Basic Trope: Another character (a parent, a sibling, a Love Interest, a friend, what have you) suffers or dies so that The Protagonist can learn the lesson they need to learn.
- Straight: Fifteen-year-old Alice falls victim to The Aggressive Drug Dealer, and smokes marijuana. She becomes addicted to it, but soon even that's not enough for her, and she starts using harder drugs like coke and heroin. Since these drugs are much more expensive, she ends up selling drugs (and her body) to pay for her habit. In the midst of a deal gone horribly wrong, her 12-year-old sister Betty (who's a virgin and has never used drugs) comes looking for her and gets shot. This spurs Alice to reexamine her life, get clean, and stop dealing drugs and hooking.
- Exaggerated: Alice's entire social circle (apart from her customers) gets killed off.
- Downplayed:
- Betty survives the gunshot wound, but winds up in a coma she might never come out of.
- Betty is raped or otherwise hurt, but not killed.
- Justified:
- Alice won't learn anything if she dies, but she might learn something if someone she cares about suffers instead.
- The Aesop is specifically about being able to move on when a loved one dies, so the only way for Alice to learn that lesson would be to kill off someone close to her.
- Alice is either invincible or unable to be punished sufficiently due to specific circumstances. Punishment by proxy would be the next best option.
- Inverted:
- Alice's lifestyle gets her killed so that her little sister (and the audience) can learn not to do what Alice did.
- Alice quitting drinking allows her to become a surgeon. This allows her to revive her comatose cousin who was injured in a truck crash. Learning her lesson allowed her to help someone harmed by someone else.
- Subverted:
- Alice is the one who gets shot.
- Alice decides she can't go on and is Driven to Suicide.
- Betty's death ends up being a Disney Death.
- It's revealed that the whole thing was a setup by their Long-Lost Uncle Aesop.
- Double Subverted:
- Alice still decides to reexamine her life and Heel–Face Turn, so that will never happen again ... or worse.
- Because she realized Betty was in danger and took the bullet for her.
- Redemption Equals Death.
- Someone stops Alice from killing herself, saying that doing so won't change anything, but that she can become The Atoner.
- Just the thought that Betty had died spurs Alice to change her life.
- The cruel prank works exactly as their concerned family hoped.
- Or, Betty actually did get shot, since Uncle Aesop didn't realize that those weren't blanks after all.
- Parodied:
- This is combined with Long-Lost Uncle Aesop and Aesop Amnesia for Black Comedy. Alice expresses annoyance at all the relatives who appear out of nowhere for the slightest misdeed. Sure, "Uncle Just Stop Drinking Alice" and "Aunt Just Say No to Drugs" were shocking the first time, but when it has gotten to "Friend of Friend's Ex's Estranged Roommate Don't Pick Your Nose" she has stopped taking them remotely seriously. The coroner is on a first-name basis with her.
- Whenever Alice partakes in bad behavior, no matter how minor, a random friend or family member of hers explodes for no adequately explained reason.
- Alice forgets Betty even existed after she dies.
- Zig-Zagged: Betty gets shot but merely injured. Alice doesn't take it well and tries to kill herself, but it doesn't take. But Alice forgets that her sister got hurt proximately due to her bad actions and resumes doing them, getting poor Betty killed. Alice refuses to accept her responsibility for this.
- Averted:
- Alice doesn't get into trouble.
- Alice is the one who ends up dying.
- Betty isn't killed.
- Enforced: "We need to really drive home the moral of the story, especially where teenagers are concerned."
- Lampshaded: "I want nothing to do with drugs. My sister got killed in a dispute between me and one of my customers."
- Invoked: Betty shows up during a dispute, and Alice's belligerent customer Bob decides to attack Betty.
- Exploited: Alice and Betty's family fake the affair to get Alice back on the straight and narrow.
- Defied:
- Bob knows the dispute is between him and Alice, so he leaves Betty alone.
- Alice takes home nothing from this; she's just that callous.
- Discussed: "Alice hasn't been the same since she lost her little sister. She's really turned her life around!"
- Conversed: "Was it really necessary to kill off sweet, innocent Betty?"
- Deconstructed: Technically, Alice learns a lesson. However, it sends her down a dark path of revenge as she kills everyone who was even tangentially involved in Betty's death, working backwards through a chain of dealers. It turns out that learning a lesson in extreme circumstances can result in going too far.
- Alternatively, Alice learns the lesson, but Betty becomes traumatized and unhinged from what she endured and in contrast, changes for the worse and seeks revenge on those who harmed her just to teach Alice a lesson.
- Betty is furious at Alice for treating her misfortune as something that "had to happen" for Alice's benefit, and doesn't believe she's actually reformed. "Because everything has to be about you, right? Who made you the main character?!"
- Reconstructed: After she's slaked her thirst for revenge, Alice does her part to help rebuild the community she helped break by working constructive in anti-drug education.
Back to Aesop Collateral Damage ... but watch where you step.
