No Yay/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Two characters end up having disturbing romantic or sexual subtext.

  • Straight: Alice ends up hunted by Sheriff Bob. Bob's tendency to grapple and try to hold her down and cuff her combined with his pursuit makes him seem like a pedophile.
  • Exaggerated: Every line Sheriff Bob says to Alice could be used in a rape scene unchanged and not seem out of place.
  • Justified: Bob actually is a pedophile.
  • Inverted: Ho Yay between the show's resident Bishonen and Hunk.
    • Or any sexual subtext handled well or liked by the audience.
  • Subverted: Bob delivers a creepily sexual evil monologue describing what he's about to do to the listener. The camera then zooms out to reveal his grown-up mistress who enjoyed the speech very much.
  • Double Subverted: The mistress gets even more turned on when he adds "But that's nothing compared to what I'll do to Alice."
  • Parodied: Bob becomes a joke compared to the other threats in the next season. Everyone else in the syndicate thinks he's a pedophile.
  • Deconstructed: Bob really is a pedophile, and obvious enough about it to alert the watchdogs.
  • Reconstructed: Bob is also powerful enough that the populace lives in fear as much as they're disgusted by him.
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted: There is no disturbing subtext in the work.
  • Enforced: The author wanted to lend a sense of wrongness but considered making it actually what it resembled trite.
  • Lampshaded: Charlie has a look of utter disgust on his face when he jump-kicks Bob in the head.
  • Invoked: The writers want you to really find one or both characters disgusting, as Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil
  • Defied: ???
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: "You actually WROTE a Bob/Alice Fanfic? And made it consensual? Let me find the Brain Bleach"

Trust me. You don't want to go back to No Yay. It's too Sick and Wrong!