"Always two, there are. No more. No less. A Master and an apprentice."
— Master Yoda, Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace, about the Sith
Sometimes the Big Bad gets bored doing everything himself. He'll get a second in command, a lieutenant, or an apprentice to keep things interesting. This is the Rule of Two. There are two big bosses, and both have to be taken down.
It's usually understood that the two want to keep it that way. Never introduce a third, and quickly replace the other if they go down. Due to infighting or general For the Evulz culture, the Big Bad may decide to dispose of the Dragon himself and get a new one. Similarly The Dragon will overthrow the Big Bad if the opportunity presents itself, and bring on a new Dragon of his own. The tension of this dynamic is that they rely on each other, but both know it's a race to see who will stab whom in the back first.
The Hero is usually the prime candidate for the replacement. If The Hero is about to take the Dragon down, expect the Big Bad to try to turn him to The Dark Side. If the Dragon is about to take the hero down, expect him to offer an alliance to overthrow the Big Bad and take his place. Compare and contrast Big Bad Duumvirate, Deceptive Disciple and Bastard Understudy. Not related to Rule of Three.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Gundam: Every dictator in the franchise usually has an Ace Pilot enforcer backing them up. Given Gundam's military themes, a series may also have a chain of these.
- Mobile Suit Gundam: Regardless of whichever member of the Zabi Family is in the lead, they always had Char Aznable as their enforcer. Other Arc Villains like Ramba Ral (as well as Char himself) also came with their own top henchmen.
- Mobile Suit Gundam Wing has a version where nearly every prominent male villain has a female underling. Treize Khushrenada has Lady Une, Zechs Merquise has Lucrezia Noin and Duke Dermail has Dorothy Catalonia.
- Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans has a very developed political setting, with most of the major players (including the protagonists) having their own ace under their wing. Orga has Mikazuki, Naze has Amida, Gaelio gains Ein as one after agreeing to help him, and Rustal has Julieta. Even McGillis, one of the most skilled mobile suit pilots in the show, gains Isurugi in the second season to cover his back.
- Hellsing: The three major players in the setting (Sir Integra, Enrico Maxwell and The Major) each have their own champion to do battle for them (Alucard, Alexander Anderson and the Captain respectively).
- In Naruto, there's Kabuto and Orochimaru. Before they were introduced, there were Zabuza and Haku.
- Madara and Obito started like this, but Madara died shortly thereafter, leaving all the work on Obito and when Madara revived, they became Big Bad Duumvirate.
- Kaguya and Black Zetsu. Although the dynamic isn't really there since Black Zetsu is the one calling the shots, as Kaguya has absolutely no personality at all.
Comic Books
- In Star Wars Tales #17, "The Apprentice", a Sith Master named Finn and his unnamed apprentice are concluding business on some backwater planet when they run into a slave owner Lod and his slave girl Marka. The apprentice ends up killing Lod and freeing Marka out of anger towards Lod (and sympathy towards Marka much to Finn's irritation). It turns out that Marka is powerful in the Force and even mind-tricked the apprentice into taking her with him — Finn suspects that the Force led them to the planet in the first place to find her. When Marka begs him to take her with them so she can learn the ways of the Sith, Finn denies her. He explains that he doesn't need a slave and he already has an apprentice. Marka takes the hint and promptly steals the apprentice's lightsaber and pushes him off the roof to his death. Finn immediately invites his new apprentice aboard his ship.
- In Star Wars: Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine explains that the master/apprentice arrangement was brought about because the last time the Sith fought the Jedi, they lost because they spent more time fighting each other than they did the Jedi, so this way the competition is kept to a manageable level. However he's lost confidence in Vader after the destruction of the Death Star, so a large part of the plot involves Vader competing with other rivals for the role. When Palpatine claims that Vader's victory over these rivals was All According to Plan, Vader sardonically replies that if any of the others had won, Palpatine would be telling them the same thing.
- In Star Wars: Legacy, Darth Krayt does away with the Rule of Two, abandoning the Sith's Social Darwinist tenets and instead teaching his followers the Rule of One which revolved around blind obedience to him and the Order. At one point he communes with the spirits of the three greatest Sith Lords, seeking advice; Darth Andeddu, the long-lived progenitor of all Darths, Darth Nihilus, who led the First Jedi Purge, and Darth Bane, the Sith Chosen One who created the Rule in the first place. All three of them then proceed to absolutely lay into him (even The Unintelligible Nihilus), branding him a heretic unworthy of calling himself Sith for arrogantly trying to "improve upon" the teachings that led to them conquering the galaxy and weakening them as a whole by attempting to share power. Krayt tries to argue that power is meaningless without a purpose to apply it toward, only for Bane to angrily retort that power is its own purpose and that Krayt's new order will make the same mistakes Bane instigated the rule to prevent.
