Basic Trope: Personal ambition often trumps morality.
- Straight: Alice is very ambitious and isn't above doing morally corrupt deeds to get what she wants.
- Exaggerated:
- Everyone who shows any ambition whatsoever is automatically an Unfettered Social Darwinist.
- Anyone who shows ambition has automatically crossed the Moral Event Horizon.
- Downplayed:
- Alice is very competitive and cares a lot about her grades—which makes her rather unpopular among her classmates.
- The story's conflict could have been solved five minutes earlier if Bob apparently getting the praise wasn't her Berserk Button. Thankfully, one of the things that happened in those five minutes was the big "Alice gets the big revelation that she needs to be a team player and atones" moment (probably caused by everybody else yelling at her over this little overtime to their misery).
- Justified:
- It's a Crapsack World where in order to get ahead in life, one needs to throw away any moral compass they may have had and unapologetically delve into corruption and evildoing.
- Alice shows a callous willingness to step on others without hesitation if it can help her reach her goals faster and she is also unapologetic about this behavior to boot, and as a result has earned her a reputation as a shameless backstabber and social climber, which makes reasonable people avoid interacting with her.
- Social mobility is actively discouraged by the ruling class of Tropevania. Whether because of religious dogma or simply out of fear over what kind of threat an emerging Nouveau Riche or ambitious would-be politicians could pose to their rule, the Upper Class works to ensure that their subjects will remain in their place.
- Inverted:
- Self-Made Man
- To Be a Master
- Living Is More than Surviving
- The highly ambitious Alice is the star, lauded for her willingness to destroy anything and anyone in her way to get what she wants, while the hard-working but honest and upstanding Bob is derided and ridiculed and treated like an Extreme Doormat for his refusal to do anything morally corrupt.
- Alice was originally one of the villains, but left them so she could pursue her own (significantly less evil) goals, and ends up becoming an Anti-Hero because of this.
- Alice ends up doing a Heel–Face Turn after realizing being evil won't get her anywhere while Good Pays Better. On the other hand, her former evil allies are content with being petty criminals.
- Emperor Evulz does acts of villainy out of impulse and for simple amusement and isn't interested in any long term goals. Captain Alice, on the contrary, is very hard working, goal-oriented and has an actual perspective in mind other than his own personal gain and amusement (possibly showing that the hero is mature and responsible in contrast to the villain).
- Alice shows a bit too much Happiness in Minimum Wage, which has become an unsustainable lifestyle because of mundane things like grocery price raises, so Alice's friends decide to teach her there's nothing wrong in dreaming a little higher and getting a raise.
- Alice is portrayed as a Go-Getter Girl for her ambitions to reform the system to be more equitable, whilst Bob is portrayed as a complacent Broken-System Dogmatist that simply does not care.
- Bob is the villain of the story and it's his lack of ambition that is portrayed as evil, because it's Sloth and Laborious Laziness of the "murder the dude ordering me to work" type.
- Subverted:
- Characters dislike a company and assume that its CEO, Alice, must be evil. But when they meet her, she is a sweet person with a strict ethical code she lives by.
- Seeking any sort of advancement is bashed as evil by the The Empire as they don't want their oppressed people to get uppity and want them complacent. The heroes are thus shunned by Les Collaborateurs for making something of themselves.
- Double Subverted:
- ...only, that's all an act. She turns out to be a Straw Hypocrite and a Corrupt Corporate Executive.
- Alternatively, Alice is Affably Evil. She's still greedy and manipulative, she's just not mean.
- Parodied: Alice harbours "wild" dreams of getting a slightly larger office or a more comfortable chair or some other minor thing and goes to ridiculously bizarre and evil lengths to achieve this ambition. So instead of just saving up money for a new chair or waiting until next year where she is up for promotion to senior accountant, she instantly decides that Murder Is the Best Solution and she must "remove Bob from the picture" in order to take his chair and/or his position and accompanying office for herself. The frequent Humiliation Congas she gets from this would seem excessive if she wasn't an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist. Her failure to expand her office (complete with actually getting her office shrunk one time) becomes a Running Gag.
- Zig Zagged: Alice starts out as being ambitious, and this is presented as evil as it corrupts her, causing her to do evil things to try to get ahead. However, after getting a few promotions this way, she reforms, using only honest means to advance her career from there on. However, she finds that Being Good Sucks and is stuck in middle management, and finds her previous deeds are coming back to haunt her. She cracks under the pressure and goes back to evil scheming again.
- Averted: Ambition is never brought as a motivation for doing evil nor does being ambitious itself make you evil.
