Basic Trope: An assassination attempt is thwarted.
- Straight: Alice tries to assassinate Bob, but Bob defeats her.
- Exaggerated:
- While barely breaking a sweat, Bob manages to overthrow the attempt in such a way that Alice accidentally kills herself instead.
- Bob defeats a massive squad of hired killers.
- Logical Extreme: An entire species of Tykebombs was created to destroy Bob. They're extinct now.
- Downplayed:
- Alice screws up an assassination attempt and after a desperate fight Bob manages to kill her in self-defence, albeit still coming away with a serious wound and fearing for his life.
- Alice believes she killed Bob, but he turns out to be Not Quite Dead.
- Bob didn't handle it himself; a couple heroic bystanders came to his rescue.
- Justified:
- Alice is an inexperienced assassin and Bob is secretly proficient in martial arts.
- Bob either knew about the attempt or had good intuition, ruining the most important part of the assassination, the surprise.
- Inverted: Bob finds out about the attempt, and we see all the measures he puts together to cause it to fail. Alice effortlessly overcomes these obstacles and kills him.
- Subverted:
- Alice didn't actually want to assassinate Bob.
- Exactly What I Aimed At; Alice wasn't trying to shoot Bob, but the Falling Chandelier of Doom.
- Double Subverted: Bob goes to help Alice up after she explains her change of heart, and she tries to stab him.
- Parodied: Alice spends the whole movie making more and more elaborate attempts on Bob's life, and due to ridiculous good luck, Contrived Coincidences and sheer obliviousness Bob doesn't even notice a single one of them.
- Zig Zagged: Bob defeats Alice, Alice tries it again and defeats him, and her intention turns out to have been nonlethal. She actually assassinates him a bit later - however, Bob is Not Quite Dead.
- Averted: The assassin either fails and escapes or succeeds in killing Bob.
- Enforced: An assassination attempt was necessary plot-wise, and the odds are against Bob, but since in this work Nobody Can Die, Alice has to be defeated by him anyway.
- Lampshaded:
- "This isn't the first time someone's been sent to kill me, you know. Although I suppose you wouldn't have heard about the other times..."
- "Your assassin posed no challenge. Next time, have the courtesy to send one with a mop and bucket.It's always such a pain in the ass to clean up the mess.
- Invoked:
- Alice's contract on Bob is a Uriah Gambit. Alice's boss knows how tough Bob is, and is trying to send Alice to her death.
- Someone sends really weak assassins at Bob to keep him entertained.
- Exploited:
- Alice realises just in time that Bob is winning, and decides "You can kill me, but I'm Taking You with Me."
- Alice's failed attempt is used for Dave's successful attempt a few seconds later.
- Defied: Bob notices Alice, but she tells him: "This isn't just one of these easily-repelled assassination attempts. Die."
- Bob has a reputation for this sort of thing, so Alice turns down the job immediately, nothing she wouldn't live to cut a profit if she took suicidal jobs.
- Discussed: "Wait, your target is Bob!? ...If You Die, I Call Your Stuff!"
- Conversed: "Who sends a nameless Mook to kill a main character? It's like they haven't even heard of the Sorting Algorithm of Mortality."
- Implied: Alice's attempt is never seen, but when Bob shows up at her boss's office he's got a new scar and is carrying Alice's distinctive weapon.
- Deconstructed:
- Eventually, no-one accepts contracts on Bob in the first place, as they realise it's suicide. He eventually dies happily of old age.
- The whole point of an assassin is to remain secretive. However, Bob has now seen Alice's face, and is able to identify her since she failed to kill him. This ruins her reputation as an assassin because no one wants to hire an assassin whose identity has been exposed.
- Reconstructed:
- A massive army of assassins is sent against Bob, each part of a massive Tontine, in that whoever survives the attempt will receive a king's ransom.
- Few people know who Bob is in the first place, so his reputation never becomes legend.
- Played For Laughs: A Carnival of Killers attacking Bob, and being effortlessly overpowered/Hoist by His Own Petard/suffering Critical Failures, is a Running Gag; they're collectively the Wile E. Coyote to his Road Runner.
- Played For Drama: Bob had no idea who's hiring these guys, and fighting them off is a constant drain on his health and wellbeing.
- Played For Horror: Bob's life is literally massacred one attack at the time. Bob can fend off all of those assassins but the collateral damage will eventually make him decide to, somehow, end it all. And it won't be pretty.
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