Basic Trope: Being treated as though you were evil makes you evil.
- Straight: Alice is treated like a thief, so she steals money.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice is treated like a mass murderer, so she kills millions of people.
- Alice is treated like a thief, so she becomes an Omnicidal Maniac.
- Alice is treated poorly or disliked by the society to the point of becoming a scapegoat all because of one heroic deed gone sour, so she becomes a Complete Monster at worst, discarding any tragedy she had in the past and rendering all excuses for her wrongdoings moot.
- Downplayed:
- Alice is treated like a Jerkass, so she becomes one.
- Alice is treated as a Dumb Blonde despite being a good student and talented in robotics, so she decides to act like one.
- Alice is treated like a mass murderer so she becomes a Noble Demon.
- Alice is treated like a monster, she responds with a speech about Dirty Business.
- Alice is treated like a villain, so she becomes one... who doesn't really do anything. The 'villain' switch is just an excuse for people to finally leave her alone.
- Alice is treated as a harmless villain. So she pokes a poodle.
- Alice is a hero but is treated poorly for her approach to doing the right thing, so she decides to embrace being a dangerous Anti-Hero.
- Alice is treated like someone who jaywalks, litters, and loiters. So she develops a habit into doing so.
- Alice is a Serial Killer who rightfully treated as a villain. So she embraces her public image and becomes a Card-Carrying Villain.
- Alice is an ex-minion of darkness who wants to repent and redeem herself before the forces of light. However, she's rejected by the forces of light on principles alone, so Alice stops attempting to redeem herself but stays neutral, because the forces of darkness do not take traitors kindly.
- Justified:
- Further accusations and hostility made Alice realize that she can't take it anymore.
- Alice spends most of her time alone, which society thinks that being alone makes you a sociopath.
- Alice was being repeatedly framed up, and she's finally fed up with it and decided to deliver a revenge by doing what exactly they accused.
- Alice used to be a Nice Gal who always went out of her ways to help others, regardless of what they thought of her. After dealing with so many people who still treat her as evil despite risking her own life to save theirs, she decides she's had enough of them and chooses to start harming them as payback.
- Alice decides that if she is to be treated like a criminal, she might as well try to profit from it.
- Alice responds by withdrawing from society. Her most questionable yet understandable action is refusing to help them out when the shoe is on the other foot.
- Inverted:
- Alice is treated as though she's the good guy, so with that, she turns into a good guy.
- Alice has done numerous terrible things to her Abusive Parents as revenge for the abuse she suffered as a child. When she learns that it was because as a fetus, she stole her twin's nutrients and the twin died as a stillborn, she decided its not worth trying to get back at them, and cuts them out of her life.
- Being treated like a villain just makes Alice more determined to prove she's a hero.
- Alice tries to be good, but then sees her enemy, who has done bad things, is treated like the good guy, just for not going all the way. Out of resentment and jealousy, Alice turns evil because she decides that if good goes unrewarded while bad is overlooked, than there’s really no point in her being good if it doesn’t get her anything.
- People keep treating Alice like a good guy no matter what she does. Alice uses this to her advantage to get away with doing irredeemable crimes that she wants to do.
- Subverted:
- Alice is treated as a mass murderer - and seems to be one, except she isn't; everyone she killed, she did so reluctantly in self-defense after trying to defuse the situation several times.
- Alice is treated like a mass murderer, although she isn't. Eventually she seem to snap and goes on rampage...except it's just an act to scare people.
- Alice kills half of the men in the town after being treated like a monster for being a witch. However it wasn't over mistreatment of herself but that they were about to burn another witch. Her code of honor calls for rescuing fellow witches by any means necessary.
- Double Subverted: Until Bob is killed because of them which causes her to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge on society.
- Parodied:Alice: C'mon guys, treat me like a bad guy so I can use it as justification to be a bad guy!
Bob: Um, why?
Alice: Screw you, now I'm evil! - Zig-Zagged:
- The forces of good think Alice is evil because of her aura. However, Alice refuses to be evil since her curse would then turn her into a monster. Though as she starts becoming monstrous her friends think she finally gave in... Except she's been cursed so long its trying to use any kind of negative emotion to trigger the change. Yet when Alice looks into a mirror...
- Alice is determined to bring down the society that brutalizes witches despite the costs. Hiro objects but Alice points out that they could have ended it at any time by just treating her like a human.. It is unclear who the author is taking the side of.
- Averted:
- Alice doesn't turn evil after all of the accusations.
- No one treats Alice as evil, but she chooses to be evil for no reason.
- Enforced: The writer is in need of a new villain, so she figures that the heroes would treat her like one so that she can become one.
- Lampshaded:
- "You treated me like a bad guy, so this is what you get. Tough shit, 'heroes'."
- "Everyone thought I was a monster. Now, all I want to do is prove them right."
- "You asked for it, I ought to thank every last one of you, don't I?!"
- "So, you became a monster because someone treated you as one. Well, if everyone treated me like a baby, shouldn't I become a baby then?"
