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| 14 | [[quoteright:350:[[Webcomic/{{Oglaf}} https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/oglaf_obstructive_bureaucrat_0.png]]]] |
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| 21 | ->''"...in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself... [In] all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."'' |
| 22 | -->-- The Iron Law of Bureaucracy, as formulated by '''Creator/JerryPournelle''' |
| 23 | %% |
| 24 | %% One page quote suffices. Please use the quotes page for additional entries. |
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| 26 | |
| 27 | This guy is the ultimate pencil pusher from a government agency or corporation, and he creates the red tape that normal citizens hate, wielding the StampOfRejection like a weapon. He's an unlikeable PunchClockVillain with a bad temper and a sizable streak of callousness. Works for any and all bureaucracies, including DepartmentOfChildDisservices, [[MorallyBankruptBanker banks]] and possibly even your own [[CelestialBureaucracy afterlife]]. His job, storywise, is to get in the way of whatever the heroes need to do, sometimes because what the heroes are doing is against some form of regulations, but other times because the character is a {{Jerkass}} who just doesn't like the heroes and is using "regulations" to make their lives difficult. In disaster movies and other works that [[NoAntagonist lack a real villain]] (or whose villains are [[EvilIsCool too cool to effectively hate]]), expect this guy to be the work's resident HateSink. |
| 28 | |
| 29 | Sometimes he can be restored to humanity by uncovering the secret dream buried deep beneath his efficient exterior. Failing that, you may be able [[BotheringByTheBook to use his respect]] for ExactWords [[RulesLawyer against him]]. |
| 30 | |
| 31 | On the other hand, sometimes he is obstructing a MatterOfLifeAndDeath. He and his colleagues often contribute to HeadInTheSandManagement, refusing to do anything to help the situation. Threat of force, or actual force, may be needed to get by him. A benevolent Obstructive Bureaucrat may go and obstruct the villain by actively devising regulations to impede and hinder him, and then, with the same mindless fervor as any other bureaucrat, insist on their [[BotheringByTheBook being followed to the letter]]. |
| 32 | |
| 33 | A common cause of DividedWeFall. Many a surreptitious entry into, or exit from, a location, or requisition of supplies, is needed because it would take too long to get by him. Almost all this form-filling out serves no useful purpose; for the hero to put in a list that will allow him access to a facility, for instance, is a very rare subversion. Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy (see above) is always in effect. |
| 34 | |
| 35 | The tropes: BeleagueredBureaucrat, DepartmentOfChildDisservices, and SocialServicesDoesNotExist overlap since they all involve the same problems. The employees are often overworked, underpaid, lack resources, and suffer the public’s wrath. They then turn into the Obstructive Bureaucrat and use BotheringByTheBook to slow down the workload or get revenge on the people who make unreasonable demands. |
| 36 | |
| 37 | This trope also has a darker version, where the character is still a government employee concerned with the bottom line, but what he does in daily work probably [[ColdBloodedTorture violates the Geneva Convention]]. He is likely to be a murderer and/or [[TortureTechnician a torturer]] who defends himself by saying [[JustFollowingOrders "I'm just doing my job"]]. In short, he is a WellIntentionedExtremist whose overriding motivation is being Employee of the Month. |
| 38 | |
| 39 | Note that this is not the same as the KnightTemplar, another type of WellIntentionedExtremist. The KnightTemplar does [[IDidWhatIHadToDo horrible things for some greater good]], whereas the Obstructive Bureaucrat [[LawfulStupid has no concept of "greater good", and cares only about following procedure]], or rather believes that procedure is equivalent to the "greater good". He's not just ''prone'' to JustFollowingOrders: as long as the orders match the rules he thinks it's his job to enforce and follow, JustFollowingOrders is what he is all about. In another sense, where the KnightTemplar is the extreme ''leader'', the Obstructive Bureaucrat is the extreme ''follower''. |
| 40 | |
| 41 | If he has no idea that the job he's doing is evil, he may be a CluelessDeputy. This sort of Obstructive Bureaucrat can be drawn into a HeelFaceTurn or FreakOut more readily than one who does know and just feels it's none of his business (a fella's gotta eat)... |
| 42 | |
| 43 | For a character who isn't so much obstructive as much as overworked, see BeleagueredBureaucrat. For a bureaucrat who can actually get things done, see BadassBureaucrat. For a civil servant who's outright crooked, see CorruptBureaucrat. |
| 44 | |
| 45 | In the US, this character can also be a member of Congress (usually a senator) who is [[HauledBeforeASenateSubcommittee investigating the heroes]]. |
| 46 | |
| 47 | This type of character is also known as a "jobsworth" in British slang, named for their tendency to deny a perfectly reasonable request with "That's more than my job's worth." |
| 48 | |
| 49 | This species might easily proliferate around a VestigialEmpire, and any VastBureaucracy is likely to include them among their numbers. |
| 50 | |
| 51 | See also TheBarnum. Related to TriageTyrant. |
| 52 | |
| 53 | These characters tend towards LawfulNeutral, usually LawfulStupid and sometimes LawfulEvil. Usually tends to be a subtrope of VillainyFreeVillain. They may dole out hefty doses of PaperworkPunishment. |
| 54 | ---- |
| 55 | !!Examples of the humorous version: |
| 56 | |
| 57 | [[foldercontrol]] |
| 58 | |
| 59 | [[folder:Advertising]] |
| 60 | * [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJipJwDPJ-g The Dutch insurance company OHRA spoofed this in one of their tv ads.]] A mother and her child go to the reception of a public pool to get their purple inflatable crocodile back. The man behind the desk gets them a form and asks them to fill it out, even though it is right behind him. After filling it out, the mother returns it to the man, only to get prompted that she also has to fill out the back as well. Finally, after the paperwork is done, the man behind the desk informs them that it can only be handed in between 9 and 10 AM the following day, the mother responds by saying: "It's standing right there," the man replies with "It's right there indeed," but doesn't do anything afterwards. |
| 61 | ** A "purple crocodile" (paarse krokodil) is now synonymous in the Netherlands for unneeded bureaucracy |
| 62 | ** A 2006 law aimed at reducing red tape in taxes has the official shortened name "Wijzigingsplan «Paarse krokodil»" (Change plan «Purple Crocodile») |
| 63 | [[/folder]] |
| 64 | |
| 65 | [[folder:Anime and Manga]] |
| 66 | * In ''Manga/BloomIntoYou'', Kuze, Touko's predecessor as StudentCouncilPresident, usually is rather lazy and tends to delegate work to his subordinates (doing said work helps Touko build up her reputation and get elected as his successor). The ''one'' time he acts as a president should is when he vetoes Touko's proposal to bring back the SchoolPlay in the second volume of the ''Regarding Sayaka Saeki'' spinoff novels, which take place during Sayaka and Touko's first year of high school, in part because it's too much trouble. That being said, Sayaka [[JerkassHasAPoint admits that he raises some reasonable objections]] about the student council lacking the resources and talent for this endeavor, so he isn't solely motivated by laziness. |
| 67 | * All Nagisa wants to do in ''VisualNovel/{{Clannad}}'' is to re-establish the Drama Club. At every turn, whenever she thinks she's either overcome a rule handed down by the Student Council or found a creative way to solve her problem, the Council either announces a new rule or tells her that her solution isn't allowed |
| 68 | * Pariston Hill, the vice-chairman of the Hunters Association in ''Manga/HunterXHunter'' is this - very intentionally. He in fact took the position just for the sake of becoming one. Why? Because [[ForTheLulz it amuses him]]. |
| 69 | -->'''Mizaistom Nana''': When he controls the pace, everything becomes more complicated. |
| 70 | * In the 114th episode of the 1981 AnimatedAdaptation of ''Manga/UruseiYatsura'', in an an anime-unique sequence in the first half of the episode, Ten and Kotori arrive at an unidentified bureaucratic building of some kind looking for Kotori's uncle and his puppies. Each person that Ten speaks to on Kotori's behalf just instructs them to go to a seemingly random window the next floor up, with this repeating until they reach the second-highest floor, who instructs them to go right back to window three on the first floor -- which is where Ten ''started''. This proves to be the last straw for Ten, who tries to barbeque the unhelpful jerks with his BreathWeapon, but they take him down with a massed fire extinguisher volley. |
| 71 | [[/folder]] |
| 72 | |
| 73 | [[folder:Comic Books]] |
| 74 | * ComicBook/{{Asterix}} had to deal with the Roman bureaucracy on a few occasions, such as in ''Recap/AsterixTheLegionary''. |
| 75 | * In the 2014 miniseries ''ComicBook/CaptainVictoryAndTheGalacticRangers'', the ''Tiger'''s attempts to rescue one of the Captain Victory clones is hampered by Ranger Central's imposing a quarantine around the area of space where the clone has landed. |
| 76 | * The mayor's receptionist in ''ComicBook/{{Copperhead}}'' is one: anyone attempting to meet with the mayor is informed his schedule is full and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Successful appointments are susceptible to cancellation due to last-minute travel or double-booking. |
| 77 | * ''ComicBook/DisneyDucksComicUniverse'': |
| 78 | ** The bureaucrat from [[http://coa.inducks.org/story.php?c=D+95200 "Cosmic Confrontation"]] originally sneaked up aboard Gyro's rocket to check how many laws it violated, but when the rocket came face-to-face with a squad of giant alien constructor workers out to destroy Earth to make room for a space highway, he proceeds to use his bureaucracy to drive them away and save Earth. |
| 79 | ** Another story shows that Duckburg's city bureaucrats were astoundingly lazy and unmotivated workers who'd leave the office to laze about or go shopping and ''proud'' of it--to the point their supervisor, seeing how fast and precise Scrooge's office workers were, at one point lied and claimed a permit Scrooge needed was being held up by his workers' laziness just to get him to break them out of it. [[CoolOldGuy Scrooge]] [[{{Determinator}} being]] [[GuileHero Scrooge]], he outsmarts and outplays constantly, breaking most of them out of their lazyness in ''days'' and the last stubborn wastrels, who decided to hide in the city hall's basement with the other covering for him just to prove he could still avoid working, being dealt with by ''locking him in''. |
| 80 | * ''[[Franchise/MonsterVerse Godzilla Aftershock]]'': The United Nations Security Council. They've made up their minds about what ''not'' to do about the MUTO Prime crisis as soon as they heard the part where the MUTO Prime succeeding in its goal of wearing down and fatally impregnating Godzilla with its parasitic spawn will cause the MUTO Prime to go back into dormancy. They're convinced this will solve both their problems with [[HeroWithBadPublicity Godzilla]] dead and the MUTO Prime inactive, in blatant and frankly obscene disregard of the bit where allowing the MUTO Prime to do that will result in its spawn being unleashed on the world to at best trigger a repeat of the [[Film/Godzilla2014 2014 incident]] or at worst succeed in causing an extinction event, with no Godzilla to fight them (or any other hostile Titans) off this time. |
| 81 | * In ''ComicBook/JudgeDredd'', Mega-City One has the Bureau of Creative Bureaucracy. Its motto is "Saving Money For The City By Making Things Difficult For You!" |
| 82 | * Probably the biggest one in the ''Franchise/MarvelUniverse'' was Henry Peter Gyrich, who gave ComicBook/TheAvengers quite the headache as government liaison. He's forced the team to cut down its numbers from 15+ to 7, forced ComicBook/TheFalcon to join the team just to fill in the TokenMinority hole (something Sam was ''not'' happy about) and infamously got the team's government approval yanked, leading to the infamous scene in ''ComicBook/TheKorvacSaga'' where the team races into battle ''on a city bus''. In addition to his annoying bureaucratic behavior, he's also a JerkAss in his own right, most prominently being a blatant [[MugglePower baseline human supremacist]]. |
| 83 | ** Subverted with Duane Freeman later on. Expecting another Gyrich, the Avengers were pleasantly surprised to find while he did argue with their actions when he believed it necessary, even standing toe-to-toe with Thor at one point and not backing down, he supported them fully and remained a big proponent of superheroes. It became a running gag that Iron Man couldn't believe how reasonable Freeman was. |
| 84 | * ''ComicBook/NewAvengers'': Jeryn Hogarth, lawyer for Rand Industries, manages to make Iron Man looking stupid, running rings around him with loopholes when the guy (and the Avengers) try to arrest his boss, Comicbook/IronFist for being a super-hero. Given Iron Man's being a {{Jerkass}}, it's brilliant to behold. |
| 85 | * In ''ComicBook/ThePulse'', the administrator of the hospital ComicBook/JessicaJones was taken to demands that she be removed from the premises immediately, despite -- and ''because of'' -- her being in active labor. |
| 86 | [[/folder]] |
| 87 | |
| 88 | [[folder:Comic Strips]] |
| 89 | * In ''ComicStrip/{{Dilbert}}'', the accounting department where Dilbert works is staffed by ugly trolls (not [[{{Troll}} this]] kind, but [[AllTrollsAreDifferent this]] kind, and dealing with them is frustrating, if not dangerous. |
| 90 | [[/folder]] |
| 91 | |
| 92 | [[folder:Fan Works]] |
| 93 | * ''Fanfic/AlwaysVisible'': Portland police see no point in investigating Delia's murder. Galbraith only miraculously manages to obtain documents to fly to London to begin the pursuit of doctor Baselard. |
| 94 | * In ''Fanfic/ABasketABlanketAndABundleOfBills'', the Treasury Wing is full of them; they don't like handing out money to anyone for any reason. |
| 95 | * ''Fanfic/BrokenSouls'' has Charles Lamb, head of Section XIII. When one of the officers within the Ministry of Magic started claiming that somebody was leaking information, he and the Joint Intelligence Committee tried to essentially sweep things under the rug. Justified in that while many people wanted a witch hunt, he wasn't about to start pointing fingers without evidence. He's also not remorseless, as he seems very distraught that several deaths have occurred because of his actions. |
| 96 | * ''Fanfic/ChasingDragons'': While Norvos is ruled by its priests, it's actually administered by a byzantine arrangement of councils and committees with a complex checks-and-balances system which means that it usually takes forever to get anything done. |
| 97 | * Subverted in ''Worm''/''DC Universe'' crossover ''Fanfic/EchoesOfYesterday''. Director Piggot tries to play hardball with Supergirl and throw the book at her in order to get her join the Protectorate, but when Piggot puts forward a Protectorate contract, Supergirl takes five seconds to read and memorize the entire document, and then makes Piggot listen to and clear all of her concerns on the spot. |
| 98 | * Greg, [[BeleagueredBureaucrat Pencil Pusher's]] boss in ''Fanfic/FlashFog''. Also the unnamed claims adjusters at Caligo's insurance company who insist that they withhold trade secrets related to the fog's composition or lose their industrial espionage coverage. |
| 99 | * ''Fanfic/ForTheGloryOfIrk'': |
| 100 | ** [[TheFederation The Syndicate's]] government has an unfortunate habit of needing to process everything through extremely precise means, and then debate it heavily, before they do anything. This earns them a lot of derision from the Irkens. |
| 101 | ** Sym, the Irkens' Chief of Agenda, is basically the Tallest's secretary who controls all of their appointments, which she uses to control who speaks to them, and makes it as difficult as possible for anyone to do so. On the other hand, she's also such a stickler for [[LoonyLaws the laws]] that it even gets on the Tallest's nerves sometimes. |
| 102 | * In ''[[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12321109/27/Gap-Year-Adventures Gap Year Adventures]]'', in which [[Fanfic/GapYearAdventures two intrepid adventurers]] explore the ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'''s Africa (As detailed by Creator/AAPessimal), Mariella Smith-Rhodes and her friend Rivka ben-Divorah have just crossed the border into Mariella's native country. Having just won a running battle against an enemy equipped with a deadly weapon that Mariella's people cannot counter, they should be getting a heroines' welcome, right? Wrong. Mariella's return to her native country involves being detained by a petty Customs official who arrests her on suspicion of smuggling illicit items into Rimwards Howondaland. Rivka gets worse: she is banged up in an insalubrious cell. Apparently that forgotten lump of Klatchian bhong resin in her luggage was a deciding factor. Either way, they're held incommunicado, despite having vital information the military needs to know about - which is not the business of a Customs and Excise officer who has his own vital priorities. |
| 103 | * In ''Fanfic/KaraOfRokyn'', Franchise/GreenLantern and ComicBook/{{Supergirl}} need to head off to Earth, but the emigration officer will not let them leave planet Rokyn because Hal Jordan needs an official authorization. So what if they need to save Superman? Hal has no travel permit, and that's it. |
| 104 | -->Green Lantern was being hassled at the [=WarPort=] entrance by the emigration officer. "I'm sorry, sir, but you need official authorization to use the ‘Port to Earth," said the man, a balding, mustached type in a brown outfit. "We just can't authorize passage to non-K worlds without it."\ |
| 105 | Hal had dealt with planetary bureaucrats before. He held up his ring hand and let the power ring display an aura of green energy. "This is my authorization, officer. I'm a deputized member of the Green Lanterns of the Universe. My authority comes from the Guardians, and I am recognized on every world in my space-sector, which is 2814. And I am a native of Earth."\ |
| 106 | Kara, behind him, said, "I'll vouch for him, tanth. We both need to get to Earth. It's very important. It involves Superman."\ |
| 107 | The officer was standing fast, blocking the passageway to the teleportation device a hundred yards distant. Armed guards were on hand, and so was an attendant, and none of them looked like they wanted to be there.\ |
| 108 | Nonetheless, the officer had just been promoted a few months ago, and he was going to live up to his responsibility. That was the lesson his mother had drummed into him, and by the sun he was going to exercise it.\ |
| 109 | "It well may involve Tanth El, Tynth Zor-El," said the officer. "But until the gentleman before me produces some government documents, I cannot allow him to ‘port to Earth. You may do so, however, with my blessings."\ |
| 110 | "This is ridiculous," said Kara. "What's your name, officer? I want to mention it to the Drygur Moliom next time I talk to him." She had two fairly bulky suitcases in her hands and didn't want to set them down yet, even if Hal had negated their weight to make them liftable. One of them held over 100 pounds of clothes.\ |
| 111 | "You may do so, Tynth Zor-El," he said. "My name is Di-Marr. You may obtain my address from the Central Directory. But unless the Drygur himself authorizes it, I may not allow the gentleman to use the ‘Port. Now, please either both of you leave, or let the Lantern leave and you, tynth, use the ‘Port. But as it is, we're holding up traffic." |
| 112 | * The "Mystery of Magic" in ''Fanfic/MyImmortal''. They were most likely ''supposed'' to be serious, but [[TrollFic given how it's written...]] |
| 113 | * Henry Peter Gyrich ''again'' in ''Fanfic/OriginStory''. He becomes obsessed with acquiring the eventual Superwoman as the government's attack dog, and authorizes several missions in a vain effort to capture or cow her. Fed up with Gyrich after several people nearly die in his attempts, Superwoman locates him in Washington, grabs him, [[spoiler:[[WhyDontYaJustShootHim and bodily hurls him into space]].]] |
| 114 | * ''Fanfic/ProjectTatterdemalion'': Referenced repeatedly — General Yamamoto and Colonel Hughes are very by-the-book about paperwork, and obstructive bureaucrats are responsible for the Republic's harsh genetic engineering laws. This is also Ryuuken's cover for infiltrating the Project: he's supposedly a health inspector. |
| 115 | * In ''Fanfic/SaviorOfDemons'', the [[TheOmniscientCouncilOfVagueness Council]] of Arcos is ridiculously obstructive, until you realize that they ''are'' trying to help by reigning in [[WellIntentionedExtremist King Kold's]] tendency to jump feet-first into whatever solution he thinks is best and most expedient. [[VoiceOfReason Queen Isa]] also accuses them of being {{Corrupt Bureaucrat}}s. |
| 116 | * In the ''Series/{{Star Trek|The Original Series}}'' fanfic ''Fanfic/StepByStep'', the admirals will not let Kirk leave the bridge until the mission is complete, even though he's so sick with the flu that sitting up and staying awake is a struggle. |
| 117 | * In ''Fanfic/WilhuffTarkinHeroOfTheRebellion'', some of the issues of the [[TheEmpire Galactic Empire]]'s military are blamed on "efficiency experts" that at the end of the Clone Wars ordered the removal of equipment they found useless without really understanding how it worked and Palpatine letting them to reroute the funds to his various superweapon projects. The two examples we're given are the Imperial Star Destroyer having been designed with dual use torpedo launchers[=/=]flak guns only to have them removed (thus making them [[PointDefenseless criminally vulnerable to fighter attacks]] and reducing their anti-ship firepower on top of that), and the line infantry squads losing their [[MoreDakka light repeating blasters]], with the "experts" resisting their reintroduction after Imperial ground forces suffered grievous losses, but it's so bad that Tarkin is genuinely surprised when it turns out the one he's being forced to work with ''actually knows his job''. |
| 118 | [[/folder]] |
| 119 | |
| 120 | [[folder:Films -- Animation]] |
| 121 | * ''WesternAnimation/{{Coco}}'': The employees of the CelestialBureaucracy are quite unhelpful to Héctor, though not by choice. During the epilogue, after the TimeSkip, they are genuinely happy to allow Héctor to visit his family. |
| 122 | * ''WesternAnimation/TheIncredibles1'': |
| 123 | ** Gilbert Huph, the Insuricare Middle Manager and Bob's [[PointyHairedBoss boss]]. His job is explicitly to see that every single claim that is made against Insuricare, no matter how valid or dire, is denied. He sees his clients as his stockholders, openly chafes at laws that protect policyholders, and mocks a man Bob sees getting mugged and beaten. Bob hurls him through several walls.[[note]]That said, we see Huph hospitalized with severe injuries, we're forced along with Bob to realize he could've ''killed'' him...[[/note]] Earlier, we have Bob secretly helping an old woman with a backdoor solution after he denied her claim. It works enough that Mr. Huph doesn't notice after she leaves. |
| 124 | ** The trope is lampshaded when Huph rants at Bob for secretly helping his clients negotiate all the obstacles he's putting in their way. "They're penetrating the bureaucracy!" |
| 125 | * In ''WesternAnimation/InsideOut'', the support staff of Riley's mind, which handle all the maintenance, are thoroughly unhelpful. They stick to their jobs even as the islands crumble, and serve as impediments to Joy and Sadness on several occasions. |
| 126 | * Disney's ''WesternAnimation/{{Mulan}}'' had Chi-Fu, a pompous government official appointed to oversee the training of the batch of recruits Mulan ended up with, who seemed to positively delight in documenting Shang's failures and the general ragtag nature of the unit in training, would have gotten Mulan killed had Shang not [[IOweYouMyLife owed her his life]], and proved to be an incredible ninny when not on duty. Though to his credit, he also seemed quite pleased when Shang or the unit actually met his unfairly high standards, and possessed enough intellectual integrity to recognize when following the rules simply wasn't possible or when The Book didn't really have anything to say about the situation. Chi-Fu also doubles as a ''MeaningfulName'', as Qi Fu (欺負) means "bully" in Mandarin. |
| 127 | * Asterix and Obelix have to deal with a whole ''building'' of obstructive bureaucrats for one of the challenges in ''WesternAnimation/TheTwelveTasksOfAsterix''. While none of the individual bureaucrats at "The Place that Sends You Mad" are particularly difficult or unhelpful in their own right, each one of them has a very specific job to do (which boils down to "If someone asks for X, request form Y, which can only be found at window Z. Then give them form A, to be filled out and delivered to window B, so they can receive form C..." There are a seemingly infinite number of forms, and the windows are randomly scattered around a very large building) and knows very little about the systems and procedures outside their own department. Realizing this, Asterix turns the tables on them by asking for a permit that ''doesn't exist'', sending the entire workforce into disarray as they scramble to find information about new documents and instructions that nobody knows anything about. In the end, one bureaucrat gives Asterix the ''real'' permit he needs just to make him go away -- and promptly goes insane himself when he realizes someone actually got a permit. |
| 128 | * In ''WesternAnimation/{{Zootopia}}'', the DMV (Department of [[WorldOfFunnyAnimals Mammal]] Vehicles) is staffed exclusively with sloths, meaning it's even slower than the RealLife version. It's a downplayed version of the trope in that none of the sloths are intentionally trying to be obstructive or petty, they're just really, really slow. |
| 129 | [[/folder]] |
| 130 | |
| 131 | [[folder:Films -- Live-Action]] |
| 132 | * InvokedTrope in ''Film/AtomicBlonde''. The cover story of British agent Lorraine Broughton is that she's a lawyer sent to bring the body of a British citizen ([[PlotTriggeringDeath another agent]]) back home from East Berlin. However she has no reason to be in East Berlin after having done this, so she makes a minor error in her paperwork knowing that the Communist bureaucracy will refuse to let her remove the body until they've spent a week sorting it out. |
