The criteria for Unintentionally Unsympathetic says:
"When a character's supposed insecurities or embarrassing quirks are supposed to inspire sympathy, but fail to impress the audience because they're mishandled or plain written badly. It can be made even worse if they have to learn a lesson. Without being at least somewhat invested in the characters, the audience might have passed the point of caring when the character finally comes around."
This is the basic criteria of the trope. There is more after but I am not sure what was present from the start and what was edited in afterwords to expand the definition. This trope is becoming more popular, with the page starting to be split-off into sub pages and such. And like all popular YMMV tropes this is causing an influx of bad examples that are probably just one-sided complaining, shoehorning, and bashing which is not in the spirit of this wiki. You can see this is causing issues just by looking at the pages discussion thread. I felt that the trope needed a dedicated cleanup thread. This way edits can be done without causing edit wars and getting people banned.
Some guidelines if a character or event is Unintentionally Unsympathetic.
1. It has to be unintentional on the authors part. It is in the title. All examples that were intentional on the author's part are disqualified by definition.
2. The example should state exactly why the author or narrative intended the subject to have been sympathetic and why it failed to resonate with the audience. If the example can not clearly state these two points, it is a bad example and needs to at minimum be rewritten.
3. Neutral tone: No insults. I know it is fun to complain about stuff but complaining is not in the spirit of the wiki. So long as one side isn't promoting hate speech examples should be written without taking a side. Examples that are heavily favoring one side or insulting the other side are probably not valid examples.
4. There should be a wide accepted disagreement between the audience and the author to be a valid example. By that I mean that there should be large consensus in the audience disagreeing with the author over why the character is unsympathetic instead of sympathetic. If the audience is too divided and one section thinks agrees with the author and the other doesn't, the example could be a pet peeve of a single person, which isn’t noteworthy.
Lastly, always consider Square Peg, Round Trope and be mindful if the example may fit better under a different trope such as Base-Breaking Character, Broken Base, and The Scrappy. Please visit other cleanup threads if you have questions about tropes that do not involve Unintentionally Unsympathetic.
Feel free to help if you spot some bad examples or can point out more rules for the trope. Or argue with me over the definitions, this is a cleanup thread after all.
MOD NOTICE: As of October 26, 2022, this thread now covers Unintentionally Sympathetic as well.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 26th 2022 at 8:15:48 AM
Beast's decision to let Belle go and see her father ends up looking very foolish and callous given the specifics of the curse in this version. In the original film, all that was said if the curse wasn't broken was the transformation of the Beast and the castle residents would be permanent, given the denizens didn't seem to bothered by their transformation Beast letting Belle go wasn't seen as a bad thing. In contrast, the remake adds that all the denizens turned into objects will become mobile and inanimate if the curse isn't broken. While this could be seen as a Trolley Problem dilemma, unlike most dilemmas diverting the trolley (letting Belle go) will lead to MORE deaths than doing nothing, making Beast’s choice hard to agree with
Small correction shouldn't it be "immobile and inanimate" and not "mobile and inanimate"? Immobile is the thing they will become having seen the film. Though I could be misremembering.
Edited by Bullman on May 11th 2023 at 2:51:18 PM
Fan-Preferred Couple cleanup threadFound this big boy for YMMV.Doctor Who S 35 E 12 Hell Bent:
- Unintentionally Sympathetic: The viewer is supposed to be horrified by the Doctor's Sanity Slippage and resultant Villain Protagonist behaviour, but who can blame him?
- Dude, Where's My Reward?: He's suffered horrifically thanks to the bad and/or misguided choices of other characters: Ashildr/Me making a deal with the Time Lords, the Time Lords wanting to know about the Hybrid and seeing that as justifying Cold-Blooded Torture, and Clara trying too hard to be a hero. All of them owe him their lives to varying extents, and only Clara returned the favour unselfishly; the Time Lords granting him a new regeneration cycle may have only been because he was key to their continued existence. When he asks if he's owed the chance to save Clara, between all the amazing, universe-saving feats he's pulled off and his recent trials, all of which the audience has been privy to, it's hard to argue that he hasn't earned his happy ending...and if Clara just had a little more faith in him when they fled, he'd have pulled it off in a way that left everyone happy, given how he comes up with plans on the fly.
- Insanity defence: Having been Driven to Madness, he needs a tranquilizer dart and help, not "The Reason You Suck" and "What the Hell, Hero?" lectures.
- Whom has he hurt?: In the end, his actions, save for the shooting of the General — and even then the episode implies the Doctor did him/her a favour — apparently do no actual damage to anyone but himself. Usually when a character disrupts time and space as drastically as he does here, the catastrophic effects are seen/felt immediately. But there are no Reapers, no time collapsing in on itself. Clara's got "wiggle room". Is her death really a fixed point in time, or is everyone just saying it is for whatever reason?
