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Vetinari Job Security
aka: Vetinari Paradox
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"Therefore a wise prince ought to adopt such a course that his citizens will always in every sort and kind of circumstance have need of the state and of him, and then he will always find them faithful."
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Pt. IX
A character steps out of his normal role, due to anything from being sick to going on vacation to being locked up in prison. The rest of the cast is confident they can handle it, and may even think they can do a better job. Naturally, they fail terribly.
The ironic thing is that it's not that the original person necessarily does a great job, merely that they do an adequate job, or even just that they do it when no one else really wants to. An added source of humor can come from how inconsequential the job seems, and this can tie into An Aesop about minor details being important. Interestingly, this can apply to both villainous and heroic bosses. When an upstart villain tries to replace a Magnificent Bastard in these scenarios, the comeuppance can be spectacular.
The oldest television version of this trope usually involved sitcoms and vacationing wives — see A Day in Her Apron — although this particular version is becoming a Discredited Trope.
Compare Just Fine Without You, in which the focus is on the feelings of the person who left. Compare with Permanent Elected Official. This trope can lead to An Aesop addressing why it's wrong for the Planet of Hats to practice Klingon Scientists Get No Respect.
Named for Lord Havelock Vetinari of the Discworld series, the ruler of Ankh-Morpork, who has made himself so utterly indispensable to the city's continued functioning that despite his Anti-Villain/ Villain Protagonist nature, any attempt to remove or replace him is likely to end in disaster.
Contrast and compare Ultimate Job Security, where someone does a truly bad job, but doesn't get replaced and George Jetson Job Security, where a character returns mostly for continuity reasons. Compare The Heart, the glue and morality of a team.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- In the second season of Witch Hunter Robin, when Robin and Amon go to ground, the witch hunter organization is barely able to function. Robin, a powerful pyrokinetic, and Amon, the resident gun toting badass, made most of the captures. The remaining members were focused mostly on intelligence and support, with little combat ability.
- Iceburg of One Piece fits, in that according to Spandam, because Iceburg had not only transformed Water 7 back into a shipbuilding corporation with the Galley-La Company, but by supplying the World Government with ships, he became too important and well-connected to simply get rid of.
- In Code Geass, Zero invokes a more situational version of this right before they enter the Battle of Narita. He puts the Black Knights in an extremely untenable situation (surrounded by enemies with seemingly no means of escape), then tells them that their only options are to give him complete trust and command, or shoot him dead and try to escape on their own.
- This was used as the argument behind not taking down Goldie Muso in the second Gunsmith Cats series, despite the fact that there was no real evidence that the mob had gotten out of control while she had amnesia, and that the person this was presented to had considerable first-person evidence to Goldie's status as a Complete Monster.
Comics
- A variation with Flycatcher in Fables. Flycatcher thinks his continual community service sentences for minor violations are cruel and unusual, but he's the only one who can keep The Woodlands floors clean, and it keeps him from going back to the Homelands to try and save his dead family.
- In the long run (very long), this works out; Flycatcher takes back his rightful place as king of a new Homeland, and actually wages a successful campaign against the Adversary that leads to the Fables having a nice foothold in the Homelands for the first time since the war began.
- But King Ambrose still visits Fabletown occasionally just to sweep the floors. There's still no-one else who can do his job.
- Wholesale averted in the same story, when the original Fabletown leadership of Mayor Old King Cole, Deputy Mayor Snow White, and Sheriff Bigby Wolf are all replaced when Cole loses an election. Their jobs are taken over by, respectively, Prince Charming, Beauty, and the Beast. You would expect that they would fail horribly at replacing our beloved main characters, but instead they all performed quite well in their positions (especially Charming).
- Notable, however, is the fact that all three had a hard time of things at first, all three complained at times, and Prince Charming never stopped complaining about the responsibility right until the end. On multiple occasions, he mentions that Cole made the job look MUCH easier than it really was, and Beauty once asked how Snow got so damned good at her job. Beast seems to adapt the quickest and most effectively, but the good advice he got from Bigby early on helped smooth his path to growth. So in a way, this particular example started out as a Vetinari Job Security situation, but over time (and with the old office holders being unwilling to take their old jobs back), the new people were forced to grow into their roles.
- Both played straight and averted in several European (mostly Italian) stories involving Scrooge McDuck. With his tendency to travel around the world seeking treasure, several stories have him mysteriously missing, declared deceased, etc. Either his heirs (Donald Duck, Huey, Dewey, Louie, Gladstone) or his office staff try to keep his financial empire running. In stories playing it straight, they really mess things up and manage to damage said empire. When Scrooge inevitably resurfaces, he has his hands full with a rebuilding process. In stories averting the trope, the replacements initially have problems but eventually wise up to proper ways of running things. Scrooge returns to find his affairs in a decent state and even notes a few improvements. Proving the intended heirs are actually worthy of the job.
