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โ‡ฑ Creator Thumbprint - TV Tropes

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No matter the story, Hayao Miyazaki will have someone/something flying.Top to bottom, left to right: Nausicaรค on her Mehve, Sheeta and Pazu in Pazu's 'thopter, Kiki flying on her broomstick, and Marco "Porco Rosso" Pagot's Savoia S.21.
A recurring item found across several works for a director, producer, or writer.

For recurring associates, see Production Posse. For recurring characters or items identified with a previous movie, see Production Throwback and Reused Character Design. The literary/unintentional equivalent of this is an Author Catchphrase, and the actor equivalent of this is just a normal catchphrase (e.g. "I'll be back"). Does not include overarching Signature Style elements of a body of work, Signature Shots, or explicit trademarks, such as Alfred Hitchcock's silhouette or Walt Disney's signature. If the Thumbprint is something the author likes, then it's Author Appeal, and if it's lifted wholesale from another series by the creator, it's Borrowing from the Sister Series. See also Self-Plagiarism.

Example subpages:

Other examples:

    open/close all folders 
    Anime & Manga 
  • Kozue Amano, the creator of ARIA and Amanchu!, clearly has a thing for Scenery Porn.
  • Hirohiko Araki is a big music fan, particularly of western progressive rock. This can be seen in the naming conventions of characters from his masterwork, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, with characters sporting such names as Dio Brando, Robert Edward O. Speedwagon, Vanilla Ice, and so forth. He even used a prog-rock song, "Roundabout" by Yes, as the ending theme of the 2012 anime's first season, with the anime's director stating it was one of the songs Araki listened to when working on the original manga. He also tends to use the death of dogs to illustrate just how evil a new villain is. Contrary to popular belief, Araki does this because he absolutely loves dogs, and killing one makes the villain viler in his eyes. In fact, one of the first things to happen in JJBA is Dio kicking Jonathan's dog, then later killing him.
  • In their "girls with guns" works, Bee Train always has a female character that wears a pair of red shoes โ€” which started with Kirika in Noir. Also, Kouichi Mashimo went to a Jesuit university, knows a lot about the Catholic Church, and likes to feature some of Aquinas's and Augustine's ideas in his shows. He also has a non-sexual love for any Action Girl (especially with a gun), being a fairly well-known feminist in Japan.
  • Bleach: Tite Kubo is a huge music geek. As a result, he gives many of his characters theme songs from a wide range of styles and nationalities. His chapter and volume titles can be a Call-Back to songs and he often finds a way to insert music into character conversations. During the Turn Back The Pendulum arc, not only did he have Captain Shinji trying to convince Vice-Captain Aizen that jazz was a brilliant invention but he also created a little character sketch at the end of the relevant volume to tell the reader that jazz didn't actually exist during Shinji's era, coupled with a sketch of Shinji looking absolutely baffled at what he's listening to if jazz doesn't exist. Kubo is also a huge fashion fan and takes every opportunity to sketch his characters in many different fashion styles from Japanese garb to punk outfits, tracksuits, and boxing gear. Even here, he often finds a way to insert music.
  • Ah! My Goddess scribe Kosuke Fujishima is a huge fan of exquisitely-detailed machinery, especially that surrounding vehicles, so it's no surprise that all his work features very in-depth discussion and imagery of the same.
  • The Wallflower author Tomoko Hayakawa practically admits in her author notes that she simply made a series full of stuff she likes: Bishลnen, J-rock performers, horror and gothic pop culture, and the Elegant Gothic Lolita style.
  • Aside from uniforms and girls with hair decs, Hidekaz Himaruya loves bunnies.
  • Kunihiko Ikuhara, most well-known for Revolutionary Girl Utena, has a very distinct style that repeats through every work he has directed - brightly coloured Stock Footage, surreal animal-based slapstick, queer themes, focus on family relationships (sometimes delving into incest), and a whole ton of Mind Screw.
  • If you couldn't tell from the series itself, Hiroyuki Imaishi, the director of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann said in an interview that he liked drills and wanted a show where they were the main character's weapon. This becomes either hilarious or creepy when you see his previous work, Dead Leaves, where one guy has a giant drill (that's drawn just like the ones in Gurren Lagann because he's also the character designer for both) for a penis.
  • This is part of the reason why Lyrical Nanoha fans love the series. The person in charge of it is a self-admitted fan of Super Robot Wars, so he inserted a lot of Humongous Mecha tropes and references into the anime. The resulting fusion of Magical Girls and Humongous Mecha is very cool indeed.
  • Kaoru Mori:
    • She is an Anglophile. It definitely shows in the immense attention to the details of upstairs-downstairs dynamics, costume details, and setting of Emma: A Victorian Romance.
    • She highlighted in her latest work A Bride's Story that she is also fascinated by Central Asian costumes and settings. All her female and male characters have exquisitely detailed embroidered clothes.
  • Tsutomu Nihei, author of Blame!!, has an obvious obsession with architecture, post-humanism, and cyborgs. The latter occasionally verges on fetish territory, and the former is something of a running joke amongst his fans.
  • Eiichiro Oda of One Piece fame very clearly loves afros. Not only do several major One Piece characters sport afros, but the story draws attention or uses the afro for comedy in almost every case:
    • Gaimon, who is mistaken for a shrub;
    • Kuromarimo, who has one afro on his head and three in his beard, fights with afro-shaped balls of hair;
    • Fleet Admiral Sengoku, despite being The Comically Serious;
    • Luffy wears an afro wig during his fight with Foxy, and everyone except Nami insists that the afro makes him stronger.
