History Main / VicariouslyAmbitious

Waking up from someone else's dream"

Waking up from someone else's dream'"

"All my life I've been pleasing everyone but me\\
Waking up from someone else's dream"

->''"Nestor is very much aware of the fact that he is part of the ''lesser'' branch of House Royce. He wants more for his son. Men of honor will do things for their children that they would never consider doing for themselves."''
-->-- '''Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish''', ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire''

* ''WesternAnimation/WanderOverYonder'''s Commander Peepers has the strategic skill to be a GalacticConqueror, but not the intimidation factor (he's [[NapoleonComplex a particularly short specimen]] of his MiniMook species) and therefore chooses to be TheDragon. Unfortunately for him, he's way more motivated and goal-directed than his boss Lord Hater, who has the power and charisma necessary to achieve Peepers' dreams but whose constant SkewedPriorities and [[AttentionDeficitOohShiny easily-distracted personality]] pose a constant challenge.

* ''Manga/AstraLostInSpace'': Kanata's father shifted his expectations in sports onto him, which he very much didn't want. The boy only returned to sports out of a desire for personal growth, but his father immediately exploited his desires to get the athlete he's always wanted out of him. [[spoiler:Once everyone learns what exactly he was born for, his father's constant pressure to go down a similar career path becomes clearer, and way more vile]].

-->'''Endeavor:''' With my blood pumping through your veins, you will surpass me...you will fulfill my ambitions!!

* Defied in ''ComicStrip/CalvinAndHobbes'', where [[http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/12/04 Calvin asks his dad if he's projecting his own ambitions.]]

'''Calvin's Dad:''' [[StealthInsult If I were, you can bet I'd be re-evaluating my strategy.]]\\

--> "Father always tried to do what is best for us... but there are things that we... came to blows over," Belyolen explained delicately, as if his father and sovereign of mortal Deerkind was somehow still there, listening in. "For example, our leadership. After Temnobog and I discovered our true natures, we realized that keeping a balance of Good and Evil is essential to all things, even ruling a kingdom. Father... well, I think he believes that a perfect ruler should be WITHOUT flaws. And since I am without flaws..." The radiant stag trailed off.\\\
Golden Scepter frowned, his vast psychic powers revealing to him what Belyolen wanted to say, but couldn't bring himself to. "...Do you think that your father is trying to live through you?" he asked honestly.\\\
Belyolen's gentle eyes widened with shock, before he turned away from the antediluvian Alicorn god. "I... I hope not. I know Father wants me to be a great ruler. I know he does. I mean, he taught me everything he could. How else do you think the Bogolenya Deer Pantheon survived all those years?" He laughed, but Golden Scepter detected a hint of nervousness. "Father has his... weaknesses, that much is certain. But I don't think he would be so willing... to..."\\\
Belyolen didn't know how long he had been quiet until he felt a large wing drape his back. It felt gentle and warm... even fatherly.\\\
"Well, in that case..." Golden Scepter said before he smiled. "You were right to get away from him. Perhaps one day he will open his eyes and truly see the mistakes he made with you and your brother."\\\
Though Belyolen's mouth smiled in great appreciation, his eyes bore cautious hope. "Being optimistic, Emperor?" The radiant stag joked.\\\

