Van Helsing Hate Crimes/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: The Hunter kills monsters who aren't all evil.

  • Straight: Valerie discovers the vampires she's just killed weren't evil after rummaging through their belongings, and freaks out as she wonders how many of her previous kills were good.
  • Exaggerated: Every vampire is afflicted with a need to feed on blood born diseases, and in so doing cures or sends these into remission in the "victim". Valerie has a Heroic BSOD and goes into a coma after the revelation.
  • Justified: Vampires can be good or evil depending on who they were in life, and since both are the same species Valerie has trouble telling them apart.
  • Inverted: Valerie the vampire is serial killing humans because they aren't living up to their evil potential, only to discover that humans are worse bastards than vampires.
  • Subverted: Valerie discovers that the group of "good" vampires who only feed on animals aren't doing it out of moral conviction, but because the older and stronger vampires won't let them feed on humans out of spite.
  • Double Subverted: ... and that spite was because the good vampires advocate feeding only on willing humans so no one has to die.
  • Parodied: The vampires are all altruistic saints who don't even need to (or want to) feed on human blood, and Valerie is a delusional psychotic who can't see that.
  • Deconstructed: With the discovery of good vampires, Valerie questions whether evil is something that can be forced on you, and whether she should try to save the people who are now evil vampires.
  • Reconstructed: The division between good and bad vampires isn't one of ethics but practicality. The "good" ones don't care about human life, they're simply more interested in maintaining the Masquerade, and excess body-bags are bad for that. Valerie has to decide whether to ally with the good vamps to wipe out the evil ones is a worthwhile risk, or just let the Enemy Civil War play out.
  • Zig Zagged: The vampire valerie is hunting isn't evil, just a LARPer, but the vampire attacking him out of the shadows sure is! Except it turns out the LARPer killed the vampire's mortal daughter, and otherwise he's nice.
  • Averted: All vampires are hateful sociopaths with no souls. The differences among them are simply behavioral patterns designed to facilitate different hunting styles, such as aggressive "evil" vampires and subversive "good" vampires.
  • Enforced: The writer wants to make vampirism an allegory for terrorism, using the few bad vampires to represent the tiny fraction of a country/religion who are giving the rest a bad name. Valerie's reaction represents the cultural shock of indiscriminate violence.
  • Lampshaded: "I miss the old days; you I didn't have to quiz vampires to find out if they're evil." [Stakes an attacking vampire] "Whoops, another failing grade!"
  • Invoked: "Please don't stake me, I'm actually good!" "You realize you're still covered in girl scout, right?" "Oh Crap"
  • Defied: Valerie realizes she's starting to empathize with the vampires and hesitating with doubts about their nature. So she starves them and then tosses an Innocent Bystander in to "test" whether they're good or evil by whether they can resist their Horror Hunger.
  • Discussed: "The worst part about being a vampire hunter? Not knowing whether I'm putting down an animal or murdering a human being."
  • Conversed: "If this vampire hunting thing were like Buffy, I'd only have to deal with one good vampire."
  • Plotted A Good Waste: A vampire Hannibal Lecture's Valerie over how by objectifying vampires into monsters, she's no different than they are since they view people as cattle.
  • Played For Laughs: The good vampires are Minions With An F In Evil, though still potentially dangerous since they suck so much Valerie can barely keep from passing out laughing.
  • Played For Drama: Valerie is turned into a vampire and is taken in by a good vampire, who shows her things from their perspective. She later has to suffer as all her old friends try to kill her.

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