Dictator

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So, you want a BBEG, but you don't want to have superhumans in your setting? Or want the BBEG to have not just a few, but an endless fountain of underlings and mooks? Dictators are the obvious answer.

A Dictator is the head of an authoritarian regime, usually strongly personalized. Since authoritarian regimes are generally unresponsive to the needs of their people, and political strongman regimes doubly so, dictators have a terrible reputation, for very good reasons.

There can be some overlap between a BBEG and a Dictator, but there can be some non-overlap. Notably, more than one BBEG has taken on the role of a dictator, but it's possible to have one who is merely an ally of the BBEG, or have a BBEG who is more of a Warlord or CEO than any kind of Ruler.

What Makes A Dictator?

Dictators can refer to two different things: a Roman dictator and a modern dictator. In both cases, they are reflections of the challenges or failures of representative government.

The Roman dictator was a regent of the Roman Republic nominated and empowered for a limited time and a specific purpose. Most commonly and famously, dictators would be nominated to take command of the Roman state to address a specific military emergency. These military dictators would arise when the elected Senate and Consuls of Rome had failed so badly that the very survival of Rome was at stake and a single decisive leader was needed to save the city; their power, or imperium, was resigned at the conclusion of the crisis. This was similar to the Byzantine Greek Despot, who was just a centralized ruler or governor of a province/city state with centralized powers (though that title too soon had negative connotations in modern times). In practice, the Roman dictator served as a superior magistrate; he possessed great but not absolute power over the Roman state that could only be applied to the cause for which he was nominated, and did not have unlimited powers over every aspect of Roman life. That being said, after the Roman Civil Wars first Sulla and then Julius Caesar used the title of dictator to reform the Roman laws and constitution, granting themselves such tremendous authority (and in Caesar's case declaring himself dictator for life) that we get the second definition of dictator...

The modern dictator is a leader with absolute power over his state, territory, or function. Now, through much of history, there have been kings, emperors, sons of Heaven, etc. who would be happy to be called dictator. It meant that they were the pivotal and unchallenged decider who could marshal the energies and resources of the state to accomplish tremendous things, be it building a canal to the Nile or freeing the serfs. Especially in pre-modern Europe, to be called a dictator was not a bad thing. Compared to being the King of Poland, who was prisoner to the whims of the Polish Sejm, or remembering the fate of Charles I, executed by his Parliament, many European rulers would be perfectly happy to be a "dictator."

Until those goddamn assholes showed up.

With the establishment of representative government in nations that had very little, or much degraded, history of it, people in power would often resent the challenges of "voting" and "compromise." Perhaps you had opinions which couldn't be spoken without shrieks of outrage from opposing ideologues in the democratic assembly. Maybe such people are so morally degenerate that you felt they should be silenced in a permanent and definitive fashion. When such opponents marshal just enough power, as granted under a constitution so new it wasn't old enough to drink, to thwart clear and necessary reforms, declaring yourself dictator in the mold of Sulla and Caesar becomes a very attractive option.

Any country can be a dictatorship. Some are more prone to it, or reliant upon it, than others.

