, then, can't he hurt anyone else with his attacks (other than enemies/ducks)? - Dink can try to rob a tavern, in which case, the waitress will call two golden-armored halbardiers. If the player chooses this course of action when he first visits the tavern, the halbardiers are too powerful, and will undoubdetly kill him. But, if the player tries the robbery out after some Level Grinding, he can beat them, at which point, nothing happens, the dialog tree remains the same, and threatening to rob the place again causes two new halbardiers to show up.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneShotRevisionism
Only Child Syndrome - TV Tropes "Curse the advent of being an only child!" Only children are often seen as having the best of both worlds. Not only do they get all of their parents attention and love, they also don't have annoying younger siblings to take care of or bossy older siblings to listen to. However, this isn't always the case. Just like middle children, only children have their own complexities and stereotypes. In fiction, only children are often portrayed as never having to compete with anyone else for parental attention or never having learned to live or communicate (in the worst cases) with others their age. They may also be spoiled by their parents. As such, only children are often portrayed as haughty, self-absorbed, or lonely, although this trope covers any behavior that the narrative ascribes to being an only child. All this is in spite of the fact that it has been repeatedly shown in scientific studies that there is no measurable difference in the personalities of only children compared to those with siblings (at least not most of the time — there are a lot of perfectionists in the only child world). Only children also tend to mature faster. See also Siblings Wanted, when an only child wants siblings. Compare and contrast Middle Child Syndrome. Compare Infant Sibling Jealousy: The former only child now has to compete with the baby for attention. ## Examples: - The Discworld of A.A. Pessimal sees two only daughters, each born to Grand Ducal families in what is left of the Discworld's Russia after its version of Soviet Collapse. Olga Romanoff and Natasha Romanoff are cousins. If they agree on one thing, it is that as only children they were deprived of a chance to fight The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry with an actual sibling. Therefore they have no choice other than to fight at one step removed, as cousins. - Adam (2009): Beth tells her Dad that she must scare people off because of being an only child. - Oceans 8: When \|\|self-absorbed actress Daphne admits that she wants to join the crew\|\| because she's lonely, Debbie asks if she's an only child. Her hesitant face suggests that she is. - The Swap: Ellie has no siblings shown in the movie, which is probably why her mom is so protective of her. - This Is Where I Leave You: Penny confesses that she can't really relate to the Altman's various hang-ups because she's an only child. Judd thinks that sounds wonderful. - The Babysitters Club: Stacey is an only child, and it shows during the books where she and Mary Anne accompany the Pike family on their summer vacations to Sea City. It's very obvious that she's used to not having to show consideration for siblings, as she keeps prioritizing her own plans over Mary Anne's and even over minding the children. Incidentally, Mary Anne is also an only child (until her father marries Dawn's mother partway through the series), but averts the trope; the fact that she had only one parent and that parent was quite strict and is implied not to have been around as much due to a demanding work schedule is likely the reason for this. - In The Berenstain Bears and the Trouble with Friends, Sister Bear befriends Lizzy Bruin, an only cub who means well but tends to to be "bossy and braggy." Her friendship with Sister helps her learn to share and compromise. Later in the series, however, she was retconned to have an older brother, Barry Bruin. - The Elenium takes a humorous twist to the "never had to compete" bit mentioned in the trope description. Patriarch Bergsten is big and impressive note : Sparhawk decides he'd really rather not fight Bergsten, thanks anyway because he was an only child and didn't have to worry about sharing food with other siblings. - Fiery Secrets: Grace is an only child and carries some stereotypical characteristics, such as being bossy and a perfectionist. - In Harry Potter, Word of God suggests that James (the title character's father) owed his flippant and at times arrogant personality to being an only child, specifically one born late in the lives of rich parents. It's worth noting that Draco Malfoy and Dudley have similar backgrounds. - Sherlock Holmes: "The Sussex Vampire" has a young boy deal very badly with the birth of his half-brother \|\|to the point of trying to murder him with a curare dart\|\|, even more so when the baby is perfectly healthy when the older one has a spinal injury. - What Maisie Knew: Maisie's parents arguing doesn't help her socially as she has no siblings to either converse or interact with and is forced to overhear what her mom and dad say. - Charmed (1998): Paige grew up as an only child and did not take well early on to moving in with her newly-discovered sisters and dedicating herself to becoming a Charmed One. She got used to it after her past life destroyed her loft. - This is discussed in an interesting way in Everybody Hates Chris. Chris is jealous of Greg when he comes to stay with them because he's an only child and he expects all of the attention and does everything by himself, whereas Chris usually has to take care of his younger siblings. Near the end of the episode, Chris confronts Greg, and Greg says that the reason why he does everything by himself is not that he wants to, but because he has to, being an only child. - Girls5eva: Scott and Dawn's plan to have a second son is hampered by Dawn's desire to have a invokedCareer Resurrection, and Scott worries that their son Max will be "weird" without siblings. Other characters reassure her that Max will be fine; he'll just grow up to be an Adorably Precocious Child. - Misfits: Nathan fits the self-centered Attention Whore stereotype to a T- he lampshades it when he's asked if he has any siblings and responds "Have you met me? Classic only child." \|\|Although it turns out he has a half-brother he never knew about.\|\| - New Girl: Schmidt's mother micromanaged the hell out of his childhood since he was her only son and now he's a micromanager himself. By contrast, his roommates all have siblings and are not nearly as uppity. - Power Rangers Ninja Storm: In "Down and Dirty", seeing Hunter and Blake constantly arguing, Cam remarks he's glad he's an only child. - Roseanne: DJ spends increasing amounts of time with his cousin Andy, much to Fred and Jackie's increasing annoyance, until he explains why. Just about everyone else in the cast had a brother or sister to grow up with, so DJ acts like a brother to Andy so he can know what it's like instead of being alone. - Harry Kim from Star Trek: Voyager is an only child, and he once talks about how much his parents spoiled him, calling him their "miracle child". He often wondered if he really deserved that much devotion. - Stuck in the Middle: Harley's best friend, Ellie, is an only child and also has a very overprotective mother. - The Young Ones: In "Nasty", Vyvyan scoffs at Rick's claim of having a sister, pointing out that the arrogant, self-centered student is "the classic example of an only child". - In Bill Cosby Himself, Cosby did a sketch on raising children. As part of this, he doesn't think that parents with only one child should be considered parents because too many things are left out. "For instance, if something's broken in the house, you have only one child, you know who did it! See, you don't have to go through, 'I...I...I...' You know the child did it! Also, people with only one child does not have to go through 'Will you stop touching me! Will you stop touching me!' I mean, if you got one child and the child is doing that, then you gotta take it away." - Pastamonsters: Because he's an only child, Slenderson grew up with a rough and lonely childhood. His upbringing is also one of the main reasons he likes spending time with the Proxies. - Clyde from The Loud House is an only child, and on a show focused on a family of 13, it shows. He's neurotic, overly cautious, and overly doted-upon. - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: - Rainbow Dash can't bear being near her parents because they give her too much attention as their only daughter, as shown in "Parental Glideance". They are just proud of her accomplishments, but they can't stop bragging about her in public. - In the season six episode, "Top Bolt", the Pegasus Vapor Trail was an only child whose parents piled attention on her, barely giving her a second to herself. Because of this, Vapor Trail developed an aversion to being in the spotlight, and was content with acting as the "wing pony" to her best friend Sky Stinger. - Rugrats (1991): Angelica is an only child (notable because all the other kids in the main cast have siblings), and a Bratty Half-Pint with a massive ego due to being spoiled rotten by her parents. In the episode, "Angelica's Worst Nightmare", Angelica has a nightmare about her parents having another baby and forgetting about her. In another episode, "The Unfair Pair", Angelica convinces the twins that in families with only children, said only child is their favorite, and such is the case with her, Tommy, and Chuckie. note : At the time of this episode's broadcast, Tommy and Chuckie were still only children. Tommy gained Dil as a younger brother after the first movie, and Chuckie gained Kimi as a stepsister after Rugrats in Paris. - South Park: Eric Cartman is the only one of the four main boys who's an only child. He's also a narcissistic Spoiled Brat because his mother never says "no" to him, who has no idea how to work with other people unless he gets to boss them around and can't believe that the world doesn't revolve around him. Additionally, while he's very emotionally immature, he often shows a desire to be seen as an adult, chastising his friends as immature in "Cartman Joins NAMBLA" and \|\|killing all his toys\|\| in a symbolic effort to grow up in "1%." - In real life, there were concerns that China's "One Child Policy" would lead to what was termed "Little Emperor Syndrome" (that is, the effect of having an entire nation of spoiled only children); however, it seems that such fears were largely unfounded.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyChildSyndrome
Forum Speak - TV Tropes The jargon used to describe Internet fora and online discussions such as Blogs and forums. While some concepts overlap with Tropes, on TV Tropes we do not usually catalogue this terminology in the form of individual articles but only as a large glossary. For TV Tropes-specific terminology, see TV Tropes Glossary. Some concepts discussed here are also mentioned by Flame Warriors. ## Forum terms with their own pages: A user is banned when the authorities of a website or social media platform prohibit them from contributing, usually by software means. This is usually due to breaking the rules or being an unpleasant person to be around, but in some places, users can be banned on a whim, for rules they weren't aware of, or even based on a false accusation. Some moderators just have an itchy trigger finger. Others are paranoid of Sock Puppets and will ban anyone who resembles a particularly nasty user. Still others say it's much easier to deal with problematic users preemptively than to wait until they make a mess and clean up after them. Not everyone who is banned will automatically know why their account was suspended, and many will assume it was someone else's mistake . Regardless of whether or not the ban was justified, the best way to handle the situation is usually to step back, look at the rules, look at your behaviour, and then find one of the site's managers and politely ask what you did wrong. Maybe it was a genuine misunderstanding. Maybe your lack of experience unwittingly made you look like a previous rule-breaker. Maybe you can convince them that you understand what you did wrong and you won't do it again. Even though real spammers, trolls, and scoundrels usually protest their innocence, talking it out is still the best way to resolve the problem. Indeed, right here on This Very Wiki , if you find yourself banned or suspended, we have a designated place to talk it out with the staff: the Edit Banned thread . First, though, check out What to Do If You Are Suspended . "Blogosphere" is the term for the interconnections between all the various blogs that exist on the internet. The name was originally coined as a joke, but the joke became so popular that many (especially in the Old Media) mistook it for a real word and began using it in complete seriousness. Memetic Mutation at its finest. The new, irony-free definition of blogosphere implies a view that no blog is an island: all of them are as part of a massive online community. Or at least that blogs on closely related topics share many of the same readers, so that there is a comics blogosphere, a Boise, Idaho dining blogosphere, rival liberal and conservative blogospheres, etc. Whether or not the blogosphere can be meaningfully defined as a distinct subset of the internet depends on how well one can draw the distinction between Blogs and regular old webpages. A browser narcotic is a website that uses up hours of your time with little effort. Like This Very Wiki, which is well known for its capacity to ruin your life. Unlike an Archive Binge, which is linear in nature, a browser narcotic allows you to go in any number of directions, often ending up on a Wiki Walk. The defining feature of a browser narcotic is the tab explosion, a browser with Eleventy Zillion tabs open at once. The name comes from xkcd, specifically the Alt Text of this comic, which explicitly describes TV Tropes as an example. Here are some other offenders aside from TV tropes: - Wikipedia - 4chan - reddit - Any porn site. Admit it, you know it to be true. - Cracked.com. Brazilians have a humorous blog that's just like Cracked. - Dark Roasted Blend - DeviantArt - Pixiv, thanks to its recommendation feature being a little too good, tends to induce Wiki Walks. Heaven help you if you start to browse for fanart of one of the more popular series, like Touhou Project, Hetalia, Pokémon, Vocaloid, or Inazuma Eleven, each of which will get you over 150,000 hits. Though the effect is lessened somewhat, as a large part of the website is in Japanese. - Digg - Everything2 - Facebook - Tumblr - FanFiction.Net. The good ones at least... and badfic too, arguably. This also applies to most well organized fanfic sites like, say, Archive of Our Own. - Fark - Oobject - Damn Interesting - Forums can end up as these if there are enough interesting threads. - The Polish site Wyhacz.pl ~~is~~ was a news service devoted mainly to various instances of citizens being screwed over by bureaucratic incompetence or corporate dishonesty. It's surprisingly fascinating. - The Let's Play Archive: Oh, you've just discovered the Let's Play phenomenon and spent several hours following an LP of your favorite game? No worries, we can recommend LP's from the same genre / author that are sure to interest you. And once you're done with those, we have more recommendations... - The Cheezburger Network - The SCP Foundation can do this, as some of the most popular articles include experiment logs involving other SCPs. The site is trying to minimize this, however. Just watch your step, because you're walking through a minefield of really terrifying stuff. - Snopes - StumbleUpon - Twitter - Orion's Arm, hoooo boooy. - Uncyclopedia - Yahoo!.com (the main page that features news articles). - YouTube - AniDB - Most estate agent/real estate websites tend to provoke this. If you've come to one looking for property to buy, you'll no doubt be opening plenty of tabs to compare different listings, and if you're not... you're probably opening loads of tabs to dream. - Hardcore Gaming 101 - Everything Is Terrible! - WeKnowMemes - Imgur: That is, of course, if we are to believe The Daily Derp. - BuzzFeed, particularly the list pages, and similar clickbait sites - Sports fans can have this on Bleacher Report and Page 2 \ Grantland. - MapCrunch takes you to a random location on Google StreetView. You can navigate on it as usual, or press a button that takes you to another random location. Now try to stop exploring the world. - Not Always Right. The effect is lessened due to only adding 5 or 6 anecdotes a day (easily read in 15 minutes), but increased due to its massive archive and eight sister sites, Not Always Working/Romantic/Related/Learning/Friendly/ Hopeless/Healthy and Legal. - The Polish equivalent of Not Always Right, piekielni.pl . - Uberfacts, with a Website, two apps, and several Twitter accounts. - Any good webcomic with a big enough archive. - Fundies Say the Darndest Things i.e. an immense archive of all the insane things fundamentalists have said in this contemporary age. It even has an article on Rational Wiki. - Most .io Games can easily waste large amounts of one's time due to the ease of joining a game and playing a few rounds... and another... Generally, it happens like this: A well-known (or under-the-radar) celebrity gets an e-mail from his publicist telling him how he should make a blog to boost his sagging reputation. Said celeb decides to try it for a while, but is never really into it, and eventually it fades into the ether. Sometimes, of course, the celeb is absolutely into it, and these tend to drift into other types of blogs. Other times, the publicist insists on Astro Turfing the blog by posting as the celeb, turning it into a Flog. Some celeb blogs achieve cult status among the geekery (the most famous of course being WWDN). You have just finished writing an article. More specifically, it is the masterpiece that TV Tropes has been waiting for. When you suggested the idea in Trope Launch Pad , the number of replies was astonishing. Seriously, this article would move any troper to tears . it's so good! But, being the savvy troper that you are, you know better than to just go submitting it without a care in the world. You smite the Data Vampires, because right as it is about to send, you press the refresh button with lightning fast reflexes, saving your trope entry from a terrible, untimely demise. ...or so you think, as right as you have hit that refresh key, you see the following message: "The database hates you right now. The entry might exist or it might not exist. We would clear this mystery up for you, if we could get to the database. We tried to look it up, but the database puked up an error." What happened? Surely this can't be right! After all, you took every step to stop the Data Vampires in their tracks! Well, unfortunately for you, you have not met the Data Vampires, you've met the database, and it hates you. We're sure you're a very nice person but the database doesn't think so. Never mind the more probable impossible answer that TV Tropes is glitching, because TV Tropes is perfect and does not malfunction. You can't get to this page because you suck. It's that simple. But to avoid this sort of thing, write your article in Notepad or TextEdit before sending, or at least copy and paste your hard work before pressing 'save'. Derailing is when a discussion goes off on a tangent, a subject irrelevant to the main point of the discussion. Sometimes it's done by accident; other times, it's done deliberately by a Troll . Like a train leaving its tracks , it's difficult to get back on track again. That's why forums tend to have strict rules about staying on topic. Not every change in topic is a derail; conversations do drift naturally. Consider, for instance, a conversation about pit bulls, in which someone brings up the perception that they're dangerous animals. A shift to a discussion about animal fights in general is natural. A post of a graphic image of a pit bull mating with a Chihuahua is a derail; it's abrupt, not a natural outgrowth of the prior conversation, and only serves to change the subject. However, the stricter forums might consider both instances against the rules, just to ensure that everyone can follow the conversation. Trolls will often derail a conversation by attacking someone or something, forcing the other users to defend themselves or their ideas. They like to rely on Misplaced Nationalism , Ad Hominem attacks, Victim-Blaming , and whataboutism , which usually require a response unrelated to the topic at hand. Nazi comparisons are akin to blowing up the railway bridge, dropping the train into the sea, and then pissing on it . Threats are also an effective way to derail a thread, shifting the discussion to dealing with the threat; many forums take a hard line on threats and will issue an immediate ban for them, and if they seem credible they may even contact local law enforcement. A less inflammatory but no less effective way to derail a thread would be to become a Left Fielder . Here on this wiki , we deal with derailment by thumping , our method of removing a post. The post is still there, but its content is replaced with a message that the post was thumped. It's usually self-explanatory (and you're free to ask a mod about it in case it's not). Users whose posts are thumped are given a PM about it, and accumulating several thumps can lead to a suspension. See also Change the Uncomfortable Subject , which is an attempt to do this in a real life conversation, usually without the sheer disruption of the Internet equivalent. A doublepost is a comment that's accidentally been added twice in succession. It's usually a result of a software bug; often, a new post is slow to show up due to server lag, so the user thinks it didn't go through and makes it again. Or maybe there's a bug when the user clicks "Add Post" a few times too many. This kind of thing is especially common on Usenet , where the nature of NNTP sometimes causes a substantial lag in the propagation of new posts. In some cases, forums will allow users to delete the last post they made, specifically to combat the doublepost. In most others, the common response is to edit the second post to read something along the lines of "doublepost, mods plz delete". Even if it's not deleted, veteran forumgoers can mentally skip over posts like this, and the conversation can continue as normal. At most places, you won't get into trouble for doubleposting, but if you do it too often, you might be mistaken for a Spammer . In some cases, doubleposting is done deliberately. For instance, some places don't allow you to edit your post (or may require you to be a prolific user before you can do it), meaning that if you wanted to correct something, you have to post again with your correction. The less savvy forumgoers will also do it just to add something to their previous comment. In other cases, there's a long period of time between the two posts, and the last post is repeated by someone wishing to "bump" the thread to the top of the list. Forums with strict limits on the number of characters or images per post might also see "doubleposting" with a single long comment spread out over multiple posts. A doublepost is a comment that's accidentally been added twice in succession. It's usually a result of a software bug; often, a new post is slow to show up due to server lag, so the user thinks it didn't go through and makes it again. Or maybe there's a bug when the user clicks "Add Post" a few times too many. This kind of thing is especially common on Usenet , where the nature of NNTP sometimes causes a substantial lag in the propagation of new posts. In some cases, forums will allow users to delete the last post they made, specifically to combat the doublepost. In most others, the common response is to edit the second post to read something along the lines of "doublepost, mods plz delete". Even if it's not deleted, veteran forumgoers can mentally skip over posts like this, and the conversation can continue as normal. At most places, you won't get into trouble for doubleposting, but if you do it too often, you might be mistaken for a Spammer . In some cases, doubleposting is done deliberately. For instance, some places don't allow you to edit your post (or may require you to be a prolific user before you can do it), meaning that if you wanted to correct something, you have to post again with your correction. The less savvy forumgoers will also do it just to add something to their previous comment. In other cases, there's a long period of time between the two posts, and the last post is repeated by someone wishing to "bump" the thread to the top of the list. Forums with strict limits on the number of characters or images per post might also see "doubleposting" with a single long comment spread out over multiple posts. "You got to love an encyclopedia that has a longer article for the lightsaber than they do for the printing press." Fannage is a wiki phenomenon where things relating to pop culture get more attention than mundane topics, even if the more mundane topics are more relevant to real life. It gives generalised wikis like Wikipedia a poor reputation by making their userbase look like a bunch of hopeless nerds who prioritise fiction over reality. But this generally isn't considered a bad thing in itself. First, you can always ignore wiki pages that don't interest you. Second, every topic will benefit from having contributors who know the subject extremely well. Third, having fun stuff on the wiki will attract more people and encourage them to work on the more mundane stuff. But the danger occurs when topics with high amounts of Fannage attract a large pool of unskilled editors. These guys have bad habits of obsessive editing, promoting Fanon , poor writing style employing lots of Weasel Words , and an obsession with categorisation — every episode and character needs to have their own page. To the extent that these guys edit the pages on mundane stuff, they take their bad habits with them. Wikipedia 's extensive fannage is famous, what with its ridiculously detailed television synopses (even the ones with Negative Continuity ). Although it's frowned upon there, it's tolerated through the sheer persistence of the editors . People will complain that the $12,000 funding drives seem to be going mostly to rewriting the Star Wars Expanded Universe in encyclopedia form. Fannage also overlaps extensively with what Wikipedia calls Fancruft, where articles for mundane things are injected with the subject's appearances in popular culture; Wikipedia is less tolerant of this and will boot such users to the myriad of other wikis that exist for documenting those things . TV Tropes itself mostly runs on fannage, but even here, we get our own version of it with specific works being massively overrepresented compared to others. We've catalogued some of them in Trope Overdosed . First!! On large platforms, there is often a race to be the first to post a comment in a new thread, article, or video, even if you don't have anything to contribute to the topic at all. The only thing you have to say is that you were the first to say something. This has now become an Internet tradition, even though it can get annoying real quickly. Many places discourage it and will just delete such posts on sight, including here at TV Tropes. Fortunately, they're easy to spot, and accordingly easy to zap. Some places even do it automatically, with software. Other places have some fun with the phenomenon, such as the Daily Kitten 's use of the term "Pounce!" Places like 4chan , never particularly content with "rules" and "moderation", will have long tangents based simply on the response to the contentless first post. Fark is probably the most prolific at having fun with it, employing a word filter to change "first post" to "Boobies" and "first comment" to "Weener", which has the added benefit of causing some ribbing if you actually use the word "boobies". If Fark detects these terms in the actual first post of a given thread, it will also move the timestamp to 12 hours into the future, which for many threads means it will be the last post in the thread. Parodied in this video . See also Me Too! and IBTL . A blog that seems to be written by a real person, but is in fact a vector employed by an advertising agency, PR firm or corporate marketing department. Invariably waxes over-enthusiastically about a product, service or company, particularly something brand new and/or trying to increase its market penetration. Almost always a tool for astroturfing. The term — which has been seen in mainstream publications like The New York Times as of December 2006 — is believed to be a blend of "fake" and "blog", but also evokes the verb "to flog" in the sense of "to make a sales pitch". It may also refer to the term 'flack' as a name for a person with a journalism degree who specializes in PR. As of December 12, 2006, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has begun a serious investigation of so-called "word of mouth" advertising campaigns, which will include flogs among its targets. Not to be confused with the 'flog' that means Freenet blog. For the act of flagellation, commonly known as "flogging", see A Taste of the Lash. Also not to be confused with "The Flog" by Felicia Day (a blend of "Felicia" and "vlog") or the Australian slang term for a useless person. "Today, I could take a photo of my butt and put it online within five seconds, and while this is objectively a good thing (at least in my case, because I have a sweet butt), it comes with the side effect of making trolls lazier. Most raids now involve flooding sites with gore, porn, or various combinations of both. While you can't argue with the effectiveness of this method, there's zero effort there. Where's the love for the craft? What amusing story did you get out of this experience that you'll tell your grandchildren eventually?" The Garbage Post Kid is a kind of Troll who delights in posting offensive and inflammatory text and punctuating them with vomit-inducing pictures and links to Shock Sites . They usually have a personal beef with a specific group member or community and will flood their topics with all the filth the 'Net can offer. If their beef is with a single person, they usually don't care about ruining the day (or constitution) of the many other innocent posters on the board, so long as that one guy knows they can't run or hide. Naturally, the GPK is one of the most egregious Internet personalities. They're known for their persistence, posting voluminous amounts of bile and being very hard to shake. Sometimes it can take hours for the mods to clean up the sewage they leave behind; in extreme cases, the entire forum may need to be temporarily shut down. The name comes from the Garbage Pail Kids , a 1980s gross-out trading-card parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids toyline that depicted some truly disturbing imagery. Just an average day out on the Internet. The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, or "GIFT" note : It kinda should be an Internet Law, like Godwin's Law, but it's called a theory to keep the acronym, is an explanation of why people who are quite "normal" in person become anti-social Internet Jerks when they're online. The "GIFT equation" was first formulated by Penny Arcade and goes like this: This phenomenon has been studied academically, and by all accounts, the comic's satirical analysis is spot-on; normal people become more aggressive when they think their behavior carries no real-world social consequences. They think that The Internet makes them anonymous, and they can thus behave as shamelessly and self-servingly as they always wanted , because they'll never have to answer their parents, spouses, teachers, employers, or challengers . (This isn't always true, by the way.) note : To elaborate, most Internet users' data and metadata are quite accessible. IP addresses and other identifying information can be found using relatively basic tools. And many active users on social media platforms will happily reveal information about themselves without thinking. All this means that someone who really wants to know the identity of an "anonymous" user can often find it out. It's related to the phenomenon of Bathroom Stall Graffiti ; they'd never do it in their own bathroom, but they'll happily do it in a public place when they think no one is looking and they don't have to clean it up. The whole phenomenon was identified by Plato in The Republic , where he recounts the myth of the the Ring of Gyges , one of the original Invisible Jerkass stories. Sadly, this leads to a culture of cyberbullying on the Internet. Without any real consequences, people realise they can say anything they want, and as such, they revel in saying the most hurtful and disgusting things, regardless of whether they even believe those things (much less whether they're true or false), probably for the thrill of seeing the damage they can do when people take their words seriously. At least one psychology paper posited that anonymity makes the Internet particularly attractive to narcissists , sociopaths , and sadists , who enjoy seeing others suffer. And since there are a lot of children and teenagers on the Internet, who are particularly vulnerable to cyberbullying, the Internet becomes a playground for these people. The rise of social media networks like Facebook and Twitter is forcing some reevaluation of this theory, though. People have been found to be just as obnoxious, rude, bigoted, and abusive while posting under their real identity as they would be if they were anonymous. This means it's not really the anonymity that drives the phenomenon; it's the lack of consequences. Turns out people will rarely get thrown off a social media site for noxious behaviour, nor will most people's teachers or employers scour their social media accounts. The only real threat in this case is the Internet Detective , who will trawl basically anyone's social media history to look for something even slightly objectionable, and the prevalence of GIFT provides them with some positive reinforcement. See also Invisible Jerkass , Jerkass Dissonance , Loss of Inhibitions and Mask of Confidence . The hit-and-run poster is the least dedicated breed of Troll . They'll make a single provocative comment and then leave, never to be seen again. Sometimes they lose interest, sometimes they're content with just knowing someone is likely pissed off, but often they're smugly watching the backlash from the safety of their own computer, refusing to give the other party the satisfaction of a response. On wikis, the term refers to someone who makes a single edit to the wiki and never responds to requests for clarification of what they did. The Other Wiki has a whole article on the phenomenon. Here on TV Tropes, though, we call this a Drive-By Updater . An item on one web-service that is requested by another web-service, usually an image. This isn't when an image is actually a potholed link. This is not only impolite (it eats up your victim's bandwidth), it's almost always a really bad idea. A hot linked item may have been removed by the original host (this is a big problem with YouTube links). The original host can be undergoing a performance problem. The original host may have changed its linking policy. The original host may no longer exist... The list of possible badness goes on and on. Luckily, this Wiki provides a way for people to upload images that skips a lot of those badnesses. See the Media Uploader on the Tools menu. See Hotlinked Image Switch for another reason not to hotlink to images on this wiki. Short for " In Before the Lock", a contentless post (like First! or Me Too!) made for two purposes: to predict that the thread will soon be locked, and to inflate one's post count. It's usually seen in a very contentious thread that's either devolved into such bickering that it's unsalvageable, or is relatively new but can't reasonably go anywhere other than unsalvageable bickering. It's a relatively useless post for pretty much every purpose. If they're right, the thread is about to be locked anyway, so no one's going to read the comment. If the thread is deleted, "IBTL" doesn't even count for their post tally. And since it's not seen very often, it's not a great way to signal that the thread is headed for lockable territory, as a sizeable number of readers aren't going to get it. It's usually frowned upon in much the same way as "First!", but since most threads that get this treatment are doomed anyway, it's less likely any action will be taken. Implonkus is that feeling you get when you make an effort to write a good post — correct spelling, correct grammar, actual organisation of thoughts, perhaps even writing a draft and working on it — only for the first response to be festooned with Rouge Angles of Satin , Emoticons , and Leet Lingo . It's quite a letdown to realise that you're the only one who actually cares enough about the topic to make an effort to have an intelligent conversation about it. First coined on HBO 's forum for The Sopranos , the term is a Portmanteau of "impetus" and "plonk", the latter a Usenet onomatopoeia for the notional sound made when someone is "killfiled", a reference to a Usenet-era ignore list. "What proof is there that [Hitler] is an atheist? In Mein Kampf , he actually seems to be a believer." "I'm sure you are against classroom prayer and homeschooling as well, just like Hitler. " — Two editors of Conservapedia have a reasoned exchange of opinions The Internet Cold Reader is a particularly annoying online persona who subjects other users to Cold Reading . He'll read a four-sentence post and use it to deduce your life story, psychology, politics, and religious views, and then use that as a basis for their argument. Sometimes they'll invite you to correct them; more often than not, they won't . To give a hypothetical example: You: I didn't think Twilight was too bad, if you don't think too hard about it . Internet Cold Reader: Ah! Obviously, you are a closet misogynist who thinks that every woman needs to find a perfect, godlike, sparkling man to obey absolutely! Also, you probably also have anti-intellectual leanings and feel threatened by the idea that there might be such a thing as quality literature outside of your little bubble. Most Internet Cold Readers don't actually sound like armchair psychologists, but the ones who do are hilarious. Some actually do it on purpose. Arguing with an Internet Cold Reader is generally believed to be a useless proposition, because anything you may say in your defence is just further proof of your deep-seated insecurities . It's a similar mindset to the Conspiracy Theorist , who thinks that all evidence to the contrary is actually evidence of a cover-up. The fact that most people on the Internet really are insecure, won't ever admit to being wrong, and prefer to dig in their heels over conceding a point means that Internet Cold Readers can rely on a grain of truth from which to spin their bizarre personality profile. But in the end, it's an Ad Hominem form of argument, focusing on the other party's obvious desires and misconceptions over the topic at hand. The Internet Detective fancies himself to be the ultimate diviner of truth from lies, a righteous warrior fighting against falsehood on the Internet. Accordingly, the Detective will trawl the Internet for any information they can find about an individual from any period of time, looking for something they did wrong at some point in time, which will then stand for all time and mean they can never be right about anything, ever. These guys can be extremely obsessive, going through old threads, social media profiles, even Real Life public records. They employ heavy use of the Wayback Machine and might even engage in Social Engineering , like posing as someone else to the subject or their friends. Anything they find will be subject to intense examination, taken in the worst possible context (if not removed from its original context outright ), and painted in the most embarrassing possible light . Accordingly, the Internet Detective's obsessive, stalker-like stance and tendency to jump to conclusions makes it an attractive disguise for a Single-Issue Wonk , who wants so desperately to be right about something that they'll scour their opponent's Internet history looking for anything they can use against them. In the worst cases, someone who wants to defend a false claim will become an Internet Detective looking to make a show of force and convince their opponents to back down, which works more often than it really should . The Internet Detective is described on Mike Reed's Flame Warriors Guide as the Archivist . The Internet Tough Guy is someone who will threaten anyone who annoys them online with physical or legal harm. These threats are always empty; Internet Tough Guys couldn't fulfill most of them even if they wanted to. They probably wouldn't even be able to figure out your IP address, much less your real identity. The most common threat is one of violence, evoking the image of a weakling who fancies himself to be a tough guy but could never convince anyone of that in Real Life. The second most common threat is of a lawsuit, which would be immediately thrown out of court if they ever tried it for real. Those threats often invoke the U.S. Constitution in places where it doesn't apply, especially where the forum isn't even owned by Americans. But there are other, more subtle variants, like the user who claims to be close to the forum moderators and threatens to get their adversary banned, or the user who notices that their opponent is a minor and threatens to call their parents. Trolls love dealing with Internet Tough Guys, because they're incredibly easy to provoke into rants, anger, and ineffectual threats — the kind of thing trolls live on. See also the Navy Seal Copypasta, an example of an Internet Tough Guy whose threats and claims of military experience are so outlandish that it became a meme. The Left Fielder is a user who will enter a discussion already under way and start talking about something only vaguely related, or even completely unrelated. When done deliberately, it's a form of derailing a thread, but usually couching the derailment in something not really inflammatory, just horrendously off-topic. Imagine, for instance, a thread about whales in which someone asks the question, "Have you ever noticed that a lot of rock stars from The '70s look like Jesus?" Most forum users can't resist the temptation to answer the question. A skilled Left Fielder will throw out something that requires a lot of discussion to untangle; in this case, the users will discuss whether The Beatles look like Jesus and transition to arguing whether the Beatles really even count as a "70s band". Eventually, someone will remind everyone that the thread was originally about "whales in the time of Jesus or something", and the other users will sheepishly go back to talking about whales, but with a few rogue comments sprinkled in about whether the Beatles were better than Led Zeppelin . This is why many forums have strict rules against "off-topic" posts. Some Left Fielders are Trolls , but others are Single Issue Wonks who just have to talk about their personal obsession, and still others are Noobs who don't know how forums work. Even seasoned users can't resist throwing something out of left field on occasion, and smart moderators will usually establish a new thread for the topic. The term comes from Baseball and is part of more general slang for something strange or unexpected. The exact link to left field (either the area of the field or the player who plays the position) is uncertain, but a commonly-cited origin is from the Chicago Cubs' old stadium at the West Side Grounds, where beyond the left field stands sat Cook County Hospital, a mental institution note : now it's the University of Illinois Medical Center; fans could occasionally hear, coming out of left field, the patients screaming crazy things. See also Weird Aside , for when it happens offline. A blog that focuses primarily on cool links that the author has found, as opposed to original content such as essays. Arguably the original form; Jorn Barger, the coiner of the term "weblog," intended it to mean a log of his Web surfing. Barger's blog Robot Wisdom , one of the oldest, still follows this format. Many Power Law Blogs have this form, often embellished with commentary. (The most pronounced example may be Instapundit who has a habit of potholing his links with cryptic descriptions like Heh. ) A lurker is someone who reads a forum but doesn't participate. They may simply read the conversations without even signing up, or they might register an account but rarely post, if at all. Unlike in Real Life , where a "lurker" would be that creepy guy at the party whom no one remembers inviting and who stands in the corner all night listening to other people's conversations, on the Internet, no one notices a lurker. In fact, lurking is highly encouraged on many corners of the Internet (hence the phrase "Lurk moar"). The idea is that a new user shouldn't just jump in and start posting without a sense of the forum's rules, style, and culture. If you take the time to read the forum and learn how it works, then when you're ready, you can jump in and be less of a Noob . However, lurking wasn't always a good thing. The term was coined in The '80s , when the Internet barely existed and was confined to governments and universities. People would connect their Commodore 64s and IBM compatible computers to bulletin board systems via modem. These were often hosted by fellow geeks in their own homes, and usually used a modem connected to a single phone line, meaning only one user could be on at a time — and many a BBS wasn't even online all day long. Thus, a lurker was someone who tied up the phone line without contributing to the community. Not all lurkers nowadays are prospective users, either. Sometimes they might lurk but not like what they see and decide to stay out of the conversation. Sometimes it's an old forum and nobody's using it anymore, but someone still wants to see an old conversation. In other cases, the forum may be free to read but charge money to register an account, and lurkers are the ones who don't want to pay for it. If you join a forum and admit to being a former lurker, the registered users might be creeped out that someone was reading their conversations, even though they were posted on a publicly viewable forum. Not related to the advanced/evolved form of a Zerg Hydralisk , nor the homeless people on Babylon 5 , nor the enemy monsters in Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy . An online "entourage" or crowd of Yes People surrounding a particular Internet user and/or a "personal army" of Internet users recruited to attack or defend someone in a Flame War or internet flare, or to promote them or their product. This is connected to AstroTurf except that Astroturf is usually for a politician, product, company, or one side in a war or conflict, whereas a Meat Puppet can appear anywhere (and are often why a debate escalates to Flame War, Internet Backdraft, or appearing on Fandom Wank levels). These are usually called Meat Puppet as opposed to Sock Puppet , because they are actually separate people, unlike a Sock Puppet, which is a different user identity (or collection of them) created by the same person. That said, good luck in telling them apart, especially in places that allow anonymity and don't ban proxies. No relation to the Meat Puppet trope, which is about possession or Mind Control. A Mediator is the opposite of a Troll — they respond to most arguments online, particularly the ones that don't directly involve them, by posting comments intended to defuse the debate (or at least admonish the other parties for "fighting"). Unfortunately, they're incapable of doing this without a heaping dose of condescension . As such, this is very grating to people who were simply having a spirited but reasoned argument. In the worst cases, the Mediator will derail the thread and shift discussion to themselves and how important they are to the forum . This, ironically , usually results in a new petty squabble between the Mediator and the users who are challenging their moral authority. The Mediator is often A Darker Me who wouldn't dare intervene in this way in Real Life , and the worst cases become an online Well-Intentioned Extremist who commits the Golden Mean Fallacy — either you're totally peaceful, or you're disrupting the forum. A Mediator who takes the time to actually be good at their job without the self-aggrandisement will successfully morph into the Shepherd . "And posting 'Me too!' like some braindead AOLer I should do the world a favor and cap you like Ol' Yeller You're just about as useless as JPEGs to Helen Keller..." "Me Too!" is a pointless, contentless post, replying to a previous post just to say that they agree with it. Of course, they don't actually have to say the exact phrase "Me too!" Variants include "Seconded," "This," "Damn straight," "+1," and even just "^" (an IRC tradition) to refer to the text above it. In really bad cases, the post will quote the entirety of the text it agrees with. Much like "First!", forums hate this and will often delete it. Indeed, it wastes not only time, but also bandwidth; some places which barely handle the traffic they get will ban posts like this just to keep the site up and running. However, there are a couple of accepted uses. For instance, some boards will automatically close a thread after a certain number of posts, and participants in a thread nearing that limit who want to break it earlier will agree to flood the thread with meaningless posts to get it locked. Threads involving voting for something will often be filled with posts like this, because all that needs to be said is whether the user agrees or disagrees. On Twitter , the phrase was used as part of the "#MeToo movement", where women who were victims of sexual harassment (or worse ) would simply post the hashtag, and the sheer volume of users who did this (particularly high-profile women like actresses — there's a reason for the Horrible Hollywood trope, after all) would draw attention to the scale of the problem. "Me too!" was particularly associated with the Eternal September , when AOL subscribers got access to Usenet and flooded it with posts like this (among other Noob behaviour). In the mid-1990s, "AOL!" became a mocking shorthand for "Me too!" on the site. A ninja editor is a person who makes a post, then almost immediately goes back and edits it without comment. Like a Ninja . Usually, this is done innocently, like fixing a typo. In those cases, it's usually customary to add something to the end of the post clarifying the situation, like "ninja-edited for typo". When it's not done innocently, however, it changes the content of the post. And this leads to mass confusion, as subsequent replies address a post saying one thing, when the post itself says another. It's often done when someone is losing an argument and wants to walk back what they said to make it easier to defend. Because of this, many forums limit the ability to edit posts to a certain period of time after the post was made (typically an hour); this allows for innocent ninja edits, but after that, there will be a marker on the post to show that it has been edited, or perhaps editing may not be permitted at all. Some sites, like GameFAQs , had such trouble with this that they didn't allow editing at all . At other places, it can make for an entertaining forum game, but in that case everyone knows what's about to happen. The most malicious form of ninja editing is a Trolling method by which a user asks a question, gets a few responses, and then goes back and edits their original post to make the replies appear super embarrassing or incriminating. For instance, the Troll might get users to innocently respond with a number under 13, then change their question to "How old are you?" — and many forums will ban anyone who admits they're under 13 years old. Or they might post a really inflammatory comment, get a bunch of inflammatory responses, then edit their original comment to something much tamer or even delete it outright, making the other users look like they started the argument by being needlessly aggressive. The easiest way to combat malicious ninja editing is to quote a user before responding to them. Users generally can't edit quoted text in someone else's post, and it clearly shows the point to which you're responding. Branching-style forums may also delete any responses to a deleted post to prevent this kind of thing from happening. A related phenomenon is the ninja post , where someone takes the time to respond to something, only for someone else to have responded more quickly in the time between the first user reading the thread and submitting their own post. This causes a break in the conversation where one person responds, then the next post appears as if the previous one didn't exist — which is especially confusing if it refers to "the last post" when it really means two posts ago, or it complains that no one's mentioned something when the ninja post did mention it. This is one of the disadvantages of a slow internet connection. Places like 4chan have the variant known as the "Combo Breaker ", where a group of posters tries to complete a sequence one post at a time (like spelling a word or posting pieces of an image), only for two users to post the same image in succession because one ninja'd the other, or for a user to post something irrelevant because they weren't paying attention to the "combo" (4chan finds things like this hilarious ). On TV Tropes, we also have what we call a Serial Tweaker , who makes an edit, realises they missed something, and makes another edit to fix that thing, realises they missed something... "Rewrites every story, every poem that ever was Eliminates incompetence, and those who break the laws." An Orwellian Editor is the extremist cousin of the Ninja Editor who goes to great lengths to remove all evidence of something they said or did online, in the hopes that the Internet will forget about it if it's no longer available. It's usually done as a response to unexpected criticism — rather than address it, they delete the offending comment and then pretend that it never happened. In some cases, though, it could be much more than a comment — like an entire Fan Fic , perhaps one that was extremely incendiary and racist. Orwellian Editors are not limited to hiding their own actions. Just as frequent are cases where a Message Board administrator attempts this on other people, usually when they end up on the losing side of an argument; they'll delete an entire thread and any reference to it to avoid having to face up to it. They'll often ban the most vocal users on the winning side as well, and they'll forbid the remaining users from mentioning the whole affair. This, by the way, is an excellent way to drive away forum users. Either way, whether or not the deleted content is truly damaging is irrelevant; in fact, most of the deletions themselves weigh a lot worse on the Orwellian Editor than whatever was posted in the first place. Some Orwellian Editors also find it very difficult to delete everything , in part because they don't always have the ability to do so (although they may try harassing forum administrators to delete stuff on their behalf), and in part because of the Streisand Effect — their zeal to remove something from the Internet is what gets others interested in what exactly it was to begin with. Out here on TV Tropes, we've experienced this sort of behaviour from people who've written works they'd like to forget and want us to delete our page on them. That's why we have a policy that The Fic May Be Yours, but the Trope Page Is Ours . The term "Orwellian" (in this and other contexts) comes from George Orwell and his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , in which society is adept at rewriting history to match what the present-day propaganda demands ("We have always been at war with Eastasia."). Post count is the number of posts a forum user has made. It's often displayed in the user's profile, and even next to the user's name on every post. For most people, post count is irrelevant — a good comment is a good comment, regardless of the number of comments the user previously made. But some users use a high post count as a proxy for high status and will judge other users — and their contributions — by their post count. There's a nugget of truth to this, in the sense that someone who's been on the forum for a long time and is highly respected there will naturally have a high post count. But correlation does not imply causation, and some users will try to manufacture respect by building up a high post count. As such, these users will artificially inflate their post counts with contentless posts, along the lines of "First!" and "Me too!", as well as engage in such activities as Thread Hopping and Thread Necromancy . These users are known as "post whores". They're not always bad; sometimes their commitment to contributing actually helps keep the forum stable and active. But others are just obnoxious Spammers . Such users also have a tendency to Suffer Newbies Poorly , because they will naturally think of newbies with low post counts as not worthy of their respect. Clay Shirky wrote an article that observed, in effect, that the popularity of blogs — as defined by inbound links — will be governed by who links to whom. Where popularity breeds popularity, this will have the effect of "clumping" popularity (inbound links, or attention ) around a relatively tight set of interconnected blogs. Naturally, there are Power Law winners in the various blog categories, as well. The Shepherd is a rare and benevolent online persona who actually helps new members find their way on the forum. They'll take the time to greet newbies, teach them the ropes, answer questions that might be common knowledge to established users, and get the rest of the forum to treat them fairly. Shepherds are incredibly useful to have on an Internet forum, where a noob can barely go five minutes without unwittingly hitting someone's Berserk Button . They don't know which topics always lead to arguments, which users have a Hair-Trigger Temper , or which opinions will draw in the Single-Issue Wonk . Most veteran users — especially those who Suffer Newbies Poorly — will not assume good faith, but instead see the new user as a Troll and react accordingly. Such reactions usually discourage the new user from continuing to contribute. But the Shepherd will protect the newbie from the attacks and help them become a respected member of the forum. Shepherds are often held in very high esteem in the Forum Pecking Order , especially if some established users once benefited from the Shepherd's help. Because of this, the Shepherd usually doesn't have to be very forceful in convincing the rest of the forum to shut up. Arguing with or trolling the Shepherd is highly frowned upon , and most other users will rally to their defence. That said, the Shepherd is usually no pushover himself, and is capable of arguing with even the moderators — and winning . And if the newbie betrays the Shepherd's trust , the Shepherd will come down harder on them than even the regulars would have without his intervention . Some particularly rabid newbie-haters will accuse the Shepherd of being a White Knight , and in a broad sense their motives are similar. But a genuine Shepherd is a Good Shepherd who really wants to grow the community, whereas the stereotypical White Knight wants to make a big show of "saving" the newbie and is hoping the newbie is a hot girl who'll fall in love with him. "Show newbies the ropes! If we see a user we've never met before make some mistakes on the wiki, instead of berating or ignoring the user, we'll hunt them down and hang them. No one was a perfect wiki editor straight off the bat, but if you're dumb enough to get caught, you deserve to die." — The Urban Dead Wiki's (Satirical) Project Un!Welcome A forum user who suffers newbies poorly has no patience for noobs and will berate them for not knowing the ins and outs of the forum, its culture, or its underlying fandom. Your average forum has a ton of this type of user, which is why it pays to be a lurker so that one can avoid proving that they're new to the forum in their ignorance. Most users who suffer newbies poorly don't really have a Hair-Trigger Temper and aren't actively looking to scare off the newbies, but their impatience with having to answer obvious questions or cleaning up after a user who doesn't know how things work leads them to blow their top pretty quickly. This user is more of an Insufferable Genius who clearly knows more about the forum and has been there long enough to prove it. This type of user is especially common on forums dealing with a specific fandom, where a new user might not know as much about the underlying fandom and asks the sort of questions that a " real fan" would obviously know. It's also prevalent in forums dealing with video games, where users have little patience for newbies who might be struggling with the game and asking for help; they usually tell them to Figure It Out Yourself . Such users might be slightly more justified if it's an online game like an MMORPG or MOBA and they'd be expected to team up with the newbie, and the newbie's poor performance and understanding of the Metagame negatively affects the veteran's enjoyment of the game. The particularly odd thing about a user who suffers newbies poorly is that regardless of how impatiently they treated you when you were a newbie, the minute you stop being a newbie and move up a rank in the Forum Pecking Order , they're perfectly okay with you and treat you like an equal. In fact, it's not uncommon for such users to be among the most liked and respected on the board; you just needed to prove your worth. That is, if you ever managed to make it that far and didn't just give up when everyone started snapping at you. The effect of users who suffer newbies poorly can be mitigated by the presence of a Shepherd , who can often remind such users that they're being unnecessarily mean. Thread hopping is a term for posting a comment without reading the thread beyond the first or last post. Nine times out of ten, a thread hopper's comment will repeat something that was previously discussed or from which the thread has long since moved on. The term comes from the idea that a person is just going from thread to thread and dropping a comment for its own sake. While it would be unreasonable to expect a user to read the entire thread before commenting (at least if it's a particularly long one), it's generally considered good Internet etiquette to at least skim the thread to see if what you wanted to discuss had already been addressed. At least go through the last page or two. What sets a threadhopper apart is that it seems like they just want to inflate their post count and will say the first thing that comes to their mind with respect to the topic. The cool thing about thread hopping is that if you spot a compulsive threadhopper, you can comment about them in a thread which they'll never actually read. "We have lots of points that we debate to death and beyond. Raise Dead is a 1st level spell on these forums." A Thread Necromancer is someone who adds a comment to a thread that hasn't been active for months, if not years. It's dead, but there's nothing stopping you bringing it back to life, like a necromancer . Supply your own Evil Laugh . Whether or not this is acceptable practice depends on the forum, and in many cases on the topic. Some places very much frown on it and will automatically lock threads that have been inactive for a certain period of time. Others encourage it, because they like to keep all discussion of a single topic in one place and don't like to clog the forum with different threads on the same topic. But more often than not, thread necromancy is not a good idea. Threads die for a reason, after all, and in some cases a thread was actually quite unpleasant and reviving it would just cause more fights . Indeed, one Troll tactic is to deliberately "necro" a Flame War thread that had burned itself out to reignite the argument and grab some popcorn . In other cases, someone will think of the perfect insult days or even weeks after the argument , and unlike in real life, on the Internet you still have the opportunity to throw it out there. Other threads, however, have very good reasons to remain dormant for long periods of time, like a Play-by-Post Game where people have taken a break. Indeed, many roleplayers will often ask for a thread necromancer to show up because they want to pick up a game they haven't played lately. Another "positive" necromancy situation is where someone posts a creative work like a Fan Fiction in installments — it can be a while between installments . In that case, though, some writers will also necro the thread to ask for feedback, which can really piss off the other users who saw a new post and had their hopes up that a new installment had just dropped. The Internet has long adopted the aphorism "timestamps are your friends" to encourage people who stumble across a thread to pay attention to how old it is, lest they anger the other forumgoers with an unwitting thread necromancy. If you absolutely need to leave a post after a long time, it's considered courteous to acknowledge the long delay. Word of Mod is a decision taken by fiat. While the name suggests that it's an order by the forum moderators, in many cases it goes all the way up to the Powers That Be , usually the site owners. Users who don't comply tend to be blocked or restrained. In some cases, the term is used to decry power-tripping forum moderation trying to silence things that reflect poorly on them; Word of Mod can be used to enact the wishes of an Orwellian Editor . In other cases, it's simply a neutral way to playfully refer to moderation decisions. In some cases, "Word of Mod" can be used to distinguish comments by moderators acting in their capacity as moderators from comments by moderators acting as forum members like everyone else. This is exactly how it works on the TV Tropes Forum , where our moderators put on their "mod hat" before invoking Word of Mod. Such posts are easily distinguished by their pink background colour. Police Sergeant Deegan: Ah, this reminds me of Vietnam... Father Ted: You were in Vietnam, sergeant? Police Sergeant Deegan: No, no, I mean the films! The YouTube War Expert is a self-proclaimed expert in all aspects of war studies. They've never actually fought in a war, nor even joined any branch of the military , nor observed any military training regimens or conducted formal study of any historical military campaigns. But they did read a book once. Maybe several! Since a lot of Internet discussion revolves around who would win a hypothetical fight between two sides, this type of Internet persona shows up frequently. They're particularly difficult to avoid on YouTube , where it's practically impossible to post a military-related video without several of these guys flooding the comment section. It usually devolves into an argument where the "expert" insists that one side would obviously win because of a myriad of technical and cultural specifications that they alone had considered. The YouTube War Expert usually exhibits the following traits: - Obsession with the technical details of individual weapons. Real soldiers care far more about the context of a weapon's use; who's using it, what's the target, how many are on each side. The YTWE cares more about how much damage it can do, what conditions it can survive, and how often it will succeed. There are a number of monomaniacs out there who favour one weapon over all others and will extol its superiority in every situation you can think of. They'll rattle off statistics about the weapon at the slightest provocation; if you ever wanted to know about a certain gun's capacity, weight, and rate of fire, they'll tell you before you even have a chance to ask. - Misplaced Nationalism and Cultural Posturing. The YTWE looks at a particular nation or ethnic group and re-characterises them as a Proud Warrior Race, uniquely suited to winning any given conflict because of how fearless and disciplined they are. As one might expect, the YTWE often shares said nationality or ethnicity with the group he's extolling. There are also anti-nationalists out there who look at a certain nation or ethnic group and claim that they are almost certain to fall apart whenever the going gets tough. Expect to see an obsession with old unresolved national rivalries, often involving the Cold War. - Hilariously masculine language. The YTWE will drop terms like "blitzkrieg", "Alpha strike", "lethality radius", and "maximum overkill". If they know anything about the slang of real-world military branches, they'll use it at every opportunity. They often double as an Internet Tough Guy who will threaten you as if they were at war with you, often saying things like, "How 'bout you say that again when I come to your house and point a [weapon of choice] at you?" See also the Navy Seal Copypasta. Any debate involving a YouTube War Expert usually devolves into bizarre hypotheticals ( e.g. which medieval weapons are better), Culture Clashes , arguments over whether Katanas Are Just Better , and comparisons to losers of major military conflicts . Anyone who actually knows something about military history or conflict will just get drowned out by these idiots. These guys nearly universally have no military experience, but in many places (particularly the U.S., which has a lot of Internet users), they can actually purchase weapons for themselves, including firearms. They'll then brag about their weapons, describe them in lavish detail, and fantasise about all the scenarios in which they may have to use said weapon, none of which will ever materialise because they live in Suburbia . These guys are also often called mall ninjas , after an internet discussion involving someone who behaved like this and claimed to be a mall security guard, who may or may not have been trolling . The bottom line is that anyone who's actually been through military training will become well aware of how long it takes to become a real military expert. The YouTube War Expert is so Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance that it becomes blindingly obvious that they've never been close to a military in their lives.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlinePersonas
On Ice - TV Tropes So you have a character who's famous in-universe, or a popular show-within-a-show. For sake of example: The Alice and Bob Show. What better way to show off that fame and popularity? Alice and Bob on Ice! When you've got your own ice show, you've officially made it to the big time. Like many Shows within Shows, an in-universe Ice Show may be rife with Adaptation Decay and Stylistic Suck. There also tends to be a high level of camp. Not related to metamphetamine, and Yuri!!! on Ice is not an example. Sub-Trope of Live on Stage!. Sometimes overlaps with Screen-to-Stage Adaptation, though that trope is usually used to refer to "legit" theater — i.e. The Musical adaptation of a hit property on the West End or Broadway. ## Examples on ice! - Love and Capes has The Crusader on Ice. The Crusader's girlfriend is the only one amused. - The House to Astonish live show opened with Paul declaring "Live! On fire! On ice!", which was also used as the episode title. It wasn't really on ice (or indeed on fire). - The Simpsons: - The full title of the 20th anniversary special was The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special - In 3-D! On Ice! (Although it was neither on ice nor in 3D, and was shown during the 21st season...but it really was about The Simpsons.) - In one episode of the show, Krusty and Sideshow Mel host an Ice Capades-type show; they slip behind some flats and two obvious skate-doubles come out to do an ice dance in their stead. When they finished, they were crushed by the scenery, revealing that Krusty and Mel were watching TV and slacking off. - In Season 2's "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge", Roger Meyers, Jr. strolls past a poster for Itchy & Scratchy on Ice as he dictates his rude reply to Marge's letter. - In an episode of The Fairly OddParents!, Timmy sells magical lemonade so he can afford tickets to Crash Nebula on Ice. - Rugrats had Reptar on Ice. Reptar is the show's expy of Godzilla, but for some reason (even the guy playing Reptar complained about its implausibility), the ice show had him falling in love with a reporter. On the other hand, Grampa was doubtful about seeing it but thought it was brilliant once he did. - Robot Chicken did a sketch where The Empire Strikes Back became " Empire... On Ice!" - Arthur: - In the episode "Play It Again, D.W.", D.W. has four tickets to Crazy Bus Live. Arthur doesn't want to go, but D.W. tells him that it's only fair; she had to go to Bionic Bunny on Ice when Arthur wanted to go. ("Buster's New Friend" also showed when Arthur and Buster had a souvenir poster signed by the Bionic Bunny actor at the ice show, who was noticeably overweight and was munching on a chili dog while signing autographs.) - Also, in the All-CGI Cartoon Arthur's Missing Pal, D.W is trying to win a contest to see Mary Moo Cow on Ice. She succeeds, but finds the ice show to be a rip-off compared to the Mary Moo Cow TV series. - Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: In "Bloo's Brothers", Bloo's popularity has resulted in a flood of Captain Ersatz Bloos, and this becomes a problem when Mac only has two tickets to the Ice Charades. - Eddie from Slacker Cats goes to see Saving Private Ryan on ice. - In Doug, Judy is a fan of Shakespeare on Ice. - The Critic episode "A Little Deb Will Do Ya" has a subplot involving Jay's rivalry with timeslot competitor Humphrey the Hippo (an Expy of Barney the Dinosaur). One establishing shot sees an advertisement for Humphrey's Madison Square Garden event "The Hug-In" getting plastered over with a "Sold Out" banner. - The Real Life progenitors of this trope were touring ice skating revues such as Ice Follies and Ice Capades, via segments inspired by popular kid-friendly franchises. Ice Follies featured Sesame Street characters in The '70s, while Ice Capades (which died in The '90s) featured: - Yogi Bear (1977 edition, plus crossovers with Scooby-Doo and The Flintstones in '79 and '91) - The Snorks (1985) - Ewoks (1986) - Teddy Ruxpin (1987) - The California Raisins (1988) - Super Mario Bros. (1989) — Princess Toadstool spoke like Mae West, King Koopa was played by Mr. Belvedere, Mario sounded like Fred Flintstone, and the whole thing ended with a Curb-Stomp Battle in which Mario did NOTHING. It has to be seen to be believed...so here it is! - The Simpsons (1990) — In this case, the Simpson clan came to watch the show and most of their stage time was spent bumbling in and around the audience (with Marge complaining to Homer and Bart that this was how they "got kicked out of the Guns N' Roses concert"). They ended up onstage by interrupting the finale, with Bart performing "Do the Bartman" before they were all shooed off. - The Smurfs (More than once in The '80s) - Barbie (Several times in The '80s and The '90s) - The 1997 show was subtitled The Magic of MGM and thus had segments based on Goldfinger (James Bond on ice!), Stargate, The Pink Panther, Rocky, and All Dogs Go to Heaven — plus a segment that went from West Side Story to Tank Girl in the blink of an eye! - Sky Dancers, as part of the very last Ice Capades show to ever be produced. - The Disney on Ice franchise, The Rival to Ice Capades that eventually came out on top. - The Wizard of Oz on Ice was adapted from the 1939 film. - Anastasia on Ice. - The Tale of Peter Rabbit along with the other characters created by Beatrix Potter had an ice show at Alton Towers in the early 90's. - Aliens - ON ICE! - Holiday on Ice, currently a Europe-only production which has given the continent shows featuring: - Rick Wakeman's Concept Album The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table was performed at the Wembley Arena as King Arthur on Ice. According to some reports, this was not an aesthetic choice on Wakeman's part, it was just the Arena had recently held a skating contest and couldn't be thawed in time. - A step up from the above tours are arena productions based on live-action or comic book properties, featuring elaborate special effects and/or stunts to put characters and creatures through their paces. - One of the final two editions of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus (which both closed in 2016, and had the same corporate parent as the aforementioned Disney on Ice) incorporated ice skating into the traditional three-ring show. - Crystal and Axel are literally Cirque du Soleil on ice. - Several Norwegian Cruise Line ships, thanks to a licensing deal with [DreamWorks] Animation, staged a How to Train Your Dragon ice show. - Some Six Flags theme parks featured a half-hour Looney Tunes ice show in the early 1990s. - In general, stage shows at the Disney Theme Parks (and the Disney Cruise Line) and Universal Studios parks are in the spirit of the above productions, putting a bevy of popular characters on stage and rarely making it to an hour's runtime, though some are considerably more elaborate than others and/or are actually condensed direct adaptations of films.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnIce
Only in America - TV Tropes A lot of weird news stories seem to take place in the United States of America, giving a misleading impression that the country has more weirdness than average. Social scientists have proposed that it makes Americans a rather poor choice for drawing broader conclusions about humanity from. Often used negatively as a No True Scotsman fallacy, in which someone says a specific negative thing can happen "only in America", regardless of if any other part of the world can or has been subjected to it. Compare with Vocal Minority, Mis-blamed. See Only in Florida and Only in Miami as a subset. See Eagleland for the unfortunate image that results. Changing with time as an increasingly large number of "and finally..." stories derive from China and India. Most of these stories are invented by the media. The two nations, not coincidentally, have the first and second largest populations in the world, respectively. This trope name does not refer to works that are only available in the US. That would be No Export for You. Only an American could make that mistake. Nor does it refer to Larry the Cable Guy's television series of the same name.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyInAmerica
Only Idiots May Pass - TV Tropes Sometimes, you have to go down the wrong path before going down the right path. Literally, you have to, even though you may already know which way is the right way. This is a relative of Stupidity Is the Only Option. The difference is that, instead of the character needing to become an idiot to advance in the game, we're talking about the player. For example, say you need the flamethrower to melt ice cubes. The end of Path A is blocked by ice cubes which you can't melt yet, and Path B leads to the door that allows you to continue on with the game. Now let's say that the door at the end of Path B is locked, and the only way to open it is to trek down Path A and take a good look at the ice cubes blocking your path. Do this, and a scripted NPC or something will come through the door in Path B, unlocking it for you. In more extreme cases, the NPC will merely say "if only there was a way to melt these ice cubes" and when you go back to path B, the locked door has mysteriously disappeared. This might not seem like such a bad idea at first, especially if the game is exploration-based. Maybe the game wants to make sure you mark that blocked passage on your map. A worse variant is if the door down path B is locked with a seemingly solvable combination lock puzzle, causing you to fruitlessly try and unlock it for ages, ignorant of the fact that only visiting the dead end will cause the puzzle to actually unlock the door. However, if you think about it, the game is always assuming you're playing for the first time, and therefore, do not have prior knowledge of the game world or events within. If this is your second or higher playthrough, you may remember which path is which and try to cut directly to the proper path. Unfortunately for you, you're not going anywhere until you get to the very dead-end of the tunnel and trigger the script that opens the door. Nice try, though. And let's not even imagine how pissed you'll get if you forgot what arbitrary condition triggers the Event Flag that makes the door open! It would become Solve the Soup Cans at its absolute worst. A specific form of the Broken Bridge. Could be a form of You Can't Thwart Stage One, or a Forced Tutorial. See also Stupidity Is the Only Option. Contrast Only Smart People May Pass, Only the Worthy May Pass. See also Script Breaking and You Shouldn't Know This Already. ## Examples: - In Futurama: The Video Game, you are asked to obtain a hammer at the beginning of the game, the only hammer around is under a dangerously lethal amount of crates and heavy objects. Of course taking the hammer would mean being crushed. So players would often find a way to get the hammer without grabbing it. After running around one would decide to take the hammer, the boxes fall and Fry is dead, along a game over. This, however, was just a way of introducing the lives/game over mechanic, as Fry is brought back to life by the Professor with his new invention. - Metroid: - In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, there is an energy generator that you need to call your ship in to destroy - which is guarded by two glaringly obvious anti-air cannons. The forward path will not open until you foolishly call your ship in for a bombing run, getting it damaged and having your advisor inform you that you first need to disable the cannons. The doors which quite obviously lead to the two cannons you have just been told to destroy are locked. Nothing the player does will unlock them, and they can't be opened until the player gives up and tries to leave; at that point, the doors open up so that enemies can come through and attack you. - Sequence breaking in Metroid: Zero Mission? After pulling off a series of bomb jumps to bypass getting the power grip, a barrier that can only be destroyed by bugs not found in the area is put in front of the door. - Happens a lot in Metroid: Other M. For instance, getting the speed booster requires you to go down a long corridor until you reach an ice wall that you need the speed booster to break; it's not until you turn back that your commander allows you to use the speed booster. - In Metroid Fusion, after you obtain Power Bombs, you're supposed to go through the Reactor Silo, but your path through the first screen can be blocked by an immobile cocoon that cannot be damaged by any weapon you have. However, the cocoon will be destroyed and pose no obstacle if, as directed, you first go back to your ship and listen to Mission Control there. The game presents a save prompt at the ship just before setting this Event Flag, which has unnecessarily confused many a player who has had to reload from this point (most likely after getting killed by Yakuza, since there are no more functional save rooms until after you defeat it). - BioShock has some annoying examples of this in the latter half of the game where you are required to salvage certain items from certain dead enemies in order to proceed, except that the items won't appear on the corpses until you are informed of this. It becomes annoying when the bodies disappear after being dead for several minutes and they happened to be the tough Big Daddies, forcing you to find and kill more of them. (Fortunately, a new one will always spawn some time after they are all killed.) - BioShock 2 has examples of doors that are inexplicably locked until you trigger a scripted event, which unlocks the door on the other side of the complex for no good reason. Sometimes the doors are boarded up and then destroyed when you get back, which is slightly more acceptable. - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: - There's one in its third mission. \|\|You have to follow the Russian agent Makarov through a crowded airport, killing civilians, before he shoots you at the end of it and leaves your American corpse for the Russians to find, sparking World War Three. If you try to shoot Makarov before he can kill you, however, you will immediately die from violating "friendly fire." Justified as the rest of the game revolves around the player character taking part in the massacre there.\|\| - Even worse is in the end of that level. \|\|You'll see an in-game cutscene, where you can still move about. And, of course, the objective point(a van) is where the cutscene is. So the game assumes that you'll be standing at the back of the van when it's over. And then Makarov shoots you. But of course, you can move during this. so once you trigger it, you can start running. And get to pretty early in the level. But, since the game thinks you're hanging out by Makarov, it doesn't actually check that you are there. So you can be 200 meters away from him, through a ton of concrete, and he'll still shoot you. with a pistol.\|\| - The Legend of Zelda: - The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: When you find the pirate ship docked at Windfall Island, the first logical step would appear to be to board the ship and see what's up. Entering the ship requires you to give the password, a horribly punny answer to a pirate riddle. It's possible (and, in some cases, quite easy) to guess the password, but you'll still be turned away unless you've visited the secret entrance to an unremarkable building in the city and overheard the password yourself. The game Hand Waves this by implying that you need to say it "exactly right" (inflections and all, apparently). - The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap: You can't get the Pegasus Boots until you try and fail to wade through the muck of Castor Wilds. Also, the Hyrule Town library doesn't open until a Minish tells you about the Minish elder who lives there. - The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures: An otherwise-mild version with a multiplayer twist appears in the Village of the Blue Maiden, in which the player must talk to an NPC who bemoans that no one can sense Dark World gates, discover a dark world gate on the next screen, and return to the NPC who then gives you the moon pearl. The problem is that in multiplayer, one particular Link must talk to the NPC, sense the gate, and return for the pearl. - The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: Once you first reach Kakariko Village, the leader of the village tells you that the path up Death Mountain is guarded by Gorons and tells you to stay away until the situation is resolved. Zelda games over time used the (possibly warped) Aesop "it's better to be courageous than to listen to the sound advice of others" more frequently, but this is a particularly noticeable example. After all, the only way to advance the plot is to head up Death Mountain anyway, get stopped by the Gorons, get knocked off the mountain, and give up on trying to climb it. It also doesn't help that the next step to bypassing this obstacle is for your horse to show up in town completely by chance after your failure. - Averted in the remake of Ninja Gaiden, where various number combinations and Plot Coupons can be used without having to activate the "informing" event. - In the original Metal Gear port on the NES, you can't blow up the supercomputer until you're told by the professor that you have to use plastic explosives, despite the map that came with the game clearly showing that you needed to use... plastic explosives. Rescuing the professor requires going through a maze forest that you are given no hints on the proper sequence, you just have to keep guessing. There's a trick around having to do this though — if you immediately go right in the computer room you'll glitch into the big boss room. - Replaying Ōkami? Don't attempt to skip anything. You have to do EXACTLY what Issun tells you to at the beginning or you won't progress. You can't just go up on the deck and draw the sun, you have to walk DOWN and look around until Issun says to go up on the deck and get a good look. - Vivisector: Beast Within has a very straightforward example of this: to progress, you have to activate a series of checkpoints. Your radar can only pick up on the next checkpoint by activating the previous one. Almost every checkpoint in the first half of the game is situated in a clearing usually lined with hidden fences or other barriers, obviously setting you up for a trap. Therefore, you have to trigger the trap to progress. - Fatal Frame takes it to a whole new level. At one point in the second game you need to find a key to free your sister from a cell she's locked in. The game explicitly tells you which house to look in but doesn't allow you to find the key without talking to Itsuki first and letting him tell you where exactly the key is. The worst part? If you're replaying the game, you are still supposed to talk to him in order for the key to appear. - Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf had one level where you have to use a flute to hypnotize Sam the sheepdog. In the next level, the flute is available again, and it seems that using it is the only way to get into Sam's area. However, attempting this reveals that Sam now wears earplugs and earns you a KO. Only after you recover is it possible to get to the sheep you're supposed to steal without using any items. - The Left 4 Dead series is full of these. The survivors know that certain things like emergency exit doors, rusty elevators, etc will make ton of noise and attract hordes of zombies, but they activate the things anyway to proceed. - Lampshaded in The Sacrifice campaign where there is a Tank inside a wrecked train car. There's no other way around the area and the survivors aren't too thrilled to release a super zombie, but they know they have to do it anyway to press on. - At one point in Panzer Dragoon Saga you have to talk to a guy to get information about finding The Tower. Only if you go to him directly (or more likely just wander around and find him first) he'll completely ignore you. The correct thing is to go to the bar, get drunk, and have a conversation about how Paet would be able to help; why don't you go talk to him? - In several poorly designed adventure games, it's not possible to pick up some items until your character knows that he will need them - this in spite of the fact that in different parts of the same game (as well as in adventure games in general), the point is to pick up every single thing, just in case. An example is the remake of King's Quest III; the original is more flexible and does not have this problem. - A related issue is not being able to interact with an object or person in the required way until you "examine" it, even if the action is a perfectly intuitive one; for example, The Secret of Monkey Island won't let you offer a mint to a prisoner (required to get him to talk to you) until you've noticed he has bad breath. - At one point in King's Quest VII, you need to place sulfur into a hearth to knock out the blacksmith and access his tools. However, even with sulfur in hand, the game won't let you do it until you overhear a couple of characters in another room gossip about how it can be used for this purpose. - Snatcher does this far too often, but by far the worst instance is a painfully obvious hidden passage in the hospital that you cannot "discover" until the plot allows you to. - Despite the fact that everybody knows that the password is "Ken sent me" in Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards, the player has to jump through all kinds of hoops to read it on the toilet wall. Only after that can it actually be used. That is, in the VGA remake; in the original, you can just type in the sentence whenever you feel like it. - In Shadow of Destiny, one level requires you to look at a locked door before getting the idea to find a key. Fine, makes sense. If you die during this level, you will have to replay and, again, must look at the door before trying to get the key. Except that the premise of the game means that the main character is well aware he's tried this once already. - The aversion in the original Myst demonstrates why this trope exists. Not only is it possible for anyone who's played the game before (and remembers the codes) to finish the game within minutes, but it's possible to enter the endgame (and even complete it!!) simply by brute forcing the \|\|fireplace codes\|\|. The characters will then refer to plot points you haven't discovered yet, and attempt to take from you Plot Coupons you haven't yet acquired. If you continue on through the endgame, you \|\|get trapped in D'ni with Atrus.\|\| However, \|\|if, instead of going through to the endgame, you listen to Atrus through the D'ni book, he will tell you how to get the game-winning Plot Coupon.\|\| - Myst didn't learn from Alpine Encounter. You could short-circuit the entire plot by \|\|waiting at a location, getting the backpack, and calling the inspector\|\|. - Hotel Dusk: Room 215 does this frequently. You have to do things in a very specific order, including learning how to do OTHER things you need to do. One particular room had several relatively straight forward puzzles to solve and an invisible timer. Solving the puzzles (using the game logic) is easy enough, but the game requires you to do things in a specific order and particularly read in an in-game book how to solve said puzzles. Simply 'knowing' isn't good enough. - In the (unfinished) Amiga game Muscarine or Erica's Trip, a sage asks you to bring him green snow, which at first seems an easy task as you can see three differently colored snow-clad peaks from outside his hut. However, when you get up in the mountains it turns out there is no path leading to the green peak. Only after you have tried cheating the sage with a mix of blue and yellow snow, does he give you a hint about the real solution \|\|which turns out to be dead simple - standing outside the hut you "take what you see" by clicking the distant peak. And you thought Escher's art was weird.\|\| - In the kitchen of Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, the key you need is in a cabinet door that needs a passcode. The game will not let you enter the passcode and one of the characters you are in the room with will say something along the lines of "Don't mess around with that if you don't even have a hint". However, to get the hint you have to get yourself trapped in the freezer and almost freeze to death. - Escape From St. Mary's: A game-in-a-game requires a specific sequence to win. The sequence is the same with each playthrough, but you need to find where the creator of the game hid the sequence and have a reason for the player character to interpret it as such before it will work. - Taken to extremes in Dark Seed II: every time you try to open the protagonist's closet, he'll inform you it's locked. Until later on you get a flashback very late in the game via a fortune teller session to his childhood where his mother decided to placate her son's fears of the "monsters" in said closet by pretending to lock it. When you open the closet, it has a portal to the place where one of the three Plot Coupons is held. And yet you HAVE to go through this sequence of events just because the protagonist doesn't even try THE DOORKNOB. To add insult to injury, if he mentions this to his mother, she will mock him for having assumed the door was locked all these years. - In Dragon Quest VII, there is a Groundhog's Day town, where the day resets every time you stay at the inn. The obvious solution would be to talk to the time/clock master, but he won't say or give you anything helpful until after you have talked to a certain bridge construction worker twice. There are no hints suggesting that talking to a construction worker twice will help you in your quest, and the construction worker only tells you to talk to the time/clock master. - EarthBound uses and abuses so many event flags that it's hard to tell if it is lampshading the practice or if it is one of the most notable victims. - The most blatant example occurs early in Threed, home of the game's designated Zombie Apocalypse. Exploring the town, you may find that zombies are guarding part of the cemetery after fighting your way through it. Scratch that. You have to find them, and allow them to notice your presence, in order to advance the plot. (Said plot advancement consists of \|\|a suspicious girl who leads you into a trap. Naturally, you have to fall for it. And to make the situation more annoying, there is no reason why your capture and assisted escape should cause the plot to advance, either.\|\|) - Apple Kid's very existence is built on these. In his first appearance, he will not build the device necessary to bypass an early barrier until you have already traversed a cave and reached the area where you cannot proceed any further. Later examples are just as arbitrary, but not as pointless. - After successfully completing a sidequest involving the Runaway Five, you are informed that a department store has opened in Fourside. To advance the plot, you must enter and leave the establishment, at which point \|\|your female party member is kidnapped. To get the plot to advance any further from there, you have to kill the monster responsible, even though he does not have her anymore and there is no reward for defeating him.\|\| At that point, you will be able to visit a café that you may have visited earlier. But now, talking to people inside triggers a sequence where \|\|a friend of yours winds up half-dead in a nearby alley.\|\| Then you can go back inside and look at a seemingly blank wall you couldn't reach before to... you know what? Let's just call EarthBound an Event Flag Plot and be done with it. - Averted in Lunar: The Silver Star. Before Alex and his party can go inside the White Dragon Cave, they have to get past a large block of ice, but none of them knows any magic that can get rid of it. By examining the rock, Ramus will mention off-hand that his old man has a ring that will do the trick. Normally, this would mean backtracking to Burg to get the ring from the cabinet, but you can actually go to Ramus' house and get the ring before you even go into the cave. In the Silver Star Story remake, Ramus brings the ring with him anyway. - Diablo II has a quest where you must touch five cairn stones in a certain order. The correct order is given on a particular scroll. You don't need to read the scroll; brute-force guessing works fine, as long as you have the scroll. Without it, the cairns do nothing no matter how much you click them. - Fridge Brilliance: You have to show the scroll to the local healer, too, before it works. Maybe her advice is needed to know how to activate the monoliths if merely touching them did not work. - Late in Neverwinter Nights 2, there are five statues in Arvahn that you must visit to complete the Ritual of Purification. One of them is actually located in the Swamp Ruins, the second area you get to visit in the beginning of the game (only in the early game, the door leading to it is blocked). However, by Act II, the ruins disappear from your global map, and going to the intact West Harbor won't bring you there. Instead, you have to enter Arvahn, at which point West Harbor is instantly destroyed in your absence, visit the other four statues, and then enter a portal to the ruins of West Harbor. And if you decide to do this quest before recruiting Orlen for Crossroad Keep... well, bad luck, he's gone. - Mega Man Battle Network enjoys doing this greatly. Across the series, there are too many to list. - In Breath of Fire II, most of the early game is spent chasing after a bat-winged girl, so as to bring her to justice in your town. When you finally locate her, locked in plain view in the dungeon of a castle, the game acts as though nothing special has happened, since that is the location of an arbitrarily necessary quest. But the current state of affairs there is not urgent in the slightest, and the local ruler states that anything at all would be a perfectly fine reward for your troubles in getting there, like, oh! the extradition of a wanted thief? But no, you have to do the absurd castle quests first, and THEN your character will randomly remember what the heck he ACTUALLY came here for all of a sudden, and ask for the prisoner milling about in plain view (who's all too glad to come along, owing to the Cool and Unusual Punishment she's been suffering the whole time.) - In Chrono Trigger, there is a point in the future where you must fight a boss, then read a note in the next room that describes a rat that looks like a statue, saying it knows the "secret of the dome" (namely, how to get to the area you need to go to advance the game) which you can learn by chasing and catching the rodent. You will spot the rat before fighting the boss, but you still can't chase him until you read the note. You also can't use the secret (which is simply holding L and R while pressing A at the terminals that control the platforms in the first room) until you catch the rat, even if you know exactly what to do. - In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, after \|\|Doopliss\|\| steals your identity, you have to go all the way back to Twilight Town with no partners, running into your foe along the way, who asks you to guess his real name before challenging you to an unwinnable fight (he'll take no damage). Oh, and you can't get the name right because there will be a letter missing from your input screen. You have to ignore what he says about you not being able to run away, continue on, get a new party member, run away from the identity thief again, and trek all the way back to go into the dungeon you just came from through a new entrance with your new party member, allowing you to pick up "The Letter P" from a chest, and also to listen to a parrot say the enemy's name. Note also that a capital P was available to you originally, but the lowercase wasn't. Next, make the long and annoying trip yet again, do your Rumplestiltskin thing, go all the way back to the dungeon again, and beat the (not-really all that hard) boss for good. - In Terranigma, the only way to reach the end of the end half of the Eklemata level is to first go into a cavern, slide several hundred feet down an ice-coated slope, and cause an avalanche, temporarily trapping you in (and opening the path from where you had previously been to the end of the level). A good-natured mountain-goat makes a way for you to escape and resume your quest, thankfully. - In one of the side episodes of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky, Team Charm explores a famously impenetrable dungeon. At one point they face a branching area with a path on each side. There's a third path in the room, requiring the explorers to walk through an illusionary wall, but it'll be nothing more than a standard wall until you've already taken both other paths. - A glitch in Dragon Age II resembles this trope. In the questline to recruit Isabela, at one point you're ambushed and you need to kill all the enemies. You need to wait for combat to end for a few seconds for Isabela to tell you that it was trap and that you should search the leader's body, but by this point, looting enemies immediately is probably second nature. If you loot the body before she tells you to, this can cause the game to not register the fact that you already looted the item you need, preventing you from entering the Chantry to continue with her quest. At this point, you're either forced to reload your game (which is particularly bad if you haven't saved it in a while), or continue without Isabela, making her lost. So in this case, you have to wait for her to bring it up before looting, or else you get this trope, albeit unintentional from the developers. - In Final Fantasy VIII, Squall and two party members are taking the elevator to Balamb Garden's maintenance level when the power goes out, stopping the elevator between floors. With the power out, obviously the control panel isn't going to do anything, but the game won't allow you to open the clearly-visible emergency hatch in the floor until Squall has first prodded the buttons of the panel anyhow and concluded that, no, it's not responding. - In Mass Effect's Espionage Probe side-quest, the door leading out of the mine will be disabled when you first go up to it, forcing you into the room that triggers the cave-in sabotage scene. Then you can use the door leading out. - Command & Conquer: Red Alert has not one but two, interconnected ones: - In the third-to-last mission, your goal is to capture a Chronosphere from an Allied island base. It is surrounded by Allied Technology Labs and you are told to get these first because they have triggers that will destroy said Chronosphere. So you capture the Labs and the Chronosphere suddenly explodes anyway. Destroying the Labs however will fail the mission. - In the second-to-last mission, a similar situation happens. This time the triggers are Allied Radar Stations which you are explicitly told to destroy. Alright, so you destroy them. Then sending an Engineer into the Chronosphere gets you "Mission Accomplished" with a cutscene of you using it successfully, only to get another cutscene pre-mission briefing for the last mission where you see it self-destruct anyway for plot reasons. Oddly, should you destroy the Chronosphere instead of capturing it after getting rid of the Radar Stations, you still get a "Mission Accomplished" even though now the next video is already the self-destruction one. - In Adventurers!, upon finding the fourth energy crystal, Karn explains that they can't take it unless they first go back to town and talk to an NPC, even though this makes no logical sense. - In universe example from Goblins. 4 keys to the chest are behind magic barriers and to pass the barrier person must have a specific stat way below average. One party is unable to open it, since neither one is The Ditz.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyIdiotsMayPass
