No Delays for the Wicked: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

Except in parodies, all villains in fiction are magically immune to the problems of bureaucracy, logistics, and bad luck. Their powers are so strong that this even transfers to their lowest minions. This trope is the opposite of the much less common (and [[Reality Is Unrealistic|much more realistic]]) [[Dystopia Is Hard]].

The only way that an [[Enemy Civil War]] can occur is through deliberate manipulation on the heroes' part (such as [[Feed the Mole]]).

 

 

One more thing; this trope describes (real or fictional) entities which are either realistically prone to complications or unrealistically immune. Examples of how (real or fictional) entities are [[Justified Trope|protected]] by the [[Weirdness Censor]], [[Bavarian Fire Drill|human nature]], or [[Xanatos Speed Chess|integrate those complications into their plans]] belong [[Xanatos Planned This Index|elsewhere]]. In other words, [[Gargoyles|David Xanatos]] is ''not'' referenced here, and is in fact smirking at [[Unwitting Pawn|all of you who believe in this trope]].

 

{{examples}}

* In ''[[Neon Genesis Evangelion]]'', SEELE has to worry about its minions committing treachery. It never has to worry that they might slack off on the job, or don't understand the [[Applied Phlebotinum]] as well as they think.

** It's reasonable to assume that people are not going to slack off on the job when failing the job will cause ''the extermination of the human race''.

** Kanon could easily send them straight there. She doesn't because the journey is as important as the destination.

 

* Averted in ''[[V for Vendetta]]'' (except for the fact that the government is fascist). The people who work for the Norsefire government all have their personal quirks and flaws, which V is able to exploit to bring them down. Take Derek Almond, who confronts V with an empty gun that he emptied earlier that night so he could threaten his wife without actually endangering her. And Almond's death sends his wife on the downward spiral that ultimately leads her to {{spoiler|assassinate Leader Adam Susan}}.

* Interesting use of this in ''[[Judge Dredd]]'' during the reign of [[The Caligula|Judge Cal]]. The entire city got very efficient (what with the death penalty for incompetence and all) but this ended up helping the heroes as the postal service was efficient enough to get them a vital piece of evidence before anyone worked out that it had been copied.

** Of course this just led Judge Cal to see it as his master work and plans to ''kill everyone in Mega-City One''.

* Averted in ''[[The Invisibles]]''. King Mob regards the all too human workforce of the evil overlords as their greatest weakness. See the quote page.

 

* The live-action ''[[Death Note]]'' film has L point out that large, secret organizations have statistically increasing degrees of inefficiency, proportional to their size. He gives this as evidence for his deduction that Kira is more likely an individual rather than a conspiracy.

** ''[[Death Note]]'' as a whole averts this trope as virtually all the factions have slackers or incompetents (Matsuda, Misa, Sidoh etc.).

* In ''[[Outland (film)|Outland]]'', the shuttle bringing the assassins sent to kill the protagonist arrives early. In the Mad Magazine parody, the hero comments that this is the first flight in the history of the station to not arrive late.

 

* Inverted in many of [[Tom Clancy]]'s novels from about ''Red Storm Rising'' on. The US military and intelligence agencies are staffed with supremely competent agents from the lowliest grunt to the most senior general or administrator. All these agencies cooperate well and share information, and the infamous real-life rivalry between the CIA and the FBI, or the fights for funding between the army, navy and air force, are nowhere to be found. Agents are given experimental equipment that works perfectly as advertised the first time out in the field. When the villains inevitably make a small misstep in their master plan, the protagonists are on them like white on rice.

** In fact, the only thing holding [[America Saves the Day|the USA back from finishing the story by page 30]] are [[Strawman Political|bleeding heart liberal socialist Commies.]]

** As [[Isaac Asimov]] pointed out in his review of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (which he thought was overrated), while the economy of Oceania is in shambles, the television sets (which always have to be switched on) seem to work all the time.

*** That's because the economy is in an artificial shambles. The Party seems to figure that (above a certain class level, at least) people who don't know where their next meal is coming from are easier to keep in line.

* Lewis acknowledges this again in ''[[The Chronicles of Narnia]]'' book ''[[The Horse and His Boy]]'' (set during the reign of the kids). [[The Evil Prince]] Rabadash is angered when Susan rejects his marriage proposal but knows that his country's massive armies can't cross the desert to reach Narnia. He decides to collect 200 horsemen in an attempt to kill the King of Archenland (Narnia's neighbor) and gain a foothold. Even then it apparently takes the better part of two days to get the men ready.

