A Doormat to His Men

Captain Aubrey: A man pushed past you without making his obedience, yet you said nothing. Why?
Midshipman Hollom: I intended to, sir, but... the right words just didn't—
Captain Aubrey: The right words?! He was deliberately insubordinate.
Midshipman Hollom: I've tried to get to know the men, sir, and be friendly, but... they've taken a set against me, always whispering when I go past and giving me looks. I'll set that right, sir. I'll be much tougher on them from now on.
Captain Aubrey: You don't make friends with the foremast jacks, lad. They'll despise you in the end. Think you weak.

— Master and Commander

Being friendly is good and being informal is cool. But rigid hierarchies are, quite frankly, not known for their friendliness and informality.

This Hard Truth Aesop occasionally (though not exclusively) crops up in Military and Warfare Works. It stresses that, while showing courtesy, benevolence and respect to those you command and even those who you fight is fundamentally a fine thing (and for regularly-adjusted people, certainly tempting), doing so excessively and especially in the face of wilful insubordination will likely get you branded as a weakling instead of a respectable figure.

While it may seem counter-intuitive, being too lenient too often can lead to The Mutiny or The Coup as quickly as being The Neidermeyer, so there is always a fine line to be walked between these two extremes. Characters that are indecisive enough to alternate between this trope and The Neidermeyer might as well paint a target on their forehead. This is generally also one of the reasons why Found Family via Work might not be a good idea. It's also not conducive for the subordinates themselves, since those who take that leniency for granted may not realize how well they have it until they have to deal with someone far less tolerant of their actions.

It is usually a point that is made in works located at the bottom half of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism. Only in the most idealistic of best-case-scenarios will the timid commander be stuck with a Mildly Military Ragtag Bunch of Misfits that can still somehow exert fighting strength if the situation calls for it. Antagonist characters in this kind of plots inevitably voice aloud that Virtue Is Weakness (and not trying to be Gung Holier Than Thou maniac being the "virtue" in question). There may be instances of a Last-Second Term of Respect if someone erroneously assumes this trope is in play. With All Due Respect can come into play if the situation is reaching critical levels of insubordination.

This need not necessarily be tied to a character's military rank, but also otherwise a job, law, social class, family status, age or even species that invariably thrusts the character into a de jure position of authority — whether as a judge, a CEO, a pet owner or as a pater familias. It's therefore often a characteristic of not just an Ensign Newbie, but many a Puppet King, Clueless Boss or other New Meat. Often, The Peter Principle is to blame. Compare Pushover Parents for when the relationship is familial and not just authoritative. In the religious sphere, The Vicar or another Good Shepherd can sometimes fall prey to this when his new-age, trendy way of preaching to the youth about all the times Jesus was way cool utterly fails to strike the fear of God into their hearts.

If he is lucky, his hands-off approach will be aided by a Sergeant Rough keeping the troops in line for him. If he's not so lucky, the ensuing power vacuum will be easily exploited by a Man Behind the Man.

Compare with Extreme Doormat, Good Is Dumb, The Farmer and the Viper, Butt-Monkey and Misplaced Kindergarten Teacher. Contrast with Cruel to Be Kind and Good Is Not Soft and The Neidermeyer. Compare and contrast with Uncle Pennybags, who is so stinking rich that he isn't in any danger of losing his status despite his overwhelming generosity.

Works featuring this trope:

Anime & Manga

• Overlord (2012): Ainz tries to run his kingdom as a Benevolent Boss, the problem is all his underlings are hardwired to see him as their lord and master to the point where they think his giving them time off is a punishment. And he can't even admit that he's not an ultra-intellectual lich chessmaster but just playing at being one because they rationalize it as being part of his (nonexistent) plan.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Part of the reason Bright Noa was such a hardass was because he feared being seen as one of these. He didn't have much choice: following the events at Side 7 he was the highest ranking able-bodied soldier left on the White Base (being an officer cadet) and so had to take command despite only being a few years older than the rest of the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits that made up the crew ^note The attack at Side 7 also resulted in the deaths of most of the crew, and civilians from Side 7 were pressed into service in a bid to survive. On several occasions, other characters like Mirai or Ryu have to take him aside and suggest that it's possible to be A Father to His Men without being a pushover. By the time of Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, he's taken that advice to heart and knows when to instill discipline and when to not be so strict.

