Pragmatic Villainy / Literature

Pragmatic Villainy in literature.

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• Agatha H. and the Voice of the Castle: Lord Selnikov of the Knights of Jove. He tells his immediate subordinate not to fire on the Jaegers because he wants it to seem like the Knights will take Mechanicsburg without unnecessary bloodshed (and pissing off the Jaegers will likely piss off the Mechanicsbergers). Unlike the comics, when Gil tells the Knights to leave or die, Selnikov immediately makes to do so. It's his much stupider underling who panics and opens fire on Gil.
• Alpha and Omega: Having slipped Gabriela a roofie to take her out of action and scoop her on a story, Brandon considers raping her but desists because the DNA evidence would crucify him.
• Zig-Zagged in Animorphs with Visser One, who claims she wants Earth to be conquered slowly and secretly because it's more pragmatic than Visser Three's plans of open war and genocide. In reality, she's worried that an open war could coincidentally kill two children she gave birth to through a previous human host. However, since the whole point of going after Earth was because there are enough people to give every Yeerk a host, the whole thing would have been pointless if Visser Three killed a large percentage of humans. Visser One also knows that Three has vastly overestimated their advantage (having taken a human host she knows that Humanity Is Insane and Humans Are Warriors) and that in an open conflict the humans may well win.
• The Gandor Family in Baccano! stays steadfastly out of the drug trade, sticking with relatively less objectionable crimes like bootlegging and gambling. This is due to actual moral objections on the part of Keith Gandor, but the other two Gandor brothers, Luck especially, recognize that it's also because their relatively small organization is not equipped to compete with the larger organized crime families currently running drugs.
• Bazil Broketail: Anything General Kreegsbrok does — good or evil alike — is because he has an interest in doing so. He avoids pointless cruelty towards his subordinates and Kraheenians not because he is squeamish about it, but because he knows that people work better under a Benevolent Boss and likewise, the locals will follow him willingly if he is nice to them. He provides Ajoth Gol Dib with prisoners of war and slaves to murder, but it's not because he approves of it — in fact, he thinks that there are many far better ways to use them — but because it is the only way to sate the Prophet's bloodlust, and Kreegsbrok already learned the hard way that the Prophet becomes unpredictable when denied someone to kill for too long. He is generous towards the people of Kraheen and gives away the land of noblemen to commoners, but it's not because he genuinely wants to make their lives happy, but because he knows he needs the support of locals to realize his plans, and being generous will definitely make him popular among them.
• Ben Safford Mysteries: In Murder Out of Commission, the killer's motive is to cover up how he improperly designed a nuclear reactor being installed nationwide. After turning to murder, he then sets out to fix the problem so that the reactors will stop leaking, but his main motive there is likely to cover up his crime rather than to protect the public.
• This is one of the defining traits of the Lady in The Black Company novels. She's almost entirely devoid of compassion and mercy, and totally devoid of remorse, but neither is she cruel for the sake of cruelty — everything she does is to get some kind of advantage, and her empire is designed to be stable and enduring. She's deliberately contrasted with her psychotic rival and sister Soulcatcher, who is pretty much pure chaos, and her ex-husband, the Dominator, whose empire, rather than being oppressive but stable and organized was almost literal Hell on Earth.
• Bob Lee Swagger:
  • In Targeted, one villain takes dozens of hostages, killing or wounding many people in the process. He then lets the FBI collect the wounded because their agonized screams are distracting, but killing them will use valuable bullets.
  • A second villain in Targeted, who wants the hostage-taker dead, decides not to bomb the besieged building and trigger a massive shootout because too many dead bodies will attract unwanted attention to the criminal conspiracy.
• Caliphate:
  • The Imperial States are rather restrictive with their mind-control implants, not because they object to the technology in principle, but because, back when they were more common, the Chinese hacked them, and they don't want that to happen again.
  • The Caliphate is a tyrannical Islamic state, that only tolerates its horribly oppressed non-Muslim minorities because the economy is reliant on their jizya tax and can't afford to forcibly convert or destroy them, with one slaver chiding an official for raising the taxes because the Christian population can barely afford it.
• A Certain Magical Index: Even when he considered himself a villain, Accelerator buys his groceries and meals instead of taking them by force. When questioned about this by Last Order, he explains that although he's powerful enough to just take anything he wants, it's too much hassle to have to deal with the authorities and others futilely trying to fight him off. Buying stuff without making a fuss means he gets it quickly and without any problems. Having everyone in the city hate him for fighting the police would be very annoying.
• The Chronicles of Narnia:
  • Discussed in The Magician's Nephew. One bit of narration points out that once the witch was finished with Diggory, she completely ignored him because witches are "terribly practical".
  • This also holds true when she tries to tempt Diggory with a forbidden apple. She first appeals to his desire for personal gain by saying it will make him immortal. When Diggory makes it clear he isn't interested in immortality, the witch starts urging him to take the apple back to his sick mother and use it to heal her. Either way, Aslan would have been deprived of the fruit needed to protect Narnia, and Diggory would have suffered in some way in the end.
  • This is shown earlier (at least in terms of publication, not chronologically) in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The White Witch captures Edmund, but is unable to catch his siblings before they reach Cair Paravel. Everyone believes that the siblings will fulfill a prophecy that the White Witch will meet her end when two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve sit on the thrones. The White Witch pragmatically concludes that it's all but impossible for her to stop every sibling from getting to the thrones, but killing only one of them would still make the prophecy impossible, which is why she singles out Edmund.
• In Companions of the Night, "don’t kill children" is one of the first rules that new vampires learn. This is because murdered children always attract more attention than murdered adults, especially from a Mama Bear or Papa Wolf who will have no problem going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge on not just you, but all of your fellow vampires.
  Ethan: One thing we’ve learned over the years, the number one rule — after "you can never have too many covers on a window" — is "don’t mess with kids."
