Ambiguous Name: Vicious Cycle

I guess? I don't know that "the heroes only get involved shortly before the time comes for the evil thing to return" is really more than just the inevitable intersection of Regularly Scheduled Evil with Rule of Drama, though.

Somebody mentioned Celestial Deadline? I think that one is a mess in and of itself ("deadline" implies a Race Against Time), but that's a different topic.

edited 16th Jul '13 7:01:05 AM by Stratadrake

You Can't Thwart Stage One. The bad guys are always defeated at the last possible moment.

According to the Merrian-Webster" second definition of "vicious circle", "a chain of events in which the response to one difficulty creates a new problem that aggravates the original difficulty", and the Wikipedia article, Vicious Cycle sounds like it would be about a bad event followed by a response that causes another problem. The new problem worsens the previous one. This continues until it comes back to the first problem, which has worsened.

This may work in storytelling, but I don't know enough about economics to understand the term fully.

^^ Not quite, that's about the good guys always failing to stop them prior to said last moment despite trying to do exactly that. He survives, gets away, it was all a setup, etc.

Exactly. And that's why the story won't pick up until its time for the recurring evil to happen. If the schedule says "every 1,000 years," there's no point writing about 999 years of everyone failing to stop it.

A simple economic example is having a loan, and then borrowing more money to pay that one off, and then borrowing even more money to pay that one off. In itself, it's a neutral operation (basically just moving the loan), but it will more likely eat up more resources than it saves, and interest will accumulate, which makes it worse. Of course, there are situations where it can be helpful, but generally speaking, it's much more likely to be a vicious cycle.

^^ But oftentimes, nobody actually tried to stop it pre-emptively.

Bump. I got Catch-22 Dilemma out the door, and are we anywhere close to something we can vote on here?

I thought the key part of the trope was less the time elements (a deadline or a regularly spaced occurrence) and more the reasons for it and the conflict that arises from it. It's generally a plot about the heroes having to confront an established order that continually causes one bad thing to happen with the excuse that it helps prevent some other bad thing. I think of Tales of Symphonia as the typical example here.

That's more Lesser of Two Evils (spelling edit)

edited 26th Jul '13 4:07:41 PM by crazysamaritan

@18 has a good solution, in my mind. Barring objections, I'll crowner it soon.

Well, is what Vicious Cycle is currently describing a trope?

That is why I haven't acted on that yet.

I think the current trope should be merged with Eternal Recurrence.

Clock is set.

Clock's waaaaay past due; locking for inactivity.