Basic Trope: A character pretends to be dead.
- Straight: Bob jumps off a high bridge into the river below. Everyone assumes he died on impact, so he goes on living under a false identity.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob has many different identities, and has disposed of them with various methods such as murder, suicide, accident, and medical complications.
- Bob arranges to receive numerous un-survivable injuries before witnesses and be carted off to a morgue, being fully aware that he will regain consciousness at a point where he can sneak out.
- Downplayed:
- Bob lures his friends to a surprise party by pretending it is a funeral.
- Bob leaves town after recovering from a heart attack, letting everyone come to the wrong conclusion after he was last seen being carted off in an ambulance.
- Justified: Bob's enemies want him dead, and won't stop until they succeed. Bob must convince them they have accomplished such a task to get them to back off.
- Inverted: Charlie impersonates Bob, to convince people that he is still alive.
- Subverted:
- Bob is assumed to be up to his tricks, but he turns up dead for real.
- Bob returns after his apparent death, but turns out to be an impostor.
- Double Subverted:
- The corpse turns out to be a fake.
- Bob hired the imposter to convince his friend and family that he is dead for real.
- Parodied: Bob points his finger at his head and yells bang. Everyone reacts as if he killed himself for real.
- Zig-Zagged: Bob seems to die, but then turns up alive. But he explains he actually did die, only to be resurrected in secret and continued to fake his death until this moment.
- Averted:
- Bob doesn't fake his own death.
- Bob really is dead.
- Enforced: Killing off Bob made the fans mad, so the producers reveal he never was dead.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: Charlie kidnaps Bob and pretends to kill him, so that everyone will be looking for a corpse and won't suspect he was kidnapped.
- Exploited: Charlie kills Bob and pretends it was an accident, knowing that Bob had arranged such an accident himself.
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: "Is Bob really dead, we never saw his body".
- Deconstructed: Bob's 'death' is so convincing that he's Buried Alive.
- Reconstructed: Bob anticipated this possibility, so he while in the morgue, he switched himself out with the corpse of a homeless doppelgänger brought in by his accomplice.
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