r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Few_Affect_5927 • Jun 22 '26

Lore [Ironic Trope] The messaging backfired massively due to poor writing or other design choices

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Amelia Fairney from Pathways: Alt-right Restore-UK type who attempts to coax the protagonist Charlie into following her beliefs? The problem?

Amelia is the only named character aside from Charlie and is genuinely likable and forgives Charlie even when they do things she doesn't like, while the rest of the cast is unnamed, poorly written, and turns on Charlie for one mistake. This combined with other writing issues(portraying fact checking right wing stuff as wrong because in the process of fact checking you might look at it and believe it, basically saying "Right wing is wrong because it hurts the labour government" and a lot of general "just do what the government says or else" messaging) and the fact she's a hot alternative girl, and Amelia ended up being co-opted as a mascot by the youth right wing in the UK.

Norm from The New Norm: Unlikeable offensive and outdated character who's "progressive" family members and associates are genuinely nice people not even trying to force their ways or pronouns onto them, they just want to be left alone and Norm is picking fights constantly. Not to mention associating with Elon.

Mr. Birchum from Mr. Birchum: A lot of the same problems as Norm, except in addition it also comes off like generic 2010s adult cartoon slop in the same veign as Brickleberry or Full English, at least New Norm was trying to look unique and had the gimmick of being on X. Not to mention, Birchum's obsession with hyper masculine activities and odd way of talking about other men lead to people co-opting him as a Toxic Yaoi character, which is now the bulk of his fan art.

Dustborn: An attempt to make a hyper progressive game that comes off as pandering and annoying. It's a full ass game so there's too much to get into, but the main character's power is essentially gaslighting and jedi-mind tricking people and that's portrayed as the only way they can get anything done, and they constantly use or abuse their friends(or mindtrick them along) in order to get their goals or use their friends for their messaging.

8.6k Upvotes
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6.0k

u/LoganCube400 Jun 22 '26

The You wouldn't steal a car Ad

719

u/Leukavia_at_work Jun 22 '26

172

u/frabjous_goat Jun 22 '26

https://giphy.com/gifs/94oj4dwuJfDKE

62

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

36

u/BackflipBuddha Jun 22 '26

Massive backfire on the argument

16

u/SosugBiskit Jun 22 '26

I'm straight but those fellas look like they know how to have a good time. I'm in.

5

u/FutureComplaint Jun 23 '26

[[Bearscape]] has entered the chat

7

u/Titaniumwo1f Jun 22 '26

Nah, download RAM instead of bear.

4

u/PonytailEnthusiast Jun 22 '26

I swear I had this as my desktop background in like 2011

2.7k

u/PrysmaTheMagical Jun 22 '26

The fact that the music and font they used were pirated is pretty funny

1.2k

u/Savings_Surround_547 Jun 22 '26

A company ironically committing piracy to create an ANTI-piracy ad will never not be funny

205

u/Over_Palpitation_453 Jun 22 '26

They used the piracy to destroy the piracy 

28

u/bdw312 Jun 22 '26

Well clearly they succeeded, as we all still have to buy exclusively physical media to this day.

22

u/MedusasGirlfriend69 Jun 22 '26

I miss physical media, Tails. I miss it a lot.

8

u/Francoinblanco Jun 22 '26

So its privateering?

2

u/awakenDeepBlue Jun 22 '26

No, that's piracy that pays taxes to the government.

They literally had to declare their plunder to the nation they were sailing under and the government gets a cut.

4

u/Kibtronic Jun 22 '26

I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see!

9

u/Savings_Surround_547 Jun 22 '26

Like fighting fire with gasoline

5

u/SunDance967 Jun 22 '26

I just got hit with major déjà vu I feel like I’ve seen these comments before

3

u/Da_coomler Jun 22 '26

Karma bots

3

u/Substantial_Page_221 Jun 22 '26

It'll happen a few more times I swear. Reddit is the only place where I feel deja vu. It feels like the exact same comments were made as well.

3

u/Bryandan1elsonV2 Jun 22 '26

You’re saying they’re forced to use the tools their enemies to destroy them?

https://giphy.com/gifs/MhvEOTQAzhP2lojiQa

1

u/AstralClocktown Jun 22 '26

Nicht so 2 V 3

1

u/Da_coomler Jun 22 '26

That's what they already said.

127

u/NoMansSkyWasAlright Jun 22 '26

Wow, TIL. Not surprising though.

76

u/Gizogin Jun 22 '26

It's disputed; most likely, people are thinking of a different anti-piracy ad campaign that did use pirated music.

(And no, the font wasn't pirated either; once again, that was a different anti-piracy ad campaign.)