| 133 | * The Creator/TimBurton film ''Film/{{Beetlejuice}}'', which explored the question: [[CelestialBureaucracy What if the afterlife were a bureaucracy]]? |
| 134 | * Arthur Brooks in ''Film/BigDaddy'' appears to be this; however, his "victim" is a {{Jerkass}} who deserves to be taught a lesson by the government, so Brooks is instead an example of GoodIsNotNice. |
| 135 | * ''Film/{{Brazil}}'' features a whole society built on them. Their utter incompetence at doing anything right and requiring forms for everything (then giving people runarounds when they try to get the needed paperwork), as well as almost militant drive to not want to take the blame for any (occasionally life-taking) snafus that happen because of having incorrect information, is played for BlackComedy at best and unleaded NightmareFuel at worst. |
| 136 | * In ''Film/TheBrotherFromAnotherPlanet'', such a bureaucrat bothers the title fugitive alien, than later on has a heroic moment when she thwarts the two bounty hunters who are after him. |
| 137 | * The British medical establishment in ''Film/TheCitadel''. They are horrified that Dr. Manson took a patient to an American named Stillman, because Stillman isn't a medical doctor—despite the fact that Stillman saved the patient when her hide-bound British doctor would have let her die. For this Manson is brought up on charges that could lose him his license. |
| 138 | * ''Film/District9'' features a rare Obstructive Bureaucrat ''protagonist'' in the (initially) cowardly and weak-willed Wikus van de Merwe, who is put in charge of the relocation of several thousand fugitive aliens from one slum to another, even worse. He's something of a deconstruction, as he's a very realistic and complex character who shows that behind even the most obstructive of bureaucrats, there's still a human being -- most likely an unhappy one in search of validation. |
| 139 | * ''Film/DoctorInLove'': Despite Dr. Deakin's drug being needed to save a young child's life, Dr. Mincing refuses to let Dr. Hare have it as he claims it is too dangerous despite knowing the boy will die. |
| 140 | * There are quite a few of these in Simon's workplace in ''Film/TheDouble'', but especially the security guard. He makes Simon fill out a form to get into work every single day, and won't let Simon in until he shows him the form ''the guard just watched him fill out''. |
| 141 | * ''Film/FunWithDickAndJane'' (1977): Dick's un-employment money is ended by a low level bureaucrat who follows the letter of the law and personally dislikes Dick. |
| 142 | * ''Franchise/{{Ghostbusters}}'': |
| 143 | ** In the original ''[[Film/{{Ghostbusters 1984}} Ghostbusters]]'' film minor EPA official Walter Peck (played to perfection by Creator/WilliamAtherton) had the unmitigated gall to arrest the Ghostbusters for causing an explosion that he himself was responsible for when he ordered, in front of multiple witnesses, that the ghost-containment grid be shut down, despite repeated warnings that would be disastrous. In a deleted scene, as Gozer the Gozerian was wreaking havoc, the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man was smashing up the city and the End Of The World was quite seriously nigh, Peck's response was to grab a fleeing police officer and order him to go up to arrest the Ghostbusters for "going too far". The officer's response, not unreasonably, was "''You'' go and arrest them!" |
| 144 | ** ''Film/GhostbustersFrozenEmpire'': And of course NYC Mayor Walter Peck continues to harass the Ghostbusters over the course of the film, and is prepared to shut them down once and for all until he realizes how low long his political career would last in that case. |
| 145 | * In ''Film/{{Ikiru}}'', Kanji Wanatabe works in a City Hall that is full of them. [[DiscussedTrope As one person said during his wake]], "in order to clean up a garbage can somewhere, [[BeleagueredBureaucrat you need a garbage can full of paperwork]]!" |
| 146 | * The U.S. Secretary of Defense Albert Nimziki in ''Film/IndependenceDay''. He knowingly concealed the fact that the aliens had visited Earth before, even after they became hostile and any information would have been immensely helpful. He only admits it after the first failed attack and David's father draws attention to the supposed "myth" of the Roswell crash. He wants to continue nuking the aliens even after the first attempt proves that their shields can resist the bombs. Then he has the gall to insist that David's plan, which he had demonstrated could actually work, is a bad idea and tries to talk the President out of it (the Podcast/RiffTrax crew dubs him "Foily [=McAntagonist=]" for his pointless and completely motive-free naysaying). At this point, the President gets tired of his crap and fires him. |
| 147 | * In ''Film/TheLifeAquaticWithSteveZissou'', the Zissou expedition is forced by their creditors to take on a "bond company stooge", and Steve immediately assumes he's going to be this. It's subverted when he turns out to be an decent, inoffensive guy, and Steve ends up mounting a rescue when he gets kidnapped by RuthlessModernPirates. |
| 148 | * ''Film/LifeIsBeautiful'': Rodolfo, Dora's DisposableFiance, is a city official in charge of issuing business licenses. He is haughty, rude, and unhelpful towards the citizens he is supposed to be serving. He and Guido, who aspires to own a bookshop, butt heads with each other even before they become [[LoveTriangle romantic rivals.]] |
| 149 | --> '''Guido:''' All I need is a signature. |
| 150 | --> '''Rodolfo:''' We close at one here. |
| 151 | --> '''Guido:''' It's ten to one. |
| 152 | --> '''Rodolfo:''' File a complaint. |
| 153 | * ''Film/ThePentagonWars:'' The sheer lengths of obstructiveness by military bureaucrats is taken to near satirical levels, when the Army insists on creating an Office of Ruminant Procurement to determine “standards for sheep used in munitions tests” before sheep are provided for a test of the M-2 Bradley’s armor. The Air Force Colonel who wants to conduct the test, just goes and buys sheep from a local farmer. |
| 154 | * PlayedForLaughs in ''Film/SpiderMan2'', where Bruce Campbell, as a live-theater usher, prevents Peter Parker from attending Mary-Jane's show because he's late... and then prevents him from questioning the decision because there's no talking during the performance. |
| 155 | * Frank Dixon in ''Film/TheTerminal'' zigzags between this and the ''Dark'' version. He is not actively malicious, and believes that following the rules is the best option (best shown when he uncovers a man hiding drugs), but this prevents Viktor from being able to leave the airport legally. For much of the movie, he wavers between trying to pass Viktor off to some other authority, finding ways for him to lawfully leave the airport, tricking him into a legal nightmare, and locking him in a cell. He also prevents him from allowing a Russian man from leaving the country with medicine for his dying father, and when Viktor gives the man the means to give his father the medicine [[spoiler: Dixon makes every attempt not to allow Viktor into the US, and threatens to destroy the careers of his friends if he tries. In the end, however, he relents when Viktor does get into the city.]] |
| 156 | * Galloway from ''Film/TransformersRevengeOfTheFallen'' insults and looks down on the Autobots, and even on Lennox, Epps and the other troops who support the Autobots. Threatens the Autobots with banishment from Earth, though it's never mentioned that he could only legally banish them from the US. |
| 157 | * ''Film/TwelveOClockHigh'': General Savage, the new commander of the 918th Bomb Group, conspires with the Group Adjutant, Major Stovall, to [[InvokedTrope invoke this trope]] in a darkly humorous fashion. Savage's new policies are so harsh that ''all'' of the pilots put in for transfers. Savage needs time (ten days is his estimate) to prove that his policies will work, but is at a loss as to how to proceed. To the rescue comes Major Stovall, formerly a civilian lawyer who knows all the tricks of the bureaucracy. He outlines a plan that will delay processing any transfer requests for quite a while. First, he has two or three days worth of other work to deal with, before he can even look at any new items. Second, he'll have to check all those transfer requests for mistakes (since [[SarcasmMode of course the General doesn't want sloppy paperwork coming out of the Group]]). Stovall predicts that every one of those requests will have to be returned to the squadrons to be redone, then checked again. By the time the whole process is done, Savage will have his ten days and probably more. Savage remarks that it's "a hell of a way to run a war." |
| 158 | [[/folder]] |
| 159 | |
| 160 | [[folder:Literature]] |
| 161 | * ''Literature/ArtemisFowl'' has quite a few of these, but the biggest one is Ark Sool. |
| 162 | ** Played with and subverted with Trouble Kelp. |
| 163 | * ''Literature/TheBible'': In the Literature/BookOfEcclesiastes, King Solomon complains of the suffering caused by corrupt magistrates. Ecclesiastes is OlderThanFeudalism. |
| 164 | * Creator/IsaacAsimov: |
| 165 | ** "Literature/BlindAlley": A seemingly fussy bureaucrat, Loodun Antyok, manages to free an alien species kept under observation, all the while making sure he comes up smelling like roses. |
| 166 | ** "Literature/TheDeadPast": Thaddeus Araman, Department Head of the Division of Chronoscopy, is supposedly in charge of determining who gets access to the {{Chronoscope}}. In actuality, his job is to suppress access and knowledge of the technology, usually by making petitioners feel like they're on a waiting list to ''eventually'' make use of it, once all the higher-priority people have gotten their chance. |
| 167 | ** "Literature/TheEvitableConflict": Stephen Byerley, [[OneWorldOrder Co-ordinator of Earth]], suspects someone is sabotaging the Machines, powerful robots that advise the decisions of humanity. He asks for help investigating this from the four Vice Coordinators of the four regions that Earth is divided into. They all dismiss the idea and none help Byerley, insisting they are doing their jobs well. Justified, because [[spoiler:the Machines already control humanity and they will never let anyone competent enough to initiate an investigation have the job]]. |
| 168 | * The ''Literature/BridgeInTheMenagerie'' series has the Emeritus Professor of Bio-Sophistry, aka the Secretary Bird, who insists on pedantically enforcing obscure bridge rules even when everybody else at the table would rather just let the offence go and get on with it. [[HoistByHisOwnPetard The result of the pedantic rule enforcement is never to the Secretary Bird's advantage]]. |
| 169 | * ''Literature/CatchTwentyTwo'' has a number of obstructive bureaucrats. Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen is a notable one -- he's just a mail clerk, but has become one of the most powerful men in the military because he can simply throw away any orders he doesn't like. |
| 170 | ** There's also a deadlier version in the air units commander. Although never made clear why, he seems to have a personal grudge against all his men and refuses to allow any pilots, or bomber crew, to return home. He specifically mentions that the U.S. Army Air Corps requires a pilot to be given some time off after 25 missions but uses an oddly worded rule, which is meant to be used in extreme circumstances, to extend the limit to first 50, 60 then 70 missions. For those unaware, a bomber crew member was likely to get injured or killed within 30 missions. He was essentially trying to kill everyone who joined his command. |
| 171 | *** The original rule of 25 missions was set to give the average crew about a 50/50 chance of surviving to completion. As survival odds went up, so did the required missions. The commander is just more enthusiastic about it. |
| 172 | * Frank Herbert's ''Literature/ConSentiency'' universe has the "Bureau of Sabotage", whose job is to create or destroy red tape. However, [=BuSab=] obstructs the government to protect individual rights (when governments become ''too'' efficient, bad stuff occurs). Instead of paper work, the Bureau employs some rather humorous sabotage to get the job done. Jorj X. [=McKie=], saboteur extraordinary and protagonist, subverts the trope by speeding up a meeting in one story, as well as being sensitive to the alien cultures he works with. |
| 173 | * In the ''Literature/ConradStargard'' series by Creator/LeoFrankowski, the hero confesses his real identity as a time traveler to his priest, who can't decide whether this is an act of God or the Devil. So he refers the matter to the Holy Inquisition in Rome. Conrad spends years with this threat hanging over his head, but it turns out someone at the higher levels of the Church always refuses to believe the report and sends it back to the local church authority for verification. But as Conrad's star rises the priest keeps getting promoted as well, because naturally the Church want to maintain their influence over any powerful figure. So the report keeps getting referred back to his friend as the local authority, and therefore just goes round in circles without reaching Rome. |
| 174 | * In Creator/SarahAHoyt's ''Literature/DarkshipThieves'', bureaucrats try to deny Kit permission to dock because Athena's on board. |
| 175 | * ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'' |
| 176 | ** ''Literature/{{Hogfather}}'': A traditional Obstructive Bureaucrat appears when Susan is searching for the Tooth Fairy. Although he doesn't actually obstruct Susan by demanding forms and procedure, he does obstruct her by incessantly {{Wangst}}ing about his rather boring life instead of answering her questions. Susan describes him as a very small, very weak bully, who couldn't find anyone smaller or weaker than him to bully and so took to making people's lives just that little bit more difficult. |
| 177 | ** ''Literature/SoulMusic'': Mr. Clete of the Musicians' Guild, is a nastier version, taking genuine pleasure in the suffering of those ensnared in red tape. It's mentioned in the text that the guild hired him for this specifically, because without a hard-ass forcing things the musicians would absentmindedly stop paying their fees and the guild would fall apart. Over the course of the story he gradually loses his mind entirely, to the point his own enforcers try to rein him in. |
| 178 | ** ''Literature/InterestingTimes'': The Agatean Empire, as a FantasyCounterpartCulture of Imperial China, has a lot of this. As Cohen puts it "You can't even go to the privy without a piece of paper." |
| 179 | * ''Literature/DivineMisfortune'': While the Court of Divine Affairs was founded to make things fair between gods and mortals, actually relying on them when things go pear-shaped — like Syph making her "followers" miserable, or Phil and Teri having to deal with Lucky's enemies showing up and making their lives difficult — is an exercise in futility considering how long it takes to get one's case sorted out. |
| 180 | * ''Literature/EstherDiamond'': Lysander Singh is a rare example who goes out into the field, but the narrator considers him to be an InsufferableGenius who isn't as smart as the people he bosses around. |
| 181 | * ''Literature/TheFold'' has two examples, both of which are more "light drama" than humorous. Protagonist Mike is hired as to audit a research project, but the subjects of his audit see his constantly asking for "access" and "basic information" as meaningless busywork that's getting in the way of their research. Later a different researcher is revealed to be ordering his staff to swap out parts relentlessly to generate a stream of paperwork that he can send up the chain showing "work" while he stalls for time to complete his own documentation. |
| 182 | * ''Literature/HarryPotter'': Dolores Umbridge is a Ministry official who wholeheartedly participates in Fudge's efforts to block the truth about Voldemort's return. During her tenure as a teacher at Hogwarts in ''Literature/HarryPotterAndTheOrderOfThePhoenix'', she constantly issues decrees that make life harder for the students and teachers in order to have total control over the school. |
| 183 | * ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxyTrilogy'': "Vogons are one of the most unpleasant races in the galaxy. Not evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious, and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. '''On no account should you allow a Vogon to read poetry at you.'''" |
| 184 | ** [[Film/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy2005 The movie]] plays it up when the ''[[CoolShip Heart of Gold]]'' makes a HyperspeedEscape from the Vogon armada. Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz turns to a subordinate and asks if the criminals they're pursuing filled out the proper paperwork to do this. The subordinate is shocked to find out that they did not. Later on, Arthur, Ford, and Zaphod fill out the release form for Trillian, who is about to be executed, only to be told that, since Zaphod is the President of the Galaxy, he has to submit a ''Presidential'' Release Form. Jeltz, who is all too eager to execute Trillian is instantly pacified when he receives the release form and orders her freed. Also, when the heroes are escaping, Jeltz is about to order pursuit, when a factory whistle is heard, and Jeltz tells everyone to take an hour for lunch. |
| 185 | * In Larry Niven's ''Literature/InfernoLarryNivenAndJerryPournelle'', the protagonist, Carpenter, finds himself in (a very [[Literature/TheDivineComedy Dante-like]]) Hell and in need to some togas to escape. Finally getting to the administrative center of Hell, he puts in a requisition for the garments and is handed a two foot tall stack of forms to complete and a single pencil. When he points out that a single pencil will never last to complete all the forms, he is told to improvise and his attention is directed to another guy nearby who is working on his own stack of forms. His pencil has been worn down to a nub and he is using a ripped out fingernail and his own blood to complete the forms. |
| 186 | * Randy Pope, Joe's superior in Fish and Game in the ''Literature/JoePickett'' novels. Having risen through the ranks of the bureaucracy rather than being a field officer, he has little understanding of field work. Having a personal dislike of Joe, at one point he demands daily (rather than weekly reports) from Joe, and insists Joe clears any investigation with him before proceeding. |
| 187 | * ''Literature/JohannesCabalTheNecromancer'': The new first [[CirclesOfHell circle of Hell]] is the [[PaperworkPunishment egregious application paperwork]] devised by Arthur Trubshaw, a former bank clerk who was so obsessed with procedural busywork for procedural busywork's sake that he died demanding a receipt from an armed robber. |
| 188 | -->Even in Hell, Trubshaw had continued to demonstrate an unswerving devotion to the penny ante, the nit-picking, the terribly trivial, the very things that had poisoned his soul and condemned him in the first place. |
| 189 | * In the ''Literature/LafayetteOLeary'' series: O'Leary has the phone number for the mysterious agency known as "Central", whose job it is to keep the [[GuardianOfTheMultiverse multiverse running properly]], but whenever he calls with a spacetime-breaking emergency, he inevitably gets connected to some paper-pusher who refuses to believe him, and doesn't want to get involved. |
| 190 | * In ''Literature/TheLaundryFiles'', almost all of the staff of the Laundry except field agents are obstructive bureaucrats that are more concerned with matrix management, powerpoint presentations and paperclip audits than with the things the Laundry is supposed to do, like saving the world from {{Eldritch Abomination}}s. This is justified for two reasons: first, TheMasquerade is upheld by recruiting people that find out about it, rather than killing them (the Laundry ''used'' to employ MurderIsTheBestSolution, but they've moved away from that), so the people that work for the Laundry aren't necessarily qualified for any position of power or access, resulting in scores of "busywork" positions, usually middle management. The other reason is that [[spoiler: those paperclips ''could'' be infused with demonic power. They need to know where all of them are at all times.]] The only aversion is Angleton, who stands at a weird position between AffablyEvil and ReasonableAuthorityFigure [[spoiler:and that is because he secretly is an extremely powerful demon. It seems nothing short of being the Eater of Souls can prevent the Laundry bureaucracy from turning you into a mindless cubicle drone.]] |
| 191 | * ''Literature/TheLeakyEstablishment'' by Creator/DavidLangford: This is how the Nuclear Utilisation Technology Centre operates. While it's supposedly their job to create and maintain Britain's Independent Deterrent, that's a long term goal, whereas the Public Relations Committee meet every Tuesday, and therefore the minutes of the last meeting have to be done ''now''. Scientists are frequently disturbed by Security men wishing to check that "valuable equipment" (cheap pocket calculators and ancient slide-rules) are still in the office and haven't been taken home, and the security measures at the front gate seem to be there purely to inconvenience people because that makes things ''look'' secure. However, since many of the scientists are rather sceptical about the nuclear deterrent they tend to the view that, while these things are hugely inconvenient for them personally, at least it stops them from actually making weapons, which is probably a good thing. (This situation is, of course, nothing like the real-world Atomic Weapons Establishment, [[WriteWhatYouKnow where Langford worked for five years]].) |
| 192 | * Administration in ''Literature/TheLicaniusTrilogy'' acts as a permanent foil to Wirr's plans for reforming Andarra's treatment of the Gifted. They do this with obstruction and politicking instead of outright violence. |
| 193 | * ''Literature/LittleDorritt'' by Charles Dickens has the Circumlocution Office, which is entirely made up of obstructive bureaucrats. A fair number of said bureaucrats are from the same family, the [[MeaningfulName Barnacles]]. |
| 194 | * ''Literature/MythAdventures'': Parodied in one of the ''M.Y.T.H. Inc'' novels. The perspective characters are trying to sabotage an army. They end up in charge of a supply depot, which they hope to use for this purpose by deliberately screwing up 10% of all supply requests. They are thwarted by Obstructive Bureaucrats in an unusual way: First, they categorically refuse to use the horrifically convoluted official record-keeping procedures, inventing their own, just because they don't want to deal with the paperwork, making the processing once requisitions get to them much faster. Second, because of the long delays caused by the bureaucrats in getting the requisitions to the supply depots, the 'accidental' mistakes often improved things (like sending summer-weight uniforms to a unit that requested winter-weight uniforms and vice versa, not realizing that the requisition orders are six months old and consequently sending them uniforms that were correct for the current season). [[SpringtimeForHitler As a result, their sabotage made their depot the most efficient facility in the army.]] |
| 195 | * In his youth, the only expression of strength and personal vengeance the mouse-like narrator of Dostoevsky's ''Literature/NotesFromUnderground'' could hope for was by playing this trope. |
| 196 | * In the ''Literature/PaladinOfShadows'' series, obstructive bureaucrats (particularly US government ones) are occasional roadblocks to the Keldara doing their jobs. However, since their boss is personal friends with the President of the United States, the bureaucrats don't remain obstructive for very long. |
| 197 | * In ''Literature/ThePaleKing'', The Author's Foreword includes a lengthy description of all the legal issues that went along with the creation of the book. Everything involving David Foster Wallace's entry into the IRS, with the sole exception of Leonard Stecyk. |
| 198 | ** The horrendously complex and ultimately bungled [[spoiler: wrongful death lawsuit after Chris Fogle's father dies.]] |
| 199 | ** After [[spoiler: his experience in Advanced Tax class, Chris tries to make up for his mistakes by going to the dean and begging for a chance to salvage his college career. The dean laughs in his face.]] |
| 200 | * In Norman Juster's ''Literature/ThePhantomTollbooth'', the Senses Taker insists that Milo, Tock, and the Humbug fill out stacks of forms. [[spoiler:Then he takes their senses, trapping them in illusions. Alas for him, [[ItWasAGift the gift of laughter Milo received]] means he can not take their senses of humor, and they can escape.]] |
| 201 | * In Ellis Parker Butler's short story "Pigs is Pigs", red tape in the railroad business combined with a clerk's poor grasp of taxonomy (on the grounds that "pigs is pigs", he insists on charging a customer the larger shipment rate for livestock, rather than the cheaper rate for domestic pets, for a pair of ''guinea'' pigs) leads to the clerk's railway station being overrun by thousands of guinea pigs by the time the debate is sorted out... and by that time, the customer had moved away without leaving a forwarding address. |
| 202 | ** Tunefully adapted as a Disney [[WesternAnimation/{{Pigs Is Pigs|1954}} animated short]]. |
| 203 | * All [[ParallelUniverse three universes]] in ''Literature/TheRedTapeWar'' suffer from [[VastBureaucracy near-galaxy-spanning]] obstructive bureaucracies. |
| 204 | * ''Literature/RetiredWitchesMysteries'': The Grand Council of Witches are ostensibly meant to keep witch society running smoothly, but more often than not they just end up making things difficult for the heroes. The witch community in Wilmington especially doesn't like them because they're more obstructive than helpful. Cassandra Black, the herald of the Grand Council of witches, especially serves in this role, since she's mainly out to stop witches from doing anything the Council doesn't like. Among other things, in book 1, the Council's representatives try to stop Molly and her coven from investigating Olivia's death (and barely do anything to investigate on their own until the witch in question's been dealt with already), and try (but fail miserably) to confiscate the amulet her mother left her because of its non-witch origins. |
| 205 | * In Creator/DerekRobinson's novels of the British military air forces in both world wars, the military bureaucracy gets a well-deserved TakeThat: |