    • Strawhat pirate Brook, who is a skeleton, still retains his afro because he has deep roots, and has great emotional attachment to the hair because it will allow his old friend Laboon to recognize him even though he is a skeleton;
    • Emporio Ivankov, who can carry his right-hand man in his afro;
    • Wild Takes and silly expressions, in general, are another favourite, even if the situation in the story is serious.
  • Ryu's Path: It's not a Shotaro Ishinomori story without the government being evil, scummy, or involved in a cover-up of sorts. Do note that in real life, he was a noted critic of the Japanese government and its corruption.
  • Makoto Shinkai clearly loves Scenery Porn and cats, including a cat in every one of his films since She and Her Cat (normally naming the cats in the later films after the earlier cats).
  • Masamune Shirow loves drawing sexy, scantily clad women, but that hardly sets him apart; what does is his obsessive attention to detail regarding near-future/sci-fi weaponry and machines.
  • Studio Gainax has not just one but two tropes named for them. They're also fond of people crossing their arms, which has aptly become known as the "Gainax Pose".
  • Works by Studio TRIGGER prominently feature four-pointed stars: the stars on Goku Uniforms in Kill la Kill, the seven stars of the Shiny Rod in Little Witch Academia, the scars in Kiznaiver, and much, much more.
  • Arina Tanemura really likes insane hair.
  • Akira Toriyama had a thing for vehicles. Give the Dragon Ball manga a look through and count how many of the chapter cover pages not directly related to the storyline feature some kind of detailed vehicle. He outright admitted that the main character of his 1987 one-shot SONCHOH is the car and not the old man who drives it. This is also lampshaded in an omake of his Dr. Slump manga, where Toriyama's editor calls him out for always drawing some sort of vehicle on the covers and asks him if the main character of the manga is a car. Theme Naming is another giveaway, particularly of the edible variety. If one or more characters in a given work are named after garments and/or food, even if the work in question is otherwise not meant to be tongue-in-cheek, there's a very good chance Toriyama had a hand in making it.
  • Naoki Urasawa is a noted Germanophile, which is very noticeable giving the settings of his work: Large parts of Monster (2004), Master Keaton, and Pluto are set in Germany.
  • Shamelessly lampshaded by Ai Yazawa in her manga Neighborhood Story, about an arts high school populated by eccentric teens. "In the Yazawa High School students have an unspoken agreement to dress in the most outrageous way possible. Why? Principal Ai Yazawa just loves outlandish clothes!". Before becoming a mangaka, she wanted to be a fashion designer, and she's a hardcore fan of Vivienne Westwood. She also loves rock and punk music. It becomes glaringly obvious since all of her mangas feature fashion designers, massive amounts of different outfits, designs lifted from Westwood, aspiring musicians and punk rockers.
  • Fumi Yoshinaga's works are very well regarded for their nuanced and fully realized characters. Yet for some reason all of these characters, no matter their profession or past, share the ability to speak for paragraphs about all the little details behind the delicious, mouthwatering dishes that always pop up.
  • Wataru Yoshizumi, the mangaka behind Marmalade Boy, Mint na Bokura, Ultra Maniac, and many others likes her tennis. She tends to have at least one of her characters in each of her series be a member of their school tennis club.
  • Manga illustrated by Yumiko Igarashi will often have characters with frilly hair, Tareme Eyes and sparkles and flowers in the background. Scenery Porn and Costume Porn are a common sight. Plus, if the love interest is a bad boy, he'll be a hunky teen with dark hair and eyes. Look no further than Candyโ™กCandy, Maymeโ™กAngel, Fostine (1978), Timโ™กTimโ™กCircus (1981) and Georgie! for proof.
    Arts 
    Comic Books 
  • Brian Michael Bendis really seems to like his hometown of Cleveland and has set many of his stories there.
  • Nell Brinkley's early serials like "Golden Eyes" and Her Hero "Bill", The Fortunes of Flossie, and The Adventures of Prudence Prim all featured curly-haired blondes with wide eyes and spindly limbs, plenty of Costume Porn and billowing fabric, and love interests with dark, slicked-back hair.
  • The Flash's John Broome seemed to have some sort of fixation with second-floor burglaries. It has been suggested that maybe he was burgled while living on the second floor and developed it because of that.
  • John Byrne likes to use the license plate GNU 556 in various vehicles (including a zeppelin) in different stories. According to him, it's a tribute to a song by British musical comedy duo Flanders and Swann.note A car with this registration features in a "Shaggy Dog" Story that Michael Flanders liked to use to introduce the song "The Gnu" in At The Drop of a Hat. He also likes to draw himself in some stories as he did on Fantastic Four, Star Brand, and She-Hulk (this time, combining with her Medium Awareness and Breaking the Fourth Wall). He is also fond of depicting the Neck Lift, to the point that some comics fans refer to it as "the Byrne Hold".
  • Paul Dini is a gigantic zoology buff, which accounts for a great deal of the animal references he tends to make in his scripts. Examples from Batman: The Animated Series include the inclusion of the extremely obscure cassowary in "Almost Got 'Im", the conversation between two of Ra's al Ghul's mooks about how crocodiles kill their prey in "Out of the Past", and the fact that Dini got Bruce Timm a STUFFED PIRANHA as drawing reference for "Mad Love".
  • Steve Ditko seems to have had an affinity of some kind for characters with brightly-colored skin and ghoulish smiles, such as the Creeper, Madman and his gang, the Green Goblin and the Jackal. (Closely related are his clown-like characters, such as Odd Man๐Ÿ‘ Image
    or Punch and Jewelee๐Ÿ‘ Image
    .)
  • D'Israeli's artwork always includes the word "fishpaste" somewhere, usually as graffiti.
