Dudley Do-Right Stops to Help: Difference between revisions

{{examples}}

* Kenzo Tenma from ''[[Monster (manga)|Monster]]'' will never let an injury go ignored. '''Ever.''' At one point, an unscrupulous character wanted to recruit him as an underground physician, but really, that's a good part of what he was doing already. {{spoiler|It actually turned out very poorly... because he convinced the patient to turn himself in and didn't even charge him}}.

* In ''[[Muhyo and Roji's Bureau of Supernatural Investigation]]'', Roji fails a test that would {{spoiler|allow him to officially advance to First Clerk and stay as Muhyo's assistant}}, when he takes too long to help carry out an injured fellow student.

== Comic Books ==

* Jubilee of the ''[[X-Men (Comic Book)|X-Men]]'' broke off her escape from Operation: Zero Tolerance to [[Save the Villain|give first aid to a villain]] she had [[Power Incontinence|accidentally injured]]. This lead directly to her being recaptured for another round of torture.

* In [[Dragon Age: The Crown of Thorns]], it is played perfectly straight by the dwarven noble protagonist, of all people. You'd think that a politician that spawns one [[Xanatos Gambit]] after another and who has the whole world on his shoulders would be a bit less eager to go into potentially deadly situations with just his dog as help. Turns out that he {{spoiler|doesn't think too hard on whether or not to totally go out of his way in the opposite direction (about ''a day's journey'' too) and check on Honnleath and if anyone was still alive there, even though he'd finally seen the first human after roaming the Korcari Wilds for weeks, during which time he almost got killed several times, nearly dyed of starvation and refused a deal with Flemeth that she would not outline until agreed upon. And his armor was so rusted and worn that it didn't even survive the trip to the golem village, although, true enough, the demon shattered most of it.}} Raonar does reason that it's important to assess whether the horde really reached so far west in such a short time or if it's just a group of stragglers. One would think this is just him looking for justification, but that wouldn't fit with his [[Brutal Honesty]] [[Honesty Is the Best Policy|policy]] that he uses on everyone, including himself, meaning that he manages to play this trope ''and'' avert [[Honor Before Reason]] altogether (after all, he had gained some nifty magical abilities to tip the scales).

== Film -- Live Action ==

* In the third movie, ''[[RoboCop]]'' veered off pursuing some insurgents to come to aid of a squad of cops locked in a firefight with a gang of thugs.

* In ''[[The Gumball Rally]]'', the car disguised as a police cruiser loses the race when it stops to help a pregnant lady giving birth while stuck on an L.A. freeway.

== Literature ==

** Subverted in ''[[Discworld/Lords and Ladies|Lords and Ladies]]''. While competing in a [[Staring Contest]] for recognition as a true witch, Granny Weatherwax stops to help a little boy who hurt himself on the protection wards. However, despite technically losing, the audience declares her a winner [[Crowning Moment of Heartwarming|because a only true witch would sacrifice her pride to help an injured child]].

* [[Harry Potter]], the boy with the "saving people thing", is of course prone to this.

* The [[O. Henry]] story "A Retrieved Reformation" is all about this trope; a safecracker escapes from jail, adopts an alias, heads west, and gets a job as a banker, and gets engaged to the bank manager's daughter. Just as the police show up in town, looking for someone like him, a young child gets locked in the safe. He quickly starts work cracking the safe open, knowing it'll give him away to the cops. At the end of the stories, the cops know damn well that he's the safecracker they're looking for, but pretend to not recognize him because he's obviously reformed.

* In ''[[Firefly]]'', Simon Tam, while breaking into an Alliance hospital to steal medicine, [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|stopped to save a man's life from his doctor's incompetence]].

** Boy, was he mad about it, too!

* [[Merlin (TV series)|Merlin]] lives in a world where magic is a crime punishable by death, but he is continually using it to save Arthur's life in pretty much episode, as well as save Camelot almost single-handedly more than once. By some miracle he's managed to keep it hidden thus far.

