Basic Trope: A kidnapping victim is too much for the kidnappers to handle.
- Straight: Kidnapper Bob kidnaps Cheerful Child Alice. Unfortunately, Alice is a Cloud Cuckoolander of the type that people pay money to stay away from, and consequently drives Bob insane.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice is such a terror that the immediate response of everybody (her parents, her friends, the police officers, the reporters) at finding out she has been taken is to celebrate and tell the kidnapper that "You Can Keep Her!" (as for Bob ... "Mook Horror Show" doesn't even begin to describe what we see happening to him).
- After trying to take Alice hostage, Bob becomes Alice's hostage.
- Downplayed: Alice is simply a constant annoyance due to her skill, speech, or both but not the point of causing insanity or physical harm to Bob. She simply makes it harder to either keep her in captivity or for Bob to want to keep her in captivity.
- Justified:
- Alice has been fully certified to be a Cloud Cuckoolander by a psychologist — once she gets going, it literally takes death to make her stop, and it only gets worse if she's stressed.
- Alice is a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass — the "moron" part is intolerable, and the "badass" part is brutal.
- Alice is the luckiest woman alive and this is going to translate into "gremlins" ruining Bob's plan.
- It's the only weapon Alice has.
- Alice is part of a specific group (such as prison guards) who are considered expendable in the case of being taken hostage. Best-case scenario will still have someone trying a token effort to negotiate for Alice's life, but it's been legally acknowledged by Alice that she won't expect much more than that.
- Everyone Has Standards.
- Their plans depend upon Alice being alive and unharmed and Alice figures it out and proceeds to be spiteful as possible to literally suicidal levels.
- Alice is a Walking Disaster Area and being a hostage does nothing to remove this factor from play, it just gives it "worthy" targets.
- Alice is too hot of a target. Bob will not only see no profit, but he will be lucky if the thousand Colliding Criminal Conspiracies and the armies of righteousness that are out to get him don't catch him… alive.
- Inverted:
- The kidnappers are such a horrible example of the "Stupid Crooks" trope that Alice does anything to speed up the negotiation and get the hell away from them ASAP.
- In a case of Lima Syndrome, Bob finds himself genuinely enjoying Alice's company and not wanting to let her go at all.
- Bob creates a Monster Protection Racket with Alice being the "monster" in question.
- Subverted: Alice is an annoying hostage (to the point there are a couple of comedy sequences spread throughout the movie/episode), but aside from that it is no different from any other Hostage Situation in fiction-land.
- Double Subverted: Alice becomes more than a simple annoyance over time forcing Bob to lose or release her.
- Parodied: Bob takes Alice. Her family, acquaintances, friends, the police, the press and even the town mayor declare the event to be worth celebrating. Cue Gilligan Cut to the kidnapper looking out the window and asking why there's a Carnival rip-off going on outside.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice begins to pull the 'obnoxious captive' routine, and the kidnapper glares at her, before telling her calmly that she doesn't need her tongue to be an effective hostage, holding up a knife for emphasis. Alice shuts up. And then employs the fact she has asthma and escalates the coughing and wheezing she had been doing so far, annoying the kidnapper that way. Bob ends up slitting her throat just to remain sane. Bob is hailed as a hero, and doesn't like it.
- Averted:
- The idea of being annoying to the hostage taker never crosses Alice's mind — she is just that scared.
- The Hostage Situation is dealt with too fast for Alice to be able to annoy anybody.
- The kidnapping plan is carried to perfection and Alice's annoying attitude ever goes beyond the stage of 'occupational hazard'.
- Enforced: Executive Meddling refuses to allow a Hostage Situation episode into their series unless it's a full-blown comedy. Exploiting the fact that one of the characters on the cast is incredibly annoying, the writers pitch the idea of her being the one who is taken and her deciding to weaponize her annoying traits.
- Lampshaded: "He took Alice!" "Oh, that poor man!"
- Implied:
- Alice has been kidnapped and Bob, who takes the call listing the kidnapper's demands, can't keep himself from snickering and grinning for some reason.