| 206 | ** In ''Literature/WarStory'', the adjutant (Executive Officer), charged with keeping the squadron in essential stores, is a corrupt gambling addict at the end of a chain of corruption. As a result the airmen are on basic rations with no coal for heating as the officer charged with providing food and warmth has gambled it away. The situation is only resolved with a change of personnel and a barter system, based on food parcels containing sought-after luxury items sent by rich relatives of affluent officers. The old Adjutant is demoted and sent to a penal regiment, whose ex-con soldiers kill him when they discover he's gambled away their rum ration. |
| 207 | ** In ''Literature/GoshawkSquadron'', an officious senior officer is humbled by Wooley and forced to provide the sort of luxuries only issued to General Staff officers far behind the front lines (though he gets his revenge later on). |
| 208 | ** In ''Literature/APieceOfCake'', half the squadron's aircraft are grounded for want of essential spare parts. An unhelpful stres depot will not issue them unless the correct paperwork is filled in properly. The squadron does not have the official forms to requisition spare parts. The Air Ministry maintain these have been sent out and you're not getting any more. A new CO mounts an armed raid on the deopt and takes what he needs at gunpoint. The enraged bureaucrat catches up with the squadron in France and threatens court-martials. A killer pilot is sent to strafe his car to destruction, which is later blamed on the Luftwaffe. |
| 209 | *** Owing to the chaos caused by the retreat out of France, the consequent scattered postings of squadron personnel to other jobs, and the frequent moves between bases in the South of England, the military bureaucracy has lost all the paperwork and none of the ''Piece of Cake'' pilots are, at the moment, even being paid for putting their lives on the line. This situation persists for a good five months. This leads a character to put an alternative meaning on Churchill's big speech: ''Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few...'' |
| 210 | ---> "He must be talking about our back-pay, then." |
| 211 | * In ''Literature/TheShipWho Won'', [[SapientShip Carialle]] is sixteen years out from a major traumatic experience. She needed two years of intensive, loving therapy to recover but has been reasonably healthy and stable since then, assisted by her [[HandyHelper brawn]], with whom she likes to LARP. Psychologists still like to check in with her to see how she's doing, which is fine with her... ''except'' when it's the Inspector General Dr. Sennet Maxwell-Corey doing it. He seems to approach her every time she makes stationfall and has what Carialle sees as an obsessive desire to prove she's unfit for service, demanding lengthy psychological profile sessions, prodding the old trauma that rarely bothers her otherwise, and fixating particularly on her LARP hobby. Avoiding him kicks off the plot of ''The Ship Who Won'', as she and Keff hare off somewhere he's not going. |
| 212 | * From ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'' we have the [[SmugSnake ever-charming]] [[TheClan House]] [[HateSink Frey]], headed by [[{{Troll}} Lord Walder Frey]]. They somehow manage to combine all the best features of this trope with those of CorruptBureaucrat and CrookedContractor, and, to top it off, are operators of what amounts to a glorified TrollBridge that brings in the bulk of the tax revenue for their part of the Riverlands. If they want to make you wait to cross their bridge, they will find a way to do it, dammit, using protocol and standard hospitality at its most excruciatingly drawn-out worst, if necessary, to do it. Do they use ExactWords and/or [[MetaphoricallyTrue various statements]] as part of their deals and treaties with you and DisproportionateRetribution if you somehow break them by their lights, no matter how good or reasonable your reasons may appear? Mayhaps. |
| 213 | * In the second book of ''Literature/TheSouthernReachTrilogy'', Control is appointed as the new director of the Southern Reach. His secretary immediately makes it known in no uncertain terms that she is still loyal to the old director and will go to every length to undermine anything he attempts to do and sabotage any change he attempts to make. |
| 214 | -->'''Grace''': I have no comment on your recommendations, except to say that I will begin to implement them in as excruciatingly slow a fashion as possible. You should begin to see a few of them -- like, 'buy a new floor cleaner', in place by next quarter. Possibly. Maybe. |
| 215 | * ''Franchise/StarTrek'': |
| 216 | ** In the ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' [[Franchise/StarTrekExpandedUniverse novel]] ''Death Count'', the ''Enterprise'' is plagued with efficiency experts who don't quite get the distinction between rules and practice, and particularly have it in for Chekov. This is summarily resolved when two of them are murdered by an on-board saboteur, and the third is so grateful to Chekov for saving his life that he gives him a glowing report. |
| 217 | ** ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'': In the novel "Station Rage" readers see obstructive Cardassian bureaucrats in action. These are obstructive bureaucrats dialed up past at least 100. The military '''hates''' them and dealing with them so much that the military leadership has to force Guls to take turns in dealing with them otherwise the military would fall apart because they would not be resupplied. |
| 218 | * ''Literature/TheStormlightArchive'': |
| 219 | ** A mix of types from the Azir. They are obsessed with paperwork, requiring proper forms for everything from prisoner transport to requisitioning snacks. On the other hand, they're a meritocracy in a world otherwise ruled by feuding warlords, and anyone has a chance to rule the country if they submit the proper forms and write a particularly good essay. When an assassin is flying around the world killing princes and kings, every country is descending into in-fighting and anarchy--every country except Azir, where the mere possibility of a civil war is dismissed as "too much paperwork." |
| 220 | ** The Azir have bureaucracy steeped into their bones so much that when [[spoiler:their slaves regain their minds and become an army following demons]], the first thing they do is [[spoiler:sue the government for back pay and damages. Even better, it's implied they are fairly close to working out a deal, until said demons forced a fight]]. |
| 221 | * ''Literature/SugawaraAkitada'': Akitada's superiors don't make his job any easier, often getting in his way or taking actions behind the scenes that disrupt Akitada's efforts. |
| 222 | * ''Literature/ThirdTimeLuckyAndOtherStoriesOfTheMostPowerfulWizardInTheWorld'': In "Nothing Up Her Sleeve" the Council of Wizards forbids wizard interference with muggle affairs, even to save them (e.g. from a disastrous flood). Magdelene's unimpressed by this and helps anyway as she sees fit. |
| 223 | * ''Literature/ThomasAndFriends'': The policeman in "Thomas in Trouble", who causes the Fat Controller to mutter that it's no use arguing with policemen. On his meeting with Thomas: |
| 224 | --> '''Policeman:''' Where is your cow-catcher? |
| 225 | --> '''Thomas:''' But I don't catch cows, sir. |
| 226 | --> '''Policeman:''' Don't be funny! (Looks at Thomas's wheels) No side plates, either! Engines going on public roads must have their wheels covered, and a cow-catcher in front. You haven't, so you are Dangerous to the Public. |
| 227 | --> '''Thomas's Driver:''' Rubbish. We've been along here hundreds of times, and there's never been an accident. |
| 228 | --> '''Policeman:''' That makes it worse. (Writes "Regular Law-Breaker" in his notebook) |
| 229 | * In Creator/DavidBrin's ''Literature/{{Uplift}}'' universe, there is an entire race of these beings. In the Uplift Storm trilogy, we find that some of them escaped to avoid being molded into them. By the end, one of those ones returned to the main civilization, to introduce them to Hawaiian shirts, boats, and rowing songs. The effect is marvelous. |
| 230 | * ''Franchise/StarWarsLegends'': |
| 231 | ** In the ''Literature/JediAcademyTrilogy'' readers learn just how little tolerance the Empire has for obstructive bureaucrats. Those who weren't executed often went into hiding to avoid the wrath of Palpatine or Vader. |
| 232 | ** Later, in ''Literature/LegacyOfTheForce'' Jacen feels the Galactic Alliance bureaucracy is hobbling the military. In order to deal with the situation he heads directly to the supply department and forces the procurement agent in charge of turbolaser parts to be sent to the frontline unit with the most misfires. After Jacen does that his troopers compliment him, telling Jacen that he acted like his grandfather would have and their weapons were already working better. |
| 233 | * In Creator/LoisMcMasterBujold's ''Literature/TheWarriorsApprentice'' the Barrayaran embassy on Beta Colony maintains a bureaucratic black hole into which Betans who have grievances against Barrayaran citizens wiall be "swallowed up in an endless möbius loop of files, forms, and reports, kept especially for such occasions by the extremely competent staff. The forms included some particularly creative ones that had to be round-tripped on the six-week journey back to Barrayar itself, and were guaranteed to be sent back several times for minor errors in execution. ... 'It works great with Betans -- they're perfectly happy, because all the time they think they're doing something to you.'" |
| 234 | * ''Literature/WetDesertTrackingDownATerroristOnTheColoradoRiver'': The governor of Nevada delays the opening of the spillways at Hoover Dam when he's informed that people have to be evacuated in preparation from the towns beneath the dam. |
| 235 | * ''Literature/WhenYouReachMe'': When the police come to interrogate Marcus, Wheelie, the school secretary, who knew all of the children at the school and what class they were in, stalled for as long as she could, asking them to repeat the name and age of Marcus and just taking time looking through the files to find him. This gave Miranda time to get Marcus out of his class. |
| 236 | * In ''Literature/YouAreDeadSignHerePlease'', the CelestialBureaucracy seems to go out of its way to be as obtuse and long-winded as possible and they require forms be filled out for absolutely everything that happens, including scheming against your boss, sobering up or disastrous romances based on clingy desperation and/or desperate clinginess. |
| 237 | [[/folder]] |
| 238 | |
| 239 | [[folder:Live-Action TV]] |
| 240 | * ''Series/TwentyFour'' ''always'' had one in there to get in the way of stopping a terrorist attack. The most memorable of which being Ryan Chappelle in the first three seasons, who essentially was an insufferable pain in the ass that got in Jack's way everywhere he went, yet had arguably the most [[AlasPoorScrappy emotionally-jarring]] death of the series. |
| 241 | ** ''Briefly'' subverted on Day 5 by [=Lynn McGill=]. When Jack (who had been in hiding for two years) uses an out-of-date distress code, [=McGill=] is the only one anal and methodical enough to recognize and research it, thereby saving the day. Of course, after that brief moment, he reverts to playing this trope completely straight, eventually crossing into TyrantTakesTheHelm territory. |
| 242 | * In Nickelodeon's TV show ''Series/TheAdventuresOfPeteAndPete'', the younger Pete befriends Clothing Inspector #34, who proceeds to make the entire neighborhood rule mongers equal to himself. [[spoiler: Finally defeated when Pete challenges him to an eating contest of barbeque chicken. Inspector 34 finishes every bit of meat on his chicken without getting a bit of sauce on his hands or clothes. Only to be reminded by Dad "You're supposed to get dirty eating chicken." Causing Inspector 27 to realize the error of his ways, and not be such a perfectionist.]] |
| 243 | * ''Series/{{Andromeda}}'': |
| 244 | ** One episode involved a world with extremely strict bureaucratic procedures. Interacting with them gave Tyr a lovely line (which the audience likely agrees with) after listening to a message summed up as "You don't have an appointment, please hold" for the umpteenth time: |
| 245 | ---> '''Tyr:''' ''[deadpan]'' ... Now can we blow them up? |
| 246 | ** Followed by this exchange: |
| 247 | ---> '''Beka Valentine:''' What if I told you we have forty missile tubes locked on your capital city, ready to fire if I don't get some straight answers?\ |
| 248 | '''Clerk:''' ''[calmly]'' You'd still need an appointment. |
| 249 | * In ''Series/AshesToAshes2008'', Jim Keats is initially made out to be this, [[spoiler:until the finale suggests he's some kind of demon trying to collect the souls of the team]]. |
| 250 | * A frequent visitor on ''Series/BarneyMiller''. Often it's the higher-ups in the department, or the gleefully malicious Scanlan of Internal Affairs, but there are many officials from the state and federal government who get drawn into whatever crazy case is going on. |
| 251 | * ''Series/BabylonFive'': |
| 252 | ** Inverted in the episode "[[Recap/BabylonFiveS01E11Survivors Survivors]]". It is the protagonists, Sinclair and Ivanova specifically, who are obstructing Major Lianna Kemmer's attempts to locate and arrest Garibaldi on suspicion of sabotage. |
| 253 | ** Played straight with Garibaldi attempting to retrieve a package from [[UnstoppableMailman an obstructive mailman]] who insists Garibaldi pay a hefty fee before he can get his package (it's special ingredients for a birthday dinner). |
| 254 | ** The Drazi have a peculiar system of government, in which every five cycles (six Earth years) the entire population, anywhere they are, is randomly divided in two sides, one wearing a green sash and one wearing a purple sash, and they beat each other up until one side gives up, leaving the other in power. However, in "[[Recap/BabylonFiveS02E03TheGeometryOfShadows The Geometry of Shadows]]", when the "election" on the station starts to include deadly force, Ivanova (trying to make them reason) takes the sash of Green Leader... and is informed that now ''she'' is Green Leader, because the system predates FirstContact and [[ObviousRulePatch the change in rules to exclude aliens]] got caught in a committee. For over ''eight hundred years''. |
| 255 | * In ''Series/{{Blindspot}}'', Jonas Fischer is a particularly malignant version, cynically using his powers as Chief Inspector of the Office of Professional Responsibility to [[spoiler:shut down an investigation that would have revealed that he's a double agent for the FSB]]. |
| 256 | * Gordon Brittas from ''Series/TheBrittasEmpire'' acts like this sometimes. Like spending well over a minute to explain why he doesn't give change for the bus (ending in "it takes too long") or refusing to let people book the badminton court for more than 40 minutes, even when no one else had even tried to book it that day. |
| 257 | * In the early seasons of ''Series/DeathInParadise'', Commissioner Selwyn Patterson often took this role, visiting the police station to inform Detective Inspector Richard Poole that some element of the current investigation implicated powerful local political figures or risked damaging the island's tourism trade, and subtly suggesting that Poole focus his attention elsewhere. However, as the series continues, this part of Patterson's personality fell to the side, and he became more willing to allow Poole's successors to follow their instincts as he trusts them to only do that with good reason. |
| 258 | * Hospital administrator Adrian Quint, as played by Creator/AngusDeayton in the ''[[Series/DoctorInTheHouse Doctor at the Top]]'' episode "The V.I.P.", refuses to spend much-needed money on improving the hospital's outdated wards and equipment until Waring tricks him into thinking the Prince of Wales is arriving at the hospital for surgery (it is, in fact, a young child who happens to be named Charles Windsor). |
| 259 | * ''Series/DoctorWho'': |
| 260 | ** Leader Clent in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS5E3TheIceWarriors "The Ice Warriors"]] insists on doing everything based on what the computer tells him to do, even though huge scaly defrosted green men from Mars have bunkered down in a dead spaceship and are trying to kill the scientists out of paranoia and there is [[OutsideContextProblem no way the computer could possibly have a plan to deal with them]]. Several times in the story, characters get a plan in motion only to have Clent scupper it due to lack of input from the computer. Everybody else in the base is frustrated with his behavior but powerless to do anything about it, and one has even dropped out of civilization entirely and gone to live in an icy wilderness due to being sick of Clent. |
| 261 | ** The Pertwee era is littered with these guys. They often show up, briefcase in hand, to slow down UNIT proceedings and the Doctor has to verbally bitchslap them down before he can get anything done. Horatio Chinn, in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS8E3TheClawsOfAxos "The Claws of Axos"]], is one of these. |
| 262 | ** The Brigadier falls into this occasionally, though bureaucracy is usually less dangerous place for him than [[MurderIsTheBestSolution behind a gun]], especially early on. |
| 263 | ** A CreatorThumbprint of Creator/RobertHolmes is his [[AuthorPhobia hatred]] of bureaucrats, which becomes more extreme as his ''Who'' career continued. When he wasn't using them as villains, he was having the Doctor make TakeThat zingers at their expense: |
| 264 | *** In [[Recap/DoctorWhoS10E2CarnivalOfMonsters "Carnival of Monsters"]], two LoveableRogue carnies spend the entire plot stuck in a torturous [[OverreactingAirportSecurity border control]] waiting area, being bullied by (literal) grey-faced bureaucrats (who are trying to engineer a political coup). |
| 265 | *** In [[Recap/DoctorWhoS12E2TheArkInSpace "The Ark in Space"]], Harry isn't useful in medical emergencies despite being a Navy doctor, because he "is only qualified to work on sailors". |
| 266 | *** In [[Recap/DoctorWhoS13E6TheSeedsOfDoom "The Seeds of Doom"]], the Fourth Doctor points out that the latest alien invasion would, if successful, "mean the end of everything, even your pension!" The civil servant looks [[SkewedPriorities suitably aghast]]. |
| 267 | *** Previous Time Lord episodes had portrayed them as BigGood CrystalSpiresAndTogas figures. When Robert Holmes got his hands on them in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS14E3TheDeadlyAssassin "The Deadly Assassin"]], they were reimagined as a bunch of shiftless, dusty politicians obsessed with pompous ritual, who can be caught out with legal loopholes and forcing them to answer straight questions. |
| 268 | *** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS15E4TheSunMakers "The Sun Makers"]] revolves around a fascistically evil and abusive tax collection regimen. |
| 269 | *** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS23E4TheUltimateFoe "The Ultimate Foe"]] features Mr. Popplewick, a Dickensian factory owner and dull-minded bean-counter, who bears perhaps some resemblance to the abuse the BBC were subjecting their writers to. |
| 270 | ** In [[Recap/DoctorWhoS24E2ParadiseTowers "Paradise Towers"]], the police organization is ''hilarious'', insisting on using their long designations every single time they needed to address anyone, and quoting the rule book every single time they did anything. |
| 271 | * In the ''Series/ForeignAffairs1966'' episode, "Can We Have Our Ball Back?", some youngsters are playing cricket near the Soviet Embassy when their ball lands in "Russian Territory". Rather than just give the boys their ball back, the Soviet Embassy and the Foreign Office get into a conflict over whether it is allowed to be returned or not. |
| 272 | * This trope [[{{Pun}} occurs]] enough times in ''Series/GavinAndStacey'' that one has to wonder whether the creators have been on the receiving end of this trope in RealLife once too often. |
| 273 | * In ''Series/HomicideLifeOnTheStreet'', the upper ranks of the BPD was ''filled'' with grand-standing, PR-obsessed {{Pointy Haired Boss}}es who constantly interfered with police investigations and sometimes stonewalled investigations out of personal spite. |
| 274 | * ''Series/{{JAG}}'': In the season eight episode "Need To Know", the CIA Director and his attorney tries to block the Navy's attempt to declassify material relating to a secret joint Navy-CIA submarine mission in 1968 in which the sub sank near the Soviet coastlline. |
| 275 | * ''Series/KamenRiderDrive'' has most of the regular police force be this to the Special Crimes Unit, but particularly their manager Mitsuhide Nira. It eventually becomes clear why nobody on the force except the RagtagBunchOfMisfits seems to take the ongoing spree of killer robot attacks seriously: [[spoiler:one of their number killed and replaced the Secretary of Defense, and has been making ''very'' liberal use of his ability to manipulate memories to make it so virtually every officer is physically incapable of thinking about the robots, leaving only an underfunded special task force to make the public think the authorities are still doing something. Nira, meanwhile, is TheQuisling]]. |
| 276 | * In ''Series/{{Lexx}}'', the entire city of [[UsefulNotes/{{Toronto}} Hogtown]] [[spoiler:in the afterlife for evil souls]] is populated by these types. [[spoiler:The devil simply leaves them to their own devices, [[EvenEvilHasStandards preferring to avoid contact with them]].]] |
| 277 | * The humorless foyer administrator in the children's TV show ''Series/LiftOff'' dug up a rule banning something new every episode... including, at one point, carrying around ''a ban sign with a mirror on it''. That one [[HoistByHisOwnPetard backfired when they got him to turn it around]]. |
| 278 | * This trope is the premise of the Austrian show ''Series/MA2412'', with the Obstructive Bureaucrats as protagonists. |
| 279 | * ''Series/TheMagicians2016'': The library in the Neitherlands runs on one. Creator/FranzKafka wrote ''Film/TheTrial'' after a week there. |
| 280 | * ''Series/{{Mash}}'': |
| 281 | ** An episode saw Hawkeye and Trapper navigate up the ranks through a series of obstructive bureaucrats in an attempt to obtain a piece of medical equipment. |
| 282 | ---> '''Trapper''': Sir, we started with a captain, went on to a major, then to a colonel. |
| 283 | ---> '''Hawkeye''': On the way, we've encountered oral compulsiveness, raging paranoia, and a colonel who's shipping Korea to Switzerland one dollar at a time. |
| 284 | *** Of note is the guy who told them they couldn't have the vital piece of medical equipment they needed, but could have a pizza oven if they filled out the standard paperwork and replace "machine gun" with "pizza" on the request. |
| 285 | *** However Radar is ultimately able to do some wheeling and dealing to obtain the equipment the surgeons need. |
| 286 | ** Later, both before and after Radar leaves for the family farm in Iowa Klinger shows off his skills in getting around bureacrats to get the camp needed supplies. Klinger later becomes proficient enough in dealing with the bureacracy and his other duties that he's promoted to seargent. |
| 287 | * Superintendent [=McClellan=] in ''Series/MonsterWarriors''. This paper-pusher is a real stickler for policy and procedure. He’s Mayor Mel’s right-hand-guy, but he’s no Warrior ally—-in fact quite the opposite! When something goes wrong in Capital City, teenagers are blamed—namely the Monster Warriors. |
| 288 | * ''Series/OddSquad'': The episode "A Job Well Undone" has Orson invoking this trope in order to claim yet another "Agent of the Month" award after Olympia and Otis win it instead of him, but can't claim the award themselves due to Otis not turning in his paperwork on time. Orson disguises himself as Opa, a receptionist who nitpicks at minor flaws with Otis's paperwork and forces him to do various things to correct the flaws in order to drop off his files. Otis doesn't figure out that "Opa" is really Orson until he becomes exasperated enough to call Olympia, admit that she was right about offering him help (and he was wrong about refusing that help), and explain his situation, only for her to respond, "Who is ''Opa?''" The two agents end up exposing Orson and win the Agent of the Month award, breaking his win streak. |
| 289 | * ''Series/TheOfficeUS'', Michael Scott definitely thinks Toby Flenderson qualifies as one of these. Toby is actually a much more sympathetic character than Michael gives him credit for, even to the point of [[TheWoobie Woobiefication]] to some viewers. |
| 290 | * ''Series/OurMissBrooks'': |
| 291 | ** Miss Brooks runs into an obstructive clerk (played by Frank Nelson) in "Custodian of Students Funds". Mrs. Davis accidently uses school money to buy Miss Brooks a present from Sherry's Department Store. Miss Brooks tries to return the dress to Sherry's, a store that promises if the customer isn't satisfied their money will be [[BlatantLies "cheerfully refunded"]]. After being given the third degree on the reason for the return, Miss Brooks is turned down because the dress was sold on sale. The scene is ommitted in the SoundToScreenAdaptation "The Embezzled Dress" |
| 292 | ** Another obstructive clerk from Sherry's appears on the television episode "Christmas Show". This time it Sherry's promises to [[BlatantLies "cheerfully exchange"]] goods. Miss Brooks, Mr. Boynton and Mr. Conklin each face the ill-tempered Mrs. Carney as they try to exchange their presents before Christmas. |
| 293 | * "Marks" on ''{{Series/Overhaulin}}'' tend to run into these in the quest to retrieve their stolen or erroneously impounded cars. They're usually played by the hosts or other members of the production crew. |
| 294 | * The central premise of the Amy Poehler comedy ''Series/ParksAndRecreation'' is the {{Inversion}} of this trope. Poehler's character, Leslie Knope, is a [[{{Pollyanna}} naively optimistic]] bureaucrat who cares for the people of her small town and is seemingly oblivious to the fact that no one else does. |
| 295 | ** Ron Swanson picked up the Obstructive Bureaucrat ball and ran with it. Namely because he's a [[StrawmanPolitical Straw Capitalist/Libertarian]] who thinks government programs like parks should be abolished in favor of children spending their time at private, for-profit entertainment outfits like Chuck E. Cheese. The only time he ever shows enthusiasm for the job and does actual work is when the government needs ideas on how to slash its budget. (Or [[MoralityPet when Leslie ropes him into something]].) |
| 296 | ** April is technically just a secretary to bureaucrats, but in matters concerning her job, she makes it her mission to do as close to nothing as humanly possible. Which makes her Ron's ideal personal secretary. |
