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Overzealous Underling
- 221 statements
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- 20 referencing feature instances
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Alice gives her underling Bob an order, which is then carried out far beyond what Alice asked for or intended. If punished, the underling may feel it's a Bewildering Punishment. May be pulled off by the Psycho for Hire, Blood Knight, Obstructive Bureaucrat, or Psycho Supporter. Shoot the Dangerous Minion is a possible outcome. The Beleaguered Boss may find himself in charge of one or more of these. Compare Psycho Supporter, Sane Boss, Psycho Henchmen, Tragically Misguided Favor, Just Following Orders (what the underling thinks they're doing), Your Approval Fills Me with Shame (if the underling thought this was the best way to carry out the boss' wishes), Rhetorical Request Blunder (when the order was stated but was never intended to be carried out in the first place), Underling with an F in PR (where the underling doesn't care about the repercussions of their actions), Better to Kill Than Frighten (a subtrope where orders to intimidate someone are turned into orders to kill them) and Gone Horribly Right. |
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| Overzealous Underling / int_1009a876 | type |
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A pet example in the third Henry Huggins book, Henry and Ribsy. Henry tries to train his dog to fetch the morning newspaper, and almost gets into trouble when Ribsy goes on to fetch not just his newspaper, but every other paper in the neighbourhood—effectively stealing them. Henry then has to "untrain" Ribsy so that he'd stop stealing his neighbours' newspaper. | |
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Afterlife SMP: After being told by resident Card-Carrying Villain Vampire Scott to steal something of Joel's to join the 'villains' club, Lauren takes it one step further by kidnapping Lizzie, Joel's real-life wife who described herself as his most prized possession. When Scott returns to Lauren's house to check in on her, he initially thinks Lauren took it further than he'd expected, as he thought just stealing an object would suffice... and when Lauren asks if killing Lizzie would be evil enough to suffice membership in the club, Scott somewhat-hesitantly approves it, causing Lauren to activate the trap to kill Lizzie and take the third of her ten lives. | |
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In the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Charisma", cult leader and pedophile Abraham Ophion meets his end when, in a fit of madness, he declares that he is greater than God. One of his young followers shoots him dead, as he'd previously told her that he was only God's messenger, and thus clearly he was committing blasphemy by claiming to be God's superior. | |
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Advance to the Rear: The trouble is started by Heath ignoring Brackenbury's truce with the enemy and instead following proper military protocol to capture a group of enemy soldiers. | |
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Leviathan: The Tempest:' This is cited as the biggest issue that Leviathans have with their cults, which are largely made up of people driven mad by the psychic aura they emit. Whilst Beloved are inherently loyal, that loyalty has been metaphorically burned into their brains with all the subtlety of a red-hot brand, so rationality takes a serious nosedive, forcing Leviathans to often need to micromanage their minions lest they screw things up in the name of helping. An example in the 2nd edition corebook is cultists misinterpreting a grocery list and a request to do some shopping as a coded missive about performing a Human Sacrifice in the Leviathan's name. | |
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The Sign of the Four: Small's accomplice is an Andaman native who thought he was carrying out Small's orders by killing Sholto (all Small wanted was to find the treasure Sholto's father had stolen from him), and is entirely surprised when Small lashes out at him. | |
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Blake and Mortimer: In "The Oath of the Five Lords", an MI5 agent is certain T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) is betraying his country, having seen him in the company of foreign operatives. The agent (who's also jealous and resentful of Lawrence) inducts a young Henry Blake (who idolizes Lawrence) to unwittingly help him murder Lawrence for his betrayal... who it turns out was infiltrating on his superiors' orders. Oops. | |
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In Monster of the Week, this is the point of the "Helper"-type bystanders: they are NPCs whose motivation is to assist the player-controlled monster hunters, but are mechanically treated as threats by the game, since in their zeal, they routinely cause more trouble than benefit. | |
