Purple Prose



"The disemboweled mercenary crumpled from his saddle and sank to the clouded sward, sprinkling the parched dust with crimson droplets of escaping life fluid. Crow: You mean blood? Mike: Let's not jump to conclusions."

- The Eye of Argon MST

There are times within the life of any teller of tales in which they are faced with a most dire situation: the writing, while not lacking in such delightful virtues as a sturdy coherent plot or rich characterization, is supremely dry and uninteresting to read.

In response, the writer chooses to indulge in the writing technique known to gentlefolk as Purple Prose, wherein the writing becomes much more elaborate and fancy, eschewing quotidian sentences for elaborate concatenation of phrases and clauses. On occasion, such racks of ornament can be despicable, with the scintillating adjectives bewildering the reader and obscuring the subject.

The writing style is named after a quote by Roman poet Horace, who compared writing such prose to sewing purple patches to clothing. This practice was a common means to show pretentiousness in wealth, since purple dye was an expensive rarity. "Purple Patches" is used when the writer only occasionally breaks into purple, like scintillating arrays of diamonds appearing incongruously in mire, which can make much of the text more readable but less consistent, so the reader is jolted from one style to the other. (Consistent purple prose at least lets the reader get into the swing of things.)

Several excellent examples, things of beauty and confusion, can be found on the quotes page. This trope does not cover works in a florid but not intrusive style -- the sacrifice of Utility on the altar of Eloquence is an essential feature of Purple Prose. It should also be noted that Purple Prose usually pairs flamboyant vocabulary with fairly plain grammar (that can get outright primitive in extreme cases) what differentiates it from true Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness. Bear in mind that Tropes Are Tools. Some of the examples below are intentional: the Purple Prose is a stylistic choice, a comedic turn or in aid of characterisation.

Compare contrastingly with the phenomenon given the appellation of Beige Prose. Seek furthermore the silicon entries known as: Walls of Text, Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, and Meaningless Meaningful Words. Mills and Boon Prose is a Sub-Trope; furthermore, that affliction known as Said Bookism is a customary peculiarity of this mode of communication. Some communications open on the traditional Dark And Stormy Night. See also Name That Unfolds Like Lotus Blossom, for when this is applied to names.

Anime & Manga

 * In-Universe example in R-15: Taketo's porn writing is pretty much universally overdone.

Comic Books
""The next morning, Tatooine's sky is the venue of a fateful encounter. As blasters fire and men die, a desperate message is sent. A message that will transform the lives of those on the planet below." -- The Tantive IV is boarded. Leia's droids flee in an escape pod. "Screaming engines rip apart the air. Like blood to a body, a gleaming transfusion of pure hope runs from ground to sky to the waiting frigate. For a moment, dead comrades and missing limbs are forgotten, as G-force slams them without touching their weightless spirits. This is triumph, hard won. The best kind." -- Rebels steal X-Wings and fly them to a frigate to take to Yavin."
 * The Trigan Empire - The writing style was very purple. Probably not since Robert E. Howard wrote that Conan the Barbarian was destined to "Tread the Jewelled thrones of the world beneath his sandalled feet" has there been more overblown verbiage in a piece of popular entertainment. Certainly, not many characters in modern comics "slake their ravening thirst" at waterholes or "feel the icy fingers of terror course down their spines"; but maybe the world of comics, and the English language, are the poorer for it.
 * Avengers Legends: The Korvac Saga - A foreword contributed by Ralph Macchio for the 1991 collected edition was a fairly pale shade of purple, in which writer Jim Shooter's time writing the Legion of Super-Heroes book prior to this story is referred to as "distinguished scrivening", and every big storyline which had occurred in superhero team comics had been "mere prelude" to this one. It's actually quite effective, considering all the purple prose which is actually in this story.
 * The narration of the four-part series about Biggs Darklighter, Luke's friend, sure does love overwrought metaphors. It usually works all right, but now and again gets a little ridiculous.

"The rabbit of my dreams! Muscles of steel, fur soft as silk, brave as a lion! I love her! I *choke* love her!"
 * What The?! - Spoofed no less than four times this parody comic from Marvel, during a battle between Man-Thang and Swamp-Thang. First, the narrator's description of the swamp included a reference to changing a cat's litter box on a hot day; second, Man-Thang chased off after a hot white-haired young woman in a tight dress before the narrator could finish; thirdly, "whoever knows overwriting burns at the touch of the Man-Thang", and finally, the narrator's incredibly long final send-off is ended by a submerging Man-Thang pulling out a "SHUT UP" sign.
 * Rorschach's journal in Watchmen is very flowery, especially compared with his near-Hulk Speak. This stems from it being a Stream of Consciousness -- and having poetic elements. Rorschach is nothing if not... layered.
 * Empowered - Lo, the Caged Demonwolf doth speak in a hue most violet! Adam Warren writes his dialogue with the aid of a thesaurus.
 * Cerebus - The purple prose in "Jaka's Story" and "Reads", is intentional. In "Jaka's Story"; it's meant to be written by an Oscar Wilde Captain Ersatz. The prose in "Reads" is a slightly more snarkified version of Sim's own writing; where it is not purple, it can be suffocatingly verbose.
 * In this page from a comic book adaptation of Space Jam, Bugs poetically describes Lola as he lusts over her:

