Strawman Has A Point / Literature

• An in-universe example appears in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in the form of Emmanuel Goldstein, a strawman politician who may be invented by the ruling party in order to draw out dissidents. Orwell uses Goldstein in order to set out his own views of totalitarian societies; in the book he is entirely correct, but the authorities do not even try to suppress his message. Instead, they attempt to condition the population into being unable to comprehend an objective reality.
• In the Anita Blake series Richard (the avatar of the author's ex-husband) frequently rants against the murder, rape, hypocrisy, greed, and general bad behavior of the protagonist, allegedly to show what a self-hating mess he is. He's the only one who makes any kind of logical, intelligent points about the heroine — and she doesn't even dispute the things he says.
• In Brideshead Revisited, in a discussion about architecture, Bridey asks how something can be good twenty years ago, not good now, and good eighty years from now and then asks whether there is a difference between liking something and thinking it good. His questions are presented as self-evidently ridiculous, despite making perfect sense.
• Melvin Sneedly, resident tattletale and straight-A student of Captain Underpants, is an arrogant, insufferable, and all-around unlikable kid. That being said, his reasons for hating George and Harold are completely legitimate (frequently disrupting classes, playing incessant pranks, and generally being annoying just because), especially if the reader has had to deal with such classmates in real life.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:
  • Many adult characters, namely the parents of the naughty children and to a lesser extent the non-Joe grandparents, are meant to be seen as annoying killjoys for believing Willy Wonka is insane. Considering he brushes off serious situations with jokes and has employees from a place that sounds made-up (and the geography teacher doesn't know about it), they have a point for thinking that.
  • Mike Teavee is meant to be an obnoxious brat, and he does have a bit of an attitude problem, but he does occasionally have a good point, such as, "If you hate gum so much, why do you make it?".
• Happens sometime in the Circle of Magic books. In Daja's Book, the protagonists butt heads with an arrogant University mage named Yarrun Firetamer. Yarrun is dead wrong about the fire risk in the valley^note The forest has so much dead brush matter in it from fire suppression that it's more dangerous than ever, a bit of Truth in Television. and pays with his life but he has an illuminating conversation with Daja in which he points out that workers of "ordinary" magic do highly necessary work such as sanitation, preventing food spoilage, etc. and deserve more credit than they usually get. He also defines learning as "when other people can work their spells as you do and get the same results." Replace "spells" with "experiments" and you have a key part of the Scientific Method. But Daja dismisses his opinions as more "bile". Noteworthy since the entire main cast has a special affinity (fire/lightning/weaving/plants) that came naturally to them, and that can't be reproduced by people without that exact same type of magic.
• The Aesop of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange is how evil it is for the state to use mind-altering techniques to cure anti-social behaviour. While it is true that you might see brainwashing akin to removing free will, the protagonist Alexander spends most of his time pre-treatment meting out acts of violence against defenseless innocents and raping people (and two of his rape victims were ten-year-old girls) leading the reader to consider perhaps the state has a point, or at the very least it's the lesser of two evils.
• Cobalt Blue: The leaders of Chicago are treated as detestable Dirty Cowards for ordering Red to fight Fury outside of the city he has spent twelve years protecting, but Fury has already killed hundreds of people and it isn't unreasonable to worry about civilian casualties and property damage if he fought Red in the middle of a city. That being said, the U.S. president lacks the same excuse for when he abandons the remaining superheroes even when they have a chance of victory if they work together and the Fury has already proven that he's willing to devastate a city even after its protector falls.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses:
  • Tamlin is overly-protective and controlling towards Feyre in A Court of Mist and Fury, but his reaction when he learns she's at the Night Court for the long-term doesn't seem as irrational or malicious as the narrative tries to present it. As far as he knows, the woman he loves (and saw tortured and killed in front of him) has been taken to the Night Court against her will by a man who presents himself as cruel and violent, has a personal grudge against Tamlin, can control minds, and had Feyre drugged, dressed like a stripper and performing lap dances for him, coerced her into making a bargain with him to save her life, and forced a kiss on her. Feyre's eventual letter informing Tamlin she went of her own free will doesn't help, because as far as Tamlin knows she can't write fluently so it could be a forgery (and she could still theoretically have been forced or mind-controlled into writing it). Tamlin's reaction is extreme, yet it doesn't seem implausible that from his perspective he was genuinely trying to save Feyre. Rhysand himself points out that from a lot of people's perspective, he's the bad guy who stole Feyre away from everything she loved.
  • Nesta in A Court of Silver Flames is presented as being in the wrong and called out by everyone for revealing to Feyre how risky her pregnancy will be for both herself and her unborn child. While Nesta was acting partly from spite and anger, Feyre had every right to know about this considering it concerns her health and body.
• Friedrich Nietzsche had this reaction to Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, from Crime and Punishment: Raskolnikov at first believes himself to be an Übermensch, but is wracked by guilt and eventually gets his redemption through a religious (specifically Orthodox Christian, as this was Dostoevsky's religion) experience. Nietzsche regarded the religious redemption bit as bull and disdained Raskolnikov's feelings of guilt, but agreed with the unreformed Raskolnikov's Ubermenschian perspective.
• Cryptonomicon:
  • There's a crew of vaguely defined academics whose work pretty much boils down to, "So there's a lot of white dudes in science and technology, what's up with that?" The protagonist, a white, male engineer, takes this very personally. But STEM fields ARE dominated by white men, and women and people of color in the real world have been known to struggle with sexism and racism in those fields. The academics' smug attitudes don't necessarily mean their underlying point — that systemic injustice exists — is wrong.
  • G.E.B. Kivistik is basically a gag character, but once he's actually challenged on his statements, he stops being pretentious and points out that Internet access is a privilege not easily given to, say, the poor, and the advantages it can confer can leave large groups of society behind rapidly while granting enormous advantages to others, which depending on who you ask, has pretty much been what's happened in the ten years since the book was released. Even Stephenson, who is probably trying to load the deck, refers to Randy's defense as "an uncontrollable urge to be a prick." Randy argues that he is not privileged because he had to work hard through college. He doesn't seem to consider the fact that getting to go to college is itself a privilege.
• In Arthur Koestler's anti-communist classic Darkness at Noon, the imprisoned protagonist, Rubashov, complains to his second interrogator, Gletkin, about the harsh methods employed to discipline factory workers during the Country of the Revolution's industrialization drive—for example, people were fired with severely negative recommendations for being a few minutes late to work. Gletkin responds by pointing out that, unlike the aristocratic Rubashov, most of those working in the factories were, like himself, from an uneducated peasant background and may not even have known how to tell time when they started, suggesting that this sort of drastic discipline may have been necessary for the state to industrialize rapidly.^note And even more so from a modern perspective: the novel was written in 1940, before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and we can imagine the counterfactual of how things might have turned out if the Wehrmacht had been up against a Red Army with far less industrial capacity to mount a defense.
• In the second Death World book (the Harry Harrison series), a major character exists solely so the Author Avatar can explain to him the virtues of moral relativism. Only problem is, while the character is a dog-kicking Designated Villain, the arguments he makes against relativism aren't really shot down, just ignored in favor of the main character being made to look much cooler than him. There is, however, the issue of the character being perfectly willing to kidnap an innocent man and taking him back to be tried in a Kangaroo Court followed by a public execution. It's hard to justify this with a "good cause".
• In Dragonlance, especially the original novels by Weis & Hickman, one is supposed to take the viewpoint that the gods are patient, long-suffering parents who have been wrongfully scorned by their mortal children, and that those mortals who argue that the gods are the ones who have done wrong and do not deserve mortal reverence, like Tanis Half-Elven, are misguided fools at best. Thing is, the story of the Cataclysm essentially involves the gods devastating the world with a massive destructive event, stealing away all sources of healing magic beforehand, and then, when the angry survivors demand to know why the gods have done this to them, the gods respond by turning their backs on mortalkind and leaving them to suffer without healing spells for centuries after. It's hard to not feel that the mortals have legitimate reasons to be angry with their gods at this point... but the authors of course fully support the viewpoint that the gods are in the right and so events proceed accordingly.
• Unusually, this actually happens In-Universe in regards to Harry Dresden and his attitude to the White Council as a whole, and the Wardens in particular. Early in the series, he dislikes/resents them for treating him like a ticking time-bomb, and for the Wardens (particularly Warden Morgan, his parole officer in the first book) playing Inspector Javert. However, as he gets a better understanding of how corrupting and dangerous Black Magic can be, and in the eleventh book, gets to know Morgan better, this softens somewhat. Specifically, he learns why Morgan's such a Jerkass and always on Dresden's back, assuming he's about to go dark: Morgan's essentially a burnt-out cop who's spent more than a century fighting the worst things the Lovecraft Lite magical world can produce, including going through World War I, and who's seen countless Warlocks (dark wizards), the trail of destruction they've left behind, and as many seem to reform before reverting and doing even more damage. It's Nothing Personal, he just genuinely thinks that based on his prior experience, Dresden will revert — though he eventually comes to accept otherwise.
  • Dresden's traits as a de facto supernatural Cowboy Cop and, once he joins the Wardens, a Military Maverick, are at first presented sympathetically, with even supporting characters' such as Murphy warning him about it being portrayed as slowing him down when he needs to get things done (and in the first two books, Murphy ends up as the Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist). Then, they get deconstructed for their potential to burn bridges — in the fourteenth book, he points out the problems this can cause (and has caused) to his apprentice, before internally wishing that someone had told him that when he was her age.
  • Harry also argues in-universe that the wizards should be getting more involved in the world, arguing that it might have been nice if they stopped Hitler. It's pointed out to him by Luccio (Italian and much older) that it was much harder to determine who was right or not at the time, and that if Hitler deserved intervention, then the council should have acted to protect Native Americans from colonial expansion. She goes on that the laws serve one simple purpose: to limit individual power. As long as a wizard isn't breaking the laws, there's a limit to the damage they can do.