• The Malkuth family in Dance Of The Butterfly. They serve as antagonists, though they also help in the fight against the otherworldly invaders. They engage in manipulation, fraud, and murder, but they are very utilitarian in the application of such means.
• Discworld:
  • Havelock Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, does not really rule his realm with an iron fist. He has the novel idea of maintaining control by making people actually want him in charge, or at the very least, make removing him from power an unsavory prospect. In both Going Postal and Making Money he's confronted by people trying to usurp him. Instead of cracking down on them, he points Loveable Rogue Moist Von Lipwig in their general direction and waits until he makes sure his usurpers are publicly discredited. Then he reminds them he's the Tyrant and can, in fact, crack down on them.
    He didn't administer a reign of terror. Just the occasional light shower.
  • In Jingo the D'regs have the same philosophy as Genghis Khan regarding their treatment of merchants. Kill merchants, or steal too much, and they don't come back. Rob them just enough and your sons can rob them too. Vimes compares it to farming.
  • The Assassins Guild is like this; they kill only for money, never taking sides, which allows them to survive political upheavals in the city because when one tyrant overthrows another the new one will want their services as well. They also refuse to assassinate anyone whose death they feel will destabilize the city; civic chaos is no good, and they want the city rich enough to afford their very expensive fees.
  • Chrysoprase, head of the troll mafia, pulls out of the drug trade when the "lie back and watch the pretty colors" drugs with long-term effects start getting supplanted by more powerful ones that cause homicidal rage or can be easily overdosed on to kill the user. He even points the city watch at drug labs manufacturing these when tensions are particularly high. It's hard to make money off dead customers, after all.
  • A good part of the conflict in Carpe Jugulum is a disagreement between vampires on what counts as Pragmatic Villainy; while the Old Count de Magpyr played up old tropes to the hilt (complete with holy symbols scattered around his castle and various stakes, complete with diagrams for finding the heart), the latest generation tried to be more efficient by creating an industrialized system for taking blood from their subjects and training themselves to be immune to traditional weaknesses like holy symbols. When their subjects inevitably rise up and wish to reinstate the Old Count, he explains that Contractual Genre Blindness is to the Disc what The Laws and Customs of War are to Roundworld; be a Fair-Play Villain and let anyone brave and clever enough storm your castle and defeat you when needed and you'll be considered a Friendly Enemy/Worthy Opponent and the heroes will be satisfied with just defeating you once; reduce a community to Industrialized Evil and they will make absolutely damn sure you are never able to do that again. Vampires can come back from most things eventually, but there are ways to kill them for good and truly pissed off villagers can absolutely find something.
  • Harry Dread operates on a similar theory. He knows that by following the Evil Overlord List to the letter, the heroes will spare his life after they topple his evil empire, leaving him free to do it again somewhere else. Trouble starts for him when a new generation of heroes crop up who don't follow the Code and actually try to kill him.
  • Even in the pre-Ridcully days of the book series, Wizards in the Discworld series avoided using deals with demons for much of anything, because they realized all the power in the bargain would come from the demon and that thus "using it for their own purposes would be like beating mice to death with a rattlesnake."
• The Draka: The Draka are horrified at the Holocaust, because the death camps were a massive waste of resources.
• The Dresden Files: Many supernatural powers range from Blue-and-Orange Morality to just plain assholes, but are willing to ally with the heroes because whatever apocalypse is happening this time is going to cut into their power/food/magic/whatever base or just happens to be occurring where they live.
  • Gentleman Johnny Marcone mercilessly crushes gang violence in Chicago and cuts down civilian casualties, imposing order in the criminal underworld, making it so that his presence is by far preferable to the anarchy that would follow, should he be taken down. He fights on the side of the good guys more often than not, if only because the villain of whatever book he's in is a greater threat to Marcone's business than Dresden is. And to top it all off, he provides Harry Dresden, a man notorious for "having problems with buildings," a lifetime membership to all of Marcone's exclusive clubs to ensure that Harry doesn't smash them to pieces breaking in all the time. This is best exemplified with Marcone, by the attitude of one of his subordinates when she saw Harry enter. "What must I give you to get you to leave very quickly."
  • Lara Raith qualifies as well. The White Court as a whole relies on humanity being prosperous so they get a more stable and convenient food source, and Lara particularly likes to help Harry come down like a ton of exploding magic bricks on White Courtiers who cause too much trouble... because said vamps are usually also her political rivals, or at least not smart enough to pull off their schemes without drawing undue attention and thus expendable.
  • The White Court vampires turn out to have been part of a secret war against terrifying ancient gods, taking it almost solely upon themselves rather than involve anyone else. Why? Because the more people know of these gods, the more powerful they get, and if the gods were allowed to live again they'd ruin the White Court's food supply.
  • Queen Mab really wants Dresden to be her Winter Knight. Her strategy for recruiting him? Ensure that she is his least horrible option so that when he inevitably gets in over his head and needs a powerup, she'll be the one he comes running to. It pays off in Changes when Dresden suffers a broken back while his daughter is being held hostage by vampires, and he agrees to become the Winter Knight for a chance at rescuing her.
• From Dune: "A pogrom? That's not like the Harkonnens. A pogrom is wasteful." Because of this, the Baron doesn't much like Rabban, who is just a brute, and he is more than willing to sacrifice Rabban for his smarter younger brother Feyd-Rautha. On the other hand, putting Rabban in charge for a while, then deposing him in favor of Feyd-Rautha makes the latter look much better by comparison. So putting a monster in charge is ultimately quite pragmatic.
• Durarara!!:
  • Inverted. Despite easily seeming more restrained than Shizuo, Izaya is highly impulsive and even admits he often makes problems since he can't stop himself from messing with others. He caused Akane incident out of sheer pettiness for not being involved with Hollywood, leading to Yodogiri stabbing him and Vorona meeting Shizuo.
