Wing Commander/YMMV

Games

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Was Hobbes a sleeper agent or a willful deserter? Or maybe a little of both?
• Complete Monster: Even if Seether is just following orders, he clearly enjoy slaughtering thousands of innocent civilians way too much, and has no problem violating The Laws and Customs of War in outright executing a prisoner of war, in the Wing Commander IV Novelization.
• Demonic Spiders: The Jalthis in Wing Commander may be slow, but their six-gun attacks are deadly, making escort missions very difficult.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: The whole "sleeper agent" business re: Hobbes is unnecessary, except as an attempt to make him unsympathetic. Think about it: What would your reaction be if the leaders of the nation you befriended a decade ago decide that the best way to stop a war with your people is to utterly destroy the birthplace of your people?
• Fandom Rivalry: Wing Commander fans often hate Free Space and its fans. FreeSpace fans generally hold no ill will towards Wing Commander and wonder why the other fandom is so hostile. It might have something to do with the fact that the commercial failure of FreeSpace 2 completed the fall of the golden age of space sims, yet FreeSpace's modding capabilities and later source code release made its popularity actually rise as it aged while the Wing Commander fandom slowly dwindled.
  • Ironically, a major mod project based on Wing Commander is running on the Freespace engine... Funny how time heals all wounds, really.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Depending on who you ask, one or a combination of the following: Prophecy and later games, the novels, the movie, the cartoon, and in rare cases, Wing Commander III and IV.
  • Humorously enough, you almost never hear Privateer 2 being shoved into this. Despite the fact it wasn't originally (pun unintended) meant to be a part of the Wing Commander universe.
    • Probably because it is either so distantly related to not have any impact on canon at all, or because attempts to put it into the canon were so transparent that nobody bothers to address it.
  • A lot of people like to pretend the Face Heel Turn by Hobbes never happened.
• It Was His Sled: Tolwyn instigated the events of Wing Commander IV. The game plays it up as a mystery, but everyone knows it by now.
• Retroactive Recognition: Josh Lucas and Francois Chau in Wing Commander III (and IV in Chau's case); Mark Dacascos in Wing Commander IV.
• Stoic Woobie: Mariko "Spirit" Tanaka
• That One Level: Anything dealing with flying through a mine cluster in a Wing Commander game. You have to maneuver painfully slowly through these if you want to make it through. At least you can shoot asteroids out of your way. Try the same with a space mine and...BOOM! Twenty-one gun salute city for you.
  • There's also the mission with cloaking torpedoes in Wing Commander III. Don't stray from that capital ship, or you'll miss the torpedo, and the mission becomes a failure.
  • The mine clusters? Sheesh! They are NOTHING compared to infamous Kurasawa-2 mission in Wing Commander. Yes, the one with Ralari defense (you have about ten seconds to destroy 4 heavy cat fighters, or else the craft you're supposed to be protecting goes boom).
    • Interestingly enough, the level was designed to discourage players from only going on the winning path.
    • If you do manage to protect the captured enemy cruiser, you are sent straight to the victorious ending mission sequence. Ramming the enemy fighters works wonders, it turns out.
• Title Confusion: Prophecy is sometimes referred to by fans as "Wing Commander 5", as the fifth "main line" Wing Commander game, even though it's never been used outside the fandom using it as a working title, when almost nothing of the game was yet known to anyone not involved with production of the game.

Movie

• Fan Dumb
• Fan Hater: They exist...see above.
• Hate Dumb: Lots of people couldn't seem to get past the concept that the Artificial Gravity aboard the Tiger Claw evidently affected the volume just beyond the end of the ship's flight deck, for whatever reason. At least it was consistently shown to be that way.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks: A very common complaint.
  • Particularly the name of the carrier changing from TCS Tiger's Claw to TCS Tiger Claw, although the change was an accidental one due to script editing confusion between editors for the film.
• They Just Didn't Care: The actors seem to be attempting to care, and many other aspects seem polished, but misspelling common words (breach) and the names of main characters (Devereaux and Tolwyn) is unforgivable. They also mix up actors Tcheky Karyo and Jurgen Prochnow on the back of the DVD.
• Video Game Movies Suck

Series

• Too Good to Last: Plans for a second season were ruined by USA Network terminating their entire Saturday morning cartoon lineup.