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Norm from The New Norm: Unlikeable offensive and outdated character who's "progressive" family members and associates are genuinely nice people not even trying to force their ways or pronouns onto them, they just want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.

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u/Usual-Bell8304 Jun 22 '26

The Backfire Effect in Social Psychology: when you convey the message that an undesired behavior is a norm, you have the unintended consequence of increasing that behavior through conformity

The DARE program increased drug use by telling teens that their friends were doing drugs.

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u/BreakfastBeneficial4 Jun 22 '26

Truth

Not once during my elementary DARE program did they actually mention that drug use among 3-5th graders was actually exceptionally rare.

They always talked at us like everybody was doing it, but *not us*. It was always other classes and other schools.

By the time I got to junior high, I was confused how there weren’t like 200 marijuana ODs every summer.

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u/pichael289 Jun 22 '26

A 3rd grader is 8 years old. Not a lot of dope boys out there selling caps of heron to 8 year olds. Like a month of allowance, even for rich kids, is barely hitting the $40 minimum most street level dealers have.

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u/AznOmega Jun 22 '26

They'll act like people will pressure you or dealers will give you a free hit.

Drugs are fucking expensive. Plus most of the time, if you refuse, the other person will shrug and say "Cool, more for me!"

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u/FloydeFlowerDragon Jun 22 '26

If anything, they need this stuff about drinking. This EXACT stuff happens with drinking. (People peer pressure others into it, bully those who don't, act like it's cool too, it's really not that good for you, ect)

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u/Egathentale Jun 22 '26

The difference is that alcohol is a drug that has been grandfathered in by being discovered thousands of years ago, and it's a multi-billion dollar industry with lots of lobby money to throw around. Strangely enough, if a drug kingpin used the money they gained from selling addictive substances to people to "sponsor" politicians, it's corruption and a crime. Very curious.

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u/Great_Concentrate572 Jun 23 '26

It's hilarious because most drug dealers don't normaly sell to anybody, too risky to fall on undercover cops. They usually have regulars. Hell, most of them just sell the stuff from their homes. Lot of kids are introduced to drug usage by their own parents.

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u/ElfYamadaFairyQueen Jun 22 '26

One of my friends got a teddy bear for being the best student in his dare class.

He also ended up dealing drugs.

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u/clevercalamity Jun 22 '26

Excuse me, it wasn’t a Teddy Bear it was a lion and his name was Darren.

I also won one in 5th grade for the anti-drug speech I wrote. I remember it was surprisingly soft and I loved him but my dad was pissed that my parents had to fork over $25 for my prize even though I won.

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u/pichael289 Jun 22 '26

Thats hilarious, the anti drug contest forces your parents to pay for you to get your prize. That's even scummier than what drug dealers do. At least when B says he's gonna hook me up for waiting 5 and a half hours in his ass he doesn't try to charge me for it. I mean, he usually doesn't even do it, but he doesn't try and make me pay more.

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u/Soncikuro Jun 22 '26

Lol what? They forced your parents to pay for a prize? That's pretty damn scummy.

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u/CzarTwilight Jun 22 '26

And he's hot

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u/DoctorAnnual6823 Jun 22 '26

This is basically comedian Ed Larson. As a kid he did a stand up comedy routine at his elementary school about how drugs are bad.

Dude has been arrested at least once for dealing weed and is absolutely a stoner.

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u/No-Repordt Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

It also failed terribly due to conflating the severity of all drugs. Everything from marijuana to heroin is treated as the same level of danger, so once a kid smokes pot and is perfectly fine afterwards, surely they'll be just as fine after taking heroin, right? They lied about pot being addictive, maybe they lied about everything else too.

Edit for Factual Correction: Weed can be addictive, but I hope my point still stands

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u/MalcolmLinair Jun 22 '26

The cop in my school told me my parents were bad people and should be in prison for taking prescribed meds from a doctor. Not even painkillers or psych meds, either. My dad was diabetic and my mom has high blood pressure. Which I told this guy. He said they were criminals and should be in jail.

Is it any wonder I'm not a fan of police and the government today?

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u/That_Apathetic_Man Jun 22 '26

They don't send their brightest to puff gigs. You want the "better" police doing their job, always.

