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troperville

That is, unless someone does something stupid or evil enough to repulse them. Whether it was the heroes or the villains, anyone who steps over some inexcusable line will invite their wrath, and this isn't the regular Neutral No Longer give-the-other-side-some-reinforcements wrath ... this is "we have an army of Cthulhu clones" wrath. Expect an Oh Crap from the receiving end if and when the former neutrals start whipping out the doomsday weapons. On the other hand, for the beleaguered side not subject to the proverbial giant's wrath, this is a moment of celebration as they gain a powerful ally and they will fight alone no more.

There are two key points to look for before and after this trope comes into play.

Before: There is an established conflict, of any sort, between any number of parties, with a prominent neutral party that wishes to remain uninvolved.
After: When the neutral party enters the conflict, it drastically alters the balance of power.

A Sub Trope of Neutral No Longer and related to Heroic Neutral. May serve as a Deus ex Machina and/or Story Breaker Power (and/or Game Breaker, if the work is a game) if the giant was an All-Powerful Bystander. Compare Default To Good. If the entity is an individual, then they won the Superpower Lottery.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

The Flying Pussyfoot arc of Baccano! would already have been a clusterfuck: A cult, a bunch of Ax Crazy mafia goons, and a gang of delinquents were all planning to attack the train, which also happened to be carrying three immortals, the wife and daughter of an influential senator, and a surprisingly badass agent of The Daily Days. However, one of those mafia guys made a huge mistake: he killed the elderly conductor Tony, then tried to kill a younger conductor when he found out. Unfortunately for him, his would-be victim was Claire Stanfield, a nigh-unstoppable, Ax Crazy, Crazy Awesome badass Professional Killer and Torture Technician who did not appreciate someone murdering his mentor. Carnage ensues as the Rail Tracer makes its merry, blood-soaked way up the length of the train.
In Gundam SEED Destiny, Durandal attempts to kill the retired Kira Yamato and Lacus Clyne so they don't get in the way of his plans. This alerts them to his evil intentions several months before anyone else on earth suspected a thing, causing them to take the Freedom, Archangel and Eternal out of storage, which all become instrumental in his defeat.
- As a matter of fact, near the end of the series Kira himself says "If not for that attack, we probably would have gone along with anything Durandal wanted."
In One Piece, Caesar Clown warns Luffy that harming him is the equivalent to getting on Donquixote Doflamingo's bad side.
- Luffy is all about this trope. Nearly every arc has him getting involved in someone else's fight and kicking major ass. Unfortunately he gets it pulled on him a few times as well. Hint: when an Admiral gets involved that's a sign that you're up shit creek without a paddle.
At the end of Princess Mononoke, Lady Eboshi decapitates the Shishigami, which ~~nearly~~ causes the destruction of the entire forest and nearby town.
Done twice in Fairy Tail, by the same person, in the same story arc, and pretty much at the same time. While attempting to simultaneously capture Zeref and annihilate Fairy Tail, Grimoire Heart, and specifically their leader Hades, manage to piss Zeref off to the point where he stops doing his best to avoid all life forms and proceeds to track Hades down with the intent to kill him. It's then revealed that Hades has also managed to draw the attention of Acnologia, a murder happy dragon capable of destorying continents.

Comic Books

In the 1960s X-Men comics, this happened to Magneto when he tried to recruit the Stranger via intimidation.
In the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, Darkseid is somewhat of a example of this.

