Misaimed Fandom / Literature

Better to reign in Hell, than serve looks.

Examples of Misaimed Fandom for characters in Literature.

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• 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 Scottish people continue to be his main fanbase.
• Author, chef, and (later in life) TV host Anthony Bourdain lamented that his memoir, Kitchen Confidential, has a substantial chunk of this. Many men who went into cooking have told him that they wanted the sort of debauched and semi-dangerous life he describes in the book as defining his early career — even though Bourdain also describes in detail the wasted years of professional advancement, painful battles with drug addiction, and years of abject poverty that his early debauched lifestyle caused him. Whether men would still want to pursue that attitude of living, following Bourdain's suicide in 2018, is unfortunately up in the air.
• Joey Comeau's Lockpick Pornography gets a lot of readers rooting for the narrator, which has caused Comeau to reply, "Aw but I hate what he does." This might to some extent be a case of a character being mistaken for an Author Avatar, since both Comeau and his protagonist are openly queer and fond of sexy trouble.
• Dean Koontz takes special care to depict his villains as petty-minded, yet when compared to the heroes — who are not only Nice Guys but are often judgmental, preachy and self-righteous, and downright irritating when humor is attempted — this often makes his villains far more interesting characters. Even if the villains want to murder innocent people or destroy mankind, they usually have nice houses, clear motivations and the determination to reach them, Evil Virtues, and often cool powers resulting in Misaimed Fandom. As result, in recent books, Dean Koontz has been trying to make his heroes even more virtuous Deadpan Snarkers and giving his villains even less intelligence, depth, personality or backstory with even more pointlessly evil goals that could never succeed. It doesn't always work, and the villain is still more interesting to read about, proving that even when the author goes out to say that Being Evil Sucks, some readers will still say Evil Is Cool.
• Go to author Sinclair Lewis' hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota sometime. In addition to the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center, his grave site (where he was buried against his wishes, as he had wanted his cremated remains scattered), 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 attitudes he saw in the allegedly "nice little towns" that dot the rural Midwest. And during his lifetime, the people of Sauk Centre knew it: they were so offended by Lewis' No Communities Were Harmed parody of his hometown that he created the fictional Midwestern state of Winnemac to set his stories in. Clearly, Lewis' death and elevation into one of America's great literary voices has seen the town eager to put all that behind them and reclaim him as a native son.
  • Not that Sinclair Lewis was fond of the city, either. His works often boil down to "Yes, the city can be cold, cruel, and impersonal, but rural America can be just as cold and cruel, and it's always personal. Which is worse?"
• Friedrich Nietzsche's writings were enthusiastically endorsed by Hitler's regime, 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. It also didn't help that the best student of Nietzsche's philosophy, Martin Heidegger, actually was a card-carrying member of the NSDAP, and not just for the benefits; he never repented for having joined the party, although he did comment that he had joined under the mistaken assumption that Hitler would help in the program of "awakening" the German people to a better future (Hitler didn't) and that the Nazis stood for anything other than hating "non-Aryans" (Heidegger didn't, and was actually a bit of a Gentile Jew-Chaser). Sadly, during and for some time after World War II, Nietzsche had an undeservedly bad reputation in much of the world as a proto-Nazi.
  • It's worse than that — not only did Nietzsche hate anti-Semitism, but he also hated pan-Germanism and to a lesser extent criticised nationalism as well. See, for instance, aphorism 337 of The Gay Science. He had such a distaste for German nationalism and all things German—whom he increasingly saw as uncivilised wreckers and imitators—that he began digging through his past to prove that he was of partial Polish heritage (which is not unlikely), and shortly before he went insane was known to insist that he was entirely Polish (which he probably wasn't). People tend to forget this, but after Jews and Roma, the Poles were next on the Nazis' hit list...
  • Not to mention that Loeb and Leopold (thrill-killers who murdered a 14-year-old boy just to prove they could; their crime was called "The Crime of the Century" during the 1920s) were apparently devoted readers of Nietzsche who saw themselves as his Superman.
  • Nietzsche's most famous work, Also sprach Zarathustra, also has an in-universe example. Zarathustra's ape tries to copy Zarathustra's speeches, but thinks that they're purely about expressing contempt for normal people, not understanding that Zarathustra's dramatic expressions are really meant to inspire his followers to overcome their limits and achieve transcendent greatness.
• There is a growing amount of slash fanfic based on Ayn Rand's books. Rand was such a homophobe (although she simultaneously supported gay marriage) that she's probably spinning in her grave.
  • Italy's fascist government approved a film version of We The Living (without Rand's 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.

  • Rand has also accumulated a misaimed hatedom among those who cannot be bothered to find out what she believed. For example, one political commenter has commented on "Ayn-Rand-style crony capitalism," implying that Rand's view on crony capitalism was the exact opposite of what she actually said about it.
• 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 conceptions of what socialism would look like.
  • Considering that the government's methods of control are hilariously absurd (loud noises to prevent thought, sandbags on ballerinas to make them less graceful) that makes sense. Also complicating things, consider that there's a subtle justification for the government: Harrison's first action in the story is to declare himself supreme emperor based solely on his superior abilities. And, as a teenager, his first priority as leader is getting laid. That can't really be described as pro-democratic capitalism.
• 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!
  • The film version basically created the "Sigma Male Grindset" meme, a parody of "alpha male" dudebros who only care about amassing more money and having sex with women, and the meme intentionally used Patrick Bateman as an icon of Sigmahood because the story he's in is satrical toward those traits. Several years later and "Sigma Male" is basically an unironic phrase, with actual so-called "Alpha Males" and Pick-up Artists using the imagery unironically.
  • This trope has affected many of his other works as well. His first novel, Less Than Zero, was intended as an attack upon the soullessness and amorality of 1980s consumerist culture, especially among young people of his generation. Naturally, in an interview he said that it was not uncommon for fans to come up to him and tell him that Less Than Zero was the book that made them want to move to L.A.
• And Then There Were None: Agatha Christie unintentionally succeeded in making some of her most despicable murderers (such as, oh, the child-killing Yandere, or anti-Semitic Social Darwinist) the most sympathetic characters in her fandom, if the artwork (and fanfiction) based on said characters is any indication.
  • 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.
  • It also doesn't help that the murderer is a self-professed sadist who freely admits that he's mainly doing what he's doing to fulfil his urges to torture and murder with impunity, and selecting other murderers as his victims is merely a way of letting him dress it up in a thin veneer of 'justice'.
  • For further misaiming, there are some fans, even on this wiki, who think the killer is not so bad because he only targets other murderers.
• Angels & Demons' descriptions of The Illuminati 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?
• In Battle Royale a good amount of fans love the series not for its action, story, or even characters. They love the series because they can't help wishing that their class was in The Program. Obviously, said fans are actually quite similar to the character Oda — a student that despises all of his classmates and doesn't hesitate to try to kill them.
• An in-universe example by Olivia Goldsmith's The Bestseller. Book editor Pam Mantiss adored Gone with the Wind as a child, especially Scarlett O'Hara to the point that she used "Scarlett" as her confirmation name. She uses Scarlett as the inspiration for her career of doing whatever it takes to get ahead, ignoring the advice of others, ruthless in her deals and not above backstabbing and cheating. It's only when all her double-crosses get her fired and ruin her reputation in the business that Pam remembers the book ended with Scarlett defeated and abandoned and she's suffered the same fate.
• In the Black Jewels series, Anne Bishop stated explicitly that she was trying to explore and reverse some gender roles: The gendered weakness emphasized by stereotypical "feminine" afflictions that didn't for a moment lessen the authority of the matriarchal society, the acknowledgment and exaggeration of how damaging sexual assault was by making the psychic trauma a quantifiable thing, the fact that rape or accusations of rape casts a serious stigma on the male perpetrator, not the victim and many other gender role reversals without making the behavior at all unrecognizable. Nonetheless, because bad things happen to women in her series, outcry has been made in fandom that it's terribly misogynistic.
