Basic Trope: A character steadily commits more and more evil acts over time.
- Straight: After killing a marauding thug to protect his family, David becomes more callous and cynical, and prone to greater acts of violence than before.
- Exaggerated:
- David guns down an innocent elderly couple for food almost immediately after killing the thug.
- David treats violence as the first, last, and only resort for dealing with others after his first encounter.
- Downplayed:
- David becomes more taciturn, but keeps his morality intact.
- Slowly Slipping Into Jerkassery.
- Justified:
- Once you've killed someone, the rest is repetition.
- Life in David's world has taken a sharp turn for the worse, and having a moral code doesn't make it easier.
- ...At least that's what David thinks now.
- Inverted: The usually immoral mercenary David shares food with a starving family in a rare moment of kindness. This signals his gradual shift towards unambiguous goodness.
- Subverted: David doesn't kill anyone else after his first murder.
- Parodied: David starts wearing a lot of black and talking about the futility of life after killing someone.
- Zig Zagged: At first, David's shell-shock prevents him from doing anything else wrong, but eventually he starts rationalizing his bad actions more and more, framing them as necessities in a harsh and unforviging world. Eventually he does something he can't justify—and that his family can't accept—that pushes him into a place where he no longer cares about his actions. But this doesn't last, and he eventually comes to his senses, saving his family from another band of maurauders by serving as a distraction, allowing them to escape unharmed.
- Averted: David's morality is never called into question.
- Enforced: Murder is a bad thing no matter what the circumstances, and being okay with it can lead to devastating consequences.
- Lampshaded: David's predicament is compared to sliding down a very tall mountain.
- Invoked: David's father encourages the behavior:"Always knew he had it in him."
- Exploited: Paul thinks David's new "killer" status is "awesome" and encourages him to do it again because he wants to see more splatter.
- Defied: David kills a man, knows it's wrong, feels terrible and vows never to do it again.
- Discussed: Father Colin warns David of the dangers of killing, even for a just cause, since the unavoidable can all too easily become the inevitable when dealing with evil.
- Conversed: David knows in his heart he might have to kill again, and secretly relishes the prospect.
- Implied: David starts showing more aggressive and loathsome behavior.
- Deconstructed: As the bad deeds begin to pile up and David's behavior becomes more reckless, the group becomes more and more endangered by it. Once they meet up with another, more stable group of survivors he's imprisoned.
- Reconstructed: David's family acknowledges that his actions, while heinous, are what allowed them to survive, and express remorse that he was the one who had to shoulder that burden alone.
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