Basic Trope: A badass goes into a mental and emotional breakdown to show how much the situation is dangerous.
- Straight: Alice, a battle hardened veteran, loses her composure and begs for her life when she faces Emperor Evulz.
- Exaggerated: Alice has defeated many Eldritch Abominations with ease, but she has panic attack strong enough to knock her out when she's got to fight Tom.
- Downplayed: Alice is a Guile Hero without much combat ability, and she she can't come up with a quip when faced by Drakon.
- Justified:
- Emperor Evulz has already wiped the floor with the rest of the party.
- Alice has lied about all of her accomplishments.
- Evulz did a pretty good job working Alice over in a previous encounter and Alice really doesn't wants a repeat performance.
- Evulz just executed all of Alice's family in front of her and Alice is in shock.
- Inverted:
- Admiring the Abomination
- Alice is thoroughly unimpressed by Emperor Evulz, who is a Non-Action Big Bad.
- Subverted: Alice isn't actually scared of Evulz, she is feigning terror to get a good hit on him.
- Double Subverted: Emperor Evulz is left completely unfazed by her attack, which causes Alice to have an actual breakdown.
- Parodied: When a Monster of the Week attacks, Alice always starts crying and ranting about how they can't beat them.
- Zig-Zagged: ???
- Averted: Alice keeps her cool in front of Evulz.
- Enforced: "Everybody knows how badass Alice is. What better way to prove Evulz is a threat than to have him scare even her?"
- Lampshaded: "Oh no. Alice is scared. This can NOT be good."
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Alice refuses to give in to fear and heads on to fight Evulz.
- Implied: Once the plot reaches its Darkest Hour, we have a shot of everybody in the team sitting together in a room looking like hell, Alice nowhere in sight, and someone crying very loudly in the background. That someone sounds like Alice…
- Discussed: "Maybe I should huddle in the corner of the room and start crying to sell how much of a threat he is."
- Conversed: "When the villain is really strong, the badass is always shown to be very terrified of them."
- Deconstructed: Alice was The Reliable One in her team, and the rest always saw her as a role model. When she breaks down, everyone's morale does too, and Evulz has no problem winning. After this bitter defeat, no one in the party dares to rely on Alice, in fear that she might let them down again.
- Reconstructed: The team learned to rely on themselves and have a few strings of victories along the way. This inspired Alice enough to regain her confidence. It took some time but she manage to rebuild her bond with her crew and both sides develop into a Family of Choice relationship rather than through blind dependency.
- Played For Laughs: Alice looks like an unstoppable badass, until she runs into her Absurd Phobia… a particularly huge dose of it.
- Played For Drama: Alice discovers that her father has recently died. She spends the rest of the episode visibly trying to keep her mourning from turning her into The Millstone.
- Played For Horror: Evulz captured Alice and tortured her to an utterly inhuman degree for a very long time (murdering of loved ones in front of her, lopping off of limbs, exposure to Things Man Was Not Meant to Know and rape were part of the list). When the rest of her team arrive to rescue her, the barely-identifiable-as-human (let alone as Alice) Talkative Loon they encounter almost makes them reach for a gun to put her out of her misery with very visible terror in their faces.
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