No-Tell Motel/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: It's the sleazy motel that rents rooms by the hour. The clerk doesn't ask what for, and doesn't want to know. The scene of various criminal activity, or at the very least, affairs.

  • Played Straight: Bob goes to the No-Tell Motel to cheat on his wife and do drugs, or Alice visits the No-Tell Motel to investigate a crime that took place there.
  • Exaggerated: The No-Tell Motel has, among other things, a recreational drug vending machine, a directory of sex workers, and even more outrageous things, is styled to look as over the top as possible, and yes, advertises via matchbooks.
  • Inverted: The No-Tell Motel is actually the most crime-free, safe place to stay in town - all of the really dangerous criminals stay and conduct their business in far better places.
  • Justified: A story set in the 1930s-1980s, where such motels were far more commonly used and when they were found in such ways.
    • In more modern stories: The criminals / dealers / prostitutes / cheating couple are too poor to afford something better and more wholesome-looking.
    • In more modern stories: The people involved see getting involved at such places as a Fetish, or a Shout-Out to the nostalgia of the past.
  • Subverted: The couple or the criminals are using places that are of higher quality and taste.
  • Double Subverted: Because the places that are of higher quality and taste are known for this, they become in their own way the Spiritual Successor of the old No-Tell Motel.
  • Deconstructed: The No-Tell Motel gets closed down for being that, or is a Red Herring.
  • Reconstructed: Something bad or criminal did happen at the No-Tell Motel, for the justified reasons above.
  • Lampshaded: "The last time we stopped at a motel we hadn't seen before, it was one of those creepy places. Keep driving."
  • Parodied: As exaggerated above, but entirely Played for Laughs as below.
    • A perfectly sane, upstanding establishment markets itself as the No-Tell Motel simply to get hipsters thinking they're being retro and oh-so-transgressive to stay there.
  • Averted:
  • Enforced:
  • Invoked:
  • Defied:
  • Discussed:
  • Conversed:
  • Played For Laughs:
  • Played For Drama:
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/No-Tell_Motel/Playing_With?oldid=942326"