How far would you go to save the one you love? Would you sacrifice your life? Suffer an irreparable blow to your reputation? Or would you sleep with your lover’s would-be killer?
Scarpia Ultimatum is when the villain threatens to kill the hero (or, alternately, a basket full of kittens) unless the romantic interest gives him some sort of sexual favor or gratification. It doesn’t have to explicitly involve the physical act, though if it does, it tends to take the story in a very dark direction. G-rated examples of this trope tend to revolve around marriage or some sort of emotional commitment instead.
The standoff can end in one of the following ways:
- The romantic interest submits to the villain’s demands. Since the ultimatum involves a fundamental betrayal of fidelity, this rarely ends well.
- The romantic interest decides she’s not all that interested in the hero after all. Alternately, she does the villain’s job for him.
- One of the side characters offers to go in the romantic interest’s place, and the villain consents. IIRC, something like this happened in Enchanted.
- The romantic interest submits to the villains demands, but the hero escapes and rescues her at the last minute. Can be difficult to pull off, since it basically consists of having your cake and eating it too.
- The romantic interest comes up with a third option that saves the hero without forcing her to give herself up to the villain. By far, this is the most common solution.
At the heart of this standoff is the fact that both choices involve a betrayal. If the romantic interest refuses, she lets the hero die. If she submits, she becomes unfaithful. Even if the standoff is over a basket full of kittens, it almost always involves a choice between two morally reprehensible options.
My favorite example of this trope is from Phantom of the Opera, where the Phantom forces Christine to choose between her freedom and Raoul’s llife. She takes the third option and kisses the Phantom, making him have compassion on her because no one else had ever shown him such affection. What makes this a crowning moment of awesome, for me at least, is the way that it empowers Christine without doing anything to diminish Raoul. He shows himself willing to make a truly heroic sacrifice, while she proves that love is more powerful than violence.
As a way to add a moral dilemma to your story, this trope is highly effective. The stakes are high, the options are limited, and the moral choices are far from black and white. If your characters do take a third option, however, it should probably make some sort of commentary on the ethical questions raised–otherwise, it’ll probably come across as an ***-pull.
Oh. I saw Phantom of the Opera live. It was sooo good 🙂
Curious to see the Scarpia reference, and wondered if you were familiar with its origin: Puccini’s opera Tosca, in which the villain Scarpia, fundamentally a very bad policeman in Napoleonic Rome, offers to spare the life of Tosca’s lover, the patriot Cavaradossi, whom Scarpia has imprisoned, in exchange for sexual favors from Tosca. It being opera, it doesn’t work out for anyone: Scarpia signs a bogus commutation of Cavaradossi’s sentence, Tosca stabs Scarpia to death before he can consummate their bargain, then having witnessed Cavaradossi’s death at the hands of a fake firing squad that turns out to be real, jumps from the parapet of the Castel Sant’Angelo before she can be arrested for Scarpia’s murder. All with some very loud singing. (Opera ain’t for the faint of heart …)
Interesting. That sounds about right. It seems that opera and Greek tragedy have a lot in common–namely, that everybody dies.