• Fifty Shades of Grey has a few examples, often relating to the Official Couple's turbulent relationship.
  • Ana sees Kate as being in the wrong and straight up tells her she should mind her own business when she confronts her and Christian about the submissive contract. However, considering the content of the contract, the secretive nature of their relationship and the fact Kate is clearly just looking out for her friend, she's not exactly wrong to be concerned.
  • In the second book, when Ana tells her mother she's just gotten engaged to Christian, Carla expresses concern over the fact Ana is still so young, has seen little of the world and hasn't actually been with Christian very long. Ana gets upset and asks why she "can't just be happy for [her]"...only everything Carla said is arguably true – Ana is very young and naive, Christian is the first and only boyfriend she's ever had and they've only known each for about a month before deciding to get married. Ana is also "disappoint[ed]" and "saddened" when her mother's first assumption is that she's marrying Christian because he knocked her up. However, considering the above circumstances, the fact that Ana and Christian have a lot of sex and the fact that in the next book Ana does accidentally get pregnant, it doesn't seem to be an entirely unreasonable assumption.
  • Ana and Christian are both deeply offended when Carrick strongly suggests they sign a pre-nup. But, considering they've only known each other a little over a month before getting engaged and Carrick's only actually spoken to Ana a handful of times, he comes across as being quite reasonable in being concerned about their marriage. Although we know Ana isn't a Golddigger, Carrick really knows nothing about the poor college student who wants to marry his insanely rich son; considering how much drama Christian and Ana have in their relationship, it also wouldn't be that surprising if the marriage didn't work out.
• In The Final Warning, Max is furious that, after she and the Flock come to the government's attention, they would dare to try to put them in a boarding school. A few of their concerns — being told they would be studied to a certain extent, etc. — were valid, given their history. Several others not so much, especially when Max basically tells them "we've had it harder than you and we know better". It's kind of difficult to argue that they are properly prepared to move to civilian life when they decide to dive-bomb the Pentagon for amusement and then are surprised that there's retaliation.
• The Fountainhead: Roark designs a building project that's intended to serve as housing for the underprivileged and is so outraged when the design is changed without his consent that he blows it up once it's built. Ellsworth Toohey writes an editorial decrying Roark's actions and calling for him to be punished. Rand portrays Toohey as a talentless hack who capitalizes on lowest-common-denominator yellow journalism for pointing out that anyone who is willing to destroy the homes of thousands of people because his design was changed is colossally egotistical at the very best, and a considerable danger to the public at worst, considering his first response to being upset was explosives.
• In The Giver, Jonas' parents claiming that "do you love me?" is a meaningless question and suggesting a few more specific ones like "do you cherish me?" is treated as a horrifying sign that they don't understand love. However, it might be argued that a parent who cherishes and takes pride in their child does indeed love that child according to any reasonable definition, and that it's not the worst thing in the world if they prefer to focus on their specific, individual feelings rather than using the blanket term for them. The idea that they do love him but choose to phrase things differently also isn't absurd. For example, witness how many languages don't have perfect translations for one another's words. Thus while the word love might be out of common use, that hardly means that the idea is.
• "Harrison Bergeron" was meant as a satire of American fears or conceptions of what socialism would look like. However, it has also been invoked successfully against such things as the American education establishment's love of equality of outcome.
• In the Harry Potter novels many debates are fleshed out with no Strawman, such as balancing the rights of werewolves, giants, house-elves and goblins with their actions. Most of the Strawman in the novels are of the Captain Obvious variety (Death Eaters, incompetent officials, etc.). But several times, the Strawman makes a pretty good point:
  • Anti-werewolf prejudice in general is treated as cruel, misguided, and irrational: the creation of werewolf watchlists, the poverty that most werewolves live in due to nobody being willing to hire them (legitimate businesses who are willing to hire them have to keep their status as a closely-guarded secret), and school curriculum treats them as dark creatures to learn how to battle. However, the only remotely sympathetic werewolf in the books who's ever even mentioned is Remus Lupin. Meanwhile, Fenrir Greyback, the most famous and influential member of the werewolf community, is a psychotic cannibal who deliberately targets children to forcibly turn them into werewolves, which is how Lupin became one in the first place. It's noted that most of the werewolves sided with Voldemort—ironically, this means the same people who so disliked werewolf discrimination were probably killing them in battle or sending them to prison by the hundreds at the end of the series. While a lot of the issues werewolves face originate from the aforementioned prejudice, no one ever actually suggests a reasonable way of dealing with the core problem of being around werewolves: even a kind and gentle werewolf is extremely dangerous when transformed, likely to kill or turn anyone they come across until they return to their human form again. The only existing way a werewolf can retain their human mind during transformation is a potion that must be taken regularly, is both expensive and time consuming to produce, tastes so nasty that only the strong-willed can drink it, and requires a very skilled potion maker to create (and any mistake will instead render the potion poisonous). Even Lupin nearly attacks his friends when he is forcibly turned because he forgot to take his potion at a critical moment, and the next day he admits to Harry that he badly screwed up and that it’s a miracle nobody died or got infected. Treating them as second class citizens may be unfair, but without a better solution it does make a good deal of sense that people are inclined to avoid werewolves around the time of the full moon and want to learn how to defend themselves from a fully-transformed werewolf in case they find themselves in that situation.
