Stupid Good/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A character that is good always tries to do the thing that is considered morally right, even if it is boneheadedly stupid.

  • Played Straight: Alice spares Emperor Evulz and never attacks his Mooks because she is just too damn good and nice to actually manage to fight anyone despite how evil they are.
  • Exaggerated: Alice spares Emperor Evulz after he killed a million people out of boredom and then she immediately proceeds to patch him up and offers friendship to him.
  • Justified: Alice was raised in a secluded village that frankly hasn't seen much evil at all, whose teachings of good and evil frankly don't mesh very well with the outside world.
  • Inverted: Stupid Evil.
  • Subverted: Alice appears to spare the Emperor Evulz at first, but it is actually a ploy to get close enough to properly seal him off for some punishment for his sins.
  • Double Subverted: ...Until she realizes in the last minute that she wants to give him another chance of being good, despite his atrocities.
  • Parodied: Alice is paired with Heroic Sociopath Tim, and keeps mistaking him for a genuinely good guy and keeps defending him against true and obvious accusations directed towards him, in blind ignorance of his evil deeds.
  • Deconstructed: Alice is forced to pay for her mistake: her friends desert her, and society labels her a pariah for having saved the life of a man who took so many.
  • Reconstructed: Alice spares Emperor Evulz, but makes him take villain rehabilitation classes, and eventually teaches him the error of his ways and gains the approval of her friends and society
    • A follow-up hero, disgusted by Alice's stupidity, vows not to follow in her path--she realizes that there's a difference between Jumping Off of the Slippery Slope and doing what needs to be done. They're much more successful in their quest, realizing what Alice did wrong and changing things around just enough.
  • Zig Zagged: Alice keeps trying to befriend anything that moves, evil or not, but suddenly has a change of heart and kills one of her enemies, which she later reveals to her teammates that it was an accident, yet this is because Alice is trying to deny it ever happened, in horror of actually having killed somebody.
  • Averted: Alice may be a good woman, but she knows that it is sometimes far more convenient to kill your enemies than to avoid it.
  • Enforced: The show is a kid's show; they can't have Alice killing people.
  • Lampshaded: "Ah geez, that's stupid, now Emperor Evulz will just come back again!"
  • Invoked: The Mole tells Alice If You Kill Him You Will Be Just Like Him.
  • Defied: Alice states that she prefers the "diplomatic approach", which means letting the fists do the talking towards the villain.
  • Discussed: Alice really doesn't comprehend evil beyond the "meanie" level, doesn't she?
  • Conversed: Why can't Alice ever seem to avoid being so boneheadedly good and nice?
  • Played For Laughs: Alice's methods of doing good actually work, much to the surprise and annoyance of the others in her party. And all she did was scold Emperor Evulz a little and ground him for a week.
  • Played For Drama: Alice's sparing of Emperor Evulz creates a rift between her and her one true love, who believes Alice is secretly in love with the Emperor and promptly breaks up with her