Hijacked By Ganon - Television Tropes & Idioms

Trope Namer. Several times in The Legend Of Zelda series the hot new Big Bad turns out to simply be a pawn of Ganon, including the Oracle games, Four Swords Adventures, and most (in)famously in Twilight Princess.
- In the Oracle games, if you're linking them, the Big Bads Veran and Onox get hijacked by Twinrova, though their purpose was to bring back Ganon.
- Ganon is good enough at this that he even does it to himself. Twice.
In A Link to the Past, you know from the start of the game that the whole evil plan is to unseal Ganon, but you don't see him until after killing Agahnim, who was introduced as The Dragon. (But if you take a good look at Agahnim's skin color in the concept art, you come to realize that Ganon was further along at unsealing himself than he seemed...
The Ocarina of Time is yet stranger. We get to know Ganondorf pretty well over the course of the game, and it's no secret that he's the same as Ganon in the later titles (he even has the same laugh), but there's no real hint that Ganon in his more familiar form will appear at all, until Ganondorf finally transforms.
The Wind Waker is an inverted example of the above. We're introduced to Ganondorf AS Ganon and eventually expect a Demon Pig Battle but instead of the usual we get tricked to...whatever the hell Puppet Ganon was since Ganondorf the Gerudo actually hijacks Ganon with a Bishonen Line instead.
This isn't exactly the case in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link — Ganon is dead, but his minions are want to kill Link and use his blood to resurrect their master, with the result that the world will be very literally Hijacked by Ganon. (The creatures in the dungeons are guardians placed by the good King who hid the Triforce of Courage, but they appear to be fine with the scheme as well.)
Four Swords Adventures is a odd mixture of this and The Man Behind The Man. Vaati is a reoccurring villain from the prequel game, and is further established in an earlier prequel, but about halfway into the game we find out that Ganon is the true villain of the story, just using Vaati as a decoy. In this case, Ganon hijacks the game from the newer villain Vaati, but Vaati was already an established villain as an alternate to Ganon, so Ganon becomes The Man Behind The Man as well.
Perhaps the most egregious example was Zant, who, after being built up as "The Twilight King", became the victim of yet another "twist" hijack by Ganon...this time, the fans were not amused, spawning enormous controversy and debates on message boards.
- In fact, for some Zelda fans, Ganon's sudden appearance in Twilight Princess was felt to be so egregious that they take it as a sign that he ought to be permanently scrapped altogether.
- This was, naturally, after many fans whined during the buildup that the game would be the worst in the series if Ganon wasn't in it.
- Of course, there were also fans who cheered at seeing Ganondorf in the game. And from his first appearance onwards, were not even the least bit surprised that he was behind all evil stuff.
In examining facial expressions, we can tell that Ganondorf was quite obviously planning this in Super Smash Bros Brawl. However, before he was able to fully implement the plan, he learns that there was another Man Behind The Man, Tabuu. He failed.
- Well, it's more complicated than that. Bowser originally appeared to be the leader, then he was Hijacked By Ganon, who was in turn hickjacked by the MASTER HAND mere moments later. Then, even later, it turns out that the Master Hand was LITERALLY hicjed like Tabuu, who was controlling him with strings.

Vamdemon/Myotismon in Digimon Adventure 02.
The manga based on the Galaxy Angel Game Verse changed the entire plot of Moonlit Lovers so that Eonia, who was already dead in the game, could be behind it again.
In Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution 2, the player spends most of the game fighting against Kagura, an evil ex-ANBU agent who wants revenge on Tsunade. It turns out that Kagura was seemingly manipulated into attacking the Hidden Leaf Village by her Dragon Bando, who in turn was manipulated by Kabuto for unknown reasons (it's unclear whether he did it on his own, or for Orochimaru).
A key plot element in Umineko No Naku Koro Ni, also inverted. Most of End of the Golden Witch involves Battler trying to keep the role as protagonist and Bernkastel doing the hijacking.