* Justified in ''[[Codex Alera]]''. At first, the obstreperous [[Obstructive Bureaucrat]] in a position of authority in the valley garrison looks like a [[Contrived Coincidence]], making things harder for the heroes and easier for the villains for no good reason. Later, though, we learn that {{spoiler|the bureaucrat is an innocent if incompetent guy, but the [[Big Bad Friend]] was so [[Crazy Prepared]] that before the story started he spent weeks sabotaging the valley garrison, including getting incompetent people reassigned to important places}}.

* The [[Cold War]]-era political thriller ''Pentagon'' is an [[Author Tract]] against the U.S. military procurement system, and [[Anvilicious]]ly examines the bureaucratic infighting and interservice rivalry that paralyzes America's military response to the chillingly efficient Soviet invasion of a Pacific island to use it as a nuclear missile base.

* Repeatedly subverted in the ''[[Honor Harrington]]'' series, where the heroic Star Kingdom of Manticore is a dynamic, powerful, stable and competent force - at least when its government is out of the hands of [[Strawman Political|anyone Honor disagrees with]] - while their various enemies are incompetent, disunited, or struggling to do some good despite the system's corruption, and generally only prove a threat because of their massive numbers. The subversion is particularly noticeable with the Solarian League, who were long talked up as being a powerful, advanced and professional outfit {{spoiler|until Manticore actually engages their ships, and we realise they're corrupt, unimaginative plodders who can't get anything done because they're too busy saving face.}}

** Justified Trope: the Solarian League Navy has entirely competent people (who we see elsewhere and in other novels), but their equipment has fallen notably behind since the beginning of the series (which is when the initial evaluation of the SLN as the Sleeping Giant was made) due to the difference between peacetime and wartime R&D rates. Also, the secretive manipulators behind the war against the Solarian League are deliberately picking the dumbest admirals they can find in the entire Solarian League Navy to be assigned to the Manticore front, because the real goal of the war is to break the Solarian League from within.

 

* One of the most obvious examples is the ''[[Star Trek]]'' episode "Patterns of Force," where a historian creates a Nazi planet because it was the "most efficient state ever." It ends in tears, of course, because it's a frickin' Nazi planet. But it's efficient - unlike, as discussed below, the real Nazi Germany...

* The conspiracy in ''[[The X-Files]]'' never, ever has to worry about coincidence. Ever. Does a UFO have to delay its flight because of bad weather?

** A particularly egregious example; even when something goes wrong the MIB move in so fast that the heroes are lucky if they get there in time to watch the evidence/witness/[[Complete Monster]] disappear.

{{quote|'''C.J.''': There is no group of people this large in the world that can keep a secret. I find it comforting. It's how I know for sure the government isn't covering up aliens in New Mexico.}}

 

* ''[[Vampire: The Masquerade]]'' occasionally suffers from this. While the Camarilla is desperate to keep humans from finding out about the existence of vampires, the Sabbat apparently gets a free ride - government agencies and police forces are apparently totally oblivious to them, even though they actively work to undermine the [[Masquerade]].

** This was noted and explained in the Sabbat Splatbook - while the Sabbat officially scoffs at the thought of hiding from humanity, its own elders have come to the same conclusion as the Camarilla: Humanity knowing about vampires would be Bad News, which is why any Sabbat packs engaging in too obvious activities are told to turn it down and clean up after themselves in no uncertain terms. The difference between the sects is mostly in the clean-up: The Camarilla hides its skeletons in the closet with media manipulation and memory-rewrites, the Sabbat simply puts any witnesses right into the closet as well. The only time the Sabbat actively works at breaking the Masquerade is when fighting the Camarilla, reasoning that the other sect will believe the Sabbat doesn't care about humans finding out about them and thus spend its own resources to clean up, essentially making the whole thing into a game of Chicken.

** For the Technocracy, when the powers in your docket include ''altering reality,'' it's a bit easier. Phrased differently, when a train's about to be late, the Technocracy makes time match the train. This makes it a lot easier to run a conspiracy.

*** To the point that many players of the [[Old World of Darkness]] wondered why the Technocracy hadn't eliminated all other supernaturals yet. Several [[Hand Wave|explanations]] were offered, including a metaplot event where the Technocracy exhausted a good third of its manpower and resources against a single [[Eldritch Abomination|vampire antediluvian]]. Most were acceptable to ''Vampire'' and ''Werewolf'' fans while ''Mage'' fans remained unconvinced.

** Then again, Valkryie and VASCU actually have these moral scruple thingies that prevent them from using mind control implants on their own employees, or selling monster parts on the black market for ridiculous profit...