Fairy Tales
- There is, of course, the classic folk tale of the husband who thinks his wife has the easy job, lazing around the house all day, while the wife thinks the husband's job playing outside in the fields is easiest. They switch jobs and both make disasters out of the other's work.
- Of course, there's another version of that folk tale where it's just the husband that thinks the wife's job is easy; they switch, she does fine, finishes early, and comes home in time to prevent him from completely destroying the entire house.
- There's an interesting version where the King spends all day hunting dragons and the Queen spends all day sewing, and they decide to switch not so much out of "your job must be easy" but out of sheer boredom. The Queen finds that dragons are actually nice and also almost extinct thanks to all the hunting, and the King finds that he doesn't really like sewing. At the end of the day, they've decided that the way it's always been done is stupid, so the Queen finds better things to do than sewing and the two of them invite the dragons to come over weekly for tea.
- There are also somewhat less pleasant versions, such as "The Mouse, The Bird and the Sausage", where the three characters keep house together. Each of them had their tasks to do, until one day the bird got tired of his job and they changed them around. Everyone ended up dead.
Films — Live-Action
- Mr. Mom
- Kramer vs. Kramer
- Sutler in V for Vendetta invokes this trope. It doesn't help.
Sutler: What we need right now is a clear message to the people of this country. This message must be read in every newspaper, heard on every radio, seen on every television. This message must resound throughout the entire Interlink! I want this country to realize that we stand on the edge of oblivion. I want every man, woman and child to understand how close we are to chaos. I want everyone to remember why they need us!
- In the beginning of Hot Fuzz, the London police send Angel to Samford because he's so efficient he makes them all look bad. By the end, they are begging him to come back because his absence made the crime rate rise enough to make them all look worse.
- Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars attempts this. He intentionally organized the entire Empire so that it was basically a huge nonsensical bureaucratic jumble with himself as the only thing holding it together. The idea was that he was so crucial for the continued peace and security of the entire galaxy that no one would dare attempt to assassinate him for fear of the complete anarchy that would result. Guess what.
- God does this in Bruce Almighty, twice. First time, he casually mentions all the horror and suffering of the medieval ages were the result of him taking a vacation. He then decides to take another vacation, leaving Bruce in charge. In the end, after everything has gone to hell, Bruce kneels in a street exclaiming that he's learned his lesson, begging for God to come back.
Literature
- This trope is named for Lord Vetinari of the Discworld book series, a benevolent tyrant who stays in power, not because anyone actually likes him, but because they dislike him less than any of the other options. Several times he has been forced out of power, then resumed his usual role when the new regime collapses from its own inability to deal with the crisis they used as an excuse to seize power initially. This is, of course, just as planned — while Machiavelli may say it is safer to be feared than loved, Vetinari holds that being permanent is even better, and has remade the political system around him to work best when he's leading it. It is explicitly stated, and shown, that although Vetinari is disliked by most citizens low and high despite turning the city into the most powerful on the Disc, they always fail because he has tamed the city like a dog. And most dogs do not like it when the master is no longer around.
- Samuel Vimes also qualifies. By the time of Night Watch, the Assassins Guild has taken him off the register, meaning they won't accept any contracts to kill him (the only other person to share this distinction being Vetinari), a sure sign that the city would be much worse off without him around.
The Assassins Guild understood the political game in the city better than anyone, and if they took you off the register it was because they felt your departure would not only spoil the game but also smash the board.
- Also, they consider him not to be a good sportman on regard to his assasination attempts.
- This is illustrated nicely in The Fifth Elephant when Vimes and every other senior officer end up leaving the Watch for different reasons and Colon is left in seniority. He quickly devolves into The Neidermeyer from the increased stress and responsibility and runs the Watch into the ground. That said, the crime rate still goes down, because while the criminals in the city know Vimes isn't around, they know he will be back, and he will not be happy if things go badly while he's away.
- Another Discworld example is Archchancellor Ridcully. He is The Ditz and a Large Ham, much to the annoyance of the other wizards. But they remember that before him, the Unseen University was rife with Klingon Promotion and not just for the position of Archchancelor, leading to this exchange in The Last Continent:
"You know, we used to kill wizards like him."
"Yes, but we used to kill wizards like us too."
