Cool Motive, Still A Crime/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A villain's backstory is brushed off because of their crimes.

  • Straight: A hero dismisses the villain's sob story.
  • Exaggerated: "Sure your mother may have tried to drown you when you were a child and beat you black and blue, but it does not excuse you for sending her to a nursing home."
  • Downplayed: The hero is sympathetic to the villain but is nevertheless determined to stop them.
  • Justified: The villain has crossed the Moral Event Horizon so many times, their backstory doesn't even come close to to making them sympathetic.
  • Inverted: The hero takes pity on the villain knowing what they went through and tries to get them help.
  • Subverted: It seems the villain's sob story will earn them pity and the hero releases them.
  • Double Subverted: Until they cross a line they can never come back from.
  • Parodied: "So what if you were under Demonic Possession and had no control over your actions, you still committed the crime.
  • Zig Zagged: The hero goes from dismissing the villain's backstory to wanting to pity the villain only for the villain to keep committing worse crimes.
  • Averted: The villain doesn't have a sad backstory at all and is only evil for fun.
  • Enforced: One of the people working on the show worked on law enforcement and heard all the sob stories.
  • Lampshaded: "Good on you for not getting sentimental over that sob story."
  • Invoked: "We went through what you did and we didn't turn to crime."
  • Exploited: "The villain's actions are indeed justified, but he's still a criminal so let's use this trope against them."
  • Defied: "No wonder why you turned to crime?"
  • Discussed: "I wish I knew why he turned to crime but at the end of the day, it doesn't excuse his massacre."
  • Conversed: "Oh boy, the sob story, big deal.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Cool_Motive,_Still_A_Crime/Playing_With?oldid=2031825"