Basic Trope: More force is used than necessary to kill something.
- Straight: Bob empties his AA-12 fully-automatic shotgun on General Alex point blank, then bashes his head into a paste with a 20-pound sledgehammer, then cleaves his headless body in half from his crotch to his neck with a chainsaw, and finally douses what's left of his corpse in diesel and sets them on fire for good measure.
- Alice pulls out a katana on a lone bandit (who was armed with only a small knife) and slashes him about 100 times in a single second, blending him into an unidentifiable scarlet puree.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob runs Alex over with the world's longest, heaviest train, then backing up, shoots him with 100 miniguns at once, covering the entire area in napalm, blowing him up with C4 which sends him in the air, launches 99 nuclear missiles at them, burns Alex's remains in an unknown forest, sets that forest on fire, and then throws whatever can be salvaged of Alex in a high-power washing machine.
- Alice kills a cockroach by launching every single nuclear weapon in the entire world at it.
- Alice uses the Starkiller Base to kill a pesky housefly.
- Evulz summons Satan and Cthulhu at the same time to kill Alex and that's after he's been set on fire, riddled with machine gun bullets and chopped apart.
- Bob Throws the Sun at Alice
- Downplayed: Evulz shoots Alex in the head with an anti-materiel rifle when one shot from a pistol is enough.
- Bob performs the Mozambique Drill (two to the torso, one to the head) on Charlie with his sidearm, and dumps the rest of the magazine on his body while he's on the floor.
- Justified:
- Alex is extremely hard to kill.
- Bob really hates Alex.
- Alex is so dangerous that Bob wants to make sure that he stays down for good.
- It would be troublesome if not outright dangerous to Bob to use only proportionate force when overkill would get things done safer and more efficiently, eg. calling artillery on a sniper instead of risking a Sniper Duel or leveling a building rather than running a gauntlet of ambushes and booby traps to clear it.
- Alice has serious problems holding back.
- Evulz is a Psychopathic Manchild who really likes turning people's heads into "pretty red fireworks".
- Bob is duplicating the results of the Haruvian bullet myth, with Alice being the meat dummy stand in for the victim.
- Inverted:
- Bob heals Alice a lot more than nessecary.
- Cherry Tapping
- Subverted: Evulz blows up Alice with a grenade launcher, shoots her with 30 miniguns, lights her on fire, and smashes her with a sledgehammer. Alice survives.
- Double Subverted: Then Evulz chops off Alice's head, which kills her.
- Parodied: Alice is killed by a massive barrage of Nerf darts, teddy bears, pool noodles, soft pillows, comfy chairs and water balloons.
- Zig-Zagged: Having defeated Alice, Evulz menaces her with a small army's worth of weapons. He ends up shooting her with a tiny gun instead... which ends up completely vaporizing Alice with an immense, spectacular explosion anyways. Turns out the unimpressive gun actually fires miniature nuclear warheads.
- Averted: There is no amount of "kill", overt or otherwise, that is going to stop Alex.
- Enforced: "The work will be more awesome if the characters do way more than necessary."
- Lampshaded: "Isn't all this a bit much?"
- "I think he's dead... but I should hit him a few more times, just to be sure."
- Invoked:
- Bob brings a minigun when everyone else brings a pistol.
- Bob The Mole knows the group values practicability and quick kills, so he goes overkill when killing them one by one to make it tougher for them to figure out who's the killer.
- Exploited: Evulz first sends his mooks in to defeat Alice. After she's defeated, Evulz ambushes Alice, knowing that she is left exhausted.
- Defied:
- Alex kills every enemy with a single shot.
- When The Armorer provides Bob with a selection of absurdly big and powerful automatic weapons, Bob picks up the piddly little 9mm pistol (probably the one with the silencer, too, and maybe some Depleted Phlebotinum Shells in the proper caliber) and some additional ammunition from the Wall of Weapons. If someone then asks why the hell he didn't picked a bigger gun, Bob will then say "this is all the gun I need" and will then go on to demonstrate it.
- Discussed: "Why do we always have to be absolutely sure that every bad guy is dead?"
- Conversed: "Well..."
- Implied: Alice goes through a lengthy Lock-and-Load Montage.
- Deconstructed:
- Evulz uses so much ammo that he runs out and is quickly killed.
- Going all-out with the weaponry causes so much collateral damage that Bob fails his mission.
- Bob is considered insane for being so excessive and everyone else is wary around them.
- Summon Bigger Fish backfires as the monster Evulz summoned is even worse than the previous one.
- Reconstructed:
- Evulz brings more ammo to account for his increased use.
- Bob has an explicit license to do whatever it takes to complete the mission, collateral damage be damned.
- Bob fails to overkill Alex and he pays greatly for it when, Not Quite Dead, he returns to wreak havoc. Now he understands that it may be grisly, but some things are better safe than sorry.
- Played For Laughs:
- Evulz looks absolutely ridiculous under the amount of weapons they have on them.
- The amount of Dakka produced by the combined weapons fire forms a Wave-Motion Gun, even if no such weapon is being used.
- Black Comedy
- Played For Drama: The Hero is on the receiving end of such a barrage.
- Played For Horror: The work is about Evulz who doesn't just kills his targets, but goes well above and beyond what anybody would consider "sane" or even "humane" in his violence. Rules of engagement, war treaties and basic humanity are all disregarded for a desire to have the biggest "boom" possible, all day, every day.
I just riddled the villain full of bullets, set his body on fire, called in an air strike, and as I was driving away to escape said air strike, ran his dead body over about four times...after which I mutilated him for profit.