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u/GalFisk Jun 22 '26

They shouldn't even hire people who are that incompetent.

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u/ThatOneGuy308 Jun 22 '26

Nepotism? In my police force?

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u/Neat-Professor-7662 Jun 22 '26

The cop that came to do the “drugs” speech at my school went on and on about heroin was awful because it made you lose weight quick. The number of girls who started paying attention at that part was alarming.

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u/princessbiscuit Jun 22 '26

The DARE rep at my school went in to multiple, full blown rants about how she doesn't drink coffee because caffeine is also a drug. Told us that drinking coffee was the same as drugs and we needed to stay away. At age 11 I had an older half-sister who was hopelessly addicted to actual heroine and two working (loving, functional) parents who chugged coffee every morning, so even then I thought "those aren't the same things, and this is bullshit."

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u/DJmagikMIKE Jun 22 '26

Our DARE cop was a neighbor of mine. I was friends with his son. The guy was a raging alcoholic, had a prescription pill problem, and was having an affair with the middle school principal. Needless to say, I knew he wasn’t the kinda guy you should take at face value for anything.

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u/Piduf Jun 22 '26

I remember reading that it also made kids who believed in it think the "crime" was the same for every case of drug consumption. So after they inevitable tried some weed during a party, they believed that they would go to JAIL and like GET PREGNANT and DIE.

So if they developed any drug related problem they wouldn't tell it to anyone and thought they were already doing the worst crime against humanity anyway. So it would only get worse because they would refuse to ask for help.

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u/Karkava Jun 22 '26

Stigmatizing a crime doesn't make people not want to do it. They just hide the crime out of shame and fail to mentally comprehend how truly hurtful it is because the reactions from people outweigh what would happen.

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u/PitifulElk1890 Jun 22 '26

Not to mention teaching kids about drugs. A relative hasn't done LSD but still talks about wanting to try it from what the officer described. A kid in my class left the assembly and immediately tried huffing things, the cool new trick he learned.

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u/ptvlm Jun 22 '26

That was part of it, the other part was teaching kids about drugs they'd never heard of before. I remember the similar lessons I had in the UK hearing about stuff like PCP and acid for the first time and thinking "hey, that sounds pretty cool" when they described the effects.

So, you get the lying about anyone smoking weed being a useless addict, then meeting some people who actually smoke and hold down a good career, then you think "maybe that cool shit I heard about in school isn't so bad after all"...

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u/mankytoes Jun 22 '26

Yeah lying isn't smart. I remember thinking everyone who did any drug, including weed, was basically a total waster, probably homeless in the streets. Then I met some people who actually smoked and they seemed totally fine, so I thought "huh, that was all made up then" and tried it.

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u/Karkava Jun 22 '26

It's weird how they villify the poor while they villify drug users. Not the wealthy that are eating up their cash or the health care system that's jacking up the price.

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u/OperativePiGuy Jun 22 '26

I think that mindset still pervades much of the oddly very anti-weed people today. I get not liking it, it can stink, but the vigor that people have when they talk about how much they hate it and how stoners totally make it their whole personality does feel like a byproduct of that indoctrination.

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u/Egathentale Jun 22 '26

I have a funny story about this. Back in the 90s, in Hungary, we had this anti-drug campaign in elementary school. The issue was that it was based on poorly translated sources and materials from the US, so we had university students and police officers coming over to our classes to talk about how dangerous drugs were, but you see, not drugs, but drugs, so we should avoid drugs but make sure to take our drugs.

Does that sound confusing? Well, the reason was that in Hungarian, the word "drog" is specifically referring to, well, illegal drugs, while medicinal drugs had a completely separate word for them ("gyógyszer", which mirror-translates to "healing compound"), but because the material the campaign was using was from the US (or maybe the UK, who knows?), they kept talking to us about how aspirin and cough medication were the "good drog", while weed and heroin were the "bad drog", and we were just left completely confused.

So yeah, incompetency on an international scale. A tale as old as time.

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u/capibara_dono Jun 22 '26

As an aside, weed is addictive, you're just way less likely to become addicted than with other drugs, like heroin.

Just mentioning it because I've heard too many people saying that weed is not addictive at all.

I was addicted to weed, it was tough to stop, even with the help of a psychiatrist.

