Basic Trope: A predator will continue to chase very elusive prey in spite of other food that's much easier to catch.
- Straight: Bloodgulper the World Killer, a tentacled, disgusting telekinetic beast, proceeds to chase Alice and Bob across an entire island.
- Exaggerated:
- The duo jumps into an interplanetary xenon-powered spacecraft and fly to Mars. Bloodgulper gets into another rocket and follows them!
- The predator chases them across an entire continent.
- Downplayed: Bloodgulper merely chases them around a house for a bit.
- Justified:
- Alice and Bob are much bigger than other prey and would fill Bloodgulper's highly elastic belly much more quickly than anything else.
- Bloodgulper's Bizarre Alien Biology makes extremely efficient use of its food, so it can afford to invest a lot of energy in wearing out its prey.
- Monster Is a Mommy, and Bob has kidnapped Bloodgulper's offspring For the Evulz, prompting it to enter Mama Bear mode.
- Alice and Bob are the only prey available on the island, and Bloodgulper has to eat too, y'know.
- Bloodgulper is smart and cunning enough to hold a grudge, and Alice and Bob have sufficiently ticked it off.
- Bloodgulper was created as a weapon and taught/programmed to seek and destroy Alice and/or Bob at any cost.
- Bloodgulper is an ultimately evil god from an alternate reality who spied on Bob and Alice and decided to kill them just For the Evulz.
- Bloodgulper is young and inexperienced, and they're only persistent because they didn't realize they should just go for the jugular right away. Older adults soon arrive and drop off some prey they caught in five minutes, completely ignoring Bob and Alice.
- Bloodgulper lives in an area with few prey (for example, a desert).
- Bloodgulper likes to chase its prey until it runs out as a hunting method.
- Bloodgulper will eat other things if it gets hungry enough, but it goes out of its way to pursue Alice and Bob because it finds humans particularly tasty.
- Inverted:
- Bloodgulper is Bob's Animal Nemesis who he persistently pursues.
- Bloodgulper gives up its chase much more quickly than a realistic predator would.
- Bob is a super-persistent prey who absolutely refuses to be taken even if that means running for so long and doing so many suicidal stunts that Bloodgulper gives up or dies.
- Subverted:
- Bloodgulper chases both of them for quite a while, but eventually gives up.
- Bloodgulper chases the two of them and finally catches them...then starts tickling them. Turns out they're really good friends and were just playing around (or perhaps practicing).
- Bloodgulper isn't hunting them for food, but is catching them on behalf of someone else as a trained animal.
- Double Subverted: ...then Bob taunts Bloodgulper, flipping it off and slapping its bare butt, and prompting it into starting the chase again.
- Parodied:
- Bloodgulper is watching TV one day, spots Alice and Bob on the 11 o'clock news, and decides to stalk them.
- Bloodgulper uses Offscreen Teleportation to appear already at whatever location they've just run to, Droopy-style.
- Bloodgulper sneaks into an Aperture Science manufacturing plant and steals a portal gun to get to Alice and Bob faster
- Zig-Zagged: Bloodgulper chases the duo, then stops when it spots much slower prey. It catches the prey and eats it, then continues to chase them after done with its meal. It then gets tired and stops to take a nap... then wakes up half an hour later, dedicated to finding them again.
- Averted: Bloodgulper leaves Alice and Bob alone as soon as they leave its territory.
- Enforced: "We need to give the audience a sense of urgency and the thrill of the ever-lasting chase!"
- Lampshaded: "What, does this thing think we're a 5-star meal or something?"
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited:
- Bob is leading Bloodgulper into a trap.
- "Sheesh. That thing must be pretty desperate if all it can find to eat is us scrawny humans. I wonder if it'll leave us alone if we find something... *spots a cow in the distance* ...tastier."
- Defied: "Oh, those two aren't even worth it, I'll just butcher this cow instead or something."
- Discussed: "Knowing our luck, he's not gonna go away 'til we kill him."
- Conversed: "Ever notice how predators on TV are stubborn when it comes to food?"
- Deconstructed:
- Bloodgulper keeps chasing Alice and Bob until it dies of starvation/exhaustion, which could have been avoided if it had gone after easier prey. When Alice and Bob come up on Bloodgulper's massive, decomposing corpse with a cloud of flies swarming it, they lament the senseless waste of monster life.
- Alice and Bob quickly tire out and Bloodgulper catches up to them and devours them, happily patting its full, bloated belly before releasing a belch of poisonous gas loud and powerful enough to push the Moon out of its orbit and into a collision course for Earth, and then it teleports out of this reality before the Moon collides into Earth and ends all life on the planet with an Earth-Shattering Kaboom.
- Reconstructed:
- Bloodgulper's species is quickly dying out, and its habitat is almost completely devoid of prey. They need to pursue any morsel of food they can find, no matter what the cost.
- Bloodgulper's species are omnivores but are also quite vengeful, like tigers. Bloodgulper isn't pursuing Bob and Alice because it's hungry, it's pursuing them because they wronged it in some way.
- Played For Laughs: Bloodgulper's rampage is a homage to Droopy. It becomes increasingly absurd to find the damned monster in places like underneath a literal grain of sand.
- Played For Drama: "Bloodgulper" is a drama about a runaway slave and the most vicious, determined dog in a slaver's hound group. As long as the dog appears implacable the poor man doesn't have any hope, so Bloodgulper turns into his greatest obstacle to clear.
- Played For Horror:
- "Bloodgulper" is a Xenomorph Xerox. It's an implacable beast because it was designed to destroy and nothing else and kills truckloads of people in every scene it appears with lots of viciousness but no satisfaction because its primary goal (kill Alice) still has not been fulfilled.
- Alice and Bob try to figure out why the heck Bloodgulper is so obsessed with getting them, even performing life-risking stunts to bypass obstacles and refusing to eat other animals and the food they dumped to get yet another attempt to gnaw at the humans, and then they stumble on the discovery that Bloodgulper is extremely intelligent and equally sadistic. It is not going after easier prey because they don't scare like humans do, and the "life-risking stunts" is the beast indulging on whatever passes for a concept of the Rule of Cool in its mind. And trying to bore it or scare it off wouldn't work because that would make Bloodgulper switch reasons to hunt them down from "sport" to "revenge" and become more obsessed with killing them.
RUN AWAY FROM THAT Super-Persistent Predator!!!!!