Fan Fiction

 * It is to great and heart-rending dismay that much amateur fiction based in the universes of other writers is plagued by this. Even otherwise good stories are brought down to the level of others with the insistence of throwing in little bits of violet verbiage ('eyes' as 'orbs', for one small example).
 * Especially when fanfic writers attempt a sex scene- they tend to describe every action in excruciating detail, use increasingly bizzare euphemisms for 'penis' and very often lapse into Mills and Boon Prose, even when the rest of the story is normally written, or even beige.
 * Some Buffy fan fiction by an otherwise excellent author who uses purple prose only in their sex scenes, referring to "pulsating manhoods", "throbbing mounds" and, oddly enough both breasts and buttocks as "firm globes." Go figure. Then again, it's also suspected that, due to the amount of purple prose found even in non-Mary Sue fan fiction, there is indeed a reason why most of these people are writing 600,000+ words of never-to-be-compensated Buffy (Star Wars/Lost/Sailor Moon/etc.) fan fiction rather than, you know, a real novel.
 * The Kingdom Hearts fan fiction is worse. "Vertical. Meat. Pistol." Those Lacking Spines parodies such over(ab)used description with the Overly Detailed Purple Description Mode™.
 * The Sentinel fan fiction is rife with descriptions of Blair's "cerulean orbs".
 * Final Fantasy VII fan fiction authors do the same thing with Cloud and the cerulean orbs. And if I hear about Sephiroth's flowing, molten silver tresses or blazing emerald orbs one more time. Just for fun, take a drink every time you see the word "orbs" describe eyes in a fic. You'll get blasted out of your mind in an hour, tops.
 * Many fan fiction writers in The Magnificent Seven create very violet prose for the dialogue of Ezra Standish. While his character did have a larger vocabulary than the rest, many writers make him sound like he swallowed a thesaurus.
 * Also prevalent in online roleplaying forums, particularly the sort where characters are animals. Try to find an online wolf or horse who doesn't describe his eyes as "orbs". These characters tend to be played by the same teenage girls who are writing all the erotic fanfiction. To make matters worse, some even penalize those who don't adopt this style, by claiming the author is illiterate. Some offer helpful synonym lists, including such brilliant entries as "talon" for "hoof".
 * My Immortal, where the author describes the details of every outfit to the "blud-collord lace" but then goes to IKEA Erotica for all the sex scenes?
 * Spoofed to death in The 2006 Goku-Lytton Awards.
 * Tokyo Mew Mew No Hope Left has little tidbits here and there. It's usually just Beige Prose, though. Being set in a World of Ham helps.
 * In Death Note fanfiction, there are very specific words that absolutely scream "Purple Prose!" Some of the most worst examples: orbs, obsidian, chocolate (when they refer to Light and not to Mello), honey, raven (as a noun) and panda. Yes, panda. Most people should not be sure why L is a panda, but many people call him one anyway. And while some just say he has panda eyes, others outright call him a freakin' panda.
 * The Neon Genesis Evangelion fic Spacedust and Chaos A Requiem, which is trying to become even more of a Mind Screw than its source material.
 * Two other Neon Genesis Evangelion fics Aeon Natum Engel and Aeon Entelechy Evangelion are the examples of well handled Purple Prose. Most of the time.
 * Fallen Love: Queen Of Thy Hearts absolutely wallows in it.
 * In Stand of the Exiles, Vindicator Alexei's complexion is compared to a "spring sky" no less than three times.
 * The Chihuatlan Chronicles - Chihuatlan Razortalon has "golden orbs" for eyes, and hair like "multicolored shade of brown silk." Then again, she's a Mary Sue of epic proportions.
 * Those who write Gossip Girl fanfiction have an odd obsession with nagging on about the characters hair color. "The blonde went and did so and so while the brunette did something else". Especially jarring since Nate is always referred to as a blonde when he is in fact a brunette. But it's just so much more poetic to call Nate and Serena "the two blondes" and Chuck and Blair "the brunettes".

Fan writers also just love to describe Nate and Serena as being like "two adorable golden retriever puppies". Failed attempts at drama abound. ""I think whoever dealt with our forms must be really good with magic and really, really bad with metaphors.""
 * The Official Fanfiction Universities play this trope vindictively. Their generally clueless badfic students sign up with a physical description of their in-universe persona, usually give it their typical Purple treatment, and the staff proceeds to give it a Literal Genie spin. This has resulted in a squirrel with leaves and fruit growing out of his fur, and one character with actual gold orbs instead of eyes.

"P is for Paris Just swimming in prose! Her lips weren't pink only They bloomed like a rose! Like wheat in the sunshine The gold of her hair Her eyes, how they sparkled As clear as the air! Her skin was as white As the robe of a saint And it's that lack of iron Keeps making her faint"
 * My Inner Life. The author seems to have an extremely unhealthy obsession with Link's blue eyes.
 * Takamachi Nanoha of 2814 deliberately uses Purple Prose to describe how Vita views Hayate (i.e., like a literal goddess). The author states that doing so was rather painful for him, and that he can't possibly understand how fan fiction writers can stand using this so often, reasoning that they have some sort of "anti-talent".
 * Cori Falls is obsessed with describing the hair and eye colors of her favorite characters, and always with the same color variations.
 * Far too many Harry Potter fanfics insist on using as many different adjectives as possible to describe the colour of eyes and hair. Harry's eyes are always "jade" or "emerald" rather than green. Hermione's hair is always "chestnut" rather than "brown".
 * That said, chestnut is a recognised hair colour that's too red for "brown" and too brown for "red". So, people with brown hair shouldn't be described as "chestnut" whereas people with genuine "chestnut" hair wouldn't be examples of this trope.
 * Similarly, there was an Avatar: The Last Airbender fanfic where, in the space of a single chapter, Zuko's eyes were golden, amber, honey-colored, flame, and golden again. But never yellow, nope.
 * But not topaz?
 * There's a Mass Effect fanfiction where, at one point, Miranda's eyes are described as "topaz", or yellow-brown(!). Eventually the author figured out how incredibly wrong this was and switched to the much more accurate "cerulean" (dark blue).
 * The author was probably thinking of the blue topaz, which really is a light blue.
 * Thirty Hs is essentially nothing but this, including such gems as "wrought from the silver heart of heaven's false promise" and "their hundreds of sweaty simian dongs trailing a now-fetid memory in the rape ape's watering eye". It somehow makes it even more awesome.
 * iCarly fanfic which is normally known for being very simple at the best of times, had a bizarre outbreak of this in anticipation of the episode iThink They Kissed. It eventually got a Deconstructive Parody with Transcending The Definitions and the trend died out after the episode aired.
 * The Harry Potter fanfic A Mary Sue Alphabet parodies this, along with many other Mary Sue tropes:

Film
""Future events like these will affect you ... in the future!""
 * Criswell's bizarre narration in Plan 9 from Outer Space.

"Perky: What's another word for... engorged? Secretary: (deadpan) I'll look it up."
 * Miss Perky's novel in Ten Things I Hate About You is a hilarious send-up of this.


 * In The Core, the Captain Ersatz Carl Sagan character frequently dictates purple prose into his tape recorder for the book he's writing about their adventures. He even does so when
 * This is one of the cornerstones of Wizard People, Dear Reader; cranked Up to Eleven for purposes of satire.
 * This is Geoffrey Chaucer's job in A Knight's Tale.

