Why evil wins

Dark Souls II casts doubt on this. It would seem that both sides are locked into this as part of an Eternal Recurrence of Light and Dark. The First Flame did not go out completely regardless of your actions in the first game; if you didn't link the fire, then someone else did. It only takes one person to end the cycle, and only one person to start it again. Dark Souls III muddles the issue even further.

All of the destruction wrought by the Cycle has been permanently screwing up the world with each cycle. The latest cycle may very well be the last one, and it's not clear whether a "good" ending is even possible anymore. All it takes is one U-Wing to make it through Scarif's shielding, or one X-Wing to reach the end of the Death Star's trenches, and the rebels have won the round.

The Empire has to shoot down everyone who tries. Team Fortress 2 : In Mann versus Machine mode, only one bot has to make it past defenses with the bomb for the defenders to lose. Averted in The Legend of Zelda , because Ganondorf is much better at conquering things than he is at holding on to his conquests.

He's won three times and been overthrown each time, despite having the deck stacked massively in his favor being literally an immortal wizard, being highly intelligent and probably quite well-educated, and having the power of one of the gods of the setting and its Devil-counterpart as well : Ocarina of Time : He conquered Hyrule, dealt wholesale strategic destruction to its various populations apart from his homeland, the Gerudos , and retired into his castle, leaving his minions to deal with the embittered remnants of the world's population.

Link got the assistance of these scattered remnants, challenged Ganondorf in his castle, and defeated him. Even in the timeline where Link doesn't defeat him, said remnants eventually defeat Ganondorf on their own anyways. The Wind Waker : Centuries after being sealed in the Golden Land, he returned in boar-demon form and swept away all opposition, forcing the goddesses to drown Hyrule under a new ocean in order to stop him.

Ganondorf eventually broke out of his underwater prison and began rebuilding his forces, but Link got the assistance of the scattered descendants of Hyrule's original population, challenged Ganondorf in his castle, and defeated him before he could reconquer Hyrule's remnants. The original The Legend of Zelda : Link arrived in a burned-out wilderness, a Hyrule utterly devastated by Ganon the usual name for Ganondorf in boar-demon form and his minions: a miscellaneous army of ogres, adventurers, summoned monsters, tame dragons, wild centaurs, unquiet spirits, Giant Enemy Crabs , and animated suits of armor.

But there were still a few survivors, hiding out in caves and mountain glens; Link got the assistance of the scattered remnants of the population, challenged Ganon in his mountain which had been hollowed out and surfaced internally to where it distinctly resembled a castle , and defeated him. Calamity Ganon destroyed Hyrule a century beforehand, killing Link in the process.

It was sealed within Hyrule Castle but the seal is increasingly diminishing by the time of the game it's very nearly broken and if it ravages the land again, it's The End of the World as We Know It. The people have been unable to do anything about it and Zelda's prayers are the only thing keeping Calamity Ganon even remotely at bay.

Link's journey in Breath of the Wild is viewed as the final opportunity to put an end to the blight. Bowser in Super Mario Bros. Bowser has none of Ganondorf's patience or dark charisma, none of his gift for intrigue, little of his impromptu gallantry, and not a whole lot of his personal courage; but he's willing and able to install garrisons, collect taxes, spare civilian populations, and generally rule.

Ganondorf likes winning, Bowser likes having won; and so Bowser, although much less dangerous and infinitely less frightening, is the one who can make his conquests stick. Mario can never risk defeat against him — not even in a go-kart race. Subverted in Knights of the Old Republic. Carth certainly thinks this is true, but Jolee is less concerned, believing that things would bounce back to normal even if evil did win - though it wouldn't be until after a few decades, or centuries, of tyranny, and he'd rather not wait that long.

Zombies: Garden Warfare. The Zombies are under a Time Limit to take down each of the Plants' strongholds; if the Plants manage to fend them off long enough for the time to run out even once , the game automatically ends with their victory. Fire Emblem Awakening establishes that the Fell Dragon Grima returns to destroy humanity once every years, meaning that statistically speaking humanity is doomed because Grima only has to succeed once whereas humanity has to defeat Grima an effectively infinite number of times.

