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Nohbody "In distress", my ass. Since: Jan, 2001
"In distress", my ass.
Aug 12th 2011 at 7:37:16 AM •••

Need help with an image.

I grabbed one of the images made available during yesterday's WC CIC party (which I missed :( ), thinking it would be nice for the page.

Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to get it to look right. I'd like to have the quote and article below the image, but all I can get it to do is wrap around, whether I left- or right-justify it.

The code given to me by the uploader:

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Winggoldlong2-small_2331.jpg]] [[caption-width-right:350:some caption text]]

(I wanted to use the stacked version from the original box art with "Wing" above "Commander" and the stylized wings to either side, but couldn't find a good copy of that, and never heard back from the graphics gurus at the CIC about one.)

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Fighteer MOD (Time Abyss)
Nohbody Since: Jan, 2001
Aug 12th 2011 at 7:49:09 AM •••

I was afraid of that. Anyway, went with right-justified, as it was the least format-breaking option.

[edit]
I have been giving consideration, though, to just finding an image of the front box art for WC1 and using that, as suggested on the wiki page about image selections

Edited by Nohbody All your safe space are belong to Trump
AFP Since: Mar, 2010
Dec 23rd 2010 at 8:22:18 AM •••

I'm breaking the article up into separate pages for the movie, animated series, and if there is a setup for it, the books (do we have a /book/ or /literature/ branching on the wiki setup?)

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Fighteer MOD (Time Abyss)
Dec 23rd 2010 at 8:35:33 AM •••

You'd use Literature, but generally it's more appropriate to make an Expanded Universe page for all the tie-in material. So, the main article would be Wing Commander (or Game.WingCommander), the film would go in Film.WingCommander, the series in Series.WingCommander, and the EU would go in Wing Commander Expanded Universe.

Edited by Fighteer "It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Nohbody Since: Jan, 2001
Dec 24th 2010 at 7:24:56 AM •••

In regards to the TV series, the full name is "Wing Commander Academy", not just "Wing Commander". After I post this I'll do up a series namespace page with the right name (Series.Wing Commander Academy), then cutlist Series.Wing Commander after adjusting the tabs (awesome/tearjerker/etc) and any wicks that might have been changed (dunno, just opened up TVT a few minutes ago).

Edited by Nohbody All your safe space are belong to Trump
Nohbody Since: Jan, 2001
Dec 24th 2010 at 7:29:32 AM •••

A thought just occurred to me (no, it didn't hurt :P ): For the character sheet, currently attached to Main.Wing Commander, it lists character tropes from all WC media (games, movie, show, etc) in one big list. Would that need to get split up into media-specific stuff?

Edited by Nohbody All your safe space are belong to Trump
Fighteer MOD (Time Abyss)
Dec 24th 2010 at 8:02:51 PM •••

There's nothing wrong with having a global characters page, if all the media share a title, since it's all (technically) part of the same universe. However, WCA would have its own Characters page because it has a different title, and so would the WCEU.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Nohbody Since: Jan, 2001
Dec 24th 2010 at 10:11:29 PM •••

The thing is, though, that WCEU (as you put it) is all "part of the same universe". It's not like with SWEU where there's levels of officialness, where some works can be ignored if inconvenient.

To be honest, I'm not really comfortable with breaking up the WC page all that much. The show split off is fine, as it's not the exact same title, and I can see the merit of the movie being its own page as a better way of organizing WC. Splitting off the other stuff seems a bit much, to me. I'm a little wary in general of making readers have to follow hotlink after hotlink to get to what they're interested in, outside of things like the pages being too large for the parser.

All your safe space are belong to Trump
AFP Since: Mar, 2010
Dec 24th 2010 at 10:45:47 PM •••

I say the easiest thing to do would be to use the Wing Commander Academy namespace as a redirect to Series.Wing Commander, so we'd still have all the tabs on the top connecting it to the other Wing Commander pages.

Nohbody Since: Jan, 2001
Dec 25th 2010 at 7:37:14 PM •••

Yeah, works for me.

(Though it's Series.Wing Commander Academy, as there's also a WC "game"  *

with the title WCA. Not all that likely a point of confusion given the relative obscurity of the WCA (game) even among WC fans, granted, but why not zap problems before they become one? :)

(edit) Redirect on Series.Wing Commander Academy set.

Edited by Nohbody All your safe space are belong to Trump
AFP Since: Mar, 2010
Dec 31st 2010 at 10:19:39 AM •••

Aaaand I may have just watched the entire series and troped as I went along. Do we have a page for people who just go on editing binges? Obsessive Troping Disorder?

Nohbody Since: Jan, 2001
Jan 1st 2011 at 3:40:29 PM •••

I think that's covered under the "ruin your life" thing. :P

Somewhat more seriously, though, a lot of what you put there is already covered on the character sheet for WC, which was why I thought we did the redirect thing for Series.Wing Commander Academy, in part to avoid duplication of effort already done on Characters.Wing Commander.

