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Literature

  • Accidental Aesop:
    • Rainbow Six was intended as a screed against ecoterrorism and animal rights extremists. However, Clancy had to put the ecoterrorists in charge of a huge megacorporation to make them credible villains. The novel can instead be taken as a tract against unchecked corporate power.
    • The sneering, unfriendly condescension Carol Brightling gets from her coworkers within the Ryan administration, and the rolling-eyes unwillingness to listen from literally every non-environmentalist character whenever one of the environmentalists pleads their case, unintentionally puts across the idea that they aren't wrong that the ecological situation is bad and degrading, but that if something drastic and forceful doesn't happen nothing's going to be done about it because most people are completely unwilling to listen.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • The test subjects picked up by Horizon for human experiments with their modified strain of Ebola, first homeless men, then sufficiently isolated people seduced in various ways, who are infected, drugged into compliant and, in the case of the second batch, sexually-open states of mind to test transmission methods, and ultimately murdered in the case of those who survive until the late stages of infection. The story goes to great lengths to show how isolated they were, and their gradual and painful decay into simple statistics that the researchers, the occasional pang of conscience that doesn't actually drive them to do anything different. After they all die, that's that; only their worried families, if they have them, will even know they were missing, and only Popov ever really finds out by accident (which helps decide his Heel–Face Turn).
    • Rather than outright kill all of the Horizon executives, or arrest them and risk losing the case because there wasn't enough explicit evidence, John decides to dump them straight into the jungle, stripped naked of all clothing and gear, and let them "reconnect with nature" the hard way. They're tracked by heat signature from satellite imagery to keep an eye on them, and while we never find out quite what happens, none of them make it out alive. Much like what Horizon did to their test subjects, the world at large will never know what happened to them, making it more than a bit dark that this was the protagonist's idea of Laser-Guided Karma and doling out justice.
  • Strawman Has a Point:
    • For all that he presents them as unsympathetic, monomaniacal hypocrites, Clancy's unwillingness to have even a single remotely sympathetic character express any understanding or concern at all for any the villain's views, even the mild maybe-we-shouldn't-turn-the-Earth-into-an-uninhabitable-wasteland-in-the-name-of-short-term-profits ones rather than their kill-humans-to-prevent-ecological-apocalypse ones, actually backs up their point that they aren't being taken seriously, and that they need to take drastic action to get something done because if they don't no one has any interest in listening to them.
    • At one point, Carol and the head of Greenpeace discuss several plans to fix environmental problems easily using technology, like filling jets full of ozone and flying them over the South Pole to plug the ozone layer, or dumping iron filings en-masse in the Indian Ocean to promote plant growth and fix global warming, and then tell each other they're terrible ideas because they represent further human meddling with nature. Clancy probably intends this to be his rebuttal to the environmentalists, suggesting they're just ideological fanatics who don't actually care about fixing the problems they rail against except on their terms, and that doing so would be simple, but they don't want to do it if it's not done in a way that fits with their view of the world. The problem is, all of these suggestions do sound like poorly-thought out bar-napkin-sketch ideas with huge potential to backfire, go horribly wrong, or at best just plain not work, and the environmentalists do seem perfectly justified in rolling their eyes at them. While trying to discredit them, Clancy has accidentally proven their point, that people like him have a distorted view of both the scope of the problem and the ease of the solution.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
    • Multiple chapters are spent building up the ecoterrorist's American headquarters, and highlighting all the things that would make it a very tough nut to crack. It's played up as the Kilimanjaro of forced entry scenarios, a hostage taker's wet dream. And then the ecoterrorists abandon the facility and flee to a smaller outpost in the jungle. Which they then leave, in order to engage in a jungle shootout with a team made up of the deadliest special forces operators in the world, which even the protagonists recognize as a painfully lopsided scenario. Though it's also entirely in-character for Horizon: for all their nightmarishly brilliant research, they're straight up too caught up in their own perceived moral superiority to realize when they became blinded by their own hubris, they didn't bother realizing how badly the scales were weighed against them once Rainbow was on their tail, and all this on top of their impulsive panic at the mere idea of even being targeted for their crimes to begin with.
