Basic Trope: A person, usually a ruling figure, seeks to eliminate poverty by killing off those who are poor.
- Straight: President Bob plots a "War on Poverty" that consists of rounding up all of the people below the poverty line in Tropeland and executing them.
- Exaggerated:
- President Bob not only seeks to kill all poor people in his nation, but tries to erase them from history too.
- Bob expands his scope to target everyone in the world who falls below the poverty line.
- Bob wants to kill everyone but the Fiction 500 and Aristocrats.
- Downplayed:
- President Bob has all homeless people in Tropeland arrested and used for prison labor.
- Bob encourages poor people to commit suicide or refuse life-saving medical aid to them.
- Bob cuts services that would help poor people in the hopes that they just die off on their own.
- Justified:
- The homeless of Tropeland are revealed to be plotting a rebellion against President Bob, so Bob announces this plan to protect his presidency.
- A severe food shortage strikes Tropeland and President Bob decides to reduce the number of mouths to feed in his nation.
- As a child, Bob's brother was killed in a riot/gang war. Bob carried a grudge against the poor to adulthood.
- The homeless are suffering intensely due to the greed of other Corrupt Corporate Executives; what Bob is doing is meant to be a Mercy Kill.
- The poor people continued to slander and oppose Bob simply because they think rich people are evil, no exceptions, even if Bob has been a just ruler who wanted to improve their lot. The continuous antagonism started causing unnecessary deaths of the rich and other poors alike. Eventually, Bob snapped and became the poor people-killer they thought him as.
- Inverted:
- President Bob plans to have the entire wealthiest rung of Tropeland executed. He may or may not use them as a food source.
- Or the ordinary people of Tropeland, sick of their impoverishment, overthrow President Bob in a revolution, having him and his rich backers executed. (This being a revolution, they aren't picky about which rich people they target either; they're all as bad as each other, right?)
- When Dirty Communists attack a country, they only spare the destitute poor, believing them and only them to be innocent.
- President Bob's plan is to make rich people immortal. The poor will die, of course, but that is up to Father Time, not Bob's own actions.
- President Bob seeks to "Remove Poverty", which essentially means to make the standard of living rise so high that living poor in Tropeland is essentially living like a king in Ruritania, Qurac, Bulungi, and the Banana Republic.
- Subverted:
- President Bob announces his plan to kill off the poorest citizens of Tropeland ... but it was merely a scare tactic to keep them from rebelling against him.
- When Bob announces his plan to "kill poverty", many suspect it's this, but it's actually a perfectly normal social services plan.
- Double Subverted:
- President Bob made that public announcement to draw suspicion away from himself while his Secret Police begin murdering homeless people across the country.
- ..That is a front for killing the poor.
- Parodied: President Bob is running for office, meets a poor Tropelander, and tells them, "Don't vote for me, because I plan to kill you."
- Zig-Zagged: Bob's plan is to kill some poor people, ignore other poor people, and help yet other poor people.
- Averted: President Bob approaches the problem of poverty in his country without resorting to murder or criminalization of poverty.
- Enforced: One of the writer's financial backers is a political organization, and they insist on adding the theme of class warfare into the story through this trope.
- Lampshaded:Bob: But it sure makes dollars!
- Invoked: President Bob announces this plan to further his Zero-Approval Gambit.
- Exploited: Queen Alice knows about Bob's schemes and works to stop him — not because of altruism but from sheer cynicism. She rallies her own generals, enlists her own previously problematic underclass, and even gets the useful but troublesome intellectuals to support her efforts out of sheer compassion. She invades Tropeland, supports and arms the underclass, and ends up deposing Bob. Before Bob's execution she denounces him as an evil fool who never saw the greatest resource of his country, the people. However, she took much of the wealth of Tropeland, both directly through soldiers guarding the treasury and indirectly by selling pardons and titles to looters looking to keep their own skin. She provides support with the stolen wealth and announces to withdrawing after the next good harvest comes in but the people beg to become a part of her kingdom. In the end she gains a whole country without a troublesome occupation, solidifies her own dynasty's position, and has even dramatically weakened republican movements by leaving President Bob as an example of what happens when the people try to rule themselves. Many malcontents in her country, meanwhile, died fighting Bob, a more egregious villain. The remainder are largely content now for various reasons. That is how you deal with troublesome poor: give them high-risk, high-reward opportunities to improve themselves. All just as planned.
- Defied:
- President Bob actively refuses to resort to having the poor executed, even during a situation that would tempt him to do it (such as a nationwide food shortage).
- President Bob is a President Evil who has done plenty of horrible things and is very cruel towards the poor, but he draws the line at systematically killing the poor.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed:
- President Bob tries to have his secret police execute the poor, but he majorly underestimates their will to survive and doesn't see their guerrilla tactics coming. Even if they win (and that is no guarantee), Bob's secret police suffer serious casualties as a result.
- President Bob's announcement to Kill the Poor destroys his approval rating. Even rich people are not willing to support his decision. He is decisively voted out of office in the next election ... or he resigns or gets impeached or recalled and removed from office first.
- King Bob lets his hatred of the lower classes get the better of him. This results in the complete destruction of his kingdom as he now lacks the labor force he needs. He ends up starving to death surrounded by gold.
- Played for Laughs:
- The declaration of literal war on poverty segues into an utterly absurd reenactment of the most strange/awesome events in warfare history with the rich as the bad guys and the poor as the good guys, such as an assault on the Hamptons that directly borrows from Operation Overlord or a plan to turn the Trumplica in charge of the rich faction into a poor person by infecting him with poor people essence
. - The literal war between the rich and the poor is a Funny Background Event in the story of a bunch of middle-class people who wisely refuse to be dragged into that mess.
- The rich people are destroyed by a The War of the Worlds (1898)-style Deus ex Machina of "poor people germs".
- The declaration of literal war on poverty segues into an utterly absurd reenactment of the most strange/awesome events in warfare history with the rich as the bad guys and the poor as the good guys, such as an assault on the Hamptons that directly borrows from Operation Overlord or a plan to turn the Trumplica in charge of the rich faction into a poor person by infecting him with poor people essence
- Played for Drama: The story focuses on Bob's Token Good Teammate, his advisor Bill, and his feelings of guilt that he couldn't stop Bob.
- Played for Horror:
- Bob's army made Carol and Charlie see them kill all their friends, relatives, neighbours, and pets. Now they'll have nightmares for the rest of their lives.
- The poor people of Tropeland suffer Cruel and Unusual Deaths.
- Implied: When a poor person enters a welfare services office, they never come back.
Go back to Kill the Poor, where all examples below the poverty line will be executed.
