Basic Trope: A hero and a villain or a anti hero have a romantic relationship.
- Straight: Alice and Bob are nemeses and sometimes lovers.
- Exaggerated: Alice and Bob are married, have three kids, and still are on opposite sides of good and evil.
- Downplayed:
- Foe Romance Subtext—there's UST between Alice and Bob, but no more than that.
- Alice and Bob aren't actually heroes or villains; instead they work for rival companies.
- Bob starts dating Alice, but only after Alice has a Heel–Face Turn.
- Justified:
- Bob is trying to lead Alice back to good via Defecting for Love.
- Alice is a Punch-Clock Villain/Hero Antagonist who keeps her job and her personality separate. She got attracted to Bob's personality after a few battles.
- Alice is an Anti-Hero/Anti-Villain. Just because she's chaotic doesn't mean she's evil.
- Bob is a Great Detective and Alice a Diabolical Mastermind; each of them considers their Arch-Enemy to be the only person in the human race worth looking at twice.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality.
- Gender Inverted: Heroine Alice has a relationship with Big Bad Bob.
- Inverted: Alice and Bob are both good, and always team up to fight evil together, despite personally despising each other.
- Subverted: Alice is just pretending to like Super Stan to betray him.
- Double Subverted: But she cannot go through with it. As soon as things get a bit intimate, she switches sides.
- Parodied: Everyone is only allowed to marry their mortal enemies. The more you hate each other, the higher your chances of getting a marriage certificate.
- Zig Zagged: Will They or Won't They? The couple's relationship hopscotches between Foe Romance Subtext, Dating Catwoman, Arch Enemies, Foe Romance Subtext, Worthy Opponents, Defeat Means Friendship, Friendly Enemies, Foe Romance Subtext.
- Averted: Alice and Bob are just adversaries and have no romantic attraction.
- Enforced: Bob has no romantic relationships and the network wants him to have one, and rather than writing in a new character they write in new subtext.
- Lampshaded: "Our leader has been fighting Alice for years, all day long. At night, though..."
- Invoked:
- The Big Bad hires sexy women in Spy Catsuits to do all his dirty work, knowing Bob's Casanova tendencies.
- The Big Bad tries to convince Bob to marry his daughter, so that they can inherit his crime empire.
- Exploited:
- Alice, cornered by the hero, acts on their subliminal attraction to worm her way out of trouble.
- Bob uses Alice's attraction to him in order to capture her.
- Evulz, aware of Bob and Alice's relationship, uses their attraction to each other to reunite them somewhere where he can kill them both in one fell swoop.
- Alice plays off a gullible Bob in order to trick him into doing her dirty work for her, under the guise of helping him against other criminals. She always makes sure that Bob thinks he prevailed in the end and that she is in love with him.
- Defied: Knight Templar Bob refuses to listen to his heart and will not forgive Alice of her crimes.
- Discussed: "If I know my hero/villain relationships, Alice, all that rage is just pent-up lust for me".
- Conversed: "Alice tried to boil Bob alive in acid again this week? She's so hot for that guy".
- Implied: Alice, usually being impersonal when fighting heroes, inexplicably goes into a flying rage when Carol claims to be dating Bob.
- Deconstructed: Their constant fighting and conflicting moralities lead to a very unhealthy relationship. Each tries desperately to change the other to disastrous results. Bob eventually realizes their inherent incompatibility and tries to leave, but Alice won’t let him go without one final fight with a far darker subtext. Bob wins and gets her locked away, leaving both bitter, angry, and unfulfilled.
- Reconstructed: Bob and Alice realize that they can’t change each other and that just because they’re on the opposite side of the law that doesn’t mean they can’t have a healthy relationship. Bob finds that his relationship with Alice makes him question and tone down the Knight Templar morality his crime-fighting is based on. Alice, similarly, chooses to steal from more deserving targets. They both worry that the other may change their mind someday, but both decides not to let it bother them.
- Played For Laughs:
- In the middle of their fight they realize they need to pick the kids up from soccer. Both leave in the middle of the fight.
- In the middle of an intense fight, Interplay of Sex and Violence kicks in. Both drop their weapons and start having sex right then and there like dogs in heat.
- Played For Drama: Alice and Bob have to deal with the emotional turmoil of having their feelings and their morals come into conflict once Bob has Alice cornered after Alice apparently crosses one line too many by killing someone—where's the point where Bob can't look at himself in the mirror and say he hasn't abandoned his code of justice for love?
Back to Dating Catwoman.
