Basic Trope: A character who manipulates events through several schemes relying on subtlety and misdirection.
- Straight: Jim "The Mastermind" has succeeded in his plan to Take Over the World by manipulating events in order to fulfill his goals.
- Exaggerated: Jim "The Mastermind" uses several subtle schemes to take over the entire galaxy, so much so no one knows anything about it until he's achieved it.
- Downplayed: Jim "The Mastermind" only has a small amount of success in manipulating events despite having several hitches in his plans.
- Justified:
- Inverted:
- Subverted:
- Jim's elaborate plans turn out to be full of holes and easily thwarted. The few times he succeeds are pure luck.
- Jim's schemes are constantly foiled by people who refuse to follow his orders and/or default to anything they suspect is Jim's manipulations by beating the everliving crap out of Jim.
- Double Subverted:
- Jim comes up with seemingly easy-to-foil plans just to make his opponents underestimate him. He's actually plotting a far more effective scheme that no one will see coming.
- Jim has learned to factor these inconveniences into his plans, and has started to specialize in using said beating's injuries to improve the power of his lies.
- Averted:
- Jim has no schemes.
- Jim doesn't manipulate people for his plans.
- Jim never does any plans that go beyond "punch bad guy in the face and arrest/run".
- People very pointedly refuse to follow any of Jim's orders/requests/suggestions/pleas, ruining his attempts at manipulating them more often than not.
- The In-Universe writer of the "Jim 'The Mastermind'" tales very pointedly refuses to write Jim as a manipulative schemer (it was meant to be an Ironic Nickname, even).
- Parodied: After Jim's birth everyone turns into chess figures.
- Enforced: "The stories are getting boring. We need to have a character manipulate events in the shadows while passing off as a normal civilian."
- Lampshaded: "The whole fight between us was part of Jim's plan to distract us and take over the world... That Bastard!
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Jim adamantly refuses to involve other people when attempting to achieve his goals, and doesn’t manipulate people, or at least not much.
- Discussed: "That whole time, he's just been manipulating the whole situation!"
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed:
- Jim can't plan for every last outcome, so when an unexpected hitch comes up, he only has a brief amount of time to act before they unravel spectacularly.
- Jim's constant manipulation of events to further his own goals makes people more weary to him in general, even when he has no ulterior motive, to the point that some of them start to resent him outright.
- Jim's slow schemes take a lot of time. The longer they last however the greater the odds that they become irrelevant because somebody else takes an action too great for him to have a contingency for.
- Reconstructed:
- Jim is fully aware that he might not be able to plan around every last hitch for a given scenario, but he can damn well try.
- Jim earns the trust of his associates by clueing them in to parts of his plans that don’t need to be secret, showing that the ultimate results of his plans are in good faith, and giving them full debriefings on his machinations so no lingering doubt remains.
- Implied: Jim always seems to come out on top, but it's not clear why.
- Played For Laughs: Jim's explanation of how he achieved victory is a third-act Clue-style excessively long and haphazard reenactment of the whole scheme and the rest of the Gambit Pileup he had to contend with.
- Played For Drama:
- Jim's story is a Columbo-style "how-to-catch-'em" in which the villains try to stay one step ahead of Jim, only for Jim to reveal that he was always five steps ahead and he manipulated them to reveal themselves… he may also have manipulated them into committing the crime for him and take the fall while he gets away with the loot.
- Jim's story is how he became a manipulative bastard who treats everybody who so much as gives him the time of the day as a disposable pawn in his schemes to save the world, and how becoming one of the most hated people on the cast was the acceptable price of a desperate final option to stop an army of invincible threats.
- Played For Horror: Jim very quickly accepts being "that guy". You know "that guy" — the one who would rather kill you and use your still-cooling corpse as a prop in his scheme than listen to reason.
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