Never Live It Down/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Character winds up defined by one minor action or event they were involved in to the point of excluding other major aspects of their personality or characterization.

  • Straight: Jet, in a moment of anger, smacks Princess Amber across the face. Fandom never lets him live it down.
  • Exaggerated: Jade declares that Viper is the one person she can't forgive for destroying her homeland, and helps the heroes defeat him. Fan Dumb immediately turns her into a Blood Knight on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
  • Justified: The action in question is genuinely unforgivable, but in-story, the character got away with it.
  • Inverted: Sapphire abruptly goes soaring across the Moral Event Horizon, then the incident is never mentioned again.
  • Subverted: Jack had disguised himself as Jet and the reputation lasted only from the previews that showed him slapping her to the episode.
  • Double Subverted: However the fans still attribute it to him for laughs despite it being canonically untrue.
  • Parodied: Jet gets called on the slap at the drop of a hat, no matter how irrelevant the situation.
    • Princess Amber becomes a Yaoi Fangirl and Jet decides to pull a Face Heel Turn. She decides to give up her love of yaoi and Jet pulls a Heel Face Turn. The fans never live the second of either side down and still portray Princess Amber as a Yaoi Fangirl and Jet as a villain.
  • Deconstructed: After seeing how the fans reacted to it, the writers address the situation by having his friends confront him; Jet argues successfully that it isn't fair for them to judge him based on one moment of weakness, and they reconcile, putting the incident behind them.
  • Reconstructed: Despite this, Fan Dumb pans the episode as a thinly-veiled Take That and clings to their image of Jet the horrible abusive Jerkass.
    • The Story's lesson is that while one should forgive minor offenses but if you have committed a major offense then the fact that you have only done it once is flat out irrelevant.
  • Zig Zagged: The story is a case of Flip-Flop of God on whether if Jet actually deserves his reputation or not.
  • Averted: Fans raise their eyebrows at Jet, but they let it drop after a while.
  • Enforced: After seeing how the fans responded to an event, the writers focus on it more and more.
  • Lampshaded: "I make one mistake, and you guys condemn me to life as a monster. Some friends you are!"
  • Invoked: Princess Amber, aware of the stigma attached to guys hitting girls, delibately provokes Jet into smacking her so she can hold it over his head.
  • Defied: ???
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???
  • Played For Laughs: The writers catch on to it and turn mentioning it into a running gag. Jet is know known as "Princess Beater".
  • Played For Drama: Jet's Nakama find out that he struck Amber and are horrified, unsure how to treat him now that he's "revealed his violent side". Jet finds himself pushed to the outskirts of the team thanks to his momentary lapse, and is rather miffed that they're letting one action override all the good he's done.

Back to Never Live It Down.

Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Never_Live_It_Down/Playing_With?oldid=597899"