Basic Trope: Someone restricts access to money that another character needs.
- Straight:
- Alice has earned lots of money in her music career, however, her parents take all but a nominal $100 a month from her to use for themselves.
- Whenever Alice makes a mistake in front of her parents, they threaten to remove her from their will to keep her in line.
- Exaggerated: Alice, despite earning every penny herself, never so much as sees one penny she's earned. Meanwhile, her parents have just bought themselves two new luxury cars and a vacation home in Tahiti.
- Downplayed: Alice has earned lots of money in her music career, but the rest of her immediate family is mostly unemployed. After the rent is paid for, bills and food, there is usually money left over, part of which is begged away by her family and spent on things ranging from new clothes to interview in to a tattoo because it "looked cool".
- Justified:
- Alice has proven too irresponsible in the past to handle money; her parents restrict her access to it in an attempt to teach her fiscal responsibility.
- The money is going towards something for Alice, such as a new car or a college fund or a wedding, something she doesn't have yet but will have in the future.
- Alice's family is impoverished. While she's still a dependent, her job pays only a little less well than her parents' and makes a vital part of their overall income. Until she gets a job that pays enough for her to support herself independently, the family simply cannot afford for her to keep her money and eat their food.
- Alice's family are completely unaware that they have taken things too far. At first they were simply taking some money from her earnings because they felt they needed it for some reason, and they got so used to doing it that they started to put more restrictions as Alice's career bloomed, unaware of how much they were restricting her.
- Alice's family doesn't know what a healthy relationship looks like so they're simply continuing the cycle of abuse thinking that's how money is supposed to be managed.
- Inverted: Alice's rich parents gives her 10 credit cards with no credit limit, which she uses to buy the most expensive junks she can find.
- Subverted: Most of the money taken by Alice's parents is to save up for her college tuition fee. And since her parents still pay for her living expenses, she really doesn't need more than $100 month to survive and entertain herself.
- Double Subverted: Alice's parents refuse to give her more than $100 even after Alice is old enough to move out, and will need more money to purchase her own food and pay rent.
- Parodied: Alice wears rags and lives outside her parents' mansion in a cardboard box, picking through their garbage for tiny scraps of food.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted:
- Alice is allowed to keep most or all of her earnings.
- Alice does not earn any money.
- Enforced: The writer is making a character who is both famous enough to be an idol, but at the same time poor enough to connect with the rest of the normal folks.
- Lampshaded: "Alice, has it ever occurred to you that your fame means you should be the one who can crash a sports car and not care, not your parents?"
- Invoked: Alice earns lots of money, and her parents worry about her losing it all.
- Exploited: Alice keeps letting them do it, eventually getting to the point where she can legally sue them for preventing her from having the money she needs.
- Defied:
- Alice's parents let her have all her money. If she makes mistakes with it, they want her to learn from them.
- Alice knows her parents want to severely restrict her access to money, so she sets up a secret bank account and has all her earnings paid into it.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Implied:
- Alice occasionally throws fancy parties for her friends, gets unlikely funding for events from her parents, and has quite a few nice things, however she and the rest of her friends always ration their money, although she occasionally gets free things and will point out different songs she made.
- Alice should have a lot of money from her music career, but can barely afford to pay the rent. Her parents, however, are quite wealthy.
- Deconstructed: Alice will never learn financial responsibility if she has no money to spend or save.
- Reconstructed: Alice's parents realize that rather than just teaching, they are actively pushing her to poverty due to how much they withhold, and start to work out another system to help Alice not spend her money.
- Plotted A Good Waste: Alice's big break has finally arrived. She can move out on her own with her boyfriend she's been with since before she started singing, and have the responsibility she wants. Then she finds out her parents have removed most of the money she had built up preventing her from moving out, meaning that after years of trying she still can't move in with her boyfriend.
- Played For Laughs: Some uses of the Credit Card Plot and Ms. Red Ink.
- Played For Drama: Alice is married to an abusive husband, and his control of the money is yet another obstacle she must face in the Lifetime Movie of the Week.
Back to Financial Abuse.