• The Book of Lord Shang is very keen on war and giving the army something to fight. In support of this, Shang cites The Art of War, in spite of the fact that Sun Tzu said that war should be resorted to as rarely as possible.
• Bridge to Terabithia
  • There are fanfics where Jesse dies or even commits suicide, which is treated as a good thing since he can finally be with Leslie. This is in spite of the book and film's rather blatant "Live life to the fullest, no matter what it throws at you" message, and given Leslie's personality, she'd be likely to slap him silly if he ever thought of suicide.
  • That more than half of the fics for this fandom revive Leslie/reveal she never died/take place in an Alternate Universe where she never even had her accident can be considered this as well, considering that the book has a pro-coping with death moral and Leslie was based on a real child who actually died.
• 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. Some commenters also hold it up as an effective satire of laissez-faire capitalism, conveniently ignoring the World State's command economy.
  • A pro-drug-legalization group in the 1970s called itself SOMA. After a drug which puts its users into a stupor so they can ignore the dissatisfaction of living in a dystopian state.
• The Catcher in the Rye has seen many readers identify with main character Holden Caulfield, to the point of seeing his misanthropic worldview as something to emulate and even idolize as an appropriate reaction to the world around him. This is missing the point of the story that his scorn and loathing mask a deep unhappiness, with the story painting him as a Jerkass Woobie who wants nothing more than to protect children from the perceived evils of the world. Tragically, a few people who missed the point of this work went on to commit violent acts because of it. Whenever the novel is brought up, oftentimes it's less for its actual content and more for its association with a number of shootings, such as the assassination of John Lennon, the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, and the killing of Rebecca Schaeffer. Note that at no point in the book is such violence ever advocated. If anything, Holden spends some time ranting that he thinks the world is too violent as it is, or at least that it certainly doesn't need any more.
• The Ciaphas Cain series gives an In-Universe example. Amberley Vail, the in-universe editor, notes in one of the forewords that while she was pleasantly surprised to find that her abridgments of Cain's memoirs are popular among her fellow Inquisitors, she's slightly put out that many of them prefer to treat them as light entertainment rather than the "serious food for thought" she'd intended them to serve as.
• 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. This is because the final chapter of the book changes the interpretation completely, and it was omitted from most US editions. (As often snarkily noted, this is perhaps the only instance of a piece of fiction being edited for US consumption because it was too optimistic.)
  • The U.S. publisher left off the last chapter because he felt it was a cop out. It's easy to see the last chapter as Burgess flinching from his own message for emotional reasons.
  • Similarly, more misanthropic readers thought that the Ludovico Technique should be used for the fact that they saw their own tormentors faces in Alex and his gang.
• Henry James' Daisy Miller is a story of a girl whose wealthy American peers misjudge her for acting too free-spirited and independent (read: American) in Europe. James was criticizing the aristocratic snobs in the novella who snub Daisy and act ashamed of her. Americans' initial reaction? They hated Daisy and were ashamed of her.
  • James himself once, in an incident G. K. Chesterton talked about in his autobiography, got an object lesson in how Americans didn't actually understand Europe, whether they liked it or not. He was visiting Chesterton, who was vacationing at Rye, and James was saying something complimentary about European refinement and class...and then Hilaire Belloc, the most European person in the world, shows up after having come back from France with no money, unshaven, in workmen's clothes, and shouting for Chesterton to give him bacon and beer. Belloc was in Parliament at the time; it sorta blew James' mind.
• Frederick Forsyth wrote his title assassin in The Day of the Jackal to embody everything he found repulsive: a charming but emotionless sociopath who only cares about money. Forsyth was reportedly dismayed that many readers treated the Jackal as the book's hero instead of the Villain Protagonist he'd intended.
• Don Quixote offers examples in and out Universe:
  • In-Universe: Alonso Quixano, some time before he had definitely gone nuts and decided to be Don Quixote, but after he devolved from a guy interested in chivalry books to a guy obsessed by them, displayed this (Unexpected) Audience Reactions:
    • Part I, chapter I: Who is Don Quixote Alonso Quixano’s favorite knight? Well, Reinaldos of Montalban. The best part is the reason because he is the favorite:
  "… But above all he admired Reinaldos of Montalban, especially when he saw him sallying forth from his castle and robbing everyone he met, and when beyond the seas he stole that image of Mahomet which, as his history says, was entirely of gold."
  • Out-universe, while Cervantes intended for Quixote to be a cutting parody of the romantized reception of the feudal system in his day, Quixote's quest to bring back knightly chivalry has a certain appeal to many hopelessly romantic idealists. Some adaptations of his work, such as Man of La Mancha have even opted for this interpretation.
• Count Dracula, upon reading the original novel that launched the character, is clearly meant to be an ancient, evil, crazy half-demon thing. His fashion sense and tendency to be played by sexy European actors made him beloved, and nearly single-handedly launched the Vampires Are Sex Gods trope.
• Frank Herbert's Dune.
  • The world he created was meant to be a dystopia, and Paul Atreides was not a role model, but a Dark Messiah and a deconstruction of The Chosen One — and one who eventually realized the error of his ways, at that. This hasn't stopped some alt-right fans from hailing him as a heroic Übermensch who serves as a great exhibition of their values, a man imbued with genetic superiority who reforges society in his image through brutal conquest. Paul's co-option by the alt-right, which is often ferocious in its hatred of the Islamic religion, is extra ironic given that Herbert based his journey on that of The Prophet Muhammad. Dune: Part Two thankfully corrects this by displaying Paul and Fremen’s victory in the climax as something unambiguously terrible and sinister with imagery reminiscent of real world terrorist attacks.
  • And on that note, the series' abundance of Arabian and Islamic elements, especially tied around the main character and his allies, has led many people to see Dune as a Muslim-friendly work, a particularly tempting view given the low representation of this religion in the science fiction genre compared to Christianity and other faiths. Again, under all the aesthetic and philosophical elements, the case is basically the reverse. Herbert's stance, and the saga's own Anvilicious Aesop, is that things like Messianism, jihad, theocracy, and organized religion in general are destructive concepts that should be opposed for the sake of mankind's future and free thought. The series' main exponent of all those, Leto II, is tormented precisely because becoming a God-Emperor himself was the only way to avoid greater evils, and is bent on setting mankind in a way that will ensure it never happens again.
• The English Patient: The relationship between Almasy and Katherine 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.
  • See also the Misaimed Fandom of Wuthering Heights and The Phantom of the Opera. Romantic relationships seem to possess a strong tendency to fall into this trope. This is evident in common perceptions of the term 'star crossed lovers' as something romantic, rather than 'fated to bad ends'.
• Fahrenheit 451: This novel is often used by people who try to say that books are the superior form of media and that everything else is stupid and shallow. However, that's not what the novel was trying to say at all. In fact, there's one scene where Faber says that books as a medium aren't the important part, it's the content that matters. It just so happens that in their society books tend to have the most meaningful content. He is trying to say that it's the content that should be deeper and more meaningful. People frequently ignore that though to argue the supremacy of books as a medium. Also, people regard it as an Author Tract against government censorship, an interpretation that the author explicitly rejected.
• Fight Club uses Tyler Durden to show valid criticism of consumer culture, with lessons that people could genuinely improve their lives by following. But Tyler takes it to a murderous extreme, throwing out the baby with the bathwater by making a group of Neo-Nazis in all but name who promote anarchism for its own sake. Tyler himself is a complete sociopath who doesn't care about anyone but himself, intended to demonstrate how dangerous the kind of man that such a culture idolizes could actually be under the right circumstances. It also shows the idea of such toxic masculinity that would start fight clubs where guys beat the hell out of each other for no reason being fundamentally flawed by deconstructing Tyler's own worldview. His fight clubs eventually turn into a totalitarian cult that dehumanizes its subjects even more thoroughly than they were before, causing chaos and destruction as a way of lashing out at the world around them. There's a significant misaimed fandom that misses the point entirely, even among the very people it was mocking. The story doesn't just blindly chastize people who feel drawn to dangerous individuals like Tyler, but makes a point to show how failings of society make it possible. Essentially, the book takes a stance against both blind consumerism and toxic masculinity, and yet was embraced as a positive affirmation of both of those things by a small subset of people.