  • Most of Warren Ellis's characters are struggling with and/or defined by their various addictions: cigarettes, coffee, alcohol, reckless behavior, etc. He also loves protagonists who began as idealists, and by the time the story starts, have become embittered and cynical by life.
  • Garth Ennis has a fondness for Irish and British characters, especially working-class ones. He's also a massive World War II buff, so references to WWII tend to drift into his work (when the comic isn't outright about the Second World War).
  • Bill Finger, the unsung early writer of the Batman comics, loved doing stories around giant-sized but functional versions of props like typewriters, cigarette lighters, and similar displays.
  • Neil Gaiman of The Sandman (1989) fame likes mythology, cats, and gothic imagery and/or clothes. And expect stories within stories within stories, and the story will be talking about other stories.
  • Steve Gallacci, the creator of Albedo: Erma Felna EDF, tends to include beautiful girls and lots of technical data about the military, guns, machines, or anything geeky. Gallacci justifies this because he was a member of the USAF and a Vietnam War veteran.
  • The late comic book writer Mark Gruenwald apparently loved his home state Wisconsin. In Captain America, he made the villain Sidewinder a Wisconsinite, while his hero Quasar also hailed from "America's Dairyland". His love for Wisconsin really showed in D.P. 7, as most of the early issues were set there, and many of the characters were from Wisconsin.
  • E.P. Jacobs, creator of Blake and Mortimer, included in every story he wrote characters spending some time underground, be it a subterranean military base, Egyptian tomb, sewers, or an entire civilisation hidden in a complex of gigantic caves.
  • Works written by Geoff Johns frequently involve a character receiving an injury to their hand or arm.
  • Stan Lee and his fondness for alliterative names โ€” Peter Parker, Reed Richards, J. Jonah Jameson, Susan Storm, Bruce Banner... He's explained that alliterative names were just easier to remember since he was writing tons of books and creating new characters all the time. A recurring trope that happened several times in every series Lee wrote were stories about an Identity Impersonator, ranging from iconic stories about slander campaigns by Mysterio and invasions by the Skrulls, as well as some less beloved copycats.
  • Rob Liefeld and his obsession with pouches. This was originally justified, as the characters in question used things like machine guns in combat and needed plenty of ammo (that's what the pouches were for). He has since leaned into this, by creating a singular drawing of a character simply called "The Pouch๐Ÿ‘ Image
    ".
  • William Moulton Marston. One word: Bondage. Joye Hummell, Marston's assistant and eventual ghost writer on many early Wonder Woman comics, said you could tell which stories were hers by the ones that featured less bondage.
  • Mike Mignola has said in interviews that he created Hellboy because he loves drawing weird monsters, big gorillas, and mad-science devices and wanted an excuse to get paid for it. All those elements showed up at one time or another in his earlier work for Marvel and DC.
  • Frank Miller:
    • Frank loves Ancient Greece, particularly the Battle of Thermopylae. References to the battle pop up all over his oeuvre, even outside of the obvious place: the climax of Sin City: The Big Fat Kill features an ambush in a city alleyway that's directly compared to Thermopylae, and The Dark Knight Returns includes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to a porn star called "Hot Gates" (the literal English translation of "Thermopylae"). Not to mention that he's the creator of Elektra, a Greek-American ninja named after a heroine from Greek tragedy. And he put a sleazy photographer named "Agamemnon" in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. And his film adaptation of The Spirit features the Blood of Heracles as a MacGuffin, and an army of cloned thugs with Ancient Greek names.
    • If you give him half a chance, Miller will find an excuse to fit ninja and samurai into a comic book. In addition to being the author of Ronin (1983), he created "The Hand" for Marvel, sent Wolverine to Japan, gave Daredevil and Elektra ninja training, and put a shuriken-throwing female ninja into the middle of urban America in Sin City.
  • Alan Moore:
    • Due to Author Appeal (he's a practicing occultist, and an admitted LSD user), Moore's works are known for their in-depth and unusually accurate depictions of mysticism, and they frequently feature characters experiencing detailed prophetic or revelatory visions, often after imbibing hallucinogens (Abby in Swamp Thing, Eric Finch in V for Vendetta, Adrian Veidt in Watchmen, both Mina and Allan in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Gull in From Hell, etc.).
    • Many of his works feature characters having sex to distract themselves from their fear of imminent death: Laurie and Dan in Watchmen, Mina and Allan in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Marie Kelly and her boyfriend Joe in From Hell, all three main characters in Lost Girls, etc.
    • He's famous for his fascination with the Apocalypse. Many of his stories are about characters attempting to bring about the End of the World, but his stories also frequently explore the idea that "The End of the World" might just be the beginning of a new age (for good or for ill). To name a few notable examples:
      • Watchmen is set in an alternate version of 1980s America where an apocalyptic nuclear war is seemingly on the horizon, the climax involves a (fake) alien invasion that's compared to the End Times, one of the main characters regularly waves around a sign that reads "The End is Nigh!", and it ends with the characters facing an uncertain future after the Cold War comes to an abrupt and unexpected end.
      • V for Vendetta is about a fascist dictatorship that rules Britain in the aftermath of a nuclear war that leaves the rest of civilization in ruins, and the protagonist is an anarchist terrorist who dreams of a new age without laws or governments. It ends with V successfully overthrowing the British government, but leaves it ambiguous whether the next regime will be better or worse than the last.
      • From Hell portrays Jack the Ripper as a mad occultist who views his murders as a magic ritual that will bring about a bold new age in human history. The ending implies that it actually worked, and that his "new age" was actually the 20th century.
