Freudian Excuse/Playing With

Basic Trope: A reason in the backstory of the villain (or apparently unsympathetic character) that explains why they act the way they do and gives them motivation for their actions.

• Straight:
  • Bob, a Serial Killer, kills people because he was abused by his parents and bullied by classmates as a child.
  • Bob is a Jerkass, because he lost his parents at age 10 and was bullied until he learned he would be left alone/respected by being a jerk, which has since then become his primary mode of interaction.
• Exaggerated: Bob, an Evil Overlord Nietzsche Wannabe Omnicidal Maniac, destroys planets and enslaves entire galaxies because his father was a sadistic pedophile who tortured and Mind Raped the hell out of him and ate his soul millimeters by millimeters ever since he was a fetus.
• Downplayed:
  • While nothing downright traumatizing ever happened to Bob, he grew up in an environment that didn't encourage positive growth. This indirectly affected his attitude growing up.
  • Bob is a Jerkass, because his parents were as well.
• Justified: After all, experiences, especially past traumas, can be groundwork on how we develop our ideas.
• Inverted:
  • Bob has no excuse; he kills people simply For the Evulz.
  • Alternatively: Bob kills people because it's In the Blood.
  • Or: Bob has a tragic past, but used it as a motivation to help others as opposed to harming them.
  • Alternatively: Bob had a monstrously horrible childhood, to the point that it would be perfectly understandable if he grew up to be an Ax Crazy Serial Killer; instead he grows up to be a Pollyanna.
  • Alternatively: Bob's life has been easy and he knows nothing of suffering. In an effort to understand it, he inflicts it on others.
  • Bob's life has been extremely easy - leaving him unequipped to deal with hardships in a mature, constructive, effective way.
  • Bob actually would have grown up to be a horrible, loathsome person, except he suffered a loss, humiliation or something else that got him to change direction onto a virtuous path.
  • Bob was exposed to serial killing as a child, so he bullies others and abuses his kids.
  • Or Bob learnt to love bullying others, so as an adult he's a really unpleasant individual.
  • Bob spends his life helping elderly people, because an old guy saved him from drowning when Bob was a child.
  • Bob has a tragic past, but instead of making him seem more sympathetic, it makes his current actions seem worse.
  • Bob's childhood was wonderful to the point of being downright saccharine. He got tired of it and decided acting horrifically towards others to be great for a change.
  • Bob's childhood has been incredibly happy as a whole and, according to his self-learnt bizarre train of thought, he thinks unhappy people are better off dead.
• Subverted:
  • Despite having a past that would qualify as a Freudian Excuse, Bob turned out to be a well-adjusted and functioning human being.
  • Alternatively: Bob's story about his Freudian Excuse regularly changes, because he's the goddamn Joker.
  • Alternatively: Bob laughs at the idea that he kills people because of his parents or that people should feel sorry for him because of it.
• Doubly Subverted:
  • His excuse eventually leads him to commit murder.
  • Alternatively: One of his many excuses is revealed to be the truth.
  • Alternatively: Bob's laughter is unconvincing, and he doth protest too much on the subject; even if he chooses not to acknowledge it, he still has issues with his past that inform his actions.
• Parodied: Bob routinely engages in mass murder and world conquest as an adult because the expensive bike he got for his fourth birthday was blue and not red as he wanted, or some other similarly trivial, pathetic and laughable excuse.
• Deconstructed:
  • Bob's Freudian Excuse, no matter how convincing or painful, doesn't change or is even unconnected to the fact that he has committed numerous irrational, vile and evil actions all on his own initiative as an adult. While we might feel sympathy for what he went through as a child, he should have resolved it peacefully and had no right to commit such actions as an adult, losing his right to our sympathy once he did so.
  • Alternatively: Freud is obsolete.
  • Alternatively: People with traumatized childhoods commit mass suicide and/or are subjected to euthanasia, and the government, having accepted Freudian and/or Behavioural theory, sanctions and punishes anyone who raises a child wrongly and abusively, ultimately resulting in the obliteration of the family system. To replace the family, children are raised in conditioning centres where they are overloaded with pleasure and happiness, making sure that they will grow up nice and obedient.
  • Alternatively: Bob's excuse just shows how pathetically weak he actually is. In some cases, he's aware of this, and begs to be stopped before his dementia hurts anyone else.
  • Bob may have had hard time when younger, but when looking closer, it's made implicitly or explicitly clear that underlying it all was Bob's poorly developed character that caused or contributed to his troubles. On some level Bob may or may not acknowledge his handy excuse is just that.
• Reconstructed:
  • In real life, operant conditioning still explains the effectiveness of a "Freudian" Excuse (for example, Bob didn't get rewarded for doing good deeds, but simply further abused for it, which weakened his want to do good), while it is shown that neglect does cause brain damage. Who knows, from Bob's perspective he is simply doing his vile actions out of a perceived and conditioned necessity, and and is actually good in the inside.
  • Bob never learnt the value of having a good, strong character and if you were to ask him, he may not even know what character even is. He responded to or resolved his conflicts the way he knew and it happened to be the wrong way.
• Zig Zagged: Bob likes to give numerous excuses for his actions, obscuring which one is the true one. Does he just do it For the Evulz? Or is one of them true? Or none of them?
• Averted:
  • Bob reveals nothing about his past to us; we know nothing one way or the other.
  • Alternatively: Bob's past was basically normal, and he does what he does either to further his agenda or just because he's a sadistic bastard.
  • Bob simply is oblivious or used to his own Jerkass-behavior.
  • Bob's Dark and Troubled Past explains his motivations and methods, perhaps even how his personality and style of relating to others developed and solidified, but everyone (including Bob himself) agrees that it does not excuse his villainy.
• Enforced: "We can't have our bad guy be evil just for the hell of it. Something should have happened to him to make him this way."
• Lampshaded: "There must be something really terrible in his past to make him capable of this..."
• Invoked: "I want to tell in you in detail why I'm doing this to you... I want to make you understand..."
• Exploited:
  • Bob uses his excuse to make heroes let their guards down.
  • A hero mocks Bob about his excuse, causing the latter to make a mistake in anger.
  • Bob brings up his excuse to gain sympathy and a claim to moral high ground in order to get heroes off his back.
  • Bob brings up an event from his past to shame someone present, who was involved with that same event, into backing off.
• Defied:
  • "I cannot be reduced to a simple, trite motivation."
  • "No, Bob. Your excuse is merely a convenient way of fleeing responsibility."
• Discussed: "These guys always have some excuse..."
• Conversed: "Do these writers think that having an awful childhood automatically makes you eat kittens or something?"
• Played for Laughs: Bob brings up his sad past in the most melodramatic way possible. Ben remarks: So that's why you are so emo!
• Played for Drama: Bob is pushed to the edge by PTSD. He has trouble believing he could get any better and thinks he and nothing else has no hope. He's considering taking an entire universe with him as he self-terminates and our hero needs to convince him, by any means necessary, that it doesn't have to be.

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