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Harry Potter: After Fudge orders the Daily Prophet to libel Harry as a delusional attention-seeker for claiming that Voldemort returned, Umbridge takes it on herself to ensure his silence by siccing Dementors on him. As she puts it, what he (Fudge) doesn't know won't hurt him, which means that he cares about the result and doesn't have to deal with any kind of qualm that he may have had. While Fudge is forced to admit that Voldemort is back, having seen him with his own eyes, she isn't punished for this as it is never officially proven, staying with the Ministry until she is finally sent off to Azkaban after Voldemort's defeat. | |
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In Thunderbirds Are Go episode "Clean Sweep", a jobsworth employee creates the danger of the week by refusing to let a cleaning crew into an anti-pollution weather device a few minutes early because they are ahead of schedule, citing the employee rule book. When the International Rescue team arrive, he creates further rule bothering because he hasn't received official clearances and that is against the rules too. He genuinely thinks he is doing what his employer wants by doing all that. At the end of the episode he's reminded of Rule Zero saying that all rules can be waived if there is an actual reason to do so, and then fired. | |
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Luke Cage: Tone is the right-hand man of Cottonmouth (who demands to referred to as "Mr. Stokes"). He is so aggressively loyal to his boss that when Shades shows up (speaking on behalf of a much more powerful criminal) and doesn't show Cottonmouth the proper respect, Tone makes things difficult by threatening Shades. Later, when the traitor Chico is found, Cottonmouth learns that he's hiding in the barber shop where Luke Cage and his friend/mentor, Pop, work. Cottonmouth is an old friend of Pop and respects his rules that the barber shop is neutral ground; Tone thinks that this makes his boss look weak, so he goes against orders and shoots up the entire shop, accidentally killing Pop while still failing to kill the target they were after. This move is so poorly thought-out that not only does Cottonmouth become enraged by his friend's death, but this act is the Inciting Incident that leads to Luke Cage rising up against crime in Harlem. For this and an accidental show of disrespect by calling Stokes "Cottonmouth" to his face, Tone gets thrown off the roof of Harlem's Paradise. | |
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In The Order of the Stick, Lord Shojo orders Miko to arrest the title band of adventurers supposedly for a great offense they inadvertently committed, but really because Shojo wants to recruit them for a secret, vitally important mission he can't assign to his own forces. Miko, not knowing this and being a Knight Templar with a big dose of Black-and-White Insanity, decides midway through tracking them that, considering their offense, she will act as Judge, Jury, and Executioner should they not surrender immediately, even without her giving them an explanation. By the time Durkon gets her to see reason, she could have easily killed several members of the group. | |
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You can be given the chance to do this in Neverwinter Nights 2, depending on whether you side with the City Watch or the Shadow Thieves in the first chapter. If you side with the Watch, Marshal Cormick will order you to root out members of the Watch who are taking bribes; if you do so by killing them, Captain Brelaina will chew you out for your "foul" and "unrelenting" approach to justice. If you side with the Thieves, your handler Moire will command you to burn down the Watch post... after which her boss, Axle, will complain that your recklessness has started a war between the Watch and the Thieves which he didn't need. | |
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GTO: The Early Years: Katsuyuki starts fights in Onizuka's name, always talking about "conquering the nation", and even started leading his "elite guard" in the last few chapters, none of which Onizuka wanted. | |
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Dragon Ball Z Abridged: In "World's Strongest", Dr . Wheelo is a giant Brain in a Jar who depends on his Dragon Kochin to get a body. Unfortunately, Kochin's determination that this new body have a functional penis leads him to kidnap (then reject) Bulma, Piccolo, and Master Roshi (getting Goku and Gohan involved). He also invested a fortune in a trap that lasted less than a minute against Goku and re-engineered some of Wheelo's creations into evil monsters. Dr. Wheelo is a complete Anti-Villain in this movie, who grows ever more horrified at Kochin's actions while completely powerless to stop him because, well... | |
