"I offer this advice to you two: If you're going to destroy something... do it mid-dialogue. They always expect you to finish talking first."
Bob and Alice are having a fairly mundane conversation. Bob stares absentmindedly out the window, and Alice is walking around the room behind him. Without changing the tone of her voice or the subject of the conversation, Alice picks up a gun, walks up to Bob and shoots him.
This trope could be used for several reasons. To spice up a boring conversation, to establish a creepily detached mood, to reveal
a traitor, to portray a character as
deranged,
overly methodical, a
dog-kicker, or to show they long since crossed the
Moral Event Horizon.
Bonus Points if the victim is
Killed Mid-Sentence.
Sister Trope to
Talk to the Fist, where the attack isn't necessarily lethal and the talking is related to the fight. Compare
Have You Told Anyone Else?. Not to be
confused with
Talking the Monster to Death or
Logic Bomb.
As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Seishirou in Tokyo Babylon and then in X1999. Or, second thought, the whole cast of X. They fight while exchanging pleasantries all the time. Seishirou is especially bad, though. See the end of Tokyo Babylon. He'd kill someone while wondering aloud about tomorrow's weather or something. Or how cigarette can kill you. (he did this)
Film
Literature
- American Psycho - Patrick Bateman certainly contemplates taking a cordless drill to the head of a lady he's chatting up.
- Also Played With in the movie when Bateman continues talking to his drunk/drugged soon-to-be-victim about retro music while putting newspapers around him, putting on a raincoat, and finally killing him with a huge fire axe.
- This happens in the end of Of Mice And Men. George is calmly talking to Lenny about the farm they've always dreamed of; he asks Lenny to close his eyes while talking, and George pulls out a gun and shoots him in the head. A non-villainous version, as George is doing this so that Lenny will die calm and happy.
- In The Big Sleep, Philip Marlowe overhears a conversation with Harry Jones, an informant, and a gangster named Canino. Canino makes sure Harry has a good stiff drink— which is poisoned.
Live-Action TV
- The pilot episode of The Sopranos had one of these. Christopher Soprano shoots Emil Kolar in the back of the head after a while of polite discussion.
- A sympathetic variant in The Vampire Diaries - Rose is already dying, having been bitten by a werewolf; Damon gives her a Dying Dream of her human life centuries ago, during which he challenges her to a race. He stakes her during the countdown.
Theatre
- In Pippin, Pippin, disguised as a monk, kills his father Charles at the end of a conversation about the meaning of empire.
Video Games
- Mass Effect — This is how the conversation between Nihlus and Saren goes.
- It is possible to end one subquest in Mass Effect 2 by talking to a mechanic repairing a plot-important weapon, asking him about what is going on and then ending the chat by stabbing one of his electric tools into his back.
- In Nimdok's scenario in the videogame adaptation of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, Nimdok can talk with the anesthetist who wants him to perform mundane operations on a child, but after getting info from the anesthetist, he can exit the conversation without performing the operation, then grab the scalpel near him and kill the anesthetist with it.
- In the NES game Day Dreamin' Davey, many knights in the Medieval stages can talk in Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe and give out info before Davey can kill them.
Webcomics
