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You'd think they couldn't actually make things any clearer, and yet...
"What I hoped would have been a higher art thing became a frat house, date-rape, strip club anthem. Sad."
The writer has a vision. They've created a character who represents everything they loathe, and have placed him in a world that satirizes everything they hate about modern society. Bring on the Moral Guardians and Media Watchdogs; he's prepared for controversy!
Only... it doesn't quite work like that. Instead of seeing a loathsome, hateful figure, the audience sees a Woobie who only is the way he is because of his daddy issues, and feel sorry for him instead of hating him... or even find him cute. They take the author's painstaking satire at face-value. The Crapsack World the writer has created is somewhere they think is pretty awesome. They have, in the writer's view, completely missed the point and avoided the subtext that the writer had thought was obvious, only to see the text-text — and they like the text-text.
They've become a Misaimed Fandom. It's around this point that the writer learns exactly how different they are from their fans... and, often, actively begins to hate them.
There are many paths leading to a Misaimed Fandom, but many of them originate from the ' Death Of The Author' theory; the idea that the interpretations of the text agreed with and intended by the creator of the text are not the only valid interpretations of that text. No matter how many times Word Of God states their case, there's always going to be a large portion of the readers who will have their own very different perspective. And they're always going to be able to find something in the text to help their case, whether the author intended it to be there or not. Of course, while fans are open to their own interpretation, that does not mean they are right. The writer's original intention should always be considered first before all others; they're the ones actually putting their thoughts down and getting them published, after all. This doesn't mean that fans have to worship at the writer's feet, but they should at least show him or her the same respect they would show their fellow man or woman (or critic.)
In some cases, the reader may genuinely be seeing something that isn't there, or might not be looking hard enough; if the text isn't read correctly then the interpretation that follows is naturally going to be flawed. The reader might miss some of the more subtle meanings or interpretations. Alternatively, they might read the text too closely, and find symbolism and meaning that the author never intended — especially if the symbolism in question is something quite obscure, that the author may not necessarily be aware of. And, of course, they may just be Completely Missing The Point.
Often, however, the fans know full well that their interpretation of the text isn't that of the author's, and may acknowledge what the author was trying to do, but choose their own interpretation anyway. They may be aware that the author is satirizing them and their views, but they're good sports and can appreciate a well-done jab in the ribs, especially if it's not without affection. Furthermore, even the best authors can at times include subtext in the work that wasn't consciously intended; the subconscious can be a powerful influence.
And sometimes the Misaimed Fandom simply comes from the fact that the author's not that good a writer. If a message is poorly communicated to begin with, then of course there's going to be problems when interpreting it. Some authors go for subtlety when when they really should have been a bit more obvious, or try to set up a Strawman Political only to make the strawman's arguments more logical and valid than their hero's. In these cases, the fandom is misaimed because the author's botched the sights on the rifle.
This trope comes in many forms, which are listed below (and it's a looong list), as well as tropes that can be compared, connected and contrasted to:
- Accentuate The Negative
- Alternate Character Interpretation: A very common case in this trope.
- Bile Fascination
- Broken Base
- Complaining About People Not Liking The Show
- Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch
- Completely Missing The Point: Can also intersect with Fan Dumb below.
- Designated Monkey
- Die For Our Ship: Basically when fans insist on a certain pairing, no matter how idiotic or nonsensical it really is.
- Die Internet
- Dis Continuity: Frequently used by Misaimed Fans to keep their preferred interpretation alive and well.
- Discredited Trope: As well as Dead Horse Trope, Undead Horse Trope and Dead Unicorn Trope.
- Don't Like, Don't Read: Frequently used by Fan Fic writers to deter their critics.
- Dork Age
- Draco In Leather Pants: A character has obvious flaws, yet is praised and adored by fans.
- Ensemble Darkhorse: Can intersect with Completely Missing The Point and Fan Dumb.
- Epileptic Trees
- Evil Is Cool
- Fan Disillusionment
- Fan Dumb: A subtrope of the Misaimed Fandom. Can also intersect with Completely Missing The Point.
- Fan Hater
- Fanon: Can occur in some cases of it.
- Finagle's Law
- Good Is Old Fashioned
- Hate Dumb
- He Panned It Now He Sucks
- Hype Aversion
- Hype Backlash
- Internet Backdraft
- Isn't It Ironic: Compare for more musical examples, anyway.
- It's Popular, Now It Sucks
- It's The Same Now It Sucks
- Let's See YOU Do Better
- Lowest Common Denominator
- The Man Is Sticking It To The Man
- Nostalgia Filter
- Not So Different
- No True Scotsman
- Opinion Myopia
- Periphery Demographic
- Ron The Death Eater: A character isn't evil, but is treated as such by fans.
- Ruined FOREVER
- The Scrappy: Sometimes justified, but most of the time it's just because of Bandwagon Haters. Also see The Wesley.
- Serious Business
- Silly Rabbit Idealism Is For Kids
- Small Name Big Ego
- Strawman Has A Point
- They Changed It Now It Sucks
- Three Chords And The Truth
- Truffaut Was Right: Also see Evil Is Cool and Draco In Leather Pants.
- Unpleasable Fanbase: Can intersect with it, at least.
- Vocal Minority
- What Do You Mean, It's For Kids?: Happens all the time in the field of Anime. Not that this or What Do You Mean, It's Not For Kids? are restricted to animation.
- What Do You Mean, It's Not Awesome?: For those that DO take it seriously anyways.
- What Do You Mean, It's Not For Kids?: Can also intersect with Animation Age Ghetto.
- What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?
- What Kind Of Lame Power Is Heart Anyway
- Willing Suspension Of Disbelief: Or lack thereof.
Misaimed Fandom is also a frequent cause of Creator Backlash and result of Alternate Character Interpretation. Often, the writer can try and force their interpretation by making the character jump off the Moral Event Horizon. Contrast with Rooting For The Empire, where the fandom knows that these are bad guys they're rooting for, and still support them anyway. Compare with Wall Banger, an example of when the series ITSELF misses the point of what it originally set out to do.
For TROPES with misaimed fandoms, see Square Peg Round Trope and Trope Decay.
Examples:
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Advertising
- In Apple's "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads, many people thought that the Mac came across as an arrogant jerk, whereas the PC was a cute, lovable loser. This was particularly notable in the UK, where the localized advertisements featured comedic duo Mitchell and Webb, who played a lovable loser and an arrogant jerk, respectively, in Peep Show.
- Also, a good number of people dislike the commercial series because it was all about making the PC look bad. Tell me why you're better, not why the other guy's worse. It could also have to do with the public perception of Mac users as arrogant jerks, as well.
- Not to mention their choice of quirky celebrity John Hodgman to play the PC.
- Especially with Hodgman specifically portraying a whiny Bill Gates caricature.
- And the fact that they blatantly misrepresent Macs as fail-proof.
- They just misrepresent their facts completely. Yes, PC has more viruses and bugs than Mac, but take into account just how many more PC users there are than Mac users.
- On the other hand, considering that there is exactly one known virus for Mac OS X in the wild, and that that virus (more a Trojan horse) can only be installed with the user's explicit permission, which requires the user to type in his username and password. Which should be enough of a clue that something is amiss, since OS X only asks for your password during regular use when it needs to install a program... User dumbness aside, Mac OS X is more secure than Windows because it is UNIX-based (BSD).
- Even Microsoft noticed this, and started making "I'm a PC" ads showing satisfied customers in a Take That to Apple.
- A series of anti-pot radio commercials in the 1990s featured a mock game show with people trying to answer simple questions when high. The moral is supposed to be "Only Dopes Smoke Dope", but comes across more as "Pot will TOTALLY fuck you up (in a good way)!", which pot-smokers were already well aware of.
- Currently in some states, there are anti-drunk driving commercials explaining how if you are drinking and driving, you will be caught and you will be arrested. In order to represent the drunk drivers, they have their cars/motorcycle helmets filled with alcohol, so that opening the window/visor causes the beer to spill out in a waterfall. It quite possibly may be the best anti-anything commercial ever because it is impossible to take seriously. Not to say, of course, that drunk driving is something to be taken lightly - but good luck convincing anyone of that with these commercials (especially people who already know the dangers of drunk driving, who will probably point out, "Look at all the alcohol they wasted" or "The inside of that car is ruined").
- Be honest, does anyone actually see the Trix Rabbit as the antagonist in those commercials?
- Wait, he's supposed to be the antagonist!?
- More importantly, are you telling me we're not supposed to sympathize with him, then!? Heck, it's easier not to sympathize with freakin' Jesus!
- Recent Barbie commercials have been using a kid safe remake of "Barbie Girl" by Aqua. Can anyone else tell me what's wrong with that picture.
- Also ironic because Mattel unsuccessfully sued Aqua when the song first came out.
- Meth, ooh meth! One of the best commercial jingles of all time. Yeah, it's supposed to make meth seem awful, but these commercials just make it sound way, way more useful than coffee.
- VD is for everybody!
 They never say if that's a good thing or not, though.
- Similar to the Mac v. PC thing above, Alltel wireless ran ads where they portrayed their representative as a "normal guy", and the competition (AT&T, Verizon, etc) as basement-dwelling, friendless nerds. Many tropers, being basement-dwelling, friendless nerds, sympathized with the competition.
- Made even funnier now that Alltel has been bought out/merged with Verizon. Y'know, one of the companies they said they were better than!
Anime and Manga
- Rei in Neon Genesis Evangelion was intended as a Creepy Emotionless Girl. The fandom reaction? Three words: "ZOMGF TEH REI!!!!11!1". Director Hideaki Anno took personal issue that Rei was fetishized among otaku for that exact reason. Also, the enigmatic single-episode character Kaworu became popular to the surprise of the writers, who admitted they were writing him to be unsettling. It doesn't help that for all their supposed unsettling qualities, they're still the only characters in the series (with the possible exception of Misato) to show genuine respect and affection towards Shinji, or, for that matter towards anyone at all (which only serves to emphasise how utterly warped the cast members of Evangelion are). Also, as shallow as it sounds, the biggest mistake Anno and crew made was that they made Kaworu too "pretty". It sounds callous, but if Kaworu looked older and a lot "uglier," Anno would've most likely accomplished his goal of making Kaworu more unsettling.
- But that would've defeated the purpose. Kaworu and Rei are SUPPOSED to be physically beautiful - they're Angels - not only that, but the human embodiments of the progenitors of mankind.
- Multiple subsections of Evangelion fandom fulfill this trope in different ways. On the one hand are the viewers who fap to Rei, attack Shinji for being "emo", and buy loads of ridiculous Eva merchandise. On the opposite end of the spectrum, however, are fans who pick apart every minute detail and symbol in the series with the intention of uncovering "the true meaning" - despite repeated statements by the creators that there isn't one.
- And they also love Rei. Looks like everybody loves her, except Anno himself.
- Some love Rei precisely for what she is. The fandom isn't misaimed. Anno just picked the wrong audience.
- And then, if you really think about it, we have the immense amount of Cosplayers, which isn't that bad, but if you really think about how deep some cosplayers seed themselves into character, it's almost like they lose their Identity, which isn't all bad for some shows, but with this one devoting 3 episodes to Shinji trying to find his Identity, it makes for some pretty good Irony.
- The ending of the Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch manga was supposed to insinuate that love wasn't as important as personal fulfillment: Hanon and Rina know they will eventually have to choose to rule their kingdoms instead of staying on the surface. (This is analogous to the original The Little Mermaid story, except Lucia gets to keep Kaito.) Fans generally ignore this and give them future children with Nagisa and Hamasaki (Masahiro).
- Kujibiki Unbalance was a Show Within A Show in the anime Genshiken made to parody nearly every romance anime by following all of the tropes. Kujibiki Unbalance was too spot on; it became a highly successful spinoff, while Genshiken itself almost didn't get a second season. (It was delayed almost a year.)
- Ouran High School Host Club was intended to make fun of the school romance/bishounen harem genre. It includes many common character and plot tropes; however, many fans don't seem to realize or care that the tropes are not being played straight. Other fangirls are capable of self-deprecation. Still others see it as the best of both worlds, with the cuteness of a romantic comedy and the funnier humor of an Affectionate Parody. * It's not like Ouran is serious, anyway.
- With Serial Experiments Lain, producer Yasuyuki Ueda hoped to stir a "cultural war" (seriously) between traditional Japanese and American values, due to the latter's perceived negative influence on post-WWII Japan. His hope with Lain was to create a story that would be interpreted differently in the East and West and spark discussions on their cultural differences and perspectives. American fans interpreted the plot the same way as Japanese fans, which suggests that either Lain wasn't enough of a Mind Screw for his purposes, or Americans and Japanese are not that different at all...
- Or perhaps Americans that watch quirky Mind Screw Anime and the Japanese are not that different at all. The producer's biggest flaw was presuming that anything anime is going to be mainstream in America and reach anybody but japanophiles to begin with.
- According to series creator Kazuki Takahashi, the main point of Yu-Gi-Oh! was intended to be friendship. Unfortunately, the children's card game (that is almost always one-on-one!) element got out of control and is now the dominant aspect of the franchise. Also, Anzu Mazaki is infamous for her "friendship speeches" in the second series of the anime. She is also the most bashed by the fangirls, even when, technically, she's not the one who makes the most speeches.
- Rurouni Kenshin fans who complain how much it sucks that Kenshin doesn't kill anyone, despite this being a major, plot-critical character trait.
- Wolf's Rain fangirls who sympathize too much with the wolves, claiming that "They don't really want to hurt anyone," even though many killings happen on-screen. The only one who shows any remorse is Toboe. Kiba, the human-intolerant leader, gets squeed over by fangirls as well—but even if he were human, he would still be a messed-up, violent, bad-tempered misanthrope. It's not that he's bad—his issues are extremely understandable and he does grow to genuinely care about the others—it's just unlikely that a fangirl can use The Power Of Love alone to cure his issues. Especially if she's human. But as their human-looking forms are all Bishounen, it's completely understandable.
- You have to keep in mind that they're wolves. Wolf morality is not human morality.
- Gundam SEED/Gundam SEED Destiny fans who think either Blue Cosmos/LOGOS or Well Intentioned Extremist Durandal were right. Word Of God is that Durandal thought what he was doing was right, which some fans have exaggerated into claiming that it outright states that Dullindal/Durandal/whatever translation you use was right in the first place. but he was going to use a weapon of mass destruction against the countries who were against his Destiny Plan! One can't blame the fandom who supports Kira, Lacus and Terminal, when they prove to be the least of the three evils. This is one of those cases where Word Of God must be taken with a grain of salt.
- Also, in Char's Counterattack, there are quite a few fans who maintain that Char was the hero. Despite, you know, his trying to drop an asteroid on Earth. Char himself considers this act Necessarily Evil, but evil nonetheless.
- If you want an example of Misaimed Fandom for Gundam, look no further than the Principality of Zeon from the Universal Century. Later series play up the space Nazi aspect so much that the only difference between Zeon battle flags and Nazi ones is the replacement of the swastika. But Zeon has a truly staggering fan following, both in Japan and in the Western world, who admire Zeon soldiers as the pinnacle of manliness and loyalty.
- To be fair, Zeon gets all the cool mobile suits (at least in the original series, where the Federation only develops like, the Gundam-series and the GM for the entire show, against Zeon's several dozen unit types). Also, the soldiers of Zeon are often quite admirable, even if their leaders tend to be evil, power-hungry backstabbers, who are willing to kill members of their own family, to say nothing of how they treat their enemies (and one of whom does actually endorse the "pure race" ideas of Nazi Germany, taking a comparison between his methods and Hitler's as a compliment). And even then, Garma Zabi is portrayed as decent enough: he's a young "noble" dedicated to his nation's cause and with a romantic subplot—though he also isn't as high ranking as his more evil siblings. Anyway, Gundam frequently blames war on those who are in charge, while depicting the people who are actually on the front lines as generally good/neutral, if possibly a bit emotionally unbalanced by the stress of their situation, and with a few whackjobs. So there are certainly a lot of Zeon soldiers we are supposed to admire for their positive qualities (Ramba Ral comes to mind).
- Many Naruto fans wanted to see Naruto kill Pain/Nagato just for the sake of revenge. The entire point of the arc (and most of the series) is that revenge is a form of cheap satisfaction that never solves anything, which just leads to more revenge, and that some problems are best solved without violence (and if Naruto killed him he would have proved his belief that people are incapable of overcoming their hatred or showing mercy to those that have hurt them to be completely right). Oddly enough, these fans also seem surprised by his tragic backstory, even though it had already been mentioned, and even though Naruto never accepted Freudian Excuses as justifications for misdeeds, often criticizing the logic behind them.
- Many Naruto fans also get kinda torqued at the notion that wanting Naruto to put Nagato down just has to be some simplistic lust for revenge, given that you can get an entire plot arc, let alone a discussion, out of exploring the difference between revenge and justice. Some also believe that forgiveness is only for those people who have not crossed the Moral Event Horizon, as Pain arguably had, especially considering that Nagato showed no signs of giving up his goals until AFTER Naruto made a big speach about not killing him. This isn't Misaimed Fandom as much as it is disagreeing with the author.