Edited by Nohbody All your safe space are belong to Trump
Nohbody "In distress", my ass. Since: Jan, 2001
"In distress", my ass.
Sep 14th 2010 at 1:41:32 PM •••

From my occasional battles with natter, in other pages, I've come to wonder if the description for the WC page could use some paring down. Putting in all that info is nice from a WC geek perspective, but it interferes with the ultimate purpose of TV Tropes: the tropes.

Should the game breakdown be trimmed or cut completely, and the rest of the description similarly reduced? It's not stupidly larger than most comparable space sim works pages (X-Wing, Freespace, etc; Freelancer, on the other hand, is solid Wall of Text, without even a page image like the two I mentioned before), but it's not exactly tiny like Starlancer's, either.

Edited by Nohbody All your safe space are belong to Trump Hide / Show Replies
SomeGuy Since: Jan, 2001
Sep 14th 2010 at 2:58:50 PM •••

Strictly speaking the best response to this situation would be to split the Wing Commander series off into separate pages, leaving this page as being only about the series in general and shared tropes across all games.

This isn't a project I'd much like to participate in, as enacting the split by necessity would involve learning a great deal of spoilers. I would be willing to redo the description to make this more clear if someone else will commit to (eventually) splitting off the narrative tropes into separate pages.

See you in the discussion pages.
Nohbody Since: Jan, 2001
Sep 14th 2010 at 4:44:35 PM •••

I wasn't thinking of anything that ambitious, just trimming down the individual game descriptions to get each down to a short sentence or so.

I have an idea or two for how to word the shorter game descriptions, but I'll need to put them to paper (well, text file :P ) before I can offer anything solid.

All your safe space are belong to Trump
Nohbody Since: Jan, 2001
Oct 1st 2010 at 3:42:08 PM •••

A bit late, but I've gone through the game descriptions and trimmed them down a bit, though not quite as much as my initial "a short sentence or so". I tried to give a very broad summary of each of the games, plus note one technical feature, to cater to the geeky sorts (guilty as charged *grin*).

Anyway, as a sanity check before changing the actual page, here's my ideas for the descriptions:


  • Wing Commander, in which your nearly-Silent Protagonist becomes a hotshot pilot aboard the TCS Tiger's Claw, a famed carrier in the Terran Confederation serving in the Vega sector of space. Its use of sound made the Sound Blaster name a household name in computers.
  • Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi, which starts out with the Claw being destroyed by Kilrathi Stealth Fighters (which can turn invisible) while trying to attack a major enemy command post. Your character finds himself unfairly blamed, and vows to clear his name, getting his chance ten years later. Its use of digitized voices finished cementing Sound Blaster's fame.
  • Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, in which the series moves to rendered 3D graphics and Full Motion Video, involving several big-name stars. Blair helps take the war to the Kilrathi one more time, but not without cost.
  • Wing Commander IV: the Price of Freedom takes place two years after the end of the war, after Blair has retired and... become a farmer on a desert planet. Instead of buying some droids, he's re-activated to investigate unrest out on the frontier, where the difference between friend and foe isn't quite as clear-cut as it used to be.
  • Wing Commander Prophecy starts a new chapter in the series. You no longer play Christopher "Maverick" Blair, but a hot-shot new pilot, son of famed Tiger's Claw veteran Michael "Iceman" Casey. From the depths of space comes a new foe, one even the Kilrathi fear, and it's up to your experimental carrier to stop them. Prophecy is one of the first space sim games to utilize 3D accelerator hardware, in particular the 3DFx line.
  • Wing Commander Secret Ops was originally released online in a free episodic format  *, using a version of Prophecy's "Vision" game engine. It moves six Midway pilots to a new ship for another campaign against the "Nephilim" invaders as they strike at the heart of the Confederation. Secret Ops is something of a favorite in the Game Mod community, for its relative ease of modification for new campaigns, even in other Science Fiction universes.

Edited by Nohbody All your safe space are belong to Trump
Nohbody Since: Jan, 2001
Oct 25th 2010 at 9:20:59 AM •••

Since there's apparently no objection to the above, I'm going to transplant it to the main page.

All your safe space are belong to Trump
Fighteer MOD (Time Abyss)
Oct 25th 2010 at 12:48:00 PM •••

I'm content to let you mind this page, Nohbody, since you have a great deal of time invested in it. Good work!

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
codenamehunterwolf codenamehunterwolf Since: Dec, 2009
codenamehunterwolf
Nohbody Since: Jan, 2001
Sep 10th 2010 at 3:36:06 PM •••

Working on it, in between bouts of Real Life interference. Given how everything WC is one continuity, regardless of the medium (yes, that includes the movie), I'm not going to sort the tropes by medium, just folders for "Humans" and "Kilrathi" (and "Others", if appropriate, if tropeable characters don't fit either category; I'll have to check that later, but I suspect there isn't enough reference to other species to justify more finely split folderization).

