Basic Trope: Vilifying wealthy people.
- Straight: Hard Times Harry, a destitute vagabond, rallies for the have-nots to start an uprising against a wealthy elite.
- Exaggerated: Hard Times Harry wants to kill everyone who happens to have any amount of money to their name.
- Downplayed: Hard Times Harry doesn't vilify everyone who's wealthy, reserving his contempt towards rich people who are objectively bad.
- Justified:
- Hard Times Harry despises the rich because he believes their extravagant lifestyle makes them out of touch with how horrible life is for the poor.
- Hard Times Harry is angered that some wealthy people can use their wealth to avoid getting in trouble for their actions.
- Harry's parents were killed by the rich people.
- Inverted: Kill the Poor
- Subverted:
- Hard Times Harry turns out to mean something else entirely when he said "eat the rich". He meant to address how delicious rich foods are.
- Hard Times Harry's words are taken out of context, he actually means to say "eat the rich in nutrients." He is actually promoting eating good healthy food!
- Double Subverted:
- Hard Times Harry then goes on to state how he can't afford to eat decent food and that the rich must be punished for keeping the good stuff to themselves.
- However, the economically rich hoards the good food rich in nutrients, so Hard Times Harry decides to punish the rich so the foods rich in nutrients can be distributed more fairly.
- Parodied: The lower class uprising involves the wealthy getting sprayed with foodstuffs and the poor attempting to stab them with silverware.
- Zig-Zagged: Hard Times Harry's main goal is to get the oppressed to turn against whoever he believes is responsible, with the wealthy only being the targets whenever they fit his narrative.
- Averted: No one expresses negative feelings about the rich.
- Enforced: The creator of the work wants to inform the audience that they shouldn't have to tolerate it when the more opulent are abusing them or screwing them over.
- Lampshaded: "I actually submit a fair amount of my fortune to charities, Hard Times Harry. Blaming all people of my class for the world's problems will only make you look ungrateful and willing to use a scapegoat."
- Invoked: Hard Times Harry wants to make a wealthy person he despises suffer, so he rallies the lower class into an anti-rich frenzy in hopes that at least one of them will attempt to harm his source of scorn.
- Exploited: Hard Times Harry doesn't really care about the rich oppressing the less wealthy, he just wants everyone to kill each other and is using an anti-rich rhetoric as an excuse to make everyone hostile to each other.
- Defied:
- "No, let's not blame the rich for everything. Assuming all of them are greedy and selfish plutocrats will likely make us look bad to the ones who actually use their wealth to help the less fortunate."
- "I know we're having a hard time here, but we will endure. Let's stop playing victim and just blaming someone else like the rich."
- "Yes, the rich are bastards and making us suffer, but if we eat and vilify them, we'll just be as bad as they are. So let's just endure, we're better than stooping that low."
- Discussed:
- "Two wrongs don't make a right, Hard Times Harry. If you think the rich are bad now, imagine how much it would suck if they stop giving hand-outs or donations because your outbursts convince them that everyone who's penniless is an irate scoundrel with no ounce of gratitude."
- "You may hate the rich for not doing anything, but when was the last time you actually did something for the poor yourself? Surely you've done more to help out your own community, right?"
- "Are you sure that the poor have absolute moral high ground, Hard Times Harry? The rich haven't been doing anything harmful, and last I heard, the poor are just abusing their status quo as 'poor little victims' without doing anything to deserve it."
- Conversed: "Funny that a message condemning the rich is put in the story when the work itself is providing the creator with an inordinate amount of cash."
- Implied: Hard Times Harry scowls whenever a wealthy person walks by.
- Deconstructed:
- Killing the rich doesn't solve the town's problems, as an absence of opulent citizens means that there are less people able to afford upkeep and the poor are stuck fighting tooth and nail to survive.
- The poor start believing that whatever they do is good, because they were always portrayed as the 'justified victim', and kickstarted a belief that 'being rich is evil', so everyone is kept in poverty, whereas rich people are constantly suffering Demonization because of the generalization that they are always greedy, selfish and evil thus undesirable. Thus the rich only exist to be vilified and everyone started believing that being poor, undernourished and suffering is 'ideal and virtuous', creating a stagnant community because no one wants to be rich and then get labelled as 'evil', preferring the virtuous way of the poor.
- Reconstructed:
- Hard Times Harry only targets rich people who are demonstrably corrupt and implores more benign rich people to make the scoundrels among them face accountability for their actions regardless of how much money they have to their name.
- Eventually, some people gets tired of the new status quo and work their way off to become rich and strive to be not as evil. Their plan half-succeeds: People became inspired to become rich and hard-working again, ensuring better lives. However, some rich people still got in tune with their vices to oppress the poor, but there are new laws to ensure that the rich don't go too far to ensure that the "Total Villification of Richness" status quo is never restored again.
- Played for Laughs: "Eat the rich? I'm afraid I might give you indigestion, dear boy. How about I buy you a nice steak-and-kidney pie?"
- Played for Drama:
- Hard Times Harry leads a revolution to get rid of the rich, and whether he wins or loses it's a very bloody quagmire.
- The uprising against the wealthy leads to the town descending into chaos because of many rich children being orphaned and the companies belonging to the victims of the lower-class activists being unprepared for accommodating the demises of their owners.
- Played for Horror: Hard Times Harry starts a "kill-the-rich" murder cult that begins with a few casual "hunts" and escalates to a country-or world-wide spree.
Tired of being stepped on and belittled just because you're poor? Then Eat the Rich!