- Naruto never said he was going to let Pain go. He merely decided not to kill him when he was helpless and defeated. Nothing indicates he wasn't going to take him captive. Furthermore, if not for Naruto's refusal of revenge, Pain wouldn't have decided to bring back the villagers.
- Many Naruto fans see Sasuke as a Complete Monster (or at least a Smug Snake) who eats babies and enjoys kicking puppies. Others see him as a Bad Ass with absolutely no flaws, who is not emotionally unstable in the least and who simply does bad things because he's "cool" and "badass" and "evil". Both sets of fans are wrong, as it's pretty clear that while he's supposed to be sympathetic, most of his life choices are shown in quite a negative light.
- Although, on the point of Sasuke, he's now shot straight past the Moral Event Horizon by killing(?) Karin in order to take out Danzo when he had her in a hostage situation. He goes so far as to tell Karin to her face that she was a liability to him as soon as she was made a hostage. tl;dr: Sasuke has made an outright ridiculous dick move.
- Word Of God has outright stated that Sakura was always intended to be an unlikable character, representing human flaws in general. (even calling her an unpleasant person)
- Is it just me? Or the words above are just a perfect example of the trope itself?
- Agreed; the Word Of God is actually that Sakura was intended as a likable character, because she represented us flawed humans.
- To this day, there are a lot of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann fans who refuse to accept that Simon is the main character of the series. These people often cast Kamina as the "real" main character, ignoring that their "real" main character dies eight episodes into a 27 episode series. Perhaps it has something to do with Kamina being more... boisterous than Simon, or perhaps more impetuous (it's worth mentioning that his impetuousness was deliberately portrayed as Kamina's fatal flaw)?
- Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni in general. The series is a dark murder-mystery about what happens if your nakama is torn apart. The anime and manga up the female fanservice in their official arts to over 9000. Still, most of the fans are female — sadistic fans who like to joke about the bloodshed and tragedies, oddly calm shippers, or people who are rather serious, usually sound novel fans.
- Believe it or not, fans of Franken Fran, but Fran isn't evil. Nor is her sister Veronica supposed to be good. If you truly pay attention, then you'll notice that they are both intended to be True Neutral.
- In a similar vein to Zeon (and the various factions of other Gundam series in general - it is a Sunrise series), Britannia in Code Geass often gets portrayed as significantly less evil in the fandom than in the series. Even the series humanizes The Empire to a degree in R2, seeming to forget that they're, you know, evil aggressors. Much like Zeon, the soldiers themselves are often pretty decent (albeit with a number of racists), and even the leaders (Princes and Princesses) are often shown to genuinely love and care for one another - to an extent.
- Yandere postergirl Gasai Yuno of Mirai Nikki spends the entire series stalking the protagonist Amano Yukiteru. She has closets full of skeletons both metaphorical and literal, at one point kidnaps and attempts to rape the hero, and persistently tries to kill anybody forging a normal human relationship with Yukiteru. And the fans adore her for it. The lesson here? If you must commit a crime, try to get at least a few otaku on the jury.
Comic Books
- Lobo started as a generic mercenary before being retooled by creator Keith Giffin as a parody of eighties "grim and gritty" heroes in a series of mini-series books. Needless to say, Lobo became a big hit with fans who took the satire at face value.
- Rorschach from Watchmen was intended to be a deconstruction of the objectivist superheroes created by Steve Ditko, most notably The Question and Mr. A: the embodiment of all that is repellent about Ditko's worldview and, at the same time, all that is noble about it. Rorschach is intelligent and uncompromising to evil with absolute moral integrity, but is a completely Ax Crazy dog kicker insane brand of character as a result. He is delusional and paranoid, but sometimes properly so when no one else is. He is a loner, unfettered by society's restrictions, but an ugly person with disgusting habits and prejudices who constantly rejects those who try to help him, and so on. Far too many readers and creators overlooked his more unsavory aspects and saw him as unambiguously heroic and unambiguously cool (or, most strangely, unambiguously ''sexy''... which he is not). As a result, Rorschach (along with the Batman of Dark Knight Returns) became the template for the less nuanced (and far more glorified) Dark Age Nineties Anti Hero. Alan Moore is known to deeply regret this; he never intended for Rorschach to be a role model and is reportedly disgusted when he receives fan-mail containing variations of the sentiment "Our society needs people like Rorschach."
- And yet he has so, so many fangirls...
- The comic-book Question had a brief story where he read Watchmen, noted Rorschach's similarity to himself, and decided to give the former's methods a try. It ended with an escaped criminal, a badly bruised Question, and the conclusion that "Rorschach sucks" as a role-model. It's something of a Take That to everyone who missed the point.
- Similarly, a number of 2000AD readers seemed to miss the satire of Judge Dredd and thought that this sort of extreme law enforcement sounded like a good thing. So did Sylvester Stallone in interviews concerning The Movie. Clearly, a 6 month — 2 year sentence for littering will solve America's problems.
- Even the writers of Judge Dredd don't know how to deal with the undertones of fascism. Some like to work around it, downplaying the fascist undertones by putting Dredd against monstrous villains who are worse than Dredd/The Judges due to their genocidal actions; others play it depressingly straight (most notably the opening stories as part of the over-reaching "Democracy" arc of the late 1980s/90s). Others try and make Dredd the literal lesser evil via portraying his fellow Judges and supervisors as being worse than him.
- To be honest, many of us 2000AD fans know the world of Dredd is pretty much the first circle of hell but damnit, Dredd is cool.
- Also V from V For Vendetta, to the point where the live action adaptation made it so that he was obviously meant to be the hero. He's a fucking anarchist terrorist for god's sake! Yes, he's the lesser of the two evils, but his main motives are revenge and his methods include torture and brutal murder. It was meant to be ambiguous!
- This happened to R. Crumb a lot — most notably with his iconic "Keep On Truckin'" character/pose, which was adopted by many rock-loving hippies as their "mascot," as it were. The truth was, Crumb was making fun of rock music lovers, who in his eyes were doing "The Dance of Cultural Death" (as he put it). He even explained it in a comic in The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book and told his (probably now disillusioned) hippie fans: "KEEP ON TRUCKIN', SCHMUCKS!". (This was followed by Mr. Natural remarking: "Don't forget, Bob, that it was the compassion, the loving forgiveness, that they found so appealing in your cartoons, that made you so popular, that got you laid, that earned you a living. Keep it in mind!")
- Mr. Natural ended his series in an insane asylum as his former followers commented about how he was impossibly out of touch with the world. What does that tell you about R. Crumb?
- And then there's his satirical race-related comics. (There's a very thin line between parodying racism and being racist.) Crumb's over-the-top satires of American prejudice, "When the N***ers Take Over America" and "When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America," which appeared back-to-back in the last issue of his Weirdo magazine in 1993, subsequently appeared without authorization on hate-group websites.
- Jhonen Vasquez repeatedly takes pages out of his Johnny The Homicidal Maniac and Squee series to Take That to various people he feels are enjoying his comic for the wrong reasons. One extended story in Johnny The Homicidal Maniac is about a serial-killing fanboy of Johnny's. Since Johnny is a character who goes around murdering the most annoying people in the typical Vasquez Crapsack World, it's not hard to see why some people might get the wrong idea.
- In the infamous Chick Tracts, readers are supposed to agree with everything the protagonists say, but there is a significant "fandom" that finds the over-the-top nature unintentionally hilarious. In addition, on first reading them, many people assume that they are intended as a parody. They are serious.
- The sheer number of times he has Straw Secularists/Liberals (especially in schools), such as the dystopia in "Last Generation" which has the security and language of Oceania, the religious politics of Left Behind, and the social politics of Straw Liberal states, with a touch of "concentration camps" for parents who discipline their children — it makes it difficult for one to accept them as serious arguments unless one realizes that there are more extreme people out there.
- Noted, but please don't put links to that idiot's actual website. The last thing they need is more people giving them attention.
- A note to Mr Chick, should he ever read this (which is unlikely): Ok, so you believe in God and many people don't. Ok, so you don't approve of Dungeons and Dragons, and Halloween, and things like that. But it doesn't give you the right to treat those things (or non-believers) as evil, and it doesn't give you the right to try and force your beliefs on others. Ok? Ok. Good? Good.
- Satirical depictions of politicians are almost inevitably popular with their targets (with the notable exception of Steve Bell's take on former British Prime Minister John Major.) Often, they will contact the cartoonist, or the paper it was published in, to ask for a copy or the original, probably thinking it's better if people are making fun of them than just ignoring them. Ralph Steadman declared he would only depict politician's arses to prevent this.
- Embracing the satirist (or impressionist) is an intelligent tactic that most politicians should at least pretend to embrace. Laugh along with the scorn and you're the fun-loving dude who can laugh at himself. Express distaste, even at an awful, unfunny portrayal, and you're the scowling buzzkill with a stick up your ass.
- The rapid transformation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles into the sort of Merchandise Driven juggernaut it was originally meant to parody had a lot to do with this. The creators and later licensees seem to have decided to run with the misaimed version instead of trying to fight it.
- Apparently, we were supposed to agree with the Pro-Registration side in Civil War. Joe Quesada stated that the Pro-Regs were right, anyway. Seriously. We were expected to like Cap's side at first (that's why they showed the Pro-Regs as complete bastards), but eventually side with Iron Man. It didn't work. Most writers in Marvel hate Iron Man these days, making him out to be a fascist crazy instead of a troubled man who thought he was doing what had to be done to keep the SHRA from becoming worse.
- Mark Millar also stated that the pro-regs were right and that he thought every right-thinking person should agree with him. This is ironic because, at the time, everyone was criticizing Millar for making the "pro" side so ludicrously unsympathetic. As one reviewer noted, "If the readers all think Iron Man's a villain, and he wasn't meant to be... well, maybe the writers and editors misunderstood what they were putting out".
- Civil War was written by many authors, each with their own political axe to grind, each feeling free to preach their own political views, left or right, with judicious use of strawmen and puppy kicking. It's why the whole thing was an ugly, undirected mess. In the end, the heavy-handed and inconsistent moral preaching turned many readers away.
- You also shouldn't have Cable tell Ironman (and thus the audience) that a pro-registration future is horrible.
- Which itself is ironic, because within Cable's own book at the time, he had just engineered the fall of the foreign Rumekistan government plus used his friends and allies for the assassination of its leader, in practically the previous arc for the greater good. Which happened to be placing himself as the new leader.
- It was made all the worse in one of the What If?'s, depicting an alternate timeline from the pro-reg, showing a decent middle ground.
- Some people read Kingdom Come just because they like the Antiheroes, this is missing the fact that Kingdom Come was written as a criticism of that kind of character.
- It also doesn't help that many of the characters created for Kingdom Come have found their way into the main DCU continuity through the pages of the JSA. Even Magog, the character created to showcase everything wrong with the Dark Age was reused in Action Comics and even got his own series recently.
- Although even Mark Waid and Alex Ross have admitted they kind of like Magog.
- Well duh. Unlike the other antiheroes, Magog has no delusion about what he's doing. Not to mention that he has an emotional breakdown when Superman and the other original heroes return and he realizes how far he has fallen from his original ideals.
Comedian Characters
- Sacha Baron Cohen relies on this phenomenon when performing in the character of Borat — he presents what can only be described as an over-the-top, wholly unbelievable portrayal of a backwards, anti-Semitic Central Asian reporter, expressing opinions that most people would find intolerable, and in so doing, gets people to agree with those opinions. Perhaps the ultimate example is "In My Country There Is Problem", which starts off innocently enough before launching into the chorus "Throw the Jew down the well/So my country can be free..." which the audience had no reservations at all about singing along to. The video is both hilarious and very, very disturbing.
- Apparently the audience caught on that he was joking, and apparently some of them were in fact Jewish. It's quite possible to sing along to a very catchy song (with questionable lyrics) with your tongue firmly lodged in your cheek.
- Furthermore, whilst there's certainly some participants who don't come over at all favourably, with at least some of the interviewees there's a sense that they're just otherwise polite people who are a little bit freaked out by this guy (who does, at times, come across as overbearingly and deliberately offensive) and are consequently trying to humour him as best they can so that he'll quickly go away and leave them alone.
- Similarly, Baron Cohen's Ali G character was intended as a satire of white guys trying to be black but was ultimately worshiped by the very people it criticized.
- Al Murray's Pub Landlord character was intended as a parodic stereotype of working-class British Nationalists. He was given a talk show on ITV and asked to play the character straight.
- Jamie Kennedy's character B-Rad. B-Rad was a satire of white kids who want to be black along the same lines as Ali G, but those who only saw him in Malibu's Most Wanted might not know how much Jamie Kennedy despised the character. He mocks it in his standup act.
- Harry Enfield's sketch character "Loadsamoney" was intended as a biting parody of smug, narcissistic, possessions-obsessed yuppies. Guess who became the character's biggest fans.
- Sarah Silverman, especially when her fans drool over her looks, demonstrating one of the attitudes she mercilessly satirizes.
"I don't care if you think I'm racist, I just want you to think I'm thin."
- Stephen Colbert's character has been mistaken for real more than once. A fan asked him about this before a taping of The Colbert Report:
Fan: What do you think of conservatives who watch your show and think you're serious about what you say?
Stephen: It just goes to show that we haven't gotten rid of all the lead paint in our houses.
- This extended to the White House, who asked him to address the White House Press Corps dinner. Hilarity Ensued. Of course, the address is meant to be a roast, so odds are they knew what was coming.
- While organziers may have had an idea, video evidence suggests the majority of guests had no idea what was coming, as does media coverage the following day downplaying or savaging Colbert's performance.
- In fact, a recent study has shown that conservative fans think he 'only pretends to be joking', and that it's the liberals who are being duped. Notably, this line of thought requires you to believe that the fake-liberal Colbert keeps up his act 24/7, backstage and in interviews. Wild Mass Guessing come to life?
- Dutch comedians Kees van Kooten and Wim de Bie had it happen to them with their characters Jacobse en van Es. Originally, they were supposed to be smalltime crooks, until, in 1980, they decided to start a political party called de Tegenpartij (the Opposing Party) with the motto "geen gezeik, iedereen rijk" which means "no complaining, everybody rich" ("geen gezeik" is Dutch slang for "no pissing" and by extension "no complaining"). It was supposed to be a spoof on all the extreme right-wing political parties. Unfortunately, said political parties had no sense of satire and openly embraced the Tegenpartij. As a result, on May 10th 1981, "Jacobse en van Es" were shot to death while staging a coup d'etat in The Hague. Van Kooten en de Bie were very sorry to have to retire their favourite characters, and had them come back from the dead several times.
- The Centrum Partij, a full on extreme right wing party, had the characters on the cover of their pamphlets and said: "THESE GUYS FINALLY LET PEOPLE HEAR THE TRUTH!"
- Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis, who starred on the hit Canadian comedy series SCTV, created the characters of Bob and Doug McKenzie (two beer-drinking, somewhat idiotic brothers that talk about menial subjects) as a way to get back at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, who (at the time the show was being produced) tried to force the show's production team to add two minutes of "identifiably Canadian content". When the show premiered, it was a hit with the audience that the two actors were trying to lampoon, and the characters became one of the most famous aspects of the show.
- Dave Chappelle is one of the ultimate cautionary tales of racial comedy — he stopped doing Chappelle's Show when he realized that most of his white audience was just laughing at the sight of a black entertainer doing clownish, stereotypical things, not paying attention to the messages.
- Comedy shows such as The Office (UK), Little Britain, Extras, and Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat have been praised by some for their disregard of political correctness, when in fact the disregard of political correctness is what's frequently being satirized.
- This is traditionally a risk of doing provocative comedy routines, particularly those involving racism and other forms of bigotry; no matter how noble the intentions of the performer, it inevitably becomes difficult to tell whether people are laughing at the satire of the racist character or whether people are laughing with the racist character. The reverse can also be true, it at times being difficult to tell whether the performer actually is satirizing racial issues or whether they're just using this as an excuse to get some cheap laughs using racially-based humour.
- Alf Barnett of the British comedy show Till Death Do Us Part and Archie Bunker of All In The Family, the American adaptation, still provoke great debate over whether they were supposed to be satires of the kind of racist mindset they displayed, or played straight. Word Of God claimed the former, but a heck of a lot of viewers seemed to believe and agree with the latter.
Film
- Extreme example: There is a sequence in the movie version of Pink Floyd's The Wall where Pink hallucinates that he is a fascist leader, leading a vicious army of skinheads. This scene is meant as a look at the relationship between a performer and his fans... but a group of Real Life white supremacists didn't get the joke and based themselves off the scene, adopting the crossed-hammers symbol of Pink's army and dubbing themselves the "Hammerskins".