Comic Books

• The Transformers (IDW): When Bumblebee is elected the leader of the Autobots trapped on Earth after Optimus Prime decides to surrender himself to the humans, he tries to maintain his usual "friend to everyone" attitude (one of the factors that got him elected, which also led to Cliffjumper sneeringly referring to the election as "a popularity contest"). His inability to maintain discipline leads to several Autobots breaking away, with Hot Rod even forming an alliance with several Decepticons in an attempt to find away to escape Earth.
• Borgia: Cesare Borgia is saddled with an incompetent ally for a brother-in-law, a Camp Gay Upper-Class Twit who can't get his men to respect him or Cesare due in part to the fact that he's had sex with a lot of them (and seems quite hot and bothered by the idea of being gang-raped by them).
  Soldier: You dare give us orders, you coward? Have you forgotten how often I've rammed my cock down your throat?

Cesare sorts the situation out by handily beating the soldier (despite being younger and smaller) in unarmed combat, and from then on they obey his orders.

• In X-Cellent, Guy Smith, AKA Mr. Sensitive, is forced to come out of retirement and re-form the X-Statix when Axel Cluney, his evil predecessor, starts a new herostratic team as part of a complicated plot to achieve godhood. Never terribly comfortable with leadership to begin with, Guy finds it even harder to lead a team that largely consists of the children (and in one case, Opposite-Sex Clone) of his late teammates and is afraid to be perceived as talking down to them, and thus his teammates regularly ignore his orders and generally walk all over him.

Films — Live-Action

• In Master and Commander, Midshipman Hollom suffers excessively from this, as his attempts to be friendly with the common sailors aboard the HMS Surprise do little but invite suspicion and ridicule. At one point, he is shoved aside by a drunken sailor, causing that sailor to be flogged (at the behest of Captain Aubrey) to salvage the situation. The air eventually becomes so bad that Hollom jumps into the sea.
• The main trait of 2nd Lieutenant Armitage in '71, who, in his first appearance, tries to timidly bond with the men he is meant to lead into Northern Ireland. While he does have a Sergeant Rock at his side, the former is knocked out while on a mission, leading to his entire unit being routed by an enraged mob, setting the events of the film in motion.
• Monty Python's The Meaning of Life has a scene featuring a sergeant-major mockingly asking his men whether they have anything better to do rather than "marching up and down the square" with him. Whenever one admits that they in fact do, he promptly allows them to leave. At the end of the sketch, he's the only one left to march up and down the square.
  Voice-Over: Democracy and humanitarianism have always been trademarks of the British Army.
  Sergeant Major: Rubbish!
• Twelve O'Clock High: Colonel Davenport, while liked by the men of his bomber group, identifies too much with them. He won't push them hard, doesn't enforce standards, won't discipline or relieve them for poor performance or failure, shields them from blame and accountability, and blames the group's failure to accomplish missions as "rotten luck." This attitude forces his boss, Major General Pritchard, to relieve him and place Brigadier General Savage (Gregory Peck) in command.
• Commented on in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, where Major General Wynne-Candy's enduring obsession with honour and fair-play only serves to hinder his allies' war efforts and encourages German brutality in the knowledge that the Brits would be unwilling to punch back. He ends up earning a lot of crap for it: Candy's WW1 subordinate van Zijl goes behind his back to torture German prisoners of war for information. A young lieutenant publicly humiliates Candy by "arresting" him inside his club's bathhouse ahead of a war exercise. At the outbreak of WW2, Candy is snubbed by the BBC when he tries to deliver a borderline-defeatist Doomed Moral Victor speech and forcibly retired in quick order. Even Candy's German friend Theo (formerly an enemy German officer and POW in Britain) ultimately calls Candy out on his dangerous naivety.