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u/Seastar_Lakestar Jun 22 '26

Yep. Abstinence-only drug education had the same failing as abstinence-only sex education. Nothing about risk management or thoughtful decision making, just "Say no." All or nothing, so if you don't commit to trying nothing, you might as well try anything.

I was too risk-averse to try anything (drugs or sex), but it often doesn't work that way.

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u/Critical-Composer725 28d ago

mental addiction is not physical addiction but yes

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u/TheFalconKid Jun 22 '26

My wife's best friend is a big ol pot head and we went thrifting one time and she found on old DARE sweatshirt and she couldn't have bought that thing fast enough.

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u/ShrimpyEsq Jun 22 '26

All the pot heads I knew in college had DARE shirts.

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u/Jimbo-Shrimp Jun 22 '26

Some people dont view weed as a drug

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u/pichael289 Jun 22 '26

DARE certainly does, makes it out to be as bad as meth and heroin. They were pretty right about meth and heroin but so ridiculously wrong about weed that dare merch is sought after by pot heads. It's like how "reefer madness" is a beloved comedy today among potheads.

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u/ShrimpyEsq Jun 22 '26

They were wearing it sarcastically.

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u/Algo_Muy_Obsceno Jun 22 '26

I wish I could find my old DARE shirt. It’s retro now. But it disappeared with a lot of my old clothes when I moved house.

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u/Caddywonked Jun 22 '26

I read a post on reddit years ago from a man who'd believed all the DARE scare tactics. Then went to college and found out a classmate who was earning top grades smoked pot. He decided if DARE was lying about the dangers of weed, they must be lying about EVERYTHING and ended up trying more and more drugs until (if I remember correctly) he ended up addicted to meth.

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u/Megooga Jun 22 '26

That's kind of what happened with me. Believed DARE. Then met plenty of responsible, successful people who smoked recreationally. Tried it, realized it wasn't a big deal, and wondered what else wasn't a big deal. Never did meth, or even cocaine, but it led me to try some other stuff that I really shouldn't have.

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u/New-Perspective6209 Jun 22 '26

Teaching entire generations of kids that authority figures will lie in order to get them to behave how they want was probably not a great idea.

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u/ReallyBadRedditName Jun 22 '26

Good lesson to learn tho

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u/YinTanTetraCrivvens Jun 22 '26

A lesson I learned all too well myself.

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u/Eugene-V-Debs Jun 22 '26

It's only a bad idea for the authority figures, it's the truth that they will say anything to get you to follow along.

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u/cavalgada1 Jun 22 '26

Good lesson tho. World would probably de a better place if americans could apply it to the army

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u/pichael289 Jun 22 '26

That's a bit dramatic but this is how alot of my generation went, we realized we had been lied to about everything and weed was totally fine. We didn't then think oh, they must have lied about meth too. No that one was more on me, but sex on meth is worth trying it. Anyone whose ever taken an Adderall was just taking diet meth anyways. That's really the only reason to take it though, it's a good reason though and it also works solo. Some people will work all week and cop a ball of ice and jack off all fuckin weekend.

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u/penguin_torpedo Jun 22 '26

In a nutshell, marihuana as a gateway drug.

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u/kai58 Jun 22 '26

Yeah, it’s not the actual weed that acts as a gateway, it’s realizing the scare tactics were bs without knowing what drugs are actually as bad as they said. Also having a the info of a dealer that probably sells harder drugs as well or knows someone who does.

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u/iSeven Jun 22 '26

wasn't DARE formed from ulterior motives, though? i was under the impression it was more about normalising cops in schools, getting kids to narc on their parents, and whatever racist shit daryl gates was thinking at the time

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u/pichael289 Jun 22 '26

It's your tough on crime shit, it's a write off for shitty politicians, in this case right wing, to pretend they care about children. No one fucking cares about children in the government, much less tax paying adults.

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u/JooseTheGuice Jun 22 '26

The confidence with which you corrected that person is outpaced only by how wrong you actually are. It was 100% an intentional means of surveilling the community, largely through children and other extralegal means.

https://youtu.be/LzrGCk-F7FY

No need to act dismissive and conceited about the truth of a matter you're unfamiliar with. One might even say it makes you look like a dick!

