Basic Trope: A character immediately considers, suggests, or outright commits murder on someone to solve a problem, even though there are obvious, more sensible, and/or less violent options.
- Straight: Alice and Bob learn that Carl has been stealing money behind their back, so Alice immediately suggests to Bob that they should kill him, or does so outright, without thinking about other options.
- Exaggerated: Alice kills Carl, his family, friends, and everyone he knows, the split second after learning he might have owed Bob some money.
- Downplayed: Alice and Bob go through a list of options to consider in regards to Carl’s theft, and killing him is simply one of several, and the most extreme one at that.
- Justified:
- Alice is Ax-Crazy and/or Stupid Evil.
- Alice herself is a criminal who often doesn’t think things through when committing crimes.
- Alice has Black-and-White Insanity; she believes that because Carl stole from her, he is a bad person, and because he's a bad person, he should be killed to guarantee that he can't hurt anyone else.
- Inverted: Alice tells Bob that no matter what course of action they take, they DO NOT kill Carl. Even though Carl has consistently been shown to be too dangerous to be kept alive.
- Subverted:
- Alice was trolling Bob.
- Alice only considered killing Carl in a fit of rage, but immediately changes her mind once she calms down.
- Double Subverted: …. But once she does calm down, she comes up with a scheme to secretly kill Carl and leave no evidence behind.
- Zig Zagged: Alice is constantly juggling the various options to consider, but occasionally goes back to the one that involves killing Carl, even though she has not made up her mind.
- Averted: No one suggests or even considers killing Carl, regardless of what he’s done
- Enforced: In a previous narrative Alice was an Assassin, so the writers simply decide to have her suggest killing someone as a reminder of her former profession and to maintain some character continuity.
- Lampshaded: Bob: “Seriously?! That’s you’re first course of action?! It’s not like we could just call the cops!”
- Exploited: Bob is a scientist who is testing out his new AI, codenamed ALICE, with various preprogramed methods of solving crime. Knowing he has to fix all the kinks with ALICE to make sure she does not needlessly harm anyone, Bob creates a fake scenario involving his Lab Assistant Carl being a thief, and monitoring her reaction to see if her programing resorts back to “terminate criminal”.
- Defied: Alice googles “How to stop a thief.” The first link she clicks on says “Kill him”. She immediately rejects the idea.
- Discussed: “There’s something …off about Alice. She once suggested killing Carl when she learned he stole from her bank account. I mean, Carl’s no saint, but I don’t know where she got that idea!”
- Conversed: “I told Alice about Carl’s theft, and then she wanted him dead. Like, seriously; she really wanted him dead.” “She should probably get help.”
- Implied: Alice nonverbally cocks her gun once she learns of Carl’s crimes, before leaving the room.
- Deconstructed: Unsurprisingly, killing Carl causes far more problems than it actually solves, both for Alice as well as everyone involved. Everyone is utterly shocked at her actions, especially since Carl's crime left behind incriminating evidence (considering that non-detectives Alice & Bob did find out about his theft) and she could have simply called the police and settled the matter legally & non-violently. For all intents & purposes, Alice has committed murder on a man whose crime was not as severe as hers are now. Not only is she charged with homicide and faces a lifetime prison sentence, but no one harbors any sympathy for her for jumping the gun so quickly.
- Reconstructed:
- Alice’s murder of Carl catches the attention of a nefarious organization, who are impressed at her ability to take extreme actions by any means necessary for whatever reason. After getting her out of prison, they invite her to become their newest member and serve as one of their Hitmen.
- ...or at least that's what they claim. Turns out, Carl's actual rap sheet goes beyond mere theft. Her murder of Carl was done to prevent the money from falling into the wrong hands, effectively hailing her as a hero.
- The investigation of who Carl was and the misdeeds he had done and gotten away with and planned to do just goes deeper and deeper by the second, revealing Carl to be a complete monster who steals, kills, rapes, blackmails and planned to do more of said stuff and much worse, beginning with Alice’s kid sister Janine. He also turned out to have everybody up to the President around his finger and there was no way he was going to see the inside of a prison cell had he been taken alive. Murder is not the best solution, but it turned out to be a solution.
- Played for Laughs: Alice is legitimately surprised/dumbfounded that killing someone is NOT the best course of action for everything. She asks Bob: “Please, Tell Me More about these Methods that are called Legal."
- Played for Drama:
- Alice is eventually shown to be a complete monster, who needs a good reason to NOT kill someone, or rather what she views as a good reason.
- Bob is forced to fight Alice because he finally finds a conscience or he figures out that whatever bad consequences he will suffer because of Carl, they are a definite lesser evil compared to having to deal with a murder rap.
- Similar to the above bullet point, Alice is arrested by the police for Carl's murder and Bob is pulled in alongside her as a (real or alleged) accomplice, and the closest the investigators show to being sympathetic is some pithy one-liner about how killing Carl was not worth it.
- Played for Horror:
- Alice's "solution" quickly escalates to a body count of at least one hundred people, either because Alice decides to eliminate anybody with the smallest level of connection to this mess, as chaff for the police to not look into Carl's death too closely, or as good old collateral damage.
- Alice is so determined to perform this solution that she decides to kill Bob too for getting in the way.
- The fact Alice so much as entertains this idea is a very definite sign she is losing it, or worse yet, she never really had it to begin with.
