1) Wilm Hosenfeld: Real Life, depicted in The Pianist

After the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, Władysław Szpilman is trapped in the ruins, forced to hide out and scavenge for food. He is found by Hosenfeld, who takes pity on him and gives him food and clothing. He was later made Righteous among the Nations.

2) General Kuribayashi: Real Life, depicted in Letters from Iwo Jima

In contrast to the abuse and suicidality prevalent in the Imperial Japanese army, Kuribayashi treats his soldiers with respect. He clamps down on corporate punishments and executions, and allows tactical retreat to preserve the lives of his men.

3) Lieutenant Dunbar: Dances with the Wolves

In contrast to the bigotry and disdain expressed against the Sioux by other cavalry officers, Dunbar tries to seek peace with his neighbors and advocates preserving their culture. And so when another Cavalry unit arrives at his post, Dunbar refuses to help them chase the Sioux and eventually turns on his country.

IE a character can only be as smart as the writer.

E1: Warhammer is really, really bad for this trope. Characters are presented as strategic geniuses or tactical masters, and then when the writer goes to show that off they do some shit like head on human wave tactics assault against fortified positions

Horus in the first few Horus Heresy books is a great example. The other characters spend a LOT of time circle jerking how smart and talented their dad is. Then every single time Horus directs a battle his gameplan is “Loken, go around the enemy, Abbadon, rush B no stop.”

E2: Sister Sage is presented as a mastermind genius in the boys, and is revealed to have been behind everything that led to homelander gaining control over the country, and the season even ends with her outright saying “all according to plan”

The issue is that she just disappears and isnt mentioned again until the very end when she goes “yep I did all of that it was all my plan”

The show doesn’t bother to try to explain how all of the completely random chance shit that happened was manipulated or controlled by her. They present is as a complex chain of dominos that she set up, even though any rational person could tell you that half of the events of that season were unpredictable complete chance events.

E3: Holdo, The last Jedi. The rebel fleet is about to get demolished, Poe and the gang are doing crackhead mutiny shit to try to survive, it’s revealed at the very end after Poe and his team fails that Holdo had an uber plan all along and simply didn’t feel the need or desire to tell anybody in her actively mutinying ship. Dumbass character logic and the movie fully presents it as a “live and learn” moment for Poe even though it would be irresponsible NOT to try to take over command and make your own future when your commanders entire spoken plan is “we’re just gonna fly away until we run out of fuel idk what else you want us to do”

Edit: more examples for the people mad at me for posting sister sage.

Honestly there’s about two dozen Warhammer examples I could give off the top of my head but it would be the same shit with a different smell

BBC Sherlock, asspulls that don’t have a logical connection. The show goes the route of “Sherlock sees or knows something implicitly that the viewer couldn’t possibly have known.” I believe a good mystery is something that the viewer can put the pieces together themselves alongside the author and then after the fact look back and go “oh how did I miss that?” Sherlock doesn’t do this but rather has Sherlock pulling some innate knowledge that wasn’t ever shown or revealed.

House, but in a positive way as the writers made it entertaining, and also borderline subverts the trope by acknowledging its own bullshit (three stories episode where a student asks him why it’s expected for them to have an innate understanding of the dosage calculations for juvenile American rattlesnakes off the top of their heads and house tells them to get good)

A recent trope example of this that I’m hesitant to put in the same category since it’s based off a real life person is The Zuck from Social Network. Half his character dialogue is shit like a character being like “this feels room temperature” and then he would interject and be go “70.7.” And when the other character says what he would be like “the temperature is 70.7, this is 0.7 degrees higher than room temperature.”

Dave Carrol - United Breaks Guitars

United Airlines broke his guitar and refused to fix it, so he made a music video making fun of them. United eventually was forced to apologize and pay him back.

Never Rent From Cindy (ft. Cindy)

Two musicians got illegally evicted by their landlady, so they made a music video exposing all her crimes to the world. They reveal at the end that all her houses are unregistered, leave notes at every single property she owns to inform her other tenants, and report her to the government.

Not Like Us

Do I even need a description for this one?