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Pretty much starts the whole plot in The Wolf Among Us. Georgie found out that some of the hookers in his employ were planning to steal from his gang to get out from under his thumb. He informed the Crooked Man and was simply told to "take care of it", which Georgie misinterpreted as a Deadly Euphemism ordering him to kill one of the hookers as an example to the others. Thus he killed Faith, with her vengeful friend Nerissa deliberately sabotaging his subsequent attempts to disappear her body, all leading to Bigby's investigation of Faith's death and exposure of the Crooked Man's whole operation. | |
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Robert Thomas Jones from The Newest Plutarch was the creator of a Death Seeker sect who insisted one must die as soon as possible. When he started approaching sixty, however, his best student had noticed others are accusing Jones of hypocrisy, so he came over with a few implements for committing suicide. The teacher attempted to flee the overly zealous follower, and was hit by a car. | |
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Sixshot is portrayed as such in Transformers: Energon: due to his own vendetta against Optimus Prime, he frequently goes against Galvatron's orders to target the Autobots. Repeated disobeying of orders, almost killing his own side in the process or just butting into Galvatron's own obsessive rivalry with Prime made him the constant target of violent lambastings and tantrums from his Control Freak Bad Boss. Sure enough, this pattern slowly embittered Sixshot into The Starscream, sabotaging and blackmailing Galvatron with Cybertron's artillery to force him to deal with things his way, and eventually attacking and almost killing him, deeming the commander an interference to his own troops. Galvatron escaped and underwent an Emergency Transformation, making sure to crush Sixshot first thing before dealing with the Autobots. | |
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In Far Cry 4, The Generalissimo Pagan Min's Establishing Character Moment has him nonchalantly kill a soldier who gets overenthusiastic and opens fire on a busful of people he was supposed to detain. | |
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During the Baltic Sea War arc in Vinland Saga, Floki orders his Ax-Crazy minion Garm to kill Thorfinn. While in the area to do this, Garm decides to take it on his own initiative to assassinate Vagn, Floki's main political enemy. Except... the assassination royally infuriates Thorkell, who Floki had previously recruited, and Thorkell (a much deadlier opponent than Vagn) promptly turns against Floki, consolidating both his own forces and Vagn's Decapitated Army to go after Floki. Oh, and Garm let Thorfinn escape in all the commotion, so he's also coming after Floki. Oops. | |
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Les Innommables: Colonel Lychee and the Dog-Man take a few of the latter's crewmen to dig up buried treasure. Lychee shoots them dead once they're done, telling the angry Dog-Man that they won't have to worry about them blabbing. The Dog-Man then says that's not the reason he's angry: they could just as easily have killed them onboard the ship, now Lychee will have to row the two of them back. | |
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I, Claudius: Tiberius sent letters to Piso, the governor of Syria, giving him general instructions to uphold Imperial authority, to stamp out disloyalty, and that Tiberius had full confidence in him. Piso and his wife Plancina interpreted these as orders to kill Germanicus, which was not what Tiberius had in mind. When the couple find themselves on trial for the murder, Piso thinks that the letters will prove he was acting with imperial approval—Placina, more accurately, thinks that showing them will make Tiberius cut them off. | |
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Offline TV and Friends: This is what caused the semi-infamous "Babushka Incident" during a game of Among Us that would be immortalized in the animation Babushka: the Movie. A group of OTV streamers and associated YouTubersnote (this particular group consisting of Valkyrae, Sykkuno, Corpse Husband, Jacksepticeye, Fuslie, BrookeAB, Quarter Jade, TinaKitten, Masayoshi and Disguised Toast) were playing Among Us with proximity chat so they can hear each other talking while doing tasks, and in one round, Sykkuno reveals to Valkyrae that he's an impostor and offers to kill other players for her at her command, with the two working out the code word of "babushka" as Rae's Trigger Phrase to get Sykkuno to kill. Things would go off the rails next round. This time, both Rae and Sykkuno are impostors, and the round begins with Sykkuno going away from his keyboard for a bathroom break while a group of players surround him to protect him from being killed by an impostor while he's not at the controls. While waiting, Rae explains how she and Sykkuno formed the earlier alliance and Sykkuno was supposed to kill for her upon hearing "babushka". Sykkuno returns at just the right time to hear her say that, and rather than play it cool since they