Pragmatic Villainy: Difference between revisions

* A Russian mob boss during Chuck Dixon's run on the ''Green Arrow'' comic displayed this trope in spades when his psychotically violent loan shark collector managed to offend the local resident superheroes. Having already decided to cut this guy loose because his excessive love of violence was resulting in decreased revenue (the point is, after all, to beat them up enough to motivate them to pay their debts, not to beat them to death for shits and grins because dead people don't make loan payments), the mob boss walks in on his enforcer while he's managed to get Green Arrow (who was coming after him to investigate his latest murder rampage) trapped in a pit. 'Look at this, boss! We can just throw grenades in the pit and shoot him! I win, yes?' His boss responded by shooting the ''enforcer'' instead and helping Green Arrow out of the pit, because he knew full well that a dead Green Arrow on his watch would result in the Justice League showing up the next day.

{{quote|'''Mob Boss:''' Idiot. This man is a superhero. They ''always'' have friends. Kill him and tomorrow I will have ''Superman'' pulling me out of my car.}}

 

== Fan Works ==

* Used for comedic effect in Dogbertcarroll's "Lex Marks The Spot" (part of his 'Glittering Motes' collection of story seeds), which involves Xander Harris mindswitched into the body of Lex Luthor. Xander considers using Luthor's power and resources as a hero... for about five seconds, at which point he decides it would be much funnier to [[Troll]] the Justice League by doing good things while acting like an eccentric supervillain. Some examples include:

** Blowing Clark Kent's mind by suddenly announcing that he intends to give a much more generous health and pension plan to Lexcorp employees instead of going forward with a planned series of layoffs, and then claiming he's doing it not for humanitarian purposes but 'we ran the numbers and market forecasting says we actually make more money this way'.

** Convincing Project Cadmus and Amanda Waller to fund the creation of a new super-lawful-good All-American superhero instead of their latest genetic abomination to try and fight the JLA with, on the reasoning that 'If we're creating this construct as a contingency against them going rogue, then all we have to do is give our living weapon a genuinely heroic motivation and he'll fight them when the day arrives just because he's a good guy and they're the bad guys. And this way they can have the Martian read his mind all day looking for hidden betrayal and not find anything, because all he's doing is thinking like a total good guy'.