Basic Trope: A character trait(s) become the character's main facet(s) over time.
- Straight: Alice is a character on Alice and Bob: she's well-rounded, but her most defining trait is her political activism. In later seasons, all facets of her character are drowned out to where the political activism is all that remains of her characterization.
- Exaggerated:
- Every character on Alice and Bob slowly becomes a one-note character with only one hobby.
- Alice goes from a basic character who occasionally mentions the president to a crazed political activist who yells at anyone who doesn't agree with her side.
- Alice becomes a crazed political activist with little to no explanation.
- The entire Alice and Bob series, originally a lighthearted political satire, soon ends up as a blatant piece of propaganda with Straw Characters built all over the place to attack various political, religious, and ethnic groups.
- Downplayed:
- Alice becomes more and more interested in politics as time passes, but still has other traits.
- Character Exaggeration
- Alice also starts appearing less.
- Justified:
- The political activism is solely in retaliation to the creeping political plot lines in the story.
- Alice's friends, seeing her talent in political activism, encouraged her to pursue it more and more, and Alice does just that.
- Alice and Bob is a show focusing mainly on political satire, and the writers want to make Alice, who they use to comment on current events, to focus more and more on commenting on politics.
- The work is a commentary on how Political Activism takes over people's lives and makes them become more and more extreme.
- There are now loads of characters, and Alice's political activism is the main trait setting her apart from the rest of the characters and the only thing worth showing.
- Alice didn't have enough personality before and didn't fit in with all the other quirky characters in the show.
- Alice had a bit of a Dark and Troubled Past and views political activism as her road to redemption, so she lets it completely envelope her life.
- Alice underwent a case of Sanity Slippage.
- Inverted:
- Characterization Marches On
- Alice goes from a one-note political activist into a rich and well-defined character with a variety of hobbies.
- Hidden Depths when it happens gradually.
- Alice's political activism, her most defining trait early on, becomes less and less important as the rest of her personality becomes more prominent. In later seasons, references to it become extremely rare and relegated to offhand remarks, to the point where its previous manifestations are seen as an Early-Installment Weirdness.
- Subverted: It seems like Alice is going to become a one-note political activist, but that was only for a multi-episode story arc.
- Double Subverted: But after that, her characterization really does slide...
- Parodied:
- Alice goes from a well-defined character to a one-note political activist in the span of one episode.
- Alice becomes increasingly defined by her despair and bitterness as she tends to the wounded in the trenches of Flanders, Belgium.
- Zig Zagged:
- Alice's characterization varies Depending on the Writer.
- Characters develop traits, gets reduced to one trait, develops new traits, the cycle continues.
- Averted:
- No one's characterization is narrowed.
- Alice was never well-rounded to begin with.
- Enforced:
- "Agh, I'm tired of writing well-rounded stories about Alice. Just turn her into a political activist and that'll make all our jobs easier."
- The author wants to use Alice to express their political views. or to discredit those they are against.
- The audience likes political jokes at the expense of Alice, so the writers make more of them.
- Lampshaded: "Remember when you used to do other things than just protest all the time?" "Sounds like you're a victim of the liberal agenda, Bob."
- Invoked: Alice decides that anything else in her life will just distract her from her main goal, and therefore focuses on political activism.
- Exploited: Every time Bob wants to distract Alice, he just mentions politics.
- Defied: Alice realizes that she's becoming obsessed and decides to stop talking about politics for a while.
- Discussed: "Alice, I think you should see a therapist. Unlike what you see on TV, normal people don't become like this!"
- Conversed: "You remember when the characters on this show used to behave like regular people? I guess the writers got lazy. Never mind, it's much more entertaining this way."
- Implied: Alice is a minor or offscreen character, so we don't know for sure that her personality is changing.
- Deconstructed:
- If Alice is a jerkass, not only being an absurdly flat character annoys the audience, but having Alice be so utterly unlikeable makes the audience hate Alice even moreso than before.
- Bob gets fed up with Alice's obsession with political activism and laments the days when she talked about other things.
- Alice has a only became a radical pro-choice extremist when strict abortion laws in her country forced her to go to a Back-Alley Doctor to terminate her pregnancy, resulting in a severe infection and later a hysterectomy, or she only started protesting against police brutality and institutionalized racism every chance she gets when her Token Black Friend was shot and killed by the police over a gross misunderstanding where he was wrongly suspected to be an armed drug dealer.
- Reconstructed: Alice explains to Bob that a vote on a particular issue she cares about is coming up, and since she's a member of a political activist group based on that issue, she can't stop thinking about it until the vote is over. Once that's done, she goes back to being a more nuanced person.
- Plotted A Good Waste: Alice gets subjected to Flanderization along with several other characters because Alice and Bob is a disguised parody and commentary on various Bad Writing Tropes.
- Played For Laughs: Alice's obsession in shown as something hilarious, and other characters always make jokes at her expense.
- Played For Drama: Alice loses all of her friends who aren't interested in political activism.
- Played for Horror: Alice’s crazed obsession with activism is mildly unsettling.
You seem pretty interesting, but you just know that sooner or later your only defining trait will be that you want to go back to Flanderization.
