Dark Action Girl/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Trope: An evil Action Girl.
  • Straight: Alice decides to take her anger out on the heroes or the Action Girl of the group, and subjects them to a Curb Stomp Battle.
  • Exaggerated: Alice is a hybrid between Femme Fatale with Apocalypse Maiden and/or Omnicidal Maniac. She will remind you why she is the villain on a regular basis.
  • Justified:
    • Alice was probably just an Action Girl, but a dark and troubled past probably drove her to the villain's side.
    • Alice is a Blood Knight who happens to be female, and a career with the forces of darkness gives her a steady supply of asses to kick and names to take.
  • Inverted: Alice is on the side of good and useless in a fight.
  • Subverted:
    • Alice seems like the Dark Action Girl for awhile, but the heroes soon find out that she is not as evil as she seems.
    • Or, perhaps she is not as actiony as we were initially led to believe.
    • Or we learn that "she" is a man.
  • Double Subverted:
  • Parodied: Alice is a dark palette-swap of the hero's Action Girl teammate, even down to the attitude.
  • Deconstructed: Alice is such a Manipulative Bitch that she is unable to cooperate with potential teammates or allies, and must fight all her fights alone, probably even attracting the attention of powers stronger than her and rendering her a Damsel in Distress.
  • Reconstructed: Even though she intimidates or drives away those who could possibly help her, she subjects them to a beat-down and intimidates them into becoming her mooks. And anyone who is bigger and badder than her probably came to her for a reason, and she'll take pretty much any job they'll offer as long as she can get her hands nice and dirty while she's doing it.
  • Zig Zagged: Alice flip flops between Femme Fatale, Dark Action Girl, and Damsel in Distress to confuse and manipulate anyone and everyone.
  • Averted:
    • There are no female villains.
    • The female villain isn't a fighter.
  • Enforced: "You know what this show needs? A strong female character. Let's make her a villain, too."
  • Lampshaded:
    • One of the heroes exclaims, "Who said all bad guys had to be male?"
    • "She's not so much a heart-breaker as she is a bone-breaker."
    • "Hi, I'm Alice. I'm here to kill you all just for shits 'n' giggles. Nothing personal, 'k?"
  • Invoked: The Evil Overlord employs a female as one of her subjects to fight her heroes.
  • Defied: A mercenary Action Girl meets the heroes first rather than the villains, and decides that helping the heroes would be more beneficial to her.
  • Discussed:"After destroying all of those villages, I'm assuming she's the bad guy...err...girl."
  • Conversed: "The bad girls are usually the ones that kick the heroes' asses."

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