    • There's this entire plot about a girl kidnapped to be a test subject on Shiva. She briefly accesses a computer, and while drugged, emails her father. The books spends pages following two cops of the NYPD who investigate her disappearance. They realize something big is happening but their investigation goes nowhere, and the entire plot thread basically ends with absolutely nothing. The only contribution to the actual plots the cops bring is that when Popov decides to spill the beans to Clark, they recognize one of the names he give as one of their suspects, and that's one more point of the pile of evidence that bolsters Clark's willingness to believe Popov.
  • Values Dissonance: Tom Clancy's anti-environmental views are full on display here - environmentalists, no matter how sensible they are (or present valid points about the state of Mother Nature), are treated with full contempt by non-environmentalist characters (especially from the Jack Ryan administration) who never bother to even listen to them. With today's world being completely aware about the dangers of climate change, and their active attempts to fix it through environmentally-friendly means - such as solar panels, wind turbines, and energy/hybrid vehicles - this comes across as downright mean-spirited, and a grim reminder on how there are folks who either pretend that climate change doesn't exist or don't care about the damage done on the environment.

Video Games

  • Adaptation Displacement: The game series has far more public exposure than the original book. When a film adaptation of the book was announced, people had to be reminded that they weren't adapting the games' storyline.
  • Anticlimax Boss:
    • Bastian Vanderwaal in Lockdown and Irena Morales in Vegas. Vegas 2 ends with a one-on-one quickdraw between you and Big Bad Gabriel Nowak, which might have worked, except he gives a long Motive Rant before either of you draw your pistols, and once you do he continues to rant on while you have your pistol aimed right at his head. Miguel Cabrero can be something of a Kaizo Trap though; he dropped his gun earlier, but he has another one in his holster, will pull it out once you've finished talking to him. Unlike Nowak, he wastes almost no time in actually pulling the trigger, but if you shoot him before he pulls the gun you get a game over.
    • Right before Nowak gets his head blown off, he sicced an attack helicopter on you. So yeah, the unfair quickdraw was more or less payback. To make it even more ridiculous, prior to going to face Nowak, Bishop orders the rest of his\her team to hold position. So, Bishop basically wanted a one-on-one confrontation, and got an assault helicopter for his trouble.
    • John Brightling in Shadow Vanguard. You kill all his mooks, blow up his door, and then a cutscene shows you killing his last two bodyguards before he is captured and gives a potential sequel hook.
  • Adaptation Displacement: Seemingly very few on the internet know that there was an original Rainbow Six novel.
  • Awesome Music: Lockdown is remembered as being the nadir of the franchise. Its only redeeming quality is the badass rendition of the Rainbow Six theme.
  • Broken Base:
    • Between those who like the older, more tactical games (up until Raven Shield) and those who prefer to more action oriented direction that the series has taken since Lockdownnote .
    • On the other hand, a lot of critics have actually preferred the more action-oriented Vegas games, arguing that the first three were too slow paced and unforgiving.
    • The story mode of Patriots. Parts of the public liked the idea of questioning morality in the age of terrorism especially since militaries have done questionable things in counter-terorrism, some are convinced that it's accusing patriotic citizens of being the bad guy.
  • Catharsis Factor: As mentioned on the main page the series had a budding mod community. Well in the wake of the September 11 attacks mods started popping up where you hunt down bin Laden, or the Taliban in general. As one gaming magazine hinted.
  • Complete Monster:
    • Raven Shield (PC version):
      • Nikola Gospić, born Dejan Blazevic, is the leader of the People's Social Nationalist Party (PSNP) who seeks to plunge the world into fascism. Previously a high-ranking member of the Nazi-sponsored Ustaše Regime in Croatia during World War II, Blazevic was tasked to liquidate assets from countless Holocaust victims. Escaping to South America after the war, Blazevic changed his name and started a new life as a successful businessman and philanthropist. Seeking to turn the world into a fascist regime after discovering he has liver cancer, Gospić plans to create an economic downturn that will tarnish South America's oil industry and allow him to swoop in with his own oil company and rise to power. Sending out his terrorists to kill anybody who knows of his identity, while also working with politician Alvaro Gutierrez for political protection, Gospić plans to use his meatpacking plants to send out a deadly nerve agent, preparing to kill millions of people to create terror, even attempting to deploy a nerve agent bomb in Rio de Janeiro with the goal of killing thousands.
