Muscles Are Meaningful/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.



Basic Trope: Bigger muscles means greater strength and stamina.

  • Straight: Bob is a bodybuilder that benches 200 pounds.
  • Exaggerated: Bob can bench a mountain and can sprint for ten thousand miles.
  • Downplayed: Bob regularly works out, but can maybe bench only 80 to 100 pounds.
  • Justified: Truth In Television
    • Bob has a job that often requires great strength, like a firefighter.
  • Inverted: Muscles Are Meaningless
  • Subverted: It seems the more agile Chazz might take down Bob with speed and skill over strength.
  • Double Subverted: Until Bob's natural armor from his muscles make the attacks useless and he sends Chazz flying with a single punch.
  • Parodied: Bob lifts 100 pounds plus Chazz who was squished trying to bench 15 pounds.
  • Zig Zagged: Sometimes Bob's strength is needed, sometimes something else is required.
  • Averted: The muscles were fake and Bob's really a wimp.
  • Enforced: The show is sponsored by a gym chain or protein powder company.
  • Lampshaded: "Well what makes you think Chazz will win? Bob's built like a tank and Chazz is a built like a string bean."
  • Invoked: Bob goes to the gym regularly to build his muscles because of this.
  • Exploited: A gambler bets money on Bob to beat Chazz because of this.
  • Defied: Chazz uses powerful robots to try and defeat Bob knowing he can't win.
  • Discussed: "It's no wonder why Bob's so strong and ripped with his healthy diet, cardio, and weight lifting."
  • Conversed: Bob's clearly the muscle of the group.
  • Deconstructed: Bob relied on steroids to get his muscles and is now sick.
  • Reconstructed: Bob recovers, dumps the steroids and works out naturally with a proper diet and exercise.
  • Played For Laughs: Bob's strength is cartoony in nature and is only as strong as the setup needs him to be.
  • Played For Drama: Bob lives in a kill or be killed world and is muscular just to survive.