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Motive Decay: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|''"And when he tried to steal our sunlight, he crossed that line between everyday villainy and [[Cartoonish Supervillainy|cartoonish super-villainy.]]"''
|'''Waylon Smithers''' on Montgomery Burns, ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'', "Who Shot Mr. Burns?"}}
A sort of [[Character Derailment]] where a character with an initially complex and even reasonable motive for his actions is [[Flanderization|Flanderized]] into a [[Flat Character]] who simply [[Status Quo Is God|does what is expected]], [[Characters As Device|regardless]] of their [[Theory of Narrative Causality|original motivation]].
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{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==
* ''[[Magical Project S]]'' Pixy Misa starts every episode ruining the balance of good vs evil (that's her purpose) but ends acting for the ''Evulz'' and more often than not ends vacationing (justified in that she is not actually evil but she just represents the repressed aspects of Misao and doesn't really care for her goals) instead of torturing Sammy and even in one episode she ended having literal vacations instead of destroying Sammy.
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* In the ''[[Little House on the Prairie (TV series)|Little House On the Prairie]]'' episode, "Family Quarrel", Nels and Harriette Oleson have separated and Nels is living in the hotel. Doc Baker and Mr. Hanson get the idea that Mr. Hanson should go ask Harriette out on a date. The reasoning is that Nels will get jealous and will want Harriette back. In the next scene, Hanson is wearing a suit and carrying some flowers as he and Doc Baker walk toward the mercantile store. Doc Baker tells Hanson that now is a good time because Nels is out of town and won't find out. This subverts the original purpose, which was to make Nels jealous.
** In the episode "Haunted House", Nellie and Willy dare Laura to go up to a haunted house. She runs away scared. Later, to redeem herself, she approaches the house again, but is discovered by the owner of the home. She ends up forming a friendship with the owner and never tries to prove her bravery again, even though it was an important plot point and her motivation for approaching the house in the first place.
* In ''[[Galactica 1980]]'', the episode ''Space Croppers'' begins with the Galactica's fleet being attacked by the Cylons. The Cylons destroy the fleet's food supplies. Boy genius Dr. Zee comes up with a plan to send Troy and Dillon down to Earth to get some supplies. Troy and Dillon pick a farm at random and soon find out that the farmer is having problems with the local growers' association. Instead of picking another farmer to get supplies from, the motive decays into helping this farmer out with his problems and the rest of the episode revolves more around helping a farmer than it does about getting food for Galactica.
* In the ''[[Highway to Heaven]]'' episode ''For the Love of Larry'', a man and his boy are missing. Johnathan and Mark find the dog that was with them when they went missing. The Sheriff runs into Mark and Johnathan and shows them a picture of the missing man and boy with the dog. They explain that they found the dog, which is now in their rented cabin. Instead of asking them to take him to where they ''found'' the dog (as a good place to start looking for the missing man and boy), the sheriff asks them to take him to where the dog is ''now'' and when they find out the dog is missing, they start looking for the dog. The motive decay here is that they stop looking for a man and boy and start searching for the dog while two people are still missing. What was finding the dog going to do?
* The original motivation of Fox Mulder in [[The X-Files]] was to find his abducted sister. This actually weaves in and out of the story for a good four years, but then it's dropped nearly entirely. When he ''does'' find her, it turns out she was killed, not abducted, and is a ghost child running around a feild. What should have been the ultimate climax of the story arc becomes a little sidenote a few years before the series actually ends.
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