Live-Action TV

• Hornblower
  • 1st Lieutenant Buckland struggles with this trope when he gets hoist into the position of Captain during an Anti-Mutiny, and relatively quickly loses all control of the ship to his subordinates Bush, Hornblower and Kennedy. The first hint of his inability to establish authority comes when a seaman deliberately splashes him with grog during a party and Buckland leaves in a huff instead of finding and punishing the culprit.
  • Invoked with Doughty the steward, who accidentally knocks out a midshipman while having a scuffle with another sailor. Having struck an officer, he is immediately sentenced to death, despite the fact that even the midshipman tries to vouch on his behalf.
• Sharpe:
  • Inverted with the man himself when he is raised from the ranks and made a lieutenant. Since he has neither the experience nor the social class necessary to pass as a commissioned officer in the early-19th-century British Army, he is publicly scorned by his fellow officers, in turn leading his men to treat him as a jumped-up ranker (at least initially). To avert this trope from taking hold, he tries to establish his authority of his former peers the only way he knows (as a Drill Sergeant Nasty), though he goes so thoroughly overboard that the men ultimately threaten to frag him.
  • In Sharpe's Company, Sharpe's commanding officer Colonel Windham is a cheerful Upper-Class Twit whose relatively easy-going and trustful style is exploited by resident Sociopathic Soldier Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill, who proceeds to rob, rape and murder his way through the camp right under his nose. When Hakeswill frames Sergeant Harper for the theft of Colonel Windham's property, the latter has Harper flogged without further investigation — and then proceeds to salute Harper for his bravery and reward him with a coin (proving that, if anything, Windham at least possesses a certain emotional intelligence).
• Parodied in Blackadder's Christmas Carol, which sees Blackadder start out as an antithesis to The Scrooge: someone who is as generous, friendly and soft-hearted as he is wealthy and well-situated. This leads him to being consistently abused and mocked by all the lower-class folks around him.
• M*A*S*H: Col. Henry Blake is a huge case of Mildly Military, a fine doctor but having neither the instinct nor the desire for command, he was somehow still put in charge of the 4077. Hawkeye and Trapper John run roughshod over him to get what they want, often while helping themselves to his hard liquor (though to be fair, they always make sure to pour for Henry, too). He also once notes of Burns and Houlihan that they go over his head so often that he has Athlete's Scalp. Even his company clerk, Radar, who sees him as a sort of Team Dad, will drink his booze and smoke his cigars behind his back. By comparison his replacement, Col. Sherman Potter, is regular Army, and while he can, and occasionally will allow the men to have a bit of leeway, recognizing that they're a medical, not a fighting, unit, he will not hesitate to pull the reins, kick keister, and give a bellicose bellow when the situation calls for it. It is a mark of the series' enduring roots in realism that while Blake is loved by all (with the possible exception of Frank Burns), Potter is loved and respected.
• In the pilot of Our Flag Means Death, Captain Stede Bonnet seeks to be a gentleman pirate, who provides his crew with amenities like a library, a regular salary, and bedtime stories. However, thanks to these and the fact that his ship has yet to raid anything of great value, much of his crew starts to view him as a weakling and prepare to mutiny. Their perception changes when Stede accidentally kills the captain of a naval warship, leading to the pirates defeating the entire enemy crew, toughening him up their eyes.
• Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide In "Hallways & Friends Moving" Ned gets appointed hall monitor (mostly so Mr Sweeny doesn't have to do it), however, he keeps letting students slide when he catches them breaking the rules (even Loomer and his crew) partially out of not taking the rules seriously and partially out of wanting to stay everyone's friend. This just leads to them committing greater and great infractions, until it descends into utter chaos complete with people flat out partying and holding hockey games in the halls. By the time Ned realises this has gotten out of hand, his attempts to rein them in completely fail and events continue to escalate until a massive collision ends up hurting multiple people and creating a massive mess.
• Several characters in Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon suffer from this:
  • Lord Tytos Lannister (known as "The Laughing Lion" as well as "The Toothless Lion") had a reputation of being a gregarious do-gooder who wanted nothing less than cordial relations with his vassals. Some of said vassals, the Tarbecks and Reynes, ultimately exploited his kindness when they borrowed and subsequently refused to pay back vast sums of money, then later tried to secede from his realm. Their rebellions were ultimately crushed by Tytos' (much less chill) son Tywin with utmost brutality.
