Basic Trope: Bad people tend to be into fetishism and BDSM.
- Straight: Villain Bob dresses like a fetishist or is into BDSM; no non-villains are shown to dress the same way or have the same interest.
- Exaggerated: Bob is only villainous because they want new people to dominate and torture sexually against their will.
- Downplayed:
- Bob is a jerk who is into bondage and inconsiderate to his partners and their enjoyment. He follows the rules of Safe, Sane, and Consensual to the letter but not the spirit.
- Anti-Hero Alice has a taste for BDSM that freaks out her fellow heroes. She's still on the side of good and sticks to Safe, Sane, and Consensual, but it's one of the ways it's emphasized that she's very much not The Cape.
- Justified:
- Bob's behavior is caused by him being a sociopath or general bastard, not him being into kinky stuff, despite a lack of showing examples of non-bastards with the same kink.
- The show keeps parroting outdated psychoanalytical theories or similar in order to establish its position as "scientific".
- Inverted:
- Sadomasochism is meant to be a sign of being cool and being into only vanilla (non-kinky) sexuality a sign of being a bad person.
- Subverted: note
- Bob's interest in BDSM make Alice and/or the audience wrongly believe that Bob is a bad person.
- Alternatively, Bob is acting abusively and tries to avoid blame by invoking prejudice about BDSM to portray himself as a victim. However, it turns out that the people around him have a far too good grasp on Safe, Sane, and Consensual for that stunt to work.
- Double Subverted: It eventually turns out that he's a real bastard after all.
- Parodied: Owning a pair of fluffy pink handcuffs is treated as a Moral Event Horizon.
- Bob tries to invoke this by doing research into real BDSM but ends up taking the Safe, Sane, and Consensual aspects to all his villainy. His torture chambers have and respect safewords absolutely. Ironically his interrogation is just as effective as before as his targets are creeped out and thrown off balance instead of just telling him what they think he wants to hear. He even abandoned a bank robbery and apologized after it triggered a PTSD attack in a bystander.
- Bob is only a villain in order to end up being beat up and punished by the gorgeous heroine Alice once his evil plans inevitably fail.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: Being into BDSM is no big deal.
- Enforced: The author dislikes bondage, and making bondage bad would appeal to him/her.
- Lampshaded: "Look out! He's naked and carrying ropes!!!"
- Invoked:
- A political rival gets her opponent to be spotted in public with BSDM gear and starts a smear campaign around that.
- An otherwise Safe, Sane, and Consensual scene plays up this trope within the context of the scenario.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: The Hero is into bondage.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Showed to be mere prejudice... or a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Reconstructed: ...But then it's shown that like with anyone else, while there are good people doing it harmlessly, there are bad people who fit the trope too.
- Played For Laughs: People who are into bondage are depicted as complete losers who constantly get into various inconvinient situations due to their sexual preference.
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