Basic Trope: Claiming that activities and aspects of the personalities of bad people are bad because of their association with bad people.
- Straight: Alice says she is going to become a vegetarian. Bob says, "You do know that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, don't you?"
- Exaggerated:
- Bob thinks that because Hitler was a vegetarian, becoming vegetarian makes you a mass murderer.
- Alice is suicidal. Bob tells her that because Hitler died by suicide, she is just as bad as he was.
- Downplayed: Bob says that Charlie is also a vegetarian and Charlie is a bit mouthy, but he's not bad, and Bob's not dismissing Alice's vegetarianism entirely.
- Justified:
- Bob knows enough about history to know Hitler was a vegetarian, but is The Ditz.
- Bob is an overzealous fanatic who is desperate enough to come up with any flimsy rationalization for why he thinks vegetarianism is bad, regardless of how little sense his claims make.
- Inverted:
- Bob tries to encourage Alice to become a vegetarian because someone good was a vegetarian.
- Bob tries to convince Alice that, contrary to all reputable evidence, tobacco smoking and heavy alcohol drinking are good and healthy, since those were things Hitler opposed.
- Alice is an animal abuser, and Bob points out that even Hitler himself despised animal abuse; thus, she is worse than Hitler.
- Alice insists that being a genocidal authoritarian is an irrelevant similarity between her and Hitler.
- Alice says and does many objectively evil things that Hitler also did. When Bob points it out, Alice accuses Bob of using this trope. In doing so, she implies her (and for that matter, the Nazis') evil actions are, in fact, perfectly reasonable.
- Alice decides to give up her vegetarianism, reasoning that because Hitler was a vegetarian and Hitler was evil, not being a vegetarian means that she cannot be evil.
- Subverted:
- Charlie, who is The Spock, points out Bob's faulty logic.
- Bob is about to name Hitler as an historical vegetarian, but stops himself.
- Alice had just said that all vegetarians are kind, moral people, and Bob bringing up Hitler is a logical retort.
- Double Subverted:
- Bob ignores Charlie, or simply doesn't hear him.
- He names somebody he or Alice hates even more than Hitler.
- He doesn't cite Hitler's vegetarianism merely to disprove her erroneous claim, but tries to prove the opposite, that all vegetarians are rude and immoral people.
- Parodied:
- Alice is a hardcore Nazi; she is a vegetarian precisely because Hitler was one.
- Because Hitler ate, drank, slept, walked, breathed, etc. in his lifetime, Bob decides not to do any of these things.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice and Bob have a whole conversation about this topic.
- Averted:
- Nobody talks about morality or uses Logical Fallacies, or invokes this trope, in the series.
- Bob doesn't try to tell Alice that she shouldn't be a vegetarian.
- Bob argues that Alice shouldn't be a vegetarian, but he doesn't appeal to any past or present vegetarians' villainy.
- Alice doesn't express a desire to become a vegetarian.
- Enforced:
- The writers hate vegetarians, and they know Hitler was a vegetarian, so they use Bob, a Creator's Pet who is still popular, to get this across.
- The writers want to do a joke involving a character making a flimsy rationalization on something being bad just because Hitler or some other widely hated (or just easy-to-lampoon) person did it or approved of it.
- Lampshaded: "So what? Hitler also had a bottom; so do we!"
- Invoked: Bob, who is prone to the Association Fallacy, gets some information about Hitler.
- Exploited: Bob knows that this trope works on Alice, so he uses it to get her to avoid doing something that would help her or disadvantage him, even though the thing itself is no worse than morally neutral.
- Defied:
- The characters try to be as logical as possible.
- Charlie interrupts Bob before he can bring up Hitler, suspecting he's about to do so.
- Alice plans out how she's going to become a vegetarian, all without telling Bob that she is doing so.
- Discussed: "'Don't do that! HITLER did that! And Hitler's eeeeeeeeeevil!' That doesn't mean the thing is evil, Bob."
- Conversed: "Why do people act as though doing random things the Nazis did makes you a Nazi, or evil? The racism, sexism, discrimination against homosexuality, and mass murder are why the Nazis were evil."
- Deconstructed: Bob's insistent claims that things he dislikes are evil just because Hitler did them eventually cause all the people he knows who partake in the things he dislikes to be alienated from him out of disgust at his obsessive intolerance.
- Reconstructed: He apologizes and stops being obsessively intolerant. He occasionally lapses into this trope, but not to the extent he did before.
- Played for Laughs: Bob makes the rationalization that since Hitler existed, everyone who exists is therefore evil.
- Played for Drama: Bob tries to make Alice feel guilty about vegetarianism because of this.
- Played for Horror: After Bob uses this rationalization and Alice can't refute it, she stays a vegetarian but decides "Then Let Me Be Evil" and commits atrocities of her own.
- Implied: Bob says, "You know who else was a vegetarian?", but Alice doesn't let him finish.
Don't go back to the main page! Hitler went back to the main page!