* In ''[[Rifts]]'', the [[The Empire|Coalition States]] pretty much never has to worry about the little things that bring other nations/militaries to a grinding halt. Partially justified, as the Coalition is a totalitarian regime whose citizens are brainwashed, but even that only goes so far. During the Siege on Tolkeen, the largest amassing of soldiers since the Great Cataclysm, the Coalition had no worries about supply lines or any other kind of logistics. Incompetence is unknown to them. Even the Sorcerer's Revenge, a massive assault carried out by Tolkeen forces that completely routed the enemy and sent them back to behind their own borders, was more or less a distraction (albeit a rather large one). The greatest example is probably the army of General Jericho Holmes, who during the Sorcerer's Revenge was driven into [[Bee People|Xiticix]] territory, and then ignored because it was a safe assumption the Xiticix would wipe them out. Unfortunately for Tolkeen, General Holmes had studied the Xiticix in great detail, and worked out a strategy to move his men through their lands and back out on the other side of Tolkeen with 3/4 of his army still intact. The question of how a General cut off from his army and all his allies managed to keep 400,000 soldiers fed (not to mention other battlefield necessities) is never addressed. You can't even theorize that they survived by eating Xiticix—part of how he was taking advantage of their swarming behavior to avoid being eaten required not harming so much as one single bug, because doing so would have triggered them all into 'kill everything moving that isn't us' mode and his army would be ''gone''.

* Alpha Complex in ''[[Paranoia (game)|Paranoia]]'' can be an example of this, depending on GM whim: a glittering engine of menace where puppets flawlessly dance at the end of Ultraviolet strings, or a sputtering wreck held together with spit and bailing wire. Either way, it's a dystopia, and the player's characters are [[Rule of Funny|hopelessly screwed.]]

 

* In the ''[[Chrono Trigger]]'' video game, if [[Heroic Mime|Crono]] is declared innocent for the crime of abducting a member of the royal family, he's only sentenced for 3 days of solitary confinement for running off with her, but the good kingdom's [[Evil Chancellor]] uses the bureaucracy flows to convince the jail warden that Crono is scheduled for execution in 3 days by saying that "the execution forms must have been lost". Of course, if he's declared guilty to begin with, the above exchange never takes place.

** [[Bavarian Fire Drill|"Or do you mean to question me?"]]

* Becomes a plot point in ''[[Nancy Drew|Alibi In Ashes]]'', when Nancy realizes that {{spoiler|Brenda}} has some secret way to get around town very fast, despite traffic delays and bridge closures.

 

* This is subverted as part of Dark Pegasus' recent fleshing-out in ''[[Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures|DMFA]]''.

** Keep in mind, however, that {{spoiler|Dan was sent to his castle by another Creature with plans of her own.}}

{{quote|[http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0543.html Do they think crushing an entire civilization beneath our heels "just happens?" It's all fun and games for them, but I'm the one who has to make the magical lightning-powered trains run on time.]}}

* ''[[Xkcd]]'' used this [http://www.xkcd.com/282/ Mussolini for a pun].

 

* The ''[[Codename: Kids Next Door]]'' episode "Operation TRIP" is based on this. Two spies chasing [[The Ditz|Numbuh Three]] are plagued by horrible coincidences, like bumping in to a rabid dog, getting on the wrong train, and so on. In the end, it turns out that every accident they had was arranged by the heroes.

* ''[[South Park]]'' spoofed this in "Mystery of the Urinal Deuce", by explaining that the 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists are in fact employed ''by'' the government to make people think that they're actually capable of doing such a thing.

** As with the Crusade subversion, are you at the [[Fridge Brilliance|Fridge]] yet?

* Subverted in an episode of ''[[Jackie Chan Adventures]]''. The [[Monster of the Week|episode's antagonists]], a well-organized magical cult, plan to harness the Stonehenge's magical power. These cultists had planned for every possible event and had Jackie and Jade in a tight spot for most of the episode. They ultimately complete their ritual, only to discover {{spoiler|[[We Could Have Avoided All This|that the Stonehenge really wasn't magical]].}} Hilariously, {{spoiler|a UFO lands at the site after everyone has left}}.

* Lampshaded in ''[[The Emperor's New Groove]]'', when Kronk and Yzma make it back to the palace before Kuzco and Pacha ''in spite of'' having a delay.

{{quote|'''Kuzco''': Wait, how did you get here before us?

'''Yzma''': I - How ''did'' we get here before them, Kronk?

'''Kronk''' You got me. (Displays a map that shows them having fallen into a ravine) By all accounts it doesn't make sense. }}

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Evil Tropes]]