  • Argus Filch's complaints about students making his job harder are treated as an extension of his surly, bitter personality. But his stance isn't quite as unreasonable as the narrative makes it seem: while his ideas on how to deal with messy students would be textbook Disproportionate Retribution, it's not hard to see where he's coming from. Having to clean up after an entire boarding school's worth of students essentially by oneself is a tall order, especially for a squib at Hogwarts who only got the job because he was a pity hire, so it's fairly easy to sympathize with him not wanting extra work that could be avoided if the students were a bit more careful.
    • The students also sometimes do things just to make him mad, in a case of Bullying the Disabled. It is even possible that being a Muggle in Mage Custody is what makes him so miserable, but since the book never explored that angle, Filch remains a Strawman and none of his points are taken seriously.
    • Ron Weasley had a detention involving polishing trophies, and was indignant that he had to do it "without magic", when "without magic" is how Filch has to do everything.
  • Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic, claims in the fifth book that the Ministry needs to interfere with Hogwarts in order to fix various problems with the way the school is run. While his methods and motivations mostly make things much worse, the good characters always treat any interference in the way Hogwarts is run as something inherently problematic. This is despite the fact that the school in question has suffered several attacks and disasters that have targeted and harmed its students since Harry enrolled, plus the numerous day to day problems like the alarming lack of safety standards throughout the school which alone should have it shut down, plus the numerous blatantly unqualified and/or problematic teachers on staff (e.g. Binns, Trelawney, and Snape). Not to mention that the incident that started the Ministry interference was a student being murdered apparently on school grounds, during a school-sponsored event. In Real Life, we would absolutely expect increased government or law enforcement involvement in said school in response to an incident like this. It's pretty hard to argue that the autonomy and total lack of external oversight at Hogwarts previously was actually a good thing, as any reasonable government would have stepped in long ago.
  • Zacharias Smith is skeptical about Harry's version of events after Goblet of Fire and is portrayed as a jerkass for not immediately believing Harry. But Zacharias points out that all everyone know was what they had been told by Dumbledore, who had gotten the information from Harry, thus nobody was given actual proof that Voldemort was back and active. The Ministry of Magic was also running a very effective disinformation campaign burying proof of Voldemort's return and discredit Harry's word due to his compromised mental state, which was compounded by his (understandable) reluctance to give his side.^note In fact, when Harry does share his side of the story through the Quibbler, many more people begin to believe him Later books show that he does tend to be a snobbish asshole, such as providing a more biased commentary for a Quidditch match than even Lee Jordan and being the first to bail before the Battle of Hogwarts begins, but that doesn't change that without the privileged viewpoint of the readership Zacharias has fair reason to doubt Harry based on word alone.
  • The Dursleys are Abusive Parents to an absurd degree, including Bewildering Punishment, Denied Food as Punishment, and Adopt-a-Servant. They are also hypocrites and liars and just unkind people. So when their son Dudley is attacked by Dementors as a result of Harry's presence, their reaction is to kick Harry out of the house. This is treated as a terrible thing in the moment, just another Dursley-ish abuse. But in this one instance, the Dursleys are justified: several forces are truly out to get Harry; Harry later in the same book considers running away explicitly because his presence endangers those around him; and a later book has them going into hiding to avoid being kidnapped for information or for ransom. In fact, the only reason they don't actually kick him out (and the only reason he doesn't leave) is because Dumbledore said so via an exploding letter.
  • In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry learns that Stan Shunpike has been arrested after drunkenly bragging about being a Death Eater. Harry treats this as the Ministry rounding up innocent people rather than going after the actual Death Eaters and insists that Stan could never be a Death Eater. He even uses it as a reason why he refuses to help the Ministry in the war. However, not only should law enforcement take someone claiming to be a terrorist seriously (especially during a terrorist insurrection), but Harry's basing his entire opinion on what Stan is or isn't capable of based on a single conversation he had with the man three years ago. While the next book shows Stan out of custody but imperiused to work for the Death Eaters, all information anyone had at the time suggested he might genuinely have been working for Voldemort.
  • When giving his New Era Speech when he thinks he's won in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Voldemort sets fire to the Sorting Hat and announces that from then on all Hogwarts students will be in Slytherin. The idea that he's picturing is unquestionably horrifying, but he does, however inadvertently, point out a genuine problem—that the house system is divisive and tribalistic, serves no point except to perpetuate the founders' disagreement over who should be accepted into Hogwarts, and even the Sorting Hat, who exists solely to assign new students to the houses, thinks the current system does a lot more harm than good and there needs to be greater unity. Just a few chapters prior, we learned about how House divisions resulted in Snape and Lily being broken up and the former falling in with a hate group, and Dumbledore mused that "I sometimes think we Sort too soon", indicating that he believes the House system caused much of the problems that had existed in the series. Putting everyone in one house could hardly make things worse, and in fact, it could actually improve school unity because there's not something trivial dividing the student body. And yet in the epilogue and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, we learn that the House system and all of the tribalistic divisions that it brings forth continues, with no apparent changes whatsoever.
