Ransacked Room: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

Why not try to search your room first?

 

 

There's two methods. Sneaky, and rushed.

* The rushed way involves tipping over all furniture, cutting open mattresses, smashing windows, and dumping everything on the floor. Seriously, if the whatever is something small; the ''mess'' would be harder to find it in than anything else. Mooks that resort to the obviously ransacked technique may want him to know it's happened, may be [[Too Dumb to Live]], or may resort to it because it's quicker.

** Sometimes the mess is intentionally created to stop investigators from finding out what's been taken.

 

[[Super-Trope]] of [[Faking and Entering]]

 

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

* Taken to extremes with Light in ''[[Death Note]]''. He hides the titular [[Artifact of Death]] in a false bottom in his drawer rigged to incinerate the Death Note if it isn't opened properly. He also pulls the handle of his door upwards after leaving, along with putting a piece of tape on the door, because he knows that if his mother, father, or sister were to enter the room, they'd trip the tape-defence. When he finds the tape still on, but the handle moved, he knows that his room has been searched by pros.

** He's also got the pencil lead on the hinge that breaks when the door is opened (the pros didn't find that).

 

* There was a ''[[Mad Magazine]]'' satire once, which showed a picture of a room before being searched by the Queensland police, and then again after. It was very neat before, totally trashed afterwards. It was a puzzle: 'How many differences can you spot between this pictures?'. The correct answer, of course, was 'none'.

 

 

== [[Literature]] ==

** In ''Ghostmaker'', Gaunt is startled awake and catches Inquisitor Lilith in his room. She assures him that she would not have done it if she had known he was there.

** [[Mind Screw|They may have been lying.]] ''Maybe''.

** Technically, she wasn't possessed by Voldemort at that time. She could only be possessed when she had the diary in her possession. She ''was,'' however, terrified that Harry would talk to Tom Riddle in the diary and find out all of her secrets.

* ''[[Cthulhu Mythos|The Shadow Over Innsmouth]]'' has the character managing to escape a room ransack. Of course, rather than his mattress, they were planning on cutting open ''him''...

* Played with in ''Hard-boiled Wonderland''. Two men deliberately break into the [[The All-Concealing "I"|main character's]] apartment when he's there to both intimidate him and search/ransack the room.

* Subverted in Rob Grant's ''[[Incompetence]]''. Harry intentionally keeps his apartment messy, but takes photographs before he leaves, reasoning that any fool can ransack a tidy room and replace it as it was, but it takes a professional to ransack a messy room without being noticed.

* In ''[[Jeeves and Wooster (novel)|The Code of the Woosters]]'' Jeeves and Bertie search Stiffy Byng's room because Bertie reads a detective novel containing the trope that the top of the cupboard is "every woman's favourite hiding-place." They find themselves [http://wodehouse.ru/cover/e/59-11.jpg treed by an Aberdeen Terrier].

He corrected me respectfully, giving it as his opinion that the undersigned was not a tiny little dog, but well above the average in muscular development. In particular, he drew my attention to the animal's teeth. }}

 

* On ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]'', [[The Professor|Mohinder]] comes home and surprises a Company agent searching (and bugging) his apartment. The agent claims to be an exterminator, and protests "this man pulled a gun on me" to a neighbor witnessing the ensuing fight. Of course, the gun holster exposed under the agent's jacket makes this lie [[Implausible Deniability|rather obvious]].

* On [[Burn Notice]], CSS agent Jason Bly has Michael's apartment searched. It's a subversion in that Michael is there at the time. Also, Bly doesn't expect to find anything; he's just doing it to mess with Michael.

* ''[[Estate of Panic]]'', similar to the above, but with adult contestants ransacking a haunted mansion filled with booby traps and unpleasant animals to find cash.

* The 1993 Australian spy series ''Secrets'' showed how this is done in real life, with the fictional intelligence agency always taking polaroids of the room beforehand so everything could be replaced.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Espionage Tropes]]

[[Category:MacGuffin]]

[[Category:Action Adventure Tropes]]

[[Category:Plots]]