Surprise Creepy/Playing With
Surprise Creepy: A work starts off cute and gets progressively creepy or scary with little or no warning to the audience.
- Straight: The story starts in an idyllic village peopled by painfully cute animals and ends in Fire and Brimstone Hell.
- Exaggerated: The story starts out in a setting reminiscent of a toddler show and ends with everyone brutally murdered in extreme detail.
- Justified: The world is actually a dystopia in which cuteness is enforced. The creepy is only found once one works their way past the facade created by the government.
- Inverted: The story begins in Fire and Brimstone Hell and ends in an idyllic village peopled by painfully cute animals.
- Or, the cover and advertising give the impression it's Rated "M" for Money, but it's actually Sweet Dreams Fuel appropriate for small children.
- Subverted: The audience gets the impression that things are creepy behind the happy setting, but then the story explains everything such that what was once creepy is cute again.
- Double Subverted: ...then the sequel comes out and it turns out it really was as messed up as the audience thought.
- Parodied: ???
- Deconstructed: ???
- Reconstructed: ???
- Zig Zagged: We start in that idyllic village. Chapters 1-3 are sugary-sweet... until the village is attacked by demons. The heroes set out, enter Fire and Brimstone Hell, and wind up freeing their fellow cute villagers. We spend a few more chapters in cuteness before Satan himself comes to, apparently, stomp the village out, but it turns out he's actually a nice guy and has the form of an adorable little goat.
- Averted: The story either stays consistently cute or consistently scary from the start.
- Enforced: ???
- Lampshaded: The Deadpan Snarker of the team, while fighting demons, notes that five minutes ago he was playing with adorable kittens.
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: A character is determined to keep things happy and upbeat even as she's wading through gore.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: Someone mentions a book he read as a kid with a unicorn on the cover which ended up very violent.
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