Now what?: Sandbox.Cleaning Small Name Big Ego

Now that Tedbaxter has been renamed to Small Name, Big Ego, what should be done over here?

The list of examples is so massive it makes my head hurt, but I have a few Film suggestions -

• I'd drop Orson Welles and Marlon Brando altogether. They both had titanic egos alright, but one is routinely feted as the greatest ever director and the other as the greatest actor. YMMV, but they aren't generally seen as small names.
• Whilst I can't cite specific examples, I think the issue with Spike Lee has been more an aggressive/confrontational stance on issues relating to race than ego as such, although I'm sure he's no shrinking violet. I think he also got into some kind of dispute over allegedly anti-Semitic remarks he made at one point. I don't think he really goes here.
• Finally, on a couple of examples the editor has suggested that being a bully/Jerkass does not necessarily make you an egomaniac. I think the two do tend to go together, but what's more significant is that James Cameron definitely isn't a small name and nor, arguably, is Val Kilmer. I would drop them.

Part of the reason the clean-up never went anywhere was that it hung up on the whole question of is the "small name" necessary, or is it really a case of Overinflated Ego — that is, the person may well be good, but they're not nearly as good as they think they are.

On the question of where simply being a dick is grounds for assuming that they also have an overinflated ego, I'm the one who was most outspoken that I don't believe it is. While the two often go hand in hand, much of the complaining and bashing that got the page in trouble in the first place was simply "He behaved like an asshole here" with no evidence that it was ego-driven assholishness.

Past experience has proven over and over again that pages which invite bashing get bashing, including bashing unrelated to the subject of the page. By saying "The misbehavior must be shown to be directly related to the person's overinflated ego", we give ourselves a weapon to use against such generalized bashing.

Like I said in another thread on Ted Baxter or Small Name, Big Ego or whatever, even the so-called "cleaned up" examples are not much more than creator bashing or complaining, and many of them have nothing to do with either small names or big egos, anyway.

When even the "cleaned up" portions are obviously suffering from the same problems that the original page had before, I cannot see anything worthwhile or salvageable in any capacity.

edited 12th Jun '11 9:35:21 AM by SeanMurrayI

We cut the examples on this once, didn't we?

^ Yes, although the Small Name, Big Ego namespace has been transplanted with what was originally the Ted Baxter trope just a day or two ago.

edited 12th Jun '11 10:46:59 AM by SeanMurrayI

We cut examples, locked the page and sandboxed it, trying to clean up the examples of bashing. The sandbox effort stalled out for the reasons I mentioned above. It's theoretically possible that it could have examples without bashing, if strict limitations were put on what is allowed, for example, these:

• Robert Pelloni, creator of the infamous - and perpetually unreleased - Bobs Game. On January 6th of 2009, during his self-imposed 100 days of isolation (an attempt to force Nintendo to grant him an SDK *
  ^{a vital piece of software to compile his game into a standard Nintendo format.}
  he posted on his blog "There is nobody like me. I have created the entire game, start to finish. I am far better than Miyamoto, Itoi, Kojima, Carmack, and Wright COMBINED. NONE of these 'designers' could create the entire thing if their lives depended on it! They rely on the assistance of others- and take all the credit. They don't even deserve their titles! I have bested them all by far."

• Linda Fiorentino. Never heard of her? Her best-known roles are the coroner (later Agent L) in Men In Black, and Bethany Sloane in Dogma. In the director's commentary for Dogma, Kevin Smith spends much of his time going on about how horrifying she was to work with, how demanding she was, what a prima donna she was, how horrible she treated other cast members, etc. He also states repeatedly his greatest regret was not giving the role to Janeane Garofalo, who had a bit part at the beginning of the film and originally auditioned for the role of Bethany, and giving Fiorentino the smaller part so she would have been out of their lives faster. (This may have been why her character was unceremoniously gone in Mi B 2 with only a single Written-In Absence line.)

• Pat Lee, of Dreamwave Productions fame. Mostly known amongst the Transformers fandom for overhyping his own art style and running Dreamwave into the ground. He has referred to himself on more than one occasion as a "superstar artist", which is ironic considering that most drawings credited with his name were actually done by uncredited and underpaid fans. This lead to his (mocking) Fan Nickname, "Superstar Funana".
  • When asked (during an interview at BotCon 2008,) if there as any possibility of bringing Lee in to work at IDW, Simon Furman replied "Over my dead body."
  • After the launch of Dream Engine, Lee's resume at the company's website claimed that he was responsible for relaunching "X-Men, Batman and more", implying that those franchises had long lingered in a near-dead state until Superstar Funana blessed them with his divine reanimating powers.

In all these cases, there is outside corroboration that the ego of the person listed far outstrips the reality of their talent or actual value as an artist.

This one would pass muster, if there was any link to where she "went on record" with that statement. I've trawled through a bunch of interviews with her (I stopped when I got tired of reading the "It came to me in a dream" spiel) and I couldn't find it.

• Stephenie Meyer went on record insisting that Twilight was a better romance then anything written by Jane Austen, Emily Bronté, William Goldman and even William Shakespeare, and that Edward was a better romantic lead then any of their protagonists (mostly because they were flawed and Edward supposedly wasn't).

But after putting a lot of effort into trying to clean it up, I have regretfully thrown in the towel on it. Sifting through the hatedoms, trying to find the documentation for the entries just got depressing.

edited 12th Jun '11 12:58:41 PM by Madrugada

What happened to all the Ted Baxter examples? None of the examples on that page itself were problematic.

Yeah, they were also pretty funny. Plus the trope is really common.

Ted Baxter is a real trope. Unlike Fleme Bait tropes this is a device that's meant to be obvious in universe. At worst it's Your Milage May Vary as some people might think the character deserves his ego but most of the examples were really clear.

Shouldn't we cut this now that Small Name, Big Ego is part of the No Real Life Examples Please index?

Yeah, the page seems fine now. Lock?