Swiper No Swiping

The villain is merely told to stop his evil scheme, and he does. Usually, this is a way to teach the audience a lesson about the importance of communication, and sometimes it stands as a testament to the hero's badassery, but just as often it's Played for Laughs due to the sheer unlikeliness of the idea.

It's the moment of truth. The villain, cackling, stands before his Doomsday Device. His finger hovers unsteadily over the Big Red Button, and you know he's enough of an asshole to push it. All hope seems lost... but then, the hero kicks open the double doors and bursts into the room. He looks at the villain straight in the eye, points his index finger at him, and says...

"Stop it! Stop it! What you're doing is wrong!!"

The villain concedes. He powers down the machine and turns himself in. Battle over. Everyone lives Happily Ever After.

Compare the Last Second Chance and Hulk Cooldown Hug.

Examples of Swiper No Swiping include:

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• Sometimes, the Hamburglar from McDonald Land succumbs to this.

Anime And Manga

• Tried and failed by Yu on Final Fantasy Unlimited. Possibly tried by other characters as well.
• The ending of Digimon Savers. Though the final enemy puts up more of a fight than season two's infamous Talking the Monster to Death sequence, it still ends with the villain finally listening to what the heroes had been yelling at it for three episodes straight. It came off as something of an anticlimax anyway - it was like "so, you really, really don't want me to destroy the world? Oh, okay. [Leaves]"
• Dragonball Z had the blustering Fake Ultimate Hero Mr. Satan befriending Majin Buu when all the rest of the characters were utterly focused on killing him. It turned out that Buu honestly didn't understand that wanton destruction and murder were bad things, and when Mr. Satan tells him this, he immediately promises to stop. This is promptly ruined by a pair of idiots with guns who shoot Buu's dog, then the big man himself, bringing out Buu's physically-manifested evil side, because they needed someone to have epic drawn-out fights with.
• Naruto: Shikamaru decides to try this with Jirobo after being trapped in his lethal Earth Dome Prison along with his friends, bargaining that if he let them go, they would completely forget about rescuing Sasuke. While it wasn’t necessarily a bad idea given how strong he is (Shikamaru didn’t plan on abandoning Sasuke, but we digress), it’s quickly made clear that he and his friends cannot be bargained with or reasoned with.
• Digimon: Arukenimon tries this with Myotismon when he realizes that not only is she at his mercy, but Myotismon plans on doing more than just kill her. He plans to torture her in the exact same ways she was dreading that he would torture her with. And yes, this is part of what makes it so horrifying. Myotismon is impossible to be reasoned with.

Film

• In Up, Dug tries to stop Muntz's dogs by standing in front of them and shouting "Stop, you dogs!" He fails. Having said that, they do eventually accept him as their leader.
• In Recess: School's Out, during the final confrontation, Gretchen asks the villain to stop his huge machine that would destroy summer. He asks if anyone honestly thought that would work after all of the work it took for him to get there. Mikey asks if it would work if they added "please", but it still doesn't work. Admittedly, TJ does point out that his plan wasn’t exactly practical (endless winter wouldn’t stop his friends and himself from having fun), but Benedict still decides to go through with it.
• Robin Hood: In the Disney version of the film, Maid Marian tried to persuade King John not to kill Robin Hood. However, it’s made clear that he’ll never stop trying to kill Robin Hood...or at least extort money from the populace.
• Meet the Robinsons’’: Lewis tries this with Bowler Hat Guy, on the basis that he is putting revenge before reason, and it wasn’t healthy for him to hold a grudge for so long. While he was not wrong, Bowler Hat Guy just won’t listen. He does however decide to quit being evil when he realizes that he let his grudge persuade him to help an evil bowler hat who wanted to turn the world into a dystopia. Though in his defense, he did think that this bowler hat was his friend.

Live-Action Television

• A sort of bottle-episode of The Cosby Show featured the casts as characters in a story by little Rudy. The nice meek townsfolk get overrun by the greedy jerks next door (led by Rudy's rival for cuteness, Kenny). The climax of the story has Rudy (as the princess or what-have-you of the nice folks) just going up to the mean folks and telling them to STOP. And they do. Rudy mentions that someday, when she's the President, she'll just tell everyone to get rid of guns and be nice to each other. Her parents are skeptical but impressed by their daughter's faith that people will listen to reasonable authority figures. The episode ends with them turning on the news for a quick run down of all the violence and crises going on. Cliff yells upstairs to Rudy that she had better hurry up, looks like they need her.

