Basic Trope: A couple team up to commit a crime.
- Straight: Lovers Alice and Bob rob a bank together.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice and Bob work together to commit mass murder.
- There are several or many outlaw couples.
- Downplayed:
- Alice and Bob work together to play a practical joke.
- They are Just Friends.
- Alice and Bob are a couple, but only Alice commits the actual crime while Bob acts as an accessory-after-the-fact.
- Justified: Teamwork is necessary for the crime in question, one person needs to hold a gun while the other commits the theft, or they need to establish an alibi that has two parts.
- Inverted: Alice and Bob work together to solve crime, or to bring criminals to justice.
- Subverted: It turns out that Alice and Bob were planning to use legal methods to obtain the money they needed...
- Doubly Subverted: ...in order to buy illegal drugs or to pay a cutthroat.
- Parodied: Alice and Bob work together to steal water from a public restroom.
- Zig Zagged: Alice and Bob have been an Outlaw Couple but decide to give up a life of crime and settle down. Then they find that they are out of money, so they commit another theft. Just when they have decided to give up crime again, Dave murders Bob's friend Charlie, the couple go after him and murder him in revenge.
- Averted: Alice and Bob are not lovers, or they do not commit any crimes, or they only commit crimes separately.
- Enforced: “The story needs a bit more romance. How about we pair Alice and Bob together?”
- Lampshaded: "They're like some sort of Bonnie and Clyde."
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Alice and Bob pointedly refuse to be outlaws and/or a couple.
- Discussed: "Even now, the power of the mystique surrounding Bonnie and Clyde is strong... and inspirational in all the wrong ways."
- Conversed: "Yup. Another homage to Bonnie and Clyde. The writers are either showing their age there, are bamboozled over the "hero" mystique that those two don't deserve, or can't write two characters in a steady relationship who are not basing it on being turned on by the other's capacity for murder."
- Deconstructed: Alice and Bob often turn their robberies into murders out of anger or just spite for their victims, and the stress and paranoia of constantly being on the run fractures their relationship.
- Reconstructed: Alice and Bob's crimes are targeted against a truly evil Corrupt Corporate Executive or Orwellian government power, and they make sure to plot their crimes around not getting innocent people killed.
Back to Outlaw Couple
