Fall of the House of Cards: Difference between revisions

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The trope name is a play on [[Edgar Allan Poe]]'s ''Fall of the House of Usher''.
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== Anime and Manga ==
== Basic House-of-Cards Version ==
=== Anime and Manga ===
* Near's tarot card house in ''[[Death Note]]''. He specifically warns his coworkers about how pissed he'll be if they knock it over. They don't. However, in a variant on the trope, he builds a huge structure of ''dice'' which [[What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?|collapses in slow motion]] when {{spoiler|most of his team gets Death Noted}}.
* Yugi made one and eventually fell in the Toei ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!]]'' series.
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=== Comic Books ===
* Done with a bit of symbolism ([[What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic|like everything else]]) in ''[[Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth]]''.
 
 
=== Fanfiction ===
* The ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!]]'' fanfiction ''[[Decks Fall, Everyone Dies|Decks Fall Everyone Dies]]'' is a metaphorical example. The card house is analogous to the government built around complicated [[Card Games]]. The stuff going on in Jamerica causes the government to fall, leaving the duelists hanging like a card house builder's hand.
 
 
=== Film ===
* The 1993 film ''House of Cards''.
 
 
=== Literature ===
* Ron does this with Exploding Snap cards in ''[[Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire]]'', and singes his eyebrows in the process.
* ''[[The Dark Tower]]: [[The Dark Tower/The Drawing of the Three|The Drawing of the Three]]'' has crime boss Enrico Balazar build a house of cards while he waits for Eddie to cough up the drugs. When things begin go pear-shaped, the [[Foreshadowing|cards collapse]] without him noticing.
 
 
=== Live-Action TV ===
* ''[[The Brady Bunch]]'', episode "54-40 and Fight": The boys and the girls face off in a house-of-cards building contest to settle an argument.
* ''[[Father Ted]]'', episode "New Jack City", as one instance of a [[Running Gag]] where Ted rings Father Larry Duff and interrupts him in the middle of doing something that requires unbroken concentration.
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=== Newspaper Comics ===
* One ''[[Hagar the Horrible]]'' strip.
 
 
=== Video Games ===
* Seen in ''[[Ghost Trick]]''. A prison security guard is building a house of cards, but just as he finishes, he thumps the table with outrage at the prospect of escorting a great police detective, who was convicted of murdering his wife with little evidence other than his (slightly dubious) confession, to be executed. This naturally causes his house of cards to collapse.
 
 
=== Western Animation ===
* ''[[Wallace and Gromit]] in A Grand Day Out''.
* ''[[The Simpsons]]'': In one of the short segments done for Tracey Ullman, Bart tries to build a house of cards, and Lisa and Maggie keep unintentionally causing it to collapse.
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=== Non-card examples (included here until somebody thinks of a good name for the super-trope) ===
=== Anime and Manga ===
 
== Anime and Manga ==
* During the recap episode of ''[[Excel Saga (anime)|Excel Saga]]'', Il Palazzo is setting up an extremely long domino chain. The Excel Girls kick a few of them down, though Il Palazzo stops the chain reaction in time, and responds by strangling them. The camera cuts away, and cuts back to plushies of them (a reference to how Japanese TV shows will sometimes sub in a cardboard cutout of a host if they're unavailable).
 
 
=== Comic Books ===
* The Klegdixal Ambassador's dust sculpture in ''[[Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire]]''.
 
 
=== Live-Action TV ===
* Subverted in an episode of ''[[M*A*S*H (television)|MashM*A*S*H]]'': propaganda photographers want to make a fragile amateur sculpture into a symbol of the war, but the artists are trying to destroy their own creation.
* In ''[[Malcolm in the Middle]]'', with Dewey's set of dominoes. They averted the collapse many times, and Hal was really looking forward to the eventual release (trying to keep himself from giving in to the temptation to set them off)... and then he comes home and Dewey has already done it.
* On an episode of ''[[Mama's Family|Mamas Family]]'', Vint starts stacking up sugar cubes on his plate, claiming to be going for the "world sugar-stacking record". Mama slams the refrigerator door, and they fall down. He starts doing it again, and this time Mama purposely knocks them down with her tongs.
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=== Video Games ===
* The opening video of ''[[Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army]]'' has Narumi building a house out of matchsticks which gets knocked over by Gouto (the protagonist's [[Talking Animal|talking cat]] [[Non-Human Sidekick|sidekick]]) jumping onto his desk.
 
 
=== Western Animation ===
* Bigweld's domino layout in ''[[Robots]]''.
* In an episode of ''[[The Fairly Odd Parents]]'', Timmy is building a scale model of the Eiffel tower when his dad or mom bursts in and it collapses. Happens as a [[Running Gag]] throughout the episode.