Basic Trope: A character is receiving a punishment that is out of proportion to reason for said punishment.
- Straight:
- Bob plots to murder Alice after she insults him.
- Judge Alice sentences Bob to life in prison for petty theft.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob plots to murder Alice and her entire extended family after she accidentally brushes against him on the subway.
- Judge Alice sentences Bob to death for littering.
- Alice disagrees with Bob about their preferences in food. Bob makes a pact with a God of Evil to gain immense power so that he can wipe out all other life in the universe, so that no one can ever disagree with him again.
- Bob burns people who disagree with his opinions.
- Alice steals Bob's toys. Bob instantly proceeds to torture her by ripping her teeth out, breaking every bone in her body and several other manners. After torturing her for days on end, Bob finally finishes his torture off by forcing her to watch him change her computer wallpaper to something gross.
- The Empire executes people for committing every crime in the book. That includes littering and jaywalking.
- Bob stubs his toe on a sharp rock. As revenge, he decides to crush the Earth into tiny pieces.
- Alice pantses Bob. Bob strips her naked, takes photos of her, posts them online and handcuffs her to a pole in the middle of the city to be gawked at.
- For all the overly disproportionate punishments and despite them constantly butting heads over the pettiest things, Judge Alice and Bob become Complete Monsters.
- Downplayed:
- Bob plots to break Alice's leg after she gets him fired.
- Judge Alice sentences Bob to life for breaking her leg.
- Judge Alice fines Bob $20,000 for jaywalking.
- Alice makes an offhand remark to Bob, who responds with a detailed and scalding speech about Alice's every character flaw.
- Justified:
- Bob is extremely mentally unstable and psychotic, prone to blowing things out of proportion. For that matter, Bob may not even know the meaning of the word "proportion."
- Bob hates Alice so much he believes that she deserves it.
- Bob believes Alice intended to get him fired so she could have his position, when it was somebody higher up who wanted Bob fired.
- Bob is The Sociopath, so he has no moral conscience and thereby believes that killing Alice would be an appropriate response to getting fired.
- Bob is narcissistic to the point that he genuinely believes that the most trivial of offenses warrant murder, if those offenses are committed against him.
- Bob is an utter Sadist who doesn't actually care about being slighted; rather, he takes a sick pleasure in using slights against him as an excuse to torture and kill others as slowly and as painfully as possible.
- Getting fired caused a chain of events: Bob's wife leaving him, getting evicted, losing all his money, and the death of his beloved cat. Bob believes that this justifies ruining Alice's life.
- Bob is in a violent Crapsack World, or at least subculture, where keeping a reputation for permitting no slight against himself is necessary if he wants to be taken seriously.
- Judge Alice is a Hanging Judge with extreme views on law enforcement.
- Bob did not account for Disaster Dominoes when punishing Alice.
- Alice has the dubious honor of breaking the proverbial camel's back.note
- The point of the overkill is to send a message that Bob is not to be fucked with. Future events in which Bob is pissed off over something may have a more proportional retribution, with Bob knowing the people he deals with think they got off easy, especially if they tried their damnedest to make up for their mistake once they figure out who they slighted.
- Bob comes roaring right out of the gate to try and stomp on Alice's potential as a threat, because a more proportionate retribution would allow Alice to begin a Cycle of Revenge that Bob cannot afford to be part of.
- Alice has the dubious honor of triggering Bob's PTSD.note
- Inverted:
- Easily Forgiven
- Disproportionate Reward
- Restrained Revenge
- Strongly Worded Letter
- Karma Houdini
- After Alice murders Bob's family, he plays a practical joke on her.
- Alice kills Bob's children. Bob gives Alice his boundless gratitude.
- Bob mildly insults Alice, but feels so bad about it that he punishes himself by committing suicide.
- Subverted:
- Although Bob's reasons for revenge initially seem trivial, it is revealed that Alice has in fact wronged Bob in a more serious and justifiable fashion.
- Bob makes it look like he murdered Alice's family as an elaborate practical joke.
- Alice shoots Bob after he demotes her, but not on purpose: the gun was only meant to scare him.
- Bob kills Alice over what seems like a mere insult, except she marked him for death and killing her is the only way to stay alive.
- Bob was teaching Alice about consequences through Scare 'Em Straight before she pisses a real psycho off.
- Double Subverted:
- Bob's planned revenge is still drastically over-the-top.
- The staged murders are just the first step in an elaborate process of making Alice suffer psychologically.
- Jim (the cop in charge of the murder investigation) points out that Alice still pulled a gun on Bob because he demoted her.
- Parodied:
- Bob attempts to murder anyone who accidentally throws a paper airplane at his head.
- Bob shoots a rocket launcher at someone he caught jaywalking.
- Zig-Zagged: Bob plots to get Alice murdered after she gets him fired. He hires a sniper to shoot Alice. However, the sniper, Charlie, doesn't fire at the last moment because Alice is his girlfriend. Bob, seeing all this, knocks out Charlie and grabs the rifle. It misfires when he tries to fire at Alice, however, so Bob, in frustration, throws the rifle at Alice, which then smashes her head clean in.
