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We Are Struggling Together / Literature

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Examples of We ARE Struggling Together in Literature:

  • Darkness at Noon has a flashback to Rubashov excommunicating a Party member for suggesting that revolutionaries should make common cause with more moderate opponents of tyrannical regimes.
  • Discworld:
    • Lord Vetinari has secretly set up several of the organisations dedicated to his overthrow, in order to keep the real ones busy with infighting. In The Discworld Companion, Vetinari's rule is credited to realizing that even revolutionary anarchists want stability so they can fight their real enemies: people with a slightly different definition of revolutionary anarchy. Vetinari doesn't just deal with potential rebellion this way: it's practically his whole political philosophy. "If there are two sides to an issue, see that they quickly become two hundred."
    • Further used in Night Watch, when the People's Republic of Treacle Mine Road can't even agree on what they're fighting for beyond "Truth, Justice and Freedom" (those are free, you see). They settle on "Truth, Justice, Freedom, Reasonably-Priced Love and a Hard-Boiled Egg!" Subverted in that they still manage to be an effective fighting force and outright zigzagged because it doesn't actually make any difference if they have a decisive victory or a crushing defeat. The real changes are made far away by The Chessmaster. Most of the people in the "Republic" aren't even aware of it; they're just trying to hunker down behind barricades until the chaos in the city burns out and they can get back to business as usual.
  • Domina:
    • The cultures of the city have been fighting each other for a very very long time, and the fact that there's some sort of supernatural zombie master running around isn't going to stop them. One of the running subplots is the local Reasonable Authority Figure trying to get everyone to understand exactly how dangerous the enemy is, with slow success. The worst is probably the Nosferatu vampires; two broods were fighting when they were attacked by screamers, and it didn't even slow them down.
      Adam: This is the same city where people were perfectly willing to fight a civil war while a zombie apocalypse dropped on their heads.
    • The kemos are known for being rather chaotic even by the standards of the city. It probably doesn't help that their individual clans are so ephemeral; it's not uncommon for one subculture to be completely wiped out, only to return again months later when someone else decides to get those same toys. During the American invasion, the kemo front is the only one that has serious trouble, and it's repeatedly lampshaded that the problem is that the kemos are just terrible about coordinating on anything.
      Captain: They busted in, a dozen echoes leading the way, and tossed a grenade at our supplies. The Alphas are trying to bring more in, but you know they're like cats in a bag on a good day.
  • Dragonlance:
    • The forces of good in the original Chronicles trilogy are hampered in their opposition to the Dragonarmies because their leaders are bickering over political matters that are petty by comparison. It takes drastic action, including Tasslehoff's destruction of the MacGuffin the leaders were fighting over and a "The Reason You Suck" Speech from the leader of the gods of good to get them to smarten up and unite.
    • This trope is later inverted after the Dark Queen's defeat, as her subordinates' fear of her kept them in line. Without her uniting presence, the Highlords begin fighting among themselves for control of the Dragonarmies, and become splintered into five mutually hostile factions.
  • Forest Kingdom: In book 1 (Blue Moon Rising), the barons are just unbelievable. They actually tried to stage a revolution in the middle of a continent-wide demonic incursion!
  • In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway shows us the ragtag coalition of liberals, anarchists and communists that make up the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and he hints at the pathological purge-mania of the Stalinists. This is a case of Truth in Television.
  • The Grace of Kings: The rebellion against the Xana Empire nearly fails because the kings are more interested in hashing out old territorial disputes and fighting for personal advantage than in forming a cohesive front. At a turning point, two kings pull a Cavalry Refusal that almost loses the entire war because they don't want to stick their necks out for a third king's army; when Marshall Zyndu turns the near-defeat into a victory, he has enough of them all and promotes himself over all of them by right of conquest.
  • In Grent's Fall, at least six different groups are or were rebelling against Osbert Grent. Henry Darro eventually merges most of the surviving ones together.
  • In Harry Potter, years of Fantastic Racism have caused various magical creatures to be suspicious of wizards and avoid them at all costs (at the same time, wizards are equally suspicious or determined to avoid said magical creatures). Almost all of them are threatened by Voldemort, but aren't really willing to work together until they see that Harry "died" at the end of Deathly Hallows, at which point virtually every living being against Voldemort takes up arms to fight against the Death Eaters. All are later seen gathered peacefully in the Great Hall together.
