Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Moderators, Rollbackers, Administrators
213,805
edits
Man in the Iron Mask: Difference between revisions
no edit summary
m (update links) |
No edit summary |
||
| (10 intermediate revisions by 6 users not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{trope}}
[[File:Prisoner.jpg|frame]]
{{quote|''My noble half-brother whose throne I usurped will be killed, not kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten cell of my dungeon.''
|[[Evil Overlord List]] item #3}}
So you've [[The Evil Prince|usurped your noble brother/half-brother's throne]] and [[The Usurper|your control is complete]]. Seems like the thing to do is to kill him and bury the corpse in a pauper's grave. But you're a ''[[Affably Evil|nice]]'' [[Evil Overlord]], so you opt simply to throw your brother, the one person who could cast your authority to rule your entire empire into doubt, into prison (or a [[Locked Away in a Monastery|monastery]]) and forget to tell anyone that he's your brother.
Of course, the hero discovers that the noble half-brother is still alive and frees him, [[Rightful King Returns|restoring order to the kingdom]], making the reader ask "[[Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?]]" before the hero shows up
Sometimes this is justified on the grounds that shedding [[Royal Blood]] has side-effects, or that the land [[Fisher King|will suffer]] if the rightful king dies.
The essential criteria for this [[Plot]] trope:
* Noble prisoner;
* The fact that you are keeping him or refusing to let him go is kept secret from the guards and/or the people at large;
* Releasing the prisoner would put the overlord's reign (or plans to reign) in jeopardy.
{{examples}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== [[
* In Marvel's ''[[G.I. Joe]]'' comic, [[Praetorian Guard|Crimson Guardsman]] [[You Are Number Six|Fred VII]] kills the original COBRA Commander and takes his place, concealing his own identity with the mask of CC's battle armour. {{spoiler|The Commanders turns out to be [[Not Quite Dead]] and returns the favour.}}
* In ''[[The Warlord]]'', Travis Morgan is captured and imprisoned by Deimos while an [[Identical Stranger]] usurps his position as Warlord of Skartaris. An iron mask is locked over Morgan's head to prevent his gaolers learning his true identity.
== [[Film]] ==
* ''The Man In the Iron Mask'' has had several adaptions. Richard Chamberlain starred in one where the older twin son had been spirited away, for leverage to make the younger one a puppet king, so the younger one was not, in fact, responsible. But he found out and ordered his brother imprisoned with the mask so no one could use it. The older one was rescued and managed to confuse the younger's flunkies so that his brother was sent off for the same fate.
* ''Le Masque de fer'' (1962) is a French swashbuckling film. A lighthearted take on the novel, it stars Jean Marais as an old and [[Large Ham|hammy]] D'Artagnan.
* [[The
* In ''[[Asterix
== [[Literature]] ==
Line 29 ⟶ 30:
** {{spoiler|Drefan}} Rahl thinks he's this, but turns out to be delusional and possibly ''possessed''.
* Solzhenitsyn's ''[[The First Circle]]'' set in a Soviet-era "special prison" features a prisoner kept in isolation and referred to by the other prisoners as "the man in the iron mask", although his actual identity is generally known
* In ''[[The Three Musketeers (novel)|The Vicomte De Bragelonne]]'' by [[Alexandre Dumas]] ''père'' ([[Trope Namer]]), King Louis XIV has a twin brother who is kept in the
** This is based on accounts of a real prisoner in the Bastille (among other prisons) forced to wear a mask. His identity was never revealed.
** This also subverts expectations as {{spoiler|the attempt fails, unlike in all its myriad adaptions}}
Line 35 ⟶ 36:
* Played with a bit in ''[[The Prisoner of Zenda]]''. [[It Was His Sled|You probably already know this,]] but:
** {{spoiler|Kidnapping the rightful heir was an act of desperation, as the original plan -drug him and make it look as if he were too drunk to be crowned- suffered a [[Spanner in the Works]] in the form of a distant relative of the royal family who resembled the heir closely enough to pass as the intended King in the short term. The would-be usurper would have had his brother killed immediately, but that would have made it impossible to depose the ringer without incriminating himself. For the stand-in King's part, acting to rescue the real King would have revealed himself as an imposter, so the situation became a [[Mexican Standoff]].}}
* Parodied in the [[Discworld]] novel ''[[
** On the other hand, for which of the two is being mistaken for the other more dangerous...? Rhetorical question, of course.
* ''The Mage In The Iron Mask'' (''[[Forgotten Realms|Nobles]]'' series).
** Includes a [[Lampshading]] of the fact that a
* In [[Ursula K. Le Guin]]'s ''A Wizard of Earthsea'', Ged meets two people alone on a desert island, barely capable of understanding human speech. In ''The Tombs of Atuan'' Tenar explains that they were the last children of a royal line, and the God-Emperor was afraid to kill them, since they had [[Royal Blood]], so he abandoned them there, very young. Subverted in that Ged did not rescue them; in fact, they were terrified at the prospect of leaving their island.
** Notably, they were put to sea when they were children and were now at least middle aged. Royal blood clearly included excellent survival instincts, but they were a bit past their "crown by" date. The God-Emperor may have been cautious, but his grip on power was quiet definitely cemented when he had them exiled.
