Basic Trope: A character has a sexual thing for corpses.
- Played Straight: Bob likes to sleep with dead people.
- Exaggerated: Bob is an exclusive necrophile willing to have sex with anything that's dead regardless of age, sex, and state of decomposition.
- Downplayed:
- Bob thinks corpses are sexually attractive but doesn't act on this attraction.
- Bob likes when his partner plays dead in bed.
- Bob briefly kisses Alice's corpse while pretending to do CPR on her out of denial that she's really dead.
- Bob’s climbs in Alice’s coffin and lies with her for a while.
- Justified:
- Bob has a history of bullying and rejection by women. His emotional need for acceptance and sex drive is still intact.
- Bob lost his True Love and still has sex with her body as a misguided coping mechanism.
- Bob enjoys shocking people by disgracing the bodies of their loved ones.
- Bob had been overexposed to Death. He is still afraid of it, so he turns the horror into lust.
- Inverted: Bob is a member of The Undead who only has sex with the living.
- Subverted: Bob eventually found love and stopped sleeping with corpses.
- Double Subverted: That love is a member of the Undead.
- Parodied: Bob arrives late at a dissection...with his pants down and embarrasses himself.
- Averted: Bob is not a necrophile.
- Enforced: "We want to show Bob's a depraved pervert, and since predators targeting animals and children have already been used a lot, let's make it so Bob's heinous preferences are towards corpses."
- Lampshaded: "This Bob works at the morgue. Be careful about him. Let's just say he likes to crack open a cold one."
- Defied: "I would never fuck a corpse! Ew!"
- Deconstructed:
- Bob catches a nasty infection due to posthumous fluids penetrating his genital membrane.
- Bob is caught by the police and is arrested.
- Bob's family disowns him when learning of his penchant.
- Bob gets jumped by the family of the dead girl he shagged.
- Bob gets a nasty corporal punishment when his parents learn this.
- Reconstructed:
- Bob gets medical help and learns his lesson. He becomes more intelligent about protecting himself.
- Bob manages to play the law in his favor to get a shorter sentence.
- Being disowned or belted didn't help Bob fight his necrophiliac penchants at all.