| 297 | * ''Series/PieInTheSky'': |
| 298 | ** In "A Matter of Taste", Henry Crabbe's restaurant is beset by one from the local planning office played by Creator/PetePostlethwaite. Turns out he just happens to be the brother-in-law of a rival restauranter who's been losing customers to Crabbe. |
| 299 | ** One from the local health inspector's office makes repeat visits to the restaurant in "Coddled Eggs". |
| 300 | * In the Brazilian musical special for kids ''Plunct Plact Zuum'' -– about a group of kids who want to explore space in a customized, weird-looking spaceship (the “Plunct Plact Zuum” from the title) -– late rockstar Raul Seixas played an Obstructive Bureaucrat from space! To him, even the sun]] should have an ID card. He says that “[[TitleDrop Plunct Plact Zuum]] won’t go anywhere”, unless it's sealed, registered, stamped, examined and labeled. Ultimately, however, he [[PetTheDog sympathizes with the kids]], confessing that he wanted to go with them, but can’t leave his job. Then, he lets them go and wishes them a good journey. |
| 301 | * Otto Palindrome from ''Series/{{Quark}}'', who often sends Quark on various garbage picking missions. |
| 302 | * ''Franchise/{{Quatermass}} II'': During TheInfiltration, these oppose the scientist hero's attempts to uncover the truth about the AlienInvasion. Some oppose the hero out of petty authoritarianism, others because they're possessed by aliens, and others interestingly enough help the hero because as experienced bureaucrats they realize that the obstructiveness is happening in a way that doesn't make sense. One of the latter even lampshades this trope. |
| 303 | -->'''Fowler:''' Quatermass, we've had dealings for a number of years. You as a driving force of an enterprise of the future; I as one of the obstructive civil servants you have to contend with. |
| 304 | * [[{{Jerkass}} Rimmer]] from ''Series/RedDwarf'' happily enforces (or at least tries to enforce) rules and directives that not even high-ranking officers care about. |
| 305 | * In ''Series/{{Spaced}}'', Daisy Steiner does not have a good time in the Job Centre: "No, this is the A-b form, you need the A-''B'' form, capital B." The clerk responds to any question with a simpering smile and an inane, "[[ObfuscatingStupidity I'm sorry, I don't understand]]." -- although this is partly because Daisy's making a transparent attempt to claim benefits for the period she spent on holiday in Asia and the clerk, whilst definitely an example of this trope, has clocked exactly what she's up to. She also told him to "fuck off" instead of serving him whilst working at a bar. Tim Bisley, on the other hand, has a rather different experience, being fast-tracked through the system thanks to a shared [[InsistentTerminology difference of opinion]] regarding ''Film/ThePhantomMenace''. |
| 306 | * Richard Woolsey from ''Series/StargateSG1'' and ''Series/StargateAtlantis'' is exactly this. Even though he strictly believes in rules, he is generally benign and fair, although annoying. When he took command of Atlantis, the initial reaction was that [[TyrantTakesTheHelm A Tyrant Has Taken The Helm]], exactly because of this trope. However, he turned out to be a [[BaitAndSwitchTyrant capable leader]] after all. |
| 307 | ** Even once he becomes a good guy Woolsey, uniquely, remains a bureaucrat. In fact he gets a few CMOA out of his skills as a lawyer and underhanded politician. |
| 308 | *** Senator Kinsey also counts. In his first appearance he tries to get the Stargate Program shut down, under the guise that it's a money pit and exposes the Earth to unnecessary dangers. While he's right, the fact that he's trying to take on a more advanced race with regular weapons and believes God wouldn't let them lose is what cements him as this trope. Later on, he's shown to be working with a GovernmentConspiracy that wants to handle interplanetary relations their way, accusing the SGC of being "too soft". This includes them slaughtering millions of Jaffa, not caring whether the planets they attack are home to Free Jaffa or Jaffa that serve the Goa'uld, thus tacking on "hypocrite" to the above (which he also justifies by citing the Bible). |
| 309 | *** Kinsey's actions, even as part of a conspiracy, are absolutely ungodly stupid. They seem to believe that they could defeat the Goa'uld by stealing certain pieces of alien technology from the Tolan, Tok'ra, and even Asgard and Ancient tech. They never seem to consider that without the help of these guys, especially the Asgard, Earth would have been conquered, glassed and/or shattered by at least a dozen different bad guys. |
| 310 | *** There's also the fact that his initial objection about exposing Earth to alien threats ignores the fact that you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Earth had ''already'' been exposed to the Goa'uld, and shutting down the Stargate program wouldn't make them go away or ignore Earth. It would just require them to take (very slightly) longer to attack using spaceships (a point made by Col. O'Neill in the pilot and during the episode in question). Which they do. The very next episode. Understandably, after the shit had barely missed the fan, the rest of the government told Kinsey to put a sock in it and overruled him. |
| 311 | *** Worth noting, Woolsey was introduced as Kinsey's assistant. When he realizes what sort of person Kinsey is and what he's up to, [[MinionWithAnFInEvil he collects evidence on him and turns it over to the President]]. |
| 312 | ** Camile Wray of ''Series/StargateUniverse'', given her status as a member of the IOA. Of course, she is also trying to take over the ship, so she's the darker variant. She gets better after things have settled down. |
| 313 | ** The entire IOA counts as this. After watching enough of ''Series/StargateAtlantis'', you would think the only decisions they make is to put the blame on whoever else they can. |
| 314 | *** On the rare occasion they ''do'' take action, they usually make things worse. Particular mention goes to their borderline-suicidal plan to stop the Ori in ''The Ark of Truth'', which involved reviving the Replicators and taking away their only weakness. |
| 315 | ** The Franchise/StargateVerse sort of has a revolving door of them. Either, like Woolsey, they see what's going on and become more {{reasonable|AuthorityFigure}} over the years, or like Kinsey, they get ''worse'' and get into a much more antagonistic role than just being the guy whose turn it is to say "the SGC is costing too much money" this year. Either way, this means it's time to bring in the next and start the cycle again. |
| 316 | * ''Franchise/StarTrek'': |
| 317 | ** ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'' In the first season episode "[[Recap/StarTrekDeepSpaceNineS01E03PastPrologue Past Prolouge]]" Commander Sisko has his crew play obstructive bureaucrats by having them insist to Gul Danar that ''all'' docking procedures have to be precisely followed no matter how long it takes. Sisko later tells Danar that [=DS9=] is still repairing all the damage the Cardassians did when they left, hence the extending docking times. |
| 318 | ** ''Series/StarTrekPicard'': The Romulan Star Empire is no more, but its successor, the Romulan Free State, is still a bureaucratic nightmare. |
| 319 | --->'''Trill''': My residency was supposed to start six months ago, but the Romulan Free State revoked it when I was halfway here. I have no idea why, or why they finally reinstated it.\ |
| 320 | '''Soji''': Well, that sounds about right. |
| 321 | * Dean and Sam from ''Series/{{Supernatural}}'' meet quite a few of these in their MonsterOfTheWeek scenarios, but are very, very good at getting round them. Mostly because they have a seemingly limitless supply of fake identification. |
| 322 | * ''Series/TheThinBlueLine'': To be fair, Fowler's rigid adherence to proper procedure is rooted in a heartfelt belief in things like due process, rule of law, work ethics and other [[BoringButPractical unglamourous but socially beneficial principles]]. He just has a tendency to take it a ''teensy'' bit too far at times.... |
| 323 | * Many in ''Series/TheWire'', but the most obvious are the various city permitting officials Cutty has to deal with in opening his gym.[[note]]Fortunately for him a local minister with connections smooths it all over[[/note]] |
| 324 | * Elevated to an art form by Sir Humphrey Appleby in ''Series/YesMinister''. |
| 325 | ** As a matter of fact, pretty much the entire British civil service is portrayed as such in those series. |
| 326 | *** On the other hand, you do see their perspective on things--though the writer clearly disagrees, the Civil Service seems to genuinely believe that it knows what's best for the country (and there are occasions when the Civil Service appears to be acting in the interests of Britain while the politicians are acting in the interests of their approval ratings), and Humphrey himself is hardly a one-dimensional character. He actually gets a fair number of sympathetic moments in. In the end, you see that they're still Obstructive Bureaucrats, but also see that there's a kind of twisted method to their obstructiveness. And in the (very) few times when the goals of the politicians matched theirs, their efficiency is deadly. |
| 327 | *** There are also times when Minister Hacker successfully adopted Humphrey's methods with devastating effect, such as the time he arranged for a 'good will' visit of British troops...to a country that had just had a surprise invasion. |
| 328 | [[/folder]] |
| 329 | |
| 330 | [[folder:Music]] |
| 331 | * The 'song' "LAMC" by Music/{{Tool}}, chronicling one man's lone and futile struggle against the automatic telephone response system of the Los Angeles Municipal Court. |
| 332 | [[/folder]] |
| 333 | |
| 334 | [[folder:Professional Wrestling]] |
| 335 | * Wink Vavasseur's aim seemed to be taking the "fun" out of the "Director Of Fun" position when promoted to it in Wrestling/{{Chikara}}. |
| 336 | * Bill Alfonso, from his debut until he started managing Taz in Wrestling/ECW, was an "Evil Referee" and kayfabe member of the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission. In the promotion that seemed to scorn rules, [[LawfulEvil he was the only one who seemed to be trying to enforce them.]] [[/folder]] |
| 337 | |
| 338 | [[folder:Quotes]] |
| 339 | * From animator Creator/ChuckJones: "Bureaucracy is stranger than fiction." |
| 340 | [[/folder]] |
| 341 | |
| 342 | [[folder:Radio]] |
| 343 | * This is constant source of comedy in ''Radio/TheMenFromTheMinistry'': whenever One and Two oversee a construction site or any other business, they always tangle on to the smallest of regulations, laws and orders no matter how insignificant they are. They also love to create forms full of personal questions which have nothing to do with what the form's about and are often impossible to answer. |
| 344 | [[/folder]] |
| 345 | |
| 346 | [[folder:Tabletop Games]] |
| 347 | * ''TabletopGame/{{Dominion}}''. In this early-Renaissance-themed deck-building card game, the Bureaucrat is an Attack card that forces everyone else to move some useless-in-game cards (which are sort of like deeds to lands) to the top of their decks. These cards therefore take up space in one's hand for two turns in a row, and the Bureaucrat player gets a shiny coin for his trouble. |
| 348 | * ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'': In the ''TabletopGame/{{Planescape}}'' setting: |
| 349 | ** Modrons are a race of LawfulStupid semi-mechanical beings. They are very close to HiveMind when working with other modrons but tend to turn into obstructive bureaucrats whenever they interact with other species. Like Vogons, they can easily push it to the lethal extreme, though it's not due to malice, it's due to Modrons being beings of perfect law to the point that they don't understand the concept of individuality or creativity: they have no choice but to follow laws and instructions exactly as they are given. |
| 350 | ** Devils functioned heavily as this trope. As the exemplars of the LawfulEvil alignment, promoting deliberately obstructive bueaucracy is part of their agenda to ruthlessly stamp out individuality. Since they all have an agenda to get ahead of everyone else, they love using whatever means they can of screwing over their competitors (which is every other devil in existence). |
| 351 | * ''TabletopGame/{{Exalted}}'': There are two uses for the Bureaucracy skill and its related Charms. One is to evade these characters. The other is to become one. With the Charms, you can ''magically aid'' your obstructions to be nearly insurmountable. |
| 352 | * ''TabletopGame/GoblinQuest'': One of the many misfortunes that can interfere with whatever the players are currently doing involves a hobgoblin arriving and demanding that the players show identity papers, which the book says the players don't have. |
| 353 | * ''TabletopGame/InNomine'': Asmodeus, Prince of the Game, runs the infernal beauracracy, and very intentionally not in a way that makes it efficent or helpful. He views all of existence as an elaborate game with arbitrary and malleable rules and with no particular goal beyond one-upping everyone else, and organizes his civil services based on that logic. |
| 354 | * ''TabletopGame/{{Paranoia}}'': Red tape is one of the many perils of life in Alpha Complex: for example, Troubleshooters might be forced to fill out Personal Authorized Handmounted Firearm Requisition Application Forms (in ''triplicate'') to get laser guns so they can defend themselves from a horde of rampaging mutants. |
| 355 | ** While being shot at by said mutants, no less. |
| 356 | ** Source materials encourage this, even suggesting a GM may send forms ''other'' than what players requested and then execute them for treason if they fail to fill them out correctly or protest that they got the wrong ones. |
| 357 | ** Another favorite: the equipment they need is available at their clearance level for once, but ''the requisition form for said equipment'' isn't. Or, for experimental equipment, the instructions aren't. |
| 358 | * ''TabletopGame/TheSpoils'': A number of cards from the Banker trade are bureaucrats created from the reanimated corpses of those who died in debt. They must pay back their debts to their lenders (a process one card implies takes roughly 500 years), and are mostly used a pencil-pushers to deal with the poor and undesirables the bank has no interest in lending money to, drowning them under mountains of paperwork. Mechanically, their function is to tie up the opponent's resources (for example, depleting their Character cards to no effect). One card's flavor text sums up the experience rather aptly: "Could I please speak to a ''living'' person?" |
| 359 | * ''TabletopGame/{{Traveller}}'': The Vilani Imperium is a VestigialEmpire composed of these. They were completely incapable of running the war against the Terrans because of this. Interestingly, they were deliberately designed this way to ensure that the Imperium ran on autopilot and had as little disorder as possible. As there hadn't been a real enemy for thousands of years, it made sense in its day. |
| 360 | * ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'': |
| 361 | ** The Administratum is notoriously inefficient, as entire planets have been lost because of misplaced paper work or ''rounding errors''. The Tau, on the other, hand, avert this with the Water Caste. Their job is to make everything run better, not worse, and they tend to be good at that job. |
| 362 | ** The Imperial Guard gets this constantly. One of their old codexes gave the example of a regiment that was wiped out making a heroic last stand, officially recognized for their HeroicSacrifice, accidentally assigned to lead an attack due to a filing error, and then ''posthumously sentenced to death for desertion'' when they failed to show up. In other cases specialized regiments have been mistakenly sent to the wrong warzones. With jungle fighters being sent to ice worlds, and arctic combatants being sent to battle in rain forests. |
| 363 | ** The Inquisition was made specifically because the High Lords of Terra couldn't be bothered to wait for due process to deal with the billions upon billions of criminals in the Imperium, as it takes centuries to fill out request forms for ''ammunition and food''. Consequently they have absolutely no checks or balances and little in the way of a formal hierarchy or structure, but this has created a chaotic internal environment where political struggles and backstabbing (sometimes metaphorical, sometimes literal) between opposing Inquisitors often delay any useful action, making the Inquisition not that much different than the Administratum they were suppose to circumvent. There is at least one order of the inquisition devoted entirely to cutting through as much as of the Administratum's red tape as possible. Whether they're having any success or making a real impact is unknown and doubtful though. |
| 364 | ** Imperial justice is usually extremely fast, but anything that can't be resolved by crushing somebody's head with a shock maul on the spot can take centuries or millennia to get resolved, with punishment doled out on the criminal's distant descendants. |
| 365 | ** There are apparently entire departments dedicated to redacting information that other entire departments spend all their time collecting. Everyone involved is fully aware of this and do their jobs to the best of their abilities anyway. |
| 366 | ** The audiodrama ''The Watcher in the Rain'' focuses on an Inquisition agent sent after an administratum file clerk who got a thousand soldiers killed with a single misfiled document folder. [[spoiler:It turns out she'd done this thousands of times, intentionally, purely ForTheEvulz after her mind snapped from the sheer tedium. Everything in the Administratum is so dedicated to rote repetition and BlindObedience with no actual oversight beyond enforcing them that nobody noticed.]] |
| 367 | ** ''TabletopGame/DarkHeresy'': One of the locations described is the "Scrivener's System" of Prol, an entire ''solar system'' filled almost completely with Obstructive Bureaucrats. There is ''literally a civil war brewing'' in the Prol system because they're running out of places to store all the paperwork. All sides making their points in multi-volume treatises is not helping. |
| 368 | [[/folder]] |
| 369 | |
| 370 | [[folder:Theater]] |
| 371 | * Creator/WilliamShakespeare's ''Winter's Tale''. The jailor wonders whether he should let Paula bring the newborn princess out of jail. |
| 372 | -->'''Gaol.''': ''Madam, if't please the queen to send the babe,\ |
| 373 | I know not what I shall incur to pass it,\ |
| 374 | Having no warrant.''\ |
| 375 | '''Paula''': ''You need not fear it, sir:\ |
| 376 | The child was prisoner to the womb, and is\ |
| 377 | By law and process of great nature thence\ |
| 378 | Freed and enfranchis'd; not a party to\ |
| 379 | The anger of the king, nor guilty of,\ |
| 380 | If, any be, the trespass of the queen.'' |
| 381 | [[/folder]] |
| 382 | |
| 383 | [[folder:Video Games]] |
| 384 | * In ''[[VideoGame/AtlantisTheLostTales Beyond Atlantis]]'' Hell is depicted as a bureaucracy run by demons who are insistent you follow protocol to get a PlotCoupon from them. The protocol involves getting a specific order of stamps on a claim form but the correct stamps and order is not disclosed. Wandering souls in the area were previous applicants who died while trying to get the order right. |
| 385 | * The [[InteractiveFiction text adventure]] game ''[[Creator/{{Infocom}} Bureaucracy]]'' is all about this. In the course of trying to sort out a snafu caused by a change of address, the main character must confront not only obstructive bureaucrats, but a tribe of cannibals, an antisocial hacker, and an angry llama, all while trying to avoid getting so stressed out they have a fatal aneurysm. |
| 386 | * The main 'good guys' in ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'' are the New California Republic, a democratic faction whose lofty ideals are tempered by an aggressive expansionist policy and more red tape than you can shake ten sticks at. While natural for such a large organization, the inefficiency is one of the reasons the NCR has come to a stall in the game and gives plenty of work for the player character. |
| 387 | * In the 8-bit Creator/ElectronicArts game ''Hard Hat Mack'', one of the antagonists you have to avoid is an OSHA inspector. |
| 388 | * In ''VideoGame/MagicalStarsign'', the Space Police have an absurdly obstructive bureaucracy, as your party discovers when they ask them for help finding their missing teacher, and are redirected through dozens of different departments before finally getting a meeting with the local lieutenant, [[spoiler: only to find out that the Space Police have a policy of obstructing people asking for their help in order to keep their officers safe.]] |
| 389 | * PlayedForLaughs in ''VideoGame/PajamaSam 2'', where one of the puzzles has Sam having to fill out a bizarrely-named form and get it signed by a [[PointyHairedBoss non-appearing manager]] to get a ''rubber band''. |
| 390 | * The Stellar Patrol in the Creator/{{Infocom}} games ''VideoGame/{{Planetfall}}'' and ''Stationfall'' administers an enormous galaxy-wide bureaucracy. Your mission at the start of ''Stationfall'' is to pick up a supply of Request for Stellar Patrol Issue Regulation Black Form Binders Request Form Forms. |
| 391 | * Go through anyone's mind in ''VideoGame/{{Psychonauts}}'' and you will find hundreds of these guys running around Censoring thoughts that should not be there. Normally, this is vital to the mental health of whoever owns the brain, but since technically ''you're'' not supposed to be in there either... |
| 392 | * Though the bureaucrats themselves are never actually seen, the Peacekeeper faction in ''VideoGame/SidMeiersAlphaCentauri'' has such extensive bureaucracy that it gives them an automatic penalty to efficiency. |
| 393 | * ''VideoGame/SimCity 4'' combines this, ShapedLikeItself and the DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment with the Bureau of Bureaucracy building. Its description? "The bureau that handles bureaucracy". |
| 394 | * ''[[VideoGame/StarControl Star Control: Origins]]'' has the Measured, an entire race that has been genetically modified to be perfect bureaucrats. Before they'll even agree to talk to you, you'll have to file a request form. They have a separate form to switch from "bureaucrat speak" to "small talk" mode, even though their exasperated reaction indicates they would much rather use the former. Attempting to leave gets you a warning that you haven't filed the official forms for leaving. When you request those forms, they tell you that you don't have permission to request the forms. Then combat begins, during which their main form of attack is called "red tape" and involves launching what looks like forms at your ship. If you run into them, then your ship slows down and takes a little bit of damage, which allows more forms to catch up and slow your ship even more. |
| 395 | * Another Douglas Adams title, ''VideoGame/StarshipTitanic'' contains the sarcastic, deliberately unhelpful [=DeskBot=], Marsinta Drewbish, at the start of the game, as well as in its novelization. [[spoiler: It only lasts until you reset her off-kilter personality settings, though.]] |
| 396 | * ''VideoGame/WestOfLoathing''’s Ghostwood is a literal GhostTown populated by nothing but these. You'll need to fill out a good dozen "different" (functionally-identical) forms to complete all the quests involving this area. And that's if you don't screw anything up and have to do it again... |
| 397 | -->'''The Protagonist, after filling out several forms for a drink only to be told the Saloon is out of whiskey:''' I hereby vow to destroy this place. I will raze the buildings and salt the earth. |
| 398 | * ''VideoGame/TheWitcher3WildHunt: Blood and Wine'' has the quest "Paperchase". Geralt of Rivia is a hardened monster slayer who has faced the undead, vampires, werewolves, {{vain sorceress}}es, dragons and a mysterious entity who might well be the setting's equivalent of the Devil himself, but none of those threats can remotely prepare him for the sheer terror of trying to prove to the bank that he is not in fact dead so he can withdraw money from an account a client set up for him years ago as payment for a job. [[spoiler:While the bank is frantically trying to cover up that they already spent Geralt's money after he was reported dead. The solution to the quest that gets Geralt his money is to be NiceToTheWaiter.]] |
| 399 | [[/folder]] |
| 400 | |
| 401 | [[folder:Webcomics]] |
| 402 | * ''Webcomic/DaisyOwl'': [[http://daisyowl.com/comic/2009-07-20 And she's pleasant, and agrees that the fees are unreasonable, to add insult to injury.]] The next strip has him go to the very man said bureaucrat recommended after the one who asked for the license to be renewed wanted a less pleasant guy who plays the trope straighter. The customer was ironically satisfied with the bad customer service the less pleasant guy gave him. |
| 403 | * ''Webcomic/EvilDiva'': [[http://www.evildivacomics.com/?p=314 Hell's complaint department just puts people on hold.]] |
| 404 | * In ''Webcomic/{{Freefall}}'', Mr. Kornada and the Mayor both qualify as these. |
| 405 | ** [[http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff600/fv00586.htm An erstwhile one sleeps better at night by (illegally) providing what people want instead.]] |
| 406 | * ''Webcomic/TheInexplicableAdventuresOfBob:'' on [[{{Pun}} Butane]], the planet of [[OurDragonsAreDifferent dragons,]] Legate [[{{Pun}} Zippobic]] seems to be this, although he views himself as a BeleagueredBureaucrat. |
| 407 | * The Lunar Government's bureaucracy in ''Webcomic/SchlockMercenary'' requires multiple redundant signatures on everything, with no copying or computers, in the 31st century. After filling out a "short" form a foot thick by exploiting a loophole that allowed them to use Ennesby (as an AI forbidding him would be discrimination) the Toughs are hired to disperse a long-term mob outside the licensing office, which actually turns out to be [[RightOnQueue the line]]. |
| 408 | * In ''Webcomic/{{Sinfest}}'', [[http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=3 the forms to sell your soul.]] |
| 409 | * In ''Webcomic/{{SSDD}}'' Trisha, [[MegaCorp Maytec's]] customer service AI, is designed to ward off complaints by being so annoying that most just give up. |
| 410 | * ''Webcomic/StandStillStaySilent'': A couple plot elements hint that the type is still around in the AfterTheEnd Known World. It's unknown if this happens with everything, of if trips to the [[DeathWorld Silent World]] being involved make things more difficult. |
