Thou Shalt Not Kill/Playing With

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Basic Trope: The hero adheres to a rigid code of morality preventing him or her from killing his / her adversaries except in extreme circumstances, and sometimes not even then.

  • Straight: Amazing Girl refuses to kill her adversary, a bank robber who committed murder during a robbery, instead apprehending him and taking him to the police.
  • Exaggerated: Amazing Girl refuses to kill her adversary, an Evil Overlord who has committed genocide across the galaxy, when she has the chance to do so. She instead lets him escape.
  • Justified: Amazing Girl is allowed only the barest minimum of tolerance from the authorities for her actions, and committing murder would see the authorities pursue her as a criminal.
    • Amazing Girl is The Cape (trope) and has been instilled with a rigid code of morality that sees murder, no matter what the circumstances, as wrong.
    • Amazing Girl used to kill, until she found out several of the "villains" she murdered were innocent. After coming out of her Heroic BSOD, she swore never to kill again.
  • Inverted: Amazing Girl is a Nineties Anti-Hero who acts as Judge, Jury, and Executioner.
  • Subverted: The villain taunts Amazing Girl that he knows she won't kill her... but then she does.
    • Or: Amazing Girl won't personally take a life, but she's got no qualms about reccomending that the criminals she catches be given the death penalty.
  • Doubly Subverted: Amazing Girl merely wounded the villain as much as she could without risking his death.
    • Alternatively, she teleported him where she will leave him for dead.
  • Parodied: Amazing Girl goes to huge lengths and causes large amounts of collateral damage to catch the criminal alive, and they're given the death penalty.
  • Deconstructed: Amazing Girl's refusal to kill is a reflection of an outdated, hypocritical and cowardly moral and ethical framework which, in allowing vicious murderers who cannot and will not be redeemed and who will inevitably escape confinement to kill again, makes her directly responsible for any future murders that they will commit.
    • Amazing Girl isn't willing to kill, but she is willing to injure, and never finds out how many criminals aren't surviving those injuries.
    • Amazing Girl preens herself on her moral superiority to teammates who will use lethal force. But she doesn't leave the team. And she never prevents their attack -- indeed, she is frequently mysteriously not there when the time comes for lethal violence.
    • Amazing Girl is a psychopath who hurts the enemy as much as possible, making sure that they don't die for the purpose of causing as much pain as possible.
  • Reconstructed: Amazing Girl's refusal to kill is something (and often the only) thing which sets her above the depraved psychopaths she battles; far from it being cowardly, her refusal to compromise her moral code and reduce herself to being no better than those she fights makes her a better hero.
    • The sneering Nineties Anti-Hero assumes that only a weak, spineless creature would bind herself. In truth, Amazing Girl is so continually outraged by the evil she sees that the only thing keeping her from a Roaring Rampage of Revenge is her rule against killing; she knows that, like an alcoholic, if she falls from the wagon she will kill more than all her victims.
      • When the Nineties Anti-Hero cold-bloodedly kills an innocent on flimsy evidence, Amazing Girl finds he can be stopped only with lethal violence. She does it, much to his shock, and needs a hiatus afterward to recontrol her rage. More people die in this interval because she was not there to stop the villains, but she knows she is too dangerous until she's back under control.
    • Amazing Girl is aware of what a role-model she is, and knows that immature superheroes would use her having killed -- no matter how justified -- as an excuse to go on a rampage.
    • Amazing Girl's refusal to kill doesn't make her soft. She'd rather make the criminals she chases beg for death, then refuse to give it to them. After all, criminals kill each other all the time, and she needs to be a worse threat than their fellow crooks if her war on crime is going to be successful.
  • Averted: Amazing Girl's moral code makes no mention of killing; or if it does, it may be justified in some situations and not in others.
  • Enforced: "This character is supposed to be an inspiration to children, and we certainly don't want to send the message to children that killing people is an appropriate way of dealing with your problems."
  • Lampshaded: "Everyone knows that you won't kill. No matter what."
  • Invoked: Amazing Girl explicitly vows at the start of her career that she won't take a life.
  • Defied: "I will defeat the forces of evil by whatever means necessary... even if it means killing them."
  • Discussed: "Sometimes there's no other way." "There's always another way."
  • Conversed: "Everyone knows that the bad guy's just going to break out of the asylum and start killing people anyway. Why doesn't the hero just whack them?"

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