Playing With / Combat Pragmatist

Basic Trope: A character who is defined by their willingness to do anything in a fight to win, even sometimes using underhanded or unfair tactics.

• Straight: Karen challenges Alice to a sword fight. Alice responds by pulling out a gun and shooting Karen instead.
• Exaggerated:
  • Alice is challenged to a boxing match by Karen. Instead of showing up at the ring, she uses some tactically-placed pipe bombs to blow up the support columns beneath the gym, thus demolishing the entire building with Karen inside it.
  • Karen sends Alice a challenge card as per the traditional rules of combat of their circle saying that the loser of their match will have to leave town. Alice sends Karen a message of her own showing that she took Karen's husband, kids, parents and pets hostage with the words: "Too busy to fight you now. Start packing."
  • You know how there's the saying "Playing Dirty" with a standard Combat Pragmatist? Then there's the saying "Playing like The Pig-Pen" with Alice. Weapons, Groin Attacks, biting, and basically turning the fight into a No-Holds-Barred Contest.
  • No-Nonsense Nemesis: Karen and the rest of the dueling circle figure out Alice is not going to abide by duelist etiquette when they feel the .50 BMG bullets begin to penetrate their skulls.
• Downplayed:
  • Alice engages in a sword fight with Karen but during the fight, she grabs a rock from off the ground and throws it at Karen to avoid being skewered.
  • Karen asked for a fist fight. Alice, who is her perfect equal in the field of brawling, brings brass knuckles.
  • Alice brings a gun to a swordfight, but it's purely so she can parley Karen into leaving her alone.
• Justified:
  • Alice needs to hurry for whatever reason and has no time to waste in a prolonged sword fight.
  • Karen is tougher, more driven, and a much better swordswoman than Alice and she doesn't want to be killed.
  • Alice is a soldier in a war and doesn't have time to fight with honor.
  • Karen has a history of not following dueling rules. Alice doesn't expect her to act any better this time, and has planned accordingly.
  • Alice is a firm believer that rules, be it for combat or society as a whole, are just a bunch of words written and followed by suckers.
  • By coercing Alice into a sword fight, Karen herself is fighting dirty.
• Inverted:
  • Alice purposefully handicaps herself in the fight against Karen "to make it fair".
  • Karen decides not to play fair and shoots Alice. Big Bad Dahlia, who sees Alice as a Worthy Opponent, has Karen killed and apologizes to Alice for her Dragon's lack of dueling etiquette.
  • No Challenge Equals No Satisfaction
  • Fair-Play Villain
  • Simple Solution Won't Work, with this trope being the "simple solution" in question.
• Subverted:
  • Alice pulls her gun and tosses it aside in order to fight Karen fairly in a swordfight.
  • Alice instantly tries to use her gun at the beginning of the fight but Karen manages to charge into melee range faster than she can draw (or is Made of Iron and is able to shrug off the gunshot), forcing Alice to fight her off with her own sword (or run around trying not to get stabbed) while she thinks a new strategy.
• Double Subverted:
  • During the fight, she gets knocked down and, seeing that she is about to be killed, grabs the gun and shoots Karen.
  • Alice manages to "think of a new strategy"... reload and give Karen a Moe Greene Special.
• Parodied:
  • Alice surprises Karen by pulling the gun on her bragging about how stupid she was for using a sword against a gun. But she is a lousy shot, enabling Karen to easily avoid her firing (through Nonchalant Dodge no less) and then slash her down.
  • Alice’s tactics fall under the definition of "combat pragmatism" but they are just plain overkill to a degree that Crosses the Line Twice, such as wiring enough high explosives to the supports of Karen's gym that instead of falling down, the whole building launches straight up into orbit a la Knighty Knight Bugs.
  • Alice is single-handedly responsible of a variation of the Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG, an already Long List of absurd methods for breaking the rules of combat of her circle that only gets longer and more stupid by the hour ("#2475: It is not allowed to slap challengers with red herrings. #2476: Nor is it allowed to slap challengers with trouts. #2477 Revision 35: It is not allowed to slap challengers with life form from the seas (including dolphins and plankton).")
