Basic Trope: Something innocent or mildly bad gets worse when you know all the facts.
- Straight: Bob accuses Alice of tampering with his alarm clock. When she claims it was a harmless prank, he answers that it nearly electrocuted him.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob goes on adding extra information for several minutes, each revelation making things worse.
- Alice is arrested for the tampering. Her lawyer is confused as to why the system has prosecuted seemingly minor property damage as a felony. The prosecutor shows footage of the alarm clock exploding and killing Bob along with 27 other people in the apartment building. Adding onto those, the explosion also caused debris to fall and claim the lives of 15 more people outside the apartment building, the fact that the apartment building's already poor and unstable foundation to fall and crumble, claiming an extra 30 lives of the inhabitants of the apartment building, as well as 38 more bystanders, the neighboring nuclear powerplant getting hit with some of the debris and going into a meltdown before exploding, claiming well over a thousand lives of the workers in that powerplant, and tens of thousands more in the vicinity (pretty much taking the entire neighborhood out), and now her lawyer is confused as to why the system had informed him that Alice was prosecuted for seemingly minor property damage as a felony, and not, y'know, the thousands of lives she accidentally claimed and the neighborhood she just wiped off the map.
- Downplayed: Bob accuses Alice of tampering with his alarm clock. When she claims it was a harmless prank, he answers that it zapped him painfully.
- Justified: Bob is giving Alice a chance to confess without making a public scene.
- Inverted: Bob thanks Alice for making him a sandwich. When she brushes it off, he answers that it was the first food he'd had a chance to eat all day.
- Subverted: Bob accuses Alice of tampering with his alarm clock. When she claims it was a harmless prank, Bob pauses, face reddening... and says it was bad enough.
- Double Subverted: Bob then points out that Alice also added Turbo-Lax to his morning diet shake and the actual reason he arrived late was because he had to get his stomach pumped.
- Parodied: Alice got on the news for fighting childhood cancer.... by killing all of the patients.
- Averted:
- Nobody tampers with the clock.
- Alice electrocutes Bob with a charged broken cord, so Bob knows full well that she had nothing but malicious intent.
- Enforced: Introducing the conflict with a Bait-and-Switch joke keeps a comedic tone.
- Lampshaded:Bob: Alice messed with my alarm clock. I'm gonna kill her!
Charlie: That seems like Disproportionate Retribution … I'm sensing this is worse than just changing the wakeup sound. - Invoked: Alice makes the alarm clock explode in an attempt to injure Bob and then play it off as a prank to save face.
- Exploited: Alice commits horrific crimes and disguises them as minor ones so that the police don't go out of their way to arrest her.
- Defied:
- Bob outright accuses Alice of everything straight away.
- Bob's debriefing of whatever bad things Alice has done to him is delivered with the "worse" part first and/or with no pauses that would allow Alice to sneak in a question of what is supposed to be wrong about what she did.
- Discussed: "Bob is late for work. Alice tampered with the clock again, killing fifty-six and injuring three."
- Conversed:Eric: We should still invite Alice, tampering with a clock is not that big of a sin.
Darla: Yeah, she only made a surgeon late and caused multiple patients to die from their wounds. Please use more than one brain cell while speaking. - Implied: Alice is shown doing something with Bob's alarm clock. The next morning, Bob is in a dire state: ashy-faced with his hair on end. The narrative lets us fill in the chain of events.
All right, who connected the link to a different page … on Wikipedia?