- After Bob kidnaps her, Alice is mysteriously released, and Bob seems to be in a very bad mood.
- Invoked: The kidnapped person decides to annoy or unnerve the kidnapper in the hopes that he will either let her go or at least she will appear (in some way) Defiant to the End.
- Exploited:
- After a while of enduring the horrors of being around Alice for any extended period of time, the kidnapper determines that the best way to make use of having Alice is to threaten other people that he will unleash her unto them if they don't pay up.
- Bob is hailed as a hero for taking Alice, and does not like it at first — but then he realizes he can take advantage of it.
- Defied:
- The kidnapper puts his foot down and asserts his role as the threat on this scenario and that he will not tolerate any foolishness (e.g., by punching Alice so hard he breaks her jaw, with her parents on the phone so he can showcase that he Would Hurt a Child ... or by killing another hostage in front of her as "an example"). The event becomes a regular Hostage Situation.
- Alice had a plan to be the most annoying hostage ever, but the kidnapper knocks her out and she remains knocked out (or is Bound and Gagged) for the duration.
- Alice is killed shortly after being kidnapped. If the kidnappers still try to undergo negotiations, it's obvious they are trying to exploit the (now false) hope her parents have.
- Bob has the emotional capability of a brick wall and carries on his kidnapping plan with machine-like steadfastness, completely immune to Alice's attempts to annoy him. Once she understands that Plan "A" (becoming the most annoying whiner in the history of mankind) was a waste of time and breath, she stops.
- Discussed: "Let's sit back and wait for a little while. Either the kidnapper will call back giving demands, or he will call back asking us to take Alice from him and put him in the deepest solitary cell in the whole prison system, where he will never have to hear from or see Alice ever again. Chances are high it will be the latter."
- Conversed: "Alice ... she's the most annoying human alive. I am pretty sure if someone kidnapped her, she would drive him crazy in fifteen minutes, tops. He would pay us to get away from her!"
- Deconstructed:
- Alice believes she can pull this trick on her kidnappers in order to escape, only to anger Bob enough to pull out a gun and shoot her.
- Alice believes that she can accomplish this. Her kidnappers are too bloodthirsty or professional to fall for this trick, or she doesn't plumb the depths of unlikability needed to make it work.
- Real Life kidnappings are solved in only one of two ways: payment is made and Alice is released, or Bob just shoots her, sometimes even after payment was made.
- Reconstructed: Bob's partner makes him miss the shot, calling out how her behavior makes her Not Worth Killing, and/or that she's still only a child, demanding that they simply let her go.
- Played for Laughs: The episode of Alice and Bob shows Alice being kidnapped on the Action Prologue and her being brought back (with the kidnapper having become borderline insane) after the opening credits. The Whole Episode Flashback that follows looks like a "best of The Three Stooges" compilation, with Alice causing hilarious antics that the kidnapper gets hurt trying to solve until he can't take it anymore — jail sounds like a safer place right about now.
- Played for Drama:
- The episode of Alice and Bob shows Alice being kidnapped on the Action Prologue. The remaining thirty-nine minutes are Alice unleashing every single Secret Forbidden Technique and mind-game he's ever learnt onto the kidnapper gang, turning what could have been a textbook "One of Our Own is in a Hostage Situation, we must show our camaraderie" episode into a terror-filled romp from which the poor bastards trapped in the same room with Alice who have no escape...
- Alice is something too big for Bob because she is a much more violent and powerful gangster who did not made her climb without doing a lot of combat along the way and is not going to take some penny-ante little idiot thinking he can muscle in on her business lying down…
- Played for Horror:
- Alice is a Humanoid Abomination. The kidnappers are not only to be pitied but have an industrial-level clean-up should probably be made.
- What Bob does to Alice in retaliation for annoying him for hours becomes the stuff of nightmares and all future kidnapping victims don't try to annoy him — they are too busy having fear-induced diarrhea to think of it.
For the love of God, please take Pity the Kidnapper back with you!
