Welcome to Fun Trope Friday, our feature that mashes up tropes and genres!
How’s it work? Glad you asked. :)
Every week we will have a new spotlight trope.
Each week, there will be a new genre assigned to write a story about the trope.
You can then either use or subvert the trope in a 750-word max story or poem (unless otherwise specified).
To qualify for ranking, you will need to provide ONE actionable feedback. More are welcome of course!
Three winners will be selected each week based on votes, so remember to read your fellow authors’ works and DM me your votes for the top three.
Next up… IP
Max Word Count: 500 WORDS!!!!
PLEASE NOTE: Given that the next FTF Campfire would fall on Christmas Day and thus is canceled, we will be doing a two-part story of 500 words for each part. The trope and genre will change for the second part, but the second trope will be naughty list related and the genre will be comedy related. This will be announced on Friday, December 26th as a standard FTF post. We will then read both parts at the January 1st 2026 FTF Campfire. If you prefer to just write for either post, that’s fine too. Just less fun as you won’t get to play with the surprise twist and challenge yourself. Please plan accordingly! Any questions? Just DM me.
Tis the holiday season for some parts of the world. Time to drink hot cocoa and relax waiting for the gifts to roll in. UNLESS you’re on the naughty list. But no one from WP or FTF would end up there surely. But just in case you find yourself on the wrong side of Santa’s pen, we’ve got you covered! So let’s explore some tropes around just how folks end up on the naughty list. Please note this theme is only loosely applied.
“The arm seized a loaf of bread and carried it off…for having broken a pane of glass and taken a loaf of bread” ― Victor Hugo, ‘Les Miserables’
Trope: Justified Crime — This is a trope for when a person becomes a criminal because of socio-economic reasons, or just plain horrible circumstances, and is portrayed sympathetically because of it. Basically someone is in dire straits and needs money immediately and starts robbing banks or dealing drugs out of necessity. A classic example of this is when Jean-Valjean in ‘Les Miserables’ steals a loaf of bread under the baker’s watchful eye and is sentenced to nineteen years in jail. Clearly this is a harsh punishment for a simple crime by a starving man and highlights the socio-economic injustice in France at the time of the Revolution. Please remember that this is part one of two, so please plan a cliffhanger ending or hook to proceed to the second part, if you want to go the fun route. The next trope will be naughty list related so it won’t be a massive leap, I promise!
Genre: Highbrow Comedy — High comedy is a term used to refer to a comedy that is marked by intelligence or sophistication. Such a comedy may include witty dialogue, satire, wordplay, psychologically realistic characterisation, intricate plotting, social commentary, or intellectual themes. A high comedy will typically feature characters from higher social classes. A naturalistic performance style can also be indicative of high comedy. High comedy will be relatively subtle, and may reference things external to the text, requiring the audience to have a level of sophistication to discern the humorous elements. Please remember that this is part one of two, so please plan a cliffhanger ending or hook to proceed to the second part, if you want to go the fun route. The next genre will be comedy related so it won’t be a massive leap, I promise!
Skill / Constraint - optional: Includes a pun.
So, have at it. Lean into the trope heavily or spin it on its head. The choice is yours!
Have a great idea for a future topic to discuss or just want to give feedback? FTF is a fun feature, so it’s all about what you want—so please let me know! Please share in the comments or DM me on Discord or Reddit!
Last Week’s Winners
PLEASE remember to give feedback—this affects your ranking. PLEASE also remember to DM me your votes for the top five stories via Discord or Reddit—both katpoker666. This is a change from the top three of the past. In weeks where we get over 15 stories, we will do a top five ranking. Weeks with less than 15 stories will show only our top three winners. If you have any questions, please DM me as well.
Some fabulous stories this week and great crit at campfire and on the post! Since we had 6 stories this week, we’re back to three winners. Congrats to:
Want to read your words aloud? Join the upcoming FTF Campfire
The next FTF campfire will be Thursday, January 1st from 6-8pm ET. There will be NO campfire on December 25th. It will be in the Discord Main Voice Lounge. Click on the events tab and mark ‘Interested’ to be kept up to date. No signup or prep needed and you don’t have to have written anything! So join in the fun—and shenanigans! 😊
Ground rules:
- Stories must incorporate both the trope and the genre
- Leave one story or poem between 100 and 750 words as a top-level comment unless otherwise specified. Use wordcounter.net to check your word count.
- Deadline: 11:59 PM EDT next Thursday. Please note stories submitted after the 6:00 PM EST campfire start may not be critted.
- No stories that have been written for another prompt or feature here on WP—please note after consultation with some of our delightful writers, new serials are now welcomed here
- No previously written content
- Any stories not meeting these rules will be disqualified from rankings
- Does your story not fit the Fun Trope Friday rules? You can post your story as a [PI] with your work when the FTF post is 3 days old!
- Please keep crit about the stories. Any crit deemed too distracting may be deleted. This is a time to focus on our wonderful authors.
- Vote to help your favorites rise to the top of the ranks (DM me at katpoker666 on Discord or Reddit)!
Thanks for joining in the fun!
