Honor Before Reason/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A character does incredibly unwise things and plays it off by stating that they're adhering to a code of honor.

  • Straight: Alice has the chance to ambush and kill Emperor Evulz for good, but decides against it because she finds sneak attacks dishonorable.
  • Exaggerated: Alice has a ridiculously specific code of honor, to the point where she's almost ineffective as a hero.
  • Justified: Alice doesn't like being dishonorable - she'd rather get killed.
    • Alice considers Honor as rational a goal as anything else. To her honor is reason.
  • Inverted: Alice is a Combat Pragmatist, willing to fight as dirty as possible to win.
  • Subverted: Alice weighs the loss of honor from ambushing the Emperor versus the loss of life that Evulz has caused, and decides to ambush him.
  • Double Subverted: However, she gives up on the plan halfway through because it just feels wrong.
  • Parodied: Alice refuses to use American Customary Measurements, even when it would make her more easily understood, because she knows metric is simply better.
  • Deconstructed: Emperor Evulz repeatedly invokes Alice's code of honor, to the point where she's not able to fight back and he successfully kills her.
  • Reconstructed: Alice's code of honor is the source of her power.
  • Zig Zagged: Alice tries her best to adhere to a code of honor, but it's a semi-flexible one.
  • Averted: Alice has no stated code of honor.
  • Enforced: "Emperor Evulz is popular, so we can't just have him be losing all the time! Wait, I've got it..."
  • Lampshaded: "I'm not going to attack an enemy from behind. I just won't! It's not fair!"
  • Invoked: Alice's predecessor was a Blood Knight of the highest caliber. To avoid being like him, she decides to create a code of honor.
  • Defied: "I know it's dishonorable to sneak up on him and kill him. But I don't care. This is for the good of the world."
  • Discussed: "Emperor Evulz! Turn around, I want you to see this one coming!"
  • Conversed:

"Alice had a clear shot at the Emperor, just one pull of the trigger and they'd be scraping his brains off the carpet, but she wouldn't shoot him."
"Why not?"
"Because she only saw the back of his head, and Alice never attacks a guy when he has his back turned to her."

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