- No Sympathy for the suffering: Almost ALL of the major characters come off as smug, ungrateful jerks who take no heed of his suffering but sure are concerned about the fate of poor old Rassilon, the sadistic tyrant and torturer. Clara, perhaps appropriately, is the only one who actually cares about what's been done to the Doctor, and even she has to forcefully make her opinion known when the Mind Rape approaches.
- Ten's sins, Twelve's punishments: The Doctor loses his memories of Clara, possibly by choice. The Tenth Doctor's mind wipe of Donna Noble over her objections, despite being done due to prevent her imminent death, continues to divide the fandom in part because he suffered no consequences. With regards to nearly crossing the Moral Event Horizon, Ten doesn't atone/accept punishment in "The Waters of Mars", in which he did more damage to others' lives...and Twelve was the one Driven to Madness! Does Twelve deserve to suffer for Ten's actions and lose his right to grieve Clara as an Author's Saving Throw? That said, while restoring Donna's memories would kill her no such danger exists for Twelve and he retained substantial memories of Clara, just not personal details, giving plenty of outs for undoing the memory wipe later if the plot demanded. After "Hell Bent" aired in December 2015 there were literally hundreds of fan fiction stories published online that have hypothesized ways in which it could be undone. Very notably, Steven Moffat came to regret this aspect of the ending, and undid it himself: shortly before his regeneration in his Grand Finale "Twice Upon a Time" the Testimony restores all of his memories of Clara Oswald and allows him to bid farewell to an avatar of her.
- Double standard ending: His choice to return to the side of good leaves him with less than what he started with. To his credit, he regards this as Laser-Guided Karma in action. But Ashildr/Me gets to be a Karma Houdini re: her relationship with him — she avoids the end of the universe, fulfils her goal of getting a TARDIS, and runs away with the Doctor's beautiful (her description!) companion to boot. Clara chooses to bop around the universe instead of returning to her death immediately — after convincing the Doctor that he has to accept she's gone and move on, and after an episode whose whole premise was that bending the rules of time in giving her this second chance makes the Doctor the villain of the piece. She gets to choose to benefit from it and ride into the sunset anyway; shouldn't he get more than a new screwdriver? Suffice to say, this further encouraged complaints that both women are Steven Moffat's Mary Sues and Creators Pets.
- Victim-Blaming: The Doctor doesn't deserve the Hell he goes through in this three-parter. It is repeatedly pointed out that it is NOT his fault that Clara died, though he believes that to be the case because he didn't rein in her more reckless tendencies and/or turn her out of the TARDIS sooner. He's betrayed by two sets of people — Ashildr/Me and the Time Lords — who owe their continued, if highly imperfect, existences to him (in her case, he also saved her people despite being tempted to abandon them to certain doom) but decide their needs are more important than his. The Time Lords blame him for his millennia of suffering in the confession dial, but they knew he was emotionally and mentally fragile when they captured him, and just kept torturing him anyway, driving him to the point that he decided his continued suffering was the better option (because he would "win" and have a chance to save Clara). Even the reading that he "deserves" to lose Clara and suffer for making Ashildr/Me immortal and unhappy is flawed because, although he was partially motivated to save her out of grief and self-pity over all the losses he's endured, he was also motivated by both his moral code to save whomever he can when he can and his unintentional hand in her death.
- Written into a corner: What options did the Doctor have besides trying to save Clara that would have led him, even in a roundabout way, back to his best self? There Are No Therapists on Gallifrey. Drylanders and soldiers won't be much for providing grief counselling after what he's been through. Ohila and the Time Lords have No Sympathy. He doesn't have his TARDIS and can't start running again. Even if he could, who would he meet who could live up to his Distaff Counterpart Clara Oswald quickly enough for him to let her drift off into memory? Poor Martha Jones wasn't able to live up to the memory of Rose Tyler, who didn't even die. The Doctor would have been suffering the way he said he would in "The Girl Who Died", forever haunted by loss, possibly not taking on other companions — which would, if Ten and Eleven's examples are anything to go by, render him corrupt or useless. He could wipe himself of his memories of her immediately, but it's doubtful he would give them up willingly — and with a "professional" wipe instead of a tampered-with neural block, would his Character Development survive or would he be a near-Blank Slate?
So... While yes the Doctor is definitely more sympathetic than the episode gives him credit for, it's also rather speculative and spends way too much time arguing from every conceivable angle that he's in the right.
Edited by WarJay77 on May 13th 2023 at 3:10:35 PM
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallI noticed the Code Geass YMMV page has the Black Knights listed as both US and UU for betraying Lelouch. I don't think they can count as both for the same actions, and it seems like the writers wanted them to be sympathetic because we were meant to understand why they lost faith in Lelouch, and as the entry itself notes, the compilation films attempted to make them even more sympathetic by changing some of their actions.
