Exaggerated Trope



"It's like they knew that we had seen this movie before, and we knew the curves they were gonna throw at us, but they made the curves just a little bit sharper than usual."

- The Distressed Watcher, on The Hangover, from his 2009 Top 10 movies list.

When the writers decide to play with a trope by turning the results Up to Eleven.

Since Tropes Are Flexible, they can be taken to various degrees. This is about taking them to degrees much higher than typical, often to ridiculous extremes.

In short, this is why The Same but More warns that higher degrees of tropes alone are not new tropes. Those are simply Playing with a Trope.

This is usually done for parody (which makes this a Sister Trope to Satire, Parody, Pastiche), but there can be other reasons to do this.

Compare Troperiffic, Serial Escalation, Up to Eleven, Refuge in Audacity, Logical Extreme.

Contrast Downplayed Trope.

Anime and Manga

 * Speaking of Power Levels, Dragon Ball would occasionally switch to a new system of power measurement, likely to avert doing this.
 * Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann does this with (what else?) Humongous Mecha.
 * There're Gag Boobs, and then there's Eiken Boobs.
 * Mahou Sensei Negima exaggerates quite a bunch of tropes, such as School Festival and BFS.
 * Monster does this to Self-Made Orphan and arguably Complete Monster; growing up, Johan Liebert killed at least five sets of foster parents.
 * Strawberry Panic exaggerates Schoolgirl Lesbians.
 * Queen's Blade exaggerates Fan Service!
 * Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei exaggerates social commentary by making the eponymous teacher prone to committing suicide over everything that is not right about society.

Film

 * Tangled exaggerates the Frying Pan of Doom. At the end of the movie, frying pans are made the official weapon of the town guards.
 * Also the Light Is Good trope. As quoted from the trope example: "Rapunzel, a gentle, caring girl who is a Friend to All Living Things, loves daylight (as well as starlight) and has shining golden hair because her mother ingested a flower that had grown from a drop of liquid sunlight."
 * Starship Troopers : Any tropes about war, army, etc...

Literature

 * The House of Leaves is much, much Bigger on the Inside.
 * Lots of characters suffer from Parental Abandonment, but Rincewind's mother "ran away before he was born." This is never explained, because it is unexplainable.
 * Also from Discworld is Monstrous Regiment, in which
 * Dulcinea del Toboso is a Shadow Archetype that Don Quixote imagined from a peasant girl called Aldonza Lorenzo. She represents for him all that is lovable about a woman without any of the defects of a real person, emboding the Shallow Love Interest. (Nobody is more shallow than a shadow).
 * H.P. Lovecraft does this with Puny Earthlings trope
 * The Planet's Revenge in Judas Unchained is this for Weather of War

Live Action TV

 * iCarly does this with Comedic Sociopathy.

Music

 * Tom Waits does this with the Star-Crossed Lovers Trope in his song "Fish And Bird". This doesn't stop the song from being a legitimately sad tear-jerker.

Tabletop Games

 * Warhammer 40,000: In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only GRIMDARKness turned up to 40,000!
 * Exalted exaggerates... well.. as many tropes as it's (super-)humanly possible to put in a heroic fantasy. To not exaggerate the length of this page we suggest you to head on to its works page.

Video Games

 * Disgaea does this with Character Levels, including going literally Over Nine Thousand.
 * Fate/stay night does this with Earn Your Happy Ending. Shirou goes through hell,  to get to the true ending of Heaven's Feel.
 * Mega Man Battle Network = Everything Is Online. No, everything. That doghouse out front, too. And the squirrel statue.
 * Okami does this with Friend to All Living Things, cranking up Amaterasu's animal magnetism far beyond "fuzzy woodland creatures love her" to reach "flowers literally bloom wherever she walks."
 * Olympus Mons is pretty much the main idea with the Mega Ten games.
 * Also, Kashiwagi is one for Christmas Cake.
 * As shown above, the hairstyle of Rival Schools' Yurika Kirishima takes Princess Curls to a ridiculous level.
 * Touhou Soccer demonstrates this with Absurdly Sharp Blade by having Youmu cut the moon in half with her katana.
 * But if that katana cuts the moon in half, then why is that soccer ball still intact...?
 * Katanas are only sharp on one side...
 * The official works Silent Sinner in Blue and Cage in Lunatic Runagate exaggerates The Plan, resulting in Gambit Pileup.
 * In Dragon Age 2, the silly dialogue got this treatment.
 * The Binding of Isaac does this with Disc One Final Boss, True Final Boss, Disc One Final Dungeon, and Very Definitely Final Dungeon.

Web Comics

 * Eight Bit Theater does this with Tempting Fate. "Everything is good and it will be that way forever!"
 * It also does this with Brick Jokes. An off-hand comment in episode 7 turned out to be foreshadowing for an important plot point in episode 1221, almost nine years later.

Western Animation

 * A lot of the Disney Princess artwork really loves to crank up Everything's Better with Sparkles.
 * The Hilariously Abusive Childhood of Doctor Doofenshmirtz's Multiple Choice Past from Phineas and Ferb: "It all started when I was born. Neither of my parents showed up." He had to pretend to be a lawn gnome after theirs was repossessed, he had to wear dresses, he wasn't allowed to go swimming in public pools, his father preferred the dog and named it "Only Son" and he was abandoned and raised by ocelots.
 * Then there's Phineas and Ferb's Homemade Inventions - they think nothing of building a mountain ski resort in their backyard, a rollercoaster that spans the city or two spacecraft and mission control with a free morning, and Candace's inevitable case of It Was Here, I Swear: whatever it is, and however much of a mess it should leave behind, everything vanishes without trace by the time she tries to show their parents.