      • The aforementioned Alvaro Gutierrez, also in Athena Sword, is a far-right politician who works with Gospić to secure funding for his presidential campaign. An accomplice in Gospić's plans to kill millions of people to create a fascist empire, Gutierrez provides Gospić with the VX nerve agent for his plan, and even launches several terrorist attacks to cover his tracks. Despite being arrested by Rainbow Six, Gutierrez still tries to complete the late Gospić's operation. Gutierrez commands his soldiers from within his prison cell to launch terrorist attacks in Italy and infect Athens with a deadly nerve agent to make up for Rio de Janeiro, fully anticipating the deaths of thousands.
    • Lockdown (console version): Bastian Vanderwaal is the South African leader of terrorist organization Global Liberation Front (GLF). Raiding Black Market tech company LNR Anderson to acquire the deadly virus Legion, Vanderwaal uses Legion on the building's scientists, smiling at their deaths, and blows the building up. Responsible for every act of terrorism in the game through his cell divisions, Vanderwaal at one point takes over the NATO Summit in Barcelona, taking intel director Bill Tawney hostage and threatening to infect him and every world leader there with Legion, making sure to broadcast the deaths as a way to horrify the world into submission. Foiled by Rainbow Six, Vanderwaal escapes and attempts to infect a major European city's water supply with Legion, willing to kill millions of people just to spite Rainbow.
    • Vegas duology:
      • First game: Irena Morales is a revolutionary Mexican terrorist leader already infamous for blowing up the French embassy and for smuggling in Americans to execute on camera. Working for Gabriel "Gabe" Nowak on his plan to take down Rainbow Six, Irena kidnaps Gabe and Akahashi to hold them captive. Taking over Las Vegas on Gabe's orders, Irena causes countless deaths through her actions, such as blowing up buildings, and threatening citizens with a micro-pulse bomb, which causes peoples' skin to burn off. Causing all that destruction as a distraction for Rainbow Six, Irena plans to blow up the Nevada Dam and launch a micro-pulse missile.
      • Second game: Miguel and Alvarez Cabrero are a duo of human trafficking brothers who take part in Gabe's plan to take down Rainbow Six for profit. Crafting chemical bombs to be deployed over various parts of Las Vegas, Miguel tortures a mole NSA Agent named Scott Neville to death and deploys a bomb on a packed sports arena, which kills hundreds, later ratting out Alvarez to save his skin. Alvarez later blows up a hotel and attempts to use the monorail to blow up a highly populated part of Vegas, later trying to blow up a Chinese theater once that fails.
  • Contested Sequel: Probably one of the most infamous cases in the Tom Clancy lineup. While the early games in the series are held as masterpieces of the tactical shooter sub-genre, Rainbow Six 3 on the Xbox was a critical darling at the time despite streamlining the gameplay significantly for console players, and this led to Lockdown being designed from the ground up to take that streamlining even further, effectively becoming more of a linear shooter where being tactical meant "shoot first and point your squad around." Every game since then has been held in some kind of contempt or another as the series dove right off into the deep end of being more "movie logic" military shooters of an elite squad taking on small armies singlehandedly, even with quick deaths still around every corner, while newer fans that came in on these later games tend to prefer this versus the rather convoluted, Trial-and-Error Gameplay nature of the first titles in the series. And then Rainbow Six Siege split everyone up in its own right and Patriot was cancelled, leaving the only modern avenue of Rainbow Six entirely to a multiplayer-focused tactical hero shooter title that has its own can of worms.
  • Demonic Spiders:
    • Pretty much every enemy you encounter with their auto-aiming capabilities and their "Instant Death" Radius (particularly in Vegas).
    • In the first three games, Elite difficulty makes all enemies into this (they most frequently get insta-death shots, have incredible accuracy and range, automatically aim without directly facing you, etc.) In Rogue Spear and beyond, if a crouched enemy sees you, they WILL immediately headshot you.
    • Shielded enemies in the Vegas games are a pain. If you hear the sound of a Mark 23 being fired, you'll know one of these guys is nearby.
  • Difficulty Spike: The first four missions of the first game are a warmup, then the difficulty hits you in the face with Ghost Dance.
  • Disappointing Last Level:
    • Happens with the last few missions of the original game. Mystic Tiger, the finale, is where it really rears its ugly head, undergoing an Unexpected Gameplay Change to a sniper-filled linear gauntlet. And Yellow Knife and Deep Magic, two unexpected stealth levels in a row.