- Enforced:
- "We have to make the ambitious co-worker an amoral sociopath, willing to backstab anyone to get what he wants. He will exist as a constrast to Alice who is ambitious too but honest and hardworking instead."
- The writers are opposed to social mobility, and make Alice ambitious look like a bad thing to teach An Aesop about being content with your lot in life.
- Lampshaded: "You know, it would be nice if we could get an ambitious, talented young go-getter who isn't completely evil or insane for once. Why don't we ever get someone like that?"
- Invoked: The boss of Alice and Bob's workplace has deliberately set things up so that only the most ruthless and amoral people will get to the top. Its all part of the system.
- Exploited:
- Alice gets lured by the secretly envious Vivian who serves Alice's goals and schemes loyally and fuels her vices by plying her with call-boys and drugs, until she gets Alice in a vulnerable position, murders her and claims all of her possessions, status and achievements for herself.
- Alice makes sure that this trope is present in all media, so no-one gets ideas of challenging her power
- Defied: Alice really wants that promotion, but wants to earn it honestly and fairly.
- Discussed: "Keep an eye on that Alice girl. Anyone that eager to get to the top of the pile will do anything to get what they want."
- Conversed: "Jeez Alice, from watching the shows you're into you'd think that wanting to get a promotion is a fair indication that you also want to eat newborn children."
- Deconstructed:
- Lonely at the Top
- No matter how ruthless, conniving and amoral Alice gets in her pursuit of her dream to rise to the top, she finds out the hard way that there's Always a Bigger Fish as she runs into the even crueler and more evil Bob. Bob easily takes away all her possessions and makes her his personal Sex Slave until he grows tired of her and kills her casually.
- Alice's goal-oriented approach means crossing the Moral Event Horizon is never beneficial to her. She ends up never going beyond Pragmatic Villainy, and is well-liked by the heroes.
- Alice did start out with noble intentions but realized that shock value brings in more attention and revenue than kindness and altruism. While minor at first, Alice began believing that none of her actions are truly evil as long as she achieves her goals or dies on a bed full of money.
- Alice, like all adults in Tropevania, teach the children that being ambitious is wrong and they should be content with their lot. Fast-forward 40 years, and business owners, clerics, politicians, and other leaders are dying off with no-one amongst the younger generations having any inclination to take their place, no matter how much the older generation beg someone—anyone—to step up. The economy implodes as businesses close left and right, society is in chaos as nobody replaces teachers or pillars of the community, infrastructure is disintegrating because nobody can call for maintenance, and Tropevania is coming apart at the seams for want of leadership.
- Over time, the people of Tropevania get more and more fed up of having no representation or power and of being told that they should stay in poverty and misery rather than taking the initiative to make something better of their lives, all while the incompetent elite either can't or won't improve the country in any way shape or form. As a result, the Tropevanians stage a revolution that gets very messy very quickly.
- Reconstructed:
- Alice eventually has a Heel Realization and takes a good hard look at what she has become. While she doesn't give up on her dreams and ambitions, she lets go of her amoral ways and starts making amends for all the discord and destruction she has caused, builds back the bridges she once burnt and becomes a much more relatable and admired person as a result.
- The adults of Tropevania teach their children the difference between healthy ambition (working for what you want out of life without compromising your morals) and unhealthy ambition (wanting something so badly that you'll do anything at all to get it).
- The Tropevanian elite are far from incompetent and ensure that the society remains without social mobility while being actually functional. Every child is taught that the social class they come from, whether aristocrat, worker, artisan or otherwise, is important to the workings of Tropevanian society in its own way and is in fact just as vital as every other class. Furthermore, the use of Bread and Circuses on the poor guarantees that they are too distracted from their actual situation to do anything about it. And if any young Tropevanian is shown to be too smart for their own good, they're taken into the hands of the government to be trained and effectively brainwashed into becoming a loyal and useful servant of the state. In the end, these policies make sure that the people are generally happy and content to remain as they are, and that any and all social mobility both works to the benefit of the state and fails to change the social order to any meaningful extent.
- Implied: Alice is both ambitious and evil, but no connection between these two traits is shown. May additionally be further muddied by other villains who lack vision and by heroic figures who still have high ambitions.
- Played For Laughs: Protest groups burn self-help books.
- Played For Drama: As Alice works her way up the ranks, she becomes increasingly ruthless and callous in her treatment of others until she alienates everyone she cared about. She comes to realize that power and position is not everything, and tries to make things right.
- Plotted A Good Waste: Alice acting on her ambitions at the expense of other people makes her look like a selfish Jerkass, which ultimately feeds back into an Aesop about how to treat other people.
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