Moral Dissonance/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Hero acts of a manner that contradicts their code and no one comments on it.

  • Straight: The Hero brutally kills a an innocent person even though he said he is against it and no one calls him out on it
  • Exaggerated: The Hero regularly murders entire planets despite his code against killing people. No one around him seems to take any notice of this.
  • Justified: The Hero kills an innocent person among enemies out of bloodlust, and the other characters don't mention it because they've experienced similar mistakes.
  • Inverted: The Fettered.
  • Subverted: Although he gets away for it at first, the rest of his friends eventually start acting more and more uncomfortable around The Hero.
  • Double Subverted: But it turns out it's because he hasn't bathed in a while and not because he was a hypocrite
  • Parodied: The series The Hero belongs to is a Dead Baby Comedy.
  • Deconstructed: The Hero's increasing hypocrisy turns him into a villain.
  • Reconstructed: The Hero is on the path of Was It Really Worth It?, knowing that saving the world will leave him shattered and alone but that it has to be done.
  • Zig Zagged: The Hero brutally murders a surrendering mook even though he is against killing people around him, which causes others to become more uncomfortable around him, but it's because he smells, but they eventually realize that the reason he smells is because he keeps killing people at point blank range and they realize that he's being a hypocrite
  • Averted: the Hero is never a hypocrite
  • Enforced: The author's priorities are as screwed up as his/her Designated Hero's.
  • Lampshaded: One moral character points out why what The Hero is doing is hypocritical and everyone doesn't care.
  • Invoked: The villain attempts to push The Hero towards hypocrisy .
  • Defied: The hero refuses to commit the double standard
  • Discussed: "Ha ha. It's a good thing they were just bad guys."
  • Conversed: "Don't you just hate it when the hero behaves like a hypocrite and no one gives a damn?"
  • They Plotted A Perfectly Good Waste: The hero's hypocrisy is there to start a subtle buildup towards his Face Heel Turn.
  • Exploited: The villain is just as big a hypocrite so he can pull a Heel Face Turn and tell the hero that he's a hypocrite just like the villain used to be. Then the villain turns evil again and decides to stop being a hypocrite.

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