Basic Trope: A character, often a villain, thinks that virtue makes you weak.
- Straight: Emperor Evulz calls Bob weak for stopping to help a wounded teammate.
- Exaggerated: Evulz mocks Bob for always withstanding temptation, being nice and compassionate to others, helping others, optimistic in the face of adversity, avoiding murdering people, forgiving others for the most horrible crimes, choosing the right thing over the smart thing, never giving up, and not purchasing porno flicks.
- Downplayed:
- Evulz recognizes Bob as a Worthy Opponent but thinks he could be even more effective if he'd be less virtuous.
- Dracone thinks that Bob could be more effective if he lets go of some moral restraints.
- Charlie feels that Bob could be a better person if he wasn't nice to everyone he meets.
- Jaynis The Uninhibited feels that Bob's virtues would hold him back, should they rub off on him, prompting the former to avoid the latter at any cost.
- Justified:
- Evulz used to do good deeds, but this caused others to underestimate him and step over him as a result.
- Evulz lives in a society where any kind of hesitation leads to death and thus he can only think of Bob's attempts at being rational as leaving himself wide open.
- Evulz is a Complete Monster.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good
- Inverted:
- Bob calls Evulz weak for killing thousands of innocents.
- Bob calls Charlie pathetic for being a Jerkass to others because he can.
- Bob calls Dracone weak for resorting to cynical means to deal with injustice.
- Evulz calls Bob a coward for letting a teammate be harmed instead of himself.
- Evulz praises Bob for stopping to help a wounded teammate.
- Evil Virtues
- Lack of virtues is weakness, because most of the time they seem to lead to a significant lack of common sense, intelligence (both intellectual and emotional), tactical awareness and patience. Even the ones who seem to avoid most of them through cleverness alone seem to constantly forget it's not a good thing to have the whole world gunning for you.
- Subverted: Emperor Evulz, seeing Bob stop to pick up a teammate, scoffs, "You're so weak. None of my soldiers would groan that way when lifting something."
- Double Subverted: "...And they'd be strong enough to leave anyone weak enough to stumble to his fate."
- Parodied:
- Bob apologized after bumping into Evulz. Evulz then gave "The Reason You Suck" Speech on how stupid he is for apologizing.
- Evulz dresses down Bob on how worthless he is for not loitering.
- Evulz is disgusted at people helping each other, so on his slow days, he blows up homeless shelters and cancer research institutions and shoots rescue workers and conservationalists.
- Evulz's fellow villains wonder if he has a loose screw after he unleashes the standard nihilistic spiels and oaths of destruction typical of this trope to a Girl Scout selling cookies (and not an evil one, either).
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: Evulz is fully aware of the benefits of being virtuous.
- Enforced: The executives want the audience to hate Emperor Evulz, so they have him scoff at our hero's most precious ideals.
- Lampshaded: "Oh, now you're going to tell us how weak we are for having compassion on poor starving orphans and all that."
- Invoked: Evulz wants to show Bob why virtues such as compassion, is a sign of weakness by telling him that No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. He then shows Bob the people he's previously saved and helped by showing no gratitude or even blaming him for their misfortunes.
- Exploited: The heroes take advantage of Evulz' belief that they're weak to take him out.
- Defied:
- Evulz chooses not to mock anyone of their virtues since this will jeopardize his goals in taking over the world.
- "If you are trying to kill me just because I am good person, the bullet I'll put between your eyes is partially a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy."
- "Oh, screw you! If people knew this is the mentality you have underneath all the running around being a superhero, they would just fear the day you decide to go on a killing spree! Label it whatever you want, whatever that… practically-minded head of yours can stand labeling it as; but you don't go far in this business if you don't care about helping others!"
- Discussed:
- "Emperor Evulz will probably call you weak if he catches you being decent at all."
- "Swear to you, if Evulz had spent those ten seconds giving me a speech about how loving my family makes me weak just trying to freaking kill me, I'm pretty sure I'd be dead." "You're not supposed to give them ideas." "What ideas? He lives in Opposite Villain-Land!"
- Conversed:
- "You know, villains in movies always say that virtue makes you weak, but it isn't true!"
- "Oh, yes, the 'loving your family makes you weak' villain spiel. That's one more cliche we can check off this film's bingo sheet."
- Deconstructed:
- Evulz’s habit of underestimating goodness bites him back hard when he goes up against Bob, who is not only compassionate, unwilling to use violence as a matter of principle and charitable to those he comes across but pragmatic, terrifyingly clever, not afraid to use deadly force and unhesitating in his decision to see that Evulz does not plague the land again. Evulz loses his mind over the contradictory nature of his opponent and spends his last few moments babbling to himself before Bob kills him to solidify the end of his reign.
- Bob answers to Evulz' rant about how having honor, love, and basic human decency makes him weak and how he will exploit this to bring Bob's doom by summarily blowing his brains out. "Just to make clear, you would have avoided that if you hadn't said that."
- Because of his philosophy, Evulz isn't virtuous towards even his subordinates or his allies. Eventually, they all turn against him, bringing his downfall.
- Evil Virtues exist for a reason and Evulz thinks those who follow them are exploitable fools while the villains who do think Evulz is an idiotic try-hardnote . This only leads to things getting harder for Evulz because he ticks off all useful connections. The other villains may even decry how Evulz's lack of code is ruining things for everybody.
- Evulz's belief that virtues can only hold you back leads to him violently repressing any capacity for good he might have had in pursuit of his goals, which eventually turns him into a pitiful shell of a human being. When General Drake realizes that the Evulz Empire won't be able to sustain itself under Evulz's command, he decides to put him down like a dog before he can cause the Empire's citizens any harm.
- Reconstructed: Evulz comes to acknowledge that virtues, like many weaknesses, can be useless to exploit if the opponent can properly defend them, so he and his allies shouldn't underestimate this if they want to succeed.
So you're going back to the main page to save lives? Ugh! How spineless are you?