- The Archchancellor was also, originally, immune to Klingon Promotion — by simply not being killable. It's mentioned, once, that one assassin attempting to get the better of him went deaf for two weeks. Since then, he made himself indispensible by stopping the trend of murder.
- He's also done a revolutionary modernizing overhaul of the management system — ie, throw the papers in a pile and ignore them, as well as anyone trying to tell him about them. If something is genuinely important, they won't give up trying to get him to listen after a minute or five. And there's always that one guy who knows what is going on who will eventually pick up the slack and do that stuff anyway. Incidently, this is exactly how Ponder Stibbons got majority vote in the staff with nobody noticing, and is almost this trope because of it.
- The Librarian is another potential candidate for this trope. While Ridcully was initially taken aback at the notion of having an ape on the faculty, the fact that nobody else at UU has the nerve or know-how to manage the Library's dangerous books is sure to keep him in bananas in perpetuity. During the Librarian's illness from The Last Continent, the unmanaged books started attacking people, and the section of Critical Essays went critical.
- Not to mention the fact that "If you mentioned to the wizards that there was an orangutan in the library, they would be more likely to ask the Librarian if he'd seen it", and that he's been an orangutan for so long that nobody can remember his real name, with the possible exception of Rincewind. It's Horace Worblehat, if you're curious.
- Not only that, but the library also contains books that would drive a man mad by glancing at them. Since the Librarian isn't technically a man, he is the only one who can possibly handle them.
- This is Mrs. Cake's modus operandi as described in Reaper Man: 1. Join a church. It can be any church for any god of any description. 2. Get involved, help out with the cleaning, maintaining the vestigal virgins, help handle collections, and so forth. 3. Continue step 2 until she is considered indespensible to the running of several major functions of the church. 4. Get into a disagreement with someone in charge of the church, and promptly leave, cutting all ties, thus throwing the entire structure into confusion.
- The novel On Borrowed Time, which was also made into a play and film, is about how some people are sure that things would be just fine if Death quit his job. It doesn't work out too well.
- In Incarnations of Immortality, the Incarnation of Evil, Satan, is a good man (for certain values of "good") just doing his job because... y'know. When he temporarily adbicates the Office, it defaults to the most evil man in the world who proves not only much less pleasant, but far less competent, so the other Incarnations, who have just spent the entire series opposing Satan at every turn, have to figure out a way to get him back in charge.
- In David Eddings' Tamuli, it's revealed that the government of a continent-spanning empire that covers nine countries and cultures has a very relaxed approach towards people who try to raise rebellion against the empire. Their view is that people get pissed for a reason, and the leader of the current rebellion probably knows what the problems are. So they ask him if he could do a better job of running his region; upon the inevitable 'yes', they put him in charge as governor and let him handle the headaches. He either A) fails and is miserable in a hard job with the populace hating him B) does a good job and straightens things out. The Tamuli Empire sees it as a win/win situation for them.
- In Eddings' Belgariad, Drasnian merchant Silk is massively involved in trading goods and services pretty much everywhere in the world, even in the Angarak nations who are supposed to be opposed to Drasnia and the other western countries. At one point the emperor of the Mallorean empire has it pointed out to him that, were Silk and all his business enterprises to be removed, the Mallorean economy would probably collapse.
- In Jennifer Fallon's series The Second Son Trilogy, we get to see Dirk literally become this. By becoming the most extreme combination of The Chessmaster and Magnificent Bastard while running on Xanatos Speed Chess with no allies whatsoever he is now actually running the world competently (a first in a loooooong while).
- Used subtly in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. At one point, a planet attempts to improve its society by putting all of the population with "useless" jobs (such as "telephone sanitizer") on a spaceship and sending them off somewhere. Their society experiences a boom of technical and artistic achievement... until a disease from an unsanitized telephone destroys all life on the planet.
- The whole joke is slightly misanthropic; the spaceship's tenants consisted mostly of middle-management types, who attempt to survive by committee. Arthur and Ford wander off in disgust, then return later, only to wander off in disgust again when they learn that the leaf has been made legal tender, and therefore they're going to burn down all the forests so that their currency will have value. Somehow they still manage to survive to supplant the local protosapients.
- This appears to be the case with "Gentleman" John Marcone of The Dresden Files. He rose to power, taking control of the Chicago Outfit. He's a crime lord, but under his rule, gang violence in Chicago quieted and he's made sure as few civilians were hurt by the criminal underworld as possible. He even personally executes anyone who hurts children in Chicago. It's stated in universe that while no one is happy that Marcone is so powerful, he's infinitely better than any alternative, so he's mostly left alone by the authorities.