| 411 | ** The main cast, who is on an expedition to explore the Silent World, runs out of food early because of an UnfortunateItemSwap while loading their supplies. The military base from which they departed could technically resupply them on the same day, but ''getting permission to do it'' is stated to take four weeks. This results in a member of MissionControl blackmailing the captain of merchant ship into doing it instead. |
| 412 | ** The merchant ship in question unfortunately turns out to have been carrying, among other things, a sheltered FarmBoy turned unpaid kitchen aid eager to see other places than his home country, and who had just found out that he wouldn't be allowed to disembark once the ship reached its destination. The main cast finds this out the hard way upon opening one of their newly delivered food crates. They end up having to keep him with them because he's not immune to ThePlague, the Silent World is ridden with PlagueZombie monsters, and merely arranging for a proper transportation to come get him would take at least half the time the expedition is supposed to last anyway. Add the twenty-something days the boat will need to get there, and the transportation might as well be used to pick up the whole expedition crew once their mission is complete. |
| 413 | * Protocol Officer Quine of ''Webcomic/{{Starslip}}'' is a humorous examination of the default characterization of these characters: when he's introduced, he sounds like a typical regulations lawyer who is [[RedShirt unceremoniously killed in his first away mission]]. Then we are introduced to his personal resurrection machine (that creates a clone of him and transfers his consciousness to it whenever he dies) and he gradually starts morphing into a ButtMonkey who is just trying to do his job surrounded by people who openly insult him for no reason other than the fact that he's the only guy willing to apply regulations on what is ostensibly a ''military vessel'' and often getting killed in the process. The pinnacle of this was a recent storyline where he used his machine to "single handedly" (in other words, going through ''a lot'' of dead clones) to take back the ''Paradigm'' from hijackers and saving the lives of the rest of the crew... only for Vanderbeam to berate him for taking too long and giving all the credit to his dead clones. [[TheWoobie Poor guy.]] |
| 414 | ** He ultimately turns out to be a good guy when he is confronted with just how corrupt the government really is. Even then, he is slightly conflicted about breaking laws. Then [[spoiler:his wife]] points out that the government's leadership is betraying the founding principles of the government, so Quine's "insubordination" is actually nothing of the sort. |
| 415 | [[/folder]] |
| 416 | |
| 417 | [[folder:Web Original]] |
| 418 | * ''WebVideo/{{Hermitcraft}}'': The DHP, or Department of Hermit Permits in Season 10 is a parody of bureaucratic offices where the staff uses the bureaucracy to avoid having to do any work. The first task is finding the office, which is located in the middle of the forest. The only door doesn't work (and has a sign that says, "please use other door"). Once you finally get inside, you're faced with monsterously long forms that force you do do nonsensical things like run laps around a lighthouse or place a live salmon in your neighbor's basement. If anything is even the slightest bit wrong, your paperwork is rejected outright. |
| 419 | * Podcast/NerdyShow's Dungeons and Doritoes portrays [[IronicHell Cleaveland]] as an entire society of these. The party must negotiate and navigate the bureaucracy to get [[TokenEvilTeammate Jen'Ifer]] [[PutOnABus off the bus]]. |
| 420 | * A series of humor oriented web videos shows a paper pusher dealing with the ''VideoGame/StreetFighterII'' warriors, having issue with quite a few of them, arguing with [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RGXRvURHbw Chun-Li]] over her outfit, with [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDT1RyVdoiI Vega]] over the definition of a "weapon" and with [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEe_mZI1sVs M. Bison]] over the finances. (One could likely view this guy as a sympathetic character doing an excellent job, considering.) |
| 421 | [[/folder]] |
| 422 | |
| 423 | [[folder:Western Animation]] |
| 424 | * Rodney Whosits from ''WesternAnimation/{{Archer}}'', the requisitions officer. Played for laughs as strict bureaucrat who cannot be threatened (but can be bribed). Also subverted in the sense that his placement is probably for the best, since the [=ISIS=] staff have a penchant of taking weapons for personal use, or for sale on the black market. |
| 425 | * ''WesternAnimation/AvatarTheLastAirbender'': The Earth Kingdom in general (particularly Ba Sing Se) is depicted as symptomatically bureaucratic, much like the ancient China that pretty much codified the concept of bureaucracy in RealLife. |
| 426 | ** An Earth Nation immigration official at Full Moon Bay prevents any refugees from taking the ferries to the city without an official ticket. Aang is forced to circumvent her by taking the deadly Serpent's Pass, to help out a family who lost their tickets. |
| 427 | ** Joo Dee plays this part when she makes the Gaang wait through weeks-long processes to post "Lost Bison" posters or talk to the Earth King about the invasion. She's really under [[EvilChancellor Long Feng's]] order to prevent them from doing anything. |
| 428 | * Alien X of ''WesternAnimation/Ben10AlienForce'' obstructs ''itself.'' The most powerful being in the universe, capable of [[RealityWarper altering reality]]... and its two halves are still in a meeting deciding whether or not they should save the dinosaurs. It's later shown that this is [[PlanetOfHats the hat]] of its species, as they all spent virtually all of their time standing motionlessly, deliberating on what to do with their awesome power and ultimately doing nothing. The only time they actually do anything is in ''WesternAnimation/Ben10Omniverse'', when they all agree to fine Ben for using their powers to [[SkewedPriorities recreate the universe without permission]]. |
| 429 | * WesternAnimation/DarkwingDuck sometimes works with an Interpol-like spy organization called SHUSH. One SHUSH bureaucrat, a Russian bear named Vladimir Goodenov Grizzlikov, loathes Darkwing and his unpredictable methods; Grizzlikov treats his agency's manual as if it were his Bible. (By contrast, Darkwing's immediate supervisor is too impressed by Darkwing's excellent track record to [[BunnyEarsLawyer object to his unorthodox techniques]].) Subverted in "The Darkwing Squad", in which SHUSH retrains a team of agents to fight crime in Darkwing's anarchic style ... and the squad eventually triumphs by following the book. |
| 430 | * ''WesternAnimation/{{Dilbert}}'''s [[MeaningfulName Bob Bastard]], the test engineer who NEVER aproves anything, and enjoys destroying people's dreams and emotionally and financially abusing women. |
| 431 | * Vice-Principal Bone from ''WesternAnimation/{{Doug}}'' was one of these characters. He had a seemingly never-ending list of rules for student behavior that made it almost impossible to do anything that wasn't against the rules somehow. In one episode, Doug daydreams of himself as his superhero alter-ego Quailman, who battles "The Rulemeister", a ControlFreak that looks and sounds exactly like Mr. Bone, and who is eventually defeated by being trapped in his own rules. Mr. Bone catches him and grabs his comic away, causing Doug to point out that "No grabbing other people's comic books" is one of his rules, and manages to convince Mr. Bone to let him and the other kids out of detention. In another episode, Quailman battles the "Robo-Bones", robot versions of Mr. Bone. Rather than trapping Bone with his own rules as in the previous example, Doug uses the "Secret Dream" version of escape by convincing the Robo-Bones to become a professional yodeling troupe. |
| 432 | * An example of this being used for good in ''WesternAnimation/EarthWormJim'', where one of these foils 'The thing that dares not speak its name''s plan to destroy the universe by making it fill out paperwork first. Paperwork so long that it would take a billion years to fill out. And after that, it turns out it was given the wrong paperwork! |
| 433 | * The first appearance of the Pixies on ''WesternAnimation/TheFairlyOddparents'' had them taking over Fairy World. They immediately implemented a long paperwork system for granting wishes that it was nearly impossible to get any wish approved. They're so into bureaucracy that [[HoistByHisOwnPetard it's often their downfall]]. |
| 434 | * ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'': |
| 435 | ** Hermes Conrad and various other agents of the Central Bureaucracy. They even have a neat pseudo-VillainSong about it in "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back". |
| 436 | --->'''Hermes''': ''[singing]'' And they said, "This boy's born to be a bureaucrat / Born to be all obsessive and snotty" / I made my friends and relations file long applications / To get into my tenth birthday party. |
| 437 | ** Nicely summed up by the leader of the Central Bureaucracy in this line: |
| 438 | --->'''Number 1.0''': Hermes, you are ''technically'' correct. The '''best kind''' of correct! |
| 439 | * As the Chief Officer of Rules and Regulations, Shika of ''WesternAnimation/MaryokuYummy'' lives to enforce the rules, and nothing makes him happier than filling out forms. |
| 440 | * In ''WesternAnimation/MyLifeAsATeenageRobot'' Jenny is needed as the Skyway Patrol, the ''official'' global defense group, have to deal with literal mountains of paperwork in order to do virtually anything. They once try to arrest Jenny for her vigilantism, but are unable to do so because the necessary paperwork would take ''decades'' to fill out. It's little wonder Nora Wakeman retired from Skyway Patrol and began working on creating her daughter. Even Brad realized that being a Skyway Patrol Officer in "Last Action Zero" wasn't all that cracked up to be, especially when basic duties, such as making arrests are completely mummified in red tape and paperwork in triplicate. |
| 441 | * Disney's ''WesternAnimation/{{Recess}}'' has Menlo, who's en route to becoming one of these guys and has already, through unfailing adherence to the rules, attained a highly trusted position within the school. An example of how strict he is: Gus and Mikey were standing in line with their permission slips for an excursion, but when they finally got to the front of the line, Menlo pointed out it was a few seconds past the due time, and got angry when they suggested still taking the slips. He seemed to find the fact that there was a line irrelevant. In one episode [[VillainTeamUp he teams up with]] [[TheInformant Randall]], and together they basically [[WhosLaughingNow take over the entire playground]] through blackmail, because there's always ''some'' rule Menlo knows everyone or one of their friends is actually breaking it. The gang in general reacts quite negatively toward his legalism, although in one episode they are shocked to discover that [[spoiler:Menlo and T.J. used to be inseparable best friends, but grew apart, some time before the gang got started -- and both still have fond feelings for each other, despite the rivalry. It gives a bit of humanity to the kid.]] |
| 442 | * The ''WesternAnimation/SheepInTheBigCity'' episode "Baah-dern Times" had Lisa Rental sing a musical number about how she'd like to grow up to be a bureaucrat because she'd be paid to make things frustrating and miserable for other people. |
| 443 | * ''WesternAnimation/StanLeesSuperheroKindergarten'' has Principal Harriet Shoutzalot, who is suspicious of Arnold and his class and is always trying to figure out their secrets. |
| 444 | [[/folder]] |
| 445 | |
| 446 | !!Examples of life-and-death matters: |
| 447 | [[folder:Anime and Manga]] |
| 448 | * The {{Jerkass}} Prime Minister from ''Manga/{{Coppelion}}'' refuses to even send ''one'' rescue helicopter to the contaminated zone to rescue the survivors... all because he is scheduled to participate in an upcoming national conference and needed the entire JSDF's arsenal to showcase their might. Ibara isn't pleased and chews him out over a phone for his SkewedPriorities. |
| 449 | [[/folder]] |
| 450 | |
| 451 | [[folder:Comic Books]] |
| 452 | * ''ComicBook/CaptainAmerica'': The Commission of Super-Human Activities, who not incidentally have aforementioned Henry Gyrich among their number, usually are just regular obstructive. In "The Captain", they find Steve Rogers technically owes them back-pay. Steve resigns on grounds of conscience, and they replace him with John Walker. Fine enough, but Gyrich insists that if Steve continues superheroing, the CSA strip the Avengers of ''any'' ability to operate on American soil. He's soon outdone by the CSA's head, who as the story goes on becomes increasingly maniacal, trying to have Steve arrested for sedition (uh) and treason (breaking into the White House to save the President from being turned into a snake man. Long story), and even the other commissioners think he's being nuts. Turns out the man is working for the Red Skull as part of a plot to ruin Cap's legacy. Once he's caught out, the Skull has him killed to tie up loose ends. |
| 453 | * ''ComicBook/SonicTheHedgehogArchieComics'': |
| 454 | ** The Council of Acorn combine this with NotSoOmniscientCouncilOfBickering. While they mean well, more often than not they prevent the Freedom Fighters from actually saving the day, such as initially refusing to let them stop [[EvilTwin Scourge and the Suppression Squad]] from invading Mobius in favor on focusing their efforts on Eggman, trying Sally for treason when she and the others do so anyway, letting [[EvilSorcerer Ixis Naugus]] become king while dismissing Sonic's warnings and annoyance, and voting to exile Nicole from New Mobotropolis because it was "[[ConvictedByPublicOpinion what the people wanted]]"; it eventually got to the point where Rotor [[ScrewThisImOuttaHere got sick of it]] and [[ResignInProtest left in outrage]]. |
| 455 | ** Hamlin Pig is one of the most blatant examples, mostly out of spite toward the Freedom Fighters for having made him a member of the rarely-used backup unit. He uses his position to attempt to make it hard for the Freedom Fighters to act, and is the only one to vote to punish Sally for leading an urgent mission against orders not to (though, granted, he likely wouldn't have been the only one if Sally hadn't threatened to become an Obstructive Bureaucrat herself). |
| 456 | * ''ComicBook/UltimateXMen'': Wraith felt that Ross was one because he wanted to shut down Weapon X. So, of course, he tried to kill him. |
| 457 | [[/folder]] |
| 458 | |
| 459 | [[folder:Fan Works]] |
| 460 | * ''Fanfic/AndrogyninjasADoseOfVenom'': Sakura runs into this when she discovers that somebody is falsely reporting that she's already claimed her accolated equipment before she can actually procure it. Her complaints about this are repeatedly dismissed, forcing her to make due with her diminishing stock of what she already has on hand. |
| 461 | * ''Fanfic/TheChaoticMasters'': |
| 462 | ** The Titans dismiss Captain Black's superiors as red tape-wielding stereotypes, who have inadvertently kept them and the Justice League in the dark about the threats that the Chans have faced due to refusing to pass along word of them without definite proof. |
| 463 | ** The Chaotic Masters and their worshippers have this view of the Dragon Council, seeing them as self-righteous jerks who stick their nose into any magical business and enforce TheMasquerade even for magic practitioners who don't want to keep things secret. |
| 464 | * ''Manga/Evangelion303'': The group of politicians tasked with overseeing the Evangelion project is always complaining about funding, the march of the program... and some of them would love an excuse for shutting it down. To be fair, their concerns are not without merit: |
| 465 | -->"Ernie, could you stop being a politician for one fucking minute? We don't have time for this kind of back and forth wishy-washy spend-then-cancel bureaucracy!"\ |
| 466 | "You've been using that bullshit for over a year now! You think you're not a politician? We were put here to do the bidding of those who elected us! Why are you guys so obsessed with spending money we don't have?" |
| 467 | * ''Fanfic/{{HERZ}}'': Every so often HERZ -the organization the main cast works for- has to deal with UN Inspectors and Auditors overseeing them, examining their accounts and records and poking their noses where they do not belong. |
| 468 | * ''Fanfic/KyoshiRising''; the magistrate's assistant Kyoshi meets early in her journey, who ignoring Kyoshi's attempts to help the town with a giant spirit monster even after she reveals she's [[TheChosenOne the Avatar]]. The dockmaster in Taizhou has the temperament of an Obstructive Bureaucrat, but is more of a BeleagueredBureaucrat. |
| 469 | * In ''Fanfic/MegaManReawakened'', General Yancey imposes a strict time limit on Project Gamma's completion, and he threatens to have the whole thing scrapped if it isn't done in time. |
| 470 | * ''Fanfic/{{Quicken}}'': When Emma is looking for her sister, she goes to her college. Unfortunately a RA refused to let her see Anne or tell her if her sister was even there. |
| 471 | * ''Fanfic/ThereWasOnceAnAvengerFromKrypton'': The World Security Council's response to Vilgax's invasion of Arcadia Oaks is to have the National Guard quarantine the area and force the Avengers to handle it themselves. When Coulson points out that this is the exact opposite of their reaction to the Battle of New York (where they wanted to sideline the Avengers and rely on conventional forces), Hill notes that it's probably retaliation to the team and Fury's habit of defying their authority. |
| 472 | [[/folder]] |
| 473 | |
| 474 | [[folder:Films -- Live-Action]] |
| 475 | * The titular group from ''Film/TheAdjustmentBureau'', though not in the usual sense. Their job is to essentially [[RailRoading railroad people]] into doing whatever [[BecauseDestinySaysSo destiny demands]], and to hell with whatever people themselves want or what has to be "adjusted" to do it. However it should be noted that, despite all this and being the antagonists of the film, they're not evil or even all that unreasonable. |
| 476 | * The ''Franchise/{{Alien}}'' franchise. |
| 477 | ** ''Film/{{Alien}}''. Ellen Ripley quotes "24 hours for decontamination" regulations rather than allow Kane to enter the ''Nostromo'' for treatment. Of course, she turns out to be right, but by making her appear unsympathetic the movie conceals her eventual role as the hero. |
| 478 | ** A more straight-up application of the trope is the board of inquiry in ''Film/{{Aliens}}''. Again this is used to mislead the audience, as the only member who expresses sympathy towards Ripley is Carter Burke, hiding [[spoiler:his role as the villain.]] |
| 479 | ** Mr. Andrews in ''Film/{{Alien 3}}''. When Ripley tells him about the Alien he won't help her and confines her to sickbay, because he finds her story very implausible and he has a much simpler explanation for the recent deaths. |
| 480 | * ''Film/DirtyHarry'' had one per film. Not as evident in the first film, where he is mostly just chewed out for his methods, Lt. Briggs in ''Film/MagnumForce'' [[spoiler: is the BigBad]], Captain [=McKay=] in ''Film/TheEnforcer'' is portrayed as completely incompetent (leading to an ending where he gives in to the terrorists' demands if they release the mayor ''after'' Harry has dealt with them) and in later films, they want him to outright retire. |
| 481 | * In ''Film/DontLookUp'', President Orleans' response to being told that an Everest-sized comet is on a collision course with Earth is to classify the information and publicly discredit its discoverers and her own [=NASA=] official when they (naturally) try to inform the public anyway. She later has Kate, its discoverer, abducted by the [=FBI=] and forced to sign a gag order when she tries again, successfully co-opts Dr. Mindy for a time, but then gives him the same treatment when he snaps and rails against her risky decision to let a private company mine the comet into pieces. (Although it's presented in a BlackComedy way, it's still deathly serious [[spoiler:and her selfish obstruction ultimately dooms the planet]].) |
| 482 | * ''Film/{{Oblivion 2013}}'': [[spoiler:Victoria is a much more obedient to mission control than Jack. She refuses to go down to the planet with him, and believes everything mission control says - even ratting him out by saying they are no longer a good team.]] |
| 483 | * In ''Film/PacificRim'' the world council shelves the Jaeger project after the {{Kaiju}} start adapting, instead choosing to focus on the coastal wall project. When a Kaiju effortlessly destroys one such wall, riots ensue. |
| 484 | * ''Film/ThePhantomMenace'': Palpatine suggests apathetic politicians rule the Republic with Chancellor Valorum as their puppet, and they are the reason that rather than doing anything about the Naboo situation, the Senate has merely had meetings. |
| 485 | [[/folder]] |
| 486 | |
| 487 | [[folder:Literature]] |
| 488 | * Creator/DanAbnett: |
| 489 | ** In the Literature/GauntsGhosts novel ''Necropolis'', an official tries to stop [[PowderKegCrowd Soric and his fellow refugees]] from seeking shelter and medical attention when they are actually being shelled. When one of his guards shoots one of the refugees, they charge and kill them to get through. |
| 490 | --->"Do you understand what a State of Emergency is, old man?" said Bownome.\ |
| 491 | "Understand? I'm [[FutureSlang gakking]] living it!" Soric blurted. |
| 492 | ** In ''Sabbat Martyr'', an official objects to Criid's opening an abandoned building to shelter {{children|AreInnocent}} in the cold. She refuses to evict them. |
| 493 | ** In the same novel, the Ghosts were barred from using their flamers by the planetary government. This was partly because most of the city was built out of wood, but mostly because the use of flamers was reserved for their own elite forces. |
| 494 | ** It's ''The Guns of Tanith'' that [[SerialEscalation escalates this]] as the book opens to a pair of Ghost sergeants trying to requisition the proper ammo, since the lagsun packs they were issued were the wrong size, but the munitorum adept's only response is "Size 5 is the standard pattern". The exchange ends with one of the Ghosts threatening to kill the adept if he says "standard pattern" one more time. |
| 495 | * As with in the humorous section, the New Testament of ''Literature/TheBible'' frequently painted the Pharisees as antagonists in this vein. It seems that one of Jesus's main purposes in coming back, aside from His sacrifice, was to clarify some very literal and twisted interpretations of Old Testament commandments. The Pharisees tried several times to catch Him in a logical contradiction using Hebraic code. |
| 496 | * Vice-Chancellor Nesselrode is portrayed as this in ''Literature/TheDeathOfTheVazirMukhtar''; he seems more funny at first, but his decisions, based on the high political considerations of avoiding all and any possible turbulence, could easily be fatal for some of his subordinates ([[spoiler: and end up being fatal for the Russian mission in Persia]]). |
| 497 | * In Creator/TerryPratchett's ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'': |
| 498 | ** In ''Literature/{{Night Watch|Discworld}}'', Vimes refused to hand over people to the [[SecretPolice Unmentionables]] without a receipt. And proof of ID from the man who signed it. He insists that it is regulations -- though regulations that had not been enforced before due to watchmen being scared. This stops them for a while, as no member of the Unmentionables wants to have his name connected to what they do to people. And asking for proof of ID made sense since the Unmentionable who initially signed for the prisoners did so with the name "Henry the Hamster" and Vimes, quite reasonably, pointed out that he'd look a bit silly if he went back to his captain with that on a receipt. |
| 499 | ** In ''Literature/MenAtArms'', Mayonnaise Quirke of the Day Watch has completely screwed things up, leading to a riot. When a Day Watch officer arrives at the Watch House for help, Carrot first points out they've been relieved of duty, and then asks him a series of questions. Based on the answers he announces that, according to the Laws and Ordinances of Ankh-Morpork, the "Citizen's Militia" is now in control of ''everything''. The Citizen's Militia consists of the Night Watch and whoever else they felt like recruiting. |
| 500 | ** A. E. Pessimal in ''Literature/{{Thud}}'' who has been sent to audit the Watch and comes up with things like "Two officers were patrolling a street where no crimes were committed. How is this a good use of resources?" and, somewhat more justifiably "What is the point of Corporal Nobbs?" Vimes tries to wind him up by saying that if he wants to know how the Watch operates he should experience it, and putting him in the middle of a riot, and is rather taken aback when Pessimal enthusiastically gets involved and chooses to remain in the Watch. By ''Literature/{{Snuff}}'' he's become the Watch's forensic accountant, as long as every so often he gets to wear a helmet and walk a beat. |
| 501 | * The ''Literature/SergeStorms'' novel ''Florida Roadkill'' has an insurance exec whose job is to block insurance claims, especially if they're actually covered by the client's policy. This gets him a KarmicDeath when he gets shot, and when he goes to the hospital, the call to his insurance company for payment regarding the treatment gets directed to his office. |
| 502 | * Cornelius Fudge of ''Literature/HarryPotter'' proves to be this. He primarily acts as headpiece for the Ministry with recommendations from Malfoy and other respected individuals deciding his actions rather than his own opinions. However, unlike his Undersecretary who is decidedly evil, Fudge simply wants to stay in control, and he seems to know that any disturbance in the peace would see him quickly ousted. As such, he refused to review the case of Sirius Black or accept Voldemort's return in order to maintain the status quo. |
| 503 | * The British Navy in the ''Literature/HoratioHornblower'' books is sometimes worse than Napoleon. In ''Lieutenant Hornblower'', they rescind his unconfirmed promotion due to the Peace of Amiens and then put him under ''complete'' pay stoppage until he's "repaid" the commander's salary he drew during that time--while he's furloughed in London in the middle of winter. He has to pawn most of his possessions and become a professional whist player to survive. In ''Hotspur'', the supplies office gets on his case for using what they deem is too much shot, powder, and cordage while at serious blockade work for months, but Cornwallis fortunately has his back there. |
