Fertile Feet/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Extremely good characters emit positive auras which cause life to flourish on their way.

  • Straight: Alice is the group's professed heroine and overall nicest person around. This status gets confirmed when she gains the power to make life grow under her feet.
  • Exaggerated: Alice is the story's Goddess given human form, her mere presence can turn an apocalyptic waste land into an terrestrial paradise.
  • Justified: Alice is a powerful and benevolent white sorcerer that also has studied some of the druids' magic, so she can use limited versions of their nature controlling spells.
  • Inverted:
    • Alice's mere presence causes life to wither and die horribly. This is a reflection of her evil heart and twisted mind. Unless it isn't.
    • Alternatively: Wherever Alice goes, life follows... but not in a good way. She leaves behind a trail of weeds, mold, and fungus. Vermin and disease flourish in her wake. When she walks down the street, horrible, gnarled roots split the pavement asunder. And nothing pleases her more than seeing the disruptive effects her "pets" have on the civilization around her.
  • Subverted: Alice wants to prove to Bob she's The Chosen One by making flowers grow under her feet. She firmly steps into the ground... But nothing happens.
  • Double Subverted: "Oh, silly me! I forgot to take off my sandals." As she discards her shoes, a vast amount of vegetation starts to cover the whole area, convincing Bob definitively.
  • Parodied:
    • Bob invites Alice to his place. He tells her to make herself at home while he goes to make a sandwich. When he returns, he's shocked to find out his living room has been turned into a little fairy-tale forest filled with cheery animals, magical spirits, classical music and Alice dancing to it. Then, a couple of squirrels take the chance to snatch his sandwich.
    • Alternatively, Alice has a pollen allergy, making the constant appearance of plant life beneath her feet not so great, actually..
    • Or: Alice sneezes kittens.
  • Deconstructed: Alice's power to "make life grow in her presence" turns out to be an uncontrollable force that causes vegetal life to grow out of control. Because of this, she chooses to live away from civilization.
  • Reconstructed:
    • Knowing her power has consequences, Alice learns to control it and to use it with responsibility, eventually reaching a state of enlightenment and peace.
    • Alternatively, plants react to Alice's passing by, but do not grow without retreating back to where they were after she goes.
  • Zig Zagged: Thanks to a series of contrived coincidences, everyone thinks Alice has this power, but she eventually explains she doesn't. Until she's revealed to be The Chosen One, which causes a genuine instance of this power, but only once... And later, Alice learns to intentionally invoke it.
  • Averted: Despite her pure and uncorrupted nature, Alice doesn't manifest this power at any point in story.
  • Enforced: "After watching the negative audience reactions to our original ending, we decided to include this sequence with Alice returning the life to the devastated land as a way to show there will be hope in the future."
  • Lampshaded:
  • Invoked: With the help of a fellow Nature Hero, Alice manages to simulate this ability to gain the trust of those unaware of her good nature.
  • Defied: Knowing Alice's power is a reflection of her pure heart, the Big Bad proceeds to emotionally and mentally destroy her; thus preventing her from ever using this ability against him.
  • Discussed: "You know, Alice and Bob are actually pretty similar. The problem is that while she's followed by a stream of life and harmony, he's being chased by an annoying trail of ROTTEN luck!"
  • Conversed: "And you said my original character was lame; this flower-growing-stuff looks like one of those cornish deodorant commercials!"

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