Fan Works
- Thunderstorm and Shadow in the one TV movie they appear in easily fit this in Calvin & Hobbes: The Series.
- The Crown of Thorns in The Roboutian Heresy operates on this principle: the organisation is divided into individual lineages, consisting of one older, more experienced master and a younger apprentice. The master trains the apprentice in minor Chaos sorcery and sabotage as they work against the Imperium, before ultimately being replaced by the apprentice when the master dies (whether by the Imperium's hand or their apprentice's). Thanks to this they've endured across the millenia since the titular Heresy, despite being officially considered destroyed on several occasions.
Films — Live-Action
- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The apprentice (Jen) is a more skilled combatant than the Master (Jade Fox), but the Master is more treacherous.
- Indiana Jones: Every Big Bad that Indy goes up against has one distinct henchmen who handles most of the dirty work, and who usually acts as a Recurring Boss that Indy must face at multiple points throughout the movie.
- Every Diabolical Mastermind in James Bond comes with their own muscle.
- Star Wars is the Trope Namer. The Sith have the Rule of Two, where there can only be a Sith master and an apprentice - no more, no less — one to possess power and the other to desire it. The idea is that each Sith Lord teaches one apprentice until they are strong enough to destroy the master and take their place, at which point the apprentice will take on a student of his own, or until the master kills the apprentice and gets a new one. In this manner, each master not only becomes strong, but must stay that way to stay alive, and each student must become stronger than their master. A master cannot have more than one apprentice, because they may team up to kill their master despite being individually weaker than them, then turn on each other and weaken the Sith Order. In short, Chronic Backstabbing Disorder as a way of life and a code of morality. (Although this didn't always work, because it was shown with Sidious, he killed his master while he was sleeping.)
- The origins of this rule are first explained in the Revenge of the Sith novelization, and explored further in Darth Bane. When the Sith order was originally created, it was indeed an order that had many members, but since they were all steeped in the dark side, they had a collective bad case of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder. This tendency to betray each other at the drop of a hat weakened the order to the point where the Jedi (who as light-siders were more unified) were gaining the upper hand. Eventually, it all came to a head and a Gambit Pileup gone horribly wrong left a single survivor, Bane. To combat this, Bane decided that there should only be two Sith Lords at one time - a master to have power and an apprentice to covet it. He also decided that they should endeavor to take over the galaxy via subtlety and manipulation (like Palpatine eventually did) instead of outright invasion. Having made up his mind on this, he manipulates all collectivist Sith Lords into committing mass suicide as part of a failed attempt to take the Jedi Order with them during their final battle.
- The Rule Of Two was designed as a general lineage protocol to prevent the survivors of any gambit from lashing out in confusion and paranoia at the other remaining survivors, leaving them with with no scholarship and no minions; Master-And-Servant is an extremely simple hierarchy, and extended relations are equivalent to a Big, Screwed-Up Family. Sith being Sith, they're bound to break their own rules, train some secret apprentices, etc., but the point was that everyone would have a specific target (so the apprentices would fight each other first and not focus on a master, who they needed at least one alive to learn from, and the masters would fight other masters first because There Can Be Only One and a master doesn't want to go back to being an apprentice), and the ensuing bloodbath would conclude with the surviving two members agreeing on who was more fit to be the master in their relationship based on their position in the lineage, instead of bickering over it to the point of weakness.
- Interestingly, the Expanded Universe reveals that Palpatine, Dooku, Vader and other Sith Lords had their own minions trained in the dark side; the rule wasn't technically broken because they weren't "true" Sith Lords, but mere warriors or spies with some lightsaber training and ability in the force. However, it seems that once a minion begins to grow too strong, or — worse — is discovered being trained in the Sith arts, one of them has to die, be it minion or master. Or potentially the apprentice, with the minion becoming the new apprentice.
- Darth Tenebrous broke the rule by recruiting two apprentices and not telling them about each other. After Darth Plagueis "took over", he was surprised by Darth Venamis, who had learned of him, was better at the use of the lightsaber and had been trained in Plagueis' style. Plagueis was smarter, imprisoning Venamis and experimenting on him for years. Venamis compounded the issue by having several potential apprentices lined up himself, even before he had dealt with Tenebrous and Plagueis.
- After claiming the mantle of Sith Lord from Tenebrous, Plagueis did away with the Rule of Two entirely, seeing no point in raising a successor when his experiments into immortality meant he would live forever. He recanted this to an extent when he met Palpatine and was so impressed with the young man's potential he felt compelled to train him. In his reckoning, though they were two Sith and had no intention of training any others, because the two were going to rule as equal partners (once Palpatine was fully trained) there was no need for a fight for dominance. That said, given he acted like Palpatine's superior even long after his apprentice had become quite powerful, it's clear this was something of a rationalization for him. Palpatine certainly thought so and while killing Plagueis lectured him on the arrogance he had to assume he would be somehow exempt from the constant Sith struggle for power.