  • In later editions of the book Palahniuk himself would express confusion and dismay when, after the book had been out for some time, men started coming up to him and telling him about the horrific things they did to emulate Tyler in their own attempts to "stick it to the man".
• The most famous line of Horton Hears a Who!, "A person is a person, no matter how small," has frequently been appropriated by pro-life groups to champion fetus personhood. Seuss, however, was very likely pro-choice in life (the story was actually inspired by Seuss changing his previously anti-Japan WWII sentiments after visiting America-occupied Japan and disliking what he saw; it's meant to be a parable about sticking up for the rights of minority groups), and his wife has sent several cease and desist orders to pro-life groups who have used the phrase, having her lawyer state, "She doesn't like to hijack Dr. Seuss characters or material to front their own points of view."
• Flashman is another shining example. George Macdonald Fraser intended his Victorian Anti-Hero to be a hateful character that readers despised. Considering that in the first book Flashman's not only an inveterate coward, womanizer and bigot, but also a rapist, one would be hard-pressed rooting for him. Yet from the word go, many readers embraced Flashman as an outright hero, to a degree that alternately amused and annoyed Fraser. Admittedly the books are essentially comedic and Flashman fulfills an Only Sane Man role next to his contemporaries, so there's some room for Alternate Character Interpretation.
• Foucault's Pendulum: An example of this trope In-Universe turns up in this Umberto Eco novel. 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 secret society catches on against their wills.
  • 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".
• The Fun They Had by Isaac Asimov was intended 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 can be) 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...
  • It Gets Worse: The story was so frequently used in that context, it's far and away Asimov's most anthologised work... all thanks to editors who completely missed the point.
    • And then the pandemic happened...
• Neil Strauss' The Game (2005) is often viewed (and marketed) as the only pickup manual any guy needs to get laid. People who aren't part of the PUA community and see videos of Strauss online frequently admire him for the way he can "decode" a woman's unconscious physical signals and charm them into bed. What most people seem to forget, though, is that Strauss became a pickup expert primarily due to an introverted personality that kept him from maintaining a relationship. Not only that, but the narrative makes it perfectly clear that being a pickup artist sucks — Strauss learns that the community discredited his techniques due to years of overuse (thus becoming "social robots"), his mentor has a psychotic breakdown and almost commits suicide, and none of the techniques he perfected work on the one woman he wanted to be with (forcing him to be himself and admit his misgivings to her). Even worse, he notes that Project Hollywood, the "haven" in West Hollywood created by fellow PUA 'Tyler Durden', descended into such anarchy that Strauss ended up leaving them behind. Yet, he is still seen as a role model by impressionable men and people who want to get into the PUA community.
• Amy Dunne from Gone Girl has received this from both directions. On one hand, her "Cool Girl" speech, about women conforming to their boyfriends' and husbands' image of the ideal woman, has been hotly debated by feminists as either a great message to women or a really horrible one; some view her as a modern feminist icon calling out the constraints women face in society and the expectations they're forced to meet, while others point out that she's a manipulative sociopath who frames people for rape, abuse, and murder, and argue that the speech contains more hate for Amy's fellow women than the men she thinks they're trying to impress. This article calls Amy the Distaff Counterpart to Tyler Durden from Fight Club (notably, David Fincher directed the film adaptations of both books) in terms of how a number of female readers embraced her and the reasons why they did so. On the other hand, both the book and the movie have won fandoms from men's rights activists who view Amy as the personification of the horrors of feminism, neglecting how her actions stemmed from a lifetime of being a Stepford Smiler forced to conform to the expectations of both her parents (in the form of the "Amazing Amy" they wrote about) and her husband (in the form of the aforementioned "Cool Girl"). Let's just say, Amy Dunne is a very complicated character.
  • For the latter case, it didn't help that the film adaptation toned down many of Nick's more unsympathetic qualities and overt misogyny, while also making it less clear just how much Amy resented having to live up to "Amazing Amy" her whole life. As a result, while the book painted both Nick and Amy as very unlikable people, with their reunion being pretty much two sociopaths realizing that they were made for each other, the film is quite a bit more on Nick's side, with the ending being a pretty clear case of The Bad Guy Wins.
• Mervyn Peake meant the eponymous setting of his Gormenghast books to be a tradition-bound hellhole that Titus Groan is obviously right in wanting to escape. But Gormenghast Castle, its environs, and its folkways are depicted as so grotesquely compelling (or compellingly grotesque) that many readers have wished they could live there themselves.
• Many people hold up The Great Gatsby as a paean to the American dream and the ostentatious wealth of the Jazz Age, which are exactly the things that the novel criticizes. The titular Gatsby is certainly a Man of Wealth and Taste, but he and most people around him are each portrayed as an Upper-Class Twit at best for various reasons. Also, all of this ostentatious wealth and power hasn't made any of the richest people any happier. This is especially true with Gatsby himself, since all of his money and power was trying to impress a woman named Daisy, whom he had been smitten with for ages. And in the end, it was All for Nothing, because she's not impressed. It ties into An Aesop presented by the book: chase the past all you want, but you'll never get it back.
• Gulliver's 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.
  • Really, most of Swift's work has been subject to misaimed fandom. The essay A Modest Proposal was meant to make the English realize what they were doing to the Irish, but instead people just laughed at the satire and did nothing.
• "The Heathen Chinee" was written in 19th century Northern California by author Bret Harte, who opposed racial discrimination. The narrative poem satirized 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.
• Harry Potter: J. K. Rowling, author of the series, has frequently complained about the vocal fanbases of Draco Malfoy and Severus Snape. Part of it is that the good guys intentionally eschew the trappings of power, including mere refinement, which turns into Evil Is Cool and Good Is Dumb — and almost Dumb Is Good — with even the slightest fumble. And, of course, it didn't help that the movie versions of Malfoy and Snape were played by the easy-on-the-eyes Tom Felton and the charismatic Alan Rickman, respectively. Granted, the Malfoy family and Snape are shown to be the most morally ambiguous of the Death Eaters. Snape leans heavily on the good side by the end and has a Freudian Excuse. The Malfoy family are at least not as unlikable as they used to be by the end of the story. Even so, there's a vocal subset of fans who insist that Malfoy and Snape did nothing wrong, which isn't true, either; Snape was a Jerkass to Harry over some Sins of the Father-type stuff (and towards pretty much every student who wasn't in Slytherin), and Malfoy was a rich bully who couldn't back up any of his talk.
  • People tend to mention Snape as right alongside Draco in the leather pants area, though Rowling seems far less concerned over people liking Snape than liking Draco. Then again, any time someone asks her who her favorite character other than Harry is, Snape gets mentioned, so... many people love him because of the actor, but just as many like him for the same reasons Rowling does. A lot of the vehement hatred toward him seems fueled by fandom rivalries, just like Sirius.
  • Some people like Tom Riddle (that is, Voldemort) because of his attractiveness and charm and will excuse his actions, especially those from his childhood, because he was an orphan. This is all despite the fact that Riddle used these exact things to garner sympathy and hide his sociopathy in-universe, enabling himself to pass as the Badass Bookworm his fans think he is.
  • While Merope is a certified Jerkass Woobie, some fans tend to sympathize with her too much. To the point of claiming her using a Love Potion on Tom Riddle, Sr.^note the father of the above was justified; even going so far as to claim Tom was the bad one, pointing to a few scenes where he's described as a snob (this is ignoring his Pet the Dog moments like taking care of his elderly parents), and him leaving a pregnant Merope and never even bothering to find out what happened to his child, never mind the fact that he was mind-controlled and magically raped, and didn't consent to the relationship in the first place. This would not exist if it were Tom who did this to Merope, mind you.
  • Certain segments of the fandom believe that being a specific blood status is better — Rowling disagrees.
    • There's also a divide of the fandom over the term "Muggles" as equivalent to either a politically correct distinction or an ethnic slur. This is in addition to "Mudblood", which is definitely a canon slur against those of Muggle descent who have magic.
