Bavarian Fire Drill/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Act like you are in charge and the Mooks will obey you.

  • Straight: In the middle of a large reception, Bob gets up and announces that everyone must leave immediately. The other guests comply in spite of the fact that Bob is not the host nor acting in any official capacity.
  • Exaggerated: Bob stands up and asks everyone to give him their wallets and the corresponding PINs for any debit and credit cards therein, and is almost buried as people begin tossing them over.
  • Downplayed: Bob announces that everyone must leave. A couple of people do. A couple more ask Bob "Who are you?"
  • Justified: Bob has a very authentic-seeming police badge.
  • Inverted: Bob has the authority to tell everyone to leave, but no one listens to him.
  • Subverted: Bob asks everyone to leave, but on their way out, some guests begin to question Bob's authority and convince everyone to ignore him and stay.
  • Double Subverted: Bob invents a title for himself to reassure the naysayers of his authority. They go along with it and everyone starts leaving again.
  • Parodied: The eccentric king of a tribal society is revealed to have come to power simply by walking into the village and starting to order people around.
  • Deconstructed:
    • Bob is shown to be a master manipulator who tricks people into doing his bidding in this manner frequently.
    • Alice, who is in charge, gives an order contradicts Bob's. Everyone believes Alice.
  • Reconstructed: Each time, Bob drops the ruse shortly after people comply with his demands so as to educate people about the dangers of excessive obedience to authority figures.
  • Zig Zagged: Bob asks everyone to be quiet for a moment, and the room falls silent. He then tells everyone that they must leave, but everyone ignores him and starts talking again. Bob then insists that everyone leave, and they ultimately do.
  • Averted: Bob asks everyone to leave, but no one pays any attention to him.
  • Enforced: The author is writing a cautionary tale about people being too quick to comply with official-sounding demands.
  • Lampshaded: As the crowd is leaving, one guest says to another, "I've never seen that Bob fellow before. He must be a new employee of the convention centre."
  • Invoked: Bob needs to get everyone out of the convention centre, and does everything he can think of to look and sound more official, including wearing a lapel pin with the centre's logo and using a megaphone.
  • Exploited: Since everyone listened to Bob when he wasn't in charge, the company in charge of the reception looks into hiring him, thinking that having someone with such a talent among their employees could be useful.
  • Defied: All of the guests were introduced to the hosts and security detail at the beginning of the reception so that they would be able to identify impostors.
  • Discussed: "You can get anything you want if you just sound official enough. Observe."
  • Conversed: "So that character can convince anyone to do anything just by sounding official? That's so unrealistic."
  • Plotted A Good Waste: ???
  • Played For Laughs: Bob begins listing off specific actions for each person at the reception to take, such as doing the chicken dance and singing "The Song That Never Ends". Everyone complies.
  • Played For Drama: Ordinary people are shown doing horrible acts, even including torturing others, all in deference to an imagined authority figure.

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