Basic Trope: A villain that cannot be defeated.
- Straight: Drake is a Knight that has been cursed with dark magic, making him so powerful none of the heroes can defeat him.
- Exaggerated:
- Drake is so powerful that not only are the heroes unable to stop him, but they die trying. Tragically. He is also so absurdly clever that no attempt at making a plan and winning a non-combat victory is possible, and he is revealed to be omnipotent so even the heroes' smallest attempts at rebellion (like writing graffiti) get instant, precise and equally nasty doom.
- All of the villains in the story are invincible.
- Downplayed:
- Drake becomes more powerful after the curse, but not immensely so. There are also a few weaknesses that the heroes try their best to exploit. They may or may not succeed.
- Drake is an extremely powerful Evil Sorcerer and a devilishly cunning manipulator, but while confronting him directly on the battlefield is out of the question, he is still a mortal, with mortal failings, and can be Out-Gambitted in a game of wits by a smarter opponent.
- Justified:
- There is no counter to Dark Magic arts in the work.
- There was a counter to Drake's dark magic, but the heroes had unintentionally gotten rid of it for good. Maybe it was because Drake was a Manipulative Bastard and goaded them into doing so, securing his invincibility.
- Drake is the Anthropomorphic Personification of death, entropy, justice (especially if the protagonists did some crime to achieve their goal) or some other inevitable cosmic or societal force that claims everyone in the end.
- Drake is a God of Evil, or Eldritch Abomination and so far above the league of the heroes that fighting him is pointless.
- Inverted:
- The hero becomes immensely powerful to the point where the villain can’t possibly kill them.
- Harmless Villain: Drake is a complete fool who poses no real threat to the heroes, all he knows is to Poke the Poodle
- Stupid Crooks: A group of thieves who are to dumb to commit a crime right
- Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain
- Subverted:
- The hero decides to sacrifice himself in order to kill Drake.
- The heroes discover Drake's Kryptonite Factor.
- Drake's invincibility turns out to have been exaggerated by propaganda. He's a tough bastard, but he can bleed and he can be killed.
- After several tough fights, Drake is finally killed, possibly at a great cost.
- Double Subverted:
- ... Only for Drake to survive the attack.
- The hero does this by sealing Drake away forever. But Drake now has newfound power thanks to the hero's soul and is biding his time.
- Drake lied about his Kryptonite Factor.
- Unfortunately for Jim, he is most definitely not one of the people who can inflict that on Drake.
- Parodied:
- Drake is a Villain Protagonist and he is barely enduring Victory Is Boring.
- Drake is an "invincible villain" but only because he's the Opposing Sports Team in some cockamamie Serious Business event. The aesop is that this is something incredibly stupid to base your life around and the heroes thus walk away, leaving Drake to gloat about being undefeated but also remaining the laughingstock of the world.
- Drake's invincibility makes him The Bore and The Friend Nobody Likes of the villain/hero business.
- Drake is so invincible and constantly getting Retconed reasons why that all of the other characters break the fourth wall and complain about how Drake is an obvious Creator's Pet and they can't work with this.
- Drake is essentially the evil version of Droopy.
- Drake spends his time gloating at the heroes, ranting (with a snide smirk and inflection, at that) about how All Your Base Are Belong to Us and the Artifact of Power is his and how the heroes are trapped in a massive Xanatos Gambit and that his death is only the beginning so you can strike him down with all of your hatred and he'd still win.
- Zig-Zagged:
- When Drake is first introduced, he's untouchable. However, as the heroes grow stronger it becomes apparent that this was just because of their inexperience- they're eventually able to give him a run for his money. Until he goes One-Winged Angel, that is. For the rest of the show the heroes continually approach Drake in power, only for him to get stronger as well and remain ahead of them.
- Depending on the Writer, Drake can either be an unstoppable force of evil, or just a normal villain with both strengths and weaknesses.
- Averted: Drake is built up as a villain with reasonable strengths and weaknesses.
- Enforced:
- The publishers needed to end the series for the time being so asked the writers to insert an unbeatable villain.
- Drake is supposed to be unbeatable in order for the story to keep going.
- Drake is a villainous version of the Lord British Postulate.
- The writers wanted to play around with themes of death, inevitability, hopelessness, etc.
- The writers wanted the story to become dramatically dreary in a hurry. There is no better Drama Bomb than having the characters run into a dude who nearly kills everyone and they can do jack to prevent it.
- Lampshaded: "This series would be a whole lot shorter and a whole lot cooler if Drake would just drop. fucking. dead already."
- Invoked: Drake goes through years of intense Training from Hell and learns all of the heroes' weaknesses to make himself unbeatable.
- Exploited:
- No one in the setting can stand against Drake, and the heroes realize it. Instead of fighting him, they resort to tricking their other enemies into combat with him, and letting Drake do their work for them.
- Because nobody can stand against Drake, he does whatever he wants whenever he wants content in the fact that he is completely unstoppable.
- Defied:
- The heroes manage to render Drake's source of power inert.
- Drake purposefully limits himself for the sake of keeping things challenging for himself.
- Deconstructed:
- Drake's complete unstoppability makes the heroes fall into despair. After all, Drake is living proof that righteousness and justice don't matter in the end - only raw power does.
- Drake's complete unstoppability makes him arrogant, and he becomes complacent. A couple of plucky heroes bide their time, wait for him to lower his guard, sneak in, and finally slit his throat.
- Drake ends up getting bored because nothing poses a challenge to him, making his crimes not very fun anymore.
- Drake The Vile sees a very quick decline in ratings and faces a potential cancellation because audiences, to be blunt, are bored to tears by Drake's unstoppability.
- Reconstructed:
- The heroes may not be able to defeat Drake in combat, but they can still protect innocents from his rampages and limit the damage he does, returning meaning to their actions.
- Drake narrowly survives an assassination attempt that came close to killing him because he got lazy. He takes this as a wake-up call and starts training again to regain his unlimited power.
- The writers quickly change gears and make Drake a Showy Invincible Villain Protagonist with a personal plot line about being a Well-Intentioned Extremist out to change a world that for a myriad of reasons (many of them Ripped from the Headlines) only an invincible character would be able to change. The audience now feeling a sense of wish fulfillment, they tune back in.
- Discussed: "Aw, man! We were just going to give Drake the final blow, but he's still not dead yet!"
- Conversed: "I had to stop watching. They can never lay a finger on Drake, and it just got kinda depressing."
- Implied: At the mere mention of Drake's presence at some disaster, the entire team of heroes refuses to go there.
- Played For Laughs: Drake The Vile is essentially the Spiritual Successor of One-Punch Man, with Drake standing in as a Corrupted Character Copy of Saitama.
- Played for Drama:
- The heroes suffer from a high level of stress being unable to defeat Drake.
- The story revolves around the heroes' desperate race to Prevent the War against the Kingdom of Drake, because some imbecilic General Ripper got it in his head that it must happen and they know that it's suicide and the Kingdom is so outrageously powerful that it would be satisfying to call the resulting genocide a "Curb-Stomp Battle", because that term at least implies that there was an extremely tiny chance in hell of achieving victory.
- Alice and Bob: The Series is a tragedy and Drake is the agent who causes said tragedy. Alice and Bob became too proud, too headstrong, with all of the victories they had, and they very stupidly went and angered the man who could murder them without breaking a sweat. They even had the gall of calling the plan "Operation Icarus".
- Played for Horror: The heroes realize what they're up against and begin to flee from Drake. The rest of the work becomes similar to a monster horror movie where Drake begins to butcher innocent people and some of the heroes in search of them.
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