Basic Trope: A heroic character that is flawed, and/or morally ambiguous at worst.
- Straight: Alice is a vigilante who wants to make the world a better place by murdering criminals.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice is even worse than the villains she fights.
- Alice is an Unscrupulous Hero or a Nominal Hero.
- Alice is a Byronic Hero.
- Alice is the Token Evil Teammate.
- Alice has a very limited amount of good moments that just barely stop her from qualifying as a Villain Protagonist.
- Alice is an outright Sociopathic Hero, even the villains find her disgusting.
- Alice is Only in It for the Money, bloodthirsty, pragmatic, brutal, cynical, shady, abrasive, sociopathic, and overall seems nowhere like a hero at all yet she’s nowhere as bad as the three Big Bads in the Big Bad Ensemble such as Evil Overlord, Emperor Evulz, an outright Card-Carrying Villain who kicks dogs and commits other reprehensibly evil crimes For the Evulz, the Serial Killer and Omnicidal Maniac Charlie, and Complete Monster General Bob.
- Well Intentioned Villain Protagonist.
- Alice has no seemingly positive traits at all whatsoever and is a completely unsympathetic person despite being on the side of good.
- Downplayed:
- Alice is a Classical Anti-Hero.
- Alice is a Knight in Sour Armour.
- Alice is a Ms. Vice Girl.
- Alice is irritable and sometimes violent, but not to the point of moral ambiguity.
- Alice doesn't have a problem with killing criminals, but is otherwise the nicest person you could meet.
- Alice doesn't go out of her way to kill people but is willing to break the law to do what she thinks is right.
- Alice is a Nice Girl who has a few jerkish qualities.
- Justified:
- Alice lives in a Crapsack World.
- Alice lives in a Death World.
- The government is evil, by fighting against them Alice is considered a criminal.
- The setting is completely lawless and Alice stands up for the people doing things that would be against the law in our world to help out others.
- Alice used to be a villain.
- Alice’s former all loving heroism lead to the villains backstabbing her and getting away with their crimes despite being unrepentant about it. This lead Alice to resort to drastic measures to ensure that the villains will get their well-deserved punishments even if it meant killing them.
- Inverted: Alice is an Anti-Villain: a villain that is morally ambiguous.
- Subverted:
- Alice appears to be killing crooks left and right, but it turns out she didn't have control of her actions at the time; when she's back to normal, she's The Cape, through and through.
- Alice is a heroine with such bad publicity that not even the viewer beleves she's really good...until she turns out to actually be an ideal heroine
- As we see more and more of Alice , it becomes clear that she was never a "hero" in the first place.
- Double Subverted:
- Alice is revealed to have been Brainwashed and Crazy, but underneath that...she's just as brutal.
- It was just an act to gain good publicity.
- Alternatively: She takes a level in jerkass to the point where she becomes a Jerkass Hero at best.
- She later reforms, but she’s not tamed.
- Parodied:
- Alice tries to bring about her own brand of harsh justice, but she lives in a Sugar Bowl society where there's hardly ever even any conflict — Alice spends most of her time angsting that there's nothing to Angst about.
- Alice is a lazy, hedonistic freeloader, but when the push comes to shove, she's a hero who stops bank robbers, evil overlords, and people who steal content from the internet.
- Alice likes to think she's a heroic individual, but she's anything but and her fellow heroes and heroines aren't even convinced that she's good.
- Alice is a “hero” who is a mean, foul-mouthed, sex-driven, hot-tempered, and racist alcoholic
- Zig Zagged:
- Alice has a very inconsistent attitude towards her crime-fighting; sometimes she's unwilling to kill anyone, sometimes she's killing left and right, and sometimes she's trying to be an Actual Pacifist. It's all Depending on the Writer.
- Alice is a Heel–Face Revolving Door and switches between being an Anti-Hero or an Anti-Villain depending on whether or not she is working with the heroes at the moment.
- Averted: All the heroes in the story actually act conventionally heroic.
- Enforced:
- "No one's interested in a flawless hero anymore, let's give this character loads of issues and have her be all morally ambiguous!"
- Alternatively; The author is trying to prove some point about the nature of heroism, or else is deconstructing The Hero or The Cape, which requires Alice to do some questionable things in the name of justice.
- Lampshaded:
- "The Chosen One seems a tad unheroic."
- What the Hell, Hero?
- Invoked: Alice is a sadist, so she decides to start taking it out on the people who society says deserve it, lowering the crime rate as she does so and leaving the town happier for it.
- Exploited: The villain takes steps to make Alice a Hero with Bad Publicity to get her out of the way.
- Defied: Alice feels herself slipping into anti-herodom, and works hard to maintain her moral code.
- Discussed: "Alice's not exactly a Nice Girl, but she's on the side of good. No, really."
- Conversed: "How did this guy not wind up in prison yet?"
- Deconstructed:
- Alice is rapidly becoming just as brutal as, if not WORSE than her villains, and when she's killed all of the real threats to society, she's still a dangerously unstable and violent individual.
- Alternatively: Alice is arrested for killing a criminal because, as it turns out, murder is murder.
- Alice kills a "criminal", only to find out the real villain's still out there. This leads Alice to question her methods, feel guilty, and wonder if all those lives she's taken away before were really the lives of innocent people.
- Alice kills a murderer, only to find out the killer was another Anti-hero who only killed villains like her.
- Alice becomes a Hero with Bad Publicity because of her anti heroism.
- Reconstructed:
- Alice has a line she will not cross; the villains are much worse than she is and she really is making the world a better place through her actions.
- Alice seeks therapy to help her become a more mentally stable individual.
- Alice decides to be even more careful not to kill an innocent person again & take time to make sure she has solid evidence against them and that the evidence wasn't planted there against the suspect before killing them.
- Alice tries to learn about the villain's motives & make sure the villain(s) isn't really another anti-hero before killing them.
- Alternatively, Alice suffers from Moral Myopia.
- Plotted A Good Waste: Alice's morally questionable actions makes her a more complex character and are used to analyze what "the qualities of a hero" truly are, and what it is that makes someone "heroic".
Back to the unscrupulous, ruthless, but overall heroic Anti-Hero.