Only Fatal to Adults - TV Tropes So the Depopulation Bomb has dropped, usually in the form of a highly selective virus or bacteria that is only fatal for adults, leaving the kids to inherit the world. Frequently seen in After the End fiction, Only Fatal to Adults has two variations: In the first, death strikes at the onset of puberty, killing only the sexually mature. In the second, the highly selective agent of the Depopulation Bomb kills in the late teens or in early adulthood, killing only the socially mature. Another important distinction is whether the Depopulation Bomb is only a concern that one time, or if it will begin to affect the kids when they grow up. Due to the difficulty in convincingly presenting a hypothetical weapon with such specific depopulation capabilities (especially if in the second form, where the bomb seems able to detect a set of legal and social traditions that are only very loosely connected to biological changes), a popular form of this is to have a non-discriminating apocalypse wipe out mankind in general, then re-populate the planet, say, sixteen years later, with a bunch of infants who were locked away in a survival shelter at the time. If the Depopulation Bomb is Only Fatal to Adults, then this trope justifies Parental Abandonment. It also justifies storylines in which children and teens have to take on the responsibilities of adults, or form extended families of their own in order to survive. Can also justify Teens Are Monsters if teens survive and are left to fend for themselves. In some variations, due to the ages of the characters and the intended audience, guns are rare and the Nerf Arm is ubiquitous. Sometimes, there are even lasers. Will eventually lead to There Are No Adults. This will pretty much always lead to a Teenage Wasteland. Compare Gendercide. Also see Improbable Infant Survival and World of No Grandparents. ## Examples: - Downplayed in Death Note. One of the rules of the titular object is that it cannot be used to kill people under 780 days old (a little over two years old). This means that children above that age are fair game, however. - The disease from Ochazuke Nori's "Infection on Flight 999". It starts with a high fever, intense pain, and blueness in the face. In anyone over ten, this is followed shortly by the head swelling up and exploding. For those under ten, it's highly unpleasant, but at least not immediately fatal. (The symptoms are nasty, and we don't find out what happens to kids long-term.) The ending raises concerns about it rendering humanity extinct. - The DCU miniseries World Without Grownups had all the adults spontaneously disappear from the face of the earth. Robin, Superboy, and Impulse had to get everything together if humanity was to be saved, leading directly to their formation of Young Justice. - Naturally, the DC Animated Universe provided its own spin in the Justice League episode "Kid Stuff", in which Mordred banishes all the adults from Earth, and Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern have to get turned into preteens to go back and stop him. - In the Pre-Crisis Earth-1 Superman continuity, Superman's adoptive parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent, died after contracting a virus that only affected adults. Superman was still Superboy at the time, so the virus did not affect him. Several years later, Lois Lane and Lana Lang contract the same virus and almost die before the now-adult Superman realizes that the virus entered his body as well, and his body created antibodies to counteract it. - "Kids Rule OK", a strip in the '70s British comic Action. The vast majority of adults die, leaving only rampaging gangs of kids that start to beat seven kinds of crap out of each other... until the comic fell foul of Moral Guardians and they all make peace after being given a stern talking-to. - One Hellblazer mini-arc features John Constantine's niece being enlisted to travel to an island where a group of vampire children, all under the age of 13, attack any adults who come near the island but don't harm other children. - This kind of thing seems to happen once a week in the universe of premier Marissa Picard, where Stephen Ratliff uses this kind of stuff to justify regularly allowing his Kids Crew protagonists to have command of starships, starbases, entire systems, etc... One story in particular had a group of hijackers use a sleeping gas that only affected adults for no apparent reason beyond this. - Eiga Sentai Scanranger had a Monster of the Week armed with poison that dehydrates anyone who touches it/drinks it, but only if they're over 25. It's unclear why that was brought up when what wasn't brought up was what the villains hoped to accomplish. The poison would only work on one of the six rangers, for crying out loud. - In Day of the Barney everyone over the age of thirteen disappears. And by "disappears", I mean Barney brainwashes all the younger children to slaughter them en masse before joining their purple friend in happy fun-fun time forever. And when they reach the age of thirteen, they get to go on a vacation... - A plague of this nature takes out nearly all the adult Smurfs in Papa Smurf's generation, leaving him as the only parent figure of a hundred young Smurfs in Empath: The Luckiest Smurf. - The 1970 Roger Corman cult film Gas-s-s-s, where an industrial accident releases a poison gas that kills everyone on earth over the age of 25. In the rest of the film, the main characters have to learn to survive on their own. The concept is laden with Fridge Logic: the gas was designed for use in The Vietnam War, but the average age of a soldier in 'Nam was 19. Maybe it just didn't work right? - Inverted in Clive Barker's The Plague, in which every child on Earth under the age of nine suddenly falls into a coma, and every baby born in the next ten years is also born comatose. - Night of the Comet has elements of this. The survivors are teens because \|\|the few people we see who were properly shielded just happened to be in that age group, while nearly the whole planetary population were out watching the sky.\|\| Probably some adults survived aboard submarines and other suitable places. One wonders about the other side of the planet. - This is apparently the background story for MST3K veteran City Limits, set in a post-apocalyptic Teenage Wasteland. James Earl Jones escaped the effect because, well, James Earl Jones! - Riot Girls: The pandemic only killed adults, leaving everyone else. - In the novel Worlds Apart by Joe Haldeman (second book of his Worlds trilogy), Earth has been devastated by the second type. He ties the disease to when the body reduces production of human growth hormone. So there are some adults around because they suffer from acromegaly, a disease where adults produce too much human growth hormone. - This was the premise for Shade's Children by Garth Nix. Except here the world is run by evil overlords who chop up anyone over 14 for body parts. When they took over, though, everyone over 14 instantly disappeared and beyond this being the fault of the overlords it's never completely explained. - In The Subtle Knife, the second book of the His Dark Materials trilogy, there's a world in which there are soul-eating 'spectres' that only target adults. At one point the heroes are in a city only occupied by children, although it turns out that most of the adults left, rather than being caught by the spectres, and will return once the spectres move on. - The plot of the Blake and Mortimer book The Voronov Plot revolved around a virus recovered by a KGB scientist from a crashed Soviet satellite which was only lethal to adults. The scientist, Dr. Voronov, a Stalin admirer, planned to use the virus to overthrow the Soviet Union and conquer the West. Late in the book, he starts using the virus in a particularly despicable fashion: \|\|he acquires a network of contacts in the West all with small children who are injected with the virus. Afterwards, the parents send the infected children near key political figures who under their orders, innocently ask them if they can kiss them on the cheek. Not suspecting an innocent child, they accept... Only to die a few hours later.\|\| - The children's book The Girl Who Owned a City. The set 'death age' here was twelve, and most of the adults knew about it before they died. - This is most of the plot of The Fire-Us Trilogy. A band of young children are living on their own, but eventually find a group of religious zealots who go so far as to name themselves after various religious passages. - \|\|In fact, it turns out that the zealots are responsible for the virus, so as to more easily find the Second Coming.\|\| - The kids also find a group of elderly women in a retirement home, who survived only because post-menopausal women were the only adults that weren't affected by the virus. - The story also deconstructs the trope: without adults to take care of them, many children end up dying from starvation, accidents, disease, or wild animals. - An interesting variation: In Larry Niven's A World Out of Time, only pre-adolescents can use the immortality treatment and cease aging, while those who pass puberty become immune to the treatment and age and die normally. Rediscovering an immortality treatment usable by adults and breaking the status quo of the immortal children's hegemony forms a large part of the book's second half. - In David Weber's Honor Harrington, people can get a treatment that will double or triple their lifespans, but only while they're still young. There are three levels of effectiveness. First-generation Prolong can be performed as late as 25. Second-generation treatment is only effective into the early teens, but gains a century or so more; Third-generation, it is implied, will extend life even more effectively (it's very new, so the first people to get it haven't grown old yet), but requires genetic manipulation even before the recipient's birth. - Availability of Prolong is the single biggest quality of life difference between various worlds. For instance, it becomes a plot point that the Kingdom of Manticore is welcomed in an area they annex simply because Prolong had not previously been available there, save to the very rich, but the Manticoran public health system guarantees it to all. - The post-apocalyptic young adult novel series Countdown began with the release of a deadly virus that somehow turned everyone but young adults into black goo. - Inverted in the Left Behind series - in addition to righteous people in general, all children under an unspecified age are Caught Up in the Rapture. Presumably this would be justified by means of Children Are Innocent. - Except that any denomination that believes in the original sin sees babies as inherently sinful. - Except that many denominations that believe in original sin also believe in the Age of Accountability, which denotes the age at which a person becomes mature enough to be held responsible by God for his or her sins. - The premise of the book series Gone. All people over the age of 15 disappear one day, and continue to disappear throughout the book, i.e once one turns 15, they vanish. \|\|At the end of the first book, Sam and Caine figure out how to avoid disappearing. They later tell the other kids, giving them a choice of staying in the FAYZ or "stepping out" when they turn 15.\|\| - Only Fatal to Adults is combined with Gendercide in the backstory to George R. R. Martin's first novel Dying of the Light. Part of what has shaped the Kavalan culture is a biological weapon that kills any sexually mature woman. - In the novel Idlewild by Nick Sagan (Carl Sagan's son) \|\|a group of teens live in a virtual boarding school. It turns out that every human on Earth was wiped out by a disease. The kids were genetically engineered to be immune to the disease, and just before the end of civilization were placed in vaults and connected to a virtual world to be raised. Through the course of their virtual lives, they are educated and trained in professions that will help them rebuild society. They were aware that the boarding school that they attended was virtual, but didn't know that the rest of their lives were also virtual. Needless to say, it comes as a shock that everywhere they've ever been and everyone that they've ever known, their families and friends (except the few that attend their school), are all simulations.\|\| - In Lord of the Flies the plane crash in the beginning kills all of the adults on board leaving the children to fend for themselves. - In Chris Adrian's book The Children's Hospital, all the adults \|\|except Ishmael\|\| die of the strange dust disease; \|\|protagonist Jemma is the last to die, and dies as Ishmael leads the now-awake children out of the hospital and onto the new world.\|\| - The Reapers trilogy by Andrew Butcher relies on this trope: everyone over 18 dies of the mysterious Sickness, leaving the protagonists to fend for themselves. It turns out \|\|it was a bunch of alien invaders who want to take Earth's children as slaves.\|\| - Donaya Haymond's Waking Echoes has The Famine Fever, which is Only Fatal To Adults And Children, sparing the adolescents alone. \|\|This is because the Creator God of the dimension did it as a Biblical-style scourge. The adults could be judged by their deeds and the children were innocent, but the youths required further testing.\|\| - The Gentleman Bastard series has Black Whisper, a plague that typically gives anyone who hasn't entered puberty a case of the sniffles and everyone who's entered or completed it a case of screaming death. An outbreak in one particular district is what makes protagonist Locke Lamora an orphan at a young age. - The disease that plagues Rhine's generation in The Chemical Garden Trilogy. The women all die at age twenty, and the men all die at age twenty-five. - The Young Adult novel Starters, by Lissa Price, is set in a post-war dystopia where only the very old and the very young survive. The young can temporarily 'rent out' their bodies so the elderly can enjoy a virtual youth. - "The Underdweller" by William F. Nolan has the world populated by children because \|\|aliens massacred all the adults to break the continuity of human civilization without actually destroying the species\|\|, or so the protagonist theorizes. He survived because \|\|he was in a sewer tunnel where the rays didn't reach.\|\| - In the Biblical Book of Exodus, only those under 20 make it to the Promised Land. Those who are older than 20 were wiped out by various means as a result of their complaining...and the fact that they were a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits wandering around the desert for 40 years. Even Moses doesn't make it in. - Neptune's Children by Bonnie Dobkin is this, with the kids trapped in an amusement park. - Inverted by the RM virus in Partials: all new babies die of it within days. At the beginning of the novel, the youngest living human is graduating from school. - The Star Trek novel The Three Minute Universe features a race called Sackers, who require uncomfortably or even fatally hot environments to survive in, though younger ones can stay alive in cooler temperatures. \|\|As a result, when the environmental controls fail on the Sacker ship, the adults are all killed and their young are left to run the ship and carry out their plan.\|\| - In Supernova Era by Cixin Liu, radiation sickness caused by a nearby supernova slowly kills off everyone over the age of 13, leaving behind a world governed by children. - Star Trek: The Original Series has a planet that is an exact duplicate of Earth (amazing!) in the episode "Miri", on which the only survivors of a mysterious plague are a band of savage children. Their childhoods last centuries, but they are doomed to die at the onset of puberty. It eventually is revealed to be the result of a flawed life-prolongation project that got loose — ageing is indeed slowed (hence the centuries-long childhood of the survivors), but something goes wrong after puberty, causing madness and death. - The Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Terra Nova" has the crew going to humanity's first colony outside our solar system to determine why contact was lost several decades earlier. It was discovered that a radioactive asteroid hit the planet and all the adults died from the radiation. The children developed an immunity to it and survived by living in nearby caves. - Jeremiah takes place fifteen years after a plague wiped out anyone over puberty. \|\|It's later revealed that the plague was a synthetic bioweapon which was designed this way as a "mercy weapon", to kill anyone in the targeted area old enough to fight back, but "sparing" the children whose parents you just killed. It got out of control and destroyed the world.\|\| - The Tribe has this as its backstory: a mysterious virus kills basically everyone over 18 or 21 and the kids and teens are left to fend for themselves. The show was half teen soap and half Cozy Catastrophe, and there were even lasers with stun settings. All it was missing was that A Clockwork Orange element of graphic, violent, badassness to make it realistic and gritty, but it tried. - The premise of the Canadian series 2030 CE is that, since 2002, no one has lived past the age of 30, due to something called Progressive Ageing Syndrome. - The Stargate Atlantis episode "Childhood's End" (unrelated to the Arthur C. Clarke novel) involved a village where everyone committed ritual suicide after reaching a certain age because they thought it was required to protect them from the Wraith. In truth, the Ancients set up an EMP field that incapacitated any technology straying into it and if the population grows too large, they will leave the field and get culled. Hence the suicides. - Japanese TV series Bokura No Yuuki, is a Lord of the Flies reminiscent story of the latter case, where a microbe kills anyone 20 and older. They fortunately came up with convincing enough sounding Applied Phlebotinum to justify it. - The world of 2030 CE is plagued with Progressive Aging Syndrome, a disease that causes rapid aging and eventually death by a person's 30th Birthday. - An episode of Andromeda centered around a Lost Colony of Commonwealth children, who, due to years of Voltarium exposure, would cause them to die by adulthood. It's not so much only fatal to adults so much as 20 years of radiation exposure with no radiation treatments kills you. - An episode of Farscape centers around Chiana running off after hearing of the death of her brother to join a group of children who either jump to their death in a sort of trial (which is usually timed to coincide with the birth of a baby) or die of long-term radiation exposure. Crichton figures out that the caves they live in magnify the radiation exposure so they can live normal lives if they move to the surface. - The series The Sparticle Mystery has this as its premise. Everyone over the age of fifteen mysteriously disappears. It is later found out that \|\|all of the adults were transported to another clone dimension\|\|. - In the New Zealand series The Cul De Sac every adult disappears for unknown reasons. At the end of the first season \|\|it is found out that the kids were "taken" to a copy of their world for unknown reasons\|\|. - Inverted in Star Trek: Picard. \|\|The Borg and the Changelings have altered the transporters so that a part of Picard's Borg-altered DNA is implanted into everyone who goes through them. As they use a certain part of the brain that stops growing at age 25, the elder people going through them wouldn't be affected, but the younger ensigns and the like would, being assimilated once a signal is sent.\|\| - The Carbon Plague in Cybergeneration uses this trope. At first, everyone who catches it dies. First kids start surviving it, then adults do. Some of the kids that survive it come out a little different. It's much less of a Depopulation Bomb than other instances of the trope. The death toll is around 5% of the world's population. Possibly a subversion: fear over the Carbon Plague allows the U.S. Mega Corps to found the Incorporated States of America and children are now demonized and feared with less political power or autonomy than before. Of course, the ability to turn your arms into guns might be a relevant tradeoff there. - In Bliss Stage, the Bliss only affects humans who are eighteen years or older. This means that everyone under eighteen is safe, but only until their eighteenth birthday... - The Dark Eldar in Warhammer 40,000 got started when the birth of a new Chaos God turned out like this. Mix with Teens Are Monsters and serve for ten thousand horrifying years. - The Vitusdance in Engel killed off every adult in the world. And it happened more than once. No wonder that centuries from now Earth has managed to rebuild itself into a feudal-level society. - Non-plague example: In the domain of Odaire in Ravenloft, the living puppet Maligno murdered all the adults except his creator, leaving the children to fend for themselves. - The Plague in KidWorld only kills adults or, failing that, renders them blind. Everyone in the world still carries it though, so the eyesight of a teenager will get progressively worse as he/she grows up until it is lost altogether. - The Miry Virus in D20 Apocalypse. It often bypasses children altogether (having a saving throw DC of 5 + target's age). - Control: After getting the Black Rock Prism and while giving Jesse some answers, Marshall tries to justify \|\|kidnapping Dylan\|\| by stating that all adults in Ordinary had vanished by the time FBC arrived. - In one of the most recent events in Dragon Vale, which had all of the adult wizards and witches turned to stone thanks to unpredictable energy floating up from the Surface. Downplayed in that they're still alive like this. At any rate, it's up to you and the young folk to find new dragons who can harness this energy to reverse the effects of the wayward forces. - A somewhat more indirect version explains the existence of Little Lamplight in Fallout 3. The kids were on a field trip when the bombs fell, the adults all died searching the wastes, and the Vault 87 dwellers wouldn't let the kids in \|\|thereby sparing them from being turned into Super Mutants by Vault-Tec's evil experiments, but the kids don't know that.\|\| The kids' distaste for adults became tradition; any Lamplighter who turns 16 gets forced out and sent across the Wastes to "Big Town", which considering the state of the place \|\|at least until the player shows up\|\| is effectively this trope. - Reading some of those diary entries, it was hard not to see something a bit more sinister in the way those kids were treated. - The design document for Vault 29 in the canceled Van Buren plays with this trope — families were selected for the Vault, but everyone older than 15 was either turned away or redirected to another Vault in the chaos. A sentient supercomputer was to raise the kids. - In Final Fantasy VI, Kefka's death ray claims everyone over 18 in Mobliz. There is no evidence that any children died with them. It's unclear whether this was coincidence, Kefka messing with them, or some kind of Heroic Sacrifice on the part of the adults. - Nintendo Wars: Inverted in Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. The Creeper only infects people under the age of 20/21 \|\|(at first)\|\|. - In games in The Sims series, toddlers can't die, and children can rarely die. Teens and older can starve to death, however, if a child or toddler gets too hungry they will be taken away by Sims Social Services. This child can then be adopted into a different household. - In Terranigma, the Asmodeus virus wipes out everyone in the city it gets deployed in except for one little girl. It's unclear if she was the only child in the city or ended up being somehow immune to the virus. - During a side-event in Tales of Symphonia, Genis's older sister Raine is discovered to have contracted an illness called the Ozette Flu, which Genis openly states is fatal if contracted in adulthood. This requires Genis and Mithos to climb to the top of a mountain to get a flower able to cure it. - At the beginning of Yoshi's Story. Baby Bowser transforms Yoshi's Island into a figure book, and all the Yoshis become zombie-like (not dangerous, just zoned out and miserable). The only ones that weren't affected were a couple of Yoshi eggs that later hatched and took on Baby Bowser. - In Tales of the Questor, an ancient elf king wished for eternal youth for his people. He got it: Elves now die around age 20 ("Just old enough to make more elves") - which more or less caused the collapse of their society and left the survivors living as thieves and scavengers. - Also, there have been references to "the Crimson Plague" or "the Scarlet Plague," which according to Word of God decimated the Racconan population on at least two occasions, killing the very old and very young—- the main reason that, despite being a long-lived race, the current population of Antillia has very few extremely old Racconans and very few families with multiple children... - Lost Boys of the Cascades is a web-published story about children struggling to survive after a pandemic killed all the adults. - A Lighter and Softer variation happens in Lloyd in Space, where a space cloud merely paralyses adults rather than kills them, while kids and teens are unaffected. - Played with in Young Justice (2010): five powerful magic users cast a spell that makes every adult on the planet disappear. However, halfway through the episode, it's revealed that they actually split the world across two dimensions — from the adults' perspective, every child in the world under 18 just vanished. Meanwhile, Captain Marvel (who can switch from a kid to an adult) shifts between worlds when he transforms, coordinating the effort to fuse the worlds back into one. Notably, the kids' dimension is portrayed as fairly stable, with the older kids looking after the younger ones and waiting patiently for the heroes to save the day. The adults' dimension suffers widespread rioting and panic, though some of this was made worse by the Light's interference. - Many common childhood illnesses can be quite serious if caught as adults and could lead to severe complications for the fetus if caught while pregnant. - The Varicella zoster virus (aka Chickenpox), while mostly harmless to children, can be fatal if contracted in adulthood, which is why before a vaccine was available, parents would often try to get their children infected while they were still young so they could develop immunity, and those opposed to vaccination still do. Since there are still minor risks in childhood (approximately the same risks one would have from a case of the flu, plus the obvious danger of passing on the virus to a non-immune adult), the development of the vaccine has been quite welcome. And if that's not enough, even if you get it as a child it can turn up again when you're an adult in the much more uncomfortable form of Herpes Zoster (shingles). - The same reasoning (and infection attempts) is often applied to Rubella (aka German measles), at least for young girls. In children, it's unpleasant but mostly harmless - in pregnant women, it is extremely serious, able to blind or kill the fetus. - Mumps, while not usually fatal, is much more unpleasant to adults than children. It's actually known to sometimes cause sterility in adult men due to severe inflammation and swelling of the testes. - Most in-house pesticides work in this manner, killing only the adult insects. A second "bug bomb" is set off a week or so later to get any that were still in eggs. - Similarly, treatments for head lice do not affect eggs, so a second treatment must be applied around 10 days after the first. - Huntington's chorea only becomes noticeable in adulthood (the exact age varies, but it often only manifests after the carrier has had children). - Huntington's chorea is also terrifying with a dose of Paranoia Fuel thrown in. It's fatal in 100% of cases, generally between ages 40 and 50. It's also a dominant genetic disorder, so when you see your parent wasting away from it, you know there's a 50% chance that that'll be you in 25 years, and the same probability applies to each of your siblings. So, do you get tested and know for sure whether you have the gene, or remain ignorant until you're in your 40s and the symptoms either do or don't appear? If you do test positive, do you have children anyway or resign yourself to dying childless in order to avoid passing on the gene? - According to The Other Wiki, the people killed in the 1918 influenza pandemic were mostly otherwise healthy young adults. This was due to a phenomenon known as a Cytokine Storm, where the body's immune system is sent into overdrive. The very young and old were relatively unaffected, due to their less robust immune systems, which reduced the damage that could be done. - The 2020 Coronavirus pandemic is this, as it has been primarily fatal to older adults (though younger ones have died too.) Young children, however, often do not show symptoms at all, or may only have mild ones. Not in the case as of 2021 where the Coronavirus variants meant that even those as young as infants aren't safe from it. - In 1620, 70 men and women, along with 32 children, boarded the Mayflower, leaving England for Virginia. They ended up in Massachusetts where, woefully unprepared for the upcoming winter, the adults came down with various illnesses like pneumonia. By the end of the winter, only 20 of the adults were still left alive. Miraculously, though, nearly all the children survived, though nearly all of them had lost one or both of their parents. - Elephant endotheliotropic herpes virus inverts this trope. Though this disease, which is fatal in approximately 80% of cases, can affect elephants of any age note : The oldest elephant recorded as having died from it was 42 years old., most fatalities have involved Asian elephants whose ages were still in single digits. Since Asian elephants are an endangered species, this makes the virus particularly devastating as it is killing calves that might otherwise have grown up to have calves of their own. Fortunately, efforts are being made to find a vaccine.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyFatalToAdults
Only a Lighter - TV Tropes Ready! Aim! . . . Fire? A cigarette lighter designed to look like something else, such as a toy ... or a gun, in which case it may become a Weapon for Intimidation. There may be some actual toys or guns that look exactly like it, causing a character to mix the two up. In the latter case, this can easily be either Played for Laughs or Played for Drama, depending on the situation. Compare Couldn't Find a Lighter, where the thing being used to light a cigarette or similar doesn't look like a lighter because it isn't. Also compare "Bang!" Flag Gun. ## Examples: - Case Closed: The third episode involves a Statue of Liberty cigarette lighter that is not mistaken for something else, but is used to show (since she knows what it is) that one particular character has been secretly trespassing. - The Cowboy Bebop movie features a lighter shaped like a grenade at one point. - GTO: The Early Years: When Eikichi sneaks into Nao Kadena's apartment, he watches her point a gun at two guys who seem to be yakuza and order them to leave. As soon as they're gone, she turns the gun on him and pulls the trigger, saying he knows too much. It's revealed to be a lighter, and only singes his hair, but he still shits himself in fright. - The third episode of Trigun is "Peace Maker", which sees an outlaw boss Dual Wielding long-barrel revolvers that are actually matching cigarette lighters. This Harmless Villain with a Slasher Smile plots a bank heist posing as The Hero, Vash The Stampede. - In Batman #171, the Riddler uses a pistol lighter to trick Batman into attacking him when he is not actually doing anything illegal. - In the Catwoman comic, Catwoman's fixer Zed had a pistol shaped cigarette lighter that nearly caused him to get shot on one occasion. - Towards the end of Transmetropolitan's run Spider Jerusalem develops a fast-progressing neurodegenerative disorder with very little chance of recovering. In the epilogue issue he has barely any manual dexterity left, \|\|his assistants leave him alone for a minute and he whips out what looks like a gun and slowly draws it towards his head, then lights a cigarette with it. Revealing that he is recovering after all.\|\| - Jeremy James: After the young boy Jeremy James has heard that the usual way to rob a bank is to get a gun and say "stick 'em up", he suddenly sees a man queueing in the bank who is holding a gun. He tells the bank manager, who discovers that the gun is in fact a cigarette lighter. However, it turns out that the man is a wanted villain, and for once, the impossibly logical Jeremy James is right about something. - In Batman (1966) episode "Hi Diddle Riddle", the Riddler uses a pistol lighter to trick Batman into attacking him when he is not actually doing anything illegal. - The first episode of Black Books has a subplot where Fran is going slowly mad trying to figure out what a bizarre object she bought to sell in her shop is. At the end of the episode, Manny wanders into her shop and immediately identifies it as a novelty cigarette lighter. - Similar scenario happens in an episode of Happy Days where a sheriff, who has a vendetta for the Fonz, proceeds to pat him down, and finds what appears to be a switch-blade. He's about to arrest him before Fonzie reveals that it's actually a novelty comb. - Hogan's Heroes: In the very first episode, a Nazi is sent in disguised as a prisoner to infiltrate their operation. One of the tricks they use to discredit him with his higher ups is showing him the novelty replica-Luger cigarette lighters they're mass producing, so that later, when he sees a real Luger, he fires it, thinking it's a cigarette lighter. - On a Christmas Episode of Just Shoot Me!, Nina scares some carolers by pulling out her pistol lighter. She later gives it to Jack as a present, and it gets him in trouble when he gets caught in an illegal immigration sting (long story). - MASH: One episode featured a sleazy chopper pilot who paid Korean children to scavenge for metal in minefields and such which he turned into sourveniers for GIs. One of the novelties he made from the scrap was a pistol lighter, which he claimed was his biggest seller. He tried passing it off as a gift for one of his "suppliers" who'd been injured by a mine explosion, much to the disgust of Hawkeye and BJ. - Jessica's friend Horace has a pistol lighter in the Murder, She Wrote* episode "Footnote to Murder". He is initially shown apparently on the verge of suicide, but actually just writing an angsty poem, and when Jessica arrives just as he pulls it out she says he's going to kill himself ... because she knows it's a lighter and thinks he smokes too much. He then pulls it in a scuffle with the Victim of the Week, just for the pleasure of watching the tough guy suddenly collapse in fear while he casually lights up. And then right at the end he goes to light a cigarette while he and Jessica are checking out of the hotel, and the receptionist hits the alarm. - In My Name Is Earl, Richard Chubby, the owner of Club Chubby, used to carry an automatic and an identical looking squirt gun filled with vodka that he used to use to freshen up patrons drink. There was more than one instance when he got the guns mixed up and shot a patron's glass. Chubby died some time later after doing vodka shots from the squirt gun, but accidentally using the real gun instead of the one with vodka in it. - The Pretender: In the episode "Scott Free", reluctant criminal Scott threatens to shoot Jarod with a gun, but when he pulls the trigger it's revealed to be a lighter, and he explains that so far he's got away with just appearing dangerous. At the climax of the episode, gang leader Nick threatens Jarod with his own gun, only to find that Jarod has sneakily remodeled it and now it's also just a lighter. - Sense8: After Lito's boyfriend leaves him for not standing up for a friend Lito becomes depressed and tries to shoot himself. When he pulls the trigger it turns out the "gun" is actually a novelty lighter. This serves as a wake-up call for Lito who snaps out of his funk and sets out to make things right. - Sherlock: "A Study in Pink" ends with Sherlock confronting the cabbie who's been forcing people to play a deadly game of picking one of two pills to see which is poisoned or he'll just shoot them. Sherlock picks the gun, which turns out to be a lighter. He comments that he knows a real gun when he sees one. - Squid Game: Gi-hun gives his young daughter a claw machine prize for her birthday, which appears to be a gun, but is actually a lighter. He decides to hold onto it and when the salesman initially attempts to make a deal with him, Gi-Hun points it at him, causing the salesman to raise both his hands. When Gi-hun pulls the trigger, the salesman is relieved to find that it was just a lighter. - In the Top Gear Middle East special, when the cast are passing through a tense border check, one of the guards finds a lighter in Richard Hammond's car that is shaped like a rifle round, and is understandably pissed off by the carelessness of bringing such a thing. - In Berlin's early video "The Metro," Terri Nunn's character steals a pistol from a sleeping soldier's bag on the titular metro. She later points the pistol at a window where two lovers' silhouettes are shown making love, only to be accosted by the soldier whose gun she'd stolen. The soldier grabs the gun barrel and pulls the trigger, revealing that the gun is a lighter. The soldier lights the cigarette in his mouth, and walks away as the gun falls from Nunn's hand. - Orbital: In an awkwardly dated moment from "The Saint" music video, Paul and Phil whip out pistols as they're passing through an airport security checkpoint. The security officers pull out their own guns, and the situation looks like a Mexican Standoff—then Paul and Phil reveal that their "guns" are really just lighters. Then the security officers laugh and wave them through. - Inverted in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Dual Destinies: One of the Phantom's weapons is a gun that can be folded and disguised as a lighter. - In Spirit Hunter: NG, Seiji explains that he learned how to pick locks so he could pilfer a gun from his father's safe. Turns out the gun in question was just a very fancy lighter, gifted to his father from a friend in Sicily. At least his lockpicking skills prove useful in the game. - Some cities and states have actually banned the marketing and sale of novelty lighters in their jurisdictions, because of their resemblance to ordinary toys, and may present a greater risk of fire or injury. - Tinder pistols from the 17-18th centuries were the first novelty lighters. They were essentially pistols of the time, but with no barrel, no bullet and an expanded flashpan. A waxy wick was put into the flashpan with all the gunpowder, and ignition set the waxy wick on fire. After that, the user lit his pipe from this fire.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyALighter
Only I Can Kill Him - TV Tropes "I admit you're very skilled. But apparently Cloud is the only one who can eliminate me." The protagonists of any given story are, of course, larger than life. Expecting the various extras and Red Shirts to actually accomplish something noteworthy would probably come off as anticlimactic. But even among the various named characters, there's clearly a hierarchy involved. That hierarchy, among other things, mandates that only the protagonist can achieve certain things. Nowhere is this more clear than when battling the Big Bad, often Because Destiny Says So. Anyone other than the main character will almost inevitably fail to defeat the Big Bad. It's a rule of drama. Any poor schmuck who tries, be he The Lancer, the hero's closest friend, the hero's Love Interest, or a random soldier, will almost certainly be cut down without the Big Bad breaking much of a sweat. There will be gloating. There may be slow-motion footage of their fall, and dramatic music. Camera pans to the hero. Cue the Unstoppable Rage. The reason writers came up with the Hero Secret Service, which gives the rest of the Five-Man Band something important to do without directly taking part in The Hero's mission. Often overlaps with the Chosen One or The Only One, as well as This Is Something He's Got to Do Himself. Differs from The Only One Allowed to Defeat You in that it's a matter of raw ability, not personal preference. ## Examples - Happens all the time in Bleach, but most strangely in the Captain Amagai Filler Arc. \|\|Ichigo has almost nothing to do with Amagai; he only meets him for the first time shortly before he fights and defeats him. And this is in a city filled with badass captains. The only possible reason he would have for being the one to kill him is because he can overcome Amagai's zanpakuto-suppressing ability. This is despite the fact that Captain-Commander Yamamoto, who actually does have a history with Amagai and is the target of his misguided revenge plot, is more than capable of fighting with only his bare hands.\|\| - The Bount Filler Arc is almost as bad; the villain Kariya has little interaction with Ichigo and instead establishes himself as a nemesis to The Lancer Uryu. But when Uryu fights him, he inexplicably overlooks a chance to strike a killing blow and the artifact temporarily restoring his powers breaks, leaving it to Ichigo to finish the battle. - In terms of actual canon, Aizen can only be beaten by Ichigo because \|\|a) Ichigo is one of the only people who hasn't seen Aizen's Shikai, Kyouka Suigetsu, and b) is the only one of those people with enough actual power to even injure Aizen.\|\| Seems to be subverted, but is actually played straight once Aizen \|\|forsakes Kyouka Suigetsu for the sake of greater power through the Hogyoku's evolutions, as once again, Ichigo is the only one who can transcend far enough to actually harm the transcended Aizen, in large part thanks to his ridiculous heritage\|\|. - A variation of this occurs in Cowboy Bebop between Spike Spiegel and Vicious, as each declares that only he can kill the other. \|\|In the final episode Vicious dies for sure, but whether Spike survives or not is left uncertain\|\|. - Subverted a couple of times in Dragon Ball. In the first case, General Red, the leader of the Red Ribbon Army, a criminal organization that's made an enemy of Goku, is killed off by \|\|his assistant, General Black\|\|. In the second instance, Goku \|\|sacrifices himself to stop Cell from destroying the Earth, so his son Gohan ultimately has to kill Cell instead\|\|. - Fairy Tail plays with this trope in different ways: - An early arc had a Big Bad in the form of Lyon, who learned under the same teacher as Gray. As a result, it's Gray who ultimately defeats Lyon. Natsu's opponent is revealed to serve the Greater-Scope Villain of that portion of the story, but in this arc acted as a subordinate of Lyon. - In the Phantom arc, Natsu did fight two of Phantom's top combatants, but Phantom's master Jose is brought down by Fairy Tail's master and Big Good Makarov. - Inverted with Zeref, who bluntly states that the only being who can kill him is the demon E.N.D., which refers to \|\| Etherious Natsu Dragneel, the younger brother he revived with the purpose of killing him\|\|. It's then subverted when \|\|Natsu forgoes killing Zeref using the one power that could potentially do the job because Happy intervened since Zeref admits that Natsu will die with Zeref since as an Etherious, Natsu's life is linked to Zeref's magic. When they fight for the final time, Natsu does win, but lets Mavis strike the final blow in the only way that could kill two immortals (Natsu is saved from dying with Zeref thanks to outside intervention on the part of Lucy and Gray).\|\| - In Inuyasha, Big Bad Naraku is threatening the whole region, yet there are only three fighters outside of the protagonist's foursome that fight the big bad for more than a single scene of them getting slaughtered. Slightly subverted towards the end, where a Buddhist priest manages to take a pot-shot at one of the greater villains, and a Shinto monk actually defeats another (who ends up taking over his body). A pity because \|\|the villain is Naraku's heart, and if the guy had killed him instead of absorbing him, the series Big Bad would have ended.\|\| - Justified in K — only a King can kill another King (though it seems that a King's second can kill their own King under certain circumstances). So the Kings — focal points of the Ensemble Cast — end up filling this role. - Played with in Monster. Dr. Tenma and Nina are both trying to find and kill the eponymous Monster Johan: Tenma because he saved Johan's life, Nina because she was the one who shot him the first time, and both because neither wants the other to have blood on their hands. \|\|In the end, it's a vengeful father who shoots Johan... and Tenma is the one who saves Johan's life once again, thus inverting the trope.\|\| - Subverted in Rave Master with the Arc Villain Hardner. The Hero Haru Glory was able to defeat this foe only because Hardner had already fought and defeated one of Haru's friends in battle immediately before Haru arrived. \|\|The two fights back-to-back wore down the regeneration abilities Hardner possessed which rendered him virtually immortal, leaving him vulnerable to take more damage than he could heal.\|\| - Justified in Shootfighter Tekken by the main hero's father having become a pacifist at this point, but since his son shows an unstoppable drive to face down the Big Bad anyway, he tutors him specifically to do so. Lampshaded by other characters fighting other mooks, or being ambushed by them, but everyone in the entire series knowing and stating only the hero can take on Iron Kiba. In hospital scenes and conversations between trainers, it's acknowledged even further. Only Kiba does not seem to know, as he is completely focused on the hero's father instead because of their battle in the past, and views the kid as being little more than a training exercise. Interestingly, he was nearly proven right, as the hero didn't take the fight seriously at first, and the first 60 seconds was essentially a cock-measuring contest of insults and posturing, each believing the other wasn't a serious challenge. - Vocally invoked by Lina Inverse in the Slayers OVA Jeffrey's Knighthood. This is so that Jeffrey's mother will not beat them up when they leave Jeffrey behind. They're not ditching The Load, they're allowing him to prepare while they carve a path to the Big Bad that only he can best. - The first season of Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds had a field day with this. Supposedly, the prophecy said that the Signers and the Dark Signers (the servants of the Crimson Dragon and Earthbound Gods, respectively) would battle every 5,000 years, and that each participant was unbeatable by anyone but a member of the opposing group. The actual conflict had a few parts that may or may not have contradicted this, depending on how you interpreted it, the biggest one being Crow defeating Bommer. (Crow wasn't a Signer at the time, but he would become one later; on the other hand, Bommer was a replacement Dark Signer, so whether he truly belonged in the conflict or not is debatable.) Of course, seeing as the story was related to the heroes by Rex Godwin, it may be hard to truly take any part of it at face value. - Repeatedly Lampshaded in the third season of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX. Whenever Evil Minions like the Masked Knights and other zombies challenge Judai, Johan and the others always step in and remind him that, as The Hero, he needs to wait and save his strength for his inevitable battle with the Big Bad. - Almost subverted in the original series: Jounouchi (The Lancer) gets into a position where Marik has no cards at all to protect himself, a single direct attack will win it, and he has a monster strong enough to do it. However, before he can declare his attack and win Jounouchi collapses from exhaustion, and Marik wins on a technicality when Jounouchi is declared unable to continue the duel. That he was seconds way from defeating Marik was a shock to every member of the cast, including Marik himself who began to freak out when he realized he was going to lose and admits Jounouchi put up a lot better of a fight than he expected. (In fact, this was the one time that Kaiba said anything about Jonouchi that even came close to being a compliment.) - Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V plays with this trope like every other trope. The protagonist Yuya \|\|isn't the only one to beat Big Bad Zarc as he is Zarc! The one who beats him is the Big Good Ray who beat him the first time.\|\| - Spider-Man didn't know it, but he was a literal case towards his enemy Kraven the Hunter for a while; a flaw in the evil ritual that his children used to bring Kraven back to life cursed him so that only Spider-Man could kill him. However, this curse was apparently broken when Kaine (as the Scarlet Spider) temporarily killed Kraven by stopping his heart with a blow to the chest and then restarted it with the same move. - A very rare inversion in With Strings Attached. On the Plains of Death, only the secondary character The Hunter can destroy the Heart of Evil by stabbing it with his BFS. Paul merely clears the way for him. - Or so the Hunter says. Since Paul doesn't even try to hit the thing, who knows? - Justified in that the Hunter is The Hero in this world, and the four (otherwise the protagonists of the book) are just being escorted around. - In Shining Armor's side story of the Pony POV Series, Reznov eventually implies that Shining may be the only one who can defeat Makarov, due to \|\|Shining being a temporal anomaly, and thus immune to the abilities that would prevent anyone from fighting him\|\|. - Literary example: The Keep by F. Paul Wilson. A great undead villain reawakens from his sleep, and the only person who can stop him is on the other side of the world — fortunately, he's psychically attuned to the villain and promptly gets moving. - Subverted in The Bourne Ultimatum (novel version) \|\|where, after David Webb/Jason Bourne spends the entire novel saying that only he'll be able to kill Carlos the Jackal, Carlos ends up drowning in a tunnel flooded by the Soviet agent who's working with Bourne.\|\| - Played with in Dragon Bones: The only person who can only be killed by the hero is the magically bound slave the hero inherited from his father. A Wizard Did It, in ancient times, and apparently knew that a slave who is magically compelled to do anything he's ordered to do, would try to commit suicide sooner or later. That's why the slave can only be killed by his owner. - In Grent's Fall, only \|\|the Bladecleaver\|\| and King Osbert have enough talent to defeat each other. \|\|Or fully distract each other.\|\| - Subverted in the Left Behind books as The Word of God demands that nobody can even defeat Satan and the Antichrist except for Jesus Christ. The Antichrist does get killed partway through the Tribulation, Because Destiny Says So, but as he is resurrected by the indwelling of Satan for the remainder of the Tribulation, the Christians during that time will have to wait for Jesus to come again in order for the Antichrist to be sent to the Lake of Fire. - Legend of the Seeker spends quite a lot of time saying how Richard is destined to kill Darken Rahl with the Sword of Truth. It's the same in the book, except there he's explicitly told that the magic of Orden means he can't use the sword to do it. - In Esther Friesner's novel The Sherwood Game, a programmer creates a VR Robin Hood game, and creates a specific rule that his character is the only one who can kill the Sheriff of Nottingham. He comes to regret this when he has to play the game with the safeties off. - Particularly notable in 24, wherein any tac team which does not include Jack Bauer is certain to let the terrorist escape, shoot the wrong guy, be vaporized in a nuclear detonation, etc. - Played straight in Angel — Connor is destined to kill Sahjhan, which appears to mean no one else can. \|\|When Sahjhan is trapped in a magical urn, his enemy Cyvus Vail insists that Connor be brought back to finish him, knowing that such things never hold the bad guy forever.\|\| To be fair, Angel had tried to kill Sahjhan when he was corporeal, and the demon handed Angel his ass. - Buffy the Vampire Slayer: - Averted in the Season 5 finale, "The Gift". Buffy might actually do the beating (with a shit-ton of help), but Giles does the killing. - Also averted in the finale of Season 6, "Grave", when Xander — often the Plucky Comic Relief of the Scoobies — talks a grieving, murderous, high-on-magic Willow out of destroying the world. Buffy, meanwhile, is fighting an endless and pointless battle against Evil Minions. - Subverted in the Firefly episode "War Stories". Mal is battling The Dragon (well... a Dragon, at any rate) when the Cavalry (Zoe, Jayne, and Wash) shows up. Jayne takes aim to shoot Niska's henchman, and Zoe stops him, saying "This is something the Captain's got to do for himself." Mal yells a panicked "No, it's not!" and the three rescuers take out the henchman all at once. - In Gotham, it's eventually revealed that Ra's al Ghul can only be killed by a specific dagger wielded by a specific person, namely Bruce Wayne. To hammer this home, at one point Barbara stabs him, but it has no effect, with him just saying "Ow" in a smug deadpan and pulling the blade out of his chest. - Subverted to a degree in Lost. It seems a lot like Ben was the only one who could kill Jacob. Several others tried, and the Man in Black said that some kind of "loophole" was necessary. - In the play Macbeth, \|\|the title character is informed that "none of woman born/shall harm Macbeth". This makes him believe he was invincible. However, Macduff was born due to a c-section, making him the only one who could kill Macbeth\|\|. - Devil Survivor: - Beldr on Day 3 is immune to everything except devil's fuge (i.e. mistletoe), and you happen to be the only combatant with it when you fight him, which means no one else — not your human allies, not your demons — can damage him. This gives the boss battle with him the unique defeat condition of "player character dies", unlike in other battles where the battle can continue as long as at least one team leader on your side is still in fighting condition, even if you personally bite it. \|\|When you rematch him in the Day 7 Boss Rush, once again you're the only character who can damage him.\|\| - An example where it's someone else rather than the player character who must inflict the killing blow: When fighting Kudlak, non-controllable ally Mari must be the one to inflict the finishing blow, or else story events will be affected very negatively upon his death. For what it's worth, if Kaido is in the fight, his attacks will never bring Kudlak's HP below 1, leaving Mari free to poke him dead. - Justified in Dragon Age: Origins with the \|\|Archdemon, who can only be killed by a Grey Warden because his soul will simply possess the nearest darkspawn when killed by anyone else.\|\| - Final Fantasy: - In Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, the player must confront \|\|the Dark Knight\|\| with Cecil and \|\|Golbez\|\| in the party, otherwise he instantly kills everyone. Once the required cinematic between the three occurs though, any party member can kill the boss. - According to Dissidia Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts II, Cloud is the only person capable of killing Sephiroth. When anyone else beats him, he just stands back up and muses over his inability to die at their hands. - in Kingdom Hearts II, we also see Tifa trying to fight Sephiroth in Cloud's place. It mostly follows this trope, as he easily dodges her barrage of punches and kicks and knocks her back. - This was true in the Final Fantasy VII Compilation as well, where Cloud was the only person in the entire setting that's managed to defeat Sephiroth. - Fire Emblem: - In the series, the Final Boss comes down to "kill them with a special weapon, or else you won't defeat him." Whether this is because of the boss's innate ability to negate damage or a rather downplayed version with lowering damage encouraging players to use the Lord with the weapon to fell them easily. - Gharnef's Imhullu spell in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light and Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem negates any kind of attack unless the unit in question is wielding Starlight. This means having your mage be ready to take on Gharnef so that you can reclaim Falchion. In addition, Medeus halves the power of all attacks unless it's either Falchion (which can only be used by Marth) or a Divine Dragon (Tiki or Nagi). - Duma in Fire Emblem Gaiden and its remake, Echoes: Shadow of Valentia becomes immune to all attacks once his HP becomes visible, unless Alm wields the Falchion... or a Cleric of yours is using Nosferatu. - The Book of Loptous in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War grants Julius an innate damage reduction against any weapons, unless it is the Book of Naga, which can only be wielded by his sister, Julia. \|\|This is rather aggravating as not only is it possible to not save Julia by accidentally killing her, but also Julius has three different defeat quotes depending on who defeats him (Julia, Seliph, or anyone else).\|\| - Raydrik's Loptr Sword in Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 grants him the same property as the Book of Loptous, unless he is attacked with the Sword of Bragi, which can only be wielded by either Leif, Nanna, Diarmud, or Fergus (which claims that only Holy Blood user can wield, but not only does Fergus imply to not have one but also, neither Mareeta nor Galzus, who has Major Od blood, can wield it). - In Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, getting the Golden Ending requires Roy to defeat Idunn with the Binding Blade. Thankfully, Idunn is such a massive pushover and the Binding Blade is so overpowered that it isn't that hard. - In Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, the Black Knight and Ashnard wear goddess-blessed armo that make them immune to anything except Ike's Ragnell, the Dragon laguz, and the Laguz kings. Thankfully, for the former, the Black Knight only cares about attacking Ike over his frail and weak sister, Mist, who is only here to help her brother not die. This is much more downplayed in the sequel, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, as not only is the Black Knight's armor is no longer blessed and although certain bosses have blessed immunity through Mantle, \|\|Yune blessed everyone's equipped weapon (or the Laguz themselves) that lets them damage the boss anyway. While Ike and the Black Knight can only kill each other, you weren't given much of a choice on that as the Black Knight put up a barrier that prevents anyone from intervening. Although anyone can damage Ashera, Ike must be the one to finish her or else she'll just revive with all of her HP restored.\|\| - Another literal example shows up in Fire Emblem: Awakening, albeit with a twist. The only power capable of destroying \|\|Grima\|\| is his own. \|\|As your Avatar is Grima's vessel, this means only the Avatar can kill Grima. Though it is only through choice after you defeat them, though anyone can damage them with Chrom dealing full damage through Exalted Falchion.\|\| - The Dragonskin skill grants the unit damage reduction as well as immunity to instantkill abilities or debuffs, with only one weapon (usually The Hero's weapon) that bypass this weakness. That said, it's a downplayed example. - In Friday the 13th: The Game \|\|only Tommy Jarvis can deliver the final blow to Jason after a series of steps are taken.\|\| - Grand Theft Auto V: Fighting his way through an skirmish between the IAA, FIB and Merryweather, Michael finds himself pinned down by an attack helicopter from the mercenary group. His rescue comes in the form of none other than Trevor, who snipes the pilot, sending him down, followed by this exchange: Trevor: Hey! If anyone's gonna kill you, old friend, it's gonna be me! Michael: Oh! You here to finish the job, T? Trevor: No, no, no, no, I'm just here for the opportunity. Now run! - Every boss in Kingdom Hearts II. You can let your AI allies attack as much as you like when the boss is down to 1 HP, but until Sora personally lands a Finishing Move, they won't die. - Raziel and Kain in the Legacy of Kain series — Kain doesn't want to kill Raziel and as he learns more about Nosgoth Raziel loses his desire to kill Kain. However, the two are functionally immortal, so they're the only ones that can kill the other by virtue of Kain \|\|possessing the material version of the sword Soul Reaver that can imprison Raziel within it\|\|, and Raziel \|\|possessing the spectral version of the same sword that can bypass Kain's vampiric body and damage his spirit directly.\|\| - The Legend of Zelda: Being the chosen wielder of the Master Sword, Link is the only one who can kill Ganondorf. - A recurring element in Metal Gear. The Patriots have something to do with all the subsequent incidents. - Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater: The Boss would accept nothing less than to die at the hands of the greatest soldiers she knew. Turns out, that includes her best student John. \|\|Unfortunately, this trope was forced on her by her enemies in Langley; they goaded a psychopath into firing a nuke and the only way to prevent World War III was to ensure that the person who gave him that nuke would be executed by her own disciple.\|\| - Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty: Raiden was selected from the list because he was the most appropriate person to take Solidus Snake out; Solidus raised Raiden as a child soldier, commanding a Redshirt Army of children while Raiden was HIS prized warrior. \|\|The real reason is that, of all the soldiers Solidus raised from kids, Raiden was the farthest away from Skull Face that a butcher could get.\|\| - Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots: And when Ocelot was possessed by Liquid, Snake declares that he's the only one meant to kill him. \|\|Or just Ocelot. As it turns out, the new Foxdie patch did that just fine.\|\| - In Paladog, the titular Paladog is the only character that can even harm Ghost Paladog. All of Paladog's Player Mooks will simply ignore and pass by Ghost Paladog, although they can still be hurt by his attacks. - Only Zeratul is able to kill the Cerebrates in StarCraft's penultimate mission, if the kill is done by any other unit the Cerebrate regenerates. Due to a glitch with location triggers it's possible for another unit to kill the Cerebrate for good while Zeratul is directly nearby, but the intent is for him to do it. In the expansion the player repeats the process in some missions using generic Dark Templar in place of Zeratul to the same effect. - In StarCraft II, several future prophecies specify that Kerrigan is absolutely vital to opposing the Big Bad. This leads several characters, who in the previous game swore to kill her or die trying, actually saving her life and helping her. \|\|It turns out to be because Kerrigan is the only living being with sufficient native power to ascend into a new Xel'Naga, which is the only thing powerful enough to challenge the Big Bad's might (given that he is a Xel'Naga). Plus, having her around means the Big Bad can't just mind-control the entire Zerg Swarm into being his slaves... he still tries and partially succeeds, but now Kerrigan is fighting him for control every step of the way.\|\| - In Tsukihime, the strange way in which Nrvnqsr's body is made up means it is nearly impossible to kill him: you have to kill all 666 of his familiars at once or he can regenerate them instantly. The protagonist, Shiki Tohno, on the other hand, has the explicit ability to kill things Deader than Dead, making him uniquely suited to killing Nrvnqsr. If Shiki kills something, it stays dead. Period. - In Warcraft III, while the trope isn't mentioned by name, it's in effect in the penultimate Night Elf level where Illidan consumes the skull of Gul'dan. This triggers his permanent transformation into a demon, and more importantly gives him Chaos damage, the only type that can damage the demon lord Tichondrius. - One boss in the first chapter of Xenosaga can only be killed if the final blow is landed by Shion or Junior. This is because it is connected to various mental issues of theirs stemming from the Miltia Incident. - Justified in El Goonish Shive. Grace was granted specific genetic modifications since birth, that grant her immunity to Damien's powers. (Namely, she's fireproof and her warform has claws with poison that slows healing, while Damien is a Pryomancer of insane powers with a massive Healing Factor). - Lampshaded by Belkar of the The Order of the Stick, who declines to finish off Crystal because he recognizes her as Haley's nemesis. - In the Sluggy Freelance arc "Dangerous Days," it's ultimately Torg, a pretty ordinary guy, who defeats Aylee, not Badass Longcoat Riff, not super-assassin Oasis, not Killer Rabbit Bun-Bun, not even \|\|the real Aylee\|\|, because Torg was the one with the most emotional involvement. - Also done in the "Oceans Unmoving" arc, where the only one who even stands a chance against Blacksoul is Bun-Bun, and the only one who stands a chance against Bun-Bun is Blacksoul. Makes sense when it's later revealed that \|\|Blacksoul is actually Bun-Bun from the future\|\|. - In the last few episodes of Red vs. Blue: Reconstruction, Washington makes it clear that only Church is capable of stopping the Meta. However, this isn't due to Church's fighting ability (which has never really been particularly good), but rather because \|\|Church is actually the Alpha A.I., and thus the only being capable of neutralizing the A.I.s that the Meta has merged with\|\|. - It was long hinted in American Dragon: Jake Long that only Jake could defeat the Dark Dragon for good. Had it not been for Executive Meddling, it no doubt would've happened. - Justified in Avatar: The Last Airbender. Only the Avatar, The Master of the Four Elements, can stop Fire Lord Ozai and restore balance among the four Elemental Nations. \|\|Iroh\|\|, who is one of the very few normal benders who could possibly match the Fire Lord in battle, explains why it must be the Avatar's responsibility: if anyone else were to defeat Ozai, it would be seen by history as little more than more violence from victims of war or another power struggle. The Avatar, however, is a spiritual figure that the public believes transcends petty worldly desires like revenge or political power. Them defeating Ozai at his strongest would be seen as an enlightened being enacting near-divine justice on a power-mad tyrant for the sake of the world. The symbolic value of this narrative would be powerful enough to prevent the remaining Ozai supporters from gaining public support to restart the war after their defeat. - On Gargoyles, Macbeth and Demona are both immortal until one kills the other, at which point both will die. Macbeth actually wants to slay Demona and put and end to them both, and this has become his lifelong goal; Demona... Not so much. Ironically it seems like most other people aren't aware of this fact, as the Hunters have been trying to kill Demona themselves for nearly a thousand years and the heroes declared No One Could Survive That! on each of them at least once. (Though that Macbeth wasn't even real anyway...) - Storm Shadow in G.I. Joe: Renegades needs to be the one to kill Snake Eyes in order to avenge \|\|the death of his uncle, the Hard Master\|\| and save face with his clan. He's also the only member of Cobra with a chance of actually defeating him one-on-one. - In Justice League, "For the Man Who Has Everything", Batman tries everything to bring Superman out of the Black Mercy-induced dream because only he is anything like powerful enough to defeat Mongul - While not 'kill', it was revealed in a web episode of Mighty Magiswords that only Vambre can hurt Prohyas (it makes sense since they are siblings). - Samurai Jack is a literal case. He is the only one who can slay Aku, because his sword is the only known weapon with the power to do so. - This also applies to the Guardian of the time portal. According to prophecy, only one person will ever be able to slay him and use the portal successfully. Guess who that person is? \|\|However, as the Guardian says at the end, Jack is "not ready" now, but he "will be... someday". Instead, in Season 5, it's revealed that Aku slew the Guardian and destroyed the portal to keep Jack from using, subverting this trope.\|\|	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyICanKillHim
Only Barely Renewed - TV Tropes "And he runs and he runs and then dives and TOUCHDOWN PANTHERS WIN WOOOOO!!!!1111!!!! YES! I WANT TO GO BUY SOMETHING NBC ADVERTISES! WOOOOO!!!!" Some shows are lucky to still be around — or were, before the axe finally fell. Their ratings were middling or poor or even awful, but the critics liked it, or it had been starting to show signs of a cult following, or it was supposed to be huge and they're reluctant to give up on it just yet, or the show is nearing an episode count needed for syndication, or everything else that premiered that year did even worse, or somebody at the network just liked the darn old thing; at any rate, it just barely got renewed by the skin of its teeth. In industry-speak, these shows are referred to as being "on the bubble," and if it's a show that seems to be on the bubble every single season, will sometimes garner the name "bubble series," taken from the fact that a soap bubble can pop at any second. This generally means the network won't value the show too much, so expect the next season to have fewer episodes, budget cuts, conspicuously missing characters to save on salaries, or be shuffled around on the network's schedule. Usually this marks the final season of a show — even the final partial season. Better plan on only running thirteen episodes note : or whatever the magic number for syndication is instead of the usual 22-26. In the best-case scenarios, it leads to a massive hit and a very good career move for the network execs responsible. The opposite of Screwed by the Network: here, the network tries in vain to sustain a show that the audience just can't get into, instead of the other way around. Compare Adored by the Network, Renewed Before Premiere. ## Examples: - Isobe Isobee Monogatari remained in Weekly Shonen Jump for several years despite it spending most of its time at or near the bottom of the popularity surveys. Whenever it came time to cancel a manga to clear up space for new series, it always managed to rise up just far enough for some other manga to get the axe in its place. Eventually, the editors at Shueisha must have gotten fed up with this always happening, so Isobe was given a permanent spot as the last manga in the magazine. - Ever since Delicious Party♡Pretty Cure, Crunchyroll's simulcast of the Pretty Cure series went through this: - Spider-Girl. The original run was barely renewed lots and lots of times, with these renewals getting it to 130 issues before dying. It has since had several continuations that have also gotten this treatment, each being cancelled before the cycle starts anew. Ironically, Joe Quesada has had a lot to do with Mayday Parker's continued existence. - Arrested Development, which was a critical smash but was watched by roughly nobody, only barely got a second season — and then got a third season by an even slimmer margin — then finally, to no one's surprise, was gone. Fans still debate whether Fox deserves respect for sticking with a failing show for so long, or criticism for not giving it much of a chance in the first place. The first season won the Emmy for best comedy just before the back nine was ordered. It was nominated for the Emmy for season 2 and 3. That may have been the reason it hung on. In an outtake on the season 2 DVD, David Cross goes on a long rant about how Fox should learn how to market an Emmy winning comedy. - Both How I Met Your Mother on CBS and My Name Is Earl on NBC only reluctantly got confirmed for third seasons at the last minute. Ditto Friday Night Lights for its second. - Scrubs. Seasons five through seven were only barely renewed by NBC, and generally wound up airing as a mid-season replacement. Season seven (intended to be the final season) was shortened by the writer's strike and aired out of order. ABC (who actually owns the series) stepped in and aired the eighth season (considered by most to be an improvement over six and seven), which officially wrapped up JD's storyline. So five seasons "on the bubble" between two networks. The eighth season was still Screwed by the Network. They continually changed up timeslots, showed new episodes back to back, rarely did re-runs of the new episodes and when they did, they weren't back to back, or they were out of order. Season 9 was a Post-Script Season. - The first season of Cheers was adored by the critics, but rated incredibly poorly (the first episode rated dead last in its timeslot). NBC stuck with it anyway, and following its surprise success at the Emmys, the ratings immediately picked up, and up and up. - MASH* performed incredibly poorly in its first season (placing 46th) and was almost guaranteed to be cancelled. Fortunately, the network had enough faith in the series to give it one more season (a possibly apocryphal story claims that the wife of the head of CBS was a fan). A combination of summer reruns gaining traction, and being given a primo time slot for season two (following the hugely popular All in the Family) catapulted the series into the top ten, where it would remain for all but one of it's remaining ten seasons. note : The fourth season would slip to 14th place, being the first season after the departures of McLean Stevenson and Wayne Rogers - Seinfeld initially went ahead despite resistance from most of NBC and Larry David himself. After the pilot aired, NBC was so ambivalent about the show that they only ordered four episodes for the first season (and that was because the executive in charge of NBC's specials who saw potential in the series had to do creative math to fund it and cut out a Bob Hope special for that year). It wasn't until season three that it showed any promise at all, and season four that it was legitimately successful. - Joey was a spinoff of Friends and got renewed because it was the only NBC show in the 2004 fall season to pull in decent enough ratings to warrant a renewal (the pilot was watched by 18 million viewers), but on the other hand, NBC screwed the show in its second season by putting it up against American Idol, causing its ratings to drop and then suddenly canceling it out of nowhere. - Angel was borderline as of the end of its fourth season. In an attempt to jumpstart the ratings, the producers changed the show's direction completely and brought over the popular character Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It wasn't enough, and the fifth season was the last. Joss Whedon said in an interview that an attempt to avert this trope led to the show's cancellation. WB's refusal to renew the show until the last possible minute created problems for the cast and crew, as it left them no time to seek new work if the show weren't renewed. Joss requested a quicker decision for the staff's sake, and WB decided to cancel. - Gunsmoke was originally meant to be cancelled after the 1966-1967 season, after nearly 11 years on the air. However, the wife of CBS president William S. Paley, who was a devoted fan of the show, simply wouldn't hear of it. After persuasion from her and many other fans, Paley decided to renew the show, placing it in Gilligan's Island's timeslot, which ended up cancelling the beloved sitcom at the last minute. Gunsmoke would continue to air for another 8 seasons, a record-breaking run totaling 20 years (and that's not even including the 1952-1961 radio series). - NewsRadio was in this position every single year of its five seasons. - It's completely possible that without the entire drama where Buffy the Vampire Slayer moved to UPN, Gilmore Girls would have received a bare renewal for the second season as it was barely holding on in its original timeslot leading off Thursdays against Survivor and Friends. Thankfully it became a shoo-in after that in their new Tuesday timeslot for the next six seasons, replacing Buffy, which stuck in the same slot on UPN for two seasons. - The last season of Charmed. Not only did they have to undo the ending of the previous season, which could have been a final ending, but budget restrictions meant not being able to have Leo in most of the episodes. - Both the fourth and fifth seasons of The Wire barely happened. The fifth possibly only because David Simon wrapped up the series and delivered a shorter season. - The original Star Trek got a third season only because of a massive letter-writing campaign (well, that and the fact that RCA owned NBC at the time, and RCA owned the patent for color TV. Since most people bought color TVs specifically for Star Trek, they realized RCA made more money in color TV sales than NBC lost because of Star Trek); but the third season is not considered that great by many fans. Forty years later, Star Trek: Enterprise barely got a fourth season because the showrunners convinced the studio that they could do it cheaply; in fact, the eventual series finale was originally written to cap the third season. Fans tremendously approved the final season— including many who feel it actually grew its beard that season, too late to be saved. - All evidence indicated Dollhouse wouldn't get a second season—poor ratings, lukewarm critical reception until halfway through the season, Fox's decision not to air the planned season finale (it was released on the DVD), the fact that it was a Whedon/Minear production on Fox, and so on. It got renewed anyway but the second season was the last. The second season may have been simply because the execs knew they'd get complaints if they canceled it after only one season. - Chuck season 3 was on the blade of a knife and wasn't announced with all of NBC's other properties. It was renewed (after Sending Stuff to Save the Show) with a lower budget, shorter season, and a Product Placement deal, as a mid-season replacement, though it actually got more episodes ordered when much of NBC's new fall material failed. Season 4 was never really in doubt since S3's ratings were good by NBC standards, but it only initially got 13 episodes. Most of NBC's new shows again bombed, while Chuck was doing reasonably well, so it got 11 episodes for the spring. Throughout the spring, however, its ratings kept sinking lower and lower. It's been picked up for a 5th and final season but it'll only be 13 episodes, and the show's moving to Fridays from the 8pm Monday slot it had always held. Many speculate that Warner Bros., who produce it, cut NBC a deal too good to pass up in order to get the show enough episodes for syndication. - The only reason the remake of V got a second season was because all of the other new dramas on ABC that year bombed. ABC later cut the order to just 10 episodes. - CSI: NY seems to have been this for season 8. It wasn't confirmed as renewed until the last possible moment and got 18 episodes for season 8. Season 9 was even closer - CBS said it was very close as to whether to renew it or CSI: Miami. Ultimately, it came down to CSI: NY being cheaper to produce and wanting to use it to help with a night of New York-themed shows. - Nikita was the lowest-rated show on the CW for most of its second season, it got renewed regardless, it's rumoured to be because of international sales. The ratings dropped even lower in the 3rd season, but it still got renewed for a final 6-episode run. - Community got renewed for the fourth season despite lukewarm ratings from the third season. Catch is, it only got a half season's worth of episodes ordered, and was initially set to air on Fridays but was moved to Thursday at the last minute. And then, after the Season 4 finale aired, it somehow got renewed for a fifth. After the fifth season, NBC flat-out cancelled the show — only to have Yahoo pick the show up for a sixth (and final) season on the last day before the contracts of the main cast members expired. - Blackadder had a relatively successful first season, but not enough to consider renewing. The BBC eventually allowed a second season on the proviso that it would have a drastically reduced budget. The seasons from the second onwards are generally considered far superior to the first. - Hannibal was given the 9 o'clock Thursday slot, which is notorious at NBC for getting bad ratings, often resulting in the untimely death of the shows (for context, the show Hannibal replaced in the time slot was Do No Harm, which had the lowest premiere ratings in TV history). Predictably, the show (while well-received by critics and audiences) never had great ratings, and there was much speculation that it would either be cancelled or moved to a different network before NBC eventually decided to renew it due to large DVR numbers and an incredibly passionate social media fanbase. Also a factor; European financing from France's Gaumont studio and Sony's AXN network, which meant that NBC could easily stomach the ratings issues because the international distributors paid most of the costs and NBC only paid a spare licensing fee and could keep most of the ad revenue, along with Amazon paying NBC to having exclusive rights to stream it in-season and long after. - The teen Game Show Peer Pressure ran for three seasons, but the second and third season were just repackaged reruns of the first season with increasingly obtrusive editing; the "second" season applied Pop-Up Trivia and Clumsy Copyright Censorship, while the "third" season changed the name of the show to Pressure 2 (editing references to the word "Peer" in the title to try and Retcon it) to go along with its new In Name Only Spin-Off Pressure 1 (which was produced as a stopgap to replace * Click, a Merv Griffin-produced children's game show from the same distributor that was usually paired with Peer Pressure, but had been cancelled after two seasons). - Thirteen weeks into its run in 1963, NBC was about to axe Match Game. Seeing nothing left to lose, writer Dick DeBartolo decided to juice up some of the fill-in-the-blanks as comical and lightly suggestive statements. Viewers picked up on it, and the show ran to September 1969. Four years later, CBS revived Match Game* in a retooled format that became even more successful. - The merger of The WB and UPN into The CW led to several cases of this, as executives decided it would be better for the network to find its legs with proven properties instead of rolling the dice with new series. - The executives at The WB were long gesticulating about the fate of 7th Heaven, whether to renew the show or stop it at Season 10. A year before the launch of the new network, the show was canceled, but in May the next year it was unexpectedly revived for a final season at The CW. The last-minute decision caused Season 11 to have its budget lessened, actors departing or missing for episodes, and a reschedule from Monday to Sunday. - The network intended to cancel Reba after its fifth season as it decided to laser in on the young, trendy, urban audience. However, they realized that the show had already been renewed for a fifth and sixth season the year before, and the "kill fee" they'd have to pay producers for breaking this contract would have cost more than actually making a sixth season. It got renewed for a 13-episode sixth season, ignored as much as possible, and disappeared soon after. - The first two seasons of Supernatural went through this. Season 1 aired on the WB during its last year before it was reformatted into the CW and the decision to keep it wasn't made until long after the finale had aired. Likewise, its ratings for the second season were pretty low even for the CW's early standards, and the decision to renew it hadn't been made until long after Season 2 wrapped up. - Beauty and the Beast (2012) got terrible ratings in its second season, was the CW's lowest-rated series in 2014, and was yanked off the schedule to air the rest of its episodes in the summer. Somehow it still got renewed for a third season. - Due to poor viewing figures, Only Fools and Horses was almost cancelled after two series. However, it was repeated in a low key time slot and achieved respectable ratings, which convinced BBC producers to commission another series. The show went from strength to strength thereafter and ironically was continually revived during the 1990s and 2000s owing to its status as a ratings winner. - Parks and Recreation had relatively low ratings for much of its run, in some cases airing as a mid-season replacement. The show would often get renewed anyway because of the failure of many of NBC's new shows. As a result, almost all of the season finales can function as a Series Fauxnale. Additionally, Word of God is that this led to the relationship subplots being resolved much quicker because the writers were unsure if Parks would run long enough to resolve them later. - It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: The first season did not make a splash (even when FX attempted to air an edited-for-content cut on Fox proper), and the network straight-up told the showrunners that they would be canceled unless they could shake things up by getting a big name to join the cast. Ultimately Danny DeVito signed on (reportedly because his kids already loved the show), and the show quickly became one of FX's biggest shows. Ultimately one of the rare examples where Executive Meddling ended up working far better than even the executive themselves may have thought. - Seaquest DSV: Nicknamed as "Voyage to the Bottom of the Ratings", the submarine focused show's fate seemed certain. Declining ratings due to deteriorating writing and sports pre-emptions led to season 2 almost being last, with the season finale blatantly supposed to end the series - the embodiment of "going out with a bang". Behind the scenes, the planned replacement series (described as being "just awful") fell through, leading to a last-minute renewal and an overall sense of "let's get past this as quickly as possible" in the truncated season 3. Even with the renewal and improving critical praise, the planned full 3rd season was cut in half and the show sank to a watery grave. - Westworld: While the first season was received well, the second season's viewer ratings and reception started to fluctuate. Though there were reports that the show was planned to have five seasons, the third season continuously suffered low viewer ratings and it's only before the last two episodes were aired that the show got renewed for a fourth season. Unfortunately, the fourth season met with terrible marketing and poor ratings which led to the show's cancellation. - While the first season of The Office (US) only had six episodes, it struggled, with weak ratings and critics regarding it as an unfocused, watered-down imitation of the original. The main reason it made it to a second season was Kevin Reilly, NBC Entertainment president at the time, had loved the second episode, "Diversity Day", and felt the series had enough potential to warrant another go. - Everyone expected Fresh Off the Boat to be cancelled at the end of its fifth season - it had been moved to the Friday Night Death Slot and its ratings predictably tanked because of that, online buzz for the show had dissipated, much of the supporting cast had already left or had taken roles on other shows, and showrunner Nahnatchka Khan announced her intention to step down note : she would go on to direct Always Be My Maybe, starring FOTB star Randall Park and former FOTB writer Ali Wong. But at the very last minute, it got a surprise renewal, infamously to the chagrin of cast member Constance Wu, who was eager to move on to other projects. The show would be cancelled midway through the sixth season. - Saturday Night Live had two near-death experiences in The '80s. The first was after Season 6 (1980-81), when Jean Doumanian took over for Lorne Michaels as producer, only to have the show turn into a critical and ratings fiasco, leading to her dismissal after twelve episodes. Dick Ebersol, the NBC executive who helped launch the show in 1975, stepped in as producer and basically saved the show. Then after Season 10 (1984-85), Ebersol was let go and the show was officially canceled, but NBC programming chief Brandon Tartikoff decided to try one last ditch gambit and reached out to Michaels, who agreed to return as producer, so the show got Un-Canceled for good. - Doctor Who was nearly cancelled in 1985 by BBC1 controller Michael Grade, who openly disliked the series for its unimpressive production values and rapidly escalating amounts of violence. Following protests from the show's production staff, he begrudgingly turned the cancellation into an 18-month-long hiatus, after which the show's budget was slashed and its episode count was limited to 14 25-minute installments (divided among four serials) per season. Additionally, between Seasons 23 and 24, Grade moved the show's timeslot to Monday evenings to compete with Coronation Street, which analysts described as a deliberate attempt to tank Doctor Who's ratings. Sure enough, while the show managed to truck on for a few more years, it eventually got cancelled by Grade's successor and fellow Who detractor Jonathan Powell after the conclusion of Season 26 in 1989, not returning to regular airing until 2005. - Bob Dylan's debut album sold around 5,000 copies in its original release, and he only really got a chance to do another album because John Hammond, who'd signed him, had a lot of clout at Columbia Records and insisted he get another shot. The follow-up album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, was much more successful and received a platinum certification (shipment of a million units). - Similar to Dylan, Bruce Springsteen's first two albums had been Acclaimed Flops, and Columbia Records only agreed to let him do a third album on the understanding that it needed to be a genuine hit. After almost two years of work, he ended up delivering on that expectation with Born to Run. - Exalted had been suffering from increasingly poor sales for years, with a particular low point being the disastrous reception of the Dreams of the First Age boxset. After a while, the release schedule was cut down dramatically, with one book even containing what was likely a note implying the official discontinuation of the line. Many of the freelance writers went into extreme damage control, releasing reams of free setting and mechanics info in a desperate attempt to keep interest in the line from flagging long enough for them to get a last few books out. The books proved to be tremendous successes (with the last jumping to the top of sales listing within days), allowing the line to be secured for the issuing of a third edition. - Tony Hawk's Shred. Its predecessor Ride sold very badly because of its insistence on a skateboard peripheral that didn't work properly. People didn't think Activision would bother with a sequel after this debacle, especially because competition from EA's Skate series was making the series look tired. Somehow, the series did get renewed for Ride's sequel, Shred, which ignored fan demand not to use the skateboard peripheral. Finally, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 finally acquiesced to not use the skateboard peripheral anymore after it too barely got renewed, but it was an Obvious Beta full of Game Breaking Bugs. - Justice League and Justice League Unlimited were the patron saints of this trope. Season one sparked some fears that the show was weaker than what the shows spun off of, largely because they ignored the canon of the Batman and Superman animated series that preceded them. At the end, they re-worked the show to reflect that canon better and felt that this was their swan song, so wrapped up with a big three-part season finale where they blew everything up. Then they got the call that they were renewed for another season and retooled the show into Justice League Unlimited. The producers thought that this would be their last great story and wrapped up dangling threads from Superman: The Animated Series as well as some in the previous Justice League, capping it off with a Fully Absorbed Finale with Batman Beyond. Then they got the call that the series was so good that they got one more season, and the final finale was strong enough that fans think it deserved more. This makes it a case of what was supposed to be the Grand Finale actually saving the show both times it happened. - Chowder's third and final season was renewed for 20 episodes, but later shortened to only 9. Fellow Cartoon Network series The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack got an even shorter third season of only six episodes and, unlike Chowder, didn't even get its final episode advertised. - Black Dynamite: After the first season saw low ratings and mixed critical reception, it was renewed, but the budget was cut, new episodes were moved to Saturdays, and they were given very little promotion. - Word of God states the second season of Wabbit: A Looney Tunes Production (renamed The New Looney Tunes Show) was produced as a direct result of the executives at Warner Bros. loving the pitch for the first season's final episode "Porky's Duck-livery Service", despite the show having seen middling success. - The Owl House was renewed for a third season before the second season had started airing, but despite the show getting high praise from both critics and the audience, it was confirmed that it would be its final season and only consist of three 44-minute specials rather than a full ~20 episode season like the first two, because the show's excessively dark and demonic nature "did not fit the Disney brand". - The original run of Futurama was handled in a messy mix of this and Screwed by the Network. While the show launched with impressive early legs (its pilot debuting with 19 million viewers) and remained a critical darling with a cult fanbase, Fox quickly became known for its inexplicable indifference to the series, giving it diminishing amounts of advertisement and poor time slots, placing season 4 premieres after sport events, making it increasingly hard to catch. Matt Groening went on record claiming that he and the production crew ended up approaching each season after their first like it was their last, as after completing the current order, they'd be left in increasingly long periods of silence before Fox would suddenly give them a renewal notice, up until the completion with season 4 where Fox responded with nothing, not even a proper cancellation notice. Groening has often implied that Fox executives who had problems with his other show, The Simpsons (which was untouchable, since it made so much money for the studio) took out all their frustrations on Futurama instead, leading to its shabby treatment by the network. It took successful syndication on [adult swim], a series of Direct to Video movies, and a full Channel Hop to Comedy Central for Futurama to get any further television seasons.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyBarelyRenewed
Forum Speak - TV Tropes The jargon used to describe Internet fora and online discussions such as Blogs and forums. While some concepts overlap with Tropes, on TV Tropes we do not usually catalogue this terminology in the form of individual articles but only as a large glossary. For TV Tropes-specific terminology, see TV Tropes Glossary. Some concepts discussed here are also mentioned by Flame Warriors. ## Forum terms with their own pages: A user is banned when the authorities of a website or social media platform prohibit them from contributing, usually by software means. This is usually due to breaking the rules or being an unpleasant person to be around, but in some places, users can be banned on a whim, for rules they weren't aware of, or even based on a false accusation. Some moderators just have an itchy trigger finger. Others are paranoid of Sock Puppets and will ban anyone who resembles a particularly nasty user. Still others say it's much easier to deal with problematic users preemptively than to wait until they make a mess and clean up after them. Not everyone who is banned will automatically know why their account was suspended, and many will assume it was someone else's mistake . Regardless of whether or not the ban was justified, the best way to handle the situation is usually to step back, look at the rules, look at your behaviour, and then find one of the site's managers and politely ask what you did wrong. Maybe it was a genuine misunderstanding. Maybe your lack of experience unwittingly made you look like a previous rule-breaker. Maybe you can convince them that you understand what you did wrong and you won't do it again. Even though real spammers, trolls, and scoundrels usually protest their innocence, talking it out is still the best way to resolve the problem. Indeed, right here on This Very Wiki , if you find yourself banned or suspended, we have a designated place to talk it out with the staff: the Edit Banned thread . First, though, check out What to Do If You Are Suspended . "Blogosphere" is the term for the interconnections between all the various blogs that exist on the internet. The name was originally coined as a joke, but the joke became so popular that many (especially in the Old Media) mistook it for a real word and began using it in complete seriousness. Memetic Mutation at its finest. The new, irony-free definition of blogosphere implies a view that no blog is an island: all of them are as part of a massive online community. Or at least that blogs on closely related topics share many of the same readers, so that there is a comics blogosphere, a Boise, Idaho dining blogosphere, rival liberal and conservative blogospheres, etc. Whether or not the blogosphere can be meaningfully defined as a distinct subset of the internet depends on how well one can draw the distinction between Blogs and regular old webpages. A browser narcotic is a website that uses up hours of your time with little effort. Like This Very Wiki, which is well known for its capacity to ruin your life. Unlike an Archive Binge, which is linear in nature, a browser narcotic allows you to go in any number of directions, often ending up on a Wiki Walk. The defining feature of a browser narcotic is the tab explosion, a browser with Eleventy Zillion tabs open at once. The name comes from xkcd, specifically the Alt Text of this comic, which explicitly describes TV Tropes as an example. Here are some other offenders aside from TV tropes: - Wikipedia - 4chan - reddit - Any porn site. Admit it, you know it to be true. - Cracked.com. Brazilians have a humorous blog that's just like Cracked. - Dark Roasted Blend - DeviantArt - Pixiv, thanks to its recommendation feature being a little too good, tends to induce Wiki Walks. Heaven help you if you start to browse for fanart of one of the more popular series, like Touhou Project, Hetalia, Pokémon, Vocaloid, or Inazuma Eleven, each of which will get you over 150,000 hits. Though the effect is lessened somewhat, as a large part of the website is in Japanese. - Digg - Everything2 - Facebook - Tumblr - FanFiction.Net. The good ones at least... and badfic too, arguably. This also applies to most well organized fanfic sites like, say, Archive of Our Own. - Fark - Oobject - Damn Interesting - Forums can end up as these if there are enough interesting threads. - The Polish site Wyhacz.pl ~~is~~ was a news service devoted mainly to various instances of citizens being screwed over by bureaucratic incompetence or corporate dishonesty. It's surprisingly fascinating. - The Let's Play Archive: Oh, you've just discovered the Let's Play phenomenon and spent several hours following an LP of your favorite game? No worries, we can recommend LP's from the same genre / author that are sure to interest you. And once you're done with those, we have more recommendations... - The Cheezburger Network - The SCP Foundation can do this, as some of the most popular articles include experiment logs involving other SCPs. The site is trying to minimize this, however. Just watch your step, because you're walking through a minefield of really terrifying stuff. - Snopes - StumbleUpon - Twitter - Orion's Arm, hoooo boooy. - Uncyclopedia - Yahoo!.com (the main page that features news articles). - YouTube - AniDB - Most estate agent/real estate websites tend to provoke this. If you've come to one looking for property to buy, you'll no doubt be opening plenty of tabs to compare different listings, and if you're not... you're probably opening loads of tabs to dream. - Hardcore Gaming 101 - Everything Is Terrible! - WeKnowMemes - Imgur: That is, of course, if we are to believe The Daily Derp. - BuzzFeed, particularly the list pages, and similar clickbait sites - Sports fans can have this on Bleacher Report and Page 2 \ Grantland. - MapCrunch takes you to a random location on Google StreetView. You can navigate on it as usual, or press a button that takes you to another random location. Now try to stop exploring the world. - Not Always Right. The effect is lessened due to only adding 5 or 6 anecdotes a day (easily read in 15 minutes), but increased due to its massive archive and eight sister sites, Not Always Working/Romantic/Related/Learning/Friendly/ Hopeless/Healthy and Legal. - The Polish equivalent of Not Always Right, piekielni.pl . - Uberfacts, with a Website, two apps, and several Twitter accounts. - Any good webcomic with a big enough archive. - Fundies Say the Darndest Things i.e. an immense archive of all the insane things fundamentalists have said in this contemporary age. It even has an article on Rational Wiki. - Most .io Games can easily waste large amounts of one's time due to the ease of joining a game and playing a few rounds... and another... Generally, it happens like this: A well-known (or under-the-radar) celebrity gets an e-mail from his publicist telling him how he should make a blog to boost his sagging reputation. Said celeb decides to try it for a while, but is never really into it, and eventually it fades into the ether. Sometimes, of course, the celeb is absolutely into it, and these tend to drift into other types of blogs. Other times, the publicist insists on Astro Turfing the blog by posting as the celeb, turning it into a Flog. Some celeb blogs achieve cult status among the geekery (the most famous of course being WWDN). You have just finished writing an article. More specifically, it is the masterpiece that TV Tropes has been waiting for. When you suggested the idea in Trope Launch Pad , the number of replies was astonishing. Seriously, this article would move any troper to tears . it's so good! But, being the savvy troper that you are, you know better than to just go submitting it without a care in the world. You smite the Data Vampires, because right as it is about to send, you press the refresh button with lightning fast reflexes, saving your trope entry from a terrible, untimely demise. ...or so you think, as right as you have hit that refresh key, you see the following message: "The database hates you right now. The entry might exist or it might not exist. We would clear this mystery up for you, if we could get to the database. We tried to look it up, but the database puked up an error." What happened? Surely this can't be right! After all, you took every step to stop the Data Vampires in their tracks! Well, unfortunately for you, you have not met the Data Vampires, you've met the database, and it hates you. We're sure you're a very nice person but the database doesn't think so. Never mind the more probable impossible answer that TV Tropes is glitching, because TV Tropes is perfect and does not malfunction. You can't get to this page because you suck. It's that simple. But to avoid this sort of thing, write your article in Notepad or TextEdit before sending, or at least copy and paste your hard work before pressing 'save'. Derailing is when a discussion goes off on a tangent, a subject irrelevant to the main point of the discussion. Sometimes it's done by accident; other times, it's done deliberately by a Troll . Like a train leaving its tracks , it's difficult to get back on track again. That's why forums tend to have strict rules about staying on topic. Not every change in topic is a derail; conversations do drift naturally. Consider, for instance, a conversation about pit bulls, in which someone brings up the perception that they're dangerous animals. A shift to a discussion about animal fights in general is natural. A post of a graphic image of a pit bull mating with a Chihuahua is a derail; it's abrupt, not a natural outgrowth of the prior conversation, and only serves to change the subject. However, the stricter forums might consider both instances against the rules, just to ensure that everyone can follow the conversation. Trolls will often derail a conversation by attacking someone or something, forcing the other users to defend themselves or their ideas. They like to rely on Misplaced Nationalism , Ad Hominem attacks, Victim-Blaming , and whataboutism , which usually require a response unrelated to the topic at hand. Nazi comparisons are akin to blowing up the railway bridge, dropping the train into the sea, and then pissing on it . Threats are also an effective way to derail a thread, shifting the discussion to dealing with the threat; many forums take a hard line on threats and will issue an immediate ban for them, and if they seem credible they may even contact local law enforcement. A less inflammatory but no less effective way to derail a thread would be to become a Left Fielder . Here on this wiki , we deal with derailment by thumping , our method of removing a post. The post is still there, but its content is replaced with a message that the post was thumped. It's usually self-explanatory (and you're free to ask a mod about it in case it's not). Users whose posts are thumped are given a PM about it, and accumulating several thumps can lead to a suspension. See also Change the Uncomfortable Subject , which is an attempt to do this in a real life conversation, usually without the sheer disruption of the Internet equivalent. A doublepost is a comment that's accidentally been added twice in succession. It's usually a result of a software bug; often, a new post is slow to show up due to server lag, so the user thinks it didn't go through and makes it again. Or maybe there's a bug when the user clicks "Add Post" a few times too many. This kind of thing is especially common on Usenet , where the nature of NNTP sometimes causes a substantial lag in the propagation of new posts. In some cases, forums will allow users to delete the last post they made, specifically to combat the doublepost. In most others, the common response is to edit the second post to read something along the lines of "doublepost, mods plz delete". Even if it's not deleted, veteran forumgoers can mentally skip over posts like this, and the conversation can continue as normal. At most places, you won't get into trouble for doubleposting, but if you do it too often, you might be mistaken for a Spammer . In some cases, doubleposting is done deliberately. For instance, some places don't allow you to edit your post (or may require you to be a prolific user before you can do it), meaning that if you wanted to correct something, you have to post again with your correction. The less savvy forumgoers will also do it just to add something to their previous comment. In other cases, there's a long period of time between the two posts, and the last post is repeated by someone wishing to "bump" the thread to the top of the list. Forums with strict limits on the number of characters or images per post might also see "doubleposting" with a single long comment spread out over multiple posts. A doublepost is a comment that's accidentally been added twice in succession. It's usually a result of a software bug; often, a new post is slow to show up due to server lag, so the user thinks it didn't go through and makes it again. Or maybe there's a bug when the user clicks "Add Post" a few times too many. This kind of thing is especially common on Usenet , where the nature of NNTP sometimes causes a substantial lag in the propagation of new posts. In some cases, forums will allow users to delete the last post they made, specifically to combat the doublepost. In most others, the common response is to edit the second post to read something along the lines of "doublepost, mods plz delete". Even if it's not deleted, veteran forumgoers can mentally skip over posts like this, and the conversation can continue as normal. At most places, you won't get into trouble for doubleposting, but if you do it too often, you might be mistaken for a Spammer . In some cases, doubleposting is done deliberately. For instance, some places don't allow you to edit your post (or may require you to be a prolific user before you can do it), meaning that if you wanted to correct something, you have to post again with your correction. The less savvy forumgoers will also do it just to add something to their previous comment. In other cases, there's a long period of time between the two posts, and the last post is repeated by someone wishing to "bump" the thread to the top of the list. Forums with strict limits on the number of characters or images per post might also see "doubleposting" with a single long comment spread out over multiple posts. "You got to love an encyclopedia that has a longer article for the lightsaber than they do for the printing press." Fannage is a wiki phenomenon where things relating to pop culture get more attention than mundane topics, even if the more mundane topics are more relevant to real life. It gives generalised wikis like Wikipedia a poor reputation by making their userbase look like a bunch of hopeless nerds who prioritise fiction over reality. But this generally isn't considered a bad thing in itself. First, you can always ignore wiki pages that don't interest you. Second, every topic will benefit from having contributors who know the subject extremely well. Third, having fun stuff on the wiki will attract more people and encourage them to work on the more mundane stuff. But the danger occurs when topics with high amounts of Fannage attract a large pool of unskilled editors. These guys have bad habits of obsessive editing, promoting Fanon , poor writing style employing lots of Weasel Words , and an obsession with categorisation — every episode and character needs to have their own page. To the extent that these guys edit the pages on mundane stuff, they take their bad habits with them. Wikipedia 's extensive fannage is famous, what with its ridiculously detailed television synopses (even the ones with Negative Continuity ). Although it's frowned upon there, it's tolerated through the sheer persistence of the editors . People will complain that the $12,000 funding drives seem to be going mostly to rewriting the Star Wars Expanded Universe in encyclopedia form. Fannage also overlaps extensively with what Wikipedia calls Fancruft, where articles for mundane things are injected with the subject's appearances in popular culture; Wikipedia is less tolerant of this and will boot such users to the myriad of other wikis that exist for documenting those things . TV Tropes itself mostly runs on fannage, but even here, we get our own version of it with specific works being massively overrepresented compared to others. We've catalogued some of them in Trope Overdosed . First!! On large platforms, there is often a race to be the first to post a comment in a new thread, article, or video, even if you don't have anything to contribute to the topic at all. The only thing you have to say is that you were the first to say something. This has now become an Internet tradition, even though it can get annoying real quickly. Many places discourage it and will just delete such posts on sight, including here at TV Tropes. Fortunately, they're easy to spot, and accordingly easy to zap. Some places even do it automatically, with software. Other places have some fun with the phenomenon, such as the Daily Kitten 's use of the term "Pounce!" Places like 4chan , never particularly content with "rules" and "moderation", will have long tangents based simply on the response to the contentless first post. Fark is probably the most prolific at having fun with it, employing a word filter to change "first post" to "Boobies" and "first comment" to "Weener", which has the added benefit of causing some ribbing if you actually use the word "boobies". If Fark detects these terms in the actual first post of a given thread, it will also move the timestamp to 12 hours into the future, which for many threads means it will be the last post in the thread. Parodied in this video . See also Me Too! and IBTL . A blog that seems to be written by a real person, but is in fact a vector employed by an advertising agency, PR firm or corporate marketing department. Invariably waxes over-enthusiastically about a product, service or company, particularly something brand new and/or trying to increase its market penetration. Almost always a tool for astroturfing. The term — which has been seen in mainstream publications like The New York Times as of December 2006 — is believed to be a blend of "fake" and "blog", but also evokes the verb "to flog" in the sense of "to make a sales pitch". It may also refer to the term 'flack' as a name for a person with a journalism degree who specializes in PR. As of December 12, 2006, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has begun a serious investigation of so-called "word of mouth" advertising campaigns, which will include flogs among its targets. Not to be confused with the 'flog' that means Freenet blog. For the act of flagellation, commonly known as "flogging", see A Taste of the Lash. Also not to be confused with "The Flog" by Felicia Day (a blend of "Felicia" and "vlog") or the Australian slang term for a useless person. "Today, I could take a photo of my butt and put it online within five seconds, and while this is objectively a good thing (at least in my case, because I have a sweet butt), it comes with the side effect of making trolls lazier. Most raids now involve flooding sites with gore, porn, or various combinations of both. While you can't argue with the effectiveness of this method, there's zero effort there. Where's the love for the craft? What amusing story did you get out of this experience that you'll tell your grandchildren eventually?" The Garbage Post Kid is a kind of Troll who delights in posting offensive and inflammatory text and punctuating them with vomit-inducing pictures and links to Shock Sites . They usually have a personal beef with a specific group member or community and will flood their topics with all the filth the 'Net can offer. If their beef is with a single person, they usually don't care about ruining the day (or constitution) of the many other innocent posters on the board, so long as that one guy knows they can't run or hide. Naturally, the GPK is one of the most egregious Internet personalities. They're known for their persistence, posting voluminous amounts of bile and being very hard to shake. Sometimes it can take hours for the mods to clean up the sewage they leave behind; in extreme cases, the entire forum may need to be temporarily shut down. The name comes from the Garbage Pail Kids , a 1980s gross-out trading-card parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids toyline that depicted some truly disturbing imagery. Just an average day out on the Internet. The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, or "GIFT" note : It kinda should be an Internet Law, like Godwin's Law, but it's called a theory to keep the acronym, is an explanation of why people who are quite "normal" in person become anti-social Internet Jerks when they're online. The "GIFT equation" was first formulated by Penny Arcade and goes like this: This phenomenon has been studied academically, and by all accounts, the comic's satirical analysis is spot-on; normal people become more aggressive when they think their behavior carries no real-world social consequences. They think that The Internet makes them anonymous, and they can thus behave as shamelessly and self-servingly as they always wanted , because they'll never have to answer their parents, spouses, teachers, employers, or challengers . (This isn't always true, by the way.) note : To elaborate, most Internet users' data and metadata are quite accessible. IP addresses and other identifying information can be found using relatively basic tools. And many active users on social media platforms will happily reveal information about themselves without thinking. All this means that someone who really wants to know the identity of an "anonymous" user can often find it out. It's related to the phenomenon of Bathroom Stall Graffiti ; they'd never do it in their own bathroom, but they'll happily do it in a public place when they think no one is looking and they don't have to clean it up. The whole phenomenon was identified by Plato in The Republic , where he recounts the myth of the the Ring of Gyges , one of the original Invisible Jerkass stories. Sadly, this leads to a culture of cyberbullying on the Internet. Without any real consequences, people realise they can say anything they want, and as such, they revel in saying the most hurtful and disgusting things, regardless of whether they even believe those things (much less whether they're true or false), probably for the thrill of seeing the damage they can do when people take their words seriously. At least one psychology paper posited that anonymity makes the Internet particularly attractive to narcissists , sociopaths , and sadists , who enjoy seeing others suffer. And since there are a lot of children and teenagers on the Internet, who are particularly vulnerable to cyberbullying, the Internet becomes a playground for these people. The rise of social media networks like Facebook and Twitter is forcing some reevaluation of this theory, though. People have been found to be just as obnoxious, rude, bigoted, and abusive while posting under their real identity as they would be if they were anonymous. This means it's not really the anonymity that drives the phenomenon; it's the lack of consequences. Turns out people will rarely get thrown off a social media site for noxious behaviour, nor will most people's teachers or employers scour their social media accounts. The only real threat in this case is the Internet Detective , who will trawl basically anyone's social media history to look for something even slightly objectionable, and the prevalence of GIFT provides them with some positive reinforcement. See also Invisible Jerkass , Jerkass Dissonance , Loss of Inhibitions and Mask of Confidence . The hit-and-run poster is the least dedicated breed of Troll . They'll make a single provocative comment and then leave, never to be seen again. Sometimes they lose interest, sometimes they're content with just knowing someone is likely pissed off, but often they're smugly watching the backlash from the safety of their own computer, refusing to give the other party the satisfaction of a response. On wikis, the term refers to someone who makes a single edit to the wiki and never responds to requests for clarification of what they did. The Other Wiki has a whole article on the phenomenon. Here on TV Tropes, though, we call this a Drive-By Updater . An item on one web-service that is requested by another web-service, usually an image. This isn't when an image is actually a potholed link. This is not only impolite (it eats up your victim's bandwidth), it's almost always a really bad idea. A hot linked item may have been removed by the original host (this is a big problem with YouTube links). The original host can be undergoing a performance problem. The original host may have changed its linking policy. The original host may no longer exist... The list of possible badness goes on and on. Luckily, this Wiki provides a way for people to upload images that skips a lot of those badnesses. See the Media Uploader on the Tools menu. See Hotlinked Image Switch for another reason not to hotlink to images on this wiki. Short for " In Before the Lock", a contentless post (like First! or Me Too!) made for two purposes: to predict that the thread will soon be locked, and to inflate one's post count. It's usually seen in a very contentious thread that's either devolved into such bickering that it's unsalvageable, or is relatively new but can't reasonably go anywhere other than unsalvageable bickering. It's a relatively useless post for pretty much every purpose. If they're right, the thread is about to be locked anyway, so no one's going to read the comment. If the thread is deleted, "IBTL" doesn't even count for their post tally. And since it's not seen very often, it's not a great way to signal that the thread is headed for lockable territory, as a sizeable number of readers aren't going to get it. It's usually frowned upon in much the same way as "First!", but since most threads that get this treatment are doomed anyway, it's less likely any action will be taken. Implonkus is that feeling you get when you make an effort to write a good post — correct spelling, correct grammar, actual organisation of thoughts, perhaps even writing a draft and working on it — only for the first response to be festooned with Rouge Angles of Satin , Emoticons , and Leet Lingo . It's quite a letdown to realise that you're the only one who actually cares enough about the topic to make an effort to have an intelligent conversation about it. First coined on HBO 's forum for The Sopranos , the term is a Portmanteau of "impetus" and "plonk", the latter a Usenet onomatopoeia for the notional sound made when someone is "killfiled", a reference to a Usenet-era ignore list. "What proof is there that [Hitler] is an atheist? In Mein Kampf , he actually seems to be a believer." "I'm sure you are against classroom prayer and homeschooling as well, just like Hitler. " — Two editors of Conservapedia have a reasoned exchange of opinions The Internet Cold Reader is a particularly annoying online persona who subjects other users to Cold Reading . He'll read a four-sentence post and use it to deduce your life story, psychology, politics, and religious views, and then use that as a basis for their argument. Sometimes they'll invite you to correct them; more often than not, they won't . To give a hypothetical example: You: I didn't think Twilight was too bad, if you don't think too hard about it . Internet Cold Reader: Ah! Obviously, you are a closet misogynist who thinks that every woman needs to find a perfect, godlike, sparkling man to obey absolutely! Also, you probably also have anti-intellectual leanings and feel threatened by the idea that there might be such a thing as quality literature outside of your little bubble. Most Internet Cold Readers don't actually sound like armchair psychologists, but the ones who do are hilarious. Some actually do it on purpose. Arguing with an Internet Cold Reader is generally believed to be a useless proposition, because anything you may say in your defence is just further proof of your deep-seated insecurities . It's a similar mindset to the Conspiracy Theorist , who thinks that all evidence to the contrary is actually evidence of a cover-up. The fact that most people on the Internet really are insecure, won't ever admit to being wrong, and prefer to dig in their heels over conceding a point means that Internet Cold Readers can rely on a grain of truth from which to spin their bizarre personality profile. But in the end, it's an Ad Hominem form of argument, focusing on the other party's obvious desires and misconceptions over the topic at hand. The Internet Detective fancies himself to be the ultimate diviner of truth from lies, a righteous warrior fighting against falsehood on the Internet. Accordingly, the Detective will trawl the Internet for any information they can find about an individual from any period of time, looking for something they did wrong at some point in time, which will then stand for all time and mean they can never be right about anything, ever. These guys can be extremely obsessive, going through old threads, social media profiles, even Real Life public records. They employ heavy use of the Wayback Machine and might even engage in Social Engineering , like posing as someone else to the subject or their friends. Anything they find will be subject to intense examination, taken in the worst possible context (if not removed from its original context outright ), and painted in the most embarrassing possible light . Accordingly, the Internet Detective's obsessive, stalker-like stance and tendency to jump to conclusions makes it an attractive disguise for a Single-Issue Wonk , who wants so desperately to be right about something that they'll scour their opponent's Internet history looking for anything they can use against them. In the worst cases, someone who wants to defend a false claim will become an Internet Detective looking to make a show of force and convince their opponents to back down, which works more often than it really should . The Internet Detective is described on Mike Reed's Flame Warriors Guide as the Archivist . The Internet Tough Guy is someone who will threaten anyone who annoys them online with physical or legal harm. These threats are always empty; Internet Tough Guys couldn't fulfill most of them even if they wanted to. They probably wouldn't even be able to figure out your IP address, much less your real identity. The most common threat is one of violence, evoking the image of a weakling who fancies himself to be a tough guy but could never convince anyone of that in Real Life. The second most common threat is of a lawsuit, which would be immediately thrown out of court if they ever tried it for real. Those threats often invoke the U.S. Constitution in places where it doesn't apply, especially where the forum isn't even owned by Americans. But there are other, more subtle variants, like the user who claims to be close to the forum moderators and threatens to get their adversary banned, or the user who notices that their opponent is a minor and threatens to call their parents. Trolls love dealing with Internet Tough Guys, because they're incredibly easy to provoke into rants, anger, and ineffectual threats — the kind of thing trolls live on. See also the Navy Seal Copypasta, an example of an Internet Tough Guy whose threats and claims of military experience are so outlandish that it became a meme. The Left Fielder is a user who will enter a discussion already under way and start talking about something only vaguely related, or even completely unrelated. When done deliberately, it's a form of derailing a thread, but usually couching the derailment in something not really inflammatory, just horrendously off-topic. Imagine, for instance, a thread about whales in which someone asks the question, "Have you ever noticed that a lot of rock stars from The '70s look like Jesus?" Most forum users can't resist the temptation to answer the question. A skilled Left Fielder will throw out something that requires a lot of discussion to untangle; in this case, the users will discuss whether The Beatles look like Jesus and transition to arguing whether the Beatles really even count as a "70s band". Eventually, someone will remind everyone that the thread was originally about "whales in the time of Jesus or something", and the other users will sheepishly go back to talking about whales, but with a few rogue comments sprinkled in about whether the Beatles were better than Led Zeppelin . This is why many forums have strict rules against "off-topic" posts. Some Left Fielders are Trolls , but others are Single Issue Wonks who just have to talk about their personal obsession, and still others are Noobs who don't know how forums work. Even seasoned users can't resist throwing something out of left field on occasion, and smart moderators will usually establish a new thread for the topic. The term comes from Baseball and is part of more general slang for something strange or unexpected. The exact link to left field (either the area of the field or the player who plays the position) is uncertain, but a commonly-cited origin is from the Chicago Cubs' old stadium at the West Side Grounds, where beyond the left field stands sat Cook County Hospital, a mental institution note : now it's the University of Illinois Medical Center; fans could occasionally hear, coming out of left field, the patients screaming crazy things. See also Weird Aside , for when it happens offline. A blog that focuses primarily on cool links that the author has found, as opposed to original content such as essays. Arguably the original form; Jorn Barger, the coiner of the term "weblog," intended it to mean a log of his Web surfing. Barger's blog Robot Wisdom , one of the oldest, still follows this format. Many Power Law Blogs have this form, often embellished with commentary. (The most pronounced example may be Instapundit who has a habit of potholing his links with cryptic descriptions like Heh. ) A lurker is someone who reads a forum but doesn't participate. They may simply read the conversations without even signing up, or they might register an account but rarely post, if at all. Unlike in Real Life , where a "lurker" would be that creepy guy at the party whom no one remembers inviting and who stands in the corner all night listening to other people's conversations, on the Internet, no one notices a lurker. In fact, lurking is highly encouraged on many corners of the Internet (hence the phrase "Lurk moar"). The idea is that a new user shouldn't just jump in and start posting without a sense of the forum's rules, style, and culture. If you take the time to read the forum and learn how it works, then when you're ready, you can jump in and be less of a Noob . However, lurking wasn't always a good thing. The term was coined in The '80s , when the Internet barely existed and was confined to governments and universities. People would connect their Commodore 64s and IBM compatible computers to bulletin board systems via modem. These were often hosted by fellow geeks in their own homes, and usually used a modem connected to a single phone line, meaning only one user could be on at a time — and many a BBS wasn't even online all day long. Thus, a lurker was someone who tied up the phone line without contributing to the community. Not all lurkers nowadays are prospective users, either. Sometimes they might lurk but not like what they see and decide to stay out of the conversation. Sometimes it's an old forum and nobody's using it anymore, but someone still wants to see an old conversation. In other cases, the forum may be free to read but charge money to register an account, and lurkers are the ones who don't want to pay for it. If you join a forum and admit to being a former lurker, the registered users might be creeped out that someone was reading their conversations, even though they were posted on a publicly viewable forum. Not related to the advanced/evolved form of a Zerg Hydralisk , nor the homeless people on Babylon 5 , nor the enemy monsters in Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy . An online "entourage" or crowd of Yes People surrounding a particular Internet user and/or a "personal army" of Internet users recruited to attack or defend someone in a Flame War or internet flare, or to promote them or their product. This is connected to AstroTurf except that Astroturf is usually for a politician, product, company, or one side in a war or conflict, whereas a Meat Puppet can appear anywhere (and are often why a debate escalates to Flame War, Internet Backdraft, or appearing on Fandom Wank levels). These are usually called Meat Puppet as opposed to Sock Puppet , because they are actually separate people, unlike a Sock Puppet, which is a different user identity (or collection of them) created by the same person. That said, good luck in telling them apart, especially in places that allow anonymity and don't ban proxies. No relation to the Meat Puppet trope, which is about possession or Mind Control. A Mediator is the opposite of a Troll — they respond to most arguments online, particularly the ones that don't directly involve them, by posting comments intended to defuse the debate (or at least admonish the other parties for "fighting"). Unfortunately, they're incapable of doing this without a heaping dose of condescension . As such, this is very grating to people who were simply having a spirited but reasoned argument. In the worst cases, the Mediator will derail the thread and shift discussion to themselves and how important they are to the forum . This, ironically , usually results in a new petty squabble between the Mediator and the users who are challenging their moral authority. The Mediator is often A Darker Me who wouldn't dare intervene in this way in Real Life , and the worst cases become an online Well-Intentioned Extremist who commits the Golden Mean Fallacy — either you're totally peaceful, or you're disrupting the forum. A Mediator who takes the time to actually be good at their job without the self-aggrandisement will successfully morph into the Shepherd . "And posting 'Me too!' like some braindead AOLer I should do the world a favor and cap you like Ol' Yeller You're just about as useless as JPEGs to Helen Keller..." "Me Too!" is a pointless, contentless post, replying to a previous post just to say that they agree with it. Of course, they don't actually have to say the exact phrase "Me too!" Variants include "Seconded," "This," "Damn straight," "+1," and even just "^" (an IRC tradition) to refer to the text above it. In really bad cases, the post will quote the entirety of the text it agrees with. Much like "First!", forums hate this and will often delete it. Indeed, it wastes not only time, but also bandwidth; some places which barely handle the traffic they get will ban posts like this just to keep the site up and running. However, there are a couple of accepted uses. For instance, some boards will automatically close a thread after a certain number of posts, and participants in a thread nearing that limit who want to break it earlier will agree to flood the thread with meaningless posts to get it locked. Threads involving voting for something will often be filled with posts like this, because all that needs to be said is whether the user agrees or disagrees. On Twitter , the phrase was used as part of the "#MeToo movement", where women who were victims of sexual harassment (or worse ) would simply post the hashtag, and the sheer volume of users who did this (particularly high-profile women like actresses — there's a reason for the Horrible Hollywood trope, after all) would draw attention to the scale of the problem. "Me too!" was particularly associated with the Eternal September , when AOL subscribers got access to Usenet and flooded it with posts like this (among other Noob behaviour). In the mid-1990s, "AOL!" became a mocking shorthand for "Me too!" on the site. A ninja editor is a person who makes a post, then almost immediately goes back and edits it without comment. Like a Ninja . Usually, this is done innocently, like fixing a typo. In those cases, it's usually customary to add something to the end of the post clarifying the situation, like "ninja-edited for typo". When it's not done innocently, however, it changes the content of the post. And this leads to mass confusion, as subsequent replies address a post saying one thing, when the post itself says another. It's often done when someone is losing an argument and wants to walk back what they said to make it easier to defend. Because of this, many forums limit the ability to edit posts to a certain period of time after the post was made (typically an hour); this allows for innocent ninja edits, but after that, there will be a marker on the post to show that it has been edited, or perhaps editing may not be permitted at all. Some sites, like GameFAQs , had such trouble with this that they didn't allow editing at all . At other places, it can make for an entertaining forum game, but in that case everyone knows what's about to happen. The most malicious form of ninja editing is a Trolling method by which a user asks a question, gets a few responses, and then goes back and edits their original post to make the replies appear super embarrassing or incriminating. For instance, the Troll might get users to innocently respond with a number under 13, then change their question to "How old are you?" — and many forums will ban anyone who admits they're under 13 years old. Or they might post a really inflammatory comment, get a bunch of inflammatory responses, then edit their original comment to something much tamer or even delete it outright, making the other users look like they started the argument by being needlessly aggressive. The easiest way to combat malicious ninja editing is to quote a user before responding to them. Users generally can't edit quoted text in someone else's post, and it clearly shows the point to which you're responding. Branching-style forums may also delete any responses to a deleted post to prevent this kind of thing from happening. A related phenomenon is the ninja post , where someone takes the time to respond to something, only for someone else to have responded more quickly in the time between the first user reading the thread and submitting their own post. This causes a break in the conversation where one person responds, then the next post appears as if the previous one didn't exist — which is especially confusing if it refers to "the last post" when it really means two posts ago, or it complains that no one's mentioned something when the ninja post did mention it. This is one of the disadvantages of a slow internet connection. Places like 4chan have the variant known as the "Combo Breaker ", where a group of posters tries to complete a sequence one post at a time (like spelling a word or posting pieces of an image), only for two users to post the same image in succession because one ninja'd the other, or for a user to post something irrelevant because they weren't paying attention to the "combo" (4chan finds things like this hilarious ). On TV Tropes, we also have what we call a Serial Tweaker , who makes an edit, realises they missed something, and makes another edit to fix that thing, realises they missed something... "Rewrites every story, every poem that ever was Eliminates incompetence, and those who break the laws." An Orwellian Editor is the extremist cousin of the Ninja Editor who goes to great lengths to remove all evidence of something they said or did online, in the hopes that the Internet will forget about it if it's no longer available. It's usually done as a response to unexpected criticism — rather than address it, they delete the offending comment and then pretend that it never happened. In some cases, though, it could be much more than a comment — like an entire Fan Fic , perhaps one that was extremely incendiary and racist. Orwellian Editors are not limited to hiding their own actions. Just as frequent are cases where a Message Board administrator attempts this on other people, usually when they end up on the losing side of an argument; they'll delete an entire thread and any reference to it to avoid having to face up to it. They'll often ban the most vocal users on the winning side as well, and they'll forbid the remaining users from mentioning the whole affair. This, by the way, is an excellent way to drive away forum users. Either way, whether or not the deleted content is truly damaging is irrelevant; in fact, most of the deletions themselves weigh a lot worse on the Orwellian Editor than whatever was posted in the first place. Some Orwellian Editors also find it very difficult to delete everything , in part because they don't always have the ability to do so (although they may try harassing forum administrators to delete stuff on their behalf), and in part because of the Streisand Effect — their zeal to remove something from the Internet is what gets others interested in what exactly it was to begin with. Out here on TV Tropes, we've experienced this sort of behaviour from people who've written works they'd like to forget and want us to delete our page on them. That's why we have a policy that The Fic May Be Yours, but the Trope Page Is Ours . The term "Orwellian" (in this and other contexts) comes from George Orwell and his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , in which society is adept at rewriting history to match what the present-day propaganda demands ("We have always been at war with Eastasia."). Post count is the number of posts a forum user has made. It's often displayed in the user's profile, and even next to the user's name on every post. For most people, post count is irrelevant — a good comment is a good comment, regardless of the number of comments the user previously made. But some users use a high post count as a proxy for high status and will judge other users — and their contributions — by their post count. There's a nugget of truth to this, in the sense that someone who's been on the forum for a long time and is highly respected there will naturally have a high post count. But correlation does not imply causation, and some users will try to manufacture respect by building up a high post count. As such, these users will artificially inflate their post counts with contentless posts, along the lines of "First!" and "Me too!", as well as engage in such activities as Thread Hopping and Thread Necromancy . These users are known as "post whores". They're not always bad; sometimes their commitment to contributing actually helps keep the forum stable and active. But others are just obnoxious Spammers . Such users also have a tendency to Suffer Newbies Poorly , because they will naturally think of newbies with low post counts as not worthy of their respect. Clay Shirky wrote an article that observed, in effect, that the popularity of blogs — as defined by inbound links — will be governed by who links to whom. Where popularity breeds popularity, this will have the effect of "clumping" popularity (inbound links, or attention ) around a relatively tight set of interconnected blogs. Naturally, there are Power Law winners in the various blog categories, as well. The Shepherd is a rare and benevolent online persona who actually helps new members find their way on the forum. They'll take the time to greet newbies, teach them the ropes, answer questions that might be common knowledge to established users, and get the rest of the forum to treat them fairly. Shepherds are incredibly useful to have on an Internet forum, where a noob can barely go five minutes without unwittingly hitting someone's Berserk Button . They don't know which topics always lead to arguments, which users have a Hair-Trigger Temper , or which opinions will draw in the Single-Issue Wonk . Most veteran users — especially those who Suffer Newbies Poorly — will not assume good faith, but instead see the new user as a Troll and react accordingly. Such reactions usually discourage the new user from continuing to contribute. But the Shepherd will protect the newbie from the attacks and help them become a respected member of the forum. Shepherds are often held in very high esteem in the Forum Pecking Order , especially if some established users once benefited from the Shepherd's help. Because of this, the Shepherd usually doesn't have to be very forceful in convincing the rest of the forum to shut up. Arguing with or trolling the Shepherd is highly frowned upon , and most other users will rally to their defence. That said, the Shepherd is usually no pushover himself, and is capable of arguing with even the moderators — and winning . And if the newbie betrays the Shepherd's trust , the Shepherd will come down harder on them than even the regulars would have without his intervention . Some particularly rabid newbie-haters will accuse the Shepherd of being a White Knight , and in a broad sense their motives are similar. But a genuine Shepherd is a Good Shepherd who really wants to grow the community, whereas the stereotypical White Knight wants to make a big show of "saving" the newbie and is hoping the newbie is a hot girl who'll fall in love with him. "Show newbies the ropes! If we see a user we've never met before make some mistakes on the wiki, instead of berating or ignoring the user, we'll hunt them down and hang them. No one was a perfect wiki editor straight off the bat, but if you're dumb enough to get caught, you deserve to die." — The Urban Dead Wiki's (Satirical) Project Un!Welcome A forum user who suffers newbies poorly has no patience for noobs and will berate them for not knowing the ins and outs of the forum, its culture, or its underlying fandom. Your average forum has a ton of this type of user, which is why it pays to be a lurker so that one can avoid proving that they're new to the forum in their ignorance. Most users who suffer newbies poorly don't really have a Hair-Trigger Temper and aren't actively looking to scare off the newbies, but their impatience with having to answer obvious questions or cleaning up after a user who doesn't know how things work leads them to blow their top pretty quickly. This user is more of an Insufferable Genius who clearly knows more about the forum and has been there long enough to prove it. This type of user is especially common on forums dealing with a specific fandom, where a new user might not know as much about the underlying fandom and asks the sort of questions that a " real fan" would obviously know. It's also prevalent in forums dealing with video games, where users have little patience for newbies who might be struggling with the game and asking for help; they usually tell them to Figure It Out Yourself . Such users might be slightly more justified if it's an online game like an MMORPG or MOBA and they'd be expected to team up with the newbie, and the newbie's poor performance and understanding of the Metagame negatively affects the veteran's enjoyment of the game. The particularly odd thing about a user who suffers newbies poorly is that regardless of how impatiently they treated you when you were a newbie, the minute you stop being a newbie and move up a rank in the Forum Pecking Order , they're perfectly okay with you and treat you like an equal. In fact, it's not uncommon for such users to be among the most liked and respected on the board; you just needed to prove your worth. That is, if you ever managed to make it that far and didn't just give up when everyone started snapping at you. The effect of users who suffer newbies poorly can be mitigated by the presence of a Shepherd , who can often remind such users that they're being unnecessarily mean. Thread hopping is a term for posting a comment without reading the thread beyond the first or last post. Nine times out of ten, a thread hopper's comment will repeat something that was previously discussed or from which the thread has long since moved on. The term comes from the idea that a person is just going from thread to thread and dropping a comment for its own sake. While it would be unreasonable to expect a user to read the entire thread before commenting (at least if it's a particularly long one), it's generally considered good Internet etiquette to at least skim the thread to see if what you wanted to discuss had already been addressed. At least go through the last page or two. What sets a threadhopper apart is that it seems like they just want to inflate their post count and will say the first thing that comes to their mind with respect to the topic. The cool thing about thread hopping is that if you spot a compulsive threadhopper, you can comment about them in a thread which they'll never actually read. "We have lots of points that we debate to death and beyond. Raise Dead is a 1st level spell on these forums." A Thread Necromancer is someone who adds a comment to a thread that hasn't been active for months, if not years. It's dead, but there's nothing stopping you bringing it back to life, like a necromancer . Supply your own Evil Laugh . Whether or not this is acceptable practice depends on the forum, and in many cases on the topic. Some places very much frown on it and will automatically lock threads that have been inactive for a certain period of time. Others encourage it, because they like to keep all discussion of a single topic in one place and don't like to clog the forum with different threads on the same topic. But more often than not, thread necromancy is not a good idea. Threads die for a reason, after all, and in some cases a thread was actually quite unpleasant and reviving it would just cause more fights . Indeed, one Troll tactic is to deliberately "necro" a Flame War thread that had burned itself out to reignite the argument and grab some popcorn . In other cases, someone will think of the perfect insult days or even weeks after the argument , and unlike in real life, on the Internet you still have the opportunity to throw it out there. Other threads, however, have very good reasons to remain dormant for long periods of time, like a Play-by-Post Game where people have taken a break. Indeed, many roleplayers will often ask for a thread necromancer to show up because they want to pick up a game they haven't played lately. Another "positive" necromancy situation is where someone posts a creative work like a Fan Fiction in installments — it can be a while between installments . In that case, though, some writers will also necro the thread to ask for feedback, which can really piss off the other users who saw a new post and had their hopes up that a new installment had just dropped. The Internet has long adopted the aphorism "timestamps are your friends" to encourage people who stumble across a thread to pay attention to how old it is, lest they anger the other forumgoers with an unwitting thread necromancy. If you absolutely need to leave a post after a long time, it's considered courteous to acknowledge the long delay. Word of Mod is a decision taken by fiat. While the name suggests that it's an order by the forum moderators, in many cases it goes all the way up to the Powers That Be , usually the site owners. Users who don't comply tend to be blocked or restrained. In some cases, the term is used to decry power-tripping forum moderation trying to silence things that reflect poorly on them; Word of Mod can be used to enact the wishes of an Orwellian Editor . In other cases, it's simply a neutral way to playfully refer to moderation decisions. In some cases, "Word of Mod" can be used to distinguish comments by moderators acting in their capacity as moderators from comments by moderators acting as forum members like everyone else. This is exactly how it works on the TV Tropes Forum , where our moderators put on their "mod hat" before invoking Word of Mod. Such posts are easily distinguished by their pink background colour. Police Sergeant Deegan: Ah, this reminds me of Vietnam... Father Ted: You were in Vietnam, sergeant? Police Sergeant Deegan: No, no, I mean the films! The YouTube War Expert is a self-proclaimed expert in all aspects of war studies. They've never actually fought in a war, nor even joined any branch of the military , nor observed any military training regimens or conducted formal study of any historical military campaigns. But they did read a book once. Maybe several! Since a lot of Internet discussion revolves around who would win a hypothetical fight between two sides, this type of Internet persona shows up frequently. They're particularly difficult to avoid on YouTube , where it's practically impossible to post a military-related video without several of these guys flooding the comment section. It usually devolves into an argument where the "expert" insists that one side would obviously win because of a myriad of technical and cultural specifications that they alone had considered. The YouTube War Expert usually exhibits the following traits: - Obsession with the technical details of individual weapons. Real soldiers care far more about the context of a weapon's use; who's using it, what's the target, how many are on each side. The YTWE cares more about how much damage it can do, what conditions it can survive, and how often it will succeed. There are a number of monomaniacs out there who favour one weapon over all others and will extol its superiority in every situation you can think of. They'll rattle off statistics about the weapon at the slightest provocation; if you ever wanted to know about a certain gun's capacity, weight, and rate of fire, they'll tell you before you even have a chance to ask. - Misplaced Nationalism and Cultural Posturing. The YTWE looks at a particular nation or ethnic group and re-characterises them as a Proud Warrior Race, uniquely suited to winning any given conflict because of how fearless and disciplined they are. As one might expect, the YTWE often shares said nationality or ethnicity with the group he's extolling. There are also anti-nationalists out there who look at a certain nation or ethnic group and claim that they are almost certain to fall apart whenever the going gets tough. Expect to see an obsession with old unresolved national rivalries, often involving the Cold War. - Hilariously masculine language. The YTWE will drop terms like "blitzkrieg", "Alpha strike", "lethality radius", and "maximum overkill". If they know anything about the slang of real-world military branches, they'll use it at every opportunity. They often double as an Internet Tough Guy who will threaten you as if they were at war with you, often saying things like, "How 'bout you say that again when I come to your house and point a [weapon of choice] at you?" See also the Navy Seal Copypasta. Any debate involving a YouTube War Expert usually devolves into bizarre hypotheticals ( e.g. which medieval weapons are better), Culture Clashes , arguments over whether Katanas Are Just Better , and comparisons to losers of major military conflicts . Anyone who actually knows something about military history or conflict will just get drowned out by these idiots. These guys nearly universally have no military experience, but in many places (particularly the U.S., which has a lot of Internet users), they can actually purchase weapons for themselves, including firearms. They'll then brag about their weapons, describe them in lavish detail, and fantasise about all the scenarios in which they may have to use said weapon, none of which will ever materialise because they live in Suburbia . These guys are also often called mall ninjas , after an internet discussion involving someone who behaved like this and claimed to be a mall security guard, who may or may not have been trolling . The bottom line is that anyone who's actually been through military training will become well aware of how long it takes to become a real military expert. The YouTube War Expert is so Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance that it becomes blindingly obvious that they've never been close to a military in their lives.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlinePersona
Only Flesh Is Safe - TV Tropes This trope describes a weapon, superpower or some kind of phenomenon that explicitly damages/affects inanimate objects but has absolutely no effect on living organic matter. It of course does not stop the user from indirectly hurting someone by say, dropping a building on their foe, taking out the floor beneath their feet or blowing up the power source of their powered armor. For instance. Can be considered a Super-Trope of The Nudifier but includes all the less prurient examples. Contrast with Neutron Bomb (which destroys organic matter only), As Lethal as It Needs to Be and Could Have Been Messy (both of which are extradiegetically brought on by poor editing and age restrictions respectively.) Opposite Trope to Biomanipulation. Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) weapons, which fry mechanical circuitry, are of course a major example of this trope. From a Doylist point of view, it's often a means of avoiding having a Story-Breaker Power or squick. ## Examples: - Catian weaponry in Cat Planet Cuties focuses specifically on destroying material matter. In the 2nd episode, anti-matter hammers are used to destroy a battalion of tanks, and the clothes of the pilots inside. Later on in the series, anti-matter bullets are used to defuse a hostage situation by shooting the gun pointed at someone's head. - Allen's sword from D.Gray-Man is capable of cutting akuma to pieces with ease, but is not meant to harm humans. Unfortunately for Allen, him \|\|being the vessel of the 14th Noah means he reacts in pain to being impaled on it with an akuma after he recalled his sword\|\|. - Dog Days: Within the world of Flonyard, there are areas where people cannot be injured and are instead temporarily turned into fluffy little balls or receive Clothing Damage. Kingdoms mainly use these to engage in Harmless War for Fun and Profit. - Fairy Tail: This is a common restriction on magic. - Urtear's Arc of Time magic can age, move, or restore objects, but it doesn't work on anything living. - Midnight is incapable of reflecting human bodies, although he can target their clothes. - Played for Laughs in Inazma Delivery. Bytheway's Disintegrator Ray wipes non-living matter out of existence but doesn't harm living flesh ... nor underwear ... at least not on regular power levels. When charged to max, not even underwear is safe. - Mid-Childan combat magic in Lyrical Nanoha is like this: you'd think that an energy beam that can pierce through layers upon layers of heavy spaceship armor would vaporize bare flesh instantly, but no, it merely knocks the target unconscious with not so much as a burn. Most cuts and bruises the characters sustain in combat actually come from secondary sources, like being slammed into a wall or caught under falling debris. - One Piece - The Fuwa Fuwa No Mi power is a bit of a mixed-case: it is a levitation power that can only affect the user himself — and inanimate objects. All other organic matter and lifeforms are immune to direct use. - Gladius' Pop Pop Fruit power is to make any non-organic object inflate and then pop, potentially spreading harmful shrapnels. Played with that it can be used on Living Toys as they're made of non-organic matter. - Ranma ½: Ryouga's Breaking Point attack can shatter rigid material like rocks with a Fingerpoke Of Doom, but does nothing to people. The real benefit of training the technique was to build endurance by subjecting himself to the shrapnel created by pulverizing rocks in such a way. - DC Universe - Firestorm's matter-altering power has no effect on living organisms. - Marvel Universe - X-Men villain Avalanche originally had the power to create seismic effects that shattered buildings but did nothing to living organic matter. At some point, he lost that particular weakness. - In his first appearance, the Molecule Man from the Fantastic Four comics was incapable of affecting organic matter. - Iron Man villain the Melter started off with a melting ray which could melt iron. As Iron Man upgraded his armours, the ray seemed pretty weak in comparison, so it was upgraded to be able to melt anything, provided it's inorganic. - Gambit can charge up anything with energy so that it explodes, unless it's organic. Hence why he usually uses cards as a weapon. - Equestria Girls: Friendship Souls: Nocturn's Yakkai Koto (Burden) can make any non-animal object it strikes, from plants, pieces of paper, clothing, even water, to be as heavy and stiff as steel. - The time travel technology in Terminator destroys inorganic matter, which prevents the traveler from bringing any future tech and is also why they happen to be Naked on Arrival. There is some leeway in covering inorganic matter with living organic tissue, which is how the titular Terminators get around this rule (a robotic endoskeleton, wrapped in an outer layer of living flesh). - Various spinoffs in the overall Terminator franchise have played around with this, from comics to books, and most notably in the Sarah Connor Chronicles TV show. In some instances, the human resistance sends people back in time who have future plasma-weapons surgically implanted in them for later retrieval. A better tactic in later installments was to simply send humans back in time with knowledge of how to build futuristic weapons from contemporary components (either by swallowing a microfilm briefly, or just sending back a trained engineer who memorized how to do it). - A little bit of the latter was seen even in the original 1984 movie: resistance member Kyle Reese couldn't bring any plasma weapons with him from the future, but he's an experienced guerrilla soldier who already knows how to make pipe-bombs from household chemicals in the right combinations. - The T-1000 stretches this the furthest because it's an entirely inorganic, liquid metal construct, but because it can perfectly mimic flesh and it can bypass this limitation. - The Fly (1958): Inverted: The teleportation device only worked on non-living things — until the protagonist made a breakthrough. - The 1986 remake with Jeff Goldblum had him phrase it as that the teleporter (at first) could only safely transport "inanimate objects". When he tried to dematerialize and then rematerialize live test animals, they literally turned inside out. He subsequently attempted a simpler test, just teleporting a cooked steak - dead flesh - but even that came out the other end tasting awful. The reason for this was pretty simple, though: transmitting a pound of chemically simple objects like iron or water is easy, but a biological organism is drastically more complex than that. He later fixed this by refining the teleporter computer's programming. - The Matrix: As it is set during a Robot War, EMP generators are one of the few effective large-scale weapons that the human resistance has against the Machines. A complication is that Neo is still jacked in to the Matrix via remote broadcast, and simply pulling the plug will lead to fatal shock, so they have to wait until Neo gets to an exit point and unplugs on his own before they can use the EMP on the robot Sentinels bursting into the ship. - Avengers: Infinity War: Ebony Maw's telekinesis only works on inanimate objects and on himself. - Steelheart - Tensors can pulverize most matter, but can't affect flesh (at one point a skilled user punches some Enforcement mooks while disintegrating holes in their body armor for his fist to go through). - Steelheart's metal-transmutation power also can't affect living beings, and many other Epic powers are the same. - Worm: This trope is called the Manton Effect, and it's very common for capes. It's theorized to be a psychological block that prevents some capes from using offensive powers directly on living targets, and later revealed to be \|\|the shards keeping their host parahumans from accidentally harming themselves with their powers. Also, it encourages innovative uses of powers by said hosts\|\|. The few capes that have surpassed the Manton Effect (like the Some Kind of Force Field — wielding Narwhal) are extremely dangerous opponents. - World-Weathering Incandescence from Exalted is a charm that lets the infernal burn and destroy inanimate non-magical objects (like walls and floors and ceilings) with a single fiery blow. - Matter powers from Mage: The Awakening, which only directly affect non-living matter. Of course, vampires count as non-living matter... - Champions - It's possible to give attacks that normally affect living creatures (such as Energy Blast and Ranged Killing Attack) a disadvantage such as "Doesn't affect living creatures". This allows the character to use the attack freely without worrying about accidentally harming the innocent or violating a Code vs. Killing. It's particularly useful when applied to area effect attacks. - In The Great Super Villain Contest, the villain Annihilator has a 6d6 Ranged Killing Attack Explosion that only affects inorganic objects. - Dungeons & Dragons: - Any spell in that lists its target as "object" will not affect creatures. A few do make an exception for constructs. - Leprechauns from 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons had "polymorph non-living" as one of their most annoying talents. - Paranoia: - One type of gas shell available for the cone rifle is Corrosion Gas. It destroys all metal in the area of effect (such as armor and the bodies of robots). It has no effect on living creatures. - A Gauss Gun sends out a powerful electromagnetic charge that has a devastating effect on electronics (including robots and computers). It doesn't affect organic beings. - GURPS: Spells from the College of Making and Breaking will only affect inanimate objects. - RuneQuest: the spell Animate (Substance) is restricted to inanimate matter with the caveat that it works on organics if they are already dead. - Forgotten Realms: Portals with the Nonliving-Only modifier will only transport inanimate matter. - Shadowrun: In Shadowrun Street Grimoire 5th Edition, the Decoy spell is a variant of the Chaos spell that only influences non-living sensor devices. - In SSI's Galactic Adventures, one of the weapons was a Heat Ray Gun that could destroy solid objects (like walls) but had no effect on opponents. - The Repair/Destruct power from Memoria can only affect non-living objects. - Depending on the patch, the Ultralisk and Reaper in Starcraft II have an attack that does a lot of damage, but can only hit buildings. - In the Star Wars videogame Knights of the Old Republic: - Ion Weapons damage machines but not living targets (might work on shields too.) - The Disable Droid light-side Force power does the same but has much higher damage and Area of Effect. Both are VERY useful when playing as a Light Side character. - In Red Alert 3, the Japanese basic Anti-Vehicle infantry weapon is not completely harmless to humans, but does very little damage to them (as is the case for most Anti-Armor weapons for balance reasons). According to the fluff they're explicitly calibrated to do so, for safety reasons. - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: The Adept-level Alteration spell Telekinesis cannot be used on living targets. It can be used to throw objects at them. - The Telekinesis power from various Ultima videogames does not affect living things. - The "Argon Matrix Laser" from Spider-Man: The Animated Series was explicitly incapable of harming organic matter but it could damage clothing and even severed two of Doctor Octopus' cybernetic limbs. - Futurama: Parodied in "Fear of a Bot Planet" with this line from a robot in a Show Within a Show: "Incredible. The human was impervious to our most powerful magnetic field, yet he was destroyed by a harmless pointed stick." - Played with by Rose's Sword in Steven Universe: It's a weapon specifically designed to never damage a Gem's stone, which is their closest equivalent of human flesh, being the only part of them that can suffer permanent damage. It'll cut through a gem's constructed hard-light body with ease and, though not commented on, we're left to assume it would slice through human flesh just fine—it once cut an insect-like alien, though not lethally. It should be noted this isn't simply a case of being not sharp or hard enough to do the job, but is physically incapable of shattering a Gem. \|\|It was able to poof Pink Diamond, who, being a Diamond, was Nigh-Invulnerable and capable of tanking attacks that would outright shatter other Gems.\|\|	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyFleshIsSafe
Only in Miami - TV Tropes "But with a solve rate for murders at about 20%, Miami is a great place for me. A great place for me to hone my craft. Viva Miami." "If Miami hasn't got it, nobody's invented it yet." — Vinne Marco in a first season episode of Miami Vice Ever since a certain 1980s detective show, Miami, Florida has become a favorite destination of TV and movie writers (and makers of certain video games involving homicide and car theft). It makes sense. If aliens, terrorists, or Mother Nature decide to smite a city, they'll go for one of those other two first. It has all the warmth and tropical glamor of the West Coast, but with an East Coast hipness. You might mistake it for Hawaiʻi at first glance. If you believe TV and the movies, Miami is the only city in Florida. The state's other major metropolitan areas — some of which have populations in the multiple millions — are either treated as merely being suburbs of Miami or else are ignored entirely. You would also think that everyone lives in Art Deco mansions, speaks Cuban-accented Spanish (or Cuban Spanish-accented English), has access to a speedboat, wears the latest designer sunglasses and takes off said sunglasses at the slightest provocation. Not quite Truth in Television. Nobody actually takes off their sunglasses — it's too bright for that. The abundance of palm trees however is true, as are the boats (though there are usually more yachts than speedboats), thanks to Miami's proximity to both Biscayne Bay and the Intracoastal Waterway. The Miami/South Florida metro area is the biggest urban area in the state, and ninth largest in the United States (it isn't the largest city proper in the state; that would be Jacksonville, which is also the largest city by square mile in the continental United States). Miami has the opposite issue from Jacksonville: whereas Jacksonville has a low population spread out over a truly huge city, Miami/Dade has a ton of tightly packed, separate municipalities which are really just fancied-up neighborhoods of a single city. Miami has the largest immigrant population of any city in North America, just ahead of Toronto, thanks to its large Caribbean and Latin American communities and it is one of the few major American cities where a majority of the populace primarily speak a language other than English. People in other parts of Florida have noticed that this trope is in action, and they really, aren't happy about it. really Completely (well, mostly) unrelated to Only in Florida. ## Examples: - Miami itself has exploited this trope: In 1972, shortly after Walt Disney World opened near Orlando, the Miami Board of Tourism placed vacation ads in eighteen different newspapers in the northern US and Europe which encouraged visitors to visit Miami because it was "just down the road from Disney World". This statement is technically true... if by "the road" you mean Interstate 95, and by "just down" you mean 235 miles (378 km) south... - In Origin Story, after falling in love with the beaches in Florida, Alex Harris and Louise Fulford decide to settle in South Florida. While Miami becomes her city (and she becomes fiercely protective of it), Alex decides that its better for Secret Identity purposes that they live on Big Pine Key, an island some 70 miles south of the city. The idea that their "hometown superheroine" doesn't actually live in their hometown never occurs to anyone in Miami, because hey, its Miami. Why would anyone live anywhere else? - The second The Fast and the Furious movie, 2 Fast 2 Furious, heads to Miami, with protagonist Brian O'Conner having moved there after leaving the LAPD. The plot involves him reluctantly infiltrating a local drug lord's organization. - Both Bad Boys (1995) and Bad Boys II center on a couple of Cowboy Cops who work for the Miami PD. These movies also had a bit of of an odd case of California Doubling, not with Cali but with quiet, gentrified Delray Beach, Florida, 50 miles to the north for some scenes. Many areas are instantly recognizable to native Miamians, though. - A few years before Miami Vice, there was Scarface (1983), which also contributed heavily to the image of Miami as a noir/cop setting by depicting the city as being a hotbed of criminal activity and gang violence. Because of the depiction of the city and its mostly Latino characters, the film's credits contain a disclaimer that Cuban-Americans as a whole are not anything like the gangsters in the movie. - One of the odder examples is Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, which involves the Miami Dolphins and a story based on their real-life archrivals, the Buffalo Bills, losing Super Bowl 25 on a missed field goal. - Any Given Sunday takes place here, following the "Miami Sharks." - Averted in Dolphin Tale. The movie takes place in Clearwater, Florida — not an obscure little town, but not one of the major four Florida cities, either (though it is just west of one: Tampa). It is based on a real story, and they kept the actual specific West Central Florida location instead of moving it to the better-known Miami. - Pain & Gain: Where sticky holders of the Villain Ball can pull off a kidnapping and get rich from the victim. - Averted in Tomorrow Land. Casey and her family live in Cape Canaveral, since that is where NASA is located, and her father works as an engineer for them. - The climax of True Lies takes place in the Florida Keys and Miami. Subverted at the end, as the main characters head to Switzerland for a ballroom meeting at the exact same mansion featured in the beginning of the film. - Almost all Elmore Leonard crime novels, largely because Leonard is a Miami-based author. Dave Barry has also set his fiction in Miami for the same reason. In 1996, Barry, Leonard and 11 other Florida writers, some of whom also set most of their works or one or more series in Miami, collaborated on a Miami-set comedy mystery novel entitled Naked Came The Manatee. - Averted with American Girl Maryellen Larkin. She lives in Daytona Beach with her family. - Miami Vice is a Buddy Cop Show set in Miami. - CSI: Miami is a forensic detective drama based in Miami-Dade county. - Any Spanish-speaking Soap Opera co-produced by Telemundo, who can showcase truly "international casts". - Burn Notice has an international superspy artificially confined to Miami, leading to the oddest combination of Stale Beer and Martini-flavored Spy Fiction ever concocted. It's also filmed in the area, and spares no opportunity to show it. - Nip/Tuck. - Dexter takes place in Miami (like the series of novels it is based on), and is filmed mostly there (but also in California). Has something of a dark twist; Dexter likes Miami not for the sun or the glamour (things which he actually personally dislikes) but for the high unsolved-murder rate, which makes it an ideal place to "hone his craft". (20%, if Dexter is to be believed, which is...impressively atrocious.) - Reno 911! Miami - The Golden Girls is based here, though none of the four protagonists are natives. They're also all over 50, leading to plenty of "old people in Florida" jokes, even though three of the girls are still working full-time. - The show owes its existence to a variety show skit promoting Miami Vice having Selma Diamond of Night Court repeatedly mishear the show's title as "Miami Nice" and execs decided to run with the idea. - Austin & Ally also takes place in Miami. One vice squad cop is a huge fan of Miami Vice, which inspired him to become a cop. - Psych: Homicide detective Juliet O'Hara originally worked in Miami before transferring to Santa Barbara. - Jersey Shore had at least one season in Miami. - Jane the Virgin takes place in Miami. - The English-language versions of teen telenovelas made by Cinemat for Nickelodeon ( Every Witch Way and Talia in the Kitchen'') are set as well as made there. - In an example that overlaps with Real Life, the Food Network is infamous among Floridian chefs for pretending that nothing outside of the city of Miami exists. Every year, Florida hosts over 300 different food festivals and shows, but the only ones that ever get covered by the Food Network are the ones that are in Miami. They don't even offer coverage of the food festivals held at Disney World. - To elaborate on how badly the Food Network ignores the rest of Florida in favor of only covering Miami, during a single 2016 episode of episode of Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, Guy Fieri visited several restaurants in the Tampa/Saint Petersberg area. This was the only time the Food Network mentioned any Florida location between 2009 and 2019. - The sample city for Changeling: The Lost is Miami, the reasoning being that Miami sees such a regular influx of immigrants and travelers that it's only logical it would serve as a net for those who fell out of the Hedge. Though the crazy probably has something to do with it as well. - YouTube-er Diane Jennings, whose channel is built around the concept of "an Irish girl discovers America and American culture," found out the hard way that this trope is still in full effect when she booked herself into a hotel in the Miami/Dade County area that said — as in the Advertising example above — that it was "just down the road" from Walt Disney World. When she found out she was nearly 500 kilometers (~300 miles) from Disney, she felt a bit cheated. Luckily, she was able to transfer her reservation, and made a video about the road trip to Orlando instead.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyInMiami
Unseen Pen Pal - TV Tropes This trope describes a relationship built upon characters sharing their secrets and flaws (and, often deliberately, not sharing certain secrets and flaws) by some sort of long-distance communication: letters, emails, linked journals, strange books, and so on. While one character may assume that their new friend is in some far-away place, they might be as close as next-door. Rather than meeting in-person, however, their relationship begins like Pen Pals. The reasons why they don't meet in person can vary. One possible reason is that they haven't noticed or already don't like each other in-person. The identity that they've formed through the letters/online is completely different, or at least they began with different assumptions about their behaviour. Talking to each other creates conflict, but sitting down to write in your magical diary allows for the feelings to flow smoothly. This is frequently a source of Dramatic Irony. Another reason for the relationship may be that one of the characters is trapped somehow, unable to leave the place they're in. While the "trapped" character might just be a shut-in, more fantastical ideas (such as an AI in a box, Time Travel, Another Dimension, etc.) are all possible. When the lovers are in this situation, the "trapped" character needs the other one for their freedom. The more supernatural the "trapped" character is, the more likely the bond was faked in order to manipulate the other character. A popular reason for the characters to meet via long-distance communication is that one of them is visibly "other". The monstrous character knows that they can never be accepted by society, but by reaching out through letters or chat rooms, they can adopt a mundane persona. This online presence (or magical equivalent) allows them to find companionship with a "normal" person, who would otherwise find their appearance too horrifying to see past. Actual examples of this trope tend to mix-and-match possible reasons, although a common element that they share is the surprise and feeling of betrayal during The Reveal, when the characters meet in person. Any ruse maintained by one or both will be up. Resolving the conflict brought by the reveal depends on what direction the work leans: comedic works will have the misunderstanding resolved and the characters continue the relationship, while tragic works will have one character intentionally tricking the other for some personal gain (such as theft, trying to take over their world, or just killing/eating them), in which case the villain must be defeated. Stories where the unseen pen pal is a villain manipulating their target may have a catfishing metaphor along with An Aesop about not readily trusting strangers. If this communication occurs online, it can lead to an Internet Safety Aesop. Online examples may also fit Date My Avatar, where someone lies about their identity in an online space. Subtrope of Pen Pals. Romance examples are often part of a Long-Distance Relationship. If this takes a short amount of time, it is a kind of Prank Date. See also Blind and the Beast, another trope about establishing a relationship with an unseen friend. ## Examples: - Lucy And The Boy is a PSA about internet safety. A girl named Suzy talks to what appears to be a boy on social media, but when she meets him in real life, he turns out to be a grown man (and ostensibly either a pedophile or a kidnapper). - A friendship sort-of version happens in the last Black Jack series, in which an unwell Japanese boy lies to his Australian online friend about his prowess in baseball and breaks off the friendship in absolute panic when said friend says he'll visit him and watch his games. \|\|It turns out the Australian kid also was lying... because he was also sick, and actually blind. When they make up, Black Jack operates on both of them and they get better.\|\| - In the very beginning of Durarara!!, this is basically Izaya's Establishing Character Moment. He uses the internet to be a sympathetic ear for a depressed teenaged girl named Rio Kamichika and talks her into a mutual suicide, then has her kidnapped and rescued, then tells Rio what he did, and then he tries to lure her into committing suicide for real by saying not even he cares if she lives or dies. All for shits and giggles. \|\|She's saved by Celty, but barely.\|\| - In Cyborg 009, Francoise aka 003 gets one of these: the super-computer named "Sphynx" that controls the robot city of Compu-Utopia. \|\|That AI actually is the placeholder of the memories and mind of Carl Eckermann, a deceased young man with hidden and huge Mommy Issues, who happened to be the son and right-hand of the creator of Sphynx and Compu-Utopia.\|\| - In Death to the Mutants, the fiery Kaiju-sized Eternal Syne is unleashed after millennia of isolation and tasked with annihilating the X-Men and their mutant nation of Krakoa. And while she's doing that, she's also going online to explore the modern world of mortal humans - and chatting to Sally in London about submitting poetry to fanzines. When Sally asks what she's like irl, Syne's initial response is just that she's " really tall". - In the comic Ultimate X-Men, cynical teenage genius Beast managed to get involved with someone he really thought was an attractive, brilliant (and mutant) model online. The "model" turned out to be \|\|the remarkably clever Ultimate version of the Blob, out for nothing more than to humiliate him by showing up to a rendezvous and revealing the scam. Too bad Beast got too trusting and and let slip a dangerous secret...\|\| - Bringing Down the House begins with Peter (Steve Martin), a financial/income tax lawyer sharing emails with a woman named Charlene, who demonstrates a good deal of knowledge of law. When they meet in person, he discovers that Charlene (Queen Latifah) was not the District Attorney in the foreground of the picture he sent her, but the convict that was being escorted out of a squad car in the background. - Jumpin' Jack Flash: Terry Doolittle strikes up an online friendship with Jack, a CIA operative who accidentally contacts her work computer, and they fall for each other as she attempts to help him escape from KGB agents. They don't meet face to face (and Jack remains completely unseen) until the last few minutes. Notably, this was the first movie to depict online chatting before it became commonplace a decade or so later. - The Shop Around the Corner: Alfred Kralik and Klara Novak correspond through letters after answering a Lonely Hearts ad in the newspaper, calling each other "Dear Friend". However, when the two unknowingly meet in real life as work colleagues, they get off on the wrong foot. When the pen pals agree to meet in person and Alfred realizes the truth first, he lashes out, while also not telling her who he is so that she thinks she was stood up. However, he realizes his mistake and decides to woo Klara in real life while also undermining his Dear Friend persona, so that she wouldn't be as upset as he was when he finally tells her. \|\|It works so well that Klara is actually relieved when he reveals himself, since she no longer has to worry about choosing between them.\|\| - You've Got Mail: Joe Fox and Kathleen Kelly meet through an online chat room for New Yorkers over 30 and agree not to share anything personal about themselves. In real life, however, the two are bitter business rivals, with his big box chain store threatening to put her independent children's bookshop out of business. Joe lashes out when he discovers Kathleen is his online love but decides to befriend her and cast suspicion on his online persona, playing with the fact that he could be anyone online. \|\|Kathleen is happy when Joe finally reveals himself.\|\| - The 'true story' "There's An Alien On The Internet" from the first edition of Chicken Soup for the Kid's Soul is a subversion: a boy makes friends with somebody online who seems nice but avoids revealing anything personal at all, even the kinds of things that no stalker could ever hope to use against him/her. When the boy presses his friend for more information, he/she reluctantly admits to being a space alien and describes their otherworldly origin in great detail. However, it turns out that \|\|the friend is actually a perfectly normal kid living in another state who was ridiculed for being disabled and could only make friends with the anonymity of the Internet.\|\| - In the Evil Genius Trilogy, \|\|the titular evil genius successfully pulls off one of these. He feels bad about it afterwards\|\|. - Daddy-Long-Legs: When orphaned Jerusha "Judy" Abbott is given the chance to go to college through a rich, mysterious benefactor, she is instructed to write him letters of her progress, which he will not reply to, only communicating to her through a representative. Having only seen a shadow of him, and thinking he must be much older, she calls him "Daddy Long Legs". While she gets very personal in these letters out of loneliness, this becomes an issue since she is beholden to him if she is to finish her education. \|\|In reality, "Daddy", a.k.a. Jervis Pendleton, is much closer in age to her, and secretly meets her through his niece, who attends the same college. While Judy does get upset at Daddy Long Legs' manipulations near the end, she ends up forgiving Jervis and marrying him once he tells her the truth because of her fondness for both sides of him. Adaptations tend to show more of his side of the story in an attempt to even things out.\|\| - Gideon the Ninth: Palamedes and Dulcinea became close friends over twelve years of letter-writing, but live on different planets and meet in person for the first time when they join the Lyctoral trials. This causes him to miss that she \|\|was killed and replaced by Cytherea just before the trip.\|\| - Ginny Weasley and Tom Riddle's diary in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets qualifies. The diary she befriended and wrote her troubles and secrets into turned out to be a Soul Jar for a piece of Voldemort's soul, who then Brainwashes her with the intent of stealing her life to bring himself back to life, taking advantage of how she was feeling lonely due to her difficulty to make any friends in her first year at Hogwarts. - Christine only communicates with The Phantom of the Opera through her wall for 3 months, never seeing his face and only knowing him as "the Angel of Music." She tells Raoul that she fell madly in love with him, but she was also terrified at the control he had over her soul — she couldn't recognize herself anymore, did whatever he told her... When Raoul tries to tell her adoptive mother that she's in over her head with a guy she doesn't know, Christine gives him the familiar "You-don't-know-anything-about-him-it's-none-of-your-business" speech. Then, of course, he kidnaps her (drugging her to ensure her cooperation), leading to the infamous Dramatic Unmask... - The reason for the title of the children's book Sarah Plain And Tall is that this is the way the character describes herself. She's a Mail-Order Bride who is corresponding with her future family, a widower and his two children, and she tells them "I am plain and tall." By the time they meet, despite not having any other clues about appearance on either side, they are all genuinely attached to each other. - In Kai Meyer's Die Seiten der Welt, Furia falls in love with Severin, who lived two hundred years ago, since they are able to communicate with the help of a magical book. She feels he is her true soulmate despite never meeting him. She does meet him in the end, however: \|\|after she finds out that it was him who caused her family's downfall and a war of mages, she learns he is still alive, but elderly and broken, and confronts him in person. Her feelings for him dies a painful death thanks to all this\|\|. - The Angel episode "Couplet" had a life-sucking tree demon with a DSL connection that lured men to their deaths by pretending to be a woman on the Internet and getting them to come meet "her." - The Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "I Robot, You Jane" had another twist on it, when Willow's cyber-boyfriend turned out to be a literal demon on the Internet, Moloch the Corruptor. (The magical book in which it was sealed had been scanned into a computer.) The metaphor was lampshaded when Buffy used it as an argument to persuade Willow to check up on "Malcolm". - Criminal Minds: In Season 8, Reid is in a relationship with a geneticist named Maeve (whom he had been consulting about recurring headaches) in which they only communicate via phonecalls. This is due to Maeve being something of a recluse because of a stalker, whom she also fears could harm Reid. They do attempt to meet in person at a restaurant, although Reid tells Maeve to leave at the last minute because he believes her stalker is present. Despite this, they have a genuinely caring relationship; Reid even tells his colleagues it doesn't matter to him what she looks like because "she's already the most beautiful girl in the world to me", although he is worried she will find him disappointing. \|\|Sadly, the first and only time they get to see each other is when Reid attempts to rescue Maeve from her stalker, only for her to be killed in front of him\|\|. - Ghost Whisperer: "Ghost in the Machine" centers around a virtual game world, where the Ghost of the Week has manifested as an avatar named Phoenix, who speaks mostly to a teenage girl named Alise Jones, alias Sedona. \|\|While Melinda initially suspects Phoenix is a predator, he turns out to be Alise's estranged father who created the avatar to stay in touch with her after a messy divorce, and died while playing. However, Alise's other online friend, Cal, turns out to be the real predator, who Melinda and Phoenix have to stop.\|\| There is also much discussion in the episode around whether the anonymity of online interaction is freeing or dangerous for users. - Odyssey 5 has "Kitty", an insane AI who developed an obsession for Neil. At first she just chatted with him and sent "pictures" of herself that never showed her face, but then she became clingy and jealous, eventually using her vast AI power to monitor him with cameras and control nearby appliances. She has to be tricked into inhabiting a computer before being unplugged, essentially making her a Sealed AI in a Can. - Pushing Daisies has a particularly convoluted example — in "Pigeon", \|\|the plane hijacker Lefty Lem was cellmates with an older man called Jackson Lucas, who went to jail for stealing jewels that were never recovered. Before his death, Jackson told Lefty where he hid the jewels — in a windmill. He also asked Lefty to keep writing letters via Instant Messenger Pigeon to his love, Elsa, who lived in said windmill. It turns out, however, that Elsa had also died, and her daughter Elsita had been writing the letters instead. Elsita and Lefty fell in love with each other through the letters and, upon discovering each others' identities at the windmill (despite the fact that Lefty tied Elsita up in order to find the jewels), Elsita promised to keep sending Lefty letters once he returned to jail.\|\| - Ted Lasso: In Season 2, Keeley encourages the team and management staff of UFC Richmond to join Bantr, a dating app based solely on anonymous text-based communication. While Rebecca initially scoffs at the idea and is having a fling with someone in real life, she develops a bond with user LDN152 note : A nod to Joe Fox's screen name NY152 in You've Got Mail , \|\|who turns out to be Sam Obisanya, a star player and her employee who is nearly 30 years younger than her (but still above legal age). When the two decide to meet in person and realize the truth, Rebecca initially shuts it down due to their professional relationship, but the two find their chemistry too intense to ignore. She later breaks it off because she realizes she is not ready to get hurt again after her messy divorce.\|\| - One episode of The X-Files featured a charming "fat-sucking vampire" who would lure lonely, overweight-by-Hollywood-standards women out to secluded areas to feed upon their fat cells. - In the My Friend Chuck podcast, the hosts Chuck and McKenzie are friends but mention they've never met in person until the recording of Episode 13. Chuck expressed worries before meeting McKenzie that she would turn out to be a "catfish stabman", but was relieved to learn she had no gills and therefore could not be catfishing him. - She Loves Me is based on the same source material as The Shop Around the Corner: the female protagonist Amalia sings in "If I Knew His Name" that she doesn't need to see her love in person to know him — a claim which gets contested throughout the rest of the musical. In contrast, her friend Ilona at first protests the idea of love without physicality, but she realizes physical attraction alone often gets her into trouble, and learns to see beyond the surface. I don't need to see his handsome profile. I don't need to see his manly frame. All I need to know is in each letter, Each long revealing letter. I couldn't know him better If I knew his name. - Root Letter centers around the relationship between Takayuki "Max" Nakamura and his pen pal, Aya Fumino, who exchanged letters in their high school days. Her last letter, however, is a disturbing confession of murder. Now a middle-aged man, Max travels to her hometown of Shimane to find her, with only her name, photo, and letters to go off of- but strangely, everyone claims she died 25 years ago. \|\|It turns out that "Aya" is actually a girl named Shiori Yoshioka pretending to be Aya for reasons that differ in each route, and the photo is of the real Aya. As for the "murder" confession, it actually refers to the death of Yoko Fumino in a house fire that Shiori blames herself for.\|\| - In a lengthy storyline in Sluggy Freelance, Gwynn is seen conversing with a friend on the Internet: a friend who happens to be skilled at the very type of black magic she's been trying to master. His advice always leads to disaster (of the kind where Hilarity Ensues, but still...) but she never seems to notice, or blames herself for not being careful enough. It's only after she's finally gotten fed up with her distrustful friends, and left on a bus to meet her 'Internet friend', that we find out that Zoe's Internet account - which Gwynn had been using - has been down for ages, and the 'friend' was actually a shard of K'Z'K the Vowelless, embedded in her brain, making her type his half of the conversation out in a word processor. He just needed to get her away from her friends so he could extend his influence to a complete possession... - The Creepypasta simply titled "Penpal" is about how a school project involving letters tied to helium balloons netted the author a mentally-ill pedophile (okay, fine, sicker than usual) as his penpal, who proceeded to stalk him for many years. This culminated in the death of the narrator's friend when the "penpal" kidnaps him and \|\|has them both Buried Alive in the same coffin\|\|. - The SCP Foundation has SCP-1269: A mailbox. A very, very, possessive mailbox. - There also is another SCP that is a creature that pretends to be a child online in order to lure pedophiles to its house and eat them. - Serina: The gravediggers communicate with one another using images that they draw into the trees and rocks that border their territories. This allows them to form relationships with each other without ever physically meeting. In fact, doing so is necessary as they are naturally solitary despite their sapience and if they were to ever meet outside of mating season then their territorial instincts would kick in and they'd get into a violent fight. - Futurama: In "A Bi-cyclops Built for Two", the Planet Express crew is on the holographic Internet when a male cyclops approaches Leela. Up till then she had never met another cyclops and knew nothing about her origins as a sewer mutant, and believed herself to be an alien. "Alcazar" persuades her to come to their "home planet" where he tells a tale of how they're the last survivors. It all falls apart when Bender and Fry find 4 other alien women on the planet and reveal the man to be a shape-shifting dude who was scamming his way into "making it with 5 weird alien babes". - Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi: In "Pen Pal", Ami is exited because she's going to meet Pierre, her penpal from Paris. But instead of the suave hunk Ami expected, Pierre turns out to be a nerdy kid from Paris, Idaho. - Raven from Teen Titans (2003) fell in love with Malchior, an Evil Mentor trapped in a Tome of Eldritch Lore. He used her introversion, loneliness, and annoyance over her goofball teammates to sway her into learning the spell necessary to release him. Oh, and by the way, he's also a dragon. Malchior also managed to swap his name with the hero's name (who sealed him inside the book to begin with) so Raven wouldn't deduce anything wrong until she finished casting the spell. - There's a particularly nasty version of this that happens in Real Life, called the "romance scam". The scammer pretends to conduct an Internet romance with the victim, then tries to convince the victim to send them money so they can meet in person, or because they're in trouble, or for any number of other reasons. This is a variation on the "Spanish Prisoner" con and goes back to long before the Internet. Then it was done with written letters, usually hand-passed to a 'close friend' (the con artist) for delivery to the 'lover'; some con artists used to have several dozen victims on their line, all sending money and other valuable (and resellable) gifts to their 'one true love'.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlineStalkerWithACrush
Last-Name Basis - TV Tropes Newscaster: ...Turanga Leela. Fry: Turanga?! Amy: That's her name, Philip. Bender: Philip?! — Futurama , "The Problem With Popplers'' In many shows, the characters refer to each other by their given names, and the audience refers to these characters as such. We refer to the friends of Friends as Rachel, Phoebe, Joey, etc. This is usually the case in Dom Coms and other shows where many of the characters are related and therefore have the same last name. In other shows, usually based on a shared workplace, characters refer to each other by surnames only. Accordingly, since this is the way the character is canonically addressed, fans will refer to them by their surname as well, sometimes to the point of forgetting a character's given name entirely. At times the last-name basis becomes jarring. (This kind of situation may be used to set up a joke if the character has an embarrassing first name.) Characters on a last-name basis are much more likely to be male than female. Sometimes there's a Double Standard for this trope: the same show may refer to men by their last names and women by their first names. In a few of Dan Brown's books, regardless of how the characters address each other, the narrator mostly calls men by their last name, and women by their first name, including protagonists or co-protagonists. Potentially due to Men Are Generic, Women Are Special. If only some characters in a work get this trope, it is frequently because they have a boring or common first name (like John), or an embarrassing or unusual one. Switching from last-name basis to First-Name Basis may indicate a Relationship Upgrade, platonic or otherwise. How much Truth in Television this is varies based on time period and cultures worldwide. Compare Full-Name Basis, They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!. Contrast Hey, You!, Terms of Endangerment, and No Full Name Given. The X-Files could probably be considered the Trope Codifier, as that series took this trope to an extreme. Try thinking of a single character in that series who isn't referred to with either a descriptive title, or their last name. ## Examples: <!—index—> <!—/index—> - The main character of Simple Samosa is, in fact, named Simple Samosa. Other characters - not just his best friends, but other townsfolk as well - usually refer to him as just Samosa. - Averted in the 7th Son podcast novel trilogy, as 7 of the main heroes AND the Big Bad all have the same last name. Played straight though with the supporting heroes, who are almost always referred to as Hill and Kleinman; their last names. - In Critical Hit, a live play Dungeons & Dragons podcast, Ket refers to his teammates almost exclusively by their last name while giving orders in battle. - Everyone in Wolf 359 refers to one another by their last names, with the exception of very emotionally heavy situations. This often leads to many characters only being known by their last names for a long time (Minkowski's first name - Reneé - wasn't revealed until the start of season 2). - Averted with Cutter, who makes a point of referring to people by their first names. - In John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, a very young Jerry Wilkinson complains that everyone at school thinks his name is "Wilkinson", and when his mother points out that it is, he says yes but not really; his name's Jerry. Interestingly, in later life he refers to his own kids collectively as "Wilkos". - Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues: - As a result of his upper-class upbringing, Benedict refers to the other characters exclusively by their last names. Finn also does so, but to a lesser extent, using first names for people that he's amicable with. - Sarah Travers, being a government agent, is almost exclusively referred to by her last name. - Depending on who's talking to who, Open Blue falls in between Last-Name Basis and address by rank for military characters, First-Name Basis for civilians and/or pirates, or some mix of such. Even the addressing in narration differs between RPers. - Most of the terrorists in Survival of the Fittest are only ever referred to by their surnames. (Danya, McLocke, Kaige, Rice, Grossi, Garnett, Konrad, Chevalier, Hurst, Richards, Baines) Dorian is the sole exception. - Among the students, we have Anna Chase of v4, who prefers to have people use her last name Chasewhen referring to her. Liam "Brook" Brooks (also v4) is a minor variation, but probably still fits. Occasionally other students get this treatment as well (sometimes J.R. Rizzolo is referred to by his last name Rizzlo or "Riz", for example). - In This Is War Logan specifically tells Tex to refer to him by his surname.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyKnowByTheSurname
Informed Judaism - TV Tropes Fox: I didn't know you were Jewish! Stick: Really? I'm always wearing this! (Lifts his hair up to reveal a kippah underneath) This character is Jewish. How do we know? Well, remember when the show did the Christmas Special? And there was that Aesop about diversity and the other holidays in December? And she was shown with a menorah lighting candles? But then again, you never see her observing Passover or the High Holy Days. Fine, but then there was that episode about pork and how she keeps Kosher? Despite the shrimp cocktail and bacon cheeseburger she had for dinner. OK, what about her Bat Mitzvah? You know, the characters were confused by the whole thing, and how they learned about her traditions. Which never got mentioned before or since. note : This happens in real life a lot, too. And that's the problem. A character who practices Informed Judaism will perform acts that most people can recognize as being Jewish, in contrast to the non-Jewish characters, but they don't show any more subtle signs of Judaism, even for an assimilated Jew, even the cultural aspect. Their Judaism becomes an Informed Attribute. The characters listed on this page are Jewish because the writers tell us, they don't show us. This is a trope that pops up in a number of Western Animation Christmas Episodes; due to the nature of the shows' audience, the powers that be will want to place An Aesop in to show that the characters keep a diverse set of friends or peers. As a result, a character's Judaism is mentioned at some point in the episode, or perhaps a menorah will just be shown in the background, in order to keep up that diverse appearance. After all, who really knows what other religiously affiliated holidays are celebrated by a large enough group of people in the mid to late period of December? This will in fact be the only mention of religion throughout the episode (if not the series), as Christmas itself (assuming the name is used at all) will not be depicted as having any religious significance, but rather just be a "Warm, Feel Good Time", thus making this revelation of a major character feel shoehorned in. This is also despite the fact that since the Jewish calendar is a lunar one, there is no guarantee that Hannukah and Christmas will in any way overlap: Hannukah could be completely over way before Christmas starts. Of course, there is a place between Informed Judaism and Anvilicious. A character doesn't need to shout "Oy, how meshuggenah, a golem! I'm ferklempt!" to be non-informed Jewish, and likewise, not every character who has a Hanukkah Episode is informed. It's more of a gestalt of the sense of the character. Yiddish as a Second Language, for example, can be a clue...though, of course, pushing any element too far lands you back here. This has an element of Truth in Television: Some Jews in countries where they've been able to assimilate increasingly practice their religion only on the most important holidays (Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur), and only celebrate Chanukah to have a winter holiday. They don't keep Kosher or observe the Sabbath. A practitioner of Reform or Reconstructionist Judaism — quite common in America — is especially likely to disregard most forms of Jewish ritual, including the Kosher laws. "Passover and High Holy Days Jews" are the Jewish equivalents of "Christmas-and-Easter Christians." That said, even many of these still show the cultural aspects of Judaism, often missing from these characters. Generally, in modern secular usage, Jews include three groups: people who were born to a Jewish family regardless of whether or not they follow the religion, those who have some Jewish ancestral background or lineage (sometimes including those who do not have strictly matrilineal descent), and people without any Jewish ancestral background or lineage who have formally converted to Judaism and therefore are followers of the religion. Therefore, someone can be a Jew and no one else would know unless they asked. Many Jews do not do any religious rituals, and some even have Christmas trees ("Chanukkah bush"). This has occasionally sparked controversy, in cases of religious figures in other religions who have explicitly claimed Jewishness via ancestry. A particularly well-known recent example is the late French Cardinal Lustiger the former archbishop of Paris and a son of Polish Jews (his mother was killed during the Holocaust). He described himself as a "fulfilled Jew" all his life and maintained Jewish customs even as a Roman Catholic clergyman (he was known to recite Kaddish for his mother at a synagogue even after he became a cardinal, for example). Still, he was subject to much criticism by both Jewish and Christian groups. Fan Fiction often subjects these characters to extreme Flanderization. It should be noted that speculating on whether or not someone is really a Jew (if they're patrilineal, a convert, or secular, for example) in real life is a big no-no, especially if the person doing the speculating is themselves not Jewish. There's a reason why this list has no real-life examples. The exact opposite of Ambiguously Jewish, where a character displays stereotypically Jewish traits but is never referred to as such; halfway between these two is reality. Compare Culturally Religious, which shares some characteristics with this trope. Often a case of Suddenly Ethnicity. Weirdly overlaps with Everyone Is Christian at Christmas, because as noted the Christmas season is when a Jewish character is most likely to inform us how they're an exception to the rule. Kin of sorts to Ambivalent Anglican, which is about Christians (or at least one branch of them) who can't be bothered much with the actual trappings of religion. ## Examples: - The young woman in this commercial for the Koolanoo Jewish social networking site is wearing a Star of David. (mildly NSFW) - Benny of Black Lagoon is Jewish. It's first mentioned in the second volume, where the crew of the Black Lagoon encounter a Neo-Nazi boat. Other than that? We're talking about a sea pirate who drinks, smokes, and, more prominently, who works with and for criminals, local mafias, smugglers, and drug dealers on a daily basis. - The Rosenthal family of A Certain Scientific Accelerator, among them series deuteragonist Esther Rosenthal, are supposed to be Jewish. Unfortunately, while Esther's brand of magic is, somewhat, inspired very loosely by some concepts from the Kabbalah and she does spew a few Hebrew phrases here and there, for the most part she behaves so generically "Western" and what little "Jewish" there is about her is so inaccurate you'd be hard-pressed to know until she mentions her ancestor's rabbis at one point (and the flashback shows them appearing as Catholic priests...). - Legion of Super-Heroes has Colossal Boy. - A few years ago, Ben Grimm of the Fantastic Four happened to mention that he's Jewish, and he is seen praying in Hebrew (which he admittedly stumbles through) when he thought a beloved store owner in his old neighborhood was dying. Since Ben was always a gentle self-caricature of Jack Kirby, who was Jewish, this makes sense, and the fans seem to be fine with it. But it still seemed to come out of nowhere after all these decades of never mentioning it. - The in-universe reason that Ben never brings it up is that he didn't want his appearance to be used as an excuse for anti-semitic propaganda. - Interestingly, a short story from a Marvel Christmas Special comic book a few years prior to this reveal had Ben Grimm discussing the difference between Christmas and Hanukkah with a little Jewish girl. This story seemed to imply that Ben is not Jewish himself. - The Incredible Hulk: During his long run as writer on the series, Peter David decided that long-time supporting character Doc Samson is Jewish, although it had never been mentioned before. He may have been influenced by the fact that the name "Samson" is rarely used by anyone but Jews these days (and even then pretty rarely), despite it being an In-Series Nickname. - According to Elliot S! Maggin, the pre-Crisis Lex Luthor is ethnically Jewish, although certainly non-practicing. Maggin himself is Jewish, and always had a slightly more tragic/sympathetic take on Luthor than other writers of the period. - Other informed Jews from DC Comics: The Atom (Ray), and the Sandman (Wesley). - The Elseworld DC Comics Bombshells has a surprising number of Jewish heroines: Batwoman, Harley Quinn, Zatanna, Raven, and Miri Marvel. Of them, only Miriam is in any way devout. Back home, Felicity Smoak is also Jewish. - The Scooby-Doo DC Comics story Diamond Dog has the gang visit Daphne's Jewish maternal uncle, Saul Slotnik, and since DC Comics are part of the official canon, it makes Daphne canonically Jewish. However, she doesn't practice Judaism and demonstrates no connection whatsoever to this part of her heritage - in contrast to Velma, who has no confirmed Jewish relatives but is Ambiguously Jewish in many ways. - Other informed Jews from Marvel Comics: Iceman, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, Polaris, Justice (Vance), Legion, Moon Knight, Sasquatch, the Two-Gun Kid, Volcana, and Wiccan. - Averted with Kitty Pryde. While the generally atheist Wolverine was unable to drive Dracula off with a makeshift cross, Kitty's Star-of-David pendant burned Dracula's hand, due to the fact that she possessed true faith. (Unlike most stories where it's merely the cross that repels vampires, in the Marvel universe, it really is the religious faith, regardless of the symbol displayed, that actually does the trick.) A number of other stories also make use of her Jewish faith. Though she's fallen more into this trope in recent decades where the fact that she's Jewish might occasionally get mentioned but is largely irrelevant. - Heavily averted for Magneto. The theme of being persecuted for two things tends to make it more-than-informed. Being a Holocaust survivor is one of the most fundamental parts of his character (though this is becoming problematic in another way: it means that he can't be easily subjected to Comic-Book Time like the rest of the X-Men). - Harley Quinn being Jewish is mentioned once or twice. She loves Christmas though, and it's even brought up once by Poison Ivy in Harley & Ivy: Harley : Here it is the holidays and we're hanging out in this dingy rat-trap! No presents, no fun, no nuthin'! Can't we at least get a Christmas tree? Poison Ivy : What?! And support the mad campaign of botanical genocide that grips this country every December? Absolutely not! And besides, aren't you Jewish? Harley : Yeah but they're so bright and colorful an' stuff. - Robin: Ives being Jewish is mostly just hinted at, such as with his snide remark about only liking the old parts of the Bible in response to something Ariana said, but it eventually becomes a plot point when Tim runs into him at a Catholic church. It turns out Ives was there for a cancer support group meeting. - Pizzazz mentions she's Jewish in the Christmas 2015 issue of Jem and the Holograms (IDW). - Y: The Last Man: The Hartle Twins on two occasions they mention that they are Jewish. \|\|In both cases, it was to avoid being mistreated by the Israeli troops of Alter Tse'elon.\|\| It does not work. - In Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.: - Gretchen Potter goes to the Jewish Community Center and Hebrew School (it's why their secret club can't meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays), but doesn't really stand out as Jewish beyond that. - Classmate Alan Gordon refuses to sing any of the Christian songs for the holiday pageant; nothing else is mentioned about his Judaism. - Sylvia Simon, Margaret's paternal grandmother. Justified as, even if she does attend services for Jewish holidays, Margaret only goes with her once for Rosh Hashanah. - Abby, in The Baby-Sitters Club, is Jewish and does get a Bat Mitzvah, but apart from it being mentioned about her as a stated fact ("Abby is Jewish"), it gets little attention. Dawn also mentions in one book that one of their sitting charges, Nancy Dawes, is Jewish; it actually had relevance to the plot because it was the Very Special Episode book about racism. - Animorphs has both Jake and Rachel as this; their Judaism was rarely ever mentioned and wasn't really connected to anything else. - There are several smaller hints, particularly from Jake, if you notice the descriptions of his family dinners. In this case, it's more a function of the stories themselves because we never get any reference to holidays for any of the other characters, either, as the series is deliberately vague about the passage of time and it's not until the second-to-last book that it's acknowledge that actual years have passed. In fact, all we know about any of the other characters' faiths is that Cassie's family has a pastor and that Marco's mother sang in the church choir. - Rachel may not be Jewish herself. In Elfangor's Secret, she only says that her father (through whom she is related to Jake) is. - Call Me by Your Name: The Jewish characters are nonobservant and are, as one character puts it, "Jews of discretion." The reader knows that they are Jewish either from their wearing stars of David or simply from their say-so. - Captain Underpants: Mr. Krupp is apparently Jewish, as his wedding in book five is officiated by a rabbi. This was likely only done so the author could set up an incredibly lame pun. - For a non-Jewish example, Sōsuke Sagara of Full Metal Panic! is an informed Muslim. He was raised by Mujahedin in Afghanistan (or its Captain Ersatz in the anime), who instructed them in their faith, but he isn't seen praying towards Mecca and sees no problem with eating pork if that's what's available. He doesn't drink, but only because he doesn't want to impair himself with alcohol, \|\|and later on because he can't have it after sustaining serious damage to his liver\|\|, not for religious reasons. - Pretty Little Liars has Hanna, who is revealed to be Jewish in Pretty Little Secrets. - An in-universe example in A Wolf in the Soul. Greg's parents are Jewish, but as he slowly becomes religious over the course of the book he starts to see their lackadaisical attitude towards religion in this light. - Fagin in Oliver Twist could be included, since he is introduced as a Jew, but never does anything Jewish. (As opposed to the stage Jewish tropes in the musical.) - In Paper Towns, Margo makes a casual reference to her bat mitzvah money, but that's about it. - In The Good Soldier vejk Chaplain Otto Katz, a bumbling (Catholic!) military priest, was originally a son of a Jewish merchant, who was more or less completely atheist, and squandered the family business on wine and women, after which he joined the military to avoid his creditors. This required a conversion to Catholicism, which he, being an atheist, did without any second thought, and his ascension to priesthood after a couple of years as a cavalry officer, has basically been a drunken joke. - Action Dude of Velveteen vs. is Jewish, but the Marketing department of Super Patriots, Inc decided that a Jewish superhero wouldn't go over well with the public, so they prohibited him from practicing openly. - Minor Harry Potter character Anthony Goldstein is a literal example since aside from his surname, we only have Word of God to confirm that he's Jewish. Though here it's justified by the fact that he's basically a Recurring Extra. - Guardians of the Flame: Doria is Jewish, but it's only shown from being stated as such, and her last name (Perlstein). - Tell Me How You Really Feel: Rachel is Jewish, though beyond simply being told this no sign of that was given. This is justified as she mentions she's only a "High Holy Days" Jew and doesn't attend synagogue except for then. - Charlotte on Sex and the City is a Protestant of English descent, but later converts to Judaism when she becomes engaged to Harry later in the series. Played with in the movies when she demonstrates knowledge of a few Hebrew terms. - George in Being Human is really only shown as Jewish through the Star of David he wears and the few times he mentions it. He became unobservant after being bitten since he felt that Judaism frowned on being a werewolf. George's father is not Jewish, as we see a vicar giving his burial rites (it makes sense that his Dad (George Sr.) isn't Jewish, since it's against Jewish tradition to name someone after a living person). - The American remake of Being Human has Josh the werewolf, who has about as little faith as his British counterpart. - Parodied in 3rd Rock from the Sun. The Solomons, after attempting to decide their ethnicity, eventually just figure they should be Jewish because their landlady assumed they were, based on their last name (which they picked off the side of a truck). Being aliens living undercover on Earth of course, they know nothing about the culture in the slightest and it only comes up again in minor instances (like Harry and Dick trying to Hand Wave Dick's attempted kidnapping with a large sack as a Jewish wedding tradition: The Sacking Of The Groom.) - Blair Sandburg in The Sentinel. Mentions that his Swiss Army Knife was a Bar Mitzvah present, and when a guest in the apartment he and Jim share asks if there are any pork chops he says, "Yeah, right next to the whale meat!" But he doesn't seem to observe any other Jewish customs; of course he was raised by a flower child mother and is a cultural anthropologist by training. . . - Power Rangers Zeo had a Christmas Episode where a special guest character celebrated Hanukkah. Being An Aesop, they were all hit with the "bias blaster" and became ethnocentric. Tanya of course celebrated Kwanzaa, despite actually being from Africa. - Max Blum on Happy Endings never displays any knowledge of Judaism or follows Jewish customs. However given that Max is established as extremely lazy, simple-minded, and slothful (ruling out him going kosher), this is very much justified. The only thing that hints at is his more clearly Jewish parents, a minor nod to him celebrating Hannukah (or probably more accurately just wanting gifts), and his Hebrew tattoo (which is actually actor Adam Pally's, who is also Jewish), and once giving a Shout-Out to Fiddleronthe Roof. - Sandy Cohen from The O.C. is Jewish but other than having a stereotypical Jewish Mother, his Judaism is only infrequently mentioned. Curiously his son Seth, who is half-Jewish (his mother is Christian and he was reared with elements of both faiths) is far more vocal about identifying as Jewish and was delighted when his girlfriend mentioned she would be Converting for Love. - Invoked and toyed with in Warehouse 13. Arthur Nielson, played by Saul Rubinek, is heavily suggested to be culturally (though not religiously) Jewish throughout the show's run. It's revealed quite early on that he was born Artie Weisfelt, and one episode hinges around him selling secrets to the Soviets during the Cold War in order to save his family. It's unclear whether they're family or family (there are a lot of names involved), but he does make reference to the persecution of Soviet Jews, as well as several of his cousins being refuseniks. - Then we get the season 2 Christmas special, which wastes no time whatsoever prominently placing a dreidel beside his photo in the Christmas-themed opening credits. Later on in the episode, he's reunited with his father, a stereotypical Alter Kocker, and they proceed to have a very Jewish reunion, replete with constant bickering, tales of cousins finally getting married and much Yiddish as a Second Language. - However, they still never openly state they're Jewish. The closest they come is at the very end of the episode, when Artie's father refers to Claudia (a fellow worker at the warehouse) as "that annoying gentile" before she recites Sheva Brachot (a completely unrelated wedding blessing). - Episode 3 of Season 4 it's made explicit when Artie and Leena have to a golf course to retrieve an artifact. - Subverted in the JAG episode "The Promised Land" where Lieutenant Singer only pretends to be Jewish in order to badger a Marine deserter and convert who had joined the IDF. Her first chair Commander Turner calls the bluff by testing her knowledge of Judaism. - In Law & Order, this trope is part of a plot where a suspected murderer claims to be Jewish so he can seek asylum in Israel. To solve the matter, Assistant District Attorney Abbie Carmichael contests his Jewish status before a Rabbinical council for a ruling. Thanks in part to her charmingly earnest courtesy to the Rabbis, and the fact that the accused never took a ceremonial bath as part of an official conversion and has not been living what they considered to be a Jewish lifestyle, the council rules that the man is not Jewish. - The Eppes family in NUMB3RS is this for most of the series (at least, once they establish that the family actually is Jewish). Don begins practicing in Season 5, but Alan and Charlie remain this throughout the series. - In-Universe example: In All in the Family, Archie had no idea his best friend and co-worker Stretch Cunningham was Jewish until he was handed a black yarmulke at Stretch's funeral. - Nora Walker on Brothers & Sisters. Often shown cooking non-Kosher (e.g. scallops wrapped in bacon) and loves hosting all the festivities of Christmas. Partly justified in that she is not very religious and her husband was a Christian, so observing Jewish traditions was not a big part of her life. Her brother Saul is a milder version. He occasionally mentions his rabbi but never seems to question Nora's meal choices. - David on The New Normal admits to being of a secular mindset and celebrates Christmas with his Catholic husband, up to and including how to baby-proof their Christmas tree. - On Alphas, the only indication we get that Red Flag leader Anna Levy is Jewish is her last name \|\|along with her headstone bearing a Star of David\|\|. - Max Bergman of Hawaii Five-0 has never been referenced as Jewish on the show, and shows absolutely zero stereotypical Jewish traits; he does avoid shrimp, but that's due to an allergy, not keeping kashrut. The only way you'd know it at all is if you happened to see an interview with his actor. - Josh on The West Wing is Jewish, but aside from saying "Mazel Tov" and getting prickly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it doesn't come up much. Practicing Jew Toby even pokes fun at Josh for being inadequately Jewish: Toby: There's an ancient Hebrew word for Jews from Westport; it's pronounced "Presbyterian." - Played with in one episode when the President asks Toby and Josh about a particular Yom Kippur tradition. Interestingly, it's Toby who draws a blank (he knows what the President is talking about, but he can't remember the exact word for it). He looks to Josh for help, and Josh supplies the word (but slightly mispronounces it). - A plot point in "Take This Sabbath Day" is that Toby is spending his Saturday morning at temple, and later returns to consult with the Rabbi. Josh, by contrast, is spending that same morning hungover in his office after a Stag Party and has a meeting scheduled making it clear he wasn't going to temple. - Rhoda Morgenstern from The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spinoff, Rhoda. She's mentioned on a few occasions that she's Jewish, but doesn't appear to be practicing. She does confess to still enjoying Hanukkah though. In one episode, she's looking through personals ads and seeing how her name sounds with the last name of the men in the ads. She comes across one guy whose last name is Christian. She quickly rejects that one, stating that her mother would kill her. - Felicity on Arrow only mentions that she's a Jew in a throwaway line during each of the first two seasons' Christmas episodes. It wasn't until season 3 when she started showing her faith at a non-Christmas time when she wishes Diggle and Lilah "Mazel tov!" after their daughter's birth, and in the next episode, she throws dirt on the grave at \|\|Sara Lance's\|\| funeral, explaining it to be a Jewish custom. - On The League, Ruxin mentions being Jewish in the first episode, describing himself as looking like a Nazi cartoon of a Jew. However he is not practicing, and in fact is married to a Catholic and Baby Geoffrey was baptized (he told his mother it was a really progressive synagogue). In one episode he celebrates Sukkot in order to get his son into a prestigious Jewish preschool. In another episode, Ruxin and his wife get in an argument over what religion to raise Baby Geoffrey in. Averted with Ruxin's sister, who is mentioned to be Orthodox. This trope is even more true with Ted, who is only known to be Jewish because a rabbi was at his funeral. - On Beverly Hills, 90210: Andrea Zuckerman is identified as Jewish, though this attribute takes a backseat to her being Jewish and Nerdy. It is occasionally brought up in very special episodes, including the episode where her daughter Hannah receives a cross from her father Jesse's mother (Andrea's husband Jesse is a Catholic). Additionally, David Silver is mentioned to be Jewish, though this is almost never mentioned on-screen, except in a Very Special Episode about anti-semitism ("Hate Is Just a Four Letter Word" in season 4), where he tries to learn more about his heritage, though this is never mentioned again after the episode. In theory, this would also make his half-sister Erin Silver Jewish as well, though this is never mentioned in her case. - In The Wire, assistant state's attorney Rhonda Pearlman is never even hinted to be Jewish, but Word of God says she is. The only clue in the show, other than her name, is that Detective McNulty uses the phrase "your twisted little tribe" to refer to her and defense attorney Maurice Levy, who is explicitly Jewish. In context, it's not even clear that he meant to imply anything about their culture or religion; he was really complaining that they're both lawyers, so at least on the surface the "tribe" is the Maryland State Bar Association. - Fear the Walking Dead: In Season 5, the beer-swilling, tough-talking, truck-driving ladette Sarah reveals that she's Jewish when she asks a rabbi about making atonement during Yom Kippur. Her fellow survivors are all surprised, as nothing before had suggested that she's a Jew. - A French Village: We get no indication that Sarah Meyer or Judith Morhange is Jewish aside from being identified as such, though Sarah's last name is common among Ashkenazim and they both have traditional Jewish first names (though they're not uncommon for Christians too). We never seen any sign they practice Judaism (of course, many European Jews were secular or even converted Christians at the time). The same goes for the Jewish family who flee and the Crémieuxes. Judith at least says she's not a believer, and thus Jewish in only the ethnic or cultural sense. - In the Pee-wee's Playhouse Christmas Special, Mrs. Renée and the Dinosaur Family are revealed to be Jewish and celebrate Chanukah. - Why Women Kill: Aside from Eli mentioning it, there's no real sign that he's Jewish (aside from this being a common Jewish male first name). Justified as he seems to be a cultural/secular Jew. - Just Shoot Me!: Jack Gallo acts, talks, and looks just like a stereotypical New York Jew from the Bronx (this is because his actor, George Segal, was a New York Jew from the Bronx). To avoid Unfortunate Implications, he's revealed to have a Jewish Mother, but he wasn't raised religiously and it otherwise doesn't come up. Finch even lampshades this when Maya expresses surprise that he and his father don't talk much. I didn't come from that Italian-Jewish-Catholic background or whatever it is you've got going. I came from a nice WASPy family where the only emotional thing Dad said at dinner was "Pass the salt." - Better Things: Aside from occasional mentions of being Jewish, rare Hebrew expressions from Sam and her overall somewhat stereotypical demeanor, it's hard to notice the Foxes are a Jewish family (obviously culturally only, as they don't practice Judaism or any other religion). She and Frankie did attend a friend's bar mitzvah, but it's then a plot point too that Frankie's never had a bat mitzvah, while once it's mentioned she's past the age for the ceremony. - The Practice: Jamie is Jewish, but this was only established by her mentioning it. She feels guilty enough about not practicing Judaism to break up with her gentile boyfriend while noting how American Jews are fading as a distinct group. - Single Drunk Female: Sam mentions she was the only Jewish girl in her school growing up, and that her dad had a shiva (a Jewish period of mourning), though other than these few mentions her Jewishness doesn't come up at all, with no sign of her or Sam's mom practicing Judaism otherwise although Samantha mentions once that, as a kid, she hated that her family did not acknowledge Christmas as a holiday in any way. In Season 2, it's revealed both Sam and her mom are atheistic Jews; they don't keep kosher or do Jewish rituals most of the time. - Paper Girls: KJ is established as Jewish when she mentions her mom buying a dress (that she dislikes) for her bat mitzvah. It's mentioned by KJ a couple times again, though never affects things really. - The L Word: Jenny's established to be Jewish, though this doesn't come up that much or ever affect her character. It appears she's only culturally or ethnically Jewish, with Jenny not practicing Judaism that we see, though flashbacks from her past indicate her family may have been Orthodox. The most notable mention is the fact that her grandmother survived the Holocaust in Europe. - 18 to Life: The Bellows often reference orthodox Jewish traditions throughout the series. However, they rarely do anything specifically Jewish in the series such as following particular traditions. - Dick Tracy's sidekick Sam Catchem is Jewish, and always has been, but since it rarely has much bearing on the cases they investigate, it doesn't get mentioned much. The creative team of Mike Curtis and Joe Staton has changed things up a little by having Sam invite the Tracys over for Chanukah. - Paul Heyman is well-known to be Jewish to wrestling buffs, but one of the only times that came up in Kayfabe was when he tried to claim that video footage showing him conspiring with The Shield (an offense that almost got him fired) was actually of an impostor. "I have a thick New York Jewish accent!" Heyman shouted (as did the "impostor" in the video, but that's neither here nor there). Heyman's Jewishness isn't brought up at other times - which is a little strange, given how universally despised Heyman is and that he could easily use this as a Wounded Gazelle Gambit. ("You just don't like me because you're an anti-Semite!") "No, we're not from West Newbury, no we can't 'hip-hop' like you, My client is the conqueror, I'm just Brock's advocating Jew!" - One episode of Under the Umbrella Tree (which was set in an apartment in some unnamed city in Canada), had a shopkeeper (who had never been seen before) introduce Gloria, Iggy, and Jacob to Chanukah and eventually perform a Chanukah-themed magic act at Holly's holiday talent show. He even explained how Chanukah got started, which included a rare non-blasphemous use of the word "God" in Western secular media. - Mr. Hooper of Sesame Street was Jewish. The only reason the audience ever knew this is because in the late 70s, a Christmas Special was filmed called "Christmas Eve on Sesame Street," and Bob wished Mr. Hooper a happy Hanukkah. He was also shown as able to read Yiddish in another episode. - Also, Moishe the Oofnik, the grouch on the Israeli version of the show, Shalom Sesame, is explicitly said to be Oscar's cousin, which potentially makes Oscar at least part Jewish too. - In recent years, the Bear family has taken up the Hanukkah ball, with Baby Bear showing Telly how to spin a dreidel in Elmo's World: Happy Holidays. Although weirdly, the later book Rosita's Easter on Sesame Street has Baby Bear buying "Easter braided bread", which at the very least suggests they don't observe Passover. (Braided bread [challah] is part of many Jewish holidays, but very specifically not that one.) - This trope appears in — of all things — The Muppets 2008 Christmas Special, A Muppets Christmas: Letters to Santa. Zoot, saxophonist for the Electric Mayhem, shows up for the Christmas Eve celebration toting a menorah and greets the hostess with a calm "Shalom." Dr. Teeth observes the menorah and remarks that he'd never been aware that Zoot was Jewish. - Zigzagged in The Puzzle Place with Jody. In general, her Jewishness is rarely discussed and rarely the main focus of the episode plots that focus on her. But it does get several days in the limelight too: not only does she teach her friends (and non-Jewish viewers) about Hanukkah, but also Passover, bar and bat mitzvahs, and sitting shiva, and in the picnic episode she brings sour cream pickled herring as her contribution. - Joel from The Last of Us is Jewish however it's not implied in the game itself. Naughty Dog has a postcard-esque official art showing several characters dressed in Christmas gear, with Joel wearing a sweater with a Menorah. - In The Last of Us Part II, when Ellie and Dina explore a synagogue in Downtown Seattle, Dina reveals to Ellie that she's Jewish, and that survival has always been a thing in her family (persecutions from The Middle Ages all the way to The Holocaust and, since 2013, the fungal plague apocalypse). - The Messian religion from Shin Megami Tensei for the most part looks like a form of anime Christianity. But to inform the viewer that it is actually a post-Christian religion born from syncretism, some of the outfits have other religious symbols tucked away in various places, such as a Jewish star. - Johnny Kleibitz in Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned is Jewish, but doesn't really practice it. He still gets antisemitic slurs thrown his way by Billy. - Stelsa Sezyat in Hiveswap Friendsim is described as "troll Jewish" in the trollcall, but there's very little evidence in her actual story. - In A Super Mario Bros X Thing, the second half of the level Demo Dance Mix portrays (female) main character Demo's bar mitzvah, apropos of nothing. raocow I'm not Jewish, but I have to assume that the ceremenolial dodging of bullets is just one of those parts they, y'know, keep out of gentiles' eyes. - In the first episode of season 2 of Red vs. Blue, one of the graves for Church and Tex is marked with the Star of David. Word of God refuses to comment on whose grave it is. - From Pimp Lando: Darboe being Jewish becomes a Running Gag in later episodes, despite not doing anything differently. Well, OK, he sings "Hava Nagila" once. - In Barbie Vlog episode about December holiday traditions, Barbie mentions that her friend Renee's family makes jelly donuts on Hannukah. Renee is also Asian. - Riff from Sluggy Freelance only mentions his Jewishness when Chanukah rolls around (though he does bring a Star of David with him when he goes vampire hunting). In the first Torg Potter arc he openly admits that he's been shooting down and cooking all the messenger owls that have been sent to Torg for years, despite the fact that owls aren't kosher. - Parodied in Kid Radd, when Kobayashi reveals in a holiday Omake comic that he's part of a Jewish order of Ninja. - Choo-Choo Bear of SomethingPositive* is Jewish. We've seen comics that featured pictures of him at his Bar Mitzvah, and one where he and his cousin Twitchy-Hug explained Passover to the audience. Only thing is... Choo-Choo is a cat. A boneless, hairless, gelatinous cat. - It's mostly Fanon since it never comes up in the comic and is based on a joke by the author, but fans of Homestuck have taken Terezi to be Jewgish due to a conversation where she admits to not knowing about "Jegus" (referring to a Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff misspelling). It Makes Sense in Context. - Hilariously, it was revealed later on that there was an actual Jesus-analogue in the history of Terezi's world. Terezi's ancestor was one of the followers of an underground cult he inspired after his death. In other words, Terezi is the descendent of an alien Christian. - Gordon Frohman of Concerned. The full extent of his possible religious beliefs we're made aware of is that he once claims to be "more of a synagogue type of guy". For all we're shown, this might not even be an admission of being Jewish, but rather him trying to make up any excuse he can to avoid a church after the trouble Father Grigori put him through trying to meet him at the church in Ravenholm, where said Father decided something like where that church actually is wasn't necessary information. - Fractious, in the Whateley Universe. Known to swear in Yiddish. When she goes with school friends from Whateley Academy for Christmas, Loophole's mother tries to make latkes for her. They don't turn out well. - In X-Ray & Vav, Rusty Bonjour reveals in the Holiday Special that he's Jewish. There was nothing to hint that he was like this at all and when he reveals it, he's in a tattered Santa suit scamming people out of money via a Salvation Army-like booth. - Chichi mentions in Broly The Legendary Super Saiyan Abridged that her mother was Jewish, though it's unknown if she was telling the truth or simply trying to raise Gohan's chances of getting accepted into college. - The Simpsons: Shauna Chalmers, Dolph Starbeam, Duffman (or one of them at least, given that there are multiple similar-looking actors), and Artie Ziff have been identified as being Jewish. - Don't forget Krusty, who was the first one to be identified as such, and had an entire episode revolving around it (where the whole concept of "bar mitzvah" is once again done wrong). - In Go Away, Unicorn! "Make Like a Tree, Unicorn", one of the past holiday displays is a Hanukkah menorah with ornamental stars of David and dreidels designed by Pixie's mom. - Tish from The Weekenders. Implied by her having Eastern European parents, getting a type of Bat Mitzvah at 12 and 1/2, which is the usual age for girls in reform and many conservative temples. Stated in the holiday special where it is revealed that she celebrates Chanukah. It should be pointed out that one early episode has her celebrate Lent, and the fans seem to have a Broken Base on whether she is Catholic or Jewish though she's generally considered Jewish with the Lent reference being Early-Installment Weirdness. Tino is also a non-Jewish example. He's apparently Pagan - or at least his mother is - but this is only referenced a few times such as how they celebrate Winter Solstice. - Sam from Danny Phantom — her religious identity is only ever mentioned in the Christmas Episode. It's even worse with her parents who fill the mold of stuck-up WASPs. Though this can be considered a case of Reality Is Unrealistic in that there are many Jewish people who act like WASPs (hence the Jewish-American Princess stereotype). - Arnold from The Magic School Bus. Once again, a Chanukah mention during the Christmas episode, and his last name being revealed as Perlstein in one episode, are our only clues. - Similarly, on Arthur, the Frensky family's Jewishness didn't come out until its holiday episode. They're making up for it since; there's been an episode in which Francine vacillates between a relative's Bar Mitzvah and a bowling match, and another in which she mentions playing on her temple's sports team. Plus, she's attempted a Yom Kippur fast. - Francine's family explicitly doesn't follow a Kosher diet so that adds to the fuel. A Postcards From Buster episode with a devout Jewish family has one scene where Francine points out that not all Jewish people follow kosher laws to the letter. However, in the holiday episode, clueless Mr. Crosswire gifts the Frensky family with a ham, which Mr. Frensky confusingly accepts. - This may be a form of Race Lift. In the source books, Francine shows no sign of being Jewish and celebrated Christmas (as she apparently did in early episodes). - Ron Stoppable from Kim Possible: His Bar Mitzvah is the focus of an early episode, which gets a Continuity Nod during a Christmas Episode. He obviously doesn't keep kosher. - Moishe from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends seems to have been rolled in just to fulfill this trope. - Harold from Hey Arnold! In one episode, he is lectured by his rabbi for stealing a ham, with more emphasis on breaking Jewish dietary restrictions than the theft itself. Rabbi Goldberg: But secondly, and most important, you stole a ham. Ham is not kosher - not kosher at all. We don't eat ham. We haven't for 5000 years, and we don't need to - In another, he has a Bar Mitzvah (yes, he's in fourth grade, but he was held back). And once, he uses the Yiddish word "kibbitzer" (meaning "person who butts in"). The Bar Mitzvah episode was the first episode anything connecting Harold to Judaism was explicitly mentioned; in fact, in one of the original claymation shorts, he is seen attending church with Arnold and Helga. - In a The Mighty B! episode where Bessie and Penny keep sneaking into Bat Mitzvah parties, we learn that Portia Gibbons is (probably) Jewish when Bessie sneaks into the Bat Mitzvah party of Portia's cousin. - Billy wishes the audience a happy Chanukah at the last possible minute in Billy and Mandy Save Christmas claiming that's what they celebrate at his house and rubs in the fact that he gets more presents. This is especially egregious (even to the point of Parody?) since he had been obsessed with Santa Claus and Christmas throughout the rest of the episode. - Jude on 6teen showed no signs of being Jewish until one of the Christmas Episodes where he said he had to get home because of Hanukkah. There is some irony that Jude was the name of one of Jesus' friends/apostles (and no, he's not the same as Judas). Not to mention Jude is German for Jew. - Kitty from X-Men: Evolution. The only evidence that she's Jewish is a scene of her lighting the menorah in her home in the Christmas Episode... and, of course, being very definitely Jewish in the comic the show was based on. - Mipsy in As Told by Ginger mentions transferring funds from a Bat Mitzvah fund in one episode. She's also drawn to look like a stereotypical Jewish American Princess. - The Christmas Episode actually explores this a bit, as Ginger finds out that her grandfather was Jewish and begins exploring Judaism as a result. - Pepper Ann, as well as her mother, sister, and aunt. Besides her obviously Jewish grandmother, the only other indication of her Judaism is in the Christmas Episode. In the Musical Episode her mother sings about cooking pork products for dinner, but it could be that they just don't practice Kosher, and it was All Just a Dream anyway. - Regular Show: "The Christmas Special". While not confirmed in any of the dialogue, Muscleman wears a sweater with a picture of a Dreidel on it.] - Tammy from Bob's Burgers. Aside from having a Bat Mitzvah episode, she otherwise has some elements of a Jewish American Princess, albeit downplayed. - Played straight in Rugrats early on. Didi is Jewish but doesn't appear to be heavy into her faith. They do eventually feature episodes based around Passover and Hanukkah. And in All Grown Up!, Tommy attends classes at a synagogue and tries to win a girl's attraction with 'nice Jewish boy' tactics. - In Foodfight!, the protagonist Dex Dogtective is revealed to be Jewish at literally the very end of the movie after the credits have started to roll. The only reason for this seems to be to set up the pun of "S'oy vey!". - Apparently, all mascots of kosher foods (like Dex's raisins) are Jewish, meaning a lot of the characters also fit under this trope. - Gargoyles never really addresses religion except when it affects its varied magical setting, but when asked about the human characters' religions, Word of God says that Matt Bluestone is Jewish. - Downplayed in the episode "Golem," where the characters are clearly Jewish, but the script seems to go out of its way to avoid using the word. - Gravity Falls: after much argument among the fandom, sometimes reaching near violence, Alex Hirsch has finally confirmed in a tweet that the Pines family are ethnically Jewish, but do not practice Judaism as a religion. - The Tick: Arthur and his family are revealed to be Jewish in the episode where his sister gets married, despite him previously having been shown celebrating Christmas and eating BLTs. - In the Tiny Toon Adventures episode, "It's a Wonderful Tiny Toons Christmas Special", a menorah can be seen in the window of Hamton's house, implying that his family is Jewish. Most likely, this is meant to be a joke, as they do not keep kosher, as Hamton once tried to cook a lobster, and indeed, they aren't even kosher themselves, being pork. However, in the Spring Break special, Hamton visits his Bubbe and Zeyde in Fort Lauderdale, who both speak with Yiddish accents. - Jody, from The Life and Times of Juniper Lee, whose sister had a Bat Mitzvah in season two episode There's No Mitzvah Like Snow Mitzvah. - Isabella Garcia-Shapiro from Phineas and Ferb only makes slight references to her religion in certain episodes. In one episode, the Star of David can be seen in her bedroom. And in a Christmas Special when the kids are worried about the holiday being cancelled, she doesn't show much sorrow since she celebrates Hanukah and received presents beforehand. Isabella (realizing that her enthusiasm isn't helping the situation): I mean, I'm with you guys. Boo, no Christmas... - Dr Mrs the Monarch from The Venture Bros. was said to be Sephardic Jewish, according to one of the creators. Although, it could be that she no longer practices Judaism since she celebrated Christmas in one episode and even sang Christmas songs with Monarch. - In DuckTales (2017), Launchpad McQuack is shown to practice Judaism as he wears a blue sweater with the menorah in front. But he does participate in the McDuck family's Christmas party. - Molly of Denali: There is no indication that Connie is Jewish until "Tooey's Hole-i-Day Sweater", where we see her lighting a menorah for Hanukkah. - Drawn Together: The Jew Producer. Other than the name, there's no real indication of his Jewishness until the film. - Miraculous Ladybug: Nathaniel Kurtzberg...according to Word of God.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyJewishAtChristmas
All Just a Dream - TV Tropes Benny: It was all a dream. Rafi: It was all a dream. Benny: It was all probably a coke-induced dream. Rafi: It was also a dream, but check this movie out anyways because it has a chick with three boobs in it! A twist where it is revealed previous events in the story were just part of a character's dream, hallucination or some other escape from reality, often put at the end to reveal the entirety of the story was some sort of dream. Sometimes, the character awakes after the dream, realises it was all "just a dream" (often actually saying this to himself, which rarely happens in real life), sighs with relief, and then sees an artifact lying next to him that was in the dream. This usually will leave protagonist and audience wondering "Or Was It a Dream?", however it may also be an opening gambit in a Dream Within a Dream sequence. Sometimes the dream lasts longer than one episode — entire seasons, and even entire series, have been known to turn out to be dreams. Often, when the dreamer awakens, the really epic events (death of a major character, etc.) from the "dream season" will be reversed. Or maybe the "waking up" is the dream? If other characters start acting out of character or otherwise just don't seem to be quite themselves during the dream sequence, expect lots of finger-pointing and exclamations of " And You Were There!" when the dreaming character awakens. Normally, this really grates on the audience, as in general it tends to completely undermine the story that's just been told; if none of it was real, then what was the point? As such, it tends to work best when done humorously (the more silly something is, the easier it can be to accept that it doesn't really matter), and if it was just one episode of a larger whole, it can undo damage done by having a Writer on Board. An especially useful device in horror movies, where it can be used to subject the characters (and audience) to all manner of fit-inducing terrors without really affecting the narrative. However, if it's done badly, expect some audience members to be seriously annoyed, as it might feel like a Deus ex Machina (or worse, lead to Opening a Can of Clones). Even if it's done well, it may require a lot of Willing Suspension of Disbelief. This trope — along with Dead All Along — makes up the basis for the Delusion Conclusion, one of many Stock Epileptic Trees. It's also a popular trope for music videos. Variant form of the Reset Button. See also Crashing Dreams, Or Was It a Dream?, Fantasy Keepsake, Dream Intro, Dream Reality Check, Dying Dream, Catapult Nightmare, and Adventures in Comaland. Compare with Nested Story Reveal, a similar trope that lacks the dream aspect. Often deconstructed with the Dream Apocalypse. If the dream is a quick-hit gag instead of a major element of the narrative, you have a Daydream Surprise. When the trope is inverted, it may turn out That Was Not a Dream. If the dream was a nightmare, this could be a Shock-and-Switch Ending. When a character insists this trope is in effect as a defense mechanism, they're In the Dreaming Stage of Grief. Contrast with Dream Episode, which doesn't hide the fact that the plot is indeed a dream. Not to be confused with Cuckoo Nest. If someone points out the contrast between dreams that frame a story and the much more chaotic dreams that people actually have, that's Real Dreams are Weirder. As an Ending Trope, all spoilers on this page are unmarked... You Have Been Warned! ## Examples subpages: <!—index—> <!—/index—> ## Other examples: - The delightful Kia Sorento commercial "Joyride Dream.'' - The Pepsi Twist commercial when Ozzy Osbourne notices his kids drinking Pepsis, only for them to actually be Pepsi Twists, and that his kids are actually the Osmonds in full rubber bodysuits. Ozzy starts screaming, only to wake up and realize that it was just a nightmare, though the Pepsi Twists are still real... - RC Cola had an animated ad where Hank Hill is riding on his mower, drinking an RC, at peace with all things. Bobby runs up excitedly shouting "Hey dad, I made the football team!" Hank smiles - and wakes up in his hammock. Bobby runs up excitedly shouting "Hey dad, I made the football team brownies!" Hank wails in horror. - A not-so-PG advertisement — lingerie company Agent Provocateur had a handsome secret agent donning his L'Agent sunglasses and being able to see all the woman at a party wearing AP's 2013 Winter Catalogue. When one of the girls starts giving him a lapdance in Black Bra and Panties, our hero is woken up by his foreman on a construction site and told to get back to work. - This Fire Safety PIF from the UK has the father who is constantly tries to prevent fire hazards in the house as a evil-sounding witch voice continuously taunts him throughout, until the curtain catches fire from a heater. The ending of the PIF shows the father waking up from a nightmare and begins to rethink his decision of smoking a cigarette. - One early Apple Jacks commercial (back when Apple was a bad guy) shows Apple putting Cinna-Mon in a cage and happily giving a bowl of Apple Jacks apple flavor. Then it turns out he was just dreaming and completely missed the cue to go for the next bowl. - The McDonaldland ad "Birdie's Dream Flight", as indicated by the title, has Birdie the Early Bird's experience of having the rest of the McDonaldland gang joining her in flying around McDonaldland turn out to be a dream. - Happy Heroes: - In Season 8 Episode 34, Happy S. uses a magic "life correction paper" to go back in time and stop a lady and even Sweet S. (who is Big M./Black Magician in disguise) from getting the elemental wands. However, Huo Haha shows up and uses the magic paper against Happy S. by reverting the other Supermen back into their Mech Stone forms with no way to return them to normal. Then Happy S. wakes up and realizes the whole thing was a nightmare he was having. - In Season 8 Episode 36, Big M. wakes up after having a dream where he meets the production crew of Happy Heroes and nearly erases the world from existence when he gets his hand on the episode script. In the end, Big M. is picked up from the wishing pool he fell into and talks about how they're created by "people from another world" to Little M. The person collecting the well's money says that drowning will cause someone to hallucinate, even though Big M.'s visit to the other world is implied to have been real. - The Motu Patlu episode "Angry Clouds", where Motu is chased by the Rain God for insulting him, turns out to be a dream Motu was having. - North Korea's educational anti-American propaganda animation Pencil Cannonball ( Korean: 연필포탄) uses this trope in a weird way. It's about a boy who dislikes studying mathematics, and one day when he's doing homework, he falls asleep and dreams that the North American submarines are attacking. The boy dreams he is a general, leading a few Child Soldiers to use a pencil cannonball to blast those submarines off. Unfortunately, because he doesn't know how to use a protractor, he can't hit against an attacking submarine. You can see it yourself first. - Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Joys of Seasons episode 1 ends with Mr. Slowy realizing that everyone's Rapid Aging caused by an alien's ship going out of control and causing planet Earth to spin much faster than usual was a dream. Then after the episode ends, we see Wolffy asking for help. - Simple Samosa: The episode "Hakka", where Samosa is whisked away to a castle inhabited by Hakka, ends with Samosa being woken up by his friends. Subverted when Samosa finds a note from Hakka telling him "thank you". - Hecatomb had a literal "It Was Only A Dream" card which can eliminate practically any card your opponent has out, essentially making them have never happened. - Comedian Emo Phillips inverts this trope when he talks about a dream he had. He describes a long series of really bizarre, Emo-Phillipian events that ends with him getting knocked unconscious. "And that's when I had my dream...." - In Robin Williams' comedy skit "Shakespeare (A Meltdowner's Nightmare)" from Reality, What A Concept, Robin plays a night watchman at a nuclear power plant, whose attempt to stop a meltdown by pulling the control rods of the reactor core results in a chain reaction, causing him to freak out until he hears this: - This has happened innumerable times in superhero comics as an "out" for a wacky story that doesn't fit into canon. So much so that it was common to include the blurb "Not a dream! Not an imaginary story!" on covers to reassure readers that no such cop-out would be used. Since Covers Always Lie, they'd usually find some other cop-out that meant the events still weren't what they seemed. - Grant Morrison ends their run of Animal Man by retconning it into a dream as a favor to the title character. - Batman: - The high-profile Batman: RIP storyline is (among other things) an attempt to bring the wackier Silver Age adventures of the Dark Knight in-canon by explaining them as hallucinations caused by sensory deprivation experiments. An original quote from one of those Silver Age tales is a prominent part of the storyline (and very typical of the trope): "It would be far easier to consider this a dream... but how can I? For in my hand, I hold the Bat-Radia!" The sensory deprivation experiment was actually not in itself a retcon, but was the framing device for a real Silver Age story; RIP just expanded it to cover others as well. An alternative explanation provided for some of these episodes is the insinuation that they were hallucinations brought about by exposure to Joker toxin, Scarecrow's fear gas, etc. - This is used in the opening of Batman: Last Knight on Earth, where Bruce Wayne seems to wake up in Arkham, where many of the people he'd considered his enemies are actually staff, he was never Batman, his Batsuit seemed to really be a shock therapy helmet and straitjacket, and he spent years locked up as he actually killed his parents. \|\|The keyword being "seems", as one: this Bruce is a clone, two: the world he woke up in is a Bad Future where the heroes failed (people decided on "Then Let Me Be Evil" after an admittedly half-assed speech from Lex Luthor, and many heroes are dead or trapped in a state of And I Must Scream), and three: the whole "being in Arkham since killing his parents thing" was a trick used by a now-elderly Alfred using Toyman's tech to deter the clone from taking up the mantle of Batman. Oh, and four: the Big Bad of the story, Omega is a Fallen Hero: the original Bruce Wayne, having been tortured after people turned on the heroes.\|\| - Mike Allred wrote a story in the seventh issue of Solo titled "Batman A-Go-Go", an homage to the 1966 television series that takes a darker turn as Aunt Harriet is gruesomely murdered off-screen and ends with Robin falling to his death. In the end, it turns out all of this was dreamed by Batman when he was knocked unconscious during the fight with the Riddler and his goons in the beginning of the story. - Batman: Black and White: - "The Hunt" ends with Bruce Wayne waking up from a dream. It's left ambiguous whether the whole story was a dream, or just the bit at the end where he flew off in a cloud of bats with a hoodlum under each arm. - "Snow Job" is a wacky story about the adventures of Batman and his son, Batman Junior, which ends with Bruce Wayne waking up and discovering he'd dreamed the whole thing. - A story told in Captain America: Red, White & Blue showed Cap and Bucky duking it out with the Red Skull seemingly during World War II. Bucky saves Cap from the Skull's trap, and we see what Cap looks like with his mask off: He's an old man. Bucky is still as young as ever. It then cuts to a shot of Cap frozen in ice. The story continues; We see Bucky saving Cap from falling off a ledge, encouraging him when he's on life support... and then four familiar silhouettes walk through the door. Bucky tells Cap that he's done all he could, that the rest is up to him now, and that no matter what, he'll always be his partner. Cap wakes up and hears Giant-Man explaining how they pulled him out of the ice, remarking that even with his advanced metabolism, the odds of surviving that experience for so long were pretty much impossible. - Cavewoman: Some of the events of It's a Girl's Life (specifically the 'booty competition') according to Carrie's Oasis Diary. This would explain some Out Of Character Moments in It's a Girl's Life. - The final arc of Daredevil (Charles Soule) has Matt hit by a car and driven to finally take down Mayor Wilson Fisk. Matt manages to beat Bullseye, reunite with estranged "Brother" Mike and get evidence that Fisk fixed the mayoral election, forcing him to resign. As he celebrates, Matt is attacked by Fisks's newest masked enforcer, beating him down, pulling off the mask...and seeing his own face. Cut to Matt on the operating table as the last four issues have all been a dream in his mind as he's near death from the accident. - Disney Ducks Comic Universe: - A dream ending was hastily written into the Barks story "The Firebug" where Donald becomes a Pyromaniac but is pardoned when he catches a more dangerous person who was starting similar fires. In the original ending, Donald sets the judge's waste basket on fire and is thrown in jail as well, but in the altered ending Donald is woken up by one of his nephews instead. - There's an Italian comic by Marco Rota where Donald takes a nap on a bed in Gyro Gearloose's workplace, but accidentally activates a dream device by releasing a nightmare potion. The rest of the comic features freaky scenes such as the Beagle Boys running the police force and pursuing Donald, Uncle Scrooge dying when he activates his Money Bin's self-destruct before turning into a giant coin-monster, and Little Helper becoming a robotic Mad Scientist by switching places with Gyro. At the end Donald wakes up back in Gyro's workplace and realizes it was all a dream. - This is the conclusion that Donald comes to at the end of The Duck Who Never Was, after wishing that he was never born and having a genie (Who happens to live in an urn instead of the typical vase) he met in the Duckburg Museum grant said wish. After Donald runs off and leaves the museum however the Genie's voice is seen emanating from the urn in which he lives, proving that it really did happen. This is partially revisited in the later story Treasury of Croesus. When Donald, along with his uncle and nephews, once again visits the museum he sees the same urn from the previous story and is then the only one to notice the lid of the urn being lifted up by a hand from inside the urn, which looks to be in greeting to Donald. - Also shown to be the case at the conclusion to Barks' The Money Stairs. Dealing with Donald and Scrooge competing to see whether there are some things that Scrooge's money can't accomplish, it ends with Donald waking up and telling his nephews that he realized it was a dream after Scrooge offered to buy him a soda. In retrospect, the events being a dream make sense, as the story features Scrooge being fairly carefree with spending his money to beat Donald. One panel survives from an aborted non-dream ending that Barks drew at first but scrappedhe went with the dream ending because the "money stairs" of the title, a mountain-size stairway built out of coins, seemed too impossible to be real. - In the story "Paperino e l'incubo dello zione" Uncle Scrooge is seemingly visited by characters from his recurring nightmares, then Donald discovers it's all a plot by the Beagle Boys to rob Scrooge. Scrooge then promises that he'll reward Donald with half of his entire riches. At this point it's revealed that the entire story was just Donald's happy dream. - A story of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers from the early '70s has the trio staging a violent assault on a prison to free an incarcerated friend. Fat Freddy ends up cut off and bludgeoned to death by a horde of cops - but it's all just a dream, and Franklin is beating him with a rolled-up newspaper for eating a whole batch of hash cookies. Then, some seven years later, an extended story where they take a cross-country trip in a vintage RV ends in a full-scale riot at a Greenwich Village Halloween parade — but it's all just a dream, and Franklin is beating Freddy with a rolled-up newspaper...implying everything that happened between the two stories was Fat Freddy dreaming! - Subverted in issue 5 of Fish Police. Inspector Gill wakes up, believing he just dreamed that he was a fish only to find that yes, he really is one. He didn't dream up a single thing that happened so far in the plot; he was just drunk when a lot of it happened. Cue the "What Did I Do Last Night?" from Gill. - The last issue of Gen¹³, Vol. 1 combined this with a Downer Ending: The team — along with various other gen-active teens they'd met along the course of the series — has one last hedonistic, live-like-there's-no-tomorrow-cuz-there-ain't good time before "The End". Turns out this was all in Caitlin Fairchild's head, an extended hallucination brought on by the effects of another gen-active's powers in the split-second before a Death Trap disintegrated them all (they got better). - In the 33rd issue of G.I. Joe (Devil's Due), Hawk is shown to have recovered from being shot by Cobra Commander in the previous issue and getting to enjoy retirement with his until-then-unseen wife after being informed that the threat of Cobra has come to a permanent end as a result of Cobra Commander being incarcerated and most of the surviving members of Cobra's top hierarchy being killed. This turns out to be a dream when Hawk pulls through for real and is told that Cobra is still active with very few casualties on their side. The reveal is especially made heartbreaking because the non-existence of Hawk's wife is confirmed by a Wham Shot showing a newspaper article confirming that the woman Hawk dreamed he was married to had died long ago. - Heavy Metal had the story "Rahu's Reich", where a demon named Rahu is summoned by a foolish wizard, only to break free from the summoning circle and take over the world. The story ends with the reveal that everything that happened was a dream of Rahu's; in truth, the book with his summoning ritual was destroyed centuries ago, and all he can do as he sleeps, forgotten, is dream of glory. - Bruce Jones' run on The Incredible Hulk was retconned in this manner, with Peter David's subsequent run explaining that it was all a hallucination brought on by Nightmare. - Judge Dredd: Played for Black Comedy when a man is randomly gunned down in a drive-by shooting and a first-time criminal decides to steal the dead man's wallet. Judge Dredd pursues and corners him, but when the man pleads that he regrets what he did, Dredd gives him a break and tells him to go home. Then the perp wakes up in prison with Dredd quipping "Keep dreaming". - All the events of Issue 26 of Paperinik New Adventures "Time Escapes" are actually the demo of a TV show of the XIII century. - There's a The Punisher story where Frank goes back in time to the 30s thanks to Reed Richards and Nick Fury. He quickly infiltrates Al Capone's gang and kills every last mobster in Chicago along with Al, the idea being that by breaking the mafia's hold early on, there'll be no gang shooting in Central Park in the late twentieth century, saving Frank's family and preventing his Start of Darkness. Then he wakes up. - Sometimes used as The Teaser in Quantum and Woody. For example, issue #5 starts with Woody, Quantum, and Amy working together as a tightly coordinated counter-terrorism team to stop a criminal called Othello. In reality, it's a dream induced after Quantum was accidentally blasted off of a building in the previous issue. - Red Dwarf Smegazine: The comic "Fashion Victims" (which had an alien take The Cat's clothes to assist in the relief effort for his planet) is revealed at the end to be a nightmare that The Cat was viewing on the Dream Recorder. - The Sandman (1989): Quite a bit of it really is just a dream, but that doesn't make it any less real. "I give you — eternal waking...". It's all about the importance of dreams and fiction. In the second story arc, the protagonist reflects on how cliche this trope is, but ultimately decides she can't find a better way to sum up her adventures. Fast-forward to the last story arc, where Dream's funeral concludes with every one of the guests waking up — even the reader. - Scooby Apocalypse: \|\|Issue 10\|\| is revealed at the end to primarily have been a fever dream. - Two Spawn issues written by Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison has Spawn dying accidentally after a fight with an angel warrior, and goes to a special level of Hell, where he finds all Marvel Comics and DC Comics superheroes imprisoned, and with help of Superman, who gave him his power, he sets them all free. Next issue happens back on Earth, with the narrator saying "Let's come back to reality. Spawn has a bad dream last days." - The infamous Spider-Man storyline One More Day had Peter and Mary Jane's marriage retconned when Peter made a Deal with the Devil to save Aunt May. The newspaper comic didn't do the whole "deal with Mephisto" storyline but it did suddenly change, making Peter single again to fit in with the comic book line. Fan uproar eventually convinced the writers of the newspaper comic to retcon that change, and they did that by saying it was all just a dream. - Supergirl: - Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade: In the beginning of chapter 2, Supergirl flies over her school. All of sudden all begin calling her "Linda Lee". She freaks out and wonders why everybody knows her Secret Identity before waking up. - In Supergirl Vol. 5 issue #22 Kara gets hit by a train and all of sudden sees herself surrounded by her friends of the Legion of Super-Heroes. She's happy until Lightning Lad tells her that she is dreaming. - Bizarrogirl opens up with a battle between Supergirl and Superwoman. It looks like a flashback narrating the final fight between both super-beings until the legions of undead make clear Kara is having a nightmare. - Tom Strong issues 29 and 30 had the eponymous hero awaken from his superheroic life into a gray world with no wonder or adventure where he was just a factory worker with a case of bad self-esteem. Then the clues mount that he really is a superhero - only to discover that he was a failed military experiment and all of his memories of a heroic life were delusions. But at the last moment, he breaks out of the hallucination - back into the superheroic world where the Big Bad of the story had been forcing him to hallucinate. He said later that he knew the world he had been in wasn't real because it was all gray, with no sense of hope or wonder in it. (A cynical person might just say that he was unable to cope with the truth and retreated into his dream-world... à la that much-referenced episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.) - An 2003 issue of an Malaysian monthly comic book magazine franchise Gemeilia (Kokko and May, or 哥妹俩), named "An Adventure In Room", Kokko and May meets an alien from an planet named Pala Planet. When the aliens have an fight over mouse, it comes with messy results and even \|\|turns Kokko into black-face "African". \|\|At the end, it was just a dream Kokko have, but when his mom came back from toy store and reward him and May for helping cleaning the room, she \|\|show the toy which is similar to the spaceship Pala Planet used, Kokko screams in horror. \|\| - Usagi Yojimbo: Usagi stays with a peasant family, and at night they are set upon by a demon which slays the mother and father, and eventually Usagi. The son wakes up and it's all revealed to have been a dream he had from eating too much candy. Usagi leaves and bids them goodbye. Then Jei, known for slaughtering people who give him hospitality, shows up at the house and asks if he can stay the night. - Sensation Comics: Wonder Woman ends up in a very surreal town with two neglected children who have her bring their parents to them to teach their parents to appreciate them. The whole thing turns out to be a dream, but as it was a shared dream and the parents never realized it wasn't real it helps things anyway. - In Wonder Woman (Rebirth), it's revealed that much of Wonder Woman (2011) was an elaborate illusion created by the Gods of Olympus to keep Diana away from Paradise Island. - From Bloom County, after a long-awaited wedding, Opus is knocked out when his nose collided with Lola's when they kiss. While unconscious, Opus dreams about Lola leaving him twenty years later with twenty-three tube-grown kids. - At another point, Opus ends up wandering lost and semi-delirious in the desert. Suddenly, he's back home in Bloom County. He announces how happy he is it was all just a dream. Milo then says "No. This is the dream. You're still in the desert." And sure enough... - Calvin and Hobbes: - The comic has the memorable "A Letter From Santa" Sunday strip, where Calvin gets a letter from Santa Claus encouraging him to be as bratty as he likes and that good kids actually nauseate Santa. "And then I awoke." - There was also the Sunday strip involving Calvin being unable to fall asleep, as late as 1:30 in the morning. He tosses and turns, and is really tired, but just can't get to sleep, until he hears his mom's voice, and wakes up from his insomnia dream. At breakfast, Calvin mutters to himself "This is going to be a bad day." - One arc began with Calvin about to hand in his completed math homework, when all the numbers suddenly spilled off the page, which then explodes into flame. His teacher turns into a tentacled alien and douses him with gasoline; Calvin leaps off his chair and is abruptly plummeting from the clouds. Calvin wakes up just as he was about to strike his house like a flaming meteor... only to remember he hadn't completed his math homework. - Drabble pulled this twice, then subverted it hilariously. The first time, Ralph dreams that his job as a mall cop is more like Batman. The second time, Norman goes to a piercing salon with Wendy and ends up with multiple ear, nose, and other rings. The third time, Norman and Wendy run off to Vegas and get married on a dare. Norman is about to invoke this trope when the next panel reveals the cartoonist has already used up his chances to use it. The plot gets resolved another way. - A two-week storyline in FoxTrot, parodying The Metamorphosis, has Jason waking up one morning to find he's turned into a miniature version of his sister, Paige. Midway through the story, he lampshades this trope by saying he's figured out that he's dreaming, because he thinks that if this were real, Mulder and Scully would've come to investigate. (Dream-Peter then points out that Mulder and Scully are TV characters — and therefore only investigate incidents appropriate for primetime shows. Turning into a teenage girl is too horrific.) - Jon got a date and asked Garfield to pinch him to be sure it wasn't a dream. It was. - The Knights of the Dinner Table story "Heroes on the Town" has Bob, Dave, and Brian actually running their characters as lawful good heroes, treating NPCs with respect and roleplaying rather than mindlessly hacking. The story ends with B.A. waking up. - Little Nemo in Slumberland ends every strip with Nemo waking up in bed. There were continuous storylines despite this. And when Nemo gets into trouble it does not feel as safe as a dream. No no no. - Also Winsor McCay's Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend— though the title makes that obvious. - What's New? with Phil and Dixie. In this strip◊ Phil and Dixie have a Catapult Nightmare to wake up from a dream (shown in previous strips) in which their alignments turned Evil. - The fanfiction story "The Reunion" considers the entire fourth season of the television version of Our Miss Brooks to be All Just A Dream. - The Bridge to Terabithia LDD-fanfic, The Phone Call, uses this trope to retcon the original story, that \|\|Leslie's death from swinging on the rope\|\| was only Jess having a bad dream. Sure enough, the very next thing Jess does is to sever the rope swing to prevent his dream from happening, but this only leads to bigger problems when Leslie finds out about what he had done. - There have been lots of fics inspired by Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles) in which the original fic was either a nightmare or a recurring nightmare for one of the two characters. (Not all had a necessarily better ending for either.) - Infinity Train: Wake Me Up: In this spin off of the Blossomverse, the very first chapter turns the events of the entire original trilogy into a bad dream that the Cerise Institute is having by the time Professor Fennel enters the scene. - In Nobody Dies: - Much of chapter 66 is Shinji having a dream (really more of a nightmare) about Zeruel slaughtering everyone. - Season 4 is just a dream, made by Arael. Fan reaction was... less than positive, to the point where the author dropped the story in disgust shortly afterwards. - Superwomen of Eva 2: Lone Heir of Krypton: In chapter thirteenth's omake Asuka and Misato are fighting over Shinji. Since Asuka has the upper hand, Misato talks her into a threesome. Asuka demands getting Shinji's first kiss and she is about to kiss him... when Pen Pen woke Shinji up. Shinji's reaction to realize it was a dream and the penguin has woken him up from the best dream he has ever had was... not serene. - Inverted in Kyon: Big Damn Hero, where Kanae was having a recurrent dream with parts... off. It was until after she kissed Kyon that she realized she was awake. - Appears in the fic, Rainbow in the Dark, where Rainbow Dash has an erotic encounter, after which she wakes up, building up the UST to even higher levels. - In a parody fan fiction about Dragon Ball GT, right after Goku's Heroic BSoD and Big "NO!" when learning that after his 100 years with Shenron, his family and friends are dead, we return to Goku and Chichi's bedroom and he explains to her the entire events of GT as a nightmare. Then, it becomes a Dream Within a Dream as Goku has a run in with Dragonball Evolution's Goku. The short story is on DeviantArt. - In Heart and Eye, Xander has a conversation with Willow that turns out to be result of heavy painkillers - The Star Trek: New Voyages episode "To Serve All My Days", involving a delayed effect of Rapid Aging that afflicts Chekov to the point where he may have died, in the final scene following the closing credits suggests that most of the whole episode was just a dream he had. - In the Star Trek: The Original Series fanfic Memories Born of Fire, Spock has a nightmare about what would have happened if Kirk had not survived the kal-i-fee. - Equestria is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fan fiction that suggests that the eponymous world is actually the elaborate fantasy world that was to be the setting of a series of stories planned by a woman who was emotionally abused by her mother. She never got around to writing it and the emotional abuse that she suffered drove her into her dream world.. - Chapter 7 of Dalton starts out like this. - One "episode" of Calvin at Camp features Calvin falling asleep and dreaming that he is in an Affectionate Parody of Lost. The readers are aware the entire time that it is a dream. - Calvin & Hobbes: The Series has the opening of "Camping Trip Part 2", a surreal Time Skip. - In The Detective and the Diplomat, Sherlock Holmes is trapped in Ankh-Morpork and would rather believe that everything he is experiencing there — from a demonstration of magic to a talking dog — is actually a fever-dream. He's wrong. - In chapter 8 of Weightless, Shepard dreamed of Garrus tied up and interrogated her to make her spill out her feelings (which she was trying to keep to herself due to several reasons). She was woken up by the real Garrus and suddenly hit him in the face. After that, things got worse. - Ed Abuse: And by the last person you would expect it to be. - In the stories Your Worst Nightmare, The Love Triangle and Dream Away of The Lion King Adventures, dreams are used by villains to try and defeat Simba. - Discussed in Dirty Sympathy when Apollo wonders whether the events of the story are actually happening, whether Klavier is actually real and if he is dreaming the whole thing to comfort himself. Klavier is all too quick to reassure him. - In Mega Man Recut, Future Shock may be this; it's ambiguous. - In The Dear Sweetie Belle Continuity, most of "The Sin of Envy, or a Mother's Love" is this, courtesy of a demon. - In Midnight Savior, it begins with Kim on Lorwardia in chains, being dragged to the gallows to be executed by beheading. The moment the blade falls, she wakes up screaming. While she was dreaming, she tried to wake herself up, convinced she's dreaming, but it seems it's actually happening. After waking up, she could almost feel the heat and dirt from the nightmare. But the worst thing for her was how it could have happened if Ron haven't saved her and killed the Lorwardians. - The first chapter of A New Way is a dream of Chrysalis's, viewed by Luna, though this is not immediately apparent. - In Vengeance from the Grave Harry, annoyed that his friends and colleagues are trying to play with his emotions, subjects them to an eight hour long forced dream about what the next eight years of their lives would be like if he got fed up and left. - Averted in Vapors. Aiko is rather traumatized when her painkillers wear off enough for her to realize that being kidnapped by Sasori is not a fever dream. - This happens a few times in the Meg's Family Series. Boyfriend had a chapter that turned out to be Zack's Adventures In Coma Land, and Family had The Obligatory Zombie Chapter, which was Maddie's nightmare (considering how it ended, it would be hard to continue the series otherwise). Returns' prologue was also this, detailing how much had changed for the family in between the stories and Brian wondering about the story possibilities. Then Meg wakes up and nothing has changed. Brian is not amused. Brian: ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? - In "Or Something" Series, the events of A Crossdresser are all just Yang's dream. - In Advice and Trust, Ritsuko does this in chapter 9. She's lying next to Maya after a fabulous and romantic date... and then she wakes up and realizes that she was dreaming. - A lot of the House fanfic "It's Time You Got A Life" is Chase's dream. - Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series: Marik's "Evil Council" Video #4 turns out to be Bakura dreaming about them actually killing Yugi. - An episode of Ranma ½: The Abridged Chronicles features Akane sleepwalking and causing chaos as she goes through several dreams. After waking her up, they discuss how ridiculous the episode was, until it turns out to be Ranma's dream. - "Just a Dream" basically makes the entirety of Kim Possible an elaborate dream real-world teen Kim Patterson had after being caught in a car crash when her boyfriend went driving away from Junior Prom while drunk. Recalling the dream, Kim decides to get back in touch with her old friend Ron Silverberg, who is both impressed at what they were like in the dream and flattered that Kim Patterson's dream "chose" him to be her boyfriend. The fic concludes with Kim suggesting she and Ron look up options for charity work and also express an interest in them starting a relationship in reality. - In Ultra Fast Pony, the episode "Random Eye Magic" begins with Twilight waking up from a Dream Within a Dream, then ends with Twilight waking up yet again, realizing the entire episode was a dream. - Dragon Ball Z Abridged does this quite often. - Turns out episode 12 about the fake Namek was all just Krillin's dream. After waking up he feels okay, until Mr. Popo shows up and terrifies him, leading to the Team Four Star director/editor KaiserNeko waking up as everything in the episode had actually been a dream of his. KaiserNeko: [wakes up in a cold sweat] Oh man, I really got stop with these late night edits. [Mr. Popo appears on his computer] Mr. Popo : I'll say! KaiserNeko : AUGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH- [cut to black] - The "Celloween" special, where Krillin attempts to rescue civilians from Cell's rampage, is actually just a dream Krillin had while sleeping during episode 45. - The entirety of Episode of Bardock was a story told by Goku to Gohan, which was dreamed up by the latter. This explains why Freeza's Death Ball sent Bardock back in time, what happened to his psychic powers, and why all the primitive Saiyans sound like Kermit the Frog. - Kai Abridged 2.9 was a dream Gohan had about the Garlic Jr. Saga, presumably because he was bored to sleep by his tutor whipping him. - Fantasy of Utter Ridiculousness's Alternate Ending, depicting Patchouli trapped in Jersey City after the Scarlet Devil Mansion's library is destroyed, turns out to be this. - The Phineas and Ferb Valentine's day fic Lovey-Dovey turns out to be Perry's dream, but whether or not the dream comes true after the story ends is up to interpretation. - Asylum (Daemon of Decay) opens up with Twilight Sparkle waking up in the titular asylum and being told that most of her life was just a dream, much to her horror. Also, in chapter eight, Twilight wakes up in her old library and it seems the asylum was just a dream. But of course, this is not the case... - Invoked in the Land of Oz oneshot Patient. A now seventeen-year-old Dorothy wakes up in an asylum with no memories of the last eight years. At the asylum, she befriends a girl who thinks she is royalty. The reader is led to believe Oz was all a fantasy, until it's revealed that Dorothy is still in Oz. Her friends are trying to make her believe she's in Kansas while she's an amnesiac so that she doesn't become too stressed. The fic pokes fun at this trope and the MGM film. - Averted in the aptly named story A Dream. After waking up in Equestria, Valiant decides he must be dreaming. It takes a full season and several months living there before he realizes that this is all real. - In Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, Izuku hoped that his traumatic fight with Bakugou was all just a dream when he woke up in his living room after blacking out at the hospital. It takes all of five seconds for his Super-Hearing to act up again and remind him that it wasn't. - Luna Game End's true ending, unlocked after replaying games 4 and 0, reveals that the experience was a "strange nightmare" Luna had after passing out while "helping Pinkie Pie collect some things". But then there's a Scare Chord as Pinkie turns into her straight-haired "Pinkamena" persona. - Parodied in a post from a Super Mario Bros. forum. The user pokes fun at the " Super Mario Bros is all just a drug-fueled hallucination" theories by inverting them. Mario's adventures aren't the hallucination, his supposed past on Earth is: a significant part of mario's life is a drug-induced hallucination that was caused by eating too many mushrooms his friends keep trying to convince him that there's not actually such a place as new york, but he insists he grew up there. he used to claim he was born there, but then princess peach pointed out to him that the village where his parents live doesn't look like how he described 'brooklyn' at all. since then he's started claiming that when he was a baby his parents shipped him to a parallel universe to protect him from kamek, and he only accidentally found his way back as an adult nobody understands why he's so insistent about all of this, since none of it really makes any sense. luigi has learned to just smile and nod whenever his brother starts telling people stories about their italian heritage - A piece of fan-art made by a detractor of Disney's take on the Star Wars universe has their entire canon be this of Luke, who laments to his wife, Mara, that all of his friends and family were gone. She jokingly suggests getting some mouse traps. - This is how the "Amy Impressions" strips of Sonic the Comic Online! go. It starts with Amy at Johnny's grave when suddenly Johnny comes back as a zombie and attacks her. She wakes up at home, but then Johnny comes in... It turns out that even that is a dream (or a nightmare to be exact). - The entirety of Faded Blue turns out to just be one of canon Steven's dreams. \|\|As the April Fools chapter would have you believe.