- Even the album it's based on was influenced by misaimed fandom; Roger Waters (Pink Floyd's bassist and leader) once stated this in an interview. During the tour for Animals, members of the audience were so crazed that a mesh fence had to be erected between the stage and the seats, creating a literal wall. (It was not lost on Waters.) In one incident, a fan climbed up the fence; Waters insulted and spat on him... and the fan went nuts. Not mad, but happy. Waters decided that a metaphysical wall existed and started working on the album.
- Gordon Gekko from Wall Street was supposed to represent the worst excesses of the 1980s. Many people took him as a role model, taking his famous "Greed is Good" speech at face value. Michael Douglas did too good a job at making him charming.
- As Oliver Stone stated in the DVD commentary, Gekko's speech was supposed to be compelling and even correct to a degree. Stone was a fan (with qualifications) of American capitalism. There are much more evil things about Gekko than his belief in American 'greed'.
- Jarhead includes a scene in which the marines cheer for Apocalypse Now [1]. On the commentary track, it is noted that marines never see anti-war movies as such; the book the movie is based on goes so far as to say that there are no true anti-war movies precisely because this trope will always kick in.
- Case in point: there are tales of Marines cheering the "soldier mutilates an Iraqi corpse" scene in Jarhead.
- Despite the fact that Paul Verhoeven is anti-war and anti-fascism (likely from having bombs dropped by fascists in his backyard as a child), people will accuse him from now until judgement day that Starship Troopers glorifies war, fascism, and blind, jingoistic patriotism. To think Paul Verhoeven made the mistake of being too subtle.
- And that's not even taking Robocop into consideration! Textbook example of the audience not even realizing that the movie was making fun of them for taking it at face value.
- I know this happened to me when I saw Starship Troopers. In the film, Verhoeven shows how paranoid and even xenophobic the humans have become after the giant alien bugs attack Buenos Aires, to the point that they're gleefully stomping on harmless little bugs that can't possibly hurt them. But while watching the movie as I teenager, I was so terrified by the alien invaders that (at least during the course of the film) I came to hate ALL bugs, and I actually felt like cheering at the end when Neil Patrick Harris (dressed as some kind of Blackshirt) announces about one of the captured aliens: "It's afraid....It's AFRAID!"
- People who worship Sarah Connor of Terminator 2 Judgement Day as a paragon of feminist virtue tend to be the ones who ignore the fact she is a cruel, violent, emotionally unstable bad-mother who is actually deconstructing militant feminism rather than celebrating it. Point in fact, according to Audio-Commentary of the 3-DVD Definitive Edition Director's Cut, Linda Hamilton (the actress who portrayed her) and James Cameron (Hamilton's then husband and the creator of the franchise) repeatedly stressed on multiple occasions that she is a messed up horror-of-a-human being rather than someone who is meant to be admired.
- Leaving Las Vegas was criticized for glamorizing alcoholism. Apparently, these people missed the bit where the protagonist decides he's going to drink himself to death and does. Then again, that summary can translate easily to "alcohol is worth dying for".
- Many, many mobster movies, such as The Godfather, Goodfellas, Casino and Scarface?. Far too many people see the big houses, beautiful women, expensive cars, and fancy suits and think of the protagonists as "men of honor". They completely forget that the characters are thieves, murderers, and drug dealers who lose everything and everybody close to them by the end. Worse still in that some of these movies are based on real events. The horrible things that the lead does in Goodfellas have Real Life analogues: Goodfellas was The Movie of a nonfiction book. Henry Hill was a real person.
- With Goodfellas at least, some of the glamour is intentional; in interviews about the movie Scorscese recalled his childhood in New York, watching flashy-dressed and successful looking mobsters all around him and, as with Henry Hill, aspiring to be like them. The Mob life can be appear quite glamourous from the outside.
- Taxi Driver has Robert DeNiro trying to kill a politician. Some guy watched the movie many times, got obsessed with Jodie Foster and, after many attempts to contact her, decided to impress her by shooting President Reagan...
- Taxi Driver scriptwriter Paul Schrader blames Executive Meddling for the intentional toning down of Travis Bickle's racism (he was much more susceptible to muttering about the N-words and W-words, in addition to inciting hate crimes), thus making DeNiro's character a complex counterculture icon rather than the paranoid, simpleminded racist the character was intended to be.
- As Clive Barker, creator of the Hellraiser series, put it, "You've got Pinhead, who hasn't done a single decent thing in eight movies, and still gets mail from women who want to have his children."
- Rollerball found its biggest success among people who were excited only by the rollerball scenes. Rollerball is a ridiculously violent sport that is the centerpiece of the movie's satire of a society increasingly desensitized to violence (another scene features people at a party blowing off steam by taking a flamethrower to some trees.) Some sports people even asked the filmmakers' permission to create a rollerball league. Almost certainly this is due to the deliberate slowness most of the Author Filibuster scenes are played: The non-sport scenes are either a bit wonderful contrast, or really, ''really'' drag.
- The cast of rollerball players in the movie actually had a great deal of fun actually playing rollerball between takes and before and after shooting using the areas and props depicted in the film.
- Disaffected youth have long put up posters of Hud in their rooms as a mark of admiration for this iconic counter-culture hero. The story is about Hud trying to get his father falsely declared mentally incompetent and himself power of attorney so he can sell his father's farm and keep the money. And he attempts to rape his love interest.
- Harry Lime from The Third Man is a black marketeer who sells his loyal girlfriend to the Russians and runs a "medical charity" that sells watered-down penicillin that results in mass death and illness. The movie even goes so far as to show a hospital room full of dying children. How does the audience respond? By demanding more adventures of Harry Lime. The result was a radio series chronicling his further adventures...
- This is somewhat counteracted by the fact that Harry essentially becomes a stand-in for the protagonist of the film, rather than the evil bastard he actually is. The admiration was more related to the glowing performance of the actor: Leave it to Orson Welles to make a character irresistible.
- Romper Stomper and American History X are quite popular among Neo-Nazi skinheads.
- Director Shusuke Kaneko clearly stated that Godzilla in the film Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All Out Attack is pure evil and that no one is supposed to root for him. Guess which monster ends up getting the most praise.
- The Japanese live action/anime hybrid film Twilight Of The Cockroaches was quite popular with various minorities, especially Jews who identified with the cockroaches' struggle to survive the humans' callous attempts to exterminate them. One can only imagine what their reaction would be on learning that, according to the director, the whole thing is an allegory for the fall of the Axis Powers.
- A particularly creepy example of this trope: reportedly, teens were cheering in theaters during Schindlers List when Ralph Fiennes' monstrous Nazi officer randomly killed innocent people.
- Debora Kampmeier's film Hounddog is meant to depict the horrible consequences of child abuse. Many critics (and viewers) see this differently.
- Howard Beale of Network has quite a bit of quotable dialogue ("I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" for one), but many of his fans forget that he essentially went insane as a result of working in television news for too long, and treat him as some kind of visionary.
- Many people sympathize with Colonel "You can't handle the truth!" Jessep of A Few Good Men and his famous courtroom speech in which he admits he ordered the "Code Red" ("You want me on that wall! You need me on that wall!") is admired by many.
- I don't think the script is condemning Jessup the man ("....my existence, while grotesque and indefensible to you, saves lives!") so much as it is condemning his actions, which actually pervert and corrupt the Marine Corps ideology. The movie does make a point of treating the basic ethos of the Marine Corps with reverence, and in this context Jessup is less a Complete Monster than a Well Intentioned Extremist.
- Going on the gangster glorification theme, Blow and American Gangster especially have a strange appreciation for their brutal drug lord "protagonists." Granted, Depp and Denzel are tough to make unlikable and are legit cash cows anyways, but how the hell do you make a guy who transports heroin with the caskets of dead soldiers a hero?
- Boys Don't Cry is about young transman Brandon Teena struggling to find his identity as an adult and as a man, since for the first time in his life he can truly be who he is inside. Most reviewers loved it, but while sympathetic to the character, referred to Teena as female and seemed to think it was a story about a lesbian who felt she had to pretend to be a boy because of homophobia or something. One reviewer even said something like "in disguising herself, ironically, this young woman helped other girls find themselves." (Yikes.) In real life, Teena was your average somewhat macho straight guy and had the kind of enlightened opinions on feminism and lesbianism you'd expect from a young man born in the Bible Belt in the early seventies.
- Your Mileage May Vary. Considering how many butch lesbians have had gender identity issues for not fitting typical female gender roles, the story has a hell of a lot of resonance for them as well. Furthermore, trans identity politics set aside, Brandon was female, and the way that his homophobia and sexism is not only treated as a non-issue in regards to his gender issues, but simply brushed off as a case of "boys will be boys" has a ton of Unfortunate Implications in itself. Not to mention how the real Brandon's confession to his therapist that he hated being a lesbian, or the fact that he was sexually abused (which causes many girls to hate their female bodies) are routinely ignored by trans activists. So Yeah, the feminist/lesbian interpretations aren't exactly unwarranted.
- Although it is very common for trans guys to hate being described as lesbians (since they aren't), and while sexual abuse may cause body image problems, it doesn't cause gender dysphoria. At the end of the day, only Brandon truly knew his own gender identity, he identified as male, and it's rather offensive to him - and to other trans guys - for armchair psychologists to decide it's their place to doubt it.
- The Wicker Man doesn't exactly portray neopaganism well. In fact, it's quite pro-Christian film, with the devout policeman's sense of duty making him more and more admirable as the film progresses. Naturally, Wiccans and neo-pagans are all over it, probably because of how well-researched it is.
- It may depend on which version you see. The original cut showed the policeman ordering pro-Christian graffiti painted over (showing his sense of duty is stronger than his religious beliefs) and also had a fairly Squicky scene where Lord Summerisle brings a teenaged boy to a mature woman for his first sexual experience. The version finally released cut both of these scenes, tilting the balance more in the islanders favor. (Notably, when the policeman complains about "corruption of the young" in the theater release, he sounds like he is simply imagining things.)
- Also, while one is perfectly entitled to dislike the policeman for his Jerk Ass behavior for the first half of the film, it's hard to see anyone denying that his statement to the islanders near the end is the one that should be agreed with: "No matter HOW you look at it, the fact is that you are committing murder!" Regardless of how the cop may have acted toward them in the past and regardless of their sympathetic motive to produce a good harvest, there is NO justification for what the islanders do in the end.
- The film's admirers also overlook one VERY important thing: Real Life Neopagans and Wiccans do NOT commit human or even animal sacrifices. Yes, they choose to worship "the spirits of the Earth" instead of a more...conventional God, but they would never dream of offering a life to said spirits.
- It can take a few watchings of Straw Dogs before one realizes that the Dustin Hoffman character, rather than being a put-upon man spurred to badassery in order to protect what's his, is a maniac, deliberately provoking people and trying to start a fight. He kills them, and he's just like them.
- Francis Ford Coppola intended the opening speech in Patton, and Patton's character in general to be ludicrously jingoistic. However, many have found George C. Scott's portrayal of the WWII general patriotic and inspiring. Supposedly it was one of Richard Nixon's favorite movies.
- Of course, it doesn't help that the speech was almost verbatim a genuine speech given on several occasions by Patton in real life as a pep-talk to his troops. The only real change is that they toned down the notoriously foul-mouthed Patton's words into something that would take them south of a R Rating.
- Inverted with the film version of The Birth Of A Nation where the fandom got the racist subtext of the original Thomas Dixon work but D. W. Griffith apparently didn't or just went with it anyways. Griffith was himself not really a racist, his next film Intolerance actually dealt with the negative effects of prejudice. His later film Broken Blossoms even went out of its way to make the Chinese protagonist very sympathetic as a reaction to the rabid anti-Chinese sentiment of the time.
- From this very Wiki's "Just Bugs Me" page for Inglourious Basterds (maybe more Misaimed Hatedom):
While I understand that this was mostly just a Nazi-snuff film without too much in the way of moral depth, it made me really uncomfortable when I inexplicably found myself to be rooting for the Nazis. With the exception of the beginning, the movie made the Nazis seem to be cultured, polite, intelligent and even likable. Those on the Allied side were depicted as homicidal, arrogant and merciless ruffians. In fact, the most heroic act in the film is done by the German officer who refuses to give up the location of his fellow troops, while the US agents engage in suicide bombing! I might be making something out of nothing here, but when a film has characters that make the Nazis look like the hapless victims, I have to object. I don't like sympathizing with Nazis.
- Welcome to your first Anti Villain , may I take your order please?
- This review of the 2009 Sherlock Holmes film accused the director of making the film into a subtle atheistic Author Tract because Holmes finds out that all of the occult stuff employed by the antagonist in the film was proved to be clever trickery. This is despite the fact that Doing In The Wizard played a big part in more than one Sherlock Holmes book. The review also complains that the film was unfaithful to Holmesian lore in that the line "elementary, my dear Watson" was never spoken, even though this exact line was never spoken in the original books at all.
- The 1970 film Joe starred Peter Boyle as a working-class reactionary who fantasizes about murdering hippies (and does so in the film's climax). Boyle was horrified to find audiences cheering the character at screenings, and reportedly turned down the role of Popeye Dole in The French Connection at least partly out of fear of inspiring a similar reaction.
- Many viewers applauded Hard Candy as a Take That toward pedophiles. While Jeff is obviously beyond redemption for what he's done, many viewers don't take into account the fact that Hayley's methods are obviously supposed to demonstrate that she too is an incredibly sick individual.
- August Rush managed to accomplish the inverse of this - it missed its intended demographic. It was supposed to play particularly well to musicians and music lovers, but those were the people most likely to spot the film's numerous Wall Bangers.
Literature
- FIGHT CLUB. Ask what Tyler Durden would do, then DON'T DO IT! The point is that we don't need that side of humanity anymore. EVOLVE!
- "And let the chips fall where they may!"
- The Iron Dream, an Alternate History novel by Norman Spinrad, presents itself as a work of literary criticism about a fantasy novel — "Lord of the Swastika" — written by a version of Adolf Hitler who left Germany in 1919. Norman Spinrad's intent was to portray the similarities between fantasy tropes (such as Always Chaotic Evil) and the beliefs that facilitated many Real Life horrors. Ironically, the American Nazi Party put the book on its recommended reading list despite the satirical intent of the work. In Spinrad's own words:
To make damn sure that even the historically naive and entirely unselfaware reader got the point, I appended a phony critical analysis of Lord of the Swastika, in which the psychopathology of Hitler's saga was spelled out by a tendentious pedant in words of one syllable.
Almost everyone got the point...
- The book can be read both as satire and as the opposite of Spinrad's intentions, at the same time. Specifically, the book can be read as an attack on the concept of Author Tract—"proving" an idea by writing a book about it doesn't look so good when the writer is Hitler. Spinrad, however, meant for the book to be an Author Tract (about militaristic fiction being fascist).
- Isaac Asimov's short story The Fun They Had was intended it to be ironic; he hated school as a child because the classes were paced for less able students and he did not get along with his teachers. Many people, though, miss the intended irony (having forgotten just how bad school is) and take the story's concluding sentence at face value. It's even appeared in elementary school readers, presumably to get kids to appreciate school...
- The relationship between Almasy and Katherine in The English Patient is a dangerous, destructive obsession that ends up claiming not only both of their lives but also the life of Katherine's husband. Yet it's held up by many as one of the greatest love stories of its time, perhaps due to the film adaptation glorifying the affair more than the book had.
- Junichiro Tanizaki's Naomi (written back in the 1920s) was supposed to be a criticism of Western influences against Japanese tradition. Many women who read it began to emulate the main female character (becoming independent, fashionable, and non-traditional, like the Flappers of the era) instead of understanding the author's intent.
- Upton Sinclair's The Jungle was written as a socialist piece to show the plight of industrial workers. But, due to Sinclair's disturbingly graphic descriptions of what was going into the nation's meat, the government stepped in and created the FDA and passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which requires ingredient listings on all foodstuffs. Sinclair commented on this in later years:
"I aimed for the public's heart, and by mistake, I hit the public's stomach."
- It goes beyond that; Sinclair actually opposed the Pure Food and Drug Act, as it shifted the cost of food inspection onto the federal government and away from the meat packing industry.
- The Secret History's central character, Henry Winter, has had fans gushing about how 'perfect' he is and how he's ideal boyfriend material. We're talking about a man who organises a bacchanal and accidentally kills someone, murders one of his friends, and was planning to kill another of his friends before he decides to commit suicide ... How is this appealing in any way whatsoever? 'Cold blooded psycho' is the description you're looking for.
- Italy's fascist government approved a film version of Ayn Rand's We the Living (without her permission) on the grounds that it was anti-communist. Several months after the film's release, it was pulled when the government realized the story was just as much anti-fascist.
- In 19th century Northern California, author Bret Harte, who opposed racial discrimination, wrote the narrative poem "The Heathen Chinee" to satirize anti-Chinese sentiment, which was widespread at the time. Readers of the poem and the periodicals that reprinted it widely interpreted it as mocking the Chinese. It was often recited by opponents of Chinese immigration, and Harte was thanked by a Senator who held anti-Chinese sentiment. Harte later heavily disparaged the poem, but it still became one of the most popular among the anti-Chinese movement.