    • And there's a whole debate about whether the prejudice against outsiders is really racism or not.
  • If you go to Average Wizard or hang out on a fan forum, you can always find a certain number of people who think that the Unforgivable Curses would be fun to use and/or want or have had the Dark Mark tattooed on their bodies.
  • And then there was the ^note "the" as in: the only that has a fairly large media standing — of course there are countless sects and factions German extreme left who absolutely loved the book. (No, it isn't just subtext about Lord 'Dolfemort, which might be intended by the author. It's more the racist antiracism: "Slytherin are born evil by nature,"^note Which isn't at all true, as evidenced by Slughorn Replace "Slytherin" with "German" and you have the official party line of the self-same extreme left.)
  • The above-alluded-to Dumb Is Good interpretations of the canon leads certain Slytherin fans to treat the Gryffindors as Jerk Jocks and the Slytherins as the sympathetic outcast alternative/arty kids. This mainly comes from American fans, who project the "Jocks vs. Nerds" dynamic common in US high school and middle school works on the series, and can't believe that Harry can be a talented athlete and still be an underdog in social terms, when Potter runs on the very different character conventions of British Boarding School stories.
  • Rowling herself was disturbed to find that there were fans who considered Bellatrix Lestrange, Voldemort's sociopathic second-in-command, to be a pro-feminist character and regarded her defeat at the hands of housewife Molly Weasley^note Apparently, the woman who kills The Dragon in an epic duel is the anti-feminist character just because she chose to stay home to raise her children. to be a sign of internalized misogyny on Rowling's part. Rowling pointed out that while Bellatrix is the best fighter of the female cast, she is also slavishly devoted to, and willing to commit murder, kidnapping, and torture for, a man who will never reciprocate her feelings.
  • Many fans consider Dumbledore to be a Card-Carrying Villain who does things For the Evulz for various reasons, completely disregarding the fact that Dumbledore himself admits to and is shown to regret his mistakes, including and up to accidentally getting his sister killed.
• Cruella de Vil in both The Hundred and One Dalmatians and the Disney adaptations of 101 Dalmatians is often seen as being symbolic of Pretty in Mink instead of Fur and Loathing.
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had a note from Mark Twain at the beginning threatening to shoot any readers attempting to see real life subtext in the story. It's used for exactly that purpose in many literature courses. Probably subverted, however, as not falling in line with what powerful people want you to do is the main theme of the entire book.
• The Hunger Games, being dark and violent as well as popular and marketable, naturally attracted this:
  • There's a strategy board game based on the books, which successfully takes the event Collins has spent three books showing as horrible, life-destroying, and a sign of just how evil humanity can be, and makes it a fun game for 2-6 players. Some fans are ecstatic. CollegeHumor parodies this here.
  • Many fans, like the Capitol crowd, were completely star-struck by the love triangles, intense action sequences and pretty costumes, to the point where wanting to be a tribute became the new "wanting to attend Hogwarts". (though some fans were more reasonable...◊) The final book didn't go over too well with these people. A lot of fanfiction involves sending OCs or other fictional characters to the Hunger Games, and it's treated like a fun game rather than a dehumanizing death-match. Oddly, few of them ever get the real violence; they usually just hang around making Original Characters, reaping, and maybe chariots/interview scenes.
• Dante's Inferno:
  • Paolo and Francesca 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.
  • There are also people who feel sorry for Count Ugolino.
• 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 un-self-aware 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...
• 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.
  • When he first wrote down the first stanza of the poem, he entitled it a Fragment of Anglo-Saxon poetry, lampooning the fashion for things Anglo-Saxon of his day.
  • There's also Alice in Wonderland, which was just a silly story he wrote to amuse Alice Liddell and eventually expanded to include jokes on logic and mathematics. Most people today simply assume that it's all about drugs and sex and don't realize that it's satire as well as following dream logic.
• Many people will use the idea of being a Jekyll & Hyde as an excuse for either their own bad behavior or that of their loved ones: "The real me (Jekyll) would never do such a thing, it was this alien force (Hyde) that took over my body and made me do it." This arguably inverts the moral of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where Jekyll deliberately uses the "Hyde" persona as an outlet for his own worst urges because no one can recognize him as Hyde and he enjoys being able to be evil without any chance of being recognized or blamed. Ultimately Jekyll's refusal to take responsibility for Hyde's actions was a big part of what caused things to go badly, and in the end Jekyll speculates that it was his own wish to do evil without the restraint of a conscience that resulted in the creation of Hyde — had he really wanted to bring out the 'totally good' side of his personality, that's what the potion would have created.
• The Jungle was written by Upton Sinclair 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 — a law which Sinclair opposed, because it shifted the cost of food inspection onto the federal government and away from the meatpacking industry. Sinclair commented on this in later years:
  "I aimed for the public's heart, and by mistake, I hit the public's stomach."
• Lancelot Lives is an article 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.
• Les Misérables has Montparnasse, a charming, attractive, sweet-talking petty criminal who, in-canon, is a cold-blooded murderer described as "the dandy of the sepulcher". He's more than willing to kill for fun, and is perfectly fine with using Éponine for sex while making no effort to actually better her life. Fans, however, interpret him as a dark antihero who only does bad things to survive and cares deeply for Éponine. One could chalk it up to Hugo's tendency to make every character memorable.
  • The musical makes it worse, with the Thénardiers largely reduced to comic relief status instead of the truly vile criminals they are in the novel. Azelma and her father's voyage to America to become slavers is left out, as well as the abandonment of Gavroche and the other sons by Madame Thénardier. This has lead to some fans insisting that they weren't that bad, even though they have no qualms about abusing Cosette or extorting money from Fantine.
• Thomas Hobbes's The Leviathan cites 1 Samuel 8: 11-17, demonstrating the absolute power of the sovereign as something desirable. He apparently chose to ignore the next verse, "And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.", which makes it clear that Samuel was warning the Israelites about getting a king.
• Louisa May Alcott of Little Women was... not happy with a good part of the feedback she got in regards to her books about the March sisters. She was so specially unhappy with hundreds of girls being so focused on shipping and asking her when would she write about Jo and Laurie's wedding, that she showed NO mercy in regards to the Ship Sinking in Good Wives. Instead of giving in to fan demand, she had Jo reject Laurie's love declarations at least twice, leave her home, marry her beta-reader Friederich Bhaer instead of Laurie — and Laurie himself fell for Jo's younger sister Amy and they got Happily Married too.
  LMA: "Girls write to ask who the Little Women will marry, as if that were the only aim of a woman's life. I won't marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone."
• Lolita has a tendency to attract its own fandom that believes in the righteousness of Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze's relationship, or think that Dolores seduced Humbert — both ignoring Nabokov's intention to cast Humbert as an Unreliable Narrator. On the flip side, because the minority of the fandom who didn't get it are louder than the reticent majority 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.
  • There seems to be a disturbing number of readers who admire a rather different Lolita to the one found in the novel — a sassy, sexually precocious teenager who gets to wear lots of cool '50s vintage clothes and spends her time on romantic hobbies such as eating lollipops, sunbathing and crushing on older men. The character in the book is pretty much an average fourteen year old girl who ends up orphaned, raped and kidnapped. It's incredibly sad and disturbing — especially since Humbert convinces her that if she goes to the police, she'll be in as much trouble as him. Definitely not someone to aspire to, no matter how much you like saddle shoes and Jeremy Irons.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • The Black Speech has quite a fanbase for how deliciously evil it sounds. Tolkien, however, designed the Black Speech to be as ugly and hateful as he could possibly design a language. At one point, a fan gave Tolkien a goblet with a copy of the One Ring inscription on it; rather than drink from something bearing such evil words, Tolkien simply used the goblet as an ashtray.
