Its Personal - Television Tropes & Idioms

The cardinal rule in going after someone with an intention to kill was not to make it personal - which it almost always ended up being anyway. It did with me.

— Max Payne

The protagonist catches bad guys for a living (usually at a rate of about one a week), but this time, the bad guy has decided that he doesn't like the protagonist. Instead of doing what any sensible psychopath would do and simply toss a grenade in the character's window, the psychopath takes creepy photos of the character's kids, abducts the character's wife, kicks the character's dog, and above all, leaves calling cards and clues to ensure that eventually he'll get caught. The bad guy (often a Big Bad) knows about the protagonist's Fatal Flaw and is more than willing to exploit it.

Related trope — In order to establish that a bad guy is really bad (as opposed to the not-so-bad guy last week?) he kills the hero's family, brother, mother, dog, or what have you. Or his own henchmen. Or easily dispatches some other bad guy who's previously been established or otherwise appears to be really bad.

The Stuffed Into The Fridge and Friendly Target tropes are invariably a setup for this.

Usually eventually leads to Not So Different. For a more specific form of this, see You Killed My Father.

The Disposable Woman is a character who exists only to make Its Personal happen. When it gets personal, characters insist they must work alone.

One common variant is to order/trick allies aside to set up an one-on-one duel without interference. This can be risky but the avenger wouldn't risk anyone else getting hurt/someone stealing his precious right to do that peculiar kill himself!