  • Played straight later on. Izaya dismantles Heaven's Slave and Amphisbaena after being assigned by the Awakusu to gain intel on them. As it turns out, the gangs had been created by Nakura under different aliases before leaving them, and both leaders posed as second-in-commands to pin everything on their nonexistent bosses. Instead of handing over this info, Izaya tells the Awakusu they probably destroyed each other and disappeared, keeping Nakura safe and ensuring that he would forever be under Izaya's thumb.
• Sandra Arminger of the Emberverse is the voice of reason to her husband's pure sadism. His vainglory, too; there are times when she exhorts him to make a kill that he perceives as damaging to his reputation. Once her husband is dead and there's a firm peace between Portland and the other nearby nations, she becomes so bloodlessly pragmatic that she comes off as a particularly intrigue-oriented good guy.
• Kiritsugu Emiya of Fate/Zero may not see himself as a villain, but deliberately uses methods he knows to be both pragmatic and villainous. In his perspective, there is no such thing as a noble war, and that chivalry is the greater crime for perpetuating war by glamorizing it, rather than ending fights with merciless and abrupt execution and leaving survivors with no taste for war.
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
  • Touched upon when Dr Gonzo mentions the defence adopted by one of his clients: "Why would I fuck children? They're too small!"
  • Raoul Duke had earlier objected to Gonzo's drugging and then taking sexual advantage of Lucy. Not because Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil, mind, but because Duke and Gonzo were already several felonies into a proper visit to Las Vegas and the last thing they needed was Lucy sobering up and calling the police, especially considering they were currently crashing a national police convention. Duke very pointedly wants to dump Lucy somewhere while she's still strung out to lower the risk of her remembering anything incriminating.
• In the Fighting Fantasy books, the Sorcerous Overlord Zharradan Marr invests most of his time and his armies of darkness operating a... mining company on the frontier so he has a secure base to pursue his magical studies. He hires competent minions, obtains his coveted MacGuffins through guile rather than force, and prepares a tactical airstrike against a Hidden Elf Village with valuable secrets rather than waste resources invading the forests en masse.
• The Fragility of Bodies: Juan Garcia wants to stop the Game of Chicken competition during the time Verónica starts snooping to avoid the attention, but his clients keep insisting thus forcing his hand. It's implied that part of of the reason he gave Verónica info on them as part of their deal was to punish them.
• Godzilla vs. Kong — The Official Movie Novelization: Like in the film, Ren Serizawa objects to Walter Simmons' order to immediately infuse Mechagodzilla with the synthesized Hollow Earth energy, because they haven't had any time to begin studying the energy and gain even a surface understand of how it might affect the Mecha's systems, and because he's worried that Godzilla is so close to their headquarters that he'll likely destroy it and kill them faster than they can get the activated Mecha outside for combat. The novel makes it clear that Ren would much rather postpone Mechagodzilla's activation, and he even contemplates luring Godzilla away from the city by relaying a signal to another Apex facility; not because he has any empathy for the eight million innocent people whom he and Simmons are putting in Godzilla's warpath, but because he wants to buy more time to examine the Hollow Earth energy and ensure it won't have any undesirable side-effects on Mechagodzilla.
• Good Omens: Crowley is actually rather nice as far as demons go, but he still participates in tempting and corrupting humans. Unlike his coworkers, who spend years and years working on one particular soul to damn them, he opts to think "not big, but wide," and focus his energies on stuff that will have a tiny effect on loads of people at once. For instance, he ties up all the phone lines in London for an hour at lunchtime, so no one can make any calls. As a result, millions of people got absolutely furious, and proceeded to take it out on their colleagues or whoever, who then proceeded to take it out on other people, and so on, leading to countless people's souls being slightly tarnished in a single afternoon. The best part, as far as Crowley's concerned, is that aside from the inciting annoyance, he doesn't actually have to do anything to make the humans take it out on each other and create a small wave of low-grade evil; they do that entirely by themselves. He respects the diligence and artistry of the old-school demons who sink several years into corrupting one human, but finds it terribly impractical; with over five billion people on Earth, it just doesn't make sense to pick them off individually anymore.
• Harmony Black: Buck Wheeler may be an amoral scumbag who bought monsters and demon-blooded to sell to customers for a variety of magical and sexual reasons, but he's not stupid enough to buy two federal agents and use them as sex slaves.
  Buck: Now, what sounds like a better business plan to you? Option A: I hold two feds hostage, have to keep 'em tied up and under constant guard the rest of their lives, and my customers get lousy service. Or, option B: I go to a couple of professional whores and say, "Hey, ladies. Wanna be my whores? I will pay you," in which case I get a couple of happy employees and a whole lot of happy customers.
• Harry Potter: Voldemort is as much of a Bad Boss as this trope allows it. Pragmatic Villainy and all this prevents him from wantonly murdering his pawns and only tortures them to scare them, with two exceptions and both had a pragmatic motive- once to keep them from learning about the Horcruxes and secondly when he believed sacrificing a minion (even one of the best ones) would be the key to unlimited power. Also he is willing to play the role of the good boss who rewards whoever serves him well handsomely because it helps cultivate his image that he is not ungrateful and that he is close to each of his henchmen (which is a lie).
  • According to Pottermore, the Malfoy family, despite their Fantastic Racism, knew that trying to "keep the blood pure" by only marrying Purebloods would be impractical in the long run since there simply aren't enough Purebloods around to prevent incestuous marriages from happening at some point. Thus, whenever an unrelated (or so distantly related that a union wouldn't lead to possible birth defects) Pureblood was unavailable for marriage, a Half-blood — considered the next best thing — would be allowed to marry into the family instead.
• The Hearts We Sold: Demons aren't inherently evil, but don't care much for humans and are seen as odd at best, and otherworldly monsters at worst. So, they have to take measures to make demon-human relations as pleasant as possible. Their one rule for making deals is that they won't bring physical harm to any humans. The Daemon, however, is willing to kill someone, for the right price.