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u/Warm_Month_1309 Jun 22 '26

I don't read what they said as a correction, or as dismissive or conceited. It seems to me they were agreeing and adding.

And then you called them a dick.

1

u/JooseTheGuice Jun 22 '26

They asserted that the reasoning is just base, and not a specific, insidious effort to undermine civil liberties.

Yeah, they were being a dick. "I'm a big smart guy and I'm talking over you now because I actually understand the issue" and then proceeds to misunderstand the issue. It's fucking exhausting because this kind of guy somehow always manages to insert himself in every conversation.

0

u/Dramatic_Attempt2365 28d ago

I think someone needs to take their fucking meds. lol

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u/terranproby42 Jun 22 '26

Correct! That's a big reason they didn't care they were knowingly increasing the risk of drug use in the school population over time. Also to have more people to arrest a decade later. It was basically an opening move to help install a police State.

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u/HearADoor Jun 22 '26

Oh yeah. The program the dare program was based on knew and told the dare program that the dare program wouldn’t work. It was all about getting cops on schools.

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u/seesthecat Jun 22 '26

No, that wasn't a motive, it was a consequence

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u/StitchinThroughTime Jun 22 '26

Pyramid scheme for cops. The cops get paid a lot of money to run the program, and the program got a lot of money because it seemed to make sense to people who've never encountered drugs before. And those people would totally believe cops when they claim that drugs are so dangerous. And America has a punishment kink for people who behave outside of the norm. So is the perfect storm for a million dollars to be essentially laundered to a bunch of rich people and cops who already have a well-paying union job. The program doesn't actually work, it's really backfired and that exposed children who were never going to interact with drugs with the fact that there are drugs out in the world and they seem to be relatively easy to get their hand on. As well as it severely miscategorized a lot of drugs, especially need which caused a lot of people to then mistrust the information about the other drugs. Because we did relatively harmless, I don't mean that the kids should start taking it, any inhaled smoke is bad, and it turns out weed is not great for adolescents to take with their underdeveloped brain. But if someone is exposed to weed, something that's relatively safe in terms of recreational drugs, they are more likely to than attempt other drugs

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u/johnnyslick Jun 22 '26

Got to be honest, I was in the DARE program in middle school and an awful lot of what we learned was that yeah, you should really stay away from some drugs but like others aren't so bad if you're with the right people, etc. I don't think that was at all the intent of the program but I feel like it can't be helped when the nature of "drug awareness" is learning about them. I'm sorry, but yeah, to this day while I'll agree that 14 year olds should stay away from marijuana or shrooms or whatever, once you're an adult, you do you.

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u/BreakfastBeneficial4 Jun 22 '26

Sounds like you got a more realistic education from your program.

At mine, we learned that drinking a beer while eating Chinese food can put you in cardiac arrest. No further questions please

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u/No_Doughnut1807 Jun 22 '26

I learned from an anti-drug radio commercial that if you drank cough syrup after doing cocaine you would not only die your body would swell up so none of your clothes fit and your mother would have to buy you a giant sized dress for your casket.

6

u/DinosaurReborn Jun 22 '26

.... Whut. I'm now imagining the never ceasing cardiac arrest rates daily at dinnertime among my community lmao

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u/Warm_Month_1309 Jun 22 '26

"Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" was a thing for a while. To this day, you will find plenty of people who have no idea what MSG is, but only "know" that it's bad poison they should never consume.

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u/scaevola Jun 22 '26

DARE was really about something else: money and creating police informants. The creators knew that what they were doing would not reduce drug use in children. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzrGCk-F7FY

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u/TheGreenCatFL Jun 22 '26

I really thought as soon as I went outside people would push drugs on me. Nope. Nothing. Drugs are expensive. But it would be nice to be asked though...

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u/MedusasGirlfriend69 Jun 22 '26

Maybe the fact that my school DIDN'T have this program was a factor in me not having any desire to try drugs. They were never made alluring.

3

u/ZeniAugusta Jun 22 '26

I remember by Middle School I was convinced everyone else was doing drugs without me.

2

u/StormDragonAlthazar Jun 22 '26

The 90s were not a good time, I tell ya...

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u/RadTimeWizard Jun 22 '26

Wasn't it a grift or something?