The last act of the game gives the player, and by extension their Avatar, the choice to let Chrom strike Grima down, only guaranteeing another years of survival, or deal the final blow personally and sacrifice themself to kill Grima permanently.

One of the possible endings of Devil Survivor 2 's Triangulum Arc. After learning that destroying Canopus will just prompt another Administrator to step in and try to destroy the world, your party can decide to regress the world anyway and fight the new guy, over and over and over until, eventually, they run out of Administrators. It's made quite clear that if ever your party loses, the world will be destroyed for good and the whole thing will be for nothing.

In Samurai Shodown II , by the time you reach Mizuki Rashojin, she's created all kinds of havoc worldwide, killed Amakusa, completely subjugated Ambrosia the very being who turned her evil in the first place , and opened an extremely scary-looking gateway. Defeat her or the whole world literally goes to Hell. In Nefarious , this is nearly said word for word in the narration for the normal ending where Crow indeed wins and takes over the world. Averted and played with in Nexus Clash. The Evil Elder Powers have won the cycle and the right to be the shaper of the next world many times, but since it's an Eternal Recurrence they have also lost many times.

What's more, the cause of a new cycle is the end of the world or human civilization on it. Thus while all the Powers have flaws that cause their worlds to fall apart eventually , the worlds shaped by the Evil Powers are self-destructive, short-lived hellholes that quickly crumble and leave creation up for grabs by better and saner Powers.

At any given time, he has dozens of schemes to corrupt or destroy Azeroth underway Most notably, he is responsible for Deathwing, Azshara, and the Infinite Dragonflight. Many of them have been thwarted by the heroes, but he's always got another one and he only needs one of them to eventually succeed for him to win.

In the campaign game mode of Fantasy General , you play as one of the Council of Five's generals who are trying to liberate the world from the evil Shadowlord. The manual tells you that the Shadowlord is so powerful that you cannot afford any setbacks or delays — and indeed, losing only a single battle means losing the entire campaign. Poked fun at in Bug Martini , where the author points out that while 'evil only has to win once,' evil still has to get off its duff and make things happen , so it's really more of a fair fight than this trope usually implies.

Web Original. The world is in for any variety of apocalypses if the SCP Foundation fails to contain some threats. SCP only has to give birth once. Dream : Evil only has to win once from Dream's point of view. If Dream dies once, his opponents win automatically unless Dream has killed the Ender Dragon before then. The hunters are not under that stipulation, however—they can die however many times they want and continue the fight, their only losing condition is Dream killing the Ender Dragon.

Western Animation. Man Of Action's Generator Rex joins the party with the introduction of the meta-nanites, special nanites which can bestow the power over things like matter, antimatter and the like, if Van Kleiss, the Consortium Providence's higher ups who intend to use them and become gods or Black Knight who intends to acquire their power for herself , gets their hands on them it's game-over.

It turns out that Evil never had a chance in the first place. The Meta-nanites had been programmed by Cesar and his parents in such a way that only Rex could use their full power. That is the only reason Cesar cooperated with Black Knight to gather the Meta-nanites in the first place — he had been planning to give that power to Rex all along.

Too bad he never told Rex that. This is the underlying premise of Beast Machines. The Maximals finally come out on top in the finale of its predecessor, Beast Wars , but as they drag him back home to Cybertron, Megatron has "one good day" and exits the time-and-space traveling journey home, enabling him to conquer the planet before the Maximals return, wiping out their victory in a matter of seconds.

In The Legend of Korra , this is the case with Vaatu. If he triumphs, good will eventually reemerge, but it will take 10, years, during which he will be left free to ravage the world. He just has to win one battle on the right day. Skips from Regular Show has to repeatedly take down Klorgbane every years. A few examples off the top of my head.

Not to mention all the times a government starts a war abroad to distract from problems at home e. Too true. Though I would like to believe that over the long term, the persecution of outgroups would make itself felt in some negative effects on society — either via civil strife or economic inefficiencies. So people who persue this path to hold power eventually run out of outgroups to demonize.

There is a nearly infinite supply of outgroups though. In the USA depending on your priors, white people, black people, immigrants, feminists, men, rich, poor, criminals, deniers, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives etc. My personal complaint is that so many beg the question of how severe many problems actually are.