• In The Hobbit, the three trolls don't want to eat Bilbo, simply because he wasn't big enough to go through the trouble of skinning and boning him.
• While Moriarty and Moran in Kim Newman's The Hound Of The D Urbervilles are not above doing things For the Evulz, they often adhere to this trope. At one point, Moriarty researched stealing the Crown Jewels of Britain, but rather than actually pulling the caper, sells the plans to the guardians, so they may tighten their security. And Moran discourses at some length about the foolishness of criminals who steal unique, one-of-a-kind, well-known (or religiously-venerated) valuables, because they're impossible to fence and often bring retribution after the thief.
• How Not to Summon a Demon Lord: Medios is a slave trader. She does not abuse her slaves and makes sure they are well educated and all their needs are met. Her reasoning is that this results in Happiness in Slavery, meaning everyone is satisfied and her slaves don't try to escape or resist their masters, resulting in higher profits for her.
• How to Succeed in Evil:
  • Central character Edwin Windsor makes a lucrative, if frustrating, living counseling would-be supervillains to turn their efforts away from wanton destruction and towards more profitable strategies. It's not just practical in the sense of money as a goal, the book's primary plot-line centers around how genuinely terrifying and brutally efficient the man is at achieving his goal when the goal ISN'T money, but revenge.
  • Amusingly, Topper's efforts to play counterpoint to his friend by doing everything just for kicks also clarifies into a clear goal in the second book, and he is similarly successful in obtaining what he was aiming for because of his underlying pragmatism in getting there, even if the goal itself is somewhat nonsensical.
• Aur from How to Build a Dungeon: Book of the Demon King treats those who have become his subjects with decency, even if he has fooled some demons to become part of his army or the women he violated to submission; he gives them what they want by being at his side, thus ensuring loyalty, and erasing suspicion and lingering hatred from those who hated him before they joined his ranks.
• The Hunger Games:
  • The eponymous games have Children Forced to Kill called "tributes" as young as twelve years old in a Deadly Game. But the games' organizers explicitly forbid the use of firearms, because they're seen as an unfair advantage. If the kids all just shot each other, the games would be over too quickly, and it wouldn't be as much fun for the Capital to watch.
  • The organizers also ensure that the climate of the Games Arenas are not too challenging — they want the tributes to be fighting each other, not spending all their time and effort struggling to stay warm and alive in desperate cold temperatures.
  • This trope is how President Snow convinces Katniss that he wasn't behind the bombs that killed Katniss's sister. He points out that, had he been in control of the hovercraft, he would have used it to escape instead of sending it to bomb civilians.
    President Snow: Ms. Everdeen, we both know I'm not above murdering children, but I am not wasteful.
• In Death: Alex Ricker in Promises In Death demonstrates this in his conversation with Roarke. Alex reveals that the men who robbed his store and were found floating in the river all carved up were killed off by his father, Max Ricker. Max did this because the thieves embarrassed Alex and embarrassment is apparently unacceptable. Alex didn't have them killed and didn't want the problem handled that way, and that he doesn't do murder... because it's just not practical.
• In Izure Shinwa No Ragnarok, the warring gods put their previous war on hold when they realized they were razing the very lands that they were fighting over. Their current rules now limit them to an island for their battlefield.
• The Jenkinsverse: Since the Corti bred out most of their morality centuries ago with eugenics, the "heroic" Corti tend to be like this (the villainous ones are just Smug Snakes). They're completely selfish, but figure that it's best to have a good reputation selling to everyone rather than a bad reputation stealing from everyone. Askit especially stands out. As a Corti criminal famous for stealing basically everything not nailed down, he's expected to last about five minutes in the company of Adrian Saunders, one of the most dangerous men in the galaxy. Instead, Askit recognizes that it's far better to be on Adrian's side than against him, and risks his life to help him on multiple occasions.
• Legends & Lattes: The Madrigal runs the Protection Racket whose territory includes Viv's new coffee shop. Viv is an orc and a retired Barbarian Hero, and would like to avoid trouble, but is willing to fight the Madrigal's thugs rather than roll over for them. The Madrigal would prefer to just have Viv pay up, and gives her an extended deadline because a confrontation wouldn't work out for anyone. In the end, she accepts free food in lieu of payment. It turns out not to be entirely selfless on her part because she recognizes the coffee shop is raising the quality of the area and attracting new businesses to her territory.
• Lord Marksman and Vanadis:
  • While leading a raid on the Alsace territory, Zion orders his men not to attack anyone who has taken shelter in the temple, saying such an act would cause everyone in the kingdom to turn against them.
  • After Roland fails a mission, Duke Ganelon has him framed for treason and executed. When Duke Thenardier finds out, he angrily calls Ganelon an idiot, since Roland was a very powerful soldier, one of the few people able to fight a War Maiden on equal terms, and was much more useful alive.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • The orcs don't torture Merry and Pippin and actually heal them because they don't have time to linger in enemy territory (and some of the orcs have orders not to search or plunder them by Saruman who needs to be the one to find the ring first). He didn't bother to give such orders about the rest of the Fellowship of course.
  • Sauron lets Gollum go after he tortures all the information he needs out of him. It could be because Sauron thought he would work more mischief if he were let go not unlike when Morgoth let Húrin go in The Children of Húrin. Characters within the story suppose that Gollum was released on orders to spy for Sauron or serve some other purpose, but Gollum strenuously denies this, never gives the full truth, and we never hear Sauron's explanation. Another probability is that Sauron hoped that Gollum would lead him to the Ring.
  • Shagrat the Uruk-hai commander defends the captured Frodo from Gorbag and the Minas Morgul orcs. Not because he cares about Frodo, but because Gorbag wants to steal Frodo's Mithril coat and other possessions for himself, whereas Shagrat has orders to take everything to Sauron.
