Subverted Trope: Difference between revisions

But how could people know a trope is going to happen? Well [[Trope|tropes]] live in the minds of the audience. As such, sufficiently [[Genre Savvy]] (or [[TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life|Trope Savvy]]) audience members can predict a familiar trope coming based on [[Trope Telegraphing|the hints dropped by the writer]]. So when the writer decides to build on this expectation, only to reveal that the expected "trope" was a [[Red Herring]] while an entirely different situation results, you have a [[Subverted Trope]].

{{examples|Examples}}

* ''[[Superman the Animated Series|Superman: The Animated Series]]'' plays straight and subverts many tropes, but it is noteworthy the way it handled [[Bury Your Gays]]. Maggie Sawyer was primarily a victim of [[Hide Your Lesbians]], up until the second season episode ''Apokolips...Now!'' there had not been any hints to her orientation in the comics, but she seemed to be [[Bury Your Gays|legitimately set up for death]]. When she is attacked by Intergang she is thrown from her car in a fiery explosion and she is shown horribly burned beneath a crushing pile of rubble, noticeably ''without'' [[Eye Awaken|a blinking eye]] or [[Finger -Twitching Revival|moving fingers]]. It looks like she is [[Killed Off for Real]], especially when Dan Turpin starts calling the attackers "murderers" while screaming at them, except a later scene reveals her to be [[Not Quite Dead]]. This later scene, which revealed that she had survived and thus subverted the [[Bury Your Gays]] trope, also provided the first ever hint at her sexuality when she is visited in the hospital by a woman that the DVD commentary reveals is Toby Raines, her partner in the comics. So, Maggie not only survives the attack, which is a straight subversion of the [[Bury Your Gays]] premise, but the setup actually lead to a (partial) revelation of her sexuality, something this trope is usually invoked specifically to avoid, making it also an ''[[Inverted Trope|inversion]].''