Basic Trope: The good guys are hampered by infighting.
- Straight: The Rival refuses to support The Hero's plan against the Dark Lord.
- Exaggerated: The Rival throws a fit over The Hero being given the only weapon that can be used against the Dark Lord when he's coming into the castle.
- Downplayed: The Rival has some disagreements with The Hero's plan, even though he agrees with the basics of it.
- Justified:
- Inverted: Enemy Civil War
- Subverted: The Rival is really The Mole and intentionally sabotaging it.
- Double Subverted: Except that The Mole framed him for it.
- Parodied: The good guys are hampered by infighting over the pettiest things. Meanwhile, the villains are hampered just as badly by far more serious concerns.
- Zig Zagged: The Hero never knows which allies will support him and which will sulk over his plan on any given day.
- Averted: The heroes all work together.
- Enforced: "The Hero's plan will work in five minutes — we need to drag this out for the rest of the episode — let's make his allies argue with him!"
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: The Quisling starts planting seeds of discord in the heroes' organization, so they become too fragmented to become a real threat to his master.
- Exploited: See Invoked and follow with the traitor taking the chance to try to convert The Rival to the Dark Lord's cause.
- Defied: For the purpose of defeating the Evil Overlord, The Hero and The Rival set aside their differences and work together as a single united team.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: The heroes spend more time fighting each other than the villains, and cause more destruction in the process.
- Reconstructed:
- The heroes have a mechanism to stop fighting before it gets out of hand. It helps them realize what they are doing and learn to work together.
- The Hero uses it to filter out those whose Pride will keep them from being good team players. It results in a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits.
- Played For Drama: The Dark Lord is a cunning strategist who is aware of the heroes' infighting and decides to take advantage of it by either let them finish each other off before he makes his moves, or manipulate the weaker faction of the heroes into his bidding.
Back to Divided We Fall