are surrounded by too many people to kill everyone, or try to covertly make sure it was a legitimate use of the code word before acting, he immediately kills the nearest person, even though the goal of Among Us impostors is to kill in secret, and again, they're surrounded by too many witnesses to eliminate them all. Unusually for this trope, rather than causing a disaster, it all actually works out: due to a series of improbable circumstances and perfect coincidencenote after overcoming her initial shock, Rae acts quickly and kills Jack while he's still laughing at the insanity and then gets Corpse — who had just been promising to make up for a betrayal in the previous round-to agree not to report the bodies and stay put. Toast and Fuslie spend the entire round in hiding putting together a restaurant order, effectively removing themselves from the game, which lets Rae and Sykkuno murder the remaining three players scattered throughout the map one by one until only Corpse (still playing along), Toast, and Fuslie are left alive besides the killers. At that point, Sykkuno leads Rae to the hiding spot Toast and Fuslie are using, which he accidentally discovered earlier (and where they are still putting together their food order, completely oblivious to the chaos), and Rae promptly kills Toast to seal the victory, Rae and Sykkuno win the round. Watch the round here, or the animated version here. | |
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In The Wheel of Time, personal tragedy spurs Aram to abandon his Actual Pacifist people, take up a sword, and join Perrin's forces. Things go downhill from there: he has to be ordered not to kill prisoners of war, gets jealous of anyone spending time with Perrin, meets the Obliviously Evil zealot Prophet Masema, and assists the Prophet's forces with Cold-Blooded Torture. Ultimately, he switches sides to the Prophet, who is his equal for insane zeal, and dies trying to murder Perrin. | |
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Not the Nine O'Clock News: Constable Savage, a British cop who's performed 117 arrests in a single month, against the same (black) man. | |
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This is a recurring problem for many sides in both A Song of Ice and Fire and its TV adaptation Game of Thrones. Tywin Lannister loves the terror inspired by his brute Gregor Clegane. Mostly, Tywin sends Gregor out to add onto that reputation by doing all the thug work for the Lannisters, meaning a whole lot of Rape, Pillage, and Burn. Gregor is so enthusiastic in these tasks that it sometimes backfires: multiple characters note that Gregor is too bloodthirsty and sadistic to take highborn captives, often killing them just because when he could get rich ransoms for them or use them strategically as hostages. And Gregor's needless rape and murder of Princess Elia years before the start of the story drove one of Elia's brothers to carefully plot to overthrow and destroy the Lannisters and everything they care about, while the other brother would eventually give Gregor a poisoned spear in the gut that caused him to die slowly and in horrific agony. In the book, Robb Stark's uncle Edmure disobeys orders to stay put (orders which are admittedly vague) and decides to move his army to block Tywin Lannister's army from crossing a river, repelling the large force with minimal losses in a series of minor skirmishes. Edmure believes he's doing the right thing by his nephew and that it was the only reasonable course based on what he knew, but this prevents Tywin from crossing the river and being caught in an ambush where Robb might have been able to crush the entire army. In the TV adaptation he acts on his own initiative and wins a Pyrrhic Victory against Gregor Clegane instead, but Clegane and most of his force escape and it ruins a trap Robb had planned for Clegane. |
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NIMONA: The titular character becomes Ballister Blackheart's henchman because she idolizes him, or rather, the cartoonishly evil persona that he plays up in his role as a supervillain. It quickly becomes apparent that she's far more dangerous than Ballister, mostly because she's actually murderous and evil, not a bumbling Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain and Technical Pacifist like he is, and she increasingly begins causing a great deal of death and destruction entirely against Ballister's desires out of an overzealous certainty that anything she does is justified if targeted at people she deems to deserve it. | |
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The villain of the third book of the Sword of Truth series, Tobias Brogan, preached throughout his life how every magic user is a servant of evil and must be destroyed. However, he did keep his sorceress sister around to fight other magic users. Then, a block is removed which had been keeping his own magical gift locked, and the revelation drives him into an A God Am I delusion within a couple of minutes. As soon as the sister sees that, she blasts Tobias right in the heart as per his lessons. | |