      • The later volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen involve an occult sect attempting to bring about "a strange and terrible new aeon" by summoning an entity known as "The Moonchild", who's presented as a composite of various Antichrist-like characters from classic literature and film (and Harry Potter). The series finale ultimately depicts the end of the world, which is presented as a composite of various fictional apocalypses.
      • In Promethea, the titular divine entity is prophesied to bring about the end of the world, but the final issue reveals that this isn't such a bad thing โ€” because the "apocalypse" is purely metaphorical, and it just involves merging the material and immaterial worlds. In the end, Promethea succeeds in fulfilling the prophecy, bringing about a new utopian age.
    • Many of his comic books feature mid-story musical numbers, often with characters breaking into song; many of them are shout-outs to showtunes that he enjoys (he's been noted to be especially fond of "The Pirate Jenny" from The Threepenny Opera).
  • Greg Pak has created or reintroduced at least one Asian-American character in almost everything he's ever written at Marvel. One of the most notable being Amadeus Cho, the The Totally Awesome Hulk.
  • Legendary comic book artist George Pรฉrez:
    • He has a non-sexual fetish of redesigning characters' costumes to be much more detailed than the average artist is willing to draw. It gets sexual because whenever he draws Wanda Maximoff, AKA the Scarlet Witch (whom he has singled out as his favorite character to draw), he draws her in this costume๐Ÿ‘ Image
      โ—Š, which references her Roma heritage. Furthermore, this outfit is designed to indicate that Wanda does not wear panties (the two sections of fabric over her hips are connected by gold loops that rest on bare skin). When asked to provide Word of God information that nobody else could give, Perez stated that Wanda prefers to go commando and dared readers to find an instance in which she is proven to be wearing underwear. He even found other ways to subtly convey this sexual trivia โ€” such as showing her wearing a very long T-shirt to bed. It is worth noting that no other artist draws this costume if they can avoid it, although that is likely because of the prohibitive level of detail rather than the designer's fetish appeal.
    • Perez just has a fetish for costume design in general. His second-favorite Marvel girl to play with is The Wasp because he can design any-and-as-many costumes as he damn well pleases for her with no one batting an eye about it. Hilariously enough, though, even with the dozens of outfits he's given her, none of the rare Stripperiffic costumes she's had were of his design. Not that he couldn't, as evidenced by his New Teen Titans design for Starfire๐Ÿ‘ Image
      โ—Š.
    • This continued into his Wonder Woman run, where he had Diana wear a variety of outfits beyond her famous Leotard of Power, such as an armored hoplite look and a tank-top and shorts look she wore when on Themyscira.
  • Keno Don Rosa:
  • Scott Snyder has a penchant for starting every story with โ€” as comics journalist David Brothers says it โ€” the main character relating "[Aged male mentor figure] used to say [anecdote relevant to the plot]."
  • Doug TenNapel's comics usually have a cat. Even when they aren't main characters or even important to the plot, there's usually at least one scene that prominently features one if not several. Also, big, freaky monsters make appearances often, even when there's no reason for them.
  • Brian K. Vaughan really likes to share obscure trivia about whatever topic is being discussed. It's particularly easy to notice in Ex Machina, where virtually every character is (sometimes inexplicably) knowledgeable about the intricacies of state- and city-level government and the history of New York.
  • Mark Waid loves to take formerly dark or unhappy characters and brighten their outlook (and the tone of their stories). In general, he favors more positive storytelling and will often address this directly in his plotlines. Examples include The Flash and Daredevil both learning to stop worrying and love being superheroes, and Waid's Kingdom Come dealing directly with the conflict between light and dark styles of superheroes. He also wrote Indestructible Hulk, which significantly lightened up the tone of the story from other recent Hulk arcs.
  • Jeremy Whitley (The Unstoppable Wasp, Princeless) is married to a black woman and has two daughters with her. Much of his creative output is a deliberate attempt to create books and stories for his daughters to read; as such, Whitley is virtually guaranteed to introduce at least one dynamic, confident female black character in everything he writes.
    Comic Strips 
  • Bill Amend of FoxTrot really loves his math/computer/geek humor. (He was a physics major.)
  • Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes cites Charles Schulz as one of his main creative influences, and it shows in his art style. A few of the stylistic twists Schulz used in his strip, such as profile shots of characters that show only their eyes and nose but not their mouths, or the use of the word "AUGH" when uttering a cry of surprise or dismay, were adopted by Watterson and later used in Calvin and Hobbes.
    Creators 
  • Aardman Animations' big projects tend to feature an extended sequence of some big, complex piece of machinery being operated or constructed, just to show off what stop-motion is capable of. The rocket-building montage in A Grand Day Out was the first, and Wallace & Gromit have built many more such contraptions since. Chicken Run features two, the Pie Machine and the chickens' "crate."
  • Kaaatie always adds gory, scary or Body Horror scenes into her animation, they always appear at the beginning or at the end of her videos.
  • Nick Cave loves flowers, violence, horror, poetry, and religious debate. He also enjoys portraying the Deep South, although it would be a stretch to say that he loved it.
  • Glenn Danzig enjoys singing about death, Satan, and demons.
  • Scott Fellows' Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide and Supernoobs both have a girl in the main cast who mostly goes by her last name and whose first name is Jennifer; Moze and Shope, respectively.
  • Toby Fox has used various arrangements of his song "Megalovania" for The Halloween Hack, Homestuck, and Undertale.
  • Rick Griffin loves kangaroos. His fursona is a kangaroo, A&H Club features a kangaroo main character, Housepets! features a pair of kangaroos as Those Two Guys, and several of his other works feature them in supporting roles.
  • Mamoru Oshii really likes Basset Hounds. He also has a thing for tanks in the rain.