• Niccolò Machiavelli:
  • The Prince: "The prince can always avoid hatred if he abstains from the property of his subjects and citizens and from their women". Machiavelli also advised that a prince was better off with popular support over the nobility. The nobles only want to oppress, and the people just want to not be oppressed. Support of the people is therefore the better and easier path.
  • This position was also noted in his Discourses on Livy. Both The Prince and The Discourses heavily influenced Enlightenment thought on politics (although people tried to mention it as little as possible), and in particular is responsible for James Madison's "Federalist No. 51" about checks and balances in the federal government.
  • It has been argued, however, that since Machiavelli's other writings were favorable towards republics, "The Prince" was intended to be a critique of the behavior of despots, not a field guide. (The flip side of this, however, is that Machiavelli recognized that politicians in republics could and did use the same techniques to gain support — the key in the Discourses is designing a republic that could withstand and guide that kind of rough play).
• In My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!, several students falsely accuse Catarina of bullying Maria (which she was guilty of in the original Fictional Video Game, but not in main story). However, Catarina's friends stand up for her and disprove the accusations. Some time later, Geordo and Catarina realize that the students would normally never even attempt to make false accusations against Catarina since, as the daughter of a duke, she outranks her accusers. It turns out that the students had fallen under the sway of a dark magic user.
• The Nero Wolfe novel And Be A Villain revolves around a blackmail syndicate with two unusual features: they blackmail their victims using fake yet damaging slander rather than genuine secrets they've uncovered, and they only keep their victims on the hook for a single calendar year before cutting them loose. While both seem odd and less immediately lucrative for the blackmailers, Wolfe explains that there's actually a very good logic behind both:
  • People are ultimately less concerned about fake slander than their genuine secrets. A slander can likely be disproven, albeit not without effort and inconvenience, so someone is unlikely to get as emotionally invested in keeping it quiet and may be willing to settle for an 'easy' way of doing so. Someone faced with a genuine and damaging secret that may be revealed is more likely to be invested in keeping it quiet and may resort to extreme measures to do so (as is demonstrated in the novel itself, as the blackmailers unwittingly stumbled on someone's genuine secret).
  • Someone on the hook to a blackmailer indefinitely will eventually decide that enough is enough and take measures to stop the blackmail; by going to the police, killing the blackmailer, or even just deciding that the secret is no longer worth the cost and calling the blackmailer's bluff. Either way, no matter how lucrative eventually the money gets cut off and the blackmailer risks exposure as well. On the other hand, people will put up with a surprising amount of inconvenience, however grudgingly, if they're given a sincere good-faith reassurance that it will eventually end.
• In the Night Watch (Series), the Dark Others tend toward this when declining more villainous actions:
  • In one scene, a Dark Other manifests a cat to torture a mouse, and his cohorts are disgusted with him because it would waste less energy to just kill the mouse himself, and he's distracted from his job of guarding their headquarters. To an extent, he's also considered to be acting Stupid Evil.
  • The Dark Other Edgar is shown not using magic to steal from a store because he wouldn't want to be caught by the other side and because since humans are the "resources" of his side, it's foolish to hurt them needlessly. Edgar also decides to do a light Charm Person on an attractive woman rather than brainwashing her, because (more or less) consensual sex is more fun than rape.
  • Zabulon/Zavulon, despite being an obvious Big Bad, is generally in the role of helping the Night Watch stop some apocalyptic scenario, since if they are allowed to happen, he won't have any victims. However, his help is always done to further some other, hidden scheme, and he's quite happy about massive casualties to the extent they help his side.
  • Their disposition towards this approach also mostly averts the common "Villains Act, Heroes React" pattern. Dark Ones are mostly content with the status quo and rarely go out of their way to try and make the world more miserable since humans themselves could usually be trusted with it. They even more often than not go along with the grand projects devised by the Light Ones to improve the humans, because, being cynical bastards, Dark Ones are assured that the human nature will prevail no matter what and those projects will backfire spectacularly, thus proving their point and providing them with all the delicious misery they could wish. They are usually right.
• The government in Nineteen Eighty-Four outlaws the death penalty, preferring to torture and brainwash potential rebels into model citizens, rather than killing them immediately, and risk them becoming martyrs for the next generation's rebels. However, ultimately they will disappear, long after everyone has forgotten about them.
• Carl Sagan, in a footnote in his nonfiction book Pale Blue Dot, says this about fears that aliens will ship us off Earth as food.
  "Put aside the profound biological differences that must exist between the hypothetical aliens and ourselves; imagine that we constitute an interstellar gastronomic delicacy. Why transport large numbers of us to alien restaurants? The freightage is enormous. Wouldn't it be better just to steal a few humans, sequence our amino acids or whatever else is the source of our delectability, and then just synthesize the identical food product from scratch?"
• Richard Stark's (Donald Westlake's) Parker is a career thief with no real morals, but he tries to avoid killing people because he knows the police search harder for a murderer than a thief. He does not cheat his partners because he knows they have to trust him to work together. This trope does go out the window if one of his partners betrays him, though. Then he will hunt you down to the ends of the earth.
• In Tony Hillerman's People of Darkness, the hitman Colton Wolf kills as few people as he can manage (aside from his assigned targets), because the fewer people that are killed, the shorter the resulting manhunt is.
• Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain: All but the most unstable villains abide by a set of unwritten rules that include not trying to learn the secret identity of superheroes or going after their loved ones, not harming civilians, and generally not actually killing anyone. In exchange, superheroes return the favor for their secret identities, and they get to retire peacefully. Ones who break the code tend to get swiftly corrected by their peers who like the status quo or who do have standards, or encounter Mourning Dove, who's notoriously bad at bringing people in alive.
