Basic Trope: A character is addicted to heroic acts.
- Straight: Alice is repeatedly sidetracked by various people in need, such as a person trapped in a car or an attempted robbery.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice's acts of heroism range from saving those trapped in a burning building to getting a cat down from a tree.
- Martyr Without a Cause.
- Alice has helped so many people, saved so many lives and helped out in some minor problems she treats her acts of heroism like a normal day
- Downplayed: Occasionally Alice does a little more heroic than necessary, but not much.
- Justified:
- Alice's Power Source actually requires her to perform several heroic acts a day in order to function.
- Alice suffers from trauma stemming from how a young girl died when she chose to do the "logical thing" and call for help rather than dive in to save the day herself. Now, whenever she comes across someone who needs her help, her fears of history repeating itself keep her from ignoring them.
- One of Alice's powers is Super-Speed. She helps everyone because she can and still have time for other things.
- Alice is a genuinely Nice Girl who just likes to help people thus when she got Powers/Skills she decided to use them just to help everyone out.
- Alice knows about the very lucrative rewards involved in doing heroic deeds, but she takes a more opportunistic approach, as being a heroism addict would either be below her, or if found out, will make her look bad.
- Some people have a lot of bad luck and are in dangerous, life-threatening situations. On top of that, there are also very despicable villains who will do horrible things for various reasons (or none at all). Bottom Line: Alice has to intervene or scores of innocent people (or the planet itself) will die.
- Inverted:
- Alice never passes up an opportunity to be a Jerkass to people.
- Chronic Villainy.
- Punch-Clock Hero.
- Bystander Syndrome.
- Subverted:
- Alice acts far too heroic for her own good but then she refuses to rescue a kidnapped little girl for whatever reason.
- Bad things seem to conveniently happen around Alice for her to solve, because she arranged them in the first place.
- Double Subverted:
- The overwhelming guilt causes Alice to rescue her later on.
- Evulz is actually the one who arranged all of the problems to happen around Alice to frame her, counting on the public to be to cynical to accept her kind and giving nature.
- Parodied: Alice is literally unable to stop acting heroic, complete with trying to quit and a Cold Turkeys Are Everywhere sequence.
- Zig Zagged: Alice acts far too heroic for her own good... but then she refuses to rescue a kidnapped little girl. The overwhelming guilt causes Alice to rescue her later on... but it turns out that that was her sister - the original little girl is still trapped! Alice goes off to rescue her, but stops mid-step. Then she goes on anyway...
- Averted: Alice never performs any more heroism than the norm.
- Enforced: "We need to show how heroic Alice is! Let's have her repeatedly act heroic!"
- Lampshaded:
- "Why can't I stop being a hero?"
- "Building on fire, cat caught in tree, ''opening a peanut butter jar''? Alice..." "Look, I don't choose who needs help with what, all right? I'm there, I help. It comes with the cape."
- Invoked: Bob dares Alice to help 50 people in one day.
- Exploited: Emperor Evulz sets up several dangerous situations in order to keep Alice busy while she works on her Death Ray.
- Defied: Alice actively avoids minor dangerous situations.
- Discussed: "Boy, is she heroic! How is she still standing after doing all that?"
- Conversed: "Yet another over-zealous hero. Aren't you getting sick of those?" "Not really; it beats one who angsts or drags their feet".
- Deconstructed:
- After not being able to save a little girl from a burning building, Alice falls into a Heroic BSoD.
- People start to catch onto Alice's constant need to be the hero, and as a result she is easily taken advantage of.
- Alice wastes so much time helping everyone in town with their problems that she fails to stop the Big Bad from activating his Doomsday Device and destroying the town, making it All for Nothing.
- Alice overworks herself to death trying to save everyone around her, deeply upsetting the people who care about her.
- Reconstructed:
- After not being able to save a little girl from a burning building, Alice resolves to help others more.
- Alice is easily taken advantage of, but is mostly because she doesn't mind, so long as a good deed is done in the process. Any attempt to exploit this for less noble ends generally ends in a destroyed plan and a pissed Alice offering a lecture.
- Everyone Alice helped returns the favor, helping her reach and defeat the Big Bad faster than she ever could alone.
- Played For Laughs: Alice brags about how she can do 20 good deeds in one hour and proceeds to do so.
- Played For Drama:
- The strain of the repeated heroic acts cause Alice to have a Heroic RRoD.
- Alice used to think someone else would deal with things. Then one day, no one did. People still remember that day very vividly, especially Alice, who feels that her slacking off is directly responsible for every single drop of blood that was spilled. So Alice's decided breaktime is over, permanently.
Back to Chronic Hero Syndrome.
