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Yeah, he's an Anti Villain, but who else can handle Ankh-Morpork?
Therefore a wise prince ought to adopt such a course that his citizens will always have need of the state and of him, and then he will always find them faithful. — Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
SI NON CONFECTVS, NON REFICIAT
— Vetinari Family Motto (roughly translated: "If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It")
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.
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. Interestingly, neither one rejoins the organization by the end of the series, but they seem to get by as well as before. Subversion?
Comics
- A variation with Flycatcher in Fables. Deputy Mayor Beauty 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 doomed family.
- Well, in the long run (very long), this works out; Flycatcher takes back his rightful place as king of his 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.
- 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 Paradox 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.
Films
- 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!
Folklore
- 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 in one of my collections 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.
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 better 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.
- Speaking of Death, 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 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 pleasent, 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.
Live Action TV
- The third and sixth season premieres of Buffy the Vampire Slayer featured Buffy's friends attempting to keep Sunnydale's vampire population in check on their own while she was off finding herself and being dead, respectively. Turns out it's harder than it looks.
- Also in Season 7 when everyone turns on Buffy and not only deprives her of the leadership but throw her out of her own house, they end up making Faith the leader - and she promptly leads them into a trap. Many fans feel they got what they deserve.
- Some fans believe that Buffy got what she deserved as well, since she wasn't doing all that good of a job leading them herself up to that point. She did seem to learn something from the experience, at least.
- Torchwood sans Captain Jack is in a similar state in the premiere of the second season.
- Several times on the US version of Kitchen Nightmares, Ramsay will force a chef that he thinks is useless to leave, only to find the kitchen even worse without them.
- On The Office (US), Michael tells Jan that the employees get less work done when he's absent. Realizing this makes it look like he can't delegate authority, he quickly tells her that they do more work when he's gone. Realizing that looks even worse, he settles on telling her that they do the same amount of work whether he's there or not. That last one might actually be true, as the others' tendency to goof off when he's not around is about equal to his hindrance of their work when he is.
- In another episode after Dwight is fired temporarily, Michael discovers that Dwight performs certain minor tasks he had always appreciated like arranging his desk items in a pleasing fashion and watering the plants, in addition to his salesman duties.
- On How I Met Your Mother it turns out that Ted did all the shopping and owned everything useful in the apartment. When he moves out, Lily and Marshall are left without food, towels, or toilet paper, and get onto each other's nerves without him around to boot.
- When JD initially moves out on Scrubs, Turk and Carla realize that he was the one who did almost everything around the apartment.
- The indispensable wife plot happened at least once on I Love Lucy. Ricky and Fred make a complete mess of the kitchen involving some bad math and a great amount of rice, while Lucy and Ethel... well, make a chocolate factory.
- Any time Col. Blake or Col. Potter left the 4077th ''M*A*S*H everything went to pieces, at least as far and Hawkeye and Trapper/B.J. (more often then not Burns/Winchester was left in charge) were concerned. Less comically, Radar's departure in Season 8.
- Re: Radar's departure, Klinger does eventually figure out the filing system & supply deals, but he never develops true Radarism.
- On Home Improvement, Al tires of being the straight man to Tim and demands they switch roles for an episode of Tool Time, saying "How hard can it be to make lame puns and screw up all the time?" Turns out, pretty hard.
- In Kaamelott, a few characters (most notably King Léodagan) criticize regularly King Arthur's rule and how he's handling the Grail Quest. But once Arthur gets fed up and step down from the throne in "Livre V", the knights find out the hard way that keeping the kingdom afloat is very hard work and beyond them.
- In one episode of Full House, Danny Tanner decided that being such a perpetual neat-freak (he even regularly cleaned his bottles of cleaning products!) was a waste of time....the house fell into total chaos in mere hours. It was only once the others all got together and talked him around that the house got cleaned again.
- In Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia, anytime part of the cast tries to get rid of another cast member (such as "Dennis and Dee go on Welfare")
Music
- Dr. Wily in the albums of The Protomen, who realizes early on that the convienience provided to mankind by the worker robots he provides will eventually make them dependent on him.
