Dead Horse Trope

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A Trope which has gone way beyond being a Discredited Trope to where the very act of parodying and/or subverting that trope has itself become a trope.

As noted on the Trope Life Cycle page, the progression is generally:

Clever idea → Trope → Discredited Trope → Dead Horse Trope. → Then, if the downward slide continues, it may end up as a Forgotten Trope.

Named for "Beating[1] a Dead Horse" - an old idiom that describes continuing to do something pointless long after it would be obvious to anybody not mentally handicapped/under the influence of the Sunk Cost Fallacy that said course of action will yield no results and is simply a waste of time. For instance, continuing to whip a dead horse in an attempt to get it to wake up and start running - the horse is dead; it's not going to move anymore.

Naturally, Dead Horse Tropes tend to be The Oldest Ones in the Book, too.

If a Dead Horse Trope is still used straight in recent works despite seemingly being subverted or parodied to death, it's an Undead Horse Trope. If it was never really played straight enough to be a trope in the first place, it's a Dead Unicorn Trope. If it's so natural to the medium of storytelling that it can still be played straight no matter how often it's used and abused, it's an Omnipresent Trope. If the trope not only makes viewers/readers groan but also makes them angry, you've probably got a Pet Peeve Trope.

A common cause of Seinfeld Is Unfunny, because it's hard to imagine yourself back into the innocent frame of mind when this was new. A similar trope is Deader Than Disco, where something once extremely popular falls out of popularity and becomes better known for being mocked as a past fad than for its own merits.

Examples of Dead Horse Trope include:

Power Rangers SPD Monster of the Week: "Enough posing! Let's FIGHT!"

  • Tall, Dark and Handsome
    • More like an Undead, Cyclic Trope that alternates with Knight in Shining Armor. Because of both of these tropes in combination with The Hero and Anti-Hero, a story can keep the audience in suspense about where exactly it will land on the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism.
    • On the most literal level, however, this trope is still alive and well. After all, Americans and northern Europeans are on the average taller than other peoples; black and brown are still the most common hair colors; and Hollywood Homely has yet to become a widespread, non-ironic look for protagonists.
  • Take Me to Your Leader: Despite the fact that there is some Truth in Television in the sense that an explorer in a distant land, upon meeting some of the locals, might wish to speak with whoever's in charge around here, the form of this where visiting extraterrestrials request this is almost never played straight these days.
  • Torches and Pitchforks is now more used as a Stock Parody than used seriously.
  • Trope 2000: In part due to the fact that we are already in the 21st century. This got replaced with IProduct.
  • Utopia is mostly deconstructed in these days.
  • Because many drama series deal with touchy real life subjects these days as a matter of course, the Very Special Episode is more often parodied than played straight these days.
  • Vampire Vords
  • Working on the Chain Gang: The punishment was once very commonplace in Southern US states up until the mid-1950s. Today only a single county in Arizona remains as the one place that still makes use of chain gangs, although inmates serving on these ones aren't shackled together anymore. Nowadays, chain gangs mostly just exist in period pieces in media that involve prisoners in the early half of the 20th Century. Replaced with "community service" nowadays; usually a crew of guys filling potholes on the highway or picking up litter in the park, but these activities aren't gritty or sexy enough for Hollywood so they rarely show up in media.
  • Early settings for Dungeons & Dragons and derivatives used to feature gods of death as undead loving always evil assholes. Newer settings and updates to older settings went to subvert it by making gods of death neutral agents of a natural part of the cycle of life that hate undead. Now the second is far more common and undead making gods are more minor gods of undeath specifically rather than having a portfolio over death in general.
    • Which is Greyhawk. Because Mystara aside of Hel has Nyx (who is more philosophical about it all, can be nice when got no good reason to be ruthless, and has worshipper alignment All/All, despite being in the Sphere of Entropy and among many other things patron of the undead) and Terra (who has worshipper alignment Lawful Good or Neutral, is in the Sphere of Matter and as such more about the whole death-and-rebirth cycle), even if they don't get along. And Forgotten Realms (aside of not being originally a D&D setting) has Jergal before Myrkul and Cyric, and Kelemvor after.
  • Doctors who make house calls. Even in the 60s, it seemed this was only mentioned as a joke about how doctors no longer do this, and eventually, even that started to go stale In more modern works, the joke has become one where only very rich people have doctors who do this. In reality, this practice started to decline in the 1930s for a variety of reasons; concerns about providing low-overhead care in the home, time inefficiency, and inconvenience made it impractical.
  • Video Game Lives. This was the go-to mechanic back when coin-ops were popular, but is almost never used in modern home consoles. Most now have a one-and-done lifebar with infinite continues, plus Save Points, and/or spawning points, depending on the genre. Many games even have auto-save mechanics that do it for you. This of course means that Tropes associated with it like 1-Up are not used either.
  1. ↑ Or 'Flogging'
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