The Parson of the Canterbury Tales. While the other members of clergy are various members of corrupt or sexual promiscuous or greedy the Parson is a genuinely faithful member who works with his flock and even helps cover Tithes.

Father Maxi (South Park) the only Catholics priest in the South Park world that isn’t a pedophile

1- tony yelling I get it in top of the mountain because he was having a good day after killing Chris and getting away with it he realized he can do whatever he wants in this world and was the same moment where he never had a panic attack

2-the flowers in Walter house the lily of the valley which are the same flowers that are used to poison Brock so he could frame Gus and make Jesse side with him

Cool Cat/Derek Savage

Sonichu/Chris Chan (DO NOT RESEARCH IF YOU DO NOT ALREADY KNOW)

1. Helena Bonham Carter playing Belatrix, who is suppose to be Hermione acting like she's Belatrix.
2. Chris Evans playing Steve Rogers, who is Loki mocking Captain America.
3. Sarah Michelle Gellar & Eliza Dushku trading places in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I’m not sure if it’s official, but I saw this image of Rei Ayanami fishing and it inspired this post (Neo Genesis Evangelion)

Yume Minami generally uses the spaceship portion of Dynazenon as a regular means of transport to get to school or to meet up with the group.(SSSS Dynazenon)

This soldier used the mech to drink water (Baki séries)

Final Destination Bloodlines: The events of the tower collapsing, and leading to Death pursuing the protagonists and countless others, is the fault of 'the penny kid'.

Elevator (2012): Madeline, the granddaughter of the building's owner, sets the plot in motion by playing with the elevator controls to torture the claustrophobic George.

When the creators of the show gently (or with obviously blatant intent) push some sort of agenda.

The Fairly OddParents: "My Shiny Teeth and Me"

Instead of nagging kids about dental hygiene, the writers hired Chris Kirkpatrick from *NSYNC to drop a legitimate pop single. The song worked as actual radio-quality pop, so brushing teeth suddenly felt fun rather than like a chore your parents forced on you. It got the message across without preachy condescension.

Saved by the Bell: "Jessie's Song"

The script originally dealt with speed, but Saturday morning censors balked, forcing the show to swap in over-the-counter caffeine pills like NoDoz. They kept the catastrophic, soap-opera-level acting anyway, giving Jessie a full-blown psychological spiral over truck-stop pills. The mismatch between the low-stakes substance and the hysterical performance turned an honest talk about burnout into accidental comedy.

Rocko's Modern Life: "Zanzibar!"

Rather than just telling kids not to drop trash on the playground, Rocko staged a full-blown Gilbert and Sullivan style musical on corporate greed and pollution. It walked viewers through packaging waste, smog, and systemic neglect with sharp, genuinely funny writing. It worked because it gave the audience credit and mocked the real culprits instead of talking down to kids.

Dinosaurs: "A New Leaf"

The show took a swing at cannabis culture with a wild plant that made everyone lazy, giggly, and unbothered by bad jobs. The problem was watching massive animatronic puppet reptiles get stoned on the sofa was just too bizarre to take seriously. Having a guy inside an eighty-pound rubber lizard suit step out of character to lecture the camera about drugs killed any point they were trying to make.

Hey Arnold!: "Chocolate Boy"

Treating chocolate as a stand-in for hard drugs sounds ridiculous, but the writers handled it with real care. Arnold basically acts as a twelve-step sponsor, guiding the kid through actual withdrawal and identifying where the habit started: a lack of love and attention at home. It gave kids a surprisingly sharp, empathetic look at why people fall into addiction in the first place.

A oddly specific yet wholesome trope in most media that I love, can be either a toy, plushie, or figurine.

Ashton Machan - Technically, every single girl in Umamusume Pretty Derby has a plush version of themselves in the game but I'm using Machan as an example since it's pretty much her whole character.

Mr Boss - Where I got the name for this trope from. Unfortunately, Alan doesn't seem to like the gift.

Mario - In the Mario Vs Donkey Kong series, Mario has his own set of toys known as Mini Mario's. The franchise is centered around these toys gameplay wise and story wise. Don't worry DK gets a mini Mario of his own at the end of their game.