Norman Osborne's revival at the end of the Clone Saga definitely counts. We in the real world know he was brought in because the story had long since gotten out of hand, and the best way to resolve it neatly was to have one mastermind behind everything. Osborne, a notorious Chessmaster, was judged the only Spidey villain with the oomph to pull it off.
In Ultimate Marvel, Dr. Doom has pulled this twice to date: in the "Ultimate Power" miniseries and in "Ultimates vol. 3". Which is weird, because he doesn't have nearly as much cred as his 616 counterpart, and except for those two instances, no one besides the Fantastic Four has dealt with him...but there you have it. The former kind of worked, the latter...not so much.
In the Tintin volume, The Blue Lotus, Tintin was after an opium company that he found out was actually run by Roberto Rastapopulus, who was presumed dead until then.
A flaw in the later seasons of the ElfQuest series is that the main villainess Winnowill turns out to be the one behind the machinations for every single plot. Shards? Yeah, that was her, shapeshifted. Wavedancers? Yup, her again. Forevergreen? Oh look, it was her insane minion. Hidden Years? Guess who made all those mutant monsters? It gets old.
The bizarre, surreal and hilarious — as with everything else in the book — reveal of the Comte de Rochefort as the Man Behind The Man in Jason's The Last Musketeer.

In Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox, the apparent villain-of-the-day (or yesterday) Damon Kronski turns out to be the pawn of Opal Koboi.
The original novel of You Only Live Twice. So James Bond needs to get his mojo back after Blofeld got away and murdered his wife out of spite last time. Well, through a complicated series of events, Japan tosses him a relatively easy one: Some loon named Doctor Shatterhand is running a poisonous garden and encouraging suicide. Investigating that should jump-start him out of his funk... dum-da-da-da! It's Blofeld again! And he's crazy! (Unusually, this turns out to be Blofeld's final undoing.)
A Series Of Unfortunate Events plays with this: about half the books introduce a new character that turns out to be Count Olaf in disguise; however, the Beaudelaires see through it early on and spend the rest of the book trying to convince the bumbling adults in charge.
- Also used for Olaf's many minions, at least one of whom always accompanies him in his schemes. Weirdly, the children never really are able to recognize them until the very end, despite the fact that the children are usually told that said minions just showed up in the area recently and they quickly notice suspicious characteristics about them. For example, the Foreman with the bad wig turns out to be the Bald Man With The Big Nose, the doctor with the "unusually solid hands" turns out to be the Hook-Handed Man, and Officer Lucinda with her "lipsticked smile" turns out to be Esme Squalor. It's not until the end of the book that the identities are revealed, which leads to the siblings inevitably trusting the newly-captured Olaf into the hands of the kind, innocent doctor or police officer that they just met.
Substitute Ganon with Takhisis and you have the entire War of Souls trilogy in the Dragonlance series.
Books of Bayern: In the fourth book, Selia shows up again after having supposedly been executed at the end of the first book... and as if that wasn't enough, the same character claims to have been indirectly responsible for the events of books 2 and 3 as well.