- Invoked:
- Alice always wanted to be the bad guy, so she creates a situation where she is treated as the villain to become one.
- Bob sets up many abusive situations for Alice, as he sees her potential as a villain.
- Exploited:
- Alice wants others to treat her as a bad guy so she can join Emperor Evulz' empire just to defeat her from within.
- Knowing that Alice felt she was driven to evil, Claire mentioned her own abuse in order to convince her otherwise.
- Defied:
- "You're making pathetic excuses, Alice! We didn't make you evil, you chose to be evil."
- Alice is a firm believer in Turn the Other Cheek ideology, refusing to give in to the dark side no matter how justified she is and how much abuse she takes.
- Against their judgement, the heroes refuse to treat Alice like a villain, knowing doing so would drive her to evil.
- Discussed: "Alice, you realize that by choosing evil, you're basically proving everything those people believed of you to be correct?"
- Conversed: "This is surely creative how the writers establish a villain - Have her being treated like one."
- Implied: When Alice was still a sidekick her mentor could clearly be seen struggling with annoyance, and none of the other heroes thought more of her than as an "annoying brat". Yet given how frequently she was kidnapped and the tortures she was put through, one can only guess what ultimately pushed her over the edge.
- Deconstructed:
- Alice is so driven into evil that she forgets her motivations for why she commits evil, leading her way beyond the Moral Event Horizon. With all of her sympathizers turning on her, Alice's reasons for being evil are no longer excused.
- Alice is the sort of person who doesn't take well to having to harm other people, but they're certainly not letting her be nice to them and doing evil is essentially the only option she has left, whether she really likes it or not. She alternates between well-justified anger at the people pushing her down and extreme guilt for pushing back, which takes a huge toll on her mental health and leaves her a paranoid, temperamental wreck.
- The heroes have no sympathy for Alice, reasoning that she is a grown adult capable of making her own choices. The heroes also point out that it is cowardly of Alice to try and blame all of society for her own self-inflicted problems.
- Alice eventually realizes her mistake and regrets the path she chose. She will genuinely make up for the wrongdoings she has caused.
- When it is publicly revealed that Alice was forced to turn to evil because the "heroes" treated her like crap and left her no other option, the public loses all faith in the heroes.
- Reconstructed:
- But since there's no turning back, she embraces this life of evil and couldn't care less if she was stopped as long as she gets the pleasure in committing evil.
- In a Evil Versus Evil setting / Crapsack World, Alice was turned into a monster by hypocrites who aren't much better than what she became, and her evil retaliation is a well-deserved punishment which needed to be done.
- The heroes are half-right: Alice is indeed ultimately responsible for her own actions, and she absolutely has used their consistently poor treatment of her as carte blanche justification for multiple truly heinous acts. However, they themselves have done their fair share of horrible things to her that they used her villainy to justify, and seeing the heroes face zero accountability for their own bad acts was a major catalyst for her embracing of villainy.
- However, society despises her more than ever, and this makes Alice's quest for redemption a failure. She either goes back to prison or she plots to destroy humanity.
- However, Alice still isn't off the hook, as she has done plenty of irredeemable things that cannot be justified or whitewashed by anything the heroes have done to her.
- Played For Laughs: Just because Alice's evil now doesn't mean she's good at it. The worst she can bring herself to do is Poke the Poodle while laughing evilly.
- Played For Drama:
- After being rejected by the unforgiving Hiro, Alice turns evil, repays by outright killing every single sidekick of Hiro and starts her career of ruining Hiro's life, not only Alice is now Hiro's vowed Arch-Enemy, Alice embraces her new life and extends her unforgiving attitude to everyone who crossed her.
- After being framed by Emperor Evulz for mass murder because of heroism, Alice becomes exactly what Evulz accused her: a mass murderer. She murdered Evulz, Evulz' lover and every last of their offspring, and continues murdering innocent citizens because of how they treated her.
- After multiple failed attempts to reform, the heroes are simply done giving Alice extra chances. It's not that she isn't serious about reforming - she genuinely wants to leave her past behind. Her problem is that she sucks at being good; whenever she does try to do something heroic, her mix of bumbling ineptitude, a Hair-Trigger Temper, and a tendency to cause huge messes that the heroes have to clean up only serve to hurt her cause, and the heroes simply don't care about being nice any more and have gone from treating her as a nuisance to be tolerated to an outright menace, and so Alice eventually opts to embrace villainy rather than reform. It's a morally grey situation: Alice sincerely wants to become one of the good guys but is harshly rebuffed every time she tries, and the heroes harshly rebuff her because she genuinely is a thorn in their side and only became a bigger pain in the ass when she started trying to reform.
- Plotted A Good Waste: Alice being pushed into villainy feeds into themes about prejudice, since the audience is meant to get the impression that she wouldn't be evil if people treated her fairly.
Back to Then Let Me Be Evil, it's what the world wanted isn't it?