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Kaamelott: Grüdü (Arthur's Viking bodyguard) has a surefire method of ensuring no assassins can reach the king: murder anyone who passes near the king's bedroom (be it a servant who's just coming to light the candles or a knight of the Round Table) or gets near the king (such as, say, the king's current bedmate). Arthur tries to pull a Logic Bomb on him by holding a dagger to his own throat, but quickly stops as he sees Grüdü about to go berserk. | |
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In G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (Marvel) #109, the Crimson Twins botch an order from Cobra Commander and order several captive Joes executed. An overzealous SAW Viper steps forward and immediately shoots; actually killing several of the prisoners. As this was not what Cobra Commander intended, this cause problems for everyone involved. | |
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Warhammer 40,000: A frequent problem when Space Marines (or Sororitas) and Imperial Guard are working together, as the former have a tendency to forget the Guardsmen don't have their superhuman physiology/insane devotion to sniffing out and purging heresy, preferably with fire, resulting in entirely avoidable losses because they didn't wait for the Guard to catch up. Exploited by the Space Wolves chapter of Space Marines, whose newest recruits are taken from their Viking Age-level societies convinced they're now in Warrior Heaven. They use them as land and airborne assault troops, reasoning that if they're going to rush into battle instead of using proper tactics, they may as well do so with the appropriate equipment. Once they've gotten it out of their system after a few battles, they can be trusted to hold different roles such as line troops or heavy weaponry. |
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The Punisher: "When Frank Sleeps" has Frank go back in time to Prohibition, where he beats the crap out of Al Capone's goons before offering his services as a hitman. Capone uses Frank to exterminate rival gangs, then holds a victory banquet where the guests (members of Capone's gang who'd failed or betrayed him in some way) are all tied up so Capone can beat them to death with a baseball bat, citing his fear of Frank becoming this trope during the Motive Rant. Frank breaks free and kills Capone, destroying organized crime in America before it could become too powerful, saving his family from the mob shootout in Central Park in the future... and then he wakes up. | |
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One of these kicks off the entire plot of Navy Seals (1990). Terrorists attack and sink a freighter with a gunboat. Captain of the freighter sends a message pleading for help. A nearby USN carrier sends a helicopter to rescue the freighter's crewmen. Had the terrorist gunboat just slunk away, letting the helicopter rescue the doomed crewmen, no one would have been the wiser about the terrorist group's plans. Instead, the commander of the gunboat shoots the helicopter down and captures the aircrew. His superior, the Big Bad is understandably pissed and orders the aircrew to be immediately executed, before their activities are compromised. Fortunately, a SEAL platoon gets there just in time to rescue the aircrew. That platoon also discovers that not only is this group in possession of Stinger missiles, but also that their leader is Lebanon's most infamous terrorist. The SEAL platoon relentlessly pursue the terrorists and the Stingers for the whole rest of the movie. | |
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Pokémon: The Series: In the Indigo League series, Ash makes the mistake of showing antipathy towards the gym leader Erika's perfume. Her assistants lambast him furiously and kick him out the store. Later he finds the same aggression at her gym, with the guards banning him from entry for hating perfume. He manages to reach Erika through disguise and, despite her earlier annoyance with Ash, she still gladly battles, saying it's her duty as a Gym Leader. In the original Japanese dub, however, Erika DOES ban Ash from the gym, though she still agrees to battle him when he gets in. During the Battle Frontier series, when trying to meet up Frontier Brain Lucy, Ash is interrogated by her assistant. Lucy however appears in time, scolding her sister for being rude to yet another competitor. |
