just rename to TheAhab?: Pick On Someone Your Own Species

So, I'm dinking around the hunting-related tropes because I just watched a giant Ahab-Expy ham his way around the latest Thundercats 2011 episode, and I find a very tiny, unindexed article with all of four entries and four wicks called The Ahab, so I merrily set about trying to get it indexed and wicked and filling it with lovely potholes because How Did We Miss This One until I realize we have it already and it's called Pick on Someone Your Own Species. Since only one example from The Ahab entry was unique, and added barely ten minutes after I found it, I undid my work and redirected The Ahab to the much more heavily wicked Pick on Someone Your Own Species, adding the one original example there. Then I wondered.

Is The Ahab a better name, or not? The phraseology "The Ahab character" is used in the article, and we already have The Ishmael. I know proper names are frowned upon, but this is Moby Dick, and the article itself quite honestly reads like Characters as Device, (specifically a subtrope of The Hunter) even though it is not indexed as such.

edited 5th Aug '11 8:17:55 PM by Aiguille

The Ahab would be much easier to understand IMO.

Pick on Someone Your Own Species is already a healthy trope that's clear without knowledge of previous work*

.

edited 5th Aug '11 8:09:16 PM by DrStarky

Put me in motion, drink the potion, use the lotion, drain the ocean, cause commotion, fake devotion, entertain a notion, be Nova Scotian

Whatever else can be said about The Ahab's merits, I think Pick on Someone Your Own Species is a pretty opaque name.

I'm not saying Pick on Someone Your Own Species is good name(sounding like a line of diolauge is about as frowned upon as a character named trope) but it has a couple advantages over The Ahab.

• Understandable without any previous context*
  ^{even though I would be a tad concerned if they didn't}
  .
• It's working.

edited 5th Aug '11 8:13:49 PM by DrStarky

Put me in motion, drink the potion, use the lotion, drain the ocean, cause commotion, fake devotion, entertain a notion, be Nova Scotian

Pick on Someone Your Own Species brings up images of a human antagonizing a perfectly sapient nonhuman, whereas The Ahab sounds more like a grudge against a normal animal.

Even the trope is unclear on that. The description plainly says, "Be it a talking anthropomorphic animal...", but the Laconic says "dumb animal".

Actually a girl.

Alright, first I'm gonna actually read this trope I'm making judgements on.

Okay, I don't know if we should name it The Ahab, but it is certianly need of a makeover.

How about Moby Dick Plot?

edited 5th Aug '11 8:21:03 PM by DrStarky

Put me in motion, drink the potion, use the lotion, drain the ocean, cause commotion, fake devotion, entertain a notion, be Nova Scotian

I guess the reason I'm asking is mostly that this seems very like it should be a character type, (again a Sub-Trope of The Hunter) and as above, the name as it currently stands seems like a conflation between Animal Jingoism and Fantastic Racism

Dunno. Ahab makes me think of someone obsessed with revenge. Not this trope. The Ahab would be too confusing. Which is the problem with Character Named tropes.

Arch Enemy Animal.

For the record, I have no idea who Ahab is.

Captain Ahab, he's our hero~
Gonna take white whale numbers down to zero~
Gonna help us rip asunder~
Cetaceans who like to drag ships under~

Neither name works, really. Character named tropes are kind of a bad idea especially when Ahab is more known for the whole revenge thing and being crazy and stuff.

While the current name does sound a bit awkward, I object to The Ahab simply because we can't assume that everyone has read Moby Dick. Isn't it a classic example of a book that school teachers gush over but none of the pupils actually manages to read for more than half a chapter? Yeah.

"The ahab" gets slightly under 30,000 google hits, so it's clearly not a common phrase.

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!

@Dr Sparky: I disagree strongly that the name is immediately understandable upon reading. As someone else pointed out:

The Ahab may be debatable, but the current name is definitely no better and probably worse.

Yeah, I read maybe five chapters. Saw the first whale kill, that was it, gave up.

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

I've never read Moby Dick, but I know that Captain Ahab is psychotically obsessed with killing a whale. Pop-Cultural Osmosis.

My only concern would be it would get misused for someone pyschotically obsessed with hunting something beyond all reason, whether that was an animal, a person, or an inanimate object.

That says SO much about the education system.

I agree. My problem is that the name has more than one conotation

I know Ahab was about obsession and revenge, but only through Stock Parodies of the book.

Fight smart, not fair.

I knew that there was a whale (called Moby Dick) that was being chased by this guy.

To be frank, I didn't even know if he had a name.

Note that Ahab himself is one of those public domain characters that appears in hundreds of works, sometimes directly, sometimes as a blatant expy. That's one more reason that calling this trope The Ahab would be highly misleading. (Along with "character named tropes are always more obscure than you think" and "characters always have multiple traits".)

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

Don't we already have a character trope named after Ahab? Captain Ahab or something? Focused on obsessive revenge as the primary motivation of the character?

edited 6th Aug '11 11:39:41 AM by Sackett

I just checked my cliff notes and found out that the name 'Ahab' is biblical... :)

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!

I just noticed there's a real life section that consists of nothing but a list of animals that are frequently misunderstood and persecuted. The Dragonheart entry looks wrong too, since he's going after a whole species. The trope's not supposed to be directly analogous to Fantastic Racism.

Kinda argues for the rename. I like Animal Archenemy.

Meantime, I'm gonna cut those examples.

edited 6th Aug '11 11:02:57 PM by Tyoria

I'm not sure how accurate the Dragonheart example is. He seemed to be after one specific one, but didn't know how, so he settled on killing them all.

Fight smart, not fair.

Well it's been forever since I've seen the movie, but if he decided that it was okay to commit genocide against an entire sapient species because of the (completely misunderstood) actions of one member of that species, it would be because he had decided they were all Always Chaotic Evil — which is Fantastic Racism. If he were after one dragon, but killed all he came across not thinking they all had it coming but basically just to punish the one, that sounds pretty unforgivably heinous for a character who later repents and is meant to be sympathetic. Not to mention, I'm still not sure it would be this trope. Vaarsuvius from OOTS wasn't fulfilling the trope when s/he exterminated a quarter of the black dragon population because of the actions of one. Dragons are sapient. You could unexpectedly hold them accountable for their actions. Taking it out on related but not guilty parties is Disproportionate Retribution / Sins of Our Fathers and probably others, but not this trope.