- Reportedly, a British Secretary of State for Education once told Muriel Spark they greatly admired the title character of The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie. Since Miss Brodie was a Sadist Teacher who encouraged one of her favourites to fight for the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, Mrs. Spark looked somewhat horrified at the notion.
- A lot of people who are politically on the right cite George Orwell's 1984 as an argument against leftist social programs that are creating what they perceive as a "nanny state". This is ignoring that George Orwell was an outspoken socialist and that Nineteen Eighty Four was written to criticize totalitarianism (specifically Stalinism), not liberalism, which Orwell viewed as not leftist enough. Orwell may have agreed with them to an extent on politically correct language, though, since he was a strong proponent of clarity of speech. Orwell himself directly refuted these claims in his own writings.
- Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, though clearly intended against paradise engineering, has its own following of people advocating the idea that Huxley's vision didn't go far enough.
- A Clockwork Orange. Lots of teens (and not so teens) tend to ignore the final chapter of the book where Alex acknowledges his wrongdoings and start dressing up like him and even learning nadsat. It doesn't help that the movie made the message look like the exact opposite.
- The final chapter was left out of the book altogether for many years, even before the film adaptation. The publishers claim that the author didn't give them the 21st chapter and that it was an afterthought of his; the author claims that the publishers tossed out the 21st chapter because fables sell well. Some versions of the book now come with a foreword containing his rant about how, without the 21st chapter, ACO is a fable.
- The final chapter was left out in the US, but was always included in UK publications of the book. Take from that what you will.
- "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost is widely considered a celebration of independence. But Frost, a diehard misanthrope, intended it as a bitterly ironic satire of people who delusionally fancy themselves individualists. Consider that the two roads are "just as fair[;] the passing... had worn them really about the same". "I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence" does not describe laudable independence: it portrays self-obsessed, melodramatic braggadocio dredged up again and again over the course of a boring life.
- And in order to prove this statement, someone should be putting a link right about here.
- Similarly, "Mending Wall", with its refrain of "Good fences make good neighbors." No more need be said.
- It should be noted that the expression "Good fences make good neighbors" precedes Frost.
- Gullivers Travels was written by Swift as a biting satire. Instead of being recognized for its wit and vicious commentary on the state of man and civilization, it instead became a beloved children's classic. To expedite this, many adaptations only cover Lilliput; almost no adaptations contain any hints of parts three and four. Happily, the 1996 TV miniseries with Ted Danson kept the satire intact.
- Really, most of Swift's work has been subject to misaimed fandom. The essay A Modest Proposal was meant to get the Irish to get off their asses and do something about the state of Ireland, but instead people just laughed at the satire and did nothing.
- A rare example of this trope as a plot element within a work itself is Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum, in which three intellectuals, using a computer program and a smorgasbord of occult, esoteric and conspiracy-theory texts, create a "manifesto" for the fictional secret society "The Tres" as a satire of secret societies and the gullibility and fanaticism surrounding both these societies and their critics. The unintended consequence is the creation of an actual Tres, the members of which turn violently against the manifesto's authors.
- Eco likely based this scenario off the anonymously-published 17th-century Fama Fraternitatis, which claimed to be the manifesto of a centuries-old mystical Christian brotherhood, the Rosiscrucians. The work eventually inspired a number of rival Rosicrucian societies, even though many historians consider the work an elaborate hoax; not only is there no evidence for the existence of such a movement prior to the 18th century, but the Fama was initially published together with an obviously fictional comical story about an absurd, failed utopian "reform."
- Hitler's regime enthusiastically endorsed Nietzsche's writings, particularly his concept of the Overman (übermensch), as a philosophical buttress for Nazism's ideals of "Aryan" supremacy and anti-Semitism. Nietzsche's Overman concept was an ideal for the individual to strive towards and had nothing to do with the pseudo-scientific "Aryan race" doctrines of his time. Furthermore, although Nietzsche wasn't pro-Jewish, he hated German anti-Semitic groups with a passion. The Misaimed Fandom was caused by Nietzsche's sister, who was an active anti-Semite, editing her brother's works to conform to her own views after he was too demented to know about it. Sadly, during and for some time after World War Two, Nietzsche had an undeservedly bad reputation in much of the world as a proto-Nazi — hence the existence of the Nietzsche Wannabe trope.
- Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy from Pride And Prejudice are often cited as the quintessential Slap Slap Kiss couple — passionate dislike is just a mask for passionate love. But Elizabeth herself tells her first suitor Mr. Collins (who she legitimately cannot stand) that this is a ridiculous notion and sometimes, No means No; not every girl who claims to dislike a man is in denial (otherwise, she may just as well have feelings for Mr. Collins!). A paragraph comparing Elizabeth's changing feelings for Wickham and Darcy clearly shows that the initial conflict between the Official Couple was just supposed to show how feelings can evolve in the real world as opposed to the Fairy Tale Love At First Sight. Dislike can evolve into love; nowhere does anyone imply dislike = love... except Mr. Collins.
- A relationship guide, Dating Mr. Darcy: A Girl's guide to Sensible Romance, missed that the whole point of Pride and Prejudice, (where, if I remember correctly, religion is never mentioned) is that both Elizabeth and Darcy have to re-examine themselves and change in order to be better people, and better for each other. Instead, you get this gem of a book description:
Any girl who has seen Pride and Prejudice or read the Jane Austen novel knows that the much misunderstood Mr. Darcy is the ideal gentleman. But is it possible to find your own Mr. Darcy in today's world of geeks and goons?...Best-selling author Sarah Arthur equips young women to gauge a guy's Darcy Potential (DP) according to his relationships with family, friends, and God.
- Yeeeeeah, Mr. Darcy freely admits at the end of the book that he was sincerely being an asshole at the start, there was no "misunderstanding".
- Among those who criticize Kurt Vonnegut, it is commonly stated that his novel Slaughterhouse-Five wants us to agree with the Tralfamadorians, a completely apathetic race of alien toilet plungers to whom war and death mean nothing. He's satirizing that pattern of thought in humans; to him, people who think that way are as ridiculous as living plungers.
- Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron" is often taken to be a parable against socialism. This ignores Vonnegut's oft-professed admiration for socialism, and for socialist heroes like Eugene Debs. In light of this the story may be read as a satire of American fears or misconceptions of what socialism would look like.
- Lolita has a tendency to attract its own fandom that believes in the righteousness of Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze's relationship. These fans usually miss out on the overarching idea that all of the characters are screwed up and potentially abusive to one another, as the fandom is likely busy contemplate how their teacher of choice so totally has the hots for them and how they should get together, despite said teacher having a wife, a child, and generations between them. On the flip-side, because of its loud fandom but reticent crowd that enjoyed and understood the novel, those who have never read the book may dismiss it as literary child pornography, which makes two groups of people missing the point.
- Members of the "loud fandom", who think the book is a celebration of older man/teenage girl relationships, apparently miss or ignore the scene in which Humbert plans to impregnate Lolita — so that by the time she's aged beyond his interest, he will already have Lolita 2.0 coming up.
- Bumper stickers proclaiming, "Eve was framed" and the interpretation of Lilith as a feminist heroine would likely be viewed by the writers of The Bible as Misaimed Fandom. Heck, half of the reinterpretations of scripture would probably have the writers crying, "that's not what I meant at all!"
- How about the fact that Lilith, as a person, is not even actually in the Bible?
- Considering that the lilitu which are thought to have been the inspiration for Lilith in Hebrew literature aren't really anything like Lilith at all would probably have caused their creators to scratch their heads in confusion at how the Hebrews could possibly have misunderstood what they were.
- Paolo and Francesca in Dante's Inferno have been under quite a bit of Misaimed Fandom from literary commentators, who often assume that they're being unfairly punished when, in fact, their dialogue indicates that their relationship was based on lust rather than love and that any love Francesca had for Paolo is gone, replaced by bitterness that he caused her to go to hell. The Pilgrim faints out of pity for the two, but it's implied that over time, he learns to stop feeling sorry for the sinners.
- The Rise of Scourge manga produced a lot of this from the Warrior Cats fandom. Because of Scourge's backstory, a large portion of fans believe that he is not evil, some even going far enough to blame everything he did on random other characters. Of course, this interpretation completely ignores the author's belief that no one is born evil, and that everyone has a reason for their actions, but that these reasons are in no way an excuse. In fact, in the author's note at the beginning of the very same book, she says his actions were inexcusable, and that she wasn't trying to make excuses, also saying that "If ever a character were purely bad, Scourge is it."
- Also on the subject of bad characters who are seen as good: Ashfur. Just... Ashfur. He was a minor character who eventually went insane because Squirrelflight didn't want to be his mate, which he interpreted as a mean-spirited rejection. He became very obsessive and eventually tried to kill as many of Squirrelflight's kin as he could so he could get her to experience pain. Fans somehow interpret him as an innocent, lovable cutie who was constantly victimized by the selfish main characters and was completely justified in his actions.
- There are also the Ashfur fans who claim that Squirrelflight was using Ashfur to make Brambleclaw jealous. Not only has this be disproved by Word Of God, but they have no actual evidence other than the fact that Ashfur became friends with Squirrelflight after she had a fight with Brambleclaw (and of course, it is likely that this was Ashfur seizing an opportunity to get close to Squirrelflight). In fact, the very idea of Brambleclaw being jealous doesn't even cross Squirrelflight's mind until near the end of Twilight, and her idea of staying Just Friends is somewhat supportive of her not using him. Of course, Asfur fans are willing to accept any idea that can help them portray Ashfur more sympathetically.
- Most people who hate Sol. Of course, it's not a crime to hate Sol; These people are entitled to their own opinions, but most of them either hate him because he's "stupid" (which he clearly isn't.) or because he's trying to get get the Clans to stop following StarClan. He does take this too far, but most people seem to be more against the fact that he doesn't like StarClan than his methods (Some also claim that he doesn't believe in StarClan which, though not a very egregious error, is still incorrect). They make it seem like StarClan is the most important thing ever, and their word should be followed rigidly, which means that most of them are completely forgetting that StarClan themselves have been telling us for the longest time that they do not hold all the answers, and that the cats are essentially masters of their own destinies. They essentially only exist to watch over them and give out warnings.
- Also, the warrior code, though very important, does not represent universal moral standards (You would think that Hollyleaf's Face Heel Turn would bring this into perspective, but no, no it apparently hasn't).
- Fans have somehow managed to take the series's message about racial tolerance and acceptance and get "Racism is Good".
- J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, has frequently bemoaned the vocal fanbases of Draco Malfoy and Severus Snape. Not to mention a certain segment of the fandom that treats being pureblood as better - Completely Missing The Point.
- Also a case of misaimed authorial intent. While it is true that "Muggle-borns" are represented as no worse than "Purebloods," the fact that there are "Muggles" at all and the suggestion that magic, which has historically been a "craft," is, instead, a matter of genetics, muddies the issue. The complete lack of resolution to the House Elves subplot also does this. Rowling is pulling a George Lucas in terms of denouncing elitism but representing its benefits pretty darn well.
- But reading between the lines shows that the "good guys" value blood a lot too — people say Harry will be great because his parents were; "blood will out" in the case of Neville Longbottom; Harry surmising that Marcus Flint "must have troll blood"; etc.
- That's not so much "blood" as it is a message that "If your parents are good, you'll be good too". In Flint's case, they're implying that he's troll-like; smelly, brutish, and stupid.
- There's also an odd tendency in fandom to portray Dumbledore as an nigh-amoral Manipulative Bastard instead of The Chessmaster he actually was, especially among "Slytherfen". He also often gets turned into a bit of a jerk.
- Descriptions of the Illuminati in Angels And Demons make them sound like they're a Misaimed Fandom of science, dogmatically and intolerantly plotting against the Catholic Church for being dogmatic and intolerant. Apparently, believing in Science means you never subject the antiquated grudges of your own secret society to the same critical scrutiny as you do, the workings of the physical universe. Subverted in that it's not really scientists who are behind the plot, so the above view only illustrates how the real villain thinks science's advocates would think.
- Just to confuse things further, reviewers' unwillingness to include spoilers when they discuss the plot tends to conceal the subversion from potential audiences, causing many people who never even read/saw it to assume that Dan Brown is bashing Science this time. Can you have a Misaimed Fandom of people who never actually read what they've misinterpreted?
- Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky was intended as a parody as how not to write a poem, and also to make fun of pretentious poetry. Now, however, it is used for serious study among scholars, the exact people it was making fun of.
- John Milton's Paradise Lost has Satan as its protagonist, but not its hero. A lot of people couldn't tell the difference, hence William Blake's famous quote about Milton being "of the devil's party without knowing it." It's also worth mentioning that Philip Pullman, the extremely anti-religious man that he is, loves this book (having missed the irony of the Villain Protagonist), to the point of naming the His Dark Materials series after quotes from it.
- Ever since Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin forty years ago, the popular academic argument is that Milton was subverting this trope. Under this theory, the reader is supposed to sympathize with Satan early on, and then be surprised to find out later in the poem that Satan really is evil and was lying all along. In a way, then, the reader symbolically re-enacts the Fall, and is forced to accept that they, too, have evil in them.
- Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho was written as a satire of the yuppie culture of the '80s, yet was subjected to massive protests by feminist groups due to violent scenes against women. Too many people read the book for what was written and not what it was saying.
- To add to the irony, in the film version, the title character was played by none other than Gloria Steinem's stepson!
- Also, although the most brutal violence is meted out against women, Bateman kills men in equal numbers, and at one point murders a boy.
- Pretty much everything Robert Burns ever wrote. He was trying to impress English gentry, using "quaint" Scots language as a gimmick. The gentry did not care. A whole lot of native Scots speakers, however, were delighted, and Celtic Scots continue to be his main fanbase.
- Go to author Sinclair Lewis' hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota sometime. In addition to the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center, his grave site, and the Gopher Prairie Motel, the high school's sports teams are called The Main Streeters. Fact is, Sinclair Lewis hated his hometown, and his books (especially Main Street)are pull-no-punches scathing indictments of the hypocrisy of the "Minnesota Nice" he saw in the allegedly "nice little towns" that dot rural Minnesota.
- Agatha Christie unintentionally succeeded in making some of her most despicable murderers in And Then There Were None (such as, oh, the child-killing Yandere, or antisemitic Darwinist) the most sympathetic characters in her fandom, if the artwork (and fanfiction) based on said characters is any indication. Of course, your mileage may vary on just how truly 'sympathetic' they are.]]
- Then again, it's often a trademark of Agatha Christie to give each of her murderers varying degrees of sympathy, so it's entirely possibly she made said characters morally ambiguous on purpose to let the reader be the judge for themselves.
- Partially because of the greater popularity and fame of the film adaptation of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, which boiled down the story into being a battle exclusively between Randle McMurphy and Nurse Ratched, a number of people argued about Ratched and McMurphy as characters. Kesey even pointed out that having a hatedom for Ratched herself (and debating a possible backstory to round out the character) was pointless. She is just supposed to be representative of the kind of repressive, conformist society bent on "fixing" people that would create a person like her in the first place and put her in a position of power.
- There is a growing amount of slash fanfic based on Ayn Rand's books. Rand was such a homophobe that she's probably spinning in her grave.
- There is an incredible amount of Ho Yay in Rand's novels, notably the scenes where Wynand daydreams about having a paperweight made in the shape of Roark's hand, and the scene where Reardon kisses the Wet Nurse. Possibly Rand wanted to write about male bonding but had absolutely no idea whatsoever about how it works. Or possibly her heroes are just that perfect.
- The Left Behind books. The main characters are total stuck-up jerks, and pretty much any character you're supposed to hate ends up looking sympathetic. Hattie, the flight attendant who ends up unknowingly working for the Antichrist? You're supposed to look down on her and feel that she deserves her inevitable fate, but it's hard not to feel sorry for her. Buck's boss, who fires him for acting like a jerk after he didn't work on his biggest, most important story? (Actually, he did, but everyone was brainwashed into not knowing Buck was there.) Buck acts like a brat and mocks her, earning laughter from his co-workers. It's hard not to imagine that they're actually laughing -at- him rather than -with- him, but the authors seem to think otherwise. Seriously, you know you've failed as an author if the characters who everyone is supposed to hate end up being the most likable. Plus, the main characters do nothing to actively affect the plot. And we're supposed to like -them-??
- Fridge Brilliance! The books are basically recounting the Apocalypse according to St. John, chapter and verse. It's portrayed as a time when evil is at its greatest height; everyone who's good (being significantly more Protestants than Catholics) is lifted body and soul into Heaven by God at the start of the series. Stands to reason only assholes have been left behind.
- Except salvation is, according to Word Of God (so to speak), supposed to completely change a person, reforming them from their Jerk Ass ways. All it does in the books is add a self-righteous streak.