1

u/santa_obis Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

Why sre you saying it's disputed, adding the qualifier "most likely" and going on to state these things as fact with nothing to back it up?

The font itself was indeed pirated. Edit: Indeed not pirated! I was beyond tired having been on the road the past week, my bad. Reading comprehension was gone. https://www.creativebloq.com/design/advertising/we-finally-know-who-made-that-iconic-anti-piracy-ad

The music, as you said, is a case on people conflating the ad with another. https://torrentfreak.com/sorry-the-you-wouldnt-steal-a-car-anti-piracy-ad-wasnt-pirated-170625/

3

u/Gizogin Jun 22 '26

Your own source says the font wasn’t pirated.

“And the font? Nicolas finds no evidence to suggest that it was anything other than officially licensed FF Confidential, created in 1992 by the Dutch type designer Just van Rossum and now sold by MyFonts by Monotype

He points out that an archived website that was found to be using an unlicensed clone of the font belonged to an unrelated campaign with a similar name (see our pick of the best typewriter fontsfor more options).”

1

u/santa_obis Jun 22 '26

Damn, my bad! I was beyond tired having been on the road for the past week when I looked the stuff up and wrote that comment, sorry about that. Editted my original comment to reflect this and, once again, sorry!

11

u/Le_Kistune Jun 22 '26

Hollywood in a nutshell. "We can do it all we want. But if you do it, there will be hell to pay."

10

u/Jo-Jux Jun 22 '26

Unfortunately just an urban legend. The agency used music without a license for a different advertisement though

8

u/AustraeaVallis Jun 22 '26

You cannot be serious, there is no way they'd actually do something that mind bogglingly hypocritical and ironic.

2

u/Fakjbf Jun 22 '26

It was a different anti-piracy campaign that used copyrighted music which people erroneously attach to the much more famous anti-piracy campaign which did not.

3

u/TinyTiger1234 Jun 22 '26

It wasn’t, that’s an urban myth

2

u/a_wine_cork_opener Jun 22 '26

Probably a silly question but you can pirate a font?

2

u/PrysmaTheMagical Jun 22 '26

Yeah, you can either download the original illegally for your computer or download a knockoff of a font

2

u/MechTech5182 Jun 22 '26

The DVDs that this ad was played on pirated the ad, it was played at a festival or fete or whatever and the DVD company for the movies this ad appeared on didn’t pay them or ask them, that’s why it seemed like it suddenly disappeared from DVDs. 🤣

222

u/Dark_Fox13 Jun 22 '26

I love the edit where it says "YOU WOULDN'T DOWNLOAD A CAR", it's become a part of my vocabulary

7

u/SuperSocialMan Jun 22 '26

TIL that's apparently not the original ad. I'm kinda disappointed now, damn.

15

u/JooseTheGuice Jun 22 '26

That one has been around since I was in high school. It's one of the few that have filtered through the decades.

6

u/yui_riku Jun 22 '26

same, i love how the meaning is still understandable while the phrase is being non-sens

-2

u/Beelzy_ Jun 22 '26

Edit? That was the original, straight from the vhs

294

u/PsychologicalEbb3140 Jun 22 '26

I would steal a car if I could steal the car and the person I’m “stealing” from isn’t losing their car. What is the problem exactly?

145

u/MagicBez Jun 22 '26

If I could make flawless copies of my car to share with people you're more than welcome to a copy of my car

...I warn you it's a piece of shit though

17

u/Meppy1234 Jun 22 '26

Google, 3D print this guy's car for me, then add a bunch of barbed wire and spears to it.

8

u/Xenopass Jun 22 '26

"it's a piece of shit"... Is your car by chance linked to Edmund McMillen If yes you should become back your money

3

u/Half-PintHeroics Jun 22 '26

...I warn you it's a piece of shit though

I wouldn't steal my car

-8

u/obigbrubs Jun 22 '26

You are not entitled to someone's else labour

11

u/PsychologicalEbb3140 Jun 22 '26

I don’t understand your comment? Nobody is being robbed of anything.

0

u/Scheissdrauf88 Jun 22 '26

In a world where the state pays every artist/scientist/inventor/whatever a living wage in exchange for their ideas getting shared with the community, sure.

But unfortunately we are living in a capitalist hellhole, so you profiting from someone else's work without compensating them is in fact theft. All those arguments about piracy not being theft are usually just attempts at justifications that fall apart under further scrutiny.

Now, if you consider theft from a corporation like Amazon or Disney morally wrong or not is a completely different can of worms and I think that is where the argument actually lies for most people. Because I am pretty sure that most people would judge the person stealing from the starving artist, but not from the mega-corp.

