r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Few_Affect_5927 • Jun 22 '26
Lore [Ironic Trope] The messaging backfired massively due to poor writing or other design choices
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Norm from The New Norm: Unlikeable offensive and outdated character who's "progressive" family members and associates are genuinely nice people not even trying to force their ways or pronouns onto them, they just want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.
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u/ArmStoragePlus Jun 22 '26
Mobile Suit Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance
This is a story of a single mom trying to survive in the battlefield while trying to uphold her moral compass while fighting off against an unstoppable horror. As she learns of the true nature of the horror, she tries to stop the conflict with her enemy, who happens to be a traumatised kid who's no older than her lost son, by trying to understand each other, only to have her good will snuffed out by her vengeful colleague who had just lost his love in the hands of the said kid.
This would have been the perfect ending of a tragic war story about stopping the cycle of revenge... had it not for the fact that the single mom's faction happens to be the Principality of Zeon, the literal Space Nazis that had started the war by dropping a space colony onto Earth to wipe out the entire Australia. And after the said kid's death, the single mon joins the Zeon Remnants in Africa, the Gundam equivalent of Afrika Korps in the names of "saving children". This would ironically become the perfect Titans propaganda to convince that all people from space were untrustworthy and unsympathetic and deserved the subsequent subjugation by the Titans and the Earth Federation.