"Your Leaders Are Secretly Evil" trope

[Edited to remove the giant blank space at the top.]

[This one contains some spoilers; highlight between the |spoiler| bars if you want to read them]

This isn't so much a book review as a trope review, and I'm reviewing/explaining the trope I call "Your Leaders Are Secretly Evil". As you may surmise, this trope (YLASE for short) is about your leaders being secretly evil.

Now, it doesn't have to be your leaders who are secretly evil. It can be anyone your main character respected or looked up to, such as a mentor/father/fleet admiral/whatnot, although it most often is the leaders. They also don't have to be actually evil; being misguided into doing evil, or simply being unsavory, is enough. 

Normally I hate this trope. It can be done well, or it can be subverted, but most often isn't. An example of pure, unadulterated YLASE is in Ice Wolves by Amie Kaufman (unreviewed, it's awful); the book is about people who can turn into wolves and use ice magic, fighting people who can turn into dragons and use fire magic. Of course, the dragons turn out not to actually *be* evil, and the having-to-fight-them was a misunderstanding, etc etc etc.

(As an aside, Ice Wolves is pretty much the embodiment of stereotypical bad middle-grade fantasy: you have a decent idea, then you shoehorn in a forcedly "quirky" but entirely blandly sterotypical cast and a pack of useless adults. Don't forget the main character kid who has some sort of hidden power that makes them (him in this case) special, some YLASE, and that stupid "nobody's actually evil, we can all get along except people don't want to" thing that always feels like bad social commentary. Gah. Hated that book; I recommend never reading it.)

This is, however, not to say YLASE can't be done well. The Bounders series by Monica Tesler has hints of YLASE in book 1 and fully springs it in book 2, and then the three further books are "yeah, our leaders are secretly evil, deal with it bro" and the bro in question trying to deal with it. Don't be fooled by my description, it's a good book with an actually quirky cast (who manage to be quirky by being the stereotypical gamer dude and genki girl and laid-back reckless guy and a couple others, no less!) and decent plot. Plus you have some proper evil bad guys.

It also can work well when subverted, as in |The Mystwick School of Musicraft| by |Jessica Khoury|. The author's other book that I've read (|Skyborn: Sparrow Rising|) does YLASE well, because you inwardly always know the leaders are secretly evil, but the main character refuses to believe it. |In Mystwick, I was prepared for it to do the same thing... which it didn't. I was so happy.|

In conclusion, I don't actually hate "Your Leaders Are Secretly Evil"; I hate it when used badly. I suppose it doesn't help that the types of books that use it badly are also the ones like Ice Wolves that are just lame all around, which all sort of merge in my head under the heading "forgettable Ice Wolves parallels" (probably because, as previously stated, Ice Wolves is the epitome of lame stereotypical fantasy).

Link to the actual post.