Given what that trope means, if they do decide to go with a bland descriptive rename it would be ironically hilarious.
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Hmm.
We already have "Ace pilot".
Maybe "Enemy Ace Pilot"? (Yes, the reference to the DC Comics comic is intended. :smallamused: )
Or "Worthy Opponent Pilot"? :smallconfused:
Or my personal favourite: "Fantasy antagonist to comic strip dog". :smalltongue:
It doesn't help that the meaning of Magnificent Bastard, at least as described by TVTropes, has changed since the page first came into being. Once upon a time, Magnificent Bastards were those villains that won through charisma, derring-do and luck to get their victories rather than through planning for every contingency. In that respect, Chessmaster and Magnificent Bastards were two entirely distinct tropes: you could tell which one a villain was by whether they relied on their intellect and planning (Chessmaster) or strength of personality (Magnificent Bastard), regardless of the fact that many Chessmasters are highly charismatic and many MB's are quite intelligent.
Now, however, the Magnificent Bastard has just grown into a villain uber-alles trope designed to celebrate villains that fans love. It is supposed to apply to villains that combine the traits of the manipulative bastard, the chessmaster and trickster, which leaves the distinction between "Magnificent Bastard" and "Villain Sue" entirely subjective to whether the viewer thinks the villain has jumped a shark.
It's a shame, because once upon a time, the trope was actually able to select out a narrow subset of villains and actually say something about why they were challenges for the protagonist. I actually wrote an entry on the MB page many years ago about why Little Bill Daggett from the Western Unforgiven was a Magnificent Bastard: he actually has a speech in the film where he admits that there are other men out there who could kill him, but fights are always about doing as much as you can to rattle the other guy and then play the odds, and he has such a combination of skill and presence that he's never lost. Moreover, that attitude is backed up the whole way through the film, as Little Bill never actually draws until the very end because everyone sees him and thinks, quite prudently, that there are better options to dueling the man. That entry has nothing to do with what the Magnificent Bastard is now stated to mean, however, because Little Bill was quite explicitly never one to rely on a plan being flawless and going off without a hitch.
For my part, while I love TV Tropes, I can't stand the hyperbolic writing that seems to characterize its contributers more than anything else. The "Crowning _______ of Awesome" pages and the like make me cringe just thinking about them.
Also I highly dislike when people add "no that's wrong" comments under entries (though God knows I've been strongly tempted to add them many times, mostly on the Mohs Scale of Rock Hardness page), but I actively correct those whenever I see them, so.
I can't bring myself to significantly edit or delete other people's trope entries either because it's hard not to feel like a jerk doing that, even if they're clearly wrong or the entry doesn't belong. My biggest peeve is aversions, because they're almost always pointless - if something doesn't use the trope, then it doesn't use the trope - you don't have to list it. Although I did like the one for Intelligent Gerbil that listed the webcomic Narbonic, because while Narbonic doesn't use the Intelligent Gerbil trope it does have an actual intelligent gerbil.
Hit the edit button, highlight the entry, hit Delete/Backspace.
The most effective solution to all of Tvtrope's woes.
Followed by writing a the correct entry if needed. If not oblivion is a fitting end for such things.
We'd still have Rape the Dog if more people did this. Its like people are scared to offend other people on the internet or something.
More because they're afraid of getting into an edit war. Especially when an editor is a fan of one of the works that have somehow developed a massive hatedom and hate dumb (for example, a large number of tropers seem to consider the works of Tom Clancy to consist solely of godlike Republicans solving all the world's problems before breakfast while brainless Democrats and foreigners whine about it) , it's pointless to simply delete a vitriolic, highly biased, and inaccurate post on the subject because someone will simply revert it. It can seem much more practical to simply attempt to point out why the post is wrong.
This.
Its going to be a rare case where the original editor is just sitting and waiting for someone to dare and touch his "perfect" entry. By their very nature the most egregious (take a shot) examples result from a sheer lack of knowledge about either the work or the trope in question. Ergo the person creating things that are flat wrong is not coming back soon, because that strongly implies knowledge.
Now if one is talking actual vandalism its another matter but that's not the reason trope title are blandified into boring mush.
Wait, is this not generally true? Because the only book of his I've read is Without Remorse and those are actually more-or-less the exact words I use to describe the book to people. Like I've said what you say above before, and that seems to be entirely accurate. Except replace, "Republican," with, "Army and ex-army," replace "Democrat," with, "Russians, liberals, and people with dark skin colors," and replace, "Whine," with, "Maliciously or ignorantly endanger the lives of good, decent people." (And you can tell when the dudes are good or decent because they always, without exception open doors for ladies, even when the logistics of doing so are frankly baffling. As far as I remember, all the ladies were decent.)
Don't get me wrong, I have no opinion on the author in general, and I'm open to the idea that I just had the bad luck to read a stinker. I'm honestly just curious whether this book is generally representative of the guy.
