Basic Trope: Vilifying wealthy people.
- Straight: Hard Times Harry, a destitute vagabond, rallies for the have-nots to start an uprising against a wealthy elite.
- Exaggerated:
- Hard Times Harry wants to kill everyone who happens to have any amount of money to their name.
- Hard Times Harry factory farms the rich and transfers their wealth to their children after they are slaughtered so he'll have an endless supply of rich-people to kill, forever.
- Hard Times Harry is a derogatory nickname that has long outlived the original man, and means someone who establishes a policy of publicly executing anyone who gets too rich and distributing their money to help out the poor.
- Hard Times Harry is secretly an Omnicidal Maniac who believes in Eat the Rich and Kill the Poor.
- Downplayed: Hard Times Harry doesn't vilify everyone who's wealthy, reserving his contempt towards rich people who are objectively bad.
- Justified:
- Hard Times Harry despises the rich because he believes their extravagant lifestyle makes them out of touch with how horrible life is for the poor.
- Hard Times Harry is angered that some wealthy people can use their wealth to avoid getting in trouble for their actions.
- Hard Time Harry's parents were killed by a Corrupt Corporate Executive and he witnessed their death. Because of this, he channels his anger and despair from his parents's death into the wealthy, believing all of them to be responsible.
- Inverted: Despite his name, Hard Times Harry despises the poor and advocates for the mass killing of them.
- Subverted:
- Hard Times Harry turns out to mean something else entirely when he said "eat the rich". He meant to address how delicious rich foods are.
- Hard Times Harry's words are taken out of context, he actually means to say "eat the rich in nutrients." He is actually promoting eating good healthy food!
- Hard Times Harry is actually a middle class grifter taking advantage of the working class and their grievances to elevate himself to the higher echelons of society.
- Double Subverted:
- Hard Times Harry then goes on to state how he can't afford to eat decent food and that the rich must be punished for keeping the good stuff to themselves.
- However, the economically rich hoards the good food rich in nutrients, so Hard Times Harry decides to punish the rich so the foods rich in nutrients can be distributed more fairly.
- On some level, Hard Times Harry really does believe that getting rid of the rich would solve a lot of problems, even if he also believes that the working class are a bunch of gullible idiots who will believe anyone who claims to hate the rich like he does.
- Parodied: Hard Times Harry literally eats the rich.
- Zig-Zagged: Hard Times Harry's main goal is to get the oppressed to turn against whoever he believes is responsible, with the wealthy only being the targets whenever they fit his narrative.
- Averted: No one expresses negative feelings about the rich.
- Lampshaded: "I actually submit a fair amount of my fortune to charities, Hard Times Harry. Blaming all people of my class for the world's problems will only make you look ungrateful and willing to use a scapegoat."
- Invoked: Hard Times Harry wants to make a wealthy person he despises suffer, so he rallies the lower class into an anti-rich frenzy in hopes that at least one of them will attempt to harm his source of scorn.
- Exploited:
- Hard Times Harry doesn't really care about the rich oppressing the less wealthy, he just wants everyone to kill each other and is using an anti-rich rhetoric as an excuse to make everyone hostile to each other.
- Evil rich people, anticipating oppositions like Hard Times Harry, hires the media to keep the spotlight on their rivals. While they themselves are kept off the radar, their competition are conveniently taken care of.
- Defied:
- "No, let's not blame the rich for everything. Assuming all of them are greedy and selfish plutocrats will likely make us look bad to the ones who actually use their wealth to help the less fortunate."
- "I know we're having a hard time here, but we will endure. Let's stop playing victim and just blaming someone else like the rich."
- "Yes, the rich are bastards and making us suffer, but if we eat and vilify them, we'll just be as bad as they are. So let's just endure, we're better than stooping that low."
- Discussed:
- "Two wrongs don't make a right, Hard Times Harry. If you think the rich are bad now, imagine how much it would suck if they stop giving hand-outs or donations because your outbursts convince them that everyone who's penniless is an irate scoundrel with no ounce of gratitude."
- "You may hate the rich for not doing anything, but when was the last time you actually did something for the poor yourself? Surely you've done more to help out your own community, right?"
- "Are you sure that the poor have absolute moral high ground, Hard Times Harry? The rich haven't been doing anything harmful, and last I heard, the poor are just abusing their status quo as 'poor little victims' without doing anything to deserve it."
- Conversed: "Funny that a message condemning the rich is put in the story when the work itself is providing the creator with an inordinate amount of cash."
- Implied: Hard Times Harry scowls and spits on the ground whenever a wealthy person walks by.
- Deconstructed:
- Killing the rich doesn't solve the town's problems, as an absence of opulent citizens means that there are less people able to afford upkeep and the poor are stuck fighting tooth and nail to survive.
- The poor start believing that whatever they do is good, because they were always portrayed as the 'justified victim', and kickstarted a belief that 'being rich is evil', so everyone is kept in poverty, whereas rich people are constantly suffering Demonization because of the generalization that they are always greedy, selfish and evil thus undesirable. Thus the rich only exist to be vilified and everyone started believing that being poor, undernourished and suffering is 'ideal and virtuous', creating a stagnant community because no one wants to be rich and then get labelled as 'evil', preferring the virtuous way of the poor.
- The "Eat the Rich" types reveal themselves to be absolutely terrible at telling the difference between "can only be rich because they exploit people for money they don't need" and "reasonably well off, but not obscenely wealthy Rags to Riches", in large part because they assume that because that they're not rich, then they're inherently good and just and not prone to horrible biases and bigotries like the wealthy people they hate. To make matters worse, their desire to kill anyone they deem too rich is ultimately used as an excuse to go after anyone they have grievances with, such as being jealous of a person who is genuinely their superior through their own merits, for their race, or even just simply because they don't like them for extremely petty reasons. The end result is that many well off but ultimately innocent people being caught in the crossfire, their movement alienates potential allies that only shrinks their influence, and their actual enemies are smart enough to take advantage of this and turn the movement against itself.
- Reconstructed:
- Hard Times Harry only targets rich people who are demonstrably corrupt and implores more benign rich people to make the scoundrels among them face accountability for their actions regardless of how much money they have to their name.
- Eventually, some people gets tired of the new status quo and work their way off to become rich and strive to be not as evil. Their plan half-succeeds: People became inspired to become rich and hard-working again, ensuring better lives. However, some rich people still got in tune with their vices to oppress the poor, but there are new laws to ensure that the rich don't go too far to ensure that the "Total Villification of Richness" status quo is never restored again.
- Played for Laughs: "Eat the rich? I'm afraid I might give you indigestion, dear boy. How about I buy you a nice steak-and-kidney pie?"
- Played for Drama:
- Hard Times Harry leads a revolution to get rid of the rich, and whether he wins or loses it's a very bloody quagmire.
- The uprising against the wealthy leads to the town descending into chaos because of many rich children being orphaned and the companies belonging to the victims of the lower-class activists being unprepared for accommodating the demises of their owners.
- Played for Horror: Hard Times Harry starts a "kill-the-rich" murder cult that begins with a few casual "hunts" and escalates to a country-or world-wide spree.
Tired of being stepped on and belittled just because you're poor? Then go back to Eat the Rich and bomb the nasty Big Corporate offices!