Basic Trope: The attack killed someone other than its intended target instead.
- Straight: Alice drops a heavy stone from a roof, meaning to hit Bob on the head fatally, but accidentally hits and kills Charlie instead.
- Exaggerated: Alice drops a bomb from a very high roof, meaning to kill Bob, but the bomb explodes and kills many other unintended victims instead.
- Downplayed: Misplaced Retribution; Alice stands on a ladder and drops a water balloon, meaning to drench Bob, but accidentally drenches Charlie instead.
- Justified:
- Alice mistook Charlie for Bob, perhaps because she did not have a clear view of his face.
- Charlie noticed that Bob was standing underneath the stone and pushed him out of the way, getting hit instead.
- Alice fumbled the stone and sent it falling off its intended course.
- Inverted: Alice kills Charlie intentionally, then covers up to make it look like Murder by Mistake. She may even make herself look like the intended victim.
- Subverted: Alice sees who she thinks is Bob, drops the stone, but it is Charlie after all. Luckily for her, she missed, and the real Bob walks underneath the path of the stone.
- Double Subverted: ...but it bounces off a wall and hits Charlie after all.
- Parodied: Alice drops a stone to kill Bob, but the stone magically teleports to directly above another victim.
- Zig-Zagged: Several murders take place, and Detective Dave is baffled by the way they don't add up—until he discovers that Alice has poor eyesight, and two of the victims were mistaken for people she actually wanted to kill.
- Averted:
- Alice commits a straightforward murder and kills her intended target.
- Alice makes no attempt to kill anyone.
- Enforced: "How are we going to kill Charlie? He doesn't have an enemy in the world." "I know! Let's have Alice accidentally kill him instead of Bob."
- Lampshaded:
- "So all along, Alice simply got the wrong man!"
- "Dammit, Bob, you moved!"
- Invoked: Bob himself wants to do away with Charlie, and knows of Alice's intention to kill him. He sets Charlie up to resemble him or be mistaken for him, and leaves him for Alice to deal with him.
- Exploited: Bob uses Alice's misdirected murder as evidence to convict her or blackmail her.
- Defied: "I am going to make sure I know what Bob looks like, so I don't kill anyone else by mistake!"
- Discussed: "He didn't have an enemy in the world! He can't have been the intended victim..."
- Conversed: "Why didn't Alice check to make sure her victim really was Bob?"
- Plotted a Good Waste: The writer has always averted, inverted, or subverted Murder by Mistake in the past, and decides to play it straight for once in order to startle his or her readers.
- Deconstructed: Alice's misdirected murder of Charlie leads people to question what kind of person would be brazen enough to plot a perfect crime and yet make an absurd mistake of falsely identifying and killing the wrong victim.
- Reconstructed: ...but this in turn brings up an interesting look at Alice's weaknesses, or a tragic backstory that made her vision impaired, or alternatively, an uncanny resemblance between Bob and Charlie that leads to a Separated at Birth backstory.
- Untwisted: Alice says, "You're history, Bob," and then drops the stone. The shadow appears on Bob, but the stone hits Charlie instead.
- Implied: A death is reported in the news. Alice watches, simply saying, "But that wasn't Bob."
Back to Murder by Mistake
