Full-Circle Revolution: Difference between revisions

|'''Jose Rizal'''}}

 

 

This trope is sadly [[Truth in Television]], because simply replacing the leaders of a country does little to resolve its underlying social problems. And if the new government doesn't have technical expertise to actually govern, they end up repeating the same mistakes as their predecessors. See the Real Life section below for many examples.

* ''[[Code Geass]]'' has an interesting subversion. {{spoiler|By the end of the series, Emperor Lelouch has become an even worse evil overlord than his social Darwinist father. But that was the ''point'', to [[0% Approval Rating|unify the world through its hatred of him]] and arrange it so he was overthrown at the last minute, thereby giving the good guys the opportunity and public support necessary to rebuild the world's various monarchies and dictatorships as democracies instead.}} Prince Schneizel's plans to overthrow his father, however, would most likely have been a case of this played straight.

* In ''[[Saint Beast]]'', Zeus overthrows the tyranny of [[The Old Gods]] and subsequently becomes a tyrant in their place leading to another (failed) rebellion by the protagonists.

 

== Comic Books ==

* I remember an [[Incredible Hulk]] story where the Hulk (technically Bruce Banner who controlled his body as Hulk) was taken to a planet where a green race was enslaved by a red race. The Hulk helped the green people overtake the rulers and before leaving asked them to live peacefully together. Looking through a telescope as he was getting far off he saw the red people enslaved by the green ones and wept.

* [http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0053/0053_01.asp This] [[Chick Tracts|Chick Tract]].

 

== Fan Works ==

* In ''[[Zero vs. Kira]]'' after [[Death Note|Kira]] overthrows the [[Code Geass|Britannian Empire, Zero]] holds a press conference telling Kira that he has simply "substitute(d) the tyranny of the Britannian Empire with your own."

 

== Film ==

* ''[[Land of the Blind]]'' - [[La Résistance]], after taking power, become just as bad or worse, prompting a restoration of the old regime.

* ''[[Lord of War]]'': [[Discussed]] by Yuri Orlov. "I guess they [African militants] can't own up to what they usually are: a federation of worse oppressors than the last bunch of oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves freedom-fighters."

 

== Literature ==

* ''[[Honor Harrington]]'' has two fictional governments of this kind: the Committee of Public Safety (modeled exactly on the historical French dictatorship), which self-destructs spectacularly, and the restored constitutional Republic of Haven, which is mostly getting its act together but is still plagued by internal corruption.

* Terry Pratchett's ''[[Discworld]]'':

* [[George Orwell]]:

** ''[[Animal Farm]]'' was all a big allegory for how it went down in Russia. One ominous sign is at the gruesome scene of [[The Purge]], where the animals consider that this is not what they had hoped to see after the revolution, and spontaneously start to sing the old revolutionary anthem "Beasts of England," only for the official propagandist Squealer to declare "Beasts of England" abolished. By the end of the tale, the pigs have become practically indistinguishable from their former human masters.

* ''The Dispossessed'', by [[Ursula K. Le Guin]]: Apart from showing how an anarcho-communist society would function, this is pretty much the entire point.

* In the [[Backstory]] of ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]'', the ruling Targaryen dynasty is ousted by an alliance of powerful nobles and replaced by a Baratheon king... but most everything else stays pretty much the same. The old king was too busy being insane to bother ruling the actual kingdom, the new king too busy getting drunk, hunting, and conceiving bastards on anything with a pulse and a uterus. Under both monarchs, the day-to-day running of the kingdom is largely done on the local level by feudal lords and on a national level by an appointed council of advisers, some half to 3/4 of whom are consistent between dynasties in both cases.

* In [[Michael Flynn]]'s ''[[Spiral Arm|Up Jim River]]'', Zorba discussed how he rescued a wannabe [[Doomed Moral Victor]] on the grounds that the revolt would only lead to this.

