Basic Trope: The replacement for an authority figure makes horrible changes.
- Straight: A substitute teacher is incredibly strict.
- Exaggerated: The substitute teacher is actually a notorious serial killer.
- Downplayed: The substitute teacher tends to frown, but he isn't vicious.
- Justified: Vetinari Job Security: The authority figure is the only one who can handle the situation.
- Inverted:
- The replacement for a boat's captain handles the ship a lot better than normal.
- Or, in a more extreme inversion: A strict disciplinarian is replaced by a Hippie Teacher.
- Subverted:
- A substitute teacher seems creepy, but he's just a Trickster Mentor and a pretty cool guy.
- It is ultimately revealed that many of the changes the tyrant introduced were good ideas, and despite his unpopularity, he's proven to be an effective leader when the chips are down.
- A extremely imposing and scary guy appears in the front of the students, saying "Things will be very, very different from now on!"... And then he introduces the real substitute teacher, which looks like a pretty normal guy.
- Double Subverted:
- That was temporary and he becomes uptight again.
- The people are still together, and correct, in their belief that the tyrant was a very lousy "peace" leader. He just happened to luck into being a good "war" leader… and that there was a "war" scenario for him to prove it.
- The real substitute teacher is still evil or incompetent, he is just much less blatant about it.
- Parodied: The substitute teachers' union's gate reads "ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE."
- Zig Zagged: Is the new teacher nice or just useless? It gets harder to tell every day...
- Averted: Nobody really complains about the replacement.
- Enforced: Executives liked the original authority figure and convince the writer to start shilling the Creator's Pet through clever use of this trope.
- Lampshaded:Alice: We have a substitute teacher.
Bob: I'll get the holy water. - Invoked: The original authority figure hires a terrible replacement to convince his subordinates that he's amazing.
- Exploited: A subordinate uses the new authority figure as the basis of a campaign to have other long-standing issues addressed.
- Defied:
- A substitute teacher acts cool and nice to make sure that the students like him.
- When the regular teacher is unavailable, another well-liked member of the faculty immediately takes over the role.
- Any substitute teachers that apply to work for he school are subject to a very extensive check, including interviews to members and students of prior work locations with an emphasis on how the substitute felt on a personal basis, to try to prevent this.
- Discussed: "Mr. Replacement keeps talking about how 'things are going to be different around here'. I have a bad feeling about this..."
- Conversed: "How come replacement authority figures are always such dicks? Do we really need to be reminded how wonderful The Captain was?"
- Deconstructed:
- The sailors of a boat hold their old captain to an impossible standard and view all changes as the work of a tyrant.
- Or they organize a mutiny to overthrow their new captain and choose someone else from the crew as their new leader. It turns out that neither of them know how to lead the ship and eventually fall into chaos.
- Reconstructed: The Captain, great guy that he might have been, didn't push his crew hard enough, and someone ended up paying the price. So when a Tyrant Takes the Helm, they may not like her much but things get done and lives are saved.
- Played for Laughs:
- The tyrant makes his subordinates pull humourous stunts.
- The "tyrant" is an even bigger pushover than the captain they replaced, but they are persnickety about sitting in one specific spot on the break room's sofa that is softer than the rest, and for this the rest of the crew label them a huge monster that needs to be overthrown ASAP.
- Played For Drama: The tyrant's changes make a previously ship-shape ship into something impossible (or at least painful) to work with. This proves detrimental to the entire crew, if not the ship itself.
- Played for Horror: The tyrant is a full-blown Caligula-esque psycho and many people get killed or worse as a result of their takeover.
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