• In Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits, Esteban Trueba's feudalistic views on his workers are unacceptable by today's standards. Still, it would indeed be quite idealistic (if not downright unreasonable) to believe that barely literate people are fully qualified to participate in political life. Apparently it never occurs to him (or more likely, this was the entire point) that they won't get to be qualified by being kept out, either. Increased education for the peasants might help, but of course Don Trueba would hardly support that.
• In LARP: The Battle for Verona, the main characters' home, the island of Verona outside of Washington, is invaded by Mongolians who use Medieval weapons, and the main characters, who have no military or combat training, but who do Live-Action Role Playing, want to help free it. The US military gives very good reasons for them not to — i.e., they're citizens with no military or combat training, no real weapons and no guarantee they could get any, no real idea what they're going up against, and any action they might take in their ignorance might make the situation worse, including getting the people of Verona killed. The "argument" the main characters put forth essentially comes down to "we just want to be cool" and that they're somehow more qualified to attack people who use Medieval weapons because they use replica Medieval weapons once a week. Somehow the military thinks these are good points and lets the main characters and their LARP friends go in to save Verona.^note Especially considering that most LARP combat is *not* realistic. Different systems have different rules and weapons, but in general they tend to reward unrealistic fighting styles that would get you killed in real-life. For example, most systems require only a "tap" to confirm a hit, and make the head an illegal target. As a result, game-play tends to favor light cherry-taps and leaving the head unguarded in favor of protecting other body parts that do count as legal targets. Real LARPers fighting Mongol warriors (or anybody else trained to fight with actual swords etc.) would almost certainly be slaughtered.
• This is a problem with the Left Behind series, as noted in Slacktivist's deconstruction. The main heroes are such jerks that many of the people with whom they argue come off looking much better by comparison. For example, in the first chapter, a drunk Texan wakes up and sees the carnage wrought by the Rapture (plane crashes, etc). He is mocked as a silly drunk by the narrators, but he is the only one to express any sort of horror at the proceedings. In the next book, we are clearly supposed to cheer for the alleged hero as he is insubordinate to his boss — whose main crime seems to be being a woman who does not fawn over him and expects him to do his job. Verna is constantly presented as a no-fun, uppity woman who thinks Buck is a pompous Jerkass, and she's right.
• In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Peter and Susan don't believe Lucy when she tells them she found a magical kingdom in a wardrobe, especially when Edmund refutes her account. The professor reproves them for that because logically, the kid is not a liar and they would rather believe Edmund who they know has lied before. In addition, the professor points out that if Lucy were suffering hallucinations or mental illness, he and the housekeeper would have seen the signs. Of course, in real life, if your little sister tells you there is a door to a magical land in a wardrobe, and you open the wardrobe and don't see that door, will you still believe her? Especially as the kids, unlike the professor, hadn't been to Narnia before.
  • The trilemma posed by the Professor is an allegory for C. S. Lewis' famous trilemma about Jesus, briefly that someone who made claims such as being able to forgive sins and return from the dead cannot also be viewed as a great moral teacher unless he actually had those abilities: he was either a madman, a liar, or really was God. The version in ''TLtWatW'' has the advantage that Peter and Susan are both first-hand witnesses of what Lucy actually said, and the readers of course already know that Lucy is telling the truth. The main weak point of Lewis' famous trilemma is that it doesn't address whether the scriptural account is accurate when it records Jesus making claims to divine powers.
  • That Digory went to Narnia himself and therefore knows first hand that the wardrobe may indeed lead into a magical country is a Doylist retcon; it's hinted at in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, but not confirmed until a later book (The Magician's Nephew).
  • Other Narnian examples:
    • In The Last Battle, a donkey poses as a lion in an obvious allegory for a false Messiah. After the end of the world, dwarves that were suckered in by the false Messiah and later broke ranks cannot perceive paradise. They see the pre-apocalyptic world. The narrative treats it as if their decision that they should be skeptical of proclaimed Messiah-figures and to trust what they see empirically - after seeing a false Messiah unmasked! - is somehow senseless. They literally cannot see what everyone else does, so somehow their skepticism is their fault. Never mind that everyone else seems to only believe in the miraculous events because they can see and experience them.
• The Department of Homeland Security in Little Brother are painted as being corrupt figures for putting the city under heavy surveillance and spying on Marcus. However, their security measures were done after a major terrorist attack occurred, so they're really just doing their jobs to protect the country. Them keeping Marcus in custody for so long and spying on him is justified too, since all he did in the first few chapters of the book was make himself look suspicious. He used his hacking skills to cut school, and as his principal implied, he used hacking multiple times before to screw around in school. Marcus's father is also depicted as a narrow-minded idiot for supporting the DHS's extreme actions, but Marcus failed to understand that his parents were worried sick about him because he went missing during a terrorist attack.
