Dismotivation/Playing With

Basic Trope: A character takes care to keep up status quo.

• Straight: John is careful not to progress in his life and to keep things as they are.
• Exaggerated: John shirks at the hint of his life going somewhere, underachieves consistently in everything, makes his decisions based on how mediocre his life will stay and takes actual pride in being called a loser and a useless slacker.
• Downplayed: John doesn't really have a problem with things changing per se. However, he's not all that motivated to change his life, either.
• Justified:
  • To John, progress means new risks and pitfalls and John prefers to keep his life safe, boring and mediocre.
  • John doesn't want to get promoted into a new position, because he doesn't like it will give him far less spaces to relax.
  • John's underachieving tendencies are because of a passive-aggressive complex carried over from childhood or some existential spite.
• Inverted: John is an over-achiever who does every thing he can so that he will go up in life.
• Subverted: John appears to be a louse who does the bare minimum, but it is revealed that he is secretly working on his skills to raise his status at work/school.
• Double Subverted: Except that's a clever lie to keep the others off pestering him.
• Parodied: John pulls off insane Xanatos and Batman Gambits to keep his state the same.
• Deconstructed: John wins at his goal of having an unremarkable life, but at the cost of passing up a lot of oppurtunities that could have helped him and his family, along with being written of as a unresponsible louse by all his coworkers and friends. He does soul-searching.
• Reconstructed: He comes to a conclusion it's all been worth it.
• Zig Zagged: ???
• Averted: ???
• Enforced: ???
• Lampshaded: "Wow, John, are you actually trying to keep yourself from getting forward?"
• Invoked: ???
• Exploited: ???
• Defied: ???
• Discussed: ???
• Conversed: ???
• Plotted A Good Waste: ???
• Played For Laughs: John considers it a compliment when people call him a slacker or a bum, but is terrified at the possibility he might get a promotion, and in order to keep the status quo, does every thing in his power to make sure he doesn't achieve it.
• Played For Drama:
  • John is horribly sheltered and scared of change, thanks to an over-protective and controlling mother who told him that he would fail miserably at most things in life. As a result, he never tries - even if he secretly wants to.
  • Things come to a point where everything hinges on John making an important decision. Except he's absolutely not willing to. He even declares that he will stay a do-nothing even if it results in him crossing the Moral Event Horizon.

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Time is precious - so back to slacking off now, because if something happened, those days of bliss would be over.