* While the [[Farscape]] team does try to lay low most (well, some) of the time, they do have a tendency to take detours whenever a distress beacon is sent out or they see someone being mistreated. More often than not, said interference tends to bite them in the ass...hard.

* In an Irish fairy tale, a girl finds a stolen bag of gold that rightfully belongs to her family and runs off with it, and the witch who stole it naturally gives chase. The girl stops to help several animals and a mill, and they in turn gratefully slow down the witch for her.

== Theatre ==

* Jean Valjean from ''[[Les Misérables]]'', of course. More often than not, his Moments involved throwing himself directly in [[Inspector Javert]]'s path, rather than merely risking the same.

* ''Fahrenheit'', AKA ''[[Fahrenheit (2005 video game)]]'': You're on the run from the police, accused of a murder that you... well, you totally committed it, but you were being controlled by a thousand-year-old Mayan Voodoo priest, see? Though for some strange reason, the cops don't wanna hear about it. On the bright side, having been briefly possessed has unlocked hidden superpowers and limited precognition in you. While secretly meeting your brother in a park in the middle of the winter, you get a warning flash of danger - not to yourself, but to a kid playing on a frozen lake nearby. The ice is gonna break, and he'll either drown or die from hypothermia! With your superhuman speed and powers, you can save him... but a pair of beat cops are patrolling the park, one of them having seen you leave the crime scene - if you make a hero of yourself, he's bound to notice! Dilemma! You can actually choose not to act but it was apparently the worst thing you could possibly do for your [[Sanity Meter]]. Fortunately, after you pull the kid out of the ice, the cop rushing to the scene, despite recognizing you, decides to pretend not to notice, figuring that arresting a guy who's just saved a kid's life would be really impolite.

** Not just impolite. If you save the kid, this is referenced later when the cop admits to Carla that he could have made an arrest, but couldn't bring himself to do it right after witnessing such a selfless act. Carla says she probably would have felt the same way in the other cop's shoes.

* Even in games where these are optional [[Sidequest]]s, [[100% Completion]] compulsion and [[Munchkin]] motivation guarantees it'll be done, and no amount of [[Continue Your Mission, Dammit!]] will stop it. More [[Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism|cynical-leaning]] games don't even bother to provide rewards, but very few put this to the test by tempting the player with a more rewarding evil option.

* In ''[[Quest for Glory III]]'', your character (if you're a [[Fighter Thief Magic User|Fighter]] or [[The Paladin]]) has to become a member of the local tribe in order to advance the plot. However, your friend Yesufu is also participating in the [[Initiation Ceremony]], and there's only room for one. At a pre-scripted point in the race, Yesufu is hurt and the proper response is to help him; if you do, the chief [[Screw the Rules, I Make Them|bends the rules]] and lets both of you pass, but if you don't you just get [[What the Hell, Hero?|chewed out]] and a [[Nonstandard Game Over]].

== Western Animation ==

* Happened from time to time in ''[[The Incredible Hulk (TV series)|The Incredible Hulk]]'' TV show (which was loosely based on ''[[The Fugitive (TV series)|The Fugitive]]'' which was in turn based partially on ''Les Miserables'').

* In the [[Saturday Morning Cartoon]] version of ''[[Mother Goose and Grimm]]'', the title character of the show-within-a-show ''Karl the Wonder Poodle'' is temporarily diverted from saving the person who made the original call for help (a kid who fell in the river and is floating toward a waterfall) by the need to deal with a dozen or so other events in need of a superhero.

* A good deal of the episodes of ''[[Samurai Jack]]'' involve Jack finding a way to [[Fish Out of Temporal Water|travel back to his own time]], but passing it up to help a bystander.

* All the time in ''[[The Zeta Project]]''. Zeta does this so constantly that it rubs off on Ro, because no one in her life had ever displayed this kind of behavior before.

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