You don’t need to make demands or threats, not if you’re even reasonably good at stage 2 (or if your stage 3 clout has reached critical mass). Once you have enough clout, people who would benefit from associating with you will go out of their way to accommodate your preferences out of their own initiative. It’s the people that will want to move against you that will need to use threats and aggression and protests and strikes.
Hm, in fact Bruce Wayne is a pretty good model of what I have in mind, now that I think of it. This reminds me of something I saw a few days ago… (rummages in TV Tropes)… here, look what I found
You don’t need to make demands or threats, not if you’re even reasonably good at stage 2 (or if your stage 3 clout has reached critical mass). Once you have enough clout, people who would benefit from associating with you will go out of their way to accommodate your preferences out of their own initiative. It’s the people that will want to move against you that will need to use threats and aggression and protests and strikes.
You’d be amazed at how much you can get done just by asking nicely, especially once you have something the other person really wants or needs. In comicbook terms, compare Nightwing (who is awesome at all stages) to Batman (who really really sucks at stage 2).
Hm, in fact Bruce Wayne is a pretty good model of what I have in mind, now that I think of it. This reminds me of something I saw a few days ago… (rummages in TV Tropes)… here, look what I found
My priors are somewhat different on that—since your examples were from fiction, do you have some evidence for the claim in your first paragraph?