  • Jhonen Vasquez (Invader Zim and Johnny the Homicidal Maniac) gives frequent homages to Alien, The Fly (both the original and David Cronenberg's version), Scanners, and video games in his comics/TV shows. He's also a fan of giant robots, space in general, horrifying imagery, Body Horror, and certain words, most notably: doom, cheese, piggies, tacos, monkeys, moose, noodles, dooky, nachos, and bunnies. He even stated at ComicCon '07 that he's fascinated with plotlines of people who are "controlled and used" by others (Johnny and the Doughboys, Devi and Sickness) and that he also hates dogs and little kids (sans Squee).
  • As a hypno-fetish creator, Dina M Nealey often features some form of hypnosis or Mind Control in her works, though these elements tend to even creep into works that aren't strictly meant as hypno-fetish content. She also seems to have a fondness for giving her characters a particular weakness to hypnosis or mind control, especially her super-powered characters. Other elements that predominantly feature in her works include snarky dialogue, LGBTQIA+ characters and themes, attractive women (she's admitted that one of her favourite things to draw is "sexy ladies", and female characters outnumber male characters by a significant margin in her works) and The Fair Folk (either appearing directly or being referred or alluded to).
    Fan Works 
    Films โ€” Animation 
  • Wes Anderson:
    • He likes to use intentionally dated objects and technology. Even in stories set 20 Minutes into the Future like Isle of Dogs, the technology may look outdated to the point of Zeerust. This gives his films an air of nostalgia and a sense of timelessness.
    • Many shots will be symmetrically framed, with the main character in the scene standing dead center, often looking directly at the camera.
  • Brad Bird works the number A113 โ€” a reference to a room at CalArts used by animation and graphic design students โ€” into all of his projects: Family Dog, Simpsons episodes, The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille. This has since become a widespread animation in-joke. The Incredibles, Ratatouille and Tomorrowland all have the message that "those with a certain talent should be allowed to pursue it, no matter what."
  • As an homage to Al Hirschfeld, artists working on the "Rhapsody in Blue" segment of Fantasia 2000 (which was inspired by Hirschfeld's drawings) added their names within the backgrounds as Freeze-Frame Bonus. They even throw in a couple of Ninas for good measure.
  • Marcell Jankovics:
    • Metaphoric Metamorphosis, transforming characters, places, symbols and colors in and out of each other. It was an assignment to create such a scene for an airline commercial that made him fall in love with animation. Most of his characters change visually in some way.
    • Symbolism. Everything, even the tiniest background details, compositions, character design elements have to mean something. In Jankovics works, symbolism and thematic allegory always trump narrative and his "characters" are treated more as symbols. He wanted to make viewers think rather than entertain them.
    • Deliberate rejection of Disneyesque art styles to strive for a more "European" feel, with looser forms and exaggerated expressions.
    • Old traditions, folk art, tales based on classical literature and ancient legends and religions.
    • Mature subjects and imagery (mainly nudity, lots of uncensored breasts, genitals, allusions to sex and gore), often incorporating them into his metamorphosis. Expect to see some even if the work is aimed at kids.
    • To a lesser extent, most of his work contained some form of blatant Hungarian nationalism, social satire and conservative ideas.
  • Of Disney's Nine Old Men, Milt Kahl was very well-known for his "head swaggle", where characters would lightly shake or tilt their heads while talking. As lip syncing to this was extremely difficult to do and Kahl was one of the only people capable of it, he would insert it as often as he could๐Ÿ‘ Image
    .
  • Disney great Glen Keane was the lead animator for Ariel, Pocahontas, and Rapunzel. What do these three ladies have in common? Long, extremely mobile hair and bare feet.
  • Hayao Miyazaki:
    • All of his films have at least one scene depicting characters at great heights or on the edges of precipitous drops: most of his films also feature at least one of Those Magnificent Flying Machines. Many of his films feature flight as a prominent theme. There are also pigs, and characters that get so angry their hair levitates.
    • Around half of his stories also tend to have some sort of pacifism or anti-war theme, either directly or indirectly, in them.
    • Many of his works also include monsters made out of black goo.
    Live-Action TV 
    Music 
  • Bathory had the instrumental track, "The Winds of Mayhem", serving as the Every Episode Ending for their early albums. While it went missing for a while, it reappeared in Nordland II โ€” likely intended as a Call-Back, although considering that this was the last Bathory album due to Quorthon's death, it serves as a fitting Bookends track to his career.
  • BEMANI:
    • A large number of L.E.D.'s songs have English titles in "(adjective) (noun)" format with all uppercase letters, such as "BLUE STRAGGLER", "THE BLACK KNIGHT", "STELLAR WIND", and "THE DEEP STRIKER".
    • Ryuโ˜†, when composing under his Seiryuu alias, always makes his songs run at 191 BPM.
  • Leonard Bernstein apparently had a passion for ferocious percussion assaults, as demonstrated in the opening scene of On the Waterfront, the Credo of Mass (which at its climax has the percussionists "ad lib. hitting everything in sight"), and the prologue of A Quiet Place; this may also explain why West Side Story, whose original production got by with just two percussionists, has as many as five drum parts at once in the published full score. Bernstein also liked transferring rhythmic motifs to relatively pitched drums, as in "Prelude, Fugue and Riffs," the prologue of West Side Story, several sections of Mass and the first movement of "Divertimento for Orchestra" (which calls for snare drums in four pitches).
  • David Bowie loved writing and singing about apocalypses, dystopias, and space-themed science fiction. The latter shows up so often in his work that it became the basis for an article in The Onion, "NASA Launches David Bowie Concept Mission๐Ÿ‘ Image
    ".
