The last couple of Sundays were about random topics. But since so much time has passed in the year, it’s time to start a new tradition that will occur every Sunday with some exceptions.
One of my hobbies was reading a wiki called TV Tropes. Before they required that you need adblock turned off to read, I was addicted to that site. I liked reading all of the definitions and examples of each trope. I got even more addicted after discovering the YMMV tropes. Anyways, TV Tropes wasn’t as good as it once was since some of my favorite examples (and some of my favorite tropes) were removed or modified. And now you can’t even read the site without looking at ads, and I had adblock for a reason (sites like GameFAQs once had browser-hijacking ads that would open the app store).
There are three types of tropes. They are standard tropes (such as Laser-Guided Karma and Tempting Fate), YMMV tropes (such as Broken Base and Moral Event Horizon), and Trivia tropes (such as Disowned Adaptation and Recycled Script). This month, I’ll be going over at least one of each trope. You’ll see entries on Meaningless Villain Victory, Values Dissonance, and Keep Circulating the Tapes. In subsequent months, you’ll eventually see entries that cover two or more tropes at once, whether they be the same type or not.
Meaningless Villain Victory – Explanation:
In many stories, the good guy always wins, while the bad guy loses. The bad guy would face an embarrassing fate, lose what they valued, go to jail, or, in darker stories, die. However, there is a different kind of defeat that the villains face, and that is where they actually win, but their victory made their efforts worthless. Basically speaking, the bad guy wins, but they don’t get what they want.
This can be considered a plot twist since it shown how much the bad guys sought for power. But when they finally succeeded, they still can’t get what they ultimately wanted. It can fall into one of these cases:
- The bad guy succeeds in his/her plan, but still doesn’t get what he/she wants.
- The bad guy gets what he/she fought for, but doesn’t have any use for what he/she got.
- The bad guy gets what he/she fought for, but was unable to fulfill his/her true destiny.
- The bad guy wins, but his/her victory is invalidated or pointless.
Here are some general examples of what would make a victory meaningless:
- The bad guy gets a device that grants superpowers, but has no use of the device for any reason.
- The bad guy gets the treasure he seeks, only to find out that the treasure is worthless.
- The bad guy successfully takes over the world, but because that position of power requires a lot of responsibility, he is overwhelmed.
- The bad guy wins the contest, but doesn’t get the prize or only gets a more boring prize than what the second place winner gets.
- The bad guy successfully defeats the hero, but defeating the hero only led to his downfall.
Of course, the bad guy doesn’t have to be a supervillain or a dictator. The bad guy can be a bully, a spoiled brat, a corrupt boss, or a corrupt spoiled bully with a mustache. As long as the antagonist of the story wins, but doesn’t get what they want (or gets what they don’t want), then the trope is played.
Specific Examples:
While this trope doesn’t have too many examples compared to many other tropes, here are some specific examples I seen on the TV Tropes site, either by the trope’s page or by work pages:
- In Cars, Chick Hicks wins the Piston Cup, but because he did it by cheating, he wasn’t given a proper ceremony, was denied the Dinoco sponsorship, and would never be able to race in a professional race again.
- Nearly every Indiana Jones movie ends with this. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Nazis got the Ark of the Covenant, but were killed by it since they weren’t part of that specific family that could use it. In The Last Crusade, Elsa got the Holy Grail but was unable to take it outside the temple and dies with it. In Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Irina Spalko gets the crystal skull, but it gives her too much information that it killed her. And in Dial of Destiny, Dr. Jurgen Voller successfully gets the dial of destiny, but was transported to the wrong time and dies.
- In the Zelda game Ocarina of Time, Ganondorf does get the Triforce, but since his heart was not in balance, the parts of the Triforce have split, only giving him part of the power. He may have successfully got the Triforce of Power, but his destiny couldn’t be fulfilled for this reason.
Playing With Trope:
Of course, there’s many ways to play with different tropes, and Meaningless Villain Victory is one of the many tropes you can play with in weird ways. Using seven of the many ways to play with a trope, here are some examples:
- Straight – an evil girl successfully takes the blondestone (a magical rock that grants blonde-haired girls magical powers when they use it) from the protagonists. Despite having blonde hair, she is genetically brunette, and thus has no use of the magical powers it could grant her.
- Exaggerated – a spoiled brat wins a bike race. Despite playing fair, her bratty behavior not only resulted in her not getting the prize, but also disqualified from not just all future bike races from that company, but from every company in the world.
- Downplayed – the bad guy’s team wins a team game to get a free lunch at school. But the next day when they offered free lunch, it was a boring lunch that they don’t like.
- Subverted – the villain successfully enters the ancient chamber and gets the “golden statue”. Turns out that it was made of pyrite. However, he donated it to a geology museum and got cash for donating something with scientific value.
- Double-Subverted – one greedy restaurant owner successfully driven the other restaurant out of business. However, his restaurant wouldn’t gain publicity, so he starts a new event that would bring in more customers. It did bring him customers, but it was so expensive that he had to shut his restaurant down too.
- Inverted – the bad guy participates in a boxing match and loses badly to the good guy, thus not getting the money he wanted. But his sidekick successfully raised money through other ways, giving the bad guy more money than he would have gotten had he won the boxing match.
- Averted – an evil scientist invents a robot, which helps him take over the world. He successfully takes over the world and fulfilled his destiny.
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