Edited by Javertshark13 on May 13th 2023 at 4:42:32 AM
It looks like the "Hell Bent" example was added as a regular example in 2016 (as in, short and simple) before it got expanded and tweaked over the years. Much of it was added by the same troper, Sapphirea2.
The first version of that example read:
- Unintentionally Sympathetic: The viewer is supposed to be horrified by the Doctor's Sanity Slippage and Anti-Villain behavior, but between all his suffering in the previous two episodes — all because No Good Deed Goes Unpunished — the apparent lack of any actual damage caused by his actions save for the shooting of the General, and most of the major characters coming off as smug jerks who have No Sympathy for his suffering, it's hard not to root for him going bad in pursuit of healing and happiness. That his choice to return to the side of good effectively leaves him with less than he had at the beginning doesn't help.
I believe so. If it helps, I agree with cutting them because they're intended to be sympathetic there (which disqualifies characters/a character from being Unintentionally Sympathetic).
- Everyone not named Ted Nugent on Surviving Nugent. A likely good reason that it only lasted one barely-noticed season was that instead of the usual band of reality show contestants that could at least make it Jerkass vs. Jerkass Sadist Show was the fact that they were a cherry-picked list of all the kind of people he didn't like (gays, minorities, metrosexuals and PETA) and said as much whether it was kicking off a guy fresh off the bus that never even gave his name or said a word because "he smelled like a French whore on fire" or how he outed the Manly Gay big enough to curb-stomp him and stated he didn't like the guy due to said homosexuality despite said guy never doing/saying anything related to his sexuality. The PETA member hyped to be the Sitcom Arch-Nemesis never achieved such status and was only memorable for wearing her shirt and being a strict vegetarian, so she went out with a whimper instead of a boom. Even his family proved to arguably be the biggest Woobies on the show because they have to live with him as his wife went out of her way to personally cook for the case, including a vegetarian meal for the PETA woman and his son got mocked for favoring the Black guy to win as "You only like him cause he's BLAAACK!" And yes, this show was an Early-Bird Cameo for a pre-Attention Whore Tila Tequila and yes, you fucked up when you can even make her a Woobie even in hindsight.
Can YMMV tropes apply to reality shows?
Anyone else want to weigh in on the Hell Bent example?
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallI've noticed Saph has a shippy Single-Issue Wonk and a tendency to get overblown, so I vote reverting.
I feel he counts and I agree with reverting, partly because the current entry is too long.
From YMMV.Total Drama Phobia Factor:
- Unintentionally Sympathetic: Tyler. His fear of chickens is supposed to make him The Load for his team so that we won't feel sorry for him when he gets eliminated. However, many fans felt bad for him because a): although he was a scaredy-cat about it, he actually did complete his challenge and b): he was shown crying on the Boat of Losers, his teammates make fun of him behind his back, Chris fills the boat with chickens and Lindsay forgets his name. This prompted more sympathy for Tyler than laughs.
I don’t think he was meant to be depicted unsympathetically.
The page for Nioh 2 has this entry:
I really don't think this fits. There's evidence that Tokichiro was being influenced by Otakemaru even before the full possession (for instance, around the time he starts his downward spiral, a cutscene shows his reflection with glowing red eyes, which all Otakemaru's victims have). And the game doesn't treat his villainous moments sympathetically anyway, the other characters make it abundantly clear that he needs to be stopped by any means, and even the player character, his former best friend, is willing to kill him for his crimes. It's only when signs of his old, more jovial personality resurface that he gets any sympathy.
I'm also not sure this is really a common reaction? I haven't kept up with a lot of Nioh 2 discussions but I seem to remember Tokichiro generally being a fairly praised character for having more depth than Kelley from the previous game.
There remains a foothold out of this mire — now climb.YMMV.Family Guy S 6 E 8 Mc Stroke
- Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The story tries to make you feel bad about Peter having a stroke and then having to struggle with every day tasks afterwards, but you might be more likely to just think of how this only happened because he gorged himself on 30 hamburgers in one sitting and brazenly ignored Brian's warnings. Even the lead-up to him eating all those burgers in the first place (being offered a lifetime's supply of burgers after being mistaken for a fireman due to him having a mustache, and saving the restaurant owner from the fire) was the result of him deciding to grow a mustache after stealing and reading through his neighbors' mail (which he had no business doing).
I'm feeling doubtful that they wanted to make you feel bad for Peter here.
Thomas fans needed! Come join me in the the show's cleanup thread!

Ironically I HAVE seen the "They are elderly, they are going to die soon, they dont matter" attitude elsewhere here on the wiki.
As long as this flower is in my heart. My Strength will flow without end.