Dogged Nice Guy/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A loser, the guy(though not necessarily always a guy) pursues, with romantic intent, someone uninterested, unreachable, or just plain out of their league.

  • Straight: Bob takes every opportunity to hang out near Alice in hopes that she'll notice he has a crush on him and return his affection.
  • Exaggerated: Bob follows Alice everywhere it would be conceivably possible to follow her, and some that aren't, in hopes of getting her to notice him at all.
  • Justified: Bob has very low self-esteem and hopes to win Alice's affection by sheer perseverance.
  • Inverted:
  • Subverted: Bob follows Alice everywhere, but only later in the story is it revealed to be because he's a Private Detective hired offscreen to keep tabs on her.
  • Double Subverted: Of course, he took the otherwise poorly-paying job mainly because it gave him the opportunity to follow Alice everywhere...
  • Parodied: Bob is just an ordinary guy trying, as most guys would, to introduce himself to Alice, but random coincidence keeps him from doing so every single time.
  • Deconstructed: Alice knows that Bob has a crush on her but she's driven away because his attempts to express it come across as creepy. He refuses to give up, and other areas in his life suffer in his pursuit of something he can't possibly achieve.
    • Alice thinks that Bob is genuinely trying to be a friend to her, but when she finds out he was just doing it to get into a relationship with her, she is absolutely devastated and decides to completely cut him out of her life. She ends up developing trust issues and doubts the motives of all her future friends.
  • Reconstructed: Bob is rejected and avoided by Alice at every turn. He gives up for a time, works on his self-image and confidence, perhaps gets counseling, and returns some time later and apologizes to Alice for his behavior. Depending on the tone of the story, it could go any of a few ways.
  • Zig Zagged: Having fallen for her at first sight, Bob falls all over himself trying to impress her. When this blows up in his face, he backs off, mortified. Alice feels sorry for him and encourages him, and they become friends. However, Bob still holds a torch for her, and waffles between clumsy overtures of affection and trying to stay 'just friends', afraid of completely ruining their relationship by pushing too far.
  • Averted: Bob has a normal approach to relationships and an average failure/success rate.
  • Enforced: "Bob's a loser and desperate for affection. There's only one tried and true way to show this."
  • Lampshaded: "Why hasn't Alice taken out a restraining order against you yet?"
  • Invoked:
    • "I know what will make Alice fall for me! I will act like a guy in the romantic comedies I've been watching!"
    • Or "I'll be really nice to Alice, give her a shoulder to cry on and buy her gifts all the time, because then she'll owe me affection in return."
  • Defied: "No, I'm not gonna be the pathetic guy that spends two seasons pining over some chick that apparently can't notice me."
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: "There goes Bob again..." "You know, that really seems stalkerish. At first, it was just plain cute."
  • Played For Laughs: Bob is an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist whose attempts to woo Alice invariably end in pain, and she is literally unaware of his existence.
  • Played For Drama: The situation is made strange by the fact that Alice's insanely jealous boyfriend, Bruce Bonecrusher thinks Alice feels something for Bob and acts 'accordingly'.

Please! If you just give me a chance and go back to Dogged Nice Guy, you won't be disappointed! I really like you!

Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Dogged_Nice_Guy/Playing_With?oldid=165866"