  • The Lord Of The Rings has many neo-Nazi fans who view the "good races" as white and the "evil races" as non-white. In reality, Tolkien opposed racial segregation in South Africa, opposed Nazism, had many Jewish friends, and had one of his most singularly awesome moments when he tore a new one into the Nazis more or less to their faces in a letter that eviscerated the historical, cultural, and linguistic fallacies of Nazi doctrine. Admittedly the book can have those Unfortunate Implications but it is heavily implied many of the "evil" characters like the men from the East and South are fighting due to Sauron's lies and threats and aren't really evil, with Sam wondering as he sees an Easterling die if he was really evil, or just an ordinary young man who'd rather be at peace, and Tolkien explicitly stating that Aragorn and Eomer's wars with the Easterlings/Southrons post Sauron as being wars between Men, not good and evil. Additionally, the increasing Numenorean tendency to look down on/oppress 'lesser' men was one of the main signs of their corruption and downfall, and the Kin-Strife, a civil war in the otherwise 'good' Kingdom of Gondor was essentially driven by a mixed marriage and the concept of a mixed race King of Gondor, with the purists being depicted as the villainous faction. As for the idea of the Orcs promoting racial segregation, Tolkien throughout his life tried to find a way to justify an Always Chaotic Evil race, and in an Unbuilt Trope claimed they were like that due to a cruel culture and served the Big Bad out of fear — and in the most commonly taken origin (that they were once elves), they were essentially broken and conditioned to evil by Morgoth.
    • One of the most notable examples of these Neo-Nazi fans is Varg Vikernes, the man behind Burzum (yep, he named his band after a word from the Black Speech). Not only does he look at Tolkien's works as racialist, he also finds a neo-Pagan anti-Christian message in them — despite Tolkien being a devout Catholic. The analogies Varg finds for racial and religious groups in Tolkien's works are so bizzare that even other Neo-Nazis find them strange.
  • The idea of Elves as a Superior Species is a partial version of this. Tolkien was the Trope Codifier for the modern conception of Elves, but throughout the Legendarium Elves are shown to be just as flawed as humans and responsible for many of the problems throughout the First Age.
  • Our Orcs Are Different could be considered another partial example, at least in regard to the works that unapologetically portray them as Always Chaotic Evil (see above for why).
  • Éowyn settling down with Faramir does NOT equal to her either "just settling for second best" or becoming a boring housewife. Her and Faramir's relationship is a part of An Aesop of the book that peace, healing and nurturing are better than war and violence (especially when the war is over) with the language evoking a Call to Agriculture. Éowyn befriends and eventually falls for a man who helps her realize that she was a Death Seeker rather than anything, so ultimately she chooses life over death, and falls for someone who even as a Forest Ranger ordered his men never to kill without need. Also, becoming a ruling lady of a princedom is different from becoming a housewife: it's a very tough position. (Ironically for modern readers, shieldmaidens in actual Norse sagas hung up their weapons whenever they married ["maiden" refers to being an unmarried woman], so Éowyn is perfectly in line with her legendary forbears.) The fandom insists that Eówyn was chickified and "reduced" to a Trophy Wife or a House Wife.
  • Tolkien also had a fierce hatred of Allegory, where people thought that events from the book were based on real life events, but heavily favored Applicability, or putting the messages of the book to use in the reader's own life. Despite this, most people who studied it in the day (and currently as well) used allegory to explain the book, much to Tolkien's annoyance. He wrote many letters angrily saying how people were missing the entire message of his book, but eventually despaired of being able to change people's minds, since using his book as allegory had already become so ingrained.
• Lord Of The World by Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson is a dystopian novel where secular humanism, one that is militantly hostile to Christianity, has largely taken over the world, and the Senator Julian Felsenburgh vows to wipe Christianity from the face of the earth to make way for world peace. When the book came out, some socialists rooted for Felsenburgh and thought he won at the end, with a non-Catholic reader writing that the novel "struck heaven out of my sky, and I don't know how to get it back again."
• Jane Austen, one of the preeminent romantic writers in English literature, gets this quite a bit:
  • Many readers of Mansfield Park agree with Edmund that Mary Crawford is a sassy, lively, witty, attractive girl... but unlike Edmund, ignore the emerging signs of her disrespect for him, her completely unreasonable expectation that he will change his life path and career choice based on her wishes if he loves her, and her value of money over love that extends to wishing his older ill brother dead. Likewise, the quiet, stoic, obedient Fanny Price finally shows her inner strength, resolve, and independence when she refuses to marry her Stalker with a Crush, yet most of her readers only remember her as the pre-Character Development Extreme Doormat. To say nothing of the shippers who think she should have accepted him. It seems readers still only judge both women based on what they initially appear on the surface before the novel digs deeper, despite the danger of first impressions as a running theme in Jane Austen.
    • Joan Aiken's sequel Return to Mansfield even brings back the Crawfords and gives them a more sympathetic development.
    • In all fairness, Austen herself did say that it was entirely possible that Fanny and Henry could have ended up Happily Married, which would have led to Edmund and Mary getting married and being happy together as well. Even so, Austen also said that such an ending only would have happened after time had passed and Henry had reformed himself due to Fanny's influence. At the point the book ended at, Fanny and Edmund would not have been happy with Henry or Mary.
  • Pride and Prejudice: Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy are often cited as the quintessential Belligerent Sexual Tension couple — passionate dislike is just a mask for passionate love. But Elizabeth herself tells her first suitor Mr. Collins (whom she legitimately cannot stand) that this is a ridiculous notion and sometimes, no; not everyone who claims to dislike someone 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 automatically equals 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 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.
    • Far from being the perfect, misunderstood romantic ideal his fangirls tend to swoon over him as being, Mr. Darcy himself admits to Elizabeth that a significant part of her earlier dislike and condemnation of him was entirely justified, that he actually was a disdainful snob (albeit to not quite the extent Elizabeth had presupposed), and that he genuinely did have to work at taking her criticisms on board and improving his character in order to earn her affection.
    • In a different Pride and Prejudice example, the English £10 note design introduced in 2017 and celebrating Jane Austen bears the quotation "I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!". Austen fans immediately pointed out that the sentence in the novel is said by an unsympathetic character and depicted as hypocritical.
  • People often quote Isabella Thorpe of Northanger Abbey on loyalty and friendship—ignoring that Isabella is actually a terrible friend, and these "inspirational" quotes are there to show what a huge hypocrite she is.
  • Austen's works in general have also attracted alt-right fans, of all things, who view her work as a celebration of sexual purity, traditional marriage, white virtue, and old-fashioned social mores... even though Austen's work often viciously satirized the culture and romantic norms of Regency England, the well-bred aristocrats more often than not portrayed as ignorant boors and scoundrels for whom money and breeding did not buy class. One academic scholar of Austen said that the only one of her characters who might have sympathized with the alt-right would be Mrs Norris from Mansfield Park, Fanny Price’s cruel and snobbish aunt.
• "Mending Wall", with its refrain of "Good fences make good neighbors." This is what the narrator's neighbor says and is the most remembered line. The narrator himself does not believe that the wall he and his neighbor are putting so much effort into mending is worth the trouble, since it isn't protecting anything.
• Mike Hammer by Mickey Spillane. One of the interesting things about the critical backlash for Mike Hammer's adventures is the disdain for Mike being a brutal killer who disdains the law, engages in Cold-Blooded Torture, and is a Vigilante Man. The thing is that even in the first book and made as a plot poiny by One Lonely Night, the books make it clear that Mike Hammer is meant to be a Antihero and Sociopathic Hero that suffers severely from a dark side he can't control.
• Lisbeth Salander from The Millennium Trilogy is viewed by many feminists as a role model because she goes out of her way to beat up misogynistic pigs.... ignoring the fact that it is made explicitly clear that not only is Lisbeth a violent person, who repeatedly goes above the law to achieve her own ends, she's not portrayed as a feminist in the books, as she is supposed to be a stand in for anyone, who has been subjected to violence and being taken advantage of, men included. She also doesn't fit into any kind of social classification, including feminism, which was another point of her character.
  • However, others do not hold the view that to be a "feminist", one can only be a woman and can only fight for women.
  • Not to mention, if Lisbeth was explicitly said to be a feminist... wouldn't the aforementioned "going out of the way to beat up misogynistic pigs" "confirm" the (untrue) belief that "all feminists are man haters"? If it did, it could go straight into Unfortunate Implications since that's one of the ugliest stereotypes about feminism as a whole.
