Tears of Remorse/Playing With

Basic Trope: A character, grieved by his own guilt, cries.

• Straight: Jack realizes he did a lot of harm and cries.
• Exaggerated: Jack realizes he caused Jill to stub her toe and weeps.
• Justified: Jack cries because he is genuinely sorry.
• Inverted: Tom laughs until he cries, remembering his evil deeds.
  • Tears of Joy
• Subverted: Tom weeps and sobs over his deeds, because he didn't get away with it.
• Double Subverted: But he admits that he deserves his punishment.
• Parodied: Sally sobs over having stolen a jelly bean until her pool of tears drowns everyone else -- whereupon she eats the jelly bean.
• Deconstructed: Jack's tears are stem from a mood he's in, caused by external circumstances that primed him to be sad, and his remorse will dry up as quickly as the tears.
• Reconstructed: After he gets out of it, Jack realizes how Not So Different he is from his victims, and decides to become a better person anyway.
• Zig Zagged: Two characters argue about whether Jack is sincere in his tears, or only faking, or...
• Averted: No one realizes his guilt.
  • No one does anything bad.
• Enforced: The writers want to show that evil actions provoke grief and regret, possibly in preparation for a Heel Face Turn.
• Lampshaded: "Ah, his grief is sincere -- as long as those aren't Water Works."
• Invoked: "You will not believe how much I wept over that, Jack."
• Defied: Jack refuses to show any remorse or grief whatsoever.
• Discussed: "He might really be sorry -- look at how he cries."
• Conversed: ???

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