  • Child king Tommen Baratheon I is a sweet-natured and trustful ruler, which prompts several other players like his queen mother Cersei, his wife Margaery Tyrell and the religious leader the High Sparrow to turn him into their Puppet King. It ends with Cersei winning the power struggle and Tommen being Driven to Suicide.
  • Subverted with mild-mannered, empathetic King Viserys I Targaryen, whose reign consists mainly of his own family repeatedly going behind his back to start wars and undermine his rule, only for him to forgive their transgressions and invite them back to court time and time again. While this sounds like a recipe for disaster (and indeed, the conflicts kindled in this period would ultimately end up plunging the realm into a bloody civil war), it actually does work out for him in his lifetime. When he dies of natural causes, he bears the epithet "the Peaceful" and is remembered fondly by most of his dysfunctional family.
• Hogan's Heroes: Col. Klink and Sgt. Schultz are the hapless authority figures of Stalag 13. Though technically members of the Nazis regime, both have expressed disdain for the Nazi party, and lack the signature trademark cruelty of the Nazis and the SS. Klink thinks he's A Father to His Men, but that's because Hogan has him snowballed. Schultz, meanwhile, was a merry toymaker who got drafted, and largely turns a blind eye to Hogan's activities, unless doing so could get him shot. There's a reason his catchphrase is "I see NUSSINK! NUSSINK!"
• The iCarly episode, "i Sell Penny-Tees" starts with Carly, Sam, and Freddie looking to produce Penny T-Shirts and sell them online. Sam goes and employs fourth-grade children, making them work in conditions that are reminiscent of a sweatshop. This disgusts Carly and Freddie enough to take some of the kids and have them work for the duo in a better environment. While Carly and Freddie try to be Benevolent Bosses, their attempts end up only coddling their workers instead. Providing their workforce with a deluge of treats, rewards, toys and paying them a full month before their work is finished leads to the kids being unproductive, sluggish and no longer have any incentive to work. By the end of the Episode, all three lose their workforce as the kids start up their own Penny Tees company.
• In Band of Brothers, Buck Compton is first seen getting a dressing-down from Winters for playing craps with a group of enlisted men. Buck tells Winters that he was gambling with them in order to get them to like him, so Winters then tells him "don't ever put yourself in a position where you can take from these men".
• Star Trek: Enterprise: Discussed in "Minefield", when Lieutenant Reed — a firm believer in military professionalism — clashes with Captain Archer over whether a commander can afford to fraternize with their subordinates.
  Reed: Frankly, sir, from my point of view that kind of socializing has no place on a starship.
  Archer: I had a C.O. once who felt the same way. "They're your crew, not your friends." I thought about that a lot when I took this command, but then I realized this is not a typical mission. We could be out here for years. All we have to depend on is each other.
  • For some context: Reed is stranded on the hull next to an unexploded Romulan mine, and is trying to convince Archer to cut him loose along with the mine, rather than risk the ship trying to disarm it. Fortunately, they find a third option.
• Porridge: This is a recurring problem for Mr Barrowclough with his gentle, friendly optimistic nature causing him issues in his efforts to serve as a prison guard. Whilst he strives his best to be a Reasonable Authority Figure and is honestly well liked throughout Slade Prison, he regularly struggles with the inmates (in particular Fletcher) taking advantage of him, with his attempts to put his foot down almost always failing. Best demonstrated in "A Day Out" when left in charge of supervising a prison work party, he gives a speech about how he doesn't want anyone to assume his compassionate nature is a sign they can slack off, only for the inmates to immediately start doing so. As the series goes on he does become more aware of this, and tries his best to avoid it, but his compassionate side still wins out.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Queen Miriel zig-zags this. She has real political power over her people, but her subjects are very divided by her decisions and show clear signs that they are ready to turn on her immediately, a situation Ar-Pharazon is taking advantage of behind Miriel. In several key scenes he is shown having more control over the people than Miriel. He secretly pays Agent Provocateurs to start a mutiny against Miriel to give him a chance to talk of patriotism to the people and calm down the spirits. In another scene, while talking to his son in a plaza, is enough for him to just make a nod without saying a word for the people around them to understand they need to leave the place.