Edited by Nohbody All your safe space are belong to Trump
Nohbody Since: Jan, 2001
Sep 12th 2010 at 9:12:14 AM •••

Aaaand... done.

Sorta.

I know there's some missed stuff, but frankly I was getting sick and tired of looking at it. Wiki Magic can cover the rest. :P

All your safe space are belong to Trump
codenamehunterwolf Since: Dec, 2009
Sep 19th 2010 at 4:21:17 PM •••

Nice. I was battling with depression otherwise I'd have helped, but let's see if I can add to it.

CharredKnight Since: Jun, 2009
Jun 12th 2010 at 3:49:07 AM •••

Can anyone explain to me how Wing Commander is not one of the worst video game movies off all times. Privateer 2 has a better cast, the writing is ridiculous, and the Kirathi's design are awful.

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Fighteer MOD (Time Abyss)
Jun 12th 2010 at 7:46:37 AM •••

Irrelevant to this wiki's mission of cataloguing tropes. Any discussion of this inevitably turns into a Flame War - just check the archived discussion.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Nohbody Since: Jan, 2001
Jun 13th 2010 at 1:59:48 PM •••

On the upside, CK did at least ask here, instead of just slapping it into the main page.

And, really, in any reality with the Super Mario Brothers movie (RIP Mr. Hopper) or Uwe Boll video game movie productions, a movie would have to work damn harder to count at "worst" than the WC movie did. :P

All your safe space are belong to Trump
codenamehunterwolf Since: Dec, 2009
Jul 18th 2010 at 3:14:25 AM •••

Some see it this way because the film has not much to do with the games. At all. As a stand alone project it is full of Narm but is not as terrible as claimed. It's only when this was how Chris Roberts wanted it that we really enter Wall Banger territory.

MoCellMan Since: Jun, 2010
Jul 7th 2010 at 10:02:20 AM •••

The entry for Least Common Skin Tone mixes skin tone and culture/ethnicity in a non-sensical way:

Least Common Skin Tone: Inverted in the first game. Your crewmates on the Tiger's Claw are a black man, a Japanese woman, a Belgian, a Taiwanese man, an Australian, a Scottish man, a Canadian, and Maniac.

What color are the Belgian, the Austrailian, the Scott, and the Canadian (that's assuming that the Taiwanese and Japanese have the "Asian" skin tones)?

Averted very strongly in the theatrical release, wherein white Americans Blair and Maniac are the Least Common Skin Tone (probably due to the movie having been filmed in Luxembourg). The only cultures never covered by the franchise are East Indians/Middle Easterners and South Americans.

Freddie Prinze Jr. has fairly white skin, as do Saffron Burrows, Tchéky Karyo, Jürgen Prochnow, David Warner...there is a lot of the light skin tone going on in this movie. This does not seem like a hard aversion of the 'one black guy' described in the trope.

The the Least Common Skin Tone trope is clearly written all about skin tone, or strong physical markers of ethnicity. These examples are of country of origin, or ethnic identity not readily apparent by skin color or Hassidic hair style or something.

I would propose just cutting it.

Edited by MoCellMan Searching for plausible mechanisms. Hide / Show Replies
Nohbody Since: Jan, 2001
Jul 7th 2010 at 11:00:13 AM •••

I'm not going to defend the movie entry, as it always did kinda sit a little uneasily with me (just not enough to change it), but in the first game, while the majority of the named characters are white, it's not all that great of a majority.

(And, yes, the oriental characters do have oriental appearances, so they're not just whiteys labeled as another race.)

I'm going off to do Real Life stuff, but I won't object chainsawing the movie entry entirely, since pretty much all the important characters save Rosie (Mr. Obutu [sp?], on the bridge crew of the Claw, isn't really important) are caucasian Europeans.

Edited by Nohbody All your safe space are belong to Trump
MoCellMan Since: Jun, 2010
Jul 7th 2010 at 11:07:46 AM •••

"...but in the first game, while the majority of the named characters are white, it's not all that great of a majority." Could that part be rewritten so that it is more clearly an aversion of the trope, which is actually about skin tone and how there is a more representative mix instead of just 'one black guy? That would make it a more useful entry (as well as make the overall work look better, as averting Least Common Skin Tone wasn't all that common for the genre).

The movie entry could be chainsawed, or could be rewritten as "played straight," again with the adjustment to actually address skin tones.

Edited by MoCellMan Searching for plausible mechanisms.
Nohbody Since: Jan, 2001
Jul 8th 2010 at 3:35:38 AM •••

Ok, I've adjusted Least Common Skin Tone to focus on races, not nationalities, and added a bit regarding the FMV games (3, 4, and Prophecy). Just for chuckles, I left the Maniac/Zoidberg entry in.

Edited by Nohbody All your safe space are belong to Trump
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