Fanfiction

Moloch from Aeon Natum Engel fits the trope, and it didn't end well for anybody, Moloch included.
In Renegade, the Batarian Hegemony did this to the Global Defense Initiative by continuously supporting pirate and slaver raids into GDI territory in an effort to impede their colonization efforts. GDI expressed their disapproval quite violently. In addition, Word Of God is that the Scrin are apparently trying to avoid doing this to the Reapers.
While the governement was favorable to help the League of Non-Aligned Worlds, the Earth Alliance in The Dilgar War is initially neutral between the Dilgar and the League, save for a little tidbid: the Dilgar were to not invade the Markab and the Mentab. When the Warmaster Council vote to invade the Markab to reach the Vree (with Jha'dur saying that attacking the Markab was an immensely stupid act exactly because Earth protected them), the Dilgar curbstomps the Markab fleet only to meet Earthforce and a Macross Missile Massacre of nuclear weapons (about a dozen nuke for every ship the Dilgar had in that battle). The losses sustained in that single battle where more than anything the Dilgar had lost before in the entire war, and cost them the war.
in any case where there is a cross over where the characters of one work are far stronger then the characters of the other works by cannon this is oftean the case. In various mon shows like Digimon and Pokemon the main characters are capble of feats with there mons that can badly wound the characters of of magic girl series like Sailor Moon and Pretty cure. Compare the attacks of the final forms or the God mons like Zekrom and Gallantmon to what Sailor Moon and Cure Black can do most cases there attacks can almost kill the Big bads of the shows.

Film

Godzilla, frequently (and literally).
The United States as per the final voice over of the trope quote in Tora! Tora! Tora!. Maybe Yamamoto never said it - but he should have.

Literature

The Ents from The Lord of the Rings curb stomp Saruman's fortress of Isengard after he cuts down their forest to burn it for fuel.
- Though the Ents weren't really neutral; they were pretty much Lethargic Good. The only thing keeping them from acting is the fact that, being essentially tree-people, they don't do much of anything without a whole lot of convincing.
- In Peter Jackson's film adaptation, the ents decided not to intervene — until Merry and Pippin steered them toward the site where all the trees had been burned down.
- Other examples from the trilogy are the Dwarves of Erebor (whom Sauron turns into enemies with his Faux Affably Evil messenger) and the Rohirrim (whom Saruman almost had reduced to political paralysis until Gandalf revealed The Man Behind the Curtain.)
Rowan And The Zebak does this with a dragon.
In The Dark Is Rising series, in the novel Greenwitch, the Greenwitch is part of the Wild Magic, which is neutral between the Light and the Dark. She is not powerful enough to present a direct threat to either faction on her own (although Tethys is), but she does end up in a situation where she has something both sides desperately need and can't take without her consent.
This is the premise of the next few Honor Harrington Novels, with the giant in question being the Solarian League, a massive star nation whose populace comprises 80% of all of humanity in the galaxy.