• About halfway through Lord Of The World, Father John Francis is on the verge of apostasy, and asks his superior Father Percy Franklin to convince him that Christianity is true after all, because he no longer can believe it. Franklin says that Christianity may not be true, but can’t be false as long as intelligent people believe it. In other words, he admits his religion is provably false, but says it is true anyway. Naturally this does nothing to stop Francis’s apostasy, and since he goes on to organize the Religion of Evil that worships The Antichrist, much of the death in the second half of the book is ultimately because of Franklin (though the author certainly didn’t see it that way.)
• In John Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan argues against God by invoking democracy, free speech and egalitarianism. This sounds more plausible nowadays that it would have at the time. The speech is so persuasive that a lot of critics think it's meant to be that way, for one reason or another. However Satan states in the speech there can be superiors and inferiors because he doesn't want his angels to revolt against him, and later admits he's just being a jerk to humanity because they have Paradise while he doesn't. This very well may have been intentional, considering Milton's political ideas, since he advocated freedom of expression and more religious tolerance.
• Pride and Prejudice: Mrs. Bennett is annoying and embarrassing, which makes it easy to find her obsession with marrying off her daughters foolish. However, she seems to be the only person genuinely concerned with making sure she and her daughters aren't rendered homeless if Mr. Bennett has a sudden stroke.
• In The Rainbow Fish, the eponymous fish is meant to be in the wrong for not giving away his shiny scales like his friends wanted him to. While he was a bit of a showoff, it's still unreasonable for someone to be expected to give away part of their body just because someone else is jealous.
• In The Raven Cycle, a minor character named Ashley is meant to be seen as a plastic airheaded girlfriend, with many references to her dyed blonde hair and clothes from the covers of Cosmopolitan and People. When asked why she did not attend church with several other characters, she says, "I refuse to participate in a ceremony that doesn't, like, allow equal spiritual privileges to women." This is presented as further proof of her shallow inanity, with characters snickering and one retorting, "Do you buy your politics out of the same catalog?" In reality, the exclusion of women from the clergy and in other aspects of religion is a completely legitimate and serious qualm that many people take with certain faiths. Probably the most frustrating part about this is that literally the only thing the narrative does to try to demonstrate why Ashley's opinion shouldn't be taken seriously is to add a stereotypical Valley Girl "like" to the middle of her sentence — as if that alone would somehow make what she's saying inherently dumber. Just read what she says without the "like," and it comes across less like the characters teasing a shallow person who parrots political points and more like them being condescending misogynists.
• The Pale Woman in the Realm of the Elderlings novel Fool's Fate actually has a very good point: reviving an apex predator with the capacity to wipe out humanity and no real reason not to is a pretty darned stupid idea. It is primarily the political implications that drive Fitz to oppose her, though.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, Daylen kills two women (one who tortured and nearly killed her husband, another who molested a child) while doling out his vigilante justice. Ahrek castigates him for this and is clearly meant to be in the right, but Daylen comes across as a lot more reasonable on this, arguing that the same crimes should have the same punishment regardless of someone's biological sex. Ahrek's argument boils down to "No, they're women!" It might be worth mentioning that the author is a Mormon, and has expressed a more paternalistic view himself on his channel.
• The Ship Who Searched starts with a Department of Child Disservices strawman insisting that seven-year-old Tia should have the company of other people, both adults and children, rather than being left alone most of the time with her archaeologist parents working. She shuts him down by talking about how smart she is, how she doesn't like other children, and how her parents planned out her existence to cause minimal disruption to their lives, working for months at a time at dig sites on airless planets with no one else around. We then see that if anything she's neglected worse than the strawman even believed - her parents frequently abandon her for weeks with no easy way to contact them and threaten to cancel the rare days she spends entirely in their company if she bothers them at all. The medical AI they leave with her tells her any unusual problems she has are entirely in her imagination or made up to get attention. By the time her parents remember they have a daughter, she's severely ill. When they take her to a hospital and get a message telling them to continue excavation or be fired, they abandon her. And yet everyone but that strawman regards them as good parents, and Tia is fond of the institution they work for.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • As controversial as the portrayals of the Republic and the Jedi in the Republic Commando Series are, this is still the only narrative in either Legends or Disney canon to seriously address the elephant in the room regarding the clones' sentience: by any reasonable definition, they're Slave Mooks, something that, morality aside, is supposed to be illegal under Republic law according to The Phantom Menace, and the characters (mainly clones and clone-sympathetic Jedi and Mandalorians) therefore question whether the preservation of the Republic and even the Jedi Order are actually causes worth fighting for if they would so readily violate their own morality for expedience. In fact, Karen Traviss partially attributes the clones' willingness to obey Order 66 to revenge for their enslavement.^note Order 66 came out a couple years before the explanation in Star Wars: The Clone Wars about the mind control chips. By comparison, for all that they're a One Nation Under Copyright ruled by a Sith Lord, the Separatists are at least using a normal army of volunteers, conscripts, and non-sentient machines to do their fighting.