Literature

 * My Antonía is positively rife with this.
 * The Secret River mostly plays this straight, but also parodies it with the letter to Lord Hawkesbury (giving us such phrases as "the pillow of compassion") and Loveday ("we must grasp the nettle, painful though it may be, or else surrender this country to treacherous savages"). The latter isn't even much purpler than most of the text, it's only comic because most of the other characters are far more succinct than the narrator.
 * The Eye of Argon - As you might imaginably discern from this epigraph. Such protracted occurrences, unfortunately transcribed to ink-utterances through means of a character-based codex, were no doubt influenced by the minutely less prosaic and infinitely superior Robert E. Howard. People do not find themselves in possession of eyes in The Eye of Argon; they possess "organs of sight" or "orbs". Ears are "auditory organs."
 * Nature's God: The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, Vol. III by Robert Anton Wilson. The following is a quotation: Maria had been reading a chryselephantinely overwritten book called Moll Flanders in the coach, and very definitely she thought the somber, passionate, tragicomic and picaresque story was most absorbing, and certainly presented the dark, sinister, underground side of English life in a vivacious and veridical manner that carried conviction, but she wished Mr. Defoe were not so in love with ornamentally excessive adjectives and long, stentorian, and somewhat inchoate sentences that, even by the standards of the time, seemed to twist and turn through curlicues and arabesques and wind on and on through ever-increasing clauses and sub-clauses, including abrupt changes of subject and total non sequiturs, even if he did seem to be making a unique effort to understand a woman's perspective on the world, which was all to the good, of course, and it was less monochromatically monotonous (she had to admit) than the other one he wrote with virtually nobody in it but that one ingenious mechanic on the island, living in total isolation until he found that mute but ineluctable footprint; and yet it could all be told as well and be more pleasant to read if those sentences did not get so totally out of control and sprawl all over the page so often in positive apotheosis of the lugubrious style, and then she wondered if reading so much of such labyrinthine and arabesque prose for so long in the hot carriage had affected her own mind and she were starting to think like that herself, instead of just enjoying the shade of the oak trees and resting from thought in the dense cool quiet of the mid-afternoon English summer."

If you do not want to slog through that, she's criticizing the book she's reading for its excessive use of purple prose. It's all one sentence, and at the end she finds herself thinking in flowery language too. Chryselephantinely is a Perfectly Cromulent Word -- by the time he reaches it he's making fun of the trope. Most of the time his vocabulary is fairly ordinary, but the concepts and scenarios he build expect that the Viewers Are Geniuses
 * Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whom we recognize for the infamous introduction to Paul Clifford, the first words of which a certain entry on the very wiki you are reading is christened in reference to, namely the one known as It Was a Dark and Stormy Night. He got his own writing contest out of this- the winner is the writer who can come up with the most painful opening sentence for a fictional novel. See it in all of its potato-triumphing, cloud-watching glory here. In all justice we must concede that 'It was a dark and stormy night' is not all that bad as an opening line - it's the rest of the paragraph that raises it above awful.
 * Ciaphas Cain - While the extracts from the private memoirs of Ciaphas Cain are themselves intriguing and entertaining material for the perusal of the common reader, the editor thereof, Inquisitor Amberley Vail has seen fit to intersperse his narrative with extracts from the autobiographical magnum opus of Lady General Jenit Sulla, who reports her early service under the aforesaid Commissar Cain. Her personal reminisces are inundated with meticulously detailed accounts of her devoted service to the Imperium and that of the women and men who serve under her. Vail, of course, does so with extreme trepidation (and often an apology beforehand), the prosaic nature of these passages being somewhat distanced from her own preferences.

Though we never see it, Vail implies that Cain's own official memoirs (not the unpublished, private recollections that form the bulk of the text) are also impossibly purple, and that this is apparently epidemic among Imperial Guard memoirs.

The very first Cain short story begins with a quote from his official memoirs, just before Cain describes those memoirs as "pious humbug and retrospective arse-covering": "'Like any newly-commissioned young commissar I faced my first assignment with an eagerness mixed with trepidation. I was, after all, the visible embodiment of the will of the Emperor Himself; and I could scarce suppress the tiny voice which bade me wonder if, when tested, I would truly prove worthy of the trust bestowed on me. When the test came at last, in the blood and glory of the battlefield, I had my answer; and my life changed forever.'"

"Narration: The branch Roran had added to the fire burst asunder with a muted pop as the coals underneath heated the gnarled length of wood to the point where a small cache of water or sap that had somehow evaded the rays of the sun for untold decades exploded into steam."
 * The Inheritance Cycle Cycle is simply filled with such a profuse amount of prose with red-blue coloration. A typical example occurs on Page 27 of Brisingr:

""Do not sit in silence and allow the blood that now boils in my veins to ooze through cavities of unrestrained passion and trickle down to drench me with its crimson hue!""
 * Paolini would never say say "Saphira flew for a day and a night" when he could instead write: "She flew nonstop until the sun had traversed the dome of the sky and extinguished itself behind the horizon and then burst forth again with a glorious conflagration of reds and yellows."
 * A drinking game based on Inheritance has been floating around the Internet for a while: One shot per outlandish simile, two shots per Accidental Innuendo and three for for every simple thing described in great detail. To quote "scary_viking" on Impish Idea: "It would be dangerous even with water - your electrolytes would deplete and you'd die. Might be survivable with Propel, though."
 * The queen of purple prose was the entertainingly deluded author, Amanda McKittrick Ros. Her works were ridiculed at the time for being so purple as to be incomprehensible.


 * We can attest that is our hope that the speaker here is not referring to a urgent and pressing need for the aid of a good physician due to the untimely departure of copious amounts of circulatory fluid.

