Basic Trope: Doing good deeds is a pleasant experience.
- Straight: Alice realizes that being kind and generous to everyone makes her feel good.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice doing good deeds on a daily basis not only makes her feel good, but makes her strong.
- Incorruptible Pure Pureness
- Downplayed: Alice was satisfied in helping her friends, but it wasn't because she had done good.
- Justified:
- Alice had experience someone being kind to her, and she thought she about doing the same to others.
- Alice is The Empath. Her good feelings come directly from those around her, and she wants to keep that up.
- Alice is simply a Nice Girl who likes helping people.
- Inverted:
- Subverted: When asked what she felt towards helping others, Alice said that it felt weird.
- Double Subverted: But she then said she liked the feeling.
- Parodied:
- Alice only did good when she was being clumsy. Even then, she enjoyed seeing that others are happy.
- Alice is literally addicted to the good feeling that comes with doing good, to the point that she goes through visually noticable withdrawal symptoms if she hasn't done a good deed recently enough.
- Zig Zagged: Alice is The Empath and frequently helps people, but doesn't feel any intrinsic pleasure in good deeds. She feels other people's intrinsic pleasure when she does good deeds. Then she stops doing good deeds because she can feel good by being around other people who do good deeds, but doing them herself feels better because the feelings are directed at her. Except when people don't want to be helped, and she feels their negative emotions instead. So she only seeks people who want help.
- Averted: Nothing is said about good feeling good or difficult.
- Enforced: The author thinks "do good, feel good" is a positive message.
- Lampshaded: "It never occurred to me before that doing good feels good. After all, I enjoyed being evil myself."
- Invoked: The hero tries to get the villain to see that doing good brings happiness to themself as well as others.
- Exploited: After decades of being evil, the villain tries being good, because he had realized that being good will feel just as satisfying as being evil.
- Defied: The villain is afraid of doing something good because he's afraid he might enjoy it.
- Discussed: "I wonder when he'll realize that helping those in need feels uplifting."
- Conversed: "If only my favorite TV villain would realize doing good things feels nice. That way, he can use his brains to actually help others instead of making them miserable."
- Deconstructed:
- Alice does so many acts of kindness that others have taken advantage of her kindness.
- Alice is doing good things because she feels good after doing them, not because they benefit the people she's doing them for. As a result, she comes off as callous and self-righteous, even if she is truly helping people. And that's before she runs into cases where her idea of "doing good" is wildly different from what the people she's helping actually want.
- Alice has been burden by having to keep a terrible secret for years; she eventually decides to come clean because it is the "right" and "honest" thing to do, she does feel better afterwards for getting it off her chest. The problem is her secret protected quite a few people from learning an Awful Truth, and they are left emotionally devastated by it getting out.
- Reconstructed:
- Bob, who was one of those that took advantage of Alice, sees that Alice still commits acts of kindness even after he took advantage of her. He wonders why Alice would continue to do so until he does one for himself. "Is this what doing good feels like? It feels...nice."
- Alice realizes that doing good solely for "good feels" makes her callous and self-righteous, so she corrects her errors by actually doing good for the benefit of others rather than for her own ego. If people have different forms of doing good, Alice learns to understand the people she is trying to help and/or if they want her help in the first place. In the end, even if doing good has its costs, Alice's actions not only made positive impacts for others, they inspire people to help one and another.
- Implied: Alice seems happier after her Heel–Face Turn, but she never outright says why.
Back to Good Feels Good. It feels nice to help out the unabridged version, doesn't it?
