{"id":10173,"date":"2016-01-04T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-01-04T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=10173"},"modified":"2016-01-04T00:42:13","modified_gmt":"2016-01-04T07:42:13","slug":"playing-with-tropes-pragmatic-villainy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/playing-with-tropes-pragmatic-villainy\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing with Tropes: Pragmatic Villainy"},"content":{"rendered":"

So as part of my effort to blog more often, I’ve decided to bring back the trope posts. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, perhaps you remember the Trope Tuesday<\/a> series that I used to do.\u00a0Those were mostly just a rehashing of each trope’s tvtropes page<\/a>, with a bit of commentary at the end. For this new series, though, I’m going to\u00a0assume you’ve already read the page and are\u00a0familiar with the trope, and focus on the commentary. I’m calling this series Playing with Tropes, and I’ll do a new post on the first and third Monday of each month.<\/p>\n

To start off this new series, I’d like to take a look at Pragmatic Villainy<\/a>. There’s something especially chilling about a villain who not only possesses power, but knows how to wield it too. In fact, one of the scariest villains is the guy who rises up the ranks\u00a0through sheer ruthlessness and ambition,\u00a0starting as an underling and rising to the top.\u00a0These villains know how to inspire and manipulate their followers, how to\u00a0use their limited resources efficiently, how to form secret alliances and backstab their enemies, and how to keep a strategic\u00a0perspective while making brilliant tactical plays.\u00a0It doesn’t matter whether they command an empire or whether\u00a0all they’ve got is a cargo-cult following on some far-off backwater. No matter where you put them, these are the guys who are truly dangerous.<\/p>\n

\"\"It’s worth pointing out that there are a lot of figures from history who fit this trope. A badass colonel<\/a> when the French Revolution began, he took advantage of the chaos to rise to power, declaring himself emperor and restoring order to his broken country. He then took his armies and conquered nearly the whole of Europe and the Mediterranean, destroying the Holy Roman Empire, invading as far as Egypt and the Nile, and leading his troops through the gates of Moscow before suffering defeat before the Russian Winter<\/a>. Ever the pragmatist, he developed the modern canning process<\/a> in order to supply his troops with food. And even after\u00a0the European powers crushed his armies and exiled him to the island of Elba, he still found a way to escape and very nearly did it all again.<\/p>\n

And Napoleon is by no means the most prominent historical example. Hitler was extremely pragmatic, and probably would have won the war if he’d actually listened to his generals and\u00a0not interfered with their ability to do their jobs. Stalin was also quite pragmatic, identifying and removing his rivals and ruling with an iron fist. Today, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are some of the best examples of this trope.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, it’s difficult\u00a0to tell whether a pragmatic villain is really a villain at all.\u00a0This is because pragmatic villains often see evil as a means, not an end. You won’t see\u00a0a lot of\u00a0gratuitous puppy-kicking<\/a> with these guys\u2014in fact, you may even see them pet the puppy<\/a> for the cameras\u2026 before quietly taking it out back to skin it.<\/p>\n

That’s not to say that pragmatic villains are more redeemable than your average big bad<\/a>. Far from it, in fact. As Darth Vader put it, “if only you knew the power of the dark side!” In the clash between good and evil, evil often has the upper hand right\u00a0until the middle of the third act. Even when evil doesn’t have the upper hand, the old poem often applies:<\/p>\n

Might and Right are always fighting
\nIn our youth it seems exciting.
\nRight is always nearly winning.
\nMight can hardly keep from grinning.<\/p>\n

\u2014Clarence Day, “Might and Right”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To really pull off a pragmatic villain, it’s important to make sure that your villain is truly evil. Grand Admiral Thrawn<\/a> from the old Star Wars Expanded Universe was a great example of this, as was Admiral Ysanne Isard<\/a>. Even with limited resources, they pulled off some brilliant moves: Thrawn by placing a cloaked warship beneath a planetary shield, to make it appear that he had shield-busting weapons, and Isard by spreading a\u00a0lethal pandemic that, while curable, was extremely expensive to treat, thus\u00a0spreading panic and instability as everyone fought over the cure. Yet in spite of their pragmatism, it was clear that neither of them\u00a0would stop at nothing in their rise to power.<\/p>\n

What’s really awesome is when a pragmatic villain manages to pull off a Xanatos Gambit<\/a>. In fact, pragmatic villains are the only kinds of villains who can pull that kind of gambit, simply because of all the planning and foresight that must necessarily go into it. For the same reason, there tends to be a lot of overlap between this trope and the Chessmaster<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When a villain falls short, it’s often because they were lacking in this trope. A huge example of this for me was The Hunger Games<\/a>.\u00a0When the villains in that book backpedaled after\u00a0Peta and Katniss threatened to kill each other, I pretty much threw the book at the wall.\u00a0The kind of people who can be manipulated by angsty lovestruck teenagers are not the kind of people who rise to power in a\u00a0totalitarian dictatorship. And while there’s certainly a place for B movie villains, the Evil Overlord List<\/a> exists for a reason.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So as part of my effort to blog more often, I’ve decided to bring back the trope posts. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, perhaps you remember the Trope Tuesday series that I used to do.\u00a0Those were mostly just a rehashing of each trope’s tvtropes page, with a bit of commentary at… Continue reading Playing with Tropes: Pragmatic Villainy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[458,456,1032,1033,306,565,626,522],"class_list":["post-10173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-good-and-evil","tag-history","tag-playing-with-tropes","tag-pragmatism","tag-star-wars","tag-tropes-and-cliches","tag-tvtropes","tag-villains","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-2E5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10173"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10368,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10173\/revisions\/10368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}