Buy Them Off/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A character tries to escape from his misdeed by paying the victims.

  • Straight: John kills Jack and throws his widow and children some money.
  • Exaggerated: John budgets money for widows and orphans and throws fits when any of them repulse it.
  • Justified: Poor people will have a serious difficulty doing anything to people as powerful as John, and he can delude himself about the value of the money.
  • Inverted: John robs the widow and children, figuring he's already evil.
  • Subverted: John genuinely had to kill Jack, and gave the money out of pity.
  • Double Subverted: It was self-defense, but only because he had driven Jack out of his head with previous cruelties.
  • Parodied: John robs a bank and then pays off the cops that show up with the money he just stole from it.
  • Deconstructed:
    • The widow and children are further insulted by his attempts to pay them off with such a shallow gesture and seek to exact revenge for the crime and his dismissal of their grief.
    • John is a broken and tragic individual who genuinely can only see value in terms of money, and absoulely nothing else.
  • Reconstructed: John offers them such an impressive bribe that it derails their revenge.
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted: John kills Jack.
  • Enforced: ???
  • Lampshaded: ???
  • Invoked: ???
  • Defied: John carries nothing of value on his person so that he isn't tempted to pay off his victims.
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???

Sorry I killed your father. Here, take this link back to Buy Them Off, and forget about this, alright?

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