Cerebus Retcon/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A previously comical act is retconned to being something completely serious.

  • Straight: Bob trips up on an banana and is really hurt that Alice would just leave it lying around on the floor.
  • Exaggerated: Bob trips up on a banana, falls on to a spiked ball also on the floor, causing him to jump up and hit his head on the fan. He then dies.
  • Justified: Some supposedly wacky stunts really are dangerous.
  • Inverted: Bob finds out he has cancer. He later finds it to be hilarious.
  • Subverted: Bob starts to feel sad, but just forgets about it...
  • Double Subverted: ...then remembers it lately and is deeply hurt about it.
  • Parodied: Bob complains about tripping on a banana, crying and wailing, but no one cares and he just sighs and forgets about it.
  • Deconstructed: ???
  • Reconstructed: ???
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted:
    • Bob avoids the banana.
    • Alternatively, Bob doesn't complain and he may as well never have tripped on the banana.
  • Enforced: "All right, gang, we need to make this show more serious. What gags have we done that are actually quite deadly?"
  • Lampshaded: "Who'd a thought bananas would be so dangerous."
  • Invoked: The Evil Overlord deliberately plants bananas all over the floor so that everyone will think he's harmless before realizing that tripping over a banana is exceptionally deadly.
  • Defied: "I'm about to slip on that banana, then I'll be really hurt! I'll just step over it then."
  • Discussed: "I don't care what Cerebus would do. Me slipping on a banana is not deadly."
  • Conversed: "In shows where everything starts getting serious, people always feel sad about things that happen to them comedically."

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