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{{tropelist|These! Are! TROPES!:}}
* [[Absurdly Sharp Blade]]: Both sides hack a lot of limbs and heads off quite cleanly, despite having only iron weapons.
* [[Acoustic License]]: At the end of the film, the narrator is talking to an army of over a thousand men. Somehow, the guys way in the back, who are probably half a mile away, hear him perfectly fine.
* [[Adaptational Badass]]: Invoked slightly. The original comic was still filled with badasses but the movie version went straight into pure fantasy with monsters and combat feats that defy the laws of physics. The movie was more of a comic book than the comic book.
* [[Adaptation Expansion]]: The entire Gorgo subplot was created for the movie.
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* [[Aggressive Negotiations]]: What the "This is Sparta!!!!" scene amounts to.
* [[Alternate DVD Commentary]]: If you love ''300'' and think it's awesome, you should check out the [[Riff Trax]]. If you hate ''300'' with the passion of a thousand nations of the Persian Empire, you should ''definitely'' check out the Rifftrax.
* [[Amazon Brigade]]: Gorgo's attitude and actions suggest that Leonidas wasn't kidding when he said he could march Sparta's women to Thermopylae instead of its men. Spartan women actually did enjoy more political power than in other Greek city-states, since their husbands were so often off at war.
* [[Artistic License]]: As [[Frank Miller]] put it, he doesn't let the facts get in the way of a good story.
* [[Armor Is Useless]]: Played so very straight.
* [[Artistic License History]]: The movie is so obviously not meant to reflect actual history. In fact, historical records of the event are already believed to be rather sensationalized and greatly embellished. [[Zack Snyder]] and [[Frank Miller]] also drew inspiration from ancient artwork, which, much like Hollywood, glamorize battles of the past. Audiences have loved muscle-bound, half-naked supermen kicking the snot out of each other for [[Older Than They Think|quite a while]]. The embellishment is heavily implied as part of the Greek propaganda even during the film. On the other hand, Zack Snyder did state rather audaciously that the history presented in the film is "90% accurate, although the visuals are pretty crazy". However, none of these explain a few details:
** The Spartan soldiers' disdain for the Ephors and the supernatural in general. Spartans were particularly religious for Ancient Greeks.
** Leondias criticises Athenians as "boy-lovers." Spartans were even more committed to pederasty, the relationship between adult men and adolescent boys, than the other Greek city-states.
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* [[Back-to-Back Badasses]]: Stelios and Astinos.
* [[Badass]]: The story's goal is to essentially portray the Spartans as the biggest badasses of all human history.
* [[Badass Army]]:
** The Spartans, who are portrayed as suicidally infatuated with carnage and glory.
** Subverted by the Immortals, who were never defeated in Xerxes' army of a thousand nations, but become an army of mooks when they meet the Spartans.
* [[Badass Beard]]: Leonidas is the most prominent example.
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* [[Badass Cape]]: The Spartan army.
* [[Bald of Evil]]: Xerxes again.
* [[Beauty Equals Goodness]]: The Ephors are grotesque, lecherous and corrupt. Many of the villainous Persians are freakish and inhuman. Ephialtes betrays his fellow Spartans when they do not accept him for his deformity.
* [[Beam Me Up, Scotty]]: Two minor examples:
** There's a good [[Dramatic Pause|twenty-second pause]] between the ambassador saying "This is madness!" and Leonidas responding with his famous line. Understandably, people usually omit the long pause when they're quoting the film.
** Leonidas full quote is "Spartans! Ready your breakfast and eat hearty, for tonight we dine IN HELL!", though it's commonly shortened to "Spartans! Tonight we dine ''in hell''!" as it is in the trailer.
* [[Black Dude Dies First]]: Messenger from Xerxes in the beginning of the movie.
* [[Blatant Lies]]: "I thought to take a short stroll. These three hundred soldiers are my personal bodyguard." The counselors clearly know he is lying, but can't do anything about it.
* [[Bottomless Pit]]: Where the Spartans threw the Persian messenger who demanded their surrender. Actually [[Truth in Television]]; in [[Real Life]], the Spartans heard that the Athenians threw their messenger off a cliff, said, "We can do better than that," and threw theirs down a well.
* [[Bowdlerise]]: Male genitalia appeared in the graphic novel, while all male characters wear at least their Spartan shorts in the film.