    • Any stealth level in the original games. To wit: it's Metal Gear on European Extreme. In first person, which just makes it harder.
  • Fridge Logic: How in the bloody hell did Gabriel not get booted out of Rainbow after his trigger-happy stupidity in the opening mission of Vegas 2 got a negotiator killed and alerted all the terrorists? In the books, an accidental discharge of a handgun was met with immediate expulsion from the organization, yet it's implied that Bishop took their role as a mentor too seriously and stood up for him. All this ends up doing is giving him the opportunity to try to sabotage and kill everyone from within Rainbow; at least if he was kicked out for his screw up he wouldn't have had anywhere near as many resources from a lack of information to sell.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: The console versions of Rainbow Six 3 involves a US intervention in Venezuela after numerous false flag terrorist attacks against US interests in the country, which ultimately leads to the assassination of the President of Venezuela by RAINBOW. Throughout the 2010s, Venezuela under President Nicolas Maduro was mired by political violence, accumulating into US sanctions and an unsuccessful coup attempt in 2019 by the American-backed political opposition.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: A scene is Rainbow Six Vegas 2 has you fight in an MLG exhibit. The MLG later become memetically successful instead of a mere niche at the time.
  • Narm: The badass theme song aside, Lockdown on consoles decided to actually put gratuitous metal music in combination with CG cutscenes that are rather cheesy, creating a Mood Whiplash of some pretty horrifying terrorist operations being excessively rife with trying way too hard to be Darker and Edgier yet filled with awkward attempts at humor and slow-motion explosions.
  • Nightmare Fuel: The Vegas games are rife with this thanks to being based around a terrorist attack of unprecedented scale on the Las Vegas strip. The first game has the terrorists threatening to use micro-pulse bombs, which are capable of literally boiling people alive, as demonstrated in one instance. The second game also has you briefly hearing an undercover operative being tortured to death, and failing to stop a chemical bomb from going off and killing an entire gymnasium's worth of civilians. While hearing them pounding on the doors and screaming before it fades. The worst part? It was all a distraction for a bigger attack.
  • Nintendo Hard: One-Hit Kill (even with the heaviest armor you can get) gameplay combined with the inability to save mid-mission resulted in very high game difficulty. Additionally, characters killed during a mission were gone forever and would be replaced on the team roster by generic Red Shirts with much lower stats, while injured team members had decreased stats.
    • While easier than the original games, the Vegas series is still very difficult, especially if you play it like it was Gears of War or Call of Duty. The regenerating health is merely the developer's mercy for newcomers, and even with heavy armor you die after taking only 2 or 3 consecutive assault rifle hits, so use of cover is extremely important. For reference, on Normal difficulty you can survive about as much damage as you can on Veteran difficulty in Call of Duty.
  • Older Than They Think:
    • While Rainbow Six was the first to do it in 3D first person, the British DOS game Deadline featured similar planning-based tactical real-time anti-terrorist gameplay a few years earlier, only from an XCOM-like isometric third-person perspective.
    • The fundamental concept originated with Ariolasoft's forgotten They Stole a Million, a heist game from 1986 in which the player carried out a series of robberies, first selecting team members and then planning their movements with the aid of stolen blueprints before acting them out in real-time. With the exception of gunplay, the concept and many of the details were identical.
    • And, of course, the S.W.A.T. series, though few people realize this because the noticeably more popular third game in that series switched to Rainbow Six-like first-person gameplay to follow its lead.
  • Player Punch: Losing any member of the team permanently from enemy fire in the original entry can leave anyone feeling guilty about not being quicker on the draw; or not having espied a hidden enemy in critically dangerous direction. What brings this feeling to a head is the utterly heartrending musical piece that plays whenever this occur, especially in the N64/Dreamcast versions.
  • The Scrappy: Gabriel Nowak, entirely because of his rapid Villain Decay in the endgame and subsequent dip in competence.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • For some reason, the Vegas games don't have subtitles, which is very frustrating because the large bulk of the plot is delivered via exposition during gameplay-including in a heavy gunfight, and most characters either speak with thick accents or communicate through radio.
    • Another problem with the Vegas games is the sheer number of enemy spawn triggers the moment you cross an invisible line. Acceptable in something like Gears of War because of the damage you can take and cover rarely ever being far, not so acceptable in a game where a head graze is instant death and only a couple bullets on Normal kill nearly as fast, combined with enemies being able to shoot you the moment you're spotted and a bad habit of enemies spawning right around your next cover's corner. Thankfully your teammates can also be used to trigger these, but that means throwing them into the firing line which can risk them being downed or outright killed. Some missions can become Trial-and-Error Gameplay due to this.
