Incredibly Obvious Bug/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A "concealed" listening or tracking device that's large and blinking.

  • Straight: Alice plants an Incredibly Obvious Bug on a chair. Despite the green flashing light and periodic beep, Bob does not notice it.
  • Exaggerated: Alice plants an Incredibly Obvious Bug outside of Bob's house. Despite the numerous multicoloured flashing lights, loud chimes, and it being three times as tall and half the width of the house, Bob does not notice it.
  • Justified: "Our technology doesn't let us make small microphones. Luckily, Bob is extremely nearsighted!"
  • Inverted: Alice plants a bug about as small as a needle inside of the hay loft in Bob's barn, and Bob notices it immediately.
    • Alice plants a small and unobtrusive bug on a chair. Bob finds it, muttering, "Does she think I'm blind?"
  • Subverted: Alice plants an Incredibly Obvious Bug on a chair. Bob finds it, muttering, "Does she think I'm blind?"
    • Alice appears to be planting an Obvious Bug on Bob's desk. However the bug turns out to be the recorder Bob alwas uses. Alice just modified it to sent the recording to her base.
  • Double Subverted: But the Incredibly Obvious Bug turns out to be a decoy, while the real equally Incredibly Obvious Bug was planted on a nearby coffee table. Bob fails to notice that one.
    • The audience sees the bug before Alice tampered with it, and it's obvious she tampered it.
  • Parodied: Alice plants a listening device in the form of a giant beetle figurine on the desk of Bob. After a few weeks of it going unnoticed, a mook goes around the room with a broom sweeping everything. When he finally gets to the scarab he gasps, grabs it and shouts to Bob! "I found a bug!"
    • A sign in front of the bug saying "THIS IS A BUG" in big bold print.
  • Deconstructed: In a hostage crisis Bob ends up shooting all the hostages in a fit of paranoia when he finds the attached bug on the bus.
  • Reconstructed: The bugs work like they're supposed to despite their appearance however due to the cloaking device attached to them.
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted: Alice plants a small and unobtrusive bug on a chair, and Bob never notices it because the desk toy disguise is so successful.
  • Enforced: The writers originally planned to use a small black magnetic disk as a prop but it got changed because the executives thought viewers would be confused.
  • Lampshaded: Alice cackles, "Isn't it funny just how easy it is to plant bugs without the heroes noticing them?"
  • Invoked: The bugs in the virtual reality game were designed that way to make them recognizable to the player.
  • Defied: Charlie tries to get Alice fired by framing him for planting a bug without a warrant. Charlie gets arrested when it's proven that the bugs they use don't even remotely look like that. Alice points out how absurd this trope is.
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???

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