- Palpatine deceived Plagueis into thinking that Darth Maul was simply an assassin, not a true apprentice. The one thing that didn't go according to plan was that Maul was defeated right after Palpatine disposed of his own master...though Palpatine made that work to his advantage by accelerating the training of Dooku, who was better suited than Maul had been for the very public role needed in the next phase of the plan. Of course, Palpatine was mentoring Dooku while Maul was still his apprentice, making Palpatine a rather blatant Hypocrite.
- Conversely, Palpatine began to suspect that Dooku was plotting the same in Star Wars: The Clone Wars with his own assassin, Asajj Ventress, and ordered him to have her killed to prove his loyalty. Dooku followed through with the order but failed to have her killed, resulting in her turning on him. Interestingly, Dooku did not have plans for betraying his master before this event. After this, however, he began to plot against Palpatine. Naturally, we know how this went.
- After said betrayal, Ventress herself recruited her own apprentice in the form of Savage Opress with the intent of taking revenge on Dooku after her attempt to do so herself failed, but with the aid of Mother Talzin sent him to Dooku under the guise of "training" as a new apprentice due to exploiting the paranoia he built up after the failed assassination attempt. In the end, however, Savage betrayed both of them after he got sick of their abuse and ran off to find his still-alive-but-not-quite-sane brother Maul with the aid of Mother Talzin, whom he became the true apprentice of. As can be plainly seen, the Rule of Two at times was more a guideline than a rule.
- When Palpatine confronts Maul and Savage on Mandalore, he chastises Maul for breaking the Rule of Two. He conveniently omits that he was training Dooku while Maul was still his apprentice, making Palpatine a Hypocrite of the highest order.
Palpatine: There can only be two, and you are not my apprentice! - Since Star Wars Rebels has canonized the Imperial Inquisition, they are Dark Side Force-sensitives employed by Darth Vader, but are immune to the Rule of Two because they are not Sith. They're purposely trained so as not to reach the power level where they'd run the risk of violating the rule like Asajj Ventress did.note
- It's revealed in the season 2 finale that despite having immense rage at the Sith Order as a whole for betraying and discarding him, Maul still adheres to this philosophy. And he's looking to corrupt Ezra into becoming his apprentice.
- Ultimately Darth Bane's philosophy, while it kept the Sith alive in secret for millennia, also resulted in the order's undoing, as the chain could be easily broken by a factor that Bane failed to take into account— the potential redemption of either the master or the apprentice. Darth Vader's Redemption Equals Death and, in the old Expanded Universe, Jacen Solo/Darth Caedus' apprentice renouncing the Dark Side of the Force and the Sith shortly after the former's demise, pretty much spells the end for the Sith Order because of the Rule of Two. What's worse is that Bane really should have known better. The Sith Lord whose Holocron gave Bane the inspiration for the Rule of Two, Darth Revan, had also renounced the Dark Side, and Bane knew this.
- The Last Jedi exposes another flaw in the Rule of Two related to the redemption example above— a Sith apprentice killing his master but then deciding to destroy the entire Sith doctrine out of some sort of principle. While Snoke was not a Sith lord, Kylo Ren still betrayed him, and comes to the realization that both Jedi and Sith doctrines are intrinsically flawed, and that the past should be let go of... by being destroyed completely.
- The rule didn't make it intact through Bane's own lifetime. By the time his apprentice confronted him he had already taken a second, and she had started training one of her own. Zannah's apprentice ended up wandering off and doing his own thing as a Dark Side user who isn't technically a Sith. Meanwhile, after killing Bane, Zannah took his second apprentice (who proved far more promising than the candidate she'd found) as her own.
Live-Action TV
- Every major villain in Chouseishin Gransazer comes with at least one main henchman. Karin has Akira, Logia has Lucia, Brighton has Algol and Belzeus has Gorgion.
- Doctor Who: The Master lacks a consistent Dragon across all of his appearances, but in each story he appears in he'll usually have a new henchman or pawn.
- In Heroes, the Company's rule is "one of them, one of us": "them" being a human with some mutant ability, and "us" being a Muggle whose first loyalty is, always and forever, to the Company.
- Almost every villain who takes the lead in Kamen Rider Revice has at least one henchman standing beside them. Aguilera has Olteca and later Julio after Olteca's betrayal, Olteca has Kanae Motomura and Hideo Akaishi goes through Olteca, Vail and Daiji.
- Seigi No Symbol Condorman: Each Monster Clan executive has at least one unique henchman who commands their mooks for them or serves as their muscle for holding off Condorman. The only ones who don't are trio of Smogton, Gomigon and Hedoronger, who don't really need one since they already work together.
- Just about every Big Bad in Super Sentai has a right-hand of some sort. Some have two or more though usually one of them will end up taking the lead.
