What Does This Mean?
A story convention that a work alternately plays straight and subverts, so the audience cannot tell which way it will go next. In trope-wiki and fan-discussion language it sits beside "played straight", "averted" and "subverted" as a label for a trope that keeps flipping.
REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE
""The prophecy is a zig-zagged trope: it is right in season one, wrong in season two and ambiguous in season three.""
LORE & ORIGIN
The TV Tropes page for the term returned HTTP 403, so its own wording could not be read. Wikipedia's TV Tropes article describes the site as documenting recurring narrative and plot devices but does not define "zig-zagging", "subverted" or "played straight", and its article on literary tropes only says that subverting a genre's tropes often reinforces others. The term therefore rests on community usage that no opened page documents in detail, and no dated first use is known. The existing entries on double-subverted tropes and trope decay cover neighbouring ideas.
MENTIONS OVER TIME
Radar observation data not yet available for this term.
RELATED SEARCHES
TOP PLATFORMS
Not enough Radar data yet to show a platform breakdown.
WHEN DID YOU FIRST HEAR THIS?
CLICK AN OPTION BELOW TO CAST YOUR VOTE.
[ VOTE TO REVEAL COMMUNITY RESULTS ]