Basic Trope: A character attempts to sabotage someone they're teaching.
- Straight: Alice asks Bob to help teach her to drive. He teaches her to run red lights.
- Exaggerated: Alice asks Bob to help teach her to drive. He teaches her to run red lights, ignore all stop signs, text while driving, and road race the cops when they try to pull her over.
- Downplayed:
- Alice asks Bob to help teach her to drive. He wants her to fail her driving test, so he refuses.
- Alice asks Bob to help teach her to drive. He doesn't teach her anything outright false, but he has a deliberately hard-to-understand teaching style, doesn't answer her questions, or withholds some information by pretending he doesn't know.
- Justified:
- Bob dislikes Alice.
- Bob doesn't want anyone outperforming him at anything.
- Bob is a major Jerkass.
- Alice is Bob's daughter and he's trying to prevent her from growing up too fast.
- When she asks Bob for help, Alice is trying to mooch off Bob's work and then take credit for it. This is Bob's revenge.
- Bob knows Alice's personality would lend itself badly to driving, one way or another, so he tries to get her to fail and give it up.
- Inverted: Alice loudly and publicly asks Bob to help teach her to drive. After he's done teaching her, she very conspicuously crashes her car and blames Bob.
- Subverted:
- Bob teaches Alice to run red lights, but it's very clear he's joking.
- Bob eventually admits he's terrible at driving and/or teaching but was trying to save face and faked it the best he could.
- Alice accuses Bob of sabotaging her, but it's clear she's trying to lay the blame for her own failures on him.
- Bob is teaching Alice to be a criminal getaway driver. Breaking the speed limit and running red lights are essential skills.
- Double Subverted:
- ...At least, he claims to be joking...
- Bob sarcastically tells Alice to run red lights. When she doesn't pick up on his sarcasm he decides to write her off as a hopeless case, and teach her wrong.
- Alice accuses Bob of sabotaging her, but he retorts that she's just trying to blame him for her failures. Then it turns out she's completely right.
- Parodied: Bob teaches Alice to run red lights, ignore all signs, and flip off cops...but it turns out to be the way you drive well in this universe.
- Zig-Zagged: Bob tries to teach Alice to run red lights, but whenever she tries, traffic keeps coming in from the side, so she decides she might as well stop at each red light and let those "awful drivers" pass from now on, for safety's sake. But she still runs them if no one's coming.
- Averted: Alice asks Bob to teach her to drive. He agrees and helps her out to the best of his ability.
- Enforced: "So, Bob is a driver's ed teacher. Let's spice things up by having him teach Alice to run red lights!"
- Lampshaded: "Who taught you how to drive?"
- Invoked:Alice: Bob, can you help me drive? After a bit I'll be a much better driver than you.
Bob: Grr... - Exploited: Alice's rival, noticing that she isn't appreciably better at driving than before but thinks she is, arranges to Break the Haughty in front of a large audience.
- Defied: "Bob, will you help teach me to drive? And I wasn't born yesterday...I'll recognize if you're screwing with me."
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: Alice is making a fool of herself as she tries to do something new to her and Bob, who's been established to be very good and experienced at the activity, is surprisingly blasé about it.
- Played for Drama: Bob sabotages Alice's gun lessons, believing she intends to murder someone.
- Played for Laughs: Bob sabotages Alice's gun lessons, but every time she misses her target, she hits something that makes her target miserable in some way (first a bucket of tar, then some birds whose feathers land all over the target, etc.) leading them to jump off a roof and stick to a flagpole a couple hundred feet off the ground. Alice decides that's probably good enough.
- Deconstructed:
- Alice's application of Bob's sabotaged lessons gets her or an innocent bystander killed.
- Alice gets in trouble with the law due to her application of Bob’s bad driving lessons. She is heavily fined and/or prosecuted. Bob, however, gets away scot-free.
"Okay, now include the link I gave you." "Back to Sabotutor...hey, wait! That's not the right link!" "You're doing it wrong...here's the main page."