 

== Live-Action TV ==

* ''[[Young Indiana Jones]]'': The History of Mexico from about 1860 to 1930, as summed up in the second episode:

{{quote|'''Old farmer''': Listen, years ago I rode with [[wikipedia:Benito Juarez|Juárez]] against [[wikipedia:Maximilian I of Mexico|Emperor Maximilian]]. I lost many chickens but I thought it was worth it to be free. When [[wikipedia:Porfirio Diaz|Porfirio]] became President, I supported him – but he stole my chickens. Then came [[wikipedia:Victoriano Huerta|Huerta]] and he stole my chickens. Then it was [[wikipedia:Venustiano Carranza|Carranza]]’s term, and he stole my chickens too. Now comes [[wikipedia:Pancho villa|Pancho Villa]] to liberate me and the first thing he does is steal my chickens!...What makes one different from the others? My chickens don’t know. All over the world revolutions come and go. Presidents rise and fall. They all steal your chickens. The only thing to change is the name of the man who takes them.}}

* The title character of ''[[Sabrina the Teenage Witch (TV series)|Sabrina the Teenage Witch]]'' used her magic to turn the [[Alpha Bitch]] Libby into [[Karmic Transformation|the kind of awkward nerd Libby always mocked]], but Libby-the-nerd adapted far better than Sabrina imagined she would and led the school geeks to social power, and they became just as vicious as the cheerleaders and jocks were.

{{quote|'''Libby:''' Let me tell you about power - how to get it, how to keep it.}}

 

== Music ==

* As implied by the title, the basic message of "Revolution Roulette" by [[Poets of the Fall]] is that "easy" solutions after a revolution lead to these.

* ''Strange World'' by [[Gamma Ray]]:

 

 

== Theatre ==

* In ''[[Pippin]]'', Pippin leads a revolution, overthrows his father, is crowned king, and promises his subjects a reign free of the slavery and bloodshed that distinguished his father's. He resolves to give their petitions the hearing his father denied. To the poor he distributes money, grants land to the peasants, abolishes taxes on the nobles, and dismisses the army. But the Infidel attacks in the East, murdering thousands of Pippin's subjects. Unwilling to supply the Hun with his head on a pike-staff, Pippin decides to rescind his reforms, and starts repressing the people just like his father did. When Fastrada praises Pippin for maintaining the same kind of rule his father did, he considers that maybe sticking a knife in his father's back wasn't such a good idea.

 

== Video Games ==

* ''[[StarCraft]]'':

** In the novel ''Starcraft: Ghost: Nova'', it's mentioned that Emperor Arcturus I is even less tolerant of rebels and dissidents than the Confederacy, sending Nova after a group of rebels who were previously on his side (they are, actually, the ones responsible for the murder of Nova's parents).

* The premise of ''[[Red Faction|Red Faction: Guerrilla]]'': The story takes place fifty years after the first ''[[Red Faction]]'' and revolves around the fact that the Earth Defense Force (EDF), who helped save the day in the original game, have become cruel oppressors as bad as Ultor, leaving your character to join a [[La Résistance|resistance movement]] to liberate the planet.

== Web Comics ==

* ''Martian Magazine'' has Foxford [http://martianmagazine.com/comic/fox-of-future-past/ once] go back in time and [[Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act|stop Hitler]].

 

== Real Life ==

** Then [[World War 2|Japan invaded]] . [[It Got Worse]].

* This trope even exists in healthy democracies, where the favoured form of revolution is by the ballot and not by the bullet. There have been many, many times where an immensely unpopular government was swept out by a new and somewhat over-idealistic opposition promising radical change, only to continue their predecessors' policies once they sat down to effectively govern.

* [[That South East Asian Country|That South East Asian Country's]] [[wikipedia:8888 Uprising|8888 Uprising]]. The military took control on September 18, and pledged elections, which occurred in 1990. Aung San Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, won 392 seats, [[Blatant Lies|which the military junta recognized at once and Burma became a free, prosperous nation]]. Oh wait, no it didn't; the military denied the results, and placed Suu Kyi under house arrest, imposing their own dictatorship on the Burmese people.

* The same thing happened in Mexico after the supposedly liberal Porfirio Díaz took power. The old aristocracy was simply replaced with an even more brutal plutocracy, and while the cities became modern, small towns were squeezed out of existence and their former denizens became de facto serfs living with inescapable debt in haciendas (they were even called peons).

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Help Help This Index Is Being Repressed]]

[[Category:Civil Unrest Tropes]]

[[Category:Politics Tropes]]