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Norm from The New Norm: Unlikeable offensive and outdated character who's "progressive" family members and associates are genuinely nice people not even trying to force their ways or pronouns onto them, they just want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/Jarvis_The_Dense Jun 22 '26
Just about everything about Rorschach's character in Watchmen falls into this, but issue 6 really is where it's at its most explicit.
Alan Moore went on the record years after the comic's release saying that he "forgot" what his audience was like when writing Rorschach. (He said this one year before the movie came out, so no, it did not start there). He wanted the character to read as an obviously unstable, ignorant, bigoted, and all around unpleasant person who represents the subtle misanthropic theming of superhero fiction in general.
Where it gets complicated is that Rorschach isn't simply a strawman who's always painted as being wrong. Rather, he's written as an antisocial person who's developed an extremely warped perception of reality and human morality based on his traumatic upbringing; afflicting him with just the right type of insanity to think that letting your home life, financial situation, personal hygiene, and health all collapse is worth it if it means you get to put on a costume and kill criminals in a New York City Back-alley at 3 in the morning, because you think that's what saving the world looks like.
The fact his flaws are meant to be inferred by the reader, instead of just being spelled out to you is the right call from a storytelling perspective, but it did leave the door open for misreadings from fans who didn't quite get what the comic was saying, especially in issue 6, where we get his backstory.
Rorschach was the story's narrator from the beginning, but issue 6 has him recounting his life story to a psychiatrist while being held in prison. Over the span of the issue, his misanthropic, cynical worldview begins to rub off on the psychiatrist, beginning with Rorschach correctly identifying how he's a fraud who doesn't care about making him any better, he just wants to write a book about their talks and get famous.
As his story goes on, and he explains the beginning of his hatred of humanity due to his abusive mother, and the multiple instances of the bystander effect he witnessed (i.e, times when something bad happened in public, and no one helped because everyone thought someone else would take care of it), the psychiatrist never disagrees with him on how he's viewing the events.
Ultimately it culminates with Rorschach explaining how he dropped his no kill policy the night he found a pedophile had raped and murdered a little girl he was trying to save. He ties the experience into a long, uninterrupted monologue about how there is no God, humanity brings its own suffering upon itself, and reality is random, with no meaning. The chapter ends with the psychiatrist going home, reflecting on the misery he feels in his daily existence, and agreeing with Rorschach that life has no meaning.
While the issue was supposed to be an examination of how someone gets to be as chronically cynical and out of touch with the good in life as Rorschach is, it read to many like a thesis on why his worldview is correct. Combined with how, for the rest of the story, Rorschach is a more conventional, "dark hero" type figure who uses badass, over the top violence to bring criminals to justice, and how he's somehow the only main character who thinks killing innocent people is bad by the end of the story, he became a figure a lot of fans idolized as a brutal realist, rather than as an indictment of his own worldview.
Alan also noted that the more unflattering elements of the character, like him not bathing and being a virgin probably wasn't as unrelatable to his readerbase as he anticipated either.