Middle Child Syndrome/Playing With

Basic Trope: The Middle Child is favoured the least.

• Straight: Alice and Bob have three children from the oldest: Charlie, Daniel and Ethan. Daniel is neglected the most.
• Exaggerated: Alice and Bob have seven children from the oldest: Charlie, Daniel, Ethan, Flower, Gerald, Harry and Igor. Flower is neglected the most.
• Downplayed: Alice and Bob have three children from the oldest: Charlie, Daniel and Ethan. They treat them with love and care; just that Charlie and Ether gets more attention than Daniel.
• Justified: For Charlie, as the oldest, he will be taking on Bob's legacy. For Ethan, as the youngest, he gets to be pampered like the baby. For Daniel, well, he is neither, so natually, he is neglected the most
• Inverted: Daniel is pampered and supported the most compared to his other brothers.
• Subverted: Daniel complained about this and the coucellor confronted his parent about this. They claimed otherwise
• Double Subverted: ...because the 'know' they only have two children, leaving Daniel out.
• Parodied: Alice and Bob have LOTS of Children. One of them complaints of being the most neglected. He is the one right in the middle of the birth order.
• Zig Zagged: ???
• Averted: All three children are treated equally.
  • Or all of them are equally neglected
• Enforced: ???
• Lampshaded: ???
• Invoked: ???
• Exploited: Daniel got to do a lot of things behind Alice and Bob's back, knowing they wouldn't care about what he is doing anyway.
• Defied: Alice and Bob both made sure to treat all of their children equally.
• Discussed: ???
• Conversed: ???

---

Back to [Trope]

Sigh. The line above has been ignored in favour of all the entries above.