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.
Video Games
- In the Kirby game Kirby's Adventure, Dedede's motivation for stealing and breaking the Star Rod is to prevent something even worse than himself, Nightmare, from being loosed on the kingdom.
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.
Web Comics
- 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."
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 Rockos 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.
- In the Beast Wars episode "Double Jepoardy," Megatron at one point responded to Terrorsaur's constant and badly thought-out power plays by giving him command and waiting for him to fail.
- When Sokka goes off to take some weapons training my himself for a day in an episode of Avatar the Last Airbender, 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 right.) By the time he comes back at the end of the day, everyone is desperate for him to do something funny.
- Charles Foster Ofdensen was the lawyer and manager of Deth Klok 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 pratically bankrupt in the span of a few months. Good thing Ofdensen turned out to still be alive.
Real Life
- Many dictators or autocrats loved to try this in history to discourage unrest, but few actually succeeded, and fewer still managed to bypass the greatest flaw of this paradox — what happens after the indispensable ruler dies?
- Nobody knows for sure, but this troper believes the answer (from their point of view) to that would be: "Who cares?"
- Louis XIV: "L'État, c'est moi." — courtesy of his reforms to centralize French power in his person. If a noble wanted their state pension and the privileges of nobility, they had to wait on him at Versailles almost constantly rather than remaining on their own estates, while his appointed bureaucrats got on with the business of governance in Paris. Those bureaucrats in turn relied entirely on royal favour to back their authority, as they invariably lacked aristocratic blood of their own. On the foreign front, his strong support for Gallicanism (special liberties for the French Church) meant that the Pope could not alienate him personally without losing France entirely. Notably, and rarely for this trope, his influence even continued after his death — the regency for Louix XV tried to restore the nobility's former rights, only to find that thanks to Louis XIV's long reign (72 years), no one among the nobility knew how to run so much as a corner shoppe, which left the power Louis XIV once commanded to the very ministries that had relied on his favour for survival.
- Also, during the brief period between the reigns of
Louis XIII Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIV, the nobles temporarily deposed Mazarin, Richelieu's successor, and ruled France for about a year. It...didn't go so well.
- In the Meiji Restoration, the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate paved the way for Emperor Meiji to assume direct control of the nation. The resultant Meiji constitution theoretically provided for the sharing of power between the Emperor and an elective Diet, but it arranged affairs in such a way that only a sufficiently capable Emperor, and more specifically Emperor Meiji himself had much of the actual power. After his death, subsequent Emperors were thus left unable to manage the government and reign in either the Diet or the military.
- Ivan the Terrible — who could be Dangerously Genre Savvy at times — pulled this off to the letter. Facing constant interference in his rule from nobles and royal bureaucrats, he responded by taking an indefinite leave of absence from his duties. After the nobles had made a right mess of things, the people begged him to return and sort things out, which he did. On the condition that he could rule as an absolute monarch.
- Stalin, who seemed to respect Ivan's example in many things, also seized power by threatening to resign and leave a power vacuum.
- And of course Putin; it's been said that the title of Russia's ruler would be "Manager of Moscow McDonalds" if Putin held it. This is only a half-joke.
- Gaius Octavianus/Octavian Caesar/Caesar Augustus (all the same man) also did this to spectacular effect some 2000 years prior. He pretty well wrote the book on becoming King without actually taking the title.
- Computer programmers often ironically refer to incomprehensible code created by bad programming practices as "job security", because if you're the only one who understands the system, they can't fire you.
- Ennesby of Schlock Mercenary remarks on a related matter when the crew discovers a technologically ancient computer
 whose data has been coded to become inaccessible in the event of an upgrade:
Ennesby: You could, in theory, replace the OS, but you'd lose the ability to work with your data.
Thurl: That sounds like the work of one of the old software monopoly hegemonies.
Ennesby: Nope. They wanted to force you into one upgrade path. This trick forces you into no upgrade path.
Thurl: That sounds more like the work of a game console company.
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