Unintentionally Sympathetic / Webcomics

• Better Days:
  • Lucy's former college housemate, Rachael, is portrayed as a shallow, obnoxious party girl who annoys the rest of the housemates and cheats on her boyfriend, Tommy. While her cheating is understandably condemned, it's hard not to feel a bit sorry for her when Lucy decides to counter this by immediately stealing Tommy for herself, taking him into the woods, and giving him a blowjob, then laughing about it in Rachael's face when she finds out. Rachael is dragged up several times in later chapters, once in which she begs Tommy to return to her only to be coldly brushed off and another where Lucy sees that Tommy based the over-sexed evil sorceress Big Bad of his D&D game after her (which Lucy agrees is completely appropriate). It gets worse when despite Rachel being condemned as an evil cheater, a later storyline has Lucy herself considering cheating on Tommy just because she feels trapped being in a monogamous relationship (which was pretty much why Rachael philandered - she wanted to have fun before tying the knot with Tommy), and the same people who hated Rachael just are mildly concerned about Lucy possibly putting her relationship in jeopardy. She ultimately doesn't go through with it, but the amount of sympathy she's shown compared to Rachael is pretty jarring.
  • When Lucy tries for a broadcasting internship, there are two girls she competes against. One is an incredibly, cartoonishly unethical journalist. The other... cracks bad puns. This is played up as an incredibly annoying trait and a reason to dislike the girl, even though quite a few other characters tell bad jokes without getting nearly as much flack for it, she has no other dislikeable things about her shown, and she's believed to have been drawn simply as a Take That! to a real-life person who annoyed Naylor online.
• Zenith in Commander Kitty. Despite spending much of the comic as a perfection-obsessed megalomaniac who spliced together who knows how many victims in an attempt to create her perfect mate, the final frustration of her plans along with her ultimate fate manage to push her into Woobie territory - note that the latter is after her Heel–Face Brainwashing!
• Syphile from Drowtales is treated like The Woobie by many fans, despite her mistreatment of Ariel since the latter was only an infant and treating many of her friends and servants poorly. This is due in part to her background as a "Well Done, Son" Guy to her adoptive mother Quain'tana, who she was never able to satisfy, and the apparent abuse she suffered at the hands of Sil'lice, because she was tainted (and to top it off, the only reason she became tainted was to please Quain'tana, who then immediately rejected her). The author said that she was "not meant to have much redeeming features, she lost them all over time. I wouldn't portray her as anything else", but given her death it's obvious that a lot of people felt for her. This is further compounded by the Continuity Snarl of the canon, where certain elements like stories where Quain'tana explicitly beat her or Sil'lice and Mel'arnach raped her are no longer considered canon. In other words, she certainly wasn't treated well, but not nearly as horrifically as was formerly portrayed.
• In Goblin Hollow, Penny gives a jerkass preacher a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, only to be reprimanded for it and slapped by Lily. We're supposed to see Penny as the bad guy, but to people who don't share Ralph Hayes Jr's beliefs that religious authorities must be respected no matter how unpleasant they are, she comes across as the victim instead.
• Angelica from Jay Naylor's Original Life was meant to be the personification of everything the author didn't like. She ended up being the most likeable character in the entire strip, especially because everyone else is such an unrepentant tool to her for little to no reason, she comes across as The Woobie.
• Pablo, introduced in The Fall of Little Red Riding Hood, came across as way more sympathetic than the sociopathic, cold-hearted protagonist, mostly due to all the crap he's put through in the story. Naylor apparently never intended for readers to like him, so he made a follow-up comic where he pines for Mary Ann Huckleberry — who completely ignores him while having sex with a well-hung horse — while espousing his personal philosophy of selflessness (which is supposed to be despicable, by Naylor's Objectivist standards). It only made him even more tragic and relatable.
• Jim from Girls with Slingshots. According to a tweet from the author, she intended to portray him as a hypocritical Dogged Nice Guy - unfortunately there were several problems with his portrayal:
  • One of his first appearances in "Members Only" (aka Guys' Night Out) had him confiding in Angel about how he seemed to either be invisible to women, or easily glossed over as soon as they saw another guy, and that only other guys and lesbians seemed interested in talking to him... only to then realize that he's sitting by himself.
  • The scene that followed the aforementioned tweet put him next to Chris who was just bragging about getting laid with Melody, painting him as a loser to whom it's okay to rub in his face that you are getting what he is not, and if that was not enough, when Jim snaps for this he is then portrayed by other guys as making the false dichotomy that since a Nice Guy can't get laid, then all guys who do must be Jerkasses.
