Basic Trope: A character teaches another character a skill by putting them in a life-or-death situation.
- Straight: Bob throws Alice into a deep lake to teach her to swim.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob throws Alice off a cruise ship in the Atlantic Ocean to teach her to swim.
- Bob fires a gun at Alice several times to test her dodging skills while in the water.
- Downplayed: Bob throws Alice into a deep lake to teach her to swim, and joins her to correct her mistakes.
- Justified:
- Alice learns best under pressure, and Bob knows this.
- Alice has a habit of not learning new skills unless she has absolutely no choice, and Bob knows this.
- The skill Bob is trying to teach Alice has little to no opportunity for time out to ask advice.
- Alice needs to learn how to swim in a short amount of time as her own life depends on it, and this was the first thing Bob thought of.
- Inverted: Bob teaches Alice to swim by putting her in a shallow pond with a life raft.
- Subverted: Bob throws Alice in the lake, but the lake was shallower than it looks, letting Alice walk across the bottom.
- Double Subverted: And then the tide comes in.
- Parodied: Bob throws Alice, who is locked in a cage, into a pool of acid with sharks to teach her to swim.
- Zig Zagged: Bob throws Alice into a lake, but it's shallower than it looks. Then Bob pushes her backwards into a deeper part of the lake, but someone throws her a life raft...
- Averted:
- Bob signs up Alice for swimming lessons.
- Bob is Alice's swimming teacher.
- Enforced: "The story needs some drama! Let's have Bob chuck Alice into a lake so she can learn to swim."
- Lampshaded: "I'll be throwing you into a lake now, cause this always works to teach people to swim."
- Implied: Alice is tied to a rock and tossed in a lake at one point and she casually mutters after saving herself that "learning how to swim was scarier than this".
- Invoked: "Alice, why can't you learn to swim?" "Just throw me in the lake. It'll work."
- Exploited: Alice secretly has power over water, which only activates when water puts her in mortal danger.
- Defied:
- "Bob, I could drown." "You're right. I won't do it."
- "Bob, just so you know, Alice isn't as tough as your regular students, so I'm going to ask you really nicely to not use your methods. If I find her huddling In the locker room muttering about you trying her to a rock and tossing her in the lake, especially after I have wasted a pretty precious minute telling you not to, I will fucking kill you. Or fire you. It really depends on how pissed I'm still feeling about it when I finally find you afterwards. Are we clear?"
- Discussed: "So, can you swim now?" "Yeah, but it was scary."
- Conversed: "You know, I'm not sure Bob should have done that." "Alice learned to swim, though."
- Deconstructed:
- Alice, traumatized by the event, grows up to loathe swimming, and becomes fearful of water.
- Willpower alone cannot guarantee that an obstacle will be overcome. Alice just sinks and drowns because she runs out of energy before figuring out any effective way to keep her head above water to continue breathing.
- Other people hate Bob because his methods, while allegedly effective, are deemed as obscenely cruel regardless. Lawsuits, warnings, arrests, being fired and being both threatened — and actually attempted — to be killed by friends, bosses and the enraged people close to his students (and many people who have no connection whatsoever but are sickened nevertheless) is the result. Bob's name goes down in history as a perfect example of how (for the love of everything you hold holy) not treat your students.
- Reconstructed: Alice faces her fear and gets swimming lessons. Her fear assuaged, it turns out she loves to swim.
- Played For Laughs:
- The horrible attempt Bob made at teaching Alice how to swim is part of Alice's Hilariously Abusive Childhood.
- Bob is a mentor in a Robot Chicken sketch about a Serious Business sport ("if you can evade bullets, you can evade a dodgeball!"). The Black Comedy just oozes off the screen.
- Played For Drama:
- Bob thinks that Alice will be able to overcome her problems when she's forced to. Unfortunately, he completely overestimates her abilities and she ends up panicking and drowning.
- Bob's methods enrage Alice's Papa Wolf or Mama Bear, and he ends up getting (at the very least) a lawsuit.
- Alice manages to complete her training (or survive at the least), but uses the results of her training against her mentor out of malice over what he put her through.
- Played For Horror:
- The Legend of Killer Alice has a flashback sequence to the events that turned Alice into the titular murderous ghost, which are Bob tossing her in a lake and letting her drown when she doesn't starts to swim fast enough. Worse yet, Bob remains completely unapologetic about it, and is still getting students killed occasionally.
- Plotted A Good Waste: Alice is the main character of the Serious Business sports anime du jour and Bob is a mini-Arc Villain deconstructing this whole concept — the point being that this is not the way trainers are supposed to act.
Back to Sink or Swim Mentor
