Basic Trope: A self-centered, manipulative, asocial person who doesn't care about right and wrong.
- Straight: Alice is self-centered, manipulative, apathetic, superficially charming, and asocial.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice shows all the symptoms of sociopathy from Lack of Empathy, manipulativeness, Ax Craziness, to lesser known ones like short-lived emotions and a lack of intense fear.
- Sadist
- Downplayed:
- Alice has standards, albeit under a Blue-and-Orange Morality.
- Alice has standards, but for purely selfish reasons.
- Alice has standards, but applies them to only other people.
- Alice is a Jerk with a Heart of Jerk.
- Alice is a Sociopathic Hero.
- Justified:
- Alice is trying to achieve a goal, well-meaning or not.
- Alice is suffering from Antisocial Personality Disorder.
- Alice had experienced a terrible, troubling childhood.
- Alice is a demon, or is otherwise not human.
- Alice suffered brain damage from some sort of physical trauma.
- Alice is the product of a super soldier program. Her behavior is due to either conditioning or the drugs used to augment her body.
- Alice is soulless.
- Inverted:
- Alice is an All-Loving Hero.
- Alice is The Empath.
- Subverted:
- Alice actually cares about Bob, making him her Morality Pet.
- Alice thinks she is a sociopath, but really, she is either unaware or in denial of her feelings and attachments to other people.
- Double Subverted:
- Turns out she faked it, though, and she has always been manipulating him.
- Alice truly is a sociopath.
- Parodied:
- The only way to prove that Alice is truly a sociopath is by her refusal to socialize with people.
- Bob calls Alice a sociopath. She responds by violently beating him up with a baseball bat while going "WHAT DID YOU JUST CALL ME?!"
- Zig Zagged: At first, Alice looks like she doesn't care about anyone else, but she may care about Bob, though the story switches back and forth between making him her Morality Pet or a subversion of the trope.
- Averted:
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones, Even Evil Has Standards, etc.
- Alice has selfish motives, but she doesn't have any symptoms of sociopathy or at least, enough to be diagnosed as such.
- Enforced:
- The writers need a scary villain.
- "Empathy is almost universally considered good, right? Let's make someone a Villain by Default by giving them a disorder that prevents such!"
- Lampshaded: "Alice could walk into a crowded room and slaughter everyone inside and she'd only be annoyed that there was blood splattered all over her."
- Invoked: Damion raises Alice terribly and teaches her how emotions are for the weak and that everyone is that way, but they just don't show it in public.
- Exploited: Damion doesn't want a Dragon the heroes can recruit, so he raises Alice to be a sociopath to deflect any such tactics and possibly make them question themselves.
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: "The person in this profile is Alice, diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder. Sociopath. Psychopath." "Uh... aren't these two terms different from each other?" "I don't know, are they?"
- Conversed: "Shows nowadays really like to have the main bad guy to be like Alice, huh?" "You mean the one who's charming on the outside, but enjoys manipulating others and doing bad things, without a shred of guilt whatsoever?"
- Implied: Alice seems to be a charming person, but there are signs of something being wrong with her.
- Deconstructed: Sociopaths like Alice are certainly frightening people on paper. In practice, they are ineffective as villains due to their crippling flaws: they tend to be bad at long-term planning, their inability to learn from past mistakes only causes them to make more mistakes, and lastly, their ego blinds them to the fact that they are not as smart as they think they are. Villain wannabes may find Alice cool, but the "cool" factor is merely superficial — being Alice would suck.
- Reconstructed: If someone is a sociopath who lives for their own enjoyment, is it possible for them to enjoy things that society sees as positive in the first place? After all, sociopaths don't have to enjoy bad things just because they're 'bad'. The resulting combination of Moral Sociopathy and Enlightened Self-Interest then makes them a valuable and reliable ally, if a bit unnerving.
- Played For Laughs:
- Played For Drama:
- Bob can't believe that Alice, whom he loved and trusted for so long, really cares the same amount of emotions for him as a potato. Bob also suffers a lot of emotional abuse from Alice, and he can't (or won't) understand why she does so.
- Alice's extreme antisocial behavior is a product of a horrible upbringing, a self-perpetuating cycle of abuse that happened in many past generations of her family. She could've been a better person, but is way too far gone now.
- Alternatively, no Freudian Excuse exists for Alice's extreme antisocial behaviour — she's born with such a personality disorder that nothing would ever make her change. The Reveal hits other people hard, as they are unable to comprehend how Always Chaotic Evil people like Alice do exist. Bob, believing there really is no hope for her, guns her down to spare others the effort of trying to cure her to no avail.
- Played For Horror: Complete Monster
Back to The Sociopath.