- Though as the League is finding out in the harshest way possible, their size doesn't mean nearly as much as they always assumed since their military technology is horrendously out-of-date. So far most of the battles they've engaged in have been curb stomps, with the League the one being stomped upon. In A Rising Thunder, in the largest naval battle in the history of the verse, the League had 300 superdreadnoughts destroyed completely and another 60 or so heavily damaged out of their 427-SD fleet, with 1.2 million or so crew dead. The Manticoran Grand Fleet, with a comparable number of S Ds, suffered minor damage to a handful of them and lost about 2000 troops.
The Culture, from the Iain M. Banks novels. From Use Of Weapons: "You might call them soft, because they're very reluctant to kill, and they might agree with you, but they're soft the way the ocean is soft, and, well; ask any sea captain how puny and harmless the ocean can be." Or, if that's a bit flowery for you, there's the universal adage of the civilizations which have dealings with them; "Do not fuck with The Culture." See Consider Phlebas and Look to Windward for what happens when those civilizations don't follow that advice. Someone phrased it as "The first rule of dealing with The Culture is that you do not fuck with The Culture. The second rule of dealing with The Culture is that you do not fuck with The Culture. The last rule is that you don't fuck with The godsdamned Culture!"
Another Iain M. Banks example: in the non-Culture novel The Algebraist, the Dwellers (in gas giants) have a reputation for wiping out civilizations that piss them off...but they don't care what the inhabitants of rocky Earthlike planets do to each other as long as they leave the Dwellers alone. One of the book's many subplots concerns trying to persuade the Dwellers to help defeat an invasion fleet before they get around to attacking the local gas giant.
- Banks is fond of this trope. The entire plot of Consider Phlebas is driven by the fact that the Culture and the Idirans have to tiptoe carefully around the Dra'Azon, a very powerful species who happen to have designed the planet they are fighting over as a sort of museum.
The Protagonist becomes the ultimate Even Bigger Neutral by the Third (and last) Part of Tranquilium. He has some very long-term plans in operation, but mostly he just sits there, confusing enemies and allies alike with his apparent inactivity. Then a cult kidnaps his son to either use him for or blackmail his father into working with their occult plans. The father arrives and dismantles the entire cult, dashing their last chance to carry out their scheme in the process and finishing with a (jaded) Breaking Speech.
David Weber's Out Of The Dark: when the alien invaders are about to make the human race extinct, someone on Earth (Count Dracula) finally decides to come out of his self-imposed exile and show them what real monsters can do.
By introducing late 20th century technology and ideas in early 17th century Europe the time traveling Americans of 1632 have awoken the interest of the Ottoman Empire: the mightiest military power of its time, ruled by a Sultan named Murad the Mad, who is, according The Spymaster Francisco Nasi, as intelligent as he is insane and bloodthirsty.
Used in The Dresden Files books to explain why the various supernatural factions upkeep The Masquerade: they fear what would happen if mortal humanity became aware of what else was out there. Bringing mortal authority around into a supernatural argument is compared to the nuclear option.
- At least that's how it's explained in-universe to humans. Most factions have enough additional reasons it's hard to judge their real priority.