  • The Hunger Games: The Capitol first created the Hunger Games because the thirteen districts rose up against their oppressors. After they were thwarted, ending with the total annihilation of District Thirteen, the Capitol decreed that each district had to send one boy and one girl to an arena where they would fight to death and only one could survive. Understandably, all the districts despise the Capitol for what they do to them and their children... However, the Hunger Games became so ritualistic that the districts are more preoccupied with training their chosen children so that one of them can survive and beat the kids from the rivaling districts, rather than trying to overthrow the Capitol and end the oppression once and for all.
  • Jack Ryan: Tends to be the case with the villains.
    • In the Cold War novels, this tends to be the case in the Soviet government. There's the longstanding rivalry between the KGB and the Red Army, the reformers led by the General Secretary versus the old guard trying to preserve the system, plus regular old power-hungry careerists. Sometimes, the Americans are able to make this work for them: in The Hunt for Red October, they know the KGB will swallow their cover story because it'll allow them to take the Soviet Navy down a peg and grab back some of the power they lost in a previous struggle. And sometimes, the results are catastrophic: in The Sum of All Fears, the General Secretary's main rival (and a CIA asset) feeds them false information to promote his own rise to power, leading to a massive misreading of the Soviet political situation at the worst possible time (a nuclear attack on Denver, which is mistakenly blamed on the USSR).
    • The extreme-left terrorist community is a recurring enemy in early novels, which suffers badly from this. Officially, they're partners in the international struggle to liberate the global working class and institute a world socialist order. In reality, their own narrow-minded prejudices tend to get in the way and set them at each other's throats; at least twice we see them murder their own accomplices from different groups once they no longer need them, usually after a lengthy process of barely keeping their prejudices in check. And then there's the argument over ideological purity: in Patriot Games, the entire plot revolves around a radical splinter faction of the IRA trying to eliminate the current leadership and remake it into something in line with their own Maoist ideology.
    • This is actually weaponized against the villains in Clear and Present Danger. The leaders of The Cartel are suspicious enough of each other that the CIA is able to convince them that the bomb they dropped on one of their board meetings was part of an internal power struggle and not an external assassination. This suspicion is well justified: as soon as the cartel's security chief has deduced what's really going on, he immediately goes to work figuring out how to use the American operation to take over himself.
    • The covert alliances of villains in Debt of Honor and Executive Orders suffer heavily from this. They're alliances between China, India, and a third party (Japan in the first case, Iran in the second one), trying to take advantage of Russia's weakness and the West's complacency in the post Cold War era to remake the world order in their favor. In both cases, China is The Man Behind the Man, promising support to the main villains but doing very little to expose themselves; India is The Friend Nobody Likes, duped by the other two into taking a more active role but left high and dry when suffers consequences for it; and the third country does the lion's share of the work and expects the lion's share of the reward, but is disavowed by its allies when things start to go wrong.
  • Julian: Libanius and Priscus intend to write a biography to help combat the rising tide of Christianity in Europe... if they can agree on who pays what to copy the manuscript.
  • In The Left Hand of Darkness, Estraven cites the "old proverb" (which Genly suspects he made up himself) that "Karhide is not a nation but a family quarrel." Estraven is trying to use First Contact to inspire planetary unity and move people beyond their old rivalries; meanwhile, Tibe is trying to unite the nation of Karhide in a fascist regime using War for Fun and Profit.
  • Discussed in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Professor Bernardo de la Paz, the brains behind La Résistance, advocates using a cell system, with no more than three members per cell even at the very top echelon, because in his words more than three people can't agree what to eat for dinner, let alone how to fight a revolution. Much later in the book, when Manny seeks advice from an ad hoc council of people he respects, he finds himself agreeing with Prof as they all begin bickering.
  • In The Obernewtyn Chronicles this happens with the main rebellion against the oppressive Council and Herder Faction. The various rebel leaders all act pretty much independently, and have rather different ideas about both methods and what they want to happen afterwards — in particular who will replace the Council. Eventually it resolves into Malik and cronies reluctantly and temporarily agreeing with everyone else. Or at least pretending to...
