Basic Trope: Victory at a catastrophic cost.
- Straight: Bob and his friends manage to stop Emperor Evulz's Evil Plan, but several of his friends die in the attempt, and Evulz manages to escape and will undoubtedly cause problems again in the future.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob and his friends manage to stop Emperor Evulz's evil plans, but all of Bob's friends and family die in the attempt, and Bob himself dies a lonely and miserably slow death as he bleeds out in the mud on a battlefield. And barely a week passes before Emperor Evulz has rebuilt his strength and makes another attempt at his Evil Plan.
- Bob and his friends stop Emperor Evulz from taking over the world and causing a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum, and Evulz is Killed Off for Real, but they all die to a man and a big chunk of the continent they are standing on becomes victim to a severe ecological disaster. The generations to come, in the midst of their Mad Max-style hand-to-foot existence, curse the heroes' names alongside Evulz's.
- Downplayed:
- Bob becomes a Hero with Bad Publicity as a result of stopping Emperor Evulz's plan.
- Won the War, Lost the Peace
- Bob finally beats a Nintendo Hard game after dozens of tries, but at that point he's so done with it that he feels no satisfaction and just wishes he had given up earlier instead of spending all that time raging at a game he wasn't enjoying.
- Alice wins the race but pulls a hamstring.
- Justified:
- It was all part of Emperor Evulz's Xanatos Gambit against Bob.
- The Godzilla Threshold had been crossed.
- Bob didn't think things through.
- Expenses and taxes put Bob's net profit in the negative.
- The Mole had crippled Bob's side from within, and it really handicaps Bob and company's ability to fight Evulz. If not for that, they would have had a straight victory with minimal losses.
- Inverted:
- Bob and his friends end up better off after Saving the World.
- Though Bob and his party utterly lost their first fight against Evulz and were forced to flee for their dear lives, they are alive and well nonetheless, and the years of exile gave them an opportunity to build The Alliance of an epic scale and gain tons of personal and combat experience. Evulz, in the meantime, can hardly control the country due to problems with soaring La Résistance and infighting between her generals and warlords. When Evulz finally dies, soon Bob's mates triumphantly come back and resume ruling the realm. In the end, Bob was a Victorious Loser, and their initial defeat a Necessary Fail.
- Subverted: Bob doesn't care about how much it cost, he just cares about winning.
- Double Subverted: ...But he wonders Was It Really Worth It??
- Parodied:
- Bob manages to catch a mouse that was bothering him, but in the process he completely destroys his house.
- Alice wins the track race, but does after being stripped naked and has photos of her go viral later.
- Averted: The victory, if any, is clear-cut and the victors do not lose too much in the process.
- Enforced:
- The execs believe that unambiguously happy endings are unrealistic and insist that Bob must defeat Evulz at great personal cost.
- Bob was The Scrappy in the original series, so the sequel has him die in his final victory, setting up the near-apocalyptic conditions that the new villain Mallory uses to her advantage.
- The producers aren't sugarcoating the historic event being retold.
- Doomed by Canon- Tropewars I started with the good times enjoyed at the end of Tropewars II ending shortly after they started.
- Lampshaded: "Well, technically you have won Bob. But what are you gonna do with this victory, now that you have lost everything to have it?"
- Invoked:
- Victory Is Boring
- Emperor Evulz knows from the start that he's not going to win, so she at least tries to screw the heroes over as much as possible before her inevitable defeat.
- Bob has already lost everything. He goes after Evulz in one last Roaring Rampage of Revenge to claw a Pyrrhic victory out of what would have been a full-blown Downer Ending.
- Exploited: Every time she meets Bob after this first defeat, Emperor Evulz rubs Bob's "victory" in his face.
- Defied:
- Bob recognizes that a frontal assault would be successful, but at a great cost. Instead, he settles for a siege and a mutually-disadvantageous stalemate so as to get a Victory by Endurance.
- Bob surrenders, at least for the time being, rather than attempting to defeat Emperor Evulz when he knows victory can only come at the expense of his friends or another disaster that he couldn't possibly repair afterwards.
- Discussed:"If you're going to lose that much, does it really count as a victory?"
"Winning is all that matters — we can rebuild afterwards." - Conversed:"Can't the heroes in this show win without something horrible happening for once?"
"Given how cynical this show is, I highly doubt it." - Implied: The story ends immediately after Bob's victory, leaving the audience to figure out what will happen to the heroes.
- Played For Laughs: Bob is oblivious to the consequences of his actions, even though the others keep telling him "it'll go horribly wrong".
- Played For Drama:
- Bob doesn't care at all about the other heroes' deaths, and is thus revealed to be extremely selfish and a megalomaniac.
- Against all odds, Bob won the epic final battle against Emperor Evulz, but several close friends and allies gave their lives in order to make his victory possible. Even though the world is at peace and Bob is celebrated as a hero, he is haunted by those losses, unable to move on or enjoy the peace he helped achieve.
- Deconstructed: Bob's "victory" costs so much that the public decides that things would have been better if they had just let Evulz win, and he is hanged for treason.
- Reconstructed: Bob's "victory" may have cost him everything, but it's still better than Evulz winning, and Bob mourns his losses while training the next generation to surpass him so they will score a more decisive victory in the future. Ultimately, the "victory" is Worth It.
Enjoy your Pyrrhic Victory while you can, before you enjoy paying for all that it cost you.