Live Action TV

The Doctor of Doctor Who is almost never looking for trouble and is willing to negotiate wherever possible, but his hand is so often forced that he's probably racked up more kills than anything else in the universe. Despite this, he remains a Neutral Good Technical Pacifist at heart and only uses violence as a last resort. Unless you're the Daleks, in which case it's plans A-Z.
In the Stargate SG-1 pilot, Apophis thought he was just kidnapping a host from a human population, albeit one with rather noisy projectile weapons instead of swords and spears. Business as usual for the Goa'uld. As it turned out, he pissed off possibly the only civilization in the Milky Way with the exact combination of manpower, militarism, scientific knowledge, and insanity needed to end not only his own tyranny, but that of his entire species.

Video Games

Command & Conquer:
- Narrowly averted in Tiberian Dawn:
Seth: Kane's been loathe to attack America, but I feel that it's time, and that you're the one to do it. This is the Pentagon. A full frontal attack with your strongest forces should render their military center of operation— *BLAM*
- Looking at Nod's arsenal, and some information of the Official Strategy guide, it's clear that Kane doesn't attack the US simply because he gets a lot of his weapons from US arms dealers. (Nod's units include the M2 Bradley, the Chenowth Desert Patrol Vehicle, the M-110 artillery, and even the Apache helicopter)
- Killian Qatar in Tiberium Wars disapproved of Nod's attack on GDI Blue Zones precisely for this reason. She even paraphrases the trope line. And she was correct.
  - Might be a subversion, however, as Kane knew it as well but was counting on a massive GDI counterattack to fulfill his master plan.
In Final Fantasy VI, the Evil Empire wakes up the sleeping magic creatures. They aren't happy about this.
- Along that same line, in VII humanity finally pisses of Mother Nature enough that she awakens the Weapons, literal sleeping giants. There is no vengeance like a Gaia scorned.
Yukari Yakumo of Touhou is a powerful Reality Warper who's normally too lazy to get involved in anything. However, in Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, Tenshi Hinanai destroys and then subverts the Hakurei shrine, putting Yukari's precious Gensokyo Barrier in jeopardy. When Yukari finally catches her, we see for the first time just what Yukari looks like when she's truly angry.
- Gensokyo has too many Sleeping Giants for its own good. It's strongly implied that shall Reimu ever fail in protecting the border (which is saying a lot), the dragon of Gensokyo will swoop down to deal with whatever problem there is. And it's not your standard fire-breathing Western fantasy dragon either: this dragon, when he/she/it appeared once in the past, fill the entire sky with his/her/its body. His/her/its presence alone cause extreme rain, enough to flood the entire Gensokyo. The dragon might be Gensokyo itself.
- Giants that have awakened are: Sakuya in Perfect Cherry Blossom; Yukari, Remilia and Yuyuko in Imperishable Night; Medicine and Yuuka in Phantasmagoria of Flower View. Those people normally don't overstep their domain, but you can't be so sure when Spring Is Late/Bad Moon Rising/Death Takes a Holiday...
Begnion in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. There is a war between two similarly sized nations, immediately south and bordering both of them is one three times as big as the two put together.
- The Dragons count for the sequel Radiant Dawn as well.
Sonic The Hedgehog: Sonic Unleashed - Despite being a horrifying Eldritch Abomination depicted nearly destroying the earth each millenia since time began, Dark Gaia is not so much evil as simply a force of nature (shown by the fact that whenever it tried to destroy the world upon awakening, it would be rebuilt by its other half, Light Gaia, and start the process all over again). It wasn't until Eggman tried to control the monster's power by firing his beam from space and woke Dark Gaia prematurely that he really put himself and the entire fate of the world in deep shit. Only Sonic and a formerly amnesiac Light Gaia make everything right again.
Both Galactic Civilizations and Mass Effect have a strange version of this. In both series, the humans are the galactic newcomers with little military to speak of, but our tenacity, bravery and the speed of build-up from token military into a powerhouse REALLY scares the other races. In Gal Civ, the Drengin (an evil warrior race) are scared of the humans and in ME the turians (the resident galactic police race) generally don't harbor a grudge over the First Contact War, but rather because they're the big, bad military and while the humans are a much smaller force, we're just as good, and did it in a tenth the time.
- In Gal Civ, the Drengin are terrified because humans operate in an entirely different method than they expect as far as militaries are concerned. They have a large, standing military fleet. Humans had no fleet at all beyond trade and exploration vessels, until another species attacked them... at which point the humans rapidly built a fleet large enough to give the Drengin nightmares, completely slaughtered the offending race (As in total genocide; that race no longer exists)... and promptly decommissioned and took apart all of its military fleet, returning to having no military at all. The Drengin are both terrified of the results the humans achieved and the fact that they would voluntarily go back to a completely demilitarized state afterward. They cannot wrap their minds around it.
