Hollywood Atheist/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: An atheist in fiction will be a Jerkass and centered on proving religion wrong.

  • Straight: Lilith went to war and saw horrifying things, and decided based on this that God cannot exist, and thus that there is no reason to do right.
  • Exaggerated: Lilith is a practicing Satanist, and she reserves her truly diabolical tortures to devout Christians.
  • Justified: Lilith is a member of a society where Hollywood Atheism is the standard.
    • Lilith is the kind of person who needs proof of something to believe in it.
  • Inverted: Alice went to war and saw horrifying things, and decided based on this that humans are fallen and totally depraved, and need God to save them, and that since humans are intrinsically evil anyway, there is no reason to do good so long as you have faith in God.
    • Lilith is a nun.
  • Subverted: Alice complains that Lilith has only lost her faith because of her tragedy. Lilith pops in and complains that Alice only says that because she's The Fundamentalist.
    • Lilith is an atheist, and maybe mentions it once or twice, but doesn't make a big hairy deal about it.
  • Double Subverted: Until one of her victims begin to pray, causing her to fly into a psychotic rage and kill them.
  • Parodied: Alice loses her faith for the duration of the episode and goes around being over-the-top evil as a result - and promptly gets thwarted, arrested, and generally fails epically at evil to the amusement of the other theists and atheists of the cast.
  • Deconstructed: Other characters routinely assume that Lilith is a Hollywood Atheist, and it's treated as religious prejudice.
  • Reconstructed: Lilith is presented as the smartest person in the cast, and all her arguments are perfectly logical. At the end of the episode, she actually gets a few of her friends to question their faith, if not renounce it, but their friendship doesn't suffer for it.
  • Zig Zagged: Lilith is a villain and disdainful towards religious people, whereas Isolde, though also an atheist and working for Lilith, is more understanding and eventually does a Heel Face Turn (while she keeps her atheism)
  • Averted:
    • Lilith never brings up her faith (or lack thereof)
    • Lilith, while villainous, doesn't appear to be motivated by lack of faith.
    • Lilith is a non-villainous and non-traumatized atheist.
  • Enforced: The show is aimed at religious people and atheists are an Acceptable Target.
  • Lampshaded: "You're just like all those atheists on TV! Stop Being Stereotypical!"
  • Invoked: The writers show how atheism can be taken to extremes, like any other thing.
  • Defied: "Dammit, worship whoever you want!"
  • Discussed: "Lilith doesn't seem to like religion..."
  • Conversed: "Man, Lilith was fucked up! What was her deal?" "The writers had a manic Christian on the loose."

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