- Bella of Twilight tends to miss the point of works like Wuthering Heights and Romeo and Juliet when she uses them to make comparisons to her love life. It does not help that she is supposed to be an extremely intelligent and deep person. Stephanie Meyer herself is a non-in-universe example, apparently not realizing that The Princess Bride is a satire of fairy tale romances.
Live Action TV
Music
- Even perfectly intelligent and perceptive people often simply can't ''make out very many of the words in the music they listen to. They're lucky if they can get the choruses right. So in the music world, Misaimed Fandom is not restricted to Stealth Parodies. It can affect anybody at any time.
- Gangsta Rap- Originally the genre focused on shining the light on the harsh world in the inner city, with the lyrics often condemning social ills such as crime and police brutality. Unfortunately, once it became popular, it morphed into a genre that glorified violence, gang life, crime, and murder with a healthy dose of misogyny and homophobia tossed in as well. It doesn't help that many of the present rappers were part of the misaimed fandom.
- On the topic of "love" songs, people dedicate Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" to their loved ones. Either they realize that the song is about leaving somebody, or they don't. Either way, it makes the annoying wail almost bearable.
- Compare/Contrast Whitney's version with the original sung by Dolly Parton. Dolly sings it as a woman who's resigned to her fate, but will never let the flame die out. Whitney's version comes off a woman desperately trying to keep the man, as if the song will make the man see the error of his ways and come back to her.
- Also on the topic of love songs, "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails (colloquially known as the "fuck-you-like-an-animal song") is considered, by some of its listeners, to be a wonderfully hot and sexy love song. Yet the lyrics are very, very clearly about a psychological wreck of a man using sex as an escape from his own self-loathing. Romantic, huh?
- Admittedly, given the meme that crazy people are better in bed, that might be part of the appeal.
- For an opposite mistake, "Time To Say Goodbye" is not a parting song; the two lovers are not saying goodbye to each other, they are leaving together (as indicated by the original Italian title, Con te partiro - "I will leave with you").
- The Jonas Brothers covered Weezer's "My Name Is Jonas" live because of the title alone. Considering how different the lyrics are from their usual boy band bilge....
- This song is not about a cult...
- It's about drugs... we think.
- Only indirectly. Word Of God is that "Hotel California" is about being famous and living the high life in Los Angeles, which, yes, sometimes includes drugs. Many celebrities do burn out, go crazy, die young, or end up with their lives ruined for any number of other reasons.
- R.E.M.'s "The One I Love" appears to be a straightforward love song ("This one goes out to the one I love") but the idea that the one I love is "a simple prop to occupy my time" and is ultimately replaced by "another prop" is usually lost between the choruses.
- R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People" has suffered a similar fate, though unlike "The One I Love", the band itself acknowledges the utter fail of the song on every conceivable level as far as their song mocking Chinese communist propaganda, which bragged that Communist China was full of "shiny happy people", came off in execution as a happy pop song about... well, shiny happy people holding hands. Hence the band pretty much going above and beyond to pretend that the song never exists.
- Bruce Springsteen's "Born In The USA" is seen by many as a Reagan-era patriotic anthem — that is, by people who only ever listen to the chorus. As the verses make abundantly clear it is about Vietnam veterans who were perceived as unemployable, and the anthemic chorus is meant to be bitter and satirical. The Reagan administration even approached Springsteen to endorse Ronnie in the 1984 elections — Springsteen, a staunch liberal, refused.
- John Cougar Mellencamp's "Pink Houses" is likewise seen as a Reagan-era patriotic anthem by those who only listen to the chorus ("Ain't that America?").
- Along the same lines as the above, Neil Young's "Rockin' In The Free World" is often thought of as a patriotic celebration of life in the free world. However, the lyrics pointedly critique the socioeconomic state of America circa George H. W. Bush's presidency, addressing topics such as homelessness and drug addiction.
- Another similar example: "Democracy" by Leonard Cohen.
- Pearl Jam's "Betterman" is a song about a woman rationalizing her place in an abusive relationship. And yet, at any given concert performance, you can see couples lovingly singing it to one another; on at least one occasion, a man proposed to his girlfriend during the song with the lyrics "She lies and says she's in love with him". That is both horrible and hysterical.
- Similarly, "Alive" is often interpreted as a defiant proclamation of vitality; in fact, it's a song about a teenage son molested by his mother because he resembles the dead father he never knew. Eddie Vedder used to introduce this song, in concert, as part of a trilogy... with the third song being "Once" - a song about a serial killer who murders hitch-hikers. Vedder's implication was that the main character's sexual abuse inspired him to kill. Irony, much?
- The de facto Aussie patriotic song, "Down Under" by Men At Work. Apparently, the band sang the song as an attack on the exploitation of the continent. However, people tend to imagine that it's about the world travels of an Australian who is proud of his nationality and attracting the attention of people interested in it.
- The music video clears a few things up, with the last scene being a funeral for the country's natural beauty.
- While we're on misaimed Aussie patriotism, Cold Chisel's "Khe Sanh", about a Vietnam veteran who can't handle returning to civilian life, became a patriotic anthem. The Australian cricket team's adoption of the song may factor into this.
- The Aussie cricket team are indeed known for choosing songs with fairly inappropriate or unrelated lyrics.
- Then again, hating the damn government is considered to be an Australian cultural trait. Therefore, when sung as a song that sympathises with this hard-done-by veteran, it becomes a celebration of Australians (as opposed to Australia) and in an odd way becomes patriotic. That's my reasoning for it, anyway.
- As an American, that makes sense to me. Much more sense than our adopting the Bruce Springstein example above.
- And even more misaimed Aussie patriotism (seems to be common) with the song "Waltzing Matilda". It's so famous and well-loved that some people push for it to be Australia's national anthem, and was again adopted by Australian cricket. Except that if one were to glance at the lyrics, they'd discover that the song was about a bushman who stole a sheep and then committed suicide in a lake to escape capture.
- Actually, Aussies usually do know what that song is about; we just tend to push for it as the new national anthem because our actual national anthem, "Advance Australia Fair", is a horrible faux-British dirge.
- Similarly, even though "Born to Run" is about how badly the main character wants to get out of the New Jersey town he grew up in, lots of rabid Springsteen fans want to make it the official state song... Which could be why it's the perfect choice!
- The Beastie Boys song "Fight For Your Right To Party" was loved by the very people the song was making fun of. The band flat-out refuses to play the song live anymore.
- Marylin Manson's "This is the new shit" is very similar in intent. And practically the same in the foreseeable results.
- DD Smash's "Bliss" was a pub-singalong-sounding savaging of the New Zealand drinking culture: "Sink yourself more bliss/Forget about the last one/Have yourself another". But picked up as an anthem by that very same culture. Its author, Dave Dobbyn, was horrified when the requests for it started coming in at concerts.
- Steriogram's "Walkie-Talkie Man" is a favourite among the employees of at least one security firm; probably, however, this is while simultaneously recognising the satire.
- Gwar's "War Party" was taken to be supportive of the Republican war effort. Did anybody even listen to the lyrics? Perhaps thanks to Gwar's typically pro-war kill-everything-that-moves stage theatrics, the song title and chorus was taken to mean the obvious. "Born in the USA" for the new generation.
- A massive smear campaign by news programs and tv-shows painted a picture of the punk scene (and especially the hardcore punk scene) in the late '70s-early '80s as being filled with violent delinquents who fight at the shows. This campaign ended up inspiring violent delinquents to attend punk concerts and then fight at the shows.
- One specific band, the Dead Kennedys, suffered badly at first, as they were thought to be a neo-Nazi band for their songs "Kill The Poor" and "California Über Alles" (both highly satirical), which drew crowds of Nazi punks to their gigs. Then they made the rather blunt song "Nazi Punks F**k Off".
- Poor Jello Biafra, the Kennedys' vocalist and bandleader, was later beaten badly by skinheads, supposedly for being "a sell-out" and "not punk enough" for them. Go figure...
- The song "Yankee Doodle" was originally a virulent insult flung at the American rebels by British Redcoats that made implications of stupidity, faux-foppishness ("macaroni" referred to a particularly extravagant style of dress), and, according to some sources, homosexuality about its targets. The American soldiers took it up as an anthem and a great big "Fuck You" to the British, basically telling them, "We revel in your insults." Over time, the song has lost a lot of its bite, and it's now thought of as a genuinely patriotic song.
- The song predates the Revolutionary War. It was written by a British army surgeon as a slam against the disorganized, backwater "Yankee" militias he had to serve alongside with during The French-Indian War. Despite the insults, the colonists reveled in the portrayal, accepting it as a big "FU" to who they saw as the arrogant, elitist, refined British soldiers. It became extremely popular in the colonies. During one march, one British officer asked another British officer "So how do you like the melody now?" The other replied "Dang you, they [the colonists] made us dance it til we were tired."
- Not a musical version but the same thing happened when Rommel's men called the Aussie diggers the "Rats of Tobruk"
- This could cover a fair number of these examples. Someone makes fun of you? Just show them how little you care by living up to their every insult. It can be hard to tell sometimes, however.
- The Stone Temple Pilots song "Sex Type Thing" was interpreted as sexy or edgy by some, when it was intended to ironically represent the typical attitude of a rapist.
- John Lennon wrote lyrics for "I am the Walrus" after being told that the English teacher he didn't like from his school was now assigning Beatles lyrics for poetry interpretation. He included schoolyard gross-out ditties with the attitude of "Let them explain that!"
- Madonna's "Material Girl" was a sarcastic jab at consumerism; but it was interpreted by many as a fun, happy-go-lucky celebration of material luxuries. When Britney Spears covered the song in concert, she was criticized for not understanding that the song was intended to be ironic. Of course, it's another question how serious you can take a singer who became one of the richest women in the world if she condemns consumerism (Madonna, not Britney).
- The video for "Material Girl" is largely to blame for the song's Misaimed Fandom; while the video itself makes a point to stick to the meaning of the song (in terms of showing Madonna's character being in love with a poor slob with a crappy car), the only part most people remember is the "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" homage that makes up the bulk of the video.
- One place that uses it right: Elite Beat Agents, where it plays over a pair of Rich Bitch sisters flirting their way around and off a deserted island. If the Hawaiian shirt is any indication, Commander Khan doesn't seem to be that concerned about them.
- Tim Robbins only averted this with the soundtrack to Bob Roberts by declining to release it.
- "The Freshmen", from The Verve Pipe, was a popular (and overplayed) song. Take a listen to the lyrics and be baffled. Bonus: In the introduction of this performance, the lead singer says he wanted to write the most deeply upsetting song possible. Ironically, people loved it because of how twisted it was.
- It's a very good song, and even if you listen to exactly what its saying (it's hard to miss the point on this one) it always brings a lump to my throat. It's upsetting, but it's upsetting because it has a powerful sense of human frailty and the fragility of love.
- Some cricket fans have adopted 10cc's "Dreadlock Holiday" as an anthem because it includes the lyrics "I don't like cricket, oh no / I love it!" — this when, in context, the song's narrator is clearly only saying this in a vain attempt to ingratiate himself with a gang of thugs who are intending to beat him up and mug him on his holidays in Jamaica. It's used on cricket shows regularly now.
- Third Eye Blind's hit single "Semi-Charmed Life" caught on as an anthem for drug-addicted college-folk due to the quick tempo and catchy lyrics even though the song dealt entirely with the negative repercussions of the behavior the main fans of the song were engaging in. This may have been because the verse dealing most explicitly with drugs was cut in most radio versions and the word "crystal meth" was often bleeped. One time the Moral Guardians messed up majorly...
- Austrian singer Falco's (RIP) song "Jeanny" is usually mistaken as a love song. Its lyrics depict the insanity of a serial rapist and killer stalking his soon-to-be next victim.
- Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" often gets played a lot due to its chorus, which tells of a couple driving in their car at night as a form of entertainment to distract them from their poor lot in life. Sadly, most people ignore the rest of the lyrics, which tells of a collapsing relationship, which ends with the woman ultimately ending the relationship before it destroys her love for her boyfriend.
- The Tom Waits song "Poor Edward" (a song about a guy with a woman's face on the back of his head that he refers to as his "devil twin"), is usually taken to be an allegory about a marriage falling apart. In reality; it's a song about a guy with a woman's face on the back of his head that he refers to as his "devil twin". I am not making this up, and neither is Tom — Edward Mordrake was the "Poor Edward" in question.
- Marks&Spencer had a disturbing Christmas commercial with a children's choir singing "Falling In Love Again" from the film The Blue Angel. Most people don't realize the full implications of the song. The original song is "what Blazing Saddles was parodying with "I'm Tired" - a song sung from the perspective of a jaded seductress about how so many men destroy themselves out of desire for her. (Come to think of it, that sort of song is appropriate for a corporation...)
- Lou Reed, best known as the frontman of the Velvet Underground, has expressed that he was horrified when people told him that they were shooting up to the song "Heroin". Of course, it's mostly ambiguous, but...
- Allegedly, while attending an AA meeting in the early 80s, Lou had a man come up to him, asking "How dare you be here? You're the reason I tried smack in the first place."
- Alan Jackson's 1994 hit song "Gone Country" provided a satirical commentary on the state of country music, describing three pop/folk musicians who, after finding their careers to be waning, decide to feign being country in order to try their hand in the then-booming country music industry. However, most people don't pick up on this (or only listen to the chorus), and interpret the song to be a fun country pride song, to such a point that it has become a strangely popular choice for radio stations to play as their first song after changing to a country format. Ironically, the song's message is equally relevant today, with pop artists such as Jessica Simpson defecting to country.
- This has led to the kind of country Jackson represents being a tiny minority. Most country these days is pop music with a cowboy hat. Even Jackson is as close to pop as he is to George Jones.
- Death Cab for Cutie's song "I Will Possess Your Heart" also has the Lyrical Dissonance thing going on; it's got an upbeat, pleasant sound, but it's another Stalker With A Crush song.
- Many of Death Cab's "love songs" have a somewhat stalkerish tone, or at the very least contain examples of things to never, ever tell a significant other.
- "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" — suicide pact, or bittersweet musing on the transience of mortal love? (I'm thinking both.)
- Alternately, the complete embrace of nihilism and settling for the material. (I happen to have Nietzsche on the brain at the moment, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong).
- Vanessa Carlton's song "Twilight" is not about Edward or Bella or anything that has to do with Stephenie Meyer's books, especially since she wrote the song before those books came out. Don't even bother looking at all the comments. Likewise, neither is anything by Muse.
- Schools have been known to use the song "Mad World" at the end of segment about drunk driving. Inappropriate much?
- In a very extreme example, several Neo-Nazi bands have covered the song "Tomorrow Belongs To Me," ostensibly a Nazi anthem about the beauty of their coming master-race run world. The thing is, the song was written by John Kander and Fred Ebb (both of them Jewish) for the musical Cabaret, and it's intended in the show and subsequent film as a chilling example of the rise of Nazism and its terrible pull on the German people. Seems they did their job a little too well.
- Something weird happened with Colombian singer Juanes' hit "La Camisa Negra", which is a break-up song from the point of view of a very resentful man; after a nasty breakup he wears black to mourn the death of his love feelings, as a symbol of his "black soul". But because the title can be translated literally as "The Black Shirt", it was adopted as an hymn of sorts by neo-fascist groups in Italy and other countries. Juanes was not happy about this appropriation.
- Pink Floyd's "Money" sometimes gets used by the Future Business Leaders of America at club fairs. Seeing a bunch of business majors in suits sitting around while it is loudly declared that "Money/It's a crime" is amusing beyond reckoning.
- Musician Volitaire's song "So Easy When You're Evil", an obvious satire of Card Carrying Villains, has actually been taken seriously by some people as a song advocating that Evil Is Cool.
- The The's song "This is the Day", which has an upbeat tune and a chorus that says "This is the day your life will surely change, this is the day when things fall into place" is often used as an anthem of determination to fix one's bad circumstances. This is in complete ignorance to the verses, which describe someone with a wasted existence, who tells himself every day that his life will change but never actually does anything about it. Lyrical Dissonance is a common trope of The The songs.
- The Residents' album Duck Stab! was intended to prove to the public that even if they recorded some shorter, "poppier" sounding songs, it would still be unpopular. People loved it. In fact, it's one of the group's most popular recordings.
- "Brick" by Ben Folds' Five is written like a melancholy love ballad, and most people tend to think of it as such. However, on listening to the lyrics you find out it's a melancholy ballad about taking your girlfriend to get an abortion.
- Nobody seems to realize that Woody Guthrie meant for "This Land Is Your Land" to be a socialist anthem.
- Many fans in the western side of the world inexplicably fail to realize that Hello Project fandom is meant to include both ninth-grade girls and college-age guys.
- Clay Aiken's first hit single "Invisible", is a creepy stalker song. It seems pretty damn obvious with lyrics like "If I was invisible/Then I could just watch you in your room", but...
