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Basic Trope: The Hunter of Monsters kills monsters who aren't all evil.

  • Straight: Valerie discovers the vampires she's just killed weren't evil after rummaging through their belongings and freaks out as she wonders how many of her previous kills were good.
  • Exaggerated: Every vampire is afflicted with a need to feed on blood born diseases, and in so doing cures or sends these into remission in the "victim". Valerie has a Heroic BSoD and Goes Mad From The Revelation.
  • Downplayed: Valerie harasses a few harmless vampires, detaining them until they can prove they're innocent.
  • Justified:
    • Vampires can be good or evil depending on who they were in life, and since both are the same species, Valerie has trouble telling them apart.
    • Valerie is a straight-up Knight Templar who doesn't even care about whether a vampire is good or evil.
    • Even if Valerie knows that good vampires exist it can be hard to tell the good vampires apart from the bad ones, and their physical superiority means that taking the time to try and see which category they fall into could be fatal, so she just doesn’t bother.
    • Valerie had no idea vampires could be good, either through misinformation, miscommunication, assumptions, or some combination of the three.
    • Valerie has no real personal hatred of Vampires, but their very existence as undead bloodsuckers is considered abominable to her.
  • Inverted: Valerie the vampire is serial killing humans because they aren't living up to their evil potential, only to discover that humans are worse bastards than vampires.
  • Subverted: Valerie discovers that the group of "good" vampires who only feed on animals aren't doing it out of moral conviction, but because the older and stronger vampires won't let them feed on humans out of spite.
  • Double Subverted: ...and that spite was because the good vampires advocated feeding only on willing humans and/or not draining them to death because they still value the lives of others.
  • Parodied: The vampires are all altruistic saints who don't even need to (or want to) feed on human blood, and Valerie is a delusional fanatic who can't see that.
  • Zig Zagged:
    • The vampire Valerie is hunting isn't evil, just a LARPer, but the vampire attacking him out of the shadows sure is! Except it turns out the LARPer killed the vampire's mortal daughter, and he's nice otherwise.
    • Valerie's vampire hunting order is known for mercilessly hunting down vampires, but only those who take human lives. But then an innocent vampire is killed by one of the order. But then Valerie is tasked with hunting him down, and upon capturing him she ties him up and leaves him in front of a town of vampires with an apology note around his neck.
  • Averted: All vampires are hateful sociopaths with no souls. The differences among them are simply behavioral patterns designed to facilitate different hunting styles, such as aggressive "evil" vampires and subversive "good" vampires.
  • Enforced:
    • The writer wants to make vampirism an allegory for terrorism, using the few bad vampires to represent the tiny fraction of a country/religion who are giving the rest a bad name. Valerie's reaction represents the cultural shock of indiscriminate violence.
    • The writer wishes to write a story about racism, with the vampire hunters standing in for the police/neighborhood watch/racist with an itchy trigger finger who made the news one month ago.
  • Lampshaded: "I miss the old days when I didn't have to quiz vampires to find out if they're evil." (Stakes an attacking vampire) "Whoops, another failing grade!"
  • Invoked: "Please don't stake me, I'm actually good!" "You realize you're still covered in girl scout, right?" "Oh, Crap!"
  • Exploited: Vinny is a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire, but his neighbor Bob is prejudiced against him anyway, so he gets Valerie to kill him.
  • Defied:
    • Valerie realizes she's starting to empathize with the vampires and hesitating with doubts about their nature. So she starves them and then tosses an Innocent Bystander in to "test" whether they're good or evil by whether they can resist their Horror Hunger.
    • Anti-vampire-slaying laws were approved by Congress a long time ago. If Valerie so much as whispers about hunting vampires somewhere she'll be heard, she will quickly end up in a terrorist watch list, if not arrested.
  • Discussed: "The worst part about being a vampire hunter? Not knowing whether I'm putting down an animal or murdering a human being."
  • Conversed: "If this vampire hunting thing were like Buffy, I'd only have to deal with one good vampire."
  • Deconstructed: With the discovery of good vampires, Valerie questions whether evil is something that can be forced on you and whether she should try to save the people who are now evil vampires.
  • Reconstructed:
    • The division between good and bad vampires isn't one of ethics but practicality. The "good" ones don't care about human life, they're simply more interested in maintaining the Masquerade, and excess body-bags are bad for that. Valerie has to decide whether to ally with the good vamps to wipe out the evil ones is a worthwhile risk, or just let the Enemy Civil War play out.
    • The situation is complicated. Just because there are vampires who don’t want to kill humans doesn’t make them any less a vampire, and their Horror Hunger means that they can lose control of themselves and drain a person of blood only returning to their senses after being sated and immediately recoiling at what they’ve done. Some of the vampires started out good and began Slowly Slipping Into Evil because they couldn’t handle what was happening to them and either became just like the rest of the bad vampires or hit the Despair Event Horizon and walked into the sunlight, and Valerie doesn’t care about the ones who stayed good anyway because she thinks the risk of them losing control and drinking someone dry is too great to leave to chance. Unfortunately, while this point of view is understandable, Valerie is enough of a bitch about it that one can easily begin sympathizing with the vampires.
  • Plotted A Good Waste: A vampire Hannibal Lecture's Valerie over how by objectifying vampires into monsters, she's no different than they are since they view people as cattle.
  • Played For Laughs: The good vampires are Minions With An F In Evil, though still potentially dangerous since they suck so much Valerie can barely keep from passing out laughing.
  • Played For Drama:
    • Valerie is turned into a vampire and is taken in by a good vampire, who shows her things from their perspective. She later has to suffer as all her old friends try to kill her.
    • Carrie was born a vampire instead of turned. When she says she did not choose to be a vampire, she means it in every possible way. The Order of the Palladium Slayers (of which Valerie is a member) want her a lot more dead than the regular vampire, citing her being a "spawn of the Devil" who "must not spread her foul seed". Carrie was born in an Underground Railroad safe house in 1863 and she did not lucked into the "Vampires Are Rich" trope. Valerie is a blonde, rich cheerleader Alpha Bitch in her off-slaying hours. Do the math of how this whole thing looks to the Muggles.
    • The Sudden Downer Ending of Carrie The Friendly Neighborhood Vampire is Carrie, after saving the neighborhood from the Vampire Mafia and destroying the Vampire leader (who is the one who turned her) and swearing she will use her resources to protect the world, having her head blown off by a shotgun blast from Valerie in front of all of her friends and family and Valerie telling all of the horrified crowd a deadpan, Buffy-esque "vampire" as an excuse.
    • After narrowly avoiding getting killed by Valerie, Carrie starts to question whether she even should want to live - while she doesn't intend to hurt anyone, she runs the risk of losing all self-control and draining someone if she gets hungry enough. She ends up seeking out Valerie, who's astounded to discover some vampires have morals, and struggles to deliver the Mercy Kill even though she's staked many vampires without guilt in the past.
  • Played For Horror: Valerie just driving a stake through an innocent person's chest would be awful enough, but she goes full KKK lynching or Night of the Long Knives re-enactment.
  • Implied: All of the heroic vampires were killed, due to a Noodle Incident that has never been elaborated upon.

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