  • Anton Bruckner had a specific rhythmic pattern๐Ÿ‘ Image
    that he used in many of his works, of two equal-length notes followed by a triplet of that note, and vice versa, i.e. 2 + 3 or 3 + 2. The most prevalent examples are the opening theme of Symphony No. 4 in Eโ™ญ major and Symphony No. 6 in A major, where it is used in the first movement to a much greater extent than anything he composed before.
  • David Byrne, both in his work with Talking Heads and in his solo music, is interested in the effects of mass media on consumers, and in the fluid nature of identity. Characters in his songs will consume a lot of fiction (particularly by watching TV), or they'll be unsure who they really are โ€” or they'll be unsure who they are because they constructed their own personality from all the TV they watched.
  • Late rapper DMX was known for his love for dogs, which makes its way into many of his songs. His fifth album, Grand Champ, took it a bit further and stated that they can't just be any dogs, but pit bulls.
  • John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants appears to enjoy writing about cranial trauma, while John Linnell likes personifying inanimate objects.
  • Downplayed with CG5. While it's not every song, he has written multiple unrelated songs in the key of C Sharp Minor. Examples include "Let Me Through," "Phantom Dancing," "Every Door," and "A Man Has Fallen Into the River in LEGO City." He also did a cover of "Infinite," which is in the same key.
  • During the late 90's, Max Martin often used a piano playing a bass riff at the beginning of a song, that would recur throughout the track (for example, Britney Spears' "...Baby One More Time" and *NSYNC's "It's Gonna Be Me").
  • Olivier Messiaen was a lifelong birdwatcher and traveled around the world to learn bird calls he could incorporate into his compositions.
  • Almost every song recorded by Modern Talking has a chorus sung in two ways: in an unison way, mostly without harmony, but with different octaves, and after that in a more high pitched way, with harmonies.
  • Giorgio Moroder likes giving songs a Slow-Paced Beginning before bringing in the drums and kicking up the tempo 40 seconds to a minute in. He's also fond of Fading into the Next Song.
  • MF DOOM often sampled old Marvel cartoons by incorporating the soundtracks into his beats or adding segments of dialogue at the beginning or end of the track. Naturally, the conversations used this way always involve Doctor Doom.
  • Mozart seemed to really like writing parts for basses and sopranos, as evidenced by many of his most famous characters, such as Figaro, Sarastro, Osmin, Leporello, the Queen of the Night, Constanze, and Zerlina. He also liked Toilet Humour.
  • The South Korean record producer Teddy Park, who handled BLACKPINK's tracks as part of YG Entertainment's in-house team, likes to use brass stabs throughout his songs; this element can also be heard in "How It's Done" (from KPop Demon Hunters), which he also produced.
  • Trent Reznor likes pigs. A lot.
  • With the exception of her first album, every single one of Shiina Ringo's official albums' track listings is symmetrical (excluding bonus tracks). She also frequently deliberately gives her albums meaningful running times; for example, Karuki Samen Kuri no Kana runs for 44 minutes and 44.4 seconds, in conjunction with the album's Four Is Death theme.
  • Voltaire writes many of his songs in the key of D Minor. Examples include "When You're Evil," "BRAINS!," "Goodnight, Demon Slayer," "Don't Go By the River," "Headless Waltz," "Beast of Pirate's Bay," and "Land of the Dead." The last two share similar melodies.
  • Richard Wagner's later music dramas exploit the dissonance and tonal ambiguity of the half-diminished seventh chord๐Ÿ‘ Image
    so much that the chord is known in some circles as the "Wagner seventh" or "Tristan chord."
  • Pink Floyd's Roger Waters:
    • His father, a pacifist, was killed in World War Two in 1944 in Anzio, Italy. This proved to be a pivotal event in Roger's life. As a result, themes of war, politics, miscommunication, isolation, and mortality often occur in his work in Pink Floyd and as a solo artist, especially starting with The Wall.
    • Other common Pink Floyd/Waters themes include madness, the music industry, and the dangers of recreational drugs, all of which played a part in the breakdown of founder Syd Barrett and reoccurred after the band's success in The '70s. The Wall and especially Pros and Cons note A Concept Album about a man going through a mid-life crisis, dreaming about both cheating on his wife by picking up two hitchhikers in Germany, then in another dream that same night having been cheated on by his wife as he moves out in the country with his family, along with many of his works at least before them (if not since) explore relationships and faithfulness, a subject he was familiar with. His marriage to his first wife Judy Trim fell apart by the mid-1970s, particularly as Pink Floyd became more successful, and the relationships and marriages other Pink Floyd members were also falling apart around him.
  • Pharrell Williams opens any track he produces with the first beat repeated four times๐Ÿ‘ Image
    .
  • Zedd frequently uses the sounds of ticking clocks in tracks that he produced, such as Alessia Cara's "Stay", Maren Morris' "The Middle", Shawn Mendes' "Lost in Japan" and Katy Perry's "Never Really Over" and "365".
  • Warren Zevon had a liking for inserting a name into the lyrics to rhyme off of or to keep the beat. One of the more famous is "You better stay away from him/He'll rip your lungs out, Jim" from "Werewolves of London".
    Pinball 
  • Greg Kmiec always includes a solid red post on his playfields. The tradition started in The '70s, when Bally refused to identify their designers for fear of competitors poaching their talent. Kmiec included a single plastic red post (at the time reserved for bingo games) as a way around the edict.
  • Pat Lawlor:
    • His pinball games almost always include some reference to "The Power", either as part of in-game dialogue or as an actual playfield element.
    • He also often has an illustration of a person holding a joystick with a red fire button.
