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Completing a triangle with the Action Hero and the Science Hero, the Guile Hero is a hero who operates by playing politics and manipulating the bad guys. The Guile Hero trades swords and guns (or science and technology) for charm, wit, political and/or financial acumen, and an in-depth knowledge of human nature. The Chain Of Deals, the Bavarian Fire Drill, the Batman Gambit, the Xanatos Gambit, Xanatos Speed Chess, and even the Xanatos Roulette are at the Guile Hero's fingertips. Often, a Guile Hero will manipulate the other good guys and a whole bunch of innocent bystanders as part of their scheme to bring down the Big Bad, though they'll take care to ensure the other characters aren't truly harmed in the process. The Guile Hero is likely to be a politician or a businessman.
The Guile Hero may be considered a heroic analogue to the Magnificent Bastard; unlike the Magnificent Bastard, the Guile Hero is unambiguously a good guy with the same goals as any Action Hero or Science Hero. While some other heroes may be unhappy with being manipulated by the Guile Hero, it is made clear to the reader that this character both has a heroic goal and is not (usually) Jumping Off The Slippery Slope into becoming a Well Intentioned Extremist.
The Guile Hero combines elements of The Chessmaster, the Trickster, and The Strategist while being neither. A Guile Hero isn't neccessarily The Chessmaster: the Guile Hero is simply a hero who uses wit, charm, and skill to mislead and set up the bad guys, while The Chessmaster is often devoted to grander schemes, and is always at the top of the food chain. A Guile Hero need not be a master manipulator; "guile" can mean "shrewdness" instead of "deceit". The Chain Of Deals is just as valid a tool for these characters as the Batman Gambit, and a Guile Hero may very well be a grown up Parker Lewis Ferris Bueller.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Rock in Black Lagoon.
- The main character (Ayumu Narumi) from Spiral fits this pretty well.
- Kisuke Urahara in Bleach combines this with Action Hero. He can kick ass when he needs to, but he prefers to use the protagonists to act as his surrogates in his conflict with Sosuke Aizen.
- Lawrence, the main character of the anime Spice And Wolf is the economic type. When Horo is kidnapped by an evil corporation, he uses economic wizardry and manipulation to arrange for her release. Which pisses her off to no end since she'd hoped to see him rescue her personally, all Prince Charming style. Every once in a while, he manages to get himself into deep enough trouble that Horo has to bail him out with her wolf form, but he's still quite the savvy trader...
- Blue (Green in the English version) from Pokemon Special.
- Chief Aramaki from Ghost In The Shell : Stand Alone Complex is shrewd and cunning, manipulating the the inter-departmental bureaucracy of the Japanese government to ensure that his people can do their jobs.
- Legend Of The Galactic Heroes give us Yang Wen-Li, a textbook example: he has all the skills of the Magnificent Bastard yet remain one of the nicest person you could ever meet.
- Mamoru Takamura of Hajime No Ippo. Arrogant, loudmouthed and mean, he never stops humiliating his fellow boxers or rubbing the defeat in their face. And yet, everyone in the gym looks up to him, especially Aoki, Kimura and Ippo, because not only he's a GREAT boxer with many CMOAs under his belt, but he is the one who got ALL of them into boxing. He rarely winds up hatching any of his ridiculous schemes, preferring brawn to brains except when it really counts - but come on, look at that charming smile
 ◊.
- Heroic Sociopath version: Hiruma Youichi, Deimon Devilbats quarterback in Eyeshield 21. How did he get his players? Blackmail, manipulation, or the ultimate fallback, guns. Lots of guns. What does he do with his players? Gives them all nicknames that start with "Fucking," and puts them through Training from Hell including running up Tokyo Tower and pushing a truck from Texas to Las Vegas. What does he do to his opponents? All out psychological warfare, showing his hand, taunting unmercifully and cackling madly (even through a freshly broken arm if he has to.) He keeps innumerable calculations going on in his head and strategizes on the fly, willing (and eager) to go for the insanest of insane trick plays. He's a complete terror, but he has the absolute loyalty of his players (even the ones he recruited at gunpoint) who are willing to push themselves to insane heights right along with him (although they would be happier if he left his guns at home).
Comic Books
Film
Literature
- Eliza and Roger in Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle.
- Mike Stearns in Eric Flint's Sixteen Thirty Two.
- Gandalf to some degree.
- Dumbledore
- The Bible: The whole arrest of Jesus thing, and arguably the whole history of humanity, turns out to be a Batman Gambit by God.