Examples

If you failed to kill the target personally, the next best thing is to resurrect him so you can kill him personally one second later. Bonus kick the dog points if you claim intention to do it over and over!
It's a common enough multiplayer game trick to have allies beat all the mooks on the way to some huge big bad monster, but that monster you must defeat alone (so you get to win a quest at a lower level than would be doable alone, get powerful and untradable monster drops, or make a memorable revenge video against some enemy gang). Bonus points if both gangs are into roleplaying enough to stand aside while 2 people duel it out without interference.
CSI usually starts or ends a season with an "It's Personal" episode.
- This troper is no expert on police procedure, but he wonders if, when the investigators fly off the handle, they end up violating some of the suspects' rights with their outbursts (Catherine Willows and Sara Sidle are especially guilty of this) or some of the ways they try to obtain evidence. As just one example, getting a suspect to give a urine sample through saying it's required by law, when it actually isn't, sounds like grounds to have the evidence thrown out of court, given that it was obtained under false pretenses, or was coerced.
- In early seasons, even if there wasn't a direct relationship between the investigators and the criminals, the nature of the crime would often make the investigator take it personally themselves. For instance: domestic abuse, or overall violence towards women? Sara would sympathize. Broken marriages, or mothers (especially the working kind)? Catherine. Damaged childhoods? Nicky. Grissom himself explicitly stated that drug dealers and people who harm children make him furious.
CSI Miami, by contrast, features such episodes all the damn time. And when it's not threatening the characters, it's arresting the characters. It's so frequent, you'd think the whole place would get shut down by Internal Affairs just on general principles.
Law And Order, Its Personal episodes give us rare glimpses into the characters' home lives/personal histories (Logan confronts the priest who abused him in childhood, Logan tracks down his partner's killer, Briscoe tracks down his daughter's killer).
Law And Order: Special Victims Unit's Det. Olivia Benson is continously searching for her mother's rapist/Benson's biological father. While only one SVU episode dealt with investigating Ma Benson's rape, this Back Story was touched on in any episode involving pregnancy from a rape and at other times as well. Det. Benson has also been stalked by perpetrators at least three times in six seasons. On the other hand, her partner, Elliot Stabler, has his buttons pushed by any crime involving children (which is roughly every episode that doesn't involve a rape). The series itself could be said to be made up almost entirely of Its Personal episodes, with each investigator having buttons that make them consider the case personal. (Why let someone work on a case they are clearly biased towards? No one ever plants evidence in this world, I guess...)
- Benson took it to the extreme when someone who was convicted because of her testimony and was later cleared by DNA evidence eight years later started actually killing people. Other people she had brought in and testified against. She took it so personally that she said she would accept responsibility for the man's crimes. He committed Suicide By Cop before the situation was resolved.
Law and Order: Criminal Intent did it too, with Goren and Eames finally solving the murder of Eames' late husband and also with the illness and death of Goren's mother.
Happens with some frequency in ER.
The popularity of the phrase possibly originates from Jaws 4's tagline: "This time... It's personal." Given that the film came out in 1987, the concept is probably substantially older.
- It was the driving plot point in most, if not all of the action films of the 80s and early 90s. It was particularly egregious in martial arts films revolving around a tournament (Bloodsport, Kickboxer, The Karate Kid, The Best of the Best). It's not enough motivation for the hero to just compete with honour in a competition. Nope, his main rival has to have killed his brother, molested his girlfriend and kicked his dog too. Cop movies were bad too—in every Lethal Weapon movie, the villains threaten Murtaugh's family, and in the second film we learn the villains have not only killed Riggs' current squeeze, but also killed his wife previous to the events of the first movie.
- Parodied in Back To The Future, when Marty sees an ad for Jaws 23 (or whatever ridiculously high number it was) with the tagline "This time it's really really personal!"
Used as a Story Arc in Profiler and season one of Millennium.
Spoofed in the Kids Next Door episode "Operation DODGEBALL", where the self-proclaimed "Dodgeball Wizard" lures Numbuh 4 into a dodgeball match by kidnapping his family. After finding the ransom note, Numbuh 4 dramatically declares "This time, it's personal!". When Numbuh 2 points out neither of them have ever met this Dodgeball Wizard, Numbuh 4 responds he just wanted to use that line.
A dramatic literary subversion, from Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel Men At Arms:
"He killed Angua. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"
"Yes. But personal isn't the same as important."
- In a later book, Jingo, Carrot decides to go to have a nap while pursuing Angua's kidnappers by boat, on the basis that if he stayed awake fretting about her, he would be useless when they caught up to them.
After distinguishing itself in the beginning by not having episodes of this type, Without A Trace has since had at least three.
Soukou No Strain; as if her beloved older brother killing her whole school didn't already give Sara Werec this complex, he goes and offs Carris too, just after exposing her true identity. True, he did have a bit of a suicide wish...
An episode of The Simpsons has recurring character Sideshow Bob attempting to rig the election for Mayor of Springfield by including the names of dead people and animals as those who voted for him. When Lisa's cat Snowball appears on the list, she angrily declares that "now Its Personal!" Bart points out that Bob had previously tried to kill him.
- Another episode has Alec Baldwin use this line (in reference to Homer). When Kim Basinger and Ron Howard just look at him, Alec says, "What? He has our underwear!"
This is the entire character description for Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel The Series villain Angelus. And, for that matter, his Nemesis, Holtz.
Punned in Doctor Who episode "The Runaway Bride":
The Doctor: It was all in the job title: Head of human resources.
Lance: This time, it's personnel.
- A suspiciously similar joke was made by Rory Bremner on Mock The Week about David Blunkett.