  • Keith Elwin: Goats. Jurassic Park (Stern) shows a goat being used to feed the T. rex (and uses its bleats as the sound effect for inserting coins), Godzilla (Stern) features a picture of a goat in a building being destroyed in one animation, and the newspaper shown after completing Celebration Multiball in Jaws (2024) can claim that March 17th is National Goat Day.note This is not actually true - the date is likely a reference to Elwin's birthday๐Ÿ‘ Image
    being around that time.
    Podcasts 
    Roleplay 
    Tabletop Games 
  • Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons.
    • Mushrooms
      • Gary created a variety of fungoid monsters for the game: ascomoid, basidirond, phycomid, shrieker, ustilagor, violet fungi, Zuggtmoy the demoness lady of fungi, etc.
      • Many of Gary's early Dungeons & Dragons adventures have Magic Mushrooms and Fungus Humongous, including D3 Vault of the Drow, EX1 Dungeonland, S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth and T1-4 The Temple of Elemental Evil. Module D1 Descent into the Depths of the Earth had underground fields of normal mushrooms.
    • Shades of the color purple (violet, amethyst, heliotrope, lavender, lilac, magenta, mauve, plum, puce, etc.)
      • They appear repeatedly in many of Gary's Dungeons & Dragons modules: B2 The Keep on the Borderlands, G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King, D3 Vault of the Drow, EX2 The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror, S1 Tomb of Horrors, T1-4 The Temple of Elemental Evil, WG4 The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun, WG5 Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure and WG6 Isle of the Ape.
      • Dungeons & Dragons monsters he created that are associated with purple: azer (love purple gems), bar-igura demons (can change their color to purple), crysmals (can be deep violet-colored), drow (violet eyes), forester's bane plant (stalks are purple), mind flayer/illithid (mauve skin), ogres (purple eyes), phoenix (plumage, beaks and claws are partially violet), purple worm, retch plants (globes can be violet or lilac), shade (eyes can have a purple iris and pupil), storm giant (could have violet skin and purple eyes), twilight bloom (purple flowers), violet fungi, Wolf-in-sheepโ€™s-clothing plant (eyes can be violet).
    • Gygax made a number of Lovecraftian references in Dungeons & Dragons, as evidenced by such creatures as the Kuo-Toa (inspired by Lovecraft's Deep Ones), the Aboleth (inspired by some sort of Great Old One), the Illithids (which are a race of Cthulhus without the bat wings), the Elder Elemental God (shown in G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King as being shaped like a Chthonian๐Ÿ‘ Image
      ) and certain elements of terror in the temple of the Eldritch Abomination gods. He outright acknowledged H. P. Lovecraft as an important influence on D&D. Gygax needed a lot of content to make the game work, so he drew from a very large number of sources. He didn't quite make D&D into an All Myths Are True setting, but he came pretty close.
    • His fantastically large and baroque vocabulary, which might have had an element of showing off. Such as "quaff", "dweomer", "draught", "chapeau", "billet", etc. He regularly used certain phrases such as "Of course", "Let us say" and "So to speak" as well.
    • Polearms. Gygax included a large number of polearms in the weapon selection of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition rules and wrote an article called "The Nomenclature of Polearms" that appeared in Dragon magazine #22 and the 1st Edition AD&D supplement "Unearthed Arcana". Ever want to know why the glaive-guisarme seems to crop up in D&D so much๐Ÿ‘ Image
      ?
  • Former Wizards of the Coast employee Monte Cook, creator of the game's 3rd Edition and a strong hand in creating 5th Edition too. Monte really, really believed in Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards and went to great lengths to enforce it in all the wrong ways. For years, martial classes were either built on poorly conceived rules (3E Monks), ridiculously generic and boring to play (3E Fighters), or just straight-up sucked (3.5E Samurai). Caster classes, on the other hand, enjoyed highly overpowered spell lists granting them an unprecedented breadth of ability plus new-fangled metamagic feats to back them up; by mid-level, a lone, half-competently played Druid or Cleric was probably equal to three well-played martial Player Characters of the same level. And don't get us started on Wizards, the preferred class of Monte and people who hated losing in 3.5E, utterly dominant at all levels and pillars of play (except being perhaps a tad weak at 1st level).
  • James Jacobs, one of the major contributors to Pathfinder, really likes dinosaurs. In general, the Paizo creative team seems to like dinosaurs; Lovecraftian abominations; horror, pulp adventure, and sci-fi elements; and putting the iconic characters in elaborate outfits.
  • David Pulver, best known as a setting writer for GURPS, has stated that many GURPS players will always want to play a Cat Girl, regardless of the setting. So in every setting he makes, there will be an option for a Cat Girl of some kind.
  • White Wolf, the writers of Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game, made it very obvious they preferred Humans, Elves, and Dwarves over the other races (especially the Trolls and the entirely absent Draenei) in the series. Even in the Horde Player's guide, they'd go on about elves, dwarves, and humans.
    Theatre 
  • William Shakespeare:
    • He loves comparing things to gardening, falconry, and hunting with dogs. He also loves cross-dressing characters, but that was a fairly common schtick at the time. When he was writing, women were not permitted to be actors, and as such all of the female characters ''were'' men, and he thought it would be funny to make jokes based on that.
    • His continual description of rebellion and social breakdown in terms of cannibalism/self-consumption. Although perhaps this belongs in the 'Miscellaneous Paraphilia' section.
    • In many plays he has a designated metaphor that keeps cropping up. For instance, Hamlet is full of references to disease, the one set in Scotland has lots of mentions of birds of prey, and so on.
    • Cain and Abel plots with hate-filled rivalry between brothers, often leading to attempted or actual fratricide.
    • Also, you can bet that there will be lots of snarking, bad puns, and dirty jokes.