Essentially this is a trope dealing with a piece of fiction that may have a stock monster but they have decided to change some part of the lore, the abilities or the design to make it stand out from the rest, the monster may be in any genre but it has to be significantly unique in some way to the stock idea of it

Wolfwalkers:

The Wolfwalkers change a lot of things from what someone what may think of werewolves though does keep some parts, they can turn into a wolf form and transmit it by bite but their souls leave their bodies and manifest into wolves

House of Ashes:

The vampires feed on blood, can burn in sunlight or UV light, can be beaten with a stake in the heart and have a bat like appearance but are actually aliens in origin and they are more monsterous then human looking typical vampires

Wish Dragon:

The titular dragon, along, resides in a jade teapot, can take back wishes if he misinterprets them and can shapeshift into human form, can grant three wishes and has three limitation, can’t kill, can’t make people fall in love, and can’t time travel, so there’s some similarities to the stock idea but enough variety

Ben 10:

Ripjaws clearly has some mermaid inspiration like some other aliens in the classic series being inspired by other monsters but it becomes clear when he gets his tail in the water though he is unique with having an angler fish light and very prominent and sharp teeth when compared to the regular mermaid

I hope my picks make sense and I may get some things wrong which I apologise for

Alduin- The Dragonborn is seconds away from being executed when Alduin attacks Helgen, unintentionally saving the one person capable of permanently defeating him. If Alduin had simply attacked somewhere else, the Dragonborn would presumably have died before becoming a threat.

Lord Shen- Had Shen left the pandas alone, Po likely would’ve grown up in the panda village rather than being raised by Mr. Ping in the Valley of Peace.

Quotes that characters have NEVER said, but thanks to fandom and meme culture, people think they did.

1. The most popular example of this is “Beam me up, Scotty!”, which was never said in any episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. It was interestingly said in an audio adaptation of the non-Canon novel “The Ashes of Eden”.
   
2. Mr. Krabs never said “How do we tell him?” in that screencap from Dying for Pie. What he actually says here is, “The lad deserves to enjoy his final hours.”. The line IS in the actual episode, but it was instead said by Squidward right before this.

Galaxy Quest: a group of aliens find “historical documents” of an sci-fi tv show and begin modeling their technology and equipment after its set pieces. They even end up bring in the original actors of the show when they need help against a ruthless invader. All while they are under the impression that the things they’ve been watching are real events and not just a television show - with actors and fake props. They even go through the effort of duplicating the technology to an absolute egregious degree of accuracy. Like making it so a self destruct function only stops at the last second, even when pressed earlier. Because that’s what happened in the show.

Big Bad Beetleborgs: after a group of kids save Flabber(who is effectively a mix of a ghost and genie), he offers them one wish in return. They wish to become beetleborgs - Superheroes from a comic series they’re a fan of. Flabber agrees, but in granting them their powers he also accuse sets free the villians of the comic. The main story is about how the kids now need to defeat them and out the villian back where they belong, now actually taking up the roles of the heroes they admired from the comics as they defend innocent people and fight evil.

Agatha All Along: a group of witches(and one teen boy) want to go on a journey through the Witches Road, a legend about a magical road that would give whoever finishes the road something they wish to attain. But here’s the thing. The road is only a myth. It doesn’t exist. It never existed. It’s a con that Agatha Harkness created as a way to trick witches so she could lead them to their deaths and steal their powers. The titular “road” the characters travel on for most of the series is revealed to be an illusion created by Billy, the son of the Scarlet witch. He creates his own version based on the stories and legends he studied about it. The various trials the witches go through are also seemingly built by their own insecurities and trauma, with Billy’s mind reading abilities subconsciously turning them into another part of the road. He’s actually wracked with guilt at the end because he realized that means he got multiple killed on a journey HE manifested without realizing it.

What do you mean this character has a lot of similarities to another, it’s totally a different original character (essentially parody characters or characters that it is very obvious where the inspiration came from, I’m gonna just do a bit where I pretend that they are totally not, okay, also I left out a fun one on purpose because i thought it would be more fun for the audience, I think it’s fun when they have to go around and make their own when its obvious whose it is supposed to be.)

