Underdogs Never Lose/Quotes
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The clacks company was a big bully, sacking people, racking up the charges, demanding lots of money for bad service. The Post Office was the underdog, and an underdog can always find somewhere soft to bite.
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“Plucky rebels topple a powerful government” plots are remarkably difficult to build well — the bigger the power imbalance between the rebels and the authorities, the harder it is to write a convincing struggle. Real-world rebellions usually end in either a crushing defeat where everyone gets killed or arrested — not a great way to sell a pulp fantasy novel — or take a long time to build, involve complex interactions between deep-seated fault lines in society, and aren’t the work of a single individual’s heroic actions. As such, authors tend to cheat in one of two ways. On the one hand, it’s tempting to solve the problem by cutting the heroes a break, giving them special abilities which let them ignore difficulties or making ostensibly difficult feats seem unrealistically easy to pull off. (Example: Tamora Pierce‘s Daughter of the Lioness series, where the heroine seems to develop any useful ability she needs at the drop of a hat and never seems to be in any real danger.) On the other hand, it’s tempting to weaken the villains to the point where victory is feasible, often with some sort of deus ex machina where a single action vanquishes the entire opposing government, like pulling the keystone out of an arch to make it crumble. (Example: The Return of the Jedi special edition, whose revised ending makes it seem as if the entire Empire comes apart the minute the Emperor dies.) — Crypt of the Shadowking review by Candlekeep Janitor
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