  • The Han Solo Trilogy: After learning that Han uses aliases plus his past as a con artist, Bria's mother and brother are insistent about him not being trustworthy. Her brother wants to call the authorities. Bria and her father insist he's changed, and she owes her freedom from slavery to them. They're right, but really her mother and brother aren't being unreasonable (despite not liking Han to begin with because he's too working class for Bria in their view). How are they to know that he has changed, and his rescue of Bria wasn't part of a scam too?
  • In the first half of the New Jedi Order series, there's a schism in the Jedi Order over whether or not it is acceptable to use leftover Imperial projects and superweapons against the Yuuzhan Vong. The Jedi in favor are called radicals and, just to make sure we know that their viewpoint is immoral and evil, the authors made them willing to kidnap children and perform other heinous acts to get what they want. No one, including Luke, seems to be able to explain to us how killing Yuuzhan Vong with superlasers is more evil than fighting them with conventional weapons. Later authors in the series recognize this as a strawman and offer the argument of superweapons being inefficient wastes of resources^note another squadron of warships is a more versatile use of money and manpower than a Death Star that are for terrorizing civilians,^note Yuuzhan Vong civilians aren't in a position to affect policy not fighting wars, with Han joking about how pretty much all the superweapons the Empire built ended up getting easily blown up somehow.
  • In the Fate of the Jedi series, Galactic Alliance Chief of State Natasi Daala enacts various policies to rein in what she sees as the unchecked power that the Jedi have within the Galactic Alliance. Coming off a major galactic civil war started by a corrupted Jedi who enacted a coup and seized control of the Alliance, she is not entirely without precedent or reason to be concerned over potentially uncontrolled actions by Force users. These policies grow excessively draconian and begin to cost her public opinion due to various publicized incidents, most notably the leader of her Mandalorian commandos cold-bloodedly shooting an unarmed young woman who'd come in peace. However, instead of using the mounting public pressure and political scandals resulting from her actions to legally rein in Daala's excesses (as had already proved effective in overturning the siege of the Jedi Temple and dissolving the Court of Jedi Affairs), the Jedi embark on a coup to remove her from power that involves taking hostages, attacking government facilities, killing the appointed acting Grand Master of the Jedi, Kenth Hamner, and removing Daala from power to install Hamner's killer as part of an acting Triumvirate over the Alliance.
• In The Story of B, the sequel to Ishmael, someone asks B why, if increasing food production simply causes population rates to rise as he claims, countries like Germany have zero population growth (others such as Japan even have negative population growth). B basically says "If you look into this more, you'll see I'm right", with no actual answer to something that would refute his entire claim.
• In Thief of Time, Susan's boss is depicted as a hopeless mess of an educator because her school uses the "learning through play" method. It's claimed that parents send their children there only as a last resort when "normal" methods fail. This seems to be a dig at non-traditional educational systems such as the Montessori method, with an added insinuation that any good teacher can make any five-year-old sit in a desk and learn arithmetic from a lecture. However, increasing bodies of evidence indicate traditional methods aren't actually the most effective (not to mention that some children genuinely have special needs and straight-up can't cope in a traditional learning environment). Some non-traditional methods have actually shown to be highly effective at teaching skills like reading. They're also hardly the product of newfangled hippie thinking; Maria Montessori established her first Casa de Bambini before World War One. Not that Susan uses traditional methods herself, of course. She's basically a slightly more stern version of Ms. Frizzle.
• The Town Of Babylon includes a rant against personal responsibility, which the reader is supposed to take as self-evidently bad. However, the rant actually makes personal responsibility seem like a useful concept.
• Treehouse: The inspector is meant to be seen as a stick-in-the-mud for wanting Andy and Terry to make their treehouse safer, but some of the things he said (like "Chainsaw juggling is seriously dumb— you could easily lose a finger or a thumb") had merit.
• True Allegiance by conservative pundit Ben Shapiro suffers from a few of these, as his critics have gleefully pointed out:
  • The president, Mark Prescott, is a vain politician obsessed with his legacy, no matter the cost to America. His nefarious plan? Pull the U.S. out of foreign wars (which is not even an unpopular opinion among conservatives) and reinvest the money in infrastructure, education, and social programs, especially jobs.
  • Similarly, when Gen. Brett Hawthorne is held by terrorists in Iran, he passes a coded message to the U.S. containing his coordinates and the word "airstrike." Mark Prescott debates some entirely salient points against going through with the airstrike: the target is too small for a missile to reliably hit, military aircraft could be intercepted by Iran, and the coordinates might be wrong. He decides on a rescue mission, though for vain reasons. When Hawthorne later calls him a coward, he justifiably points out that following Hawthorne's advice would've meant committing an act of war with Iran over one man.
  • The president, media, and country crucify well-meaning Texas governor Bubba Davis for using the National Guard to secure the Mexican border - when he was asked to send them to New York to help out after a massive terror attack. One news commentator points out that Texas is a state, and can't just ignore the federal government whenever it wants. This point is never addressed.
