Playing With / Somebody Doesn't Love Raymond

Basic Trope: A character freaks out because someone doesn't like them.

• Straight: When the well-regarded Alice discovers that Bob dislikes her, she goes crazy trying to figure out why.
• Exaggerated:
  • Alice is almost universally beloved; however, when she finds out that Bob once said something bad about her, she has a mental breakdown.
  • Bob doesn't just "dislike" her, he utterly hates her guts because of whichever reason he does (or worse yet, he has no real reason to hate her, he just does, and he doesn't bother to question this lack of reason) and makes it his life's mission to make her life hell, to the point that having the rest of the universe on her side and constantly reassuring her really can't compensate for all the bullying of this one man.
• Downplayed: When Alice discovers that Bob doesn't like her, she is confused.
• Justified:
  • Alice doesn't like when people dislike her; she tries to please people.
  • Bob openly disrespects Alice, which she naturally doesn't appreciate.
  • Alice is a die-hard perfectionist, and she takes Bob's dislike of her as a sign of a personal flaw she has rather than something irrational.
  • It probably would be easier to ignore Bob if not for the way he stands there giving her a hateful glare.
  • Alice has a Dark and Troubled Past that made her develop a need to please people.
  • Alice would be totally cool with Bob just plain not liking her, but no. Bob makes it a point to actively make her life miserable. She obviously wants to know why the hell he's even doing this to her when she didn't do anything to him!
• Inverted:
  • Alice is the biggest Jerkass imaginable. When she learns that Bob respects her and values her friendship, she freaks out, wondering why. (Somebody Doesn't Hate Chris?)
  • Bob is the Protagonist. From his point of view, he seems to be the only man in town that has some amount (hell, any amount) of dislike for Alice the Walking Disaster Area (who brings down unspeakable catastrophes to the town Once per Episode) and wondering why everybody else loves her ends up driving him insane. (Nobody Else Hates Chris?)
  • Alice likes everyone except for Bob.
    • Alice hates everyone except for Bob.
  • Alice and Bob are sworn enemies yet Alice is enraged that Bob does not spends his every waking moment plotting her downfall and swearing revenge over every inconvenience she causes him, like she does.
• Subverted:
  • Bob was in a bad mood when he said he didn't like her.
  • When Alice learns that Bob dislikes her, she's initially annoyed, but soon shrugs it off.
  • Alice replies "Whew, that's a relief, because I don't like you either", which stuns Bob.
• Double Subverted:
  • Bob got better. He still doesn't like her, just not as much as he let on.
  • ...Until her friends walk away, when she starts obsessing over the fact that someone doesn't like her.
  • After Bob ruins her credit rating, calls a SWAT Team on her, smashes her car with a crowbar, sets her summer home ablaze, gets her daughter Carol expelled from school, her sister Betty mistaken for an Argentinean and deported, her father fired, her mother arrested as an alleged drug dealer, runs over her Golden Retriever and breaks into her house to piss in her coffee maker, Alice wonders (as she sits with her lawyer to file a restraining order) just what the heck did she do to Bob to deserve him acting like this.
  • Now Bob is the one obsessing over the fact that Alice doesn't like him! How could miss popularity who seems to like everybody not like Bob? So, now we have a weird situation of someone not liking somebody but trying to get them to like them all the same.
  • Alternately, Bob was attempting to invoke this trope through Reverse Psychology, to try to get Alice obsessed with him. It backfired.
• Parodied:
  • Alice is an Obviously Evil Super Villain, but she still freaks out when she hears that Bob doesn't like her.
  • Alice discovers that the audience doesn't like her.
  • Alice's attempts to get Bob to like her are so destructive that Bob, who still doesn't likes her, still winces in sympathy and tells her that either it's okay some people don't like her or offers to pretend to be her friend, whatever works to make her stop.
• Zig-Zagged: Bob is sometimes rude to Alice and sometimes nice to her. Alice alternates between obsessing over his dislike and not caring.
• Averted: When Alice learns that Bob dislikes her, she doesn't care.
• Enforced: "We can't make Alice too perfect, or she won't be relatable. Why not have one character who doesn't like her?"
• Lampshaded: "How could anyone hate me?"