• Fascism; Obviously. The ideology based around might makes right outright advocates for a nation to be entirely led by a single leader, who embodies the will of the nation in his person. Fascism is all about aesthetics and emotions and using them to co-opt symbols and ideas that can be used to convince people of the fascist politician's platform, all part of the dictator's playbook. Guns, goons, and money pave the road to power, but charisma stops the revolutionary from being born until it's too late. However, that charisma is essential. Fascist regimes tend to die with their leader. Fascist leaders tend to die after their Genius Plan fails and partisans/enemy soldiers/their own citizens find out where they're hiding.
  • Nazism or "National Socialism"; also obviously. The name derives itself from two major interwar German political issues: the rebuilding of a national identity and workers' rights. It was similar to Mussolini's fascism in many ways, but also incorporated weird occultism, an almost completely fabricated national past for Germany (Hitler was embarrassed that nothing north of the Rhine had stone buildings by the time Romans had figured out indoor plumbing), and a "Master Race" theory(which was cobbled together from maliciously misinterpreted Nietzschean ideas and the need to blame the German loss in WWI on someone convenient and easy to beat up.) Half of the villains of the past eighty years have some flavor of Nazi in them, for obvious reasons.
• Banana "Republics"; Sometimes, the dictator is just a power-hungry general who thinks the current leader is a wuss. Suppose he's in a third-world country, and said country has resources that could be exploited for great monetary gain while the foreign megacorporations are more than happy to sponsor with the blessings of whatever host country’s intelligence agencies are in the loop. Well, a big massive trust of companies or investors or a cabal of military officers can push a rebellion and finance said general to establish a dictatorship under the promise that he would have full control over the country as long as he keeps giving them exactly what they want. Is this an extremely petty excuse for a regime? Yes. Does it work? You betcha. Is that uniform snazzy as hell? You already know. However, the Generalissimo isn't always at the top of the food chain, because...
• [REDACTED]; So, it's a time of great political upheaval. The old order is collapsing, new countries are popping up everywhere, and you want your country to be up there with the big boys in this bright new tomorrow.There's one ideology that is spreading across the globe like wildfire and you wanna prevent that, as its supporters don't like you for some reason. So you start spying on a country that just recently adopted that ideology(or one similar to it), you orchestrate a coup, find one of the aforementioned tinpot dictators to lead the country, and boom! Your mines, farms, and factories have a favorable tax rate and the former government is reduced to guerillas hiding in the mountains. Hey, as long as the commies aren't in power, we can justify the deaths of millions of innocents by a hostile and self-harming government, right? You'll glow a little, especially if you swear you weren't behind it.
• Communism; Marx was convinced that the first communist revolutions would be in countries like Germany and England, industrial nations that ran on wage labor. Therefore, he assumed the whole "one nutjob becomes Supreme Comrade" business wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue as it was. In fact, the building blocks of his dreamed-of future would be tested in feudal economies or unindustrialized former colonial nations. The bones of his ideas would, unfortunately, be used by some of the most repressive rulers of the 20th Century, starting with the power struggle of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Lenin, in the short time he was alive after the revolution, was actually ruling over the USSR, but he at least tried to share his power amongst his men. However, the Bolsheviks were taking more and more power for themselves as they set about the task of building up a nation of dirt farmers into a modern industrial nation, invading various neighbors, and fighting off invasions by the rest of Europe, who were at this point scared shitless by the fact that Communists had successfully formed a government. When he died, the party sought a successor that could lead the newborn Soviet Union away from the famines and shortages of the Tsarist years and the devastating civil war. It didn't took long for Stalin, an ambitious party member that nobody suspected of harboring such aspirations or abilities, to eliminate the competition (as in the infamous Trotsky ice pick incident), create a cult of personality based around him, and use his rapidly expanding power to make sure that political opponents or even critics of his regime were properly disposed of. Oh, and let's not forget how he separated some people into castes and heavily rewarded those who obeyed him the most with fancier things than anyone else. It took the USSR a lot of time to unfuck everything he did. Tankies will deny all of that, of course. Or claim that it was all necessary. Possibly both.
