Malicious Slander/Playing With
Basic Trope: Lies and rumours spread to discredit someone.
- Straight: Carol tells Bob that Alice is cheating on him.
- Exaggerated: Carol prints leaflets that claim that Alice starts fires, devours small children and never washes her hands after using the loo.
- Downplayed: Carol halfheartedly claims that Alice is a Jerkass.
- Justified: Carol is a good liar and is jealous of Alice's relationship with Bob.
- Inverted: Carol tries to exagerate rumours of Alice's great deeds in order to improve her reputation.
- Subverted: Carol's lies are far too outlandish to be belived. Bob traces them back and confronts her.
- Double Subverted: Carol uses the transparency of the lies to convince Bob that Alice set her up.
- Parodied: Carol leaves a badly done crayon drawing of Alice cheating on Bob to be found. It becomes accepted as fact in minutes.
- Deconstructed: In the end no one believes any rumours they hear because almost everyone's been slandered at some point.
- Reconstructed: Carol and other rumourmongers get creative and frame people for starting rumours.
- Zig Zagged: Some rumours are revealed to actually be true, some were lies, some were half truths and some were designed to be identified as false rumours to cover up the fact that they were true.
- Averted: Nobody starts any rumours.
- Enforced: The Hero needs to have a bad reputation, but he can't have done anything wrong. False rumours are the obvious solution to the writers' problem.
- Lampshaded: "You guys really do believe everything you read in the papers, don't you?"
- Invoked: Carol realises that she can get rumours about Alice to snowball if she plays her cards right.
- Defied: Alice goes out of her way to make sure she can prove what she was doing at any given moment and makes sure at least one of her friends is a respected journalist who can clear her name.
- Discussed: "Don't believe everything you hear about Alice, I hear that that gossip Carol's got it in for her."
- Conversed: "So is the Alpha Bitch going to spread rumours about her to split them up?"
- Exploited: Alice wants a fearsome reputation and allows Carol to spread rumours of her dastardly deeds for this reason.
I heard that the writer of this Playing with Wiki isn't any good. Just go back to Malicious Slander.