Basic Trope: A character attempts to make the best choice for survival in a given story and is killed for choosing said choice.
- Straight: A group of students get trapped in their school after hours by Alice, who wants revenge. Bob, the Smart Guy, ditches his friends and attempts to leave the school at the first opportunity. Alice kills him before he gets out.
- Exaggerated: Bob is brutally murdered for even suggesting a sensible option.
- Downplayed: Bob is wounded in his escape attempt.
- Justified: Alice is Genre-Savvy like Bob, so she predicts his escape plan and sets a booby trap by the door.
- Inverted:
- Charlie, the Dumb Blonde, splits up the gang with no consequences whatsoever.
- Too Dumb to Live
- Subverted: Bob makes it out of the school.
- Double Subverted: Alice was waiting for him.
- Parodied: A Death Flag pings every time Bob brings up a sensible decision.
- Zig-Zagged: Bob attempts to escape but is killed for it. Drake does the same and survives.
- Averted: Bob isn’t killed for making pragmatic decisions.
- Enforced: “We don’t want the story to end too soon by having Bob break everyone out. Let’s kill him for it!”
- Lampshaded: “Isn’t it weird that Bob died right after he tried to escape?”
- Invoked: Bob performs an escape attempt as a distraction for his friends to escape in a Heroic Sacrifice.
- Exploited: Alice targets Bob in order to dissuade the rest of his friends from making pragmatic decisions themselves.
- Defied: Bob takes precautions so that Alice can't foil his escape attempt.
- Discussed: “Don’t you think Alice will pick you off if you try to escape?”
- Conversed: “And here comes Alice to stop Bob’s sensible escape”.
- Deconstructed: Punishing characters like Bob for making pragmatic choices leads to yet another Slasher Film filled to the brim with characters Too Dumb to Live with the last one surviving out of sheer luck.
- Reconstructed: Punishing characters like Bob out of the selfishness of their pragmatic choices rather than the intelligence of their actions helps establish that the characters need to work together in order to beat Alice.
Look, just because you're doing the sensible thing, doesn't mean you'll live because of it.