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* [[Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep"]]: Captain Artemis as "Captain".
* [[Evil Laugh]]: Stelios.
* [[Evil Plan]]: The battle at Thermoplyae is triggered by Xerxes' desire to take over Greece.
* [[Evil Sounds Deep]]: They ''really'' lower Rodrigo Santoro's voice for Xerxes.
* [[Exact Words]]: The Persian emissary demands that Sparta give the traditional tokens of submission: earth and water. Leonidas complies by throwing the emissary down a well.
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* [[Acceptable Feminine Goals]]: As was the case in real life, Spartan women seem to take the highest pride in giving birth to strong Spartan soldiers. Gorgo boasts, "Only Spartan women give birth to ''real'' men." In fact, only women who died in childbirth merited a tombstone in ancient Sparta.
* [[Final Speech]]
* [[Five-Man Band]]:
** [[Big Good]] / [[The Hero]]: Leonidas
** [[The Captain]] / [[The Lancer]]: Artemis
** [[The Smart Guy]]: Dilios
** [[The Big Guy]]: All 300 Spartans count, but Stelios fills the role meta wise.
** [[Tagalong Kid|Tagalong Guy]]: Astinos
** [[The Chick]]: Gorgo
** [[Sixth Ranger]]: The Archadians
** [[Sixth Ranger Traitor]]: Ephialtes.
* [[Foreign Money Is Proof of Guilt]]: The fact that Theron had Persian coins on him when he died serve to convince the assembly that he was a traitor.
* [[Genre Blindness]]: Astinos should have been well-trained enough to know that hearing ''any''one crying out his name in terror would mean he was in imminent danger and take action accordingly. {{spoiler|He loses his head for it.}}
* [[Giant Mook]]: At least two of them are fought in battle.
* [[Glowing Eyes of Doom]]:
** In the scene where the (black) emissary of Xerxes bribes the priests of the oracle; the emissary fades to a silhouette with only his eyes remaining, glowing white.
** Also, the eyes of the wolf Leonidas slays for his initiation.
* [[A God Am I]]: Xerxes.
* [[God-Emperor]]: Xerxes, reflecting an actual belief the ancient Persians had and explaining why the "making him bleed" bit was so dramatic. The Persians were actually mostly Zoroastrian in real life, monotheistically believing in the divinity of a single deity, not that of their king.
* [[Good People Have Good Sex]]: Leonidas and Gorgo.
* [[Have I Mentioned I Am a Dwarf Today?]]: It is very important that there is no doubt they are Spartans.
* [[The Hero Dies]]: Leonidas and all 300 Spartans, with the sole exception of Dilios.
* [[Historical Hero Upgrade]]: The Spartans.
* [[Historical Villain Upgrade]]: The Persians.
* [[Hollywood Costuming]]: The Spartans are dressed in loincloths save for their helmets and shields. This was based on the Greek fondness for athletic male figures in artwork, which fitted in well with Frank Miller's superhero comic background.
* [[Honor Before Reason]]
* [[Hot Dad]]: Leonidas, Artemis
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* [[Hufflepuff House]]: The Arcadians who come help the Spartans.
{{quote|'''Dilios''': ''"Brave amateurs. They do their part."''}}
* [[Idiot Ball]]: Leonidas, in spite of being an wise commander, doesn't seem to realize how stupid it is to kick Ephialtes to the curb when he's only other guy who knows about the critical weakness in the Spartans' strategic location. Leonidas refuses to allow him to fight with the Spartans because he is physically unable to hold the line, but he could at least have offered to let him fight with the "brawlers" from the other Greek city-states. At the very least he should have preventing him from just wandering off. It might be explained by sheer Spartan arrogance, however, in assuming that Ephialtes could never be a threat to them.
* [[I Like Those Odds]]: At the end, just before the [[wikipedia:Battle of Plataea|Battle of Plataea]], Dilios points out that though the Persians number 120,000, they are actually scared out of their minds. "The enemy outnumbers us a paltry three-to-one, ''good odds for any Greek!''"
* [[Instant Oracle, Just Add Water]]: A meta-example. The oracle's surreal dancing was achieved by filming the actress underwater.
* [[Ironic Echo]]: "This will not end quickly." The funny part about this line is that it did end rather quickly.
* [[I Surrender, Suckers]]: At the end. They know it'll fail, but it's a cover for Leonidas to use his plan.