  • It takes a while for Rob of An Outcast in Another World to convince the Elves that he’s on their side, but once he does, they put a lot of faith in him as an ally.
  • Prisoners of Power by the Strugatsky Brothers: the mind-controlling totalitarian oligarchy is opposed by what may initially seem to be an unified rebel "Underground". However, to quote the novel itself, "the Underground wasn't a political party. What's more, it wasn't even a front of political parties". Its members couldn't even agree as to whether or not the mind control has to go. Factions range from blatant fascists (who want to overthrow the government and keep the mind control towers) to "biologists" (who just want to destroy the towers, but don't mind keeping the government — so they can't even agree about that), and there are factions within factions as well. It is explicitly pointed out that many prominent Underground leaders are either agents or secret allies of the government. The protagonist ultimately doesn't even bother trying to rally them, instead striking a deal with one of the less secure government leaders for inside information, recruiting a few of the more sensible Underground members and blowing up the mind control center without consulting anybody else. It is implied in later Noonverse novels that he and his allies then had to put down rebellions by some of the other groups, even though the country was already a terrible mess by then due to mind control withdrawal and such. It also doesn't help that the protagonist destroying the towers also ruined the efforts of human agents to gradually improve the situation on the planet. The incident is the last nail in the coffin of civilians exploring unknown space.
  • The first Martian Revolution in the Red Mars Trilogy fits this trope to a T. The general disorganization of the revolution leads to catastrophic destruction, the death of several main characters, and the total retreat of all rebels into hiding. This failed revolution is what makes them get it right the second time.
  • Red Storm Rising: Averted more often than not: NATO and the Warsaw Pact mostly stick together throughout the war. There are exceptions, however:
    • On the Western side, Greece accepts the official Soviet line, that the Kremlin explosionnote  was a neo-Nazi terrorist plot supported by West German intelligence, dismisses the entire war as a "Soviet-German dispute," and refuses to honor its defense treaty obligations. This leaves Turkey cut off and vulnerable, effectively taking them out of the war as well, and neutralizing NATO's entire Eastern Mediterranean theater. (This ends up mattering minimally to the overall war, but would have made a big difference if the Soviets had been able to carry out the full plan; phase two, after neutralizing NATO, was supposed to be an invasion of the Middle East).
    • On the Eastern side, Cuba refuses to support the Soviet war effort, depriving them of their only ally on the other side of the Atlantic, and even gets the word to the United States that it won't do anything to interfere with convoys passing through the Windward Passage to resupply Europe (so long as those convoys are blacked out and they can truthfully say they haven't seen them). This is because Castro is furious that the Soviets didn't consult or even inform him before starting World War III - understandable, since, being only ninety miles from Florida, Cuba is first in the line of fire if the U.S. decides to start punishing Soviet allies.
    • On a domestic level, this trope is in full force with the Soviet government. Not everybody's on board with the decision to go to war, but the skeptics support the group consensus... until the war bogs down and the Politburo begins to consider the possibility of using nuclear weapons. This is enough to convince the KGB director, one of the war's most successful generals, and a few moderate Politburo members to launch a coup and end the war. There's also the fact that KGB itself is said to be split, and the decision to go to war in the first place resulted partly from a power struggle within it (the Director's main rival having given far too optimistic war scenarios to the Politburo in order to stay in their good graces).
  • The Resistance Trilogy by Clive Egleton depicts La Résistance to a Soviet-occupied Britain. In the final novel the Soviets are pulling out of Britain due to war with China. This should be a time of victory, but instead the 'moderate' wing forms an alliance with The Quisling government to eliminate their hardline members (including the protagonist).
  • This is the ideal state of the Romulan government in Rihannsu. The Romulans have had bad experiences in the past with dictators so the senators and praetors are supposed to spend lots of time infighting to prevent tyranny. Unfortunately the Three (a trio of praetors) managed to work around this in the novels' timeframe.
  • The Rising of the Shield Hero: A major hurdle that The Waves of Catastrophe brings is how Naofumi Iwatani has found himself in the middle of a three-ring circus of a struggle with his fellow Cardinal Heroes, The Kingdom of Melromarc, and The Three Heroes Church.