| 504 | * ''Literature/IRobot'': In "The Evitable Conflict", Stephen Byerley, Coordinator of the Earth, suspects someone is sabotaging the Machines, powerful robots that advice the best decision to humanity, ''endangering the peace and stability of the entire planet''. He asks for help investigating this from the four Vice Co ordinators of the four regions in that Earth is divided. All dismiss the idea and none helps Byerley, insisting they are doing their jobs well. Justified, because [[spoiler: The Machines already control humanity and they will never let anyone capable of initiating an investigation have the job]]. |
| 505 | -->"They all minimize the state of affairs." [Byerley's] voice was low. "Is it not easy to imagine that they all laugh at me?" |
| 506 | * In Creator/BernardCornwell's ''Literature/{{Sharpe}}'s Triumph'', when [=McCandless=] is handed a warrant for Sharpe's arrest, he asks how he spells his name -- with or without a "e" -- tampers with the warrant so that it says "Sharp" and refuses to hand over the wrong man. When Hakeswill says the ink ran, he loftily declares that obviously it was corrected. |
| 507 | * ''The Small Back Room'' the novel (later film) by Nigel Balchin details the internal struggles of a team of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII scientists/public servants who are the embodiment of this trope. The team spends its time working on an anti-tank weapon that is theoretically efficient but has little practical field value. The protagonist is a decent yet weak man who fails to take the tough steps needed to improve matters, while his ManipulativeBastard friend delights in deposing those whom he's deemed incompetent, but ends up putting an even more incompetent man in charge of the team. |
| 508 | * In ''Literature/StarTrekGemworld'', there's Tangre Bertoran, and indeed most of the Jeptah (as the government elite maintaining Gemworld's environment are called). In contrast to most of the “normal” folk encountered on Gemworld (who tend to be pleasant and welcoming enough), the Jeptah -- and Bertoran in particular -- resent the presence of anyone trying to actually help rather than blindly follow the rules, and complicate plans to save the planet considerably. |
| 509 | * ''Franchise/StarWars'': |
| 510 | ** ''Franchise/StarWarsExpandedUniverse'': |
| 511 | *** ''[[Literature/StarWarsAhsoka Ahsoka]]'' has an Imperial broker named Jenneth Pilar, who sends the Empire to out-of-the-way moon Raada so it can grow a plant used in nutritional supplements that renders the soil barren for years afterward, without any concern for the inhabitants that will be stuck there after the Empire is gone. He ends up having to flee Imperial service after things go pear-shaped. |
| 512 | ** ''Franchise/StarWarsLegends'': |
| 513 | *** In the ''Literature/XWingSeries'' Admiral Ackbar assigns a droid called M-3PO (aka Emtrey) to the squadron at the behest of General Cracken in order to ensure that Captain Celchu is not a ManchurianAgent after escaping Imperial captivity. Emtrey has programming and an override mode installed that make him a [[HoneyTrap very tempting tool]] for such agents. Part of his abilities are an ability to work around obstructive bureacrats to get Rogue Squadron the equipment they need, and to wheel and deal to obtain goods. Even after the [[TheMole real mole]] is exposed and the override mode is removed, Emtrey still has some of the requisition programming and is still able to function as a requisition specialist for the unit. |
| 514 | *** The Galactic Federation of Free Alliances military starts having supply issues due to obstructive bureaucrats. Jacen Solo solves the problem by sending a requisition officer who had inflicted faulty turbolaser equipment on the military to inspect the equipment of a front line unit having a lot of trouble with misfires due to the faulty equipment. |
| 515 | * ''Literature/TortallUniverse'': Sir Lionel of Trebond from the second ''Literature/BekaCooper'' book. He's the Lord Provost of Port Caynn (DaChief, in other words), but when Beka and Goodwin arrive to investigate the colemongering he actually forbids them from doing any other policework. Nor does he allow his own officers to interfere much with all the crime a port city can generate. After [[BigBad Pearl Skinner]] threatened his family, he's too scared of her retribution to curb her activities. |
| 516 | * In [[http://parahumans.wordpress.com/2013/05/25/drone-23-1/ Chapter 23.1]] of ''Literature/{{Worm}}'', Glenn Chambers, [[SlaveToPR Chief of Image]] for the PRT (which is in charge of all U.S. government superheroes), requires [[spoiler:Weaver to use butterflies]] when fighting criminals instead of anything effective. When she tries to talk him out of the restriction in [[http://parahumans.wordpress.com/2013/05/30/drone-23-3/ Chapter 23.3]], he refuses on the grounds that [[spoiler:[[SubvertedTrope she needs to prove that she's capable of restraining herself]] given the way she [[UnstoppableRage flipped out and killed Alexandria and Director Tagg]]]]. |
| 517 | * Near the end of ''Series/TheXFiles'' novel ''Ground Zero'' by Kevin J. Anderson, Mulder, Scully and four civilians are stranded on a boat far out in the Pacific Ocean. Mulder tries to call for help on his cell phone, finally reaching a tracking station whose operator tells him to get off the line because this is a restricted number. Even when Mulder says that he's making an emergency distress call, the operator tells him that he shouldn't be on this frequency and to "try the appropriate contact numbers." Mulder then suggests that they send someone out to arrest him for misusing the number. The tracking station does eventually send help, but still... |
| 518 | [[/folder]] |
| 519 | |
| 520 | [[folder:Live-Action TV]] |
| 521 | * On ''C.H.A.O.S'' Director Higgins is this to the ODS team and his goal is to have the ODS team disbanded. His obstruction can result in someone dying or a dangerous criminal or terrorist getting away. However, his actions are often justified by the fact that acting on unconfirmed intelligence from dubious sources can result in the deaths of innocents and a PR nightmare for the CIA. Once he approves a mission he will give it his full support and do everything he can to keep his agents safe. |
| 522 | * ''Series/DoctorWho'': [[Recap/DoctorWho2019NYSResolution "Resolution"]] presents us with Polly, telephone operator with the UK Security Helpline, which is taking calls while UNIT's operations are suspended pending a budgetary review. When the Doctor talks to her on the phone trying to get help because [[spoiler:there's a Dalek on the loose]], she is completely useless and utterly fails to realize that there is, in fact, a very real and extremely serious situation going on. |
| 523 | * ''Series/TheGlades'': The hospital insurance administrator in "A Perfect Storm". She tries to stop Sanchez connecting up a generator to the blacked-out hospital during a hurricane. Later she is targeted by a spree killer because she was the one who cut off his meds when his insurance ran out, causing him to suffer a psychotic break. |
| 524 | * In [[Recap/TheGoodPlaceS3E10TheBookOfDougs an episode]] in season 3 of ''Series/TheGoodPlace'', [[spoiler:the titular version of heaven is run by [[CelestialBureaucracy the committee]], bureaucrats who never break the rules, even if it's the right thing to do. When it is revealed to them that [[EasyRoadToHell no one has gotten into the good place in half a millennium]] because of how in modern society most choices lead to more unintended bad outcomes than intended good ones, the most urgent rule-abiding action they can take is form an investigational team which will take 400 years. They are aware this issue is incredibly urgent and that billions of good people will suffer in hell due to their slow actions but [[LawfulStupid choose to remain bound by their rules no matter what]].]] |
| 525 | * In ''Series/KolchakTheNightStalker'', pretty much every cop and authority figure Kolchak ran into was one of these, stonewalling his investigation and refusing to acknowledge anything supernatural was going on. A few of them actually turned out to be corrupt and in the know about whatever monster was on the loose, but covering it up for their own reasons. |
| 526 | %%* Just about every person who outranked Kirk in ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' was this. |
| 527 | * Vice Admiral Alynna Nechayev is presented this way in most of her appearances on ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' and ''[[Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine DS9]]''. Her involvement in the Cardassian [=DMZ=] crisis, if not actually outright caused by her, certainly aggravated the situation |
| 528 | ** The Sheliak, a one-episode race, act as this. The ''claim'' is that their particular mindset is simply fixated on the letter of agreements, but they very conveniently refuse to invoke the negotiation clause of their treaty with the Federation when it would cause minor delays for them and potentially allow ''fifteen thousand humans'' to be evacuated. Picard's ultimate response is to turn it right back at them: [[spoiler: the negotiation clause requires both parties to agree, but a single party can invoke the third party arbitration clause. Picard does so and names a species that is in a months-long hibernation cycle as the arbitrators, meaning the delay would be ''much'' longer than the one he had asked for]]. The Sheliak quickly change their tune. |
| 529 | [[/folder]] |
| 530 | |
| 531 | [[folder:Video Games]] |
| 532 | * In ''VideoGame/{{Battleborn}}'', this is one of the major things if not the major thing obstructing the Peacekeepers from doing their job properly and to the fullest. Rather than get things done right away, the UPR's higher ups would rather [[SkewedPriorities follow protocol even in the dire state the universe is in]]. This is best seen in the second and third chapters of the web motioncomic where the UPR's bureaucracy causes problems such as not giving supplies immediately, and almost killing Rath and Ambra in the respective chapters. |
| 533 | * Purchase the Democracy perk in ''[[VideoGame/{{Civilization}} Civilization Revolution]]'' and your production and culture increase greatly, but at the cost of your Congress vetoing you whenever you try to break peace treaties or refuse peace offers from rival civs. The other civs understand this limitation, and will liberally abuse it by attacking and capturing one of your cities, quickly offering you peace so you can't do anything about it, and repeating the process from there. And Congress never lets you refuse the peace offer or launch a counter-attack to reclaim your city, [[ArtificialStupidity no matter how obvious it is that you're being played.]] |
| 534 | * ''VideoGame/DawnOfWar 2'': When the Space Marines arrive to the industrial planet Meridian and request access to a huge productional facility called Angel Forge, the planetary adminitrator Elena Derosa replies that the use of Forge is booked years in advance, and even then, only a fraction of its capacity will be available. When the bewildered Marines explain, that the Forge is needed urgently to make weapons against the Tyranid Fleet that threatens the entire sector, Derosa haughtily retorts that no Tyranid presence was registered on Meridian (implying that the rest of the sector can go frag itself). However, it turns out she wasn't entirely at fault. The lack of intelligence on Tyranids was due to the meddling from the Eldar, and Derosa was instructed to stall the Marines by the treacherous planetary governor. Once both those issues are resolved, she becomes much more helpful. |
| 535 | * ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim'': |
| 536 | ** One particularly vicious and procedure-oriented Imperial captain hears one of her subordinates protesting that one of the traitorous rebels being sent to the block for execution is not on the list of Stormcloak rebels sentenced to death. She promptly shouts him down, since the prisoner is in that cart, so that prisoner is going to the block, and nothing is stopping this execution [[spoiler: save for the dragon-god showing up a few minutes later]]. Said prisoner is ''you'', the player-character. It is entirely possible after you escape [[RoaringRampageOfRevenge to join up with the Stormcloaks and proceed to utterly destroy the entire Imperial presence in Skyrim out of raw fury at your near-experience with a Viking crewcut]]... [[DisproportionateRetribution because one jerk didn't double-check the list]]. |
| 537 | ** Should you favor the Stormcloaks during your escape[[note]]By following Ralof, the same Stormcloak official who you shared the cart ride with at the first minutes of the game, inside the fort.[[/note]], the player can get retribution against said Captain, who's one of the enemy [=NPCs=] spawned inside said fort, right at the doors. No such chance is given if the player follows Hadvar, the Imperial officer, instead. This, of course, shifted ''many'' players in favor of the Stormcloaks. |
| 538 | * ''VideoGame/{{Halo 4}}'' has [[spoiler:Captain Andrew Del Rio. When his ship is dragged into a Forerunner Shield World, his first impulse is to do whatever it takes to flee. Despite the fact that the Master Chief warns him about the danger posed by the Didact, Del Rio focuses on leaving Requiem. While he has some legitimate concerns (regarding Cortana's Rampancy), he is completely dismissive of a soldier whose entire life was defined by protecting humanity (going so far as to flippantly respond to the Chief asking for intel about a combat zone he was being sent to), as well as his own officers. His refusal to try and interdict the Didact allows the Forerunner to retrieve the Composer and wipe out all life in the city of New Phoenix with it, before the Master Chief managed to stop him. Del Rio, meanwhile, ended up thrown in the brig for his treatment of the Chief.]] |
| 539 | * ZigZagged in ''VideoGame/KnightsOfTheOldRepublic'' FanGame ''VideoGame/TheJediMasters''. General Revan appears before the Galactic Senate to warn them about the [[ForeverWar revenge of the Sith]], and initially appears to be an IgnoredExpert as the Senators are skeptical of his claims ([[HeelFaceRevolvingDoor especially since he was once Sith himself]]). However, [[ReasonableAuthorityFigure Supreme Chancellor Cressa]] explains that while the galactic constitution forbids him from mobilizing the troops without evidence of a threat, he'll allow a flagship out to find the Sith and allow them to prepare for battle. [[spoiler:Unfortunately, by the time they find the Sith they're already prepared for an invasion of Coruscant. [[BigBad Kannos]] then strolls right onto the Senate floor and delivers a TheReasonYouSuckSpeech blaming the senators for dragging their feet through every recent galactic conflict before having his {{mooks}} butcher them all.]] |
| 540 | * ''Franchise/MassEffect'' |
| 541 | ** Donnel Udina serves this role to Shepard, [[SlaveToPR caring only for looking good politically]]. He gets a special mention just for nearly causing the destruction of the universe in the first game [[spoiler:before JumpingOffTheSlipperySlope in the third]]. |
| 542 | ** There's also [[OverlyLongName Rannadril Ghan Swa Fulsoom Karaten Narr Eadi Bel Anoleis]], who as the administrator of Port Hanshan on Noveria, sits halfway between this and CorruptCorporateExecutive. Fortunately, you can acquire evidence of his corruption (demanding large kickbacks from corporate interests who want to operate on Noveria to the point that it is damaging profits for Noveria as a whole) and get him arrested or killed. Amusingly you can bypass his entire subplot by exploiting this trope and turning an unrelated smuggler in to him and he'll handle the red tape as the reward. |
| 543 | ** Shepard can threaten to get Illium's own obstructive bureaucracy involved in ''VideoGame/MassEffect2'' when trying to convince a Synthetic Insights representative to buy a contract for an [[InsistentTerminology "indentured servant"]]. The representative is ''extremely'' quick to take up the contract because they ''don't'' want the bureaucracy to get involved. |
| 544 | *** There's also a minor sidequest where you find a lost trinket with no monetary worth but significant sentimental value during Miranda's loyalty mission, and can return it to its owner, who gives you a fistful of money on the grounds that getting it back via the bureaucracy would have cost far more. |
| 545 | ** Councilor [[NoMereWindmill "We have dismissed that claim"]] Sparatus. The man seems to make it his mission in life to question everything Shepard says or does, regardless of how insane it makes him look... up until the third game (if he lives that long), where he's the first councillor to offer Shepard assistance. |
| 546 | ** The Citadel's bureaucracy in general. |
| 547 | ** Proving you just can't escape some things, ''VideoGame/MassEffectAndromeda'' has the acting head of the Andromeda Initiative, Jarunn Tann (acting because everyone above him died), and Director of Colonial Affairs Foster Addison. They're the people Ryder has to report to. Thankfully, [[WeAreStrugglingTogether they hate one another]], and they at least don't ''try'' to make Ryder's job harder than it needs to be often. Intentionally. Usually. Though they are both serious micromanagers, though ''unlike'' the Citadel council, they at least are willing to admit they were wrong. Well, sometimes. |
| 548 | * The first world of ''VideoGame/{{Obsidian}}'' plays with this trope to fit the fact that it's based on one of the main character's dreams. So much that ''the receptionist'' is as much of a bureaucrat as everybody else, and all of them are shown as [[TvHeadRobot TV-headed robots]] that only show the nose and mouth of a human. Their chief is withholding information about your partner Max, and you are asked to fix a literal BrokenBridge between you and the Chief's office, "through the proper channels"; but as you progress, the complexity of the tasks you have to do increases to the point that the facility's rules actually have to be broken to reach the Chief by the end. |
| 549 | * In ''VideoGame/StarCraftI'', Aldaris [[spoiler:sends a fleet to Char, the planet that Tassadar was stranded on. To arrest him for, in short; disobeying orders and not purifying the infected Terran planets, not returning to Aiur to be punished, demoted, and maybe executed; attempting to help his race and home world by allying with the Nerazim; whom the Conclave had exiled for "heretical powers born of darkness", and not returning to Aiur after his ship was destroyed and he was marooned. His military contingent (led by the player) defects to Tassadar on the spot when they finally hear this spelled out.]] The entire Conclave likely fits this trope, although Aldaris is the only Judicator you meet. Also, [[spoiler:the Confederacy when they arrested James Raynor for "destruction of Confederate property". The destroyed property? Infested Terran bases that were making more infested Terrans]]. The last example actually makes sense later on; [[spoiler:the real reason Raynor was arrested was for disrupting the progress of the Zerg on Mar Sara. The Confederacy ''wanted'' to let the Zerg run free as a sort of sick "weapons test"]]. |
| 550 | [[/folder]] |
| 551 | |
| 552 | [[folder:Webcomics]] |
| 553 | * ''Webcomic/QuentynQuinnSpaceRanger'': A series of trials deconstructs varying codes of conduct and harshly judges those responsible for mass death and destruction with the use of subtle laws and regulations that ended up causing no-win situations. |
| 554 | ** First off, the Captain Picard expy and his civilization get massive penalties to spatial travel and are sentenced to planetary rebuilding because they didn't save a planet with intelligent, non-advanced life over [[AlienNonInterferenceClause Prime Directive regulations.]] |
| 555 | ** Then 'Yoda' is charged with abducting children to be indoctrinated into a cult and assassinating a legally-elected ruler over 'religious differences'. |
| 556 | ** Finally, what seems like an OpenAndShutCase of a space pilot spacing a young housewife because he wasn't prepared or determined to come up with a third option (spacecraft was carrying crucial medical supplies and there was too much weight, classic ColdEquation) ends up going the opposite way because of the bureaucracy forcing him to do it: The shuttle was a deathtrap because of "safety regulations" banning advanced technology or even redundant systems, the housewife stowed away because the local TSA was "cracking down" on space pirates, which made getting a shuttle too expensive, and she was able to get stow away because TSA TERRORIST REGULATIONS BANNED DOOR LOCKS (YES REALLY), and finally, while the pilot wasn't smart enough to just use the chair instead of the housewife, he did call for help and got a direct order to follow protocol and execute her. Fortunately, he got a slap on the wrist[[spoiler: because he didn't even try to kill her; he intended to kill himself instead, but she sacrificed herself first]], and she got paid enough for medical bills (she survived spacing herself) and her own ship. Additionally, the TSA was cracked down for designing this no-win situation intentionally to justify their "losing spacecraft constantly"; the plan was to decrease security, wait for hitchhikers to board one of the deathtraps, and then get their recently-promoted pilots to panic and do something stupid, thereby justifying the rumors of pirates (frame the pilot as a murderer, record the death of the housewife, or watch the ship blow itself to bits). |
| 557 | [[/folder]] |
| 558 | |
| 559 | [[folder:Western Animation]] |
| 560 | * ''WesternAnimation/CaptainPlanetAndThePlaneteers'': Subverted in "[[Recap/CaptainPlanetAndThePlaneteersS2E25FareTheeWhale Fare Thee Whale]]". The whaling commissioner seems to be one at first, but soon reveals that he also wishes to see Blight and Plunder stopped. It's just that he can't take any legal action without solid evidence. |
| 561 | [[/folder]] |
| 562 | |
| 563 | [[folder:Real Life]] |
| 564 | * PinkElephants being nowhere near as charming in RealLife as in fiction, Theodore Dalrymple tried to wrestle with them because of it: |
| 565 | -->''Indeed, I have known such patients dive through windows of the upper stories of my hospital in order, as they supposed, to escape the monsters, or enemies, who pursued or were attacking them. (Interestingly, it has proved difficult to persuade the hospital administration that such patients should be nursed on the ground floor as a precautionary measure, suggesting a subliminal death wish, though not on the part of the patients.)'' |
| 566 | * This was such a problem in the militaries of ancient China that Sun Tzu addressed it in ''Literature/{{The Art of War|SunTzu}}''. His favored tactic - which the annotations also ascribe to other great generals - was to ignore the bureaucracy, and if the bureaucrat became too obstructive, execute him. |
| 567 | * Best shown by the [[UsefulNotes/NewRomanLegions Italian military]] before and during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII (at the end of which they were finally put in their place. Those dealing with the military, at least), obstructive enough that only the threat of being shot as saboteurs could stop them for the duration of UsefulNotes/WorldWarI. Some of their best hits are: |
| 568 | ** Preventing the adoption of the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cei-Rigotti Cei-Rigotti]], an automatic rifle available in the year ''1900'' (the same decision happened everywhere the rifle was offered so they're not alone in this, but they managed to keep it out of service even after it was shown it was a good idea, forcing Italy to adopt the [[ReliablyUnreliableGuns infamously crappy Chauchat]]). |
| 569 | ** Messing with Italy's machine guns adoption, leading to paying in advance a large number of Vickers that were never delivered due to the start of UsefulNotes/WorldWarI, the adoption of the [[ReliablyUnreliableGuns infamously unreliable Fiat-Revelli mod. 1914]] over a better and less expensive design, and, between the two World Wars, the replacement of the Mod. 1914 with a number of machine guns that are almost as bad. |
| 570 | ** Giving every combat aircraft that wasn't a seaplane to the Royal Italian Air Force and putting in place a needlessly slow and complicated procedure for the Army and the Navy to call airstrikes on the enemy, fostering resentment against the Air Force (especially from the Navy, who wanted and needed their carriers). |
| 571 | ** After the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto Battle of Taranto]] proved that carriers were necessary, they blocked the construction and development of carrier-based aircraft again on the basis of technical issues that should have already been solved and the carriers' vulnerability in the confined waters of the Mediterranean Sea. [[JerkassHasAPoint While they had a point about the vulnerability of carriers]], the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cape_Matapan Battle of Cape Matapan]] ended with the crippling of a battleship and the loss of three cruisers and two destroyers ''precisely because there were no carrier-based aircraft to provide air cover and prevent the torpedoing of the battleship''. |
| 572 | ** Given that World War II era Italy was a fascist dictatorship, this may be the invoked [[GoodCounterpart heroic version]]... In a fraction of the cases at least. |
| 573 | * Following Stalin's [[ThePurge Great Purges]] in the '30s, the Soviet military implemented a system where all military orders had to be countersigned by the [[ThePoliticalOfficer Commissar]] attached to the officer's unit. Predictably, this hampered the effectiveness of the Soviet defense during the early stages of Operation Barbarossa. |
| 574 | * A positive example was [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Oldham_Kelsey Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey]] of the US FDA. In the early sixties, she was driving a major drug company nuts demanding more extensive scientific testing documentation about a profitable new drug called thalidomide. Despite the corporate pressure, Dr. Kelsey refused to give in and approve the drug for market because her personal alarm bells were going off at the info about the drug. Eventually, the drug's infamous birth defects were revealed to the world and Dr. Kelsey was hailed as a hero for largely sparing the USA the same tragedy. |
