This one is sociopathy played for comedy. That trope is general "bad stuff" comedy.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Just a question, but why isn't the Avenue Q song "Schadenfreude" mentioned at all on this page, it seems to explain the trope rather well, was it just not thought of or am I missing something important?
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Can someone explain the joke, "To the cruel, it is meat and drink; to the kind, it is the chicken the vegan compliments as the best tofu ever." For some reason, I'm not getting it.
Thank you.
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I'm irritated by all the examples on this page where tropers cry that individual characters 'are this trope'. The entire trope is about out-of-character sociopathy for the sake of comedy. Someone who is like this all the time is an outright Heroic Sociopath.
I was going to edit the main article to emphasize this, but it's conflicting. In any case, the volume of tropers raving about characters who are both this and that should indicate that this ought to have more clarity. It's true that a lot of these characters seem to cause others in the same work to use this trope, whether that's sociologically believable or just the writers fault varies depending on the characters and the connections between them.
On a tangentially related note, I consider this trope pretty important because I see it overused a lot. Sometimes it seems the majority of shows use it for the majority of their jokes! It's got reason for it to be popular, but anything nearly dedicated to the use of a single trope is likely to become shallow, especially when mass-produced.
Any thoughts on how to clean this up?
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I'm not really sure, but my best bet is you could just outright delete examples that don't fit the trope. If the case is ambiguous, though, you might ask for help from someone who could help (definitely not me, I'm a rather busy person).
And sometimes I wish our universe and the Tokimeki Memorial universe shall one day converge.
I think I'm suffering from a case of I Thought It Meant or the first person in the thread is since I don't think that a character need be a Heroic Sociopath to use Comedic Sociopathy often. A Jerkass (for instance Suzumiya Haruhi or Mayuri from {Bleach}) is just as likely to invoke this trope and neither can really be seen as heroes.
No, Heroic Sociopath is a character who works toward a heroic goal by being as villainous as possible for comedy.
Edited by ading I'm a Troper!!!
And this trope is schadenfreude, pure and simple. It doesn't necessarily mean the person is acting out of character. For instance, if I have a female protagonist whose signature move is "Misandry Punch", which has actually caused her male comrades to flinch. For one thing, she may not be peachy-clean by moral standards, but she's no Heroic Sociopath either. But then, this wouldn't be considered out-of-character for her either.
What's the difference between this trope and Black Comedy?
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