redirect farming: Bavarian Fire Drill

Bump. We good here? There's one good redirect, and maybe adding Refuge In Authority as another would work.

Please do not add Refuge In Authority. It's a snowclone of the name of another trope that has a very weak relationship to this one, and it's close enough to cause confusion.

edited 30th Jun '11 7:40:10 PM by Madrugada

I'm not adding anything. I'm just trying to get this discussion finished.

Authority Bluff?

We're just farming redirects, right?

How about Authority Con?

Also, I hate Refuge In Authority, it sounds like it means something along the lines of Screw the Rules, I Make Them! or a Lawful Evil authority figure.

edited 4th Jul '11 8:43:23 AM by savage

Refuge in Authority is bad. It doesn't describe the trope and can cause confusion. I'm behind Acting In Charge Equals Auhority and Sound Authoritive And People Obey. They're long, maybe wordy, but they're descriptive.

Authority Bluff sounds best to me, though it lacks the charm of the current name. Bavarian Fire Drill is so easily punned into Barrayaran Fire Drill.

Authority Bluff and Authority Con are good.

I like Authority Con.

Can we throw up a crowner and pick some redirects so we can close this thread?

Maybe Con With Confidence. I've always looked at the trope as being that if you are confident enough in your persona you can convince anyone you are legit. It doesn't have to be just an authority figure, as the nature of a Bavarian Fire Drill suggests that just shouting fire convincingly will get people to panic (you don't have to act like a fire chief to accomplish that).

I think that's much too general. That could instead be referring to being confident about any kind of con.

It's just a redirect. Those can be a bit more general.

There's no such thing as a flawless name, there are only names that work. Authority Bluff is too specific and Con With Confidence is too general, when it comes to redirects we could have both. When it comes to a search buth Con and Bluff are likely candidates.

I actually like Con With Confidence. It's certainly easier to remember.

Sorry, didn't realize you meant it as a redirect only, but still I think that name could really sort of apply to any con trope we have.

Like I said, there is no such thing as a perfect name and whatever we come up with will likely miss some aspect of the trope, short of If You Are Sure Of Yourself You Can Impersonate An Authority Figure.

I'm not saying it has to be perfectly descriptive and encompass everything about the trope in a single word, no more, no less. I'm just saying it should at least be specific enough that it couldn't mean almost anything.

All I get from Con With Confidence is that "if you are going to con someone do it confidently," but the trope is actually "If you pretend to know what you are talking about then people will listen to you without thinking." I think the problem here is the way it's phrase (One Should) Con With Confidence sounds more like advice or a motto then a title.

Besides this is usually just as much of an Indy Ploy as it is a con.

Note that the word "Con" itself derives from the term "confidence", as in "confidence trick", so Con With Confidence is almost an oxymoron.

edit: sorry, not oxymoron, but the opposite. Redundant.

edited 30th Jul '11 6:18:08 PM by Xtifr

Unless that's going to confuse people I don't see how the redundancy hurts. We have a trope called Bastard Bastard for crying out loud.

It sort of suggests that there's some other type of con. This is more of a supertrope, of which the con game (used to further a specific goal, usually extracting money from the mark) is a subtrope. The trope namer is about a trick run for no purpose except to mess with people (for the lulz).

This is not a complete disagreement with your argument, merely a clarification of why I think the name might not be ideal.

The trope covers a wide range of variations on how this can be done, we've already described several of them here. There is impersonating an authority figure (such as a claiming to be a doctor when someone is injured in public), taking on a persona that doesn't look out of place (wearing a white lab coat in an ER) and there is just sounding convincing when expressing an emergency (such as Richard Kimble directing security guards to stop Gerard just by sounding like a worried bystander). I just feel the crux of the trope surrounds how convincing you are in the deception rather than exactly how you are deceiving them. Sarcastic Confession is a pretty closely related trope in that regard.

As for the whole topic on mere audible appeal it does have Added Alliterative Appeal going for it. If we go with something else we may go somewhere in the realm of Deceive With A Convincing Smile.

edited 30th Jul '11 11:12:35 PM by KJMackley

Adding support for Fake Emergency or Faking An Emergency as redirects.

But the trope isn't limited to faking an emergency.

I'm partial to Authority Bluff, myself.