History Main / BatmanGambit

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* In ''YuYuHakusho'', the reason Sensui set it up so that the tunnel to Makai would be opened, and the events that came afterwards, is so that he could die in Makai at the hands of a powerful demon, since it would be nobler than to die of the terminal illness he had. Said strong demon happened to be Yusuke, possessed by the spirit of his ancestor, Raizen.
** Later in the manga-only final arc, it was revealed that ''everything'' the heroes faced was an elaborate setup by King Enma, who purposely pardoned dangerous criminals with the specific hope that his detectives would capture them and thus make himself look better.

* Found in an unfortunate situation where he had to do 100 pushups, this troper said, "At least it's better than taking a lap around the track." Which, to this troper, was much easier. They switched this troper over to that instead, and he ran a lap.

** Mesmero likes this too, in The Spider Episode, he brainwashes Gambit into stealing one half of a spider stone, Knowing that Magneto would stop him & capture Mesmero, he knew that Magneto would have Mastermind check his mind for info on the spider & find out its identity as a key but not how to use it, He knew that by escaping & uniting the two spider stones, thus freeing the giant spider guardian, that Magneto would follow him & try to stop him, & that only Magneto could destroy the spider, so after Gambit stops the spider by crashing a bus into it & blowing it up (Badass) that Magneto would then destroy the spider, what only Mesmero knew is that should the spider be destroyed, that it would then automatically unlock the second door to Apocalypse & bring fourth a mutant filled future of death & war.

*** At which point it really becomes XanatosRoulette

* In ''[=~Kyon: Big Damn Hero~=]'', when Kyon, Koizumi, Yuki and Mikuru go to see the Student Council President:

* Magneto brilliantly pulls 95% of one in ''{{X-Men: Evolution}}'''s Season 2 finale "Day of Reckoning", manipulating four different factions -- the X-Men, the Brotherhood, Bolivar Trask's private army, and his Acolytes in order to: reveal to the world the existence of mutants, out Trask's group and destroy their Sentinel prototype, brand the X-Men as fugitives, and severely drain his enemies' resources. Only one unaccounted-for factor -- his daugher, Wanda Maximoff -- prevents it from going perfectly.

* Also during WWII, when the allies were planning to invade southern Europe from Africa, the British launched a homeless who had died of pneumonia from a submarine, in an area where the Spanish would recover his body. Handcuffed to his wrist was a briefcase that explained that the invasion site would NOT be Sicily, and hinted instead it would be Greece. The Spanish under Franco being on friendly terms with the Germans found the body, gave the evidence to the German embassy who bought the story, leaving the invasion site nearly undefended. It may also help that the Abwehr which asserted the authenticity of the documents was riddled with British agents including its head Admiral Canaris.
** The success of this plan, [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat Operation Mincemeat]], was actually what led the Germans to disregard information that they had actually gotten a hold of. Once the invasion was complete, they realised they'd been fooled and disregarded several other actual intelligence leaks as simple repeats of Mincemeat.

# In [[MarvelUniverse Marvel's]] ''Excalibur'', it is revealed that Merlyn arranged the formation of Excalibur and manipulated many subsequent events (including faking his own death), in order to ultimately prevent the collapse of Merlyn's Energy Matrix and destroy Merlyn's former teacher Necrom.

* The [[strike: entire]] second ''StarWars'' [[strike: Saga]] trilogy is perhaps a huge BatmanGambit; essentially, Palpatine/Sidious is planning the Sith revenge against the Jedi. In doing so, he manipulates virtually every character to make his plan work: first, the Trade Federation blockading his home planet, knowing the Republic bureaucracy would drag its heels; then, gets Padm?o call for a "vote of no-confidence" against the sitting supreme chancellor, to get himself elected. Next, he manipulates multiple commercial and nationalist interests into forming the Confederacy of Independent Systems. Back to Padm?getting her to leave Coruscant "for her safety" after an assassination attempt; then her proxy, gullible Jar-Jar Binks, into pushing the Senate to grant him the emergency powers to form the Grand Army. Then, he manipulated (through apprentice Darth Tyranus) Jedi master Sifo-Dyas into ordering a massive clone army. He manipulates Anakin: presenting himself as a fatherly figure, unlike the stern Jedi Order, he makes Anakin likelier to trust his advice; uses his fear of loss to bring him closer, and gets him to kill Tyranus, pushing him closer to the dark side; when the Jedi are about to out him as a Sith , Palpatine turns it to his advantage: by not beating Windu he plays on Anakin's sympathy and convinces him to "disarm" Windu, making it easier to turn Anakin to the Dark Side. With Anakin ready, Palpatine executes Order 66. He then uses his "new" appearance to justify ordering the Grand Army to turn on the Jedi: a Jedi plot to take over the Republic.

*** Palapatines whole plan may have been a (failed) XanatosGambit to prepare the galaxy for the Yuuzah Vong, going by the EU. OR a batman gambit by the FORCE to do the same thing...