• A major focus of A Practical Guide to Evil. The current Dread Empress and Calamities are really no more powerful than their predecessors (in Amadeus's case, he admits that the previous Black Knight was far more powerful than himself), but they have become the most powerful and successful leaders of the Empire due to a combination of being pragmatic enough to win the hearts and minds of their subjects rather than trying to cow them with raw power, and partly by the fact that they genuinely get along and aren't wasting effort scheming against each other.
• In the President's Vampire series, it's shown that the Nazis recruited Johann Konrad to create Unmanschensoldaten for them, using the Holocaust as a means of gathering "parts", something he was all too happy to do. However, he refused to follow through on their secondary directive of creating magical-powered viruses to wipe out the British with, not out of morality, but because he knew that viruses can all too easily turn on their makers.
• The Reynard Cycle: Shortly after the "attack" on Dis, the Calvarian general Drauglir had to stop his men from hanging Mosca, his Southern translator. He may consider the man to be less than a dog, but he was of the opinion that training another translator would take too much time.
• The Corrupt Corporate Executive in Stephen King's The Running Man insists to Ben Richards that he didn't have his wife killed as part of a plan to recruit him as a Hunter. He makes no attempt to convince Richards that he's above such a thing, merely that it would have been a lousy plan and Richards would have seen through it, as evidenced by the fact that his suspicions immediately landed on the network when he heard about the misdeed.
• The Screwtape Letters: Screwtape, while giving advice to his nephew Wormwood about how best to corrupt the human he's assigned to, advises against trying to get the man to cross the Moral Event Horizon. Sure, horribly evil people make the best meals, but tempting people with atrocities tends to result in either rejecting the demon out of hand or going My God, What Have I Done? and being a much harder target later. Screwtape much prefers tempting people into atheism and small-minded selfishness since that gets them damned all the same (even if it does make the soul rather tasteless) and they're much less likely to notice what the demon is doing.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: This work constantly reminds us that Stupid (either Stupid Evil, Chaotic Stupid or Stupid Good) has a steep price, so makes the Pragmatic stuff that much shinier by comparison (even if cold pragmatism also tends to come at a somewhat less immediately acute, if more predictable, price further down the line — that can prove a small nightmare to juggle).
  • When Joffrey acts all Stupid Evil and wants to totally wipe out surrendering enemies and their families, his grandfather, the powerful and cunning Tywin, counsels him: "When your enemies defy you, you must serve them steel and fire. When they go to their knees, however, you must help them back to their feet. Elsewise no man will ever bend the knee to you." Underscoring that this is pragmatism rather than mercy is the fact that Tywin famously had no qualms utterly wiping out families that wouldn't go to their knees.
    • Tywin also berates Joffrey for the latter's execution of Ned Stark — not because Tywin cared about Ned, but because Ned would have been a vital bargaining chip, and indeed the North rose in rebellion after the execution. Tywin's son Tyrion (who actually has a conscience) and daughter Cersei (who is perfectly capable of both Pragmatic Villainy and Stupid Evil and is sans conscience) share this opinion — in fact, Joffrey has a gift of pushing people onto this trope, because he is such The Millstone that everyone in the family is forced into frantic, ad hoc, quick-and-dirty damage control and conciliation as a result of his dumbest of dumb moves.
    • Tywin's entire relationship with Gregor Clegane is packed with this. He finds Clegane's methods of brutality, rape, and mass killings to be distasteful but finds him useful enough to still protect him and make use of him. Tywin is offended at the notion that he'd ordered the rape and murder of Elia Martell, because her death was unnecessary, and she would have been a useful hostage. Still, once the deed was done, he continues to employ Gregor, for as long as he's useful. But the moment protecting him is more trouble than it's worth, Tywin will happily sell him up the river.
    • Tywin also uses this when confronted by Tyrion over the Red Wedding, stating that it was far more efficient to kill a dozen men at dinner than ten thousand in battle to end the war. However, it is undermined by the fact that far more than a dozen were killed (aside from Robb and Catelyn Stark, around two to three thousand Northern and Riverlands soldiers were murdered) and the slaughter violated Sacred Hospitality, which causes a massive continent-wide uproar of moral outrage. Tywin himself takes great pains to officially distance himself and his cause from the massacre, knowing deep down that even his reputation would not survive such a stain.
  • Roose Bolton is also extremely pragmatic, with his preference for "a peaceful land and a quiet people". This leads to some annoyance with his son Ramsey's open and increasingly inconvenient sadism. He gets a Crowning Moment Of Pragmatic Villainy after his son expresses a desire to flay a related(ish) noblewoman, who quite openly doesn't like him, and make her skin into footwear. She's actually a usefully sharp political ally, a consistent Stark-hater and has a decently manned, equipped, and trained levy-army with a sound cavalry wing, so...
    "How many of our grudging friends do you imagine we’d retain if the truth were known? Only Lady Barbrey, whom you would turn into a pair of boots... inferior boots. Human skin is not as tough as cowhide and will not wear as well."
    • Another example is his objections to Ramsay's horrific treatment of Jeyne who has been presented as Arya Stark. Her screams and cries can be heard throughout the castle, which are demoralizing the people, and in turn making it harder for Roose to rule the North.
  • Viserys Targaryen shows off some of his lovely Stupid Evil moves when he chooses to insult a whole hall stuffed full of "barbarians" while drunk. Unsurprisingly, this doesn't end well. That's just one of his more impressive moments, though: he had plenty, far less impressive examples than that one in the tank, all serving to underline that he'd've been a Joffrey-level (mis)ruler. Why is this here? Because his sister, Daenerys Targaryen, resolves from then on that, should she have to be nasty to regain the throne, she'll try to be neither as Stupid nor as unnecessarily Evil (when Good is not an option) with it. Hence, conquering and establishing control over Essosi City States to learn the basics of ruling with: dressing this up as the liberation of slaves does little to hide the whole "foreign conqueror-queen changing your whole lifestyle through Might Makes Right simply as a warm-up" bit. She's making her own mistakes, sure: but, she's been careful to not directly duplicate her brother's. She's somewhere between being a learner Pragmatic Hero and Villain with a horribly spotty record thanks to having few decent examples to copy, as a result. Depending on who you ask.
