Godwin's Law/Playing With

Basic Trope: Some participant will inevitably make a comparison to Hitler and/or Nazis during any online debate

• Straight: Bob loses his temper during a forum discussion and compares his opponents to Hitler
• Exaggerated:
  • Bob spends all day trolling the forums, making Hitler references to anything he can
  • Bob decides after some thought that such a comparison is unfair to Hitler.
• Justified:
  • The forum discussion is about Germany during World War 2, so such references are appropriate
  • Another poster mentioned, in a positive light, one or more of the reasons that Hitler is considered evil. If someone was telling you that they support genocide, wouldn't you mention that it's a horrible thing to do?
• Inverted:
  • The forum has a strict policy banning contributors who make Hitler comparisons, so users go out of these way to avoid such references.
  • The forum members are anti-Semites, and among such a community a common meme is that someone insults his opponent by comparing him to the Jews.
  • Hitler is compared to someone else.
• Subverted:
  • Bob enters a forum and makes a comparison to a man named Hitler, which is actually a reference to his great-grandfather, not the dictator.
  • Bob references at length "a certain European with a tooth-brush mustache," but he's actually thinking of Charlie Chaplin.
• Double Subverted:
  • Bob's great-grandfather was a Nazi.
  • And then Bob's opponent compares him to Hitler.
• Parodied:
  • When Bob makes his Hitler reference, huge sirens go off through his computer speakers and the screen begins to flash red warning messages, and then explodes.
  • Hitler Ate Sugar
• Deconstructed:
  • Bob continues to make Hitler and Nazi references in various forums, which gets the attention of the FBI, who quickly add Bob to their list of suspected terrorists and arrest him.
  • Alternatively, Bob becomes so infamous that he is actually recognized in real life and fired from his job.
  • Bob's tirades about Hitler get so prevalent that everyone stops taking him seriously and he ends up as the laughingstock of the forum.
• Reconstructed: Bob is careful when using Hitler references to ensure everyone knows he is being funny and/or ironic, so nobody mistakes him for a right-wing crazy.
• Zig Zagged: Bob frequently posts online in situations where Hitler would be an obvious comparison, but always manages to find another historical figure who's done more or less the same thing: Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, Subotai, what have you. He becomes a famous historical lecturer, known as "The Man who killed Godwin", and is invited on to TV talk shows to talk about the Nazi's and/or Israel, but turns these down because he's "very busy planning a reunion." Near the end of the [Entertainment] we see Bob shaving his full mustache, but we don't get a look at his face again until he walks into a German restaurant and shakes hands with several elderly German gentlemen. "Herr Goering, Herr Himmler. JOSEF! Liebschen! It's been so long!" And as he embraces a short frail old man, the POV turns around and we see that he IS Hitler.
• Averted: Bob never makes any Hitler references and uses modern dictators as a comparison instead.
• Enforced: Bob is a sociologist studying the effects of Hitler/Nazi references in online discussions
• Lampshaded: "Looks like Bob just played the Hitler card..."
• Invoked: Bob has been in a heated argument with his opponent for weeks and finally decides that a comparison to Hitler is both unavoidable and entirely appropriate.
• Defied: Bob resists the temptation to use the Hitler comparison and instead draws a more realistic comparison to his opponent.
• Discussed: "Look, Bob, playing the Hitler card doesn't make you cool or witty, it just shows that you're out of arguments."
• Conversed: "Why are all these forums full of Nazi references?"

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You know who else wouldn't have clicked on this link? HITLER!