- In the short story Aftermath, which takes place shortly after Harry is shot dead at the end of Changes, Murphy unhappily concedes that Marcone is in an even stronger position because as a signatory of the Unseelie Accords and thus a minor power in the Chicago magical community, Marcone has basically become the city's first line of defence against supernatural threats.
- Bertie Wooster fired Jeeves once. Guess how long that lasted. There are also several other occasions where Bertie simply tries to resolve his difficulties without consulting Jeeves for various reasons (mostly injured pride or not wanting to give up whatever piece of clothing Jeeves disapproves of in gratitude), and it always ends up making things much worse before he's forced to return to Jeeves for help.
- Foaly in Artemis Fowl occupies this position; the technology he develops is one of the things keeping fairy society hidden from humans, and he's set himself up as being irreplacable to the L.E.P.
Live-Action TV
Music
- Dr. Wily in the albums of The Protomen, who realizes early on that the convenience provided to mankind by the worker robots he provides will eventually make them dependent on him.
Mythology/Religion
- Needless to say, many gods effectively have this. Somebody's got to drive the sun chariot or make the crops grow, for example, and if the original deity takes a break, it tends to turn out that either nobody else can do the job at all or else the would-be replacement isn't up to the task, makes a mess of things, and may (if mortal) not even survive the experience.
- Zeus from Classical Mythology tends to be portrayed this way both in myth and modern pop culture. He is generally recognized for being a better alternative to his father Kronos and is necessary to keep the other gods in line and overall order in the universe from more chaotic forces. In modern adaptations as bad as Zeus can be at times he is almost always portrayed as better than any possible replacements or no Zeus at all. A few examples include Marvel Comics' Incredible Hercules, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and the Disney Hercules film,
Puppet Shows
- In The Muppet Show and sequels where Kermit the Frog is in charge of the entertainment business, the place falls into complete chaos when he is not around. Given what The Muppet Show is like when Kermit is around, this is saying something.
Theater
- During the days of the Stuart Succession in the early 1600s, there was an entire slew of these "disguised ruler plays", the most famous of which is Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, which makes this Older Than Steam.
- Although, arguably, this is an early subversion, as the Duke states at the opening of the show that one of the reasons he's taking a sabbatical is that he's too soft of a ruler and needs Angelo to step in to administer the punishments that he could not.
Tabletop Games
- In Exalted, the Scarlet Empress of the Realm disappeared without a trace a few years ago. This has led to a breakdown in just about every area of government, because the Scarlet Empress, knowing how many people would love to dethrone her, made damn sure that she was irreplaceable.
- When the Ravenloft setting's resident lich, Azalin Rex, blew himself to atoms in a failed attempt to escape his domain of Darkon, the country was left leaderless for several years and most of it descended into chaos. Several lesser villains emerged as "demi-lords" and managed to take limited control of smaller subregions within Darkon, but it wasn't until Azalin acquired a new undead body and reclaimed his throne that things (mostly) settled down there.
Video Games
- Portal 2 has Chell replacing GLaDOS with an idiotic A.I. named Wheatley. They then spend the rest of the game working to restore GLaDOS to power after Wheatley becomes Drunk with Power and almost destroys the Enrichment Centre through a series of spectacularly bad decisions.
- Team Fortress 2: The medic is nearly essential to any team. If your medic leaves, prepare for a Difficulty Spike.
- This is largely true of any game system where "The Medic" is a player class option, including tabletop games as well as many video games.
- One way to tell which team you should join is by the amount of medics they have. If they have at least one more than the opposing team, they're more likely to win.
- But this also applies to the other class TYPES as well. If you have a team full of medics you will last, but don't expect a high bodycount. One "offense" type character to dish out some damage, otherwise you will not get far in any mode unless the other team is entirely dumb, and a defense to help stop attackers and set up points of defense to run away to if needed. Without those, you the entire team will have a tough time running.
- Some Touhou Fan Fiction often depicts Sakuya as being this to the SDM. An off-hand example is Life Of Maid.
- This trope is applied to other characters (such as Youmu and Ran) too, but it's more common with Sakuya.
Web Comics
- In Vexxarr, at one point Carl and Minionbot build a robotic double of Vexxarr to replace him. The double quickly finds out what a horror Vexxarr's position is, demands that Vexxarr take back command, and self-destructs when Vexxarr tries to refuse.
- R. K. Milholland's secondary strip Midnight Macabre features a variant on this. Local TV station secretary Gladys has a bizarre, completely incomprehensible filing system for the express purpose of making her irreplaceable. As she puts it: "Competency gets you hired, confusion keeps you employed."
