Couldn't Find a Pen/Playing With
Basic Trope: A character writes in a more unusual medium than ink.
- Straight: Alice finds Bob's dying words scrawled on the wall in blood.
- Exaggerated: Bob wrote a lengthy essay in blood.
- Justified: Bob had crucial information to share and no other method at hand of preserving it.
- Inverted: Due to a magical accident involving a small squid and a book of elves in bikinis Bob has ink for blood and writes with it when dying.
- Subverted: The blood turns out to be ink from Bob's red pen.
- Double Subverted: And the pen is red because it was filled with blood.
- Parodied:
- Bob's bloody message is something as inconsequential as his shopping list. And there was a pen right next to him.
- Bob's message is written in an unpleasant bodily secretion.
- Deconstructed: Bob died of blood loss before he could finish writing the message.
- Reconstructed: But it still gets the point across.
- Zig Zagged: The message jumps repeatedly between writing in blood and ink.
- Averted: Bob had a pen and used it.
- Enforced: "We need to up the shock value of Bob's death."
- Lampshaded: "Yes, I am writing this in blood."
- Invoked: Bob is trying to creep out Alice, so he opens a vein and writes bloodily on the wall.
- Defied: Bob is badly wounded, but he takes the time to find a conventional pen and paper.
- Discussed: "...and on the wall by his corpse, there was a message written in blood."
- Conversed: "If more characters carried pens in their shirt pockets, this sort of thing wouldn't happen."
- Played for Laughs: Instead of blood like the majority of the examples, the medium is something Lighter and Softer that seems rather silly. And it's also funnier if, like the "Parodied" example above, the failure to use a pen makes the character seem rather inefficient and unprofessional. Like a college student who hands in his graduate thesis, written in crayon. Or a newspaper columnist who hands a column in to her boss, written in eyeliner.
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