• Zig Zagged:
  • Alice will fight fair until she's losing, then go for whatever dirty trick that will put her on top. Then she'll fight fair again unless it's taking too long, at which point she'll use the necessary tactics to end the fight quickly.
  • In a friendly sparring match or an official competition, Alice will fight fair. If she's in mortal danger, however, she'll fight as dirty as necessary.
• Averted: Let's Fight Like Gentlemen.
• Enforced: The writers originally wanted Alice and Karen to have a long, drawn out, climactic sword duel, but due to time and/or budget restrictions, they replaced it with a much shorter scene where Alice just shoots Karen.
• Lampshaded:
  • "I'm not about the rules, I'm about efficiency. I will "follow the rules" when the rules don't impede me getting the job done."
  • "Since when has being a paragon of honor ever worked out for anyone?"
  • "Well, Bob, congratulations on teaching Alice 'how to win'. She is gonna spend the rest of her career paying hospital stays with her fight purses, but nobody is gonna deny the fact she wins."
  • "You cheated!" "You challenged me to a fight. You let me have the first punch. I knocked you out with that punch. I won." "Do not give me that 'in a real battle there are no rules' crap! It was a proper challenge, in a boxing ring, with a referee, with rules that we agreed on four days earlier! I punch you, you punch me, with heads and hands protected, no hits below the belt, first one to fall loses! Blinding me with sulfuric acid is cheating! Using brass knuckles inside the gloves is cheating! Kicking me in the face after you knocked me down is cheating!" "You were knocked out by then; the latter would be Unsportsmanlike Gloating." "So now you wanna argue what part of that is sportsmanlike?"
• Invoked:
  • Alice brings a gun to the sword fight, knowing Karen would be too honest to have one herself.
  • The Big Good hired Alice to defeat Karen, knowing she'll be more likely to shoot her and get it over with, unlike more honorable heroes.
  • "Karen, you know how much of a bitch I am when I fight. Please don't make me."
• Exploited: Combat pragmatists are gathered in a spec-ops team send into dangerous missions where their pragmatic approach to fighting will give them the edge.
• Defied:
  • Karen realizes Alice would likely pull a gun so she wore a bulletproof vest, forcing her to fight more fairly.
  • Alice for once brought a sword just like Karen did - under the knowledge that once she starts ignoring the rules, others would follow suit, and she would have a difficult time dealing with other opponents in the long run.
  • Karen asks Jane to get Alice's children and stand by the sidelines with a shotgun to their head and then tells Alice that if she so much as thinks of playing dirty, Jane will kill the kids one by one as a "penalty" each time she breaks the rules.
  • Alice decides it's too much of a chore to think outside the box, so she doesn't.
  • The enemy is [too good and denies Alice any and all options she could take that are not eating dirt before she can even think of them.
• Discussed: "Alice might not fight fair but at least she gets the job done."
• Conversed:
  • Two characters watch the scene play out in a movie and discuss how practical Alice is.
  • "Of course Bob would say something like [imitating Bob's baritone] 'I'm not going to teach [Alice] how to duel, I'm going to teach you how to win' and then tell her how to leave herself open to an assault charge."
• Implied:
  • "Bring a sword to a sword fight if you must but I've always preferred bringing guns."
  • The Movie Buff comic relief discusses what makes a proper No-Nonsense Nemesis while the camera focuses on Alice checking her gun's load.
• Deconstructed:
  • Alice's way of fighting is seen as dirty: she quickly gains a bad reputation as a weakling and/or Dirty Coward for not fighting with strength, skill, or honor. Worse yet, because of this thinking, whenever the enemy finds out that they are fighting her they end up doing the complete opposite of what Alice was trying to cause with her tactics and instead decide to escalate and utilize methods they usually wouldn't deploy, deciding that her destruction is worth any price.
  • Alice's decision to stick to "unfair" tactics ends up with her devolving into Crippling Overspecialization, so every time she's unable to utilize them, she is inevitably screwed.
  • Soon as Alice shoots Karen during their sword duel, Karen smiles a bloody smile and orders her goons in the crowd to just stab, shoot and bludgeon Alice to death all at once, which they proceed to attempt.