  • Same goes for Mao Zedong. If anything, he was worse at governing than Stalin and crazier too. Some claim he had a genuine desire to revolutionize China and get rid of the old aristocracy that kept dividing the country. His party's policies and infrastructure projects did successfully end the millennia-old cycle of famines in China, and hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty because of this. However, due to the indoctrination and sheer pressure he applied to his followers (and his followers to the populace), he pushed an aggressive tabula-rasa and made the most abrupt turns. Supposedly for "the good of the country". See; The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the destruction of a massive chunk of China's cultural heritage, the oppression of minorities and neighboring countries, the Sparrow Incident, and so and so forth.
  • Dictatorships of the Proletariat are related, but they're named more in reference to the Roman idea of a dictatorship rather than the modern one. By definition, there is no dictator, but instead a direct democracy or a set of "representatives of the people" in charge. Marx envisioned such a system as the end result of a transition to communist society. For various reasons, this hasn't happened yet. There were only a few systems like this one, but they rarely prevail in the long term. Generally, some external factors come into play, but they are often short-lived because of how they tend to form as local governments during revolutions, being absorbed by someone with less idealism and more weapons. They are usually more benevolent since they are, in theory, led by the "people of the land" and not aristocrats or nobles. The ELZN, an anarchist organization of villages of the Mexican state of Chiapas, is a good example of how such a system would function.
• Religious: Rare in the real world (arguably, only Iran qualified since 1900), and so, in fictionland, somewhat rare outside stuff that's doing the whole Cult thing. Though most of them are referred to as Theocracies, and the actual man in charge is nothing more than in-name-only spokesperson for the big guy above. The Catholic Church should probably be mentioned here, if only to state that 1. various officials of the Church across the world have supported every conceivable ideological position at some point or other, although the higher-ups once tended to be friendly to fascists for various reasons, and 2. you should pick another set of religious aesthetics to steal wholesale for your setting's Big Bad Theocrats, since that's a little overdone at this point.
  • North Korea: A rare (not even Türkmenbaşy came close) blend of communist and religious dictatorship, the Kim family of North Korea uses Juche ideology to maintain its grip on the Hermit Kingdom. Juche states that political independence relies upon economic and military self-dependency, and that the challenges to such goals can be overcome through the thought and will of the revolutionary people as channeled by a single, vital, unquestioned leader. That unquestioned leader is always a member of the Kim family, also known as the Mount Paektu Bloodline. Mount Paektu is the holiest place in the Korean peninsula because it is where the legendary Dangun, founder of the Korean nation, was born from the union of the Son of Heaven and a bear-woman; it is also where North Korean propagandists claim Kim Jong-Il, the second ruler of North Korea, was born as his father led the fight to overthrow the Japanese Empire and liberate Korea. The rebirth of the Korean nation under the Kim family, and the prosperous life enjoyed by all North Koreans, is self-evident proof that the Kims deserve to be the unchallenged and unquestionable rulers of the Korean people. In the absence of any information to the contrary, many North Koreans give thanks to photos and statues of the Kim family in their daily lives and attend to their pronouncements with a fervor that wouldn't be out of place in a hive manufactory.
• Military Junta; basically a ‘state within a state,’ it’s basically the setup where the ruling party is very embedded with the military establishment and officer corps. Expect a lot of cases of coups led by generals against any presidents that fall out of favor, martial law and dissolution of legislative assembles in the case of gridlock or undesirable laws being passed, and of martial law being declared “for the duration of the emergency.” Many non-democratic governments (regardless of whether they were left-wing or right-wing) in the developing world can fall into this category at one point in history or another. The most infamous cases are Myanmar, Pakistan, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, Cold-War Era South Korea, Cold-War Era Taiwan, and various African or Latin American countries during the Cold War.

Notable examples related to /tg/

Battletech

• Stefan Amaris

DC Comics

• Darkseid rules Apokalips as both ruler and god, and he's strong and cruel enough that nobody dares question him.
• There's been plenty of examples of dictatorships run by previously-good heroes, with the most prevalent being Injustice (Superman loses his wife, kills Joker in revenge and conquers the world with an iron fist), the Justice Lords (Justice League kill President Lex Luthor, world becomes all-seeing police state), and Earth-3 (Everyone was just born evil on opposite day)

Marvel Comics

• Doctor Doom when the writers want to portray him as evil.

Star Wars

• Palpatine (AKA Darth Sidious) posed as one.

Warhammer 40k

• Da BEEEEEEG umie
• Da BEEEEEEG Bea- Beaur- Be-u-ro-kra-see ov da Imperi-oom
• Give or Take 35% of all Planetary Governors of the Imperium of Man
• That Dick