Literature

• Inverted for the most part in Ciaphas Cain:
  • Cain makes it a point to be open and friendly with the people he meets, be they soldiers or general staff (though never outright chummy) to avoid Unfriendly Fire, but he seems persuaded that they think him the bog-standard execute-a-trooper-for-not-having-parade-ready-gear-during-a-battle Kommissar (in other words, the kind who regularly do suffer Unfriendly Fire). He attributes the exceptional performance of the units he's attached to their fear of him, when it's obvious the morale boost comes from no one wanting to disappoint him.
  • In Duty Calls, Cain sees a PDF (Planetary Defense Forces, considered a Redshirt Army by the Redshirt Army Imperial Guard) lieutenant trying to get through a crowd of civilians by moving around them and apologizing, instead of using elbows and his authority as an officer. Not that Cain is for military brutality, but he realizes the man is an Ensign Newbie assigned guard duty because he wouldn't be missed on the frontline.
• Full Metal Panic!: Mithril is a pseudo-military organization, staffed wholly by mercenaries willing to fight for the pay provided, with no actual state sponsor. This makes them very susceptible to infiltration by Moles. In "The Second Raid", one such mole is being interrogated after a mission went south because of him, with the intel agents breaking his fingers. Capt. Teletha Testarosa, who tries to be cordial to all of the crew of her super-submarine, is clearly disturbed by witnessing the act, while her subordinate, Kalinin, says if he were conducting the interrogation as a member of the KGB, he would have cut the fingers off instead. Not long after, in a later installment, Kalinin sides with Amalgam, Mithril's rival organization, believing that wide-eyed idealists like Teletha would only lead to Mithril's ruin in the long run.
• Romance of the Three Kingdoms:
  • Liu Yu is one of the warlords who initially raised forces to battle against Dong Zhuo. However, he was such a good sort that his much more warlike subordinate Gongsun Zan lost respect for him and started thinking that he could utilise Liu's territory better. Liu even ordered his troops to minimise casualties to Gongsun's forces, feeling they were simply led astray. This naturally led to his defeat, and him and his entire family being publicly executed.
  • Tao Qian is portrayed as one of these, being a genial and trusting old man who even accepted former bandits into his ranks. However, he's such a nice old fellow that these bandits don't actually feel afraid of him, and so when a former high minister of the Han Empire is travelling through Tao's territory they ambush and murder him and his entire entourage. Unhappily for all involved, said former minister was the father of Cao Cao, who proceeded to launch a genocidal attack on the territory out of a desire for vengeance. ^note  The historical Tao Qian was far less nice or naive, and essentially permitted bandits to run roughshod over his territory so long as he got a cut.
• Ender's Game: Colonel Graff of the Battle School seeks to shape prodigy student Ender Wiggin into the Admiral to lead humanity's star fleet. To this end, he has Ender transferred to a new unit every time the boy starts to make close friends. His reasoning is that Ender feeling safe among trusted partners diminishes his leadership ability, and aims for a balance between Ender attracting the loyalty of his army and being isolated enough to keep thinking on his feet. As Graff puts it: "He can have friends. It's parents he can't have."
• In the first published Hornblower book, "The Happy Return", Hornblower himself thinks he was a victim of this on his first commission as a result of his natural garrulity. He often discussed things with his first officer and by the end was unable to give any order without it being discussed, leading him to his current ambition to never say an unnecessary word to his officers and crew. When the books actually covered his early career though he's shown as if he was always rather stoic and taciturn.
• Making Money: Moist tries to ingratiate himself to the Mint workers by suggesting less hours and work. It doesn't take as they don't actually mind the workload.
• Alexis Carew: When Alexis gets her first real command in HMS Nightingale, she's deeply hesitant to use A Taste of the Lash to address discipline problems, both because she genuinely likes her enlisted men and wants them to like her, and because she herself had been stripped of her commission and flogged by a previous CO who would have men whipped for no reason at all. However, this leads to some persistently unruly enlisted men not respecting her—Alexis being a small and singularly un-intimidating young woman—so she does ultimately order a few punitive floggings (though still being far more judicious than the hated Captain Neals).

Other

• Auf dem Kasernenhof, a caricature by Heinrich Zille, features a short, bespectacled, friendly-looking sergeant with a dachshund on a parade square, getting chewed out by an officer for apparently being too meek at drilling his underlings.
  Officer: Sergeant Levi. You'll have to drill them louder. Absolutely no one can hear you. You'll have to shout! Can't you shout? I took you for such an intelligent person!

