Basic Trope: A character tries to blackmail another one, and it doesn't work very well.
- Straight: Alice blackmails Bob. He calls the police and Alice gets arrested.
- Exaggerated: Alice blackmails Bob. Bob blackmails her back, saying that he will "ruin her life" unless she backs down.
- Downplayed:
- Alice blackmails Bob. Bob doesn't care.
- Bob gives Alice 100 dollars for her silence. Getting greedy, Alice asks for 1,000 dollars and he reports her.
- Justified: Bob is a very powerful man, so Alice was essentially Bullying a Dragon.
- Inverted: Alice tells Bob that he will keep his Dark Secret from everyone else. She doesn't.
- Subverted: Alice bribes the police.
- Double Subverted: Which the cop(s) do not accept.
- Parodied: Alice blackmails Bob, but the things that she threatens to reveal are either known by everyone, or extremely minor. Bob laughs in her face and tells her to do it.
- Alice blackmails Bob. Bob responds by threatening to tell her mother.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Averted: Alice blackmails Bob, and successfully gets him to do her bidding.
- Enforced: The writer wants An Aesop about how crime never pays.
- Lampshaded:Alice (being arrested): "Well, I guess I deserved that one..."
- Invoked: Alice taunts Bob, encouraging him to call the cops.
- Defied:And if you even think of calling the cops, or doing anything that is not giving me the (whichever expletive would be scarier to Bob) money, you're a dead man and everything you love will follow you shortly.
- Discussed:
- Conversed: "Of course Bob calls the cops. What was Alice thinking?"
- Deconstructed: Alice was threatening to reveal the many evil things that Bob has done, but now that she's in jail, there's no one else who can expose his misdeeds. In the end, Bob gets away with it all.
- Reconstructed: Being incarcerated gives Alice nothing to lose, so she exposes Bob's crime in exchange for leniency.