- Subverted several times in the Ciem Webcomic Series. With Emeraldon gone, Ciem must take over the job of protecting Evansville. She does an okay job, but not as good of one. Then, Emeraldon returns. However, his return is only to be temporary. By the time he's forced to retire for good, the Hebbleskin Gang has been weakened to the point that Ciem is the city's true costumed protector. Then, Ciem gets captured. And the Earwig tries to fill in; making a tremendous mess of things until Ciem can return. Then, after both of them fail to protect one city block from being completely destroyed before Milp was defeated, they agree that they need to spread out across the country to keep the Hebbleskin Gang from focusing so much on Evansville, leaving the city with almost no superhuman protection. And for many years, it ends up not needing any.
- Baron Wulfenbach from Girl Genius certainly is the quintessential definition of this trope, that without him around and in charge Europa would fall into chaos, and yet no one seems to get this and many aristocrats continuously are trying to kill him.
Western Animation
- Goofy once did the "dad does the housework" version in Father's Day Off. Being Goofy, naturally, the house is left a shambles.
- In the Rocko's Modern Life episode "She's the Toad", Bev Bighead has to give a business proposal in place of her sick husband. She ends up doing a much better job than Ed usually does.
- Miriam Pataki does the same thing for Big Bob's Beepers in the Hey Arnold!! episode "The Beeper Queen" when Bob throws his back out and can't work.
- In the Beast Wars episode "Double Jeopardy", Megatron at one point responds to Terrorsaur's constant and badly thought-out power plays by giving him command and waiting for him to fail. Which he does. Spectacularly.
- In an episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender in which Sokka goes off to take some weapons training by himself for a day, the rest of the group tries to fill in for him as the comic relief, but they fail miserably. (Also, none of them know how to read maps correctly.) By the time he comes back at the end of the day, everyone is desperate for him to do something funny.
- More important than the comedy is the planning. Nobody knows what to do with themselves without Sokka directing things, however goofy and incompetent he seemed when he was doing the directing. He was always the one with the vision, and the schedule.
- Metalocalypse: Charles Foster Ofdensen was the lawyer and manager of Dethklok for years before being killed at the end of Season 2. Once they're left to manage themselves, the band goes from being their own majorly successful economy, and the five richest people in the world, to practically bankrupt in the span of a few months. Good thing Ofdensen turned out to still be alive.
- One South Park episode features Officer Barbrady, the incompetent policeman, taking a sabbatical so he could learn to read, which led to mass chaos. It wasn't so much that he was good at his job — it's just that as long as somebody was doing it nobody would go out of their way to commit crimes, but without him people decided to just start looting at will. The problem was eventually solved when Cartman took over for a while. Well... depending on one's definition of "solved," anyway.
- The Futurama episode "Lethal Inspection" saw Hermes and Bender off on an adventure to discover the identity of Bender's factory inspector. Hermes appoints Leela as Lil' Bureaucrat until he returns. Leela is quickly overwhelmed by the volume of paperwork, finally resorting to hiding papers behind potted plants. By the time Hermes returns, Planet Express is in shambles. Hermes saves the day by simply tossing all the paperwork into the furnace.
- When Marge Simpson went to jail for accidentally shoplifting a whiskey bottle, she was absent from her usual bake sale table with her Rice Krispies squares. The chain of events snowballed into city-wide riots at which point everyone realized how important Marge was.
- In the earlier episode "Little Big Mom", Marge is sent to Springfield Presbyterian Hospital because an antique clock fell on and broke her leg. After a quick tiff between the the two of who can do a better job of taking care of Bart and Homer, Lisa is left in charge. Things dissolve quickly after a couple months of being in charge: All of the dishes are rusted through, there is at least a few feet of water in the kitchen and living room. the cops have been called and shooed away at least once, and the food supply is drastically dwindling. Lisa, in a nod to I Love Lucy, tries to scare Bart and Homer into doing chores by making them think they have leprosy. Instead of the two actually doing chores, they run to a lepers' colony in Molokai, Hawaii, using all of the Christmas money Ned was saving up to send them there. Lisa does eventually clean the mess up by herself, but it takes the combined efforts of both Marge and Lisa to track Homer and Bart down.
- In one episode of Cyberchase, the drum player from one of the best bands on the Mount Olympus was kidnapped and convinced by Hacker that he'd be better appreciated as a solo act. The rest of the team were already thinking of of dumping him, as they didn't think that he added anything to the band. Turned out, he was the most important member, since he seems to be the only one who can keep the proper rhythm pattern (the day's lesson) and without him, the music was awful. The band player is eventually convinced to come back and he reunites with his bandmates, who finally realize how important he is.
Real Life
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