Come to Gawk/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A character is humiliated by being treated as a spectacle.

  • Straight: The character is displayed to the public, or characters come to see him in his cell.
  • Exaggerated: The character is crucified naked in the centre of the public square, and everyone in the kingdom has to stop by the square to see and ridicule him/her.
  • Justified:
    • Standard punishment in the kingdom (as, indeed, it has been in Real Life).
    • The Dark Lord has such a big ego he wants to show off his prisoners.
  • Inverted: The character is displayed to the public to excite their admiration. (Ermine Cape Effect is one possibility.)
  • Subverted: The characters who come festoon him with flowers instead of throwing rotten fruit, and the Power of Friendship strengthens him.
  • Double Subverted: The supportive characters are just trying to get something from him, and drop him the instance they get it.
  • Parodied: The Dark Lord opens a zoo of all his captives. And sells tickets.
  • Deconstructed:
    • The prisoner is convinced that everyone was staring at him, when it was really his paranoia.
    • Alternatively, the humiliation was just to teach him a lesson and he was meant to be released, but it was so severe it causes him to be Driven to Suicide. The punishment then suffers such severe bad publicity it becomes useless.
  • Reconstructed: But given the way the king's been treating him, he really has grounds for paranoia.
  • Zig Zagged: A character comes to smash a rotten fruit in his face. Another one intervenes and beats his attacker up. The prisoner realizes that the rotten fruit held the key to his chains.
  • Averted: No one looks at a prisoner.
  • Enforced: "We have to show him in some humiliation and discomfort because it leads to Character Development later on, and this is a relatively humane way."
  • Lampshaded: "So you're going to parade him before the populace?"
  • Invoked: "Displaying him like this will make them realize how weak he is."
  • Defied: "I don't care whether people will believe he was really my prisoner unless they see him; he's too dangerous to live!"
  • Discussed: "They'll put him in the stocks. King Evilbeard likes to do that the day before an execution."
  • Conversed: "Bet you the Dark Lord will parade him before anyone to prove he caught him -- and give the Big Damn Heroes a chance to rescue him."

Hah! Come look at Come to Gawk! (Stop cringing there, you trope -- we want to look at you!)

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