Basic Trope: A character feels good after having killed someone.
- Played Straight: Alice kills Bob, who had killed Alice's father and feels satisfied afterwards.
- Exaggerated: Alice gets an orgasm after a murder spree.
- Downplayed: Alice punches a bully back in the face and feel a little more confident about herself.
- Inverted:
- Death Seeker
- A victim of murder gets a rush as they die.
- Alice feels guilty after having killed someone.
- Emperor Evulz dies smiling as Alice has ensured that his Thanatos Gambit will go off without a hitch.
- Justified: Alice is The Sociopath or a Blood Knight.
- Subverted:
- Alice pretends to like killing to prove false loyalty to her master Emperor Evulz.
- Alice is disgusted at Bob's death and goes off to vomit before disposing of the body.
- Just as Alice is about to enjoy the moment, Bob awakens and stabs Alice in the throat while her guard is down.
- After killing Emperor Evulz, Alice is about to celebrate until he sees the dead emperor rise again in his One-Winged Angel form.
- Parodied: Bob's murder is treated the same way as a one night stand and when Alice tells her next victim about his death, they assume she slept with him before whacked to death with a giant dildo.
- Invoked: "We need to show viewers that Alice has gone off the deep end, so let's have it so that when she kills Bob, she shows utter joy in doing so."
- Enforced: Feeling that Emperor Evulz will soon prove to be inconvient, God Malevolente decides to guide Alice down the path of murder, nurturing the joy she gets from killing people so that she'll kill her boss Emperor Evulz once he's of no further use.
- Defied:
- Alice is a professional killer. She cleans up, disposes of the body and burns the house down to destroy all evidence of her presence.
- Master Murder, the one who taught Alice how to be a killer, deliberately taught Alice techniques and gave her enhancements that destroy her capacity to feel happy in a psychological or physical way after killing someone. After the fifth or sixth kill in her Roaring Rampage of Revenge leaves her with a depression worse than that of a penny-dreadful teenage thriller protagonist, Alice decides to quit murdering people.
- Deconstructed:
- Much like a drug addict, Alice's "fix" is killing people. Killing Bob may've been great, but now she has to kill more and more people to get that same rush she felt the first time. Eventually, she becomes the Big Bad of someone's story and eventually dies.
- Having grown bored of murdering people, Alice decides that the only way to get that high again is to turn the blade upon herself. She dies laughing, and feels genuine happiness for the first time in years.
- Reconstructed:
- Implied:
- A blood covered Alice is seen with a euphoric expression on her face as she leaves Bob's house.
- Played for Drama:
- After killing Bob, Alice has a nightmarish grin plastered on her face. She then murders everyone else in Bob's neighbour. A Time Skip later, it's revealed that Alice is now committing genocide and when the rush fades, she'll become an Omnicidal Maniac.
- Played for Horror:
- Alice is the Villain Protagonist of a slasher film and Bob's death happens in the first scene of the film. Every other scene after that is the same but worse.
- Played for Laughs: Alice is the main protagonist of a Black Comedy series where she explores her sexuality and realizes she has a murder fetish.