Toys

• Transformers:
  • Many iterations of Grimlock throughout the franchise tend to despise Optimus Prime because they view Optimus as one of these. In the UK-exclusive Earthforce comics, Grimlock mocks the Autobot Code (i.e. the code of conduct) and argues for brutal, unyielding force rather than Optimus Prime's weak-willed concern for collateral damage or casualties. In Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, that Grimlock tells Optimus to his face that "you are weak. You run when you should fight." in response to Optimus calling on him to fall back to evacuate the other Autobots. ^note In both these cases, Grimlock's offensive-minded attitude is shown to be quite mistaken: in the Marvel comics when he takes charge of the Autobot army and pursues Bludgeon's Decepticons he leads them into an ambush that results in only 5 survivors out of the entire Autobot faction, while in Fall Of Cybertron he blithely ignores that him abandoning his post led to numerous Autobot casualties because the Decepticons simply walked right through his abandoned outpost and took them by surprise.
  • Invoked in the expanded toy bio of the Autobot Smokescreen. His primary function is to distract and disorient enemies using his ability to generate blinding, choking, debilitating clouds of smoke (hence his name "Smokescreen"). However, his other major function is to hang around the other Autobots, and then report back to Optimus Prime about how they're feeling. The reason for this is because Optimus Prime is well aware that as the Autobot supreme commander, he can never truly befriend his soldiers, and so he needs others like Smokescreen to keep him posted on matters like morale.
  • The G1 Micromaster Eagle Eye commands the Autobot Air Patrol, a team of air-based Micromasters. However, the Air Patrol is nowhere is effective as it should be, as Eagle Eye does nothing to try to handle the various interpersonal issues within the team. Part of this is because he's not really interested in trying, and part of it is because he'd rather not actually boss them around.
  • The Decepticon Micromaster Direct-Hit came to the attention of Decepticon High Command thanks to his successes on the battlefield, being a skilled and tenacious warrior who inspired his comrades by leading by example. Unhappily for Direct-Hit, this resulted in a promotion that put him in charge of the Battle Squad, which requires a very different set of skills. As a frontline warrior he was a Sergeant Rock, but as a commander it's become common knowledge amongst Decepticon soldiers that the poor shmuck is a General Failure. He relies on his previous close friendship with his teammates to see the Battle Squad through operations (and his friend Power Punch has Undying Loyalty for him), but what they really need is discipline and leadership. Since he just can't provide that Meltdown ignores his orders and Fireshot is planning a Klingon Promotion.
• Deliberately averted in most versions of G.I. Joe. The Joes are generally depicted as being fairly Mildly Military (what with their decidedly non-standard combat wear and lax grooming standards), and this normally includes small things like saluting superior officers ^note This is partially because the Joe chain of command differs from the regular military chain of command, like non-commissioned officer Duke (E-8) being higher ranked than actual officers like Doc or Ace (O-3) due to his position as Joe second-in-command. However, the Joe commanders are never depicted as being pushovers, partially because while they fight alongside the others and have good camaraderie they're also aware that in combat proper adherence to The Chain of Command can spell the difference between life and death.

Video Games

• Judgment has family patriarch Mitsugu Matsugane of the Matsugane Family, who is essentially what franchise protagonist Kiryu Kazuma would become if he had become a leader or stayed with the Tojo Clan for too long. Matsugane has a big code of honor, but this prevents him from participating in the darker side of the Yakuza society. It also prevents his family from rising in prominence, saddling them with financial problems. While Matsugane is a Father to His Men, they all think he's soft for being bound by his moral code. Family captain Kyohei Hamura is forced to get his hands dirty in order to resolve these issues, with his control of the clan's finances displacing Matsugane's influence within the family, leaving the patriarch a powerless figurehead.
• Brothers in Arms: By the third entry, Hell's Highway, Baker, thanks in no small part to his increasingly worse PTSD, has become this. While A Father to His Men and having the respect of his squad at the start of Operation "Market-Garden", the stress of combat eventually gets to him by the events of "Baptism of Fire", where Franky ends up going AWOL to save a Dutch girl he met, with Baker simply letting it happen. His later attempts to find and save Franky cause Baker to wander off from his squad, fight through an Abandoned Hospital full of German infantrymen, and watch Franky get killed (no thanks to treating him like a son rather than a subordinate, and Franky, having a shaky relationship with a possibly abusive father, getting angry at him for it). By the events of "Black Friday", Hartsock outright calls him out on this.
  Hartsock: Maybe if you were in control of your men, instead of trying to be their best friend...They. Wouldn't. Need. Finding!
• In the Kiwami remake of Yakuza, it's shown that Akira Nishikiyama had trouble getting his men to respect him since most of them were senior officers sent by Kazama to prop up a fledgling gang, most prominently a guy by the name of Matsushige. When Nishiki is in dire need of 3 million yen, he personally grovels before Matsushige to get that money however he can, which Matsushige does by muscling in on other Tojo Clan turf while leaving Nishiki to take the consequences. Eventually, when Matsushige barges into Nishiki grieving for his sister and further insults him, Nishiki decides to gut him right then and there, solidifying him into the ruthless villain and Bad Boss that he is by the time of the game.