  • It came up again when Chris mentions that he's stopped hanging out with him because Jim can't stand to hear him talk about his relationship with Melody, implying that he's still gushing about his relationship and how much sex he's getting to someone who's lonely and having trouble meeting women. With the rest of the guys snarking about him and the fact they stopped hanging out with him after one frustrated blow-up that was taken out of context, they don't come off looking any better than Jim.
  • After the webcomic ended, during the colored re-release of the strip, the author, Danielle Corsetto, admitted in the comments that Jim's characterization came out a little too sympathetic, and that she wished she had conveyed more clearly what was wrong with him.
• It's easy to feel sorry for Luna in It's (Not) Your Fault, over the fact that her own girlfriend raped her little brother, and pretty much felt ostracized by the family when they chose to protect Sam over her.
• Shawn and the other "carnists" in Vegan Artbook. He's meant to be viewed as annoying troll with an addiction to meat and an irrational hatred of Vegans. However, he and the other carnists usually make points more centered in reality than the story's heroes. He's also shown to be a tolerant person when it comes to other topics and his hatred of the vegans is hardly illogical given how violent and fanatical they are in the comic.
  • Ditto with Bunny for being the only Vegan in the comic who tolerates meat eaters and isn't a violent lunatic. The narrative treats this like it's a bad thing.
• Nip and Tuck features a transwoman who is stopped when she tries to enter the men's bathroom and, after she asserts that she is a female, the janitor pinches her testicles. This is followed by the janitor lecturing her about how she's really a man, and threatening to do worse to her if she goes into the women's restroom again. We're meant to see this as a fitting punishment for a sex offender, but to people who don't share the author's disapproval of transsexuality, the woman comes off as the victim of a hate crime, and the janitor ends up being Unintentionally Unsympathetic.
• A web comic by artist Mallorie Jessica Udischas depicts her Author Avatar laughing at PewDiePie being burgled, then a new colleague of hers points out The Golden Rule, and she sarcastically responds that they're going to be great friends. Many people who read the comic agreed with "New Guy" over her, and started producing fan-art emphasizing his wholesomeness and empathy.
• A somewhat silly example in Concerned. The writer decided to do a joke mini-arc about Combine soldiers mourning the death of a comrade. The entire thing is utterly wreathed in Bathos, which is much of the joke; the gag is that members of the Combine Overwatch are inhuman cyborgs and it makes no sense for them to have loved ones, much less adorable little kids who are literally wearing tiny Combine uniforms. However, since the comic brings in so many cliché elements of tragedy and coping with loss, it went all the way around and a lot of readers found the death of Frank oddly heartrending.
• Sly Cooper: Thief of Virtue has at least two characters; Chief Director Dominic Torus and a nameless female mouse.
  • It's very easy to dislike Torus at first simply because he's against Sly and the Cooper Gang, but if you take into account certain aspects of the series, it becomes harder to hate him given that he's had more success than anyone else in Interpol in stopping crime and yet he still gets nothing but flak from everyone, including the pretentious Judge Bubo; his willingness to bypass his red tape helped him save innocents being terrorized by the Congo's warlords that Sly nor Bubo ever gave a second thought about. Ironically enough, the anti-liberal/progressive sentiment the author had in creating this character actually made Torus even more likeable with certain people than he intended; namely those who weren't fans of the comic or criticized it.
  • Very little is known about the nameless female mouse who was seen in the chapter "Wrath of the Wolf King" that lashed out at Drake; She might've come out of a very abusive/strict/controlling relationship where the guy insisted on doing everything for her instead of letting her live. That sort of thing can leave one with raw, easily-frayed nerves when faced with things that reminded of past situations when Drake opened the door for her.
• Las Lindas:
  • Miles in the very early comic, for being blackmailed, essentially enslaved and generally treated like crap.
  • Alejandra has the absolute right to be mad at Mora and Las Lindas for receiving preferential treatment from the upper echelons of Prime society simply because Minos happened to have connections with Ambar instead of any actual merit, and while she was being quite a jerk about it, the humiliation she goes through at the Harvest Festival can come off as mean-spirited, even if it was accidental.
  • Tootsie describes Alexandria Dairy's board of directors as "goons who only care about the bottom line" just because they were losing trust in Alejandra's capacity to lead and pushing for an investigation on her, actions that couldn't be further from plainly reasonable, since Alejandra was wasting their money for petty, personal reasons and taking the moral high ground simply for not going all in with her risky projects after starting them.
• Ctrl+Alt+Del: Rob's interest in Counter-Strike as the only game he really plays is supposed to paint him as a "less" serious gamer, which in turn is supposed to make him acceptable for a "more" serious gamer like Ethan to heap scorn and abuse on (all of which are Played for Laughs). But in practice, Rob pretty much just comes across as an enthusiastic, lovable doofus, who tries his best to bond with Ethan over a shared interest, in spite of Ethan constantly insulting, belittling, and even occasionally physically abusing him.