* ''Fanfic/ISawGraysonKissingSantaClaus'': Comedic example. When Dick Grayson was nine, he had his first Christmas at the manor ruined after Bruce told him that Santa didn't exist. Over a decade later, Dick tries to relive the magic of Santa through Damian and is desperate to make sure his younger brother still believes in Santa at ten. Unfortunately for him, Damian is convinced that Santa is a master criminal who is going to kidnap and molest Dick, so telling Damian that Santa still exists backfires. ''Badly''.
* ''Fanfic/BequeathedFromPaleEstates'': Varys is doing everything in his power to ensure that Visenya Targaryen, aka Lyarra Martell nee Snow or at least her son ends up on the Iron Throne. Separately from him, Lord Velaryon is doing the same, having realised that Lyarra/Visenya is Rhaegar's daughter by Lyanna.
* ''Fanfic/NarniaAndTheNorth'': King Tomas of Telmar really wants his newborn daughter to become a Queen. When Narnia asks for his help, he refuses to grant it unless the other country agrees to a betrothal between Princess Marilisa and their infant Prince Edmund, and he confesses he also considers the Tisroc's grandson as a viable suitor, in spite of Calormen's reputation as an evil empire.
* ''Fanfic/DarkSunResurgent'': The sorcerer Sargon is low-resentful towards other magic lineages for sneering at his weak power or lack of traditions, so when his grandson unexpectedly befriends an extradimensional deity, he's not really opposed since a divine patron would bestow a lot of prestige and skill on little David and his future children.

* ''Film/ThePrincessDiaries2RoyalEngagement'' has Mia expecting to become queen of Genovia without any opposition when she discovers that Viscount Mabrey is opposed to her ascension, placing his nephew Nicholas Devereaux in her way to ruling the kingdom.

* In ''Film/NoNameOnTheBullet'', Asa was the one who first wanted his son to be a doctor, although Luke didn't protest and seems to enjoy the work.

* This comes up constantly in ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'' since the nature of medieval politics means that parents are always trying to [[ArrangedMarriage position marriages]] and alliances that will get their children (or further generations) higher up the social ladder rather than attempting to climb it themselves. A few of the many, ''many'', specific examples include:
** Tywin Lannister planned to have his daughter Cersei marry Prince Rhaegar Targaryen since Cersei was just a young girl. When Rhaegar was killed and the Targaryens were overthrown in Robert's Rebellion, Tywin didn't miss a beat and promptly wedded Cersei off to the newly crowned King Robert Baratheon instead.
** Littlefinger, TheChessmaster supreme, uses this as part of a BatmanGambit to entrap Nestor Royce. Nestor comes from an ancient and prestigious family, but neither Nestor nor his children are in line to inherit any of the family's holdings, which leaves Nestor and his children in a tenuous position where they could very easily become {{Impoverished Patrician}}s. Littlefinger offers Nestor and his son a hereditary title that would save them from that fate, but because the order is signed in Littlefinger's name, taking it will force Nestor to be permanently loyal to Littlefinger, because if Littlefinger is removed from power (something a group of lords are about to try to do), the order can and almost certainly will be nullified by whoever winds up in charge afterwards. After Nestor agrees and then leaves, Littlefinger tells Sansa that any attempt to simply bribe Nestor would have enraged Nestor's pride and sense of honor, therefore a little flattery and the prospect of a better life for Nestor's children was necessary. The page quote is a part of those observations.
** Mace Tyrell married off his daughter Margaery to Renly and later [[spoiler:after Renly's death to Joffrey, and after ''Joffrey's'' assassination, to Joffrey's brother Tommen]] in a blatant power grab so that Margaery would be queen and her children kings. Somewhat ironically, most of House Tyrell thinks this was a terrible idea as the Tyrells prefer more of a soft power, LovedByAll type of arrangement, and this sort of open attempt at power could blow up in their faces, but they're trying to make the best of it.
** Arianne Martell did something of a version with Myrcella Baratheon, as she tried to use a legal loophole to negate the HeirClubForMen rule and get Myrcella crowned in place of Myrcella's younger brother.