* [[It's What I Do]]: Leonidas explains to the Arcadians that dispite having fewer number he brought more soldiers then they did.
* [[Karma Houdini]]: We never see the Ephors punished for selling out their country. It might be presumed that, once corruption in the Senate was discovered, it could be traced back to them.
* [[Karmic Death]], metaphorically, sort of: Queen Gorgo was awesome enough to {{spoiler|shank Theron (by surprise) with a borrowed sword some time after he requires a sex-bribe from her, complete with the [[Ironic Echo]] mentioned above.}}
* [[Kneel Before Zod]]
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* [[Loophole Abuse]]: Leonidas legally cannot send his army to fight the Persians. So, [[Blatant Lies|he decides to just take a walk. To the Hot Gates, a strategic point. With 300 bodyguards]].
* [[Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me]]
* [[Made of Iron]]:
** The Spartans...
** The [[Giant Mook]] that Leonidas fights during the Immortals' assault takes this to a perhaps even crazier level, casually removing a sword stabbed all the way through his upper arm and continuing without any real sign of discomfort or impaired ability.
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* [[Major Injury Underreaction]]: "It's just an eye. The gods saw fit to give me a spare."
* [[Male Frontal Nudity]]: In the comic.
* [[McNinja]]: The Immortals.
* [[Mooks]]: Pretty much every Persian.
* [[Mr. Fanservice]]: The Spartans. Incredibly so. There's a reason why this movie is considered girl porn.
* [[Narrator All Along]]: Dilios, in his role of retelling the story as a morale-boosting tale.
* '''[[No Indoor Voice]]''': Gerard Butler screams about half his lines in the film. In the comic, Leonidas' dialogue is not drawn as yelling quite so often.
* [[Off with His Head]]: {{spoiler|Astinos}} and the Uber-Immortal
* [[One-Liner]]: Plenty. Stelios's "Then we shall fight in the shade," Leonidas's "This is SPARTA!", "Tonight we dine in Hell!", and "Come and get them!" The narrator Delios receives a slightly more subtle joke: When asked about his one eye, he replies, "It's only an eye. The gods saw fit to grant me a spare." Probably the most obvious one is Leonidas's comment that "There's no reason we can't be civilized" as his men butcher their wounded enemies. Historically, the Spartans were well trained in philosophy and literature, and several of the above lines were either paraphrased or directly taken from actual accounts of the battle.
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* [[Protagonist-Centered Morality]]: Leonidas rants about 'an age of freedom'...which freedom? The freedom to hurl babies from a roof because they are not perfect? the freedom to take 7-years-old children away from their mothers and turn them into indoctrinated super-soldiers? The freedom to break the rules of diplomacy because the messenger was nothing more than rude? The freedom to kill wounded, helpless Mooks who are repeatedly stated to be [[Punch Clock Villain|slaves]] forced against their will to fight by fear and have absolutely nothing against you just [[For the Evulz|for nothing more than spite]]?
* [[Proud Warrior Race]]: Why are 300 Spartans more of a threat than ten thousand troops from other Greek cities? Because the other troops are bakers, potters, bankers, and other civilian professionals who've been conscripted into militia duty. The Spartans are something that had never been seen on Earth before: Full-time ''professional soldiers''.
* [[Punctuated!
* [[Pyrrhic Victory]]: the Persians win, in the technical sense.
* [[The Quisling]]: Ephialtes turns the tide of the battle in the Persians' favour by revealing a mountain pass that will allow them to outflank the Greek forces. The Persians also bribe the Spartan priests and a member of their senate to facilitate the Persian conquest.
* [[Rage Helm]]: The Immortals wear them.
* [[Rated "M" for Manly]]: Warning: this film will impregnate any non-protected viewers, be they men or women.
* [[A Real Man Is a Killer]]: If you're not killing your fellow man or dying to him, You Fail Spartan Forever.
* [[Recursive Adaptation]]: The film was based on a Frank Miller comic based on his view of the film ''The 300 Spartans''... as in he loved it when he saw it as a child, later saw it as an adult and hated it, so he wrote a comic using his childhood memories as the basis - he actually used a [[Nostalgia Filter]] to ''enhance'' the work! The reason it hits the [[Rated "M" for Manly]] button is because it's based around that integral process!
* [[Refuge in Audacity]]: You think the Spartans are being sarcastically witty about fighting in the shade? ''They mean it''.
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