I like writing and writing byproducts
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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

are there any well known essays about the fiction trope of "hypercompetence"? that is, the spy or asssassin who can slip into any building completely undetected and always has ten backup plans, the ninja who can throw down a smoke bomb and disappear from a locked room, the gunman who can shoot an apple off someone's head, firing from the hip at 100 yards

it's one of the most common phenomena in fiction that deals with the military and espionage. i have always assumed it's absurdly unrealistic. even without any direct knowledge of the subject matter i remember watching Munich (2005) and feeling like it had to be a more realistic portrayal of the facts of covert operations.

movies would suggest that the CIA, mossad, MI6, etc. can track you down despite your using an alias; can get a room on the floor beneath yours without arousing suspicion; can place a bomb that perfectly obliterates you in your bed with no collateral damage; but how would they know how to do that? how often has any intelligence agency blown up a hotel room?

how often have assassinations really happened? the CIA may have a thousand agents, but how many assassinations have happened, total, in all of history? could any one operative really be that experienced, that competent? if you said two hundred members of foreign governments died in suspicious circumstances in the 20th century, how many specific operations could that be per-agent? one or two at best? and in many cases, only assisting, not doing the deed directly.

how could a james bond exist? as awful as even the US or UK are, even with their imperialist bullshit, how could there be a person who actually has enough experience doing these things to be able to slip in, silently put a bullet in a person, and slip out undetected? or is the reality far messier? i have always suspected it is.


amydentata
@amydentata

If you read about the assassination attempts on Fidel Castro, or all the times the CIA has hit itself with its own paranoia, it gives you an entirely different vision of state actors. They’re bumbling weirdos that just have a lot of money and resources at their disposal.


NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

One of Fleming's fellow agents, childrens book author Roald Dahl,

this sentence jumped out of the screen and flicked my forehead


sakiamu
@sakiamu

The fact that both agents were also successful authors kinda scans to me. If you're able to understand and blend in with people due to understanding them, you'd also be able to spin a good yarn. Why not use that to make some money?


NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

I appreciate that the thought process is apparently "I am a highly-skilled government worker, difficult to replace, with government benefits and hazard pay... you know what will make me even more money? writing"


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

I actually had a chat with Corey on my channel about this trope as it was used to play with the 'autistic savant' as hypercompetent character a few years ago. but yeah, this stuff is all about what we believe is possible and one of the go-to examples of how people believe media that 'feels' realistic vs realistic scenarios tends to be the Scalia 24 example

A lot of this trope came from Ian Fleming writing Bond. Before that, the figure of the spy, if it came up at all, was mostly an aristocrat smooth talking their way into positions where they can get info, which is honestly a much more realistic portrayal of spies even today. If the government wants someone dead, most of how they get it done is military based, delta teams or cruise missiles or what have you, like Bin Laden and Soleimani. When they try to do movie spy shit, it's a clownshow. See: the history of the CIA trying to kill Castro in increasingly ludicrous ways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_attempts_on_Fidel_Castro

Sure, but that's more the gentleman thief, which certainly has some overlap with the superspy, but is a bit of a different thing, focusing on the playfulness/righteousness of the protagonist and the final outwitting/downfall of the antagonist. Zorro, Lupin, Westley, The Count of Monte Christo. It also overlaps with the con artist media, like The Sting, Leverage, Ocean's N (as mentioned elsewhere in the comments here).

taking this rhetorical question seriously, you're describing an astronaut not a spy

alternatively, I'd like to think that since you can only do spy things so many times, people who survive more operations will tend to do better jobs -- so you've got a lot of incompetent spies getting killed at obvious dead drops, and like 3 of them pulling off national-treasure-esque assassination plots perfectly

at least one of them has to be Vin Diesel

I find when it comes to spies it's worth remembering that one of the most prolific and successful spies in the CIA was Robert Hanssen, who was such a breathtakingly incompetent boob his wife reported the giant stacks of cash he kept in the house

its partly believable partly because part of the con is how effortlessly they hide, so its plausible to them believe if they exist (lol), theyre just SO well hidden.

the only good version of this trope is the oceans movies. its kinda predictable but god i love how those movies throw spanners into the works and then half the time act all suave like "yeah we predicted this actually, using peoples ability to be bossed around by someone doing a terrible accent"

I mean the publicly known ones are...publicly known so that's the less-secret subset, but there's the Russian ones using spy-novel-like over-complicated methods that make it obvious it just had to be a state actor and also which one based on like where can polonium be made, gee whizz, not a long list.

w.r.t. spying specifically; people will mostly just believe what you say as long as you don't cause any trouble for them directly; physical penetration tests rely on this principle

I'd say maybe look at the JFK/MLK assassinations to see how this stuff looks in practice: the weirdo doing the thing probably has mental problems that both motivate him to perform actions of this kind and allow him to socially engineer his way through whatever security is provided; the real shadows are in the bureaucrats and handlers that guide him towards what they think he should specifically be doing

(do I really just think the federal government assassinated MLK and JFK? I don't know if I want to sign for that exactly, but the pattern I'm describing is present there as much so as in the Bay of Pigs, I think)

remember that Jon Bois video about the guy who wrecked his plane into a football stadium? that guy was on the same waterslide (erratic weirdo leveraged by TLA ghouls for political/material gain) but he slipped off the side in the middle of it

in reply to @NoelBWrites's post:

Oh I get it I just thought "why not use that to make money" was funny considering writing is famously not lucrative

It's definitely a self-actualization thing because writing is fun and enjoyable and cool