    • The Three Heroes all think that the world they were summoned into was actually their favorite videogame and that the people around them along with their Companions are nothing more than NPCs. And that their interactions with their followers and other people had caused The Three Heroes to be seen as idiots. And them all collectively thinking that Shielders are terrible from their respective games, and that when the "Worthless Shielder" managed to completely destroy a Wave Boss that the three of them were struggling for hours against; they thought that Naofumi had cheated. Making matters worse is that unlike Naofumi Iwatani; who was the proper candidate for becoming the new Shield Hero, the other Three Heroes were three of many other secondary candidates that the Cardinal Weapons had in-reserve until they could have found proper Heroes to wield them.
    • King Aultcray and Princess Malty constantly working towards similar goals to undermine any effort for Naofumi to get stronger, simply due to him being The Shield Hero. In spite of the fact that the subsequent Waves of Catastrophe will only get stronger the more time passes between them, and that all Four Heroes need to be at the top of their game in order to stop them, and that the Waves are happening in other parts of the world and other Kingdoms outside of Melromarc. This mostly applies to King Aultcray and Princess Malty, whereas Queen Mirellia and Princess Melty actually wanted to avoid this situation and as such strive to make amends and appeasements to other nations to keep their Kingdom safe from being conquered by other powers.
      • King Aultcray's animosity towards Naofumi stems from his past trauma as a veteran of the war between Melromarc and the Demi-Human nation of Siltvelt; where his younger sister was apparently killed by a radical group. The majority of his anger to them is placed on The Shield Hero; whom the Demi-Humans revere as their own God due to previous Shield Heroes coming to their aid; while Naofumi himself is completely in the dark to all of this and sees Aultcray as an unjustifiable asshole that wants to make his life miserable by denying him any political or financial aid, labeling him as a Pariah, and constantly preventing him from getting his Party their Class Upgrades at a Dragon Hourglass (First by Cash-Gating him with 15 Gold per person to Class Up, then by royal decree to prevent the Shield Heroes' Party from getting Class Upgrades when he had the funds to buy an Upgrade, and then planning to arrest their Party should Naofumi try leaving Melromarc to try Class Upgrading at another Countries' Dragon Hourglass): all this after he was Kidnapped by the Call to come save their world from the Waves in the first place. To make matters worse, Aultcray wasn't even the first choice for leading Melromarc in the absence of his wife and actual ruler of Melromarc, Queen Mirellia who was in-attendance with the other world leaders and had left Lord Seaetto as the temporary ruler of Melromarc. Mirellias' meeting with the other world leaders was to discuss about the Waves of Catastrophe, where the initial plan was for each nation to only summon a single Cardinal Hero with Melromarc being saved for last in the summoning. It was only when The First Wave had hit Luroluna Village which was in Lord Saettos' territory that led to the Lords' untimely death and King Aultcray becoming the new temporary ruler; where the King Consort essentially jumped the gun to summon all four Heroes into Melromarc which caused a stir with the other world leaders and forcing his wife to stay away longer to assuage them from declaring war against Melromarc in-retaliation because of her husband.
      • Princess Malty is considerably even worse than Aultcray; while her Father does care about the safety and well-being of his subjects to a degree, Malty is an Upper-Class Twit who would rather spend her time screwing over every man, woman, and child that crosses her path and taking sadistic pleasure in making the lives of those around her absolutely miserable to the point that if she had a modicum of intelligence in that hollow skull of hers and did not at least care about her father, Princess Malty would be a shoe-horn in for The Starscream trope. Queen Mirellia knows exactly how problematic her eldest daughter is that she made Maltys' younger sister Melty the Next-in-Line for the Throne, because of Meltys' more compassionate and logical nature.