The final arc of Rurouni Kenshin has Kenshin fighting Enishi Yukishiro, his brother-in-law because Kenshin accidentally killed Tomoe Yukishiro, Enishi's sister, and Kenshin's first wife. Enishi makes it clear that this is personal, by sending Kenshin into a "living hell" by defeating him and killing Kenshin's lover Kaoru, though he actually only kidnaps her.
The 1989 Tim Burton Batman movie adds this to the relationship between Batman and the Joker — it is revealed that the Joker was the man responsible for murdering Bruce Wayne's parents.
- Subverted, however, in Batman Begins: Bruce plans to murder Joe Chill, the man who killed his parents, but is denied the chance when a crime boss' assassin kills him instead to prevent Chill from testifying against him. Ironically, being denied this chance for personal closure is partly what leads Bruce to the path that will result in his becoming Batman.
The Punisher MAX series had one story arc that involved a vengeful mob boss trying to get revenge on Frank Castle - and he started by unearthing the bodies of Frank's deceased wife and children and urinating on their bones. Frank wasn't very happy about this. The arc ended with Frank dragging the man out into the woods and shooting him in the stomach, then leaving him to die a long, inevitable death.
24 features this in pretty much every series. Over six hellish days, Jack has had to deal with people he's already killed, his former partner, his former mistress, his mentor and his own family. He seems to have accepted this as standard practice, though- he gets quite upset early on when his wife is murdered, but when his best friends are killed in Series 5 he barely even blinks.
Final Fantasy X's Auron is the stoic, quiet, all-knowing, Badass Longcoat of the group, never losing his cool or raising his voice. He doesn't have to - his reputation and obvious awesomeness compels everyone else to fear and respect him. The one and only time we see any passion from him is when he and the heroes confront Yunalesca... who, when he last saw her, calmly explained how his friends' deaths were meaningless, then killed him. Yes, he has a bit of a grudge there.
The James Bond film Licence To Kill exemplifies this trope. The slimy villain, Franz Sanchez, throws Felix Leiter (Bond's best pal) to the sharks. Bond is naturally pissed, and subsequently blows up windows, laboratories and trailer trucks to get to Sanchez.
This is one reason why The Ring 2 was less successful than the first: Samara's wrath was horrifying in the original precisely because it was impersonal. Not only was she out to kill people who had never done anything to her, she was out to kill anyone who watched the video, regardless of whether they had done anything wrong ever. In the sequel, however, she targets Rachel and Aiden specifically, and the feeling of "it could happen to you," so powerful in the first film, was accordingly defenestrated.
Parodied in an episode of Futurama, when giant alien brains are trying to gather all knowledge in the universe.
Fry: So they're trying to learn things? The bastards!
Nibblonians: Yes. Then, once it has collected all data in the universe it will open its protective shell, so as to scan itself.
Fry: I'm as mad as I've ever been!
Nibblonians: Then, it will destroy the universe, so no new information can come about.
Fry: Now it's personal.
Kvar, one of the desian grand cardinals from Tales Of Symphonia, takes the Villain Ball and runs with it into this trope when he starts badmouthing one of his human test subjects and gloats about how ingeniously he had her tormented and killed — right in front of her son and her widower husband. Needless to say, Its Personal ensued.
Subverted in Batman Beyond. Terry believes his relationship with season one Big Bad Blight is personal. Blight is ignorant of this.
Blight: [being stalked from the shadows by Batman] Who are you?!
Batman: [pauses] You really want to know?
Blight: Yes!
Batman: [enters] You killed my father.
[Slight pause]
Blight: Do you have the slightest idea how little that narrows it down?
- Then again, Blight was turned into a "walking meltdown" thanks to a fight with Batman, and Batman kept foiling his various schemes, to the point where Blight visably lost his temper at even the mention of Batman's name. So in a way it was personal for Blight too...just for completely different reasons.
Vent and Aile lost their mother to a Maverick raid on Area H ten years ago, and the lack of intervention on Slither Inc's part gave them a reason to hate the company. The truth behind it gives them a reason to search for Model W... and that's to destroy it.
Subverted in Order Of The Stick. Roy pursues Xykon due to an oath of revenge, but not for his sake. His father swore the oath after his mentor was killed by Xykon, but was too lazy to persue it and handed it to Roy who tries to fufill it out of duty.
Reversed in Metal Gear Solid 3, with the villain declaring It's Personal on the hero. Volgin already intended to kill the CIA operative who had infiltrated his base. But after he found out what Snake did to Major Raikov...
The Boss: Are you going to kill him?
Volgin: Of course. But first, I will make him pay for hurting Ivan.
Doctor Horrible's rivalry with Captain Hammer is more or less a fact of life for the both of them, with the Doctor trying to take down Hammer with nonlethal means, and getting thoroughly pounded on every time by the Captain. However, when Hammer announces to Horrible that he's going to sleep with Penny "just because you want her," it gets personal. The normally pacifistic Doctor upgrades his Stun Ray to a Death Ray, and makes his intentions quite clear with his next song:
It's a brand new day, and the sun is high
All the birds are singing that you're gonna die!
Partially subverted in Terry Pratchett's Thud!. The baddies and the Summoning Dark try to get the main character Vimes to make it personal multiple times. Whether they succeed is subject to discussion (though it does seem so in the end).
Seeing his friends attacked, injured and imprisoned by the Metarex in the episode Testing Time gives us the first appearance of Dark Sonic in animated Sonic continuity. And also show us a side of Sonic that we've really never seen in full swing before - namely the part of him that you do not, under any circumstances, piss off.
Alex Mahona and Wyatt in Prison Break.. And it's not the cool kind.
Quantum Of Solace has this at its heart. Cars crash, boats explode and planes fall as the two protagonists battle their way to get revenge.
At one point in Preacher, Allfather D'aronique explains to Jesse Custer why he changed his plans from exploiting the word to killing him:
Allfather D'aronique: You killed her, Custer. You killed my Aunt Marie!
Jesse: Grandma.
Used twice in the pilot to Leverage. Dubenich gets Nate to take on the job because the company they're targeting is ensured by Nate's old company, who refused to pay for the procedure that could have saved his son. When Dubenich turns on Nate and the team, Nate strikes back because he used his son's death as emotional blackmail.