Basic Trope: A character, grieved by their own guilt, cries.
- Straight: Jack realizes he did a lot of harm and cries.
- Exaggerated: Jack realizes he caused Jill to stub her toe and weeps.
- Downplayed:
- Jack realizes he did something bad and it leaves him feeling a little down.
- Single Tear of remorse.
- While Jack is a little misty-eyed after the incident, no tears were shed.
- Justified: Jack cries because he is genuinely sorry.
- Inverted:
- Tom laughs until he cries, remembering his evil deeds.
- Tears of Joy
- Subverted:
- The tears are crocodile tears.
- Tom weeps and sobs over his deeds, because he didn't get away with it.
- Double Subverted: But he admits that he deserves his punishment.
- Parodied: Sally sobs over having stolen a jelly bean until her pool of tears drowns everyone else — whereupon she eats the jelly bean.
- Zig Zagged: Jack the Well-Intentioned Extremist prone to holding the Idiot Ball keeps realizing how much grief his latest plans have caused people, but only cries at some of these realizations. This seems to not have any correlation with how many good reasons he had to act the way he did.
- Averted:
- No one realizes his guilt.
- No one does anything bad.
- Enforced: The writers want to show that evil actions provoke grief and regret, possibly in preparation for a Heel–Face Turn.
- Lampshaded: "Ah, his grief is sincere."
- Invoked: "You will not believe how much I wept over that, Jack."
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Jack refuses to show any remorse or grief whatsoever.
- Discussed: "He might really be sorry — look at how he cries."
- Conversed: "... You know, I think that Draco in Leather Pants-like treatment he's been getting might be slightly understandable due to this one scene. That's some realistic crying."
- Implied: Jack puts his head in his hands or does another motion associated with crying, but there is no way to tell he actually did.
- Deconstructed: Jack's tears are stem from a mood he's in, caused by external circumstances that primed him to be sad, and his remorse will dry up as quickly as the tears.
- Reconstructed: After he gets out of it, Jack realizes how similar he is to his victims, and decides to become a better person anyway.
Back to Tears of Remorse
