Perpetual Poverty/Playing With

Basic Trope: Characters always seem to be hungry but don't run out of food. They always need supplies too. They get by without actually having anything.
 * Straight: The Five Man Band lives poorly without much for supplies or food.
 * Exaggerated: Each member of the Five Man Band rarely eat well and live in a place that is falling apart.
 * Justified: The Five Man Band doesn't earn very much money when their real job is Saving the World.
 * The Five Man Band earns plenty of money - but they have to spend a lot of it on necessities.
 * They're really bad with finances and spend foolishly.
 * Inverted: The Five Man Band has Infinite Supplies.
 * Subverted: The leader of them actually has quite a lot of money, but are saving it for important matters.
 * Double Subverted: The leader only claims to be squirreling the money away from them. They actually have close to nothing as they first thought.
 * Parodied: The crew lives on one frozen waffle a day and their living space is duct taped together.
 * Deconstructed: The stress trying to survive and of being close to completely broke all the time is too much on the heroes and they end up homeless.
 * Reconstructed: Once they are homeless, they work all the harder to earn money. Their hard work pays off and each of them find work and get more money little by little.
 * Zig Zagged: Sometimes the band has Infinite Supplies, but other times the supplies just disappear and they're trying to scrape together bit by bit to survive.
 * Averted: The characters have sufficient supplies and money at all times.
 * Enforced: The audience can relate better to characters barely scraping by, some of the audience itself is probably barely scraping by.
 * Lampshaded: "We're trying to save the world but we live like college students!"
 * Invoked: The leader of the band thinks that the band of heroes should get used to living with little, so they ration their supplies.
 * Defied: The Five Man Band starts charging for Saving the World.
 * Discussed: "Those guys are always broke!"
 * Conversed: "Maybe we should stop looking for handouts and get real jobs?"

Back to Perpetual Poverty