  • Tom Stoppard frequently references William Shakespeare. The guy even wrote a play deconstructing Hamlet with two of its bit players as the main characters.
    Web Animation 
  • There's an unclickable "Joy of Painting" toon on Homestar Runner that shows Marzipan dressed as Bob Ross painting a picture of a mountain landscape. Matt and Mike Chapman, creators of Homestar Runner, admitted that they only did this because they thought showing Granola Girl Marzipan with a beard would be funny. A lot of the stuff at Homestar Runner is based on the creators' childhood. Note the frequent appearance of breakfast cereals and Merchandise-Driven Saturday morning cartoons, the sibling rivalry between Strong Bad and his brother Strong Sad, the characters' Vague Age, and in-universe Nightmare Fuel.
  • STBlackST loves filling his videos with Funny Background Events, Sudden Video Game Moments, and JoJo references.
  • Liam Vickers likes giving his characters a wide creepy long smile that spans half of their faces, with their heads designed to reflect that.
    Webcomics 
  • Several works written by Mary Cagle feature the loss of limbs as a dramatic device, either in a character's backstory or as part of a significant plot development, and usually followed by the characters gaining some form of Artificial Limbs. Just for example, main character Steffi of Kiwi Blitz has a prosthetic leg, her recurring nemesis Gear has had most of the left side of her body replaced with cybernetics, and the side character Reed has his right arm cut off during an encounter with Gear, after which he eventually gets a bionic replacement. Meanwhile, in Sleepless Domain, Mingxing lost an arm protecting the infant Kokoro from a monster attack, and now wears a Magitek prosthesis in the present day. Cagle herself at one point commented on the prevalence of "good ol' classic arm damage" in her work:
    "I SWEAR THIS ISN'T JUST A THING I LOVE OR SOMETHING IT JUST MAKES SENSE IN CERTAIN SITUATIONS AAAAAAA"
  • Erika's New Perfume contains certain things that pop up in most of the author's other works, such as Fountain of Youth.
  • Freefall has this in-universe with the sapient AIs, who have a distinct tendency to be as proudly nerdy as the scientists who produced their neural networks.
    Florence: What were you expecting from minds designed by engineers?
  • Andrew Hussie likes including horses, or horselike creatures such as centaurs, in his work, more often than not exaggerated in musculature (they also paid good money for a picture of a flaming stallion facing a football player, and used to do ironic reviews of muscular horse porn). When questioned about this, they responded that "horses are funny.".They also seem to be very fond of hip-hop/rap and the culture surrounding it, perhaps best exemplified with And It Don't Stop๐Ÿ‘ Image
    โ—Š    .
  • Living with Insanity: The writer's projects all have couples in them. According to the blog posts, LWI would include more gaming and comic references, but the artist avoids jokes he doesn't understand.
  • Penny Arcade:
    • It is all about things the authors like, but also seems to feature a lot of terrifying aliens and strange creatures for little reason.
    • Jerry Holkins (Tycho) is a massive Cthulhu nerd. Really, what else can you expect from a mind that writes things like this?๐Ÿ‘ Image
  • Jocelyn Samara's comics are heavily inspired by manga and anime, even adopting an art style akin to '90s manga. She is also quite fond of having a mainly queer cast as the central characters, as seen in Rain and My Impossible Soulmate.
  • Many themes and tropes in We Are The Wyrecats are carried over from the creator's previous webcomic, Ruby Nation, such as Animal Motifs, deconstruction of the superhero genre, Idealism vs. Cynicism, characters with disabilities, and cats.
    Web Original 
  • They're best known for their Goth aesthetic, but Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab also really likes creating perfume inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft (and Lovecraft Lite) and pirates.
  • The stories by SD40kanote No weblink, it's hosted on a NSFW porn-hosting site often enough star a male computer programmer, who marries/is married to a genius woman, and either or both of them recently served America proudly in Iraq thank-you-very-much. The characters are always staunch political conservatives, often actively reshaping the fictional universe into a Republican Paradise. He plugs that his (genius!) characters love the Cato Institute๐Ÿ‘ Image
    and Townhall.com๐Ÿ‘ Image
    , just in passing. There's even the occasional Easy Evangelism of a merely misguided (rather than evil) liberal. And everyone accepts Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, without whom there was a great big hole in their hearts. In fact, it's a lot like the Chick Tracts, only with lots of monogamous sex with big penises.
    Web Videos 
  • Doug Walker really has a thing for broken, insane jerks who'll never get what they want but they'll keep on trying. The Nostalgia Critic is a perfect example of this, and Ask That Guy with the Glasses is getting there (as a more depraved version) with the amount of Sanity Slippage he's been put through. You also notice that much of the comedy he enjoys (ranging from Daffy Duck to Blackadder) is based on this. Doug has repeatedly stated that, in his viewpoint, all good comedy is based on suffering.
    Western Animation 
    Wrestling 
  • Vince Russo loves pole matches. If you see a pole match in a WWE, WCW, or TNA show, Russo's booking this match. The pole matches are also for the craziest things. These include a rat, a bottle of Viagra, Judy Bagwell (they needed to use a forklift), a pinata, and the keys to Mick Foley's office, among other things.
  • Harley Race loved to, when booking his own promotion populated by his students, have one lower card match end in shenanagins when two heels ran roughshod over a face wrestler and a friend making the save. A tag match would be quickly booked between the four for the main event.
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Spielberg's Ominous Spotlights

A recurring trend in Steven Spielberg's filmography is the use of light as foreboding or ominous in some manner.

Alternative Title(s): Creator Insignia, Director Trademark

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A recurring trend in Steven Spielberg's filmography is the use of light as foreboding or ominous in some manner.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (8 votes)

Example of:

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