    • Ironically, the original Swedish title for the first book is "Men who hate women".
• Missionaries trilogy by Lyubov and Yevgeny Lukin. "Missionaries of rocket launchers" being clearly intended as a big He Who Fights Monsters view, Lukin noted that the Islanders civilization got an excess of fan approval. Some readers obviously are as "fed up" as the wannabe heroes. But the main reason is that locals, however messed up with their utterly pointless war and low-industrial waste, are mostly Blood Knight type: enthusiastic, but neither hypocritical about it nor too trigger-happy, and despite paranoia in best Cold War-style already setting in, still quite serious about war conventions — ships about to drift into a demilitarized zone get blown up by their own crew or if already a pyre, sunk by their own assault planes. Compared to both typical "explorers" of The Dung Ages they briefly met and XX century politicians eager to battle for a "good cause" as long as they personally are out of range — they get to look healthy and refreshing.
• Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki (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.
• 1984: Many people who are politically on the right cite George Orwell's classic as an argument against leftist social programs, which they would see as the creation of a "nanny state". This ignores that George Orwell was an outspoken democratic socialist, and that Nineteen Eighty-Four was written to criticize totalitarianism (specifically Stalinism) and trends toward it among certain segments of the left — not leftism in general, 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 claims that he was entirely anti-socialist in his own writings.
  • Indeed, Orwell himself said on more than one occasion that he aimed to end the "myth" that Soviet Russia was a socialist country, as he viewed that association as extremely damaging to the socialist movement for precisely this reason.
  • O'Brien in 1984 actually lampshades this to a degree; when he and Winston are in Room 101, he openly rejects several key components of Marxist theory, such as the idea that the workers will revolt, the idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the idea of abolishing class altogether.
  • And the book-within-a-book, "The Principle and Theory of Oligarchical Collectivism," states that IngSoc was called "socialism" but had none of socialism's "virtues" and that the economy of Oceania was actually an evolved form of capitalism.
  • Another common misunderstanding of 1984 is that it was genuinely Orwell's prediction of the future and what he thought the world would look like by that date. For this reason, many claim that the book is "no longer relevant". It is in fact partly a laying-out of Orwell's issues vis-a-vis much of the then-contemporary Left, partly a study of totalitarianism and partly a satire (things like the man talking in "duckspeak" are Orwell taking a jokey swipe at opinionated dinner-party bores who would regurgitate newspaper columns and the like as their own opinions — something that is fairly timeless.) It also goes beyond the fact that Smith clearly states in one scene that he is "not sure what year it actually is", because history has been changed so much over the years.
  • Some people have claimed that criticism of racism is equivalent to charges of thoughtcrime (i.e., the "crime" of not being 100% in agreement with Big Brother, even if one never acts on or even speaks of this disagreement). Orwell himself was profoundly anti-colonialist by the standards of his time, and found the prevailing attitudes of the English towards the people of colour whom the British Empire ruled over to be heinous.
  • Libertarian economist Henry Hazlitt included 1984 in his list of recommended books compiled in The Freeman's Library. However, Hazlitt does point out Orwell's democratic socialism, and says that Orwell's ideology logically lead to the book having its Downer Ending.
• Another commonly misunderstood George Orwell story is Animal Farm, which was written as a combination of a disguised expose on the true wickedness of Josef Stalin and an essay on how "Stalinism" and Socialism are not only different things, but Capitalism and Stalinism are equally bad and true Democratic Socialism is the only good form of government. Many people instead see it as either arguing "Communism is bad!" and/or that conservatism is good, when both are complete opposites of Orwell's message.
  • This is especially evident in that the villains of the story (the pigs) take on all the mannerisms and behaviors of humans (who represented the capitalists).
• In Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens seems to have considered The Artful Dodger as much a villain and scoundrel as any other character. However, his name is almost synonymous with an Anti-Hero, so much so that he is the Trope Namer for a fully heroic archetype.
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: Partly because of the greater popularity and fame of the film adaptation, which boils down the story into 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. Yet the fascination with how she got that way led as far as Netflix creating a whole series about her backstory.
• "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is a popular short story often studied in schools as an intro to the concept of False Utopia, with discussions often surrounding the infamous twist that the perfection of what is otherwise a utopia is powered solely by the suffering of an innocent child, often treated as the point of the story to branch into discussions surrounding Bystander Syndrome or sacrifices for "the greater good". However, this usually ends up missing the actual purpose of the story, that being to deconstruct the reader's perceptions of Utopia and Dystopia as root concepts, namely the presumptions that the former is impossible, but the latter is instantly more "realistic". It's strongly implied that the narrator, while describing the utopia, made up the suffering child as a means to give "rationale" to a setting the reader is likely unable to accept as "realistic" unless there's a Dark Secret, in turn questioning the reader's presumed pessimism as being unable to accept happiness without a substantial cost, even if the "cost" in question is equally as absurd as the true "heaven on Earth" reality presented.
• John Milton's Paradise Lost has Satan as its protagonist, but not its hero. Many readers actually sympathized with Satan, leading to William Blake famously saying that Milton was "of the devil's party without knowing it."
  • Satan gives some pretty speeches, but let's look at his objective deeds. He knows he will be punished, as will his followers, if he further descends. He impregnates his daughter Sin, creating Death. Death in turns rapes Sin. He then goes to Eden, decides to ruin Adam and Eve because somehow he convinces himself ruining these two innocents will avenge him on God. He does so, and gets himself and all his followers punished. Compare him to Mammon, whose speech can be summarized as a bit greedy but otherwise a Dare to Be Badass. Mammon challenges the rebels to basically scour Hell for every resource and make it as awesome as they can, so Hell is nearly as cool as Heaven is and the cosmos has two blindingly beautiful realms instead of one. Nope, the fallen go with Satan's plan and get even worse punishments as a result.
• The Phantom of the Opera overlapping with the Theatre page has a lot this going on.
  • Many fans of the book treat Leroux’s work as a Romance Novel due to the central Love Triangle. Really it’s a Gothic Horror with romantic elements, if not an outright Pulp considering the story was originally released as a serial in the French newspaper.
  • A recurring belief among the many fans of the book who support Christine and Erik’s relationship is that Erik really represents the exciting life of tempestuous bohemian freedom for her, while Raoul in contrast just wants to chain Christine down to a marriage and make her a submissive wife. In actual fact Erik is the one trying to rob Christine of her freedom and choices as he spends a lot of the novel gaslighting Christine into believing he’s a voice from Heaven sent by her father to teach her music and she can’t marry anyone if she wants his lessons. Upon revealing his true identity and Christine seeing his Nightmare Face, Erik outright declares that she can never leave him now and essentially exploits Christine‘s compassion so that she takes pity on him. While there is some ambiguity over Christine’s feelings for Erik in the original text, especially when Raoul asks if she would love Erik if he had a handsome face — it’s still made clear in the novel that their relationship is entrapment, dominance and pity rather than true love. The lesson Erik learns in the end is that can’t control or trap Christine if he actually loves her.
  • On the other hand, the book fans that whole heartedly support Christine and Raoul’s romance aren’t completely in the right either. Raoul obviously isn’t a murderer like Erik and he has every right to care about Christine due to their shared childhood (which is why she loves him) but his childishly lovesick attitude towards her is only marginally less obsessive than the Phantom’s and he’s just as guilty of stalking Christine and trampling on her privacy.
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Reportedly, a British Secretary of State for Education once told Muriel Spark they greatly admired the title character. 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.
• "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost is widely considered a celebration of independence, because the narrator "took the road less traveled by / and that has made all the difference". Most people haven't read the entire poem, which makes it clear that both roads are actually the same. The poem is actually meant as a gentle mocking of indecision. In fact, it was inspired by the real-life walks that Frost took with Edward Thomas. No matter which path they took, Thomas would always get mad at himself for not choosing a better path. Frost was making the point that all the paths were fine, and that Thomas didn't need to be such a perfectionist. See more here and here.