  - And yet, in the sequel, the Drengin are on the verge of beating the humans back to the Stone Age.
- Mass Effect 3 has another example. Not that they were exactly sleeping by this point, but Kai Leng stealing the data on the Catalyst out from under Shepard's nose finally pisses the Alliance off enough to focus their entire military might on Cerberus.
  - Also, the Alliance almost invariably forms the bulk of Shepard's War Assets, with only the geth and krogan coming close to matching them (though adding the DLCs puts the miscellaneous alien groups over the top). Nothing like a Reaper invasion to get an entire species motivated.
Sort of in Overlord II. The elves futilely try to stop the Overlord from clubbing baby seals. Due to these actions, the Overlord and his horde of Minions decide to kill some elves and knock down their Sanctuary. He then decides to enslave or destroy both the elves and The Empire.
The Trade Order in Sins of a Solar Empire had no standing military to speak of. Just local planet-operated defense flotillas mainly consisting of frigates and cruisers in order to protect shipping lanes against Space Pirates. Then the Vasari invade with a massive fleet and thousands of years of technological advantage over the humans. They rapidly take a number of human colonies. Then the Trade Order gets reformed into the Trade Emergency Coalition, using its industrial and financial might to build an unprecedented number of warships, mostly using militarized versions of civilian ships. While the Vasari are still stronger in terms of technology and firepower, they can't possibly match the industrial capacity of the TEC. Even when the Advent join the conflict, the TEC are fully capable of waging a two-front war. Basically, We Have Reserves is in full effect for the TEC.
World of Warcraft: Word Of God gave this as their reasoning for having the Horde destroy Theramore, as a way to bring the Alliance into the war against the Horde proper. Of course, the Alliance fans felt the sleeping giant should have already been awakened by the attacks on Southshore, Ashenvale and Gilneas...
- In doing so, Horde Warchief Garrosh Hellscream has not only declared war on the Alliance, but also the avowedly neutral Kirin Tor and the blue dragonflight.
  - And on top of that, odds are fairly good that both the Alliance and the Horde will piss off the pandaren, most notably the Shado-Pan, whose leader is outspokenly against the faction hostilities brought to Pandaria's soil, dismissing it as a race war and calling the factions out for trying to pull the pandaren into it. Considering that Pandaria has a built-in defense mechanism called the Sha that react to and spawn from a variety of negative emotions, all of which both Red and Blue bring with them, and whose modus operandi is rampaging through the countryside until stopped, odds are increasingly in favor of Red and Blue getting a handy asskicking before this is all over.
  - That is they'll be giving one considering that A:The sha have more or less been beaten down already and B:Both sides are already studying them for further conflicts (And in the case of the horde, weaponizing).
Marathon 2: A large part of the game revolves around Durandal's comparatively paltry forces (made up of humans and S'pht) trying desperately to defeat a Pfhor fleet. Then the player succeeds in getting a message out to the long-lost S'pht'kr, a very powerful and advanced race of S'pht, about their brothers' plight, which leads to the curb-stomping of the Pfhor in the system (and plants the seeds for a decades-long conflict that eventually leads to the downfall of the entire Pfhor Empire at the hands of the S'pht'kr and humanity).
Exit Fate plays with this to the point that you don't actually realise it's been in effect until the very end. Rather large spoilers ahoy. At the end of the first half of the game, Daniel Vinyard and his Elysium Army manage to defeat the State Union. Then, out of the blue, the Almenga Empire gets up and conquers the hell out of Daniel's homeland: the Kingdom of Kirgard for seemingly no reason. Since no one's quite sure what the Empire is up to, they're not sure why the giant awoke - so everyone from Elysium and the Union bands together and unites under Daniel to take them down... which is exactly what the Big Bad, Emperor Siegfried, wanted all along. You see, Sieg's a Well-Intentioned Extremist who wanted to put an end to war forever by creating the world's greatest leader using the Hand of Fate - a powerful demonic spirit capable of influencing destiny. Said spirit resides within the body of his son, who turns out to be none other than Daniel himself and, together, the Hand of Fate and Siegfried have been manipulating events to force the world to unite under Daniel's banner. The empire wasn't the sleeping giant - Daniel's own potential as a leader was. In Siegfried's own words, everything that has happened up until this point was to take away the leaders of the world so that they would be forced to unite under a new one - his son. The Elysium giant then goes on to completely dominate the crap out of Almenga and ends up assimilating it into the Elysium Republic in the ending... just as Siegfried planned.
Metroplex heeds the call of the last Prime. Literal and figurative. Before the energon shortage, there was plenty running through Iacon to have him take direct action well before, but he remained uninvolved, seeing no need. Right until the Ark was attacked.

