Rule of Perception/Sandbox

Gems are naturally shiny and pre-cut so that the audience can recognize them. Characters who are more competent will also look older/more mature. You can't see air; therefore, it does not exist. The characters already know this exposition, but the viewers don't, so it has to be stated onscreen. It's easy to tell when a blade is sharp because it makes a "sharp noise." Computers beep so that you can tell they're doing something. Anything that's offscreen is invisible. There's only so many weird tentacles and extra eyes and such to a character design before they all blend together. At that point, if you want to make a clearly visible transformation, you have to remove all those weird features and go back to a humanoid design. Stationary images have to do something to represent motion. Bullets spark when they ricochet to make it obvious where they hit. You can tell this guy is using a special attack because he's shouting the attack's name while he's using it. Cheese is always immediately recognizable by a distinctive shape and color. Chainsaws are flashy and make a lot of noise, so they must be really powerful. If you can't be seen, you can't be hit. Fire and lava are only dangerous if you touch them directly. If a character has a seizure, the writers will make it the most visible kind of seizure. You can tell a character is terrified by their exaggerated cowering. The audience probably doesn't know about foreign cultural norms, so the characters will be clueless as well. If you don't touch the visible part of a tornado, the most it can do is whip your hair around a little. A clear, auditory representation of a character's shock. Non-visual senses like smell and pain have to have some form of visual representation. Fancy clothing is an easy way for us to tell which characters are royalty. Bullets leave visible trails in the air to make it easy to tell which way they went. Everything has a progress bar, even if it logically shouldn't, so the viewers know how close it is to being done. Computers use flashy, unnecessary graphics. You can tell a video game character just got damaged because they briefly flashed a different color. When you're tracking someone, their trail will glow brightly so the audience can see it too. Lasers behave in unusual ways that make them more visible. There will always be an obvious cue so we know the exact moment when a character dies. Ninjas are stealthy, but they can't be so stealthy that the audience doesn't know they're there. As long as you don't touch the rocket, you'll be okay. It's dark, but not so dark that we can't see what's happening. Holograms have little flickers and static effects and such so that it's obvious they're not real. Physical blows make loud noises so the audience knows when someone gets hit. A type of security system that is conveniently easy to see. Snipers use laser sights so that the audience can tell where they're aiming. If it's not visually obvious that your superpowers are protecting you, you'd better state it explicitly in dialogue. The audience can't feel the character's pain, so the character won't be incapacitated by what should be serious injuries. When a character is bobbing up and down, you know they're floating in the air and not just misaligned with the background. When a character shapeshifts, there are visual cues that make it easy to tell they're the same person. If the writers want the audience to know the bad guy's motives, he has to actually explain them at some point. For the benefit of the audience, having characters narrate events that should be extremely obvious to them. How else will you know that it's foreign? The camera doesn't have peripheral vision, so neither do the characters. As long as you don't splat into the ground, you'll be okay. Offscreen characters are in a sort of limbo that allows them to reappear wherever they like when they come back onscreen. As long as you can escape the visible blast, you won't be hurt by the invisible shockwaves that would tear you to bits in real life. Power is represented with a highly-visible glowing effect. A strictly-mental injury is represented with the more-visible effect of a nosebleed. Parachutes are small enough to fit on the screen. You can tell the voice is coming from the radio because it's slightly distorted. We can't hear the other end of his telephone conversation, but that's okay because he'll repeat it back for us. If it isn't visible, it isn't audible either. Why shouldn't water be soft? It looks pretty soft! A visible disruption effect in the air, usually with appropriate sound effects, accompanies a force field. A character reads something out loud for the benefit of the audience, even though there's nobody else around to hear. There is sound in space because the viewers want to be able to hear what's going on. An index of visual shorthands that help the audience understand what's going on. Poison is brightly-colored so it's easy to tell that it's poisonous. For obvious reasons, you can't just display a character's genitalia, so you've got to find some way to make it clear who's a boy and who's a girl. As long as a character is offscreen, it's assumed that they continue doing whatever it was we last saw them doing. Actors exaggerate pain for the benefit of the audience. When a character is traveling through a pipe, the pipe will bulge to show their location. Computer interfaces are designed for the viewers watching them on TV, not the characters who are actually using them. The audience needs to be able to see what an invisible character is doing. We can't see the actual text of the letter, so instead we hear a voiceover of the person who wrote it. If characters swap bodies, their new body will talk in their old voice so that you can tell it's the same character. A character just entering the set has somehow heard what the characters already there were talking about before they walked in--the audience knows, after all, so the characters should too. There's no point in having it rain so lightly that the audience can't even tell it's raining, so if it's gonna rain, it rains a lot. When something is tunneling underground, you can tell where it is because it will displace dirt or break floorboards on the surface. You can tell he's being electrocuted because his skeleton is showing through his skin.
 * All-Natural Gem Polish
 * Age Is Relative
 * The Air Not There
 * As You Know
 * Audible Sharpness
 * Beeping Computers
 * Behind the Black
 * Bishonen Line
 * Briffits and Squeans
 * Bullet Sparks
 * Calling Your Attacks
 * Cartoon Cheese
 * Chainsaw Good
 * Concealment Equals Cover
 * Convection, Schmonvection
 * Convulsive Seizures
 * Cower Power
 * Culture Blind
 * Do Not Touch the Funnel Cloud
 * Dramatic Stutter
 * Editorial Synaesthesia
 * Ermine Cape Effect
 * Every Bullet Is a Tracer
 * Exact Progress Bar
 * Extreme Graphical Representation
 * Flash of Pain
 * Fluorescent Footprints
 * Frickin' Laser Beams
 * He's Dead, Jim
 * Highly-Visible Ninja
 * High-Speed Missile Dodge
 * Hollywood Darkness
 * Hologram Projection Imperfection
 * Kung Foley
 * Laser Hallway
 * Laser Sight
 * Luckily, My Powers Will Protect Me
 * Made of Iron
 * Mid-Air Bobbing
 * Morphic Resonance
 * Motive Rant
 * Narrating the Obvious
 * National Stereotypes
 * No Peripheral Vision
 * Not the Fall That Kills You
 * Offscreen Teleportation
 * Outrun the Fireball
 * Power Glows
 * Psychic Nosebleed
 * Puny Parachute
 * Radio Voice
 * Repeating So the Audience Can Hear
 * See No Evil Hear No Evil
 * Soft Water
 * Some Kind of Force Field
 * Sounding It Out
 * Space Is Noisy
 * Stock Visual Metaphors
 * Technicolor Toxin
 * Tertiary Sexual Characteristics
 * Tethercat Principle
 * Theatrics of Pain
 * Traveling Pipe Bulge
 * Viewer-Friendly Interface
 * Visible Invisibility
 * Voiceover Letter
 * Voices Are Mental
 * Walk in Chime In
 * When It Rains, It Pours
 * Worm Sign
 * X-Ray Sparks

Other (what tropes are these?):

 * Mutilated corpses are never noticed until the audience sees them, as smell is a very difficult thing to portray.
 * When characters do use their sense of smell they have to sniff loudly twice.
 * The sound of flies buzzing also indicates a bad smell, particularly an organic one (e.g. rotting meat).
 * School/playground bullies usually wear black shirts with Punisher skulls and are commonly (though not always) obese. Similarly, street punks are known to wear piercings, mohawks, and other punk insignia.
 * Likewise, mooks performing surveillence on the heroes will always dress ominously, use obvious "lurking" body postures, and/or pause periodically to report their observations into miniature microphones, rather than blend into the crowd as any genuine spy ought to.
 * Soap bubbles make sound when popped.