  • House Frey pretty clearly thinks they're doing this, but are really bad at it. They're implied to have deliberately shown up late to the Battle of the Trident to save their resources and join the winning side, but the result is that everyone sees them as untrustworthy and unreliable. They try to do the same thing in the War of Five Kings, allying with Robb only in exchange for really significant concessions, but this ties them closely to Robb when the war goes badly for him. They then get out from under this by betraying Robb in the infamous Red Wedding, with the net result that they're now universally despised and mistrusted, and both paramilitary bands and their own ostensible allies are actively plotting to get rid of them. Their goal was to do what was best for their house, but it rarely turns out well.
• In Star Trek: The Battle of Betazed, the Vorta overseer Luaran objects to her colleague Gul Lemec casually shooting Betazoids during their occupation of the Betazoid homeworld. Like most Vorta, she has no moral qualms at all but does not approve of needless violence when there are more orderly ways to keep things in check. As far as she's concerned, Lemec's brutality will only serve to increase resistance among the occupied Betazoids.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Darth Bane:
    • Bane forces the healer Caleb to save Bane's life by threatening Caleb's daughter. After he is healed, he briefly considers killing them but decides to let them live since he might need Caleb's abilities again one day. Later on, when he's Sith Lord, he spends some of his time sabotaging anti-Republic plots, because a divided galaxy is more work to conquer.
    • Zannah is Nice to the Waiter not out of any genuine niceness (Sith and all), but rather because people are more willing to help the good looking lady who's nice to them, giving her a network of contacts for minimal expenditure.
  • Kenobi: Mosep Binneed, Jabba the Hutt's accountant, is a gangster but also a businessman. He's perfectly willing to torture a delinquent debtor but insists that no lasting damage be done because he still wants the man to be able to make future payments. In the novel's climax, he decides that the effort of collecting Orrin's debt is no longer worth it and calls his men off.
  • In Star Wars: Tatooine Ghost, set a few months before the Thrawn trilogy, readers can infer that Thrawn put on stormtrooper armor and went dirtside with some of his soldiers, not telling them who he was but still making them aware that he was someone very important. A squad leader is rough while trying to get information out of someone, and when asked about it says he thought that brutal was the new doctrine. Thrawn hits the squad leader with his blaster, then asks the leader if he wants to do Thrawn any favors now, and orders him to tell the truth. The squad leader says no, and Thrawn pointedly says that someone who has been threatened is likely to give nothing more than what they need to survive. The new doctrine is efficiency.
  • The Thrawn Trilogy:
    • Grand Admiral Thrawn will execute subordinates who failed and tried to pin the blame on others, but subordinates who failed at almost the exact same job who tried harder and took responsibility? Everyone braces for the order and the poor schlub sweats, but what happens? Promoted. It's a Career-Building Blunder. Thrawn explains to Pellaeon that this Tractor Beam operator tried a novel technique when faced with something he wasn't trained for, that it might have failed this time but the basic idea was promising, and if the operator can perfect this technique and teach it to others (shown to pay off in the Hand of Thrawn duology), the Empire won't have a problem with people escaping tractor beams in this way. Pellaeon privately remarks that Thrawn's action also served to make everyone who saw it much more willing to give him their all.
    • And when he gives an I Want Them Alive! order, he also says, "if possible. If not — If not, I'll understand."
  • Tarzen Tagge makes sure that the Tagge Company only builds the highest quality construction work. That way the customers have no reason to complain to law enforcement. An investigation would reveal Tarzen's smuggling operations. Eventually the legitimate business is so profitable that the smuggling becomes redundant.
  • I, Jedi:
    • For obvious reasons, when Corran Horn goes undercover as a Space Pirate, he prefers this sort of piracy, encouraging the gang to kill as few people as possible to encourage cooperation in the future—essentially changing the approach from Rape, Pillage, and Burn into a Protection Racket. While a few of the pirates are in it more For the Evulz, most of them recognize the potential of this racket and end up accepting a legitimate security contract at the end of the novel.
      Corran: Yeah, a refueling station might blow up really pretty, and might even set half a city on fire, but that's not the objective here. Look, you can kill a woolly-nerf and make a coat out of its skin, or you can shear the beast's coat and come back year after year for more wool. We play this right, six months from now we show up in the system, send a list of demands and they'll freighter the loot out to us.
    • Later, when the pirate gang has to fight its way out of a confrontation with the New Republic Defense Force, Corran convinces the crew's leader that they should use ion cannons to disable the Republic fighters, arguing that some forces will have to be diverted to rescue the pilots, distracting from chasing the pirates (obviously, his real motive is not wanting to kill anyone on his own side).
  • X-Wing Series: Fliry Vorru has this as his modus operandi. Everything he does has a practical purpose. In The Bacta War, he's constantly advising Isard on the best method to root out the problem of Wedge Antilles and his squadron, even if it doesn't appeal to Isard's desire for blood (and her primary objective to "destroy the Rebels"). Often the methods are targeted at crippling the economic capabilities of Antilles and the people working with him, and/or increasing their own. This becomes increasingly difficult as Isard becomes more unstable over time.
  • New Jedi Order: During a strategy meeting in "Destiny's Way", one of the Yuuzhan Vong higher-ups advocates not holding an inquisition into the spreading Jeedai heresy going through their lowest castes. Not because he's in favor of it, as he quickly assures the Supreme Overlord, but just because it would take up resources they no longer have, waste workers they can't spare, and if they go with the option of offering incentives it'd almost certainly encourage bus-throwing.
