Basic Trope: A character rejects a solution for being imperfect, when the perfect solution is impossible or near-impossible.
- Straight: Alice the exterminator offers to kill all the rats in Bob's house, but he says no because she can't repair the damage the rats did.
- Exaggerated: Alice offers food to Bob, who's stranded in the North Pole and starving, but he rejects it because the food is cold.
- Downplayed:
- Justified: Bob is The Perfectionist.
- Inverted: Bob, for some reason, wants all solutions to be imperfect and thus seeks to have the rats killed, but avoids having the damage repaired.
- Subverted: Alice says that she can kill the rats but not fix the damage. Bob turns her down... because her services are too expensive.
- Double Subverted:
- Parodied:
- Zigzagged:
- Averted: Bob does hire Alice.
- Enforced: It's an Edutainment Show and they're doing an episode on logical fallacies.
- Lampshaded: "He's a full-grown man and doesn't realise that not everything can be perfect?"
- Invoked:
- Exploited: Bob uses this as an excuse because he's stingy and doesn't want to spend any money.
- Defied: "I know hiring an exterminator won't fix the damage, but it'll stop it from getting any worse."
- Discussed: "There just isn't pleasing some people — they turn you down in favour of something perfect that's just a pipe dream!"
- Conversed: "That character is so unreasonable, turning everything remotely imperfect down."
- Implied: Alice often complains about Bob having ludicrous conditions for what he wants. This is never expanded upon.
- Deconstructed: In his futile search for someone who can kill the rats and repair the damage, Bob lets the situation worsen until his house is completely overrun.
- Reconstructed: ???
- Played for Laughs: Bob rejects all forms of public transport on the basis that ideally, teleporters would exist.
- Played for Drama: Bob dies of starvation due to turning down food he saw as inferior.
- Played for Horror: Alice offers to kill the zombies on Bob's property, but he turns her down because she can't stop the Zombie Apocalypse as a whole.
Back to Perfect Solution Fallacy.