- Well, Desmond Child wrote it... And fans don't seem to care.
- Soundgarden's song "Big Dumb Sex" was a Stealth Parody of the glam metal scene at the time, but many hair bands and their fans took a liking to the song without realizing what it was about. Guns N Roses even did a cover of it.
- Carly Simon doesn't seem to know what her own song is about. She addresses a vain lover saying "I bet you think this song is about you, don't you, don't you." ...that's because it IS about him. What the hell is your point? This could make her a Misaimed Artist.
- Uh, the point is that the identity of the lover is left ambiguous (it's not like she's only ever had one lover in her life), and that the person she's talking about would be vain enough to think that she wrote a song about him. Carly Simon herself has kept her lips sealed on whom it's supposed to refer to, but given that the most sensible theory is that it's really an amalgamation of several boyfriends she's had, and that several male celebrities have claimed to be the subject of the song, it's not a bad commentary on that type of narcissistic psyche. So Yeah.
- Australian pub rock band The Angels are now reluctant to play their popular song "Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again". Fans screaming "No way, get f***ed, f*** off!" during the song probably aren't aware that the song is about a friend with a terminal illness.
- Billy Idol's "White Wedding" gets played at a number of weddings, despite the fact that it is intended to be a protest against his little sister having a shotgun wedding with her babydaddy.
- Apparently some people think that the Screeching Weasel song "The Science of Myth" is a great Take That to Christianity. It's actually about taking elements from science and from theology and respecting that both fields of study are valuable and important to humanity. Ironically one of the few Screeching Weasel songs that isn't just a Take That of extreme sarcasm, then.
- The Toadies may also have an accidental fandom among Goths & Vamps since several of their songs could be taken to be refer to vampirism. How accidental this is is still a subject of debate but the band itself doesn't present itself as a gothic band.
- "Tyler" is definitely about a man breaking into a woman's house so he can "be with her tonight", though whether or not he is a blood-drinker or a murderer/rapist may depend upon how you feel about vampires being able to enjoy a beer.
- "POSSUM Kingdom", with ITS mention of a "dark secret" is either about a serial killer attacking a woman at a North Texas lake with that name or a vampire revealing himself to a woman violently before offering to make her a vampire as well.
- "Away" can be taken as being about a vampire's invitation of hospitality to a mortal friend. ("If I'm out hunting - Come right on in, yeah. - And even when I'm gone, -My doors are always open.")
- Green Day's "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" is very commonly heard at weddings, graduations, and other important ceremonies. But the song was written when Billie Joe Armstrong was breaking up with his girlfriend. So the song is a break-up song, but is used to denote love. This confusion is likely due to the lyrics (which by themselves do not express the intended meaning very well) and the predictable habit of radio stations of calling the song "Time of Your Life," since the "actual" title does not appear in the lyrics. Word Of God is that the song was meant to be bittersweet, not sarcastic.
- "Frankie says 'Relax'".
- U2's One is often played at weddings. Edge apparently gets rather pissed off about this.
- It's quite hard to tell if the fact that it was the first song played at Cyclops and Jean Grey's meant Marvel writers were part of the Misaimed Fandom, or were aware enough for a subtle Take That against the relationship.
- Also from U2, "Sunday Bloody Sunday" is very frequently taken to be a rebel anthem in support of the cause of the IRA. In reality, it's a 'plague on both your houses' song. Perhaps the most famous live performance of it was a 1987 American concert that took place mere hours after a bomb had gone off in Enniskillen and slain 11 civilians. Bono stopped midway through to deliver a moving speech declaring "fuck the revolution". He would later go on to enthusiastically campaign for the Good Friday agreement, including hosting the only public meeting of the main Catholic and Protestant leaders, at a concert rally.
- In the Rattle and Hum version, Bono excoriates Irish-Americans for raving about the "glorious revolution" while actual Irish just wanted people to stop getting killed.
- Repeat it with me, "I'm On a Boat" is a parody. Observe: over-the-top cursing, simple repetition of lyrics, catchy hook, pointless inclusion of T-Pain, and the fact that it was created by the comedy troupe The Lonely Island and shown on SNL, and the words. "Gonna fly this boat to the moon somehow..." This hasn't stopped people from not realizing that it's not actually another rap song about how glamorous life is when you're a rapper. The fact that it was made by the same writers of "Dick in a Box" and "Jizz in My Pants" should be the first clue.
- Like "I Will Always Love You" and "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)", "Every Breath You Take" by The Police is often played as a ballad of love, when in fact it's anything but. Sting wrote it after a guy was stalking his wife to show the fine line between love and obsession.
- Merle Haggard's 1969 song "Okie from Muskogee" became something of an anthem for Middle Americans, people, who were opposed to student protest, hippie lifestyle and such. It was intended as a satire of those views.
- You're partly right. It is true that Merle Haggard is actually a Democrat, as were his parents and grandparents. However, he makes clear that he's a CONSERVATIVE Democrat (he voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential primary) who only opposes the Republicans because he doesn't like how their pro-corporate agenda is destroying small, family-owned businesses.
- Korn's "Camel Song" isn't about camels at all.
- Joe Walsh's "Life's Been Good" is actually a satire.
- "Where the Wild Roses Grow" is apparently a popular choice for slow dancing. *HEADDESK*
- "Walking on the Sun" by Smash Mouth is often used in commercials for items like cars. Marketers apparently assume that the band really intended to urge people not to delay, and to act now. Hilarious how it's seen as an upbeat anthem to capitalism, no?
- Lordi, after partaking in the Eurovision Song Contest. ESC-viewers love their freakshow (relative to the usual ESC-fare) contestants.
- The song "Next Best Superstar" was actually used in the German edition of Pop Idol.
- The famous 80's anthem "I'm Too Sexy" was meant to be a parody of the vanity found amongst bodybuilders and models. The song subsequently went on to become a very popular song amongst bodybuilders and models, and to this day, is regularly played at gyms and fashion-shows. Whether it's done tongue-in-cheek or seriously is for you to decide.
- The song, "Independence Day" by Martina McBride is a song about domestic violence. The protagonist/battered woman is abused by her husband. To protect her life as well as the life of her child, she kills the husband by burning the house down. Yet, for some odd reason (e.g. not listening at all to the lyrics), the song is played during Fourth of July/Independence Day festivals/activities. Odd!
- Actually she kills herself as well as her husband. Her pride wouldn't let her walk away from her marriage vows but she gambles that her daughter will have a better life without the both of them.
- Thinking of the lyrics now, the fact that this song serves as the intro for the Sean Hannity radio program suddenly becomes hilarious.
- The song "One Night in Bangkok" has nothing to do with prostitution, it's about a chess game!
- It's about Freddie's lack of interest in prostitution, tourism and other such things. He's only in Bangkok to report on the World Chess Championships.
- Taken out of context, it would appear to be even more than that — he really doesn't care where he is. It's all about the chess, and he's sort of annoyed at being there to begin with.
- The song "Beautiful Day" by English folk-punk band The Levellers is sometimes used in commercials to convey a cheerful tone, the producers apparently having looked no further than the first line of the chorus to realise that the song discusses political revolution, is peppered with references to historical revolutionaries or that the "beautiful day" in question being the one on which "Wealth redistribution/Became the new solution".
- "Smile" by 90s band The Supernaturals receives similar treatment. I even found it on a CD of "Songs to Make You Happy" right along with "Beautiful Day" and other questionable choices. The line that ends the chorus, "Smile, cos that's all that you've got left, your life's a mess" is certainly never included in the adverts. Maybe I'm wrong and it IS supposed to be cheerful, but I just can't think of it as a happy song with that context.
- In what is either an utterly absurd example of this trope or the most brilliant of subversions, the Marilyn Manson song "Beautiful People" was once played over commercials for America's Next Top Model on British television.
- The Talking Heads song "Life During Wartime" was considered an anti-disco song for the lyric "This ain't no disco", despite the fact that the song is quite danceable, and the members of the band were fans of disco music. The song is actually about hypothetical guerilla warfare in the United States.
- See also, Don Henley's "All She Wants to Do is Dance," a hash on superficial people who dance while their world crumbles... which remains a popular '80s dance hit.
- Many people think "Prison Sex" by Tool is about just that: rape while in prison. The actual message is much more disturbing. It's about a child who is molested and grows up to himself become a child molester. The prison in the title is the cycle suffering that is created and which the character can't break free from. This confusion could be more due to some of the lyrics being hard to hear.
- This becomes much less ambiguous in the video, which is downright terrifying.
- Jill Sobule's song "Soldiers of Christ" is a savage deconstruction of the modern Christian intolerance, and anyone who knows more than one of her songs (she's an open bisexual atheist) would realize this. However, the song has been played in churches without a hint of irony.
- Radiohead's song "Nude" is often taken to be some sort of love song or ballad, by people who a) don't actually listen to the lyrics of songs and b) have never heard of Lyrical Dissonance. In reality, it's almost definitely about masturbation (or at the very least, adultery). It's still a very elegant song about how the physical pleasure derived from such acts does not equate to emotional pleasure, but it's definitely not a love song.
- Their song "Creep" is often quoted on pro-anorexia websites, for its lines "I don't care if it hurts/I wanna have control/I want a perfect body/I want a perfect soul".
- I Hate Myself was a Florida emocore band of the mid-90s, playing a style of music that, while having no similarity to today bastardized use of the term Emo or Emo Teens, still relied on angsty and vague lyrics, pretentious build-up and over the top vocals, including rabid screaming and often even crying. The band played deliberately all these cliches to the max, writing super-angsty lyrics about mundane situations, almost parody-level vocals, refusing to give names to their records besides the number of songs on them to sound "deep", and well, just look at their name. Despite all this, no one got the joke until about five years after they broke up, and they were praised frequently by fans of the music they were parodying for their emotional and deep music. It is worth noting however that there were serious bands at the time with similar styles, and a type of Poes Law might be at work.
- Another Florida band of the era, Don Martin 3 released a similar record initially record as an inside joke among the band. No song titles, angsty and psuedo-poetic lyrics and extreme over the top vocals. They did not get the opportunity to re-record however, and the record was released in its joke form. It instantly became regarded as a classic among fans of the style and today is frequently referenced as the epitome as emotional hardcore of the mid-90s.
- People enjoy the catchy opening riff of Jethro Tull's "Aqualung", and maybe even sing "Sitting on a park bench!...", without actually listening to rest of the song's lyrics about a homeless pedophile dying of hypothermia.
- Another of Tull's songs, "Bungle in the Jungle" is often taken at face value as being about the everyday struggles of jungle creatures, when it is actually an allegory of the seedy world of business.
- One last Tull: after Aqualung was praised as a "concept album" (which Tull never intended it to be), Tull decided to write the 45-minute "epic poem" Thick as a Brick as a parody of concept albums. Many took it seriously (it outsold Aqualung, and was the band's first #1 album in the States), so Tull decided to do an actual concept album, A Passion Play, which while successful in the States (another #1 seller), didn't sell as well in the UK (peaking at #12).
- As Kurt Cobain wrote in the liner notes for Nirvana's Incesticide: "Last year, a girl was raped by two wastes of sperm and eggs while they sang the lyrics to our song 'Polly.' I have a hard time carrying on knowing there are plankton like that in our audience."
- Cobain was aware enough about his band's misaimed fandom that he satirized it on Nirvana's second album. "In Bloom" is a complete hash on rednecky fans, while the best-selling "Smells Like Teen Spirit" rips the whole audience. Some folks just never get the joke...
- According to frontman Devin Townsend, the majority of Strapping Young Lad fans don't like the bands music for the reason they're supposed to. To quote Devin: "When we did Ozzfest I remember thinking that Strapping Young Lad started as the giant middle finger, and then suddenly there were people saying "Yeah! Tell us we're assholes!"
- During the 2005 German federal election, future chancellor Angela Merkel's party attempted (and failed) to obtain the rights to use the Rolling Stones song "Angie" as the official song for her campaign. Considering that the song features lines like "But angie, angie, aint it time we said good-bye?", the Stones probably did them a favour by denying them the rights.
- The Village People's "In The Navy" was for a time under consideration by the U.S. Navy to become its theme song. When you compare it to their "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy about homosexuality... So Yeah. I guess someone actually read the lyrics, or went to a show, or saw a poster, or asked their kids... or something. Either way they came to their senses and opted against it. Too bad.
- T.I.S.M's "Old Man River" has fans amongst the drug addled set for its chorus of "I'm on the drug that killed River Phoenix". Despite the song being about society's additive dependence on heroes and celebrities.
- Venom, a British speed metal band from the mid-80s who for all intents invented extreme metal as we now know it, had an over-the-top Satanic image and lyrics about death, Hell, Satan and evil. Their sound influenced a great number of musicians from the early Norwegian black metal scene (the name of the genre is in fact derived from Venom's second album), specifically Euronymous of the band Mayhem, who got the name of the band from Venom's song "Mayhem With Mercy". The thing is, Euronymous and the like thought the band were actually serious about the whole Satanic thing, when of course they were anything but, and after a lot of the people involved in the scene started burning down churches and murdering each other, Cronos, Venom's bassist, started making a concerted effort to distance the band from that particular scene.
- ...until he realized how much fun and money he could acquire from that scene. He's since guided Venom back to the Black Metal underground, literally damn the consequences.
- Worst thing that can happen to a music is an international adaptation. Some Brazilian adaptations took the melody and adapted into musics that meant something very different. An egregious example is when singer Kelly Key made a version for Barbie Girl, talking about the very same lifestyle the song mocked. And I won't even start to mention the Forró and Country adaptations...
- The song "Song 2" by Blur was created as a mocking parody of the flash-in-the-pan "post-grunge" music (like Candlebox and Seven Mary Three) popular in the United States at the time. Unfortunatly, the song became wildly popular with the fans of the same genre they were mocking and hence, it became their biggest hit in the country. The fact that alternative rock radio - then beginning its split between more "indie rock" leaning stations and the post-grunge/ nu metal stations - picked up the song and played it to death didn't help things much.
- It didn't help that all of the band's other big hits in America sound nothing like the sound they're known for in the rest of the world and instead are either their hardest ("Crazy Beat") or danciest ("There's No Other Way" and "Boys & Girls") songs. The only two songs that sound like the band's actual sound that got any major American rock radio airplay were "Chemical World" and "Coffee & TV" and neither at the level of the other four songs mentioned.
- Chipz - Captain Hook
- "American Woman" is a classic, although the lyrics can be interpreted differently. At best, however, it's not a very flattering portrayal of the kind of women the band encountered in the cities. Then again, it may be most popular with American men, so...
- "I don't want your war machines/I don't want your ghetto scenes" takes the song in an explicitly political direction that is often overlooked - the "Woman" here is America herself. The Guess Who were Canadian, after all.
- Def Leppard's "From the Inside" is about Heroin addiction, All I Want Is Everything is about a man dying of AIDS.
- Pet Shop Boys' "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" was a satire of Thatcherism and the crass consumerism, conspicuous consumption, and general lifestyle of the 1980s. The protagonist of the song and his companion are obviously two losers whose schemes will amount to naught. However the song gets taken unironically in many contexts as a celebration of the very lifestyle it criticizes.
- "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" was originally intended as a parody of country Tear Jerker songs that feature "two verses that get you to fall in love with the character, and then 'kill 'em!" The writer (Randy Brooks) decided to write a song where an adorable character dies at the very beginning in an extremely absurd fashion. Neither Brooks nor Elmo & Patsy anticipated that the public would embrace it as an Anti Christmas Song, or that it would appeal to the Playground Song demographic.
- A recent Lincoln commercial uses a cover of "Major Tom (Coming Home)" to evoke a sense that driving a cool, powerful Lincoln is like blasting off into space. The fact that the astronaut protagonist of the song burns up on reentry and dies seems to have been overlooked.
- Plus, his wife is cheating on him in the video, subverting any hints at a Fancy Cars Make You Sexy trope.
- West Coast punk band X would eventually refuse to play their song "Johnny Hit and Run Pauline" (a rather serious song about rape) at live concerts when their crowds would constantly embrace it like any other punk song with wild moshing and boisterous fist pumping during the chorus.
- Rod Stewart took a lot of flack for "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" because people thought Rod was boasting about himself. Needless to say, he wasn't.
Newspaper Comics
- Darby Conley's Get Fuzzy has attracted a moderately sized vegan high school and collegiate fanbase due to numerous appearances of PeTA apparel. The catch? Bucky uses PETA as a shield for misbehaving under the guise of a revolt against whatever stick is up his butt during that installment, while Satchel is too dumb to know what they're really all about. This isn't official support from the organization - just many younger members without enough English courses under their belt to recognize the mockery of their hijinks. (And maybe a few who don't care.) Will usually occur in forums, blogs, journals, or news commentary box debates.
- Berke Breathed used to complain that, no matter how unsympathetic he made Steve Dallas seem in The Academia Waltz, many University of Texas students couldn't help but LOVE the character.