• 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.
  • TSH in general has a case of this — fittingly, in some ways, given Richard's desire for the picaresque at all costs.
• Shakespeare's plays are so ubiquitous and influential that it's inevitable that there's a lot of this, especially since they're in archaic enough English that many people (including the people adapting them for other media) never actually read them, but special mention should go to:
  • Romeo and Juliet has a misaimed Hatedom, that claims that none of the tragedies would take place if "a couple of dumb rich kids could keep it in their pants", essentially putting the blame for everyone else's actions entirely on the main couple. This misses that the Montagues and Capulets have been feuding for so long even they don't know the reason anymore, and the only way to get them to stop was for those "dumb rich kids" to die.
  • There are many jokes surrounding the idea on how the titular character in Hamlet may have romantic feelings for his own mother, despite the play depicting how disgusted the protagonist is of her mother marrying his uncle— comparing it to incest.
• Tess of the D'Urbervilles: There are some people out there who think that Tess should have ended up with Alec, only because he wants her as a mistress after Angel leaves her. Disregarding the "rape is love" vibe from this pairing, it is completely out of character for Tess, who never liked him romantically before, and despises him when she is his mistress, only taking the position to support her family.
• Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea gets a lot of this, both regular Draco in Leather Pants because of his Affably Evil and Wicked Cultured tendencies and sympathetic backstory and people who wish they could have his awesome submarine and other cool technology.
  • In Return To Mysterious Island, a video game roughly based off Leagues, Nemo is actually a purely benevolent character. Ascended Fanon?
• Warrior Cats: The Rise of Scourge manga produced a lot of this from the 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."
  • Ashfur is a Base-Breaking Character in general, and Word of God states that this was intentional. As always, though, there's a minority of Ashfur fans who claim that he was justified in trying to murder Squirrelflight's father and children to make her feel the same pain he had. It doesn't matter that he's killing innocent cats to get his revenge, because Squirrelflight was mean to him!
  • Most people who hate Sol either hate him because he's "stupid" (which he clearly isn't) or because he's trying to 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).
    • On a similar note, there is also the entirety of SkyClan's Destiny. The most popular reaction to the book is disgust towards/complaining about the travesty that is the Daylight Warriors. People regularly cite the Warrior Code as a reason for why the Daylight Warriors are horrible, both ignoring way the books constantly show that the Warrior Code isn't right, or that the entire point of the book was to demonstrate that SkyClan doesn't need to follow the other Clans' examples, and are free to welcome the Daylight Warriors if it is in their best interests.
• "The White Man's Burden" by Rudyard Kipling is a case of Misaimed Fandom and Misaimed Hatedom.^note Whether the hatedom is truly misaimed is questionable, considering that Kipling genuinely believed that (British) colonialism was always good for the colonized and that counterexamples were caused by bad apples, rather than being Inherent in the System. This point-missing is aggravated by the prints forgetting its "dedication" line. That's like forgetting to supply dynamite with a detonator, because this was "An Address to the United States" published on the heels of the Philippine War. If you don't see the trouble yet, read Mark Twain's articles about it. Some could take it seriously, more as vicious irony, some like, some not — but no chance this would not provoke an untold riot then and there. The author of Stalky and Pig should have known what he did was trolleriffic. But just in case it wasn't enough, he also did publicly "bequeath" The British Empire's role to the people looking for contrasts with it and still remembering The American Revolution, implicitly stating that the Americans had Become Their Own Antithesis.
• Belgian author Hendrik Conscience's novel "The Lion of Flanders" glorifies the Battle of the Golden Spurs (1302), where a group of Flemish peasants defeated a French royal army. The book is extremely popular with Flemish nationalists, who see it as a justification of their goal for Flemish independence. In reality, Conscience had written the book to promote Belgian nationalism. Until the 19th Century, the Battle of the Golden Spurs was mostly forgotten in national history. But after Belgium became independent in 1830, Conscience rediscovered this unique historical event, in which a group of Flemish peasants actually won a battle against a much more powerful army, and wrote a very romanticized novel about it full of Large Ham and scenes that are not always historically accurate. The battle itself wasn't even a national war between the Flemish and the French, as a few Flemish nationalists have tried to imply. Back in 1302, Flanders was just a county consisting of only two provinces of what is now the region Flanders, and not a whole nation. Also after winning this battle out of dumb luck (the French army got stuck in the mud and swamps), the Flemish were conquered and forced into submission again soon after. Despite all that, Conscience is still hailed as an icon of Flemish nationalism and even voted into a 10th place during the Flemish version of the "Greatest Belgian" contest.
• Plato:
  • His dialogues are basically debates between people supporting different points of view. However, many of his modern viewers fail to understand which of the points Plato himself supported. A prominent example is Crito, which was used for centuries to teach how important it is to obey the authorities (including by the Nazis). Plato was using it to demonstrate the insanity of the Athenian system (Crito states he wants to save Socrates not because the sentence is unjust, but because if he won't, the very people who sentenced Socrates to death will consider Crito a bad member of their society).
  • Scholars generally believe that Timaeus and Critias, like his other dialogues, were philosophical exercises about hubris. Most people today know them indirectly through countless pop history authors unironically claiming that Atlantis was a real place and proposing theories on where it was located and how it was destroyed.
• Take any author who is known for heavily indulging in alcohol, tobacco and/or drugs: Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs, Irvine Welsh, Carlos Castaneda, Charles Bukowski, Aldous Huxley... the majority of their cult fanbase loves them more for this fact than those who've actually read any of their books.
• Aside from all the uncertainties surrounding him, King Arthur can certainly be linked to two specific cultures, namely Breton/Welsh and Norman. Let's sum it up: there are five authors whose writings are considered the literary basis of Arthurian Legend: Geoffrey of Monmouth (a Welsh cleric), Wace (a Norman poet), Marie de France (a French poetess), Robert de Boron (a French(-Norman) poet) and last but not least Chrétien de Troyes (a French cleric). All of them wrote/compiled stories of Arthur and his court rooted in Breton/Welsh/Gallic legendary settings, stories all written in either Latin or a variation of Ancient French (Picard, Anglo-Norman). In those stories, apart from the fiefs of the knights being located in either Brittany, Wales or Cornwall, the authors made it crystal clear that Arthur and his realm is fighting a neverending war against Saxons trying to invade the British Isles. The first king to use thoses legends to promote himself? William the Conqueror, in order to legitimize the Norman reign (with Breton help) on Saxon subjects in England. Yet, to this day, you will still find Englishmen/Americans (Anglo-Saxons) talking about "our glorious, semi-legendary king Arthur, protector of England". In Le Morte D Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory consistently describes Arthur as the "King of England", which must have really thrilled any Welshmen reading the book...
• Deconstructed in-universe with Zadie Smith's 2000 novel White Teeth, in which a young Muslim extremist admires the gangster characters portrayed by Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, et.al., but also feels tremendous guilt about this admiration (mostly because those characters are from Western popular culture, and therefore anathema to radical Islam). This ultimately becomes a subversion, however, as the boy remains an unrepentantly violent Malcolm Xerox-type radical who imagines himself as Michael Corleone as he carries out a religiously-motivated assassination attempt. Then, double-subverted when the assassination plot fails and he experiences a Heel–Face Turn at the end of the novel.
• Due to the moral ambiguity A Song of Ice and Fire can face this at times, especially due to the frequent changes from the show.
  • In general, the novels were written with the theme that war is a horrible, bloody construct that hurts everybody involved, especially the innocent. George R.R. Martin has been on record stating that he wished to create a dialogue with other fantasy writers, such as Tolkien, who more or less glorified warfare and made it into a matter of "Black-and-White Morality" versus mindlessly evil monsters or villains.^note  Though this itself may be Misaimed Fandom. See above. In A Song of Ice and Fire, moral ambiguity abounds, with sympathetic characters committing atrocities, formerly unsympathetic characters receiving character development to make them more sympathetic, and yes, major players of all factions dying on a regular basis. The overall message is that nobody is safe in war. Meanwhile, due in part to the show's popularity, many people only know the series as one that kills off all the likable characters willy-nilly just for shock effect and will tune in just to see the next big death.
