Leonine Contract/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A one-sided bargain.

  • Straight: Leon, her wicked stepbrother, offers to allow Hesione some of her own inheritance, which he controls as her guardian, if she agrees to marry him.
  • Exaggerated: Leon offers to rescue Hesione from swinging from a cliff-face if she will become his slave for life.
  • Downplayed: Leon sets some conditions on Hesione's marriage -- not an Impossible Task, but enough to keep him controlling her money for a few more years -- and gets her to agree by threatening to lower her allowance.
  • Justified: ???
  • Inverted: Hesione guilt-trips Leon into marrying her, because she's afraid if he marries someone else he will not protect her properly.
  • Subverted: He refuses to consummate the marriage, it turns out that the king would have seized her for one of his favorites if she hadn't married him, and once that is cleared up, Leon offers to free her from the marriage.
  • Double Subverted: But Leon still manages to hold onto the fortune and pressures her to chose to stay married.
  • Parodied: ???
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted: No one tries to exploit positions of weakness.
  • Enforced: ???
  • Lampshaded: "My dear, I have you in my power. Of course I'm going to be monstrously unjust."
  • Invoked: ???
  • Exploited: Hesione appears helpless to Leon because she know she can get an Engineered Public Confession and once his manipulations are known, she can get a new guardian.
  • Defied: Hesione escapes through the window because she knows Leon will make an offer.
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???

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