Basic Trope: Inventor/architect is killed when his work is complete.
- Straight: Alice asks Bob to build her the deadliest war machine in the world. When his task is finished she has Bob killed to keep secrets of the machine from her enemies.
- Exaggerated: Alice kills her house decorators after their work is finished.
- Downplayed:
- Alice doesn’t kill Bob, but blinds him so that he won't be able to build deadlier war machines for her enemies.
- Alice tries to take Bob on full time given his proven value. His refusal to work with her again leads to her reluctantly killing him and lamenting the waste.
- Justified:
- Alice knows her enemies bought Bob’s loyalty.
- Bob was an independent contractor with no loyalties. Alice got rid of him, lest he blab about Alice's secrets to future employers.
- Alice is insane and feels immense pleasure in the fact that, with Bob dead, anything he created for her is truly one-of-a-kind.
- The artifact draws from a common source and gets weaker the more are made. Losing the ability to reproduce it ensure that Alice always has it at peak power.
- Bob is suffering from the later stages of the very illness his machine is supposed to cure the earlier stages of. Alice is simply putting him out of his misery.
- Inverted:
- Bob kills Alice once she is done providing money and resources, so he can take the machine for himself.
- Alice preserves Bob as an immortal in case she needs his services again. It may not be in a very pleasant way.
- Subverted: Alice imprisons Bob and forces him to invent many other things for her.
- Double Subverted: Bob runs out of ideas eventually and is slayed.
- Parodied: Architect is listed as one of the most dangerous professions on the world, along with demon hunter and firefighter.
- Zig Zagged: Alice kills some of her architects, some are left alone and others are asked to remain in her service, forever.
- Averted: No architects or inventors are killed after finishing their work.
- Enforced: "We want Alice to appear ungrateful and dictating. Also, we should kill off Bob."
- Lampshaded: “I will have to kill Bob after his task is finished if I want to keep my secrets safe.”
- Invoked: Bob specifically asks Alice to kill him after his work is done.
- Exploited:
- Bob wants to die after his life’s work is complete, so he goes working for Alice, a queen known for her impressive collection of dead architects.
- Alice's enemies turn Bob against her by pointing out what happened to her last chief engineer.
- Bob's rival Charlie, knowing of Alice's reputation for killing her contractors, tricks Bob into offering her his services.
- Defied:
- Bob escapes before Alice can execute him.
- Bob rigs a Self-Destruct Mechanism to his war machine that will go off if he's killed, taking Alice and her kingdom with it, and makes sure Alice knows it before he hands her the machine's keys.
- Bob avoids work for people like Alice, worrying about what will happen when the job is done.
- Alice makes perfectly clear when she's hiring Bob that this kind of "reward" is not going to happen to Bob when he finishes the job, or that the job she's hiring him to do is the kind where this kind of "reward" is to be expected.
- Discussed: “You are not going to be one of these kings who murder architects after their work is complete, are you?”
- Conversed: “I can bet Bob will end in the crocodile pool after he finishes his task for Alice. Architects always get killed by their employers in movies.”
- Implied: Alice asks Bob to come to her throne room after his task is complete and comments that her crocodiles are getting hungry. Bob is never seen again.
- Deconstructed:
- Because more and more kings murder their architects and inventors, fewer and fewer people choose these professions.
- With the designer dead, there's nobody who knows how to properly maintain the creations, which rapidly fall into disrepair.
- Charlie and his forces destroy Alice's war machine, and with Bob dead, there's nobody who can build another one.
- The Builder's Union that the murdered underling belonged to confronted the client and punished them accordingly, and no architect has been killed ever since. Or even stiffed on a payment.
- Alice is defeated by Charlie who rewards his successful inventor Daniel, generously and keeps him to innovate continually. Even though Bob was more talented than Daniel eventually Daniel surpasses his works.
- Alice gains a reputation for killing off architects and inventors after they complete their work. Pretty soon, everyone left working for her realizes that they have every incentive to prolong their project as much as is humanly possible. Alice is saddled with dozens of major projects crawling along at a snail's pace and draining her treasury, with no way to make the designers hurry up and finish the work. What's she going to do, threaten to kill them?
- Reconstructed:
- As good as Daniel is, he still has to admit that he had to do some work to get around certain features of Bob's schematics that he could never figure out and make him imagine that if Bob was still around, what wonders they could have designed together…
- For a given value of "reconstructed"… Alice takes the builders of the two most useless projects and inflicts on them a Fate Worse than Death (up to and including being executed then zombified and forced to become muscle for the construction of one of the other projects). Now the other builders have the "option" of finishing their work efficiently and as a "reward" Alice will give them a quick and clean death with no further strings attached, or keep screwing around and… well, now you see what that gives ya.
- Played For Laughs: "Great work on the machine, Bob! By the way, You Have Outlived Your Usefulness. See ya!" *Stab*
- Played For Drama: The work focuses on Bob, who is struggling with an unpleasant Morton's Fork: Refuse to work for Alice, and be executed, or work for Alice, and be executed once the work is done.
- Played For Horror: Bob's death is most definitely neither quick or painless (or clean, for that matter), and he was forced to work for Alice because the alternative was just too horrible to even consider. As well, the device Bob was forced to build is capable of committing such atrocities that Bob's death would have been inevitable, just at the hands of a court-appointed execution and/or an enraged Vigilante Militia.
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