Characters:

Agent Spider from Invincible:

What do you mean this character is similar to any Marvel character, just because he’s got spider abilities and is voiced by Josh Keaton, doesn’t mean that its Spider-Man

Rorschach from Watchmen:

This character may have a faceless mask and wear trenchcoat and fedora but that does not mean he is a knock off of The Question

Creature of the Clergy from Its Bunlith! The Witch Upstairs!

Okay this character may have some resemblances to other characters but it has a fluffy tail so it is in no way the Cleric Beast from Bloodborne

(I have no idea of the actual name of the last creature so I made my own, please let me know if there is one)

1. Dragon Ball Z - in order to buy more time for Goten and Trunks in the time chamber, Piccolo recommends that Super Buu kills some more time by... killing everyone else on Earth. I mean I guess you've got Dragon Balls but still, what the Hell, man? This backfires about as spectacularly as it sounds as Buu does exactly that, only he doesn't take his time with it.
2. Doctor Who - Amy and Rory are trapped in a TARDIS possessed by a malevolent entity called House. When asked why House shouldn't just kill the two right away, Rory replies "Well, killing us quickly wouldn't be any fun. Why not take your time torturing us." Like I get being a bit panicked but why was that your first suggestion?

1. The old guy from Mega Man Starforce - He says he is 30 but anyone with working eyes can tell he is 20 at most.

2. The guy from Benchwarmers - He says he is 12 but bro looks like he is around 14 in reality.

My name is Earl: Earl decides to take the blame from the stolen truck and kidnapped guy just to keep the family of his cheating ex wife together, at the expense of his own personal growth.

The mentalist: Patrick jane is sent to prison, but that wouldn’t stop him from getting his way.

Roadrunner: Roadrunners name being the same as the actual animal heavily contributes to this one

Knuckles the echidna: Knuckles even calls himself a porcupine in his Sonic Adventure theme song

Tasmanian Devil: same at Roadrunner (kind of strange that looney tunes has two of these)

Wolverine: even Hugh Jackman didn’t know what a wolverine was when he was casted to play the character

Perry the platypus: in the extended version of his theme song it goes on to mention simple aspects of his design like his bill and tail as if they would be uncommon in a platypus

Edit: for got to label this as a (Meta Trope)

They're up against a wall. There's nowhere to run and no other choice. So, a character gives up their humanity to become a monster capable of saving them.

1). Adventure Time:
The "Great Mushroom War" has destroyed human civilization. The radiation turns the (unprotected) survivors into zombie-like "oozers." Simon Petrikov is an antiquarian protected by a magic crown. Its potent magic slowly warps his body and erodes his mind with each use.
In the aftermath, he discovered Marceline. A young, half-human child. As the only two immune to the radiation, they became family. When they're cornered by a pack of oozers, Simon is forced to wear the crown to save Marceline. Furthering his transformation into an insane, inhuman ice wizard.

2). Sweet Home:
Civilization falls apart after people start turning into violent monsters. Each monster reflects a warped version of their human progenitor's greatest desire. For example, someone who wants to get in shape might turn into a hulking mass of muscle. The protagonist, Hyun-su, starts turning into a monster. But because the depressed man has no desire to act upon, he is trapped halfway through the transformation.
He is helping evacuate his apartment building's survivors. At the last minute, a monster appears on the roof. At this point in his story, he has finally developed a desire of his own: to save his friends from the apocalypse. He morphs into a monstrous, knight-like creature. And defeats the attacking monster.

3). 30 Days of Night:
A group of vampires invade a far-north Alaskan town during the arctic winter. To save the town and buy time for the sun to return, the protagonist willingly becomes a vampire. He holds the others off long enough for the townspeople to escape. But dies once the sun returns.

4). One Piece:
Kuma willingly allows himself to be converted into a cybernetic weapon. In order to get treatment for his dying daughter.