\|\| - In The Flash Sentry Chronicles ( My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and My Little Pony: Equestria Girls): \|\|Springer's Hedgehog Day experience is revealed to be an artificial dream he had while on a "Vision Quest" after some "Vision Quest Potion" spills on his head at Zecora's hut.\|\| - Most of the first part of Ask King Sombra was his subconscious dreaming after he was blown to bits by the Crystal Heart, trapping his mind in his horn in the process. The only thing that's real is Coffee Talk, who he absorbed in his shadow form before it happened. - The final scene of Below Average reveals the entire story was a nightmare sent by Princess Luna to make Starlight Glimmer give up her equality crusade. - The problem in A Game of Castles is that Mario thinks that he's dreaming, but he's not. Mario came to the Mushroom Kingdom by a pipe. It's so weird and fantastical that he imagines it as a dream. He doesn't take anything seriously and just wants to be a hero, so he's very reckless. He ran off to "save" Peach from Bowser without asking whether she actually needed saving. - In Chapter 14 of No Such Luck, No Such Love, Lana catches Lincoln leaving the house in the middle of the night due to all the mistreatment he receives. The readers are lead to believe that he is running away, similar to many fics showing Lincoln running away from home, but it turns out that it was just a nightmare that Lana was having. - Subverted in Lonely Kagamin. There was an ending where Kagami wakes up alone, however it turned out to be an April Fool's prank. That comic was a dream, and Kagami wakes up to find Konata next to her in bed. She breaks down in tears, but fortunately has Konata there to comfort her. - The Bolt Chronicles: The Murder Mystery is revealed at the end of the story to be Pennys jalapeno and pepperoni pizza-fueled nightmare. - While this is not true for the narrative of the Steven Universe Deconstruction Fic Flawed Crystals, the story reveals in the final arc that the canon ending of the show was this: After being unable to cope with the knowledge that Rose Quartz really did shatter Pink Diamond, Steven had a Freak Out and created it as a wish-fulfillment fantasy. - In What You Wish For, the whole thing turns out to be a coma dream Lori had while unconscious from breathing in fumes. - In Chapter 2 of To What Subservience Leads, Megatron accidentally shoots Starscream during a battle, then spends the rest of the chapter and the first half of Chapter 3 deal with the ever-growing guilt and anger, only to learn of the Seeker's death when the Autobots (who had taken Starscream back to their base to fix him up) call him with the news. Just as he's about to succumb to Sanity Slippage, however, it's revealed that what he saw was actually a simulation Starscream was running during their merging to show Megatron the potential consequences of the raid scheduled for the next morning. - The Nutdealer Expanded Universe: "Unaltered" reveals that "Unrelated" was just a fantasy of Nathan's after Tommy ruined his reputation. - The bulk of Always You exists as an odd dream Strange Aeons is having, revealed only in the final chapter when she wakes up to her roommate Cindy writing the story. She then sees a message from Abby Classic on her computer... Only to wake up once again, this time with no roommate named Cindy and no message on her computer. - "Nightmare Scenario", a chapter of Ma Fille, in which the long-deceased Heather comes to Joe's dream and shows him what would have happened had her entitled sister Laura taken custody of their daughter Katrina. - After The Centre: The first story of the series, Dream a Little Dream, is about a strange interview that goes very wrong, ending with the reveal that Brittas had just dreamed it all. The fic also uses the opportunity to retcon away the All Just a Dream reveal of the show which the fanfic is based on, seeing as the dream started with the final scene of the series which gave this reveal. - Alice in Wonderland: Alice realizes she's dreaming and begs herself to wake up at the very end- and succeeds (thanks to her sister also calling her name in the real world). - An American Tail: Fievel Goes West is written off as a dream Fievel had in the third An American Tail movie, An American Tail: The Treasure of Manhattan Island. But there was a TV series with the Wild West theme that aired prior to the 3rd movie (Fridge Brilliance when you realized that it's possible to stay in what seems to be forever in the dream world and then wake up to discover that only one night has passed in reality). - The ending of Disney's Peter Pan strongly hints that the adventures in Neverland may have been just a dream of Wendy's unlike in the original play, live-action 2003 Warner Brothers film and book, where it's all explicitly real. Mr. and Mrs. Darling come home from their dinner party to find the children asleep in the nursery as if they had never left (even though the Neverland trip seemed longer than just one night), and while Wendy and her parents see what looks like the pirate ship's silhouette in the sky, it's not clear if it really is the ship or just a cloud formation. This is left ambiguous, though, for a few seconds until the 'ship' breaks up in the wind before "The End" appears. - Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland toys with this throughout; the whole thing is a dream of course, but at a couple points it seems like Nemo has awoken in his bed, only for something from his dream to appear in his bedroom, such as the scepter King Morpheus gave him, meaning that he's still dreaming. This trope was one of many reasons Hayao Miyazaki left the production of the film, as he didn't want the movie to be all just a dream (despite this being the entire premise of the Little Nemo comic strip in the first place). - Waking Life is basically a bunch of people talking about philosophy, all with trippy Rotoscoping and loosely connected by one main character. Occasionally he wakes up in bed, only to eventually realize that he's still dreaming. His quest to wake up forms a vague plot during the second half of the film. - The Year Without a Santa Claus ends by revealing that the whole story was Santa Claus' dream. What's that? You watch it on TV every year and didn't know that? That's because its final scene is often left out in syndication. The use of this trope is actually rather odd, since Santa Claus already decided to uncancel Christmas and it's not like we need to justify the story's fantastical elements. Maybe the creators just wanted to reassure kids that Santa would never really consider sitting Christmas out? - Aaron Carter's upbeat song "That's How I Beat Shaq" relates the singer's adventures as he beats Shaquille O'Neal in a one-on-one basketball match, and ends with him waking up in bed. ("But if it was a dream, and it wasn't real... how'd I get a jersey with the name O'Neal?") - The Presidents of the United States of America have "Basketball Dream", which appears as a Hidden Track on the album II. It features Chris Balleau's son talking about a dream he had where he met Magic Johnson. - Mesozoic Mind, by the Charmers. Last night I had a crazy dream, I fell out of my bed! I missed the floor entirely, I fell through time instead! - Josh Turner, "Loretta Lynn's Lincoln" begins with the singer buying Loretta Lynn's Lincoln, ends with the singer being woken up from a nap in his pickup truck. I heard a tappin' on the window as I woke up - R.E.M., "Losing My Religion": I thought that I heard you laughing I thought that I heard you sing I think I thought I saw you try But that was just a dream That was just a dream - Porter Wagoner/Tom Jones's song "Green Green Grass of Home" has the subject of the song seemingly returning home after being away for a long time, enjoying his return, only to wake up in prison awaiting his execution, only to return home dead and buried there. - Appears via Executive Meddling in the Billie Holiday cover of "Gloomy Sunday", the lyrics of which were used in most subsequent English-language covers. After the protagonist is Driven to Suicide, a third verse is tacked on to appease publishers, in which the suicide is revealed to have been a dream. - Metallica: "Enter Sandman" and "Ride the Lightning". - "One More Red Nightmare" by King Crimson, where a guy dreams he's on a plane that's about to crash. He wakes up to find that's he's on a road trip on a Greyhound Bus. - Daniel Amos' album ¡Alarma! includes a short story in the liner notes, which is presented as a dream-vision akin to John's Revelation. Was it all a dream? It seems like it now. But then it also seems so real. More real than anything I've ever experienced when awake. But I was not awake. At least I don't think I was. I don't know—maybe I'm going crazy. But I must write it down before it all disappears, or I will go crazy. - Diamond Rio's song, "In a Week or Two" has the narrator kicking himself because he waited too long to make his move, and now the woman he loves is about to marry someone else. The video is this trope. He has fallen asleep in his tux, and all of that footage of her with that other man is only his bad dream. His Best Man, after looking for him everywhere, finds him and wakes him up. "Dude, what are you doing? You're going to miss your own wedding!" - "The Sound of Silence", by Simon & Garfunkel, when taken literally, consists of the singer narrating the events of a nightmare he had. - BIGMAMA's "(50) days of flower," a song about the singer's run in with an angel who'd lost her wings the last time they met, turns out to be: One morning the angel left jp: : Aru asa tenshi wa dekaketa yo And never came back jp: : Sorekiri kaeranai kedo It was all just a dream jp: : Subete ga zenbu yume ochi datte But it wasn't so bad." jp: : Soredemo warukunai you na - Kids Praise: In the fourth album, an ambitious gospel singer falls asleep while trying to write a song, and has a dream that a Con Man tricks her into signing a contract that quite literally traps her! She wakes up screaming her lungs out. - Nelly's "Just a Dream". - An early Beck song called "Blackfire Choked Our Death" recounts the travails of a family caught in Deadly Dust Storm, possibly during The Great Depression, as Beck discusses sand pouring through the walls of the house and grit in the food. Towards the end of the song, the imagery becomes more surreal and stream-of-consciousness, until the narrator wakes up in his bedroom with Black Sabbath playing on the radio. - MC Lyte's "Cappucino" describes the singer getting shot in a drug deal gone bad and visiting the afterlife, only to wake up at the end. - Britney Spears uses this in the videos for "Baby One More Time", "Born To Make You Happy", and "Everytime". - All of the video Michael Jackson's Thriller is this, or a subversion? - "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Eat It" video, a parody of Michael Jackson's song/video "Beat It", ends with Al waking up with a bellyache and popping a couple of Alka-Seltzer. - The video to The Scorpions song "No One Like You". - The music video for Gorillaz's "Dare" is a Dream Within a Dream Within a Dream. - Converge's music video for "Eagles Become Vultures" probably applies, though it's more of a waking fantasy than a dream. - The video for Three Days Grace's "Animal I Have Become". - The music video for Evanescence's "Bring Me To Life" suggests this — the main action is interspersed with shots of Amy asleep and apparently dreaming, and the video ends with her asleep. - Katy Perry: - The music video for Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" ends with her on the bed next to someone whom we are to assume is her boyfriend. - The same thing happens in "Hot & Cold", though that was a daydream. - Subverted in the video for "Roar." The video starts with a plane crash before Katy's boyfriend is killed by a tiger and Katy becomes a badass Jungle Princess. At the end, we see Katy waking up next to an airplane window only to find out that the events of the video really did happen and the plane had been made into a part of her shelter. - Airbourne's "Blonde, Bad and Beautiful" turns out to be this, in a video that was filled with alcohol, stripping and a bit of pole-dancing. - The Barenaked Ladies' video for "Shoebox" is a dream of the girl who sneaks out on her date. - Dokken's video for "Dream Warriors" winds up being a nightmare that Freddy Krueger is having. - The video for Live's "Run To The Water" turns out to be Ed Kowalczyk's dream. - The video for Miley Cyrus' "Start All Over" is established as being a dream in the very beginning; it starts with her going to sleep and waking up in the dream world, and ends with her going to sleep in the dream world and waking up in the real world. Then pictures she took while in the dream world start coming out of the printer. - The video for Maroon5's "Makes Me Wonder" features this. With gratuitous fanservice. - In her song "Moon Trance", Lindsey Stirling shortcuts through a Creepy Cemetery with her friends. She encounters dancing zombies and performs with them, but when they vanish at the end her friends have noticed nothing and it's clear it wasn't real, at least in the normal sense of the word. - The Video for Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus turns out to be a dream when the prom discoball falls on the singer and his love interest. - The video for "California Love" by Tupac Shakur has this revelation as well. - The video for Chromeo's "When The Night Falls" has this revelation. - Céline Dion's first single, Ce ne'tait qu'un reve, actually translates into this (Nothing But a Dream). - The video for Billy Joel's Sometimes a Fantasy. - A few Fall Out Boy music videos end like this. Specifically, "The Takeover, The Break's Over", "This Ain't A Scene, It's an Arms Race", and their cover of Michael Jackson's "Beat It". - The obtuse song "Madame Merry-Go-Round" in the Evillious Chronicles is explained to be Gammon Octo's (probably) prophetic dream about what will happen when the Clockworker's Doll achieves her utopia. - The video for Unearth's "Zombie Autopilot" reveals that large chunks of it, most notably the Office Drone protagonist chucking a file folder at his boss and quitting, were just a dream he had after falling asleep on the subway early in the vid. - The video for Moenia's "Ni tú ni Nadie" is all a daydream. - Certain branches of Hindu philosophy hold that because truth is unchanging, and the world is constantly changing, then the world is not real. Hence, Real Life is just a sort of dream state. Some forms of Buddhism do also, and Gnosticism. - In Critical Hit, a Dungeons and Dragons live play podcast, GM Rodrigo uses this to devastating effect when the characters are in deep in the mire of the Demonweb (compounded by the reaction of the players). - From Fat, French and Fabulous, Janel fears that her entire life since middle school has been a dream after the Columbia Marching Band starts chanting lines from the horrifying public access television show commonly inflicted upon Canadian children, Téléfrançais. - Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons has an episode where The Mysterons actually come to Cloudbase to attack it, leading to Captain Scarlet's death and the destruction of Cloudbase. We then find out this was all a dream one of the Angels was having after she'd been shot down over the desert earlier in the episode. When repackaged in a Compilation Movie for the American market, the episode ended up with the Reset Button treatment. - Gerry Anderson is all over this one (he was once quoted as saying "I wish somebody would make a film of my dreams"). There's one episode of Four Feather Falls, one of Supercar, three of Stingray (1964), two of Joe 90, one of Terrahawks, two of UFO (1970) as noted under Live-Action TV, and one of Space: 1999 where the events of the episode turn out to be dreams, hallucinations or implanted visions. - The Thunderbirds episode "Security Hazard" manages to invert this by having International Rescue convince a boy that his real-life trip to Tracy Island has only been a dream. - There's an episode of Adventures in Odyssey in which one of the children characters goes on an adventure in the Imagination Station (a virtual reality machine) that seems to be the same story over and over again, just set in different genres. At the end of the episode it's revealed the character is actually in a coma, reliving the events that put him in a coma, with the "bad guy" being Death coming for him and the friendly helper in his dream actually being a guardian angel trying to prevent an early death for him. - The entire Secondary Phase of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978) (episodes 7-12) was written off as a psychotic episode suffered by Zaphod Beeblebrox. - More than once this has been used for Survival of the Fittest characters, usually in imagining a rescue. However, on one occasion it was used to make it appear as if a particular character had died, only for it to be revealed that it had been a dream. - The NoPixel 2020 Halloween and Christmas events each saw the citizens of Los Santos transported into the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse, and each situation ended up being a bizarre mass dream. - Played with in Angels in America, with regards to Prior's visions and Harper's hallucinations. The work as a whole, for what it's worth, is not. - In Avenue Q, Rod overhears Nicky talking in his sleep, but at the end of the song "Fantasies come true" we find out that Rod was talking in his sleep. - Done well in Erich Wolfgang Korngold's opera Die tote Stadt (" The Dead City"). At the finale, it is revealed that much of the story is the dream of the protagonist Paul. However, this experience allows Paul to realize how destructive his obsession over his dead wife can be, thus compelling him to let go of his past, leaving the eponymous "Dead City" and starting anew. - In N.E.R.D.S., Steve Jobs hallucinates Oracle dancing with him and teaching him to 'Think Different' after he is infected with the Microsoft virus. - The famous ballet The Nutcracker usually ends with the curtain closing on Clara awakening in her home with the eponymous Nutcracker in her arms, and realizing that all of her adventures were a dream. Some productions stick a little closer to the source material and subvert this trope instead when the Prince turns out to be Drosselmeyer's nephew, whose uncle had orchestrated the entire series of events in order to break the curse on him. - Toyed with in the Red Shift: Interplanetry Do-Gooder radioplay episode "Havoc Over Holowood" (available here), where the entire episode turns out to have been a story Lumpy wrote about his friends and was reading to them. - I and You: At the end of the play Anthony reveals that none of the play has physically happened. He was the boy discussed earlier who died while playing basketball, and his liver is a match for Caroline, who needed a transplant. She's been unconscious as it was transferred to her, and this was Anthony's final effort to both meet and say goodbye to her as he wasn't able to in life. The play ends with her waking up in the hospital. - Shakespeare played with this. Most of the main characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream believe this to be the case (or they just decide to pretend it is). Then, in the final lines, Puck advises the audience to do the same if they disliked the play. ''If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber'd here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream. - Alan Ayckbourn's 1985 play Woman in Mind. The entire play. From start to finish. Really. - Tomoya in CLANNAD has a dream that can only be described as trippy, to him it all seemed fairly natural. Makes one wonder what it was that Kotomi put in the pie he ate before he passed out. - In the Appetizer Edition of Cooking Companions, the first time you start a New Game Plus, you wake up in one of the cabin's beds with Karin and are asked if you just had a nightmare. Runs after that, however, go into That Was Not a Dream territory with Karin now having a Nightmare Face. - Corpse Party has this as one of its Wrong Ends. It turns out to be a case of Or Was It a Dream? and "Groundhog Day" Loop. - The Twist Ending for The Cradle of Ruin is that \|\|everything in the story was a dream made up by Hotarou while hes still in his mothers womb. This can only be acquired if the player has all the letters from the previous endings and has gone through Route C. Hotarou is given a choice by Megi to either stay in his dream, which would be him dying, or he can say goodbye to his world and be born. However, there is the implication that Hotarou will live through the events again and may not have any memory of what happened.\|\| - In The Great Ace Attorney the events in one of the Randst magazine turns out to be this. - Played with in 11eyes. The second-to-last episode of the anime shows everything going downright awful for the protagonists, with several characters dying, the hero and heroine having sex, and the Big Bad claiming a rather unsettling victory. It ends with a little foreshadowing that all is not as it seems. Start the next episode, and it turns out the whole thing was a vision of the future by the main character, who then averts it. - In ClockUp's Euphoria, this is the end of Rinne's route. After Keisuke wakes up in a bed in a room inside a house stated to both his and Rinne, where Rinne is watching over him, he says to her that he had a bad dream, she assures that she will always be by his side, and the route just ends after Keisuke assures himself he don't have to think about the dream after all. But don't worry, it's not the True Ending. - Fate/hollow ataraxia ...Maybe. What's dream and what is real can be difficult to separate. - Teased at in Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star. - Halfway through the second chapter something bizarre happens — for one, there's a Death Ray and the heroine rates it as about as powerful as one of her "Starlight Kicks" — and the exit of that scene leads directly to the heroine in a cafe saying "Crazy dream, huh?" to her best friend. He's flabbergasted and falls for it, and chides her when she says she was joking, this stuff really happened. This is Hatoful Boyfriend, after all - bizarre is everywhere. - Also poked at in the Shrine Visit with Yuuya. He starts trying to confess why he's never at school, then changes his mind, dissembles, and says he had a dream like that, anyway. - 8-Bit Theater had one of these as a fake final episode, since its author loves jokes that are on the reader. Except that what was intended to cause backlash instead resulted in numerous fans genuinely pleased with the horrible ending, as it fit the comic perfectly, and thanking the author for years of free entertainment. - Batman: Wayne Family Adventures: In "Daydreaming" ninjas invade the cave and are eaten by the T-Rex robot as a stunned Duke runs to grab his costume, only for Duke to be woken by Bruce as he'd dosed off while reviewing boring contingency plans. - In Bittersweet Candy Bowl: - The chapter "Wonderland". Lucy "wakes up" at the beginning of the chapter and the chapter before it was an April Fool's comic, making it all just a dream as well. - Commander Kitty starts off with CK apparently having become the galaxy's greatest hero and the emperor of the entire cat system. No surprise that it's all just a crazy daydream. - Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures manages to make this actually downright chilling. The character dreaming is explicitly unable to dream. - Educomix: The entire Garden of Edam storyline was dreamed by Jessica. Also, in this strip, Dave and Jessica's first kiss was actually dreamed by Jessica. - Grace of El Goonish Shive, goes through her first day of highschool, then wakes up. She's disappointed that it was just a dream, but still hopeful the experience would be close. - In Greg, Greg dreams he's a swashbuckling slayer of beasts and a suave ladies man, too bad the reality is so different. - The first page of Held Within features a short dream sequence misdirect involving Susie asleep in class dreaming about her girlfriend and being caught. The author has admitted it was a way to not only quickly establish some info about Susie, but to also insert nudity early on while not holding up the start of the story. - Homestuck: Here, Doc Scratch reveals that, from the coin flip onwards, he had actually been describing a doomed alternate timeline in which Terezi let Vriska carry out her plan, and that, in the alpha timeline, Terezi had foreseen that outcome and stabbed Vriska to avoid it. It's revealed eventually that that was a doomed alternate timeline (which was followed for the entire rest of the comic), and that actually, Vriska survives due to a literal in-universe Retcon. - In Housepets!, the Celestial Nerds (Pete, Spirit Dragon, Great Kitsune; the ones using Babylon Gardens as pawns in their Cosmic D&D Game) end any dealings with mortal pets with the trick of making them wake up in their bed as if it was all just a dream. Tarot calls it "standard celestial policy". In most cases, it's a very thinly-veiled tactic, and those it happens to tend to return with relics, for instance a gold statuette of a derp-faced kitsune saying "Or was it" - In L's Empire, the Zombie Apocalypse during the April Fools Day special was actually a movie directed by M. Night Shyamalan. - This happens twice in My Milk Toof with the episode of "villainous ickle" who goes around breaking everything and when they go fishing they fall asleep and dream of catching a fish. - Ozy and Millie does it twice, once when Ozy grows dragon wings and again when Millie's homework comes to life and rebels against her. - In one strip of The Petri Dish, Dr. Thaddeus Euphemism discovers a secret organization of potatoes called the Tubernati, but they turn out to just be a dream of his. - Puck has a dream sequence (ending at #381) involving Puck losing her freckles, becoming a blonde and abandoning her family to make a career in Hollywood. Subverted in that compared to some of the things that happen in canon, it all seems quite likely... - Happens every year in Rhapsodies with Kevin getting shanghaied into helping with Santa's Christmas rush. This always ends with him waking up... Though occasionally there's a few details lying around to make the audience wonder. - In the April Fools 2016 strip of Shortpacked!, it's revealed that the entire comic was all a dream of Historical Jesus, back in thirtysomething AD. This, of course, makes no sense on multiple levels but, hey, April Fools strip. - Silent Hill: Promise uses this in the beginning, before getting to the real horror. - In Soul Symphony the protagonist purposely makes another character believe that his experience of using magic to fight evil demons was this. It really wasn't. - At the end of Chapter 1 of Tales from the Interface, we learn that what happened up to that point was all a virtual world. - This Touhou Nekokayou comic turns Concealed the Conclusion's All Just a Dream into a Mind Screw, simply by switching the "all" and the "dream." A later one combines this, Acid Reflux Nightmare, and a Brick Joke about Meiling's accused Homosexual Reproduction. (Word of Muffin states that only this comic is All Just A Dream, not the entire Story Arc.) - TRU-Life Adventures is suggesting everything that happened since the first time travel story has been Bob's dream. - In Urban Underbrush, Caius dreams that Santa Claus rescues him, only to learn that the tenants of the building had, and a vet had patched him up. - xkcd strip #806 "Tech Support" shows an amateur developer calling a tech-support hotline, and discovering a secret phrase that, when said, will automatically transfer him to someone who knows at least two programming languages; he then wakes up. - YU+ME: dream has a Wham Episode (and Broken Base inducer) in the middle when this happens, leading to a Coming-Out Story having a Genre Shift; instead of the usual dream revelation being at the end and nothing in the real world having changed, the dream is the turning point of the story and the main character is greatly affected by what happened. The comic was conceived after its author experienced this trope for real: she met a girl and fell in love, only to wake up after what felt like months of being with her. Interestingly, the dreams are real, and what we think is the dream world is actually another dimension called "Nod", which means it's not just a dream. - In Zebra Girl, apparently all this Zebra Girl stuff is just a dream, Sandra is perfectly normal girl and Sam is a cartoon character; and then Sam breaks the fourth wall. It's Incubus' attempt at a Lotus-Eater Machine, and Sandra wasn't fooled for a second. - Discussed in the autobiographical comic Joe vs. Elan School when Joe describes dreaming about his sister; he explains that the constant emotional abuse at the titular school causes its inmates to have frighteningly realistic dreams about leaving. As he says, "The human brain craves the comfort of home and it will bring you home in your dreams and make it so damn real that you'll even have memories in your dream of leaving or escaping the hell you're suffering..." Double Subverted later on after Joe graduates from Elan School — he wakes up back in Elan and realizes his graduation was yet another dream — then he wakes up for real in a hotel room on his way home. - Blood Reverie: Subverted. When Cassia falls asleep, she finds herself in the presence of a vampire lord. She thinks this is just a repeated erotic dream she's having at first, but he's quite real. - In Drumsy's backrooms video, Dora, Diego, Boots and "Drumsy" are in the backrooms, as Dora has been affecting her fantasies and spreads them. Even Boots is not even a cartoon-like! Near the end, Boots tells Dora the truth and that she is in a coma. She wakes up and says The real adventure was the subscribers we made along the way! - Don't Hug Me I'm Scared: - The third video's new characters and creepy hijinks turn out to be a dream in the Yellow Guy's heads. The Red Guy and Duck Guy's subplot is real, though it is Out of Focus for most of the video. - The finale plays around with this concept, beginning with a dream in a dream caused by the episode's teacher, the Lamp. - The Misadventures of Skooks: - In The Most Stupid Deaths In Super Mario 64, Mario has multiple nightmares which turn out just to be dreams. One of them is of the game ending. - The Nostalgia Critic: - His review of Surf Ninjas, in which every stupid scene (but one) was greeted with increasingly fervent cries of "Genius!", was eventually revealed to be a dream. - The end of the review of Full House when the Olsen twins came to silence him was revealed to be a dream. Then they showed up again, which was revealed to be a dream. And so on. - This also appears to be a pet peeve of the Critic's, given his reaction to learning that North was entirely a dream. - The Onion episode "Today Now!: Save Money by Taking a Vacation Entirely in Your Mind" deals with using this trope to your advantage. Naturally, the whole thing was taking place in the mind of the interviewee; she wasn't actually invited to go on the show. - Project Million is revealed to be a variant of this; the events that we watched were just a video made by the people starring in it. - Randy Rainbow: "Hillary Wins" ends with Randy waking up to discover that Trump has won the election instead of Clinton, as most of the video was filmed and edited before the election results were in. - Some Jerk with a Camera's Star Tours review was The Wire's dream within Jerk's dream within Spazz's dream within Heffer's dream within Lisa's dream within North's dream within Jerk's dream within Marty McFly's dream within Michael Jackson's mind. - StacheBros: - "Yoshi's Story OF DEATH!!!!" turns out to be one of Bowser's nightmares from eating 1-UPs before bed. - "Night Of The Living Goomba" turns out to be one of Mario's dreams inside of one of Luigi's dreams inside one of Bowser's nightmares from eating 1-UPs before bed (the reveal of which reuses footage from "Yoshi's Story OF DEATH!!!!"). - "Toadsworth's Funeral" turns out to be a dream Peach had after passing out from forgetting to take her medication. Apparently, she also said the things she said in her dream out loud in her sleep. - The ending of SUPERBOOBYGREASYWARRIORS. Slightly hints at Or Was It a Dream? as the reveal has the main character waking up in the same way he did at the start of the series. On-screen text explicitly states "It wuz All a DReam LOL" however. - SuperMarioLogan: - In the episode, "Mario the Babysitter!", Mario babysits a kid named Jeffy who continuously frustrates him to the point of being Driven to Suicide. After a visit from a police cop telling him that he has to babysit Jeffy until they can find his parents, Mario tries to bump into his couch in an attempt to wake up from his dream. It works, but at the end, Mario sees Jeffy at his door, much like in the beginning of the episode, causing him to scream in horror. - The entire duration of "Jeffy's Mistake!" turns out to be just a dream of Mario's. - The entire duration of "Jeffy's Sister!" turns out to be just a dream of Jeffy's. - Zsdav Adventures: - Szent block 3 ( Holy block 3) ends with Zsdav falling into a lava pit. Then he wakes up in his house. - The Space Pig arc turns out to be Zsdav's dream in the Sötét tenger ( Dark sea) arc. - Some people believe that "real life" is really all just a simulation using technology that doesn't yet exist in real life/this simulation. This is based on the belief that technology is likely to get to the point of being able to perfectly simulate real life while making the subject forget real life while in the simulation and that since once this technology exists it will result in more virtual worlds than the one real one the odds are that this is a simulation and not real life. The Simulation Argument tells that: it is overwhelmingly likely that either 1) we are living in an "ancestor simulation" created by our descendants or 2) this is not. A counterpoint is the idea that "real life" is a meaningless term, since any reality must be absolute from the perspective of its inhabitants (if we are indeed simulated beings, this is still the highest level of nested realities we can exist in). - The trope may have arisen from a dream those grieving a deceased loved one often experience. In the dream, the griever learns that the loved one is not dead and that the "death" was nothing but a very bad dream. The griever then wakes up, only to realize that the death really took place and the "miraculous survival" was in fact the dream. Although not every griever experiences this dream, it's common enough to be considered a normal part of the grieving process. Children who experience the dream may not be able to differentiate the dream from reality and therefore may suspect that the deceased person didn't really die (a common fallacy among bereaved children). Books by reputable scientists have been written on this phenomenon. Interestingly, it's possible to have an inversion of that—someone dreams of losing a loved one (or ones), only to wake up. - Subversion: After Daniel Radcliffe learned that he had gotten the part of Harry Potter, he woke up in the middle of the following night. He woke up his parents to ask them if he'd really gotten the part or if it was a dream. - The philosophy of existentialism holds that how one views the world is subjective to one's experiences. Existentialists believe that truth is in the eye of the beholder, as is even the existence of the world around us. It's the basis for the scene in The Matrix in which the boy in the Oracle's apartment tells Neo, "There is no spoon." - Confabulation, or false memory syndrome, applies to this trope, as well. Also see this Cracked article: 5 Mind Blowing Ways Your Memory Plays Tricks On You. - How many times have you been sure what's happening be real, only to wake up? This can be a disappointment or a relief depending on the nature of the dream. In some cases, it is possible to realize when one's dreaming (lucid dream), and the person may even prefer make the dream last as long as possible. - The Boltzmann brain thought experiment does this for all of reality. To summarize it, random fluctuations are capable of creating matter spontaneously, so what's more likely: an entire universe being created from those random fluctuations? Or your brain being created in a void, which then hallucinates that reality exists? Because simpler things are more likely to happen based on random chance, probability favors the hallucinating brain to be the only thing that truly exists, but there's no real way to confirm or deny this.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyADream
Only Friend - TV Tropes "Listen — what I said before, John? I meant it. I don't have friends . I've just got one." Some characters have True Companions. Some characters have social circles (however limited they may be). Alice doesn't have that. Alice has Bob and only Bob. There are two possible (though not mutually exclusive) variations on the loner character here: - The Loner is shy or a bit of a misfit, but ultimately a nice person. The friend is the only one to take the time to get to know her and realize that she's actually pretty cool. - The loner is a Jerkass or otherwise hard to get along with. The friend is the only one willing to put up with her shenanigans. There are also two variations on the friend character: - The friend is a fellow misfit who was drawn to the loner because neither of them had any other friends. - The friend is the one with all the social skills, and may try to help Alice make more friends and/or smooth over situations where her behavior has caused problems. While shy loners often go along with fellow loners and mean loners with a social friend, they can be mixed and matched: a shy loner might have a social friend who tries to draw her out of her shell, while a mean loner might have a shy friend who's stuck with her because he's lonely or doesn't have the nerve to ditch her. Or both. In many stories, an Only Friend doesn't stay that way for long: a nice loner will usually have learned to make friends by the end of the story, while a mean loner will often find their friend finally getting fed up and leaving her. Compare with Living Emotional Crutch, which might be at play in an extreme form of this trope. Compare Best Friend, where a character has other friends, but one of them is the closest and most trusted, and First Friend, which this trope is likely to be in nicer cases. ## Examples: - Applies to Alice in ARIA to a degree. Since she's extremely unsociable and cold towards everyone, it's really only Akari and Aika that she can truly call her friends. She insists that they are different from all the other girls, although this is mainly because of her warped perception of the people around her — she thinks she's disliked and envied for being talented, when in reality most people admire her. - In Attack on Titan, Armin is Eren's only friend till he meets Mikasa. Most likely to be the case that Eren is also Armin's only friend. - In Azumanga Daioh, Nyamo is Yukari's only friend at the start of the series. She later bonds with several of her students, but they're obviously not as close as she is to Nyamo. - Beelzebub: - Furuichi is Oga's one and only friend, due to the latter's inability to stop fighting and rough personality. - Himekawa's only friend was Kugayama, until he betrayed him, which really screwed him up and left him unable to heal until he met Oga. \|\|That said friend was also in reality a chick and in love with him did not help.\|\| - In Bocchi the Rock!, when Nijika and Ryo are first introduced, it's stated outright that Nijika is the only friend Ryo has. This puts Ryo in contrast with the friendless, anxious Shrinking Violet Bocchi, as Ryo is more of an asocial loner. - In Bokura no Hentai, Akane was Marika's only friend from pre-k to elementary. Marika was bullied by the other kids growing up for being too girly. - In Code Geass \|\|Season 2 Lelouch has lost his love interest, his sister, his best friend, and has a confusing relationship with the rest of his friends. The only person who truly understands and trusts him is CC. Then she loses all her memories and personality. Because of this Lelouch takes over the pre-episode speech for the next few episodes, and the bitterness and anger in his voice just tells all.\|\| - Death Note: - L claims that Light is his "first ever friend". According to Word of God, though, he's lying; he knows that even Light isn't really his friend. - Matt and Mello play this role (for real) to each other. - Digimon Adventure 02: Yukio Oikawa's only friend during his childhood was Hiroki \|\|Iida\|\|, with whom he shared a love for videogames and the dream of \|\|visiting the Digital World together\|\| one day. Unfortunately, Hiroki's father thought this could become a very codependent relationship and forcibly separated them, causing Oikawa to become a depressed and bitter man in his later years, which only worsened when Hiroki became a police officer and died in the line of duty. This made Oikawa easy prey for \|\|Myotismon's manipulations, essentially orchestrating all of the events of the entire season\|\|. - Dragon Ball: - Dragon Ball Z: - After saving Gohan's life by jumping in the way of an energy blast, the dying Piccolo admits that the kid he abducted and put through Training from Hell is the only friend he's ever had. Granted, after his revival, this is no longer the case as he ends up becoming good friends with the Z-Fighters, or at least Goku, Krillin, and some of the others. - Hercule/Mr. Satan tearfully admits that despite his popularity, Fat Buu is his only real friend. He later becomes good friends with the Z-Fighters. - Dragon Ball Super: - \|\|Future Zamasu\|\| is the only person Goku Black regards as an equal and shares a good relationship with. It quickly becomes clear that the reason is because \|\|they are literally the same person\|\|. - Goku is one to Zeno, the Top God of the Dragonball Multiverse; Goku is the only being in existence to treat him with genuine warmth as opposed to obsequious respect, and not fear him as a force of nature. The Godling dearly loves the Saiyan Warrior in return. - In a roundabout way, Goku is one to Freeza of all people by the end of the Universe Survival Arc of Super; sure, they would still gladly pound each other into the ground, but Goku has become one of the few beings in the Universe that has earned Freeza's trust, admiration, and respect, and the feeling is completely mutual on Goku's part. Theirs is a "friendship" that resembles the furious yet oddly affectionate war between Batman and The Joker, and that is as close to having a "friend" that someone like Freeza will ever get. - Fairy Tail: Zeref had \|\|Mavis. She was the only one to ever see beyond his curse and empathize with his pain. After she herself fell under the same curse, she also became the only one that would ever be able to truly relate with him — it was what ultimately caused their friendship to evolve into love. Mavis's death is what drove Zeref over the deep end and to finally succumb to being as evil as the rest of the world declared him to be.\|\| - Food Wars!: Due to her father isolating her from pretty much everyone, at the beginning of the story Erina Nakiri doesn't have anyone she could call a real friend, barring her secretary/assistant Hisako Arato. And even then, Hisako mostly just hero-worships Erina and wants to serve her. Erina isn't quite happy about that, but Hisako doesn't find herself worthy to be anything more than Erina's secretary until Soma tells her otherwise. - In Hitoribocchi no OO Seikatsu, at the start of the series, Kai is the protagonist Bocchi's only friend, because Bocchi's social anxiety prevents her from reaching out to anyone else. When they get into separate middle schools due to Bocchi's social anxiety ruining her interview for Kai's middle school, Kai tells Bocchi that she'll break off their friendship until Bocchi befriends her entire class. As a result, Nako, Bocchi's first friend in her class, becomes her only friend until Bocchi befriends Aru. - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: - There are only two people in all the world (aside from his deceased mother) that Dio Brando ever legitimately cared about (and the latter might simply be a case of Undying Loyalty). - First and foremost is Jonathan Joestar, his adopted brother, though even that's complicated. At first, Dio despises Jonathan for what he sees as foolhardy friendship and brotherly love. This eventually turns into a bizarre form of respect after Jonathan continues to rise up and match against him through their battles to the death to the point DIO decides that Jonathan \|\|is the only person worthy of becoming his new body after he was forced to destroy his old one to survive being disintegrated by Jonathan's strongest attack. As the years pass and DIO reflects on his life and the meaning of happiness, he comes to realize that Jonathan's affection extended even to his last moment and was truly sincere despite having been fatally wounded by DIO and choosing to trap them both under the ocean for nearly a hundred years to slow his evil down. This realization prompts Dio to recognize Jonathan Joestar as the only person he truly considers a friend rather than a pawn or worthy opponent, to the point he almost regrets that Jonathan had to die to allow himself, DIO, to live.\|\| - Among his various subordinates, Enrico Pucci is the closest to him of all. Unlike the other servants who DIO would discard and kill without hesitation if it suited him despite their Undying Loyalty, he treats Pucci like a close equal rather than a subordinate and even talks philosophy with him \|\|and entrusted him with the final phase of his plan to remake the universe in his image which Pucci worked to fulfill even after DIO's death\|\|. - In Diamond is Unbreakable, Rohan Kishibe is only close to three people. - He respects the elderly Joseph Joestar. The two have a number of friendly talks and Joseph seems curious about Rohan's manga. While Rohan doesn't like Josuke at all, he is willing to put up with him for the sake of Joseph (given that Josuke is Joseph's estranged and illegitimate son). - But Rohan is especially close to Koichi, outright calls him friend and unhesitantly trusts him. Koichi, putting up less and less with Rohan's Jerkass antics, is ultimately a Positive Friend Influence on Rohan. \|\|By the end of Diamond is Unbreakable, one reproachful look from Koichi was enough to put a crack on Rohan's Tsundere attitude towards Reimi, revealing that he truly cares about her as she's about to go to the afterlife\|\|. - The aforementioned Reimi used to be Rohan's neighbor and babysitter and sacrificed her life to save him from Yoshikage Kira when he was 4. This explains why he's helping the heroes track down Yoshikage Kira. As a ghost, Reimi still jokingly treats him like a child while he acts Tsundere towards her. \|\|When her ghost ascends to the afterlife, Rohan confesses that he'll miss her.\|\| - Misaki Yata and Saruhiko Fushimi in K-Project. They were this to each other for a few years. Then Misaki decided to expand his social circle and Saruhiko got jealous, eventually becoming a perfect example of Love Makes You Crazy. - From the backstories of the girls in K-On!, it seems like before they met each other and became True Companions, nearly all of them had only one friend to depend on. Mugi (Alice-1) and Sumire (Bob-1) literally had no one else except each other growing up, because both of them were home-schooled and heavily sheltered. Yui (Alice-1) doesn't seem to have had any other friends before high school except Nodoka (Bob-2), and Mio (Alice-1) was so shy and quiet as a child that only Ritsu (Bob-2) ever managed to break through her shell. - In Kotoura-san, Dai'chi was Yurikos only friend growing up, mainly because Yuriko's being ostracized from the fallout of her mother's death. - Discounting Hayasaka (who is more of a sibling), Fujiwara was Kaguya's sole friend during middle school in Kaguya-sama: Love Is War. Kaguya didn't want friends at all \|\|since she felt that it was better to avoid people rather than risk hurting them with her Innocently Insensitive nature\|\|, but Fujiwara's sheer persistence eventually won her over. - In Legend of the Galactic Heroes, it can be assumed that this trope applies to Reinhard and Reuenthal, with Kircheis and Mittermeier respectively. The latter two are sociable enough to at least be able to have friends aside from them, but Reinhard is far too busy realizing his ambition to befriend anyone but Kircheis, and Reuenthal's trainwreck of a psyche doesn't let him get close to anyone aside of Mittermeier, who becomes his Living Emotional Crutch. Reinhard does open up a bit to others as the story goes on, most notably Hilda, Mittermeier, and Emil. - Koyuki is Ginta's only friend at the beginning of MÄR. Weirdly enough, it's implied that she's just a friendly classmate in the opening, but as we see more and more flashbacks, it turns out she's been his only friend for a long time. - My Hero Academia: - While his classmates respect him, nobody actually likes Bakugo, except for Kirishima, who plays this for him. He is the only one that can handle the boy's explosive behaviour, eventually developing into his Morality Pet. - A variation happens with Midoriya towards Todoroki. While Todoroki is by no means isolated from the rest of the class, Midoriya is still the one he is closest to, and he rarely ever speaks to other people. - In My-HiME, at the start of the series, Shizuru is Natsuki's only friend. Shizuru is a Bob-2 as a fairly popular individual on campus, while Natsuki is somewhere between Alice-1 and Alice-2, as she's given up on the idea of getting close to others. - From The Name of the Flower, Mizushima Kei's only friend is his editor and biggest fan, Akiyama Shinichi, though Kei tries to claim that he hates Shinichi. - Naruto: Naruto is this to Sasuke, being the only one to still be fond of him even after his various questionable actions. In turn, Sasuke calls him his "one and only friend". - Neon Genesis Evangelion: - Shinji is this to Rei, as he's the only one to be drawn to her despite Rei's aloof attitude and always speaks to her in a friendly manner, leading to Rei defrosting and acting more warmly toward him. - In the original anime, Shinji is also this to Kaworu, as while everyone else is immediately suspicious and unaccepting of him, Shinji is instead drawn to him because of his kindness and open affection. In turn, Kaworu outright tells Shinji that he loves him and that he was probably born to meet him. - In the third part of Rebuild of Evangelion, Shinji and Kaworu are this to each other. To elaborate: \|\|Shinji unintentionally triggered Third Impact while trying to save Rei in the second movie, making people who were formerly his loved ones hate him and treat him like crap. Only Kaworu treats him with love and affection and genuinely wants the best for him, which makes Shinji love him as well. And Shinji is the only one to interact in an intimate way with Kaworu, making him also this to Kaworu.\|\| - Pokémon: Since Pokémon is about making friends, this rarely stays true for long. - Ash had Gary as his first and only friend for a while. They had a falling out and only made up in the latter half of the original series. - Cross and his Lycanroc in the movie Pokémon: I Choose You! - Chloe was Goh's only friend before he met Horace and Ash (and before he owned any pokemon). One of his first lines is that he doesn't need any more friends because he already has Chloe. - Puella Magi Madoka Magica: - Madoka is \|\|Homura's\|\| only friend in most timelines. \|\|It's the main reason Homura keeps going.\|\| It gets a little darker than that (naturally). She was friends with all of the girls before but \|\|with each new timeline\|\| she got closer to the edge of insanity and stopped caring about them altogether, admitting that she doesn't "give a damn" if \|\|some of them die along the way to save Madoka\|\|. It could be assumed that the reason she never stopped caring about Madoka is because in \|\|every timeline\|\| Madoka is literally the only one who never turned on her and was always nice to her no matter the situation they were in, unlike the other girls, who would call her a liar and sometimes attempt to kill her in a bout of depression. Sayaka in particular could be very cruel to her. - Which is ironic considering that \|\|Madoka happens to be the only person that stands behind Sayaka as well. For the same reasons as Homura. When Sayaka, in a moment of grief and rage, pushes Madoka away, she is freaking out about it soon after. The fact that she pushed away the only person willing to support her also happens to be one of the factors that makes Sayaka come to the conclusion that everything is hopeless.\|\| - This seems to be a recurring element of the series. It's shown in The Different Story that Mami and Kyouko once had this relationship, and them breaking it off is a major factor in Mami's possessive attitude at the time of the series, and why Kyouko is so desperate to get close to Sayaka. In Rebellion, it's revealed that Mami's greatest wish was to have a friend, hence the presence of Bebe/Charlotte\|\|/Nagisa\|\|, who acted as this toward her. - Then there's Oriko and Kirika, who take it all the way to Living Emotional Crutch territory on both ends. - Shi ni Aruki has Natsuki for Tokiko. The duo met in middle school, where Natsuki couldn't really fit in with the other kids, and Tokiko had no interest even interacting with other children. After making terrible first impressions on each other, they spent the following weeks embroiled in a prank war that, after getting in trouble for destroying school property, shifted into them simply competing over everything. By the next school year, the animosity became a close bond of friendship, and come high school, they openly declare themselves to be Platonic Life-Partners with Natsuki being the only person who can get any expressions of joy out of the otherwise stoic and detached Tokiko. - In Tiger & Bunny, Barnaby pushed people away for so long that he never had a single friend in his life before Kotetsu came along, defrosted him like no one's business, and became his Heterosexual Life-Partner/Living Emotional Crutch. - In Vinland Saga, Askeladd calls Bjorn his only friend \|\|as he Mercy Kills him from an infected gut wound\|\|. Whether it was genuinely meant is never made clear. - For most of ViVid Strike!, Victoria is the only one that Rinne is even remotely open with due to a combination of her Team Mom nature and being the only major competitor who's her social equal. That's not to say that the others don't try to be close with her though, since Vivio is shown subscribing to her mother's handbook for making friends, the season pretty much revolves around Fuka's attempts to reconnect with her, and everyone shows genuine concern when she's suffering from a Heroic BSoD. It's just that \|\|Rinne's cold attitude is a coping mechanism for dealing with her grandfather's death (and her guilt over what she did to the bullies that kept her from being with him) and she fears that any attempts to be open with others would be viewed as weakness\|\|. - For several volumes of Wandering Son, Kanako is Saori's only friend. Saori had a Friendless Background until the start of the series due to having No Social Skills and disliking the other children. At the start she starts befriending Nitori, which also makes her friends with Kanako, Mako, and Takatsuki. The Love Triangle between her, Nitori, and Takatsuki however ruins their friendship and Saori Takes a Level in Jerkass. She only hangs around Kanako for most of middle school, but eventually rekindles her old friendships. \|\|In high school Takatsuki is her only friend, as she's become distant with the others due to being in different schools.\|\| - Yuri is My Job! has both the main characters. Mitsuki Yano didn't have any friends back in elementary school due to her overly serious and duty-driven personality until she met Hime Shiraki. While Hime is well-liked in her class, Mitsuki also seems to be the only real friend she has, and after Hime and Mitsuki have a falling out, Kanoko becomes Hime's only friend. Similarly, Kanoko was a loner who didn't have any other friends before she met Hime. - Yuri!!! on Ice: - Episode 10 reveals that Christophe is this to Victor. During his years dedicating his life to his career, Victor had almost no time to actually create interpersonal relationships, but since Christophe has been competing with him from the start, they eventually became closer. - Otabek is this to Yuri Plisetsky. Otabek is explicitly stated to be Yuri's first friend. - Tetsuo from Yuureitou mentions that Amano was his first friend. Growing up he stood out and didn't get along much with the girls at his orphanage. As an adult he was very aloof until allying with Amano. In the end they \|\|have a Relationship Upgrade\|\|. - Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld: In the 2020 series, Amy's heroics have caused her to be deemed a political liability, and Turquoise is her only friend left. - Batman, when not the Papa Wolf for his collection of sidekicks, is often portrayed this way, with Superman as his only friend. In these cases, it's implied that Batman is friends with Superman because he's Nigh-Invulnerable and Batman is therefore unlikely to lose him, while Superman is friendly because Batman understands having the weight of the world on his shoulders and doesn't hero worship Supes. - Helena Bertinelli, aka the Huntress, had only one friend, the Black Canary. This was primarily because Huntress was a borderline sociopathic misanthropic loner, so she was an Alice-2. Eventually, Huntress seemed to be forming friendships with a couple of other characters, notably Renee Montoya (the new Question), and Oracle. All this, of course, was in the old DCU; now we're back to Helena Wayne. - Loki: Agent of Asgard: - Loki's new Muggle Best Friend is Verity Willis. Loki is Loki, and thus a certifiable jerkass and Consummate Liar. Verity is a fellow misfit for the opposite reason: she's a Living Lie Detector with no way to switch it off. - In issue 11, it turns out this went both ways: \|\|After the evil future Loki drops one bombshell too many on her, Verity can't handle the betrayal and walks out. King Loki asks his younger self if he ever noticed her lack of other friends - and then cracks up. "I kid."\|\| - And then it becomes heartwarming/tear jerking in issue 13. \|\|Loki, when faced with a Sadistic Choice between I Die Free and Chronic Villainy, Takes a Third Option which is basically Loss of Identity, with this friendship chosen to become as a core part of the new.\|\| - In Mélusine, Cancrelune counts Mélusine as her one and only friend. Cancrelune is shunned by everyone because of her clumsiness and is essentially a walking disaster. Mélusine see past all of that and is the only one in the series who cares about her. - Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: Brainstorm is a quirky Mad Scientist with a Lack of Empathy, a penchant for making weapons so utterly unethical he's built up a reputation for them, and a Heroic Comedic Sociopath streak. Chromedome is his only friend, a fact he acknowledges to have Brainstorm do him a few favors. Brainstorm actually cares for Chromedome, and tries to \|\|talk him out of erasing all the memories of his now-dead lover Rewind to spare himself the pain\|\|. He admits to seeing him do it three times before, and is concerned about him, worrying about his mental health and his lack of coping abilities. \|\|He gives Chromedome Rewind's last message, and leaves him to do what Chromedome thinks is best.\|\| - In Watchmen, Rorschach's only friend is Nite-Owl, and even his patience is really tested with Rorschach's personal habits and extreme opinions. - Wonder Woman: - Wonder Woman (1987): Veronica Cale seems to care very little for anyone besides her dear friend Leslie Anderson, whom she's very protective of. This makes her nonchalant betrayal of Leslie come off as out of character to most readers. - Wonder Woman (Rebirth): Adrianna Anderson is the only genuine friend Veronica Cale seems to have. - In Calvin and Hobbes, Hobbes doubles as both Calvin's Imaginary Friend and his only friend. - In FoxTrot, Marcus is basically Jason's only real friend. The only other peer he ever spends any time hanging out alone with is Eileen (on a few rare occasions), and his feelings towards her are so conflicted — partly because she's also an academic rival and partly because he's still convinced Girls Have Cooties — that it's hard to call it a truly mutual friendship. This is acknowledged at the start of one storyline when Jason is asking his mother to go to a science camp for the summer and says Marcus is going, even calling him his only friend. - In Luann, a number of supporting characters have one friend each. Brad and TJ are each other's only friend (where Brad is the Bob to TJ's Alice-2), Toni once had another female friend but has since stopped spending time with anyone except her fiance Brad (to the point where she had to ask his sister to be her Maid of Honor due to not knowing anyone else) and Quill had only Gunther. Until she receives some Character Development enabling her to grow closer to the main cast, even the resident Alpha Bitch has only a single friend instead of the usual Girl Posse associated with the trope. - All Mixed Up!: Carlos, the sentient paper fortune teller that resides in the Language Room, served as Mariana Mag's only friend while she was employed with Odd Squad as Agent Ocean. They shared a love of language, which is how they bonded. Mariana would go and visit Carlos often up until Oprah scolded her for it, and Mariana eventually rebelled against her for this reason. Even as a villainess, she is still shown to harbor a love for Carlos, as when he tries to convince her to stop attacking Otto, she considers it for a moment before going right back to what she was doing. - Asylum (Daemon of Decay): Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy are each others' only friends \|\|until Twilight begins befriending them\|\|. Fluttershy has extreme social anxiety and shuts down around most ponies, while Dash is very aggressive and keeps everyone at arm's length. The two go back years \|\|because they were foster siblings\|\|. - Bakery "Enemies": Chloe was the only person Adrien was allowed to interact with growing up, and after the Hawkmoth reveal she was the only one who stuck by him. - The Bridge: Xenilla and Destroyah. While they don't use the term "friend" to describe each other initially, Destroyah is the only Mutation faction member genuinely loyal to Xenilla and backed him up against multiple attempted overthrows. After some time in Equestria however, they softened considerably. Freeing her of any duty owed to him, Xenilla awknowledged the Oxygen Destroyer mutation truthfully had always been his friend and the feeling is mutual. - The plot of Castling Cozy Glow is kicked off because despite everything Cozy Glow had done, Sweetie Belle still believed there was good in her and even went so far as sincerely declaring her her friend, while pleading with Twilight to give her another chance. Even Cozy herself is surprised there's still anypony that still considered her a friend at that point when she's first released. And doesn't even learn the identity her "friend" is Sweetie Belle till she actually shows up to visit her. \|\|Despite that, Sweetie Belle becomes Cozy Glow's first genuine (and at first only) friend.\|\| - Crimson and White: Princess and Bubbles become this to each other. Princess is too untrustworthy of others to have friends and Bubbles isn't close to the other children. When they start becoming friends Princess at first tries to act like they're just spending time together, not acting like friends, but she later accepts Bubbles as her best friend. \|\|This only makes Bubbles murdering her later all the more tragic.\|\| - Despair's Last Resort: It's made clear that Chiyo is Kumiko's only friend since they were kids. \|\|After Chiyo dies, Kumiko begins to make friends with the others.\|\| - Does Marge have friends?: Maude is the closest Marge could call a friend, but even then she admits that they were acquaintances at best. - Don't Touch That Remote!: Handy is this for Nutty, as implied in Chapter 3. - Enlightenments: Wander has been banished from anywhere he'd have contact with anyone besides his abusive wife and the god Dormin, whom he initially wants nothing to do with. Dormin's a god with no followers. The fic is about their slowly-growing friendship; it means more to Wander because of Dormin's different social expectations as a deity. - In the Kieshara fic Gryphontears, the hybrid shapeshifter Agrippina is discriminated against and has no friends except for Riadne. Most falcons my age refused to be seen near me- if I entered a room, they would leave it. Aside from Riadne, the peregrine in front of me, I had no friends. And because of me, neither did Riadne. - In A Sky Of A Million Stars: In Aldera Junior High, Midoriya Izuku was this to Bakugou Katsuki and vice versa, despite Katsuki treating Izuku terribly at first. Katsuki comes to this realization in the wake of Izuku's suicide attempt, and is proven correct when he briefly returns to Aldera a few weeks later. All of his former lackeys outright ditch him and join the other students in gossiping over the situation, leaving Katsuki alone to stew in his grief and rage until he hits his Rage-Breaking Point. In return, Katsuki is the only student from Aldera shown to make any attempt at all to visit and/or make amends with Izuku. This situation persists throughout Izuku's recovery, until Katsuki enters U.A. and joins Class 1-A. - Limpet AU: In "Meet the Skywalkers", Mara claims that Vader only has one friend in the whole galaxy, in reference to Admiral Piett, who had served as his second-in-command for twenty-eight years. That being said, Piett sees himself as merely Vader's subordinate, until they get to a point where Piett can't in good conscience remain a Yes-Man, which leads Piett to defy Vader's orders, but concludes that he still cares for the man. - In Mortality, Holmes and Watson are this for each other. - Edward and Van Hohenheim in My Master Ed are each other's only friend, Ed due to being stranded in a time and place where he only knows two people in any capacity and can't afford to open up to anyone new, and Van because his life of slavery left him unable to facilitate any real connection with others. - In Necessary to Win, Sumire is Teru's only friend, as perhaps the only person who knows her from before her personality was altered forever and she became colder, more distant, and estranged from her younger sister, Saki, making Teru something of an Alice-2. Sumire is a Bob-1, who was, originally, the Alice-1 to Teru's Bob-2, since Teru was the one who reached out to her, back when she was more social. - In the W.I.T.C.H. fanfic Ripples, Will — Trapped in the Past as a child and operating under the Secret Identity of "Van Rivers" — becomes this to a young Prince Phobos, something that everyone acknowledges. - Lydia is this for Betelgeuse in Say It Thrice. He rants at Danny Phantom that this is the reason he calls her "his girl" — she's his only friend and that makes her his. - Shatterheart, Kurogane is initially \|\|the real\|\| Syaoran's only friend since the rest of the group avoided him or hated him. - In A Triangle in the Stars, Bill comes to consider \|\|Steven\|\| this, since he overall thinks \|\|Kryptos and Hectorgon\|\| only befriended him out of pity, and the rest only see him as a boss. - Variation Modification: Dave becomes Karkat's only friend after saving him from a gang of bullies. - In Where Talent Goes to Die, Anzu Sugiura, the Ultimate Waitress, is a cynical and blunt girl who keeps most people at a distance, especially after \|\|she's exposed as the Ultimate Poisoner\|\|. As a result of this, Kaori Miura is the only person she considers a friend. - The Anderssons: - In "Drömmar av glas", Rebecka and Samuel are each other's only friend. - In "Skärvor av kristall", Louise comes to see Heinz as her only friend after she has a falling out with her former best friend Caroline. - In Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts, it's revealed that \|\|Yuuji was the first person who treated Shouko as an equal and didn't fear her [[{{}}Ojou because of her wealth and high social status\|\|. In fact, this is one of the reasons why she's Yandere for him.]] - At the beginning of The Black Fox of Beckham, the autistic teenager Fi's only friend is the groom Evan Lockerby, who has been helping her ride horses since she was a young child, and who sees her as a younger sister. - In The Boy from Aleppo Who Painted the War, Nabil is the only boy in school who is friendly to Adam instead of mocking him. He sometimes invites Adam over to his house to play Guild Wars. - Jack Peter from The Boy Who Drew Monsters used to have friends in school, but after he developed severe agoraphobia at age seven that left him housebound, all of them stopped visiting except Nick. It sort of goes both ways - although Nick has other friends, Jack Peter is the only one he sees outside of school, since the others all want to avoid his alcoholic parents. - Bridge to Terabithia: Jess Aarons and Leslie Burke are this to each other. - In Cemetery Bird, the autistic teenager Brandon is this to his special ed classmate Boots, who is so angry and unpleasant that most of the other kids won't go near him. Jay isn't entirely comfortable with the friendship, since Brandon doesn't understand the seriousness of Boots' problems and thinks his convulsions and religious rants are funny, but he's still almost the only person who genuinely enjoys his company. The boys often visit each other's homes and go to movies together. - In Christine, Dennis is Arnie's only friend. - In A Christmas Carol, Jacob Marley was Ebenezer Scrooge's only friend and vice-versa until his death. It's telling that, although they were both unfeeling, ruthless capitalists, they remained business partners almost their entire adult lives, and neither ever tried to effect a takeover or muscle out the other. In fact, Marley says that the reason the ghosts visited Scrooge in the first place was "a chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer": Marley was unable to save himself, but he was able to get a chance for Scrooge. - Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rowley is this to Greg, who doesn't appear to have any actual friends other than him. - In Dragon Queen, since Sajag is a dwarf living among humans, and is normally pretty quiet, Trava is his only friend. Sajag also starts as Trava's best friend, but quickly becomes her only friend. - Cara from Eye Contact was socially awkward as a child. Her only friend was Suzette, whom she met in second grade. - In Fate/Zero, Gilgamesh cites this as the reason \|\|he refuses Rider's offer for them to join forces\|\|. Enkidu is the only friend he has ever had, and the only one he ever wants to have. - Flawed: According to Celestine, her sister Juniper only has one friend, though they are very tight-knit and brave school together. - From the Harry Potter series: - In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry and Ron are each other's only friend at first. Hermione begins the year friendless and doesn't become friends with Harry and Ron until midway through the book. - It's hinted that Ron's younger sister Ginny was this to Luna Lovegood, as one of the few people who didn't straightforwardly reject her for being odd. - From what we see of Snape's memories, it's made clear that his only real friend was \|\|Harry's mother, Lily\|\|, until she ended the friendship at the end of their fifth year \|\|because he was becoming a bigger jerk and delving into the dark arts with his Death Eater buddies, but the final drop came when he called her a racist epithet when she was trying to help him\|\|. In his adult life, if he has a friend, it's \|\|Dumbledore; he's certainly the only person who truly knows and likes him\|\|. - Haruhi Suzumiya: - Jerkass Haruhi Suzumiya notes with pride in The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan that only Kyon speaks to her informally. In the original light novels, Kyon's sister (that's all we know of her name) and Tsuruya are the only people who are friendly towards Haruhi, without being burdened with Haruhi's secret. - Shy Yuki Nagato (in either series) doesn't feel comfortable going to the library without Kyon. - In High School D×D, Ophis refers to \|\|the protagonist Issei as its one and only true friend\|\|. - Before the main events of The Hunger Games, Katniss only had two friends, neither of whom was friends with the other. One was Gale. The other, her only friend at school, was the mayor's daughter Madge, whom she got to know as they both were loners and therefore got paired up together in activities by default. - John Cleaver from the I Am Not a Serial Killer trilogy is friends with Max, another social outcast, in order to try to avert falling into Loners Are Freaks. Despite his sociopathic nature, John makes other friends in the sequels, but is so focused on his quest that he pretty much still only has one friend at a time, leaving poor Max friendless. - A Kind of Spark: At Nina and Keedie's fourteenth birthday, Nina had lots of guests, but Keedie had no one except Bonnie, another autistic girl. Nina sat by quietly while her friends made fun of the two. Keedie quietly took any insults directed at herself, but let everyone have it for mocking Bonnie. Now Nina hasn't heard from any of her "friends" since they started university, while Keedie never forgot Bonnie even after she was involuntarily committed. - Mannie is this to Mike at the beginning of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. His desire to make more friends is the main reason Mike becomes involved in the Lunar rebellion to begin with. - In The Mortal Instruments, Simon Lewis is the only mundane with whom Clary Fray is ever shown to interact. - The Place Inside the Storm: Tara's one friend in PacNW was Rosie, who walked up to her on the playground in fourth grade and asked if she wanted to help garden. - Power: Omishto's only friend in school was Jewel, who even brought her to school every day. However, once the panther is killed with Omishto being involved, even Jewel stops talking to her, though she admits they would've grown apart anyway. - RWBY: Fairy Tales of Remnant: In The Warrior in the Woods, although the Warrior keeps telling the hero to leave her alone and stop coming back, she eventually learns to accept the routine and even prepares tea in anticipation of his next visit. She still doesn't want him to tell the village about her, but she comes to accept him. - Sherlock Holmes: - In Small as an Elephant, Jack's only real friend is a girl named Nina. They hang out with other kids at school so they won't be teased about going steady, but after school they only go to each other's homes. \|\|When Jack's grandmother realizes his mom abandoned him, she calls Nina, who tells her that Jack hasn't been going to school. His grandmother calls the police, resulting in Jack being all over the news. Jack feels betrayed when he finds out, because Nina knows he doesn't want her to ever even hint to anyone that his mother isn't a suitable guardian.\|\| - Francis is Michael's only friend in The Traitor Game. Not the other way round, though; there are mentions of Francis's other friends. They're both a mix of the two types. Michael doesn't easily make friends (and when he does form a friendship, \|\|he manages to break it\|\|), but that's only because he was bullied at his previous school. And while Francis is a Nice Guy and a Cool Loser, he's also a bit of a misfit - possibly because of his friendship with Michael and \|\|his homosexuality\|\| - and he too sees Evgard as an escape from everything else. - In Timekeeper by Tara Sim, clock mechanic Danny Hart has only one friend, Cassie, whom he's known since childhood. Not only is he bullied for this (among other things) by his colleagues, it's also a plot point when he investigates the site of a suspicious event and, encountering another mechanic, extemporizes that he's there to visit a friend—an excuse considered implausible by the other mechanic and everyone else who hears the story, even allies. - In Why We Took the Car, Tschick and Maik eventually become this for each other. - You Look Different in Real Life: Justine used to be Rory's only friend before Justine ditched her after Five at Eleven finished filming. Rory was eventually able to meet other friends through her interest in The House of Tudor. - Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues: - Due to being socially awkward, Ivy's only stable friend throughout her life has been Luna, and even that started to drift when Luna become embroiled with Nadine's group. They've come back together after receiving powers, though the separation did cause some damage to Ivy's mental well-being. - Because he's spent so much time looking after his siblings, or otherwise working, Ciro hasn't fostered any deep relationships with his peers. The exception to this is Zia, who's been a longtime friend since they were kids and she defended him from bullies. While somewhat of an outcast herself, Zia does have some other close friends in Mirielle and Ivan. - In Chess, Florence is Freddie's only friend, although by the end of the first act even she has gotten fed up with his Jerkass behavior and left him. Which, given what we see of their interactions, is less surprising than the fact that she was with him in the first place. - Albus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy are each other's only friend in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, as both of them are shunned (but for different reasons: Albus is viewed with suspicion as the only one in the legendary Potter family being sorted into the Slytherin House [all of the other Potter family members are Gryffindor House members] while Scorpius has the baggage of being born into an infamous Death Eater family — the Malfoy family, in his case). - Willy Loman tells his neighbor and Vitriolic Best Bud Charley that he's the only friend he's got in Death Of A Salesman. He seems to be right, in that Charley is the only person that Willy can turn to. - A Running Gag in the one man play Shylock is that Tubal is Shylock's best friend — well, his only friend. - In Wicked, Elphaba is a mix of Alice-1 and Alice-2, while her only friend Glinda is a Bob-2. - In Bionic Heart, the only friend Luke seems to have at work is Tom, who is the social type trying to help Luke get out more. This makes it all the worse when \|\|Luke learns that Tom was having an affair with Helen, his girlfriend\|\|. And then if Luke chooses to tell him about Tanya, the fugitive android hiding in Luke's apartment that was manufactured by their company, \|\|Tom sells Luke out to the company to ensure his own safety\|\|. - Danganronpa: - Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: This is how Kiyotaka Ishimaru views Mondo Owada. Due to how strict he is and how much time he spends on studying and encouraging the rules and proper school behavior, Taka never had a chance to make a single friend, even among the cast as most of the other students consider him an annoyance (barring the optional friendship he can have with Makoto), until Mondo comes along. As a result, he suffers from a Heroic BSoD when \|\|Mondo is revealed to be the murderer in Chapter 2 and is executed. So not only is his only friend dead, but he also killed someone, even if it was unintentional.\|\| - Danganronpa 2: Sonia Nevermind is this for Gundham Tanaka. Gundham rarely socializes with the other students when there isn't a problem, claiming that his only friends are his pets and that he doesn't need human companions. Not including the optional friendship he can have with Hajime Hinata, the only student he eventually befriends and shows respect to is Sonia, who shares his interest in animals and occult things. She's also the only person whom Gundham doesn't refer to with any sort of contempt or condescending attitude, and the only one he willingly hangs around and communicates with. - Danganronpa V3: Keebo is this for Miu Iruma. Miu is a major Jerkass with an extreme arrogant streak and a tendency to make aggressively perverted and sexual comments. The only people who really seem to be able to tolerate her are Kaede, Shuichi, and Keebo. By the time \|\|Miu dies, Kaede is dead, which leaves only Shuichi and Keebo for people she might have liked. Keebo is the only one to truly mourn her death, and despite truly wanting to cry upon finding her corpse, finds that he cannot.\|\| - Heart of the Woods: Tara had a group of friends in the past, but by the time she transitioned from male to female, Madison was the only one she had left. At the start of the story, their friendship is on the rocks due to Madison announcing that she's quitting Taranormal. - Katawa Shoujo: - Lilly is initially Hanako's only friend, until Hanako falls in love with Hisao in her own route, and befriends Hisao and the members of the Newspaper Club in Lilly's route. - \|\|Shizune and Misha are also this to one another unless you take Shizune's route, although Hisao says in Lilly's route that he considers both of them his friends.\|\| - Kindred Spirits on the Roof has Yuna. In her final year of middle school, Yuna \|\|overheard the members of her cooking club badmouthing her for pushing them too hard\|\|, resulting in her distancing herself from everyone besides her Childhood Friend Hina. Upon getting into high school, Yuna befriended Ano, but isn't as close with her as Hina. - Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair has Momoko and Kamen be each other's only friends. Momoko has severe trust issues due to being taken advantage of in the past, and Kamen is the only person she trusts. Similarly, while Kamen is nominally a member of the group of friends invited to the party, Momoko is her only real friend. - In Tokimeki Memorial 2, Kaori Yae starts this way, with Kaedeko Sakura being her only friend. That's because Kaori is hugely distrustful of others due to a traumatic past experience, and Kaedeko is the only person she feels innocent, straight, and honest. By the end of her storyline, when she'll solve her personal turmoils, the male protagonist will be her other close friend and lover, and she'll have made a few other friends along the way. - In The Bug Pond, Eldwin is the only friend of Flash because Eldwin's the only one that can put up with him. - In Gifts of Wandering Ice, chapter 1, Rikter is Elie's only friend. - Homestuck: - Karkat is Eridan's only friend (and even that's stretching the definition a bit) \|\|after Feferi breaks up with him\|\|. And even Karkat abandons him \|\|after he murders Feferi and Kanaya and hopesplodes the Matriorb\|\|. - Kanaya is Vriska's only friend \|\|after the Incident that led to the split-up of Team Scourge\|\|, for reasons like this: AG note : Vriska: Lousy st8 pid godd8mn supportive fri8nd! note : This is right after Kanaya tries to help Vriska, who isn't being sarcastic here and is genuinely pissed off about it. - Ozy and Millie, in the most heartwarming way. Ozy's zen nature is the only thing that can withstand Millie's craziness, and Millie gives his life much-needed excitement. - Stand Still, Stay Silent: Onni explicitly states that Emil is the first friend Lalli has ever made. There is a dose of No Social Skills and hard-to-handle personalities on both sides, but other aspects of their personalites manage to complement each other. - In the Noob webseries and comics, Dark Avenger's only friend is his student Précieux. Sparadrap is more than willing to be a second one, except that Dark Avenger mistakes his attempts at cross-faction friendship for a "getting your enemy's guard down" strategy.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyFriend
Only Good People May Pass - TV Tropes So you got yourself a MacGuffin/treasure/other item of value. Great. But of course, you have to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. The problem? Ordinary security measures won't do it. The Big Bad has the power to break through any standard magical and/or technological method of protection in a matter of minutes. What to do? Simple. Protect your item by placing it somewhere evil people can't go to. There are two basic means of doing this: - Magically create a barrier that locks out anyone with an impure heart and secure the object there. Keep in mind, this kind of magic doesn't discriminate. Even good people can have impurities of heart, and you risk running into Pure Is Not Good. - Place the object on ground that is innately sacred, such as a shrine, temple, or church. The sacred nature of the place should keep out evil people. (Keep in mind, whether or not this works depends on the rules of the universe you live in: sometimes Holy Burns Evil, in other works it's less powerful). If all of the above work perfectly, expect the bad guys to use the MacGuffin Delivery Service. Sub-Trope of Only the Pure of Heart and Only the Worthy May Pass. If you are not worthy to this place, then You Shall Not Pass! and sometimes prepare for a Fate Worse than Death. Usually this place is guarded by a Gate Guardian. Tangentially related to Phlebotinum-Handling Requirements and Trial by Ordeal. ## Examples - The title character of Inuyasha once had to enter a cave that was protected by an enchantment that prevented anyone from going in for selfish reasons. Needless to say, this presented some difficulty for him. - The entrance to Paradise in Wolf's Rain. Darcia attempts to enter \|\|after being fatally poisoned by Cheza's blood\|\| and is spectacularly destroyed. Unfortunately this also prevents Kiba and Cheza from using the portal. - Heaven in Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt is shown as this. In fact, both titular angels were kicked out of there because of their deadly sins (including Lust and Gluttony) and now they have to gain their re-entrance with "Heaven Coins", getting them by destroying Ghosts in Earth and saving people in the process. - Sky Doll features Aqua, the world of (another) alien species who are devoted to harmony and peace. To keep aggression away, the method of entering Aqua expects that the individual seeking entrance can "purify their mind" through meditating in a specific place. It's proven not quite failsafe when an assasinator manages to enter by using a specific drug. - Hellblazer: The "All His Engines" story has John exploit this by summoning a bunch of demons inside a church (so they can't pass the door). Cue an Aztec death god, who is older than Christian rituals and thus could not care less about them, plowing through the wall and devouring them all. - The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: The Matrix of Leadership has a "morality lock" that ensures only the worthy can open it; the corrupt lineage of Primes that lasted up to Zeta Prime came about because they lost the real Matrix and used a fake, with Optimus Prime finding the real one after Megatron's betrayal. It's mentioned that certain non-Cybertronian religions are willing to accept "ability to open the Matrix" as proof of good character. \|\|When Rung creates twelve Matrices to defeat Functionist Cybertron at the climax of Lost Light, most of the main cast manage to pass the lock: Ratchet, Nautica, Swerve and Misfire, Rodimus, Lug, Riptide, Tailgate, Thunderclash, First Aid, Velocity, Roller, even Whirl. Later, at Megatron's retrial, Rodimus lies on the stand and claims that Megatron managed to open one.\|\| - Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series. The entrance to the Dark Tower has a barrier which prevents anyone from passing unless they are sufficiently ethically advanced. - The Divine Comedy: While sinners are famously sent to the various circles of Hell depending on their greatest sin in life, the entrance to Hell (Limbo) is populated by "virtuous pagans": philosophers or good people in general but were unfortunately not baptized (being for the most part born before Christ). Among them, Dante put Homer, Plato and Saladin (due to being a Worthy Opponent during the Crusades; by contrast, the prophet Muhammad is in the circle reserved for those who create discord). - In Deltora Quest - For anyone who drinks from the Dreaming Springs, if they are of good will then they will visit the place they thought about while drinking in their dreams, but for those who are evil they will become transformed into trees. - Only those who are righteous with no evil intent can enter the City of Tora. If an evil being tries to, such as the Ol named Dain, they became greatly weakened and reduced to a sobbing mass. - This is the requirement of the final test to get the Philosopher's Stone in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Dumbledore specifically set it up so that only a good person who wanted the Stone, but not for their own use out of personal greed, etc. could get it. Therefore Harry, who just wants the Stone to protect it from Voldemort, is worthy, and Voldemort, who wants the Stone to achieve immortality, is not. - In Reaper, Alan Townsend takes advantage of this to hide from The Devil after he wins his freedom from his contract. He hides in a cemetary, which is consecrated ground. This prevents The Devil from tempting him into sin. - The main purpose of the season 2 of The Good Place: After the revelation that The Good Place is revealed to be the Bad Place the whole time, thanks to a scheme of Michael who planned to have the four protagonists (Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason) torture each other. The four main characters all tried to be good by performing good deeds to get into the real good place. - In Arrow, the episode "Haunted" had Oliver and John Constantine finding a mystical place with a seal that warned only those pure of heart could pass. Constantine was under the impression that Oliver was a bad person so hand cuffs him and leaves him outside, but Oliver escapes and enters the room, proving he's actually good. - Stargate SG-1: Zigzagged Trope in "The Quest", when the team goes looking for a MacGuffin that can defeat the evil godlike Ori, but are forced to team up with the Ori's field general Adria and the former Goa'uld System Lord Ba'al to safely traverse the maze leading to the treasure. The final doorway is through a Stargate that automatically refuses entry to Adria, but lets Ba'al through. Daniel Jackson points out that the Ancients who designed the Gate probably didn't see the Goa'uld as a real threat compared to the much more powerful Ori. - Dungeons & Dragons - Dragon magazine #50 article "The Glyphs of Cerilon". One of the Symbols (clerical/priest spell) in the article causes damage to anyone of Evil alignment who tries to pass it. - Several spells do this, such as the mage/wizard spell Antipathy and the cleric/priest spell Forbiddance, which can be used to enchant just about anything to make a creature of any given alignment not wish to approach. - The Forgotten Realms city of Silverymoon has a variety of powerful magical wards, one of which bars entry to creatures with an evil Character Alignment who belong to a long list of species. Evil humans and demi-humans, however, are free to come and go. - Call of Cthulhu - The Elder Sign can block the passage of any creature of the Cthulhu Mythos (who are almost all evil). - Campaign setting Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, adventure "The Watchers of Easter Island". The Crystal of Noa is placed inside an Elder Sign to protect it from being stolen by the evil Deep Ones. - In Warhammer 40,000, there is the Black Library. Despite the imposing name, it is actually a catalog of all the known information regarding Chaos. The Eldar Harlequins that guard it are known to grant access to anyone they feel has both the need and the strength of character to be useful in the fight against Chaos. Notably, the Emperor of Mankind has entered. - Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne has three doors you can only go through if you are on a different section of the morality meter that was based on what Magatamas (power-up items)you had mastered thus far in the game: Light, Neutral, and Dark. - The Legend of Zelda: - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link: The Great Temple (the final dungeon of the game) houses the Triforce of Courage—and true to the item's name, the Temple's barrier will not open unless the entrant has placed six jewels in the other temples as proof of their courage. The final challenge, before the person can claim the Triforce itself, is to fight the evil within them. - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: The entrance to the Sacred Realm (also known as the Golden Land) where the Triforce dwells is hidden and requires four sacred objects (the Kokiri Emerald, Goron Ruby, Zora Sapphire and Ocarina of Time) that are each protected by the various nations that populate Hyrule. Only possessing all four and then playing the Song of Time in the Temple of Time will reveal the hidden entrance, but this is technically possible if the items are stolen through nefarious means. The final test, however, is pulling out the Master Sword, which can't be touched by someone evil. \|\|Unfortunately, there's nothing stopping someone evil from waiting for a good person to do all that, and then step inside and enter the Sacred Realm themselves\|\|. - The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: At the conclusion of Ocarina of Time, the previous Chosen One that wielded the Master Sword was sent back to his original time, thus breaking the cycle of reincarnation which spawns a new Chosen One. The Tower of the Gods was created to test anyone who wanted to wield the sword in the future, and it requires three pearls that embody the virtues of the goddesses themselves to unlock it. - Very close to the beginning of The Order of the Stick, the heroes are fooled into helping The Psycho Rangers claim a powerful magic talisman. The final layer of protection for the talisman was a group of runes that wouldn't activate and reveal the room where the talisman was kept unless all three runes were touched by someone of pure heart. Naturally, various members of the Order were convinced or tricked into touching these runes. - El Tigre: During hero awards, they have in the doorway (where a metal detector would be in an ordinary building) a good and evil detector, meant to catch any bad guys trying to sneak in disguised. White Pantera buries the needle at good. His father, Puma Loco would likely bury the needle at evil and be carted off to jail. His son, Manny, as El Tigre, upon entering the machine, causes the needle to flail wildly between good and evil before finally exploding. - Samurai Jack: In "Jack and the Warrior Woman", the reality warping gem—powerful enough to send Jack back to his own time—is protected by a magical guardian who bars the way for all but the pure of heart. \|\|The guardian attacks Jack's companion for the episode, Ikra, revealing she was evil all along.\|\| - Here Comes the Grump: The Grump chases the heroes into a deep pit. As they fall, the heroes find themselves gently floating. Grump gazes into the hole and reads a message: "The good float lightly, but the bad will fall." Declaring "I'm just as good as any of them", Grump steps into the hole - and of course falls with a splat. Grump is further infuriated when he looks up and sees that his dragon is floating down.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyGoodPeopleMayPass
Only Killable at Home - TV Tropes "The Ring was made in the fires of Mount Doom; only there can it be unmade." People like their homes, and if you will permit us a bit of profiling, so do you. It's your sanctuary, a place of respite and relaxation. It doesn't matter if it is small or grandiose — unless it is in need of a major overhaul, you're likely to have some connection to it that is almost indescribable. Likely because, unless you are the seriously extroverted sort, or The Insomniac who likes going for long nightly walks, you'll likely spend more time in your home than you do anywhere else. Is it any wonder, then, that a home is of importance for fantastical settings the same way a True Name is? Whether by magic, by the nature of their being, by the simple reason of spending most of their life there, or some other metaphysical reason, for some beings note : we don't discriminate what constitutes a 'being' the home address/dimension/timeline/planet/lair or place of origin/birth/creation truly is an anchor beyond the mundane. It is where they start, and it is, apparently, the only point where they can truly end, as if something In-Universe is demanding that their story is Book Ended. If this doesn't grant Complete Immortality outside whatever counts as 'home', the home will act as a bonafide Respawn Point, ensuring that no lethal harm can come to them outside it — at most there'll be a time delay between their death in a non-home place and their respawning. In these cases, it might be used by time travelers/dimension hoppers who have gotten stuck for the purpose of Resurrection Teleportation — sure, dying no doubt hurts, but it beats being stuck wherever they ended up or taking The Slow Path. Of course, this also means that if you want to end the threat of the Returning Big Bad or Recurring Boss for good, you're forced to invade their home, giving them the Home Field Advantage with all the trouble that implies — because killing them elsewhere will just mean they'll be Staying Alive and be back for as many more rounds as they like. Alternatively, if invading their home isn't an option, nothing inherent in this trope prevents you from finding means of containment — either by sealing off their home and preventing them from leaving or trapping them in yours while they are still alive, the latter of which is usually one of the reasons why you find so many evils sealed in cans; they couldn't be gotten rid of permanently by other means. If you're of the morally dubious sort, you could also inflict a Fate Worse than Death on them. Compare the Soul Jar, which not only requires the soul to be sealed within a container but is also usually actively created rather than innate. Also compare Fighting a Shadow, where the reason you cannot kill them is that they were never really there — but if you found their actual self, it wouldn't matter where they were (In particular, watch out for something being described as an 'avatar' of whatever is being fought; if the being uses avatars, you're probably not looking at this trope). Might be justified by the character being a Domain Holder. ## Examples - Transformers: Unicron and Primus were once multiversal singularities, meaning that in all the Multiverse there was only one. In some universes, Unicron succeeds in destroying Primus and consuming all life, while in others Primus' creations the Transformers succeed in defeating him. However, in one miniseries from Fun Publications, Unicron managed to create an Anti-Matrix that could be used to simultaneously slay all iterations of Primus at once, killing him once and for all. The catch was the Anti-Matrix would only work if used in the Vector Sigma chamber in the very core of Cybertron (i.e. Primus' alternate mode). - My Immortal: When Ebony gets shot while back in time, it doesn't kill her because she can apparently only die in her own time. - Inverted in Wreck-It Ralph. Video game characters cannot die in their home game (where, being part of that game, they will simply re-spawn). If they die in any other game, on the other hand... - Inverted in The Heroes of Olympus. One of the second book's Big Bad Duumvirate can't be killed on Alaskan soil, which is where he was born. The heroes solve this by luring him across the border from Alaska to Canada. - The Lord of the Rings downplays this: The fact that The One Ring can only be destroyed by dropping it into the volcano where it was forged is central to the story, as said volcano is in the middle of Mordor. However, it is also technically destructible by a power greater than the forger, Sauron — but such power no longer exists in Middle-earth, leaving this caveat moot. - Skulduggery Pleasant reverses this trope: Cadaverous Gant can only be killed outside his home, for he is invulnerable inside it, has superhuman strength and speed, and can warp reality inside the place. This ability is transferable should Gant claim a new place as his home. - The Strain Trilogy: The Master topples all other breeds of vampire by destroying their "black sites," the geographical location where each came into being (all original vampires being pieces of a fallen angel scattered over the earth). He also guards the secret of his own black site, knowing that he and his strain will vanish if the heroes find it. The heroes, in turn, search for the black site in the last novel, planning to obliterate it with a suitcase nuke. - "Shia LaBeouf" Live tells the story of a couple of fights between the aforementioned Shia LaBeouf and you, but you only manage to kill him once he retreats to his cottage. - In Dungeons & Dragons - Outsiders have a home plane; if killed anywhere else, they'll reincorporate there. If they're killed on their home plane, they stay dead and even resurrecting them is tricky because they don't have a soul as much as they are simply composed of their home plane's essence. - This was true in Planescape for Devils and Yugoloths, but for demons the reverse was true: they could only be permanently slain when they weren't in the Abyss. - In 3.5 Edition, Outsiders native to the material plane (mainly Half-Mortal Hybrids of many different sorts) avert this trope as they do have souls, and this soul prevents their entrance to the plane they are otherwise associated with. As such, once killed, they remain dead, and the normal rules of resurrection apply. - Vampires slain outside their coffin will turn to mist and return to it to regenerate. Only inside their coffins can they be slain (barring rare and extreme measures such as a Sphere of Annihilation). Though if their coffin has already been destroyed or they're prevented from reaching it, they die after a time anyway. - Geist: The Sin-Eaters: Mortals have shades of this in the core game; any living creature who dies in The Underworld reappears outside the nearest Avernian Gate, mentally exhausted and worse for wear on the Sanity Meter but alive. This doesn't hold true for the greater Chronicles of Darkness cosmology, as there are plenty of lethal otherworlds. - Pathfinder: inverted for the fey, who will die permanently if slain anywhere except their plane of origin, the First World. The First World, as a prototype of creation that was abandoned by the gods, exists outside of the normal cycles of existence, including those of life and death. While in the First World, fey — and non-native beings who become acclimated to it — will gradually reform if killed, although not without some loss of power. This is one of the primary reasons behind the fey's bizarre behavior — they genuinely aren't used to thinking of death, whether their own or others', as anything more than a temporary inconvenience, and its permanency in other worlds tends to catch them somewhat flat-footed. - Destiny: The Ascendant Hive are Hive who have accumulated enough power to develop a personal pocket dimension called a throne world, described as a result of their mind expanding beyond their body until it becomes a universe of its own. Killing an Ascendant Hive simply banishes them to their throne world, from which they can return at will. The only way to kill an Ascendant Hive Deader than Dead is to kill them, pursue them into their throne, and then kill them in there, where they'll be at the center and the height of their power. It's also possible to kill them in someone else's throne world, but this doesn't seem to cause a "true" death — two known cases were banished into their thrones but trapped inside, and could only be resurrected by the actions of a third Ascendant, but all three were the Hive's top gods and running on slightly different rules, and it's not clear if the same applies to 'regular' Ascendant Hive. - Inverted in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion with the realm of the Daedric Prince Mehrunes Dagon. Nothing in the Deadlands, his personal Plane of Oblivion, can be killed permanently—any Daedra or Dremora that are slain there automatically resurrect after a certain period of time. It's actually something of an And I Must Scream situation for Mehrunes: he's the Daedric Prince of Destruction, but as long as he's in Oblivion, he can't actually destroy anything. This is his whole motivation for invading Nirn, the physical plane; once he's there, he can start causing lasting damage. - Eternal Darkness: In Edward Roivas' chapter, the first enemy to appear is the Vampire, who kills one of his maids, and proceeds to go around the mansion attacking other servants. Each time Edward drives it off, the Vampire returns to the basement to replenish its health from an obelisk with a rune on it. To permanently kill it, Edward needs to first destroy the obelisk in the basement. - Inverted in Final Fantasy XIV with the voidsent. Outside of the void, they can be struck down as they're most frequently inhabiting mortal vessels. But in the void, they will simply regenerate over time since \|\|the Thirteenth is so astrally-charged that life can't return to the Lifestream. As a result, the only ways to permanently kill a voidsent in the void are to either absorb their essence into oneself or to be a Memoriate capable of sealing them in inert crystals.\|\| - Hollow Knight: The Radiance can only be fought if The Knight has the Voidheart and uses an Awoken Dream Nail on the Hollow Knight once Hornet pins it down, the former of whom is where the Radiance is sealed and can be defeated inside of. - Lost Odyssey: The Big Bad Gongora can only be destroyed in his native dimension, (as he's \|\|mortal there\|\|) which is why \|\|he wants to use the Grand Staff to destroy the Tower of Mirrors and seal off said dimension from the Mortal Realm\|\|. - Played With in Planescape: Torment: The Final Boss' home is only place The Nameless One and the Final Boss can permanently die, meaning going there to face them is equally potentially fatal to your both. \|\|The Transcendent One is The Nameless One's mortality, and since The Nameless One can't die, his mortality can't die either. The only loophole to this (barring getting a Non Standard Game Over by pissing off a deity or soul-imprisoning necromancer) is for The Nameless One to specifically kill himself inside the Fortress of Regrets and end them both.\|\| - Quake series: - The only way to finish off the outer menace in Quake is by putting Shub-Niggurath, the game's Final Boss, to a permanent end. And that is done in her home location. - The Strogg arc spans three games, in canonical order: Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Quake II and Quake IV. After being on the receiving end of a Strogg invasion in the former game, humanity begins the counterattack in II, with a lone marine (Bitterman) managing to disable the interplanetary defense system as well as getting the entirety of the Strogg in disarray after killing the Makron, its leader. The entirety of Quake IV is about humanity finishing up Bitterman's job, entering Stroggos, getting to its depths, and putting the Strogg menace to a permanent end. \|\|Then, Kane receives new orders...\|\| - In The Sims 2, a Sim can't die in a "community lot" (public place), only in a private home. - The Xel'Naga of Starcraft are multiversal travellers, seeding one universe with life, and then resting in the Void between universes until the seeded universe, by means of evolution, produces two species who will provide viable Fusion Dance material to birth a new Xel'Naga, then repeating the process in a Time Abyss analogue to reproduction. Should they be rendered without form outside the Void (which they are perfectly capable of doing by themselves), they will return to the Void and reform there, but if slain in the Void, they will remain dead. - World of Warcraft is home to many different planes of existence aside from the normal one. Beings either closely attuned to such a plane, or born from it/bound to it, are — aside a few exceptions that prove the rule — Barred from the Shadowlands, with their home plane pulling their soul back to it (or the Kyrian guiding it to it if it somehow doesn't get pulled) whereafter the body is reconstituted. If slain in their home plane, the plane simply absorbs the soul, making the being suffer Cessation of Existence. - The Legion expansion reveals that the demons of The Burning Legion, who normally reside in the Twisting Nether, have managed to redirect a Titan's power to ensure that the 'Demons can be permanently killed in the Twisting Nether' rule is nulled, meaning that as long as the Titan exists, the demons cannot be permanently killed anywhere. - Hotis from Critical Role is a fiend who is reborn in Hell whenever he is killed and slowly grows back to his original strength. After the heroes assassinate him on the mortal plane once, he becomes a recurring villain seeking vengeance against them, forcing them to go to Hell if they want peace. This is all in keeping with lore for fiends like Hotis (called rakshasas) in Dungeons & Dragons. - Argai: The Prophecy works on this principle in regards to Time Travel: You can go back and forth in time by multiple means, whether magical or technological, but if you die in a timeline that's not your own, you get transported back to your own timeline to the point where you left it — though, if you used a Time Machine to get to wherever you died, that Time Machine isn't coming with you.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyKillableAtHome
Minor Character, Major Song - TV Tropes "Wait, you get a song. That's surprising; you're kind of a minor [character]..." A minor character in a musical or opera, who only gets one song, but that one song is really, really memorable. When the musical is discussed, he's the one who makes people say, "And what about that one guy who sang..." Sometimes this is a result of Adaptation Distillation that removes the character's part from other songs (or removes the other songs entirely). A bit rarer in animated musicals since they usually have around 4-8 songs, while theater musicals can have 10-30, maybe 40 songs. Compare One-Scene Wonder and Small Role, Big Impact. ## Examples: - 1776: See the theatre section. - Absolute Beginners has two cases of this, owing to the stature of the performers playing the roles. Vendice is just one of several antagonists in on an evil scheme, but since he's played by David Bowie he gets the Bowie-penned song "That's Motivation" and a Disney Acid Sequence to go with it. Between that, writing/singing the Title Theme Tune for the film's credits, and simply being the biggest name in the cast, Bowie was billed third! (As a bonus, while his character only sings a snatch of the old standard "Volare" in one scene, the soundtrack album includes a full performance of it.) Another minor character, Arthur (the hero's dad), gets the big number "Quiet Life" — he's played by Ray Davies of The Kinks. - Anna and the Apocalypse: Lisa's the least plot-relevant of the main kids, but she gets a solo to herself in the form of "It's That Time Of Year". - Afterglow from Bran Nue Dae, sung by the resident hippy of the film, Annie. - Chicago: - Amos Hart, singing "Mr. Cellophane". John C. Reilly's performance of this one song earned him a Best Supporting Actor nomination. - Likewise, Queen Latifah's one song ("When You're Good to Mama") in the same film. Mama Morton is a bigger role than Amos however. - Darling Lili has Crepe Suzette who appears in two scenes besides her performance of the Bad Girl Song "Your Goodwill Ambassador" - which sets up the third act conflict. It's the only song in the movie not sung by Julie Andrews. - Julie Brown in Earth Girls Are Easy with "Cause I'm a Blonde". (Her character in this scene is different from the one she plays in the remainder of the film, Candy Pink; had plans for a Screen-to-Stage Adaptation gone through at the Turn of the Millennium a Composite Character approach would have averted this trope.) - Flashdance: A dancing version occurs. Alex's fellow dancer Tina doesn't contribute too much to the plot and only has about ten lines of dialogue, but her dancing to the original song "Manhunt", is one of the film's Signature Scenes. - The dentist in Little Shop of Horrors. One of those resultant from Adaptation Distillation, as in the stage musical he sang in two other songs (the same ACTOR also sang in a multitude of other songs, And You Were There-style). - The Don in the "Il Muto" scene in The Phantom of the Opera. - Phantom of the Paradise: The Juicy Fruits/ Beach Bums/ Undeads are rarely on screen, and only one of them has a speaking part, but they sing three of the major songs, "Goodbye, Eddie. Goodbye", "Upholstery" and "Somebody Super Like You", which was released as a single. - Eddie the (Ex-)Delivery Boy from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He shows up, sings one of the most memorable songs in the movie, and is promptly murdered with a pickaxe. He has one later song (titled "Eddie", in fact), but this verse is a voiceover intended to represent other characters reading a letter he wrote. - In The Rundown Ewen Bremen got his own major song when he playe his bagpipes towards the end. - The guy in Singin' in the Rain who sings "Beautiful Girls" isn't even credited. (His name is Jimmy Thompson.) In the same movie, Cyd Charise is a minor character with a major dance number. - Elton John's Pinball Wizard, Eric Clapton's Eyesight To The Blind, and Tina Turner's Acid Queen from Tommy. - Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory gives these to two characters who disappear in the film's second half. - The opening number "The Candy Man" may be about Willy Wonka but is sung by Bill, the candy shop owner who later sells the Wonka Bar with the last Golden Ticket to Charlie. Director Mel Stuart had to convince songwriters Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse not to use Stunt Casting for the minor role by way of showing off the song because he knew it would be too distracting for audiences. - Mrs. Bucket, who mostly serves as the blue oni to Grandpa Joe's red oni, has the touching Parental Love Song "Cheer Up, Charlie", which Stuart regarded as unnecessary and tried to have cut from the film altogether. He got his wish in early Edited for Syndication TV cuts of the film. (The Bucket parents seem blessed by this trope; see Theatre below for another adaptation.) - Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds gives the epic duet "The Spirit Of Man" to the minor but hammy Parson Nathaniel and his even more minor wife Beth. - Soldier 7285 in The Dolls of New Albion is only around for the fourth and final act of the opera, where he only has two distinct songs: "The Day We Come" and "I Will Bring You Down", the latter being one of the most popular songs of the entire album, yet he's so irrelevant that he's not even given a proper name. - In The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Mitch Mahoney is there mainly to walk out eliminated contestants, not getting as many lines as the kids nor the other adults. However, after the final guest speller is eliminated, he sings Prayer of the Comfort Counselor, which replaces the usual "Goodbye" melody and sends off the guest on a triumphant note. - 1776: - Richard Henry Lee, who carries some great big wonderful slabs of roast pork while he's singing "The Lees of Old Virginia." As the next song occurs thirty minutes later, the writers made this number as big and bombastic as possible to carry the audience through. Ron Holgate, the original Lee, even got a Tony despite the fact that his character appears in all of two scenes and disappears before the second act. note : Interestingly, William Daniels — the original John Adams, who reprised his role in the film — was also nominated for a Tony in the same category as Holgate instead of in the Lead Actor category due to a peculiarity of the awards at the time in which a Lead Actor nominee had to be Billed Above the Title — and Daniels, despite carrying the show on his extremely talented back and playing inarguably the lead character, wasn't. Daniels, piqued, promptly refused his nomination. - Also the Courier, who exists mainly to tromp in with a dispatch from Washington and leave. Near the middle of the play he sings "Momma, Look Sharp," an absolutely gutwrenching song about the death of his friend at Lexington and Concord. - In the 2016 stage production of Anastasia, Count Ipolitov, a royal count who recognizes Anya as Anastasia at the train station, leads the departing passengers in singing "Stay, I Pray You," a farewell to Russia. He doesn't appear again \|\|as he is dragged off the train and shot for having the wrong papers\|\|. - Andrew Lloyd Webber: - Despite having the Signature Song of the play and \|\|being chosen by Old Deuteronomy at the end\|\|, Grizabella from Cats barely appears on-stage. She's shunned by the tribe and only appears for a few sequences. - Juan Peron's mistress from Evita, lyrics by Tim Rice, who sings "Another Suitcase in Another Hall" and is quickly dismissed. In the film version, Evita herself sings it because, y'know...Madonna. - King Herod ("King Herod's Song") and Simon ("Simon Zealotes") from Jesus Christ Superstar, again with lyrics by Tim Rice. - In Annie, the Star-to-Be only gets a brief solo in the "N.Y.C." number then is never seen again, but during it the actress gets to showcase some impressive belting that makes the moment a highlight. - In The Band's Visit Telephone Guy, a character who doesn't even have a name and whose role consists entirely of standing near a payphone WAITING for a call from his girlfriend, has one of the show's most powerful songs, "Answer Me". - Pan in Bat Boy: The Musical qualifies with "Children Children". He shows up randomly and sings a song that is memorable for not fitting in with any of the rest of the show; particularly due to a bunch of animals that proceed to have an 'interspecies orgy' during said song. He is also never named. - Downplayed in Be More Chill: plenty of people who have never listened to the show have at the very least heard of "Michael in the Bathroom". While Michael gets a decent amount of stage time, his big solo song is one of the reasons many people were introduced to the show in the first place. - The Book of Mormon uses Mafala Hatimbi to introduce the missionaries (and the audience) to Uganda and their philosophy of life through the song "Hasa Diga Eebowai" \|\|which ends up meaning "Fuck you, God".\|\| The rest of the show then shifts its focus to Mafala's daughter, Nabulungi, and he becomes a background character. - Nimue, from Camelot, who sings "Follow Me." - Vanderdendur in the Final Revised Version of Candide is only in one scene (and is mentioned as having been killed, off-stage, in another), and yet he gets the show's big spectacular Villain Song. Averted in earlier versions of the show, where the Governor gets to sing it. - Bizet's Carmen has two of these. Escamillo's ostentatious Toreador Song is one of the most memorable pieces in the opera and Micaela's Aria in Act III regularly earns her almost as much applause as the leading lady despite the fact that both of the characters are very secondary. - Catch Me If You Can: "Fly, Fly Away", sung by Brenda Strong, Frank Abagnale Jr's love interest. The fact that this is just a major song is the understatement of the year, because this song is pretty much the hit of the show. - Mr. and Mrs. Bucket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory have "If Your Mother Were Here", a quiet Parental Love Song that bridges the four brats finding their Golden Tickets and Charlie (who is in the midst of a Heroic BSoD) finding his. Elsewhere they have minor singing parts in two huge production numbers, being stuck in the shadow of Charlie's wacky grandparents in Act One and absent for most of Act Two. Nevertheless, "If Your Mother Were Here" is a fan favorite that's received praise even from people who don't like the show. - The 2017 Broadway production made this song fit this trope even better by turning it into a solo sung by Mrs. Bucket, "If Your Father Were Here", with the premise that \|\|Charlie's father is dead\|\|. - The Foreign Woman, from Gian-Carlo Menotti's The Consul. To be fair, she is onstage for more than the one aria she sings, but that aria is her only real point of significance. - The Drowsy Chaperone, being an ensemble show, has many of these: - Trix the Aviatrix pops up briefly to introduce herself in the opening number and doesn't appear again until the finale, when she leads "I Do, I Do in the Sky". - Likewise, the pastry chefs, \|\|actually undercover gangsters\|\|, get their day in the sun with "Toledo Surprise". - The Latin lover Aldolpho has his song I Am Aldolpho when he seduces \|\|the Chaperone, whom he mistakes for Janet\|\|. - Evil Dead: The Musical has the very self-aware "Bit Part Demon", where a lowly mook laments that he only exists to be forgettable cannon fodder for the hero. And right when he starts to think that maybe getting a whole song to himself means that he's less expendable, Ash shoots him. - In Finale, the character of Lucy Everett (whose name is All There in the Manual) sings the song "Congratulations!", one of the biggest production numbers in the show. However, the character only makes two more minor appearances, and other than that never appears again. - The Steersman from Wagner's "The Flying Dutchman" might qualify. - In Girl Crazy, Kate Fothergill, aside from three songs tailored for Ethel Merman's prodigious voice, adds little more to the show than comic banter. One of those three songs is "I Got Rhythm." - Although Glory Days only has four characters total, Skip gets the least focus- and to make up for this he gets 'Generation Apathy', a cynical solo number about how oblivious and self-centered today's society is. - Gutenberg! The Musical! technically has all the songs sung by Bud and Doug, the only two characters. But in-universe, they wrote the song "Biscuits" to be given to the extremely minor characters of Young Monk and Bootblack. They admit it's because they're hoping a big production number would entice a famous actor to play Young Monk. (They always suggest someone who has recently died, as they've been too busy writing and haven't seen the news. John Candy in the original production.) - Nicely-Nicely Johnson in Guys and Dolls, who gets one of the greatest Eleven O'Clock Numbers in theatre - "Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat". - In Hamilton, King George III has nothing to do plot-wise note : aside from mysteriously showing up in "The Reynolds Pamphlet", but he does get to sing three major songs (all to the same tune). - Maria Reynolds has "Say No to This" which is a big number, also crosses over with Small Role, Big Impact as it's a huge turning point in the story. - Martha from Heathers gets to sing "Kindergarten Boyfriend", a solo song where she \|\|mourns the death of her long-time crush and then attempts suicide.\|\| It's the only song she gets all to herself and, despite what the song title might make you think, is extremely heartbreaking to listen to. - Kurt and Ram's father's get "Dead Gay Son", a showstopper at the beginning of Act 2 and Mrs. Fleming gets to rock out in "Shine A Light". - In H.M.S. Pinafore, The Boatswain has practically no other role but to sing the solo for "He Is An Englishman", and join in the trio for "A British Tar"— two of the best songs in the show. - Saint Aphrodisias- who is barely mentioned throughout the musical at all up until this number- gets 'Flight into Egypt' in the stage version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, though Quasimodo does end up taking over the end part of the song \|\|once he's realised that Esmeralda's talisman is a map leading to the Court of Miracles\|\|. - "Miss Marmelstein" from I Can Get It For You Wholesale. This minor piece helped kickstart the career of Barbra Streisand. - In In the Heights, Piragua Guy is present throughout the show but doesn't really interact with any of the other characters in any significant way. That all being said, he gets two solo songs: "Piragua" and "Piragua - Reprise". - Osiris from Jasper in Deadland. He only appears for roughly 20 seconds in the song "Living Dead". - Kiss Me, Kate: The two gangsters who sing "Brush Up Your Shakespeare." - Li'l Abner assigns Marryin' Sam singing duties out of proportion to his part in the plot, including the incredibly catchy "Jubilation T. Cornpone". (With both this and the previous example, when the play was adapted into a film, Stubby Kaye got this as his moment to shine, and seized it with both hands.) - Man of La Mancha has one of its most beautiful songs, "To Each His Dulcinea", sung by the priest; he's presented as a mute inmate of an insane asylum during the Show Within a Show portions, until he is the second inmate to take up the Finale reprise at the end.. - Most of the students/revolutionaries in Les Misérables besides Marius and Enjolras are given little in terms of characterization, or even names, as they're either named exactly once in a quick line (and that includes Enjolras), or named in the script alone. Nonetheless, they get a rousing Friendship Song in "Drink With Me", which also contains Grantaire's Establishing Character Moment, when he questions if the revolution is worth dying for. - Gigi from Miss Saigon who sings "Movie In My Mind" with Kim early in the show, makes one more appearance during Kim and Chris' wedding and then disappears from the narrative during the timeskip to after the fall of Saigon. - In Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, Balaga is a "just for fun" character who only appears during Anatole's \|\|attempted abduction of Natasha\|\| in the second act. He still gets an action-packed number named after him where practically the whole cast joins him in singing about how awesome he is. - "The Private and Intimate Life of the House" could be seen as this for the elder Prince Bolkonsky. - Steve, from Paint Your Wagon, who sings "They Call The Wind Maria." - The Young Confederate Soldier from Parade. - Pippin's grandmother Berthe is in only one scene, but in that scene she sings "No Time At All", an extremely catchy tune she turns into an Audience Participation Song. - Porgy and Bess all but begins with Clara singing "Summertime" to her baby. Despite being the first character to appear, even her dramatic exit at the end of the second act (and the chorus mourning her at the start of the third) doesn't elevate her role to much importance. - The HIV/AIDS support group in RENT only features in a few scenes, but they get the chilling 'Will I?', a song where they attempt to come to terms with their inevitable death and what they will leave behind. - Rodgers and Hammerstein: - In Allegro, Beulah, Joe's friend's girlfriend's friend who has a tryst with him in one scene and never appears again, gets to sing one of the score's most appealing tunes, "So Far." - In Carousel, Nettie Fowler, a secondary character with no real involvement in the plot, takes the lead in singing "June Is Bustin' Out All Over" and "You'll Never Walk Alone." - Helen Chao from Flower Drum Song has "Love, Look Away" which turns into a spectacular Dream Ballet and also sets up a Third-Act Misunderstanding - as Mei Li finds Ta at her house. - Joe in Show Boat. It helps that he has one of the best Broadway songs ever written, "Ol' Man River." - Nostradamus in Something Rotten!, who leads the cast in the show's Signature Song, "A Musical". - Perch Perkins, the newsreader in The Spongebob Musical gets 'No Control', an adaptation of David Bowie's pessimistic hit. Due to its intense harmonies and generally depressing mood, it's one of the most memorable songs of the show. - Martha from Spring Awakening is a minor character whose only major song is "The Dark I Know Well," a duet with Ilse about their physically \|\|and sexually\|\| Abusive Parents. The actresses frequently get thanked by fans who were also abuse victims. - As for Starlight Express: - Dinah gets 'U.N.C.O.U.P.L.E.D', one of the most well-known songs of the show, despite her relatively small role as Greaseball's love interest (or, rather, Love Martyr). - In productions where C.B's role is shortened or simplified, 'Wide Smile, High Style' definitely applies here. - Poppa, despite being The Mentor, is relatively minor; he serves mainly as a plot device, as \|\|Rusty would not have been able to take part in the race if Poppa had not broken down after the third heat\|\|. Still, he leads one of the most well-known songs of the entire thing- 'Light at the End of the Tunnel'- as well as the less recognised 'Poppa's Blues'. - Stephen Sondheim seemed to really like this trope. - The Proprietor from Assassins. He sings "Everybody's Got the Right" at the beginning of the show. Though he does show up at various points, as a background character, an announcer, or even the President of the United States. And in some productions, he does sing part of "Another National Anthem." - Productions from the 2004 revival onward give one to the Housewife who leads "Something Just Broke." While the number is a Crowd Song, she is the focal point, and the song is frequently cited as one of the most memorable in the show, if only because it reminds the audience (who've spent the whole musical watching the assassins) about the grief and pain felt by everyday people after massive tragedies. - Company has Marta and "Another Hundred People". She and Joanne ("The Ladies Who Lunch") are the only characters aside from Bobby that get songs entirely to themselves, and she is significantly less important to the plot (such as it is) than Joanne. The song was included to showcase Pamela Myers in the original production. - Follies has many old-fashioned showtunes sung by minor characters who do very little else outside their one number. "Beautiful Girls" (Roscoe) and "Who's That Woman?" (Stella) are ostentatious production numbers, but "I'm Still Here" (Carlotta) may be more of a fan favorite. - "You Gotta Get a Gimmick" from Gypsy, lyrics by Sondheim and music by Jule Styne. Mazeppa, Electra, and Tessie Tura don't really appear again outside of their scene and song. However, they heavily inspire Louise's act that later catapults her to fame as Gypsy Rose Lee, and the song is one of the more memorable in an already memorable score. - The Wolf in Into the Woods sings most of "Hello, Little Girl", a song about how he hungers for Little Red Riding Hood. - Petra of A Little Night Music with "The Miller's Son." She does have a relatively small part in the "A Weekend In The Country" musical sequence, but she is the only non-central character to get a song all to herself which ends up having little to no bearing on the plot. Composer Stephen Sondheim tried to do the same by giving Frid, a character with even less stage time, a tune called "Silly People," but that one ended up a Cut Song instead (rumor has it the original director remarked "Who cares what Frid thinks?"). - Pirelli in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. - The girl who sings "Somewhere" in West Side Story, lyrics by Sondheim and music by Leonard Bernstein. - Depending on the staging, this is usually sung by someone offstage or by Tony and Maria as a duet. The "someone offstage" makes it not just a minor character but a non-character, and the Tony and Maria version ... well, they're the leads. - In the recent revival and national tour, the song was sung by the actress who plays Anybodys, in costume as Anybodys, but presumably not in character as Anybodys because it isn't in character. It would still qualify, as Anybodys is a minor character. - "Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed" from Street Scene, a highly catchy song-and-jitterbug number, is sung by a drunken young couple who make only one other very brief appearance. - The Street Singer from The Threepenny Opera, who sings "Mack the Knife." - Fleet, the ship's lookout at the time of the iceberg striking the Titanic gets "No Moon" in Titanic. - Hugo in the musical adaptation of Tuck Everlasting gets 'Hugo's First Case Pt. 1' and 'Hugo's First Case Pt. 2' to himself, but arguably the song that embodies this trope most is 'You Can't Trust a Man', a duet between him and his father (who's even more of a minor character than he is). - Westeros: An American Musical: Daenerys, aside from being a brief conversation topic during "Small Council", spends the play doing her own thing on the other side of the Narrow Sea. She still gets to sing "I'll Be Back" and "The Storm's End". - The Hermit in the stage adaptation of Young Frankenstein gets "Please Send Me Someone", a lament of his loneliness. - The main theme to Hypnospace Outlaw is "Millennium Anthem", which is from the perspective of RebeRuthPin, a minor, plot-unimportant Teentopia user who mostly posts about her love of SquisherZ despite her family's religious belief that they are Satanic. She is forced off Hypnospace around the beginning of the Millennium because she believes the Rapture is going to happen then; the lyrics describe her disappointment that she can't find out whether or not she won the online fanart contest she entered.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneSongWonder
Only in It for the Money - TV Tropes "This mission doesn't sound like good business... but your Illusive Man can move a lot of credits." Some heroes do what they do for honor, some for glory, some For Great Justice. Others are only looking for the cash. This attitude is held by people who are honestly greedy, just need a living, or don't want to act like they care. Characters fitting this attitude are often Hired Guns and the Bounty Hunter. In fact, the Evil Overlord List states that bounty hunters should only be hired for money; those that love the thrill of the chase are too likely to give the prey a chance to get away. Of course even this can backfire if The Hero is Genre Savvy and has access to the funds to pay said Hired Guns more to turn on the villain. Every Man Has His Price after all. This is a sub-trope of Not in This for Your Revolution. Money, Dear Boy is when it happens in Real Life. Villains who say this are likely to be Punch Clock Villains who work for the bad guys because Evil Pays Better, and might show that Even Evil Has Standards. On the other hand it might show they're a Greedy creep who doesn't care about anyone. Contrast the Psycho for Hire, who while equally villainous, has other motivations. Compare to Signed Up for the Dental. This may also provide an Evil Versus Oblivion motive if the Big Bad proposes either to destroy everything, or even simply to destroy the economy. A character following this trope but on the heroes' side may, if asked for further help, claim that said help is Not in My Contract. ## Examples: - Discussed in Chapter 52 of BlazBlue Alternative: Remnant. Makoto Nanaya tells her teammates that her initial motivation for becoming a Huntress was to make money to support her family, not caring for much else. However, years later, she looked back and realized that her reasons were far more self-centered, wanting to relish in standing above those who brought her down. By the present, this trope is dowplayed, as while she still wants to make money for her family, she also wants to help the people close to her out of kindness. - Dungeon Keeper Ami: All armies are comprised of hired guns. Whether it's the forces of good in their battle against the Keepers, or the Keepers themselves to attack other Keepers. Some of the most important characters, like Cathy, Jered or Keeper Midori started working with Keeper Mercury because of the money they could get out of it. - A Gamer In South Blue: Rowan and Towa, a pair of bounty hunters and Devil Fruit users native to the Grand Line, who confront Jack at the end of Chapter 20 to tell him to stop his crusade because he's killing business for the rest of them. When Jack refuses on moral grounds, they resign themselves to killing him. With no concern whatsoever for the fact that they're in the middle of a city and surrounded by civilians. \|\|Jack kills Towa while Rowan gets blasted who-knows-where by Bartholomew Kuma.\|\| - The Night Unfurls: - Kyril, in the beginning. He has been working as a freelance sellsword since his arrival to Eostia, hunting down numerous orc war bands by himself not for heroics, but for a living. In fact, this trope is the sole reason why he gets involved in the quest of bringing Olga alive back to Ken. His insistence in the completion of his mission, hence getting paid, is made more prominent in the remastered version. Later on, he would gradually grow out of this mentality when he gets more involved in the war against the Black Dogs. In particular, the moment where he decides to defy Bystander Syndrome marks his Character Development. - In Chapter 25, Kyril claims himself as this while interrogating a clergyman who follows Grishom. The clergyman takes the bait and frantically reveals that he knows where Grishom is, culminating in the climax of the Rebel Scum Arc. - Pokémon: The Lost Child: Aegislash isn't working as an assassin for The Brotherhood for any reason other than the money it gives him. - In Pokémon Reset Bloodlines, the Laramie Clan organizes the Big P Pokémon Race and names the winners honorary members so they can help spread their message about living in harmony with Pokémon. Dario couldn't care less about spreading any message; he's only interested in the money and prestige he can get by using the Laramies' name. - In Tales of a Junk Town Pony Peddler Prodigious Peddler only agrees to take Sun Beam along when she promises to pay him. It fits the gruff, Spaghetti Western vibe he has around him, but of course Road Trip Plot ensues. - Many of the more cynical Naruto fanfics, such as A Teacher's Glory make it clear that ninja do rescue princesses and save countries, but only because they're paid to do so. A mission like Wave where it's for a good cause but they're severely underpaid will be called off unless their contractors can make up the difference (plus an additional fee for lying). Despite the stories of heroism kids are told in the academy, ninja are mercenaries by definition. - In The Spectre Trilogy, Carlas motivations for becoming a trainer are purely monetary. Subverted in that the money is for her sister, who needs it somewhat urgently. - In Tales of the Hunger Games, Maxima's motivations for mentoring the District Fourteen tributes following the 95th Hunger Games are purely monetary, as the Capitol promised her a large yet undisclosed financial reward if one of her tributes won a Hunger Games. She also admits to her 97th Hunger Games tributes that the financial reward makes her want to help them win even more than the other mentors who wanted their tributes to win. \|\|She gets her wish following Ross's victory, where the Capitol follows up on their promise and transfers that money into her bank account\|\|. - Cheating Death: Those That Lived has two Victors whose motivations for entering the Hunger Games are purely monetary: - Ashes of the Past: Like in the previous timeline, Gary Oak tries to retire from serious competition to become a researcher after coming in second place of the Indigo League (which he only competed in because he was in the middle of doing the Gym Challenge when his memories of the last timeline got restored). However, while researching Mega Evolution in the Kalos Region, he's forced to do the Kalos Gym Challenge in order to support himself after a run of bad luck leaves his bank account running dry. The only reason he even enters the conference is due to timing and Blastoise's encouragement. \|\|Of course, he's nonetheless delighted when he wins the entire thing\|\|. - In Atlantis: The Lost Empire all of the explorers except for Milo are motivated by money. They actually look at Milo with confusion and contempt for being motivated by anything else. \|\|They change their tune when they find out the damage they'll inflict is a little too much even by their standards.\|\| - Spike claims this to intimidate a thug in the opening of Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door, when said thug tries to get him to back down by threatening an old lady. It's not actually completely true of the Bebop's crew, but money is their primary motivation. "Well, that's a real shame, but we're not cops and we're not from some charity organization. Sorry, lady, but we don't protect or serve — this is strictly business." - The Incredibles: Played with when Bob chooses to take the mysterious job offer to stop the Omnidroid. The fact that it would provide him a chance to do (apparently) good hero work again without getting into legal trouble was already a big factor, but the fact that the offer came just after he was fired from his insurance company job with no easy way forward and they were promising triple his government salary was definitely a factor in him taking it and lying about a "company conference" to his wife. - Ratatouille: Skinner is much more interested in whoring out Gusteau's image for a line of frozen foods than restoring the restaurant's reputation, and doesn't especially care about how this move has damaged Gusteau's standing in the culinary world. Though it is justified from a financial perspective, as the restaurant's rating (and by extension its popularity) that attracts customers is lower than it used to be in Gusteau's heyday, and the frozen food sales are at least keeping the staff paid and the lights on. - While Marcel in Rio is an Evil Poacher, he is only interested in money and doesn't get a kick out of making animals suffer. \|\|That personality trait is instead given to Marcel's pet cockatoo and Dragon-in-Chief Nigel.\|\| - In Turning Red, Mei and her friends only agree to go to Tyler's birthday party for the money he promises to pay for Mei's panda form to be the entertainment. - Branch Rickey gives this in 42 as the reason why he wants to add an African-American baseball player to the Brookyln Dodgers. \|\|He's lying.\|\| - Pee Wee Reese also cites this as the reason why he won't sign the team's anti-Robinson boycott petition. - In Date with an Angel, Patty Winston's father Ed is willing to dump her as the face of his company because he believes that her fiance's mistress (the titular Angel) is prettier. Business is business. - District 13: The only reason that Taha's mooks put up with his tyranny is because of the paycheck. \|\|Sure enough, as soon as he loses all his money thanks to the heroes, they immediately turn on him.\|\| - In Film: 5 Fingers (1952), the butler turned spy Diello (Agent Cicero) makes it clear he cares not a whit who wins the war, and in a gesture of contempt for his German employers, demands to be paid in British pounds sterling for spying against the British. When his controller points out that when the Nazis win the war, as Diello is helping them do, British pounds will be valueless, he coolly replies that he is confident the Nazis will lose whatever he does for them. - Ghostbusters: Peter's primary motivation for starting the company ("The franchise rights alone will make us rich beyond our wildest dreams!") and Winston's motivation for signing on ("If there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say."). Naturally, this changes for both characters — Harold Ramis has said that the main character arc is Peter's turn "from shady cynic to true believer." - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Blondie, Tuco, and especially Angel Eyes. Unlike many villains with this trait it doesn't make him more sympathetic; in fact, it does just the opposite. - Happy Gilmore takes up golf initially for this purpose, with the intent of saving his grandma's house from the IRS. - Hard Rain: Jim, says this almost word-for-word several times in the film. Even in the end, when Tom thinks Jim helped save his life: Jim: You just don't get it, do you? (He grabs the money bags and puts them in his boat.) - Hustle (2022): Vince Merrick, who succeeds his father Rex as manager of the 76ers, only cares about the business side of basketball and how profitable his players are. This contrasts with the protagonists Stanley and Bo, who do what they do for their love of the sport. - Indiana Jones takes a dim view of anyone who views historic treasures by their monetary value, and the worst is likely Mac from The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, who has a viewpoint similar to Lone Star's on the Quote page: Mac: Comrade? You think this is about flags? This is about uniforms? Its about lines on a map? Indy: It's just about money, isn't it? Mac: No, not only money". A gigantic pile of money! Dont worry about what the Russians will pay us, its nothing compared to whats at Akator. An entire city of gold , its what the Conquistadors were after, for Dogs sake Jonesey! We could be richer, richer than Howard Hughes! - In Iron Man 2 Nick Fury claims that Vanko's father wanted to get rich off of the arc reactor technology, rather than use it to benefit the world. This is the reason why Howard Stark had him deported back to Russia. - In It's a Wonderful World, Guy isn't above getting $100/week even if it means taking care of an embarrassing client. - From Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior: "I'm just here for the gasoline." - In The Mechanic (1972), Charles Bronson's character says this is it. His Bastard Understudy however does it for the thrill of existing outside morals and laws, and kills Bronson's character for not living up to that image. - From The Muppet Movie: Doc Hopper: I'll double your salary. Max: ...I'll open the door. - In the Film Noir Murder, My Sweet, Philip Marlowe perfectly describes this. He outright states that he only did it for the cash. Lt. Randall: You're not a detective, you're a slot machine. You'd slit your own throat for six bits plus tax. - An example from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End: Jack Sparrow: Who are you? Tai Huang: Tai Huang. These are my men. Jack Sparrow: Where does your allegiance lie? Tai Huang: With the highest bidder. Jack Sparrow: I have a ship. Tai Huang: That makes you the highest bidder. - In The Rock, it turns out that some of Hummel's men only joined because of money, and \|\|as soon as Hummel realizes this, it's already too late.\|\| - In Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, right before the big fight, Kim says "We are Sex Bob-omb and we're here to sell out and make money and stuff." \|\|She changes her tune in the replay.\|\| - Smokey and the Bandit: When Bo explains why he and Cledus Snow are driving to Texas to bring back a truckload of Coors beer: "For the money, for the glory, and for the fun. Mainly for the money." - The Star Wars parody Spaceballs. Lone Starr and Barf originally wanted to claim the reward for rescuing Princess Vespa to pay off a debt to Pizza the Hutt. \|\|It later turns out that Pizza the Hutt ate himself to death after being trapped in his limo, which meant that Lone Starr and Barf could keep the entire reward for themselves. However, when the mission is accomplished, Lone Star realizes that he loves Vespa more than the idea of obtaining the reward, only accepting enough from her father for lunch, gas and tolls. He asks him not to tell her but he does anyway when she gets angry because he left.\|\| - In the Star Trek universe, Federation scientists and engineers such as Geordi LaForge revere Zefram Cochrane for inventing the warp drive, which allowed the Federation to form. The Cochrane that Geordi meets in Star Trek: First Contact breaks the pedestal somewhat: he invented the warp drive to get rich and had no idea what would happen because of it. - Star Wars: - Han Solo in A New Hope: "Look, I ain't in this for your revolution, and I'm not in it for you, princess. I expect to be well paid. I'm in it for the money." Or so he says. It's also justified, as he really needed the money to survive against Jabba the Hutt (let's just say that he needs a lot of money to redeem himself for not delivering spice to Jabba). - Also the reason bounty hunter Boba Fett (among others) agrees to help Darth Vader capture Han and company, as Jabba made good on his threat to "put a price on Solo's head so high, he wouldn't be able to get near a civilized system." This is averted with Boba's "father" Jango Fett when he makes a deal to become the template for the Clone Troopers. Though Jango's fee was still sizeable, another of his conditions was to have a single unaltered clone to raise as his son. - The Anthology film Solo, Han Solo's origin story, Han signs on to Tobias Beckett's team only because he wanted money to return to his homeworld of Corellia. But working with Beckett helps turn him into the legendary smuggler we know and love. - In The Last Jedi, like Han before him, DJ makes it clear that he's not interested in the Resistance's plight and is only helping them out for the chance to earn some credits. \|\|And unlike Han, he actually means it; when the operation goes belly up, DJ just cuts a deal with the First Order, telling them the Resistance's plans in exchange for a boatload of credits and a shiny new spaceship to fly away in, leaving Rose and Finn behind to be executed.\|\| - Dee Jay of the Street Fighter movie only worked for M. Bison because he promised him a fortune, and was fully aware that he was a power-mad dictator wannabe unlike the clueless Zangief. This became a case of \|\|Laser-Guided Karma as his "fortune" turns out to be stacks of worthless Bison dollars\|\|. - Tom Cody in Streets of Fire: A Rock and Roll Fable originally agreed to save his former girlfriend, singer Ellen Aim of the Attackers from Raven and his gang, The Bombers, for $10,000. \|\|After accomplishing the mission, Ellen finds out, leaving one half of her pissed off at him, and the other half feeling her love reignite.\|\| - In To Have And Have Not, the hero states that the decision to help the Free French movement is solely based on the monetary return offered. - In Tropic Thunder, Pecker is offered cash and a G5 airplane if he keeps his mouth shut in Tugg's abduction and murder. Peck: Let me get this straight. You want me to let my client of 15 years, one of my best friends, die in the jungle alone, for some money and a G5? Grossman: Yes. Peck: [pause] A G5 airplane? Grossman: Yes... and lots of money. - Juno Skinner in True Lies admits to Harold Tasker that she's only helping the terrorists because they are " well-funded raving psychotics." - When the Last Sword Is Drawn: Zig-Zagged with protagonist Yoshimura Kanichiro, who leaves his job as a dojo instructor against the orders of his lord to join the Shinsengumi under the pseudonym "Nambu Morioka". As Morioka, he cultivates the image of a money-grubbing coward, but still takes his duties and samurai honor seriously, and sends most of the money he earns back to his family. - In Woman in Gold, Holocaust survivor Maria Altmann approaches attorney Randy Schönberg for help in recovering a painting of her aunt that was stolen by the Nazis. Randy initially accepts after learning that the painting is worth $100 million, which he thinks will be good for the law firm he just started working at. However, Randy has a change of heart after accompanying Maria to Austria and visiting the Holocaust memorial in Vienna. - X-Men Film Series: - The Wolverine: - Shingen Yashida's big objective is to gain his father's inheritance. - Viper describes herself as a capitalist. - Noburo Mori is only marrying Mariko for the power and money that comes with such a connection to Shingen. - X-Men: Apocalypse: Mystique accuses Caliban of caring only about money. - Ciaphas Cain ( HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!) once runs into a bunch of saboteurs dedicated to the Tau cause who kill nearly everyone aboard a Starship Luxurious, intending to use it as a giant bomb to take out an Imperial General. Cain escapes and makes it to the escape pods, but there he meets one of the saboteurs, who reveals she's actually a burglar, looting the staterooms and leaving the others to heroically give their lives for the Tau cause. - Cradle Series: - The Eight-Man Empire are a collective Monarch, having found a way to share their powers and match the other Monarchs despite not actually being on that level themselves. They mostly use their ability to be in eight places at once to sell their services to the other Monarchs for whatever they might need. In Reaper, \|\|it is revealed that Reigan Shen bought their loyalty as part of his plan to get rid of the Dreadgods for good. Larian, one of the Empire, fully admits that they don't really think Shen can do it (or that he's being straight with them), but any shake-up to the status quo is good for them. Besides, he paid them so much\|\|. - In Dreadgod, \|\|this is subverted. The Empire realizes that Lindon's team has a chance to get rid of not only the Dreadgods, but the Monarchs as well, which would solve most of the world's problems in one fell swoop. So they team up with Emriss Silentborn, the only unselfish Monarch, to help Lindon behind the scenes despite nominally still being employed by Reigan Shen\|\|. - In the Disgaea novels we meet the Ozonne, who believe money is the solution to helping people, not love like all the other angels of Celestia. Ironic since her sister Flonne is the Love Freak. - Discworld: - The Dresden Files: - Ernest Armand "Binder" Tinwhistle, a century-old minor talent mercenary, is also a pragmatic man when it comes to payments. He accepts money and nothing else. When protagonist Harry Dresden has to work with him, Harry tries to win his loyalty by hinting at some of the political factions Harry had connections to, but Binder retorts that favors from Fae Queens and the White Council might sound nice but both groups are schemers and would twist that "favor" into an action that puts Binder in their debt or not be that helpful in the end. He also \|\|refuses a coin of the Denarians, which would put a Fallen Angel in his head in exchange for a lot more power\|\|. He prefers simple hard currency or gems as his payments. - Subverted with Goodman Grey. While he claims to be loyal to whoever hired him, his open bloodlust makes it clear what side he's really on, \|\|which makes the price he charges Harry, the one who actually hired him, all the more surprising: One dollar.\|\| - Harlan Briscor, an unseen suspect in one of Stuart Gibbs Funjungle novels is described as being the dedicated manager of two TV hosts, one a passionate environmentalist and the other and Alt-Right rabble-rouser who wants to abolish the endangered species act, meaning that he takes this attitude with at least one of them. - In Galaxy of Fear: Ghost of the Jedi, Dannik Jerriko \|\|was hired to take out Vader's assassin before she could kill the Arrandas.\|\| That's it, that's all, as soon as that's done he's gone and never mind the rest of the danger there, it's what he was paid for. - The idea that if someone's only interested in the money, you can turn them by offering more money is explored and deconstructed in Last Chance to See. Douglas Adams asks some conservationists in Zimbabwe why they don't pay the poachers not to kill rhinos. The answer is that they would still have to devote all the resources they currently use to stop the poachers towards making sure they weren't killing the rhinos anyway and claiming two paycheques. - Mistborn: The Original Trilogy has the Kandra, helping the protagonists only because they're being paid in Atium. \|\|Zig-zagged when it's learned that Atium is the condensed power of the Omnicidal Maniac god Ruin and the Kandra are stockpiling it in their caves to keep him from finding it.\|\| - In Nero Wolfe, the titular detective is very reluctant to accept a case without the promise of a big fat paycheck, due both to his incredible laziness and his expensive tastes (a rooftop greenhouse full of orchids and five star dining every night doesn't come cheap). He's not entirely without honour, however, and can sometimes be prodded into working for free if the circumstances are right. - Reserved for the Cat: Ninette has this motivation at first. It's portrayed sympathetically; it's not that she's greedy, it's that she wants to survive. - Second Apocalypse has the scalpoi, mercenaries who venture into the North and collect sranc scalps to turn in for an Imperial reward. They're considered quite unsavory, but they're helping wage a war of extermination for the survival of humanity. - A Song of Ice and Fire: - Bronn, Tyrion's dragon only works for the person who will pay him the most. Unlike some cases, Bronn is much less moral than his Anti-Hero employer, and will commit any dirty job so long as he gets a good price for it. \|\|Tyrion isn't shocked when Bronn refuses to champion him in spite of their pseudo-friendship since Tyrion's sister, Cersei, has paid Bronn much more for him to not risk his life trying to save Tyrion\|\|. - Stannis Baratheon, rightful king of Westeros, Azhor Ahai reborn, the man who stands between the world and eternal night... and the guy who can be depended on to pay back the colossal amounts of money the throne owes to the Iron Bank if he wins. As such they're all too happy to give him financial support. It just means they'll get more money in the end. - The City Watch of King's Landing, aka "the gold cloaks". Technically, they're supposed to primarily answer to the Master of Laws on the king's small council — because, you know, law and order. In reality, it mostly plays out them doing as either the Hand of the King or the Master of Coin decrees. Take a wild guess which positions have actual access to the treasury and in determining that they get their monthly take-home pay... - In Heinlein's The Star Beast, the Rargyllians while honest, are like mercenaries. They would sooner let a man die of thirst on an alien world, rather than tell him the native word for "water", unless money was first offered up-front for their services. - Played straight and discussed in the novelization of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 when Juno Eclipse tries to bribe Boba Fett to her side. While he is only in it for the money, he refuses on the grounds that the Rebel Alliance likely won't be around long enough to pay his first fee, and sticks with the Empire because he knows that their credit is good. - Inverted in The Stormlight Archive, where the Lovable Rogue Lift lends her supernatural abilities to a gang of thieves because, while they're off stealing boring old valuables, she gets to enjoy the challenge of eating well-guarded aristocrats' dinners. - The villain in the kids' book They Melted His Brain has developed highly effective subliminal messages, which he uses to advertise toys and breakfast cereals. He explains his motivations: - In Robert A. Heinlein's Time Enough for Love, Lazarus Long claims that one of the (thousands of) jobs he's held was as a mercenary, that he used it to finance his way through college, and never got higher than corporal because he was only doing it to get enough money for another semester, then he'd quit. - Tuf Voyaging: Subverted in The Plague Star, the (chronological) first story in the series. Slightly down-on-his-luck Space Trucker Havilund Tuf is hired to transport some historians and a couple of mercenaries to the location of an ancient starship full of incredibly valuable Lost Technology, and within minutes of setting foot onboard said ship literally everyone is overcome with Gold Fever and its frequent co-morbid condition Chronic Backstabbing Disorder... except Tuf, who steadfastly refuses to get caught up in the madness and insists that all he wants is to collect the second half his agreed fee for doing the job they hired him for, no more and no less. \|\|Between the infighting and the automatic security systems the rest of the party triggered through their own negligence, Tuf is the only survivor.\|\| Played straight in the rest of the stories, although Tuf isn't above employing a little malicious compliance to get back at a client who he finds particularly disagreeable. - In The Witchlands, Aeduen agrees to help Iseult find Safi because she promises to reveal the location of his stolen money, despite the fact that Corlant has ordered him to capture her. - \|\|Sergei Bazhaev\|\| in Season 8 of 24, who's only involved initial Big Bad \|\|Farhad Hassan\|\| because he's set to make lots of money selling him spent nuclear fuel rods. After he gets captured by CTU and sees his deal has fallen through, he actually tries (unsuccessfully) to help Jack recover the rods. - Spike at the end of Season 4 and the beginning of Season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. - Jayne from Firefly. He eventually becomes one of Mal's True Companions. - Game of Thrones: - Bronn makes it clear to Tyrion that he's serving him solely for the riches, even though he does consider him a friend (the pay really "enhances" their friendship, he says). When his services earn him a knighthood, he insists on a higher wage. Eventually, Bronn accepts money and an advantageous marriage to not stand champion for Tyrion in a Trial by Combat, a deal Tyrion cannot match. This later transfers onto Jaime. While Bronn becomes as close a friend with Jaime as he was with Tyrion, he still expects Jaime to pay him — in ever-larger amounts, given the increasing danger Jaime drags him into. However, he's quite a bit less Only in It for the Money on the show than in the books, where he never really becomes friends with Tyrion and makes ever-larger financial demands for increasingly lesser tasks... though he does still name new wife's child after him, so there was clearly something there. Tyrion: I thought we were friends. Bronn: We are, but I'm a sellsword. I sell my sword. I don't loan it out as a favor to a friend. - Littlefinger points out that the gold cloaks will support whoever pays their salary. - Defied with Locke: while he certainly likes money, it's ultimately not all that important to him. He'd rather just be entertained. Cutting off Jaime's hand is worth more to him than all Lord Tywin's money, and watching Brienne fight a bear with a wooden sword is worth more than all her father's sapphires (of which he actually has none). - The Second Sons are mercenaries who normally fight for gold. - Salladhor abandons Stannis after the Battle of Blackwater Bay. He gave Stannis 30 ships in return for gold from plundering King's Landing. The defeat at Blackwater meant that Stannis couldn't uphold his side of the bargain. He re-enters his service however after the Iron Bank gives Stannis a loan and Davos gives him satchels of coins with more sent to his wife. - House of Anubis: Pre-Character Development, Jerome was quite uncaring and sneaky, and did things only for his own benefit, usually monetary. The first thing he did when he decided to meet Rufus was take money from him in exchange to spy on Sibuna. He also set up "Donkey Day" in Season 2 to get money, but it was played with- he needed to pay off a Private Eye he hired to find his father, so it was much less selfish this time around. - Jeeves and Wooster: Bingo Little replies to Bertie with this when asked why he would ever tutor Oswald Glossop. Bertie: What would you want to tutor the Glossop kid for? Bingo: Money, Bertie. Moolah. Oof. Spondulicks. - A majority of the villains on Leverage. Notable examples include Marcus Starke's crew, who as a Similar Squad provide a strong contrast with the Leverage team (who are motivated equally by cash and a desire to help people), and Mr. Quinn, a mercenary hired by Sterling to give Eliot the worst beating of his life. - Miles Straume from Lost, who only joined the freighter crew because he was paid $1.6 million and would be willing to switch sides if he received a better offer. - In the Masters of Horror episode "Cigarette Burns", initially Kirby only takes the job offer to look for La Fin Absolue du Monde to pay off his enormous debts. Subverted later on as he becomes increasingly obsessed with the film itself due to its corrupting influence. This is lampshaded by Bakovic's widow who notes that the money is just an excuse. - Andamo of Mr. Lucky seems to be all about the money, all the time, though occasionally it becomes apparent that there are a few other things he prizes more highly. - Person of Interest: How Zoe Morgan presents herself to the world; it seems she actually has a Hidden Heart of Gold. - An episode of Reba made a reference to this: Reba, after watching a recorded clip of Barbra Jean with her dog: I feel bad for the poor sap who had to tape through all of this. Kyra: Eighty bucks is eighty bucks. - In Star Trek, this is basically the Ferengi's Hat, doing everything just for the pursuit of profit. They will do evil if it will land them cash, but are not willing to just do evil for evil sake. - In Veep: - Sue Wilson is persuaded to stay on only with the promise of a salary raise. - Selina Meyer herself, although in a variation, this is more about political donations rather than personal wealth: she is already loaded. Her team even comes up with codewords for donors who they feel are being stingy: HADDA note : How About Digging Deeper, Asshole? and GUMMI note : Give Us More Money, Idiot. Sue: We also have $2,000 from a guy named Paul Duffy from the local dry cleaner — Selina: Okay, for two grand, you don't get a call from me, okay? Just send him a button or something. - Subverted by Frank Zappa when he released a Mothers of Invention album entitled We're Only in It for the Money, itself the Trope Namer. The cover featured a parody of The Beatles and the whole thing was designed to satirize rock stars profiting off the counterculture. - The song "Mang Jose" by Filipino band Parokya ni Edgar sings of the titular character (Mr. Jose) as a superhero for rent. He is described as "being much like Daimos, except that he charges you after saving you". The music video shows him presenting the people he saves with a receipt right after beating up the bad guys. - Alan Jackson's "Gone Country" is an affectionate ribbing of artists who Genre Shift into country music, implying they're only doing so for financial reasons because their careers in their original genre have stalled. - In Hip-Hop, it's common for Glam Rappers to brag about not caring about anything except how much money they make. (Outside of Kayfabe Music, it's extremely uncommon for this to be the only reason someone wants to rap, and the few rappers who are only in it for the money don't tend to be very positively regarded.) - This pretty much defined Steve Corino's attitude towards then fledgling organization Ring of Honor during its early days, as he was set up in direct contrast to Christopher Daniels, who cared deeply about the promotion (read: he wanted to destroy it). - Samoa Joe joined Christopher Daniels' Prophecy only because he was paid and later defected to more liked minded Steve Corino's group. In a shocking twist he would revert to this mindset in TNA after fighting the Main Event Mafia for breaking his arm saw him go so far as to try and murder Scott Steiner. - With Samoa Joe bought, it was no surprise Jenna Morasca of the Main Event Mafia would also be able to buy off Awesome Kong. However, money only went so far and when Morasca slapped Kong (who had so far succeeded in everything asked), that put an end to all deals. - Austin Aries claimed so in TNA, proclaiming this trait made him better than Alex Shelley and Brian Kendrick, who he proclaimed only cared about making sure the fans were entertained (presumably, those two things would be directly intertwined but whatever) - This was Wade Barrett's attitude in WWE's version of FCW. However, he felt he was treated so badly on NXT that he had abandoned this motivation by the time he got to the main roster. He was now motivated by revenge. - The Devastation Corporation Sidney Bakabella led through Chikara didn't care about glory or even about championship belts. Just about hurting people and hitting the pay window. - A classic way of getting the player characters involved in a plot in games ranging from Shadowrun to Dungeons & Dragons is to have an NPC hire them to do a specific task. The NPC may pay the players directly, be authorized to waive any taxes or fees they'd have to pay on treasure they find, etc. - Basic Dungeons & Dragons adventure The Keep on the Borderlands. The ogre in the Caves of Chaos will fight for whoever pays him the most money. - The Yuggoloths from the Planescape setting are some of the best mercenaries in the multiverse, and often fight to their death for their employers (mostly because they have Resurrective Immortality). However, if you outbid their current employers, they will immediately turn their back on them. - Sentinels of the Multiverse: Greazer Clutch, a rockabilly space mercenary and bounty hunter, is something of an Anti-Villain because he doesn't have any actual hostility to anyone — he's just a guy who catches people for money. Notably, when his target is incapacitated, he'll bail on the spot in order to get them back to his client, incapacitating himself automatically — although, since his incapacitated effect is pretty nasty, this may not increase the heroes' lifespan much. - In Violence: The Roleplaying Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed, the author ("Designer X") invokes this trope, repeatedly asserting that he's only writing this game to make some money so he can pay his bills. "And I can't be bothered to do the research, I don't even what to discuss what my fucking advance is, and I'm knocking this out between projects that actually have a chance of paying my rent for the month." - Although there are both noble and malevolent Glatorian in BIONICLE, a lot of them only agree to help out others (or at least, people from other settlements) for a reward. Especially Strakk, who will partake in a battle to have an opportunity at looting the bodies. - In Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, Cipher and Pixy initially fight in the eponymous conflict for Ustio's money, as Pixy regularly reminds us on the radio. In fact, many regular forces comment on this in disdain... until both of them are so feared/revered for their accomplishments that nobody mentions it anymore (especially if you take the Knight route). \|\|The fact that Pixy goes MIA and is replaced with PJ, who is a commissioned Ustio officer, as your wingman probably contributes.\|\| - Advanced V.G.: While the other waitresses have entered tournament in the spirit of competition, Satomi's only interested in winning the prize money. She's had to support herself and her kid brother and needs the money to cover the cost of the procedure that can cure his condition. - Finn, the main character of Adventures to Go! likes the recognition that comes with completing quests, but he mainly does it because he gets paid to do so. - Many minor characters in Armored Core series is explicitly described as purely in it for the money. Since Ravens are, after all, mercenaries (or, as one of the Bureau said it, "Dispute Resolution Agents"), fighting purely for the filthy lucre isn't all that unjustified. People who do espouse this kind of view run the gamut from being simply in love with cash, greedy bastard(s) who couldn't care less about others, recently unemployed ex-blue-collar worker that needs to desperately earn a living, a notoriously spendthrifty person who uses only Energy weapons due to them not having an ammo cost, all the way to a Hitman with a Heart. This tradition is continued all the way to Armored Core: Verdict Day, where the player character is yet another mercenary eking out a living amidst the war between the Three Great Forces. - Subverted with Wynne D. Fanchon, and otherwise the majority of LYNXes in Armored Core 4/for Answer. Being one step above the rank-and-file soldiers that use MT or Normals, some of them truly takes the Honor Before Reason approach a bit far. Wong Shao-Lung: "Do you...have any pride, Wynne?" Wynne D. Fanchon: "Of course. Otherwise, aren't we simply in the business of killing?" - Also subverted with Rosary in Armored Core V. Although she started out this way, she genuinely grew to be fond of her latest clients: Fran, the daughter of a late revolutionary, and you, the player character. Then double subverted in the ending of the Order Missions, where, when asked what to do by "living for one's own sake", she immediately suggests making money as the first thing to do. - In The Babylon Project, the Raiders begin doing mercenary contract work for an unknown employer. At one point they're told to stand down from massacring civilians, and they reply they would miss out on a big payout if they did. - Borador in Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II is out to earn as much gold as possible, although his motivation is a bit less selfish than it first appears; his clan owes a massive debt to the elves, and he's just doing his bit to make sure they pay it off. Few people know his clan name, \|\|Goblinbreaker\|\|, but since avarice is his most obvious trait, he's earned the nickname 'Gold-hand' amongst people who know him. - Of the 8 assassins hired by Black Mask in Batman: Arkham Origins, only Deathstroke, Copperhead, Electrocutioner, and Deadshot care about the money. \|\|This is especially true with Deathstroke. When it's revealed that The Joker is the true mastermind (For the Evulz naturally) and there is no money involved anymore, he simply stays in his cell and refuses to get involved. Annoyed, he even says that he never would have taken the job had he known there would be no money.\|\| - In Batman: Arkham Knight, \|\|Deathstroke\|\| comes back again, and explains the reason he didn't come back earlier is that it took this long for someone to be willing/able to pay enough to be worth his time. He also says that he took payment in advance, making him "contractually obliged" to finish the job. \|\|After losing again, he declares now It's Personal and he'll kill Batman for free\|\|. - The main motivation of the LLC from Battleborn is making money. The faction only does anything as long as a profit could be made. It's the reason why the LLC split from the UPR for "Where's the profit in defending every sentient race if we can't sell our drones to everyone left in the universe?" It's so much so in fact the only reason the LLC's against Solus being darkened is that it no longer existing means no more profit. While they certainly wish to preserve the universe, if it were to come to a sudden and dramatic end however, the LLC would be the group selling tickets to the live stream to watch the last battle. - BattleTech (2018) has Kamea Arano speculate that perhaps this is why you joined her countercoup against her uncle—she pays extremely well. She does posit that your intent could also have been genuinely noble, out of concern for the suffering of the Aurigan people, or your participation could have been born of pure spite, a grudge against the Directorate for their assassination attempt on you at the start of the game and their murder of your badass mentor "Mastiff" Montgomery. - Bendy and the Ink Machine: Wally Franks is always threatening to quit his janitorial job at Joey Drew Studios, but he stays on as work conditions get progressively worse. The only thing that keeps him motivated to keep the job is the money. Considering that the studio was in business primarily through the Great Depression, it's likely that he's the variety that just needs to make a living. Wally: Also, get this, Joey had each of us donate something from our work station. We put them on these little pedastals in the break room. To help appease the gods, Joey says. Keep things going. I think he's lost his mind, but hey, he writes the checks. - Wilhelm in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! is purely mercenary and has basically no goals in life other than "make a lot of money" and "apply more cybernetics". Everyone gets a recorded ECHO log explaining why they're going to Elpis to hunt a Vault; Wilhelm's is the most direct: Recording!Jack: Hey Wilhelm, wanna come to the moon and hunt a Vault for me? Recording!Wilhelm: No. Recording!Jack: I'll pay you a couple million dollars. Recording!Wilhelm: Okay. [End Recording] Wilhelm: Yep. That's my backstory. - Bravely Default: Flying Fairy: Ciggma Khint, holder of the Spell Fencer asterisk, will only work with anyone who is willing to provide coins for his purse. He isn't above doubling or even tripping his fee, even in the middle of a battle, and will ditch his employers if they fail to pay without as much as a second thought. \|\|It's implied he became a mercenary to pay for the treatment of his daughter.\|\| - Gobi in Breath of Fire joins and stays in your party because Ryu owes him money. - Jarmen Kell, the GLA's Hero Unit in Command & Conquer: Generals, is implied to work for money rather than to further the cause. (Whatever the hell that cause is meant to be, anyway.) - Mercenaries in Crusader Kings will only fight for you if you have money and they will simply disband if you run out of money. Or worse, they'll sign on with your opponent or try to conquer some of your land. - The Bounty Hunter of Darkest Dungeon is at least partially in it for the promise of payment, which comes to a head if he is given the Paranoid or Selfish afflictions during gameplay. - In the Descent series, Material Defender is entirely in it for his paycheck from the PTMC, going so far as to grumble that he doesn't really care if they sue him for breach of contract at the start of the second game, but he's got no choice if he wants his money, despite having risked his life repeatedly through a long series of hellish robot-infested mines. Though the third game's plot involves MD working with a group out for revenge against the PTMC, during his final confrontation with Dravis, he seems more concerned with getting his payment than actually stopping the computer virus that's caused all the problems in the first place. - Disgaea 4: New angel Vulcanus is in it only for the Zenons. She's called the Angel of Avarice for a reason. \|\|Hard to say if it's to fuel the Great Flonnger or not...\|\| - The Elder Scrolls - Throughout the series, this is sometimes a trait of members of the Fighters Guild, an organization of "warriors-for-hire". There have been several instances in the series of Fighters Guild members refusing a dangerous mission, though this isn't usually an option for the Player Character if he/she wants to advance in the Guild. - In the spin-off Action-Adventure game Redguard, the protagonist is the Redguard pirate Cyrus. Cyrus' primary modus operandi is acquiring wealth and treasure, which, as a pirate, makes a lot of sense. He only got involved in the events of the Stros M'Kai uprising because it was made personal when his sister went missing. During his quest to rescue her, Cyrus unintentionally becomes the leader of the Hammerfell Rebellion against the corrupt Imperial governor of Stros M'Kai, leading them to great success. They would have named him King of the Redguards afterward, but he turned them down. - In Emerald City Confidential, Dee hires Petra to find her Runaway Fiancé. Petra admits that she only takes the case because of the large amount of money Dee offers. This is later subverted though once Dee offers more money for Petra to get involved in obtaining illegal magical items. Petra refuses. - EXTRAPOWER: Professor Ace very blatantly only follows Zophy along on adventures for the opportunity to make easy money. Though he never participates in any combat himself, he'd prefer to let everyone else do the dangerous work. Giant Fist lampshades this by having Professor Ace pick up money dropped when Zophy fights enemies, and as the Bank of Ace for all characters. Money stored in the Bank of Ace contributes to a sum of money that can be used to unlock extra characters, credits, game modes and the like, but also snazzies up the Professor Room the more money is deposited. - The Operators in the Nuka World DLC of Fallout 4 are the greediest of the three raider gangs. They dress rather smartly for a gang of spoiled misfits, their primary goal is simply to make as much caps as possible. Any material reward satisfies them, whether it's stolen or earned. - Final Fantasy: - Shadow from Final Fantasy VI is this. He requests to be paid to join the group, there is a risk that he simply leaves with every battle and he literally doesn't care about the heroes until \|\|the world is about to end where he will try a Heroic Sacrifice\|\|. From then on, he gets better thanks to Character Development. - The summon Yojimbo in Final Fantasy X must be paid for each attack he makes. Which attack he uses depends partly on how much you pay him and partly on his affection level, with higher levels resulting in stronger attacks. His affection level rises when you overpay him or when he uses a strong attack, and it drops when you underpay him or he uses a weak attack. - Yojimbo returns in Final Fantasy XIV as the boss of Kugane Castle. The main gimmick of the fight is that the actual antagonist pays Yojimbo to use his ultimate by tossing piles of gold into the arena, which you can intercept to weaken the attack. If you're foolish or clumsy enough to let Yojimbo pick up every last pile, it's a guaranteed wipe. - Fire Emblem series has the "Beowulf archetype", a mercenary working for the enemy side who can be bought over to your own with enough cash. - Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War's Beowulf is the namesake of this, recruited in Chapter 3 with a payment of 10,000 gold. - In Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, Hugh initially demands 10,000 gold as well. You can haggle him down to 5,000, but reducing his fee also means reducing his stats. Try to go lower and he'll go back to attacking you. - Farina from Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, only recruitable on Hector's route, requires 20,000 gold. Not even having her sisters talk to her will bring her over. If she is hired, most of her support conversations are bragging about how much she's getting, and her pre-Final Battle quote is reminding Hector about her pay. \|\|She's got a noble reason, though; she's trying to pay off big sister Fiora's massive debt after Fiora went against her own employer to save Farina's life.\|\| - Rennac from Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones is another example. He was with L'Arachel and Dozla at first as a part of L'Arachel's crusade against evil. He soon left the two after feeling shortchanged when he wasn't receiving any compensation (L'Arachel believes that he's doing it out of the goodness of his heart). When you meet him alone and try to recruit him with Eirika/Ephraim, he joins after you pay him 9,980 gold. However he can join for free if you use L'Arachel instead. - In Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, Volke also charges for his services — as a thief in Path of Radiance, 50 gold per lock picked; as \|\|an assassin in the same game, 50,000 one-time, and all locks picked afterward are free\|\|. Radiant Dawn plays with this characterization, however; while he does cost a 3,000 gold one-time fee for his services for the rest of the game (and you only get him very late in said game), he comes with a weapon that, by itself, normally costs about four times that, and is a worthwhile fighter in and of himself — in short, he's giving you a bargain. Volke also has a Running Gag along these lines; while he charges reasonable prices for his regular services, he charges far higher prices for "tasks" not part of his regular services (such as eating meals with the rest of the company), or to learn his real motivations—in other words, things he doesn't want to do. - Humorously subverted in Fire Emblem: Awakening. A group of assassins attack the Ylissean palace to kill the current ruler, but one thief named Gaius lets on that they were only told to kill her once they were five feet from her room, and he was led to believe they were just robbing her blind and he really doesn't want her to die. If the player has the ruler's younger brother Chrom talk to Gaius, he explains his situation to Chrom, who offers to have him join the good side. Gaius says he'll only do it for pay. Chrom is a little peeved at this, but reaches for some cash anyway, only to drop a bag; Gaius looks inside and, accompanied by the delightful voice clip of "sugar...", decides to defect to the good side if he gets to keep the bag. The contents of said bag? Candy that Chrom was keeping for his other sister, Lissa. Double Subverted when he says "don't worry about the gold — I'll take that later." Triple Subverted when he says quite obsessively "Unless you have more candy. DO YOU!?"; Chrom says he'll check with his sister, securing his spot as the thief on your party. - Goldfinger's Hong Kong contact in Goldeneye Rogue Agent, who was supposed to provide you with a souped-up sniper rifle to kill Dr. No. "Goldfinger pays me well...but Dr. No pays me better!" - Grand Theft Auto: - Tommy Vercetti from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is in theory only in it for the money, due to his boss's three million dollars getting stolen during a drug deal gone awry. He does build loyalty with some people, though. In turn, Ray Liotta said he voiced Tommy Vercetti for the money. Which is the opposite of irony. Possibly. - Franklin Clinton in Grand Theft Auto V. Franklin starts off a down-to-earth street hood but after doing a heist with Michael de Santa and Lester Crest, Lester begins tapping Franklin to perform hits on his behalf to manipulate the stock market. Franklin goes through with it but when Lester attempts to justify his actions as being for the greater good, Franklin brushes him off and replies that he's only looking for a good payday and that there's no way to whitewash how unpleasant his task is. - A major plot point in H.A.W.X., where the player works for the PMC Artemis. After spending significant capital to get a defense contract with Brazil, tensions flare between that country and a terrorist organization, prompting the United States to assist with military force. Facing loss of profit (a defense contractor loses out when they're not the primary defense force anymore), Artemis makes the illegal decision to switch sides mid-conflict to support the terrorists, who are paying them more. They then go completely off the walls when they decide to attack US forces in retaliation for the loss of their profit margin (and also to hold the country ransom). - This applies to just about every playable character in the Jagged Alliance series to a greater or lesser extent, as well as quite a few of the non-Mook enemies. Exaggerated by "Mike", the top-tier (and top price note : Most mercenaries demand a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a day, with the second most expensive mercenary starting at $5,500 a day. Mike starts at $12,000 a day, which would get you a full team of qualified mercenaries easily) mercenary from the first game; in-game flavour text from the sequel states that he's parted ways with the Association of International Mercenaries because they were tired of his ridiculous salary demands. \|\|Not altogether surprisingly, he turns up working for the other side.\|\| - In Jedi Outcast, Kyle Katarn sarcastically asks Reelo Baruk what a decent crime lord like him is doing associating with the likes of Desann and the Imperial Remnant, and Reelo answers "Making money, of course." He's probably indifferent to who ends up ruling the galaxy. - Magnus in Kid Icarus: Uprising. Apparently, he's willing to fight the forces of an evil god for it. - Seems to be a Subverted Trope when Palutena discusses his motivation and you see his personal ties to the villain of the chapter. He also seems to actually be doing hero work later on, but it's implied his appearance in \|\|Chapter 24 is just him being hired again, this time to face off against Pit, though again it's for the benevolent purpose of making sure he's worthy.