Standing Between the Enemies/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A third character stops a battle between two misled or misguided factions.

  • Straight: Carl stops a battle betwen the armies of Queen Alice and King Bob, explaining that they were manipulated into fighting by Emperor Evulz.
  • Exaggerated: As soon as Carl steps onto the field, Alice and Bob's armies stop fighting immediately. She is able to win them over and turn them into Perfect Pacifist People just by looking at them.
  • Justified: Alice and Bob respect and trust Carl, who is neutral in the conflict, allow him to speak, and decide to believe him.
    • Carl startles everyone by the sheer guts of standing up to two armies much stronger than him and his allies (if he has any), and they are impressed by his sheer bravery.
    • Alice and Bob didn't really want to fight, and consider Emperor Evulz more of a threat than each other.
  • Inverted: Carl turns up to encourage Alice and Bob to fight one another because he is a spy working for Emperor Evulz.
  • Subverted: Carl shows up and announces that the war is all a scheme by Emperor Evulz. The armies ignore him and fight anyway, because they don't know who he is or don't care.
  • Double Subverted: However, Alice and Bob do and order a halt to hear Carl out.
  • Parodied: Alice and Bob stop their war campaign at the request of Carl, an ordinary person neither of them have met.
  • Deconstructed: Carl, who Alice and Bob see as True Neutral, is not prejudiced to favor either side and so they are willing to listen to him. Since neither of them are really bloodthirsty enough to fight a pointless war, they call a truce under his advice to battle Emperor Evulz.
    • Alternately, Carl's idealism reminds Alica and Bob that their war is pointless and will end up causing much more destruction than good. Witnessing an act of simple, selfless courage gets them back to their senses.
  • Reconstructed: Bob and Alice suspected Emperor Evulz, and only fought each other since the other ruler's army was the more immediate threat. Learning that they were used makes them angry and more keen to fight Evulz instead of each other. After Emperor Evulz is defeated, Carl constantly has to find a greater enemy to battle to keep Bob and Alice from fighting.
  • Zig Zagged: Carl manages to stop Alice and Bob from slaughtering each other at that battle, but the two keep fighting anyway. It takes an attack from Emperor Evulz for Carl to get his message through and get the two to cooperate.
  • Averted: Carl doesn't try to stop the fight.
  • Enforced: "We have to make Carl do something cool, but he's an Actual Pacifist. Let's have him stop a war."
  • Lampshaded: "You'd have thought Alice and Bob would've been more careful if they were willing to stop the fight."
  • Invoked: Bob is fated to help stop a war, and since Bob is not a good warrior he decides to follow his destiny peacefully by encouraging diplomacy.
  • Defied: Carl appears on the scene and, instead of interfering, joins Alice's army to fight Bob.
  • Discussed: "Is Bob a pacifist or suicidal?" "I'm not sure."
  • Conversed: "What do we do about Alice and Bob?" "I'll jump in between them to stop the fight and get them to listen to me. After all, they both know who I am."

Stop fighting! Listen to Standing Between the Enemies!

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