Infraction Distraction/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A character uses a minor offense to distract from a greater one.

  • Straight: Hesione puts smuggled books in her desk drawer on folders that contain treasonable letters.
  • Exaggerated: Hesione confesses to jaywalking, and the police don't glance around and see the corpse of the policeman she killed.
  • Downplayed: Hesione oversleeps and then makes a delivery before school, and is late; she tells the teachers only that she overslept, and they do not press the matter.
  • Justified: The police only want to make themselves look good by catching a crook.
  • Inverted: Hesione parades a minor offense in order to convince people she's really a cool bad girl.
  • Subverted: The police take Hesione's smuggled books, and return to search again.
  • Double Subverted: But only for more books; they glance over the letters and do not read them because they are not books.
  • Parodied: Hesione is holding a butcher knife, covered in blood, and openly dragging a bloody corpse. She gets stopped by the police... for jaywalking.
    • Alternatively, she gets caught dumping the body, but the problem is that she was littering.
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted: Hesione tries to cover up her treason by a life of perfect virtue.
  • Enforced: ???
  • Lampshaded: ???
  • Invoked: ???
  • Exploited: ???
  • Defied: ???
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???

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