""...Above all, study innuendo. Hint everything--assert nothing. If you feel inclined to say 'bread and butter,' do not by any means say it outright. You may say any thing and every thing approaching to 'bread and butter.' You may hint at buck-wheat cake, or you may even go so far as to insinuate oat-meal porridge, but if bread and butter be your real meaning, be cautious, my dear Miss Psyche, not on any account to say 'bread and butter'!""
 * H.P. Lovecraft. Concerning the things he is writing about, this should not come as surprising. But Tropes Are Not Bad, and at least he had the decency to be genuinely good at it. Furthermore, Lovecraft often deliberately used arcane and obscure terms -- such as 'eldritch' and 'shewn' instead of 'shown' -- in order to add to the creepy, antiquated feel of his stories. He also liked to think of himself as an 18th century gentleman stuck in the 20th century. He deliberately invoked this trope in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, where the villain uses 17th century expressions and spelling in the 18th century, and later in the 20th century to hint at his true age.
 * Indeed, HPL is evidently capable of a different style - take the conversation segment in Pickman's Model, confirming this is for effect. Also, he was writing in an age of voluminous prose, and while he was elaborate,by the standards of his day he was less so - a reader of Dickens, for example, would view Lovecraft as only mildly more extreme, and often less so (compare the Call of Cthulhu to Nicholas Nickelby or Little Dorrit) and is often maligned.
 * Conan the Barbarian - As Lovecraft was to horror, Robert E. Howard was to fantasy (not to mention a great deal of other genres). Conan of Cimmeria always "tread the jeweled thrones of the earth beneath his sandalled feet" as opposed to "walked around". Howard's poetic prose is famous in readers of fantasy literature, and like Lovecraft, he was really good at it. Fittingly, Lovecraft and Howard were co-correspondents, and Conan himself fought an Expy or two of Lovecraft deities.
 * Poppy Z. Brite, at least her first couple of novels. She not only acknowledges this, but briefly ran a zine called "Purple Proze", and has since publicly called herself out on the usage of such overblown language. Done on purpose in Calcutta, Lord of Nerves, in which an Indian-American wanders through a wrecked, but somewhat functioning Calcutta overrun by zombies. (in other words, nothing's changed. Literally. Except that zombies roam the streets.) A) She wrote it as if the main character was on one of those old style travel novels, B) The narrator fucking loves Calcutta.
 * E. E. "Doc" Smith's science fiction, including his Lensman series, tended to fall into this trap. Doc Smith was well aware of this, and wasn't above poking fun at himself. In Children of the Lens, one of the protagonist's cover identities was a writer of Space Opera whose prose was even purpler than Smith's own. Given that he was born in 1895, he could perhaps be excused for having a writing style which was somewhat archaic.
 * It became rather jarring when he would, for no apparent reason, slip out of purple prose in the narration. In among phrases like "indescribably incandescent beams of literally unthinkable power," you have the narrator facetiously Hand Waving the deaths of millions of people with a "what the hell?"
 * Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan freakin' Poe. It took longer for him to describe it than it did for the house to actually fall down. All tongue-in-cheek, though. Poe - who had more of a sense of humor than you might expect - mocks this trope in his short story How to Write a Blackwood Article (and its followup, A Predicament):

""Her presence brought memories of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies, and tropical midnight; her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march in Athalie; her motions, the ebb and flow of the sea; her voice, the viola. In a dim light, and with a slight rearrangement of her hair, her general figure might have stood for that of either of the higher female deities. The new moon behind her head, an old helmet upon it, a diadem of accidental dewdrops round her brow, would have been adjuncts sufficient to strike the note of Artemis, Athena, or Hera respectively, with as close an approximation to the antique as that which passes muster on many respected canvases.""
 * Justified in the first trilogy of Kushiel's Legacy - it's written from the point of view of Phedre, who would naturally talk that way because of her upbringing. Sidonie snarks in a love letter to Imriel that she was trying to write him in the style of great love poetry, but couldn't pull it off.
 * Charles Dickens, although being paid by the word probably didn't help in his case. Nell's death in The Old Curiosity Shop was mocked by Oscar Wilde when he stated "It would require a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell." Others have picked up this opinion too. It even shows up in Doctor Who, when the Doctor tells Dickens that section always cracks him up.
 * If you take all the purple prose out of A Tale of Two Cities, the book would be about 50 pages long.
 * For a wonderful rendition of Purple Prose to rival Eye of Argon for sheer awfulness, check out the introduction of Blood and Roses, a vampire story anthology. Anything that features the phrase "ruptures the hymen of midnight" is gonna be gold.
 * Lavyrle Spencer. This "comedy goldmine" thread regarding November of the Heart explains it all.
 * Anne Rice, especially in her Sleeping Beauty books. Okay, Interview with the Vampire, too. Add that it was written in third person.
 * Dragaera - Perhaps it was rather inevitable that the inestimable author Steven Brust has fallen into this dark abyss, albeit intentionally. Paarfi of Roundwood is apt to compose long rambling sentences full of metaphors that flow away like rivers, falling down hills and curving through fertile plains before they, at last, reach the sea of consciousness. And you don't remember what the hell the whole thing was about in the first place.
 * Tracy Hickman, one of the Dragonlance original trilogy authors, was known during the days of writing Ravenloft as "the master of purple prose" and had everything as being either "heavy" or "looming". According to the annotations in, well, Annotated Dragonlance, his editor once found the phrase "loomed heavily" and came straight to his office to strangle him.
 * Quoth George Orwell: "I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book."
 * Thomas Hardy is an excellent writer, but when he does fall into this, he falls hard. Especially in the scenes he describes Eustacia inThe Return of the Native

""(Clark) is an extraordinary stylist at the best of times - a man who would never call the moon 'the moon', when he might instead call it 'the lunar orb"."
 * Stella Gibbon's book Cold Comfort Farm is a parody of writers like Thomas Hardy. In an author's note she says that especially verbose passages have been marked with one, two or three asterisks like a travel guide would mark places of interest.
 * Bill Bryson thought this applied to the "most exasperating" Australian historian Manning Clark:


 * ER Eddison and Mervyn Peake are the uncrowned kings of purple prose. The former because his faux-rennaissance style gave his endless battles, intrigues, murders, and subversions . The latter because his solid wall of images and metaphors gave insights into his deeply strange characters that almost nothing else would have pulled off.
 * Tim Rogers. He either believes himself to be the second coming of Hunter S. Thompson, or he is gaming journalism's biggest prank. His writing is a fine tapestry of Author Filibusters couched in language like this.
 * The truth is a bit of both. Rogers has two "personas" which he uses both in real life and in his writing: "Games Journalist" Tim, a semi-fictionalized persona, is a narcissistic Jerkass gaming-Otaku/hipster who writes the verbose, ranting, sardonic articles for which he has become famous/infamous among fans and proponents of New Games Journalism. "Real" Tim (known mostly to his friends and dedicated fans) shares many qualities with his fictionalized counterpart, but is (slightly) more restrained as a writer and allegedly a decent (if self-centered and/or crazy) guy.
 * Foucault's Pendulum had a pathological aversion to describing simple action. The other novels by Umberto Eco, and some of his essay books, are no better.
 * Despite the numerous aforementioned examples wherein the intensely lurid and potentially malapropism-laden pith of the amaranthine compositions which this article is devoted to cataloguing serves to facilitate the general mediocrity of the works mentioned therein, it should be noted withal that to the contrary of previous examples, a merely esoteric and extravagant expository affectation contains within it the potential to bring about a type of literary experience which would otherwise be impossible, rather than sufficing only to engender the unequivocal condemnation of the magna opera here referenced:
 * The quintessential counterexample to this lamentable ineptitude would indubitably be the short story Spawn, scriven by the incomparable P Schuyler Miller.
 * And now, the lesson learned from reading R.A. Salvatore's description of Catti-brie: no female character should ever be said to have "thick waves of rich, auburn hair". Or eyes that make men spill secrets by their very... deep... blue-ness. Hell, even the male lead had a "thick mane" of varying descriptions. After awhile he started to sound downright hairy. Makes you wonder what's with Salvatore and hair...