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Ciaphas Cain: In "The Traitor's Hand", the Imperial Guard finds evidence of a daemon summoning ritual, though too late to find anything useful. Another site is discovered, but the overly puritanical Tallarn soldiers and their commissar Beije completely destroy the site before the psykers can examine it. Because Beije believes Cain to be acting traitorously (along with a big helping of decades-old resentment), he attempts to arrest Cain with a Tallarn squad as he investigates the final site, inadvertently providing Cain with reinforcements to defeat the daemon princess as she's summoned and character witnesses for his heroic behavior (to the point where years later there's a Tallarn sect that believes Cain was the Emperor's will embodied). In "Duty Calls", a squad of Sororitas gets so caught up in burning Tyranids that they leave their position, leaving a gap in the line they're supposed to be defending and leaving the temple/refugee camp wide open. Cain gets them back in by pointing out that their noble sacrifices mean certain death for the civilians depending on them for protection. |
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Liam Kosta, your Crisis Specialist in Mass Effect: Andromeda becomes one of these just prior to his loyalty mission. Liam freaks out that diplomatic relations with the Angaara, an alien race native to the Heleus cluster, aren't proceeding fast enough for his liking, takes "initiative" and does things that cause you a lot of trouble. First he tries to get you to surreptitiously scan agricultural products from a "gouging hardliner" who is actually just really protective of Angaara farming techniques as they are vital to the survival of a race fighting a brutal occupation by the Kett. Your attempt to scan almost creates a diplomatic incident. Liam then tries to trade something for those farming techniques - except he trades vital codes used by the Andromeda colonization Initiative, that in the wrong hands pose a serious security risk to the Initiative's Nexus space station. And when pirates kidnap Liam's Angaara contact and have the codes, Liam co-opts a group of settlers (instead of trained Strike Teams from the Nexus militia) to launch a rescue mission that literally goes sideways. | |
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Sherlock Holmes: The Sign of the Four: Small's accomplice is an Andaman native who thought he was carrying out Small's orders by killing Sholto (all Small wanted was to find the treasure Sholto's father had stolen from him), and is entirely surprised when Small lashes out at him. "The Priory School": What was supposed to be a simple kidnapping turns into a murder by the mastermind's accomplice, which so horrifies said mastermind (James Wilder, the Duke's secretary and bastard son) that he immediately makes a full confession to the Duke and arranges to flee the country. Holmes agrees not to pursue Wilder due to not being legally guilty of his henchman's crime. |
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The Mountain and the Wolf: The Wolf briefly functions as one for Daenerys, first by insulting Cersei during parley, resulting in the death of several prisoners (which he justifies as being better for said prisoners than being starved during a siege, and now they can't be used against her), then by torturing Lannister soldiers to death in her absence. He's so morally repulsive (and so evidently convinced she's the kind of tyrant who would order public executions for her own entertainment) that she ends up declaring a blanket pardon for the Lannisters out of sheer spite (Shoot the Dangerous Minion not being an option at either time). The final straw is when he's caught trying to pry the Iron Throne free, seeming genuinely surprised she'd disapprove. She sics Drogon on him but it costs her her life when she gets between him and Drogon. | |
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In The Quick and the Dead, when the Quick Draw tournament is down to Herod and Cort, the night before the final match Herod has his follower Ratsy work Cort over, since Cort attempted to attack Herod earlier in the day. During the course of this, Ratsy breaks Cort's right hand in revenge for Cort breaking his nose. Herod, who claims that he's wanted to have a proper gunfight with Cort even back when the two were bandits together so they can find out who really is the Fastest Gun in the West, is pissed when he sees what Ratsy did. | |
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Mahabharata: In the 1988 television adaptation of the old epic, Duryodhan is shown to be prone to this as a youngster. In one instance, Duryodhan's evil uncle Shakuni orders him to feed Bhim poisoned porridge. Duryodhan does feed Bhim the poisoned food, but he then proceeds to dump Bhim into a snake-infested river, just to make sure, but without explicit instructions to do so. When Bhim survives the poison due to snake venom being the antidote, Shakuni berates Duryodhan for exceeding his instructions. A few years later, when Duryodhan has just graduated from his required military training by the guru Dronacharya, the guru demands that a rival king Drupad be defeated, captured and brought before him as "payment" for knowledge imparted. Duryodhan declares that he will kill Drupad and bring his head to Dronacharya as payment, but Dronacharya scolds Duryodhan that exceeding orders is as bad as disobeying them. | |
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