Professional Wrestling
- Believe it or not, the "Wooo!" sound that accompanies Knife-Edge Chops in Professional Wrestling were also derogatory in nature (at first, anyway). They were made famous by "The Nature Boy" Ric Flair, an enemy of "The Franchise" Shane Douglas, ECW mainstay. He would often imitate Ric Flair's famous "Wooo!" after landing a chop, and soon the entire ECW crowd would join in; ECW at that time strongly hated the old style of wrestling companies like NWA and WWF were putting on at the time. Soon, though, the "Wooo!"s from the crowd lost their original meaning, and even Flair himself sees it as a term of endearment.
- A big reason why the cry became more popular was that, while originally it was to praise the face Shane Douglas, when Douglas turned heel the Woos were a way of mocking Douglas. However, since that logically meant fans were cheering for Flair instead, people just started doing it for Flair and anyone else who'd throw a chop.
Tabletop Games
- Anytime anyone at all thinks that one of the factions in Warhammer 40000 is "the good guys" (hint: Evil Versus Evil is one of the foundations of the setting). This is almost always directed at the Tau, the Imperium of Man (mostly via the Imperial Guard) and/or the Eldar (and occasionally Da Orks), probably because their most common enemies routinely perform actions several orders of magnitude worse than anything the previous factions could possibly achieve.
- To get a little more specific: some neo-Nazis think that the Imperium is some kind of post-neo-fascist paradise. *shudder*
- And don't forget the Eldar fanboys who portrait them as the epitome of creation, they seem to have a guided amnesia about the fact the current so-decent-and-good-guys eldars are basically a really small minority of what at a time was a race who rejoiced in debauchery, rape, torture and mutilation and ended being devoured by the Cosmic Horror they created by their acts? Oh well, half of the current eldar, the other half is, just to add the adjective dark doesn't remove the fact they are eldar too, and didn't change their ways. And of course, don't forget their view of ANY other sentient lifeform in the galaxy, sure, humans can be evil and you should kill them on sight, but all humans? Even human children?
- The craftworld Eldar themselves do not consider the Dark Eldar to be "Eldar" anymore, though they acknowledge that they share blood. At least, according to an Eldar character in one of the novels.
- The World Of Darkness supplement The Book of Nod was originally a source of stories and a prop for the setting. Imagine the author's surprise when Noddism became a cult.
Palm meet face.
Theatre
- Bertolt Brecht: inventor of Epic Theater, staunch hater of Capitalism, and victim of terrible Misaimed Fandom.
- When The Threepenny Opera first premiered in Berlin in 1928, it was a satirical indictment of the bourgeoisie, although it was wildly popular with this particular social class.
- Similarly, it seems strange how "The Ballad of Mack the Knife" (from said opera) transformed from an eerie depiction of a serial killer/rapist/arsonist/thief to a happy-go-lucky jazz standard. The badass lyrics and neat meter are probably responsible (not to mention how many jazzy singers are linked with the Mafia).
- Another example is the song "What Keeps A Man Alive?", which is a lyrical Freudian Excuse about how poverty leads to savagery in order to survive. Brecht condemned this attitude, as in practice, it meant that the poor would prey on one another rather than organizing and bettering their condition. This was missed at people that took the message at face value.
- Mother Courage from the play Mother Courage and Her Children. Admired by the audience for her courage, perseverance, and resourcefulness — but Bertolt Brecht wanted her to be a detestable personification of the evils of capitalism. She doesn't give up her business even after her three kids are killed in the war, after all.
- The Threepenny Opera is a remake of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, which was as much a victim of Misaimed Fandom as Brecht's version. It was originally meant as a satire of both Italian opera and English society, but was seen by most as just a rollicking good time. Even sixty years later, Boswell and Johnson were debating about what exactly it was supposed to have satirized.
- Of course, William Shakespeare's works have attracted a Misaimed Fandom. Romeo And Juliet is often thought to be nothing but a bittersweet romance whose major tragedy is bad luck; many readers miss the pointed criticisms of early marriage, arranged marriage, and negligent parenting. In Victorian times, Hamlet was thought of as a noble, Too Good For This Sinful Earth victim. Falstaff, a lazy fat drunk whose main purpose in the Henry IV trilogy was to show how dissipated Prince Hal really was, became so popular that Shakespeare was asked by Elizabeth I to write a comedy around him.
- Speaking of Shakespeare, take a close look at Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. An anti-Semitic caricature, or a tragic satire thereof?
- Indeed, the characterisation of Shylock is just interestingly complicated enough (unlike the totally monstrous caricature in The Jew of Malta, for example) that it allows modern readers to re-interpret the antisemitism that undoubtedly was originally in the play and recast the whole thing around Shylock. Most modern productions do some editing, for instance omitting Shylock being forced to convert at the end.
- Going back to the Romeo and Juliet example... in the very beginning of the play, it's outright stated that Romeo and Juliet are going to die (or at least that their romance was doomed from the beginning). Why would anyone want to compare their forbidden romance to Romeo and Juliet (who are likely more in lust than in love)? The saddest part is when English teachers are actually part of this Misaimed Fandom.
- Iago in Othello is cruel, manipulative, abusive towards his wife, a murderer, and is quite possibly a compulsive liar. There's a popular theory that he might be a homosexual who was jealous of Desdemona and in love with Othello, though supposedly his motivation in the play is he is jealous because he wasn't promoted. Iago is an extremely early example of a Draco In Leather Pants character. Edmund from King Lear gets this, too.
- Arguably, the Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera has a dreadfully Misaimed Fandom. In the book, he was a frightening monster. In the musical, he usually leans toward Anti Hero.
Video Games
- Silent Hill 2 shows many misogynistic themes, perfectly summed up in the scene where a large, muscular man-monster is shown raping a creature composed of a pair of sexy legs, with another pair of sexy legs in place of an upper body. This was interpreted by many to mean that sexual objectification is cool and edgy, which was met with either approval or disapproval. It was actually intended as psychological symbolism of the main character's masculinity issues.
- Also, the aforementioned muscular man-monster, Pyramid Head, is seen as a Draco In Leather Pants by his fans despite the fact that he does virtually nothing but violently rape and murder the other inhabitants of Silent Hill. A common term used to describe Pyramid Head by his fans is "sex god", so apparently indiscriminant rape and psychological torture is sexy now. Similarly, there are those that consider the Bubble Head Nurses in the same game to be genuinely attractive despite designed to be something that really, really wasn't, and they are only the most obvious examples. Silent Hill fandom is almost as disturbing as the series itself.
- In a way this simply means the series is extremely successful at what it's doing, bringing out the darker side of ones psyche. And those fans a probably (hopefully) aware of how it was originally meant.
- Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII is a megalomaniacal Big Bad who spends most of the game on a murderous killing spree (including famously and brutally slaying a beloved main character), pausing only to mock and psychologically manipulate the main character, but he does it with such style and is such a Badass White Haired Pretty Boy that fans lap it up and have turned him into a Draco In Leather Pants (see that entry for more). Prequel games portraying him as sympathetic before he went sociopathically insane have not helped.
- Some have even started a Hatedom for said beloved main character, saying that they were glad she got stabbed.
- Considering that the 'Sephiroth' we see during the game Is actually Jenova the entire obsession with Sephiroth is FALSE! He was encased in Mako since Cloud threw him in there, Every bit of plot in FF 7 was due to Jenova's actions, NOT Sephiroth's!. Truly a case of Fan Dumb.
- The infamous Sephiroth/Jenova control debate rages on. The above-mentioned theory actually drives Sephiroth's misaimed fandom; portraying him as a mind-controlled Woobie who had done nothing wrong. As no consensus will ever be reached, it is probably best for each individual to make up their own mind.
- Except that Word Of God is that Sephiroth was controlling the remaining Jenova bits. The only reason debate still rages is because some people can't deal with the idea that their precious pretty thing was a manipulative sociopath who was planning genocide.
- People who complain about the Squall and Rinoa romance of Final Fantasy VIII, saying that he should have jumped Quistis's bones when she offered the opportunity simply because she's Ms Fanservice. They never seem to pick up on the fact that later in the game it's implied that Squall and Quistis engaging in such a relationship would be akin to Brother Sister Incest. One is allowed to dislike the main romance, but yeah, Squall and Quistis, in hindsight, is pretty squicky.
- Also, people who base support on a Sora and Namine romance due to the events of Kingdom Hearts Chain Of Memories, which ignores that all of the memories Sora had of Namine were fake, and the feelings he had toward her were actually his feelings for Kairi increased to obsessive levels by the fake memories so that he would become Namine's - and thus, Marluxia's - slave. Yeah, it wasn't supposed to be a good, loving thing.
- Tales Of Symphonia is about a battle of ideals between The Hero, who believes that people can learn to grow and change and correct their mistakes if given a chance, and the Big Bad, who believes that people cannot change and the only way to make everyone treat each other the same is to make them all identical. Despite the fact that The Hero wins, and examples within the game are overwhelmingly on his side, some fans still insist that the Big Bad was right all along, and that the hero's efforts will fail down the line.
- Not to mention the fact that it's a prequel.
- The original Leeroy Jenkins video from World Of Warcraft was, despite being a staged over-the-top reconstruction of a real event, more a parody of "nerd guilds" with their excessive and sometimes nonsensical planning than a parody of Leeroy's player archetype.
- Also some quests are clearly meant to be evil but players view these actions as justified. Good examples include the quest "The Broken Front", all Royal Apothecary quests and "It Was The Orcs, Honest!"
- Lezard Valeth from Valkyrie Profile was written to be as repulsive as possible, a sexually deviant stalker and violator of natural laws; like Harry Potter grown up terribly, terribly wrong. Some fans eat his character up, and pair him with the heroine of the first game. The blame/credit probably on the shoulders of his highly talented (and sexy-sounding) English voice actor. In the original Japanese version, he's more of a standard deep-voiced villain.
- Then again, said Japanese voice actor is Takehito Koyasu.
- And said English VA (or one of them) was Meowth, which makes the whole thing even more bizarre.
- Modern Warfare 2 has a few different categories of this, the most obvious being a large part of the player-base that at best doesn't notice the series has an anti-war message and at worst takes a positive view of war because of it. The worst are, by far, the players who root for General Shepherd. It's largely because the game's finale involves him both kicking ass in a crazy action-scene, as well as being where he explains his motivation and ultimate goal, both of which are easy to sympathize with. They are not, however, justification for a senior officer killing his own men in cold blood so that they won't discover he's manipulated another country to invade the United States, specifically with the goal of killing as many civilians as possible.
- Nominally-objectivist dictator Andrew Ryan of Bioshock is seen by some fans as a visionary who could do no wrong. No matter what your politics, you'd still have to ignore the fact that he went off the deep end and started murdering anyone who looked at him funny.
Web Comics
- According to the Word Of God of Drowtales Syphile is "not meant to have much redeeming features, she lost them all over time. I wouldn't portray her as anything else." Guess who's treated as The Woobie by a good portion of the fandom? Given the Grey And Gray Morality of the world it's understandable to a point, but now that Syphile's dead it'll probably get worse.
- Misaimed fandom is the point of this Something Positive comic. For those who don't get the joke, the author had previously used "cat girls" to represent annoying teenage anime fangirls who spout Gratuitous Japanese.
- A rare positive example of this occurred during the fake "ending" in this strip of 8-Bit Theater. As he claimed in the blog post for the following strip, Brian Clevinger made the strip to piss people off and was later astounded to receive several e-mails of people saying how it was a perfect way to end the strip and thanking him for a job well done (even the ones who hated the "ending").
- Someone once posted this Minus strip on a board, without any context nor any link to the comic. Immediately people saw it as a Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming, an innocent child's dream of saving the world because nobody told her it was impossible, that no one should ever lose hope when faced with a The End Of The World As We Know It, etc. Of course, anybody who has read the comic knows that:
- It's Minus, so there is nothing "impossible" here. She will make a home-run with the meteor.
- Knowing her, she probably summoned it in the first place.
- Richard, the undead warlock of Looking For Group, does nothing so much as play jump rope with the line. He has an entire summer home in audacity. About the only time we ever see him is when he's killing stuff for the hell of it or making kinda Vincenty Price-y jokes. And "stuff" in this context means, well, you name it. Women, children, innocent bystanders, orphanages, whatever. It was well into the story before there was even a hint that he had any purpose or role other than as super-dark comic relief, or any redeeming qualities at all. Go on and guess which character seems to be by far the fandom favorite. Saying things like "I don't like to see evil characters get away with the things Richard gets away with" on the forums isn't quite going to get anyone flamed, but expect plenty of people to leap to defense of their favorite comic mass murderer.
- To be fair, there are both Foe Yay and heroics in the strip revolving around Richard, especially in the more recent installments of the comic, So it's unclear if the character has a genuinely misguided fandom, or if he is being evolved in the comic progression, or if one has led to the other or vice-versa.
- And one must remember that given the way the fact that the writer is the same person that gave us Rayne it's not too much of a stretch to assume that we're supposed to cheer on his acts no matter how destructive or senseless they may be. And then there's the fact that Richard is the designated source of comic relief...
- It's pretty much impossible to claim Misaimed Fandom in Order Of The Stick without getting hit with massive amounts of Internet Backdraft, though the contradictory positions means that someone must have the wrong end of the ten-foot pole. But Word Of God eventually stepped in to confirm the "Belkar is Chaotic Good" claim as nonsense. He's Chaotic Evil, and not exactly subtle about it either.
- And just confirmed Yes, killing off a quarter of an entire race is evil, even if most of them are also evil. Not that it's stopped people arguing about it.
- There's also the case of Miko Miyazaki who was a parody of a badly roleplayed Paladin (in contrast to more balanced characters like Hinjo, O-Chul and Lien) yet developed a rather bizarre following despite her overwhelmingly unlikeable nature. Time seems to have faded most of it away, though there are still occasional outbreaks on the official forums.
- NewRem Comics entire fanbase is misaimed. According to Word Of God, the main character is intended to be a deconstruction of an RPG Heroine's life after there's nothing left to save, not a cutesy nerd rage comic.
- It would probably help if the author gave any hint of this at all in the strip.
Western Animation
- Reportedly, Cartman of South Park was designed under the idea that you couldn't have an Archie Bunker character on TV now... unless he was a ludicrous little kid cartoon character. Naturally, there's dispute over why Cartman is one of the most popular kids. Just to make matters worse, Stan and Kyle, the characters based on series creators Parker and Stone and supposedly the only normal sensible people in all of South Park, are often perceived as "whiny little bitches" by a fanbase that prefers fat racist anti-Semetic misogynist Cartman.
- The latter part about Stan and Kyle is definitely misaimed, but Cartman's popularity is probably because he's NOT supposed to be agreed with, thus setting up a character whom one loves to hate, and are able to laugh at him and his over-the-top evil antics, so long as he gets thwarted in the end (which he usually does, with some exceptions.) Even Parker and Stone "like" Cartman because of this.
- Also, the Goth Kids. They're meant to be a parody of teen and pre-teen Wangsting, but instead get used by fangirls as outlets for their own misery. Also, the two older guys are apparently gay for each other, though the show gives no indication of that.
- Trey and Matt seem to be aware of this, so naturally they exploited it for merchandising. (Also it looks like Hot Topic has a sense of humor about itself.)
- The two-part episode "Go God Go" gets misaimed Fandom in TWO directions, one being Atheist and the other being Creationists.
- This troper once read article using "Go God Go", the episode with the Mormon kid and the John Edward one to argue that those episodes showed that we should never believe in something without sufficient evidence. But that wasn't the point any of those episodes were making. they made the point that believing in God might be illogical but if it helps us out, we make sure not to take it too literally, and not be intolerant about it, it's fine to believe. And the John Edward one was just showing us to not take obvious con men so seriously.
- Similarly, Beavis And Butthead and King Of The Hill are animated satires of certain subcultures (dimwitted rock and roll loving teenagers and suburban Texans) done by Mike Judge. Both of the groups they target vocally enjoyed the very show that mocked them, and it's hard to claim that all of them are getting the joke. As Patrick Stewart once aptly put it: "Both the very smart and very stupid are fans of Beavis And Butthead, for very different reasons."
- Or as The Onion put it in their Our Dumb Century book: "New MTV Show About Idiots Who Watch MTV Big Hit Among Idiots Who Watch MTV".
- On the other hand, those paying attention might notice that smug jerks who look down their noses on Flyover Country suburbanites are the ones to get lampooned the most on King Of The Hill.
- In the series The Maxx, Mr. Gone is often quoted for saying "Of course I have a problem with women. Everybody has a problem with women. Because women taunt, and tease, and are attractive, and punish you for being attracted," which some fans find to be insightful and accurate. In fact, Mr. Gone is a rapist, and this attitude was intended as a representation of how a rapist thinks.
