Basic Trope: Someone who craves attention more than is considered normal.
- Straight: Alice loves to talk and direct attention to herself, whether a situation requires her to be noticed or not. Everyone finds this annoying.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice gets aggravated when something hasn't anything to do with her or she has to share the spotlight. She does the freakiest of tricks to get noticed everywhere she goes, including dressing in a way that would make Lady Gaga blush with envy. Everyone else around Alice who isn't captivated by Alice either hates her, finds her annoying as hell or is embarrassed for her.
- Alice believes that there is No Such Thing as Bad Publicity and stoops to the lowest of lows solely to become talk-of-the-town.
- Downplayed: Alice is outgoing and likes attention, but is happy to share the spotlight with others.
- Justified:
- Alice suffers from Histrionic Personality Disorder and/or Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
- She never got any attention whatsoever as a child.
- She got TONS of attention as a child, and never quite learned to cope with being ignored because it happened so infrequently.
- Inverted: Alice is a Shrinking Violet who is afraid of attention of all sorts.
- Subverted:
- Alice actually likes to share attention and invites her friends to do so.
- Alice learns she can't get the attention of everyone she wants.
- Alice does stunts for her own amusement, not because she craves attention from others.
- Double Subverted: Only to overshadow them anyway.
- Parodied: Alice tap dances in the quad wearing only mashed potatoes (and presumably tap shoes) because she knows that means people will pay attention to her.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: Alice doesn't crave attention any more than other people and has no problem blending into the background if it would be more appropriate.
- Enforced: ???
- Lampshaded:Bob: "Alice, are you so desperate for attention that you had to tap-dance in the quad wearing nothing but mashed potatoes?"
- Invoked: Steve encourages Alice to keep looking for attention.
- Exploited: People avoid Alice, especially if they happen to have a camera with them, because they know she's just going to make an annoying ass of herself.
- Defied: Alice moderates her antics because she doesn't like being thought of as an attention-seeker.
- Discussed: "Why is Alice such an attention whore?"
- Conversed:Bob: "Ever notice that this character will do anything to get attention?"
Claire: "Yeah, well, Alice is an attention whore. What do you expect?" - Deconstructed:
- Her attention stunts (such as the mashed-potato-and-tap-shoes number) get her in trouble with the police for "disturbing the peace" or "indecent exposure", among other misdemeanors.
- Alice's stunts start small, but as her reputation as an attention whore grows, it becomes harder and harder to get people to pay attention, which drives her to keep going further and further past the line, desperate to be noticed, throwing away her dignity, and sometimes her safety, just so people will look at her.
- Alice's need for attention becomes so great that she begins to not only inflate her own exploits but steal credit from others to the point of stealing credit from Bob, who's dead and not in any position to stand up for himself, and when Charlie has to step in and clean up after one of her antics, she paints that hapless Charlie as the villain and herself in Charlie's role to preserve her reputation. Not only does it cause Charlie a lot of grief and Bob's family to be oblivious of his achievements, but eventually when Diane discovers the truth and outs her, everyone is disgusted with Alice and her reputation hits rock bottom.
- Reconstructed:
- Diane confronts Alice in private, outraged by Alice's actions, and Diane's words manage to give Alice a Heel Realization. By fessing up herself instead of Diane doing it for her, Alice manages to preserve a shred of honor and go on the path to becoming a better person... Who still occasionally has her Attention Whore moments, but knows when to drop it when things get serious.
- Played For Drama: Alice is a traumatized girl trying to cope with her pain by being the center of attention. At first, the viewer finds her to be The Scrappy for all her stupids stunts and the time she gets on screen, but as they get more insight on her life and suffering, they're supposed to start crying and hate themselves for despising her.
Back to being an Attention Whore.