    • The Three Heroes Church as the central religious authority of Melromarc holds The Sword, Spear, and Bow Heroes in high-regards. This comes to severely bite them in the ass constantly where the current set of Three Heroes they worship spend their time doing inane activities and unknowingly bringing about death and destruction from their actions, all the while Naofumi Iwatani; "The Devil Of The Shield", follows in their wake and not only fixes the problems that the Three Heroes leave behind, but also manage to make the situation better overall. This prompts the Three Heroes Church to stage a Coup against Melromarc to do away with the Royal Family in order to take control themselves, along with attempting to kill the "False Heroes" and "The Devil" in order to save face with their religion, with the goal of afterwards summoning in a new set of Four Cardinal Heroes all over again... and immediately kill the new Shield Hero afterwards. Which all flies in the face of all logic of their world because The Cardinal Heroes aren't summoned in to act as objects of worship for the Church, they are here to... y'know, SAVE THE WORLD FROM DESTRUCTION. And that The Waves are still on-going, and that the only way to beat them is to have all Four Heroes to defend the world against it. And that even if a single Cardinal Hero dies, the subsequent Waves will become even stronger, and the only way for a new Hero to be summoned in would be to have all four current set of Heroes to die. If the Church even went through with this plan: The Waves of Catastrophe will become FIVE TIMES STRONGER than they currently are.
  • Schooled in Magic: Much is made from the fact that the Allied Lands are constantly bickering and fighting with each other, instead of the necromancers. It's stated all of them would have been conquered long ago if the necromancers had not been doing the same thing.
  • Shades of Magic: The Veskan royalty attempt to assassinate the Arnesian royal family and launch an invasion while Arnes is desperately trying to contain a godlike entity of chaos magic that wants to devour their entire world. For bonus points, the invading forces would have actually made the entity stronger and accelerated its spread.
  • The Silerian Trilogy: It is explicitly stated that one reason Sileria has been ruled by foreigners for so long stems from them fighting each other constantly, and when they finally do manage some unity, this only lasts long enough to win their independence before it falls apart with civil war breaking out.
  • A Song of Ice and Fire:
    • A major problem during the War of the Five Kings. Nobody likes the Lannisters, and while some of the kings do try to make alliances, the other side is never willing to cooperate. Stannis attempts to ally with his younger brother Renly, accurately citing that he (Stannis) has the proper claim anyway. Renly essentially replies "no one wants you as a king (including yourself), I do want to be king and am popular enough to do it, and I have the biggest army." Robb Stark tries to make alliances with both Stannis and Renly, and even Balon Greyjoy, but Stannis sees Robb declaring Northern independence as treason, Robb himself won't give up his own crown, and Balon sneak attacks the North due to a (misplaced) grudge he had against Robb's dead father. All of which allows the Lannisters to win.
    • Ends up being a problem for the Lannisters after Tywin Lannister's death. His daughter Cersei takes control as regent and proves herself to be paranoid and incompetent, believing the Tyrells, the House of her son's wife, to be plotting against her. As a result the Lannister regime is facing collapse. This is briefly averted due to Tywin's brother Kevan becoming regent; however, his murder at the hands of Varys begins the problem again, just as another side enters the conflict.
    • Comes up again in A Dance with Dragons. Jon Snow, having become Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, allows and encourages the Wildlings to come through the Wall and into the Seven Kingdoms. He does so because he realizes that every Wildling on the other side of the wall will become another Wight they will have to fight. Most of the Wildlings see his logic, but his own brothers in the Night's Watch only see this as him breaking traditions and vows.
    • And in a broader sense, the lords of Westeros are all so focused on their complex political gambits and petty feuds that they've forgotten that their true enemy - perhaps the enemy of every living thing - is the Others. The only ones doing anything about them are treated as jokes or loonies.
  • To some extent, the Last International in The Star Fraction, which seems to be mainly an umbrella label for all the forces fighting USUN. "...the ultimate conspiracy— nothing BUT front organizations. The fronts are real, the conspiracy isn't."
  • Star Wars Legends:
    • The Empire is, among other things, a human supremacist regime, while the Rebel Alliance/New Republic is a diverse movement in which many different species are represented. This makes for a lot of inter-species friction, particularly between nonhumans (who feel that many of the Rebel humans share the Empire's supremacist attitudes and are only pretending otherwise) and humans (who feel that they're being collectively blamed for the Imperials' sins out of pure species prejudice). Neither feeling is entirely unjustified. The X-Wing Series especially delves into the details at length; it also shows that the Empire is entirely aware of this, and has repeatedly staged operations to drive wedges between these factions.