- The Decepticons might as well be called "Transformers: Robots In Leather Pants". It's not quite clear how one can perceive the Autobots as evil and the Decepticons as noble warriors when they're called "the evil Decepticons" in the theme song, but there's a small but vocal fan group that supports this theory. One fan by the name of Raksha (yes, that's her legal name) even became moderately famous within the fandom for it.
- Oddly enough, in Transformers Animated Megatron actively promotes himself as a freedom fighter, seeking to rid Cybertron of Autobot oppression. It's not clear whether he means it or is simply using propaganda, but at least some of the Decepticons seem to sincerely believe in that cause.
- Actually, the theory holds a bit of water in Transformers Animated. Not so much with Decepticons being noble (clearly, they're opportunistic and evil), but with the Autobots not being so saintly as previously portrayed. Our main five Autobots are great 'bots, no denying, but the further up the chain of command you go, the creepier and more morally gray the Autobots get (the creation of Omega Supreme, anyone?). Since the "good guys" are no longer squeaky clean, it stands to reasons that the Decepticons, at one time, may've had more motive that "gosh, it's good to be evil!"
- For that matter, Word Of God heavily implies that Lockdown was once an Autobot
- David Slack, writer/producer of the Teen Titans animated series, has said of the character Terra, "....she's just lost. Something inside her hurts so bad, right and wrong don't matter anymore." However, rather than accept that the character was an Anti Villain of the Dark Magical Girl variety, most of the fandom divided into two opposing camps: those who saw Terra as a blameless martyr who deserved a Titan's funeral, and those who saw her as a scheming sociopath who deserved to die. (Admittedly, the latter was how the original comic-book version was portrayed initially; the animated version is a radically different character.) When the series finale revealed that Terra was apparently alive and happily living as a normal schoolgirl with no interest in pursuing her former life, both sides of the fandom imploded, responding by writing either Fix Fic in which Terra chooses to acknowledge her former life and return to the team, or continuing to write Hate Fic featuring Terra dying in brutal fashion.
- An episode of The Powerpuff Girls called "The City of Clipsville" had one segment which was a Take That to PPG fanfiction cliches Craig McCracken hated, including Powerpuff Girls/Rowdyruff Boys shipper fics. The fake Flashback showed the characters as dumb airheaded teenagers. Fandom embraced that scene and even made fanart of it.
- Danny Phantom Fan Fic is sharply divided between the silliness of the later episodes and very serious fan fiction that could rightly belong in novel form. Also, many see Ax Crazy Dark Danny as sympathetic, in spite of having the honor of being a sadistic sociopath who killed his human self along with
probably thousands millions of others.
- Duckman. In some very strange parts of the internet, Duckman gets hailed as "the greatest philosophical mind of this generation." Really? While his rants are sometimes justified, he's generally a spiteful, selfish, arrogant prick.
"Don't you see what's it's like living in this deranged, Waring blender of a world? Every day is an agonizing ordeal, like balancing a pot of scalding water on your head while people whip your legs and butt. Ah, you never forget your senior prom. You think I'm sick? Well the only disease I've got is modern life, a shnug-busting gauntlet of inefficiency and misery that's one long parade of letdowns, putdowns, trickle-downs, shutouts, freezeouts, sellouts, numbnuts, nincompoops and nimrods! All making every day as much fun as waxing a flaming Pontiac with your tongue! And even if you do luck into the possibility of some fleeting pleasure, like say if some nymphomaniac telephone operator with the muscle control of Romanian mat slappers agree to a little strip air hockey, it will be over before it starts, 'cause some foul lacking, Feta-reeking cab jockey slams his checker up your hatchback and the cab is owned by some pinata-spanker from a Santaria cult who starts shaking chicken bones at you and gives you a boil on your neck so big that all it needs is Michael Jordan's autograph to make it complete! And even with all this, with all this! I still drag my sorry butt off the Sealy every morning and stick my face in the reaping machine for one more day! Knowing when it's time to flash the cosmic card key at those pearly gates, I won't be in the coffin anyways, because some underhanded undertaker sold my heart, pancreas and other assorted good and plenty to that same Santaria cult! So does anybody really wonder why anybody is hanging onto sanity by the atoms on the tips of their fingernails, while life dirty dances on their digits, and is it really any wonder THAT I SEEM DERANGED?
- In this one particular case, he may have a point...
- Chuck Jones created Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner as a parody of popular "chase cartoons" like Tom and Jerry, by picking two unlikely animals in a bizarre setting, making the Coyote his own worst enemy, and making the whole thing as over-the-top as possible. He was surprised when audiences took the first Road Runner short at face value, rather than as a parody, and loved it. Even though it didn't work out as he'd intended, Jones was happy to have a hit and continued using the two characters for years.
- In the Family Guy episode "8 Simple Rules for Buying My Teenage Daughter", there is a scene where Brian, Chris, Peter and Stewie have an ipecac drinking contest. This is shown to be a terrible, terrible idea. And yet, the scene is credited with inspiring a recent upsurge in Ipecac-use among teenage bulimics.
- Not really surprising-for a start, many of my friends didn't know what "ipecac" was until I told them what it was, so the scene doubtless taught many youths who would otherwise have gone uneducated about this oh-so-pleasant flower derivative. Second, consider this: the scene shows uncontrolled vomiting all over the floor, which is gross no matter who you are; but bulimics are intentionally vomiting in toilets and other places where cleanup is minimal. So the scene was less Squick and more brilliant inspiration for these teens.
- In Pixar's Cars, the Delinquent Road Hazards who were responsible for Lightning falling out of his transport truck were meant to be a gang of dislikable street punks, to the point that the animators modeled them after tastelessly modified "ricer" cars. Strangely enough, the fandom completely fell in love with them, making enough fan art and fanfiction centering around them to impress even the most hardened internet warrior.
- Also from Pixar: While no one disagrees that AUTO is a villain, they frequently seem to see a lot more to his (lack of) personality then there actually is. Then again, this may just be because Evil Is Cool and as noted, no one thinks he's a good guy.
- Technically, NONE of the robots ever do anything they're not supposed to do, not even AUTO. It's just that AUTO's orders come from a dead man centuries ago based on centuries-out-of-date information, but nonetheless the dead man outranks the captain.
- The Riley Freeman character from The Boondocks is sometimes seen as a badass kid rather than the mockery of the gangsta rap style that he actually is.
- Then again, rappers do voice some characters on the show. Even Ghostface killa voiced himself in an episode.
- To be fair, he's not a mockery of gangsta rap, but a mockery of wannabe thugs who see gangsta rappers as heroes (see the whole thing about Gangsta Rap in the Music section above), and rappers who play up the "gangsta" part of the rap to be cool without having a message, hence why a lot of rappers who aren't like that are involved in the show or given Shout Outs by the characters.
- Many Invader Zim fans seem perfectly willing to ignore Zim's ridiculous egotism and admitted evil, making him out to be a hero rather than a Villain Protagonist. These same fans often will hate and vilify Dib for, wait for it..."trying to stop Zim" from enslaving or destroying humanity.
- Granted, both the earth and its inhabitants in Zim are generally presented in a less-than idealistic fashion, and while Dib is a Hero Antagonist he can be kind of a jerk, whose motives aren't totally altruistic either.
- Also GIR. Jhonen Vasquez has commented he gets particularly annoyed by people who think he's "cute," when the point was to make him an idiotic hedonist. The episode "GIR Goes Crazy and Stuff," where he goes nuts and tries to destroy Zim, was actually meant to make people "uncomfortable" with the robot.
- The ridiculously cute dog suit is not our fault!
- There is a Russian animated short called "The Shooting Range". It looks cool, set in a Retro Universe Dystopia, where everyone is unemployed, and capitalism has dehumanized the population to the point where human targets at a shooting range are the only job people can come up with, making it kind of neat Cyber Punk pastiche. Plus the animation style is unique. Turns out, it's actually Soviet propaganda, the creators actually thought the United States was like that in real life (Anachronism Stew coming from limited understanding American culture), the animation style is actually quite common for the Soviet "film collectives" of the time, and it was made in 1979, predating Cyber Punk, so it can't possibly be a pastiche. It can be seen on You Tube Here and Here.
- Demona of Gargoyles gets this a lot. Being arguably the most popular character in the series, and a very attractive female, a large and vocal number of her fans tend not only to absolve her of any responsibility for her mistakes, but to pin the blame on other characters. These fans completely miss the point, as series creator, Greg Weisman has said over and over again that Demona is her own worst enemy, and that her entire life is a rationalization. Her most iconic quote, after witnessing the massacre of her clan was "what have I... what have THEY done to you?!" That's pretty much what the "Demona Revisionists" do. Like character like fandom.
- Hilariously, Demona actually gets into a fight with previous herself. Apparently, even her earlier self despises her for what she's done. Heh.
- Explained (or perhaps made even worse) by the fact that while Demona is a sympathetic villain, she's sympathetic in a "we feel sorry for her because she's so messed up" way, not a "we think she's great and want her to win" way.
Miscellaneous
- As hinted at in the quote at the top of the page, this seems to be almost an inevitability in any kind of organized religion, or really any large, ideological organization for that matter; no matter how much your god, prophet, and/or central doctrine waxes eloquently about peace, love, and turning the other cheek, sooner or later somebody is going to use their faith as a justification for pretty much anything, from lying through their teeth or giving themselves pay raises to instigating war, torture and genocide.
- In the mid-1800s, the people of Northern Italy (who at the time were under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) came to consider Giuseppe Verdi's opera Nabucco (specifically the aria Va Pensiero) as a manifesto in favour of Italian unification. It was nothing of the sort.
- Though most of the games reviewed by the Angry Video Game Nerd are just as bad as he says they are, there are a large number of viewers that didn't realize his first review of Castlevania II: Simon's Quest was deliberate Accentuate The Negative, and thought the guy who played him genuinely hated that much (James Rolfe stated that the first review was done as a joke and he didn't really think the game was that bad). It doesn't help that he frequently brings up Castlevania II when discussing other games' flaws, notably long passwords. His Metal Gear review does a better job of what he was aiming for with Castlevania II.
- Game reviews by IGSRJ, which serve as dual Irate Gamer parodies/AVGN tributes (though Third Rate Gamer does a better job at the parody part), not only include So Bad Its Horrible games, but also games generally believed to be the best of all time, including Super Mario Bros. 3, Mortal Kombat and Duke Nukem 3D. He does a well enough job at Accentuating The Negative that reading the comments reveals that viewers who are Completely Missing The Point consistently either bitch about how wrong IGSRJ is, or more stupidly, agree with his arguments.
- Many modern perception of the Amazons of Greek mythology. So they're Action Girls out there to kick guys' asses, and to represent the strength of women? Well, yeah, but the original point of their characters was to be beaten by -- and often submit to -- a stronger man, with the (warped) moral that women are weak no matter no matter how strong they get. Fortunately, William M. Marston and DC Comics didn't get the memo... For those requiring less subtlety, this is an example of how even Misaimed Fandom can be not necessarily bad.
- Pastafarianism originated out of an open letter to the Kansas Board of Education that parodied the idea of teaching Creationism as a science. However, once it gained notoriety, it developed its own Misaimed Fandom as atheists came out of the woodwork, praising the open letter's contents as a Take That to religion in general—which grew even more prevalent when Richard Dawkins considered the letter a valid anti-theological argument. The argument is simply "you can't prove a negative", as in "you can't prove the FSM doesn't exist/didn't create the universe", in response to those who claim that the lack of proof of God's non-existence is evidence for his existence. Russell's Teapot is a more classic example.
- Ultimately, Pastafarianism's creator subverted this trope: Although he had originally professed that he had nothing against religion, he embraced his atheist fans and catered to their desires. Now that Pastafarianism is a Straw Religion with the message that "Belief Makes You Stupid," it's attracted its fair share of serious followers.
- There are many other parody religions such as the Church of the Subgenius and Discordianism as well.
- Discordianism actually started as a silly but serious religion to parody other parodies of religion, and there are still "serious" Discordian followers out there. Anyone who says otherwise will rot in Thud.
- Now now, don't be a cabbage, you don't rot in Thud, you are simply reincarnated as a precious Mao Button and distributed to the poor in the Region of Thud. Really, don't make us out to be monsters.
- Rastafarianism originally started as somewhere between a joke religion and a sort of political group for mocking those who were deemed oppressors, but over time has become a serious religion. This is even more amusing when you realize that in Rasatarianism: God is the deceased king of Ethiopia, Heaven is Ethiopia, and Satan is Queen Elizabeth II.
- Even though Haile Selassie (a Christian) actively tried to inform his first worshippers that he wasn't a god, said worshippers immediately concluded his humility was due to him being a god... So Yeah.
- So apparently, the Life Of Brian method of finding a messiah is valid. Who knew?
- "Any religion whose major sacrament is marijuana is going to get very weird very fast." — description of Rasta on Christian talk radio, circa 1980s.
- Rastafari is actually a very conservative religion, rife with misogyny and homophobia. Ironically, in the US it has a large Misaimed Fandom of young (and liberal) hippie kids who are into reggae music and think Rastafari is all about peace and love.
- KFC attempted a Battlestar Galactica related promotion, the "Frak Pak". Considering what the word "frak" is a substitute for, this got a bit of attention from the fanbase, albeit not for the intended reasons.
- What's worse is what they did when they realised their mistake: they replaced "Frak" with "Can't-Say-That-Word-On-Television". So it became literally a "fuck pak". Way to go, KFC.
- This can be a case with Nintendo's "Seal of Quality". After the NES arrived on the video game scene, Nintendo wanted its consumers to be assured that their games would run properly and that the games they make/publish have met their "standards". So came the "Seal Of Quality" which denoted that games baring the seal had met Nintendo's stringent licensing requirements, specifically, that all companies (with several exceptions) were limited to five game releases a year, a direct reaction to the scores of poorly made games that were one of the reasons for The Great Video Game Crash Of 1983. Certainly, this stopped much of the Shovelware for the system, but also contributed to the system's quotient No Export For You. It made no assurances of play quality, but seemed to satisfy the consumer demand for an assurance that someone had looked over the game before it went out the door (something that was understandable considering the latter years of the Atari 2600). However, the more stringent aspects of the licensing requirements were ditched at around the time developers began defecting to the Sega Genesis, the seal became nothing more than saying "this game will work on the system", and the "quality" aspect of the seal was ditched in 2003. The funny thing is many people today believe by having Nintendo bring back the "Seal of Quality", it would reduce the amount of shovelware the Wii has. They all seem to ignore that some of the worst games of all time have borne the seal, including Superman 64, Deadly Towers, Heroes Of The Lance, Bad Street Brawler, the occasionally-good-but-always-eye-damaging Virtual Boy catalogue...
- Not to mention the fact that several developers got around the limits by making umbrella companies (most notably, Ultra was a front for Konami, which ended up publishing the first two Metal Gear installments and the first two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games for the NES.
- There is an article called Lancelot Lives which is about how to set proper boundaries in relationships with women, not give in to lust and up hold the sanctity of marriage. Because, as we all know, Lancelot is a perfect example of those particular virtues.
- This video is a parody of incredibly impatient gamers. Then people started believing the kid was one, which led him to stop making videos for about a year.
- The Greatest Freakout Ever, which has become ridiculously popular among teens and young adults as a humorous video. Any responsible adult who views it can only be horrified at the dysfunction it represents - in both brothers and in their parents.
- "Any responsible adult" would realize the video is staged around the point where the kid pretends to shove the remote control up his ass. Really, now...
- Poe's Law: "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing."
- This very page that you are reading contains numerous instances of Completely Missing The Point, which is so closely tied to Misaimed Fandom that the resulting metastorm might destroy the universe.
- There is an anthropological theory called "Culture of Poverty," that basically says poor people don't have the skills needed to advance in class. This has frequently been misconstrued as blaming the victim.
- There are a number of historical/pseudo-historical groups that suffer from this to a greater or lesser degree, often to extreme levels of Fan Dumb. Ninjas and Druids come to mind, with fictional versions all but taking over the little-known reality in the eyes of popular culture, but almost any group probably fits into the spectrum somewhere.
- Ugly example: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an anti-Semitic propaganda-tract written to discredit anti-royalist movements, depicting them as the gullible puppets of evil Jewish bankers. Frequently quoted by Nazis, both original and neo-, even though its pro-royalist stance is no more compatible with fascism than with any other recent political system.
- Even though nothing vaguely resembling their ideologies appeared in the mythology, many Neo-Nazis have hijacked Norse paganism as a vehicle for their beliefs.
- Che Guevara, Marxist revolutionary, would surely be proud that his face is plastered on overpriced t-shirts made by underpaid works, worn by overprivledged middle class white kids.
- Missing the point a little less, there are committed anti-capitalists who nonetheless Did Not Do The Research; many Anarchists and Trotskyists idolize Che despite his having fought to establish a regime both parties decry (as "statist" and "Stalinist", respectively) — not to mention that he famously had Anarchists and Trotskyists shot.
- A major reason for the "chicks dig assholes" meme on the Internet, at least in those sad few corners where it's still taken seriously.
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