| 575 | * [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braxton_Bragg Braxton Bragg]], according to one apocryphal story, was this to such a degree that when he was serving as commander and quartermaster simultaneously, he was going so far as to submit requisition requests in his role as commander that he in his role as quartermaster felt duty bound to refuse, even when they were resubmitted with additional information that he of course already knew. It got to the point where he had to request mediation by the post commandant between himself and ''himself''. The post commandant's reply was, according to the story, a thing of legend. |
| 576 | -->''"My God, Mr. Bragg, you have quarreled with every officer in the army, and now you are quarreling with yourself!"'' |
| 577 | * A heroic example (at least for those opposed to absolutist monarchy) was William Lenthall, who in 1642 was Speaker of the English House of Commons when King Charles I personally led troops into the building to arrest five members accused of treason. Unable to pick them out by sight (as it happens, all five had escaped a short time earlier), he demanded that Lenthall tell him where they were. Confronted by his King, and a large contingent of armed men, Lenthall responded in almost excessively polite terms that Parliamentary rules forbade him from answering that question. The King, luckily for the Speaker, accepted defeat. |
| 578 | -->'''Lenthall:''' May it please your majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this House is pleased to direct me whose servant I am here; and I humbly beg your majesty's pardon that I cannot give any other answer than this to what your majesty is pleased to demand of me. |
| 579 | [[/folder]] |
| 580 | |
| 581 | !!Examples of the dark version: |
| 582 | |
| 583 | [[folder:Anime & Manga]] |
| 584 | * In ''Literature/ChivalryOfAFailedKnight'' Ikki's family put pressure on Hagun Academy to keep him from graduating. This resulted in new rules that require students to have a certain ranking in order to take classes, keeping Ikki from getting units and passing his first year. Luckily, Kurono Shinguuji became director and fired the obstructive staff. Turns out to be the real reason they were trying to stop Ikki was they want Ikki to fail as an example. They don't want other F-Ranked to try to succeed as unlike Ikki, they will fail causing unrest in the mage-knight system. |
| 585 | * Captain William Sutherland, a member of the Earth Forces' General Staff in ''Anime/MobileSuitGundamSEED''. During his initial appearances he interrogates the crew of the ''Archangel'' about the alleged improprieties in voyage, transfers the crewmembers he views as politically reliable to other assignments, than puts in motion a plan that will get not only the remaining ''Archangel'' crew, but also most of the Earth Forces' Eurasian allies killed off. He's later revealed to be TheDragon to [[FantasticRacism Blue Cosmos]] leader Muruta Azrael, and in his own banal, pencil-pushing way, a major mover and shaker behind the plan to [[FinalSolution exterminate]] all of the [[DesignerBabies Coordinators]]. A truly reprehensible, if dull personality. |
| 586 | * Cecilia Irene of ''Manga/MobileSuitGundamThePlotToAssassinateGihren'' is a cross between this and SexySecretary. An attractive, efficent young woman, Cecelia is [[TheEvilPrince Gihren Zabi]]'s keeper of the keys. She takes care of administrative trivia, acts as his liaison to the high-command, and arranges assassinations, political crackdowns, arrests, and other black operations that the brass won't touch. |
| 587 | [[/folder]] |
| 588 | |
| 589 | [[folder:Card Games]] |
| 590 | * In the ''Ravnica: City of Guilds'' set of ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'', the Azorius Senate can be seen as an entire guild of such characters. Just look at the cards [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=96929 Droning Bureaucrats]] and [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=97083 Minister of Impediments]]. Naturally, the guild's cards lend themselves well to stalling and control strategies. The Guild Charter of Ravnica explicitly states that the purpose of the Azorius Senate is to make the most complex and confusing laws possible. |
| 591 | --> "Where much work is done to make sure nothing is accomplished." - flavor text for Prahv, headquarters for the Azorius.\ |
| 592 | "...and you must also apply for an application license, file documents 136(iv) and 22-C and -D in triplicate, pay all requisite fees, request a ..." - flavor text for Droning Bureaucrats. |
| 593 | ** In 'Ravnica' fluff, Orzhov are shown to be more or less the same - a massive obfusticating bureaucracy, but this being black, partially staffed by the undead - adding a whole new meaning to the idiom ' corporate zombie '. |
| 594 | ** This is pretty much the modus operandi for a good portion of White's cards. Being the color of light and law, [[LawfulStupid (though not]] [[LightIsNotGood necessarily good,)]] White has no trouble using the Long Arm of The Law to strangle you to death. Of course, since the ''military'' falls under the technical definition of "law," they're just as likely to strangle you the old-fashioned way as well. |
| 595 | ** And the [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=3014 Aysen Bureaucrats]] from the ''Homelands'' set. |
| 596 | --->'''[[BigBad Baron Sengir]]:''' [[EvenEvilHasStandards All the tortures of my vault of horrors pale in comparison to dealing with those petty Bureaucrats.]]\ |
| 597 | '''Murat, Death Speaker:''' I would say that our Bureaucrats are no better than vipers - [[InsultToRocks but I shouldn't insult the vipers]]. |
| 598 | ** Parodied with Bureaucracy, an Unglued card where the bureaucratese is not only in the flavor text but in ''the entire text of what the card does''. |
| 599 | [[/folder]] |
| 600 | |
| 601 | [[folder:Comic Books]] |
| 602 | * In ''ComicBook/TheKillersOfKrypton'', C'Zal tries to hinder and dissuade ComicBook/{{Supergirl}} from checking the vault storing the most sensitive items in the Franchise/GreenLantern Archives -- where she might find evidence regarding Rogol Zaar and the Circle's dirty dealings -- by listing the massive amount of paperwork she must fill to be allowed access to the Tower. |
| 603 | * If there is ever a need for an insufferable jackass with a load of red tape in the ''Franchise/MarvelUniverse'', expect to see another appearance by Henry Peter Gyrich. He spent ''decades'' being a massive pain in the ass of superhero teams, particularly the Avengers, before CrisisCrossover events such as ''ComicBook/{{Civil War|2006}}'' and ''ComicBook/SecretInvasion'' pushed him into KnightTemplar territory. |
| 604 | ** He's even beyond that. His actions during ''ComicBook/AvengersTheInitiative'' (cloning a teenage soldier and using him to cover up a training death) clearly cross the MoralEventHorizon. He's the only comic book character where "basic human decency" is an InformedAttribute. Everyone goes out of their way to say he's not a villain, while Gyrich's actions would say otherwise. |
| 605 | ** In a related example, in the climactic issue of ''ComicBook/RomSpaceknight'', he attempts to use the weapon that just defeated the Dire Wraiths to ''strip every super-being on Earth'' of their powers. No country on Marvel Earth has any law forbidding the possession of super-powers (though the US had tried to pass similar legislations - and failed), and Gyrich has no judicial authority at all. |
| 606 | ** Hilariously enough, at one point, he was almost ''redeemed''. During the Creator/GeoffJohns run around '03, Gyrich even managed to have a somewhat friendly relationship with Falcon and the two of them working together discovered that the US Secretary of Defense was the Red Skull in disguise, which was instrumental in trying to fight the Skull's plan to cover the US in a flesh-eating virus and use the attack to start WWIII by blaming Wakanda for it. Aaaaaand then Gyrich promptly dropped off the MoralEventHorizon himself only about three years later with his aforementioned atrocities in the Initiative. |
| 607 | * ''ComicBook/TransformersMoreThanMeetsTheEye'': Prowl, who can and will use all manner of legal loopholes and red tape to get what he wants, while using it to make everyone else's life miserable. As can be imagined, the guy is all kinds of unpopular with everyone. He's bad enough that [[spoiler: when the Decepticons mind-controlled him]], ''none'' of Autobots noticed a change in his behavior. |
| 608 | [[/folder]] |
| 609 | |
| 610 | [[folder:Fan Works]] |
| 611 | * Yamamoto Genryusai Shigekuni is this to Ichigo in ''A Protector's Pride''. It leads to a war with Hell and Ichigo firmly distrusting of the Gotei 13. [[SelfFulfillingProphecy Something he wanted to avoid.]] |
| 612 | [[/folder]] |
| 613 | |
| 614 | [[folder:Films -- Animation]] |
| 615 | * Kent Mansley in ''WesternAnimation/TheIronGiant'' starts out as a humorous Obstructive Bureaucrat, but as his [[InspectorJavert obsession with finding the giant]] grows, he starts to venture into KnightTemplar territory, threatening to separate Hogarth from his mother and even suggesting nuking the town. When his recklessness leads to [[spoiler:a nuclear missile actually being launched toward the town]], his PatrioticFervor is quickly replaced with [[DirtyCoward outright cowardice]]: "Screw our country! I wanna ''live''!" |
| 616 | [[/folder]] |
| 617 | |
| 618 | [[folder:Films -- Live-Action]] |
| 619 | * A major theme in ''Film/{{Brazil}}''. The world is a consumer-driven, bureaucratic nightmare, with the Central Service being aggressively unhelpful to anyone who needs them and classifying anyone who tries to report a mistake as a terrorist. The hero, Sam Lowry, tries to defy this, and has daydreams about being a BadassBureaucrat. |
| 620 | * {{Implied}} and subverted by Harvey Dent in ''Film/TheDarkKnight''. He was said to have been an Internal Affairs agent investigating Lieutenant Gordon's men on corruption charges for political points before he became the District Attorney for Gotham City. However, [[spoiler:his suspicions are later found to be true when two men he investigated betrayed him and indirectly led him to becoming Two-Face]]. [[spoiler:He blames Gordon for what happened to him and for the death of Rachel Dawes.]] |
| 621 | * Creator/AkiraKurosawa's film ''Film/{{Ikiru}}'' is all about this trope. In it, a man who has been a city bureaucrat of the mindless drone variety discovers that he is dying of stomach cancer. Confronted with this, and the realization that his son is only concerned about his inheritance, he first tries hedonism to get some meaning out of life. When that fails, he decides to take up the concern of a group of locals -- cleaning a polluted pond and creating a park, a process that had been stalled into oblivion by the city bureaucracy giving citizens the workaround. Through ''[[TheDeterminator sheer determination]]'' and blatant disregard for the traditional means of operation of the Japanese bureaucracy, he gets the park built before he dies. At his funeral, his fellow Obstructive Bureaucrats get drunk and promise to take up his example and no longer ignore the cause of their citizens... [[IgnoredEpiphany and the final scene is of everyone doing just that]]. Well, almost everyone... |
| 622 | * Deconstructed in ''Film/{{Spectre}}''. C/Max Denbigh is a corrupt paper-shuffler who expresses ignorant views on issues like total surveillance, interferes in [=MI6=]'s operations, and advocates for the replacement of field agents like 007 with {{Attack Drone}}s. However, Film/JamesBond and M find him to be quite suspicious given he's in charge of the Centre for National Surveillance system, [[spoiler:which is really a Trojan horse for world domination for the titular criminal empire (of which C is a top-ranking member of) that they could use it to destroy their enemies. [[NearVillainVictory He nearly succeeds in getting it activated too]]. C is actually the Bond-verse's version of [[TheQuisling Kim Philby]]]]. |
| 623 | * Director Theodore Galloway, the President's Aide sent to oversee NEST in ''Film/TransformersRevengeOfTheFallen'' actively believes that the Autobots are to blame for the Decepticons attacking Earth, and attempts to force the Autobots to leave. When the Decepticons finally invade in force, instead of mobilizing NEST, the aide instead forces NEST to stand down and return to base, citing that standard operating procedure would be to try and negotiate a peaceful resolution with the enemy. Fortunately, they manage to get rid of him by shoving him out of a plane and dumping him in the middle of the Egyptian desert. Unfortunately they gave him a parachute first. Though considering that he's still the president's aide, that was probably for the best. |
| 624 | [[/folder]] |
| 625 | |
| 626 | [[folder:Literature]] |
| 627 | * Ark Sool in ''Literature/ArtemisFowl'', a ''painfully'' ByTheBookCop obsessed with regulations and incredibly rude about it to boot. His [[TyrantTakesTheHelm being promoted to commander]] is enough to get Holly Short to quit LEP for a while. |
| 628 | * In ''Literature/CatchTwentyTwo'' Doc Daneeka is listed as a crew member of a plane so he can get flight pay, although he hates flying. He's not actually aboard the plane [[spoiler:when it crashes. Still, since he is listed as being on it, he is marked down as dead. Even while he is standing right in front of people who have known him for months, they talk about what a shame it is he died in the crash. This does not turn out well for him]]. |
| 629 | * The Senators in ''Literature/CodexAlera'' are ''bad'' about this. They tend to focus on irrelevant personal feuds and power plays in the face of such things as an invasion of 60,000 {{Wolf M|an}}en or a HordeOfAlienLocusts, and one of them, Arnos, turns out to be an incompetent GeneralRipper when he's actually put in charge of something. Cheers could be heard from the readers when High Lord Placida bodily threw Senator Valerius out of a command meeting in the last book.[[note]](He'd been ranting about how Bernard was breaking the law by building the fortifications that were the last defense of the human race, for the curious.)[[/note]] |
| 630 | * Mr. Chesney in ''Literature/DarkLordOfDerkholm'' by Creator/DianaWynneJones is somewhere in between humorous and dark. Making an entire world act like a bad fantasy novel might seem like a funny concept, until you take into account the people who are tortured, raped or killed because of it. A more benevolent version of this trope is found in another Creator/DianaWynneJones book: Brother Lawrence in ''Literature/ASuddenWildMagic''. |
| 631 | * The ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'' universe features the Auditors, mysterious, cosmic beings who balance the books of reality. They would prefer an existence devoid of life, which makes things untidy, and intelligent thought, which is even less tidy and predictable. They have repeatedly attempted to eliminate the Discworld in an attempt to tidy up their books. |
| 632 | ** If they even ''think'' the world "I" or "me" or any other personal pronoun [[RuleOfThree too many times]] they vanish in a PuffOfLogic. They don't have names or even designations. They don't have faces. They never have any original thoughts. They have no feelings. Period. Abstract concepts cause them difficulties as the Auditors want to quantify everything that exists, but cannot isolate these concepts; at one point, they even disassembled a portrait to its component atoms in a vain attempt to locate the beauty. |
| 633 | *** In ''Literature/ThiefOfTime'' they were introduced to mortal delights. Unlike the description in the page header where this could free them of their evil, this doesn't. The shock of experiencing chocolate was enough to make them vanish. Their attempts to catalog everything their body experienced made them think so hard they forgot to exist. |
| 634 | ** The [[TheGrimReaper Death of the Discworld]] is, ironically, a recurring opponent of theirs; his job may be to take it away, but that doesn't stop Death from ''appreciating'' life. |
| 635 | ** One might point out cynically that by defeating the Auditors, Death is protecting his own job, since if there's no life anymore he's literally redundant. In fact the real reason is probably because the Auditors are trying to disrupt the natural order of things, of which Death is a part. |
| 636 | *** But while he is Bill Door he saves a little girl -- even though it's usually his job to take people's lives away. The implication is that while he would prefer to be saving people, he's attached to his job to make sure that no one ''worse'' does it. |
| 637 | *** Death has been shown as being the only remaining thing at the end of the universe, and then waiting for another one to inevitably form. His job is safe. |
| 638 | *** By the end of ''Reaper Man'', he makes it clear that he cares, first by asking the Ultimate Death, "What can the harvest hope for if not the care of the Reaper Man?", and, later, having installed fields of corn in his deathly estate, proceeds to carefully notice that they are ''not'' all alike, but are individuals each worth caring for. Of course, his waiting for a new universe occurs in an earlier book (he started out as an OmnicidalManiac) and this was his CharacterDevelopment book. |
| 639 | *** Indeed, saving the girl was part of the Character Development -- he had to be ''convinced to do it''. Since from his point of view, if it was her time to die, then it was time. As 'Death', his (official) concern had been making sure it happened 'at the appropriate time' (and didn't take too long to actually happen); as 'Bill Door', well... what's wrong with fighting for those few extra minutes? |
| 640 | ** In ''Literature/ReaperMan'', Miss Flitworth helps Death against them because he explains they are like revenuers -- which everyone knows are worse than death. (You only have to die once.) |
| 641 | * The ''Literature/ForgottenRealms'' novel ''Literature/AzureBonds'' shows how Lhaeo does his job, that is, prevents adventurers from bothering Elminster. How the scribe is supposed to intimidate and turn away people who used to take out dragons and worse? ''Riiight''... |
| 642 | --> '''Akabar''': Does anyone ever make it past this blizzard of parchment?\ |
| 643 | '''Lhaeo''': Well. There was a delegation from the Forest of Anauroch.\ |
| 644 | '''Akabar''': Anauroch is a desert, not a forest.\ |
| 645 | '''Lhaeo''': Well, now it is, yes. |
| 646 | * [[Characters/HarryPotter Dolores Umbridge]] in ''Literature/HarryPotterAndTheOrderOfThePhoenix'' is a SmugSnake who, initially appointed as Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, gradually works her way to a [[TyrantTakesTheHelm position of supreme power]] at Hogwarts... and eventually, assumes a great deal of control over the wizard government. Percy Weasley also became one of these, though he managed to [[HeelFaceTurn redeem himself]] at the end. |
| 647 | * The bureaucrats of the Solarian League in the ''Literature/HonorHarrington'' books. Unfortunately, they are the ones with the real decision-making power, thanks to the League's ''very'' poorly-written constitution. |
| 648 | * Taylor Mali wrote a poem called [[https://youtu.be/2qXgPfMGG8E "I'll Fight You For The Library"]], a series of four letters that details his 5th/6th grade English teacher Dr. Joseph D'Angelo finding out his reservation for the school library for class research had been unilaterally canceled by Dr. Richard Blackstone, Dean of Instruction for an administrative meeting -- [[{{Irony}} on facility utilization, no less]] -- and the library was the only place in the school large enough to hold it. Dr. D'Angelo barely hides his anger in his third letter, addressed to the Dean with a [[ADickInName "Dear Dick,"]] and ending with the threat of resigning in protest if his class isn't given back their reserved library time. The final letter addressed to the school district superintendent [[spoiler:details Dr. D'Angelo's gratitude to her for persuading Dr. Blackstone to hold his meeting elsewhere.]] |
| 649 | * In ''Literature/JamesBond'' book ''Literature/FromRussiaWithLove'', the author points out that all well-run organizations have at least one Obstructive Bureaucrat for ''the other workers'' to hate. He should have a job which isn't vital but affects everyone's day to day life. Something like being in charge of the office supplies. This is to unite them in at least one thing, that is they all agree this guy is a {{Jerkass}}. M makes sure to have one. |
| 650 | * Creator/FranzKafka [[TropeCodifier practically invented this trope]], most notably appearing in his novels ''Film/TheTrial'' and ''Literature/TheCastle''. Kafka manages to incorporate (obstructive bureaucratic) evil into the very fabric of reality. This was actually based on his day-job, where he did everything he could to not be one of these. He largely succeeded, doing more work before 2 PM than most people did all day. |
| 651 | * In ''Literature/MaxHavelaar'', the titular character's attempts to do something about the merciless exploitation of the Javanese peasants by their feudal overlords are thwarted at every step by those above, below, and next to him in the Dutch colonial bureaucracy. Some actually don't want him to succeed (it's easier to keep the peasants in check if the local feudal system remains in place, after all), but others are simply {{Dirty Coward}}s who don't want to step on any powerful toes -- especially not since Havelaar's similarly idealistic predecessor died in a [[MakeItLookLikeAnAccident terrible accident]]. (Note that [[RomanAClef all of this actually happened]] in RealLife.) |
| 652 | * In ''Literature/ThePhantomTollbooth'' one of the demons lurking in the Mountains of Ignorance is the Senses Taker. He stalls the heroes with reams of pointless paperwork, which he then uses to distract them by creating the ultimate sensory experience for each one. The Taker is defeated when Milo accidentally breaks open a package of laughter, since the only sense he can't take is humor. |
| 653 | * In his preface to the ''Literature/TheScrewtapeLetters'', Creator/CSLewis references the [[ThoseWackyNazis "Eichmann" bureaucrat type]] as a model for how he envisioned demons. |
| 654 | * ''Literature/SisterhoodSeries'' by Creator/FernMichaels: A major plotline that develops is how Martine Connor becomes the first female President of the United States, and she is trying to secure pardons to the Vigilantes. It proves to be more difficult than it appears. Here's why: ''Deadly Deals'' reveals her chief of staff, Aaron Lowry, who is TheNapoleon, had been obstructing the presidential pardons, supposedly because it would be political suicide for the president to even try it. She ends up firing him as well as charging him in ''Game Over'', because he turns out to be in bed with Baron Bell, a lawyer and VillainWithGoodPublicity who had been selling babies! ''Game Over'' also has the president obstructed by her advisors, who are more interested in their own agendas than in being loyal to her. At the urging of Henry "Hank" Jellicoe, head of Global Securities, she ends up throwing out many more people, and he supposedly pulls strings to replace them with people 100% loyal to her. She also has the pardons signed, and she paves the way to make it easy for the Vigilantes to sneak in and snatch the pardons! It's hard to be president! |
| 655 | * ''Literature/SmallerAndSmallerCircles'' has Attorney Arcinas, who siphons off resources from the Payatas murder cases and turns down the priests' assistance in order to go chasing after far more sensational crimes. Never mind that his own boss asked them to help him with the said murders -- UngratefulBastard, indeed. |
| 656 | ** In his defense, even Arcinas thinks (however mistakenly) that: a) the Director will agree with him that the Bureau can conclude the investigation without the priests' help; and b) the person he framed might actually be the murderer (although the former could just be Arcinas trying to throw the priests off or an attempt to win more glory for himself, and the latter is mostly Jerome's speculation). |
| 657 | ** Subverted by a few other government workers, the NBI Director most of all. The novel pointedly goes on to state that he is something of a rarity in the Philippine government, precisely because he is remarkably [[ConsummateProfessional competent and honest]]. In fact it is because of this that the Director found it difficult to get good appointments in a public sector crawling with Obstructive Bureaucrats, {{Corrupt Bureaucrat}}s, and [[{{Nepotism}} friends and family of incumbent politicians]]. |
| 658 | * ''Franchise/StarWarsLegends'': Borsk Fey'lya, to an astonishing degree. He was introduced in ''Literature/TheThrawnTrilogy'' as a Bothan council member of the New Republic, proudly flaunting his species' [[PlanetOfHats hat]] of [[ChronicBackstabbingDisorder backbiting political savvy]] (the other hats being [[CityOfSpies spying]], [[HollywoodHacking hacking]], and [[ArsonMurderAndLifeSaving great personal courage]]). He literally cannot imagine his fellow Council members as ''not'' out to get him just as much as he is out to get them; everyone who opposes him is his enemy. He will try and bar them at any given opportunity. And he's on the New Republic's side, shows no signs of going over to the enemy, and does not actually engineer events so much as take advantage of them, so he is never the outright ''enemy'', to several characters' frustration, as that would've given them the ability to [[StatingTheSimpleSolution just shoot him]]. And unfortunately for everyone, he's ''very'' good at recovering from even the most embarrassing political setbacks. |
| 659 | ** In the ''Literature/NewJediOrder'' he does, after Coruscant's fall, surrender to the highest-ranked nearby Vong, and then trigger a massive suicide bomb. Books that don't have him as a petty semi-villain portray him as brave in his way, but unable to let go of his paranoia and vindictiveness. |
| 660 | ** Fey'lya, up to his usual {{Rules Lawyer}}ing, tries to take control of Booster's [[BigDamnGunship Star Destroyer]] and pull off an elegant piece of backstabbing that will end up killing Corran Horn. Fey'lya unfortunately doesn't take two things into consideration; although Booster dislikes Horn, Corran is engaged to his daughter and more importantly Booster, being a 'former' smuggler, doesn't give a damn about any rules or laws protect Borsk. What follows is a brutal [[NoHoldsBarredBeatdown beatdown]] of Fey'lya by Terrick that ends with a broken nose and a lot of blood. What's even funnier is that Fey'lya knows that if he ever does try and get Terrik arrested he'll become a laughingstock among Bothans because he, a fairly young Bothan, got his ass handed to him by a middle-aged human despite the fact Bothans are supposedly much physically stronger than humans. |
