Basic Trope: A creature who attacks on your behalf as a weapon.
- Straight: Alice fights by sicking her dog on her foes.
- Exaggerated:
- Everyone fights each other by sending trained animals, robots or some other creature which obeys their commands after them.
- Mon fighting
- Downplayed: Alice has the power to call animals to her aid, but usually fights with more conventional weapons.
- Justified: Alice isn't a trained fighter or very strong, but her dog's loyal and perfectly capable of tackling her foes.
- Inverted:
- Alice has to escort her dog to safety.
- Alice has an armadillo that can block enemy attacks for her.
- Subverted: Alice sicks her dog on Bob... but since it wasn't trained as an attack dog he just sits there.
- Double Subverted: Bob sneers and attacks Alice, which causes her dog to leap to his master's defence.
- Parodied:
- Alice looks completly defenceless until she snaps her fingers to call in her Canis Major.
- Alice uses her dog as a club.
- Zig Zagged: Sometimes Alice has her dog attack, other times it simply runs away when a fight breaks out.
- Averted: Alice just uses a gun.
- Enforced: The show's creators wanted to include the dog as a Series Mascot and needed a way to make sure it didn't look like he was there just to sell toys.
- Lampshaded: "Uh-oh...nice doggy...?"
- Invoked: Alice trains her dog as an attack dog so she can use him as a concealed weapon (since being accompanied by a dog wouldn't be very unusual).
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Using animals or any other semi-intelligent creature as a weapon is strictly forbidden by animal rights laws. The few people who try it have to deal with Animal Wrongs Groups.
- Discussed: "Is she armed?" "She has a fully loaded dog pointed at us."
- Conversed: "Why does that character have a trained dog?" "Because trained dogs are cool."
- Deconstructed: Bob calls out Alice for making her pet fight her battles for her.
- Reconstructed: Alice points out that dogs are simply wolves which have been bred to get along with humans; she's not making it do anything that it wouldn't do on instinct.
- Played For Laughs: Alice's dog frequently ignores her commands or gets distracted by sticks and balls thrown by enemies.
- Played For Drama: Alice's beloved pet is slowly becoming more violent and bloodthirsty. Can she protect herself without letting her dog become a monster?
OK, Attack Animal; Stay! ...there's a good Pot Hole. Yes you are!
