Berrenta
MOD
Bejeweled (she/her)
(Ten years in the joint)
Relationship Status: I made a point to burn all of the photographs
#2: Nov 6th 2016 at 5:12:07 AM
Really a Useful Note is not the right option to choose for this issue. That is for tropes covering real life subjects that read like a Useful Note.
Secondly, you did not provide enough evidence to prove that the trope needs to be broader.
Declining.
Total posts: 2

Put Down Your Gun and Step Away is a perfectly decent and valid trope, don't get me wrong, but it seems to me that it would be useful to either make it broader or make it a sub-trope of something broader.
I feel like lately I'm encountering in various media an increasing number of cases where the heroes, faced with a hostage situation (or a situation of similar peril, like the release of a bioweapon or other WMD), behave with *incredible stupidity*- quickly negotiating away any power they might have had in the situation while frequently failing to achieve any sort of security regarding the threat that was being held over their heads, often while allowing the villain(s) to increase the range of the threat or the number of hostages threatened enormously.
Jacob in the final book of Ransom Riggs' "Miss Peregrine" Trilogy allows a threat to *one* ymbryne to make him put every "peculiar", and ALL the surviving ymbrynes, in danger, while putting the villain on a path that may allow him to accrue powers that will let him conquer the world. The hero of "The Flash" sacrifices his speed to a known serial killer to save one hostage, only to have said serial killer take a *different* hostage, and use his uncontested power to kill most of the police department and threaten the destruction of multiple universes. Liz, of "Blacklist", allows a bad guy to escape from an enclosed cathedral basement with limited accessibility with a bioweapon, only for said bad guy to bring that bioweapon to an airport.
...And many other examples as well, with heroes often wrenching defeat from the jaws of victory in the name of trusting notoriously unreliable villains to keep their word.
"Put Down Your Gun And Step Away" is, broadly, the same situation- but heroic stupidity often comes to the fore in ways that aren't necessarily about guns or even explicit hostages, yet in which the heroes allow the potential for immediate personal losses or threats to completely blind them to often far broader threats that could impact far more people.