  • Soledad Ramirez and her militia are presented in the media as white supremacist terrorists, even though the narrative treats them as freedom fighters. The white supremacy part is debatable - but given that their actions including bombing a(n admittedly empty) government building, a standoff with authorities that leaves numerous SWAT officers dead, and provoking a race riot to break into a detention center and force police to release a prisoner at gunpoint, the "terrorists" part is not an exaggeration.
  • The activists calling for a police officer to be punished are portrayed as cynical operators who set the whole thing up and the cop as a victim of an overzealous media frenzy. The cop had shot and killed an eight-year-old boy and tried to claim it was self-defence.
• The Turner Diaries: A strawman proclaims the "heroes" of the book as "depraved, racist criminals." He's supposed to be a strawman, yet this is a 100% accurate description of the "heroic" white supremacist Right-Wing Militia Fanatic group known as the Order (that went on to inspire an actual group of depraved, racist terrorists by the same name, whose exploits included murdering a critical Jewish talk show host in his own driveway).
• The Twilight Saga: Anyone who disagrees with or doesn't like Bella is automatically wrong, no matter how right they are.
  • In the novel New Moon, Bella is annoyed that Jessica won't talk to her, and thinks that Jessica is being petty and evil. This is after Bella has ignored everyone for four months, used Jessica to get Charlie off her back, ditched her shortly into the movie to pine over Edward, and then nearly frightened Jessica to death by walking up to a very dangerous-looking biker in a bad part of town that Jessica clearly wanted to avoid, all because Bella thought it may be the same one that Edward rescued her from before.
  • In Breaking Dawn, Leah calls Bella out on some of her more selfish actions in trying to manipulate and keep Jacob with her despite knowing full well how much it hurts Jacob to be around her knowing that she's chosen to die and become an undead monstrosity with Edward over a life with him. Even Bella admits that she's being selfish, but chooses to keep doing it anyway. Everyone else gets angry at Leah for upsetting Bella, including the guy Leah was trying to stand up for. And any point Leah made is completely forgotten.
  • The part where Aro says that humans now have technology that could be used to hurt or kill vampires, so since there's no way of knowing that Renesmee will always be able to keep vampires a secret she's a vulnerability. The response to this is something along the lines of "Aro is a big mean jerk who just wants to destroy the Cullen family for loving each other" and nobody bothers to refute his point until Alice conveniently shows up with another half-vampire. Aro is actually kind of right, though, especially since Renesmee's superpower involves sharing her thoughts with people, and her power is suspected to be an inversion of Bella's, which Bella finds out she can project her power over an area (if she ever experiences any Power Incontinence she could end up accidentally sharing random things with random humans). Of course, if that was his concern, 99% of their race eating humans on a regular basis had far more potential for exposing them while guaranteeing that humans would not recognize them as Friendly Neighborhood Vampires and would probably try to wipe them out.
  • Charlie gets both this and Informed Wrongness. His daughter is creepily obsessed with a guy who has never displayed any attributes aside from being equally creepily obsessed with her and being an asshole, giving him no reason to assume that he isn't an abuser (which, by real world standards, he is). The narrative pretty clearly wants the reader to side against Charlie, even when Bella and Edward team up to casually manipulate and bully him into letting her do whatever she wants. In New Moon he's trying to get Bella help when she's clearly depressed, pointing out (correctly) that she's just going through the motions and that it would be better if she lived with her mother rather than staying in the town that has too many painful memories. He points out that it's not normal to spend several months nearly catatonic because her boyfriend dumped her. By any objective standpoint, he's correct. The readers are supposed to side with Bella, who refuses to move on with her life.
• In We Need to Talk About Kevin, despite Franklin's constant siding with Kevin over any evidence, when Eva tells him she wants another child, he isn't wrong when he points out that she's an incredibly cold mother toward Kevin and interprets everything he does to be motivated out of spite towards her and asks what makes her think she'd be any better with another child. Eva notably has no rebuttal to this and has to resort to getting pregnant in secret.
• The Children of the Light in The Wheel of Time are portrayed as a Knight Templar organization with a high population of Tautological Templars, whose belief that Magic Is Evil leads them to oppose the Aes Sedai and other channelers as a matter of course. Meanwhile, the Aes Sedai are at least twenty times as likely as the general population to be sworn to the Dark One, the evil Black Ajah controls many high-ranking positions within the Aes Sedai, and the new organization of male channelers is run by a ranking servant of the Dark One who forcibly recruits a large chunk of his subordinates. Factoring in Aes Sedai's habit of outright ignoring local laws, to the extent of kidnapping reigning monarchs for their bargaining power, one starts to sympathize with the Children's motives (while not their methods, which mirror the Inquisition's).
• In World War Z, Grover Carlson, a Take That! expy of U.S. conservatives, mentions the U.S. government initially refused to come clean about the zombies before the start of the outbreak, because it was worried about the amount of mass panic it would cause as a result. In his interview, Todd Wainio remarks that at start of the outbreak, the Great Panic by frenzied uninfected civilians ended up killing more people in the U.S. than the zombies themselves actually did, putting Carlson's point into perspective.

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