Bondage Is Bad/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Basic Trope: Bad people tend to be into fetishism and BDSM.
  • Played Straight: Villain Bob dresses like a fetishist or is into BDSM; no non-villains are shown to dress the same way or have the same interest.
  • Exaggerated:
    • The villain is only villainous because they want new people to dominate and torture sexually against their will.
    • Replace "torture sexually" with "rape". Or just add "rape".
  • Justified: Bob's behavior is caused by him being a sociopath or general bastard, not him being into kinky stuff, despite a lack of showing examples of non-bastards with the same kink. Alternatively, the show keeps parroting outdated psychoanalytical theories or similar in order to establish its position as "scientific".
  • Inverted: There are two very different ways to do this. One is to make sadomasochism a sign of being cool. The other is to make being into only vanilla (non-kinky) sexuality a sign of being a bad person.
  • Subverted:
    • Bob's interest in BDSM make Alice and/or the audience wrongly believe that Bob is a bad person.
    • Alternatively, Bob is acting abusively and tries to avoid blame by invoking prejudice about BDSM to portray himself as a victim. However, it turns out that the people around him have a far too good grasp on Safe, Sane, and Consensual for that stunt to work.
    • Note that using BDSM without implying that either character is evil is not a subversion, it's just Casual Kink.
  • Double Subverted: It eventually turns out that he's a real bastard after all.
  • Parodied: Owning a pair of fluffy pink handcuffs is treated as a Moral Event Horizon.
  • Deconstructed: Showed to be mere prejudice... or a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  • Reconstructed: ...but then it's shown that like with anyone else, while there are good people doing it harmlessly, there are bad people who fit the trope too.
  • Lampshaded: "Look out! He's naked and carrying ropes!!!"
  • Averted: Being into BDSM is no big deal.
  • Enforced: The author dislikes bondage (or is into the whole Sex Is Evil=Evil Is Sexy thing), and making bondage bad would appeal to him/her.
  • Invoked: A political rival gets her opponent to be spotted in public with BSDM gear and starts a smear campaign around that.
  • Defied: The Hero is into bondage.
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???
  • Played For Laughs: ???
  • Played For Drama: ???

Back to Bondage Is Bad

Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Bondage_Is_Bad/Playing_With?oldid=505967"