Evil Costume Switch/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A hero pulls a Face Heel Turn and gets a new outfit to match.

  • Straight: Maybelle betrays her friends and joins The Empire. She then replaces her old, brightly colored clothes with darker, sexier attire.
  • Exaggerated: Whenever Maybelle forgets to clean her room, refuses to share cookies with her little brother, shoves someone and doesn't apologise - ominous music is heard, and Maybelle's white dress suddently turns into a red and black Stripperiffic outfit, and her golden hair become dark purple with neon green highlights...
  • Downplayed: Maybelle joins The Empire after leaving La Résistance. She keeps most of her old outfit, but a couple pieces are switched out to create a more ominous effect.
  • Justified: Maybelle's new duds are the uniform or dress code of her new faction.
  • Inverted:
    • Good Costume Switch.
    • Maybelle dresses in darker, sexier fashion while she is a hero. Upon her Face Heel Turn, she dresses in brighter and more conservative clothing.
  • Subverted: Maybelle keeps her old outfit after joining the empire.
  • Double Subverted: However, she only retains it long enough to lure Albert into a trap, then tears it off to reveal her new skintight evil threads underneath.
  • Parodied:
    • Upon switching sides, Maybelle is immediately ushered off to meet Emperor Evulz' personal tailor, who bombards her with criticisms and suggestions.
    • Axel gets his clothes ripped in a fight, leading to fashionable asymmetry, and covered in ash, making them black. This leads to him becoming inexplicably evil. Hiro is determined to get him naked to turn him good again.
    • Maybelle gets her clothes ripped up into a stripperiffic black outfit. She then tries to steal some new clothes to wear, but everyone thinks she's turned evil.
    • Every time Maybelle thinks about doing something particularly good or evil, she tears off her clothes to reveal either a good or evil set of clothes under it. This continues until either people start tripping over her discarded clothing or she accidentally runs out of layers.
  • Deconstructed: People eventually figure this out, leading to a bizarrely literal "fashion police" and the gradual erosion of freedom of expression.
  • Reconstructed: In fact, things go so far that the uniform of the Fashion Police becomes the only Evil Costume to which Faces Turned Heels will switch.
  • Zig Zagged: Sometimes, Heel Face Turns cause a costume switch, sometimes, they don't.
  • Averted: Maybelle's style has always been and still is alignment-neutral.
  • Enforced: "We need to make it clear that Maybelle's one of the bad guys now -- Makeover time! And remember, don't skimp on the Fan Service!"
  • Lampshaded: "Hey Maybelle. Long time no see. Are those new clothes?" "They came with the evil."
  • Invoked: Maybelle wants the world to know of her new ideologies and picks out a new outfit to announce it to the world.
  • Defied:
    • "I like the clothes I have, and I'm not changing them now just because I'm evil."
    • Maybelle keeps the old outfit in order to make her former allies hesitant to attack her.
  • Discussed: "Has she started wearing a cleavage-exposing, black leather outfit yet? No? Then she's probably still on our side."
  • Conversed: "What is it about evil that makes all these characters want to suddenly start wearing leather?"
  • Played For Laughs:
    • Maybelle, already shown to be quite shallow and obsessed with her appearance, switches sides because Evil Is Sexy and she's fallen in love with Emperor Evulz' fashion sense.
    • Maybelle becomes a Fashion Victim Villain, much to her former friend's amusement.
  • Played For Drama: The evil costume in itself goes against the principles that they once held. Maybelle who once refused to fight now wears an outfit bearing the heads of her slain foes.

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