One loses track of how many Doctor Who serials open with a seemingly original villain who turns out to be a pawn of the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Sontarans, or the Master.
- The Daleks also do this in the first two series of the revived Doctor Who.
In Star Trek Deep Space Nine, the revelation that the Breen were working for the Dominion was done in a similar fashion.
More obvious was in the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Descent", when the rogue Borg the Enterprise has been chasing turned out to be led by Lore.
The majority of new villains introduced on Days Of Our Lives in the past 15 years have been revealed to be working for Stefano Di Mera.
The TV adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes mystery "The Red-Headed League" ultimately connects its mastermind with Holmes' archnemesis Moriarty. No such connection exists in the original story.
- Is that the Grenada adaptation? And heck, just about every one of the Basil Rathbone serials made Moriarty the villain.
Every volume of Heroes so far has been hijacked by Sylar. The volumes set up their Big Bad as, in order, Daniel Linderman, Adam Monroe, Arthur Petrelli and Emile Danko, only for them to be dealt with a couple episodes before the end of the volume, generally unceremoniously. Sylar's MO is to pop out of nowhere at around that time and catch everyone with their pants down, brewing some mayhem for an episode or two until the heroes get him under control... at least until the next volume begins. Volume 5 seems to be setting up Samuel Sullivan as its Big Bad so far, but it remains to be seen whether Sylar will once again hijack the plot.
- This is made all the more predictable by each volume's insistance on having a major plot thread centering around Sylar regaining his powers, deciding he'd rather be evil or remembering who he is. Really makes you wonder why they don't just Kill Him Already at this point.
  - Not entirely true. In volume 1, Linderman was the mastermind, and Sylar was just the unwitting means to Linderman's plans. In volume 2, Sylar has practically nothing to do with the main threat of the volume- all he did was get his powers back while Adam tried to kill everything. True enough for volumes 3 and 4, tho.

In 1999, WWE featured a long and convolted storyline about the Undertaker attempting to seize control of the WWE from former bad guy Vince McMahon under the orders of a mysterious figure known only as "The Higher Power". This "Higher Power" turned out to be... Vince McMahon.
In WCW, there was the infamous Sting vs. the Black Scorpion angle, who was revealed to be... Ric Flair. Flair was shoehorned into this angle after the wrestler who played the Black Scorpion quit WCW.

The main Makuta from Bionicle got into the habit of this. The first two years after he was first defeated, it was known he orchestrated the new antagonists to fight the heroes, but the two year after that it was part of The Reveal, the year after that not so much but did involve his cronies setting him free, then after that it was again revealed he had basically been behind it all. The next year he was a major player, and then the last year was the culmination of his master plan to take over the universe. It works.