Web Comics

• Schlock Mercenary: On getting a new ship, Tagon vetoes a room assignment plan that would give every grunt their own cabin, citing a former officer who didn't impose sufficient discipline on his troops.
  Tagon: I was in an infantry unit once, when deployments left us with one company of soldiers to about five companies' worth of empty barracks.
  Tagon: The major was green brass. He let us spread out a bit, and neglected to secure the unused buildings.
  Tagon: Within two weeks, we had four stills, two smack labs, an onsite escort service, a two-star casino, and a greenhouse full of hyperjuana.
  Kevyn: So...you want me to assign standard-sized barracks, and then lock down the extra space?
  Tagon: When they tried to pull us back in, some of the men lodged their protests with rocket launchers.

Web Video

• Discussed in the Rules For Rulers video by CGP Grey:
  • The stability of a dictatorship is inversely proportional to how well the population is taken care of by the regime (particularly in terms of liberties, education, health and infrastructure). In other words: The more emancipated, read, fed and connected the population is, the more capable they are of rising in opposition to the regime, so the regime may as well try to keep them as oppressed, ignorant, starving and isolated as possible (while still turning a buck) if it wants to survive in the long run.
  • Likewise, a dictator who spends more state assets on public welfare than on buying off his cronies runs the risk of being toppled and replaced by someone who doesn't.
• Reconstructed in If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device. By his own admission, Captain-General "Kitten" of the Adeptus Custodes doesn't exactly have a Warmaster personality; he's a Nice Guy who keeps getting pushed around by his subordinates. However, even though they don't always defer to him, most of the Custodians genuinely love him as a surrogate father figure, which they need even more than a general. After all, the Custodes are brothers and have no other family but each other.

Western Animation

• Gravity Falls: In the episode "Boss Mabel", Mabel takes the reins of the Mystery Shack while Grunkle Stan is away on a TV contest and decides to be a more chummy boss instead of Stan's meanness (even betting Stan that she will make more money than him by following this tenet). Unfortunately, it goes way too wrong: Wendy, a huge slacker, takes advantage of Mabel's generosity to get off from work and still get paid, Soos' ideas for marketing the Shack are awful, and Dipper decides to exhibit the real monsters of Gravity Falls instead of Stan's fakes, which puts two customers in the hospital and wrecks the Shack. Mabel is forced to put her foot down hard and yell at everybody like a drill sergeant to help fix things before Stan arrives, spending all of the money they earned (ironically, she still won the bet — when all of the repairs were done one dollar remained, while Stan won nothing at the contest)

