Opposed Mentors/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: The protagonist has two mentors who're trying to bring him over to their point of view.

  • Straight: Alice and Bob are both masters of Trope-Fu, however Alice is a lumper, while Bob is a splitter. They both try to convince Claire to be their student and adopt their chosen approach.
  • Exaggerated: An ancient curse means that Alice and Bob are complete opposites of one another. Whenever one says something to Claire, the other will appear via a Contrived Coincidence to disagree.
  • Downplayed: Alice and Bob both mentor Claire together, giving her their differing opinions, but letting her choose her own path.
  • Justified: Alice and Bob are rivals and Claire is a promising student. She's really just another objective for them to quarrel over.
  • Inverted: Claire's two students, Alice and Bob, can't agree on what her teachings are.
  • Subverted: Claire can't stand Alice and Bob's bickering and goes with her own philosophy.
  • Double Subverted: Dan shows up and it becomes a mentorship Melee a Trois as Alice, Bob and Claire try to make him their student.
  • Parodied: Alice and Bob both argue and fight with each other to try and give Claire her lesson for the day.
  • Deconstructed: Alice and Bob spend more time bickering than teaching Claire anything.
  • Reconstructed: Through their bickering Claire is able to see both sides of the argument and ends up stronger than both of them as a result.
  • Zig Zagged: Alice and Bob sometimes agree to teach Claire and other times one of them can't teach her anything without the other butting in Depending on the Writer.
  • Averted: Claire chooses either Alice or Bob as a mentor and the one she doesn't choose respects the decision and looks elsewhere for a student.
  • Enforced: Since the villain isn't introduced, Alice and Bob are written in instead of a single mentor in order to create a conflict and give Claire a chance for some Character Development.
  • Lampshaded: "So...are either of you going to teach me anything or are you just going to argue?"
  • Defied: Claire decides to learn something else to avoid being caught up in Alice and Bob's rivalry.
  • Discussed: "This is Alice and this is Bob. They're my Trope-Fu sensei when they aren't arguing."
  • Conversed: "Oh, a second mentor, I bet they aren't going to see eye to eye."
  • Exploited: Claire plays on Alice and Bob's rivalry in order to get them to mentor her in order to one up each other.
  • Played for Laughs: Claire often finds herself standing between Alice and Bob as they argue back and forth.
  • Played for Drama: Alice becomes furious that Claire doesn't drop Bob as a mentor and kills him with a Dangerous Forbidden Technique, which causes her to given in to The Corruption.

I suppose you could go back to Opposed Mentors if you want, but why not use this much cooler Pothole instead of that lame Wiki Word?