Basic Trope: Making yourself look bad in order to accomplish good.
- Straight: Bob sacrifices his good name in order to save the people he loves.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob allows himself to be seen as a Card-Carrying Villain in order to save the world from destruction.
- In order to save the entire multiverse, Bob implements a plan which includes magically making every living being hate him with passion.
- Downplayed: Bob takes the blame for a minor misdemeanor that Alice committed in the heat of the moment and now regrets.
- Justified:
- Bob cares more about what he sees as the greater good than about what people think of him.
- Bob is the newest successor in a lineage of evil rulers who have used their influence to manipulate the populace to embrace cruel tyranny. After years of pretending to be a proper successor, he intends to destroy the reputation of the entire lineage, its power, and its values, by gaining the public's absolute hatred.
- Inverted:
- Bob's scheme involves gaining the love and approval of everyone around him.
- Bob's scheme involves gaining the above within one single public action.
- The entire society seeks to plant a 0% Approval Rating on Bob to further their own collective agenda, possibly by making him The Scapegoat.
- Subverted: Bob appears to sacrifice his good name for a greater cause, but ends up more popular than before.
- Double Subverted: But only for a short time, after which the people hate him.
- Parodied: Bob seeks to enact his gambit by punting a kitten in front of everyone.
- Zig Zagged:
- Public opinion of Bob's deliberately heinous display fluctuates wildly, repeatedly switching between disgust and defensiveness over time.
- Or both at the same time. The society cannot agree on how to view Bob after the incident, so he becomes an in-universe Base-Breaking Character.
- Averted: Bob does not sacrifice his reputation for any cause.
- Enforced: "It's An Aesop; The good deeds you do are more important than the credit you gain for them."
- Lampshaded: "It doesn't matter that they'll all hate me. I need to save them."
- Invoked: Evulz sets up a Sadistic Choice between people getting hurt and Bob losing his reputation.
- Exploited: Charlie, The Rival to Bob, swoops up Bob's girlfriend while everyone hates him.
- Charlie makes sure that Bob's plans backfire as he frames Bobs friends as his accomplices for Bob's alleged misdeeds.
- Defied: Bob is a Slave to PR and painstakingly works to ensure that his approval rating is never tarnished.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed:
- Skarka's Law
comes into effect and Bob's friends defend his behavior, effectively sabotaging the credibility of his new-found bad image. - Bob's plans horribly backfire as this ends up endangering the people he is trying to protect than saving them.
- The world being what it is, the atrocities Bob has done for the sake of the "build up a reputation as an evil creature so vile the entire worldnote will band together to destroy me" part of the plan are just excessive.
- Skarka's Law
- Reconstructed:
- Bob's friends know what he is trying to do, so they pretend to disown him along with everyone else in order to ensure the plan's success.
- It was still a gambit, albeit one that wasn't planned or implemented correctly by Bob. Charlie studies how Bob did his and where it went wrong, learns from Bob's mistakes and executes a successful one of his own when the need arises.
- Implied: Bob is assumed to be evil at the start of the work, but it turns out this is not true. Bob at one point comments that being a scapegoat was worth it.
- Played For Laughs: Bob Can't Get in Trouble for Nuthin', and there's a humorous montage of his failures.
Back to Zero-Approval Gambit