- Miles Vorkosigan of the Vorkosigan Saga, especially in his later years.
- Kim in the novel by that name by Rudyard Kipling
- Kelsier of Mistborn straddles the line between this and Magnificent Bastard. He's unambiguously on the good guys' side, but often comes perilously close towards slipping into Well Intentioned Extremist or even Knight Templar territory. He's also a brilliant revolutionary who takes down an Empire ruled by a Physical God... and he does it posthumously.
- Most heroic characters in Discworld qualify. Moist von Lipwig defines.
- Lyra from His Dark Materials.
- As a Grand Admiral, Thrawn is unquestionably a Magnificent Bastard and a bad guy who lies and executes incompetent suboordinates, albeit one who is less evil than most. Interestingly, the younger he is, or the longer it's been since his death, the more morally ambiguous he is. In a novella called "Side Trip", he disguises himself as the Mandalorian bounty hunter/Boba Fett's Palette Swap, Jodo Kast, and helps undercover cop Corran Horn while taking down someone as a favor for Darth Vader. In Outbound Flight he's... again, ambiguous, but he's at his most heroic. And he pulls more than one epic Xanatos Gambit / game of Xanatos Speed Chess in his efforts to, ultimately, wipe out a force of nomadic slavers and safeguard his Martial Pacifist people.
- One of those is how he took out a Trade Federation taskforce that attacked him, which had two battleships, six armored transports, seven escort cruisers, and three thousand vulture droid starfighters. He had three small cruisers and nine heavy starfighters. He wiped it out, capturing the flagship. Without taking any casualties. Having never seen or heard of the Trade Federation before they turned up.
- In the Hand Of Thrawn duology, the mains find that he set up the Empire of the Hand, which looks like the Empire, is arranged like the Empire, and has Imperials in it, but is a Lawful Good government. Well, more or less. They're still pretty ruthless.
- In Survivors Quest, thirteen years after he died, Mara finds reason to believe that he's back. She decides not to inquire too closely about that. If he is back, he's not their enemy anymore.
- In The Phoenix Guards, Pel gets his nakama and himself out of prison by tricking a guard into propositioning his (Pel's) lover, who then almost kills the guard in a duel. Then she asks the poor guy who put him up to it, he tells her, and she pulls some strings to get Pel and the others out.
- Alaric from the Warhammer 40000 Grey Knights novels was already a Genius Bruiser, but he becomes one of this with his plan to take down the Chaos lords of Drakaasi, even if he does not think such a plan to be right.
Live Action TV
Religion and Mythology
- Odysseus must surely be the patron saint of the Guile Hero. In an age when most Greek heroes were part-divine, unstoppable, ass-kicking badasses, along comes Odysseus who's greatest weapon is his mind, officially making this trope Older Than Dirt.
Western Animation
- Aladdin is a roguish street rat who gets by via theft and charm - but we never doubt he's the good guy.
- Rattrap from TransformersBeastWars is the quintessential Guile Hero. Uses his brains and cunning in every situation, will feign loyalty and pretend to switch sides an abandon his team to gain access to information that will really further his team's goals.
Video Games
- Nippon Ichi loves this trope. Sereph Lamington from Disgaea basically manipulated the entire plot of the first game. Virtuous from Soul Nomad pulls a Xanatos Gambit designed to solve the real problem with the world. Mr. Champloo was part of a Batman Gambit orchestrated by his boss to counter the scheme of the Big Bad of the third Disgaea.
Web Comics
- Petey from Schlock Mercenary generally qualifies, although he has been willing to use force occasionally.
Real Life
- One name: King Juan Carlos I of Spain. When Francisco Franco agreed to change Spain from a dictatorship to an absolute monarchy, he started trying to groom the 'Prince of Spain', Juan Carlos of the Borbón House, into a good successor who'd maintain the authoritarian state. The prince went along with this, publicly supporting Franco, enduring harsh criticism from reformists and moderates all over... Until Franco fell gravely ill in 1975 and handed him absolute authority as King. Only a couple of days after Franco's death, Juan Carlos began to institute reforms at an incredible pace, turning Spain from western Europe's strictest dictatorship into a functional parliamentary democracy in less than three years. Heck, he even refused to take power after the military executed a coup so he could be returned to full authority, pretty much single-handedly saving a struggling democracy, and renounced almost all of the ancestral powers he once wielded.
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