Basic Trope: An authoritarian government turns out to be just as inefficient as it is oppressive.
- Straight: The country of Nekhoroshiya is a dystopic totalitarian state whose high-level government officials are too busy backstabbing each other to run the country, while Corrupt Corporate Executives and Morally Bankrupt Bankers bleed domestic industry dry, the treasury doesn't contain much besides Wallet Moths, and the bloated civil bureaucracy can barely keep the lights on. Besides, the military has barely enough firearms and ammo for current active-duty personnel, while in the air force, at most one out of every ten planes is fit for combat — and don't get us started on the navy. Even the Secret Police and State Sec are a bad joke: the Big Brother Is Watching surveillance network is down for months at a time, and the whole system needs just a light push to fall apart completely.
- Exaggerated:
- Nekhoroshiya is so inefficient and corrupt that the story depicting it shows, from multiple viewpoints, its complete collapse in the span of hours.
- Nekhoroshiya is One Nation Under Copyright. Most goods and services are so overpriced and hard to find that even the Corrupt Corporate Executive leadership has to buy black market toilet paper.
- Behold! The government of the future; Nekhoroshiya is a hyper-totalitarian dictatorship which savages the wallets of the poorly educated unruly scum of society — who are of course confined to Perpetual Poverty — via soul-crushing tax rates (collected by rabid tax collectors who will literally snatch the clothes of your back if you're so much as an hour late in filing), which the wealthier black shirts and upper class are exempt from for some reason, 20% of their tax revenue is wasted Crushing the Populace and supporting a never-ending Reign of Terror due to the daily peasant rebellions, and importing (read: kidnapping) skilled workers to replace them. And of course, we can't forget about the superfluous persecution of the intelligentsia. But at least they still have tax revenue to show for their efforts, right? Wrong. 90% of the remaining, unsquandered tax revenue is wasted in the nation's vast, inefficient, stratified bureaucracy filled with incompetent yes-men and conniving ass-kissers, who are customarily shoved into cramped battery cages and forced to work round the clock to make up for lost productivity (resulting in a Vicious Cycle), archive and control every last movement made by the populace, as well as each other and the State Sec, who if they are not preoccupied dogpiling jaywalkers, are corrupt to a fault and are pretty much glorified thugs who sell their services to the highest bidder, and often are pawns in the constant schemes for power played by the Deck of Wild Cards that is Nekhoroshiya's 'government'. The military is a stale joke, with most active personnel manifesting in the form of commissars keeping an eye on their rebellious lessers, and food rationing forcing millions, with most of the conscripted, brainwashed Child Soldiers especially hard hit, to eat bread as hard as wood. But still, 8% of the country's gross tax revenue remains, yes? Nope! Most of it is used by Smug Snake Corrupt Politicians to line their wallets, bailing out megacorporations and their Corrupt Corporate Executive Robber Barons, and maintaining the only piece of national infrastructure that counts: the lavish double-decker limousines State Sec Fat Bastard police chiefs use to commute to work. But at least the trains run on time ... right?
- Downplayed: Nekhoroshiya was planned to be a utopian society, and it does have an awesome reputation in other countries. However, in practice, it's not much greater than any other society (though not an outright dystopia either).
- Justified: The Glorious Leader of Nekhoroshiya has no ideology beyond Despotism Justifies the Means, or even actively seeks to make the citizenry suffer, so inefficiency is part of how the country is supposed to run.
- Inverted:
- Subverted: The Glorious Leader can't run the country worth a damn, but he uses Mind Control technology to make people not care about any governance flaws.
- Double Subverted: Then the mind control system breaks and shuts down, and the entire country promptly collapses.