Vinnie Palermo had a problem. For years he’d steered clear of the family business. He’d worked and earned a living like an average Joe. While his cousins and uncles made millions, and did occasional time at Rikers, he kept the straight and narrow. He had problems, who didn’t? But the real problem, was his mother.
"Ma, the hospital is a business," Vinnie pleaded, holding the phone away from his ear as if it were a live grenade. Which, when Rosa Palermo was on the other end, it functionally was.
"A business? They want eighty grand for a new hip and the chemo, Vincent! Eighty! You know what this hip did? Spread open and gave birth to you and now I need a second mortgage for a titanium ass-bone and some drugs?"
"It's a hip and you have osteosarcoma, Ma."
Vinnie pinched the bridge of his nose. He'd tried the legitimate route. He'd even put on a suit and gone to the bank. The loan officer, a kid named Kevin, had looked at Vinnie's salary and laughed so hard he snorted out his oat milk latte.
"Your debt-to-income ratio is… well, let's call it 'theatrical,' Mr. Palermo," Kevin had chuckled.
Vinnie had smiled, the kind of smile that made wiseguys at the club quietly excuse themselves to check on their families. "My ratio, huh? Tell me, Kevin, what's your skull-to-concrete ratio? We could run an experiment."
The loan was not approved. And Vinnie was forcibly removed and banned from the establishment.
So now, sitting in the back booth of The Satin Sausage, nursing a ginger ale for his ulcer, Vinnie faced the music. The music, in this case, was the discordant symphony of his failing life.
"You're in a liquidity crisis, Vinnie," consigliere Sal DeLuca muttered, tapping an iPad. "There’s more liquidity in a block of Pecorino Romano. Your mother's surgery is Tuesday."
Vinnie stared at the red-sauce stain on the tablecloth that had stubbornly outlasted four owners.
"Alright," he sighed, the sound leaking out of him like air from a punctured tire. "Get me the ledger for the prescription business."
Sal blinked. "The Oxy ring? Vinnie, no one would touch that. You’re a biomedical salesman, not a pharmacist."
"That was when I had money, Sal!" He slammed a fist on the table, making the silverware jump. "My mother needs a new hip and chemotherapy. My daughter wants to go to a college that costs more than a townhouse in Jersey. I got a German mechanic who thinks 'leather interior' is an optional extra on a BMW he already sold me. This is what it is."
And so, Vinnie Palermo, who prided himself on being separate from the life, became a drug lord.
The operation was, in his view, classy. No street-corner nonsense. He used a network of disgraced orthodontists and yoga instructors with questionable histories. The pills moved through upscale gyms, spin studios, and country club locker rooms. His sales pitch was pure Vinnie.
"You look stressed, Paulie," he'd tell a hedge fund manager at the nineteenth hole. “The market's got you bent over like Gino's kid brother in the can at Rikers. I got a little something. Pharmaceutical grade. Takes the edge off, lets you focus. Better than a martini, fewer calories. Think of it as a… performance enhancer for capitalism."
He justified it the only way he knew how. "I'm not creating addicts, Sal," he'd argue, "I'm meeting a market demand. I'm a service provider! These people were gonna get their pills from some rat in a tracksuit in Port Newark. I’m not peddling anything different than the hospitals, that are charging my mom eighty large for chemo and a new hip.”
The complication came in the form of a kid. Not a junkie, just a kid. A college sophomore with anxiety and a physics final. He got a few blues from his uncle's "secret stash," overdid it studying the thermodynamics, and was found blue-lipped and cold in his dorm room at Princeton.
The "justification" that had felt so solid, providing a service, helping Ma, maintaining a certain lifestyle, cracked like a central incisor over the barrel of a gun. He’d started in a hole and dug himself a palace, only to find it was built on a mausoleum of dead kids.
He picked up the phone. Not to call his lawyer, or his enforcer, or his motha’. He called Sal.
"Sal," he said, his voice stripped of all its former bravado. "We're out of the pharmacy business."
"Vinnie, the cash flow..."
"I don't care. Liquidate it. Sell the stock to the Russians, the Albanians, the fucking Martians. We're done."
There was a long pause. "And what do we do instead?"
Vinnie looked out his window at the perfectly manicured lawn, bought with blood and blue pills. He had no idea. The dope had provided a roadmap out of desperation, but it led straight to hell. Now he had to find his own way back, if one even existed. All he knew was he couldn't look at another sports car, another marble countertop, or another mother's smile, without seeing a kid who wouldn't see his own motha' ever again.
Modularity
“Here it comes,” I whispered to myself. “Just a little more…”
The package drone wavered meters above the ground, its tiny camera fluttering as if it knew I was there.
I pulled the trigger on my electromagnetic stun-gun. “Gotcha, bitch!”
The drone lurched sideways. Its payload grapple splayed open, jettisoning the package. The drone plummeted with the box, clattering against the pavement in a shower of plastic and sparks.
I scurried to the box, still roughly intact within its broken aerial cradle. With a small prybar, I wrenched it from the packaging. With a bent smile, I absconded into the shadows, box in hand.
