It’s Tuesday, and that means you suckers are barely 2/5ths of the way through the work week. So why don’t we alleviate the tedium by diving into Tosche Station’s favorite waste-of-time on the web, TV Tropes! This week, we’re taking a look at the Villainous Breakdown:

The tendency of relatively calm and composed villains to lose their cool over the course of the story. Usually happens to arrogant Chessmaster-typevillains (especially if said villain is a Smug Snake), as control of the situation slips from his or her grasp and things come up that they Didn’t See Coming. Most notable when it happens towards the end of the story to show how pathetic the Big Bad is when things are not going exactly as planned (“This Cannot Be!!”). Especially apparent if they previously had Creepy Monotone or Dissonant Serenity, and suddenly start Chewing the Scenery(when they do this because their plan is succeeding, it’s more of a case of Drunk on the Dark Side). Thus, a Villainous Breakdown is frequently a trigger for a One-Winged Angel transformation.

Similar to Oh Crap, though the difference lies in that Oh Crap moments involve a single moment where the character finds that they are screwed, while Villainous Breakdowns have them see it coming from miles away. The good-guy counterpart is the Heroic BSOD.

Since we’ve been tying these tropes into the X-Wing series lately, let’s take a look at the two primary villains from the first seven books. Through the Stackpole novels, there was Ysanne Isard. There were a few moments in The Bacta War that were textbook examples of this trope in motion, such as the instance where she flips the frak out when one of her Star Destroyer captains defects to the New Republic. Meanwhile in the Allston novels, we have Solo Command, which is pretty much Warlord Zsinj’s Villainous Breakdown stretched out brilliantly over the course of the novel.

When things go bad for villains, they go really bad.