* The ending of ''{{Superman}} II'' hinges on Lex Luthor selling out Superman and telling Zod about the "take away all super powers" device... which Superman had set to affect everyone ''outside'' the device, having seen this coming.
* Another master of plan B would be Tony Wendice from ''Dial M for Murder''. This trope is actually subverted a few times as Tony is never quite able to anticipate everything that will happen, despite his incredibly intricate schemes. The bulk of the film is set up by the failure of his first one: having blackmailed a classmate turned two bit crook into killing his cheating wife Margot and set up a perfect alibi for himself alongside Mark, the man who she was cheating on him with, Margot's will to live is a bit too strong and she ends up killing the man in their desperate struggle. Tony spends the rest of the film trying to make it look like she killed the man in cold blood rather than self defense, wildly improvising whenever someone is about to send it all crashing down again. This is all even [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] early on when Mark, a novelist who specializes in just this kind of story, notes that he would never try one in real life because there will always be just one little thing that no one can anticipate.

* In ''Heat'', [=McCauley's=] crew meet up in a particular location seemingly to paint it as their next target, as well as to map out the viable escape routes, while Hanna's team surveys their activities secretly. When Hanna and his team later assemble on the same location to break down the gameplan of [=McCauley's crew=], they quickly discover the worthlessness of the target location, as well as the absence of any effective escape routes. Hanna then realizes that [=McCauley's=] plan all along was to get his team out in the open so that the latter could get a good glimpse of the men pursuing them.

* Walt Kowalski does this in the finale of ''GranTorino'' where he [[spoiler:tricks the Hmong gang into [[HeroicSacrifice gunning him down]] in front of an entire neighborhood of witnesses]].

* Xykon pulls one of these in the climax of ''Start of Darkness''. Redcloak's brother Right-Eye is obsessed with destroying him, and has bought a magic knife that can deliver a sneak attack to an undead creature. Xykon knew about this, and protected himself accordingly. However, he still lets Right-Eye attack, knowing full well that Redcloak will kill his own brother rather than jeopardize The Plan. And now Xykon has proof that Redcloak will not betray him, will protect his phylactery, and will sink to any depths to see The Plan come to fruition; otherwise the sacrifice he made would be meaningless.

* Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of Prussia, successfully manipulated his enemies to unify Germany, using his ally Austria to defeat Denmark, then caused Austria to declare war on Prussia, and finally manipulated France into another war, thus creating the political climate to unite the many German states into a single one. He pulled some of this off by taking advantage of pre-existing circumstances, which certainly took skill of its own, and he definitely did deliberately lure enemies (and his boss!) into traps several times, but if he planned ''everything'', he'd be something of a real life XanatosRoulette. Then again, a man wearing [[NiceHat that formidable a hat]] is clearly working at a higher level than most.
** Unfortunately, Bismark's gambit had consequences that he either never properly planned for or foresaw; seeing as it became part of the ThirtyXanatosPileup which would lead to WorldWarI and later WorldWarII. Seeing as how he predicted a great "European War" coming, he probably ''did'' plan something to counteract this, but the actions of those that would come after him caused those plans to go out the window.
*** He foresaw exactly that's why his number one foreign policy objective after unification was stopping any possibility of an alliance between France and Russia. His number two objective was to make sure Germany didn't bring the British into continental politics by making them feel threatened. Unfortunately his successors were retards who saw to that these things came to pass.
**** Honestly, Bismarck's reputation for BatmanGambits has been overstated. In particular, he gets a lot more credit for trying to prevent WWI than he honestly deserves. His attempt to Check Russian expansion after the defeat of Turkey at the Congress of Berlin did decimated the very goodwill he had been trying to build with Russia for the past few decades, it was he who began to build up the German surface fleet which brought British ire down in the first place (though to be fair he kept it fairly small and was mostly able to work damage control by claiming it was meant to check the Scandinavians and the Russians), his attempts to gain German colonies were hardly cost-efficient and led to yet more issues, and his support of Spain in Cuba and the Philippines set Germany on a collision course with the US. That, and his writings make it fairly clear he was less concerned about a general continental war breaking out persee as long as Germany came out on top of it. That, and this is before we consider that he largely served as the mentor to most of the German officials who went to war- including Wilhelm II- doesn't help matters. He was cunning, but he wasn't that charitable or foresighted.
**** He did have plans to prevent (what became) World War I - by maintaining an alliance with Austria and Russia, which worked for 20 years (1870-1890). What he didn't plan on was the Kaiser Wilhelm I dying and being succeeded by his grandson, Wilhelm II (technically Wilhelm I was succeeded by his son Frederick, but he lasted less than a year). Willy Jr. thought he knew better than Bismark and sacked him.
***** That Bismarck provided him with his FreudianExcuse didn't help Bismarck's chances any.
* Real-Life DoubleSubversion: During Operation Market Garden, an Allied official accidentally left several operation plans on a glider that the Germans captured. The Germans spotted a XanatosGambit at once: those plans would never have been placed in such an insecure vehicle. Instead of countering the operation described in the plans, they deliberately put their troops elsewhere. Unfortunately for them, there was no gambit. The plans had been genuine.
** Not that it helped the Allies much, as their airborne troops instead came across an SS Panzer division which had been sent to this "safe" sector for a bit of R&R and to refit. Oops.