  • Alice and Karen are participating in what is supposed to be an honorable contest for sport. Alice's actions show she has no respect for the contest or her opponent and only cares about victory at any cost.
  • Even trickery in combat is a field in which there is Always Someone Better and Alice will run into that better trickster sooner or later.
• Reconstructed:
  • Because of her reputation of winning fights by "cheating", most enemies are hesitant to mess with her.
  • Alice learns how to actually fight. That way, she now knows and can exploit even more flaws in her opponents fighting styles than before, alongside being able to put up a tough fight even if she's unable to use her usual tactics.
  • Karen discovers that Alice also expected her pragmatism to backfire on her some time and not only had a countermeasure in place for that, but she used herself as bait. Talk about "turning your weakness into a strength".
  • Alice and Karen later fight in an actual war, where Alice's desire to win no matter what is more appropriate.
  • Alice is the Deliberately Bad Example to Wynonna, who is a Lawful Stupid Stock Shōnen Hero but gets things done in the long term because she creates pacts between factions while Alice's murders and humiliations only reinforce the Cycle of Revenge.
• Played For Laughs:
  • Karen pulls a sword and does a lot of flynning. Alice shrugs, pulls a gun, and shoots her.
  • Karen challenges Alice to a sparring match. Knowing that she can't win, Alice double-punches Karen right in the boobs instead.
  • The episode spends twenty-nine minutes and fifty seconds following the summoning of the ghost of Bob Mann, the greatest warrior who ever lived, and convincing him to go hurt Alice, who works for the IRS… followed by ten seconds of Alice destroying Bob by tossing a cupful of hot coffee to his face and hitting him with a folding chair before going back to eating her lunch.
  • Karen uses absurd improvised weaponry to get one over her enemy and has to defend her decisions through Exact Words discussions ("I was told not to bring any weapons. A swordfish is not a weapon." "You stabbed Bob through the heart!" "How the heck was I to know that swordfish points could stab through nine-inch-thick titanium plating?" "Kingdom of New Connecticut swordfish can!" "Come on, are you gonna pull that Monty Python crap on me, "the speed of an unweighted swallow from the so-and-so"?" "You used a swallow to airmail a grenade to Steve last week!" "And I didn't factored that kind of crap into my plan because it's got to be one of the stupidest things you could factor into a plan!" "You said the stupid swallow had accidentally taken the grenade!" "Ok, I confess to the grenade, but I DEFINITELY was not expecting the damn swordfish to work!")
• Played For Drama:
  • Karen tries to kill Alice with a knife and nearly succeeds. In desperation, Alice grabs a gun and opens fire.
  • Alice's decision to utilize dirty tactics is displayed as a mark of her becoming increasingly jaded.
  • Alice ambushes Karen and her sister Jill in an attempt at get their rivalry over with. Unfortunately, not only does Karen manages to escape the ambush, Alice manages to kill Jill. The result: the beginning of a Cycle of Revenge that only keeps getting worse by Alice's continuous attempts at being pragmatic leading to more and more people wishing her dead and Karen keeping off escaping with an increasingly longer list of reasons to tear Alice apart.
  • Alice is on the wrong end of a "Screw the Rules, They Broke Them First!" situation. The way wrong end.
• Played For Horror: Alice's tactics are pragmatic but overtly callous and lead to massive collateral damage; the result is that Alice is branded a terrorist and she deserves the label.
• Plotted A Good Waste:
  • Alice is sold as a strong fighter because her drive to shoot first (oftentimes literally) borders on No-Nonsense Nemesis... and then she gets kicked out of the Tournament Arc because she jumped the gun and knocked out her opponent before the match officially started. The lesson to be learned is that there is one time and place for fighting "smart" and a different one for following every cliché in the fighting media book.
  • Alice is sold as the greatest strategist ever, who can figure out a hundred thousand ways to overcome her opponent with dirty tactics… and then General Killemall does short work of her by dropping a nuclear warhead on her general position. Or by quick-drawing on her Indiana Jones-style (while being indisposed by something he ate). Lesson being that sometimes superior enemies remain superior enemies and the only stratagem against them is to run like hell.

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