  • Many people, including the showrunners, remain convinced that Renly Baratheon would have made an ideal King and is a progressive leader who is becoming King because the people love him, the showrunners engaging in an Adaptational Personality Change for Renly and outright claiming he would be a great King. However, Renly frequently shows he has no actual ruling knowledge outside of publicity, acting as a Yes-Man in council meetings and being utterly incompetent in military affairs. As for being loving, Renly mocks the unattractiveness of his niece Shireen and the kind and loyal Brienne, and is trying to starve King's Landing into submission so he can usurp the throne. His image is helped by the Ideal Hero Brienne thinking lovingly of him for being nice to her at a dance, even though the books show her treatment meant she was starved for attention and latched onto someone for showing her kindness, while in private Renly sneeringly insulted her and mocked her appearance. And despite people thinking Renly is becoming King because the people want him to, when Catelyn suggests calling a Great Council to decide who should be King, Renly's reaction is to dismiss this and say his rule is based on strength, and his main backers, the Tyrells, are clearly supporting him because he's married to Margaery Tyrell, as shown by them supporting the monstrously evil usurper Joffrey when it is agreed he will marry Margaery. Also, some people act as if Renly's older brother Stannis Baratheon killing him is a Moral Event Horizon, even though Renly makes it clear he intends to kill Stannis, despite knowing he has more right to the throne than him.
  • Some people insist that the Red Wedding was justified as it saved lives and brought peace when Robb was losing the war, taking Tywin's "Explain to me why it is more noble to kill ten thousand men in battle than a dozen at dinner" seriously. This discounts the fact that thousands of people were killed at the Red Wedding, and Robb was losing the war partially because one of his commanders, Roose Bolton, was, over time, sending thousands of Northmen to their deaths in a Uriah Gambit, forcing Robb into a losing position. Also, the later books show that this action doesn't really bring peace, leaving a resentful Riverlands and North who don't truly accept their new rulers and are plotting to restore the Starks and take vengeance for those murdered.
  • A lot of fans approach many morally grey characters in this book in much the same way they do in most other media... With a terminal case of Black-and-White Insanity. Examples abound even on this very wiki, but needless to say, pick a morally grey character and you will find both fans for whom they can do no wrong and antifans who see them as an absolute monster.
  • There are, however, characters whose complete horribleness is undeniable, and a prime example is Tywin Lannister. This a man who has on his payroll people like Gregor "The Mountain" Clegane or Roose Bolton, whose first notable act was the massacre of a rival house, about which he actually openly boasts about in a well-known song, and who destroyed the lives of two of his children — and when they attempt to call him out on this, he actually calls them selfish for not putting "the needs of their house" first. Despite this, a disturbingly high number of people actually think he's cool, to the point of overlooking his horrible deeds and general selfishness. Many also consider him a genius on account of his military and administrative hypercompetence, ignoring the fact that outside of these areas, he is largely influenced by his biases — as shown in his treatment of the child who is the most like him.
• Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls is about a Lia, a girl with anorexia. The entire book has been co-opted by the pro-anorexia movement, to the point where some call it the "Pro-Ana Bible". Anderson herself was horrified and infuriated with this interpretation. The book goes into graphic detail about not just what anorexia does to Lia's body (which is scientifically accurate, at that), but also how Lia's webs of lies about how she's supposedly beaten anorexia but continues with it anyways end up destroying her family. There's even a chapter containing only the words "Must. Not. Eat." over and over again, repeated over a hundred times as a Madness Mantra to show that Lia is undergoing Sanity Slippage from being so underweight and stressed out by what she's done to the people she loves. But pro-ana readers take it as a Survival Mantra, using the book to glamorize anorexia, and completely ignore the consequences on Lia's health and family life her anorexia has. Finally, in the ending, Lia ultimately begins to actually recover from her eating disorder, realizing that it came dangerously close destroying Lia's life as it did her best friend Cassie, who died an Undignified Death, alone in a hotel room. In short, the ultimate message of the book is that anorexia will ruin your life and it needs to be cured as soon as possible. So the fact that pro-ana followers use this book as a "how-to" guide goes directly against what the author was saying and completely ignores how terrible one's life will become if they go through with it.
• The Sea Wolf by Jack London developed this from the beginning. The book revolves around a philosophical conflict between the protagonist Humphrey van Weyden, a well-meaning but naïve academic who has been living a sheltered and comfortable life and whose arguments in defense of altruism and human dignity are based primarily on metaphysical notions of "the soul", and the antagonist Wolf Larsen, a self-made sea captain who possesses incredible physical strength as well as self-taught intelligence and makes an essentially nihilist argument while backing it up with scientific facts. Although Larsen is an incredibly brutal tyrant who will gladly throw a person into the sea if he has no further use for them, he easily wins over most readers due to his sheer charisma and the fact that van Weyden, for all his good intentions, is a rather bland character who continuously fails to provide a non-disputable, rational counterargument to Larsen's social Darwinism. Even contemporary critic and author of note Ambrose Bierce commented that Larsen, while detestable as an individual, is by far the most complex and fascinating character in the book.
• In Ranger's Apprentice Book 12, many fans see Cassandra as being a Hypocrite for condemning her daughter for said daughter's reckless actions, even though Cassandra herself did such things as a teenager. Obviously, these fans, though not wrong, are not parents who have never had to see their children make their mistakes, which happens all the time in Real Life.
• These Words Are True and Faithful has been taken as critical of transgender people. However, the author shows how transphobes use ridiculous and ultimately self-defeating arguments, as when a fundamentalist pastor criticizes transgender people for believing "something fanciful that had no support in objective evidence," and places those arguments into the mouths of two of the villains.
• My Dark Vanessa contains an in-universe example. Mr. Strane grooms 15-year-old Vanessa by giving her a copy of Lolita, and she's entranced by the story of forbidden love between a man and a seductive child.
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance gained a cult following for supporting new-age mysticism over rationality, which is pretty much the opposite of what the book is actually about.
• Venus in Furs is the origin of the term "masochism", but what it really is is a screed against gender inequality and for the empowerment and education of women. The book argues that any relationship that is based on power inequality is doomed from the onset. Of course, this noble idea vanished under all the delicious, delicious kink.
• Industrial Society and Its Future: The manifesto has inspired many anarcho-primitivists and other similar groups who seek the destruction of all technology and a complete return of humanity to the wilderness. This is in spite of the Unabomber accepting the existence of a few types of technology in limited, local use and later criticizing these ideas as utopian. These groups also tend to have leftist views in spite of their opposition to technology and civilization, when a great part of the manifesto is dedicated to Kaczynski' associating these movements with modern civilization and it's aforementioned "disastrous consequences".
• Karl Popper is frequently quoted by anti-free speech leftists, with his paradox of tolerance being cited in arguments for why it is okay to censor "hateful" ideas. However, Popper was in fact ardently pro-free speech and believed in countering bad ideas through rational debate, with "intolerance" being reserved only for those who reject the concept of debate and opt for violence against those they disagree with instead. Indeed, while many will recite where he says "If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them", these omit the second part of the quote where he states:
  I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
• Back when John Michael Greer was still publishing Star's Reach as a series of blog posts on The Archdruid Report, some of the story's fans didn't seem to understand its message about technological progress — namely, that it's a finite and self-limiting phenomenon, with serious repercussions for the future after a certain point. Greer himself later commented on this phenomemon:
  Back when it was being written and posted online an episode at a time, I could count nearly every month on hearing from people who enthused about how wonderful the story was, and in the next breath tried to push me into inserting some pop-culture cliché about what the future is supposed to look like. Far more often than not, the point of the insertion was to show that “progress” was still on track and would eventually lead to a more “advanced” society—that is, a society like ours. When I explained that the story is about what happens when “progress,” in the sense that word has today, is over forever, and our kind of society is a fading memory of the troubled past, they simply insisted all the louder that the changes they wanted me to make were perfectly consistent with my story.

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