- Parodied: Nekhoroshiya is in a satirical Black Comedy depicting the country's leaders as a bunch of Stupid Evil buffoons that would make the characters of The Great Dictator do a double-take.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Nekhoroshiya has a very uneven degree of efficiency between the agencies. Its army has fairly good, if imperfect, supply, since its commanders won the funding war against the navy and air force. The Security Bureau boasts frightening efficiency at nabbing smugglers and shade traders... because they've been assigned to that job after the laughably understaffed criminal police proved unable to handle it, and political dissidents may take a short break in the meantime. Industry overall functions... just barely — yet some factories manage to sustain themselves somehow, even after the state sucks away the lion's share of their earnings to sustain failing organizations deemed 'vital for national security'. The education and especially public healthcare systems are most definitely a sham, though.
- Nekhoroshiya is a totalitarian state whose leaders look ready to throw in the towel any minute now, but nearby Ruritania imposed the same philosophy of government and made it work despite itself. At the geopolitical scale, admirers of the Nekhoroshiyan/Ruritanian ideals present them as a Right Way/Wrong Way Pair.
- Averted:
- Nekhoroshiya is a totalitarian state that is neither extremely effective nor completely incompetent.
- Nekhoroshiya doesn't even exist outside an in-universe Propaganda Piece from Troperia, meant to show what 'communism' brings.
- Enforced:
- The author is writing social commentary designed to blow the lid off the shortcomings of a real-life totalitarian state that is hiding behind its Propaganda Machine.
- Alternatively, the story is being written to deconstruct Invincible Villain dystopian narratives and inspire the audience by showing how brittle dystopias really are.
- Lampshaded: "This new Nekhoroshiya was not really as great as it was hyped up to be, huh?"
- Invoked: Nekhoroshiya is a social experiment made with this trope in mind.
- Exploited: La Résistance, Hired Guns, Black Market dealers, and other people looking to topple or exploit the system of Nekhoroshiya take full advantage of its shortcomings.
- Defied: Nekhoroshiya either collapses before it reaches true totalitarian status, or never becomes totalitarian at all.
- Discussed: "They say that Nekhoroshiya is such a great country, but fascism doesn't really tend to work that well. I bet the leaders are really struggling to make it work, but of course they're too scared to admit that."
- Conversed: "Have you watched the latest episode of Nekhoroshiya?" "The one where the leaders are planning to make a super-effective fascist society?" "Yeah, that one! I bet it won't work for them at all."
- Deconstructed:
- Nekhoroshiya is as stupid and inefficient as totalitarian states come, but it still does a lot of damage to its people and neighboring countries just with its cruel incompetence.
- Nekhoroshiya is very inefficient, but it remains dangerous because the people and countries around them enable their existence, either by being even more incompetent than they are and being so convinced that Nekhoroshiya is too weak to pose any threat, or by being so self-absorbed and self-serving that they carelessly allow Nekhoroshiya's horrifically destructive policies to flourish out of a foolish belief that they'd never get caught in the crossfire.
- Nekhoroshiya is so incompetent that it completely falls apart and a revolution swiftly follows. Hopefully, the New Nekhoroshiya would be WAY better than the old one.
- Reconstructed: The leadership of Nekhoroshiya is so ineffectual and full of itself that it can't even effectively persecute anyone, constantly falling to tropes like Bullying a Dragon, Mugging the Monster, and other forms of Underestimating Badassery. The leaders are soon deposed because they bit off way more than they could chew.
- Played for Laughs: The story is told from the point of view of an outsider character who keeps bouncing between Nekhoroshiya's dystopian social institutions and can't help but wonder how any of them are still functioning.
- Played for Drama: The story is a painful drama about Bob, a true believer in Nekhoroshiya's ideology watching his country fall apart around him.
- Played for Horror: Nekhoroshiya collapses under the weight of its own ineptitude, but not before it blunders into starting a world war, destroying vast swathes of the planet and getting millions of people killed, leaving the world in an even worse state than it was before.
- Implied: Nekhoroshiya's fall isn't seen in detail, but it's shown that it didn't last very long.
Back to Fascist, but Inefficient, citizen. Remember, you may not claim the trains don't run on time.