- Averted: Bob plans to get Alice fired after she gets him fired.
- Enforced:
- "What comedy trope can we put in this show? Oh! Disproportionate Retribution!"
- Today's Aesop? Life isn't fair.
- Lampshaded:
- "You don't think that taking revenge to this degree is a little... excessive?"
- "This punishment may be overboard, but it's truly justified!"
- Invoked:
- Bob uses threats of Disproportionate Retribution to terrify anybody who might otherwise challenge him, and brutally carries those threats out to the letter when somebody mistakes them for Ineffectual Death Threats.
- Dog-Kicking Excuse
- Defied:
- "Seriously, what happened to me wasn't that bad; I'm not going to go crazy here."
- Bob decides to save his more extreme punishments for crimes that are proportionate to such punishments.
- Exploited:
- Diane uses Bob's psychology to send him after her enemies by tricking them into pranking him.
- Alice insults Bob to goad him into attacking her so she can kill him and claim self-defense.
- Doubly exploited with Bob actually planning to make Alice insult him, which gets him angry and attempts to attack her, she attempts to murder him in self-defense, but he actually survives and calls the cops on Alice who promptly gets Death Row.
- Discussed: "Ran into Bob yet? Well, be very careful, he set Charlie on fire for giving him scalding hot coffee once."
- Conversed: "You have to wonder what those people who make overblown revenge plots are compensating for."
- Deconstructed:
- Bob spends all his money and loses his job, friends, and credibility trying to get his disproportionate retribution. He probably fails, too, since the Rube Goldberg Device of a plot is likely to implode. And even if he succeeds, Being Evil Sucks and he realizes it cost him more than it was worth.
- The police later found the real culprit and released Bob. Alice tries to apologize to Bob, but Bob, who was treated very badly during his short time in prison, tells her, even if he had done the crime, that he would had understood if the punishment was proportionate to his crime but the punishment far outweighs what he was wrongly imprisoned for. So he refuses to forgive her.
- He realizes how insane this plan is after he executes it, then it comes to bite him in the ass.
- Those around Bob see his attempts in revenge for something small as being petty and immature. Authority figures see him as unhinged for the extent he is willing to go for revenge and suggest he be institutionalized.
- Judge Alice's extreme sentencing makes crime even worse as criminals decide to try and kill all their witnesses as the punishment for their crime is already so severe that any additional penalties resulting from murder are irrelevant.
- Bob's disproportionate retribution means that Alice feels free to escalate her own retaliation. Bob eventually figures out that he's not quite prepared for this game of chicken.
- Alice insulted Bob. Bob had her killed. The police come for him. Bob can paint it anyway he wants, but ending in prison for fifty years sure doesn't sounds like a good price to pay.
- Reconstructed:
- Bob has serious repressed anger from being wronged by Alice in a way that does merit his over-the-top vengeance, her recent mistreatment of him just happened to be the straw that broke the camel's back.
- Based on Niccolò Machiavelli's "People should either be caressed or crushed" and to avoid "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind", Bob carries out a very potent revenge on his target to fully neutralize them, as said target is the kind to violently retaliate when properly punished.
- Bob decides to continue his escalation after a moment of hesitation, in the hopes that he will be the one on top and thus it will be Worth It.
- The policemen of Judge Alice's district escalate to summary execution of all criminals, as a result of the criminals' escalation. It will take some time, but eventually enough criminals will be culled and the crime rate figures will start to look acceptable.
- Played for Laughs:
- If you interrupt Bob, or express hatred for any of his favorite things, he'll kill you, but the victim will come back.
- If you interrupt him, he'll make the victim watch Barney the Dinosaur. Cue horrified screams.
- Bob kills Alice for murdering Charlie in Bob's house, because Charlie's screams woke up Bob from his nap and Charlie's blood ruined Bob's favorite carpet.
- Played for Drama:
- This all results from a serious anger problem and a lack of understanding of consequences and what is proportionate; every time his younger siblings or children are picked on, a building goes down.
- Bob intended to only break Alice's knee, but Bob was unaware that Alice had hemophilia, leading her to bleed uncontrollably and die, forcing Bob to run, as he is now a murderer.
- Played for Horror: The knowledge that Bob is perfectly willing and able to murder anybody who insults him (and plan how to get away with it) means a whole lot of paranoia is in the air every time people even thinks of him.
- Untwisted: Getting Alice fired for getting him fired seems like an appropriate response on Bob's part, until we find out that Alice simply pointed out what she thought was a simple accounting error on Bob's part, which lead to the discovery that he was embezzling from the company for years. Meanwhile Bob's idea of getting Alice fired is spreading so many rumors that not only does Alice lose her job but no reputable business would ever hire her.
If you go back to Disproportionate Retribution, I will kill your pet turtle!