** The success of this plan, [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat Operation Mincemeat]], was actually what led the Germans to disregard information such as the plans in the glider from the above example. Once the invasion was complete, they realised they'd been fooled and disregarded several other actual intelligence leaks as simple repeats of Mincemeat.
*** One wonders whether such a "fool me twice" reaction was precisely what the allies planned would happen.
* Wasn't [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Overlord Operation Overlord]] dependent such a gambit as well? After all the success of the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandy_landings Normandy Landings]] heavily depended on Hitler being deceived into thinking the landings would take place elsewhere - specifically at Pas de Calais, using [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude Operation Fortitude]] which served as the gamit.

* The Arms Race of the Cold War was arguably an elaborate Batman Gambit. Nuclear weapons are inherently AwesomeButImpractical due to them causing rather indiscriminate destruction to people and the environment and costing billions of dollars. As such, the building of increasingly expensive monuments to suicidal overkill was just an elaborate ruse to trick the Soviets into ruining their own economy by spending too much of their GDP on nuclear weapons.
** An AlternateCharacterInterpretation posits that the Soviets were actually cutting defense spending because they recognized the futility of trying to win an arms race and didn't even try. Meanwhile, they let the Americans believe that such a race was actually going on to trick ''them'' into wasting money on the weapons. In the long run, though, the Americans still won.
** Heck, with both sides coming up with like the "[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative Star Wars]]" program (not to be confused with the [[StarWars movies]] of the same name) or the Cuban Missile Crisis just to throw the opposition into the costly process of developing a countermeasure, the entire Cold War, including the Arms Race and the related Space Race, was a ThirtyXanatosPileUp of epic proportions.
*** The Star Wars project DID produce viable defense systems like the Patriot missile system, which we use as an anti-air and anti-conventional-missile system to this day. It's success was just blown up massively to make the other side think that they had a successful method of countering nukes, which they didn't. So it still counts.
* The Spartan defense during The Battle of Thermopylae was contingent on a Batman Gambit. If the Persian army had landed anywhere else along the shore, or just found a different way around, guarding a small path through some cliffs wouldn't have worked very effectively.
** This was actually the work of the Athenian politician Themistocles. Seeing the Persian threat, he convinced the Athenians to spend the proceeds from a lode of silver to build a large navy, naming a threat from Greek rivals (Persia seemed too distant to the people). He then formed a battle plan to defend the pass at Thermopylae while the Allied (largely Athenian navy) held the Strait of Artemisium so the Persians couldn't sail around. When the Spartans were reluctant to deploy their armies far away from their home, Themistocles goaded them into it by successfully pledging the entire able-bodied population of Athens to man the allied Greek fleet. When the Spartan naval commander wanted to run from the approaching Persians, who outnumbered the Greeks six to one, Themistocles secured a large bribe to have the fleet stay there and defend the people. He subsequently took the initiative in the sea battle by attacking the Persians in the late afternoon when they off guard, so that that it would be dark by the time the Persians got their act together (the Greeks could withdraw more easily.) After holding the strait until the Spartans were defeated, Themistocles sailed back to Athens to evacuate everyone, leaving messages at all the towns along the way for the Ionians, Greek allies of Persia, in the Persian fleet to make Xerxes distrust them. Then, playing on Xerxes' desire to conquer the Greeks totally, he tricked the Persian fleet into an ambush in the Strait of Salamis, destroying most of their troop ships and crippling Persia's invasion force.
* Al Qaeda seems to love these, good thing they're terrible at them. Their overall plan seems to be to cause anti-Islamic discrimination, thus uniting all Muslims to their cause, destroying the US and giving them control of the world. [[SoYeah Somehow.]]

** Yeah, but Johnson knew that was going to happen; he just didn't give a damn. So in a way it was a double-Batman Gambit; Johnson played along with their gambit, knowing that he'd be impeached but not removed from office. (He had taken over after Lincoln was assassinated, and nobody was entirely sure who was next in line.)

* America's entire participation in WWII was one giant Batman Gambit: Roosevelt had wanted to get in the war since before it started, but very little of the country felt the same way.

* In ''TheTwilightZone'' episode "A Pitch for the Angels", Death uses one of these on the salesman. He sets things up so that some random child is going to die at midnight, knowing that in order to save her, the salesman will try to delay him with his sales pitch as part of the deal they made. Not to mention "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," in which a small group of Aliens fuck with the machines and force people to kill each other, and "To Serve Man" in which a large group of aliens convince people to visit their home planet on which they are cooked and eaten.