Basic Trope Description: To receive a degree from their respective education, characters have to kill someone close to them or someone innocent.
- Straight: Alice has to kill her best friend Denise to graduate from the Assassin Academy.
- Exaggerated: Alice, the student with the best prospects for the future, has to slaughter her whole class in the most effective way possible as her graduation exam.
- Downplayed:
- Alice has to hurt Denise in a way she starts bleeding.
- A requirement for graduation is to pass a Death Course (or one that will leave Alice maimed somehow if she screws up, even if it's not deliberately designed to be lethal). The school got the nickname "Assassin Academy" because of such barbaric practices.
- Justified:
- The school believes in and encourages a practice of Social Darwinism.
- The school's brainwashing has a big flaw: The Power of Love. The test is meant to root out the students who still have some humanity (hopefully by putting them in the morgue) and the ones who will unhesitatingly follow kill orders.
- "Assassin Academy" is a secret government project to create teenage assassins. Key word, "government". The budget does not covers a big field team, and this way the culling's made for free and maybe removes competition/potential whistleblowers.
- The school is full of Sadist Teachers.
- Inverted: To graduate from the Assassin Academy, Alice has to keep her friend Denise alive in a deadly environment as long as possible.
- Subverted: Alice hast to kill her best friend Denise to graduate from the Assassin Academy, but it is a Secret Test of Character, and her weapon only fires blanks.
- Double Subverted: Alice doesn't understand the idea of a Secret Test of Character, fears that the blanks in her gun are a mistake by the examiners and wants to fulfill her task anyway. So she stabs Denise with a dagger instead.
- Enforced: The author plans to turn the trauma Alice has from being forced to shoot Denise into her Freudian Excuse.
- Averted: The Assassin Academy has a quite normal graduation exam in which nobody is forced to kill someone for real.
- Parodied: Alice shoots Denise...but it is just a paper dummy that looks like her and falls over as soon as the bullets riddle it.
- Invoked: The Academy's director is unnerved by the friendship of Alice and Denise, so he decides to give Alice an exam task that will end their friendship for good.
- Defied: Alice tries to steal the graduation tasks and finds out what she is supposed to do before this way. It makes her escape from school together with Denise.
- Discussed: "Rumours say that we shall kill someone..." "No fear, they won't force us to shoot our best friends."
- Conversed: "And where do they put all those corpses then? And what do they tell the families of the dead?"
- Implied: Alice's classmate Bob walks into the exam room before her. After he gets out, he cries and sobs in terror and has blood on his clothing.
- Deconstructed: Due to the practice, bodies start piling up and cannot be disposed properly anymore. The police starts to investigate the Assassin Academy, also since so many students disappear there without explanation, their relatives get angry and an unregistered cemetery was discovered nearby.
- Reconstructed: The Deadly Graduation is now done in a foreign country, so the local police has nothing to suspect anymore. After a while, they go.
And now, go back to Deadly Graduation, where it will be your task to kill your beloved dog. Good luck.