In his other big series, The Demon Wars, mentioned the female lead as having blond hair you could lose a hand in, it's so thick. Admittedly, that is impressively thick. ""[The rain] bloated the sky full like a fat goose, and when it fell, it was as if some celestial knife had slit the fat goose belly and splashed the innards onto the land in monstrous conflagration.""
 * The Young Toerless. The plot sounds interesting at first, and it isn't very long, but even the basic fact that these two young boys liked to sleep with a prostitute was stretched out for pages. And pages. And pages.
 * Donna Gillespie, in The Light Bearer. As wonderful a novel as it is, the (multiple) sex scenes read like a stoned poet's wet dream. In some places, it in no way even resembles sex.
 * David Eddings can write in Purple Prose (and, indeed, write a variety of accents dialects, and styles to spice it up), and he can do it well, but he's not above poking fun at it--the biggest example was in the third book of the Elenium, The Sapphire Rose, where a goddess brings the party to her domain to give them an emotional boost and some information. They wake up in her place, which is fantastically beautiful and contains nothing but peace, and all the animals there are gentle and beautiful. The descriptions are solid purple, and when the Goddess begins speaking to the party--mostly a bunch of straightforward, plain men ... see the quotes page for the text.
 * More generally, scenes that relate to fate, prophecy, or the Gods in some way tend to be purple.
 * He mocks it in The Belgariad and The Mallorean as well. Any time someone starts using thee and thou a lot, it's like the character's brain temporarily rewires itself into a Mimbrate resulting in them waxing lyrical about the most mundane things. It's taken to such Running Gag lengths that, at one point, even Zakath is afflicted by the "curse".
 * Atlanta Nights carries this to extremes. Although this is %100 intentional, as the book was intended to be atrocious. Phrases like "the stark, plain, severe starkness of the unadorned walls" can hardly be taken seriously.
 * The Sheik. Though it's a romance novel written in 1919, so that's kind of to be expected.
 * Mike McQuay's deplorable novel Pure Blood would, it seems, have us believe that it will rain flaming pâté de foie gras After the End:

"Edward in the sunlight was shocking. I couldn't get used to it, though I'd been staring at him all afternoon. His skin, white despite the faint flush from yesterday's hunting trip, literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface. He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare. His glistening, pale lavender lids were shut, though of course he didn't sleep. A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal."
 * Herman Melville was accused of this in most of the original 1851 reviews of Moby Dick. Seventy years later, just after the world woke up from hurling itself down a path psychologically similar to the novel's captain, critics began revising their opinion slightly. However, the verisimilitude of the artistic theme does not alter the hue of the text.
 * A bit Justified--Ishamel, the narrator, is implied to be a former school teacher, which explains his overtly intellectual language.
 * Frankenstein. The damn book would have been at least half as short if someone would translate that god-awful Purple Prose into respectable English. Mary Shelley's original text was perfectly clear and readable. It was her husband Percy who convinced her that it had to be purpled up.
 * To be fair, Percy improved as much text as he ruined, since Mary's text was honestly somewhat dull. Percy just got carried away; after all he was a great poet, not a novelist like Mary.
 * Twilight. Is. Filled. To. The. Brim. With. Purple. Prose. Twilight constantly describes how beautiful Edward is, how velvety his voice is and how he is perfect at absolutely everything, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and OVER! again. WE HEARD YOU THE FIRST TIME, STEPHENIE MEYER!!!!! Also, Bella's transformation scene in Breaking Dawn took seventeen pages. Seriously.

"A new voice hailed me of an old friend when, first returned from the Peninsula, I paced again in that long street of Damascus which is called Straight; and suddenly taking me wondering by the hand "Tell me (said he), since thou art here again in the peace and assurance of Ullah, and whilst we walk, as in the former years, toward the new blossoming orchards, full of the sweet spring as the garden of God, what moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?""
 * Take out all the purple prose and all you have left is the occasional Beige Prose and complaining about how Forks has fugly weather and its residents that aren't magical beings.
 * In Elizabeth Taylor's Angel, fictional novelist Angelica Deverell writes much purple prose, and, though reviled by critics, is hugely successful, if only for a while. Elizabeth Taylor herself, however, is much more restrained.
 * Lolita is a justified example: the purple prose is Humbert's, who is trying to make himself seem sympathetic. The Purple Prose is really ridiculous at times -- he manages to make picking a wedgie seem elegant and gorgeous.
 * The Lord of the Rings is usually given a free pass for any purple hue for being a classic. Many of his unfinished/unreleased works that were later published by his son in anthologies like The History of Middle-Earth suffer far more from the syndrome; some even come with footnotes for all the archaic words, and many of them are quite tedious to read. After reading some of them it starts to become rather obvious why they were not published within his lifetime.
 * Travels in Arabia Deserta - Charles M. Doughty wrote this lengthy account of his travels in the Arabian Desert in the 1880s. The first sentence is as follows:

""where he often found passages like "the reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty;" or again, "the high heavens, that of your divinity divinely fortify you with the stars, render you deserving of the desert your greatness deserves.""
 * Don Quixote: Parodied and Lampshaded. Cervantes achieved the rare miracle of having a florid style that is clearly understandable. But he recognized and denounced this trope: In the Chapter I Part I, Cervantes explains us that Alonso Quijano went crazy because he tried to understand the purple prose found in the chivalry books:


 * Another example that uses a style perhaps not as exaggerated as some examples of purple prose, but certainly is overdeveloped and fancy. In Chapter II, Part I, Don Quixote begins his adventure getting up early and riding Rocinante through the countryside of Montiel. Obviously, this brief description is very boring and short. So Don Quixote imagines how some wise wizard will write the beginning of his adventure:

"'Scarce had the rubicund Apollo spread o'er the face of the broad spacious earth the golden threads of his bright hair, scarce had the little birds of painted plumage attuned their notes to hail with dulcet and mellifluous harmony the coming of the rosy Dawn, that, deserting the soft couch of her jealous spouse, was appearing to mortals at the gates and balconies of the Manchegan horizon, when the renowned knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, quitting the lazy down, mounted his celebrated steed Rocinante and began to traverse the ancient and famous Campo de Montiel;'"

