Due to the Dead/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Respect for death is a sign of morality

  • Straight: The hero shows proper respect for the dead, and the villain doesn't.
  • Exaggerated: Tombs, funerals, commerations, etc. all are more important than any other duty to the hero, but the villain eats the dead.
  • Justified: Failure lacerates the feelings of the living, and sometimes brings back the dead as ghosts.
  • Inverted: The villain parades his mourning and arranges lavish funerals for his victims, where the hero leaves behinid corpses to care for the living.
  • Subverted:
    • The Anti-Villain was driven by necessity to the deaths, and is deeply grieved, where the Knight Templar hero doesn't notice how he hurts the living.
    • Jack grieves so much over Jill than he doesn't even notice Janet.
  • Double Subverted: Janet doesn't have any claim on Jack's attention; she's just blaming Jill because she wants to blame someone.
  • Parodied: Mourning is a big business, pursued with no interest in the dead.
  • Deconstructed: Mourning is a way for Hypocrites to parade their concern about people they never cared about, living, and empty forms.
  • Reconstructed: Characters may truly be concerned for those where it did not show publicly -- perhaps they were alienated from the dead character and are doubly grieved that they can never make up in this life -- and the forms of mourning give structure to people suffering from such emotions they can not think of what to do.
  • Zig Zagged: Jack grieves so excessively that he neglects the living, Jill ignores the dead, James practices strange customs that no one can recognize, Jeff sticks stolidly to the local custom and doesn't recognize anyone else's.
  • Averted: No one dies in the story, so no one notices what people do.
  • Enforced: "We can't let Bob just ignore the dead girl's body or he'll come across as a callous monster and lose the audience's sympathy."
  • Lampshaded: "Yes. Yes, I'm buying flowers, and yes I'm driving to the cemetary to put them on Mom's grave. Good guys do that."
  • Invoked: "We have to bury them, what sort of people do you think we are?"
  • Defied: "I'm going to save the Damsel in Distress even if the bodies get eaten by wild animals!"
  • Discussed: "I can't believe he goes out there every week. He's so devoted."
  • Conversed: "Okay.. yep.. cemetary. Lots of people. There's one kneeling down gently brushing the dirt off a tombstone.. that must be our good guy."

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