Middle class income has been stagnant for three decades is a complaint that has to ignore multiple gains in standard of living with middle class being defined upward. Though a secondary problem is that if you cast too many people as outgroups, you turn yourself into an outgroup. I walked away from a so called conservative group for that reason. It remains though that there is an almost unlimited supply of people and organizations to blame for the ones that work that way.

This seems related to the just world fallacy. People will generally assume that victors are good, and this process may not be all conscious. The fallacy has mental health benefits though.

But most people seem to think this situation is perfectly fine, and that seems to be a happier way to live. What they regard as wrong is when we on the opposite side win. I agree. None of these things are true. He lost the popular vote. A statistical aberration could flip the next election the other direction and send everyone spiralling off into the same cycles of rationalization in other directions.

Winning over Trump voters by implementing bad policies is not a long-term solution as those policies negative effects will eventually be felt.

History will remember it if you hang an innocent man to placate a mob. The correct course is always to try to persuade people of the good policies. In the best case, you will convince them, and they will change their minds and the balance of power will shift, and in the worst case, over the long term the effects of the good and bad policies will shake out of the system.

But would Obama have won in with a promise to abolish ICE? With a promise to create a free market in immigration? You know we are a generous and welcoming people here in the United States, but those who enter the country illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of law, and they are showing disregard for those who are following the law.

We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants in this country. If this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole—especially by keeping our workforce young, in contrast to an increasingly geriatric Europe and Japan—it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and put strains on an already overburdened safety net.

So if you run the counterfactual of an uncompromising, take no prisoners policy instead, what is the result? How can we be sure that Obama was wrong? In the process, Amy tricks and kills another man; gets a police department to turn against its best detective; and ends up both pregnant with the baby she wanted and back together with the husband whose life she very nearly destroyed — which I guess is a win? As Verbal pieces together what happened in a police interrogation, director Bryan Singer tells the story in flashbacks, where we learn about the five felons including Gabriel Byrne and then-unknown Benicio del Toro who met in a seemingly random police lineup and decide to pull off the heist.

The narration is consistently unreliable, everyone onscreen seems to be both a patsy and a potential perpetrator, and the storytelling moves at such an insane pace that even when the truth comes out, you just have to applaud the villain for pulling it off.

Brazil In a world defined by consumerism and terrorism, one man who works at the all-powerful Ministry of Information dares to buck the system in the pursuit of love and freedom. And he fails. Heartbreakingly and totally, he fails. Forever trapped in his own mind, Sam will remain a prisoner of the system until the day he meets his end. If you want to feel good about the future, do not watch Brazil.

Funny Games To say that the bad guys win at the end of Funny Games is a bit of a dodge. The whole gist of Funny Games is that nobody wins, least of all you, the viewer, who just spent two hours watching a family get massacred by a pair of sociopaths in golf shirts.

Funny Games is an indictment of cinematic violence that indulges lustily in cinematic violence, so lustily that Michael Haneke made it twice, once in Austria and again a decade later in the U. Creep This two-man show is surprising for many reasons. Chara and XTale! Frisk attempting to stop XGaster's repeated attempts to create a perfect universe. They fail in the end and XGaster succeeds at getting his chance of obtaining his perfect universe, and both of them end up unstable.

In Underverse 0. Chara and they escape. Sans, Cross still manages to escape with Underfell's Snowdin. Underverse 0. Ink starts losing his emotions after X-Event! Chara is brought back to life, X-Event! Chara escapes with the Underswap cast, and the Underswap timeline is destroyed, with Underswap! Papyrus staying behind with Underswap! Chara until the very end. The nail in the coffin is Underverse 0. A good chunk of the cast is killed, including Underfell! Sans and Underswap!

Sans, XGaster is revived, and the Doodle Sphere is gone, leaving behind a destroyed multiverse without alternate realities and thus leaving Error the "winner" of the truce.

Had it not been for the revelation that CORE! Frisk managed to save a good amount of people as well as Cross and Dream safely escaping to the Omega Timeline, it could've been worse. Feedback Video Example s :. Jack beats The Scorpius Triump Chipwrecked Prisma beats Sofia King K.

Rool win Smash Ultimate Damien Wins. Show Spoilers.