Basic Trope: The heroes are herbivores, and the villains are carnivores.
- Straight: A few rabbits and squirrels band together to save themselves from the evil wolves.
- Exaggerated: The predators love to torture their prey for hours before killing them.
- Downplayed: Predators tend to be portrayed, at worst, as anti villains. Dangerous during feeding time but even then they prefer to kill those who likely wouldn't make it far. They go for quick relatively painless kills and only what they need to survive and feed their children.
- Justified: The cosmology enforces it. The plants are bland but ample enough to sustain those who eat them. However those who taste flesh and blood are rejected by it and are not nourished. This means only those who kill and eat are warped by it.
- All potential prey is sapient, so predators who have a problem with killing sapient beings don't last long.
- Inverted:
- The wolves are the heroes, and the rabbits and squirrels are the villains.
- Combine with "Exaggerated"! And you get: A Five-Man Band of a Lion a wolf, a Hawk, a Tiger, and a human fight a Five-Man Band of a Cow, a Squirrel, a Rhino, a Donkey and a Deer.
- Subverted:
- The wolves are actually quite pleasant and friendly.
- While brusque and not friendly to be around, the wolf is an Anti-Hero.
- Some Wolves are mean while others are friendly.
- Double Subverted: ...Until they rip your throat out.
- Parodied:
- The heroes are talking plants and the villains are ravenous herbivores.
- In a Five-Man Band of a horse, a human, a wolf, a tiger, and a hawk, the horse is constantly recognized as the Token Minority and assumed as the Token Good Teammate. Naturally, most characters are shocked when they discover he's actually the biggest jerk in the party.
- Zig Zagged: The rabbits and squirrels band together and drive away the wolves; unfortunately this leaves an ecological niche open for weasels, coyotes and other meat-eaters. And after they're gone, those hairless apes with their tame wolves and thundersticks arrive...
- Averted:
- The predators are no more good or evil than their prey.
- There aren't any animals eating each other.
- Enforced: "There's a nice easy source of conflict. Let's make the wolves evil!"
- Lampshaded: "How dare that shark want to avoid a painful death of starvation! Satanically evil, isn't he?"
- Invoked: "Don't trust Professor Wolverton, Mayor Long-ears! He's just wants to eat us all up!"
- Exploited: An evil rabbit kills another rabbit and blames it on the wolves.
- Defied:
- "Just because we have to eat animals to survive doesn't make us evil! It's just a (burp) necessity."
- "I can't feel my legs..." "Even with Human medicine, you will never walk again. The only question remaining now, rabbit, is do you want some fiveleaf, or will you face death with a clear head?"
- Discussed: "No voice actors for the velociraptors, then."
- Conversed: "Hrm, a chinchilla serial killer. Didn't see that coming."
- Deconstructed: The rabbits and squirrels drive the wolves out, then they reproduce so much that they exhaust their food supply, ruining the local ecosystem, resulting in mass starvation. And that was just plain careless and irresponsible.
- Reconstructed:
- The wolves return and enjoy a delicious bounty of food, causing the rabbit and squirrel population to return to sustainable levels, ensuring a plentiful food supply for everyone!
- Alternately: Then, the rabbits and squirrels work to solve the population problem by executing some and take up farming to ensure there is food for everyone. Others wish for the 'good old days' when they only had to worry about the wolves instead of each other and bring the wolves back. This results in a newer more complex system with a variety of factions on both sides, none of which are truly evil or truly good.
Back to Predators Are Mean, Prince With A Thousand Enemies!
