Playing With / Vile Vulture

Basic Trope: Malicious, menacing, and opportunistic vultures.

• Straight: Carrion, a Talking Animal vulture, acts as an opportunistic villain.
• Exaggerated:
  • All vulture species are considered Always Chaotic Evil.
  • The bad guys are all vultures.
  • Carrion is a Complete Monster.
• Downplayed:
  • Carrion is an Anti-Hero.
  • The vulture isn't an active threat and is just waiting patiently for Bob to die.
  • Vultures aren't portrayed as evil, but do kill their prey more frequently than they do in reality.
• Justified: Carrion has a sort of Freudian Excuse that explains why he became evil. For example, everyone always thought he was a nobody (or worse) because Scavengers Are Scum, so he decided Then Let Me Be Evil.
• Inverted:
  • Vultures don't kill, they are just shown waiting for Bob to kill Alice or waiting for Bob to die so they can eat. They're not forcing Bob to kill or making his injuries worse so he'd die faster.
  • The vultures only ate Bob's body because they were very hungry and there was nothing else available for them to eat. To the vultures, if Bob cared about being eaten then he would have run away or defended himself by now.
  • Vultures are depicted as friendly, or even friendlier than all of the other animals.
• Subverted:
  • Carrion is a friendly comic relief character, or vultures are represented positively.
  • The character accompanied by a circling vulture turns out to be on the good side.
  • The vulture is eating a corpse but the bird is actually quite jovial and hospitable.
  • The vulture is simply just a wild animal eating Alice's corpse, it wasn't the one who killed her.
• Double Subverted:
  • His friendliness is genuine, but he's still Affably Evil.
  • The "friendly" vulture turns out to be The Mole.
  • A vulture eating Bob's corpse is still seen as a form of desecration, no matter how much the bird tries to explain that they had the basic decency to wait until Bob died before they ate him.
  • Alice was only paralyzed and the vulture was so hungry that it ate her alive.
• Parodied: Bob is alone and stranded, he is close to death and sees a vulture sitting next to him.
  Bob: Quit it with the pleasantries, I know you're gonna eat me.
  Vulture: (wearing a napkin bib with Bob's face on it and holding a knife and fork) Eeh, what? No! No I won't!
• Zig Zagged:
  • Vultures may eat the dead and may make jokes at their prey's expense but their role is essential to the ecosystem and they weren't the ones who killed their food source.
  • Carrion is constantly flying around in a Heel–Face Revolving Door.
• Averted:
  • Vultures are treated like any other bird species and are True Neutral.
  • Despite their eating methods and habits, vultures are seen as noble and heroic for cleaning up the ecosystem.
  • Vultures are offended by the notion that they kill and their "evilness" is attributed to practicality, prejudice from the other characters, and the vulture simply lacks any self-awareness; they don't see the problem with perching on dead trees, waiting for their prey to die, and enveloping the corpse once they've stopped moving.
  • Vultures see their eating habits as a public service because, without the vultures to eat the bodies, the environment would be full of scavengers who are more dangerous to people than them and the land would be rampant with infectious diseases.
• Enforced:
  • Vultures are seen as the evil relative of the Accipitridae family, which consists of hawks, eagles, kites, and harriers, making them a potential Unpleasant Animal Counterpart for a story that features heroic eagles (often going hand in hand with Scavengers Are Scum, which is somewhat odd because eagles also tend to be scavengers).
  • "We need a scary bird on Team Evil. Let's use a vulture. Dark Is Evil, right?"
• Lampshaded: "That vulture circling us must be out to beat us up!"
• Invoked:
  • Vultures are genetically modified to be aggressive.
  • An evil character uses vultures as their motif, for example, a character is compared to a vulture because they rob the dead.
• Exploited: Bob murdered Alice and deliberately left her body in an isolated place populated by vultures so they'd eat the evidence.
• Defied: "Just because we have to eat animals to survive doesn't make us evil! It's just a (burp) necessity."
• Discussed: "Vultures? That's never a good sign."
• Conversed: ???
• Deconstructed: Because of their nature as scavengers, the vultures are unfairly seen as vile and villainous.
• Reconstructed: ???

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Observe the vultures flying in circles over some luckless creature on the verge of death at the main page HERE.

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