    • The Take Cover! mechanic itself ranges from "the player/AI is nigh untouchable" to "most of your entire upper body is exposed because the character stuck to it at a weird position or the cover is kind of glitchy". And Logan % Bishop both have a really, really clunky set of animations from trying to lean around it to shoot or throw grenades, leaving nearly your entire body exposed in the process. Since blind fire is near-useless outside of point blank situations, taking aim without someone distracting a target is liable to get you killed before you can fire a shot off sometimes. Even worse is trying to shoot from over low cover, as the camera absolutely insists on viewing the action from whichever side of your body will have it block off your view of your targets.
  • Sequel Difficulty Spike: For console players, the Vegas games are actually a sharp step up in difficulty from 3 and Lockdown. Those games, even on Elite difficulty, still gave you a surprising amount of damage leeway so long as you didn't stand in front of an enemy eating up bullets, and your teammates can be incapacitated with impunity as they'll never truly die nor will you be penalized for it. Vegas on the other hand will kill you stone cold if you dare risk a confrontation outside of cover even if you're on the Recruit difficulty, being able to Take Cover! and attack with a third-person perspective is more of an equalizer against super accurate AI, and while your squadmates can be downed and revived, they can also get outright killed off, forcing a checkpoint reload if you threw them straight into the line of fire. Combine this with enemy spawn scripting regularly throwing the bastards around every other corner ready to take you down if you so much as peek a pixel out to alert them and the series actually got harder with its action-ified sequels.
  • That One Level:
    • The refinery level in Vegas 2, where you don't have your teammates to back you up. A control room near the end of the level is a particular spot of hell, with large windows all across every wall and five or so doorways for the enemy to flank you from, leaving you with options for cover that at best only protect from one possible ambush point, and at worst actively expose you to most of the rest. And then you've got the added bonus of more groups of bad guys spawning in every time you move up five feet, with even worse cover available outside of that control room.
    • Operation Mystic Tiger, the final level in the first game. Remember how the novel had the ecoterrorists march into the jungle to confront Rainbow in a predictably lop-sided battle? Not the case here - you're forced to breach into their highly fortified facility to end the madness. It's really long, and there are a lot of blind corners with enemies hiding around them, as well as automatic doors that open into wide-open rooms. As there's the possibility of viral exposure within the facility, your operators will be wearing lightly armored biosuits, making them that much more vulnerable to gunfire.
    • The sixteenth level of Rogue Spear: Even with the invisibility cheat code on, screw up even slightly and the terrorists will get into their cars and escape.
  • Villain Decay: Gabriel Nowak, the Big Bad of the Rainbow Six: Vegas series, goes through this rapidly in the second game; as soon as he's revealed to be the mastermind behind the entire terrorist plot, his previously mysterious master plan and motives are rapidly revealed to be nothing more than a hissy fit thrown because he was the team screw-up.
  • Vindicated by History: Sort of happened with the PC version of Rainbow Six 3. While the game was very well received upon release, the Xbox version (released about seven months later) was much more popular and influential, with its online play being especially praised. However, thanks to the PC game's Version 2.0 mod and the shutdown of the original Xbox Live servers (meaning online play is now impossible with the Xbox version), many people retrospectively agree the PC version of 3 is the better game - as well as possibly the best tactical shooter ever made.
    • Lockdown was panned on release for being too casual and unrealistic compared to its predecessors. However, compared to its even more casualized and unrealistic successors like Vegas and Siege, it's more of a truer Rainbow Six game (in the vein of its predecessors) than those two are.

Film

  • Questionable Casting: As of 2018, it has been announced that Michael B. Jordan has been cast as John Clark in Rainbow Six film adaptation, which has caused an uproar among fans, since John Clark is established as a white man in both the book and the game while Jordan is black. Fans have pointed that this not only goes against the original source material, but doesn't make sense in the context of the other books since Clark's physical appearance played a critical role in undercover operations in sensitive countries like Russia. Another point of criticism is that Jordan is simply too young for the role, being 31 at the time of the casting announcement while Clark is well into his 50s when he forms Rainbow.

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