Western Animation

Played Straight and Discussed in the Thundercats (2011) episode "Between Brothers" when the usualy pacifist Elephants, previously constrained by a need to meditate on their every dilemma, decide to enter the fight against the Lizards:
Wilykit: You just woke a village of sleeping giants!
Ssslithe: The elephants... the elephants never fight!
Anet: Only rarely. But when we do, we fight to win!

Real Life

The American Revolution
- British General Burgoyne invaded New York from Canada in 1777. Facing him was a much smaller, poorly motivated American Army ... until British allied Mohawk Indians murdered a young woman named Jane McCrea. Burgoyne was not able to discipline the killers for fear of losing his Mohawk allies. The atrocity, and Burgoyne's seeming acceptance of it, was a propaganda/recruitment dream come true for the Patriots, who would soon amass an army of about 17,000 to force Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga.
- By 1779, a considerable number of rough'n' tough settlers lived west of the Appalachians. Since they were cut off from much of the goings on in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, they honestly didn't care who won the Revolutionary War (either way, government would not be a big factor in their day-to-day lives). In 1780, British major Patrick Ferguson firmly pushed them into the American camp by threatening to cross the mountains and destroy their homesteads and towns unless they swore loyalty to the Crown. The backwoodsmen, who had played no part in the American Revolution up to this time, responded by killing Ferguson and most of his men at the Battle of King's Mountain.
Real Life: Happened twice in one year (1941) during World War II:
- The Soviet Union was neutral^noteBy "neutral" we mean neutral relative to the rest of the war, i.e. not fighting one of the Axis Powers. At that stage in the war, the USSR had fought several wars with its neighbors, conquering the eastern half of Poland and attempting the same trick with Finland; these wars are legally and historically regarded as sideshows not properly regarded as actually part of the main war until...well...just close the note. until Germany invaded it in June 1941, and we all know how that turned out.
  - This Cracked article explains that even if Germany had not gone to war with Great Britain and the USA, Stalin would still have curbstomped the hell ouf of the third Reich.
"But the major reason Hitler was never this close to making your grandparents goose step through Times Square: The Soviet Union. Today, it's widely believed that Hitler, or really anyone's, chances of winning a war against the Soviet Union were on par with a snowball in a cage match with a chainsaw wielding Mike Tyson in hell. Yes, Hitler plowed through Europe and had the UK on the ropes, and could have done more. It didn't matter. Stalin was waiting on the other side, and Hitler was never going to win that war. It was just a matter of how much of Europe he would control at the moment Stalin eventually crushed him."
- In December 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy implemented its 'southern strategy' before its fuel reserves ran out under the United States' oil embargo. Invading British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, they also took the American Philippines and attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor. The Imperial Cabinet had, however, made a grievous error: The USA wasn't going to take an attack, an implied threat, and a blow to its pride without a fight. The film depiction in Tora! Tora! Tora! provides the trope-naming quotation.
- To paraphrase John McWhorter: "By the end of 1941 Hitler would invade Russia and declare war on the United States, which as mistakes go were both quite big ones."
The actual quote, featured in the movie Tora! Tora! Tora!, appears to be a case of Beam Me Up, Scotty!, as there is no reliable record of Yamamoto ever saying it.
- While he did not explicitly say those words, Yamamoto did express similar sentiments to his superiors prior to the attack. Yamamoto was of no illusions that all the attack would accomplish in the end would be the destruction of Japan as a Great Power, and the only question he could raise was whether the attack would buy six months or a year of grace with which to act before the hammer fell. (Midway was six months to the day after Pearl Harbor, bizarrely).
- Pearl Harbor was rather inept as a First Strike - but in all fairness, it was supposed to deter US entry into the war. The whole thing would appear to be a case of the Empire's top echelons believing what they want to believe, rather than what their intelligence analysts tell them. What's more, this wasn't the first time they had so grossly misread another country's motivations; that they even went to war with Britain and the Netherlands - and the USA - is a testament to this inability.