Dr. Eggman (Robotnik) and Eggman-Nega in Sonic Rush Adventure.
This is Dr. Wily's trademark tactic in the Mega Man series; he used it at least five times. He pretended to reform in Mega Man 3, and set up Dr. Cossack, Proto Man, Mr. X, and the Star Droids as puppets in 4, 5, 6, and "V" for the Game Boy. (He got lazy in 6 — Mr. X was just Wily in disguise.) He never could quite get past the problem of his robots inevitably being vulnerable to each other's weapons, though, so this never worked. It did seem for a while that he wised up to it in 7 and 8 (with his hand in the latest crisis blatantly clear)... but goes back to it in Mega Man & Bass when he claims that King ransacked his lab, even sending a clueless Bass out to stop King, and in 9 when he frames Dr. Light of all people for the latest wave of Robot Master attacks.
- Wily owns this trope. He's got the title dead to it in his safety deposit box, has a large insurance policy on it and wrote the official "villain hijacking for dummies" guide. All that, and it STILL ends up getting named after Ganon? Should not this trope be "Hijacked by Dr. Wily?"
- Strangely, Megaman Battle Network 4 and 5 do not have him, making it actually effective when he appears in 6 and reveals his Xanatos Gambit.
  - Seemingly averted in Battle Network 2, until the Big Bad from that game appears in the third game to, you know it, shunt all the blame onto Wily for his actions in the second.
  - This was hinted at in 2's ending, and not a leap of logic to correctly guess Wily.
- Sigma took over for Wily in the Mega Man X games. It's actually a plot twist that he *isn't* the main villain in X8. It gets lampshaded in X4 when Split Mushroom responds to a demand to reveal the mastermind behind the game's plot with his meme-tastic Catch Phrase "Take a wild guess."
  - And immediately after, you enter battle against Split Mushroom and his lifebar appears, blatantly carrying Sigma's logo unlike previous bosses.
  - And to really twist this trope, X5 implies Sigma's latest plot is merely implementing one of Dr. Wily's long lost plans.
  - In X6 he isn't even mentioned until you stomp Gate and he reveals he's been working on resurrecting Sigma. Sigma's essentially a zombie, but he has enough intelligence to promptly kill Gate and challenge our heroes to a final duel.
- Technically, he still is the one responsible for the Maverick wars in at least X1-X5, as the Sigma computer virus was the result of Sigma being infected by Wily's original, almost certainly source-of-Mavericism Zero.
Andross also pulled this one in Star Fox Adventures. You even have to beat him the same way as in 64.
- Yet this isn't done in Assault, where he's stated to be dead and his empire scattered.
  - As of Command, it actually seems likely that he'll stay dead. He only appears as a ghost, and even then, only on certain paths and not as the final boss.
Ansem/Xehanort/Xemnas/Master X/whatever name he's going by these days of Kingdom Hearts fame is pretty good at this. Sure he changes his name an face a bit each time around (okay, not his name...it's a bit weird), but he's still pretty much the same guy.
Bowser in Super Mario Sunshine.
- It's kind of a twist in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. The primary villainess, through the entire plot, is Cackletta. However, midway through the game, the titular heroes kill her body, and her henchman restores her soul into an unconscious Bowser's body. So while the final dungeon and boss starts out very Bowserlike, especially with the return of the Koopalings, it eventually boils down to you vs. "Bowletta".
- Bowser also does a hijacking in the original Yoshi's Island. You enter the final area and confront Kamek, the essential main antagonist... who is then stomped on by Baby Bowser. Cue obligatory final battle.
- Averted in Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, where Bowser is not the main antagonist. He and Kammy Koopa appear in several cut scenes seeking the Crystal Stars, but always arrive after Mario and company have left with the Stars. In the climax, Bowser drops in ... literally ... during the confrontation between Mario and Grodus (the essential main antagonist), and then the player has to fight Bowser and Kammy. But once the player defeats Bowser and Kammy, it turns out that Grodus took advantage of the distraction to grab Peach and take her to the next chamber. So in the end, Bowser doesn't hijack the plot. He never even finds out what's going on, and ends up being little more than comic relief in the otherwise serious endgame.
  - Because seriously, "What's a finale without a Bowser appearance, huh? A cruddy finale, that's what!"
- Played with in Super Paper Mario. The heroes goes to his castle without even checking if he is the bad guy this time. He was not.
- Super Mario RPG did this in reverse - the game opens with Bowser kidnapping the Princess, again, and Mario rescuing her, again. He complains about how annoying this is. At which point the real villain shatters the Star Road and ejects Bowser from his castle. Bowser joins your party later in the game to serve his own purposes, and he remains firmly against Smithy for the entire game.
- Super Mario Bros 3 uses a variation of this: you know from the beginning of the game that Bowser was responsible for transforming the kings of the Mushroom World into animals, but it isn't until you reach World 8 that you find out that he has kidnapped Princess Peach again.
- In Mario and Luigi, Partners in Time, Baby Bowser is a recurring nuisance, and Bowser only shows up late in the game to kidnap the princess and fight the brothers once. At the end of the game, however, after the brothers defeat the older Princess Shroob, Bowser eats the mushroom that Princess Shroob left behind, absorbs her power, and fights the brothers in one last battle.
- Bowser's Inside Story takes an interesting spin on this. You'd think that, Bowser being one of the protagonists, he wouldn't be able to hijack the plot. Technically, he doesn't. Fawful combines with the energy half of the Dark Star while Bowser accidentally combines with the physical half of the Dark Star. The physical half copies Bowser's DNA and turns into a purple and black version of Bowser, but only as a smoky spirit. After defeating Dark Fawful, the Dark Star eats Dark Fawful, completing his transformation into Dark Bowser just in time to have a climactic boss battle with the real Bowser.
  - Further played with in that the epilogue consists of a Credits Montage of the Mario Brothers defeating the real Bowser anyway.
