Never Recycle a Building/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: An abandoned building important to the plot will remain conveniently available, no matter how much time has passed or how useful its location.

  • Straight: Alice goes to the childhood home of her grandmother in search of a family heirloom. The abandoned house is in a quiet Boston neighborhood, dusty yet undisturbed despite the booming neighborhood around it.
  • Exaggerated: Alice finds the home in the middle of the city, undisturbed under a four-level freeway overpass.
  • Justified: Alice's great-grandfather was an influential councilman who got a local law passed stipulating that the property would not be disturbed for any reason.
  • Inverted: Alice's job involves finding long-undisturbed properties, then buying them for demolition and redevelopment.
  • Subverted: Alice goes to the address, only to find that an office building is there now.
  • Double Subverted: When Alice enters the building, she finds that the home is sitting undisturbed in an indoor atrium in the center of the courtyard.
  • Parodied: The building has been perfectly preserved due to the efforts of the Alice's Convenience Historical Society.
  • Deconstructed: The presence of the ramshackle old house has been a long-time local blight, and the neighbors insult Alice and her family when they learn who she is.
  • Reconstructed: ???
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted: The story takes place in a setting with no permanent structures.
  • Enforced: ???
  • Lampshaded: "It's amazing that this house has been sitting here undisturbed for decades."
  • Invoked: The city planner knows the house has an expensive heirloom hidden inside that requires a descendant to find, so he kept the house undisturbed until then.
  • Exploited: The city planner is preparing to ambush Alice after she finds the heirloom and steal it.
  • Defied: The city planner is part of an Ancient Conspiracy who knows the heirloom is the key to summoning an Eldritch Abomination. He quickly orders the home destroyed and has a parking structure built on the site to bury it.
  • Discussed: Bob tells Alice, "You're nuts if you think that your grandma's old abandoned house will still be there after all these years."
  • Conversed: "The movie would be a lot shorter if she finds the old house has been torn down and paved over, wouldn't it?"

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