  - Why was Pearl Harbor 'inept'? Well, it did just enough damage to shock, enrage, unify, and motivate America like nothing else could, while doing as little truly significant damage as possible. Most of the battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor were relatively easily raised, repaired, refitted, and sent back into the war. In the biggest naval battle in history (Battle of Leyte Gulf), these Back from the Dead battleships utterly annihilated a third of the remaining Japanese fleet. Hundreds of aircraft were destroyed, but they were all very outdated or obsolete anyway. The massive oil reserves, submarine pens, intelligence/cryptology buildings, and most of the cruisers and destroyers were untouched, and none of the three fleet carriers were even there. And, because the attack took place in the middle of a very shallow harbor in warm waters, surrounded by military bases and a city, relatively few people died. So the end results? America began relying on what it had left, which turned out to be the most effective possible means to fight Japan—submarines, intelligence, and carriers with destroyer/cruiser support. Further, it made Japan extremely overconfident, as they thought that battleships were the true capital ships of the day, and that by destroying America's battleships, they had essentially struck a fatal blow. This actually also applied to America, who thought that it had taken far more crippling damage than it actually had, galvanizing its population and military like never before. As a result, you'd see marines, crews, and pilots alike going against Japan. The only truly major damage done was to morale—which was remedied by the Doolittle Raid, whereby large (but stripped down) bombers would be launched from aircraft carriers deep in Japanese waters to fly over Tokyo, bomb some targets of opportunity, and try to reach Free China (some didn't even have enough fuel to make as far as Korea). This turned out to be the opposite of Pearl Harbor—extremely cost effective, a huge morale boost for America, a major blow to Japanese confidence (which caused them to call back their entire carrier force that was wrecking Allied assets near India for a while), and caused a lot of confusion for Japan (as they wondered where these heavy bombers had come from, since even the idea of launching them from a carrier would never even occur to them).
- Germany also made a horrible fumble with Pearl Harbor. The US only really had an excuse to go to war with Japan, not the Axis powers in Europe, and FDR didn't even ask Congress for declaration of war against the Nazis. But the Nazis declared war on the US four days after the attack. Whoooooooops. (Yes, Germany decided to declare war on the world's greatest superpower, which was already galvanized and ready for action after Pearl Harbor but which probably would have left Germany well enough alone if they hadn't done. There is a reason this decision is mentioned on the What an Idiot page.)
This is what happened on 9/11, only the giant had no visible enemy to lash out at.
- When Osama bin Laden was killed and his records seized, it turned out that he was completely Genre Blind to this trope. He was actively holding his forces back from several planned attacks until someone came up with a plan for a massive attack on a date of great symbolic importance to Americans, in the hope they would be intimidated into withdrawing. Christina H at Cracked.com compared this strategy to repeatedly kicking a bees' nest in the hope that all the bees would give up and go home.
The SOPA and PIPA bills have ultimately unified the internet (yes, the entire internet) against censorship. Not only that, but tech companies, who have until now tried to not meddle too much in politics, have finally realized the only way they can fight back against Hollywood lobbyists is to use the same tactics - and since Silicon Valley's biggest conglomerates MASSIVELY outgun than even the biggest Hollywood film companies and are the single biggest contributors to the American economy and the modern world as a whole, it seems all these bills have done is ruin Lamar Smith's chances at re-election and make Darrel Issa's OPEN act far more likely to pass. By the end of the internet blackout, several lawmakers, a number of Congresspeople, and both Obama and Romney withdrew their support for the bills.
- This is actually pretty standard in modern US politics. Since the news media almost never covers politics in any depth except for elections and most voters are too apathetic to follow it on their own any voter mobilization will shift the balance of power on the relevant issue.
Napoleon considered China a sleeping giant. Given China's current "rise", he was probably on to something.
Right up until the Revolution most European powers were terrified of what would happen if Russia ever got its shit together. After all, being the single largest nation in the world with huge amounts of natural resources and a massive army, one would think Russia would have already curb-stomped most of continental Europe centuries ago. The Russians, however, were woefully behind the times in terms of industrialization; often times they didn't even have enough rifles to make sure every one of their soldiers was armed. It took decades of condescension by other powers, two invasions from Europe and being the first European nation to lose a war to an East Asian state for them to finally get it together (and become the single greatest threat to Western civilization ever, to boot).