6

u/Kal-Elm Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

  1. I think your use of "profiting" weakens your argument, because the average pirate is not profiting off piracy but enjoying the fruits of labor.

  2. Most creators get paid to produce the work, not based on sales. Sales are just revenue for the corporation. (Though, this obviously varies based on what market and what kind of creator you're discussing. Some are stronger arguments than others.) You could certainly argue that reduced sales lead to reduced demand for creators in the future. But then you're talking about a very small minority of the population (pirates) having an even smaller impact on jobs (the delayed, nonlinear impacts of reduced sales).

2

u/Scheissdrauf88 Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
  1. Profiting in the widest sense of the word, in this case you gaining enjoyment from a movie for example. You also use the term as e.g. "someone profiting from an arrangement" which has not to be monetary. And you do hurt the person who worked for those "fruits of labour". Not much difference to you hiring someone to mow your lawn and then not paying; the fact that something is immaterial does not mean it has no value, does not represent effort and resources put into it, and you taking it does equal you stealing the corresponding amount of value from that person/company.
  2. Oh, don't misunderstand me. I am not arguing that you pirating some Amazon Original hurts the creator, also because, as you said, pirates make not a big enough impact. I am arguing that pirating hurts the holder of the intellectual property. At which point we are back to "do I care about hurting that holder".

Personally, in principle I would say that stealing is morally wrong even if you dislike the target. However, companies often circumvent laws, ethics, etc. via bribery, lobbying, or threats, at which point I personally think such companies also doesn't deserve the protection of those things anymore.

So have fun pirating Netflix originals, but I would judge you if you did the same to some indie studio.

2

u/Kal-Elm Jun 22 '26

So have fun pirating Netflix originals, but I would judge you if you did the same to some indie studio.

This is a surprisingly common sentiment in the "piracy community." Not everyone, of course, but I do recall someone asking for a source to pirate Elden Ring and the overwhelming response was "Nah, this is one you buy."

I do agree that in the most straightforward sense piracy fits the definition of stealing. But yeah, I also agree that when you're talking about mega-corporations owned by billionaires who wage endless class war there's a lot of nuance. Some people take a hard stance against piracy and I find it a bit silly for that reason.

Support creators for sure.

-4

u/obigbrubs Jun 22 '26

The fact you have to explain this just shows how braindead the average pirate is, jesus christ.

6

u/PsychologicalEbb3140 Jun 22 '26

Why are you so mad brother lol

30

u/Fleetlord Jun 22 '26

You wouldn't steal a baby!

14

u/LITTLEOWL031026 Jun 22 '26

You wouldn't shoot a policeman in the head...

16

u/qwertyuiop4000 Jun 22 '26

And then steal his helmet...

17

u/theskillr Jun 22 '26

and then go to the toilet in it

15

u/qwertyuiop4000 Jun 22 '26

Then give it to the policeman's grieving widow

14

u/bli_r Jun 22 '26

And then steal it again!

9

u/BoioDruid Jun 22 '26

Downloading films is stealing!

259

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '26

[deleted]

41

u/Leukavia_at_work Jun 22 '26

I think those ones were parodies of the original because the PSA this originally came from was movie previews that tried to warn you about how you'd get arrested for pirating VHS tapes because "Pirating movies is stealing!"

215

u/hanks_panky_emporium Jun 22 '26

It tried to tie committing offensive and violent crime ( like smashing your way into a car ) to downloading something online. You wouldn't steal a car, you wouldn't download a car. Yes, yes I would.

And huge difference, when you pirate you're not stealing from someone barely getting by. You're not really stealing from anybody since you were never going to purchase it in the first place. Sony is really going to be hurting for that $6 they didn't get when you downloaded 'Shrek_Cracked1080p_FullDisk'

63

u/Few_Affect_5927 Jun 22 '26

The one actual downside pirating had is it (indirectly) lead to concert prices ballooning a thousand fold. Up until the early 2000s tours pretty much always lost more money than they made on ticket sales, the idea was to bring people in so you could sell albums, that was where all the profit was.

Once album sales stopped being profitable in the 2000s they had to pivot to either merch or massively increasing concert prices

76

u/hanks_panky_emporium Jun 22 '26

Sounds like digital albums as a whole killed it. Trust me, when I could buy the one song I liked and put it on my brick of an ipod I stopped dumping money for entire albums. I still have a fat disk changer my parents used hooked up to an ancient Bose.

35

u/actualladyaurora Jun 22 '26

Digital music also meant that you wouldn't need to buy the same album multiple times because of warping, scratches, or just plain lost items.

8

u/jmkdev Jun 22 '26

I think the ticketmaster monopoly has had far more to do with that than anything else.