"instead of being written in plain language, it is adorned with that peculiar style of grandiloquence which is held by some lady novelists to give an antique colouring, and which we recognise at once in such phrases as these:–"the splendid regnal talents undoubtedly possessed by the Emperor Nero"–"the expiring scion of a lofty stem"–"the virtuous partner of his couch"–"ah, by Vesta!"–and "I tell thee, Roman.""
 * Ron Miller's Bronwyn Book Two: Silk and Steel has gained a measure of infamy on the internet with this scan.
 * Matt Stover's work generally contains a fair amount of this. He likes to get philosophical, and in each of his Star Wars Expanded Universe books he expands on The Force as vast and mysterious, and what using it feels like to a powerful Jedi or Sith. This always involves extended metaphors, like Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor with its life-as-stars and Revenge of the Sith's The Force-as-water.
 * Victor Hugo. The man spends at least thirty pages describing the detailed history of every stone in the cathedral in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, not to mention the spider-and-the-fly metaphor he wants to bash into our heads. Les Misérables has even more of it.
 * George Eliot takes aim at this in Silly Novels By Lady Novelists, in particular citing a work entitled Adonijah.

""I don't like this, Leia." "You have this wonderfully evocative way about you, Luke, of reducing the most excruciatingly uncomfortable circumstances to the merely mundane." Luke looked hurt."
 * Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea spends quite a few pages simply cataloging the sea life the protagonists encountered.
 * Played With in Madame Bovary. Flaubert used Purple Prose to convey the characters' overly romantic hopes and dreams before describing in a much more caustic tone how they inevitably come crashing down when confronted with reality.
 * Allan Dean Foster's Splinter of the Minds Eye has occasional stretches where the characters suddenly get very, very verbose. There's this part, where Leia and Luke have been captured by Imperials who are talking amongst themselves.

" ' ... The early fall,' said Gussie, who is a bit of a poet in his way, 'is vaudeville's springtime. All over the country, as August wanes, sparkling comediennes burst into bloom, the sap stirs in the veins of tramp cyclists, and last year's contortionists, waking from their summer sleep, tie themselves tentatively into knots. What I mean is, this is the beginning of the new season, and everybody's out hunting for bookings.' "
 * Aleister Crowley wrote in this style intentionally in the hopes that his writings would be remembered.
 * In dialogue Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard tend to render the language of Westerners in colloquial and the language of non-westerners in Purple Prose . This can come out with such amusing oddities as a Street Urchin like Kim jeering at people with "thees" and "thous".
 * This has some nice examples of romance novels making use of it.
 * In fact, it is an unwritten rule of the romance novel genre that this must be used. Some authors pull it off with aplomb. Others... don't.
 * This is one criticism Gor can't counter. It might have been justified by the Narrator, but speakers from various educations and countries all use the same style.
 * Laurell K. Hamilton slips in and out of this both before and after Jumping the Shark, particularly whenever she describes Anita's clothing or an attractive person, male or female. Sometimes the results are hilarious, such as one scene in Narcissus in Chains where she says, "I could feel his fear like a fine champagne." Take your time analyzing that one, folks.
 * The Comedic Hero of Scoop, the 1938 satire by Evelyn Waugh, uses the line in a country column he writes -- "Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole".
 * When Ray Bradbury gets carried away, he can pile on about ten similes per sentence, each more stream-of-consciously bizarre than the last. He's quite good at it.
 * Sometimes used deliberately, and to great effect, in Jeeves and Wooster. Bertie Wooster, our narrator, loves to embellish what he's saying, which becomes hilarious when he starts shoving in the Buffy-Speak. The other characters aren't averse to this trope, either:

"Parting the wild roses at the entrance was beauty of which Freckles never had dreamed. Was it real or would it vanish as the other dreams? He dropped his book, and rising to his feet, went a step closer, gazing intently. This was real flesh and blood. It was in every way kin to the Limberlost, for no bird of its branches swung with easier grace than this dainty young thing rocked on the bit of morass on which she stood. A sapling beside her was not straighter or rounder than her slender form. Her soft, waving hair clung around her face from the heat, and curled over her shoulders. It was all of one piece with the gold of the sun that filtered between the branches. Her eyes were the deepest blue of the iris, her lips the reddest red of the foxfire, while her cheeks were exactly of the same satin as the wild rose petals caressing them. "
 * Gene Stratton Porter, especially in the Scenery Porn bits. Or this:


 * When Pat Garrett decided to write "The Authentic Life Of Billy The Kid" he employed journalist Ash Upson to help him along. The unfortunate result is passages of Garrett's dry writing interspersed with terrible flowery writing from Upson, making the whole thing a rather painful read. (Some of Upson's passages are quoted in the Young Guns movie.)

Live-Action TV

 * Lampshaded in an episode of Friends where Joey 'bigs' up a letter of recommendation by using the thesaurus on Chandler's laptop on every single word, leading to a description of Chandler and Monica being people with big hearts being described as them having 'full sized aortic pumps'.
 * At the end of the letter, he signs his name "Baby Kangaroo".
 * Garth Marenghi's Darkplace - Judging from the samplings at the beginning of every episode, Garth Marenghi's writing is full of this. Of course, Marenghi doesn't seem to have a very large vocabulary, leading to an awful lot of repeated words (e.g., padding out a passage by repeating "blood" over and over.) (And bits of sick). To be fair, by his own admission he is one of the few people you meet who've written more books than they've read.
 * The Big Bang Theory - Played hilariously straight by "Leo", Sheldon's "recovering drug-addicted cousin" (who's actually a theater minor) when he starts to described how he "was abused by a chaplain during his teens". Penny still buys it, though.
 * The Australian comedy show Full Frontal had a skit where a romance novelist arrived at a police station to report a theft, which she proceeds to describe in full purple prose. While the cop is trying to work out what "sylph-like" means, another police officer enters saying they've arrested a suspect, whom he describes in the exact same purple prose.
 * The writers of The X-Files were very fond of giving Mulder and Scully convoluted, over-worded monologues, even when the monologue was supposed to be the text of an official case report.
 * Deadwood - E.B. Farnum and Alma Garret spout almost nothing but purple prose. Thankfully, Al Sweringen is there to balance it out.
 * So do Merrick, Cy Tolliver, Calamity Jane (albeit very dark purple)...hell, the show practically runs off the stuff.
 * An early episode of Mash plays this for laughs, with Radar taking a correspondence course in writing and producing purple reports (done in voiceover).
 * The characters of Californication refer to an in-universe short story as "too purple", and even spend a minute arguing on the degree of purpleness. One can only assume they're referring to this trope.
 * Frasier Crane, from Cheers and Frasier, often speaks in elaborate prose. His brother Niles Crane and his radio host co-worker and restaurant-reviewer Gil Chesterton also speak in a similarly long-winded and overly-indulgent manner.
 * Whenever Shigesato Itoi showed up as a guest judge on Iron Chef, he was dubbed in such a way that gave him the most over-the-top Purple Prose elaboration possible on how good the food was.