Dracula loves to do this in the Castlevania games. He's the final boss almost every time, whether he's been visibly in play from the start or not. Symphony of the Night is a classic example; Richter Belmont seems to be the villain, until you find out he was possessed by Shaft from Rondo of Blood, who orchestrated this as another raising-Dracula ritual.
- You only get to know this if you explore the castle thoroughly, though, and equip the Holy Glasses you get by doing so. Then you can see what's possessing Richter, and kill it. If you don't free Richter from his curse, you get the Bad Ending by killing him. And you miss the Inverted Castle, which makes up another half of the game to get to Dracula.
- Subverted in Aria Of Sorrow with a Tomato In The Mirror - you can't expect to fight Dracula if you're playing him, right?
  - In Dawn of Sorrow Julius Mode has Soma as Dracula as the final boss.
King K. Rool (or, as he preferred to be called in this game, Baron K. Roolenstein) in Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie's Double Trouble hijacks the antagonist slot from evil robot KAOS.
In City Of Heroes, It's all a Nemesis plot; he orchestrated the Rikti invasion and possibly the Council overthrow of the 5th Column. However, the events in Cimerora were started by a different group of villains: the Nictus, including Requiem and the 5th Column.
- Or Is It? The Cimerora zone was only introduced after the appearance of Ouroboros whose chief has a Significant Anagram.
- True veterans of the game know it's only a matter of the time until the writers make Nemesis responsible for All of the Nictus and Kheldian plots entirely as well.
  - The game pokes fun at this in one of the loading screens.
In Steve Meretzky's Spellcasting 201 (an Interactive Fiction game published by Legend Entertainment), the villain of the game turns out to be the villain of the previous game Spellcasting 101 (the evil stepfather of the protagonist) in disguise. The same trick is pulled in the sequel, Spellcasting 301, and it's done with an even more heavy-handed joke: it turns out that the father disguised himself as a ridiculously hot woman. Talk about having it in for your son...
LittleBigAdventure 2: Twinsen's Odyssey. Turns out the aliens are just dupes of good ol' Doctor Funfrock.
The Bubble Bobble spinoff Bust-A-Move, AKA Puzzle Bobble: In the VS CPU modes of installments 2 through 4, a enemy named Drunk (the green hooded beer-drinking enemy from Bubble Bobble) has been inside, respectively, a giant robot Mecha named Bubblen (one letter shy of Bub's long bubble dragon name), a giant fake bubble dragon named Debblun, and a spaceship face named Madam Luna.
Commander Keen does this with both major trilogies — it turns out the "Grand Intellect" manipulating the Vorticons is actually Mortimer Mc Mire, Billy Blaze's rival from school. Then it turns out the ruler of the Shikadi, the "Gannalech", is just Mc Mire again (the Shikadi heard "Grand Intellect" but couldn't pronounce it). Also, his babysitter Molly from Aliens Ate My Babysitter turns out to be Mortimer's sister.
Boss Cass, the Big Bad in TY 1 and 2 is presented as The Quisling (though, like Black Mage, this would imply he'd never been on "Team Evil") with the Quinkan in TY 3. He's the one who invited them over for a nice cup of tea and a spot of global domination.
Outright inverted by Dedede from the Kirby series. He was the Big Bad and Final Boss of the Original Kirby's Dreamland. In all subsequent games he is demoted to Fake Boss, and by Squeak Squad, Kirby pretty much beats him up for shits and giggles as soon as his cake is stolen.
Resident Evil 4 was originally intended to not have any involvement with Umbrella or Albert Wesker in any kind, instead focusing on Osmund Saddler, and the Los Illuminados. But as you progress through the game, you will find out that Umbrella and Wesker actually did have an involvement, and Wesker is especially prominent in Ada's scenarios.
Implied in an ending illustration in King Of Fighters 2002 - that was a plotless dream match games featuring several characters from different story arcs, some of them already dead. Rugal gets to be the final boss in that one, as in the previous dream match in 98, but curiously the illustration shows him sitting in a throne surrounded by boss charactersfrom the latest story arc (NESTS saga), implying he may have been behind it all. Plausible, as his last canonical appearance in the series, in 1995, had a version of him with cybernetic implants, white hair and an darker skin tone compared to his previous appearance in 94 - darker skin and white hair aren't uncommon features of clone characters in the NESTS saga, as isn't cyborg/robotic technology, so the Omega Rugal from 95 could have been a clone, and the real one might still be around.
In several Metal Slug games, Morden's evil scheme for domination is hijacked right at the end by Martians. In another iteration, the martian's plot is hijacked by martian eating, Giant Space Flea From Nowhere race of aliens.
Ninja Gaiden II on the NES spends a lot of time building up Ashtar, the self-proclaimed "Emperor of Darkness," as the Big Bad. Your showdown with him occurs only halfway through the game, though, and after you kill him it turns out that Ashtar is just a pawn of Jaquio, the villain of the previous game.
Who is and isn't a villain in Deus Ex: Invisible War is subject to some interpretation, but it's a major Wham to find out that Apostle Corp is led by JC Denton, the player character from the original Deus Ex.
Escape from Monkey Island both inverts this trope and plays it straight in two separate examples: When it is revealed that recurring villian Le Chuck has teamed up with pirate-hating entrepreneur Ozzy Mandrill, Guybrush Threepwood calls out Mandrill as working for Le Chuck. He has it backwards; Le Chuck is actually working for Mandrill. The trope is played straight with Pegnose Pete, who is suspected of and working for Mandrill.
Sly Cooper subverts this. The second game centers around the robotic body parts of previous Big Bad Clockwerk, and Sly's attempts to destroy them and make sure he can never threaten anyone again. Clockwerk's body is reassembled in the final level...and it turns out that Arpeggio doesn't want to ressurect the old owl, just use his body to become immortal. Even when Clockwerk comes alive again, it's not his mind in the metal body, but Neyla's. Just to drive the point home, the final scene has Carmelita destroy a vital compotent that renders Clockwerk Deader Then Dead.

