Basic Trope: The author or other characters point out how bad something a villain does is.
- Straight: Doctor Steel kicks a puppy, and Bob the narrator tells us how wrong that was.
- Exaggerated:
- Doctor Steel kidnaps, rapes, kills and eats a young girl, and Bob tells us how wrong that was.
- The author and/or the characters in the story are constantly talking about how horrible Doctor Steel's actions are.
- Downplayed:
- Doctor Steel leaves the toilet seat up, and Bob reprimands him.
- Hiro subtly points out how disturbed he is by one of Doctor Steel's actions at one point.
- Justified:
- The act Doctor Steel did was very subtle, and needed to be pointed out.
- Rookie Nurse Goodheart honestly thinks Dr. Steel is a nice person because she's never seen him do anything evil; when someone else sees him do something evil, they need to explain it to her so she can understand the doctor's true persona and join the band of protagonists.
- A character is the one describing Doctor Steel's action as evil, because they were truly disturbed by what he did.
- Inverted:
- Bob tells us how good an act the heroes did was.
- Doctor Steel kicks a puppy, and Bob tells us how good an act this was.
- Subverted: Doctor Steel does something bad, and Bob tells us how terr...ifically competent he is at puppy-punting.
- Double Subverted:
- Instead, he shifts to describe how Madame Ironhand killed a beggar for asking money, and how terrible it was.
- Bob talks about how terr... iffic that puppy-punt was, but adds that the act was still immoral and shouldn't be tried at home.
- Parodied:
- Anything remotely bad is described with a "And that's terrible!"
- Bob goes on a long rant when Steel leaves the toilet seat up, but doesn't bother to make a comment when he blows up an orphanage.
- Doctor Steel is a Harmless Villain whose "evil deeds" chalk up to not brushing his teeth, lightly poking a poodle, making faces at babies, and tearing the tags off mattresses. Bob is horrified by what he's doing.
- Zig-Zagged: Doctor Steel is walking down the street using a mirror to point sun into people's eyes, and Bob says that it is terrible. He then walks into a supermarket and slips condoms into an old lady's cart, and Bob says that it is terrible. Doctor Steel walks through an alley and only donates a penny to a homeless man, and Bob describes that this is terrible. Doctor Steel then kicks an already crippled puppy, and the audience expects Bob to react, but he doesn't. Finally, Doctor Steel announces aloud that he ate the last piece of pizza in the fridge without asking, to which Bob wails, trembling in abject terror, "AND THAT'S TERRIBLE."
- Averted: The author doesn't tell us how bad an act Doctor Steel did was.
- Enforced:
- "This is a kids' show; they don't see why this is a bad thing to do."
- Doctor Steel is engaging in evil acts that are especially controversial, such as rape, or anything relating to Those Wacky Nazis. To avoid the possibility of audiences taking a depiction as being an endorsement, the author wants to make it clear that they don't support such depravities.
- Lampshaded: "I'm EVIL! I have the power to KILL and MAIM and BREAK THE FOURTH WALL! Do you think I'm stupid enough to not know what I did was evil?"
- Invoked: When describing the actions of Dr. Steel, someone asks whether they were evil.
- Exploited: Dr. Steel hates being told the obvious, so when Bob tells him this, Dr. Steel charges and falls to his death.
- Defied: "Well, I don't need to tell you how terrible that is."
- Discussed: "I'm a villain! I know you think I'm evil, so stop trying to point it out. What're you going to do next, follow me around and comment on how evil whatever I just did was?"
- Conversed: "God, do the people who write this really think we can't recognize evil?"
- Implied: Nothing is said about Doctor Steel’s actions, but the story hints on how bad they are, due to the Excessive Backlash from many characters and how serious (and unintentionally disproportionate) the punishment is, for Doctor Steel’s crimes.
- Deconstructed: Bob asks the audience whether they think Dr. Steel did something truly morally wrong.
- Reconstructed:
- The medium is such that explicitly identifying evil is necessary, such as a historic work on the wrong side of Values Dissonance.
- Alternately: Doctor Steel or other characters have No Fourth Wall and interact with the narrator after they makes such a statement.
- Played for Drama: The formerly-cavalier New Meat observes a villain committing an atrocity and, shell-shocked, he begins babbling about how horrible it was and how he couldn't believe that ANYONE was capable of doing something so inhumanly evil. Another member of the team calmly asks him if he understands now what kind of monsters they're up against.
We can't leave out a link to And That's Terrible! That would be awful!