Music
"And nine stars illumine the northern heavens, a vast cosmic sigil with the silvern moon at its centre... Blazing argent light fills the chamber, engulfing the hewn walls of elder ice, These ancient carvings in a time-veiled tongue, (etched into the primeval ice countless aeons ago, now bathed in diaphanous incandescence by this storm of lucent stellar power, their mindsearing meaning at last becomes known to me... Their cosmic secrets unfold... The ice-throne is encased by a shimmering wall of writhing cerulean flame, A lambent flame far colder than the frozen surface upon which it dances..."
 * In his 2001 song "This Train Don't Stop There Anymore" Elton John sings a line about Purple Prose. The song's lyrics detail John's coming to terms with getting older, and his admission that he has "put one over" on his fans because he was unable to feel the music he was giving to them.
 * EMF's "Unbeleivable": "The things/ You say/ Your purple prose just gives you away/ The things/ You say/ You're unbelievable.''
 * Symphonic metal band Bal-Sagoth is a rare musical example. A sample from "Starfire Burning Upon the Ice-Veiled Throne of Ultima Thule":


 * Most of their lyrics are like that. They also have a love of the Long Title.


 * Almost all Black Metal lyrics, and any attempts these bands make at philosophizing in the album liner notes.
 * Led Zeppelin. Justified, since usually whenever their songs go towards purple prose it's because they are referencing Lord of the Rings.
 * Mariah Carey's lyrics are mostly purple prose. She heavily abuses pretty thesaurus words like "inevitably", "sublime" and "splendor". She also has a cheeky romance with the words "nice", "festive" and "bleak".
 * Alan Moore's spoken word album The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels features lyrics that are downright baroque, describing subjects and references that are equally arcane.
 * Progressive Rock tends to follow this trope. Bands such as Yes and Emerson Lake and Palmer are often criticized for their pretentious lyrics. However, many bands such as Rush and Genesis write in high prose yet do it very well.

Other

 * The documentery Victory at Sea is drenched with this.

Tabletop Games

 * Dungeons and Dragons - The 1st Edition Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, penned by Mr. Gygax himself, are rife with what is endearingly known as High Gygaxian: "While as strict in their prosecution of law and order, characters of lawful good alignment follow these precepts to improve the common weal." It's a major point of contention between diehard 1st Edition fans and everybody else who plays the game. Possibly we can see the effect of Mr Gygax's deep admiration of Jack Vance.

Theater
"Mountfleury: "Thrice happy he who hides from pomp and power In sylvan shade or solitary bower; Where balmy zephyrs fan his burning cheeks ""
 * Cyrano De Bergerac: In the Show Within a Show, ‘’La Clorise’’, a real play written at The Cavalier Years by one of les Précieuse’s favorite authors, Balthazar Baró, Giftedly Bad actor Montfleury declaims the first lines… before being interrupted by Cyrano:


 * Don Armado, the "braggart" from Love's Labour's Lost, speaks (and writes) in a combination of this and Department of Redundancy Department.

Video Games

 * Innumerable character descriptions on Furcadia. Use this generator to see some good examples of the type of descriptions many players endow their furries with, and try not to let out the contents of your stomach: "You see refractive colorless orbs flash with innocence 'neath cilia of ivory. The lamia rotates 'pon husky limbs... audionts alert and oculars a-ripple... fervid canvas of ruby tinge shimmers o'er her hale frame."

This is perhaps a rather desperate attempt to avoid the Beige Prose sexual descriptors that clog up most sex scenes. No happy medium exists, apparently. Many writers avoid sex scenes or truncate them for this very reason: they end up being dull, silly, or dull and silly.
 * Sadly, this trope is common in just about every role-playing chat-room. Usually the worst perpetrators are young girls (aged 13-21), playing oh so beautiful and perfect characters. In any given chat, 50% of the people will make perfectly comprehensible posts, 25% will write with so many typos, misspellings and so much text speak that their posts are almost incomprehensible, and 25% will write with prose so purple that it seeps into the ultraviolet.
 * World of Warcraft - Install the FlagRSP or MyRolePlay addon, login to any role-playing server, and look at player character descriptions. A lot of them fall into either short and badly written without a single word spelled right, or a Purple Prose laden opus about luscious bosoms, voluptuous curves and delicate eyelashes, especially if you happened to look for players in areas frequented by Mary Sues, such as Goldshire, Stormwind's Cathedral Square, or Silvermoon.

There're at least two blogs here and here devoted to poking fun at such descriptions. However, "almost" is the key word there.

It is possible to write a multi-paragraphed description of a character without being overly-purple - simply being detailed, considering the unfortunate limitations in the game engine for significant character customization (such as scars, detailed equipment/supplies, or any customization of pets/mounts). It's simply not common to see. "Redd White: Allow me to furnish you with the title of my personage."
 * City of Heroes has free-text character descriptions built in. They fall into either short and badly written without a single word spelled right, or a Purple Prose about luscious bosoms, voluptuous curves and delicate eyelashes -- same as RPG servers in World of Warcraft
 * Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Everything Luke Atmey says. Ever. To the point that Phoenix has to translate his overly-dramatic, verbose ramblings to poor Maya, who's invariably left in the dark.

