Basic Trope: A solitary character whose efficiency is limited because of the lack of friends.
- Straight: Alice is a loner who is capable in fighting, but her effectiveness is limited because she doesn't have friends.
- Exaggerated: Alice is the most badass character in the series, but is rather vulnerable in the biggest battles because she always does things alone.
- Downplayed: Alice would've been an even stronger fighter if she actually led others to help her.
- Justified:
- Alice really isn't strong without the support of friends, but is too stubborn to have them help her.
- Alice used to accept the help of others, but they abandoned her when things went badly.
- Inverted:
- A character is empowered because of her companionship with her teammates.
- Alice is mostly inefficient because of her friends.
- Alice is a force to be reckoned with because of her solitary nature.
- Alice is stronger than all of her peers, but struggles to find friends or teammates to work with and suffers from loneliness.
- Subverted: Alice looks like she's this way for most of her introduction, but at the end, we find out she belongs to a team already.
- Double Subverted: A team made up of other Ineffectual Loners who engage in Teeth-Clenched Teamwork and run off to do their own things as often as possible.
- Parodied: ???
- Zig Zagged: Alice loses in fights due to inevitably being outnumbered. However she excels in stealth as she leaves no trace and is self-reliant enough that attempts to track her down by things like going for food fails. She is a decent assassin but only if she can get away cleanly afterwards.
- Averted: Alice is averagely skilled regardless of whether or not she's alone.
- Enforced: The author wants to create Alice as a loner for the sake of teaching viewers about teamwork and friendship.
- Lampshaded: "Need any help, Alice? You know you could use it."
- Invoked: The Big Bad deliberately isolates Alice from her friends to defeat her.
- Exploited: Alice's ineffectiveness in battle due to her being a loner is used as a cautionary tale that The Mentor Albert imparts towards young cadets in training, in order to encourage teamwork and dissuade standoffish "I Work Alone" behaviour.
- Defied: Alice saves the day without the help of her friends.
- Discussed: "Alice seems to be blind to the fact that she's getting curb-stomped left and right when she's on her lonesome, while the only time she's ever won a battle is by joining The Team." "Well, it'd take a long while for her to learn, I suppose."
- Conversed: "You think she were to join the heroes and stop relying too much on herself by now?" "From how this show is one of those 'friendship is cool' shows, she's gonna join them because the plot says so."
- Deconstructed:
- Alice doesn't work alone because she rejects friendship, she works alone because all of her potential friends bullied, rejected, and tried to kill her. When The Hero condemns her for not relying on The Power of Friendship, it comes off less as rebuking her for not letting others in and more as victim-blaming her for being a loser who nobody loves.
- Alice's ineffectiveness as a loner only applies to combat, due to absence of numerical advantage. Otherwise, it's not problematic. During non-combat related situations, Alice proves to be a happier person because she is an introvert who enjoys the peace and quiet provided by solitude. To her, being a loner is a preference, a lifestyle, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Back to Ineffectual Loner.
