Basic Trope: An amiable, openly crooked con artist.
- Straight: Ulysses believes people are fools, so you may as well give them what they ask for and pocket the difference.
- Exaggerated: Despite insulting his "customers" to their faces, Ulysses maintains that he likes people and wants nothing but the best for them.
- Downplayed: Ulysses holds a lot of ill will toward people, but doesn't cheat them any more than necessary.
- Justified: A con artist is in contact with lots of people, and negative word-of-mouth makes being a jerk unprofitable.
- Inverted: Ulysses is straight-laced, serious, and about as interesting as a beige dishcloth.
- Subverted: Being extroverted makes Ulysses a natural people person, and despite his crookedness, he's more than happy to associate with people of his own chosen caliber while off the clock.
- Parodied: Known aliases of Ulysses are "Mr. Golden Personality" and "The Man who Backstabs".
- Zig Zagged: Ulysses goes back and forth between loving showmanship and loving money.
- Averted: Ulysses doesn't care one way or the other about his marks, and says whatever he needs to say to get them to open their wallets.
- Enforced:
- The writers wish to add a Con Man as a Wild Card to their cast, and wish to avoid an Obvious Judas. So making Ulysses a happy-go-lucky pseudo-Pollyanna who takes his Chronic Backstabbing Disorder as a game is a nice change of pace.
- Lampshaded: "I suppose with my talents I could still get by being an honest and up-front gent, but where's the fun in that?"
- Invoked: The smiling face Ulysses puts on for his marks masks his absolute contempt for them.
- Exploited: A disarming, cheeky personality makes conning people a breeze.
- Defied: Ulysses doesn't cheat people or look down on them.
- Discussed: The roots of Ulysses' happy-go-lucky attitude and criminal behavior are examined in detail.
- Conversed: "Don't let the bubbly exterior fool you: cross me, or my money, and you will be miserable indeed."
- Implied: Ulysses is often seen rolling his eyes behind people's backs.
- Deconstructed:
- Despite his pretensions, Ulysses can't reconcile his facade of good humor (or his ego) with the underhanded things he does to separate people from their money. He ends up a hard, bitter person, ruined by a lifetime spent meditating on the most unattractive aspects of human nature.
- Whoever looks beneath Ulysses' surface will not only be angry because he is swindling them, they are going to be enraged because Ulysses dares to destroy them while keeping a damn smile on his face and they will do anything to wipe it right off.
- Reconstructed: A few rounds of therapy later, Ulysses has learned to balance his cynical attitude with a healthy sense of perspective; some people are dolts, yes, but plenty more are smart and interesting enough to satisfy his curiosity. He keeps playing his cons, but less often than before and with more mutually satisfying results.
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