    • There's also the simpler political jockeying between senior New Republic leaders, which we first see in The Thrawn Trilogy. Most of it can be blamed on Borsk Fey'lya and his attempts to gain power, but he's not alone. Garm Bel Iblis, after Bail Organa's death, had actually split off and formed his own rebellion against the Empire, since he thought Mon Mothma was becoming too authoritarian. One of the many plot points in the trilogy is his realizing that a great deal of her reasoning was due to The Chains of Commanding, and they could work together again.
    • By the time of the New Jedi Order, it's gotten worse (it certainly doesn't help that Borsk Fey'lya is now the Chief of State). The leadership refuses to recognize the threat of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion for far too long because they're fixated on their political differences with the Jedi and believe the entire thing is a Jedi hoax. It becomes worse when a senior senator actually betrays the New Republic to the invaders. The galaxy's other factions aren't much better, with the Hapans and Imperial Remnant seriously divided on the question of whether to help the New Republic or ignore the invasion, and the Hutts actually trying to collaborate with the enemy. Everybody pulls together in the end, but their inability to unite makes the war far worse and bloodier than it might have been.
    • Despite the appearance of strength and unity, the Empire may be even worse. The number of senior Imperials who have tried to overthrow Emperor Palpatine would be too long to list here, and then of course there's Darth Vader himself. While Palpatine and Vader are able to suppress this dissent, their government flies apart as soon as they've died; on the one hand, a couple dozen senior officers and governors break off from the Empire to become independent warlords, while on the other, the central government that remains is paralyzed by power squabbles until the Rebels take Coruscant and make it irrelevant. The infighting between the warlords and the Imperial quasi-state lasts for years, until The Callista Trilogy, where the one success Admiral Daala had was in reuniting those fragments and handing them over to Pellaeon after she'd lost a lot of the newly-reformed Empire's forces. Pellaeon worked at keeping the Imperial Remnant together, then decided that it could only survive by making peace with the New Republic. Of course, parts of the Empire didn't agree...
  • The Stormlight Archive:
    • This is more or less the Hat of the Alethi people. Their religions glorifies competition in everything from literal combat to conversations to painting. It's not simply enough to be good at something, you must be beating someone else at it.
      • Even when they are technically working together, The Way of Kings (2010) shows us how the Alethi Highprinces are much more concerned with outdoing each other and getting more wealth and glory. As a result they've been at war for years with no end in sight, as they're effectively entirely unable to coordinate on any long term plans, making actually winning effectively impossible, despite their overwhelming advantages.
      • And even while they are technically united (and actually not directly fighting) in the foreign war, back home their armies still fight each other over minor land disputes and so on. In a sane world (or even a sane country on their world) this would be called civil war, but for the Alethi it's simple status quo.
    • Even the end of the world isn't enough to get proper unity, as in Words of Radiance we see their numerous different conspiracies all working at cross-purposes to deal with the Desolation in their own way.
      • First and foremost, we have Dalinar, the only one trying to fight honorably and unite everyone against the coming darkness. Sadeas spends the entire book undermining him every single way he can.
      • The Sons of Honor think that by bringing back the Voidbringers and the Desolation, the Heralds will come back as well, bringing the Church back to prominence and fixing everything wrong with the world. They're completely unaware of the fact that the Heralds never left, having abandoned their oaths millennia ago in favor of wandering the world in anonymity.
      • The group serving the Diagram are following a plan Taravangian wrote in his most brilliant moment, detailing how to put him slowly in control of the whole world in order to stop the Desolation, manipulating spren and people alike—including assassinating pretty much every other ruler in the world.
      • The Ghostbloods are apparently at odds with anyone they decide is in their way, and are more than happy to kill their opponents. They also have numerous world-hoppers among their number.
      • Eshonai, the Parshendi Shardbearer, ordered the death of the Alethi king to keep the gods of her people from returning and turning them into Voidbringers, and are now fighting a losing war against the Alethi; too bad her sister unintentionally brings the Fused back, causing exactly what the listeners had feared.
      • And finally, several of these are implied to be splinter factions of the same group, as the Diagram and the Sons of Honor both take their cues from the murdered king Gavilar, and the Ghostbloods make a passing reference to the Diagram and seem to know what they're up to, implying that between all the double agents and so on it's basically impossible to tell who's actually a part of which group.
