Playing With / The Mole

Basic Trope: A character is secretly working for the other side.

• Straight: Most people assume Bob is a good guy working with La Résistance, until The Reveal when it turns out he was working for The Empire and Emperor Evulz all along.
• Exaggerated:
  • Everybody in the story is secretly working for someone else.
  • Bob is working for more sides than he can keep track of at any given time.
  • Bob is the leader of the heroes.
  • Bob is Emperor Evulz.
• Downplayed: Not in This for Your Revolution
• Justified:
  • Bob is a mole because he's being blackmailed or coerced.
  • Bob has good reason to dislike the good guys.
• Inverted: In a group where everyone else is The Mole, Bob is the only member sincere about his allegiances.
• Subverted:
  • Bob is revealed as a mole, but then it turns out to be someone else framing him.
  • Bob is Becoming the Mask and pulls a Heel–Face Turn.
  • Red Herring Mole
• Double Subverted:
  • Bob is revealed as a mole, then it turns out to be someone else framing him, but at the end Bob really is the mole after all.
  • Except he faked his Heel-Face Turn on purpose.
• Parodied:
  • Bob is so obviously a mole that it's ridiculous nobody else notices. For example, in a Funny Animal work, he is literally a burrowing mammal of the family Talpidae.
  • The mole has a large brown melanocytic nevus on his face or elsewhere on his body, a la Austin Powers.
  • Lareneg Elomeht, an Obviously Evil person looks like a Nazi general with his Sdrawkcab Alias to boot, has no one suspecting him at all.
• Zig Zagged: Bob is set up as the mole, but turns out to be a Double Agent. The guy framing him is actually the mole, but working for a third side. Then the protagonist ends up being a mole too.
• Averted: There are no moles — everybody's on the side they claim to be.
• Enforced: In any work set during the Cold War, it's well known that both sides employed moles, so there pretty much has to be one.
• Lampshaded: "There's always a mole in these stories. And it's always the person you least suspect."
• Invoked: "We've got to plant a mole in their team; it's right there in the Spies Handbook."
• Exploited: The heroes know that Bob is a mole, and so feed him false information.
• Defied: "There's no mole among us; the psychometer would ferret one out in an instant."
• Discussed: The characters talk about how likely it is that there will be a mole, given the political situation.
• Conversed: "I knew he was a bad guy!"
• Deconstructed:
  • The psychological aspects of being a mole are discussed. We see the angst Bob suffers over having to betray the people he befriended.
  • The pressure of staying under the radar and putting himself in dangerous situations to do his mission takes a toll on Bob, and he makes a huge mistake that causes him to get caught.
• Reconstructed: Bob is the focus character, or even the protagonist. His Backstory and psychological issues are studied; he has an opportunity to make a Heel–Face Turn... but doesn't. In the end, he carries out his betrayal exactly as planned, surprising everybody.

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