* When the realm of Andor experiences a SuccessionCrisis during ''Literature/TheWheelOfTime'', Elayne has a difficult time claiming the throne due to the way her mother mismanaged the realm while being a victim of mind control. Dyelin, by contrast, is the head of the one House that is in good standing with virtually all the other Great Houses, and about the only person who could easily consolidate power and become queen. However, she believes that Elayne should be queen, so Dyelin supports Elayne and becomes the key to Elayne keeping the throne.
* The {{Rebel Leader}}s in the ''Literature/TrickstersDuet'' are plotting everything not to put themselves on the throne but Sarai Balitang, since she has the required bloodline for TheProphecy. Notably, they keep Sarai LockedOutOfTheLoop both for her own safety and her tendency for LooseLips in the DecadentCourt and there's serious question about whether Sarai would be happy about it, or good at it. [[spoiler:Fortunately, she elopes out of the country and her more capable younger sister willingly takes her place.]]
* In ''Literature/TheCountOfMonteCristo'', Héloïse de Villefort commits a series of murders with the intention of ensuring that the wealth of her husband's family will be inherited by her own son and not by the child of her husband's first marriage.

* Creator/IsaacAsimov's ''{{Literature/Franchise}}'': Mr. Muller is chosen for a position that will put him in the limelight, and desperately wants to get out of it. His wife [[SuppressedRage angrily tells him that he'll]] not only show up but milk the opportunity for every advantage he can, including a better contract with his job.
* In the ''Franchise/HarryPotter'' series, Horace Slughorn positions himself as something of a low-level kingmaker. Being BrilliantButLazy, he doesn't care to pursue power himself, but instead builds up a network of promising young people, puts his efforts into helping them succeed, and then cashes in all the favors they owe him, which consists of hedonistic, harmless things like free sports tickets, free sweets, or the chance to write an opinion piece for the newspaper.

* ''Series/CriminalMinds'' featured a woman whose main ambition in life was to get her younger son elected to public office (potentially up to the Presidency, but that wasn't specified). While her intentions seem to be pure (she didn't show signs of being the ManBehindTheMan), her means of achieving them were... less than. For starters, she wrote off her older son as a child because an accident left him with facial scarring that was too hard for her to spin positively. She also [[spoiler: orchestrated her daughter-in-law's kidnapping to both eliminate what she saw as an unworthy suitor and gain sympathy for her son to boost his popularity]]. She only agrees to call off the plot when the team [[spoiler: threatens to charge her younger son with illegal possession of a handgun, which will torpedo his legal career and all her hard work]]. Rossi points out that she was a very driven career woman before having children, and all that ambition had to go somewhere.

* ''Series/IClaudius''. Livia spends most of the series trying to get her son Tiberius made Emperor of Rome. She shows no restraint in her tactics and ends up murdering several people to achieve her goal.
* In a second season episode of ''Series/BarneyMiller'' Barney is offered a job as a small-town Florida Chief of Police. After considering the position he turns it down and suggests Fish for it. A later episode has Barney's subordinates trying to get Barney to accept a promotion he initially declines, in part because as long as Barney is Captain all of their careers are stalled too.
* In Series/{{Empire}}, Cookie and Lucious are both fighting to position their favored son to take over their record company, infighting that threatens to tear their family apart for power.
* In the backstory of Cedric Daniels in ''Series/TheWire'', his wife Marla was this to him for many years, and at one point she even says that it was his ambition and burning need to make something of himself that she first fell in love with. However, he got burned out on trying to make it to the top of the corrupt and dysfunctional Baltimore Police Department, and the events of the first season put him on a road to [[TheLastDJ caring more about doing what's right than what will get him promoted]]. Marla and Cedric's [[DeadSparks relationship doesn't survive that]], and she later runs for office herself to try to fulfill some of her own ambitions.

* ''Series/{{Versailles}}'' has the Chevalier de Lorraine, who makes his disdain for King Louis XIV no secret. Being a minor noble, he stands no chance at inheriting the throne himself, nor does he want to. But he's more than eager and willing to do everything he can to put his lover, the king's younger brother Philippe, on the throne.
* ''Series/YoungSheldon'': In "A Live Chicken, a Fried Chicken and Holy Matrimony", Pastor Jeff hires Mary to plan his wedding. While it's merely a gateway to a physical relationship with his girlfriend to him, it is pretty clear Mary wants to construct the glamorous wedding she missed out on due to hers to George being a ShotgunWedding.

