Ambition Is Evil/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Trying to improve your lot in life is something only bad guys do.

  • Straight: Eva, one of Bob's friends, is very ambitious and is treated like a bad guy for it.
  • Exaggerated: Everyone who shows any ambition whatsoever is automatically an Unfettered Social Darwinist Complete Monster.
  • Justified: It's a Crapsack World where in order to get ahead in life, one needs some measure of vision, desire, assertion, ruthlessness and will to power. Eva is just taking it too far.
  • Inverted:
    • The highly ambitious Eva is the star, lauded for her willingness to work hard and pursue her dreams, while the lazy and laidback Bob is derided for his refusal to do anything approaching work.
    • Self-Made Man
  • Subverted:
    • Characters dislike a company and assume that its CEO, Eva, must be evil. But when they meet her, she is a sweet person with a strict ethical code she lives by.
    • Seeking any sort of advancement is bashed as evil by the The Empire as they don't want their oppressed people to get uppity and want them complacent. The heroes are thus shunned by Les Collaborateurs for making something of themselves.
  • Double Subverted:
  • Parodied: Eva harbours "wild" dreams of getting a slightly larger office or a more comfortable chair or some other minor thing and goes to ridiculously bizarre and evil lengths to achieve this ambition. The frequent Humiliation Congas she gets from this would seem excessive if she wasn't an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist. Her failure to expand her office (complete with actually getting her office shrunk one time) becomes a Running Gag.
  • Deconstructed:
    • Because only evil people are allowed to be ambitious, only evil people can obtain positions of power, resulting in a Dystopia that gets worse and worse with every new generation, as nobody with any morals can make something of themselves.
    • Additionally, because only evil people are allowed to be ambitious, There Are No Good Executives, resulting in bad products, supernormal prices, and general impoverishment.
    • Since only evil people are ambitious, anyone displaying ambition is shot at first sight. Because of this, society remains in a decaying stone age with no developments in technology or culture.
  • Reconstructed:
    • Since advancing in society involves compromising your standards, those who don't give up their standards for the sake of ambition consider themselves morally superior.
    • This provides ample opportunity for The Fettered who tempers his ambition with iron morals to become an important political personage and pass safety laws to force the aforementioned executives to test their protects.
  • Zig Zagged: Eva starts out as being ambitious, and this is presented as evil as it corrupts her, causing her to do evil things to try to get ahead. However, after getting a few promotions this way, she reforms, using only honest means to advance her career from there on. However, she finds that Being Good Sucks and is stuck in middle management, and finds her previous deeds are coming back to haunt her. She cracks under the pressure and goes back to evil scheming again.
  • Averted: Eva is ambitious, and no one thinks thats bad per se
  • Enforced: "We have to make the ambitious co-worker evil, otherwise viewers will be reminded of their own laziness and switch channel because they don't like being reminded that harder workers are doing better than them."
  • Lampshaded: "You know, it would be nice if we could get an ambitious, talented young go-getter who isn't completely evil or insane for once. Why don't we ever get someone like that?"
  • Invoked: The boss of Eva and Bobs workplace has deliberately set things up so that only the most ruthless people will get to the top. Its all part of the system.
  • Defied: Eva is really determined to get a promotion, but refuses to compromise her morals to get it.
  • Discussed: "Keep an eye on that Eva girl. Anyone that eager to get to the top of the pile will do anything to get what they want."
  • Conversed: "Jeez Alice, from watching the shows you're into you'd think that wanting to get a promotion is a fair indication that you also want to eat newborn children."
  • Played For Laughs: Protest groups burn self-help books.
  • Played For Drama: As Eva works her way up the ranks, she becomes increasingly ruthless and callous in her treatment of others until she alienates everyone she cared about. She comes to realize that power and position is not everything, and tries to make things right.

Take your sinister dreams back to Ambition Is Evil!

Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Ambition_Is_Evil/Playing_With?oldid=494778"