Basic Trope: For whatever reason, the feelings of others don't affect a character.
- Straight:
- Bob sees Alice crying after the death of her father and wonders why she's crying.
- Bob injures Alice without any guilt about it.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice is crying because all of her close family members have died and she's dying of cancer. Bob doesn't understand why she's sad.
- Bob tortures and kills Alice and her entire family. His only regret is not forcing Alice's daughter, the 6-year-old Charlotte, to watch her dog being slaughtered.
- Downplayed:
- Bob sees Alice crying because her old car is broken. He doesn't understand what the car meant to her.
- No Sympathy
- But for Me, It Was Tuesday
- Bob has a hard time empathising with other people, but he's not heartless by any means, and he does his best to be kind and caring towards other people even if empathy doesn't come naturally to him.
- Bob can empathise with other people, except for Alice, his abusive ex-girlfriend who psychologically tortured him for years before he broke up with her.
- Bob is empathetic towards Alice, but he handles any traumatic situation a lot calmer than usual.
- Justified:
- Everyone involved has no desire to feel empathy because it would mean having to admit that even the most vile and evil people originally started off no different than themselves. The Lack of Empathy is driven less by a desire to not care about others, so much as a desire to avoid facing the darker aspects about themselves and present themselves as pure and untainted by distancing themselves from their fellow flawed human beings.
- Bob chooses to have no empathy to others because it makes it easier for him to justify getting what he wants if he doesn't care about who he has to stomp on in the process.
- Bob is an Empty Shell that can't even feel emotions, making it impossible for him to feel others.
- Bob tried to be kind towards Alice but they always end up bitting him back, and Alice doesn't show appreciation. So he doesn't see any point in helping again.
- Bob did something wrong to Alice, but he despises her so much he feels nothing but hate towards her.
- Bob is just a natural-born loner who doesn't have any social skills and only cares about achieving his own goals.
- Bob is ignorant of what and how some things hurt others' feelings badly.
- Bob has a disorder of some kind.
- Bob was raised in a world where empathizing is useless.
- Bob belongs to a race that has no concept of "emotions".
- Bob has closed his heart to the suffering of others.
- Bob has an Abusive Parent who beat him senseless if he ever showed any emotion, including compassion towards other people, believing it to be a sign that Bob is not a real man. After years of this abuse, Bob internalised it and became a cold and harsh person as a means of survival.
- Bob used to be a much more compassionate person in the past. However, people took advantage of this compassion and neglected Bob's own emotional needs, leading him to close himself off from the suffering of other people.
- Bob used to be a much more compassionate person in the past. And then his own compassion led him to a very unhealthy and destructive lifestyle that costed him a lot, so Bob decided that he doesn't need empathy in order to live a better personal life.
- Bob is a child and his brain is still developing, or worse a Psychopathic Manchild.
- For Straight and Exaggerated 1; He just arrived with the lack of knowledge on why Alice cries.
- Bob is a Complete Monster who could care less about the feelings of others and would rather see them suffer emotionally.
- Inverted:
- The Empath.
- Nice Guy.
- All-Loving Hero.
- Bob does everything he can to make people's lives terrible (like telling Alice that her father deserved to die and secretly hated her) because he enjoys feeling their emotions as they suffer.
- Bob is such a bleeding heart that he feels disproportionately strongly about others feelings. For example, Alice dropping her ice cream and feeling a bit bummed about it makes him burst into tears.
- Subverted:
- Bob appears to not care, but it turns out he's just holding all his emotions in.
- Bob is usually an emotionless bastard, but then he finally breaks down and cries when he loses his pet.
- Bob can't empathize with people on the emotional level (whether because he's born an Emotionless Boy or just too adherent to the philosophy of Stoicism) but he can empathize with people on the logical level.
- Bob is capable of empathizing with what others are feeling, but chooses to ignore it or not care about it.
- Double Subverted:
- People think Bob is just holding it in, but he's not.
- And only so he can manipulate people into doing his bidding.
- Except that Bob doesn't understand how other people's emotions could play a role in their decision-making process. He doesn't understand why someone would act against their own self-interest out of, for example, an attachment to another person or a sense of duty towards their fellow human beings, because these feelings are foreign to him.
- Parodied: Bob goes to a movie that makes everyone cry, and he then says it sucks.
- Zig Zagged: Bob constantly changes from being a Manly Tears kind of guy, to an uncaring shell.
- Averted: Bob can feel and understand the emotions of others.
- Enforced: "We need a villain that can do the worst things possible, with no regret or mercy."
- Lampshaded: "You don't seem to care about anyone."
- Invoked: Emperor Evulz performs a lobotomy on Bob to take away his ability to feel emotions.
- Defied:
- Even if Bob doesn't feel any empathy, he still does his best to sooth Alice's feelings.
- Bob feels empathy. He understands and recognizes when people are hurt. AND HE LOVES IT.
- Exploited: Bob can't feel anything at all, so Evulz recruits him as an assassin who will kill with no regrets.
- Discussed:Alice: Bob, do you even care about anything?
Bob: What's caring? - Conversed: "Is Bob an alien with no understanding of emotions?"
- Deconstructed:
- Bob's lack of empathy has earned him the reputation of being a sociopath.
- Alice notices Bob's lack of empathy, so she snaps and beats him senseless.
- Bob notices his lack of empathy and starts to wonder whether he's a terrible person.
- Bob genuinely wants to make friends and have real connections with other people, but his lack of empathy prevents him from doing so. This causes a lot of angst on Bob's part. Which, since he's probably an emotionless lad, doesn't even know what "angst" is.
- Demonstrating empathy is a skill essential to Bob's occupation. Since Bob lacks empathy, he fails to understand the thoughts and feelings of other people, leading him to screw up and lose his job.
- Reconstructed:
- But Bob can't empathize why people hate him.
- And the sociopath is the only one who remains loyal to the hero because he can't be swayed by appeals to emotion.
- Bob makes up for his lack of empathy through actual physical action whenever someone is suffering while everyone else thinks that their sympathy is enough of a response to other's suffering.
- Bob's desire for real connections with other people causes him to go into therapy. A few years later, while it still takes a lot of effort on his part, his capacity to consider other people's feelings has improved a lot.
- Played For Drama: Bob is a Visionary Villain who saw people suffering and was inspired to create a utopia because he believes everyone deserves to be happy. At least, he started out that way: nowadays he cannot see the forest for the trees, willing to sacrifice hundreds, even thousands without a second thought for the 'greater good'. His lack of empathy ironically stemmed from a sense of empathy that could be called overdeveloped.
- Implied: The way Bob expresses sympathy for other is always the same way. Clearly rehearsed behavior with no genuine emotion.
Back to Lack of Empathy... but I couldn't care less whether you visit it or not.