-->'''Richard Bashir:''' All those gifts, all those accomplishments, and you still want to behave like a spoiled child. Well you'd better grow up right now or you're going to lose everything!
-->'''Julian Bashir:''' (''bitterly'') [[CallingTheOldManOut You mean]] '''''[[CallingTheOldManOut you're]]''''' [[CallingTheOldManOut going to lose everything]]. You're going to lose your only real accomplishment in this life. Me. [[LegacySeeker You said before, I'm your legacy, your proud gift to the world]]. Well, father, your gift is about to be revealed as a fraud, just like you.
* ''Series/GilmoreGirls'': Lorelai is this, something the show acknowledges but rarely explores fully. She was a teenage mother and single parent, and as a result, did not reach her "full" potential. She's determined that Rory will. Rory's desire to go to Harvard at the start of the series was Lorelai's idea, and Lorelai has a hard time dealing with the fact that Rory might want a different life than what's expected of her. This causes a rift in their relationship in season 4, when Rory goes to Yale (itself a decision Lorelai did not approve of) and buckles under the pressure. However, this trope is hilariously [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] in the pilot, when Rory is accepted at Chilton:
-->'''Lorelai:''' This is it. She can finally go to Harvard like she's always wanted and get the education that I never got and get to do all the things that I never got to do and then I can resent her for it and we can finally have a normal mother-daughter relationship!

* Volumnia in Shakespeare's ''Theatre/{{Coriolanus}}'' lives through her eponymous WarGod son and pressures him to strive for political power he does not really want -- with disastrous results as he’s a much better warrior than a politician and he can’t hide his contempt for the plebes.

* In ''VisualNovel/DanganronpaTriggerHappyHavoc'', nearly all the School Mode endings have Makoto agreeing to spend the rest of his days helping the student in question achieve their dream. When Celeste asks for a reason that he thinks he can do it in the best response to her Trigger Happy Heart event, he simply says helping her "would be a lot of fun".

* AntiHero Yuri Lowell of ''VideoGame/TalesOfVesperia'' does [[MurderIsTheBestSolution the]] [[LaserGuidedKarma dirty]] [[PayEvilUntoEvil work]] for his HeterosexualLifePartner Flynn Scifo and gives him credit for his own good deeds, all in an attempt to encourage Flynn to change the corrupt government from within. At least one person views him as a PsychoSidekick because of it; meanwhile, Flynn'd rather have Yuri take credit for the good he has done (like rescuing the princess and ultimately [[spoiler: saving the world]]) and gets frustrated enough with Yuri to start a DuelBoss fight to settle things.
* In ''Franchise/AceAttorney'', Morgan Fey knew that she could never take the position as the master of the Fey family due to her own lack of spiritual power. So she gave birth to a third daughter after [[spoiler: Dahlia and Iris]], this time a little girl named Pearl, who was born with immense spiritual power. This would put her in the running to become the next master, but the top candidate is her cousin Maya, since she's the daughter of the old master, and she too has great spiritual power. So Morgan decides to knock Maya out of the running whatever way she can, whether it be [[spoiler: framing her for murder, which would lead to her execution if found guilty]] or [[spoiler:enacting a plot to have her murdered.]] In [[spoiler: Dahlia]]'s words, Morgan never actually cared about what Pearl wanted, only that, through Pearl's hypothetical rise to power (whether she wanted it or not) her branch of the Fey family would become the most powerful.
* ''VideoGame/CrusaderKings'':
** Thanks to the focus on dynastic {{Generational Saga}}s, have this as a gameplay consideration. An important part of the game involves setting up long-term plans that your current character may not live to see completed, but that may benefit their heirs when the player takes them over in turn. This can include things like killing your character's wife to make her claims pass on to your children so you can press them. If you're caught doing this, your children will obviously hate you for killing their mother, but they have no chance to turn down her ancestral titles when you go to war for them.
** Considering that a good way to inherit various other nations in the game also revolves around marriages, you may end up marrying a daughter to an heir that's so low on the succession totem pole that no one will mind your own family being the dominant party in the marriage...which you can then use to ensure your house takes control of the kingdom after possibly assassinating every other heir.
* Inverted in ''VideoGame/HonkaiStarRail'' with Luka. He met a DelicateAndSickly girl from his hometown of Moltammerville named Margie who was a big fan of his and wanted to be just like him. But she was dying from her illness and eventually succumbed when her father gave Luka her notebook filled with her hopes and dreams. The three trials he put himself through for "training" are actually attempts to fulfill her dreams through him: helping people in the Underworld, making life better for the people living there, and defeating Svarog to reopen the path to the Overworld. His hammy and childish post-victory slogans are recited verbatim from her notes.
* In ''VideoGame/Persona5'', Hifumi Togo, the Star Confidant, is a talented young shogi player who comments that her mother, Mitsuyo, rejoices over each one of Hifumi's victories as if it were her own. Unfortunately, Mitsuyo only sees Hifumi's shogi career as a stepping stone to establish her as a gravure idol, something Hifumi has no interest in, and Hifumi realizes that her mother is using her to achieve what she couldn't. [[spoiler:Even worse, once you confront Mitsuyo's Shadow in Mementos, Mitsuyo admits that she used blackmail and other methods to get many of Hifumi's opponents to throw their matches, something that ruins Hifumi's reputation when it becomes public]].