My heart thundered against its cage as I ran. Throwing the box over a fence, I vaulted the chain link and continued my retreat. Only when I made it to the freeway overpass did my pace slow to a walk.
An hour later, I heaved my tenement door shut behind me, its hundred-year-old hinges creaking, as fluorescent lighting came on autonomously.
“Welcome home Alexis.” An anachronistic artificial voice chimed, my name spliced into its greeting with cringe-worthy last century charm.
“Thanks,” I replied facetiously. “How the hell was your day?”
The archaic protocol bot didn't respond, as I hadn't addressed it by nomenclature. Such was the life of a working stiff, whose only subsistence was the meager universal-basic-income provided by the Human Resource Authority, and whatever body-mods I could swipe off a delivery drone as they made their rounds.
Sighing heavily, I made my way to the living room. Plopping down on the lawn chair that was my couch, I examined the package. It was discreet. No flashy logos or distinctive markings. Whatever it was, the recipient didn't want their neighbors to know the contents of the box.
“Let's see what-” Lifting my score from its package, I nearly choked. “Fucking hell!”
Inside the box were two modular items, with one clear intent. I kneaded their artificial flesh, utterly disgusted by my hard-won acquisition. Still, a bemused thought flashed through my mind, and I held the two orbs to my chest out of curiosity.
“Damn these things are heavy,” I mused. “Who the fuck would want to lug them around all day?”
The items stirred to life in my hands, their surfaces warming as fibrous tendrils nuzzled my skin. Realizing the modulars’ systems were initializing, I ripped the flesh-like prosthetics away from my chest.
“That was close – Did not wanna get stuck with these things.”
Placing the mammoth mods on the floor, I retrieved their box. Peering inside I gasped, snapping the lids shut.
“What the hell was she gonna do with that thing!?”
A year prior, my sister and I would’ve died laughing at the remaining modular. I imagined her, jubilantly theorizing its use, forcing me to spit wine into a haze. Glancing toward her bedroom door, sadness enveloped my smirk. I swallowed, remembering she could now barely speak, let alone get outta bed.
“Okay Lex,” I told myself. “Better get back to work...”
I'd critique that it's not exactly "highbrow," but that's a matter of taste, I suppose. And my own entry is light on the "comedy" side of the genre aspect. Yours had me chuckling throughout. Well, almost. That ending had me a bit worried, and caring about the character so hard as a result of the tonal whiplash. I can hardly wait for next week's followup.
This post was highlighted by mods and automatically crossposted to r/highlights. Check it out to see a feed of highlighted posts!
[deleted]
Marquis Fel Dranim
He wrote in swooping letters, then ran a line through it.
Marquis FEl Dranim
Another line.
He stared at the page and chuckled. Here he was, couple days an aristocrat, trying to reinvent himself. He'd dreamed of power, assuming it meant freedom, but now?
He suddenly realized one of the guards (Maddox? Mariks?) was speaking with someone other than... Swort? Like sword with a T. He remembered that.
"What's going on?"
There was a noise as Whatsisface slid down, "Just a kid playing bandit. We—" Breaking branches cut in. "—just got rid of him."
The Marquis turned back to his paper as the guard climbed up.
Marquis FelDranim
Closer. What did they all have wrong, in common? Or what were they dancing around? Often it was something missing.
He glanced out the window and marveled at how fast they were moving. The ride was so smooth, he hardly noticed. It was a nice forest. He wondered what hunting they had. He'd never hunted animals, unless you counted rats in the drainway. Ha, he pictured the viscounts scrambling through those sewers. For all his squirming in the palace, it was more accepting of him than the slums would be them.
Then the carriage stopped. He glanced out to see a smaller man drop down. Not a guard. He drew a dagger, and moved to the opposite door. He was likely surrounded, but a quick exit might catch them off guard.
~*~
Kor landed on the ground and turned to the carriage. The guards wouldn't catch up before he was gone, but their passenger could walk back.
"Go 'head and hop out. I've no will to hurt ya."
A latch clicked on the far side. Fat noble was gonna squirm away. Fine enough. Least there'd be no fight. He ducked to look under, expecting panicked legs waddling. Instead, a man's weight pushed him to ground. He struggled until a hand got his scalp and a blade his throat.
"Mentioned not wanting to harm ya, yes?"
"The feeling's mutual, lad. Tell me your name."
"Me? Kor. Name's Kor."
"Kor. You get one warning. I will not tolerate crime in my lands."
"Shoulda known. S'an honor, Marquis. Welcome to Soubara. Well, bara's a couple hours northish. Start that way, you'll see road again'll take ya to Sousfeld, and—" He tried to buck the Marquis off.
~*~
Unfortunately for Kor, his body tensed in preparation, and his foe readied himself. The Marquis moved the knife around and brought the butt down on Kor's head.
He debated leaving the boy. "Bah, what if he's mouths to feed? You know what leads to thieving. It rarely starts with greed. Least not his type."
He turned Kor over and looked at him. The sort of face lasses loved.
"All the more likely there's a littl'un at home." He sighed and plucked a decorative fish off his carriage, and tucked the bit of gillding in Kor's hand, before driving back the way they'd come.