\|\| - In Kingdom Hearts II, Yuffie mutters that she's going to send a bill to a woman for their service of saving her from a bunch of Shadows. Leon calls her out on this. - While many Champions in League of Legends are motivated to fight for their city or for influence and power, Sivir is motivated solely by material wealth and riches and has become one of the richest people on Valoran. She no longer works for Noxus after objecting to their war on Ionia; not on moral grounds, but simply because she foresaw that the war would end in a stalemate. - Your Mii gets into trading in Market Crashers to become the wealthiest Mii in the world, just for the sake of it. - Mass Effect 2: - MechWarrior 2 Mecenaries: this is unsurprisingly pretty much your character's only apparent motivation. Summed up rather well during the game's intro movie when your commander fails to make it back to the dropship in time. Right after she's killed and the screen starts to fade to black, the dropship captain tells you "Look at the bright side, kid. You get to keep all the money." - No surprise it shows up again in 4: Mercenaries. Castle will occasionally comment on Spectre's various choices of employers, and his responses include things like "We're here for the payday, not the politics" or "That's the mercenary's lot — we go where the pay is." - In Mega Man Battle Network, Dark Miyabi and Shadowman.EXE are this. They only care about being paid enough, not about the ethics of their employer. - Mortal Kombat has their fair share of people who work only for money: Kano, Kabal, Kira, Kobra and Erron Black, with Erron mentioning it when against Raiden. - Bile, the Payday Gang's primary pilot in PAYDAY 2 appears to operate this way. This is most noticeable in the "Aftershock" heist, which takes place in Los Angeles during an 8.8 earthquake. As he is flying to extract the gang towards the end of the heist, he can mention that the authorities are trying to ask him to use his helicopter to help extract injure civilians. He refuses, noting that injured civs don't pay as much as the gang does. - In Persona 5, the second Arc Villain Ichiryusai Madarame is a painter and serial plagiarist who only sees art as a tool to make money. His pupil Yusuke, who paints for the sake of beauty, is utterly disgusted when he finds out what his mentor really thinks of art. - The Vailian Trading Company in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, which actually helps their case when compared to Rautai. They don't want to trample the Huana culture like the Ruataians do, they just want to do business. And while they're a morally grey bunch, many of them even do so honestly. \|\|Though their willingness to overlook the slave trade is a bit of an issue, they can be convinced it's better to wipe the slavers out.\|\| - Almost averted in the Ratchet & Clank series. When the Thug Leader is discussing a service with a client \|\|opposed to their current employer Angela\|\|, he initially declines until he's offered a lot of money. - Nicholai from Resident Evil 3: Nemesis stands out from other villains in the series for having no grandiose plans of world domination and couldn't care less about Umbrella's larger schemes; he just wants to complete the job they sent him to Raccoon City to do, collect his big-ass paycheck for it, and kill anyone or anything that either gets in the way of that, or can make that paycheck even bigger by being dead. The remake makes him into a bit more of a Card-Carrying Villain, but his primary goal is still to make a huge pile of dough. - In Shadowrun Returns dialogue choices allow you to roleplay this way, and the game encourages it by having some times when the only way to get payment for services awarded is to directly ask for it. - Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey: - Jimenez admits outright that he volunteered just because of the pay (he's contrasting himself to the various more idealistic members of the Schwarzwelt expedition). We're not exactly talking the most pleasant human on the planet here... - Captain Jack and his mercenary squad are the same way, but unlike Jimenez, they're actual villains. - The Wealth aspiration from The Sims 2: most of their wants will revolve around either earning ever more money or spending that money on lavish objects to use or show off. They may want to make friends or build up their skills, but only as a means to get that next promotion at their job, raising their earning power even more. - Lawrence the helmsman in Skies of Arcadia makes it clear that he doesn't give a damn about Vyse's goal, but he'll follow him to the ends of the earth as long as he's paid. Lawrence: If I had known how big this job was going to be, I would have asked for more than 10,000 gold... - In Sonic Adventure 2, Rouge the Bat appears to be this at first, going into action to get her hands on the Master Emerald, but she's actually \|\|a government spy trying find out what Dr. Eggman is up to. Although she still insists on getting paid for her services.\|\| - In Sonic Heroes, Team Chaotix is initially reluctant but is spurred into action when their client offers to "pay them handsomely" — they are working for \|\|Dr. Eggman\|\|, and Vector knows it, but they are perpetually broke and desperately need the money. They ultimately manage to obtain two Chaos Emeralds and are the extra nudge Sonic needs to defeat the final boss. \|\|Eggman WAS going to pay them, but only after he had taken over the world. Vector has had enough of him and forcibly removes the money from his pockets. By that, he means getting revenge on Eggman for forgetting not to pay him.\|\| In a subversion, Vector, according to his background, is willing to do anything for money, but he usually does it when there's good deeds involved and he also has a sense of justice as well. - In Sonic Riders, the Babylon Rogues are thieves who are in it for the treasure. Eggman signs them onto his scheme by offering to help them uncover their ancient ancestral Babylonian treasure. \|\|When the Rogues discover from digging through Eggman's digital diary that the "treasure" isn't actually gold or gems but rather Lost Technology that could possibly be used for world domination, Jet isn't even mad but more disappointed as he gets ready to pull out of the scheme, admitting to his disinterest. It takes Wave pointing out this Lost Technology could be worth a lucrative payday to get him fired back up for taking it out from under Eggman\|\|. - Another EA/Maxis example would be the Trader philosophy from Spore. - Star Trek Online: The Letheans and Nausicaans are mercenaries who joined the Klingon Defense Force because they're being paid. - The Bounty Hunter class in Star Wars: The Old Republic is a cross of this and Glory Seeker. They sure as hell aren't loyal to the Empire, and have very little reason to be (especially if you play non-human). Your alignment determines if you're a Hitman with a Heart, a Psycho for Hire, or a Consummate Professional. - Depending on how the player chooses to play the Smuggler class, they can be helping the Republic because they feel it's the right thing to do, or just for the money. - Balrog from Street Fighter operates entirely on what will earn him the biggest paycheck. Once his boxing career derailed he became a full-fledged criminal in Shadaloo because Bison was paying so well. The promise of money is a good way to keep him in his place since he's otherwise none too bright. - Dex from the webgame Strike Force Heroes 2 is the only member of the title team who isn't in it for the cause. \|\|He turns out to be the one tipping off their enemies, the evil organization Globex, for cash. He kills West, the General of the team, and Professor Iagi, whose research the team was counting on against Globex's clones, but is ultimately killed by the Globex Leader, who considered him a great pawn, but too expensive to keep around\|\|. - Ninja Kage from Suikoden is willing to do anything (robbery, murder, deliver messages), as long as he's being paid. In the first Suikoden, you even have to pay him to join you (and he leaves as soon as his contract is up). - The Striker in Sword of the Stars: The Pit is a mercenary on Arbuda IV only to search for phat lewt, in contrast with the other characters who are either there under orders or because It's Personal. - Tales of Destiny: Rutee's only ever into anything for the money, including community service. At least she has a reason for it; \|\|the orphanage she grew up in will get shut down if it doesn't repay a huge debt.\|\| - Tales from the Borderlands kicks off this way. Rhys, Vaughn, and Yvette are after the vault key because they want to take back the promotions that their new boss stole out from under them. Sasha, Fiona, and Felix make a fake vault key as their biggest con yet, the one that will set them up for life. Everyone wants one thing: to get unbelievably, mouth-wateringly rich. As time goes on, however, Rhys, Vaughn, Sasha, and Fiona all come to deeply care about each other and think of themselves as a family while tracking down the vault, and so the goal changes to everyone getting rich together. - Pierre, Lara's rival in Tomb Raider, raids tombs for artifacts like Lara does. However, Pierre only raids tombs for the money while Lara does it for appreciation of the past. - The Goblin Alchemist hero in Warcraft III has "For the highest bidder!" as his war cry. - Warframe: The Corpus, being a shameless Mega-Corp who worship the very concept of Profit, do this a lot. They're even infamous for selling weapons to their own enemies. Part of this is because the Corpus is made up of multiple merchant-kings and guilds who might have different alliances, but most of it is just that they will literally sell anything to anyone. - Wario in general. Pretty much any time he's trying to do something it's either to get some treasure or the reclaim the stuff stolen from him, and anything else that happens (i.e. saving the world) is a side effect. (And his rival Captain Syrup is even worse.) - While the Teladi in the X-Universe have a very respectable military and rather large industrial capability, as well as having their entire society organized like a Mega-Corp, their borderline obsession with profitsss makes it clear that they are this trope; although it shouldn't be discounted that they are a Proud Merchant Race. It's not surprising to see some rogue Teladi operate as pirates who do whatever unscrupulous activity possible, and all in the name of the almighty buckzoid. The encyclopedia explains that this is mostly only true of Teladi spacefarers, however: planetside Teladi exhibit much more variation and can be as cynical or as selfless as any human. - Area X: Elcia isn't interested in Project Recovery, she just accepted the job as a Time Negotiator because it paid well. - Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: Akane Owari is the Ultimate Gymnast, but she mentions that she only became a gymnast in order to win lots of money from competitions by setting records. The Ultimate title is because even though she only does gymnastics for the money, she also happens to be really good at it. It makes a little more sense when you learn about her backstory and find out that she grew up very poor with many siblings and never knew where her next meal was coming from, so she had to do some demeaning work just to have enough to eat. She just wants enough money to never have to worry about food again. - In Sickness, this is how Suoh justifies some of his criminal activity, at least towards the beginning. - The Karate Duo (Numbah One) from Bowser's Kingdom show off this trope. - Frogfucius chastises them for embodying this trope in Episode 9. - They only help Hal and Jeff in The Movie because Jeff is gonna pay them. - In Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers, the gang only agreed to attend university after being told graduating would grant them loads of money. They're not too pleased when SMG4 tells them they now have to get jobs after graduation, leading everyone to beat him up. - Achilles Shieldmaidens: Invoked by the Shieldmaidens' recruiter, Colonel Max Nichols, who specifically wanted pilot candidates who needed the job and therefore "wouldn't blow their chance by talking about the program." Emily Doyle grew up poor and the job pays well. Nia Davis says something similar when asked why she wanted to join, though she also says she caught the bug from her father, a mecha test pilot. - In Elf Blood, mercenary information saleswoman Carlita Delacroix sells to both sides of the central conflict and is very open about this. She even requests a down payment on information that would ultimately be used to help save a dying client's life. - In El Goonish Shive, during "Nanase Craft And The Crypt of Zappiness", Nanase will only go adventuring for millons of dollars. - I Don't Want This Kind of Hero: The primary reason why Naga became an official superhero — in today's society, it's a paying job (otherwise, as he points out, classic superheroism was really just hardcore volunteer work). - In Lucid Spring, Viktor describes his job as being this, though he seems like a genuinely considerate person at the same time. - Marble Gate Dungeon: This is Coleen's motive for delving into the titular dungeon, though with a more heroic twist as she wants the money to pay the taxes for her impoverished village and generally give them a better life. - In No Rest for the Wicked, November, realizing Perrault has no nobility, offers gold. - In The Order of the Stick, Haley starts out with treasure as her main motivation. While she does have a very good reason to gather large amounts of gold, even before then she was greedy. Though she does have a noble streak, and in one case funded a resistance movement out of her own pocket. She's since grown out of it and is now trying to do good just for its own sake (in part because of Elan's influence on her). - Miron, one of Tarquin's associates, appears to be mainly motivated by money. \|\|He was the one responsible for Haley's money motivation by holding her father for ransom.\|\| - In Schlock Mercenary, Tagon's Toughs play this to the hilt. The one time they weren't, the Reverend thought Tagon had developed a conscience, until he realized Tagon just hated \|\|Xinchub\|\| more than he wanted the money. It makes Tagon in particular very easy to manipulate: if you give him the chance to get paid twice for something, he will take it unless it is overtly suicidal, and even then he'll have the brains trust take a look at it to see if there's a way to handle it. Dr Bunnigus: We'd all feel really bad if the local biosphere got consumed by nanobots after we left. Tagon: We'd still get paid, right? - While she's not only in it for the money, Sylvia in Sleepless Domain is certainly the one who exploits the 'magical girls as celebrites' status to make more money the most. Justified as it's revealed \|\|after her death\|\| that she was the sole breadwinner in her household. - Stand Still, Stay Silent: Torbjörn organized the very first expedition in a Forbidden Zone in ninety years to salvage very valuable Old World books and sell them on the black market for a large sum of money. The only reason the crew is doing any kind of scientific reasearch is that this is the official reason for which the expedition got funding. - SCP Foundation: Marshall, Carter, & Dark of the SCP universe are only interested in SCPs for the massive profits they make off selling the stuff to the rich, unlike the other organizations, most of whom are Well Intentioned Extremists (the others being a few insane cults, a group which makes paranormal toys, and a group which makes paranormal Dadaist art). They're also the only "organisation of interest" on the list who have willingly surrendered an anomalous object to the Foundation, considering it so exceptionally dangerous that even they won't take money from anyone insane or evil enough to buy it. After all, The End of the World as We Know It would be terribly bad for business. - Conversed in the SF Debris review of Star Trek: First Contact (see Film, above). Off of the Enterprise crew's surprise that Zefram Cochrane invented the warp drive to get rich, Chuck points out that a lot of major historical scientists and engineers and whatnot weren't thinking of much beyond how much money they could make from it. - The Cry of Mann: Frank teamed up with Gergiev at the promise of getting rewarded for his efforts in destroying Mann Corp., expecting a large sum of money and asking for it often. - Punz from the Dream SMP is a mercenary, most often hired by Dream. He was willing to do pretty much any dirty work for Dream, from helping him in combat to espionage, as long as Dream paid him, and he was The Dragon to Dream for a long time. However, right before the final Disc War, Tommy left him a chest full of valuables in his base, with signs asking him to stay on Tommy's side. Punz took the money, and not only stopped aiding Dream, but rallied together a team of fourteen people and led them right to Dream's secret vault, where they saved Tommy and Tubbo's lives. Punz: I'm sorry, Dream. But you should've paid me more. - Michael Bay states that this is his motivation during his appearence in Epic Rap Battles of History. To quote: Michael Bay: "If there's one thing I learned, bitch /This game's about /Motherfucking money!/ I make that dollar, y'all/ Motherfucking money!/Even make Mark Wahlberg/ Make some motherfucking money!" - Idiotsitter: - Billie is hired to babysit the adult Gene as a mixture of legal guardian/nanny/tutor. Being a Harvard grad, she is quite resistant-but she is also quite poor, and is swayed by Gene's father eventually offering double his original price. Slowly, she starts to actually like Gene. - "Fight Day" has a textbook example of this trope at work. Billie: We're going go in there and tell her that this is over, because it is a terrible and violent tradition. Mr. Russel: Yes it is. It is terribly cleansing and violently healing, and if you don't do this, you're not part of the Russel family. Billie: I'm not part of the Russel family! Mr. Russel: I'll give you a thousand dollars. Billie: Let's go beat up your daughter. - Oxventure: In the Dungeons & Dragons game, Andy's character, Corazon, is motivated primarily by the possibility of loot. Alfred: note : the questgiver And it's probably worth lots of money! Andy: The magic words!	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyInItForTheMoney
Full-Name Basis - TV Tropes "Dear John Freeman, how are you? I miss you at home, come home safe and soon with Gordon Freeman for thanksgiving dinner. Love mom." Some characters will stick to formal address, some go straight for the First-Name Basis. Others don't even bother with names. When none of these will do, and the character is not No Name Given or The Trope without a Title, you get the Full Name Basis. This is a good sign that the character might be a Fish out of Water. Sometimes it is used just because the full name sounds more cool or intimidating, or at least the user believes that it does (especially when it's the user's own name). Obviously, if someone is on a Full Name Basis, a Full-Name Ultimatum loses its effectiveness. A common subversion is for a character to have their name misinterpreted. This can get really long if said character is also The Magnificent (combining both these tropes leads to Large Ham Title). See Significant Name Shift. ## Examples: - The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: Nano Eiai refers to everyone she knows by their full name. - Kaori Sakiyama of Air Master; everyone says her full name. It helps that she's a force of nature who can match any martial artist except the main character not through training, but sheer unadulterated crazy. - Asura Cryin': Reishirou Saeki does this with just about everyone, including Tomoharu Natsume, Misao Minakuni, and Shuri Kurosaki. - Ayakashi Triangle: Soga is so impersonal, he calls even close acquaintances by their full name (just their last if he wants to be brief). Bizarrely, he also applies this to himself—not just when introducing himself, but for internal monologues. - In Barakamon, everyone calls Shin Yoshida by his full name, for no particular reason. - William T. Spears of Black Butler seems to address most people by their full names... including himself. Always. - Bleach: - Ichigo Kurosaki and Byakuya Kuchiki seemed unable to not refer to the other as such during their fight. They said each other's full names 20 times. Afterwards, when it was clear they were no longer enemies, Ichigo dropped the last name (to Byakuya's chagrin) and Byakuya kept calling him by his full name. In the dub, at the points where Ichigo calls Byakuya by name when he doesn't in the original, he sometimes just uses Byakuya's first name; for example, midway through Episode 57, he says "You haven't put a scratch on me yet, Byakuya!" - Ulquiorra also calls Ichigo and Orihime by their full names, when not calling them "Shinigami" or "woman", respectively, and also once refers to Rukia by her full name. Though in Byakuya and Ulquiorra' case, they were intentionally trying to be dicks. Likewise, Ichigo was trying to be a dick up until he beat down Byakuya's sorry ass. - Mayuri Kurotsuchi briefly complains about Ichigo addressing him by his full name without an honorific, but notes that it's better than a First-Name Basis. - The Zanpakutou in the filler arc tend to refer to people other than their owners by full name, and Sode no Shirayuki tends to exclusively refer to Rukia as "Kuchiki Rukia". - When they were enemies Ishida also used to address Ichigo by his full name. He stopped doing that after they became allies and friends. - After the end of the Soul Society Arc, Aizen changed his hairstyle, and his way of speech as well. It became colder and more formal, changing his personal pronoun (from boku to watashi) and changing the way he refers to others. Aside for his minions, he now calls everyone (except his subordinates) by their full name - it sounds really cold. - Death Note: - Light refers to Raye Penber by his full name, and does the same to many of his victims. It is justified, however, as his full name would need to be remembered and written in the Death Note. - L calls Light either "Light-kun" or "Yagami-kun". However, when doing internal monologues and wondering whether he is Kira or not, he'll refer to Light by his full name, usually with it preceding the rest of the sentence. - Digimon Universe: App Monsters has Rei Katsura, who addresses anyone other than his brother Hajime by their full name ("Shinkai Haru", "Oozora Yuujin" etc.). Depending on the situation, it either comes off as rather intimidating or, more often than not, incredibly silly, especially when Rei joins the Appli Drivers team for good. - Fairy Tail has Mard Geer, the Underworld King of Tartaros; even he calls himself as "Mard Geer", signifying how high and mighty he is. \|\|It's later revealed that his true full name is "Mard Geer Tartaros", which he starts using after entering his Etherious form\|\|. - Fullmetal Alchemist: - Scar addresses everyone he speaks to either by their full name or their state alchemist title. Al is one of the few that don't have both and wis thus always addressed by Scar as "Alphonse Elric". Which sounds rather awkward at times... - Major Armstrong also tends to refer to Edward by his full name whenever conversing with him. - Führer King Bradley is rarely referred to as just Fuhrer Bradley. Having "Fuhrer" for a title and "King" for a first name is just doubly badass. - In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) Van Hohenheim is constantly referred to as "Hohenheim of Light", which was almost exclusively treated as if it (or "That Bastard" by Edward) was his true name. - The English dub of Garzey's Wing has a particularly Narmful example in which the main character will always refer to Yamato Takeru no Mikoto in full, even after getting knocked back in combat. - Gundam: - In Mobile Suit Gundam, Frau Bow is more likely to be called by her full name than just Frau. - And over in Mobile Suit Gundam 00, Tieria Erde refers to other people by their full names more often than not. - Setsuna also does this so much. "Marina Ismail..." and "Saji Crossroad..." might as well be his catchphrase. - Between the two, Setsuna and Ribbons also only refer to each other by using their Full Name. It's never just "Setsuna" or "Ribbons". - In fact, the Gundam Meisters usually end up referring to not only the other Meisters but themselves a lot this way. As shown in the quote above, Shinn gets annoyed by it. - And how could we forget Graham Aker, screaming in anguish as his favourite wingman is shot down: HOWARD MASON!!!!!!!!!!!! - Domon Kasshu from Mobile Fighter G Gundam is usually refereed to with both his names by almost everyone. - Somewhat in Haruhi Suzumiya. Nagato never calls people by their name, but when she refers to someone, she always uses the full name. Except for Kyon, who she's never addressed as anything but "you". - Takane from the anime version of THE iDOLM@STER has the tendency to call people with their full name. - Vice of Karakuridouji Ultimo tends to refer to Yamato as "Agari Yamato". - The arrogant fighter Tokita Ohma from Kengan Ashura only addresses his manager Yamashita Kazuo as such, even when Kazuo told Ohma to be more casual and everyone else that he even bothers calling by name as well, those usually are the people he doesnt to beat into a pulp, so in his case it is his own way of being polite. - In Kill la Kill, Ryuko Matoi and Satsuki Kiryuin refer to each other by full name whenever they're not on a Last-Name Basis, as an indication of their enmity. \|\|When it turns out that not only do they have a common enemy but are also sisters, they switch to a First-Name Basis, since Ryuko finds herself unable to refer to Satsuki as "Nee-san" or "Sis".\|\| - In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, most people address or refer to Jail Scaglietti by his full name, with the only exceptions being his Numbers Cyborgs and Lutecia. Precia Testarossa is also addressed by Chrono like this, so one could assume that Time-Space Administration Bureau personnel in general treat all criminals in this way. - Chrono once addresses Fate by her full name late in the original series, presumably due to her status as a criminal. Vita addresses Nanoha by her full name throughout A's, (and usually gets her given name wrong on purpose), but switches to First-Name Basis by StrikerS. Signum similarly calls Nanoha "Takamachi Nanoha" in the third A's sound stage but switches to "Nanoha" after getting to know her better. - In Mitama Security: Spirit Busters, everyone always calls Rena Haze by her full name regardless of if they're long-time acquaintances or if they've just met her. She is the only character with this trait, and there's no explanation for it. - My Dress-Up Darling: Sajuna "Juju" Inui always refers to Wakana Gojo and Marin Kitagawa by their full names. This is due to her more professional and distant attitude, as she's not interested in making friends in the cosplay scene. - In My Hero Academia, Kurogiri always calls Tomura Shigaraki by his full name. - Aizawa Nagisa from My Monster Secret calls everyone by their full name, even her friends, which emphases her Comically Serious character. - Maria Gracebert of My-Otome tends to address students by their full names, although Arika is sometimes just "Arika" to her. - In Naruto, the Sand Siblings typically refer to Naruto by his full name. Since all of them have only one name (Gaara's "Of the Desert" title doesn't count), Naruto is technically doing the same to them. - One Piece: - When he first joins, Franky is the only Straw Hat that refers to Nico Robin by her full name. He eventually switches to First-Name Basis as they become closer friends. - Zoro referred to Robin by her first name after she joined, but when it seemed she had betrayed the crew, Zoro used her full name when referring to her, to show his mistrust. When the truth came out and he fought to save her, he switched back to First-Name Basis. - Villains always call Zoro and Robin by their full names ("Roronoa Zoro" and "Nico Robin", respectively) when they address them. This also goes for Luffy in the few times when they don't just call him by his nickname. - With Luffy, when he is not called by his first name or "Straw Hat", it is always Monkey D. Luffy, but never just Monkey Luffy. That is because the D is very important. - In Panzer World Galient, the majority of the characters meeting Hy Shaltat always address to him by his full name. - In Pokémon: The Series this happens occasionally when characters are introduced, usually starting with: "Hi, I'm Ash Ketchum, of Pallet Town." Soon after, almost every other character in the vicinity begins rifling off names. This is due to Ash's Japanese name ("Satoshi") being three syllables long. - Kirihara always calls The Prince of Tennis by his full name. He is questioned about this in at least one of the spin-off video games. - Homura Akemi of Puella Magi Madoka Magica refers to almost everyone except Madoka by their full name, with no honorifics. \|\|It seems to be part of her facade, reflecting her distance from the others compared with previous timelines\|\|. Kyuubey is also known to do this, but not all of the time. - Tatewaki and Kodachi Kunō in Ranma ½ have a tendency to do this in most cases, generally with the only exceptions to the rule being that they tend to refer to each other with very sarcastic terms of endearment. The other exception would be Ranma himself, whom Kodachi refers to as "Ranma darling". - RIN-NE: Rinne Rokudo toward Sakura Mamiya. - Masuda Eiji's previous work Sakura Discord has Sumiyoshi, who calls the main character Sakura Kousuke by his full name, as she finds him somewhat intriguing. Sumiyoshi could actually be considered a prototype of Aizawa on several aspects. - Self-proclaimed mermaid Umino in Satou Kashi no Dangan wa Uchinukenai always refers to the protagonist Nagisa as "Nagisa Yamada", even in the most mundane of conversations. - Shugo Chara!'s Misaki Watarai persists in calling the protagonist "Hinamori Amu". - Ayako of Slam Dunk always refers to Sakuragi by his full name. Strange, considering Hanamichi Sakuragi doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. - Xellos of Slayers always drawls out Lina Inverse's full name. - Unless this is something unique to a dub version, Xellos has hardly ever used Lina's full name. He usually calls her "Lina-san". - Valgaav calls Lina Inverse by her full name. He talk to her in a rather harsh way because she killed his master, Gaav, and he resents her deeply for this. - In Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee, most characters are on a First-Name Basis, but they will sometimes switch to addressing others by their full names, often when exceptionally serious. - In Tokyo Mew Mew, most of Zakuro's admirers call her "Fujiwara Zakuro". - In the parent series Triangle Heart 3, Elise MacGaren once addresses Miyuki as "Miyuki Takamachi"—with her given name first, even while speaking Japanese. - In Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, Yuya Sakaki and Reiji Akaba refer to each other by their full names until the finale of the second season. - Karin from Yuki Yuna is a Hero originally called Yuna "Yuki Yuna" due to her aloof personality. She eventually stopped. - Ayano Sugiura from YuruYuri refers to everyone with normal naming patterns, except for one. TOSHINO KYOUKO! - Stephen Stills from Scott Pilgrim. - Dead Girl did this a lot when she first joined X-Force/X-Statix. - In W.I.T.C.H., the Lins (Yan and Hay) are always referred to by their full name. (Though, a few teachers have been shown addressing Hay Lin as "Miss Lin".) - Tomoe Ame from Usagi Yojimbo is always called that, which would seem normal given the Jidaigeki setting except that other major characters (Usagi and Gen, for example) use given names. - Porker Lewis from Sonic the Comic is almost always referred to by his full name. \|\|His friends later learn that isn't his real name.\|\| - Charlie Brown in Peanuts is mostly addressed this way. Exceptions are Eudora (who calls him "Charles"), Peppermint Patty (who calls him "Chuck"), and Marcie (who goes back and forth between the two). His sister Sally calls him "Big Brother", because at the very least calling him by her own family name would be odd. Strangely enough, however, in the Thanksgiving episode, he refers to himself as "Charlie Brown" when speaking to his grandmother on the phone. note : He was pretty nervous in that scene, though, leading to the mixup. In many post-1970 strips, Snoopy refers to him as "the Round-Headed Kid", suggesting he doesn't even know, or has forgotten, his name. note : It's even possible that he simply chooses not to refer to him by name, or only refers to him by name when he feels like it. Also, in a 1990 storyline, Charlie Brown's summer girlfriend Peggy Jean calls him "Brownie Charles", because that's how he nervously introduces himself. At one point in the Christmas Episode, Lucy demonstrates a moment of frankness by saying "Look, Charlie." This is probably the only time anyone addresses him simply by his preferred nickname. - Marcie is very formal and calls everyone by their proper first names, including not only the aforementioned "Charles" but also "Lucille" for Lucy and "Patricia" for Patty (on the rare occasions she calls her something other than "sir.") - Peppermint Patty, for that matter, is almost always called that, in full. - Aaron Hill in Luann very rarely gets referred to as simply "Aaron." If Luann and her friends know any other Aarons to justify them having to differentiate, those characters have never been revealed. More recently, Ann Eiffel has been subject to this. - In Turning Red, Carter Murphy-Mayhew is the only character referred to this way. - People of the future in Demolition Man always refers to each other by their full names, most noticeably when they address John Spartan. - The titular Starman was a Fish out of Water who referred to Jenny Hayden not only by her full name, but as if it were one word. "JennyHayden." - In the Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie The Phantom Planet, one of the alien women refers to Earth astronaut Frank Chapman as "Frankchapman", because, apparently, surnames are unheard of on a planet with only thirty people. - Will always calls Lee "Lee Carter" in Son of Rambow. - In Avatar, Jake Sully is often referred to by his full name by the Na'vi, often as one word (With the exception of his love interest). This could be because they have Only One Name. - In the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, Gary Murray, the school principal. In the screenplay, Joss Whedon compared him to Charlie Brown — you always have to say his full name. - Used (at first) for laughs in the Biopic Temple Grandin; autistic Temple has trouble staying in her new room since she doesn't feel like it's hers. Her aunt puts a sign on the door that reads "TEMPLE'S ROOM", only for Temple to come back later and write "TEMPLE'S Grandin ROOM." It takes a not so funny turn when it becomes a plot driver for Temple inventing the 'Hug Machine.' - Don't forget Temple's greeting every single time, "My name is Temple Grandin!" It's even the first line of the film. - In Small Soldiers, after a bad introduction, Archer thinks Alan's name is "Alannowshutup", a mistake that is quickly cleared up. - The Wu-Tang Clan play themselves in a skit in Coffee and Cigarettes. They immediately recognize their server as Bill Murray, and address him by full name at every opportunity. - Harry Potter: - Luna Lovegood typically refers to Harry Potter by his full name. - Dobby does this as well, mixed with Third-Person Person. As does Voldemort, for the most part. - Haggis the witch from the Pumpkinhead series always refers to everyone who contacts her by their full name. In her case it's probably to emphasize that she's nobody's friend. - In Terminator Genisys, the T-800 always calls everyone by their full name, \|\|except for a part near the end where he tells Kyle, "Protect my Sarah."\|\| - The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming: Lieutenant Rozanov, off a grounded Soviet sub, encounters one Walt Whittaker who volunteers his name last name first, and Rozanov refers to him thereafter as "Whittaker Walt". - Twilight Zone: The Movie: In "Kick the Can", Mrs. Dempsey always refers to her late husband as Jack Dempsey. - In Star Trek Beyond, Jaylah combines this with the person's nickname, always referring to the Enterprise engineer as "Montgomery Scotty". - In the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Kylo Ren consistently refers to Han Solo by full name, likely in an attempt to \|\|distance himself from his father and own birth name.\|\| He continues to do this until \|\|his HeelFace Turn, in which he finally refers to him as "Dad".\|\| - In Christopher Robin, "Robin" is the title character's surname (even though his real-life namesake's surname was "Milne," and "Robin" was his middle name), making him an example of this trope. - Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: When Lex Luthor finally meets Superman face to face and has learned his secret identity, Lex repeatedly calls him "Clark Joseph Kent". - The basis for a Japanese rakugo story involving a child whose parents struggle to come up with a suitable name for him; by the time they are finished, he's gained a mouthful — Jugemu-jugemu Gokonosurikire Kaijarisuigyo-no Suigyomatsu Unraimatsu Furaimatsu Kunerutokoroni-sumutokoro Yaburakojino-burakoji Paipopaipo-paiponoshuringan Shuringanno-gurindai Gurindaino-ponpokopino-ponpokonano Chokyumeino-chosuke. And it is said in full every single time. note : This was the inspiration for Lakitu's Japanese name (Jugemu; or "Jugem"). Additionally, the Spiny eggs he throws are called "Paipo". - David Tench, Australia-based Channel 10's short-lived computer-generated parody of American talk-show hosts, had the habit of speaking to his celebrity guests by their full names. - Tracy Jordan of 30 Rock calls Liz Lemon by her full name. His wife Angie does the same. - The Americans: Russians refer to each other by first name and patronymic in formal settings, as is Truth in Television. - Arrested Development: Steve Holt! - Barry: Barry always refers to director Jay Roach by his full name. He also runs the two names together, suggesting that he thinks the man's name is "Jayroach." - Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory often refers to Amy by her full name, Amy Farrah Fowler. - The Borgias: Giulia Farnese is always referred to as Giulia Farnese, or else her nickname "La Bella". - Californication: In season 3, Rick Springfield has a recurring role playing an exaggerated version of himself. Lead character Hank Moody only ever refers to and addresses him as Rick Springfield. - Peter Mills on Chicago Fire, to the point where he starts doing it himself. - In Daddy's Daughters, Galina Sergeevna Vasnetsova (Liza Arzamasova) is always addressed as Galia Sergeevna, even by her own family. This is how the Russians address adults, emphasizing that Galina Sergeevna is Wise Beyond Her Years. - Imogen Moreno in Degrassi spends the first half of her intro season using this trope. She stops doing it when they toned down her strangeness for the second half of the season. Which is odd, as this was the most normal thing about her at the time. - Doctor Who: - On The Flash (2014), Harry usually refers to a certain character as "DA Cecille Horton". - Friday Night Lights does this a lot, particularly with Tim Riggins and Matt Saracen. - On Friends, one of the subtle differences in "The One That Could Have Been" is that Rachel calls Joey by his full name when referring to him. To her, he's a celebrity, and just like we call celebrities by their full names (for example, we would say Matt LeBlanc when talking about the actor, not Matty), she calls him Joey Tribbiani. - Fringe antagonist David Robert Jones is referred to by full name in every episode he plays a part in. - Happens more often than one might expect in Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, due to the importance people place on family names. Common people don't even have last names, so calling someone by their full name is a way of acknowledging their nobility. What's more, noble bastards note : offspring of nobles born out of wedlock or unclaimed by their noble parents are usually shunned by society, and have special last names based on where their mother was from, note : Snow, Flowers, Sand, etc thus invoking their full name is a way of reminding them of their oft-shunned position in society. Other examples include: Ygritte is quite fond of Jon Snow's full name and the Spice King refers to Xaro Xoan Daxos by his full name for the benefit of the audience during his introduction. - A variation on General Hospital. While he didn't use their first and last names, Luke Spencer consistently referred to the women in his life by their real names—sister Bobbie ("Barbara"), niece Carly ("Caroline"), friend Alexis ("Natasha"), and daughter Lulu ("Lesley Lu")—and was the only person on the show to do so. - In Gilmore Girls, Emily lampshades this in her jealousy over Pennilyn Lott, an old flame of Richard's: she states that Lott should never be referred to as anything other than Pennilyn Lott, indicating her wish that no one should be familiar with Pennilyn. - The Graham Norton Show: Graham Norton has a tendency to do this with his guests. - Ben Bennett on Greek. His full name is hilarious enough to be his Kappa Tau nickname. - On The Goldbergs, there is Dave Kim. Even his mother calls him this. - There is also Ruben Amaro Jr. (and Sr.), as well as Matt Bradley. - Characters on Hannibal always, always seem to refer to each other by their full name - Will Graham, Jack Crawford, Alana Bloom, Beverly Katz, Freddie Lounds - except, notably enough, when it comes to the good doctor himself. Alana usually calls him Hannibal, everyone else calls him Dr. Lecter. - In the episode "The Shrink, The Dare, Her Date and Her Brother" of Happy Endings, Dave refers to his therapist as Richard, until he finds out he prefers to be called Rick. As his last name is Rickman, Dave finds this strange and from then on, constantly refers to him by his full name. Dave: What kind of name is Rick Rickman, anyway? Alex: Its better than Dick Dickman. Dave: No, you can't change the first name... nevermind, I did dodge a bullet. - Hawkeye (2021): When Yelena Belova meets the title character's partner\successor she repeatedly calls her "Kate Bishop", which annoys Kate enough that she asks why Yelena keeps using her full name. - Hiro on Heroes refers to a few characters mostly by full name. For instance, he almost always uses Matt Parkman's full name. He pronounces it more like "Matto Pakman" (since he barely speaks English at the beginning), which may be why he goes for the full name, so he can be more easily understood. - How I Met Your Mother combines this trope with Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": at McClaren's bar, the waitress Wendy is always referred to as Wendy the Waitress. - Frankie Gaines, protagonist of I Am Frankie, is a teenage android who's gradually learning proper human behavior, and refers to everyone except "Mom" and "Dad" by their first and last names, even her best friend and the boy she likes. What makes this a particularly odd example is that Frankie is more than capable of behaving like a normal teenager in many regards, including falling in love, and yet she retains this one peculiar verbal tic instead of gradually shedding it. - In From the Cold: When Becca complains about Jenny calling her "baby", Jenny decides to go with "Rebecca Mary Leah Franklin." - Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon?: Arnav and Khushi often refer to the other and themselves with their full names. - Grace Polk and Adam Rove get this fairly often, though not all the time, in Joan of Arcadia. - Most other characters on Lost are known by their first or last name exclusively, but Benjamin Linus and Daniel Faraday are almost invariably referred to by their full name and always refer to themselves that way. - Bob Rooney, a minor character from Married... with Children was never called simply 'Bob' (even his wife calls out his full name in the bedroom). The writers once explained that in every group of friends one person is always called by his full name. - In Merlin everyone refers to Guinevere as "Gwen", save for her Love Interests Arthur and Lancelot, who almost always call her by her full name. As of series 4, there has been an inversion. Given Gwen's rise in status, she is now frequently being addressed by most characters as "Guinevere", whilst Love Interests Arthur and Lancelot are using the pet name of "Gwen" as a sign of their more intimate relationships with her. The sole exception is Merlin, who always has (and probably always will, even once she's queen) refer to her as Gwen. - On The Middle Man, Noser always refers to Wendy as "Wendy Watson". - In Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, both of Bob Trow's characters (Bob Dog and Robert Troll) are usually referred to this way. - In Monty Python's Flying Circus, they did a skit which was a documentary on a forgotten baroque musician, in which every mention of his name recited his full name: "Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern- schplenden- schlitter- crasscrenbon- fried- digger- dingle- dangle- dongle- dungle- burstein- von- knacker- thrasher- apple- banger- horowitz- ticolensic- grander- knotty- spelltinkle- grandlich- grumblemeyer- spelterwasser- kurstlich- himbleeisen- bahnwagen- gutenabend- bitte- ein- nürnburger- bratwustle- gerspurten- mitz- weimache- luber- hundsfut- gumberaber- shönedanker- kalbsfleisch- mittler- aucher von Hautkopft of Ulm". - One of the more distinctive speech patterns on My So-Called Life was the tendency of most of the characters to refer to the others by their full names. This varied from person to person, but the one who just about always got this treatment was Jordan Catalano. - NCIS' Ducky consistently calls everyone by their real names instead of their commonly used nicknames—"Timothy", "Anthony", etc. - On The Office (US), Bob Vance, Vance Refrigeration, is always referred to as Bob Vance. And he refers to himself as "Bob Vance, Vance Refrigeration." Priest: Do you, Bob Vance of Vance Refrigeration, take this woman... - Parks and Recreation: Chris Traeger always refers everyone by their full names. Especially "Ann Perkins". Even when he was dating her. - Rich ditz Mary Cherry on Popular is always referred to with her full name. (The same goes for her mother, Cherry Cherry.) Also, not only does April Tuna get this all the time, but she uses it on other people as well, most notably Carmen Ferrera. - The Price Is Right host Drew Carey usually refers to The Announcer, Rich Fields, by his full name, especially when asking for another contestant. Rich sometimes plays along and prefixes his copy with "All right, Drew Carey..." - The narrator in Pushing Daisies does this a lot. Except for Ned, who apparently doesn't have a last name. - In Robin Hood, Djaq usually always calls Will Scarlett and Allan-a-Dale by their full names. - Evan on Royal Pains always introduces himself as "Evan R. Lawson, CFO of HankMed." - While everyone on Sam & Cat assumed Goomer was either his first name or a nickname, his actual name was from French: Gieux Merr (phonetically the same as Goomer). - On Saturday Night Live, Tom Hanks is at one point inducted into the Five Timers club for hosting the show five times. During the sketch, he gets to meet Paul Simon, whom he calls "Mr. Simon", but is subsequently told "Please, call me 'Paul'.". Then he runs into Steve Martin, who tells him "Tom, Tom old bean! Let's have a look at you. That robe fits you smashingly." Tom Hanks, enthusiastically thanks him— "Thanks, Mr. Martin." To which he responds "Please, call me Mr. Steve Martin." - Seinfeld: - The main characters always refer to their friend Joe Mayo as Joe Mayo. When he asks one of them to do a favor, they even reply, "Sure thing, Joe Mayo." - Also, Kramer's offscreen pal Bob Sacomano. Unusual because Kramer usually has friends who are only identified by one name (Newman, Spector, Lomez, Brody, even himself before "Cosmo" was revealed in Season 6), but Bob Sacomano is always Bob Sacomano. - There's also Crazy Joe Davola. When Elaine briefly dates him (before having found out about the "crazy" part), she refers to him as Joe or Joey, but Jerry and Kramer always refer to him as Crazy Joe Davola. - Stargate SG-1: Teal'c always refers to Daniel Jackson by his full name, pronouncing it as though it were one word, and leaving out the salutation "Doctor". Any character without a title (Jonas Quinn, Ronon Dex, Vala Mal Doran) is referred to by full name. He'll use ranks or titles in place of first names with others ("General Hammond", "Captain/Major/Colonel Carter") although Colonel/General O'Neill is usually simply O'Neill. Fans have theorized that it's due to the nature of Jaffa names (one word with an apostrophe somewhere, for the most part.) He's calling them "Daniel'Jackson" or "Major'Carter" as if they were Jaffa, while O'Neill already has the apostrophe. - Star Trek: Voyager: Seven of Nine always addresses Naomi Wildman by her full name. Seven doesn't do this with everyone, though. - In Taskmaster Australia, Tom Gleeson is the Taskmaster and his assistant is Tom Cashman. In the first episode, Gleeson makes a point of always addressing and referring to Cashman in full as "Tom Cashman", as if to say that there's room for only one "Tom" on the show and he's got dibs. - Toast of London: One of the two producers who oversees all of Steven Toast's voice-over work has a Running Gag where he always begins whatever he's going to say with, "Hello Steven, this is Clem Fandango. Can you hear me?" To which Steven gives increasingly exasperated responses of, "Yes, I can hear you, Clem Fandango!" - Lois Habiba from Torchwood almost always refers to herself with both names. - Colin Robinson in What We Do in the Shadows (2019) is just about always referenced and addressed by his full name, even self-referentially. In fact, in one episode he corrects his assistant from calling him 'Mr Robinson' to Colin Robinson. - The eponymous murderer in "Shia LaBeouf" is almost always referred by first name and last name, "Shia LaBeouf". The only time it isn't is when he's revealed to be Not Quite Dead, and the chorus exclaims, "Shia Surprise!" - The bassist of Reel Big Fish is referred to in the CD booklets as: Matt "mattwong" Wong. - Daryl Hall & John Oates are always officially credited by their full names. If a CD calls them "Hall & Oates" (usually budget live albums), you can be sure they didn't approve it. - The biggest-selling musician in the history of the contemporary Christian genre grew up in far western Kentucky as Steve Chapman. When he entered the industry in the mid-1980s, there was already a prominent musician of that name, and the younger Chapman has recorded under his full name of Steven Curtis Chapman ever since. - Music fans of a certain age will likely remember the 1975 hit "Wildfire" by singer-songwriter Michael Murphey. He has continued to record in the pop, country, and western genres to this day, but became an example of this trope at around the same time that Steven Curtis Chapman did. Murphey decided to branch into acting, and discovered that there was already an actor named Michael Murphy. The musician began using his full name of Michael Martin Murphey in both his musical and acting pursuits. - The song "Totes My Prez" by Miscellaneous always refers to its subject as "Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson". - After Carly got his Carlito Caribbean Cool gimmick, he's almost always referred to by it in full while in WWC, especially after they also signed his parody from IWA Puerto Rico, El Sensacional Carlitos. - The majority of pro wrestling groups prefer to be referred to by initials (FMW, ECW, WSU, CZW, RoH, etc.), but Memphis Ladies Wrestling backpedaled and urged fans to refer to them by their full name after changing to Magnificent Ladies Wrestling due to legal fears. At least until they added an "Of" to their name (MLOW). - Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, owner of the NWA since 2017, has generally been called by his full name of William Patrick Corgan in all NWA-related media. The use of "Patrick" hasn't been universal since mid-2021, but "William" continues to be consistently used, and more often than not the full name still appears. - Radio talk shows will often do this with featured guests, for the benefit of people just tuning it. - In Bleak Expectations, most of the main cast tend to be referred to like this. The only one who isn't is Pippa Bin, the main character's sister, and wife of his best friend, Harry Biscuit. - Radio Sketch Show That Mitchell and Webb Sound features "Master Hinjuku for whom the Mountains of Hinshao Cleft in Twain his Passage to Allow". He's really good with air conditioning. - Kjell Bjarne in the play Elling is rarely if ever referred to as anything other than "Kjell Bjarne". Curiously, his roommate and the main character of the play, Elling himself, is an Only One Name. - I Sebastiani, the Greatest Commedia Dell'Arte Troupe in the Entire World! They've got their fans more or less trained so anytime anyone says "I Sebastiani", it gets followed up with "the Greatest Commedia Dell'Arte Trouble in the Entire World!" - Hamilton: At no point during the play is Aaron Burr ever referred to by simply Aaron. Hamilton occasionally calls him Burr after \|\|their friendship deteriorates\|\|, but other than that, he's Aaron Burr to everyone. - This is actually an honor in BattleTech for the Clans. In the Clans, warriors are only given one name at birth and have to earn the right to bear a surname. This is because the warrior caste reproduces via genetic engineering rather than natural biology and therefore can only further their line by being chosen for inclusion into future generations, the ultimate goal of any warrior. Possessing a surname—known in the Clans as a Bloodname—is the only way to be accepted into the breeding program, essentially a guarantee of immortality through one's offspring since genetic legacies are not merely used once but often stored for repeated uses. Therefore, Clan warriors who are Bloodnamed often insist on and receive the Full Name Basis treatment as a testament to their achievement. - Hifumi Yamada from Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc refers to everyone by their full name and with the old-fashioned honorific "-dono". In the English version, he's the only one to refer to everyone by their last names. \|\|Later on, this turns out to be a big clue towards interpreting his dying words and figuring out who murdered him.\|\| - In Everlasting Summer, the camp's director is always referred to as Olga Dmitrievna. Neither any of the characters, the narration, or even the display of the name of which character is speaking, ever calls her by anything other than both her names. - Little Busters!: Rin always refers to Sasasegawa Sasami using her full name. Or, rather, she always tries to use her full name, but messes it up somehow. - Franziska von Karma in the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series refers to practically everyone by their full names. - Lampshaded in the first phase of the Japan-only game, The Reminiscences of Haruhi Suzumiya. When Kyon is deciding how to address Haruhi in the alternate universe (the options being first name, last name or full name), Haruhi will object and ask if you call everyone by their full name if you choose the third option, leading Kyon to settle on just "Suzumiya". - In Sekien no Inganock, a brothel matron in the Infinitely Crowded Street prefers to be called by her full name Alisa Greg. In fact, she subtly demands it, and the naga-like woman has torn up a man's face with fangs drawn, even though he was a customer. - Touka in Sharin no Kuni refers to Kenichi by his full name, Morita Kenichi, until a certain point. Apparently, the reason is that using his last name would be formal, and his first name would be too intimate. - She originally did it to try to annoy him, he doesn't really care though. It latter just becomes her nickname for him; every one of the three heroine has a nickname for him, Sacchi's is Moriken and Natsumi's is Ken-chan. - Suzuha in Steins;Gate has a habit of referring to people by full name. - DC Super Hero Girls features no secret identities. Everyone is referred to as their superhero name... Except for Green Lantern, who goes by "Hal Jordan". Granted, there are several Green Lanterns, but this version of the DCSHG continuity only has Hal for most of its run, before being replaced completely with another one (Jessica Cruz) in its fourth season. - In Homestar Runner The Cheat's name is always The Cheat, making for some weird dialogue, such as, "Awesome! My very own The Cheat!" Also, the Brothers Strong are always called Strong Bad/Sad/Mad. Nobody ever calls Pom Pom "Pom", always "Pom Pom". This applies to other characters like Pan Pan, Sickly Sam, and The Homestar Runner (the "old-timey" one, not the "modern" one, who's typically just "Homestar"). - A majority of The Most Popular Girls in School characters are referred to by their full names. Examples include Mackenzie Zales, Shay van Buren, Ashley Katchadourian, Rachel Tice, Jenna Darabond, Jenna Dapananian, Matthew Derringer, Saison Marguerite...the list goes on, including even minor characters like Jennifer McMinamin, Lunch Lady Belinda, and Tanya Berkowitz and her crew. The only people who are not regularly referred to by their full names are Deandra (who doesn't seem to have a last name, but whose full name might very well be "Deandra The New Girl"), Trisha (whose last name is Cappelletti, but is said far more rarely than the other main characters' last names), the other Trisha (who also has no last name but is sometimes called Trisha 2), Blaine (also has no last name) and Jonathan (who prefers the even shorter "Than") - Funny Foreigner Nelly Smith from Senpai Club is always referred to by her full name, even by herself. - Tank Mann, from The Cry of Mann, is always called "Tank Mann", even by his children. - Rich Evans of RedLetterMedia is credited as such more often than not, even when everyone else is listed by first name only. - Sometimes occurs with certain characters, such as Captain Gordon, Defender of Earth! from Disgaea who (at least on this wiki) is always referred to as exactly that, Bold Inflation and all. - Similarly the DC universe character Solomon Grundy is rarely called anything but Solomon Grundy and almost never Solomon or Grundy. - Ahem... BRIAN BLESSED! - Ciaphas Cain, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM! But oddly, only here on the Wiki. In-continuity, he gets called what's appropriate to the station of the person addressing him. - Othar Trygvassen, Gentleman Adventurer! - Also happens for series with long names, usually they are namespaced by the full name, so linking then via Wiki Words is prone to this. For example, Neon Genesis Evangelion (which is informally referred as just Evangelion, NGE or Eva), but in our articles (and especially in the mouse-hovering thingy) you'll most likely see in its full name. - In Russian, the normal method of addressing is to use the Patronymic, but not the family name. - In Chinese-speaking areas, people invariably introduce themselves and are referred to by their full name, and it is quite normal even for friends to use their full name in everyday conversation, unless they have titles or nicknames (including 'English names', which are often treated as nicknames). The use of the given name without the surname is often an indicator of a closer, sometimes more intimate relationship (e.g. a teacher who is particularly close to their students may do so). - The more serious biologists and scientists will exclusively refer to any living organism by its entire binomial, sometimes trinomial name, known to us as "scientific name". This is justified by a number of reasons. Depending on the region, many living beings can have a plethora of common names even in the same language, which is rather confusing, as well as the the fact that completely unrelated species are known to share common names in some cases, not to mention that there are several species whose data is so deficient, they do not even have a common name to begin with. And since we keep discovering more and more species each year, giving them all a common name isn't an exactly easy endeavour. - Speaking of scientific names, we have good ol' Tyrannosaurus rex, the only dinosaur even people with casual knowledge of prehistoric life will usually always be able to address by its entire scientific nomenclature. - In the West, it's necessary when referring to a famous person whose first and last name are too common to identify them alone. - When someone shares their name with an already well known celebrity, this is taken further by using the middle name. - This could happen if multiple people in a school/work environment share the same name, in order to differentiate them. - When George H. W. Bush first met his squadron during World War II, he introduced himself to each person as "George Herbert Walker Bush". His squadron mates thought this was annoying and hilarious that they addressed him by his full name from then on. They even made it his callsign.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyKnownByTheFullName
Only Mostly Dead - TV Tropes rez @ next town k thx Miracle Max: It just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. [...] Now, mostly dead is slightly alive . Now, all dead, well, with all dead, there's usually only one thing that you can do. Inigo Montoya: What's that? Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change. The step in between Non-Lethal K.O. and Killed Off for Real. It took Jesus three days to come Back from the Dead, but for your party members all it takes is for you to fork over the cash. The procedure is relatively common in in-game mechanics, but possibly restricted to the wealthy. Game mechanics-wise, there's little difference between Only Mostly Dead and Non-Lethal K.O.. It's the general feel of the plot that is affected. Some writers feel that this cheapens death too much, or complicates Plotline Death, so they don't use this trope. On the other hand, it avoids the problems a Non-Lethal K.O. has with plausibility a mighty robo-demon topples an entire flaming skyscraper onto you, and you are merely unconscious. Occasionally, a writer may put in guidelines to explain the difference between Only Mostly Dead and All Dead. This could be the amount of time that passed since death (the soul was still in the Afterlife Antechamber), or amount of damage to the body (Chunky Salsa Rule is virtually always All Dead without Deus ex Machina). Compare with Universes where the Necromantic can only ensure the dead Came Back Wrong. If you inflict a genuine Character Deaths and they're still "alive" in a manner of speaking, then you need to make them Deader than Dead. Contrast with Almost Dead Guy, who is presumed to be a lost cause, and Resurrective Immortality, where yes, the character is dead, but it's a given that they will eventually come back to life. Traditionally, if the characters believe the Almost Dead Guy can be saved, it is only due to Genre Blindness, and angsting will soon ensue. Not to be confused with Not Quite Dead. This may lead it to be a Disney Death. If this triggers something that was supposed to occur upon the character's death, it's the Revival Loophole. Given that this is a Death Trope, there may be unmarked spoilers. You Have Been Warned. ## Examples: - Ash in the 35th episode of Pokémon (the real Safari Zone episode that was banned in America). This is the first episode that shows he is Made of Iron. - Ash uses Pikachu as a Magical Defibrillator a lot. - It happens again in the Lavender Tower episode, where he actually becomes a ghost for a short period of time. - Celebi in the fourth movie. It takes the combined effort of every other version of it in every time period to bring it back. - Horrifically averted with Zoroark in the 14th movie. It is blatantly clear that she really was fully dead and that Celebi's actions were a full resurrection instead of a simple healing. - In Delicious in Dungeon, there's some kind of hard limit on how long a body can lie around before being revived, but the magic to do so seems plentiful and non-costly, at least in the dungeon itself. In fact, it seems to be an aspect of the dungeon itself, it cannot be done outside a dungeon. - This is addressed by ex-party member Namari, who explains that losing even 1/13th of your body permanently (i.e. disintegration) causes Resurrection Magic to become far less reliable and being turned to ash renders you permanently dead to all but the greatest Clerics. Heaven forbid you get shattered after you're petrified. - It's also addressed even further in that meat of some kind is required for any kind of resurrection that involves either purely skeletal remains or heavily rotted remains immense amounts of calories are needed for the body to both reform and get back to working order. As such, goat or pig meat is used. This also means that deep dungeon resurrections of such a kind are nigh impossible for this reason and one other: - While souls are chained to bodies after death, the bonds weaken over time, creating Spirits. However, the moment a Spirit is made manifest, resurrection becomes 100% impossible as there's no longer ANY connection between soul and body. \|\|Falin was barely hours or days away from becoming a spirit Marcille's envisioning of the bonds keeping her soul tethered to her skeleton is that only one decrepit bond remains, necessitating the elf's use of Forbidden Magic.\|\| - In Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple, \|\|Kenichi himself\|\| is at one point 'killed' by Tirawit Kōkin, a disciple of Muay Thai. Although Ryozanpaku's ridiculously good medicine manages a revival, there are some other serious consequences that continue for quite some time. - Later, Apachai, one of Kenichi's masters, was 'killed' and confirmed as dead by his rival Agaard (also Tirawit Kōkin's Master), and came back by 'asking a reaper for help' to protect Kenichi. - Perhaps ironically, the early series used Apachai doing this to Kenichi as a Running Gag, showing Apachai's problems with the concept of "Holding Back". - The 4Kids dub of Yu-Gi-Oh! treats the "Shadow Realm" this way. If characters are sent there, it's a Fate Worse than Death but if the villain who sent them is defeated within a certain, non-specified period of time, then they are restored (although PTSD is a known side-effect). If they spend too long in the Shadow Realm, however, their minds will be completely lost. This is implied to be what happened to Marik's father (in the original, he was murdered with a knife). - Happens to Tenma in Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas after Hades effectively kills him. Turns out Tenma's soul is still barely connected to his body due to the flower bracelet his childhood friend gave him. - In Naruto, this happens to \|\|both Naruto (by having the nine tails extracted) and Sasuke (by old-fashioned sword to the chest)\|\|, almost simultaneously, courtesy of \|\|Madara Uchiha\|\|. \|\|Naruto's heart literally stops and Sakura has to pump it herself to keep him alive while they find a way to save him.\|\| - Hayate the Combat Butler parodies this in an anime filler episode. Risa dies in battle against a slime, but continues to hop around in a coffin after Izumi and Miki; exaggerated later on with the coffin gaining equipment and weapons that Risa couldn't possibly use. - At the climax of Fullmetal Alchemist, \|\|Father actually succeeds in his goal and absorbs the souls of everyone in Amestris not currently in his sanctum\|\|. However, \|\|Hohenheim reveals that he had prepared a reverse transmutation circle using the moon's shadow from the eclipse, and dots made of his own Philosopher's Stone souls, so that even if Father had the souls, the minds were still functioning as a link to their bodies, and ensured the souls would be pulled back to their owners, meaning that the seemingly dead inhabitants (which were technically still saveable even in that situation, provided rapid action was taken) returned to life when the aforementioned failsafe activated itself automatically.\|\| - During part of the Buu arc of Dragon Ball Z, Gohan is thought to be dead. As the narrator mentions, however, he's at Death's door instead of fully dead (and he got better eventually). - Frederica from Coffin Princess Chaika, a massive armoured dragon who spends most of her time disguised as a cute little girl, has impressive healing powers and "dies" quite often, but supposedly would die permanently if her brain were destroyed. Naturally, she does eventually get impaled through the head. When the other heroes find her seemingly lifeless body, a tiny version of her disguised self rips its way out of her chest. She had, apparently, shapeshifted her real brain into a spare body, so that she could fake her death if necessary. She grows back to 'normal' size shortly (no pun intended). - Danganronpa 3's Side:Future has the majority of Class-77 being comatose after the events of Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. \|\|All of the comatose students come back for the Side:Hope series finale.\|\| \|\|In addition, Side:Hope reveals that Kyoko Kirigiri, previously thought to have died during the Final Killing Game, was also in this state, and she is fully revived off-screen during the episode.\|\| - It's revealed this is what really happened to \|\|Mavis\|\| in Fairy Tail. \|\|While Zeref's Curse of Ankhselam was able to "kill" her due to his love for her, because she suffered from the same Curse her immortality ended up putting her in a state between life and death rather than truly killing her as he thought. However, it took her years before her consciousness was able to regain enough strength to manifest as an astral projection, and at that point her body was trapped inside a powerful stasis Lacrima crystal and had become the container for a potentially-infinite magical source of energy in addition to having the same Walking Wasteland powers as before, so letting herself out wasn't exactly an option.\|\| - Spoofed, as many things are, in KonoSuba. In episode 6, Darkness starts to wax lyrical about the people killed in the battle with Verdia. But then Aqua casts resurrect on them all. - In Dr. STONE, Tsukasa seemingly kills Senku with a Neck Snap, but it turns out Senku had been drawing attention to his neck for months, conditioning Tsukasa to strike there. When Taiju and Yuzuriha find Senku's body, they realize \|\|there's a tiny stone fragment left on the back of his neck, and pouring miracle fluid on it heals his broken neck and revives him.\|\| - Rebuild World: Due to Brain Uploading technology in this Cyberpunk setting, doctor Yatsubiyashi tells the protagonist Akira about how many hunters have a 'black box' of sorts containing their personality on their body to be put into a cyborg one after they supposedly die. When Akira is involved in a medevac mission, they have to treat the corpses as wounded for this reason. This gets taken advantage of by \|\|Zelmo and Tiol, with Zelmo having one of said backups, and Tiols personality being backed up by Tsubaki to re-upload into a Remote Body he still had.\|\| - In Bleach, \|\|Ichibe\|\| ends up getting blasted to smithereens by Yhwach, but comes back to life once Ichigo calls out his name. Bleach: Can't Fear Your Own World reveals that \|\|this method of revival is actually an ability shared amongst all members of Squad Zero as long as at least one of them is alive.\|\| - In Detective Comics #64, "The Joker Walks the Last Mile", this is part of a plan for the Joker: after he is fried by the electric chair for all of his past offenses, his henchmen quickly retrieve his body from the prison morgue and bring him Back from the Dead with a life serum within 15 minutes in order to keep him from slipping off from "only mostly dead" to "all dead". Once he is revived, he walks away a free man... that is, until he is apprehended for newer robberies. - Black Panther was once killed during a battle with Erik Killmonger. Though his friends were able to (just barely) resuscitate his body, it took Moon Knight venturing into the afterlife to actually bring his spirit back to the realm of the living. - In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (IDW), Donatello's shell is shattered by Bebop and Rocksteady and everyone initially thinks he's died. However, the Fugitoid detects faint signs of life and realizes that he's just barely alive. Acting quickly, they put his body into a cold room in order to slow down his biological processes, then upload his brain into Metalhead while they repair the damage which includes an artificial shell. - Wonder Woman: - Wonder Woman (1942): The Silver Age/Earth-One Steve Trevor's third death turns out to have not quite fully killed him, allowing him to be resuscitated by using a purple healing ray to repair the internal damage to his torso from the fall. - Wonder Woman (1987): When the Amazons revert to clay statues due to the Olympians withdrawing their magic from them their breathing and measurable life functions cease but they're not considered fully dead. - Immortal Hulk: After the Avengers defeat Hulk with Project: Helios, Captain Marvel states he is only in an "inert state resembling death", the implication being that all of his previous "deaths" are the same. - One of Wonder Man's powers is that when he seems to be killed, he is just recouperating in an "ionic coma". - Many Redwall Fix Fics claim that Rose, Martin the Warrior's love interest, was Only Mostly Dead when she was taken back to her home. - In Abraxas: - In Aeon Entelechy Evangelion, Shinji got into this state after Mot's counterattack. "Do not worry," Rei said, face emotionless. "He is only clinically dead." There was a pause, just enough for the black-haired woman to take a breath to respond, before Rei added, "He will get better." - Seen in Cinderjuice and its sequels. Thanks to the Magically-Binding Contract presented at the end of the first story, \|\|Beetlejuice is this; Lydia, by contrast, is Only Mostly Alive. She's accidentally been given a small portion of his powers over time, and the contract removes an equivalent portion of her humanity and gives it to him.\|\| The second story illustrates this with the yin and yang symbols. - In Gold Poisons, Xichen is this close to actually being dead after the antidote appears to not work. Thankfully, hes still barely alive, enough so that they can give him qi and save his life. - A shout out to the trope namer occurs in Hogyoku ex Machina by Unohana. - The Immortal Game: \|\|Rarity is mortally wounded during the Final Battle, with her heart being dissolved by Titan's magic. Twilight, having become an alicorn herself by this point, puts Rarity in stasis, keeping her preserved long enough for Twilight to give her a new heart and save her after Titan is defeated.\|\| - In One Punch Man: Hero's Harem, Deep Sea Queen (sister of Deep Sea King) is revived from near death when a Heroes Association worker accidentally spills his water bottle on her body, though she's still badly injured. Earlier, Vaccine Woman is nearly killed by Saitama's punch and reduced to a child-like form that is too weak to fight off human children. - In Son of the Sannin, unlike in canon, Akatsuki's ritual to extract the Shukaku from Gaara is interrupted, so Gaara is left with a sliver of chakra that keeps him alive long enough for Naruto to transfer some of his own chakra and save his life. - In Tangled In Time, Ganondorf was mortally wounded by the Master Sword but the Twinrova manage to save him in time since the sword wasn't removed from his body, and he wakes up decades after The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. - In the Transformers fanfic Things We Don't Tell Humans, we discover that Jetfire is this after Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen. Van Helsing: (coming out from his cover to check her over)"She's almost dead!" Johnathan: (wiping the blood out of his eyes)"She's dead enough!" - The Trope Namer is from The Princess Bride, wherein Westley, following torture to near-death by suction pump, turns out to be revivable as long as the pill has time to work and he doesn't go swimming for at least an hour. - In The Golden Child, Love Interest Kee Nang is struck by a crossbow bolt after Taking the Bullet for The Chosen One, Chandler Jarrell, forcing him to race against time to rescue the titular Golden Child so his powers can be used to save her. It's also played with a little. Her body is laid out on a table, with the sunlight shining on her through a window. Jarrell is told that as long as the sunlight touches her, she can be revived by the Golden Child, but if he takes too long, it'll be too late. After defeating Numspa and saving the Child, Jarrell notices sadly that the sunbeam has already moved past Kee Nang's body. Then the Golden Child walks over, props Kee Nang's foot back up into the sunlight, and revives her. - The Invisible: \|\|Nick thought he was dead until he saw a bird hit a window, and its spirit stuck around only until its body finally died\|\|. Cue the race to \|\|find Nick's body\|\|. - According to Congo, the ghost tribe has different levels of dead (presumably including catatonia as a condition where the spirit has left the body [death] yet the body still breathes). Only the last level is dead-dead. - The British Hammer Horror film Wake Wood has the post-death caveat type there is a ritual to bring a loved one back to life for a short amount of time, as long as the death didn't happen too long ago. A grieving couple bring back their dead daughter after lying about the length of time since the death. Hilarity ensues. - In the movie Source Code, \|\|Colter Stevens\|\| is not quite dead yet. - Mentioned in The Wizard of Oz as Munchkinland does not begin full celebrations until it's definitely confirmed that the Witch of the East is dead (even though a house fell on her), implying that the Munchkins have run into this trope before: As coroner I must aver I've thoroughly examined her And she's not only merely dead, She's really most sincerely dead - In Star Trek Into Darkness, \|\|Kirk appears to die in the containment chamber in Engineering from radiation poisoning after saving the Enterprise from crashing on Earth. He is then shown lying in an open body bag in Sickbay. But when McCoy figures out how to save him note : using Khan's blood, which he noticed had revived a dead tribble he gets a cryotube and has Kirk frozen to preserve his brain, revealing he wasn't quite completely dead yet.\|\| - Transformers: Age of Extinction: Turns out \|\|getting an axe through what was left of his head, which was then torn off his neck, wasn't quite enough to put Megatron down for good, and he's able to survive long enough to transfer himself into a shiny new body.\|\| - Justice League (2017): Bruce Wayne suggests this when he's talking about reviving Superman using a Mother Box. Diana argues against it and tells him to accept that Superman is dead, to which he answers that "we don't know what state he's in." \|\|Well, either way, you guessed it, they are able to bring him back.\|\| - The Wheel of Time has several levels of being dead. Most people die and their souls are eventually reincarnated sans memories. The Dark One can also resurrect followers of his who die normally. Big heroes are bound to the Pattern and between incarnations they inhabit the World of Dreams where they retain memories of their past lives. When they're reincarnated, their new lives tend to be just as heroic as their past ones. Finally there's people who die via balefire, which kills you retroactively. Their souls can still be reincarnated according to Word of God, but they can't be resurrected by the Dark One. However, as a consequence of killing you before it hits you, anyone who was killed by you after your adjusted time of death gets unkilled, with some funny memories of dying. About the only cause of Deader than Dead shown is dying while in the World of Dreams. Dying there removes you from the Pattern so you can't be reincarnated. - The entire premise of Altered Carbon, in which death and Real Death (or RD) are two separate concepts. Everyone is fitted with a brain backup implant called a cortical stack at birth. As long as it's intact, a person who dies can be resurrected into another body (provided they can fork up the cash for it). - The eponymous Skulduggery Pleasant is this trope entirely. He was human but was killed in agony by Serpine during the war, then was burned and put in a bag - but it turned out \|\|(through Necromancer power that we find out about in Book 6)\|\| that he was only Mostly Dead, and as such was able to pull himself together and continue fighting. - Mortal Coil has Valkyrie become mostly dead in order to \|\|have her true name sealed\|\|, in one of the single creepiest bits of the series. And that's saying something. - Also applies to the partygoers in Death Bringer who were dead until their energy was returned to them. - Harry Potter \|\|gives himself up to Lord Voldemort in an attempt to save his friends in the last book. Harry is hit with Avada Kedavra and his soul enters some form of limbo long enough for exposition from Dumbledore, but because Voldemort accidentally tied him to life by taking his blood, Harry eventually revives unharmed\|\|. - Voldemort himself could count. He is hit by an unstoppable killing spell, but survives as a spirit 'less than the meanest ghost' \|\|because he split up his soul and hid the pieces in ordinary objects\|\|. He eventually returns to his whole body. - In Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, the titular cat, Maurice, uses one of his nine lives to avoid becoming "all dead". He also trades another of his lives to save \|\|Dangerous Beans\|\| from the same fate. - In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, famed Disaster Area frontman Hotblack Desiato is "spending a year dead for tax purposes". He still manages to eat at fine restaurants, travels the universe hooked up to his Death Support System, and employs a medium to translate his psychic impulses from beyond the grave into music. - In Lonely Werewolf Girl the souls of dead werewolves go to the Forest Of The Werewolf Dead, fortunately Fire-Demon Malvera is able to intercept heroine Kalix's soul while it's just in the outskirts and bring her back. All for the bargain price of one human girl's ability to love. - In the book The Princess Bride, Miracle Max actually first proclaims Westley "Sort of Dead." After a while, he notices something wrong, and the other characters ask him what it is. He then informs them that Westley has just slipped from Sort of Dead to Mostly Dead. - George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series has a few examples of this. Lord Berric Dondarrion \|\|was brought back to life repeatedly by the Red Priest, although his regenerated form still had the wounds and scars from his death, most notably a huge hole in his chest left by a lance, and he gradually forgot more of his life with each subsequent revival.\|\| Catelyn Stark \|\|was murdered along with her son Robb at the Red Wedding, then later reappears, restored to life by the same sort of magic as Dondarrion. In a subversion, Catelyn is visibly rotted as a result of being resurrected several days after her demise.\|\| - In the The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids story The Grand Multiverse Hotel, the Queen of the Black Market bound her soul to her body, so that she could be easily resurrected even if her body physically died. A slightly more lively form of Only-Mostly-Deadness comes in when characters attempt a resurrection on her body but don't quite manage it, resulting in her spending the climax as a mostly still presence who can barely manage to whisper. (She eventually gets better.) - In the Warrior Cats series, Clan leaders are granted nine lives by their ancestors. When they receive a fatal injury or sickness, they'll stay dead for several minutes before waking up, assuming they have more lives left. - The Dresden Files: - This happens in Ghost Story when, \|\|after spending the entire book as a ghost, Harry attempts to move on, only to awaken in his still-alive body. Mab and Demonreach had healed Harry's mortal wounds while his disembodied soul wandered Chicago\|\|. - In Dead Beat, the Enigmatic Minion Kumori Invokes this on a mortally wounded man, using Necromancy to bind his soul to his body until EMTs are able to stabilize him normally. - Main villains of Nightingale's Lament put a very popular singer into this state to keep her compliant and easily controlled. - The Stormlight Archive: - Healing magic is rare but does exist, so this is examined in depth. It's pointed out that most few things actually instantly kill, no matter how terrible they are; you have at least some time until the brain dies. Until that happens, the Surge of Regrowth (or fabrials that imitate it) can be used to heal the person, bringing them back from the bring of death. Of course the setting also has Shardblades, which ignore living flesh and cut straight through the soul, and if one connects with your spine, you do seem to actually die nearly instantly as your soul is severed from your body. In Words of Radiance \|\|Szeth\|\| is specifically revived this way, although because it was done so late his soul is not fully properly attached, resulting in some people seeing a ghostly afterimage when he moves. It's unclear what (if any) the consequences are to this. - Surgebinders holding Stormlight gain a powerful Healing Factor. As long as they have enough Stormlight in them, it is seemingly impossible for them to die, no matter how terrible the wound. Characters have survived falling hundreds of feet, getting their throat slit and then stabbed through the heart, and even taking a crossbow bolt to the head. Of course, healing also consumes the Stormlight, so there are a number of occasions where a Surgebinder runs out of Stormlight without actually fully healing their wounds. - This appears to be the effective status of \|\|the dead shardblades. Spren don't die in the same way humans do as they are more akin to elemental forces than normal living beings. It has been mentiond that if their Radiants returned, the spren could be revived, but since their Radiants are long dead it seems impossible. However in Oathbringer, Adolin's blade has appeared to show more signs of life than usual such as saving Adolin's life of her own volition when he was in Shadesmar, telling him her name, and appearing in his hand on only seven heartbeats rather than the usual 10 when he desperately needed her. It's unclear if it is possible to fully revive her, however.\|\| - Then there's the Sibling, the Genius Loci spren of Urithiru. They were always mysterious, even to other spren, and something happened to them, disabling most of the tower functions and forcing the ancient Radiants to abandon it. Navani knows that death for spren is always weird, so she interviews several spren that were active at the time. They say the Sibling is "slumbering," but she notes they treat it with an air of finality. \|\|In the end, the answer is rather simpler: The Sibling was Faking the Dead, fully awake and aware the entire time but refusing to help humans\|\|. - In The Story of Valentine and His Brother, Val's boat is knocked over while he's rowing. He's normally an excellent swimmer, but because of his breakup-induced Brain Fever he passes out in the water. When he's rescued, \|\|his mother\|\| spends some time thinking he's dead until a doctor revives him. - In Almost Perfect (2014), the dog Susie starts to give birth while outside. Her first puppy lies in the snow for some time before David finds him and, thinking he's dead, wraps him in a newspaper and takes him inside. When David unwraps him, he and Bess are surprised to find that he's still breathing. Bess tucks him inside her shirt until he's warmed up. - Goblins in the Castle: While Fauna's visiting her in Goblins on the Prowl, Granny Pinchbottom reveals she's working on a combination spell/recipe which is supposed to be given to someone who's on the brink of death and hold them in that state for a while, though since she was interrupted while working on it, she doesn't know if it'll actually work. She still gives Fauna a piece, just in case, which comes in handy when the Baron suddenly collapses and seems to be dying — the specipe saves his life, but won't wake him up. \|\|When Helagon is banished back into the Pit of Thogmoth, all his spells are broken and the Baron safely reawakens.\|\| - Seven Days: A backstep goes wrong (of course) due to sabotage, which kills Frank...mostly. He's still a ghost, and when a Blind Black Guy is able to hear him Parker manages to save the day by backstepping again. - Buffy the Vampire Slayer: - Buffy is killed, she is brought back by a magical ritual. - Buffy in "Prophecy Girl", after the Master drowned her. - Buffyverse has a good few levels of dead including but probably not limited to: vampire/demon possessed corpse, mummy/zombie/reanimated corpse sans demon, ghost, resuscitated, dead but brought back by magic, dead and beyond being brought back by magic (e.g. Darla), whatever the heck happened to Cordelia. - Doctor Who: - Played completely straight, and even quoted, in "The Big Bang". Amy, who'd been shot and presumably killed, is placed in the most secure prison in the universe designed so that the person inside it could never escape, not even through death and stored there until given a way to be revived. - In "Hell Bent", \|\|Clara is extracted from her timeline in between her next-to-last and last heartbeat, and kept suspended in that moment while still being able to walk and talk and act pretty normally\|\|. So, she's right on the edge of dead, but not quite there. - \|\|Aeryn Sun\|\| on Farscape qualifies for this - she drowns and is given a tearful burial scene. Then Zhaan, grieving, decides to \|\|give up her own life using her mystical Delvian powers\|\| and revive her deceased friend. Zhaan's able to do this because - yes! - \|\|Aeryn's not totally dead!\|\| - In the Pilot episode of Fringe, Walter suggests to Olivia that they communicate with the comatose John Scott by linking their minds. Walter: I have used this technique to extract information from a corpse once. You can do that if they haven't been dead for longer than six hours. Peter: Right , 'cause after six hours, that's when they're really dead . - In Heroes, anyone with a Healing Factor is rendered "dead" if an object is stabbed into a certain part of the brain, but if it's removed, recovery is as quick as with any other injury. The characters believe that being shot in that part of the brain would kill such a person permanently, but it's never been done yet. - Except since neither Ted nor Peter have hurt themselves while using that power at the lower levels, it shouldn't immediately follow that they'll blow themselves apart when going fully nuclear. - In the alternate future of season 3, \|\|Sylar goes nuclear while standing a few feet away from Peter and Claire, both of whom are shown to survive.\|\| - Charlie does this in Lost. At least, that seems to have been the case, since Jack finds him hanged yet manages to resuscitate him. Mikhail has been Only Mostly Dead a few times. - Maleficent is this in Once Upon a Time. Regina was extra angry with her when she trapped the Enchanted forest residents in Storybrooke, so cursed Maleficent so that she could never die. She's seemingly killed by Emma in the first season finale, but returns in season 2 as a phantom that attacks Killian. By season four \|\|Cruella and Ursula are able to revive her\|\|. - In the Stargate-verse, there seem to be two levels of dead: "revivable by the Sarcophagus"-dead (which, as the sarc is purely non-magical advanced technology, should probably be considered "dead as best as Earth medicine can tell but not truly dead", but they call it dead) and dead-dead. Daniel Jackson winds up Only Mostly Dead on several occasions, though all of the original four got their turn at least once. (Kawalsky, on the other hand, winds up dead-dead.) - And in the Stargate SG-1 Tabletop Games, there are two degrees of death: merely dead, between -10 and -25 HP (revivable by a sarcophagus), and destroyed, below -25 HP (the body is messed up beyond repair). And certain species, such as the Unas, have the "Sarcophagus Incompatible" feat; for them, dead is dead. - In the Supernatural episode "All Hell Breaks Loose, Part Two" (S02, Ep22), Dean claims that this was Sam's state, but that Bobby patched Sam up. - This has also been intentionally invoked by the boys in order to communicate with spirits or get in touch with a Reaper. Dangerous, yet effective. See, for example: Advanced Thanatology. - In Torchwood, \|\|after Owen is killed and brought Back from the Dead by the second Resurrection Glove, he ends up in a state like this; he's clinically dead and all metabolism has ceased, but he is kept conscious and ambulatory (and non-decomposing) by residual Green Rocks in his system. How he manages to talk if he doesn't breathe is a question for Fridge Logic philosophers to decide.\|\| - In the various Ultra Series', a common rule among the titular and rotating Ultra Heroes is that they have only 3 Minutes to survive on Earth's atmosphere. When the plot calls for it however, this can change in more climactic ways than expected... - This has happened on at least 2 different occasions in Ultraman Mebius: - The first time was when Mebius and Taro were battling against Imperializer, when Mebius takes a powerful blast from the robot while protecting GUYS from its assault. Mebius's Color Timer goes out and Mebius seemingly dies then and there. He gets better however \|\|after the members of GUYS cheer him on and remind him of the promises he made to them as a human (Mebius, as Mirai also had revealed his secret identity to them shortly into his fight with the robot,)\|\| and with it, Mebius also gets a new power-up that helps him win the day. - The second time (and most legit of the examples) was when Mebius was Killed Off for Real by Alien Emperor, while GUYS laments that they cannot beat the Emperor without Mebius's help, now it's the Ultras of the Past reminding them at it was because of their faith in Mebius that kept him going and with them renewing it, Mirai returns to them, now as an entity stored away in Ultraman Hikari's Knight Brace, (which was given to him by Ultraman King.) Like before though, with their faith and Mirai/Mebius's faith is renewed, it allows the Ultra to come back to life with an even stronger form than before. - Mulder makes a regular habit of this in The X-Files. The most noteworthy occurrence is in season 8. It went so far that his body started decomposing and he was buried with a funeral and everything, only to be dug up three months later and found to be only mostly dead. - Old-school RPGs based on Dungeons & Dragons rules often had relatively easy resurrection at shrines/churches for those willing to "donate." - The SSI Gold Box games, which use AD&D rules, also have multiple levels: - "Unconscious", at exactly zero hit points and can be restored with any sort of healing. - "Bleeding", when between -1 and -9 hit points (inclusive). Works like "unconscious", but the character loses 1 hit point each round, which leads to... - "Dead", requires a "Raise Dead" or "Resurrection" spell to restore; caused by having -10 or less hit points. Which one you need depends on whether the corpse is in one piece or not. - "Gone", results from a failed raise, death from disintegration or dragon breath, or having the party flee from battle when the character is laying unconscious, bleeding, or dead on the field. Restoring the character from this typically requires nothing less than a "Wish" spell or divine intervention. - The tabletop games have multiple levels of 'Mostly Dead', depending on edition, the power of the spellcaster, and what spells the spellcaster knows. This means that in 3.5 the smallest possible 'Mostly Dead' is less than nine days dead, cannot be missing vital parts of the body, can not have been turned into an undead or have been killed by a death effect, and must not have died of old age, while the greatest (assuming that one does not get into supplements or epic-level stuff) requires that the death was not of old age, that it was less than 200 years ago, and that the deceased can be unambiguously identified in some way. - Hack Master builds upon the AD&D second edition rules, and imposes the limit that a character's starting Constitution score represents the number of times they can be resurrected; this total can never be raised short of the personal intervention of an actual Gawd. - Some games have a different kind of "Mostly Dead", meaning that the character is unconscious and unresponsive, but not actually dead yet and still capable of being revived by "normal" (i.e. magical) healing processes. For example, in some editions of D&D, there's a reserve of 10 "negative" hit points, and you don't actually die die until you hit -10 HP. Any magical healing you receive while in the -9 to 0 range takes you to 0 HP and then adds HP normally. It's also possible to use the healing skill on such a character, which doesn't actually recover any hit points but does stabilize them and keep them from getting any worse (unless they get hit again). In some editions there's a feat characters can take that allows them to remain conscious and active with negative hit points, but -10 is still dead. - In Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: The Requiem, being critically injured will knock a vampire into torpor, a deathlike sleep that lasts a certain amount of time based on their Karma Meter. Sending one to final dead requires special measures - throwing them into a fire or into direct sunlight is most dependable. (A stake through the heart also triggers torpor.) - If a character is "zeroed out" in Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, he is literally "mostly dead", as a nod to the Trope Namer, and to swashbuckling fiction in general. Killing an unconscious or helpless foe is Bad Form, even among villains. - In the FASA Doctor Who roleplaying game, there is no point of death, only a slowly increasing modifier to the difficulty of bringing someone back. Eventually you just have to give up. - Genius: The Transgression: Actual resurrection of a dead body is not only a scientific sin that will ding your Karma Meter, it's an open invitation for a Monster from Beyond the Veil to make your life harder. However, when it comes to mad science, if the person died less than an hour ago, not of old age and not of head-applied Chunky Salsa Rule, it doesn't really count as dead, and you can bring them back with neither of those problems. - Pathfinder: - Raising the dead is usually a costly, lengthy bit of Ritual Magic that causes long-term Resurrection Sickness. However, the "Breath of Life" spell can do it for free, provided it's cast within a few seconds of death and the target wasn't too badly mangled in the course of their demise. - Defied by the nation of Galt in the default Lost Omens setting, which conducts executions using "Final Blades": guillotines enchanted to trap the souls of people executed on them. During the early days of Galt's revolution (inspired by the French Revolution), this was intended to prevent wealthy convicts from escaping justice by prearranging resurrection or cloning magic. - The One Ring: A hero who falls to zero Endurance or suffers two major Wounds is merely unconscious. A hero with zero Endurance and a Wound will die within hours unless they receive proper medical care. - The classic game Wizardry had 3 levels of dead. They are: - "Dead", which could possibly be cured with a simple "Raise Dead" spell. - "Ashes", which was the result of a botched resurrection. This person could still be brought back for more gold, but if that failed... - "Gone", where nothing other than hacking the game will bring them back. At the time, there weren't that many hackers, however, if one sent their character disk to the game developers; they would bring them back and send the character disk back. Provided they be allowed to use the previously wiped out party as enemies in Wizardry IV. - Pikmin: - Pikmin (2001) has multiple endings. The Bad End happens if you don't manage to collect at least the 25 necessary ship parts within thirty days; \|\|Olimar, unable to take off with his spaceship, dies (offscreen) from oxygen poisoning, but his corpse is brought to an Onion by the Pikmin, thus reviving their "leader" as one of their own kind, turning the situation into slightly creepy Disney Death.