Pyromaniac/Playing With
Basic Trope: A character who has an unhealthy love of and fixation on fire.
- Straight: Patrick Yro loves to burn things, and possibly uses incendiary weapons or fire powers. He generally has to restrain himself to stop burning down things compulsively.
- Exaggerated: Patrick is completely Ax Crazy and tries to burn down everything around him, constantly.
- Downplayed: Patrick suffers from low-level pyromania and satisfies himself by burning junk mail, dry grass and other harmless actions in the safety of his own home.
- Justified: Patrick is diagnosed with actual Pyromania.
- Inverted: Patrick has Pyrophobia: The mere presence of fire makes him flee, turn catatonic, or suffer other forms of mental breakdown.
- Pops Sickle is a cyromaniac, and his unnatural fondness for the frigid has gone past the point of eccentric and turned him into a stone cold killer who derives sadistic glee from watching the warmth slowly leave his victims' bodies as they fall into the cold embrace of death.
- Subverted: Although Patrick inevitably seems like a pyromaniac, it turns out he's actually a professional and uses fire because it's an effective weapon instead of any personal love of it.
- Double Subverted: ...But he's only professional at work. At home he routinely starts fires to amuse and comfort himself.
- Parodied: Patrick's entire vocabulary is related to fire. He constantly goes around giggling about how much he loves fire.
- Zig Zagged: Patrick constantly shifts between treating fire in a sane, rational manner and showing open love and longing for fires.
- Deconstructed: Patrick is genuinely insane and suffers from lots of personal problems that he represses through starting fires, knows he has a problem, and routinely goes to therapy to stop himself from burning and hurting people just because of his compulsion.
- Reconstructed: Patrick eventually gives up on trying to get better and gets a job as the Big Bad's Chief Arsonist.
- Averted: Patrick does not have pyromania.
- Enforced: "We need to show people that this guy is really bad, but him just using fire isn't cutting it. Let's make him unhealthily obsessed with the stuff."
- Lampshaded: "Um... I hope you're going to therapy over all that 'laugh and cheer while you burn things' you do."
- "The world makes a lovely fire..."
- Invoked: Patrick is an undercover cop, pretending to have pyromania to get close to another pyromaniac.
- Defied: "You know, sometimes I wish people wouldn't mistake me. Yes, I can fire fireballs from my hands. Yes, I was born with this power. No, it does not mean I'm about to start giggling over starting fires with them."
- Discussed: Two characters are looking at Patrick at work and comment upon how he seems to enjoy it, and the possibility that he might suffer from Pyromania.
- Conversed: Two characters watching a show on superheroes comment on how often villains with fire-based superpowers seem to combo it with genuine pyromania, and how this almost always is of the 'burn the world down' level unlike gradual onset like with most Real Life insanities.
BURN! BURN! BURN!