"The Magic Pot Clamors for an Elixir! The Magic Pot is Outraged!"
 * Many of the lines in Arcanum fit. Justified, given the setting.
 * Final Fantasy series
 * Final Fantasy Tactics was rereleased on PSP. They retranslated the Engrish translation into this. Many fans of the original translation deride it for replacing the failed drama charm with Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe; others deride it just for being overwrought. And yet others like it or think that its excesses are as amusing as the original's.
 * Final Fantasy XII has a generally straightforward, albeit poetic script. But the Bestiary entries are horribly, horribly guilty of this, especially the One Hundred Percent Completion alternate texts that delve into Ivalician culture and history. The help box when going against the magic pot turns its basic claims "Gimme Elixir" into hammy Shakespearean dialogue:


 * Final Fantasy X - Maechen's long-winded lectures on the history of Spira were met with similar complaints by some fans.
 * Final Fantasy X 2 - If you wanted One Hundred Percent Completion in you had to listen to every single word of Maechen's long-winded and rather purple lectures, without pressing anything on your controller to advance the dialogue on-screen, even during the long pauses where the game prompts you to interject!
 * Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War - Indeed, that's the way the narrator and everyone else in the series speaks. Such speach is usual in the setting. Everyone speak in Purple except the Orks -- who cannot as yet pronounce the word.
 * Max Payne - As a character, Max talks normally. While doing narration, Max loves this.
 * Bioshock - Andrew friggin' Ryan.
 * Fire Emblem Elibe - Sain speaks purple prose as his second language, especially around women. He mostly does it to show off.
 * Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon's localisation in general leaned very much in this direction, especially compared to its predecessors. While generally very entertaining, some parts and characters (like Nabarl) speaking in such a way sort of feel out of place.
 * Golden Sun: Dark Dawn for the Nintendo DS is an overly talky RPG that will take 10-minutes to present a cutscene that could have easily been reduced to a line or two without losing a single bit of relevant information. It's an enjoyable enough game otherwise.
 * The original Golden Sun and The Lost Age suffered from the same problem; not to mention a tendency for Kraden to prance about Narrating the Obvious.
 * Golden Sun and TLA have scripts that, between them, come out to something like two or three times the wordcount of Metal Gear Solid.

Webcomics

 * Irregular Webcomic - Utilized effectively with the deliberate goal of provoking a response of comedic familiarity in the audience, alongside a conscious acknowledgment of purple prose in the role of an artistic device, within the hereby linked strip.
 * Rocky of Lackadaisy frequently, and randomly, lapses into Purple Prose -- or poetry. Rocky, however, is arguably the strangest and quirkiest of the webcomic's characters, and his launching into such monologues emphasizes that. Prime example here.
 * The news section of Penny Arcade is often full of purple prose about Tycho's current thoughts on gaming, mainly in the form of very convoluted metaphors. He sometimes depends on readers being quite literate. Sometimes he does give out some helpful links explaining what he's talking about.
 * Vaarsuvius in Order of the Stick talks like this to the bereavement of his/her companions whenever he/she feels strongly about anything.
 * Purple Prose is practically the first language of Rose Lalonde of Homestuck, who extensively uses it (both literally and figuratively) when talking over the IM client Pesterchum. A notorious instance is her wizardly writing journal, "Complacency of the Learned", written entirely in purple text Or as she would put it, "velvet". Another outstanding example is her Game FAQs walkthrough for Sburb. The game is trying to kill you! Your audience could be DEAD by the time they get through your longwinded introduction! And this is after she went to the effort of keeping it "short".
 * Colonel Sassacre's Daunting Text of Magical Frivolity and Practical Japery is literally heavy with this.
 * The introductions ofeach character slip into this, for comedic purposes. Lampshaded with Karkat's introduction
 * Author Andrew Hussie seems very fond of it in general, at least on the web. Reading his blog, complete with an epic struggle with online spam messages to obtain a free meal at Olive Garden, should give you a great idea.
 * In Sinfest, Slick goes for extended metaphor when approaching Monique.
 * This webcomic seems to exist just to parody purple prose.

Web Game

 * The Company of Myself Web Game not only contains such Purple Prose, because even the preloader and the volume control have it.
 * Pirouette conveys most of the conversations through this.

Web Original
"We do not regret to inform you that this submission is unusable, unintelligent and frequently illegible. We do not regret that your mental seepage, poured in such an ungainly fashion on your half-cent-per-thousand-sheet paper, will not be gracing this or any future publication of the Writer's Guild World Newsletter. We do not regret that you will most probably die alone, penniless, unloved and foul-smelling."
 * Vatsy and Bruno - The unscrupulous journalist Vatsy resorts to this. One paragraph from the rejection letter that serves as an introduction reads:


 * Promise not to Tell - The lead character is so full of it, his eyes are varying degrees of purple. Literally. Note that this is just one part of a chapter of an entire book devoted to this style. Her original writing was not as intense, but through revisions and alterations it became the purple-people-eating monster it is today.
 * Here's an excerpt reads like a mixture of ADD and synesthaesia: "Her face had the fragrance of a gibbous moon. The scent of fresh snow. Her eyes were dark birds in fresh snow. They were the birds' shadows, they were mirrors; they were the legends on old charts. They were antique armor and the tears of dragons. Her brows were a raptor's sharp, anxious wings. They were a pair of scythes. Her ears were a puzzle carved in ivory. Her teeth were her only bracelet; she carried them within the red velvet purse of her lips. Her tongue was amber. Her tongue was a ferret, an anemone, a fox caught in the teeth of a tiger." This wonderfully purple excerpt of Silk and Steel goes on like that for two pages. Someone illustrated her; the page image is part of this.
 * Virtually everything written on Songun Blog (with a touch of Engrish thrown in for good measure). It's a wonder the author was able to keep it up for so long.
 * Team Fortress 2 - This edit of "Meet the Spy".
 * A Delightful Interview with the Expert of Explosives Manufacture and Detonation, An Introduction to the Demolitions Class
 * Encounter the long range combatant whose sole purpose is to be used by bragging idiots
 * Meet the Prestigious and Well-Mannered Soldier

Western Animation

 * The Powerpuff Girls - Mojo Jojo. Some of his dialogue is this; other times it just sounds like it because of the Department of Redundancy Department.
 * Doc Venture in The Venture Brothers does this in an episode where he's trying to find a lost wreck using an underwater robot. He's narrating into a tape recorder everything that happens, making everything as grandiose as possible, including rewinding the tape and recording over something that he felt wasn't elaborate enough. Almost literally all of his lines from the episode are purple prose.

Phantom Limb is also somewhat fond of this -- so much so that  suggests they rename their new villain's union The Purple Prose.
 * This was more of a bit of a Stealth Pun, though, as they were also professional villains who wore purple.
 * Histeria! had an episode entitled "Riders of the Purple Prose", which showed William Shakespeare and other historical authors as hard-ridin' cowboys.
 * A small gag on Hey Arnold when Rhonda writes Curly a fake love letter (with the elegant prose she usually speaks in cranked up to eleven) ...using a purple pen..