Video Games

• Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters: The titular Ur-Quan generally attack and kill anyone who is not either an Ur-Quan, or a 'Battle Thrall' in their service, owing to a huge (and fairly well-justified) sense of paranoia regarding any sentient species other than their own race. However, one of the tenets of their shared philosophy involves the Question; if one of their enemies does ask in the proper way, the Ur-Quan captain has a moral duty to stop firing and explain the Ur-Quan's history and the reason why it has them killing and/or enslaving every sentient race in the universe. (Interestingly, once you hear it, they're actually pretty damn well justified overall.) However, once they've finished explaining it, they'll get right back to shooting at you.
• The main plot of Rosenkreuzstilette revolves around Spiritia fighting against her colleagues for the whole Swiper No Swiping deal of convincing them that fighting against the Holy Empire isn't exactly the way to go about the whole "fear and persecution" stuff. But without knowing that the Empire didn't really persecute the magi of RKS at all but actually wanted Iris dead as Iris was planning to have RKS fight against the Empire For the Evulz.
• A lot of solutions to problems when going Paragon (and even a few Renegade solutions as well) in Mass Effect are just a well-chosen remark that makes the other guy see things your way. In fact, a lot of neutral responses have the same effect. You kind of have to make an effort to make things get out of hand, sometimes.
  • In fact, if your Charm or Intimidate scores in the first game are maxed, you can talk The Dragon into shooting himself in the head rather than fight him.
• RuneScape: The player character can try this with Sliske (who’s trying to restart the god wars), but he’s too far gone to be reasoned with. He’s apparently spent centuries contemplating this decision, as terrible as it was.
• Shin Megami Tensei V: Tao attempts to do this with Lahmu when he kidnaps Sahori so that he can merge with her without interference, as she loves Sahori and wishes to stay with her. It’s understandable given that it prevented bloody conflict with Abdiel and the Nahobino, as Tao was able to persuade her that she shouldn’t kill him, regardless of whether it was temporary or not. But it doesn’t work on Lahmu, because he doesn’t truly care about anyone but himself and willingly chose to be a monster, unlike Sahori herself, whose misery was the main reason she more or less became a demon. Unfortunately, when Tao tries to dissuade Sahori from listening to him, Lahmu decides to kill her as well, not just the Nahobino.
• In the supplementary videos and comics to Team Fortress 2, a subplot culminates in the other RED mercenaries rescuing Scout and Spy from a city (as it turns out) deranged by lead poisoning... which goes surprisingly poorly, until Miss Pauling explains that mayors don't have anything resembling the powers which "Mike" has taken on himself and it plays out as a "Reading Is Cool" Aesop.

Theater

• In the finale of The Pirates of Penzance, the pirates have just bested the constables, when the policemen ask the pirates to yield in the name of Queen Victoria. Since disobeying the queen is unthinkable, the pirates promptly surrender.

Webcomics

• Femmegasm parodied the trope namer here.

Western Animation

• Police Sgt. Mike Cosgrove from Freakazoid! can stop any criminal from carrying out his act by looking at them straight in the eye and saying, "Hey. Cut it out."
• In Family Guy, Peter watches The Passion of the Christ and states that if he were Jesus, he wouldn't have taken the Romans' cruel treatment so lightly. Cut to Peter's imagination, wherein he, as Jesus, orders a Roman sentry to stop whipping him by standing up and yelling, "No, no! Stop it, stop it!" in a stern, parental voice.
• In Adventure Time, Finn stops a "bazooka goblin" from shooting him and Jake by shouting, "Don't do it, man!"
• The Trope Namer is Dora the Explorer, wherein Dora would often stop Swiper the fox from stealing something (usually of little value) from her or her friends by repeatedly chanting the trope name at him. Or rather, she would ask us to do that for her.
  • In an ironic twist, it's subverted in the Yet Another Christmas Carol episode when Swiper himself tries it on his future self. Future Swiper just laughs at him, tells him it doesn't work anymore, and swipes the object in question anyway. Turns out that Swiper was just being polite and listening to Dora, when he got put on the Naughty List, he stopped listening and swiped so much stuff that the future Dora angrily tells the present Swiper there's nothing left to steal.
• Go Diego Go (a Spin-Off of Dora above) "Freeze, Bobos!" in response to the antics of the Bobo Brothers, the two monkeys who are always causing trouble in the series. Though to be fair, unlike Swiper, they're not trying to cause trouble, so telling them to stop and them listening makes more sense.
• Done in the Powerpuff Girls when a Godzilla-like monster rampages in Townsville. Blossom believes in strategy to take it down while Buttercup believes in brute force. Both tactics fail and Bubbles, getting fed up with her sisters' bickering, just flies to the monster and politely asks it to stop. It Works (though more then likely the monster was getting tired of Bloss's and Buttercup's arguing as well)
• Butters tries this in South Park when he realizes that the terrorists are more or less going to burn Imaginationland to the ground. The terrorists actually do seem to consider his proposal, but they ultimately decide their hatred of the Americans is more important than the welfare of the imaginary characters. The mayor believes what Butters did was stupid, but considering how strong the terrorists are, fighting them wasn’t such a good idea.

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