In Sluggy Freelance, the "wraiths" attacking the other dimension in the "Aylee" arc are actually members of Aylee's species, who, not counting Aylee's evil clone, hadn't appeared since Aylee was introduced 10 years previously.
- Not to mention several dangerous situations set up by demons who appear to be fragments of K'Z'K', the demonic Big Bad from several early arcs.
- And then there's Hereti Corp, which at least usually has it logo on everything, except during its man-behind-the-man-who-was-actually-behind-the-first-man-anyway plots. Really, it's getting less "Is this _____ or a new enemy?" and more "Is this ____ or ____?"

Contrary to what Mario believed in There Will Be Brawl, Bowser did not kidnap Peach. Ganondorf did.
- Considering that Ganondorf is played by the creator of the series, it was almost inevitable that his role would prove critical. That said, it's quite possible that he won't be the final villain...Hijacked By Olimar, anyone? Also, Sakurai may be trolling again.
  - Ironically, Ganon himself is hijacked again, not by Olimar, but by Kirby. Also Lucas and Ness, but they weren't previously known to be villains.

In Gargoyles, for a large chunk midway through the series a group of three fairies called the Weird Sisters pop up from time to time, manipulating the main cast for their own ends. It turns out in the epic three-part episode "Avalon" that they were answering to the Archmage, a previous villain who was believed to be dead, and all their plotting had been to help him conquer the titular island.
- Which makes the Archmage a proud practitioner of the Gargoyles famed art of Xanatos Gambit. Since everything the Weird Sisters did throughout their meddling was a part of the Archmage's master plan.
In Justice League Unlimited, it's revealed that Lex Luthor was being manipulated by Brainiac to build him a new body. Luthor had been infected by a copy of Brainiac's programming after Brainiac had exploded the last time he and Luthor had met.

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