Is this really Always Male, there's a ton of female examples listed here.
While "female bully who plays football" is pretty rare, this page and many others defines the trope as "good at sports and is a bully", of which there a ton of female examples.
Sorcerer in training
Removed Real Life section per discussion and vote in Real Life Maintenance thread. Truth in Television counts as Real Life.
Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving. -Terry Pratchett
So even if my character is female, not exactly tall, isn't very popular (since in fact most people are either annoyed or scared of her), and even proves to not be entirely a bitch, but is still arrogant, foul-mouthed, short-fused, and skilled physically, and is an Obnoxious Snarker to boot, would she still be this trope?
Edited by 69.172.221.4
Does it count if the hero is a jock too? Many works of fiction have an Lovable Jock protaganist and a rival in sports who fits this trope. In that case, they aren't claiming that all jocks are jerks, just some.
Edited by Waterlily
If a character looks the part for this trope, being tall for his age, muscular, blond and academically bad to boot, but personality-wise is really shy and a nice person, would this be a subversion or an aversion?
EDIT: Pffft- silly me. It's a subversion.
Edited by 69.172.221.4
Anyone think we need a page for the "All Football Teams Are Assholes" cliche? Any work that I've seen that is not specifically about the team in question tends to portray them as a bunch of boorish dumbasses, but in my experience football teams are no different than anyone else in temperament. There's also the "dumb quarterback" thing that boggles my mind because generally the quarterback is the most intelligent person on the team. Most people that I have heard of acting like the Jerk Jock trope tend to not even play sports at all.
Edited by Jimbag Hide / Show Replies
The dumb quarterback thing definitely needs a page. Quarterbacks should never be stupid. The ego that walks, sure. Stupid, no.
How close to the stereotype: big, dumb, violent, sexist, and male does a character have to be to belong on this page? Is it enough to be evil and a member of a sports team (preferrably one who likes to rub their success in)? Or do you need to have the full set of traits.
On a similar note, this is listed as the Spear Counterpart to The Libby, but could one have a female example? And, connecting to the first question, if you did, how close would she need to be to the archetype/stereotype?
Although everyone has a few Jerk Jock stories (this troper included), I sometimes feel as if Hollywood thinks that the simple trait of being good at a sport guaruntees the young athlete will be a bullying, violent misogynistic sociopath.
I'm thinking of putting this justification on the main page.
No doubt there's some Truth in Television, to a certian extant. High schools and colleges have been known to tolerate or even condone and coverup disrespectful and sometimes even criminal behavior by star athletes (athletic programs tend to be hefty sources of publicity and revenue for schools). Additionally much ink has been spilled on the sense of entitlement that "Jock Culture" in schools encourages. ...
... And yet, beware Unfortunate Implications. Simply enjoying sports, and being athletic does not necessarily make one a sociopath. In Hollywood, however the Jock will rarely be the good guy, unless the story is a High School Sports movie.
Hide / Show Replies
Additionally, this seems to be a specifically US problem. Or at least, I've only ever seen it used as a common trope in American works, not in British ones. And in my own experience (as a shy nerdy kid who got bullied), the main bullies were the under-achieving thick kids who took out their frustration on people who were smarter but weaker than they were. I never saw or experienced any antagonism between the sporty types (not "Jocks" - in a UK context, that would mean the Scots) and geeks/nerds. Both groups did well at their own thing, and weren't particularly interested in the other's thing, so there was no rivalry or resentment in either direction.
...
No, no there really shouldn't. Please, let's not do this.
Wrestler, bodybuilder. No hopes, no dreams.
Yes, there really should. I'm a bit shocked that it doesn't already exist. For something that's so blatantly Truth in Television, that so many of us have personal experience with, the Troper Tales for Jerk Jock should be just as big by now as the one for his grown-up counterpart, the Sadist Teacher.
Edited by 69.46.35.146
I think it's fine if someone wants to make a Troper Tales for either of those- I don't read Troper Tales anyway, but I don't see the problem with having the page.
Hodor
Troper Tales for something like this would simply be a large amount of stories of something prevalent that it doesn't really add to the discussion. If it appeared in stories as often as it was in real life, it would end up as a Discredited Trope; and there's already threads on various sites where people added stories about themselves being bullied on a daily basis - and the schools doing nothing about it.
Most instances aren't different from each other, and such tales are only minimally different from Jerkass.
Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Complaining
, started by KaiserMazoku on Apr 22nd 2012 at 10:26:41 PM
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman