Basic Trope: Nobody leaves the evil organization alive.
- Straight: Bob runs the Syndicate. When Alice tries to quit, he orders her killed.
- Exaggerated:
- When Bob hears that Alice is trying to leave, he orders her entire family killed.
- Bob is a necromancer. Not even death is an excuse to leave his service.
- Alice does a few jobs for the Syndicate. When Bob offers an upgrade from contract work to full time employment, she politely declines, and Bob has her killed.
- Downplayed:
- Alice can leave, but not until she's finished a certain amount of years, usually a very long time. If she attempts to leave any time before that, Bob will order her death.
- Alice leaves, but Bob tortures her for doing so when he retrieves her.
- Alice leaves, but finds it hard to "truly" leave.
- Alice leaves but is still considered to be an associate of the Syndicate and must do an occasional favor for them if they ever ask.
- Officially no one can leave, but some members dislike this policy and will help fellow members appear dead and agree to look the other way.
- Justified:
- Nobody in the Syndicate wants to be there, so Bob would lose everyone if he let them quit.
- Alice knows too much.
- Inverted:
- Alice quits and then kills Bob.
- Despite strong encouragement to resign from Bob, Alice stays with the Syndicate long past the time her contract nominally expired.
- Alice died while working for the Syndicate, but she's brought Back from the Dead and told she may leave.
- Subverted: Alice asks Bob if she can leave, despite knowing that nobody else who has done so has ever been heard from again. Bob offers her reasonable retirement package which includes a residence in an isolated location.
- Double Subverted:
- ...unless they know enough to bring down his organization, in which case he has them killed.
- Bob's right-hand man Charlie kills him and takes over his command. To assert his leadership, he has all ex-members hunted down and killed.
- Parodied:
- Alice gets an Unishment for trying to quit.
- Alice approaches Bob and announces her intention to leave the Syndicate. This precipitates:Bob You can't just up and walk! The only way you leave this organisation is in a body bag!Alice: OK. [Zips herself into a body bag.]Bob: Huh. Can't argue with that. You're excused.
- Zig-Zagged: Bob has a retirement package for his minions, but it turns out to be a case of being Released to Elsewhere. But it turns out Alice's rival was targeting her, so it's not normal practice ... but it turns out it is normal practice after all and said rival actually sabotaged it so Alice could actually escape. Alice never actually quit and was being set up to feed false information to the police — but she betrayed the Syndicate anyway at the last minute, allowing her to retire for good.
- Averted: Bob lets people leave, figuring that they would betray him if he threatened them into staying.
- Enforced: The plot of the story revolves around Alice not being able to leave the Syndicate.
- Lampshaded: "You can't quit this business of ours! Well, you can try..."
- Invoked: Bob's assassins are paid by the kill, and one of them convinces him to kill Alice.
- Exploited: Alice quits the Syndicate to kick off a Thanatos Gambit.
- Defied:
- "I'm not going to kill someone just because they don't like their job."
- Alice is The Dreaded, and even Bob is scared of her. When she resigns, she promises to stay quiet... and warns him to "not make this harder than it has to be".
- Discussed:Alice: I don't want to keep working here.Carol: I hear you, but you can't quit. I tried once and I was lucky to have my request politely declined.
- Conversed: "Alice is quitting, don't think things are going to go well for her."
- Implied: Nobody else ever seems to consider quitting, and when they hear Alice talk about it they act like it would be suicide.
- Deconstructed:
- Everyone Bob employs is kept in line purely by fear. None of his people shows any devotion whatsoever.
- This policy ends up biting Bob majorly as Alice ends up assassinating him and his enforcers so she can leave.
- Word of this policy spreads, resulting in Bob having trouble in finding people willing to work for him.
- Reconstructed:
- Bob is such a poor leader that even subordinates motivated by fear are still the best he could get.
- Alice is an extremely abnormal case: The average mook has little chance of escape and so the policy persists. Bob's successor Charlie rules in his place, and institutes standard policy that the punishment for misbehavior is to be assigned to hit squads targeting Alice.
- For the same reason, most of the people who do work with Bob are loyal to the end, either out of fear or because they have no interest in leaving the Syndicate.
- Played for Laughs: The same rules apply to an innocuous job, like the national postal service.
- Played for Drama: Alice is a Minion with an F in Evil, and desperately wants to leave the Syndicate, but she's Trapped in Villainy because The Mob Boss Is Scarier.
- Played for Horror:
- Anyone who tries to leave the Syndicate gets a Cruel and Unusual Death for it.
- If Alice manages to successfully leave the Syndicate it's because she is something way beyond mere mortals trying to contain, and who leaves violent bloodbaths in her wake that are most definitely not "Action Girl kicking ass" but rather ”ok, who the hell locked up these guys with the pack of cocaine-fueled grizzlies?"
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