Misused: General Ripper

What if artistic license creates a mismatch between the character's stated rank and the character's role in the story?

EDIT: I guess what I'm saying is, wouldn't how to categorize such examples be less blurry if we merged tropes that were similar but referred to a different rank?

edited 7th Aug '16 4:56:32 PM by neoYTPism

For what it's worth, This Index Is Not an Example lists the trope namer as a partial credit.

• General Ripper — General Jack D. Ripper of Doctor Strangelove is indeed insane, and he does indeed concoct a scheme to start a nuclear war between the United States and Russia, but he has almost none of the classic markers of the trope. Rather than being a loud, brash, jingoistic madman who gleefully sends his troops to die in battle, he's a quiet, soft-spoken man who successfully manages to hide his mental instability from everyone else in the military, and he spends most of the movie keeping his troops safely fortified in a military base.

So we have proof that at least one troper understood this trope as "insane evil military man" without reading the description. Not a surprise. :)

Bumping.

@neothing: Probably. Really this is a family of tropes organized on two axes:

• Motivations and how they affect the characters (current categories are "loves fighting", "obsessed with 'the enemy'", "other").
• Position in the army (not necessarily exact rank, we could be dealing with a Fantastic Rank System, and Insane Admiral applies to land force generals or air force/Space Fighter squadron leaders as well as naval fleet commanders). This dictates how much authority they have, the kind of damage they can do, and what it's going to take to bring them down.

edited 12th Jan '17 5:59:26 PM by StarSword

Clock expired; closing.