Dictator

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So, you want a BBEG, but you don't want to have superhumans in your setting? 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 be two different things. There's the Roman one and the modern one.

A roman dictator was temporary regent of the Roman Republic for a limited time. A Dictator would be elected to take command of the legions and handle a specific emergency before stepping down and handing power back to the Senate. Now bear in mind that, in practice and in general, the roman dictator was a judge, and he rarely had absolute power, and his power was defined for that specific emergency. Didn't help though that a Dictator had the power to rewrite the constitution, which allowed the last Dictator Julius Caesar to declare himself Dictator for Life; this little abuse of power ties directly into our next category...

The modern dictator, can mostly summed up as a leader with absolute power over anything. Meaning that the entire country relies on his decision-making, image, leadership, reputation, coordination, and just about anything else related to the guy, to run properly. Of course, for the large majority of History, people who had absolute power over anything (even a region or small colony) were referred to as dictators. Now whether or not they technically qualified as such is an overall different question, but if anyone had complete control over a country, they would get the "prestige" of being referred to as a dictator. Because yes, for a time, a dictator wasn't exactly seen as a bad thing at all.

Until those goddamn assholes showed up.

Imagine, if you will, you have very controversial opinions which wouldn't even pass without shrieks from the ideologues who oppose you in a democratic assembly. Or, you see some peeps as morally despicable, and thus you don't even want them to have the slightest amount of power or influence. In that case, being a dictator and subjugating the country into obeying your every command has its advantages. There's someone you don't like? Send him to prison without any proof of any foul act or misdeed to his name! There's a very large group of people you really, really don't like for one reason or another? You know what to do. You want an entire cult of personality dedicated to you in spite of how horrid, morally disgusting, and butt ugly you are? Here's your ticket.

Now, usually speaking, any country or "political system" can become a dictatorship. All there needs to be is a man who abuses the rules, usurps power for himself, and nobody with sufficient power/will/not-being-bought-off to call him on this. However, some systems are more prone to have a dictatorship than others;

• Fascism; Obviously. The ideology based around might makes right outright advocates for a nation to be entirely led by a single leader. 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. 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 numerous massacres, the destruction of a massive chunk of China's cultural heritage, the oppression of minorities and neighboring countries, and so and so forth.
  • Proletarian Dictatorship also qualify, but the power is shared by a council of either technocrats or "representatives of the people". 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.

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