* In ''VideoGame/MagiaRecordPuellaMagiMadokaMagicaSideStory'', Alina's art got increasingly morbid after her beloved grandparents and dog died when she was 8 years old. Instead of noticing that their daughter perhaps was grieving but didn't know how to handle that feeling, her parents capitalized on her new muse and paraded her genius.
* In ''VideoGame/NoStraightRoads'', this is heavily implied to be the case for ChildProdigy Yinu's overbearing {{Stage Mom}}. As Yinu begins voicing her concerns over how much the fight is escalating, her mother shouts that Mayday and Zuke are making a fool out of her and pushes Yinu to keep the concert going. Considering she's the one who takes all the damage during the fight rather than Yinu, she seems to view the two of them as equally involved in the performance.

* Supposedly the case with Cabbage in ''Webcomic/CucumberQuest''. [[spoiler:Cabbage was unable to become the Legendary Hero because someone else defeated the Nightmare Knight]]. So he pushed his son Cucumber into it when the Dream Oracle showed up, snidely dismissing Cucumber's protests that he wants to go to magic school, not become the Legendary Hero.

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Inside Job|2021}}'': Rand torpedoed any chance for Reagan to have had a normal childhood, including [[spoiler:erasing his daughter's memories of her only friend in fourth grade]], just so he could use her success to maintain control over Cognito Inc.

** Barb pushes her daughter Sadie into doing a performance in "Sadie's Song", and seems to have done the same thing before with Sadie's other activities in the past.

* ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'': Rainbow Dash, Applejack, and Rarity all turn their involvement with their little sisters' carts in the Applewood Derby into a way to either relive or fix their childhood experience with the Derby.

Compare PassingTheTorch and FromHeroToMentor, particularly if their reason to pass the torch/become a mentor is to keep their glory/standing through their successor/apprentice.

Sometimes though, those same people who are uninterested or unable to do some social climbing for themselves may have someone else that they're willing to back and help get ahead. In the most altruistic cases, it's because they have a case of UndyingLoyalty toward this person, perhaps because that person is one of their TrueCompanions, a [[BloodBrothers blood brother]], [[ThickerThanWater relative]], or a spouse. Less altruistic cases may be looking to turn that other person into an UnwittingPawn while becoming TheManBehindTheMan, or to benefit from some {{Nepotism}} after putting them into power, or to be able to say "YouOweMe" sometime later.