Bring News Back/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Characters must journey to ensure an authority figure learns something

  • Straight: Characters learn that Tom is about to betray King Jack, and bring the news to King Jack.
  • Exaggerated:
    • Characters learn of something and make a forty-page PowerPoint presentation which goes into exhaustive, boring detail. The authority figure falls asleep before the end of it.
    • Characters trek through the Lost Woods and many other dangerous terrains, such that it would have been easier to cope with the original problem.
  • Justified: The something is far beyond their ability to cope with, but the authority figure can handle it.
  • Inverted: Characters must keep news from getting out.
  • Subverted: The thing should happen, and the authority figure is actually the villain who will stop it.
  • Double Subverted: But just because he's a villain doesn't mean his judgement of this is wrong; unleashing a plague to remove even a bad king will be worse than the king himself.
  • Parodied: They get back to find dozens of characters thronging the authority figure with the news.
  • Deconstructed: Characters discover that, despite how difficult it was to bring back news, the situation is no better off with the authority figure having knowledge than without it. Possibly worse.
  • Reconstructed: But they realize that sometimes it does make things better, and they have to do the best they can without knowing in advance which it will be.
  • Zig Zagged: Jack brings news to Jill who sends him off to Charlie, who himself runs off to tell Agatha, who sends for Jack to send him to Dave -- who may, actually, do something.
  • Averted: The characters can and do cope with any problems they face.
  • Enforced: "We can't show kids fighting this! It's too dangerous."
  • Lampshaded: ???
  • Invoked: "It doesn't matter that we can't fight the Evil Overlord, we have to bring the news back."
  • Defied: ???
  • Discussed: "Do you ever feel more like the paparazzi than a crusading hero in this kingdom?"
  • Conversed: "All they're going to bring back this time will amount to an article on page 5 of the Royal Herald."
  • They Plotted A Perfectly Good Waste The entire plot is the grueling, terriifying journey through unimaginable horror to get the message to base.

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