| 661 | ** Another example, during the Black Fleet Crisis, rejected Tenn Graneet's application to join the Republic military because he came from an Imperial planet. The main thing this earned him was [[TheReasonYouSuckSpeech a chewing out]] from [[ReasonableAuthorityFigure Admiral Ackbar]]. |
| 662 | ** Making things worse for the heroes in ''New Jedi Order'' is that Fey'lya is backed up by a whole ''senate'' of corrupt and obstructive politicians, who refuse to help with the incoming Yuuzhan Vong because they're happening to faraway places, or Leia's ''clearly'' making them up in a transparent grab for power, or it's somehow the Jedi's fault, hampering the war effort right up until the Vong are kicking the door down. Even the one bureaucrat who seems reasonable is actually working for them. |
| 663 | * The [[FoxFolk anthropomorphic fox-like]] dan'lai in Creator/GeorgeRRMartin's short story "The Stone City". They are constantly telling protagonist Holt that they will find him a berth on a ship and allow him to leave the planet "next week" (they seem to take sadistic pleasure in denying him). Finally he meets one who tells him he can get a berth on the ship he arrived at Grayrest on immediately...provided he can get a signature from his missing and presumed dead captain. This infuriates Holt so much that he strangles the dan'lai to death in a fit of rage and has to go into hiding in the titular Stone City... |
| 664 | * ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'''s bureaucrats will tell you you're dead to your face if they have the paperwork, and there are ''planets'' of them, running a million-world Imperium as best they can. |
| 665 | ** In the Literature/CiaphasCain novel ''The Caves of Ice'', there are ''two'' particular Obstructive Bureaucrats, the local heads of the Administratum and Adeptus Mechanicus. Their constant arguing over protocols and procedure affects not only the normal operation of the promethium-mining facility there, but also the efforts of the Valhallan 597th as it works to prepare defenses against an oncoming Ork onslaught. Fortunately, Cain is able to find some lower-level officials in both ranks who not only are on amicable working terms with one another (and the mining population), but also happen to be able to actually get things ''done'' despite their superiors' constant bickering. The "dark" element of this trope comes into play when it is learned that [[spoiler: the mine is built atop a Necron tomb; as later evidence proves, the site was intentionally chosen by the [=AdMech=] to give them easy access to the facility away from prying eyes should a way be found to investigate the tomb and recover its ancient technology.]] Fortunately, Cain and his comrades are able to deal with the "obstructive" part of the problem by imposing martial law and threatening to shoot anyone who gets in their way. The Valhallan 597th also owns some thanks to the Administratum, which still thinks they're two regiments, as such they are given twice as much supplies and recruits than most (also why the men/women ratio is always 50/50) |
| 666 | ** Subverted by the Administratum bureaucrat Scrivener Quintus from ''Death or Glory'', who single-handedly organizes logistics for Cain's ragtag army with impeccable skill for several months. He's also quite easy to get along with and even has something of a sense of humour. |
| 667 | ** Also subverted by [[spoiler:Bursar Brasker]] in ''Cain's Last Stand'' who is using ObfuscatingStupidity to conform to peoples' expectations of a fussy bureaucrat and is actually quite an amiable (and helpful) fellow once Cain finds out. Though, it wasn't so much ObfuscatingStupidity as it was Cain never seeing his skills as necessary before, and [[spoiler:Brasker]] never really having anything important to do before. The book is written from Cain's perspective, who would have had little interest in how competent [[spoiler:Brasker]] was at his job until the planet was being invaded and he had to ask for his help. |
| 668 | ** In ''The Last Ditch'' the ship Cain and his regiment arrive on crashes on arrival before the shuttles assigned to unload them even leave the spaceport. The shuttles are therefore declared lost and made to leave so there's room for shuttles that exist. Cain doesn't give details, but apparently ex-quartermaster Sulla absolutely rips the administrators responsible a new one getting it straightened out. |
| 669 | ** There's also a subversion in the Literature/GauntsGhosts novel ''Necropolis''. When the government begins bickering over whether they should call the Imperial Guard to help, the ranking Administratum official goes over their heads and contacts the Imperium anyways. He justifies this by saying that the planet is crucial for its production of military equipment, so it is therefore the Imperium's problem, not a local one. |
| 670 | ** It should be also noted that the Administratum, is only Obstructive Bureaucrat because it covers such a large Empire, this is why fluff always shows that the lower-levels are so good at their jobs. |
| 671 | ** The 5th ed. Imperial Guard codex has a mention of a unit that died to a man in battle. The paperwork wasn't completed properly, and their leader was selected to lead a later attack. When they didn't show up, the entire unit was posthumously sentenced to death for desertion. |
| 672 | ** There's an example in one of the ''Eisenhorn'' books when Aemos tells someone that if all the data generated by the entire Imperium in a single ''second'' was put through all of Earth's cogitators, they would ''explode''. |
| 673 | [[/folder]] |
| 674 | |
| 675 | [[folder:Live-Action TV]] |
| 676 | %%* Too many in ''Series/TwentyFour'' to list. |
| 677 | * ''Series/DoctorWho'': |
| 678 | ** Mr. Popplewick in "The Trial of a Time Lord" is a Victorian clerk who pops up numerous times to obfuscate, torment and hold up the Doctor while he's trying to locate the Valeyard in the Matrix. [[spoiler:It's revealed that Popplewick is a disguise used by the Valeyard.]] |
| 679 | ** The true villain of [[Recap/DoctorWhoS26E2GhostLight "Ghost Light"]] is a godlike bureaucrat known only as Light: having made a comprehensive survey of life on Earth many millions of years ago, he retires to stasis — only to awake in the nineteenth century and discover that evolution has made all his work invalid. His proposed solution is to sterilise the planet of all organic life and prevent any further amendments to his catalogue. |
| 680 | * Sanford Harris from ''Series/{{Fringe}}'', although his motivations are partly due to a personal vendetta against Olivia Dunham. |
| 681 | ** [[spoiler:...and being TheMole.]] |
| 682 | * ''Series/{{Harrow}}'': In "Aurum Potestas Est" ("Gold is Power"), an official from the Department of Energy does everything in her power to stymie Harrow's murder investigation when it threatens to derail a multi-billion dollar mining deal. |
| 683 | * Season 5 of ''Series/MajorCrimes'' introduces Deputy Chief Winnie Davis. She is gunning for the position of Assistant Chief and resents the preferential treatment that Major Crimes gets. She uses her position as Chief of Operations to make life as difficult for Rayder and her team as possible. |
| 684 | * How most city employees in ''Series/ParkingWars'' are regarded by the public, whether deserved or not. |
| 685 | * Supreme Commander Birdie and, according to WordOfGod, the rest of the governing body of SPD from ''Franchise/PowerRangers.'' They won't help you if you don't have all your "t"s crossed and "i"s dotted, even if you have concrete proof that evil aliens have landed on your lawn. It's not an uncommon {{Fanon}} interpretation to portray them as actively hindering the protagonists. |
| 686 | %%* Agent Mahone from ''Series/PrisonBreak''. |
| 687 | * ''Series/PrzygodyPsaCywila'' have lt. Zubek, ByTheBookCop who oversees the daily proceedings of the training facility and is ComicallySerious to boot. |
| 688 | * Many politicians and high-ranking police officers in ''Series/TheWire''. Stan Valchek and Ervin Burrell are probably the most notable. Special mention goes to people in charge of homicide, all the way to the top, being more obsessed with their crime stats than with actually finding the guilty parties and jaling them, going so far as to being willing to jail someone innocent of the crime on dodgy evidence or refusing to go looking for bodies for fear it will worsen their statistics. |
| 689 | [[/folder]] |
| 690 | |
| 691 | [[folder:Tabletop Games]] |
| 692 | * In ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' cosmology, anyone who has a legitimate reason to visit the Nine Hells (which also means being desperate or insane enough to want to) has to deal with one or more amnizu who watch the portals, obese, ugly fiends who double and triple check everything a visitor has, ask dozens of questions, and subject them to the most humiliating of searches before letting them by, both to be thorough and because, well, [[ForTheEvulz devils do that kind of thing.]] Natives of Mechanus - the Plane of Ultimate Law - are even worse. Simply being allowed one hour's access to the Guvner's library in the Fortress of Disciplined Enlightenment could mean filling out hundreds of pages of paper work just to get on the waiting list to see someone who you can make the request to. (Unless the guy making the request is also a Guvner; that might eliminate ''some'' of the red tape.) And don't even get into how long it takes when dealing with the modrons. For beings obsessed with law, it's ''always'' complicated, and sometimes dangerous, because ''not'' dealing with these bureaucrats in Mechanus could get someone arrested for something they had no idea was a crime. |
| 693 | * Dis in ''TabletopGame/{{Earthdawn}}'' is a literal ''god'' of bureaucracy. His rituals include the creation and filing of needless paperwork, and a specific element of his portfolio is busywork that does nothing for anyone. What makes him dark instead of humorous is that he's the chief god of [[TheEmpire Thera]], and his beliefs and practices are a strong part of why slavery flourishes in that country. |
| 694 | [[/folder]] |
| 695 | |
| 696 | [[folder:Theatre]] |
| 697 | * The embassy workers in ''{{Theatre/Chess}}'', in their handling of a Russian potential defector. The lyrics of "Embassy Lament" really say it all. |
| 698 | -->Oh my dear how boring, he's defecting.\ |
| 699 | Just like all the others he's expecting\ |
| 700 | us to be impressed with what he's done here\ |
| 701 | But he hasn't stopped to think about \ |
| 702 | the paperwork his gesture causes.\ |
| 703 | We've an embassy to run here!\ |
| 704 | [...]\ |
| 705 | Russia must be empty.\ |
| 706 | Though we're all for\ |
| 707 | basic human rights it makes you wonder\ |
| 708 | what they built the Berlin wall for.\ |
| 709 | Who do these foreign chappies think they are?! |
| 710 | * In ''Theatre/TheConsul'', the only visible employee of a foreign consulate in a European PoliceState is a secretary who gives people trying to obtain exit visas an endless series of forms for them to fill out and sign, if the documents she asks them to provide are all in order. Many are made to wait for months on end. The secretary views them as numbers rather than as people with names, because "otherwise, how can one do any work?" |
| 711 | [[/folder]] |
| 712 | |
| 713 | [[folder:Toys]] |
| 714 | * Holepunch, a Targetmaster from ''Franchise/{{Transformers}}'', is an ''actively malicious'' Obstructive Bureaucrat. In fact, making people wait in lines and having them come back later and such is basically all the fun he ''ever'' has. And he's an [[TokenEvilTeammate Autobot!]] The MirrorUniverse version of him inverts this as a peppy motivational speaker skilled at keeping morale high. |
| 715 | [[/folder]] |
| 716 | |
| 717 | [[folder:Video Games]] |
| 718 | * In ''VideoGame/DeusEx'', you start out under the employ of a Joseph Manderley, a respected counter-terrorism official best known for [[InformedAbility eradicating a sect of Knights Templar]]. The best you ever see him do is push papers until he decides to [[spoiler:shoot you in the back rather than the face when you escape UNATCO.]] |
| 719 | * In ''VideoGame/GuildWars: Factions'', we have Cantha's Celestial Ministry. The cities and slums around the Kaineng Center are struggling with oppressive Guilds, pirates, and the [[BodyHorror Infected]]. There are dozens of homeless Canthan peasants, and the Celestial Ministry couldn't care less about their well being. In one mission, you are tasked with delivering ''handmirrors'' to the homeless; with each delivery, you are told, in no uncertain terms, that the Ministry ''should'' be sending them food and medicine, instead of increasingly pretty and useless trinkets like the mirrors (or decorative lawn gnomes). Another mission has you running all over the city trying to find the bureaucrat with the authority to hand out the new medical supplies; the highlight of that mission is when a guy tells you to talk to his superior, who is ''five feet away from him''. Thankfully, the Emperor himself is far more in touch with what the people need. |
| 720 | %%* Captain Perry in ''VideoGame/HeavyRain''. |
| 721 | * The G-Man in ''VideoGame/HalfLife'' is an [[AmbiguouslyEvil (evil?)]] inter-dimensional bureaucrat, walking in the middle of a destroyed facility while wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, orchestrating events threatening the whole of humanity, taking care of selected people, all for his "employers". We just don't know who they are yet. |
| 722 | * ''VideoGame/MassEffectAndromeda:'' Assistant to the Director of Colonial Affairs William Spender. He's a clueless idiot who frequently tries to interfere with the Nexus' engineering teams trying to keep the station functioning (and the people living on it living). Even his boss knows he's an idiot, but keeps him around because he'll take jobs no-one else will... despite, again, being an idiot. It later turns out he's ''deliberately'' doing his best to make everyone frustrated and miserable so he can weasel his way up the ladder, [[spoiler:helped provoke the riots that led to a massive split in the Andromeda Initiative, and is trying to kill of the krogan who came along just 'cuz. The end of Drack's loyalty mission has Ryder either have him exiled, in which case he's screwed, or imprisoned. Either way, it's not ''nearly'' as much as he deserves.]] |
| 723 | * The player can be this in ''[[VideoGame/PapersPlease Papers, Please]]''. There are often decisions that give you the choice between helping out a person whose paperwork has simple errors and keeping your family warm and fed. There are also people who are just asking for rejection, though ("What is passport?"). As bad as you may be, your boss is worse. If he sees a sports poster, family photo, or child's drawing on the wall, he issues a fine equivalent to what basically amounts to a day's salary, for your ''first offense''. |
| 724 | [[/folder]] |
| 725 | |
| 726 | [[folder:Webcomics]] |
| 727 | * ''Webcomic/{{Homestuck}}'': |
| 728 | ** Jack Noir was originally this, stating that he'd rather gut someone than do paperwork for them that he doesn't feel like doing. This is dropped when he later goes on to be the DiscOneFinalBoss of the series. |
| 729 | ** It resurfaces again in Act 6, and when Jack ends up imprisoned on Prospit, Draconian Dignitary, now saddled with his job, [[http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=007461 contemplates]] negotiating with the White Queen to have some of the paperwork shipped to Jack's cell. |
| 730 | [[/folder]] |
| 731 | |
| 732 | [[folder:Web Original]] |
| 733 | * The Literature/BastardOperatorFromHell regularly meets these, so there are plans for such a case. |
| 734 | --> [[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/18/bofh_2010_episode_7/ Risk 1:]] A lifetime of filling out meaningless paperwork to appease some glory-hogging control freak. |
| 735 | * [[PlayedForLaughs Played For]] BlackComedy in ''Website/SCPFoundation'' with [[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-4703 SCP-4703]], an EldritchLocation grocery store that openly maims its customers while performing a form of magic called "bureaucromancy" RealityWarping the Texas legal code so that nobody can interfere. For some reason this also stops the Foundation [[WellIntentionedExtremist that regularly scoffs at the Geneva Convention]], so they have an entire team of magical lawyers working around the clock to find a workaround. |
| 736 | --> '''Sheldon M. Katz, Esq.''': This in itself would be an exceptional feat even for the most skilled of bureaucromancers, and it is further compounded by the necessary incorporation of contingency clauses against the self-aware fact patterns that keep [[FedToTheBeast legitimizing rabid lions into existence inside my goddamned bathroom]]. |
| 737 | * From the ''Literature/WhateleyUniverse'', Amelia Hartford, assistant to the headmistress at Whateley Academy, is the superpowered version of this. She uses her [[{{Technopath}} power over computers]] as well as her malicious nature to be the Obstructive Bureaucrat of your nightmares, except for the chosen few who get special privileges from her. |
| 738 | ** As the stories go on, it's shown from time to time that she does in fact have a human side as well. She's nonetheless quite possibly the most difficult actual member of the school staff to get along with, and there's not much love lost between her and Team Kimba in particular. |
| 739 | [[/folder]] |
| 740 | |
| 741 | [[folder:Real Life]] |
| 742 | * In ''Literature/CourierFromWarsaw'' the author recounts the troubles Churchill's assistant (who may or may not have been a Soviet agent) gave him, from the "yes, sir, of course the prime minister will see you sometime in this century" variety, to outright lying his face off to discredit the author and his entire organisation. |
| 743 | * Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis became infamous because she was being obstructive for ''not'' doing her job. After the US Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples despite the ruling by claiming it was a violation of her religious rights. She was sued to try and force her to issue licenses to gay couples, from which she repeatedly tried to fight by appealing to higher courts until she reached the Supreme Court. Despite this, she still banned her deputy clerks from issuing same-sex marriage licenses. This led to Davis being jailed for a number of days for violating a court order. Long story short, she will not personally issue same-sex marriage licenses, but she isn't allowed to veto when they're issued. |
| 744 | * A number of German military, German civil service, and Nazi Party officials at the IMT/Nuremberg and other trials post-UsefulNotes/WorldWarII attempted to weasel out of the charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity or reduce their sentences by claiming that they had been "JustFollowingOrders"-- rather than exercising initiative, acting for personal gain, or lashing out in hatred. The Nuremberg Defense has been ruled invalid in situations involving genocide or crimes against humanity, though it can still be a valid legal defense for military personnel: unlike in civilian law, the prosecution has to prove that it was unreasonable for the defendant to be ignorant of the fact that the order was illegal. Opening a gate to let a convoy through: reasonable. [[UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust Administering lethal injections to four hundred disabled children]]: unreasonable. It should be noted that genuine fear for not following an order ("shoot them or we shoot you") can be used as a successful defence. Despite some claims to the contrary, this was never a factor at Nuremberg or any of the other post-war trials of German personnel-- who were all volunteers. German citizens could not be coerced into committing war crimes or crimes against humanity, and so were worse than useless to the military and civilian security units tasked with carrying out such tasks: their units encouraged them to apply for transfers to regular military units (which undertook such tasks less frequently) so that more enthusiastic people could take their place. Of course, the Germans did force many non-Germans to kill for them as 'Hiwi' auxiliaries-- but these were tried separately [[UsefulNotes/MoscowCentre by the NKVD]]. |
| 745 | ** The most recent trial in 2022 had a 97-year-old German woman prosecuted [[NaziHunter for simply working as a secretary at a concentration camp when she was 19]], [[NoSwastikas charging her as an accessory to over 10,000 murders]] for paperwork. The prosecution argued that there was no way she couldn't have known what was happening behind those doors, but regardless the whole trial [[KangarooCourt was essentially just for show]] as she was given a suspended sentence that she likely wouldn't live to fulfill. |
| 746 | ** Early on in his career, Hitler would get around both the law and this trope by making intentionally vague orders to be interpreted in the harshest way possible, mostly as a way of downplaying his involvement in some of the Nazi-associated paramilitary groups' more violent doings. You can bet that if he wanted some Social Democrat or Communist "taken care of", he meant that he wanted that person to be shanked, or worse. |
| 747 | ** The biggest thing keeping the Nazis from coming ''anywhere near'' to getting an A-bomb was, right after encouraging their Jewish physicists (i.e. ''most of their physicists'') to emigrate, [[FascistButInefficient infighting]]. Of the five nuclear programs, the most advanced was headed by ''the Post Office''. |
| 748 | * Erich Honecker, the longest-ruling and most well-known leader of East Germany, was quite possibly the most conservative of all East Bloc leaders, and his country was notorious for its all-pervading, soul-crushing bureaucracy. He even [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/42/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-R0518-182,_Erich_Honecker.jpg/220px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-R0518-182,_Erich_Honecker.jpg looked the part]]. |
| 749 | * The Interstate Commerce Commission was established in the 1880s to try and reign in the more unsavory business practices the railroads were engaging in. However, they weren't given the teeth to do so until the Teddy Roosevelt Administration, at which point they were given plenty of power to control the railroads. Unfortunately, they wielded a little too much power to decide what the railroads could or could not do when it became clear they needed to ditch some unprofitable business practices, as during the 1950s and 1960s, their passenger trains were becoming money pits; the boom of WWII had wained heavily as a consequence of automobiles and passenger airlines making travel more convenient (and in some cases cheaper) compared to rail. The railroads tried to cancel their passenger trains, but the ICC wouldn't let them drop most of their services, even if the lines proved it was costing them a lot of money to keep them running, citing a public need for these trains despite the fact that hardly anyone was riding them (it didn't help that a lot of these trains were subject to protests against their cancellation). It was only when the situation was getting far more dire for these lines that the ICC was more willing to let them end passenger services, especially when the 1970 bankruptcy of Penn Central made it abundantly clear just how vulnerable these economically vital services were needed. This eventually cost them, however, as deregulation efforts by the Reagan administration led to their powers decreasing by the 1980s, eliminating many of the rules they so strictly enforced. The ICC eventually was dissolved in 1996, with all of its responsibilities given to the Federal Railroad Administration. |
| 750 | * Before he became the Soviet dictator, UsefulNotes/JosefStalin was General Secretary of the Communist Party, which gave him powers of patronage, the resources he needed to build up a power base in the party, and control of the civil service and Politburo. Effectively, he was Russia's chief bureaucrat, and he was good at it, by all accounts. Other members of the party gave him names like "Comrade Card Index" and "the Grey Blur", but he certainly showed that a list of names and a telephone are as useful as a gun when it comes to taking over a country. That said, UsefulNotes/TsaristRussia had relied on the bureaucracy (as well as the church and army) as a major part of controlling the country. This directly led to General Secretary of the Communist Party becoming the ''de facto'' highest office in the USSR; Stalin managed to turn a bureaucratic office into the imperial seat. It wasn't until Mikhail Gorbachev that the USSR underwent a political shakeup in the early '90s and the Executive President became the Soviet Union's highest office (the Union didn't last very long after that). |
| 751 | * UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan once claimed, "There seems to be an increasing awareness of something we Americans have known for some time: that the ten most dangerous words in the English language are, 'Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'" |
| 752 | * Averted during the Russian Civil War. "Bureaucracy" was a serious accusation against any official, as it was deemed that paperwork should not get in the way of revolution. In more egregious cases the bureaucrat could even be court-martialed. |
| 753 | * There is a reason why almost all procedural laws relating to the filling out and filing of court documents say "A document is not invalid simply because it doesn't follow a form." Of course, some don't help by immediately specifying the forms to horrifying detail (margins, spacing, font, etc.) |
| 754 | * Indian Agents in TheWildWest were notorious for this. They would steal the subsidies meant to keep the reservations from being more miserable than was perceived as necessary. Then they would sell guns to the Indians. They thus provided both the provocation and the means at the same time. Of course the ones who suffered from this were Indians and soldiers, and not Obstructive Bureaucrats. This was alluded to in Creator/JohnWayne's cavalry trilogy. |
| 755 | * It should be remembered that Government employees are, unlike most other jobs, enacting the law of the country; everything they do can have legal ramifications. Not following a law, no matter how absurd in a specific situation, can set a precedent that allows others, to whom the law should be a reasonable requirement, to complain they are not getting equal treatment. Civil servants are often given a range of options within which they can act, to allow them some judgement, but cannot legally act outside this clearly defined range. |
| 756 | [[/folder]] |
| 757 | ---- |
| 758 | Disapproved. Resubmit in 90 days for Final Disapproval. |
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