- Himitsu Sentai Gorenger: The Black Cross Fuuml;hrer goes through four Dragons across the entire series. Whenever his current Dragon would fail too many times, he'd summon a new one to take his place.
- The Co-Dragons in Hikari Sentai Maskman, Igam and Baraba, each have Ninja bodyguards Fumin and Oyobu as their own respective personal henchmen.
- GoGo Sentai Boukenger: This is played straight by every member of the Big Bad Ensemble except Ryuuwon. Gai has Rei. Gekkou of Illusions has Yaiba of Darkness, with Shizuka of the Wind getting bumped up after Yaiba deserts. After going solo, Yaiba gains his own right-hand in Masumi after corrupting him to The Dark Side. Gajah spends most of the series without any henchmen other than his Mooks, but towards the end he creates Desperado to be his main enforcer.
Video Games
- In Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City, the Joker keeps Harley as his right hand girl. Even if she's not very good at it.
- Subverted in Daughter for Dessert. Cecilia has Saul as her legal muscle when she makes her debut, but he represents the protagonist for free at his criminal trial, and plays dirty to get him a not guilty verdict.
- Played with in Double Homework. When Dennis starts blackmailing Dr. Mosely/Zeta, she helps him by expelling the protagonist from summer school, arranging a class trip in which he can sleep with all the girls (he thinks), and tells Tamara that she has to come along so he can have his way with her too. However, Dr. Mosely/Zeta is just biding her time until her cleanup crew can neutralize Dennis’s threats to her secrecy.
- Prominent in Fate/stay night. Sure, you could just kill the Master and run away from the Servant (it's even repeatedly stated to be the best strategy), but nobody ever does. Most apparent with Kotomine/Gilgamesh and Kuzuki/Caster. Nobody in either pairing is really the boss. Gilgamesh will do what Kotomine says, if he feels like it. Caster would obey Kuzuki's orders, but Kuzuki is too passive to really bother most of the time. Also apparent in Kotomine's fight against True Assassin and Zouken Matou. He's stronger than Assassin, but can't kill him due to him being a Servant, so he has to take out Zouken first and then Assassin would be vulnerable. But Zouken is essentially unkillable by normal means plus Assassin is keeping him busy.
- Magical Battle Arena has Ruru Gerard and Nowel Diastasis as the two primary antagonists of the game. This is however dropped in the sequel which sees Ruru Put on a Bus.
- The two major villains of Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga are Big Bad Cackletta and The Dragon Fawful. In Bowser's Inside Story, where Fawful is the Big Bad, he gets a Dragon of his own, Midbus.
- In Melody, Bethany and Steve team up to break up the dream team of the protagonist and title character.
- This is a recurring motif in Touhou Project.
- Big Bad and her one-and-only dragon: Remillia-Sakuya, Yuyuko-Youmu, Yukari-Ran, Kaguya-Eirin, Eiki-Komachi (not bad folks), Kanako-Sanae, and so on.
- Everyone have a counterpart (not necessarily yin-yang or dark side): Reimu vs Sanae, Chen vs Rin, Marisa vs Alice, Remillia vs Flandre, the list goes on and on...
- Characters fight in pair during Imperishable Night.
- Yukari Yakumo's ability is explicitly defined as the ability to manipulate border between two different things. As for what that means in practice, it apparently means whatever Yukari wants it to mean.
- For that matter, the yin-yang features heavily in Touhou Project; it's even one of Reimu's attack mode.
- Metal Gear: Similar to Star Wars above, there is only one Boss (Master), and one Snake (Apprentice). Big Boss was once Naked Snake, and his master was the #1 heroine of WWII, The Boss. Then she went rogue, he had to kill her and take the Boss title, which he wasn't happy about. But in a plot twist of epic proportions, Solid Snake was never the apprentice - that was Venom Snake, Big Boss' body double and second-in-command. Snake killed the body double without realizing, and then set the master on fire. Then through sheer coincidence, he became the master of Raiden, who succeeded him non-violently as the master when Snake passed away of Werner Syndrome.
- Rocket Knight Adventures: Regardless of whoever is the Big Bad, they'll always have Axel Gear (the series' sole recurring villain) as their right-hand man.
Webcomics
- In Evil Plan
. Dr. Kinesis hires Alice as his second in command because he loses his previous number two.
Western Animation
- This is a common theme in Kim Possible. Drakken and Shego, the Seniors, and even Gemini says that he was saving the "Alpha" title for someone special.
Real Life
- In Rome, this began with the rule of two consuls in the diarchy, was revived by Emperor Diocletian creating the ranks of senior emperors (the Augustus) and junior emperors (the Caesars), then squared by implementing the Tetrarchy, which ended after the Civil Wars of the Tetrachy and Constantine the Great ultimately becoming a single Augustus.