Without Remorse isn't really like that in itself, though it comes closer than most of his books. To put it simply, the two traitors aren't vilified for their political views at all. Even Clark sympathises with their pacifism. It's their naivete that causes them to be unsympathetic. Likewise, the Russian officer is doing little more than trying to defend his homeland. He's the "bad guy" only because he's on the opposing side as the protagonists. The drug dealers, the closest the book comes to true villians, are motivated by greed. That's my point. Clancy's books do tend to favor one political perspective, but there's very few cardboard cutouts, and virtually no strawmen among major characters. Yet, any attempt to remove the Clancy examples from pages like Straw Liberal, Strawman Has a Point, and similar pages results, within an hour, with a revert, becuase the Hatedom for his work is so prevalent.
See, I'm not even focused in on the politics, it was more the, "Invincible main character who solves everything before lunch," thing that struck a chord. I mean, if Clancy was dead set on giving Kelly a girl's name, I think Mary would have been more appropriate. Or possibly Sue. (And, yeah I know Kelly is unisex in some places but then I wouldn't have been able to do a thing.)
I dunno, I'm not going to debate the virtues of the book with you - at least, not in this thread - but I will say that I don't really think one has to be a member of a hatedom to take those points of view. There were, at the very least, some poorly thought out decisions made in that book.
John Clark is the maximum end of the competence spectrum in the books. However it is fairly rare in Clancy books that problems can be solved before lunch, because they revolve around complex political situations where no matter how badassed he is won't really resolve the problems.
Sum Of All Fears is a good one for where all the protagonists essentially fail and only "win" by managing to not make things epic scale worse. Debt of Honor (easily the most ridiculous scenario) ends with an eerily familiar disaster despite "victory" being achieved.
I'd say that Tom Clancy's books are more characterized by realism vs idealism (in the Political Science sense). The idealists are shown as naive and often the reason the situations get out of control, while the realists are the ones who come in and save the day.
Personally I think that the big failing of his books is that they kept upping the ante each time, with Jack Ryan and co. doing more and more ridiculous stuff to solve increasingly out there problems.
There are two things you need to check before reading a Tom Clancy novel and expecting it to be good:
1) Was it written before the fall of the Soviet Union
2) Does it mention Jack Ryan in a major role
As far as I can tell, Debt of Honor (1994) is where he went off the deep end and never recovered.
I will just read them as Alternative History. :smalltongue:
The return of the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" was quite ludicruous, but Clancy wasn't alone being afraid of Japan taking over the world at that time.
Is there a similar hatedom against other thriller writers, like John le Carré, Graham Greene, Robert Ludlum, Graig Thomas (Firefox :smallbiggrin: ) etc? I know Ian Fleming receives a lot of criticism, but it usually is pretty much well-deserved.
Clancy's certainly not the only such Hatedom on the site. It's simply the example I used to illustrate the problem as I see it.
I understand the predicament.
The problem with Tom Clancy (nowadays, at least) is that the rights to his name are owned by, right now, Ubisoft, who uses ghostwriters to crank out stuff 'by Tom Clancy'.
Wait, does Tom Clancy the person still write books? Because I mostly consider "Tom Clancy" to be a brand these days.
He does, as far as I know. You can identify a Tom Clancy-brand book or work if the cover reads Tom Clancy's whatever. AFAIK, the Jack Ryan jr books are still written by him. In any case, the Hatedom I mentioned is toward his older Ryanverse books.
Quite true. The trouble is that, for example, people seem to mistake Elizabeth Elliot and President Fowler as a Straw Feminist and a Straw Liberal. In both cases, their actual politics are rarely touched on, it's their personal flaws that make them antagonists. EE is vain, ambitious, and overconfident, which leads to her being utterly incompetent in the role she wound up playing. Fowler is too insular and cliquish, meaning he'd rather accept a flawed recommendation from Elliot than a sounder one from an outsider. There's barely a trace of straw on either of them, but, becuase they're liberal semi-antagonists in a book that tends to support a more conservative viewpoint, they are tarred with the strawman brush.
I would assume that those who paint them as strawmen see the whole ordeal as a sort of ad hominem deal: it doesn't matter that he doesn't focus on their politics, what matters is that they HAVE those political views and that they are ALSO incompetent/flawed/whatever. Strawmen not in the sense that their political views are exaggerated and shown to be horrible, but strawmen by association of their horrible other traits with the fact that they have those political views.
I've never read his books, but such ad hominem type mockeries are not at all uncommon. Sort of a "see, I don't even need to show why these political views are bad, because only people who are bad for OTHER reasons would even have those views!" type deal. While I have no idea whether this is how things come across in his books and/or whether that was intended, I would not be at all surprised if this is how the hatedom saw it.
A fair point, and likely how the Hatedom interprets things. However, other characters in the books pretty strongly show that this was not intended. Not going into it anymore here, as this is getting pretty far off-topic.
So you are enforcing the fallacious argument of personal failings as comments on political philosophies, to argue that character who's critical flaws personal are ad homeim attacks on any policy the source disagree with. I always liked the description of this as a verbal Escher drawing.