troacctid
(4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
#2: Feb 17th 2011 at 3:52:51 PM
It's Running Both Sides because they are the sides. Playing Both Sides would require two opposed factions manipulated to a third party's benefit.
Total posts: 2

I was reading through the Playing Both Sides examples when I noticed the following:
in the Enderverse, a subversion occurs where peter and valentine wiggan are writting for opposing views on every subject imaginable. a subversion in two ways; first, they actually ARE two different people, who merely collaborate on what they each "think"/write on each topic. second, they actually start out writing something very close to each others "real" POV. so, to quote wikipedia: "While Ender is away in Battle School, Peter implores Valentine to "work with him". As young children, they write political commentary under pseudonyms ("Demosthenes" for Valentine, and "Locke" for Peter). The former would be demagogue who called for war with the country's coalition partners, especially Russia, while the latter would be a mild intellectual who advocated diplomacy — a decision at odds with both writers' actual personalities. Demosthenes becomes extremely popular, whipping the public into a xenophobic frenzy and moving the country closer and closer to war."
I was simply going to rewrite it to clean up the messy grammar, spelling, and a copy-pasta quote off The Other Wiki. But I got to thinking about whether or not it's a proper example or if the subversion is correct. The facts as I understand them are:
If I recall, Peter is really the driving force here. It's his idea because the kid has actual plans for world domination. I don't remember if he bullied her into helping or if she goes along for the hell of it. Peter is the one meant to benefit from all this.
The troper who added the example claims it's a subversion of Playing Both Sides because:
So what exactly is going on here?
A post preview, my kingdom for a post preview...
Edit: As a side note, neither trope has Laconic/Playing With entries.
edited 13th Feb '11 2:04:56 AM by Rotpar
But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you.