\|\| - Pikmin 2: The Gatling Groink and Spotty Bulbear enemies slowly regain health after being "killed". If you let their health get back to full before you convert them into Pikmin food or money, they'll get back up and attack your team again. The Bulbear doesn't do this in Pikmin 3, notably. - Final Fantasy: - In Final Fantasy Tactics, any defeated characters would fall over with a turn-counter above their heads. If a Raise-spell or a Phoenix Down is adminstered to them before the timer runs out, they return to life - they are Only Mostly Dead — but if the timer runs all the way out, they are Killed Off for Real. If this happens to any plot-important characters, it's Game Over. Interestingly enough, the same rules apply to all enemies... while Undead types may actually come back to life on their own after the timer runs out, unless a special spell is used to permanently destroy them. - In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance this was altered: If a character (other than the protagonist) is defeated, he is merely knocked unconscious, and can either be revived during the battle or automatically after it's over. However there are certain areas in the game called "Jagds" where if a defeated character isn't revived before the battle is over, then they are Killed Off for Real. The plot explains this by saying that conflicts in these areas are not overseen by the Judges, and can therefore turn lethal. - The heroes tried the full range of Phoenix Downs, Life spells and such during the Plotline Death in Final Fantasy V. It didn't work. - And we all wondered why they didn't just use a Phoenix Down when Aerith dies in Final Fantasy VII... - Final Fantasy IX: There are two ways to "die" in this game: KO from HP loss, and being Stopped. KO can be remedied via the usual tactics, but Stop cannot be reversed until the spell wears off on its own. If all characters are stopped, it's Game Over. - Multiple games in the series also have the Zombie/Undead and Petrify/Stone conditions. As long as at least one member of the active party remains alive and unafflicted, the affected characters can usually be restored to normal with a spell or item that heals those particular status effects. But if everybody who's not already K.O.'d is affected, then it's Game Over, just the same as if everybody was K.O.'d. - Rainbow Six 1-3: - In games with Magical Defibrillators, this happens when you're brought down by gunfire or other non-Permadeath means, but only lasts until you respawn. Occasionally results in cases of people "dying" repeatedly by headshots and massive explosions, to be zapped back to full health moments later. - In Legacy of Kain: Defiance, it is revealed that, even though the heart was ripped out of his chest, Janos Audron's body had not been decayed for 500 years, and trying to find his heart to resurrect him became a plot point. \|\|That heart of his was christened as "The Heart of Darkness", and was used to resurrect Kain at the beginning of Blood Omen.\|\| - The Legend of Zelda: - Might and Magic 6, 7, and 8 have three stages of Death: Unconscious, when HP is below 0; Dead, when negative HP exceeds the inverse of the character's constitution; and Eradicated, a condition caused only by certain late-game attacks, and being so powerful that it "destroys the body", but not their weapons, armor, or inventory. Each condition only differs in the cure. Unconsciousness can be remedied by any source of healing, but Eradication can only be fixed by end-game magic or a temple. - In Persona 4, the silent protagonist may revive himself with a number of moon tsukubames in his pocket, depending on the difficulty selected. At a certain event in the game, \|\|the character's choices determine whether 7-year-old Nanako remains dead, or miraculously revives herself with some apparent help from Teddie.\|\| - In Treasure of the Rudra during the battle with Nagiya, one of the Four Horsemen, Foxy is hit with an attack called "Foxy Killer" and cannot be resurrected until you get a certain plot related item. - After a certain (Early) point in FPS Prey (2006), it's simply impossible to die. Upon losing your last drop of health you're simply sent to the spirit world where, rather than move on to the other side you're granted a brief moment to restock on health and spiritual energy by shooting the conveniently color-coordinated spirits before being reunited with your mostly dead body. However, this simply negates Check Point or Save Point attrition with death attrition. With enough deaths, you can grind your way past any situation. This is arguably still an improvement, however, as playing a shooting gallery Mini-Game with weird undead creatures, then jumping back in where you left off is probably more fun than being sent back to your last save/checkpoint and having to work your way back to your original location. - Assuming you remembered to activate them beforehand, the "Quantum Bio-Reconstruction Devices" in System Shock 2 would resurrect the player if he died anywhere within the level they were located on. Not found in the climactic final level, of course. - The original System Shock had something similar in the form of automatic healing devices that are converted to cyborg conversion chambers. By deactivating the cyborg process, the healing process is reactivated without the enemies knowing. So when you die, you just wake up in the healing chamber with no one the wiser. Of course, some of them were easy to find but extremely difficult to activate, and at least six of the games thirteen levels don't have healing devices at all. - In BioShock and BioShock 2, every time you die, you are revived at the nearest "Vita-Chamber" with some of your health restored, though your enemies' health stays the same. In both games, there is an achievement for beating the entire game on Hard with Vita-Chambers turned off. - In BioShock 2, The Vita-Chambers are even a plotpoint. Subject Delta was psychically forced to shoot himself in the head during the prologue and remained dead for over a decade until he is revived in a Vita-Chamber. And later in the game, the Big Bad realizes that the best way to deal with Delta is to simply restrain him, since if she kills him, he'll just revive and continue his rampage to save his "daughter". - And you are returned to the opening screen when you die, Loads and Loads of Loading away from resuming at your last save point. A fate worse than this particular death. - The Sims 2 University expansion pack introduced the Resurrect-O-Nomitron, which is unlocked when a Sim completes a certain career path and allows them to summon The Grim Reaper and attempt to buy back any Sim (or pet!) whose tombstone is still in the neighborhood. If the tombstone's been sold or destroyed, though, they're gone for good - and if the Grim Reaper doesn't like what you're offering in return, you may not like what you get back. - Throughout the Dragon Quest series, monsters overcome in battle are described as "defeated". This rule does not apply to your own party, however — when a character is reduced to zero HP, the game announces, "(Character) dies". In addition, monsters dispatched by the instant-death Whack and Thwack spells are explicitly described as "killed". Dead party members were put in coffins and carried by the remaining party members. (The American Bowdlerization changed this to ghosts.) Dead party members need to be revived at a church, with a special item, or high-level magic. - In the Dragon Quest V remake, wedding vows include "in sickness and in health, and for as long as you both shall be resurrected from death in a church." - In Ultima III, if someone was so gone that they have since then reincarnated, there is still a spell that brings them back anyways. Presumably, the baby they had become drops dead. There is a cost of the wisdom stat to the caster, though. - Class of Heroes, which is largely inspired by Wizardry, has the same three stages of death (Dead, Ashes, and "Lost"). It is possible to pay the doctors at the infirmary to revive a character who has been turned to ashes, but the cost is three times as much as it is to revive a character who is simply "dead". And if that fails, well...you'll just have to enroll a new level 1 character, won't you? - Referenced in Mass Effect 2, which starts with Shepard dying and being painstakingly revived by Cerberus over two years. Later, when asked about it, one possible response is, "I was only mostly dead. Try finding that option on government paperwork." - \|\|Alyx\|\| in Half-Life 2: Episode 2 was dead enough for a Combine Hunter to credit it as a kill (although why it ignores \|\|Gordon\|\| is uncertain). However, she isn't too dead for \|\|the Vortigaunts to render assistance\|\|. - Similar to the RPG examples above, the Exile system has "dead", "dust", and "stone" statuses. "Stone" was relatively rare, being applied only by certain special monsters, and reversed by a spell. "Dead" was the common form of death, reached by being hit to 0 HP and then hit again while on the brink of death (if you were at 1 HP and hit for 100, you still lived - until the next swing), and could be reversed by the Raise Dead spell - but if it failed you were dusted. "Dust" could also be caused by an excessively powerful kill-shot, and was much harder to reverse. Assuming you didn't cheat, anyway. - In Left 4 Dead 2, if one of your teammates dies they can be revived with a defibrillator regardless of how much time has passed since their "death." While many fans attribute this to a Magical Defibrillator, others believe that the character is instead Only Mostly Dead. - The latter is more likely, considering it can't be used on the one character who actually does suffer a Plotline Death (\|\|poor Bill\|\|). - In World of Warcraft, players can be resurrected for the cost of a bit of mana, or by running their spirit back to their corpse. NPCs are slaughtered by the thousands, but respawn minutes later (or every week in the case of raid bosses). The only final deaths are dictated by the plot, and you can be sure that if the plot requires someone to die for real while you watch, you can do nothing to save them. - Even in the storylines, you occasionally see a character previously you saw killed in front of you be standing before you, very much alive. (And we're not talking respawns of the same character, we're talking about later events involving the previously "dead" character.) When it's a boss, often you'll get the line "[previous location] was merely a setback!" - In Metal Gear Solid 4, \|\|Big Boss is revealed to have been sealed away in a coma for 15 years after his "final" battle with Solid Snake, having been snatched away by the Patriots, his legs and arms amputated and his consciousness locked away with nanomachines. As it turns out, that was actually Solidus Snake, who is physically identical to Big Boss aside from the fact that the eye he lost is on the other side of his face. Big Boss shows up in the ending later with new cybernetic limbs (as well as replacement limbs from his sons, Liquid and Solidus) to let Snake know that he shouldn't spend his last days as a soldier. He finally succumbs to FOXDIE at the end of his speech to his son.\|\| - Dungeon Siege has resurrection shrines scattered about multiplayer mode, as well as resurrection spells that Nature Mages can use to revive a dead character. Carries over into Dungeon Siege II with the addition of Resurrection Scrolls that any character can use, as well as NPC's at the various major towns to summon your corpses (and the gear you were using at the time) for a fee. Alternately, you can go back to where your party died at and recover the equipment manually. - Dungeon Siege II: Broken World introduces enemies called Familiars that, once they hit 0 HP the first time, fall down as if dead for a few seconds, then spontaneously revive in a blast of energy, badly damaging any characters unlucky enough to be caught in the blast. Quite the nasty surprise for newcomers to the expansion. - There is also a fourth level in multiplayer games: "Ghost". Ghosts revive if they find a resurrection shrine or after a set period of time automatically. - Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal addressed this point by having the character Imoen ask \|\|Sarevok\|\| what it was like to be dead. He pretty much responds with a "Pfft, like you've never been dead before," suggesting that in the game (rather than as in the Forgotten Realms) there's a distinction between Raise Dead dead and dead dead. Dead. - In fact, Imoen confirms this, as she recounts what it's like being "dead until the priest gets there". - Shortly after the beginning of Shadows of Amn (the game T.o.B. is an expansion pack for) the party discovers \|\|Jaihera's husband Khalid\|\| lying on a table horribly tortured to death, sending \|\|his widow\|\| into a traumatized fit of grief. When Imoen suggests using a resurrection spell, the \|\|widow\|\| replies that "some things can not be fixed by magic". The implication is that the body is seriously damaged due to Irenicus' 'experiments', which is actually a nice aversion of Gameplay and Story Segregation — in D&D, a corpse must be whole for revival magic to function, and a character that is reduced to less than -10 HP in the Baldur's Gate series is 'chunked' and Killed Off for Real. - Not everyone takes it so seriously. "Greetings, everyone. Sorry, no gifts or souvenirs this time but I'll keep you all in mind the next time I'm gone. Oh, Keldorn, the gods say 'hi' and that you should wash your underwear more thoroughly. Everyone ready? Let's go adventuring." Yes, this is said by someone brought back from the dead. - Due to your character's... unusual heredity, your character is the exception; dead is dead is very, very dead. Sadly this leads to some retcon-induced Fridge Logic with regard to \|\|Imoen\|\|. - A lot of entities also seem to be Not Quite Dead in the series. The most notable of course being your daddy who keeps talking to you despite being long dead and gone. This seems to be par for the course for his class of beings though as \|\|Amaunator, dead God of the Sun\|\| does similar things. - Vampires get a standard "killing them only makes them turn into mist and sends them back to recover in their coffins, unless you destroy them there" treatment, so they barely count as even mostly dead then, since while they're inanimate, they will recover automatically. In a special case, it turns out a character incompletely turned into a vampire just turns into a mostly dead body that can't be raised normally but can be raised with a special ritual at the \|\|temple of Amaunator\|\|. - Most units in S.W.I.N.E. will merely lose their turret and the ability to move. This allows players the ability to recover "lost" units and bring them back into service with a repair trailer. There are a few exceptions to this, but all but one of those are non-combat units. It's fairly easy to go along with it, as all the units in the game are some sort of vehicle. - Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) has \|\|Sonic\|\| killed off by the Big Bad, except not really due to the princess detecting the fallen's spirit lingering around and everyone then deciding the Chaos Emeralds can bring their friend back to life. It does. - Fallout Shelter: Dead Vault Dwellers can be brought back to life if you stump up the cash. - In Undertale, part of a monster's natural death process is a comatose period, known as being "fallen down". Monsters that have fallen down will eventually turn into dust, but they're technically still alive, as proven by experiments documented in the True Lab that unexpectedly brought some monsters back from this state, \|\|sort of\|\|. - Comes up in the finale of Tombs & Treasure. \|\|The girl is found in Tentacula's Shrine, laid out on a stone slab, and the protagonist thinks she's dead at first... but upon further examination realizes she's not, but she can only be woken up by burning some incense in the Silver Censer. If you didn't bring either item (or the Zippo lighter from the very beginning of the game), your only option is to reset.\|\| - Girl Genius: - \|\|Adam and Lilith Clay are ripped to pieces by Von Pinn. They are later resurrected by Agatha's love interest Gilgamesh.\|\| Of course, they are \|\|constructs, built by the Heterodyne boys.\|\| - However, dialog elsewhere in the series makes the rules for being Only Mostly Dead more clear; having your brain incinerated, for instance, is described as making you Deader than Dead, while one character notes that even aside from that resurrection techniques usually don't work so well. - Also, if you're a member of the nobility, being killed causes you to lose your status (rulership or Xth-in-line-for rulership), even if you are successfully resurrected. "So, the good news is, you're alive again. The bad news is ... well, here are the want ads." Baron Wulfenbach doesn't respect this rule, though. - Terinu: \|\|Terinu himself\|\| is believed killed after being speared through the gut by poisonous, acidic stinger the size of a shortsword. Fortunately for him, his species is designed to go into a protective coma when they can't sustain themselves. Of course the fact that he could survive a week with an untreated gut wound in a cell with no food or water is pretty amazing already... - The Adventures of Dr. McNinja has a ridiculous parody of an example: Doc appears to get shot to death, and collapses to the ground, riddled with bullet holes. Shortly after this, it turns out he's perfectly fine, supposedly because the bullets missed all his vital organs. At least, that's the excuse he gives to Death, who doesn't buy it. So Doc beats him up and declares his own previously fatal injuries to be Only a Flesh Wound. - Schlock Mercenary: - Referenced. Any injury other than damage to the brain is repairable, so the characters can be (and have been) reduced to just a head in a nannybag at one point or another, before having your body rebuilt. This is apparently referred to in the UNS military (although not among the mercenaries) as being "mostly dead." Later advances in technology lead to there being five levels of "dead", Laz-1 to Laz-5, explained here. Laz-1 is 20th Century dead - cessation of brain-stem activity. Laz-2 is Laz-1 plus damage to brain-tissue. Laz-3 is total loss of brain, but distributed nanite-backups are intact. Laz-4 is Laz-3 with significant damage to the backups. Laz-5 is complete loss of identity and memory beyond retrieval by technology so far. - Later, they come up with a way to store off-body backups, allowing one to be brought back from even a Laz-5 death, though missing any memories since their last backup. Opinions differ in-universe whether or not someone brought back this way is the same person as the one that died. - Roommates is generally a Nobody Can Die work, but is also a Massive Multiplayer Crossover Meta Fic soooo it runs on two main powers: (1) Clap Your Hands If You Believe (mostly the fandom's) and the (2) Theory of Narrative Causality. If you have both on your side you're obviously alive (even if the story calls it differently). If only (1) then you are "Canonically Dead", which means this trope, you can come back just don't go close to a narrative that wants you not breathing (this is why Death by Origin Story works). If only (2) then pray that you never have to leave your story or you are as good as dead. If neither you never existed in the first place. - In Kill Six Billion Demons, the first Demiurge Zoss massacred most of the Prime Angels after breaching Heaven, leaving one barely alive to torture for information about the Gods. Since this left it trapped on the verge of death in a broken body for millennia rather than trigger its Resurrective Immortality, it's gone a bit wrong in the head. - Gloomverse: What happens when \|\|your wand breaks.\|\| - In the MMORPG for Gaia Online, if a player loses all health they they are "dazed", which leaves them unable to attack, open chests or crates, move to another screen, or really do anything besides use the chatbox or wander around drunkenly. The player can be saved from this state by clicking the "awaken" button which whisks you to a place called the Null Chamber (thanks to the mysterious attack rings), using a potion, or having another player use a reviving ring on them. - This occurs in Justice League Unlimited when Flash taps into the Speed Force to defeat Nigh Invulnerable foe, "Brainthor", and appears to fade from existence, for good. After a few brief moments of hopelessness, it is revealed that Flash is still alive, but continually regressing and his dreaded demise appears inevitable, so the remaining core seven decide to ''pull'' him out of the Speed Force. After being rescued, he says that he's certain that if he ever tries going that fast again, he won't be able to come back. - In the Amphibia Season 2 finale, King Andrias \|\|stabs Marcy in the back with his Laser Blade, and she appears to have died until The Stinger reveals that Marcy survived, but is comatose in a Healing Vat. When she's freed from the container in "Olivia & Yunan", she is practically delirious and unable to walk properly after spending weeks in a medically induced coma, but otherwise is perfectly healed (at least until The Core forcibly possesses her).\|\| - In the She-Ra and the Princesses of Power episode Save the Cat, \|\|Catra is critically injured by Horde Prime but is revived by She-Ra. Although Catra seemingly died before her revival, some very faint breaths can be heard implying Catra was technically, albeit barely, alive. ND Stevenson confirmed that Catra was originally supposed to be dead but the breaths were added due to Executive Meddling.\|\| - Possibly the Trope Maker behind the trope: The Mbuti people of the Ituri forest in the Congo use a gradated series of expressions to convey the degree of "death," ranging from plain "dead" (i.e., very ill) to "completely dead" and finally "dead forever." Described in The Forest People (1961), an anthropological bestseller by Colin Turnbull. - Clinical death means that the heart and circulatory system has stopped functioning. Up until the 20th Century, this was the official definition of death. Even today it usually means your ticket's been punched. But, thanks to modern resuscitation science, death can no longer be considered an absolute moment but rather a process that can be reversed even many hours after it has taken place. If medical interventions do not exist at any given time or place, then of course death cannot be reversed. [1] - The Lazarus syndrome is defined as a delayed return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC) after CPR has ceased. In other words, patients who are clinically dead sometimes spontaneously return to life. Occurrences of the syndrome are extremely rare, and the causes are not well understood. A possible theory is the delayed action of drugs, due to build-up of pressure in the chest. [2] - Hypothermia: there have been been multiple cases of people who've been pulled out of extremely cold water or found outside in sub-zero temperatures, seemingly dead. They're cold, stiff, blue and without any vital signs. But despite appearances they're actually this trope due to hypothermia both causing, or at least contributing to, the lack of vitals and greatly extending the length of time that the brain can go without oxygen. Many of the individuals in question have gone on to make full recoveries after being warmed up and resuscitated. This is why there is an adage in medicine that goes, theyre not dead until theyre warm and dead. [3] - Suspended animation is the temporary (short- or long-term) slowing or stopping of biological function so that physiological capabilities are preserved. [4] - DHCA is a surgical technique that induces deep medical hypothermia. It's used when blood circulation to the brain must be stopped because of delicate surgery within the brain, or because of surgery on large blood vessels that lead to or from the brain. It's is a form of carefully managed clinical death in which heartbeat, breathing and all brain activity cease. [5] - EPR is an emergency procedure to save dying patients with traumatic injuries. The blood will be replaced with a cold saline solution, which stops cellular activity. There is no heartbeat, no breathing and no brain activity. At this point, the patient is technically dead. But the cells will stay alive, working at a much slower pace at the lower temperature. This gives doctors more time to fix the injury. The patients can be returned to life by replacing the saline with blood. [6] - Scientists hope to create a drug that induces suspended animation (pill or injection). - Cryonics patients. They arrange to be frozen after death, in the hopes that future technology will bring them back to life. [7] - Sometimes its posible for long dead languages to come back to life if the language was well documented enough. Motivated people can learn it and then pass it on to their children as as their native language. Examples include Hebrew, Cornish, and Massachusett which are spoken natively today despite their last original speakers dying centuries ago. A list of revived languages can be found here.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyMostlyDead
Only Known by Their Nickname - TV Tropes "Let me explain something to you. Um, I am not "Mr. Lebowski". You're * Mr. Lebowski. I'm the Dude. So that's what you call me. You know, that or, uh, His Dudeness, or uh, Duder, or El Duderino if you're not into the whole brevity thing."* This is a character who is primarily, or even only, known by their In-Series Nickname. Related to Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep", but that is about people being referred to exclusively by their jobs or what they're best known for doing. Also related to Stage Names. Does not include Fan Nicknames, secret identities or explicit pseudonyms. Also doesn't include people who give themselves new names following an act of self-reinvention, and stop responding to their old name (e.g. Voldemort). Exceptionally badass examples of this trope fall into the Red Baron. Obvious and common contractions, e.g. someone named William introducing themselves as Bill, don't really count either. Usually, Dramatis Personae will give the full name of such a character first, though the actual script will use the nickname almost exclusively even in the unspoken directions. If the character insists on the nickname, it's Do Not Call Me "Paul". If the nickname is actually his real name, it's His Name Really Is "Barkeep". ## Examples: <!—index—> <!—/index—> - Grande Odalisque: The woman's name is never given, not even in the painting's title. She's simply referred to as the Grande Odalisque. - The titular Kid Hero of BoBoiBoy is only ever referred to as such, his real name remaining a mystery. Similarly, BoBoiBoy's grandfather, Tok Aba, only goes by such regardless of who talks to him, although Tok Aba literally means Granddad. - Kung Fu Wa: One of Tee Yang's classmates is only known as "Gossip Boy", everyone refers to him by that nickname, even he calls himself like that. - BBV Productions: - In The Time Travellers, the eponymous characters are known only by their nicknames, "Professor" and "Ace". Toward the end of the series, Ace decides to start going by her real name, which is revealed to be Alice. - The protagonist of The Wanderer has Name Amnesia. In the first installment of the series, another character dubs him "Fred" for the sake of having something to call him, and it sticks. - In The Broons, the three youngest kids are called "the twins" and "the bairn". Maybe their parents got tired of naming kids. - Very few people in Footrot Flats refer to Cooch his given name, which is Socrates. - Doc Boy from Garfield hates being called by his nickname, especially by his older brother Jon, but ironically has no known name. His first few appearances said his name is Doc. - In Luann, only two of the main character's fellow students in junior college have been identified — and they are known only as Mr. Jock and Mr. Goth. - Peanuts: - Pig-Pen. Nobody knows his real name; at his first appearance, he actually says: "I haven't got a name... People just call me things... Real insulting things." In one strip, Pig-Pen says that everyone calls his dad "Pig-Pen Sr." - Rerun Van Pelt. When he is introducing himself to his kindergarten class, he reveals that even he doesn't know what his real name is. - As well: Patricia "Peppermint Patty" Reichardt. - Apparently a characteristic of Pluggers according to this strip◊. - Retail: Lunker is only called Lunker among his fellow employees, at his insistence. Only his Old Friend Crystal is allowed to call him Mel. - Thimble Theatre: - Scooner Seawell Georgia Washenting Christiffer Columbia Daniel Boom, usually called Swee'pea - Popeye, upon finding his long-lost father, asks him what their real names are. Pappy doesn't remember. - In Back to the Outback, when Chaz introduces Maddie to the audience at his show, he calls her "Medusa", but among the other animals (as well as the movie credits and other official material), she just goes by Maddie. - In a couple of Disney Animated Canon examples, there are many characters who are never given real names: - In Cinderella, Gus is originally given the name "Octavius" by Cinderella after she takes him in, but is called "Gus" for short (or in Jaq's case, "Gus-Gus"), and is never referred to by his full name afterwards. - On the surface, The Lion King's Scar appears to be named after his scar, but in a non-canon novel series, it's revealed that his given name was "Taka." This isn't much better, however, as it's Swahili for dirt/trash, which goes to show his status in the family. "Taka" is also Swahili for to want/to wish. This was most likely the intended meaning. The Lion Guard would later confirm his real name to be "Askari", thus making "Scar" both a shortened form of his real name and a reference to his scar. - Tramp from Lady and the Tramp has a rather strange name. He is a homeless stray though, so he probably named himself, since no human named him. Later it's subverted, since that becomes his name (minus "The") once he's adopted. This is also an example of Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep", because one of his old flames wrote a song about him called "He's a Tramp," and the name stuck. - Dumbo's name is actually Jumbo Jr. He doesn't seem to mind the cruel nickname he's given, but his mother certainly does (at least at first). Interestingly, despite it starting as a cruel nickname, it sticks and everybody calls him that (including Timothy Q. Mouse, one of the few characters who is nice to him). - When it comes to the members of Big Hero 6, Hiro and Fred are normal names, and Baymax is a robot name. But Wasabi, GoGo Tomago, and Honey Lemon? They're nicknames given to them by Fred. Adaptation Name Change is in play for Wasabi and GoGo; in the original comics it was "Wasabi No-Ginger" (and it was unclear it was if that was a nickname or his real name), and Jamie Chung (GoGo's voice actress) says that the latter's real name is \|\|Ethel\|\| instead of "Leiko Tanaka." Given that, like the other two, Honey Lemon was Race Lifted, it's unlikely "Aiko Miyazaki" is her real name, either. - Lumpy, originally from Pooh's Heffalump Movie and later My Friends Tigger & Pooh and a couple of other Disney Pooh works has the full name of Heffridge Trumpler Brompet Heffalump the Fourth. However, he can (almost) never remember it, so everyone just calls him "Lumpy". - Flower of Bambi is merely called that because the infant Bambi is blurting out new words he's learning from Thumper. Thumper is about to correct him, but Flower shyly allows the name to stick. - Metegol: El Grosso's real name (Ezekial Remancho) is only mentioned once. - Phantom Boy: The Face's real name is never revealed. - Ratatouille: Since Rémy is presumably unable to write like a human, Linguini never learns his actual name, merely calling him "Little Chef." - Meilin Lee of Turning Red has multiple nicknames. Her real name is Meilin, yet her friends call her "Mei" while her family members call her "Mei-Mei." It's rare that you will hear people call her Meilin (the only one who calls her Meilin is Tyler). - Duck from The Adventure Zone: Amnesty was this for the vast majority of the podcast, until episode 35 revealed his real name was \|\|Wayne\|\|. However, several people in universe still haven't heard his real name by the end, thus still fulfilling this trope. - In In Strange Woods, Shane O'Connor is much more commonly referred to as "Woodsley", stemming from a nickname he got during Scouts due to a malapropism of "I'm really woodsy." - In Pokemon: Adventures in the Millennium, the Cool Loot Gang never reveal their names and are only referred to as "Cool [Item] [Guy/Gal/Pal]". - Red Panda Adventures: The real name of the villain of the novel The Mind Master is never revealed. During his training under Nepalese master Rashan alongside the future Red Panda, he insisted on being called "One", to go along with their master's calling the Red Panda "Two" when he would not give his own name. In Toronto, he adopts the name "Ajay Shah", which the Red Panda explains is Nepalese for "Unconquerable King". Fitting for his stated desire of world domination. - Many, many characters from Welcome to Night Vale, though several of them may not even have real names to begin with. - Just about every Professional Wrestler ever. Has a trope named after the two Pauls, Triple H and The Big Show, who only go by their ring names. - Triple H is a case even in kayfabe, since his full name is Hunter Hearst Helmsley, but he's rarely, if ever, called that anymore. He's still called "Hunter" on occasion, and he and his in-laws are referred to as the McMahon/Helmsley family, so this name is still canon. - Some wrestlers avert this by using their actual real names such as John Cena, Randy Orton (who even named his finisher after his initials), both Hardys, Brock Lesnar, and Shelton Benjamin. - Some other wrestlers are in a middle-ground where they invoke and avert this at the same time. Examples of this grouping include Ric Flair (Ric is a common nickname for Richard while his real last name has an 'h' the ring name lacks and an 'e' that got swapped for an 'a'), Batista (Batista is his actual last name, minus a 'u', and his real first name Dave has been mentioned on-screen occasionally), The Miz (he himself revealed in a 2010 promo that his real name is Mike Mizanin, with the Miz part allowing a contestant on a game show he appeared in to correctly identify him), plus female wrestlers Maryse and Melina (who invoke this in tandem with First-Name Basis; their real-life last names are Mizanin (originally Ouellet) and Perez respectively). - When Rocky Maivia turned heel he gave himself the nickname "The Rock". To say this nickname stuck is an understatement, to the point where his original ring name is all but Canon Discontinuity at this point. - Sesame Street: - Snuffy's real name is Aloysius Snuffleupagus. Even though almost everyone on the series refers to him by his nickname, his mother usually refers to him by his real name. - Cookie Monster, whose real name was eventually revealed to be \|\|Sid.\|\| - "My name is Guy Smiley, and they call me Guy Smiley because I changed my name from Bernie Liederkrantz!" - Journey into Space: Doc Matthews' first name is never revealed in the original. However, it is said to be Daniel in The Host. - James Golden, the longtime call screener for The Rush Limbaugh Show, was consistently called Bo Snerdley. - In Both Your Houses, Girl Friday Hypercompetent Sidekick secretary Greta Nilsson is only ever referred to as "Bus" — and the play never explains why. - In Fangirls, Edna's online Gay Best Friend 'Salty Pringl' is only ever identified by his online handle. - In David Belasco's The Girl of the Golden West, the title character is known as "the Girl" even in the play's Dramatis Personae; only very rarely is her real name, Minnie, mentioned in dialogue. The opera averts this and has her called Minnie all the time. - Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls, called that because nobody bets higher. In the few moments between "My Time Of Day" and "I've Never Been In Love Before", Sky reveals to Sarah his real name, Obediah Masterson, and says she's the first person he ever told it to. - "Yank", the protagonist of The Hairy Ape by Eugene O'Neill. In one of the later scenes, he gives his name as Bob Smith, "but I been just Yank for so long." - Little Buttercup in Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore. Her real name, Mrs. Cripps, appears only in the Dramatis Personae. - In Liliom, Liliom's actual name of Andreas Zavocki is only used when policemen are interrogating him. - The title character of Madame Butterfly is only called "Butterfly," "Madame Butterfly," or "Cho-Cho San" (which means "Madame Butterfly" or "Miss Butterfly"), even by her relatives. Her birth name is never revealed. - In The Most Happy Fella, Tony addresses his love letters to "Rosabella" because he doesn't know her name. Nobody in the play calls her anything else, until the final scene where she reveals that her real name is (or was) Amy. (This is averted in They Knew What They Wanted, where Amy is never called Rosabella.) - The Wreck in My Sister Eileen and The Musical Wonderful Town. His name is Ted Loomis, but nobody calls him Ted. Eileen: Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Loomis? The Wreck: Leave out the mister—call me Wreck. Eileen: Wreck? The Wreck: That's what they called me at Georgia Tech. I'd have made All American, only I was expelled. - Perfect Pie: The protagonist Patsy's real name (Patricia) is mentioned only once in the entire play, and is very easy to miss completely. - In Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, the male leads go by the nicknames Roo and Barney; their real names are given once, when they're being introduced at the beginning, and then never mentioned again. Then there's the neighbor Bubba, who everyone's known since she was a little girl; it's a significant moment in her personal arc when a newly-introduced character, Johnny, thinks to ask what her actual name is (and it's followed by a scene where Johnny refers to her by that name and Barney is like "who?" before realizing he means Bubba). - In West Side Story, pretty much of all of the Jets only use their nicknames and thus their real names are never revealed. Its less of a case with the Sharks, who have names that Puerto Ricans would likely have. - Barbie: - No one ever calls Barbie by her full name, Barbara. - Her oldest younger sibling seems to have a name, but she's only called "Skipper". - In BIONICLE, the ruthless leader of the Dark Hunters is only ever referred to as "The Shadowed One". Even while other Dark Hunters work under various Code Names, usually their real names are revealed to the audience, but despite the rest of the info known about the man on top (his face, his motives, and even a good chunk of his backstory), there's nothing on his real name. Reportedly, series writer Greg Farshtey chose not to name him due to the amount of backlash he faced in changing the name of the series' actual Big Bad note : Originally known as "Makuta", halfway through the series, it was later retconned that "Makuta" is a title given to several baddies, and that his real name was "Teridax", keeping it unknown to preserve a mystery and save himself the headache. - Fate/stay night: - All the Servants continue using only their class names long after their true identities are revealed. It can be a bit awkward to refer to an apparently teenaged girl by the term "Saber". The only one who is commonly referred to by name is Gilgamesh, who is often called Archer by Saber. - Gilgamesh admits that his weird drill-lance "sword" doesn't have a real name. He calls it "Ea", but this is not its true name, just his own pet name for the weapon. Since it predates the world, it also predates the concept of names, so by definition it cannot have one. - Minotaur Hotel: As you can imagine, the guy known as P wasn't named "P" at birth. Apparently, this was a family tradition, with his grandfather also being known as "P". His real name is \|\|Pedro. "Storm" is also a nickname, with his real name being "Oscar". After the two reveal their real names to each other, the game changes their in-game name to their real names, though they're still known by their nicknames towards everyone else.\|\| - Zen and 707's real names (Hyun Ryu and Luciel Choi, respectively) in Mystic Messenger are mentioned in the prologue, but V (himself an example of this trope) is nearly the only one to use them. There's also a double-nested example with \|\|707: a player who does the Casual Story first will probably assume that Luciel is his real name, but the Deep Story reveals that Luciel is actually his baptismal name and Saeyoung is his true birth name.\|\| - M in Shikkoku no Sharnoth is never called anything but that. \|\|He claims not to actually have a name. If he had a name, it would be James.\|\| - The protagonist of Songs and Flowers tries to invoke this by referring to herself as "Miss Info," but ends up telling her love interest her real name, Jazz Overstreet, early in each route anyway. - Spirit Hunter: NG: - It's revealed in her introduction that Rosé Mulan isn't the woman's real name, but her stage name. Whatever it actually is doesn't get revealed. - Up until all his quests are done and he formally introduces himself, D-Man is only known as such. The nickname came about \|\|by him shortening Desk Man, since he was a desk editor for a magazine in life.\|\| - Ciel in Tsukihime. Her real name is Elesia, which is referenced roughly equally relating to her as to her Nightmare in Kagetsu Tohya: One scene. - The servants in Umineko: When They Cry are all referred to by names ending with the character for "sound" (pronounced "on", "non" or "ne"). Shannon's actual name is Sayo, and Kanon's is Yoshiya. \|\|And then there's the servant who is only known as Yasu. His/her full name is confirmed in the manga to be Sayo Yasuda, further establishing that Shannon and Yasu are the same person.\|\| - Zero Escape: - Everyone except Junpei is eligible for this trope in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. The nine players of the Nonary Game decide to create nicknames for themselves based on their bracelet numbers, and then there's Zero, their kidnapper, whose name is also fake, and a couple more characters who also receive nicknames temporarily for the sake of explaining their deaths until the others figure out their real ones. Ultimately, we get to know all their real names except for Seven. Clover is a Double Subversion: her real name actually is Clover, \|\|and using her real name turns out to bite her in the ass, showing just why the characters were using aliases to begin with.\|\| - Virtue's Last Reward: - Zero III is usually called "Zero Jr." by the cast to differentiate him from the actual mastermind of the Nonary Game, who also calls himself "Zero" and who the cast refers to as "Zero Sr." Zero Jr.'s official name is \|\|Lagomorph\|\|, while Zero Sr.'s real name is \|\|Dr. Sigma Klim\|\|. - One participant is an amnesiac man in a suit of armor who can't remember anything about himself except that his name starts with a K, and so asks everyone to just call him "K". \|\|Depending on the timeline, K is either Kyle Klim (who actually has amnesia) or Akane Kurashiki (who is pretending to be Kyle)\|\|. - In Zero Time Dilemma, the amnesiac boy in a strange helmet is only referred to as "Q" by the game and promotional materials. In one path, you learn that his real name is \|\|Sean\|\|. Then, in another, you learn that \|\|Sean was always known to the cast by his real name, and isn't Q at all. Q is actually an entirely different character who was always just offscreen, but who the cast was always well aware of. His real name is Delta, but he also has a second nickname the cast knows him by: Zero II\|\|.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyKnownByHisNickname
Only Has Same-Sex Admirers - TV Tropes In cases where a character is so good-looking, kind, muscular, badass, etc. they may suffer the misfortune (or not) of being found attractive by members of their own sex, and only by their own sex. Note: A character can only qualify for this if people of the opposite sex show up in the series and clearly show no romantic or sexual interest in them. So if there are only members of the same sex that show up, they don't count. Could develop into Chick Magnet or Dude Magnet later on if members of the opposite gender do eventually show interest. If the male character is a Bishōnen it could be a case of So Beautiful, It's a Curse or of only men wanting to go for him because he looks like a beautiful girl and the men may justify still being straight by pointing this out. A reason they may not attract characters of the opposite sex is they look at them as not being good looking, too macho, too tomboyish, too rude, too feminine looking, too tempermental, too spineless or even too nice. If the character is a big enough same-sex magnet this could be another reason they don't attract people of the opposite sex because the opposite-sex characters are jealous of the magnetic pull the character has on their crushes. (For example, a guy may attract numerous guys some of who are chick magnets and their female admirers see the pheromone releasing male to be in the way of them being with their crushes to the point of jealousy and this can go both ways if a female character attracts all the female characters in the vicinity that the guys are crushing on.) If the female character is a Bifauxnen, girls could be wanting to go for her instead of guys because she's the next best thing. Another reason she may not attract guys is because No Guy Wants an Amazon. Bara, Yaoi or Yuri genre can still appear here when other gender characters appear in those shows. Compare Unwanted Harem and Abhorrent Admirer. Compare/contrast Even the Guys Want Him and Even the Girls Want Her. ## Examples: - Teito Klein of 07-Ghost. Mikage once told him he loved him; Frau, Hakuren, and Ayanami also have an interest in him and though there are girls in the setting they haven't expressed interest yet. - In Anne Happy, Bifauxnen Ren's "misfortune" is that while she's an extreme Chick Magnet that can literally attract females of any species, no males seem to be interested in her so far. - Black Butler: - In contrast to Ciel and Sebastian, Claude and Edward attract the attention of only Alois and Aleister, respectively. - Soma. Agni's behavior towards him seems similar to a Bodyguard Crush at times. - Maylene is subject to some blatant sexual overtures when Nina Hopkins is around (which includes Nina kissing her, hugging her, and openly groping her breasts and thighs with some heavy breathing sound effects and hearts). Also, in the behind-the-scenes episode, Ran-Mao strips Maylene of her maid outfit and straddles her and has them switch clothing before she gropes her breasts and thighs. Despite her being attractive to the point of attracting girls there are no guys in the series that have expressed interest in her as of yet. - The Case Study of Vanitas: Vanitas. Johann mentions that he thinks Vanitas "has a pretty dishy (attractive) face" with a heart in his speech bubble. It becomes increasingly apparent that Noé has a thing for him as well. All girls thus far either want to kill him or think he's a jerk. Although, as of late there is one girl who has taken a shine to him though she initially hated him. - Akiyoshi of Cute Devil counts as Naruse is obsessively and unhealthily in love with him, and he also had a fellow male classmate try to jump him while his back was turned and a straight guy mentioned he wouldn't mind kissing Akiyoshi since he's so cute without his glasses. Although he goes to a school with girls and boys there are no girls who find him attractive. - Devils and Realist: - Shino of Hakkenden: Eight Dogs of the East notably has only guys having a thing for him with one going so far as to say he's his type and wanting to marry him when he gets older. - Haru wo Daiteita: Iwaki gets this constantly from both men who are essentially straight and gay men. This, of course, causes Katou to be very paranoid about every guy he meets and sends him into Crazy Jealous Guy mode more than once (although admittedly he gets a lot better as time goes on). - In episode 100 of Inazuma Eleven there's a one-episode character named Kamezaki Kappa (yes, a kappa) who apparently is more than just a Hiroto fanboy. He stalks him while he's training, follows him in the forest, and even blushes when he asks him for an autograph, but Hiroto doesn't mind him. In addition, one comic in the defunct mobile game Inazuma Eleven SD reveals that him and Midorikawa are both Kariya's legal guardians. On the other hand, none of the female characters are attracted to him and he has no fangirls, but there's no evidence that Hiroto expresses any interest in girls, either. - Family Complex has Natsuru, a Bifauxnen who has attracted fangirls ever since primary school all the way to college. Her male friends don't see her as a girl, and therefore never show romantic interest towards her. - In the Clear Moonlit Dusk: Up until she meets Ichimura, this has been Yoi's experience. She is fawned over by girls of all stripes because of her Bifauxnen looks and accidental princely treatment towards women and is otherwise ignored by guys who often mistake her as one of them. This changes as she begins to be pursued by Ichimura \|\|and later Ouji\|\|. - Hetalia: Axis Powers: - China is a Dude Looks Like a Lady Bishōnen whose looks have attracted the attention of only guys thus far. The guys include N. Korea, France, Russia, and maybe Hong Kong. - Germany has guys like Iceland commenting on his attractiveness and getting distracted by his muscles and has Italy wrapped around his finger. Also in season 5, Japan called Germany "the most handsome man in the EU." - England has attracted no girls, and he has shown no interest either. Although they also get annoyed and fight with him his fellow male nations have occasionally shown interest, namely America and France. - The only girl Lithuania interacts with would be Belarus who hates and abuses him because he has her brother Russia's affections. Poland also hints that he has a beyond platonic interest in him. - In one strip Emperor Nero mentions "a cute boy wouldn't be bad all all" when talking about Roman woman lovers being scary before leaning towards Anicetus who pushes him away. - K: - Yata attracts attention mainly from Fushimi, his childhood male friend who seems to have Single-Target Sexuality towards him. - Mikoto is not a Chick Magnet but attracts tons of Foe Romantic Subtext with Reisi starting with their suggestive, almost flirtatious conversation in prison, which is later followed up by Reisi leaning down so close to Mikoto at one point that their faces are only inches apart. He and Tatara were also extremely close with the two being hinted at having a thing together. - Kaguya Hime: Akira, at first, when she gets crushed on at school and outside of school only from girls who range from sweet to seriously creepy. She comments on this in the beginning wondering why only girls seem to have a thing for her and if she's releasing pheromones. She grows out of this trope as we discover she has started to attract boys as well as the story progresses. - Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl has Tomari where, especially in the anime, it seems that only the girls want her. The following is what they have to say about her: "I was surrounded by reporters, and just when I thought it was all over... Tomari-chan leapt to my rescue!" "KYAAAAA!"... "Tomari is so cool sometimes that she makes my heart skip a beat." "She's even received love letters from girls before." "Ah, my wonderful prince." "I'm also attracted to you." "She's like a prince!" - Kaze to Ki no Uta: Whereas Serge attracts girls (and guys) it seems only the males who come across Gilbert want to sleep with him. Naturally, he's okay with this. - Teshio of Kyoumen no Silhouette is a Dude Looks Like a Lady bishie in a world where manly men appeal better to girls, and perverted men are the only thing Teshio can attract. Later he starts attracting girls too just by being himself making him grow into being Chick Magnet as well. - Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: Kobayashi has at least three girls that show interest in her (Tohru, Elma, and Ilulu), not that she's interested. The only man she regularly interacts with is her Platonic Life Partner Takiya. - Monochrome Factor: - Akira has Kengo, who's attracted to him; Shirogane, who's in love with him; and Haruka, who's blushed around him and is hinted to like him. Kou also is quite fond of him and wanted to see him naked. Also, the only girl he interacts with is tsundere around him but does not like him that way. - And Haruka as Kou loves to flirt with him. - Yuu Kashima from Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun has a massive fanclub of her female classmates, but doesn't generate much interest from guys. While her sexuality is ambiguous, it's not an issue for her, since she's an incorrigible flirt towards her admirers. - Setsuna Sakurazaki in Negima! Magister Negi Magi gets endless flirtatious remarks from Konoka Konoe, a psychotic attraction from Tsukuyomi and has been paired with Asuna in at least one CD drama in a moment that wasn't what it looked like. She remains the series' center of Yuri. - No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!: Tomoko Kuroki starts the manga utterly friendless, completely lacking in social skills, and determined to get a boyfriend. Over time, she's able to improve herself and manages to gain a circle of admirers...all of whom are female. Ucchi becomes her Stalker with a Crush, Asuka takes an interest in her that at times seems romantic, Yuri develops a possessive streak over her, Hina aggressively pushes herself closer to Tomoko, and Shizuku becomes excited at being Tomoko's kohai. Tomoko, for her part, doesn't seem to be fully aware of all these girls' feelings for her, though it's greatly implied she has the potential to reciprocate. - PandoraHearts: - For all his skills and good looks, Leo is notably only found attractive by Vincent who also likes to be abused by Leo. - Elliot is said to be considered attractive by his male schoolmates and no girls have shown attraction to him. - Mira from Papa To Kiss In The Dark attracts plenty of attention from his fellow pretty boy companions. - Osanai of Paprika. Himuro seems to have fetishized Osanai—we briefly see dirty magazines in his apartment with a younger Osanai on the cover, and his dreamscape features a towering statue of Osanai as a Greek god. Although there is a woman he loves, she finds his stalker behavior (and thus him) repulsive. - Shouma of Penguindrum. Despite his pretty boy looks, girls show no interest in him, saying he is boring and plain. However, his best male friend is revealed to have feelings for him in the novels. He eventually falls into Chick Magnet and out of this trope in that Ringo eventually falls for him, making him Even the Guys Want Him since he now has both a female and male admirer. - Sailor Moon: Although both men and women acknowledge Haruka's androgynous good looks, it's only other girls that are shown as outright infatuated with her. At one point all of the Inner Sailor Guardians bicker over who gets to dance with Haruka, and Makoto spends one episode nursing a blatant crush. - Seraph of the End: - Ferid is an effeminate vampire but he has a horrible personality that leads people of both genders to be wary of him, and for good reason. In an omake, Crowley, the one person who can stand him, willingly kisses him while both are at work and requests they go in the back to continue where they left off. - Mitsuba attracts no interest from guys but has Shinoa tease her and have a Shower Scene with her while later saying that she'd like to see her body in detail and calling her "sexy". Also, the Lesbian Vampire Chess drapes her body over Mitsuba's when sucking her blood. She later develops into a Dude Magnet when we find out that Yoichi may have a secret affection for her as well. - Sora of Shitsurakuen. She's got quite the harem of adoring schoolgirls who she's rescued from evil boys. - Nako, Uruka, and Kurumi from Steel Angel Kurumi 2. Nako has Karinka, Kurumi, and her best friend Uruka in love with her. Kurumi has Saki in love with both her and Uruka. And in episode 4 Kurumi gets legions of fangirls at her school. - Texhnolyze. Toyama is wanted only by his father and maybe Ichise. - Tokyo Ghoul: - Urie has captured the interest of Hige and Uta who both comment on his sexiness. They are both men, and so far no woman has shown interest. In chapter 100 of re \|\|even Matsuri gets in on the act as he tears off all his clothes and loudly proclaims his love for Urie\|\|. - Yamori, by contrast, is not attractive, but is so badass and deranged that it more than makes up for it. At least according to Nico and Naki. - Ayato is attractive but has only attracted interest from Nico much to his dismay. - Yomo is found attractive mainly by Uta who flirts with him in a live-action show while touching his kagune and Nico in an omake when he arrives in his bar and hits on him. Kaneki also comments on his good looks in the sequel. - Ishida Sui (the creator of Tokyo Ghoul) also briefly wrote another comic called The Penisman (about a muscular guy with a penis for a head) who attracted a sexual Villainous Crush from another male, Cannibalman. - Toward the Terra: Jomy appears to fall into this. Virtually no girl seems to be attracted to him, just the guys. - Ultimate Otaku Teacher: Araki Koutarou has only boys falling for him due to his girlish looks. - Sen and Swordfish from the yaoi manga Under Grand Hotel. Sen has Swordfish in love with him and has had numerous guys try to rape him, and Swordfish has Sen and Norman in love with him, and there are girls that show up but none show interest in them. - Played or Drama with Momoe in Wonder Egg Priority. Her admirers are exclusively female, but her problem is not that they like her— it's that they use her as an idealized male stand-in because of her boyish looks and protective personality. The one girl who did love her as a girl she was still uncomfortable with, and only became more guilty for breaking her heart when that girl killed herself. - Fu Inubozaki from Yuki Yuna is a Hero. The Vita game mentions that she's gotten love letters from a few girls, including a girl from the Cheerleading Club after she helped them out. She has no luck with the opposite sex, though. - Yuri!!! on Ice: Main character Yuri attracts varying degrees of interest from his male childhood friend, Victor \|\|(who he even gets engaged to)\|\|, Yurio, and Christophe. Notably he has no girls that have crushes on him or fangirls like Victor, Christophe, and Yurio do (Sara is friendly towards him but it isn't clear if she's romantically interested in him, and the Nishigori triplets are fans of him but they're only six years old). - The Title Character of Yurika's Campus Life is utterly irresistible to women for some reason (she blames it on genetics since her father was an infamous gigolo in his youth, and pheromones). This initially frustrates her to no end; the problem being she considers herself to be straight and desperately wishes for a boyfriend but despite her stunning beauty, the opposite sex considers Yurika to be unattractive for reasons they themselves can't explain (not helped by unsubstantiated rumors that she's already knocked up half the 10,000 women at her strict, girls-only college) and don't have the slightest interest in her because her charms completely failing on them. She eventually recognizes the utility of being popular with many girls and starts sliding down the Kinsey scale. Then the plot drove her to become a gigolette master, seducing, conquering the hearts, and bedding every woman she encountered with the simplest of ease. - Yuureitou: - Pre taking a level in badass Taichi attracted interest from trans male Tetsuo and Marube and when he cross-dressed he had males at a local village attracted to him. This didn't extend to girls until he attracted Q by displaying his new badass credentials and this is also part of what made Tetsuo fall in love with him and become his Closet Key. - Tetsuo identifies as a straight trans male and while he does initially attract girls and boys, it's when he tried to get intimate with girls that they rejected him when they discovered he was assigned female. Because Taichi accepts him as who he is, they fall in love. - Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts: To Hideyoshi's annoyance, his girly looks have him garnering only male attention at regular intervals. - Sukisho: Sora and Sunao are the most obvious, but there are also other examples. Despite the large mostly Bishōnen cast, there are some girls who show up and none show attraction to the main characters. - Chris Kattan's recurring character Mango on Saturday Night Live is an exotic dancer who instantly triggers love in every man who sees him, regardless of their previous orientation, but has no effect on women. - Advanced V.G. II: - Satomi Yajima is an athletic and borderline androgynous looking tomboy, which has incited Ayako Yuuki's unrequited lust for her. Ayako merely tries to flirt with her in-game, but the OVA adaptation has Ayako grope Satomi before shredding her clothing then steal a kiss on her cheek. - The third Light Novel adaptation features a new female transfer student who also becomes smitten with Satomi. It eventually leads up to a scene in the school's infirmary where she steals Satomi's first kiss, making it the second time it was done to her by another girl. She's never been hit on by any guys, despite attending a co-ed highschool. - In Ensemble Stars!, Hajime's girly looks make him more popular with men than women, and he has many fanboys declaring that he's "cuter than any girl!" He is not very happy about this, as he'd much prefer to be considered cool than cute. - DRAMAtical Murder: Aoba has feminine features and an alluring voice, which attracts many a guy's attention to the point of inspiring some to try to rape him or get maddeningly protective over him. When it comes to girls, they aren't so much attracted to him as annoyed and jealous of him for the fact that he can attract their male crushes' attention without even trying. - Kyou Fujibayashi from CLANNAD only gets love letters from girls, who think she's beautiful and cool, while guys are generally just scared of her. This leaves her very embarrassed and frustrated. - Akira from the Togainu no Chi anime/manga and game is definitely a dude magnet. Although girls show up it appears that he's only really wanted by the guys. Keisuke is not so subtly in love with him and follows him around like a devoted puppy, Rin regularly comments on his looks, insinuates wanting to have sex with him, and acts all clingy around him, Shiki, Gunji, and other guys love to invade his personal space a lot while acting dangerously flirtatious and commenting on his looks, and Arbitro has an "interest" in him. In the game, he's \|\|raped sometimes by his male admirers\|\|. - Donnie DuPre from Demo Reel seems to be a case of only guys wanting him. His wife hates him, a blonde girl who he tries hitting on is completely uninterested, while he and Rebecca share some Ship Tease she's still aiming for Tacoma, and the less said about the yandere daughter the better, but Tacoma, Carl, Uncle Yo, Egoraptor, and Quinn all eventually melt under his sad Puppy-Dog Eyes and shameless flirting. - Furry Fury: Only the guys want Sinku.	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyHasSameSexAdmirers
Only in Florida - TV Tropes Florida Man Hijacks TV Tropes Caption. "Don't all the nuts roll downhill to Florida?" When reading a "News of the Weird" site, it has been noticed that Florida has more than its fair share of weird stories. Some of them even hang one with a "Florida" tag, as seen below. - Woman in an argument with town council over a goose? Florida. - Voters pass a law making the wearing of baggy pants a criminal offense that may cost you up to $150 and 60 days in jail? Just as baggy pants were starting to go out of style, one might add, extending the fashion for at least another year? Florida. - Japanese stripper claims judge (who looks like Bill Cosby) shared business and bank accounts but insists their relationship is "a pure business matter"? Florida. - Man tries to legally marry a letter opener because he believes it to be the reincarnated form of his dead wife? Florida. Now try and figure out which of those four we made up. And that's just from one day's worth of news in the Persistent Vegetative State. Quite literally one day's worth of news: All of the above (except the aforementioned fictional one) are summaries of Fark items from March 12, 2008. Don't get us started on the 2000 Presidential election either. Of course, Florida doesn't actually have more weirdos per capita than any other state with a similarly large and diverse population. They're just more willing to talk about it. In most other states, the details of crimes and legal proceedings are either classified or not available right away, whereas Florida is quite proud of its transparency laws, also known as "sunshine laws", which give reporters easier access to police reports and court documents. So whereas an Ohio headline would read "Maple Heights woman arrested after assaulting sister," a Florida headline gets to go the extra mile and say "Manatee woman note : That is, a woman from Manatee County, not some half-human aberration, though, again, you can't entirely rule out the existence of such a creature in Florida. punched sister during fight over vibrator." Of course, the manner in which these laws are enforced can themselves create some weird "only in Florida" stories, sometimes even creating A Rare Sentence in the process; see, for instance, the time when a father and son who were both Miami-Dade County commissioners had to file a public notice just to have a private chat because they'd be discussing public transit issues, or when the governor was legally required to invite journalists to cover his wedding. Another reason for the stereotype may be the fact that Florida is famous for its alligators. While not the only US state to have gators, it does have the highest gator population of any state. In fact, Gainesville, Florida has the highest gator population of any city. Florida is so well-known for its gators that it has tourist attractions based around them, such as Gatorland. Gators are typically seen as chaotic, vicious beasts, so they are very conducive to the madness of Florida. They are even involved in many of the "Florida Man" news stories. It's perhaps for these reasons that Florida has developed a number of excellent newspapers, and several famous journalists like Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen got their start here, which is perhaps why so much is known about the state's quirks. Also, the now-defunct tabloid Weekly World News, known for its extremely bizarre cover stories, was based here as well, doubtlessly drawing inspiration from the local headlines. One newspaper, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, has even used Florida's reputation as a recruiting tool, calling Florida "arguably the best news state in the country". Given the fact that such headlines are usually worded in the manner of "Florida Man does X," Memetic Mutation has opted to interpret this to mean that all of these bizarre acts are the work of a single specific individual, a "superhero"/supervillain named Florida Man, who is considered to be the Anthropomorphic Personification of Chaotic Stupid and the Avatar of Crystal Meth. Also check out Only in Miami, which is about the city, rather than the state. Note: there is little relation between this and the Bermuda Triangle, as the Bermuda Triangle is more about the paranormal than the weird and wacky. Compare Cloud Cuckoo Land. See also Poe's Law. And despite this trope being very closely intertwined with Reality Is Unrealistic, No Real Life Examples, Please! ## People who remark about the unusually large quantity of weird news stories coming out of Florida: - Most likely being referenced in this Sonic commercial. - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean (Part 6 of the series overall) takes place in the Sunshine State in 2011 and is widely regarded as one of the weirder parts of the series. After all, only Florida would play host to such events as a prison escape with invisible zombies, fictional characters coming to life, "rods" * : visual artifacts in photographs that don't exist in real life capable of absorbing body heat being weaponized, and rainbows that turn people into snails via subliminal messaging. The protagonist group is no slouch either, consisting of: a former delinquent who can unravel parts of her body into strings, a Hot-Blooded prison veteran who can duplicate items via attaching stickers to them, a young boy born in prison that can use "ghost objects" * : Manifestations of things that were destroyed in a location such as a chocolate bar that can be tasted but not physically eaten, a sentient colony of plankton living in and controlling a dead prisoner's corpse that can use a literal hand-gun to shoot from the fingertips (using the self-duplicating plankton themselves as bullets), a Laser-Guided Amnesiac who doesn't remember anything before going to prison and who can exert control over the weather and/or atmosphere * : A secondary ability is responsible for the aforementioned rainbows turning people into snails, and a dangerously-obsessive inmate who can "imprint" an attack on any surface as well as phasing through solid objects while changing their composition. And all of this is on the long path to fighting and defeating the Big Bad of the Part whose power and threat initially comes from being able to turn people's memories and abilities into CD-like discs that are transferrable to other people, who then later on gains control of the forces of gravity by fusing with a plant-human-hybrid baby, before specifically going to Cape Canaveral to gain the power to \|\|increase the flow of time\|\| in order to \|\|perform a Cosmic Retcon on the universe\|\|. \|\|In the end, the plan succeeds, if only partly, and the series ends up changing the setting to an entire Alternate Universe going forward.\|\| And Florida is to thank for all of it. - In the Marvel Universe, Florida plays home to the Nexus of All Realities, a multiversal intersection that leads to high weirdness. Which plays on the true source of Florida weirdness. It's a Deep South tourist state that's also popular to retirees and refugees alike, leading to a very diverse mix of culture (Miami-Dade county is often referred to as "Little Cuba.") - In the Disney Kingdoms book Figment 2, the Academy Scientifica-Lucida relocated to a large plot of land in Florida to avoid any legal trouble with their experiments. At some point in the early 1980s, a large energy-filled geodesic sphere appeared with no explanation on the campus and occasionally wavers in and out of existence. The faculty includes an aged blue fairy man and they've still kept Dreamfinder's Mesmonic Spark Convertor in storage. - As it turns out in Future Quest, the reason Dr. Quest set up shop in Palm Key was that it was the most regular incursion site for the interdimensional portals. - In The Walking Dead, Douglas mentions a news story he read before the apocalypse where a man in Florida ate his son's eyeballs out of his head. - In Tex Willer, at some point Florida had a medieval castle inhabited by voodoo cultists that followed a white man who believed himself Baron Samedi and had recently escaped from an asylum with his cellmate, who happens to be a Satanist with enormous magic powers, with the cultists, that include a houngan who can actually raise zombies, planning to conquer the whole United States and trying to ally themselves with the Seminoles for it. And it started out because the houngan, his daughter and a friend of theirs decided to scam the white man (who happened to be wealthy). - In Transmetropolitan, Bob Heller, a colossally racist and fascist presidential candidate accurately described by Spider as "Hitler stuffed to the skin with Viagra, Jumpstart (a fictional stimulant drug), gila monster genes, and syphilis" holds has overwhelming support in Florida. After writing about one of Heller's violence-themed and profanity-laden campaign speeches, Spider was shaken to the point of appending a "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer to his report. The real kicker and what truly cements the Crapsack World of Transmetropolitan is that Heller is not the evilest candidate running for president. Hell, he's not the evilest candidate within his own political party. - Soul Eater fanfiction Soul Eater: Troubled Souls has a mission. In it, a monstrous runaway train is trying to cause as much destruction as possible as it goes on a joyride down a high-speed rail. It takes a whole lot of effort to bring it down from both the Academy and emergency personnel. Property damage happens, and a couple of lives are lost. Guess where it happened? Even better, the resident Little Miss Snarker OC quotes this trope word-for-word. - The My Hero Academia fanfic One for All and Eight for the Ninth has an original arc in which class 1A and 1B meet some American and Mexican heroes, one of the American heroes is Florida Man, who, in the scene he was mentioned in, was trying to coax a ten-meters long Sarcosuchus into wrestling him - The fact that so much weird stuff happens in Florida inspired the Gravity Falls AU Gravity Key, which relocates the Mystery Shack (and the show's action) to the Florida Keys. The Bermuda Triangle is involved, naturally. - Total Drama Legacy: In "Aftermath: The Next Generation", Tinfoil Hat-wearing Conspiracy Theorist Josh (who is one of Zack's fans that video-calls him) is said to be from Florida. - Dumbo begins in Florida. Only in Florida would a flying elephant be born...(In real life, touring circuses such as Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey had winter headquarters in Florida due to the climate.) - A major plot point of the Teacher's Pet Finale Movie is that the Helperman family are going on vacation to Florida and Spot sees it as his chance to achieve his dream of becoming a human after hearing from Barry Anger's talk show that the Mad Scientist Dr. Ivan Krank lives there. Barry Anger derisively refers to Florida as "where the coo-coo nuts grow". - Big Trouble is unsurprisingly this being adapted from a Dave Barry book. It's often discussed by two out of town hitmen who constantly refer to the complete oddness around them and call it as Weirdsville, USA. - The book's Stealth Sequel Tricky Business is also set in Florida. Like Big Trouble, there is just as much weirdness. - This trope is possibly the reason why, at the end of the 2002 made-for-TV version of Carrie, \|\|the title character heads to Florida to hide out after faking her death. Where else could a teenage girl with Psychic Powers blend into the populace?\|\| The setup for the planned TV series to follow (never picked up due to the film's low ratings) was that \|\|Carrie would be meeting other people with Psychic Powers, meaning that, at the very least, she's far from the only freak who came to that conclusion\|\|. - Adaptation., A.K.A: Post Modernist Mind Screw: The Movie 2, takes place largely in Florida. - Ace Ventura features the kidnapping of the Miami Dolphins' live mascot, and star player, Dan Marino as part of a convoluted revenge plot by a disgraced former player who hailed from a small town in central Florida. Said player then escaped from a mental hospital in Tampa, and then \|\|assumed the identity of a missing female hiker, became a captain in the Miami police department, and is in charge of the dolphin/Marino case.\|\| The case is solved by an eccentric private investigator who specializes in finding missing pets. - The characters in Zombieland are all named after the cities they're from. Tallahassee, then, is a Florida man (from the state capital, even), and also a Florida Man: a Crazy Survivalist with a Mysterious Past on a quest for the last remaining Hostess Twinkies, and one who takes great pleasure in coming up with creative and badass ways to kill zombies. He is by far the most eccentric and over-the-top character in the film, and Columbus is understandably freaked out upon first meeting him. - Brooklyn Nine-Nine: The Season 4 three-part opener takes place in Coral Palms, Florida, while Jake and Holt are under witness protection. While the show is generally fairly absurd, the Florida setting pushes things up a notch with everything being named after some aspect of the Miami Dolphins football team note : For example, a storage unit named after famous player Larry Csonka , a woman demanding $15,000 for the video she recorded of the two getting hit by go-karts, an inept sheriff not batting an eye at prison fights but horrified by two men kissing, and Jake and Gina being able to get all the guns and bullets they want with no background check or questions asked. - The Daily Show: - A "10 F#@king Years" segment was devoted solely to Florida stories. "But without tacky shit on your lawn, how does anyone know they're in Florida?" - This video from the show features Desi Lydic going to Florida to investigate the source of Florida Man news stories, including interviews with actual Florida Men who had made bizarre headlines (two of them involving alligators). Upon finding out about the state's sunshine laws and that, in reality, every state has its own weird stories that just get buried in unreleased police reports, she concludes that there's a Florida Man living inside all of us. - An episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! on the subject was planned before the 2007/2008 WGA strike. - From Criminal Minds, which sees some of the most bizarre, gruesome, inventive, and just generally screwed-up serial killers not set in a Stephen King novel: JJ: We got a bad [case]. Morgan: How bad? JJ: Florida. - Examples include a hitchhiker who \|\|takes his victim's identities\|\| and an insane \|\|cannibal who feeds his victims to other people in the form of chili\|\|. - Countdown with Keith Olbermann included a regular segment called "Oddball" where Keith talked about the weird stories of the day. Florida was such a regular part of the segment that, at the end of every year when they did a week-long recap of the news of the year, they always did one episode on Oddball, and there was always a part of that episode on Florida. - Florida is always mercilessly mocked in Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. "Felony Disenfranchisement" is a segment dedicated to injustice in voting restoration in Florida, but it wouldn't be right not to mention some other bizarre things that have made headlines there. - On Strangers with Candy, most of Jerri's drug-riddled, highly-sexed Expansion Pack Past seemed to have taken place there. "Florida. Beautiful weather...harsh penal system." - Every episode of World's Dumbest... seems to have at least one thing that takes place in Florida. - Seinfeld portrayed South Florida (home to most of our senior citizens) as being Cloud Cuckoo Land, where the most trivial things affect condo board politics. - In the season 2 finale of Star Trek: Enterprise, a devastating alien probe attacks Earth. Free to target anywhere on the planet, it, of course, levels its deadly energy beam directly at...Florida. - The X-Files: - The season 2 episode "Humbug" was set in Gibsonton, Florida — a small town seemingly populated entirely by carnies and sideshow performers. This is Truth in Television as Gibsonton is the off-season home for a large number of carnival employees. More appropriate for the trope, the carnies are represented as mostly being the Only Sane Man. - The episode "Agua Mala" is set in Florida amidst a hurricane and has "Don't all the nuts roll downhill to Florida?" as a Running Gag. - In season 12 of Degrassi: The Next Generation, devout evangelical Christian boorish homophobes Luke and Becky just moved up from Florida. They're widely believed to be a Take That! to the Florida Family Association. - Let's not forget that Dexter, the show about the world's most lovable serial killer, takes place in Miami. Not only is it strange that Dexter lives there, but Miami is apparently so full of messed-up people that Dexter usually slices up a character an episode while he is looking for each season's "Big Bad". Also, almost no character is introduced to the show who isn't in some way completely insane. - Late Night With Seth Meyers has a recurring game segment titled "Fake or Florida" in which three selected audience members had to guess if the headlines Meyers reads to them are fictional or from Florida. Audience members who actually are from Florida are given a handicap to even the playing field. - While Miami Vice was more straight-up cop drama, some of the more bizarre stories and quirky characters had true-life antecedents that were Ripped from the Headlines. - Jupiter, Florida is the setting for American Horror Story: Freak Show and with good reason. It has the most outlandish plot twists and characters, and the highest body count of any of the show's seasons to date. - The Good Place paints Florida as equal parts backwards, hopeless, weird, and awesome — the kind of place where you'd land at the "Macho Man Randy Savage Non-International Airport" and get picked up by a monster truck taxi. Accordingly, one of the protagonists is Jason Mendoza, a Jacksonville native who is best described as the "Florida Man" meme in human form. To give one example, the reason he's dead is that he tried to pull off a bank heist with a buddy by locking himself in a safe, expecting to avoid suffocation with a snorkel. Jason's Floridian status brings extra scrutiny; Michael claims that being born in Florida automatically docks you points in the afterlife's morality system (much like France), and when Tahani tries to transfer a large amount of her fortune to Jason, the banker mentions that the building — which is in Australia — will shut down if anyone from Florida so much as walks in the door. - Atlanta: Earn mentions to Darius that his parents are in Florida to visit a dying relative. Darius proceeds to tell Earn the tale of Florida Man, a creepy criminal responsible for a bizarre crime spree. Darius: Florida Man is responsible for a percentage of abnormal incidents that occur in Florida. Think of him as an alt-right Johnny Appleseed. No one knows his true identity, date of birth, what he looks like. That's why headlines always say "Florida Man". - Superstore: Jonah is a little taken aback in one episode when Amy reveals she's always wanted to visit Florida. Jonah: Like... the Florida from the news? Amy: Well, if you ignore all the people, it's basically Hawaii. - Truth is Stranger Than Florida is a True Crime series devoted entirely to weird cases from Florida. - Interestingly, back in the 1840s it was Kentucky, not Florida, which had this reputation, according to Punch!. - The March 2013 issue of Game Informer once had the Game Over segment "RPG or Florida?", in which you are given multiple weird stories and have to guess whether they happened in an RPG or in Florida. Play it here. - This is a reliable and never-ending stream of material for British News Of The Weird publication, Fortean Times. While the whole of the USA is seen as an extension of Only In Florida, this state does seem to contribute more weirdness than the rest. - Anchorage, Alaska radio DJs Woody and Wilcox cover this daily in the "It Happened in Florida" segment; three recent news stories are presented, all real. Of the three, two are subversions, sounding like things that happened in Florida, but not actually occurring there. The calling guest who finds the straight example gets some prizes. They are now on 106.5 The End in Charlotte, North Caroline. - When Adam Carolla was hosting Loveline, they played a game called "Germany or Florida", where listeners would call in with weird news stories and the hosts would have to guess whether it took place in Germany or Florida. Germany's reputation is well-deserved; it's one of the most common locations for such stories on The BBC radio show It's Been A Bad Week. - Former child star and current Seattle DJ Danny Bonaduce has a segment during the news portion of his morning drive program titled "Our 'Things Are Not Right in Florida' Story of the Day." - The hosts of the Majic Morning Show on WMJI 105.7 (based in Cleveland) often make special mention of Florida stories during their "Knuckleheads in the News" segment. - The Kevin and Bean Show has a recurring segment called What's Up With Florida, where they cover a block of about five to eight strange tales from the news. - Mikey and Big Bob, Pittsburgh morning radio hosts, also have a special segment in which they talk about bizarre events that have happened in Florida. The trope has been referred to by name not only by the hosts but by the news segments they sample. They cover bizarre things happening elsewhere as well - West Virginia also has its own dedicated intro, though less than half the length of the one they use for Florida, which is a favorite area of the hosts for the sheer number of odd stories emerging from it. - Distorted View, a podcast created to present interesting and disgusting things that happen in the news each day, has a special sound clip that plays whenever a news story occurs in Florida, "our most fucked-up state". - Fark has, along with such categories as "Interesting", "Cool", "Asinine", "Scary", and "Weird", a category named "Florida". - Drew Curtis has commented on this in his book. To paraphrase: California news gets no reaction because "Oh, it's just those crazy hippies." No one expects weird news from Florida. After reading all the examples though one has to wonder why. It's a massive tourist state with alligators. Stupid people plus giant reptiles. How bad could it be? - If more than one category tag can apply to a story set in Florida, the Florida tag automatically wins. - Chuck Shepherd, writer of the News of the Weird column, simply calls it the "F State". - Less is Morgue: The show is set in Florida and they never miss a chance to joke about how weird the state is. The pinnacle of this is episode 10, which is set during a hurricane and features Florida Man as a demented Santa Claus-esque character who travels house to house collecting offerings of meth. Florida Man: Oh, I'm real, baby. I'm really real. Every story you've heard is true - The twelve-car police chase where I stopped off at the Mickey Ds drive thru? True. The 18 foot banana I stole and tied to the top of a two-seat smart car? True. Riley: Uh, Im feeling very uncomf— Florida Man: Burned down an apartment complex because the landlord threatened to kick me out if I didnt stop masturbating loudly to My Little Pony fan animations? The truest of all. - The off-topic section of the NeoGAF forums frequently tags weird news stories with a guessing game—does the weird news story happen in Germany, Australia, or Florida? - "Accidental human deaths in Florida" is a separate category on Wikipedia. It's since been changed to just "Accidental deaths in Florida", and joined by other categories of accidental deaths from the other states. - What the Fuck Is Wrong with You?, hosted by Nash Bozard of "Radio Dead Air" fame, features stories about the general craziness that is Florida on a Once an Episode basis. One of the early episodes was even made up entirely of Florida stories. The title? "The Wang of America." Part of the WTFIWWY Live drinking game includes taking a shot for Florida, and in the live episodes, Nash or Tara will normally comment "And it's Florida..." - It's gotten to the point that specific cities and counties are showing up multiple times, especially Melbourne and Brevard County (also one of the most popular locations for episodes of COPS). - Cracked: - ScrewAttack's sidescroller makes frequent use of this during the Newsdesk (so much so that it's a running gag that Chad will either be ecstatic or upset if there isn't a Florida story) and at least one fan-submitted question said that he was in a dangerous place at the time. And yes, they are always the weirdest... - The Cox n' Crendor Show, a podcast hosted by Jesse Cox and Wowcrendor has caught on to the phenomenon. The absurdity of some of Florida's news is highlighted, especially on the Valentine's Day episode when Jesse finds a quiz asking whether a set of seventeen statements are an RPG plotline or a Florida headline. It's about a 50/50 split. Now in glorious animation. - Twitter account Florida Man collects odd news articles from the state and bills itself as "real-life stories of the world's worst superhero". Essentially, it acts under the premise that all of the stories are referring to a single individual named "Florida Man", playing on the fact that most news articles tend to begin by citing the location and gender of the subject in question, i.e "Florida man/woman arrested for committing X crime..." Florida Man has migrated to Reddit. - Spoofed by ClickHole with "Only In Florida...", making bewildered commentary on completely ordinary photos of Florida life. - There is a Tumblr blog dedicated to archiving the strange daily experiences of Florida natives. - The forum at snopes.com has a thread in its "Fun House" section entitled "Florida Man: The World's Worst Superhero." - During an interview, Rotten Tomatoes played a game with the cast of The Force Awakens. In it they were told weird and outrageous stories and had to guess if they were from Star Wars or Florida news headlines. - Brows Held High discussed this reviewing 'Spring Breakers''. According to American stereotypes, everything outside of Disney World is a stew of rednecks, racists, racist rednecks , crazed ignorami, crass pornographers, charming serial killers, and of course, insipid, semi-nude drunks. The only people there who are happy are the retirees, and only because they know they're going to die soon and leave Florida forever. - Texts From Last Night: the whole site runs on bizarre noodle incidents but some of the most truly odd come from Florida area codes. - Mann Shorts has an entire series of "D&D: Florida Edition" videos on YouTube, all of which reference actual offenses committed in the State. - In Volume 8 of Look to the West, the Encyclopedia Exposita quotes are all from Carolinian news broadcasts in the present. One begins "Thank you, Miss Jaxon. Im sure we all hope the gentleman from West Florida has a speedy recovery and that the hospital staff are able to remove it as soon as they find a long enough pair of tongs." - In one of his "Cringe of the Week" videos, Filthy Frank talks about a man in Florida biting off the head of a hamster at a party, then thinking that hamster blood is the key to immortality. Then there's this line mid video: Frank: Why does everything fucked up happen in Florida? - GrayStillPlays is an unashamedly proud Floridian who refers to his Grand Theft Auto V player character as Florida Man, created a Sims family whose patriarch is named Florida Man, names all of his Episode characters as some variation of Floridaman, and once referred to Venus as South Florida. All of these characters have gotten themselves and/or numerous other people killed in the most ridiculous ways Gray (or, in the case of GTA, his board creators) can manage. Yes, including Venus. - Welcome To The Table: Ben plays Florida as the incarnation of this trope, and whenever he appears, he will make suggestions that are wildly regressive, illegal or dangerous. Or as he would call them, "fun". This drives the Gov and other states (except Louisiana) slowly insane, which Florida considers a bonus. - In the first episode of the relaunched Beavis and Butt-Head, the two are watching the video for MGMT's "Kids" from Oracular Spectacular, in which a toddler walks down a street surrounded by zombies and various Body Horror-esque monsters. Their reaction? Beavis: Is this Florida? Butt-Head: Yup. That's Florida. [Beat, laugh] Florida sucks. - Big Mouth has an episode set in Florida. The main plot revolves around Andrew's cousin trying to seduce him. Maurice goes full throttle on this trope with his song "Anything Goes In Florida", which features children getting eaten alive by alligators, the KKK taking their children to Disney World, public masturbation and Maurice snorts bath salts right before eating his dealer's face of his skull. - The Fairly OddParents!: In "School's Out: The Musical", Timmy wished kids ruled the world. He was elected President of the whole nation except Florida because they're still voting. - In one episode of Hamster & Gretel, the speed settings on a Ferris wheel are "Fast", "Faster", and "Only Legal in Florida". - In the pilot of Inside Job, the robotic president of the United States decides to nuke humanity after reading Facebook posts about Florida. - In Metalocalypse, the Governor of Florida gets lynched after decrying Dethklok and Nathan gets voted in as a replacement. Due to his complete lack of even the most basic life knowledge, he makes executions a standard punishment (because it's "Brutal"), introduces a new dollar that's printed in such quantities that it's useless (driving the state into a recession), and, when all else fails, they try to hold a concert because music makes everything better...except that considering who Dethklok is, it winds up summoning a category 6 hurricane that pretty much wipes the state off the map. And despite this, one of the tattered, starving-to-death survivors still says he's the best governor the state's ever had. Florida Man Caught Adding Stingers To TV Tropes Pages	https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlyInFlorida

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