5). Black Clover:
A devil manipulates the human nobles of the Clover Kingdom to massacre the elves. Licht, the leader of the elves and holder of an insanely rare "four-leaf grimoire," realizes this is the work of a devil. To keep the devil from stealing his grimoire and attacking innocent people with it, Licht commits the ultimate act of forbidden magic. He absorbs huge amounts of corrupt energy from the underworld, and is transformed into a rampaging demon. His friend, the first wizard king, stops Licht before he can level the country. His grimoire is lost, and his wife and unborn child survive.

6). Pantheon:
At this point in the story, humans are trying to wipe out "uploaded intelligences" that are living in the internet. An evil UI creates a biological weapon to attack humanity. Unable to stop him indirectly, the protagonist uploads his mind. Destroying his physical brain in the process. As a digital ghost himself, Caspian is able to stop the evil UI and prevent him from unleashing a viral plague.

7). Young Justice:
Zatara offers himself up to the immortal lord of order, Nabu, so that his daughter does not become the next Doctor Fate. Nabu agrees, and Zatara spends the next decade as the powerless host of the immortal spirit.

8). Ben 10: Ultimate Alien
Kevil Leven willingly mutates himself into a chimeric alien monster to stop the villain, Aggregor.

Coraline(Coraline):”It’s over and done with, for us.” Coraline finds the Ghost Children’s eyes and freed their souls from a child predator/spider lady and they’re telling her she’s still skulking around in the house?
Thanks for nothing.
Are we serious? And now she has to make sure she doesn’t come back and she has to do it alone? And she can still reach her parents? I would’ve been terrified. Coraline would need a lot of therapy. They never told her about the Other Mother being able to get back to her world.

Luke Skywalker(Star Wars):At the climax of Return of the Jedi Luke deliberately goes without the aid of his comrades to confront Darth Vader and the Emperor. Though as the Emperor disdainfully pointed out, Luke had faith that his friends would succeed.

Miles and Kingpin(Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse), near the end of the final battle, Miles Morales sends the other Spider-People home, since they're in danger of disintegrating if they stay in his dimension for too long, and fights the Kingpin alone.

The final missions(Call of Duty: Black Ops II) become this, especially in the Golden Ending. For most of the game, David Mason has a reliable squad of SEALs under his command and is commanded by Admiral Briggs from the USS Obama. Then Odysseus happens. The Obama is suddenly stormed by Menendez's mercs and severely damaged, if not outright destroyed. Farid, if he survived "Achilles' Veil", is killed, Crosby is W.I.A., Salazar turns out to be Menendez's mole, and Briggs is critically wounded, if not outright killed. By the final mission, the only one of your supporting team that you can possibly still have with you is Harper - and even then, that's only if Farid didn't kill him to keep his cover in an earlier mission, which is a requirement for the best ending.

1. Ice King's Crown (Adventure Time): in earlier seasons of the show, it was initially assumed that the crown only gave ice magic to the wearer. However, in the episode 'Evergreen', the crown is actually a wish making tool that the aforementioned character made to stop a Catalyst Comet. Unfortunately, he couldn't made the wish himself due to being trapped under rubble and had to rely on his apprentice, Gunther, to wish for the comet's destruction. This lead to him actually wishing to be like Evergreen, with the white beard, pointy nose, and ice powers, which led to the same situation to Simon Petrikov millions of years later.

2. The Power Bands (Boboiboy): specifically, the three I encircled. They're thought to just give super speed, strength and flight, and turn anything into food. There's more to it, though. Ying's band actually gives her time manipulation, she only looked fast to others because she actually made time slow to her. Yaya's is actually gravity powers, which explains the flight and strength. Gopal actually has full molecular change, changing anything to more than Just food. He's just a fatass.

Castaway - Chuck removes his tooth with a rock and a blade from an ice skate because the tooth had a really bad root canal and the pain had become unbearable.

The Martian - Mark Watney removes an antenna fragment embedded in his abdomen, extracts the remaining debris, and staples his wound shut. He's a botanist and astronaut, not a surgeon.

127 Hours/IRL - Trapped by a boulder in a remote canyon, Aron realizes that his only chance of survival is to amputate his trapped forearm using a small, dull knife. After cutting off part of his arm, he climbed out of the ravine and was able to be rescued.