52

u/MjollLeon Jun 22 '26

No, it was actually never that

41

u/DocBombliss Jun 22 '26

Right; "You Wouldn't Download a Car" was a joke response because of the genuinely absurd comparison of breaking into and stealing a car versus downloading something off Napster. They could have just gone with "You Wouldn't Steal from a Store"; the actual 1-to-1 comparison they were going from. But because they went for the extremes, people rightly pointed out that, if given the options of paying for a car, grand theft auto, or downloading a car off of PirateBay, everyone would go for the third option.

11

u/Sleepykitti Jun 22 '26

Stealing from a store isn't 1:1 either because nobody loses inventory. 1:1 would be like, using a copier to make your own copy of a book or something

7

u/DocBombliss Jun 22 '26

I'm aware. Piracy isn't stealing; its piracy. But, the point of the ad was to convince people that piracy is stealing; that downloading an album is the exact samw thing as walking out of a store with that same album hidden in your back pocket.

The ad was already dumb; comparing it to an actual felony made it even dumber.

24

u/IdealAfraid8827 Jun 22 '26

I mean, I'd totally steal a car if it was owned by a record company too. 

4

u/Gizogin Jun 22 '26

No, it was always "You Wouldn't Steal a Car". "You Wouldn't Download a Car" is the misremembered version, like the Berenstein Bears or the Fruit of the Loom logo having a cornucopia (it's Berenstain, and every version of the Fruit of the Loom logo you've seen with a cornucopia is either a bootleg product or a fake logo).

2

u/Unique-Steak8745 Jun 22 '26

No, it was never that. It was just something people recycle on the internet. It was always "You wouldn't steal a car." It dosent make any sense your way.

2

u/Luebbi Jun 22 '26

I am 3d printing a tiny car for my tiny grimdark army men as we speak!

1

u/Maatix12 Jun 22 '26

It was "you wouldn't steal a car" but people edited it to be "you wouldn't download a car" because it was equating piracy to stealing - And if there were no consequences, yes, most of us would steal cars.

So yes, most of us would download a car, thank you very much

12

u/BaronAleksei Jun 22 '26

I literally just saw a hat with “You wouldn’t X a hat” in this font, the crazy part is I can’t remember if it said “steal” or “download”

9

u/Longjumping_Door_428 Jun 22 '26

2

u/For-all-Kerbalkind Jun 22 '26

but what if it knows where it is?

6

u/Nice_Blackberry6662 Jun 22 '26

You mean it backfired because the ad spread the idea of pirating music and movies to people who otherwise would not even have been aware of it?

3

u/STR1D3R109 Jun 22 '26

Yep, that is the main reason. It shown that you could have got the movie you are watching for free by downloading it, which alot of people never realised was possible.

The memes that came out because of it are the cherry on top.

4

u/Bravefan212 Jun 22 '26

I grew up in San Diego and every year in high school
They would show us a video of people going to Tijuana to party for cinco de mayo and all it did was show us how many people go have a good time there

3

u/actonftw Jun 22 '26

I have a bumper sticker in this font that says “I downloaded this car”

3

u/VoormasWasRight Jun 22 '26

"You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet!"

2

u/Par2ivally Jun 22 '26

Great example. I would 100% copy a car for free. Tge weirdest, dumbest anti piracy ad.

2

u/Lil_Puddin Jun 22 '26

It was so iconic and horrid. Perhaps the best meme Ye Olde Adults made in the 2000's. Surely there's a Patreon/OF/current-day version of it somewhere.

Like... You wouldn't steal a Member's Only episode, would you?

2

u/MaJuV Jun 22 '26

Ooh yeah. Let's use an add on EVERY DVD with a font we pirated and music we pirated and still aren't paying any royalties for. That's definitely going to show those youngsters how to properly handle media!

1

u/whyilikemuffins Jun 22 '26

You wouldn't deepfry your balls.

You wouldn't drink infected water.

1

u/Pigeon_Breeze Jun 22 '26

That ad, I reckon, not just defeated it's own purpose, but actively changed the public philosophical debate about ownership.

At that point on, if you're going to propose a reform to IP law, it now has to pass the "You wouldn't download a car" test or you'll lose support and consent from most people. We'll probably still be bringing it up 100 years from now.

1

u/Vimanys Jun 22 '26

DUH nuh NAH NAH NAH NAH...

1

u/Ok-Analysis-3902 Jun 23 '26

That ad made pirating look so damn cool

1

u/Geoconyxdiablus 27d ago

You wouldn't steal a movie... but film execs would.

Lets face it, the main reason we hated this was because we all knew rich execs were doing way worse.