Real Life

• This is one of the main issues that the principle of legal certainty concerns itself with in law. Laws must keep their boundaries distinct and firm in order to keep the enforcement both restrained and effective. If a law's boundaries are distinct but insufficiently enforced, this can lead to the regulation only being enforced more and more selectively and leniently, inevitably hollowing it out until it effectively loses all significance. A popular maxim sums it up as:
  An unenforced law is a contradiction in its own right, like a flame that doesn't burn.
• This trope has been cited as being responsible for military defeats:
  • The mutiny aboard the HMS Bounty is often partially blamed on this trope as, while Lt. Bligh was arguably dictatorial and overbearing in some regards, he also often failed to maintain the degree of discipline that Royal Navy sailors would have otherwise been used to — namely by granting them a fairly relaxed five-month layover on Tahiti, which the men spent gorging on the local foods and getting intimate with the locals. This led to a lot to resentment amongst the crew when they were forced back aboard for the return trip, and Bligh's continued lack of oversight allowed many of the men to act on their discontent in a more coordinated and unrestricted fashion that could otherwise have been the case.
  • This has also been cited as a contributing factor to the defeat of the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War. Since the army was made up primarily of volunteers and militiamen, and many fighting formations had furthermore subscribed to libertarian-socialist and anarchist ideals that rejected strict military hierarchies, many fighters ended up simply deserting or refusing to fight because unit commanders couldn't exert the discipline and cohesion necessary to keep them in the battle against their will. This even happened amongst volunteers of the Nationalist side, proving it to be not just a fluke.
  • The American Civil War:
    • In their memoirs, generals on both sides pointed to this being an issue, especially early in the war. The reason for this was because many units were raised in particular towns, and elected their officers from among their ranks. This led to many of these officers either being unwilling or unable to enforce discipline amongst their troops, due to them often being their friends, neighbours or family members.
    • General William Tecumseh Sherman by the end of the war was known by his soldiers as "Uncle Billy". However, it was understood that while Sherman was not willing to throw the lives of his men away, he was not "soft". In his memoirs, he makes note of an occasion shortly after the Union defeat at the first Battle of Bull Run when a soldier whose enlistment was about to expire ^note The Union government initially called for volunteers to enlist for a few months, expecting the war to be over quickly. asked permission to leave. Sherman denied him permission, as the government had just extended the enlistment length. Not long after, he saw the man again about to leave, and called out to him. Sherman mentions that he noticed everyone around watching, and quickly realised that if he allowed the man to leave, many others would follow. Realising this could quickly lead to the disintegration of the army, he made a big show of ordering the soldier back to his unit and threatened to have him shot for desertion. The soldier looked as though he was going to argue, but begrudgingly stood down. Reflecting on the affair, Sherman in his memoirs notes that he could have tried to appeal to the man's better nature, but he realised that the volunteers had to learn that discipline was necessary in the army, no matter how unpleasant.
  • Three Kingdoms – Shu, Wei, Wu:
    • As mentioned under Literature, Liu Yu was a genuinely good man who was Too Good for This Sinful Earth. Commentators, even in his era, noted that he'd have been better off living 10 years earlier (when the Han Empire was strong enough to keep ambitious subordinates like Gongsun Zan in line) or 10 years later (when Cao Cao had reestablished most of the former empire and happily welcomed cultured men like Liu into his forces).
    • Kong Rong was an intellectual and descendant of Kongzhi (i.e. Confucius). When he was in charge of a territory, his response to an uptick in bandit activity was to build schools, feeling that by introducing education the bandits could find honest work and so stop banditry. This didn't work, and even his subordinates began bribing the bandits to leave them alone, which just emboldened the bandits even more. Worse, Kong opted not to punish these subordinates, correctly feeling they only did so to preserve their lives and so weren't to blame. This of course led to some subordinates even joining the bandits, and eventually the bandits became so powerful Kong himself had to abandon his city and family to flee to safety. While he eventually found refuge with the warlord Cao Cao, he managed to get on Cao's bad side and was eventually executed. ^note Kong had begun making speeches that Cao ought to resign as Chancellor, but as Kong was a noted scholar and descendent of Confucius Cao restrained himself and simply exiled him for a time. When Kong was allowed to return, he went right back to decrying Cao, and finally made the fatal mistake of misrepresenting a quote to bolster his point. Offended that Kong had resorted to twisting scholarly works, Cao (a serious scholar himself) lost patience and had him executed.
    • Sun Quan, first emperor of Wu, had a bad habit of turning a blind eye to the crimes of favoured servants like Pan Zhang (who would recruit rich men into his army, find an excuse to execute them, and then seize their property) or Gan Ning (who was an unashamed pirate even after becoming a general). In later life, people began taking advantage of this, such as his personal secretary who began having people he disliked executed among other crimes, while Sun refused to hear out any accusations even from his old friends. When Sun finally took the time to investigate, he had the offender executed and attempted to apologise, but his old friends and comrades declined to help him. ^note This willingness to turn a blind eye was directly linked to how much Sun trusted and valued someone, as when Gan Ning's son and successor tried to act like Gan himself (i.e. raiding Sun's own people for his own amusement), he was quickly executed.