Hannibal Lecture/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A captured or cornered villain delivers a speech psychologically deconstructing the hero and undermining the hero's confidence, sense of identity and purpose.

  • Straight: Serial Killer Bob, who has been captured by police officer Alice, accuses Alice of being a weak, pathetic inadequate who is Not So Different from Bob and who arrests people to give herself a false sense of purpose and power. Alice is shaken and disconcerted by Bob's insights and understanding of her.
  • Exaggerated: Bob delivers a speech that has resulted in mind raping Alice from being a relatively confident and well-adjusted person to being Driven to Suicide within a minute and a half.
  • Justified: Bob is a psychological mastermind with a deep understanding of human nature who has studied and profiled his target.
  • Inverted:
  • Subverted:
    • Shut UP, Hannibal.
    • Alternatively: Bob delivers his speech. Alice appears to be upset about it, but she was only pretending to be so in order to lull Bob into a false sense of security. Alice laughs at Bob's attempts to undermine her.
    • Alternatively: Bob delivers his speech. Alice bluntly and calmly points out that Bob is completely wrong and doesn't know what he's talking about at all, and moves on.
    • Alternatively: Alice doesn't respond to Bob's attempts to provoke her and keeps on topic.
    • Alternatively: Bob's understanding of human nature and psychological warfare isn't as good as he thinks it is; he's completely wrong about Alice.
    • Alternatively: Alice is Too Dumb to Fool and her only response to Bob's lecture is blank incomprehension.
  • Doubly Subverted: Bob wasn't entirely wrong, however, and some of his observations still cut a nerve; Alice doesn't reveal so to him, but reveals it later.
  • Parodied:
    • Bob's observations are ridiculously trite, feeble and simplistic, bordering on petty insults, but they nevertheless reduce Alice to an emotional cripple.
    • Serial Killer Bob, who has been captured by police officer Alice, accuses Alice of being a weak, pathetic inadequate who is Not So Different from Bob and who arrests people to give herself a false sense of purpose and power. Turns out learnt that Alice REALLY wanted to arrest Bob for fame, to his horror.
  • Deconstructed:
    • Bob's understanding of human nature only goes so far, and is limited by his own sociopathy and Freudian Excuse, which has poisoned and corrupted his view of the world. Not everyone and everything can be so easily compartmentalised into his limited view of the world, and once he comes across something which challenges this understanding his psychological attacks completely fall apart, as does Bob himself.
    • Alternately; Bob's little speech is shown to be practically worthless, regardless of whetever he successfully picks Alice apart psychologically. All that evidence and those expert witnesses won't go away just because he mocked Alice's bad relationship with her mother. Bob is convicted for his crimes and survives three months in a high security prison before a more impulsive inmate shanks him to death.
    • Alternatively: Bob's little speech, whilst insightful, ends up getting him into deeper trouble; he's so confident and smug about his ability to unpick Alice that he doesn't realize that in doing so, he's giving away vital information that can be used to convict him. Alice does realize this, however, and regardless of the pain it causes her allows him to continue in order to let him dig his own grave. Once Alice reveals what Bob has done, Bob realizes that he probably should have kept his mouth shut.
    • Bob is so consumed with self-loathing that he projects his own hate of himself onto others.
    • Alice shuts Bob up before he starts delivering his speech. Depending on the setting he's rendered unconscious or killed on the spot.
    • Alice doesn't pay attention to Bob's speech and takes him down anyway.
  • Reconstructed:
  • Zig Zagged: Both Alice and Bob go back and forth with deconstructing each other, with the result that that it's not clear who is most affected.
  • Averted:
    • Bob doesn't say anything during Alice's interrogation.
    • Bob answers in a way that is not meant to harm Alice psychologically, and does not.
  • Enforced: "We want our villain to be a dark, creepy badass with a deep understanding of human nature, and our cop to be flawed. What better way to show this than have the villain turn the tables on the cop in the interrogation room?"
  • Lampshaded: "Is the part where you tell me what an inadequate I am?"
  • Invoked: "Walk away, Detective. If you continue this line of inquiry, I will take your psyche apart piece by piece until there's nothing left of you."
  • Defied:
    • Shut UP, Hannibal is usually this as well.
    • "This is the part where you expect me to give some kind of Hannibal Lecture, right? Well, no thanks, I just want a lawyer."
  • Discussed: "When did all of these serial killers and psychopaths get psychology degrees?"
  • Conversed: "Oh come on! He's a psychopath -- why are these characters taking him seriously?"

Back to Hannibal Lecture. No, on second thought, stay here. After all, you're here to have other people hold your hand through this entire trope, aren't you?

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