Basic Trope: A character arc in which a character slowly becomes addicted to a substance or pattern of behaviour.
- Straight: At the outset of the film Tropespotting, Alice is clean, but starts using heroin, until by the end she has become hopelessly addicted.
- Exaggerated: Alice was the most pristine, flawlessly abstemious character in the world at the beginning of Tropespotting, but by the end of it she has sampled just about every drug in existence and spends the equivalent of a small country's GDP every day just to feed her habit.
- Downplayed: Alice is a casual user of heroin at the beginning of Tropespotting. By the end of it, she's starting to look agitated and sweaty because she hasn't had a fix in awhile. Tropespotting doesn't dwell on it, however.
- Justified:
- Alice has a genetic predisposition to becoming addicted to certain substances, including heroin.
- Alice's mother used heroin while she was pregnant with Alice, resulting in Alice being highly prone to forming an addiction.
- Inverted: At the start of Tropespotting, Alice is addicted to heroin, but by the end she's made a full recovery.
- Subverted: It looks like Alice has become addicted to heroin - but at the end it turns out she'd been faking all along as a cruel prank on Bob.
- Double Subverted: ... she is an alcoholic, however.
- Parodied: ???
- Zig Zagged: At the start of Tropespotting, Alice is addicted to heroin, but manages to make a full recovery... then falls Off the Wagon, then recovers again, then it looks like she's fallen off again but actually hasn't...
- Averted: Alice uses heroin once, and then abstains for the rest of Tropespotting.
- Enforced: The producers of Tropespotting are nervous about possible accusations of glorifying drug use, so they insist on the creators portraying Alice's addiction as hopeless and humiliating, when the creators had originally intended a more ambiguous portrayal.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: The Aggressive Drug Dealer targets Alice for addiction.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied:
- Alice quits heroin before it's too late.
- Alice never even took heroin in the first place, having refused it from the start.
- Discussed: "Alice, we're all worried about you! Please, we just want to help you! Please! ...Before it is too late."
- Conversed: ???
- Played For Laughs: Alice gets "addicted" to powdered sugar, which she snorts like cocaine.
Back to Descent into Addiction.