Line 46 ⟶ 47:
* In the backstory of the [[Ravenloft]] novel ''Tower of Doom'', a nobleman's wife births a hunchbacked child and his undeformed twin. Their father doesn't lock up the malformed baby's face behind a mask, but he does lie about which kid was born first, raising the handsome younger twin as his successor while his blighted brother, the true heir, is confined to the titular bell tower.
* In [[Robert E. Howard]]'s [[Conan the Barbarian]] story "A Witch Shall Be Born", Salome, the [[Evil Twin]], does this to Tamaris when becoming the [[Fake King]]. She wants to [[Break the Haughty]] on Tamaris.
{{quote|
* Erik does this to Corwin at the end of the first book in Roger Zelazny's [[Book of Amber]].
** Somewhat
* King Jakoven in Patricia Briggs' ''[[Hurog]]'' series built the Assylum specifically to lock up his brother Kellen. Justified in that he was warned in a prophecy that it would be a very bad idea to kill his brother. While it's common knowledge that he's in there, most of the common people seem to have bought the idea that he's genuinely nuts, rather than unjustly imprisoned.
* ''The Prisoner in the Mask'' by [[Dennis Wheatley]].
== [[Live
* In one episode of ''[[Smallville]]'', Lex is [[Literal Split Personality|split into his good side and his evil side]] after accidentally creating Black Kryptonite. His evil side locks up his good side, complete with the requisite iron mask and [[Lampshade|Lampshading]] the situation.
* In one alternate-universe in the [[Legend of the Seeker]], Richard does this fairly stupidly, though in a rather unusual fashion. Unsurprisingly, it backfires. Turns out, leaving your omnipotence-macguffin out in the open, unstoppable though it may be, is a ''bad'' idea.
* In the second season of ''[[The Flash (TV 2014)|The Flash]]'' the [[Big Bad]] Zoom keeps a prisoner this way, unable to speak, the entire season. His identity, and why the genocidal Zoom would keep him alive, is a mystery to the audience and the cast.
== [[Tabletop
* In [[Eberron]], the person (secretly a vampire) on Karrnath's throne is [[My Grandson, Myself|the great grandfather of the actual ruler, posing as his great grandson]]. It's strongly hinted that the real monarch is locked up in Eberron's equivalent of Alcatraz.
** And with an actual iron mask, no less.
* As the ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]'' world operates under [[Death Is a Slap on The Wrist]], it's preferable to keep foes with high level resources imprisoned instead of killing them because more powerful resurrection methods work without a body, allowing the recently deceased to pop up in friendly territory as soon as someone forks over the stuff to revive him, immediately if there's contingency magic, or slightly later with more complicated ways of coming back (non-corporeal undead state, prepared lich transformation, stasis clones, etc).
== Toys ==
Line 70 ⟶ 73:
* Appears in ''[[Lunar Silver Star Story Complete|Lunar: The Silver Star]]''. {{spoiler|Lemia had her memory wiped by an enchanted mask and is locked away in the dungeon while the usurper takes her place. The cast doesn't realise who she is upon finding her, and free her mainly out of pity and disgust at her... less-than-pleasant condition.}}
* A subversion of this appears in the ''[[Kingdom Hearts]]'' series, with the character {{spoiler|Diz.}} in reality {{spoiler|Ansem the Wise,}} his kingdom and his very name are taken by {{spoiler|his apprentice, Xehanort, whose Heartless and Nobody are the [[Big Bad|main antagonists]]}} of Kingdom Hearts I and II separately.
* Because he's technically noble (a knight), ''[[Final Fantasy XII]]''{{'}}s Basch fon Ronsenberg ('''[[Memetic Mutation|of Dalmasca]]''') counts. His twin brother put him in prison after he (the twin) framed Basch for the murder of the king of Dalmasca years earlier. The public at large assumed him dead, though instead he's in chains at the bottom of the world's most infamous prison-fortress. He goes on to be freed by Vaan, Balthier, and Fran, eventually joining them permanently in order to safeguard Princess Ashe.
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* Disney's ''[[DuckTales (1987)]]'' has "The Duck In The Iron Mask". Scrooge visits his old friend Count Roy, who rules a small kingdom, to find that his twin brother Ray has usurped the throne. Roy, in the obvious role, explains that he never told Scrooge about his brother [[My Greatest Failure|because he felt responsible for his brother's disappearance]].
== [[Real Life]] ==
* The legend of the [[wikipedia:Man in the Iron Mask|Man in the Iron Mask]] was based on actual records found from Bastille. There are a lot of theories regarding the Man's identity, but very little information remains of the real events.
** What has been discovered is that the Iron Mask itself was an exaggeration - the mask was just silk, and the Man probably wore it voluntarily.
** A fair amount of evidence points to his having been an insignificant figure whose knowledge was dangerous, not he himself. You will not find that in any of the legends.
* Aversion: The Ottoman Sultan Mehmet the II (the guy who took
{{reflist}}
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Prison Tropes]]
[[Category:Plots]]
| |||