People's Republic of Tyranny/Playing With

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Basic Trope: A dictatorial nation gives itself a nice, democratic-sounding name.

  • Straight: The People's Republic of Tropeland is a tyrannical dictatorship.
  • Exaggerated: The Liberated People's Glorious Democratic Workers' Republic of Tropeland is an Orwellian twentiethworld hellhole.
  • Justified: The Tropeland populace is not particularly smart, so the government tries to dupe them into believing they live in a democracy.
    • Or, Tropeland is trying to project a democratic image to other countries despite being an oppressive dictatorship.
  • Inverted: The Holy Empire of Vikipedia is a secular liberal constitutional monarchy/oligarchy.
    • The Troperian Empire is a respectable democracy.
  • Subverted: The People's Republic of Tropeland is..... a functioning democracy.
  • Double Subverted: Until the Dirty Communists revolt.
  • Parodied: In this universe, dictatorships are not taken seriously unless they give themselves democratic-sounding names.
    • The People's Republic of Tropeland doesn't get any aid from other countries because they're all going to the Democratic People's Republic and Commonwealth of the Peaceful, Definitely Not Opressed Tropetians, who routinely threaten to bomb all their neighbors.
  • Deconstructed: The governments of the world all had the best intentions when they started and so they all had democratic names. Unfortunately, reality kicks in and the progressive policies and democratic-ness has to be dropped. Its a point of shame for every leader, but they can't change it because of the idealism that every citizen embraces.
  • Reconstructed: The governments are given ideals to aspire to by their very names, and once some semblance of order comes to the country, they're reminded of the principles that the nation was created under and decide to pursue those again.
  • Zig Zagged: The People's Republic of Tropeland is a dictatorship... but then the people revolt! However, a military junta takes control shortly after that. But then another resistance movement revolts and takes over the government....
    • Tropeland calls itself something in Tropese which can be translated as both "the People's Republic of Tropeland" and "the State of Tropeland". The protagonists never visit Tropeland, and the stuff they hear about it is pretty contradictory.
  • Averted: Tropeland simply calls itself the State of Tropeland.
  • Enforced: International law requires that all dictatorships have democratic-sounding names.
  • Lampshaded: "The People's Republic of Tropeland? Lemme guess, it's a dictatorship."
  • Invoked: "Change it from Empire to People's Republic, it sounds better and makes us sleep better at night.
  • Defied: "Peoples Republic? That's stupid, Empire sounds much nicer"
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???

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