    • It simply gets worse in Oathbringer, as Dalinar attempts to unite all the leaders of the world to fight the Desolation. It doesn't help that everyone starts off assuming it's a trick and the Alethi are looking to conquer them, and even those he does manage to convince never seem to agree on how to actually go about fighting their enemies and saving humanity.
  • Tolkien's Legendarium:
    • In The Lord of the Rings books, the elves, dwarves, and men are constantly squabbling with each other when they should be joining forces to fight the Evil Overlord. Fortunately, they never actually come to blows. Lothlórien's elves distrust Gimli the dwarf, and so all the Fellowship must go blind into the path to Lórien (at Aragon's suggestion to avoid singling out Gimli). Legolas laments this, though his complaint is somewhat undermined by the fact that he was perfectly willing to have Gimli blindfolded, and only objects when he must be as well.
      Legolas: Alas for the folly of these days! Here all are enemies of the one Enemy, and yet I must walk blind, while the sun is merry in the woodland under leaves of gold!
      Haldir: Folly it may seem. Indeed in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him.
    • Faramir captures Frodo and Sam, and spends some time trying to ascertain if they're working for Sauron. Sam gets upset at this, and (in a tone adults use to talk to mouthy children) tells Faramir off for wasting time and commenting on how Sauron would love seeing this. Amused but unimpressed, Faramir tells Sam to sit down, shut up, and not speak of things he doesn't understand. Trying to make sure they aren't servants of the enemy is his job, and if he was as impatient as Sam, he would have killed them already.
    • The Silmarillion: Exaggerated when Mandos prophesizes that the elves will fail to defeat Morgoth because they are too busy fighting each other. 500 years and several million corpses later, he is proved right.
  • The underground in William Rotsler's To The Land Of The Electric Angel, which comprises everyone from the Pope to free-love hedonists. They actually pull off a successful revolution under the protagonist (who gets elected Pope so he can lead the uprising, and thereafter has to answer "Is the Pope Catholic?" with "No").
  • The Wheel of Time series may as well be called Fighting the Wrong People. While everyone agrees that everyone needs to work together in order to win the imminent Last Battle, most factions are also of the opinion that this needs to happen by them conquering the world. For instance, the Seanchan follow mostly the same prophecy everyone follows — but their version disagrees with everyone else's, maybe by as little as one sentence out of an entire book, so they believe they need to subdue the Dragon Reborn in order to have a chance of winning. The Dragon Reborn controls about half the continent, which required forcibly overcoming many struggling factions, embodying this trope right there. The outcome is predictable. Others such as various Aes Sedai factions see the need to cooperate, but only so long as they control everything behind the scenes (even if it means they have to kidnap and abuse the Chosen One.) It certainly doesn't help that, for a while, every major faction had a Treacherous second-in-command loyal to the Dark One.
  • Wings of Fire: During Arc III, what little we see of the Chrysalis comes across of this. The Jewel Hive branch is small and disorganized, with one member, Morpho, constantly harassing the others over their loyalty. However, the Jewel Hive branch leader, Tau, and her right-talon, Cinnabar, are fairly level-headed, hold Morpho in check, and are actually effective: they successfully create a diversion to avoid the capture of Morpho and the protagonists, and later are crucial in the success of a jailbreak.
  • In Victoria, much of The Alliance's early troubles consists of averting, or at least mitigating these tendencies. The secessionists are initially a fairly heterogeneous coalition whose chief unifying trait is their opposition to the increasingly tyrannical Federal Government—and even that does not always suffice to stop the bickering and internal rivalries. Early on, elaborate political deals and power-sharing agreements must be brokered between the different states, militias and private actors; and after the death of the beloved Governor Adams, who kept the factions together, the differences boil up again in the newly independent Confederation, culminating in an outright coup attempt by dissatisfied elements in the political establishment and the "Deep Green" militia faction. Things really only settle down after William Kraft becomes established as the new Governor.
  • The situation that prevailed on Barrayar at the beginning of the Vorkosigan Saga:
    Aral Vorkosigan: I could take over the universe with this army if I could ever get all their weapons pointed in the same direction.

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