• Sufficiently Advanced Magic (2017): Part of the reason that Corin refuses to work with Professor Orden (besides the moral objections) is because the organization keeps taking massive risks in order to advance their country's place in the world, but if they make any mistake along the way, their entire nation could be wiped out. Corin just isn't willing to work with people so reckless.
• In Sword Art Online, Sigurd threatens to kill Kirito when the latter intercedes in a dispute between Sigurd and Leafa. Since Kirito is in an enemy capital city, he can't fight back, but Sigurd stops when one of his underlings points out that there are people watching, and it would look bad if he killed Kirito. Apparently believing that taking his anger out on Kirito wouldn't be worth the blow to his reputation, Sigurd lets Kirito go.
• Sword of Truth:
  • Both Darken Rahl shows shades of this. In the first book, you'd expect Rahl to pull a You Have Failed Me when it turns out Richard broke through Denna's training. Hell, she certainly expects it. Instead, Rahl reasons that her failure was no fault of her own, and shrugs it off. In the same scene, Richard plans to get Rahl angry enough to kill him, so that he can't use Richard's knowledge of the Book of Counted Shadows. Rahl calmly listens to Richard, then, after verifying his knowledge, shrugs, and gives him two options, amounting to, "Help me open the right box, or don't. I've got a 50-50 chance of getting it right either way and if I end the world, no skin off my nose."
  • Emperor Jagang perhaps manages to be a bigger monster, but he's still smart enough to gather intelligence and listen to his advisers, especially when they're experts in magic and he's not. In Phantom, for instance, he and the Sisters of the Dark are looking for the Book of Counted Shadows. On finding what appears to be a copy, he thinks it's fake, while the Sisters insist it could be real. You might expect him to simply overrule them considering they're essentially slaves. Instead, they have a pretty civil debate about it. He also reads the warnings in spell books and heeds them. Jagang also reads lots of books and sends some of his best troops off looking to salvage ancient libraries in the hopes of finding knowledge from the wizards' war that could help him. He didn't even care terribly much when the Palace of the Prophets was destroyed, because the knowledge buried under in one of the "central sites" was much more valuable to him. When Kahlan is captured, has her mind erased, and is made invisible to almost everyone, her captors are captured by Jagang, and they discover that the process that turned Kahlan invisible was tainted and that random people will be able to see her. Instead of killing his prisoners who failed in their magic, he sends her out walking in the camp, naked (though with guards close by) to see who notices, thus assembling guards who can see her.
  • The Fellowship of Order sent spies to many of the wonders of the world to use or copy their magic. In one instance, they sent one of their top people to work in the stables just so he'd have a chance at copying a magical construct.
• Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers is stated to have given up such petty things as vengeance, since they end up in the way of getting and keeping power.
• Tower of Somnus: The higher-level executives are universally terrible people, but they also tend to be smart people—if they weren't, they'd be dead. Belle Donnst considers revenge a waste of resources, and refuses to entertain the possibility of selling off the planet to the highest bidder.
• Tress of the Emerald Sea: In this setting, pirates use specialized ammunition designed to immobilize ships rather than sinking them, because a sunken ship cannot be plundered. Similarly, most pirates refrain from killing the crews of ships that surrender, because the royal navy imprisons pirates who stick to that code and executes those that don't. And most merchant ships surrender and don't fight back once immobilized, because they know that the pirates know the rules and will most likely let them live if they behave.
• Sight, in Two Percent Power, avoids giving his minions guns because he knows that it will bring the police down on him.
• Villains by Necessity:
  • Robin spends most of the adventure confused why the group doesn't act like a stereotypical cutthroat band, and he keeps on expecting them to backstab one another at any moment. The group realize it, telling him that good and evil aren't black and white, and that being evil hardly means you need to kill your friends for no reason. Kaylana points out that had they behaved that way, the party wouldn't have lasted five minutes. They did nearly come to blows once, while Valerie once coerced them into accepting her leadership before Sam and Arcie overpowered her, but always refrained from worse due to mutual benefit.
  • In a specific example, Valerie (who's the most evil among them) tells Sam to not kill a unicorn whom they trapped after it attacks them, as doing so would bring down even more wrath from the forces of Good, which they can't afford to have.
• Warhammer: In the third Sundering trilogy novel Caledor, Malekith, Witch King of the Dark Elves spares the life of one of his captains who was fully expecting to be executed for marching his men into a High Elf trap. In his inner monologue, Malekith notes firstly that he ordered the captain into the trap in order to spring it and flush out the enemy, so he can't justifiably punish the man for obeying orders. Secondly, Malekith acknowledges that he doesn't have numerical superiority over his enemies, so he can't afford to kill underlings every time they screw up. Thirdly, Malekith muses that if he kills someone every time they fail him, he might get a reputation for being predictable.
• In The Witches, the Grand High Witch states that they only use magic to kill children rather than killing them through poison or other mundane methods as magic is harder to track.
• Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall disapproves of pointless cruelty, but while interrogating Mark Smeaton he declines to torture him mostly because it doesn't work as well as hinting obliquely and letting Mark's own imagination terrify him into saying what Cromwell wants to hear. He can't transcribe screaming.
• Queen Arabelle in A Woman's Work by Tanya Huff is ruthless enough to encourage her not-very-bright son to wear highly decorated bright uniforms while she wears something more subdued (because who will an assassin instinctively aim at?) but makes sure her people are educated (at government schools with an approved curriculum), employed, have a good medical system, knows many of her troops by name and rewards them for good work and initiative, and when she conquers a new territory has most of the defeated nobles' property distributed among the lower classes of the conquered country and immediately starts infrastructure programs to help improve their lives. She even allows the odd dissident to make public speeches against her reign, giving her an excuse to remind the "oppressed citizens" that she's made their lives much better. And letting them beat up the troublemaker. She even encourages this -in the story itself one of these dissidents is an actress in her pay. Giving a speech in front of a hospital.

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