• Invoked: Bob wants Alice to pay him some attention, but everyone fawns over her so it's hard to stand out. He decides to pretend to dislike her, hoping this trope will come into effect.
• Exploited: Bob genuinely dislikes Alice, but when he takes note of her desperation to please him he doesn't mind getting a few favors out of her while it lasts.
• Defied:
  • "He doesn't like me? What, you think I'm going to obsess over that? I have plenty of friends."
    • "He doesn't like me? ...Of course he doesn't. There's gotta be at least SOME people who don't like me, and a lot more who don't even know I even exist!"
  • Alice makes Bob like her. How she manages to achieve this, especially if Bob's militant about hating her, may wander into the realm of horror, though.
• Discussed: "Wow, everyone loves Alice, don't they?" "Ah, somewhere there's got to be someone who hates her guts, and when she finds out it's all gonna kick off..."
• Conversed: "Huh, you'd think Alice would take that in stride."
• Implied: Bob is the only one among many characters who doesn't regularly talk to Alice.
• Deconstructed:
  • Alice's obsession with pleasing people who dislike her takes a toll when she focuses so much on Bob that she starts to ignore the people who already liked her. This causes her to lose all of her friends.
  • Alternatively, this happens to Bob instead because he ends up trying to make everyone understand that Alice isn't as great as they make her out to be. At least in his honest opinion. He doesn't even dislike her that much.
  • Alice hates herself, and so assumes that her friends and admirers either pity her or are Loving a Shadow. By contrast, she finds Bob's hostility validating and assumes he's Brutally Honest and/or that he sees through her "facade", prompting her to hopelessly court his friendship.
• Reconstructed:
  • After a while, Alice realizes that she can't please everyone and stops trying to make Bob happy. Her friends come back happy now that she's over it.
  • Bob either finally accepts Alice and they patch things up, or decides that maybe he doesn't like everyone else that much either.
  • After working her ass off to prove herself to Bob, Alice finally notices that his "The Reason You Suck" Speech is completely ridiculous, his childish insults merely revealing that he's a Horrible Judge of Character Jerk with a Heart of Jerk that rationalizes his Irrational Hatred via Insane Troll Logic. This prompts Alice's "Eureka!" Moment, forcing her to seriously question her self-image and consider that, maybe, the people who love her might understand her better than she understands herself.
  • Bob at least shows to have a Hidden Heart of Gold by helping Alice with the Aesop, admitting he has Nothing Personal against her because he Hates Everyone Equally.
• Played for Laughs:
  • Everyone hates Alice, but she takes the news that Bob dislikes her as a personal assault.
  • Alice causes an awful lot of mayhem trying to find out why Bob hates her and overcompensating to make him like her, which of course leads to Bob having a thousand more reasons to hate her more afterwards. For further irony points, the initial reason why Bob hates Alice probably goes unsaid.
• Played for Drama:
  • Alice has a crippling personality disorder that won't allow her to accept the fact that people might not like her. Therefore, when she learns that Bob isn't fond of her, it tears her up inside.
  • The reason Alice has her pathological need to please people is because of a past of being abused or bullied quite harshly, and even if it is not Bob's intent, Alice expects him to begin hurting her eventually and is doing her absolute damnedest to prevent it.
  • Alice would be perfectly okay with not being liked by Bob, but the trouble is that Bob hates Alice and the regular Aesop of this trope ("haters gonna hate") doesn't flies because Alice has done nothing to deserve this overkill reaction.
  • Bob hating Alice is the small anomaly that leads to The Reveal that there is something wrong with Bob like racism or mental illness.
• Played for Horror: Either Bob is going to kill Alice because he hates her that much and believes he's doing humanity a favor or Alice will go full-on Yandere on Bob because she is that driven to have him like her. Though both are still afraid that the other will kill them first.
• Plotted a Good Waste: What seems to be one of these plots turns out to be a series of absurd coincidences in which Alice is in the general direction or collateral damage of some other person Bob hates for more understandable reasons, giving us the chance to obtain the Aesop while not turning Bob into a militant Jerkass.

---

Back to Somebody Doesn't Love Raymond — wait, what do you mean you don't like that trope?

---