Assassin Outclassin'/Playing With

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Basic Trope: An assassination attempt is thwarted.

• Straight: Alice tries to assassinate Bob, but Bob defeats her.
• Exaggerated: While barely breaking a sweat, Bob manages to overthrow the attempt in such a way that Alice accidentally kills herself instead.
• Justified: Alice is an unexperienced assassin, and Bob is secretly proficient in martial arts.
• Averted: Although such a situation might have been foreshadowed, no assassination attempts - successful or not - occur at all.
• Inverted: Bob finds out about the attempt, and we see all the measures he puts together to cause it to fail. Alice effortlessly overcomes these obstacles and kills him.
• Subverted:
  • Alice didn't actually want to assassinate Bob.
  • Exactly What I Aimed At; Alice wasn't trying to shoot Bob, but the Falling Chandelier of Doom.
• Double Subverted: Bob goes to help Alice up after she explains her change of heart, and she tries to stab him.
• Parodied: Alice spends the whole movie making more and more elaborate attempts on Bob's life, and due to ridiculous good luck, Contrived Coincidences and sheer obliviousness Bob doesn't even notice a single one of them.
• Zig Zagged: Bob defeats Alice, Alice tries it again and defeats him, and her intention turns out to have been nonlethal. She actually assassinates him a bit later - however, Bob is Not Quite Dead.
• Enforced: An assassination attempt was necessary plot-wise, and the odds are against Bob, but since in this work Nobody Can Die, Alice has to be defeated by him anyway.
• Invoked: Alice's contract on Bob is a Uriah Gambit -- her boss wants her dead.
• Exploited: Alice realises just in time that Bob is winning, and decides "You can kill me, but I'm Taking You with Me."
• Defied: Bob notices Alice, but she tells him: "This isn't just one of these easily-repelled assassination attempts. Die."
• Discussed: "Wait, your target is Bob!? ...IfYouDieICallYourStuff!"
• Conversed: "Who sends a nameless Mook to kill a main character? It's like they haven't even heard of the Sorting Algorithm of Mortality..."
• Played For Laughs: Assassins attacking Bob, and being effortlessly overpowered/HoistByHisOwnPetard/suffering Critical Failures, is a Running Gag; they're collectively the Wile E. Coyote to his Road Runner.

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