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| - The Adventurer Archaeologist has gone through all manner of Death Course hazards and exhausted himself narrowly escaping from certain death, but he has succeeded in retrieving the idol! ....except that he emerges to find his arch-nemesis aiming a gun point blank at him, casually ordering him to hand it over. The Hero has collected a ragtag band of fellow survivors and enemies of the Evil Overlord, and even ventured deep into the very underbelly of the earth, fighting his way past killer trapped doors and all manner of random encounter beasts to get hold of an artifact of legendary power before the Big Bad gets to it, and thereby safeguard it from his Evil Plan.... but when the team comes struggling up out of the dungeon to return to the surface, half dead and gasping for a save point, there's the Big Bad, confronting them with overwhelming power fresh from an HP/MP restore! He seizes the artifact, and leaves them Only Mostly Dead, as his Evil Plan moves forward. Sometimes you just have to wonder why the good guys never say to each other, "Hey, I've got an idea. Why don't we hide out near the entrance of the dungeon, get a good night's sleep, and wait for him to go in and fetch the MacGuffin for us, this time?!" Ah, the magic of Genre Blindness. (This could make sense in the event that the Big Bad only needs to get his hands on the MacGuffin for an instant in order to triumph; but of course, that's never the case in a story involving a MacGuffin Delivery Service, since the plot would end rather abruptly if it were.) This is one of the rare cases in good vs. evil where evil invariably triumphs, and its popularity is due to the fact that the audience wouldn't get to see the Evil Plan play out in full if the good guys win this scene. We want the good guys to win in the Grand Finale, where the Big Bad is as big and bad as possible while still being beatable. Otherwise it could get downright anticlimactic, if the guy who burned down your Doomed Hometown has to give up and go into hiding because he can't Take Over the World without the one MacGuffin you managed to hang onto, preventing him from completing the set needed for his Evil Plan. Nobody likes a hero who hunts down and murders a villain that already threw in the towel. Of course, that means that even if the hero does get a hold of it, expect it to leave his hands before they can use it, getting us back to the start of the trope. Often a Xanatos Gambit: if the hero doesn't try to get the Maguffin before the villain than there's nothing stopping the villain from getting it first. Likewise, the whole scenario can be a Batman Gambit by a Big Bad Friend or treacherous leader to manipulate the heroes into willingly giving them the MacGuffin. You can expect these villains to enjoy some Evil Gloating, asking "Did You Actually Believe? all that tripe about 'The Power of Friendship'?" Or most frustratingly of all, the villain may just teleport behind the hero and yoink it away. If something is promised in exchange for the MacGuffin and the villian goes back on his word, it's a case of The Cake Is a Lie. This is a subtrope of Unwitting Pawn, where the villain's goal is unknown to the heroes. In a MacGuffin Delivery Service, the heroes know the villain wants the MacGuffin, and preventing the villain from getting it is, ironically, the reason for the whole quest. Maybe not the only reason, but a major reason throughout the story arc. Polar opposite of Keep-Away. Compare You Can't Thwart Stage One. Subtrope of Nice Job Breaking It, Hero. Not to be confused with MacGuffin Escort Mission, where the good guys give the heroes a mission to deliver the item somewhere. This is an inversion of that trope.
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