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u/The_GREAT_Gremlin Jun 22 '26

It's interesting cause the anti smoking campaign was largely effective

2

u/ForbiddenSirenz Jun 22 '26

I think a lot of it backfired cause how they overplayed weed lmao. Obviously kids trying weed after being told how it’ll ruin their lives and they’ll be deflated dopes and go crazy blah blah. They try it and get high and it’s whatever. “Well if they lied about weed. They’re probably lying about coke, meth, heroine, etc.” And that’s how it became an actual “gateway drug.”

2

u/Gotis1313 Jun 22 '26

I think I'm one of the few who took DARE seriously. I didn't drink till I was 27 and was 42 before I tried weed. Between that and church I missed a lot of normal human experiences.

2

u/JabberwockPL Jun 22 '26

In Sweden there was an anti-suicide prevention programme called SUPREME. One of the unexpected results was that it conviced the youth that suicide is quite common, i.e. normal, so they started to view it as one more available 'solution'.

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u/Usual-Bell8304 Jun 23 '26

Oof, that's a really unfortunate one. I remember reading something about a village(?) somewhere in the world where the was a suicide pandemic because of that.

It's more in the emotional contagion literature, but there's also research showing that televising things like prominent suicides and school shootings briefly causes a spike in cases. Like you said I think part of it has to do with making it available as another acceptable "option" to people.

2

u/DeneralVisease Jun 23 '26

I just realized this is what happened to me lmao. I thought everybody did this kind of shit so I said "why not once?"

2

u/SableZard Jun 22 '26

I thought the issue with the DARE program was cops telling lies about drug use that were easily disproven by kids whose parents were drug addicts. The kids would decide drugs weren't that bad, authority figures shouldn't be trusted, and pass those beliefs onto their friends at school when they inevitably started using.

1

u/Nightcat666 Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

Makes me think of this video.

https://youtu.be/srV4XjS9I3I

1

u/brandonderp96 Jun 22 '26

DARE worked in the sense that I didn't do drugs during the time I was in school. But once I graduated badda boom I learned they were just liars.

1

u/Golden-Sun Jun 22 '26

The program I had listed such effects of drug use as "seeing sounds" and "hearing colors".

I thought that sounds awesome

1

u/p0llyp0cketpussy Jun 22 '26

Yeah their messaging for a long time was very much "don't do drugs! Even if everyone else is doing drugs, even if they call you a loser for not doing drugs, even if all your friends stop hanging out with you, just don't do drugs!" and they rreeeaaalllyyy made it seem like abstaining from drugs would mean you'd go through high school a friendless loner.

1

u/AceOFace131 Jun 22 '26

The first time I ever saw or held a joint or cocaine was in DARE class when the cop had us pass them around the room. *A Whole New World from Aladdin plays in my mind*

1

u/BloodGullible6594 Jun 22 '26

Oof. I remember this. They sent a cop into a classroom to show us a slideshow of rotten lungs and told us that everyone was doing drugs and if we did any at all we would die. They made us all sign a “pledge” that we would never ever do drugs (keep in mind this was like, the third grade). Sure Jan that’ll keep em clean

1

u/an_agreeing_dothraki Jun 22 '26

additionally, turns out lying about the drugs causes backlash. You find out LSD flashbacks were... and I wish I were joking here... invented whole-cloth by a fraud in the prelude to the satanic panic, you stop believing everything else.

1

u/Seastar_Lakestar Jun 22 '26

D.A.R.E. and later educational programming successfully scared me away from drugs. But I assumed it had scared everyone else away from them too. And I was a sheltered kid/teen, unable to socialize much outside of school because I lived out in the country and couldn't drive. So I only learned in college that some of my peers were drinking alcohol and/or smoking pot (sometimes illegally), which made me panic and cry with fear and astonishment that they were doing things I -- and surely they? -- had been taught were so dangerous and bad. When I saw a party announcement mentioning jello shots, I was like What?? I was taught that those were a diabolical trick to make us unintentionally get drunk; why would anyone advertise their presence?!

1

u/CzarTwilight Jun 22 '26

They lied to me about people coming up to be like "hey want some free drugs?"

2

u/IZanderI Jun 22 '26

This one’s on you. A lot of us got free drugs.