Basic Trope: Inducing paranoia on someone through promises/implications of retribution.
- Straight: Bob tells Alice he'll play a practical joke on her sometime during the next day. He periodically wanders past Alice and does something like chuckle mischievously or make a Suspiciously Specific Denial. Alice drives herself crazy trying to avoid and/or figure out whatever Bob's promised prank is.
- Exaggerated: Bob tells Alice he'll play a practical joke on her sometime when he feels like it. Alice spends years in suspicion of everything Bob does in case it's the promised prank.
- Downplayed: Bob promises to get back at Alice within an hour and makes do on that promise.
- Justified:
- Bob is a Guile Hero and prefers tricking people to doing something to them.
- Bob honestly believes that living well is the best revenge. If Alice drives herself nuts thinking he will hurt her, that's her problem, not his.
- Inverted: Alice thinks that Bob's forgiveness for her prank means she is off the hook. His plan for revenge depends on her believing this.
- Subverted:
- Bob tells Alice he'll play a practical joke on her sometime during the next day and walks away, chuckling...and then grabs the hose off the wall and sprays her.
- Bob tells Alice he'll play a practical joke on her sometime during the next day. Alice is at first worried...but by the next day she already forgot Bob was supposed to pull a prank and all those times he was chuckling while walking by were lost on her. Rendering the gambit a failure.
- Double Subverted:
- However, he tells Alice that wasn't the prank; that was merely an impulse.
- Because Alice is too much of an idiot for a conventional paranoia gambit to work, Bob does a very small and harmless practical joke like a whoopee cushion the day he said he would, reminds Alice that he said he would do it, and then falsely promises he will perform a worse gag at some time during the day. That makes Alice nervous.
- Zigzagged: ???
- Parodied: ???
- Averted: ???
- Enforced: The writers want Alice to cause all kinds of mayhem by trying to forestall the event or appease Bob to call it off.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: Charlie tells Bob to only pretend like he's going to pull a prank on Alice, because Charlie also hates Alice and he'd love to see her get some comeuppance for causing mayhem.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied:
- Alice attacks Bob at the first possible second. "The HELL am I gonna wait!"
- Alice attacks Bob at the first possible second, implementing all the necessary brutality to prevent any possible future counterattacks. "You should not have tried to drive me crazy."
- "This was a nice joke, Alice. I'm not going to strike back. I don't know what kind of oaths I would need to take in order for you to believe me, but I'd be glad to do so just to prevent you from acting like I'm going to fuck you over every day for the rest of our lives."
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Alice performs a variety of brutal actions that she sees as proper escalation to prevent whatever she thinks Bob will do to her, eventually, and the collateral damage is such that Alice is given the third degree. Bob could have prevented this by just doing something other than playing with her paranoia, but he just had to try to play clever, didn't he?
- Reconstructed:
- Of course, Bob feels no remorse. It all played out beautifully. Besides, Alice deserved to be tortured for trying to make a fool of him.
- Bob decides to bide his time building up resources so next time he tries to pull this on Alice, he will be threatening enough that Alice will have genuine fear of his wrath and thus she will be glad he only chose to use a whoopee cushion.
- Bob decides to re-evaluate when this kind of plot is useful: good for prank wars, bad for actual threats. With this new understanding, Bob then goes on to become the local prank king with this kind of gambit being his signature card.
Here, take this link back to the main page. I promise I didn't do anything to it.
